work_22zh7shbzrflfep4wo6tsx77lu ---- Engaging Students in Life-Changing Learning Engaging Students in Life-Changing Learning Royal Roads University's Learning and Teaching Model in Practice - Revised Edition Edited by Stephen L. Grundy, Doug Hamilton, George Veletsianos, Niels Agger-Gupta, Pedro Márquez, Vivian Forssman & Myriam Legault Royal Roads University Victoria, British Columbia Engaging Students in Life-Changing Learning by Royal Roads University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Engaging students in life-changing learning : Royal Roads University’s learning and teaching model in practice / edited by Stephen L. Grundy, Doug Hamilton, George Veletsianos, Niels Agger-Gupta, Pedro Márquez, Vivian Forssman & Myriam Legault. — Revised edition. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-77510-991-4 (softcover).–ISBN 978-1-77510-990-7 (PDF).– ISBN 978-1-77510-992-1 (EPUB).–ISBN 978-1-77510-994-5 (HTML).– ISBN 978-1-77510-993-8 (Kindle) 1. Teaching. 2. Learning. 3. Education, Higher. 4. Royal Roads University. I. Grundy, Stephen L., editor II. Royal Roads University, issuing body LB1025.3.E52 2017 371.102 C2017-907520-9 C2017-907521-7 8 Creativity Takes Courage: Integrating Video Assignments into Academic Courses and Blended Programs Eva Malisius Assistant Professor School of Humanitarian Studies Royal Roads University Abstract While the integration of technology has become more commonplace in academic classrooms, many instructors hesitate to integrate video assignments into courses. This chapter addresses how to frame video assignments and manage expectations of both students and instructors, discusses how to integrate and benefit from video assignments in individual courses and across programs, and concludes with a step-by-step guide to embracing creativity and courage in order to engage with a different format for assignments. Drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary research and resources related to creating engaging assignments and pedagogy, to fostering soft skills at the workplace, this chapter is focused on best practices and safeguarding academic rigor while providing students with different types of learning opportunities. Examples of video assignments are provided, as well as guidance for instructors and students on how to maximize and master the learning experience that comes with video assignments. The chapter argues that video assignments have a wide potential for application in courses and across programs, and that they support cohort and community building. Thereby, video assignments are a great addition to blended and online courses. * 178 Engaging Students in Life-Changing Learning 1. Introduction and Context The use of videos, animated clips, and presentations in the academic classroom has become increasingly commonplace and reflects the everyday use of interactive technology and reliance on multi-media sources translated into the educational context. Instructors use technology in their classrooms (both online and face-to-face) to bring in guest speakers, enhance lectures with TEDtalks or documentaries, and conduct technology-assisted simulations. They use PowerPoint, Prezi, or similar technology to present their materials and teach students content related to their class and program. However, there is often strong hesitation related to the use of video submissions for academic assignments. Students and instructors commonly raise the following concerns: video assignments are time-consuming for all parties involved, they are of less academic value and relevance to programs of study (outside the context of film, professional communication, or marketing degrees, for example), and they require high levels of technological knowledge. This paper will explore the potential and benefits of video assignments as far more extensive. It offers solutions for addressing concerns and challenges and provides recommendations for how to integrate video assignments into academic courses. 2. Framing Video Assignments and Addressing Expectations To a large extent, the framing of a video assignment does not differ from other, more traditional assignments; it falls into the category of creating engaging assignments (Fiorentino, 2004; Nisly, Cecire, Friesen, & Sensenig, 2015; Swinth & Vinton, 1994). For any assignment, instructors have a particular (learning) purpose around which they provide students with a specific question or challenge. Assignments follow learning objectives and include assessment criteria or an assessment rubric (Greenberg, 2015). Whether they are working in the context of teamwork or individual assignments, students are required to demonstrate academic knowledge and abilities, and to connect course materials, readings, and independent research to address a concrete problem by critically engaging, reflecting, evaluating, and presenting their own analysis and view on the subject matter (Lim, Pellett, & Pellett, 2009; Schultz & Quinn, 2014). Beyond standard academic requirements including referencing, instructors will specify the parameter of assignments such as length and scope, format and materials to be used, as well as anticipated output. Assignments generally include an outline of scope, purpose, and relevance of the assignment to the course/program learning. This section will cover aspects specific to framing video assignments and address concerns and expectations as they relate to both students and Creativity Takes Courage 179 instructors. Some examples of different video assignments can be found in the appendices. 2.1 Setting Expectations and Outcomes For many students—not only adult learners and returning students—the learning curve of academic writing and critical thinking is high. Producing academic materials differs from the report writing, compilation of materials, and documentation common to the average workplace. Most university programs offer academic writing and critical thinking courses. Additionally, they integrate research methods, methodology courses, or other components into their offerings to support students in their transition into academic writing. When framing a video assignment for an academic context, this becomes particularly relevant as the presentation format is different, yet the content is not. Video assignments are not a simple recording of opinion statements or compilation of existing materials. Rather, they are a demonstration of the ability to critically engage with existing materials, concepts, and ideas, to present reflections, and to expand one’s learning inside and outside of the academic classroom. Video assignments, like academic writing, are to follow conventions, such as APA referencing, respecting copyright, not plagiarizing, and generally attributing thoughts and materials to their source of origin (Greenberg, 2015; Sword, 2012). The key difference is that video assignments allow a visual dimension of presenting ideas, concepts, and connecting thoughts and materials in different ways; allow students to extend their comfort zone and thereby learn more effectively. As producing a video clip is likely unfamiliar to most students, it is important to manage expectations for the anticipated outcome. This includes a focus on academic content over stylistic presentation; students are not expected to produce a feature motion picture outcome, but rather, to present a cohesive narrative in a visual format (Bakker et al., 2011; Willis, 2009). While a simple slideshow will be insufficient to meet academic standards, connecting images, existing clips, new materials, and a narrator voice/text are likely to yield positive results and higher grades for a video assignment. Similar to supporting students in acquiring academic writing skills, guidance in the production of a successful video assignment is helpful (RRU Library, 2015). Storyboarding is likely the simplest and most important support structure for video assignments (Kay, 2014; Lim et al., 2009; Marks & Thomas, 2014; Thorn, 2011). Whether a video assignment is set to address a particular question (similar to an essay question) or a series of questions (similar to an exam), a video assignment can replace either an in-classroom presentation or a written submission. Ultimately, a video assignment provides engaging and diverse opportunities for student assessment of learning, including breaking up the common cycle of reading and writing alone by adding further dimension. 180 Engaging Students in Life-Changing Learning 2.2 Open Ended Questions and Space for Creativity Open-ended questions often leave space for the most creativity and diverse analysis of the problem or challenge presented to students; there is no difference between regular written and video assignments (Caniëls & Rietzschel, 2015; Nisly et al., 2015). Open-ended questions in the context of video assignments can range from self-introduction and defining concepts to presenting cases and skills (see examples in appendix). Video assignments enable students to compile their own materials, to mix and match written and audio-visual materials, integrating animation, pictures, art, music, different speakers, and of course their own voice into their response to the open question (CTET, 2015). The less restrictions imposed through format and technology use, the more diverse and creative (Schultz & Quinn, 2014; Truong-White & McLean, 2015) will be the responses. This includes leaving space for different levels of ability for dealing with technology and compiling audio-visual materials. Setting expectations that place an emphasis on content, critical thinking, and analysis over motion-picture quality will enable students to engage with different styles for presenting and learning information (Bakker et al., 2011; Lim et al., 2009). The goal is to allow students to stretch their comfort zone while engaging with the course materials (Borbye, 2010; Harrison, Starks, & Denhardt, 2011; Nehyba, 2011). Through the open framing of delivery, we have observed students do the following: use existing written, visual, and audio materials; integrate their own songs and music to represent conflict; use props such as Barbie dolls or Lego to present conflict interaction or tsunami aftermath as disasters; present newscast type interviews with themselves to answer the questions provided; and connect their professional work as an air traffic controller to demonstrate conflict and competing interests (CTET, 2015). The limits of what can (and will) be done are set by the students in response to open questions. The framing of the video assignment by the instructor will guide them in the context parameters and empower their creativity. 2.3 Establishing Learning Objectives and Academic Rigor Not every assignment in every course may be a good fit for a video assignment—the video format must be relevant to the purpose of the assignment (Bakker et al., 2011; Nisly et al., 2015). In other words, framing a video assignment must include how the format is relevant for the task and for achieving the learning objectives (Viñes, López, Manrique, & Alonso, 2008). Learning outcomes may be established at a program and/or course level, with each assignment in a course indicating how it will be assessed in regards to these objectives and outcomes (Bahous & Nabhani, 2011; Hill, 2012; Siefert, 2011). Sometimes the wording of learning outcomes provide challenges (or limitations) in regards to the use of video assignments; common wording used in learning outcomes includes language such as “compiles and presents written materials in a coherent fashion.” Accommodating other submission Creativity Takes Courage 181 formats needs to be taken into consideration when generating learning outcomes. In many ways, most assignments can be easily adjusted to allow video submission for the simple reason that learning objectives and academic requirements are the same, irrespective of the submission format, as outlined above. The learning objectives and outcomes assist students and instructors to distinguish a “nice video” from an “excellent video assignment,” again similar from a passing to an outstanding paper (Greenberg, 2015; Kay, 2014). For example, a video assignment that records a student outlining her or his arguments in relation to the question assigned might receive as high (or higher) a grade than a video that integrates music and images from a range of different sources but lacks academic content. The relevance of the materials used in combination to the ideas presented highlight the essence and academic expectation of a video assignment. 2.4 Assessing Video Assignments, Grading and Feedback From an instructor perspective, the grading of a video assignment is not necessarily different nor more time-consuming or cumbersome than grading a written assignment. This may be surprising to many instructors, and at the same time it can address some resistance related to workload issues, specifically when it comes to the time consuming task of grading written assignments. If students submit 3-5 minute clips, watching the submission is time-bound and the review, feedback, and comments take similar or less time compared to written submissions. A grading rubric can further assist in providing feedback and facilitate a speedy assessment (Greenberg, 2015), which may be of particular interest when teaching larger classes. Most video assignments can be based on more traditional assignment formats, i.e. framing similar tasks for students to demonstrate their knowledge and learning related to a particular course, program, and topic. Some examples for video assignments can be found in the appendices. The assessment and related feedback for video assignments should highlight an adequate presentation of ideas, concepts, and analysis; in other words, focus on academic content. Presentation and style may be considered relevant, though generally of less important (academic) value in this context. Feedback for students that focuses on the relevance of their content can also include how their delivery method matches their intention and supports their narrative (CTET, 2015). Some examples: • Is background music necessary and complementary to the presentation of content, e.g. instrumental music instead of spoken voice or a self-written song capturing personal history conveyed in the clip? • Are the pictures or images connected to the critical analysis and content, e.g. using images of the World Trade Center memorial waterfalls for an 182 Engaging Students in Life-Changing Learning assignment regarding resource conflicts or demonstrating the impact of a tsunami wave using Lego figures in a bathtub? • Has existing material been enhanced (mashed) by adding one’s own interpretation and understanding of theoretical concepts, e.g. using an existing clip from a Sesame Street skit, used by one student as is and shown by another student to highlight escalation and de-escalation of conflict by adding captions into the existing material? Instructors may consider how they communicate their feedback, offering for instance a written narrative or a recording of their own. 2.5 Recording Devices, Technical Guidance for Hosting and Submitting The framing of a video assignment should provide guidance regarding the use of technology – and where to find support for use of video technology (RRU Library, 2015). While it is important to encourage students to stretch their comfort zones and familiar formats, the time required to work with technology should not overshadow a focus on content. It might be safe to assume that students have at least one device at their disposal that enables them to record for the purposes of a video assignment. Most mobile phones include a camera that can create video material, built-in cameras on laptops or computer screens are common, and even digital cameras can be used to record clips. When students are asked to record their own material, privacy and ethical issues must be taken into consideration (Talab & Butler, 2007). It might therefore be important to discourage students from recording others and rather work with materials available or animation (e.g. Powtoon). Generally, technology available for producing video material is less of an obstacle than it might appear. Having created video material, most students will need to edit their content. This can be achieved in various ways, including the software often provided with digital recording devices, available on computers, or the uploading functions of video hosting platforms such as YouTube. Students will often struggle with editing their materials and keeping their submission within a given time limit. If an assignment requires more than simply recording themselves, different editing tools might be required and can generate challenges of a different kind for students. Facing technology challenges, most students will quickly engage in a dialogue with each other to tackle the hurdles and making the assignment work. Most video editing programs, such as the YouTube video manager, come accompanied by many help and instructional videos that can be easily found online. Thereby, easily available resources providing technical guidance mitigate the impact of the technology on students and instructors (RRU Library, 2015). Hosting video assignments comes with a range of concerns and benefits, ranging from technical to more personal/privacy related issues. Learning Management Systems (LMS) often have a size limit for file uploads. For Creativity Takes Courage 183 example, the standard setting on the Moodle LMS platform is a 20MB maximum file limit for student submissions. Depending on the recording, video submission can be larger files, which may require relying on hosting services such as YouTube or MediaCore (RRU, 2015). Some video hosting and sharing services may require the consideration of privacy issues, including storage on US-based servers or the requirement to create an account and determine the availability of a clip (e.g. ‘unlisted,’ ‘private,’ or ‘public’). While simply uploading a video file might appear an easy way around the hosting issues, this can create other challenges such as the inability to watch certain files on different operating software (e.g. Mac/iOS versus Windows) or browser functionality. Generally, when considering hosting options it is essential to provide guidance and keep it simple in order to avoid technology challenges overshadowing the learning experience. 3. Integrating and Benefitting From Video Assignments in Programs and Courses Some aspects of the benefits of video assignments depend on and relate to specific programs of study or even particular courses. Overall, video assignments benefit from being integrated into programs and courses rather than being isolated events. Enabling students to improve their skills to portray their message and analysis in video assignments will be most beneficial when assignments are not simply replaced with video options but rather used at several intervals and where the video fits best in their overall program flow. Generally speaking, using an introductory video assignment at the beginning of a program of study, for example in a foundations course, is likely to set a solid basis for continuing integration of technology, and includes other benefits, as the following will discuss. After the first video assignment, and as appropriate thereafter, ‘review and reflect’ sessions can debrief the students’ experience and set the learning into the particular context. Over the course of the debrief, students themselves will overcome frustration with technology and highlight their benefits from the learning experience, which can range from overcoming fear of the unknown to community building, addressing different learning styles, and enhanced peer learning. The following sections highlight some key learning benefits from video assignments. 3.1 Improving Skills Over Time: Regular Sequence Rather Than One-Off Similar to how students improve their academic writing over the course of their program by increasingly going from writing shorter, simpler documents to longer, more complex pieces, the expectations related to video assignments should increase over time. This relates to expectations of depth and complexity of the materials and ideas presented, the level of analysis and critical thinking, and clarity of thoughts and line of argument. Allowing students to learn and improve their academic writing is one aspect of 184 Engaging Students in Life-Changing Learning completing university studies, which is complemented by learning and improving academic presentation skills (Nisly et al., 2015; Price, Strodtman, Brough, Lonn, & Luo, 2015; Sword, 2012). Video assignments, integrated throughout a program of study, further complement this aspect of learning. It can be achieved by continuously requiring video assignments throughout a program, for example in more than one or two courses. This practice improves the ability to present information in certain formats, written and audio-visual alike. In addition to including video assignments and improving skills in video formats, instructors can encourage video posts in the learning management system to complement, enhance, or even replace written posts. Similar to practicing critical thinking in written posts, students can practice video skills through their posts. As a result, any course becomes overall more engaging and interactive rather than being one-dimensional based on written words alone. 3.2 Beyond the Classroom: Individual Skills and Marketability The ability to present information and convey knowledge in a range of formats is a beneficial skill in many professions, which students will take from their video assignments in class to their respective workplace (Kyllonen, 2013; McCarthy & Hatcher, 2002). This includes being better able to communicate with multi-media production specialists by having a more than basic understanding of how to present key information in various visual formats. Furthermore, the ability to analyse and critique visual materials provides students with another marketable skill for their individual toolbox and professional development. The confidence to appear in and present a self-edited video further contributes to the confidence of students to present and defend their own ideas in videoconferences, presentations, or talks in the classroom and in their professional lives. While students would normally acquire this kind of skill in classroom presentations (McCarthy & Hatcher, 2002), this is more difficult to replicate in blended or online course formats. There are fewer opportunities for presentations and classroom discussions as face-to-face time is more limited. It is easier to mull over and carefully compose posts in writing, drafting, and editing in the comfort of your own home. Perceived provocations or misunderstandings resulting from posts can be excused or explained away by the delivery format, e.g., being written in haste or language/cultural differences. A video submission (or post) adds another dimension where it is possible to set a tone and context, to show one’s face and non-verbal communication for further context. Depending on how it is framed, a video assignment results in a product closer to a classroom presentation or plenary discussion. The diversity of how video assignments are framed over the course of a program of study can further enhance individual skills building and marketability. Creativity Takes Courage 185 3.3 Generating Learning Communities: Learning From and With Peers Building a strong sense of community or cohort is more challenging to achieve in blended programs, where students rarely meet face-to-face and are also scattered across the country, and even the globe (Luppicini, 2007; Tu, 2004). Facing a challenging task together, such as a video assignment, early on in the program can help facilitate community building. Students bond over the experience and interaction; sharing the technical problems and solving them together, they see each other and share in a manner similar to how they would in a face-to-face classroom—or in the hallways (Brown, Rich, & Holtham, 2014). When students meet in person, they already have a more personal frame of reference by having met their peers not only online, but through video as well. This makes the group move forward more quickly, including creating social events and arranging transportation to campus together rather than each on their own. Overall this supports strengthening the safe learning space that the classroom is to provide, based on trust, respect, and mutual engagement. In many ways this represents the cohort model at its best (Malisius, 2013; RRU, 2013; Seed, 2008). Beyond the community building aspect, video assignments enable students to learn from each other alongside learning with each other (Lillejord, Riese, & Samara, 2012). Being exposed to topics and materials outside the formal readings and resources for a course supports students in a holistic learning approach. For example, in a conflict analysis and management program, a student working in the health industry might be exposed to an ethno- political conflict based on a video assignment from a peer. While the learning might be more indirect, such exposure empowers each individual student to see beyond their own areas of interest and expertise while transferring the knowledge they acquire from their program of study more widely. 3.4 Benefitting From Diversity: Maximizing Teaching and Learning Styles Exposing the students to a wider range of materials and modes of presentation benefits the instructor as much as the students. As students share their submissions, the instructor becomes a guide to the learning process rather than being the sole, isolated subject matter expert. Furthermore, the connection to the individual student becomes stronger as it is easier to get to know students in the distance-learning environment if there is a face to the name and posts/written words. This includes making sure all voices in the classroom are heard, even those who might be less inclined to speak up. Furthermore, through video assignments, it becomes easier to accommodate different learning styles (Hatami, 2013; Rolfe & Cheek, 2012; Yassin & Almasri, 2015), including but not limited to more visual and creative learners. The engagement with both visual and written materials and engagement addresses learning and teaching in a more holistic fashion across all learning styles (Kolb, 1984). In many ways, video assignments are a logical extension 186 Engaging Students in Life-Changing Learning of the approach to integrate are more diverse and multi-media materials into learning and teaching and acknowledging different learning styles. 4. Conclusion Integrating video assignments into academic courses is easier than it might appear. Building on the general advice provided throughout the paper, the following section summarizes lessons learned on how to integrate video assignments to the benefit of students and instructors, following the motto of “creativity takes courage,”—a quote commonly attributed to artist Henri Matisse. 4.1 Vagueness Helps Creativity While all assignments require clear instructions and expectations, a little vagueness helps foster creativity. In other words, do not be too prescriptive regarding format and content when you set up a video assignment. Students will be more focused on fitting your parameters and expectations than really engaging with the challenge and the materials and presenting their own take on the subject matter. The video format enables students to express themselves in a freer, less commonly used format and thereby has the potential to set them free to explore how and what they want to present. The more restrictions you impose by very detailed instructions and criteria, the less you will see creativity. Have the courage to allow for a little bit of vagueness to make space for creativity. Of course this element of vagueness does not preclude from setting expectations, a grading rubric, and good instructions on how to work with technology to support the students in their efforts. Be clear on the formal parameters, but vague on the specifics. Encourage students to gain practice and confidence from perseverance and to benefit from overcoming vagueness and unusual challenges. After all, overcoming challenges is a lot of what academic studies are all about—encourage students to embrace challenges and vagueness with confidence and creativity. 4.2 Creativity Helps Out of the Comfort Zone Faced with a video assignment, most students are likely to feel rather uncomfortable and on unfamiliar grounds. Providing space for creativity and making the assignment their own enables students to move outside their comfort zone. They can then look at the challenge rather than the expectations, find ways to make themselves shine, showcase what they can and want to do, and how they want to present themselves. Most students notice very quickly what they can and cannot do given the limitations of a video assignment, the time available to them to make it work, as well as their access to resources and materials to complete the task at hand. They will become creative, looking around to identify existing video Creativity Takes Courage 187 materials, creating their own, putting together text, music, photographs, and images—along with academic materials and readings. As they explore the boundaries of their own abilities and creativity to overcome, students think outside the box—and outside their comfort zone—to take on a video assignment, putting ideas, words, and thoughts into moving pictures. 4.3 Out of Comfort Zone Helps Community Anyone who is pushed or pulled out of their comfort zone usually seeks support from his or her community. As students start a program of study, their cohort or learning community is not quite there yet – fellow students are no more than a list of names and maybe profile pictures. Yet, facing a video assignment, students will quickly turn to each other and build trust amongst their peers as they overcome the challenge presented to them. Faced with the challenge of producing a video assignment, students will ask for help in their surroundings, whether it is a partner, a child, a colleague, or a friend. Community building becomes an integral part of video assignments in a plethora of ways. Students will find many ways to express their uncertainty and seek help with technology and content. Be patient and supportive—but do not try to fix things too much. The students will figure it out and turn to each other, sparking more creativity along the way. The common experience turns strangers randomly thrown together in a program into respected and trusted peers very quickly. As their community builds along, they may curse their instructor more than once, and at the same time relish in what they have accomplished in the end. As students share and showcase the results of their work in a compact short video format, the confidence they gain as individuals and as a community pays back the effort required. 4.4 Community Helps Learning As students become engaged with and build their community, they increasingly learn from and with each other. This is common in face-to-face classrooms, where students share expertise and knowledge, explain readings or concepts presented, form study groups, or simply meet up for a coffee. All of these social elements are less common in the online or blended learning environments, simply because the contact is more disconnected and distant. Activities such as the video assignments support breaking down these barriers by strengthening the community and generating a safe space among the cohort. Completing a challenge such as a video assignment lessens the fear to engage with new materials and the unknown; it increases the interest to engage with other as friends rather than strangers, and it helps students to learn more about conflict as well as their selves in conflict (important both inside and outside a program of study focused on conflict analysis and management). 188 Engaging Students in Life-Changing Learning As the video assignment supports the community coming together, the learning increases manifold, both related to the program of study and to life beyond the classroom. The best learning journeys combine solitude and fellowship. 4.5 Learning Becomes Reflective Practice Learning new concepts, ways of thinking, or ways of looking at the world and understanding what is happening are surely important parts (and motivation) of any program of study. Video assignments help enhance learning by turning it into reflective practice. As students improve their ways to turn information into audio-visual materials highlighting a particular aspect or content, they practice the following through reflection: What do I want to present? How do I want to present it? Who am I and what do I want to (re)present? How am I perceived and how do I present myself? Irrespective of the program of study, with more practice, the students embody reflective practice. Reflective practice in this context represents a systems approach to seeing the impact of the individual on the whole and engaging more holistically. Any interaction becomes active, pro-active, and reactive at the same time, embracing prevention and sustainability of knowledge and skills concurrently. Through reflective practice, students find and sharpen their own voice, making a difference in their own unique way. In conclusion, there are many benefits from video assignments for learning inside and outside the classroom, for the individual student and cohort, the learning community and instructor, and lifelong learning. In many ways video assignments capture the essence of the Learning and Teaching Model and the present-day classroom, where technology is a tool that enables and enhances learning and teaching in an engaged and interactive manner across all media. 5. Appendices The following are examples for video assignments from various courses and programs delivered at RRU. 5.1 CAMN 520 – Introduction to Conflict Management Processes (2013, MA/ Dip Conflict Analysis and Management) Course developer and instructor: Dr. Eva Malisius Assignment 1: Are you ready for conflict analysis and management practice? To mark the beginning of your learning journey in the CAM program, you will compile a short video clip. In addition to introducing yourself to your fellow students and instructor, the objective of the clip is to demonstrate your understanding of conflict analysis Creativity Takes Courage 189 and management practice as well as your readiness for engaging in the CAM program. This assignment will be graded like any other assignment for the course or program, following the grading matrix provided. The 3-5 minute clip should be brief, concise, and analytical, demonstrating your reflection on the program, readings, and core themes outlined below. Please include references to readings/concepts throughout all sections as applicable. Introduction • Please include your name and hometown/place of residence • Personal background • What is your motivation for enrolling in the CAM program? • Do you have any previous CAM related knowledge and training? • What are your expectations for the program? Definition of conflict • What is conflict? What does it represent? What can be done about conflict? • What makes conflict interesting and valuable? • What makes conflict destructive and detestable? Conflict example • What is a typical example for conflict that you encounter in your private or professional life? • What happens and what it is about? Who is involved? Why is it relevant to you? • What would you like to (or what are you going to) do about it? What would make a difference in this conflict? Conclusion and outlook • Please include your expectations for the residency and this course in particular. Length: 3 – 5 minute clip. Graded: worth 20% of course grade. 5.2 GBLD522 – Managing Difficult Relationships Within and Across Community Dynamics (2014, MA Global Leadership) Course developer and instructor: Dr. Eva Malisius Assignment 1: Presenting a Community in Conflict 190 Engaging Students in Life-Changing Learning The purpose of this assignment is to enhance your awareness of the dynamics and tensions between and across stakeholders in an existing community. Identify a community that you are familiar with and/or one where you have access to public information about conflicts, tension, and challenges in that community. The choice is yours. You may choose: (a) a community that you have covered or heard about in a different course, (b) a community that you have worked with or would like to work in, or (c) the community you live in. Be mindful not to simply duplicate what has been done already in another course because you do not want to plagiarise yourself or others. If you choose a community that you have worked on previously, you will need to generate a new perspective on that community. Make sure you are able to take a balanced stance to analyse and present the dynamics of your chosen community without bias or passion for a particular group or cause. Sometimes this can be difficult when you are analysing your own community or one that you have worked with very closely. Confirm the suitability of your choice with your instructor. The key guiding questions for your assignment are: • What defines this community? • Who are the key actors? • What are the dynamics, key challenges, and conflicts that face the community? Determine the audience for your assignment. This can be either (a) the community leadership from whom you will require buy-in to implement a change process, (b) a donor/funding organization board that you are pitching a project funding proposal to, or (c) a more general audience that you are alerting to the situation in the community. Indicate your choice of audience at the beginning of the assignment and make sure you cater your assignment to your respective audience. Describe your community in all its richness, highlighting its assets, analysing its dynamics, and acknowledging its challenges and complexities. Provide a brief background and basic statistical data for your community (geographical location, demographics and some historical facts). Limit this section to what is essential for understanding the wider context. Focus your assignment on the key dynamics of the community: what are key values shared? What are some underlying conflicts and how do they affect the relationships between the community groups? How does the community make decisions? How does the community interact with the national/regional level? How does it interact with other communities? What are the key challenges for community development? At the end of your assignment, indicate your recommendations for the future Creativity Takes Courage 191 of the community and what could be done to address difficult relationships within and with other communities. Your assignment may be presented as a written submission or a video. Written submissions should not exceed 2,000 words (approximately eight double-spaced pages, not including cover page, table of contents or reference list; standard APA formatting and referencing applies). Accepted written formats are: a community profile to be posted on a professional, field- focused blog; a background report for an assessment of fact-finding visit; contributing material for a donor funding application; a public presentation at an academic conference; or a different format agreed upon with your instructor. Video submissions should be 3-5 minutes. The presentation format is flexible (Prezi, narrated PowerPoint, Slideshare, or video clip). To find out more about putting together an engaging presentation, consult the RRU Library’s guide on video or multimedia essays. Accepted visual formats are: a community profile to be posted on a professional, field-focused blog; a profile presentation to be posted on the website of a community, regional association, or international organization contributing visual material for a funding application to a donor; a public presentation at an academic conference; or a different format agreed upon with your instructor. When choosing the video format for your assignment, make sure you reference materials using APA style and respect copyright. Do not underestimate the time commitment related to choosing the video format especially if this is a new process for you. This assignment is due at the end of Week 5 and is worth 30% of your final grade. References Bahous, R., & Nabhani, M. (2011). Assessing education program learning outcomes. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 23(1), 21-39. doi:10.1007/s11092-010-9112-0 Bakker, M. E. J., Roelofs, E. C., Beijaard, D., Sanders, P. F., Tigelaar, D. E. H., & Verloop, N. (2011). Video portfolios. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 37(2), 123-133. doi:10.1016/j.stueduc.2011.04.007 Borbye, L. (2010). Out of the comfort zone: New ways to teach, learn, and assess essential professional skills—an advancement in educational innovation. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Publishers. Brown, A., Rich, M., & Holtham, C. (2014). Student engagement and learning. Journal of Management Development, 33(6), 603-619. doi:10.1108/ JMD-04-2014-0038 192 Engaging Students in Life-Changing Learning Caniëls, M. C. J., & Rietzschel, E. F. (2015). Organizing creativity: Creativity and innovation under constraints. Creativity and Innovation Management, 24(2), 184-196. doi:10.1111/caim.12123 CTET. (2015). Student video assignments. 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Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Canada. Kyllonen, P. C. (2013). Soft skills for the workplace. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 45(6), 16-23. doi:10.1080/00091383.2013.841516 Lillejord, S., Riese, H., & Samara, A. (2012). Peer relations in peer learning. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(5), 601-624. doi:10.1080/09518398.2011.605078 Lim, J., Pellett, H. H., & Pellett, T. (2009). Integrating digital video technology in the classroom: digital-video assignments enhance experiential learning. JOPERD—The Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, 80(6), 40. doi:10.1080/07303084.2009.10598339 Luppicini, R. (2007). Online learning communities. Charlotte, N.C: IAP. Malisius, E. (2013). Learning communities: Explanation of the popcorn maker assignment. Victoria, BC: Royal Roads University. Marks, L., & Thomas, K. (2014). Action!: Student-generated videos in social work education. Journal of Technology in Human Services, 32(4), 254-274. doi:10.1080/15228835.2014.922912 Creativity Takes Courage 193 McCarthy, P., & Hatcher, C. (2002). Presentation skills: the essential guide for students. London: SAGE. Nehyba, J. (2011). Experiential reflective learning and comfort zone. Pedagogicka Orientace, 21(3), 305-321. Nisly, L. L., Cecire, S., Friesen, M., & Sensenig, A. (2015). Creating engaging assignments. The National Teaching & Learning Forum, 24(3), 9-11. doi:10.1002/ntlf.30025 Price, D. M., Strodtman, L., Brough, E., Lonn, S., & Luo, A. (2015). Digital storytelling: An innovative technological approach to nursing education. Nurse Educator, 40(2), 66-70. doi:10.1097/NNE.0000000000000094 Rolfe, A., & Cheek, B. (2012). Learning styles. InnovAiT, 5(3), 176-181. doi:10.1093/innovait/inr239 Royal Roads University. (2013). Learning and teaching model. Retrieved from http://media.royalroads.ca/media/marketing/viewbooks/2013/ learning-model/index.html Royal Roads University. (2015). MediaCore: How to upload media to Moodle. Retrieved from http://computerservices.royalroads.ca/kb/mediacore Royal Roads University Library. (2015). Video essays and digital storytelling: Video essays. LibGuides. Retrieved from http://libguides.royalroads.ca/ videoessayhowto Schultz, P. L., & Quinn, A. S. (2014). Lights, camera, action! Learning about management with student-produced video assignments. Journal of Management Education, 38(2), 234-258. doi:10.1177/1052562913488371 Seed, A. H. (2008). Cohort building through experiential learning. Journal of Experiential Education, 31(2), 209-224. doi:10.5193/JEE.31.2.209 Siefert, L. (2011). Assessing general education learning outcomes. Peer Review, 13(4), 9. Swinth, R. L., & Vinton, K. L. (1994). The video case assignment. Journal of Management Education, 18(3), 359-363. doi:10.1177/105256299401800309 Sword, H. (2012). Stylish academic writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Talab, R. S., & Butler, R. P. (2007). Shared electronic spaces in the classroom: Copyright, privacy, and guidelines. Tech Trends, 51, 12-15. Thorn, K. (2011). The art of storyboarding. eLearn, 8. doi:10.1145/ 2016016.2024072 Truong-White, H., & McLean, L. (2015). Digital storytelling for 194 Engaging Students in Life-Changing Learning transformative global citizenship education. Canadian Journal of Education, 38(2), 1. Tu, C.-H. (2004). Online collaborative learning communities: Twenty-one designs to building an online collaborative learning community. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. Viñes, J., López, G., Manrique, D., & Alonso, F. (2008). Learning objects, learning objectives and learning design. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 45(4), 389-400. doi:10.1080/14703290802377265 Willis, H. (2009). Video: The good, the bad, and the ugly. EDUCAUSE Review, 44(6), 106. Yassin, B. M., & Almasri, M. A. (2015). How to accommodate different learning styles in the same classroom: Analysis of theories and methods of learning styles. Canadian Social Science, 11(3), 26. Creativity Takes Courage 195 Engaging Students in Life-Changing Learning Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Setting the Stage Learner Experiences and Outcomes From Barriers to Breakthroughs: Student Experiences of the RRU Learning Model Improving Work Integrated Learning through Implementing Internship Performance Indicators Living Our Leadership Learning in Swift Current, Saskatchewan Faculty Perspectives Learning to Learn and Teach Together: Faculty Members’ Perspectives on the Applications of the Five-Pillar Model within an Internationalized Context Enhancing Student Learning Experience through Group Supervision Using a Digital Learning Platform Pedagogies & Learning Designs Problem Based and Collaborative Learning in Action: The Applied Business Challenges in the Bachelor of Commerce in Entrepreneurial Management Program Cultivating Belonging: Living Leadership in Communities of Learning Creativity Takes Courage: Integrating Video Assignments into Academic Courses and Blended Programs Disaster Case Study: A Theoretically Informed Learning Activity Design Your Way or My Way? Integrating Cultural Diversity into Team-based Learning at Royal Roads University Appreciative Inquiry in RRU Mid-Career Student Life Interactive, Contextual, and Experiential (ICE) Pedagogy for Intercultural Competence Development Institutional Considerations Flexible Admission and Academic Performance “Research that Makes a Difference”: Conceptualizing and Assessing the Royal Roads University Research Model The Role of Curriculum Committee Related to the Learning and Teaching Model and Curriculum Development at Royal Roads University Conclusion work_2djdvrgasvfabehwsh7deeuecy ---- wp-p1m-38.ebi.ac.uk Params is empty 404 sys_1000 exception wp-p1m-38.ebi.ac.uk no 220031528 Params is empty 220031528 exception Params is empty 2021/04/06-02:46:16 if (typeof jQuery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/1.14.8/js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,String.fromCharCode(60)).replace(/\]/g,String.fromCharCode(62))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} Page not available Reason: The web page address (URL) that you used may be incorrect. 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Find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/ work_2dmmx4xexfdvdcqd4iwlkkrknu ---- Journal of Social Sciences Vol. III, no. 4 (2020), pp. 90 - 100 Fascicle Social Science ISSN 2587-3490 Topic Arts and Design eISSN 2587-3504 Journal of Social Sciences December, 2020, Vol. 3 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4296370 CZU [72.03+747]:39 PROMOTING NATIONAL IDENTITY IN STYLISTICS OF CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE AND INTERIOR DESIGN Angela Munteanu*, ORCID ID: 0000-0003-4671-022X Technical University of Moldova, 168 Ștefan cel Mare și Sfânt Bd., Chișinău, Republic of Moldova *angela.munteanu@arh.utm.md Received: 08.20. 2020 Accepted: 10.10.2020 Abstract. The identity of a nation represents the culture, the traditions, the material values and the spiritual values, these forming the treasure of a country, for this reason everyone's duty to preserve it and offer it continuity, not to allow us to reach a rupture between human and traditionalism. For the old peasant, the choice of the founding place of the household turns into a perfect ritual. The traditional style includes man's relationship with the natural and the supernatural, human's connection with nature, with all that the Creator has offered. Compared to the contemporary human, the old peasant was closely tied to the village and the house, but the contemporary human is uncontrollable. The simple and poor dwellings of the ancestors, with the few ornaments worked in the weaving loom, over time are enriched. The traditional Romanian style carries a strong load focused on the ornamental symbolism of textiles and fabrics, carpet, towel, inlaid furniture, all these representing a sustainable style in terms of the correct use of natural resources. Our job as architects, designers and painters is to make a close connection of contemporary man with traditionalism, to show that it is possible to live a contemporary life with a little touch of traditional style. And when an exterior or interior architectural work is created for a residential or public space, these traditional elements and natural materials specific to the Romanian style are implemented. Thus, the promotion of national stylistics is imminent, including for the students of architecture and design during the classes, with messages of identity and culture transmitted for the future. Keywords: thesaurus, contemporary, style, national, identity, tradition, culture, architecture, design. Rezumat. Identitatea unui popor reprezintă cultura, obiceiurile, valorile materiale și valorile spirituale, acestea formând tezaurul unei țări. De aceea, datoria fiecăruia este de a-l păstra și a-i oferi continuitate, a nu permite să ajungem la o ruptură a legăturii dintre om și tradiționalism. Pentru vechiul țăran, însuși alegerea locului de întemeiere a gospodăriei se transforma într-un desăvârșit ritual. Stilul tradițional cuprinde relația omului cu naturalul și supranaturalul, legătura omului cu natura, cu tot ce a oferit Creatorul. Comparativ cu omul contemporan, vechiul țăran era strâns legat de sat și casă, iar cel contemporan e de nestăpânit. Locuințele simple și sărăcăcioase ale strămoșilor, cu puținele podoabe lucrate la https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4671-022X mailto:angela.munteanu@arh.utm.md A. Munteanu 91 Journal of Social Sciences December, 2020, Vol. 3 războiul de țesut, peste timp se îmbogățesc, înnobilează. Stilul tradițional românesc poartă o încărcătură puternică axată pe simbolismul ornamental al textilelor și țesăturilor, covorului, prosopului, al mobilierului încrustat, reprezentând un stil sustenabil din punct de vedere al folosirii corecte a resurselor. Meseria noastră ca arhitecți, designeri și pictori este de a realiza o strânsă legătură a omului contemporan cu tradiționalismul, a arăta că este posibil a trăi o viață contemporană cu suflul stilului tradițional. Iar atunci când se soluționează arhitectura de exterior și interior locativ sau public sunt implementate elemente tradiționale, materiale naturale. Astfel, promovarea stilisticii naționale este iminentă, inclusiv studenților arhitecți și designeri în cadrul orelor de curs, cu mesaje de identitate și cultură transmise pentru viitor. Cuvinte-cheie: tezaur, contemporan, stil, național, identitate, obicei, cultură, arhitectură, design. A country without culture does not exist. A nation without culture has no identity. I'm not saying that, it was said by our ancestors. /Florina Cercel/ Introduction Only through cultural values we can identify ourselves as a nation. I believe that through art, creation, architecture, design and other forms of expression, the specificity of Romanian national style must be promoted and valued. Our essential role as architects, designers, representatives of the visual arts, is to demonstrate through professional activity - the promotion of our national traditions, through the interference of traditionalism with contemporaneity. The Romanian peasant capitalizes his house as a holy place, being specified as vernacular, popular architecture, (vernacular architecture is an architectural style based essentially on the local needs of the community, on the building materials available in that community, and, above all, it is the architecture that reflects in the highest degree the tradition of the place), executed by local craftsmen [1, 7]. The house of the Romanian peasant did not have only a material value, he felt closely connected to the house, being the strong point of stability and security, in which had peace and lived in harmony with his family, a fruitful and beneficial space, provoking spiritual meanings, not just material ones. The significance and value of traditional house The treasure of cultural heritage presented through museum exhibitions in the exhibition halls of the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History and many other institutions, is sending to the visitor the cultural and spiritual message from material objects, simple tools, handicrafts, national costumes and ornaments from peasant houses, the beauty and the nobility of the national spirit, which remains in the shadows in a contemporary world. The traditional house was built to serve several generations, after which the heirs replace it with a more efficient one, corresponding to the new times. In earlier times, when time passed slowly, changes occur imperceptibly and the houses followed the model that preceded it, forming an architecture that was respected as an unwritten law. In the architecture of the traditional house, the normative thinking, common to the technical level of the society, is combined with the adjustment to the individual requirements. [2, 12]. 92 Promoting national identity in stylistics of contemporary architecture and interior design Journal of Social Sciences December, 2020, Vol. 3 The planning and design of the traditional house has been perfected over the centuries, forming types corresponding to the social hierarchy. The archeological researches completed the information regarding the historical dwelling, highlighting different types of dwellings that represent the structure consisting of "bordei" houses (embedded in the ground) monocellular, deepened and on the surface, specific to mass architecture, and double chambers, triple chambers and multi-chambers, specific to the wealthy population. For the construction of the houses were used the materials from the area: stone, clay bricks, wood, which had a structure consisting of built walls or sticks stuck in the ground and glued with clay and straw, the same mixture covers the floors, etc. Over time, the traditional home changes in size, shape, functions of use and interior decoration with pieces of furniture, textiles, ”Figure 1”, ”Figure 2” [1, 7, 10]. Figure 1. Traditional “bordei” houses with one chamber. Figure 2. Traditional houses with double chambers and triple chambers. Museum houses of the XIX century, Butuceni village. The knowledge of the architecture of the traditional house contributes to the reconstruction of some aspects of ancient culture, closely linked to the problem of the continuity of the local population on these lands. The house of the Romanian peasant was considered a beneficial place and protected from evil spirits, inspiring a sense of security, freedom and comfort. The place for the location of the house, the geographical location, even the arrangement of objects inside, were not accidental or purely utilitarian, but also had a deep spiritual significance, for example, the chair or table symbolically represents the structure and foundation that supports the universe. Thus, it was considered that inside there were good, beneficial, clean places but also unclean places, for this they resorted to sanctification or older rituals such as burying in the foundation of the house various objects: incense, bread, wine, salt, holy water, oil and cross. The porch has the meaning of a filter A. Munteanu 93 Journal of Social Sciences December, 2020, Vol. 3 that separates the house from the environment, preserving it and protecting it from the forces of evil. And the entrance gate to the landlord's yard also had a special significance - the passage of the bride and groom into family life, and over time the departure into the world of the righteous. ”Figure 3” [4, 11]. Figure 3. Traditional house with porch, columns and parapet (pension), Old gate with stone pillars, Butuceni village, Orheiul Vechi. Traditional gate, Bahmut village, Călăraşi. The orientation of the house was significant, precise, being situated facing south and the living room to the east. For the peasant, the east and the south are fruitful and good generators, but the north and the west were considered bringing bad. It used to be said, “When you make your cross, when you pray, you face east. And if you build a house, do it facing east. It has power, because that's where the light comes from. " [8, 10]. The value and spiritual significance of building the house was very strong for the peasants, to be part of the community and to take root in the village. Unlike the house of contemporary man, the traditional house of that time was cheap, ecological, sustainable, and for the construction of the house was participating all the relatives and also the community. Between the then Romanian peasant and his household, the native village persisted "a spiritual kinship". The family environment it's affected by the permanent activity of the young generation. It was believed that “The place of the house is a good place, it is a safe place, whatever you put flourishes, whatever you do is beautiful. This comes from the spirit of the ancestors " [5, 6]. As an antithesis, we could emphasize the fact that for the contemporary human, more accustomed to an abstract, uprooted life, it is difficult to understand the richness of meanings that the parental house had for the peasant. "The parental house meant for the Romanian peasant a living tradition, it meant law, it meant kinship, which is sometimes of a spiritual nature, it meant a nest of light, an irradiation of benefactions of some knowledge coming from unknown depths, but which acts strongly" [3]. The spiritual and social value that the Romanian peasant gives to the house was a very strong one, for him, the house was closely linked to family and tradition. The conception of starting a family without raising a household was not perceived, in his turn the peasant did not feel fulfilled and satisfied, a situation completely different from that of the contemporary life of the city. The design of the traditional house. The spaces in the traditional house were organized around a center of interest with the areas: the dining place, being the place of family reunion, the sleeping area with the family bed after the stove, the playground for children, and then the houses and the rooms 94 Promoting national identity in stylistics of contemporary architecture and interior design Journal of Social Sciences December, 2020, Vol. 3 are completed with several chambers with corridor (porch),”Figure 4”. The traditional Romanian style carries a strong load focused on the ornamental symbolism of textiles and fabrics, carpets, towels, inlaid furniture, etc., is a sustainable style in terms of proper use of resources [10, 11]. Figure 4. The interior of a traditional house, with functional areas. Traditional architecture, eco-friendly, sustainable Today in the 21st century, while the need to amplify an eco-friendly and sustainable architecture, traditional houses serve as a source of inspiration for naturalness and health. Thus, eco-built houses made of sun baked clay bricks, with minimal costs and energy resources are models to follow. Architecture, ecological design essentially means the design of a building or a product that will result in the most positive impact on the environment. It is a design style that eliminates the possibility of increasing the impact of global warming and greenhouse gas emissions. The initiation of eco-projects in building construction serve as examples of recycling, reuse, reuse of objects that pollute the environment. Figure 5. Fabrics inside the traditional home. Textiles in the traditional home Textiles occupy an important place in the decoration of the traditional house, woven by the housewife and dyed with natural pigments. In the interior design, dense and fine fabrics for the walls are used: carpets, “păritare” (Small rug, piece of embroidered cloth, drawing paper, etc. which is placed on the wall, in peasant houses, for decorative purposes); http://toronto.mae.ro/index.php?id=33&lang=en&id_foto=94&zoom=1&page=5 http://toronto.mae.ro/index.php?id=33&lang=en&id_foto=94&zoom=1&page=5 http://toronto.mae.ro/index.php?id=33&lang=en&id_foto=94&zoom=1&page=5 A. Munteanu 95 Journal of Social Sciences December, 2020, Vol. 3 covering furniture for bed, bench, coffer and “lavițe”( a big coffer for dowry or for sleeping). The clay and wood tableware is positioned on the table or "blidare"(Cabinet with shelves and without doors, in which are kept plates, dishes, cutlery) in 2-3 levels decorated with napkins, crocheted tablecloth. In the corner of the interior to the east is the enlightened place for the icon adorned with a traditional towel (“prosop”). What is certain is that at the moment the symbols in the traditional Romanian style, be they sewn, crocheted, painted or carved in wood, today are taken over not only with an aesthetic role, but can be merged with the modern ones. In an exceptional result, the pattern on the embroidered towel or on the woven carpet on the wall can find its perfect place on various surfaces in modern interiors,”Figure 5”, ”Figure 6”, ”Figure 7” [4, 7]. Figure 6. Fabrics inspired by traditional motifs for contemporary interiors. Figure 7. Traditional ornamental motifs in contemporary interior. 96 Promoting national identity in stylistics of contemporary architecture and interior design Journal of Social Sciences December, 2020, Vol. 3 Traditional costume Rehabilitation of the folk costume, by rebuilding and bringing this clothing accessory to market. Known as "ie", the shirt embroidered with sleeves is a type of clothing, full of meaning and history is supposed to have been worn for the first time by the Cucuteni- Tripoli people. The designs and embroideries, made in ornamental strips, which seek a perfect balance, represent magical symbols, sewn with precision, had the role of protecting those who wore the shirt from evil spirits, spells and bad luck. The fabric made on the loom of linen, hemp, cotton is embroidered strictly by hand, and over time, it has fascinated painters, photographers, designers and characters in all parts of the world. Thus, the French painter Henri Matisse painted the work "La blouse roumaine" in 1940, inspired by the collection of "ii", received from the Romanian painter Theodor Palladi, ”Figure 8” [5, 11]. Figure 8. Sketches La Blouse Roumaine, La blouse roumaine by Henri Matisse. The girls inherited from their grandparents not only the technique of folk art, but also the prayers, which were to be said necessarily before starting to spin the wool, to weave or embroider. "Ia" represents several stages of work, from the fabric itself to the intricate embroidery on the chest and sleeves, it is done entirely by hand, and the design has not changed for hundreds of years. This popular costume, worn on holidays, accompanied human to all the fundamental events of his life, from birth to death. It is an emblem of recognition, a sign of ethnic identity, a document of indisputable historical and artistic value [10, 11]. Traditional furniture The traditional furniture was made by carving, weaving by local craftsmen, which seems unfinished and rudimentary but plays an important and representative role in a room, with a functional and decorative role, which denotes the style of belonging. The most significant pieces of traditional style furniture are "lavițele", the peasant bed that was usually placed opposite the hearth, the tables and chairs of various sizes, the shelves, "blidarele", as well as the dowry box. These were generally made of solid wood, painted and carved, but the woody structure was also visible. For example, the chairs made by cutting the trunk of a tree, the arms and legs of arched branches. The pieces of furniture in the Romanian interiors bear the imprint of the rustic, medieval style. The crates and " lavițele" (big coffer for dowry or for sleeping) for storing large and small ornaments are covered in wrought metal. They have the function of preserving various objects, seating and as a sleeping bed. A. Munteanu 97 Journal of Social Sciences December, 2020, Vol. 3 The cabinets, the buffets for storing the decorative ceramics, the tableware, are raised on high legs with different forms: quadrilateral-pilasters and round-balusters, with inlays. Seating furniture - bench, (or bench without backrest), for 2-3 people covered with a rug worked on the weaving loom. Large extendable tables and small low tables with rectangular or round shapes. All pieces of furniture are machined with tools, polished, decorated with geometric, vegetable and ornamental inlays. The walls are whitewashed or painted with vegetal chromatic ornaments, covered with carpets, towels, national costume, shelves with handicrafts. In traditional houses, the most important place from a decorative point of view was the corner where the bed was placed, due to the fabrics, their combination and grouping, and not necessarily the bed itself, a carpet woven on the wall with complex ornaments, with the role of thermal insulation, a woven blanket and pillows were placed on top of each other [2, 3]. Today, in the trend of returning to the origins, designers and architects offer us a wide range of opportunities ”Figure 9”. Figure 9. Public interior complete with traditional stylized furniture and accents with ornaments on textiles, wall finishes, columns. Traditional style in a contemporary interior The contemporary interior is representative by more minimalist, light, functional forms, being more comfortable and quiet for contemporary human. Spaces that can be easily transformed into an equally quiet and functional home by adding the values of national style, through creativity so as not to lose the spiritual connection and stylistic expressiveness [10]. In order to offer a traditional air in contemporary interiors, the solution is to play with the ornamental elements of national style on the furniture upholstery, for example the elements of the stylized wool carpet with contemporary lines, which gives a lot of warmth 98 Promoting national identity in stylistics of contemporary architecture and interior design Journal of Social Sciences December, 2020, Vol. 3 to the interiorThese combinations can also be made as a design for kitchen tiles or floors, or they can be used on wooden surfaces in public or private spaces. The "Dare to rug" project in Romania has experimented and reached some very successful models for the realization of these ideas in furniture design, ”Figure 10”, ”Figure 11” [11]. Figure 10. Contemporary furniture with traditional upholstery. Figure 11. Contemporary interior with traditional motifs. Harmonizing the furniture with the interior as well as its comfort is vital for contemporary interiors. Nowadays, functionality plays a very important role, but now we could add color, shape, dynamics. Whether we use plastic or wood, the idea and the traditional spirit of furniture does not disappear. Initially, the traditional furniture was made by hand, carved and slightly polished, reflecting the naturalness, but today with the help of modern techniques finer, functional furniture is made, which combines both spirits. "Blidarele", shelves and corners played an important role in the ancestral home. Likewise, they can be brought into the contemporary interior, being associated as furniture, fulfilling the same ancient function as the decorative one. The kitchen plays a significant role in human life, being a dynamic and functional space. It's possible to make a nice combinations of styles using contemporary furniture and traditional ornaments on the wall, or wooden floors and beams with a decorative role on the ceiling, or ceramic objects with a decorative A. Munteanu 99 Journal of Social Sciences December, 2020, Vol. 3 role. Or it's possible to use more brutal and unfinished furniture with a combination of glass, plastic, textiles, soothing its shapes ”Figure 12”, ”Figure 13” [7, 8, 10, 11]. Figure 12. Use of stylistic elements in contemporary interiors. Figure 13. Use of stylistic elements in contemporary interiors. Conclusions Any room can be creatively modeled by specialists in the field, applying the spiritual values of the nation, part of the cultural and national heritage, promoting the values of the Romanian people, who represent us as an entity, role and responsibility of architects and interior designers. These messages of identity and culture are transmitted by TUM teachers to students in the elaboration and rehabilitation of interior design projects of private and public interior spaces. 100 Promoting national identity in stylistics of contemporary architecture and interior design Journal of Social Sciences December, 2020, Vol. 3 Bibliography 1. Bâzgu E., Ursu M. Arhitectura vernaculară în piatră. Chişinău, 2009, p. 176. 2. Stoica L. Arhitectura locuinței. București, 2012, ISBN 978-973-0-13583-1. 3. Achiței Gh. Frumosul dincolo de Artă. Editura Meridiane, 1988, București, 2000. 4. Constantin P. Industrial Design, arta formelor utile. București: Editura Meridiane, 1973. 5. Dunăre N. Ornamentica tradițională comparată. București: Editura Meridiane, 1979, p. 328. 6. Pascadi I. Idealul și valoarea estetică. Bucuresti, 1966. 7. Meşteşuguri populare artistice. Chid metodic pentru cadrele didactice din învăţământul special. Chişinău, 2006. 8. Лившиц М. Я. Декор в народной архитектуры Молдавии. Кшинев, 1971. 9. Gașler A. Întemeierea unei gospodării țărănești tradiționle. În: revista Satul, anul III, nr.8, februarie–aprilie, 2011. 10. Malcoci V. Decorul arhitectural în piatră din arta populară moldovenească (sf. sec.XIX-sec.XX). Chişinău, 2000. 11. www.Pinterest.com, accesat pe 10.05.2020. 12. http://arhimania.ro/pin/arhitectura-vernaculara-romaneasca/ accesat pe 12.08.2020. https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Referin%C8%9Be_%C3%AEn_c%C4%83r%C8%9Bi/9789730135831 http://www.pinterest.com/ http://arhimania.ro/pin/arhitectura-vernaculara-romaneasca/ FINMA1F 's role ANALYSIS OF INTERNATIONAL REGULATIONS REGARDING THE HERITAGE AND HISTORICAL VALUE Viorica Ursu*, ORCID ID: 0000-0003-4194-4799, Natalia Chiriac, ORCID ID: 0000-0002-1189-2273, Ina Bostan, ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9191-8885 Abstract. Humanity today is facing a series of changes. These changes concern the human habitat in general, cities and urban complexes in particular. The globalization, markets and production methods cause population movements between regions and towa... The loss of the valuable patrimonial fund represents a cultural, scientific, economic loss, but, first of all, an identity loss: the disregard of history leads to the dilution of the feeling of belonging to the national community. The lack of a patrim... Thus, in order to outline policies, programs and projects in the field of cultural heritage, which would consolidate the territorial development of our country, this study aims to make a diagnosis of the international regulatory framework in terms of ... However, the state institutions and organizations responsible for the protection, conservation and improvement of cultural heritage must develop their skills, tools, attitudes and, in many cases, their role in the process of creating and implementing ... Keywords: culture, cultural heritage, cultural values, architectural heritage, normative regulations, convention, protocol, recommendations. Rezumat. Astăzi umanitatea se confruntă cu o serie de schimbări. Aceste schimbări privesc habitatul uman, în general, orașe și complexuri urbane, în special. Globalizarea, piețele și metodele de producție cauzează mișcări ale populației între regiuni ... Cuvinte-cheie: cultură, patrimoniu cultural, valori culturale, patrimoniu arhitectural, reglementări normative, convenție, protocol, recomandări. Patrimoniul istorico-cultural reprezintă una dintre valorile sacre cu rol important în dezvoltarea etico-morală a societăţii contemporane şi generaţiilor ce se vor perpetua. El are un rol important în dezvoltarea istoriei, ştiinţei, artei, învăţământu... work_2paxmopnvzhy7ojqbxxm3ehisy ---- From the Museum.indd Th e Ar t o f T hi nk in g Eur Respir J 2014; 44: 1426–1427 | DOI: 10.1183/09031936.004406141426 DOI: 10.1183/09031936.00440614 | Copyright ©ERS 2014 From the M useum Th e War triptych is a monumental revisiting of the traps, revulsions and needlessness of war at the mid- point between two world wars (commenced 1929). Remembrances of horrors past now become harbingers of things to come. Although Dix’s painting was in the tradition of the old masters, it was fused with the subjectivity of felt emotion and the objectivity of lived experience. Th e middle panel is reminiscent of the earlier “Trench” masterwork featuring widespread devastation framing a fragmenting circle of fi ve disarranged corpses (impaled-inverted-dismembered-disfi gured-masked). On the left of this “still life” explosion of mayhem are soldiers heading off to battle through an ominous morning fog, only to retreat in the right hand panel under a smoke-fi lled, burning sky. In the circularising predella below, a restful sleep beckons – a sleep however which is “too” close to death (as eternalised by the mythological twins: hypnos and thanatos). Th is is not for Dix, however, who had gone to war as a means of “experiencing” life to the fullest (never regretting having done so) and paints himself walking away shouldering a brother-in-arms. Dix courageously embraced life without dilution, inclusive of all its ugliness and his fanaticism for “truth” and “reality” meant that he was just as comfortable with the early expressionist slogan “Man is good” as he was with its supplanting anti-thesis “Man is a beast”. If Expressionistic art is “a spontaneous genial grab at life…a direct syntheses…a summary without going into the various elements”, then this was true of all three forms of German Expressionism. Th e pre-war Die Brucke (Dresden) and Der Blaue Reiter (Munich) movements were distinct responses to avant-garde trends (utilising expressive distortions of colour, scale and space to convey the subjective in what was seen). Die Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) however, evolved in the 1920s and was as much a bitter post-war protest movement as a style of modern art. Dix’s Nietzschean infused life philosophy led him to be both a founding member and a great exponent of the satirical style of German Expressionism in which realistic observation was caricatured with intense line, brutal detail and acid colour. Expressive-symbolism and meticulous detail resonated strongly with Dix’s all-round training, irrepressible passion for life’s experiment and unyielding embrace of “amor fati”. Although the directness of Dix’s art meant that it became politicised in a climate of growing fascism, his life-seizing parallel identities (proletarian, professor, provocateur) enabled him to view the world from multiple perspectives and to continually adapt/re-invent himself in response to many adversities; his “Art of life” easily morphing into an “Art of survival”. For Dix, the cause and eff ect that was entrenched in his world applied equally to his behaviour and his expressionistic art – both best understood as a means of approaching life, change and the ephemeral nature of all things. Like Dix, Matisse was exposed to both the traditional and revolutionary art infl uences of his time, broke out into his own bold, colour-focussed expressive style, vigorously guarded his independent artistic evolution, survived two world wars and had a late creative period. Th ere, however, the similarities end. Matisse was a conservative, introspective loner (only son, rural upbringing, law degree before a late, accidental introduction to art) who became increasingly hermetic as he avoided the scandalous public, war-time activity and anything that upset his idealised world: “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject-matter.” He therefore danced to a completely diff erent drum to Dix. Dance II is a masterpiece of physical ecstasy depicting frenzied dancing, moving to a beat that can almost be heard. Volcanic red-orange fi gures of radiant energy are enraptured in a ritualistic, circular dance atop a grass-green hill surrounded by a cosmic-blue sky – all three primary colours in stunning accord as they unite man, earth and the heavens. Th e colour-inspired simplifi ed forms and composition exude passionate arousal and expressive resonance with minimal eff ort. No (e)motion is superfl uous in communicating the power of all-consuming dance and man’s subconscious sense of being bound to nature’s rhythms (witness the break in the hands of the front two dancers overlapping the knee of the fi ft h dancer – thereby simultaneously emphasising the individual and the group in a circle that is both one and broken). Profoundly, the dynamics of cause and eff ect are one as centripetal and centrifugal tensions balance into a harmonious whole. Dance II evolved from a “lighter” Dance I which itself was borrowed from the more “joyous” earlier Fauve masterpiece (Bonheur de Vivre, 1906). Whereas Dix’s art was energised by calamitous external change, Matisse’s art was driven by internal forces (even more-so when challenged by his contemporaneous rival and natural opposite – Picasso). Despite their very diff erent life arcs, Matisse and Dix traversed the extremes of primal depths to societal (un)sophistications as they sought out “the essential character of things” in their quest for existential expression. Tom Kotsimbos Dept of Medicine, Central Clinical School, Monash University; Dept of Allergy, Immunology and Respiratory Medicine, Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, Victoria, 3004, Australia. E-mail: tom.kotsimbos@monash.edu Otto Dix: The War: 1932; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Germany Henri Matisse: Dance II: 1910; Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia Ex pr es si on is m (s ym bo lis m ) 1427 Cause Behaviour Effect Expressionism (sym bolism ) Dix/Matisse “We must act out passion before we can feel it” Jean-Paul Sartre << /ASCII85EncodePages false /AllowTransparency false /AutoPositionEPSFiles true /AutoRotatePages /None /Binding /Left /CalGrayProfile (Dot Gain 10%) /CalRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CalCMYKProfile (Europe ISO Coated FOGRA27) /sRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CannotEmbedFontPolicy /Error /CompatibilityLevel 1.7 /CompressObjects /Off /CompressPages true /ConvertImagesToIndexed true /PassThroughJPEGImages true /CreateJobTicket false /DefaultRenderingIntent /Default /DetectBlends true /DetectCurves 0.1000 /ColorConversionStrategy /LeaveColorUnchanged /DoThumbnails false /EmbedAllFonts true /EmbedOpenType false /ParseICCProfilesInComments true /EmbedJobOptions true /DSCReportingLevel 0 /EmitDSCWarnings false /EndPage -1 /ImageMemory 1048576 /LockDistillerParams true /MaxSubsetPct 100 /Optimize false /OPM 1 /ParseDSCComments true /ParseDSCCommentsForDocInfo true /PreserveCopyPage false /PreserveDICMYKValues true /PreserveEPSInfo true /PreserveFlatness true /PreserveHalftoneInfo false /PreserveOPIComments false /PreserveOverprintSettings true /StartPage 1 /SubsetFonts false /TransferFunctionInfo /Apply /UCRandBGInfo /Preserve /UsePrologue false /ColorSettingsFile () /AlwaysEmbed [ true ] /NeverEmbed [ true /AdobeSansMM /AdobeSerifMM ] /AntiAliasColorImages false /CropColorImages true /ColorImageMinResolution 150 /ColorImageMinResolutionPolicy /Warning /DownsampleColorImages false /ColorImageDownsampleType /Average /ColorImageResolution 300 /ColorImageDepth 8 /ColorImageMinDownsampleDepth 1 /ColorImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeColorImages true /ColorImageFilter /FlateEncode /AutoFilterColorImages false /ColorImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /ColorACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /ColorImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000ColorACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000ColorImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasGrayImages false /CropGrayImages true /GrayImageMinResolution 150 /GrayImageMinResolutionPolicy /Warning /DownsampleGrayImages false /GrayImageDownsampleType /Average /GrayImageResolution 300 /GrayImageDepth 8 /GrayImageMinDownsampleDepth 2 /GrayImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeGrayImages true /GrayImageFilter /FlateEncode /AutoFilterGrayImages false /GrayImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /GrayACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /GrayImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000GrayACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000GrayImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasMonoImages false /CropMonoImages true /MonoImageMinResolution 900 /MonoImageMinResolutionPolicy /Warning /DownsampleMonoImages false /MonoImageDownsampleType /Average /MonoImageResolution 1200 /MonoImageDepth -1 /MonoImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeMonoImages true /MonoImageFilter /CCITTFaxEncode /MonoImageDict << /K -1 >> /AllowPSXObjects false /CheckCompliance [ /None ] /PDFX1aCheck false /PDFX3Check false /PDFXCompliantPDFOnly true /PDFXNoTrimBoxError true /PDFXTrimBoxToMediaBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXSetBleedBoxToMediaBox true /PDFXBleedBoxToTrimBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfile (None) /PDFXOutputConditionIdentifier () /PDFXOutputCondition () /PDFXRegistryName () /PDFXTrapped /False /CreateJDFFile false /Description << /CHS /CHT /DAN /DEU /ESP /FRA /ITA (Utilizzare queste impostazioni per creare documenti Adobe PDF adatti per visualizzare e stampare documenti aziendali in modo affidabile. 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Vol. 18, No. 2:14-28, Jun. 2014 ISSN 1229-3350(Print) http://dx.doi.org/10.12940/jfb.2014.18.2.14 ISSN 2288-1867(Online) 14 현대 패션에 나타난 큐비즘스타일패션 연구: 2010 S/S - 2013 S/S 파리컬렉션을 중심으로 최예리 · 최정욱⁺ 경희대학교 아트퓨전디자인대학원 패션아트학과, 경희대학교 의류학과⁺ A Study on Cubism Fashion Style Appearing in Modern Fashion: Focused on the 2010 S/S-2013 S/S Paris Collection Choi Yeree · Choi jeongwook⁺ Dept. of Fashion Art Graduate School of Art Fusion Design, Kyung Hee University Dept. ofClothing & Textile Design, Kyung Hee University⁺ Abstract This study analyzed the group of experts who were related to cubism, selected among th e works of 2010~2013 Paris Collection based on F.G.R.(Focus Group Research). According to the results of this study, there were appeared first, ‘a one-piece dress’ second, ‘H silh ouette’ third, ‘cotton’, in case of item distribution and frequency. The analysis was done b y using the manner of expression, cubical expression, exaggeration, distortion, dismantleme nt, geometrical division of face, mix-match look, wraparound·repetition, asymmetric structur e, etc. Based on the outcomes of the analysis on figurative design elements, this study ad justed three manners appearing on cubism fashion style. First, it was ‘avant garde manner’ of constitution or ‘dismantlement’ which was compiled into multi-view representations of ov erlaps and viewpoints by repetitive use of color tone·trimming·detail. Second, it was ‘geom agnetic block placement’ which expresses cubism with geometric partitioning of surface an d separation of panel by cutting·disintegration. Finally, it was ‘distortion and simplification of silhouette’ which is a distortion created by constitution-line pressed thin with silhouette. It maximizes the beauty of human body outline, which was distorted by three-dimensional- manipulation, and simplified by ellipsis for another shape for the extension or expansion of detail trimming. ted Corresponding author: Choi Jeongwook , Tel. +82-10-8958-0701, Fax. +82-31-273-0127 E-mail: jwchoi@khu.ac.kr This research is a part of master's thesis. 최예리 · 최정욱 / 현대 패션에 나타난 큐비즘스타일패션 연구 15 Key words : cubism(큐비즘), distortion of silhouette(실루엣의 왜곡), geomagnetic(지오메틱), transposition(전위성) Ⅰ. 서 론 최근 패션계에서는 획일적이고 평범한 스타일은 지양되고 실험적인 디자인이 많이 시도되고 있으며 소비자들의 요구 또한 기능성과 같은 보편적이고 실 용적인 목적보다는 장식성·독창성·심미성 등에 더 많은 관심을 갖게 되었다. 20세기에 등장한 예술 운 동 중 하나인 큐비즘은 지속적으로 패션 디자이너들 에 의해 지속적인 영감의 원천으로 해석되어 왔다 (Sung, 2010). 20세기 미술 사조의 변혁이었던 큐 비즘은 입체적 표현의 새로운 시도였으며, 기존의 원근법을 부정하는 동시표현의 방법을 시도하였고 2 차원의 평면 위에 3차원적인 공간 감각을 추구하며 예술영역의 확대에 큰 영향을 주었다. 예술사에서 15세기 원근법을 제1의 혁명이라 한다면 그 이후 제2의 혁명은 20세기 초 큐비즘이라 할 정도로 현 대의 추상예술을 잉태시킨 큐비즘이 차지하는 위치 는 지대하다(Yoon, 2006). 또한 현대미술의 저류가 된 큐비즘이 근대 복식을 벗어나 모더니즘으로 향하 는 20세기 현대 패션에 미친 영향은 지대한 것으로 표현영역에서 상호간의 일치성을 나타내는 부분이 있다고 할 수 있다(D. Lee, 2003). 이에 본 연구에서는 큐비즘이 패션디자인에 어떠 한 방식으로 영향을 끼쳤는지 알아보기 위해 큐비즘 패션 스타일의 조형적 디자인 요소를 분석하고 이를 통해 큐비즘스타일패션의 특성을 정리해보고자 하였 다. 큐비즘과 패션과의 연관성에 관한 연구를 살펴보 면, 대부분이 문헌연구에 기초한 미학적 연구이거나, 주관적 해석을 통한 작품 디자인을 제안한 연구가 대부분으로 큐비즘과 패션에 대한 객관적 연구는 미 비한 실정이다. 이에 본 연구는 전문적이고 객관적 인 방법을 통해 현대 패션 디자인에서 나타난 큐비 즘적 디자인 요소를 분석하고, 큐비즘과 현대 패션 과의 연관성을 정리하고자 한다. 본 연구는 객관적이고 논리적인 절차를 통해 큐비 즘적 패션 스타일을 규명하고, 이를 하나의 패션 스 타일로 확립하는 데 목적이 있다. 이를 통해 20세기 미술의 신호탄이 된 큐비즘이 패션 디자인 영역에서 큐비즘스타일패션으로 발전해 갈 가능성을 제안하고 현대 패션에 나아갈 방향을 제시하는데 의의가 있 다. Ⅱ. 이론적 배경 1. 큐비즘의 개념 및 발생배경 큐비즘은 20세기 초 야수파 운동과 전후해서 프랑 스를 중심으로 1907년부터 1914년 사이에 일어났던 파리의 아방가르드 미술운동으로서 실험적인 운동이 었다. 매년 가을에 개최되는 프랑스 미술 단체 전시 회인 살롱도톤(Salon d'Automne)에 1908년 출품된 브라크의 「레스타크의 집들」이란 연작에 대해 심 사위원장이었던 마티스(Henri Matisse, 1869-1954) 가 '조그만 입체(큐브)의 덩어리’라고 말한 데서 유 래되었다(Edward, 1985). 큐비즘이 발생하기 전인 제 1차 세계 대전 직전의 10년 간 파리는 사치와 향락의 본거지로서의 역할도 하였지만 경제 붐을 주도하던 자본주의의 역학에 따 라 사회 불평등이 더욱 심화되었고, 이에 따라 사회 주의, 노동자 계층과 페미니즘 운동의 거센 저항에 부딪치게 되었다. 이후 1914년의 세계대전이 발생하 였으며 이 복잡하고 역동적인 사회 안에서 다양한 예술적 아방가르드 공동체가 형성되었다. 큐비즘 회화는 이전 회화 기법과 달리 불안정한 구조와 공간 배열 및 최소한의 색채사용을 하였다. 뿐만 아니라, 작품 속 인물이 투과되거나 뒤섞여 정 물이나 풍경을 구분할 수 없도록 함으로써 유머러스 한 표현을 보여주었다. 게다가 르네상스 미술에 대 한 그들의 도전은, 그들의 작품이 근본적으로 같아 보이지는 않더라도 전통적인 회화와 조각에 대한 지 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 18권 2호 16 식을 바탕으로 한 것에 의해 적당히 완화되었다. 즉, 입체주의는 미술 작품이 또 다른 공간으로의 창문 역할을 한다는 평범한 개념을 거부하고, 세상을 보 고 앎으로써 미술이 진정으로 ‘있는 그대로의’ 세상 을 다룰 수 있다고 주장하였다(Neil, 2003). 2. 패션에 있어서의 큐비즘 현대패션과 미술사조는 서로 장르는 다르지만, 창 작세계 안에서 추구하는 바가 일맥상통한다. 현대미 술의 저류가 된 큐비즘이 근대복식을 벗어나 모더니 즘으로 향하던 20세기 현대패션에 미친 영향은 지대 하였으며 현대패션의 표현영역에서 상호 간의 일치 성을 나타낸다고 할 수 있다(Yu & Kim, 1993). 20세기 초반 패션은 기능주의와 더불어 직선형 실 루엣이 시도되어 인체의 자연미가 추구되며 복식에 많은 영향력을 발휘하였으며, 모드는 이러한 기능주 의의 영향으로 합리적인 의상이 전개되는 모던 스타 일이 정착되기 시작하였다. 큐비즘의 영향을 받은 패션 디자인은 합리성과 구조적인 기능성을 강조한 간결미를 추구하였으며 명쾌한 색채와 기하학적인 문양 그리고 단순한 실루엣의 형태를 추구하였다. 아르누보의 과잉장식인 S-curve 스타일에서 벗어나 완전히 원통형의 단순한 실루엣을 발표하는 등 이러 한 요소들은 큐비즘의 기하학적 단순미와 밀접한 관 계가 있다(Chae, 2002). 이브 생 로랑은 1988년 S/S 컬렉션의 테마로 큐비즘을 도입하여 화제를 불 (year) Name Shapes (physical beauty) Dismantlement & reconstitution Overlap Multi-view (simultaneity) Reality Sung, P. (2011) O Song, A. (2009) O O O O O Lee, D. (2003) O Kang, K. (1992) O O Table 1. Cubism Fashion’s Formativeness Based on Preceding Studies 러일으켰다. 그는 피카소와 더불어 큐비즘을 창시한 프랑스의 거장 브라크의 그림을 그대로 정교하게 수 놓은 입체화된 패션을 선보였다. 큐비즘이 패션에 미친 영향은 단순성, 실용성, 기능성 등 큐비즘의 표현기법 뿐만 아니라, 큐비즘이 사물을 분해시키고 재구성하여 사물의 본질을 찾고자 했던 것처럼 패션 도 좀 더 내면적인 면을 추구하게끔 영향을 끼쳤고 큐비즘의 조형적 특징은 현대 패션의 새로운 방향을 제공하였다고 볼 수 있다(E. Lee, 2002). Table 1의 큐비즘에 관련된 선행 연구를 살펴보 면, Sung(2011)은 분석적 큐비즘 단계의 기하학적 형태미를 연구하고, 이를 응용한 패션디자인 사례를 분석하여 큐비즘 시대의 풍부한 기하학적 조형성을 의상에 응용한 디자인을 제안하였다. Song(2009)은 큐비즘 패션 디자인을 사실성, 동시성, 도형성, 해체 와 재구성, 중첩성으로 분석하였으며 큐비즘이 활용 된 큐비즘 패션의 조형성을 파악한 후, 그 안에 내 재된 조형미를 도출하여 작품을 제작·제안하였다. D. Lee(2003)는 큐비즘 회화의 조형성을 분석하고 현대 패션 디자인에 표현된 큐비즘의 조형적 특성들 을 분류·분석하였고 이를 바탕으로 새로운 디자인 모티브를 제시하였다. Kang(1992)은 큐비즘의 흐름 을 살펴보고 현대 회화와 패션과의 관계를 분석하였 으며, 그중에서도 피카소의 큐비즘 작품을 분석하여 복식디자인에 응용하여 표현하였다. 위의 선행 연구 에서 살펴본 큐비즘 패션의 조형성을 자세히 살펴보 면 다음과 같다. 최예리 · 최정욱 / 현대 패션에 나타난 큐비즘스타일패션 연구 17 1) 도형성 큐비즘 회화에서 보이는 선의 기하학적 조형미와 다채로운 화면의 분할은 편안하고 자연스럽게 인체 에 밀착되면서 단순한 실루엣을 원하는 현대의 트렌 드에 부합하며 패션에 변화를 줄 수 있는 디자인 요 소로 현대 패션 디자인에 다양한 모습으로 적용되고 있다(Ju, 1990). 서로 다른 크기의 도형들이 점진적인 강조로 시선 을 유도하여 착시현상을 일으킴으로써 인체의 특정 부위를 부각하거나, 톤 온 톤(tone on tone) 배색을 통한 평면 공간의 입체감 부여, 인체에 둘러지면서 인체를 따라 생기는 표면의 나선이나 율동으로 인해 유연한 실루엣으로 바뀌어 이지적인 이미지로 만들 기도 한다. 또한, 서로 크기가 다른 개체를 점증적 으로 반복, 배열함으로써 시선을 확장시키고 비대칭 과 사선의 움직임을 통한 기하학 도형의 대비와 움 직임에 따른 역동성이 도형성 안에 포함될 수 있다. 2) 해체와 재구성 큐비즘 패션의 해체와 재구성은 형태요소 중 가장 기본적인 선, 면, 아이템의 형태에 대한 조화를 파 괴하여 해체하고 불규칙하게 재구성하여 새롭고 다 양한 형태로 나타난다. 즉, 큐비즘 회화에서 선이 대상을 분해하여 새롭게 구성하는 매개로 사용되는 것처럼 패션에서 선은 의복구성의 패턴을 해체해 재 구성하는 용도로 절개선, 혹은 여러 가지 재료를 사 용한 장식 선으로 표현되어 단조로운 실루엣에 변화 를 주고 시선을 끄는 효과를 낸다. 또한, 다채로운 화면의 분할은 패션에 변화를 줄 수 있는 디자인 요 소로써 현대 패션 디자인에 다양한 모습으로 적용되 고 있다. 선에 의한 해체와 재구성을 살펴보면 장식 선을 활용하여 다양한 사선에 의해 분할된 면을 사 선과 바탕의 색대비로 인하여 선을 강조시키거나, 의복구성 시 서로 다른 색상의 패널들을 재구성하여 명도 대비에 의한 시각적 즐거움을 준다. 이러한 해 체와 왜곡은 단순히 디자인 요소와 패턴에만 한정되 는 것이 아니라 다양한 소재의 믹스매치를 통해서도 정형화되지 않게 변화를 주고 재구성하여 생동감과 자유로움을 느끼게 한다. 3) 중첩성 큐비즘 패션에서의 중첩성은 기하학형 도형을 크 기의 변화를 주어 도형들을 연속적으로 반복, 중첩 하거나 동일한 소재에 상이한 컬러의 아이템을 중첩 시켜 다른 아이템을 입고 있는 것처럼 과장된 실루 엣을 만들 수 있다. 또한 동일한 컬러, 소재의 러플 을 중첩할 수 있으며 여러 아이템을 여러 층으로 겹 겹이 쌓아올려 부풀려서 실루엣을 만들 수도 있다. 이처럼 현대 패션에 나타난 큐비즘의 두드러진 특징 은 의상의 전체적인 외형에 있어 형태의 변형과 왜 곡에 있으며, 이것은 구성에 있어 기존의 규칙을 버 리고 더욱 기초적인 조형방법으로 구성해나가 기하 학적인 형태에 의해 실현되고 있다(E. Lee, 2002). 4) 동시성 큐비즘 회화에서의 동시성은 현대패션에서 인체에 대한 고정적 관념, 즉 인간이 만들어 놓은 아름다운 신체에 대한 전통의 미학적 가치를 거부하며 20세기 전반까지 신체의 보호와 미적 기능을 목적으로 하였 던 전통의 관습적 편견들을 해체하고자 하였다 (Park, 2004). 큐비즘 패션에 나타난 동시성은 시점의 각도에 따라 아이템이나 디자인 요소가 갖고 있는 다양한 기능을 변형시키는 방식으로, 앞여밈이 항상 정면에 있어야 하는 정형화 된 셔츠와 재킷의 착장 방식을 부정하여 앞여밈을 어깨 쪽으로 구성하여 시선을 집 중시켜 아이템 형태의 상상을 할 수 있도록 시각적 재미를 나타내기도 하고, 재킷 위에 원피스를 겹쳐 입은 듯 한 느낌을 주면서 왜곡되어 나타나며 원피 스는 재킷의 패널에 의해 마치 원피스 위에 재킷을 입은 듯 한 시각적 착각을 주며 한 벌에 두 가지의 아이템이 동시에 관찰되게 표현하기도 하였다. 5) 사실성 큐비즘 패션에서의 사실성은 일상생활에서의 재료 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 18권 2호 18 로서 성질과 본질을 지닌 전혀 왜곡된 재료가 아님 에도 불구하고 그 재료를 의상에 도입하여 모호하게 왜곡되어 전위적인 조형미로 나타났다(Song, 2007). 다른 용도로 쓰이는 의외의 소재를 왜곡하여 사용하 기도 하며, 특이한 소재를 새로운 기법으로 패션에 전위적으로 표현하기도 한다. 이러한 새롭고 실험적 인 제3의 소재 도입으로 인해 의외성과 부조화를 유 발하는 동시에 유희적인 일종의 그로테스크를 나타 내었다(Chae, 2002). 재료로는 인공물, 동물, 자연물 등의 다양한 종류 가 사용되고 있는데 인공물의 금속 재료를 이용한 디자인 사례를 보면 금속으로 바디스(badies)를 성 형하고 씨퀸으로 장식한 팔, 다리는 빛의 명암효과 로 인해 관능적인 이미지를 주며 관찰자의 시선을 바디스(badies)쪽으로 집중시켜 점차적으로 씨퀸으 로 장식된 팔, 다리 쪽으로 시선을 이동시켜 시각적 확장을 유도하기도 한다. Ⅲ. 연구방법 및 절차 본 연구는 큐비즘스타일패션 선정을 위한 1차 F.G.R. 연구와 큐비즘스타일패션의 조형적 디자인 요소 분석을 위한 2차 F.G.R. 연구로 나누어 진행되 었다. 1. 큐비즘스타일패션 선정을 위한 연구 (1차 F.G.R.) 본 연구는 2012년 12월 28일부터 2013년 1월 9 일까지 기간 중 10일 동안 실시되었으며, 연구범위 는 2010년 S/S부터 2013년 S/S까지 파리 컬렉션에 발표된 모든 작품을 대상으로 하였다. 자료의 출처 는 패션 정보 사이트 firstviewkorea.com에서 제공 되는 컬렉션 사진을 중심으로 진행되었으며, 분석 자료는 3년여 동안 7회 파리 컬렉션에 나타난 총 199명의 디자이너의 26,883점의 작품 전체를 대상 으로 하였다. 2010년 S/S부터 2013년 S/S까지의 파리 컬렉션을 선정한 이유는 연구시점에서 최근 컬 렉션에 나타난 큐비즘 적 동향을 알아보기 위함이 고, 세계 4대 컬렉션인 파리컬렉션, 밀라노 컬렉션, 뉴욕 컬렉션, 런던 컬렉션 중에서 파리 컬렉션을 선 택한 이유는 4대 컬렉션 중 가장 큐비즘 적 성향이 두드러지게 나타나 연구에 적합하다고 판단하여 결 정하게 되었다. 컬렉션 작품 중 큐비즘과 관련성이 있는 패션스타 일을 큐비즘스타일패션으로 선정하기 위해 F.G.R.을 실시하였다. 이는 보다 전문적이고 객관적인 판단을 통해 결과에 대한 신뢰도를 높이기 위함이다. F.G.R.에 참여한 전문가는 의류디자인학을 전공한 석사학위 이상인 자로, 연구 및 실무경력 10년 이상 되는 전문가 5명으로 구성하였다. 본 연구는 컬렉션에 나타난 패션스타일 중 큐비즘 에 영향을 받은 스타일을 추출해내기 위해 전문가 집단을 대상으로 26,883개의 컬렉션 사진을 보여주 고 각각의 스타일에 대해 큐비즘과의 관련성 정도를 5점 리커드 척도로 판단하게 하였다. F.G.R.의 진행 은 정해진 시간에 5명의 구성원이 한자리에 모여 모 니터 상에 제시되는 패션 스타일에 대해 리커드 척 도에 따른 점수를 무기명으로 각각 평가하도록 하였 다. 집중도를 높이기 위해 동일 장소에 모여 진행하 되, 서로 간 상의과정 없이 비밀평가 방식으로 유도 진행 하였다. 2. 큐비즘스타일패션의 조형적 디자인 요소 분석을 위한 연구 (2차 F.G.R.) 본 연구는 2013년 2월 5일부터 2월 7일까지 3일 간에 걸쳐 실시되었으며, 연구범위는 선행된 1차 F.G.R.을 통해 큐비즘스타일패션으로 분석·선정된 19명의 디자이너, 90점의 큐비즘스타일패션을 대상 으로 하였다. 1차 F.G.R.에서 선정된 90점의 큐비즘스타일패션 에 대한 전·후·측면 및 디테일 사진을 연구대상으로 하였다. 이들 90개 스타일의 조형적 디자인 요소를 분석하고자 아이템, 실루엣, 색상, 배색, 소재, 디테 일, 트리밍 등 7개 요소를 분석 변수로 사용하였다. 7개 요소 각각의 세부항목은 요소별로 수를 달리하 여 총 85개의 항목을 통해 해당 사항 여부를 분석하 였다. 색상의 경우에는 PANTONE TEXTILE 컬러칩 최예리 · 최정욱 / 현대 패션에 나타난 큐비즘스타일패션 연구 19 을 사용하여 정확한 색상분석을 시도하였다. 보다 전문적이고 객관적인 평가를 통해 결과에 대 한 신뢰도를 높이기 위해 1차 연구와 마찬가지로 2 차 연구에서도 F.G.R.을 실시하였다. F.G.R.의 구성 은 의류디자인학을 전공한 석사학위 이상인 자로, 연구 및 실무경력 6년 이상의 전문가 10명을 선정 하였다. Ⅳ. 연구 결과 및 고찰 1. 큐비즘스타일 선정을 위한 연구 결과 F.G.R.의 구성원인 패션 전문가 5인에게 2010년 S/S부터 2013년 S/S까지 파리컬렉션에 발표된 총 26,883점 전체 작품을 대상으로 각 작품에서 보이 는 큐비즘 관련 정도를 리커드 척도로 표시하도록 하여 분석한 결과는 다음과 같다. 먼저 연구범위의 시즌별 빈도수를 살펴보면, S/S (15132, 56.29%), F/W(11751, 43.71%)이다. S/S 컬렉션의 작품 수가 F/W 컬렉션의 작품 수 보다 많 게 조사되었으며 각 연도별 빈도수를 분석해본 결과 2011년(7919, 29.46%), 2010년(7468, 27.78%), 2 012년(7414, 27.58%), 2013년(4082, 15.18%) 순으 로 나타났다. 2010년에서 2013년까지 파리 컬렉션 에 참여한 디자이너에 대해 조사한 결과, 총 199명 인 것으로 나타났으며 이들 디자이너 중 조사범위 동안 매회 컬렉션에 빠짐없이 참여한 디자이너는 53 명인 것으로 분석되었다. F.G.R.의 구성원인 전문가 5명에게 26,883점의 파리 컬렉션 작품 각각에 대한 큐비즘과의 관련성을 5점 리커드 척도를 통해 평가하도록 하였으며 이때 검사자 간 평가결과의 신뢰도를 알아보기 위하여 상 관분석을 실시하였다. 분석결과 평가자 1부터 평가 자 5까지 모두 각각 유의수준 0.01하에서 상관관계 가 존재함을 알 수 있었으며 이를 통해 평가자들 간 의 응답 경향이 비슷함을 알 수 있고, 평가자들 간 의 응답을 신뢰할 수 있다고 판단할 수 있었다. 큐비즘스타일의 시즌 분포를 살펴보면 S/S(268, 50.09%)와 F/W(267, 49.91%)가 거의 같은 정도로 나타났는데, 이는 파리 컬렉션에서 시즌에 상관없이 큐비즘스타일이 선보여진 것으로 분석되었다. 다음 으로 큐비즘스타일의 연도별 출현 빈도를 분석한 결 과 전반적으로 매해 출현 빈도가 유사하였으나 201 1년도의 경우 빈도가 높게 나타났다. 즉, 2010년도 (138, 25.79%)에 비해 2011년도(231, 43.18%)에 눈에 띄게 큐비즘스타일이 많이 선보여진 것으로 나 타났다. 이는 2010년도에 전 세계적으로 불어 닥친 경제적 불황이 끼친 영향이라 분석할 수 있다. 즉, 불황일수록 디자이너들의 발명 및 창작에 대한 요구 가 커진다는 분석에 근거하듯, 2010년 불황기에 새 로운 것에 대한 열망이 커진 디자이너들이 2011년 부터 조심스럽게 예견되는 경기 회복의 기미를 발판 으로 긍정적이고 경쾌한 분위기를 디자인한 것으로 해석할 수 있다. 즉, 2010년 F/W 시즌에는 안정과 현실의 기반 위에 새로운 변화와 재미를 추구하는 시즌이었으며 생각지 못한 방식과 결합으로 세련된 창조물을 만들어내기 시작한 것으로 볼 수 있다(Inte rnet Site, firstviewkorea). 그 결과 큐비즘스타일패 션과 같은 새로운 스타일이 많이 선보여지게 된 것 으로 사료된다. 큐비즘스타일을 제안한 디자이너를 조사한 결과 전체 디자이너 199명 중 49명으로 전체의 24.62% 에 해당하였다. 이들 디자이너 중 큐비즘스타일의 디자인을 매년 출현 빈도가 10 이상으로 제작한 디 자이너로는, 꼼 데 가르송(110, 20.56%), 알렉산더 맥퀸(44, 8.22%), 매니쉬 아로라(36, 6.73%), 빅터 앤 롤프(28, 5.23%), 메종 마틴 마르지엘라와 파코 라반(26, 4.86%), 아마야 아르주아가(24, 4.49%), 티에리 뮈글러(22, 4.11%), 페드로 로렌코(19, 3.5 5%), 아르주 캐프롤과 릭 오웬스(17, 3.18%), 파티 마 로페즈, 가레스 푸, 이세이 미야케(14, 2.62%), 이상봉(12, 2.24%), 발렌시아가(11, 2.06%) 순으로 나타났다. 이들 중 아시아계 디자이너로 꼼 데 가르 송의 레이 가와쿠보와 이세이 미야케가 있으며, 특 히 한국계 디자이너로는 이상봉, 문영희 등이 큐비 즘스타일패션 디자이너로 분류되었음을 알 수 있다. 2. 큐비즘스타일패션의 조형적 디자인 요소 분석을 위한 연구 결과 (2차 F.G.R.) 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 18권 2호 20 1차 F.G.R.을 통해 큐비즘과의 관련성에서 4점 이상의 점수를 받은 535개의 큐비즘스타일 작품 중 다시 4.75점 이상의 점수를 받은 90개의 작품만을 선별하여 이들 작품의 전·후·측면 및 디테일 사진을 면밀히 분석하였다. 이때 사용된 변수 7개의 조형적 디자인 요소를 기 준으로 85개 세부항목에 따라 분석하였다. 보다 전 문적이고 객관적인 판단을 통해 결과에 대한 신뢰도 를 높이기 위해 1차 연구와 마찬가지로 2차 연구에 서도 F.G.R.을 실시하였다. F.G.R.의 구성은 의류디 자인학을 전공한 석사학위 이상인 자로, 연구 및 실 무경력 6년 이상의 전문가 10명을 선정하여 진행하 였다. 앞서 설명한 바, 조형적 디자인 요소 분석을 위해 1차 F.G.R.의 평가 결과에서 4.75점 이상의 점수를 받은 90개의 작품을 큐비즘스타일패션으로 정하고 이들의 조형적 디자인 요소를 분석하였다. 평가자 평균점수가 5점 이상인 경우는 32(3.07%), 4.75점 이상인 경우는 90(8.64%), 4.50점 이상인 경우는 1 60(15.36%), 4.25점 이상인 경우는 225(21.59%), 4점 이상인 경우는 535(51.34%)로 나타났다. 이에 평가 값 4.75이상인 작품 90점을 본 논문의 2차 연 구 대상으로 선정하였다. 큐비즘스타일패션에 나타난 아이템의 종류를 살펴 본 결과, 원피스(482, 32.70%), 재킷(199, 13.50%) 순으로 높게 나타났으며 롱 슬랙스, 블라우스/셔츠, 드레스, 코트 등 20여개의 다양한 아이템이 출현한 것으로 조사되었다. 원피스의 출현 빈도가 가장 많 은 이유는 실루엣을 통한 형태 표현이나 입체적 디 테일을 통한 큐비즘적 표현이 용이한 아이템이기 때 문으로 생각된다. 다음으로 큐비즘스타일패션의 실루엣 분포를 살펴 본 결과, H 실루엣(392, 43.6%), O 실루엣(192, 2 1.3%), A 실루엣(161, 17.9%), Y or T 실루엣(100, 11.1%) 순이었다. 이 중에서 H 실루엣이나 O 실루 엣이 높은 빈도로 나타난 것은 심플하고 기하학적 형태로 표현되는 큐비즘 성향과 일치한다고 사료된 다. 뿐만 아니라, X 실루엣(55, 6.1%)의 빈도가 가 장 낮게 나타난 이유는 X 실루엣이 여성적이고 곡선 적인 느낌이 강한 실루엣이므로 큐비즘의 심플하고 기하학적인 스타일과 대치되기 때문으로 분석되었 다. 큐비즘스타일패션의 각 스타일마다 사용된 색상을 모두(중복응답) 분석한 결과, 총 49가지의 색상이 사용되었음을 알 수 있었다. 주로 사용된 색상은 레 드 계열, 옐로우 계열, 블루 계열 색상 정도로 국한 되었으며 저채도나 무채색의 빈도가 높은 것으로 분 석되었다. 큐비즘스타일패션에 나타난 배색 방법을 분석한 결과, 솔리드(solid)(498, 55.3)%가 과반 수 이상으 로 가장 많이 응답하였고, 톤 인 톤(tone in tone)(1 50, 16.7%), 톤 온 톤(tone on tone)(130, 14.4%), 세퍼레이트(separate)(122, 13.6%) 순으로 나타났 다. 솔리드가 많이 사용된 것은 심플하고 입체적인 형태 표현을 주로 하는 큐비즘적 성향을 표현하기에 솔리드가 적합한 배색 방법이기 때문인 것으로 사료 되었다. 즉, 직선적, 곡선적 혹은 입체적으로 실루엣 이나 디테일을 강조하는 경우, 색상에 의한 표현을 절제해야 하는 디자인 원리를 활용하기 때문인 것으 로 생각되었다. 큐비즘스타일패션에 사용된 소재의 분포를 살펴보 면, 면(279, 19.73%), 새틴(158, 11.17%), 메탈릭(1 32, 9.34%), 가죽(130, 9.19%), 실크(127, 8.98%), 쉬폰(77, 5.45%), 펠트(69, 4.88%), 모(66, 4.67%), 벨벳(58, 4.10%), 저지(54, 3.82%), 니트(42, 2.9 7%), 에나멜(40, 2.83%), T/C(38, 2.69%), 패딩(3 5, 2.48%), 마(27, 1.91%), 비닐(26, 1.84%), 퍼와 레이스(21, 1.49%), 코듀로이(12, 0.85%), 진(2, 0. 14%)으로 나타났다. 이를 통해 알 수 있는 바, 큐비즘스타일패션에는 면, 새틴, 가죽, 실크 등 표면 요철감이 적은 플랫한 소재들이 많이 사용되었고, 특히 가죽이나 메탈릭 등의 빈도가 높게 나타난 것은 큐비즘의 기하학적· 도형적·매니쉬한 느낌을 표현하는데 용이한 까닭으 로 사료된다. 디테일이 큐비즘적 스타일을 표현하기 위해 다양 하게 사용되었는데 이를 살펴본 결과, 입체적 표현(4 23, 17.08%), 과장·확대·연장(345, 13.93%), 왜곡(27 6, 11.14%), 해체·전치·도치(273, 11.02%), 기하학적 면 분할(188, 7.59%), 소재 믹스매치(165, 6.66%), 최예리 · 최정욱 / 현대 패션에 나타난 큐비즘스타일패션 연구 21 겹침·반복(149, 6.02%), 비대칭적 구조(146, 5.89%), 라운드 커팅(77, 3.11%), 드레이프(66, 2.66%), 레이 어드(64, 2.58%), 아웃 커팅(55, 2.22%), 기하학적 프린팅(50, 2.02%), 구김(48, 1.94%), 패치워크(42, 1.70%), 묶음·엮음(30, 1.21%), 누빔(패딩)(24, 0.9 7%), 페이크(fake)(20, 0.81%), 없음(19, 0.77%), 추 상적 프린팅(17, 0.69%) 순으로 나타났다. 즉, 큐비 즘스타일패션을 표현하는데 있어 ‘입체적 표현’, ‘과 장·확대·연장’, ‘왜곡’, ‘해체·전치·도치’ 등의 디테일 표현방법이 주로 사용된 것으로 분석되었다. 마지막으로 큐비즘스타일패션에 사용된 트리밍의 종류를 분석한 결과, 없음(595, 63.16%)이 과반 이 상으로 가장 높게 나타났으며, 다음으로 벨트(82, 8. 70%), 기타 구조물, 주머니(59, 6.26%) 순으로 분 석되었다. 이 결과, 큐비즘스타일패션은 부가적인 트리밍 장식보다 실루엣이나 전체적인 디테일 변화 를 통해 표현하고 있음을 알 수 있었다. Figure 1. Cubism Fashion’s Characteristics Based on Detail Manner of Expressions 3. 현대 패션에 나타난 큐비즘스타일패션 연구 앞서 F.G.R.을 통해 큐비즘스타일패션의 조형적 디 자인 요소를 종합하여 살펴본 결과, 큐비즘스타일패 션의 특성은 Figure 1과 같이 추출되었다. 큐비즘스 타일패션을 표현하는데 있어 디테일 표현방법이 가 장 두드러지게 나타나 이를 바탕으로 큐비즘스타일 패션을 도출하였다. 선행연구와 디테일의 표현방법을 분석한 결과 큐비 즘스타일패션은 다음의 세 가지로 정의해 볼 수 있다. 1) 전위적인 구성 방법 먼저 큐비즘스타일패션은 “전위적인 구성 방법”의 성향을 띄는데, 이러한 특성은 ‘중첩’, ‘해체’등의 표 현기법을 통해 보인다. ‘중첩’이란 디테일 또는 색상 을 거듭하여 겹쳐 나타내는 방법으로 반복·방사·그 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 18권 2호 22 라데이션 등의 방법을 통해 연속적 혹은 규칙적인 배열을 보여주는 경우를 말한다. ‘해체’란 원래 있어 야 하는 자리에 없게 하여 흩어지게 하거나 분해하 는 것을 의미하는 것으로, 전치·도치와 같이 원래 위치해야 하는 곳에 위치하지 않고 위치를 바꿈으로 써 기대와 예측을 바꾸는 것을 말한다. 본 연구의 대상인 큐비즘스타일패션의 경우, ‘중첩’을 사용한 디테일의 표현은 색상의 반복, 트리밍의 반복, 디테 일의 반복 등을 통해 표현되고 있었다. 이를 좀 더 자세히 살펴보면 먼저, 중첩 기법 중 에서도 색상을 반복적으로 사용하여 나타낸 것으로 인도의 디자이너 매니쉬 아로라(Manish Arora)의 2010년 F/W 작품 Figure 2를 들 수 있다. Figure 2 는 블루, 오렌지, 레드 등 비비드한 색상 사이에 블 랙과 화이트를 매치하여 나머지 색들을 돋보이게 하 는 세퍼레이션 배색 기법을 반복적으로 사용한 것으 로, 특히 엉덩이 부분에 사선의 형태로 반복 배치하 는 동시에 입체감을 주어 밋밋할 수 있는 색채 중첩 기법에 리듬감을 더하였다. 조쉬 구트(Josh goot)는 2010년 S/S 컬렉션에서 Figure 3의 작품을 통해 기 하학적 패턴 배치에 모노톤의 그라데이션 효과를 사 용한 색상 배치를 한 바 있다. 그라데이션 색상의 반복을 기하학적 패턴 안에서 표현함으로써 큐비즘 적 스타일을 잘 나타내고 있다. 다음으로 트리밍의 반복을 통해 표현한 중첩 기법 을 사용한 예로, 빅터 앤 롤프(Viktor & Rolf)의 2010년 S/S 컬렉션에서는 Figure 4와 같이 색색깔 의 쉬폰(chiffon)과 튤(tulle)을 사용하여 옷 자체의 실루엣이 주는 단조로움을 깨고 자잘한 프릴을 여러 겹으로 겹쳐 3차원적인 형태로 나타내어 입체감을 더했다. 빅터 앤 롤프는 2011년 F/W 컬렉션 Figure 5에서 빳빳한 소재를 사용하여 플리츠를 과장하고 반복적으로 덧붙임으로써 실루엣의 과장 및 확대까 지 보여주었다. 또한 슬리브와 어깨의 연결 부위에 반복적인 주름을 직각으로 세워 어깨를 강조하고 스 커트는 라운드 컷팅 된 조각을 스파이럴 형태로 반 복 배치함으로써 각진 상의와 부드러운 하의 간의 상반된 느낌을 대치시켜 표현하였다. 디테일의 반복을 통해 표현된 중첩의 예로는, 빅 터 앤 롤프의 2011년 S/S 컬렉션을 들 수 있다. Figure 6은 슬리브와 커프스를 과장하고 반복시킴으 로써 독특한 조형적 표현을 보여준 원피스이다. 꼼 데 가르송(Comme des Garcons)은 Figure 7에서 기존 의복이 갖고 있는 내부의 디테일 선을 모두 생 략하고 최소한의 절개를 통해 심플한 실루엣을 기하 학적 형태로 표현한 후, 오브제로 사용한 꽃을 여러 개 중첩시킴으로써 독창적이며 입체적인 느낌을 강 조하였다. 다음으로 ‘해체’ 기법을 통해 표현된 큐비즘스타일 패션을 살펴보면, 먼저 분해 및 재조립을 통한 해체 에서, Figure 8의 꼼 데 가르송은 2011년 S/S 컬렉 션에서 외투의 슬리브가 있을 자리에 또 다른 형태의 코트를 비대칭적으로 배치하여 기이한 실루엣을 만들 어냄으로써 의복의 구조를 완전히 왜곡시켜 새로운 형태로 재탄생시켰다. 2010년 S/S 컬렉션 Figure 9 에서는 어깨 부분의 볼록한 부분을 가슴 쪽으로 전치 시킴으로써 있어야 할 자리가 아닌 새로운 곳에 특정 형태를 두어 구조적인 형태의 변형을 꾀했다. 다음으로 착장 방법의 무시를 통한 해체의 예를 살펴보면, Figure 10은 꼼 데 가르송의 2011년 S/S 컬렉션으로 재킷의 한쪽 혹은 뒤쪽에 또 다른 재킷 을 덧붙임으로써 입는 재킷이 아닌 걸쳐진 형태의 재킷을 통해 착장 방법에 의한 해체를 보여주고 있 다. 다음으로 Figure 11은 서로 다른 두 가지의 외 투를 연결하여 원피스를 입은 후 상의에 착장하지 않고 목에 두름으로써 기존 의복의 착장 방법을 무 시하고 새로운 형태로 표현하였다. 마지막으로 다시점 표현에 의한 해체 표현에 관해 살펴보면, 큐비즘 회화에서의 동시성과 관련성이 있 다. 큐비즘 패션에서의 동시성이 가지는 의미는 다 시점에서 본 형태들을 동시에 패션에 표현되어 나타 난 것이라 할 수 있겠다. 즉 아이템의 디테일을 해 체해 정형화된 시각에서 벗어나 다양한 시점을 지닌 과장된 형태로 왜곡되어 나타난다. 이는 일반적인 옷의 형태와 착장 방법을 정형화된 실루엣들 사이에 비정형화된 사고의 차이를 통해 본질을 부각하는 시 각적 효과다. 이러한 동시성은 정형화된 패션의 스 타일이 아니라 다양한 시점의 변화를 줌으로써 시선 을 확장하며, 이러한 시각의 확장은 양적인 미적확 장 뿐만 아니라 의외성을 갖는 유희적 수단으로서 활용된다. 그 실례로 로미오 피레(Romeo Pires)의 2010년 S/S 컬렉션 작품을 들 수 있다. 측면에 위 치해야 하는 정형화된 셔츠의 소매 위치를 Figure 12처럼 앞 중심 쪽으로 구성하여 다양한 시점에서 최예리 · 최정욱 / 현대 패션에 나타난 큐비즘스타일패션 연구 23 본 패션의 형태를 표현함으로써 패션의 표현 영역을 확장시켰다. 또한 꼼 데 가르송은 Figure 13에서와 같이 재킷을 스커트로 사용하여 햄 라인에 라펠과 Figure 2. Manish Arora 2010 F/W RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 3. Josh Goot 2010 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 4. VIKTOR & ROLF 2010 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 5. VIKTOR & ROLF 2006 F/W RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 6. VIKTOR & ROLF 2011 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 7. Comme des Garcons 2012 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 8. Comme des Garcons 2011 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 9. Comme des Garcons 2010 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 10. Comme des Garcons 2011 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 11. Comme des Garcons 2011 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 12. Romeo Pires 2010 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 13. Comme des Garcons 2011 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com 슬리브가 위치하도록 배치함으로써 다각도 시점에서 본 새로운 형태를 제안하여 의복구성의 본질적 질서 를 부정한 유니크한 원피스를 선보였다. 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 18권 2호 24 2) 지오메틱한 블록 배치 다음으로 현대 패션에 나타난 큐비즘스타일패션 에서는 컷팅·분해, 프린트, 패치워크 등의 기법을 통 해 기하학적인 면 분할이 많이 나타났으며 다양한 형태의 독특한 오브제를 통한 입체적 표현이 자주 보였는데, 이러한 특성을 ‘지오메틱한 블록 배치’로 정리하였다. 먼저 ‘기하학적 면 분할’을 통한 표현을 살펴보 면, 재단 등에 의해 나누어진 패턴·패널을 기하학적 인 형태로 다채롭게 분할함으로써 다양한 모습으로 패션에 적용하였다. 특히 컷팅, 프린트, 패치워크 등 의 기법을 사용하였는데, 먼저 컷팅·분해를 통한 패 널 분리의 예로는 페드로 로렌코(Pedro Lourenco) 의 2013년 S/S 컬렉션의 작품 Figure 14로 기하학 적 커팅을 사용하여 패널을 분리하여 표현함으로써 고스적인 분위기를 큐비즘적으로 해석·표현하였다. 꼼 데 가르송은 Figure 15에서 기하학적 면 분할로 나누어진 각각의 패널에 이질적 소재를 믹스매치하 고, 각각의 패널에 라운드 컷팅함으로써 이질적 소 재의 대비를 극대화시켰다. 스테피 크리스티안 (Steffie Christiaens)은 Figure 16에서 기하학적인 컷팅으로 패널을 분리시키고 부분적으로 천을 덧붙 여 입체적으로 표현하였다. Figure 14. Pedro Lourenco 2013 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 15. Comme des Garcons 2012 F/W RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 16. Steffi Chrishan 2013 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 17. Issey Miyake 2011 F/W RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com 다음으로 프린트를 이용하여 지오메틱한 블록 배 치를 표현한 작품을 살펴보면, Figure 17의 이세이 미야케 작품에서는 지그재그와 하운드 투스 패턴을 상·하의에 각각 배치하여 써피스 프린트하여 표현하 였으며, 입체적인 칼라가 드레이프로 연출되는 베스 트를 착장함으로써 큐비즘적 느낌을 강조하였다. 한 편, Figure 18에서 보여지듯이 알렉산더 맥퀸은 파 충류나 바다생물이 떠올려지는 추상적인 문양을 대 칭으로 배치하여 디지털 프린팅 하였는데, 이는 에 어리한 소재와 함께 조화롭게 연출되었다. 패치워크로 표현된 면 배치의 예로, 매니쉬 아로 라의 2010년 F/W 컬렉션에서 선보인 작품 Figure 19는 다양한 컬러로 면 분할된 원피스 위에 입체적 인 형태의 패치워크 볼레로를 더해 큐비즘적 패션을 완성하였다. 다음으로 ‘오브제에 의한 입체적 표현’을 통한 큐 비즘스타일패션을 살펴보면, Figure 20에서 꼼 데 가르송은 외투를 페티코트 형태의 오브제로 사용하 면서 페티코트 골격 형태를 그대로 겉으로 드러내고 슬리브 등의 디테일을 생략함으로써 충격적인 실루 엣을 만들어냈다. Figure 21은 아르주 캐프롤(Arzu Kaprol)의 2011 F/W 컬렉션 작품으로, 입체적인 원 통형의 상의에 스터드 등의 메탈 소재 트리밍을 빽 빽하게 달아 오브제를 사용한 입체적인 표현을 잘 나타낸 작품이다. 최예리 · 최정욱 / 현대 패션에 나타난 큐비즘스타일패션 연구 25 Figure 18. Alexander Mcqueen 2010 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 19. Manish Arora 2010 F/W RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 20. Comme des Garcons 2012 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 21. Arzew Kefrol 2011 F/W RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 22. Hussein Chalayan 2012 F/W RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 23. Maison Martin Margiela 2011 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 24. VIKTOR & ROLF 2010 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 25. VIKTOR & ROLF 2010 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 26. Comme des Garcons 2012 F/W RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 27. VIKTOR & ROLF 2010 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 28. Rick Owens 2010 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com Figure 29. Blythe Damis Emi 2010 S/S RTW - www.firstviewkorea.com 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 18권 2호 26 3) 실루엣의 왜곡 및 단순화 마지막으로 현대 패션에 나타난 큐비즘스타일패션 은 여성의 인체가 갖고 있는 고유의 곡선미를 부정 하고 평면적 혹은 3차원적으로 조작·왜곡하여 실루 엣을 생략·단순화 시키거나 기존의 디테일을 확대· 연장함으로써 ‘실루엣의 왜곡 및 단순화’를 통해 표 현되었다. ‘왜곡’이란, 예술에서 원형과 그 표상 간 의 의도적이거나 비의도적으로 나타나는 차이를 가 리키는 용어로써(“Glossary of world art,” 2014), 미술용어사전에 나타난 왜곡에 대한 용어 정의는 다 양하지만 패션에 있어서 왜곡의 개념은 인체의 이상 적 형태를 이탈해 만들어진 것, 즉 강조와 과장, 확 대 등의 방법으로 인체의 자연적 비례를 무시한 복 식으로 정의할 수 있다(Kim, 2009). ‘단순화’는 복잡 하지 않고 간단하며 단조롭게 만들어지는 형태로 인 체의 실루엣이나 의복의 구조를 단순화시켜 왜곡되 어 표현한 것을 말한다. 이러한 특성은 평면적 혹은 3차원적으로 왜곡시키거나 실루엣의 단순화 혹은 디 테일·트리밍의 확대 및 연장에 의해 표현되는 것으 로 나타났다. 먼저 ‘평면적 왜곡’을 표현한 예를 살펴보면, 후 세인 샬라얀(Hussein Chalayan)은 Figure 22에서 여성 인체 곡선미를 철저히 부정하고 직사각형의 플 랫한 형태의 실루엣으로 표현하였으며, 메종 마틴 마르지엘라(Maison Martin Margiela)는 Figure 23에 서 트렌치 코트가 그려진 빳빳한 종이를 어깨에 걸 친 듯한 평면적인 직사각형 실루엣을 표현하였다. 다음으로 ‘3차원적 조작’ 기법의 예로, Figure 24 에서 빅터 앤 롤프는 3차원적으로 면을 마치 전기톱 으로 잘라낸 듯한 독창적인 컷팅감이 돋보이는 드레 스를 선보였다. Figure 25는 튤 소재로 만든 드레스 의 중간을 뻥 뚫어서 안이 보이게 하는 드레스로, 소재의 특성을 적극 이용하여 3차원적인 왜곡·조작 을 진행하였다. 다음으로 ‘실루엣의 생략’을 통한 큐비즘스타일패 션의 표현 사례를 살펴보면, 2012년 F/W 꼼 데 가 르송의 ‘미래는 평면적이다.’라는 컨셉을 가진 컬렉 션을 볼 수 있다. Figure 26에서는 실루엣을 단순화 시켜 생략시킴과 동시에 과장되게 표현한 평면적 디 자인을 전개하였으며 단순화한 실루엣의 오버사이즈 의상으로 패션에 대한 고정관념을 무너뜨렸다. 뿐만 아니라 단추와 지퍼 없이 단순한 형태들로 만들어 새로운 의복의 개념을 정립하였으며, 인체의 실루엣 을 생각하지 않고 단순화시킨 표현이 마치 종이 인 형 같은 인상을 주었다. 마지막으로 ‘디테일·트리밍을 확대하고 연장’함으 로써 큐비즘스타일패션을 표현하였는데, Figure 27 에서 빅터 앤 롤프는 얇은 소재를 여러 겹으로 겹쳐 3차원적인 도형의 형태를 어깨와 스커트에 어시매트 릭(asymmetric)하게 배치하고, 이를 사선으로 다시 잘라 마치 인체가 도형 안에 들어가 있는 느낌을 연 출하였다. Figure 28은 릭 오웬스(Rick Owens)의 작품으로 재킷의 한쪽 칼라만 지오메트릭한 도형의 형태로 확대시켜 어시매트릭하게 표현하였다. 다음 으로 브라이스 다미스 에미(Bryce Damice Aime)의 Figure 29에서는 베스트 어깨를 입체적인 실루엣으 로 확대시켜 공작새 느낌을 주었고, 스커트는 패널 을 기하학적으로 재단하여 입체적인 요철감을 표현 하였다. Ⅴ. 결론 및 제언 본 연구는 2010년-2013년 파리 컬렉션 작품 중 F.G.R. 분석을 통해 객관적인 방법으로 큐비즘과 관 련 깊은 패션스타일을 선정하고, 선정된 큐비즘스타 일패션의 조형적 디자인 요소를 분석함으로써 현대 패션에 나타난 큐비즘스타일패션의 특성을 분석하는 것을 목적으로 하였으며 연구의 결과는 다음과 같 다. 아이템 분포의 경우 ‘원피스’가 가장 많은 것으로 분석되었고, ‘H 실루엣’이 주를 이루었으며 ‘면’ 소 재의 사용빈도가 높은 것으로 나타났다. 색상의 경 우, 주로 사용된 색상은 ‘레드, 옐로우, 블루 계열’ 정도로 국한되었으며 ‘저채도와 무채색’의 빈도가 높은 것으로 분석되었다. 배색은 ‘솔리드’가 대부분 이었으며, 트리밍은 거의 사용하지 않는 것으로 보 였다. 디테일 표현방법의 경우, 큐비즘스타일패션은 입체적 표현, 과장·확대·연장, 왜곡, 해체·전치·도치, 최예리 · 최정욱 / 현대 패션에 나타난 큐비즘스타일패션 연구 27 기하학적 면 분할 등을 통해 의복 디테일의 변화를 보여주는 것을 알 수 있었다. 이외에도 소재 믹스매 치, 겹침·반복, 비대칭적 구조 등의 표현 방식이 사 용된 것으로 분석되었다. 이상의 결과는 큐비즘적 성향 표현에 있어 용이하기 때문인 것으로 사료되었 다. 즉, 기하학적이고 심플하며 입체적인 디테일 표 현을 주로 하는 큐비즘적 성향을 표현하는데 이와 같은 디자인 요소의 조건이 적합한 것으로 나타났 다. 이상의 실증적 자료의 분석 결과를 통해 큐비즘스 타일패션에 나타난 여러 가지의 표현 방식들을 종합 하고 정리하여 세 가지 특성을 도출할 수 있다. 먼저, '전위적인 구성 방법'이다. 현대 패션에서 색상·트리밍·디테일의 반복적 사용을 통한 ‘중첩’기 법의 빈번한 활용이 큐비즘적 스타일로 연결되었으 며 의복 구성을 위한 여러 디테일 요소를 분해한 후 다시 재조립, 기존의 착장 방법에서 벗어난 착장의 형태를 보여주거나 보는 각도에 따라 다르게 보이는 여러 형태의 집약된 형태로 제시되는 다시점 표현을 통해 집대성된 ‘해체’기법의 표현이 전위적인 구성 형태로 나타나 큐비즘스타일패션을 표현하는 것으로 보여 졌다. 다음으로 '지오메틱한 블록 배치'이다. 컷팅·분해 등을 이용한 물리적 조작에 의한 패널 분리나 프린 트 혹은 패치워크 기법을 이용하여 기하학적 면 분 할을 통해 큐비즘적 느낌을 표현하였다. 뿐만 아니 라, 입체적인 오브제를 사용함으로써 큐비즘적 느낌 을 강조하였다. 마지막으로 '실루엣의 왜곡 및 단순화'이다. 인체 의 윤곽선의 미를 극대화시키기 위해 사용되는 의복 의 구성선 및 실루엣을 평면적으로 납작하게 눌러 왜곡하거나 3차원적인 조작을 통한 왜곡, 전혀 다른 형태로 생략하여 단순화시키거나 세부 디테일 트리 밍을 확대 혹은 연장 하는 형태로 표현하는 방법을 통해 큐비즘적 스타일을 나타내고 있었다. 본 연구는 20세기에 등장한 예술 운동 중 가장 실 험적이고 새로운 모더니즘의 시작이라 칭해지며 현 대 디자인에 큰 영향을 미친 예술양식인 큐비즘을 살펴보고 현대 패션 디자인에서 나타난 큐비즘적 디 자인 요소를 분석하여 큐비즘적 패션 스타일을 규명 하고 이를 하나의 패션 스타일로 확립하려 하였다. 나아가 패션 디자인 영역에서 큐비즘패션스타일로서 의 자리를 확립하는 가능성을 제시하는데 일조할 수 있으리라 기대한다. 본 연구에서는 현대 패션 디자인에서 나타난 큐비 즘적 요소를 분석하여 큐비즘적 패션 스타일을 규명 하는데 그쳤지만, 후속 연구에서는 큐비즘스타일을 다양하게 다루어 큐비즘 패션 디자인으로 제시하는 연구가 되길 기대한다. References Chae G. (2002), Modern dress aesthetics, Seoul: Gyeongchunsa. Edward, F. F. (1985). Cubism. (I. Kim, Trans.). Seoul: mijinsa. (Original work published 1995). Glossary of world art, 'distortion'. (2014). Retriev ed from http://terms.naver.com/entry.nhn?cid= 170&docId=894834&mobile&categoryId=170 Ju, M. (1990), A study on the modern fashion u nder the influence of Fauvis (Unpublished doc toral dissertation). Chung-Ang University, Seou l, Korea. Kang, K. (1992), A Study on the Dress Design U sing P. Picasso’s cubistic Work (Unpublished master’s thesis). Ewha Women University, Seo ul, Korea. Kim, E. (2009), A Study on Modern Fashion Desi gn Utilizing Memphis Design’s characteristics (Unpublished master’s thesis). Hong-Ik Univer sity, Seoul, Korea. Lee, D. (2003), The Fashion Design Applying to the Formation of Cubism Arts (Unpublished m aster’s thesis). Keimyung University, Daegu, K orea. Lee, E. 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(1993), A study on concentrated on t he years between 1910s and 1920s: Effects o n the modern clothes-design by the art of th e Cubism. Research Bulletin. 46(1), 193-220. Collection 2010 S/S-2013 F/W RTW. (2013, Dec ember 1 - 2012, March 30). firstviewkorea, R etrieved from http://www.firstviewkorea.com Received(January 10, 2014) Revised(March 17, 2014) Accepted(June 5, 2014) work_2xdb432qyrfbzksi7v2lzge534 ---- Discrete Morphological Size Distributionsand Densities : Estimation | Semantic Scholar Skip to search formSkip to main content> Semantic Scholar's Logo Search Sign InCreate Free Account You are currently offline. Some features of the site may not work correctly. Corpus ID: 207775972Discrete Morphological Size Distributionsand Densities : Estimation @inproceedings{ApplicationsK1996DiscreteMS, title={Discrete Morphological Size Distributionsand Densities : Estimation}, author={Techniquesand ApplicationsK}, year={1996} } Techniquesand ApplicationsK Published 1996 | Morphological size distributions and densities are frequently used as descriptors of granularity or texture within an image. They have been successfully employed in a number of image processing and analysis tasks, including shape analysis, multiscale shape representation, texture classiication, and noise ltering. In most cases however it is not possible to analytically compute these quantities. In this paper, we study the problem of estimating the (discrete) morphological size distribution… Expand Save to Library Create Alert Cite Launch Research Feed Share This Paper References SHOWING 1-10 OF 64 REFERENCES SORT BYRelevance Most Influenced Papers Recency Monte Carlo Estimation of Morphological Granulometric Discrete Size Distributions K. Sivakumar, J. Goutsias Computer Science ISMM 1994 9 Save Alert Research Feed On Estimating Granulometric Discrete Size Distributions of Random Sets K. Sivakumar, John I. Goutsias Mathematics 1997 3 Save Alert Research Feed Pattern Spectrum and Multiscale Shape Representation P. Maragos Mathematics, Computer Science IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 1989 704 PDF Save Alert Research Feed Morphological texture-based maximum-likelihood pixel classification based on local granulometric moments E. Dougherty, John T. Newell, J. Pelz Mathematics, Computer Science Pattern Recognit. 1992 120 Save Alert Research Feed Morphological image segmentation by local granulometric size distributions E. Dougherty, J. Pelz, F. Sand, A. Lent Mathematics, Computer Science J. Electronic Imaging 1992 68 Save Alert Research Feed Gray-scale morphological granulometric texture classification Yidong Chen, E. Dougherty Mathematics 1994 124 Save Alert Research Feed Asymptotic normality of the morphological pattern-spectrum moments and orthogonal granulometric generators F. Sand, E. Dougherty Mathematics, Computer Science J. Vis. Commun. Image Represent. 1992 33 Save Alert Research Feed On the asymptotic behavior of some statistics based on morphological operations M. Moore, S. Archambault Mathematics 1991 6 Save Alert Research Feed Representation of Linear Granulometric Moments for Deterministic and Random Binary Euclidean Images E. Dougherty, F. Sand Mathematics, Computer Science J. Vis. Commun. Image Represent. 1995 31 Save Alert Research Feed Random field models in image analysis R. Dubes, Anil K. Jain Mathematics 1989 520 Save Alert Research Feed ... 1 2 3 4 5 ... Related Papers Abstract 64 References Related Papers Stay Connected With Semantic Scholar Sign Up About Semantic Scholar Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the Allen Institute for AI. Learn More → Resources DatasetsSupp.aiAPIOpen Corpus Organization About UsResearchPublishing PartnersData Partners   FAQContact Proudly built by AI2 with the help of our Collaborators Terms of Service•Privacy Policy The Allen Institute for AI By clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Dataset License ACCEPT & CONTINUE work_2by36bz7pfcadjkotl735ayfv4 ---- A P H I L O S O P H I C A L DESIGN A P P R O A C H FOR A N ALTERNATIVE C O N C E P T FOR THE URBAN PARKING G A R A G E By L E U N G YEN C H O W B.Arch., University of Idaho, 1987 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT O F T H E REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE O F MASTER O F A D V A N C E D STUDIES IN ARCHITECTURE in T H E F A C U L T Y O F G R A D U A T E STUDIES S C H O O L O F ARCHITECTURE W e accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY O F BRITISH C O L U M B I A February 1989 © L e u n g Yen C h o w , 1989 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British C o l u m b i a , I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of At2-CU'/TBC-WZ^ The University of British C o l u m b i a Vancouver, Canada Date f^e&HUM^f DE-6 (2/88) A B S T R A C T This thesis proposes an expanded conceptualization of traditional parking garages. It is of contemporary design practice to separate the activity of parking from that of adjacent buildings and places. D o i n g so results in parking structures being exclusive and without positive urban context. As a c o n s e q u e n c e , barren and often, hostile environs are created within these garages. The thesis identifies this practice as a contributor to a discontinuity of urban movement and activity. The thesis also identifies the contradictory nature and ineffectiveness of facade decoration. Through four propositions developed from a philosophical design approach, which draws primarily from the work of Heidegger, the thesis proposes to engage human awareness so as to supplement the utilitarian nature of the traditional garage c o n c e p t . It is suggested that doing so allows a positive environmental consciousness, and that active user participation can be elicited. It is also suggested that these propositions can potentially promote an integrity of construction and detailing, and that by overcoming the barren and hostile environs, a sense of civility and security can elevate the garage to a state of integrated function. Integrating the function of garages with those of other buildings can ii lead to a holistic use of site by facilitating urban continuity and, an architecture for garages richer in meaning than facade decoration. iii TABLE O F C O N T E N T S Abstract ii Introduction 1 1. A U T O M O B I L E S A N D TRADITIONAL G A R A G E S : 5 U R B A N IMPACT A N D R E A C T I O N Automobiles, 6. Utility as the design priority in practical garages, 10. Impact o n urban continuity, 16. Community and architectural reaction, 21. 2. EXPANDING T H E C O N C E P T O F G A R A G E S 27 Treasured objects and the expression of identity, 29. Driver perception and the quality of participation, 35. The inclusion of drivers/cars in architectural design, 39. 3. INTEGRATED F U N C T I O N : P R O G R A M EXPANSION A N D TACTILITY 42 Integrated function, 42. Expanded program, 43. Dwelling and the question concerning technology, 47. Tactile design, 56. Haptic perception and a human/mechanical dialogue, 63. Material joints, 73. Theoretical summary, 76. iv 4. G O A L S A N D PROPOSITIONS 76 Amenities for human inhabitation,83. Local orientation and building introduction, 85. "Place," 94. Integrity of building assembly, 98. Examples, 101. 5. C O N C L U S I O N 106 Notes I l l Sources 121 Appendix A 125 v A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T M y greatest debt I owe to Bill Bowler, G e o r g e Roberts, and Gregg Kessler. Their teachings during my attendance at the University of Idaho have spurred within me a desire to feel architecture. I also must acknowledge Ron Walkey for his sensitivity for the automobile. Sherry McKay for her prompt attention and expertise in communication, and William M c C r e e r y for his painfully correct criticisms. N o less deserving of thanks are John Biln and Clemens Pollok. Discussions with them have had an intensity and richness that has affected this and other of my pondering considerably. I am also grateful to the University of British C o l u m b i a for their financial support. vi I N T R O D U C T I O N The doing of architecture is predicated o n the premise that architecture is to address both the physical and psychological needs of human beings. Detail, finish, light, m o o d , metaphor, and symbolism must be considered in conjunction with practical requirements. In this way, the usability of a building can be both subjective and objective simultaneously. It is this coexistence of the subjective/objective which distances architecture from both construction and pure art. This intrinsic state of architecture though difficult to achieve possesses one identifiable goal: the construction of a building for a practical purpose, although a building rich in meaning so as to engage the imagination of anyone w h o might use it. For most urban building typologies, this is so. In view of this, it is o d d that there exists one very basic and ubiquitous building typology in which this is not the case. That building type is the garage. Parking garages are necessary buildings in urban areas. The reason is twofold: first, the vast majority of p e o p l e commute by automobile which creates a high demand for parking space, and two, the stacking of parking layers is the most economically attractive to investors due to high land prices. Thus, to maximize the return o n investment and to 1 a c c o m m o d a t e the demand for parking, multi-storey parking structures have proliferated. E c o n o m i c criteria remains the dominant influence and the standardization of form, materials, and plan in their construction has ensued. Consequently, many garages look and function alike and their c o n c e p t is one associated only with storage. These e c o n o m i c storage buildings are designed for maximum space efficiency. Being thus, garages d o not attend to the psychological needs of the p e o p l e using them and any consideration b e y o n d the s c o p e of life support and basic safety are not priorities. In garages, the extent to which their users can participate is limited to following directional signs to parking spaces. This thesis proposes to improve the quality of garage user participation. T o attempt this requires that architectural deliberations be granted to garages in the same intensity as they w o u l d be to other building typologies. This intensity could result in richer interpretations of garages and could stimulate a higher level of urban awareness for their users. Garages are worthy of such deliberations because they are public places that should serve as transitory connections between streets and the structures that garages serve. The thesis contests the priority set on pragmatism in garage design. Pragmatism, by definition, is not c o n c e r n e d with theory or ideas to which something like symbolism 2 belongs. Yet the seizing of pragmatism as the priority in garage design has unwittingly resulted in a very symbolic typology by default; contemporary garages symbolize structures d e v o i d of interest w h o s e urban contribution is limited to being ancillary storage bins for cars. The result has b e e n what the thesis refers to as a fracture of urban continuity. The thesis suggests that this as an unacceptable condition and p r o p o s e s an alternate way of conceptualizing garages. A philosophical design approach which draws primarily from the work of Martin H e i d e g g e r is d e v e l o p e d . This approach uses human experience to set in motion a building/user dialogue. Heidegger's p h e n o m e n o l o g i c a l insights have already informed various architectural theorists such as Kenneth Frampton, and have influenced urban planning theorists such as Kevin Lynch, and artists such as Robert Irwin. Heidegger's views have also influenced the practicing profession as is evident in the current work of Phau/Jones - Holt/Hinshaw, and as can be seen in the haptic architecture of Charles M o o r e . Heidegger's sensitivity of thinking about building, and how technology is e n g a g e d in a phenomenal relationship under the domain of dwelling has provided a general philosophical position from which various architects, artists, and other individuals have based their designs of built forms. As Heidegger's insights offer a general p h i l o s o p h y from which the design of any building can be conceptualized, this thesis has a d o p t e d his 3 philosophy as the starting point for an alternative conceptualization of the urban parking garage. The position recognizes the importance and necessity of practicality with regards to garages, but puts emphasis o n the quality of human experience. This allows the incorporation of parking into a higher level of participation in which an environmental consciousness and an urban c o n n e c t i o n can be made in a positive way. Physical elements such as site and climate, and non-physical c o m p o n e n t s such as history (indicating traditional use of site) and symbolism, must interact cohesively to establish a sense of permanence for the garage so that it can serve as a place of transition and thus facilitate urban continuity. It is not the intent of the thesis to glorify the car, but to integrate the experience of the driver into architectural strategies - strategies that can supplement the process of parking. With these supplements, the garage typology can d o more than merely provide ancillary concrete buildings for the storing of cars. From the philosophical position, the thesis generates propositions that, although not overtly prescriptive, are generative. They d o not prescribe an exacting solution, but rather, they e m b o d y architectural goals which are d e v e l o p e d from Heidegger's philosophy. They also reflect the views of various architects, theorists, and artists w h o have applied Heidegger's philosophy to built forms. As such, the propositions involve 4 theory concerning human experience as a whole p h e n o m e n o n . Being s o , they belong to a realm in which the subjective is the necessary compliment for the objective. M o s t literature o n parking structures is of a practical ilk, dealing with program, engineering, and maintenance. This has been discussed in the volumes of literature c o n c e r n i n g practical requirements - stall design, turning radii, clearances, atmospheric control, and the e c o n o m i c s of their construction, and will not be repeated here. A l o n e , they cannot bring about an architecture of garages; they require additional attributes that carry meaning and interpretation beyond operation. There is a scarcity of work addressing such attributes hence, the contribution of this thesis. The spirit of the usage of place in this thesis is meant to be associated with positive dialogue and a conscious environmental awareness. Garages are in fact, "places," but ones which currently possess negative association. Except where indicated, the illustrations within the thesis are by the author. 5 Chapter O n e A U T O M O B I L E S A N D TRADITIONAL GARAGES: U R B A N IMPACT A N D R E A C T I O N The o p e n i n g chapter is divided into four major parts: automobiles, utility as a design priority, urban impact, and community reaction. Automobiles T o understand the necessity and importance of the garage, a brief discussion of the automobile is useful. Although the birthplace of the automobile is Europe, by the late twenties, there were over twenty six million cars registered in the United States, o n e for nearly every five p e o p l e . During this time eighty percent of the world's motorized vehicles were in the U.S., largely because of Henry Ford's assembly line technique of automobile production. In 1915 Ford's Highland Park factory (Detroit) could produce o n e thousand M o d e l Ts per day at a cost to the consumer of a modest $ 3 6 0 . 2 By the mid-to-late twenties, fifteen million Ford M o d e l T's had been built, one every ten seconds from the assembly line and in 1926 were 6 selling for $290. As early as the first quarter of this century, cars became so ubiquitous that in 1937 Robert and Helen Lynd would write in their Middletown in Transition, "ownership of an automobile has now reached the point of being an essential part of normal living."'* In this regard, the role of the automobile has not changed for sixty years. For the average p e r s o n , the automobile represents the largest monetary investment second only to the cost of a c c o m m o d a t i o n . The proliferation of the car since its advent has spurred the construction of interstate highway systems, increasing the magnitude of any individual's mobility. The car is the vehicle from which the vast majority of the population experience their environment. Henri LeFebvre states: "traffic circulation is o n e of the main functions of a society and, as such, involves the priority of parking spaces, adequate streets and roadways...it is a fact that for many people the car is perhaps the most substantial part of their living conditions."^ With the advent of private automobiles came a fundamentally different m o d e of environmental perception. A c c o m p a n i e d by a new dimension of personal i n d e p e n d e n c e , the geographic horizons of any individual using a car were increased dramatically. N o 7 longer were one's social contacts restricted to a single n e i g h b o r h o o d , and this i n d e p e n d e n c e from transit schedules meant new routes and adventure. In this way, its practical use has b e c o m e completely integrated into contemporary living and there can be n o denying the necessity for automobiles in North American lifestyles. With the advantages grew disadvantages. The increasing number of cars o n roadways and city streets led to traffic congestion and pollution. Traditional n e i g h b o r h o o d s were fractured and lost by a frenzied m o m e n t u m of indiscriminate road construction during the Urban Renewal of the fifties and sixties. It was not that these traditional n e i g h b o r h o o d s were of no use; the demand for unrestricted mobility and the euphoric liberative state of mind of which the car provided, simply outweighed any associated drawbacks. As a result, indiscriminate road construction was tolerated because of the expanded c o m m u t i n g range made possible by the car. A c o n s e q u e n c e of this expanded range was the deterioration of life in city cores. Suburban shopping centers proliferated, drawing business and activity away from the downtown sector. "The elevated superhighway systems, the most important legacy of visionary city planners to the postwar built environment, were conceived initially as a solution to traffic congestion o n local roads and urban streets, though many highways and freeways p r o d u c e d adverse e c o n o m i c effects 8 o n the quality of life in bypassed n e i g h b o r h o o d s and small town centers. Many superhighway systems built in the late forties, fifties, and sixties are now c o n s i d e r e d to have had a dehumanizing effect, a sentiment that has catalyzed a resurgence of interest in the random, small-scale vernacular architecture o n countless small-town strips, and roadsides. In architectural circles, Louis Kahn envisioned entire cities whose form and organization were dictated by the circulation of automobiles and submitted a design for Philadelphia indicating s u c h . I suspect his intention was to create efficient movement patterns, but o n e c o u l d also misinterpret his design as a car-as-master c o n c e s s i o n ; an environment where the p e o p l e in cities are subordinated to efficient traffic flow. O t h e r architects of this futuristic vision (Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Richard Neutra for example), like Kahn, envisioned entire cities and the Utopian planning of transportation systems in their respective designs, Project of City of the Future, 1925, Contemporary City for Three Million P e o p l e , 1921-22, and Rush City Reformed, 1920s-30s. The scale of these projects is staggering by contemporary standards and the garage systems of these designs appear n o more human than those of traditional design. Negative associations did not stem from only the use of the automobile; maintenance has been an inconvenience for car owners since the car's inception into society. Fuels and Kahn's proposal lor an automobile city. Philadelphia. Source: Architectural Review, August, I960: 135. 9 lubricants are messy necessities, adding to the perception that the maintenance of a car is something dirty, involving dripping oil and emitting noxious fumes. Further, to anyone not mechanically inclined, the car is something mysterious, to be expensively repaired only by experts. Body repair expense is a major factor in exorbitant automobile insurance premiums. After an explosive emergence into society, "the wholehearted approval and celebration of the motorcar gave way to more sober, critical, and negative assessments of its impact."^ I suspect that o n e resulting p h e n o m e n o n of these negative associations is that the use of an automobile is accepted as a necessary condition, but the automobile itself is regarded as a space and money c o n s u m i n g object, often dangerous, and to be hidden in pedestrian sensitive areas. I also suspect it is these negative associations which contribute to the practical design of garages. Utility as the Design Priority in Practical Garages North American garages up to the early Seventies reflected the negative associations mentioned above. C o n c e i v e d as buildings to store necessary but cumbersome objects, their architectural expression and execution were sterile. Their facades were insensitive to 1 0 n e i g h b o r h o o d context and their interiors barren. This tendency has persisted reflecting our recognition of only the practical uses of garages and cars. As a c o n s e q u e n c e of a society w h o s e tendency is to measure an object by its usefulness, utility has been a strong influence in the design of parking structures. To propose an alternate way of conceptualizing garages, it is first necessary to discuss the impact brought o n by the shortcomings of traditional garage design. Utility often precludes amenity. Such is the case with traditional parking structures, which are depressing and which suppress any interesting dialogue between garages and their users. Space within them is maximized for e c o n o m i c efficiency, and aside from affording basic life support and safety, little is provided. This is not to c o n d e m n pragmatic design; garages must store cars and we clearly require the basics for life support and safety. But with these as the only criteria in design, the idea of a positive environmental consciousness b e c o m e s impotent, and the possibility for an interesting interpretation of the building is suppressed. Moreover, some safety concerns (fire regulations, for example) are so prioritized that the already bleak character of garage environments can change from lifeless to hostile. Completely enclosed concrete stairwells (a response to fire c o d e s ) , many with narrow passage, are perceived as potentially dangerous areas for personal safety and are not welcoming. 1 1 As storage places, garages are dissociated with any specific place. That is, most parkades look and function alike giving them the characteristic of being interchangeable and neutral. This is anti-architectural according to a philosophical assumption which understands architecture to be the revelation of place, and which implies s o m e degree of uniqueness brought about by a surrounding context. A basic premise of architecture is to facilitate a dialogue between person and building, by response to site, and by using procession, symbolism, interpretation, deliberation, and civility. A further assumption of architecture can be thus stated: architecture's innate quality is to elicit participation so that p e o p l e may interact with their immediate environment without being completely separated from their other urban or rural surroundings. In garages, this separation is blatant and quality of user participation has b e e n reduced to following directional signage. The result is the experience of exclusion, a feeling that garages seem lacking. Rudolf Arnheim provides an accurate explanation: "...the environment is complete without him, nothing refers to him, needs him, calls him, or responds to him. This lack of external definition destroys the internal sense of identity, because a person defines the nature of his o w n being largely by his place in a network of personal relations."® 1 2 Arnheim describes this general c o n d i t i o n as empty and forlorn. The parking garage at Sun W a h Market in Vancouver's Chinatown has this emptiness. The parking is located above the street o n levels five through eight. The lack of an exterior pedestrian access to the parking levels clearly separates the driver from street level activity. A c c e s s is permitted through interior stairs and elevators only. This condition of abandonment is a c o n s e q u e n c e of excluding the users from the scheme of events, o r of including the users only to the point where their actions are completely determined by a p r e c o n c e i v e d intention, that is, parking. At this point, the users are processed by an operation, the operation being " p e r f o r m e d in a specified sequence and in accordance with specific r u l e s . " With this processing, Robert Yudell states that in such instance, the user "is n o w the object of an operation, not the subject of an a c t i o n . " 1 * * A condition of contemporary society is to believe that garages are where we rid ourselves of cars, and as such these storage buildings require no amenities. This wholesale dismissal corresponds to O s w a l d Spengler's s e c o n d necessary phase of life in civilization, a phase where creativity is given up for the organization and rigid processes of a m e c h a n i z e d dictum. M u m f o r d , assessing Spengler's "universal" explanation, refutes its correctness: " T h o s e w h o took Spengler's thesis seriously - and many w h o never heard of it accepted it in practice - were in effect preparing to commit suicide; A sense of abandonment at Sun Wah Market. Chinatown. Vancouver 13 for they were transferring meaning and value to only o n e part of the environment, to only one process and function, to only one aspect of the human personality. That part, [pragmatic] no matter h o w vastly o n e magnifies it or energizes it, can never b e c o m e an adequate substitute for the w h o l e . If technical achievements were alone capable of absorbing human interest and manifesting creativity, if the machine were in fact the only reputable source of value for m o d e r n man, that w o u l d mean that his biological and social and personal activities would all shrink and s h r i v e l . " 1 1 It is of human nature to resist standardization which suppresses the potential for personal interpretation. Utility, with the maximization of efficiency as a premise, standardizes procedures and means. Utility alone therefore, is in conflict with the very essence of human nature. In architecture this pragmatic end is de-humanizing and o p p o s e s the premise of architecture whose e n d is to attend to the nature of the human being. Hence, utility has an originary lack and as Hannah Arendt has suggested in The Human Condition, "utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness. The garage, designed in this way can only be perceived as something usable, temporary, and ancillary to the point 1 4 of exclusion: " A s A d o r n o has indicated, o n c e under these demands of pure functionality, technology can n o longer be e x p e r i e n c e d , only operated - resulting in our gestures b e c o m i n g brutal and precise, without deliberation or civility...Irregular sites are flattened by the bulldozer, eliminating all traces of the particular characteristics of the place, in order that it may efficiently a c c o m m o d a t e a maximized v o l u m e of universal space." T o avoid this undesirable state of architecture, whose equivalent in physics might be entropy zero, a supplement for utility is n e e d e d . This supplement in architecture can be attained by the use of metaphor, history, analogy, and e x p a n d e d program, all of which place practical use in a milieu of richer interpretations. This supplement is not inessential, o r superfluous: it is the necessary compliment to practicality in buildings because buildings, being to the service of human beings, must a c c o m m o d a t e the human will to resist universal standardization. In architecture, this c o n c e p t of supplement is the means by which the idea of the building itself is appropriated, read, which in turn establishes significance and the feeling of place. The seemingly exclusive roles of art and utility are in fact, symbiotic in architecture because architecture is to e m b o d y shelter in the widest sense: it protects us from the elements (physical refuge), but also gives us a reading filled Alley entrance, stained canister doors, garbage dumpster, dark recesses, all contribute to brutal ambience at US. Bank garage. 1st & Cherry. Seattle. 15 with personal identity and meaning that can also provide us with psychological sanctuary and imaginative journey. Implicitly, an architecture of the garage is only possible if its design extends b e y o n d the precise measure of e c o n o m i c efficiency. Impact o n Urban Continuity The n e e d for parking space has resulted in the establishment of the parking garage as a major urban building type. However, to meet the enormous demand for storage space, investors have c h o s e n to d e v e l o p parking garages with maximized efficiency and e c o n o m y . The ensuing impact that traditional parking garages have had on the city environment can be described as a fracturing of urban continuity. Urban areas are networks of destinations and connections - connections where transition between destinations occur. A n d although the destinations themselves may have quite differing characteristics, the context in which they are situated and c o n n e c t e d to each other, possesses a felt and understandable coherence. The context or coherence, might be qualified as global, holistic, or at a more urban level, civic. These destinations and connections are of differing scales, ranging from corridors between rooms, pathways between buildings, and streets between neighborhoods. In many cases, the connections 1 6 are simply the overlapping zones of adjacent places. Lynch describes this p h e n o m e n o n : [City] "elements are connected through an immense and intricate network, which can be understood only as a series of overlapping local systems, never rigidly or instantaneously linked, and yet part of a fabric without edges. Each part has a history and a context, and that history and context shift as we move from part to part. In a peculiar way, each part contains information about its local context, and thus, by extension, about the w h o l e . " 1 4 Parking garages as they have been designed traditionally interrupt the continuum of which Lynch's passage implicitly refers. The overlap is non-existent. W e d o not enter garages for the explicit end of being processed into a parking spot. True, this is part of the inherent function of garages, but our goal or intended destination is not a oil-stained patch of concrete 2.4m wide by 5.5m long b o u n d e d by painted lines. The destination may be an office, apartment, shopping center, a medical facility. As p e o p l e move towards their intended destination, I suggest a mental image is created of what the place will look like u p o n arriving; and yet, the traditional design strategy for the garage inevitably causes an interruption of this image. Instead of arriving at the place previously visualized, arrival occurs via an ancillary concrete maze. 1 7 T o illustrate the counterpoint, consider a vestibule. A vestibule is an integral part of a building, that is, the vestibule can introduce the building to anyone who walks through it by revealing materials, construction, and history. Thus, by walking through a vestibule, a visitor has already embarked u p o n his destination. If designed sensitively, vestibules can contain what Lynch terms is "information about its local context, and thus, by extension, about the whole." That is, the vestibule is an architectural connection which joins the sidewalk with the building; its integrity is born from its role as a transition area within a larger continuum, that is, the immediate locale involving the street system and the building. Parkades and garages are currently d e v o i d of this architectural joining as they are spaces deliberately separated from the buildings they serve. They are designed as ancillary buildings with no overlapping qualities that would give to them a transitional capacity; they do not respond to site. A n d yet, they are the first spaces a commuter by car will experience when arriving at a destination. A sensitive response to site can achieve a number of qualities: one, it can root the garage to place; two, it can create a specific sense of place for the car and driver; three, it can integrate the activities of the garage with those of other buildings on the site; and four, it can reveal to the driver the organization of the site, and where important features may be. A n interesting example of this is Fraser Parkade o n U B C campus. The garage is situated in 1 8 a stand of evergreens and faces the gardens of the Asian Center. Respecting the lush vegetation, the garage has a low profile, e m p h a s i z e d by horizontal bands of concrete, stretching its width. M o r e o v e r , these bands have shelves o n t h e m where vegetation is allowed to hang over the face of the c o n c r e t e . O n e of these bands is a pedestrian walkway which connects the s e c o n d level of parking with the W e s t Mall. During the day, its low profile and vegetated setting complement the dark s h a d o w recesses characteristic to garage facades during the day. During the evening, the fluorescent glow filtering through the stand of trees gives the place a sense of warmth; it is somewhat reminiscent of the glow emitted from lumber mills of mountainous regions, or hydro-electric dams along the C o l u m b i a River in the d e a d of night. Fluorescent lighting and daytime dark shadows are two characteristics that make city garages uninviting, but by responding to site, Fraser Parkade has taken full advantage of t h e m . In a society that considers parking a necessary inconvenience, it is easy to ignore the considerable presence of urban parking garages. Therefore, a brief statistical diversion is in order. In Vancouver, a 1984 survey indicates that 50 per cent of all d o w n t o w n commuters use cars during peak h o u r s . 1 •* The same survey indicates that transit was not keeping pace with d e m a n d , and forecasts for the effect that the Light Rail Transit system will have, indicated still, a deficiency in transit supply. Thus, as traffic volumes increase, Sensitive response to site has taken full advantage of shadows and fluorescent lighting, two otherwise negative garage characteristics, Fraser Parkade. UBC, Vancouver. 19 the increase will be in the number of automobiles circulating in the core. C u r b space is heavily used during the day and saturated during the evening. The modal split of the transit/automobile ratio increases during the evening in favor of the car (approaching 25/75), and since in several locations curb occupancy reaches 100 per c e n t , 1 ^ the remaining cars are forced to use parkades. However, there is a more important statistic. In the survey, a parking inventory was performed whose numbers have great implication. In the survey z o n e (comprised chiefly of the financial core, Castown, C h i n a t o w n , Robsonstrasse, and immediate peripheral areas) a count of 43387 parking spaces was 17 r e c o r d e d . O f these, 23873 spaces were spaces in parkades. Using a conservative allowance of 3 2 5 1 ® square feet per automobile (due to garage efficiency), the result is close to 7.6 million square feet of parking - which does not include curb or surface lot parking. This figure, compared to the 16.5 million square feet of office/commercial space, results in a staggering 32 per cent of that built space being occupied by parking - 32 per cent delegated to an area of non-descript and non-transitional space in an area where urban vitality is perceived to be most intense. These figures indicate the importance of more deliberating design. Receptive and integrated functions must be designed into parkades because the parking garage is where a natural transition should take place between street and building. A n d as the numbers indicate, their potential to strengthen or interrupt the continuity and activity of the urban environment cannot be ignored. 20 Community and Architectural Reaction to Practical Parking Garages Architectural development of the garage has been slow to evolve for three major reasons: the post war b o o m , the persistence of the negative or utilitarian associations with the car in the minds of planners and the public, and the oversight of the garage as a potential urban contributor. Construction of parking garages increased sharply during the years following W o r l d War II. O p t i m i s m and increased consumer purchasing power led to a high production rate of automobiles creating a large d e m a n d for parking space within cities. T o accommodate the growing demand, simple concrete parkades afforded investors a means by which to capitalize o n parking revenue. Garage design became an exercise in maximizing spatial and e c o n o m i c efficiency. It is apparent that the d e m a n d for parking space took precedence over any concern for what the building l o o k e d like and what impact it w o u l d have o n its surrounding areas. Another reason for the slow response to the architectural development of garages is the "gradual [my emphasis] rise of the automobile as a respectable cultural by-product [that] has been quietly happening for over a century," 1 ^ a s observed by Angelo Tito Anselmi, contributor to Automobile and Culture. The negative, sober assessments of the early 2 1 impact of the automobile have had a tenacious influence on planners and many architects. Ebeneazer Howard's Garden Cities clearly subordinate the activity of motorists, m u c h like Radburn does with its separation of the car from the pedestrian zones. Despite the necessity of and the benefits derived from the automobile, the inconvenience of its storage and maintenance has left a negative impression that has rarely motivated an architectural response to the development of garages. Perhaps a more important reason for a slow response to the garage is that its potential for urban contribution has been overlooked. This has allowed the construction of generic and bleak garages to proliferate. In response, (due partly to the recognized necessity of the car in North American lifestyles), a growing number of communities are exercising ordinances which govern the contextual fit of garages, communities of which New Haven, C o n n e c t i c u t is the probable leader in this regard. The philosophy of N e w Haven City C o u n c i l has been to encourage high-style garage design and construction in the city core. Their rationale assumes that providing attractive and accessible parking space d o w n t o w n will draw commuters into the core, revitalizing it by increasing s h o p p i n g and entertainment a c t i v i t y . ^ What is important from their philosophy is that it includes the garage as a contributor to vital urban activity. 22 The m o m e n t u m brought about by a m o r e sensitive garage context has had an encouraging effect. At a s y m p o s i u m at the University of Texas at Austin (April, 1986) a selective group of architects r e c o g n i z e d the n e e d to address the design of garages. A m o n g the architects were Robert Stern, Sinclair Black, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. They were all in agreement: "The parking garage has to cease being a minimal function building. 1 Architects Kevin Roche, Stanley Tigerman, and HKS Architects, realizing the potential of garages, have addressed context and have explored ways of making the typology of garages recognizable while acknowledging their visual impact. O f these, Tigerman's is the most literal in metaphor; the facade of his 60 East Lake Street Garage in C h i c a g o resembles the grill of a Rolls Royce, c o m p l e t e with h o o d ornament. A definition of the function and c o n c e p t of the garage itself has not b e e n the impetus; the issue with which the architectural practicing profession s e e m s more c o n c e r n e d is packaging, and what it is to look like. O n this point, the profession has b e e n split and three distinct directions have e m e r g e d in the construction of garages. O n e strategy is to make the garage look like some other type of building with only the entrance to indicate its use. A s e c o n d strategy is to make the garage look like a place to park a car while at the same time dignifying its banality. A n d yet another strategy is to mix uses. All are attempts to beautify, and perhaps the 23 Tigerman s Rolls Royce metaphor, 60 Cast Lake Street. Chicago. Source: Progressive Architecture. November. 1987; 109. latter two are more honest, but neither puts emphasis o n the fact that these structures ought to be designed for the arrival of p e o p l e w h o use cars. Current architectural strategies for parking garages can be categorized as: o n e , facade decoration and two, the mixed-use c o n c e p t . Facade decoration c a m e as a response to the criticism of garages as ugly. It is the strategy a d o p t e d by N e w H a v e n , in response to its desire that a garage not negatively stick out in a setting of offices, historic areas, and waterfronts. Although a step towards sensitive design, facade decoration has b e e n criticized as being " w i n d o w dressing" by Clovis Heimsath, author of Behavioral Architecture and is suspect for two distinct reasons: o n e , facadism d o e s not alter the inner workings of garages and can be thus recognized for what it is, and secondly, decoration approaches contradiction o n structures whose design c o n c e p t is pragmatic. O n decorated garage facades, a visual effect is fabricated so that the building appears to belong, but its internal activity is disassociated with the building's outer appearance, breaking the integrity b e t w e e n activity and expression. The parking garage at 160 Water Street in Vancouver's C a s t o w n district is such an example. A r c h e d brick-work o n the entrances and pilasters are used in an effort to blend the facade of the garage with the historic buildings in the area. The interior is much the same as any other standard garage. This is where the problem occurs: the facade is clearly an attempt to hide the presence of Facade decoration. 160 Water Street, Vancouver. 24 a garage. Despite the effort, the garage remains plainly recognizable (as it must do), and the perception of it remains a perception closely associated with utility. As a result, the facade b e c o m e s dissociated with the internal activity of the garage and its integrity lies solely in its decorative capacity. The strategy of mixing uses has provided a means to recover more return o n investment for garage owners by supplementing parking revenue with other leasing revenue (office space, retail, etc.). This strategy only camouflages the existence of garages. That is, by limiting the v o l u m e of parking and mixing in other uses, the idea of automobile storage b e c o m e s less obvious. Unlike the facade decoration of parkades, facade treatment in the case of mixed-use carries more integrity simply because the facade detailing can add to the interpretation of what some of the activities within the building may be. Thus, the building can be more contextual via a more honest relation to other buildings. Both categories, facade decoration and mixed-use, d o not alter the traditional c o n c e p t of the garage. Even within mixed-use structures, the garage part of the building is conceived as storage space. Herein lies the weakness of most garages - their initial c o n c e p t . Storage as the priority fails as a c o n c e p t for garages for two distinct reasons: people occupy these buildings, indicating the need for amenities and, exclusively pragmatic garages interrupt the continuum of urban activity and movement. A major misconception 25 is the thought that garages and parkades serve only to store automobiles. These limited assumptions can only lead to an increasing number of problematic garages and with them, an increase in the interruption of the continuum Lynch describes. A shift is n e e d e d : a shift in architectural thinking that includes people and human participation in the c o n c e p t of garages. As the parking garage has asserted itself as a major urban building typology, an alternate way of conceptualizing garages is n e e d e d . "In potential, the access system is a prime piece of educational equipment. It enlarges an individual's reach, but in addition the act of moving through a city can in itself be an enlightenment. Taking advantage of that possibility means opening up the transport system,...treating it seriously as an educational opportunity. Travel can be a pleasure, if we pay attention to the human experience: the visual sequences, the opportunities to l e a r n . . . " 2 2 26 Chapter T w o E X P A N D I N G THE C O N C E P T O F G A R A G E S Circulation and storage are intrinsic to garages, but an approach that synthesizes these characteristics with other simultaneous needs should b e e x p l o r e d . The need to explore such an approach is twofold: o n e , the physical mass and size of parking garages cannot be i g n o r e d , and this precludes any immediate dismissal of aesthetics and two, using pragmatism as the only motive to a c c o m m o d a t e cars severely limits the relationship that can o c c u r between buildings and visitors and is disrespectful to the p e o p l e w h o arrive by cars. Further, according to Parking Market Research C o m p a n y , 8.5 billion dollars will be spent in the U.S. between 1986 and 1989 o n garage design and c o n s t r u c t i o n . 1 This projection, that does not include land acquisitions, clearly establishes garages as major urban buildings. Moreover, as suggested earlier, insensitive design is less tolerated than before, indicating that parking structures can n o longer be designed as generic storage places for cars. T o break away from this neutrality, garage design strategy should be altered to incorporate the human experience and not only the service of cars. If altered, c o n c e p t s such as arrival 27 Civic scale necessitates aesthetic consideration. U.S. Bank garage. 1st & Cherry. Seattle. and departure, issues such as orientation and detailing and goals such as transition and reception make themselves apparent. N o d o u b t intuitively, p e o p l e r e c o g n i z e that some parking garages address these variables with m o r e positive results than others. At O a k r i d g e Center in Vancouver for example, light wells and planters are used in conjunction with white ceiling paint in the u p p e r level parkade. This gives the parking area a lighter and brighter feel. The entrance to the mall at this level is in direct sight from most points within the parkade, and the north a n d south facades are c o m p l e t e l y o p e n , allowing natural light to spill in either e n d . T o fully appreciate the possibility of an alternate way of conceptualizing garages, we should first recognize the essence of the car/driver symbiosis; it is the movement of a human being using a mechanical means rather than his/her o w n two legs for l o c o m o t i o n . That is, it is a person mechanically mobilized that is the essence of a m o v i n g automobile. Cars m o v i n g through garages are not merely machines circulating in a structure - they are operated by people w h o are engaged in perceiving their surroundings while arriving at their destination. A n e x p a n d e d concept for garages is twofold and addresses the needs of drivers and passengers. The first c o m p o n e n t is c o n c e r n e d with the protective t e n d e n c y owners display about their cars; cars are sometimes held as treasured objects and their owners Surprising detail and civility with light wells complemented by greenery is found in the upper covered parking area at Oakridge Center. Vancouver The essence of moving cars; humans using mechanical means. Source: I Fenton. Vehicle Body Layout & Analysis. 1980; 32. 28 w o u l d like a decent or good place to display or protect their investment. The s e c o n d is more general than the first and deals with the quality of driver/passenger participation that is possible during the process of parking; the emphasis is on enhancing awareness of place, time, and purpose. Treasured Objects and the Expression of Personal Identity Although the s e c o n d aspect of the expanded c o n c e p t is wider in scope than the first, it is beneficial to first discuss the car, as it is the object for which traditional garages have b e e n designed. As mentioned earlier, the euphoria brought o n by the advent of the automobile gave way to skepticism. Contrary to the skeptics were those w h o assessed the car as a liberative device. "Because it offered instant mobility and possible adventure, the car symbolized a freedom - political, social, cultural, and e c o n o m i c - that had been cramped and threatened by war and e c o n o m i c deprivation." That is, in the post war years, the mobility, expression, c o n f i d e n c e , and social gregariousness that the car provided catalyzed a regal picture of cars. T h o s e who held their cars in this esteem, sought places where they c o u l d partake in a range of activities that did not separate them from their cars. 29 In response, the fifties and sixties saw the emergence of strip architecture as the car tenaciously pervaded North American lifestyles. The strip is where a mix of people can g o and "allows almost complete freedom of conduct and d r e s s . T h e strip is where the expression of identity became so prominent; the way a car was driven, worked o n , decorated, maintained, and what m o d e l it may have been, all expressed an intimate part of its owner's identity. Henri LeFebvre described the automobile as "the sum of everyday c o m p u l s i o n s , " and would write in 1971: "...the practical significance of the motor-car, as an instrument of road communication and transport, is only part of its social significance. This highly privileged object has a s e c o n d , intenser significance, more ambiguous than the first, real and symbolic...a status symbol, it stands for comfort, power, authority and s p e e d , it is consumed as a sign in addition to its practical use, it is something magic, a denizen from the land of "4 make-believe. As treasured objects expressing personal identities, the car gave rise to concern for its storage place. The more integrated the parking was to a place, the more popular it was. 30 J.B. Jackson in 1970 speculated o n this p h e n o m e n o n : "The chief reason for the popularity of the strip, however, is that it is entirely adjusted to the automobile; it does not try to separate the M r automobile from its driver. Although Jackson's passage references the strip, his reasoning pinpoints the major cause of the reluctance to use garages; garages are clearly separated from the buildings they serve. C o n s e q u e n t l y , a physical and psychological separation occurs when commuters leave the garage for their intended activity. The psychological separation occurs because n o other activity save parking happens in garages and thus, garage users are alienated from their relation to the city. Conversely, parking o n the street occurs within a milieu of activities; other p e o p l e are constantly in motion - by foot, car, and assorted other m o d e s ; different buildings with different purposes set against a context of landscape and changing places elicit a collage of thoughts and emotions. Here people can feel the vitality of their personal identity and h o w they exist in a network of urban relations. They feel c o n n e c t e d : "It is characteristic of this generation to use not only the environment to create its identity but to use objects as well; and one the most useful II r objects from this point of view is the automobile. 31 From this, it can be inferred that the automobile needs to be set in a context of other urban activities and their associated surroundings. It is because p e o p l e communicate in two fundamental ways (physical and social) via the car that this context is n e e d e d . The architecture of the drive-in culture, "coffee shop architecture" and more recently, drive-through architecture, (fast f o o d , for example) are set within this context. The general idea of these places is to welcome visitors and to accommodate them. This is crucial: people arriving by cars are anticipated to o c c u p y these places, if only for a brief period of time. Temporary occupation implies inhabitation, and albeit temporary inhabitation, amenities are necessary. MacDonalds is an example of this where walls facing the cars are well finished, hedges are used as screens, and in some of them, playgrounds and patio areas c o m p l e m e n t e d by small trees and shrubs are in direct sight and proximity to parking. The activity of the automobile z o n e is directly associated (by sight, proximity, and function) with the internal activity of the restaurant. There is an uninterrupted c o h e r e n c e , a continuum of integrated activity and movement which unites the entire site. Parking garages too, are drive-through places that are temporarily o c c u p i e d by p e o p l e . Their activities are not however, integrated with those of other buildings of a site. There is scarcity of amenity and finishes are often no more than the removal of the form-work 32 for the structural concrete. Even with fifty percent wall opening, (a device e m p l o y e d for ventilation of toxic fumes), the interiors of parkades are often dark and somber. C o n c e d i n g that p e o p l e are c o n c e r n e d where they park their treasured objects, garage environments should possess amenity and security. The above discussion deals with the car as an object of status and o n e of social c o m m u n i c a t i o n . Two years after LeFebvre identified the symbolic p o w e r of the car, Roland Barthes (1972) was suggesting that the car was losing its symbolic significance of s p e e d , power, and authority. Jean Baudrillard later (1983) in support of Barthes states: "... it's all over with s p e e d - I drive more and consume less... N o more expenditure, consumption, performance, but instead regulation, well tempered functionality..."^ This is only partially completely correct. In view of the many different manufacturers using performance as a marketable feature in cars, witnessed by the market durability of the exotic cars, (which epitomize performance in automobiles), it is clear that it is not all over with s p e e d and power. Consider the car ads that feature family cars being tested o n race tracks, or H o n d a ' s introduction of four-wheel steering on their Prelude series. H e n c e , the last d e c a d e has shown that it has not been the complete sacrifice of "performance" for 33 fuel e c o n o m y , but m o r e a maximization of efficiency that cars have undergone. S p e e d , power, and handling have not been discounted - only a premium has been put o n them Although Baudrillard may not be completely correct in antiquating performance, his assessment correctly suggests that moving away from the "performance" symbolism of the seventies to the ecological symbolism of the efficient computerized cars of the eighties has altered the relationship of driver/car: " . . . n o more fantasies of power, s p e e d and appropriation linked to the object itself, but instead a tactic of potentialities linked to usage: mastery, control, c o m m a n d , an optimization of the play of possibilities offered by the car as vector and vehicle, and no longer as an object of psychological sanctuary."® Interesting is Baudrillard's shifting of the emphasis from the car, that is, "fantasies linked to the object itself" to the driver, that is, the "tactic of potentialities linked to usage: mastery, control, c o m m a n d . . . " This puts the impetus o n human perception and illustrates the symbiosis of car and driver; it indicates the high degree of transparency evident between driving and environmental perception. 34 Driver Perception and the Quality of Garage User Participation Early in the century G i a c o m o Balla and Lugi Russolo, b o t h major Italian Futurist artists, celebrated the change in environmental perception brought about by the car in their works Speeding Automobile (c.1913) and Dynamism of an Automobile (1911). Inherent in their preference for using the car as a modern subject was the idea of motion and simultaneity. G i n o Severini, another Futurist, graphically expressed m o v e m e n t and changing viewpoints in The Autobus (c. 1912). However, it was Henri Matisse with his Through the Windshield (c.1917), Stuart Davis in his paintings Garage Lights and Windshield Mirror (c. 1931 & 1932), and John Marin in his Street Movement (c.1934) w h o illustrated quite clearly the appropriation of the urban landscape from within an automobile. Although their m e d i u m was two dimensional, their experiments w o u l d have an effect o n architects and their architecture. Le C o r b u s i e r was a m o n g those affected and, acknowledging the impact the car was having, designed for the automobile in some of his projects. Le Corbusier's Villa Savoie has a g r o u n d floor plan set back which "leaves r o o m for a motor-car to pass between the wall and the pilotis supporting the floor above; the curve of this wall o n the side away from Giacomo Balla. Speeding Automobile, 1913. Source: R. Hughes. Shock of the New. 1982: 25. Henri Matisse. Through the Wimishield, 1917 Source: R Silk. Automobile and Culture. 1984: 75. 35 36 the road was, Le Corbusier claims, dictated by the minimum turning circle of a car. A car, having set d o w n its passengers at the main entrance o n the apex of this curve, c o u l d pass d o w n the other side of the building, still under the cover of the floor above, and return to the main road along a drive parallel to that o n which it had approached the h o u s e . Le Corbusier e x c e e d e d the s c o p e of the Futurists by applying the n e w way of environmental perception to built form. The function of the circulation route at Villa Savoie was integrated. It allowed immediate access for car passengers, oriented t h e m to the structure and approximate organization of the h o u s e , and gave expression to the architectural relationship of motion (automobiles and p e o p l e ) and stasis (buildings). In Villa Savoie, Corbusier's sympathetic understanding of the role the automobile resulted in a design where activity and movement was not interrupted between the street system and the building. However, the Savoie residence was an infrequent example of an intimate and positive architectural response to the automobile. It was only after Venturi's pioneering study of Las Vegas, that the intimate experience of driving a car and h o w the urban structure related itself to the driver became a g r o w i n g concern for the architectural community at large. Venturi extensively discussed the phenomenal emergence of strip architecture and with it, the whole drive-in culture H e 37 Integration of automobile circulation at Le Corbusier s. Villa Savoie, Source: K. Bloomer and C Moore, Body. Memory, and Architecture. 197 7 68. identified an intensity, richness and structure that strips possess. Salient is his observation that the architecture of the strip responds to the perceptual experiences of drivers. Venturi's work indicates the importance of the continuity of urban stimuli for a conscious environmental awareness. It is this high level of awareness that c o u l d allow the active participation of parking garage users. Already mentioned above are the benefits of site and building orientation. A sense of coordinates or bearings can be established; a feeling of scale, limits and bounds can also materialize if the site and building are in a general sense, comprehensible. Inviting the participation of the p e o p l e using garages can bring about in them a consciousness of their built environment, a sense of active decision and manipulation, a sense of imaginative journey and interpretation, and a sense of identity and well-being. Engaging p e o p l e by the use of metaphor, history, and orientation techniques can supplement the prosaic routine of parking. Parking a car for a driver is inevitable and the thesis does not c o n t e n d otherwise, but it can be collaged with other activities and functions for a positive dialogue between buildings and the people using them. 38 T h e Inclusion of Drivers/Cars into Architectural Design This brings us to why garages should be included into architectural design. There are four major reasons to d o so. First, the experiences derived from driving cars has b e c o m e rooted in contemporary society, and traditional garage design interrupts the continuity of urban inter-relations. T h e perception of urban areas is brought about by a continuum of destinations, c o n n e c t i o n s , and transitions; each has traces of the others to generate a holistic interactive relationship between changing places and activities. N o one part exists as an entity in itself. Traditional garage design with storage as its singular purpose is antithetical to the mu/r/-faceted collage of urban spaces. A s e c o n d reason to include the car/driver into architectural design is that the car is a culturally loaded urban artifact. The car connects p e o p l e to a city by function (mobility) and by being an object of social communication (personal identity). Cars are objects that e m b o d y the context of city life. In this way they are necessary c o m p o n e n t s in urban settings. As s u c h , cars are essential for personal mobility and are necessary for urban perception, that is, people get to know their cities by driving around in them. T o remove 39 cars from this role of communication, (as traditional garage design does), disorients their users from their urban associations. Third, garages are o c c u p i e d by p e o p l e . That is, drivers are cognizant of their surroundings and possibilities; the garage is not exclusively an automobile area - people must use them. Cars d o not isolate their o c c u p a n t s , but they d o encapsulate them; perception is altered from that of a pedestrian, but value judgments of what is a receptive place to arrive at, and what is not, is consistent. Limiting the potential for positive participation is a condition of traditional parking garages and is disrespectful to those having to use these structures. Changes in smells, air movement, light, noise, road surface, and m o o d s can be easily sensed from within a car. Implicated then are detail, finish, air and light quality, symbolism and c o n c e p t . As pedestrians m o v e and are cognitive of the possibilities presented to them, so are drivers. Fourth, including the car/driver in design w o u l d allow garages to express themselves with architectural integrity. T h e packaging of parking garages is, in many cases, architecturally dishonest. Decoration and masking are not only superficial, but are recognized as such. O n e premise of architecture is that it is c o n c e r n e d with human ends, and if there is an architecture for garages, then it must e m b o d y in its form and expression human endeavor and activity. The detailing of the facade can contribute to an individual interpretation An Porte-cochere at Canada Place. Vancouver, in an architecturally welcoming gesture By contrast, garage entrances are often brutal and uninviting. Lonsdale Quay garage entrance. North Vancouver about the whole building and its purpose, as o p p o s e d to only its facadal packaging. A plan integrated with other locales and activities can overlay use (practical storage) with human participation, enhancing awareness, and fostering a sense of well-being. M o r e o v e r , the physical mass and size of garages exist at a scale that cannot be ignored by the public. It follows that the internal function and finish should be architecturally considered in context with the exterior facades and surrounding areas since clearly, both the inside and the outside of garages are public realms. The four above reasons I believe are sufficient cause for considering an alternative way of conceptualizing parking garage design. A theory to initiate this new conceptualization is what the thesis refers to as integrated function. 41 Chapter Three INTEGRATED F U N C T I O N : P R O G R A M EXPANSION A N D TACTIL1TY A Philosophical design approach for an alternate conceptualization of parking garages INTEGRATED F U N C T I O N A strategy that can transform the role of a garage and supplement its pragmatic tendency is to integrate its function with those of other buildings and places. In this way the garage can no longer be exclusive. However, careful consideration should be given to what this integration involves. The word function is not to be confused or misinterpreted as purely utilitarian. A function indicates a relationship between objects and events, thus symbolism is part of a functional relationship. Moreover, the manner and closeness in which these things are related d e p e n d o n the significance of their functioning together. That is, the significance of a garage depends o n the extent to which it is included with the other buildings and activities of the site. In this light, it is essential to note that integrated function with respect to garages does not limit itself to programmatic concerns. The design of clearance requirements and traffic allowances are relevant to integrated function, 42 but the s c o p e of integrated function includes dimensions such as finishes and detailing as these considerations also affect the relationship b e t w e e n garage and place. There are two means of achieving a state of integrated function: o n e , expand the program of garages to include m o r e than parking alone, and; two, provide s o m e form of tactile reading that can be associated with the particular place and p u r p o s e of which the garage is a part. Both acknowledge the necessity of practicality, but supplement it to offset its inherent deficiency. Program expansion w o u l d include such things as site/building organization, having direct implications o n the layout of circulation routes. This has implications o n what garages can facilitate with regard to activity and use. Tactility involves factors that affect b o t h the mental and physiological perceptions of the human body; symbolism and analogy as examples of those affecting the mental capacities, and ground surface and ramp grades as examples of those affecting the physiological o n e s . E X P A N D E D P R O G R A M A n example of the e x p a n d e d p r o g r a m is the mixed-use c o n c e p t as used in the design of Congress Plaza, in H o u s t o n , by Morris Architects. 1 A l t h o u g h the program of the building (formerly a garage, now a hybrid structure a c c o m m o d a t i n g parking and other activities) 43 MUNI FLOOR PLAN Mixed-use concept. Congress Plaza, Houston. Source: Progressive Architecture. November. 1987: lliy has b e e n e x p a n d e d , the function of the garage part of the building has not c h a n g e d . Its functional relation to the rest of the building is still one of auxiliary service. In other words, despite the mixing of uses, the function of the garage was not integrated with the rest of the building's activities: parking remains an exclusive activity, less obvious perhaps, but clearly separated. N o w consider another contemporary example. O u t d o o r urban squares have been criticized for their low use. O n e reason posited by Mark Chidister is that these squares use design criteria that originate from medieval squares, and these antiquated criteria d o not fit the lifestyles of contemporary s o c i e t y . 2 Chidister, an assistant professor of landscape architecture in the C o l l e g e of Design at Iowa State University, cites Robert Jensen, author of Dreaming of Urban Plazas, who suggests that although the medieval inspired urban squares are limited in their practical application at present, their function of providing public experience is necessary: " O u r plaza problem is cultural, technological and endemic, anchored in the way we live and not amenable to easy solutions...Concealed in the way we live, implied by even the briefest description of what causes us not to use urban plazas, is a sense of alienation from public experience. Because we have lost part of this pleasure, our need to reclaim it is all the 44 more real. N e w urban plazas e m b o d y our dreams of overcoming the l o s s . " 3 Chidister concurs with Jensen but adds that public experience is possible in places such as sporting arenas, auditoriums, z o o s , campuses, transit c o n n e c t i o n s , and shopping malls. Interestingly, he singles o n e out: "While public plazas incorporated into the designs of these settings are frequently u s e d , only the s h o p p i n g mall can be considered a regular part of daily life rather than an event. N o w suppose that the huge expanses of surface parking that most large s h o p p i n g centers have were integrated with another function, say of a public market. Imagine that market stalls c o u l d be placed either at random ( d e p e n d i n g o n the needs of the merchant) or within a regimented but flexible structure. This spontaneity of arrangement in a place of daily focal gathering is similar to that of medieval squares. The parking lot could change from being a flat expanse of concrete to being in itself part of a larger activity. That is, driving through the parking lot could not only allow a visitor to park, but because the lot has been integrated, driving through the lot c o u l d also be arriving at a destination. Granville Island has this quality; circulation throughout the Island, especially in the North Parking in North end of Granville Island is in close proximity to store fronts, and is landscaped. retail section, reveals to drivers a sense of the time, place, and history while they may be searching for parking. The parking is not separated from other activities, and i n d e e d , at Granville Island, vitality of the pavement activity depends largely o n the circulation of drivers. The contribution of circulating drivers and their cars to a local vitality can also be observed in Vancouver's Chinatown district. The market atmosphere is intense and the circulation of traffic is a major part of the overall activity. The sidewalk area between the curb and the storefronts teems with activity. To encourage this activity and to integrate the street system with the sidewalk system, awnings often reach to the curb, protecting the area between buildings and parked cars. This concentration of human activity is not brought about by an event, such as would be brought about by a sporting event; s h o p p i n g in Chinatown for many is a daily activity. Shopping malls also are places of ordinary routine. I suggest there exists potential for the shopping mall parking lot to facilitate the functions and values that Jensen deems still necessary, but unattainable in contemporary urban squares. The latter hypothetical situation involves practical usability (parking) and a supplement (shopping) in the same b o u n d e d area (the parking lot surface). It's intent is to show the impact of supplementing utility by integrating it with local activities. By using the c o n c e p t Chinatown sidewalk activity is protected in many places by awnings reaching to curbs. 46 of integrated function, an engaging experience is possible for the visitor because with this supplement, there is room for personal awareness, choice (orientation via circulation routes, for example) and interpretation (of the architectural gestures originating from the building). Giving users an opportunity to c h o o s e , to take the place and manipulate it in their o w n way, allows a sense of personal belonging to be established. Dwelling and the Q u e s t i o n C o n c e r n i n g T e c h n o l o g y At this point, it w o u l d be best to discuss Heidegger's analysis of the intent of technology. This discussion is necessary to set the groundwork for tactility. If we can consider Heidegger's usage of the Greek word techne, we find that techne is a word which refers to the coexistence between utility and art, and further, that in the case of techne, both are mutually dependent: "...techne is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something p o e t i c . . t e c h n e is linked with the word episteme. Both words are terms for knowing in the widest sense. 47 It is this simultaneous existence which is the quality of architecture. It is precisely this where the potential is so great in the design of garages. T h e fact that garages have certain limitations (based o n storage requirements) is not an obstacle. C o n c e i v a b l y it is the opposite: the limitations, by keeping the structure recognizable, provide a starting point for the task of reaching a state of techne. Grafted d e c o r a t i o n , by Heidegger's analysis, merely reinforces the exclusive roles of decoration and utility and is not true to the idea of techne and architectural integrity. Consider an example. Bridges are capable of being interesting and engaging without grafted decoration. Their arcing decks and cables in taut resistance indicate a human awareness of gravitational forces. M u c h of the interest is b o r n from what story the bridge can tell; h o w the structural members were made and assembled can stir the imagination, imagination which can p r o d u c e images of human activity in the making of the bridge. History, p u r p o s e , and human endeavor are characteristics of many bridges. Images of cranes, trucks, and steelworkers c o m e to mind. A n d yet, bridges are the e p i t o m e of usability. Their c o n n e c t i o n of o p p o s i n g banks so that p e o p l e may pass is the reason that they exist. T h e Lion's Gate Bridge and the Burrard Bridge in Vancouver, and even the swinging pedestrian bridge at Lynn Valley, are examples of bridges that a p p r o a c h the rich simultaneous state which H e i d e g g e r refers to as techne. Construction and the understanding of gravitational forces can evoke imaginative interpretations. Source: /. Fitchen, Building Construction Before Mechanization. 7986. 114. Roof support system at Granville Island. Vancouver 48 O n e may initially consider bridges as singular in purpose, and therefore invalid as examples for a multi-use argument. It is the opposite; bridges clearly illustrate a richness of interpretation that can be born from a structure w h o s e reason for being is singular. The reason is twofold; bridges express human endeavor, and bridges, because they c o n n e c t , are set in a context of use and landscape. Because they are not exclusive of the urban continuity, bridges are places that are rooted and that have significance. Heidegger elucidates this importance of the human connection and the subtlety of dwelling: "Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not dwelling places. Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling...the working woman is at h o m e in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at h o m e in the power station, but he does not dwell there. These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them,...Yet those buildings that are not dwelling places remain in turn determined by dwelling insofar as they serve man's dwelling. Thus dwelling would in any case be the end that presides over all building."** 4 9 Heidegger correctly identifies the realm to which garages must belong - "man's dwelling." As s u c h , they must be capable of human inhabitation because man "inhabits them and yet d o e s not dwell in them". Details, finishes, daylighting, and other amenities are not luxuries, but are necessities for human inhabitation. Further, garages designed to be ' n o - places' cannot exist, even if the wish is to hide t h e m . Again from Heidegger: "Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be o c c u p i e d by something. O n e of them proves to be a location, and does so because of the bridge. Thus the bridge d o e s not first c o m e to a location to stand in it; rather, a location c o m e s into existence only by virtue of the bridge. O n l y things that are locations in this manner allow for spaces...A space is something that has b e e n made r o o m for, something that is cleared and free, namely, within a boundary,...A boundary is not that at which something stops but, that from which something begins its essential unfolding. Accordingly, spaces receive their essential being from locations and not from 'space.'"^ David Leatherbarrow, professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses an interesting point that follows Heidegger's theme. Leatherbarrow uses Janus, the Roman d e m i - g o d to describe the union of seemingly opposite spaces, that is, inside and 50 outside. In short, Janus exists at every threshold, every doorway, every boundary to which subdivided spaces meet. His two or four faces were situated on one head and one neck, looking in opposite directions, indicating his presence as a connection, not a separation: "...Janus fixed spatial relationships, it was a knot which b o u n d places together, or joint that located an indivisible and untransferable here.'"^ This view falls in a c c o r d with that of Heidegger's. Both point out that the strength of spaces, that is, their sense of place and purpose, is born from location. In Leatherbarrow's terms, the garage is the "here" where Janus exists. He joins the street and the building, the moving and the static, the outside and the inside. In this way, he can preserve the urban continuum mentioned earlier. By both Heidegger's and Leatherbarrow's analyses, garages must be places that unfold their context, origins, and functions; they simply cannot be generically designed because location establishes their existence. Therefore, the placement of the garage, regardless of locale, will bring about a place-ness that cannot be denied. Acknowledging the specificity of the location by responding to it, will give to the garage a positive sense by which the users can feel at ease. 5 1 Having established garages as buildings that are "determined by dwelling insofar as they serve man's dwelling," the issue now b e c o m e s with what intent technology is e m p l o y e d to construct garages. In current practices of construction, it is too easy to measure a design element by its practicality, hence the nature of contemporary garages. However, it is this one-sided decision making process that contributes to the loss of the architectonic. Practical usability is o n e condition of architecture, but it cannot exist as an architectural determinant; this would lead to every building and every tool according to use being the same. "This attempt to establish the precedence of either utility or art is c o n d e m n e d to the ambiguity that plagues origin in general: assigning absolute priority to an entity always admits the paradox of the endless deferral of priority." 1 ^ In other words, with architecture, utility and art must coincide. A similar sentiment is f o u n d in Heidegger's questioning of technology: "Thus questioning, we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupation with technology we d o not yet experience the c o m i n g to presence of technology, that in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the c o m i n g to presence of art. Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art b e c o m e s . " 52 That is, in an effort to sway the other, the other's validity is too easily dismissed, and by being so fixed o n o n e criterion, we lose sight of how it must exist in a relational network of others. Heidegger's mention of "sheer occupation with technology" can be interpreted to describe contemporary society's urge to maximize efficiency of p r o d u c t i o n and resources: obtaining the most use at the least expense. It is clear that this tendency exists in the design of parking garages, with efficiency interpreted as maximum number of parking stalls per unit area. An expanded program can add to the practical use of garages by integrating its function with the entire site. It can become an aspect that loses its current opaqueness and exclusiveness. A n interesting and rewarding awareness can be born from the working relation between objects and events, and is not limited to the esoteric of high art. T o o easily is the idea of imagination with regard to garages labelled superfluous and dismissed for the seeming lack of e c o n o m i c usefulness. Conceivably it is the reverse: the seemingly uselessness of objects leaves room for interpretation and interest. As practical usability is de-centered as the central determinant for building, the 'excess' is referred to the realm of the s u b j e c t i v e . 1 2 A different dimension of function reveals itself as uselessness makes a presence. Here we have an interesting point: u p o n the m o m e n t of articulating efficiency, e c o n o m i c optimization is diminished. Articulation is the 53 counterpart of pragmatism. By articulation, the building can be interpreted as more than utilitarian, and M u m f o r d suggests that subjective counterpoint to objective operation is necessary for a complete human existence. M u m f o r d contends that organic creativity exists with utility at every stage of life. Being so, p e o p l e cannot help but feel that without this simultaneity, buildings d e v o t e d entirely to practical use, are s o m e h o w lacking and hence, attempts to beautify the mundane. By this, garages should be expressive of their function and articulated in their construction. Heidegger tells us that techne is a revealing and a bringing forth. This adds additional light to a strategy of integration. W h e n something reveals itself to people, its objective nature is meshed with discovery and reflection. People d o not preconceive its revelation. They c o m e u p o n it, a natural occurrence not ordered in advance. N o manipulation is n e e d e d ; it is brought forth by its o w n presence. The discoverers place themselves in the context of the event by reflecting o n origins, immediate opportunities, future implications, or merely the w o n d e r of it all. They are engaged, and participate in a c o m p l e t e experience. The opening up of a site, as it unfolds and reveals itself to visitors (by carefully designed circulation routes) can d o much the same. Heidegger also tells us that the man-ordering of the maximization of efficiency and resources is also a revealing. But this type of revealing is a challenge set in m o t i o n by an 54 e c o n o m i z i n g intention and as such is an enframing. His usage of enframing refers to a c o n d i t i o n of optimization in which everything is predictable; no discovery, n o dialogue, only process. The revealing by enframing orders potential to be immediately available to w h o m e v e r might desire it. Heidegger refers to this as standing-reserve.^^ In other words, the optimization with e c o n o m y and practicality as priorities leaves no room for interpretation and alienates man from the environment. Traditional garage design and its relation to site falls under this criticism; always at the ready to process the maximum number of cars for parking and nothing more. Heidegger further points out that enframing blocks the revealing whose sense is poiesis, a bringing-forth of the object's fundamental characteristics. 1 4 Poiesis is a fundamental condition of techne, the coexistence between art and utility, which in Heidegger's terms, is manifested in architecture. If so, traditional garage design must be altered to o n e where the revelation of the site and the garage's fundamental role are made perceptible to visitors in positive associations. The engaging interpretation must originate from the architectural experience of the building itself. It is not the appliques that carry a stirring presence, because they can be seen as grafted, borrowed, temporary, and certainly it is not the docile operation of a garage that moves us. M o r e , it is how the necessary function required of garages can be 55 integrated into places to elicit positive responses from their users that is potentially so interesting. TACTILE DESIGN So far, the discussion has indicated the possibilities of expanded program as a supplement to the utility of garages. What follows is a design approach which focuses o n the perception capacities of the human being. It is presented as tactile design. The premise of tactile design acknowledges the capacity of the human b o d y to perceive its surroundings in terms other than those of sight alone. Consequently, not only are visual cues relevant, but cues that affect other physiological responses are to be considered. M o r e o v e r , Ittelson points out that a sharp division between cognitive ability and physiological reaction: "Perceiving is both phenomenal experience and directive for action. Both aspects are crucial...perceiving is actually a m u c h more complex process [than the conscious experience of sensory input]...stimulus considered as a source of information, is quite a different proposition from the stimulus 56 considered as a source of stimulation. For o n e thing, stimulation can be understood in the immediate context of physical and physiological reactions: Information refers to a much larger context." 1 -* From Ittelson's analysis, cognitive abilities that perceive such things as symbolism cannot be exclusively separated from physiological reactions, and thus, the tactile involves the use of analogy and metaphor as well. For garages, this w o u l d have implications for the manner in which we move though them, and also for what we gather from this movement as a c o n s e q u e n c e . For example, what a person can gather from a garage that is concerned only with parking can be quite limited in comparison to that which orients the user to a specific site by incorporating, for example, the notion of embarkation. The former serves only to store vehicles, the latter is c o n c e r n e d with personal engagement. O n e generative point need only be remembered should this c o n c e p t of engaging p e o p l e be c h o s e n : acknowledging that the garage is to serve people and is not only to store cars, necessitates that the garage be in dialogue with the user in a manner which involves human experience. 57 Since the w o r d 'experience' is rather ambiguous, clarification is in order. Experience, in its usage in this thesis, is intended to refer to the capacity of the body (therefore more encompassing than the capacity of vision alone) to perceive the environment. So far, the discussion has been critical of facade treatment alone as being ancillary. This criticism is b o r n from the fact that decoration of a garage depends primarily o n vision to have any effect o n a user or passerby, and d o e s not contribute to integrating its function. This limitation suppresses the other senses and reduces the intensity of the experience. Visual information, the only way in which the decoration of a garage can be appropriated, is responsible for some form of experience, but this experience is emaciated; emaciated because it d o e s not motivate active participation. Buildings with architectural integrity have implications o n the bodily movement of p e o p l e through them and, this unison of the physiological and psychological responses, makes the experience immediate. It is this cognizance and the use of this type of experience (characterized by its immediacy) that can offer a strategy for the tactile design of engaging garages. O f Kenneth Frampton's Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,^** point six is entitled The Visual Verses the Tactile. Frampton, being critical of the gravitation of architecture towards c o m m o d i t y is critical of pure scenography, or that which merely masks or packages. Implicit in his discussion is the notion that visual information as the only source 58 of stimulus distances the observer from the object displaying this information, and denies the possibility for a cornplete experience. Hence: "It is symptomatic of the priority given to sight that we find it necessary to remind ourselves that the tactile is an important dimension in the perception of built f o r m . " 1 ^ Frampton goes o n to discuss the importance of hearing, smell, the sensing of temperature, and kinetic movement (haptics). T o him, these sensory capacities can be included in design decisions to create an overall perception at a level of directness which cannot be attained by considering vision alone. This is not to say that the importance of sight is to be jettisoned in architectural design. Frampton only separates sight from the rest to reveal its shortcomings as a single priority (as is apparent in garage beautification). His argument acknowledges the western tendency to prioritize sight, but suggests that this "normative visual experience" be complimented by "readdressing the tactile range of 1 ft human perceptions." In addressing the tactile, Frampton underscores its fundamental condition : "...it is clear that the liberative importance of the tactile resides in the fact that it can only be d e c o d e d in terms of experience itself: it cannot be 5 9 r e d u c e d to mere information, to representation or to the simple evocation of a simulacrum substituting for absent p r e s e n c e s . " 1 ^ In other words, human-experience used in balance with the constructing of buildings, results in an inherent dialogue between building and user in terms other than those that can be generated by sight alone. Thus, the limitations of garage decoration can be greatly e x p a n d e d to make the appropriation of the building more immediate. This immediacy elicits a higher state of consciousness from the visitor and thus, makes the place memorable. A n d memorable places, by being r o o t e d to a specific locale and cultural p u r p o s e , acquire permanence, which innately resists the temporariness associated with fashion, a temporariness from which garage decoration follows. Frampton is not alone in his summations. Charles M o o r e , with Kent Bloomer and Robert Yudell in 1977 wrote Body, Memory, and Architecture which concurs with this theme. As the title indicates, the b o o k elucidates the significance of the connection of mind/body to built forms. Throughout the entire book, a call is made to bring human participation (mind and body) back into design. Consequently, the call is for an architecture that communicates directly with human experience. Identified by M o o r e as missing in contemporary structures "are the potential transactions between body, imagination, and environment" and after a brief condemnation of meaningless building, M o o r e sums up the 60 present state of architecture (1977) as " h o m o g e n e o u s environments [that] require little of us, and [that] give little in return besides the shelter of a cubical c o c o o n . M o o r e ' s observation might aptly be applied to a description of a parking structure. M o r e o v e r , Clovis Heimsath, author of Behavioral Architecture has pointed out that despite a parking garage's safety or visual context, people still find the buildings' cave-like entrances and interiors forbidding. She further goes o n to state: "Until y o u make that sequence of entering a sequence to be l o o k e d forward to, a sequence that will be thoroughly benign, until y o u subtract the negative...until that is addressed, all the rest is window dressing." O n e approach to the sequence to which Heimsath refers is to design for reception and participation in garages. A prerequisite for participation is experience. Robert Irwin, a contemporary Los Angeles artist, discusses at length this close relationship of experience and participation. Irwin argues for the independent validity of subjective perceptions and suggests that the power of our perceptive systems is immense, and to consciously be aware of their operation leads to a phenomenal and responsive art. If only that can be realized, a positive environmental consciousness can be designed for, and Irwin's notion 61 of being and circumstance can be directly applicable: "Being and circumstance, then, constitute the operative frame of reference for an extended (phenomenal) art activity, which becomes a process of reasoning between our mediated culture (being) and our immediate presence (circumstance). Being embodies in you the observer, participant, or user, your complete genetic, cultural, and personal histories as "subsidiary" cues bearing on your "focal" attending (experiencing) of your circumstances... There is in any set of circumstances and your being in them the dynamic of a past and future, what was, how it came to be, what it is, and what it may c o m e to be. In other words, recognition of familiar objects and events, and reasons for their being constitute only part of an experience. Irwin suggests that to complete an aesthetic experience requires that we partake in the setting or as he puts it, attend focally on our set of circumstances. This supports the notion that garages must allow their sites to reveal themselves to visitors so that the visitors may partake in positive and complete experiences. Traditional garages deny the taking of them or their sites in the way that p e o p l e d o when visiting other places; barns, industrial warehouses, and factories have such potential, the parking garages o n Granville Island (re-adapted machine shops and 62 warehouses) being an example. W i t h o u t this dialogue, a fundamental c o n d i t i o n of architecture itself is missing. M o r e o v e r , Irwin asserts that to know s o m e thing for what it is (as o p p o s e d to what it may outwardly look like) "requires o u r immediate p r e s e n c e , which if effect puts individual experience at the root of our u n d e r s t a n d i n g . T h e r e f o r e , if garages are to affect and engage p e o p l e in a positive way, they must break away from the trap of processing and restricting the action of p e o p l e using them, and e m b o d y human experience and allow for active participation. Haptic Perception and a H u m a n / M e c h a n i c a l Dialogue A s tactile perception assumes appropriation via the b o d y , M o o r e ' s discussion o n the haptic system is related. The haptic system is Aristotle's definition of touch reconsidered to include the entire b o d y in addition to the instruments of t o u c h , that is, the hands. As a perceptual system, pressure, temperature, pain, and kinesthetics are i n c o r p o r a t e d . ^ 4 Specifically, it is the kinesthetics of the haptic system that has potential in garage design. 25 N o other perceptual system involves feeling and doing simultaneously. H e n c e , experience and awareness are inherently involved. Irwin refers this type of p h e n o m e n o n as knowing in action^ which in itself describes the immediacy of the action/reaction of the haptic system. Ramp grades, turning radii, and s p e e d , three major concerns in 63 Ramp grades at Canada Place offer memorable kinesthetics via haptic perception garages, can intensify the experience through kinesthetics, or the perception of b o d y movement. This movement can help establish a sense of on-site bearings. The texture of the paving surface itself can be haptically felt from within cars. Occupants of cars are not isolated from their surroundings, therefore, the haptic system can be used in tactile design to affect drivers/passengers. O n e characteristic of haptic perception is that it is linked to the mechanical m o v e m e n t of the human b o d y or parts thereof. The human body and its c o m p o n e n t parts are subject to the forces of gravity. It is the sensation of gravity and its immediate understanding via the b o d y that allows the structuring and construction of buildings. The "physical" sciences describe gravity in terms of Newtons and meters per second squared, but this is just a description using an abstract logic that can not explain anything but its o w n formalism. Conversely, movement and connections which are termed mechanical are e m b e d d e d in the human perception of the environment. The understanding of mechanical m o v e m e n t is through bodily experience (for example, we understand leverage because we possess levers within our bodies), and requires no abstract description as it is immediately appropriated. Because of this mechanical understanding, and the cognizance of gravity, humans have a close affinity for mechanical objects. The number of mechanical objects used in daily 64 routine by any individual is testimony to this. The interesting point of this affinity is that the machine has potential for inspiring the incorporation of the human experience in the design of garages. The thesis refers to this affinity as human/mechanical dialogue. Human/mechanical dialogue describes the c o n n e c t i o n discernible between the realm of mechanical objects and the human being. This c o n n e c t i o n makes itself felt in buildings such as factories, warehouses, service garages, and in structures such as cranes, bridges and earlier forms of machinery. Waterfront industrial areas are rich in this dialogue, and places such as Granville Island and Lonsdale Q u a y , b o t h of Vancouver, and Pike Place Market in Seattle have used this dialogue to enhance retail d e v e l o p m e n t . It is not however, restricted to industrial typologies as it is also recognizable in boats, and in mechanical detailing in certain other building types. For example, stairways that pull d o w n from attics, e x p o s e d elevators, panic hardware o n fire d o o r s , w e l d e d wire mesh, revolving lights, all have a construction quality about them which alludes to this affinity for the machine. Robert McCarter has recently brought to light an interesting c o n n e c t i o n between building and early machines. H e has c h o s e n early machines as a source of forms which might resist the temporariness of contemporary architecture. This is interesting because the gestural movements of early machines are perceived in a state of immediacy, that is, in a 65 Crane in shipyard adjacent Lonsdale Quay human/mechanical expression. tactile way, and it is tactility that has possibilities for garages. M c C a r t e r has correctly identified early machine forms as experimental in nature "having to d o with human experience and the discovery of the w o r l d . I m p l i c i t is his allusion is the notion that t e c h n o l o g y was a human e n d e a v o r at the time of these machines. This is important because by being a human endeavor, the e n d to which technology was used was human related, not function related. True to Heidegger's usage of techne, M c C a r t e r elucidates the difference between these early machines and contemporary ones: "...technology has since lost its nature of being an experiment: a calculating, optimizing, e c o n o m i z i n g intention has taken over...This contemporary t e c h n o l o g y and the machines it produces are unrelated to 2ft the human values that motivated the early inventors." It is because these now archaic machines were experimental, e m b o d y i n g t e c h n o l o g y as a human activity to the service of human beings, that McCarter makes the suggestion of drawing inspiration from t h e m . A c c o r d i n g to McCarter, the machine can be assessed by values other than those associated with optimization, and it is these other values that offer the means of supplementing utility. These experimental machines e m b o d i e d the inquisitive and explorative h u m a n mind, giving sustenance to human action. Risk and 66 Elevator at Lonsdale Quay expressing motion and stasis by mechanical forms. reward, the playing out of life itself, are why these "technological dinosaurs, these extinct species of invention, remain so alive to artistic d e v e l o p m e n t . " 2 ^ However, this use of t e c h n o l o g y with human ends evident in the machine is not the only attribute from which garage design can draw. T h e machine is a mechanical object with interconnecting parts that move. They epitomize the meeting of the moving and the static. Even at rest, machines physiognomically imply their movement. T o emphasize this paradoxical and yet transparent relationship of motion/stasis is appropriate in a place where the moving (automobiles and people) e n c o u n t e r the static (buildings). It is of use therefore to identify the innate qualities of the machine so that they might be used in garage design. The qualities of archaic machinery are at o n c e romantic and topical. Romanticism has its limitations regarding machinery as it is skeptical of future d e v e l o p m e n t and aspires to unattainable conditions antiquated by time. Therefore, as p r e c o n c e i v e d aging, the romantic dimension of robust machinery should not be misused or c o n f u s e d as the human association with mechanical objects. Also, it is important to n o t e what kind of machinery we are referring to. M c C a r t e r uses archaic machinery as o p p o s e d to contemporary o n e s . The resonant quality of these i Ingersoll-Rand pump at Gasworks Park. Seattle Interconnecting parts that move rationalize their interdependence. A very definite gestural quality is expressed. 67 machines is their inherent connection to human beings. This c o n n e c t i o n is brought about by the gestural qualities innate to mechanical movement. M o r e o v e r , these older machines possessed something of human scale, making the association between humans and machines even greater. The connection is close to being transparent: " M a n made the machine in his own image. She has limbs which act; lungs which breathe; a heart which beats; a nervous system through which runs electricity...After making the machine in his o w n image, he has made his human ideal m a c h i n o m o r p h i c . . . " ^ Implicit in his choice of machines is McCarter's preference for the integrity of mechanical expression. The counterpoint to this would be a machine which reveals little of its working and logic. Consider an example of timepieces. With the c o m i n g of quartz crystals, watches took on two fundamentally different modes of expression, o n e mechanical and o n e electronic. The watch faces themselves identify each m o d e with the mechanical analog using metal hands that point, and the electronic quartz watch using L C D or LED read-outs. The biggest difference can be observed u p o n removing the backs of the timepieces. The analog with all its gears, springs, wheels, screws, jewels, pins, 68 rods, and plates have a curiously human inference. Part of the reason may be its mechanical expression and part may be that the screws and fasteners, and crafting of parts, imply hand-tools which gives the watch the attribute of being recognized as a human artifact. Whatever the reason, its ability to be immediate surpasses that of quartz- run timepieces. In m o t i o n , the mechanics of the analog rationalize the movement of the hands. The e x p o s e d innards of a quartz watch reveal very little in addition to its face expression that c o u l d make the working and human connection of the piece understandable. The potency of its power source cannot be witnessed. The flow of electrons is comprehensible by abstraction and is not physically perceivable. Aside from the blinking of the c o l o n and the periodic change of numerals o n its face, the quartz timepiece is expressively an inert object in comparison to the mechanical analog. It is this revealing of origin, power source, and mechanical working that archaic machines possess. Merleau-Ponty suggests, "Prior to and independently of other people, the thing achieves that miracle of expression: an inner reality which reveals itself externally [and] expression is the language of the thing itself and springs from.its configuration."-^1 The gears and plates, levers and springs, screws and pins, are all configured by human designers. M o r e o v e r , the mechanical/human expression of the watch parts is unavoidable and Norberg-Schulz asserts "Expression, thus, is basically physiognomic, regardless of the 69 nature of the thing, and identification therefore comprises a rapport between man's o w n body and the bodily form of the o b j e c t . " 3 ^ All of these reasons are why archaic machines have an integrity of mechanical expression which is topical and relevant to current design strategies. The car, despite the packaging of its mechanical expression, is still perceived chiefly as a mechanical object by which we physically move. Unlike the telephone or television that communicate via electricity, the communicative ability of the car resides in its mechanical m o d e of l o c o m o t i o n . Its magnitude of m o v e m e n t is physical, both visibly and kinesthetically perceivable. The car is intimately human in scale and we can make the car move where we wish at the speed of our reflexes (given g o o d road conditions) making the c o n n e c t i o n more immediate. In this way, mechanical movement is directly connected with human experience, and thus, it can be used in tactile design. H e n c e , two things are important in human/mechanical dialogue: o n e , mechanical movement actual or implied is immediately understandable because human b o d i e s m o v e by mechanical movement, and two, machines express their human origins b e c a u s e their c o m p o n e n t parts are d e s i g n e d and crafted using human experience. Both are directly applicable to tactile design. The potential for garage design lies in the machine's innate condition of motion/stasis. As there is such a close h u m a n identification with mechanical .Mthough its mechanical expression is packaged, the car remains to be perceived chiefly a mechanical object. Source: /. Fenton. Vehicle Body Layout & .Analysis, 1980; 30 70 machines, establishing this association in a place of cars and people would give that place a sense of human belonging. A n d this goal is precisely the goal that can transform the traditional design of garages. Like the space in factories, mills, and warehouses, the space in garages must a c c o m m o d a t e the needs of moving equipment and moving p e o p l e . W h e n the machine operators have left, factories, mills, and warehouses are recognizable as places of human activity. It is the remaining machinery in the machine-shops, implying their connection to human operators (by knobs, levers, and pedals), that makes this recognition possible. Scale of passageways, windows, and overhead clearances, all leave a residual idea of human activity in a place involving machinery. What traces, or nuances can be left behind, or m o r e importantly, what end can the garage serve that makes the garage a place for human activity? This question is all important. The answer lies in creating a machine expression (that communicates human involvement) with static forms. Sundials have this movement/stasis condition. They are intensely human related and can be easily recognized as human artifacts. Moreover, they are latitude-specific, their gnomons being angled to parallel the Earth's rotational axis. In Heidegger's terms, sundials reveal by poiesis, they reveal the specific site, and they do not exist as standing-reserve. They are human in scale, reveal the presence of human influence, and stir the imagination. 71 Train stations and airports too are places involving m o v i n g (transport) equipment and p e o p l e . Unlike garages, they are c o n c e r n e d with a positive and c o n n e c t e d environment for embarking/debarking. Train stations may be stronger in this association because of the relatively closer proximity of the pedestrian platform to i n c o m i n g / o u t g o i n g passenger carriers. Nonetheless, this arrival/departure idea can be used in a place for cars and p e o p l e in a similar manner. At M c C a r r a n International Airport in Las Vegas, parking is part of the terminal with elevators providing access. The o p e n perimeter of the garage allows a visual c o n n e c t i o n to the g r o u n d , although the scale is o n e of mega-structure. M o r e interesting is Q u i n c y Adams Station in Q u i n c y , Massachusetts. Bus and c o m m u t e r train staging areas make up part of the 2200-car-parking c o m p l e x . A l t h o u g h the scale is similar to M c C a r r a n Airport, the mixing of activities and the moving machinery in a building whose structure is e x p o s e d , gives Q u i n c y station an immediate vitality. Human/mechanical dialogue is potentially a design approach that can alter the traditional c o n c e p t of garages. It is not the intent of the dialogue to glorify the machine, but more to explore a relationship between p e o p l e and the mechanical objects approximating a human scale. It is because garages must a c c o m m o d a t e b o t h p e o p l e and machines that 72 Quincy Adams Station. Quincy. Mass Platform close to carrier dock, mixing activities and movement. this notion has potential. "The frame we place a r o u n d external reality in order to subject(ify) it, to cast it as a projection of ourselves, is mechanical...It is in the machine that use finds expression and is elevated through this necessary excess into cognition as significance...Due to its historic and psychological depth, a machine architecture is not gesture of futurism but an archaeology of c o m m o n u n d e r s t a n d i n g . " 3 3 Material joints M u c h of the expression that archaic machines possess originates from the joints between c o m p o n e n t parts. They rationalize each part's reason for being and reveal their mutual d e p e n d e n c e . M a r c o Frascari, a professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in an essay o n detailing suggests that what we traditionally refer to as details can be used as generators by which a total architecture can be perceived. That is, by looking at, or touching, and understanding the structure of a fertile detail?4 a sense of the wholeness of the place can be appropriated. Frascari then points out that the traditional definition of detail cannot be properly used in architecture since s o m e elements of architecture are in Material joint, expressing stability of exposed elevator, Lonsdale Quay. Vancouver. 73 themselves whole pieces but at the same time parts of larger wholes. H e uses the lantern atop Brunelleschi's D u o m o to illustrate this. T o better describe this situation, Frascari uses the word joint: "...it is possible to observe that any architectural element defined as detail is always a joint. Details can be "material joints," as in the case of a capital, which is the c o n n e c t i o n b e t w e e n a c o l u m n shaft and an architrave, or they can be "formal joints," as in the case of a p o r c h , which is the c o n n e c t i o n between an interior and an exterior space. The exposure of joints intrinsic to e c o n o m i c construction practices f o u n d in contemporary parking structures is not d e v e l o p e d ; the joints by being e x p o s e d already have expressive potential, but because they are direct results of engineering and e c o n o m i c 'finishing,' they are perceived as subordinate elements. Their potential to be an expression of technology, and with it the ability to e m b o d y the local sense of place g o e s largely untapped. A n example is the use of corner windows in V a n c o u v e r residences. T o obtain view and light, many residences glaze intersecting exterior corners, s o m e with n o more than a silicon bead to reveal the intersection. This use of glazing is in a general way, location specific. Frascari, in summary suggests "The joint, that is the fertile detail, is the place where both the construction and the construing of architecture takes place. 74 Roof system at Granville Island covered parking has integrity of function and expression. Developing this two-sided idea of joint in garages can give to them an authenticity and permanence, as d o e s the detailing o n Granville Island. The revealed joints in construction, particularly in the roof support systems, communicate a time, place, and purpose. They possess an integrity of function and expression, giving them authenticity and permanence. Joints in more current construction involve nuts and bolts, or screws (implying hand tools), w e l d e d steel plates, angle iron and I-beam sections. What is so engaging in Frascari's argument is that it argues for architectural integrity. This integrity has much potential in parking structures. The reason for this potential is three-fold: parkades are not meant to be places of p r o l o n g e d inhabitation, which allows for a more robust and revealed execution of finishes and joinery; two, parking structures are not limited by climate control and noise level criteria to the extent that residences, or places of work are, which allows spatial development and expression; and three, the garage is the point along the schema of movement where a joining of street and building is necessary. The articulation of joints, and the recognition of a human/mechanical dialogue, has potential to elevate the function of the parking garage to its more appropriate twofold capacity; a staging place where the activity of embarking and debarking is positively manifested and, a transitional place that joins the street system with the building. 75 THEORETICAL S U M M A R Y This chapter has b e e n devoted to a philosophical design approach developed from position which adopts the p h e n o m e n o l o g i c a l views of Heidegger. Its intent is to elevate the function of garages in urban settings. The approach embodies a strategy termed integrated function which involves making design decisions directly c o n n e c t e d to tactile human experience. The aim of integrated function is to engage users of garages in ways other than those associated with sight alone via tactility, and in ways other than those associated with utility alone via expanded program. The contention is that the c o n c e p t of garages cannot exist o n the singular premise of pragmatism. If expanded to incorporate the allowance for a conscious and positive environmental perception, the c o n c e p t for garages can integrate the presently exclusive process of parking with other activities, allowing a cohesive use and perception of site. In this way an urban continuum of movement and activity can be preserved. 76 Chapter Four C O A L S A N D PROPOSITIONS Established by the philosophical position discussed above is the need for an expanded c o n c e p t of parking garages. Their fundamental capacity should be twofold; o n e , to facilitate the circulation and storage of automobiles and two, promote a c o n s c i o u s and positive environmental awareness to elicit active participation from their users. The achieving of these two functions allows an ultimate goal to be reached; they allow parking garages to assume a role whose transitional position between streets and buildings is coherent and contextual e n o u g h to preserve the continuity of movement of people through urban places. The thesis suggests that to achieve this state of integrated function, the general amenities of respect and civility towards garage users must be used in conceptualizing an expanded c o n c e p t for garages. In order that the garage should constitute a place of vital activity and purpose (urban connection), these general qualities of respect and civility are required. O n e specific criterion regarding the civility of garages is security. As m e n t i o n e d above, garages are often hostile. T o counter this, security must be clearly discernible by the 77 building users. G . S. Shaffer and L. M . A n d e r s o n released a research study in 1985 o n the perceived security and attractiveness of urban parking l o t s . 1 User security is a major issue in the design of garages and the study indicates certain physical variables can be responsible for a higher or lower rating in b o t h security and attractiveness. M o r e interesting is the overall implication from the study; amenity in garage design is not superfluous and can conceivably contribute to user v o l u m e . Some of the results are as follows: Security tended to be greater for scenes having high apparent property value. By using careful detailing practices and high standard finishes, not only is respect granted to the user, but a sense of security is e n c o u r a g e d as well. Pan Pacific Hotel at the Cruise Ship level is an example. Frontal as opposed to rear views of structures were preferred. This is interesting because many contemporary garage entrances are located o n elevations other than the frontal o n e , as is the case where the garage is part of a larger c o m p l e x . fase of access and entrance location corresponded to security perception. This indicates the dual advantage of strategic entrance location. P r o n o u n c e d entrances facing the major streets were s c o r e d convenient for accessibility as well as high Pan Pacific Hotel entrance on the Cruise Ship Level at Canada Place is sensitively finished and well lit. enhancing respect and security 78 security ratings. Entrances placed in lanes contributed to lower security ratings. This also coincides with the attractiveness dimension in the study which indicated that automobile entrances be located on the frontal elevation. The presence or implied presence of others related to higher security ratings. The central thrust of this thesis is concerned with engaging human experience to elicit participation from building users in their settings. All the following propositions revolve around this engagement of human experience and an interesting observation of the study is that implied presence is e n o u g h to bring about higher security ratings. Moreover, the greater the number of cars and people visible directly c o r r e s p o n d e d to higher security ratings. This indicates the need to expose the garage as o p p o s e d to hiding it. High visibility and low sense of enclosure resulted in positive ratings. Visibility was attributed to the desire to see sky. The anxiety of personal assault was also a probable factor in this result. Barriers such as fences and retaining walls p r o d u c e d negative results. Thin slabs and o p e n guard rails produce a lighter, brighter atmosphere than heavy concrete retaining walls. The garages at Granville and C o r d o v a , and C o r d o v a and Richards serve as a comparison. At C o r d o v a and Richards, three of the four sides are opaque, with relief occasionally c o m i n g from 79 sparse openings o n the south facing alley facade. M o s t of the openings are o n the north facade, where daylighting is naturally soft and as a result, the interior is very dark and sight lines for visibility are obstructed. Conversely, at Granville and C o r d o v a , the facades are made up mostly of thin guardrails interrupted only by o n e major structural diaphragm o n each of the e x p o s e d west and north elevations. The d e c k slabs are tapered to the e d g e , creating a very light framework. Visibility is high and the sense of enclosure is low in comparison. Perhaps most important to the perceptions of both security and attractiveness are those features that demonstrate care and attention by people. This is directly related to a category the study terms Design and Maintenance. Maintenance of all objects (including vegetation) and surfaces implied higher property value and higher security. Design for visibility, enclosure, and entrance placement were major areas of c o n c e r n . Dumpsters, wires and litter were negatively correlated with the above two perception ratings. This is the c o n s e q u e n c e of p o o r maintenance and inattentive design. 80 At Cordova & Granville. Vancouver, open facades increases security rating and is well suited for orientation using sight-lines. At Cordova & Richards, Vancouver, highly enclosed bomb shelter' atmosphere decreases security and the use of sight-lines. The results of Shaffer and Anderson's research reveal a need to approach garage design as a problem which includes attributes of human occupation. Shaffer and Anderson s u m this up by stating: [the results of the study]"suggest that urban planners should not try to hide the presence of [these] buildings altogether. Instead, perceived security might be enhanced with well-maintained structures where individuals feel they can seek refuge or that imply the presence of others w h o can either provide deterrence or assistance. Shaffer and A n d e r s o n ' s research indicates a n e e d for an expanded c o n c e p t for the urban parking garage. Implied in their discussion is the need to express a human association in garages. This falls in line with the central aim of this thesis. Having discussed a general philosophical position for garage design, and having presented independent scientific research findings, which are directly related and supportive of such a position, four propositions can now be presented. The first embodies Heidegger's view of dwelling, and reflects his insistence that all buildings are inhabitable. Implicitly c o n n e c t e d is M u m f o r d ' s suggestion of a holistic human experience. The s e c o n d deals with Heidegger's discussion of location, but at a scale of site-with-building, that is, at a 8 1 scale that orients users in an urban continuum as identified by Lynch. The third again deals with location, but is more intimate, and aims to bring about a specific here (from Leatherbarrow, page 51) for the garage itself. A n d the fourth proposition e m b o d i e s Heidegger's philosophy o n building, thinking, and technology, identified by Frascari as an architectural integrity of building assembly. These propositions originate from the belief that parking garages can, by initial c o n c e p t , contribute positively to a more coherent continuity of urban movement and activity. All four are c o n c e r n e d with an environmental learning, as implied by Chidister's and Francis' identification of discovery, challenge, delight, and participation - a learning that can result from what M u m f o r d implies is a sensitivity for the balance between objective and subjective perceptions of buildings, and which Irwin describes as being and circumstance. They e m b o d y architectonic goals attainable by various means. Each proposition is presented with examples of means to achieve the intent. 82 Proposition O n e : Design the entire garage with amenities for human inhabitation. If urban continuity can be accepted as a goal applicable to garage d e s i g n , and if the general conditions of respect and civility are to be incorporated, then an architectural gesture must e m b o d y these factors. Entrances for example, are to be located where they are easily visible and perceived as important, m o s t likely along or near the frontal elevation. Carage entrances should not be bleak and lacking in detail because they symbolically mark the boundary, a threshold b e t w e e n two spaces. Locating the entrance at the back of the building, or in an obscure c o m e r , hard to find, and difficult to access, cannot help but make a negative gesture towards drivers. Conversely, making them visible and locating them where they can be perceived as important, as in the case of porte- c o c h e r e s , will incorporate the idea of embarkation and w e l c o m e users in a dignified way. A u t o m o b i l e entrances are not alone in this regard. Pedestrian entrances for those going to/from their cars also deserve detailing and thoughtful location. City C e n t e r , Vancouver, uses elegant detailing o n the pedestrian entrance to the parking area. T h u s , respect is granted to drivers returning to or departing f r o m their cars. Oakridge C e n t e r o n the upper level parking uses highly appointed detailing in the atrium entrances. This is an interesting example because this splendor d o e s not o c c u r at plaza level. The intention of this proposition is to e m b o d y in garages, recognition that p e o p l e use these buildings. \ Approach to Robson Square garage entrance is a roundabout path because of one-way street system. Entrance is at back of building, bleak, and is in sharp contrast to pedestrian entrances at front. Sensitive detailing of pedestrian entrance. City Center. 12th & Cambie. Vancouver. 83 This gesture however, n e e d not be limited to entrances. Wall surface, lighting, d o o r fixtures and hardware, acoustics, pavement surface, and graphics all contribute to interiors which are responsible for setting the overall m o o d of the place. The extremely low head clearance (in some places 2.1m) f o u n d in the W a s h i n g t o n State C o n v e n t i o n and Trade Center, along with the lack of natural lighting, and c o m p o u n d e d by the c h o i c e of finishing, creates a very cavernous atmosphere. A n exceptionally hostile atmosphere can be f o u n d in the Butler Garage, at the corner of 2nd A v e n u e and James, in Seattle. Not only is the building in a state of ill-repair (broken w i n d o w panes in several locations, grimy walls, garbage), but it also suggests that it contains n o o k s and crannies to harbor crime. The entrance is depressingly dark, with the only indication of life being s o m e cars parked nearby. Thus, as can be seen from this example, interior amenities must be e m p l o y e d to w e l c o m e users. O n e may initially confuse this proposition with decorating. It is not. Design is more appropriate. The strategic allowance of daylighting is not mere decoration, nor is the placement of entrances. Both have implications o n structure and plan that can have more impact than decoration o n the physiological and psychological responses of building users. As amenities are important in other places of human inhabitation, so they are in garages. Pedestrian entrance at roof-top parking, Oakridge Center, Vancouver Sensitive detailing of entrance and panoramic view upon entering is respectful to visitors. Low headroom and no natural lighting creates cavernous atmosphere at parking level 2, Washington State Convention and Trade Center, Seattle 84 Proposition Two: Reinforce local orientation and introduce the building. William H. Ittelson, an environmental psychologist, tells us that p e o p l e tend to organize their responses and actions around five identifiable m o d e s of analysis; affect, orientation, categorization, systemization, and manipulation.^ Individually identifiable, they exist in an overlapping and simultaneous context. A brief c o m m e n t about each will aid in presenting the current proposition. Affect refers to that which immediately impacts our e m o t i o n s . It usually is in response to the general ambience and sets the motivational tone for action. Garages clearly have ambiences that provoke rather than evoke. General maintenance and design of finishes and detailing can result in positive affects. Orientation in environmental p s y c h o l o g y usage refers to the most primitive form of orientation - the identification of e s c a p e routes. Ittelson suggests that establishing an initial mapping of any situation will provide a base for m o r e detailed exploration. With respect to parking, a sense of b o u n d s , limits, scale, and the presentation of options of route can contribute to this type of orientation. D o i n g so will allow more complete use of the on-site possibilities, which in turn can reinforce a local orientation within the urban continuum. 85 Hostile environ, Butler garage, Seattle. Categorization is that which allows for analysis and understanding. Within this realm, the identification of building types and places occur. Also, concepts are interpreted here and the idea of the building and concept undergoes a distillation process which leads to the fourth dimension of systemization. O n c e categorized, a system, or set of logical and ordered connections is sought by the person perceiving. Predictable events are expected. Patterns are made and u n d e r s t o o d in relation to the building. Manipulation c o m e s about by the active participation of the individual. By participating, the individual re-informs the earlier processes and the entire perceptive experience is repeated. Personal forthcoming actions will provide a learning of environmental change in accordance to individual needs and purposes. Considering the above five modes of analysis, the sequence of approach, particularly the occurrences immediately before parking, can help to orient the visitor to the site. There are two major types of orientation: o n e that involves site orientation, and another that involves building orientation. 86 Site Orientation Site orientation introduces the site by presenting the visitor with possible routes to and from, and, in and around the site. Placement of entrances, sight lines, presentation of pathways, visual cues in detailing, and c o m m u n i c a t i o n of plan contribute to effective orientation, important for wayfinding. Granville Island a u t o m o b i l e circulation and parking is diffused over the entire site, mixing parking with individual events and activities. H e n c e a smooth transition is m a d e , and the organization of the site is revealed by the routing of circulation. Transit is provided o n site, but its circulation is limited in comparison to that of the automobile. Oakridge Center, V a n c o u v e r , is similar in its circulation pattern (that is, o n e consisting of a major circulation ring), to that of Granville Island's, but clearly separates parking from other activities. H e n c e , the fundamental difference in site organization is the relation of the ring to the rest of the site; o n Granville Island, the circulation happens within the activity space, whereas the ring at Oakridge surrounds the activity area. Although both present options of route o n site, and provide ingress and egress information, the circulation at Granville Island by its integration allows internal characteristics of buildings to overlap those of the street system, whereas the external conditions at Oakridge are quite independent in function and perceived ambience from the interior of the s h o p p i n g mall. At O a k r i d g e , exterior a m b i e n c e is influenced by adjacent building facades and not by the activity from within the mall. The intention of Activity is in center of circulation ring' at Oakridge Center. 41st & Cambie, Vancouver. 87 F « t M Creek Granville Island Parking and Circulation Plan. Source: Granville Island April 1986 Plan Update.' 88 Granville Island Transit and Rail Circulation. In comparison to automobile circulation, transit is limited. Source: Granville Island April 7986 Plan Update.' 89 this proposition is to unite buildings and sites with their parking areas so that p e o p l e arriving at these places by car can obtain a sense for the urban c o n t i n u u m . This gives the parking area a quality unique to that site, roots it to location, and makes it easily negotiable. Site orientation can be a c c o m p l i s h e d by two major devices: the strategic routing of circulation, and the use of uninterrupted sight lines. If a garage has sufficient o p e n i n g s o n its elevations, orientation can be established through sight lines w h i c h use the buildings around the garage as reference points. The garage at the corner of Granville and C o r d o v a in Vancouver is ideally suited for this type of orientation. Located o n a corner, with its street facing elevations having minimum sight obstruction, this garage has uninterrupted sight lines to prominent buildings such as Sinclair Center, 200 Granville Square, C a n a d a Place, and the Sea Bus terminal at Waterfront Station, all which can be used to effectively orient the user. S p e e d reduction occurs w h e n a driver leaves the street system and this is where more exacting coordinates can be provided for the visitor. Site orientation is at a larger scale than building orientation, and its main function is to provide reference points in important features of the building, and where these points are in relation t o the site in terms of ingress and egress. The s p e e d of circulation here is less than street circulation, but still I Garage at corner of Cordova & Granville, Vancouver,is ideally suited for using sight-lines to the surrounding buildings for orientation. Source: The World Trade Center Office Complex, Vancouver, BC. 90 greater than garage s p e e d which indicates that the scale of forms and details should be designed for the occupants of cars. Building Orientation U p o n entering the garage, s p e e d is r e d u c e d again, and building orientation should be made available. That is, characteristics of a building should be presented to people arriving by car. Revelation of the structural and mechanical systems en route to parking should be used to suggest organization below or above the level at which the car is arriving. O n e way to accomplish this may be exposing visitors to various vertical elements (elevators, stairwells, mechanical ducts, atria, sight line openings), that reveal or imply their uninterrupted continuance - an atrium being an example of a revealed continuance, and an elevator being an example of an implied continuance. Pan Pacific Hotel at Canada Place is confusing in this regard as the elevators connecting the parking levels continues only as far up as the Exhibition level. Another bank of elevators connects that level to the rest of the building. In addition, implied vertical orientation may be brought about by the replication and stacking of striking parts of a building. If, during site orientation, visitors are presented 91 with a particular part of the building that was striking and m e m o r a b l e , a skew in floor plan causing change of elevation, or change in roof line for example, and if the route to or from parking passes through this part at any level, the visitors are potentially afforded a reference locale to which they have already experienced in context with the general mass of the building. This repeating of orientation reassures the visitor of a correctly selected route and lessens the anxiety of ' g o i n g in the wrong direction.' Romedi Passini, author of Wayfinding in Architecture, refers to this repeating of information as reassurance.4 Passini points out the two major functions of reassurance are reducing anxiety (driver related) and refreshing the m e m o r y of earlier collected information. A closely related device that can be e m p l o y e d for reassurance is scale. Scale is important for user orientation. Mega-structures as parkades are confusing as well as alienating. Alienating d o e s not necessarily mean oppressive, but large sizes simply make garages less c o m p r e h e n s i b l e . T h e closer to human scale the structure and circulation are, the more memorable the s e q u e n c e of approach is. T w o existing examples that could take advantage of this reassurance are the parking a c c o m m o d a t i o n s at R o b s o n Square in Vancouver, and the W a s h i n g t o n State C o n v e n t i o n and Trade C e n t e r ( W S C T C ) in Seattle. The vertical circulation between the sub-grade 9 2 Key coordinates along Robson Square parking circulation, ie. Smithe and Robson Streets, are not communicated to visitors. parking levels of the Law C o u r t s of R o b s o n Square occurs beneath Smithe Street. Yet, no indication is given to patrons that this is so. The scale of the horizontal travel from the parking entrance (at H o w e and Nelson) to the north limit of parking (approximately beneath R o b s o n Street) is two city blocks, making disorientation a c o m m o n occurrence. The W S C T C has a similar disorientation p r o b l e m that c o u l d be remedied much easier than the situation at R o b s o n Square simply because W S C T C has above grade parking. Entering off of 8th A v e n u e , a patron is led through row u p o n row of parking in an area where sight lines to the extremes are not possible because of structural supports. However, a large portion of the parking level spans the space above 8th A v e n u e . A sight line connecting the Level 3 parking area with 8th avenue w o u l d immediately provide coordinates for a visitor, and yet, the wall is completely o p a q u e . A n o p e n i n g in the wall is not difficult here as this wall is also the exterior enclosure for the parking area. Since the street system is a network already u n d e r s t o o d by p e o p l e using cars, reference to this network can only help establish orientation. The fact that the c o m p l e x straddles major arterials differentiates W S C T C from most other buildings because other buildings usually d o not impinge o n the space above the street system. Interstate 5 as well as 8th A v e n u e pass underneath the c o m p l e x indicating a potential for interesting interfaces between visitors (drivers and pedestrians) and the c o m p l e x , and a potential for effective orientation. Dotted arrows indicate potential sight-lines to Pike Street and 8th Avenue are possible. Washington State Convention and Trade Center, Seattle Source: 'Seattle the Mew West.' WSCTC administration. 93 A n important c o n s e q u e n c e of providing an orientation is that it inherently situates the parked car for easy relocation. Proposition Three: Root the garage to "place." This proposition deals more qualitatively with a sense of location (see page 50) for the garage itself, and is meant to compliment building orientation. Contemporary parking structures, by having neutrality as an innate characteristic, are antithetical to a traditional notion of architecture understands architecture to involve the revelation of place and time. M o r e o v e r , with specific regard to garages, automobiles are e m b e d d e d urban artifacts. They possess an urban contextual quality of which urban settings are incomplete without. Their communication is both physical and social; their role is not neutral. Strategies to negate neutrality and to integrate the driver's role are thus appropriate. Time and place in architecture can be brought about by the use of indigenous materials, construction techniques, and building types. Sensitive response to a site's historic significance, climate, use, how it exists within a network of other sites, can result in a 94 definite here for the garage itself, and because here is recognizably coherent, it is the strongest means to counter the neutral tendency of traditional parking garages. History and overlapping activities with automobile circulation and parking can express a change owing to time that allows a different interpretation of purpose, which in turn can lead to an adaptive re-use of the historic integrity already e m b o d i e d by the primary buildings and site. Granville Island is an example. This d o e s not mean that new construction with regards to garage design is limited to using historicized motifs. Individuality can be brought about by recognizing the uniqueness of cars, and how to integrate the activity of them and their drivers with that of buildings. This individuality should not be confused with exclusiveness which better describes the situation where the garage and its function are not integrated with those of other buildings. Instead, individuality is intended to negate neutrality by providing an identity for the garage, albeit in juxtaposition to the building. As C u l l e n has pointed out, "the effects of juxtaposition are in themselves as exciting as the objects juxtaposed - often more s o . " ^ Juxtaposition can be used for activities as well as objects. Newspaper stands, mobile expresso bars, public information and advertising billboards, artwork such as wall murals, can all be juxtaposed in the immediate proximity of parking areas to overlap uses. This overlap gives a uniqueness of location, and is another means of negating neutrality. 95 Superficially applied historic motifs have the distinct drawback of being perceived as a d d - ons and decorative design. Therefore, it is important to note that the p o t e n c y of historic context arises from authenticity. The site, h o w p e o p l e use it, h o w the sun and wind affect the microclimate, history, and gestures for the future all contribute to strong themes. A metaphorical interpretation that alludes to the historic significance of the site is o n e way to secure a degree of here. C a n a d a Place has a strong theme, a bit literal perhaps, but strong just the same. The building resembles a ship in full sail, and its position o n the Burrard Inlet is an appropriate setting. What is interesting about the parking, is that because of the ship analogy, parking is reminiscent of boarding a ferry. Minimal clearances, sharp entry/exit ramps, and o p e n steel structural m e m b e r s support this feeling in the parking levels. A n interesting p h e n o m e n o n c o n c e r n i n g history is that without it, applied interpretations feel temporary and arbitrary, and Frederic Jameson has termed this temporariness schizophrenic^ Places where history is easily read are perceived as permanent, and integral with their surroundings. They express a reason for being there. Implicated is the history of garages, and perhaps the evolution of the central involvement of the car. However, romanticism can be the result of misused historic context. Romanticism in this manner c o n c e d e s to the past as the only source of inspiration. This skepticism of future Elevation of Canada Place. Source: Canada Place; Where Vancouver Meets the World." Sharp ramp grades, close quarters, the ocean and views thereof, the thip metaphor, all make the parking entrance.exit at Canada Place. Vancouver. reminiscent of ferry embarking debarking 96 d e v e l o p m e n t has b e e n criticized as b e i n g an archaeological 'ruining' of architecture. It promises no h o p e of things to c o m e and is rigidly f o c u s e d o n experiences that cannot b e . In essence, its p r e c o n c e i v e d aging is n o m o r e valid than the condition of p o s t - m o d e r n i s m which Jameson refers to as paranoia. C o n f u s i o n arises between engaging history and historicizing and the latter should b e v i e w e d with caution. The recognition of historic authenticity is however, important to give sustenance and integrity to the place. Granville Bridge is a fitting introduction for the industrial vernacular of Granville Island. In Irwin's usage, "what was, how it c a m e to be, what it is, and what it may c o m e to b e " ® is essential to the evolution of any particular site and is equally important for authenticity. Historic nuances can situate a place (garage) in a time period and can thus fix it. Joel Shack in a critique of architects using "industrial archaeology"^ suggests that authenticity is born from revealing origins. H e refers to this quality as Place-Story and implicit in his discussion is the setting for human action. H e uses Port Alberni Harbor Q u a y o n Vancouver Island as an example. A n o t h e r example is Pioneer Square in Seattle. During the evening hours, the large n u m b e r of p e o p l e patronizing their favourite drinking establishments, night clubs, and restaurants, gives Pioneer Square a sense that it is a place of vital urban participation. By providing s o m e story of a place, a setting is established in which the visitor may partake. Settings sometimes include artifacts which in themselves 97 A firing kiln is an artifact of Granville Island's legacy tell a story. The firing kiln in o n e of the Granville Island parking garages hints at the building's legacy. This too, may be a source of negating neutrality in garage design. Proposition Four: Reveal the integrity of building assembly. A means to achieve an integrity of building assembly is to articulate forms and joints in construction. Heidegger's usage of techne and poiesis^® can be used as inspiration for this proposition. Revealing to Heidegger is not to mean making and manipulating. Making and manipulating belong in the realm of process, whereas revealing is an expression of the thing itself. Heidegger uses the example of a blossom bursting into b l o o m to communicate this idea. In architecture, this revealing is the interplay of the parts, and how they d e p e n d on each other. Poiesis is concerned with revealing ends, means, and origins. Infatuation with the technical does not offer a sense of ends, nor any specific origin. In such a case, the end is confused as the making of the object itself and not as the e n d to which the object serves. For example, pre-fabricated rafters stacked up o n the ground d o not express their belonging until supporting a roof structure. 98 Revealing in contemporary usage is centered on manipulation. The expression of the garage is entirely one of technical efficiency, with its precise conditions. The revealing of which Heidegger suggests, the revealing of which garages design can c o n c e r n itself with, is the bringing fort/711 of its forms and construction. This bringing forth is evident in bridge construction. Discernible human involvement is present (oversized turn-buckles, nuts and bolt heads implying wrenches) which makes the experience of perceiving bridges immediate. Piping, handrails, electrical raceways, ticket machines, beam and c o l u m n c o n n e c t i o n s , Georgian wired glass, plate fasteners, lag screws, suspension systems, panic hardware and d o o r closers, lighting systems, edge finishes, all are areas that can be d e v e l o p e d in garage design to bring about a integrity of expression, and with it a human/mechanical dialogue. For example, construction around openings admitting daylight, can express the tending to the natural p h e n o m e n o n (in this case sunlight), its n e e d in human applications (by the pleasing affect it brings), and the t e c h n o l o g y e m p l o y e d to meet this human need (the use and strength of lintels and glass). It is this multi-faceted perception that is the aim of articulating forms and joints in construction. Articulated forms naturally attract attention, and as such, are important not only for an integrity of architecture, but also for site and building orientation. Architecturally sensitive buildings usually set up a hierarchy of forms, bringing attention to specific locales in or of 99 the building. For example, an atrium may be highlighted because it can be a focal point. These forms can usually be spotted from the exterior, as the skylight of the atrium can. The garage, by having its o w n identity, can articulate itself in much the same way. Bringing more attention to the garage c o u l d make ingress and egress routes easy to remember and thus, less confusing. M o r e important though is that articulation communicates a positive intent. Revealing can bring about environmental discovery. Lynch refers to this m o d e of perception and action as a learning ecology. Implicit in his discussion is that p e o p l e need to learn and discover their natural and built environs. Mark Francis of the University of California, Davis, has pointed out that an important ingredient of successful urban spaces is its ability to foster environmental learning: "The public environment teaches a city's inhabitants about its past...It is here we b e c o m e competent in reading and understanding our built environment...fantasy and objects people discover as they use a space make public spaces more meaningful. As Lynch suggests, much of the risk and challenge has been removed from our public environments...Users of a space must maintain direct control of places, making them "ours" as 13 o p p o s e d to 'theirs.'" 100 D i s c o v e r / , meaning, delight, challenge, and participation can all be attributes of articulating forms and joints. A n example is the view tower and its use at Lonsdale Q u a y . The learning of construction joinery (of the tower itself), the challenge of climbing, the discovery of the surrounding view, all contribute to an active learning by an individual and give meaning to the tower's existence. H e n c e , there are two major reasons for articulating forms and joints. Frascari has correctly pointed out that it is in the joint where a construing of the construction gives strength to a sense of architectural integrity. The second reason is revelation and articulation can potentially bring about an environmental learning and an understanding of built forms. These are the qualities that can supplement the pragmatism of garages by engaging the p e o p l e using them. It is of note that, although a large proportion of contemporary parking structures are barren, generic, and uninteresting, there exist a number of examples which d o not have these negative characteristics. Moreover, the garages that were not generic, have within them traces of the attributes of which the above propositions seek. 101 View lower at Lonsdale Quay. North Vancouver. encourages environmental learning. Granville Island is an example of a design which integrates well the role of the driver into its c o n c e p t . Using the historic significance, that is, the industrial legacy of the locale, adaptive re-use of existing structures is successful for drivers and pedestrians. Circulation is an orienting experience as well as a learning one, stirring interest and the imagination. Authenticity was established by respecting the Island's history, giving the buildings a permanence and integrity of expression. All of this roots the site and its buildings to place, and allows p e o p l e to embark. This in itself is interesting because in areas such as shopping centers, there is a sharper division between driver area and pedestrian area. The parking beneath Pacific Center, having n o orienting qualities, historic content, and amenities for human inhabitation, feels detached from the continuum to which Lynch refers. Metaphorical connections are made in s o m e garages such as Canada Place. The surrounding context, both natural and architectural were r e s p o n d e d to in a way that gives the building a newness, but a newness that respects the heritage of the waterfront. Moreover, it hints at the human/mechanical dialogue by its metaphorical expression of a ship. M e n t i o n e d earlier was its ferry-boarding effect. 102 Another interesting note of C a n a d a Place is the detailing a n d lighting of the Cruise Ship Level. The exterior staging area for vehicles is finished in a very similar manner to that of the interior of the exhibition halls. This gives recognition to those arriving by vehicles. The entrance to the Pan Pacific Hotel, albeit down-played from the o n e at street level, is sensitively finished with glazing, complete with n e o n signage. Mirrors that increase the ambience of pedestrian activity have b e e n placed o n the white rectangular columns in the bays. The west wall is completely glazed, (the glazing divided into a grid pattern), and this glazing affords a view of Burrard Inlet and with it, ample natural daylighting. T h e pedestrian activity, moving machines, sensitive detailing, and natural daylighting, is appropriate to a place where embarkation and debarkation is staged. Examples exist where orientation can or c o u l d have b e e n further d e v e l o p e d as identified above in the designs of R o b s o n Square and the Washington State C o n v e n t i o n and Trade Center. Opportunities exist in their configurations that w o u l d allow direct sight lines, and vertical c o n n e c t i o n s , both implied or revealed, to be made. These c o n n e c t i o n s and sight lines would aid in a negotiable wayfinding in these buildings. Reception in entrance design was not e n c o u n t e r e d in a convincing degree, w h i c h indicates a p r o b l e m area. O n e notable entrance was City C e n t e r , Vancouver. Its expressly thematic entrance t h o u g h , is sensational, displaced in time, and has a ring of theatrics Similar detailing inside and outside of staging area at Canada Place Cruise Ship Level provide respect and smooth transition 103 about it. It does however, grant status to the p e o p l e using the garage. O n e result of the coherent theatrics used at City C e n t e r is that the detailing approaches the condition of which Frascari refers to as joint. Even though the expression of the garage entrance is somewhat contrived, it carries a sense of permanence about it and possesses integrity because it indicates what the rest of the building carries as an expression. In most other parking structures, no indication is given to what the quality of the destination may be. As well, articulation of forms and joints in construction was not encountered as decisive. Granville Island garage structure, although very expressive, is a unique situation because of the Island's status and heritage. M o s t other garages were constructed in very ordinary terms. C a n a d a Place was again of note because of its use of steel beams in the parking levels, and elements such as G e o r g i a n wired glass and heavy steel d o o r hardware. The Washington State C o n v e n t i o n and Trade Center has similar structural design. The steel beams sometimes revealed their b o l t e d and w e l d e d c o n n e c t i o n s , and the angles in which they met c o m m u n i c a t e d an idea of stability, transferring the forces of gravity to the g r o u n d . A n interesting example of overlapping activities can be e n c o u n t e r e d in the Chinatown district of Vancouver. A surface parking lot at G o r e and G e o r g i a , has juxtaposed next to it, activity of a market type. R a n d o m p r o d u c e stands have b e e n erected and the activity of Garage entrance to City Center. 12th & Cambie. Vancouver, is expressively thematic, almost Piranesian (Carceri series). and indicates what expression the entire complex carries. Structural steel beams and columns, Washington State Convention and Trade Center, Seattle, express constnjctional integrity and stability 104 retail sales occurs in the immediate proximity of the parking area. This however, is an example specific to C h i n a t o w n , where the activity of open-air-market retailing is standard. O f the areas in which parking structures were surveyed, perhaps only o n e area a p p r o a c h e d a level of having attributes of all the above propositions. That area is Granville Island. Its weakest point is site orientation. Because of its irregular circulation pattern, first-time visitors may have difficulty in establishing on-site bearings. Its other qualities are worth noting as has been d o n e throughout this thesis. Granville Island access, circulation, and parking structure serves as a transitional link b e t w e e n the urban street system and Granville Island and, as such, contributes to the urban continuity. 105 Random market stalls erected in close proximity to surface parking lot, Chinatown, Vancouver. Chapter Five C O N C L U S I O N From the outset, it was of interest to investigate the potential that the automobile/driver combination c o u l d have in architectural design. Preliminary observations indicated a tendency exists which separates the activity of parking from other activities of buildings and places. Whether an independent garage, or one which is part of a larger complex (a s h o p p i n g center, for example), o n e characteristic was clear - their utilitarian function in relation to site and place. As a c o n s e q u e n c e , barren and sometimes hostile atmospheres often resulted in garages using storage as the primary design concern. Because possession of an automobile and the experiences derived from driving o n e are so completely a part of daily routine, of interest was the possibility of integrating the function of garages with other buildings and activities that these garages may be associated with, and of o v e r c o m i n g the barren and hostile environments of traditional garages. From the field observations, it was clear that most parking garages included the driving experience only to the extent of parking a car, and in such garages, deliberation and 106 civility were not influences in their designs. This has the effect of excluding active participation (beyond that of following signs) on the part of the visitor. M o n o t o n o u s exteriors and interiors were characteristic of such garages. Also evident from the field observations was the fact that architectural design for most garages was concentrated o n the facades and the internal workings and their functional relation to other places remained primarily utilitarian. As a result, the facade treatment related more to the role of decoration (and is perceived as such), leaving bleak interiors to be found by p e o p l e using these garages. This lack of respect and amenity decreases sharply the possibilities for the garage to contribute to the site, and also decreases sharply the chance for an environmental awareness. The exclusion of individual participation and denial of occupation, that is, the taking of places, are responsible for the disorienting and alienating environs of garages. These deficiencies contribute to what the thesis refers to as a fracturing of urban continuity. As most garages contribute to this discontinuity, a parking study c o n d u c t e d by the Vancouver City Engineering Department was used to discern what fraction of the downtown commercial area was devoted to parking. The result warrants consideration; thirty two percent of the gross built space in the survey area (1983) was o c c u p i e d by structured parking. This percentage does not include surface or curb parking. Indicated, is the urgency to reassess the role of parking structures. 107 A theory to elevate the role of the automobile/driver that directly implicates garage design and site circulation is presented. Drawing primarily from the philosophy of Heidegger, integrated function with regards to parking garages via expanded program and tactility is p r o p o s e d as a philosophical design approach whose aim is fourfold; to g r o u n d architecture in experience, to provide a theater for human action, to establish a certainty of place, but above all, to bring back a sense of urban continuity by expanding the c o n c e p t of traditional garages. From this approach four propositions are presented: o n e , design the entire building with amenities for human inhabitation, two, reinforce local orientation and introduce the building, three, root the garage to "place," and four, reveal the integrity of building assembly. These propositions are presented in an attempt to reach a state of architectural integrity resulting from a sensitivity for the balance between subjective and objective perceptions of buildings. They are meant to offer an alternative way of conceptualizing the design of parking structures. The propositions are revolutionary only insofar as they have not been engaged in the design of most urban building types. Heidegger's philosophy is acknowledged, but manifestation of that philosophy is infrequent in buildings. The thesis proposes to engage this p h e n o m e n o l o g i c a l position as a design catalyst for parking garages, structures having potential of contributing to the urban continuum. 108 By engaging the users of garages, their function can be integrated with other buildings and activities to which they are associated. In connection with this, it is suggested that facilitating a positive environmental awareness and eliciting active participation could bring about discovery, delight, challenge, and control, all of which c o u l d add meaning to garages. Utility is a c k n o w l e d g e d as a prerequisite (that is, garages, as part of their function, must store cars), but only as a prerequisite requiring supplementation. Practicality in its singular and exclusive state cannot exist alone as a building determinant in a multi-faceted urban network of destinations and activities. H e n c e , the philosophical design approach proposes using human experience via tactility and expanded program in an attempt to reach a state of garage architecture in which the routine of parking can be meshed with a collage of urban activity that promotes positive environmental awareness. The potential for garage design lies in the reconsideration of its traditional premise. It is this single urban building typology, that has evolved slowly in architectural qualities, that is potentially a catalyst for the continuity of urban activity and movement. It is o d d that this significant urban building type remains to be determined only by pragmatism. Robert Irwin, a contemporary Los Angeles artist, commenting o n the subject of aesthetics, 109 proffers a reason: "What appeared to be a question of object/non-object has turned out to be a question of seeing and not seeing, of how it is we actually perceive or fail to perceive "things" in their real contexts." 1 The garage has been overlooked as a potentially major contributor to the urban fabric. There are existing examples from which the architectural evolution of garages can benefit. These examples have one c o m m o n thread - they include visitors in ways b e y o n d utility and elicit positive participation and interpretation. Architects must look u p o n the garage as an architectural possibility. It is in fact, o n e like any other by virtue of the fact that the garage is a place, only one presently lacking positive associations. It belongs within the realm of architecture and is to the service of human dwelling. The practice of architecture involves statics, assembly, construction, and dwelling which puts these things in time and place. The garage as any other building, is capable of possessing qualities provocative of a context that elicits positive awareness. T o realize this potential, it is necessary to acknowledge individual and subjective assessments as valid criterion in the design of parking structures. 110 N O T E S Chapter O n e 1. Silk, Gerald. A u t o m o b i l e and Culture. N e w York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1984. p.100. 2. Ibid, p.205. 3. Ibid. p.97. 4. Ibid, p.100. 5. Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the M o d e r n W o r l d . L o n d o n : Penguin Press, 1971. p.100. 6. Silk, Gerald. Automobile and Culture. New York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1984. p.297. 7 Ibid: p.27 8. A m h e i m , Rudolf A . The Dynamics of Architectural Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. p.21. 9. Webster's II N e w Riverside University Dictionary. Boston: H o u g h t o n Mifflin C o m p a n y , 1984. p.824: operation 10. Bloomer, Kent and Charles M o o r e . Body, Memory, and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. p.62. 11. M u m f o r d , Lewis. 'Art and T e c h n i c s / i n The Lewis M u m f o r d Reader. D. Miller, e d . New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. p.355. 12. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of C h i c a g o Press, 1958. p.154. 13. McCarter, Robert. 'Escape from the Revolving Door: Architecture and the Machine,' in Pamphlet Architecture 12: Building and Machines. R. McCarter, e d . New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987. p.11. 14. Lynch, Kevin. G o o d City Form. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981; reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985) p.116 (page reference is to reprint edition). 15. City of Vancouver Engineering Dept. Vancouver Parking Study: Technical Appendix ' A ' , Parking Policy Background Report. Vancouver: 1984. p.76. 16. City of Vancouver Engineering Dept. Vancouver Parking Study: Technical Appendix ' B ' , 1983 D o w n t o w n Parking Survey. Vancouver: City of Vancouver, 1984. Table I. 17. City of Vancouver Engineering Dept. Vancouver Parking Study: Technical Appendix ' A ' , 1983 D o w n t o w n Parking Survey. Vancouver: City of Vancouver, 1984. Table 2. p.30 112 18. Parking Consultants Council, National Parking Association. The Dimensions of Parking. Washington: Urban Land Institute and National Parking Association, 1979. p.33. note: the above source quotes figures ranging from 300 to 400 square feet. In consultation with Bill M c C r e e r y Architect, of Vancouver, B.C., who has considerable experience with parking structures, a figure of 325 square feet is presented as appropriate. 19. Silk, Gerald. Automobile and Culture. New York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1984. p.255. 20. McCullar, Michael. 'P/A Inquiry: Garage Mechanics,' Progressive Architecture ( N o v e m b e r 1987): p.107. 21. Ibid, p.106. 22. Lynch, Kevin. G o o d City Form. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981; reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985) p.116 (page reference is to reprint edition). Chapter T w o 1. McCullar, Michael. 'P/A Inquiry: Garage Mechanics,' Progressive Architecture ( N o v e m b e r 1987): p.107. 2. Silk, Gerald. Automobile and Culture. N e w York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1984. p.119. 113 3. Jackson, J.B. "The Social Landscape" in Selected Writings of J.B. Jackson. Ervin H. Rube, e d . University of Massachusetts Press, 1971. p.150. 4. Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the M o d e r n W o r l d . L o n d o n : Penguin Press, 1971. p.102. 5. Jackson, J.B. "The Social Landscape" in Selected Writings of J.B. Jackson. Ervin H. Rube, e d . University of Massachusetts Press, 1971. p. 150. 6. Jackson, J.B. "The Social Landscape" in Selected Writings of J.B. Jackson. Ervin H. Rube, e d . University of Massachusetts Press, 1971. p. 150. 7. Baudrillard, Jean. 'The Ecstasy of Communication,'in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays o n Postmodern Culture. H. Foster e d . Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1983. p. 127. 8. Ibid: p.127. 9. Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine A g e . (London: The Architectural Press, 1960; reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), p.324 (page reference is to reprint edition). Chapter Three 1. Mccullar, Michael. 'P/A Inquiry: Garage Mechanics,' Progressive Architecture 68 (November 1987): 110. 114 2. Chidister, Mark. 'Reconsidering the Piazza,' Landscape Architecture 78 (February 1988): 42. 3. Ibid. p.41. 4. Ibid. p.42. 5. Heidegger, Martin. 'The Q u e s t i o n C o n c e r n i n g T e c h n o l o g y / i n Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. D.F. Krell, e d . N e w York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1977. p.294. 6. Heidegger, Martin. 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking,' in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. D.F. Krell, e d . New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1977. p.323-324. 7. Ibid: p.332. 8. Leatherbarrow, David. "Janus and the Idea of the Facade," in Semiotics: Proceedings of the 10th Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America. New York: Plenum Press, 1985. p.701. 9. Ibid: p.704. 10. Pfau, Peter and W e s Jones. 'Primitive Huts, 1985,'in Pamphlet Architecture 12: Building and Machines. R. McCarter, e d . New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987. p. 49 11. Heidegger, Martin. T h e Q u e s t i o n C o n c e r n i n g T e c h n o l o g y / i n Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. D.F. Krell, e d . N e w York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1977. p. 317. 115 12. Pfau, Peter and W e s Jones. 'Primitive Huts, 1985,'in Pamphlet Architecture 12: Building and Machines. R. McCarter, e d . New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987. p.54. 13. Heidegger, Martin. T h e Question C o n c e r n i n g Technology,'in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. D.F. Krell, ed. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1977. p. 301. 14. Heidegger, Martin. T h e Question C o n c e r n i n g T e c h n o l o g y / i n Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. D.F. Krell, ed. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1977. p. 309. 15. Ittelson, William H. ed. Environment and C o g n i t i o n . New York: Seminar Press, 1973. p.3,9. 16. Frampton, Kenneth. 'Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance/in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays o n Postmodern Culture. H. Foster e d . Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1983. p.28. 17. Frampton, Kenneth. 'Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance/in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays o n Postmodern Culture. H. Foster e d . Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1983. p.28. 18. Ibid. p.29. 19. Ibid. p.28. 20. Bloomer, Kent and Charles M o o r e . Body, M e m o r y , and Architecture. N e w Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. p. 105. 116 21. McCullar, Michael. 'P/A Inquiry: Garage Mechanics,' Progressive Architecture (November 1987): p.16. McCullar, Michael. 'P/A Inquiry: Garage Mechanics,' Progressive Architecture (November 1987): p.111. 22. Irwin, Robert. Being and Circumstance. Larkspur Landing, California: Lapis Press, 1985. p.28. 23. Ibid. p19. 24. Bloomer, Kent and Charles M o o r e . Body, M e m o r y , and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. p. 34. 25. Bloomer, Kent and Charles M o o r e . Body, M e m o r y , and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. p.35. 26. Irwin, Robert. Being and Circumstance. Larkspur Landing, California: Lapis Press, 1985. p.24. 27. McCarter, Robert. 'Escape from the Revolving D o o r : Architecture and the Machine,' in Pamphlet Architecture 12: Building and Machines. R. McCarter, ed. New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987. p.11. 28. Ibid: p.11. 29. Ibid: p.11. 30. Silk, Gerald. A u t o m o b i l e and Culture. New York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1984. p.79. 117 31. Lagan, Thomas. Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Reason. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. p.322. 32. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. The C o n c e p t of Dwelling. N e w York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1985. p.19. 33. Pfau, Peter and W e s Jones. 'Primitive Huts, 1985,' in Pamphlet Architecture 12: Building and Machines. R. McCarter, e d . New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987. p. 48-51. 34. Frascari, Marco. "The Tell-the-Tale Detail," VIA 7. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984. p.32. 35. Ibid: p.24. 36. Ibid: p.35. Chapter Four 1. Shaffer, Garnett S. and L.M. A n d e r s o n . 'Perceptions of the Security and Attractiveness of Urban Parking Lots,' Journal of Environmental Psychology 5 ( D e c e m b e r 1985): 311-323. 2. Ibid: p.320. 118 3. Ittelson, William H. ed. Environment and Cognition. New York: Seminar Press, 1973. p.17. 4. Passini, Romedi. Wayfinding in Architecture. N e w York: Van Nostrand Reinhold C o m p a n y , 1984. p.106. 5. Cullen, G o r d o n . The Concise Townscape. London: Van Nostrand Reinhold C o m p a n y , 1983. p. 189. 6. Jameson, Frederic. 'Postmodernism and C o n s u m e r Society/in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays o n Postmodern Culture, H . Foster, e d . Seattle, Wa.: Bay Press, 1983. p.118-123. 7. McCarter, Robert. 'Escape from the Revolving Door: Architecture and the Machine,' in Pamphlet Architecture 12: Building and Machines. R. McCarter, ed. New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987. p. 10. 8. Irwin, Robert. Being and Circumstance. Larkspur Landing, California: Lapis Press, 1985. p.28. 9. Shack, Joel. 'Cultivating a Place-Story,' The Canadian Architect. O c t o b e r 1986: 22. 10. Heidegger, Martin. 'The Q u e s t i o n C o n c e r n i n g Technology,' in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. D.F. Krell, e d . N e w York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1977. p.294. 11. Heidegger, Martin. 'The Q u e s t i o n C o n c e r n i n g Technology,' in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. D.F. Krell, e d . N e w York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1977. p.293. 119 12. Lynch, Kevin. G o o d City Form. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981; reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985) p.116 (page reference is to reprint edition). 13. Francis, Mark. 'Changing Values for Public Spaces,' Landscape Architecture 78 (February 1988): 58. Chapter Five Irwin, Robert. Being and Circumstance. Larkspur Landing, California: Lapis Press, 1985. p.29. 120 S O U R C E S Arendt, Hannah. The Human C o n d i t i o n . Chicago: University of C h i c a g o Press, 1958. Arnheim, Rudolf A . The Dynamics of Architectural Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. London: The Architectural Press, 1960; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983. Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ecstasy of C o m m u n i c a t i o n . " The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays o n Postmodern Culture. H. Foster, ed. Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1983. Berube, Margery S., e d . Webster's II N e w Riverside University Dictionary. Boston: H o u g h t o n Mifflin C o m p a n y , 1984. Bloomer, Kent, and Charles M o o r e . Body, Memory, and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Chidister, Mark. "Reconsidering the Piazza." Landscape Architecture 78 (February 1988): 40-42. City of Vancouver Engineering Dept. Vancouver Parking Study: Technical A p p e n d i x " A " , Parking Policy Background Report. Vancouver: 1984. 121 City of Vancouver Engineering Dept. Vancouver Parking Study: Technical Appendix " B " , 1983 D o w n t o w n Parking Survey. Vancouver: City of Vancouver, 1984. Cullen, G o r d o n . The C o n c i s e Townscape. L o n d o n : Van Nostrand Reinhold C o m p a n y , 1983. Foster, Hal, e d . The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays o n Postmodern Culture. Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1983. Frampton, Kenneth. "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance." In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays o n Postmodern Culture, H. Foster, e d . Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1983. Francis, Mark. " C h a n g i n g Values for Public Spaces." Landscape Architecture 78 (February 1988): 54-59. Frascari, Marco. "The Tell-the-Tale Detail," in VIA 7. Cambrdige, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984. Irwin, Robert. Being and Circumstance. Larkspur Landing/California: Lapis Press, 1985. Ittelson, William H., e d . Environment and C o g n i t i o n . New York: Seminar Press, 1973. Jameson, Frederic. "Postmodernism and C o n s u m e r Society." In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, H. Foster, e d . Seattle, W a . : Bay Press, 1983. Krell, David Farrell, e d . Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1977. 122 Lagan, Thomas. Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Reason. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the M o d e m World. London: Penguin Press, 1971. Lynch, Kevin. G o o d City Form. Cambridge, Mass.: 1981; reprint, Cambridge, Mass., 1985. McCarter, Robert, e d . Pamphlet Architecture 12: Building and Machines. N e w Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987. McCullar, Michael. "P/A Inquiry: Garage Mechanics." Progressive Architecture ( N o v e m b e r 1987): 106-111. Miller, D o n a l d , e d . The Lewis M u m f o r d Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. The C o n c e p t of Dwelling. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1985. Passini, Romedi. Wayfinding in Architecture. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold C o m p a n y , 1984. Perez-Gomez, Alberto. Architecture and the Crisis of M o d e r n Science. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983. Shack, Joel. "Cultivating a Place-Story." The Canadian Architect. ( O c t o b e r 1986): 20-27. 123 Shaffer, Carnett S. and L.M. A n d e r s o n . "Perceptions of the Security and Attractiveness of Urban Parking Lots." Journal of Environmental Psychology 5 (December 1985): 311-323. Silk, Gerald. A u t o m o b i l e and Culture. N e w York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1984. Venturi, Robert. Learning From Las Vegas. Rev. e d . Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972, reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. 124 Appendix A THE SELECTION O F OBSERVATIONS FOR FIELD S T U D Y The field observations were d o n e concentrating on 6 general areas of parking. They are: 7. Approach A p p r o a c h I take to mean the route a car must follow that is part of the street system. A p p r o a c h can be broken down into two main phases: distant approach, where view corridors and general or silhouette massing can be considerations, and near approach, where more detailed massing and site orientation begins. 2. Entry/exit Similar to a gate or doorway, the entry marks the e n d of the street system and beginning of the arrival path. In many cases, it is nothing more than a depression in the sidewalk or an opening in a facade. S p e e d reduction usually occurs u p o n entry. By reducing the speed of the incoming car, a transition is already in progress from street to building. 3. Control Control usually occurs in the form of ticket machine or parking attendant. C o n t r o l can be located anywhere along the arrival path, but usually is situated near the entry. C o n t r o l is sometimes passive (warning signs to non patrons using private parking lots) or non-existent (major shopping centers) when parking is free. 125 4. Arrival I exit Path Arrival path is that part of the circulation route which leads from the street to the parking area. It may be long or short depending o n proximity of parking to street system. If path is long, control may be situated further away from street system so that the arrival path can d o u b l e as a reservoir for incoming traffic. 5. Parking That area where cars are parked and a connection to the building is initiated. 6. Connection to/from Building The path from the parking area to the building and the path from the building back to the car. As wayfinding is important to arrive, it is also important to relocate the automobile for departure. These general areas by category d o not describe such considerations as detailing, daylighting and so o n . These considerations however related, are of a different dimension and might be better termed means. Some means are as follows: symbolism detailing (themes/materials) daylighting plan/configuration haptics sight lines scale C o n s i d e r i n g the means, together with the 6 general areas of parking, the propositions were d e v e l o p e d . It would be redundant to discuss h o w each individual proposition affects each area of parking, or which means corresponds to what other variable. The 126 reason is that they all are interdependent, that is, different means can be used for different areas and propositions. A list of some of the more salient garages that contributed to this thesis is as follows: 1. 760 Water Street, Vancouver, B.C. 2. Butler Garage, 2nd Ave. & James, Seattle, W A . 3. Canada Place, Vancouver, B.C. 4. City Center, 12th & Cambie, Vancouver, B . C . 5. C o r d o v a & Richards, Vancouver, B.C. 6. Fraser Parkade, U B C Campus, Vancouver, B . C . 7. Gasworks Park, Seattle, W A . 8. Granville & C o r d o v a , Vancouver, B.C. 9. Granville Island, Vancouver, B.C. 10. Lonsdale Quay, Vancouver, B.C. 11. Oakridge Center, 41st & Cambie, Vancouver, B.C. 12. O c c i d e n t a l & Yesler, Seattle, W A . 13. Robson Square, Vancouver, B.C. 14. Sun W a h Market, Keefer & Main, Vancouver, B.C. 127 15. Surface lot between Keefer & Union o n G o r e , Vancouver, B.C. 16. U.S. Bank, 1st Ave. & Cherry, Seattle, W A . 17. Washington State C o n v e n t i o n & Trade Center, 8th Ave. & Pike, Seattle, W A . 128 work_2v775ec7knbofh7c4tx22akmn4 ---- S001041751700010Xjra 446..476 The Bengali Pharaoh: Upper-Caste Aryanism, Pan-Egyptianism, and the Contested History of Biometric Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Bengal PROJIT BIHARI MUKHARJI Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania I N T R O D U C T I O N Today “raciology,” in its new genomic avatar, is once again on the rise.1 Gen- erations of humanists have insisted that “race” is only a “social construct,” but some scholars and scientists are now rethinking or rejecting this view. What is more, many of the most enthusiastic exponents of the new raciology are based outside the Minority World. Countries like Mexico, South Africa, and India are major players in genomic studies that operationalize new genomic forms of race.2 How did we get here? Raciology made a comeback while we were happy in the belief that it had disappeared, but did it ever really go away? Was the reemergence of raciology in the postcolony inevitable? Must human Acknowledgments: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the South Asia Conference at Madison in 2015. I am grateful to the many comments and suggestions I received on that occasion. Thomas Trautmann and Chris Fuller’s suggestions and encouragement were particularly helpful. The feedback I received from the anonymous CSSH referees was both generous and productive. Finally, I must acknowledge Manjita Mukharji’s patience in reading multiple drafts of this paper. 1 Nadia Abu El-Haj, “The Genetic Reinscription of Race,” Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (2007): 283–300; Pamela Sankar, “MEDLINE Definitions of Race and Ethnicity and their Appli- cations to Genetic Research,” Nature Genetics 34, 2 (2002): 119; Nikolas Rose, “Race, Risk and Medicine in the Age of ‘Your Own Personal Genome,’” BioSocieties 3 (2003): 423–39; Michael Montoya, “Bioethnic Conscription: Genes, Race and Mexicana/o Ethnicity in Diabetes Research,” Current Anthropology 22, 1 (2007): 94–128; Ann Morning, The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Dorothy E. Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press, 2011). 2 Ruha Benjamin, “A Lab of Their Own: Genomic Sovereignty as Postcolonial Science Policy,” Policy and Society 28 (2009): 341–55. Comparative Studies in Society and History 2017;59(2):446–476. 0010-4175/17 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2017 doi:10.1017/S001041751700010X 446 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core difference be imagined as one or the other form of somatic difference? The time has come to ask these and related questions. Historians of colonialism in general and the British Empire in South Asia in particular have produced many fascinating accounts of imperial raciology. Today, anyone who has taken undergraduate classes in the history of British India has encountered the towering figure of Sir Herbert Hope Risley and his notorious “nasal index.”3 There are also broader cultural accounts of the role of race and raciology in British imperial knowledge.4 But few such studies extend chronologically beyond the Great War or sociologically beyond the British administrative elite.5 As David Arnold points out, “race” was never a “relatively homogeneous set of ideas and practices, driven by material greed and social anxieties in the West, and capable of delivering social power and political authority to whites across the globe.” It was always a far more “nebulous and self-contradictory concept” that was frequently “internalized and reworked” by the very people who were subjects of European racial discourse.6 To understand the reemer- gence of raciology in the present genomic age, we must better understand this process of “internalization and reworking.” As important and consequen- tial as imperial raciologies remain, there is a gaping scholarly hole regarding late colonial and postcolonial national raciologies, and we urgently need to turn our critical eye toward them. This is what I undertake in the present article. My intentions here are threefold. First, I describe the long afterlives of Risleyan raciology in late colonial and postcolonial Bengal. In so doing, I high- light the direct institutional and intellectual genealogies that connect Risley, his early Indian inheritors, and the present generation of genomicists. Second, I map the diverse interests, agendas, and nationalisms that these post-Risleyan raciologies have served. Here I examine the conspicuous “public life” of raci- ology that helped the post-Risleyan version sink deep roots in the postcolonial Bengali imaginary. Finally, I detail an alternative approach for thinking about group-based human difference that did not somaticize it. Craftology, as this other imagination of group-based human difference came to be called, drew 3 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 2001); Crispin Bates, Race, Caste and Tribe in Central India: The Early Origins of Indian Anthropometry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Papers in South Asian Studies, 1995); Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 4 Peter Robb, ed., The Concept of Race in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 5 For an exception, see Projit Bihari Mukharji, “From Serosocial to Sanguinary Identities: Caste, Transnational Race Science and the Shifting Metonymies of Blood Broup B, India c. 1918–1960,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 51, 2 (2014): 143–76. 6 David Arnold, “‘An Ancient Race Outworn’: Malaria and Race in Colonial India, 1860– 1930,” in Waltraud Ernst and Bernard Harris, eds., Race, Science and Medicine (London: Rout- ledge, 1999), 123–43, 123. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 447 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core upon a diverse set of influences, the most important being a Bengali tradition of Egyptology. Egyptology left an enormous cultural footprint upon the modern world. Its history is linked to the emergence of several key modern academic disciplines ranging from evolutionary biology to archaeology, and it also featured promi- nently in art, literature, and the cinema. Yet, thus far its impact has been explored almost exclusively in relation to modern Egypt and the imperial West, and its influences upon other areas of the world, such as South Asia, have been utterly neglected. As I will show in what follows, Egyptology was a significant presence in Bengal, where it played a prominent role in shaping ideas about race and history. The key figure through whom Bengali Egyptology intersects with mid-twentieth-century Bengali raciology is the enigmatic Bengali Pharaoh. This figure of an exiled Egyptian pharaoh who had settled in Bengal with his followers, though dismissed by Egyptologists and archaeologists, was nur- tured by artists and folklorists seeking an alternative to the pervasive Aryanism that shaped the historical self-identity of Bengali upper castes. Despite the seemingly flimsy ground upon which the Bengali Pharaoh stands, he embodies an important alternate imaginary, one that interrupts the teleology connecting imperial raciology to modern genomic raciology via mid-twentieth-century upper-caste Aryanism. The writings and controversies surrounding the Bengali Pharaoh draw our attention to an attempt to conceptualize group-based human difference in non-somatic ways. As I briefly describe in the conclusion, in Bengal such alternative imaginaries remain current outside the formal academy, despite the disdain of mainstream scholars. B I O M E T R I C N AT I O N A L I S M Overturning the historiographic importance granted to Risley’s raciology, C. J. Fuller has recently pointed out that in fact it had little impact upon British colo- nial policies.7 In stark contrast to its seemingly stillborn career within the impe- rial administrative apparatus, however, Risleyan raciology had a robust and fulsome life in nationalist circles, which, following Dipesh Chakrabarty, I call its “public life.” Chakrabarty distinguishes between the “public” and the “cloistered” lives of scholarly knowledges.8 While a discipline’s “cloistered” life is restricted to university classrooms, professional associations, academic conferences, and so forth, its “public” lives are much more chaotic and disor- ganized. This distinction is immensely useful for thinking about the history of anthropometry in Bengal. 7 C. J. Fuller, “Anthropologists and Viceroys: Colonial Knowledge and Policy Making, 1870– 1911,” Modern Asian Studies 50, 1 (2016): 1–42. 8 Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 448 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core Anthropometry’s public life in Bengal commenced soon after the publication of Risley’s 1901 Census Report. A young schoolmaster at the famous Hindu School in Calcutta, Ramprasad Chandra, was piqued by Risley’s description of Bengalis as being of Mongolo-Dravidian origin, and he decided to refute Risley by collecting and analyzing his own data. Over the next few years, Chanda, while continuing his day job as a schoolmaster, gathered data and pub- lished anthropometric studies in a Bombay-based journal called East and West. In 1905 he was transferred to the Rajshahi Collegiate School, and he played an important part in the second annual conference of the Bengal Literary Conference (Bangiya Sahitya Parishad) held at Rajshahi in 1909.9 At the meeting Chanda read a paper on the origins of the Bengali people based on his own anthropometric research. The paper struck a chord and the conference passed a resolution to support Chanda to undertake further study and publish a book on the subject. The following year, the Varendra Research Society was established in Rajshahi to further historical research in northern Bengal, and it undertook to support Chanda’s work.10 His monograph The Indo-Aryan Races finally appeared in 1916 and was firmly grounded in anthro- pometric data. In the book Chanda deftly compared his own data with that col- lected by a number of other, mostly British anthropometry researchers, including Risley. Along with Sasadhar Ray, Chanda had measured a number of “living sub- jects belonging to different sections of the Brahman caste” over several months in 1909 and 1910. They were aided in this work by a number of well-placed Bengali friends and acquaintances such as Surya Kumar Guha, the deputy superintendent of police in Rajshahi, and Hem Chanda Ganguly, a professor at the Rajshahi College. In 1910, Director of Public Instruction Mr. H. Sharpe intervened and got the provincial government to relieve Chanda from his teaching duties for three months by putting him on “special duty for ethnological researches.”11 This official backing also enabled Chanda to borrow anthropometric instruments from the Ethnographic Survey of India. His involvement with the Varendra Research Society, on the other hand, earned him the support of a number of local aristocrats who backed its work, most notably the Maharaja of Dinajpur Sir Girijanath Ray, the Maharaja of Kasimbazar Sir Manindra Chanda Nandi, and Kumar Sarat Kumar Ray of Dighapatiya. 9 Ramprasad Chanda, The Indo-Aryan Races (Rajshahi: Varendra Research Society, 1916), ix–x. 10 The Varendra Research Society was an enormously influential and productive scholarly asso- ciation that conducted several archaeological surveys and excavations, besides publishing critical editions of old Sanskrit texts and a number of academic monographs and articles. It also established a museum of local antiquities. See Saifuddin Chowdhury, “Varendra Research Society,” Banglape- dia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh: http://en.banglapedia.org/index.php?title=Varendra_ Research_Society (accessed 21 Jan. 2016). 11 Chanda, Indo-Aryan Races, ix–x. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 449 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core http://en.banglapedia.org/index.php?title=Varendra_Research_Society http://en.banglapedia.org/index.php?title=Varendra_Research_Society https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core With the exception of the three-month relief from teaching and the loan of a few instruments relatively late in the project, governmental involvement in this anthropometric venture was minimal. The project was driven forward by Bengali intellectuals and aristocrats using their own contacts and capital— Chanda’s anthropometric work was clearly a form of public anthropometry. Around the same time as Chanda was undertaking his measurements, the eminent Bengali intellectual Sir Brajendranath Seal was invited to the Univer- sal Races Congress in London. Organized by Gustave Spiller of the Ethical Culture Movement, the Congress brought together anthropologists, sociolo- gists, politicians, lawyers, and students from across the world to discuss race relations between “East” and “West.” Attendees included Sir Syed Ameer Ali, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mancherjee Bhownaggree, Annie Besant, and Margaret Noble (also known as “Sister Nivedita”).12 On 26 July 1911, Seal delivered the keynote address, entitled “The Meaning of Race, Tribe, Nation.” He declared his unabashed faith in raciology as the route through which international conflict could be scientifically resolved. “A scientific study of the constituent elements and the composition of races and peoples,” he iterated, “will alone point the way to a settlement of interracial claims and conflicts on a sound progressive basis, the solution of many an administrative problem in the composite United States and the het- erogeneous British Empire, and even the scope and methods of social legisla- tion in every modern State.”13 In Seal’s hands, then, raciology and anthropometry were no longer merely instruments to further the social ambi- tions of upper-caste Bengalis like Chanda; but were far-reaching means to create a new political settlement for the modern world. Two of the most prominent young Bengalis to take up anthropometry in the following decade, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and Biraja Shankar Guha, were both inspired by Seal. Mahalanobis, doyen of Indian statistics, was close to Seal through their common membership in a reformist faction of the Brahmo Samaj. Originally a physics student at Cambridge (though he left without taking a degree), Mahalanobis taught himself the then-new science of statistics on the ship home when World War I broke out. A chance meeting later with the zoologist Nelson Annandale led Mahalanobis in 1922 to apply his statistical methods to Annandale’s study of the anthropom- etry of Calcutta’s mixed-race population.14 12 “Universal Races Congress” (no author): http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbri- tain/content/universal-races-congress (accessed 21 Jan. 2016). 13 Brajendranath Seal, “Meaning of Race, Tribe, Nation,” in G. Spiller, ed., Papers on Inter- Racial Problems (London: P. S. King & Sons, 1911), 13. 14 Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Profiling the Profiloscope: Facialization of Race Technologies and the Rise of Biometric Nationalism in Inter-War British India,” History and Technology 31, 4 (2015): 376–96; P. C. Mahalanobis, “Anthropological Observations of the Anglo-Indians of Calcutta: Part I—Analysis of Male Stature,” Records of the Indian Museum 23 (1922): 1–96. 450 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/universal-races-congress http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/universal-races-congress http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/universal-races-congress http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/universal-races-congress https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core Mahalanobis rose rapidly in the field and in 1925 he was invited to preside over the Anthropology Section of the Indian Science Congress. Res- urrecting Risley for the Presidential Address, he argued that modern statistical analysis of Risley’s data demonstrated its fundamental accuracy and usabil- ity.15 Mahalanobis published further research papers based exclusively on Risley’s data in 1933, 1934, and 1941.16 He posited that the only “serious objection” to Risley’s work was that there were inconsistencies between his individual figures and his averages. Using advanced statistical tools, Mahala- nobis argued that these errors had only crept in later, during tabulation, and were therefore superficial—Risley’s basic data was singularly free of faults and therefore entirely accurate. Mahalanobis’ defense of Risley in the name of accuracy is reminiscent of more recent attempts by some anthropologists to redeem Samuel Morton’s racialized craniometry after Stephen Jay Gould had held it up as a classic example of nineteenth-century race science. Such defenses, by making the issue one of precision, hide the overtly racialized assumptions behind the mea- surements.17 The problem is not whether someone correctly read the calipers placed on another man’s nose, but rather whether the length of the nose should in the first place be considered a sign of some deeper, inheritable racial difference. Mahalanobis’ defense of Risley’s work influenced a number of others, including D. N. Majumdar, to use Risley’s data as well as to undertake new anthropometric surveys to produce data sets comparable with Risley’s. Majum- dar’s Bengal Anthropometric Survey of 1945, undertaken even as the country and the province were in the midst of severe political turmoil, was instigated and enabled by Mahalanobis’ personal interest in the matter.18 Today, many of those working on genomic studies of human variation in India who cite Risley as an intellectual pioneer work directly within the institutional and intel- lectual legacies left behind by Mahalanobis.19 15 P. C. Mahalanobis, “Analysis of Race-Mixture in Bengal,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 23 (1927): 301–33. 16 P. C. Mahalanobis, “A Revision of Risley’s Anthropometric Data Relating to Tribes and Castes of Bengal,” Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics 1, 1 (1933): 76–105; P. C. Mahalano- bis, “A Revision of Risley’s Anthropometric Data Relating to the Chittagong Hill Tribes,” Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics 1, 2/3 (1934): 267–76; P. C. Mahalanobis and Chameli Bose, “Cor- relation between Anthropometric Characters in some Bengal Castes and Tribes,” Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics 5, 3 (1941): 249–60. 17 On the Morton-Gould controversy and its problems, see Michael Weisberg, “Remeasuring Man,” Development and Evolution 16, 3 (2014): 166–78. 18 D. N. Majumdar, “Bengal Anthropometric Survey, 1945: A Statistical Study,” Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics 19, 3/4 (1958): 201–408. 19 Partha P. Majumder, “People of India: Biological Diversity and Affinities,” in D. Balasubramanian and N. Appaji Rao, eds., The Indian Human Heritage (Hyderabad: United Press, 1998), 45–59. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 451 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core Mahalanobis acknowledged his debt to Seal in taking up anthropometry,20 and Seal’s influence on B. S. Guha was no less significant. Unlike Mahalano- bis, who had no formal training in anthropometry or anthropology, Guha became the first South Asian to earn a Ph.D. in Anthropology, from Harvard University in 1924.21 His application for admission to Harvard’s graduate program mentioned Seal as one of the two “principal teachers” who had taught him at the Calcutta University as an undergraduate.22 Guha wrote his Ph.D. thesis on “The Racial Basis of the Caste System in India.” Upon his return to India he initially joined the Zoological Survey of India before founding the Indian Anthropological Institute at Calcutta in 1936. In 1938, he presided over the anthropology sections of both the Indian Science Congress and the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Calcutta. That same year he acted as vice-president of the Physical Anthropology and Racial Biology Section of the International Congress of Anthropology in Copenhagen. Finally, just before the end of colonial rule in 1946, he convinced the government to create a separate Anthropological Survey of India along the lines of older governmental surveys such as the Trig- onometric Survey, the Archaeological Survey, and the Zoological Survey.23 Mahalanobis, on the other hand, had gradually established a very different institutional base. Initially, while a teacher at the Presidency College in Calcutta, he set up a Statistical Laboratory within the College to pursue small, ad hoc projects that the government occasionally gave him. Later, in the early 1930s, along with two colleagues from the College, he established the Indian Statistical Institute. Though officially registered in 1932, the Institute remained physically based at the Presidency College until 1953, when it acquired its own campus.24 It is one of those delicious historical ironies that while the British imperial state of Risley’s era had been reluctant to give a stable departmental home to Risleyan anthropometry, the almost-postcolonial state of the 1940s seemed far more sympathetic to Risleyan raciology. Today, both the Anthropological Survey of India and the Indian Statistical Institute are actively involved in con- ducting genomic surveys of the Indian population, and both are part of the Indian Genome Variation Consortium (IGVC).25 Partha Pratim Majumder, who represented the Indian Statistical Institute in the Consortium, was both a student and a professor at the Indian Statistical Institute. In a 1998 article 20 Mahalanobis, “Analysis of Race-Mixture,” 324. 21 D. P. Sinha and Carleton S. Coon, “Biraja Sankar Guha, 1894–1961,” American Anthropol- ogist 65, 2 (1963): 382–87. 22 B. S. Guha, “Application for Admission to Candidacy in a Degree,” Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University Archives, UAV 161.201.10, box 42. 23 Sinha and Coon, “Biraja Sankar Guha.” 24 C. Radhakrishna Rao, “Mahalanobis Era in Statistics,” Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics, Series B (1961–2002) 35 (1973): 12–26. 25 Indian Genome Variation Database Portal: www.igvdb.res.in (accessed 12 July 2016). 452 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core http://www.igvdb.res.in https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core explaining the basis of the genetic work, he acknowledged Risley as the earliest exponent of anthropometry in South Asia. While Majumder argued that, after the 1950s, the earlier typological agenda of anthropometry had given way to greater emphasis on the quantification of variation, he himself continued to use measurements that recalled Risleyan anthropometry, including the hal- lowed nasal index.26 Majumder’s comments echo a public perception that scientific raciology had disappeared after World War II, but historians have increasingly disproved this. There were some crucial changes to raciology, but the continuities remained strong. Preeminently, a highly somaticized idea of inheritable group- based human difference survived, though it now serves distinctly neoliberal political and economic rationales.27 This continuity is not peculiar to India. A growing number of scholars have pointed out that, despite some important changes, throughout the world the new, postwar raciology retained significant continuities with the prewar forms. New disciplines, like population genetics, replaced older ones like physical anthropology,28 and an essence-based idea of “race” was replaced by a frequency-based notion of “population.”29 New forms of measurements, such as blood group frequencies, supplemented older nasal indices.30 Nonetheless, through all of this change a fundamental idea of inheritable, group-based, somatic difference was retained. Warwick Anderson observes that racial thinking has likewise retained a powerful pres- ence in the mundane everydayness of contemporary medical school curricula.31 Similar shifts and continuities have been documented in the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, and many other parts of the world.32 26 Majumder, “People of India.” 27 El-Haj, “Genetic Reinscription.” 28 Veronika Lipphardt, “Geographical Distribution Patterns of Various Genes: Genetic Studies of Human Variation after 1945,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomed- ical Sciences 47 (2001): 50–61. 29 Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Prince- ton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 65. 30 For blood groups in India, see Projit Bihari Mukharji, “From Serosocial to Sanguinary Iden- tities: Caste, Transnational Race Science and the Shifting Metonymies of Blood Group B, India c. 1918–1960,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 51, 2 (2014): 146–73. For a more global account of blood groups, see Jenny Bangham, “Blood Groups and Human Groups: Collecting and Calibrating Genetic Data after World War Two,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biolog- ical and Biomedical Sciences 47 (2014): 74–86. 31 Warwick Anderson, “Teaching ‘Race’ at Medical School: Social Scientists on the Margin,” Social Studies of Science 38, 5 (2008): 785–800. 32 See Emma Kowal, “Orphan DNA: Indigenous Samples, Ethical Biovalue and Postcolonial Science,” Social Studies of Science 43, 4 (2013): 577–97; Snait B Gissis, “When Is ‘Race’ a Race? 1946–2003,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 39, 4 (2008): 437–50; Soraya de Chadarevian, “Chromosome Surveys of Human Populations: Between Epidemiology and Anthropology,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 47 (2014): 87–96. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 453 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core One conspicuous aspect of the new, mid-twentieth century raciology was the vastly expanded set of biomarkers to be counted. Superficial features like height, nasal length, eye color, and the like were now supplemented by bio- markers invisible to the naked eye such as blood groups, cell enzymes, and genes. Anthropometry thus gradually evolved into biometry, while “biometric nationalism” emerged as a much more politically plastic assemblage of an ever- expanding repertoire of raciological techniques and varied forms of nationalism.33 Upper-Caste Aryanism A small but enormously influential book, Bangalir Nritattwik Porichoy [The anthropological identity of Bengalis], was published in 1942. It was a momen- tous year in South Asia. In August, M. K. Gandhi had asked the British to “quit India” and launched one of the largest mass movements against colonial rule. In response, the British had imprisoned most of the Congress leadership. The Muslim League, which claimed to represent Muslim interests in British India, and the Hindu Mahasabha, which claimed to speak for Hindus, were both opposed to the “Quit India” movement. It was in this fevered political climate and amidst the clash of rival nationalist visions that the Hindu Maha- sabha published Bangalir Nritattwik Porichoy that October. The very fact that the Hindu Mahasabha would undertake to publish a work on biometrics in the febrile political climate, just as the debate over the possible partition of India and Bengal was reaching a climax, is enough to testify to the emotional and political charge that biometrics had taken on in the public life of the nation. The little book’s author was Atul Krishna Sur, and he dedicated it to two of his teachers, Haranchandra Chakladar and B. S. Guha. Sur had graduated in ancient Indian history and anthropology before obtaining a Ph.D. in Econom- ics. He taught at the Calcutta University and worked simultaneously on the edi- torial staff of a leading Bengali newspaper. He wrote more than one hundred and fifty books in his lifetime, many of them about the racial history and iden- tity of Bengalis.34 His 1942 publication remained one of his most popular works and was even translated into Hindi in the 1970s. Most significantly for us, Sur’s book reopened the public life of biometrics at a time when Maha- lanobis and Guha were striving to carve out new cloistered spaces for it. Sur positioned himself within the tradition of Ramprasad Chanda and Biraja Sankar Guha. He avoided any mention of Mahalanobis and was blunt about the unreliability of Risley’s data: “It must be said that the people Sir Herbert Risley had employed in anthropometric work had absolutely no scien- tific training in anthropometry. He simply trained them in how to take measure- ments and sent them into the field with the important task of anthropometric 33 Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Profiling the Profiloscope.” 34 Atul Sur, Bangla O Bangalir Bibartan (Calcutta: Sahityalok, n.d.), “Lekhak Parichiti.” 454 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core work on their shoulders. There are therefore enough grounds to be suspicious about the scientific accuracy of the data produced by them.”35 Interestingly, Sur did not seem to mind that Chanda, too, was bereft of any specialized training in anthropometry or anthropology. Be that as it may, in Sur we find crystallizing a position that drew upon Chanda and Guha and was clearly opposed to Maha- lanobis’ attempts to rehabilitate Risley’s work. Like Chanda before him, Sur was opposed not to Risley’s raciology as such, but rather to the conclusions he had arrived at. More specifically, both men contested the designation of upper-caste Bengalis as non-Aryans and sought to prove that they were in fact true Aryans. Sur wrote, Practically all the upper castes in Bengal possess the characteristic of having broad fore- heads … we know how Risley had been confused by noticing the broad foreheads of the Bengali upper castes. We know that the Bengali upper castes inherited their broad fore- heads from the Alpine race. We feel that these Alpine people must have traveled either from Asia Minor or Baluchistan along the coast of the western seas … it was these Alpine people who were the ancestors of upper caste Bengalis…. Though these Alpine people spoke the Aryan tongue, their language had some differences from the language of the Nordic group of Vedic Aryans who had settled in the Punjab.36 The biometric divergence of the Bengali upper castes from the people of the Punjab, which the latter had since Risley’s time been seen as the closest to the ancient Aryans, was thus explained by positing two distinctive but equally Aryan founding populations, one Nordic and the other Alpine. They had bifur- cated at some point before entering South Asia, but were both equally Aryan. The Homo Alpinus was first proposed by the French raciologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge, but Chanda picked it up through the writings of T. A. Joyce.37 Like Sur, Chanda had denied any direct relationship between Bengali upper castes and north Indian upper castes.38 Yet, this did not mean that the Bengali upper castes were autochthons; they were merely descended from a separate branch of the Aryan family tree, namely, the Homo Alpinus. Interestingly, Chanda had also openly challenged the racial distinctiveness of Brahmins in Bengal by describing their likeness to the two other elite Bengali castes: Bengali Kayasthas and Baidyas.39 Bengali upper-caste Aryan- ism, therefore, had certain specific contours. It emphasized the similarities within elite Bengali castes, while distancing them from north Indian upper castes. Instead, they were often posited to have similarities with Marathi and Kannada upper castes, which were also thought to have descended from Homo Alpinus. These upper castes were plainly distinguished from the lower castes of these regions. 35 Atul Sur, Bangalir Nritattwik Parichay (Calcutta: Jignasa, 1977), 10. 36 Ibid., 38. 37 Chanda, Indo-Aryan Races, 73. 38 Ibid., 44. 39 Ibid., 180. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 455 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core Unlike Chanda and Sur, who wrote for a more public audience and had limited disciplinary training in anthropology, Guha worked squarely within the “cloistered” world of academic anthropology. Predictably, he differed on many points from Chanda and Sur, yet one point he shared with them was in regards to upper-caste Aryanism. Brahmins, “more than any other caste,” he argued, “have preserved their original physical characteristics.”40 Writing of Bengal, Guha is once again clear that the upper castes, particularly the Brah- mins, are obviously distinct from the rest of the population. Their noses, alleg- edly, are the sharpest in all of South Asia outside of the Punjab.41 However, like Chanda and Sur, Guha had to concede that the upper castes of Bihar and the United Provinces still differed from the Bengali upper castes amongst whom, despite their sharp noses, a different head-type (viz. brachycephalic) predomi- nated.42 Despite avoiding the term Homo Alpinus, Guha’s framework was similar to that used by Chanda and Sur. For him, too, there was an obvious and visible divergence between Bengali upper castes and lower castes, and the former were patently Aryan. Still, they were not identical with north Indian upper castes. What Guha added to Chanda and Sur was an argument about ethno-geographic variations within the Bengal region. All this served to undermine the racial, and therefore national homogeneity of the region, and instead it emphasized the distinctiveness and social prestige of the upper castes. Guha’s absolute faith in the racial separation of upper and lower castes was expressed in the most unambiguous terms when he mocked J. C. Nesfield, who had proposed a non-racial theory of caste: “Mr Nesfield’s power of obser- vation can be best judged from the fact that according to him ‘no observer could now distinguish members of the higher castes (in India) from the scavengers who sweep the roads.’”43 For Guha, the racial divide between upper and lower castes was obvious and anyone who failed to see it was a poor observer. Upper-caste Aryanism also impelled its most trenchant promoters to be singularly critical of Risley. Though they worked within the same anthropomet- ric tradition, much of their work was devoted to refuting Risley since he had denied the existence of any Aryan element in Bengal. Guha wrote, for instance, that Risley’s material had “doubtful comparative value.”44 Aside from such frontal attacks on Risley’s data, Guha throughout his thesis snipped at Risley’s Indian subordinates as a way of undermining that data. Regarding Risley’s Kashmir data, Guha faulted him for depending on a “Mohamedan” called Alauddin, which led to the “proud” Kashmiri Brahmins being left out 40 Biraja Sankar Guha, “The Racial Basis of the Caste System of India,” PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1924, 45. 41 Ibid., 121. 42 Ibid., 121. 43 Ibid., 103. 44 Ibid., 234. 456 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core of the data set. Concerning the United Provinces, Risley was criticized for having relied on one Chandi Singh, whose “scholastic attainments,” Guha felt, were of an “extremely dubious character.”45 Later, Sur repeated this line of attack: “It must be said that the employees of the Ethnography Department that Sir Herbert Risley deployed to make the anthropometric measurements lacked any specialized training in anthropology.… As a result there are enough grounds to be doubtful of the scientific value of the measurements they took.”46 Such denunciations of Risley ran completely counter to the tradi- tion inaugurated by Mahalanobis, wherein he argued, “The real defect in Risley’s data creeped [sic] in during the calculation of average values, and … his primary data of individual measurements can be used with safety….”47 Tony Ballantyne has argued that while British Orientalist scholarship and particularly its Aryanism were crucial to the constitution of modern Hindu nationalism, there were significant variations in how different Hindu national- ists deployed Aryanism: “For some it was a vehicle for stressing kinship with the British rulers and praising the gifts of the Raj, for others it was an inclusive term which was to underpin their vision of Indian nationalism, and for others still it was a tool to inscribe rigid lines between communities, to offer a narrow and particularizing definition of their racial and religious identity.”48 These are fascinating insights, but one nuance of Hindu Aryanism that has escaped attention is how it split the category “Aryan” itself into different types—Nordic, Alpine, and so forth. Such distinctions were particularly useful in Bengal, where the relation- ship between the “Indian” and the “Bengali” identities remained ill-defined and ambiguous throughout the better part of the anticolonial struggle. On one hand, Bengali intellectuals played an important part in developing Indian and Hindu nationalism underwritten by Aryanism. On the other, many of these same intellectuals were proud of their distinctive Bengali identity and dis- tinguished it from the larger, and especially north Indian, Hindustani identity. The Nordic and the Alpine Aryanisms allowed this ambiguity to be sustained at the racial level. Notwithstanding such inflexions, what is inescapable about the Aryanism that colored the biometric discourse of twentieth-century Bengali intellectuals is its evident links with a racialized Hindu upper-caste identity. Chanda, Guha, and Sur all agreed that the fundamental basis of caste was racial and that upper castes were one type of Aryan or the other. By contrast, Mahalanobis, following Seal, held that races were mutable and therefore shaped by their location. 45 Ibid., 85, 103. 46 Sur, Bangalir Nritattwik Parichay, 10. 47 Mahalanobis, “Revision of Risley’s Anthropometric Data,” 104. 48 Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2002), 169. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 457 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core Hence different castes in the same region resembled each other rather than geo- graphically distant caste-mates.49 A E S T H E T I C N O N - A R YA N I S M Upper-caste Aryanism may have been rampant in the Bengali biometric dis- course, but it did not go unchallenged in public life. Mahalanobis’ effort to dis- place this casted Aryanism with his own, distinctly regionalist biometric nationalism was not alone in rejecting it. A more fulsome challenge was mounted by those who wholly ignored the claims of biometricians to determine the racial identity of the Bengalis. These intellectuals sought the basis of racial identity in cultural practices rather than in the biological body. For them, racial identity was engendered in an archive of cultural practices, and particularly in craft objects, rather than in body morphology. This culture-centric and strangely “asomatic” notion of race first began to emerge in the work of Gurusaday Dutt (1882–1941). Born in Sylhet, Dutt was a brilliant student who placed first in the First Arts Examinations before traveling to England in order to enter the Indian Civil Service. There he ranked first in the highly competitive Civil Service entrance exams, and also qualified as a barris- ter. Upon his return to India, Dutt served with distinction as a civil servant for many years. In the late 1920s he became involved with folk arts. During his fourth visit to Britain, in 1929, he attended the All-England Folk Dance Festi- val at the Royal Albert Hall. Asok Mitra, in posthumously editing one of Dutt’s major works on folk dances of Bengal, wrote, “The Festival became the histo- rian of his memories. The festivals of his village, the toys, pictures and objects of art, the dances, all flashed across his mind, and gave him the inward look.”50 Returning again to India, Dutt set about establishing a number of organi- zations for the revival, study, and appreciation of Bengal’s (and to some extent India’s) folk heritage, one of the first being The Rural Preservation Society of Bengal, established in 1931. Subsequently he tried to align preservation work with a youth movement called the Bratachari Movement.51 Many later Bengali stalwarts, including Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first president of independent Bangladesh, were involved with this movement in their youth and embraced its message of physical culture and earthy Bengali nationalism built on an appre- ciation of Bengali folk heritage. Besides his organizational work, Dutt was an avid collector of folk arts and his collections and exhibitions introduced many of Bengal’s intellectual elites to the regions’ rural heritage. In a little over a decade, between his return from his 1929 London trip and his death, he 49 Mahalanobis, “Analysis of Race Mixture,” 311. 50 Asok Mitra, “Preface,” in Gurusaday Dutt, The Folk Dances of Bengal (Calcutta: Birendrasa- day Dutt, 1941), vi–vii. 51 For a recent history of the Bratachari Movement, see Sayantani Adhikary, “The Bratachari Movement and the Invention of a ‘Folk Tradition,’” South Asia 38, 4 (2015): 656–70. 458 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core collected over two and half thousand “folk” art objects, ranging from textiles to woodwork, paintings, metalwork, pottery, jewelry, and much else. Eventually he established a museum to house his collection.52 Like the exponents of upper-caste Aryanism, Dutt believed in a funda- mental divide within Indian and/or Hindu-Bengali culture. They all agreed that the religion and culture of the upper castes were significantly different from the religion and culture of the lower castes. The upper strata they repeat- edly identified with a prehistoric “Aryan” heritage, while the lower strata were of non-Aryan vintage. Where Dutt differed was in his valuation of upper-caste Aryanism—while those writing within Chanda’s biometric tradition valorized what they saw to be an upper-caste Aryan culture uniting the Bengali upper castes with other pan-Indian upper castes, Dutt valued more the rustic, lower-caste-based, and, according to him, “non-Aryan” culture and religion. Expressing his historical views, he wrote: The form of Hinduism practiced by Bengal’s popular/national race (Banglar ganajati) has always been quite distinct from the religion of the Brahmins. The habitually irre- pressibly independent soul of the Bengalis could not slavishly follow the scriptural injunctions.… That despite the oppression by the Brahmins and [Brahminic] society, these national devotees, saints, and artists did not surrender their national mentality and aesthetic, is a glowing testament to the irrepressible love for freedom in our national race.53 I call this position an “aesthetic non-Aryanism.” At a time when Aryanism was highly valued amongst Indian intellectuals and nationalists, and particularly Hindu nationalists, Dutt and those he influ- enced asserted a strident and confident non-Aryanism grounded in an appreci- ation of folk arts.54 The basis of this non-Aryanism was the aesthetic value ascribed to folk arts and crafts. This aesthetic non-Aryanism was distinct from the Dravidianism that developed in Tamil-speaking regions.55 The propo- nents of aesthetic non-Aryanism were seldom themselves from lower castes and they did not putatively attack Brahmins. Instead, they sought to argue that Bengali culture was heavily indebted to non-Aryan contributions and that these contributions were clearest in the rustic religious life of the lower- caste Bengali peasantry. But Bengali aesthetic non-Aryanism’s most prominent divergence from Dravidianism was its dependence on the study and apprecia- tion of folk arts and artifacts. In 1932, Dutt organized an exhibition in Calcutta to which he invited some of the most important intellectuals of the day. Those who attended and, accord- ing to Dutt, were transformed by what they saw, included the famous painter 52 Gurusaday Dutt, Banglar Lokshilpa O Loknritya (Calcutta: Chhatim Books, 2000). 53 Ibid., 8–9. 54 Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 169–87. 55 Thomas R. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: Conversations in Colonial South India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 186–211. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 459 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core and folk art enthusiast Abanindranath Tagore, historian Dineshchandra Sen, linguist Sunitikumar Chatterji, and the editor of the influential Modern Review, Ramananda Chatterji.56 Young men who were in the Bratachari Movement in their youth recall Dutt’s enthusiasm about Dineshchandra Sen’s book Brihat Banga [Great Bengal]. Dipesh Chakrabarty has described how, by the time it was published in the 1930s, Sen had lost his once-preeminent position as an academic histo- rian. Dismissed by a later generation of “scientific” historians as a hopeless romantic, Sen sought to delve into what Chakrabarty calls a “romantic archive.”57 This was an archive of, not the textual documents, archaeological objects, and coins that the “scientific historians” held so dear, but rather the everyday rusticity that Sen sought out. This archive, which Sen lovingly mined, included a vast array of folk arts including paintings, story-scrolls (pot), pottery, embroidered quilts (nakshi kantha), and dolls. In the lengthy introduction to Brihat Banga, Sen expressed his debt to Dutt; not only had he gained his knowledge of folk dances through conversa- tions with Dutt, but he also asserted that it was Dutt who had elevated the status of Bengali folk arts in general. “Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, and Jamini Roy were undoubted pioneers in the field, but they were busy with their paintbrushes. It was left to Mr. Gurusaday Dutt, through his researches and lecturing at various places about Bengal’s authentic artistic heritage, to reveal the origins of Bengal’s living artistic traditions.”58 To be fair, Sen did not really subscribe to the strong non-Aryanism of Dutt. He argued that one could find the last remnants of the true Aryan culture in Bengali villages,59 yet Sen agreed with Dutt that it was among the lowest strata of Bengali Hindu society that the truly authentic ingredients of Bengali culture were to be found.60 Abanindranath Tagore was more forthright in his non-Aryanism. As Sen pointed out, Abanindranath, alongside contemporary artists like Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy, had already undertaken an artistic movement inspired by rustic folk arts. Eschewing the refined high-cultural styles, they sought to reinvent a new Bengali artistic tradition based upon the simplicity of folk art. But Abanin- dranath was not satisfied to remain “busy with his paintbrush,” and he soon undertook the formal collection and study of two specific genres of Bengali folk arts: ritual floor illustrations called alpona, and the ritual art and rhymes that were performed during a form of pious observances called bratas. Both 56 Dutt, Banglar Lokshilpa, 3. 57 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Romantic Archive: Literature and the Politics of Identity in Bengal,” Critical Inquiry 30, 3 (2004): 654–82. 58 Dineshchandra Sen, Brihat Banga: Suprachin Kal Haite Palashir Juddha (Calcutta: Calcutta University, 1935), ii.vi. 59 Ibid., xiii. 60 Ibid., ii.viii. 460 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core forms were usually practiced by women of the household and, though religious in nature, neither involved the participation of Brahmin priests. Abanindranath expressed the same aesthetic non-Aryanism we see in Dutt: On one hand, we have the immigrant Aryans with their religious festivals, on the other, we have the resident non-Aryans with the bratas; the first group lived in the pious her- mitages in forests, the latter lived in their riparian motherland tucked away in nonde- script villages; in the midst of these two was the Hindu nation.… The history of the Vedas, the Puranas, and what is older than all that, namely these bratas, testifies to one thing—on two sides were two mammoth races and their life stories, in their midst was a group [of common people] and its dreams.61 Although Abanindranath seems less confrontational than Dutt, his basic argu- ment and moral valuation are very similar. Both men hold that both Aryans and non-Aryans have contributed to the creation of a Bengali Hindu culture, and that what is truly or authentically Bengali comes from the non-Aryan side. It is this pride in the non-Aryan heritage and its location in art and aesthetics that marks out both authors. This swirling, aesthetic non-Aryanism received its full-blown form in the Africanism of Sunitikumar Chatterji. Today, Chatterji is remembered largely as a historical linguist who wrote extensively on Bengali and other vernacular lan- guages. Yet he also had an enduring love for folk art, which he wrote had arisen in 1919 when he attended an exhibition of African and particularly Congolese art in London. This love of folk African art also instigated for Chatterji a lasting love for Africa itself. In 1960, only four years after Ray proposed his theory of the Bengali Pharaoh, Chatterji published a book titled Africanism. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, then vice-president of India and soon to be its president, stated in a foreword to Chatterji’s treatise that Africanism drew “attention to the past achievements and future possibilities of the African peoples, the black ones.”62 Chatterji was a resolute humanist who believed in the unity of all humankind, but he emphasized that no such unity could be complete without a recognition of Africa’s contribution to it.63 He also mentioned that Black Africans had settled in India in prehistoric times, before being “absorbed or exterminated” by races that came after them (except in places like the Anda- mans and some places in southern India where they survived independently). Irrespective of the fate of these early African settlers, Chatterji said, “It is believed that some of their religious notions and practices maybe found as a substratum in the cults and religious ideas of the subsequent peoples who estab- lished themselves in India….”64 61 Abanindranath Tagore, Banglar Brata (Calcutta: Biswabharati, 1995 [1943]), 8–9. 62 Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, “Foreword,” in Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Africanism: The African Personality (Calcutta: Bengali Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1960), v. 63 Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Africanism: The African Personality (Calcutta: Bengali Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1960), viii. 64 Ibid., 3. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 461 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core Chatterji’s Africanism echoed certain pan-Africanist trends that sought the origin of African and world civilizations in ancient Egypt. Senegalese pan- Africanist Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986) began popularizing both the African origins of “civilization” and the centrality of ancient Egypt to African history. His doctoral thesis on the Egyptian origins of African civiliza- tions was rejected by the French academy, but was nonetheless published first in French (1955) and later in English (1974).65 While we do not know if Chat- terji was directly exposed to Diop’s ideas, he would certainly have been aware of the larger pan-Africanist movements. London was a hotbed of pan-Africanism, especially in the 1920s. That is where the Trinidadian barrister Sylvester Williams first met West African stu- dents and began to conceptualize pan-Africanism, and in 1900 he organized the very first Pan-African Conference there. In 1919 and 1921, W.E.B. Du Bois’ Pan-African Congresses convened their sessions in London.66 More- over, pan-Africanists based in London, such as George Padmore, were keenly aware of and sympathetic to anti-colonial struggles in British India.67 When Chatterji visited the exhibition on Congolese art in London in the 1920s, then, chances are that he encountered an event with strong pan-Africanist resonances. Chatterji was not alone in India in turning toward Africa at the time. Soon after independence, leading Indian universities introduced programs in African Studies. In 1955, less than a decade after independence, the newly established Jadavpur University in Calcutta was already offering courses on Africa and pan-Africanism in its International Relations program. That same year, Prime Minister Nehru inaugurated a separate African Studies department at the Delhi University with a mandate to promoting greater awareness of Africa. By 1964, some of the new department’s faculty had already developed close ties with colleagues in Ghanaian Universities.68 Aesthetic non-Aryanism was over-determined by these diverse intellec- tual and political currents. It emerged in the 1920s and continued to grow through the 1950s and into the 1960s. It created in its wake not only a broader context for the emergence of our Bengali Pharaoh, but also a political and aesthetic challenge to the rising authority of biometric nationalism and upper-caste Aryanism. As art historian Partha Mitter has rightly written, “The new “ruralism” [evinced by the works of Dutt, Abanindranath, and others] was the particularly Indian expression of the global response to modernity—the romantic longing 65 Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787 (London: Routledge, 2003): 40–43. 66 Angsu Datta, Utthita Africa (Calcutta: Anandadhara Prakashan, 1967), 127–42. 67 Leslie James, George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 55, 84, 90, 98, 109. 68 Datta, Utthita Africa, Bhumika [Preface]. 462 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core of a complex society for the simplicity of premodern existence.”69 There is little doubt that the new appreciation of folk art that emerged in the 1920s in Bengal was, however loosely, connected with the cult of primitivism that was develop- ing among such avant-garde artists abroad as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Amedeo Modigliani. But in India it was much more; its political potential was not limited to a rejection of technocratic modernity—it was also an attempt to resist the somaticization of national identity, and its attendant upper-caste Aryanism, while building stronger global ties with black Africa. Folkloristics One of the key sources for aesthetic non-Aryanism was folkloristics. The emer- gence of folkloristics in colonial South Asia dated from the second half of the nineteenth century and was intimately tied to a general emergence of ethnogra- phy during that period. As David Ludden points out, after the 1857 rebellion British attempts to “know” India emphasized ethnography rather than the study of classical texts.70 This, Karuna Mantena observes, coincided with a new phase of liberalism inaugurated by Sir Henry Maine. Maine, Mantena argues, “invented” the notion of a “traditional society,” which in order to be administered had to be studied ethnographically.71 This new administrative interest in ethnography produced a rich archive made up of gazetteers and set- tlement reports, and quasi-official journals and monographs authored by colo- nial civil servants. Folklore and ethnography are difficult to parse apart in this archive. Many of the district gazetteers, for instance, contain both folklore and ethnographic details,72 as do the monographs authored by civil servants such as William Crooke or L.S.S. O’Malley. Not until the emergence of figures like Radcliffe- Brown and Malinowski in the interwar period were folklore and ethnography definitively separated. By then, a new domain of the “folk” had long been in public view, distinct from the “classical,” the “modern,” and the “urban.” Bengali and indeed South Asian elites generally had begun developing an interest in this “folk” domain in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Sadhana Naithani has recently described Ram Gharib Chaube’s contribution to Crooke’s folklore collections, while Gautam Bhadra has drawn attention to Haraprasad Shastri’s redeployment of the Asiatic Society’s Sanskrit 69 Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism in India: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 33. 70 David Ludden, “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge,” in Carol Appadurai Breckenridge, ed., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: Univer- sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 250–78. 71 Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Prince- ton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 155. 72 For the history of gazetteers, see Projit Bihari Mukharji, “In-Disciplining Jwarasur: The Folk/ Classical Divide and the Transmateriality of Fevers in Colonial Bengal,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 50, 3 (2013): 261–88. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 463 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core manuscript collection projects toward the acquisition of Bengali folk mate- rial.73 This new thirst for the “folk” was further encouraged by the emergence of a Bengali literary romanticism that reconstituted “the Bengali village” as a “transcendent idyll.”74 The romance of the simple, rustic village drew suste- nance from the growing angst of an urban lower-middle-class population.75 Simultaneously, the advent of new material technologies engendered new pos- sibilities for accessing the “folk.” For instance, pioneering folktale collector Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar used the then-novel phonograph to collect the folktales he published.76 All of these diverse energies were consolidated with the founding of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad [the Bengali Literary Asso- ciation] in 1906, which gave institutional encouragement to ethnographic studies.77 By the 1920s these trends were taking on a concrete disciplinary form. When the University of Calcutta opened a Department of Anthropology in 1921, Saratchandra Mitra (1863–1938), a folklorist with no formal training, was appointed its first professor.78 In that same year another autodidact, Sar- atchandra Roy (1871–1942), founded Man in India, which would become the leading Indian anthropological journal.79 Both Mitra and Roy published extensively and never directly disputed the utility of biometrics. But biometrics were either entirely absent from their published studies or pushed to the margins. Unlike the next generation of anthropologists, such as B. S. Guha, folklore and folkways, not biometrics, remained central to the works of Mitra and Roy. Traumatized by the Nazi embrace of romanticism, leftist intellectuals have been overly hasty in lumping any interest in the “folk” and romanticism into a 73 Sadhana Naithani, The Story-Time of the British Empire: Colonial and Postcolonial Folklor- istics (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010); Gautam Bhadra, Nyara Bot-tolaye Jaye Ko Bar? (Calcutta: Chhatim, 2011). 74 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Peter J. Klaus and Frank J. Korom, Folkloristics and Indian Folklore (Udupi: Mahatma Gandhi Memorial College, 1991), 60–63. 75 Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). 76 Chandak Sengoopta, The Rays before Satyajit: Creativity and Modernity in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), 220, 245. 77 MN Srinivas, Collected Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). 78 There is some discrepancy in the literature regarding who was the first professor of anthropol- ogy in Calcutta. Srinivas for instance, suggests that it was K. P. Chattopadhyay. MN Srinivas and MN Panini, “The Development of Sociology and Social Anthropology in India”, Sociological Bul- letin 22, 2 (1973): 179–215. I have followed Sankar Sen Gupta in accepting S. C. Mitra as the first. Sen Gupta does, however, say that, owing to persistent ill health, Mitra’s impact on the department was small. Sankar Sen Gupta, Folklorists of Bengal: Life Sketches and Biographical Notes (Cal- cutta: Indian Publications, 1965), 54, and see 53–88. 79 Sangeeta Dasgupta, “Recasting the Oraons and the ‘Tribe’: Saratchandra Roy’s Anthropol- ogy,” in Patricia Uberoi, Nandini Sundar, and Satish Deshpande, eds., Anthropology in the East: Founders of Indian Sociology and Anthropology (Calcutta: Seagull, 2007), 132–71. 464 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core fascist, or at least nationalist assemblage.80 Yet, beyond Europe, folkloristics has been tied up with a variety of political programs, including leftist, radical ones. For example, Neilesh Bose recently explored aspects of the complex interplay between folklore, leftist politics, and regional identity in late colonial Bengal, while Peter J. Klaus and Frank Korom pointed out that folkloristics is fundamentally an “international and comparative” discipline.81 “Evolutionism” and “diffusionism” were two key axes along which the “international and comparative” dimension of folkloristics was expressed up until the 1930s. “Evolutionism,” as Klaus and Korom clarified, did not com- mence with Darwin and was far from homogenous. What all the varieties of evolutionism did share was a tendency to “account for differences between cul- tures by encouraging one to see one’s own culture as superior to others. It account[ed] for the difference observed to exist between cultures in terms of the advanced state of one’s own culture. Other cultures [were] seen as earlier, primitive stages of one’s own more advanced culture.”82 This stagist view of cultural difference encouraged comparisons between multiple cultures and their arrangement into hierarchies. Evolutionist thinking did not simply create hierarchies between the colonized and the colonizer; as the colonized urban elite gradually came to produce their own ethnographies, they created hierarchies that set themselves off from various subaltern groups. Despite evo- lutionism’s general decline, it has continued to thrive in Indian folkloristics departments, producing and sustaining these elite-subaltern cultural orders.83 Alongside evolutionism, diffusionism emerged as another powerful tool of comparison. It saw cultural traits as originating in one area and then being diffused or disseminated through the world. Though diffusionism was already on the retreat by the mid-1920s, its chief promoters W.H.R. Rivers, Grafton Elliot Smith, and Will Perry made much of the archaeological discov- ery of the Indus Valley Civilization.84 As Stuart Blackburn observes, the Aryan thesis propounded by evolutionists such as Max Müller had already provided a shared linguistic and racial history that could potentially connect Europe and Asia, and “diffusion theory added the mechanics of literary borrowing” to this mix.85 Yet, as Henrika Kuklick has shown, in British anthropology diffu- sionism attracted few adherents even at the height of its popularity around the time of World War I. Moreover, the two most prominent components of British 80 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 37. 81 Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014); Klaus and Korom, Folkloristics, 12. 82 Ibid., 49. 83 Ibid., 66–68. 84 David Paul Crook, Grafton Elliot Smith, Egyptology and the Diffusion of Culture: A Bio- graphical Perspective (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), 79. 85 Stuart H. Blackburn, Print, Folklore, and Nationalism in Colonial South India (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2006), 186. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 465 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core diffusionism consisted of an interest in the psychological influence of social forms on the individual, and a quite distinctive, normative political theory.86 Neither translated effectively to South Asian writers. For them, diffusionism was mainly of a method for working out racial and cultural histories. Early folk- lorists and anthropologists like Mitra and Roy repeatedly tried to trace the dif- fusion of particular cultural traits as a form of cultural history.87 Notwithstanding such differences, one can hardly miss the similarities between the ideas of early Bengali anthropologists and the Perry-Elliot Smith thesis that all civilization originated in Egypt and was taken from there to the rest of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.88 Bengali Egyptomania One of the most pervasive yet curiously neglected templates for imagining Bengal’s cultural pasts was provided by the widespread popularity of writings about ancient Egypt, which spanned both formal academic and popular genres. In colonial Bengal one encountered the grandeur of ancient Egypt everywhere, from schoolbook history to the theatre. To grapple with the story of the Bengali Pharaoh that I will present in the next section, we must take account of this Bengali Egyptomania. Egyptology in Europe is usually thought to date from around the 1820s. Recent scholars such as Elliott Colla have pointed out that “ancient Egypt and its material culture have meant many things to many people.”89 From Neo- platonists and Rosicrucians to modern Egyptian nationalists and Jews, people the world over have deployed Egyptology to their own distinctive ends. There have thus been not one but many Egyptologies,90 and that in colonial Bengal developed its own, characteristic tone. The first Bengali book on modern Egyptology appeared within a decade of the emergence of formal Egyptology in the West. Modern Egyptology’s beginning is usually dated from Jean-Francois Champollion’s 1822 decipher- ment of the ancient Egyptian script. Barely eight years later, the Calcutta School Book Society printed Prachin Itihas Samuccaya. Written by James Princep and translated largely by Rev. J. D. Pearson of Chinsurah, this book 86 Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: A Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 124. 87 See for instance, Sarat Chandra Roy, “A Note on the Kolarian Beliefs about Neolithic Celts,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Bombay 14, 6 (1907): 783–90. 88 Crook, Grafton Elliot Smith, 28, 30–31, 59. 89 Elliott Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 21. 90 David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822– 1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Colla, Conflicted Antiquities; Lindsay J. Ambridge, “Imperialism and Racial Geography in James Henry Breasted’s Ancient Times, a History of the Early World,” Journal of Egyptian History 5 (2012): 12–33; Lynn Meskell, Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present (Oxford: Berg, 2004). 466 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core was printed in both English and Bengali, on alternate pages, and was avowedly based on the works of “Anquetil, Rollin and others.”91 Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron was a Frenchman who had lived in India from 1755 to 1761. Mainly a student of Asian religions, particularly Zorastrianism, he is today remembered mainly for his critique of Montes- quieu’s “Asiatic despotism” thesis and for having introduced the West to the mysticism of the Upanishads.92 An unfortunate spat he had with Sir William Jones had marginalized him in Anglo-Indian scholarly circles. By invoking him, Princep was not only rehabilitating Anquetil-Dupperon’s scholarly repu- tation but also looking back to an older, eighteenth-century genealogy of Anglo-Indian Egyptology. Thomas Trautmann observes that it was only with the decipherment of the hieroglyphics that the relationship between India and Egypt was split asunder in the Orientalist imagination.93 Prior to that, in the eighteenth century, the two ancient peoples were seen to have been intimately connected. Princep’s text did not sit alone, since a number of other works, such as a Bengali translation of Robinson’s Grammar of History (1832) and Rev. Krish- namohan Banerjea’s 1847 translation of Charles Rollin as Ijipt Desher Purav- ritto [Antiquities of Egypt],94 also influenced Bengali Egyptology and hearkened back to the late eighteenth century. That these works were aimed mainly at students and were often included in school curricula augmented their influence on Bengali intellectuals of the next generation.95 This textual and curricular Bengali Egyptology contrasts starkly with the origins of British and European Egyptology. Colla has written that the constitution of the “pharaonic artifact” brought back from Egypt was central to the emergence of British Egyptology.96 The distant and disembodied textual Egypt was made a palpable reality in India not by massive museums but rather by the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882. As the second city of the now enormous British Empire, Calcutta was awash with reports on and about Egypt. Several Bengalis travelled there as part of the British contingent, usually as clerks, peons, doctors, administrative staff, and the like. One of them was Shyamlal Mitra, who wrote an immensely 91 James Princep, ed., Prachin Itihas Samuchchaya: An Epitome of Ancient History (Calcutta: Calcutta School Book Society’s Press, 1830). 92 J. G. Manning, The Last Pharaohs: Egypt under the Ptolemies, 305–330 BC (Princeton: Princeton University of Press, 2010), 41; Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory and the ‘Mystic East’ (London: Routledge, 1999), 119. 93 Trautmann, Aryans, 15. 94 Robinson’s Grammar of History (no author provided) (Calcutta: Indigenous Literary Club, 1832); J. F. Blumhardt, Catalogue of Bengali Printed Books in the Library of the British Museum (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1886), 54. 95 James Long, Descriptive Catalogue of Bengali Works (Calcutta: Sanders, Cones & Co., 1855), 25. 96 Colla, Conflicted Antiquities, 27. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 467 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core successful travelogue, Mishor Jatri Bangali (The Bengali traveler to Egypt) that was serialized in a leading periodical and later released as a book. The book’s preface echoed eighteenth-century Egyptology in emphasizing the sim- ilarities between Egypt and India: “Like India, Egypt is an ancient civilized country.”97 In 1909, Dinendrakumar Ray produced what was possibly the first Bengali attempt at “mummy fiction.” Clearly influenced by Mitra’s travelogue, his Pishach Purohit (The Zombie Priest) articulated familiar Victorian and Edwardian anxieties about the mummy’s curse. On a less familiar note, though, instead of depicting the mummy simply as a threatening Other, Pishach Purohit constantly shuttled between Otherization and identification of the Bengali hero with the “villainous” mummy. At one point the narrator tells us, “Hundreds of years ago, when Europe and America were covered in the darkness of ignorance, when they had no acquaintance with civilization, in that long gone era it was only India in Asia and Egypt in Africa that had ascended to the highest stage of civilization.”98 Later in the novel we hear the back-from-the-dead mummy himself tell the Bengali hero, “You may not know this, but the ancient Hindus and the ancient Egyptians are the same people. They are scions of the same family. They are two branches of the same great tree.”99 No longer was this claim simply an echo of eighteenth-century Egyptol- ogy. By 1910, modern Egyptians had begun to claim a pharaonic past for their own nationalist ends, and the mummy’s comments seem like a thinly veiled plea for an anti-colonial unity of the ancient civilizations laboring under the British yoke. Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski explain that it was around the turn of the century that Egyptian nationalists began to develop an ideology of “pharaonicism,” or al fir’awniyya. This ideology posited a “unique and durable Egyptian national essence persisting from the pharaonic era to the present.”100 This ideology became one of the key “emo- tional pivots” of Egyptian territorial nationalism. While Egyptian intellectuals strove to disseminate pharaonicism widely through arts and literature, its basis was a racialized understanding of biological unity with the pharaonic era. Salama Musa, one of the leading proponents of the biological unity of ancient and modern Egyptians, repeatedly deployed exactly the same images of the “family” and “family unity” that we find in Ray’s novel.101 World War I, as had the Anglo-Egyptian War in 1882, again deepened Bengali interest in Egypt. As significant numbers of Bengali officials, clerks, 97 Shyamlal Mitra, Mishor Jatri Bangali (Calcutta: Adityakumar Chattopadhyay, 1884), i. 98 Dinendrakumar Ray, Pishach Purohit (Meherpur: Dinendrakumar Ray, 1910), 50. 99 Ibid., 99. 100 Israel Gershoni and James P Jankowski, Egypt, Islam and the Arabs: The Search for Egyp- tian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 164. 101 Ibid., 165. 468 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core and doctors once more traveled there as part of the British war effort, Egyptian news and history grew in importance. The leading Calcutta daily newspaper, the Amrita Bazar Patrika, frequently interspersed its war reporting with snip- pets of academic and popular histories of pharaonic antiquities in the immediate surroundings of the military conflict. In February 1915, for instance, the Patrika printed a brief report entitled “The Story of Kantara” amidst the war reports. In it, Flinders Petrie’s discoveries of a pharaonic palace in the immedi- ate vicinity of the fighting was mentioned alongside the fact that Kantara had for centuries been a “bridge” between Asia and Africa.102 By the war’s end popular Bengali Egyptomania was obviously growing, and the Minerva Theatre in Calcutta advertised a lavish new production entitled Mishor Kumari (The Egyptian girl). The advertisement announced that the “epoch-making new drama in five acts” would show “the glories of the forgot- ten past … the wonderful temple of god Amonra, the mighty pharaoh’s match- less palace, the cataract of the Nile, the pyramids with their myriads of wonderful sphinxes.…”103 The play ran from May 1919 to at least December 1922 (records are missing for after that) and its advertisements soon carried a long, personalized, handwritten endorsement from none other than Abanindra- nath Tagore.104 Howard Carter’s November 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb added to Egyptomania; it was widely reported in the local press, and as one reporter put it, “illuminate[d] more of the Pharaonic splendor with amazing brilliance and reveals that the Egyptian soared to the world’s record height of civilization.”105 In 1926, Abanindranath’s famous uncle, Rabindranath Tagore, visited Egypt for the second time, having traveled there as a boy with his father. This time he made close contacts with Egyptian intellectuals. Even before this more intellectually engaged trip Egypt had begun to fascinate the poet. He wrote movingly in 1922 about Egypt from his ship as he traveled to Europe. There, Tagore turned Egypt and Arabia into two idealized and oppos- ing tropes, standing respectively for the “spirit of harmony” and the “spirit of conquest.” While he asserted that both spirits were necessary to human life and civilization, he obviously identified more strongly with Egypt’s “spirit of harmony,” wherein he believed man had achieved greatness without cutting himself off from or trying to dominate nature.106 Bengali Egyptophillia continued to grow apace during the decade that fol- lowed. As the 1920s drew to a close, a Tamil intellectual based in Lucknow 102 “The Story of Kantara,” Amrita Bazar Patrika, 19 Feb. 1915: 4. 103 U. K. Mitter, “Minerva Theatre,” Amrita Bazar Patrika, 23 Dec. 1919: 9. 104 U. K. Mitter, “Minerva Theatre,” Amrita Bazar Patrika, 16 Aug. 1919: 3. The last advertise- ment for Mishar Kumari that I have been able to trace appeared in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 2 Dec. 1922: 3. 105 “Remarkable Egyptian Discovery: Last Tomb of Pharaoh,” Leader, 25 Dec. 1922: 4. 106 Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 60–61. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 469 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core wrote a two-volume work in English arguing at length that the Pharaoh Ramses II was actually the Hindu epic hero Rama.107 While many Bengalis no doubt read the book, many more would have read a pulp novel Morar Mrityu [Death of a corpse] by Hemendrakumar Roy, one of the best-known authors of Bengali adventure fiction. Roy told the story of a Bengali Egyptologist who discovered an ancient Egyptian formula to revive mummies and use them to do his bidding. He employed these zombies to torment anyone who had displeased him.108 Roy also penned a short story about a Bengali tourist to Egypt who buys a mummified human leg only to then be haunted by the mummy’s ghost at his home in Calcutta.109 It was in this climate that the Bengali Pharaoh made his appearance. Pan-Egyptianism Aesthetic anti-Aryanism, folkloristics and diffusionism, and Bengali Egypto- mania all came together to create a radically alternate vision of Bengali racial and cultural history. This vision was engendered in the figure of the Bengali Pharaoh and completely ignored biometric nationalism and its somati- cized claims to represent Bengali history and identity. In 1951, independent India conducted its first census as a postcolonial nation-state. The State of West Bengal, now severed from the rest of the historic and cultural region of Bengal, had existed for only three years, and the issue of Bengali identity was still hotly contested. One of the unnumbered volumes of the 1951 census, Tribes and Castes of West Bengal, addressed this issue head-on.110 Edited by provincial Census Commissioner Asok Mitra, the volume was comprised of four independent essays and some extracts from older authors on the subject, including Risley. The new essays pulled in different directions. Two of them, both titled “The Racial Composition of Bengalees,” sought to align the two dominant forms of biometric nationalism, associated with Maha- lanobis and Guha, respectively.111 The volume then went on to reproduce Risley’s measurement tables at length along with both Mahalanobis’ correc- tions and Guha’s additional measurements.112 107 Malladi Venkata Ratnam, Rama, The Greatest Pharaoh of Egypt (Rajahmundry: n.p., 1934). 108 Hemendrakumar Roy, Morar Mrityu (Calcutta: Eastern Law House, 1939). 109 Hemendrakumar Roy, “Pepir Dakshin Pad,” in Gita Dutta, ed., Hemendrakumar Roy, vol. 26 (Asia Publishing Company, Calcutta, 2013), 125–30. 110 A. Mitra, ed., Tribes and Castes of West Bengal (Calcutta: West Bengal Government Press, 1953). 111 K. P. Chattopadhyay, “The Racial Composition of the Bengalees”; and Sailendra Nath Sen- gupta, “The Racial Composition of the Bengalees—A Further Note,” both in A. Mitra, ed., Tribes and Castes of West Bengal (Calcutta: West Bengal Government Press, 1953), 365–74, and 375–89, respectively. 112 Mitra, Tribes and Castes, 390–405. 470 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core But the fourth essay, “The Artisan Castes of West Bengal and Their Crafts,” took things in a completely novel direction.113 Authored by Sudhansu Kumar Ray, it was more akin to an independent treatise. Mitra’s foreword to it stated that Ray was well known in Bengali intellectual circles and possessed an unparalleled knowledge of Bengali folk arts.114 Ray’s essay was not only rich in detail, but also proposed a new historical method for recovering the origins of the Bengali identity. He suggested that folk arts and artifacts were effectively an archive of a remote history. Thus ritual diagrams called alponas were ancient irrigation maps, while the complex ritual art of the Sejuti Brata depicted Bengal’s marshy ecological past. He repeatedly drew attention to striking similarities between southern Bengali folk art and classical Egyptian artifacts. A certain twin-pigeon motif common amongst southern Bengali potters and carpenters, for instance, was said to be identical to the “bowl-head pillars of Egypt.” Images and legends of the Dakshin Dwar (Door of the South) were said to closely resemble legends and images of ancient Egypt.115 In another ritual Ray found parallels with Egyptian festivals memorializing ancient conquests.116 Five years later, in 1956, Ray, then a junior field officer at the Crafts Museum in New Delhi, published a short book in which he formally proposed the founding of the new discipline of “craftology.” It was also in this slim volume that Ray first suggested that the many similarities between southern Bengali folk art and ancient Egyptian art evidenced an actual racial connection between the two peoples. Ray claimed that Akhenaten and his successor Smenkhkare, the two pow- erful monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt, lay buried somewhere in the Rajmahal Hills of West Bengal. Driven out by the orthodox worshippers of Amon sometime between 1358 and 1355 BC, these pharaohs themselves, or their followers carrying their mummies, arrived in lower Bengal, Ray said, and it was from these ancient Egyptians that southern Bengal derived its dis- tinctive linguistic and cultural identity.117 Ray’s purported discovery was intimately tied up with the discipline he was attempting to found. Describing craftology as a “new science,” he argued that “it throws much light on the unknown history of a nation.”118 Its 113 Sudhansu Kumar Ray, “The Artisan Castes of West Bengal and Their Crafts,” in A. Mitra, ed., Tribes and Castes of West Bengal (Calcutta: West Bengal Government Press, 1953), 293–350. 114 A. Mitra, “Note”: n.p. 115 Ray, “Artisan Castes,” 301. 116 Ibid., 306. 117 Sudhansu Kumar Ray, Prehistoric India and Ancient Egypt: Artistic, Linguistic and Political Relations, Revealed by the Bengali Traditional Documents (New Delhi: Cambridge Book and Sta- tionery Store (1956), 12. 118 Ibid., 3. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 471 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core key methodology was the comparison of folk and historical artifacts. While Ray admitted the importance of archaeology, he stated plainly that “archaeol- ogy must follow Craftology.”119 The major difference between the two was that whereas archeology studied artifacts by extrapolating them from their loca- tion, craftology explored artifacts within their lived and performative contexts. More importantly for our discussion of race is that craftology completely ignored biometric nationalism. In Ray’s hands, “asomatic” racial history became a reality. Instead of merely speaking of cultural forms being diffused, Ray was arguing for the racial diffusion of Egyptians to lower Bengal, but, stun- ningly, was doing so without any reference to physical likeness. Race became something to be derived from cultural artifacts and not bodily similarities. Ray’s intellectual influences were all too clear. He was widely known to be Gurusaday Dutt’s protégé and had become interested in folk arts through Dutt.120 Later authors commented also on his proximity to Abanindranath Tagore,121 while he himself cited Sunitikumar Chatterji and Dineshchandra Sen.122 On the Egyptology side, Ray acknowledged his enormous debt to the works of Sir Flinders Petrie and H. R. Hall. Though he had never met these scholars, he invoked a figure in the Mahabharata and called himself their “ekalavya-disciple”; that is, a disciple who learns from a teacher without the teacher’s knowledge. Ray’s pan-Egyptianism resonated with the larger political context of the times. The 1950s in India were marked by much public hope for Afro-Asian solidarity. In April 1955, the Bandung Conference gave substance to these abstract hopes. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser attended, and emerged, alongside Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, as a key propo- nent of what in time would become the Non-Aligned Movement.123 The next year was even more momentous. When a crisis broke out over Nasser’s nation- alization of the Suez Canal, Nehru initially tried to play a mediating role while taking a definite stand in favor of Egyptian sovereignty. Benjamin Zachariah has written of how the crisis evoked strong passions in India and revived the specter of imperialism. Nehru, riding this popular support, threatened to pull India out of the British Commonwealth.124 It was in this Cold War context of India and Egypt forming a strong political alliance that older cultural tradi- tions of identification, such as those engendered in Tagore’s writings and his relationships with Egyptian intellectuals, acquired a new resonance. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid., Foreword. 121 Amalendu Mitra, Rarher Samskriti O Dharmathakur (Calcutta: Firma KL Mukhopadhyay, 1972), 51, 94. 122 Ray, Prehistoric India, 7, 8. 123 Robert McNamara, Britain, Nasser and the Balance of Power in the Middle East, 1952–1977 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2003), 42. 124 Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru (London: Routledge, 2004), 222. 472 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core C O N C L U S I O N : V E R N A C U L A R A N T H R O P O L O G Y International scholars rejected Ray’s Bengali Pharaoh in the most unambiguous terms. John D. Cooney, an eminent Egyptologist who reviewed the book for the journal Artibus Asiae, dubbed it a “curious book” and said that to encourage any further publications from the author along these lines would be an act of “misplaced kindness.” Cooney argued that the ancient Egyptians “were not adventurous, nor were they intellectually curious; there was scant inducement for them to undertake such discomforts and he seriously questioned whether they had the seamanship and vessels for such a journey.”125 Cooney’s unkind review seems to have had an immediate effect. Ray never published the fuller version of his argument that he had promised, of which he had said he had already typed up over four hundred pages in 1956. Yet he did not completely give up on his theory. In 1961, he published another slim book on the ritual art of the bratas in which he reiterated his belief in the Bengali Pharaoh.126 For a while that seemed to have been the end of the Bengali Pharaoh. A decade later, though, in 1972, the publisher of Ray’s last work on ritual art released a bulky monograph by a new author, Amalendu Mitra, which revived Ray’s theory of Egyptian settlement in Bengal. Mitra’s monograph dealt with the Bengali cult of Dharmathakur,127 one of the most widely studied regional cults, which had long perplexed ethnologists. It had come to be seen as one of the quintessentially Bengali folk deities. Mitra’s work was based on decades of fieldwork and the richness of his field data is beyond ques- tion. He had never held an academic job and for years had scoured southwest Bengali villages for every scrap of information he could find. The book was warmly received by Bengali intellectuals and won the prestigious Rabindra Puraskar from the West Bengal government. This critically acclaimed book revived the Bengali Pharaoh. Not only did Mitra lend the authority of his considerable experience and ethnographic knowledge to supporting Ray’s thesis, but he also mentioned that Abanindranath Tagore, a mentor of Mitra, had been preparing a more fulsome defense of Ray’s theory with new proofs that he had acquired in research trips to museums in London.128 The prize Mitra won, and the fact that, unlike Ray, he had written in Bengali rather than English, ensured that the Bengali Pharaoh got a much broader reception after his revival. This did not seem to alter the Bengali Pharaoh’s fate among international scholars. Rahul Peter Das, a German scholar of Bengali origin, in a lengthy 125 John D. Cooney, “Sudhansu Kumar Ray,” Artibus Asiae 20, 2/3 (1957), 229. 126 Sudhansu Kumar Ray, The Ritual Art of the Bratas of Bengal (Calcutta: Firma KL Mukho- padhyay, 1961). 127 Mitra, Rarher Samskriti. 128 Ibid., 51, 94. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 473 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core review of Mitra’s book trashed Ray’s “unwholesome influence” on Mitra. He called Ray’s work “a book full of weird ideas based on incompletely under- stood popular writings on Egypt and India,” and rhetorically asked, “Is it any wonder that many Indian publications are dismissed as not being worth reading by serious scholars”?129 Yet Das, like Cooney before him, failed to kill the enthusiasm Bengali scholars displayed for the book. Writing in 1985, for instance, Sriharsa Mallick included Ray’s work in a short bibliography of the most relevant works he had consulted in writing a treatise on Bengali folk art.130 The following year Akshaykumar Kayal included both Ray and Mitra in a selective bibliography of the most important works on the history and character of the Dharmathakur cult.131 In Suhridkumar Bhowmick’s small 1990 book on the Aryans we once again find Ray invoked at length.132 Writing in 2000, Tarapada Santra still cited Ray extensively in his book on Bengali folk art and artisans.133 Beyond these references to Ray’s thesis, there is evidence that some of his theories had by the mid-1980s almost become a shared commonsense amongst Bengali vernacular ethnologists. Narottam Haldar’s 1988 publication, for instance, argued, “Travel instigated by trade along with the establishment of colonies had led to these exchanges with Egypt; even the cloth used to wrap Egyptian mummies came from Bengal.”134 Strikingly, the largest part of Haldar’s evidence for this claim was identical to evidence Ray had cited. Yet Haldar did not cite Ray. He sourced his evidence to the writings of another, obscure vernacular anthropologist, Purnenduprasad Bhattacharya, which had been published in an equally obscure local periodical. Despite the utter disdain of international scholars, then, the Bengali Pharaoh has continued to cast his shadow on Bengali authors. This divergence testifies to the very different standards of plausibility and proof that prevail among the two sets of authors. While Cooney and Das reject the Bengali Pharaoh as utterly implausible and born out of poor scholarship, Bengali authors like Mallick, Kayal, and Haldar continue to find accounts of the pharaoh credible and the scholarly arguments in his favor reliable. This marks a distinctive body of scholarship in Bengali that is only partially con- nected to the mainstream of the international discipline of anthropology. 129 Rahul Peter Das, “Some Remarks on the Bengali Deity Dharma: Its Cult and Study,” Anthro- pos 78, 5/6 (1983): 661–700, 665. 130 Sriharsa Mallick, Prasanga Lokchitrakala (Calcutta: Pustak Bipani, 1985). 131 Akshaykumar Kayal, Rupramer Dharmamangal (Calcutta: Bharbi, 1986): ou. 132 Suhridkumar Bhowmick, Arya Rahasya (Mecheda: Maramburu Press, 1990), 58–60. 133 Tarapada Santra, Pashchimbanger Lokshilpa O Shilpasamaj (Calcutta: Sarkar Enterprise, 2000). 134 Narottam Haldar, Gangaridi: Alochona O Porjalochona (Calcutta: Dey Book Store, 1988), 85 (my italics). 474 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core This Bengali scholarship is produced by scholars who reside on the margins of academia, such as Ray, Mitra, and Haldar. None of these men had full-time academic jobs, yet all had an enormous amount of field experi- ence. For them, the study of folkways was always a way to access a particular racial and cultural history, one that made sense within a political context that operated at both the international and the regional levels. At the regional level their politics favored the non-elite rural masses whose cultural expres- sions they studied, while at the international level their politics resonated with what is often called the “Spirit of Bandung,” a hope of Afro-Asian unity against empire. I call this body of scholarship “vernacular anthropology.” Both the textual references and the methods of this scholarship often seem dated if we adopt disciplinary anthropology as our norm. For instance, etymo- logical word lists that continue to be a favorite tool for our vernacular anthro- pologists have long been rejected by mainstream anthropology.135 Likewise, Mitra and many other vernacular anthropologists continue to rely on James Frazer’s nineteenth-century classic The Golden Bough. Such practices bewilder scholars like Das because they are convinced that disciplinary anthropology’s norms should apply to this body of scholarship as well. Vernacular anthropol- ogy, however, has very different methodological concerns and within it schol- arly authority is quite differently constituted. I contend that the tremendous importance of long, even life-long immer- sive fieldwork, though it is seldom overtly theorized, gives these vernacular anthropologists a political instinct that frequently impels them to see their work as a technology for empowerment. Their work thus acts not merely to archive a wealth of locally relevant ethnographic information, but also to craft a possible political language of empowerment. Therefore, for them, the scholarly apparatus is not an end in itself, run, as in strictly academic circles, by the simple logic of professional academic protocols. Instead, for vernacular anthropologists the scholarly apparatus is a technology by which they craft a more empowering political identity for their subjects and neighbors. When Cooney or Das fault vernacular anthropologists for not adhering to the disciplinary protocols of anthropology, they overlook two crucial facts. First, for the vernacular anthropologist, issues of empowerment and academic accuracy may not be as unequivocally segregated as they are for professional anthropologists. Second, much of the space for disciplinary anthropology, whether at the Anthropological Survey of India or the Indian Statistical Insti- tute, has been progressively taken over by biometric nationalism of one kind or another. These biometric nationalisms might fit better with global trends for the re-inscription of race, but their local impact is to naturalize and reinforce existing socio-cultural hierarchies of caste as racial hierarchies between Aryans 135 Trautmann, Languages and Nations, 1–41. T H E B E N G A L I P H A R A O H 475 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core and non-Aryans or, to use the contemporary terminology, Caucasoids and Pro- toaustraloids.136 Vernacular anthropology’s “asomatic” discourse on racial history is radical precisely because it ignores these hegemonic forms of think- ing about group-based human difference. Vernacular anthropology continues to be practiced in Bengal today even as biometric nationalism dominates institutional academic spaces for the “study of man.” Even as hallowed, mainstream institutions of excellence such as the Indian Statistical Institute, often unwittingly, produce the most static and reductively racialized images of marginal groups, vernacular anthro- pology continues in its own seemingly idiosyncratic vein to foster new lan- guages of empowerment by relocating racial history as a history of cultural creativity. While the biometric nationalists look to genes in writing narrow, linear demographic histories, in the hands of today’s craftologists—that is, the vernacular anthropologists—folk artifacts become eloquent embodiments of the potentially open-ended, de-somaticized, and cosmopolitan histories of “raced” subalterns. Abstract: Extant South Asian histories of race, and more specifically biometrics, focus almost exclusively upon the colonial era and especially the nineteenth century. Yet an increasing number of ethnographic accounts observe that Indian scientists have enthusiastically embraced the resurgent raciology engen- dered by genomic research into human variation. What is sorely lacking is a his- torical account of how raciology fared in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods, roughly the period between the decline of craniometry and the rise of genomics. It is this history that I explore in this article. I argue that anthropometry, far from being a purely colonial science, was adopted by Indian nationalists quite early on. Various distinctive shades of biometric nationalism publicly competed from the 1920s onward. To counter any sense that biometric nationalism was tel- eologically inevitable, I contrast it with a radical alternative called “craftology” that emerged on the margins of formal academia amongst scholars practicing what I call “vernacular anthropology.” Craftology and biometric nationalism con- tinued to compete, contrast, and selectively entangle with each other until almost the end of the twentieth century. Key words: race, physical anthropology, genetics, folklore, folk art, non-aligned movement, caste, Pan-Africanism 136 Indian Genome Variation Database Portal; Laura Dudley Jenkins, “Another ‘People of India’ Project: Colonial and National Anthropology,” Journal of Asian Studies 62, 4 (2003): 1143–70. 476 P R O J I T B I H A R I M U K H A R J I terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:25, subject to the Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041751700010X https://www.cambridge.org/core The Bengali Pharaoh: Upper-Caste Aryanism, Pan-Egyptianism, and the Contested History of Biometric Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Bengal INTRODUCTION BIOMETRIC NATIONALISM Upper-Caste Aryanism AESTHETIC NON-ARYANISM Folkloristics Bengali Egyptomania Pan-Egyptianism CONCLUSION: VERNACULAR ANTHROPOLOGY work_3cwttq2vdvh6tclkclpefeprg4 ---- SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ doi:10.5194/soil-1-543-2015 © Author(s) 2015. CC Attribution 3.0 License. SOIL Case studies of soil in art C. Feller1, E. R. Landa2, A. Toland3, and G. Wessolek3 1Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), 28 rue Dr Blanchard, 30700 Uzès, France 2Department of Environmental Science and Technology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA 3Department of Soil Protection, Institute for Ecology, Technische Universität Berlin, Ernst Reuter Platz 1, 10587 Berlin, Germany Correspondence to: C. Feller (christian.feller@ird.fr) Received: 14 August 2014 – Published in SOIL Discuss.: 9 February 2015 Revised: 9 June 2015 – Accepted: 16 July 2015 – Published: 13 August 2015 Abstract. The material and symbolic appropriations of soil in artworks are numerous and diverse, spanning many centuries and artistic traditions, from prehistoric painting and ceramics to early Renaissance works in Western literature, poetry, paintings, and sculpture, to recent developments in film, architecture, and contem- porary art. Case studies focused on painting, installation, and film are presented with the view of encouraging further exploration of art about, in, and with soil as a contribution to raising soil awareness. 1 Introduction Soil is a word whose meaning varies according to context. The patriotic understanding of soil (as in the “soil of France”) and the agricultural understanding of soil have very little in common. Even in the environmental and geological sciences, there are often vast differences between the soil of the geolo- gist, the archaeologist, the geotechnical engineer, and the soil scientist, or pedologist. In the history of soil science, numer- ous definitions have been formulated, but all tend to have one or more of the following criteria in common: the presence of, or ability to sustain, life; the state and position of the soil as unconsolidated porous matter occupying the topmost layer of the earth, from the surface to the parent rock below; and the ability to demonstrate a record of physical and chemical change (genesis) due to myriad environmental factors over time (Certini and Ugolini, 2013). Until now, no other planet has been identified with such a substrate fulfilling these criteria. The Earth’s soil is unique in our universe, and yet represents a presence in daily life so common that it is taken for granted. For the non-scientific public at large, soil is mainly the surface on which we walk, or an obscure part of the larger landscape. Because of its life-giving sustenance for all humans and other living be- ings, soils are far too important to be studied by soil scien- tists alone. But we live in a world where disciplinary bound- aries define our work. Within the realm of science, bound- ary crossings – or what Julie Thompson Klein (1990, p. 65) refers to as “border disciplinarity” – are typically of the nearest-neighbor type: i.e., biology + chemistry = biochem- istry, or geology and physics = geophysics. Extensions of soil science outside the agricultural or earth sciences, to the arts and humanities, are far less frequent. The last decades show, however, that the activities of the soil science commu- nity and its traditional partners have been insufficient in pro- tecting our soils and landscapes. Soil degradation due to poor agricultural practice and lack of regulation and soil loss due to sealing and urban sprawl continue to occur at an alarming rate. To encourage more holistic approaches to soil protection, our soil science community must open the doors to develop new perspectives by investigating and initiating transdisci- plinary projects. Art, history, anthropology, sociology, psy- chology, economics, and religious studies represent just a few fields for expanding the scope of soil protection and rais- ing soil awareness. In this contribution we aim to show how artists help reveal the interconnectivity of soil, life, and cul- ture, and in so doing offer a different lens for appreciating the soil. The range of art forms and genres dealing with soil is wide and diverse, spanning many centuries and artistic traditions, Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. 544 C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art from prehistoric painting and ceramics to early Renaissance works in Western paintings and sculpture, to recent devel- opments in film, architecture, and contemporary art (Landa and Feller, 2010; Toland and Wessolek, 2010, 2014). With the emergence of environmental awareness and activism dur- ing the second part of 20th century, especially since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, individual artists all around the world began to include soil (and not simply the landscape in general) as a subject of artistic inquiry. En- vironmental art, ecological art, and Land Art are some of the more well-known genres that took up issues of land use, soil ecology, and agricultural change in the latter half of the 20th century. Following Wessolek’s (2002) personal vision “to encour- age a new art style, named Soil Art”, we have assembled a set of case studies that we feel expose the possibilities of this vision. For our purposes of case selection, we will define soil art as “artistic work about, in, or with soil or soil protection issues, that is produced by artists in a multitude of genres and media, to be understood, among other things, as artwork that may contribute to wider environmental and soil protec- tion and awareness-raising discourses” (adapted from Toland and Wessolek, 2010). This definition does not presume the recognition of a new art genre but rather narrows our field of inquiry and opens the door for future discussion. Since the scope of artistic activity with and about soil is so large and diverse, it will be impossible to give examples of all artistic forms and genres in a single article. Rather than attempt a comprehensive overview, we will offer selected ex- amples, from Renaissance paintings to contemporary instal- lation works, to feature films, which reflect our observations as soil scientists with focused interests in art: – Sect. 2 (painting) by C. Feller, with additions by A. Toland and G. Wessolek; – Sect. 3 (installation) by A. Toland and G. Wessolek; – Sect. 4 (film) by E. R. Landa. 2 Painting 2.1 Roots, resurrection, and rural life – examples from the Renaissance Examples of soil in paintings are numerous and date to antiquity. On the one hand, there is soil as the medium itself; soils have been used as a material for art as pig- ments (since the prehistoric wall paintings in caves) (Ugolini, 2010), and more recently in contemporary paintings to give special effects to the subject (Van Breemen, 2010). On the other hand, soil has been represented in paintings and mo- saics in the form of lines or surfaces as an element of the landscape. In some cases, it was a schematic representa- tion, as if the artist appeared to have consciously failed to observe the soil (Feller et al., 2010), as in Venus Stand- ing in a Landscape (see http://www.louvre.fr/oeuvre-notices/ venus-debout-dans-un-paysage). But in other cases, the depiction of the soil (as a surface or a soil profile in the paintings) is remarkable, even when the focus is on another subject. Feller et al. (2010) distinguish three motifs of soil profile representation in paintings from the Renaissance: i. Visualization of the soil profile for the resurrection of the dead In The Last Judgment by Rogier Van der Weyden (1432) (Fig. 1), the resurrection of the dead required the artist to show the soil profile. The complete painting exhibits numerous soil profiles. Details of the emergence of men and women from soil profiles (lower part of the paint- ing) are so true to reality that they might have been painted by a pedologist. ii. Visualization of the soil profile for displaying plant roots In several Renaissance paintings, the representation of a ditch or a soil cut in a painting served very often as an opportunity to picture roots. In St. John the Baptist by Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516), the figure of St. John leans towards a sharp vertical exposure of soil that in- cludes a strange large root: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ St._John_the_Baptist_in_the_Wilderness). A large root also appears in The Tempest, painted by Giorgione (1477/78–1510) (http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/The_Tempest_(Giorgione)). These works are just two examples of paintings in which large, forked roots were made evident. The represen- tation of roots was not due to chance, but was chosen for its symbolic value. The root presented in detail in the foreground of the St. John the Baptist painted by Bosch is most likely the mandragora root, as suggested by Marjnissen and Ruyffelaere (1987). The mandragora root is thick, hairy and forked, and in a humanoid form. The roots of the Mandragora genus (mandrake) were extensively used by alchemists and in magic rituals based on their psychotropic properties (see Feller et al., 2010, p. 12, Fig. 1.6).1The mandrake was also a reli- gious symbol for Christians, for whom it was linked to Genesis and aspects of Christ’s life (for further details, see Feller et al., 2010). iii. Visualization of the soil profile to depict rural life and agricultural practices 1To view images of mandragora, (1) go to http://mandragore. bnf.fr/jsp/rechercheExperte.jsp; (2) click on “Département des Manuscrits (occidentaux)”; (3) at “Cote”, enter “français 12322”; (4) click on “Les images numérisées”; (5) at “Folio” box, enter “180v”; (6) hit “Chercher”, then click on the individual images to view. SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ http://www.louvre.fr/oeuvre-notices/venus-debout-dans-un-paysage http://www.louvre.fr/oeuvre-notices/venus-debout-dans-un-paysage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John_ the_Baptist_in_ the_Wilderness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John_ the_Baptist_in_ the_Wilderness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest_(Giorgione) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest_(Giorgione) http://mandragore.bnf.fr/jsp/rechercheExperte.jsp http://mandragore.bnf.fr/jsp/rechercheExperte.jsp C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art 545 Figures for article “Case studies of soil in art” Authors: Feller C., Landa Edward R., Toland A., Wessolek G. Figure 01. Details of Le Jugement Dernier (The Last Jugement), circa 1432, Van der Weyden R., Musée Hôtel-Dieu, Hospices Civils de Beaune, Beaune, France (© Hospices de Beaune). Figure 1. R. Van der Weyden. Details of Le Jugement Dernier (The Last Judgment). Circa 1432. Musée Hôtel-Dieu, Hospices Civils de Beaune, Beaune, France (© Hospices de Beaune). In the 14th and 15th centuries artists also turned their gaze towards the soil in their depiction of agricultural practices. In the Très Riches Heures,2 for example, we see representations of specific agricultural tasks and toils. Here, the soil is depicted with a clear concern of realism and technical specificity, including the tilling of the soil. Herein is an early artistic and technical repre- sentation of what agronomists and pedologists describe as an agricultural profile. In addition to this example, Peter Brueghel the Elder (1525/30–1569) might also be cited for The Fall of Icarus (Fig. 2). Icarus is the tiny fig- ure at the bottom in the right-hand corner, with only his legs visible as he descends into the sea, while in fore- front of the canvas, attention is centered on the good Flemish ploughman tilling furrows. That was the tri- umph of daily working life over Utopia (“falling from the sky”). Besides the ploughman serving as a reference for agriculture, Brueghel the Elder did not fail to sym- bolize other of the world’s riches – animal husbandry in the form of the sheepherder leaning on his staff, and the wealth of the sea shown in the form of a busy fish- erman. It should be also noticed that forked roots are included in the agricultural profile – perhaps meant to be mandrake. 2The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, or Très Riches Heures, is the most famous example of French Gothic manuscript illumination. It is a book of hours: a collection of prayers to be said at the canonical hours. It was created between ca. 1412 and 1416 for the Duke of Berry by the Limbourg brothers. The “calendar” images are vivid representations of peasants performing agricultural work. 2.2 Abstraction, experience, and inspiration – examples from the 20th century Our next two examples stem from two very different and op- posed artistic traditions of the 20th century: European ab- stract painting and American regionalism, which favored re- alistic representation over abstraction. 2.2.1 Grant Wood (USA) Art critics such as John Arthur (2000) and Lauren Della Monica (2013) have described realism in landscape paint- ing as an ongoing tradition in American art, suggesting that our understandings and relationships with the land are em- bedded in the American cultural experience, as depicted by 19th century painters such as Frederic Church and Winslow Homer, and later by, for example, Georgia O’Keefe and Alex Katz. One of the most well-known proponents of American landscape painting was Grant DeVolson Wood (1891–1942). He is best known for his paintings depicting the rural Amer- ican Midwest, particularly the painting American Gothic, an iconic image of the 20th century (http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Grant_Wood). Arbor Day (1932) is well known to soil scien- tists around the world (see http://www.wikiart.org/en/ grant-wood/arbor-day-1932). Arbor Day (from the Latin arbor, meaning tree) is a holi- day in which individuals and groups are encouraged to plant and care for trees. Years before the creation of the first World Soil Day on 5 December 2012, the first Arbor Day, held in the state of Nebraska on 10 April 1872, could also be seen as a day to celebrate the soil. While the founder of Arbor Day, J. Sterling Morton, went on to become the Secretary of www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Wood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Wood http://www.wikiart.org/en/grant-wood/arbor-day-1932 http://www.wikiart.org/en/grant-wood/arbor-day-1932 546 C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art Figure 2. P. I. Bruegel. La chute d’Icare (The Fall of Icarus). Circa 1568. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium (Inv. 4030). Photo: RoScan, J. Geleyns (© Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium). Agriculture of the United States (1893–1897), the connection between this American traditional and its agricultural context is evident in Grant Wood’s painting, as the schematization of soil horizons is equally as prominent as the planting of the tree. This contrast between the title and the obvious attention to the soilscape below the main subject (the tree planting) is interesting to consider. It reminds one of the Brueghel paint- ing The Fall of Icarus, discussed above, where the main sub- ject was not Icarus, who is quite invisible, but rather a Flem- ish ploughman tilling the soil. In both examples, the soil and its horizons provide for a richer visual narrative that links cultural tradition and working practices to the soil below. 2.2.2 Jean Dubuffet (France) While painters of genres past used their medium to docu- ment specific land formations and land use practices (Van Breemen, 2010; Zika, 2001; Feller et al., 2010), painters of the European Abstract tradition used soil materials more ab- stractly to explore the physical qualities of a given place rather than to realistically represent it. This turn towards ab- stract painting must be understood as a backlash against es- tablished norms of visual expression dominant in the 19th century salons. With regard to the soil, the Texturology se- ries of works by the French modernist painter Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) is perhaps the most famous example of what art historian Grant Kester (2011) has described as the “turn towards abstraction”. At the height of action painting and abstract expressionism most notably characterized by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Dubuf- fet began using a plastering technique called the “Tyrolean” method in the early 1950s to create large-format paintings celebrating the complexity of the soil (Alley, 1981). Dubuffet discovered he could do splendid paintings us- ing the soil from his garden (Fig. 3). About his series Topographies or Texturologies or Materiologies, he wrote (15 April 1958) to his friend Henri Matisse (Dubuffet, Cata- logue Gianadda, 1993, p. 104): J’entends par là une nouvelle série de ‘tableaux d’assemblages’ représentant des morceaux de sols. (I mean by that a new series of paintings represent- ing an assemblage of pieces of soils.) While other painters before 1970 used soil as a material or represented soil as a background feature, it was rare for soil to be central and presented in and of itself, as with the work of Jean Dubuffet. Between 1950 and 1960, Dubuffet’s paint- ings even carried “pedological” titles, such as the following: – Terre mon biscuit (Earth, my biscuit). April 1953. – Terre orange aux trois hommes (Orange earth with three men). May 1953. – Histologie du sol (Histology of soil). October 1957. – Série Texturologie (Texturology series). 1957–1958. – Mécanique du sol Texturologie (Mechanics of soil tex- turology). December 1958. SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art 547 Figure 3. Jean Dubuffet with soil (1958) (© Archives Fondation Dubuffet, Paris; photo: Jean Weber and © Fondation Gianadda, Martigny). – Topographie honneur au sol (Topography in honor of soil). December 1958. – Terre mère (Mother Earth). December 1959–May 1960. 2.2.3 Anselm Kiefer (Germany) In addition to works by Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, and Herman Prigann, Anselm Kiefer (1945–) is one of the most prominent German artists of 21st century to directly use and depict the soil as an artistic expression of political critique. Until recent years, Kiefer lived for part of the year in Barjac in the south of France (Gard) in a vast domain of “garrigue” (a type of low, soft-leaved scrubland in the Mediterranean woodlands) that he transformed into a huge work of art: a concrete architectural landscape with buildings and towers in ruins, a cathedral of soil and concrete, and a network of tunnels that evokes the landscape in the scale of giant earthworm galleries giving access to small houses as art chapels showing very large paintings or other art works. These cultivated landscapes have been created with mixed materials including soil, but also with reinforced concrete, as in the 2004 giant art work Von den Verlorenen gerührt, die der Glaube nicht trug, erwachen die Trommeln im Fluss at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) (http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/ new-contemporary-galleries/featured-artists-and-works/ anselm-kiefer). It seems that this artist has developed a special relationship with soil: in architecture, with digging the soil in the manner of an earthworm; in painting, with the representation of soil landscape. Some of these paintings (as in many others by Kiefer in various museum and private collections around the world) show cultivated fields which could have caught on fire – a vision of devastation. It looks dry and bare, but some of these paintings exhibit a glimmer of hope as Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem (Let the earth be opened and send forth a savior) (2005–2006). The painting was done with oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, and clay on canvas with colored www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/new-contemporary-galleries/featured-artists-and-works/anselm-kiefer http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/new-contemporary-galleries/featured-artists-and-works/anselm-kiefer http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/new-contemporary-galleries/featured-artists-and-works/anselm-kiefer 548 C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art Figure 4. Anselm Kiefer. Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem. 2005–2006. (© Anselm Kiefer, courtesy of the artist.) flowers gathered at the bottom evocating the new birth of life (Fig. 4). 2.3 Teaching the soil – a place for painting in the soil science curricula One of the main objectives of teaching soil science is to con- vey the concept of a three-dimensional, organized natural body – the pedosphere. Soil is organized into different layers named “horizons”, and the whole of the horizons is the “soil profile” (Fig. 5), with a thickness from some centimeters to more than 10 m. It means that soil is not only “earth” but a “natural body” dependent upon different factors, such as climate, topogra- phy, geology, biology (including human activities), and time. Hence, earth as a material (and Earth as a planet) must not be equated with soil as an organized natural body. This vi- sion of the soil is attributed to the Russian scientist Vasil- lii Dokuchaev, who suggested in his 1883 thesis The Rus- sian Chernozem that the soil be considered the fourth natu- ral kingdom of nature, equivalent to the mineral, animal, and vegetable kingdoms. Every soil scientist knows how students are astonished and fascinated when they discover the soil profile (Hartemink et al., 2014). A new world appears for them with this organi- zation of multi-colored horizons – a world filled with living creatures. For some, the first time seeing a soil profile can be an emotional experience. As Hartemink (2014) noted at the 20th World Congress of Soil Science, “The soil profile speaks to us. . . . The soil profile tells us stories”. Nowadays, in modern soil textbooks, soil profiles are shown and de- scribed with photographs. But the early scientific depictions of soil in paintings dated from the beginning of the 20th cen- tury, either as splendid illustrations in textbooks on soil or prepared for educational exhibitions in lecture halls, gener- ally as canvases representing different types of soil (Fig. 6). The two oil canvases (60×100 cm) shown in Fig. 6 rep- resent soil profiles. These canvases were published as il- lustrations in the soil science textbook of Demolon (1952, p. 86) and were anonymously displayed in the 1940s for a soil science course. In an art exhibition on “the Earth” (2005, Uzès, France), C. Feller presented these paintings, without any technical explanation. The visitors generally found these canvases splendid, and asked if they were painted by an artist. Soil scientists who have written about historical farming practices, land use, and soil geomorphologic processes have often referenced paintings such as those discussed in this chapter, as well as others by Jacob and Salomon van Ruys- dael, Paul Gauguin, Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Brueghel the Elder, and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, in their communications (Feller et al., 2010; Hartemink, 2009; Jenny, 1968). They use artistic examples to make the story of the soil profile come alive. Other soil scientists – for example Gerd Wessolek and Alexandra Toland (Technische Universität Berlin), Ken van Rees (University of Saskatchewan), and Jay Stratton Noller (Oregon State University), and Folkert Van Oort and Béné- dicte and Louis-Marie Bresson (INRA, France) – go beyond showing famous case studies of paintings to include artistic techniques and artistic collaborations in their teaching prac- tices. A transdisciplinary confluence of soil science and art is achieved by including soil science students in artistic activi- ties, and inviting artists to participate in soil science research and teaching endeavors. Paintings by soil scientists are a way of presenting soil scientific concepts in a visual way. Figure 7 explores formal aesthetic features (color, texture, structure, composition of horizons) to describe soil properties. Such aesthetic features are often used in field descriptions for soil mapping but are not referred to as such. Capturing the profile in a painting is an exercise in aesthetic observation and documentation that allows the field scientist or student to capture subtle details not possible in tabular, written form. Painting techniques are also often used in soil awareness- raising activities, such as the “Painting with the colours of SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art 549 Figure 5. Soil profiles and associated vegetation represented as paintings in Walter Kubiena’s textbook (1953) Bestimmungsbuch und Sys- tematik der Böden Europas (The Soils of Europe) the earth” program with Irena Racek in Austria (Szlezak, 2009), the soil painting program at the Museu de Ciências da Terra Alexis Dorofeef (Earth Science Museum) in Brazil (Muggler, 2013), or the soil painting exercises with Marcela Moraga at the Global Soil Week in 2015. Beginning with Wessolek’s international “art and soil” calendar in 2004, the calendar has become a popular format for displaying soils from an aesthetic perspective. Since that time, several soil science societies have developed similar calendars as an ef- fort to raise soil awareness. These examples aim to encour- age a direct physical, personal, and aesthetic experience with materials otherwise rarely seen. 3 Installation Installation art provides artists with unlimited media and tools with which to explore the soil as social, ecological, and political subject. This is not to say that more traditional forms such as painting and sculpture are not sufficient to capture the complexity of the soil, but that installation introduces dimensions of time, space, and sensory experience beyond traditional fields of vision. “By inviting the viewer literally to enter into the work of art, and by appealing not only to the sense of sight but also, on occasion, to those of hearing and smell, such works demand the spectator’s active engage- ment” (Grove Art Online, 2009). Rosenthal (2003) catego- rized installation art into two main groups – filled-space in- stallation, and site-specific installation, to which many exam- ples of land art and public outdoor interventions with soil be- long. We will focus on the “filled-space” type of installation art here, and differentiate between two directions: (i) instal- lation as an immersive spatial experience that relies heavily on architectural design, and (ii) installation as Gesamtkunst- werk, 3 or an assemblage of multiple forms that symbolically, materially, or thematically relate to one another concerning the values and functions of soil in society. 3.1 Immersive experience 3.1.1 Walter de Maria (USA) and Urs Fischer (Switzerland) To begin with the first type of installation, installation as im- mersive experience, we can think about the soil in terms of its 3The term Gesamtkunstwerk was first introduced by the philosopher Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff in an essay from 1827 and later popularized by Richard Wagner to de- scribe the use of multiple art forms in his operas. Although the term has been hotly debated by art history scholars regard- ing works from the Modernist period to the neo-avant-garde movements of the 1960s, it may be used to interpret instal- lation art as a work of art consisting of many related parts. www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 550 C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art Figure 6. Unknown artist. Paintings of soil profiles used by A. Demolon and colleagues for their lectures in Paris (in the 1940s). Left: “Vertisol” from the Centre region (Clermont-Ferrand, France); right: “Luvisol” from the Île-de-France region (Versailles, France) (private collection). unique spatial qualities. On the one hand, soil is solid ground – a dense, stable, immobile field upon which to walk, stand, and build. On the other hand, soil is a porous zone in per- petual flux – a complex labyrinth of moist pore spaces and crevices churning with microscopic life. Regarding the first vision of the soil, we can cite two well-known examples from New York City: Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977, Fig. 8) and Urs Fischer’s You (2007, Fig. 9). For the New York Earth Room, the pioneering land artist, Walter de Maria, filled an entire Manhattan loft with soil from a Penn- sylvania farm, only to be viewed (and smelled) through a small doorway blocked off by a Plexiglas window. The in- stallation of earth materials completely occupies the viewers’ experience, bringing the physical, visual awe of land art into a familiar, indoor, architectural space. By filling a loft space in Manhattan with earth, De Maria makes a theatrical use of space. It is the space itself, which is being shown, transformed by both the quantity and nature of the material. . . . A sense of exclusion is experienced by the viewer, as the space occupied by the work cannot be entered (Kastner and Wallis, 1998). Thirty years later and only ten blocks away, Swiss artist Urs Fischer “installed” a formal antithesis of de Maria’s Earth Room by excavating rather than depositing about the same amount of earth from the depths of Gavin Brown’s gallery floor and inviting the viewer to actually enter into the work of art at his or her own risk. Here too, the viewer is overwhelmed by the earth materials that challenge the architecture of the exhibition space. The solid ground necessary for any architectural venture gives way to a new and somewhat ungrounding spatial experience. In Earth Room and You, typical conceptions of earth materi- als, such as ploughed fields or excavated pits for construction work, are brought indoors to disrupt the viewers’ normal re- lationship to the materials and the space they occupy, calling for deeper contemplation of and confrontation with both. SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art 551 Figure 7. G. Wessolek. Soil Aesthetics Criteria. 2007. (Courtesy of the artist.) 3.1.2 Philip Beesley (Canada) Another example of immersive installation soil art explores the more porous, labyrinthine qualities of the soil as a spa- tial entity without actually moving a grain. An ongoing re- search project by architects Philip Beesley, Rachel Arm- strong, Hayley Isaacs, Eric Bury, and Jonathan Tyrell, Hy- lozoic Soil (Fig. 10) is an interactive environment of tiny sensors, “groves of frond-like ‘breathing’ pores, tongues and thickets of twitching whiskers” and other mechanized com- ponents that make up what Beesley envisions as a proto- typical model of “immersive architecture and synthetic ecol- ogy” (Beesley and Armstrong, 2011). With far more potential than the massive, inert, singly functioning building material it is commonly considered, the soil is seen as a responsive framework for myriad encounters and a physical template for social and biological evolution. Where de Maria and Fis- cher challenge the viewer’s experience of architecture by in- stalling soil within the familiar framework of walls and floors in Earth Room and You, Beesley and his partners challenge the very idea of architecture by redefining that framework of walls and floors as a system of reactive pore spaces that imitate the soil. Hylozoism refers to the Greek philosophy that life may be found in all matter. Hylozoic Soil is a multisensory ki- netic installation that uses the sculptural metaphor of fer- tile soil to bring architecture – usually inert – to life. It si- multaneously references the microbial aesthetics of mycor- rhizal plant–root–fungi interdependence and the metaphysics of Graham Cairns-Smith’s controversial clay-life hypothe- sis.4 Like the hyper-reactivity of clay particles, the delicately responsive structures of Hylozoic Soil are predetermined to evolve and change based on human (or other biological) pres- ence. A meshed network of movement sensors, air filters, and flasks filled with ferrofluids sends feedback signals of light and rippling movement triggered by the smallest presence of otherness within the system (Beesley and Armstrong, 2011). It is this juxtapositioning of life as container and as contained that creates tension in Beesley’s work. As an installation, or architectural prototype, Hylozoic Soil succeeds in momentarily transporting human experience to the scale of a springtail, reminiscent of multimedia exhibits that magnify the soil microcosm in natural history museums and soil educational exhibitions.5 But Beesley and his part- ners have created more than an installation to contemplate the 4In his controversial book, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, Cairns-Smith (1985) proposed that clays were a proto-organic vehi- cle or template for biological replication. 5See, for example, soil pore-space-scale models at the Dig It! The Secrets of the Soil exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s Na- tional Museum of Natural History, Washington DC; the Unter Wel- ten exhibit at the Museum am Schölerberg in Osnabrück, Germany; www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 552 C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art Figure 8. Walter de Maria. New York Earth Room. 1977. Long-term installation at 141 Wooster Street, New York City. Photo: John Cliett. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, New York. complexity of the soil. They use the concept of the living soil to challenge accepted notions of architecture by focusing on the fantastic universe of soil pore systems – the spaces in be- tween – rather than the predictable boundaries of cubes and spheres that separate life (via traditional architectural struc- tures) from the wilderness beyond. Beesley remarks: In opposition to design principles of the past cen- tury that favored optimal equations where maxi- mum volume might be enclosed by the minimum possible surface, the structures in Hylozoic Ground prefer diffuse, deeply reticulated skins (Beesley and Armstrong, 2011). If we think about the immense surface area of a soil, with pore spaces matching aggregates, and sand, silt and clay frac- tions evenly distributed to allow for optimized flow of water, air, nutrients, and biota, we approach a new vision of archi- tecture where no space is empty and no structure is station- ary. A handful of loam becomes the ultimate installation and architectural template for life itself. and the Unter Unseren Füßen exhibit of the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History in Görlitz, Germany. 3.2 Gesamtkunstwerk 3.2.1 Claire Pentecost (USA) As a term that gained currency in the 1960s to describe a “construction or assemblage conceived for a specific interior, often for a temporary period, and distinguished from more conventional sculpture as a discrete object by its physical domination of the entire space” (Grove Art Online, 2009), in- stallation art has become a household name in the contempo- rary art world. By its nature, installation art can reference and appropriate all other visual art forms, cherry-picking differ- ent styles, media, and techniques to condense meaning into three-dimensional spatial experience. Some artists and crit- ics have referred to installation art as a development of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, as it ap- propriates a spectrum of different artistic disciplines brought together into one work (de Oliveira et al., 1993). This reading of installation art as a total work of art consisting of many re- lated parts is exemplified by a further example, Claire Pente- cost’s acclaimed contribution to dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, the Soil-Erg (Fig. 11). In the rotunda of the historic Ottoneum, a theater turned hospital turned gallery turned natural history museum, Claire Pentecost assembled a series of drawings, sculptures, worm compost, and appropriated museum pieces that all revolved around a central theme – the soil as post-capitalist currency and common resource that anyone can create by learning how SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art 553 Figure 9. Urs Fischer. you. 2007. Excavation in gallery space (Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York). Installation view. Collection of The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut (© Urs Fischer. Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York. Photo: Ellen Page Wilson; additional photos at https://www.gavinbrown.biz/artists/urs_fischer/works). to compost. As part of this well-researched Gesamtkunst- werk, Pentecost participated in a three-month residency pro- gram at the University of Kassel’s Faculty of Organic Agri- cultural Sciences, offered workshops at dOCUMENTA 13 on composting, soil health, and capitalist alternatives to land grabbing, and developed a series of pillar-like vertical planters in and around the city together with designer and philanthropist Ben Friton of the CanYa Love Foundation. The installation at the Ottoneum served as the visual cen- terpiece of Soil-Erg, visited by thousands of people over the course of the summer. Lining the walls of the Ottoneum are oversized soil coins, too big and crumbly to fit in anyone’s pockets, and 43 draw- ings in earth-based pigments that reference the graphic style of banknotes. The series of soil-erg bills features images of historic figures of sustainable agriculture such as Rachel Car- son, Wangari Maathai, and Vandana Shiva, as well as influ- ential ecological artists and writers such as Joseph Beuys and www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 https://www.gavinbrown.biz/artists/urs_fischer/works 554 C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art Figure 10. Philip Beesley et al. Hylozoic Soil. 2007. Installation at the Musée des Beaux Arts, Montreal, Canada, 2007 (© PBAI, courtesy of the artist). Henry David Thoreau, and a cast of non-human soil workers from snails and bees to fungal mycelium and bacteriophagic nematodes. The installation proposes a new system of value based on living soil. At the center of the room compost made from local food waste is symbolically pressed and stacked into the shape of gold bars, representing units of a new cur- rency – the soil-erg. Mounted on another wall of the Ottoneum, like the ghost of an affluent fossil fuel past, is the Richelsdorfer Moun- tain Cabinet from 1783, a scale model of Hesse’s geologic strata once used for teaching the fundamentals of extrac- tion. Next to the historical cabinet appropriated from the natural history museum’s collection, a new cabinet squirms with worm compost produced in part by the food scraps of visiting dOCUMENTA guests, offset by a list of current “land-grabbing” deals between sovereign countries in Africa, Asia, and South America and multinational agribusiness con- cerns.6 If we go back to the sheer gravity of Walter de Maria’s Earth Room, we recognize not only a playful approach to redefining architectural space but also an underlying inten- tion to free art from the commodification and value control of the market economy – a reoccurring debate of installa- tion art. A pile of earth cannot be as easily auctioned as 6Pentecost cites the following websites for her list of land- grabbing info presented in the Soil-Erg installation: http:// farmlandgrab.org/ and http://oaklandinstitute.org a landscape painting or ceramic bowl. Claire Pentecost ex- tends such ideas about the de-commodification of art to the soil, using sculpture, drawing, writing, lecturing, collabora- tive engineering, public participation, urban gardening, and composting as a Gesamtkunstwerk to not only explore but also demand new systems of value for the soil. Made of soil and work, the soil-erg both is and is not an abstraction. Symbolically, it refers to a field of value, but that value is of a special nature: soil must be produced and maintained in a con- text. It is completely impractical to circulate it. It is heavy, and, because of the loose structure required of good soil, it falls apart. . . . The physical nature of soil the soil-erg both evokes and denies the pos- sibility of coinage. If currency as we know it is the ultimate deterritorialization, the soil-erg’s value is inherently territorialized (Pentecost, 2012). While human societies have long benefited from the goods and services of the soil, including food production and medicines; materials for pigments, ceramics, and building constructions; and materials for religious and spiritual activ- ities, the notion of valuing and protecting the soil on account of its goods and services is a more recent phenomenon of the mid-20th century. With the emergence of emissions trad- ing and environmental economic accounts in the early 1990s, natural functions have become increasingly instrumentalized and institutionalized under the rubric of ecosystems services SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ http://farmlandgrab.org/ http://farmlandgrab.org/ http://oaklandinstitute.org C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art 555 Figure 11. Claire Pentecost. Soil-Erg. Installation at dOCUMENTA 13 (2012). (© Claire Pentecost, courtesy of the artist, photo Jürgen Hess.) (Gómez-Baggethun et al., 2010), which is effectively an eco- nomic approach to understanding and valuing natural func- tions as “goods”. The role of the soil is not only to provide foods and fibers; its optimal management also considers reg- ulation of climate, mitigation of pollution, maintenance of biodiversity, etc. But this system of goods and services must also be considered in the framework of ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic dimensions. By choosing a unit of energy for the title of her installation (erg is short for the Greek word for work, ergon, and represents the equivalent of 10−7 joules), Pentecost places an abstract value on the soil that challenges the restrictive vision of soil as provider of goods and ser- vices that can be monetarily quantified for dominant market economies. 4 Film In the visual arts, soil is sometimes “in your face” – it is the foreground, the medium, the center of attention, as in the works of the above-mentioned artists. In contrast and not un- expectedly, this is rarely the case in Hollywood films. Nev- ertheless, location scouts and directors clearly recognize that soils can form a visually striking element that adds mood and texture to the viewing experience. Some filmmakers have recognized the human connection to the soil and have used it in their storytelling. A few screenwriters and filmmakers have gone even further and moved from the typical view of soils as a static backdrop on which the action is played out to a view of soils as a dynamic ecosystem feature. Woman in the Dunes (1964) and Dune (1984), two films previously discussed in detail in Landa (2010), focus on not only the dynamism of the moving sands but also on the sub- surface water of the dune as a key ecosystem feature. Soil is central to the story of planet Arrakis in Dune, the David Lynch film based upon the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert. In- deed the “planetary ecologist” who is the hero of the Dune saga was based upon an Oregon soil scientist (Landa, 2010). A 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, on the unsuccess- ful mid-1970s attempt of surrealist director Alejandro Jodor- owsky to adapt and film Herbert’s novel, is reviving interest in both the Lynch film and in Herbert as a potent force in the environmental movement. The natural history of the prairie and the abundance de- rived from the soil is exquisitely depicted in Days of Heaven, the 1978 film by acclaimed director Terrence Malick. Char- acterized by rich images and sparse dialog,7 this circa 1915 tale of life on the wheat farms of Texas (actually filmed in Alberta and Montana) includes a brief but memorable time- lapse photography sequence by cinematographer Ken Mid- 7For soil scientists, an endearing and perhaps unscripted line (33:10 to 33:26) in Days of Heaven has a 12-year-old girl, played by Linda Manz, musing in voice-over about her future, as she studies a clod of soil and lowers her ear to the earth: “I could be a mud doctor. . . checking out the earth. . . underneath.” www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 556 C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art dleham.8 The footage (originally shot for the 1979 documen- tary The Secret Life of Plants; Weber, 2007) is accompanied by a soundtrack composed and conducted by Ennio Morri- cone. Images of unfurling seedlings and probing roots have a special magic for scientists and non-scientists alike – see, for example, the 10 January 2014 cover of Science maga- zine showing a lateral root emerging from the main root of a young Arabidopsis thaliana plant (http://www.sciencemag. org/content/343/6167.cover-expansion). Indeed, moving images of elongating roots seem to beg for music, a fact not unnoticed by Auburn University plant phys- iologist Elizabeth (“Betty”) L. Klepper and her US Depart- ment of Agriculture/Agricultural Research Service colleague Morris G. Huck. Their 16 mm film, Time-lapse photography of root growth, depicting research at the Auburn rhizotron (Fig. 12) where cotton roots in soil were observed through glass panels while the plant tops were exposed to field condi- tions (Taylor 1969; Huck et al., 1970), premiered at the 11th International Botanical Congress in Seattle in the summer of 1969. The film opens with a classical musical soundtrack that appears to be a re-write of Luigi Boccherini’s “Celebrated Minuet”9 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= epJahNtJzss). Klepper wrote the film’s narration that was later recorded by a staff member from Auburn University Television. He recommended several possible accompanying music selections to the research team. Klepper and Huck se- lected one that had a dramatic upturn in the music at a point in the edited, final version of the film where a root growing down a pane of glass has disappeared behind the soil and suddenly reappears (e-mail, E. L. Klepper to E. R. Landa; 21 April 2014). The film was given new life in 1999 with its re-release on DVD by the American Society of Agron- omy/Crop Science Society of America/Soil Science Soci- ety of America, and has been a popular instructional video (Kirkham, 2011). The works of Klepper/Huck in the scientific sphere, and of Middleham in the commercial film world, are early ex- amples of the convergence of film with the soil and plant sciences. More recently, soil scientist/geo-archaeologist Paul Adderley (University of Stirling, Scotland) and composer Michael Young (University of London) have collaborated on 8For an in-depth look at the time-lapse photography of Ken Middleham (1927–2001), see Filming the Invisible: The Story of Ken Middleham, Cinematographer at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cDElLm1hfSQ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= azIXfxqFVQo. Middleham was the natural history cinematog- rapher on The Secret Life of Plants (http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sGl4btrsiHk), and the soundtrack to accompany his im- ages there was composed and performed by Stevie Wonder. 9The Boccherini minuet has been used in the soundtrack of a considerable number of feature films (http://www.imdb.com/name/ nm0090530/), including the Coen brothers’ The Ladykillers (2004). Exposure: Understanding Living in Extreme Environments (http://www.ground-breaking.net/exposure.html), an instal- lation that integrates sight and sound across scales ranging from the microscopic to the landscape scale and that de- picts both the physicality of soil and its role as a cultural archive of past civilizations (an experimental 12 min video from the installation is available at http://soundsrite.uws.edu. au/soundsRiteContent/volume4/YoungInfo.html). Modern rhizotron facilities, sampling devices adapted from engineering and medicine (including borescopes and laparoscopic samplers), and advanced, three-dimensional to- mographic imaging techniques offer new opportunities for creative explorations at the interface of science and art, with the potential of attracting new collaborators and audiences to soil science. Ken Middleham’s talents in micro-scale motion picture photography were also put to use in the 1974 science fiction film Phase IV, where ants become a threat to human civiliza- tion. Middleham provided the insect photography – which has appropriately been described as “creating a sort of animal acting verisimilitude that has gone unmatched on film before or since” (Gilchrist, 2012). But from a viewer’s perspective of the entire film – aptly described as “an ecological para- ble set within the science fiction genre” (Bass and Kirkham, 2011, p. 257) – soil is primarily featured not in the micropho- tography of ant activity but on the macro-scale, in towering geometric obelisks made of soil. Rising from the desert floor, they are ominous; the massive and alien occurrence of soil in these ant observation towers and in the form of massive solar reflectors, combined with the storyline and soundtrack, is a highly effective conveyor of threat to the viewer. Having ob- served much smaller, cylindrical, indurated-soil ant nests in Oregon (Landa, 1977), this image had particular resonance with me – the unfamiliar soil feature in that case provoking curiosity. The director of Phase IV, Saul Bass (1920–1996), was a noted graphic designer whose corporate logos (e.g., the United Airlines “flying U” and blue/red/orange stripes) are known to all, and whose design of motion picture title se- quences and advertising posters made him a sought-after tal- ent in Hollywood – the directors with whom Bass worked in- cluded Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese (who wrote the foreword to the Bass and Kirkham book). There is a strong linear character in many of the Bass graphics, and this signature style is reflected in the imagining and construction of the soil pillars for the only feature film that he directed. Bass conceptualized and designed all of the earthen mani- festations of the ant civilization in the film – the tunnels, tow- ers, reflectors, and the final chamber (e-mail from J. Bass, 6 May 2014). The film critic of London’s Sunday Times picked up on the linkage of design, imagery, and mood, call- ing Phase IV “a film of design, of unsentimental forces set against one another in lines, curves, angles, shining surfaces. Beautiful, but always threatening, mysterious, forbidding.” SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6167.cover-expansion http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6167.cover-expansion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epJahNtJzss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epJahNtJzss http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDElLm1hfSQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDElLm1hfSQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azIXfxqFVQo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azIXfxqFVQo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGl4btrsiHk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGl4btrsiHk http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0090530/ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0090530/ http://www.ground-breaking.net/exposure.html http://soundsrite.uws.edu.au/soundsRiteContent/volume4/YoungInfo.html http://soundsrite.uws.edu.au/soundsRiteContent/volume4/YoungInfo.html C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art 557 Figure 12. Time-lapse photography setup used by Klepper and Huck at the Auburn rhizotron to examine root behavior behind glass panels (courtesy of Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station). The camera support could be moved to allow photography of any part of the visible root system. The 1/2 in. square grid-wire mesh embedded in the glass panes provided a measuring scale and would reduce shattering if the glass broke (from Taylor, 1969). (Bass and Kirkham, 2011, p. 258). Although the story is set in Arizona, the outdoor filming was done in the Rift Valley of Kenya, and Bass had to be careful not to get a giraffe in the shot (e-mail from J. Bass, 6 May 2014). Bass’ surreal epilogue to the film (cut by Paramount Pictures and not on the presently available DVD) was screened for the first time in Los Angeles in 2012 (Gilchrist, 2012). Available at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=beLpsWaUDNk, it is a stunning summation that is a must-see to get the unambiguous storyline and to appreci- ate Bass’ artistic vision in its full realization. Marketed by Paramount Pictures as a B-horror movie, Phase IV had only a small footprint in the US, but was a hit in France (Bass and Kirkham, 2011). Hopefully Saul Bass’ pioneering work will receive greater attention when scholars and movie buffs gather to discuss environmental films, and future audiences will get to see the uncut version of Phase IV. As soil scientists, our view of soil in films is admittedly atypical. A case in point is the 2011 film from director Lech Majewski, The Mill and the Cross. A truly unique film in- spired by a still image – Pieter Bruegel’s 1564 painting The Procession to Calvary depicting Christ carrying the cross to the crucifixion in a reimagined 16th century Flemish setting – it has a scene in which a woman is buried alive. The grave has box-like, vertical walls. But even more visually power- ful than the geometry are the color contrasts and the strong horizon boundaries in the soil exposed on the pit walls: – a very dark surface which grades to a somewhat lighter brown, – then a very sharp demarcation to a thick white layer. Captivated by the image, my first thoughts were – Was that the natural color in the soil pit? If yes, was the filming location specifically chosen for this look? – Alternatively, were some profile color effects enhanced through computer-generated imagery or other methods? I had a series of e-mail exchanges with director Lech Majew- ski on these questions (e-mails, L. Majewski to E. R. Landa: 31 December 2012; 26 February 2014). The scene was shot near Katowice, Poland, on an old slag-deposit field. The choice of the pit site was just chance – the look of the soil had nothing to do with the selection of the filming location; rather, the slope was chosen to give a good view of the monks in the same shot. The lesson for me was clear – not all de- pictions of soil, even if eye-catching for a soil scientist, are conscious acts of filmmaking. But one can dream. . . 5 Conclusions Art is one way of communicating the complex visual, cul- tural, and symbolic dimensions embodied in the soil. We www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beLpsWaUDNk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beLpsWaUDNk 558 C. Feller et al.: Case studies of soil in art have presented a set of case studies taken from three for- mal artistic traditions: painting, installation, and film. While some examples are more incidental depictions of the soil, others are focused on environmental, social, and political questions surrounding soil and land use. Although the ex- amples stem from our personal interests in the given genres, we come to the following conclusions: – Artworks focused on soils and landscapes provide a dif- ferent way of appreciating the soil and could therefore be valuable for soil conservation and soil awareness raising efforts. – Professional soil science societies should encourage in- terdisciplinary collaboration in areas such as soil and art, soil and culture, soil and religion, and soil and his- tory. – At the same time, the soil science community can offer the art world a new analytical lens to examine soil and environmental protection issues. – Artists expand the realm of soil science research with visual, cultural, and symbolic forms of inquiry, offering new ways of visualizing, interpreting, and interacting with soil. In contrast to soil scientific work, artistic work is designed to touch our emotions and provoke discussions on environ- mental, social, and political change. 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PhD Dissertation, Fachbereich 5 der Ber- gischen Universität, Wuppertal, 2001. www.soil-journal.net/1/543/2015/ SOIL, 1, 543–559, 2015 http://www.soilart.eu/1-0-Home.htm http://www.soilart.eu/1-0-Home.htm Abstract Introduction Painting Roots, resurrection, and rural life -- examples from the Renaissance Abstraction, experience, and inspiration -- examples from the 20th century Grant Wood (USA) Jean Dubuffet (France) Anselm Kiefer (Germany) Teaching the soil -- a place for painting in the soil science curricula Installation Immersive experience Walter de Maria (USA) and Urs Fischer (Switzerland) Philip Beesley (Canada) Gesamtkunstwerk Claire Pentecost (USA) Film Conclusions Acknowledgements References work_3g26vrz6cbez3eshzm4uhaixga ---- Enseignement à distance de la musique ou l’e-learning musical All Rights Reserved © Canadian University Music Society / Société de musique des universités canadiennes, 2010 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. 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Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ Document généré le 5 avr. 2021 21:46 Intersections Canadian Journal of Music Revue canadienne de musique Enseignement à distance de la musique ou l’e-learning musical Sylvaine Martin de Guise Volume 29, numéro 2, 2009 URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1000041ar DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1000041ar Aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) Canadian University Music Society / Société de musique des universités canadiennes ISSN 1911-0146 (imprimé) 1918-512X (numérique) Découvrir la revue Citer cet article Martin de Guise, S. (2009). Enseignement à distance de la musique ou l’e-learning musical. Intersections, 29(2), 84–108. https://doi.org/10.7202/1000041ar Résumé de l'article Aujourd’hui l’e-learning musical est un outil d’apprentissage de la musique en plein essor depuis le développement des technologies tel que le standard MIDI — permettant la communication entre ordinateurs et instruments de musique —, Internet, le Web et les multimédias. Tous ces domaines reliés favorisent la création de cours mis sur logiciels qui peuvent être diffusés sur Internet ou en Intranet dans les écoles. Cette avancée dans l’éducation musicale se constate partout dans le monde et nous verrons dans cet article différents exemples et procédés d’apprentissage à distance de la musique qui sont mis en oeuvre en France et au Canada. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/is/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1000041ar https://doi.org/10.7202/1000041ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/is/2009-v29-n2-is1473076/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/is/ Chroniques : enseignement à distanCe de la musique ou l’e-LeaRning musiCal Sylvaine Martin de Guise introduction Actuellement, la formation à distance par Internet, ou l’e-learning, s’étend à toutes les disciplines de l’éducation. L’enseignement de la musique n’échappe pas à la tendance générale grâce au protocole de communication MIDI1 qui permet le dialogue entre machines et instruments de musique traditionnels et la transformation en données informatiques des éléments fondamentaux musicaux : hauteur de sons, durée, volume, timbre, transcription. Toutes ces possibilités ouvrent des voies inédites pour l’enseignement de la musique qui emploient les nouvelles technologies, associées au réseau Internet et au système hypertexte. Les TICCE2 (Technologies de l’Information, de la Communication et de la Création pour l’Enseignement) veulent répondre aux exigences et aux critè- res de l’enseignement musical en proposant un éventail d’outils multimédia (vidéos, enregistrements sonores, copies de partition, plateformes de commu- nication) qui peuvent appuyer et renouveler le travail traditionnel d’un profes- seur de musique. Afin d’observer le progrès des cours à distance de la musique dans les systèmes scolaires (écoles primaires et secondaires, cégeps ou lycées) et les institutions spécialisées (écoles de musique, conservatoires et facultés de musique des universités), il faut faire un bref récapitulatif du formidable déve- loppement des technologies de l’audiovisuel et de l’informatique depuis leurs origines jusqu’au début du XXIe siècle. développement parallèle et concomitant de l’audiovi- suel et de l’informatique La formation à distance et l’e-learning qui s’exercent de nos jours dans toutes les sphères de l’éducation représentent l’aboutissement de la notion d’ensei- gnement à distance telle qu’elle a été imaginée la première fois, aux débuts de la radio (1929) et de la télévision (1949). L’e-learning musical, ou l’apprentissage musical par Internet, en est un des ultimes développements. Cependant, il faut rappeler que l’idée de l’enseignement à distance de la musique est avant tout née 1 MIDI est l’acronyme de Musical Instrument Digital Interface. 2 Michel Bézard, « TICCE : le MIDI à l’heure du second C », Les dossiers de l’ingénierie éduca- tive — Des outils pour la musique, N°43 (juin 2003):1. Intersections29-2.indd 84 10/25/10 3:10:50 PM 29/2 (2009) 85 de l’émergence d’une technologie : la réalisation des premiers enregistrements sur disque vinyle (1950). En effet, la captation sonore de la musique sur un objet, un microsillon ou une bande enregistrée, a permis d’en analyser le contenu et de partager ce contenu de manière inédite, bref de concevoir désormais une méthode didactique innovatrice portant sur l’étude de la musique. C’est ainsi que, dès l’émergence de ces nouveaux moyens de communication, on a soup- çonné et compris l’énorme potentiel pédagogique qu’ils recélaient indépen- damment des domaines que ces moyens de communication pouvaient couvrir et de la façon dont ils pouvaient se décliner à leur abord. Parallèlement, on a assisté à la progression de l’informatique (1930), à la fabrication des premiers ordinateurs (1940) et à la création du disque compact (1978) pouvant stocker des données sous forme numérique destinées à être gérées par les ordinateurs. Les années 1980 débutent avec l’arrivée des microordinateurs et se terminent avec l’apparition du multimédia. Ce dernier mot désigne des applications ren- dues possibles par la combinaison de la mémoire de l’ordinateur, du disque compact (CD) et des fonctions de l’ordinateur. Ces applications, ou logiciels, permettent la gestion, l’utilisation et la direction de différents médias simulta- nément : musique, son, image, vidéo et interface homme-machine. Les progrès techniques et le faible coût des mémoires et des réseaux font que la technologie multimédia, voire hypermédia3, est maintenant disponible avec beaucoup de facilité. Ces découvertes audiovisuelles et informatiques ont eu des retombées directes, à des degrés divers, dans la pratique des musiciens, toutes spécialités confondues. Compositeurs, interprètes, professeurs, chefs d’orchestre, musi- cologues, producteurs, éditeurs, tous ont commencé à s’intéresser, même s’ils les dédaignaient, à ces nouvelles ressources et possibilités d’expression de la musique. les tiCe et les tiCCe De nos jours, la formation à distance, que ce soit de la musique ou de tout autre domaine, signifie associer les moyens technologiques modernes aux métho- des d’enseignement classique, ce qui ouvre le champ des TICE (Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication pour l’Éducation). Ces technologies, qui sont appelées communément les TICE pour tous les domaines de l’éduca- tion, deviennent TICCE pour les domaines de l’éducation artistique. En effet, le « C » ajouté représente la part de création qui n’est pas absolument exigée dans l’esprit des autres disciplines. Les TICE et les TICCE offrent au public un support pédagogique original en utilisant des procédés techniques développés en multimédia pour rénover les systèmes d’éducation habituels et contribuer ainsi à leur modernisation. Ces technologies engagent automatiquement un effort de normalisation et de standardisation de leurs procédés et de leurs dif- 3 Hypermédia vient de « hypertexte » qui est un système contenant des documents liés entre eux par des hyperliens permettant de passer automatiquement (en pratique grâce à l’informatique) du document consulté à un autre document lié. Un document hypertexte est donc un document qui contient des hyperliens. Lorsque les documents ne sont pas uniquement textuels, mais aussi audiovi- suels, on peut parler de système et de documents hypermédias. Intersections29-2.indd 85 10/25/10 3:10:50 PM 86 Intersections fusions : c’est ici qu’interviennent, dans les modèles (logiciels) de cours, les normes et les standards tels que LOM4, SCORM5, MPEG-216, etc. Les TICCE ont une implication particulière dans la musique parce que l’enseignement de cet art suppose que l’on puisse non seulement l’expliquer par des textes ou des partitions, mais que l’on puisse le faire entendre en appuyant chacune des il- lustrations visuelles par une illustration sonore. Enfin, il s’agit aussi de pouvoir reproduire ou créer des œuvres musicales originales avec ces mêmes moyens des TICCE. i- développement de l’e-learning musical les débuts On sait que l’enseignement musical « à distance » a été initié bien avant Inter- net : il a ses précurseurs et ses archétypes qui sont les programmes culturels à la radio et à la télévision, et l’université à la télévision7. Grâce à ces initiatives, une tradition est déjà inscrite : elle est approfondie et devenue incontournable depuis les années 1970 avec les enregistrements musicaux de grande qualité rendus possibles par l’enregistrement analogique sur cassette puis, au début des années 1980, par l’enregistrement numérique sur CD. Dans la perspective d’un enseignement de la musique de bonne tenue, les outils d’enregistrements sonores et musicaux ont été enrichis avec succès par la généralisation des tech- niques multimédias, de l’usage des ordinateurs et du protocole de communi- cation MIDI, comme ce fut le cas, dès 1995, des essais d’interopérabilité de ce protocole avec d’autres normes ou spécifications, telles que SCORM (pédago- gie) et MPEG (audiovisuel). Ainsi, dans les années 1990, l’on assiste à la nais- sance du « home studio » qui autorise tout un chacun, avec un investissement modéré, de réaliser d’excellents enregistrements et de graver des CDs sur un ordinateur personnel. Cela donne une grande liberté d’action et la possibilité de créer des petits modules d’enseignement sur logiciels de la musique qui sont quasi autonomes et qui donnent satisfaction, tant aux maîtres qu’aux élèves. Dès lors, dans toutes les facultés de musique des universités, les conservatoires ou les écoles d’enseignement de la musique, nous trouvons des professeurs qui conçoivent leurs cours en utilisant ces nouvelles technologies. De même, les enseignants peuvent eux-mêmes créer des exercices de musique sur des sup- ports analogiques ou numériques (les bandes ou les cassettes d’enregistrements audio) mis à la disposition des étudiants, qu’ils pourront pratiquer chez eux ou dans une classe aménagée à cet effet. Bien qu’à l’origine expérimental, person- 4 LOM (Learning Object Metadata) est un modèle de description de données pour des objets d’apprentissage. 5 SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) est une spécification permettant de créer des objets pédagogiques structurés. 6 MPEG-21 (Moving Picture Experts Group) est une norme proposant une architecture pour l’interopérabilité et l’utilisation simple de tous les contenus multimédias. 7 L’enseignement télévisuel est actif depuis longtemps dans les universités dans le domaine de la formation continue qui s’adresse aux professionnels. Quelques exemples : en France, Centre de Télé-Enseignement Universitaires (CTEU), les Services d’Enseignement à Distance (SEAD) ; au Ca- nada, au Québec, Télé université du Québec (Supérieur) ; en Suisse, Formation universitaire à distance (Supérieur), etc. Intersections29-2.indd 86 10/25/10 3:10:50 PM 29/2 (2009) 87 nel et marginal, cet emploi des technologies dans l’enseignement musical est devenu bientôt tellement répandu et fréquent qu’il s’est finalement fait remar- quer par les instances et les autorités de l’éducation et de la pédagogie. Voyons ce qui s’est passé en France. enseignement à distance de la musique pratiqué dans les écoles françaises En France, le Ministère de l’éducation a rapidement été informé de ce phéno- mène de « création de cours de musiques par l’informatique » et s’est intéressé dès 1992 à s’associer aux grandes institutions de recherches musicales comme l’IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), le GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) et MIM (Musique et Informatique de Marseille) afin de produire des contenus éducatifs de musique pouvant conve- nir au système scolaire français, de l’élémentaire au lycée (Maestracci 2003). La réussite est exemplaire. Depuis 1998, dans le cadre de ses missions pour développer l’usage des technologies de l’information et de la communication dans l’éducation le Ministère mène une politique de développement de ressources multimé- dias pédagogiques, qui se traduit notamment par un dispositif de soutien élaboré et mis en œuvre par la Direction de la technologie. (Plas 2003, p. 42) Plusieurs outils ont été mis en place ; ils existaient déjà commercialement ou ont été développés avec la demande académique. Ils sont énumérés ici in- différemment dans leur ordre d’apparition dans l’usage commercial et dans le système public d’enseignement. Étienne Gégout, professeur d’éducation musicale, coordonnateur du réseau TICE Éducation Musicale, Direction de la technologie (Gégout 2003, p. 46–47), décrit le « kit » indispensable au professeur d’éducation musicale en sept clas- ses d’outils ; la 8e classe (le cartable électronique) est ajoutée par Jean-Marc Maurer (2003, p. 38) : 1. Les outils de création au service des œuvres musicales (par exemple, Musi- cLab) : l’outil de création Musique Lab — conçu pour l’Éducation natio- nale par des professeurs en collaboration avec l’IRCAM — est une série logicielle composée de six modules (Hauteur et intensité, Polycycles, Construction rythmique, Échelles et modes, Nuages, Montage). Musi- queLab permet l’étude, la manipulation et l’expérimentation des notions essentielles du langage musical qui organisent toutes les esthétiques et proposent des ateliers de création sonore. 2. Les séquenceurs MIDI (par exemple, Cubase) : un séquenceur MIDI est un appareil ou logiciel qui permet de gérer des données MIDI et qui pos- sède des fonctions d’enregistrement sur plusieurs canaux virtuels. Les marques connues sont Logic Pro, Cubase (de marque RIP — Reconnu d’Intérêt Pédagogique) et Cakewalk. 3. Les éditeurs de partition (par exemple, Finale) : un logiciel éditeur de partitions sert à retranscrire des musiques sur des portées musicales. Il Intersections29-2.indd 87 10/25/10 3:10:50 PM 88 Intersections est souvent intégré dans le séquenceur lui-même, ou « brut » comme les marques Finale, Encore et Sibelius. 4. Les éditeurs audionumériques (par exemple, Sound Forge) : l’éditeur audionumérique est un logiciel qui permet d’enregistrer, de corriger, de transformer et de monter le son qu’on enregistre ou qui sont pré- enregistrés. On connaît les marques Sound Forge, WaveLab, CoolEdit. 5 . Les « arrangeurs » (par exemple, Band In Box) : un arrangeur est un lo- giciel qui permet de transformer un enchaînement harmonique en un accompagnement instrumental dans le style choisi par l’utilisateur. La marque la plus connue est Band in Box. 6 . Les logiciels de présentation (par exemple, Asymétrix Présentation) : un logiciel de présentation permet de créer des applications multimédia qui manipulent des fichiers MIDI, sonores et vidéo. Le logiciel le plus appré- cié des professeurs de musique est Asymétrix Présentation . 7 . Les bancs de montage multimédia (par exemple, Music Maker) : un banc de montage ou une plateforme de montage multimédia est un logiciel qui permet de traiter simultanément des images, des sons MIDI, Wave et MP3 et des vidéos. La marque la plus utilisée dans l’éducation nationale est MusicMaker. 8. Le cartable électronique : le cartable électronique est une dénomination de l’ensemble des outils réunis — ordinateur portable, Internet et logi- ciels — qui est mis à la disposition de l’étudiant. Cohabitation de deux approches pédagogiques : l’autoformation et la for- mation traditionnelle Définition de l’ « autoformation » : Avec l’implication des TICE et des TICCE dans l’enseignement, nous décou- vrons une nouvelle approche pédagogique, « l’autoformation », qui s’ajoute à la première, « la formation traditionnelle ». L’autoformation, que nous aurions appelée autrefois autodidaxie, consiste à encourager l’étudiant à pratiquer une grande autonomie dans ses acquisitions tout au long de son apprentissage. En effet, l’e-learning part du principe qu’il met à la disposition de l’étudiant tous les outils et les moyens de la formation qu’il a choisie. Le dispositif, qui se veut très complet et souple, est d’habitude amplement expliqué au futur étudiant, qu’on appelle désormais « apprenant » en langage d’apprentissage à distance. Ce dispositif est ainsi composé de séances en « présentiel ». Ceci signifie qu’une rencontre classique entre professeur et étudiant(s), à une date et à une heure fixe, est organisée. Ces séances sont suivies de sessions en « distanciel » : elles offrent à l’apprenant la possibilité de travailler à un contenu de cours mis en ligne dans un site sur Internet selon ses propres disponibilités, dans le temps et dans le lieu de son choix (le soir, le week-end, chez lui ou à l’étranger…). Enfin, l’apprenant peut rester en contact avec un « tuteur », variation du traditionnel assistant du professeur, et en relation avec ses collègues étudiants par le biais de forums et de rencontres en visioconférences. Dans une formation générale, l’e-learning n’est pas le seul mode d’enseigne- ment recommandé, surtout dans l’apprentissage du musicien professionnel, Intersections29-2.indd 88 10/25/10 3:10:50 PM 29/2 (2009) 89 qu’il soit compositeur, interprète ou musicologue. En effet, l’e-learning musi- cal doit s’ajouter aux outils d’apprentissage conventionnels et convenus pour constituer avec ces derniers une version moderne du métier de musicien. En effet, l’expérience nous montre que les formations spécialisées, en musique comme d’autres disciplines, continuent d’exiger de suivre les grandes lignes de l’enseignement traditionnel comportant la rigueur indispensable à une for- mation de qualité. Dans ces institutions, la hiérarchie des spécialisations et l’organisation des matières ont, de tout temps, été réactualisées : les contenus des cours sont régulièrement adaptés aux découvertes et aux méthodes du mo- ment et, finalement, l’absolue nécessité du contact avec des maîtres de renom ou de la régie par de grands directeurs, reste incontournable, outre les progrès technologiques. Aussi, lorsque l’on souhaite adapter à distance des cours des écoles musicales professionnelles, il semble préférable de se conformer dans un premier temps à la forme classique du cours pour que la valeur ajoutée que représente l’apport technologique puisse être intégrée de façon pertinente en développant des supports d’éducation inédits. On peut employer l’e-learning en respectant les impératifs de l’éthique professionnelle dans l’enseignement de la musique, comme en observant les obligations sociales et économiques de ces institutions. Depuis longtemps, les progrès technologiques multimédias et audiovisuels sont utilisés pour être mis au service de ce savoir héréditaire et séculaire que représente la pratique musicale occidentale. L’e-learning peut être joint sans difficulté à la panoplie existante. Distinction entre les cours d’ « autoformation » et les cours « traditionnels mis à distance » : Pour la clarté de l’exposé, il est approprié de distinguer les deux types de cours à distance suivants : 1. Les cours de type « autoformation », (sur logiciels) que nous trouvons déjà en très grand nombre dans toutes les universités et les écoles de musique dans le monde. 2. Les cours de type « traditionnels », calqués sur le modèle des matières enseignées dans les facultés de musique et des classes des conservatoires, qui sont mis à distance (sur vidéos, PDF, etc.) et de quelle façon ils sont réalisés. Sont ici détaillés les cours d’autoformation, en profitant des exemples cités cor- respondants, pour voir : a) La question des moyens techniques employés dans ces cours — qui sont sur logiciels, sur vidéos ou entièrement sous formats PDF — et qui utili- sent à des degrés divers des fichiers sonores MP3 et des fichiers d’images JPEG, des animations Flash, etc. b) La question des droits d’auteur, d’exécution et de reproduction. ii- les cours d’autoformation Il existe aujourd’hui autant de façon d’utiliser les nouvelles technologies dans un cours de musique qu’il y a de sortes de cours, voire de professeurs qui en- seignent la musique et qui créent dès lors un produit original, marqué de leur Intersections29-2.indd 89 10/25/10 3:10:50 PM 90 Intersections personnalité. Souvent un enseignant qui décide d’employer des ressources technologiques modernes pour montrer différemment ses leçons et suppor- ter autrement son programme est un éducateur qui n’hésite pas à sortir des sentiers battus. Pour ce professeur, il s’agit d’une création personnelle et d’une « œuvre » pédagogique. Il est à l’écoute de ce qui fascine et environne naturel- lement ses élèves d’aujourd’hui, et veut tenter de les rejoindre ou de les sen- sibiliser à la matière ou la discipline musicale qu’il enseigne par l’utilisation d’outils de communication connus et largement répandus auprès de ce jeune public — Internet, le chat, les lecteurs MP3, etc. Cette sorte d’enseignant sera donc notre spécialiste type des cours d’autoformation. les moyens techniques 1) : les cours sur logiciels Les cours sur logiciels représentent le cours d’autoformation à la fois le plus répandu et le plus exigent au niveau de sa fabrication. En effet, ils demandent à l’éducateur une certaine connaissance des logiciels et des applications multi- média, tels que la technologie Flash, ou d’autres formats ou technologies. Ces cours sont généralement conçus pour permettre aux étudiants de pratiquer des exercices de dictées musicales, de formation de l’oreille ou d’analyses musica- les. Par exemple, il s’agit pour l’apprenant de reconnaître des extraits des musi- ques (formation de l’oreille), de distinguer des parties des formes musicales des morceaux de musique (analyse musicale) ou de donner le nom des notes des musiques qui sont jouées (dictée musicale), etc. Ces exercices (qui peuvent être créés en très grand nombre une fois que le procédé technique est assimilé par le professeur) ont l’avantage de permettre une pratique abondante, voire infinie des mêmes exercices musicaux jusqu’à ce que l’étudiant maîtrise le sujet. Par- mi les cours actuellement mis à distance, les cours de reconnaissance auditive sont ceux que les institutions et les professeurs adaptent volontiers sur logiciel, car il s’agit d’une matière qui nécessite le plus d’explications et de répétitions afin que l’étudiant soit à l’aise avec ses principes. Ces cours sont déjà en place à l’Université Laval à Québec et à l’Université Paris 8 à Paris. exerciseurs de formation auditive (Faculté de musique de l’Université Laval à Québec) La Faculté de musique de l’Université Laval à Québec propose en ligne des « Exerciseurs de formation auditive » dont on peut faire l’essai gratuitement pendant quelques jours. Ensuite il est demandé de s’inscrire si on veut conti- nuer de pratiquer cette formation. Logiciels de pratique de formation auditive (Faculté de musique de l’Univer- sité de Paris 8) La Faculté de musique de l’Université Paris 8 présente à ses étudiants des logi- ciels de pratique de dictées, de reconnaissances d’accords, etc. Ces derniers ne sont pas en ligne car les professeurs ont souvent employé de courts extraits de musiques connues sans avoir acquis les droits d’exécution ou de reproduction des morceaux. Néanmoins, ces logiciels sont mis à la disposition des étudiants Intersections29-2.indd 90 10/25/10 3:10:50 PM 29/2 (2009) 91 dans les locaux de la Faculté sur des postes d’ordinateurs et leur utilisation ne sortant pas cadre de l’université, la question des droits est négligée et tempo- rairement éludée. À dire vrai, on ferme les yeux sur ces pratiques car elles sont en total désaccord avec la loi française. De fait, il existe en France « le droit de citation » qui concerne les images (ici, les partitions) et qui se rapproche de la doctrine du fair use (ensemble des règles de droit d’origine législative et jurisprudentielle) américain et canadien, en vigueur dans la plupart des pays de common law. On traduit en français par « usage loyal », « usage raisonnable » ou « usage acceptable ». Mais on aura remarqué que le « droit de citation » s’étend aux images mais non pas aux « sons et à la musique ». D’où une extension du « droit de citation » aucunement légale en réalité. Mais nous revenons plus loin dans l’article, et à chaque fois que c’est nécessaire, sur la question des différents droits (d’auteur, d’exécution et de reproduction). les moyens techniques 2) : les cours enregistrés entièrement sur vidéos Un autre type d’enseignement est la captation du cours sur vidéo : le cours en- tier est enregistré et l’enregistrement est configuré dans un format efficace pour la transmission par Internet. L’étudiant peut à sa guise arrêter le film du cours, le réécouter, le reprendre autant de fois qu’il en éprouve le besoin. Le cours sur vidéo peut être accompagné de sa version « papier » (PDF) que prépare le pro- fesseur à l’intention de l’étudiant de la même manière qu’un contenu de cours remis à l’étudiant qui vient en classe. Formation auditive FMa-113-08 et FMa-114-08 (Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Rimouski) Josée April, et l’auteure du présent article, ont réalisé l’enregistrement d’un cours « live » de formation auditive à l’intention des étudiants du Conserva- toire de musique du Québec à Rimouski. Ce cours a été enregistré sur vidéo et réalisé en cours à distance avec le modèle Opale de Scenari8. Force est de constater que les deux procédés, « logiciel ou exerciseurs » ou « live en vidéo » fonctionnent tous les deux très bien pour ce type de formation qu’est l’écriture musicale. les moyens techniques 3) : les cours combinant les fichiers pdf, mp3 et Jpeg À l’instar des cours dans d’autres domaines de l’éducation, on voit le cours sur « papier » qui est un résumé complet de la matière, distribué par email sur or- dinateur et téléchargeable sous format PDF. En musique on ajoute souvent aux cours qui sont donnés en textes explicatifs et partitions les illustrations sonores sous forme de fichiers audio MP3 et des images sous forme de fichiers JPEG. 8 Opale est une chaîne éditoriale qui permet la rédaction, la gestion et la publication multisup- port de documents de formation de type académique. Scenari est une suite logicielle libre de concep- tion et d’utilisation de chaînes éditoriales pour la création de documents multimédia. Intersections29-2.indd 91 10/25/10 3:10:50 PM 92 Intersections iii- le problème des droits d’auteurs, de compositeurs, d’exécution et de reproduction Il est courant de faire des photocopies des partitions dans le cadre des cours de musique des institutions d’enseignement et cette pratique est tolérée parce qu’elle ne sort pas de la classe et donc du cercle pédagogique. Il en va de même de l’échange en classe, ou du commerce sans but lucratif, des extraits d’enregis- trements de musique : ils sont relativement consentis dans la mesure de l’exer- cice pédagogique. Cependant, juridiquement, cette question n’est pas exacte- ment perçue de la même façon de part et d’autre de l’Atlantique ; les Français ont tendance à s’arrêter « au strict cercle de famille », alors que la jurisprudence anglo-saxonne prend volontiers en compte la notion de fair use, citée plus tôt, pour les usages académiques ou en direction des handicapés. Cette question des droits d’auteurs et d’exécutions a longtemps fait obstacle à la diffusion et au progrès des cours à distance dans les établissements d’enseignement de la mu- sique : c’est l’un des problèmes qui gêne l’avancement de l’e-learning musical. Toutefois, plusieurs solutions ont été trouvées, le plus souvent au cas par cas, et la décision finale de relever ce défi semble appartenir désormais à l’institution et aux professeurs qui acceptent de tenter l’expérience de l’enseignement en ligne ou à distance. Des outils ont été mis en place pour dégager une ligne de conduite et une méthode afin de résoudre la problématique des droits d’auteurs et compositeurs, mais les droits d’exécution et de reproduction constituent fi- nalement les principales difficultés en ce qui concerne les formations « à dis- tance » diffusées sur Internet. droits d’exécutions : les différentes solutions possibles Lors d’une rencontre d’experts en science de la communication et de musiciens à la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Paris Nord concernant l’enseignement à distance de la musique, la question des droits d’auteurs et d’exécutions a été le premier sujet abordé. Étaient réunis à cette occasion Nicolas Desjardins9, Hen- ri Hudrisier10, Guillaume Loizillon11, Gabriel Popovici12 et Priscilla Velut13. Contrat préalable Dans cette réunion, on a examiné la difficulté qu’il y a désormais d’exercer un contrôle sur la diffusion des enregistrements commerciaux des musiques qui concernent directement les droits que perçoivent les interprètes sur leurs enregistrements des œuvres musicales : droits d’exécution. Ainsi, l’idée a été suggérée d’établir et de payer un prix forfaitaire qui serait accordé au musicien- interprète, dès l’enregistrement d’une œuvre, en prévision de toutes les cir- 9 Nicolas Desjardins est Directeur général des Conservatoires d’art dramatique et de musique du Québec. 10 Henri Hudrisier est Maître de Conférence et HDR (Habilité à diriger des recherches) à l’Uni- versité de Paris 8. 11 Guillaume Loizillon, Professeur au Département de musique de l’Université de Paris 8. 12 Gabriel Popovici, Responsable du Centre de documentation de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris-Nord. 13 Priscilla Velut, Professeur en informatique de l’Université de Technologies de Compiègne. Intersections29-2.indd 92 10/25/10 3:10:51 PM 29/2 (2009) 93 constances où ensuite cet enregistrement pourrait être utilisé. C’est un moyen simple qui a l’avantage d’être parfaitement réalisable et acceptable. Compilation spéciale faite par la maison de disque pour un établissement d’enseignement Concernant les cours d’autoformation que les professeurs ont déjà réalisés, des enregistrements de musique ont été utilisés sans en avoir acquis des droits d’exécution : il a été suggéré alors de séparer le contenu pédagogique de son contenu d’« exemples ». Ce qui veut dire que l’enseignant peut concevoir un cours comme une grille d’analyse qui est posée directement sur la source d’ex- traits musicaux. Et inversement, on peut décider de constituer un cours et de l’« habiller » ensuite de musiques sélectionnées avec l’accord et selon l’arran- gement de la maison de disque — qui peut choisir de produire de son côté une édition de compilations spéciale en vue d’un enseignement déterminé ou de l’édition d’une compilation d’une grande variété d’extraits. Les étudiants n’ont plus qu’à se procurer l’enregistrement des extraits sonores comme ils achètent un livre de classe ou un manuel scolaire en début d’année. dissociation du contenu pédagogique de son contenu d’exemples La dissociation du contenu du cours de ses exemples est une manœuvre com- plètement inédite mais absolument exécutable avec les modèles de chaînes édi- toriales puisque leurs ingénieurs ont poussé à l’extrême l’idée de la séparation du fond et de la forme. Il faut simplement que l’enseignant exploite cette pers- pective qui lui est donnée au travers de l’emploi des chaînes éditoriales. droits de reproduction : un constat fait par serge lacasse, professeur de la faculté de musique de l’université laval à québec Au Canada, par exemple, d’un point de vue strictement légal, pour qu’une mu- sique originale puisse être diffusée en ligne, elle doit, au préalable, être fixée sur un fichier MP3, accessible sur un serveur, à partir desquels, pour être diffusée sur Internet, la SODRAC14 exige 500 $ par « chanson » (soit une musique d’une durée d’environ 3 minutes) avant d’accorder les droits de reproduction dans le cadre d’un cours en ligne. Vu le coût de l’entreprise, Serge Lacasse conseille « d’exploiter les outils existants légaux (ex. iTunes, YouTube, Deezer ou Mu- sicMe) pour faire entendre des extraits dans le cadre d’un cours en ligne parce que ces sites offrent la possibilité de créer des listes d’écoute » (Lacasse 2010), comme un étudiant se procurerait une liste de livres conseillée par un profes- seur afin de suivre son cours. Nous terminons ici cette courte analyse des cours d’autoformation et des questions de droits qu’ils soulèvent pour aborder maintenant les cours tradi- tionnels « mis à distance ». 14 Société canadienne de gestion du droit de reproduction qui représente les auteurs, composi- teurs et éditeurs au Canada. Intersections29-2.indd 93 10/25/10 3:10:51 PM 94 Intersections iv- Cours traditionnels mis à distance Il existe différentes leçons de musique composées selon le domaine musical étudié. Cela va de l’apprentissage d’un instrument ou de la voix, en passant par la classe d’instrumentation ou d’orchestration, au cours d’histoire de la mu- sique ; le premier se caractérise par un enseignement individuel, « du maître à l’élève », alors que le dernier peut être donné devant un très grand groupe. Entre les deux se présente un grand éventail de classes de cours, en fonction de la matière qu’ils traitent et du nombre d’élèves à qui ils peuvent s’adresser simultanément pour être bien expliqués et bien compris (de petits, moyens ou grands groupes de participants). Pour chacun des types de cours, nous don- nerons un exemple de « réalisation à distance » qui sera commenté et explicité ensuite. Mais disons déjà qu’il y a « le cours privé » ou « en petit groupe », le « cours en moyen groupe » et le « cours magistral ». Le cours privé ou le cours en petit groupe représente la situation où un maître enseigne l’interprétation d’un instrument, comme, par exemple, la leçon de piano. Il peut durer une heure, ou davantage, et il existe la version en master class où le maître enseigne à l’élève devant les autres participants qui profi- tent de son exemple. Le cas est similaire avec le cours de composition qui peut se donner individuellement ou en petit groupe d’étudiants pour que chacun puisse profiter du travail de ses collègues. Ex. Cours de piano à distance du département de musique de l’Univer-• sité d’Ottawa. Ex. Cours de saxophone donné par Benoît Plourde, Directeur du Conser-• vatoire de musique du Québec à Rimouski. Le cours en groupe moyen peut concerner, par exemple, le cours d’écriture musicale, harmonie tonale ou contrepoint, qui est donné généralement dans une petite classe d’un nombre limité d’élèves (une dizaine), et les cours théo- riques et pratiques — de solfège, théorie et dictées musicales — qui peuvent regrouper une douzaine d’étudiants. Ex. Cours d’harmonie tonale de Josée April, professeur au Conserva-• toire de musique du Québec à Rimouski. Il existe aussi les cours d’instrumentation ou d’orchestration, les classes d’analyse musicale et les classes d’ethnomusicologie, qui peuvent se pratiquer dans une classe moyenne d’une quinzaine d’étudiants ou plus. Ex. Cours d’ethnomusicologie de Monique Desroches, professeur d’eth-• nomusicologie de la Faculté de musique de l’Université de Montréal. Enfin il y a le cours magistral, comme, par exemple, celui d’histoire de la musique, ou tout exposé de type « conférence », qui est présenté dans un am- phithéâtre et qui peut s’adresser à un grand groupe d’étudiants ou un large auditoire. Intersections29-2.indd 94 10/25/10 3:10:51 PM 29/2 (2009) 95 Ex. Cours d’histoire de la musique de Dujka Smoje, professeur hono-• raire de la Faculté de musique de l’Université de Montréal « Les sources de la musique occidentale (du Big Bang à Bach) » ■ « Les grands moments de l’histoire musicale (de Bach à 1992) » ■ Voyons maintenant chacun de ces types de cours en étudiant l’exemple qui lui a été associé. le cours magistral et sa version « à distance » Description du cours d’histoire de la musique de Dujka smoje de la Faculté de musique de l’Université de Montréal De prime abord, le cours d’histoire de la musique peut sembler être un des cours les plus faciles à intégrer dans un enseignement à distance, car l’on peut imaginer qu’il ne s’agit que d’enregistrer sur bande-vidéo le professeur qui donne son cours en classe et ensuite de le diffuser à la radio ou mieux, à la télévision. Or le projet et sa démonstration peuvent être plus complexes. Nous évoque- rons ici la version télévisuelle du cours d’histoire de la musique de Dujka Smoje, professeur honoraire de la Faculté de musique de l’Université de Montréal, qui montre toute l’exigence que la mise sur pied d’un tel enseignement à distance peut demander mais aussi les avantages que le programme révèle. Ces deux cours créés respectivement en 1989 et en 1992 ont été une expérien- ce innovatrice réalisée par Dujka Smoje et produite par la Faculté de musique avec l’aide technique de l’équipe de l’audiovisuel de l’Université de Montréal. Difficultés de réalisation De fait, Dujka Smoje aurait pu simplement demander au technicien à la ca- méra de filmer son cours afin de transmettre le contenu tel quel à ses étudiants qui pouvaient ensuite en disposer à leur guise. Mais Madame Smoje a préféré s’interroger sur le médium audiovisuel lui-même et elle a pensé à une méthode originale, inspirée du modèle platonicien, pour composer un cours inédit pour la télévision. La stratégie adoptée pour passer à l’écran mon enseignement a été de re- noncer au monologue — le professeur disant ordinairement le contenu de son cours comme il fait en classe — pour utiliser la manière du « dia- logue », c’est-à-dire en donnant son cours dans un échange arrangé avec un animateur et par le jeu de « questions et réponses » (selon le modèle platonicien) : ce moyen s’est avéré le plus efficace pour traduire mon ensei- gnement. (Smoje 2008) Les difficultés strictement pédagogiques ont été après coup de transposer le cours (monologue) en émission télé (dialogue) et de resserrer un contenu de cours de trois heures en une émission de 56 minutes sans que cette réduction dans le temps n’entraîne une simplification excessive du propos. La recherche de documentation visuelle et d’illustrations sonores appropriées et pouvant convenir au médium de la télévision a été le prochain défi pédagogique. Enfin, Intersections29-2.indd 95 10/25/10 3:10:51 PM 96 Intersections la structure de l’exposé a représenté la dernière problématique : en effet, il est connu que l’attention d’un spectateur se disperse assez rapidement, aussi Ma- dame Smoje a choisi d’organiser son cours en séquences filmées de moins de 5 minutes chacune, permettant en cela aux spectateurs-étudiants de prévoir un comportement d’écoute assidue durant ce laps de temps défini. Les avantages pédagogiques de l’entreprise Concernant l’enseignement donné en classe aux étudiants en histoire de la mu- sique, la possibilité de combiner le cours et les cassettes vidéo ont montré ra- pidement tout le bénéfice qu’on pouvait en tirer : en effet, aussitôt réalisées, les cassettes VHS ont servi d’outil pédagogique fondamental. L’essentiel de l’en- seignement se trouvant sur ces cassettes, les étudiants pouvaient les réécouter autant de fois que nécessaire. De même, ils pouvaient fragmenter le contenu et préparer les questions qu’ils souhaitaient poser en classe la semaine suivante. De son côté, le professeur, sachant que les étudiants avaient visionné le cours à l’avance, pouvaient se permettre de développer et d’approfondir certains as- pects du sujet du cours. Dujka Smoje relate elle-même : Grâce aux scénarios des émissions, rigoureusement structurés et minutés, les cours étaient construits et articulés très scrupuleusement. L’exposé à l’écran était complété par les documents pédagogiques écrits, précisant les objectifs de chaque cours, identifiant le sujet de chaque séquence, les détails de l’illustration musicale, et le complément de lecture. Et, enfin, chaque fois que c’était possible, un extrait de la partition des œuvres était présenté. Ainsi l’étudiant avait une vision claire du sujet et de la démar- che à suivre pour maîtriser la matière et la connaissance du répertoire. (Smoje 2008) Ces vidéos du cours accompagnés des documents pédagogiques ont ain- si donné au professeur une très grande liberté d’innover en classe, d’avoir le temps de faire entendre davantage de musique du répertoire et de discuter des partitions comme de disposer de périodes pour les échanges suscités par les informations contenues dans la vidéo. À l’évidence, cette dynamique du cours télévisé de Madame Smoje correspond en tout point aux cours en ligne d’aujourd’hui avec leurs forums sur Internet et les rencontres en classe. Les droits d’exécution Dujka Smoje a utilisé ici le moyen préconisé aujourd’hui par différentes écoles de musique : en effet, lorsque c’est possible, il peut être demandé à une classe d’interprètes faisant partie de l’école où se donne le cours d’histoire de la mu- sique, d’enregistrer des œuvres musicales choisies qui illustrent les exemples de la musique d’une époque et d’utiliser ces enregistrements avec l’accord des musiciens dans ce but pédagogique précis et à aucun autre escient. C’est ainsi qu’ont participé à la réalisation de ce cours de musique les professeurs de la Faculté accompagnés de leurs étudiants : Marc Durand, pianiste, Lise Daoust, flûtiste, Réjean Poirier, organiste et claveciniste, Alan Belkin, compositeur, Vla- dimir Landsman, violoniste, Yuli Turovsky, violoncelliste et chef d’ orchestre ; Intersections29-2.indd 96 10/25/10 3:10:51 PM 29/2 (2009) 97 le NEM, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne fondé et dirigé par Lorraine Vaillancourt, et I Musici, orchestre de 15 musiciens fondé et dirigé par Yuli Turovsky. Le problème des droits s’est arrêté avec la première période musicale définie par le cours, des origines à Jean-Sébastien Bach. Il est devenu omniprésent et presque insurmontable lorsque la seconde période, de Jean-Sébastien Bach à nos jours, a été abordée, à cause principalement des images. En effet, il a été quasi impos- sible d’utiliser des reproductions de peintures (par exemple celles de Henri Ma- tisse), même si ces images n’étaient exposées que quelques secondes à l’écran, car les musées, et les agents qui les géraient, ont exigé à l’époque des sommes très importantes pour les ayants droit de chaque image. Il en a été de même pour la reproduction des exemples musicaux avec les sociétés de reproduction de musique. Tenant compte qu’il était inséré plus de 800 images — reproductions d’œu- vres d’art visuelles dans la deuxième série —, cela représentait une facture que l’Université n’était pas en mesure de payer. Les nombreuses discus- sions pour faire valoir le rôle éducatif de l’utilisation de ces reproductions, ainsi que toutes les explications montrant que rien ni personne — ni le professeur, ni l’institution — ne tiraient aucun avantage financier de ces cours, n’ont résolu le problème et les cours ont été retirés du circuit public. Ces difficultés (des droits) existaient en 1999, pour la diffusion des cours par la télévision, et aujourd’hui nous pouvons penser que la situation est inchangée. (Smoje 2008) En effet, il semble qu’en 1992 les musées et les gestionnaires mandatés, pour faire respecter les ayants droit, aient été inflexibles. Pourtant, la contribution de ces travaux d’enseignement télévisuels à faire connaître et partager la cultu- re des musées par un plus large public était évidente. Néanmoins l’idée de pro- fit, dans les musées, a persisté au détriment de l’idée d’un enrichissement de l’esprit, contrairement aux professeurs et chercheurs impliqués dans le projet d’enseignement qui n’envisageaient tirer aucun bénéfice personnel au départ. Ce type d’entreprise, à la longue, devrait certainement mettre en place des droits pour les auteurs des cours et des illustrations sonores comme visuelles, mais ce n’est pas la motivation première des acteurs de ce projet d’enseigne- ment. De plus, l’expérience montre que, souvent, c’est le contraire qui se pro- duit : les enseignants qui, comme Madame Smoje, poursuivent des recherches dans le domaine de l’iconographie musicale, doivent nécessairement payer des droits pour chaque reproduction dans un article publié. Les auteurs doivent « ruser » en découpant les images et en reproduisant des fragments en blanc et noir pour réduire les coûts. Pourtant, généralement, ces mêmes auteurs ne perçoivent aucune compensation des revues qui les publient. Coûts de réalisation des cours à distance de l’histoire de la musique et frais d’inscription à ces cours pour les étudiants En ce qui a trait au coût de réalisation des cours à distance et des frais d’ins- cription à ces cours, Dujka Smoje suggère de considérer l’entreprise à moyen et à long terme. Les droits d’inscription ne peuvent pas compenser le coût de Intersections29-2.indd 97 10/25/10 3:10:51 PM 98 Intersections l’affaire dès la première année. Cependant, l’entreprise est parfaitement possi- ble et rentable si ces frais sont répartis sur plusieurs trimestres, voire sur trois ou quatre ans, en mettant à jour régulièrement les documents pédagogiques en ligne, comme le permet actuellement l’usage des modèles (logiciels) de chaînes éditoriales15 tel que Opale de Scenari. Le prix (de l’enseignement à distance) pourrait être légèrement supérieur par rapport à celui facturé par crédit des cours en classe. Au terme de deux ou trois ans, l’investissement peut être amorti. (Smoje 2008) Autrefois, lorsque Dujka Smoje a conçu ses cours d’histoire télévisés et les documents pédagogiques qui les accompagnaient, Internet n’existait pas en- core. Mais avec les moyens actuels, la conception d’un cours vidéo pour l’ensei- gnement à distance serait tout à fait dynamique grâce à son complément en li- gne. La question qui pourrait être posée à propos de l’enseignement à distance concerne l’intérêt du grand public. L’Université n’a pas seulement la mission de former des professionnels, mais aussi d’ouvrir l’accès à la culture au grand public. De cette façon, les activités musicales pourraient compter sur un public élargi. Cette mission culturelle est souvent ignorée par l’université comme étant marginale et sans intérêt financier. Pourtant, les divers témoignages des personnes qui suivaient, en 1992, les cours d’Histoire de la musique à la télévision, ont souligné l’intérêt de ce type de solution. (Smoje 2008) le cours en groupe moyen Description du cours d’ethnomusicologie de Monique Desroches de la Fa- culté de musique de l’Université de Montréal À l’Université de Montréal, par l’entremise de SUITE-CEFES et avec l’aide de techniciens de la plateforme WebCT, un cours d’ethnomusicologie a été réalisé par le professeur Monique Desroches, Responsable du secteur Ethnomusicolo- gie de la Faculté de musique. Monique Desroches a conçu le cours « Introduc- tion à l’ethnomusicologie (cours en ligne) » (MUL 3314). La réalisation comme la production ont nécessité la collaboration d’un technicien de WebCT durant deux ans, à raison d’une rencontre par semaine. De même, Madame Desroches a été invitée à suivre une formation de 45 heures pour connaître et appren- dre le fonctionnement de la plateforme WebCT. Cette entreprise a permis de construire un cours, annoncé dans le site du Laboratoire LRMM — Labora- toire de Recherche des Musiques du Monde — qui s’adresse aux étudiants qui peuvent s’y inscrire au même titre qu’un cours régulier de la programmation des cours de la Faculté de musique. À l’inverse du cours d’histoire de Dujka Smoje, Monique Desroches incite ses étudiants à assister en classe à son ensei- gnement, puis à aller suivre le programme complémentaire de son cours sur le 15 Une chaîne éditoriale est un moyen méthodologique et technologique développé par la re- cherche en ingénierie documentaire. Le procédé consiste à réaliser un modèle de document, à assister les tâches de création du contenu et à automatiser leur mise en forme. Intersections29-2.indd 98 10/25/10 3:10:51 PM 29/2 (2009) 99 module en ligne. Des discussions sur forums hebdomadaires sont assurées et les étudiants sont conviés à y participer régulièrement. Concernant la contribution et les avantages pédagogiques de ce cours sur Internet, Desroches souligne le dynamisme (cette qualité fréquemment énon- cée dans l’ensemble des valeurs qu’on attribue à l’e-learning) dans la partici- pation des étudiants à ses cours. De même que le professeur signale la grande flexibilité dans la présentation du cours et la quantité importante d’informa- tions qu’elle peut joindre à ses documents pédagogiques sous forme d’images, d’illustrations sonores et de vidéo de toutes sortes. En effet, l’ethnomusicolo- gie est connue pour être essentiellement un travail qui repose sur la collecte de sources inédites de musiques populaires ou classiques de toutes régions du globe ; son activité essentielle est souvent de réunir dans les meilleures condi- tions les exemples musicaux trouvés et choisis des civilisations étudiées. Par conséquent, la question des droits d’auteur, des compositeurs ou d’exécution est plus facilement esquivée qu’en ce qui a trait à la musique classique parce qu’il s’agit souvent d’œuvres non encore répertoriées et que ce premier exercice de catalogage permet de classer et conserver souvent ces musiques pour la pre- mière fois et de profiter de cette occasion pour signifier et protéger les droits des musiciens qui les interprètent. Description du cours d’harmonie tonale de Josée april du Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Rimouski Le cours d’harmonie tonale de Josée April, M04-201-202-203-204, est actuel- lement en travail de réalisation à distance par le professeur et par l’auteur du présent texte : en effet, il est entièrement enregistré sur vidéos numériques, de la façon dont il est donné en classe au Conservatoire de musique de Rimouski. Le cours fait l’objet de l’enregistrement de trois disquettes vidéo de 20 minutes chacune, totalisant l’heure de la leçon, l’ensemble du cours se divisant sur deux sessions de 14 leçons respectives. Ces vidéos servent ensuite de matériel de base qui donne le contenu théorique et pratique de la leçon. Par exemple, on voit Josée April expliciter les règles d’harmonie en utilisant un exemple d’une mé- lodie à harmoniser inscrite au tableau. Une fois données, les explications orales sont ajoutées à la vidéo sous forme de sous-titres. Ces sous-titres sont ensuite repris intégralement pour être rassemblés par écrits dans les pages qui accom- pagnent en parallèle le déroulement de la vidéo : ainsi les étudiants peuvent-ils suivre en lecture les mêmes explications qui sont données oralement par April. À la fin de chaque leçon, on retrouve deux exercices à réaliser à la maison, tels qu’il est demandé en classe et la correction de ces exercices se retrouve en début de leçon suivante en vidéo, c’est-à-dire la leçon suivante en classe. L’harmoni- sation d’une mélodie étant un travail qui n’est pas accompli de la même façon par chaque étudiant, car il s’agit d’une création musicale originale, la correc- tion de chaque devoir est individuelle : cela signifie que le devoir réalisé par un étudiant qui suit le cours à chaque semaine sur Internet doit pouvoir être rendu au professeur ou à un tuteur avant la prochaine leçon. La notion de tutorat, ou d’accompagnement d’un élève suivant un cours à distance, est une conception qui a été développée depuis l’origine de Intersections29-2.indd 99 10/25/10 3:10:51 PM 100 Intersections l’enseignement à distance : il s’agit de mettre en place une équipe de correc- teurs, ou de « soutien ». En effet, traditionnellement un professeur donnait son cours à une douzaine d’étudiants. À cela correspondait bien normalement une douzaine de copies à corriger. Mais si un cours est diffusé à distance à 50 ou 100 élèves, il devient impossible pour le professeur qui a conçu le cours — et qui a déjà eu un travail supplémentaire pour ce faire — de corriger autant de copies qu’il y a d’élèves. Cela crée l’obligation d’engager des tuteurs qui peuvent être des étudiants finissant. Concernant les droits d’auteurs des musiques, la question s’efface automatiquement puisque les étudiants sont eux-mêmes les compositeurs des harmonies. le cours privé ou le cours en petit groupe Description du cours de saxophone de Benoît Plourde du Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Rimouski Enfin, une expérience de cours à distance d’un instrument de musique, du pro- fesseur à son élève, a été tentée par Benoît Plourde, Directeur du Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Rimouski, professeur de saxophone. Cette expérience a été enregistrée par Josée April sur vidéo numérique. D’autres cours d’inter- prétation ont été explorés dans cette institution, tels que l’enseignement du pia- no et du clavecin, mais notre choix s’est arrêté sur l’instrument à vent à cause des difficultés spécifiques que son enseignement soulevait. En effet, le saxo- phone est un instrument que l’on porte à la bouche pour jouer. On introduit d’abord une pièce que l’on appelle une anche simple immédiatement sur l’em- bouchure ; cette anche se trouve au contact direct des lèvres lorsqu’on en joue. Or dans l’enseignement, la façon de placer les lèvres sur cette partie doit être montrée sur plusieurs côtés du visage : de profil et de face. Vouloir apercevoir ces deux perspectives entraîne de filmer successivement les deux scènes, puis d’utiliser la technique cinématographique de « l’écran divisé » avec laquelle on peut afficher les deux perspectives simultanément. C’est une difficulté mi- neure, qui peut être aisément surmontée, mais qui manifeste la complexité de l’approche lorsqu’il s’agit de montrer comment pratiquer un instrument sans que le maître ne se trouve dans la même pièce que son étudiant. Par ailleurs, depuis une vingtaine d’années, il est obligatoire en Amérique du Nord d’évi- ter tout contact physique non nécessaire d’un maître sur son élève, à cause de plaintes concernant les contacts qui pourraient être interprétés comme étant trop intimes. Cette nouvelle contrainte astreint le professeur à développer un langage pédagogique explicite et imagé pour que son étudiant comprenne sans qu’il soit nécessaire de porter la main à son visage ou sur son bras. Cette exi- gence comporte heureusement des bienfaits : le vocabulaire s’est ainsi diversi- fié, nuancé et élaboré en profondeur et l’étudiant s’exprime désormais au sujet de son instrument avec beaucoup de clarté et de compétence. L’inconvénient qui, néanmoins, est rapporté dans l’expérience de l’enseignement à distance du jeu d’instrument concerne la maturité de l’étudiant : par exemple, un enfant de douze ans ne saura pas profiter pleinement de ce type d’enseignement ; il a besoin de la présence physique de son professeur dans la même salle que Intersections29-2.indd 100 10/25/10 3:10:51 PM 29/2 (2009) 101 lui, d’entendre sa voix à ses côtés, et de ressentir sa présence. Sinon, la qua- lité d’enregistrement sonore est amplement suffisante pour que l’élève ait une idée précise de la sonorité qu’on attend de lui dans le jeu de son interprétation, comme les prises de vue par la caméra des partitions et des feuilles de musique permettent une lecture claire et il est même facile de voir les annotations ajou- tées au crayon dans le cahier du maître pour l’étudiant. Cela dit, nous consta- tons que ce cours sur vidéo est montré sans que le spectateur puisse participer. Cependant, on peut aussi faire ce cours à distance par le biais de la WebCa- mera et faire ainsi un cours d’interprétation « en public » à distance. Toutefois, l’exemple suivant montre que, dans le cours à distance de piano réalisé par le Département de musique de l’Université d’Ottawa, la vidéo peut être employée de façon « interactive » par les réalisateurs comme par les spectateurs. Description du cours de piano à distance et la « technologie d’annotation de la vidéo » du Département de musique de l’Université d’ottawa La vidéo est utilisée pour soutenir l’apprentissage et l’enseignement dans plusieurs domaines. Cependant, la majorité des applications de la vidéo à des fins d’apprentissage et d’enseignement utilise peu les avantages de la vidéo numérique. Un élément fondamental associé à la vidéo numérique est la possibilité d’annoter de manière automatique ou manuelle le conte- nu visuel et sonore et d’amalgamer ces annotations à la vidéo pour créer de nouveaux documents multimédias. (Edmond et al 2006, p. 49) Malgré l’apparente difficulté de traduire un cours d’interprétation musicale pour l’enseignement à distance sur Internet, le Département de musique de l’Université d’Ottawa expérimente depuis des années, avec l’Institut de tech- nologie de l’information, le Conseil national de recherches Canada et le Dé- partement des sciences de l’éducation de l’Université du Québec en Outaouais, l’enseignement à distance du piano avec l’aide d’enregistrements vidéos. Cette expérimentation porte le nom de « Développement de programmes informati- ques et de logiciels qui procureront l’interface technique essentielle et les outils pédagogiques pour l’enseignement du piano à distance ». Il est dit à propos de la vidéo employée simplement comme « témoin » d’un cours d’interprétation : Sans des moyens de naviguer dans un document audiovisuel, celui-ci de- meure essentiellement un médium narratif qui supporte difficilement un apprentissage actif où l’apprenant a un contrôle sur le médium (Laurillard, 1995 ; Shephard, 2003).(Edmond et al 2006, p. 50) En effet, l’utilisation de la technologie d’annotation vidéo est l’élément clé dans ce laboratoire : cette technique permet d’ajouter des commentaires de formation au fur et à mesure du déroulement de la vidéo. Ces annotations sont aussi un moyen de « naviguer » dans le document visuel et d’atteindre directement des sujets précis de l’apprentissage qui intéressent l’enseignant ou l’étudiant. Intersections29-2.indd 101 10/25/10 3:10:51 PM 102 Intersections L’ajout d’annotations ouvre toutes sortes de possibilités sur le plan du dé- veloppement des ressources médiatiques pour soutenir l’apprentissage, l’enseignement et la recherche sur la pédagogie du piano. Ainsi, l’indexa- tion de leçons de piano, en y ajoutant des annotations, permet d’accéder à des segments particuliers de vidéos à partir de divers critères de recherche comme le type d’intervention pédagogique, une séquence de notes jouée au piano, le geste technique, ou même la qualité expressive du jeu musical. (Edmond et al 2006, p. 56) Ces recherches pour l’enseignement à distance du piano ne fonctionnent pas selon les TICE (Technologies de l’information et de la communication pour l’éducation) ou TICCE (Technologies de l’information, la communication et la création pour l’enseignement) qui sont assujettis au comité de normalisation JTC1SC-36 proposant la norme SCORM dont le rôle est de mettre en forme le document-texte du cours et d’harmoniser le fonctionnement de ses éléments constituants pour le rendre inter-opérable. Ces documents textes comportent des fichiers d’images comme des fichiers sonores, ou des fichiers vidéos mais ces fichiers sonores et visuels n’entrent pas dans la composition du document SCORM en tant que tel : les documents d’enseignement normalisés SCORM peuvent contenir des fichiers audiovisuels sans pour autant avoir les capacités de gérer leurs métadonnées. De leur côté, les vidéos font partie du domaine de MPEG, Moving Picture Experts Group, qui est le groupe de travail SC29/WG11 du comité technique mixte JTC1 de l’ISO et de la CEI pour les technologies de l’information. Ce groupe d’experts est chargé du développement des normes internationales pour la compression, la décompression, le traitement et le co- dage de la vidéo, de l’audio et de leur combinaison, de façon à satisfaire une large gamme d’applications. Les normes MPeg explicitées par alain Vaucelle, chercheur du département artémis Telecom Paris : Les normes audiovisuelles employées sont MPEG-1 & 2, MPEG-4, MPEG-7 et MPEG-21 dont les définitions et les précisions sont apportées ici par Alain Vaucelle. MPEG-1 & 2 exécute la compression de l’information et représente la norme de codage de l’audio et de la vidéo pour le transport pour la télévision numérique. Puis MPEG-4 propose l’organisation des normes d’un audiovisuel et d’un multimédia très exhaustivement interactif et intégralement structuré selon les principes des langages à balises. Un flux MPEG-4 est un contenu vidéo enrichi de divers éléments d’infor- mations relatifs aux différents objets individuels considérés, comme durée de vie, régions support, emplacement dans une scène… Il vient tout natu- rellement à l’esprit la possibilité d’enrichir encore davantage cette repré- sentation, en associant aux différents objets des descripteurs spécifiques débouchant sur des fonctionnalités nouvelles, comme par exemple l’Accès automatique et les requêtes par le contenu. C’est l’objet de MPEG-7 (Mul- timédia Content Description Interface). (Vaucelle 2010) Intersections29-2.indd 102 10/25/10 3:10:51 PM 29/2 (2009) 103 MPEG-7 est l’organisation des normes documentaires du domaine. Norme ISO/IEC 15938, 2002 édifie une palette d’outils normalisés pour indexer et dé- crire syntaxiquement de façon automatique ou semi-automatique tout contenu multimédia. Une même information pourra être traitée en fonction des ca- pacités communicationnelles recherchées, allant du spatio-temporel (audio et vidéo traités séparément) à une description sémantique du flux de données. MPEG-7 peut être associé aux autres descripteurs spécifiant le format, les conditions d’accès, leurs classifications, les liens pertinents en relation avec l’in- formation initiale, le contexte d’enregistrement ou de la diffusion du matériel : c’est la possibilité de naviguer, de chercher, de filtrer et de s’approprier l’infor- mation dans n’importe quel corpus multimédia ouvert. (Vaucelle 2010) Et, pour terminer, MPEG-21 qui distingue l’organisation des normes de l’in- tégration des services dans la totalité du domaine multimédia (ce qui implique la création notamment d’une couche du e-procurement (approvisionnement électronique), notamment lorsque le multimédia devient interactif). MPEG-21 (ISO/IEC 21000. 2003), appelé Multimedia Framework, se pro- pose notamment de lever ce verrou technologique en standardisant des descriptions non seulement des contenus, mais aussi de tous les éléments susceptibles d’intervenir dans la chaîne de consommation, depuis la création, en passant par la diffusion et en allant jusqu’à l’utilisateur final. (Vaucelle 2010) Dans le laboratoire du cours de piano à distance de l’Université d’Ottawa, l’utilisation du protocole de communication MIDI est directement reliée au travail d’annotation de la vidéo. L’annotation multimodale permet aussi d’as- socier le contenu MIDI au document audiovisuel, permettant ainsi de faire jouer le piano simultanément avec le visionnement ou même d’utiliser le piano comme outil de recherche de documents vidéo (comme rechercher tous les documents vidéo qui incluent une certaine séquence de notes). Les normes et standards MPEG gèrent les métadonnées qui servent à fabriquer des conte- nus audiovisuels inter-opérables permettant de bâtir le cours qu’il est possi- ble ensuite de diffuser sur Internet. Cet enseignement à distance « vidéo » du piano est un cours fonctionnant sur le modèle des émissions de la télévision numérique, non des programmes d’enseignement à distance ou d’e-learning traditionnel. Conclusion L’e-learning en général développe l’idée et l’approche pédagogique « d’autofor- mation » qui sollicite une conduite autonome de l’étudiant dans les différentes étapes et niveaux de son apprentissage. Cette attitude en formation musicale est parfaitement viable dans de nombreux types de cours, en commençant avec la classe magistrale (cours d’histoire) jusqu’à la classe en privé (cours de piano ou d’un autre instrument de musique). Ont été distingués les cours d’autoforma- tion (les logiciels de reconnaissance auditive, de dictées et d’analyse musicales) des cours traditionnels mis à distance (cours d’harmonie tonale, d’ethnomusi- cologie, d’histoire de la musique et les cours d’interprétation musicale). Cette Intersections29-2.indd 103 10/25/10 3:10:51 PM 104 Intersections distinction montre que plusieurs réalisations de cours ont connu un succès immédiat auprès des étudiants, des professeurs et des directeurs des écoles de musique. En aucun cas la nécessité du contact avec un professeur ou un tuteur n’est remise en question : seul le mode de fréquentation est différent, ce qui ne veut pas dire que le nombre de fréquentations doive baisser. Qu’ils se passent en visioconférence ou sur forums, les échanges entre professeurs et étudiants, comme entre les apprenants eux-mêmes, sont encouragés et peut-être plus mo- tivés, car l’élève est davantage maître de son apprentissage et doit s’impliquer dans les modalités et le parcours de sa formation. À propos des droits d’auteurs, d’exécution et de reproduction, il existe plu- sieurs manières aujourd’hui de contourner le problème. Cependant, les solu- tions proposées sont peu satisfaisantes au regard de droits et de règlements en cause. Ce dysfonctionnement fait appel à de nouvelles perspectives que le « tout numérique » permet d’entrevoir, comme les révolutions accomplies dans le do- maine de la télévision numérique et ce que ces révolutions laissent présager. Depuis février 2010, la télévision numérique a été implantée en région d’Al- sace comme base d’expérimentation de la généralisation de la télévision numé- rique en France et la diffusion de la télévision analogique par voie terrestre ces- sera pour les trois quarts de la population française le 30 novembre 2011. Aux États-Unis, l’Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) est le groupe qui a contribué au développement du nouveau standard de télévision numéri- que. Ce standard a été adopté par le Canada, le Mexique et la Corée du Sud. Il doit remplacer le système analogique NTSC (National Television System Com- mittee), standard de codage analogique de la vidéo en couleurs qui opérait de- puis 1953. La télévision numérique commence avec le développement en audio- visuel de la norme MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) et ses déclinaisons (MPEG-4, MPEG-7 et MPEG-21). Ces normes MPEG favorisent la compres- sion de l’information (MPEG-1 et 2), l’usage des applications multimédias et la description d’un codage vidéo (MPEG-4), l’indexation et la recherche de docu- ments multimédia (MPEG-7) et la spécification d’une architecture permettant l’interopérabilité et l’utilisation transparente des représentations audiovisuel- les numériques et la gestion automatique des droits numériques (MPEG-21). Le monde de l’audiovisuel maîtrise ainsi déjà le problème des droits, quels qu’ils soient (d’auteur, d’exécution, de production) depuis le standard MPEG-4 et dé- finitivement avec la norme MPEG-21. Cette dernière gestion qui est automati- que peut être comparée à « l’achat d’un billet d’avion sur Internet ». En effet, la métaphore du billet d’avion « acheté sur Internet pour aller d’une grande ville à un village éloigné » est celle qui exprime le mieux la complexité du problème et l’efficacité de sa solution : d’un simple clic, l’ordre est donné à l’agent de voyage qui apportera un résultat au bout d’environ cinq minutes. Dès lors, le voyage, son itinéraire en avion, suivi du trajet en train puis en bus, jusqu’à la réserva- tion de l’hôtel, est prévu : toutes les variantes des coûts entre les pays et entre les moyens de transport ont été analysées, répertoriées et exprimées dans une somme finale proposée à l’acheteur. C’est ainsi que les droits des images, des textes, des musiques, etc., sont entièrement pris en charge par la norme MPEG- 21 dans le cadre d’une émission numérique audiovisuelle aujourd’hui. Intersections29-2.indd 104 10/25/10 3:10:51 PM 29/2 (2009) 105 Les TICE réorganisent la circulation des savoirs pour l’enseignement et la formation professionnelle. La réussite de l’accès à ces contenus et de la maîtrise de ces technologies vers le plus grand nombre est étroitement dépendante de leur normalisation. Les instances de normalisation tentent de couvrir les spécifications inhérentes aux TICE afin de rendre possible cette convergence des médias. Cette convergence questionne la notion même de document. (Vaucelle 2009, p. 15) Ainsi s’exprime Alain Vaucelle à propos des TICE. Il suggère une « recréation de la notion de document » puisque désormais le terme « document » englobe des informations de toute provenance : textes, images, vidéos, sons, anima- tions. Alain Vaucelle et Henri Hudrisier, Expert du Comité de normalisation SC-36, Maître de conférences et HDR16 à l’Université de Paris 8, proposent que des passerelles entre les domaines de l’audiovisuel numérique et de l’e-learning soient établies afin que chacun des deux champs d’activité soient enrichis des découvertes et des solutions trouvées par l’autre. Pour normaliser ces technologiques de l’éducation et de la formation, il est nécessaire de parvenir à des consensus favorisant la médiation entre des pédagogues et des communautés d’experts en multimédia. L’intérêt de la norme MPEG-21 est de définir un cadre normatif qui couvre l’ensemble de la chaîne de production et de distribution des ressources multimédias. Face à ces enjeux, on doit analyser à travers la famille MPEG, les bénéfices de cette approche normative pour les métadonnées associées aux TICE et au multimédia. (Vaucelle 2009, p. 15) Ces deux domaines peuvent s’apporter mutuellement lorsqu’ils gèrent des contenus numériques similaires — textes, vidéos, images, etc. — selon des nor- mes respectives, mais non hermétiques. Par exemple, il est possible que l’e-lear- ning emprunte des réponses trouvées par l’audiovisuel numérique pour régler des problèmes identiques, et réciproquement, si, éventuellement, le monde de l’audiovisuel décidait de produire de l’enseignement à grande échelle sur des chaînes télévisées. Pour terminer ce rapide parcours de l’enseignement à dis- tance de la musique et des outils qui permettent aujourd’hui de traduire ces cours « en ligne », nous rappellerons qu’il existe nombre d’autres expériences, que celles mentionnées ici, en e-learning musical ou formation à distance de la musique dans divers établissements d’enseignement. Et les expérimentations vont en se propageant : à la suite de l’observation du succès de l’e-learning musi- cal dans les institutions canadiennes, André Picard, Directeur des études et du développement des Conservatoires de musique et d’art dramatique du Québec, a annoncé l’entreprise, depuis février 2010, pour la création d’une plateforme de formation en ligne mettant en réseau l’ensemble des sept Conservatoires du Québec ; il s’agissait de proposer graduellement des cours à distance inédits à ses étudiants. Car la réalisation de cours de musique à distance propose une aussi grande variété de productions qu’il existe une diversité et pluralité des en- seignements caractérisés par les établissements dont ils sont issus — Facultés 16 HDR est le sigle désignant l’« Habilitation à diriger des recherches ». Intersections29-2.indd 105 10/25/10 3:10:52 PM 106 Intersections d’universités qui enseignent la pratique instrumentale et vocale tout en se spé- cialisant dans la recherche, Conservatoires qui se destinent principalement à l’interprétation instrumentale et vocale ou les diverses écoles qui favorisent certaines activités musicales. Cette abondance est au cœur du patrimoine pé- dagogique que les grands maîtres de musique de par le monde représentent. Il serait souhaitable de pouvoir en répertorier le plus d’exemples possibles qui té- moigneraient de manière éloquente de la multiformité de l’enseignement musi- cal, devenu quasi protéiforme lorsqu’il est adapté dorénavant « à distance ». références Baron, Georges-Louis et Éric Dane. 2009. « Technologies éducatives et fran- cophonie : un champ de recherches pluriel ». La recherche en technologie éducative : Un guide pour découvrir un domaine en émergence, sous la dir. de Christian Depover, 25–33. 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Entretien avec l’auteur, le 1er février. rÉsumÉ Aujourd’hui l’e-learning musical est un outil d’apprentissage de la musique en plein es- sor depuis le développement des technologies tel que le standard MIDI — permettant la communication entre ordinateurs et instruments de musique —, Internet, le Web et les multimédias. Tous ces domaines reliés favorisent la création de cours mis sur logi- ciels qui peuvent être diffusés sur Internet ou en Intranet dans les écoles. Cette avancée dans l’éducation musicale se constate partout dans le monde et nous verrons dans cet article différents exemples et procédés d’apprentissage à distance de la musique qui sont mis en œuvre en France et au Canada. abstraCt Musical e-learning is nowadays possible since the development of the technologies as the standard MIDI, which allow communication between computers and musical instruments, Internet, Web and multimedia tools. All those components combined together help to produce musical courses on CDs, which can be brought after on In- ternet or Intranet of musical institutions. This progress in musical education can be observed all over the world and we will see in this article various examples of musical’s e-learning which as been applied in schools in France and Canada. Intersections29-2.indd 108 10/25/10 3:10:52 PM work_3i2x5r65rfbb5amel53owj7zxq ---- Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018, p. 311-330 DOI Number: http://dx.doi.org/10.7827/TurkishStudies.12801 ISSN: 1308-2140, ANKARA-TURKEY Research Article / Araştırma Makalesi Article Info/Makale Bilgisi  Received/Geliş: Aralık 2017 Accepted/Kabul: Mart 2018  Referees/Hakemler: Doç. Dr. Mehmet ÖZKARTAL – Doç. Dr. Emine NAS – Doç. Dr. M. Emin KAYSERİLİ – Doç. Dr. Oğuz DİLMAÇ This article was checked by iThenticate. İSLAM PLASTİK SANATLARINDA SOYUTLAYICI YAKLAŞIMLAR VE BATI SANATI ÜZERİNDEKİ YANSIMALARI* Şemseddin DAĞLI** ÖZET Günümüz çağdaş sanatlar kapsamında farklı görsel örnekler ve sanatçılar örnekleminde ve Çalışmamızda üzerinde durmaya çalıştığımız sorun Geleneksel Türk ve İslam sanatlarının, modern sanatlar dâhilinde müstesna bir yeri yer tutan soyut sanat içerisindeki konumudur. Bu bağlamda, Batı sanatı kapsamında soyut sanat içinde gerçekleşerek, yüzyılımıza damgasını vuran modern sanat akımları arasındaki birtakım benzerlikleri ortaya koymaktır. Bu anlamda batı sanatçısının doğu ve İslam sanatlarından (Henry Matisse, Mark Tobey, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Hans Hartung, başta olmak üzere daha pek çok sanatçının) bu etkileşime örnek olabilecek nitelikte çok sayıda eser ortaya koydukları ve faydalandıkları bilinen bir gerçektir. Bizim amacımız bu etkileşimi belgelemek değildir. Burada üzerinde durduğumuz konu plastik anlamda sanat dediğimiz bu eylemi gerçekleştiren sanatçının bir insan olduğundan hareket ederek insanın temel içgüdüsel yaklaşımlarında farklı coğrafya ve değişik kültürel ortamlarda tarihsel süreç içerisinde benzer tepkisel refleks geliştirerek yine benzeri sanatsal hadiseleri gerçekleştirmiş olduğu gerçeğidir. Felsefi olarak İslam sanatlarının arka yapısı ile düşünsel gerçeği ve çıkış kaynağını yorumlayarak sorgulamak için İslam’daki resim yasağı sorununu ve bu yasağın nedenleri ile birlikte sonuçlarını analiz etmek gerekir. Söz konusu konularda yapılan araştırma ve yorumlamalar ise günümüzde bile kesin olarak herhangi somut bir yargıya ulaşamamıştır. Bu haliyle ele aldığımız konu her bir ele alınışında daha yeni tartışmalar başlatacak sonuçlar doğurmaktadır. Anahtar Kelimeler: İslam, soyut, sanat, resim, modern. * Bu makale, 18-24 Eylül 2017 tarihinde Malaga/ İspanya da düzenlenen USOS Uluslararası Sosyal Bilimler Kongresi’nde sunulan “İslam Sanatlarında Soyut Yaklaşımlar Ve Batı Resmindeki Yansımaları” isimli tebliğin geliştirilerek yayıma hazırlanmış biçimidir. ** Doç. Dr., Akdeniz Üniversitesi Güzel Sanatlar Fakültesi, El-mek: szdagli@hotmail.com http://dx.doi.org/10.7827/TurkishStudies. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3085-2879 312 Şemseddin DAĞLI Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 ABSTRACTIVE APPROACHES IN THE ISLAMIC ARTS AND ITS REFLECTION ON WESTERN PAINTING ABSTRACT The question that we attempted to emphasize in our study is the position of Traditional Turkish Arts within the abstract arts included in modern arts. In this context, it reveals some similarities among modern art movements which left its mark on our century by realizing in abstract art within the scope of western art. In this sense, it is known that western artists revealed many works (Henri Matisse, Mark Tobey, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky Van Gogh’ Picasso and many others) gave many examples and made use of this interaction. Our purpose is not to certificate this interaction. What we emphasized here that is based on that the artist who performed the action which we called as art in plastic sense is a human being, it is a fact that human realizes the similar artistic events by reacting similarly within the same historical process in different geographies and different culture mediums in his/her basic instinctual approaches. Philosophically, it is necessary to analyse the problem of painting ban in Islam and the reasons and consequences of this ban in order to inquire by interpreting the background, intellectual truth and its origin of emergence in Islamic arts. Researches and interpretations on these issues concluded in such a manner that each will create newer discussions without ever reaching a definite judgment even today. STRUCTURED ABSTRACT The question that we attempted to emphasize in our study is the position of Traditional Turkish Arts within the abstract arts included in modern arts. In this context, it reveals some similarities among modern art movements which left its mark on our century by realizing in abstract art within the scope of western art. In this sense, it is known that western artists revealed many works (Henri Matisse, Mark Tobey, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky Van Gogh’ Picasso and many others) gave many examples and made use of this interaction. Our purpose is not to certificate this interaction. What we emphasized here that is based on that the artist who performed the action which we called as art in plastic sense is a human being, it is a fact that human realizes the similar artistic events by reacting similarly within the same historical process in different geographies and different culture mediums in his/her basic instinctual approaches. Philosophically, it is necessary to analyse the problem of painting ban in Islam and the reasons and consequences of this ban in order to inquire by interpreting the background, intellectual truth and its origin of emergence in Islamic arts. Researches and interpretations on these issues concluded in such a manner that each will create newer discussions without ever reaching a definite judgment even today. Culture is a sociological phenomenon formed by nurturing with the material and spiritual resources of the way of thinking, thinking and living that is based on the life of a society. It embraces all the aesthetic and scientific fields in the direction of traditions. It is also affected and fed by other cultures and is degenerated by the pressure of other cultures. Art is a universal form. It is a language of emotion. Voices İslam Plastik Sanatlarında Soyutlayıcı Yaklaşımlar ve Batı Sanatı Üzerindeki… 313 Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 melodies words pictures figures lines colors forms language tools. People have followed different ways of explaining the formations of the outer world in objects or in everything they designed in their minds. Human thought and art. These two social phenomena cannot jump from one point to another. Each period is a natural consequence of the previous period, but it is the next one. Only in this way is it possible to connect the previous turn to the present. The western artist who is looking for innovation in the past century has created different styles with different searches and descriptions other than what came to that day. A number of western artists who did not stay within themselves during this period of search but turned their faces to the east found the stone stones of eastern Islamic arts in the advent of modernism. From this optic, 20 yr. The fact that art is influenced by eastern art while art is being created is evident in the works and expressions of artists. It is observed that the Western artist imitates eastern arts while imitating his work with a rationalist approach but has a different dimension to form language. The motives of the Eastern Islamic world are in the form of socio-cultural phenomena clad in plastic forms that are appropriate to the needs of Western artists. In most of the contemporary societies, traditional folkloric values and traditional arts appear in different dimensions with new interpretations and conclusions. It is known that artists who produce works with abstract understanding by offering them with examples within the scope of Yeruz are inspired by their approach to this art in this direction. It is possible to see this inspiration in the works of artists such as Picasso, Paul Klee, Hans Hartung, Piette Mondrian and Joan Miro. This is an indication of the formal sense of richness and plasticity of eastern Islamic arts. It is observed that the contemporary western art, which we try to put forth in the texts and pictures, is particularly influenced by the Islamic arts especially when compared to western paintings and eastern Islamic art examples. It is observed that Paul Klee, Piette Mondrian strong representative of surrealism Miro, the important representative of Cubism Pablo Picasso, and the Dutch Escher studies are clearly observed. In Islam, the abstractionist tendencies at the core of Islamic art as a result of the insufficiency of understanding of the picture ban are the Islamic artist's distant from the painting tradition as opposed to the Western artist, and the surrealist narratives beyond the reality, with an intellectual connotation, sometimes poetic, the expression is conveyed to the appearance of the form as text. This composition has been achieved by the Islamic artist, sometimes as a mysterious mystery, and sometimes as a guide to realistic narratives. Keywords: Islam, art, picture, modern. GİRİŞ Sanat dediğimiz sosyal olay tüm canlılar içinde insanoğluna ait uğraşılarından birisi durumundaki bir kavramdır. Bir toplumun duyuş yaşayış biçimi olarak kavradığımız Kültürün sosyal yapısı kapsamı içerisinde ele aldığımız bu olgu tarihsel süreçte toplulukların dinsel siyasal inançları ve sosyolojik yapısı içerisinde şekillenmiştir. Türk ve İslam sanatçıları bulundukları coğrafyadan hareketle diğer kıtalara ve coğrafyaya adım attıklarında da bu kültürel aktarım farklı din inanç ve öğretilerin etkilediği bu coğrafyada kültürden direk beslenen sanatlarında birbirinden etkilenmesi doğaldır. İslam sanat anlayışını kavrayabilmek için kutsal kitabı olan kurana bakmak gerekir. Kuranda belirgin olan soyut duygular İslam sanatçısına başlangıç noktası teşkil etmiştir Kitap 314 Şemseddin DAĞLI Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 sanatları diye adlandırabileceğimiz hat tezhip ciltçilik ebru gibi sanatlar İslam dünyasının sanat dünyasına sunduğu estetik kazanımlarıdır. Resim ve heykel gibi boyutlandırılmış sanata karşı özellikle ibadethaneler ve kitaplarda hoş bakmayan İslam sanatı soyut formlarda kendini bulmuştur İslam’da resim yasağının yanlış anlaşılması sonucu soyuta ve farklı biçim arayışlarına yön tutan İslam sanatçıları böyle bir endişe içerisinde bulunmadan salt insansı sezgi ve endişelerini plastik bir ifadeyle her şekilde görünüşe ulaştırmayı hedefleyen batılı sanatçı arasında somut benzerlikler söz konusudur. İslam sanatlarında Tanrıya ulaşma güdüsü içinde tam bir teslimiyet batıl sanatçıda ise çatışmacı bir diyalektik vardır. Sonuçta oluşan iki eylemde her ne kadar farklıysa da sonuç neredeyse aynıdır. Günümüz modern sanatı ve çağdaşlık kavramları dekoratif ve sezgisel anlamlar taşır. Ruhun derinliklerine kısa sürede ulaşarak etki oluşturur. Bu çalışmanın amacı bir ilişkiyi ortaya koymak olmamakla birlikte zaman içinde çağın ve dönemin anlayışları gereği teknolojik ve kültürel yakınlaşmaların yoğun olarak yaşandığı yüz yılımızda sanatsal olarak ortaya çıkan eserlerin biçimsel olmamakla birlikte yaklaşım dâhilinde benzerlikler olarak ortaya çıkmasıdır. Çalışmada bu benzerlikleri dönemler ve eserler bazında ortaya koymaktır. MATERYAL ve YÖNTEM Çalışmada materyal olarak ele aldığımız örnekler İslam sanatçıları tarafından ortaya konulan ve çok değişik alanlarda üretilen eserlerdir. Bunlar İslam yazı sanatı hat diğer kitap sanatlarından birisi olan minyatür özgün dokuma tekniklerinden düz ve havlı dokumalar kilim ve halı ve çini ağırlıklı eserlerdir. Bura da ele alınan eserler ön ve arka yapılarıyla birlikte plastik açıdan analiz edilmiştir. Örnekler belirlenirken alan sınırlaması yapılıp ülkemiz müzelerinden Türk İslam eserleri müzesi, İstanbul şehir müzesi, Topkapı sarayı müzesi, Ankara etnografya müzesinde bulunan yazı resim örnekleri seçilmiştir. Materyaller dönem üslup biçim form vb. açısından değerlendirilmiştir. Avrupa sanatına söz konusu olan eserler ise Hollanda İngiltere, Almanya ve diğer Avrupa müze ve koleksiyonlarından seçilmiş örneklerdir. Çalışmada temel yaklaşım olarak İslam sanatlarının değişik malzemelerle ve tekniklerle sunulmuş örnekleri ve batının modernist resim anlayışları arasındaki plastik benzeşimi anlam bütünlüğü içinde ortaya koymaktır. Veriler Türk İslam sanatının görsel örnekleri olan hat ve dokuma örneklerinden ve batı resim sanatının modern soyut anlayışta eserler üreten sanatçılarından Escher, Fausto Zonaro, Robert Delaunay, George Braque, Paul Klee, Joan Miro Hans Hartung, Vassily Kandinsky seçilmiştir. Çalışmanın yöntemi karşılaştırmalı analiz yöntemidir. Çalışmamıza konu alarak ele aldığımız örnekler dönem üslup ve biçimsel form benzerlikleri dâhilinde ele alınmıştır. Eser incelemeleri batılı resim anlayışı içinde yapılan resimlerle karşılaştırmalı olarak benzerliklere ele alınmıştır. Bu benzerlikler ortaya konulmaya çalışılırken eserler renk biçim espas denge armoni ritm hareket vb. ön yapıyı oluşturan plastik kriterler ışığında arka yapı yani içerik açısından karşılaştırmalı olarak incelenmiştir. İslam sanatı İslam sanatları içinde müstesna bir yeri bulunan geleneksel Türk süsleme sanatlarının tarihsel gelişim süreci içerisinde tanımlamasını yaparken İslam sanat anlayışının doğası içinde var olan soyut yaklaşımlarla batı sanatında yüzyılımıza damgasını vuran soyut sanat arasındaki bazı benzerlikler mevcuttur. Günümüz batı resmine ve sanatına yön veren çağdaş batılı sanatçıların doğu sanatlarından Wincent Van Gogh’un Henri Matisse, Mark Tobey, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky ve daha pek çok sanatçının bu etkileşimin örneklerini verdiği hatta faydalandıkları bilinen bir gerçektir. Bizim ise buradaki amacımız doğu İslam sanatları ve batı sanatının etkileşimi belgelemek değildir. Burada problem olarak baktığımız olay plastik anlamda sanat dediğimiz eylemi gerçekleştiren sanatçı bir insan olduğuna göre insanın temel içgüdüsel yaklaşımlarında farklı coğrafya, farklı kültür İslam Plastik Sanatlarında Soyutlayıcı Yaklaşımlar ve Batı Sanatı Üzerindeki… 315 Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 ortamlarında tarihi zaman diliminde aynı reflekslerle tepki vererek benzeri sanatsal olayları gerçekleştirdiği gerçeğidir. Bu yöndeki diğer farklı değerlendirmelere göre ise insanoğlu güzel sanatlardan hiçbir zaman sürecinde ayrılamamıştır. Bundan ötürü medeniyetleri güzel sanatlardan ayrıyeten düşünmekte mümkün olmamaktadır (Kara, 1999,187). Din sanat Sanat ve din bazen birbirlerine baskın olarak sürekli birbirinden etkilenmişlerdir. Din, bilim sanat ve ahlâk gibi fenomenler insanın şuuraltında bir bütün olarak yaşanmaktadır (Coşkun, 2014, 98). Bölgesel ve toplumsal ayrımlara karşı ortak bir dünya görüşü ışığında gelişen İslam inancının içinde bulunduğumuz evreni tanıma yaşama ve günlük hayatı bir uyum içinde bütünleştiren İslam sanatları batı sanatını da etkileyen ve etkilemeye devam eden evrensel özellikler taşımaktadır (Köksal, 1984,31). Batı sanatında, resim, genellikle izleyiciye bir çerçeve ya da pencereden izleniyormuş hissi verirken doğu resmi zihinsel ve kalpte mevcut olan oradan da mekâna yansıtılan bir duruma sahiptir. Batılı sanat, zaman içerisindeki, durdurulmuş bir anlık hareketin resmini yaparken, doğu sanatı, durağan olmayan, hareketli ve sürekli bir durumun resmini yapmaktadır (Coomaraswamy,1995, 32-34). İslam sanatlarının arka yapı elemanlarını yorumlayabilmek içim resim yasağı meselesi ve bu yasağın boyutlarını iyi analiz etmek gerekir. Bu konularda yapılan araştırma ve yorumlamalar kesin bir yasaya ulaşmadan her biri daha yeni tartışmalar başlatacak şekilde sonuçlanmaktadır. Eldeki mevcut örneklere göre, İslam sanatlarının erken dönelerinde bilinçli olarak tasvirden kaçınılmış ve bunu doğal sonucu olarak soyutlamaya girilmiştir (Yakutcan, 1989,2). Kur’ân dilinde yaratma “bara'a”, biçim verme “savvara” aynı anlamda yorumlandığı için, yaratılan varlıkların benzerini tasvir yani resim, Allah’ı taklit sayılmış ve sanatçılar figürleri benzetmeye çalışmaktan kaçınmışlardır. (Buhârî, Libâs 90, 2). “Döneminde henüz oluşum aşamasındaki İslam sanatının Emevi döneminde gözlemlenen resim yasağı ve bu yasağa uymayan bazı kural dışı uygulamalarda halifelerin şahsi davranışları, sanatsal sorun ve coğrafi etkileşmelerle açıklanabilecektir.” (Grabar,1988, 15) (Resim 1). Resim 1. Ürdün'de 6. Emevî Halifesi Velid bin Abdülmelik tarafından yaptırılan kuseyramra sarayında duvar resimleri İslam’da resim yasağı kesin bir yargı olmamakla birlikte, güçlü bir etki alanına sahip olduğu gerçektir. Bunun sonucu olarak İslam toplumlarında hat geleneği güçlenmiş; yazı, resmin yerini doldurma düşüncesinin merkezi olmuştur (Koçan, 1997, 11). İslam dininde resim yapmak yasak sayıldığı için İslâm ülkelerinde yazıları süslemek bir bakıma resmin yerini tutuyordu. Bu nedenle hat 316 Şemseddin DAĞLI Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 sanatı ile bugünkü nonfigüratif resim sanatı arasında büyük benzerlik vardır. İslam’ın doğuşu sırasında Araplar 'kufi' denen bir yazı biçimi kullanıyorlardı. Hattat denen yazı ustaları daha sonra değişik biçimde yazılar icat etti. Ondan sonra süsleme sanatları arasında yer alan yazı sanatı bir meslek haline geldi, büyük bir gelişme gösterdi. Türk sanatçıları Arap yazısını güzel sanat haline getirdi (Sabah Gazetesi, Kasım,2014)(Resim 2-3). Resim 2. Hattat Mustafa Rakım Efendiye Ait Celi Sülüs ve Sülüs yazılı Levha TSMK-GY. 324/1) Resim 3.Ahmet Karahisari Müselsel Besmele İslam sanatçısı güzelliğin yaratıcısı değil onu keşfedendir ve asla onu varedenle rekabete kalkışmaz. Sanatını o’nu anlamaya, anlatmaya ve yüceltmeye adar. Sanatçı tüm güzelliklerin kaynağının yaradan olduğunu fark ederek göreceli bir güzellik anlayışından ideal güzelliğe ulaşmak ister. Böylece insanı, hayvanî derekenin bile altına düşürecek olan süfli bağlarından kurtularak, onu meleklerin bile üzerine taşıyacak olan ulvi bir idraki ve derunî bir sezgiyi yakalar; Allah’ın büyüklüğünü, haşmetini ve güzelliğini ifade etmek için gerekli olan düşünceye dalar (Pişkin, 2014,50). İslam sanatçısı eserlerini oluştururken, yaratıcı ile bir yarış halindeymiş gibi algılanmaktan mümkün olduğunca uzak durmaya çalışan, "kendi yaratımı” üzerinde yorumlamaktan ziyade, “Tanrı'nın yarattıklarının keyfi” üzerinde yorumlamayı öne çıkaran bir bakışa sahiptir (Can & Gün, 2012, 164). İslam bir zarafet dinidir. Düzendir intizamdır ve bu manzumelerin hayata geçirilmesini öngörür. İslam’ın peygamberi bir hadislerinde “Allah güzeldir ve güzelliği sever.” Müslim, iman, 147 diyerek “Allah’ın ve dinin ölçüsünün her şeyde zarafet olduğunu öğütlemiştir. Buna ilişkin bir örnekte Hz Peygamberin bir süre sonra kapatılacak olan bir mezarın çukurundaki uyumu bozan yığının düzeltilm esini isteyerek, “esasında bu tür şeyler ölüyü ne sıkar ne de ona rahatlık verir, ama bu iş hayatta olanların gözlerine güzel görünmek içindir” emretmesi, İslâmi sanat anlayışının içeriğini, onun duyurucusunun sanata verdiği önemi göstermektedir. Bu hassasiyet aynı zamanda “o Allah ki, her şeyi güzel yapmış ve ilk başta insanı çamurdan yaratmıştır.” “Sen dağları görürsün de onları yerinde durur sanırsın. Oysa onlar bulutların yürümesi gibi yürümektedirler. Bu her şeyi güzel ve sağlam yapan Allah’ın sanatıdır.” ayetlerinin tefsiri niteliğindedir (Coşkun, 2014, 95). İslam Plastik Sanatlarında Soyutlayıcı Yaklaşımlar ve Batı Sanatı Üzerindeki… 317 Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 Din ve sanat arasında duyguların ifadesi açısından dapek çok benzerlik bulunmaktadır. Din ahlâkta güzellik ararken, sanat görece güzelliği yansıtmaktadır. Tolstoy ise eserinde sanatın gerçek amacının ahlâkî mükemmellik olduğunu belirtmiştir (Tolstoy, 1996,88). Tüm bu ahlaki söylemlerine rağmen Tolstoy sanat için yapılan yanlışlıklara tepkisini şu şekilde belirtmektedir: “Sanat dünyasının en büyük meselesi, sanatçının yalandan ve kötülükten uzaklaşamaması, insanın kötü duygularının ve şeytanın ortak hareket etmeleridir” (Tolstoy,1996, 62). Din- tarikat- resim Objeleri olduğu gibi resmetmekten imtina eden bir takım sanatçılar (nakkaşlar), nesnel gerçeğe yönelerek, sezginin akıl ve mantık yoluyla görselleşerek vahdet-i vücuda ulaşmak istemişlerdir. Bu anlamda İslâm sanatçısı, üç boyutlu hacimsel anlatım unsurları olan, ışık-gölge ve perspektifi kullanmaktan bilinçli olarak uzak kalmışlardır. Resimlenmek istenen nesneler; içleri renklerle doldurulmuş sade geometrik biçimlerle ifade edilmiştir. Bu sayede İslâm sanatçısına nesnel görsellik yolu kapanmış, soyut ve sonsuzluk yolu açılmıştır(Bingöl, 2015,67).Anadolu’da yazı ve resim ilişkisinin bütünleşmesinde İslam da resim yasağı düşüncesine diğer tarikatlara göre daha hoş görü ile bakan iki tarikatın önemi büyüktür. Mevlevilik ve Bektaşilik (Resim 4). Resim 4. Osman Yumni, Leylek Formunda Yazı-Levha Topkapı Sarayı Minyatür ve Yazma Eserler Salonu H.1309/M.1901 G.Y. 1474. Mevleviler resim sanatı için iyi bir ilham kaynağıdır. Önceleri bir tür soyut resim olan minyatürle başladı. Sonraları klasik veya modern çalışan ressamlar da konuya ilgi gösterdi. Batıdan G. Mandel, Hollandalı Van Mour, İtalyan Zanora'nın Mevlevi resimleri meşhurdur. Bizden 318 Şemseddin DAĞLI Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 İbrahim Çallı, Cemal Tollu, Maide Arel ve Aliye Berger "Mevleviler" konulu resimler yaptılar (Demirci 2015) (Resim 5 -6-7). Resim 5. Jean BaptisteVan Mour Galata Mevlevihanesi Resim 6. Fausto Zonaro Neyzen Resim 7. Fausto Zonaro, haykıran dervişler Tasavvufun dışında oluşan düşünce ve anlayışlarda sanat, eşyayı algılamak, eşyaya işlev yüklemek açısından bulunulan şartlara göre değişkenlik arzeder. Sanat anlayışlarında nesne, öznenin kontrolündedir. Sanatçı istediği şekilde nesneyi yorumlayıp biçim verebilmektedirEstetik ve sanat üzerindeçalışma yapanlar, sadece kendi anlayışları paralelinde yorum oluşturmaktadırlar. Bunun için şunu ifade edilmelidir ki, estetik ne psikolojik duyguların ne genel sanat anlayışının ne de bütün bu alanları içeren felsefenin kapsamı dâhilinde değildir. Sanat ve estetik, tüm düşüncelerin inanışların ve dinin kapsamı dâhilindedir. Bu anlamda estetik ve güzellik, “estetik, yalnız felsefî tavır alan bir kimse için bir şey ifade eder” 10 mantığıyla bakan felsefecilerin isavının dışında olan bir realitedir(Teknik, 2014, 497 ). İslam Plastik Sanatlarında Soyutlayıcı Yaklaşımlar ve Batı Sanatı Üzerindeki… 319 Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 Modern sanat Modern sanatın gelişim sürecinde xx. yüzyıl sanatçısı, sürekli bir hareketlilik içinde soyutanlayışı aramış ona yönelmiştir. Aynı yüzyılda plastik sanatlarda biçimi ve yüzeyi parçalama eğilimi belirmiş eşyanın ana fonksiyonları görerek farklı yorumlarını irdelemişlerdir(Müller, 1972,75). (Resim 8). Resim 8. George Braque, Şişe ve Balıklar,61x75cm,1910 Tate Gallery / Londra - İngiltere Çalışmamıza konu olan modern sanat algısını anlayabilmek için, öncelikle modern- modernizm kavramlarını irdelemek gerekir. Köken olarak “modern” kelimesi Latince “modernus” kelimesinden türetilmiştir. Modern kelimesinin geç Latincedeki şekli olan "modernus", "hemen şimdi, tam, bugüne ait" anlamlarındaki "modo" zarfından türer. Modernus, ilk kez kullanıldığı V. yüzyıldan günümüzde işaret ettiği anlamına kadar farklı anlayışları ya da toplulukları ifade etmiştir. Hıristiyanlar, Romalı ve pagan geçmişten ayrı tutmak üzere kendilerini modernus diye adlandırırlar (Kızılçelik, 1994, 87). Ortak bir dünya görüşü ışığında gelişen İslam inancının içinde bulunduğumuz evreyi tanıma, yaşana günlük hayatı uyumlu kılan İslam sanatları batıyı da açıdan baktığımızda “batı sanatının en büyük özelliği, insanın Allah’a karşı mücadelesidir. Batıda insan yaptıklarıyla Allah’ın altında olmak istemez, o’na karşı adeta savaşır. Sanat da onun yarattığıdır. Batılı ressamlar büyük boyutlarda insan vücutlarını, kasları ve dokularıyla birlikte çizmişlerdir. İslâm’da ise, sanat ibadet gibidir. İnsana, tabiata bakışta Allah ile herhangi bir çatışma yoktur. Müslüman’ın yaratıcı olmak gibi herhangi bir iddiası yoktur’’ (Çetin,43). Gerçek olan şuki, sanatsal değerler ve etkinlikler insan ruhunu yücelterek dinginleştiren kılan, hoşgörü ve sevgiyle yoğuran motive edici bir etkiye sahiptirler. Arseven,1994, 1755-1756; Denilebilir ki sanat, din ile iç içe bir görünüm sergiler. Dinin kendisini anlatma, mesajını iletme yollarından birisi sanattır (Ökten, 2014, 28). İslam soyut sanat İslâm sanatı başlangıcından itibaren soyuta yönelmiştir. Bu nedenle geometrik formları tercih ederek doğadan aldığını bir nevi doğasızlaştırarak ortaya koymuştur. Bu durum yalnızca süsleme sanatına özgü değildir. Minyatür sanatını açıklamak için de bize gerekli olan doneleri sunmaktadır. İslam yazı sanatı hat, arabesk ve minyatür sanatlarının gelişmesini sadece "resim 320 Şemseddin DAĞLI Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 yasağı" gibi puta tapmayı önleme amacı güden bir önleme bağlamak yanlıştır. Aslında İslâm dünyasında tasvir, yaygın olmamasına karşın hep var olmuştur. Soyuta yönelişin arkasındaki itici güç, yukarıda temas ettiğimiz tevhit ve tenzih prensipleri olmuştur( Aydın, 1987,237). Bu konuyla ilgili olarak verilebilecek en güzel örneklerden biride Hollandalı sanatçı M.C Escher’dir. M.C Escher 1922 yılındagerçekleştirdiği İspanya ziyareti esnasında gördüğü Alhamra Sarayı'nda alçı ve süslemelerden fazlasıyla etkilenmiş, ileriki dönem sanat hayatındaki baskılarının vazgeçilmez konularından birisi olarak biçimlenmiştir (Resim 9-10-11-12-13-14). Resim 9. Cordoba ulu camii Resim 10.Alhambra çinileri Resim 11,M.C.Escher mimari çizim Resim 10. M.C Escher, metamorfoz -Rotterdam İslam Plastik Sanatlarında Soyutlayıcı Yaklaşımlar ve Batı Sanatı Üzerindeki… 321 Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 Resim 11 M.CEscher metamorfoz. Escher Museum, roterdam Resim 12. Elhamra Sarayı- Granada II. Dünya savaşının hemen ardından ortaya çıkan soyut sanat akımı, yüzyılın en büyük sanat olayıdır. Düşüncenin gerçekleşmesinden soyutlama yavaş yavaş oluşagelmiştir (Erdem,1963, 18). Soyutlamakonu üzerine eğilen farklı yazarlar tarafından terminolojik anlamda şu şekilde tanımlanmıştır. Bu yazarlardan John Louke’ye göre “soyutlama”, dış dünyaya ilişkin belirli nesnelerden belirli fikirleri alarak onları gerçek varoluştan (zaman, mekân) ayırır. ( genç-sipahioğlu 1990: 180) Soyut sanat olası tüm dış gerçekleri inkâr eden sade renk ve formlarla estetik duygular heyecanlar uyandırmayı hedefleyen bir kavramdır. Soyut sanat zihinsel bir vakadır. Tabiatın taklidi dışındadır. Devam eden bir sanat evriminin 20 yy’da ki görünüşüdür (Kınay 1993: 266.) (Resim 15). Resim 13. Robert Delaunay, Circular Forms (Formescirculaires) Soyut sanat yalnızca bir ressamın keyfi bir anlatım üslubu olmadığı için 20. yüzyılı kültürel, politik açılardan büyüteç altına almakta yarar vardır. Böyle bir ayrıştırmadan sonra bu sanatın dünyadaki sosyal dengesizliklere duyarsız kalamayan sanatçının süper güçlere karşı hiçliğini anlayarak kendi içine kapanması sonucu bakışlarını doğadan uzaklaştırmasını kendi içine çevirmesiyle ortaya çıkmış, bir iç çatışmadır (Büyükişleyen, 1978, 134). Soyut sanat pek çokları için garip üçgenler, kareler, ucubik şekillerden ibarettir. Gerek soyut sanat gerekse ”normal” sanatın ne olduğu, nasıl olması gerektiği konusunda Batıda yapılan tartışmalar asırlardır devam etmektedir. Ancak meselenin özüne inmek isterseniz bütün kavgaların iki noktada yoğunlaştığı görülür. Bunlardan ilki sanat görüneni taklit etmelidir, estetik prensipler kuralınca gerçekleşir. Diğeri ise sanat bir anlam içermez renk, şekil, ses, ritm vs. 322 Şemseddin DAĞLI Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 amaç değil araçtır. Batı sanatçısı gerçekçi yaklaşımdan ayrılarak soyuta yönelmeye başlamış bir başka deyimle, soyut sanatçı Paul Klee’nin de söylediği gibi görünmeyeni görünür eylemenin yollarını araştırmıştır (Eti,1977, 28). Modern sanatın pek çok öncüsünün ortaya koydukları eserlerde Doğu ve eski Türk el sanatı örneklerinde olduğu gibi, sadelik, minimuma indirgeme, çoktlukta birlik, belirlginlik içinde belirsizlik gibi ilkelerin ön plana çıkmasıdır. Modern sanat akımlarının böylesine sentez ve deneme yolu ile sonuca gitme uğraşları, duygusal ve anlamlı eserlerin temelinde olması gereken bir özellik ve bir estetik zenginliktir. Bu anlamda resim sanatın gelişim süreçlerinde etkili olduğunu, bu öğelere yakın durarak çok daha yakın bakıp incelemek gerektiği düşünülmektedir (Bayramoğlu, 2016, 353). “Şüphesiz Modern Sanatın geniş çatısı altında, her toplumun kendine haslığını ve kültürel rengini koruyarak farklı seçenekler sunabilmesi olağan bir durumdur.” (Lynton 2004: 52-57). Kültürlerin başka kültürleri ve sanatlarını etkilemek gibi bir başka fonksiyonellikleri de vardır Bu bağlamda sanata baktığımızda modern resim sanatında haklı bir şekilde yer bırakanların halı ve kilimlerimizi görmemiş olduklarından bahsedemeyiz. Halıların daha 13. ve 14. yüzyıllarda Venedikli tüccarlarca Avrupa'ya yayıldığını, ünlü Alman ressam HansHolbein'in de 15. yüzyılda yaptığı resimlerindebir fon elemanı olarak kullandığı bilinmektedir. Sonraki yüzyıllarda batılı sanatçıların halı ve kilimlerle fazlaca ilgilenmişlerdir. Burada söz konusu olan sorun, hangi sanatçının hangi halıdan ya da kilimden nasıl faydalandığından öte modern sanatçıların kullandığı görsel anlatım unsurları veya düzenlemeler ile geleneksel kültürün ürünü Anadolu halı ve kilim örgeleri arasında çok yakın benzerliğe dikkat çekilmesidir ( Bingöl, 2014,72), (Resim 16-17). Resim 14. Afyon yöresi cicim yolluk (Şemseddin Dağlı kolleksiyonu) Resim 15. Paul Klee. Portale di una moschea İslam Plastik Sanatlarında Soyutlayıcı Yaklaşımlar ve Batı Sanatı Üzerindeki… 323 Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 Resim 16. Afyon yöresi cicim kilim (Şemseddin Dağlı kolleksiyonu) Resim 17. Paul Klee_. Highwayand Byways [Hauptwegund Nebenwege] (1928)Museum Ludwig, Cologne 20. yüzyıl Modern Batı Resim sanatının öncülerinden Paul Klee, Doğu kültürü etkisini eserlerinde yansıtan ressamlardandır. Gençliğinde bir süre resim ve müzik arasında seçim yapmakta kararsız kalan Klee, tavrını resimden yana koyarken akademik resim kurallarına aykırı bir yol izlemiştir. Bu süre içerisinde farklı yönelimler içerisinde çelişkiler yaşayan sanatçının, 1914 yılında yaptığı Tunus seyahati yaşamı ve sanatında dönüm noktası olarak izlenir. Bu gezi sırasında sanatçı, Doğunun saf parlak renkleri ile ritim ve geometri ağırlıklı süslemelerini keşfeder. Ayrıca 1929’da yaptığı Mısır gezisi Klee’nin tüm sanat yaşamında etkili olduğu görülmektedir (Bayramoğlu, 2016,354), (Resim 20-21-22-23). 324 Şemseddin DAĞLI Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 Resim 18. Paul Klee, Zitronen Resim 19. Paul Klee Castleand sun Sanatçıların özgür duruşlarını sergileyerek öze ulaşma çabalarının arttığı bir dönem olan birinci dünya savası sonrası özellikle Amerikalı sanatçıların ortaya koydukları eserlerde bu etkileşimin izleri görülmektedir. Özellikle halı ve kilimlerimizdeki örge motif dizaynı renk düzenleri bazı sanatçılara ilham vererek kullanılmıştır. İslâm inancına göre; “gerçek güzellik, nesnenin değişen niteliklerinde değil, değişmeyen özündedir. Bu öze ancak nesneyi sadeleştirip temel çizgilerini yakalamakla ulaşılabilir.” Adeta stilizasyonu anlatan bu tavır kültür dünyamızda sanatın, İslâmî inanç sistemi ile nasıl buluşup, beslendiğini açıkça ortaya koymaktadır (Birol, 2016,63). Sembolleşmiş olarak görülen motif-nesne sıralama yöntemi başta Manisa Gördes halıları olmak üzere, Anadolu halı ve kilimlerinde geleneksel olarak çeşitli şekillerde kullanılan bir yöntemdir. Afyon-Bayat yöresinde dokunan Türkmen gelini ile kaynana arasındaki kavgadan ismini alan, “örümcekli” kiliminde, görülen geleneksel motif-nesne sıralama yöntemi yıllardan beri günümüzdede aynı şekilde kullanılmaktadır. Kilimde ardışık bi şekilde tekrarlanan motiflerin içleri sıcak-soğuk renk düzeninde doldurulmuş bu sayede kompozisyona farklı bir hareketlilik kazandırılmıştır. Pop sanatın önde gelen temsilcisi Andy Warhol’un “Marilyn Monroe” adlı yapıtında da motif-nesne sıralama yöntemini benzer bir biçimde kullanıldığı görülmektedir. Soğuk- sıcak renklerle betimlenen Monroe’nun portesi, kilimde olduğu gibi, yan yana dizilerek bir istif düzeni içerisinde oluşturulmuştur. Sanatçı, motif sıralama yöntemini kullanarak, soğuk-sıcak renklerle betimlediği portrelerle, Monroe’nun değişken ruh hali izleyiciye hissettirmektedir (Bingöl,2014,70-71).(Resim 24-25) İslam Plastik Sanatlarında Soyutlayıcı Yaklaşımlar ve Batı Sanatı Üzerindeki… 325 Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 Resim 22 Kayarevan kufisi Resim 23 Paul Klee in the Style of Kairouan1914. Resim 24Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe, 1967 Resim 20. Afyon yöresi örümcekli kilim Klee resimlerinde, aldığı müzik eğitiminde de etkisi ile İslâm kültüründe tanıdığı nesnel gerçeği aramaya yönelerek müzikte olduğu gibi, resimde sadeleştirilmiş anlatımlara ulaşmak istemiştir. İslâm kültüründe var olan nesnel gerçek düşüncesini arayışa çıkan sadece Klee değildi. Bu sanatçılar arasında Matisse, Delaunay, Vassily, Kandinsky ve daha birçok döneminin ünlü ismi sayılabilir (Turani, 1960). Cezanne’nin (1839 1906), “doğa; küre, koni ve silindirden oluşur.” diyerek, doğayı yalın biçimlerde görmek isteği, daha sonraki kuşak tarafından benimsenip, kübizmde ifadesini bulmuştur. Wasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Paul Klee (1879 1940) bunlarla da yetinmeyip, sanatta gerçeği arama çabasına girmişlerdi.11 nesnelerin görünümlerini resmetmek onlar için yeterli olmuyor, nesnel gerçeği arayarak soyut anlatıma ulaşmak istiyorlardı. Sanatçıların, sanatın kendi ifadesini arayışına yönelmeleri, 19. yüzyılın sonlarında sanatçıları yeni arayışlara yöneltti (Bingöl,2014,69). Soyut resmin önde gelen temsilcilerinden Wassily Kandinsky’nin çalışmalarını ele alacak olursak, her iki sanatta da bir renk uyumu bulunmaktadır Kandinsky’nin resimlerinde, boya lekeleri figüratif bir anlam içermeksizin tuval üzerine rastgele bir şekilde serpilmiştir (Kınay, 1993, 266),(Resim 26). 326 Şemseddin DAĞLI Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 Resim 21. Wassily Kandinsky, Transverse Line 1923. Kandinskynin soyut sanatta kuramlar aradığı süreçte Klee’ de doğadaki denge ve ilişkinin armonilerini aramaktadır. Soyut resim sanatının öncülerinden Kandinsky “Doğa kendi biçimini kendi amaçları, sanat da kendi biçimini kendi amaçları için yaratır.” Anlayışı ile soyuta yönelmiştir (Büyük İşleyen, 1978,136). Dönemin bir başka ünlü sanatçısı Picasso Paris’te karşılaştığı Cezayir’li bir hattatın yapmış olduğu hat eserlerini görünce aynen söyle demiştir; “İşte gerçek resim bu.” sanatçı tanıdığı bu hat ustasından bir dönem dersler almış ve hat sanatına olan hayranlığını ileride şu sözlerle ifade etmiştir.” Batı’nın yüzyıllar boyu üzerinde durup peşinden koştuğu soyut ifadeyi hattatlar asırlar önce bularak çağın üstüne çıkmış ve en güzel örneklerini vermişlerdir. Benim varmak istediğim son noktayı, İslam yazısı çoktan bulmuş” (https://indigodergisi.com, 28 Kasım 2014), (Resim 27). Resim 22. Qur'anic Manuscript - Maghribi Burada Picasso’nun doğu hattatlığı diyerek tarif ettiği hattatlık, doğrudan doğruya Türk yazı sanatı olabilir. Çünkü Doğu’da Türkler’den başka hattat olan toplum yoktur. Anlaşılması güç olan İslam Plastik Sanatlarında Soyutlayıcı Yaklaşımlar ve Batı Sanatı Üzerindeki… 327 Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 bir gerçekte şudur: hattatlık Picasso’nun zannettiği gibi, sadece nonfigüratif değil, hem figüratif hem de nonfigüratif olan bir sanattır. Türk hattatları batı soyut sanatçıları gibi yalnızca gerçeklerden kaçınmakla kalmamışlar, bu gerçeği anlatmışlardır. Resim sanatının geleceği hakkında sunmaya çalıştığımız örnekler bağlamında Picasso’yu bir diğer örnek olarak görmek olasıdır. Bu ressam, geleneksel Afrika maskelerinden esinlenerek Kübizm akımının temel değerlerini prensiplerini ortaya koyarak 20. asrın başlarında resim sanatında yepyeni bir hava estirmiştir. Georges Braque ile birlikte başlattıkları kübizm akımı sanat tarihinde silinmez derin bir iz bırakmıştır. Bu resim anlayışının temelinde ise bazı doğu etkilerinin yattığı söylenebilir. Bir defasında, Picasso, bir Türk hat sanatı eserini görüp “işte gerçek soyut resim budur” dediği söylenir. Doğu sanat anlayışının kökünde tasavvufun yerini, rolünü ve etkisini kabul etmiş olursak, bu manevi cevherlerle dolu engin deryanın verebileceği ilhamların tükenmeyeceğini diyebilmekteyiz. Tasavvufa dayanan sanatçı, bilgeliğe ermiş bir zat oluverir. Tasavvuf sayesinde yeniliğe olan kapılar hep açık kalacaktır. Vurgulamak istediğim husus, tasavvufun sanatta yol gösterici bir rehber olması için gereken her şeyi içinde barındırmasıdır. Bu ise yalnız sanatta değil, hayatın her sahasında geçerli olmalıdır. Sanatta gerçek avangard olmak bugün artık çok zor. Muhyiddin i Arabi’nin dediği gibi “söylenmemiş söz kalmadı”. Ancak Mevlana diyor ki: “yeni şeyler söylemek lazım”. Sanatta tekrarlamanın “bir âlemi yok”. Sanatımızın geleceğiyle kafa yormak vazgeçilmez bir merakımdır. Yaşatıldığımız tüm bu savaş rüzgârlarına rağmen sanata sarılalım diyorum. Asıl uğraşlara hayatımızı adamak (kaderimiz Picasso ve tasavvuf, Rıfat emin). Son yüzyılın Avrupalı sanatçılarında bir takım izmler akımlar belirginleşmiş ve bunlardan dönem ve üslup açmış Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky, Klee, Hartung gibi bazı dev sanatçıların bizim geleneksel kültürümüzün ürünleri hat minyatür ebru halı kilim gibi plastik ve simgesel boyutu yüksek sanatlarımızı karakterize ederek kullandıkları gözlemlenmektedir (Resim 28, 29). Resim 23. Joan Miro Les Grandes Manoeuvres Resim 24. Hans Hartung, Untitled 1938 Kültürün önemli belirtilerinden olan bazı im ve işaretlerin başka biçimlerde başka sanatlarda plastik ifadeler bulması çağlar boyu sanatçıların ortak güdüsü olmuştur. Burada anlaşılması gerekense bu kültürel alıntıların doğrudan direk değil yorumlanarak kendi anlayışlarına göre işlenmesi sonucudur. Din-Sanat ilişkisi Sanat, özü itibariyle değil ancak yapıtları noktasında 328 Şemseddin DAĞLI Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 psikolojik bir inceleme konusu olabilir. Sanatın özde ne olduğu sorusu psikolojinin alanını aşan bir durumdur. Benzer şekilde din de, esas itibariyle kendi fenomenolojisini oluşturan, kendine özgü coşku ve simgeleriyle öz olarak psikoloji tarafından tam olarak açıklanamayan bir olgudur. En nihayetinde din ve sanat, her ikisi de öz olarak bilim olmadığı gibi ancak kendilerine özgü nesnelerle açıklanabilirler. Sanatçı ile yapıtı arsındaki ilişki sanatçının yetiştiği ortam, şartlar bilinmeden tam olarak anlaşılamaz (Jung, 2006, 308-309). SONUÇ VE ÖNERİLER Geçtiğimiz yüzyılda yenilik arayan batı sanatçısı o güne kadar gelenin dışında farklı arayış ve betimlemelerle farklı üsluplar oluşturmuştur. Bu arayış dönemlerinde kendi içlerinde kalmayıp yüzünü doğuya çeviren bir takım batılı sanatçılar modernizm serüvenindeki mihenk taşlarını doğu İslam sanatlarında bulmuşlardır. Bu optikten bakıldığında 20 yy. sanatı oluşturulurken batının doğu sanatından etkilendiği gerçeği sanatçıların ortaya koyduğu eserler ve anlatımlarında belirgindir. Rasyonalist bir yaklaşımla eserini ortaya koyarken batılı sanatçı doğu sanatlarını taklit etmeden ama form dili bakımından farklı bir boyuta taşıdığı gözlemlenmektedir. Doğu İslam dünyası motifleri batılı sanatçı elinde çağın gereklerine uygun form ve biçimlerde plastiğe bürünmüş sosyokültürel olgular halindedir. Çağdaş toplumların pek çoğunda yöresel folklorik değerler ve geleneksel sanatlar yeni yorumlar ve sonuçlarla farklı boyutlarda görünüşe ulaşır. Konumuz dâhilinde ele aldığımız batılı soyut sanatçıların bu yöndeki sanat anlayışına yönelerek esinlendikleri bilinmektedir. Örnekler içinde yer alan Picasso, Paul Klee, Hans Hartung, Piette Mondrian, Joan Miro gibi sanatçıların eserlerinde bu esinlenmeyi görmek mümkündür. Bu doğu İslam sanatlarının biçimsel ve anlam zenginliğinin plastik bir görünüşünün bir göstergesidir. Çalışmada metinlerde ve resimlerde ortaya koymaya çalıştığımız, günümüz batı sanatı özellikle batılı resimler ve doğu İslam sanatı örneklerine karşılaştırmalı olarak bakıldığında özellikle İslam sanatlarından oldukça etkilenildiği gözlemlenir. Burada soyut sanatın önemli temsilcilerinden Paul Klee ve Piette Mondrian sürrealizmin güçlü temsilcisi Miro, kübizmin önemli temsilcisi Pablo Picasso, Hollandalı Escherin çalışmalarındaki etkileşimleri net bir şekilde gözlemlenmektedir. Yapılan incelememiz sonucunda elde ettiğimiz karşılaştırmalı sonuçlarda İslam yazı sanatının Hurufilik inançları dâhilinde ele alınan ürünleri yazı resimler Gerek ön yapı ( renk biçim form e espas denge vd.) şekilden yön espas kompozisyon vb. açılardan benzerlikler teşkil etmektedir. Bunların yanı sıra bilinç dışı salt hayal ve mistik inanışlar çerçevesinde gelişen gerçeküstü ifadeler ve anlamlar taşıdığı gözlemlenmiştir. Sürrealizmin temel dayanaklarından hayali betimlemeler İslam yazı resimlerinde de farklı boyutlarda ve şekillerde tezahür etmektedir. İslam da resim yasağının yeterince anlaşılamayıp kavranamaması sonucunda İslam sanatının özünde bulunan soyutlayıcı eğilimler Batılı sanatçının aksine pentür geleneğinden uzak duran İslam sanatçısı elindeki malzemeyle gerçeğin ötesindeki sürre el anlatımları düşünsel bir çağrışımla bazen şiirsel, basende tılsımlı bir ifade metni olarak form etrafında görünüşe ulaştırmıştır. Bu kompozisyon düzeni İslam hat sanatçısı tarafından kimi zaman zahiri bir sır kimi zamanda bir yol gösterici olarak düşsel anlatımlara ulaşmıştır. Her ülke sanatçısı kendi mitlerinden kendi doğasından ve kültüründen beslenmektedir. Plastik anlamda ya da diğer sanatlarımızda olsun eserler ve kompozisyonlar oluşturulurken öz değerler ön planda tutulmalı hareket noktası buradan seçilmeli buradan beslenerek çalışmalar yapılmalıdır. Batılı sanatçının tüm değerlerini tüketerek yüzünü bozulmamış doğu ve İslam dünyasına ve kültürüne çevirdiği günümüzde bize düşen kendi içimizden ve benliğimizden hareketle kültürel değerlerimizi çağdaş yorumlamalarla sunmaktır. Çağdaşlaşmak kendinden kopmak değil çağla bütünleşen ama bozulmayan bir yorumu yakalamaktan geçer. İslam Plastik Sanatlarında Soyutlayıcı Yaklaşımlar ve Batı Sanatı Üzerindeki… 329 Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 KAYNAKÇA Arseven, C.E., (1994). “Sanat Ansiklopedisi”, C. IV, 1755-1756, İstanbul. Aydın, M., (1987).“Din Felsefesi”, 237, İzmir. Bayramoğlu, M., (2016). “20.Yüzyıl Modern Batı Resim Sanatında Geleneksel Türk Sanatı Örneklerinin Etkisi”,Sobider Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, Yıl: 3, Sayı: 6, 351-366,Mart. Bingöl, Y. (2014).“İslam ve Modern Sanat” İslam Ve Sanat. Tartışmalı İlmi Toplantı 07-09 Kasım 2014 Akdeniz Üniversitesi Antalya. Birol, İ. A. (2016). “Sanat ve Çizgilerin Dili” İsmek El Sanatları Dergisi, Sayı 22. Büyükişleyen, M. Z. (1978). Sanat Eserlerini İnceleme. Ankara: Yaygın Yüksek Öğretim Kurumu. Can, Y., Gün, R. (2012). İslam Sanatına Giriş (2. Baskı). Dem Yayınları, İstanbul. Coşkun, İ. (2014).“İslam Sanatının Gelişmesini Engelleyen Kelami Yorumlar” İslam Ve Sanat Tartışmalı İlmi Toplantı, 7-9 Kasım, (Yayımlanmış Bildiri Kitabı) Antalya. Comaraswamy, A. K. (1995). “Sanatın Tabiatındaki Başkalaşım”, (Çev. Nejat Özdemiroğlu), İnsan Yayınları, İstanbul. Çetin, M. “İslâm Sanatının Yeniden Teşekkülü”, Adım Yayıncılık, İstanbul. Demirci, M. (2015). “Resim Sanatında Mevleviler”, Yeni Asır Gazetesi, 7.12.2015. Erdem, S. (1963). “Modern Sanat”, Türkiye Basımevi, İstanbul. Eti, S. (1977). “Soyut Resim Ve Ebru”, Türkiye’miz Kültür Ve Sanat Dergisi, 23, 28-32. Gombrich, E. H, Çev. Bedrettin Cömert, Sanatın Öyküsü, S. 443-475. Jung, C. G. (2006). “Analitik Psikoloji”, (Çev.) Ender Gürol ( 2. Baskı). Payel Yayınevi, İstanbul. Kara, M. (1999).“Din Hayat Sanat Açısından Tekkeler Ve Zaviyeler”, Dergâh Yayınları, İstanbul, 187. Kınay, C. (1993). Sanat Tarihi. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı. Kızılçelik, S. (1994). “Postmodernizm: ‘Modernlik Projesine’ Bir Başkaldırı”, Türkiye Günlüğü, Sayı: 30, S. 87. Köksal, A. “Türk Ve İslam Dünyasında El Yazması Hat Ve Tasvir Sanatı”. Milliyet Sanat Dergisi, S.102(Ağustos 1984), 31-33.). Lynton, N. (2004 ) “Modern Sanatın Öyküsü”, Remzi Kitabevi, Üçüncü Baskı, İstanbul. Müller, J. E. (1972). “Modern Sanat”. (Çev.) Mehmet Toprak, Remzi Kitabevi,İstanbul. Ökten, S. (2014). “Fincanımda Kola Var”, Tuti Kitap, İstanbul. Paul K. (1971). BildnerischeDenken, Basel/Bümtiz. S. 15-19. Pişkin, Y. (2014). “Din Sanat Bağlamında Dini Tecrübenin Sanat Ruhuna Etkisi”, İslam ve Sanat, Tartışmalı İlmi Toplantı 07-09 Kasım 2014 Akdeniz Üniversitesi Antalya. Teknik, A. 2014). “Tasavvufi Perspektifte Nesnedeki Sanat Ve Estetik Algısı”, İslam ve Sanat, Tartışmalı İlmi Toplantı 07-09 Kasım 2014 Akdeniz Üniversitesi Antalya. Tolstoy, L. N. (1996). “Sanat Nedir”,(Çev.) Baran Dural, Şule Yayınları. İstanbul. Turani, A. (1960).“Modern Resim Sanatının Gerçek Çehresi”, Ankara. Yakutcan, A., Ömür, C. (1989).İslam’da Resim, Heykel Ve Musiki, Nil Yayınevi, İzmir. 330 Şemseddin DAĞLI Turkish Studies Volume 13/2, Winter 2018 İNTERNET KAYNAKLARI Müslim, İ. 147. 49 Ebu Dâvûd, Edâhî, 11 www.Yenibalkan.Com/Kose-Yazilari/Picasso-Ve-Tasavvuf-H6082.Html, 29 Mart 2016 Salı 13:51yeni Balkan, https://İndigodergisi.Com › 28 Kasım 2014 Kaderimiz picasso ve Tasavvuf Rifat Emin 29 Mart 2016 Salı 13:51Yeni Balkan www.Yenibalkan.Com/Kose-Yazilari/Picasso-Ve-Tasavvuf-H6082.Html Sabah Gazetesi, Hat Sanatına İlgi Azaldı Kültür Sanat Haberleri: 14.11.2014 10:35 http://www.yenibalkan.com/Kose-Yazilari/Picasso-Ve-Tasavvuf-H6082.Html https://www.google.com.tr/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=85&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjSi7TT7cDVAhWC7RQKHU0BBy44UBAWCDwwBA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yenibalkan.com%2Fkose-yazilari%2Fpicasso-ve-tasavvuf-h6082.html&usg=AFQjCNEsmIJB-FW1N4UzC4ERC1rkU5-8qg https://www.google.com.tr/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=85&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjSi7TT7cDVAhWC7RQKHU0BBy44UBAWCDwwBA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yenibalkan.com%2Fkose-yazilari%2Fpicasso-ve-tasavvuf-h6082.html&usg=AFQjCNEsmIJB-FW1N4UzC4ERC1rkU5-8qg http://www.sabah.com.tr/kultur-sanat work_3kr63fmm5fcwzgwwtykns3m3te ---- None work_3l4i7l35qjhznnhbri44igmkau ---- Lydia Delectorskaya 626 British Journal of General Practice, August 2010 Lydia Delectorskaya Behind The Pink Nude (1935) by Henri Matisse, there is the story of an extraordinary life, not of Matisse, but of his model, muse, friend, personal assistant and eventual carer, Lydia Delectorskaya. She should have been a doctor, like her father, a respected paediatrician in Tomsk in Siberia, but he died of typhus and her mother of cholera in 1922, leaving her an orphan at 12. Brought up by her aunt, and leaving Russia to escape the revolution, she was accepted for medical studies at the Sorbonne, but could not afford the fees. She married young, but the marriage lasted only a year and she moved to be part of the Russian émigré community in the south of France, trading on her looks as a film extra, dancer, and model. Delectorskaya had no money. After 6 months of helping Matisse with his huge mural The Dance, she was given 500 francs by Matisse to make a new start, but her partner blew the lot in one night at the Casino, and left. When Matisse found out she was taking part in dance marathons to repay the debt, he was both horrified and impressed. It was the beginning of one of the most fruitful partnerships in art. Despite his sedate appearance in later life, Matisse was a driven man, seething to paint. On marrying Amelie in 1900, he told her, ‘I love you dearly, mademoiselle, but I shall always love painting more’.1 He began conventionally enough, as an impoverished art student in Paris, but parted company with convention in 1905 with his Woman with the Hat and blazed a trail of colour for the next 50 years. He courted neither celebrity nor critics and was at the receiving end of a lifetime of hostility, rejection, misunderstanding, and abuse. Matisse competed mainly with himself and found painting stressful. He was fortunate in having dedicated collectors who bought his work, although much of it went abroad and was not widely seen for decades. His wife Amelie supported him through thick and thin, but by 1930, when Matisse had achieved financial security, she had already retreated into invalidism. Delectorskaya was hired to look after her and 3 years later, Matisse asked her to model. As a blonde ice princess, she was unlike anyone he had painted before. Matisse impressed her as the first painter she had met who did not try to get her into bed. As Hilary Spurling makes clear in her magnificent biography, Matisse the Master,1 Matisse was too committed to painting to waste time and energy having sex with his models. For 4 years he painted nobody else. She became indispensable, not only as his model, but also his factotum, taking charge of his studio and his affairs. Amelie rose from her invalid bed, insisting ‘it’s me or her’. Years later, Delectorskaya reflected, ‘Madame wanted me to leave, not from female jealousy — there was no question of adultery — but because I was running the whole house’.1 When Matisse did sack her, Delectorskaya tried to shoot herself. After the marriage finally failed, Matisse took her on again. Matisse was 40 years older. Hilary Spurling says there is no evidence that they had a sexual relationship and Delectorskaya herself denied it. Matisse gave her a sense of power and purpose. Spurling interviewed Delectorskaya several times: ‘She could have run an army, she had amazing capacities. She ran the studio, she organised the models, she dealt with the dealers, sales people, the gallery … everything worked like clockwork.’1 From the cancer operation in 1941, which he was not expected to survive, until he died in 1954, Delectorskaya provided Matisse with the calm, support and comradeship that enabled him to continue at the top of his creative powers. Remembering her father, she likened Matisse to a doctor, totally absorbed in his work. Delectorskaya was his theatre sister. Without her, it is unlikely there would have been the brilliant flowering of his cut out shapes, for which he is now perhaps most remembered. Delectorskaya also coordinated the 4 years of preparation and installation that Henri Matisse, French, 1869-1954. Large Reclining Nude, 1935. Oil on canvas. 26 x 36 1/2 in. (66 x 92.7 cm.). The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland BMA 1950.258. Photography By: Mitro Hood. This image is available in the print version British Journal of General Practice, August 2010 627 Essay went into the exquisite chapel at Vence, just outside Nice, which he flooded with blue and yellow light. The relationship of Henri Matisse and Lydia Delectorskaya was hugely productive but exclusive, especially of the Matisse family, who never came to terms with her position. When he died, the day after making his last portrait of her, she left immediately, leaving the funeral arrangements to them. Although this part of her life was over, she lived as long again, dying aged 88 in Paris in 1998. By then she had donated the paintings Matisse had given her to the Hermitage in St Petersburg and published two authoritative books on Matisse’s most productive years. Spurling describes this summer’s exhibition at the Musée Matisse in Nice, ‘Lydia Delectorskaya was the beautiful, blue-eyed blonde from Siberia who became Matissse’s model, muse and studio manager in the last two decades of his life, and the show includes all the works he gave her, which she in turn presented to her Russian homeland. A scintillating homage to an extraordinary woman.’2 Graham Watt Exhibition Lydia Delectorskaya, Matissse’s muse and model. Musée Matisse, Nice. 18th June – 27th September 2010. See www.musee-matisse- nice.org/ (details of the exhibition are on the French language site only). REFERENCES 1. Spurling H. Matisse the Master: a life of Henri Matisse, Volume Two: 1909–1954. London: Penguin Books, 2005. 2. Cripps C. Cultural Life: Hilary Spurling, writer. The Independent 2010, 14 May: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts- entertainment/books/features/cultural-life-hilary- spurling-writer-1972553.html (accessed 13 Jul 2010). DOI: 10.3399/bjgp10X515250 age. This avoids having to look up different chapters and saves time. Care of the Elderly and Child Health chapters are not compromised however, remaining as extensive as in prior additions. The symptoms and signs chapter has been removed. This is replaced with a short segment at the start of each chapter which details symptoms and signs relevant to each system. This affords a more streamlined layout. Finally, this edition retains its tendency to be funny, wise, and have encouraging quotations dotted throughout its pages. As a comfort blanket for the less experienced it remains unrivalled, but truly, it is a must-have book for all. Faye McCleery DOI: 10.3399/bjgp10X515269 Digest Book review OXFORD HANDBOOK OF GENERAL PRACTICE: THIRD EDITION CHANTAL SIMON, HAZEL EVERITT, AND FRANCOISE VAN DORP 2010, Oxford University Press, PB, 1200 pages, £32.95, 9780199236107 In this digital age is the traditional reference book a thing of the past? Or can it still be useful in modern day general practice? The new edition of the Oxford Handbook of General Practice is a champion in the battle between hardback and hard drive. Its compact size makes it the perfect companion not only for the surgery but also for house calls. The logical lay out and referencing makes it as fast (if not at IT meltdown times, faster) than online resources. It provides an up-to-date and comprehensive guide to current day general practice. New sections include requirements for foundation level doctors and details of the nMRCGP. There is also a new ‘Healthy Living’ chapter which provides useful advice on tackling such hot topics as obesity, drug and alcohol abuse. Many conditions that affect all age groups may differ for children or the elderly. A superb new feature is the highlight system for these instances. A box with a symbol for the elderly or children draws the reader’s attention to relevant differences for the extremes of work_4djqugl6ojga7ajykijkegfwca ---- Zurich Open Repository and Archive University of Zurich Main Library Strickhofstrasse 39 CH-8057 Zurich www.zora.uzh.ch Year: 1997 March 1996–February 1997 Siehr, Kurt DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/s0940739197000222 Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-154389 Journal Article Published Version Originally published at: Siehr, Kurt (1997). March 1996–February 1997. International Journal of Cultural Property, 6(1):161-168. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/s0940739197000222 Chronicles March 1996-February 1997 Kurt Siehr* The French Cour de Cassation held that the authenticity of a piece March 1996 of art may be questioned even if the artist's heir had certified that the object was a genuine product of the artist: Le journal des arts, September 1996, p. 61. The French Court of Appeals in Metz awarded to the receiver of 22 May 1996 bankrupt enterprise Schlumpf 25 million francs as compensation for the devaluation of a collection of motorcars (exhibited in a museum in Alsace) which had been classified as unmerchantable French "monuments historiques": Le journal des arts, September 1996, p. 61. French decree no. 96-541 changes the French statute of 1913 on 14 June 1996 historical monuments in order to decentralize certain procedures for the protection of cultural property: Recueil Dalloz Sirey 1996, Le- gislation, p. 279 and 370. Publication of the EC Proposal for a European Parliament and Coun- 21 June 1996 cil Directive on the resale right for the benefit of the author of an original work of art. This instrument proposes to harmonize the law on a "droit de suite" in Europe: Official Gazette of the EC, No. C 178 p. 16. Kinshasa "Regional Seminar on Illicit Traffic in Cultural Property". 26—28 June 1996 See report by Etienne Clement, supra at 139—41. In Saint-Malo (Brittany, France) an exhibition opened with unsigned 2 July 1996 works of Vincent van Gogh, promoted as newly discovered works but in reality being clumsy fakes. The visitors had to pay for en- trance. Three weeks later the police shut down the exhibition: ART- newsletter, vol. XXII, no. 3 of 8 October 1996, p. 7. The Paris Court of Appeals found that certain art objects of the royal 3 July 1996 family of Orleans (Count of Paris) do not qualify as "souvenirs de famille" and therefore can be sold as part of an estate to be divided among the heirs of the deceased person: La Semaine juridique, Juris- classeur periodique, 1996, II, 22703. See infra 14/15 December 1996. Royal Assent to the English Treasure Act 1996 (1996 c. L4): New 4 July 1996 Law Journal 1996, p. 1346. * Professor of Law, University of Zurich. 161 use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739197000222 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 14:42:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of Chronicles 23 July 1996 The Nigerian Minister of Information and Culture inaugurated an Inter-Ministerial Committee on the Looting of Nigerian Cultural Property. Information by Prof. Folarin Shyllon of Ibadan University. 23 July 1996 The bill of an Italian statute implementing the EC Directive no. 93/ 7 of 15 March 1993 on the return of cultural objects unlawfully removed from the territory of a Member State was introduced in the Italian Senate: II giornale dell'arte, vol. XIV, no. 150 of December 1996, p. 35 (text) and 33 (article by F. Lemme). 24 July 1996 The mayor of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) issued a decree concerning art objects and collections of documents of historical, literary or artistic interest, owned or held by public enterprises or being under public administration in order to be privatized, which should be classified as cultural property under Article 5 of City Law No. 166 and not be scattered. A list of those items will be prepared. Decree No. 14.998: ARTnewsletter, vol. XXII, no. 1 of 10 September 1996, p. 5. 31 July 1996 The European Convention of 16 January 1992 on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage (European Treaty Series No. 143) en- tered into force in Poland: Dziennik Ustaw No. 120, 9 October 1996, Pos. 564 and 565. July 1996 A New York court, confronted with a suit in rem against an Artemis statue stolen in 1988 from the Convent of Maria Immaculata in Poz- zuoli (Naples), applied for the first time the UNESCO Convention of 1970 on the return of illegally exported cultural objects and or- dered the return of the statue: The Art Newspaper, January 1997, p. 25. The International Law Association (ILA) held its 67th Conference in Helsinki (Finland). The ILA Committee on Cultural Heritage drafted a resolution which was adopted by the ILA plenary session on 17 August 1996. See report by K. Siehr, supra at 142—43. The Australian business magnate Alan Bond was convicted in Perth (West Australia) of charges of fraud and deception and was sen- tenced to three years in jail. In November 1987 Bond purchased Vincent van Gogh's "Irises" for $ 53.9 million at Sotheby's and partially paid by proceeds from the sale of Eduard Manet's "La promenade": ARTnewsletter, vol. XXII, no. 1 of 9 September 1996, p. 7. August 1996 Austrian President of State Klestil announced that on his forthcom- ing visit to Mexico he may take with him as a present the "crown of Montezuma" exhibited for a long time in the Vienna Volkerkun- demuseum (Museum of Ethnology). This announcement aroused an outcry of Austrian museum people: ART, September 1996, p. 9. August 1996 A Johannesburg court of South Africa held that an auctioneer may reopen the bidding at his discretion if he missed a bid and that there- fore the hammer went down too early: ARTnewsletter, vol. XXII, no. 2 of 24 September 1996, p. 8. 1 2 - 1 7 August 1996 16 August 1996 162 use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739197000222 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 14:42:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of Chronicles An agreement between the Russian Federation and the Principality of Liechtenstein on the exchange of archives has been signed in Vaduz. Russia returns the archives of the royal house of Liech- tenstein taken by Russian troops as booty in 1945 after the occupa- tion of Austria. The Principality of Liechtenstein provides docu- ments on the execution of Tsar Nicholas II recently bought at auction in London: Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 7/8 September 1996, p. 9. On a visit of the German Chancellor Kohl to the Ukraine both States agreed to return cultural objects displaced during or after World War II: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 September 1996, p. 1; supra at 134-36. Opening of the Berlin exhibition devoted to the collection Heinz Berggruen in the Sriilerbau (opposite the Charlottenburg Castle). The collection of paintings of Paul Cezanne, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse and especially of Pablo Picasso will stay in Berlin for the next ten years: ARTnews, January 1997, p. 54. Celebration of the Day of Cultural Heritage, initiated by the Council of Europe. See Swiss publication "Tag der Kulturgiiter". Polish Statute on the Inspection of Monuments (pos. 496 of 1996) was passed: Dziennik Ustaw. Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej Nr. 106, 30 September 1996, p. 2346. The International Association of Legal Science (Paris) organized the Conference on the protection of cultural property in Rabat (Mo- rocco). See report by R. K. Paterson and K. Siehr, supra at 144-50. Conference was held in Venice (Italy) on the question of the authen- ticity of the Ludovisi Throne (Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome) and the Boston Throne (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The Thrones were exhibited in the Palazzo Grassi (Venice) in the exhibition "Magna Graeca": Minerva 7 (no. 6/1996), p. 33 et seq. (article by J. M. Eisenberg). Treaty between Italy and the Episcopalian Conference of Italy on the protection of cultural property of religious interest owned by church institutions: II giornale dell'arte, October 1996, p. 5. Ninth session of the Intergovernmental UNESCO Committee for promoting the return of cultural property to its countries of origin or its restitution in case of illicit appropriation. See report by Jan Hladik, supra at 151-53. The library of Linkoeping (Sweden) has been set on fire. About 300.000 books have been destroyed: La Repubblica, 22 September 1996, p. 16. Itar-Tass of Moscow reported that a very precious book was stolen from the Moscow State Library. The book of 1564 is supposed to be the oldest printed book in the Russian language: The Art Newspaper, November 1996, p. 1. 3 September 1996 3 September 1996 6 September 1996 7 September 1996 8 September 1996 11-12 September 1996 12 September 1996 13 September 1996 16-19 September 1996 20 September 1996 24 September 1996 163 use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739197000222 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 14:42:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of Chronicles 26 September 1996 September 1996 13 October 1996 22 October 1996 28 October 1996 29/30 October 1996 29 October 1996 30 October 1996 30 October 1996 The Art-Law Centre of Geneva organized an international sympo- sium on "Patronage of the Arts" in Lausanne. See report by Q. Byrne-Sutton and M.-A. Renold, supra at 154—55. The Swiss National Council voted unanimously to set up a special commission to investigate what happened to Nazi art loot brought to Switzerland before and during World War II: ARTnewspaper, vol. XXII, no. 4 of 22 October 1996, p. 2. Henri Nannen, publisher (i. a. of the weekly "Der Stern"), art enthu- siast and founder of a museum in Emden (Germany), passed away: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 October 1996, p. 45. The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsyl- vania entered a judgment in favor of the defendants in the civil action Crisoty v. Rizik. The plaintiffs purchased in 1989 a painting by Corrado Giaquinto stolen more than three decades earlier from the defendants' parents' home. The plaintiffs, who had delivered the painting to the defendants after having been informed about the theft, asked for recovery of their expenses for restoration of the painting. The court denied an unjust enrichment claim against the defendants. Unpublished decision No. 93 — 6215. Belgium passed the statute implementing the EC Directive 93/7/ EEC of 15 March 1993 on the return of cultural property unlawfully removed from the territory of a Member State: Moniteur beige of 21 December 1996, No. 245, p. 31865. Christie's of Vienna sold at auction the Mauerbach treasures which were items seized by the National Socialists and stored since 1945 in Austria, finally in the Mauerbach cloisters. This Mauerbach auc- tion for the benefit of the victims of the Holocaust comprised more than 1.000 items (paintings, drawings, sculptures and other works of art) and produced about $ 14 mill., i. e. five times more than ex- pected: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 November 1996, p. 33; Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 2/3 November 1996, p. 47; The Art Newspa- per, December 1996, p. 35; ARTnewsletter, vol. XXII, no. 6 of 19 November 1996, p. 2. ARTnews, December 1996, p. 91. The Institute of Art and Law (Leicester) held a conference in London on "Transacting in Art — the Legal Pitfalls": The Art Newspaper, October 1996, p. 26. In the State Library of Berlin the Ambassador of the Republic of Georgia returned to Germany 100.000 books taken from German libraries after World War II and deposited later in Georgia. This was done according to Art. 16 of the German-Georgian Treaty of 25 June 1993 on Cultural Cooperation: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 30 October 1996, p. 6; 31 October 1996, p. 8 and 37 (article by W. Fiedler); Die Zeit, 8 November 1996, p. 52 (article by K. Garbo). The French Tribunal de grande instance de Paris declined to annul the sale of a painting sold as a piece of the "atelier de Poussin" but 164 use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739197000222 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 14:42:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of Chronicles which later turned out to be a painting of the master himself: // giornale dell 'arte, December 1996, p. 81. The criminal court of Sherman (Texas) dismissed criminal charges against the heirs of Jack Meador who looted the Quedlinburg trea- sure reacquired by Germany in 1990 (see Int'l J. Cult. Prop. 1992, p. 215). The US attorney had filed the indictment too late. Yet the heirs may face an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 October 1996, p. 37; The Art Newspaper, December 1996, p. 7. Treasures of the Wettin dynasty of Saxony, buried at the end of World War II in Moritzburg (Germany), have been discovered and excavated: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 October 1996, p. 44. Part of a Giorgione fresco from the Venetian palace "Fondaco dei Tedeschi" has been discovered in England (Saltwood Castle). As to this fresco, see Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione. Peintre de la "Brievete Poetique". Catalogue Raisonne. Paris: Lagune 1996, p. 279 no. 169, pp. 261-263, 280-284; ARTnewsletter, vol. XXII, no. 5 of 5 No- vember 1996, p. 2. The French archaeologist Franck Goddio presented the results of his underwater explorations in the harbour of Alexandria (Egypt) and told that he may have located the royal palaces of the Ptolemean kingdom: Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 8 November 1996, p. 20; Frank- furter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 November 1996, p. 4. The French Minister of Foreign Affairs Herve de Charette returned to Antoinette Carvailho the painting "Les Glaneuses" of Leon Augustin Lhermitte (1844—1925). This art object had been taken by the Ger- man occupation army in 1940, remained in East Germany and in 1994 was returned to France after the German reunification: Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 18 December 1996, p. 42; Museart, January 1997, p. 30. The Hungarian Minister of Culture and Education published the De- cree No. 14/1996 on the Procedure Declaring Private Records with Permanent Value as Legally Protected. This Decree is based on the Hungarian Statute No. LXVI of 1995 in Public Records, Public Ar- chives and Protection of Private Archives: Magyar Kozlony 1996 No. 95 of 7 November 1996, p. 5456; 1995 No. 56 of 30 June 1995, p. 3018. England restored the "Stone of Scone" to Scotland. This stone placed in the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey had been brought to London in 1296 and is supposed to be a symbol used since 840 in Scone for the ceremony of the coronation of Scottish kings: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 November 1996, p. 3. Conference of the "Direction des Musees de France" on "Pillage and Restitution - what became of works of art removed from France October 1996 October 1996 October 1996 3 November 1996 6 November 1996 7 November 1996 15 November 1996 17 November 1996 165 use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739197000222 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 14:42:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of Chronicles 23 November 1996 November 1996 November 1996 November 1996 1 December 1996 3 December 1996 6 December 1996 5—6 December 1996 10 December 1996 during World War II." See report by Veronique Parisot, supra at 156-57. The ashes of Andre Malraux (1901-1976), former French minister of cultural affairs (1959 — 1969), adventurer (Angkor) and "hommes des lettres" and "art historian" (Musee imaginaire), were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris: Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 25 November 1996, p. 3; The Art Newspaper, December 1996, p. 7; Journal des Arts, November 1996, p. 1. Turkey declared the site of Troy as "Historical National Park Troy and Vicinity — Park of Peace" and is expecting the listing of the site as World Cultural Heritage by UNESCO: Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 7 November 1996, p. 20; see Int'l J. Cult. Prop. 1996, p. 315. The Tribunal de la Seine decided that the former owner of the Pous- sin painting "La fuite en Egypte" has no claim for return of the painting or for compensation against the auctioneer because the attri- bution of the painting to Poussin was doubtful at the time of auction: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 November 1996, p. 41. The Sternburg family created a foundation of its art collection exhib- ited in the Leipzig Art Gallery in favour of this institution which will get a new building in some years: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zei- tung, 18 November 1996, p. 35. In the United Kingdom the law implementing the EC Directive on copyright of unpublished materials came into force: The Art Newspa- per, January 1997, p. 12. The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (Russia) opens until 30 March 1997 the fourth Russian exhibition of art objects taken from Germany under the title "Masterpieces of Western European Draw- ings from Private German Collections": Frankfurter Allgemeine Zei- tung, 3 December 1996, p. 4 and 7 December 1996, p. 35; Die Zeit, 6 December 1996, p. 54; ARTnewsletter, vol. XXII, no. 9 of 31 De- cember 1996, p. 7; The Art Newspaper, December 1996, p. 7. The Institute of the International Chamber of Commerce organized a conference on "Cultural Aspects of International Trade in Goods and Services: Are there any Exceptions": La Semaine juridique 1996, no. 47, Echos et opinions. Conference on "International Protection of Cultural Property - New Law on the Protection of Cultural Property" organized by the Lud- wig Boltzmann Institute of European Law, Vienna. Van Gogh's painting "Jardin a Auvers," formerly owned by Jean- Jacques Walter (he received in court 145 million French Francs as compensation for not being allowed to export the painting), was put at auction by the Paris auction house Jacques Tajan in the name of the estate of Jean-Marc Vernes (he bought the painting in 1992 for 166 use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739197000222 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 14:42:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of Chronicles 55 million French Francs) — and was not sold because only 32 mil- lion French Francs ($ 6.1 million) were offered: Frankfurter Allgem- eine Zeitung, 14 December 1996, p. 41; ARTnewsletter vol. XXII, no. 9 of 31 December 1996, p. 2. The Italian Ministry of Cultural Property quashed the notification of 22 November 1995 by which the Ministry prohibited the export of a Bellotto painting temporarily imported from England for an exhibi- tion in Milano (see Int'l J. Cult. Prop. 1996, p. 208): // Giomale dell'arte, January 1997, p. 1. Sotheby's of Monte Carlo sold at auction the collection of the Count and Countess of Paris. This collection had been the subject matter of several court proceedings (supra 3 July 1996): // giornale dell'arte, December 1996, p. 85. A new agreement on the financial support of the Foundation Prus- sian Cultural Heritage, holding the biggest European museum unit consisting of 16 museums in Berlin, several libraries, archives and research institutes, has been concluded between the German federal government and the German states and entered into force. Neue Ju- ristische Wochenschrift, Wochenspiegel, 1997, no. 4, p. XXXIX. German Chancellor Kohl and Russian President Yeltsin met in the vicinity of Moscow. They agreed that the open question of return of German cultural objects must be solved in 1997: Frankfurter Allge- meine Zeitung 6 January 1997, p. 2 and 25. France ratified the UNESCO Convention of 17 November 1970 on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Frankfurter Allge- meine Zeitung, 1 February 1997, p. 41; II giornale dell'arte, Febru- ary 1997, p. 4 The painting "Lady Elizabeth Vervey with Pigeon in her Arms" by Johann Friedrich August Tischbein (1750—1812), stolen in Weimar (Germany) in 1945 and about to be auctioned with Sotheby's in New York, is returned to the Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar: Tagesspiegel (Berlin), 2 February 1997, p. 19; Neue Zurcher Zeitung 8/9 Febrruary 1997, p. 47. Sotheby's of London suspended two senior staff members in Milan and London because they are suspected of having smuggled a paint- ing by the Italian painter Giuseppe Nogari form Italy to London: The Times 6 February 1997, pp. 1 and 14, 15. 12 December 1996 14/15 December 1996 1 January 1997 4 January 1997 7 January 1997 4 February 1997 5 February 1997 167 use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739197000222 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 14:42:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739197000222 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Basel Library, on 11 Jul 2017 at 14:42:03, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of work_44szwsuwjnerpjevfcvysj4hqq ---- Formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade a r t i g o ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 Formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade Formas de apropiación del arte por la publicidad Ways of art appropriation by the advertising Roberta Fernandes Esteves1 João Batista Freitas Cardoso2 Resumo Utilizando como base as distintas maneiras de apropriações das representações visuais artísticas pela comunicação publicitária propostas por Lúcia Santaella (2005) – imitação das maneiras de compor e incorporação da imagem artística –, o presente artigo apresenta, a partir do exame de peças publicitárias veiculadas em diferentes países, sete novas categorias delineadas em função do uso parcial ou total da imagem apropriada e de interferências realizadas nessas. Palavras-chave: Criação publicitária; Artes visuais; Apropriação Resumen Utilizando como base las distintas maneras de apropiaciones de las representaciones visuales artísticas en la comunicación publicitária propues- tas por Lúcia Santaella (2005) – imitación de las maneras de componer e incor- poración de la imagen artística – el presente artículo presenta, a partir del exa- men de los anuncios publicitários vehículados en diferentes países, siete nuevas categorías delineadas en función del uso parcial o total de la imagen apropiada y de interferencias realizadas en ellas. Palabras-clave: Creación publicitária; Artes visuales; Apropiación 1 Doutorado em andamento em Publicidad y Relaciones Públicas. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona – UAB, Espanha. 2 Doutor pelo Programa Comunicação e Semiótica. Professor na Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie. Profes- sor no Programa de Mestrado em Comunicação da Universidade Municipal de São Caetano do Sul – USCS, São Caetano do Sul, SP, Brasil; jbfcardoso@uol.com.br ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 138 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade Abstract Based on the different ways of appropriation of the artistic visual representations by the advertising communication, proposed by Lucia Santaella (2005) – imitation of the ways of composing and incorporation of the artistic image – this article presents, as of the examination of advertisements broadcast in different countries, seven new categories outlined on the basis of partial or total use of the appropriated image and the interference performed in them. Keywords: Advertising creation; Visual arts; Appropriation Data de submissão: 15/08/2012 Data de aceite: 01/02/2013 a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 139 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 Introdução De maneira geral, as artes e a publicidade apresentam-se como sistemas assimétricos no que se refere a certos procedimentos no processo de con- cepção, produção e difusão de seus produtos. Na publicidade, por exem- plo, a comunicação sempre visa atingir um público específico, fazendo com que esse tome uma decisão que vá ao encontro das estratégias pre- vistas no planejamento. Dessa maneira, o sistema publicitário se carac- teriza pelo trabalho em equipe. Até o anúncio chegar ao receptor, vários profissionais com diferentes habilidades (planejamento, mídia, criação, redação, direção de arte, produção etc.), de uma maneira ou de outra, acabam impondo limites ou restrições ao texto – entendendo-se aqui “texto” em um sentido mais amplo e não limitado aos códigos verbais. Essa prática, por sua vez, determina em grande parte o uso dos elemen- tos visuais na composição das imagens publicitárias. Por outro lado, no caso da produção artística, ainda que os processos de concepção e produção possam também ser coletivos, existe a possibi- lidade de o artista desenvolver seu trabalho individualmente, do come- ço ao fim, sem que ninguém interfira em nenhuma etapa do processo. Assim, o artista não tem a obrigatoriedade de compor um texto que seja compreensível a um público específico e que transmita uma mensagem determinada. Nesse caso, a composição dos elementos visuais se define em função de crenças e interesses próprios. Contudo, ainda que possuam suas especificidades, as bases sígnicas (verbais, visuais e sonoras) utilizadas por esses dois sistemas e as influ- ências de outras linguagens que compõem a cultura (literatura, músi- ca, moda etc.) acabam permitindo que pontos fronteiriços surjam. Ao compartilharem certos tipos de signos e certos códigos culturais, as artes plásticas e a comunicação visual publicitária estabelecem uma série de relações intercambiáveis que fazem com que esses sistemas se misturem e até mesmo se confundam. As histórias das artes visuais e da comuni- cação publicitária apresentam diversos exemplos que reforçam a cren- ça nessas relações. A criação de cartazes, por Jules Cherèt e Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, para os cabarés na Paris do final do século XIX, são ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 140 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade apenas alguns desses. Essas produções colaboraram para comprovar o estreito vínculo entre a linguagem das artes visuais e a linguagem visual publicitária. Para Juan Carlos Pérez Gauli (2000, p. 11), um dos princi- pais aspectos da relação estabelecida entre o sistema da arte e da publici- dade é a constante vinculação icônica, que inicia no final do século XIX e se manifesta ao longo de diversos movimentos e tendências criativas do século XX. Partindo da estreita relação entre essas linguagens, o presente texto propõe o desdobramento das categorias de apropriação das imagens suge- ridas por Lucia Santaella em seu livro Por que as comunicações e as artes estão se convergindo? (2005). Tendo como base as categorias de incorpo- ração e imitação (SANTAELLA, 2005, p. 42), apresentamos a ampliação desses conceitos em forma de sete novas subcategorias fundamentadas a partir do uso parcial ou total da obra apropriada e de interferências realizadas nessa. A observação dessas categorias permite verificar como diferentes tipos de apropriações podem ser utilizados como práticas de articulação de sentido que permitem agregar valor às marcas a partir de determinados procedimentos da linguagem publicitária. Processo criativo e apropriações A publicidade, de uma maneira ou outra, sempre cultivou uma relação de proximidade com os sistemas das artes plásticas, uma vez que as artes servem de inspiração para os publicitários em seu processo cria- tivo e compositivo. João Carrascoza, ao falar sobre os criativos e suas associações de imagens no processo de brainstorm, faz uso das ideias de Everardo Rocha (2010) e define o publicitário como uma espécie de bricoleur: [...] definimos esse tipo de profissional como um bricoleur, já que sua missão é compor mensagens, preferencialmente de impacto, valendo-se dos mais diversos recursos que possam servir ao propósito de persuadir o público-alvo. Os criativos atuam, cortando, associando, unindo e, conse- quentemente, editando informações do repertório cultural da sociedade. (CARRASCOZA, 2008, p. 18). a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 141 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 Com isso, o autor afirma que, como a propaganda visa influenciar determinado público, é recomendável o uso de discursos já conhecidos desse target. E pontua: O objetivo, obviamente, é facilitar a assimilação, dando-lhe o que ele de certa forma já conhece – embora haja um trabalho para vestir esse conhecimento já apreendido, que é a própria finalidade do ato criativo publicitário. Esses materiais culturais, populares ou eruditos, são utili- zados como pontos de partida para a criação das peças de propaganda (idem, p. 24). É com base no já pronto, nas imagens consagradas e conhecidas por parte do público, que os publicitários iniciam o processo de associação de ideias. Essas imagens já conhecidas, muitas vezes, passam também a compor o próprio leiaute da peça. As maneiras como se apropriam de re- ferências das artes visuais para a criação de seus anúncios é objeto de es- tudo de diversos autores. Alguns desses as veem de forma negativa, como se o pastiche, a fragmentação das obras, fizesse com que a publicidade, ao associar essas representações aos seus produtos, roubasse os valores que as artes possuem. Outros apoiam esse discurso baseados nas ideias do pós-moderno, entendendo as apropriações como uma espécie de jogo intertextual que brinca com o espectador. Para Steven Connor (1989, p. 149), o pós-modernismo evidencia o interesse da crítica acadêmica por práticas culturais que antes eram ignoradas, e “isso constitui em si um fenômeno pós-moderno, por ser a marca do nivelamento de hierarquias e do apagamento de fronteiras” entre o popular (rock, moda etc.) e o eru- dito. Sobre essa prática pós-moderna, Danto comenta: [...] a principal contribuição artística da década [1970] foi o surgimento da imagem apropriada – a apropriação de imagens com sentido e identi- dade estabelecidos, conferindo-lhes um sentido e uma identidade novos. Como qualquer imagem poderia ser apropriada, segue-se imediatamente que não poderia haver uniformidade estilística perceptual entre as ima- gens apropriadas. (2006, p. 18-19). Com base nas experiências da arte pós-moderna é possível com- preender a apropriação da imagem artística pela publicidade. Affonso ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 142 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade Romano de Sant’Anna, em Paródia, paráfrase & Cia (2007), defende a ideia de que a técnica da apropriação moderna se deu por meio das artes plásticas, [...] principalmente pelas experimentações dadaístas, a partir de 1916. Identifica-se com a colagem: a reunião de materiais diversos encontráveis no cotidiano para a confecção de um objeto artístico. Ela já existia no ready-made de Marcel Duchamp, que consistia em apropriar-se de obje- tos produzidos pela indústria e expô-los em museus ou galerias como se fossem objetos artísticos. (2007, p. 43). Para o autor, os artistas, “ao invés de representarem”, “re-apresentam os objetos em sua estranhidade”. Havendo, assim, dois graus de apro- priação: “quando é o próprio objeto que entra em cena”; e “quando ele é representado, traduzido para outro código” (idem, p. 45). Sant’Anna categoriza essas apropriações em dois tipos específicos: a “parodística, significando uma subversão do sentido original do texto”; e a parafrási- ca, que “prolonga o texto anterior no texto atual” (idem, p. 54-56). Ana- lisando alguns exemplos da publicidade mundial, podemos encontrar diferentes formas de apropriação das imagens artísticas na comunicação publicitária. Para a criação da campanha de lançamento, na Alemanha, do novo Golf GTI, da Volkswagen (Figura 1), os criativos partiram da obra In the car (Figura 2), do artista Roy Lichtenstein, que ficou conhecido por suas composições baseadas em comics. É visível que o anúncio publici- tário é praticamente uma imitação da obra original, “trata-se da apro- priação de um know-how para a criação visual” (SANTAELLA, 2005, p. 42). Apesar das pequenas mudanças compositivas, como a atualização da caracterização dos personagens e do carro, a peça mantém o mesmo enquadramento, a mesma representação gráfica de velocidade e pontos de impressão característicos das obras de Lichtenstein. Também na Alemanha, a agência DDB apropriou-se das formas de compor de Salvador Dalí, para comunicar o lançamento de um mode- lo econômico da Volkswagen chamado BlueMotion (Figura 3). A peça publicitária, ainda que não mantenha o mesmo nível de analogia com a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 143 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 Figura 1. Anúncio alemão para o novo Golf GTI. Figura 2. Obra In the car, Lichtenstein, 1963. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 144 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade Figura 3. Anúncio para o lançamento do BlueMotion, o carro econômico da Volkswagen. Figura 4. Obra surrealista Jirafa en llamas, 1936/37. a obra artística como no exemplo anterior, faz uso de certas referências das obras de Dalí e do movimento surrealista: o ambiente desértico; a forquilha; as formigas. Alguns elementos do anúncio, apesar de adquiri- rem nova forma, referem-se diretamente à obra Jirafa en llamas (Figura 4) – os vários bolsos do frentista, insinuando o quanto estão vazios em virtude do surgimento do carro econômico, são clara referência às gave- tas na pintura original. Nesse exemplo, temos uma imitação do estilo do pintor e das formas de compor, já que os elementos, em sua maioria, são distintos dos da obra inspiradora. Uma das fotografias que integram o calendário promocional de 2009 da marca italiana de cafés Lavazza (Figura 5) faz uso da conhecida ima- gem Homem vitruviano (Figura 6), de Leonardo Da Vinci. Nessa pe- ça estão contidas algumas ideias do pensamento pós-moderno, como a fragmentação e o hibridismo dos elementos que compõem a imagem. A fotógrafa coloca a xícara de café como um dos pontos principais da ima- gem e, como que para quebrar a ideia de obra de arte, deixa evidente a estrutura do estúdio fotográfico e assume o cenário. A empresa Siemens, para divulgar seu novo modelo de celular (Figu- ra 7), ainda que não faça uso de nenhuma referência visual a obras artís- ticas, remete, por meio do título, ao polêmico quadro de René Magritte La trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) – “A traição das imagens a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 145 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 Figura 5. Calendário promocional para a marca de café italiano Lavazza, 2009. Figura 6. Desenho de Da Vinci, Homem vitruviano, 1492. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 146 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade (Isso não é um cachimbo)” – (Figura 8). A paródia é constatada com o trocadilho Ceci n’est pas un mobile – “Isso não é um celular”. Segundo Sant’Anna, o objetivo da paródia como apropriação é desvincular “um texto-objeto de seus sujeitos anteriores, sujeitando-o a uma nova leitura” (2007, p. 46). Figura 7. Anúncio de celular da Siemens, 2001. Figura 8. Obra La trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), Magritte, 1928/29. a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 147 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 No Brasil, apenas para dar um exemplo, a agência GiovanniFCB de- senvolveu para a gráfica Pancrom, em 2003, a campanha Arte e Pro- paganda. Como os serviços da gráfica são reconhecidos no mercado publicitário por sua alta qualidade em impressão, o conceito das peças comparou a qualidade da reprodução de uma obra de arte impressa feita pela gráfica com os trabalhos de renomados diretores de criação da pu- blicidade nacional. Para isso, nas peças foram exploradas as semelhanças entre pintores como Van Gogh (Figura 9) e Tintoretto (Figura 10) com diretores de criação da agência. Figura 9. “Nós imprimimos Van Gogh e Gabriel Zellmeister com a mesma qualidade”. Figura 10. “Nós imprimimos Tintoretto e Jaques Lewkowicks com a mesma qualidade”. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 148 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade Após esse breve panorama, com exemplos do uso das artes visuais na publicidade, pode-se afirmar que é recorrente o emprego das imagens artísticas na criação de anúncios. As formas de apropriação são diversas, mas o intuito-base é praticamente o mesmo: trazer o já conhecido co- mo forma de auxiliar não apenas no processo criativo como também na mensagem ao consumidor, assim como em seus valores culturais. O ob- jetivo deste trabalho é apresentar, a partir das categorias de apropriação das imagens proposta por Santaella (2005), sete subcategorias que mos- tram diferentes tipos de relações entre a publicidade e a arte. Formas de apropriação Considerando a vinculação icônica, muitos autores passam a estabelecer categorias de relações entre o sistema visual publicitário e as artes vi- suais. Lucia Santaella, em Por que as comunicações e as artes estão con- vergindo?, categoriza essas relações da seguinte maneira: [...] há pelo menos duas maneiras principais pelas quais as mídias, es- pecialmente a publicidade, apropriam-se das imagens da arte: (a) pela imitação de seus modos de compor, de seus estilos e (b) pela incorpora- ção de uma imagem artística mesclada à imagem do produto anunciado. (SANTAELLA, 2005, p. 42). Partindo das categorias de apropriação de Santaella, apresentaremos nas páginas seguintes sete novas categorias para análises de anúncios que fazem uso de imagens apropriadas das artes. Essas categorias foram delineadas em função do uso parcial ou total da imagem apropriada, assim como das interferências realizadas, ou não, nas obras apropriadas (Figura 11). Tendo em vista que a maioria das peças publicitárias possui algum tipo de assinatura de um produto ou de uma marca, nessas novas categorias, não consideraremos tais itens como interferência. Da mesma maneira, não é considerada interferência a inserção de título ou texto sobre a representação da obra. São compreendidas como interferências apenas as alterações formais nas representações visuais. Ou seja, interfe- rências que afetam de alguma maneira a obra artística apropriada. a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 149 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 Tipos de incorporações (1) Segundo Santaella, a apropriação das artes pela publicidade por meio da incorporação é dada por “uma imagem artística mesclada à imagem do produto anunciado” (2005, p. 42). Sendo assim, as duas primeiras divi- sões apresentam-se pela incorporação total com (1.1.1) ou sem interferên- cia (1.1.2) da imagem artística. Incorporação total com interferência (1.1.1) No primeiro tipo de incorporação, total com interferência, o publicitá- rio toma determinada imagem artística e a incorpora de forma integral à sua composição. Para dar sentido à mensagem que a comunicação obje- tiva passar, realiza-se algum tipo de interferência na obra. Para compreendermos esse tipo de apropriação, tomamos como exem- plo o anúncio criado em 2008, por uma agência da República Tcheca, para o clube Misch Masch, em Praga (Figura 12). A obra incorporada é o tríptico O jardim das delícias, do espanhol Hieronymus Bosch (El Bosco) – que se divide em O paraíso, O jardim das delícias e O inferno (Figura 14). No anúncio, a parte central da obra (Figura 13) é totalmente incorporada e a interferência se dá pela inserção de um personagem de costas com as mãos levantadas, frente a uma típica mesa de DJ com caixas de som nas Figura 11. Categorização dos tipos de apropriações da imagem artística pela publicidade a partir dos conceitos de Lucia Santaella (2005). 1. Incorporação 1.1 total 1.2 de fragmento 2. Imitação 2.1 com referência a uma obra 2.2 com referência a uma série e/ou um movimento 1.1.1 com interferência 1.1.2 sem interferência 1.2.1 com interferência 1.2.2 sem interferência 2.1.1 total 2.1.2 fragmentada ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 150 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade laterais. Apesar de bem integrada à composição da obra, chegando a ponto de a ilustração imitar em cores e traços a obra de arte, a interferência, um elemento da atualidade, é facilmente identificada ao encontrar-se inserida em uma obra criada por volta de 1500. A interferência na obra transforma O jardim das delícias em uma festa no estilo rave. Figura 12. Anúncio para o clube Misch Masch. Figura 13. Obra central de O jardim das delícias. Figura 14. Tríptico O jardim das delícias, 1500-1505, Bosch. a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 151 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 Incorporação total sem interferência (1.1.2) Nessa categoria, a incorporação total não sofre interferência que afete diretamente os aspectos formais da representação visual. Nesse caso, a imagem artística apropriada consegue transmitir de forma quase que exata a mensagem que o criativo deseja passar, não havendo a necessida- de de nenhum tipo de edição da imagem (fragmentação) nem a inserção de um novo elemento gráfico na composição. No exemplo seguinte, o retrato da famosa madona de Da Vinci, a Monalisa (Figura 15), é inserido integralmente na composição do anún- cio criado em 2009, pela agência Ogilvy & Mather Brussels, da Bélgica, para a rede europeia de lojas de produtos para pintura artística Schleiper (Figura 16). Nesse caso, não há interferência alguma na imagem artís- tica apropriada, apenas é inserida uma espécie de cupom fiscal com a lista de produtos que podem ser adquiridos na loja. O publicitário não precisou fazer nenhuma interferência na imagem artística para passar a Figura 15. Monalisa, Da Vinci, 1503-1506. Figura 16. Anúncio para a rede Shleiper de produtos para arte, 2009. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 152 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade mensagem, uma vez que o público-alvo naturalmente associa a consa- grada tela renascentista à rede de lojas. Incorporação de fragmento com interferência (1.2.1) Assim como na incorporação total, a incorporação de fragmentos de uma obra também pode ser dividida em dois tipos: com (1.2.1) ou sem in- terferência (1.2.2). Ao incorporar parte de uma obra, o publicitário apro- Figura 17. Anúncio criado para os relógios Vagary, com o slogan: “Vagary, feito na Itália”. Figura 18. Afresco A criação de Adão, aproximadamente 1511, Michelangelo. a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 153 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 pria-se apenas dos detalhes que são pertinentes para a composição de seu anúncio. Contudo, algumas vezes o simples detalhe não é suficiente para transmitir a mensagem desejada, é preciso realizar algum tipo de interferência no fragmento. Podemos ver esse tipo de incorporação em um anúncio criado para a marca de relógios Vagary (Figura 17), que incorpora uma parte da obra mestra de Michelangelo, o afresco A criação de Adão (Figura 18), que se encontra no teto da Capela Sistina (Vaticano). Mas, ao contrário do original, a figura de Adão é substituída por uma mulher sedutora sentada tranquilamente em um sofá. Com a interferência, o sentido original da figura de Michelangelo também se altera. Incorporação de fragmento sem interferência (1.2.2) No segundo tipo de incorporação de fragmento, o publicitário apro- pria-se de determinada obra, incorporando apenas parte dela sem haver nenhum tipo de interferência, tanto na imagem quanto na composição. Na campanha desenvolvida para o Masp pela agência DM9DDB Brasil, em 2010, foram incorporados fragmentos de obras que fazem parte do acervo permanente do museu. As peças impressas, intituladas “Olhos”, têm como conceito contar um pouco da trajetória da obra, des- de o momento que foi concebida até sua chegada ao museu. A composi- ção dos anúncios foi feita apenas com fragmentos das obras, e a trajetória da obra é apresentada em um texto inserido ao redor dos olhos dos per- sonagens das obras referenciadas. Esses textos, sobrepostos à figura, não alteram a composição visual da obra. No anúncio Van Gogh (Figura 19), por exemplo, foi apropriada parte da obra O escolar (Figura 20). Na face da figura, foi inserido o seguinte texto: “Eu vi o fracasso de um gênio. Eu vi os últimos anos de Vincent van Gogh. Vi franceses não reconhecendo meu valor. Vi um mestre morrer na miséria. Vi a Europa se arrependendo. Vi milionários me disputando em leilões. Vi um novo lar. Vi professores en- sinando. Vi crianças aprendendo. Vi um jovem museu virar o museu mais visitado do país. Mas no meio disso tudo, uma coisa ainda não vi: você. Venha. Eu quero te ver”. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 154 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade Tipos de imitações (2) A segunda maneira de apropriação proposta por Santaella, a imitação, é realizada “pela imitação de seus modos de compor, de seus estilos” (2005, p. 42). A imitação pode se referir a uma obra específica, ao modo de compor de um artista, ou ao estilo de determinado movimento artís- tico. Dessa observação, surgem três novas subcategorias: a imitação com referência a uma obra específica (2.1) – que se divide em total (2.1.1) e fragmento (2.1.2); e imitação com referência a uma série e/ou movimento (2.2). Imitação com referência a uma obra total (2.1.1) A imitação com referência a uma obra total é dada quando o publicitá- rio encontra em determinada obra todos, ou grande parte, dos elementos necessários à comunicação. Na peça criada pela agência J.W. Thompson Brasil, em 2009, para o Banco HSBC (Figura 21), observa-se a imitação da gravura Céu e água I (Figura 22), do holandês M. C. Escher. Como na obra original, o anúncio mantém a composição com a divisão do fundo em preto e branco, invertendo a relação figura/fundo. No entanto, na obra origi- Figura 19. Anúncio contando a trajetória da obra de Van Gogh até sua chegada ao Masp, 2010. Figura 20. Obra O escolar, Vincent van Gogh, 1888. a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 155 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 Figura 21. Anúncio para o Banco HSBC. Figura 22. Obra Céu e água I, Escher, 1938. nal, peixes transformam-se em marrecos, já no anúncio, latas trans- formam-se em araras. A referência à obra apropriada é notada não só pela forma de compor, como também pela transformação de um obje- to em outro na exata proporção e quantidade de elementos utilizados no anúncio. Não há a incorporação das figuras de Escher, mas sim de sua composição. Imitação com referência a fragmentos de uma obra (2.1.2) Como na incorporação de fragmentos (1.2.1 e 1.2.2), na imitação com referência a fragmentos de uma obra, o publicitário faz uso apenas de parte, ou partes, de determinada obra. Mas, nesse caso, a diferença se dá pela imitação do fragmento apropriado e não pela incorporação dos elementos figurativos. Esse tipo de apropriação também pode ser observada no anúncio de- senvolvido para o lançamento do carro Polo BlueMotion. A peça (Figura ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 156 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade 23) é uma imitação com referência a fragmentos da obra O jardim das delícias, de Bosch. Contendo elementos de uma atmosfera onírica muito marcante do pintor flamenco, é evidente a imitação e referência direta a partes da obra na peça publicitária. Figura 23. Anúncio para o lançamento do Polo BlueMotion, 2008. Figura 24. Tríptico O jardim das delícias, 1500-1505, Bosch. a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 157 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 Um dos personagens em destaque, o “frentista-caixa-registradora” (Figura 25) é uma citação direta ao “homem-árvore” que se encontra no pórtico direito da obra, assim como algumas figuras com facas contidas em O inferno (Figura 26). Figura 25. Detalhe do anúncio com o “frentista-caixa-registradora”. Figura 26. Detalhe do pórtico direito O inferno com o “homem-árvore”. Podemos ainda conferir nos detalhes abaixo referências a elementos marcantes na composição de Bosch (Figura 27), como, por exemplo, as imitações de figuras dentro de flores e frutos (Figura 28). Figura 27. Detalhe do pórtico central O jardim das delícias. Figura 28. Detalhe do anúncio. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 158 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade Com referência a uma série e/ou um movimento (2.2) A imitação com referência a uma série refere-se a diversas obras de um artista, não apenas uma específica, ou a um movimento artístico. Muitas vezes, como apresentaremos a seguir, o publicitário necessita apropriar- -se de mais elementos para compor a mensagem desejada, tornando ne- cessário mais de uma obra. Em 2011, a agência DM9DDB Brasil desenvolveu seis peças para a campanha de 92 anos da marca de eletrodomésticos KitchenAid. A mar- ca tornou-se conhecida no mercado pelo design inovador de seus produ- tos, sendo a batedeira o mais conhecido – o design desse produto é tão consagrado que se encontra no acervo do MoMA, Museu de Arte Mo- derna de Nova York. Os criativos associaram a marca à história da arte e à arte da gastronomia (DM9DDB). Na peça intitulada Modernismo bra- sileiro (Figura 29), a imitação se deu com referência a uma série de obras da artista brasileira Tarsila do Amaral: a mão de Abaporu (Figura 30); as casas de O mamoeiro (Figura 31); e o céu de Sol poente (Figura 32). Figura 29. Anúncio para a marca de eletrodomésticos KitchenAid com referência às obras de Tarsila do Amaral. a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 159 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 Esse mesmo tipo de referência também pode ser dado pela imitação de um movimento. Muitas vezes o que pode interessar a um publicitário ao apropriar-se das imagens artísticas é o estilo de compor de determina- do movimento, não havendo a necessidade de reunir diferentes obras de um único artista ou referenciar um artista específico. Figura 30. Obra Abaporu, 1928. Figura 31. Obra O mamoeiro, 1925. Figura 32. Obra Sol poente, 1929. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 160 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade No anúncio Arte Moderna (Figura 33), também da KitchenAid, é fei- ta referência a um estilo que pode ser atribuído a Henri Matisse ou Paul Gauguin. Ainda assim, os traços, cores e formas de compor podem ser re- conhecidos pelo observador como um tipo de genérico de Arte Moderna. Figura 33. Anúncio para os eletrodomésticos KitchenAid com referência à Arte Moderna, 2011. Apropriações como estratégia de comunicação No período de 2007 a 2012, a rede espanhola de lojas de departamento El Corte Inglês veiculou uma série de peças publicitárias, direcionadas aos turistas que visitam a Espanha no verão, em que foram utilizados dife- rentes modos de apropriação de obras de renomados artistas espanhóis na composição dos anúncios. Segundo José Maria Cañas, responsável pelo Departamento Criativo da rede, o critério de escolha dos artistas foi defini- do em função de sua notoriedade internacional: “Hay que pensar que esta campaña pretende dar la bienvenida a extranjeros que vienen básicamente a España por el arte español. Entonces, debíamos coger autores internacio- nalmente conocidos”. (apud CARDOSO; ESTEVES, 2012). a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 161 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 Em uma dessas peças, Venus de Miro (Figura 34), o publicitário apro- pria-se do estilo do artista catalão Joan Miró (1893-1983), a partir de certas formas e linhas da obra O Carnaval de Arlequim (Figura 35). Consideran- do as categorias propostas, esse tipo de relação se apresenta como imita- ção com referência a fragmentos de uma obra. A apropriação publicitária, assim, foi dada pela imitação de diversos fragmentos da obra em todo o fundo da peça. Porém, sem deixar de imitar as cores e os traços, característicos do estilo do artista, o publicitário acabou por contextualizar al- guns dos fragmentos da obra com objetos de costura, como tesoura, tecidos e até um ma- nequim. Como é da natureza da apropriação por imitação, os elementos visuais da peça pu- blicitária não são reproduções exatas da obra do artista. Ape- nas os modos de compor as for- mas, linhas e cores indicam a apropriação do estilo. A escolha do artista cata- lão para representar a marca, nesse caso, justifica-se pela sua importância para a cultu- ra espanhola e também para a história da arte em geral. Nes- se sentido, acredita-se que há o reconhecimento, por parte do público da campanha, de ele- mentos da obra do artista na peça publicitária. Figura 34. Anúncio El Corte Inglés. Figura 35. O carnaval de Arlequim (1924-1925), Miró. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 162 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade Segundo Erns H. Gombrich (apud AUMONT, 2009, p. 86), “recono- cer algo en una imagen es identificar, al menos parcialmente, lo que se ve en ella con algo que se ve o podría verse en la realidad. Es, pues, un proceso, un trabajo, que utiliza las propiedades del sistema visual”. Para compreender o conceito de reconhecimento, Jacques Aumont dividiu- -o em duas dimensões: “el trabajo del reconocimiento” e o “placer del reconocimiento”. No que tange ao “trabajo del reconocimiento”, além da constância de um bom número de características visuais que reencon- tram entre o mundo real e as imagens que representam essa realidade, o autor complementa: […] este trabajo de reconocimiento […] se apoya en la memoria, más exactamente, en una reserva de formas de objetos y de disposiciones espa- ciales memorizadas: la constancia perceptiva es la comparación incesante que hacemos entre lo que vemos y lo que ya hemos visto (idem, p. 86). Para Aumont, no momento do reconhecimento há o “placer del re- conocimento”. Nesse sentido, a parcela do público que identifica na peça publicitária a citação a Miró sentiria certo tipo de prazer nesse reconhecimento. Baseados nesse “prazer” de reconhecer imagens, pu- blicitários trabalham com enunciados e discursos já prontos em seus anúncios, recontextualizando-os junto ao produto anunciado. São nes- ses jogos intertextuais que as imagens de artistas são inseridas, para de alguma maneira interagir com o espectador. A principal intenção dessa estratégia comunicativa, obviamente, é que a mensagem possa ser assi- milada e compreendida facilmente, já que são imagens já conhecidas por parte do público-alvo e que possuem seus valores e representativi- dade estabelecidos. Ainda que elementos estranhos ao universo mironiano façam parte da composição da peça publicitária, é possível que o público ao qual a men- sagem se dirige reconheça e rememore a citação ao artista. O conceito de rememoração, para Gombrich (apud AUMONT, 2009, p. 88), dá-se por meio da codificação da imagem, sendo preciso possuir certo saber sobre o real para compreendê-la, já que possui uma função simbólica. Aumont (2009, p. 88) complementa a visão de Gombrich dando como a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 163 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 exemplo a imagem artística e os estilos que usam “esquemas” (estruturas simples, memorizáveis) para representar. Esses “esquemas”, quando são empregados como instrumento de rememoração, utilizam formas sim- ples e legíveis em sua representação. Sendo algo que não está fechado por absoluto, os esquemas mudam, já que correspondem a certas formas esquemáticas nas quais estão adaptados, chegando até a desaparecer à medida que mudam esses usos, que também produzem novos conheci- mentos convertendo-os em inadequados. “Para decirlo brevemente, hay un aspecto ‘experimental’ en el esquema, sometido permanentemente a un proceso de corrección”. (idem, p. 88). No caso desta peça, os esque- mas se definem a partir de certo estilo que permite a rememoração de um artista, corrente ou movimento. Naturalmente, a imitação formal não implica a incorporação do discurso da obra, já que há na comunicação um discurso publicitário. Enquanto o original apresenta um ambiente onírico do Carnaval, a imitação cria um ambiente imaginário onde as ideias para elaboração das roupas se materializam a partir de formas, cores, movimentos e texturas. Como em qualquer texto da cultura, no momento em que ele é apropriado, há uma nova leitura, atualizando-o. Essa atualização, no caso específico dessa campanha, permite a construção de um discurso, destinado a um público de diferentes origens, que atravessa as frontei- ras entre local e o global. São códigos culturais locais que teoricamente estão arraigados ao processo histórico de determinado grupo, mas que podem ter longo alcance a ponto de muitos se identificarem com eles. Essas referências, de alguma maneira, formam a memória de grande parte do público. Outra série de peças da marca, Las torres de Gaudí (Figura, 36), enquadra-se na categoria incorporação de fragmento com interferência, em que o publicitário apropria-se de detalhes de uma ou mais peças e realiza nesses certas interferências que considera pertinentes à compo- sição do seu anúncio. Nessa peça, as torres gaudinianas da Casa Mi- lá (Figura 37), Park Güell (Figura 38) e Sagrada Família (Figura 39) servem como base para que as imagens das modelos representem um desfile de moda. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 164 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade Figura 36. Anúncio Las torres de Gaudí. Figura 37. Park Güell, detalhe do telhado de La Portería. Figura 38. La Azotea, área do telhado da Casa Milà. Figura 39. Torres dos apóstolos, La Sagrada Família. No caso desta peça, a arte de Gaudí, ainda que represente uma cul- tura local, de uma dada região, possui uma expressividade que vai além da região da Catalunha, faz parte da memória coletiva de um tempo. Quando ocorre a compreensão dessa produção simbólica de uma socie- a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 165 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 dade, tanto por parte de consumidores locais, moradores de Barcelona, quanto por parte de consumidores estrangeiros, turistas de diversas par- tes da Espanha e de outros países, a incorporação dos códigos culturais de uma localidade e uma época pela marca exerce sua principal função. As torres foram utilizadas estrategicamente para que o público reconhe- ça esses códigos culturais e faça a relação entre arte e moda. Na prática publicitária, em casos como este, a comunicação explora o potencial de semelhança figurativa das representações, o aspecto mi- mético. Mesmo alterando partes das torres para a inserção das modelos e ajuste aos corpos – como, por exemplo, os movimentos de braços e postu- ra corporal que dão continuidade às formas das torres ao mesmo tempo em que sugerem a representação de desfile –, existe a possibilidade de reconhecimento, por parte do público, dos fragmentos de obras do artista utilizados na comunicação. Contudo, ainda que alcance o nível de re- conhecimento, a rememoração de cada edifício dependerá do repertório do observador, uma vez que todas as referências foram misturadas e in- seridas no mesmo contexto. Nesta peça fica claro como é impreciso o limite fronteiriço entre o local e o global. Como bem lembra Iuri Lotman (1996, p. 24), essa fron- teira apresenta-se como “un conjunto de puntos perteneciente simul- táneamente al espacio interior y al espacio exterior”. A fronteira, nesse caso, oscila entre um lado e outro a partir do momento em que mora- dores da região reconhecem a loja, a marca, a língua e a obra artística como elementos da sua terra, e o estrangeiro, sob outro ponto de vista, reconhece esses mesmos elementos como parte do seu repertório. A in- tencionalidade da comunicação publicitária, no que se refere especifica- mente a esse aspecto, pode ser verificada no uso dos signos verbais – são utilizadas nas peças as duas línguas oficiais locais: o castelhano, por ser o idioma oficial espanhol, e o catalão, a língua oficial da Catalunha; e, dividindo o mesmo espaço, a língua inglesa. Considerações finais Com base nos termos de Charles S. Peirce, Gombrich entende a repre- sentação visual como um signo icônico à medida que essa tem algo em ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 166 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade comum com seu aspecto denotativo. Nesse sentido “o significado dos sig- nos é transmitido não por sua aparência geral, mas por aquilo que se conhece como características identificadoras”. (GOMBRICH, 2007, p. xviii). Partindo do estreito vínculo icônico que existe entre os sistemas das artes visuais e da comunicação publicitária, ou seja, partindo do princípio de que existem características identificadoras que permitem reconhecer na representação visual de um sistema elementos já apresentados no ou- tro, este texto propôs diferentes formas de apropriações das imagens ar- tísticas utilizadas na composição de peças publicitárias. Os conceitos de incorporação e imitação, desenvolvidos por Lúcia Santaella (2005, p. 42), serviram de base para o desenvolvimento dessas sete novas subcategorias (Figura 11). O uso das diferentes formas de apropriações das representa- ções visuais artísticas, como apresentado, pode gerar uma série de sen- tidos distintos que permitem aos criativos optar por uma dada categoria como estratégia de comunicação, como forma de agregar valor à marca ao mesmo tempo em que comunica o benefício do produto ou serviço. Ao identificarmos que a publicidade incorpora uma obra de arte de forma integral sem interferência (1.1.2), podemos inferir que o criativo se vale de uma composição pronta que é capaz de comunicar os benefí- cios da marca, afirmação básica da comunicação publicitária. Ao mesmo tempo em que comunica os benefícios, essa representação visual apro- priada agrega valores culturais à marca anunciada. Esse mesmo tipo de apropriação ocorre com a incorporação de fragmentos de uma obra sem interferência (1.2.2). A proposição de valor da marca é condicionada ape- nas a um fragmento da obra artística exposta no anúncio. Não há, tam- bém nesse caso, qualquer tipo de interferência formal (cores, texturas, volumes etc.) que altere a representação visual. Diferente dos casos em que a interferência (1.1.1; 1.2.1) é realizada para alterar o sentido original da representação artística. No caso das subcategorias de imitação (2), os publicitários apropriam- -se da maneira de compor de um determinado artista (2.1) ou movi- mento (2.2). A apropriação do estilo do artista, ou artistas, pode se dar na referência a uma obra de arte específica ou um conjunto delas. Nes- se caso, a representação publicitária indica a(s) obra(s) e, consequente- a r t i g o roberta fernandes esteves | joão batista freitas cardoso 167 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 137-168 MAI./ago . 2013 mente, o(s) artista(s). Esse tipo de apropriação também pode limitar-se a fragmento(s) da(s) obra(s) (2.1.2) ou referenciar uma obra em toda a sua composição (2.1.1). Já no caso da apropriação do modo de compor de um determinado movimento artístico, a representação publicitária não permite o reconhecimento de uma obra ou de um autor. Se no pri- meiro modelo é preciso que o público tenha em seu repertório alguns elementos das obras do(s) artista(s), no segundo, é preciso que tenha co- nhecimento dos traços que marcam essa escola para que reconheça no anúncio a referência. O nível de conhecimento do público – das obras dos artistas ou dos movimentos – indicará o melhor uso de uma forma de apropriação ou de outra. De qualquer maneira, em maior ou menor grau, há sempre a necessi- dade, nesse tipo de comunicação publicitária, que o público tenha algum conhecimento das referências utilizadas. Essa espécie de jogo intertex- tual com o público-alvo parte do princípio de que as imagens apropria- das já fazem parte do repertório do receptor. Dessa maneira, é preciso que o publicitário tenha em conta o repertório do espectador que irá receber tais mensagens. Pensando no espectador como um ser que parti- cipa e faz parte do sistema da cultura, os produtores do texto publicitário devem considerar os aspectos locais, regionais e globais, que definem os códigos culturais que formam esse ser cultural. É justamente do reco- nhecimento dos textos da cultura, no qual público e marca estão inseri- dos, que os publicitários iniciam o processo de associação e apropriação. Referências AUMONT, J. La imagen, Barcelona: Paidós Comunicación, 2009. CARDOSO, J. B. F.; ESTEVES, R. F. Apropriações da arte: o caso El Corte Inglés. In: Anais do XXI Encontro Anual da COMPÓS, Universidade Juiz de Fora, 2012. Dis- ponível em: . Acesso em: 28 nov. 2012. CARRASCOZA, J. A. Do caos à criação publicitária: processo criativo, plágio e ready-made na publicidade. São Paulo: Saraiva, 2008. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 168 formas de apropriação da arte pela publicidade CONNOR, S. Cultura pós-moderna: introdução às teorias do contemporâneo. 2. ed. São Paulo: Loyola, 1989. DANTO, A. C. Após o fim da arte: a arte contemporânea e os limites da História. São Paulo: Odysseus Editora, 2006. GOMBRICH, E. H. Arte e ilusão – um estudo da psicologia da representação pictórica. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2007. LOTMAN, I. M. La semiosfera: semiótica de la cultura y del texto. Madrid: Ediciones Cá- tedra, 1996. PÉREZ GAULI, J. C. El cuerpo en venta: relación entre arte y publicidad. Madrid: Ediciones Catedra, 2000. ROCHA, E. P. G. Magia e capitalismo: um estudo antropológico da publicidade. 4. ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2010. SANTAELLA, L. Por que as comunicações e as artes estão convergindo? São Paulo: Paulus, 2005. SANT’ANNA, A. R. Paródia, paráfrase & Cia. São Paulo: Ática, 2007. work_3yrwfohlbzhbthkrakwdjyljr4 ---- PLASTİK SANATLARDA TOPLUMSAL CİNSİYET: FEMİNİZME KARŞI FEMİNİZM M. Demet ULUSOY* Özet İnsan davranışının belirleyicisinin doğa mı yoksa sosyal kurumlar mı olduğu tartışması hala cevabını aramaktadır. Onca yıldır bu bağlamda devam eden amansız mücadelenin, birbiri ile çelişen kanıtlar eşliğinde geldiği nokta konunun tek yönlü olarak ele alınmasının eksik olacağı ve yanılgılara neden olacağıdır. Bu çerçevede toplumsal cinsiyet tartışmalarının da bu eksende olmasının çok daha verimli olacağı açıktır. Feminist sanat tarihi literatürü incelendiğinde sanat ve toplumsal cinsiyet tartışmalarının bu entellektüel serüvenden kendine düşen payı almış olduğu görülmektedir. Feminist sanat tarihi, temel feminist paradigmanın argümanları altında seyrini takip ederken ünlü sanat tarihçi Nochlin’in formülasyonu ile farkındalık yakalayan “plastik sanatlarda kadının neden yok olduğu” sorunsalını sosyolojik, psikolojik ve antropolojik bakış açılarını büyük oranda ıskalayarak, ister istemez kadını güçsüz ve edilgen bir konuma yerleştirmiş ve üstesinden hala gelemediği bu durumdan kurtulmak için de giderek radikalleşmeyi seçmiş ve böylelikle daha da güçsüz hale gelmesine ya da öyle algılanmasına katkıda bulunmuştur. Oysa kadın sosyal gerçekliğin kurgusunda aktif rol oynayan stratejist taraflardan biridir. Bunun en taze kanıtı da onun değişen sosyal koşullara bağlı olarak çağımızda kendini yeniden inşa etme girişiminde bulunmasıdır. Bu bakış açısı ile çalışmamızın araştırma sorusu; “kadının plastik sanatlarda neden yeterince var olmayı tercih etmediği” üzerine kurgulanmıştır. Bu bağlamda, çalışmamız plastik sanatlar üzerinden, feminizme belki de her zamankinden daha fazla ihtiyaç duyduğumuz günümüzde içine düştüğü çelişkileri ve çıkmazları disiplinlerarası bir bakış açısıyla yeniden tartışması için açık bir çağrı niteliğindedir. Anahtar kelimeler: Toplumsal cinsiyet, feminizm, feminist sanat, postmodernizm, evrimsel psikoloji. Sosyoloji Konferansları No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 * Prof. Dr., Hacettepe Üniversitesi, Edebiyat Fakültesi, Sosyoloji Bölümü. İletişim: demet@hacettepe.edu.tr Kuramsal Makale/ Theoretical Article DOI: 10.18368/iusoskon.328327 414 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY GENDER IN PLASTIC ARTS: FEMINISM VERSUS FEMINISM Abstract The debate on whether it is social institutions or nature determines that human behavior is yet to be resolved. All those years of ongoing debates in this context, accompanied by contradictory pieces of evidence, have reached the final point, in which addressing this issue in a unilateral way could be considered incomplete and can thus lead to delusions. In this context, engaging in gender debates would be much more efficient. When feminist art history is examined, it cab be seen that the debates on gender and art have also occurred during this intellectual journey. While feminist art history has followed its own course under the fundamental feminist arguments, the question “Why have there been no great women artists?” exemplifies the belief of the renowned art historian Nochline who, in his analysis, inevitably placed women in a powerless and passive position by overlooking the sociological, psychological, and anthropological perspectives. In overcoming this situation—something that Nochline has been unable to do—the formulation has become increasingly radicalized, further reinforcing the “weakness” of women or the perception of women having a weak and passive position. However, as we all know women play an active role in the construction of social reality. The most current proof of their role is their attempt to reconstruct themselves according to the changing social conditions. Within this perspective, our study is founded upon the research question “Why have there been few women who prefer to create in the plastic arts?” Based on plastic arts, our study is an open call for feminists to discuss their contradictions and dilemmas using an interdisciplinary perspective. Keywords: Gender, feminism, feminist art, postmodernism, evolutionary psychology. Giriş Bu çalışmanın gerçekleşmesinin esin kaynağı internet sanat portallarında sık sık yer verilen feminist makalelerdir. Bu makalelerin önemli bir kısmının -alıntı vermemekle birlikte- Linda Nochlin’in (1973) yaklaşık 40 yılı aşkın bir süre önce 1971’de yayınladığı ve sanata ilk olarak feminist bakış açısını getiren “Neden Hiç Büyük Kadın Sanatçı Yok?” başlıklı çalışmasındaki sorgulamayı yineledikleri ve 1980’lerin sonunda, Amerika’da bir grup kadın sanatçı tarafından oluşturulan “Gerilla Kızlar”ın protestolarındaki iddiaları tekrarladıkları görülür. Gerilla kızlar, sanat tarihindeki cinsiyet ayrımcı, erkek egemen yapıyı deşifre etmek için 415Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 uğraş vermiş ve dönemin tartışmalarından da esinlenerek Goril maskesi takarak protesto eylemlerinde bulunmuşlardır. Başlıca eleştiri konularından biri; Metropolitan müzesindeki kadınların yüzde doksanının çıplak olmasını işaret ederek, kadın bedeninin seyirlik bir nesne haline getirilmesi ve bunun ‘dünyanın en doğal durumu’ymuş gibi sunulmasıydı. Bunun için hazırladıkları “kadın sanatçıların müzelerde yer almak için kadınların çıplak olması mı gerekir?” başlıklı posterleri ile o dönemde; sanatta cinsiyet ayrımcılığına büyük dikkat çekmeyi başarmışlardır. Feminist sanat hareketinin temel iddiası; sanat alanında kadınların erkek egemen yapı nedeniyle hak ettikleri biçimde yer alamamalarıdır. Başta Nochlin olmak üzere feminist hareketin mücadeleleri sonucunda günümüzde sanat alanında bu ayrımcılığın büyük oranda ortadan kalktığı ve eskiye göre çok daha fazla sayıda kadının görünür olduğu kabul edilmektedir. Ancak bu söylendiğinde hemen pek çoğumuzun gözlerinin önüne Mayıs 2014’de, Paris’deki d’Orsay Müzesi’nde sergilenen Gustave Courbet’nin ünlü “Dünyanın Kökeni” tablosunun önünde yere oturarak vajinasını sergileyen performans sanatçısı Deborah de Robertis gelir. Aslında, bu sıra dışı gibi görünen gösteri toplumda gittikçe daha çok pazarlanan bir olguya işaret eden sayısız örnekten sadece biridir. Nitekim, benzer performanslar, Megumi Igarişi ve Nobuyoshi Araki gibi sanatçılar tarafından da tekrarlanmıştır. Bu tarz gösterilerin sonrasında sanatçılar “ahlaka aykırılık”dan göz altına alınmışlardır. Çünkü, performansları estetik değil, pornografik bulunmuştur. Giriş Bu çalışmanın gerçekleşmesinin esin kaynağı internet sanat portallarında sık sık yer verilen feminist makalelerdir. Bu makalelerin önemli bir kısmının -alıntı vermemekle birlikte- Linda Nochlin’in (1973) yaklaşık 40 yılı aşkın bir süre önce 1971’de yayınladığı ve sanata ilk olarak feminist bakış açısını getiren "Neden Hiç Büyük Kadın Sanatçı Yok?" başlıklı çalışmasındaki sorgulamayı yineledikleri ve 1980’lerin sonunda, Amerika’da bir grup kadın sanatçı tarafından oluşturulan “Gerilla Kızlar”ın protestolarındaki iddiaları tekrarladıkları görülür. Gerilla kızlar, sanat tarihindeki cinsiyet ayrımcı, erkek egemen yapıyı deşifre etmek için uğraş vermiş ve dönemin tartışmalarından da esinlenerek Goril maskesi takarak protesto eylemlerinde bulunmuşlardır. Başlıca eleştiri konularından biri; Metropolitan müzesindeki kadınların yüzde doksanının çıplak olmasını işaret ederek, kadın bedeninin seyirlik bir nesne haline getirilmesi ve bunun ‘dünyanın en doğal durumu’ymuş gibi sunulmasıydı. Bunun için hazırladıkları “kadın sanatçıların müzelerde yer almak için kadınların çıplak olması mı gerekir?” başlıklı posterleri ile o dönemde; sanatta cinsiyet ayrımcılığına büyük dikkat çekmeyi başarmışlardır. Feminist sanat hareketinin temel iddiası; sanat alanında kadınların erkek egemen yapı nedeniyle hak ettikleri biçimde yer alamamalarıdır. Başta Nochlin olmak üzere feminist hareketin mücadeleleri sonucunda günümüzde sanat alanında bu ayrımcılığın büyük oranda ortadan kalktığı ve eskiye göre çok daha fazla sayıda kadının görünür olduğu kabul edilmektedir. Ancak bu söylendiğinde hemen pek çoğumuzun gözlerinin önüne Mayıs 2014’de, Paris’deki d’Orsay Müzesi’nde sergilenen Gustave Courbet'nin ünlü “Dünyanın Kökeni” tablosunun önünde yere oturarak vajinasını sergileyen performans sanatçısı Deborah de Robertis gelir. Aslında, bu sıra dışı gibi görünen gösteri toplumda gittikçe daha çok pazarlanan bir olguya işaret eden sayısız örnekten sadece biridir. Nitekim, benzer performanslar, Megumi Igarişi ve Nobuyoshi Araki gibi sanatçılar tarafından da tekrarlanmıştır. Bu tarz gösterilerin sonrasında sanatçılar “ahlaka aykırılık”dan göz altına alınmışlardır. Çünkü, performansları estetik değil, pornografik bulunmuştur. Ayrıca, örneğin; sanatçı Nabuyoshi Araki1’nin çalışmaları çıplaklığın yanında insanları rahatsız edecek düzeyde şiddet unsurları da içermektedir. Çok benzer bir yaklaşımı ünlü İngiliz stilist Vivienne Westwood’un moda performanslarında da görürüz. Westwood tüm cüretkârlığı ile PUNK ve BDSM2 akımının düşüncelerini podyumlara taşımıştır: 1 http://www.artnet.com/artists/nobuyoshi-araki/ 2 BDSM, genelde seksüel tercihleriyle farklılık gösteren ve literatürde D/S veya S&M (sadomazoşizm) olarak tanımlanan ve Bondage (kölelik, bağlılık) ve Discipline (disiplin), Domination (baskınlık) ve Submission (itaat), Sadism (sadizm) ve Masochism (mazoşizm) 416 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY Bir moda gösterisinde mankenler düzen karşıtlıklarını sembolize etmek için podyumda sigara içerek, deri maskeler, zincir ve kamçı, deri bandaj gibi fetiş duyguları simgeleyen aksesuarlarla zenginleştirilmiş özel lateks kıyafetleri giyerek serbest seksi simgelemişlerdir. Erkek ve kadın mankenler podyumda kadın- erkek, erkek-erkek, kadın-kadın olmak üzere her üç kombinasyon içinde öpüşmüşler, ellerinde penis figürünü taşımışlar ve cinsel organları öne çıkaran kıyafetler giymişlerdir. Böylece bu defile ile moda dünyasında da sembolik anlatımını bulan serbest seks ve şiddet, yani pornografi, yeni bir akım olarak “fashion porn” tanımlamasıyla reklamlarda, müzikte, resim ve diğer plastik sanatlarda olduğu kadar moda dünyasında da yerini almış olur. Deborah de Robertis Megumi Igarişi Nobuyoshi Araki Nobuyoshi Araki Ayrıca, örneğin; sanatçı Nabuyoshi Araki 2 ’nin çalışmaları çıplaklığın yanında insanları rahatsız edecek düzeyde şiddet unsurları da içermektedir. Çok benzer bir yaklaşımı ünlü İngiliz stilist Vivienne Westwood’un moda performanslarında da görürüz. Westwood tüm cüretkârlığı ile PUNK ve BDSM3 akımının düşüncelerini podyumlara taşımıştır: Bir moda gösterisinde mankenler düzen karşıtlıklarını sembolize etmek için podyumda sigara içerek, deri maskeler, zincir ve kamçı, deri bandaj gibi fetiş duyguları simgeleyen aksesuarlarla zenginleştirilmiş özel lateks kıyafetleri giyerek serbest seksi simgelemişlerdir. Erkek ve kadın mankenler podyumda kadın- erkek, erkek-erkek, kadın-kadın olmak üzere her üç kombinasyon içinde öpüşmüşler, ellerinde penis figürünü taşımışlar ve cinsel organları öne çıkaran kıyafetler giymişlerdir. Böylece bu defile ile moda dünyasında da sembolik anlatımını bulan serbest seks ve şiddet, yani pornografi, yeni bir akım olarak “fashion porn” tanımlamasıyla reklamlarda, müzikte, resim ve diğer plastik sanatlarda olduğu kadar moda dünyasında da yerini almış olur. Vivienne Westwood ve 1990 moda gösterisi Nochlin (1973), tarih boyunca kadın sanatçıların her alanda ve her düzeyde baskılandığını ileri sürmüştür; ancak, günümüzde artık bundan söz etmek pek mümkün görünmemektedir. Önceden sanat okullarına bile alınmayan kadınlar günümüzde okul kontenjanlarını büyük bir ekseriyetle doldurmakta ve ünlü sergi salonlarında eserlerini sergileme imkanı buldukları gibi, ülkelerin en prestijli müzelerine eserler vermektedirler. Örneğin, Tracey Emin; aslen göçmen olan bir İngiliz sanatçıdır. Maidstone College of Art ve Royal College of Art’da eğitim görmüştür. Şu anda aynı okulda üçyüz yılı aşkın bir süreden sonra Royal Academician olarak ders veren ilk iki kadından biridir. İlk olarak şansı 1997 yılında Londra’da Royal College of Art’da, Charles Saatchi’s sergisindeki çalışması 2 http://www.artnet.com/artists/nobuyoshi-araki/ 3 BDSM, genelde seksüel tercihleriyle farklılık gösteren ve literatürde D/S veya S&M (sadomazoşizm) olarak tanımlanan ve Bondage (kölelik, bağlılık) ve Discipline (disiplin), Domination (baskınlık) ve Submission (itaat), Sadism (sadizm) ve Masochism (mazoşizm) kelimelerinin baş harflerinden üretilen ve daha çok seksüel aktivitelerdeki hemen hiçbir sınırı kabul etmeyen ve cinsel hazzı esas alan geniş bir davranış biçimini yaşam tarzı olarak kabul eden sıra dışı bir alt grup olarak tanımlanabilir. Ancak, bu gruplar her ne kadar marjinal olsalar da düşüncelerinin belli oranda ve boyutta toplumda yerleştiğini kabul etmek gerekir. Nochlin (1973), tarih boyunca kadın sanatçıların her alanda ve her düzeyde baskılandığını ileri sürmüştür; ancak, günümüzde artık bundan söz etmek pek mümkün görünmemektedir. Önceden sanat okullarına bile alınmayan kadınlar günümüzde okul kontenjanlarını büyük bir ekseriyetle doldurmakta ve ünlü sergi salonlarında eserlerini sergileme imkanı buldukları gibi, ülkelerin en prestijli müzelerine eserler vermektedirler. Örneğin, Tracey Emin; aslen göçmen olan bir İngiliz sanatçıdır. Maidstone College of Art ve Royal College of Art’da eğitim görmüştür. Şu anda aynı okulda üçyüz yılı aşkın bir süreden sonra Royal Academician olarak ders veren ilk iki kadından biridir. İlk olarak şansı 1997 yılında Londra’da Royal College of Art’da, Charles Saatchi’s sergisindeki çalışması “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995” ile dönmüştür. Sanatçının mavi bir çadırın içinde 1963 yılından beri yatağını paylaştığı insanlara yer verdiği bu sansasyonel çalışması, medyanın ilgisini çekmeyi başarmıştır. Emin, peşi sıra medyadan mülakat için çağrılar almış ve bu programlarda da çarpıcı sansasyonel kelimelerinin baş harflerinden üretilen ve daha çok seksüel aktivitelerdeki hemen hiçbir sınırı kabul etmeyen ve cinsel hazzı esas alan geniş bir davranış biçimini yaşam tarzı olarak kabul eden sıra dışı bir alt grup olarak tanımlanabilir. Ancak, bu gruplar her ne kadar marjinal olsalar da düşüncelerinin belli oranda ve boyutta toplumda yerleştiğini kabul etmek gerekir. 417Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 duruşunu devam ettirmiştir. Canlı yayına sarhoş olarak elinde içki kadehi ve sigara ile katılarak sokak ağzı ile konuşmuş, evinde yapılan bir ropörtajda ise dekolte kıyafeti ve rahat hareketleri ile sıra dışı bir görüntü vermiştir. Sanki bu gösteri, sanatçının kendisini ve kişisel tarihini bir sanat malzemesi olarak kullanarak sanat nesnesini ve sanat üreticisini bütünleştirdiği ve sonuçta toplumsal yaşamının tümünü bir eser olarak sergilediği bir performansa dönmüştür. Sergilenen, pazarlanan ürünle birlikte onu üreten sanatçının bizzat kendisiydi ve değeri medya tarafından belirleniyordu. Bundan bir yıl sonra, seks yaparak, yemek yiyerek, içki ve sigara içerek üzerinde birkaç hafta zaman geçirildiği izlenimini veren; kanlı iç çamaşırlarının, kondonların, içki kadehlerinin, sigara izmaritlerinin ve ilaç kutularının aksesuar olarak kullanılarak dağınık ve kirli bir yatağın tasvir edildiği “My Bed” isimli çalışmasıyla çok daha popüler olmuş ve Turner ödülüne aday gösterilmiştir. “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995” ile dönmüştür. Sanatçının mavi bir çadırın içinde 1963 yılından beri yatağını paylaştığı insanlara yer verdiği bu sansasyonel çalışması, medyanın ilgisini çekmeyi başarmıştır. Emin, peşi sıra medyadan mülakat için çağrılar almış ve bu programlarda da çarpıcı sansasyonel duruşunu devam ettirmiştir. Canlı yayına sarhoş olarak elinde içki kadehi ve sigara ile katılarak sokak ağzı ile konuşmuş, evinde yapılan bir ropörtajda ise dekolte kıyafeti ve rahat hareketleri ile sıra dışı bir görüntü vermiştir. Sanki bu gösteri, sanatçının kendisini ve kişisel tarihini bir sanat malzemesi olarak kullanarak sanat nesnesini ve sanat üreticisini bütünleştirdiği ve sonuçta toplumsal yaşamının tümünü bir eser olarak sergilediği bir performansa dönmüştür. Sergilenen, pazarlanan ürünle birlikte onu üreten sanatçının bizzat kendisiydi ve değeri medya tarafından belirleniyordu. Bundan bir yıl sonra, seks yaparak, yemek yiyerek, içki ve sigara içerek üzerinde birkaç hafta zaman geçirildiği izlenimini veren; kanlı iç çamaşırlarının, kondonların, içki kadehlerinin, sigara izmaritlerinin ve ilaç kutularının aksesuar olarak kullanılarak dağınık ve kirli bir yatağın tasvir edildiği “My Bed” isimli çalışmasıyla çok daha popüler olmuş ve Turner ödülüne aday gösterilmiştir. Tracey Emin Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 My Bed TV Ropörtajı Nochlin’in 1971’de kaleme aldığı bu tarihsel makaleden ve 1980’lerde Gerilla kızların çarpıcı iddia ve mücadelelerinin ardından, günümüze kadar gelinen bu süreci nasıl değerlendireceğiz? 1. Feminizmin Kısa Tarihsel Gelişimi ve Cevaplanamayan Sorular İlk feminist hareketler 1800’lü yıllarda, kadınların toplumsal yaşama katılımında eşit hak talepleriyle başlamış ve John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Harriet Tatlor (1807-1858)4 gibi filozoflar dahil erkeklerden de destek görmüştür. Feminizm modernizmin bir ürünü, Fransız devriminin düşünsel değerlerinin bir sonucuydu. Tüm vatandaşlar için eşitlik ve özgürlük talep ediliyordu; doğal olarak kadınlar için de. Kısa sayılabilecek sürede, en azından batı dünyasında, kadınların yasalar önünde büyük oranda eşitliği sağlandı. Ancak toplumsal 4 Bu konuda, Taylor’un Enfranchisement of Women (1851) ve Mill’in The Subjection of Women (1869) yayınlarına bakmak fikir verecektir. Nochlin’in 1971’de kaleme aldığı bu tarihsel makaleden ve 1980’lerde Gerilla kızların çarpıcı iddia ve mücadelelerinin ardından, günümüze kadar gelinen bu süreci nasıl değerlendireceğiz? 1. Feminizmin Kısa Tarihsel Gelişimi ve Cevaplanamayan Sorular İlk feminist hareketler 1800’lü yıllarda, kadınların toplumsal yaşama katılımında eşit hak talepleriyle başlamış ve John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Harriet Tatlor (1807-1858)3 gibi filozoflar dahil erkeklerden de destek görmüştür. Feminizm modernizmin bir ürünü, Fransız devriminin düşünsel değerlerinin bir sonucuydu. Tüm vatandaşlar için eşitlik ve özgürlük talep ediliyordu; doğal olarak kadınlar için de. Kısa sayılabilecek sürede, en azından batı dünyasında, kadınların yasalar önünde büyük oranda eşitliği sağlandı. Ancak toplumsal yaşam içinde, köklerini belki de varoluşun 3 Bu konuda, Taylor’un Enfranchisement of Women (1851) ve Mill’in The Subjection of Women (1869) yayınlarına bakmak fikir verecektir. 418 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY derinliklerinden alan kültürel örüntüler nedeniyle kadınlar, erkekler karşısında ikincil konumlarından kurtulamıyorlardı. “Kadın ve erkek gerçekten fiziki ve zihinsel melekeler açısından eşit midir?” ya da “Kadın ve erkeğe atfedilen özellikler doğuştan mı geliyor, yoksa toplum içinde mi kazanılıyor?” gibi sorularla günümüze kadar azalarak da olsa devam eden bu entelletüel tartışma bir dönem “cinsiyet savaşları” tanımını hak edecek şekilde, entelektüel camianın tüm kesimlerinin katılımıyla şiddetle yürütülmüştür. Bu arada İkinci Dünya Savaşı ve sonrası yaşanan ekonomik koşulların kadının aile dışına çıkarak toplumsal ve ekonomik yaşama katılımını hızlandırması da tartışmalara yeni boyutların ilave edilmesini sağlamıştır: Eşitsizliğin kaynağı ailedir ve aile cinsiyetçilik üzerine kuruludur. Böylelikle 1980’ler, cinsellik üzerine politik ve kültürel tartışmalarla, cinsiyet savaşlarının (sex wars) en yoğun yaşandığı yıllar olmuştur (Duggan, 1995:1). Nochlin’in plastik sanatlar tarihinde neden ünlü kadınların olmadığını ya da çok az olduğunu irdelemesi de tam bu tartışmaların merkezine oturur. Sanat kamusunun bu alanda temelde iki kategoriye ayrıldığını söyleyebiliriz: Bir tarafta bunun nedenini kadınların doğaları gereği erkekler kadar yaratıcı olmamasına kadar vardıran, deyim yerindeyse kadının bu alandaki yetersizliğini savunanlar; diğer tarafta ise kadının sanattaki başarısızlığını tamamen erkeklerin ve eril sosyal yapılanmanın koyduğu aşılmaz bariyerlerle açıklayanlar yer almaktadır. Bu iki zıt bakış açısının taraftarlarının amansız ve şiddetli entellektüel mücadeleleri sanki hiç bitmeyecekmiş gibi görünmektedir. Kuşkusuz bu tartışma, aslında sosyal bilimler alanındaki insan davranışının belirleyicisinin doğa mı; yoksa sosyalleşme süreci mi? olduğuna dair günümüze kadar uzanan sorunsalın bir alt varyantıdır. Sanat alanında da yapılan bu entellektüel tartışmaların istemeyerek tek vardığı somut nokta “sanat yapma gücü”nü betimleyen söylemin giderek içinin boşaltılması olmuştur (Garrard, 1991-1992: 36). Son dönem tartışmaları ise, feminist düşüncede ve sanat anlayışındaki dönüşümlerde büyük etkisi olan, 1960’larda başlayan, 1980’lere gelindiğinde popülerliğinin doruğuna ulaşan postmodernizmi anlamadan değerlendirmek mümkün değildir. Dünyadaki temel problemlerin çözümü konusunda umutlarını yitiren ve bundan aydınlanma ve onun ürünü modernizmi sorumlu olarak gören sol entelijans içinde ortaya çıkan postmodernizm, modernizme bir tepki 419Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 olarak; gerçeği, bilimi ve düalizmi yadsır. Bireylerin kendi gerçekliklerinden kaynaklanan bütüncül bir kişilik ve benlik olgusunun varlığının olanaksızlığını, aksine; kişiliğin çelişkili ve çok parçalı olduğunu ileri sürer. Gerçeğin olmadığı bir ortamda, doğru ve yanlışın baskın iktidar tarafından belirlendiğini ve bu nedenle modernitenin, gerçekleştirdiği bu hegomonik yapı nedeniyle ortadan kaldırılması gerektiğini ileri sürer (Örneğin, Faucault). Postmodernizm, modernizmin dayattığı bütüncül hegemonik yapıyı sergileyebilmek için yapıbozum (deconstruction) metodu ile tekrar parçalarına ayırarak iktidar mekanizmalarını ortaya çıkarmayı amaçlar. Bu metod feministler tarafından da toplumsal yapıdaki ataerkil hegemonik yapıyı sergilemek amacıyla kullanılır. Geliştirilen ortak söylem feminizm ile post-modernizmin birbirlerine eklemlenmesine yol açar. Onlara göre ataerkil bir hegemonyanın “gerçek”lerini meşrulaştıran bilim; bunu kabul etmeyenleri hasta, deli, mantıksız, bilim dışı olarak damgalayarak “ötekileştirir” ve sistem dışına çıkarır. Böylece feministler de sistemin bütün kurum ve dil dahil tüm kültürel yapılarıyla toplumdaki erkek egemen yapının inşası ve devamını sağlamaya yönelik olduğu konusunda postmodernistlerle aynı düşünceleri paylaşırlar ve özgürlüğe kavuşmanın bu yapının tümüyle reddi ve yıkılması ile mümkün olacağı savına da katılırlar. Bu düşünce zaman zaman anarşizm ile de özdeşleşir (Millett, 1987). Modern endüstriyel kapitalizmin temel unsurunun ataerkil toplumsal yapı olarak görülmesi nedeniyle, Doug Brown(1991: 3) postmodernizmin, kapitalizmi de değiştireceğini ileri sürer. Günümüze kadar gelen üçüncü dalga feminizm, postmodernizme eklemlenme ile birlikte, öncelikle ırk ve çok kültürlülük gibi kavramların ve 1990’lı yıllarda ise melezlik politikaları (politics of hybridity) ve çoklu kimlikler (multiple identities) kavramları merkezinde çoklu etnik, kültür ve sınıf kimliklerinin sorgulandığı aşırı akımlar olarak belirginleşmiştir. Aslında, bugünün de temel konuları olan göç, sınıf çatışması, çok kültürlülük, ulusal ve uluslar arası insan hakları, sosyal aktivizm ve çevre konularına feminist teorinin katkıları yadsınamaz. Ancak, ne var ki, daha sonra feminizmde cinsiyet ve cinsellik üzerine oluşan düşünceler çok daha radikal bir boyuta taşınmış ve ardından da ortaya atılan eşcinsellik teorisi (queer theory) eleştirel feminist düşüncenin merkezine yerleşmiştir. İlginç bir şekilde, bütün bu entellektüel tartışmalara karşın hala cevaplanamayan soruların pörtföyü de küçülmemiştir. 420 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY 2. Hala Cevaplanamayan Sorular Şimdi kendi bağlamımızda sorumuzu tekrar edelim: Nochlin’in kaleme aldığı tarihsel makaleden ve 1980’lerde Gerilla Kızların çarpıcı iddia ve mücadelelerinin ardından günümüzde gelinen noktayı nasıl değerlendireceğiz? Ayrıca, sormamız gereken başka sorular da bulabiliriz: Plastik sanatların dışında örneğin müzikte ne kadar dünyaca tanınmış, ekol, akım ya da -izm yaratmış kadın kompozitör, koreograf vardır? Ya da plastik sanatlarla ilgili olduğunu düşündüğümüz mimaride, toplumsal olarak kadının rolü içinde tanımlanan aşçılıkta -herhangi bir engel olmamasına rağmen -kadının yeri nedir? Günümüzde jet uçağını uçuran kadın varken, kaç balıkçı teknesi kaptanı vardır? Yine üniversitelerde, medyada, eğitimde çalışan kadın oranı en azından eşitlenmişken, kadınlar madenlerde, inşaatda neden yok denecek kadar azlar? Kadınlar, örneğin makina mühendisi olmak yerine çok daha fazla oranda neden doktor olmayı yeğliyorlar? Ya da pek çok kadın diş hekimimiz varken; diş teknisyenliğine o oranda neden ilgi göstermiyorlar? Bu soruların yanıtlarını da birlikte vermemiz gerekmez mi? Feminist pencereden daha geniş bir bağlamda; bugün kadınlar, tarihsel olarak güçlerinin zirvesinde görüldükleri bu noktada bile, neden dramatik olarak hala temsil edilememekte, daha düşük ücretler almakta, kadının metalaştırılması artarak devam etmekte ve hemen her alanda artan oranda daha çok şiddete maruz kalmaktadırlar? Sanatta eşitlik adına yapılan bu performanslar kadınların ironik bir şekilde eleştirdikleri konumlarını pekiştirme ya da yeniden üretme fonksiyonunun dışına çıkabilmekte midir? Çağımızda özellikle gelişmiş ülkelerde kadın, çok daha eğitimli, çoğunlukla ekonomik özgürlüğünü kazanmış, tüm politik haklarını elde etmiş ve kamusal alanda çok daha görünürdür. Hatta çağdaş dünyada, plastik sanatlar alanı büyük oranda kadınlara bırakılmıştır. Örneğin, pek çok ülkede üniversite düzeyinde plastik sanatlarla ilgili eğitim kurumları neredeyse kadınların hakimiyetindedir. Sanatçı kişilikleri ile kamuda ve meslek piyasalarında profesyonel olarak da çalışmaktadırlar. Ancak, yine de kadınlar bir ekol ya da “izm” yaratamamışlar, karar alma, sevk ve yönlendirme ya da prestijli konum elde etme ve daha fazla gelir kazanma gibi durumlarda yine erkeklerin ilerisine geçememektedirler. Gelişmiş Batılı ülkelerde bile, sanat müzelerinde yönetici olarak görev alanlar arasında, daha yüksek ücret alanlar yine de 421Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 erkeklerdir (Schwarzer, 2010; Katz, 2012; Gan ve diğerleri, 2015). Rhode ve Kellerman (2007) yayınladıkları kitapta dünyanın ilk 500 CEO’sunun ancak %2’sinin ve üst düzey yöneticilerinin %16’sının kadın olduğunu belirtirler. Dünyada sosyal refah düzeyinin en yüksek olduğu ve en eşitlikçi politikaların hayata geçirildiği İsveç gibi ülkeler, işgücü piyasasındaki eşitsizlikleri ortadan kaldıramadıkları gibi, bu ülkelerde bile hâlâ tam olarak cinsiyet eşitliği sağlanabilmiş ve kadına yönelik şiddet, cinsel istismar, aile içi taciz, tecavüz olayları önlenebilmiş değildir (Gelb, 1990). İsveç, son yirmi yılda rapor edilen tecavüz vakalarının dörde katlanması ile Avrupa’nın en yüksek tecavüz oranına sahip ülkesidir. Feminist Parti temsilcisi Johanna Grantaxem: “İsveç’te kime sorsanız feministtir. Kime sorsanız burada kadına şiddet ve taciz yoktur. Ancak bu kocaman bir pazarlama stratejisinin görünen kısmından başka bir şey değildir” diyerek, İsveç’te bilinenin aksine, kadınlarla erkeklerin hiç de eşit olmadığını ve acilen feminizme ihtiyaç duyduklarını söylerken neyi ifade etmek istemektedir?4 İngiltere gibi batılı ve çağdaş bir ülkede yapılan bir araştırma, insanların büyük oranda kadınların erkeklerle eşit haklara sahip olması gerektiğine inanırlarken, kendilerini feminist olarak tanımlamakta isteksiz olduklarını ortaya koymaktadır. Kadınlarda dahi kendini feminist olarak tanımlayanların oranı sadece %27’dir. Ülkenin başbakanı David Cameron, politik herhangi bir kaygı gütmeden kendini feminist olarak tanımlamayı red etmiştir.5 Türkiye gibi büyük oranda geleneksel yapısını koruyan ülkelerde ise bu tanımlamayı yapanların çok daha azınlıkta olacaklarını öngörmek falcılık olmayacaktır. Bugün pek çok kişi tarafından feminizm toksitlenmiş bir alan olarak görülmektedir ve artık eski popüleritesinden söz etmek mümkün değildir. Hammer (2002)’in belirttiği üzere, kadın haklarını savunan ve kadının sosyal hayata daha etkin olarak katılımını amaçlayan feminist hareket, sonunda feminizmin kurbanı olmuştur. Şimdi sorgulanması gereken de budur. 4 http://www.ucansupurge.org/TR,1305/feministlere-verilen-oy-bos-oydur.html 5 https://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/10/05/treat-women-equally-dont-call-it-feminism/ 422 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY 3. Feminizmin Hataları Feminizm gelinen noktada kendini ve içine düştüğü hataları sorgulayarak yeni söylemler geliştirmelidir. Bu aşamada, bu konudaki tartışmalara katkı sağlamak üzere şunlar tartışılabilir: 1) Eril toplumsal yapının düşünsel sistematiğinin temelinde var olduğu için, başta feministler tarafından eleştirilen dualektik düşünce sistematiği –belki de kaçınılmaz olarak- ister istemez tekrar edilmiştir. Bunun sonucunda kadın ve erkek karşıtlığına dayalı bir cinsiyet savaşları kurgusundan öteye geçilememiştir. Uzun yıllar boyunca kadınların da erkekler kadar yetenekli, güçlü, zeki ve atılgan olabileceği, çünkü bu özelliklerin kişinin yetiştiği sosyo-kültürel çevre tarafından belirlendiği, yoksa ilahi güçler tarafından erkeklere bahşedilmediği ve tüm erilliği yücelten kültürel tanımlamaların bizzat erkekler tarafından kadınların sömürülmesi amacıyla üretildiği ve kullanılageldiği, başlangıçta anaerkil topluluklar varken, tarihsel süreçte gelinen son noktada aileden başlayarak toplumun tüm kurumsal yapısında hegomonik ilişkinin inşa edildiği, bu nedenle de sürekli olarak yeniden kendini ürettiği gibi tartışılmaların içine hapsolunmuştur. Bu hegemonik ortamın kadının kendini geliştirmesine olanak vermediğini iddia eden feministler; bunun tek sorumlusu olarak da erkekleri işaret etmişlerdir. Böyle olunca tarafların kendi iddialarını desteklemek amacıyla, uzunca bir süreyi biyolojinin, antropolojinin, psikolojinin ve tarihin birbirini çürütür verilerini kullanarak birbirlerini aşma çabaları içinde geçirdikleri görülmektedir. Oysa, bu düşünce ölü doğmuş bir bebek gibidir ve feministler tarafından ileri sürülen veriler de kendi iddiaları ile çelişir konumdadır: Çünkü bir şekilde mevcut erkek egemen yapının tüm sorumluluğu erkekler üzerinden tanımlandığında, günümüzde kadının pek çok açıdan erkekten daha geri düzeyde olduğu da dolaylı olarak kabul edilmiş olur. Nochlin de kadınların plastik sanatlar alanında erkekler ve ataerkil sosyal kurumlar tarafından engellenmeleri nedeniyle yeteneklerini geliştiremediklerini ifade ederek, kadınların edilgen, aciz ve fiziksel ya da zihinsel olarak yeterli olmadıklarını söylemektedir. 2) Özellikle üçüncü dalga feminist hareketin düalektik bakışı reddetmesi ile de feminizm, iddialarının aksine, monoloğa dönüşmüştür. Feminizme göre, kadın ancak ataerkil hegemonyanın ürünü olan toplumsal rollerinden 423Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 ve değerlerinden arındırıldığında özgürleşebilir. Ancak bu durumda kadına kalan tek gerçeklik bedeni ve seksüelitesi olmuştur. Bu durum sanatta da kadın bedeni ve cinsel organ fetişizmine (örneğin, vajina sanatı) yol açmıştır. Sanatta bu bağlamda ilk örneği Judy Chicago verir. Chicago’nun arkadaşları ile gerçekleştirdiği “Yemek Ziyafeti” (The Dinner Party) isimli çalışmasında üçgen şeklinde ince ince nakış gibi işlenmiş masa üzerinde o döneme kadar bilinen kadın ressamları temsilen vajina şeklinde tabaklar bulunmaktadır. Ferdinand Saint-Martin’in de ifade ettiği üzere; Chicago, kadınların tarihsel konumlarından çok vajina ile ilgilenmiştir; onun öne çıkmasına vesile olmuştur (Akt: Gouma Peterson ve Mathews, 2008: 54). Bu aslında, Queer teorinin feminist düşünce içine aşılanmasıyla “seks ve haz”ın ön plana çıkarılarak konunun çok daha radikal bir noktaya taşınmasının öncüllerindendir. İşte, Feminizmin içindeki en büyük kırılma da bu noktada gerçekleşmiştir. Susan Faludi (1995), kendilerini üçüncü kuşak ya da post feminist olarak adlandıranlara şiddetle karşı çıkarak, bu yeni feministleri “media made-pseudo feminist” ya da “pod feminist”6 olarak adlandırmakta ve bu yeni akımı şöyle tanımlamaktadır; “….. bu dramanın en doğru tanımı, kadın vücudunun medya yardımı ile istilasıdır..” (Faludi, 1995: 32). Böylece, sorgulamaya yönelik metodundan olsa gerek, daha çok sol düşünceye sahip, erkek karşıtı, aslında genç kadınların ihtiyaçlarını karşılamaktan uzak, özgür ve serbest cinselliği savunan7, medya tarafından kuvvetle desteklenen yalancı, basma kalıp bir feminist tipi yaratılmıştır. Popüler medya, ultra kapitalist, tüketim toplumunun değerlerini pompalamak üzere, seks ve alışveriş üzerine kurulu bu yeni hayat tarzını hemen benimseyip metalaştırmakta gecikmemiştir. Michelle Goldberg (2001) bu yeni feminizmi “shoping-and fucking feminism” olarak tanımlamakta ve mevcut durumu şöyle özetlemektedir: 6 “Pod” Saksı benzetmesi 1956 yılına ait bir bilim kurgu filmi olan “Invasion of The Body Snatchers” filminden bir uyarlamadır. Bir kasabada yaşayanlar, esrarengiz bir şekilde, saksıdaki bir bitkiden farksız benzerleri ile değiştirilmekte, ruhları çalınmaktadır. 7 Dramatik olarak, bu dönemde kadın cinsel organlarının “fethedilmesi gereken kaleler” olduğuna ilişkin görüşler de yaygındı. Bu görüş, kendi cinsellikleri üzerindeki hâkimiyetlerini ve cinselliği ön plana taşımayı amaçlıyordu. Ancak, her kale gibi bir şekilde ele geçirildi, bunun için de en bilinen ve genel yöntem olarak “şiddet” kullanılır oldu. 424 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY “Bu yeni “shoping-and-fucking feminism”, tüketim toplumunun mesajları ile öylesine uyum içindedir ki, özgürlüğün anlamı, “hotter” seks, daha iyi yemek, Manolo Blahniks’de çift çift ayakkabı, Betsey Johnson’dan döşeli bir gardrop, Kate Spade çanta ve MAC rujları demektir ve bu, yeni feminist akımın bu kadar yaygın olmasını da anlaşılır kılmaktadır. “ (Goldberg, 2001). Özellikle, kadını metalaştıran medya, onu sadece bir seks objesi olarak ele alıp, bunu yaygın bir reklam unsuru olarak kullanmaktadır. Ayrıca, temelleri Herbert Macuse 8 (1966[1955])’un felsefi düşüncesine dayanan Eros da, S&M’in cinsellik ve tehlike içerikli fantezileri ile teknoloji potasında birleştirilerek, sanal seks (pornografi)’e feda edilmiştir. Böylece başlangıçda kadınların sömürülmesi üzerine kurulu kapitalist dünyaya bir başkaldırı olarak ortaya çıkan feminizm, ultrakapitalist sisteme, tüketim toplumunun medyadaki ajanları olarak eklemlenmiştir. Gerilla kızlar bir bakıma amaçlarına ulaşmışlardır. Artık kadınlar sanatta çok daha görünür olmuşlardır; ancak kadın bedeni halen yine en geçerli malzemedir ve neyin sanat olup olmadığı ve kimin sanatçı olacağı da kapitalizmin en önemli kültür ajanı medya tarafından belirlenmektedir. 3) Diğer bir sonuç ise, feminizmin hegemonik toplumsal yapıyı parçalayarak alttaki küçük güç odaklarını daha görünür kılmaya ve bu yolla bu düzeni değiştirme idiasındaki postmodern düşünceye eklemlenmesi ile ortaya çıkmıştır. Postmodern düşünceye göre gerçeklik yoktur, doğru yoktur. Bu nedenle de gelecek için bir vaadi, öngörüsü, kurgusu da yoktur. Ancak ironik bir biçimde toplumsal yaşamdaki tüm “gerçeklikleri” yadsıyan postmodernizm, sanat faaliyetini gerçekliği arama çabası; yeni olasıklara yer açma çabası olarak tanımlayarak, sanat eserlerini de gerçekliğin kendisi olarak tanımlamıştır. Baudrillard (1994) bu durumu, sanat ile gerçekliğin arasındaki sınırların ortadan kalktığı, ‘simulacra’ların gerçeğin yerini aldığı yeni bir süreç olarak tanımlamaktadır. Modernist sanatın ince fikir işçiliğinin, biçimsel bilgiçliğinin ve estetik meraklılığının aksine, yüksek kültür ve popüler kültür biçimlerini karıştıran, 8 Herbert Marcuse, 1955’de yayınlanan Eros and Civilization adlı kitabında, yasaksız bir medeniyeti tartışmış ve sadece Freudyen bir yaklaşımla, üreme organlarına odaklanmış bir cinsellik anlayışının Eros’a yönelmesi gerektiğini önermiştir. 425Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 estetik sınırları alt üst eden, sanatın alanını reklam imgelerini, televizyonun oldukça değişken mozaiklerini, soykırım sonrası nükleer çağın deneyimlerini kapsayacak şekilde genişleten ve her zaman tüketim kapitalizmini arttırarak üreten postmodernist sanat, bölük pörçük ve eklektiktir. Böylece yüksek modernizmin ahlaki ciddiyetinin yerini, ironi, “pastiche-postij”, kinizm, ticari tutum ve bazı durumlarda çok keskin bir nihilizm anlayışı almıştır (Kellner, 2000: 367). Böylelikle herşey sanattır hükmü ile sanat ile sanat olmayan arasındaki ayrımı silikleştirerek sanatın özerk alanını yani ontolojik varlık alanını yok etmiştir. Bu bağlamda ortada üretilecek bir özel alan kalmadığından, sanatın kimin tarafından sahiplenildiği tartışması da otomotik olarak anlamsızlaşmıştır. 4)Ayrıca postmodernizmin tarihsel araştırma yöntemi de sorunludur. Öldürücü bir silah gibidir; silahı kimin tuttuğu ve hedefe kimin konulduğuna göre sonuç verir ve bir otopsi gibi kaba bir yöntemdir. Fonksiyonel olarak bir araya getirme kaygısı olmadan bedenin bütünlüğünü parçalamaktadır. “Neden” sorusuna cevap bulunabilse bile “nasıl” sorusu genelde hatalı bir tarihsel bakış ile cevaplandırılır: Çünkü postmodern sanattaki “postij” uygulaması gibi; olaylar, kavramlar, kişiler, zaman ve mekan bağlamından uzak olarak kurgulanır. Bu açıdan bazı postmodern feministler, postmodernizmin kadınları dışlayan erkek icatlarından biri daha olabileceği tehlikesine bile işaret ederken (Owens, 1983: 61) postmodernizm kendi yöntemiyle irdelendiğinde de, iddia ettiğinin dışında bir sistem görünümü vermektedir. Çünkü Lyotard (1990)’ın da ifade ettiği üzere “cinsler arasında çizilen sınır, aynı toplumsal bütünü bozmaz”. Tam bu noktada konumuzla ilgili olarak Nochlin’in “tarihte neden kadın sanatçılar yok” sorusuna tekrar dönersek; bu durumu zaman ve mekan bağlamından kopararak en basit şekliyle sadece erkeklerin engellemesine ya da hegomanyasına bağlamak ne kadar gerçekçidir? Ya da Garrard (1991-1992: 36)’ın plastik sanatlar alanında kadının yokluğu için yaptığı; “En azından Rönesans’tan bu yana kadın sanatçı ile toplum arasında bir ayrı durma hali görülmektedir. Bu ayrışma kadınları “yaratıcılığın erkek tarafında”rakip olarak görmek istemeyen erkek sanatçılar tarafından kasten yaratılmıştır. Kadın sanatçılar sanatın inşaasında sınırın içinde güçsüz, yetkisiz ve ‘sanatçı olarak görünmez’ kalmışlardır…...” açıklaması ne derece gerçeği yansıtmaktadır? 426 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY Bu bakış açılarından hareketle Avustralyalı akademisyen, yazar ve aktivist olan Germain Greer (1979) de “The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work” adlı çalışmasında, ortaçağdan 19.yüzyıla kadar batı plastik sanatlarında istinai bazı kadın sanatçıların varlığını ortaya koymaya çalışmış ve sanatsal başarı için erkeklerle rekabet eden kadın sanatçıların çoğunluğunun yaşadığı sosyal hayattaki silik konumlarını, başta kendileri de sanatçı olan babaları ya da aşkları veya hayran oldukları erkeklerle girdikleri ailevi veya romantik ilişkilere bağlamıştır. Greer (1979) Paula Modersohn- Becker, Sonia Terk Delaunay gibi uzak ve yakın tarihten sanatçıları örnek olarak vererek, kadınların kocaları ile birlikte çalışmalarına rağmen, sanat tarihine sadece kocalarının isimlerinin geçtiğini ileri sürmektedir. Kadın sanatçıların geri plandaki konumunu, tarihsel zaman ve mekanından kopararak, erkeklerin engellemelerine, hatta sömürülmelerine bağlamak ne kadar doğrudur? Herşeyden önce, bu iddialar aslında kanıtlanamaz bir değerlendirme niteliğindedir. Çünkü, hangisinin ne kadar katkı verdiği belli değildir ve asla da ölçülebilir değildir. İkinci olarak tarihte kocası ya da babasının desteği ya da şöhreti nedeniyle sosyal konum elde eden kadın da pek çoktur. Bu bağlamda Feminist sanat tarihinde bu konunun Greer’in tersine değerlendirilmesine olanak sağlayacak pek çok örnek vardır. Hatta bir kadın sanatçı eğer tanınmış ise; bunun yine bir erkeğin desteği ile sağlandığı da iddia edilmektedir. Eleanor Tufts (1974) ve Cowen (1996) kadın sanatçılar üzerine yaptıkları çalışmalarda, kadın sanatçıların büyük bir kısmının babalarının da sanatçı olduğunu, onlara eğitmenlik, mentörlük, menejerlik yaptıklarını ya da mali destek sağladıklarını anlatmaktadırlar. Ailesinde sanatçı olan kadınların önemli bir kısmı, ailelerinden eğitim, eleştirel geri bildirim, sanatsal malzeme ya da mekan elde etme şansını bulmuştur (Cowen 1996). Örneğin, Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807), ressam Joseph Kauffmann’ın kızıdır. Babasının atölyesinde ona yardım ederken, babası tarafından yeteneği keşfedilmiş9 ve onun tarafından eğitilmiştir. Baba kız, Milano, Bolonya, Parma, Florensa’ya birlikte gitmişler ve böylelikle Angelica buralarda İtalyan duayenlerin eserlerini kopyalama şansını elde etmiştir. Yani, Angelica’nın başarılı olması babasının sayesindedir. Feminist Sanat tarihi literatüründe Marry Cassatt, Berthe ve Edma Morisot kardeşler gibi bir çok kadın sanatçının oldukça zengin ailelerden geldikleri ve babalarının ya da kocaların desteğinin onların plastik sanatlar alanındaki başarılarının temel anahtarı olduğu sık sık anlatılmaktadır. 9 http://www.angelica-kauffmann.com/index.shtml 427Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 Diğer ilginç bir örnek ise, Artemisia Gentileschi’dir. Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652/53)’in babası; Orazio Gentileschi de ressamdır. Artemisia ailenin dört çocuğundan biridir. Diğer kardeşleri içinde (ki diğerleri erkektir) onun sıradışı yeteneği babası tarafından erken yaşlarda farkedilmiş ve babasının bir çalışanı tarafından eğitilmeye başlanmıştır. İlk bağımsız eseri olan “Susanna and The Elders” (1610)’i 17 yaşındayken yapmıştır. Daha sonra babası onu perspektif çalışması yapması için arkadaşı ressam Agostino Tassi ile tanıştırmıştır. Ancak, bu baba destekli olumlu atmosfer Artemisia’nın, Tassi tarafından tecavüze uğraması ile talihsizliğe dönmüştür. Sanatta pek çok erkek tarafından destek ve teşvik görmesine rağmen, Tassi bu davranışı ile bu alanın da kadınlar için tehlikeli olduğuna ilişkin bir görüntü vermiştir. Artemisia daha sonra yine bir ressam olan ve kendisini destekleyen Floransalı Pietro Antonio di Vincenzo Stiattesi ile evlenmiş ve 1616 yılında Floransa’da Accademia del Disegno’ya kabul edilen ilk kadın ünvanını almıştır. Yaşadığı tecavüzün intikamını ise İncil’deki bir hikayeye vücut verirken, bir yandan da ister istemez erkek iktidarını eleştirdiği ve kadını bu yolda savaş veren bir kahraman olarak sunduğu ünlü tablosu “Judith Slaying Holofernes / Judith Holofernes’i katlediyor”i yaparak almış ve böylelikle sanat tarihine de, kadın tarihine de çok tartışılacak bir imza atmıştır. Greer ve Nochlin gibi sanat tarihçi yazarların, kadınların sanat hayatında Leonardo Vinci, Rambrandt, Picasso, Dali, Matis vb. gibi konumlanamayışlarının sebebini irdelerken tarihe bakışlarının sosyolojik temelden noksan, hatta hatalı olduğu söylenebilir; onlar Postmodernizmin yarattığı yanılsama ile; kavramları, değerleri tarihsel bağlamlarından bağımsız olarak değerlendirmek hatasına düşmüşlerdir: Klasik dönem sanatçılarının tek müşterileri saray, aristokratlar ve kilisedir. Bu dönemde sanatçılar her ne kadar yüksek sanat icra etseler de, iyi bir taş ya da marangoz ustasından toplumsal statü olarak farklı konumda değillerdir. Zaten bu dönemde heykel ya da resim sanatı, mimarinin içinde bir dekorasyon (süsleme) ya da aristokratların tarihe kendilerini yazdırma çabalarının bir ürünüdür ve ancak Rönesans sonrası, modernleşme ile birlikte ayrışarak müstakil sanat alanlarına dönüşmüş ve burjuvazinin gelişip yaygınlaşması ile şansını elde etmiştir. Yani, Angelica’nın başarılı olması babasının sayesindedir. Feminist Sanat tarihi literatüründe Marry Cassatt, Berthe ve Edma Morisot kardeşler gibi bir çok kadın sanatçının oldukça zengin ailelerden geldikleri ve babalarının ya da kocaların desteğinin onların plastik sanatlar alanındaki başarılarının temel anahtarı olduğu sık sık anlatılmaktadır. Diğer ilginç bir örnek ise, Artemisia Gentileschi’dir. Artemisia Gentileschi (1593- 1652/53)’in babası; Orazio Gentileschi de ressamdır. Artemisia ailenin dört çocuğundan biridir. Diğer kardeşleri içinde (ki diğerleri erkektir) onun sıradışı yeteneği babası tarafından erken yaşlarda farkedilmiş ve babasının bir çalışanı tarafından eğitilmeye başlanmıştır. İlk bağımsız eseri olan “Susanna and The Elders” (1610)’i 17 yaşındayken yapmıştır. Daha sonra babası onu perspektif çalışması yapması için arkadaşı ressam Agostino Tassi ile tanıştırmıştır. Ancak, bu baba destekli olumlu atmosfer Artemisia’nın, Tassi tarafından tecavüze uğraması ile talihsizliğe dönmüştür. Sanatta pek çok erkek tarafından destek ve teşvik görmesine rağmen, Tassi bu davranışı ile bu alanın da kadınlar için tehlikeli olduğuna ilişkin bir görüntü vermiştir. Artemisia daha sonra yine bir ressam olan ve kendisini destekleyen Floransalı Pietro Antonio di Vincenzo Stiattesi ile evlenmiş ve 1616 yılında Floransa’da Accademia del Disegno’ya kabul edilen ilk kadın ünvanını almıştır. Yaşadığı tecavüzün intikamını ise İncil’deki bir hikayeye vücut verirken, bir yandan da ister istemez erkek iktidarını eleştirdiği ve kadını bu yolda savaş veren bir kahraman olarak sunduğu ünlü tablosu “Judith Slaying Holofernes /Judith Holofernes’i katlediyor”i yaparak almış ve böylelikle sanat tarihine de, kadın tarihine de çok tartışılacak bir imza atmıştır. Greer ve Nochlin gibi sanat tarihçi yazarların, kadınların sanat hayatında Leonardo Vinci, Rambrandt, Picasso, Dali, Matis vb. gibi konumlanamayışlarının sebebini irdelerken tarihe bakışlarının sosyolojik temelden noksan, hatta hatalı olduğu söylenebilir; onlar Postmodernizmin yarattığı yanılsama ile; kavramları, değerleri tarihsel bağlamlarından bağımsız olarak değerlendirmek hatasına düşmüşlerdir: Klasik dönem sanatçılarının tek müşterileri saray, aristokratlar ve kilisedir. Bu dönemde sanatçılar her ne kadar yüksek sanat icra etseler de, iyi bir taş ya da marangoz ustasından toplumsal statü olarak farklı konumda değillerdir. Zaten bu dönemde heykel ya da resim sanatı, mimarinin içinde bir dekorasyon (süsleme) ya da aristokratların tarihe kendilerini yazdırma çabalarının bir ürünüdür ve ancak Rönesans sonrası, modernleşme ile birlikte ayrışarak müstakil sanat alanlarına dönüşmüş ve burjuvazinin gelişip yaygınlaşması ile de Judith Slaying Holofernes 428 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY de sanat ve sanatçının toplumsal statüsü artmıştır. Bunun en açık göstergesi yaptıkları evliliklerdir. Bu dönemde hiç soyluluk ünvanı ya da soylu bir ailenin kızını almış bir sanatçıya rastlamak mümkün değildir. Ya da ressam olup da geriye saraylar veya geniş topraklar bırakan da yoktur. Bırakın klasik dönemi, gelişen burjuvazi ile birlikte statü ve maddi olarak daha iyi koşullara sahip modern dönem sanatçıları arasında bile zengin, soylu kaç tane sanatçı sayabiliriz? Pek çok sanatçı ciddi olarak -en azından belli dönemde- maddi sıkıntılar içinde yaşamış, uzun süreli ilişkiler kuramamış, çoğu kendi sosyal konumlarının altındaki kadınlarla yaşamlarını birleştirmişlerdir. Büyük olasılıkla yüzlerce sanatçı da, yeteri kadar ünlenemediklerinden isimlerini günümüze taşıyamamışlardır. Günümüzdeki sanatçıya ilişkin toplumsal değer algısı son 60-80 yıllık bir geçmişte yaratılmıştır ve halen de çok az kişiye nasip olmaktadır. Sanatçı olmak belirsiz bir geleceğe, meşakkatli bir süreçten geçmeye, şansın yaver gitmesine ve genelde “sefil” bir yaşama direnebilmeye bağlıdır. (Günümüzde de pek farklı değildir.) Sanat eseri üretim süreci ve koşulları kolay değildir; getirisi de şüphelidir. Bu yüzden tarihin hiç bir döneminde ortalama bir aile, çoçuklarını sanatçı olmaları için teşvik etmemişlerdir. Nitekim erkek sanatçıların biyografileri bu koşullar hakkında bize fikir vermektedir: Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)’in, babası kuyumcuydu ve bir tüccarın kızıyla evliydi. Pieter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) bir Hollandalı avukatın oğluydu. Başta Montova Dükü olmak üzere pek çok aristokratın himayesinde çalıştı. Antwerp’in yüksek dereceli memuru ve bir hukukçunun güzelliği ile bilinen kızıyla ilk evliliğini yaptı. İlk olarak bir düzineyi aşkın asistanıyla birlikte 3000 civarında seri resim üretimi yaptı. Bunların ancak 600’ünde katkısı olduğu tahmin edilmektedir. Eşinin ölümünü takiben 53 yaşında, 16 yaşında bir tüccarın kızıyla ikinci evliliğini yaptı ve yaşamının son yıllarını satın aldığı şatoda geçirdi. Rembrant van Rijn (1605-1669), dönemin pek çok sanatçısına aykırı bir hayat çizgisi takip etti. Varlıklı bir değirmencinin oğlu olarak dünyaya gelen Rembrandt, çok küçük yaştan itibaren resme ilgi duydu. Hollanda’nın en parlak dönemi idi ve yeni zengin pek çok burjuva bir moda olarak Rembrandt’ın kapısında kuyruk oluyorlardı. Çok erken sayılabilecek yaşta gösterişli bir yaşama kavuşmuştu. Zengin bir kızla evlendi. Ancak karısının ölümünü müteakip şansı dönmeye başladı. Modası geçmiş, gün geçtikçe zenginler 429Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 kapısını çalmaz olmuştu. Evinde çalışan, modellik yapan kadınlarla hayatını sürdürdü ve geride resimlerinden başka bir şey bırakmadan öldü. Jean- Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875) iyi halli bir tüccar ailenin çocuğuydu. Ticaret üzerine eğitim almasına ve ailenin bu yönde yönlendirmesine karşın ressamlığı seçti. Camilla Pissarro (1830-1903), tüccar bir babanın oğluydu ve babasından kaçarak resme başladı. Bir köylü genç kızla evlendi. Edgar Degas (1834-1917), varlıklı sayılabilecek bankacı bir ailenin çocuğu idi. Ailenin hukukçu olması için yönlendirmelerine karşın resmi seçti. Hiç evlenmedi. Alfred Sisley (1839-1899), bir İngiliz tüccar ailenin çocuğu idi. Ailenin tüccar olması isteklerine rağmen resmi seçti ve buna rağmen uzun yıllar ancak aile desteği ile yaşadı. Claude Monet (1840-1926)’de bir tüccarın oğluydu. Uzun dönem ressam arkadaşlarının ve ailesinin maddi desteği ile ayakta durdu. İlk eşi model Camille Doncieux idi. İkinci eşi, bir süre metres hayatı yaşadığı dul Alice Hoschede idi. Eugene Henri Pal Gauguin (1848-1903), bir gazetecinin oğluydu. Önce gemilerde çalıştı. Borsa işine girdi ve büyük başarı kazandı. Borsadan kazandığı büyük paralarla tablo komisyonculuğu yapmaya, amatör olarak resim çalışmaya başladı. Bu arada Danimarkalı bir hakimin devletin hayır işleri organizasyonlarında çalışan kızıyla evlenerek sakin bir yaşam sürerken, 35 yaşına geldiğinde ailesine bile haber vermeden Paris’e, oradan pek çok ülkeye gitti ve kendini tamamen resme verdi. 55 yaşında ölümüne kadar, Cava’lı metresiyle yoksulluk, sefalet içinde bir yaşam sürdü. Hikayesi en ilginç ressamlardan biri Vincent Van Gogh (1853- 1890)’dur. Zengin bir aile içinde bir köy papazının oğlu olarak dünyaya gelmiştir. Çocukluk ve gençlik yıllarında girip çıkmadığı iş kalmayan, ölümle yüzleşecek kadar sefalet içinde yaşam süren, ancak kardeşinin desteği ile hayatının son yıllarında resim yapmaya zaman ayırabilen Van Gogh, kısa yaşamında ancak tek bir resminin satışını görmüştür. Başlangıçta sevdiği iki kadın evlenme isteğini red etmişti. Ruh sağlığı da bozulan Van Gogh bundan sonra yaşamını genelevlerden kadınlarla paylaştı. Henri Matisse (1869-1954), yine bir tüccarın oğlu, hukuk eğitimi gördü. 21 yaşından sonra resimle ilgilendi. Ailesini zor ikna ederek Paris’e eğitim için gitti. Ressamın ilk sevgilisi ve çocuğunun annesi, modeli Caroline Joblau idi. İkinci eşi elit bir burjuva ailesinden gelen Amelie Noellie Parayre’di. Diego Rivera (1886-1957), öğretmenlik, bir dergide editörlük ve sağlık müfettişliği yapan bir baba ile doktor annenin çocukları olarak dünyaya geldi. Küçük yaşta resme başlayarak dikkat çekti. Daha ilkokulda okurken, burslu olarak sanat akademisinde dersler almaya başladı. 1920’lerden itibaren tanınmaya başlayan Rivera, 1930’lara geldiğinde dünyaca tanınır olmuştu. ABD’den, 430 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY başta Henry Ford ve Rockefeller olmak üzere siparişler almaya başladı. Bu arada henüz öğrenci olan Frida Kahlo ile tanıştı ve büyük bir aşkla 1929’da evlendi. Frida üçüncü eşiydi. Frida’nın sanat alanında yükselmesi için destek oldu. Çirkin denilebilecek fizik özelliklere sahip Rivera, dönemin en güzel kadınları ile Frida’yı defalarca aldattı. Frida da benzer şekilde karşılık verdi. Sanat tarihini ya da yukarıda isimlerini sıraladığımız pek çok sanatçının yaşamlarını irdelediğimizde şu ortak özellikleri görürüz: 1) Sanatçı olma talebi büyük çoğunlukla başta soylu ve zengin olmayan zanaatkar, tüccar, orta halli, sonra da giderek zenginleşmiş burjuva ailelerden gelmektedir. 2) Avrupa’da üç sanat merkezi oluşmuştu: Fransa (Paris), İtalya ve Hollanda. Buralardaki sanat okullarına devam etmek ve daha sonra belli başlı atölyelerde uzunca sayılabilecek bir süre çıraklık yapmak gerekmekteydi. Tanınma ya da şöhret kazanma, şansı varsa genellikle ileri yaşlarda mümkün olabilmekteydi. Pek çoğu sanat tarihindeki yerlerini bilmeden öldüler. 3) Klasik ve Rönesans dönemi sanatının mimari ile olan birlikteliği nedeniyle sanatsal faaliyetler şantiyelerde, geniş mekanlarda, bireyselden çok bir atölye çalışması olarak icra ediliyordu. Eserler, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci gibi sanatçıların imzasını taşısa da, beraberlerinde adları bile bilinmeyen pek çok sanatçı çalışırdı. Bu dönem sanatçılarının bu çalışma koşulları nedeniyle bir evlilik yapmaları da çok zordu. 4) Sanatçı olmak üzere yola çıkmak tam bir maceraydı ve bu nedenle erkekler, aileleri tarafından teşvik edilmekten ziyade büyük bir dirençle karşılaşıyorlardı. 5) İstisnai olarak varlık elde edilen dönemler dışında çoğunlukla, kendi aile statülerinin altında statüden gelen kadınlarla evlilikler yapıyorlardı. Bu bulgular, erkeklerin kadınları sanat alanına sokmayarak, baskıladığına ilişkin hükmü geçersiz kılmaktadır. Ailelerin kendilerinin, varlıklı olsalar bile, erkek çocuklarını sanatçı olmaktan alıkoymaya çalışmaları ve ancak daha alt statü gruplarından kadınlarla evlilik yapabilmeleri, sanatçı olmanın toplumda tercih edilen bir statü olmadığını göstermektedir. Erkeğin aileye bakma yükümlülüğünden ve sanatın bu yükümlülüğü yerine getirmeye olanak verecek bir gelir düzeyini ve yaşam koşullarını sağlayamayacak olduğuna ilişkin inanç nedeniyle; o dönemden günümüze uzanan “sanatçıya, çalgıcıya kız verilmez” toplumsal yargısı anlamlılık kazanır. Kadın sanatçılar ise; erkeklerin aksine genellikle toplumda belli bir statüye ve varlığa sahip ya da kendi de sanatçı olan babaları ya da eşleri tarafından 431Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 desteklenmişlerdir. Kadınlar için evi geçindirme gibi bir yükümlülüğün olmaması ile teşvik etme arasında anlamlı bir korelasyon vardır. Örneğin, Bologna, Rönesans döneminde pek çok kadın sanatçı çıkarmıştır. Varlıklı bir ailenin kızı olan ve erkeklerle birlikte mermer rölyef çalışan Properzia de’Rossi (1490-1530) buna iyi bir örnekdir. Bu açıdan, sanat tarihinde engellemenin aksine erkeklerden gördükleri destek sayesinde, kariyerlerinde hızlı yükselen ve erkeklerin geçmek zorunda oldukları meşakkatli süreçleri yaşamayan kadın sanatçı örneği de çoktur. Daha alt sosyal grupların ise ister kadın, ister erkek olsun, böyle bir maceraya atılmak için hiç şanslarının olmadığı açıktır. Özellikle alt sınıf üyesi kadınlar için, çömlekçilik, sepetçilik, küçük eşya süslemeciliği, dokumacılık çok daha güvenilir ve garantili işlerdir. Kadının sanat bağlamında toplumsal görünürlüğünü irdelediğimizde, bir diğer tarihsel olguya daha dikkat çekmek gerekir: Ortalama yaşam süresi. Kadınların doğum ve hastalık kaynaklı ölüm olguları gözardı edildiğinde, erkeklerin ortalama ömürleri yüzyıllardır hemen hemen aynı seviyededir. Aynı dönemde kadınların ortalama ömürleri ise dramatik bir şekilde artış göstermiştir. Örneğin 1300-1570 yıllarındaki erkek İtalyan ressamların ortalama ömürleri 62.7±17.4 yıldı (Griffin, 1995: 9). Buna karşın bir çalışmaya göre İngiltere’de 1480-1679 yıllarında 15 yaşındaki bir kadının yaşam beklentisi 48.2 yıldır. Kadınlar için ortalama ömür beklentisi ancak 1920’li yıllarda erkeklerle eşitlenmiştir. Bu süre 1989 yılında ise erkekleri geçerek 79.2 yıla çıkmıştır (Hollingsworth, 1969: 73-102). Yukarıda verdiğimiz sanatçı ve ailelerinden oluşan örneklem grubu da bu sonucu doğrulamaktadır. Örneğin, erkek sanatçıların pek çoğu, kendilerinden genç yaşta olmalarına ragmen, ilk eşlerini kaybettikten sonra çoğunlukla ikinci evliliklerini yapmışlardır. Bunun temel nedeni, kadınların yüksek orandaki doğurganlık oranlarıdır. Avrupa’da 1600’lü yılların sonunda ortalama doğum sayısı toplumun ileri gelen yönetici gruplarına ait kadınlar için (6)’nın, çalışan gruplara ait kadınlar için ise (7)’nin üzerindedir ve bir yüz yıl sonra bu değerler ancak birer adet düşmüştür. Bu verilere, sayılarının tesbiti mümkün olmayan düşükler ya da ölü doğumlar dahil değildir. Dolayısıyla, çok yakın tarihe kadar, tek başına sadece kadın olmak, anne olma fonksiyonu nedeniyle oldukça tehlikeli bir işti. Sanatsal alanda eğer şans yardım ederse meşhur olmak ve tanınmak çoğu zaman ileri yaşlarda mümkün oluyordu ki, kadınların önemli bir kısmının bu yaşları göremeden öldükleri görülmektedir. 432 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY Ancak sanat tarihinde istisnai örnekler de vardır. Örneğin, Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614), Bologna/İtalya’da School of Bologna’da ressam olan bir babanın kızıdır. Resim eğitimini öncelikle babasından almıştır. Daha önce kadınların alınmadığı bu okula erkeklerle birlikte devam etmiş ve yine babasının desteği altında kısa sürede kariyerinde yükselerek para kazanmaya başlamıştır. Profesyonel olarak resim yapan ilk kadın sanatçı olmanın yanı sıra ilk nü çalışan kadındır. Fontana kariyerinde başarıya ulaşmış ve pek çok kez anne olmayı başarmış nadir örneklerden biridir. 11 çocuk sahibiydi ve öldüğünde 62 yaşındaydı. Tüm bunlardan anlaşılacağı üzere; evlenmek, çocuk sahibi olmak ve onların yaşamını garanti altına almak istiyorsa; hele önünde yolunu açıp destek olacak biri de yok ise, ne sanatçı olmak; ne de bir sanatçının eşi olmak, bir kadın için tercih edilebilir görülmemektedir. Nitekim, sanat tarihinde bu korelatif ilişkiyi anlatan ünlü bir aile vardır: Sofonisba’nın ailesi. Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625), Rönesans dönemi kadın sanatçılarına ilginç bir örnektir. Cremona/İtalya’da soylu bir anne babanın, 6 kız ve bir oğlan yedi çocuğunun en büyüğüdür. Babaları tüm çocuklarının sanatçı olmaları için çaba göstermiş ve özel dersler aldırmıştır. Sofonisba kariyerinde hızla yükselerek 23-24 yaşında resimlerini Michelangelo’ya gösterme şansını elde etmiştir. Onun da desteği ile kısa zamanda önce yerel soylular daha sonra İspanya Kralının sarayına ve himayesine girmeyi başarmıştır. İki kez evlenmiş ve eşlerinden resim konusunda destek görmüştür. İstisnai bir durum olarak 93 yaşında ölmüştür. Ancak, hiç çocuğu olmamıştır. Diğer üç kız kardeşi de aynı ortamda resimle iç içe büyümelerine rağmen, ikisi evlilik ve çocukları nedeniyle resim çalışmalarını bırakmışlardır. En az kendisi kadar yetenekli bulunan küçük kardeşi Lucia ise çok genç yaşta hayatını kaybetmiştir. 4. Feminizm, ‘Female’e Karşı: Kendini Arayan Feminizm Kadını tamamen edilgen ve bunun sorumlusu olarak da tamamen erkekler tarafından kurulmuş bilinçli hegemonik yapıyı gören ve bunu delillendirmek için tarihi yeniden kurgulayan ve içinde bulunduğumuz dönemde diğer tüm feminist yaklaşımları da dışlayarak, temsili tamamen üstlenen postmodern feminizmin yeniden kendini sorgulaması gerekmektedir. Yıllardır belli bir bakışı yansıtan ve neredeyse söylemlerinin ilahi bir yasaya dönüştüğü, 433Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 alternatif düşüncenin aforoz edildiği bir dönemi yaşamaktayız. Halbuki her zamankinden çok feminist çözümlere ihtiyacımız var. Günümüzde yapılan pek çok araştırmanın ortaya koyduğu üzere objektif olarak bir kadın tanımını yapamadığımız sürece, bir “erillik/masculinity” krizinin de doğmakta olduğunu görüyoruz (Carrigan, T. ve diğerleri,1985; Clare, 2000; Pleck, 1981; Beynon, 2002). Son yıllarda gelişimsel psikolojinin sunduğu veriler, günümüz ve onun tarihsel gelişiminin gizillerinin aydınlanmasına ışık tutmaktadır. Örneğin, psikolog Melissa Hines ve Gerianne M. Alexander’ın (2008) çocukların cinsiyete dayalı oyuncak tercihlerinin sosyalleşme süreçleri içinde toplum tarafından mı; yoksa doğuştan gelen güdüleri ile mi belirlendiğine ilişkin deneysel çalışmaları oldukça ilginçtir. Araştırmacılar erkek ve kız çocuklarına yönelik oyuncakları maymunlara verdiklerinde maymunların insanlardakine benzer şekilde tercihler yaptıklarını saptamışlardır. Bunun anlamı şudur; pek çok davranış modellerimiz sosyalleşme sürecinde kazanılmasına karşın, bazı temel dürtülerin de biyolojik olarak aktarıldığını kabul etmemiz gerekir. Bunlardan biri de kadının anneliğine ilişkin davranışlarıdır. Üreme dürtüsü erkek ve kadında ortak olmasına rağmen, annenin bebeği ile olan özel bağı, erkeğe göre farklılık gösterir. Bir başka ilgi çekici bulgu ise kadın ve erkeğin eş seçimine ilişkindir. Romantizm, sosyal psikologlar tarafından cinsel partner, yani eş seçiminde “aşk”ın en önemli kriter olma hali olarak tanımlanır (Weaver ve Ganong, 2004). Araştırmacılar geliştirdikleri “Romantik İnanç Skalası” (Sprecher ve Metts, 1989) ile kadın ve erkeklerin hangisinin daha romantik olduğunu incelemişlerdir. Yapılan araştırmalar pek çoğumuzun inancının aksine, erkeklerin kadınlara göre çok daha romantik (Northrup ve diğerleri, 2013) ve kadınların da eş seçimlerinde çok daha pragmatik (Hendrick ve diğerleri, 1998) olduğunu ortaya koymuştur. Evrimsel psikoloji çalışanlar bunu, biyolojik gerekliliğin kadının erkeğe göre çok daha seçici olmasını zorunlu kılması nedeniyle, kadın tarafından geliştirilen bir cinsel strateji olarak açıklamaktadırlar (Buss ve Schmitt; 1993). Bu stratejinin diğer unsurlarını yine evrimsel psikolojinin bulguları ortaya koymaktadır. Günümüzde kadınlar, erkeklere oranla iki kat daha fazla, seçecekleri erkeklerde finansal bir güç aramaktadırlar (Buss; 1989). Kenrick ve arkadaşları (1990) araştırma sonuçlarında bu farklılığı çok daha açık 434 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY biçimde tartışmaktadırlar (Şekil-1). Erkek cinsel ilişki için, hiçbir finansal güç aramazken, kadın romantik bir ilişki için bile, erkekten finansal güç talep etmektedir. Kadın için finansal standartlar evlilik durumunda ise erkeğe göre -iki katı bir oranla- en yüksek seviyeye çıkmaktadır. Yine kadınlar romantik bir ilişkide, büyük oranda yüksek statüyü, cinsel çekiciliğe tercih etmekteler (Townsend ve Levy;1990a). Yüksek statü sahibi kadınlar bile, eş seçimlerinde, kendinden yüksek statülü erkekleri tercih etmektedirler. Sadella ve arkadaşları (1987) araştırmalarında kadın ve erkeklerin kendi hemcins sosyal grupları içinde, baskın olma durumlarının, karşı cinsin tercihlerini ne yönde etkilediğini incelemişlerdir. Bulgulara göre kadınlar büyük oranda baskın erkekleri tercih ederlerken, erkeklerin tercihlerinde belirgin bir değişiklik olmadığı görülmüştür. Bu kadının erkeğin statüsü üzerinden statü arayışı olarak açıklanmaktadır (Sadella ve diğerleri; 1987). Tüm bu bulgular erkeğin pek seçici olmadığını işaret eder. Babalıkla ilişkisi kadınla geçirdiği sadece birkaç dakikadır. Hâlbuki kadın için annelik uzun bir süreçtir. Çocuğu dokuz ay karnında taşıması gerekecek ve doğan çocuk daha uzun yıllar bakıma muhtaç olacaktır. Kadın bu nedenle, erkeğin aksine çok daha seçici olmak zorundadır. Erkek sağlıklı çocuklar vermek için sağlıklı olmalı, kendini diğer erkeklerin tecavüzlerinden koruyabilmeli, çocuğunun ve kendisinin temel ihtiyaçlarını karşılayabilmelidir. Yani her bakımdan “güçlü” olmalıdır. Kadının eş seçiminde uyguladığı bu strateji günümüzde de onbinlerce yılda oluşturduğu stratejinin devamıdır. Biyolojinin birbirlerine zorunlu kıldığı kadın ve erkeğin beklentilerinin birbirlerinden bu farklılığı, erkekleri kısa süreli, kadınları ise çocukları ile olan ilişkilerinden dolayı, çok daha uzun süreli stratejiler geliştirme zorunda bırakmıştır. Kadın bu stratejisi ile, kendisinden birkaç dakikalık zevk beklentisi olan erkeği kendine bağlayarak pek çok şeyden sorumlu kılmıştır. Bu bağlamda iddia edilenin aksine, kadın günümüz medeniyetinin temelini teşkil eden kendi stratejisi ile merkeze yerleşmiştir. Aslında mitolojideki pek çok hikayede kadının şeytani, akıl çelen olarak tasvir edilmesi, erkeğin bu gerçeği idrakinin Bir başka ilgi çekici bulgu ise kadın ve erkeğin eş seçimine ilişkindir. Romantizm, sosyal psikologlar tarafından cinsel partner, yani eş seçiminde “aşk”ın en önemli kriter olma hali olarak tanımlanır (Weaver ve Ganong, 2004). Araştırmacılar geliştirdikleri “Romantik İnanç Skalası” (Sprecher ve Metts, 1989) ile kadın ve erkeklerin hangisinin daha romantik olduğunu incelemişlerdir. Yapılan araştırmalar pek çoğumuzun inancının aksine, erkeklerin kadınlara göre çok daha romantik (Northrup ve diğerleri, 2013) ve kadınların da eş seçimlerinde çok daha pragmatik (Hendrick ve diğerleri, 1998) olduğunu ortaya koymuştur. Evrimsel psikoloji çalışanlar bunu, biyolojik gerekliliğin kadının erkeğe göre çok daha seçici olmasını zorunlu kılması nedeniyle, kadın tarafından geliştirilen bir cinsel strateji olarak açıklamaktadırlar (Buss ve Schmitt; 1993). Bu stratejinin diğer unsurlarını yine evrimsel psikolojinin bulguları ortaya koymaktadır. Günümüzde kadınlar, erkeklere oranla iki kat daha fazla, seçecekleri erkeklerde finansal bir güç aramaktadırlar (Buss; 1989). Kenrick ve arkadaşları (1990) araştırma sonuçlarında bu farklılığı çok daha açık biçimde tartışmaktadırlar (Şekil-1). Erkek cinsel ilişki için, hiçbir finansal güç aramazken, kadın romantik bir ilişki için bile, erkekten finansal güç talep etmektedir. Kadın için finansal standartlar evlilik durumunda ise erkeğe göre -iki katı bir oranla- en yüksek seviyeye çıkmaktadır. Yine kadınlar romantik bir ilişkide, büyük oranda yüksek statüyü, cinsel çekiciliğe tercih etmekteler (Townsend ve Levy;1990a). Yüksek statü sahibi kadınlar bile, eş seçimlerinde, kendinden yüksek statülü erkekleri tercih etmektedirler. Sadella ve arkadaşları (1987) araştırmalarında kadın ve erkeklerin kendi hemcins sosyal grupları içinde, baskın olma durumlarının, karşı cinsin tercihlerini ne yönde etkilediğini incelemişlerdir. Bulgulara göre kadınlar büyük oranda baskın erkekleri tercih ederlerken, erkeklerin tercihlerinde belirgin bir değişiklik olmadığı görülmüştür. Bu kadının erkeğin statüsü üzerinden statü arayışı olarak açıklanmaktadır (Sadella ve diğerleri; 1987). Tüm bu bulgular erkeğin pek seçici olmadığını işaret eder. Babalıkla ilişkisi kadınla geçirdiği sadece birkaç dakikadır. Hâlbuki kadın için annelik uzun bir süreçtir. Çocuğu dokuz ay karnında taşıması gerekecek ve doğan çocuk daha uzun yıllar bakıma muhtaç olacaktır. Kadın bu nedenle, erkeğin aksine çok daha seçici olmak zorundadır. Erkek sağlıklı çocuklar vermek için sağlıklı olmalı, kendini diğer erkeklerin tecavüzlerinden koruyabilmeli, çocuğunun ve kendisinin temel ihtiyaçlarını karşılayabilmelidir. Yani her bakımdan “güçlü” Şekil 1 435Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 ifadesi olsa gerek: Yaratılış mitinde Adem, dünyevi pek çok problemle yüzleşmesinde, bir anlık zevk için kendini kandıran Havva’yı sorumlu tutar. Radikal feminizmin önemli isimlerinden birisi olan Shulamith Firestone, feminizmin temel eserlerinden biri sayılan Cinselliğin Diyalektiği (1979) isimli çalışmasında kadınların ikincileştirilmesinin temelinin sosyal değil, biyolojik unsurlardan kaynaklandığını savunurken aslında bu görüşe yaklaşmıştı. O da kadının doğurmasını ve adet görüyor olmasını onun güçsüzlüğünün temeli olarak görür. Ayrıca, aile, din, cinsellik gibi diğer tüm sosyal, kültürel unsurların bu temel biyolojik varoluş üzerine kurulduğunu iddia eder. Bu bağlamda Firestone sözkonusu durumdan kurtuluş yolu olarak kadınların biyolojik yeniden üretim araçlarını ele geçirmeleri gerektiğini öne sürmüştür. Yani tıbbi ve teknolojik olarak kadınları bu biyolojik boyunduruktan kurtaracak olan yeniliklerin geliştirilmesi gerektiğini söylemiştir. Bu çerçevede özellikle tüp bebek gibi teknolojilerin desteklenmesi gerektiğini ve kadınların sadece bu şekilde özgürleşebileceğini söyleyerek yandaşları ile çelişmiş ve çözüm olarak insanlık tarihi boyunca birlikte yürüdüğü erkek ile olan ilişkisini sadece seks boyutuna indirgemiştir (ki artık ona da ihtiyaç yoktur). Görmediği, tüm kurgunun kadının uyum stratejilerinin bir ürünü olduğu ve sınırsız bir özgürlüğün de aslında bir mahkûmiyet olduğudur. Kadınların pek çoğunun bu aşırı liberal düşüncelere uzak durması, bu temelde bir çözümün de toplumsal bir karşılığının olmadığını göstermesi açısından önemlidir. Schopenhauer (2006) “Aşka ve Kadınlara Dair Aşkın Metafiziği” adlı eserinde erkeklerin kadınlardan ne beklediğini ve kadınların erkeklerden ne istediğini analiz ederek tarihe geçecek kadar önemli işlerde kadının adının olamamasının nedenini kadınların, zihinsel ya da bedensel olarak, büyük işler için yaratılmamış olmalarına bağlamaktaydı. Paglia Camille (1990) bu iddiayı “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson” adlı eserinde daha da ileriye taşıyarak, erkeklerin olağanüstü olduklarına ve 2013’de Time’da yayınlanan “It’s a Man’s World, and It Always Will Be” adlı makalesinde de erkeklerin olmadığı yerde kadınların da olamayacağına kadar vardırmıştı. Halbuki, bilimsel veriler hiç de böyle olmadığını göstermektedir. Kadının belli alanlarda nisbi olarak yokluğu, kadınların acizliğinden çok, kendi olmalıdır. Kadının eş seçiminde uyguladığı bu strateji günümüzde de onbinlerce yılda oluşturduğu stratejinin devamıdır. Biyolojinin birbirlerine zorunlu kıldığı kadın ve erkeğin beklentilerinin birbirlerinden bu farklılığı, erkekleri kısa süreli, kadınları ise çocukları ile olan ilişkilerinden dolayı, çok daha uzun süreli stratejiler geliştirme zorunda bırakmıştır. Kadın bu stratejisi ile, kendisinden birkaç dakikalık zevk beklentisi olan erkeği kendine bağlayarak pek çok şeyden sorumlu kılmıştır. Bu bağlamda iddia edilenin aksine, kadın günümüz medeniyetinin temelini teşkil eden kendi stratejisi ile merkeze yerleşmiştir. Aslında mitolojideki pek çok hikayede kadının şeytani, akıl çelen olarak tasvir edilmesi, erkeğin bu gerçeği idrakinin ifadesi olsa gerek: Yaratılış mitinde Adem, dünyevi pek çok problemle yüzleşmesinde, bir anlık zevk için kendini kandıran Havva’yı sorumlu tutar. Radikal feminizmin önemli isimlerinden birisi olan Shulamith Firestone, feminizmin temel eserlerinden biri sayılan Cinselliğin Diyalektiği (1979) isimli çalışmasında kadınların ikincileştirilmesinin temelinin sosyal değil, biyolojik unsurlardan kaynaklandığını savunurken aslında bu görüşe yaklaşmıştı. O da kadının doğurmasını ve adet görüyor olmasını onun güçsüzlüğünün temeli olarak görür. Ayrıca, aile, din, cinsellik gibi diğer tüm sosyal, kültürel unsurların bu temel biyolojik varoluş üzerine kurulduğunu iddia eder. Bu bağlamda Firestone sözkonusu durumdan kurtuluş yolu olarak kadınların biyolojik yeniden üretim araçlarını ele geçirmeleri gerektiğini öne sürmüştür. Yani tıbbi ve teknolojik olarak kadınları bu biyolojik boyunduruktan kurtaracak olan yeniliklerin geliştirilmesi gerektiğini söylemiştir. Bu çerçevede özellikle tüp bebek gibi teknolojilerin desteklenmesi gerektiğini ve kadınların sadece bu şekilde özgürleşebileceğini söyleyerek yandaşları ile çelişmiş ve çözüm olarak insanlık tarihi boyunca birlikte yürüdüğü erkek ile olan ilişkisini sadece seks boyutuna indirgemiştir (ki artık ona da ihtiyaç yoktur). Görmediği, tüm kurgunun kadının uyum stratejilerinin bir ürünü olduğu ve sınırsız bir özgürlüğün de aslında bir mahkûmiyet olduğudur. Kadınların pek çoğunun bu aşırı liberal düşüncelere uzak durması, bu temelde bir çözümün de toplumsal bir karşılığının olmadığını göstermesi açısından önemlidir. Schopenhauer (2006) “Aşka ve Kadınlara Dair Aşkın Metafiziği” adlı eserinde erkeklerin kadınlardan ne beklediğini ve kadınların erkeklerden ne istediğini analiz ederek tarihe geçecek kadar önemli işlerde kadının adının olamamasının nedenini kadınların, zihinsel ya da bedensel olarak, büyük işler için yaratılmamış olmalarına bağlamaktaydı. Paglia Camille (1990) bu iddiayı “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson” Error! Style not defined.Adem ve Havva Adem ve Havva 436 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY stratejilerinin bir sonucudur: Uğraşların cinsiyet temelinde tanımlanan rollerle birlikte kesin olarak ayrışması, yeteneklerin hatta düşünce sistematiğindeki değerlerin bile farklılaşmasına neden olmuştur. Harvard Universitesi’nden psikolog Mahzarin Banaji (2004: 284) de benliği, kültürden ayıran net bir çizginin olmadığına ve içinde geliştiğimiz kültürün zihinlerimizdeki “derin uzantısına” dikkat çeker. Bu yüzden, kadın ile erkek beyinleri arasındaki -düşüncelerimizin, duygularımızın, yeteneklerimizin, motivasyonlarımızın ve davranışlarımızın kaynağı olan zihinlerimiz- toplumsal cinsiyet farklılıklarını, psikolojik olarak sosyo-kültürel bağlamın zihne ne kadar nüfuz ettiğini kavrayamadan anlayamayacağımızı ileri sürer. Çevre toplumsal cinsiyeti önemli kılınca, zihinde uyarıcı etkisi oluşur ve kendimizi toplumsal cinsiyetimiz üzerinden düşünmeye başlarız; kalıp yargılarla toplumsal beklentiler zihinde daha önemli hale gelir. Bu durum, benlik algısını ve ilgi alanlarını değiştirebilir, yetkinlikleri azaltabilir ya da çoğaltabilir, istençsiz ayrımcılığı tetikleyebilir. Diğer bir deyişle, toplumsal bağlam kendinizin kim olduğunu, nasıl düşündüğünüzü ve ne yaptığınızı etkiler. Bu düşüncelerimiz, tutumlarımız ve davranışlarımız toplumsal bağlamın bir parçası olur. Mahremdir ve Banajiye göre bunun çözülmesi zordur. Bu nedenle, toplumsal cinsiyet hakkında, farklı bir düşünme biçimi gereklidir. Böyle değerlendirdiğimizde kadının, toplumsal olarak erkeğe ait bir statüyü işgal ettiğinde, erillikle ilişkilendirilen davranış kalıplarını kullanması anlaşılabilir hale gelir. 2007 yılında yapılan bir araştırmada, katılımcıların %45’i ofis ortamında yöneticilerinin sözlü şiddet, işini sabote etme, otoritesini yanlış kullanma ve ilişkiyi bozacak davranışlarına maruz kaldıklarını ifade ediyorlardı. İlginç olan bu davranışı gösteren yöneticilerin %40’ı kadındı.10 Benaji’nin ifade ettiği gibi kadın, erilliğe atfedilen bir statüdeki rolünü oynarken, yine bu statü ile ilişkilendirilen eril davranış kalıplarını kullanmaktadır. Günümüzde pek çok kadın, bu yolla kendi zihinsel kabuğunu kırarak, erilliğe atfedilen alanlara girmekte ve başarı kazanmaktadır. Ancak, burada bir sorun vardır; erilliğin rolleri alınırken, davranış kalıpları da alınmaktadır. 2010 yılında yapılan diğer bir araştırmaya gore, yine iş ortamında kadından gelen tacizkar davranışların %80’i yine kadınlara yöneliktir. Gallup, 60 10 http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323884304578328271526080496 437Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 yıldır kadın ve erkeklerin iş yaşamlarında, kadın mı; yoksa erkek bir patronu mu tercih ettiklerini sorgulamaktadır ve araştırmalarına göre, ilginç bir şekilde %39 ile kadınlar, erkeklerden daha fazla bir oranla (%26) erkek yönetici ile çalışmayı tercih edeceklerini; yine kadınların %95’i, profesyonel yaşamlarında en az bir kez, diğer bir kadın tarafından önlerinin kesildiğini ve kadın yönetici ile çalışırken de, erkek yöneticilerle çalışmaya göre daha fazla stres yaşadıklarını beyan etmişlerdir.11 Bu verilere bakarak, kadınların profesyonel yaşama katılmalarının ve yükselmelerinin önündeki engelin yine kadınlar olduğu iddiası ortaya atılamaz mı? Peki, kadının, kadına olan bu ‘düşmanlığının’ nedeni nedir? Bunun aslında kadının kendi geliştirdiği stratejisinin doğal bir sonucu olduğu düşünülebilir; erkekleri yarıştırırken, diğer kadınları kendine rakip kılmıştır. Yine kadın üstlendiği rol nedeniyle çok daha fazla insani ilişkilere odaklanmaktadır. Günümüzde de pek çok araştırmanın ortaya koyduğu üzere; onun için güvenlik esasdır ve risk almak, maceralara girmek onun işi değildir. Ancak, yeri geldiğinde risk almak, maceralara girmek, sert mücadelelere girişmek gerekiyorsa da bu, kadın tarafından cesaret kavramı etrafında “erkeklik” değeri ile birlikte, erkeğin sorumluluğu olarak tanımlanmıştır. Tüm savaşlarda, erkekleri cepheye göndermek için bir anda ortaya çıkan ve onlara görevlerini hatırlatan kimi anne, kimi sevgili, kimi tanrıça görünümlü kadın figürleri rastlantı değildir. Bu anlamda cennete; kadın melekleri (hurileri) koymadığınızda, oraya gitmek için bile çaba göstermeyeceğini bildiğiniz erkeklerin, kadınların olmadığı bir dünyada günümüz medeniyetini inşa edebileceklerini ileri sürmek mümkün değildir. yaşamlarında, kadın mı; yoksa erkek bir patronu mu tercih ettiklerini sorgulamaktadır ve araştırmalarına göre, ilginç bir şekilde %39 ile kadınlar, erkeklerden daha fazla bir oranla (%26) erkek yönetici ile çalışmayı tercih edeceklerini; yine kadınların %95’i, profesyonel yaşamlarında en az bir kez, diğer bir kadın tarafından önlerinin kesildiğini ve kadın yönetici ile çalışırken de, erkek yöneticilerle çalışmaya göre daha fazla stres yaşadıklarını beyan etmişlerdir. 12 Bu verilere bakarak, kadınların profesyonel yaşama katılmalarının ve yükselmelerinin önündeki engelin yine kadınlar olduğu iddiası ortaya atılamaz mı? Peki, kadının, kadına olan bu ‘düşmanlığının’ nedeni nedir? Bunun aslında kadının kendi geliştirdiği stratejisinin doğal bir sonucu olduğu düşünülebilir; erkekleri yarıştırırken, diğer kadınları kendine rakip kılmıştır. Yine kadın üstlendiği rol nedeniyle çok daha fazla insani ilişkilere odaklanmaktadır. Günümüzde de pek çok araştırmanın ortaya koyduğu üzere; onun için güvenlik esasdır ve risk almak, maceralara girmek onun işi değildir. Ancak, yeri geldiğinde risk almak, maceralara girmek, sert mücadelelere girişmek gerekiyorsa da bu, kadın tarafından cesaret kavramı etrafında “erkeklik” değeri ile birlikte, erkeğin sorumluluğu olarak tanımlanmıştır. Tüm savaşlarda, erkekleri cepheye göndermek için bir anda ortaya çıkan ve onlara görevlerini hatırlatan kimi anne, kimi sevgili, kimi tanrıça görünümlü kadın figürleri rastlantı değildir. Bu anlamda cennete; kadın melekleri (hurileri) koymadığınızda, oraya gitmek için bile çaba göstermeyeceğini bildiğiniz erkeklerin, kadınların olmadığı bir dünyada günümüz medeniyetini inşa edebileceklerini ileri sürmek mümkün değildir. Gustave Courbet, ünlü “Dünyanın Kökeni” tablosunda bu gerçeği en çarpıcı biçimde ortaya koymuştur. Günümüzün dünyası ve medeniyeti kadının bu stratejisi üzerine şekillenmiştir. Kate Millett (1987)’in Cinsel Politika isimli kitabında ataerkilliği yeniden üreten kurumlar olarak tanımladığı aile, aşk ve cinsellik kadının bu stratejisi gereği kadın tarafından üretilen kurumlar olarak işaretlenir. Ataerkil sistemi ailede yeniden üreten, nesilleri yetiştiren yine kadındır. En önemlisi kendi stratejisi gereği erkeğe bu gücü atfeden de kadın değil midir? 12 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-16/women-dislike-having-female-bosses-more-than-men- do Gustave Courbet, ünlü “Dünyanın Kökeni” tablosunda bu gerçeği en çarpıcı biçimde ortaya koymuştur. Günümüzün dünyası ve medeniyeti kadının bu stratejisi üzerine şekillenmiştir. Kate Millett (1987)’in Cinsel Politika isimli kitabında ataerkilliği yeniden üreten kurumlar olarak tanımladığı aile, aşk 11 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-16/women-dislike-having-female-bosses- more-than-men-do 438 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY ve cinsellik kadının bu stratejisi gereği kadın tarafından üretilen kurumlar olarak işaretlenir. Ataerkil sistemi ailede yeniden üreten, nesilleri yetiştiren yine kadındır. En önemlisi kendi stratejisi gereği erkeğe bu gücü atfeden de kadın değil midir? Zaman içinde her güç yapılanması gibi kimi zaman ve kimi yerde hegomonik bir yapıya bürünse de, bu strateji uzunca bir süre toplumsal ilişkilerin temel belirleyicisi olmuştur. Ancak, zaman içindeki gelişmeler karşısında gelinen noktada yine kadın, feminizm kavramı içinde geleceğin yeni stratejisinin arayışı içindedir. Tarihsel süreç içinde, kadınları buna yönlendiren modernitenin sunduğu dört önemli gelişmedir: Doğum kontrol teknolojilerinin gelişimi ile kadının bedeni üzerindeki kontrolünün mümkün olması ve doğum olayının kadın için tehlikeli bir olay olmaktan çıkması; teknolojik gelişmelerin beden gücünün istihdamdaki yerini alabildiğine düşürmesi, hizmet sektörünün payının yükselmesi ve erkeğe gücü sağlayan fonksiyonlarının önemini yitirmesi; teknolojik gelişimlere paralel demografik yapı değişimlerinin sonucu olarak, kadın üzerindeki doğurganlığa ilişkin toplumsal baskının azalması. Ataerkil bir sistem olarak tanımlanan kapitalizmin, postmodern feminizm ile yıkılacağı iddiasının da yaşanan gerçeklikte bir karşılığı bulunmamaktadır. Ancak feminizmin günümüzde bu sistemin karşısında alacağı tutum ile sınanacağı da muhakkaktır. Döneminin en zengin armatörlerinden ve en hızlı uluslararası kazanova olarak bilinen Aristotle Onassis’e atfedilen sözler bir gerçeği anlatır: “Eğer kadın olmasaydı, dünyadaki tüm paraların bir anlamı kalmazdı.” O para kapitalist sistemde erkeğin elindedir. Ancak günümüzde, paranın tamamen özgürlüğünü ilan ettiği ultra kapitalist sistemde, “kadın eski stratejisinin kriterlerine dokunmadan, bu yeni sisteme mi entegre olacaktır, yoksa zoru tercih ederek kendine daha eşitlikçi bir dünyayı mı inşa edecektir?” sorusu cevabını aramaktadır. 439Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 Sonuç Abyss Creation LLC, ABD, California, San Marcos’da bir firma; RealDoll adı altında gerçeğe her iki cinsiyete çok yakın, gerçek boyutlu, cinsel organlar dahil bire bir kopya edilmiş yüksek kaliteli silikondan “seks robotu” oyuncaklar i m a l e t m e k t e d i r l e r. Erkeklerin oyuna olan düşkünlüğünden tahmin edilebileceği üzere, bu seks oyuncaklarından çok büyük oranda kadın olanları satılmaktadır. Fiyatları 5-6 bin dolardan başlamaktadır. Firma son olarak ‘artificial intelligence’ teknolojisi ile bu oyuncaklara ruh kazandırmaya çalışmaktadır. Şimdiden belli bir mesafe almış görünmektedirler; bu oyuncak mankenlerin konuşma ve belli mimikleri de kulanabilme düzeyinde bir teknolojileri bulunmaktadır. Üzerinde çalışılan bu üst modellerin fiyatlarının 60 bin dolara çıkması beklenmektedir. Firma şimdiye kadar beşbin’in üzerinde satış gerçekleştirdiğini beyan etmiştir. Firma ömür boyu garanti vermektedir. Kısaca, artık erkekler için de çok daha gerçekçi ‘virtual sex’ olanakları var olduğu görülmektedir; üstelik baş ağrıtmayan, hiç bir sorumluluk talep etmeyen ve her daim emre amade..... Yani, bir anlamda erkekler de gittikçe ‘özgürleşiyorlar’. Feminizm ile salt cinselliğe indirgenen kadın ve erkek ilişkisinin ‘sexbot’ların gelişip yaygınlaşmasıyla gelecek yaşamımızda günümüzden oldukça farklı olacağı anlaşılmaktadır. Birbirlerimizden koptukça, bizler de birer ‘realdoll’a dönüşüyoruz: Parayla alıp satılan ve kendimizin bile farkında olmadan pek çok duygularımızı yitirdiğimiz, tekdüze bir yaşam … Bir kadın ve erkeğin birlikteliği, anne ve çocuğun birlikteliğinden sonra gelen en güzel bağdır. Sevgi bu ortamda yeşerir ve öğrenilir. Empati yetisi başka nerede daha iyi kazanılabilir? Düşünce zenginliği daha fazla başka hangi ortamda sağlanabilir? Dünyada kadın ve erkeğin birlikteliğinden daha fazla dayanışmayı sağlayan bir birlik yoktur. Ve çocuklar için bu birlikten daha ideal bir yetişme ortamı bulunabilir mi? RealDolls- SexBots 440 Plastik Sanatlarda Toplumsal Cinsiyet: Feminizme Karşı Feminizm / M. Demet ULUSOY Feminizm kendini geçmişe hapsederek, geleceği atlamaktadır. Günümüz medeniyeti kadının stratejisi ve erkekle olan dayanışmasının ürünüdür. Korkarız bu birlikteliğin dağılması nedeniyle, gelecek medeniyetimiz insana ait olmayacak. Çalışmamızda feminizm çalışmalarına farklı bir pencereden katkı sunulmak istenmiştir. Çerçeve alabildiğine geniş tutularak, konunun; dağılma riskine rağmen, çok boyutluluğunun ve bütünlüğünün vurgulanması amaçlanmıştır. Öncelikle de feminizmin içindeki çelişkiler, çıkmazlar vurgulanmaya çalışılmıştır. Günümüzde yaşanan ve kadını ikinci plana öteleyen hegomonik yapının erkek kaynaklı ataerkil sistem olduğu ve bu nedenle problemin bir “erkek” problemi olduğuna ilişkin neredeyse ideolojik hale gelmiş söylemlerin yanlışlığına dikkat çekilmek istenilmiştir. Bu bakışın, tek başına bir erkek problemi olmasa da bir “erkeklik” krizi yarattığı düşünülebilir. Problemin kaynağı öncelikle kadınlardır. Bu nedenle sağlıklı bir geleceğin kurgulanması açısından feminist bakış açısı büyük önem taşımaktadır. Buna erkeklerin de ihtiyacı vardır. Feministler, modernite ile birlikte fonksiyonları zaten zayıflamış kurumları ve bu nedenle erozyona uğramış değerleri terk ederken, stratejilerinde değişikliğe gitmezlerse korkarız farklı ve humanizmadan çok daha uzak bir hegomonyanın inşasına sebep olacaklar. Bu nedenle kadınlar, feministlerin bile istemeden kendilerine biçtiği değeri red ederek, güçlerinin ve yeteneklerinin farkına varmalı ve sorumluluklarını üstlenmelidirler. 441Sosyoloji Konferansları, No: 55 (2017-1) / 413-444 KAYNAKÇA Bailey, J.M., Gaulin, S., Agyei, Y., & Gladue, B.A. (1994), “Effects of Gender and Sexual Orientation on Evolutionary Relevant Aspects of Human Mating Psychology”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66: pp.1081-1093. Banaji, M. R. (2004), “Implicit attitudes can be measured”, In (eds. H. L. Roediger, J. S. Naime, I. Neath & A. Suprenant ) The Nature of Remembering: Essays in Honor of Robert G. 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(1993), “Evolved Gender Differences in Mate Preferences: Evidence from Personal Advertisements”, Ethology and Sociobiology, 14: 331-352. work_3z2khowgprbxzmpojqkuatkxwu ---- From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond An Interview with Paul Virilio John Armitage Postmodernism and Hypermodernism JA: Professor Virilio, I would like to begin by charting your place within the contemporary intellectual landscape. 1 For instance, your work is closely associated with the cultural movement known as postmodernism. Certainly, your most recently translated study Open Sky (1997 [1995]) is being received as such in the English-speaking world. 2 However, you have always been sceptical of the idea of postmodernism. Could you explain the basis of your critique of this concept? PV: Postmodernism is a notion that makes sense in architecture, through the work of [Robert] Venturi (Venturi et al., 1977) and so on. Since I am teaching architecture, to me, postmodernism is a `suitcase' word, a syncret- ism. In architecture it is a clear-cut phenomenon: styles are mixed up, history is ignored, one goes for a `melting pot' of approaches. But as far as thought is concerned, thought as developed in the years 1970±80, I simply cannot understand why people are talking about postmodernism. Post- structuralism? Yes, OK. Postmodernism? It doesn't make any sense to me. Hence, I do not feel linked at all with postmodernity. Moreover, as a teacher in a college of architecture, I believe postmodernism was a catastrophe in the history of modern architecture. Therefore there is no linkage between me and postmodernism. I know that many people tend to associate post- modernism with relativism, especially with cognitive relativism. Well, this is a new polemic that is cropping up, especially here in France, and which does not concern, let alone interest me in the slightest measure. Another & Theory, Culture & Society 1999 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 16(5±6): 25±55 [0263-2764(199910/12)16:5±6;25±55;009957] http://www.sagepub.co.uk/ thing is that I am a very marginal thinker, I do not relate to any established school of thought. Of course, I am a phenomenologist. When young, I was a pupil of [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, I loved [Edmund] Husserl. You could call me a `Gestaltist', I was enthusiastic about the psychology of form, Paul Guillaume, and the Berlin school: these are my intellectual origins. 3 I have been associated with the end phase of structuralism, with [Michel] Foucault, of course, and [Gilles] Deleuze. But I am essentially a marginal ®gure. The main in¯uence in my work has been the Second World War, that is, strategy, spatial planning, and this body of thinking about total war of which I was victim in my youth. JA: It seems to me that your work, which is primarily concerned with technological, urban and socio-cultural change, is the work of someone whose thinking addresses the problem of what might be called `super' or `hypermodernism'? 4 I say this because your theoretical interventions appear to be aimed not only at intensifying but also at displacing traditional forms of thought about the modern world and the way it is represented. How do you respond to this interpretation? PV: I totally agree. As a so-called `war baby', I have been deeply marked by the accident, the catastrophe, and thus by sudden changes, and upheavals. I am a child of the Blitzkrieg, the `lightning war', I am a child of history's acceleration, as Daniel Hale vy put it in 1947. 5 Hence, it is clear that my work is a critical analysis of modernity, but through a perception of tech- nology which is largely, I might say, catastrophic. I say catastrophic, not catastrophist. This is because I have witnessed the drama of total war myself, I have lived through it, the millions of deaths, the cities razed to the ground, all that. As far as `hyper' or `super' modernism is concerned, I think we are not out of modernity yet, by far. I think that modernity will only come to a halt within the ambit of what I call the `integral accident' (Virilio, 1989b [1986], 1997). I believe that technical modernity, modernity taken as the outcome of technical inventions over the past two centuries, can only be stopped by an integral ecological accident, which, in a certain way, I am forecasting. Each and every invention of a technical object has also been the innovation of a particular accident. From the sum total of the technos- ciences does arise, and will arise a `generalized accident' (1997). And this will be modernism's end. JA: Do you consider yourself a modernist author? Your writing style, for example, seems to many people to replace traditional narrative and struc- ture with the `stream of consciousness' technique . . . PV: Yes, I do. Well, let me put it this way: to be concerned with speed, like I am, means to be involved in music. For 20 years now I have been working on `dromology', that is, on the importance of speed in history, and thus of acceleration (Virilio, 1986 [1977]). Now, if there is a realm where speed is 26 Theory, Culture & Society really an important element, it is music, rhythm, tempo. And thus my writing is a dynamic, cinematic process. Moreover, and I state this as modestly as possible, it is my belief that philosophy is a mere subdivision of literature. To me, Shakespeare is really a great philosopher, perhaps above Kant and a few others. Relativity JA: Open Sky (1997 [1995]) brings to the fore one of the most under- appreciated themes of your writings, namely, your interest in Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. This scienti®c concept is also occasionally viewed as a facet of modernism. How does the theory of relativity relate to your current projects? PV: Well, frankly, this is quite simple. There is no way one could study the phenomenon of acceleration in all these domains, whether that is in the realm of transportation, or in the realm of information, that is, in the transfer of information, without stepping full scale into the issue of relativity. It is unavoidable. Ours are cinematic societies. They are not only societies of movement, but of the acceleration of that very movement. And hence, of the shortening of distances in terms of time, but, I would also add, of the relation to reality. It is thus simply impossible to ignore the theory of relativity. We're all going through the gates of relativity. It is well known that the theory of relativity is very poorly popularized, it is not at all well-understood by the general public. One cannot skip the theory of relativity for the mere reason that it is dif®cult to understand. Why so? Because we live it. We live it through mobile phones, through `live' programmes on TV, through the telecommunications media, through Virtual Reality (VR), through cyber- space, through video-conferencing, through supersonic air travel and so on. Thus, as we live it, we interpret it, in the musical sense of the word. Like one says, `to interpret a musical score', we, all of us, interpret the theory of relativity through our own lived lives. We do that through our calendar, through our time planning, our relationships, our involvement in love affairs even. We do that through the telephone, for instance, we do that through education, and through `tele-learning'. We have become deterritorialized. Our embedding in our native soil, that element of hic et nunc (here and now), `in situ', that embedding belongs, now, in a certain way, to the past. It has been overtaken by the acceleration of history, ± by the acceleration of reality itself ± by `real time', and by the `live', all of which are in a stage beyond the hic et nunc, `in situ' condition. Caught as we are between this territory-based embedding, which is of a geographic, geophysical nature, or even of a geostrategic nature in the case of the military, and total deterritor- ialization, what remains in order to interpret our world? Nothing but relativity! Not the physicists' relativity, but our relativity, the relativity of our own lived lives, for which we are responsible, and of which we are the victims, at the same time. Relativity is no longer the exclusive domain of Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 27 (natural) scientists, it has become the property of all those who live in the modern world. Phenomenology and Marxism JA: Before we move on to discuss your relationship to deconstruction (Derrida, 1973 [1967], 1976 [1967]) and post-structuralism, I would like to ask one or two questions about your own intellectual formation. For ex- ample, one of the leading philosophies in France and elsewhere in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War was structuralism . . . PV: Yes, indeed, absolutely so. And certainly not existentialism . . . JA: Even so, your own philosophical background developed through an engagement with Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1962 [1945]). What would you say you learnt most from Merleau-Ponty's work and how has it in¯uenced your own? PV: First of all, I was a pupil of Merleau-Ponty, of Jean Wahl and of Vladimir Jankelevitch, to name three French philosophers who were teach- ing at the Sorbonne at that time. The one to which I felt most attracted was quite naturally Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and his Phenomenology of Percep- tion. Why? Because I am so totally involved with perception myself, through my childhood, through painting. Yes, I painted, I even worked with famous painters such as [Henri] Matisse and [Georges] Braque when I was young. I am a man of perception, a man of the gaze, I am a man of the visual school of thought. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception appeared to me to form a crossroads with the psychology of form, with Gestalt and the whole Berlin School. And thus it is at this crossroads of the psychology of form, Gestalt theory and the Phenomenology of Perception that I position myself. And to that one of course has to add the reading of Einstein, of the big scienti®c names of the time, [Paul] Dirac, [Werner] Heisenberg and yes, of course, [Henri] Bergson. 6 So you have a crossroads there, and it's where I stand, at the intersection. JA: Merleau-Ponty was, for a large part of his life, associated with the philosophy of humanist Marxism. One thing that has always surprised me about your writings, particularly within the intellectual context of postwar France, is the absence of any reference to Marx. What is your relationship, if any, to Marxism? PV: I am no Marxist, nor have I ever been one. But my father was a communist. We'll come back to that later. You see, my mother was a Breton, and my father Italian. Like every young boy (laughs) I had to choose between my mother and my father. So, although I have a lot of respect for my father, I totally reject his political views. I absolutely cannot be a communist. I might well feel at home as a `communard', as in the Paris 28 Theory, Culture & Society Commune, or as an anarcho-syndicalist, these would suit me. But Marxism, no! Take it as a reaction against my father. JA: Are you saying that your reasons for rejecting the Marxism of your intellectual contemporaries like Merleau-Ponty were autobiographical rather than theoretical? PV: Yes, you're right, my intellectual contemporaries were communist to a man. I was not. But my reasons were theoretical also. This is because, when I was young, I converted to Christianity. I converted when I was 18, as an adult. The war had just ended then, and I had seen terrible things, and that was also one of the reasons for my conversion to Christianity. But then, you must know that I converted in the company of `worker-priests'. Worker- priests are, in France, those priests who take an industrial job and go to live with the factory workers. They do not display their pastoral cross. I chose to convert with a worker-priest because I wanted something real, not some religious show with a guy in a costume. It is since that time that I have worked with Abbe Pierre. 7 JA: Would it be correct, then, to suggest that you have no theoretical objections against socialism, against the left as a body of thought? PV: No, of course not, I have nothing against socialism. I belong to the left, that is quite clear . . . JA: Nevertheless, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, many of your friends were not merely on the left but also committed Marxists . . . PV: True . . . JA: Can you recall why you felt it necessary to develop your own political perspective at that time? . . . PV: I feel that many of my contemporaries have totally blacked out the war from their minds. Many of them never experienced totalitarianism. I lived through that experience. With a communist father, who was Italian to boot, we had to make our escape from totalitarianism, from Nazism and so on. It was no joke to be both communist and Italian during the Second World War (in occupied France). This meant that I never could get involved in some- thing that appeared to me, right from the beginning, to be a totalitarian phenomenon. Yet I have always remained interested in the leftist dimension within Marxism. Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 29 `Anarcho-Christianity' JA: You spoke earlier of your conversion to Christianity. What role does it play in your work? Do you see yourself, for example, as part of a French Catholic moral tradition that might include other Christian and existential- ist critics of technology like Gabriel Marcel or Jacques Ellul? 8 PV: Yes, I do see linkages, especially with Jacques Ellul, rather than with Gabriel Marcel, who is from an earlier generation. But I cannot really place myself within what you call a Catholic tradition. The reason is that I have always been utterly unable to write about my faith. I do not have the gift for that. I have always considered that my life as a follower of Christ was something happening through my everyday life, not through my theoretical writings. It is not that I refuse to do it, I would gladly write a book about it, but I simply do not have the gift for it. You see, I do not have much of a theological culture. My conversion was an affair of the heart, a love affair you may say, more than an intellectual one. Speaking of religion, I feel much more at ease with an ordinary, poor person. When I am writing, I am somewhere else. JA: In the late 1950s and throughout most of the 1960s the philosophy of structuralism began to challenge Christian existentialism, phenomenology and humanist Marxism. Structuralism was, of course, profoundly anti- humanist. Could your own theoretical approach be described as anti- humanist? PV: Oh, not at all. I am an anarcho-Christian. It sounds quite paradoxical, but to me the de®nition of man is subsumed, and I quote it often, in a saying by someone I have come to like very much, Hildegarde of Bingen. St Hildegarde wrote, composed music, played harp, and was many other things at once. The saying is: `Homo Est Clausura Mirabilium Dei': `Man is the closing point of the marvels of the universe' (i.e. God). Thus, for me, Man is not the centre of the universe, he is the end of the universe, the end of the world. This has nothing to do with ideas like `transcendental ego' or `egocentrism'. For me, there is nothing beyond man. Forget about tech- nology, eugenism, robotics, prostheses. Forget also about [Friedrich Nietzsche's] `Uebermensch' [Overman]. I do not believe these ideas are at all humanist. I think they're far worse. This is a very important point for me, because I am absolutely against this newfangled form of totalitarianism which I call technoscience and its cult. I see there a yet unheard-of eugenics programme, eugenics written very large, far beyond [Sir Francis] Galton's. 9 The idea behind this new brand of eugenicism being to perfect man, to make a better man. Well, there is no such thing as the possibility of `improving' man, of tinkering man into something better. No way. Never. JA: You would say that such a programme would not be a desirable aim? 30 Theory, Culture & Society PV: No indeed, I believe it is not. Yet it is exactly the programme of technoscience. Take, for instance, `Dolly' [the recently cloned sheep], take neo-eugenicism, clones, take all new technologies. We see now a eugenic desire running amok. From Military Space to Cyberspace JA: The initial signi®cance of your theoretical work ¯ows from your archi- tectural and photographic enquiries, documented in Bunker Archeology [sic] (1994a [1975]), into the `Atlantic Wall' ± those 1500 German bunkers constructed during the Second World War along the French coastline to prevent an Allied invasion . . . PV: There were in fact 15,000 of them, one zero more! And they stretched along the West European coast all the way up to Denmark. But about me: I spent my youth in the town of Nantes. Nantes lies at the mouth of the Loire, just before the Atlantic Ocean. Its true oceanic harbour is St Nazaire, where there was a German submarine base, and in fact an Allied landing took place there at some stage. Thus I spent the war time as a boy, with the sea just one hour away, yet without ever being able to go and see it: the seashore was a forbidden zone. So when liberation ®nally came, I rushed to the sea, to the beaches, like everybody else did. And there I encountered structures which were littering the beaches: the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall. And thus at the same time as I saw the sea for the ®rst time, I also discovered these mysterious, enigmatic architectural structures. To me, they were like the statues on Easter Island. And so, for ten years, I went on a quest after these structures. I sketched and photographed these bunkers in order to come to grips with the totalitarian dimension of the war. My ®rst snapshots were taken in 1957, the last ones in 1965. JA: What was the connection between this discovery and your thinking on military space? PV: First, it was an emotional discovery, which you might compare with Victor Segalen's ®rst encounter with Chinese sculpture. You can also call it an archaeological experience, and a shocking one. Another element, aside from this encounter with military space, and which led me to write Bunker Archeology, was that I wanted to get involved in the study of urban phen- omena, in the city and its technique. I switched over to urbanism, to architecture and thus to the study of the technique's impact on the space of the city, and the way it alters the urban landscape. And at this point, you of course meet Gestalt theory, the psychology of forms. Military space is an organized form of perception. When I was a conscript ± I served in the artillery ± I was a gunner. Part of my military service was in Germany, in the French occupation zone. I was stationed in Freiburg, at the HQ of the First French Army. I ended up as a cartographic of®cer in the staff of Field Marshall Juin. In this function I made a good number of military surveys in Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 31 the Black Forest region, to be used in manoeuvres taking place in the occupied zone. So everything is linked up. There is an aesthetic kind of involvement with bunkers, and an urbanistic one in the ®eld of regional planning. Over thousands of kilometres, the coast was organized in such a way as to be controlled by sight. It is that logic that made me understand to what extent the war had been a total one. War had not only conditioned the people through manslaughter, Auschwitz and wholesale executions, it had also reorganized the territory, just like the Great Chinese Wall had done. One could say that military architecture was the ®rst incarnation of Land Art. In fact, minimalist and Land artists like Robert Morris came to me later to re¯ect on my book, and said they had found it most interesting. 10 JA: In The Function of the Oblique (Johnston, 1996) you, along with the architect Claude Parent, outline your efforts in the `Architecture Principe' group of the early 1960s to initiate an urban regime based on the theory of the `oblique function', which, while founded on uneven planes and bodily disorientation, nevertheless resulted in the construction of several major works. Looking back, what do you think were the major achievements and disappointments of Architecture Principe and the theory of the oblique function? PV: Architecture Principe was the name of a group. That period lasted ®ve years in all (1963±8). You must know that this was at a time when many artists, philosophers and the like would come together to do things. For instance, we did quite a few things together with `Archigram'. You also had Paulo Soleri in the United States, and there was also the `Metabolic' group in Japan. 11 And so, Claude Parent and myself decided to start a research group together, and the main thing I contributed to was a church. That was the St Bernadette church in Nevers, and that church is a so-called `Bunker church'. Why? Because I wanted to `Christianize' the bunker. Of course, at the time, the prevailing myth was that of the crypt ± the atomic shelter. One was then living under the permanent threat of the atomic bomb, and hence the atomic shelter. And so, you get a cross-point between the theme of St Bernadette of Lourdes, and that of the bunker. In Lourdes, the Virgin Mary appeared to St Bernadette in a grotto. Now, both the grotto and the bunker are crypts, hidden places, as in the English word, cryptic. And thus there was an opportunity to make a cross-over happen between that monolithic branch of architecture and a religious building. There is another reason: I had frequently been to Germany, to look at bunkers, and there I had seen a lot of so-called `Luftschutzraum', air-shelters and, in Dusseldorf, I suddenly saw Luftschutzraums which had been converted into Protestant or Catholic churches. And a correspondence dawned on me as between these places of shelter from danger, and places of worship, which are also places of salvation. We had another big project, a factory, and we also designed a number of private homes with inclined planes. Now if you want me to explain the concept of the oblique function as succinctly as possible it is 32 Theory, Culture & Society this: simply to have people inhabit places with inclined, not horizontal, planes . . . JA: And the disappointments? PV: We published things. But, basically, this was a typical `youth group'. And it broke up with the `events' of May 1968. I was myself very much involved in those events, whereas Claude Parent was against the whole thing. So our ways parted, I went to the left, and he went to the right. 12 JA: Much of your work in the late 1960s and early 1970s is overtly concerned with the idea of `critical space'. Could you elaborate on this concept? PV: Critical space is indeed a very important concept. You must see it as the direct outcome of me joining the E cole Spe ciale d'Architecture, in 1968, at the formal request of the students there. And then, I immediately realized that the prima materia of the architect is not matter, bricks, stones and concrete, but space. And that it is necessary to construct space ®rst before you can build up matter, with materials. Now, about the critical aspect of space: this means that space ®nds itself in a critical situation, just like one would speak of critical times, or of a critical situation. Space is under threat. Not only matter is threatened, space too is being destroyed. But it is being rebuilt at the same time. This is what I started to feel in the 1960s, and it was by then that I got the foreboding of cyberspace! I got the foreboding of virtual space, through Benoit Mandelbrot and the new geometry of frac- tals. 13 I came to see that the unity of space, which served as a basis for Le Corbusier, for the Archigram group, for all of us in sense, is in the process of being broken up. And the curious thing is that I published The Lost Dimension (1991b [1984]) in the same year as William Gibson published Neuromancer (1984). So here you have someone who writes on virtual space, on cyberspace, and someone who works on critical space. And both approaches will come to mesh into each other. To me, the reason why space is critical is because it is on the verge of becoming virtual space. Let me give you another example: whole dimensions no longer exist. For the modern architect, there exist the three dimensions, and time on top of them. This is what you might call `ancient space'. It's modern space too, but it is conventional. From Mandelbrot onwards, dimensions are no longer whole, they are broken up. Space is fractured too. Nothing remains whole, as space, from approximately the 1970s onwards. And, to me, this is a great joy, since I am an anti-totalitarian. Newtonian absolute space disappears with the break up brought about by fractals, and by Einsteinian relativity in the ®rst place, of course. The entire unity of space, which was the basis of architec- ture, modern architecture included, is deconstructed, fractionalized. This is what I call an `accident'. It is a far better situation than that of totalitarian space. Geometry has now encountered its accident in fractalization. Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 33 JA: In The Lost Dimension and elsewhere, you present critical analyses of the nature of electronic space and the spread of new information and communications technologies. Why is it necessary to criticize, say, the Internet and cyberspace? PV: I do not criticize the Internet and cyberspace as such. What I criticize is the propaganda unleashed by Bill Gates and everything that goes with it. What I loathe are the monopolies of Microsoft, of Time Warner, etc. I cannot stand those! I am an Apple fan, I am for Apple's convivial approach. I am not fretting against technology per se, but against the logic behind it. But ®rst and foremost I'd like to position myself as an art critic of technology. Everybody is familiar with the conventional art critic, the musicologist. But art criticism of technology is a taboo. `Yes and Amen' is the only allowed position. Well, not for me, thanks! Nietzsche, Derrida, Power JA: Although you were working on critical space in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was also in that period when both structuralism and Marxism came under attack. Deconstructionists and post-structuralist philosophers like Jacques Derrida, for example, looked to Nietzsche rather than Marx for inspiration. Would it be correct to say that Nietzsche's philosophy is close to your own? PV: It is true that I always have felt close to Deleuze and Derrida, who were very intimate friends, and Derrida still is, but I must confess that I have never been convinced by their `Nietzscheanism'. I love `Nietzschean music'. But, to me, Nietzsche is a man of the grand opera! His linkage with Wagner is not at all fortuitous. And I really admire the operatic part of Nietzsche. But his underlying philosophy? I'm sorry, I cannot stand it! It's physically repulsive! All that crap about the `Uebermensch', and `the Will to Power'! I do, though, profoundly admire the dramatic, the literary dimension, in Nietzsche. But I cannot assign any philosophical value to that brand of thinking. Here we encounter Shakespeare again. It is clear that I prefer Shakespeare to Nietzsche, by far. When I link Nietzsche's writings to the opera, it is because, to me, philosophy is spread out over the arts. Take Marcel Duchamp: for me, he is a philosopher who happens to paint. Shake- speare is a philosopher who writes plays. Kant is a philosopher who writes philosophical treatises. But philosophy transcends all this. When reading Nietzsche, I admire the literary music, the `heroization' of concepts. As half Italian, I admire! I clap my hands! I love theatre! To me, Nietzsche is like Verdi. I applaud. But at the same time, I cannot, simply cannot, accept his philosophy. You see, I remain an art critic. JA: Do you see any points of contact between your work and that of Derrida? Derrida (1984, 1996 [1995]) has, for instance, not only written on Nietzsche but also on speed and technoscience . . . 34 Theory, Culture & Society PV: No. The fact is that I do appreciate Derrida very much, but I do not encounter him. There are parallels in our work, but we do not share common ground. I cannot formulate it better. We are friends, but there are no points of contact in our writings. JA: Earlier, you rejected the Nietzschean conception of power. How would you de®ne power? PV: This is a rather dif®cult type of question to respond to. The question of power is a long and vexed one. The ancient Chinese had an extraordinary phrase for it. When a representative of the Emperor would meet some local or regional power holder, his ®rst words would be: `Tremble and Obey!' To me, this is the best de®nition of power. Fear! That is, to instil fear, to frighten. The ®rst thing power is about is fear, and from that compliance follows. Fear is of course also about emotions, about astonishment. And speed frightens. There is an awful lot more to say, naturally. The Political Economy of Speed JA: Power and speed are central to perhaps what is your best known book, Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology (1986 [1977]). Could you explain the nature and signi®cance of dromology? PV: Dromology originates from the Greek word, dromos. Hence, dromology is the science of the ride, the journey, the drive, the way. To me, this means that speed and riches are totally linked concepts. And that the history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches, that is, wealth, money, capital, but also about the political economy of speed. If time is money, as they say, then speed is power. You see it with the velocity of the predators, of the cavalry, of railways, of ships and maritime power. But it is also possible to see it with the velocity of dispatching information. So all my work has been about attempting to trace the dromocratic dimension of societies from ancient Greek society right up to our present-day societies. This work is of course about unrelenting acceleration, but it is mostly about the fact that all societies are pyramidal in nature: the higher speeds belong to the upper reaches of society, the slower to the bottom. The wealth pyramid is the replica of the velocity pyramid. Examples are easy to ®nd: it was true in ancient societies, through maritime power and cavalry, and through their ways of dispatching messages, and it holds true in our modern societies, through the transport revolution, and through the current revol- ution in data transport and information processing. Thus my work is all about stating that it is of paramount importance to analyse acceleration as a major political phenomenon, a phenomenon without which no understand- ing of history, and especially history-that-is-in-the-making since the 18th century is possible. Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 35 JA: In Speed & Politics you also suggest that successive waves of accelera- tion imply both the `disappearance' of physical geographical space and a new politics of real time. What, for you, is the most important aspect of the relationship between the physical dimension and the political space of real time? PV: Well, the old politics of acceleration were mainly about transport. That is, the possibilities inherent in moving goods from one place to another, or, perhaps equally importantly, moving troops from one point to another. This means that acceleration bore next to no relationship to information. You had pigeons, and other methods of despatching, but through the ages there was hardly any acceleration of information transmission. But today, that is, since the beginning of the 20th century, acceleration is mainly about the increas- ing speed of information transmission. Sure, transportation has been con- stantly speeded up too, but, today, the major development is the increasing speed of information transmission, and the quest for the attainment of real time. Information transmission is thus no longer concerned with the bring- ing about of a relative gain in velocity, as was the case with railway transport compared to horse power, or jet aircraft compared to trains, but about the absolute velocity of electromagnetic waves. Pure War and the Politics of Everyday Life JA: Your concerns about what might be called `the dromocratic condition' led, in the late 1970s, to the publication of your Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles (1990 [1978]). This seems to me to be one of the few books of yours which, while discussing the theoretical concept of `Pure War', also makes a practical political case for `Revolutionary Resistance' against the tyranny of speed politics and, in particular, the military- industrial complex. Could you elaborate upon these concepts? Are they still relevant today? PV: Here, one must state that the book might also have been titled Pure War (Virilio and Lotringer, 1997 [1983]) since that is the heading of the Introduction. 14 That was the time when we were living with the unadulter- ated balance of terror. What I mean is that one cannot understand the concept of pure war outside of the atomic bomb, the weapon of the apocalypse. At that time, and this has been somewhat forgotten, we were living with the potentiality of a pure war, which, nevertheless, failed to materialize. What is pure war? It is a war of a single utterance: Fear! Fear! Fear! Nuclear deterrence can be conceived of as pure war for the simple reason that nuclear war never took place. However, such deterrence did spawn a technoscienti®c explosion, inclusive of the Internet, and other satellite technologies. And so one saw that the history of warfare, of siege war, of the war of movement, of total war, of world war, all somehow merged into pure war. That is, into a blockade, into nuclear deterrence. What had been reached was the dimension of the integral accident, the moment of the 36 Theory, Culture & Society total destruction of the world. And there it stopped. Thus, at that stage, the whole concept of resistance to war became a new phenomenon. It was no longer about resisting an invader, German or other, but about resisting the military-scienti®c and industrial complex. Take my generation: during the Second World War you had resistance, combat against the Germans who invaded France. During the 1960s and 1970s there was resistance, among others by me, not against an invader, but against the military-industrial complex, that is against the invention of ever crazier sorts of weapons, like the neutron bomb, and `Doomsday machines', something that we saw, for instance, in Stanley Kubrick's ®lm, Dr Strangelove. Thus resistance to pure war is of another nature than resistance to an oppressor, to an invader. It is resistance against science: that is extraordinary, unheard of! JA: At this point, I would like to ask a question on behalf of my students. For when I give a lecture on your work there is one question that comes up over and over again at the end of the session. It usually runs something like this: `While I ®nd Paul Virilio's analyses of pure war, and revolutionary resistance against the military-industrial complex extremely thought- provoking, I'm not quite sure what he is suggesting I actually do about these issues at the political level, at the level of the everyday?' What, in your view, should one tell them? PV: Well, tell them the following. I was a militant against the atomic bomb. I joined leftist movements during the events of May 1968. But I must say that I became very disappointed about political struggles, since they appear to me to lag very much behind developments both within the post-industrial revolution and technoscience. Thus I am, and many people with me, out of phase with real existing political movements. I feel henceforth margin- alized, and the only action I can partake in takes place within the urban realm, with homeless people, with travellers, with people whose lives are being destroyed by the revolution brought about by the end of salaried work, by automation, by delocalization. You may call it street-corner work in a sense. For instance, together with Abbe Pierre, I was member of the High Committee for the Housing of Destitute People that was instituted by President [FrancË ois] Mitterand and [Jacques] Chirac. I was on that Com- mittee for three years. That work has stopped now, but, for the last 15 years, I have been a member of private associations which work together with homeless people. These are Christian associations for the most part, and there lie my political activities these days. I am a disappointed man of the left. By the way, this is no fun because at the same time there is the rise of extremist political parties like [Jean-Marie] Le Pen's Front National, and so on. Modernity and `Globalitarianism' JA: If we can broadly de®ne modernity as an attempt to understand the present period by contrasting it with the recent past, what key features, other Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 37 than speed, would you point to in the contemporary era as being of most political signi®cance? PV: Globalitarianism! This is what transcends totalitarianism. Let's take an example, and excuse the neologism, but I cannot ®nd another word. Totalitarianism covered my life, through the Second World War and through the period of nuclear deterrence, so you may say through Nazism ®rst and then Stalinism. Totalitarianism was thus a central issue at that time. But now, through the single market, through globalization, through the conver- gence of time towards a single time, a world time, a time which comes to dominate local time, and the stuff of history, what emerges ± through cyberspace, through the big telecommunications conglomerates, is a new totalitarianism, a totalitarianism of totalitarianism, and that is what I call globalitarianism. It is the totalitarianism of all totalities. Globalization, in this sense, is a truly important event. But, when people say to me, `We'll become world citizens!', I reply, `Forget it'. I was a world citizen long before globalization. After the war, I met Gary Davis, I went to meetings which took place in the PeÁ re Lachaise neighbourhood of Paris. I was 16±17±18 at that time. I was half Italian, I felt a world citizen. But when people say that Bill Gates, cyberspace and VR are the stuff of world citizenship, I say, no way! Globalitarianism is social cybernetics. And that's something in®nitely dan- gerous, more dangerous even, perhaps, than the Nazi or communist brands of totalitarianism. It is dif®cult to explain globalitarianism but it is simple enough in itself. Totalitarianisms were singular and localized. Occupied Europe, for example, was one, the Soviet empire another, or China. That's clear. The rest of the world was not under totalitarianism. Now, with the advent of globalization, it is everywhere that one can be under control and surveillance. The world market is globalitarian. It is on purpose that I use the doublet total/totalitarian, and global/globalitarian. I consider this phenomenon a grave menace. It is manifest that Time Warner and the large conglomerates like Westinghouse, MCIWorldCom and all the other gigantic companies are not the exact equivalent of Hitler or Stalin. Yet, bad things are possible . . . JA: Undoubtedly, I believe that one of the leading microelectronics con- glomerates has even adopted `One World, One Operating System' as its corporate logo . . . PV: Yes. I can't stand it. Let me remind you of a sentence by Saint Just, one of the main protagonists of the French Revolution who got guillotined in the end, and who said once: `There's this new idea in Europe: happiness.' Well, his other phrase, which I like very much is: `If the people can be oppressed, even if they are not actually oppressed, then they are oppressed already.' It is a very interesting statement, because it says that the possibility is already the reality. Even if you are unaware of it, it has already happened. Hence the menace in the present period. 38 Theory, Culture & Society Lyotard JA: Shortly after the publication of Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles, Jean-FrancË ois Lyotard published his seminal book The Postmodern Con- dition (1984 [1979]). Does this book's renowned scepticism about the possibility of historical understanding, along with its rejection of the `grand narratives' of progress, have any signi®cance for you? PV: Well, yes. We see here the fractalization of history, and Lyotard expressed ± at an early stage ± the end of the grand ideological narratives. But then, there was a question put by a Jewish friend of mine, Gerard Rabinowich ± it was just after the book's publication, and we had gathered among friends in St Germain des Pre s. My friend asked: `Well, Lyotard, what do you have to say about that grand narrative called justice? Is that too a grand narrative belonging to the past?' A ®ne point indeed! Needless to say, Lyotard was at a loss for an answer. And indeed, to me, even if I accept the demise of the grand historical and ideological narratives in favour of the small narratives, the narrative of justice is beyond deconstruction. If that was the case, I would not be a Christian. You cannot deconstruct the absolute necessity of justice. Hence that issue remains intact. Justice cannot be divided up, be fractalized, on pain of descent into barbarism. We have reached a limit there. Speed and Inertia JA: While some cultural theorists are sympathetic to your critique of speed, few of them appear to appreciate the stress you place on the relationship between absolute speed and its `Other' ± inertia? Indeed, you have written a book about speed and the environmental crisis entitled Polar Inertia (1999 [1990]). Why is speed inextricably bound up with inertia? PV: That is quite simple. When what is being put to work are relative speeds, no inertia obtains, but acceleration or deceleration. We are then in the realm of mobility and emancipation. But when absolute speed, that is the speed of light, is put to work, then one hits a wall, a barrier, which is the barrier of light. Let me remind you that there exist three recognized barriers: the sound barrier, which was passed in 1947 by Chuck Jaeger, the barrier of heat, which was crossed in the 1960s with rockets, at what is called `escape velocity' and, ®nally, the speed of light, which is the effectuation of the `live' in almost all realms of human activity. That is, the possibility to transfer over distance sight, sound, smell and tactile feeling. Only gustation, taste, seems to be left out of it. From that moment onwards, it is no longer necessary to make any journey: one has already arrived. The consequence of staying in the same place is a sort of Foucauldian imprisonment, but this new type of imprisonment is the ultimate form because it means that the world has been reduced to nothing. The world is reduced, both in terms of surface and extension, to nothing, and this results in a kind of incarceration, Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 39 in a stasis, which means that it is no longer necessary to go towards the world, to journey, to stand up, to depart, to go to things. Everything is already there. This is, again, an effect of relativity. Why? Because the earth is so small. In the cosmos, absolute speed amounts to little, but at that scale, it is earth which amounts to nothing. This is the meaning of inertia. There is a de®nite relationship between inertia and absolute speed which is based on the stasis which results from absolute speed. Absolute stasis leads ± potentially ± to absolute stasis. The world, then, remains `at home' [in English], already there, given. I repeat: this is a possibility, a potentiality, but here we are back to what I said before: when the people are in a situation of possible inertia, they are already inert. The Integral Accident JA: You said before that `modernity will only come to a halt within the ambit of the integral accident' . . . PV: Indeed, the accident has always fascinated me. In fact, I am currently preparing my end-of-the-century book, the one for the year 2000, which will be on the integral accident, although I am writing another book before that. The integral accident is the one that integrates all others. JA: Could you elaborate on the concept of the integral, or, generalized accident, a little further? PV: Let me put it this way: every time a technology is invented, take shipping for instance, an accident is invented together with it, in this case, the shipwreck, which is exactly contemporaneous with the invention of the ship. The invention of the railway meant, perforce, the invention of the railway disaster. The invention of the aeroplane brought the air crash in its wake. Now, the three accidents I have just mentioned are speci®c and localized accidents. The Titanic sank at a given location. A train de-rails at another location and a plane crashes, again, somewhere else. This is a fundamental point, because people tend to focus on the vehicle, the invention itself, but not on the accident, which is its consequence. As an art critic of technology, I always try to emphasize both the invention and the accident. But the occurrence of the accident is being denied. This is the result of the hype which always goes together with technical objects, as with Bill Gates and cyberspace, for instance. The hype in favour of technology dismisses its negative aspects. It is a positive thing to have electricity, it is a wonderful device, but at the same time it is based on nuclear energy. Thus what these three types of accidents have in common is that they are localized, and this is because they are about relative velocities, the trans- port velocities of ships, trains and planes. But from the moment that the absolute velocity of electromagnetic waves is put to use, the potential of the accident is no longer local, but general. It is no longer a particular accident, hence the possibility arises of a generalized accident. Let me stress the 40 Theory, Culture & Society point by giving you two examples: the collapse of the stock exchange and radioactivity as result of a nuclear con¯ict. These examples mean that when an event takes place somewhere today, the possibility arises that it might destroy everything. A virus in an electronic network, an atomic leakage in Chernobyl ± and that was not much, compared to a massive nuclear strike. Today's collapse of the stock exchange is a nice icon for the integral accident, in the sense that a very small occurrence changes everything, as the speed of quotations and programmed trading spreads and enhances any trend instantaneously. What happened a few weeks ago in [South East] Asia is an integral accident, well, almost an integral accident. The Aesthetics of Disappearance JA: In works such as The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991a [1980]) you argue that modern culture is not simply characterized by speed but also by what you call the `aesthetics of disappearance'. What is the relationship between speed and the aesthetics of disappearance? PV: These are the cinematic effects, which are characteristic of the con- temporary arts, and stem from ®lm, television, video, etc. Let me explain: in ancient societies you had an aesthetic of appearance, which means that there was an enduring material support to the image: wood or canvas in the case of paintings; marble, in the case of sculptures, etc. Save for music, most aesthetics-related phenomena were phenomena of appearance, of emer- gence. Painting enabled the emergence of a ®gure on the canvas, which was subsequently `®xed' with a varnish, for example, Leonardo's Mona Lisa. The image had appeared, as it were, through the medium of the canvas. The same could be said of Michelangelo, shaping Moses out of a block of marble, and that block of marble, suddenly becoming Moses. Persistence had a material basis. But with the invention of photography, of the photogramme, that is of instant photography, and of cinematography, from that moment onwards, one enters into an aesthetic of disappearance. At that stage, persistence is no longer material but cognitive, it is in the eye of the beholder. Things owe their existence to the fact that they disappear, like they do on a screen for instance. They are there, they appear, and are in motion, because they vanish afterwards. Quite different, therefore, from frescoes, paintings, etc. It is a sequential phenomenon. In the ®rst phase, there was a cinematic effect of painting: if you take snapshots of an artist at work, you see that the painting develops in stages. But this is a very slow cinematic phenomenon as opposed to the ®lm where we are talking about 24 frames per second ± even up to 60 frames per second with special effects. So, this is the aesthetics of disappearance, it means that most of the art has vanished. Hence, by the way, the current crisis in contemporary art. Hence, too, `the art of the motor'. When I write about The Art of the Motor (1995 [1993]), I mean that there has been a motorization of art. And, by `motor', I mean the French cinematographic word `moteur', for `action'! This motoriza- tion of art is a very important phenomenon, and you cannot come to grips Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 41 with the current crisis in the contemporary arts ± I am thinking of documenta in Kassel, among others ± without it (Joly, 1996). All branches of the arts are involved in this motorization, that is, in acceleration. JA: So, you are arguing that the crisis in the contemporary arts is the direct outcome of motorization?... PV: Yes, it is the result of the motorization of images. Let's take ships, for instance, and compare the grace of a sail-boat with a motor vessel: you're not talking about the same kind of marine vessel any longer. The same holds true for ®gurative images: whether they are from paintings, or from photo stills, or the cinema, or video: it's not the same. You must see that. Mean- while, photography and cinema have in¯uenced painting. They have also in¯uenced the theatre, and other realms too. Motorization has exerted its in¯uence over art in general. Every time there is a gain, there is a loss too. By losing the slow pace of the revelation of things, we have lost one sense of time in favour of another. Let me give you another example: the moment we acquired the mechanical lift, we lost the staircase. It became the service or emergency staircase, and was no longer the magni®cent grand staircase of old. But we gained in speed ± as is always the case. When transatlantic air services were invented, we incurred the loss of the ocean liners. This holds true in all possible realms. Foucault and Baudrillard JA: Much of your recent work is concerned with cyberspace and imaging technologies of various kinds such as VR. However, it appears to be less in¯uenced by Jean Baudrillard's writings on the nature and impact of Simulations (1983) and `hyperreality,' and more by Foucault's work on surveillance in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977 [1975]). Why is this? PV: Discipline and Punish is the source, obviously. Let me remind you that when Foucault published Discipline and Punish, one of his collaborators ± he had quite a few of them at the time ± was Jacques Donzelot. And Jacques Donzelot happened to sit on the examination board of one of my students who was doing research on prisons. We were working on prisons together, on the panopticon and so on, as part of the college curriculum at the time, and that was before Discipline and Punish came out. The proof of that is that the illustrations provided in Foucault's book can be directly traced to my student's thesis! His name, incidentally, is Carthoux, and his thesis ± for the Ecole Spe ciale d'Architecture ± was entitled `The Place of Detention'. So, whether there is mutual in¯uence or not, there are, again, clear parallels. Another link is of course my work about war and its particular ®eld of perception. Now, as far as Baudrillard is concerned, there is for sure something about his work that I have never liked at all, and that is his concept of 42 Theory, Culture & Society simulation. I do not believe in simulation. To me, what takes place is substitution. Seminars have already been convened on this theme. The reason why is that I believe that different categories of reality have unfolded since the beginning of time, from the Neolithic Age to the present day. This means that reality is never given, but is the outcome of a culture. And thus we have a category of `class I reality', and then there is a simulation of that reality, through a new technology, such as photography, or some other thing, or VR, for instance, and then you have a fresh substitution, a second reality. Hence simulation is a mere intermediary phase, without import. What is important is substitution; how a class I reality is substituted by a `class II reality', and so on, up to the `nth' reality. JA: For you, then, one class of reality is continually substituted by other realities? PV: Well, reality is produced by a society's culture, it is not given. A reality that has been produced by one society will be taken over, and changed by another, younger society, producing a fresh reality. This happens ®rst by mimicry, then by substitution, and the original reality will, by that time, be totally forgotten. Take, for instance, the reality of the ancient Egyptians, of the Chinese of thousands of years ago: we cannot make any sense out of it, we are clueless about what it looked like, about what it sounded like. JA: You talked before of the `disappearance aesthetic'. At the same time, Baudrillard suggests that the advent of simulation and hyperreality have led to the `disappearance of the social'. Isn't there some kind of connection between your work and his? PV: Absolutely none whatsoever. As I have said and repeated often: there is a nihilistic dimension in Baudrillard's writings which I cannot accept. It is quite clear to me that Baudrillard has totally lost faith in the social. To me, this is sheer nihilism. I have not at all lost faith in the social. First of all, I believe that the social eludes the so-called social sciences, and always has ± that's why I am not a sociologist! So I am disappointed, and very much so, about politics, but I am not disappointed by the social. You need only to go into the streets, and meet the poor: they're extraordinary, superior people. The social drama leaves the stunts of the political class far behind. The power and resilience of individual people in the streets puts the intelligence of today's political leaders to shame. And as far as the social scientists are concerned, the less said the better! Technological Culture JA: Would you say that your work on the aesthetics of disappearance is characterized by a disenchantment with the modern world? Do you advocate a return to some kind of religious sensibility, one that might place limits, for instance, on the social effects of cinematic disappearance? Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 43 PV: I believe that, without some religious culture, it doesn't matter which, one will never be able to understand technological culture and cinematics. I believe that a society, a society which has moved to such an extent into virtuality, will not be able to advance further, without an appreciation of moral virtues, that is, of mystical thought. I mean by that all that has been contributed by philosophers and theologians, of all religions, not only Christianity. The new technologies bring into effect the three traditional characteristics of the Divine: ubiquity, instantaneity and immediacy. Without some cultural familiarity with these themes, mediated by Chris- tianity, Protestantism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, etc., they remain incom- prehensible. One cannot come to grips with the phenomenon of cyberspace without some inkling of, or some respect for, metaphysical intelligence! That does not mean that you have to be converted. I believe that the new technologies demand from those who are interested in them that they have a substantial measure of religious culture ± not merely some religious opinion. I may emphasize that all this has nothing to do whatsoever with `New Age', and the like . . . JA: Don't you think that some people invest technology with a mystical dimension already? PV: Yes, of course. `Transhumans', New Age types, cyberpunks and the like. There are plenty of them in the United States, you need only to read Mark Dery's book. 15 I think this is a scary development, leading up to the Heaven's Gate sect, whose members committed suicide in order to depart for the stars. But this is not the sort of thing I am talking about. My point is simply that without a knowledge of the history and philosophy of religions, one cannot come to grips with what I have termed `technological funda- mentalism'. Which is the possibility of a Deus ex Machina. Just like there is a Jewish fundamentalism, or an Islamic or Christian one, you have also now got a technological fundamentalism. It is the religion of those who believe in the absolute power of technology, a ubiquitous, instantaneous and immedi- ate technology. I think a balance is needed to remain free vis-a-vis tech- nology, a balance which consists of a knowledge of religion, even if this entails the risks of fundamentalism and intolerance. Without this knowledge one is without balance, and one cannot face the threats of technological fundamentalism, of cyberspace and of the extreme lunacy of social cyber- netics. The War Model JA: To many people, your work in Bunker Archeology and later is associated with what has come to be known as `the war model'. Could you explain this model? PV: Well, as a child of the Second World War, a `war baby', you may say that the war was my university. I learned to know the world through the fear 44 Theory, Culture & Society brought about by war. So for me the archetypal war was the Second World War, which lasted from 1939 to 1945. This war produced both Auschwitz and Hiroshima ± in fact I keep a stone from Hiroshima on my desk. The war model is a method of total control over a territory and of a population. The aim is to have total control of the population, to bring a whole region or a continent into subjection, through radio, telephone, and a combination of both of these was already very much there during the Second World War. Hence my work is about de®ning total war as a con¯ict model, in all realms, not only in the realm of the military, but also in the realm of the social, and in what I would call `colonization'. Colonization is already a model of total war. To quote [Jules] Michelet, the 19th-century French historian: `Without a powerful navy, there are no colonies.' It is the power of technology which makes colonization possible; maritime power is one. Later, other forms of colonial power followed. Thus it is clear that my writings on the war model are linked to the history of the colonial empires, that is, to the times of colonial imperialism and ideological totalitarianism. JA: Does the notion of the war model ¯ow only from the Second World War? Or, is it linked in some way to your resistance to the Algerian war? Or both? PV: What is for sure is that, as far as my approach to war is concerned, I have passed through three stages in my life: I suffered from the Second World War as a child; I was called into military service during the Algerian War and served six months in Algeria ± in the AureÁ s, the mountainous region south of Constantine. And I opposed nuclear war, that is, the total war par excellence. So the three wars that have moulded me, we could say, are the Second World War, the Algerian war and the epoch of nuclear deter- rence. These wars, of course, carry the seeds of their followers, especially the Malvinas War and the Persian Gulf War. The War of Images JA: In the early 1980s you produced one of your most well-known books, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1989a; [1984]). In this book you discuss the use by the military of cinematic technologies of perception. Why is the analysis of the relationship between war and the cinema so important for you? PV: Because images have turned into ammunition. Logistics deals in the ®rst place with the supply to the front-line of ammunition, energy and so on. The front-line is constantly being replenished with ammunition, energy and foodstuffs. Now, from the end of the First World War onwards, but es- pecially with the Second World War, the front-line is also being fed with images and information. That means that a `logistics of perception' will be put in place, just as there is a logistics of fuel supplies, of explosives and shells. For instance, one can observe that the First World War was fought on the basis of maps. Maps were being drawn, lines were sketched on them and Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 45 height-lines established, whereupon the artillery was told where to ®re. But at the close of the war, maps were being displaced by aerial photography, shot by planes and then assembled on tables like mosaics ± I did that kind of job myself, when I was a HQ staffer. How did that come about? Well, because the destructive power of artillery is such that the ordinary topo- graphical landmarks simply disappear ± here, again, the aesthetics of disappearance at work! Only ®lm or photography keep the memory of the landscape as it was, and as it is constantly being reshaped. The ®lm substitutes for the ordnance survey and, at the same time, architecture goes underground. It buries itself in the soil, in bunkers, in order to escape control from the skies. If you look at the Second World War, there was no bombing without photographs of the planned bomb site being taken back, being scrutinized with specialized equipment. Images thus become a prod- uct of extraordinary strategic importance. And if we switch to contemporary military con¯icts, what you get are video missiles, unmanned miniature planes or `drones', observation satellites and more wondrous things. War has morphed into images, into the eyes . . . JA: According to you, war is now a war of images? PV: Absolutely. It is impossible to imagine war without images. And, if possible, `live' images. Cyberwar in the Persian Gulf JA: Your re¯ections on the so-called `cyberwar' in the Persian Gulf were published as L'E cran du desert (1991c). What, for you, are the qualitative differences between conventional warfare and cyberwar? PV: First, about the book's title. It is very important because there were three phases in the Gulf War. Two are well-documented, and the third has been named by myself: `Desert Shield', `Desert Storm' and then, `Desert Screen' ± the latter is my invention. You may say the title is `War TV'. The Gulf War was truly a war of images. This is because it was fought out, on the one hand, with drones, that is, with ¯ying cameras on unmanned planes. On the other hand, one also saw Cruise missiles, which were making surveys all the time about where they were ¯ying, with televised bombs which were streaming into Saddam's bunkers, with video missiles. A jet ®ghter pilot turns on his screen, ®res a missile equipped with a camera, and the missile lights up what is on the horizon, while the pilot sees beyond the horizon. And, as soon as he sees an adversary, he directs the missile towards him. We have, therefore, now entered a type of war which is about directing images, hence the invention of C 3 I ± a type of war management which means command, control, communication and intelligence ± a kind of (®lm) director's way of running a war, with images and information coming up from everywhere at once. One observes that in the very ®rst armed con¯ict after the Cold War, the image is right in the middle of the mechanism. The 46 Theory, Culture & Society war is being directed straight from the USA, through communication satellites which are guiding the Patriot missiles. There is a kind of video- game war going on. This perfectly illustrates what I wrote seven years before in War and Cinema. In fact, quite a few friends told me that they couldn't make anything out of my book in 1984 but now, after the Gulf War, they tell me that they have got the message ± seven years too late. So when there is talk today about the `new war', the `info war', the war of information, well, now we are in quite an uncharted territory. 16 It is quite clear that the USA is currently entering a period of great upheaval in military affairs. This means that the command of `globalitarian', or total information, by the last remain- ing Big Power, leads to a repositioning of its powers. What we now see happening in its relations with Iraq goes a long way to show the limitations of this war of information, as far as the `how-far-to-go', `what-to-do', issues are concerned. It is very dif®cult to make pronouncements about these developments, save to say that `cyberwar' manoeuvres have already taken place in Germany, and have been witnessed by my friend James Der Derian. 17 Here we enter a realm of electronic gamesmanship of which very little can be said. It's still quite tricky, and con®dential. I am presently working on that, of course, but there is simply not very much open infor- mation about this war of information. What is certain is that the locale of war is no longer the `geosphere', military geography, the realm of geostrategy, but the `infosphere', cyberspace. We have entered a new world. The War Machine: Deleuze and Guattari JA: Before we leave the subject of war, could I ask you about your relation- ship to Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and politics of desire? Their `Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine', in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987 [1980]) is obviously in¯uenced by your writings about pure war, military space, speed and power. But what, if anything, have you learnt from their writings and how has it in¯uenced your thinking? PV: I do not think there is in¯uence here but, rather, convergence. If you care to look in A Thousand Plateaus, I believe there are 27 references to my work. That's not nothing. Now, I am not stating this in order to claim as my own the qualities of Deleuze and Guattari, whom I have loved very much, but to emphasize that, here again, there were parallels at work. However, I felt rather closer to Deleuze than to Guattari because I am totally devoid of any psychoanalytic background or culture. Guattari and I were, though, on extremely friendly terms, and we did things together. You see, Deleuze was, like me, a man of `the event', someone who not only worked with the concept of the event but who also rose to the occasion when an event occurred and who reacted with feeling, as be®ts a phenomenologist. Hence, to me, the interest of A Thousand Plateaus lies chie¯y in its liberating effect from a certain kind of academic discourse, one which belonged to the end phase of structuralism. I am not talking about Foucault here. I am referring to Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 47 [Claude] Le vi-Strauss, to [Louis] Althusser and so on. Here, again, liber- ation took on a kind of musical hue. For me, A Thousand Plateaus is also a form of, shall we say, `ritornello' (a recurring couplet or refrain in a folk song), as they called it themselves. So what I like about Deleuze and Guattari is their poetic language, a language which enables them to convey meanings which cannot be conveyed otherwise . . . JA: Do you mean that Deleuze and Guattari have a poetic understanding of the world, as opposed to a prosaic or an analytical one? PV: Yes, but even better, a `nomadological' understanding of the world ± they have that word of their own after all ± stemming from the fact that the world is constantly on the move. Today's world no longer has any kind of stability; it is shifting, straddling, gliding away all the time. Hence their ideas about superimposition, strata, layers and cross-currents. Ours is a world that is shifting, like the polar ice-cap, or `Continental Drift'. 18 Nomadology is thus an idea which is in total accordance with what I feel with regard to speed and deterritorialization. So, it is hardly surprising that we clearly agree on the theme of deterritorialization. The Gaze of the Machine JA: Your interest in the acceleration and automation of perception was further developed in The Vision Machine (1994b [1988]). What was your central aim in that book? . . . PV: There was, for me, this crucial development, of which nobody, once again, seemed aware of. Everybody was talking about Orwellian remote control and surveillance, with cameras all over the place, scanning the city. I agree, it is scary, the Orwell scenario, police cameras everywhere. But there is something worse, which gives its title to The Vision Machine: a device to see with. For it means that an inanimate object now can see for itself. A remote camera, for example, is for the use of a policeman or a security guard. There is someone behind it who does the viewing. Nothing special about that and nothing to worry about. But behind the vision machine there is nobody. There is only a micro-receiver, and a computer. A door can `recognize' me, as it were. This set up without a human spectator means that there is now vision without a gaze. And let me remind you that the research on the vision machine ± that is its of®cial name, I did not invent it ± was for the Cruise missile! Cruise missiles were equipped with detection radar and built-in mapping systems. They had maps charting their course towards Teheran or Leningrad. The device was constantly surveying the ground with radar and checking it against the map to make sure the missile was on course. No need for a vision machine here, the radar does the work. But, at the ®nal approach stage, a vision machine is necessary, in order to ®lm the target and choose the window to enter the building or the door to the bunker. These vision machines are an improvement on what are called 48 Theory, Culture & Society `shape recognition devices'. They are like those industrial machines that punch holes in metal sheets. They come equipped with a microchip that enables them to recognize the shape of the sheet they're supposed to punch holes in. This is termed contour recognition, which is not fully ¯edged vision yet. A further development has led to the devising of highly sophisticated vision machines for Cruise missiles. This means that Cruise missiles are endowed with a gaze even though it is an automatic one . . . JA: But all this is not being carried out for the machines themselves. It is being carried out by, or at least on behalf of, human beings, even if none are directly involved? . . . PV: No, nobody is there. Well, ultimately, yes, of course, but when you've got a camera, you make a ®lm, and then you view it. Here the object is looking for itself, the Cruise missile looks for itself. To me, something like this is an unheard of event. Imagine this table we are sitting around starting to look for itself! The Transplant Revolution JA: In The Art of the Motor (1995 [1993]) another shift seems to take place in your thinking. For, in that work, you focus on the invasion of the human body by technoscience. Could you explain your interest in what you call `the transplant revolution'? PV: Oh yes, this is the `Third Revolution'. In the realm of speed, the ®rst revolution was that of transportation, the invention of the steam engine, the combustion engine, the electrical motor, the jet engine and the rocket. The second revolution is the revolution of transmission, and it is happening right now in electronics, but it began with Marconi, radio and television. The third revolution, which is intimately linked to the minaturization of objects, is the transplantation revolution. By this term I mean that technology is becoming something physically assimilable, it is a kind of nourishment for the human race, through dynamic inserts, implants and so on. Here, I am not talking about implants such as silicon breasts, but dynamic implants like additional memory storage. What we see here is that science and technology aim for miniaturization in order to invade the human body. This is already true of the cardiac stimulator, a device I am especially interested in, since much of my work is about rhythms and speed, and the cardiac stimulator is what gives the rhythm to the life of a human patient. I am writing about that in my next book, and about the case of those twin sisters, which were prematurely born, and who had a cardiac stimulator implanted in them practically from birth: their life-rhythm, thus, is that of a machine, a stimulator. Here is an icon of the transplant revolution, of the human body being eaten up, being possessed by technology. Technology no longer spreads over the body of the territory, as with railways, motorways, bridges and large factories, but now enters the innards of the human body . . . Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 49 JA: And, in your view, this is a negative development? PV: It is absolutely scary. It means that the machine enters into the human. It is no longer a prosthesis, it is a new eugenicism in fact . . . JA: Nonetheless, this is a dif®cult position to maintain with someone whose life may depend upon the insertion of a cardiac stimulator? PV: Well, here again you see how the indisputable is always put forward in order to foster extremely dubious measures. It all starts by saying how great those things are for people who need them, and then comes the day when it is being forced upon people who don't need or want them. There lies the problem. JA: Is this the basis of your criticisms, in The Art of the Motor, (1995 [1993]) of the Australian performance artist Stelarc? PV: Yes. This is because Stelarc has opted for `eugenic suicide'. Instead of committing plain suicide, he does so by grafting himself into various gizmos, so that in the end, there will be no Stelarc left, pffuuut!, gone! Only a pure automaton will remain. That being said, his work is absolutely fascinating. JA: How does the transplant revolution relate to your concept of `endo- colonization'? PV: First, endo-colonization happens when a political power turns against its own people. I have lived through this during the Second World War. Totalitarian societies colonize their own people. You cannot understand Nazi Germany without accounting for the fact that it had been deprived of colonies and embarked on a programme of colonization at home. So Germany's colonization was a programme of colonizing the East (ostkoloni- zation), inclusive of Poland, Russia and France for that matter. But, by necessity, Germany's colonization was also a logic of endo-colonization, that is, to force upon its own population the fate that the British ± or the French ± had forced upon the Aboriginals in Australia or the blacks in South Africa, or, in other words, brute force. And, in the case of the transplant revolution, what takes place is an endo-colonization of the human body by technology. The human body is eaten up, invaded and controlled by technology . . . JA: Are you suggesting that the idea of the transplant revolution is identical to the concept of endo-colonization? PV: Yes, it is, but on the person, on the human body. There is no coloniz- ation without control of the body. We are here back to Foucault, evidently. Every time a country is being colonized, bodies are colonized. The body of the Negro, of the slave, of the deportee, of the inmate of the labour camp, is a 50 Theory, Culture & Society colonized body. Thus technology colonizes the world, through globalitarian- ism, as we have seen earlier, but it also colonizes bodies, their attitudes and behaviours. You need only to watch all those nerdy `internaut' types to see to what extent their behaviour is already being shaped by technology. So we have this technology of absorption, or as the Futurists used to say: man will be fed by technology, and technology will colonize human behaviour, just as television and the computer are doing, but this last form of colonization is a much more intimate, and a much more irresistible form. This is scary! It is neo-eugenicism, endo-technological eugenicism! Cyberfeminism JA: In Open Sky (1997 [1995]) you make reference to `cyberfeminism', a movement which some see as one of the most important theoretical and political developments in the past decade with regard to our understanding of the human body, technology and subjectivity. Could you describe your response to these developments? PV: Well, I have become very interested in the notion of `cybersexuality'. Even if it is still at the gimmick stage, it is a well-known fact that research is very advanced in the ®eld of `tele', `remote' or cybersexuality, especially in Japan. And thus, I am quite baf¯ed to see feminists ± far from opposing, like I do, the conditioning of the female body, or the male body for that matter ± projecting themselves as followers of cybersexuality. I cannot understand it. I cannot understand why opposing machismo does not also imply opposing cybersexuality. Do the cyberfeminists really believe that cybersexuality is going to liberate them? Come on. . . . Give me a break! JA: Are you arguing that feminists have much more to lose than they have to gain by embracing cybernetic technologies? PV: I believe that the question of technology is predicated upon the ques- tion of sexuality, be it male or female. If cyberfeminists do not want to understand the replacement of emotions by electrical impulses ± because that is what we are talking about ± the replacement of emotional involve- ment by electrical impulses, it is clear that they will never be liberated. Instead, they will become the servants of a new type of sexual control. Remote or tele-sexuality is by de®nition machine-controlled sexuality. JA: The American cyberfeminist, Donna Haraway (1985) has stated that she `would rather be a cyborg than a goddess'. What is your reaction to such claims? PV: (laughs ± out loud) I want to be neither a God nor a cyborg! I want to be man. It suf®ces to be a man ± or a woman. As I said before, `Man is the endpoint of the wonders of the universe'! Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 51 Georgio Agamben JA: One ®nal question. Are there any other cultural theorists writing today whose work you admire? PV: Hm, this is a dif®cult question to answer, but, yes, there is one book which I've just reviewed, and liked very, very much. It is Giorgio Agam- ben's Homo Sacer: le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue (1997). In ancient Roman law Homo Sacer means a human being whose life is considered worthless, meaning someone whom one could kill without committing homicide, and who is also un®t for sacri®cial purposes. Such a man stands condemned to summary execution. Killing him is no worse than squashing an insect. I must say I have a boundless admiration for Agamben. I was asked by several papers to give my choice of the best books of the year and I mentioned Homo Sacer. It is a remarkable book, and one with which I could not agree more. Translated by Patrice Riemens Notes 1. This interview was conducted on 27 November 1997 at the Ecole Spe ciale d'Architecture in Paris. I would like to thank Mike Featherstone for his encourage- ment, Ken Harrop for personal and institutional support, and Mark Little for practical help in setting up the interview. However, I am also heavily indebted to Magali Fowler for interpretation and to Rob Turner and Patrice Riemens for translating numerous letters, tapes and texts. Lastly, I am especially grateful to Paul Virilio for giving his time and energy so freely to this project. 2. See, for example, Kerrigan (1997: 14±15). 3. Gestalt psychology is a body of thought which springs from the experimental studies conducted by German psychologists like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka around 1910. Brie¯y, the Gestaltists argued that philosophical, artistic, scienti®c, perceptual and aesthetic con®gurations endowed with qualities as a whole could not be characterized simply as the totality of their parts. 4. `Hypermodernism' is a term I reserve for a forthcoming book on Virilio. 5. Here, Virilio is referring to Daniel Hale vy (1872±1962). Hale vy was an anti- clerical radical French historian and well-known `Dreyfusard'. 6. Paul Dirac and Werner Heisenberg were both instrumental in developing Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics in the early part of this century. For a recent and accessible introduction to this fascinating but complex ®eld see Milburn (1996). Henri Bergson (1859±1941) founded a philosophy based on `creative evolution' and, like Virilio, was much preoccupied with questions relating to the nature of knowledge, time and religion. See, for instance, Bergson (1910). 7. Abbe Pierre is a ®gure held in high regard in France for his championing of the poor. 8. See, inter alia, Marcel (1950) and Ellul (1965). 52 Theory, Culture & Society 9. Sir Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883. Eugenics is, of course, the `science' which purports to `improve' humanity through the application of genetic policies. 10. Robert Morris (1931± ) is an American minimalist sculptor and Land artist. However, in recent years he has turned increasingly to ®gurative painting. For a general overview that includes Morris' work, see, for example, Lucie-Smith (1995: 74±133). 11. Archigram is the name of an English utopian architectural group, founded in 1960 by Peter Cook (1974). It disbanded in 1975. Paulo Soleri (1919± ) is an Italian architect who, since the 1950s, has worked in the USA on alternative planning schemes at the Cosanti Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona (see Wall, 1971). The science ®ction inspired Metabolic Group in Japan was initiated by Kenzo Tange (see Kurokawa, 1972). 12. For a somewhat different explanation of the break up of Architecture Principe see, I. Scalbert and M. Mostafavi, `Interview with Claude Parent', in Johnston (1996: 49±58). 13. See, for instance, Mandelbrot (1977). 14. As indicated in the references below, Pure War (1997) is the title of a recently revised book-length interview with Virilio conducted by SylveÁ re Lotringer. The English edition of Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles (1990 [1978]) does not contain an Introduction. 15. Virilio is referring to Dery (1996). 16. `Info War' is the title of the Postscript in the new edition of Pure War (Virilio and Lotringer, 1997: 165±86). 17. See, for example, Der Derian (1992). 18. `Continental Drift' is the title of a chapter in Open Sky (1997 [1995]). References Agamben, G. (1997) Homo Sacer: le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue. Paris: Seuil. Baudrillard, J. (1983) Simulations, trans. P. Foss, P. Patton and P. Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e). Bergson, H. (1910 [1889]) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson. London: George Allen and Unwin. Cook, P. (1974) Archigram. London: Klotz. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987 [1980]) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Der Derian, J. (1992) Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War. Oxford: Black- well. Derrida, J. (1973 [1967]) Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. D.B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1976 [1967]) Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1984) `No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)', trans. C. Porter and P. Lewis, Diacritics 14 (summer): 20±31. Derrida, J. (1996 [1995]) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. E. Prenowitz. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 53 Dery, M. (1996) Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. New York: Grove Press. Ellul, J. (1965) The Technological Society. London: Jonathan Cape. Foucault, M. (1977 [1975]) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan. London: Penguin. Gibson, W. (1984) Neuromancer. London: Victor Gollancz. Haraway, D. (1985) `A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s', Socialist Review 80(2): 65±108. Johnston, P. (ed.) (1996) The Function of the Oblique: The Architecture of Claude Parent and Paul Virilio: 1963Ð1969, trans. P. Johnston. London: Architectural Association. Joly, F. (ed.) (1996) documenta. documents 1. Stuttgart: Cantz Verlag. Kerrigan, J. (1997) `When Eyesight is Fully Industrialised', London Review of Books 19(20): 14±15. Kurokawa, K. (1972) The Concept of Metabolism. Tokyo: Architectural Foundation. Lucie-Smith, E. (1995) Art Today. London: Phaidon Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984 [1979]) The Postmodern Condition, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mandelbrot, B. (1977) The Fractal Geometry of Nature. New York: Freeman. Marcel, G. (1950 [1949]) The Mystery of Being, vol. 1: Re¯ection and Mystery, trans. G.S. Fraser. London and Chicago: Harvill Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962 [1945]) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge. Milburn, G. (1996) Quantum Technology. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin. Venturi, R., D. Scott Brown and S. Izenour (1977) Learning From Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Virilio, P. (1986 [1977]) Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. M. Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e). Virilio, P. (1989a [1984]) War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. P. Camiller. London: Verso. Virilio, P. (1989b [1986]) `The Museum of Accidents', trans. Y. Leonard. Public 2: The Lunatic of One Idea: 81±5. Virilio, P. (1990 [1978]) Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles, trans. M. Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e). Virilio, P. (1991a [1980]) The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. P. Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e). Virilio, P. (1991b [1984]) The Lost Dimension, trans. D. Moshenberg. New York: Semiotext(e). Virilio, P. (1991c) L'E cran du desert. Paris: Galile e. Virilio, P. (1994a [1975]) Bunker Archeology, trans. G. Collins. New York: Prince- ton Architectural Press. Virilio, P. (1994b [1988]) The Vision Machine, trans. J. Rose. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press and British Film Institute, London. Virilio, P. (1995 [1993]) The Art of the Motor, trans. J. Rose. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 54 Theory, Culture & Society Virilio, P. (1997 [1995]) Open Sky, trans. J. Rose. London: Verso. Virilio, P. (1999 [1990]) Polar Inertia, trans. P. Camiller. London: Sage Publica- tions. Virilio, P. and Lotringer, S. (1997 [1983]) Pure War, revised edn, trans. M. Polizzotti, Postscript trans. B. O' Keeffe. New York: Semiotext(e). Wall, D. (1971) Visionary Cities: The Arcology of P.S. London: Banham. Paul Virilio is Director of the E cole Spe ciale d' Architecture in Paris. John Armitage teaches at the Division of Government & Politics, Uni- versity of Northumbria at Newcastle, United Kingdom. Armitage ± Interview with Virilio 55 work_4namjhchrvfz7gy4j24hiwgdzq ---- Entropic Design in Post-industrial Landscapes (embedded images) [anonymous]_ 14 March 17 Edinburgh Research Explorer Sand, Silt, Salt, Water Citation for published version: Moffitt, L 2017, 'Sand, Silt, Salt, Water: Entropy as a Lens for Design in Post-industrial Landscapes', Landscape Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2017.1363878 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1080/01426397.2017.1363878 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Peer reviewed version Published In: Landscape Research General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 06. Apr. 2021 https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2017.1363878 https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2017.1363878 https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/sand-silt-salt-water(0708db22-81ba-4f65-a3b0-944b5c445452).html Landscape Research, 2017 Correspondence Address: ----- [author name, contact address, telephone and email] © 2017 Landscape Research Group Ltd Sand, Silt, Salt, Water: Entropy as a Lens for Design in Post-industrial Landscapes ----- [author name] ----- [affiliation] ABSTRACT Entropy is a contemporary buzzword in landscape architecture used to describe a vast range of material, environmental, and social processes. Most uses of the word are loose appropriations of a very specific thermodynamic principle. This paper first explores some of the more common applications of entropy to describe post-industrial case study projects explored by Robert Smithson, Matthew Gandy, Gilles Clément, and John Beardsley. It then suggests that entropy is a lens for understanding particular challenges associated with designing in landscapes that bear the traces of past industrial occupation. It concludes by offering a design technique using physical models of salt crystallisation, sand dispersal, sedimentation, and water flow, for engaging with these themes as part of the design process. The paper suggests that viewing post-industrial sites through the lens of entropy raises productive design questions and that the indeterminacies of entropic processes are analogous to productive indeterminacies in the design process. KEY WORDS: Entropy, post-industrial landscapes, models, design research 1.0 A Jejune Experiment 1.1 Introduction Picture in your mind’s eye a sandbox divided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other. We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy. (Smithson, 1967, p. 74) So goes a ‘jejune experiment’ ‘to prove entropy’ by American land artist Robert Smithson in his essay ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’ (Smithson, 1967). Smithson’s monuments are the artefacts of past, present, and hints of future industrialisation seen along a walking excursion through Passaic, a former industrial city turned into a New York suburb. Like many post-industrial cities, Smithson suggests, ‘Passaic seems full of “holes” compared to New York City, which seems tightly packed and solid, and those holes in a sense are the monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures’ (Smithson, 1967, p. 72). Smithson’s entropy experiment describes the temporal and material ----- [author name] dialogue in many post-industrial cities between past industrial artefacts and their current remains overtaken by nature as they are subsumed by vegetation, eroded by water, and worn by weather. His interest in entropy as a process and as a conceptual framework mirrors broader application of entropic processes to lateral disciplines ranging from economics to ecology in the 1960s. Entropy, and more specifically, making entropy visible, is one of the defining features of Smithson’s work. Entropy has re-emerged as a buzzword in landscape architecture in relation to designing in post-industrial contexts. In the 2012 article, ‘Entropy by Design: Gilles Clément, Parc Henri Matisse and the Limits of Avant-garde Urbanism’, cultural geographer Matthew Gandy explores the tension between the ecological ambitions and the cultural reception of Clément’s Derborence Island, an inaccessible concrete wall containing undisturbed nature in Parc Henri Matisse in Lille, France. Gandy uses entropy as a metaphor for the exclusionary nature of the design and for a breakdown between scientific intent by designer and public reception. In ‘A Word for Landscape Architecture,’ art historian John Beardsley suggests ‘entropy’ is a narrative device that has the power to give increased agency to landscape architecture as a discipline. Using three post-industrial landscapes as precedents, Beardsley (2008) suggests that ‘it is this tension—between order and disorder, between organization and entropy—that provides much of the narrative power of contemporary landscape architecture’ (p. 196). A common thread in Smithson, Gandy, and Beardsley’s writing is use of the term entropy to describe processes within a particular context: post- industrial landscapes that are untended, scarred, derelict, or degraded. Close reading reveals that entropy is a useful lens for highlighting particular design challenges of working in post-industrial landscapes. After exploring three such design themes revealed through the lens of entropy—indeterminacy, a new aesthetic, and dialectics—the paper concludes by introducing a design technique using physical models that engages with these themes early in the design process. 1.2 Defining Entropy The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; all energy that will ever exist already exists. While tidy and predictable, this law does not take into account that energetic processes have temporal directionality. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Law of Entropy, introduces ‘time’s arrow’ to energetic processes. The Law of Entropy states that there is an energy penalty incurred in establishing equilibrium in a closed system; this penalty is often in the form of thermal energy or dissipated heat. The mid-nineteenth century discovery of this scientific law ushered in a new thermodynamic world view that differed from the mechanistic world view that preceded it. Luis Fernández-Galiano (2001) notes that this world-view initiated a fundamental paradigm shift in how space and time were conceived. He cites complexity theorist Edgar Morin as noting: …the universe inherited from Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and Laplace was a cold, frozen universe of celestial spheres, perpetual movements, implacable order, measurement, balance. It is necessary to exchange it for a warm universe with a burning cloud, balls of fire, irreversible movements, order mixed with disorder, waste, imbalance. (p. 37) Entropy and Design in Post-industrial Landscapes In this new world view, cyclical time and orderly space are replaced by irreversible time and continually degrading space. The 1960s marked a time of peak interest in applying understanding of entropic processes to lateral disciplines. Of particular significance were Rudolf Arnheim’s application of entropy to art, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s to economics, Ilya Prirogine and Isabelle Stengers’s to chemistry, Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon’s to information theory, and Howard and Eugene Odum’s to ecology (Fernández-Galiano, 2001; Ponte, 2011). The Odums’ application of cybernetics- based interpretations of entropy to ecology is perhaps most significant to landscape architecture (Lystra, 2014). Margot Lystra has explored how Ian McHarg applied the Odums’ interpretation of entropy to his highly influential ecological theories of design; McHarg used entropy as a counterpoint to ideas about fitness, “posing it (entropy) as a threat to the healthy, balanced functioning of a living system” (2014, p.25). Application of entropy to landscape architecture reflects a circuitous interdisciplinary journey from thermodynamics, to information theory, to landscape ecology, and finally to design. Entropy is a complex scientific law that has been so widely appropriated by non-scientific disciplines that its exact meaning has been dulled. Fernández-Galiano (2001) explores the many interpretations that the second law of thermodynamics has had on conceptions of space-making. He cautions that: …such generic use of the word…has given rise to the introduction of the concept of entropy in fields from economics to sociology, from psychology to art. However, the extended use of the concept has not been accompanied by a parallel deepening in its real sense; original rigor has gradually dispersed in a merely metaphorical use. (p. 59) It is misleading to describe all visual manifestations of disorder, waste, imbalance, or chaos as entropic. Frank Lambert (2002) notes that ‘over the years, popular authors have learned that scientists talked about entropy in terms of disorder, and thereby entropy has become a code word for the “scientific” interpretation of everything disorderly from drunken parties to dysfunctional personal relationships, and even to the decline of society’ (p. 187). While processes associated with waste, imbalance, and disequilibrium are often entropic at molecular scales, they are not necessarily entropic at the human (‘heat engine’) scales associated with classical thermodynamics. One example of literal thermodynamic entropy in post-industrial projects is the spontaneous mixing of fluids due to temperature differentials. Oxidisation of iron resulting in rust and photosynthetic chemical reactions of plant growth are examples of entropy at a molecular level. Any clutter, waste, or visual disorder, however, is not entropy, at least not at the scale of observation of the viewer. Given the scientific complexity and the circuitous disciplinary journey of ‘entropy’, it is not surprising that it is a term in which literal and metaphoric use are often unknowingly conflated. The intention of this paper is not to recentre literal thermodynamic entropy as a scientific principle to landscape design; this requires an unreasonable level of technical knowledge. Similarly, the intention is not to advocate for increasingly tenuous application and misapplications of the term that tightropes unknowingly between the literal and metaphoric. While entropy is a term whose ----- [author name] application often lacks clarity, that it is used to describe a range of conditions particular to post-industrial sites, suggests that it offers a productive lens for focusing on challenges associated with designing in this context. Therefore, my intention is to use Smithson, Gandy, and Beardsley’s writing to reveal some common applications of entropy in post-industrial projects and then to explore what issues these uses offer for understanding challenges associated with designing in post-industrial landscapes. 1.3 Methodology Methodologically, research operates in two related strands that adopt Christopher Frayling’s distinction between research into design and research through design (Frayling, 1993/4). Research into design adopts the conventions of the humanities model of researching history, theory, and aesthetics. In this case, analysis of the ways in which Smithson, Gandy, Clément, and Beardsley use entropy to describe particular conditions within post-industrial contexts operate as research into design. Robert Smithson’s work was selected because his writing on entropy in the 1970s provides a natural starting point for understanding how entropy figures into the temporal and material framing of early creative practice within degraded sites. Gandy and Beardsley’s papers were selected because both authors explicitly and recently use entropy to describe processes taking place particularly within post-industrial contexts. Research through design includes ‘materials research’, ‘development work’, and ‘action research’ (Frayling, 1993/4, p.5). The paper concludes by presenting a series of schematic physical models that operate as material research. The models—of sand, silt, salt, and water—explore the relationship between natural processes such as erosion, tidal ebbs and flows, and water evaporation and the relatively inert synthetic materials that contain and direct these processes. Videos of the models reveal ‘entropic’ processes at work and suggest a design process that raises parallel themes to those revealed through Smithson, Gandy, Clément, and Beardsley’s writing. Just as text-based research explores what design themes are raised by viewing design in post- industrial contexts through the lens of entropy, research through design explores how designers might actively engage with these themes early in the design process. 2.0 Entropy as a Lens 2.1 Robert Smithson: Irreversible Time and Material Juxtaposition For Robert Smithson, the land artist best known for Spiral Jetty, entropy was the ‘matrix that holds together the whole diverse body of his work’ (Flam, 1996, p. xix). His 1973 interview ‘Entropy Made Visible’ begins with a conventional description of entropy: Ok, we’ll begin with entropy. That’s a subject that has preoccupied me for some time. On the whole I would say entropy contradicts the usual notion of a Entropy and Design in Post-industrial Landscapes mechanistic world-view. In other words it’s a condition that’s irreversible, it’s a condition that’s moving towards a gradual equilibrium and it’s suggested in many ways. (in Flam, 1996, p. 301) Smithson elaborates on several examples of ‘entropy made visible,’ which generally include confrontations between the natural world and the manmade processes of industrialisation. Smithson’s examples vacillate between the quotidian, such as Humpty Dumpty’s fall and futile reconstruction, and the profound, such as the energy crisis in which the earth is understood as a closed system with finite resources that are being increasingly exhausted and accelerated through industrialisation (Smithson, 1973). Smithson’s art ‘makes entropy visible’ through temporal and synthetic/natural material juxtaposition. In ‘Asphalt Rundown,’ for example, a single dump truck releases asphalt down the eroded side of a steep hill. The asphalt coagulates across the hill’s topographic contours. The pour is filmed and lasts just over a minute; the timeframe of the pour is juxtaposed against the temporalities of the weathering away of eroded soil as well as what Smithson refers to as the slow ‘fluvial entropy’ of geological processes. ‘Asphalt Rundown’ is the most well-known of Smithson’s ‘Pour’ projects; others, using concrete and glue, reveal similar synthetic/natural material exchanges. Smithson used large-scale natural disasters and sites of industrial reclamation to illustrate similar disjuncted temporalities. He critiqued reclamation strategies that deny traces of their industrial past through wholesale erasure, suggesting these projects are ‘an attempt to recover a frontier or a wilderness that no longer exists. Here we have to accept the entropic situation and more or less learn how to reincorporate these things that seem ugly’ (Smithson, 1973, p. 307). Post-industrial landscapes were frequent sites of Smithson’s work, possibly because those sites where untended nature and obsolete industrial artefacts co-exist offer a visual counterpoint to the reclamation strategies of erasure he critiqued. In ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,’ Smithson used film and photography to capture this juxtaposition between industrial relics and natural processes, heightening natural/synthetic dialogues of weathering and change. His home state of New Jersey was a frequent site of investigation. Passaic, a city-turned-suburb close to Hoboken and Newark, across the Hudson River from New York City, has similar urban conditions to many post-industrial cities that show the traces of a more productive industrial past. These traces and the resultant spaces in-between are often particularly legible along historic infrastructural routes like rivers and rail lines. The route Smithson traverses and chronicles is littered with infrastructural relics, so-called ‘monuments’ that have been increasingly paved over, left unattended, and turned back to nature. The ‘monuments’ identified include a derelict walking bridge over the Passaic River, a pumping derrick, concrete highway abutments, and a parking lot covering a former rail line. Smithson’s work aestheticizes maximum entropy in post- industrial contexts by revealing often radical disjunction in rates of material change over time. His work ‘aspires to engage and reveal, even if they cannot contain, the whole of nature and the distant extremes of time’ (Flam, 1996, p. xiv). Smithson applies particular features of entropy—temporal irreversibility and tendencies towards equilibrium—to non-thermodynamic processes, such as material flow or vegetative growth adjacent to industrial relics, reflecting an intermixing of the literal with metaphor. ----- [author name] 2.2 Matthew Gandy and Gilles Clément: Social Breakdown In ‘Entropy by design: Gilles Clément, Parc Henri Matisse and the Limits to Avant- garde Urbanism’, cultural geographer Matthew Gandy explores the social, political and ecological implications of Clément’s Derborence Island, a patch of undisturbed nature bound by an eight-metre-high, inaccessible, raw concrete wall within Parc Henri Matisse in Lille, France. Parc Henri Matisse was commissioned as part of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)-masterplanned ‘Euralille’ project in an attempt to rebrand the post-industrial city through large-scale development (2013). Clément’s design creates an amorphous island of untended nature within a large tended public park. The effect of the contrast between contained ‘wild’ and maintained lawn is amplified by the exaggerated height of the intervention; below the vegetation lies a seven-meter-deep pile of rubble excavated during construction of an adjacent train station (Clément, 2006, p. 96). Derborence Island reflects Gilles Clément’s interest in the ecology of ‘fallow’ urban spaces. In this project, it is tempting to frame entropy in ecological terms by describing the contrasting dynamics between tended and untended nature or the tendencies of ecological systems towards dynamic equilibrium. However, while much has been written about the relationship between ecology and entropy, there is little consensus as to a precise application of the term. Isabelle Vranken, Jacques Baudry, Marc Aubinet, Marjolein Visser, and Jan Bogaert (2014) conducted a literature review of how the term entropy was applied in over 50 landscape ecology papers, noting that the term was widely used to describe a loose range of temporal and pattern-finding ecological processes, and that there was no consensus in precise application of the term. They identified two strands of interpretation: a literal thermodynamic application, and one rooted in cybernetics and information theory. The team concluded that ‘there is no confirmation that any thermodynamic interpretation of information theory is relevant. Information entropy is, therefore, merely a formal parallelism to thermodynamic entropy’ (Vranken et al., 2004, p. 4). Instead, Gandy uses entropy as a social metaphor. He focuses more on the cultural implications of making the design physically and intellectually inaccessible, suggesting that the project is socially entropic. Because the island is conceptually opaque, physically inaccessible, and not signposted, Gandy suggests the project is socially disruptive. He uses entropy as a metaphor to describe the exclusionary nature of the design and the interpretive rift between scientific intent by designer and public reception. Gandy (2013) says ‘there is an implicit didacticism and utilitarianism that runs through the discourse of landscape design, which presupposes the existence of a relationship between professional practice and public culture’ (p. 11), and suggests that Clément’s design breaks a social contract between the landscape architect and the public. Knowing whether to frame Clément’s work in relation to ecological or social entropy varies depending on whether the focus of the analysis is on the garden, the gardener, or the public. Clément’s writing about planetary gardens suggest an ecological reading of entropy because his gardening strategies are predicated on allowing naturally entropic processes to play out with little to no resistance through design intervention; he goes so far as to controversially advocate for the inclusion of non-native, persistent invasive species (Skinner, 2011). The gardener’s role (and Clément would likely suggest the landscape architect should act as a gardener) is Entropy and Design in Post-industrial Landscapes simply to read this ‘wilding’ landscape of energy dispersal and to minimally intervene as necessary to act as its steward. Clément’s view of the general public is less adversarial than Gandy might suggest. For Clément, the public is not necessarily prioritised as the key stakeholder in a project. He suggests “the role of humans in the environment is to understand how it functions and to promote its continued functioning…man is just one species among the great diversity of species in nature” (Clément in Borasi, 2006, p. 90). Instead, the public’s role is to be an active participant and observer of the natural taking place within the landscape. This may prove at times conceptually challenging, and is perhaps particularly so given the physical boundary around Derborence Island which prevents physical occupation. Ultimately for Clément, the public’s role is as active observer and occasional participant in the larger logics of the garden’s natural (and thermodynamic) progression; this is not an exclusionary view. Clément gardens tend towards entropy as the inevitable progression of natural processes, but his work is not culturally exclusive because it invites active occupation and engagement. 2.3 John Beardsley: A Value Shift Beardsley suggests that ‘it is this tension—between order and disorder, between organization and entropy—that provides much of the narrative power of contemporary landscape architecture’ (2008, p. 196). In ‘A Word for Landscape Architecture,’ Beardsley explores the entropic narrative of three precedents: Herbert Dreiseitl’s visible urban storm-water retention design for Renzo Piano’s Daimler Chrysler Potsdamer Platz; the large-scale remediation of Landscape Park Duisburg Nord by Peter Latz and Partners; and the restoration of the pre-Aztec landscape of artificial garden islands in Parque Ecologico Xochilmilco in Mexico City by Mario Schjetnan. While Beardsley’s description of entropy as ‘disorder or randomness in a system’ (p. 194) is an out-dated one, his writing is useful because he outlines some examples of entropy in conventional post-industrial project. Beardsley’s examples of entropy in post-industrial sites walk the tenuous tightrope between literal and metaphor described in section 1.3. In Parque Ecologico Xochilmilco, entropic processes include water pollution and eroding soils, which are juxtaposed against designed interventions such as walkways, walls, pergolas, and natural filtration systems that impose order by retaining, cleansing, filtering, and containing. As with Derborence Island, designated spaces are allowed to lie fallow or to succumb to inevitable processes caused by natural forces such as gravity, weathering, and other natural flows. Beardsley’s thesis reflects a value shift from understanding entropy historically as a threat to a contemporary understanding of it as an opportunity. Lystra (2014) notes that, according to Ian McHarg: …a system was inevitably entropic — but entropy was also a danger to the system’s stability, and stability was associated with wellbeing. The individual—whether mathematician, scientist, or landscape architect —had a ----- [author name] responsibility to facilitate order by constraining the entropic tendencies of the dynamic system. (Lystra, 2014, p. 75) In the 1960s, entropy was seen as disruptive and destabilizing to ecological processes, which were seen as tending towards equilibrium. Entropy was understood as a threat to a desired sense of stability. Beardsley’s re-framing of entropy as a productive narrative device suggests that it may play a much more productive and defining role in contemporary design practice; some of the broader design implications on this value-shift will be explored in the next section. 3.0 Focusing the Lens of Entropy Smithson, Gandy, Clément, and Beardsley reveal some common appropriations of entropy in post-industrial contexts. Smithson applies literal thermodynamic ideas about temporal directionality and energy dispersal to non-thermodynamic conditions. While Gandy uses entropy as a metaphor for describing a social breakdown between designer and public in Gilles Clement’s work, in fact Clement’s work reveals a nuanced interpretation of how both designer and public might steward and respect, rather than resist, entropic landscape processes. Beardsley uses an out-dated understanding of entropy as disorder or chaos, focusing on visual patterns found in nature rather than on the energetic processes that govern these patterns, but reveals a clear value shift in use of the word. Rather than attempting to forge a clearer definition of entropy that retains fidelity to its scientific origins or that disambiguates literal from metaphoric application, this section explores a related question: what makes entropy such an appealing term for describing conditions within post-industrial contexts? How might we focus this lens of entropy to address particular concerns of designing in post-industrial contexts? 3.1 Indeterminacy First, viewing sites through the lens of entropy raises questions about the agency and role of the designer. Entropic processes are spatially indeterminate, and they raise corresponding questions about design indeterminacy. This is not a new idea; Ignasi de Solà-Morales suggests in ‘Terrain Vague’ that design intervention in ‘terrain vague’ spaces should focus less on large-scale control and more on making the subtle tracings of forces and flows on the site legible (de Solà-Morales, 1995). More recently, Ian Hamilton Thompson (2013) suggests a number of designer classifications that define contemporary landscape architecture. Designing through the lens of entropy would certainly fall under the category of the ‘Indeterminists’, which is ‘built on the notion that we should not attempt to determine all the outcomes of our design interventions’ (p. 31). Hamilton-Thompson refers to James Corner’s ‘Terra Fluxus,’ which suggests that landscape architects ‘can set processes in motion but cannot, and indeed should not seek to control them in their entirety’ (2013, p. 31). Smithson and Clément’s work, in particular, reveal the indeterminacy of what Entropy and Design in Post-industrial Landscapes constitutes a project and of where authorship of that project starts and stops. Smithson’s work suggests that entropic processes can be made visible through a carefully constructed photograph, as is the case in ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,’ or through the introduction of one material system to another, as in the case of ‘Asphalt Rundown’ and his other ‘Pour’ projects. For Smithson, a subtle alteration to the landscape, a walking tour or journey, or the simple application of a new material to an existing natural condition all constituted projects; these acupunctural approaches redefined conventions of art practice at the time. Similarly, Gandy (2013) suggests, ‘central to Clément’s vision is a redefinition of the role of designer as a ‘guide’ to steer innate processes of landscape change and reintegrate the natural and the artificial’ (p. 15). Clément (2006) admits that he finds ‘that which is unpredictable, that which we cannot completely anticipate ‘very pleasing’ (p. 91). Spatial indeterminacy is an inevitable twin to authorial indeterminacy. ‘Entropic’ processes do not follow predictable geometries or patterns, and they often resist containment and the tight tolerances imposed by designers. In ‘Entropy Made Visible,’ Alison Sky describes a spatial blurring that results when multiple temporalities play out over time, noting that ‘Ruins melt and merge into new structures, and you get this marvellous and energetic juxtaposition occurring—with accident a large part of the whole process’ (1973, p. 304). This blurring of physical edges of the fallow in Clément’s work is particularly legible in Derborence Island. 3.2 A New Aesthetic When Smithson (1973) notes that ‘we have to accept the entropic situation and more or less learn how to reincorporate these things that seem ugly’ (in Flam, 1996, p. 307), he is suggesting that making entropy visible necessitates developing a new aesthetic, one that challenges conventional notions of natural beauty, the picturesque, and design formalism. Jack Flam (1996) notes that Smithson ‘renounced traditional notions of beauty and of the picturesque—and the nostalgia and sentimentality often associated with those values’ (p.xx). Smithson’s entropy is revealed through natural disasters, scars of industrialisation, messy materials, and natural deformations, all of which challenge conventional notions of the picturesque in design. In Smithson’s (1973) writing about Central Park, for example, he notes an interest in landscape ‘deformation’ and on refining understanding of often overlooked, messy processes and materials and processes such as mud, asphalt, and sedimentation (in Flam, 1996). Giovanna Borasi (2006) notes ‘Clément dissociates himself from historical models as well as aesthetic approaches’ (p. 40). Gandy suggests that Derborence Island is socially disruptive, using entropy as a metaphor for the exclusionary nature of the design; he notes that the opacity of Clément’s design breaks a social contract between the landscape architect and the public. Surely part of the breaking of this social contract is related to the fact that Clément’s design—nature that is untended, unruly, and overgrown within a raw, unrefined concrete wall—does not align with public expectations of what a public park should look like. Just as Smithson challenges conventional notions of the picturesque in the natural world, Clément (2006) suggests a value reappraisal of untended or fallow space ‘which is not worthless, but rather…. something positive, even a great asset… it is no longer a place abandoned to the rubbish and weeds, but becomes a sort of reservoir or ----- [author name] “biological time capsule” for the future’ (p. 92). When describing Derborence Island, Gandy (2013) refers to Yuriko Saito’s notion of ‘The Un-Scenic.’ Saito (1998) suggests that: a revolution in the aesthetics of nature often takes place when people start appreciating the parts of nature formerly regarded as aesthetically negative… We are witnessing another revolution in this country which started a century ago. Its primary purpose is to overcome the pictorial appreciation of the natural environment, a legacy left by the picturesque aesthetics. (p. 101) Saito explores the aesthetic value to ‘those environments devoid of effective pictorial composition, excitement, or amusement,’ (p. 101) focusing on aesthetics of natural disaster, dangerous species/events, unappealing conditions, and materials such as rot, dirt, and waste. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the broader history of such aesthetic theory, and the term ‘un-scenic’ is suggested here as an offering for future speculation as a way of refining a vocabulary for designing within the waste/degraded conditions of the post-industrial site. 3.3 Dialectics Intervening within the often vast territorial scales of scarred post-industrial urban landscapes raises questions about where industrial remains stop and nature begins; about how synthetic and natural materials are altered, worn and degraded; and about how these rates of change are amplified or resisted through design intervention. One consistent design theme in case study projects is that ‘entropic’ conditions are most legible in relation to extreme material and temporal juxtapositions. Interpretations of entropy varied in selected case study projects, but in all cases, entropy was amplified through contrasting timescales, often made legible through material contrast. The following contrasts are heightened in post-industrial contexts: weathering of synthetic relics of construction in relation to the weathering of natural materials and systems; the growth and maintenance of natural conditions that are well-tended against those that are un-tended; and the invisible chemical compositions of contaminated soils or water against those that are pristine. The rhetorical power of the dialectic was a tool used by Smithson (1973), most notably in his writing about Central Park, which he described as ‘the democratic dialectic between the sylvan and the industrial’ (in Flam, 1996, p. 162). Smithson ‘makes entropy visible’ through deliberate material and temporal juxtaposition, which allows for the measure of one rate of change against the backdrop of another. Gandy (2013) also notes that the Parc Henri Matisse ‘can be conceived as a “third object” produced dialectically from the antimony between the island of disordered nature at its core and the more closely controlled features that surround it’ (p. 12). Deliberate contrasts are evident throughout Derborence Island: the tended horizontal lawn of Parc Henri Matisse is set against the extreme extruded island of untended nature in Derborence Island; a conventionally accessible public park is set against an isolated inaccessible fragment; and a dynamic of extreme control and maintenance is offset by one of lack of control. On a more conventional level, for Beardsley, entropy is Entropy and Design in Post-industrial Landscapes heightened simply through the dialectic between ordered design systems and disorderly natural processes. 4.0 Model Experiments: Sand, Silt, Salt, Water Viewing post-industrial sites through the lens of entropy raises particular questions about design and spatial indeterminacy, about honing a new ‘un-scenic’ aesthetic, and about heightening material change over time through juxtaposition. If viewing sites through the lens of entropy offers a new contextual focus, what generative design technique(s) might facilitate exploration of this dialogue off-site as part of early design investigation? A return to Robert Smithson’s introductory ‘jejune experiment’ to ‘prove entropy’ provides a point of departure for answering this question. Smithson’s thought experiment uses a simple material palette—a sandbox divided between white and black sand—and applies a simple process—a child that mixes the sand by walking through both halves—to illustrate a basic principle: the irreversibility of natural processes, the directionality of time, and the tendency for the entropy of a system to increase over time. It is not difficult to translate this thought experiment to a basic experiment using physical models of material processes. Four case study models offer a nascent working method that draws from the insights explored in the last section. In each model, synthetic materials act as a vessel, scaffold, or substrate upon which active processes, of air or water flow or of material weathering, take place. A dialogue between natural and synthetic materials and rates of change between inert and active processes plays out in each model. Video as a time-based medium captures these exchanges, reinforcing their temporal irreversibility. The designer’s role in developing the model is to establish a backdrop upon which natural processes can take place; the exact nature of these processes and the inscriptions they leave, are only partially predictable. As such, the design process reflects the indeterminacies of the designer’s role and the resultant inscriptions reflect a spatial distribution that defies conventional formal aesthetics. In the first model, a basic wind tunnel approximates the distribution of an array of grey and white sand piles across a windswept landscape (Figure 1). As with more sophisticated wind tunnels, the basic wind tunnel operates as a vessel within which air movement is translated from turbulent to laminar flow, thus approximating wind flow along a vast unobstructed landscape. Six conical piles of sand, three white and three grey, are arranged upon the wind tunnel surface, reflecting an initial ordered condition that is then activated by air. The resultant dispersal mirrors Smithson’s sandbox observation that the final landscape will ‘not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy’ (Smithson, 1967, p. 74). The base of the wind tunnel provides a backdrop upon which air inscribes its only partially predictable course onto the sand piles. A split-screen video captures the gradual wearing away of the piles of sand in one screen and increased intermixing and dispersal of the sand in the other screen. ----- [author name] Figure 1. Sand: A basic wind tunnel distributes an orderly array of grey and white sand piles (left) across a windswept landscape (right). Source: video still by author. The second model consists of an acrylic box into which thinned plaster containing suspended graphite particles is rocked (Figure 2). The model simulates particulate movement around a series of angled fins. The particulates act as traces, or material indices, of flow patterns. Video captures eddies and flows of particulate movement. The model approximates the intermixing that takes place when two fluids of differing densities or material compositions meet, particularly in tidal conditions or other fluid ebbs and flows. Examples of such conditions include material erosion along coastal edges where soil or other debris is swept into the sea or at the outlet of fresh or contaminated water to salt water where fluids of different densities intermix. The model includes interventions that allow the designer to alter flow rates and to see how changing the orientation of fins channels, directs, or catches the water’s natural course. Altering the materiality of the fins, to steel (that would eventually rust) for example, would reveal further material rates of change. In the third model, absorbent tapered ‘towers’ are placed in a tray of concentrated saltwater (Figure 3). As the saline solution evaporates and the towers absorb water, increasingly intricate salt crystals aggregate. The model replicates exchanges that take place in highly saline environments in which evaporation facilitates salt colonisation. Robert Smithson’s earthwork sculpture ‘Spiral Jetty’ in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, can be read as a register both of water height and of salt growth as it has been increasingly encrusted with salt over time. Similar crystallisation takes place at finer levels within any saline evaporative environment and this process can be heightened or made more visible through materials that absorb and encourage salt growth. Similarly, some industrial or water desalination processes often have by-products of highly saline solution. The model suggests that design interventions might encourage crystalline growth in such contexts. Entropy and Design in Post-industrial Landscapes Figure 2. Silt: The sedimentation experiment simulates flow around physical obstructions and indicates eddies and flows of particulates over time. The particulates act as traces, or material indices, of these flow patterns. Source: video still by author. Figure 3. Salt: Tapered ‘towers’ in a tray of concentrated saltwater act as a substrate for salt crystal growth, offering insights for designing within saline environments where salt growth might be made visible as a natural process. Source: photo by author. A final model operates more as a ‘thick’ drawing or ‘thin’ model (Figure 4). In this experiment, a hybrid model/drawing is completed on a substrate that is half dry and half wet, allowing for a dialogue between a fixed ‘inert’ substrate which receives ink undisturbed and the only partially predictable flow of ink within a thin wet surface that is shifted and raised. This artefact registers flow patterns, and the technique could expand to test how alterations or obstructions to the paper substrate, varying degrees of fluidity, or the nibs of different ink drawing implements affect these patterns. The ----- [author name] drawing/model offers insights to designing in a way that accommodates absorption, inclination, porosity, and configuration of ground conditions of varying moisture levels. Figure 4. Water: A hybrid model/drawing is completed on a substrate that is half dry and half wet, allowing for a dialogue between a fixed ‘inert’ substrate which receives ink undisturbed, and the only partially predictable flow of ink within a thin wet surface that is raised and folded. Source: video still by author. In all four experiments, one can imagine design variations for testing these material dispersal tendencies. In the sedimentation study, the location and size of acrylic fins, the configuration of the container and the speed and directionality of flow could be altered. In the salt crystal study, the size, configuration, and materiality of the tapered legs and the amount of saline bath could be altered and tested. The testing of variations allows for the kind of call and response required for imaginative design engagement. Each of these processes are not entirely predictable and often results in blurry, indeterminate, and only partially predictable results, but they allow for active design engagement with the messy, ill-defined problems of the only partially known familiar in design exploration (Cross, 2007). Physical models have been relatively under-theorised in comparison to drawing in design discourse. This prioritisation traces back to the Victorian era when drawing was conducted within the clean, gentlemanly domain of the studio, whereas models were relegated to the messy material domain of the workshop (Starkey, 2005). It is the very messy materiality of models, however, that make them productive design tools for exploring entropic processes. The models evade conventional aesthetic descriptions because they introduce material processes—of erosion, sedimentation, and crystallisation—that are dispersed, shifting, and formally elusive. The models merge sensibilities from their dual disciplinary roots in design and environmental science, thus leading to a further indeterminacy of disciplinary roles. Rather than Entropy and Design in Post-industrial Landscapes being quantitative environmental models, however, they operate as qualitative tools that allow the designer to refine understanding of how designed interventions interact with the materials and timescales of natural processes. Entropy is a complex thermodynamic principle whose lateral disciplinary use over time has dulled its meaning. Projects explored by Smithson, Gandy, Clément, and Beardsley reveal some of the more pervasive literal and metaphoric applications of entropy in post-industrial landscapes. Rather than honing a more precise definition of entropy, these readings suggest that entropy provides a lens for viewing conditions particular to post-industrial contexts. Active physical models refocus the lens of entropy as material registrars of energetic processes. The dialogue between messy and erratic natural processes and more static artefacts of construction are analogous to many material and temporal dialogues present in ‘entropic’ post-industrial landscape projects. The slippage between model and world, between energetic process and material registrar, and between designing with intention and designing through accident opens up productive interpretive possibilities for designing within the expanding post-industrial landscapes of contemporary shrinking cities. ----- [author name] Acknowledgements I would like to thank colleagues at xxxx for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, two anonymous referees for feedback, and xxxx and xxx for assistance with draft editing. References Atkins, P. (2010). The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beardsley, J. (2008). A Word for Landscape Architecture. In W. Saunders (Ed.), Nature, Landscape and Building for Sustainability: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader (pp. 185-197). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Borasi, G. (2006). Between Nature and Environment: “In Truth, man is hard to accommodate” in In G. Borasi (Ed). Environ(ne)ment: Approaches for Tomorrow. Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture. Clément, G. (2006). Working with (and never against) Nature. In G. Borasi (Ed). Environ(ne)ment: Approaches for Tomorrow. Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture. Cross, N. (2007). Designerly Ways of Knowing. Basel: Birkhäuser GmbH. de Solà-Morales, I. (1995). Terrain Vague. In C. Davidson (Ed.) Anyplace (pp.118- 123). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fernández-Galiano, L. (2001). Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy (Illustrated ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Flam, J. (1996). Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Frayling, C. (1993/4). Research in Art and Design. Royal College of Art Research Papers, 1 (1), 1-5. Gandy, M. (2013). Entropy by design: Gilles Clément, Parc Henri Matisse and the Limits to Avant-garde Urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (1), 259-278. Lambert, F. (2002). Disorder—A Cracked Crutch for Supporting Entropy Discussions. Journal of Chemical Education, 79:2, pp.187-192. Lambert, F. (2002). Entropy is Simple, Qualitatively. Journal of Chemical Education, 79:10, pp.1241-1246. Lystra, M. (2014). McHarg's Entropy, Halprin's Chance: Representations of Cybemetic Change in 1960s Landscape Architecture. Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 34, 71-84. Ponte, A. (2011) Terrain. Architecture and Ideas: Entropic Territories, xi, pp. 4-5. Saito, Y. (1998). The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56:2, pp. 101-111. Skinner, J. (2011). Gardens of Resistance: Gilles Clément, New Poetics, and Future Landscapes. Qui Parle.1:2, pp. 259-274. Smithson, R. (1967). A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. In J. Flam (Ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (1996 Edition ed.) (pp. 68-74). Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Entropy and Design in Post-industrial Landscapes Smithson, R. (Director). (1969). Ashpalt Rundown [Motion Picture]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AmpyiR6kj8. Smithson, R., & Sky, A. (1973). Entropy Made Visible. In J. Flam (Ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (1996 Edition ed.) (pp. 301-309). Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Smithson, R. (1973). Frederick Law Olmstead and The Dialectical Landscape. In J. Flam (Ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (1996 Edition ed.) (pp.157- 171). Oakland, CA: University of California Press.   Starkey, B. (2005). Architectural models: material, intellectual, spiritual. Architectural Research Quaterly, 9, 265-272. Thompson, I. (2013). Essence-less Landscape Architecture and its Extended Family. Harvard Design Magazine, 36, 24-29. Vranken, I., Baudry, J., Aubinet, M., Visser, M., & Bogaert, J (2014). A review on the use of entropy in landscape ecology: heterogeneity, unpredictability, scale dependence and their links with thermodynamics. Landscape Ecology, 30 (1), 1-15. Figure Captions Figure 1. Sand: A basic wind tunnel distributes an orderly array of grey and white sand piles (left) across a windswept landscape (right). Source: video still by author. Figure 2. Silt: The sedimentation experiment simulates flow around physical obstructions and indicates eddies and flows of particulates over time. The particulates act as traces, or material indices, of these flow patterns. Source: video still by author. Figure 3. Salt: Tapered ‘towers’ in a tray of concentrated saltwater act as a substrate for salt crystal growth, offering insights for designing within saline environments where salt growth might be made visible as a natural process. Source: photo by author.Source: photo by author. Figure 4. Water: A hybrid model/drawing is completed on a substrate that is half dry and half wet, allowing for a dialogue between a fixed ‘inert’ substrate which receives ink undisturbed, and the only partially predictable flow of ink within a thin wet surface that is raised and folded. Source: video still by author. work_3yc54oxe5vdnpi3vbhvzbv4d44 ---- Microsoft Word - Bruce Reynolds DVA .docx ! ! The Persistence of Relief Relief Sculpture in Contemporary Art Bruce Reynolds September 2018 Candidate for a Doctorate of Visual Art Queensland College of Art, AEL, Griffith University Supervised by Dr Julie Fragar and Dr Rosemary Hawker All photographs by the author unless otherwise noted. ! ! Submitted in Partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Visual Arts. This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself. 11th September, 2018 ! III! Acknowledgements Thank you to my supervisors, Dr. Julie Fragar and Dr. Rosemary Hawker who generously enabled me to benefit from their invaluable experience. Thank you to Isabella Reynolds and Genevieve Reynolds and Marian Drew for their patience and support. Thank you to all of the artists and students of art who continue to inspire and to The British School at Rome. ! IV! Abstract Relief sculpture can be understood as a form in two and a half dimensions, between drawing or painting and sculpture. Relief is also a renewed area of artistic practice, long in decline and marginalized in the 20th Century. It engages with the archaic and the physical and as such is counterpoint to the proliferation of disembodied digital images in contemporary culture. Relief is an art form well suited to re-examining our past from under the shadow of sculpture and painting, not least because it is characterised by ambiguity and dualism and the compatibility of its formal character with themes of conflict and antiquity. This paper discusses the persistence and value of relief sculpture in the 21st Century and analyses the historical dualities of relief and how these dualities resonate in contemporary art. I argue that the scattered presence of relief sculpture in contemporary art no longer designates a strict formal discipline but rather expresses both disjecta membra (fracturing) and a transitional zone in visual arts. Contemporary relief is analysed through the work of artists who have explored dualities within this transitional space: works by Thomas Houseago, Anselm Kiefer, William Kentridge and Matthew Monahan, and through key works from my own studio research, including publically sited works from 2015 to 2018. This paper explores how the transitional zone of contemporary relief echoes the duality inherent in historical (classical) relief. It examines this zone with the superimposition of dualities that include the physical and the image, the archaic and the contemporary. Relief is characterized by dialectics, and the coexistence, reconciliation or synthesis of opposites. It is a manifestation of Edward Soja’s thirdspace (1996) —a shared response or methexis synthesizing history with sensorial and conceptual (or physical and imaginary) space. The research draws from Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) and his observations and historical perspective across art forms, arguing that the nature and fate of genres inform understandings of relief sculpture in contemporary art. Perspectives of time and space as described in Jacques Ranciere’s episodic approach to history are complemented by Henri Lefebvre’s and Edward Soja’s subsequent analysis of space. Other philosophers and historians referenced include Walter Pater (1839 to 1894) and his biographer Lene Ostermark-Johansen who form a part of the historical perspective on relief and its position in art. Adolph von ! V! Hildebrandt (1847-1921) and Rosalind Krauss assist in comparing relief before and after cubism, which I argue is critical in understanding relief’s renewal through its revised approach to materials coupled to spatial enquiry. ! VI! Table of Contents Abstract Preface A Revised Direction Introduction Chapter 1 Previously in Relief Sculpture. Genre Loses Definition This Century Chapter 2 Dualities as Characteristics of Relief Locating Relief in Art The Archaic and the Contemporary: Creation and Destruction The Recent Work of William Kentridge and Matthew Monahan The Pictorial and the Physical The Separation of Image and Object The Recent Work of Anselm Kiefer and Thomas Houseago Compressed and Uncompressed Spaces Chapter 3 Reflections on Studio Research Earlier Related Work Three Vessels Carving as Drawing and Form From Ornament Response to The Eighteenth Century Narrative and Spolia Outside: Covalent Bond, Confluence and Oceania Frieze Saturation Point. Conclusion List of Illustrations List of works organised by exhibition References ! VII! Preface: This Doctoral research was preceded by research in Dunhuang, northwest China, in London, Venice and at the British School in Rome, where the project in this form was conceived. It evolved from considerations of motifs and forms in architecture, sculpture, painting and carpets. I considered this vast area synonymous with trade, contestation, the uncertain— and crucially, the in-between.1 My interest then moved from what lies between the east and west and the traffic between the archaic and contemporary in order to contain and focus overlapping concerns. I began to concentrate on a specific form of work that lies between the two and three dimensional as the encapsulation of these broader cultural dualities and proceeded to work within the material and technical limitations of gypsum-based casting in relief. The archaic (by which I simply mean the very old) resonates in recent conflict in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Tibet where past cultures are disseminated or destroyed in the initiation of new political imperatives. Recent works by artists including Matthew Monahan and Thomas Houseago reflect shared interest in the past and in themes relating to the contradiction, paradox and polarity indicated in such conflicts. The work I have made during my candidature extends more than three decades of studio based research on the nature of images and their relationship with objects and materiality. The focus of this research—the value of relief to contemporary art—has provided a useful framework for reflecting on the key concerns of my studio practice as a whole, and in identifying my specific contribution to this area. Documentation of work leading up to this research can be viewed online at BruceReynolds.com.au and the earlier archive, BruceReynolds.net.au . 1 Conflict has historically been followed or accompanied by trade, religious and other forms of cultural exchange. On Artist and corporate trader Xu Zhen deals with this. He accumulated copies of ancient work from Dunhuang and Rome and showed Eternity Buddha in Nirvana 2018 at the NGV Triennial. He previously exhibited his version of the Parthenon pediment made by Swiss sculpture company Kunst Giesserie AG who also produced work for Rudolf Stingel. see Black Relief 2012 chapter two. See http://www.afr.com/lifestyle/xu-zhen-is-the-steve-jobs-of-the-art-world-20171129-gzvk9n ! ! 1! Introduction Historically, relief has been defined as a principally carved or cast form, frequently associated with the monumental and memorial. Its revision and development continue in the face of new technologies. For the purposes of this research, bas-relief, high relief and relief sculpture will be referred to as relief. I argue that those traditional terms lead, at times, to inappropriate categorization and misleading associations based on the understanding of early techniques employed. Relief, I shall argue, is most significantly characterized by dualities— pairs of coexistent and interactive characteristics; what critic and curator Guy Brett calls “pairs of opposites that can’t exist without each other”. 2 Collectively, contemporary works in relief are identified in this research as the confluence of what occurs between several poles or dualities and are no longer described as a genre or discipline. Advancing from Brett’s interpretation, I examine prominent dualities through theoretical and studio-based examples. Central to my approach, relief— rather than simply bringing separate elements into proximity, the side-by-side placement of opposites or presenting a form in the round— is the formal incorporation of the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional. The surface of relief can therefore be regarded as the frontier of the art/life boundary. It represents the physical extension of the pictorial into the material world. Simultaneously, this extended pictorial plane is wedded with the wall—attached to an architectural and social context in a coexistence of spatial types. Relief is an ancient form that has endured into the 21stcentury yet is generally unacknowledged in visual art discourse. It has become an uncommon term. However, prominent contemporary artists, (such as Thomas Houseago, William Kentridge, Anselm Kiefer and Matthew Monahan), arriving from diverse positions, converge in the formal territory that relief describes; where their dynamic engagement addresses themes both distinct and shared. This research therefore constitutes an important contribution to the field, investigating relief’s renewed and integral role within contemporary art. Further, I argue that relief changed in utility and conception after its decline in significance in the previous two centuries moving from a physical and deeply rooted subservience to architecture 3 to a diversity of more 2!Guy Brett Between Work and World in Modern Sculpture Reader. Ed. Jon Wood David Hulks and Alex Potts 485. (Leeds and Los Angeles: Henry Moore Foundation and Getty Publications, 2012) ! 3!The notable exception being the spiral relief tower! ! 2! autonomous forms in reconsidered spaces.4 Relief is altered in perception and execution. While I have described relief as between and arbitrating painting and sculpture, the examination of relief that follows is largely independent of discourse on painting and to a lesser extent, independent of sculpture in order to locate this neglected area more precisely.5 I outline how relief has become a zone of art making rather than a discipline, where specific formal and thematic concerns meet and resonate with the content and subjects engaged by the artists examined, (where artists exploit relief’s character in accordance with their thematic interests or those interests lead to this area of formal concerns perhaps due to its comparatively flexible, extended dimensionality or indeed its compressed and restricted nature). I argue that the character of relief reflects the works content and vice versa.6 This view of relief is informed by its historical use and discussed with reference to recent works where duality and opposites are seen to recur and overlap. It also suggests a model for thinking more broadly about contemporary art. Discussion of the archaic and contemporary is closely aligned with that of creation and destruction in chapter two and followed by the duality of the image and object—the pictorial and the physical. Relief’s recurrence, persistence and occasional prominence in art this century is indicative of its relevance and efficacy in exploring the relationship between abstract, physical and social spaces and poses questions for those interested in taxonomies of the interdisciplinary and cross disciplinary or hybrid. The first chapter Previously in Relief Sculpture, sketches relief’s widespread use in prehistory: How it was associated with authority and proclamation from Nineveh to Rome and beyond, how it transmitted figurative sculpture’s achievements from Rome to August Rodin,7 how it peaked in technical and artistic achievement in Renaissance Italy8 and declined to eventually be seen as an apology for sculpture in the nineteenth century. Aesthetes, such as Walter Pater, 4!including social and pictorial spaces.! 5 While this has been the case historically, recent texts rarely refer to relief as independent of sculpture. See Shape of things – Un Monumental, New Museum 2011. 6!For example, Kiefer’s disruption of pictorial language with appended objects echoes his view of history and philosophy while conforming to the spatial language of relief.! 7!Nicola Pisano, cited by Henri Moore as the father of Modern sculpture, was particularly important in reviving the Roman achievements in relief through his study of sarcophagi in Pisa.! 8!See Donal Cooper and Marika Leino’s. Depth of field: relief sculpture in Renaissance Italy. Bern, Switzerland 2007 and William Dunning’s The Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991! ! 3! with their distaste for the physical, viewed relief as inferior to painting and superior to sculpture, sharing the latter’s fate as memorializing and moribund. 9 Influential 19th century sculptor and theorist, Adolf von Hildebrand, indirectly contributes to relief’s reinvention by Pablo Picasso and other Cubists as a tool to re-examine vision and perspective.10 As a practitioner, his comprehensive formal analysis accounted for an informed if arcane approach to the evaluation of art and its popularity offered a focus point for discourse in a climate of continuing change. Relief’s persistence into this century, now with diverse approaches to its function and to materials, is subsequently recognized as a transitional zone rather than as the earlier, discrete art form exemplified by the Frieze of Parnassus in London in 1872.11 Many contemporary artists with diverse media interests share an interest in the archaic. This is argued with reference to ideas from Rosalind Krauss, Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Ranciere and evidenced in the range of works discussed. A tradition from the Parthenon to Rodin marks two millennia of figuration. Representation is fundamental to the nature of relief and warrants more comment than is possible here. 12 I confine the research to considering the representational space used in relief (Chapter 4), rather than providing an analysis of representation and figuration per se. In Chapter 2 Dualities as Characteristics of Relief, duality is defined and discussed as a strategy for analysis and put into the context of a model with reference to the nexus of specific dualities. Connections are made between dualities observed historically and those that are common to 9!Less grossly material than sculpture; more transformed and textual but less so than painting. 10!There is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest a direct link via Hildebrand’s popular “Problem of form in Painting and Sculpture” (published in French in 1903, English in 1907) where an explanation of planar space describes cubism accurately if inadvertently. This was sufficient to cause Ernst Gombrich to write to Picasso’s dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who’s denial of such an influence somehow adds to its credibility, given Picasso’s confessed extreme contrariness in those years— an attitude shared with the anarchist Carl Einstein who like Picasso sought a new, ground zero approach to art. It would also explain Braque’s refusal to disclose what he intimated was a banal source of cubism. See “The back plane and the front plane” and “The unimportance of the actual depth” page 88 11 Designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott 12 See Donal Cooper and Marika Leino’s. Depth of field: relief sculpture in Renaissance Italy. Bern, Switzerland 2007 and William Dunning’s The Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991 for the foundational material on this topic which complements Adolf von Hildebrand’s influencial The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture 1907 which is likely to have caused the focus on spatial perception to eventuate in Cubism. ! 4! the artists discussed in the second part of the Chapter. This addresses the question of why this implicit tension between opposites has been compelling for my studio research that follows in the final chapter. In order to further assess the significance of relief in contemporary art, the characteristics established here are acknowledged by linking the Archaic and Contemporary with Creation and Destruction. Relief is no longer restricted to stone, bronze and ivory. It is a formal and conceptual approach to representation. From ancient petroglyphs through to the 18th and 19th centuries, it was dominated by carving, modelling and casting. Relief works have more recently used software driven processes and a wide range of materials. I will also argue that the archaic has special significance for contemporary artists using relief and that the theme of creation and destruction is one of several dualities that collectively resonate to characterize relief in the work of Kentridge and Monahan. Artists reflect on inequity, conflict and the nature of change both now and in history. For some, the past and present often find equivalence in the physicality of binary processes: modelled, carved or cast, reductive or additive. The simultaneity of destruction and creation is increasingly visible in art and elsewhere. In the section that follows on The Pictorial and the Physical, relief is discussed as sitting between drawing and sculpture, between two-dimensional or pictorial space and three-dimensional, sculptural space. The physical and social context represents a third type of space in in which relief exists. Thus the three types of space that occur in relief works can be identified as the pictorial, the physical and the social. Relief operates as a social and political indicator of how a space is intended to function. Pictorial and physical spaces coexist in works while representational space is compressed in depth, represented in a much higher ratio than width and height. A painting has little or no depth and a sculpture may deploy various ratios but are generally equal, without distortion or compression but relief’s measured or implied reduction in dimension from front to back constitutes a compressed, translation of space. Of course, not all reliefs are representational, however, like painting, relief has a history of viewing conventions around representation and transformation. In the discussion of the physical, the materials and processes of realization are also considered with reference to Anselm Kiefer and Thomas Houseago. ! 5! Philosophers Jacques Ranciere and Henri Lefebvre take a wide and long view across art forms and history and have informed an understanding that incorporates Edward Soja’s thirdspace, itself a clarification of aspects of Lefebvre’s Production of Space.13A confluence of Ranciere’s episodic view and thirdspace via Lefebvre, offers a way of considering the zone of relief that is defined by all of its users over time—the artists, and the respondent context of their works. The third chapter Reflections on Studio Research describes the role of earlier work and the studio methodology I have used during my candidature. I summarize the major stages of research gathered in three exhibitions in Sydney and Brisbane and in three stages of publically installed works commissioned by Cox Architects. The Conclusion reflects further on the overall research and indicate the trajectories of the research including the changing nature of context for relief works, the oscillation of contemporary artists practices between media and the increasing importance of the past in the future as exemplified by relief. Several questions emerge. The illustrations (photographs) in the paper form part of the exegesis and are residual elements of quantitative as well as qualitative research. The diagrams included formed part of evolving and clarifying ideas expressed in the text. 13 Lefebvre, Henri Production of Space Blackwell 1991 Soja, Edward Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1996 ! ! 6! Chapter 1 Previously in Relief Sculpture “The substantial element of genres and forms has its locus in the historical needs of their materials.” 14 observes Adorno in Aesthetic Theory. This material genesis determined relief’s course in history. The origin of relief as a genre in carved form was influenced and largely determined by the nature of stone— geology—site. This is observable in preserved sites around the world, throughout millennia. Dependency on available materials, techniques, the organization of labour and the need or otherwise for durability all interdependently play roles. The Murujuga petroglyphs in Western Australia, estimated to be up to 37,000 years old included the world’s oldest known depiction of a human face (recently destroyed) make this clear.15 The economy of line expressing pictographically reduced imagery reflects the hardness of the stone and the level of visibility in relation to the stones colour, texture and illumination as well as the petroglyphers’ desire for durability. That material imperative however, changed over time. Adorno further stated, that “In antiquity, the ontological view of art, on which genre aesthetics is based, was part of aesthetic pragmatism in a fashion that is now scarcely imaginable.”16 This pragmatism would return to relief in the 20th century. Monuments, Portals, panels, shields, medallions, pediments, friezes and sarcophagi are principal forms associated with stone and metal relief work since the iron age that varies in depth and technique but consistently presents a compressed space between the two- 14!Theodore Adorno Aesthetic theory pg199 Art forms and genres have been subjected to macro and micro categorizations of media, subject and forms that may overlap or be contradictory. From a background in music, Theodore Adorno references the fugue and the rondo among genres and forms from drama, literature, music and visual arts. Relief can be similarly understood as a genre or category of art based on a formal tradition originating in materiality. It is in this sense that I refer to relief as a genre or form rather than as a reference to subject or style. 15 Submission 13 to the Australian Government Senate Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Rock Art of the Burrup Peninsula Black, J. L., MacLeod I. D. and Smith B. W. (2017). Theoretical effects of industrial emissions on colour change at rock art sites on Burrup Peninsula, Western Australia. Submitted 8 November 2016: Journal of Archaeological Science Reports. Paradoxically, the petroglyphs at Burrup are simultaneously under threat of destruction and consideration for World Heritage listing. 16!Theodore Adorno Aesthetic theory ! ! 7! dimensional and the three-dimensional. To clarify this, an object in the round, in three dimensions, has a ratio of height to width to depth of 1:1:1 and when represented in relief the depth ratio is reduced. For example in a landscape with figures foregrounded, the ratio might become 1:1:100 so as to accommodate distance within the shallow space of the relief object. The background is commonly most compressed and the foreground figures least. 17 This manner of working in relief has declined and undergone numerous reinventions since the Murujuga petroglyphs were made. Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Indochinese relief works are widely studied and comprehensively discussed elsewhere. So too are the key works that represent relief’s highlights up to the 19th century, at which time its role in art diminished. Ara Pacis and Trajan’s Column in Rome, 18 the works of Nicola Pisano (1220-1284), 19 Lorenzo Ghiberti (c.1378 –1455), Donatello (Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi c.1386 – 1466),20 Antonio Canova (1757-1822)21 are among such works. Relief has also varied through time according to its social imperatives. In antiquity, a function of relief sculpture was to proclaim and convince in monumental form, to memorialize, make real and to promise or render in law.22 Powerful regimes commissioned massive works in living rock where circumstance and means coincided, such as in the necropolis Naqsh-e Rustam (550–330 BCE) and the temples of Abu Simbel (13th century BCE). Continuing to associate stone with endurance and the afterlife, Greek and Roman sarcophagi designs depicted complex hunting or battles scenes with dozens of figures. The Portonaccio Sarcophagus (180–190 CE) and the Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus, in Rome and others collected in Campo 17!Ghiberti and Donatello reduced the depth of backgrounds to an inscribed surface while foreground figures retain their three dimensional form. ! 18 See Eugenie Strong’s volumes Roman Sculpture from Augustus to Constantine 1907 and Art in Ancient Rome 1929 and on relief’s highest point and its types of implied space see ‘Depth of Field: Relief Sculpture in Renaissance Italy ed. Donal Cooper 2007’. 19 Henry Moore referred to Nicola Pisano as the father of modern sculpture, see Henry Moore’s Henry Moore Writings and Conversations 20 Donatello and “his greatest rival” Ghiberti feature prominently in Donal Cooper’s Depth of Field. Relief Sculpture in Renaissance Italy. 2007 21 See R. Krauss Passages in Modern Sculpture!! ! 22!Examples include the Stele of Hammurabi (c. 1792-1750 BCE) a code of law commissioned by Hammurabi in Babylon, Ashurnasirpal II holding the Assyrian instruments of power, and triumphal arches, columns and the Ara Pacis in Rome, commissioned by the Senate to celebrate the emperor Augustus's victorious return from war. ! ! 8! Santo in Pisa are examples that preserved achievements in figurative, narrative stone carving that were taken up by Nicola Pisano. In metal, the shield, the cuirass (breast plate armour), and coinage all used relief with varying combinations of gravitas, ceremony, symbolism and decoration in their functions. This functionality dependency on materials and technique can be followed into the Italian Renaissance. Fig.1 left: Portonaccio Sarcophagus (Rome 2nd century) in the Palazzo Massimo, Rome. right: Nicola Pisano Pulpit in Sienna (1268). Increasing trade and patronage contributed to formal refinement in relief through advances in perspective and casting technique leading up to the 15th century, during the lives of Lorenzo Ghiberti and his student Donatello who brought relief sculpture to virtuosic heights of expression. Their works exemplifies the mastery of material control where bronze complies with intricately designed narrative and spatial schemes in shallow relief (rilievo schiacciato). 23 This mastery of material and technique extended through the baroque interior in a comprehensive orchestration of stones, plaster, bronze, gold, silver and paint uniting the 23!see Donal Cooper’s Depth of Field. Relief Sculpture in Renaissance Italy. 2007 ! ! 9! pictorial and physical worlds, the representational and the real, the viewer and the divine.24 In the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria DellaVittoria, Bernini’s bel composto —his promotion of the unity of art forms—is clear from Saint Teresa’s illuminating ocular lantern above, to her feet below and the adjacent relief portraits of patron witnesses. She is surrounded by at least ten types of marble and contained within an elliptical— that is a compressed circular space— with coffered dome and lantern to match. The whole chapel has been reduced in depth while occupying real space in the same manner as a relief panel. This design is used for Sant’Andrea al Quirinale (1661-1670) where those who enter find themselves confronted by and then occupying this theatrical, geometrically transformative space, the result of a continuum of orchestrated disciplines. Fig.2 left: Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1652) and adjacent wall relief of Cornaro Portraits in Santa Maria DellaVittoria. right: detail of two and three dimensional media in a chapel of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale 1670 Rome. Marble relief panels occupying the focal point above church altars in Rome continued into the 18th century. Alessandro Algardi (1598-1664) and Filipo Della Valle (1697-1768) pushed 24 I have visited Sant'Andrea del Quirinale (1661-1670) numerous times; during its restoration in 2013 and afterwards in 2017. My observations no doubt follow those of many others. Lorenzo Bernini, typically quiet regarding his achievements, was reputedly pleased with Sant’Andrea. (see page 5 of Sarah Watson’s Martyrdom in the Oeuvre of Gianlorenzo Bernini: Evolution and Resolution of a Theme within San’Andrea al Quirinale in which she recounts Bernini’s son Domineco’s recollections and discusses the “wholeness” and “ fusion of all disciplines…” in the church). ! 10! complex pictorial relief towards sculpture in the round and provided influential examples in St. Peters in Rome.25 Fig.3 left: Alessandro Algardi St. Leo Repulsing Attila 1646 centre: Filipo Della Valle Annunciation 1750 right: Nicola Salvi Trevi Fountain 1762 with relief panels above the statues of Abundance and Sobriety Under Papal patronage, relief continued to reflect technical, political and institutional power and continued its grave and elevated themes, its narratives and fine material skills with pioneering perspectival illusion. Where relief remained outside, it advertised patronage and the longevity of power as seen in the ubiquitous papal and family emblems of the Pamphilj, Corsini, Barberini and Chigi that overlook the streets of Rome. An example designed by Bernini, caps the Porta del Popolo. Antonio Canova, Bertel Thorwaldsen and François Rude maintained a classical approach to relief leading up to August Rodin’s Gates of Hell 1880. Gradually, relief became less independently significant in its position between the two- dimensional, the sculptural and the architectural, while seamless multi media spectacles such as the Trevi Fountain continued to be realized across Europe and expanded into landscape designs and events.26 25!St Leo repulsing Attila" 1646 by Alessandro Algardi!is an example in Saint Peters demonstrating a union of carving and pictorial virtuosity.! ! 26!The architectural façade forming a low relief backdrop for the Trevi Fountain sculptures and water, displays two reliefs and conforms to the earlier description of spatial compression in the manner of a theatrical stage.! ! 11! Fig.4 left: The Doria Pamphilj crest. right: inner façade of the Porta del Popolo designed by Bernini for Pope Alexander VII of the Chigi family, featuring his insignia of six mountains with a star above. The insignia is similar in size to the portal below. Broad political and intellectual developments continued to affect relief’s position in the arts. The industrial revolution influenced changes in sculptural production. Steam power transformed the marble quarry at Carrara, foundries multiplied. Aesthetics in Europe and Britain, the emerging discourse on art and beauty, was another agent of change. Excavations at Herculanum and Pompeii, Egypt and Greece fuelled the birth of art history. Johannn Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art (1764) subsequently informed Walter Pater, Jacques Ranciere and much writing between. Relief was subject to the reappraisal of social and artistic hierarchies. Joseph Addison (1672-1719) proposed “a new principle of pleasure, which is nothing else but the action of the mind, which compares the ideas that arise from [the representation], with the ideas that arise from the objects themselves”.27 This precedent anticipated a changing hierarchy of materials based largely on cost. Patrons (and their budgets) influenced materials used by artists and the techniques tied to those materials. As a result, in relief preference shifted to bronze over marble by the late 19th century. 27 The Spectator; with notes volume II. 1826 New York. See also https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetics-18th-british/ ! 12! Fig. 5 19th century sandstone relief in Australia. left Royal coat of arms designed by J.J.Clarke (1875) Government House Melbourne centre: Sydney Mortuary Railway Chapel. right: Art Gallery of New South Wales façade designed (1897) with the last commissioned relief Augustus at Nimes (1931) by Sir William Reid Dick. Genre Loses Definition By the nineteenth century, relief had become predominately associated with monuments and decoration in a revisionist manner.28 It had slipped from Donatello’s high art achievement and sculpture too, now came in for severe criticism. "Why is Sculpture Boring?" Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) had asked in 1846. In 1859 he observed that “the bas-relief is already a lie, that is to say, a step taken in the direction of a more civilized art”. Théophile Gautier declared the death of sculpture in 1855 comparing it to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. “Sculpture, I knew was a dead art; buried centuries deep out of sight, with no angel keeping watch...”. 29 These declarations were symptomatic of the low regard for both relief and sculpture in the nineteenth century. 30 According to Gautier, relief’s status below painting but above sculpture partly originated in the aesthete’s distaste for a physical, apish materiality that occupied the same space as the viewer. Gautier was also implying that the love affair with antiquity that 28 For example, the Frieze of Parnassus on the Albert Memorial 1872 in London. 29!Algernon Charles Swinburne, Notes on Poems and Reviews (London: J. Camden Hotten, 1866), pp. 16–17 30 Lene Ostermark-Johansen-writes of Walter Pater’s problem with sculpture’s materiality suggesting “he moves towards more painterly and atmospheric ideals, to texture and relief, to tactility in two-and-a-half dimensions rather than in troublesome three dimensions.” Caught Between Gautier and Baudelaire: Walter Pater and the Death of Sculpture https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261936853_Caught_Between_Gautier_and_Baudelaire_Walter_Pater_an d_the_Death_of_Sculpture [accessed Jan 15, 2018]. In Walter Pater and the language of Sculpture , Ostermark-Johansen reproduces David Teniere’s The Monkey Sculptor (1660) devoting pages 136 to147 to this idea that links Beaudelaire with DaVinci and with the perennial art school joke about sculptors knuckles dragging along the ground. ! 13! Winckelmann championed had run its course. Broken stone and even bronze had become tiresome or at least the relationship between subject and object had become an area of repetitive discourse. Sculpture’s three-dimensionality was tediously similar to nature, which the urban aesthete held in disdain. The limited viewpoints of relief, closer to painting, therefore made it a more civilized art. Contemporaneous with Baudelaire, John Charles Robinson compiled the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collections of Italian relief sculpture, in spite of its unpopularity.31 “Bucking the period’s disregard for this type of sculpture, Robinson exploited the museum’s foundation as a repository of applied and decorative arts to justify his unpopular selections…other scholars relegated the sculptures to the category of decoration”32 Paradoxically and still looking backwards, Walter Pater in The Renaissance (1873) saw relief as a metaphor for the emergence of modern art. His poetic analogies had little to do with the materials of relief since the hierarchy of marble, bronze and terracotta had persisted for centuries. Rather, Pater’s metaphor used the inscribed and sculpted components of high and low relief to represent history, literature and art. A century later, Jacques Ranciere also generated metaphor with a poetic logic that attempted to balance historical understanding with modern needs. Ranciere’s metaphor of body (aesthetic, sensate) and fragmentation (episodic experiences) offers a new view also built on Johann Winckelmann’s experience. Ranciere and Pater similarly ignore what is not suited to their purpose: Ranciere ignoring Winckelmann’s homoeroticism, Pater inspired by it. Independently they convey speculative, modified observations departing from objectivity in order to synthesize an account of humanity. Following 18th and 19th century neoclassicism, relief remained largely un-discussed in contemporary discourse with one key exception, August Rodin’s relief doors The Gates of Hell— the subject of work by Rainer Maria Rilke and Albert E. Elsen and included by Rosalind Krauss in Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977). Here Krauss argues that the doors are not concerned with narrative nor depicted space, describing the work as “opaque” and 31 In the 1850’s and 1860’s he made several collecting trips around Europe. 32 Wrote Sarah Blake McHam In Depth of Field: The Place of Relief in the Time of Donatello Donal Cooper ed. Leeds: Henry Moore Institute with Victoria and Albert Museum, 2005. ! ! 14! intended to “dam up the flow of sequential time”(pg 15). It was also manifestly Rodin’s—and sculpture’s— struggle with the dynamic modernity of the late 19th century Parisian art scene where impressionism, symbolism and the art nouveau style coexisted, (the latter especially celebrating surface rather than illusionist space.) Impressionism rejected glazing in favour of opacity and surface. Rodin had already started on the weight of Dante’s Inferno even before the Gates were commissioned. Rodin’s thirty-seven years working on them was a struggle to deal with narrative, decoration, form and function as well as life and death— together informing another critical question. What relief and sculpture would become in the impending new millennia? and how could sculpture catch up with painting? Contrary to Elsen’s view, the relief form of The Gates of Hell was a painterly approach to sculpture, inspired by paintings as well as narrative. His Adam came from Michelangelo Buonarotti’s Sistine Chapel, the figure made vertical. And from The Last Judgement a damned figure is the precedent for Rodin’s thinker, originally depicting Dante.33 In The Politics of Aesthetics (2006) Ranciere discusses the mechanical arts (a term coined in the 9th century that in the 19th century distinguishes fine art and the intelligentsia from practiced skills).34 He cites Walter Benjamin’s “deduction of aesthetic and political properties… from its technical properties” 35 while noting Benjamin’s allowance for crossing over between the two. By the turn of the 20th century, photography and film are mechanical arts in the ascendency while relief, had become a marginalized historically arrested art activity unable to move much beyond the territory of Adriaen de Vries’ The Forge of Vulcan(1611).When Matisse’s relief series of Backs were cast posthumously in 1955, modernism had largely relegated relief to colourless historical reference and confinement in the mechanical arts. 33!See!An Interpretation of Rodin’s Adam (1982) by Alicia Faxon, Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal ! 34 An Introduction to the Mechanical Arts in the Middle Ages Steven A. Walton web version 2003 http://www.avista.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Walton_MechArts.pdf 35 The Politics of Aesthetics (2006) Jacques Ranciere page 31 Bloomsbury. In prelude of Aisthesis (2013), Ranciere mentions the Greek origins of separating coarse labour from higher arts and in the Chapter Divided Beauty, page 10 he underlines Winckelmann’s separation of art into beauty and science, an idea he seeks to reform. ! 15! Fig. 6 Adriaen de Vries The Forge of Vulcan (1611) and Henri Matisse The Back (modelled 1908-1909 cast 1955) Crucially, relief was reinvented early in the twentieth century as a tool for the re-examination of space and representation. The strategy of working with genres themselves (here genre is used inter-changeably with art form) served to extend an artist’s principal area of practice. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Tatlin(1885-1953) were prominent in this and used prosaic materials such as wood, paper, wire to assemble works with a directness and urgency that shunned the historical burden of bronze and marble. The artist’s dependency on historically approved materials —‘art supplies’ was gone. Paint would be acquired from industry rather than exclusively from traditional suppliers. In their pragmatic employment of materials in relief formats, possibilities re-emerged for the reviewing of space and materiality in modernist terms and for the reinvigoration of the anachronistic. The purpose of the research is to argue the importance of relief as a means to understanding not just certain artists’ practices that include my own but to illuminate questions of genre. Adorno qualifies the role genre plays. “Just as the arts as such do not disappear tracelessly in the general concept of art, the genres and forms do not merge perfectly into the individual art forms. Probably no important artwork ever corresponded completely to its genre.” 36 In the use of materials and technique, the new reliefs would have a sustained impact beyond the limits of genre. Since Canova, Picasso is the most influential figure in relief sculpture and in the relationships between genres. In 1912 while working with collage, he also assembled several paper guitars. His collage and assemblage signalled a radical approach to an unfashionable and neglected medium. 36!!Theodore Adorno Aesthetic Theory.- Pgs 273, 199 ! ! 16! The displacement of marble and bronze reprioritized visual thinking over academic modelling and carving from life or from plaster casts. Theories of space extended and consolidated concerns, revising the role of illusionism in painting and collage, drawing, sculpture and theatre design. Exploring viewpoint and pictorial space, following leads from Cezanne, Cubism’s emphasis on strategy, analysis, and geometry at the expense of representational detail and deep pictorial space would have immediate consequences for relief even where the artist returned to traditional media as can be seen in Jacques Lipchitz’s (1891-1973) sculptures and relief works. Picasso had no formal training in sculpture. He said “now we are delivered from Painting and Sculpture, themselves already liberated from the imbecile tyranny of genres. It’s neither one thing nor another.”37 Fig.7 Picasso Guitar 1912 and right: Lipchitz Still Life With Musical Instruments 1918 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The approach to materials became a key element in relief’s reinvigoration that resulted from radical cubist investigations of space. After conceptual, performative , deconstructive works of the 1960’s and 70’s, a refreshed approach to materials followed. Benjamin Buchloh notes, commenting on the Venice Biennale in 2017 “ the features that both sculpture and the book once shared have now, on their loss, become all the more prominent: Made with material supports derived from natural resources.” 38 37!J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso 1907–1917: The Painter of Modern Life, London 1996, p.254 38#Benjamin H.D.Buchloh Rock Paper and Scissors Art Forum September 2017 https://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=201707&id=70461 ! 17! Buchloh, is reiterating the break from the order of genres and disciplines of Pater’s time and the renewed engagement that motivates artists towards their chosen zone of making.39 This disruption and renewal between Pater and Buchloh is evident in Adorno’s overview and in the effect of Cubism and later assemblage that reinforced the importance of strategy. 40 Relief, even as it persisted through the twentieth century, is rarely referred to as genre, discipline or form in this century. Contemporary examples of relief that I will discuss shortly are in dialogue with the past and future. Recently, relief has continued to share formal and associative qualities even while approached with diversity of intent, method and material substance. However, artists’ exemplification of relief as a genre may be incidental. That is to say, artists are often indifferent to taxonomies of forms and genres. If relief no longer describes a discrete genre, it does suggest mobility and renewal acknowledging its associated traditions by responding to or denying the functions that it once had, echoing rather than displaying continuity. Robert Morris held that relief was an inadequate format because of its pictorial convention. “it cannot be accepted today as legitimate”41 since that would imply sculpture sharing with painting, defying gravity by hanging on a wall. Yet Morris himself had made reliefs, as Judd pointed out and would return to relief later. Therefore, relief remained a problematic term. Part of a reinvigorated attention to history since modernism is the excavation of Modernism itself, within which relief reappears in diverse practices. 20th century examples include: David Smith, who said “I do not recognize the limits where painting ends and sculpture begins”42, Red Grooms, who documented Manhattan in painted relief as cereal box dioramas and film sets and Lee Bontecou, whose reliefs epitomise the union of destruction and creation—or sex and death. Donald Judd designated her work specific objects : “a three- dimensional form that was neither painting nor sculpture”.43 This statement demonstrates the forgotten or disowned nature of relief in High Modernist Manhattan, then Greenberg’s domain 39!Walter Pater (1839–1894) was an influential essayist, critic and promoter of aestheticism and style.! 40!For example!by Kurt Schwitters and Jean Dubuffet in Europe, Rauschenberg and Robert Morris in the U.S.! 41 Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris 1993 October Books ! 42!https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/david-smith-australia-1951 43!quoted by Arthur C. Danto in A Tribe Called Quest https://www.thenation.com/article/tribe-called-quest/ ! 18! where sculpture and painting should confine themselves to their “essential conditions” (that Krauss represented as media specificity.) Fig. 8 right: David Smith Hudson River Landscape 1951 left: Lee Bontecou in her studio New York 1963 This Century Considered in the contemporary context of painting and sculpture, relief’s dimensional ambiguity, its mobile or transitional character of between-ness has a potential to transgress the norms of the surviving genres of architecture, painting and sculpture. Permeable facades, extended surfaces and compressed three dimensionality that shelters against the wall are uncertainties attractive to artists seeking a platform of investigation and reassessment, untethered to immediate social and technological trends such as audience participatory apps and video projected reportage. Earlier mentioned artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg made excursions across art forms usually in collaborations. Such excursions once described as hybridity or interdisciplinarity are, in a post conceptual age, now routine for artists who are motivated by representations of meaning more than commitment to a discipline or singular art form. Relief then is both an historic discipline and in contemporary art an area of formal interest taken up by artists in a range of media. While some artists might participate in relief as a conscious extension of an historic discipline (for example, Australian Ricky Swallow), artists are now ! 19! more likely to be motivated by factors external to that tradition once associated with an architectural context. Artists might be motivated to use relief to examine aspects of space, representation, images, form, time, gesture and, as mentioned in the introduction, any other concerns through this conceptually and formally dualistic art form. These possibilities of relief do not dissolve into a ‘non-medium’. Rather they exist at the nexus of numerous artistic and related axes. Gerard Genette’s perception of the Baroque is a useful mechanism for considering the position of relief in the twenty-first century: “The Baroque, if it exists, is not an island …but a crossroads (or nexus, un carrefor) a ‘star’ and, as is very evident in Rome, a public place. Its genius is syncretism, its order is its very openness”.44 The diagram below situates relief as nexus and epicentre in relation to other forms located (impermanently) between poles of influence. The consideration of art forms within a constellation re-occurs with variation in the writings of Theodore Adorno, Jacques Ranciere, Edward Soja and Rosalind Krauss to whom I shall soon return. Fig.9 Relief as a transitional zone and epicentre in a constellation of mutually influential elements. Reference to the constellation as a model recurs in the writings of Adorno, Ranciere, Soja and Krauss. 44 Gregg Lambert The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture Bloomsbury ! ! 20! These crossroads or epicentres are often more visible to historians than to artists who may be less tethered to a historical view of disciplines as discrete. For instance, an artist may use photography but not identify as a photographer. Artists arrived at the zone of relief from different directions or axes. Monahan, Houseago and Kentridge exemplify this. Monahan, with a background in conceptual art and theory, worked with drawing and moved towards sculpture, encountering relief between the two and three- dimensional. 45 Houseago came from performance, which informs his very physical approach to sculpture and relief. Kentridge’s foundational work method is drawing, from which animation, printing and relief have flowed. All of these approaches reflect what Krauss referred to as ‘post-medium condition' in the shift to a more dynamic, exploratory and transient zone from the fixed hierarchies of genre of the 18th century.46 This century, the practices of Thomas Houseago (U.S.A.), William Kentridge (S.A.), Anselm Kiefer (F.R.G), and Matthew Monahan(U.S.A.) exemplify this nexus. They have either pushed out beyond the picture plane and the pictorial, embracing their materials en route to inhabiting a sculptural or theatrical space or, in Houseago and Monahan’s cases, reduced their performative space to a wall work. This area between two and three dimensionalities is their re-negotiation of image and material, their re-investigation of representation. In contrast to the site specific nature of earlier relief works, the expanded audiences of this century allow for regularly moved and reinstalled work on almost any scale, including Houseago’s monumental Masks (Pentagon) (2015).47 They counter the polished granite architectural site with hand made human fallibility and impermanence emanating precisely from what Adorno describes as “unknowable pragmatism”. 45!With What Hegel called the unfolding of truth that occurred as the same process of unfolding both in art and philosophy. Adorno, T. Aesthetic Theory Page 222. See Monahan’s masked response to this statement in his reliefs.! 46!More accurately, their approaches respond to the temporal circumstance and social space reflected in Peter Osbourne's assertions regarding contemporaneity, the trans categorical, post-conceptual and the tenacity and flexibility of conventional categories.! 47!Houseago made them in his Los Angeles studio for installation at the Rockerfeller Centre, New York. They are five meters tall. There are Five. His Moun Room is 14meters by 11 meters by four meters. ! 21! Kentridge’s half-kilometer Roman frieze Triumphs and Laments (2016) exploited the theatricality that such scale suggests. It survives as film, drawings, book and gallery sized individual reliefs. Fig.10 Matthew Monahan’s F minor I and II 2000 ink on paper and Untitled 2016 (palladium steel). The model of the epicentre in a field of connected disciplines corresponds with Jacques Rancière’s “thinking between disciplines” that he states is “neither a basis, nor an instrument, nor a specific material. It is the perceptual milieu of their coexistence.” This coexistence parallels the dualities and their reconciliation that Ranciere might refer to as the “sensible fabric of experience”, 48 the diversity in ideas and material use where art emerges. Modelling relief in recent art, the constellation is a dynamic configuration of elements, surrounding the nexus of dualities. Particularities are suspended as in Ranciere’s “sensible fabric”, in a mesh of polarities in order to see where works sit in proximity to one another and in relation to events. Ranciere’s episodic Aisthesis (2013) attempts to see examples of art or literature together transforming “into a moving constellation in which modes of perception and affect and forms of interpretation defining a paradigm take shape… weaving together a sensible community”49 beyond the formal limits of media or genre and without its earlier hierarchical features. In his 48!Ranciere Aisthesis (2013)! 49!ibid! ! 22! “esthetic regime of art”, art’s ‘singularity’ means that the use of materials need no longer conform to disciplines and genres. Ranciere’s abstracted idealism evokes numerous questions, provocative in their connectivity of events, objects and social context. When discussing sculpture, he focuses on the literature associated with sculpture rather than sculpture itself. However, links with episodic time and a transitional space where artists work within his singularity promote new connections indicating how relief can be experienced as events perceived in space and time rather than as static points of reference. Relief can be conceived as an event based on a synthesis of Ranciere’s episodes from Aisthesis, 50 with Lefebvre’s physical, psychological, social types of space and Soja’s Third Space which is determined by what happens in that space, how its users can define that space. This model synthesises axioms with a Venn diagram, in order to visualize the variables associated with an abstraction of relief as an experienced event. 51 This promotes a consciousness of the interactivity, the social and temporal nature of relief experienced, neither as fixed nor as an isolated individual experience. Paired opposites surround an individual work, just as they also surround the zone that is relief, an area of transition, of between-ness, traversed by artists, some of whom linger, finding nourishment and enlightenment away from other traditional media or genres.52 This traversing of relief's zone as (or if) the artists move beyond it, is important in examining what Krauss referred to as the post-medium condition. Whilst working in this area, artists are likely to be reviewing any commitment to traditional mediums, materials or genres. Krauss explains that outmoded technologies can reveal how to “grasp the inner complexity of the mediums those techniques support.” Relief is such a medium. Assemblage, casting and 50!Contributing editor at Art Forum, Marcus Greil has used a similar model published in Art forum and elsewhere since 1986. My exposure to Marcus’ episodic cultural criticism which emphasizes perception in episodic context has significantly shaped my interpretation of Rancier’s episodes and Lefebvre’s account of space not least due to the sharing of specific and particular experiences that define the fine grain of what is sharable and what is not in culture and where the edges of art and life can be found. 51!It remains conceivable as a three dimensional model with the addition of other axioms where the circles become spherical overlaps. It started as an alternative to Krauss’ synthesis of Frederick Jameson’s use of the Klein group with Michal Fried’s famous discussion of art and non art in “Art and Objecthood”. 52!This is illustrated in the chronological catalogue of artists’ works as seen on Ricky Swallow’s web site.! http://www.rickyswallow.com/ ! 23! drawing are such technologies. Krauss cites Kentridge as involved in this understanding and reinvention.53 This reorientation brings us to a contemporary art where the space of relief can be understood in new ways while remaining historically and formally tethered to the space between painting and sculpture, installation and site. Accepting this, Monahan and Houseago are also proponents of the “outmoded” as an expression of history. Direct, unambiguous technique is suited to address ambiguity and complexity, the known being pushed towards the unknown. Houseago has up-scaled the plaster casting process to grossly physical proportions.54 Brett and Krauss substantiate the plausibility of such zones of transition as having displaced earlier disciplines or genres as societal conditions and technical developments have influenced the dynamics and nuance of artistic development. Contemporary art is then viewed against a 53 Krauss said in A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture) Rosalind E. Krauss Thames & Hudson, 2000 “Artists have resisted, as impossible, to retreat into etiolated forms of the traditional mediums…Instead, artists such as…William Kentridge has embraced the idea of differential specificity, which is to say the medium as such, which they understand they will now have to reinvent or rearticulate."[8] 54 Similarly, the emergence of Cubism from did not result from Braque of Picasso turning to film or photography or printing, but from rawness and paint. They can be distinguished from Rudolf Stingel, Olafur Eliasson and others working with software, architects and parametricians54 to harness recent technologies in producing reliefs in the form of installations and walls. Eliasson has become an architect and Stingel a designer. Their work is in contrast to the tension and dynamics in the work of Houseago, Kentridge, Kiefer, and Monahan resulting from multiplicity, complexity, paradox and the in-between or unresolved. It is unsurprisingly accompanied by elements of scepticism and anxiety. These artists are discussed in chapter two. Fig.11 left: Olafur Eliason Oslo Opera House 2008 right: Rudolph Stingel Untitled 2007 South Tyrol carving cast by Kunst Gieserrie, Switzerland. (photographs unattributed). ! ! 24! framework of historical, formal and conceptual reference where other paradigms and categories have “run into sand” as Hal Foster put it.55 Relief is both an archaic form and now an area where artists test the relationship between history and the contemporary. Its formal and historical characteristic of representing space necessitates the negotiation of modes of representation with the role played by materials. It is an area characterized by mediation and reconciliation as well as duality. 55 Foster, Hal Design and Crime: And Other Diatribes pg126 ! 25! Chapter 2 Dualities as Characteristics of Relief As a structure, dualism is primitive: the most basic forms of cellular life simply distinguish forwards and backward—eating from defecating. Dualism is in the DNA of the biological universe and implies parameters as well as direction and gradation. Polarity, the intermediate or in-between-ness, complexity and nuance all flow from this understanding; a strategy to highlight difference and deviation. Dualism is a recurrent theme in my research, defined by the Oxford dictionary as “The division of something conceptually into two opposed or contrasted aspects”.56 It is as ubiquitous as it is antique, notably playing a role in the abstraction of ideas in ancient Greece leading to the privileging of mind over body and the separation of beauty from concept (as identified by Ranciere following Johann Winckelmann). Ancient Romans evoked the two faced Janus, god of doorways, transition, journeys and possibility. He personified the inseparable nature of time and space, past and future. Dualism has been long associated with taxonomy and with opposites and beyond this, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel identified duality’s complexity. “That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements.” 57 Duality here does not refer to the separation of body and mind but to those dualities that characterize relief in particular: the two-dimensional and three-dimensional, the image and the material object, the pictorial and physical that resonate within (and beyond) this area of art— with other persistent dualities— archaic and contemporary, destruction and creation (a subset of positive and negative). They bridge metaphor and representation with the physical reality of casting and carving. The implication of hegemonic and a moral axes co existing with a spatial or tonal one involves complexities too great for this account. I have therefore limited the dualities to the sections that follow in this chapter and identify aspects of these in the accounts of key works in the final Chapter. 56!https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/dualism ! 57 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830) Part One IV. Second Attitude of Thought to Objectivity TWO. THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY §40 ! ! 26! Following from Hegel and Adorno, Ranciere addresses the separation of art history from medium. He describes how genre and medium were joined and the arts themselves were separated into the ‘liberal’ and the ‘mechanical’. Lefebvre identifies the separation and the privileging of abstracted or conceived representations of space over perceived spaces. Relief provides the opportunity to seek redress from such separations— in the studio research and in the work of the artists discussed, since it has the ability to affect and link types of space. As we have seen, the role of opposites or dualities is at the base of dialectics. As such, they represent a way to consider a question or proposition of the type that artists regularly encounter. They are a device, a theme and a recurring structure. They imply analysis, pose questions about the in-between, about synthesis or location on a scale of gradation. They overlay a reference with which to assess a complex set of conditions, to measure extent and to reveal aberration from a polar axis. As Bertrand Russell holds, the dualism of the universal and the particular is profound in art.58 Adorno, while referring to music, reminds us “The dialectic of the universal and the particular does not… eliminate their difference.” 59 The specificities within relief suggest a sub-language, where this dialectic resonates with other dualities. Duality and metaphor in relief frustrate categorical distinction as they promote poetic meaning. Paired opposites indicate parameters within which a dialogue or negotiation can occur. Whether axiomatic or entirely theoretical, when overlapping more than one pair of opposites —intersecting axes of graduated contrast between each extreme— they propose points of reference that become a part of the background noise of propositions in the studio. They provide a means to invoke external (sometimes physical or chemical) processes to play a role. In this way, an awareness of connections between subject and object or process and concept and so on is rationalized. An example could involve critical reflection on whether a work in progress would benefit from more destruction or more creation and therefore suggest a process or technique with which to proceed. 60The consequential path may follow a decision 58 Bertrand Russell On The relations of Universals and Particulars PAS new series 1912 Aristotolian Society reprint. 59!Adorno, Theodore Aesthetic Theory Universal and Particular pg 201 60 Specifically Kiefers’ 2017 ! 27! stimulated by, although not necessarily represented on the continuum between the extremes. Here is a reminder of Ranciere’s articulation of another familiar idea— an invitation to the unlikely that welcomes the impossible. Broardly, the nexus of dualities provides a speculation or confirmation of our concerns in the interrogation of relief. In relation to dualities and their nexus, the fragmentary should also be acknowledged in the constellation metaphor shared in various accounts of art by Ranciere, Rilke and Adorno.61 Victor Burgin too, repeats the astronomy metaphor: Diverse visual practices surround relief and come “together...not as a totality but as a constantly shifting constellation of fragments.” 62 Here, time and space are connected in the same way that Adorno insists on the union of subject and methodology. We are compelled to acknowledge continua and a poetic in- betweenness with regard to these models and relief as a zone or form. Polarities account for these forces that organize the fragments, the constellation. My model below, Traces of everything, relates to Ranciere’s Aesthesis or Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: Art is related to its other as is a magnet to a field of iron filings. Not only art's elements, but their constellation as well, that which is specifically aesthetic and to which its spirit is usually chalked up, refer back to its other. The identity of the artwork… is also that of the work's gravitational force, which gathers around itself its membra disjecta, traces of the existing.63 Ranciere’s episodes, derived from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, are particularities or fragments that could also take the form of specific relief works located within the model. 64 History and possibility is represented here. At the centre, and close to the central vertical axis, more data is knowable due to its proximity to the present whereas knowledge at sparser, more distant regions is more speculative. Any straight line passing through the torus will therefore 61 “The fragment is that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality.” The word ‘constellation’ occurs twenty four times in Aesthetic Theory.For Adorno “ideas are related to objects as constellations are to stars”. Adorno – Aesthetic Theory page 45 62 Victor Burgin In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture By pg22 63 Adorno –Aesthetic Theory pg7 64!!The confluence of visualization is of interest given that the model preceded my familiarity with both Aesthesis and Aesthetic Theory.! ! 28! include some speculation since abstractions and universals more likely include conjecture and postulation. The circular, torus form with its sparse outer edges, is a reminder of arts need for autonomy and its simultaneous dependency. Fig.12 Torus of particularities: Traces of Everything The Archaic and the Contemporary: Creation and Destruction Our consciousness in contemporary life is both excited by and burdened with information including an awareness of many histories from uneven geopolitical terrain. The duality of a distant past coupled with contemporaneity is a shared interest for the artists considered here. The organization of labour, war and other determinants of civilization have been rendered physically onto the landscape and in this way relief is the visual form that represents the gravity of human destiny, whether in Ridley Scott movies or at World Heritage sites.65 65!Relief works representing ancient civilization set the scene in Prometheus (2012) and!Alien: Covenant (2017).! ! 29! Creation and destruction signify sequenced and cyclical events on scales varying from valley walls to intimate ivory carvings. Adorno’s ‘unimaginable pragmatism’ is at the heart of this marriage of materials and techniques that fades with technical mastery and returns with the return to the basic needs of cubism and artists who followed, often guided by materials and the actions that those materials demanded. Contradiction, incompleteness, heroism and dysfunction describe prominent relief works by Kentridge, Houseago, Monahan and Kiefer. They cut, erase, melt, blast, bend, rip and scrape. What follows is the background of creation and destruction in historic relief works and in philosophic commentary. I will account for how Kentridge and Houseago, representing two different generations, work with these two dualities. In this way, they are interchangeable with Monahan and Kiefer. The latter addresses himself in his journal: You laid the paintings on the floor without anger, without despair, and poured the burning hot lead on them. No cause for despair any longer, for you know: at some point something will come of it; indeed, you count on the disappointment from the outset.66 However, discussion of Kiefer and Monahan regarding the pictorial and the physical will follow my focus on Kentridge and Houseago. A letter to Walter Benjamin from Adorno states “I have come to realize that just as the modern is the most ancient, so too the archaic itself is a function of the new.” 67 This supports a perceived reawakening of the numinous paralleled by “a new awareness of the archaic”68 that is symptomatic of the spiritual aspirations for art in the West and is complementary to today’s highly connected, information-saturated awareness of the contemporary. Rilke’s account of Rodin’s fragmentary approach to Dante’s 14th Century epic details destruction and creation in the themes of the Gates of Hell and that we see unfolded a century 66 Kiefer’s journal is quoted on Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac’s website and press release, February 2018.! https://www.ropac.net/exhibition/fur-andrea-emo 67 The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin 68!Jacques Derrida is quoted in Paul Bishop’s The Archaic: the past in the present (2011) Routledge ! ! 30! later into the frieze sequence of suffering and heroism in Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments (2016). Artists continue to seek an understanding of now in the past. As with the broken Belvedere Torso, last damaged during the 1527 sacking of Rome, the incompleteness of the archaic offers the opportunity to find superior beauty, a poetic truth in ambiguity. 69 Winckelmann saw the torso as the invincible conqueror in vulnerable state. The mutilated statue symbolized the end of the Roman Renaissance amidst the most shocking defilement of Europe. The inextricability of destruction and creation is bonded to our relationship with history and therefore with our nature and our origins.70 Fig.13 left: Belvedere Torso 1st Century BCE. centre: The Gates of Hell 1917 Rodin. right: Relief set from Alien: Covenant 2016 directed by Ridley Scott. The past and present continue to meet on violent terms. Around 600 BCE, Nineveh was the greatest city in the world. Much of the city’s large and long-lived relief works survived to be destroyed in February 2015 with pneumatic hammers and power tools, filmed and shared from mobile phones. 71 The detonation of the Bamian Valley Buddha in Afghanistan (carved around 450 AD, destroyed 2001) and the ongoing destruction on Burrup Peninsular of probably the largest and oldest group of petroglyphs in the world, all result from contemporary ideology confronting the archaic. These events continue to impact on artists and historians alike. 69 Rilke is Ranciere’s lens on Rodin, and Winckelmann is his other lens to focus on the headless Belvedere torso that represents antiquity and damage as beauty. Jacques Ranciere Aesthesis pg 2 and Johann Winckleman History of Ancient Art Volume II ! 70 “The archaic is encountered en route to origin itself”. Paul Bishop -Plato to NATO 71 Archaeologist Khaled al-Asaadwas beheaded in Palmyra Syria in 2016 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-33984006 ! 31! Fig. 14 left: Ludovisi Sarcophagus 3rd century AD Palazzo Altemps, Rome right: from the Arch of Constantine 315 AD a panel reused from Trajan’s Dacian war frieze. The reliefs of antiquity memorialize conflict, conquest, victory and destruction. Roman reliefs are primarily war-related—Trajan’s Column (113AD) and the Arch of Constantine (315 AD) are iconic examples— the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace, 9BCE) being the exception. The Arch of Constantine incorporates spolia in the form of relief works depicting conquest, looting, subjugation and slaughter; already over two hundred years old at the time the arch was commissioned. 72 These are the subjects of some of the most influential works of Europe: the Parthenon frieze and metopes both depicting and subject to violence and destruction.73 Trajan’s column, Hadrian’s column, and the numerous sarcophagi including the Portonaccio and Ludovisi sarcophagi are further examples that edify and memorialize conflict and destruction. All ruins lie between the erection of culture and the erosion of nature. The surface of ruins is the patina of events, the interface of past and present. However, Winckelmann’s romance with the past and the Romanticism that followed is mostly absent from these dualities as they occur in the work presented in Rome in 2016 by Kentridge and Monahan. This ruinous sensibility 72 The form of the triumphal arch is symbolic of hindsight/foresight and of Janus, the god of doorways and the transition between past and future. On the narrative and violence in the reliefs on the Arch of Constantine and Arch of the Argentarii at Rome see Jas Elsner From the Culture of Spolia to the Cult of Relics: The Arch of Constantine and the Genesis of Late Antique Forms Papers of the British School at Rome, Vol. 68 (2000), pp. 149-184 Published by: British School at Rome Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40311027 and Sacrifice and narrative on the Arch of the Argentarii at Rome. Journal of Roman Archaeology, 18, 83-98. doi:10.1017/S1047759400007224 73 The Fall of Troy, Centaurs vs. Lapiths, battles of Amazonomachy and Gigamarchy.- Gods, mythical creatures and foreign peoples were all represented in conflict and severely damaged in a Venetian military attack. ! 32! and the rough edges of spolia inform Kentridge's work including his Roman frieze, Triumph and Lament 2016 of which he said he was finding the triumph in lament and lament in the triumphs.74 Fig.15 The processional performance of William Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments Rome 2016. Triumphs and Laments consisted of travertine areas revealed from beneath a layer of accumulated algal material by abrasively blasting through ninety ten-meter high stencils onto 550-meters of the eastern stone embankment of the river Tiber.75 Its residual images of victory and defeat simultaneously bears witness to the city and incorporates images from the murder of Remus, Bernini’s sculptures, Pasolini’s death and recent refugee crises.76 Fig.16 Details of Triumphs and Laments Rome 2016 with spoils from Jerusalem from the Arch of Titus (82AD). 74 http://www.lizatlancaster.co.za/blog/every-winner-has-a-loser-william-kentridges-triumphs-and-laments-on-the-banks-of- the-tiber-in-rome http://magazine.art21.org/2016/11/23/triumphs-and-laments-a-procession-across-time-an-interview-with-william- kentridge/#.WbqAx9MjHXE ! 75!a process reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even” (1915 to 1923), the surface of which, (Oil, lead, dust and varnish on glass) results from destructive and creative events that extend our understanding of that work’s existence in time. ! 76 Kentridge mentions celebration and shame, the wealth of baroque achievement in Rome, and the simultaneous creation of its ghetto. W. Kentridge at the British School at Rome in conversation (with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev on the 15th April 2016.describes his focus on destruction and creation in art making as ‘anti- entropy'. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO3djofjrtc ! 33! At the contemporary art museum MAXXI in Rome, after the removal of Triumphs in 2017, paper studies of the frieze remained on show, displaying the connections Kentridge made between drawing, printmaking and relief. His use of negative stencils is, in essence, a printmaking technique familiar to screen printers and photo-etchers. The drawings have been cut out then laid on top of news printed pages that represent the wall support of the procession of historic images and incidents.77 Processions have been a major part of Roman city life and Kentridge extended the frieze from propaganda to performance with an operatic production casting the players and their shadows into relief with the imagery on the stone wall. The frieze included reference to events such as “…the looting of Jerusalem in 70 BCE (from the Arch of Titus)…put together with images of Jews in the ghetto from the seventeenth century… with the beheading of barbarians (from Trajan’s Column) placed together with the body of Aldo Moro… together with The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa”. 78 Thus Kentridge has not only rearranged the past, he has done so with a condensed history of Roman relief as ghostly residual images made from the grime of ages and frozen in poses from an epic cinematic sequence that compresses millennia as well as pictorial space. Fig.17 William Kentridge Study for Triumphs and Laments 2016 with spoils from Jerusalem from the Arch of Titus (82AD) exhibited in MAXI Rome 2017. In contrast to Kentridge’s selective erasure of history’s grime, Monahan’s drawing and erasure of drawings is taken to the point where an image on paper is buckled and ripped. In this way 77 http://www.maxxi.art/en/william- ge-vertical-thinking-3/ The residue and aftermath http://www.artspace.com/magazine/news_events/art-fairs/10-of-the-best-artworks-at-frieze-london-2016-54260 ! 78!from an interview with art21. See http://magazine.art21.org/2016/11/23/triumphs-and-laments-a-procession- across-time-an-interview-with-william-kentridge/#.WxiztKmYMUE! ! 34! the graphic process ritualistically and performatively becomes more three-dimensional, driven by Monahan’s need to “scour art history for new ways into sculpture”79 and driving the materials and images into relief. He creates objects that often do not fully arrive at sculpture. This incompletion can be accounted for by Monahan’s own words: Breaking and fixing are key notions in my practice, like an accelerated archaeological process: every work is confronted by wars and earthquakes, continually cracked up by my dissatisfaction. 80 Destruction is synonymous with history for Monahan and it is essential thematically in countering a kind of classicism with the barbaric in representations that include masks and warriors referencing both immortality and the dead. His influences include Persepolis and Mycenae, Medardo Rosso and Ridley Scott.81 The wide eyes of Archaic Greek statues and Assyrian relief figures at Persepolis stare at destiny from their fate in Monahan’s fractured figurative incarnations. Not simply damaged but arrested in a state that amplifies the ambiguous smile and stare of history. “Time is not moving forward here, it is piled up in ruins… I have been handed a skeleton key to a room full of ghosts…” 82 and “place and time have to be buried within the figures. They are remote and incomplete…and the journey is paradoxical in any case: to go back in order to go forward.” 83 This incompletion in perpetuity recalls several literary precedents. The first, a short story by Gerald Kersh—with an inconclusive, Chekov style ending—of an immortal corporal, a soldier scarred from four hundred years of battle injuries, who questions the point of immortality.84 It is a personal recollection (my own), of the type that occurs in the complex formal and poetic space constructed by the artist; one that is also evoked by Kentridge and in a prescribed, heavy handed and illustrative manner in Scott’s film Prometheus (2012). 79!Ludovico Pratesi Notes on the Side-line of an Exhibition in Matthew Monahan 2016 (Milan Mousse) page 5 ! 80!Matthew Monahan Bronzo Mousse Publishing 2017 pg 5! 81!Many artists today including Monahan and Houseago, make no distinction between high and popular cultural references.!This is a point of generational distinction with older, non American artists such as Kentridge and Kiefer who felt a need to minimize such influences since they were principally aligned with consumerism.! 82!Matthew Monahan, Monahan by Monahan (Cologne Hatje Cantz 2011) page 61! 83 ibid 84 Gerald Kersh’s What happened To Corporal Cuckoo I from One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (Simon and Schuster 1968) ! 35! Fig.16 from left to right: Matthew Monahan Drawing 2010, Untitled 2007 Anton Kern Gallery and Neptune (Rescue) 2016 installed at Palazzo Altemps, Rome. The second perpetual incompletion recalled is a theoretical context described by historian and critic Carl Einstein (1885-1940): “our precarious achievements built on a void, grounded in a fundamental groundlessness”. 85 Einstein was responding to Cubism’s well documented disruption and antagonism, when Picasso and Braque researched without any interest in completion. They share something of the circumstance of the artist as “lost wanderer”, godless and disconnected from a broken western art history, Modernist or otherwise — built on assumption and error. “…like a tragedy all its own.”86 This climate of investigations free of earlier dogma is shared in relief by Picasso and Monahan. Monahan’s work evokes the use of spolia, antiquity’s reuse of already historical fragments. However, he precludes found objects, and direct observational drawing from life or photos. His studio rules promote an internalization of his studies of antiquity and promoting a sense of what is absent in the presence of his works. This is clearly articulated in his Palazzo Altemps exhibition where, as the first contemporary artist to show work, he responded to the spaces and the permanent collection of antique sculpture that includes the Ludovisi Sarcophagus, the Ludovisi Throne and the subject of Winckelmann and Ranciere’s attention, Juno Ludovisi. 85 Sebastian Zeidler Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art pg 27 Cornell University Press, NY. 86 Matthew Monahan, Monahan by Monahan (Cologne Hatje Cantz 2011) page 79. More fully, “ I don’t want to bridge the gap between art and life. I want to sustain it, like a tragedy all its own.” which, in turn recalls Einstein’s suicide — when cornered by the advancing Nazi army in France in 1940, jumping from a bridge. Understood collectively, these references and observations gather elements of critique and desperation, nihilism, existentialism, anarchy and poetry evident in works by Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Alfred Jarry as well as Carl Einstien. ! 36! Monahan does not compete but comments and accessorizes these signposts of history to remind us that the past is not past. This exceptional site is affected as a thirdspace of a singular nature; an event that itself is changed by the installation of the same work in London’s Regent’s Park at the Frieze art fair. This conscious extension of the works space is implicit too, in his catalogue for the exhibition reproduced over that of the Palazzo Altemps collection. Fig.17 left: Neptune (Rescued) 2016 installed at Palazzo Altemps. Rome. centre: Neptune (Rescued) 2016 reproduced in catalogue. right: Neptune (Rescued) 2016 installed at Frieze, Regent’s Park, London. With an awareness of Gilles Deleuze’s reference to folds in time and space, Monahan’s folding of faces, bring drawings into relief.87 This procedure transformed drawings and other flat surfaces into mask forms reminiscent of the Mycenaean Mask of Agamemnon. His works, as curator and art historian Raphaela Platow says, “are suspended in mid-process”, between destruction and reconstruction.88 87!Matthew Monahan, Monahan by Monahan (Cologne Hatje Cantz 2011) 80! 88!Matthew Monahan Raphaela Platow Ruins without History “intelligibility of surfaces” page22 ! ! 37! Fig.18 left: Untitled (Green Head) work on paper 2017 right: Basho 2014 polished bronze. Raphaela Platow, writing on Monahan, cites the precedent of the art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-29) that attempted to travel pictorially from the archaic to the contemporary, just as Kentridge, in frieze form, physically parades a reshuffled chronology in Triumph’s and Laments. This shared sense of the historical is born both of a profound desire to investigate and account for humanity in addition to literature and contemporary commentary. Neither Monahan nor Kentridge offer a chronology but both demonstrate through their time travels, a trajectory of which we may not have been aware. The simultaneous presence in Rome on both sides of the Tiber by these two artists establishes temporal, social, physical spaces surrounding relief with a continuity that extends to the geopolitical origins of wealth that Rome is built on. They represent an ambitious if unresolved historical reach, making substantial links between place and time. The Pictorial and the Physical Relief utilizes pictorial language and representations of space within its corporeal reality while confronting its physical location. The Roman works by Kentridge and Monahan demonstrate the integration of this with their temporal concerns and use of site. Since dualities in relief are not discrete, as established in discussion of the models and elsewhere, the following exemplars, Anselm Kiefer and Thomas Houseago could change places with Monahan and ! 38! Kentridge from the previous section Archaic and Contemporary, Creation and Destruction. Their overlapping content and its integration with the formal duality in the discussion to follow is symptomatic of common understanding among artists from diverse backgrounds and different generations. In contrast to Monahan and Kentridge, Kiefer and Houseago have backgrounds respectively in painting and performance. Kiefer is informed by the philosophy and the burden of German history, Houseago energized by his own migration to California and an openness to the broadest cultural references. My intention here is to extend a consciousness of the multiple dualities that coexist in relief through discussion of their work following a broader explanation of the physical, pictorial duality with some historical context for this image-object relationship.89 The contemporary separation of image from physicality can in part be understood in terms of the increasing role of digital interfaces and Fredric Jameson’s claim that “the total saturation of cultural space by the image” is accompanied by the ghettoization of physical experience into clubs and gyms in a world of specialization and increased population densities. 90 The pictorial has been viewed as the higher, transcendent aspect of art; the physical being associated with labour and servitude since Plato, as discussed with regard to the decline of relief in the first chapter. The characteristic physicality of relief in carved wood, terracotta, cast bronze and marble, has historically been defined by the mechanical craft of its material. It has been approached with pragmatism in the economic use of material, whether bronze, wood or stone. Artists systematized the space of relief mathematically in the 15th century. Donal Cooper’s Depth of field, elaborates on the wedding of material technique to geometric and pictorial development in the Renaissance such as occurs in Florence where Lorenzo Ghiberti and Donatello’s low relief perspectival inscription was grounded respectively in gold smithing 89!Critical events in the changes to this duality include the widening dissemination of images through the printing press, photography, television and digital platforms that utilize the internet. Less so, material processes such as casting and transportation have also played roles. ! 90!Modes of image presentation vary from petro glyphic to digitally projected. The ubiquity of photography is well documented. There are more than 36,000 labeled images of the Rosetta Stone on Instagram : socks, tea towels, ties, shirts, bags and more carry its image. Objects editioned from 3d scans are disseminated as reproductions of artifacts and art works, including relief works recently destroyed in Iraq and Syria along with pirated Tony Cragg sculpture copies in Singaporean shops. ! 39! and foundry work as much as in the new geometry.91 Similarly, Canova’s achievements, like Borromini’s, stemmed from his stonemasonry experience, demonstrating the power of three- dimensional geometry as a foundational language shared between imagery, abstraction and the material, physical world. Relief was used more intuitively and flexibly in the compression and containment of narrative or representational space prior to the 15th C and since the early 20th C when Picasso’s approach marked an emphatic liberation of sculpture and relief from the mechanical trade skills of carving and casting still dominant then. Leading up to this in the 19th century, the separation of imagery and physicality in art reaches another crisis with the spread of photography and the revision of the pictorial, analysed in Adolph von Hildebrand’s The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture (1907) that discusses relief and its relationship with the two-dimensional image. It implies a system, built on an assumed tradition of technical virtuosity or craft upon which was imposed a schema: a set of planes that Hildebrand outlines. Yet, in painting, this set of rendering skills had already been overwritten by Impressionists and by Post-Impressionists including Cezanne. Artists’ technical approach to media, to clay, paint and to object making was shifting along with revisions of their approach to representation. So too was the ground beneath Hildebrandt’s pictorial approach to sculpture. Carl Einstein referred to Hildebrand’s Fernbild or distant picture as “pictorial sculpture”— his derogatory term, describing a pre-modern, privileged frontality, where the world is reorganized for the subject and object as image, effectively making most sculpture operate with a limited viewpoint— as high relief. 92 Hildebrand describes the formal mechanisms of relief but rejects any disturbance of the viewer/work relationship such as intrusions into the viewers space, even as occurs in Canova’s Tomb of Maria Christina (1805). His analysis was taken on by many including Einstein but was inverted to serve Einstein’s own, radically different ideas. It is easy to imagine Einstein’s friend Picasso, working literally from Hildebrand’s text with a diametrically opposed agenda, having already abandoned 91 Donal Cooper and Mariko Leino Depth of Field: Relief Sculpture in Renaissance Italy 2007 published Peter Lang, Bern gives a complete picture of the topic in this period and place. 92 Sebastian Zeidler Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art pg 81 Von Hildebrand’s Wittelsbacher Fountain, 1890-1895 is a famous example. It can be compared with Francoise Rude’s La Marsellaise 1836 mentioned in Krauss’Passages of Modern Sculpture. ! 40! perspective, —an agenda that would reify the picture plane and step in front of it rather than remain forever in the pictorial window.93 In Hildebrand’s pictorial 19th century approach, representational image and object coincided in illustrative or pictorial sculpture with the subject foremost. In early Cubist reliefs, the discrepancy or tension between image an object represents a dialogue with considerable potency where a renewed pragmatism (remember Adorno’s wistful reference to the “unimaginable pragmatism” of the archaic) takes place with regard to both materials and technique. Greenberg describes this with reference to Picasso’s Guitar (1912). It was as though, in that instant, he, (Picasso) had felt the flatness of collage as too constricting and had suddenly tried to escape all the way back—or forward —to literal three-dimensionality. This he did by using utterly literal means to carry the forward push of the collage (and of Cubism in general) literally into the literal space in front of the picture plane.94 Picasso went on to nail together the first assemblages or construction works. His succinct, technically primitive and simultaneously radical approach intensified focus on ideas by making technique transparent, an influential approach continued with Julio Gonzalez— welding sculptures that Gonzalez referred to as “drawing in space”.95 The same notion of creating form and image simultaneously by extending pictorial space to become a relief space— including real space without embracing sculpture in the round— has become a common place strategy among artists since: notably the sculptors David Smith and Anthony Caro who assembled images such as Caro’s Twenty four Hours (1960). 93!At the time of publication of The Problem of Form, Picasso had determined to break through his problems with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) with an “utterly original, compelling style” taking a contrary stand to much that surrounded him. ! 94 Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Collage By Clement Greenberg Beacon press Boston pg79 Greenberg’s privileging the idea over the material recalls the much earlier artisan’s exclusion from art (and Winckelmann’s separation of sensorial beauty and technically delivered concepts). He is in conflict with Michael Fried’s recognition that the artwork is still an object. For Picasso this was never an issue but a given. He was thinking with materials, whether painting or working with scissors. Picasso and Braque left many unsigned works in this period and decried the notion of a finished, completed work. It was simply inquiry. 95 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gonzalez-head-called-the-tunnel-t01698 ! 41! Fig.19 left: Hildebrand Dionysus Relief 1900 from The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture. centre: Picasso Guitar1912 Museum of Modern art New York. right: Anthony Caro Twenty Four Hours 1960 Tate Britain. Hildebrand’s inadvertent description of Cubism in his chapter Ideas of Planes and Depth inThe Problem of Form (which suggests a role as catalyst for Cubism), he states, “…deriving the principles of art from the material (is a) confusion of the end with the means (and) should be discredited once and for all.”96 This confirms a conventional understanding of the time, contested on two fronts: by a tradesman like approach to sculpture and by early modernists such as Constantine Brancusi who partially inverted this approach to materials and image with The Kiss in 1907, the year Hildebrand was published in English. Brancusi’s vision of a material essence awakens the possibility that, rather than the imagery of relief being subservient to architecture, the Ludovisi Throne, the Parthenon friezes and the Lions Gate can be seen as physically realized images in an architectural role. The Ludovisi Throne (an altar), counterpoints three sides of lucid pictorial images with the mass and gravity of a cubic meter of marble. It features “delicate, transparent drapery, calligraphically chiselled” 97 accompanied by cross-legged chastity and the suggestion of music—the antithesis of stony silence—poetic abstractions of a numinous culture in resolute material with qualities derived from the counterpoint of image and substance, the Hypokeimenon. 96 Adolf von Hildebrand The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture pg 92 97 Giovani Becatti The Art of Ancient Greece and Rome 1968 Thames and Hudson pg 154 ! 42! Fig.20 left: Constantin Brâncuși The Kiss 1907-08 in the Museum of Art, Craiova, Romania. right: The Ludovisis Throne 460 BCE in the Palazzo Altemps, Rome. This material use is aligned with the living rock architecture of widespread ancient precedents that include Greek theatres, Egyptian temples and Sassanian tombs. The tombs of Darius and Xerxes in Iran attach images to landscape connecting dynastic representations with geological time and demonstrating the complex associative meanings that emanate from image/object/material/place relationships. Subsequently, artists including Kiefer, Monahan and Houseago display an attraction to this “naïve” mediation of materials and images to avoid the “uncritical use of new technology” of the type that Benjamin Buchloh denounced in Bill Viola’s video work98 and to avoid the identified negative attributes of spectacle that Claire Bishop identifies through similar reasoning.99 Houseago and Monahan once shared studio space and studio rules intended to focus their vision on processes and materials through the idiosyncrasies of personal authorship. Their rules were contrived to excluded the premade and effectively facilitate the assertion of self at all stages of image and object making. Monahan’s “no skulls!” policy marks their difference as 98 Claire Bishop Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now? transcript of lecture at Cooper Union May 18th 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvXhgAmkvLs accessed 2017. Here Bishop gathers Buchloh, Krauss and others’ objections to forms of spectacle. 99 Ibid. ! ! 43! Houseago frequently returns to conflating skulls with masks in relief and in freestanding works.100 Houseago’s masks and the reinforced plaster figures, Baby (2009-10) or Working Title (2008) for instance, are rapidly and simply drawn on the floor, then poured wet onto the drawing, then lifted into the vertical plane once set, entering three-dimensions from a conception as an image via Houseagos’ physical performance with plaster. Unmitigated and uncoloured, its reinforcing and its procedural sketching is plainly in evidence transferred from the floor onto the plaster surfaces. These figures are anatomically reckless, at times, technically primitive, even formally hideous in their pragmatism but everything about them is perfect since they do no more or less than exist—as the residual artefact of a sincere performance that realises frailty along with heroism. Fig.21 Thomas Houseago: left: Baby 2009-2010 right: Houseago starting a relief in clay on a drawing 2013 100 from the Marizio Catellan interview for Flash Art 259 March-April 2008 MC: You mentioned you have rules in the studio. MM: No use of photography, no projections, no mannequins, no live models, no body casts, no ready-mades, no fabricators and no source material. I am pretty dogmatic about this.….If you fix the rules and the subject matter, you can really concentrate on the development of style….The loneliness could have been too much but I was in a kind of gang with two other artists, Tom Houseago and Micheal Kirkham. We called ourselves “the crows,” and we really stuck to this dogma and supported each other in our new figurative adventure. Otherwise I think it would have been impossible. ! ! 44! Fig.22 Thomas Houseago: left: Instagram post 2015. centre: Untitled 2008 right: Walking Boy 2009 Other mask reliefs pile lengths of clay on top of a flat drawing, extending the linear treatment into relief with overlaps and creating voids between what were previously blank spaces in the drawing. Many of these works approach or exceed two meters in height, realised with each laborious performance and vast quantities of clay or recast from large plaster moulds.101 At conception, the imagery is frontal, graphic and symbolic; informed by the flatness of modernism: masks, faces, skulls reduced to diagrammatic shapes that are brought into the space of relief either as flat components to be assembled or as individual relief works. Houseago’s exertion is cast solid to portray civilization as an exhausted quarterback (Baby 2009-10), exhibited with skulls and masks.102 Many of Houseago’s works depict a conflict between of vitality and mortality. The composition of Pentagon (masks) 2015 creates a central void reminiscent of some atavistic altar or archaic temple, lined unapologetically with the procedural surfaces of their making. It is primitive architecture and relief, uncertain of its own secular or religious nature. Its fallibility 101 The negative moulds themselves are often interchangeable with the positive cast components to compound the intentional with the procedural. 102 This is contrasted with artists who subcontract physical, technical and design work. Rudolph Stingel, who used South Tyrolian woodcarvers, then the Kunst Geisserei (Swiss Art foundry) to fabricate his modular Relief 2007! ! 45! emanates from the graphic nature of the masks’ starting point and their development to a scale that interacts with the plaza, retaining tension with its origins in the form of an awkward physical presence in the corporate architectural environment of New York city.103 It is one of two handmade works to be presented in this ongoing series of pubic art commissions, the other one being Kiefer’s Uraeus (2018) that combines the industrial with the literary in reconciling its imagery and physicality. Fig.23 Thomas Houseago: Roman Mask II 2013, Abstract Portrait 2009 and Pentagon (Masks) (2015) at the Rockefeller Plaza. Both share the tension of each artist’s haptic engagement with a pointed materiality used to address the question of how or if contemporary art can speak to spirituality. Each work extends the frontality of relief to address the public space in a multi directional way rather than in a three-dimensional, sculpturally coordinated manner. They evoke relief’s earlier function as papal stemma, emblematically branding the public space. The real alchemist is not interested in material things but in transubstantiation, in transforming the spirit. An alchemist puts the phenomena of the world in another context.104 Kiefer’s statement, a definition of personal, artistic intent, affirms the crucial role of materiality in creating his imagery of desolation and ruin. For Kiefer, duality involves the coexistence of representational image and material object fused with themes associated with 103!Pentagon (Masks) is neighbored by permanently installed reliefs by Paul Manship (1885-1966) and Isamu Noguchi (1904-88).! 104 Kiefer interviewed by Jackie Wullschlager for the Financial Times September, 2014 https://www.ft.com/content/4ad87118-3f42-11e4-a861-00144feabdc0#slide0 ! ! 46! creation and destruction. To elaborate, it is not merely an accompaniment but an evolved synthesis of graphic, two-dimensional images with the actual, physical and chemical residue of processes that contribute to the artist’s reconciliation with history, philosophy and poetry. The materials and processes are linked to poetic intent; expressions of the phoenix, melancholy, waste, beauty.105 Lead, soil, paint, straw, oxidation, burning, peeling, hacking, cracking all contribute to the imagery of paintings that extend towards the sculptural or the imagery of sculptures. Kiefer has developed a vocabulary of materials and a formal language of low saturated colours that contribute tonally to building a relief space. This space has a background of pictorial devices such as linear and atmospheric perspective, drawn, painted or relief printed or composed of silver nitrate photographic prints. They are surfaces that enlists the physical to give gravity and emphasis to the graphic—to reach from illusionistic and representational picture making toward the world of substance and objects often culminating in a foreground attachment of a constructed or selected component. It is a language of dereliction, iconoclasm and bravura. Many works are two-dimensionally monumental with their depth only modestly extending towards the viewers’ space with the size of the foregrounded subject/object adding to a pathetic tenor through scale by emphasizing the vastness of the background field of pictorial space. His vocabulary of materials conforms to Hildebrand’s description of successive proportional depth layers, with the flattest as background, on the support and the deepest at the front. Multiple items are arranged with the largest to the foreground (usually lower) section and smallest to the perspectivally recessive (upper) area in order to maintain unity between depicted and actual elements. Kiefer makes little attempt to construct intermediate forms of transition, preferring to leave such connections to the viewer. 106 His interpretation of relief’s space extends its pictorial/material possibilities while abbreviating or simplifying the formal language of Hildebrand that remains a reference for relief. 105 “ You cannot avoid beauty in a work of art.” however Kiefer withdrew at least one painting from his Royal Academy retrospective “ because it is too beautiful” he told Jackie Wullschlager in September, 2014. My use of phoenix comes from Kiefer’s frequent use of ashes and his statement “you’ve come to realize that a picture always erases the immediately preceding one, that it’s a matter of constant disposal and rebirth”. https://www.ft.com/content/4ad87118-3f42-11e4-a861-00144feabdc0#slide0!! 106!Kiefer has used impasto paint to sculpt imagery (flowers) on, above a works surface in an intermediate manner. ! ! 47! Fur Paul Celan: Ashenblume 2006 typically moves from actual books attached (smallest above, to register in the background) in front of a single viewpoint, linear perspective field that can be connected as a continuum by the viewer. The Heavenly Palace 2004 operates in the same way, with three-dimensional additions to a two-dimensional surface and little if any intermediary work. Even the level of impasto changes little across the most of the surface. Nonetheless, our desire to experience the work as a pictorial space will likely prevail with as little as a horizon form with which to infer a window space. In this way, Kiefer knowingly uses our narrative- needy projections on to his surfaces. Thus, he shows us a strategy for approaching narrative in relief. Fig.24 Anselm Kiefer Fur Paul Celan: Ashenblumen 2006 at Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv. The coupling of sculptural object and image in one work forms a relief space that operates in a similar, but more exaggerated manner in the more recent works A Snake In Paradise 1991-2017 where an earlier landscape is subjected to molten lead, which combines with and transforms the painted surface both chemically and with heat. The soft metal was subsequently peeled back and brought into conversation with a cast snake, also in lead. The ensuing dialogue between a burnt (literally) landscape and the now grossly sculptural elements, extends the pictorial/physical exchange of earlier work with a stronger tonal and colourfully saturated rendering of the landscape beneath. A similarly strong, graphic ground in other works extracted the same fiery and toxic response in most of the other works in Kiefer’s 2018 Thadeus Ropac exhibition titled Fur Andrea Emo. Many of which gain a more sculptural identity as opposed to a more pictorial unity more typical of the earlier work. This is also ! 48! symptomatic of Kiefer’s extensive works in vitrines and installations that demonstrate his interest in three-dimensional form and his exploration of this dry littoral zone. Fig.25 Anselm Kiefer A Snake in Paradise 1991-2017 Gallerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Fig.26 Anselm Kiefer left: Am Grunde der Moldau, da wandern die Steine 2008-2017. right: Gehäutete Landschaft 2014-2017 from the exhibition Fur Andrea Emo 2018 Gallerie Thadeus Ropac, Paris. A final point here is to note the difference in approach to relief between Houseago and Kiefer, most clearly articulated in relief’s 20th century precedents. In the nineteen fifties Robert ! 49! Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns employed an uncompromising frontality in their works that brought their pictorial compositions into the viewers’ space. Rauschenberg’s ‘combines’, Monogram (1955-59) for example, develops Picasso’s and Kurt Schwitters’ assemblage and collage into the action or installation space of the gallery in literal terms—the non representational use of paint, tyre and stuffed goat. Along with the flag, target and numeral motifs that Johns used (which sit in both worlds), Rauschenberg’s work contributes to a non- illusionist occupation of the physical world that eschews the perspectival devices that Kiefer, until Fur Andrea Emo in 2018, has relied on to deliver a window into history. One could add that the device itself is of that history, further connecting form and content. Houseago remains closer formally to Johns’ subject matter of target, flag, beer can and numerals with his own Spoon and the motifs of masks and coins, by choosing to depict objects already flattened rather than deploying numerous pictorial devices to that end. Houseago and Kiefer represent a divergence that once defined art in the second half of the twentieth century along the lines of using or rejecting pictorial space and representation. Rauschenberg, Johns and Houseago employ a shallow, deadpan space for the wall works while Kiefer’s window spaced works are accompanied by an emphatic acknowledgement of surfaces and their physical decay along with their depictive marks. ! 50! Chapter 3 Reflections on Studio Research This chapter is an overview of my studio research based in reflexive and deductive processes that aim to clarify pre-existing concerns and speculate on the dualities and themes discussed in the earlier chapters. The research was informed by observing the antique107, attending museums and recent art exhibitions 108 and by assimilating photographic and written notes, diagrams and other works on paper. In late 2012, I had experienced a history of painting and sculpture in the temple caves of Mogao in Northern China. Buddhists worked these 492 caves in the Gobi desert with little disruption from the 4th century to the 19th century. Arts developed in Rome over a similar period but with contrasting extreme and recurrent disruption. Rome is shattered into layered and interrupted sites. I started working there with plaster and a limited knowledge of Rome’s history but determined to respond to the cultural cacophony experienced in the company of archaeologists, classicists and other artists.109 The research through making recommenced in 2015 in a Brisbane studio and fabrication workshop and is chronologically considered here in four groups of work. The first explores carving as drawing in an attempt to harness memory in order to interpret, speculate on and summarize the overloaded complexity of East-West trafficked motifs from China to Rome without prescribed form. The second group, also dealing with the difficulty of distant or unknowable history, attempts to realize specific forms and devices evoking 18th century Europe. They follow on from the previous stemma 110 like works and include allusions to archaeology, vessels and objects of militaria. The third group responds to the figurative, narrative and spoilia.111 107 The British Museum, Academia in Venice, the Cathedral in Orvieto, Palazzo Altemps, Palazzo Massimo and numerous Roman museums and sites 108 In 2017 Frieze and the Venice Biennale, White Cube , Saatchi Galleries, the Serpentine. ! 109 In a studio of the British School at Rome in 2013, designed in 1900 by Sir Edward Lutyens expressly for a sculptor. These studios provide for a sense of immersion at the recent end of the Rome’s long history. 110 Papal insignia often set in relief above entrances in Rome, as illustrated in Chapter one. 111 Reused stone from earlier architectural works, often inscribed and carrying the significance of antiquity into its new placement. ! 51! The final section of the chapter addresses works that synthesise and adapt these investigations and conclusions in the form of commissioned architectural works in Brisbane and a site- specific work in a Townsville gallery space. Earlier Related Work: Fig.27 Bruce Reynolds left: Wynnum Pool with Brush ( various woods from 85 Haylock Street, Wynnum)1986. right: Cast and Elevation (cast in-situ concrete, linoleum, Axminster carpet, laminex.) 2001Brisbane magistrates Court, Brisbane. On arrival in Queensland from Europe, my first relief, Wynnum Pool with Brush (1986), was made from pieces of the timber house that I had started to repair and alter. Like collage, it was assembled from selected components with some paint removed and none applied. 112 In 2002, an eight meter blade wall, Cast and Elevation, was conceived as a collage with embedded elements of the suburbs cast into the wall and imprinted with carved hardboard sheets — drawings in relief— sharing surfaces with recent spolia in the form of linoleum, Axminster and Laminex.113 These two works, along with Tread 2009, summarize previous excursions in relief where the materials suggested the level of spatial compression that would indirectly inform the research that followed and is accounted for here. 112 I have worked with collage and assemblage for many years. My first solo exhibition was of 22 collages titled Thin Objects at Bitumen River in Canberra 1981 which gave rise to assemblage in subsequent shows. Some collage and relief printing of the moulds accompanied the relief works making up this research. ! 113 Cast and Elevation 2002 . Brisbane Magistrates Court and later also in Tread 2010 - cast from rubber tyres and polyurethane components. ! ! 52! Fig.28 Bruce Reynolds Tread 2009 (cast in-situ pigmented concrete) Ipswich Magistrates Court By extracting and thus isolating the concept of form from its dialectic with its other, it in turn tends toward petrification. At the opposite extreme, Hegel too did not escape the danger of such ossification.” —Adorno Aesthetic Theory pg. 354 Carving as Drawing and Form from Ornament The initial intent was to investigate the relationship between two and three dimensionality, more specifically posing the question: What if surface preceded the object? What if motif preceded form? These works investigate the duality of surface, image and pattern with physical processes and the object—another approach to negotiating the two and a half dimensional. Put another way, they use relief to investigate connections between decoration, sculpture and collage, all of which preserve gestural action and promote speculation. Drawing here meant carving with an electric chainsaw or blade to remove material from a 20mm thick sheet of closed cell foam. The material imposes limits and a method of organizing the physical space of the relief and can only be cut or marked with specific techniques. Carving rapidly created a surface with voids and troughs, motif and gesture in negative space to be cast to generate form from surface. The carving required a certain focus coordinating physical gesture and tool according to the behaviour of the material. In this way, numerous moulds of motifs and patterns were accumulated for reuse, linking periods and places remembered with the shortcomings and disjuncture associated with an overwhelming ! 53! exposure to diverse cultural forms and motifs. For example adjoining references to the Baroque and Seljuk had no predetermined sequence and would be interpreted in the negative, in reverse, so a final composition was unknown. These works involved bending carved sheets towards three-dimensional form to produce shallow reliefs in plaster— colourless, bone-like objects, calcium carbonate, the material of shells, coral, limestone and eggshells- the youthful, modest and prosaic cousin of marble.114 They became initially shield like then vessels. The earliest piece took on the form of an incised war shield, ironically delicate in plaster. Shield represents an improvised, personal account of history; an unintended, but recognizably defensive shape— incised and scarred. Pieces consciously alluding to human or ceremonial military forms followed: greaves, the cuirass, a carapace – shells, residue of conflict. The carapace or shell is a transformative object, changing man to warrior or even hero. This reading is a reflection of David Malouf having brought earlier Homeric themes into focus with his imagined account of Ovid in exile.115 Fig.29 Bruce Reynolds Carapace and Greave I and Greave II in David Malouf and Friends at the Museum of Brisbane 2014 cast pigmented plaster. 114!Marble is still not entirely forgiven since Pater. The carved fifteen millimetres thick polyethylene sheet can still be torn bent or cut.! 115 D. Malouf “An Imaginary Life” 1978 published by George Braziller is about relearning from a child, in the wilderness where previous knowledge is useless. I also had several conversations with Malouf himself when he was in Brisbane. ! 54! Three Vessels from the Second Group. The intention in these works was to give a non-prescribed form to existent surfaces (the same relief carved sheets of polyethylene foam) and to further assess how two and three-dimensionality can relate to each other, beyond the traditional ornamentation of a pre-existing object. Making a cylinder from a flat sheet and interrupting that form with a concave intrusion formed Archaic Vessel, by filling with plaster. The self-imposed limitations of such tasks invite decisions that prioritize and summarize aspects of complex research, reducing many options to just one or two. In this case the tube form that was initially reminiscent of the Seljuk towers of Central Asia (in a preliminary cast piece). They became more obviously vase like. ! Fig.30 Archaic Vessel cast pigmented plaster 2015 ! This improvised approach to assembling the mould, anticipated form, proportions and the location of motifs. The resultant solid form addressed the question “could one decorate a form before the form came into being?” I was covertly empathizing with ancient Greek potters. Subsequently, I determined to improvise a large Krater from the base up, in an additive ! 55! process starting with a more contrived, constructed mould at the bottom and adding sections in five successive casts. The resultant vessel appears partially complete, however the role that the relief surface has taken is clear within this quasi-functional object. The pervasive form of the vase or vessel and their histories contain the possibilities of new readings for the forms. The scale and readings of the relief (relative to the forms) were of continuing interest. Fig.31 left: Krater 2015. cast pigmented plaster right: Archaic Vessel 2015 cast pigmented plaster and Neapolitan Stereo 2015 installed in Oxiana 2016 Pop Gallery, Woolloongabba The final vessel sought a compromise between a single sided relief and an object in the round. Skyphos is a double-sided relief, arrived at in response to Krater. It is a shallow two-sided form, part vessel, and part picture; pigmented with a Sienna tinted arabesque on one face, a dark grey shape incorporated into the reverse face. Both shapes are subservient to the activated surfaces and the straightforward assertion of the material form. Each face depicts bay crabs and prawns that scavenge, and are preyed on and are intended to link Moreton Bay now with the Mediterranean of antiquity. Its form was constructed in three pours: one for each face and one for the base. Skyphos refers to another utilitarian Greek vessel, a bowl. The outcome sought clarification of subject and object in the context of its support. Its tentative, compromised existence in the round is a challenge to the nature of the surface, begging the question that sculpture often poses: what is this object’s relationship to function? To viewer, ! 56! to the lived space? In addition, from that: what is the meaning of representational imagery in this non-functional non-pictorial context.116 The work confirmed the breadth of possibility associated with these dualities and indicated that the wall and its history as a site for the pictorial was a useful anchorage not only for the pictorial but also for the functional, which is interwoven with the physical. A large space appeared between an ornamented bowl and a sculpture. The indications were that the inquiry was too wide and that a return to the wall would be useful. Monoprints and other works on paper produced at this time confirmed this. The earlier Shield pointed away from objects in the round, back to single-surfaced wall pieces. Hence Accrual and Unification, both wall works, immediately followed the vessels. Fig.32 Skyphos 2015 cast pigmented plaster 116!This returns me to Fried’s famous point about objecthood which evokes questions about representation and support, function and the separation of art from life and what is the role of decoration in this.! ! 57! Response to the Eighteenth Century Accrual (2015) and Unification (2015) are both heavy, fragile shield-like forms, burdened with surface relief. Their purpose was to directly commit the absorbed motifs of Eurasia to relief as a reflection of the history of interaction between East and West— in other words, to interpret history and impossible complexity in concrete terms in a specifically constricted format in order to reveal the potential and limitations of cast relief. Their form suggests papal stemma or coats of arms, recombining carved components on an authoritarian form of identification once common in the 18th century. Made one after the other, sections of moulds were accumulated in separate, serial castings to provide widely varying motifs. A type of relief cast collage, responding to the Baroque and the antique was achieved by interchanging the moulds as sections of the works were cast and composed, by ripping, cutting and re-joining pieces of the moulds before casting. Fig.33 left: Accrual 2015 cast pigmented Hydrocal. right: Unification 2015 cast pigmented Hydrocal. ! 58! First an undulating profiled wooden armature was built to a accommodate the polyethylene mould pieces and to produce a concave surface confining the liquid state gypsum to the shape of a Tiepolo ceiling panel, still shield like in size. Pigments117 once traded on the Silk Road were used to distinguish each pour incorporating casts from different moulds in stages of accumulation, interlocking components of image/structure/composition, the various motifs interrupted and embedded like little territories achieved through conflict. This method of combining and embedding image/objects in a conglomerated geology, allowed a piece to contain its own history, able to be read or unravelled by its visible process of production. Papal signifiers like the Barberini bees, (which came to signify Barberini looting) were embedded along with molluscs and less recognisable shapes and patterns. Ambiguous markers of historic despotism and those without meaning were mixed and fixed in a process that demotes potentially heroic symbols and images to an equivalency with bricks, dragons, insects or drapery, reassigning a hierarchy of values and shuffling the chronology of events. M a n o f L e t t e r s tested another configuration of form and image conceived as a generalization of portraiture and representing the Enlightenment’s revised concern with the ancient. Initially modelled on Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet 1694-1778), and his contemporaries Winckelmann and Captain James Cook (1728-1779), it combines four distinct components of relief: a collar cast from sheet plastic, two sections of hair and a slightly convex ovoid cast from a carved memory of Roman stucco ceiling decoration.118 Each component takes on shapes determined by the liquid state of the plaster rather than having been confined to shaped moulds. The motifs of wig, collar and face are interlocked and mutually overlapping, slightly concave elements that follow a ratio of depth to width to establish the form logically in its relief space. The components are joined by pouring modified gypsum, seeping through between chain-sawn curls and arabesques from a blade, solidifying as part of the final image, underlined by the collar cast from the creased plastic bag that previously held the plaster. The well-mannered wig, the stylized vines, the artificial collar together a fanciful construction of 117 Yellow ochre, red Sienna and ultramarine blue carry their own sub plot of history and geography. ! 118!Vila Farnesina rooms are preserved in Palazzo Massimo and other Roman ceilings were observed at Ostia and the baths at the forum in Rome . ! 59! what is formally organized and historically misremembered. It attempts to focus on the tension between the vague and the tangible, the particular and the general, history and the modern as well as pattern and form. Fig.34 left: Man of Letters II 2015 right: Coronet Sconce (Sconce IV) 2015 S c o n c e s The sconces directly approached drawing a wall dependent object in three dimensions in a form that continues the 18th century frame of reference. Functional (in an archaic sense) yet an abstraction (originally from acanthus, still growing wild and curling as they wither around Rome), their gestural composition and materiality speak to an architectural context, wherever that may be. Like John’s numerals and targets, they are both a thing and a representation. Collectively, they are also petrified gestures of figuration alluding to drapery and inviting a reconsideration of the functional, the figurative and the decorative. The technique used liquid Ultracal119 on a galvanized steel frame with cloth as the vehicle for suspension and manipulation. The setting time dictates the speed and the adhesion of the 119 A form of modified gypsum, stronger than plaster.! ! 60! material to its frame so the sculpting is performative and somewhat improvised. This heightened the voice of the material previously contained on a mould surface. The second sconce made more of the cloth with stronger reference to its Baroque ancestors and their gestural origins in gilt bronze or carved wood. The third and forth sconces incorporate spoilia; draped figures previously cast then used as a central motif within their form increasingly aligning performative gesture and figuration. They attempt to evoke a wistful neo-classical past. N e a p o l i t a n S t e r e o The Baroque interest in optics and perspectival deception suggests another way of considering relief’s spatial ambiguity. The intent with Neapolitan Wall and Neapolitan Stereo (2015) was to counter this idea— inherent in the use of perspective and its reference to optics— with the opaque materiality of the irregular shaped object. The pattern employed on the stone façade of the Neapolitan Church of Gesù Nuovo (originally a palace) was carved in single point perspective and cast twice, allowing the fluid material to determine the shape of each. As a pair, they reference stereo vision and the convex optics of lenses, intended to highlight the light source and the space in front of the work— the viewers’ space as additional to the pictorial and physical spaces. Their duplication depicting two walls directing us to the third wall, implies a perceptual trick. Looking into the distance, we are aware of where we stand. Fig.35 Neapolitan Stereo 2015 installed at Oxiana 2016 at Pop Gallery, Woolloongabba. ! 61! Narrative and S p o l i a The intention in these works was to test allusions to narrative, to imply broken moments in longer stories in relief while considering the landmark precedents of Trajan’s Column, the Parthenon Frieze and the reliefs of Persepolis.120 The aim was also to resonate ancient stories and violent events in remixed depictions and in new contexts. The inclusion of narrative in relief, reflecting themes of conflict from contemporary news sources as well as historic ones, required the development of characters beyond the established vocabulary of pattern and motif. Arbor is an investigation into the setting for figuration—the question of figure - ground relationships and pictorial space. When does the setting become a character? It was made in three pours, firstly the grey tree based on the Milanese relief from the cathedral exterior in Candoglia marble that I photographed in 1985 and that stayed with me as a contradiction - tree as marble. The pour approximately formed the tree’s outline. This oak is engulfed by Queensland tree species (genetically much older) that make up the back ground, becoming foreground. The plaster was controlled by regulating its viscosity and through measured distribution on moulds of a Hoop pine and a Livingstone palm. I strategically drilled holes through this piece, to encourage the second pour of the white, wet mix to move into areas between the branches as well as around the tree, physically interlocking and visually enveloping the subject. The third pour tinted with sienna pigment, partially repeated the image of the pine and palm extending the subject from the one original tree to a represent a small grove or arbor composed of very different tree types as might appear in a city’s botanical garden. The impenetrable pictorial space was reinforced with the tension between the devices of overlapping, relative scale (large versus small) and the reversal of colour use by placing the warm colour at the back, cool grey in the foreground. 120 The landscape format of the Portonaccio sarcophagi and earlier Parthenon friezes climax in the 190 meter spiraling narrative of Trajan’s Column. ! ! 62! Fig.36 Arbor 2016 cast pigmented Hydrocal. An oak tree from Milan Cathedral, figures from the Forge of Vulcan (1611) by Adrian De Fries, draped and headless figures from Hatra, Assyrian Lamassu and centaurs were cast both individually and together as actors in events with mixed historical references designed to suggest the interlocking of past and present. Vulcan pitted against centaur, hammer smiths overlaying damaged draped figures, antagonists ossified with protagonists— small figurative personifications of power and conflict, ornamental rather than monumental, their pastel tints and scale evoking domestic ornament. Fig. 37 Little Centaur, Draped Figure, Blue Swingers, Little Lamassu 2015 cast pigmented Hydrocal ! 63! Their references are to the smashed statues of Hatra, draped classical figures and Isis videos of the destruction in Iraq and Syria at Mosul, Nimrud, Nineveh, Hatra and Palmyra121. They were cut with blades and the chainsaw in negative then precast for rearrangement in various configurations. Fig.38 Hammer Frieze 2015 lying on its mould. The space before a work; the viewer’s space, was given further consideration through the investigation of the frieze form and related representations of time in relief. Longitudinal compositions of varying poses are overlayed and animated with the viewer’s participation. Processional narrative and the frieze have been partnered for millennia. In Hammer Frieze and Cornice Frieze, the figures are both animated and arrested while presenting what might appear to be a section of narrative from a greater whole. Motifs and events are components of narration. The role of narrative in relief has been pivotal in its longevity and in its decline. It prompted further contemplation of the greatest narrative 121 In its blackest moment, ancient and contemporary converged with the beheading of Khaled al-Asaad, an archaeologist and head of antiquities for the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Palmyra ! ! 64! relief, Trajan’s Column and led to the incorporation of the individual figures of conflict derived from various times and places (Roman and Greek mythology and recent events in Iraq and Syria) in a panel suggestive of a larger landscape with cypress and hills in Column (section #1).122 It was conceived as a module to be repeated as additional episodes, hung one on top of another in the manner of the column relief that spiralled upward. Here the spiral is reduced to a single frame. Fig.39 Column 2015 (section #1) 60cm x 100cm Hydrocal, carbon, ochre. Additionally, several figurative compositions were cast from single carved works; for example Terrain with Coronet (2015) and Struggle (after Michelangelo) (2015), that incorporate a crown and statue that interrupts the intestinal wrestling of Michelangelo Buonarotti’s earliest sculpted work, a relief of the battle of the centaurs indirectly derived from the Roman sarcophagi in Pisa. Michelangelo’s composition orchestrates the movement of the eye across the work, linking pictorial space and time with links between characters as they act out the works 122!!Trajan’s Column 107 to 113 AD, a copy of which dominates the Architectural courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The relief winds 90 meters around its support which is 30 meters tall.! ! 65! constituent episodes. Struggle (2015) is not Donatello’s pictorial theatre space but a surface of writhing bodies interrupted by the submerged headless draped figure from Hatra and a foreign crown lending the apparently fragmentary panel a pretence of authority. Its overall form is contained top and bottom with cable motif, its sides peter out inconclusively. Fig.40 Struggle (2015) (after Michelangelo Buoranotti) and Terrain with Coronet 2015 The intention in making Cornice Frieze was to consider the containment of narrative elements of relief within a fragment of a frieze wall, or architectural element and to relfect on incomplete or indefinite forms. This objective emerged from Struggle, Hammer Wall and Centaur in Weekender and reappraised the architectural /narrative relationship with its ability to speak of a greater absent whole. They continue the embedding of precast elements within objects and surfaces interrupted by earlier events or other places. This incorporation of previous histories occurred in the inclusion of spolia in Roman and later Italian architecture, usually marble set in marble. I hypothesized that resonance of components within a work might imply a similar relationship by extension between the work and its third space. ! 66! Fig.41 left: Cornice Frieze 2015 mould with precast characters positioned prior to casting and right: Cornice Frieze 2015. The research at this point collectively suggests an archaeological timeframe and a speculative interpretation of history (albeit one with many familiar elements), placing greater emphasis on forms that continued to question the image/object relationship. Narrative in this context adds to a sense of incompleteness, while the duality of what has been discussed as the pictorial and the physical can be understood as depiction and existence, since each object produced contains depiction within it and each depicts an artefact or object symptomatic of an incomplete or damaged set—substantiating its own history, its own existence. The narrative has therefore moved outside of singular contained depictions to the set of fragmentary works that require a wider, even more speculative reading of a fictitious but vaguely familiar history. Epistemologically, this may be obvious—a chain that links relief to a familiar maxim that also connects back to Fred Orton describing Johns work as “a perpetual oscillation between subject and surface.” 123— between idea and object, depiction and existence (pictorial/physical) — think/am. 123 Quoted by Greg.Org https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/05/23/everything-in-sight ! 67! V e i l e d Following earlier attempts to link historical ideas to pictorial outcomes in plaster, I responded to an image from a Canadian artist in my instagram feed of a veiled bust in storage, covered during studio maintenance. It is an image both prosaic and timeless. It is and isn’t art. I remade the photo as a cast relief. A month previous, I had carved a bust after a Roman portrait in order to most directly confront the figurative aspect of relief’s depictive space. I then cast it as a negative in order to observe the illusion of tonal reading when a directional light source comes from the opposite direction, transforming negative to positive space. This negative was used as a mould jacket and lined with a thin membrane to mimic the shrouding of the bust and its identity in the original photo by Frieso Boning (1958-2016). Veiled has a sense of airless compression from the meeting of liquid and the negative space moderated by three different membranes. It is half pillow and half corpse made from an iphone photograph of a sculpture into negative relief, addressing transposition and moderation. Fig.42 Veiled 2015 in Woolloogabba studio ! 68! C o r o n a s (2016) is another configuration of the duality previously expressed as the pictorial and the physical. Coronas reverses the early works improvisation, executing a plan conceived to examine the integration of two types of pattern, two types of inserted elements that I have come to regard as spolia: precast crowns and linoleum shapes from Brisbane houses. The contained undulating convex surface in the shape of a Tiepolo canvas with a shared surface of alternating graphic and relief elements, forgoes the compressed pictorial space of depictive relief in favour of the decorated image/object, semi-official emblematic ornamental residue— part Chelsea Barracks, part Coorparoo. Its modesty of means negotiates a theme familiar to all of the artists discussed in this paper, the theme of failure and triumph. It is a secular, domesticated, and urbanized version of the papal stemma that are attached to buildings and herald the patronage of the various popes in Rome.124 Fig.43 Coronas 2016 pigmented Hydrocal and linoleum with precast elements. 124 Retrospectively and incidentally, I also see it as autobiographical. ! 69! Fig.44 Coronas 2016 with precast elements arranged face down on composition of patterned surfaces prior to inserting the linoleum pieces. The curved armature of plywood is visible upper centre and the washed lino pieces are drying on the ground near the buckets. The amalgamation is completed with several pours of pigmented modified gypsum. Outside: The progression of research culminated in an architectural frieze as the third of a series of three publically sited commissions in Newstead, on the northern edge of the Brisbane CBD. I had introduced the clients to relief in the first commissioned work by incorporating it in a secondary role. The three works were interspersed in a development that includes four apartment towers, and saw relief in three different roles: as ancillary to a freestanding sculpture titled Covalent Bond; as architectural decoration cladding columns and marking a street entry titled Confluence; and overseeing an atrium and contributing to the street view of the building titled Oceania Frieze. Covalent Bond is the first of three stages consisting of a freestanding sculpture in a small public use courtyard between the Waterloo Hotel and a development including four apartment towers. The principal form of vertically stacked components sits on a polygonal podium that references Pisano’s Fontana Maggiore (1278) in Perugia’s Palazzo dei Priori. Cast relief panels surround the podium and adjacently form the vertical faces of cast in situ concrete benches. This dialogue within the site attempts to integrate the space sculpturally and architecturally. ! 70! The cast relief represents the only hand-made surfaces in the building and probably for a considerable distance. These surfaces contribute personalization and commitment that is frequently absent in a newly completed urban space. There is a speculative aspect in this context, which follows from the nature of the development itself, economically and socially.125 Fig.45 Covalent Bond 2015 stainless steel, cast relief, aluminium and enamel 5m x 2m x1.2m 125 Such commissions are subject to good faith from all parties. Preconditions influencing the work include the building construction methodology that presses for late installation and site minimal site access. Art is not commonly included on a project management spread sheet and may still only reluctantly be accommodated under the contractual pressure of completion schedules. In other words, off site fabrication is assumed. The seating was previously specified to be rendered, painted block work or solid cast concrete. The form of the sculpture is based on a stack of vessels. (the district was a long term storage depot). ! 71! The technical method was adapted from the preceding research in response to the intimate nature of the urban, architectural space, a refuge adjacent to one of Brisbane’s city arteries. The material used for the relief components was a modified gypsum product with added sand. Casting this coarser, waterproof material, containing an acrylic resin for exterior durability required an adapted method.126 Their images of crustaceans implicate the site with another time scale. They connect thematically with the two following stages. Fig. 46 left: Component with cast panel for Covalent Bond 2015 right: Relief panels in its base and adjacent cast benches territorialize and integrate with the site. Confluence (2017), the second stage, consists of the decoration of two existent concrete columns distinguishing the street entry. The task is essentially archaic. Broadly, it is defined by the hierarchical relationship between client, architect, builder and artist, which in turn is defined by the economy of urban development. This structure of patronage echoes much earlier relief production. Fronting one of four mainly residential towers, Confluence sits above the subterranean junction of the nineteenth century Stratton Drain that still connects the filled in swamp of Newstead to 126!!Lower viscosity when pouring and the coarser detail required for reading in a larger space informed the carving of the moulds, which also needed to be low relief , avoiding prominent and sharp elements with regard to perceptions of public safety.! ! 72! Moreton Bay and the Coral Sea. Across the street is The Triffid, an enduring, well used music venue. The site is therefore at the junction of a foyer of white leather and marble, a drinking hall with music and the runoff from both to the Bay. Fig.47 left: Digital simulation of the proposed design centre: Installed work at night right: South column in daylight The north column is encircled with high relief of folded, polished stainless steel, connecting form with ornament, graphic with physical.127 The southern column is clad with organic, low relief imagery derived from the marine organisms of Moreton Bay and informed by proto geometric Greek pottery as well architectural capitals. Both columns incorporate painted metal skins encasing the façade’s structural elements. 127 This element was refined to address the softening of extremities (removal of pointed ends) exposed to public contact and to resolve a fixing system that minimizes on site installation requirements. ! ! 73! Fig.48 Early drawings for Confluence 2017 Oceania Frieze is ten meters long, in five panels. Approximately six meters above the ground, its elevated, suspended form conceals a cistern and suggests a cantoria128 where, rather than serving a choir, its soundtrack is running water from a water feature. Fig.49 Oceania Frieze 2017 (detail of central section) in Newstead, September 2017 glass fibre reinforced modified gypsum and concrete. The frieze is a reconsideration of the ancient panoramic, filmic form that comes with some expectation of narrative: a battle with victory uncertain. Events take place amongst the 128 A cantoria is a balcony specifically accommodating a choir. Copies of Della Robbia’s and Donatello’s Cantoria are in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. ! 74! imagery of cephalopods (squid, octopuses129) and medusozoa (jellyfish) that vastly pre-date our species and suggest an older theme. Fig.50 Detail of right section Oceania Frieze 2017 after nearby tiling and before the builder’s water feature . A large octopus approaches a decorated vase. The octopus is the most intelligent invertebrate, ancient, arabesque, mercurial, decorative and common food source. Paired, they are intended to suggest slippage between culture and nature, to evoke our debt to the distant Mediterranean as well as to the adjacent Coral Sea — presenting local content as exotic. Micro and macro marine biology migrate to and from the surface of the vases that they have adorned. Animals are stylized in mirrored shapes of polished steel set in the white cast gypsum-concrete. The paradox of animated compositions in a static frieze, an opaque fossilized surface, is an ancient dramatic device, here amplified by its relationship to the passing commuter traffic on a principal artery. Perhaps it will eventually accrued readings of the work that invite contemplation of the animals depicted ( the giant jellyfish, the rampant octopus) and of their narrative, revealing aspects of the familiar, the exotic and the absurd in the form of a reminder of our relationship to the ancient life forms from the bay. 129 The octopus, “the body itself is protean, all possibility” it “lives outside the usual body/brain divide”. Peter Godfrey-Smith. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/15/other-minds-peter-godfrey-smith-review- octopus-philip-hoare ! 75! Following preliminary studies in ink on paper, the moulds were cut and carved in foam through direct drawing with chainsaw and blades. These were ripped, cut and reassembled as composite images for the moulds for each panel in a similar manner as the initial paper collaged studies made from ripped and glued ink drawings. Digital compositions were rescaled and revised as alternative compositions. Fig.51 left to right: Octopus drawn in its own ink, carved mould, studio photograph and Minoan pot 15th century BCE. A proprietary formula gypsum based casting material (Trinic) reinforced with glass fibre) offered a way of achieving light-weight panels for the anticipated difficulty of installation conditions. Closed cell Polyethylene foam was chosen to enable directness of gesture to counter the frozen final form of relief with a fluid, interpretive carving process that offers the immediacy of small-scale drawing. The foam yields even more easily to blade than to the electric chainsaw. I am unaware of anyone else having used this process for mould making. It has enabled the reuse and recombining of moulds. Working in the negative may dissuade those who would avoid the unpredictable or the interventionist nature of the process that sits between industrial production (it is a largely repeatable system akin to printmaking) and the hand made. The process of casting the frieze is, like Houseago’s method, predictably physical. A thousand kilograms of material were mixed and poured by hand into the five panels. Several of the panels incorporate water jet cut stainless steel shapes enlarged from ink drawings. The mirror polished steel and matt white gypsum are colourless and contrasted while sharing a flush continuous surface. ! 76! The moulds for Panels 3 and 4 included areas of polystyrene that are dramatically impacted by acetone solvents applied to chemically dissolve polystyrene into organic shaped voids and surfaces of cellular character with low predictability in rates of corrosion that determine the depth and shapes representing sponges and corals.130 Their eroded voids were cast as positive organic forms that occur amidst flat flush laser cut stainless steel shapes. Fig.52 Oceania Frieze prior to installation left: panel #1 showing a large jelly fish, the oldest multi organ animal. right: panel #5 flush shapes of water jet cut mirrored stainless steelin contrast to the gypsum cast surface. Both Oceania Frieze and Saturation Point lay on a flat white ground — ambiguous spaces that relate to the building as support.131 The work’s architectural context is an external three-walled atrium open to Anne Street designed to acknowledge the traffic entering the CBD. Primarily viewed from the atrium but also from within the building, its length requires movement as well as duration for a full 130!This chemical corrosion is the basis of Rudolph Stiegel’s works made by walking over polystyrene in solvent drenched boots.! 131 This was foiled in the case of Oceania Frieze when the large wall above it was tiled without design input, removing any useful relationship with the frieze. From this comes a desire to contribute early in the design process, to affect the site more and particularly to reduce the ubiquitous dependency on cladding and to engage instead with the structural material to respond with less mediation to the site rather than contribute to the “seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed”. - Rem Koolhaas Junkspace OCTOBER 100, Spring 2002, pp. 175. In-situ cast concrete, as an alternative example, provides the opportunity for a considered response in cast relief to the fabric of the building, as opposed to associating with the retrofitted surface finishes that are the dominant visible areas of contemporary architecture. ! 77! reading of its detail.132 An analysis of this high traffic location shows the architectural design addressing complex criteria that serve client, construction company and council, recalling Lefebvre’s “illusion of transparency” in social space as well as Rem Koolhaus’ Junkspace — “held together not by structure but by skin…conditional space”. 133 The artwork’s invitation onto the site too is conditional and understood by the architects attempting to counter Lefebvre’s identified illusion. Their constraints implicitly become the foundation of the artist’s commission. Oceania Frieze awaits the establishment of the perceived space that Soja stated results from a synthesis of openness and critical exchange with the physical, knowable and conjectural, imagined, conceived aspects of experiencing the work in context. The attenuated accumulation of events: individual, collective, and serial represent this ongoing completion; what Adorno referred to as methexis or shared response134. O c e a n i a F r i e z e , contained within what was once considered a genre, is simply a new work rather than a new model. Rodin’s Gates of Hell was also a new work rather than a new model. This is frequently so in institutional commissions, however the immodest comparison fails because the Gates were much closer to the genre’s decline than Oceania, a century later, unexpectedly retrograde and mediating formal quietude with personal response. Here relief risks condemnation by association with commercial enterprise seeking validation beyond council approval. Oceania seeks engagement in Soja’s third space — a union of the public and particular space, the formal and socio-political. It is an idealistic, optimistic gesture within the development. These works have sought to respond and engage; acknowledging the perils of their circumstance. Contrary to Krauss and Winckelmann, relief in a frieze is a time-based work no less than a short film. In spite of Hildebrand’s insistence on single viewpoint simultaneity, from Trajan’s 132 The inclusion of an art work had been anticipated while its final position on the site was arrived at collaboratively with the architect and client. This position and its form suggested the nature of the relief undertaken, although the eventual usage of the space and its architectural finishes were unknown. 133 Rem Koolhaas Junkspace OCTOBER 100, Spring 2002, pp. 175 134 This social view of art in public is a reminder of sculptures renamed or relocated in a changing urban context. The stability of much contemporary architecture is now unconvincing. For example the award winning Neville Bonner Building was destroyed as this frieze was installed. 134 At the same time Kentridge’s and Houseago’s much larger works were installed and removed, further revising our expectations of art and site. ! 78! column to Rodin’s Gates of Hell, the viewing intake of relief works is rarely instantaneous. How quickly can the viewer absorb the content of the Donatello choir relief? The awareness of stone and its representation (figures interacting) is subject to constant renegotiation, a series of events rather than an immortal instant.135 Not only does relief reveal itself over time, its meaning accrues and shifts with re visitation within one lifetime and in history. Winckelmann required contemplative views of sculpture from designed viewpoints. The frieze here remains in this sense incomplete, its third space still emergent. It is not yet entirely of its setting, retaining anonymity and undefended as public art often is, fortunate were it to be mentioned in architectural discourse. It has survived the course of council, client, constructors and engineers and been fortunate to have had sympathetic architects involved. It is the space and time in front of relief works that brings them nearer completion and determine relief’s significance. The frieze exists over time as an accumulation of events, a small history. S a t u r a t i o n P o i n t at Umbrella Studios in Townsville August 2017 was painted, printed and cast in the gallery over four days. Reflecting on Ranciere’s understanding of art in history and the attenuated process of Oceania Frieze, Saturation Point was approached as a temporal work— episodic—rather than long term. The performative aspect of producing reliefs and imagery on the walls was only visible to the public incidentally. A conventional gallery opening followed the completed installation of work. One wall was painted with an enlarged adaptation of an earlier drawing accompanied by an ultramarine print from a relief mould used previously in Oceania Frieze panel #5. A second 135 The unforeseen imposition by the city council of a pedestrian awning separating the atrium and artwork from the street and therefore from the passing traffic, has restricted or obliterated the medium distance views of the frieze. The opportunity for making the work stemmed from the councils desire for visually /culturally enriched spaces. I have responded to “an integrated public art strategic plan” and client briefing. The relevance of relief as a viable engaging form is acknowledged by all parties involved in the regeneration of the site. One concludes that even with the promotion of the artist into an empowered position of dialogue and decision- making, the authorship of space is largely administrative and even anonymous. The outcome remains contingent on how responsibility for the site is shared as well as how the artist responds. If there is a formula for success, its complexity involves faith as a modifier of regulation in the possibilities that emerge from the projects preconditions. The good faith of architects, clients, government and public art consultants go a long way towards achieving an integrated positive ‘third space’ which users of the atrium are yet to determine in the evolving relationship of the work and the fate of this little agora. ! 79! colourless wall opposite was hung with multiple casts from five moulds—some from Oceania and extending East West Frieze 2016 with a layer of marine animals over terrestrial. The installed show thus built on existing motifs and themes and countered the incongruity of depicted species with a repetitive rhythm of zoology with an evolutionary overtone. Fig.53 A detail from the west wall of Saturation Point 2017 Townsville. ! 80! Fig.54 Detail from Saturation Point east wall 2017 Interplay between relief and painting and between depictive and non-representational imagery invited questions regarding these formal modes of representing land and sea as resources and motifs on the east and west walls that faced each other. A third shorter wall displayed an emblematic arrangement of relief components that offered a more composed and pointed reading. ! 81! Fig.55 Detail of the Third Wall from Saturation Point 2017 Thirteen hundred kilometres from the state capital, mining and beef exports define Townsville’s wealth and fishing the reef defines its leisure. After one-month, the destruction of the work would leave it as a residual memory with its viewers. This focus on a specific audience and timeframe highlighted the work’s dependency and the role of social development, nurturing and promotion as opposed to a fly in, fly out delivery. Limitations were obvious in responding through content and imagery to the location of an exhibition. The shift to a particular viewing public could benefit from several iterations and varying approaches in order to develop work as a series of events that more directly addressed this, to me, previously unknown audience. In this sense, the contrast with Kentridge’s approach in Rome is informative.136 Saturation Point highlighted a dependence on the physical and visual nature of the work in a larger art world context. and represented a significantly different paradigm. 136 The well attended events were the result of complex negotiation, large scale collaboration, assistance and patronage, although Kentridge later had the frieze prematurely removed in response to recurring graffiti. The work may have had Roman subjects but the long neglected walls are contested space. ! 82! Conclusion Where relief has become functionless, (no longer part of pediments or memorials) its conventions serve as masks (to paraphrase Adorno) and tools of an earlier code, a dialect that is not unfamiliar but whose distance imparts the attractiveness of the exotic begging to be re- worked in its new context. The persistent character of relief and the influences of its various contexts are especially significant today in the near absence of prescribed functions of genre. Relief invites reconciliation with history even as is it reemployed in what Monahan sees as a “violent regression”. What has also been confirmed is that this relief is now associated with the mobility of artists responding to formal needs, according to their concerns, both personal (particular) and universal. By extension, it is relevant to many areas of contemporary art practice. Its dualist character aligns with the content of artists’ work while its physical, tactile forms contrast with the digital backdrop of urban life. Relief is an interface that invites viewers to complete it, that is, it enacts a spatial event that assimilates its context into its function. Artists gather in and scatter from this zone defined by between-ness and transition from historical and conceptual origins. Collectively, they reaffirm relief’s contemporary relevance. Kiefer’s and Kentridge’s art does not resemble the younger Houseago’s nor Monahan’s. Their motivations and modes of arrival at relief differs: driven from painting, drawing, and performance. They share however, a consciousness of the significance of history and destruction in metaphor and method. Their discipline is not formally narrow but scattered, disparate and formed with personal intent and an awareness that formal stasis courts complacency— the adversary of each of these artists. Following Adorno’s observations, where once newness occurred within genres, now the new is more likely found between and external to them.137 The identification of relief as a zone of art practice assists in inquiring into the nature and extent of specialization and commitment in what were once discreet disciplines, such as sculpture. The stability and parameters of these are now widely questioned, where curatorial 137!Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic theory Continuum 2002 pg. 308 ! ! 83! priorities shift and institutions redefine their functions.138 An understanding of relief also assists in the interrogation of shifting boundaries and their increasing permeability.# The much discussed art/life border is also permeable and soluble to the point that it is of diminished consequence. Art in schools and galleries continues in decline.139#Artists are negotiating changes of context, locating work in a meaningful way without retreating further into the digital realm. The changing context of relief and its suitability for linking the universal with the particular occurs within a continuum that Lefebvre bracketed (some fifty years ago) with “a delirium of aesthetic saturation on the bourgeois side, and in an absence of aestheticism and a use of art as a politico-ideological instrument on the socialist side.”140 The scale of Lefebvre’s undertaking, effectively a four hundred-page primer for a long-term collaboration for change, demonstrates scope, ambition and difficulty in his commitment to theory. Adorno’s absence of a finite objectivity can be taken as endorsement and empowerment of irrational strategies but demand a particular fusion of the unreasonable and the correct in every case.141 Together, with Ranciere’s assessment, Adorno and Lefebvre favour a dynamic, responsive sensitivity of perception in preference to any elusive formula. The incomplete, ongoing nature of their projects resonates with artists’ investigations between dimensionality, where specifics meet with the undetermined.142 Correspondingly, thirdspace is defined by the incomplete and ongoing with regard to the relief- site-time interface apparent in the varying circumstances of my works Saturation Point and Oceania Frieze. The unintended incompleteness of the Belvedere Torso reminders us of the seduction of ambiguity and speculation derived from our programmed needs. Thus our 138 For an example of recent (and continuing) reassessment of art boundaries, see Claire Bishop. ARTIFICIAL HELLS Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship Verso London 2012 pg 27 where she brings us back to Ranciere and Juno Ludovisi, a kind of non art, art for all and later returns to Ranciere’s unchallenging definition of the artwork as a mediation, itself shifting between heterogeneity and autonomy.ie. Art as integrated with life or art as separate from it. 139 https://news.artnet.com/market/foot-traffic-galleries-new-york-1318769 https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/devastating-decline-arts-schools-surges 140 Henri Lefebvre Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes translated by John Moore verso 1995 ! 141!The dialectics referred to by Adorno do not lead to positive definition through the negation of negatives but echo Lefebvre’s problematic axis of class. ! 142!and where absolutes equate with the formulaic, as oppose to the strategic use of constants such as casting or drawing. ! ! 84! participation also accompanies incompletion in relief’s space. The tension of its dualities is similarly an opportunity for involvement where materials, form and narrative combine to explain relief’s attraction of artists who seek negotiation rather than compromise in a space that gestures out towards its audience. The identification of trends and trajectories emerging in a fractured art environment is problematic. Some trajectories evaginate and revise what had previously been determined.143 Oceania Frieze for example, appears uncertain about its complicity in the denial of the anxiety associated with surfaces of pretence, where cladding creates urban spaces and temporal architecture— campsites masquerading as piazzas and palazzos. However, questions inevitably emerged for me regarding this alternative, transformed space that is both real and metaphoric, How significant is the face-to-face experience of work that is the only handmade surface in an urban environment that is managed remotely and with anonymity? To what extent can the intimacy of labouring with physical materials save relief from becoming another veneer, another cladding? Since relief draws our attention to history and to ongoing revaluation of the past, it leads us to reimagine what Lefebvre and Soja saw as an interactive space.144 It is a space shared with those interested in the overlooked and in the revision of how relief (and art) engages with a public beyond the art-fair, the biennale circuit and beyond Instagram? I have come to relate the smaller, itinerant, irregular shaped pieces of the studio research to archaeology and fragmentation (influenced by Ranciere’s view of Rilke’s view of Rodin, when Ranciere was still thinking of Winckelmann’s beloved and incomplete Belvedere Torso). They are episodic, interrupted— a broken set of investigations and reflections. I have recently come to 143 Once tidily categorized as a minimalist, the now recognized eclectic New York artist and writer Robert Morris paid homage to Rodin’s "Gates of Hell" in his 1980’s relief works. Whilst on record as regarding relief as ‘unviable’ as an art form, he exhibited relief works throughout the 1980’s. His attraction to paradox is well documented. These works precede the relief discussed in chapters two and three. They are a shift from his pictorial-literary paradox to a pictorial-sculptural one. He got there via dance—he choreographed several produced works, his wife was a dancer and he viewed Jackson Pollock’s painting as the product of performative dance— and yet is seen as a conceptualist. In this light we can look at Pollock and others as having arrived at relief too, as the intermediary between performance and graphic image making. Over stepping the pictorial with overlapping, shriveled globules and tentacles of paint, more physical than a conventionally integrated surface, they can be directly related to Kiefer’s processes. 144“everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.” Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996. Pg57 !! ! 85! acknowledge that in the transitional nature of practicing relief lies an element of transgression or subversion of the dominance of painting and sculpture and aspects of failure. Malouf’s An Imaginary Life 145 follows Ovid’s banishment from Rome and his failure to adapt in the muddy space between East and West. Malouf described my plaster studio work that lead into this research, as suspended in fossilized time… the sense we get of their having been unearthed and preserved; dug up out of a past that is ‘just yesterday’ and in being frozen or fossilised is still close to what once was life and for the artist, a living and lyrical relic of his own life.146 He could also have been describing Monahan’s work. An alternate model of relief now might resemble the terrain wandered, as Einstein described, well suited to a melancholic time traveller for whom frailty and failure are affirmations of life and history.147 It is possible to align Carl Einstein’s notion of modern art’s ‘groundlessness’ (which does not mean a denial of history but a severance in the theoretical-fictional continuity woven by historians) with the wandering of many artists of this and the previous century and to find other manifestations of the nexus of failure, destruction, tabula rasa and creation.148 The recurrent need in artists to re-excavate a deep history suggests that the modernist continuity 145 An Imaginary Life Random House 146 David Malouf TheAustralian 12:00AM May 8, 2014 https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/malouf-and-friends/news- story/420c271fe3586c36d21489e575d0fe87?sv=f0659a5e102b79237d3e9d48c83dcec4 147 For Houseago, death and failure are inseparable from life.!! “I was always had this Fitzcarraldo-like desire to build these things that couldn't quite be done, I couldn't quite handle. Now I'm more conscious of it but looking back, this idea of the impossible, the possible idea of being an artist and dramatizing that.” Houseago interviewed by Nora Lawrence at Houseago's studio on February 28, 2013. http://houseago.stormking.org/ Failure accompanies transition with others artists too: Kiefer, making lyrical a shared tragedy, lives in the present by reading about the past; George Baselitz, whose sculpture fails to overcome the singularity that repulsed 19th century critics; Rodin, whose Gates of Hell, after three decades of effort, fail to find a purpose beyond decoration. David Smith is a painter who makes sculpture (and in those terms, fails to make paintings, but incidentally, like Brancusi makes great photographs). Altmejd, accepting humanity’s failure, builds his entire ouvre on the inevitability of Armageddon. Kentridge, failed thespian, failed painter, in Johannesburg started the ‘Centre for the Less Good Idea’. 148 The ideal of a blank slate, a severance or fresh start is counter to the artist’s inevitably accumulated cultural burden. Together, as with dualities discussed previously, they can produce a tension or ignition that benefits artists in their work. This is where the research started— with the overload of Rome and the whiteness of plaster. ! 86! may be a superficial collegiate and that reconnection with a deeper history is necessitated by earlier misconstructions. In engaging with relief in this way, I have isolated it—its image and materiality, its representations in a transformed space so that it can be scrutinized. Relief serves to illuminate its adjacent areas of art making, where artists continue to reassess commitment to materials, disciplines and genres. In this way, relief contributes to the review of our assumptions about disciplinarity while interdisciplinarity as a label seems to have been of limited usefulness. Relief is ideally placed at the convergence of key issues in contemporary art practice to both illuminate and re-evaluate art from a position of material and technical expansion and with the focused interrogation that accompanies the resonance of history and relief’s dualities in a manner beyond the possibilities of its 19th century circumstances. Monahan was asked why he does not call himself a sculptor.149 He replied “I finally agree to be an artist and now you wonder why I don’t call myself a sculptor!” He continued “Relief has its own great history but got lost in our race to the expanded field. (Three dimensional) Space is too much for me!” For some, including Monahan, two and a half dimensions are just about right. Relief represents a genre partially obscured by its own weighty history and by art’s dissipating, cloudy embrace of a future made of everything, everywhere. Relief is ideally positioned as a conceptual and formal lens that with its dualities can highlight tensions and logic in art’s use of space and representation. It is a compass to navigate genres, interdisciplinarity and history. It offers artists a means to obliquely approach formal questions (such as why don’t you call yourself a sculptor?) and to negotiate metaphor and the physicality of materials with a language no longer set in stone. 149 Interviewed by Marta GNYP for ZOO http://www.martagnyp.com/interviews/matthewmonahan.php ! 87! List of Illustrations Cover. Installation view Weston Cast Court, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 2017 Fig.1 left: Portonaccio Sarcophagus 2nd century, Rome in the Palazzo Massimo Rome. right: Nicola Pisano Pulpit in Sienna (1268). Fig.2 Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa 1652 and adjacent wall relief of Cornaro Portraits in Santa Maria DellaVittoria and detail of two and three dimensional media in a chapel of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale 1670 Rome during restoration work in 2013. Fig.3 left: Alessandro Algardi St. Leo Repulsing Attila 1646. centre: Filipo Della Valle Annunciation 1750 and right: Nicola Salvi Trevi Fountain 1762 with relief panels above the statues of Abundance and Sobriety. Fig.4 left: The Doria Pamphilj crest and right: inner façade of the Porta del Popolo designed by Bernini for Pope Alexander VII of the Chigi family, featuring his insignia of six mountains and a star above. Fig. 5 19th century sandstone relief in Australia. left Royal coat of arms designed by J.J.Clarke (1875) Government House Melbourne centre: Sydney Mortuary Railway Chapel. right: Art Gallery of New South Wales façade designed (1897) with the last commissioned relief Augustus at Nimes (1931) by Sir William Reid Dick. Fig. 6 Adriaen de Vries The Forge of Vulcan 1611 Henri Matisse The Back modelled 1908-1909, cast 1955 (photographs unattributed). Fig.7 Picasso Guitar 1912 and right: Lipchitz Still Life With Musical Instruments 1918 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (photographs unattributed). Fig. 8 right: David Smith Hudson River Landscape 1951 left: Lee Bontecou in her studio New York 1963 (photographs unattributed). Fig.9 Relief as a transitional zone and epicentre in a constellation of mutually influential elements. Reference to the constellation as a model recurs in the writings of Adorno, Ranciere, Soja and Krauss. Fig.10 Matthew Monahan’s F minor I and II 2000 ink on paper and Untitled 2016 palladium steel (photographs unattributed). Fig.11 left: Olafur Eliason Oslo Opera House 2008 right: Rudolph Stingel Untitled 2007 South Tyrol carving cast by Kunst Gieserrie, Switzerland. (photographs unattributed). Fig.12 Torus of particularities: Traces of Everything. Fig.13 left: Belvedere Torso 1st Century BCE. centre: The Gates of Hell 1917 Rodin. right: Relief set from Alien: Covenant 2016 directed by Ridley Scott. Fig. 14 left: Ludovisi Sarcophagus 3rd century CE Palazzo Altemps, Rome. right: from the Arch of Constantine 315 CE a panel reused from Trajan’s Dacian war frieze. Fig.15 The processional performance of William Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments 2016 Rome. Fig.16 Details of Triumphs and Laments Rome 2016 with spoils from Jerusalem from the Arch of Titus (82AD). Fig.17 William Kentridge Study for Triumphs and Laments 2016 with spoils from Jerusalem from the Arch of Titus (82AD) exhibited in MAXI Rome, 2017. Fig.16 from left to right: Matthew Monahan Drawing 2010, Untitled 2007 Anton Kern Gallery and Neptune (Rescue) 2016 installed at Palazzo Altemps, Rome. ! 88! Fig.17 left: Neptune (Rescued) 2016 installed at Palazzo Altemps. Rome. centre: Neptune (Rescued) 2016 reproduced in catalogue. right: Neptune (Rescued) 2016 installed at Frieze, Regent’s Park, London. Fig.18 left: Untitled (Green Head) work on paper 2017 right: Basho 2014 polished bronze. Fig.19 left: Hildebrand Dionysus Relief 1900 from The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture. centre: Picasso Guitar1912 Museum of Modern art New York. right: Anthony Caro Twenty Four Hours 1960 Tate Britain. Fig.20 left: Constantin Brâncuși The Kiss 1907-08 in the Museum of Art, Craiova, Romania. right: The Ludovisis Throne 460 BCE in the Palazzo Altemps, Rome. Fig.21 Thomas Houseago: left: Instagram post on demoulding 2015. centre: Untitled 2008 (rear) right: Walking Boy 2009 Fig.21 Thomas Houseago: left: Instagram post 2015. centre: Untitled 2008 right: Walking Boy 2009. Fig.22 Thomas Houseago: left: Baby 2009-2010 right: Houseago starting a relief in clay on a drawing 2013 Fig.23 Thomas Houseago: Roman Mask II 2013, Abstract Portrait 2009 and Pentagon (Masks) 2015 installed at Rockerfeller Plaza. Fig.24 Anselm Kiefer Fur Paul Celan: Ashenblumen 2006 at Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv. Fig.25 Anselm Kiefer A Snake in Paradise 1991-2017 Gallerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Fig.26 Anselm Kiefer left: Am Grunde der Moldau, da wandern die Steine 2008-2017. right: Gehäutete Landschaft 2014-2017 from the exhibition Fur Andrea Emo 2018 Gallerie Thadeus Ropac, Paris. Fig.27 left: Bruce Reynolds left: Wynnum Pool with Brush 1986. various woods from 85 Haylock Street, Wynnum. right: Cast and Elevation 2001 cast in-situ concrete, linoleum, Axminster carpet, laminex. Brisbane magistrates Court, Brisbane. Fig.28 Bruce Reynolds Tread 2009 (cast in-situ pigmented concrete) Ipswich Magistrates Court. Fig.29 Bruce Reynolds Carapace and Greave I and Greave II in David Malouf and Friends at the Museum of Brisbane 2014 cast pigmented plaster. Fig.30 Archaic Vessel cast pigmented plaster 2015. Fig.31 left: Krater 2015. cast pigmented plaster right: Archaic Vessel 2015 cast pigmented plaster and Neapolitan Stereo 2015 installed in Oxiana 2016 Pop Gallery, Woolloongabba. Fig.32 Skyphos 2015 cast pigmented plaster. Fig.33 left: Accrual 2015 cast pigmented Hydrocal. right: Unification 2015 cast pigmented Hydrocal. Fig.34 left: Man of Letters II 2015 right: Coronet Sconce (Sconce IV) 2015. Fig.35 Neapolitan Stereo 2015 installed at Oxiana 2016 at Pop Gallery, Woolloongabba Fig.36 Arbor 2016 cast pigmented Hydrocal. Fig. 37 Little Centaur, Draped Figure, Blue Swingers, Little Lamassu 2015 cast pigmented Hydrocal. Fig.38 Hammer Frieze 2015 lying on its mould. Fig.39 Column 2015 (section #1) 60cm x 100cm Hydrocal, carbon, ochre. Fig.40 Struggle 2015 (after Michelangelo Buoranotti) and Terrain with Coronet 2015. ! 89! Fig.41 left: Cornice Frieze 2015 mould with precast characters positioned prior to casting and right: Cornice Frieze 2015. Fig.42 Veiled 2015 in Woolloogabba studio Fig.43 Coronas 2016 pigmented Hydrocal and linoleum with precast elements. Fig.44 Coronas 2016 with precast elements arranged face down on composition of patterned surfaces prior to inserting the linoleum pieces. The curved armature of plywood is visible upper centre and the washed lino pieces are drying on the ground near the buckets. The amalgamation is completed with several pours of pigmented modified gypsum. Fig.45 Covalent Bond 2015 stainless steel, cast relief, aluminium, enamel 5m x 2m x1.2m Fig. 46 left: Component with cast panel for Covalent Bond 2015 right: Relief panels in its base and adjacent cast benches territorialize and integrate with the site. Fig.47 left: Digital simulation of the proposed design. centre: Installed work at night. right: South column in daylight. Fig.48 Early drawings for Confluence 2017. Fig.49 Oceania Frieze 2017 (detail of central section) in Newstead, glass fibre reinforced modified gypsum and concrete September 2017. Fig.50 Detail of right section Oceania Frieze 2017 after nearby tiling and before the builder’s water feature . Fig.51 left to right: Octopus drawn in its own ink, carved mould, studio photograph and Minoan pot from the 15th century BCE. Fig.52 Oceania Frieze prior to installation left: panel #1 showing a large jelly fish, the oldest multi organ animal. right: panel #5 flush shapes of water jet cut mirrored stainless steelin contrast to the gypsum cast surface. Fig.53 A detail from the west wall of Saturation Point 2017 Townsville. Fig.54 Detail from Saturation Point east wall 2017 Fig.55 Detail of the Third Wall from Saturation Point 2017 ! 90! List of works organised by exhibition Fixed Jan Manton Gallery, Spring Hill (6th April – 7th May) Reynolds, Bruce. Unification, 2015. Hydrostone and pigment, 130cm x 86cm x 13cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Atlantis (Skyphos), 2015. Hydrostone and pigment, 56cm x 66cm x 26cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Hammer Wall (Neapolitan), 2016. Hydrostone and pigment, 80cm x 55cm x 15cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Arbour, 2016. Hydrostone and pigment, 80cm x 70cm x 6cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Frieze with Cornice (Spoilia), 2015-6. Hydrostone and pigment, 80cm x 113cm x 25cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Blue Swinger (left) #1, 2016. Hydrostone and pigment, 37cm x 21cm x 2cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Blue Swinger (right) #1, 2016. Hydrostone and pigment, 37cm x 20cm x 2cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Draped Figure, 2016. Hydrostone and pigment, 37cm x 16cm x 2cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Blue Amphora, 2016. Hydrostone and pigment, 84cm x 61cm x 2cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Figure in a Landscape, 2016. Hydrostone and pigment, 55cm x 84cm x 7cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Coronas, 2015. Hydrostone and pigment, 95cm x 62cm x 12cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Struggle (after Michelangelo), 2015. Hydrostone and pigment, 72cm x 87cm x 2cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Sconce #3, 2016. Hydrostone and pigment, 92cm x 76cm x 27cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Reconstructed, 2016. Acrylic and linoleum on plywood panel, 45cm x 40cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Vase with Cypress, 2016. Photographic print, enamel and linoleum on plywood panel, 45cm x 40cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Eastern Vase, 2016. Linoleum on plywood panel, 45cm x 40cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Japan Vase, 2016. Acrylic and linoleum on plywood panel, 45cm x 40cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Tank Street Hydria, 2016. Photographic print and linoleum on plywood panel, 168cm x 103cm. Brisbane, Jan Manton Gallery. ! 91! Oxiana Pop Gallery Woolloongabba. 1st June – 19th June, 2016. Reynolds, Bruce. Man of Letters 2, 2015. Plaster and pigment, 86cm x 60cm x 18cm. Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Krater, 2015. Plaster and pigment, 76cm x 64cm x 66cm, Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Archaic Vessel, 2014. Plaster and pigment, 57cm x 36cm 32cm, Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Kylix, 2014. Plaster, pigment and laminex tabletop, 76cm x 122cm 5cm., Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Heraldic, 2015. Hydrocal and pigment, 130cm x 85cm x 15cm, Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Accrual, 2015. Hydrocal and pigment, 126cm x 66cm x 14cm, Sydney, Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Neapolitan Stereo, 2015. Hydrostone and pigment, 56cm x 72cm x 9cm, Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Hindsight Compression, 2016. Hydrostone and pigment, 76cm x 78cm x 4cm, Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Theory in Practice, 2016. Hydrostone and pigment, 72cm x 66cm x 5cm, Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. East West Frieze: Bull Yak Oak, 2016. Hydrocal, pigment and hardwood shelf, dimensions variable, Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Terrain with Coronet, 2016. Hydrocal and pigment, 71cm x 50cm x 5cm, Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Sconce #1, 2016. Hydrocal and pigment, 94cm x 76cm x 26cm, Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Sconce #2, 2016. Hydrocal and pigment, 94cm x 76cm x 26cm, Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Sconce #3, 2016. Hydrocal and pigment, 92cm x 76cm x 27cm, Brisbane, POP Gallery. Reynolds, Bruce. Sconce #4 (Coronet Sconce), 2016. Hydrocal and pigment, 92cm x 76cm x 29cm, Brisbane, POP Gallery. Unification Wellington Street Projects Chippendale, N.S.W. April 29th – May 10th, 2015 Reynolds, Bruce. Man of Letters, 2015. Hydrostone and pigment, 86cm x 60cm x 18cm. Sydney, Wellington Street Projects. Reynolds, Bruce. Unification, 2015. Hydrostone and pigment, 130cm x 86cm x 13cm. Sydney, Wellington Street Projects. Reynolds, Bruce. Heraldic, 2015. Hydrostone and pigment, 130cm x 85cm x 15cm. Sydney, Wellington Street Projects. Reynolds, Bruce. Accrual, 2015. Hydrostone and pigment, 126cm x 66cm x 14cm. Sydney, Wellington Street Projects. Reynolds, Bruce. Neapolitan Wall, 2015. Hydrostone and pigment, 56cm x 72cm x 9cm. Sydney, Wellington Street Projects. Reynolds, Bruce. Skyphos, 2015. Hydrostone and pigment, 56cm x 26cm x 23cm. Sydney, Wellington Street Projects. ! 92! Publically sited works in Newstead Reynolds, Bruce. Covalent Bond, July 2016. Stainless steel, aluminium, enamel and cast hydrostone, 410cm x 110cm x 169cm. Newstead, Ann Street. Reynolds, Bruce. Confluence, May 2017. Stainless steel, aluminium and enamel, 300cm x 88cm x 88cm. Newstead, Stratton Street. Reynolds, Bruce. Ocean Frieze, 2017. Stainless steel, aluminium and paint, 300cm x 88cm x 88cm. Newstead, Ann Street. Group Exhibitions Cast By The Sun The Hold, South Brisbane August 2015 15 Artists Redcliffe Art Gallery November 2015 Plenty Brisbane PowerHouse 27th September to 23th October 2016 Bad Mannerism Pom Pom Gallery, Chippendale, N.S.W. May 2018 ! 93! References Adorno, T. W. 1970. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Adorno, Theodor W. and Walter Benjamin. 1999. The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940. Cambridge: Polity Press with Blackwell Publishing. Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York and London: Continuum. Auping, M. and Alselm Kiefer. 2005. Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth. Munich: Prestel Verlag. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image - Music - Text, Trans. Stephen Heath, 152-162. 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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (June), Accessed Feb 10, 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/aesthetics-18th-british/. Spencer, Catherine There’s more to Moore than his monumental sculptures Mar 25, 2015 http://www.apollo-magazine.com/theres-more-to-moore-than-his-monumental-sculptures- yorkshire-sculpture-park/ "Syrian Archaeologist 'Killed in Palmyra' by Is Militants." (2015). Published electronically 19 August 2015. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east 33984006. Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830) Part One IV. Second Attitude of Thought to Objectivity TWO. THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY §40 Graham, Daniel W., "Heraclitus", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/heraclitus/ Walton, Steven A. An Introduction to the Mechanical Arts in the Middle Ages Toronto: University of Toronto. 2014. http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~avista/PAPERS/mecharts_walton.htm http://www.avista.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/Walton_MechArts.pdf work_4xbni7w5cjdppgb4ahdjj25klm ---- untitled SSaalloonn: a gathering of stimulating peo- ple under the roof of an inspiring host- ess, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine their taste and increase their knowledge through conversation and reading (Wikipedia). W elcome to CMAJ Salon, an exchange of lateral think- ing about health that as- pires to feed the culture of curiosity and nurture the intellect, both in print and online. Salons began in Renaissance Italy and France but gained prominence for stimulating lively intellectual conversa- tion in 17th-century France. Initially, sa- lons were concerned with the fields of arts and literature, but later they ex- panded to include music, philosophy and politics. Now, CMAJ’s Salon intro- duces health as the overarching topic of discourse. Health, in this context, will be interpreted in the widest manner possible with potential subjects ranging from an ode to your favourite body part to shrinking our environmental foot- print, from an exposition on the stetho- scope to innovative cognitive theories. CMAJ’s Salon will be an exploration of a nascent idea or hypothesis that is fu- elled by fact and driven by passion. The thoughts of scientists, researchers and other health-related experts will fre- quently grace these pages, but Salon will also lure contributors who are not always part of the world of health and medicine, people such as an eco-farmer or a yoga master, who can make a worthwhile contribution to the discourse on health in the spirit of our transdisciplinary world. The aim is to introduce novel ideas into health and medicine. This page will offer a lively mélange of thoughtful and sometimes quirky ideas that will ignite sparks of insight and stimulate thought and discussion. Our hope is that the conversational nar- ratives in CMAJ Salon will become fod- der for engaging stories that one offers at parties or in staff rooms. One churlish definition contends that salons are a combination of a wa- tering hole plus bookish thugs. Sadly, we cannot offer the former, but we hope to avoid the latter. Off the printed page, the heart of the salon experience — the interchange of ideas — will be- gin in earnest at cmaj.ca, where readers can post their thoughts on the articles. This intellectual e-exchange, open to all in an atmosphere of politeness and respect for others, will provide a way out of the cul de sac of elitism associ- ated with salons. Historically, salons were hosted by titled or wealthy women and later, in the 20th century, by gifted, intelligent women with a facility for stimulating conversation. I will endeavour to fulfill the role as a quiet, behind-the-scenes editor and, perhaps, in the best-case scenario, muse. I have big shoes to fill. G e r t r u d e S t e i n h o s t e d S a t u r d a y evening salons in Paris beginning in 1907 for luminaries such as Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Henri Ma- tisse and Guillame Apollinaire. Host- ing is a serious business and not al- ways risk free: Madame Anne Louise Germaine de Staël, a well-known host- ess of a philosophy-based salon in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was exiled from Paris by Napoleon Bona- parte. I don’t particularly aspire to life in the wilds of Renfrew County, but then again an e-letter from Stephen Harper would be amusing. Above all else, as readers, writers or e-participants, CMAJ Salon is your page. Welcome, and as Stein report- edly said when greeting callers at her salon, “Entrez-vous.” Barbara Sibbald BJ CMAJ Deputy Editor, News and Humanities D O I: 10 .1 5 0 3 /c m aj .0 7 0 7 0 5 Salon CMAJ’s Salon: lateral thinking about health Contributors are encouraged to send their discourse (700 words maximum, F r e n c h o r E n g l i s h l a n g u a g e ) t o s a l o n @ c m a . c a . S e e c o n t r i b u t o r s guidelines at cmaj.ca. CMAJ • July 3, 2007 • 177(1) © 2007 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors 111122 The author wishes to thank the journalists and editors, in particular Dr. Dorian Deshauer, who helped develop the CMAJ Salon concept. St u ar t K in m on d work_4y22w26canduze3pe27yy5oh7i ---- Microsoft Word - Лингвистика 2015 №4.docx 17 THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION STRUCTURE�INTERACTION THEORY: CONCEPTUAL, CONTEXTUAL AND STRATEGIC INFLUENCES ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION Steven A. Beebe Regents’ and University Distinguished Professor Texas State University Department of Communication Studies 601 University Drive, San Marcos, TX 78666 This paper addresses Structure-Interaction Theory (SIT), a theoretical framework that both describes communication messages as well as assists in making predictions about how human communication can be improved based on listener preferences for message structure or interaction. Communication messages may be characterized as existing on a continuum of structure-interaction. Communication structure is the inherent way information in a message is organized. A highly structured message is one in which the message is strategically organized using a planned arrangement of symbols to create meaning. Communi- cation interaction is a way of viewing a message with give-and-take, less sustained “notes,” more change in note sequence and briefer notes. SIT seeks to provide a framework to assist communicators in appropriate- ly adapting a message for maximum effectiveness. Although Structure-Interaction Theory newly articu- lated here, it is anchored in both classic ways of describing communication, such as rhetoric and dialectic (Aristotle, 1959), as well as more contemporary communication theories (Salem, 2012; Littlejohn & Foss, 2008). Specifically, the paper provides an overview of the theory and its conceptual assumptions, iden- tifies how the theory can help explain and predict communication in several communication contexts (interpersonal, group, public communication), and suggests how SIT may help identify strategies to en- hance human development. Structure-Interaction Theory is based on an assumption that a human communication message which is understood, achieves the intended effect of the communicator, and is ethical, requires an appropriate balance of two things: structure and interaction. Communication structure is the inherent way a message is constructed to provide a sustained direction to present information to another person. In linking structure and interaction to Aristotle’s description of messages, rhetoric is a more structured, sustained speech or planned message. Dialectic is characterized by a more spontaneous give and take interaction of messages and response to messages. SIT posits that all communication can be placed on a continuum of structure- interaction. The paper identifies applications of SIT to several communication situations and presents communication strategies that can enhance human development. The paper also notes how SIT can be used to develop message strategies to adapt to audience preferences for structure and interaction based on culture and audience expectations. Considering the needs, interests, values (including cultural values) of the audience, is the prime determinant of the degree of structure or interaction that should be evident in a communica- tion episode. Russian Journal of Linguistics, Vestnik RUDN, 2015, N. 4 18 Appropriately applied, SIT may help both describe the nature of messages (as structured or inter- active) as well as assist in making predictions as to how applications of the structure-interaction mes- sage continuum may enhance communication effectiveness. Key words: Structure-interaction theory (SIT), communication messages, сcommunication context, communication strategies, rhetoric, dialectic. There are fundamental principles of human communication that unite all human interaction. I have suggested that there are five fundamental principles of human com- munication that operate in all cultures and all communication contexts—mediated or unmediated (Beebe, Beebe & Ivy, 2016): 1. Be aware of your communication and your communication with others. 2. Effectively use and interpret verbal messages. 3. Effectively use and interpret nonverbal messages. 4. Listen and thoughtfully respond to others. 5. Appropriately adapt messages to others. I suggest that all cultures and all people would find these principles useful. Cer- tainly there are cultural differences in the way we use and interpret verbal and non- verbal messages and in the way we adapt and even in listening style; but all cultures value the effective use and interpretation of verbal and nonverbal messages. All com- munication requires some level of awareness for communication to be effective. In ad- dition, listening and adapting are important principles for all human interaction. This pa- per elaborates on principle five, how to adapt messages to others. Specifically, I discuss how to adapt message structure and message interaction based on a variety of factors including culture, audience expectations and individual personality traits. “Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic” (Aristotle, 1959). This opening sentence from Aristotle’s seminal work, Rhetoric, foreshadowed a pervasive way of conceptua- lizing human communication. In contrasting rhetoric with dialectic, Aristotle identified fundamental ways of describing the form and function of human communication mes- sages—the way information is organized to create a message and subsequent meaning. Rhetoric, according to Aristotle (1959), is the discovery of the available means of persuasion in a given case. To “use” rhetoric is to carefully construct a planned, inten- tional, pre-mediated, organized message that seeks to persuade (change or reinforce attitudes, beliefs, values and/or behavior). Although Aristotle did not define dialectic as crisply as he defined rhetoric, for Aristotle dialectic is the Socratic method of using questions, answers, debate, and dialogue to discover the truth in a given situation. Dialec- tical forms and functions of communication are most typically found in courtrooms in which witnesses, experts, attorneys, a jury and a judge or judges seek to discover what is true and what is false. Dialectical expression may also occur in conversations be- tween two or more people to express a range of ideas and emotions. Group communi- cation often exhibits considerable give-and-take truth-searching dialectical exchanges. In comparing and contrasting rhetoric and dialectic as a fundamental way of describ- ing communication genres, Aristotle provided a seminal communication taxonomy of message organization. The word counterpart (antistrophus) in Aristotle’s taxonomy, Beebe S.A. Structure-Interaction Theory: Conceptual, Contextual and Strategic Influences... 19 according to Kennedy (1980; Anderson, 2007), can also mean “correlative”, “coordi- nate”, or “converse”. Communication may be described based on both its function (to persuade, inform, entertain) and form (whether brief or sustained, organized or disor- ganized). Rhetoric and dialectic are two distinct ways of communicating with differ- ing goals, strategies, methods and forms. Rhetoric, based on Aristotle’s (1959) trea- tise, is characterized as more of a sustained, organized speech presented to persuade. Dialectic is a more interactive, question and answer communication format that certainly may have persuasive intentions, but is often designed to uncover what is and is not true. More succinctly, dialectic is the search for truth; rhetoric is employed when one be- lieves the truth has been found. Rhetoric is a more structured message; dialectic is a more interactive message. The purpose of this paper is to describe Structure-Interaction Theory (SIT), a co- gent theoretical framework useful for both explaining communication messages as well as assisting in making predictions about how human communication can be improved (both in terms of its effectiveness and appropriateness). SIT seeks to inform commu- nication strategies that can assist with human development and enhance the quality of communication. The theory helps both describe communication messages, as well as suggests the development of communication strategies which may enhance commu- nication effectiveness and appropriateness. Structure-Interaction Theory is anchored in both classic communication paradigms (Aristotle, 1959) as well as more contempo- rary communication theories (Littlejohn & Foss, 2008; Salem, 2012). Specifically, the paper provides an overview of SIT and its conceptual assumptions, identifies how the theory may be applied to communication in several communication contexts, and final- ly suggests how SIT may help inform strategies to enhance human communication. CONCEPTUAL UNDERPINNINGS OF STRUCTURE�INTERACTION THEORY At its essence, communication is the process of acting on information (Dance & Larson, 1967). Someone creates a message and another person acts or responds to the message. A message (comprised of information) does not become communication until someone or something reacts or responds to the message. The proverbial tree that falls in the forest does not create meaningful sound until someone hears and interprets it. Similarly, encoding a message, creating information (the reduction of uncertainty) ei- ther intentionally or unintentionally, does not constitute communication until there is a response to the message; the response may be conscious (such as being aware of listening to a message) or unconscious (such as simply having the hammer, anvil and stirrup in the ear drums vibrate) even though there is no conscious awareness of the meaning of the message. Machines and animals communicate — they act on information. Human communication is concerned with meaning, symbols and sense making; it is the process of making sense out of the world and sharing that sense with others by creat- ing meaning though the use of verbal and nonverbal messages (Beebe, Beebe & Ivy, 2016). To be effective communication should achieve three criteria; a communication message should: (1) be understood, (2) achieve the intended effect, and (3) be ethical. Russian Journal of Linguistics, Vestnik RUDN, 2015, N. 4 20 The meaning that results from responding to information creates ongoing connections or relationships between other people. Simply stated, messages (information) create meaning (sense making) that results in relationships (mutual connections). Structure-Interaction Theory is based on an assumption that effective and appropri- ate human communication (that achieves the three criteria stated above) needs a bal- ance of two things: Structure and interaction. Communication structure is the inherent way information in a message is organized. A highly structured message is one in which the message is strategically organized using a planned arrangement of symbols to create meaning. A highly structured message typically is a more sustained message that contains fewer interruptions than an interactive message. Using a music analogy, music can be described in terms of the rhythm, pitch, sequence, and duration of the notes that con- stitute the music. A structured message is one that includes more sustained notes and evidences fewer changes in the note patterns, pitch and rhythm. A structured message embodies less change or variation in message organization. Structuration theory, originally developed by Giddens (1984), provides a theoreti- cal framework for describing how people develop social structures in societies, organ- izations and groups. The essence of structuration theory is that people use the rules and resources within a human system to provide order and structure. The structures that are iteratively created are based on the rules and resources of the past and the present. According to researchers (Giddens, 1984; Poole, Seibold & McPhee, 1996) the process of developing a structure is a natural and normal aspect of human groups, large or small. We use the structure of a message to help make sense of the message. In contrast with the development of structure, communication interaction is a way of viewing a message with give-and-take, less sustained “notes”, more change in note sequence and briefer notes. In linking structure and interaction to Aristotle’s descrip- tion of messages, rhetoric is a more structured, sustained or planned message. Dialectic is characterized by the give-and-take interaction of messages and responses to messages. SIT suggests that all communication messages can be placed on a continuum of struc- ture-interaction. Highly structured messages are analogous to Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric. A structured message is usually planned, sustained and seeks to accomplish an inten- tional rhetorical goal. In contrast, interactive messages are usually shorter and are con- textually synchronous with the messages both before and after the message presented. To continue the music metaphor, classical music is analogous to structure; jazz is ana- logous to interaction. SIT is anchored in several theoretical frameworks and perspectives. Russian phi- losopher and educator Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualization of forces that influence our life trajectory provides one foundation to SIT. Bakhtin (1930) described everyday reality as prosaic; our lives consist of sleeping, talking, eating, listening — these seemingly mundane aspects of living constitute the prosaic nature of living. Within the context of the prosaic nature of life emerge decisions and actions that result in changes to the prosaic. We live life; events and actions influence how life is lived. According to Bakh- tin, two fundamental forces that result in change or lack of change are centripetal forces Beebe S.A. Structure-Interaction Theory: Conceptual, Contextual and Strategic Influences... 21 and centrifugal forces. Centripetal forces are those that impose order (structure) on the general chaos of life. Using an analogy from physics, centripetal forces are similar to gravity. Gravity creates order out of chaos by anchoring and centering our actions; gravity creates a structure that brings stability and coherence to the prosaic, everyday actions of living. In contrast, centrifugal forces (interaction) are analogous to the rota- tion of the earth; this movement exerts a counter force to the pull of the centripetal or gravitational force. These are forces that result in movement, action and interaction with others. In describing these two forces on actions and decisions, Bakhtin was im- plicitly describing the nature of structure and interaction that results from these two forces. SIT presumes that there are similar forces that influence the nature, sequence and organization of human communication; centripetal forces influence the coherent structure of messages; centrifugal forces result in movement, punctuation and give and take responses that result in interaction. Yet another way of describing the fundamental nature of communication struc- ture and interaction may be found in perspectives emanating from scientific hypothesis. Scientist and educator Raymo (2008) has observed that the nature of scientific inquiry can be sorted into two often simultaneous quests: We seek answers to questions that reveal universal truths and we also strive to explain and predict phenomena in individual, particular situations. Scientific inquiry, by observing and measuring “what is”, is de- signed to answer both kinds of questions—first, those that provide universal axioms (principles that provide structure) to help make sense of the chaos of life and, second, those answers that seek to explain and predict specific instances in a given situation (in a given interactive moment in time). Scientific inquiry seeks answers to these expla- nations and predictions at the same time. Again, these two elements of inquiry, univer- sal (structure) and particular (interaction), suggest a quest to seek both a predictable, universal structure while helping to make sense of the chaotic, interactive, multisen- sory nature of life. SIT draws upon both of these anchoring questions — those that provide universal answers — the structure of a message, and those that seek explain specific instances — the interactive nature of messages. Another way of viewing communication from a structure-interaction perspective is to consider the fundamental aspect of communication. As Salem (2012) has noted in his insightful analysis highlighting the process-nature of communication, Complexity, the most fundamental aspect of communication involves identifying similarity and dif- ferences. As Salem (2012) described it, “...there is a tension between similar and dif- ferent in the enactment of communication” (p. 49). Similarity and difference in human communication form the basis of what Bateson (1958) described as balancing sym- metrical and complementary patterns of communication. The symmetrical and com- plementary nature of communication and the nature of relationships is yet another way of describing the structuring-interactive nature of communication messages. Similarity in communication results in predictability and more communication symmetry; the com- munication patterns or structure of messages mirror each other. Communication dif- ferences result in change and ultimately to entropic chaos (interaction). Messages of high structure are messages that are similar and more symmetrical (mirrored) in that Russian Journal of Linguistics, Vestnik RUDN, 2015, N. 4 22 one is able to predict what will occur in the message. Messages of difference involve messages in which predictability is low — also an element of interactive messages; mes- sages compete or complement which results in a complementary relationship. So struc- tured messages include greater predictability—there are fewer differences and there- fore we are able to more accurately predict the overall structure or sequence of a message. Interactive messages include more differences and those messages have less predicta- bility because of the differences inherent in an interactive message. The structured and interactive nature of communication and the messages that result from the information is evident in a variety of modes of human expression; struc- ture and interaction occur not only in verbal communication but also in art as well as in music. In describing the art of Henri Matisse, Flam (2013) noted that “The world is conceived as a continuum in which objects and people are seen as being both stable and dynamic...” (p. 17). When describing Matisse’s works of art he noted, “... the energy and meanings implicit in things are fluid and individual parts have meaning only in re- lation to all the others” (p. 17). Meaning, then, results when humans interpret the structure and interaction of communication messages, whether in a sonnet, a symphony or a swirl of color in a Matisse painting. STRUCTURE�INTERACTION THEORY APPLIED TO COMMUNICATION CONTEXTS A communication context is the overall situation in which the communication oc- curs including the number of people involved in a given communication, the norms (what normally occurs), rules (followable prescriptions) or expectations (predictions) of communication within a given situation, and the goal and function of communication within a given communication setting. Context also includes the physical environment in which the communication occurs. Classic communication contexts include interper- sonal communication, group communication, public communication, and electronic and print mediated communication. There is a considerable body of research that has inves- tigated the nature and function of communication within these contexts. The structured or unstructured nature of a communication message is influenced by the message’s goal and is especially adaptive to the receiver of the message. The struc- ture of a given message influences the meaning a receiver creates within a given com- munication context. The resulting meaning, in turn, is a significant factor in the develop- ment of human relationships — the ongoing connections that occur because of commu- nication. In the interpersonal communication context there is often meaning generated about the nature of the relationship. In group communication contexts, although rela- tionships occur because of the need to merely associate with others (primary groups), most secondary groups exist to achieve a specific task or function. Public communi- cation messages establish a relationship between speaker and audience as rhetors ad- just ideas to people and people to ideas (Bryant, 1953). In the increasingly prevalent electronic mediated communication context, relationships are developed as suggested by social information processing theory (Tidwell and Walther, 2002), but task func- tions have priority over relational development, especially in business and other orga- Beebe S.A. Structure-Interaction Theory: Conceptual, Contextual and Strategic Influences... 23 nizational settings. Interpersonal, group, public and electronically-mediated communi- cation is discussed to illustrate applications of SIT to a variety of different communica- tion contexts. Interpersonal Communication Interpersonal communication is a distinctive, transactional form of human com- munication involving mutual influence usually for the purpose of managing relation- ships (Beebe, Beebe and Ivy, 2016). Relationships consist of the connections we make with another person through communication; relationships may be fleeting or ongoing. As defined by Salem (2012) a relationship is “The emergent set of shared, cooriented, or compatible perceptions actors have about each other with each other” (p. 230). SIT may be used to describe interpersonal communication from several existing theoretical frameworks. Philosopher Martin Buber influenced the discussion of interpersonal relationships when he described communication as consisting of two different qualities of relation- ships: an “I-It” relationship or an “I-Thou” relationship (Buber, 1958). An “I-It” rela- tionship is more impersonal in which the other person is perceived as an “It” rather than as a unique, authentic person. “I-It” relationships occur with more structured, for- mulaic communication messages. In contrast, “I-Thou” relationships treat the other per- son as an authentic, unique individual. “I-Thou” relationships grow from interactive communication rather than static, structured messages. Such a relationship stems from dialogue rather than monologue. Or, viewed from an SIT perspective, an “I-Thou” re- lationship is characterized by increased interaction rather than structured messages. A related construct to Buber’s (1958) description of relationships on a continuum of “I-Thou” to “I-It” is viewing interpersonal relationships in terms of monologue or dialogue. Monologic relationships are those in which messages are more structured; there are longer periods of talk. Dialogic relationships, on the other hand, are characte- rized by more interactive talk; messages are listened to and responded to (Stewart, 2013). In a dialogic communication there is a greater sense of being other-oriented. To be other- oriented is to be aware of the thoughts, needs, experiences, personality, emotions, mo- tives, desires, culture and goals of the other person. But it does not mean a person ab- andons his or her sense of integrity or ethics. To be other-oriented is to listen, though- tfully respond, and appropriately adapt messages (Beebe, Beebe and Redmond, 2017). Yet an additional theoretical perspective, anchored in the work of Mikhail Bakh- tin (1930), views relationship development as the management of tensions that pull us in two directions simultaneously. Relational Dialectic Theory (Baxter, 1988; Baxter & Montgomery, 1997) seeks to describe the nature of these simultaneous tensions that operate in all relationships. According to Baxter (1988) and Baxter and Montgo- mery (1997), three predominant dialectical tensions include: (1) connectedness versus autonomy — the desire to both connect and be interdependent with another person and a desire to remain autonomous and independent; (2) Predictability versus novelty (certainty versus uncertainty); and (3) openness versus closedness. SIT suggests that the two directions are pressures for structure and opposing forces of interaction. Mes- sage structure and interaction is a framework for viewing the nature of interactive Russian Journal of Linguistics, Vestnik RUDN, 2015, N. 4 24 connectedness versus more structured autonomy. Structured messages are more predic- able whereas novel messages are inherently more interactive. Openness is more inter- active in describing message structure whereas closedness is more structured. Thus, SIT may serve as a way of describing the dialectical tensions that evolved from Bakh- tin’s original characterizations of centripetal forces and centrifugal forces that shape the prosaic, everyday communication in interpersonal relationships. Group Communication Group communication is the communication that occurs among a small group of people who share a common purpose, who feel a sense of belonging to the group, and who exert influence on one another (Beebe & Masterson, 2015). Communication with others in small groups, given the number of people involved in the conversation, is often fraught with uncertainty. Although research has found group communication may (but not always) occur in predictable phases (Fisher, 1970), talk in small groups may also occur in a variety of less predictable forms described variously as punctuated equilibrium (Gersick, 1989) and multisequence models (Poole, 1983). To help group members manage the messiness of group discussion, a group needs a certain amount of struc- ture to keep the discussion focused. Group structure, consistent with SIT, includes the agenda and other structuring techniques, rules and procedures to help a group stay fo- cused on the task. A group also needs the energy that comes from interaction. Interaction is the give-and-take conversation that occurs when people collaborate (Beebe & Mas- terson, 2015). Group researchers have found that groups which have no planned structure or agen- da have more difficulty accomplishing the task (Kerr & Tindale, 2004). Specifically, without structure, groups (Sunwolf & Seibold, 1999) are characterized by these com- munication attributes: ♦ The group will take more time to deliberate. ♦ Group members are more likely to prematurely focus on solutions. ♦ Group members will hop from one idea to the next. ♦ The Group is more likely to be controlled by a dominating group member. ♦ Groups are likely to experience more unmanaged conflict. A predominate research conclusion about group performance and structure is this: Any method of structuring group problem solving and decision making is better than no method at all (Beebe & Masters, 2015; White, 2007). Groups need a certain degree of structure because members have relatively short attention spans and because uncer- tainty results both from the relationships among group members and from group mem- bers’ varied definition of the task. Researchers have found that groups shift topics about once a minute (Berg, 1967; also see Poole, 1983) unless there is structure or facilitation. Thus, groups benefit from an agenda and other structuring methods and techniques that keep the discussion focused on the task. In addition to structure, groups need a counterbalance of synergistic interaction, talk, and dialogue. Too much structure and not enough interaction results in a group that be- comes out of balance. An overly structured group conversation would be one that invol- ves one person dominating the discussion and an over-reliance of techniques that squelch Beebe S.A. Structure-Interaction Theory: Conceptual, Contextual and Strategic Influences... 25 conversation and group collaboration. An overly interactive group discussion would be characterized by frequent topic shifts, group members not listening, increased interrup- tions, and several members speaking at once. Research supports the value of appropriate amounts of interaction in group deliberations. Appropriate amounts of group interaction support these outcomes (for a summary see Beebe & Masterson, 2015): ♦ High quality contributions early in the group’s discussion improve group per- formance. ♦ The more individuals share their information with others early in the group’s history the better the overall group performance. ♦ Group members should understand the information presented for improved group performance. For maximum group performance a group needs structure to stay on task as well as facilitation (interaction) to accomplish the goal of the group (Pavitt, Philipp & John- son, 2004). One research team found that group members who first had a collaborative discussion before making an individual decision were more likely to make a decision that benefited the entire group (Hopthrow & Hulbert, 2005). SIT can be used to help explain why some groups are more successful than others. Successful groups have an appropriate balance of structure and interaction; ineffective groups have either too much structure that limits collaboration, or too much interaction that results in disjointed, unconnected conversation that is not focused on accomplishing the group’s task. Public Speaking Public speaking is the process of presenting a thoughtful message to an audience, small or large (Beebe & Beebe, 2015). Aristotle’s wise and cogent observation that “Rhe- toric is the counterpart of dialectic” provides the foundational taxonomy of the public communication context and presupposes the importance of relying on both structure and interaction to seek and present credible messages to an audience. SIT suggests that at times either the speaker or audience may prefer a more structured message. At other times, a more interactive dialogue is more appropriate and effective in achieving the communication goals of speaker or listeners. Public speaking texts note both the structured and interactive nature of public communication. As Beebe and Beebe (2015) observed in their introductory public speaking text: The skill of public speaking builds upon your normal, everyday interactions with others. In fact, as you begin to study and practice public speaking, you will discover that it has much in common with conversation, a form of communication in which you engage in every day. Like conversation, pubic speaking requires you to focus and verbalize your thoughts. Yet in addition to the interactive nature of communication, public speaking involves a more sustained, prepared and structured message. Specifically, public speaking: ♦ Takes more preparation than conversation. ♦ Has a more formal syntax than conversation. ♦ Assumes more clearly defined roles of speaker and listener. Each of these observations is predicated on the assumption that public speaking is more structured than impromptu conversation (Beebe & Beebe, 2015). So both in- Russian Journal of Linguistics, Vestnik RUDN, 2015, N. 4 26 teractive and structured communication is needed for effective public communication. In some situations, a highly structured, sustained message is needed to achieve the goals of the communication. High structure is needed when: (1) the speaker has a clear rhetorical goal, and (2) the audience expects and needs ample information to manage uncertainty. Electronically Mediated Communication In some respects, all communication is “mediated”: all communication involves some channel that carries the encoded message to a receiver. In face-to-face communi- cation contexts sound and light waves mediate the message. Electronic mediated com- munication (EMC) consists of any communication that is carried out using an elec- tronically mediated channel; a channel other than those used in face-to-face communi- cation connects the message from sender to receiver. Research suggests that EMC is pervasive; in 2012 over a billion people were using Facebook and 70% of people con- nected to the Internet in the U.S. used Facebook (Stewart, 2013, p. 85). Differences between face-to-face and electronic communication include: (1) time, (2) varying de- grees of anonymity, (3) potential for deception, (4) nonverbal messages, (5) written mes- sages, and (6) distance (Amichai-Hamburger, 2005). The more synchronous our interaction (messages that occur in real time) as com- pared with asynchronous messages (a message not seen or heard at the same time the message is sent) the more the electronic mediated message emulates the feeling of so- cial presence. Social presence is the sense that we act and think as if we were in- volved in an unmediated, face-to-face conversation. Some EMC messages may need more structure if selected cues, such as nonver- bal cues, are not available to the receiver. Cues-filtered-Out theory, an early theory of EMC, suggests that emotional expression is severely restricted when we communi- cate using only text messages. (Sproull & Kiesler, 1986). The theory predicts that be- cause of the lack of nonverbal cues people are less likely to use text-based EMC to manage conflict in an interpersonal communication situation that is more complicated such as managing relationships. An additional theory of EMC, called Media Richness Theory, suggests that the richness of a communication channel is based upon four cri- teria: (1) the amount of feedback that the communicators receive, (2) the number of cues the channel conveys, (3) the variety of language that communicators use, and (4) the potential for expressing emotions and feelings (Trevino, Daft & Lengel, 1990). Based on these four criteria, researchers have developed a continuum of communication channels from rich to lean. Face-to-face is the most communication rich channel. A post- er or impersonal memo is media lean. Media rich channels are those in which there is considerable potential for interaction. Media lean channels are those characterized by little interaction and high structure. The overall prediction of the appropriateness of a mediated channel is the degree of structure or interaction the channel permits or en- courages. Specifically, media rich communication is likely to call for greater interaction and less structure; media lean messages are likely to result in less interaction and more structure. Beebe S.A. Structure-Interaction Theory: Conceptual, Contextual and Strategic Influences... 27 When the communicator wishes to discourage feedback by the communicator and interaction then a more structured message in a more media-lean channel is preferred (Tidwell & Walther, 2002). When feedback and responses to messages are encouraged a more interactive, media-rich channel is selected. Thus, the preference for the channel of a communication is related to the amount of structure or interaction expected from the receiver of the message. Social Information-Processing Theory suggests that people do communicate re- lational and emotional messages via electronically mediated channels, but that it takes longer to express messages and develop relationships when electronically mediated. Whereas the Cues-filtered-Out Theory suggests that there are no or significantly di- minished nonverbal/emotional/relational cues in an EMC, Social Information-Processing Theory suggests that the social and relational cues (primarily nonverbal cues) are evi- dent in ECM but that it takes more time for the cues to be decoded and interpreted. The social and relational cues exist but are subtler. Computer-mediated exchanges in comparison with face-to-face exchanges typically involve asking more direct ques- tions that result in people revealing more, not less information about themselves when online. Implications of Structure�Interaction Theory for Developing Communication Strategies Structure-Interaction Theory describes the nature of communication message or- ganization varying on a continuum from highly structured, organized and predictable to less structured, less predictable and more interactive. The theory is not only descrip- tive of communication message but can facilitate prescriptions for enhanced communi- cation effectiveness and appropriateness. The fundamental prescription stemming from SIT is this: The appropriate degree of message structure and interaction is influenced by the nature, values, culture and expectations of the receiver of the communication message. In supporting a receiver- centric approach to communication Aristotle (1959) suggested: “For of the three elements in speechmaking—speaker, subject, and person addressed---it is the last one, the hearer, that determines the speech’s end and object”. Thus, the “person addressed” (audience or listener) is the prime determinant of the appropriate degree of message organiza- tion as structured or interactive. In analyzing an audience to assess the degree of structure or interaction to incor- porate in a message one should be mindful of three general observations about a lis- tener: (1) similarities; (2) differences, and (3) based on the analysis of similarities and differences, the identification of common ground with listeners. An audience’s prefe- rence for structure or interaction is but one strategy among many to consider. The ap- propriate degree of message structure and interaction is rooted, in part, in the cultural expectations of listeners. The degree of similarity and difference among audience member characteristics (as also noted earlier by Salem, 2012) is a factor in considering the degree of message structure or interaction that audiences would prefer. Audience demographic uniformity and similarity would predict a preference and expectation for greater message structure. Russian Journal of Linguistics, Vestnik RUDN, 2015, N. 4 28 Greater uniformity among audience members would suggest less need to manage lis- tener uncertainty thus greater message organizational structure. Increased structure would suggest increased predictability. Audiences with greater variation in demographic characteristics would value increased message interaction. Larger, homogenious audiences would suggest a preference and expectation for message structure. In public speaking contexts audience members have less expecta- tion of participating in the interactive “conversation” than in interpersonal situations in which the number of people involved in the communication is smaller. Smaller groups or dyadic communication would suggest a preference for greater interaction. Displaying visual text, such as using PowerPoint during a public presentation, is a way of reinforcing the structure of a message. The degree of message redundancy expected during oral presentations (such as the often prescribed, “Tell us what you are going to tell us; tell us; tell us what you told us) is a way of increasing message struc- ture. Oral communication in more formal communication context which is indicative of a larger audience, requires greater redundancy (structure) to enhance its effective- ness. Oral communication in less formal situations which involve fewer people would require less structure and more interaction. Culture One of the key elements of audience or listener is the cultural expectations and values of the communication receiver. Culture is the learned system of knowledge, behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, values and norms that are shared by a group of people. A common culture is one in which there are more shared similarities among a group of people than there are differences. Specifically, SIT may be used to help explain and predict communication effectiveness and appropriateness depending on the cultural context (high or low) and values. Cultural context, as described by Hall (1976), refers to high and low context mes- sage preferences. Cultural values, as described by Hofstede (1991) in his classic taxono- my of cultural values, include: (1) individualism and collectivism, (2) masculine and feminine values, (3) tolerance for uncertainty, (4) power distance, and (5) orientation to time. Cultural Context Preference for the influence of context is a receiver/listener/audience cultural va- riable that influences preferences for high and low structured or interactive messages. In high-context cultures people rely heavily on implicit, nonverbal cues to interpret the meaning of messages (Hall, 1976). In low-context cultures there is greater reliance on the words that are spoken and the explicit message content when interpreting encoded messages. Greater use of re- dundancy, including the use of message “sign posts” to communication message struc- ture, developing explicit outline of verbal messages, message previews, message sum- maries, message transitions and other methods of adding to message structure would enhance clarity and meaning. SIT would suggest that people from low-context cultures (who value verbal messages) would prefer greater structure when seeking to interpret Beebe S.A. Structure-Interaction Theory: Conceptual, Contextual and Strategic Influences... 29 messages of others. Additionally, someone from a low context culture may seek to reduce uncertainty by asking questions and seeking additional information through conversation. Individuals with a low context orientation, however, are more likely to rely more on words to manage their uncertainty. In high-context cultures the interaction and meaning occur with emphasis on the nonverbal messages; so verbal interaction is less important than in low context cultures. Images and other nonverbal message elements would be valued by listeners who rely more heavily on more subtle, implicit strategies to organize messages. Individuals from high context cultures usually prefer less verbal interaction and are more comfortable with the ultimate form of message structure—silence. Individualism and Collectivism The relative importance of cultural values as described by Hofstede (1991) is anoth- er cultural variable that influences in how humans interpret messages. One of the most predominate cultural values is the preference for individualism or collectivism. People from a culture with strong individualism values tend to place greater emphasis on indi- vidual accomplishment than do people from collectivistic cultures (Hofstede, 1991). SIT would predict that collectivist cultures would have greater preference for struc- tured messages—messages that have similar, common, predictable structures. Individu- alistic cultures would prefer more interactive, unique messages—interaction adapted to the individual rather than structure designed to appeal to a collective group of lis- teners. Masculine�Feminine Cultural Dimension In masculine cultures people tend to value more traditional roles for both men and women; there is also a high value placed on achievement, assertiveness, heroism and material wealth. SIT would suggest greater preference for message structure for masculine cultures that emphasize the content or instrumental nature of communica- tion. People from feminine cultures tend to value caring for the less fortunate, greater sensitivity toward others and an overall enhanced quality of life (Hofstede, 1991). More feminine, relationally-oriented cultures would resonate with more interactive messages that would facilitate the development of relationships. Tolerance for Uncertainty Cultures in which people value certainty more than uncertainty are more likely to prefer interactive, dialectic communication than a sustained, non-interactive mono- logue; they want to predict the future by reducing uncertainty through the use of ques- tions. People who have a greater tolerance for uncertainty may not expect answers to questions and therefore may be comfortable with more message structure. Interactive, spontaneous messages are likely to be preferred in situations in which there is a need to know answers to the question of “what happens next?” Greater tolerance for uncer- tainty, characterized by such sentiments as “just go with the flow” and “it will sort itself out” may result in communicators asking fewer questions. Consequently communica- tors would expect more message structure. Russian Journal of Linguistics, Vestnik RUDN, 2015, N. 4 30 Power Distribution According to Hofstede (1991) some cultures prefer an equal, or a decentralized distribution of power, whereas other cultures prefer and are more comfortable with concentrated, centralized power structures. More centralized distributions of power would predict a preference for messages with greater structure. Decentralized power distributions would suggest a preference for greater interactive messages to negotiate power and manage uncertainty. Where power is concentrated in more centralized struc- tures the messages would be expected to be more structured and less interactive. More distributed power would result in the need for more give-and-take, interactive mes- sages. Time Orientation Time orientation falls on a continuum between long-term and short-term time values. People with a long-term orientation to time place greater emphasis on what will hap- pen in the future; they value perseverance and thrift. With an emphasis on endurance and a value for predictability, long-term time cultural orientations may likely result in com- municator preferences for enhanced message structure. Short-term time orientations would predict a general preference for briefer more ephemeral interaction. Conclusion These initial ideas about the role and conclusion influence of culture and preferences for structured or interactive messages are speculative. Additional research is needed to examine the validity and reliability of these prescriptions and strategies. SIT is offered as a general framework to assist in both describing the nature of communication in spe- cific contexts as well as helping to predict the receiver preference for structure or in- teraction in communication messages. Listener preference for structure or interaction is based on expectations according to communication context and culture. REFERENCES [1] Amichai-Hamburger, Y (2005). The social net: Human behavior in cyberspace. 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Understanding mangers’ media choices: A symbolic interactions perspective, in Fulk, J. & Steinfield, C. (Eds.). Organizations and Com- munication Technology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 71074. Russian Journal of Linguistics, Vestnik RUDN, 2015, N. 4 ТЕОРИЯ СТРУКТУРНОГО ВЗАИМОДЕЙСТВИЯ: КОНЦЕПТУАЛЬНЫЕ, КОНТЕКСТУАЛЬНЫЕ И СТРАТЕГИЧЕСКИЕ ОПРЕДЕЛЯЮЩИЕ КОММУНИКАЦИИ Стивен А. Биби Кафедра коммуникативных исследований Университет штата Техас 601 University Drive Сан-Маркос, Техас, США, TX 78666 В статье описывается Теория структурного взаимодействия (ТСВ), в рамках которой рассмат- риваются коммуникативные сообщения и предлагаются способы улучшения коммуникации, осно- ванные на выборе наиболее предпочтительной для реципиента структуры сообщения или способа взаимодействия. Хотя Теория структурного взаимодействия является новой, она уходит корнями в такие классические науки, описывающие коммуникацию, как риторика и диалектика (Аристо- тель, 1959), а также современные теории коммуникации (Салем, 2012; Литтлджон, Фосс 2008). В статье даются основные положения Теории структурного взаимодействия, показано, как она мо- жет помочь объяснить и предсказать ход коммуникации в разных контекстах (в межличностной, групповой и общественной коммуникации) и определить стратегии, нацеленные на улучшение общения (что обсуждалось на конференции Российской коммуникативной ассоциации). Согласно Теории структурного взаимодействия, для того, чтобы сообщение было понято и достигло цели говорящего, необходим баланс двух составляющих: структуры и взаимодействия. Структура коммуникации — неотъемлемый элемент, участвующий в донесении информации до со- беседника. Согласно описанию Аристотеля, в структуре связей и взаимодействия риторика является наиболее структурированной и четкой моделью передачи сообщения. Диалектика характеризуется более спонтанным обменом сообщениями. Согласно ТСВ, вся коммуникация может быть рассмот- рена в рамках культурного взаимодействия. Данная работа иллюстрирует применение ТСВ к неко- торым коммуникативным ситуациям и предлагает стратегии улучшения общения. В частности, рассматриваются возможности развития сообщений в соответствии с предпочтениями аудитории, основанными на коммуникативных ожиданиях и культурной специфике. Структура взаимодейст- вия должна определяться запросами, интересами, ценностями (включая культурные ценности) аудитории, которые влияют на тип коммуникации. Ключевые слова: Теория структурного взаимодействия (ТСВ), коммуникативные сообще- ния, коммуникативный контекст, коммуникативные стратегии, риторика, диалектика. work_4ygjgk5dwzgrrpfhf3exddce4a ---- Microsoft Word - Revised-572-Article%20Text-3679-1-9-20190115.docx Transmotion Vol 5, No 1 (2019) 33 Gerald Vizenor's Transnational Aesthetics in Blue Ravens DANNE JOBIN More than any of Gerald Vizenor's previous work, Blue Ravens deploys a transnational aesthetic which playfully explores potential avenues for Native ⁠1 sovereignty, a space of self-determination opened up by artistic production that juxtaposes an Anishinaabe sensibility onto French war scenes and the urban environment of Paris, thus imprinting Native presence onto the land. It enables like-minded individuals to find refuge and create a new order in which Native voices are heard and artistic influence is mutual as Indigenous artists participate in the thriving cultural scene of interwar France. Indeed, Vizenor's fiction explores mobile forms of citizenship, which do not attempt to regulate subjects but allow a celebration of communal as well as individual identities. The novel showcases a Native relationship to space transformed by Indigenous art into inventive, transnational forms of aesthetic citizenship. It also outlines dynamic maps of transnational networks that nevertheless retain their Indigenous, tribal-specific focus even as they open up the field for new exchanges with global spaces. The focus on Anishinaabe art and writing demonstrates that tribal national specificities, when entering transnational space, can adapt and evolve without compromising their integrity. As this article will show, instead of breaking its ties to White Earth, the protagonists' art transposes Anishinaabe aesthetics onto Parisian locales, thus exploring new forms of Indigenous sovereignty that transcends political borders. In order to situate the critical contribution of Blue Ravens within transnational Indigenous studies, I will call on hemispheric and transnational theories to help articulate international and global intersections, and I will also explore questions regarding the sharing of Native space and the regulation of Indigenous identities. To begin with, the novel underscores Native American peoples' participation in transnational spaces by drawing from the experience of Anishinaabe World War One soldiers. Blue Ravens is one of two recent novels to retrace the history of Native North American participation in World War One, with Joseph Boyden's The Three Day Road providing a Canadian counterpart.2 When Gerald Vizenor researched the engagement of his family members in the Great War, he discovered that two of his forebears were drafted to France, simultaneously coming across other names from the region and more specifically the White Danne Jobin “Gerald Vizenor’s Transnational Aesthetics” 34 Earth Anishinaabe Reservation in Minnesota. He then used these facts as a basis for his fictional narrative, which is partly biographical and thus offers insight into what the experience of fighting might have entailed for Indigenous soldiers. However, the scope of Blue Ravens is much wider than a war narrative or an account of the legacy borne by war veterans, and in this respect differs markedly from other Native novels focusing on combat or its aftermath. The narrator, Basile Hudon Beaulieu, is a storyteller—or to use Vizenor's term, a storier—who travels alongside his painter brother Aloysius and narrates their encounters as well as Aloysius's evolving portfolio. The narrative moves beyond a mere focus on mobility to illuminate art as a spatial practice that enables a dialogue between Indigeneity and spatial practices in a foreign land. Art is the center of focus, in the form of both Aloysius's visual production and Basile's writing, the novel itself. Once the war is over, the Beaulieus move to Paris where they meet prestigious artists and achieve recognition within the art scene themselves. All the while, their connection to White Earth is maintained through aesthetic transmotion, an assertive sense of movement tied to sovereignty through "native motion and an active presence," as Vizenor defines it in Fugitive Poses: The connotations of transmotion are creation stories, totemic visions, reincarnation, and sovenance; transmotion, that sense of native motion and an active presence, is sui generis sovereignty. Native transmotion is survivance, a reciprocal use of nature, not a monotheistic, territorial sovereignty. Native stories of survivance are the creases of transmotion and sovereignty. (15, italics in the original) Art, therefore, enables international connections and exchanges through unrestrained mobility as the brothers create art pieces based on Anishinaabe aesthetics in various spaces. These aesthetics refer back to White Earth as a central node, which shaped the Beaulieus' artistic sensibilities and goes on informing their artistic production. Thus, Vizenor imbues art with the potential to transmit and transform Native modes of creative expression in innovative ways that speak to transmotion and ensure survivance. Padraig Kirwan more specifically articulates the potential of art forms to assert relationships across and beyond boundaries as a way of reclaiming Native space outside the reservation through "aesthetic sovereignty," which he defines as a "spatially- informed aesthetics" (Sovereign Stories, 27). Kirwan reads Native American texts as "expressions of tribal sovereignty" (23) that bear an "aesthetic" which not only expresses but also produces tribal autonomy (23), and thus articulates a critique of tribal nationalism in relation to Transmotion Vol 5, No 1 (2019) 35 the "artistic, political, and cultural sovereignty” (37) found in literary works. The sovereign aesthetic which emerges can link "rhetorical sovereignty" with the current "political and legal debates" taking place in Indian country (17) by providing “a deeper understanding of both the means by which political movements are supported by the discrete mobilization of spatialized metaphors in fiction as well as critical theory, and an appreciation of the ways in which Native American fictionists create multifarious narrative spaces” (17). This helps conceive of a model in which the Beaulieus are not merely transposing Native artists into a foreign environment but actually engaging with the new urban space as promoting their Indigenous sensibility through their artistic, imaginative engagement with particular locales. Paris becomes an Indigenised space as the Beaulieus develop their artistic vision of White Earth through their presence in the City of Light, in turn inspiring international artists through their own production. One morning in Paris, for instance, Aloysius paints "a throng of blue ravens at the entrance of Le Chemin du Montparnasse" with "abstract wings," "cubist beaks," and "baroque talons" in reference to Apollinaire, Picasso, and Vassilieff (163). He thus adds his own Indigenous art, with a touch of Japanese rouge, to the street where international artists have their ateliers, referencing some of the masters who inspired him. As Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart point out in Global Indigenous Media, maintaining a "local cultural distinctiveness" while also establishing a "transnational affiliation" allows an artistic support network to develop on a global scale and produces "works that question dominant worldviews while at the same time promoting a strategic, internationally conceived Indigenism" (31). Blue Ravens provides a fictional example of the ways in which such a model might work. In a similar line, the first chapter of Indigenous Cosmopolitans by Maximilian C. Forte also asks what happens to indigenous culture and identity when being in the "original place" is no longer possible or even necessary, and whether displacement signifies a negation of Indigeneity. Forte wonders how being and becoming Indigenous is "experienced and practised along translocal pathways", and how philosophies and politics of identification are constructed in translocal settings (2). These productive questions are key to a transnational reading of Blue Ravens as a narrative that creates a space for Indigenous art in Europe and encourages mobility for Native subjects. Vizenor's novel offers imaginative answers by staging an Anishinaabe painter and a writer who employ aesthetic sovereignty to inscribe Indigenous meanings onto spaces situated beyond the reservation, thereby re-envisioning them as Native Danne Jobin “Gerald Vizenor’s Transnational Aesthetics” 36 spaces where new kinship networks between similarly-minded artists and war veterans become possible. Vizenor has progressively been working towards transnational Anishinaabe characters who use artistic expression to apprehend new spaces. His previous novel, Shrouds of White Earth (2010), also features an Anishinaabe artist whose art is showcased not only in other states but in Europe as well, thus crossing international boundaries in addition to artistic ones. Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987) already manifested Vizenor's international vision for Native transmotion by showing how a White Earth English teacher finds a place for himself as an Anishinaabe trickster within Chinese culture by embodying the mythological Monkey King. Griever, however, is based on the trickster tradition rather than the artistic, cosmoprimitivist angle increasingly developed in the author's recent work. In his article “Wanton and Sensuous in the Musée du Quai Branly,” James Mackay argues that, in Shrouds of White Earth, for instance, “Vizenor is primarily concerned with challenging the colonially inflected power balance assumptions inhering in the word ‘primitivism’” in order to move away from a simple idealisation of the primitive (171). Mackay explains that the main protagonist envisions a “new art theory, Native Visionary Cosmopolitan Primitivism, or Cosmoprimitivism” to redress the assumption that although ledger art emerged decades before Chagall came to be known, “the native artists are seen more as representative of ancient Plains traditions while Chagall alone is the innovator and colourist” (177). Blue Ravens, then, pursues this thread in its representation of a painter and a writer from White Earth who become active participants in the avant-garde movement. In this novel, Vizenor's cosmoprimitivism transforms Indigenous aesthetics into a form of political subversion that inscribes a sense of Native presence onto transnational locales as a way of side-stepping U.S. settler rule over restrictive reservation policies. Enabling more inclusive models of sovereignty to move beyond such containment, the novel gestures towards a mobile, even international, vision of Native space. As an illustration, when posted in France, Aloysius paints "one, three, four, and seven blue ravens […] in the back of trucks on the rough roads to war, at meals, and even in the beam and roar of enemy bombardments" (126), thus inscribing a sense of Native presence onto locales and events. This aesthetic Anishinaabe space is constituted by the artist's relationship to a place as a form of self-definition re-enacted through art rather than a prescriptive model of enclosure within a static tradition. Cosmoprimitive Native art is both mobile and capable of asserting tribal sovereignty throughout the world while Transmotion Vol 5, No 1 (2019) 37 conversing with other art springing from compatible perspectives. Indeed, Vizenor extends Native sovereignty far beyond the reservation through a literary aesthetics that showcases art as a vessel for Native transmotion, which envisions new forms of artistic citizenship—ways of belonging that are established through artistic practices rather than strict notions of membership. At a gathering of artists and writers in Montparnasse, Basile tells the stories of "native totems and animals, and the presence of animals and birds in art and literature," aiming to inspire others to reflect on "the visionary presence of animals," while Aloysius discusses mongrel healers in the spirit of the fur trade, invoking a common history of exchange in order to stimulate the imaginative potential of the listeners (164). By so doing, the brothers not only call Native presence into the Parisian setting but inform the vision of other artists and writers around them and create a community of influence. In his review, Jay Whitaker comments on the autobiographical background of the novel, which is dedicated "to the memory of Ignatius Vizenor, the author's own great-uncle" and is "reminiscent of Vizenor's early years, including the extended family and community contributions to his upbringing in the absence of a paternal figure, his military service, and his work as a newspaper writer" (228). Whitaker also emphasises the author's contribution to Indigenous politics through "transnational and transcultural interactions" that occur during the war when the brothers "meet and learn from Oneida warriors on the front line" before making a place for themselves in Paris: [T]he brothers, in their role as veterans, acknowledge that France is the place for them to explore and create their identities because the French soil and the French people remember the specific local traumas of World War I battles; the United States and the White Earth Reservation are in many ways too disconnected, despite the disproportionate ratio of casualties many Native American communities endured during the war. France becomes the place where these brothers can best cultivate their Native cultural productions and, in so doing, continue to form their Anishinaabe identities even apart from their homeland. (229) France facilitates a particular relationship to place, as the events of the war impress themselves upon the land, and thus enable the Beaulieus to bridge place and memory in accordance with "a naturally reasoned existence in relation to a specific surrounding" that is "inherently Native" (229). As Billy Stratton points out, this perspective shares similarities with "what N. Scott Momaday terms ‘the remembered earth,’" a feature which Vizenor transposes from Minnesota to Danne Jobin “Gerald Vizenor’s Transnational Aesthetics” 38 other states and Europe as well as Japan and China (112). Thus, the setting of Blue Ravens allows its main protagonists to demonstrate "the active presence of Native people in urban spaces" while maintaining "their storied connection to the lands emanating from the White Earth Reservation" (112). The Parisian setting also provides a visual and imaginative freedom that contrasts with the federal stronghold established on the reservation (113), thereby envisioning a Native relationship to foreign lands that reasserts mobile Indigenous practices. Vizenor's "movement from hyperlocal to global sources of knowledge" is congruent with transmotion (Eils et. al. 214). Furthermore, in Eils, Lederman and Uzendoski's interview article "You're Always More Famous When You Are Banished," Vizenor expands upon his vision of Native transmotion in relation to his entire corpus, as well as Blue Ravens more specifically, saying that more than being a geographical movement, transmotion allows a visionary, imaginative motion that participates in the "sentiment of continental liberty" for Native people (225): You can live anywhere and have a story of presence on this continent, have a connection to the stories that created this continent—this hemisphere, actually—not just the metes and bounds and treaty borders and territorial boundaries. This is particularly critical for Natives—especially in border states, where in the past they could cross. Physically you had the motion to ignore territorial boundaries because your culture transcended it, but then with security problems, now you can't. My argument is straightforward: Native transmotion is visionary motion, and transmotion creates a sense of presence. (Eils et. al. 225-226) He goes on to argue that new language is required to convey this notion, a language "that allows history to include theory and emotive possibilities for which there are no documents and that are critical in understanding a people" (227). This quote describes the Blue Ravens project very accurately. Through the Beaulieu brothers' artistry, Vizenor invents new literary possibilities that express transmotion as a way of piecing together the forgotten histories of war. For Indigenous peoples, that imaginative creativity is foundational to a way of interacting with the land as well. Vizenor extends this notion to sovereignty, stating: "I've only written about transmotion in the context of sovereignty—which is an abstract sovereignty—and literature," and explains that for pre-contact Native peoples, sovereignty must have resembled transmotion, in the sense of visionary presence, more closely than contemporary political sovereignty, which is territorial. Transmotion Vol 5, No 1 (2019) 39 Native relationship to the land was made of "reciprocal relationships" (226) and did not acknowledge borders: "Natives had extensive, dynamic trade routes throughout the hemisphere: north to south, usually along rivers but also trails […] There were extensive trade networks" (227). Therefore, although transmotion is not intrinsically territorial, but rather visionary, it also offers a lens through which to apprehend a Native relationship to space that manifests itself dynamically in the land, according to principles of reciprocity and presence instead of ownership. These elements are key to a transnational reading of Blue Ravens because they underscore movement as an intrinsic part of Native life across centuries. The novel maintains continuity with such mobile practices by foregrounding more recent developments such as the First World War, thus demonstrating that a narrative centred on the White Earth reservation can also be transnational in its scope. The transnational elements of the novel serve to illuminate the common oversight of Native studies in American studies. For instance, in their introduction to Hemispheric American Studies, Caroline Levander and Robert Levine propose a radical shift from regarding the United States as a somewhat unified and concrete entity by "moving beyond the national frame to consider regions, areas, and diasporic affiliations that exist apart from or in conflicted relation to the nation" (2) in order to approach American locales as "products of overlapping, mutually inflecting fields—as complex webs of regional, national and hemispheric forces that can be approached from multiple locations and perspectives" (3). Indeed, just as America and the Western hemisphere are inventions –politically and ideologically strategic ones (4), it is possible to see borderlands not just as restricted to the Mexican-U.S. border but as moving throughout many locales in the U.S., Canada, and South America (15). This latter point seems fairly obvious from an Indigenous perspective that recognises that settler borders not only exist within the U.S. but also create arbitrary separations with Canada and Mexico that have direct implications for everyday life. However, while Hemispheric Americans Studies aims to "chart new literary and cultural geographies by decentering the U.S. nation" (3) and "contextualiz[ing] what can sometimes appear to be the artificially hardened borders and boundaries of the U.S. nation or for that matter, any nation of the American hemisphere" (2-3), the volume gives little attention to Native American viewpoints. Indigenous peoples are marginally addressed in some of the volume’s chapters but the introduction tends to inscribe Native Americans within an Danne Jobin “Gerald Vizenor’s Transnational Aesthetics” 40 undifferentiated flow of discourses and movements. Thus, although the book redirects critical attention toward a hemispheric frame of analysis, it does little to correct the oversight of Indigenous perspectives pervasive to American Studies. Furthermore, as a counter-nationalist project, hemispheric studies also pose a threat to the Native effort to centre tribal perspectives as a critical methodology. In order to disrupt and displace American Studies as a monolithic site that perpetuates a colonial outlook, another more radical proposal would be to recenter Indigenous perspectives instead, for instance by considering Lisa Brooks's questions in her introduction to The Common Pot. She asks, "What happens when the texts of Anglo-American history and literature are participants in Native space rather than the center of the story? What kind of map emerges?" (xxxv). In her response to the tribal nationalist project, Shari Huhndorf also attempts to correct this particular oversight in Mapping the Americas by inscribing Native studies within hemispheric and transnational perspectives. As she points out in her critique of literary nationalism, "Although nationalism is an essential anti-colonial strategy in indigenous settings, nationalist scholarship neglects the historical forces (such as imperialism) that increasingly draw indigenous communities into global contexts" (3). The challenge is therefore to consider global issues without decentring Indigenous Studies but instead to examine the questions that arise from the frictions of gender, culture, the nation state, and their geographical implications (4). This is why the nationalist project was followed by a transnational turn, prompted also by a new focus on urban Indians and global tribal relationships (12-13). Indeed, Robert Warrior's article "Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn" promotes an articulation of transnational theory that emphasises how "the effects of capitalism, which were once contained and constrained by the sovereignty of nations, now supersede and trump the power of states" with a reduced focus on the national boundaries of settler states (119), thus opening up the field of enquiry beyond boundaries: "At best, the transnational turn describes the reality of what we often seek in looking for ways to reach across borders and oceans in search of consonance and […] perspective" (120). Warrior does not, however, decry Native Studies' rejection of transnational theory (120), although the contradiction between cultural studies' view of "nationalism as a pathology" and Native studies framing it as survival (Womack in Warrior 121) can seem disorienting. For Warrior, "a resistance to [or against] ideas like transnationality" is not only "intellectually defensible" but can provide "fruitful theoretical insight" (122). It is their very Transmotion Vol 5, No 1 (2019) 41 refusal to engage with the terms of transnationalism that has enabled Native scholars to articulate a nationalism "born out of native transnationalism, the flow and exchange of ideas and politics across our respective nations' borders" (125). Although "the discourse on nationalism remains […] the domestic and international language in which Native struggle is waged" and provides "a primary vehicle for fuelling Indigenous imagination," there is scope to develop the field "toward a sense that encompasses not just North America, but the Indigenous world more broadly" (126). Huhndorf offers Silko's Almanac of the Dead as an example of a Native American novel in which global connections lay the basis for an anticolonial revolution in order to demonstrate how an Indigenous agenda might reclaim worldwide networks. Such shifts test parameters that are at the heart of contemporary American Studies, where "[I]ndigenous transnationalisms in particular have extended existing American Studies critiques of national identity and imperialism as they radically challenge the histories, geographies, and contemporary social relations that constitute America itself" (Huhndorf 19). In her insistence on the use of visual representation as a central factor in colonisation as well as a tool for resistance to it, Huhndorf includes maps as visual representations that can be subverted and recreated to support land claims and thus become the visual technologies of Native politics (22). Such maps extend far beyond reservation boundaries and surrounding mis-appropriated/occupied land to constitute highly dynamic maps of transnational Indigenous networks that extend across the continent and hemisphere and run throughout the globe. Just as tribal nations have always practiced movement and relationship, they continue to develop and recreate them in ways that mediate Indigeneity across the world by asserting a sense of Native presence in unexpected places. In Blue Ravens, a group of Native men meet at Café du Dôme, calling it their "commune of native stories" and stating that the stories they tell each other in Paris become "more memorable than at any other native commune" (240). This instance stresses not only the possibility of transnational Native spaces but their vitality—in this case mediated through oral literature and Basile's later recording of the encounter in writing. As a geographical extension of Brooks's "common pot"—a space where resources are shared (3)—these connections create commonalities based on Indigenous perspectives that maintain awareness of their roots in tribal traditions while opening dialogues with the inhabitants of markedly different spaces, from America to Europe. Brooks demonstrates that the frameworks developed by tribal nations were adapted to negotiations with the settler and still constitute a useful tool to redefine land use and sovereignty. Art is well suited to Danne Jobin “Gerald Vizenor’s Transnational Aesthetics” 42 communicate in such a dialogical space. Chadwick Allen remarks that Indigenous intellectual and artistic sovereignty is global in its scope (xviii), as is indeed the case in Blue Ravens where Anishinaabe art writes meaning onto transnational spaces. In Trans-Indigenous, Allen suggests that the prefix trans moves beside, through and across (6), thus representing movements susceptible to disrupt colonial order. Allen also insists that local work is of global importance not in opposition to but rather because of its relationship to a particular place (135-136). Although rooted in Indigenous locales and their specific histories, Indigenous art production speaks to global issues and enables the establishment of wider networks. However, he also remarks that there must remain a centre for art production to talk back to, even as other nodes emerge through exchange. Critics, therefore, need to postpone the urge to generalise from the local to theorise an aesthetic (141), instead adopting a more mobile framework that sees the local in movement through a range of spaces, just as when the Beaulieu brothers transpose Anishinaabe artistic imagination onto transnational spaces. There is a notable difference between the pan-Indian focus of Allen's Trans-Indigenous, which describes exchanges between Indigenous peoples across the globe, and the transnational scope of Vizenor's work, where Anishinaabe art is transposed onto non-Indigenous spaces. As mixedbloods, the protagonists of Blue Ravens attempt to rethink France as a place of origins as well as a site that bears the traces of colonialism. The novel also tackles the question of belonging: leaving the reservation to establish themselves as artists in Paris, Anishinaabe characters suggest different networks of connection and kinship. Besides sharing stories about their experience of growing up on White Earth reservation, Basile and Aloysius do not refer to themselves as Native American. Instead, they rely on their art and storytelling to convey their particular outlook and sensibility as Anishinaabe subjects. This refusal to converge with the discourse of identity politics suggests alternatives for Native identities and relations. Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson argues that on the Kahnawà:ke reserve, people have recourse to their knowledge of a kinship network that enables them to recognise one another as tribal members regardless of official regulations regarding membership: "This archive of social and genealogical knowledge operates as an authorizing nexus of identification that also can and sometimes does refuse logics of the state" (15). The question of consent, of individuals and groups accepting the state citizenship offered to them, is at the forefront of conversations concerning membership (17). In effect, the granting of citizenship asserts the state's power (18), which tribal members can refuse to comply with "based upon the Transmotion Vol 5, No 1 (2019) 43 validity and vitality of their own philosophical and governmental systems, systems that predate the advent of the settler state" (19). When it comes to overlapping claims to territory, Simpson argues that "[r]ecognition is the gentler form, perhaps, or the least corporeally violent way of managing Indians and their difference, a multicultural solution to the settlers' Indian problem. The desires and attendant practices of settlers get rerouted, or displaced, in liberal argumentation through the trick of toleration" (20). However, far from being benign, these tactics nevertheless conform to "settler logics of elimination" (12). In Blue Ravens, the Beaulieu brothers never identify as American, and in fact often behave in ways that challenge federal regulations regarding Native Americans; for instance, they routinely cross reservation boundaries without asking for the agent's permission. What is more, the freedom they find in Paris is positioned against restrictive reservation politics, suggesting that transnational practices correspond more closely to Anishinaabe identities than the negotiation of Indigeneity as limited to a reservation home base. The novel instead outlines a fluid relational network that starts by blurring the logic of blood relations as the only family model, history versus fiction and Indigeneity as tied to the reservation. The first chapter establishes partial genealogies and a brief history of the Vizenor and Beaulieu families—Gerald Vizenor's ancestors (9-10/134). The past is thereby reimagined in ways that create new possibilities for the present and future. In Blue Ravens, family is not restricted to direct descendency and blood ties. The Beaulieu brothers, it turns out, are not real twins since Aloysius was adopted by Basile's parents, who raised them as "natural brothers" (3). Namesakes likewise share common characteristics, as though it constituted a kind of kinship (9). Basile describes their identities as "steadfast brothers on the road of lonesome warriors, a native artist and writer ready to transmute the desolation of war with blue ravens and poetic scenes of a scary civilization and native liberty" (8). There is a sense that artistic engagement provides a new type of family, created by the meeting of aesthetic sensibilities. Geographical Movement The novel stages a series of movements: out of the reservation, across the Atlantic Ocean, and in the brothers' art itself, increasingly demonstrating the importance of mobile aesthetics in engaging with the French capital. From the start, the novel explores connections between the White Earth Reservation and other places, showing characters' mobile practices on the American continent. Movement is at the forefront in Blue Ravens, not only in terms of aesthetics but also Danne Jobin “Gerald Vizenor’s Transnational Aesthetics” 44 more pragmatically as a form of geographical curiosity, which manifests in the brothers' refusal to be bound to White Earth exclusively. Early on, the Beaulieus are connected to the world outside the reservation by the railway that brings travellers from Winnipeg and Saint Paul, and takes the brothers from Ogema Station to Minneapolis as they hawk newspapers (15). Train rides enable the brothers to touch upon the essential quality of freedom, which motivates their art: The slow and steady motion of the train created our private window scenes […] We were eager captives in the motion and excitement of railroad time […] We decided then that we would rather be in the motion of adventure, chance, and the future. (27) The names and possibilities of other places stimulate their imagination and artistic sensibilities, seemingly offering alternatives to the constraints of life on the reservation. When the Great White Fleet leaves San Francisco in 1908, Aloysius paints blue ravens on the ship masts and renames it the Great Blue Peace Fleet in order to represent "a greater sense of peace than the voyage of dominance around the world by sixteen white battleships of the United States Navy" (22). Already, Aloysius's art expresses a sense of Native motion that counters federal attempts to establish dominance both on the reservation and internationally, while allowing the brothers to travel in imagination far beyond the boundaries of their known environment along with the painted ravens to "Australia, New Zealand, Philippine Islands, Brazil, Chile, Peru" (22) years before they are drafted to Europe for the war. From the beginning, a tight relationship between movement, art, and politics is cultivated. Art is created in motion and, in turn, motion is represented through art, shaping the movement of Aloysius's blue ravens. Manifesting the impression of movement onto art, Aloysius also uses the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi as a setting for "a row of three blue ravens […] with enormous wings raised to wave away the poison coal-fire smoke" raised by the train (28). Abstract art documents the artist's presence and is further reflected by Basile's ekphrasis as he describes the scenes, writing his brother's art on to the landscape. Movement prompts them to create and is then captured onto their creation, which remain mobile through their suggestive power. The brothers also visit Minneapolis (39) to enable Aloysius to meet other artists and show his own work. The Beaulieus spend several formative years on the reservation before being drafted to France. Once they arrive in Europe, the narrative reimagines the stories of White Earth veterans to stage an active native presence in the war. Basile's narrative also shows a tendency to romanticise the French and stresses a particular sense of kinship due to the entanglements of Transmotion Vol 5, No 1 (2019) 45 Anishinaabe and French fur trade histories. The brothers express reverence towards "our distant ancestors, the fur traders" (107), and Basile describes French officers as "courteous" but "firm," in contrast to the "arrogant poses and manners" of the British (101). The brothers paradoxically experience the approach of France by ship as a "magical return and at the same time a discovery" (107)—the magical return to the land of their French ancestors, and a Native discovery of a different continent. Three transatlantic crossings suggest longtime connections between Europe and Native America. Jace Weaver's The Red Atlantic traces the history of crossings in the Atlantic, starting with Viking settlements. Weaver takes into account not just geographical journeys across the ocean but also traces the various ways in which these affected the wider Native American population through economic and cultural exchanges. He shows that trans-Atlantic relations are not limited to travels across the ocean but soon involved inland inhabitants via trade networks, forming a "multi-lane, two-way bridge across which traveled ideas and things that changed both Europeans and American indigenes" (30). Far from compromising authenticity, "the cosmopolitanism and hybridity of Indians" actually demonstrates that "Natives and their cultures had always been highly adaptive, appropriating and absorbing anything that seemed useful or powerful" (30). In short, "The Red Atlantic is part of a larger story of globalization and the worldwide movement Western Hemisphere indigenes and their technologies, ideas, and material goods" (32). Weaver exposes many of the biographies that have been obscured, forgotten, or mis-remembered, revealing the erasure of Indigenous political actors and especially women, and representing them as active agents. Recentring the map across the ocean reframes the narrative of Blue Ravens as a series of crossings: in and out of the reservation, across the ocean to France, back to Minnesota and to Paris again, while also emphasising the continuous history of such migrations as reflected in the histories of French trading ancestors and Indigenous movement and exchange throughout the hemisphere. Basile and Aloysius repeatedly affiliate themselves with their fur trader ancestors to designate France as a place of origin as much as a new land for them to explore, which playfully destabilises binary notions of settler discovery in opposition to Indigenous fixity. War does not prevent the Beaulieus from practicing their arts but, rather, motivates them to develop in new directions. They re-imagine their direct environment through their artistic production, which provides a means to shape stories and heal people and place from the events Danne Jobin “Gerald Vizenor’s Transnational Aesthetics” 46 of the war, while also shaping their experience. Basile's war stories are published on the reservation, which prompts him to write and send his pieces regularly (97). Basile also reads a translation of Homer during training and service (103), inserting passages from The Odyssey into his wider narrative, thus establishing constant parallels between the epic and the brothers' lives as soldiers (108). Basile's book (and Blue Ravens), like The Odyssey, is written in twenty-four sections (90). By reading Homer in the trenches, he transposes another imagination onto the landscape, which provides another example of transnational exchanges, where an Indigenous American in France is inspired by Ancient Greece and, through literary aesthetics, weaves these elements together seamlessly. Reality is to be reinvented through art, storied imaginatively, in order to maintain a sense of presence and movement. Traumatic events are re-imagined through visual aesthetics to convey resilience, and scenes are often depicted as paintings themselves (116). Aloysius's use of woad blue, from a plant that was used to produce blue paint in Europe before indigo was imported, shows that his development, or adaptation, of Native knowledge in his new locale, creates connection between geographically separated forms of Indigenous knowledge. Its "elusive blues" produce "subtle hues, and the scenes created a sense of motion and ceremony" (126). The plant becomes part of the artist, whose blue tongue, acquired by mixing paint, earns him the nickname of Blueblood (126). It integrates history when he paints blue wing feathers on the cheeks of seven soldiers for combat (129). The scenes they witness turn into art themselves, albeit without being romanticised: "The war was surreal, faces, forests, and enemies" (130). Again, colours play a crucial role in Aloysius's rendering of war scenes, each of them possessing special significance. As mentioned above, his blue ravens are associated with memory and remembrance, whereas black has more macabre connotations. In Aloysius's palette, even "the night is blue" (2). During the war, the painter uses black in a painting for the first time to represent apartment buildings ravaged by German bombing (116-117). Used as war paint, charcoal also washes away faster than the blue paint (132), the latter leaving more durable and stable traces. The trace of rouge in the paintings, first suggested by the Japanese artist Baske, is reminiscent of "the red crown of the totemic sandhill crane" (120). War paint is also used on the reservation when a French Banquet is reproduced by John Leecy for war veterans (179), and later at the Parisian art gallery exhibition, when Aloysius paints a blue raven on his hand and another on Basile's face (276). Depictions of French war scenes both transpose reservation symbols and images onto the European landscape and act as signifiers of Indigeneity in the Transmotion Vol 5, No 1 (2019) 47 Parisian artistic milieu where they come to stand as a symbol for the mutilés de guerre. Basile likewise travels in spirit through his descriptions: "I […] imagined that the war was over and we had returned to the livery stables at the Hotel Leecy. The maple leaves had turned magical and radiant in the bright morning light that brisk autumn on the reservation. The sandhill cranes were on the wing, ravens bounced on the leafy roads, and the elusive cedar waxwings hovered in the bright red sumac" (135). This scene reveals similarities in the Beaulieu brothers' imagination, where the sense of aesthetics, colour, and vision is largely shared. Basile's depictions often look like paintings: "I might have become a painter instead of a creative writer […] with a sense of color, tone, touch, style, and a choice of literary brushes" (205). The return to the reservation, inversely, brings the presence of French war scenes back to White Earth: "The First World War continues forever on the White Earth Reservations [sic] in the stories of veterans and survivors of combat. We were the native descendants of the fur trade who returned with new stories from France" (140). Continuity is thus maintained, even as the ocean is crossed for the second time, through the imaginative power of visual art and stories. Of course, the veterans suffer from the violence that their participation as soldiers has subjected them to: "The allied casualties sustained to recover these common country scenes have forever […] haunted the memories and stories of war veterans on the reservation" (138). Although it ends abruptly, the war leaves tangible traces on both the soldiers' psyches and the land. France, memory, and Freedom Following the war, France becomes a place of connection while the brothers experience rupture with reservation experience. Even when warfare finally ceases, places are marked and will keep memories of the war, transforming human matter into life-sustaining food: "The native forests and field would bear forever the blood, brain, and cracked bones in every season of the fruit trees and cultivated sugar beets" (141); a sense of active remembering and processing is missing from their home in Minnesota, where it is replaced by the patriotism, the "hoax, theatrical and political revision" (169) promoted by post-war U.S. politics. Finding that their capacity to create has been affected by the war, they obtain furlough and leave for Paris to pursue the "vision of art and literature” (144), where they encounter disfigured soldiers wearing masks and Aloysius paints ravens with abstract masks (147) that counter the somewhat grotesque realism of the soldiers' prosthetics. He deems the hornbeam leg a soldier carved for himself "a work of art" (149), Danne Jobin “Gerald Vizenor’s Transnational Aesthetics” 48 emblematic of Aloysius's desire to create an "abstract work of art" rather than an "aesthetic disguise" (150). War provides a productive site to engage with remembrance in the face of the absences created by conflict and loss, in that respect not unlike the ongoing experience of colonisation on the reservation. The need to envision a different future thus creates a bridge between the Anishinaabe brothers and post-war French. Ravens are painted on diverse Quays and bridges, such as the Pont des Arts raven, which reveals "a native presence in our names, blue paint, and in my [Basile's] stories" (151). Thus, during their visit to Paris, the brothers establish their presence as Native artists through art, visiting the favourite meeting places of artists, such as Café du Dôme (152) and painting ravens in those locations (153) to act as "visual memories" (250). In Café de Flore one morning, the Beaulieus envision their possible future as artists in the City of Lights (153/154), and La Rotonde becomes one of the few "sovereign cafés" where artists meet and discuss politics (157), and argue somewhat extravagantly, manifesting similar behaviour to the "native conduct on the reservation" (159). Nathan Crémieux's3 gallery provides a space where Aloysius's art is admired and respected. Knowledgeable about Native art, Nathan is moved by the blue ravens (155) and deems the art avant-garde (162), offering to frame and sell some of the paintings in his gallery (163). Thus, he does not participate in "[t]he French romance of natives and nature [which] excluded the possibility of any cosmopolitan experiences in the world" (161). Similarly, the Musée d'Ethnographie is criticised for abandoning native arts and sanctioning the theft of sacred artefacts (166), without mentioning "the voices of native artists," the "cosmototemic voices," thus adding a second crime: "the abuse of precious cultural memories" (166). France provides a space in which Indigenous presence can take hold, provided it is tied to remembrance. There is a strong relationship between land and memory as the former carries indelible markers of the latter. For instance, by dying in combat, Ignatius's spirit "returned to the earth of his fur trade ancestors" (164); showing that to the Anishinaabe protagonists France is not an exile, but a return, a coming home of sorts. Scenes of war cling to them, making the return to White Earth difficult for the writer and artists: "Aloysius painted nothing on our return to the reservation. He could not paint the reversal of war" (169). In sharp contrast with the freedom found in avant-garde Paris after the war, their homeland is under strict supervision: "We returned to a federal occupation on the reservation […] neither peace nor the end of the war" (170). The gap between "federal and church politics on the reservation […] and the generous cosmopolitan world of art and literature revealed the wounds of my spirit" (170) is hard Transmotion Vol 5, No 1 (2019) 49 to heal. Despite recovering a "basic native sense of survivance," near Bad Boy Lake, they know that there is no "truce of remembrance" or "reversal of war memories" (172) on the reservation, and long for the freedom found in France: "the anthem of fraternité, égalité, and liberté was necessary on the White Earth Reservation" (176). Published under the title French Returns: The New Fur Trade (177), Basile's latest stories focus on Native veterans, thus manifesting his will to bear the memory of France but also his hope to return to Paris in the near future. Considered the "best of the outsiders" on the reservation (183), they no longer fully belong to the community and cannot lose memories of the war (190) that generate fear and weaken stories (191). Just as Aloysius is determined to move to Minneapolis "to meet with other artists, and encounter a new world of chance" (196), Basile agrees that "for my brother and me, the reservation would never be enough to cope with the world or to envision the new and wild cosmopolitan world of exotic art, literature, music […]" (197). The letter from Nathan Crémieux telling them he has sold most of the raven paintings at his gallery (208) reveals a receptivity to the brothers' art, unequaled outside of Paris, where their aesthetics of motion as Natives intrigues and moves people. Applying for passports (211), they embark on their "return voyage to France" (215), again framing it as a homecoming that recalls the "premier union" of French fur traders "with our ancestors the native Anishinaabe" (255). James Mackay has drawn attention to a tendency in Native American literature to represent Europe in a positive light, indicating that it serves the purpose of building an alliance against U.S. power by drawing on “the deep-rooted sense of tradition shared by indigenous and European peoples” (170). Referring to Vizenor’s previous novel Shrouds of White Earth, he notes that “the novel’s invocation of France must be understood as a subtle countervailing force to what might otherwise be a simplistic anti-colonial screed” (173). However, even as Vizenor aims to “overturn the negative associations that inhere in the word ‘primitivism,’” he nevertheless “celebrates notions of shamanism and native visionary art” (177) that may end up “reifying the category” (171) and its colonial undertones. Thus, once the war is over, what Paris offers to the Beaulieus seems to conveniently side-step the reality of colonisation; in opposition to the occupied space of the reservation, the city is largely idealised despite the protagonists' critique of ethnographic practices. Transnational Aesthetics Finally, Blue Ravens suggests that an Anishinaabe artistic practice can establish strong ties with Danne Jobin “Gerald Vizenor’s Transnational Aesthetics” 50 Paris as well as create networks based on its aesthetic sensibility. Art provides and maintains connection with Paris by enabling an Indigenous relationship to the urban space. In Paris, Nathan provides a safe environment for the brothers, becoming their promoter and protector as he denounces "the primacy of the primitive" as a product of "fascist sentiments" (221), believing that "natives had always been modernists" (222). In an echo of the Paris school of art, Nathan calls their art Ecole Indienne (225). Rather than framing this patronage as problematic, the narrative describes the gallery as a dynamic space of openness that makes Aloysius's art available to like-minded people and enables connection with other artists. Writing in cafés and enjoying food provides another kind of home for the Beaulieus. Basile often writes in cafés, finding the freedom that was missing from White Earth and meets up weekly with other Natives at the Café du Dôme, the latter becoming a "new commune of native storiers that had started many centuries earlier on the Mississippi river" (240). They establish a "commune of river veterans" who tease the two artists, a "native sanctuary" (246). These many parallels with life on the reservation demonstrate that, far from a rupture from their Indigenous background, Paris represents a fuller realisation of their artistic sensibilities while they retain their particularities as Native artists. In some ways, the capital becomes an artistic reservation for the Beaulieus, whose aesthetic heritage is honoured. Audra Simpson describes how in tribal contexts, the definition of membership can become a point of contention as to what the "terms of recognition" are: memory, blood, participation (40), or simply claims of belonging (41). Simpson proposes the term of "feelings citizenships" as a means to describe the "alternative citizenships to the state that are structured in the present space of intracommunity recognition, affection, and care, outside of the logics of colonial and imperial rule" (109). Distinct from membership (171), they represent "the affective sense of being a Mohawk […] in spite of the lack of recognition that some may unjustly experience" (173). Although not formally recognized by institutional structures, these living citzenships are narratively constructed, linked politically and socially to "the simultaneous topography of colonialism and Iroquoia," creating "a frame of collective experience" (175) that functions in more fluid ways than institutional regulations of tribal membership. Simpson's research speaks from the perspective of Kahnawà:ke, where Mohawks strongly resist Canadian citizenship as it constitutes a direct threat to their sovereignty. In Blue Ravens, the Beaulieus never identify themselves as American but, rather, as coming from White Earth specifically, implicitly claiming Anishinaabe citizenship as distinct from the settler state. What is more, they Transmotion Vol 5, No 1 (2019) 51 use their connection to France and its avant-garde scene as a way of circumventing U.S. settler rule on the reservation in order to find free artistic expression. Thus, despite emerging from a very different tribal context, and being less place-bound, the narrative also reexamines notions of belonging that are tied to citizenship, in this case through aesthetics. Formative of the brothers' capacity to create networks around them, chance associations also carry over into the artistic process. First painted on newspaper print, Aloysius's ravens are distinctively blue, a colour tied to memory and imagination. Basile describes the blue ravens as "traces of visions and original abstract totems, the chance associations of native memories in the natural world" (1). Whereas black "has no tease or sentiment," shades of blue "are ironic, the tease of natural light" (2). Aloysius's ravens also stand out due to the types of paint he uses, "only natural paint colors" which his mother "made with crushed plums, blue berries, or the roots of red cedars" and by "boil[ing] decomposed maple stumps and includ[ing] fine dust of various soft stones to concoct the rich darker hues of blue and purple" (7). Later in Paris, he mixes natural pigments and honey (267). While Aloysius experimented with his blue ravens, Marc Chagall was also creating "blue visionary creatures and communal scenes" (2). The same summer, Henri Matisse painted Nu Bleu, Souvenir de Biskra (1); and Aloysius shared avant-garde, impressionist and expressionist features with Pablo Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (8) long before they met in Paris. Thus, the Anishinaabe painter's production is synchronistic with other innovative artists of the time, reflecting aspects of their genius even as it maintains local characteristics such as the paint he uses. While the Beaulieus grow up as Natives on an Anishinaabe reservation, their creativity lets them participate in another community with which they share certain aesthetic sensibilities simultaneously, and without any contradiction. Transmotion, it appears, can also entail that meeting of spirits across space. Indeed, the brothers' claim to belonging to White Earth, although confirmed by blood and kinship, develops a rhetoric that asserts their attachment to the homeland but also encompasses a sense of Paris as a space compatible with their own Indigenous heritage. Indeed, the Beaulieu brothers are not alone in perceiving the world through an Anishinaabe lens: other non-Native characters are open to different points of view and understand the Beaulieus very well, perhaps fulfilling the notion that they have ancestors in common, a heritage to share—ties that are paradoxically stronger in France than in the U.S., where the reservation is described as politically corrupt, in contrast with "the liberty of France" (253). Aloysius creates many paintings of Danne Jobin “Gerald Vizenor’s Transnational Aesthetics” 52 memory in Parisian locales ("memorial bridges were portrayed in natural motion" (220)), as well as ironic re-presencing of Natives from stolen stories: painted totem scenes (270), counterpoints to Exposition Universelle—the International Exposition—and Delacroix's Natchez, thus indigenising the city as well as incorporating transnational influences. Among them, Basile calls Apollinaire his "poetic totem" (213) while Aloysius borrows from the Japanese floating world tradition (226), echoing Hokusai in his ravens merging with waves. This Japanese influence on Aloysius's painting was initiated years before, in Saint Paul, when the Japanese artist Yamada Baske (44) invited the brothers to his studio. Baske admired Aloysius's ravens and understood them as "native impressionism, an original style of abstract blue ravens" (46). Before parting, he gave "a tin of rouge watercolour paint" to the Anishinaabe artist, advising him to add "a tiny and faint hue of rouge" to the blue scenes (47). This "master teacher" is the first artist who directly intervenes in the painter's technique, evaluating it with sensitivity and helping Aloysius move forward with his art. The sense of movement manifested by Japanese art is shown as compatible with the aesthetic transmotion of the Anishinaabe painter, and reflects Vizenor's longstanding interest in Japanese art and literature. Indeed, while serving in the US military, the author was posted in Japan in 1953 and borrowed from the haiku tradition, which he described in "Envoy to Haiku" as "an overture to dream songs" (26), implying that certain aspects of Japanese culture are highly compatible with his own Anishinaabe background. The 2003 novel Hiroshima Bugi also bears testament to the enduring influence of Japan in the author's work. Such convergences manifest the transnational connections which artistic expression makes possible in Vizenor's work. In Blue Ravens, Basile's stories are likewise connected to Parisian locales (284), ascribing meaning to those locales and affirming the artists' ties to place, thus suggesting a sense of belonging that is akin to Simpson's "feelings citizenship" but no longer attached exclusively to a reservation community, an "aesthetic citizenship" which the brothers transpose through art onto transnational spaces that become indigenised. Basile's statement that "the stories never seemed to really end that night" reasserts the sense of memory established by this coming together of artists and veterans in a "secure sense of presence", "a natural sense of solace" (285). The novel ends with a quotation from the last book of The Odyssey: "never yet did any stranger come to me whom I liked better" (285) so that the scene ends in perfect transnational harmony, a meeting of souls around visual art and story. Transmotion Vol 5, No 1 (2019) 53 Conclusion Blue Ravens turns towards France to situate the White-Earth-based Beaulieu brothers as artists at the heart of the modernist movement in Paris. Gerald Vizenor's novel thus proposes a model for the creation of transnational network of aesthetic affiliations that refers back to a tribal centre even as it explores other places. This model creates cross-Atlantic pathways that in some ways reiterate, and in other ways reverse, the spatial practices of the protagonists' ancestors. Juxtaposing Anishinaabe perspectives onto new territories through aesthetics and exchange as the brothers' art finds an appreciative audience in Paris, the novel envisions a kind of Indigenous space where artists and other art afficionados develop affinities with Aloysius's paintings and Basile's stories. Non-Native characters manage to eschew the trappings of authenticity and acknowledge the fluidity of blue raven paintings as participating in the avant-garde scene of Paris as well as emerging from White Earth in distinctive ways. The novel thus encourages readers and critics to rethink notions of Indigeneity as bounded in place and provides useful elements towards a more transnational model for Native Studies; a shift that could bear particular importance for the many registered tribal Nations without an official land base, as well as Indigenous individuals who live away from their traditional homelands and/or communities. Blue Ravens thus asks productive questions about the significance of calling oneself Anishinaabe when living in global spaces, arguing that the category holds meaning far beyond containment within reservation—or even continental—borders. Instead, aesthetic practices that convey transmotion enable Indigeneity to write itself upon transnational spaces and establish new networks of belonging. Notes 1 In this article, I use the terms "Native" and "Indigenous" interchangeably to avoid repetition. While "Native" always refers to North American Indians specifically, "Indigenous" can apply to global Indigenous subjects more broadly. For more precision, I prefer to employ the term "Anishinaabe" where relevant. 2 Bearing in mind that there is now a serious controversy regarding Boyden's claims to Indigenous identity. 3 Nathan is a French gallerist who admires Aloysius's art and promotes his work by organising openings (where Basile also reads his writing) and selling his paintings. He becomes the brothers' protector and introduces them to other artists, thus helping to establish their reputation in the Parisian scene. While the narrative presents this relationship in a positive light, it nevertheless carries unsettling colonial undertones. Danne Jobin “Gerald Vizenor’s Transnational Aesthetics” 54 Works Cited Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2012. Boyden, Joseph. Three Day Road. London: Penguin. 2006. Brooks, Lisa. The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. 2008. Eils, Colleen, Emily Lederman, and Andrew Uzendoski. "You're Always More Famous When You Are Banished: Gerald Vizenor on Citizenship, War, and Continental Liberty." American Indian Quarterly. 39:2 (Spring 2015): 213-227. Erdrich, Louise. Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling in the Land of My Ancestors. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic. 2003. Forte, Maximilian C. Indigenous Cosmopolitanism: Transnational and Transcultural Indigeneity in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Peter Lang. 2010. Huhndorf, Shari M. Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture. New York: Cornell University Press. 2009. Kirwan, Padraig. Sovereign Stories: Aesthetics, Autonomy, and Contemporary Native American Writing. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2013. Levander, Caroline F., and Robert S. Levine. Hemispheric American Studies. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. 2008. Mackay, James. "Wanton and Sensuous in the Musée du Quai Branly: Gerald Vizenor's Cosmoprimitivist Visions of France." Journal of Postcolonial Writing. 51:2 (2015): 170- 183. Miner, Dylan. Creating Aztlán: Chicano Art, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Lowriding Across Turtle Island. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. 2014. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin. 1992. Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press. 2014. Stratton, Billy J. "Book Review of Blue Ravens by Gerald Vizenor." Studies in American Indian Literatures. 27:3 (Fall 2015): 112-132. Vizenor, Gerald. "The Unmissable: Transmotion in Native Stories and Literature." Transmotion. Transmotion Vol 5, No 1 (2019) 55 1:1 (2015): 63-75. ---. Blue Ravens. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2014. ---. Shrouds of White Earth. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010 ---. Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2003. ---. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1998. ---. “Envoy to Haiku.” Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader. Ed. A. Robert Lee. Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press. 1994. 25-32. ---. Griever: An American Monkey King in China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1987. Warrior, Robert Allen. "Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn." Cultural Studies Review. 15.2 (September 2009): 119-130. Weaver, Jace. The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2014. Whitaker, Jay. "Book Review of Blue Ravens by Gerald Vizenor." American Indian Quarterly. 39:2 (Spring 2015): 228-230. Wilson, Pamela, and Michelle Stewart. Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2008. work_4zyfi3uojzfdjcdtaeixyfam6a ---- Journal of Art Historiography Number 9 December 2013 Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit Nicholas E. Johnson Samuel Beckett achieved worldwide recognition first as the playwright of Waiting for Godot by the mid-1950s, and the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature secured his reputation as a novelist. It is less widely known that before this fame in other fields, he was a published critic of visual art, especially painting, from the year 1938 forward. Some of these writings on art were collected and published in 1984 as the third part of his book Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. This edition includes nearly forty pages of previously uncollected commentaries, reviews, and fragments about figures including Jack B. Yeats, Henri Hayden, Avigdor Arikha, and the brothers Geer and Bram Van Velde.1 Various Beckett archives around the world hold more of this critical corpus, as well as much of the same material in its original context, including his contributions to Les Cahiers d’Art (1945-46), Derrière le Miroir (June 1948), and Bulletin Galerie Michel Warren (May 1957). Beckett’s extensive correspondence with Georges Duthuit, a major figure of the 1950s postwar visual art scene in Paris and a close friend of Beckett’s between 1948 and 1952, reveals that he had regular involvement in the translation of French art criticism for the literary magazine Transition, which Duthuit edited from 1948. Beckett did this for financial compensation, but not attribution, so its full extent remains unknown.2 As has been widely discussed since the earliest stages of the now-institutionalized field of Beckett Studies, Beckett’s works on paper and on stage are also saturated with cross-references to paintings.3 Finally, it emerges from all three of his major biographies that Beckett had lasting friendships with many artists, contributing to his evident knowledge of, and fascination with, both visual art and art history. It is interesting that given this context, Beckett is not taken particularly seriously as an art critic generally, and is rarely considered as an Irish art critic specifically. There are several reasons for these interlocking absences from art historical discourse. First, Beckett’s achievements in other literary areas clearly 1 Ruby Cohn, ed, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, by Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove Press, 1984. Part III of this work, ‘Words about Painters’, takes up pages 115-52. 2 Samuel Beckett to Georges Duthuit, 27 May 1948, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 2: 1941-1956, eds George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011, 78-80. 3 The references are too numerous to list in full, but a useful summary of past scholarship can be found in the entry entitled ‘art’ in C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski, eds, The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, London: Faber, 2006, 19-24. Deeper investigations have been made in book form (see Lois Oppenheim, ed, Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media, New York: Garland Publishing, 1999) and in the curatorial arts (Fionnuala Croke, Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Paintings, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 2006). Nicholas E. Johnson Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit 2 overshadow his identity as a critic, in terms of where his lasting importance is most evident and where scholarly attention is likely to focus. His theories on painting are mostly mined for the ways in which they give clues to his own emerging aesthetic, or in other words, tacitly in subordinate status to his other works. Second, Beckett’s achievement of literary stature as an Irishman writing in self-imposed geographic and linguistic exile, together with the legacy of censorship of his works and other public conflicts with the ideology of the Irish Free State, created a mutually adverse relationship between Beckett and Ireland that is still not fully resolved (though notably rehabilitated as of his 2006 centenary).4 Third, Beckett’s critical voice, especially in his early criticism, simply does not adhere to rhetorical conventions of contemporary academic discourse, nor does it make any special bid for clarity. During Beckett’s student years Trinity College Dublin was not a bastion of the professional critical diction that would become New Criticism by mid-century, and it is unlikely that this movement’s 1920s avant-garde – figures like Ivor Richards and William Empson – were known to Beckett. Instead, as Steven Connor notes, Beckett’s rhetoric in his non-fiction is notable for its ‘crustacean antiqueness’. In a 2009 lecture reflecting on Beckett’s ambivalent attitude toward academia in general, Connor writes, ‘His is a language of smirking self-exhibition, of highly wrought phrases creased and corrugated by snarling self-disgust […] it is a sort of poisoned bell-lettrism, a connoisseurship turned convulsively and self-mutilatingly on itself.’5 In short, while Beckett’s theatrical style may have won the twenty-first century, his critical style did not win the twentieth. It is particularly difficult to secure a legacy as a scholar without a readership that can follow one’s arguments. This article will focus on Samuel Beckett’s most famous work of art criticism, and the only one to which substantial study has already been devoted: his ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’, a work that first appeared in December 1949 in Volume 5 of Transition under the title ‘Three Dialogues: Tal Coat – Masson – Van Velde’. 6 The aim of this exploration is twofold. First, while intricate debates about this work have unfolded over many years within Beckett Studies, the current status of the work may not be as widely known among art historians. Second, the works were approached in a new manner in 2010 and 2011 in Dublin, with interdisciplinary links with art history and three distinct performances as part of a practice-based research project: recitation in architectural space, intervention in a conference setting, and more traditional ‘theatrical’ staging with a seated audience.7 4 There is evidence of a recent renewal in attempts to historicize Beckett’s relation with Ireland more rigorously in works like Seán Kennedy’s Beckett and Ireland (2010) and in events like the ‘Samuel Beckett and the “State” of Ireland’ conferences held annually 2011-13 at University College Dublin. 5 Steven Connor, ‘Literature, Politics and the Loutishness of Learning,’ a plenary lecture to the Literature and Politics Conference of the Australasian Association of Literature, University of Sydney, 6 July 2009 (available at http://www.stevenconnor.com/loutishness). 6 Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, ‘Three Dialogues: Tal Coat – Masson – Van Velde’, Transition Forty-Nine, No. 5 (December 1949): 97-103 (University of Reading MS 3107). 7 The three performances directed by Nicholas Johnson were Bram Van Velde, 9 October 2010, Samuel Beckett Centre, TCD (Open House Dublin); Performative Criticism: Beckett and Duthuit, 20 November 2010, Swift Theatre, TCD (Writing Irish Art History/TRIARC); Three Dialogues: A Textual Event, 5-6 April 2011, Arts Technology Research Laboratory, TCD. The author wishes to acknowledge the funding of the Provost’s Fund for the Visual and Performing Arts, TCD, as well as the collaborators, organizations and venues that provided in-kind support for this research. Nicholas E. Johnson Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit 3 In the content and form of this new work with the ‘Dialogues’, methodological questions of interest to both art historiographers and scholars of Beckett arise. In critical discourse now dominated by monologue and the tangible textual object, what is the legacy or possible role of dialogue and the ephemeral textual event? By investigating the context, the argument, and the performance of this text, it is hoped that some of the broader implications of ‘performative criticism’ may emerge. ‘Three Dialogues’: Context, Publications, and Scholarship The issue of Transition in which the ‘Dialogues’ first appeared was dedicated to the visual arts, with multiple pieces referring in particular to the three painters that are discussed in each dialogue respectively: Pierre Tal-Coat, André Masson, and Bram Van Velde. With cover art by Henri Matisse, who was also George Duthuit’s father- in-law, the edition included plates of paintings by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Masson, Matisse, Tal Coat, and both Van Velde brothers, as well as essays and reflections on painting by Eugene Delacroix, Paul Eluard, Alfred Jarry, Stephane Mallarmé, and Duthuit himself. Structured as three separate exchanges between ‘B’ and ‘D’, ostensibly representing Beckett and Duthuit, the ‘Dialogues’ provide no framing of the mise-en-scène and only a few stage directions, some of which are clearly for comic effect (for example, the mid-dialogue note ‘a fortnight later’ before Beckett answers one question posed to him). Thus, both context and content of the ‘Dialogues’ place them not as part of Beckett’s dramatic oeuvre, but rather within a tradition of philosophical dialogues going back at least as far as Plato. Certainly they are also responding in part to a philosophical work read and studied by Beckett as a student, the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous published in 1713 by Bishop George Berkeley, a fellow alumnus and later Fellow of Trinity College. Berkeley’s own turn to the dramatic form was an attempt to restate in a more digestible manner his idealist and immaterialist metaphysics – the radical notion that nothing exists outside the mind – that had failed to have an impact in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710.8 This shift from monologue to dialogue perhaps provides a clue to Beckett’s situation in 1949, and also partly explains the popularity of this work compared to his other critical writings.9 A short history of publication and scholarship on Beckett’s ‘Three Dialogues’ may help to illuminate some of the complexity of their present status, in which the works’ title, authorship, accurate text, influences, significance, and meaning are all variously disputed. Though there is little documentation surrounding the small readership of Transition Forty-Nine, it is likely that for the journal’s original audience, who would have known Duthuit as the editor of the journal and as an established public intellectual, Beckett’s arguments were at an automatic 8 The motivations for Berkeley’s shift to dialogue between 1710 and 1713 are discussed in both critical introductions of standard contemporary editions of his Dialogues; see Howard Robinson, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009; and Jonathan Dancy, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 9 Beckett is reported to have said that he wrote Godot partly to ‘get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time’. See Colin Duckworth, ‘The Making of Godot’, Casebook on Waiting for Godot, ed Ruby Cohn, New York: Grove Press, 1967, 89. Nicholas E. Johnson Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit 4 disadvantage, before even accounting for their complex locution and paradoxical conclusions. In June of 1949, when Beckett began work on ‘Three Dialogues’ in earnest, he was in the midst of writing L’Innomable and had finished En Attendant Godot only months before; though these would both go on to be towering works of their genres, Beckett was still a relatively peripheral figure in the Paris literary circle of the time. After eight years of apparent irrelevance, the ‘Dialogues’ began to reappear in reprints, excerpts, and translations, sometimes with significant variations, either in the context of exhibitions and catalogues of Bram Van Velde’s work, or else in publications by and about Beckett, upheld as an important key to the increasingly famous author’s own aesthetic development. Several extracts of the first type emerged in 1957 and 1958 in Paris and the United States. First, a French extract from the third dialogue (translated by Beckett) was published as ‘Dialogue Samuel Beckett-Georges Duthuit’ in a brochure by Galerie Michel Warren for a Paris exhibit of Bram Van Velde’s work (7 May – 1 June 1957). Also on 1 June 1957, the Nouvelle Revue Française IX excerpted a different translation (apparently not by Beckett) of the third dialogue and the long final response by B. A catalogue entitled Bram Van Velde including essays by Duthuit and Jacques Putnam was released in 1958 containing this same passage, published in French in Paris by Georges Fall, and later in English by Grove Press (1958) and Harry Abrams (1962); these latter texts have variants from the other published versions, but are notable especially for their abandonment of the dialogue format, reframing Beckett’s statements on Van Velde as stand-alone commentary by him, rather than his character B. The texts continued to be used in this manner in exhibition contexts and catalogues through 1970 in both New York and Paris. The complete text of the ‘Three Dialogues’ first reappeared in 1965 in Martin Esslin’s Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, again in 1965 in John Calder’s Beckett series as Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, in Ruby Cohn’s Disjecta in 1984, in Edith Fournier’s French translation Trois Dialogues in 1998, and finally in John Calder’s Beckett Shorts #2: Dramatic Works and Dialogues in 1999. These latter two recent publications credited Beckett as sole author in spite of the publication history and the correspondence, which clearly reveals the extent of collaboration, with near-verbatim transcriptions from both men’s letters appearing in the ‘Dialogues’. This is a revealing inaccuracy, however, critiqued in the Faber Companion as ‘specious’10 and signalling, for historicist scholars like David Hatch, the unthinking acceptance of the ‘Dialogues’ – some passages of which are quoted ubiquitously in Beckett studies – as a solo artistic manifesto rather than dialectic combat between equals.11 Hatch is part of a clear movement over the past fifteen years to reconsider ‘Three Dialogues’ in a more historicized manner, galvanized by a conference on the ‘Dialogues’ in London in 2001 and a subsequent special section of the journal Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui entitled ‘“Three Dialogues” Revisited’, published in 2003.12 10 Ackerley and Gontarski, ‘Georges Duthuit,’ Companion, 158. 11 David Hatch has published several helpful articles on the ‘Three Dialogues’, and his PhD thesis Beckett in (t)Transition: ‘Three Dialogues’ with Georges Duthuit, Aesthetic Evolution, and an Assault on Modernism, Florida State University, 2003, provides a detailed historical and critical account of both genesis and reception (available at http://etd.lib.fsu.edu/theses/available/etd-02262004-190546/). 12 The conference was held 10 November 2001 by the London Network for Modern Fiction Studies. Key publications in what I have called a trend in reconsidering the ‘Dialogues’ include: Lois Oppenheim, Nicholas E. Johnson Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit 5 ‘Three Dialogues’: Content and Argument Beckett and Duthuit’s conversations do not have an analytic structure that is as easy to break down as either Plato’s or Berkeley’s dialogues, an instability that reflects both Beckett’s style and the time and place of their development. Given its wartime upheaval, Paris in 1949 could be read as a cultural zone in which modernist aesthetics were increasingly contested, and philosophically, the meaning of the ‘human’, let alone ‘artist’, was a vital but unresolved question.13 Indeed, this generational and aesthetic division is one of the chief binaries in how the pieces have been read: D is a humanist against art-for-art’s-sake and thus aligned with Masson (whose call to arms for artists to contribute to the postwar rebuilding of the human was published in the same issue of Transition), while B advocates for a poetics of ‘indigence’ and revalorization of ‘failure.’ B has a number of resonant lines that have found their way into theoretical discussions across many disciplines. In the first dialogue, the most famous exchange is as follows: B. — […] The only thing disturbed by the revolutionaries Matisse and Tal Coat is a certain order on the plane of the feasible. D. — What other plane can there be for the maker? B. — Logically none. Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road. D. — And preferring what? B. — The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. D. — But that is a violently extreme and personal point of view, of no help to us in the matter of Tal Coat. B. — D. — Perhaps that is enough for today.14 B’s non-statement that ends the first dialogue sets up a repetitive structure through which it appears, both by the rules of traditional debate and by his own concession at the end of each dialogue, that B ‘loses’ the argument. The second dialogue ends with the stage direction ‘Exit weeping’ for B, following a beautiful passage of affirmative humanism from D; the third dialogue ends with ‘B. — (remembering, warmly) Yes, Yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken.’15 These serial refusals to compete or complete rhetorically can be read in one sense as a solution that demonstrates – ‘Three Dialogues: One Author or Two’, Journal of Beckett Studies 8.2 (Spring 1999): 61-72; the entire special section of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 13 (2003); David Hatch, ‘Beckett in Transition: “Three Dialogues”, Little Magazines, and Post-War Parisian Aesthetic Debate’, SBT/A 15 (2005): 43-56. 13 For placing historical context of this environment and its concerns, excellent further detail is available in Andrew Gibson, Samuel Beckett, London: Reaktion, 2010; and Kevin Brazil, ‘Beckett, Painting, and the Question of the Human’, Journal of Modern Literature, 36.3 (Spring 2013): 81-99. 14 ‘Three Dialogues,’ Disjecta, 139. 15 Disjecta, 145. Nicholas E. Johnson Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit 6 performatively – his argument’s success, however, since it is an object lesson in the failure of expression, regarded by B as inevitable. B’s stance has, as Ackerley and Gontarski note, ‘chimed with poststructuralist aesthetics’ and encouraged ‘a pessimism concerning the expressive powers of language: de-centring the discourse, deconstructing it, acknowledging vanishing structures, and seeking transient traces’.16 Such moments of caesura or void in the text are also some of the most inviting and suggestive for the live performer, since they offer an open space that can be filled by the actor’s energy or the audience’s gaze. A central theme of the third dialogue, in which the axiomatic Beckettian line ‘To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail’17 appears, is that the ‘artist’ and the artist’s ‘occasion’ are both an ‘unstable term of relation’. The relevant passages, in context, are as follows: B. — […] I suggest that Van Velde is the first whose painting is bereft, rid if you prefer, of occasion in every shape and form, ideal as well as material, and the first whose hands have not been tied by the certitude that expression is an impossible act. D. — But might it not be suggested, even by one tolerant of this fantastic theory, that the occasion of his painting is his predicament, and that it is expressive of the impossibility to express? B. — No more ingenious method could be devised for restoring him, safe and sound, to the bosom of Saint Luke […]18 A bit later, in the midst of B’s final lengthy statement, the term ‘occasion’ reappears: B. — […] The analysis of the relation between the artist and his occasion, a relation always regarded as indispensable, does not seem to have been very productive either, the reason being perhaps that it lost its way in disquisitions on the nature of occasion. It is obvious that for the artist obsessed with his creative vocation, anything and everything is doomed to become occasion, including, as is apparently to some extent the case with Masson, the pursuit of occasion […] But if the occasion appears as an unstable term of relation, the artist, who is the other term, is hardly less so, thanks to his warren of modes and attitudes. The objections to this dualist view of the creative process are unconvincing.19 In characteristic fashion, Beckett seems to be using idiosyncratic terminology; a search for these ‘disquisitions on the nature of occasion’ in art history does not yield much. The Oxford English Dictionary provides one definition of ‘occasion’ as ‘a need or necessity’ that seems at first to fit many of these uses in the dialogue. There is, typically, a hidden key: it is B’s line ‘ideal as well as material’ which shows that the code that Beckett is engaging here is a strictly philosophical one, lifted from the 16 Companion, 578. 17 Disjecta, 145. 18 Disjecta, 143. 19 Disjecta, 144. Nicholas E. Johnson Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit 7 debates of early modern metaphysicians, particularly Nicolas Malebranche and Arnold Geulincx, two founders of the doctrine of Occasionalism. In this formal usage, ‘occasion’ (the actions of God’s creatures locally motivated) is differentiated from ‘cause’ (of which God is the sole origin), a distinction that has been enlisted both to solve Cartesian mind-body dualism and the theodicy problem (an omnipotent God’s responsibility for evil in the world). There are lengthy exchanges on ‘occasion’ in George Berkeley’s dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, whose names mean ‘matter’ and ‘lover of mind’ in Latin and thus represent the struggle between idealism and materialism, and which it seems lent something to Beckett in both locution and content: HYLAS. […] by occasion I mean an inactive unthinking being, at the presence whereof God excites ideas in our minds. PHILONOUS. And what may be the nature of that inactive unthinking being? HYLAS. I know nothing of its nature. PHILONOUS. Proceed then to the second point, and assign some reason why we should allow an existence to this unthinking, unknown thing. HYLAS. When we see ideas produced in our minds after an orderly and constant manner, it is natural to think they have some fixed and regular occasions, at the presence of which they are excited. PHILONOUS. You acknowledge then God alone to be the cause of our ideas, and that he causes them at the presence of those occasions. HYLAS. That is my opinion.20 Though the Occasionalists have been discussed extensively in their link to Beckett’s novel Murphy and traces of Berkeley are clearly visible in Endgame, the centrality of this source for Beckett’s ‘Three Dialogues’ is less well known (beyond the obviously identical title). It reveals again the grave difficulty in rehabilitating Beckett’s aesthetic ideas, fascinating as they are, in the context of art historiography: must the art historian read Malebranche, Geulincx, Berkeley, and only then approach Beckett, all in order to answer a minor question about the criticism of painting in Paris in 1949? Performative Criticism and the Textual Event Live performance opens new possibilities for the ‘Three Dialogues’, both in terms of how they are understood by Beckett scholars and how they are integrated by art historians investigating twentieth-century France or Ireland. Much of this development in learning will naturally accrue to the practice-based researchers themselves, who by design spend many more months studying, memorizing, designing, and embodying the text, in comparison to an audience that will attend for perhaps thirty minutes. However, if this preparation is undertaken studiously and the performance aesthetics deployed effectively, then much of the clarity achieved by the performers should be able to be communicated to an audience. Many of the questions that are asked of a text in preparation for performance are 20 Berkeley, Principles and Three Dialogues, 161. Nicholas E. Johnson Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit 8 questions that scholars equally have a stake in. Like a genetic historian, the director asks: which is the most accurate text that actors should memorize? Like a close reader, the actor asks: what is the action or meaning behind a given line, and what is the heritage of any difficult words? Like a biographer, the designer seeks to illuminate: what is the relationship or emotional bond between or behind these characters? The process of exploring each of these in the laboratory/rehearsal context is a form of scholarship, a methodology with the potential to develop knowledge across the humanities, including in art history. But because it is embodied and expressed as a different form than what has conventionally come to be known as academic research – namely, because it is not secured in print, but rather communicated orally and ephemerally in time – it has been somewhat devalued since the Enlightenment. The expression ‘old wives’ tales’ as a rhetorical antonym to scientific knowledge reveals how oral, community, and embodied knowledge has been both aged and gendered out of cultural significance. The later triumph of distribution in the era of mechanical reproduction, the market forces of late capitalism, and the near-total integration of the university into the culture industry has further put the ‘event’ of knowledge creation in a subordinate position to the dissemination of objects. This boundary between ‘objects’ and ‘events’ of knowledge, however, has never been completely binary, and it is growing increasingly blurred by practices in digital culture, where ubiquitous reproduction no longer provides an easy distinction between textual stability and lived experience. Performance studies since the 1980s has also provocatively questioned the division between practice and theory. One of the founders of that discipline, Dwight Conquergood, provides a key to the epistemological tension that informs these practices: The ongoing challenge of performance studies is to refuse and supersede [the] deeply entrenched division of labour, apartheid of knowledges, that plays out inside the academy as the difference between thinking and doing, interpreting and making, conceptualizing and creating. The division of labor between theory and practice, abstraction and embodiment, is an arbitrary and rigged choice, and, like all binarisms, it is booby-trapped. […] Our radical move is to turn, and return, insistently, to the crossroads.21 A credo of both practice-based research and performance studies applied to this project, then, would be that theorizing ‘Three Dialogues’ can be enriched by enacting it, and that performance of ‘Three Dialogues’ can be enhanced by theorizing it, and thus that these strategies are co-dependent, not exclusive. Merely the fact that the printed knowledge laid out in the present article arose from the experience of having to direct and perform these texts should be sufficient to demonstrate this claim. Though the ‘Dialogues’ were read in full at the 2001 London conference focusing on them, there is not a substantial performance history of the texts beyond 21 Dwight Conquergood, ‘Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research’, The Drama Review 46.2 (T174) (Summer 2002): 153-54. Nicholas E. Johnson Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit 9 this.22 When asked for permission by John Calder to stage a reading at the launch of the 1965 London edition, Beckett responded, ‘What ever you like, but please not the Duthuit Dialogues. We can always find something to replace them.’23 Certainly they do not fit fluidly into a performance context, and it is clear that unlike the scripts published as part of Beckett’s collected dramatic works, they were written for the print medium – to be read silently in a literary magazine – rather than for the context of performance. There is a reflexive position that such distinctions should continue to be respected, since Beckett was clearly an author highly attuned to the formal characteristics of each new medium in which he worked, and at times was openly resistant to adaptations in contravention of his stated aims and wishes. On the other hand, like Beckett’s prose works, the presence of a voice and the suggestion of the body in space are coupled with an exquisitely wrought language that seems at moments to beg to be read aloud. For the practice-based researcher, the question is simply whether there is valuable knowledge to be gained or shared by performing the work. Such a researcher is Janus-faced, however, with one side concerned with confronting the work on its own terms and learning from it, and the other side occupied with the ‘occasion’ of presenting the work and communicating its ideas to others. The first opportunity to present this work in performance was linked to the 2010 Open House Dublin architecture festival, in which Trinity College Dublin generally, and the Samuel Beckett Centre specifically, was one of the venues designated for public exploration. A dance studio at the top of this Centre was arranged to be opened for tours, but because ‘inhabited’ space is often more interesting to experience than ‘empty’ space, the organizers wished to fill the room with actors in rehearsal, ideally with text by Beckett.24 As the idea to perform the ‘Dialogues’ was then in its nascent stages at the Beckett Centre, a reading of the texts was arranged with two actors and an assistant, using only the third dialogue and treating the event as a workshop for work in progress. The context suggested by the design and layout was a public debate between two ostentatiously intellectual figures. Though valuable as rehearsal to test the language in front of a non-specialist audience, this staging did not appear to help any understanding of the substance of the third dialogue, operating instead mostly as entertainment and general support for the creative aims of Open House Dublin. The second stage of development was a performance on 20 November 2010 at a conference session of the ‘Writing Irish Art History’ conference organized by 22 The readers were Orlando Harrison and Will Cox. Given the conference context and the fact that texts were not memorized, this would not be viewed as a full-fledged staging, though it is performance. 23 There appear to be two different performances rejected by Beckett in 1965. This exchange with Calder is quoted in Hatch, Beckett in (t)Transition, footnote 35, 219, and is sourced there to Gontarski. Peter Fifield, in his lecture Switching On and Off: Beckett’s Prose on the Radio, Samuel Beckett Summer School 2013, Trinity College Dublin, 13 August 2013, also discussed correspondence from Curtis Brown (Beckett’s agents) refusing a similar request from the BBC Third Programme, which sought to broadcast a reading. Fifield has supplied dates of the letters in question: 6 October 1965 (request for permission from BBC) and 27 October 1965 (rejection from Curtis Brown). 24 A theoretical treatment of an earlier performance of Beckett in the Open House Dublin context that reflects on the significance of animating architectural space appears in: Nicholas Johnson, ‘Unfrozen Music: Beckett in the Museum’, Museum Ireland 19 (2009): 36-41. Nicholas E. Johnson Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit 10 the Irish Art Research Centre (TRIARC) at Trinity College. This version was more of an ‘intervention’ into a different discourse, a physicalization of some of the aims of the present article. In the midst of a conference plenary session in a lecture theatre, the actor playing B took the podium as though about to give a paper. With the actor playing D standing adjacent, the third dialogue was enacted as an emotional public debate, suggesting the position of the ‘Dialogues’ in an art historical discourse, while at the same time foregrounding its conspicuous lack of adherence to conventional rules of engagement. At a conference whose title suggests history as something specifically textual, the appearance of this event also brought home some of the ways in which art history is performed, and also stood as a reminder of the role of passion and emotion in academic debate that is upheld as ‘objective’ or besmirched as ‘dry’. Both to aid in the audience’s understanding of the argument and to mimic the conference form that was being lightly satirized, a PowerPoint presentation was included to support B’s arguments with definitions, logic diagrams, and images of the paintings under discussion. The third performance, 5-6 April 2011 at the Arts Technology Research Laboratory (ATRL) in Dublin, was not only formally funded practice-based research, but also actively intended as a stage adaptation of the ‘Dialogues’. This entailed full memorization by professional actors, script production that preserved Beckett’s text while creating context around it, and design elements to enhance the clarity of philosophy in the text. Reflecting on the origins of the ‘Dialogues’ as emerging from the informal relationship between Beckett and Duthuit and taking cues from each section of the text, three settings were devised: Scene One was a friendly discussion over a game of chess, Scene Two an emotional discussion over a bottle of whiskey, and Scene Three a public discussion in front of an audience. The chess game was borrowed from a climactic scene in Beckett’s novel Murphy, and the actors memorized the moves between Murphy and the mental patient Mr. Endon as a ‘pre-set’ activity during the audience’s entrance. There is strong resonance between this chess match in Beckett’s 1938 novel and the way in which B conducts his form of debate, so B played the moves of Mr. Endon.25 The structure of the performance space was fashioned to enhance distanced contemplation and debate, so the audience watched from a single row on two opposing sides. Four screens at the end of each row provided a live video feed of the chess game and the whiskey in scenes one and two. A much larger screen covering an entire wall was then used in the final dialogue (again, as in the second performance, to enhance clarity and help show the public and self-conscious nature of the debate), with a digital projection mocked up to appear as an analogue slide projector, placing the whole discourse on the uncomfortable edge between old and new technologies of art history. Post-show discussions held on both nights revealed that while the performances themselves were engaging and textual understanding was enhanced 25 For non-chess players who cannot follow the notation of these moves in the novel, the summary of the match is that Endon (whose name is the preposition ‘within’ in Greek) manages to make a series of legal moves that achieve as little as possible, his ‘perfect’ conclusion being a rearrangement of his own pieces on his own back row, with minimal shifting of his pieces required to arrive there. It is a model of indolence and inaction, of the closed system, of the ‘little world’ or ‘microcosmopolitan’ that Murphy envies, indebted to Occasionalism. It is chess minus chess, purely as philosophical expression and without any spirit of competition, and in this way it is analogous to B’s rhetoric in ‘Three Dialogues’. Nicholas E. Johnson Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit 11 over a first reading, the arguments nonetheless remain extremely difficult for first- time viewers to follow in the moment. The performance was most pleasurable for those who already had experience of the texts, and particularly revelatory for those who came to the text with substantial knowledge of Beckett’s oeuvre. Certainly the knowledge gained by the performers from the interior of the text hugely enhanced their own understanding, so the objectives of ‘research’ through practice were certainly met. If a fourth performance in this trajectory were to be devised, the objective of the audience understanding would have to be placed foremost. Shifting from the theatrical model to an installation in the gallery context would be one solution, where the actors undertake an endurance project of repeatedly performing the ‘Dialogues’, and where the audience can engage to whatever depth or number of cycles they might wish. Over time, the exhaustion of the actors would also likely shift the performance from fidelity to the author (which was a main concern, in terms of maintaining textual accuracy, in 2011) to fidelity to audience (in which actors might intervene in the text to make their understood meaning plainer at times, something that happened during rehearsal but not performance). The ‘Three Dialogues’ project in both its forms – presently as written object, and in 2010-11 as performed event – might serve to remind that art criticism, like literature, is itself an evanescent event, bounded in time. The current modes of exchanging art historical knowledge already include performative criticism, as embodied minds are applied to the task of reading, viewing, conversing, conferencing, and thinking about art. Activating written criticism consciously, however, can provide a powerful methodology for both research and pedagogy, and the dialogic form remains a vibrant stream where theatre and theory sometimes intersect. For those who would write art history, there may be insights still to be gained from Samuel Beckett, not only as a critic in his own right, but also for the intricate and dynamic research happening around him. The first two volumes of Beckett’s letters each hinge on one main correspondent from the world of visual arts: Thomas MacGreevy and Georges Duthuit respectively.26 In their unguarded exchanges, these three men reveal the passion that undergirded their thought and action, and in the scholarly apparatus surrounding them, there are frequent gemlike insights that show how much more they were than the sum of their publications. There are numerous contemporaneous reports in these letters that capture the fervor and confusion of the art of the time, and their places within it. For example, Beckett wrote to Duthuit from Dublin on 11 August 1948: […] back home after ‘living art’ exhibition, with ‘French’ paintings, dud Manet, unthinkable Derain, pukeworthy Renoir (there is not just Pichette, you know), fine good sew-sew Matisse, painter who talked to me of Macakio with sperm in his cock, a Clavé (?) that had everybody oh-ing and ah-ing, painter (same) who talked at length about abstract art (only hope), art critic who had been (when) not unimpressed by the ‘abstractionists’ at Denise somebody’s place, and more, and more, back I say after breakdown for lack 26 This is discussed in the introduction to The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 1: 1929-1940, eds Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Nicholas E. Johnson Performative Criticism: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit 12 of petrol on main road at the hour of the earliest drunks, I find your long letter which makes up for everything, or many things, including not being drunk enough to go straight to sleep.27 This sentence alone is accompanied by a twenty-four-line footnote that identifies, as nearly as possible, all of the references in this long sentence, including which specific exhibit was attended, which paintings were displayed, and which Denise is under discussion. It is precisely Beckett’s stature as something other than an art critic that has made this material available, and that has interested scholars sufficiently to pursue so many of his peripheral activities. Viewing criticism as an ongoing performance suggests that a full picture of a critical period exists not only in text, nor in the formal readings of conference papers, but also in the late-night post-conference conversations, blog posts, text messages, and chatter of opinion, even (or perhaps particularly) when one interlocutor is inebriated. How does a historian or historiographer account for this Heraclitean flow, the process of thoughts being made and unmade? One must seek the traces of gatherings and dialogues, formal and informal, if a body of criticism is to be inhabited, rather than merely constructed. Nicholas E. Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, as well as a performer, director, and writer. He has contributed articles to Theatre Research International, Forum Modernes Theater, the Journal of Beckett Studies, and the Methuen Critical Companion The Plays of Samuel Beckett. He is co-editor of a special issue on performance for the Journal of Beckett Studies (23.1, 2014) with Jonathan Heron. He is artistic director of Painted Filly Theatre and a co-founder of the Samuel Beckett Summer School in Dublin. johnson@tcd.ie 27 Translated from the French by the editors, Beckett to Duthuit, 11 August 1948, Letters Vol. 2, 98-99. work_55urj4x2snfplbno6zxhnlcyzq ---- Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society Vol. 17, No. 12 pp. 518-531, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5762/KAIS.2016.17.12.518 ISSN 1975-4701 / eISSN 2288-4688 518 마리 알랭 쿠튀리에가 주창한 성미술(L'Art Sacré) 운동의 건축적 의미와 특성 고찰 반상철1*, 김홍기2 1 서원대학교 건축학과, 2 동양미래대학교 실내환경디자인학과 A Study on the Architectural Meaning and Characteristics of L'Art Sacré Movement advocated by Marie Alain Couturie Sang-Chul Bahn1*, Hong-Ki Kim2 1Dept. of Architecture, Seowon University 2Dept. of Interior Design, Dongyang Mirae University 요 약 본 연구는 교회 건축 디자인에 많은 향을 끼친 도미니크 수도회 신부 마리 알랭 쿠튀리에(Marie Alain Couturie)가 주창한 성미술(L’Art Sacre) 운동의 추진과정과 건축 특성을 고찰하는데 목 이 있다. 이를 해 성미술 운동 의 개과정을 분석한 후, 이를 토 로 성미술 운동 속에 내재해 있는 건축 담론, 특히 쿠튀리에가 주창한 건축개념의 특성이 무엇인가를 분석하고자 하 다. 1차 으로 1936년부터 1954년 사이에 성미술 운동의 기 지 라르 사크 지에 기고 된 쿠튀리에의 속에 나타난 언설을 분석하고, 2차 으로 성미술 건축 로젝트의 지답사를 통해 성미술 운동의 실체를 악하 다. 성미술 운동의 표 인 건축물인 아시성당과 로사리오성당, 롱샹교회, 라투렛수도원, 로스코채 등 5개의 로젝트를 분석 상으로 하 다. 본 연구의 결과 쿠튀리에의 건축개념의 특성은 ‘시 ’(Poetic) 분 기의 창출에 기 하고 있 음을 악할 수 있었으며, 재료의 즉물성과 순수함은 모더니즘기의 추상 사유와 연결되어 있음을 규명할 수 있었다. 쿠튀 리에 신부는 르 코르뷔지에를 성미술 운동을 구 할 수 있는 가장 합한 건축가로 인식하 으며, 이러한 사유는 롱샹 성당 과 라투렛 수도원을 탄생시키는 직 동인이 되었음을 악할 수 있었다. 본 연구에서는 20세기 반 교회건축의 신을 일으켰던 성미술 운동의 개과정과 쿠튀리에 신부가 펼친 건축개념의 분석을 통해 교회건축의 공간이미지 구성과 디 자인에 지침과 교훈이 될 것으로 사료된다. Abstract This study aimed to find the architectural meaning and characteristics of L'Art Sacr? Movement advocated by Dominican Father Marie Alain Couturie. From 1936 till 1954 Father Couturier was the chief editor of the review L'Art Sacr? that became very influential among art critics no longer satisfied with what was considered outdated 19th century church interior decoration. Marie Alain Couturie was a French Dominican friar and Catholic priest who gained fame as a designer of stained glass windows. He was noted for his modern inspiration in the field of Sacred Art. Couturier's greatest ambition was to revive Christian art by appealing to the independent masters of his time. From these viewpoint, we investigated the background and process of the movement and analyzed the architectural meaning and characteristics which represented the Art Sacr? movement. The analyzed chapel buildings were as follows: 1) The Church of Notre-Dame de Toute Gr?ce du Plateau d'Assy, bringing together Braque, Matisse, Rouault, L?ger and Chagall, 2) The Chapel of Saint-Marie Rosaire by Henri Matisse, 3) The Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut and The Couvent de La Tourette by Le Corbusier, and 4) The Rothko Chapel by Mark Rothko and Philip Johnson. These L'Art Sacr? projects inscribedthemselveswithin what was the century's most serious attempt at the reintegration of Art and religious space. Courturier's interactions with artists and architects are traced and shown to have played a major role in the evolution of the priest's thinking and Church interior decoration. At the same time, Courturier's clear and vigorous L'Art Sacr? articles were both defining the theoretical basis of new vision and anticipating the renewal of the religious space. Keywords : Chapel, L'Art Sacré (Sacred Art), Marie Alain Couturie, Le Corbusie, New version, religious space *Corresonding Author : Sang-Chul Bahn(Seowon Univ.) Tel : +82-10-5492-0755 email : gahwoon@seowon.ac.kr Received October 12, 2016 Accepted December 8, 2016 Revised (1st October 28, 2016, 2nd November 22, 2016) Published December 31, 2016 마리 알랭 쿠튀리에가 주창한 성미술(L'Art Sacré) 운동의 건축적 의미와 특성 고찰 519 1. 서론 1.1 연구의 배경과 목적 종교화는 서양미술사 종교건축에서 매우 요한 치를 차지해 왔다. 성화는 기독교 문명의 세계 을 표 상하는 핵심 주제 으며, 교회건축 내부에는 거의 모두 종교 메시지를 발 하기 해 종교 주제의 천장화와 벽화가 장식 다. 그러나 19세기 이후 종교 주제는 랑스 명 이후 신앙의 시 가 가고 이성과 물질의 시 가 도래하면서 교구축소와 수도회 해산 등 그 효용성 을 상실하게 되었다. 종교를 구심 으로 철 히 계질 서의 틀 안에 묶여있던 사회구조와 법, 학문, 술들의 가치 역들이 분화되게 된 것이다. 즉 미술은 종교 신화 내용으로부터 벗어나 표 의 자유를 리게 되었 다. 주술 믿음과 신화 신비감이 쇠퇴하자 화가들은 자연스럽게 새로운 주제를 찾아 나섰고, 그림의 형식 한 속한 변이과정을 거치게 되었다. 앙드 말로가 인 상 를 ‘추상을 향한 한 진’으로 묘사했듯이, 형식 의 변증으로 표상되는 개 로그램이 작동된 것이다. 그러나 종교 술 분야만은 시 정신에 부응하지 못한 채 과거의 양식을 당히 수용하는 퇴행 인 수 에 머물고 있었다. 과거처럼 엘리트 술가들이 교회건축을 해 술혼을 투여하지 않게 된 것이다. 의식 있는 종교계의 은 선각자들은 이를 교회건축의 기로 받아들 고, 이에 따라 랑스를 심으로 종교미술의 해석이 라는 기치아래 가톨릭교회에 새로운 미학을 불어넣으려 는 일련의 움직임이 생성되었다. 마리 알랭 쿠튀리에 (Marie-Alain Couturier)를 비롯한 도미니크 수도회의 진보 인 성직자들을 심으로 ‘아르 사크 ’(Art Sacré), 즉 성미술(聖美術) 운동이 일기 시작한 것이다. 쿠튀리에 신부의 극 활동으로 아시성당과 로사리오 성당, 건축의 걸작으로 불리는 롱샹교회와 라투렛 수도원이 탄생되었다. 찰스 젱크스를 비롯한 많은 건축 이론가들이 언 했듯이 롱샹교회는 종교건축의 신기원 이자 건축의 환 을 알리는 이정표 다[1]. 그런 의미에서 쿠튀리에가 펼친 성미술 운동은 단순히 교회건 축의 신만이 아닌 건축의 환 을 마련해 주었다 고 할 수 있다. 르 코르뷔지에가 회고했듯이 쿠튀리에 신 부가 아니었으면 롱샹성당과 라투렛수도원은 존재하지 못할 것이었기 때문이다. 쿠튀리에는 단순히 종교 이 념으로 무장된 사제가 아닌 건축에 한 확고한 신 념을 지녔던 이론가이자 사상가 다[2]. Fig. 1. Le Lancy Church, August Peret, 1923 그동안 ‘아르 사크 ’(성미술) 운동에 한 연구가 일 부 있었으나, 쿠튀리에 신부가 추구한 건축개념에 한 체계 인 연구는 거의 없었다. 본 연구는 이 같은 맥락에 서 20세기 반 교회건축의 신을 일으켰던 성미술 운 동의 개과정과 더불어 쿠튀리에 신부가 펼친 건축개념 을 분석하고자 하 다. 특히 1950년 쿠튀리에와 르 코 르뷔지에 사이에 펼쳐졌던 일련의 건축활동에 주목하 다. 화가들을 교회건축 디자인에 극 참여시켜 술성을 높이고자 한 쿠튀리에의 성미술 운동의 취지 속 에서 교회건축 디자인의 질 향상을 한 방안을 모색 제시해 보고자 하 다. 1.2 연구 방법 및 범위 본 연구는 이같은 목 을 달성하기 해 도미니크 수 도회 신부 쿠튀리에의 생애와 그가 주창한 성미술 운동 의 개과정을 다룬 문헌을 조사한 후, 이를 토 로 성미 술 운동 속에 내재해 있는 건축 담론, 특히 쿠튀리에가 주창한 건축개념과 장식논리의 핵심이 무엇인가를 악 하 다. 이를 해 성미술 운동의 기 지인 라르 사크 (L’Art Sacre)지에 1950년부터 1953년 사이에 기고된 쿠튀리에의 속에 나타난 언설을 집 으로 분석하 다. 쿠튀리에가 직 작성한 기고문이야말로 그의 건축 사유를 실증 으로 악할 수 있는 사료인 동시에, 성 미술 운동의 추진 략을 악할 수 있는 텍스트이기 때 문이다. 1950년부터 1953년 사이로 한정한 것은 이 시 기가 성미술 운동의 성기로, 실 된 건축물이 집 으로 등장할 뿐만 아니라 롱샹교회와 라투렛 수도원 한국산학기술학회논문지 제17권 제12호, 2016 520 로젝트가 진행되는 시 이기 때문이다[3]. 문헌 연구와 병행하여 쿠튀리에 신부에 의해 추진된 건축 로젝트의 지 답사를 통해 ‘라르 사크 ’ 잡지 에 그가 서술했던 내용의 실체를 악하고자 하 다. 성 미술 운동의 성과물에 한 답사는 지역별로 나 어 두 차례에 걸쳐 실시하 다, 랑스 토에 치한 아시성 당과 로사리오 성당, 롱샹교회와, 라투렛 수도원은 2012 년 7월 방문 조사를 하 고, 쿠튀리에 신부의 조언을 받 아 완공된 휴스턴에 치한 로스코 채 은 2013년 7월 에 장조사를 실시하 다. 장답사는 ‘라르 사크 ’지 에서 언 하고 있는 키워드들이 무엇을 의미하는지를 재 확인하는 과정이라 할 수 있다. 성미술 운동의 개과정 과 쿠튀리에의 건축 활동에 한 ‘사 고찰’의 형식 을 취하게 됨에 따라, 개개의 건축물에 한 세부 인 공 간 해석은 추후의 연구과제로 삼기로 하 다. 2. 쿠튀리에의 생애와 성미술 (L’Art Sacré) 운동의 전개과정 2.1 쿠튀리에 신부의 생애 앙리 마티스, 마르크 샤갈, 페르낭 제, 조르주 루오, 르 코르뷔지에 같은 당 의 아방가르드 술가들을 교회 건축 작업에 끌어들인 마리 알랭 쿠튀리에는 1897년 랑스 몽 리송에서 태어났다. 유년 시 화가의 꿈은 쟁으로 1919년이 되어서야 진보 인 미술학교 아카데미 드 라 그랑드 쇼미에르(Académie de la Grande Chaumière)에 입학하여 체계 인 미술교육을 받았다. 모리스 드니(Maurice Denis)와 조르주 데발리에르 (Georges Desvallieres)가 이끄는 아르 사크 스튜디오 (les Ateliers d’art sacre)에서 스테인드 라스와 스 코화 등 종교미술과 련한 기법을 습득한 그는[4] 모리 스 드니와 함께 1923년 리에서 동쪽으로 10킬로미터 떨어진 마을에 치한 르 랑시(Le Raincy) 성당의 스테 인드 라스 작업에 참여하면서 건축과 장식 술의 상 성을 체득하게 되었다[5]. 오거스트 페 의 설계로 1923년 완공된 이 성당은 랑스 최 의 철근콘크리트 구조로 건립된 성당으로, 벽 체가 완 히 구조로부터 해방되는 모더니즘 건축의 본질 이 응축되어 있었다. 공간 어디에도 고딕건축의 요소인 첨두아치와 리 볼트가 등장하지 않고, 격자 그리드의 창문 패 과 스테인드 라스 디자인 역시 구상성에서 벗 어나 추상성을 지니고 있었다. 쿠튀리에는 이 작업을 통 해 새로운 구조와 공법에 의해 구 되는 모더니즘 건축 의 본질에 해 을 뜨게 되었다. 리에서 활동하면서 모더니즘 술을 이끌던 마티스와 피카소, 르 코르뷔지 에를 알게 되지만 그의 내부에서는 새로운 열정이 뜨겁 게 솟구치고 있었다. 시인이자 극작가인 울 클로델 (Paul Claudel)과 옹 블로이(Léon Bloy)의 ‘ 성’ (spirituality)을 불러일으키는 종교 성향이 강한 작품 을 읽고는 정신 인 성찰에 몰두하게 되었다[6]. 그들의 작품에 감화된 그는 1925년 9월 22일 수도사가 되기 해 아미앵의 도미니크 수도원을 찾았다[7]. 이 수도생활 기간에도 미술에 한 열정은 식지 않았다. 수도원 고 성직자가 교회내부의 미술에 해 어떻게 생각하느냐는 질문을 던졌을 때, 쿠튀리에는 ‘오늘날 교회 술은 완 히 타락했다’라고 말하면서 미술은 신 으로 변화 하고 있는데 교회는 그 지 못함을 이 게 역설했 다. “오늘날 교회건축은 모두 다 생명력이 없고 먼지를 뒤집어 쓴 아카데미즘 뿐 입니다. 마네, 세잔, 마티스, 피 카소 같은 화가들은 모두 성당 밖에서 일하고 있습 니다. 그들은 더 이상 과거의 술가들처럼 교회를 해 일하지 않습니다. 우리가 아무리 열심히 도한들 세 교회에 있는 거장들의 작품처럼 직 이고 강한 설득력 을 발휘할 수 없습니다”[8]. 도미니크 수도회에 입문하 지 5년이 경과한 1930년 7월 25일 쿠튀리에는 사제 서 품을 받는다. 그가 종교미술의 낙후성을 직시하고 있을 무렵, 도미니크 수도회 신부를 심으로 가톨릭 교회에 새로운 미학을 불어넣고자 하는 움직임이 탄생하면서, 쿠튀리에는 자신이 지녀왔던 종교건축과 미술의 합 일이라는 제를 실천할 기회를 잡게 되었다. 2.2 성미술 운동의 전개과정 1935년 7월 마리 알랭 쿠튀리에 신부 등이 주동이 되 어 ‘성미술’을 뜻하는 ‘아르 사크 ’(Art Sacré)의 기치 아래 뭉쳤다. 이 운동의 열렬한 후원자 조셉 피사르 (Joseph Pichard)가 종교미술잡지 라르 사크 (L'Art Sacré)를 창간하여 성미술 운동을 이론 으로 뒷받침하 고자 했다. 1937년 1월 창간된 ‘라르 사크 ’는 격월간 지로, 쿠튀리에 신부는 1937년부터 1954년 사망하기까 지 편집을 맡아보게 된다. 성미술 운동의 주동자들은 교 회미술의 퇴보를 극복하기 해 미술을 교회 안으로 마리 알랭 쿠튀리에가 주창한 성미술(L'Art Sacré) 운동의 건축적 의미와 특성 고찰 521 끌어들인다는 명확한 가치 을 내세웠다. 지나치게 장식 이거나 일화 인 요소가 생략된 단순하고 순수한 형태 의 교회건축을 지향했고, 교회건축과 세속미술을 연결시 킨다는 략으로 작가의 신앙심보다는 술 재능을 우 선시했다. 그리고 교회미술의 타락이 아카데미즘의 답습 에서 비롯된 것으로 단하고 이를 극복하기 해 양식 의 틀에서 벗어나 자유로운 세미술의 정신성이 강조된 라 안젤리코의 미술을 모범으로 삼았다[9]. 쿠튀리에는 가미 신부와 함께 성미술 운동의 첫 건 축 로젝트로 랑스 동부, 오트 사보아((Haute-Savoie) 지역의 아시(Assy)에 성당을 짓기로 하 다. 스 스와 국경을 한 몽블랑 근처의 작은 산골마을에 치한 아 시는 폐결핵 환자 치료를 한 심구역으로 많은 가톨 릭교도 환자들을 한 새로운 교구의 설립이 필요한 곳 이었다. 1937년에 건축공모를 실시하여 당선된 건축가 모리스 노바리나(Maurice Novarina).의 설계안을 토 로 1938년 착공되었다. 1939년 3월 쿠튀리에는 로마에 서 산타 사비나(Santa Sabina) 성당의 스테인드 라스 작업을 끝낸 후, 랑스로 돌아와 아시성당 건설작업 책 임자인 장 드보메(Jean Devemy) 신부를 찾아 의하 다[10]. 쿠튀리에가 아시에 도착했을 때는 노바리나 설 계에 의해 기 공사를 마친 상태 다. 벽체공사는 아직 시행되지 않은 상태이었기에 성당 내부를 장식할 술가 섭외가 필요한 시 이었다. 쿠튀리에는 드보메 신부에게 리 미술계의 근황을 들려주면서 우수한 술가의 참여 가 요함을 역설하 다. 쿠튀리에는 미술을 교회공간에 목시키기 해 술 감독에 오트 쾨르를 선임한 후 참여할 화가 목록을 작성하고자 하 다. 선정된 술가들에게는 충분히 상상 력을 발휘할 수 있도록 교회 내부를 장식할 수 있는 권 리와 자유를 부여할 계획이었다. 그러나 참여할 술가 들을 섭외하기 해 리 화단을 둘러볼 무렵 세계 2차 이 발발하면서 계획은 유보해야만 했다. 독일군이 리를 침공하는 1940년 1월 쿠튀리에는 쟁을 피해 뉴욕으로 건 갔다. 당시 뉴욕은 미술 흐름을 악 하기에 훌륭한 여건을 갖추고 있었다. 달리, 스트라빈스 키와 교류했고, 제와 오장팡, 샤갈 등과 함께 뉴욕 주 재 랑스 고등연구학교에 랑스 미술회 을 개설 해 활발한 교류를 펼쳤다[11]. 단기간이었지만 미술 의 흐름을 체험한 쿠튀리에는 2차 세계 이 종식되는 1945년 8월, 아르 사크 운동의 실천에 념하기 해 리로 귀환하여 본격 인 성미술 운동의 실행에 나서게 되고, 미술의 가들을 설득하여 단되었던 아시성 당 로젝트에 참여시켰다. 앙리 마티스와 조르쥬 루오, 마르크 샤갈 등 당 의 한 화가들을 하여 성미 술 운동의 첫 사례를 실 하게 되었다. Fig. 2. Le Pere Courturier at Magazine L'Art Sacré Fig. 3. Ronchamp in Cover L'Art Sacré, 1955. 1-2 한국산학기술학회논문지 제17권 제12호, 2016 522 3. 성미술 운동의 건축개념과 장식논리 3.1 라르 사크레지와 성미술 건축개념 성미술 운동의 기 지 ‘라르 사크 ’(L'Art Sacré)에 실린 쿠튀리에의 기고는 1950년부터 1953년 사이에 집 되는데, 이 시기에 무려 12편의 이 실렸다. 이는 1950년부터 1953년 사이에 성미술 운동이 본격 인 궤 도에 이르 음을 반증하는 것으로, 성미술 운동의 주요 성과물인 아시성당(1950)과 오댕꾸르 성당(1951), 로사 리오 채 (1951)이 잇달아 완공될 뿐만 아니라 롱샹 교 회의 공사가 착수되고 라투렛 수도원의 설계작업이 시작 되는 시 이기도 하 다. 쟁기간 휴간되었던 ‘라르 사크 ’지가 재발행된 것은 1948년이나, 1950년 이 까 지 쿠튀리에가 기고한 은 발견되지 않고 있다. 1980년 들어 미국 휴스턴의 메닐 재단(Menil Foundation)은 1950년부터 1953년 사이에 쿠튀리에가 기고한 12편의 들만을 모아 단행본 ‘Sacred Art’.[12]를 발행하는데, 3장에서는 쿠튀리에의 12개 기고문에 나타난 언설을 토 로 성미술 운동의 건축개념과 장식논리를 크게 두 가 지로 분석하 다. 쿠튀리에가 기고한 12개의 기사 제목 과 주요 내용을 정리하면 표-1과 같다. 다음 표에서 볼 수 있듯이 쿠튀리에의 성미술 개념은 종교건축의 성을 구 하기 해 당 의 한 술 가들을 새로운 성당 로젝트에 끌어들여 공간의 심원성 을 회복하는데 1차 인 이 맞추어져 있다. 그러나 이 과정에서 쿠튀리에는 시행착오를 겪기도 하 다. 기 성미술 로젝트인 아시성당과 오댕꾸르 성심성당에 서는 여러 명의 술가들 끌어들인 결과 다양한 미술작 가의 작품을 시한 미술 처럼 통일성이 부족하고 건축 인 재성도 미약함을 감하 다. 이후 성미술 운동 이 추구하는 정신 가치 과 종교 의미를 강화하기 한 공간의 미학 과 건축가의 선정이 무엇보다도 요함을 깨닫게 되고, 그로 인해 시토회 수도원 건축에 나타난 검박함을 강조하게 되었다. 그러한 개념은 쿠튀 리에 신부가 쓴 논고를 통해 강화되고, 건축가 르 코르뷔 지에를 통해 이를 실 하고자 하 다. Fig. 4. Assy Cathedral, by Matisse, Chagall and other Artists. Published No. Title Main Contents Jan.-Feb. 1950 Secular art, sacred art :(For the eyes ; Purity) Differences between Secular arts & Sacred arts. Emphasizing the Purity & Autonomy May-June 1950 The priest and artisique Creation The Standards & Values of the great art works & the great artists as seen from the sacred art view. July-Aug. 1950 When The poverty rules: (The magnificence of poverty) Laws & Historical cases for implementing the Sacred spaces $ the Encourage thrift. Sep.-Oct. 1950 Assy (What Assy teaches us) Assi cathedral lessons. Proposal for the cause of failure for first work of sacred arts movement and the importance for selection of architects. Jan.-Feb. 1951 Sacred art and its public Relationship to Sacred arts & Publicity. Analysis for problems of church art that away from the crowd Mar.-Apri l 1951 The painful problem of the arts in missionary lands Religious profound and abstraction of Primative art. Abstractness acceptance of Modernism art.. July-Aug. 1951 Vence The Sacred values & Architectural meanings of Rosair Chapel by Matisse. Nov.-Dec. 1951 Audincourt Analysis for Sacred meanings of artist who took part in competed sacred heart cathedral at 1951. Nov.-Dec. 1952 Modest tasks Simplicity & piety. Frugal of the Monastery. Precept from Sénanque and Le Thoronet Abbey May-June 1953 Byzantium and our efforts Compare to spiritual values for Byzantium architecture and Sacred art Cathedral projevt.. Nov.-Dec. 1953 Ronchamp Reflecting to Sacred values & Architectural archieveness for Ronchamp Table 1. Contribute to Magazine L’Art Sacre by Coutrie 마리 알랭 쿠튀리에가 주창한 성미술(L'Art Sacré) 운동의 건축적 의미와 특성 고찰 523 3.2 쿠튀리에의 성미술 건축개념 쿠튀리에가 성미술 운동의 기 지인 ‘라르 사크 ’에 극 으로 개입한 1948년 이후 잡지의 이아웃과 자체를 바꾸기 시작하 다. 쿠튀리에는 잡지의 편집디자 인 역시 성미술 운동의 연장선상에 있어야 한다고 생각 했고, 자신의 에는 여백을 강조하고자 했다. 이러한 은 공동편집장이었던 가미 신부와의 노선 차이를 보 다. 가미 신부가 ‘라르 사크 ’에서 교육(Pedagogy) 인 차원을 강조한 반면, 쿠튀리에는 종교미술의 문제 을 극복하기 한 수단으로 ‘시 ’(Potery)인 성향에 을 맞출 것을 주장했다. ‘시 ’ 성향이 무엇인지는 쿠튀리에가 가미에게 1949년에 쓴 편지에 잘 나타나 있다. “아르 사크 의 목 은 사람들의 취향을 재구축하는 데 모아져야 합니다. 특히 시 인 감각이 요합니 다”[13]라고 했다. 이 같은 사유로 인해 퀴튀리에는 1950년 완공된 아시 성당에 해서도 부정 평가를 내렸다. 그는 아시성당 은 결코 걸작이 아니고 완 하지도 못하다고 평했다. 여 섯 명의 작가가 참여한 스테인드 라스 뿐만 아니라 건 축에 있어서도 과실이 발견된다는 것이었다[14]. 무 많은 작가들이 참여함에 따라 작품 간에 통일성이 결여 되어 있고, 건축이 갖는 정신 순수함과 검소함이 부족 하다는 것이다. 심지어 성당이라기보다는 시실에 가깝 다고 말하기도 했다. ‘아시의 교훈’이라는 주제의 에서 꾸뛰리에는 우리가 만약 다시 시작한다면 좀 더 엄격한 것을 선호해야 한다고 주장했다. 1950년 간행된 아르사크 5-6월호에 실린 ‘세속 술 과 성스런 술’에서 쿠튀리에는 성스런 술이 되기 한 두 개의 을 제시했다. 하나는 ‘순수함’ (Purification), 다른 하나는 ‘자율성’(Liberation)으로 [15], 쿠튀리에는 순수함이 가장 잘 나타난 건축으로서 르 코르뷔지에의 설계로 완공된 마르세이유의 집합주택 니테 다비타시옹((United d'Habitation)을 꼽았다. 1950년 7-8월호 라르 사르크지에 니테 다비타시옹의 층부 사진을 실고는 콘크리트 재료가 갖는 순수함과 검박함을 강조했다. 쿠튀리에의 성미술 구 을 한 건 축 인 의사 표명은 곧이어 발간된 1950년 7-8월호에 실린 ‘가난(검박)의 장려함’(Magnificence of Poverty)이 라는 제목의 기사를 통해 더욱 구체화되었다. 1952년 11-12월호에 게재한 논고에서는 검박함의 표 인 사 례로 시토회의 자매 수도원인 세낭크 수도원(Sénanque Abbey)과 르 토로네 수도원(Le Thoronet Abbey)을 언 하 다. 특히 르 토로네 수도원에 해서 이 게 서술 하 다. Fig. 5. The Corridor of Le Thoronet Abbey “르 토로네와 같은 거 한 걸작은 천재에 의해 건설 되었고, 과시 인 건물이 아님에도 종교 완벽성을 갖 추고 있다. 겉치 가 없는 평범함은 사소한 것조차도 감 동으로 몰아넣는다.”[16] 가난과 청빈을 외치는 수도사 들이 침묵으로 묵언 수행하는 르 토로네 수도원 내부에 는 오르지 단순한 선(line)과 ‘넓고 평평한 즉물 인 평 면’(broad naked planes)만이 존재하 다. 석재의 쓰임은 지극히 검박하고 장식은 극도로 제되어 있으며 석재끼 리의 맞춤 한 정교하면서 단순하게 되었다. 쿠튀리에 는 르 토로네 수도원 내부야말로 어디하나 모자람도 없 는 더함도 없는 상태라고 말했다. 쿠튀리에는 ‘순수’(purity)라는 단어를 ‘stripped’ 라는 단어와 연결시킨다. 이는 피복되지 않은 재료의 상태를 말한다. ‘세낭크 수도원과 르 토로네 수도원은 재료의 솔 직함과 무장식성을 통해 ‘존엄함’(dignity)의 경지에 도 달해 있다고 주장하 다. 존엄함의 건축 달성은 선의 질과 재료의 즉물성에 비례해서 나오는데 많은 종교건축 에서도 11세기 이후 등장하는 시토회 수도원 내부가 그 다는 것이다. 재료의 솔직함과 단순함, 장식이 배제 된 즉물성과 같은 어휘는 근 건축의 모토와 일치하는 건축개념이다. 이는 쿠튀리에가 무신론자 던 르 코르뷔 지에를 성미술 운동의 가장 합한 건축가로 인식하는 이유이기도 하다. 라르 사크 1950년 5-6월호에 실린 논고 ‘사제와 술 창작’(Le pretre et la Creation artisique)>에서 쿠튀 리에는 이 게 선언하 다. “ 한 일은 한 사람들 한국산학기술학회논문지 제17권 제12호, 2016 524 에게 맡겨져야 한다. 성당을 하나 건축해야 한다고 할 때 이 세상에는 가장 훌륭한 건축가가 분명히 있을 것이다, 신자이든 무신론자이든 간에 바로 그가 가장 격자이 며, 그가 바로 이 일을 할 수 있는 사람이다"라고 주 장하고 있다. 한 쿠튀리에는 한 기독교 미술의 부흥 사에 있어서 1951년 1월 20일을 역사 인 날로 언 하 고 있다. 성미술 교구 원회에서 페르낭 제의 스 치 17 , 장 바젠 (Jean Bazaine)의 형 모자이크 모형 르 코르뷔지에의 롱샹 교회 설계도 등이 모두 만장일치 로 승인을 받은 날이기 때문이다. 세속 인 술가들의 작품을 아무런 거부감 없이 받아들여졌다는 것은 랑스 교회에 있어 큰 변화라고 쿠튀리에는 강조하고 있다 [17]. 아무 거부감 없이 받아들여졌다는 의미는 페르낭 제와 르 코르뷔지에 모두 무신론자 기 때문이다. 쿠튀리에가 르 코르뷔지에에게 성당건축을 의뢰했을 때, 가톨릭을 믿는 건축가에게 의뢰하는 것이 나을 것이 라며 르 코르뷔지에는 거 하 다. 그러나 쿠튀리에는 가톨릭 신자인지 아닌지는 요하지 않으며, 신자 가 아니기에 오히려 과거의 형식에서 벗어날 수 있다고 설득하 고, 그러한 결과로 롱샹성당 내부에는 조각상과 성화가 거의 존재하지 않고 공간과 빛, 색채와 재료에 의 해 성스런 분 기가 유도되게 되었다. 뿐만 아니라 라투 렛 수도원 설계 역시 노바리나에게 의뢰되어 설계를 마 친 상태 으나 쿠튀리에는 르 코르뷔지에에게 재설계를 맡기기 해 진력을 다하 다[18]. 이 듯 쿠튀리에 신 부는 신앙보다도 재능을 시했다. 즉 과거의 양식을 모 방하는 충주의 자세를 극복하기 해 시 정신을 담 고 있는 건축가의 선정을 무엇보다 시하 다. 4. 쿠튀리에의 성미술 건축 프로젝트 3장에서 분석된 쿠튀리에의 건축개념과 장식논리를 토 로 4장에서는 성미술 건축 로젝트의 추진과정을 분석하 다. 쿠튀리에가 직 여해 완공된 로젝트와 함께, 성미술 개념에 직 인 향을 받고 완공된 로스 코 채 까지 분석 상에 포함시켰다. 4.1 사례별 분석 4.1.1 로사리오 성당 니스에서 서북쪽으로 23킬로미터 떨어진 세마을 방 스의 구릉에 치한 로사리오 성당(Chapel of Saint-Marie Rosaire)은 도미니크 수도회 수녀들을 한 배당인 동시에 폐결핵을 앓고 있는 여성 환자들을 해 지어진 작은 성당으로 ‘마티스 성당’으로도 불린다. 가로 15미터, 세로 6미터, 높이 5미터에 불과한 창고처 럼 보이는 작은 성당의 건축설계는 물론 벽화와 스테인 드 라스에 이르기까지 앙리 마티스가 직 제작하 다. 이 까지 마티스는 건축설계를 해본 경험이 없었기 에 건축가 선정이 으로 필요했다. 로젝트가 시 작 무렵, 쿠튀리에는 마티스를 찾아가 르 코르뷔지에에 게 건축설계를 맡길 것을 권하지만 마티스가 생각하기에 르 코르뷔지에는 무 개성이 강해 거 했다. 자신의 요 구를 따르지 않을 것을 염려한 나머지, 마티스는 오거스 트 페 에게 건축 자문을 받아 독자 으로 성당을 설계 하기로 결정한다[19]. 무신론자에 가까웠던 마티스는 스테인드 라스 작업 을 해본 경험이 없었기 때문에 건축과 장식 술이 총체화된 ‘건축학 그림’을 완성해 내기 해서는 쿠튀 리에의 도움을 받아야만 했다. 스테인드 라스 작가로도 활동한 쿠튀리에는 마티스를 만나 스테인드 라스의 원 리를 노트르담 성당 남측 장미창을 로 들면서 푸른색 과 핑크빛이 만나 어떻게 보라색이 나오는지를 알려주는 등 자세히 설명해 주었다. 어느 화가보다도 색채에 한 요성을 강조해 온 마티스에게 스테인드 라스는 최 의 소재 다. 빛과 색의 집 성이 이루어질 수 있다는 기 감은 마티스 후기 작품을 표하는 걸작을 만들어 내 었다. 특히 스테인드 라스 ‘생명의 나무’가 연출해내는 빛의 타지는 채 내부공간을 찾는 방문객에게 감탄을 자아내게 하 다. Fig. 6. Chapel of Saint-Marie Rosair by H. Matisse 마리 알랭 쿠튀리에가 주창한 성미술(L'Art Sacré) 운동의 건축적 의미와 특성 고찰 525 마티스의 후기작품에 나타나는 종이 오리기 기법을 사용한 ‘생명의 나무’는 랑, 노랑, 록 세 가지 색으로 추상화되어 있다. 피카소를 비롯한 몇몇 작가와 평론가 들은 경건한 분 기는 느껴지지 않고 색의 유희를 통한 낙천 느낌만 존재한다고 혹평을 늘어놓았지만 마 티스가 목표한 것은 경건감이 아니라 빛과 색에 의해 으로 정화됨을 느끼게 하는 것이었다. 종교 엄숙함 이 부여하는 무게감보다는 속세의 모든 짐을 덜어내는 듯한 편안함과 즐거움을 하는 것이었다. 로사리오 채 은 단순하고 순수한 형태를 지향했던 성미술 로젝트 답게 단순한 평면에 세 개의 벽화와 스테인드 라스로 장식되어 있다. 생명의 나무가 치한 제단 벽면에는 수 도회의 설립자 성 도미니크상이 자리하고 있다. 긴 수사 복을 걸친 쿠튀리에 신부를 모델로 삼아 백색의 타일에 제작된 성 도미니크 상은 기존의 도상과 달리 마티스 특 유의 생명력이 넘치는 간략한 선묘로 구성되어 있다 [20]. 입구 쪽 벽면에 치한 벽화 <십자가의 길>로 시선을 돌려보면 선묘는 더욱 거칠다. 마티스는 수가 수난을 당한 14처의 그림을 단순한 몇 개의 선으로 추상화시켰 다. 뿐만 아니라 성모자상에서도 성모와 아기 수 얼굴 을 윤곽선만으로 그렸다. 추상화 된 선묘는 범 할 수 없 는 종교 신비감으로 안내하며, 성모와 아기 수 모습 을 자기 마음 로 상상해 그린다는 것이 한계 밖의 일이 라 생각했던 것이다. Fig. 7. Chapel of Saint-Marie Rosair by H. Matisse. Priest Coutrie with black priest costume 로사리오 채 은 1951년 6월 25일 개 되었고, 그로 부터 2개월이 지난 1951년 8월, 남 랑스 카 마르탱 별 장에 머물고 있던 르 코르뷔지에는 마티스 성당을 방문 하기 해 방스를 찾았다. 르 코르뷔지에의 별장이 있던 캅 마르탱에서 방스까지는 승용차로 한 시간 내에 도달 할 수 있는 가까운 거리로, 로사리오 채 의 작은 문을 열고 들어서자마자 르 코르뷔지에는 경탄하 다고 한다. 푸른 빛과 노란 빛이 감도는 밝은 색조의 스테인드 라 스와 흑백의 벽화, 담하게 정제된 십자가상, 모두 것이 기 이상이었다. 르 코르뷔지에가 갖고 있던 마티스 작품에 한 인식 이 바 는 순간이었고, 마티스야말로 진정 한 화가 이며 술가임을 인식하게 된 것이다. 성당을 방문 며칠 뒤 마티스에게 “당신이 설계한 방스의 채 을 며칠 방문했습니다. 모든 것에 기쁨과 청명함, 원기가 담겨있 어 자신도 모르게 숭고함과 기쁨에 빠집니다. 당신의 작 업은 나에게 용기와 자극을 주었습니다. 종교건축에 한 나의 사고를 바꾸어 놓았습니다. 이 작은 채 은 정말 단한 기념물입니다. 다시 한 번 삶의 아름다움을 느낍 니다.”라는 편지를 보낼 만큼 감탄하 다. 마티스가 자 신을 배제했다는 사실을 모르고 쓴 편지 다. 르 코르뷔 지에는 로사리오 채 을 통해 종교건축에 있어서 빛과 색채의 계에 해서 각인하게 되고 이는. 롱샹성당 내 부에 감도는 화려한 빛과 색에 한 조가 되었다고 볼 수 있다. 4.1.2 롱샹성당 아시 성당의 건축 실패 이후 쿠튀리에는 건축가 선 정이 무엇보다 요하다는 사실을 인식하게 되었다. 로 사리오 채 에서는 마티스의 반 로 성사되지 못했지만 르 코르뷔지에야 말로 성미술 운동에 가장 합한 술 가라는 인식에는 변함이 없었다. 르 코르뷔지에와 쿠튀 리에 신부의 첫 만남은 1948년 이루어졌다[21]. 쿠튀리 에가 마르세이유 인근 라 생트 붐(La Sainte Baume)에 치한 동굴성당의 설계를 르 코르뷔지에에게 의뢰하여 계획안이 수립되지만, 랑스의 추기경과 주교들의 거 센 반 에 부딪 취소되었다. 르 코르뷔지에는 다시는 수도회가 의뢰하는 일을 맡지 않겠다고 하 다[22]. 1950년 쿠튀리에는 르 코르뷔지에 를 다시 찾아가서 2차 세계 때 괴된 롱샹언덕 의 순례자 성당을 재건하는 로젝트에 참여해 달라는 부탁을 하 다. 르 코르뷔지에는 가톨릭을 믿는 건축가 에게 의뢰하는 것이 나을 것이라며 강하게 거 하 으 나, 쿠튀리에는 “나는 당신이 가톨릭 신자인지 아닌지는 한국산학기술학회논문지 제17권 제12호, 2016 526 개의치 않습니다”라고 정 하고 간곡한 요청이 거 듭되자 1950년 6월 4일 롱샹 언덕을 방문하고는 그 제 안을 받아들 다. 쿠튀리에는 최고의 건축을 만들어낼 수 있도록 르 코르뷔지에에게 모든 권한을 주었다. 어떠 한 종교 단서도 달지 않았다. 그로부터 한 달이 지난 1953년 7월 쿠튀리에는 르 코르뷔지에에게 다음과 같은 편지 한 통을 보냈다. “이일을 착수할 수 있도록 당신을 설득할 수 있었던 것이 내 인생에 있어서 가장 큰 기쁨 에 하나입니다. 한 이일이 매우 가난한 상태에서 진행되는 우리 시 의 가장 요한 작업이자 가장 순수한 작업의 하나라고 알고 있습니다” [23]. 1951년 1월 장송 주교 구의 성미술 원회에 안을 제출하여 그해 1월 20일에 승인을 받지만, 계획안 에 한 반 가 거세지자 착공까지 무려 3년이 더 소요 되었다. 반 는 주로 지역 신자와 주민들로부터 나왔는 데 그들은 새로운 형태보다는 옛 성당을 재건하길 원했 다. 지역신문 한 무나 격 인 계획안에 해 반 운동을 폈다[24]. 기독교 통에 익숙한 가톨릭 신자 들이 보기에 르 코르뷔지에의 설계는 지나치게 이 었고, 기존의 로마네스크 양식이나 고딕양식의 건축 정서는 어디에도 나타나 있지 않았다. 백색의 콘크리트 벽면 어디에도 벽화나 조각상이 장식되지 않았다. 스테 인드 라스 한 종교 구상성이 배제된 채색면 분할로 추상화되어 있었다. 직설 으로 종교 안을 얻을 수 있는 시각 요소는 성당 북쪽 면에 치한 성모상뿐이 었다. 그마 도 거 한 콘크리트의 낭만 조형의 세 에 려 왜소하게 느껴지게 보 다. 성모마리아를 경배 하는 공간임에도 불구하고 성모상은 용을 잃은 채 부 수 인 존재가 되어 있고, 신 빛이 만들어내는 성스런 분 기가 성당내부를 지배하게 하 다. 오장팡과 함께 퓨리즘을 주창한 화가이자 건축가라는 에서 르 코르뷔 지에는 미술과 종교건축의 결합이라는 명제를 실 할 최고의 임자라는 쿠튀리에의 상은 정확한 것이 었음을 보여주는 것이었다. 두터운 벽체의 뚫고 창을 통해 들어온 신비한 색 과 천창의 빛, 그리고 르 코르뷔지에가 손수 그린 건물 출입 문 에 부착된 패 벽화야말로 성미술 운동의 정수라 는 해석을 할 수 있을 것이다. 비록 쿠튀리에 신부는 완 공을 보지 못하고 1954년 2월 9일 사망하지만, 사망하기 에 쓴 마지막 원고에서 롱샹성당에 해 빛과 그림자 가 정교하게 배분되어 있는 서양 건축물 가장 빼 어난 걸작으로 서술하 다.[25] Fig. 8. Ronchamp Fig. 9. Ronchamp Insides 4.1.3 라투렛 수도원 1952년 10월 22일, 북유럽에 머물고 있던 쿠튀리에 신부는 라투렛 수도원 건립소식을 듣고는 곧장 리옹에 있는 도미니코 수도회 구장에게 1930년 리 근교 에 세워진 수도원이 건축 으로 혹평을 받았음을 상기시 키고 건축가 선정에 심 을 기울여야 함을 역설했다. 도 미니크 수도회는 랑스에 세 개의 수도회 구를 두고 있었는데, 리옹 구가 그 에서도 가장 보수 이었다. 그러나 이미 모리스 노바리나에 의해 수도원 설계도면이 완료되어 정부의 심사가 끝난 상태이기에 더 이상 논의 가 필요 없다는 답을 받았다. 쿠튀리에는 처음보다 훨씬 강한 어조로 수도원은 무슨 일이 있더라도 당 의 가장 우수한 건축가에게 맡겨야 하며 수도회 구장의 결정이 역사에 의해 평가될 것이라는 충고까지 덧붙이며 응했 다. 쿠튀리에의 조언이 수용되어 건죽가 재선정 작업에 들어갔다. 건축가 선정 투표가 이루어지는 1953년 2월, 마리 알랭 쿠튀리에가 주창한 성미술(L'Art Sacré) 운동의 건축적 의미와 특성 고찰 527 쿠튀리에는 리옹 구에서 다음과 같이 주장했다. “성자에 가까운 독실한 신앙과 재능을 갖춘 건축가가 수도원을 설계하는 것이 가장 이상 일 것입니다. 하지 만 그런 사람을 찾을 수가 없다면, 신앙은 있으나 재능이 없는 건축가보다는 신앙은 없지만 재능이 있는 건축가에 게 설계를 맡겨야 한다고 생각합니다. 그것이 르네상스 시 의 을 재 하기 한 최상의 선택입니다[26]. 쿠튀리에가 추천한 건축가는 르 코르뷔지에 다. 투표결 과 찬성 7표, 반 4표로 르 코르뷔지에가 담당하기로 결정되었다. 이 때 쿠튀리에 신부가 르 코르뷔지에게 주 문했던 요구 조건은, “조용하며 많은 사람들이 혼의 안식을 얻을 수 있는 곳으로 만들어 달라”는 아주 단순 한 것이었다. 그리고 며칠 후 무신론자 던 르 코르뷔지 에에게 다음과 같이 제안하 다. Fig. 10. La Tourette Monastery Fig. 11. Chapel “르 토로네 수도원을 방문하길 바랍니다. 수도원이 세워질 당시의 본질을 당신은 발견하실 수 있을 것입니 다. 그 곳 수도원은 수도사들이 침묵을 고수하고, 자기 성찰과 명상으로 헌신하며, 공동생활을 했던 곳으로 시간이 흘러도 별로 변하는 것이 없는 장소라는 것을 알 게 될 것입니다.” 르 코르뷔지에는 르 토로네 수도원을 방문하고는 후기로 이런 문장을 남긴다.“빛과 그림자가 진실의 건축을 변하는 확성기다” (the light and the shadow are the loud- speakers of this architecture of truth) 이 문장에서 주목할 부분은 ‘architecture of truth’ 이다. 도미니크 수도회와 쿠튀리에가 추구하는 ‘진실 (Truth)’와 순수함(Purity)의 건축과 일치하는 것으로 [27] 르 코르뷔지에는 ‘진실의 책’ 서문의 끝에 “빛과 그 림자는 진실함과 고요함과 장엄함으로 이 건축에서 크게 외치고 있다. 어떤 것도 더해질 수 없다. 이 미숙한 콘크 리트의 시 에 처한 우리의 삶 속에서 이 엄청난 조우를 기뻐하고 축복하여 반기자.”[28]라고 기술하 다. 르 토로네 수도원을 다녀온 1953년 9월 르 코르뷔지 에의 안이 완성되었다. 일부 수사들은 시토회 수도원 과 무 비슷해 도미니크 수도회의 정신에 부합하지 않 는다는 의견을 내놓았지만 쿠튀리에가 묵살했다. 그로부 터 몇 개월이 지난 1954년 1월 30일, 쿠튀리에 신부는 르 코르뷔지에에 한 마지막 에세이를 완성하는데, 문 장 속에서 르 코르뷔지에는 ‘ 존하는 가장 한 건축 가’로 서술하 다. 르 코르뷔지에가 평생 동안 설계한 217개의 계획안 교회 로젝트는 7개에 불과하다. 그 에서 쿠튀리에가 의뢰한 롱샹교회와 라투렛 수 도원만이 실행되었고, 1965년에 설계한 피르미니성당은 사후 40년 후에야 완공되었다. 쿠튀리에의 거장에 한 안목이 빛을 발한 것이다. 4.1.4 로스코 채플 로스코 채 은 쿠튀리에가 사망하고 17년 후인 1971 년 완공된 작은 채 로 오늘날 표 인 성미술 운동의 표 건축물 하나로 평가되고 있다. 기업가이자 술 후원자인 도미니크 드 메닐은 세계 인 석유기업 슐름베 르거의 상속녀로 랑스 리에서 활동하다 쟁을 피해 미국으로 이주하 는데, 뉴욕에 머무는 동안 같은 시기 에 뉴욕으로 건 온 쿠튀리에 신부와 교류하면서 성미 술 운동에 깊이 감화되어 그 취지를 수받았다. 1952년 에는 쿠튀리에의 안내를 받아 아시성당과 방스의 로사리 오성당, 그리고 건설 인 롱샹교회를 방문하고는 추상미술이 종교건축과 얼마나 잘 융합될 수 있는지를 직 경험하게 되었다. 특히 마티스가 참여한 방스의 로 사리오 성당은 로스코 채 이 탄생되는 결정 인 역할을 하게 되었다. 슐름베르거사의 본사가 치한 휴스턴으로 돌아온 도미니크 드 메닐은 앙리 마티스가 참여한 방스 성당에서 느 던 감동을 재생시키기 해 휴스턴의 성토 마스 학 캠퍼스 내에 채 을 건립하기로 하 다[29]. 한국산학기술학회논문지 제17권 제12호, 2016 528 채 을 설계할 건축가로 필립 존슨을 선임한 뒤, 건축가 와 함께 작업할 화가로 마크 로스코를 선정하 다. 마크 로스코는 1964년부터 뉴욕 맨해튼에 작업실을 빌려 작품 제작에 돌입하여, 14 의 형 벽화를 차례로 완성해 나갔다. 필립 존슨은 1964년 10월 로스코에게 사 각형 평면을 제시하지만 로스코의 머리 속에는 팔각형이 자리 잡고 있었다. 이탈리아의 베니스와 라벤다 여행을 통해 팔각형의 배당 내부공간에 한 강한 기억을 갖 고 있었기 때문이었다. 필립 존슨의 계획안과 로스코의 수정안이 교류되면서 평면도는 한 달 만에 로스코의 요 구 로 팔각형으로 바 었다[30]. 건축가와 화가 사이의 의견 립은 지붕의 형태와 빛의 해결에서도 발생했다. 필립 존슨은 높은 천정고를 지닌 삼각 피라미드형 지붕 을 제안한 반면 로스코는 낮은 천정을 요구했다. 건축가 의 입장에서는 종교건축이 갖는 상징성이 무엇보다 요 했다. 낮은 천창보다는 높은 천정 상부에서 유입되는 조명이 성당 내부의 월 신비감을 자아내는데 유리 하다고 단한 것이다. 하지만 로스코는 그림에 담긴 숭 고성의 표 을 해 차분한 빛의 유입에 의한 어두움을 강조하고 싶어 했다. 강한 조명보다는 희미한 산란 조명 상태에서만이 회화의 미묘한 색상 계를 효과 으로 달할 수 있다고 생각하 다. 뿐만 아니라 채 내부를 압 도하는 매스의 수직 상승감은 그림 자체를 왜소하게 할 뿐만 아니라, 그림에 한 집 력을 떨어트릴 수 있으 므로 낮은 지붕과 앙 채 창으로 수정되길 원했다. 특 히 휴스턴 지역의 일 은 매우 강했기에 조명의 처리에 민감할 수 밖에 없었다. 이러한 마찰로 인해 1967년 이 후 계획은 한동안 지되었다. 타 을 찾지 못한 필립 존슨은 채 계획에서 손을 뗄 것을 결심하 고, 설계는 휴스턴의 건축가 반스톤 유진 오 리(Banstone and Aubry)에게 넘겨졌다. 로스코의 요구 로 낮은 천정으 로 치되었고, 실내의 벽과 바닥의 색채와 질감에 이르 기까지 자신의 의사를 반 하 다. 벽은 택을 없애기 해 회벽 바탕에 성 인 색상의 수성페인트로 칠해졌 고, 바닥에는 푸른색이 감도는 암갈색의 타일이 선택되 었다, 거친 질감과 어두운 색상의 마감재를 통해 상당량 의 빛을 흡수시킴으로서 청빈함을 추구하는 도미니크 수 도회의 수도원 내부처럼 어두움에서 표출되는 사색 이 고 명상 인 공간이 조성되었다. 회화가 표출하는 숭고 의 미학이 교회의 내부공간과 합일되어 성미술 운동의 본질을 구 한 채 로 평가되고 있다[31]. Fig. 12. Mural of Mark Rothko in Rothko Chapel Fig. 13. Rothko Chapel 로스코 채 내부에는 십자가나 어떤 성상도 존재하 지 않고, 팔각형 내벽에는 오직 로스코의 형 그림 열 네 만이 걸려 있어, 개인 시장을 방불 하고 있다. 사람들은 로스코가 남긴 어두운 색면을 응시하면서 명상 과 침묵에 빠지게 되며, 형태도 없고 주제도 없으며 아무 런 조형을 포함하지 않은 채색면 추상의 그림들과 미세 하게 조 된 자연 채 이 합일되어 성스러운 분 기가 조성되게 되었다. 이는 쿠튀리에가 라르 사크 지에서 언 했던 경건한 종교 분 기의 ‘존엄함’과 일치되는 것이었다. 설립자 도미니크 드 메닐은 로스코 채 이 완 공된 후 쿠튀리에가 1950년부터 1953년 사이에 기고한 을 모아 단행본으로 발간했는데, 쿠튀리에의 성미술 운동에 한 헌정이라 할 수 있다. 4.2 분석의 종합 본 에서는 상기 사례분석한 내용을 종합하고 각각 의 사례를 두 개의 유형으로 나 어 그 특징과 디자인 내용을 표로 정리하여 설명하 다. 마리 알랭 쿠튀리에가 주창한 성미술(L'Art Sacré) 운동의 건축적 의미와 특성 고찰 529 Projects Artists & Critics The church of the plateau d'Assy France, 1946 Architect: Maurice Novarina -. Make an Altar : J.Leucate -. Stainedglass + Mural : G, Rouault, M. Chagall, H. Matisse, P. Bonnard, J. Rimsitz, J. Leucate, J. Bazaine -. Too Many Artists Involved -. Lack of Unity -. Sacred Space Image Composition Fails Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Audincourt, France, 1952 Architect: Maurice Novarina -. Facade Mosaic : F. Lager -. Stainedglass : F. Lager -. Altar Decoration : J, Bazaine -. Recognized Importance of Architect Selection for Success of L'Art Sacré Movement -. Change Clues : L..Corbusier from Novarina Table 2. Type-A of L'Art Sacré Movement Churchs Facades / Interiors Stainedglass/ Mural & Altar d'Assy Architect : M. Novarina Stainedglass : G. Rouault Altar Picture : J.Leucate Mural : H. Matisse Audincourt, Architect : M.Novarina Stainedglass : F. Lager Staindglass : F. Lager Altar Mural : J. Bazaine Table 3. Type-A Churches Projects Artists & Critics Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence (Chapel of the Rosary) 1948-1951 Designer : Henri Matisse -. Bldg. & Interior Design -. Stainedglass & Mural : H. Matisse -. Simple Rectangular -. 3 Murals & Stainedglass -. Abstraction by Energeic Line Depicting -> Matisse Type -. Quality Improvement through the Participation of Great Artists in Church Design -> A. Couturie Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut Ronchamp, France, 1950-1955 Architect : Le Corbusier -. Bldg. & Interior Design -. Stainedglass & Mural : Le Corbusier -. Blanding & Lighting from Building Exterior -> Accord to L'Art Sacré Concept by Priest Couturie -. Unity between Religious Sanctity and Chuch Art -> The Most Successful Project Table 4. Type-B of L'Art Sacré Movement Churches Facades / Interiors Stainedglass/ Mural & Altar Chapelle du Rosaire Facade Stainedglass Altar Mural Entrance Mural Ronchamp Facade Gate Mural Interior Stainedglass Table 4. Type-B Churches 한국산학기술학회논문지 제17권 제12호, 2016 530 쿠튀리에 신부가 주창한 성미술 운동에 의해 진행된 건축 로젝트를 종합해 보면, 상기 표와 같이 크게 두 개의 유형으로 분류될 수 있다. 기 여러 명의 술가가 참여하는 방식(유형-A)에서 한 명의 술가 혹은 건축가 가 로젝트를 담하는 방식(유형-B)으로 환된다. 이 러한 경향은 라르 사크 1951년 1-2월 호에 쿠튀리에 신부가 기고한 ‘아시의 교훈’에서 지 했듯이 여러 명의 술가가 참여했을 경우에 발생하는 통일성의 결여와 그 에 따른 간결함과 성스러움의 문제 을 극복하기 한 방안으로 생된 것이었다. 즉 이를 통해 로사리오 성당 과 롱샹 성당처럼 건축과 장식 술이 통합 사고 아래 총체 술 으로 결합될 때 성미술 운동이 완성도를 높힐 수 있음을 악할 수 있었다. 5. 결 론 본 연구를 통해 19세기 이후 만연한 고딕복고를 심 으로 한 양식주의 이고 충주의 인 디자인에서 벗어 나, 모더니즘의 흐름에 합한 교회건축의 향방이 고찰 되기 시작한 것은 1930년 이후임을 알 수 있었다. 이 는 례운동(Liturgical Movement)에 의한 배의식의 변화와 20세기 근 건축운동의 향에 힘입은 것이라 할 수 있으나, 쿠튀리에 신부를 비롯한 랑스 도미니크 수도회 신부들이 주창한 라르 사크 운동의 결과임을 1 차 으로 확인할 수 있었다, 이 시기의 종교건축 로젝 트의 부흥은 쟁으로 괴된 수많은 성당의 재건과 맞 물려 있으나, 성당건축의 질 발 을 해 일생을 보냈 던 쿠튀리에 신부를 심으로 개되었던 성미술 운동의 결과임을 알 수 있다. 특히 아시성당을 비롯해 로사리오 채 과 롱샹성당이 세워지는 1950년 반은 성미술 운동의 르네상스라 할 수 있다. 이 시기에 쿠튀리에는 라 르 사크 지의 성미술 운동의 실천 략이라 할 수 있는 건축개념이 담긴 을 집 으로 발표한 바, 본 연구를 통해 분석된 결과를 요약하면 다음과 같다. 첫째, 19세기 이후 개된 가톨릭 교회 건축의 퇴행 인 흐름에서 벗어나기 해, 미술의 흐름을 주도하 고 있는 술가들을 교회 로젝트에 참여시킨다는 략 을 세우고 무신론자 혹은 이교도 술가들을 극 으로 성당 신축에 참여시키는 개 인 자세를 취했다. 논쟁 인 종교 술과 건축 로젝트를 심의하는 성미술 원 회(Commission d’Art Sacre)를 설득하여, 당 최고의 술가들을 참여할 수 있게 하는 기회를 제공하 다는 에서 쿠튀리에 신부의 성과 그 성과를 악할 수 있었다. 둘째, 성미술 첫 로젝트인 아시성당의 실패 원인을 찾아내어 교훈으로 삼았다는 이다. 건축가 선정이 요하다는 교훈과 함께 스테인드 라스를 포함한 교회 장 식에 여러 술가들을 참여시키는 방식은 바람직하지 못 하다는 것이었다. 이 단계에서 쿠튀리에는 르 코르뷔지 에를 성미술 운동을 구 할 수 있는 가장 합한 건축가 로 인식하 으며, 이러한 결과로 롱샹 성당과 라투렛 수 도원과 같은 한 성미술 건축물을 탄생시키는 직 동인이 되었음을 악할 수 있었다. 셋째, 쿠튀리에의 건축개념의 특성은 ‘시 ’(Poetic) 분 기의 창출에 기 하고 있으며, 고딕성당의 용과 수사 인 장식보다는 로마네스크 건축이 지닌 차분함과 검박함, 재료의 즉물성과 순수함을 찬하고 있음을 볼 때 모더니즘기의 추상 사유와 연결되어 있음을 규명할 수 있었다. 르 토로네 수도원과 세낭크 수도원이 지닌 순 수함과 검박함을 강조한 배경은 20세기 모더니즘 술 이 지닌 평면성의 추구, 선과 평활한 면의 강조, 장식성 의 배제와 부합하기 때문인 것으로 악되었다. 즉, 라투 렛 수도원을 설계하기에 앞서 르 토로네 수도원 방문을 권했던 쿠튀리에의 건축 안목과 성과에 한 집념를 악할 수 있었다. 넷째, 쿠튀리에 신부는 사망했지만 그가 남긴 성미술 운동의 취지와 디자인 략은 로스코 채 을 통해 의 종교건축 디자인 략으로 까지 이어지고 있음을 확 인할 수 있었다. 쿠튀리에 신부는 단순한 수도자가 아닌 고도의 술 사유와 건축 인 식견을 갖춘 교회건축의 개 자라 할 수 있다. 탁월한 식견을 바탕으로 집념과 의지를 가지 고 유능한 건축가와 술가들을 종교의 당으로 안 내했고 그들이 자유롭게 재능을 발휘할 수 있는 무 를 마련해 주었다는 에서 20세기에서 에 이르는 건 축사 인 가치를 부여할 수 있을 것이다. 1950년 완성 된 로사리오 채 과 롱샹성당, 라투렛 수도원은 성미술 운동의 결정체라 할 수 있는 바, 성미술 운동 개개의 결 과물에 한 특성 고찰은 추후 연구과제로 삼기로 한다. 마리 알랭 쿠튀리에가 주창한 성미술(L'Art Sacré) 운동의 건축적 의미와 특성 고찰 531 Reference [1] William J R Curtis, ,Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms, p. 178, Phaidon Press, 2003, Charles Jencks, Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture, p.276, The Monacelli Press, 2000. [2] M. A. Couturier, Sacerd Art, University of Texas Press, 1989. [3] Father Marie-Alain Couturier a 9nd the Sacred Art Movement, p.9, City University of New York, 2002. [4] Denis McNamara, Almost Religious: Couturier, Le Corbusier and the Monastery of La Tourette, Sacred Architecture 2, p.22, 1999. [5] Charlene Spretnak, The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art: Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the Present, p.174, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342577 [6] William S. Rubin. Modern Sacerd Art and the Church of Assy, p.7, Columbia University, 1960. [7] Charlene Spretnak, The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art: Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the Present, p.174, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342577 [8] Nicholas Pan, Youyoung Huh, Le Corbusier’s Last Vision, p.73, The covent on the hil, Culturebooks. 2009. [9] 501 Great Artists, Maronie Books, 2009. [10] William S. Rubin. Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy, p.30, Columbia University, 1980. [11] J. L. Perie, Adventure 2 of 20th Century Art, p.484, AP International, 1993. [12] M.A. Couturie, Sacred Art, Univ. of Texas Press, 1989. [13] Marie-Alain Couturier, op. cit, p.11 [14] Marie-Alain Couturier, op. cit, p.56 [15] Marie-Alain Couturier, op. cit., pp.14-17 [16] Marie-Alain Couturier, op. cit, p.111 [17] J. L. Perie, Adventure 2 of 20th Century Art, p.484,, AP International, 1993. [18] Nicholas Pan, Youyoung Huh, op.cit. p.73 [19] Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master-A Life of Henri Matisse: p.450, The Conquest of Color, 1909-1954 [20] William S. Rubin. Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy, p.71. Columbia University, 1960. [21] Nicholas Fox Weber, Le Corbusier, p.63, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008. [22] Charles Jencks, Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture, p.263, The Monacelli Press, 2000. [23] Nicholas Fox Weber, Le Corbusier, Alfred A. Knopf, pp.664-665, New York, 2008. [24] Dosik Kim, Reading for Le Corburier Works, p.237, Kimoondang, 2002. [25] Marie-Alain Couturier, op. cit. p.154 [26] Nicholas Pan, Youyoung Huh, Le Corbusier’s Last Vision, p. 135, The covent on the hil, Culturebooks, 2013. [27] Charles Jencks, Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture, p.327, The Monacelli Press, 2000. [28] Nicholas Pan, op. cit. p.19 [29] Peter Marzio, Marti Mayo, Image of the Not-Seen: Search for Understanding, p.22, The Rothko Chapel Art Series, 2005. [30] Susan J Barnes, The Rothko Chapel, An act of Faith, pp.51-52, The Rothko Chapel, 1996. [31] David E. Brauer, Space as Spirit (Image of the Not-Seen: Search for Understanding, pp.52-53, The Rothko Chapel Art Series, 2005. 반 상 철(Sang-Chul Bahn) [정회원] •1983년 2월 : 홍익 학교 학원 건축학과 (공학석사) •2001년 2월 : 홍익 학교 학원 도시계획과 (공학박사) •1984년 3월 ~ 2002년 8월 : (주) 종합건축사사무소 •2002년 9월 ~ 재 : 서원 학교 건축학과 교수 < 심분야> 건축계획, 도시설계, 친환경건축 김 홍 기(Hong-Ki Kim) [정회원] •1986년 8월 : 홍익 학교 학원 건축학과 (공학석사) •1995년 2월 : 홍익 학교 학원 건축학과 (공학박사) •2012년 1월 ~ 2013년 12월 : 한 국실내디자인학회 회장 •1991년 3월 ~ 재 : 동양미래 학교 실내환경디자인과 교수 < 심분야> 건축계획, 건축역사, 실내건축 work_57jnzzlxrbbbxjys3tzysqqpva ---- Teologia y Vida N3.indb 503Teología y Vida, Vol. LII (2011), 503-526 Tradición e Historia en Congar. Desafío y oportunidades para una renovación en la transmisión de la fe Alberto Toutin, ss.cc. PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DE CHILE FACULTAD DE TEOLOGÍA 1. Un contexto desafi ante para la relación entre tradición e historia. Ofrecer una presentación sobre la comprensión de la relación entre his- toria y Tradición –y tradiciones– en Yves-Marie Congar es entrar en un terreno complejo y dinámico. Una primera aproximación a la complejidad de esta articulación es dada ya por las distintas acepciones que tiene en el habla corriente la voz Tradición y que se encuentran recogidas en el Dic- cionario de la Real Academia Española: - Transmisión de noticias, de composiciones literarias, doctrinas, ritos, costumbres, etc., hecha de generación en generación. - Noticia de un hecho antiguo transmitida de este modo. - Doctrina, costumbres, etc., conservada en un pueblo por transmisión de padres a hijos. - Elaboración literaria, en prosa o verso, de un suceso transmitido vía oral. - Entrega de algo a alguien. - Conjunto de los textos, conservados o no, que a lo largo del tiempo han transmitido una determinada obra1. Una primera dimensión de la complejidad de la tradición tiene que ver con el objeto multiforme de lo trasmitido: noticias de hechos o sucesos, 1 http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/ [consultado el 1 de septiembre de 2010]. 504 Alberto Toutin, ss.cc. doctrinas, textos literarios, ritos, costumbres. Una segunda dimensión se refi ere a la acción misma implicada en la tradición: transmisión, entrega, conservación, elaboración de textos. Una tercera dimensión tiene que ver esta vez con los actores o agentes de esta tradición, que son sujetos vivos que se encuentran ya implicados en una relación: miembros de una gene- ración, la relación padre-hijo. Una cuarta dimensión toma en cuenta las mediaciones de esta comunicación: la oralidad, la escritura, en distintas formas, en defi nitiva, el encuentro. Y fi nalmente, una quinta dimensión dice relación con el medio en que se realiza esta acción, la historia, que no es un mero vehículo o canal aséptico o indiferente a lo transmitido y a quienes lo transmiten sino que los envuelve a ambos y los condiciona mutuamente. Otra vía que permite sopesar la complejidad de la articulación entre Tradición e historia, es dada, esta vez, por la acción pastoral de nuestra Iglesia y el contexto en el que ella se inscribe. En efecto, en distintos contextos socioculturales se observa una crisis en la transmisión o tra- dición (entrega) de la fe, en sus expresiones espirituales, celebrativas, dogmáticas, imaginativas, artísticas y normativas, de una generación a otra. En especial, las generaciones jóvenes no reciben o no están en condiciones de recibir dichas expresiones como estructurantes para sus vidas. Lejos de toda moralización apresurada que apuntaría a una mala voluntad o indisposición de los jóvenes, se trata de una situación radical- mente nueva ante la cual los actores de esta transmisión se sienten a menudo sin recursos. Además a los jóvenes los contenidos de la misma les resultan anacrónicos, los canales de socialización y de comunicación de la fe se muestran desfasados y sus lenguajes poco o prácticamente insignifi cantes. Es lo que señalan los pastores y laicos reunidos en Aparecida como una de las sombras que desafían hondamente a la Iglesia en la hora pre- sente: «En la evangelización, en la catequesis y, en general, en la pastoral, persisten también lenguajes poco signifi cativos para la cultura actual, en particular para los jóvenes. Muchas veces, los lenguajes utilizados parecie- ran no tener en cuenta la mutación de los códigos existencialmente rele- vantes en las sociedades infl uenciadas por la postmodernidad y marcadas por un amplio pluralismo social y cultural. Los cambios culturales difi cul- tan la transmisión de la Fe por parte de la familia y de la sociedad. Frente a ello, no se ve una presencia importante de la Iglesia en la generación de 505Tradición e Historia en Congar. Desafío y oportunidades para una renovación... cultura, de modo especial en el mundo universitario y en los medios de comunicación»2. Esta constatación creciente de una crisis de la transmisión de la fe –tanto en sus contenidos como en los actores e instancias que la favorecerían– es la repercusión de un fenómeno más vasto de una crisis de transmisión de sentido de una generación a otra, debido, en gran medida, a una mutación importante del contexto en donde acontece dicha transmisión: Efectiva- mente, el contexto de mutaciones sociales y culturales rápidas y profundas como la globalización, el pluralismo, la multiculturalidad, la tecnifi cación de la vida cotidiana, sin desconocer los progresos que representa, opera una transformación de la cosmovisión en cuyo horizonte se despliega la vida humana: los valores, imaginarios, actitudes y criterios humanos y cristianos que tradicionalmente permitían situarse existencialmente. Todo ello incide en la realidad de la Iglesia tanto en los sentimientos de perte- nencia por parte de los fi eles como en la vivencia, en la comprensión y en la transmisión de la fe. Todos estos aspectos se ven afectados, para bien y para mal, por un proceso creciente de desinstitucionalización o destradicio- nalización de la experiencia religiosa y de una correlativa individualización y subjetivación de la experiencia religiosa3. Por un lado, se observa un fuerte debilitamiento del sentido comunitario, de las pertenencias a colectivos concretos y de los referentes y modelos de vida tradicionales. Por otro, se instalan en su lugar otros modelos que se fundan más bien en el sujeto individual y en su proceso de individualización entendido este como el proceso que hace «que los referentes y valores tradicionales son tomados como opción y no como obligación y, paralelamente, que hay un aumento de la capacidad de los individuos para diseñar o escoger por sí mismos el tipo de vida que desean»4. Todo ello no signifi ca que lo religioso-católico desaparezca del espacio social y público sino que se reconfi gura, confor- me a las oportunidades que ofrece y requerimientos que exige este nuevo contexto social: «En contexto de individualización ella [la religión] tiende a ser una fuente de sentido subjetivo que cada persona elige, selecciona y orga- niza de manera más o menos arbitraria para otorgar orientación a sus 2 V Conferencia General del Episcopado Latinoamericano y del Caribe, Aparecida- Do- cumento conclusivo, 100 e). 3 DESARROLLO HUMANO EN CHILE, Nosotros los chilenos. Un desafío cultural (Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo –PNUD–), (Santiago 2002) 234-241. 4 DESARROLLO HUMANO EN CHILE, Nosotros los chilenos. Un desafío cultural, 192. 506 Alberto Toutin, ss.cc. proyectos personales»5. En el proceso de reconfi guración de lo religio- so, existe pues una difi cultad para muchos de los contemporáneos tan- to para vivir como para transmitir y comunicar de manera signifi cativa los valores, prácticas, conocimientos e imaginarios religiosos católicos que informaron su vida e inspiraron sus opciones a una nueva genera- ción. Esta, por su parte, se ve enfrentada a nuevas preguntas que sus mayores no conocieron: amor en tiempos de inestabilidad, movilidad y precariedad laboral, tecnifi cación de la vida, etc. Además la genera- ción de los jóvenes se muestra particularmente reticente a modelos valóricos y religiosos que se les impongan y que no se hayan hecho cargo de su realidad, de su gramática o códigos de lenguaje, no solo en su condición de destinatarios sino también como interlocutores capa- ces o, al menos, deseosos de decidir y organizar dichos modelos para dar sentido a sus proyecto biográfi cos o personales. En este contexto presentaremos algunos de los elementos principales que caracterizan la comprensión de la Tradición y el vínculo de esta con la historia en el pensamiento de Yves-Marie Congar, o.p. (1904-1995). Esta presentación apunta a poner en perspectiva crítica a los elementos contextuales antes señalados y a ofrecer elementos para un discernimien- to sobre los desafíos y oportunidades que existen en este contexto para hacer presente de manera signifi cativa el Evangelio que hemos recibido. 2. Tradición e historia en Congar En una primera aproximación a la realidad de la Tradición, Congar la ca- racteriza de la manera siguiente: «La tradición es una entrega mediante la cual el don del Padre se co- munica a un gran número de hombres a través del espacio y en la sucesión de las generaciones, de tal manera que una multitud de indi- viduos, materialmente separados por la distancia y por los años, viven de una misma e idéntica Realidad que es el don del Padre y, en primer lugar, la verdad salvadora, la Revelación divina realizada en Jesucris- to. Esta es comunicación de un tesoro que permanece idéntico a sí mismo: es victoria sobre el tiempo y su caducidad, sobre el espacio y alejamiento de la distancia»6. 5 DESARROLLO HUMANO EN CHILE, Nosotros los chilenos. Un desafío cultural, 239. 6 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia. Traducido por F. REVILLA (Yo sé, Yo creo 3; Casal I Vall (Andorra 1964) 19. Esta obra es una presentación más sucinta y pensada para un público amplio, de su estudio consagrado al tema de la Tradición y 507Tradición e Historia en Congar. Desafío y oportunidades para una renovación... En esta defi nición se encuentran sintetizados todos los elementos que componen la realidad compleja de la Tradición y su nexo con la historia. Su contenido: el don del Padre, y en primer lugar, la verdad salvadora, la Revelación divina realizada en Jesucristo. No se trata entonces de un contenido periférico o marginal de la fe. Ni tampoco es un listado de verdades o de normas sino Alguien, Dios que se dio y comunicó defi niti- vamente en su Hijo Jesús y que ahora Resucitado desea seguir dándose y ofreciendo su vida por la humanidad, mediante su Espíritu. Los actores implicados: se trata de todos aquellos que, tras la revela- ción de Dios acontecida de una vez en Jesús, han recibido y entregado este acontecimiento a las futuras generaciones. Entre estos actores desta- can el sujeto trascendente, el Espíritu y el sujeto histórico, la Iglesia. En esta destacan en primer lugar los apóstoles y su generación que recibió y puso por escrito, inspirada por el Espíritu, las palabras y hechos de Jesús y su impacto en las primeras comunidades apostólicas. Y también sus sucesores y los fi eles, que asistidos por el mismo Espíritu, despliegan, actualizan e interiorizan la acción de Jesús. El proceso de la tradición: consiste en un recibir y dar, el proceso de comunicación, de profundización y de actualización de una relación entre el Señor Viviente y los hombres y mujeres de todo tiempo y lugar, rela- ción que se hace existencialmente contemporánea de ellos. Contenido, sujetos y proceso de la Tradición se condicionan e impli- can mutuamente en la realidad compleja de la Tradición. Detengámonos en cada uno de estos elementos, destacando en ellos su estrecha vincula- ción con la historia, como contexto y medio de la Tradición. El contenido de la Tradición Dos elementos caracterizan de manera constante la comprensión de la Tradición en Congar. Por un lado, que lo transmitido no es algo fi jo, está- tico, sino Alguien vivo, dinámico. Al punto que es toda la Tradición la que es cualifi cada por quien es así transmitido: es la Tradición viva. Por otro, toma distancia de una comprensión historizante y meramente documen- taria de la Tradición, según la cual su contenido verídico es aquel del que las tradiciones. Y.M.CONGAR, La Tradition et les traditions. Essai historique (I) Essai théolo- gique (II) (Le Signe; Arthème Fayard, Paris 1960). 508 Alberto Toutin, ss.cc. se pueden proveer las piezas documentales, comprobables mediante los procedimientos historiográfi cos. Para comprender mejor el alcance del contenido de la Tradición, Con- gar distingue entre el aspecto más objetivo de la misma, entendido como la creencia común y unánime de la Iglesia, considerada no solo en su ac- tualidad sino incluso a lo largo de la historia; es la manera de ser cristiano común a los fi eles de ayer y de hoy, recibida de los primeros cristianos y de los apóstoles. Este contenido es católico total, que supera con mucho lo que de él se encuentra formulado (tradiciones apostólicas escritas y no escritas) y todavía más lo que hemos comprendido y seríamos capaces de explicar. Lo que ha sido transmitido no es solo un enunciado teórico, ni siquiera una profesión de fe, sino la realidad misma del cristianismo, siempre presentes, especialmente en la Palabra proclamada y acogida en la Iglesia y en los Sacramentos. El sentido subjetivo, corresponde al modo como dicha realidad pre- sente es recibida por los testigos. Congar llama a este sentido subjetivo de la Tradición el sentido católico, entendido como «cierto instinto, sentimiento o disposición íntima debida a la conciencia que la Iglesia tiene de su pro- pia identidad y de lo que pudiera hacerla peligrar»7. Llamamos la atención sobre el hecho que la catolicidad de la Tradición se refi ere tanto a la realidad presente y relacional que defi ne al cristianis- mo (contenido), expresada en las formas variadas y jerarquizadas como a los sujetos que la acogen y viven de ella (actores). Esta articulación entre el contenido de la tradición y los sujetos es po- sible por cuanto la tradición atañe también al proceso de la «transmisión vital del cristianismo» y por esta vía «es poseído y tenido en su totalidad y como totalidad más allá de lo que se pueda comprender y formular del mismo e incluso más allá de lo que se pueda justifi car mediante referencias externas de tipo histórico-crítico»8. En esta perspectiva, Congar está lejos de oponer una transmisión viva y una concepción historiográfi ca de la misma, en primer lugar, por el hecho de que el contenido fundamental de la Tradición –Dios que se comunica, especialmente en Jesús de Nazaret muerto y resucitado– aconteció en una historia y cultura particular, cuyas huellas e impacto en los que lo encontraron son efectivamente identifi ca- bles historiográfi camente. Luego, la actitud subyacente a los testimonios 7 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 36. 8 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 30 509Tradición e Historia en Congar. Desafío y oportunidades para una renovación... historiográfi cos es la misma que anima a la Tradición como transmisión vital del cristianismo, a saber, como expresión de la manera como la co- munidad recibió, vivió y plasmó la vitalidad del cristianismo tradicional. Sin embargo, Congar advierte que la comunicación vital del cristianismo no se agota ni es reducible a sus testimonios historiográfi camente com- probables, como tampoco, mutatis mutandi, la obra escrita de una persona agota su paso y su devenir por la historia. A ello se añade el hecho de que la realidad de la Tradición no solo está residualmente viva en la memoria de los que conservan su recuerdo sino también su gesto y su entrega se actualizan existencialmente para cada hombre y cada mujer en la fe de los que viven del Resucitado, en la comunidad –la Iglesia– que visibiliza especialmente su presencia y su actuar. La tradición se la aprecia, por tanto, en su real valor no solo ni exclusivamente por los documentos historiográfi cos que atestiguan su ve- racidad sino también y sobre todo, en los testigos que en sus propias vidas verifi can la realidad siempre actual y presente de la acción del Resucitado. Estos ofrecen una síntesis vital del Viviente, síntesis que implica elemen- tos históricos por cierto pero también intelectuales, afectivos, morales. La Iglesia, como el conjunto de los testigos que creen en Jesús, profundiza la Tradición que ha recibido de los Apóstoles –en la fase constitutiva de la revelación– y la recibe en la circunstancia inédita del hoy, asistida por el Espíritu Santo para ver en donde está actuando el Señor Resucitado: «Refl exionando sobre los textos y sobre los hechos, cobrando conciencia de lo que implica la experiencia que verifi ca de las realidades santas que la habitan, releyendo una vez más los textos a la luz de esa experiencia, la Iglesia llega a reconocer, con la confi rmación divina, un contenido más rico que lo que pudiera resultar de una simple lectura histórica de los tex- tos, sin más»9. Sujetos de la tradición Si bien Congar introduce la noción de sujeto de la Tradición, en correla- ción con el objeto o contenido de la misma, sin embargo, esta distinción es más formal que real en la medida en que el contenido de la Tradición no es un objeto fi jo sino un Sujeto actuante –Dios que se manifestó de una vez para siempre en Jesús– que sigue comunicándose y comunicando la fuerza de este acontecimiento cuando hombres y mujeres en la historia 9 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 134. 510 Alberto Toutin, ss.cc. lo hacen suyo. Puesto que la Tradición es la comunicación vital de rela- ción religiosa –fi lial y fraternal– de Dios en Jesús por su Espíritu, ella se hace presente en una relación entre dos sujetos: El Espíritu Santo como sujeto trascendental de la Tradición y la Iglesia como sujeto visible e his- tórico de la Tradición. Estos dos sujetos interactúan de manera sinérgica y asimétrica, mutuamente implicados en una misma historia. El Espíritu, por ser Espíritu de Cristo, en los tiempos apostólicos –por inspiración– y posapostólicos –por asistencia– «actualiza e interioriza lo que fue dicho y hecho de una vez para siempre por Cristo, es decir, el Evangelio (cf. Jn 14, 26; 16, 12-13)»10. Esto signifi ca que la vida según en el Evangelio, cuyos rasgos esencia- les se hicieron visibles de una vez para siempre en la misión histórica y visible del Verbo Encarnado, apunta precisamente a ser conocida y ofre- cida como una forma válida para todos los tiempos, que debe por tanto extenderse al mundo y a la historia, aplicándose a la infi nita variedad de situaciones y de personas. Lo propio de la acción del Espíritu es su nexo indefectible tanto al acontecimiento único de Jesús, en su vida y su his- toria como en su realidad presente y actuante resucitada. Y, a la vez, en cuanto Espíritu del Resucitado, él actualiza, universaliza e interioriza el pro nobis que defi ne el ser, las actitudes y las acciones de Jesús. Esta compren- sión de la acción cristifi cante del Espíritu reposa sobre lo que el mismo Congar desarrolla en lo que él llama una «cristología pneumatológica»11. Esta recomprensión del único y defi nitivo acontecimiento de Cristo bus- ca poner de relieve no tanto las relaciones eternas intratrinitarias entre el Verbo y el Espíritu sino más bien la estrecha relación histórica que se dan entre Jesús muerto y Resucitado y el Espíritu: en el estado de kénosis en donde Jesús aparece como el Ungido por el Espíritu y guiado por Él y en el estado glorioso, en donde Jesús, Señor Resucitado aparece como Señor que comunica su Espíritu y a través de este –Dios en nosotros– nos hace hijos adoptivos del Padre y hermanos de Jesús. La relación indisociable que se da por naturaleza entre el Señor Resu- citado y su Espíritu, se mantiene también en la realidad de la Iglesia –¡su Iglesia!– en cuanto cuerpo social que visibiliza en la historia la presencia de Cristo. El Espíritu del Resucitado es coinstituyente de la Iglesia, la 10 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 52. 11 Y.M. CONGAR, El Espíritu Santo. Traducido por A. MARTÍNEZ DE LAPERA (Barcelona 1983), 598-603. 511Tradición e Historia en Congar. Desafío y oportunidades para una renovación... que no tiene otro fi n que hacer visible y presente al Señor Resucitado en la historia. De esta unión de la acción del Espíritu en el testigo de Jesús Resucitado habla Pablo cuando formula el criterio cristológico de discernimiento de la acción del Espíritu: «Nadie puede decir: “Jesús es el Señor” si no lo hace movido por el Espíritu Santo» (1Co 12, 3). Lo que el Espíritu hace en cada creyente, lo hace también en el conjunto de la realidad de la Iglesia, en sus distintas actividades, ministerios y carismas, así como en las distintas expresiones –dogmáticas, litúrgicas, normativas, artísticas– en las que se le da cuerpo y rostro humano a la acción del Re- sucitado. Retomando una imagen de Ireneo de Lyon, Congar expresa esta acción conjunta del resucitado y de su Espíritu en la marcha de la Iglesia, como las «dos manos»12 Cf. IRENEO DE LYON, Adversus Haereses V, 6, 1; V, 28, 4. de Dios: «La Iglesia aparece así provenir a la vez del Verbo en su Encarnación y del Espíritu –o del Señor Glorifi cado– incesantemente activo al interior de las personas como de las estructuras sacramentales y jurídicas. Verdaderamente, Dios opera con sus dos manos conjuntas»13. Esta acción cristifi cante del Espíritu se verifi ca entonces ad intra eccle- siae. Dicha acción no anula la condición creatural, pecadora y peregrinante en el tiempo de sus miembros. Si bien a la Iglesia, como a su cuerpo, el re- sucitado le ha prometido la asistencia indefectible de su Espíritu, no todo lo que la Iglesia hace y dice es obra del Espíritu del Resucitado. Dicha acción requiere ser discernida por el conjunto de la Iglesia, teniendo en cuenta sus diferentes instancias y actores, en los niveles de corresponsabi- lidad que les competen, así como una suerte de gradación –¡la expresión es infeliz!– de la presencia del Espíritu operante en ella: «Existe una grada- ción muy matizada y compleja en lo que pudiera llamarse su compromiso [el del Espíritu] en lo humano de la historia de la salvación y que va desde su don perfecto a Cristo a los trabajosos tanteos de los teólogos, pasando por las gracias concedidas a los apóstoles, a los profetas, a los Padres, a los grandes pontífi ces o a los fundadores religiosos...14. Congar insiste también en la atención que la Iglesia ha de prestar a la acción del Espíritu ad extra ecclesiae, en las experiencias de la mundanidad del mundo, en su implicación en los acontecimientos y movimientos his- tóricos en favor de condiciones de vida más humana para todos, leyendo 12 Cf. IRENEO DE LYON, Adversus Haereses V, 6, 1; V, 28, 4. 13 Y.M. CONGAR, La Parole et Le Souffl e (Jésus et Jésus-Christ 20; Paris 1983) 135. 14 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 54. 512 Alberto Toutin, ss.cc. a la luz del Evangelio los signos de los tiempos: «El Pueblo de Dios, movi- do por la fe, que le impulsa a creer que quien conduce es el Espíritu Santo, que llena el universo, procura discernir en los acontecimientos, exigencias y deseos, de los cuales participa juntamente con sus contemporáneos los signos verdaderos de la presencia o de los planes de Dios» (GS 11, 1). El Espíritu Santo que asiste a la Iglesia, y que opera discreta y efi caz- mente en el mundo, la pone a ella entera en una dinámica de descentra- miento de sí para estar efectivamente centrada en la acción de Dios en la historia y en el mundo. De este modo, la Iglesia asume su propia mun- danidad e historicidad que le son constitutivas en virtud de la presencia operante del Espíritu que la sostiene y la precede. Esta comunicación en la Tradición de lo que Dios es por lo que él hace en favor de la humanidad conlleva una verdadera sinergia de los todos los actores implicados en dicho proceso. Cada uno en su ámbito y nivel de corresponsabilidad está llamado a hacer visible eso que el Espíritu del resucitado está realizando por todos. Magisterio pastoral, teólogos y pueblo fi el en su conjunto están llamados a colaborarse en la tarea del discerni- miento y de la visibilización de la acción del Espíritu de Dios. Dicha ac- ción se hace patente de modo especial en los testigos cuyas vidas son una respuesta creíble a lo que Dios por su Espíritu hace en favor de ellos. En este sentido, los fi eles no se contentan simplemente con una conserva- ción y transmisión de la Tradición, no devuelven al Magisterio pastoral un mero «eco de su enseñanza», sino algo que realiza una recepción original, produciendo algo inédito como «el eco de unos sujetos vivos»15 en una auténtica colaboración entre la jerarquía y fi eles así como entre las iglesias particulares entre sí16. Pero esta colaboración se funda en otra sinergia más fundamental que es la que acontece en el corazón del ser humano entre el Dios que se abre paso entre las aspiraciones, obstáculos anhelos y esperanzas del hombre. Allí se entregan y reciben mutuamente como sujetos vivos. Una vez más, la realidad misma del Dios cuyo ser lo conoce- mos por la relación que establece con la humanidad y por lo que continúa haciendo en su favor requiere el concurso de las energías y de las mejores capacidades de todos los fi eles. La riqueza siempre desbordante de Dios 15 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 70. 16 Sobre la recepción como dinámica eclesial que hace la verdad de lo transmitido por la Tradición. Cf. Y.M. CONGAR, «La "réception" comme réalité ecclésiologique», en Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 56 (1972) 369-403. 513Tradición e Historia en Congar. Desafío y oportunidades para una renovación... brilla así de manera más homogénea con esta realidad, en la diversidad también inédita de ministerios y carismas que interactúan en la Iglesia. Congar precisa de qué manera los fi eles, con sus competencias, con- tribuyen a la transmisión viva, recepción y comunicación eclesialmente mediada de la Tradición y a su desarrollo multiforme en el tiempo: «Lo hacen con la piedad y el ejercicio de su vida religiosa. Es un hecho que así han contribuido poderosamente a desplegar la creencia de la Iglesia, por ejemplo, en lo referente al misterio mariano: se ha visto en el dogma de la Inmaculada Concepción. Pero asimismo lo hacen me- diante el estudio científi co de las fuentes de la fe y de los monumentos de la Tradición, mediante la refl exión fi losófi ca e incluso teológica, mediante las creaciones artísticas y culturales que afectan la religión, y mediante sus iniciativas apostólicas y misioneras, sin contar todo lo que monjes y hombres de elevada espiritualidad que no fueron sacer- dotes han aportado al tesoro de la espiritualidad cristiana»17. Proceso de la tradición Dado que lo que se transmite es la relación religiosa, la relación que Dios establece con la humanidad y que para actualizarla y profundizarla, re- quiere de las mejores energías y de los recursos con los que cuentan los actores implicados en ella, lo que defi ne a la Tradición como proceso es que es del orden de una comunicación viva. Esto supone no solo cono- cer las normas que rigen toda comunicación humana y someterse a ellas –atención al mensaje, al emisor y al receptor/interlocutor y al contexto en que se da dicha comunicación– sino también acoger la comunicación específi ca que Dios estableció con la humanidad, en especial al entrar en la historia de un pueblo y hacer alianza, a través de él, con toda la humani- dad. En este sentido, la Tradición comporta una dimensión comunicativa que abraza toda la historia en virtud de la modalidad misma mediante la cual Dios entra en comunicación con nosotros. Esta idea madura poco a poco en Congar y se va a consolidar durante el año de exilio que vivió en Jerusalén en 1954. Allí profundiza sus conoci- mientos bíblicos que van a enriquecer de manera decisiva su comprensión de Dios. Pasa de una visión de cuño más tomista, esencialista, centrada en los atributos de Dios como absoluto, a una visión más bíblica, existencial, centrada en la relación que Dios quiere establecer con la humanidad. Así 17 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 71. 514 Alberto Toutin, ss.cc. lo explicita años más tarde cuando es consultado acerca de su visión de Dios. Por un lado, se opone a las imágenes de un Dios en sí que parecería desentenderse de su compromiso real con la historia de la humanidad, ya sea en la fi gura del gran arquitecto o del relojero del mundo, de un Dios que habría actuado en el impulso inicial de la creación para luego des- aparecer. Por otro, afi rma que su imagen de Dios es de fuerte raigambre bíblica, el Dios vivo, activo y presente, un Dios que está volcado hacia la humanidad y entra en relación permanente con ella. Para referirse a Dios habría que llamarlo, estima él, en una sola frase: «Dios-que-hizo-salir-a Is- rael- de Egipto». «Dios-que-ha-hecho-alianza». El Dios de la Biblia es «Yo soy- yo era- yo vengo», [...] y siempre el Dios que ha hecho alguna cosa18. Una vez admitido que Dios en su diálogo con la humanidad, asume la historicidad para hacerla lugar de encuentro salvífi co con él, Congar saca una consecuencia fundamental que concierne tanto el conocimiento que podemos tener de Dios como los modos de hacerlo visible y de comuni- carlo a los demás. Se trata de la aproximación a Dios desde su economía, es decir, desde «la gestión del mundo por Dios en vista de la salvación. Y el conocimiento económico de Dios –por tanto, a través de lo que Él hace– nos lleva a conocer lo que Él es en sí mismo: Él es según lo que hace y hace según lo que Él es»19. Esta afi rmación implica reconocer que la historia no es ajena al quehacer y ser de Dios, sino que al contrario es el espacio media- dor en donde lleva su acción salvífi ca y en donde la humanidad, en la fe, puede abrirse a esa misma acción. Dicho de otro modo, el compromiso de Dios con la historia –máxime en Jesús, en que el Verbo se hace historia, cultura, carne– es expresión de su estar permanentemente volcado hacia la humanidad y en donde atisbamos su ser en el eterno interrelacionarse del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu. Esta aproximación económica a Dios entraña también para la Tradición la tarea del discernimiento, de recono- cimiento y de colaboración en el hoy de esta relación salvífi ca de Dios con toda la humanidad. La Tradición está entonces normativamente orientada al servicio de esta relación de Dios actuante y actual de Dios. Para ello ha de buscar y crear los modos de comunicación que le sean más adecuados al Dios que así actúa y a la humanidad en cuyo favor opera. 18 J. PUYO, Une vie pour la vérité. Jean Puyo interroge le Père Congar (Paris 1975) 171-172. 19 J. PUYO, Une vie pour la vérité. Jean Puyo interroge le Père Congar, 173. El destacado es de Congar. 515Tradición e Historia en Congar. Desafío y oportunidades para una renovación... Por lo mismo, la realidad misma de la Tradición –en su contenido indisociable de sus modos de comunicación en la Revelación y de actua- lización mediante la Tradición– requiere de sujetos vivos, de testigos que vivan de «lo que han recibido» en la fe y ellos mismos, a su vez, en sus mo- dos de entenderse, de relacionarse con los demás, de actuar, «entreguen» a los otros, de manera veraz y creíble la realidad viva que los sostiene. Se trata de vivir como testigo de un encuentro con el Dios vivo, el cual reconfi gura la existencia cristiana, introduciéndole un nuevo principio de acción y urgiéndola a una radical coherencia de vida: «Yo ya no vivo, sino Cristo vive en mí». (Gál 2, 20) Al modo de Pablo y de tantos otros hom- bres y mujeres, creyentes en la historia, el Espíritu de Jesús actualiza la presencia del Resucitado en los testigos que este mismo Espíritu suscita. La relación personal de Dios con su Pueblo, el don de su fi liación adop- tiva en Jesús por el Espíritu, se hace visible y operacional en la realidad de los testigos que así viven: «La tradición, como medio en que recibimos el cristianismo y somos formados según él, no existe sino por medio de quienes, habiéndola recibido, viven de ella y la transmiten a otros, para que estos vivan de ella a su vez. Es, como la educación, una comunicación viva; es la comunicación cuyo contenido es inseparable del acto con que una persona viva hace benefi ciaria de ella a otra persona viva»20. Por la unión indisociable que existe en el núcleo de la tradición entre lo que Dios es y lo que él hace y continúa haciendo en favor de la humani- dad, la atención prestada a la historia en toda su contingencia y su perma- nente devenir, corresponde a un acto de fi delidad al Dios que así se reveló y sigue actuando. De este modo, la novedad de la acción presente de Dios requiere ser discernida en las circunstancias siempre inéditas y cambiantes de la historia. De algún modo, la acción defi nitiva de Dios manifestada ya en Jesús, de una vez para siempre, es profundizada y desplegada en las coordenadas dinámicas de la historia, con sus interrogantes y desafíos propios, a la vez que mantiene a los testigos abiertos a esa acción-por- venir de Dios cuando el Señor Resucitado vuelva en su Gloria y Dios «sea todo en todos» (1 Co 15, 28): «La Tradición es algo vivo porque es vehiculada por unos espíritus vivos, y que viven en el tiempo. Estos encuentran en él unos proble- mas o adquieren unos recursos que les llevan a dar a la Tradición, o a la verdad que la misma contiene, las formas y las reacciones de una cosa viva: adaptación, reacción, crecimiento, fecundidad. La Tradición 20 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 29. 516 Alberto Toutin, ss.cc. es algo vivo porque la sostienen unos espíritus que viven de ella en la historia, una historia que es actividad, problemas, discusiones, aporta- ciones y exigencias de respuesta»21. Todos estos esfuerzos de adaptación requeridos por el contenido mis- mo de la Tradición no son meramente pragmáticos que, en el sentido que apuntarían a que el mensaje pase mejor o sea mejor recibido. Ello comporta una renovación en la comprensión de ese mismo mensaje del que la Iglesia es portadora en la medida en que acoge esas preguntas y desafíos inéditos que plantea el presente histórico y se dota de recursos categoriales nue- vos, acordes con el carácter también inédito de la acción de Dios en la historia. De alguna manera, el contenido mismo de la Tradición y los ac- tores implicados en su fi delidad testimonial se ven renovados al procurar nuevas formas de expresión. La relación contenido y forma no es de ex- trinsecismo mutuo sino que se hallan mutuamente referidos y condiciona- dos. Congar describe en la imagen elocuente de la arteria esta interacción entre forma y contenido que se opera en la transmisión de la Tradición: «En el acto mismo en que es canal, por no ser un canal mecánico, sino viviente, es también fuente en cierto modo. Alimentando los tejidos, la sangre se regenera también en las arterias que la vehiculan. La Tra- dición es arteria viva que, en el acto mismo de transmitir, recibe un crecimiento de la vida misma que comunica»22. Con todo, Congar articula estas exigencias de adaptación inherentes a Tradición con las exigencias no menos importantes de fi delidad al conte- nido de la misma, en su carácter irreductible. En este sentido, toma dis- tancia de lo que él califi ca como un «relativismo de la verdad» que «no es otra cosa que el pensamiento sucesivo y cambiante de los hombres», una dilución del contenido objetivo y de la pretensión de verdad aneja a ese contenido, en el proceso de la transmisión viva en la historia. «La Tradi- ción no implica ni siquiera soporta alteración alguna en su contenido ob- jetivo. Es comunicación de un ser vivo a otro, pero comunicación de un objeto defi nido y que permanece idéntico en su naturaleza profunda»23. En la relación indisociable que existe al interior de la Tradición entre su objeto –Él es lo que hace por nosotros– y sus modalidades –relacio- nales históricas– según las cuales se da conocer y se actualiza, todo el 21 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 72. 22 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 108. 23 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 101. 517Tradición e Historia en Congar. Desafío y oportunidades para una renovación... trabajo teológico reside en mantener la tensión, lo más fecunda posible, entre la necesaria adaptación de formas de expresión y de inteligibilidad de la Tradición y la conservación de la naturaleza profunda e irreductible de su contenido. Esta tensión se ha de orientar tanto por el ideal de pleni- tud –de lo que aún está por venir y manifestarse de Dios y su acción en la historia– como por un ideal de pureza- respecto a lo que hemos recibido de nuestros predecesores, desde los Apóstoles a nuestros días. «Toda la historia de la Iglesia está atravesada por una tensión entre un ideal de plenitud y un ideal de pureza. El primero inclina a bus- car la apertura, la acogida y el movimiento, la síntesis con lo que se le presenta, pero entraña el peligro de perder la pureza. Esta debe reafi rmar continuamente sus exigencias, en nombre de los princi- pios originales cuyo testimonio más inmutable, más íntegro y más indiscutible presentan las Sagradas Escrituras. Por ello, estas son una referencia crítica necesaria para todo desarrollo o crecimiento de la Tradición»24. 3. Acerca del arte de la transmisión de la Tradición. Notas de una sinfonía inconclusa Con este telón de fondo de las grandes líneas del pensamiento de Congar sobre los vínculos entre la Tradición y la historia, volvamos a las pregun- tas iniciales que sitúan hoy la problemática de la crisis de la transmisión de la Tradición a las nuevas generaciones y precisemos de manera específi ca el trabajo que le incumbe a la teología. Al servicio de lo inédito y porvenir de la acción de Dios en la historia La fi delidad al objeto/sujeto de la Tradición como a su dinámica comuni- cacional propia –de un ser vivo a otro en la historia– es la que justamente pone a los sujetos que colaboran en su transmisión en una situación de una inconfortable inestabilidad. Es cierto que, a lo largo de la historia, la Iglesia ha ido institucionalizando algunas distintas formas de expresión –escrita y no escrita– sacramental, dogmática, normativa, exegética, ar- tística mediante las cuales se ha hecho visible para el hoy de cada época, la relación kairótica de Dios con la humanidad. Esta relación tiene su pa- radigma en la relación establecida por Dios, de una vez para siempre, en la humanidad crucifi cada y resucitada de Jesús de Nazaret. La fi delidad al Dios de Jesús y al Dios de nuestros Padres conlleva entonces una atención al carácter siempre nuevo y por venir –desde Dios para nosotros– de esa 24 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 140. 518 Alberto Toutin, ss.cc. relación de Dios en el transcurso de tiempo y al carácter también nuevo de los desafíos, inquietudes y anhelos que trabajan abierta o secretamente a la humanidad. Desde el punto de vista de la Tradición como proceso comunicacional, las mismas formas en que se ha ido plasmando llevan en sí y hablan a la vez de las circunstancias –preguntas o desafíos– que les dieron origen. Recibir estas formas para iluminar el presente con su novedad involucra un trabajo hermenéutico parte de la teología de resignifi cación de esas formas en los nuevos contextos en que son leídas y asumidas. Sin em- bargo, hoy nos enfrentamos a desafíos culturales de tal envergadura que dicho esfuerzo interpretativo requiere ser llevado adelante con un nuevo vigor. Pensemos tan solo en los avances tecnológicos y su impacto en dos áreas como son las comunicaciones y la salud. La novedad que estas introducen entre nosotros sobre la comprensión de la vida humana –de su inicio, calidad de vida y su fi n– sobre lo que signifi can los vínculos comunicacionales, las nuevas formas de lo presencial-virtual, son de tal magnitud que por mucho que interroguemos a la Tradición a la luz de es- tos nuevos cuestionamientos, las respuestas que surjan estarán marcadas por un desfase inevitable entre las matrices culturales de la Tradición y las nuevas coordenadas culturales en que nos situamos. «Hay que echar el vino nuevo en pellejos nuevos, y así ambos se conservan» (Mt 9, 17) res- pondía Jesús a lo que lo criticaban porque sus discípulos no se moldeaban a las formas de ayuno entonces normativas para la piedad judía. La novedad de la acción de Dios hoy en la movediza y vertiginosa realidad de la historia exige de la Tradición y de los distintos sujetos que la reciben y transmiten un trabajo que no se puede contentar con una adaptación de formas –permaneciendo el contenido radicalmente inal- terable– sino que exige en fi delidad a esta novedad del actuar de Dios en el hoy, lo que Von Balthasar llama un trabajo de fundición: «conocer, repensar y apropiarse de manera originaria y nueva la revelación entera para cada época»25. Este trabajo de fundición viene exigido no solo por las circunstancias históricas cambiantes que dictarían los cambios –formales y de comprensión– que deben introducirse en la Tradición sino también y sobre todo, por la misma Tradición que hace que su contenido mistérico 25 H.U. VON BALTHASAR, ¿Qué es un cristiano? Traducido por A. SÁNCHEZ PASCUAL (Omega 10; Madrid 1967), 45-46. 519Tradición e Historia en Congar. Desafío y oportunidades para una renovación... no pueda ser encapsulado en una fórmula única y rígida, so pena de incu- rrir en las diferentes formas de idolatría. A quienes se dedican a la teología entendida como «la forma o el cul- tivo científi co de la fe, que toma en una razón humana utilizando para su mejor comprensión sus recursos racionales»26, les corresponde un ejerci- cio de racionalidad de la fe que dé cuenta de la legitimidad de su acceso singular a la multidimensionalidad de lo real y de sus condicionamientos mutuos en confrontación crítica con otros sistemas sectoriales de inter- pretación de lo real. Este ejercicio además tiene por un lado, un sentido propositivo, que apunta a «designar en el presente» –en expresión de Da- vid Tracy– de la Iglesia y del mundo, la acción siempre inédita de Dios, y por otro, un sentido crítico respecto a toda forma que, desde la precarie- dad de su propia relatividad hermenéutica y teológica, pretenda encapsu- lar la realidad inobjetualizable del misterio de Dios. Un nuevo ropaje cultural para la Tradición En su lectura de la realidad de la Tradición, Congar subraya el valor que tienen en ella las tradiciones que «son maneras de obrar y de expresar la fe, unas costumbres, unos ritos, unas disposiciones prácticas, toda suerte de determinaciones concretas, asimismo heredadas, que forman una cier- ta disciplina de la vida cristiana»27. Entre estas tradiciones se cuentan el ayuno pascual, el bautismo de niños, el culto a las imágenes, las oraciones fúnebres, etc.”28. En efecto estas tradiciones obedecen al esfuerzo cons- tante de la Iglesia de dotar de un ropaje cultural adecuado a los contenidos fundamentales de la fe y que se expresan en formas doctrinales, litúrgica, rituales, disciplinares, normativas y artísticas. Dichas formas confi guran una cosmovisión, ordenadora de la existencia, que surge como resultado de un trabajo creativo de los distintos actores de la Iglesia por articular la vitalidad de la fe con las formas de la creencia y de pensamiento que se ofrecen en cada época. Incluso más, la fe tradicional recibida de los pa- dres ha sido capaz, en muchos períodos de la historia, de engendrar y de promover formas culturales nuevas de expresión. Pensemos en lo que ha signifi cado como contribución al pensamiento de la humanidad la noción 26 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 109. 27 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 137. 28 Para una presentación detallada de estas tradiciones Cf. Y.M. CONGAR, La Tradition et les traditions. (I) Essai historique (Paris, 1960), 64-76. 520 Alberto Toutin, ss.cc. de persona o algunas expresiones del arte religioso, como las obras de Miguel Ángel Buonarroti en la Capilla Sixtina o Henri Matisse en la Ca- pilla de Vence o en un contexto más nuestro las escultura de Peter Horn y los retablos de Claudio Di Girólamo. En defi nitivas estas tradiciones son las que crean un medio, un hogar, un contexto que no solo cualifi ca la cultura de una época dada sino que permite la socialización de los va- lores, conocimientos, normas e imaginarios que constituyen la Tradición. «Las tradiciones son también los medios humildes de un calor sin el que nuestra Iglesia, más que un hogar, parecería una sala de escuela del siglo pasado: forman ese clima de calor, de familiaridad y de seguridad propio de una casa habitada, de una mansión familiar. No obstante, no tienen el mismo valor de absoluto que la Tradición de la fe. Son más bien el ropaje de esta»29. Sin embargo, Congar constata que hoy en día existe una suerte de des- pojamiento del ropaje cultural de la fe, en parte debido al hecho que las formas en las que tradicionalmente se la ha revestido no resultan signifi ca- tivas para el hombre y mujer de hoy y, en parte, por un exilio –voluntario u obligado– de los creyentes de los espacios generadores de cultura. Congar habla de una suerte de iconoclasmo contemporáneo de la fe que hace que no posea ni se la haya dotado de imágenes culturales que expresen adecuada y sólidamente para el hoy una visión de la existencia cristiana. «Estoy convencido por una parte que la fe, [...] tiene necesidad de una expresión cultural, de ceremonias, del arte, de la belleza, de la literatu- ra, de la música. Empero, hoy el medio cultural no es favorable a ello, aun cuando exista un sentido espiritual real en ciertos artistas, sobre todo fuera de la Iglesia. Lo que antes existió del revestimiento cultural católico y cristiano en diferentes ámbitos del arte, de la literatura y de la música, hoy es bastante débil o se limita a grupos a menudo margi- nales, en una suerte de subcultura»30. Ya no existe un medio cristiano que sea espiritualmente consistente como para atraer y engendrar formas culturales nuevas y sufi cientemente contundentes en las que la Tradición hable en católico, es decir hable la lengua de los hombres y mujeres de hoy. Se trata de formas dotadas de la fuerza confi guradora de mentes y de existencias que se ofrezcan como caminos de sentido –y de salvación como felicidad ofrecida (por Dios)– a quienes quieran recorrerlos. Esta tarea incumbe de modo particular a la 29 Y.M. CONGAR, La tradición y la vida de la Iglesia, 138. 30 Y.M. CONGAR, Entretiens d’automne. Présentés par Bernard Lauret (Paris 1987), 89. 521Tradición e Historia en Congar. Desafío y oportunidades para una renovación... teología entendida ella misma como una expresión en el orden de la in- teligencia del diálogo entre la fe y la cultura, en un momento dado de la historia. Bajo este respecto, la teología es, según Congar «la cultura de la fe por el uso honesto de los medios de cultura disponibles en un momento dado»31. La teología tiene en sí una vocación cultural y es generadora de cultura, como expresión del dinamismo de la fe, de su carácter englobante del conjunto de la persona y de sus relaciones. Muestra de la vitalidad de fe es precisamente una teología, capaz de utilizar con discernimiento críti- co los recursos de la racionalidad humana para dar que pensar la novedad permanente de Dios volcándose hacia la humanidad y su relación con las cuestiones fundamentales a las que todo ser humano, tarde o temprano, se enfrenta en su propia tarea de existir. De la selección a la elección El contexto actual en que constatamos una cierta crisis de transmisión de la fe a las generaciones jóvenes puede ser leído simplemente como un espacio amenazante que conduzca a petrifi car ciertas formas tradicionales como una respuesta a los tiempos inestables y hostiles que corren. Detrás de una desconfi anza de las generaciones mayores hacia los jóvenes y las acusaciones recíprocas de indiferencia de unos y de rigidez de otros, pue- den esconderse respuestas paralizantes a un problema que ambos experi- mentan como real: ¿Cuál es el terreno propicio en que pueda acontecer la transmisión de la fe tradicional de una generación a otra? Pregunta que se hace más urgente por el desfase cada vez mayor, más heterogéneo y más rápido que se instala entre una generación y otra. Para enfrentar este desafío se requiere discernir en el presente no solo amenazas sino también oportunidades. En el nuevo contexto en que se dan las experiencias religiosas en nuestro país marcado por un proceso por un lado de desinstitucionalización de las prácticas y desafi liación a las pertenencias colectivas y, por otro, de creciente individualización, ello no signifi ca la desaparición de lo religioso sino una nueva confi guración que estaría en curso. En efecto, lo religioso-católico –en el caso nuestro– puede seguir siendo recibido por las nuevas generaciones, en la medida que sea presentado como un objeto no de selección aleatoria, motivada por las necesidades variables de los sujetos sino de elección, de algo fun- 31 Y.M. CONGAR, Je crois en l’Esprit Saint. III (Paris 1981), 11. 522 Alberto Toutin, ss.cc. damental para vivir y estructurar con sentido la propia vida, los proyectos biográfi cos y los sociales. Esto representa una tarea tan vasta como la que señalábamos antes como una fundición de la Tradición. En clave de comunicación, implica que los mismos agentes de la transmisión hayan experimentado en carne propia que lo central de la fe es recibido como un acontecimiento trans- formador, que confi gure sus modos de ver, de sentir, de pensar, de actuar y de situarse en el mundo. Es lo que probablemente constituye uno de los aportes mayores de la V Conferencia del Episcopado Latinoamericano y del Caribe, reunida en Aparecida, al poner el acento en que solo puede ser misionero –comunicador de la vida en abundancia que ofrece Jesús– quien es primero discípulo, que él mismo se ha dejado encontrar por Jesús que es la Vida y ha transformado su existencia en una proexistencia como la suya. Supone también un esfuerzo decidido tanto de la acción pastoral como de la refl exión teológica que la acompaña por situarse en la perspectiva de su interlocutor de la comunicación. Ello no solo para conocer sus códigos de comunicación y adaptar pragmáticamente el mensaje sino para abrirse comunicador y receptor a un mensaje nuevo que surge precisamente del encuentro, del reconocimiento de una acción del Espíritu que precede a la comunicación de la fe. Ocurre, por tanto, algo inédito e imprevisible rela- cionado con Dios, también para el que lo presenta explícitamente cuando se dispone a buscar las formas que sean más adecuadas y signifi cativas para el interlocutor y cuando se abre a lo que ya el Espíritu está operando en este último. Esto implica además que la relación entre Iglesia y mundo, en lo que a la fe y a la Tradición se refi ere, ya no se estructura sobre la lógica de pre- guntas que el mundo presuntamente se plantearía o que la Iglesia ayudaría a formular y las respuestas que esta, desde la fe, le presentaría como su servicio. Se trata más bien de estructurar estas relaciones sobre la base una lógica de preguntas-preguntas: ya sea porque reconocemos como nues- tras las preguntas de los hombres, ya sea porque nos permitimos poner en estado de pregunta a los hombres, desde nuestra fe. Evidentemente no se trata de renunciar a la posibilidad de la respuesta, pero esta la bus- camos juntos con los hombres y mujeres de nuestro tiempo, ofreciendo el Evangelio del que somos portadores como un camino de sentido –de salvación– que invitamos a recorrer por las sendas de los hombres, que 523Tradición e Historia en Congar. Desafío y oportunidades para una renovación... son también las nuestras. De ello depende una de las formas que tenemos como Iglesia de asumir nuestra propia mundanidad constitutiva. En lo que concierne a esta otra lógica de relación Iglesia-mundo, Con- gar, se reprochaba el no haber dado sufi ciente espacio a las preguntas que le venían de sus contemporáneos –reproche que pareciera provenir más bien de la sabiduría de los años que de un sentimiento inconfeso de culpa por una pusilanimidad intelectual para enfrentar las verdaderas pre- guntas–. Al mismo tiempo, valora como una oportunidad que le ofrece el tiempo presente el dar mayor espacio a las preguntas y a las búsquedas con los hombres y mujeres de hoy, en especial con los jóvenes: «Me reprocho a veces no vivir sufi cientemente las preguntas, cortarlas demasiado rápido por las respuestas. En esas condiciones, ellas po- drían ser solo respuestas a las cuestiones de anteayer o de ayer pero tal vez no las de hoy ni las de mañana. En la incertidumbre en la que parecen complacerse muchos jóvenes ¿No hay allí una riqueza de es- píritu que me haría falta un poco?»32. Ello no le hace de ningún modo renunciar a la Tradición, pues le da un lugar, un medio y hace de él un testigo, al mismo tiempo que le ofrece un impulso nuevo para situarse en el tiempo presente, por incierto que parez- ca. Lo que señala Congar estimo válido para todo testigo de la Tradición: «Pero mi rol –si tengo alguno– sería ser sin duda un testigo de la tradición en medio del cambio: siendo la Tradición completamente otra cosa que una afi rmación mecánica y repetitiva del pasado: es la presencia activa de un principio en toda su historia»33. Se trata de pensar el conjunto de la Tradición de la fe en clave de pro- posición, de oferta signifi cativa no solo para el que la comunica sino ade- más deseable y razonable para el que la recibe. Este paso lo encontramos por ejemplo en el esfuerzo realizado por la Iglesia de Francia que duró más de cuatro años (1994-1997), en que se pensó el conjunto de la vida pastoral de la Iglesia ya no en clave de herencia que se transmite sino en clave de proposición que se ofrece. El camino emprendido fue acorde con este propósito: hubo encuentros de pastores con los fi eles y de estos con recomenzantes y con personas alejadas o situadas fuera de la Iglesia. Tam- bién la forma en que se expresó ese camino refl exivo hablaba por sí mis- ma de lo que se quería comunicar: una carta dirigida en primer lugar a los 32 J. PUYO, Une vie pour la vérité. Jean Puyo interroge le Père Congar, 238. 33 J. PUYO, Une vie pour la vérité. Jean Puyo interroge le Père Congar, 239. 524 Alberto Toutin, ss.cc. católicos de Francia para proponer la fe en la sociedad actual. Esta carta iba dirigida también a los hermanos de las iglesias protestante y ortodoxa, a los hombres y mujeres de otras confesiones y tradiciones religiosas e incluso a los hombres y mujeres que se interesan en el lugar y futuro de la fe cristiana en la sociedad actual, aun cuando no compartan las mismas convicciones creyentes34. En esta misma perspectiva se sitúa el esfuerzo teológico de síntesis y de divulgación inteligente de la fe realizado por el teólogo Bernard Sesboüé, en donde propone un panorama del conjunto de la fe católica expresada en el Credo y tematizada a lo largo de la historia en la Tradición de la Iglesia. En coherencia con este propósito de fondo, el autor presenta su libro –¡de más de 650 páginas!– como una invitación a creer. En cuanto invitación, sitúa esta obra «en un clima de libertad mutua y de gratuidad entre el autor y el lector. El primero no desea imponerle nada al segundo, ni exhortarlo a lo que quiera que sea. El segundo, por su parte, no está obligado a nada. Es invitado simplemente a entrar en un diálogo de hombre a hombre y a recorrer un camino en relación con cuestiones de hombre». Y en cuanto invitación a creer, apunta a entrar en el acto de creer que supone «un acto de libertad personal que ningún otro puede realizar en nuestro lugar» y, a la vez, «ciertas condiciones [...], superar numerosos obstáculo en nosotros y fuera de nosotros»35. El mismo espíritu de invitación es el que anima al documento de la Conferencia Episcopal de Chile, En camino al bicentenario, presentado en septiembre de 2004. El acontecimiento que lo motiva es el Bicentenario de la independencia de nuestro país que involucra a todos los chilenos y chilenas. Se trata de una proposición dirigida a los católicos, creyen- tes adultos, a quienes la Iglesia considera como instauradores del orden temporal, así como a los hermanos o hermanas cristianos y no cristia- nos, creyentes y no creyentes, «con el fi n de escucharlos, enriquecer nues- tras refl exiones y llegar, eventualmente, a un documento más maduro y representativo»36. Para lograr este propósito el documento fue presentado en la forma no de un texto magisterial –vinculante para el pueblo cris- tiano– sino de un documento de trabajo para «estimular la refl exión y 34 LES ÉVÊQUES DE FRANCE, Proposer la foi dans la société actuelle III. Lettre aux catholiques de France (Paris, 1997). 35 B. SESBOÜÉ, Creer. Invitación a la fe católica para las mujeres y los hombres del siglo XXI. Tra- ducido por J. PADILLA MORENO (Magister 7; Madrid 2000) 7. 36 CONFERENCIA EPISCOPAL DE CHILE, En camino al bicentenario. En el mes de la patria 2004, nº 10, 7. 525Tradición e Historia en Congar. Desafío y oportunidades para una renovación... ayudar»37 a los destinatarios invitándoles a sopesar sus responsabilidades en la construcción del país. Si la perspectiva de la invitación y de la proposición fuera una perspec- tiva adecuada para situarnos en la coyuntura actual del país y de la Iglesia, podríamos imaginar lo que signifi caría repensar la liturgia, la moral, la iniciación sacramental y la teología misma desde esta óptica. Si nos situá- ramos más decididamente en esta perspectiva, probablemente no solo la transmisión de la Tradición de la fe podría ser un tesoro que una genera- ción le ofrece a otra sino también ese tesoro mismo sería comprendido en su perenne novedad y ofrecimiento, bajo la forma presente y defi nitiva de la comensalidad: «Ten en cuenta que estoy a la puerta y voy a llamar: y, si alguno oye mi voz y me abre, entraré en su casa y cenaremos juntos los dos» (Ap 3, 20). 37 CONFERENCIA EPISCOPAL DE CHILE, En camino al bicentenario. En el mes de la patria 2004, nº 10, 7. 526 Alberto Toutin, ss.cc. Resumen: En un contexto de crisis de transmisión de la cultura y de la fe cristiana de una generación a otra se hace urgente preguntarse por la dinámica que defi ne a la Tradición de la Iglesia y su articulación dialéctica con las tradiciones que la alimentan y expresan a los largo de la historia. Para ello, estudiamos dicha articulación en la obra del teólogo francés Yves-Marie Congar. Esta lectura la hacemos en diálogo con el presente de nuestra cultura e Iglesia para discernir allí las oportunidades, resisten- cias y desafíos que se ofrecen tanto para la comprensión como para la comunicación de la Tradición eclesial. Palabras clave: Crisis de la transmisión de la fe, Tradición y tradiciones, Yves-Marie Congar, proposición de la fe. Abstract: In a context of a crisis of transmission of culture and the Christian faith from one generation to the next, it becomes urgent to question the dynamic that defi nes the Church Tradition and its dialectic articulation with the traditions that nourish and express it throughout history. To do this, we studied this articulation in the work of the French theologian Yves-Marie Congar. We did this reading in relation to the present state of our culture and Church to discern there the oppor- tunities, strengths and challenges that are offered both for the understanding of and communication of the Ecclesiastical Tradition. Keywords: faith transmission crisis, Tradition and traditions, Yves-Marie Congar, Proposition of faith. work_5dtsgouud5dstbzabs5e3vmc7m ---- Egocentric Perspective: Depicting the Body from Its Own Point of View 1 Egocentric Perspective: Depicting the Body from Its Own Point of View Robert Pepperell (artist), Cardiff School of Art & Design, Cardiff CF5 2YB, U.K. Email: rpepperell@cardiffmet.ac.uk. © ISAST Abstract We are almost always visible to ourselves. Depending on how you are seated, reclining or standing you will see parts of your nose, legs, hands, arms, shoulders or trunk from your own point of view. Yet these everyday features of our visual world are rarely depicted and hardly ever in a way that accords with our perceptual experience. In this paper the author considers why we tend to ignore this “egocentric perspective” and how it can be represented. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin is regarded as one of the greatest observational painters in western art. Yet when he made his self-portrait in pastel of 1771 he omitted his view of his nose and the frames of his thick-rimmed pince-nez, even though these would have been features of his visual field [1]. An expert reviewing an ultra-wide-angle fisheye lens warns his readers against inadvertently photographing their own hands and feet, and describes the contortions needed to avoid doing so [2]. Referring to a diagram in a textbook, its author says: “It illustrates the visual field and shows the roughly triangular region of binocular overlap within which both eyes receive input. The reason there is not more overlap is that the nose blocks the view” [3]. As these examples show, we prefer to exclude what we see of our bodies when representing the visual world. Whether seen in direct vision or obliquely in the periphery, the egocentric perspective, which is distinguished from the view we have of ourselves in reflections or photographs, is the one constant feature of our visual experience. On those rare occasions when it is depicted in visual media the results, I will argue, lack fidelity to the perceptual structure of the experience. As an artist I have experimented with representing the egocentric perspective and have become aware through doing so of its widespread neglect and frequent misrepresentation. Some possible reasons for this will be discussed here, as will some examples of egocentric depictions in art and visual media. I will also outline my own attempts to capture visual experience more faithfully. The Invisible Self Why do we habitually omit the view we have of our own bodies from representations of the visual world? According to the art historian LeRoy McDermott, it was not always so. Among the earliest forms of art are the so-called Venus figurines of the Upper Paleolithic period, made between around 10,000 and 30,000 years ago. For reasons that are still not clear, the figurines often lack feet or heads and have oddly proportioned anatomies. McDermott argues the characteristic features of these clay or stone figures can be explained if we recognize them as views of the body seen subjectively from the egocentric perspective — a proposal he calls the “autogenous hypothesis” [4]. He believes objects like the Venus of Willendorf represent what a pregnant woman would see looking down at her own body. McDermott supplies Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 mailto:rpepperell@cardiffmet.ac.uk 2 photographs of figurines shot from the point of view of the absent heads that appear remarkably similar to those of modern women’s pregnant bodies seen from their own perspective. Most commentators have failed to accept this thesis, despite recognizing its originality and welcoming the accent it gives to women’s self-determination in early human societies. But McDermott attributes some of this resistance to our presumption that such artifacts are to be viewed from a disembodied third-person perspective, and this betrays a powerful cultural bias — evident in science as much as anything else — that may not have applied when they were made. At some point in human development, he suggests, images based on the appearance of others supplanted those based on the embodied view of the self, resulting in the disappearance of the first person perspective from cultural life. If these figurines indeed represent what McDermott claims they would be the first of their kind in recorded history and almost the last. We find almost no explicit portrayals of the egocentric perspective until the late nineteenth century. There are several possible reasons for our long standing neglect of the egocentric perspective: perhaps we become desensitized to the view of our own bodies through overfamiliarity, or perhaps it is the price of our ability to interact effectively with the world and with other people. Here we consider two possible causes for this neglect. First, it reflects a widespread and long held delusion that we are separate from the world around us; as a consequence, representing the world does not necessitate representing the self. Second, that we have habitually privileged what is focus over what is indistinct when representing what we see. On the basis of the way space is organized in pre-Renaissance pictures it is sometimes claimed artists of that period did not suffer the delusion they were separate from the world [5]. But even if this were true, we find no images of the egocentric perspective in art of that time. It is the intellectual climate of the European Renaissance, and the logic of geometrical perspective in particular, that take dubious credit for reinforcing our sense of exclusion from the world. Jonathan Crary writes: “Classical representation, from Alberti onward, defines itself by the fundamental subtraction of the body from the constitution of a visual field and the related intellectual distinction between observer and object” [6]. Hailed as a method for accurately re-presenting to the eye what it would see in reality, the application of geometrical perspective necessitated the subtraction of the viewer’s self (and that of the artist) because any scene depicted was confined within a rectangular aperture — Leon Battista Alberti’s eponymous window [7]. According to Robert Romanyshyn: “The condition of the window implies a boundary between the perceiver and the perceived…in addition to the separation between perceiver and world, the condition of the window also initiates an eclipse of the body” [8]. Artists, and later photographers and cinematographers, recorded only the central or foveal part of the visual field visible through the notional window, excluding the wider peripheral area, that indistinct part of vision in which the viewer (or artist) would normally see his or her own body [9]. This imaginary window frame has so fundamentally conditioned the way reality is represented in the European tradition — including in our technology — we are oblivious to the restrictions it imposes [10]. Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 3 Despite excluding the majority of the visual field we happily accept the results as realistic. In one of the great essays on perspective, the art historian Erwin Panofsky noted: “Perspective creates distance between human beings and things […]; but then in turn it abolishes this distance by, in a sense, drawing this world of things, an autonomous world confronting the individual, into the eye” [11]. Fig 1. Ernst Mach’s illustration of the ego’s point of view, as included in his book The Analysis of Sensations (1897). Mach was trying to depict the continuity between his “visual ego,” his body and the world around him. (Source: Internet Archive, scanned copy of The Analysis of Sensations, p. 19) Probably the first image we have that explicitly depicts the egocentric perspective, showing the natural bounds of vision rather than the artificial window of convention, is the woodcut included by the scientist-philosopher Ernst Mach in Analysis of Sensation (Fig. 1). Mach argued that the physical world is not a separate domain from the self. His woodcut is designed to illustrate the integration between the observing ego, the human body and worldly bodies. He says: “The ego can be so extended as ultimately to embrace the entire world. The ego is not sharply marked off, its limits are very indefinite and arbitrarily displaceable” [12]. The drawing reminds us, as Mach must have intended it to remind his nineteenth century readers, that the self-view is constitutive of our entire world-view. But the fact that even some 130 years after its first publication we have so few images of this kind demonstrates continuing ignorance of this perspective. Like Mach, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty aimed to repair the rupture between mind and body, self and world, often attributed to the Cartesian tradition Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 4 within philosophy. In Phenomenology of Perception, he accounts for the invisible self by arguing the body has a different status from other entities in the world. For Merleau-Ponty the way I apprehend my body means it is not an object in the ordinary sense. I cannot turn away from it, or look at it from another perspective, as I can with anything else; even in a mirror I see only a simulacrum. My body is not something I can see like a church through a window, but is the very precondition of being able to see anything at all. He says: “I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, examine them, walk around them, but my body itself is a thing which I do not observe” [13]. When we experience external objects in the world what we are actually experiencing is our “ever present and anterior” bodily processes in the act of perceiving. In short, we cannot see what is seeing [14]. The psychologist James Gibson, like Mach and Merleau-Ponty, resisted the assumed separation between self and world. Gibson suggests we erroneously confine the self to one side of a conceptual barrier, beyond which the world in view lies. According to his “ecological” theory of perception, the appearance of the world is conditional on, and indeed partly constituted by, the very self we habitually overlook: Perceiving the environment includes the ego as part of the total process. In order to localize any object there must be a point of reference. An impression of “there” implies an impression of “here,” and neither could exist without the other [15]. Mach’s egocentric illustration was an important reference for Gibson. He reproduced it in his treatise on visual perception in 1950 and provided an updated version of his own, which he titled “The Modern Visual Ego” [16]. Gibson’s version is designed to emphasize that the visual field is enclosed by an elliptical boundary, including facial features such as the nose and the eyebrows, which he notes are normally seen in the peripheral part of the visual field [17]. This is one way in which Mach’s original woodcut and Gibson’s version are somewhat misleading as depictions of actual visual experience; both authors (or their illustrators) have rendered objects in the peripheral field quite distinctly. Depictions of the Egocentric Perspective in Art and Visual Media Where depictions of the egocentric perspective do occur in art and in visual media they generally fail to capture its full perceptual structure. This is usually because they conform to the conventions of geometrical perspective by excluding the peripheral visual field, which is where of the self-viewed body is mostly visible. On the rare occasions when the peripheral field is included, its indistinctness and its particular spatial structure are not, as I will show below. But these omissions do not necessarily detract from the aesthetic merit of artworks that portray the self-body view; artists seldom have the simulation of vision as their only goal. A brief and selective history of the egocentric perspective in art reveals a variety of intentions behind artists’ explorations of the space between themselves and the world that was for so long obscured by geometrical perspective’s window. The art historian Karl Clausberg identifies a seam of thought running through 19th- century German philosophy and science that manifests itself in the paintings of Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 5 Adolph Menzel. Clausberg cites a series of drawings and paintings that Menzel made of his own body as symptoms of a more widespread interest in what German philosophers then called the “self-observation ‘I’,” and which Clausberg believes Mach explicitly illustrated in his woodcut [18]. Menzel’s tightly composed observations of his own hands and feet, which can be seen today in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin are, he argues, examples of a rarely acknowledged tendency in the history of art in which artists — from Boccaccio and Rembrandt to Kandinsky and Magritte — rendered the view from the “embodied eye,” which they signaled by the presence of nose-like borders, binocular compositions, or indeterminate fringing [19]. Compared to the Mach drawing, however, the art historical examples he cites are at best suggestive representations of the egocentric perspective. By the early 20th century we begin to find more overt depictions. Pierre Bonnard’s Large Blue Nude of 1924 [20] seems to include his own leg in the lower left corner, while there are several pen and ink drawings of nudes made by Henri Matisse in the late 1930s where his hand appears at the bottom of the page captured in the act of drawing itself — an echo of the self-reflexive pencil in the Mach woodcut. Matisse also partially rendered his own point of view in Goldfish and Palette of 1914 [21] which features his hand holding a palette. For Bonnard the inclusion of his self-view would have contributed to the sense of domestic intimacy he sought to portray in his interiors, while for Matisse it was a natural outcome of his direct approach to recording his visual world. During the 1930s and 40s, the little-known Welsh painter Evan Walters undertook a series of novel experiments in which he aimed to document what he called “total vision” by portraying phenomena such as double vision and peripheral vision, sometimes including his own nose in profile and extreme close-ups of his face seen in a mirror [22]. Coincidentally a contemporary, the American painter Harold Haydon, depicted very similar perceptual phenomena although there appears to have been no connection between them [23]. John Bratby was known at the peak of his fame in the 1950s as one of the “Kitchen Sink” painters, a British school noted for images of mundane scenes and everyday objects. In a letter to a friend Bratby describes his excitement at discovering the pictorial device of painting his own hands in the act of painting, and how it reinvigorated his work at the time [24]. An example is shown in Fig. 2. Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 6 Fig. 2. Small Window with Hands by John Bratby, Oil on board, 60.9 x 60.9 cm, c. 1959, Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead; Wirral Museums Service; gift of Contemporary Art Society 1965. A rare example of an artist painting the egocentric perspective. The New York-based painter Joan Semmel has portrayed naked or partially clothed figures as seen from the self-view, often her own, as in Me Without Mirrors (1974) [25]. Semmel’s work gives primacy to the female first-person perspective to counter to the predominance of images depicting the woman’s body from the third person, often associated with the “objectifying” male point of view. Also working today in New York are the twin brothers Ryan and Trevor Oakes, who have developed novel ways of transcribing the totality of visual space, including the nose, using a labour intensive method of plotting the binocular visual field [26]. For artists, depicting the first person view of the body may reflect philosophical, aesthetic or poetic concerns, or a fascination with the visual world and how to describe it. Although few addressed the problem of how to depict the egocentric perspective systematically, that they have done so at all is remarkable given the lack Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 7 of historical precedent. With the possible exception of some prehistoric relics, these seem to be among the few examples of their kind in the history of image making, which is even more remarkable given the continuous presence of the self-view in visual experience. Unlike in art, where a variety of motivations for depicting the egocentric perspective can be found, in visual media it tends to have one main purpose: to persuade the audience to identify with character being portrayed. We are familiar with the generic “point of view” shot in cinema and TV, which represents the position a character occupies within a scene, or devices like the “binocular shot” which emulate the view through binoculars, periscopes or gun sights. Of more interest here, though, is a technique in which filmmakers or computer game designers try to simulate a subjective viewpoint using the self-body perspective. There are a number of notable cinematic examples, including the noire detective mystery Lady in the Lake [27] in which the protagonist’s hands, legs, shadow and reflection feature prominently in an attempt to convince the audience they are seeing what he sees. The movie’s trailer proclaims: “The most thrilling of all mysteries, and you play the starring role.” Being John Malkovich aims for a similar effect by inviting its audience into the head of the eponymous character — the poster strap line asked: “Ever wanted to be someone else?” — but achieves it with greater sophistication [28]. It departs from the convention of the rectangular window frame, for example, by using a softened elliptical vignette to indicate the shape of the visual field when showing the first person perspective (as Gibson had in his own version of Mach’s drawing). Enter the Void [29] was inspired in part by the director’s viewing of Lady in the Lake under the influence of magic mushrooms. Director Gaspar Noé wanted the audience to share the visual experience of a drug taker from the first person point of view, resulting in a claustrophobic and hallucinogenic atmosphere that permeates the movie [30]. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [31] used a number of ingenious props and camera techniques to convey the perceptual experience of the main character, a man completely paralyzed, apart from his left eye. The screenwriter, Ronald Harwood, said he had the idea to turn the main character into the camera, “and the camera should blink, so it would take the audience into his experience of locked-in syndrome” [32]. Mirror’s Edge represents a genre of video game that merge the subjective view of the game player with the character being played, in this case a female “Runner” called Faith who is being hunted through a futuristic cityscape. The producers claim: “With a never before seen sense of movement and perspective, you will be drawn into Faith's world” [33]. The egocentric perspective is usually depicted in visual media by locating a camera (real or virtual) in place of the head [34]. But cameras do not capture the totality of human vision, not least because they are effectively geometrical perspective devices that suffer the limitations noted above, that is, they impose a window on visual space that truncates the peripheral field where much of the self-viewed body is seen. Consequently, such depictions present only a limited portion of self-view, generally excluding the nose or objects in close proximity to the face, such as spectacles or hat brims. Moreover, they misrepresent the relative size of objects compared to how they are actually seen, and hence the perceived spatial structure of the scene. Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 8 A New Method of Depicting the Egocentric Perspective Depicting the egocentric perspective in a way that corresponds to the structure of visual experience is challenging. Currently there is no technology that can capture the entire area of the binocular visual field in a way that appears naturalistic and is practical to display. The full visual field extends some 180º horizontally and 130º vertically when the eyes are fixating straight ahead [35]. Most cameras and imaging systems are limited to capturing much narrower fields of view; a standard 50 mm lens on a full frame camera, for example, will record around 40º horizontal degrees. Fisheye lenses and panoramic stitching techniques can be used to capture wider angles, but these introduce either unnatural “barrel” distortions or highly elongated aspect ratios. I have been investigating ways of depicting the full scope of the visual field that correspond as closely as possible to how it is subjectively perceived [36]. My method is to fixate on a point in visual space and plot the position of all visible objects relative to that point. I begin by noting the extreme boundaries of the periphery, which determine the scope of the visual space to be depicted, and marking these on an elliptical boundary, similar to the one used by Gibson, which represents the edge of the visual field. I then mark the location of the fixation point within that boundary, which is roughly in the center. While maintaining fixation, I map the size and position of all the objects in the scene relative to that point. Part of the challenge in this process was learning to draw the indistinct visual space lying outside fixation. There is a natural tendency to look at objects directly when drawing them in order to grasp them clearly. But this had to be resisted, as changing the direction of gaze creates a new and different visual field from the one being drawn. I also became aware that the size of objects varied considerably depending on where they appeared in the visual field. Objects seemed bigger when observed directly, and smaller when seen peripherally. It was hard to suppress the knowledge that objects do not grow as we look at them or shrink when we look away, but it was necessary to do so in order to record the scene as it appeared and not as I knew it to be [37]. Equally problematic was the issue of how to depict the relative indistinctness of the peripheral field. Again, we know objects do not become in themselves less coherent when we look away, but achieving perceptual fidelity required some means of rendering them so. Various methods, including blurring, distressing, deforming, and scrambling were tried but none seemed to match the peculiar optical properties of objects seen peripherally. In the end what seemed to matter most was that the viewer of the picture could discriminate between the clear central area of fixation and the indistinct periphery, irrespective of what method was used to differentiate them. Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 9 Fig. 3. Self-portrait (after Mach), 2012, oil on formed canvas, 100cm x 150cm. This painting shows the view from my left eye looking at my feet and tries to capture as accurately as possible the subjective appearance of the visual space. (© Robert Pepperell 2012) Fig. 3 shows a painting made according to the principles described above based on the view from the left eye depicted by Mach. The objects around the point of fixation, my feet, are rendered with increasing indistinctness towards the periphery, although the effect is less pronounced in this reproduction due to downsizing. In addition, the total volume of space captured, covering the entire monocular visual field, is much greater that would be captured using a conventional camera fitted with a rectilinear lens, as can be seen by comparison with Fig. 4, which is shot from the same position and is typical of the depictions of the self-view found in visual media. Moreover, the spatial structure is different from that in a photograph. Fig. 5 shows a view of the same space taken with a fisheye lens (8 mm). Besides the obvious omission of the nose in the photograph, the fisheye lens not only produces more warping, it also changes the size of objects compared to how they are actually experienced, as can be seen when Figs. 3 and 5 are compared. The feet in the painting appear much larger relative to the total picture area and objects in the periphery, such as the iPad and the sofa on the left, are significantly compressed. Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 1 0 Fig. 4. A photograph taken with a 50 mm lens on a full-frame camera showing the view of my feet as seen from the same position as the painting in Figure 3. Note the cropping of the peripheral area of the visual field and the lack of differentiation between the fixation point and the periphery in terms of distinctness. This is typical of the kind of self-view found in visual media. (© Robert Pepperell 2014) Current imaging technologies based on geometrical perspective fail to capture the structure of visual experience, as can be seen by a comparing a directly observed painting with photographs of the same viewpoint. This suggests the need for a new generation of imaging devices that can fully accommodate the scope of human vision. Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 11 Fig. 5. A view of the same scene depicted in Fig. 3 taken from the same position with an 8 mm fisheye lens and showing the same visual space. While the total physical space shown is similar the size of objects, such as the iPad and feet, are very different, and there is greater warp distortion. (© Robert Pepperell 2014) Conclusion In our culture the egocentric perspective is largely overlooked and rarely depicted. This may be in part due to our sense of estrangement from the world and the legacy of geometrical perspective, which continues to dominate imaging technology and shape our representations of visual reality. Artists have had varied and complex motives for depicting the self-view. But makers of visual media have consistently expressed the desire to simulate first person visual experience in order to replicate a character’s point of view [38]. Current methods of doing this based on camera technology, however, lack fidelity to the experience they purport to represent. Representing visual experience more convincingly will mean abandoning geometrical perspective-based devices and developing new forms of capture, synthesis and display that can accommodate the full structure of the visual field, including the self-perceived body. References and Notes 1. Collection of Musée du Louvre, Paris. 2. Camera Labs, 2 May 2014: www.cameralabs.com/reviews/Canon_EF_8- 15mm_f4L_Fisheye_USM. Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 http://www.cameralabs.com/reviews/Canon_EF_8-15mm_f4L_Fisheye_USM http://www.cameralabs.com/reviews/Canon_EF_8-15mm_f4L_Fisheye_USM 1 2 3. Colin Ware, Information Visualization (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004), p. 52. 4. LeRoy McDermott. “Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines,” Current Anthropology 37:2 (1996) pp. 227-275. 5. According to William Dunning, in Changing Images of Pictorial Space (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991), Medieval artists felt themselves part of pictorial space, unlike their Renaissance successors who “stood outside the world they represented” (p.13). 6. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999), p. 220. 7. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (ed. Cecil Grayson, (London: Penguin, 1972) p. 54. 8. Robert Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptom & Dream (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 42. Emphasis in original. 9. The way light sensitive rod and cone cells are distributed on the retina in the eye means only a small part of the visual field, where light is focused on the fovea, detects sharp detail. Beyond this acuity drops off rapidly, and objects become less distinct and harder to recognize. As Dunning notes: “Renaissance perspective appears to mimic only foveal vision, and foveal vision is a minute percentage of retinal vision.” See [5] p. 36. 10. In The Virtual Window from Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2006) Anne Friedberg notes the dominance of the window metaphor throughout the history of visual media and argues Alberti’s window is better understood a virtual viewing frame rather than a transparent aperture through which a portion of reality is seen (p. 30). 11. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, tr. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 67. 12. Ernst Mach, Analysis of the Sensations, tr. C. M. Williams (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1897), p. 16. 13. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 104. 14. See [13] p. 106. 15. James Jerome Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1950) p. 226. 16. See [15] p. 227. 17. See [15] p. 27. Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 13 18. Karl Clausberg, “Feeling embodied in vision,” in Embodiment and Cognition, (eds.) John Krois, Mats Rodengren, Angela Steidele and Dirk Westerkamp (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007). 19. See [18] pp. 84-86. Clausberg may have overlooked some drawings made around 1493 by the young Albrecht Dürer of his own legs and hands, examples of which are now held by the Courtauld Trust, London and the Albertina Museum, Vienna. 20. Private collection. Bonnard’s Intimacy of 1891 (in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris) almost certainly shows his own hand holding a pipe, resting on his bent leg. 21. Collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York. 22. Evan Walters, “Vision and the Artist,” The Artist, March to April (1940). 23. 2 May 2014: www.haroldhaydon.com. 24. Bratby to Mary Chamot. London, Tate, Tate Gallery Archives, British Artists, PC4.2.2 Tate Catalogue Files: letter (A22295). The device can be seen in works like ‘Painting’ of 1958 (Oil on board, Collection Saatchi Gallery, London). 25. Peter Frank “Joan Semmel” New York Reviews: Art News 74:10 (1975), p. 123. 26. Lawrence Weschler “Double Vision: The Art of Trevor and Ryan Oakes,” Virginia Quarterly Review 85:2 (2009) pp. 124-139. 27. Directed by and starring Robert Montgomery, MGM 1946. 28. Directed by Spike Jonze, Universal 1999. 29. Directed by Gaspar Noé, Wild Bunch 2009. 30. Enter the Void press pack, 2 May 2014: www.enter-the- void.co.uk/press/ENTER_THE_VOID-Production_Notes.pdf. 31. Directed by Julian Schnabel, Pathé 2007. 32. Interview included on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly DVD. 33. Mirror’s Edge site, 2 May 2014: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N1TJP1cxmo. 34. Joanna Quinn’s animated short “Dreams and Desires: Family Ties” (Beryl Productions 2006) offers an amusing perspective on the self-view mediated through a video camera. 35. Hans Strasburger, Ingo Rentschler and Martin Jüttner, “Peripheral vision and pattern recognition: A Review,” Journal of Vision, 11(5):12, (2011) pp. 1-82. Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 http://www.haroldhaydon.com/ http://www.enter-the-void.co.uk/press/ENTER_THE_VOID-Production_Notes.pdf http://www.enter-the-void.co.uk/press/ENTER_THE_VOID-Production_Notes.pdf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N1TJP1cxmo 1 4 36. Robert Pepperell “The Perception of Art and the Science of Perception,” Rogowitz, Thrasyvoulos, & de Ridder (Eds.), Vision and Electronic Imaging XVII, (SPIE 2012). 37. Subsequent studies have shown this effect is replicated in the work of other artists, including John Constable and Paul Cézanne, and that it may be the result of a number of physiological and psychological processes occurring in perception. For a fuller account see Robert Pepperell & Manuela Haertel “Do artists use linear perspective to depict visual space?” Perception, 43 (5) (2014) pp. 395-416. 38. This desire is increasingly catered for by manufacturers of the new generation of virtual reality, gaming and entertainment technologies. See for example the Oculus Rift and Sony Morpheus Project, which promise gamers more immersive experiences. Manuscript received 23 January 2014. Robert Pepperell PhD has published several books, many academic articles and reviews, and exhibited widely. He is currently Professor of Fine Art at Cardiff School of Art & Design, UK, and joint Executive Editor of Art & Perception. Leonardo Just Accepted MS. © ISAST doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01056 work_5opccyjtarb2hhtxlyd4cuccly ---- Painting the Body: Feminist Musings on Visual Autographies Maria Tamboukou, University of East London, UK Abstract In this paper I look at autographical depictions of the body in the work of Mato Ioannidou, a Greek woman artist, who participated in a wider narrative-based project on visual and textual entanglements between life and art. The paper unfolds in three parts: first , I give an overview of Ioannidou’s artwork, making connections with significant events in her life; then I discuss feminist theorizations of embodiment and visual auto/biography; and finally I draw on insights from Spinozist feminist philosophers to discuss the artist’s portrayal of women’s bodies in three cycles of her work. What I argue is that the body becomes a centerpiece in the attempt to perceive connections between life and art through expressionism rather than representation. My painting is all about my life, nothing else. . . . through my paintings I tell my life-story, I write my autobiography. . . . I have often painted raw feelings and emotions before I had even realized what I had been going through. — Mato Ioannidou The extract above comes from a life-history interview with the Greek artist Mato Ioannidou in her studio in Athens in May 2006, part of a wider project with contemporary women artists.1 In preparation for this interview, I had visited Ioannidou’s solo exhibition2 in the Greek island of Syros in the summer of 2005, and I had also meticulously studied exhibition catalogs of her previous work. However, it was actually when I went to her studio for the interview that I had the chance to immerse myself in the rich and colorful world of her paintings across times and places. Ioannidou’s artwork is rich and multifaceted, in terms of both themes and topics as well as the media and materials she is working with,3 but in this paper I will focus on her artistic and aesthetic practices vis-à-vis female bodies. What I argue is that Ioannidou’s paintings are forcefully entangled with autobiographical narratives and create a plane for the female self to emerge as an embodied figure in the web of human and nonhuman relations. The essay unfolds in three parts: first I give an overview of Ioannidou’s artwork, then I discuss feminist theorizations of embodiment in philosophy and visual auto/biography, and finally I make connections between insights from Spinozist feminist philosophers with Ioannidou’s portrayal of women’s bodies in three cycles of her work: Erotics, Women, and Ai-Giorgis (Saint George). Mato Ioannidou: A Self-Portrait of the Artist Mato Ioannidou was born in Athens in 1960 and studied French literature, theater, and painting at the Sorbonne and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris between 1978 and 1985. She then returned to Athens, where she has lived and worked as an independent artist but also as an art teacher in schools and community workshops. Talking about her journey, Ioannidou remembered that she had always wanted to become an artist, but the routes she followed to become one were not quite straightforward. After failing to enter the School of Fine Arts in Athens, she went to Paris, and it was while being absorbed in the literary worlds and the medieval phonetics of the French language that she became inspired to take up painting again. Her first maître was the sculptor Roger Plin,4 about whom she says, “I owe a lot”; when he retired, and after some anxious wanderings, she followed Jean Bertolle’s atelier.5 What drew her to these ateliers was a disciplined approach to what art should be about, which was quite out of tune with the 1980s spirit of experimentation and of 2 “anything goes.” Ioannidou fondly remembered Plin as an art teacher of the old guard, who would show interest in his students but would also be sharply critical of their work. “He would look at our drawings and would say, ‘No, Rodin would never do that, what are you doing?’” Ioannidou admits that such an approach was quite unpopular for many art students, “but for me it was exceptionally rich to be juxtaposed with Rodin. I didn’t know about Camille Claudel then . . .” she commented playfully during the interview.6 Upon her return to Athens, a city she had greatly missed, since she “never got excited with Paris,” Ioannidou set up her studio in a flat near the Acropolis, where she is still based and where the interview was conducted. Her first solo exhibition in 1988 was a collection of seascapes and landscapes as well as interiors and urban scenes painted from the window of her atelier, “in the joy of the Greek light.”7 It was soon after this exhibition that “I fell in love,” and from then on, “I started painting the Erotics,” she told me at the interview.8 When I asked her about whether her life and artwork were intertwined, Ioannidou was bold and adamant, as we have already seen in the interview extract that opened this paper: “My painting is all about my life, nothing else. I have not found another reason to paint. For better or for worse, I can’t do otherwise. I say it as I feel it. If I want to take a distance and theorize it, my life is the prime raison d’être of my painting, but beyond that, every time I experiment with modalities of expression, I unconsciously respond to things of concern that I am not necessarily aware of. . . . My painting is of my times, a response to what is happening around me. . . . I can tell you that through my paintings, I tell my life story, I write my autobiography.” In elaborating on the complex interrelationship between her art and her life, Ioannidou places her lived experiences at the heart of her artistic creativity, adding that her artistic expression preceded her cognitive understanding of complex relations with the world and with others: “First I paint something and it might take months or years to look back and understand how I felt at the time,” she told me at the interview. This reciprocal relation between art and life was expressed in the two cycles of her Erotics, in 1990 and 1995: “The first cycle of the Erotics were landscapes. Figures are still like shadows within spaces.” Ioannidou thus sees her 1990 Erotics exhibition as a continuation of the 1988 landscapes and interiors: “the emergence of the figure is still indiscernible in these oeuvres.” There was a feeling of incompleteness in this first cycle of the Erotics, which is why she went on working with this theme until 1995, when she had the second exhibition on the same theme. In her view, this second exhibition marked the point where “the encounter of bodies, as well as the energy they emitted in space” was exhausted, in her artwork but also in her life, as the turmoil of love came to devour her energy and creativity for a very long period: “I could not touch my brushes and I was not motivated whatsoever to paint.” Ioannidou went through dark times of total disillusionment, not only with her own work and motivation but also with the wider state of things in art at the time: “painting was torturing me and I did not want to have anything to do with it.” Despite her disillusionment, she kept her studio, “which meant something.” It was during these two years of artistic paralysis that she started doing some collage work with torn papers and other materials, which somehow expressed the chaos and fragmentation of her lived experiences, but which were also a sign of her flickering desire to reconstitute some sense of order and orientation: “this is why I have since thought that art took me out of this.” Collage work was thus “the thread” that she took up again, supported by theoretical and auto/biographical readings, mostly artists’ diaries and journals. When this short interim period of collage work ended, Women emerged as the overarching theme of her artwork: “With the Women, my own self-healing started. . . . these were broken women in dark backgrounds, they were essentially like rubber dummies, who could barely live or stand on their feet and they were definitely endangered. . . . I worked with this theme for many years, five maybe, and that’s why the paintings evolve in phases; beyond those who melt away and are in the brink of existence, there were others who were leaping, crying, burning, setting themselves on fire, and in the last period there were the kourotrofoi and the kores, who start having bodily dimensions, take up a bit of space, feed and care for others.” Ioannidou had difficulties in finding gallery space for her Women, although she was reluctant to admit that it might have to do with the theme. What she vividly remembered is that the exhibition had a psychic influence on the spectators: “they were all leaving shaken.” The time of the exhibition was an eventful one in her personal and professional life: apart from immersing herself passionately into painting again, she left her job as an art teacher in a prestigious private school in Athens. She separated from her lover and also founded the Leschi Artistic Workshops, a community art club at the heart of an ethnic minority area in Athens, which took up a lot of her energy, time, and creative work.9 Her next exhibition in 2003, a collection of bazaars and mermaids,10 was largely influenced by the Leschi Artistic Workshops activities and particularly by the street theater performances that she had directed until then. This time it was not just her personal life but the everyday life of her neighborhood that inspired her artwork: “This was an urban area that hosted the Muslim minority from Thrace [northern Greece], and it was like an island at the heart of the city with many children in the streets, not abandoned, but there were no boundaries between the house, the doorstep, and the street, 3 and I somehow felt connected with this neighborhood. . . . It is not that I was not initially scared, but I eventually found it rich. So, as the Muslim people would organize wedding parties in the street and would block the traffic and nobody stopped them and there would be barbecues and life music. . . . I had the idea of staging street theater performances for children.” It was in this colorful context of street theater, collective art workshops, and surrealist group writing that the figure of the Mermaid emerged in Ioannidou’s artwork. As a mythical Greek female figure, the Mermaid cast a spell on her artistic imagination to the point that, she says, “I thought I was the Mermaid.” There were many playful elements in this cycle of work, which blended with images from her childhood, when she would be happy being left alone to play with button boxes and other mundane materials that she would reassemble and experiment with: “I was happy because I had been given beads and I could play with them.” Having seen this exhibition in Syros myself, I asked Ioannidou about the role of texts in this cycle of her work. She told me that apart from objects, she had also been collecting literary and folk stories about the Mermaid, some of which had found a place in her artwork. The autobiographical aspects of her artwork notwithstanding, she had never used her own texts in her work, since this would be very restrictive and would foreclose possibilities for whatever meaning her work might convey: “I am not interested in expressing myself through discourse. . . . I refuse to add textual commentaries on my work; it should speak for itself.” Although refusing to write about her work, Ioannidou was open to dialogic exchanges between her visual art and literary production, specifically poetry. As the Mermaid cycle was coming full circle, the Ai-Giorgis (Saint George) series emerged.11 This artistic idea did not come out of the blue: Ai-Giorgis was the answer to the Mermaid series, this is what I said without knowing why. . . . It was during this time that I happened to listen to a verse from Maria Topali, which excited me, did something to me, it gave birth to images and ideas: I, St. George, shall free the all-beautiful one whom I hold captive in my guts, I, the Dragon.12 I asked Maria Topali, “Who is St. George?” and she told me “Saint George is me” . . . so later in my paintings the all-beautiful one was Saint George. . . .” The Ai-Giorgis series—some pieces of which were also exhibited in London at an exhibition I curated for the women artists who had participated in my project (Tamboukou, “Becomings”)—initiated a cycle of paintings by Ioannidou wherein male, female, monster, and animal bodies are entangled and intertwined. It was through blending colors, lines, symbols, and figures that sex, gender, and human and nonhuman borders were traversed and reconfigured. The artist identified herself with St. George: “I was Ai-Giorgis,” she told me, but also “the all-beautiful one” becomes Ai-Giorgis in Ioannidou’s artistic imagination. It is this explosion of human and nonhuman bodies in the artistic and auto/biographical imagination that I want to consider in the next section. In doing so, I will look at feminist theorizations of the body, and I will explore ways of seeing and understanding embodied depictions in textual and visual autographical narratives. Corporeal Feminisms and Visual Autographies Feminist theorists have long interrogated philosophical representations of human embodiment.13 They have particularly grappled with the problem of how to theorize embodiment, considering the corporeality of the human condition as well as its multiple material, social, cultural, and sexual differences. Visual theorists— feminists among them—have further been concerned with the difficulty of representing the diversity of bodies through language, images, and discourse, and they have radically interrogated representation as a concept.14 The literature is vast and ever growing, but for the purpose of this essay, I will focus on Spinozist feminists and their critique of poststructuralist approaches to the body. Judith Butler’s work, and particularly her argument that bodies are always already effects of discursive formations, was pathbreaking in interrogating the sex-gender distinction (Butler, Bodies that matter). While undoing this distinction, however, Butler’s work intensified the matter-representation dichotomy, as Claire Colebrook has argued (“From” 77). In Colebrook’s analysis, it was the Australian philosophers Genevieve Lloyd, Moira Gatens, and Elizabeth Grosz who used corporeality “as a means of deconstructing [the] sameness/difference opposition” (76), mostly influenced by Spinoza and Deleuze.”15 Gatens’s work has been highly influential in the field of corporeal feminisms, and her notion of “imaginary bodies” has inspired new ways of interrogating discourses around and about the body. In explicating her use of the notion, Gatens has clarified that “an imaginary body is not simply a product of subjective imagination, fantasy or folklore” (Imaginary viii). It is rather used to denote “the (often 4 unconscious) imaginaries of a specific culture: those ready-made images and symbols through which we make sense of social bodies” (viii). Gatens’s idea of “imaginary bodies,” therefore, has been at the heart of how I have tried to understand artistic depictions of the female body in Ioannidou’s paintings. Here, I have been particularly captivated by Gatens’s strong Spinozistic influences in how she understands bodies, imagination, and expression: “Drawing upon Deleuze’s readings of Spinoza, I have used Spinoza’s notion of imagination in order to develop a notion of embodiment that posits multiple and historically specific social imaginaries” (Gatens, Imaginary x). What has also drawn Gatens to Spinoza is his take on imagination and his insistence to keep it as an important component of the philosophical analysis, succinctly encapsulated in the first proposition of the fourth part of the Ethics: “Nothing positive which a false idea has is removed by the presence of the true insofar as it is true” (E IVP1).16 As Gatens has noted, Spinozistic approaches to the theorization of the body have been largely neglected in Anglo-American philosophy, although there has recently been an important wave of thinkers who have turned to Spinoza’s ideas and writings for inspiration in the area of bodies, body politics, and beyond.17 Although biology and natural sciences have radically changed and advanced since Spinoza’s times, his monistic philosophy has opened up ways to transcend dualisms that have dominated social and political thought in modernity, the mind-body distinction being one of them. As Gatens succinctly puts it, “for Spinoza the body is not part of passive nature ruled over by an active mind but rather the body is the ground of human action” (Imaginary 57). Since “the mind is the idea of the body”18 in Spinoza’s universe, there is an ongoing body-mind interaction, a process through which neither the body nor the mind can be frozen or stabilized as substances; they are rather becomings in a neverending process of transformation. Lloyd has responded to Spinoza’s proposition, arguing that “the body is not the underlying cause of the mind’s awareness and knowledge, but rather the mind’s object—what it knows. And the mind knows itself only through reflection on its ideas of body. Its nature is to be the idea of a particular body” (“Woman” 20). It is through this mind-body assemblage that reason is not a force that submits the body to the orders and control of the mind. As Sarah Donovan has noted, “the mind is constituted by the affirmation of the actual existence of the body, and reason is active and embodied, precisely because it is the affirmation of a particular bodily existence” (179). Perceived beyond the mind-body dichotomy, reason thus emerges in its splendid materiality and situatedness. Once we have moved beyond the mind-body split and we have established “that the mind and the body are one and the same thing [and] that the order of actions and passions of the mind is, by nature, at one with the order of actions and passions of the mind” (E IIIP2S), then we can understand Spinoza’s beautiful scholium in the third part of the Ethics that “no one has yet determined what the body can do” (E IIIP2S). Deleuze has particularly drawn on this passage to argue that this scholium is Spinoza’s “cry” about what ethics should be about: “The point of view of an ethics is: of what are you capable, what can you do? Hence a return to this sort of cry of Spinoza’s: what can a body do? We never know in advance what a body can do. We never know how we’re organized and how the modes of existence are enveloped in somebody” (“Cours”). In Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s thought as expressionism in philosophy, the structure (fabrica) of a body and its potential for action cannot be separated: “what a body can do corresponds to the nature and limits of its capacity to be affected” (Expressionism 218). It is within this Spinozist-Deleuzian ontology that the body is not a ground, a being, or a substance but a modality of expression. As Lloyd has commented, we can grasp the notion of “expression” in Deleuze through the metaphors of the mirror and the seed: “Spinoza’s attributes are mirrors, each expressing in its own way the essence of substances. But what is ‘expressed’ is also enveloped in the expression, like the tree in the seed” (Spinoza 31). This idea of expressionism in philosophy— and particularly its readings in corporeal feminisms—has been catalytic in the way I have seen Ioannidou’s autographical depictions of the body, as I will discuss in the next section. But how is the body seen in the light of feminist approaches to visual autographies? In using the notion of “autography,” I have drawn on Domna Stanton’s important work, The Female Autograph, wherein she has bracketed “bio,” that is life, from autobiographical theorizing. She did that not to deny that there is a “real” life out there but to foreground the problematic relationship between lived experiences and their representation, be it textual or visual. Stanton’s insights have opened a line of feminist theorization of the autographical subject, which I have traced, followed, and indeed bended in my own work with textual and visual narratives of the female self.19 How we see, sense, interpret, and textualize art and how we bring together texts and images are pertinent questions around which a rich body of literature and a range of quite different approaches has evolved.20 In thus exploring the body in the context of visual autographies, I have deployed a mode of seeing, very much drawing on Deleuze’s take on paintings developed in his work on Bacon and in his coauthored text with Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Tamboukou, “Beyond”). There are two main themes that I have 5 found particularly interesting for my own experiment in seeing: the concept of “faciality” and the problem of “painting forces.” Ronald Bogue has pithily noted that Deleuze sees the human face “as an important constituent of every social configuration of language practices and power relations” (5). Deleuze has theorized the task of painting as “the attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible” (Francis 56). “Dismantling the face” and “capturing forces” have therefore become central axes in my analytical strategies of Ioannidou’s autographical paintings. While working in the fold of life and art, however, I have always been aware of the problem that Griselda Pollock has so succinctly identified and criticized, namely the auto/biographical lens that women artists’ work has often been viewed through, as opposed to “the universal principles” that male artists’ work is often assumed to address even when their work is discussed in relation to their life (Differencing 106). In tackling the problem of what I have called the “autobiographication” of women’s art (Tamboukou, In the Fold 9), it is not the “bio” but rather Ioannidou’s art as an autographic practice that I have focused on—that is, the multiplicity of ways she constitutes and indeed makes sense of herself as an artist through her art. As beautifully expressed in her interview, through painting she was expressing affects, emotions, and feelings, well before she had become aware of them. In this context, it is not Ioannidou’s “real life” events that I have been interested in, then, but “the logic of sense” (Deleuze, Logic) and indeed “the logic of sensation” (Deleuze, Francis) that allow autographical images and embodied figures to emerge from her paintings as “two sides of a certain folding” (Colebrook, “Grammar” 128), the folding between life and art. Pointing to the relation between philosophy and art in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, Colebrook has noted that “whereas philosophers create concepts that lead thought to the plane of pure difference from which intensities emerge, artists present us with those intensities” (Understanding 176). What I therefore argue is that Ioannidou’s paintings create planes of intensities for singularities to emerge and forces to be released. In charting these intensities and forces, I have drawn upon her artwork as well as her life story to create an assemblage of visual and textual images of embodiment. It is thus to Ioannidou’s artwork that I now turn, particularly focusing on her pictorial approaches to the body in three cycles of her work, The Erotics, Women, and Ai-Giorgis (Saint George). Painting What a Body Can Do Although as we have seen in the first section, Ioannidou locates the emergence of the erotics theme in the landscapes and interiors she painted upon her return to Athens in 1985, bodies emerge in her paintings through her first cycle of the Erotics, created between 1987 and 1990. Her first exhibition in 1990 was a continuation of her landscapes series and comprised small-scale paintings, where body figures are indiscernible and entangled, saturated by mostly red, blue, and greenish backgrounds.21 The artist was still uncertain about the role of these figures in her paintings, and so she went on with the Erotics series until 1995, the date of her second exhibition. Her colors became darker in this second series, with mostly brown and grey hues; the paintings became bigger, while the bodies got even more entangled and indiscernible, gradually losing their sex and gender markers that were more readily identified in the first series. This second series is stronger in painting bodies that emit energy and intensities of pleasure and pain.22 It was the possibility of bodies to affect and to be affected that the artist was interested in, “the ferment of bodies,” as she put it in her interview. Figure 1: Erotics, oil on canvas 100x114 “I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes and bodies,” wrote Spinoza in the third part of the Ethics (E, III). As Deleuze has pointed out, Spinoza defines beings “by their capacity for being affected by the affections of which they are capable, the excitations to which they react, those by which they are unaffected, and those which exceed their capacity and make them ill or cause them to die” (Spinoza 127). The more bodies become aware of their capacity to act the more joyful they become. Joy (laetitia) in Spinoza’s philosophy is a primary affect, tightly 6 interwoven with the crucial concept of conatus, the desire to persevere in our existence, as the essence of all beings—humans and nonhumans. Sadness (tristia) comes with the gradual realization that we lose the power to affect and be affected, and this capacity to act rather than be acted on “is an expression of one’s freedom, power, virtue or conatus,” Gatens has pithily noted (“Politics” 199). Thus bodies do not act in isolation; their power to act, to affect, and to be affected is always relational. It is in this light that embodiment in Spinoza’s thought is not about individual bodies but about “their total milieu” (Gatens, “Politics” 201). It is precisely the “total milieu” of embodied encounters that Ioannidou’s Erotics forcefully express, visualizing the “lines, planes and bodies” that Spinoza refers to, in defining “human actions and appetites,” as we have seen above. In painting lines, planes, and bodies, Ioannidou’s artistic practices dismantle the faces of the lovers, rendering them indiscernible and insignificant. It is the encounter of the bodies, their movement in space, and the energy they emit that the artist is interested in as she tries to make sense of Eros’s effects upon her own constitution as a woman in love: “the question for my art has always been how you can freeze in a pictorial image the sensation of some boiling material, which is most probably me.” I was particularly attracted to Ioannidou’s idea of creating images of Eros as an assemblage of corporeal forces. As I have argued elsewhere in my work, love is often conceptualized as passion in philosophical histories, while “women in love” is a topic often invoking passivity and submission or hysteria and madness (Tamboukou, Nomadic). Ioannidou’s Erotics visualize the embodied link between Eros, desire, and movement and bring the body at the heart of visually capturing love as force. But, as Deleuze has commented above on Spinoza’s ontology, there are forces that exceed the capacity of bodies and may “make them ill or cause them to die.” It is such a destructive period that Ioannidou went through in her life and work, temporarily defeated by the erotic forces she had celebrated in her paintings: “this great love almost destroyed me . . . and I started doubting the whole idea of painting, as a mode of expression.” It is after this dark period that Women emerged as a forceful topic in her art, as we have already seen in the first section. Painting became for Ioannidou a mode of experimentation: it was through colors, lines, and embodied planes that she expressed forces of “becoming other.” There are several striking motifs in this autographical series of female body paintings that I want to discuss in the light of Spinoza’s philosophical insights around the unpredictability of “what a body can do”: 1) bodies that fold and unfold, thus blurring distinctions between inner and outer boundaries; 2) bodies that hang in space with no orientation or association; 3) bodies that move and dance anxiously, leaping or falling; 4) body lines that become curves at the end of the cycle; and 5) embodied encounters in caring relations that put forward the figure of the wet nurse—not the mother.23 As Susan Langer has shown, “motifs are organized devices that give the artist’s imagination a start. . . . they guide it forward and guide its progress” (Feeling 69). Figure 2: Women-Mato Ioannidou, acrylic on paper, 55x75, 1996 Deleuze has used Leibniz’s concept of “the fold” to trace connections between spaces and bodies: the world folds into the self in different speeds and on a variety of levels and intensities, affecting the ways we live, relate to other bodies, and make sense of our worldliness (Deleuze, Fold). At the same time, however, we keep folding out into the world, as Foucault in his later work argued, acting upon received knowledge, discourses, and practices and thus molding ourselves as subjects through the deployment of “technologies of the self” (Foucault, “Technologies of the Self”). Elspeth Probyn has particularly pointed to the crucial concept of “the fold” in both Foucault’s and Deleuze’s analyses, foregrounding the very constitution of subjectivity as an incessant process of folding and unfolding: “The act of pleating or folding (‘la pliure’) is thus the doubling-up, the refolding, the bending-onto-itself of the line of the outside in order to constitute the inside/outside—the modes of the self” (129). In this light, the artist’s erotic experiences fold into her body, activating a series of movements, thoughts, affects, and eventually pictorial practices that render embodied forces visible through processes of symbolic transformation. This was most influentially theorized by Langer, who took symbols as the expression of 7 relations between material components and entities. Symbols are always material, she argued, looking closely at the minutiae, processes, and details of their transformation into words, propositions, and artwork (Philosophy 34). In this context, bodies hanging in space are pictorial symbols of the artist’s feelings of creative paralysis, of having lost the desire to paint, of having surrendered herself to the black holes and destructive forces of Eros, as recounted in her interview. “A work of art is often a spontaneous expression of feeling, i.e., a symptom of the artist’s state of mind,” Langer has noted (Feeling 25). Ioannidou has clearly admitted in her interview that in the beginning of her Women series their bodies expressed this feeling between existence and nonexistence, the ambiguity of art’s and life’s worth in their interrelation. In this sense, her female bodies hanging in space have become “significant forms,” a concept introduced by art critic Clive Bell to denote “lines and colors combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, [that] stir our aesthetic emotions” (8). Bell coined this concept to articulate the idea that even when artworks cannot be linked to a recognizable context, they can still be expressive through their “significant form” as “the one quality common to all works of visual art” (8). Female bodies frozen in different positions of motion and rest thus became “significant forms,” expressing the artist’s feelings but also stirring the viewers’ affects and imagination, although on different levels and in different times. While for Ioannidou Women expressed her emergence from the black hole of non-creativity, viewers would be thrown into the darkness the artist had escaped from; “they would leave shaken by the slaughtered women,” as Ioannidou puts it. It is precisely the artist’s escape that the bodies’ movement and dance would ultimately express: “in art forms are abstracted only to be made clearly apparent, and are freed from their common use only to be put to new uses: to act as symbols, to become expressive of human feeling,” Langer has aptly commented (Feeling 51). Female bodies in Ioannidou’s Women fly down from high above and move through disjointed articulations. Yet in their free-falling movement, they reassemble the artist’s conatus, her will to persevere: while they throw light to what has come to ruin, they also point to new possibilities and potentialities—one can never know what a woman’s body can do. As women’s bodies move against destruction and erasure, they gradually take up space and expand. It is through this ongoing process that “transpositions” occur: lines turn into embodied curves, and the female figure, on the brink of extinction, becomes a source of life and care. In Rosi Braidotti’s theorization, transpositions is a concept drawn from both music and genetics indicating “an intertextual, cross-boundary or transversal transfer, in the sense of a leap from one code, field or axis into another, not merely in the quantitative mode of plural multiplications, but rather in the qualitative sense of complex multiplicities” (Transpositions 5). The artist holds her lines and curves together as a variation on the theme of how it feels to be a woman. There are changes, ruptures, and shifts, but also an overall harmonious pattern, while “central to transpositions is the notion of material embodiment” expressed through a spatial rhythm of forms, intersecting planes, shadows, and lights; in short, the artist’s pictorial techniques. For Henri Matisse, expression is not about “the passion that will burst upon a face or will be asserted by a violent movement” (237), It is rather the overall arrangement of the “virtual space” of the picture that becomes a plane for embodied forces to become visible. As Langer has noted, we should not conflate the space we live and experience with “the virtual space” of the picture, which is created by means of color and “exists for vision alone” (Feeling 72). Interestingly enough, the curved figures are not “mothers” but kourotrofoi, women who feed and nurture in the tradition of neolithic figurines. Although Ioannidou’s late Women are depicted as carers, they do not necessarily become mothers, an essentialist trap that the artist carefully avoids. It was this artistic commitment to “transpositions” that was taken forward to the Ai-Giorgis (Saint George) series. As we have already seen in the first section, the inspiration for these paintings was a verse from a poem wherein Saint George pledges to free “the all-beautiful one” from the dragon. But the figures of the poetess, the artist, Saint George, the dragon, and “the all-beautiful one” are blended in this series of paintings. Replete with embodied encounters between monsters, women, animals, and mythical figures, the Ai-Giorgis series is a cartography of metamorphoses, transpositions, and becomings par excellence. As Braidotti has suggested, becoming is “a collective assemblage of forces that coalesce around commonly shared elements and empower them to grow and to last” (Metamorphoses 135). The Ai-Giorgis series thus becomes an assemblage where humans, animals, and monsters join forces, and in doing so they get entangled in a plane of immanence, where bodily differences become indiscernible. This process of becoming is saturated by desires and affects and thus explodes conventions of visual and textual representations. “The all-beautiful one” becomes Saint George, trying to kill the dragon, who lives within her viscera. The face of “the all-beautiful one” returns powerful in this series. Moreover, the mythical figure of Saint George brings in more religious myths in Ioannidou’s paintings, most notably Eve and the serpent as the visual motif of “the cursed women,” as Ioannidou told me in the interview. In creating this series of paintings, Ioannidou was inspired by a wide 8 range of motifs, colors, and techniques from religious and popular art, radically disrupting their conventions through the female nude and the female face in countless repetitions and renditions.24 The fusion and blending of bodies is strikingly visible in this series, since “the encounter of two bodies bring something more than the two bodies together,” as she told me at the interview. Figure 3: Saint George, Mato Ioannidou, 70x100, oil on canvas, 2007 Given that “the process of becoming is collectively driven,” in Braidotti’s theorization (Metamorphoses 143), it creates its own imaginaries. In this light the Ai-Giorgis series is the artist’s visual imaginary par excellence. It obviously does not express unconscious desires and dreams, as in Salvador Dali’s surrealist paintings, among others. Rather, Ioannidou’s series remains close to the social and cultural practices that created conditions of possibility for the artist to reimagine the female figure within religious and cultural myths that had initially marginalized and excluded her. The body of “the all-beautiful one” is clearly crucial in this process, wherein the imaginary functions as “a symbolic glue between the social and the self, the outside and the subject; the material and the ethereal” (143). Through the human, animal, and monster figures that blend and intra-act in the pictorial space, the artist blurs boundaries between actions and passions, reason and imagination, body and mind. Ai-Giorgis thus visualizes a plane of intensities as a Spinozistic way of living with intensities, and in doing so it increases one’s reasonable understanding and intuitive knowledge and therefore freedom. The depiction of “the all-beautiful one” riding her horse and slaying the dragon in her guts is one of the most powerful symbols of becoming free. The idea of becoming rather than being free comes from Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza: “man is not born free, but becomes free or frees himself” (Spinoza 70). It is this process of becoming free through action that Ioannidou’s artwork has visually expressed. Embodied Cartographies of Feelings In this paper, I have looked at entanglements between life and art in a woman artist’s paintings. Throughout her life-history interview, Ioannidou expressed in no uncertain terms that her art was all about her life, but the autobiographical components of her artistic compositions cannot be subsumed under any regime of representation-based ways of thinking, not in terms of mediating “the real self of the artist.” Her artwork has thus been seen and discussed in the light of expressionism, a line of thinking that Deleuze has traced back to Spinoza’s philosophy. In this light, Ioannidou’s pictorial images have expressed feelings, affects, impressions, and desires as responses to “the real” rather than representations of it. The artist’s response to the concerns, problems, and questions of “real life” in general and her own self in particular has the body at its heart. Indeed, the body has become the central piece of Ioannidou’s artwork. It has created a material unity for the artist’s imaginaries to unfold through lines, colors, planes, and forms expressed in a sequence of cycles in her artwork. Presented and discussed as a series rather than single works of art, Ioannidou’s paintings chart planes of lived experiences in terms of resolving space-time tensions and creating visual rhythms, eventually becoming embodied cartographies of affects, emotions, and feelings. As Langer has noted, it is not pure sensation that creates unity and meaning in human life but rather “sensation remembered and anticipated, feared or sought or even imagined and eschewed . . . by virtue of our thought and imagination we have not only feelings, but a life of feeling” (Feeling 372). It is thus “lives of feelings” that Ioannidou’s paintings express through a variety of pictorial techniques and aesthetic practices that revolve around the female body, perceived within different sociocultural encounters, regimes, and imaginaries. 9 Acknowledgement I want to thank Mato Ioannidou for generously sharing her life story and for giving me permission to include images of her beautiful paintings in this article. Notes 1 For an overview of this project, see Tamboukou, “In the Fold.” 2 The exhibition that I saw in Syros in 2005 had also been curated in Athens in 2003. For an overview, see Ioannidou, “Astra.” 3 For an overview of her work, see Ioannidou, Homepage. 4 For more information on Plin, see Plin. 5 For more information on Bertholle, see Bertholle. 6 Camille Claudel was a French sculptor who worked with Rodin but also had a volatile relationship with him. 7 For an overview of this exhibition, see Ioannidou, “Third.” 8 For an overview of these two exhibitions, see Ioannidou, “Adyto”; and “3.” 9 For an overview of her work, see Ioannidou, “Leschi.” 10 Also, as noted above, see Ioannidou, “Astra.” 11 See Ioannidou, “Adam.” 12 Verse translated by Alexandra Halkias. See Topali. 13 For an overview of this body of literature, see Gonzalez-Arnal et al.; and Price and Shildrick. 14 See, among others, Davis, et al.; Fleetwood; Jones; Mirzoeff; and Rice. 15 For an overview of feminists’ encounters with Deleuze, see Buchanan and Colebrook; and Nigianni and Storr. 16 Abbreviated references to the Ethics follow the conventions introduced by Curley in the introduction to A Spinoza Reader (xxxv). Thus: E=Ethics, P=Proposition, S=Scholium 17 See Gatens, ed. for a comprehensive overview of this field. 18 “[T]he object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body. Or a certain mode of extension which actually exists, and nothing else” (E IIP13). 19 See Gilmore; Perrault; and Tamboukou, “Relational.” 20 See, among others, Brophy and Hladki; Gingell and Roy; Pollock, Vision; Riessman-Kohler; Rose; Smith and Watson; and Tamboukou, “Narrative.” 21 For more information, see “Adyto.” 22 For more information, see “3.” 23 For more information, see “Women.” 24 For more information, see “Adam.” Works Cited Bell, Clive. Art. New York: F. A. Stokes, 1913. Print. Jean Bertholle. Wikipedia, n.d. Web. 8 Feb. 2018. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts. London: Routledge, 2003. Print. Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Print. —. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Print. Brophy, Sarah, and Janice Hladki, eds. Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014. Print. Buchanan, Ian, and Claire Colebrook, eds. Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Print. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Colebrook, Claire. “From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings: The Feminist Philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz and Gatens.” Hypatia 15.2 (2000): 76–93. Print. —. “A Grammar of Becoming: Strategy, Subjectivism and Style.” Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Ed. Elizabeth Grosz. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. 117–40. Print. —. Understanding Deleuze. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Print. Curley, Edwin, ed. and trans. A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works: Benedict de Spinoza. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. Print. Davis, Rocío, et al., eds. Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art: Performing Migration. London: Routledge, 2011. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Zone, 1992. Print. —. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. T. Conley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print. —. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. 1981. London: Continuum, 2003. Print. —. “Cours Vincennes: Ontologie/Ethique, 21 Dec. 1980.” Les Cours de Gille Deleuze. Webdeleuze, 2017. 8 Feb. 2018. —. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. 1969. London: Continuum, 2001. Print. —. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. 1980. London: Athlone, 1988. Print. Donovan, Sarah. “Rereading Irigaray’s Spinoza.” Gatens, ed. 165–87. Fleetwood, Nicole R. Troubling Visions: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Print. Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self”. Technologies of the Self. Eds. Luther, H. Martin, Huck, Gutman, Patrick, H. Hutton. London: Tavistock. 16-49. Print. 10 Gatens, Moira. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. —. “The Politics of the Imagination.” Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza. Ed. Gatens. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP. 189– 209. Print. Gatens, Moira, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza. London: Routledge, 2009. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Print. Gingell, Susan, and Wendy Roy, eds. Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2012. Print. Gonzalez-Arnal, Stella, et al., eds. Embodied Selves. London: Palgrave. 2012. Print. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Print. Ioannidou, Mato. “3 1995.” Mato Ioannidou. Web. 8 Feb. 2018. —. “Adam 2008.” Mato Ioannidou. Web. 8 Feb. 2018. —. “Adyto 1990.” Mato Ioannidou. Web. 8 Feb. 2018. —. “Astra 2003.” Mato Ioannidou. Web. 8 Feb. 2018. —. Homepage. Mato Ioannidou. Web. 8 Feb. 2018. —. “Leschi.” Mato Ioannidou. Web. 8 Feb. 2018. —. Personal interview. 15 May 2006. —. “Third [To trito mati 1988].” Mato Ioannidou. Web. 8 Feb. 2018. —. “Women 2001.” Mato Ioannidou. Web. 8 Feb. 2018. Jones, Amelia. “Material Traces: Performativity, Artistic ‘Work,’ and New Concepts of Agency.” TDR: The Drama Review 4 (2015): 18–35. Print. Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953. Print. —. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art. 1942. New York: Mentor Books, 1951. Print. Lloyd, Genevieve. Spinoza and the Ethics. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. —. “Woman as Other: Sex, Gender, and Subjectivity.” Australian Feminist Studies 10.4 (1989): 13–22. Print. Matisse, Henri. “Notes d’un Peintre, 1908.” Matisse on Art. Ed. Jack D. Flam. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. 237–49. Print. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print. Nigianni, Chrysanthi, and Merl Storr, eds. Deleuze and Queer Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. Print. Perrault, Jeanne. Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995. Print. Roger Plin. Wikipedia, n.d. Web. 8 Feb. 2018. Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London: Routledge, 1999. Print. —. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. London: Routledge, 1988. Print. Price, Janet, and Shildrick, Margrit, eds. Feminist Theory and The Body: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. Print. Probyn, Elspeth. Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Rice, Carla. Becoming Women: The Embodied Self in Image Culture. Toronto: Toronto UP, 2017. Print. Riessman-Kohler, Catherine. Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. London: Sage, 2007. Print. Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. 2001. London: Sage, 2008. Print. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. Hawaii: U of Hawai’i P, 2002. Print Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. Ed. Seymour Feldman. Trans. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982. Print. Stanton, Domna C., ed. The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print. Tamboukou, Maria. “Becomings: Narrative Entanglements and Microsociology.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 16.1 (2015): 1–18. Institute for Qualitative Research. Web. 3 Feb. 2018. —. “Beyond Figuration and Narration: Deleuzian Approaches to Gwen John’s Paintings.” Deleuze Studies 8.2 (2014): 230–55. —. “In the Fold Between Life and Art.” Mariatamboukoupersonalblog, n.d. Web. 8 Feb. 2018. —. “Narrative Personae and Visual Signs: Reading Leonard’s Intimate Photo-Memoir.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 29.1 (2014): 27–49. —. Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen John’s Letters and Paintings. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Print. —. “Relational Narratives: Autobiography and the Portrait.” Women Studies International Forum 33 (2010): 170–79. Print. Topali, Maria. “Dream on a Light Blue Background.” Tea Set. 1999. Greek Poetry Now!: A Directory for Contemporary Greek Poetry, translated by Alexandra Halkias, www.greekpoetrynow.com/poet_poems_eng/topali_poems.html. Accessed 8 Feb. 2018. Painting the Body: Feminist Musings on Visual Autographies Abstract Mato Ioannidou: A Self-Portrait of the Artist Corporeal Feminisms and Visual Autographies Painting What a Body Can Do Embodied Cartographies of Feelings Acknowledgement Notes Works Cited work_5ouska6aqjhjrjynq5zfw5jr6q ---- <303730365FB4D9C2F7BCF6C1A45FB9CCB1B9C7D02033342D312E687770> An East/West Pas De Deux: The Ballets Russes and the Orient in the Modern Western Imagination Robert Myers OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;1) The opening couplet of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West,” first published in 1889, is one of Kipling’s well-worn tautologies and all too obviously fallacious truths that seem simply to confirm his position as the most egregious of Victorian Orientalists. These verses appear, at first glance, to assert that the Orient and the Occident are not only essential spaces but eternal antinomies. In that sense, of course, Kipling’s words can be seen as prefiguring much of the recent rhetoric about East and West (‘Clash of Civilizations,’ ‘War on Terror,’ ‘Islamofascism,’ ‘Islamism,’ etc.) that has been repeated ad nauseam and, as such, has achieved a sort of naturalized, self-evident status in spite of its obvious vacuity. “Kipling,” as 1) Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West,” in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940), 234. George Orwell writes, “is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.”2) But as Orwell also observes in the same essay, Kipling is a paradoxical writer, and not simply because he is “a good bad writer,” who coined such memorable phrases as “the White man’s burden,” “somewhere East of Suez,” and “what do they know of England who only England know.”3) Upon closer inspection in fact in the very next couplet: “But there is neither East nor West, nor Breed nor Birth / When two strong men stand face to face tho’ they come from the ends of the earth” Kipling makes precisely the opposite point from the one the opening lines had suggested. The ballad recounts a story set in the Khyber Pass near the Afghan border in what the contemporary American media glibly refer to as the “tribal region” of Pakistan about a standoff between a Western soldier and his Eastern adversary. The tale ends when the Easterner, who has stolen the soldier’s father’s horse, offers to send his own son to guard the soldier as he returns the horse to its rightful owner. As such, Kipling’s ballad is a very good bad poem about how human solidarity can transcend the most intractable borders of race, culture and geography. One hint of how overly-optimistic Kipling was can be seen a century later, at least in the military realm, in the cover story of the November 20, 2010 Independent newspaper, which recounts the story of the death of the hundredth British soldier in the current Afghan war. In this essay I will discuss the permeability of borders between 2) George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling,” originally published in Horizon (1942), reproduced on The Orwell Prize website, accessed May 23, 2011, http:// theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/rudyard-kipling/. 3) Ibid. East and West in another sphere, the arts, in an earlier era the beginning of aesthetic modernism, with respect to the fine arts, in Europe and North America and the attendant paradoxes and ironies of cultural transmission, which, I hope, will call into question the very notion of such facile phrases as ‘Western culture,’ ‘Western civilization,’ ‘the Muslim world,’ and ‘radical Islam and the East,’ as well as the supposedly inherent world-views and innate antagonisms that ostensibly exist between these clearly delineated spheres. Like any aesthetic movement, especially one defined by a radical break with the past, European modernism has many beginnings. A number of art and cultural historians, for example, locate its beginning with the 1907 retrospective show at the Salon d’Automne in Paris of the work of Paul Cezanne, who died the year before. Cezanne, who asserted that “[p]ainting stands for no other end than itself it is simply a pretext for line and colour, nothing more,” laid the groundwork for Cubism and abstraction, and Picasso famously referred to him as “the father of us all.”4) I will assert, however, that it is just as, if not more, logical to locate that beginning two years later with the arrival in Paris from St. Petersburg of the Ballets Russes in 1909. Certainly modernism, if it means anything, means rupture to “make it new” in the phrase of Ezra Pound, who writes, although somewhat ironically, in the 1913 poem “Les Millwin” about the young artists from the Slade School who attended a 1910 production of Cléopâtre in London “with forearms / Crossed in great 4) Qtd. in Rosemary Bailey, “See France through Artists’ Eyes,” The Guardian, May 17, 2009, accessed May 23, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/may/ 17/ provence-cezannne-picasso-france-travel. futuristic x’s” and certainly no one in Paris had seen anything before remotely like those first productions of the Ballets Russes.5) As John MacKenzie, Lynn Garafola and others have written, ballet was essentially an ossified, nearly moribund, art form, when the group’s producer Serge Diaghilev, designer Leon Bakst, choreographer Mikhail Fokine and a troupe that included performers such as Ana Pavlova, Ida Rubinstein and Vaslav Nijinsky arrived in Paris.6) Not only did the subject matter unbridled and orgiastic female desire, inverted sexuality, masturbatory delight, sado-masochism, homoeroticism and the link between eroticism and death create shock, another indispensable element in the creation of a modernist aesthetic, the forms of the pieces produced by the Ballets Russes transcended the simply novel. They radically and permanently altered notions of what constitutes dance and of the relationships both between dance and ballet and between performance and painting. The body, gestures, clothing and their relationship to notions of what we now refer to as gender were interrogated most particularly in the performances of Rubinstein and Nijinsky. But the group’s investigation of form was not limited to movement and the body. The works themselves were radically re-imagined. For example, Schèhèrazade (1910) based on The 1001 Nights was reduced from an epic, never-ending narrative to a half-hour, non-narrative based on the outer frame tale, in which King Shahryar returns unexpectedly from a hunting trip to discover that his wife, Zobeida, is in the midst of an orgy with the slaves in 5) Laura Marcus and Peter Nichols (eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Literature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), 111. 6) John Mackenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 197. the seraglio; he then proceeds to slaughter the slaves and his wife.7) As many modernist writers would later do for example, Joyce, in Ulysses, published in 1922, compressed the epic of the Odyssey into a single day in modern Dublin Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes transformed the languid, always delayed eroticism of 1001 Nights into the sexual frenzy of Sheherazade. The Ballets Russes also radically redefined gender by repeatedly dramatizing powerful females such as Cleopatra, Thamar and Zobeida as insatiable and sadistic sexual devourers and by for the first time in the history of ballet foregrounding the male body as erotic object. The troupe’s founder, Diaghilev, was an inveterate collector, curator and impresario, whose genius lay in a combination of showmanship and the ability to create novel and shocking aesthetic synergies. The designers, composers, choreographers and performers of the Ballet Russes also redefined genre by creating one-of-a-kind gesamtkunstwerks i.e. total works of art such as L’Aprés Midi d’un Faune (Afternoon of a Faun), Le Spectre de la Rose (The Specter of the Rose), Daphnis et Chloé (Daphnis and Chloe), Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), and the troupe’s lesser-known but equally innovative works with more overtly Eastern themes. These pieces incorporated innovative, sometimes disjunctive and, at times, almost atonal scores with harmonies and scales from the East by composers such as Debussy, Stravinsky, Ravel and Satie that completely eschewed the hackneyed 7) In 1001 Nights, Shahryar, traumatized by this infidelity, goes on to murder every woman with whom he sleeps afterwards until he meets Sheherazade, who avoids the fate of her predecessors by telling him riveting tales many, not unsurprisingly, about infidelity, chicanery and brutality every night, which she interrupts as dawn approaches. style of German symphonic music based on Wagnerian leitmotifs. The sets for the pieces were designed by designers such as Leon Bakst, who saturated the stage with ostensibly dissonant colors such as green and blue; by Natalia Goncharov, whose designs for L’Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird) and Le Coq D’or (The Golden Cockerel) are manifestations of her belief that “the East means the creation of new forms, and extending of the problems of color;”8) and by Pablo Picasso, who transported the Cubist lines of his paintings onto the stage. The costumes were created by Bakst, Matisse and others using draping Asian lines, splotches of color and elaborate embroidery heretofore unseen on European stages. These juxtapositions of jarringly new sounds, costumes and scenic designs not only created new theatrical universes, they resonated in the realms of fashion design in the clothing of Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel, both of whom worked with the dance troupe, and in Bakst and Poiret’s influential interior designs. As Peter Wollen writes, “The huge success of Scheherazade was the pre-condition for Poiret’s Oriental fashion The Russian Ballet launched orientalism, Poiret popularized it, Matisse channeled it into painting and fine art.”9) One further element that is essential to consider in assessing the breadth and complexity of the achievement of the Ballet Russes is the influence they have had and continue to have on both “high” and “popular” culture. In addition to the artists mentioned above who collaborated with them directly, Jean Cocteau worked closely with the 8) John E. Bowlt, “Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova and Pablo Picasso,” in Jane Pritchard, ed., Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929 (London: Victoria & Albert Publishing, 2010). 9) Peter Wollen, “Fashion/Orientalism/The Body,” New Formations 1 (1987): 12. troupe and wrote librettos for several operatic pieces. They also had close links to Juan Gris, Rodin, Marinetti, Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant and others in the Bloomsbury Circle, and they spawned dozens of imitators on American vaudeville stages in the 1910s during the period the group toured there.10) The Ballet Russes defined ballet in the 20 century through the work of Diaghilev’s last choreographer, George Balanchine, and his collaborator Lincoln Kirstein, the founder of the New York City Ballet, who consciously modeled his career on Diaghilev’s, and through the work of the two greatest male dancers of the second half of the twentieth-century Rudolph Nuryev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, both of whom acknowledged their debt to Nijinsky, just as Balanchine acknowledged his to the troupe’s other choreographers, Michel Fokine, Leonide Massine, and Nijinsky. The group’s aesthetic migrated directly into modern American experimental dance in the figure of one of the troupe’s principal dancers, Adolph Bolm, into Hollywood cinema through the figure of Theodore Kosloff who left the Ballet Russes after the first season in Paris and in the 1920s and became an “actor, dancer, choreographer, technical director and unofficial advisor” to Cecile B. DeMille,11) and the group’s costumes and designs were revived in the 1970s in the fashion designs of Yves St. Laurent. The aesthetic also continues in exhibitions like the major autumn 2010 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, “Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes,1909-1927,” attesting to the lasting influence of the troupe’s 10) Judith Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs. John Maynard Keynes (London: Weidenfeld &Nicolson, 2008). 11) Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer, The Ballets Russes and Its World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 9. work in many spheres of art and culture.12) Here, I would like to briefly focus on three aspects of the history and aesthetic of the Ballet Russes. First, it seems significant that so many of the group’s earliest works were based on Arab and Islamic motifs. The first two productions presented in Paris, in 1909, the year before Scheherazade was presented, were Cleopatra and Thamar. Cleopatra, based on Pushkin’s Egyptian Nights, portrays a sexually voracious monarch who indulges her passion at will and then kills her prey after she is sexually satisfied. Nijinsky danced the role of a slave who begs for a night with Cleopatra, knowing the price for his pleasure will be death. Ida Rubinstein, a tall exceedingly slender dancer, who played the role of the Arab femme fatale, is carried onstage “on the shoulders of six slaves, in a sarcophagus which, when opened, revealed her swathed from head to foot like a mummy.”13) Cocteau describes the scene as follows: Each of the veils unwound itself in a fashion of its own; one demanded a host of subtle touches, another the deliberation required in peeling a walnut, the third the airy detachment of the petals of a rose, and the eleventh, most difficult of all, came away in one piece like the bark of the eucalyptus tree.14) 12) The Yves St. Laurent collection was part of the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibit. See, for example: Jenna Rossi-Camus, “Exhibition Review: Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballet Russes at the V&A,” Worn Through: Apparel from an Academic Perspective, October 28, 2010, http://www. wornthrough.com/2010/10/28/exhibition-review-diaghilev-and-the-golden-age- of-the- ballet-r/. 13) Wollen, “Fashion/Orientalism/The Body,” 19. 14) Ibid. Thamar, produced two years after Scheherazade and based on a narrative poem by Lermontov, dramatizes the story of a Georgian princess who lures a male passerby into her castle then “plunges a dagger into the heart of her captive lover”.15) Not coincidentally, all three ballets link slavery or captivity, female sexuality, violence and death, motifs which recur with frequency in the troupe’s oeuvre in the 1910s and which prefigure preoccupations of post-war European aesthetics and the 1917 Russian Revolution. In spite of their lurid subject matter, their basis in literary works from the East emphasizes the fact that, beyond their obvious shock value, Diaghilev, who was notoriously high-brow and evinced virtually no interest in the burgeoning cinema industry, expected that these new forms of ballet would be taken seriously as works of art. Many of the pieces performed in the first ten years of the troupe’s existence are overtly linked to the Arab and Islamic East Salome (1913); The Polovtsian Dances (1909), based on Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, featuring a metatheatrical scene in which Uzbeki slaves entertain the captive Christian Prince Igor, who is offered his choice of dancers by his Uzbeki counterpart; Les Orientales (The Orientals) (1910), a revue of Eastern dances, which featured “The Saracens’ Dance,” “The Assyrians’ Dance,” and “The Oriental Dance” and the “Djinn’s Dance,” both choreographed and performed by Nijinsky; and The Golden Cockerel (1914), a “fable with sets more like Persian carpets or painted peasant furniture than backdrops for dancing”.16) Numerous other ballets, such as Le Dieu Bleu (The Blue God) (1912), with a 15) Garafola and Baer, The Ballets Russes and Its World, 250. 16) John E. Bowlt, “Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova and Pablo Picasso,” 107. libretto co-written by Jean Cocteau and based on a Hindu legend, and, of course, the ballets with Russian themes, are also set in the East. Other pieces not based on Eastern source material nevertheless feature motifs inspired by Asia or the East, such as Le Chant de Rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale) (1925), based on a Stravinsky opera after a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale and containing Tibetan-style costumes designed by Matisse, and Parade (1917), with music by Eric Satie and costumes, curtain and scenery by Picasso and containing a character called the Chinese Conjuror, who first introduces Cubist design into the theatre. Perhaps most importantly, other works by the Ballets Russes allow us to perceive the ways in which artistic creation in, what Howard Goodall calls “a collaborative hothouse of an unprecedented order,”17) reconfigures facile political and ideological geographies. For example, when one looks at Bakst’s designs in the book Bakst in Greece, by Charles Spencer, and analyzes the profound influence that ancient Greece had on the Bakst’s designs one can’t help but see what a thin line separates the supposedly Western nymphs and shepherdesses in Narcisse and Afternoon of the Faun from the Eastern pilgrims and potentates in The Blue God and Scheherazade. And that insight prompts a second look at the costume and set of Le Tricorne (1919) based on Alarcon’s novel The Three-Cornered Hat which were designed by Picasso, who was, after all, born in Malaga, from where on a clear day one can see the North African coast and which for eight centuries was part of the Islamic world. His Sevillan 17) Howard Goodall, “Music and the Ballets Russes,” in Jane Pritchard, ed., Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 177. dancer, with her stacked, pagoda-like headdress, suddenly resembles Bakst’s design for the child’s headdress in The Blue God, which was “inspired by details from Angkor Thom in Cambodia,”18) and his set for a Spanish town looks indistinguishable from an Arab town in the Maghreb right across the Mediterranean. The other two aspects I would like to focus on are, first, the many profound paradoxes one encounters in the history and aesthetic of the Ballets Russes and, finally, several crucial aspects of the troupe’s relationship to American culture. Of course the reason these paradoxes are so significant is that they very rapidly undermine the facile antinomies so often attributed to the East (femininity, passivity, dissimulation, excessive ornamentation, unbridled sexuality, etc.) and the West (masculinity, functionality, straightforwardness, clean engineering, productive repression, etc.). The most obvious paradox concerning the Ballet Russes as the vessel of what might be termed a neo-Orientalist aesthetic, which profoundly altered Western modernist art is, of course, the fact that the company, its producer, choreographers, performers and many of its designers were Russian. Less obvious, but equally ironic is the fact that the principal designer of this visual universe that theatrically came to represent the Arab and Islamic universe in the West was Leon Bakst, who was a Russian Jew i.e. an outsider who was not, according to law, allowed to live in St. Petersburg without a permit. Although most of Bakst’s collaborators were not Jewish, the troupe’s varied oeuvre obviously forces us to reconsider whether Russia’s position as simultaneously 18) Jane Pritchard, “The Transformation of Ballet,” in Jane Pritchard, ed., Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 78. an Eastern and Western country makes it a singular hybrid or simply the most potent example of an increasingly widespread phenomenon, which at a given historical moment created an environment that produced some of the modern world’s most innovative artists. Another paradox essential to understanding the group’s aesthetic is the fact that not only did the principal choreographer Michel Fokine, Diaghilev and, of course, Nijinsky, transform ballet from a long narrative to a short non-narrative form, they shifted the focus from female to male more specifically the eroticized, androgynous male body. This radical shift appears all the more amazing when one considers that Fokine, Diaghilev and most of the members of the troupe were products of the seemingly stodgy Imperial Ballet School, which was wholly subsidized by the Czar and his court.19) It is, however, important to remember that St. Petersburg was the most cosmopolitan and Westernized city in Russia. In fact, Diaghilev and many of his contemporaries considered themselves Decadents and prided themselves on owning copies of the works of Baudelaire and Huysmanns, which were banned in Russia. Not only were Diaghilev and these Russian aesthetes influenced by Western Decadents, they read 19 -century Russian literature, some of which, like the works of Lermontov, portrayed the Caucasus and other Islamic regions of Russia, and Diaghilev curated an exhibition of over 300 paintings from throughout the Russian empire.20) At least three other significant Western figures influenced the 19) Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina, 15-34. 20) Sjeng Scheijen, “Diaghilev the Man,” in Jane Pritchard, ed., Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes. development of the Ballets Russes. The American modern dancer Isadora Duncan championed a more “natural” style of dance that she associated with ancient Greece and in which, for example, she eschewed toe shoes in favor of bare feet and flowing clothes; she performed in St. Petersburg in 1906 and profoundly influenced the choreographer Michel Fokine and other members of the Ballets Russes. Conversely, Peter Wollen suggests that the use of loose-fitting harem pants in several of the productions by the Ballets Russes in Paris created an enormous vogue which was actively promoted and exploited by the fashion designer Paul Poiret that was responsible for freeing Western women from the confines of the tight-fitting corset that they had worn until the troupe’s arrival.21) The second significant Western figure is Claude Debussy, whose approach to musical composition, particularly his treatment of harmony, had been profoundly altered by hearing “the complex resonances of the Javanese gamelan at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle.” Goodall explains that “by transplanting the exotic clash of sonorities of Eastern music into the Western palette, [Debussy] radically challenged the established ‘rules’ of nineteenth century music.”22) Of the “handful of visionary musicians” who grasped “the enormity of Debussy’s approac h was Igor Stravinsky.”23) The Firedbird, Petrushka and the Rite of Spring, are, Goodall contends, a result of the collision of Stravinsky’s classic training under the tutelage of Rimsky-Korsakov and his fascination with Debussy. It is difficult to imagine a more complex 21) Wollen, “Fashion/Orientalism/The Body,” 8-10. 22) Goodall, “Music and the Ballets Russes,” 173. 23) Ibid., 174. and fitting allegory of cultural transmission between East and West than the exchange between Debussy and Stravinsky, both of whom composed for the Ballets Russes. The other significant Western figure was Oscar Wilde. Ida Rubinstein, who appeared in some of the earliest productions in Paris, approached Fokine in St. Petersburg in 1907, two years before the troupe’s departure for Paris, about performing Wilde’s Salomé. According to some versions of the story, the performance was planned and ultimately cancelled because there was a rumor that when she removed the final veil in the notorious “Dance of the Seven Veils” she would appear in the nude.24) Like Wilde, Diaghilev, Nijinsky and many other members of the troupe, Rubinstein was gay, and she eventually became a significant figure in a circle of lesbians in Paris that included Natalie Barney and the painter Romaine Brooks.25) It is hardly surprising that another border that the troupe’s members transgressed was the one between the forbidden sexuality manifested on stage and similarly proscribed sexuality offstage. Diaghilev, for instance, famously fired his lover, Nijinsky, when news arrived in Paris in 1914 that the dancer had suddenly married a Hungarian aristocrat.26) In 1909, Fokine approached Diaghilev and suggested that he cast Bernstein, who was an actor, not a dancer, in the version of Cleopatra produced the same year in Paris. It seems apparent that Fokine simply transplanted Wilde’s “Dance of the Seven Veils” into 24) Charles Spencer, Bakst in Greece (Athens, Greece: GEMA Publications, 2009), 42. 25) Ibid., 81. 26) Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina, 91. the Cleopatra the Ballets Russes presented.27) This example is but one of many of how designers, choreographers and dancers sought out Eastern and Western raw materials, stylized them and imported them into the ballets. For example, for his designs in Le Chant du Rossignol, Matisse used robes from the Tibet-China border that he had seen in the Buddhist gallery at the Musée Guimet in Paris;28) for costumes in the The Polovtsian Dancers, the designer Roerich purchased Uzbeki fabrics from the market in St. Petersburg; and for his role in Afternoon of a Faun Nijinsky studied figures on Greek vases and the movements of a mechanical toy duck. As John Mackenzie writes, “With the Ballets Russes the Orientalist thesis of Edward Said seems at one level superficially confirmed and at another irretrievably disrupted” (199).29) I would like to close with several observations about the Ballets Russes in America. In 1916, the group toured the U.S. for the first time, where it was both reviled and revered. The Kansas City police chief, having been forewarned about the risqué subject matter of the troupe assured his citizens that he had instructed “Dogleaf,” as he referred to Diaghilev, that theirs was a “strictly moral town” and he would not tolerate any “high brow immorality.”30) The mayor of Boston “gave instructions that the Russians were permitted to bare only their toes,” and when Adolph Bolm performed the Golden Slave in Schèhèrazade in New York, his body blackened with paint, one critic remarked that such a disturbing portrayal of cross-racial 27) Wollen, “Fashion/Orientalism/The Body,” 19. 28) Jane Pritchard, “The Transformation of Ballet,” 78. 29) John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts, 199. 30) Qtd. in Judith Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina, 94. eroticism would be impossible in the segregated South, and the Catholic Theatre Movement called for an outright ban of the piece.31) Nonetheless, when Nijinsky re-joined the troupe and danced in The Specter of the Rose in New York, rose petals rained down on him, and the Herald wrote that he was “probably the greatest [artist] that the present generation has seen here.”32) Because of Diaghilev’s aversion to the cinema, there are no films of the Ballet Russes, but Hollywood did produce one film, The Thief of Baghdad, in 1924, starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. that, in some respects, captures the aesthetic of the group. As Garafola and Baer write, the more natural style of Fokine’s choreography coincides “with the requirements of silent screen acting.”33) And The Thief of Baghdad, writes Gaylyn Studlar, is a “gesamkunstwerk driven by dance aesthetics at every level” that utilizes its “Leon Bakst-influenced production design” to create “scenic décor as ‘dance space.’”34) Fairbanks was the precursor of the Hollywood Western “he-man” embodied two decades later by John Wayne. In films such as The Mask of Zorro, Fairbanks had developed a persona as a virile man of action in the mould of the ardent imperialist Theodore Roosevelt, whose achievements as president included the brutal suppression of Phillippine nationalism in colonial war fueled by ferocious anti-Asian racism. It was thus ironic that Fairbanks should, 31) Ibid. 32) Qtd. in Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina, 105. 33) Garafola and Baer, 4. 34) Gaylyn Studlar, “Douglas Fairbanks: Thief of the Ballets Russes,” in Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, ed. Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 109. as Studlar writes, emulate “the orientalized and feminized male body of the Ballets Russes danseur,” and more specifically Nijinsky in Schèhèrazade.35) Although in the film Fairbanks adopts the role of a cultural other an Arab thief and his “movements often have the look of postclassical ballet techniques,”36) his performance is un-done because, unlike the aesthetic form from which he borrows androgynous costumes, scenic opulence and oriental excess represented in Bakst, Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes he ultimately asserts a non-virtuosic and clumsy masculine certitude, what Studlar calls “all-American stomping.”37) As Gary Wills has written, John Wayne’s signature manly swagger was actually in part the result of ballet lessons, but of course those were always off-screen. In spite of pursuing the profoundly liberating possibilities of an aesthetic that continually redefines genre, geography and gender, Fairbanks like most Americans and like Kipling’s “two strong men” continues to refuse to cross certain borders, perhaps because crossing them inevitably leads into territories in which we must acknowledge the extent to which “so-called” others reside in us.38) 35) Ibid., 115. 36) Ibid., 117. 37) Ibid. 38) Gary Wills, “John Wayne’s Body,” New Yorker, August 19, 1996, 38. Bailey, Rosemary. “See France through Artists’ Eyes.” The Guardian, May 17, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/may/17/provence-cezannne-picasso- france-travel. Bernstein, Matthew, and Gaylyn Studlar. Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. London: I.B.Tauris and Co Ltd, 1997. Bowlt, John E. “Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova and Pablo Picasso.” In Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929 edited by Jane Pritchard, 103-128. London: Victoria & Albert Publishing, 2010. Garafola, Lynn, and Nancy Van Norman Baer, The Ballets Russes and Its World. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. Goodall, Howard. “Music and the Ballets Russes.” In Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929, edited by Jane Pritchard, 103-128. London: Victoria & Albert Publishing, 2010. Kipling, Rudyard. “The Ballad of East and West.” In Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition, 234-238. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940. MacKenzie, John M., Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. Mackrell, Judith, Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs. John Maynard Keynes. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008. Marcus, Laura and Peter Nichols, eds. The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Literature. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Orwell, George. “Rudyard Kipling.” The Orwell Prize. http://theorwellprize.co. uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/rudyard-kipling. Pritchard, Jane ed., Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929. London: Victoria & Albert Publishing, 2010. Pritchard, Jane. “The Transformation of Ballet.” In Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929, edited by Jane Pritchard, 103-128. London: Victoria & Albert Publishing, 2010. Rossi-Camus, Rossi. “Exhibition Review: Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballet Russes at the V&A.” Worn Through: Apparel from an Academic Perspective, October 28, 2010. http://www.wornthrough. com/2010/10/28/exhibition-review-diaghilev-and-the-golden-age-of-the- ballet-r/. Scheijen, Sjeng. “Diaghilev the Man.” In Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929, edited by Jane Pritchard, 103-128. London: Victoria & Albert Publishing, 2010. Spencer, Charles, Bakst in Greece. Athens, Greece: GEMA Publications, 2009. Studlar, Gaylyn, “Douglas Fairbanks: Thief of the Ballets Russes.” In Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, edited by Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Wills, Gary. “John Wayne’s Body.” New Yorker, August 19, 1996, 38. Wollen, Peter. “Fashion/Orientalism/The Body.” New Formations 1 (1987): 12-19. An East/West Pas De Deux: The Ballets Russes and the Orient in the Modern Western Imagination Using the case of the Ballets Russes, this paper continues an interrogation of the viability of applying Edward Said’s definitions of Orientalism to the sphere of the arts. Although in his original study, Orientalism, Said explicitly asserts that his study is a delimited analysis focused principally on British and French 18th- and 19th-century academic Orientalism and that he is not analyzing so-called Orientalist painting and literary artists such as Flaubert, his followers, and later Said himself, extended his theoretical framework to include studies of literature and the arts. By examining the profundity of the rupture caused in the aesthetic sphere by the arrival of the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1909, this study simultaneously repositions the works of the Russian ballet troupe to the center and the very beginning of European modernism and attempts to show how its radically subversive works undermine the notion of such facile categories as “East” and “West” or “Oriental” and “Occidental.” In addition to examining the paradoxes of cultural transmission inherent in the group’s works, which belie the existence of rigid civilizational borders in the arts, the study also proposes a reconsideration of European modernism by re-examining the place of ballet in the modernist movement; the significance of the work of the group’s producer Serge Diaghilev, designers Leon Bakst and Natalia Goncharov, choreographer Mikhail Fokine, composer Igor Stravinsky and performers such as Ana Pavlova, Ida Rubinstein and Vaslav Nijinsky; and of the work produced in collaboration with the Ballets Russes by European artists, composers and designers such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie and Coco Chanel. Orientalism, Ballets Russes, Diaghilev, Leon Bakst, Vaslav Nijinsky, Ida Rubinstein, Michel Fokine, Natalia Goncharov, Modernism, Edward Said, Stravinsky, Debussy, Matisse, Picasso, Thief of Baghdad, Douglas Fairbanks, Modern Dance, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, Scheherezade work_5zb7ipywq5fwdkgezcx6izbhmy ---- doi:10.3402/blft.v3i0.20075 Play, parody, intertextuality and interaction: Postmodern Flemish picture books as semiotic playgrounds Sara Van Meerbergen* Department of Baltic Languages, Finnish and German, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Abstract Because of their prominent use of artistic illustrations, contemporary Flemish picture books have often been referred to as ‘‘aesthetic picture books’’ in Flanders. In this article, I will argue that the use of art and references to art by no means is a feature that is unique for contemporary Flemish picture books. The use of artistic allusions is only one of many characteristics that contemporary Flemish picture books share with what internationally has come to be described as ‘‘postmodern picture books’’. Typical postmodern features such as play, parody, intertextuality and interaction (between text and reader) will consequently be identified and analysed in works by several Flemish picture book artists. Because of these postmodern features, picture books are furthermore described as ‘‘semiotic playgrounds’’ where readers can become (inter)active readers. Keywords: Picture books; postmodernism; visual intertextuality; interaction; play; Carll Cneut; Tom Schamp; Little Red Riding Hood; fairy tales; wimmelbooks Because of social, economic and political reasons, the Flemish children’s book market has been dominated by the Netherlands for a long period of time (Ghesquière 1992; Leysen 2005; Van Coillie 2007). Flanders is the Dutch speaking part of Belgium situated in the north of the country inhabiting more than half of the country’s population. When Belgium was founded in 1830, French was the only official language and this remained so until 1898, the year that Dutch also was recognised as an official language. Despite this, a so-called ‘‘language struggle’’ between French and Dutch continued for several decades, and it was not until the 1920s that Dutch was accepted and implemented for the first time as an official language at a university in Flanders. The specific language situation in Flanders has played a considerable role for the relatively late development and establishment of the Flemish children’s book market. While freeing itself from the French domination, Flanders had to simulta- neously position itself against the Netherlands, its neighbouring country with which it shares its official language and by which literary and linguistic norms traditionally have been dictated. Because of this many, publishers of Dutch (children’s) literature have traditionally been located in the Netherlands, publishing books in both Flanders and in the Netherlands. It was not until the decades after the Second World War that Flemish publishing houses were able to emanci- pate themselves more fully thus creating a more independent Flemish book market and establish- ing a more Flemish literary identity (Absillis 2009). In the case of Flemish children’s literature and the Flemish picture book specifically, there has been a clear process of emancipation since the end of the 1980s (Leysen 2005; Van Coillie 2007, 369; Vermeulen 2006, 19�27). It was during this and the following decade that Flemish illustrators, such as Lieve Baeten, Koen Fossey and Klaas Verplancke who had long been confined to illust- rating children’s magazines, came out in the open and made their debut as picture book illustrators. Some of these illustrators stood out by their explicit artistic approach. This artistic approach would come to be considered one of the central characteristics for contemporary Flemish picture books which consequently, in Flanders have often *Correspondence: E-mail: sara.vanmeerbergen@nederlandska.su.se Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics Vol. 3, 2012 #2012 S. Van Meerbergen. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Citation: Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics, Vol. 3, 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/blft.v3i0.20075 1 (page number not for citation purpose) http://www.childlitaesthetics.net/index.php/blft/article/view/20075 http://www.childlitaesthetics.net/index.php/blft/article/view/20075 http://www.childlitaesthetics.net/index.php/blft/article/view/20075 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/blft.v3i0.20075 been referred to as ‘‘aesthetic picture books’’ (cf. Vermeulen 2006; Nauwelaerts 2008). In this article, I want to question the extent to which the artistic trend really is unique for contemporary Flemish picture books. Further- more, I will argue that contemporary Flemish picture books should instead be seen as part of a more broad development within the Western picture book scene which has been referred to as ‘‘postmodern’’ in recent international picture book research. I will start off describing Gregie De Maeyer’s pioneering role in the establishment of a more artistically oriented Flemish picture book scene. Following this, the notion of ‘aesthetic picture book’ is discussed and illustrated with the picture book Dulle Griet (2005) by Geert De Kockere and Carll Cneut. The notion is then critically examined and compared to what other researchers have come to refer to as ‘postmodern picture books’. Finally, some typical postmodern features will be analysed in contemporary Flemish picture books by artists such as Isabelle Vandena- beele, Gerda Dendooven, Pieter Gaudesaboos and Tom Schamp. GREGIE DE MAYER, A POSTMODERN PICTURE BOOK PIONEER Graphic designer, illustrator and author Gregie De Maeyer (1951�1998) is often seen as an important artistic pioneer within the Flemish picture book scene (see e.g. Van Coillie 2007; Vermeulen 2006). In 1984, De Maeyer was the first Flemish person to receive the Premio Grafico prize at the International Children’s Book Fair in Bologna. De Maeyer considered the picture book as a total work of art. He freely explored its visual, artistic and semiotic boundaries by, for example, integrating poetry, philosophical texts and other (visual) art forms into his books (Vermeulen 2006, 23; see also Van Coillie et al. 2004, 221). An interesting example of this is the picture book Juul (1996), which De Maeyer made in collaboration with the Flemish conceptual artist Koen Vanmechelen. In this book, the illustrations consist of a series of photographs showing a wooden sculpture representing the main character of the story, the boy Juul (see Figure 1). Through- out the book, Juul is being bullied in school because of his physical appearance, for instance his curly red hair. For each page, the wooden sculpture representing Juul is shown to be more and more mutilated as the bullying worsens and Juul starts to harm himself; Juul pulls out his hair, rips off his ears and pushes out his eyes. Even- tually he even loses his limbs, and by the end of the story only his decapitated and delimbed wooden torso and his head depraved of ears, eyes and hair are left to be seen. The book does not only strike the reader with its confronting story. The tragic course of events within the story and the seriousness of the issue are also intensified by the symbolic use and the ‘rawness’ of the sys- tematically mutilated and abstract wooden sculp- ture in the pictures. Internationally, this book also Figure 1. Wooden sculptures in Juul by Gregie De Maeyer and Koen Vanmechelen, Altiora Averbode, 1996. S. Van Meerbergen 2 (page number not for citation purpose) stands out because it was among the first to deal with dark and heavy themes such as bullying and self-harm which together with other taboo themes such as violence or death, had traditionally been avoided in picture books (Beckett 2012, 241�272; Reynolds 2007, 91�101). AESTHETIC PICTURE BOOKS De Maeyer’s experimental and artistic way of working cleared the way for a whole new genera- tion of Flemish picture book artists that defined and influenced the Flemish picture book scene to a great extent throughout the 1990s and up to the present day (Van Coillie 2007, 369; Vermeulen 2006, 21�25). Because of their extensive use of artistic images, often with more or less explicit intertextual references to (Flemish or Belgian) art and painting history, combined with literary texts and a conscious use of graphic design, Nauwelaerts (2008), in reference to Vermeulen (2006), describes the work of this new generation of Flemish picture book artists as aesthetic picture books. A typical example of such a picture book is Dulle Griet (2005*‘Mad Meg’) written by Geert De Kockere and illustrated by Carll Cneut. In a very explicit way, this picture book refers to the well- known 16th century painting with the same name by the Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The story of the picture book is constructed around the main character Griet (Meg), the woman in the war helmet shown in the centre on Brueghel’s painting. In addition to the main character, the images in the picture book also show clear and direct intertextual reference to the painting and its detailed scenery. Just like the painting, the book has a very dark and ominous atmosphere, which is already announced by the dark brown cover and the black title pages. Throughout the book, many grotesque scenes are shown with horrid looking people and crea- tures bearing a remarkable resemblance to the scenery on the triptych The Last Judgement by 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch; this painting has often been said to have been a direct inspiration for Brueghel’s Mad Meg. One image in the book shows Meg drawn by Cneut placed against a background fragment cut out directly from Brueghel’s painting (see Figure 2). Here, a direct and explicit intertextual reference is made to the painting. The reference is materialised visually through a mixture of collage and pastiche where the old and the ‘copied new’ are literally combined into a new unity. To conclude the circle, the original painting by Brueghel is shown on the backside of the book serving as a direct visual source of reference (see also Beckett 2012, 175). The picture book by De Kockere and Cneut clearly shows a multi-layered play with different types of more and less explicit intertextual refe- rences to specific aspects from Flemish art and painting history. Many contemporary Flemish picture books contain not only references to art, they also frequently feature an intricate play with other types of intertextual references to aspects from other (popular) media, genres or literary and visual traditions. While Nauwelaerts (2008) Figure 2. Fragments from Dulle Griet by Geert De Kockere and Carll Cneut, De Eenhoorn, 2005. Play, parody, intertextuality and interaction 3 (page number not for citation purpose) mainly in connection to the art references speaks of ‘aesthetic’ Flemish picture books, these other types of play, parody and intertextuality have been described by other picture book scholars as typically belonging to the so-called postmodern picture book (see e.g. Pantaleo & Sipe 2008). Before any further analysis of particular post- modern Flemish picture books, let us take a closer look at the notions ‘aesthetic’ and ‘postmodern’ in connection to picture books. AESTHETIC OR POSTMODERN PICTURE BOOKS? Nauwelaerts (2008) considers the intertextual relations to art as an important and almost defi- ning characteristic for contemporary Flemish picture books, which he consequently refers to as aesthetic picture books. At the same time, it is important to point out that the use of intertextual references to art is by no means a characteristic that is unique for (contemporary) Flemish picture books. This becomes clear when looking at the detailed discussions of artistic allusions in con- temporary picture books presented in Beckett (2010) and Beckett (2012, 147�208). While allu- sions to art in contemporary picture books tend to have a strong playful and parodic character which Beckett (2010, 83; 2012, 147) describes as typically postmodern, the influence of art on picture books should be seen as a phenomenon of all times (at least for as long as we can speak about picture books). Proof of this can, for example, be found in the historical discussions about the development of Dutch and Flemish picture books presented in Vermeulen (2006) and Van Coillie (2008). 1 The latter discusses, among other things, the influence of Jugendstil in the many picture books illustrated by the Dutch illustrator Rie Cramer around the turn between the 19th and 20th century (these Dutch books were also spread in Flanders as pointed out in the introduction of this article). The work of Rie Cramer shows many interesting parallels to other Jugendstil-inspired illustrators and picture book artists of that time, even abroad, such as the Swedish Elsa Beskow and Jenny Nyström. An example of the use of art in picture books from the 1950s and 1960s is the work by Dutch picture book artist Dick Bruna (see Figure 3). Although greatly commercialised during later years, Bruna’s picture books were initially de- signed within the artistic context of modernism and functionalism using a minimalistic design, relatively abstract forms and mainly primary colours (Van Meerbergen 2010, 36�44, 2012, 10�11). Important inspiration sources for Bruna Figure 3. Nijntje (1963), Nijntje in de sneeuw (1963) and De koning (1962) by Dick Bruna, Mercis. S. Van Meerbergen 4 (page number not for citation purpose) were modernist artists such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Ferdinand Léger, but also artists from the Dutch functionalist art group De Stijl of which Piet Mondriaan was a prominent member (see also Kohnstam 1991; Linders et al. 2006; Reitsma 1989). Modernist and functionalist inspired picture books can additionally be found in other countries around this time period, for example in the Nordic countries which is dis- cussed in more depth by, e.g. Christensen (2003) and Druker (2008b). The notion ‘aesthetic’ thus tends to be slightly misguiding when used to describe a unique feature for contemporary Flemish picture books which seems to be suggested by Nauwelaerts (2008). The use of the notion ‘aesthetic’ is furthermore proble- matic as it tends to be too closely connected to certain qualitatively evaluated characteristics in a picture book. It inevitably evokes questions such as: ‘What is to be considered as artistic and therefore aesthetic? What is not?’ Besides their intertextual connection to art, Nauwelaerts (2008) describes some other impor- tant characteristics of what he refers to as aesthetic picture books. Because of their artistic character, according to Nauwelaerts (2008), aesthetic picture books place a stronger demand on the reader from whom it is, for example, expected and assumed that (s)he has some background knowledge about art. These types of books often also use what Nauwelaerts (2008) refers to as ‘layered images’, i.e. images which through their complex composi- tion can encourage different interpretations and readings. Nauwelaerts (2008) further mentions visual intertextuality as a typical characteristic for the aesthetic picture book. He makes a distinction between intertextual references that are realised on a text�internal level (i.e. when certain images or aspects appear repeatedly within one and the same book) and those that are realised on a text�external level (i.e. when images refer to art or other reference objects outside the book). Interestingly enough these descriptions by Nauwelaerts (2008) bear a great deal of resemb- lance to what is described as postmodern picture books by Pantaleo and Sipe (2008). In contrast to the notion ‘aesthetic’, the notion ‘postmodern’ offers a broader and more neutral reach as it can be used to describe more general tendencies occurring in picture books within the context of the postmodern society. As also pointed out by Lewis (2001, 93�94), postmodern fiction (including the picture book) is to be seen as an historical phenomenon rather than to be based solely on qualitative criteria. 2 Postmodernism is often used as a term to describe certain changes and tendencies which started occurring within western culture and society during the last half of the 20th century. As this definition is rather broad and vague, there is no real consensus on what postmodernism exactly entails, and consequently this term is often used and interpreted in different ways (see dis- cussion in Pantaleo & Sipe 2008). Flieger (1991) summarises the debate on postmodernism by distinguishing between four main positions; it is seen as either ‘‘a reaction, a denial, a residue or an intensification of modernism’’ (cited in Pantaleo & Sipe 2008, 1�2). In any case, one central and reoccurring theme within postmodernism seems to be the establishing of a critical and ironic dialogue with the past (Grieve 1993, 15; see also Beckett 2010, 83; 2012, 147). Leaving this particular discussion aside, Pantaleo and Sipe (2008) discuss and line up some typical characteristics for what has come to be described as postmodern picture books in picture book research (see also, e.g. Anstey & Bull 2004; Grieve 1993; Lewis 2001, 87�101; McGuire & Sipe 2008; Pantaleo 2007). A first characteristic is the mixing of genres. The border between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture is often blurred and thereby (implicitly) challenged and put into question. The breaking of (literary) traditions and conventions can also be mentioned as a typical feature together with the mixing of reality and fiction. Furthermore, there is the occurrence of explicit forms of (visual) inter- textuality, combined with play, parody, pastiche and irony. This involves aspects or fragments from other works of art, (well) known stories and other forms of (popular) culture (e.g. board games, (animated) films or computer games) being picked up and combined into a new semiotic unity. All of the features mentioned so far can be seen as metafictive devices as they all in some way draw attention to the picture book text as an artefact (cf. Grieve 1993, 17). The postmodern picture book text can further be seen as an ‘open text’, i.e. text that invites different interpretations and readings, which in many cases is combined with an open ending or a circular and therefore never-ending structure. The reader is often given an active role as a participant in the story as (s)he is expected to connect certain points and to create all sorts of meanings. In some cases, a direct form of interaction between text and reader is established as the reader is addressed personally Play, parody, intertextuality and interaction 5 (page number not for citation purpose) and/or is instructed to perform certain tasks. All of these postmodern features make the picture book text into what can be referred to as a semiotic playground where play, parody, intertextuality and interaction between text and reader are central features. Many of these postmodern features can be found in contemporary Flemish picture books of which some examples will be discussed below. RED CAP REVISITED The postmodern retelling of traditional fairy tales has become an internationally spread pheno- menon in Western (children’s) literature during the last four decades (Joosen 2011, 1�8). Since the 1990s, the retelling of traditional fairy tales has also become a reoccurring theme in Dutch and Flemish (children’s) literature (Joosen 2011, 6; see also Joosen & Vloeberghs 2008, 69). Sandra Beckett has shown that the story of ‘‘Little Red Riding Hood’’ (or ‘‘Little Red Cap’’ as it is sometimes referred to) has been retold in nume- rous ways in contemporary (mostly Western) children’s literature (Beckett 2008), but also in works of fiction for all ages (Beckett 2010). Some interesting examples of these Little Red Cap retellings can be found in several contemporary Flemish picture books. In 2003, two Flemish postmodern picture book retellings with clear intertextual reference to ‘‘Little Red Cap’’ were published: Rood Rood Roodkapje (‘Red Red Red Cap’) by Dutch author Edward van de Vendel and Flemish illustrator Isabelle Vandenabeele, and Roodlapje (‘Little Red Rag’) by Flemish picture book artist Pieter Gaudesaboos. Both books typically establish what Joosen (2011, 11), in reference to Nikolajeva (1996), calls an ‘open intertextual dialogue’ with the traditional story through their title and through the name of the main character (‘Roodkapje’ in Dutch). Both books also start in a slightly ironic tone with the traditional (Dutch) fairy tale opening words, ‘‘Er was eens . . .’’ (‘Once upon a time . . .’), after which each book presents its own version of the traditional tale. Rood Rood Roodkapje can be read as a feminist parody on the original story as Red Cap takes the right into her own hands and cold bloodedly kills the wolf with an axe (Beckett 2008, 53; Joosen & Vloeberghs 2008, 72�76).3 The limited use of colour (black, white, red and tones of grey) in combination with the rough woodcuts, a techni- que that Vandenabeele typically uses, gives this book an almost grotesque horror-like character (see Figure 4). The colour red is further stressed through the repetition in the protagonist’s name which is Rood Rood Roodkapje or ‘Red Red Red Cap’. In the pictures, the colour red signals danger and disaster and eventually blood as the killing of the grandmother and later also the wolf take place. Although Vandenabeele expresses a highly individual style in and through her wood- cuts, the use of the technique in this case also makes the book into a modern version or ‘remake’ of Perrault’s traditional version of the tale that was illustrated with the famous woodcuts by Gustave Doré. Compared to the later and extended version by the Grimm Brothers where the girl and her grandmother are saved by the hunter, Perrault’s early version ends in a rather brutal and abrupt way when Red Cap is eaten by the wolf. Also Rood Rood Roodkapje ends in an abrupt and highly macabre way showing Red Cap in a blood covered room watching the lifeless body of the wolf that is spread out widely over the floor. Despite its very traditional opening line, Roodlapje by Gaudesaboos also proves to be any- thing but traditional. The book consists of what appears to be an associative collage where, for example, photographs, games, postcards, hand- written texts and drawings, 19th century looking writings and typography, mirror-reflected images, sequences of films and fragments of computer games follow each other freely (see also Joosen & Vloeberghs 2008, 76�79). This technique almost works as a visual ‘stream of consciousness’, the literary technique typically used by modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. A central theme in Gaudesaboos’ story is the loneliness of the protagonist Little Red Rag who seems to be moving in a grim, desolate, decayed and, through the structure of the book, also lit- erally fragmented modern society (see Figure 5). 4 By using multiple photographs of everyday objects and sceneries in combination with the artificially Figure 4. Fragment from Rood Rood Roodkapje by Edward van de Vendel and Isabelle Vandenabeele, De Eenhoorn, 2003. S. Van Meerbergen 6 (page number not for citation purpose) manipulated visual material in the collages, fiction and reality (or what we would like to perceive of as reality) are mixed and also indirectly put into question (what is manipulated, and what is not?). This fragmentary collage technique and the ten- sion between fiction and reality are key features in the picture books by Gaudesaboos. The fragmen- tary structure also forces the reader to become an active participant in the reading process connec- ting all of the details throughout the book into a meaningful unity. A third picture book that can be named within the theme of Little Red Riding Hood is De wonderlijke reis van Roosje Rood (2007*‘Rosie Red’s marvellous journey’) by Flemish picture book artist Gerda Dendooven. 5 Contrary to the previously discussed books, this one starts at the end of the traditional story. On the first spread, we see the gigantic black wolf lying on its back while our red-capped protagonist Rosie Red is professionally sewing up the wolf ’s belly. It is left unclear how this opening scene should be read exactly; maybe Rosie just escaped from the wolf ’s belly after she had been eaten by him? In any case, the wolf is depicted on his back with its paws upwards and his gigantic red tongue hanging loosely out of his mouth, both of which can be read as signs of subordination (almost like when a dog lies over to be cuddled). Rosie is on top of him and clearly dominates the situation; she is depicted as being empowered over the wolf. After this Rosie wants to head home, but where is her home and where is her mother? These are the leading questions throughout the rest of the book where the reader follows Rosie on her on-going search for her mother through day and night and through different seasons and landscapes. On her journey, Rosie meets several characters from more or less well known fairy tales and popular stories such as the seven dwarfs, the three little pigs, Thumbelina and Thumb. She also meets a ‘sleeping beauty’, named Belle, lying in a forest between thorn bushes. Belle has been sleeping for over 100 years and through this character, clear intertextual references are thus made to Perrault’s ‘‘Sleeping Beauty’’, originally named ‘‘La Belle au bois dormant’’ in French (‘The beauty in the sleeping forest’). Belle is shown in a position similar to the old stone sculptures of important people in churches, her body is stretched out, she has her hands on her chest and her body is arranged symmetrically (see Figure 6). Figure 5. Fragment from Roodlapje by Pieter Gaudesaboos, Lannoo, 2003. Figure 6. Fragments from De wonderlijke reis van Roosje Rood by Gerda Dendooven, Querido, 2007. Play, parody, intertextuality and interaction 7 (page number not for citation purpose) At the same time Belle also is reminiscent of a huge Russian matryoshka doll, as she has a rather tall and static figure, clear red painted lips and a reoccurring pattern on her colourful dress which at several points has horizontal cutting lines (as if she could be opened here to get to the next doll inside). Her dress also continues over her head covering her hair. This matryoshka doll can be seen as a symbol for the on-going search in the story which continues from page to page. Besides fairy tales and toys, references are also made to known (Dutch) children’s songs and nursery rhymes. A reference is made to the finger rhyme about Duimeloot (Thumb) who appears as a character in the book and who is always depicted while clearly showing his five fingers to the reader. In one scene, one of the seven dwarfs is shown swinging on a red mushroom with white dots on it which for Dutch speaking readers becomes a clear reference to the famous children’s song ‘‘Op een grote paddestoel, rood met witte stippen . . .’’ (‘On a big mushroom, red with white dots . . .’*this song uses the same melody as ‘‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’’). Dendooven borrows visual techniques from other genres, such as the cartoon. While the main story line is told through small white text boxes at the bottom of the pages, the dialogue and words of the characters are shown in speech bubbles in the pictures (see Figure 6). Some of the characters are shown in black and very often also in profile, which is suggestive of the early newspaper car- toons made in black and white with limited printing techniques. Another feature typically used in cartoons*but also in other popular media for children (e.g. Manga, computer games or animated movies)*is that several of the charac- ters are depicted with relatively large heads and eyes (cf. Gould 1980; Van Meerbergen 2010, 129�132, 227�228 on ‘juvenile’ depictions of picture book characters; Van Meerbergen 2012). For some of the characters’ clothes and also for some of the background elements (e.g. the trees in Figure 6), a technique of digital collage is used. This technique is common in several contempo- rary postmodern picture books. Similar analogue expressions can be found in several modernist picture books, which are discussed in more depth by Druker (2008a). Dendooven uses a special technique to create a certain form of sequentiality in the story and movement between the pages. Throughout the search for Rosie’s mother, each page refers to the next one as a small strip or fragment on the right side of the page which already shows the begin- ning of the picture on the next page (see Figure 6). This is reminiscent of, for example, techniques used in modernist picture books, such as the Finland�Swedish Tove Jansson’s picture book Hur gick det sen? (1952*translated into English as Moomin, Mymble and Little My). In this book, physical holes in the pages are used as so-called ‘page turners’ to create suspense in the story by showing fragments of the next page which makes the reader curious to turn the pages (Druker 2008b, 79�97). In the story about Rosie Red, the characters are also often depicted (in profile) moving toward the right which together with the horizontally oriented format of the book enhances the page turning even more. Another aspect used to create suspense in the story is the reoccurring tail of the wolf shown discreetly in the background on several pages, popping up behind a cactus or behind a tree, without it being mentioned in the written text. This can be described as a form of text�internal intertextuality where elements repeatedly reoccur throughout the story (see earlier discussion of Nauwelaerts 2008). By the end of the story Rosie, together with her helpers, finally finds her mother, and at this point the wolf also comes out of hiding. The wolf confesses that he wants to have a mother as well, and after Rosie’s mother has tied up his mouth (for safety) the wolf is allowed to join the others on their way to grandma. But where is grandma . . .? With this question, the story gets an open ending and the search can begin all over again. REALITY REVISITED AND INTERACTIVE PLAYSCAPES As mentioned earlier in this article, several of the picture books by Flemish Pieter Gaudesaboos consist of associative collages and experiments with images, materials and graphic design. Frequently, the border between reality and fiction is also explored. A clear example of this last feature is the book Negen schijfjes banaan op zoek naar een plekje om te slapen (‘Nine slices of banana looking for a place to sleep’) published in 2004. The pictures in this book consist of manipulated photographs where the reader can follow the protagonists, nine slices of banana, each time shown against a new background on their search for a place to sleep. Everyday sceneries are mixed with the absurd story about the ‘living’ banana slices (see Figure 7). S. Van Meerbergen 8 (page number not for citation purpose) The manipulation of reality and the play with reality and fiction are driven to the extreme in the two books about the made up boy Briek, Briek (2008) and Herr Luna (2010), which Gaudesaboos made in collaboration with the Flemish radio documentary maker Annick Lesage. These books document the life and mysterious disappearance of the fictional character Briek, a former supposed child celebrity. Because of the great amount of manipulated documentary mate- rial used in the books, great effort is placed in convincing the reader that Briek existed in real-life. Briek contains an audio CD with a documentary made by Annick Lesage (whose radio voice sounds relatively familiar to many Flemish people) where the reader/listener is presented with, for example, news reports and interviews with so-called eye- witnesses. Herr Luna also includes a CD which requires listening to while looking at the pictures in the book. On the CD, Annick Lesage gives the reader/listener clear instructions and tells him/her exactly what to do in order to find Briek in Berlin of which pictures are shown in the book. 6 As is announced on the cover of the book (‘Lead your own investigation. Hugely thrilling audio detecti- ve.’*my translation), this is a true detective story where the reader is assumed to play the role of the detective. Interaction with the reader is also a central feature in 123 piano! by Gaudesaboos from 2005. The title of this book refers to a playground game with the same name (in Dutch) that has been popular for several decades in many Flemish schools; it will therefore be recognised by both children and their parents. As is suggested by the title, play is one of the central themes in the book along with childhood (days) and everything that can be associated with this such as toys, games and candy. The photographs and pictures often have a slightly nostalgic tone and play with references to a childhood in past times. Some of the pictures show, for example, diary pages or fragments of a calendar combined with old and discoloured photographs. These types of images are then varied with visual games where the reader is assigned to perform certain tasks. On one page, for example, different sorts of (photographed) candy are shown, and the reader is asked to compose his/her own little bag of candy (see Figure 8). The element of play is thus used as an interactive resource in the text, and through play the reader is invited to become an active participant in the reading process. On another page in 123 piano!, several rows of houses are drawn and the reader has to look for the Easter eggs that are hidden in some of them. The houses and the style in which they are drawn reoccur in other books by Gaudesaboos. On some other pages the nine slices of banana from the previously discussed book suddenly reoccur in a new adventure, this time looking for a place in the sun. By doing this Gaudesaboos also establishes a clear play with intertextual references to his own Figure 8. Double-spread from 123 piano! By Pieter Gaudesaboos, Lannoo, 2005. Figure 7. Cover from Negen schijfjes banaan op zoek naar een plaatsje om te slapen by Pieter Gaudesaboos, Lannoo, 2004. Play, parody, intertextuality and interaction 9 (page number not for citation purpose) work, which will be picked up by readers who are familiar with his work. Gaudesaboos’ books can be described as ‘‘visual�verbal playscapes’’, where play is used to engage the reader, a postmodern feature that has been discussed earlier by, e.g. Pantaleo (2007, 50). In an interview for the Flemish magazine Leeswelp, Gaudesaboos compared his books to a fairground where ‘‘you can walk around freely, see all kinds of things, take a big tour or a small one’’ (Bulcaen 2008, 322*my translation). He further describes them as books to be read, ‘used’ and ‘re-used’ by the readers as it suits them. The idea of the picture book as a functional object made to be ‘used’, played and worked with is already present in some of the modernist picture books discussed by Druker (2008b), but it is also desc- ribed as a typical feature for postmodern picture books by Lewis (2001, 98). 7 Functionality, intertextuality and play are also central features in the three cardboard books about the little cat Otto by Flemish picture book artist Tom Schamp. In the first two books, Otto rijdt heen en weer (2007*‘Otto drives back and forth’) and Otto in de stad (2008*‘Otto in the city’), the reader can follow Otto on a car trip to and through the city. 8 In the third book, Otto in de sneeuw (2010*‘Otto in the snow’), Otto goes on a skiing trip by car. 9 In each of the three books, a circular structure is used which makes it possible to read the books in two directions (in Dutch the books are called ‘lusboeken’ which literally means ‘loop books’). The reader can follow Otto from the first page to the last and then turn around the book to follow Otto’s journey back home. In the last book the reader has to continue reading the last pages in vertical direction instead of horizontally (see Figure 9). Schamp gives his books a highly material and functional use by exploiting the large format and the thick card- board pages. Because of these features the books are almost suggestive of a game board or a play mat for cars that can easily be spread out, for example on the floor, while the young reader follows Otto on his journeys and is able to turn the books in whichever direction. The large format of the books also provides an opportunity to create large scenes and land- scapes with many details. Schamp’s pictures and sceneries contain numerous small details and separate story lines which can engage the reader for hours. They also make the books highly ‘re-readable’ as the reader can choose alternative reading paths and/or discover new details in each reading. These features are typical of what Rémi (2012) has described as ‘wimmelbooks’, books crawling with details such as the well-known cardboard books (with a similar large format) by Figure 9. Fragment from Otto in de sneeuw by Tom Schamp, Lannoo, 2010. S. Van Meerbergen 10 (page number not for citation purpose) German picture book artist Rotraut Susanne Berner. Although wimmelbooks normally do not contain any written text (apart from words integ- rated in the pictures such as signs in a shop or a train station; cf. Rémi 2012, 117�118), Schamp’s books still contain a basic storyline formulated in short sentences that are integrated in the pictures on each spread. In his detailed visual compositions, Schamp typically uses many visual and verbal puns ma- king intertextual reference to a great variety of things ranging from, for example, existing places, buildings, persons and objects to art, children’s literature, comic books and advertising. In a documentary about his work made by the Flemish television channel Canvas, Schamp states that his work is constantly influenced by whatever is happening around him, be it art exhibitions, work by other artists, youth memories or other aspects from his personal life. 10 In the book about Otto in the city, clear references are made to the city of Brussels (where Schamp grew up and studied), its shops, buildings and squares. The name of the protagonist cat Otto, who throughout the books is depicted sitting in a car with his father, is a pun in itself as the word ‘otto’ is often used in the Flemish dialect around Brussels to refer to a car (in standard Dutch ‘auto’). The third book, where Otto goes on a skiing trip, is partly inspired by Schamp’s youth memories and his own family’s skiing trips to Switzerland. Many elements in the book reflect the landscape that can be seen when driving to Switzerland from Belgium. The river Rhône, for example, appears and is renamed to TobleRhône referring to the famous Swiss chocolate (see Figure 9). 11 Just next to the river there is a chocolate fac- tory with a roof made of a triangularly shaped Toblerone chocolate tablet. Outside the factory there is a truck shaped like the triangular yellowish wrapping of a Toblerone chocolate bar with the name ‘‘Tomi’’ spelled on it in red letters. On the side of the truck, the letter ‘‘S’’ can be found thus referring to Tom(i)’s last name, Schamp. The name of the factory is ‘‘& the chocolate factory’’ which then together with the name on the truck (‘‘Tomi’’) forms an allusion to the famous Roald Dahl story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This is only one of the many puns and intertex- tual references in the details appearing on each double-spread. Schamp’s ‘wimmel style’ and his prominent use of cars and animal characters also evoke images of the busy worlds in the books by Richard Scarry, which Schamp has pointed out as an important inspiration source along with the work by French picture book artist Marc Boutavant. 12 In the book where Otto goes on a skiing trip even a copy of Scarry’s little cat protagonist can be found in one of the pictures. In addition to this, other well- known children’s literature characters, such as Babar, Mickey Mouse and a cat in a boot, (re-) appear throughout the three books. Other than Tom Schamp’s own name and/or initials that can be found at least once on every spread, characters can also be found wearing the name or initials of his children on their clothes. Furthermore, the same cars and characters constantly reappear in new constellations throughout the three books making them tightly interconnected. These different types of internal and external intertextuality are also typical features in the wimmelbooks by Rotraut Susanne Berner and Thé Jong King that are discussed by Rémi (2012). The reoccurrence of characters adds to the suspense as the experienced Schamp-reader will learn to know the characters and might even go in search of them. With all its forms of playful intertextuality constantly activating the reader, Tom Schamp’s postmodern landscapes make each reading into a unique experience. CONCLUSION While studies such as Vermeulen (2006) and Nauwelaerts (2008) have mainly focused on the artistic allusions and qualities in contemporary Flemish picture books, the goal of this article has been to describe and analyse the contemporary Flemish picture book within a more neutral, broad and international context of postmodern picture book research. The many examples discussed in this article have clearly shown that besides artistic allusions, many of the postmodern characteristics that have been described in earlier research are clearly present in contemporary Flemish picture books by artists such as Isabelle Vandenabeele, Gerda Dendooven, Pieter Gaudesaboos and Tom Schamp. Through their use of play, parody and intertextuality, these books are typical examples of postmodern semiotic playgrounds activating the reader in different ways and up to different degrees. While some of the books activate the reader by their intertextual playfulness, depending on the reader to recognise and connect aspects from different tales, genres and other media, other books take one step further using play, parody and intertextuality as tools to make the reader into an Play, parody, intertextuality and interaction 11 (page number not for citation purpose) active participant in the story and/or an interactive creator of meaning in the reading process. In the latter cases, exemplified in this article by the books by Pieter Gaudesaboos and Tom Schamp, the picture book in itself becomes a functional object of play, a semiotic playground where the reader can move around freely and become an interactive reader. Notes 1. See also De Bodt (2010) about Dutch picture book illustrations and art. 2. However, also here opinions are divided and some researchers make a clear difference between what they consider to be ‘outstanding’ postmodern pic- ture books and picture book artists and what not (cf. Grieve 1993). 3. For a further discussion of feminist fairy tale retellings, see Joosen (2004) and Joosen (2011). 4. Fragments of the books by Pieter Gaudesaboos are shown on his webpage; accessed September 11, 2012, http://www.gaudesaboos.be 5. This book was first published in French as Où est Maman? in 2006 by Editions Être. 6. Teasers can be found on Pieter Gaudesaboos webpage; accessed September 11, 2012, http:// www.gaudesaboos.be/boeken/13_herr_luna/?width� 1680&height�1020 7. As is pointed out by Lewis (2001: 82), picture books that can be worked and played with are not some- thing entirely new; popup books and other ‘‘movab- les of all shapes and sizes’’ have been popular since the 1800s. Within research and amongst critics, these books have often not received great attention as they have been considered to be more similar to toys than to books (Lewis 2011: 98). 8. These first two books were bundled into one in 2011 and also feature some new material. 9. While this article was in its finishing phase also a fourth book in the series about Otto was published, Otto in de luchthaven (‘Otto in the airport’ � Tielt: Lannoo, 2012). 10. The documentary Vormgevers. Tom Schamp (2010) can be found on Tom Schamp’s webpage; accessed September 14, 2012, http://www.tomschamp.com/ about.html 11. An animated fragment of this book can be found on Tom Schamp’s webpage; accessed September 11, 2012: http://www.tomschamp.com/about.html 12. See documentary made by Canvas (note 10). CHILDREN’S BOOKS DISCUSSED AND MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE Bruna, Dick. De koning. Amsterdam: Mercis, 1962/2005. Bruna, Dick. Nijntje. Amsterdam: Mercis, 1963/2005. Bruna, Dick. Nijntje in de sneeuw. Amsterdam: Mercis, 1963/2001. Dahl, Roald. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1967. De Kockere, Geert and Carll Cneut. Dulle Griet. Wielsbeke: De Eenhoorn, 2005. De Maeyer, Gregie and Koen Vanmechelen. Juul. Averbode: Altiora Averbode, 1996. Dendooven, Gerda. De wonderlijke reis van Roosje Rood. Amsterdam: Querido, 2006. Gaudesaboos, Pieter. 123 piano! Tielt: Lannoo, 2005. Gaudesaboos, Pieter. Briek. Tielt: Lannoo, 2008. Gaudesaboos, Pieter. Herr Luna. Tielt: Lannoo, 2010. Gaudesaboos, Pieter. Negen schijfjes banaan op zoek naar een plekje om te slapen. Tielt: Lannoo, 2004. Gaudesaboos, Pieter. Roodlapje. Tielt: Lannoo, 2003. Jansson, Tove. Hur gick det sen? Boken om Mymlan, Mumintrollet och lilla My. Helsingfors: Schildts, 1952. Perrault, Charles, Gustave Doré and preface by P-J Stahl. Les contes de Perrault. Paris: Ed. Hetzel, 1869. Schamp, Tom. Otto in de sneeuw. Tielt: Lannoo, 2010. Schamp, Tom. Otto in de stad. Tielt: Lannoo, 2008. Schamp, Tom. Otto rijdt heen en weer. Tielt: Lannoo, 2007. van de Vendel, Edward and Isabelle Vandenabeele. Rood Rood Roodkapje. Wielsbeke: De Eenhoorn, 2003. BIBLIOGRAPHY Absillis, Kevin. ‘‘‘From now on we speak civilized Dutch’: the authors of Flanders, the language of the Netherlands, and the readers of A. Manteau’’. Language and Literature 18 (2009) 3: 265�280. Anstey, Michèle & Geoff Bull. ‘‘The Picture Book. Modern and Postmodern’’. In International Compa- nion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (Volume 1), edited by Peter Hunt, pp. 328�339. New York: Routledge, 2004. Beckett, Sandra. Recycling Red Riding Hood. New York: Routledge, 2002. Beckett, Sandra. Red Riding Hood for All Ages. A Fairy-Tale Icon in Cross-Cultural Contexts. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008. Beckett, Sandra. ‘‘Artistic Allusions in Picturebooks.’’ In New directions in picturebook research, edited by Teresa Colomer, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Cecilia Silva-Dı́az, pp. 83�98. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. Beckett, Sandra. Crossover picturebooks. A Genre for All Ages. New York and London: Routledge, 2012. Bulcaen, Chris. ‘‘Vrij rondlopen in een boek. Chris Bulcaen sprak met Pieter Gaudesaboos’’. De Leeswelp (2008) 9: 322. Christensen, Nina. Den danske Billedbog 1950�1999. Teori, analyse, historie. Fredriksberg: Roskilde universitets- forlag, Center for børnelitteratur, 2003. De Bodt, Saskia. Van Poe tot Pooh. Illustreren om je penselen te kunnen betalen? Zwolle: D’jonge Hond, 2010. Druker, Elina. ‘‘From Avant-garde to Digital Images. Collage in Nordic Picturebooks’’. Bookbird (2008a) 3: 45�51. Druker, Elina. Modernismens bilder. Den moderna bilderbo- ken i Norden. Stockholm: Makadam, 2008b. Flieger, Jerry. The Purloined Punch Line: Freud’s Comic Theory and the Postmodern Text. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1991. S. Van Meerbergen 12 (page number not for citation purpose) http://www.gaudesaboos.be http://www.gaudesaboos.be/boeken/13_herr_luna/?width=1680height=1020 http://www.gaudesaboos.be/boeken/13_herr_luna/?width=1680height=1020 http://www.gaudesaboos.be/boeken/13_herr_luna/?width=1680height=1020 http://www.gaudesaboos.be/boeken/13_herr_luna/?width=1680height=1020 http://www.gaudesaboos.be/boeken/13_herr_luna/?width=1680height=1020 http://www.gaudesaboos.be/boeken/13_herr_luna/?width=1680height=1020 http://www.gaudesaboos.be/boeken/13_herr_luna/?width=1680height=1020 http://www.gaudesaboos.be/boeken/13_herr_luna/?width=1680height=1020 http://www.gaudesaboos.be/boeken/13_herr_luna/?width=1680height=1020 http://www.gaudesaboos.be/boeken/13_herr_luna/?width=1680height=1020 http://www.tomschamp.com/about.html http://www.tomschamp.com/about.html http://www.tomschamp.com/about.html Ghesquière, Rita. ‘‘Cinderella and Her Sisters’’. Poetics Today 13 (1992) 1: 85�95. Gould, Stephen J. ‘‘A biological homage to Mickey Mouse’’. In The Panda’s Thumb. More Reflections in Natural History, pp. 95�107. London and New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1980. Grieve, Ann. ‘‘Postmodernism in Picture Books’’. Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 4 (1993) 3: 15�25. Joosen, Vanessa. Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales. An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011. Joosen, Vanessa. ‘‘Feminist criticism and the fairy tale. The emancipation of ‘Snow White’ in fairy tale criticism and fairy-tale retellings’’. New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship 10 (2004) 1: 5�14. Joosen, Vanessa & Katrien Vloeberghs. Uitgelezen jeugdli- teratuur. Ontmoetingen tussen traditie en vernieuwing. Leuven: Lannoo Campus, 2008. Kohnstam, Dolph. Het oog wil oog zien: gedachten bij de kinderboekjes van Dick Bruna. Amsterdam: Mercis, 1991. Lewis, David. Reading contemporary picturebooks. Picturing text. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Leysen, Annemie. ‘‘Vlaamse uitgeverijen in beweging’’. Literatuur zonder leeftijd (2005) 66: 47�58. Linders, Joke, Koosje Sierman, Ivo de Wijs & Truusje Vrooland-Löb. Dick Bruna. Amsterdam: Mercis, 2006. McGuire, Caroline E. and Lawrence R. Sipe. ‘‘The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Postmodern Picture Books for Children.’’ In Shattering the Looking Glass. Challenge, Risk & Controversy in Children’s Literature, edited by Susan S. Lehr, pp. 273�288. Norwood: Christopher-Gordon Publishers, 2008. Nauwelaerts, Kris. ‘‘De fascinatie voor het esthetisch prentenboek’’. Literatuur zonder leeftijd (2008) 75: 63�74. Nikolajeva, Maria. Children’s literature comes of age. Toward a new aesthetic. New York: Garland, 1996. Pantaleo, Sylvia. ‘‘‘Everything comes from seeing things’: Narrative and Illustrative Play in Black and White’’. Children’s Literature in Education (2007) 38: 45�58. Pantaleo, Sylvia & Lawrence R. Sipe. ‘‘Introduction: Postmodernism and Picturebooks’’. In Postmodern Picturebooks. Play, Parody, and Self-Referentiality, edited by Sylvia Pantaleo and Lawrence R. Sipe, pp. 1�8. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Reitsma, Ella. Het paradijs in pictogram: het werk van Dick Bruna. Amsterdam: Van Goor, 1989. Rémi, Cornelia. ‘‘Reading as playing. The cognitive challenge of the wimmelbook.’’ In Emergent literacy. Children’s books from 0 to 3, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, pp. 115�139. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2012. Reynolds, Kimberley. Radical Children’s Literature. Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Van Coillie, Jan. Leesbeesten en boekenfeesten. Hoe werken (met) kinder-en jeugdboeken. Leuven: Biblion, 2007. Van Coillie, Jan. ‘‘Van Blauwbaard tot Roodlapje’’. Litera- tuur zonder leeftijd (2008) 75: 10�29. Van Coillie, Jan, Joke Linders, Selma Niewold & Jos Staal (editors). Encyclopedie van de jeugdliteratuur. Baarn: De Fontijn, 2004. Van Meerbergen, Sara. ‘‘De Kerk als slagroomtaart. Een multimodale vertaalanalyse van veranderende kindbeelden in de Zweedse vertaling van Nijntje in de sneeuw.’’ Internationale Neerlandistiek 50 (2012): 4�19. Accessed September 19, 2012, http://www. internationaleneerlandistiek.nl/cgi/t/text/get-pdf?c� ivn;idno�5001a01 Van Meerbergen, Sara. ‘‘Nederländska bilderböcker blir svenska. En multimodal översättningsanalys’’ PhD Diss., Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stock- holmiensis, 2010. Accessed September 19, 2012, http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid�diva2: 349561 Vermeulen, Marita. Colouring Outside the Lines. Flemish Illustrators Making their Mark. Berchem: Flemish Literature Fund, 2006. Play, parody, intertextuality and interaction 13 (page number not for citation purpose) http://www.internationaleneerlandistiek.nl/cgi/t/text/get-pdf?c=ivn;idno=5001a01 http://www.internationaleneerlandistiek.nl/cgi/t/text/get-pdf?c=ivn;idno=5001a01 http://www.internationaleneerlandistiek.nl/cgi/t/text/get-pdf?c=ivn;idno=5001a01 http://www.internationaleneerlandistiek.nl/cgi/t/text/get-pdf?c=ivn;idno=5001a01 http://www.internationaleneerlandistiek.nl/cgi/t/text/get-pdf?c=ivn;idno=5001a01 http://www.internationaleneerlandistiek.nl/cgi/t/text/get-pdf?c=ivn;idno=5001a01 http://www.internationaleneerlandistiek.nl/cgi/t/text/get-pdf?c=ivn;idno=5001a01 http://www.internationaleneerlandistiek.nl/cgi/t/text/get-pdf?c=ivn;idno=5001a01 http://www.internationaleneerlandistiek.nl/cgi/t/text/get-pdf?c=ivn;idno=5001a01 http://www.internationaleneerlandistiek.nl/cgi/t/text/get-pdf?c=ivn;idno=5001a01 << /ASCII85EncodePages false /AllowTransparency false /AutoPositionEPSFiles true /AutoRotatePages /None /Binding /Left /CalGrayProfile (Dot Gain 20%) /CalRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CalCMYKProfile (U.S. Web Coated \050SWOP\051 v2) /sRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CannotEmbedFontPolicy /Error /CompatibilityLevel 1.4 /CompressObjects /Tags /CompressPages true /ConvertImagesToIndexed true /PassThroughJPEGImages true /CreateJobTicket false /DefaultRenderingIntent /Default /DetectBlends true /DetectCurves 0.0000 /ColorConversionStrategy /CMYK /DoThumbnails false /EmbedAllFonts true /EmbedOpenType false /ParseICCProfilesInComments true /EmbedJobOptions true /DSCReportingLevel 0 /EmitDSCWarnings false /EndPage -1 /ImageMemory 1048576 /LockDistillerParams false /MaxSubsetPct 100 /Optimize true /OPM 1 /ParseDSCComments true /ParseDSCCommentsForDocInfo true /PreserveCopyPage true /PreserveDICMYKValues true /PreserveEPSInfo true /PreserveFlatness true /PreserveHalftoneInfo false /PreserveOPIComments true /PreserveOverprintSettings true /StartPage 1 /SubsetFonts true /TransferFunctionInfo /Apply /UCRandBGInfo /Preserve /UsePrologue false /ColorSettingsFile () /AlwaysEmbed [ true ] /NeverEmbed [ true ] /AntiAliasColorImages false /CropColorImages true /ColorImageMinResolution 300 /ColorImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleColorImages true /ColorImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /ColorImageResolution 300 /ColorImageDepth -1 /ColorImageMinDownsampleDepth 1 /ColorImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeColorImages true /ColorImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterColorImages true /ColorImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /ColorACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /ColorImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000ColorACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000ColorImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasGrayImages false /CropGrayImages true /GrayImageMinResolution 300 /GrayImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleGrayImages true /GrayImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /GrayImageResolution 300 /GrayImageDepth -1 /GrayImageMinDownsampleDepth 2 /GrayImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeGrayImages true /GrayImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterGrayImages true /GrayImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /GrayACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /GrayImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000GrayACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000GrayImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasMonoImages false /CropMonoImages true /MonoImageMinResolution 1200 /MonoImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleMonoImages true /MonoImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /MonoImageResolution 1200 /MonoImageDepth -1 /MonoImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeMonoImages true /MonoImageFilter /CCITTFaxEncode /MonoImageDict << /K -1 >> /AllowPSXObjects false /CheckCompliance [ /None ] /PDFX1aCheck false /PDFX3Check false /PDFXCompliantPDFOnly false /PDFXNoTrimBoxError true /PDFXTrimBoxToMediaBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXSetBleedBoxToMediaBox true /PDFXBleedBoxToTrimBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfile () /PDFXOutputConditionIdentifier () /PDFXOutputCondition () /PDFXRegistryName () /PDFXTrapped /False /CreateJDFFile false /Description << /ARA /BGR /CHS /CHT /CZE /DAN /DEU /ESP /ETI /FRA /GRE /HEB /HRV (Za stvaranje Adobe PDF dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. 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The issue is guest- edited by Tania Woloshyn and Anne Dymond in cooperation with Regina Wenninger and Anne-Laure Brisac-Chraïbi from RIHA Journal. External peer reviewers for this Special Issue were Hollis Clayson, André Dombrowski, Chantal Georgel, Catherine Meneux, Robyn Roslak, and Michael Zimmermann. Valiant, Independent, and Harmonious: Paul Signac and Neo- Impressionism after 1900* Anne Dymond Abstract Through a close reading of Parisian art criticism around 1900, this essay examines Paul Signac's role as de facto head of the neo-impressionists and guiding spirit of the Salon des Indépendants. Signac, and the neo-impressionists generally, had suffered from the decline of the Indépendants in the latter 1890s, but the resurgence of both group and Salon in 1901 positioned Signac as one of the most significant avant-garde artists in the early 20th century, where he played a vital role in the most significant art debates then animating Paris. Their return to prominence was due in no small measure to Signac's latest foray into the decorative, a highly charged arena that would be central to the artistic debates of the first decade of the 20th century. Contents Introduction The Independents and Neo-Impressionists in the 1890s The Turning Point: 1901 "Towards a New Classical Canon": 1902-1904 Paul Signac … neo-impressionists … Independents … It is difficult to speak of one without evoking the others. Henri Guilbeaux, 19111 Introduction [1] In March of 1904, the death of Paul Signac (1863-1935) was erroneously reported in the Parisian press.2 While this error was quickly corrected, more than a century later Signac's reputation has continued to suffer. His role in the development of many 20th century artists' work has often been noted, only to be rhetorically eradicated. The widespread interest in neo-impressionism by a generation of artists coming to age after 1900 has been most often explained as a combination of factors which minimize the art of Signac and the other living neo-impressionists. Most often, the interest is explained away as a delayed reaction to Signac's 1898 text D'Eugène Delacroix au néo- * I would like to thank Regina Wenninger and the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments, as well as Tania Woloshyn, for her enthusiastic interest in the neo-impressionists, her insightful comments, and with Anthea Callen her organizing of the "New Directions in Neo-Impressionism" conference for which this paper was originally written. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine. 1 Henri Guilbeaux, "Paul Signac et les Indépendants," in: Les Hommes du Jour (22 Apr. 1911), unpaginated. 2 Marina Ferretti-Bocquillon, "Chronologie," in: Françoise Cachin with Marina Ferretti-Bocquillon, Signac: Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, Paris 2000, 343-399, here 374. The mistake was because of the very similar name of the recently deceased but little known artist Paul Seignac. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" impressionnisme, as if his paintings were of negligible significance.3 It is also often explained almost apologetically, as if younger artists had no where else to look, because of the lack of major artists then in Paris.4 Despite some important recent re-evaluations of late neo-impressionism, secondary literature – including even such significant contributions to our understanding of the movement as the exhibition catalogue, Le néo- impressionnisme de Seurat à Paul Klee – often negatively characterizes Signac and late neo-impressionism's importance in various ways. It remains all too common to see neo- impressionism in the 20th century through the lens of Georges Seurat's (1859-1891) work. Yet even those well versed in later neo-impressionism sometimes undercut the movement's significance. Françoise Cachin, for example, described the widespread interest in the 20th century as both an epidemic and a fever,5 suggesting how prevalent the interest was, but also implying that it was infectious and needed to be overcome. The impact of neo-impressionism, it has been so often argued, was "relatively brief,"6 merely "a way station on the trip to other destinations,"7 or a stricture, which artists had to "free themselves from."8 This rhetoric has admitted and then immediately minimized the significance of both Signac and neo-impressionism in the early 20th century. [2] This essay, through a close reading of Parisian art criticism around 1900, reveals a very different narrative. Despite reports of his death in the Parisian press in the years leading up to 1904, Signac was a leading artist. His role as de facto head of the neo- impressionists and, at the same time, guiding spirit of the Salon de la Société des Indépendants (hereafter Independents) positioned him as much more than a follower of Seurat. Beginning in 1901, the neo-impressionists, generally, and Signac, in particular, were highly regarded. Their success closely mirrored the perceived value of the Independents from 1898-1906. I argue that in the opening years of the 20th century, the 3 Much of the interest in neo-impressionism in the twentieth century arises out of research on Matisse for which Catherine Bock's ground-breaking book Henri Matisse and neo-impressionism, 1898-1908, Ann Arbor 1981, has been instrumental; the opening sentence of her text highlights the importance of Signac's text for Matisse and many other young artists, and, throughout, her account remains balanced. More recently, Marina Ferretti-Bocquillon has given Signac's text as the explanation of neo-impressionism's "second souffle" in the twentieth century, while suggesting artists in the school of Signac were of minor importance: "Le néo-impressionnisme (1884-1898)," in: Le néo-impressionnisme de Seurat à Paul Klee, exh. cat., Paris 2005, 14-25, here 25. Cachin, Signac, 64, similarly attributes greater influence to Signac's text than his works. 4 Cachin, "Néo-impressionnisme et fauvisme," in: Le néo-impressionnisme de Seurat à Paul Klee, 83-93, here 83, also sees a dearth of significant artists in the early twentieth century arguing that for young artists "En France, les toutes premières années du siècle on été marquées par une absence d'enseignement théorique et de modèles." She goes on to note that most major nineteenth century figures had died, and the two most relevant, Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin were absent from Paris. 5 Cachin, "Néo-impressionnisme et fauvisme," 83: "une sorte d'épidémie de touches de couleur pure"; and 90: "Nous ne ferons pas ici la liste exhaustive de tous les artistes qui, avant le cubisme, l'orphisme ou l'abstraction, eurent [...] une petite fièvre pointilliste." 6 Cachin, "Néo-impressionnisme et fauvisme," 83. 7 John Leighton, "Out of Seurat's Shadow: Signac, 1863-1935, An Introduction," in: Anne Distel et al., eds., Signac, 1863-1935, exh. cat., New York 2001, 3-21, here 20. 8 Cachin, "Néo-impressionnisme et fauvisme," 83. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" neo-impressionist movement played a vital role in the most significant art debates then animating Paris. Despite a period in the later 1890s when the significance of both the neo-impressionists and the Independents waned, the resurgence of both in the early years of the 20th century has not been fully explored. Their twinned resurgence in 1901 was due in no small measure to Signac's latest foray into the decorative, a highly charged arena that would be central to the artistic debates of the first decade of the 20th century. The Independents and Neo-Impressionists in the 1890s [3] From its founding in 1884, the Independents was closely tied to neo- impressionism, and the fortunes of the inter-related groups would rise and fall together.9 Like the Salon des Refusés before it, the group arose in response to the repressive juries of the official Salon of the Société des artistes français.10 The neo-impressionist Albert Dubois-Pillet (1846-1890) was instrumental to the founding of the society, and acted as its first president until his death in 1890. The Independents took as its founding principles the suppression of an admission jury, making its annual exhibition open to any who paid the small membership fee. From the outset, the principles of the Independents were recognized (and sometimes applauded) for their anarchist political corollary, which most members of the neo-impressionist movement shared, as Robyn Roslak has ably shown.11 The adhesion to the society of such major figures of the latter 1880s, such as Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), Odilon Redon (1840-1916), and the artists who came to be known as the Nabis, guaranteed a certain notoriety; but, as with the Refusés, individual works were often overwhelmed in the massive show. Indeed, despite its importance, even as early as 1889 the German press had stopped reviewing the Independents.12 Throughout the 1880s it was the most avant-garde, but also the unruliest, of the annual Salons. [4] Multiple factors led to its decline in the 1890s. First, the founding and immediate success of the Salon nationale des beaux-arts (hereafter National) in 1890 set the stage for the Independents' loss of direction. Their position as the alternative to the conservative Société des artists français was usurped by the National, which firmly entrenched itself in the middle with a calculated appeal to the middle class consumer.13 Many artists who had shown with the Independents in the 1880s switched to the National 9 Martha Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde, Chicago 1996, 193. See also Dominique Lobstein, "Néo-impressionnistes et Indépendants," in: Le Néo- impressionnisme de Seurat à Paul Klee, 54-61. 10 See Lobstein, "Néo-impressionnistes et Indépendants," 55-56. 11 Robyn Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France: Painting, Politics and Landscape, Aldershot 2007, 42. 12 Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle France, Princeton 1994, 135. 13 Marie J. Aquilino, "The Decorating Campaigns at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars and the Salon des Champs-Elysées in the 1890s," in: Art Journal 48 (1989), 78-84. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" in the following decade. If this new competition did not devastate the exhibiting society, it mounted a significant challenge. More challenging still was the loss in quick succession of three of the leading independent artists of the day: Van Gogh (d.1890); Dubois-Pillet (d.1890), who was given a large memorial retrospective; and, most significantly, the devastating and sudden death of Georges Seurat after the exhibition's opening, in 1891 (see Marnin Young's paper in this Special Issue).14 [5] Throughout the 1890s, reviews of the Independent's annual show in the Parisian press became increasingly brief, infrequent, and often negative. As Martha Ward has shown, avant-garde groups including the neo-impressionists shifted towards commercial venues in that decade.15 After 1895, when Signac exhibited his poorly received Au temps d'harmonie, "the force of neo-impressionism as a movement and the appeal of the independents as an exhibition venue seem to have declined loosely in tandem."16 Few Parisian journals bothered to review the 1897 Salon des Indépendants at all. André Fontainas could write in the Mercure de France that "The salon of the Independents […] reveals itself to be more and more sterile every year. Nothing, nothing, and nothing! [….] Why M. Signac? Why M. Luce?"17 La Plume, which had been generally sympathetic to the neo-impressionists and the Independents, included a slightly longer review in which Yvanhoé Rambosson trotted out the well-rehearsed complaints about pointillism as a theory spoiling the work of fine artists. He expressed his relief about its supposed demise: "Very happily the sacred battalion has only these 2 combatants."18 Rambosson's use of the military metaphor, typical of much commentary on neo-impressionism, is undoubtedly a veiled reference to their political ties to the anarchist movement, which had also been an important component of the Independents, and was also suffering serious decline. The anarchist attentats, the assassination of President Sadi Carnot, the government's press and artistic censorship and crackdown on anarchist public assemblies, and the consequent Trial of the Thirty all dimmed the attractions of the movement in the mid-1890s.19 When Rambosson concluded, "There is nothing remarkable in this Salon. The beautiful days of the Independents have passed," his 14 Gustave Geffroy, "Les Indépendants," in: La Vie Artistique (1892), 306-312, here 306. 15 On the long association between the neo-impressionists and the Independents, see Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde, 55. 16 Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde, 193. 17 André Fontainas, "Art," in: Mercure de France 22, no. 89 (May 1897), 411-413, here 412: "Le Salon des Independants […] se manifeste de plus en plus stérile, chaque année. Rien, rien et rien! […] pourquoi M. Signac? pourquoi M. Luce?" 18 Yvanhoé Rambosson, "Le Salon des Indépendants," in: La Plume (1897), 311-313, here 312: "Fort heuresement le bataillon sacré ne compte plus que ces deux combatants." 19 On anarchism, see Jean Maitron, Le Mouvement anarchiste en France, vol.1, Des origines à 1914, Paris 1975; on its relation to neo-impressionism see Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 173-174. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" comments likely seemed to apply equally to the Independents, the neo-impressionists, and anarchism itself.20 [6] In these same years, neo-impressionist painters began to experiment with a larger touch, resulting in more brilliantly colored canvases, and more individualistic results. In the early 1890s, Signac and his friend and fellow neo-impressionist, Henri- Edmond Cross (1856-1910), both relocated to small towns in Provence. Their subject matter increasingly became France's Mediterranean coast, beautifully rendered, and meant to suggest by both form and content the harmonious society envisioned in the anarchist future.21 Later in the decade, Signac wrote and published D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme, an important history of color and explanation of neo- impressionist technique. The text was first published in installments in La Revue Blanche in the spring of 1898, and in book format from the press Éditions de la Revue Blanche in 1899.22 Despite the fact that the text is often used to explain neo-impressionism's popularity in the first years of the 20th century, response even in 1898-1899 was mixed at best. André Fontainas, writing in 1899 for Mercure de France, praised Signac's "excellent" history, but was not won over to the style; he concluded "but, in matters of art, it is the considered view of the art that can persuade." He disparaged Cross's work, in which "the air no longer circulates," and Maximilien Luce's (1858-1941), which he said had "the chill of an overly methodical glance."23 Indeed, even the faint praise for Signac's technique was further muted, since Fontainas said that it was only when the technique was used "with discretion" that he was willing to concede any success to neo- impressionist canvases. [7] Despite the publication of Signac's text, the Independents hit low points in 1899 and 1900. Space constraints, due to preparations for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, caused their annual shows during these years to be held late in the fall and at a poor venue.24 In 1899, the number of exhibiting artists fell sharply to 187, down from more than 1000 as late as 1897. Even the most loyal neo-impressionists were ambivalent about the exhibition that year: despite his gentle chiding of Théo Van Rysselberghe 20 Rambosson, "Art," 313: "il n'y a dans ce Salon rien de remarquable. Les beaux jours des Indépendants sont passés." 21 On Cross, see Tania Woloshyn, "Aesthetic and Therapeutic Imprints: Artists and Invalids on the Côte d'Azur, ca. 1890-1910," in: Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 11 (2012), http://www.19thc- artworldwide.org/index.php/spring12/aesthetic-and-therapeutic-imprints-artists-and-invalids-on- the-cote-dazur-c-18901910 (accessed 15 Apr. 2012). 22 It would be reprinted in Paris in 1911; see Ferretti-Bocquillon, "Chronologie," 370-371; and Marina Ferretti-Boquillon, "Ports and Travels: Paul Signac in the Twentieth Century," in: Signac, 1863-1935, 224 which also describes the text's success in Belgium and Germany. 23 André Fontainas, "Art Moderne," in: Mercure de France 30, no. 112 (Apr. 1899), 247-252, here 250: "Mais, en matière d'art, ce qui peut convaincre c'est la vue raisonnée des œuvres," and 251: "l'air ne circule plus"; "la froideur d'un coup d'oeil trop méthodique." 24 It was at the Hôtel de Poilly, 5, rue du Colisée: Félicien Fagus (pseud Georges Faillet), "XVe Exposition des artists Indépendants (1)," in: La Revue Blanche 20 (1899), 387-388, here 387; also described by Henry Eon, "Expositions: Les Indépendants – Lachenal," in: La Plume (1899), 751-752, here 751. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/spring12/aesthetic-and-therapeutic-imprints-artists-and-invalids-on-the-cote-dazur-c-18901910 http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/spring12/aesthetic-and-therapeutic-imprints-artists-and-invalids-on-the-cote-dazur-c-18901910 http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/spring12/aesthetic-and-therapeutic-imprints-artists-and-invalids-on-the-cote-dazur-c-18901910 RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" (1862-1926) for not supporting the Independents in the latter 1890s,25 Signac himself sent only two works in 1899. Cross accurately assessed the situation: "This exhibition has no importance due to the small number of works and the poor location. I believe that it was our duty to send something: it was simply for that reason that I did it."26 In 1899, journals like La Plume and Mercure de France wrote what read as elegies for the Independents: Fontainas devoted a single paragraph to the show, which he described as more than half dead, and as having had its revolutionary hour.27 In 1900, the Independents reached its nadir, with only 55 exhibitors and a dearth of reviews.28 The Turning Point: 1901 [8] Yet reports of the Independents' imminent death were mistaken. Response to both the Independents and neo-impressionist works in 1901 were decidedly – even shockingly – positive.29 The Mercure de France, which had sung the society's death knell, and La Plume, which had not bothered to review the 1900 exhibition, devoted long articles in 1901 to the phoenix-like Salon. In Mercure de France, Emile Verhaeren's article enthusiastically exclaimed: "The Independants! They are alive and have abandoned none of their daring."30 Critics agreed that the 1901 show was "one of the most brilliant exhibitions" in the group's 17-year history.31 Partial explanation for this turnaround must be given to the exhibition's timing: their return to the spring season better fitted established conventions. The new location, in the Grand Palais, was also beneficial. Gustave Coquiot stated "The site is magnificently chosen," and "We are pleased that it has finally become the right home for the Société des Indépendants."32 Cross reported the exhibition's success to Angrand: It is going well! That's to say that the number of visitors to the Independents has maintained itself until now – an average which varies from 150 to 180; slightly lower numbers began to be evident for the last three days – yesterday 140. But the important thing is that, in view of the next show, our funds will be sufficient 25 Undated letter from Signac to van Rysselberghe, Getty Archives, 870355 (4). 26 Quoted in translation in Bock, Henri Matisse and Neo-Impressionism, 136. 27 Fontainas, "Art Moderne," in: Mercure de France 32, no. 120 (Dec. 1899), 811-817, here 816. 28 Although the numbers do not tell the whole story, they are revealing. Before 1890, their annual exhibit had no more than 170 exhibitors; 1891-1898 the number of exhibitors ranged from 198 to 312; but in 1899 the number fell back to 187; and 1900 fell to only 55. The numbers of exhibitors rebounded to 162 in 1901, when it secured a better location, and they expanded rapidly reaching 1320 in 1908 and remained high until the First World War. 29 Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 135, briefly discusses its resurgence. 30 Emile Verhaeren, "Les Salons," in: Mercure de France 38 (June 1901), 673-692, here 687: "Les indépendants! Ils vivent et n'ont rien abandonné de leurs audaces." 31 B. Guinaudeau, "Le Salon des Indépendants," in: L'Aurore (13 May 1901), 1. 32 Gustave Coquiot, "Les Indépendants," in: Gil Blas (20 Apr. 1901), 1-2, here 1: "Le lieu est magnifiquement choisi," and "nous sommes heureux qu'elle soit enfin devenue le bon gite pour la Société des Indépendants." License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" and – that is the case. The quality of the visitors is not mediocre and, which is not always seen in our society, much was sold.33 [9] The majority of reviews of the annual show began by referencing in some way the exhibition's history. Some situated it as having evolved out of the notorious 1863 Salon des Refusés, thus relying on that old trope used to explain unpopular art by comparing it to older works unappreciated in its time but belatedly recognized as of the highest quality.34 Reviews generally agreed that the exhibiting society had proven its worth and triumphed over its naysayers. Most noted the Society's distinctive and revolutionary principle of open admission, "neither jury, nor awards," some even directly quoting motto of the principles at length.35 This call to principles had been common enough in the 1880s, but was far less prevalent in the latter 1890s. Indeed, when the principles had been invoked in the late 1890s, they were often given as the explanation for the failure of the exhibition, rather than its success, as was the case in 1899 when Henry Eon complained: "Independence understood in this way is anarchy and it leads to nothing; it becomes, in fact, the paralysis of all carefully thought out effort."36 Yet, increasingly, after the turn of the century, critics would praise this governing artistic principle precisely for its political corollary, which had often gone unremarked in the restrictive days after 1894.37 Michel Puy, for example, began by praising the Salon des Indépendants for its "spirit of critique" and "assault on the established order," which "worries the good citizens," concluding that all art searching for the new signifies "emancipation."38 Laertes, in La Dépêche, explained that, "The Independents live under the regime of absolute freedom and equality."39 Emile Sedeyn made the positive association between artistic independence and political independence even clearer: The idea of independence enhances human dignity. He who knows how to be honest without fearing the police, to be fair without fear of purgatory, to be a painter without fearing the approval of the official jury and without begging for honors from the Institute, it is he who affirms the beauty of independence.40 33 Cross to Angrand, as quoted and translated in Bock, Henri Matisse, 136, note 41. 34 Coquiot, "Les Indépendants," 1. 35 As a sample, see Verhaeren, "Les Salons," 687; Coquiot, "Les Indépendants," 1; Emile Sedeyn, "Les Artistes Indépendants," in: La Critique 7, no. 149 (5 May 1901), 69-70, here 69; Michel Puy, "Les Indépendants," in: Le Messidor 1, no. 6 (June 1901), 209-214, here 209; and Roger Marx, "La Saison d'art," in: Revue universelle (1901), 649-652, here 652. 36 Henry Eon, "Expositions: Les Indépendants – Lachenal," 751: "L'indépendance ainsi comprise, c'est l'anarchie, et cela ne mène à rien; cela deviant, en effet, la paralysie de tout effort raisonné." See also Henry Eon, "Salon des Indépendants," in: La Plume (1896), 263-4. 37 On the Trial of Thirty, see Maitron, Le Mouvement anarchiste en France, 251-261. 38 Puy, "Les Indépendants," here 209-210: "J'insisterai d'autant plus sur le Salon des Indépendants que, par les tendances qu'il manifeste, labeur, esprit de critique et d'analyse, effort jamais découragé, il apparaît comme attentatoire à l'ordre établi. La clairvoyance des bons citoyens s'en inquiète [...] Un art qui recherche du nouveau ne signifie-t-il pas: émancipation?" 39 Laertes, "Le Salon des Indépendants," in: La Dépêche 32, no. 11, 927 (24 Apr. 1901), 1: "Les Indépendants vivent sous le regime de la liberté et de l'égalité plênières." License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" [10] Such positive assessments of the Société's principles, both artistic and political, reveal a marked shift from responses dating to the latter 1890s, and make clear that 1901 was a decisive turning point for the Independents. [11] Undoubtedly part of the resurgence was due to artists outside the neo- impressionist circle. Cézanne, who had begun showing with the Independents in 1899, continued to exhibit there in 1901 and 190241; his rising status brought much luster. Discussions of the individual artists at the 1901 exhibition most often began with him, "the most renowned landscapist of this time."42 The next discussed group was the neo- impressionists, closely followed by the Nabis, Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940), Pierre Bonnard (1867-1946) and Maurice Denis (1870-1943), who had abandoned the Independents in previous years for the Salon de la Société nationale des beaux-arts. They returned in 1901, in part because the National had taken a more conservative turn. André Fontainas in La Plume noted that many painters of talent showed at both the Independents and the National. He pondered why their works looked different in the different venues: "Strange thing. Is it due to the more pleasant atmosphere? Is it the selection of the official juries that restrained them? The paintings shown at the Independents better reveal, in general, a free temperament, an ease of style, their own beauty."43 The Independents was being attributed new powers. While the presence of so many significant artists does much to explain the resurgence of the Independents, it does not explain the praise newly heaped on the Signac and the other neo-impressionists. [12] If critics did not launch their reviews with Cézanne, most began either by discussing the posthumous retrospective given to the recently discovered painter, Edmond Le Marcis (1829-1900), or by describing the works of Signac and the other neo- impressionists.44 The order of discussion clearly indicated status. The neo-impressionists as a group received increasing critical attention and concomitant space in reviews, even as their technique took less. As their consistent supporter Emile Verhaeren explained, neo-impressionism's "technique is no longer discussed as a challenge or childish behaviour; it has slowly taken its place in the world of art and those who use it, at least 40 Sedeyn, "Les Artistes Indépendants," 69-70: "L'idée d'indépendance rehausse la dignité humaine. Celui qui sait être honnête sans craindre les gendarmes, être juste sans craindre le purgatoire, être peintre sans craindre les suffrages du jury official et sans quémander des honneurs à l'Institut, celui-là affirme la beauté de l'indépendance." 41 Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 135 and 310, note 98, who further notes that Cézanne left the Independents for the Salon d'Automne in 1904 where he was given his own room with 31 works. 42 Coquiot, "Les Indépendants," 1901, 1: "le plus illustre paysagiste de ce temps." 43 Fontainas, "Les Artistes Indépendants," in: La Plume (1901), 352 -355, here 352: "Chose étrange, est-ce dû à l'atmosphère plus sympathique? est-ce le choix des jurys officiels les y a contraints? les toiles mises aux Indépendants, révèlent mieux, en general, un tempérament libre, une aisance de style, leur beauté propre." 44 The reverence with which Cézanne is treated in these reviews is also notable. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" some of them, are in the process of asserting their mastery."45 While a few critics continued to discuss the perceived limits of the divisionist technique in 1901, far more devoted significant space to praising the group and Signac in particular. Coquiot identified him as "the soul of the this admirable Society."46 In L' Encyclopédie Contemporaine, Ivan barely mentioned the technique in passing, as he described Signac as "the well-known pointillist," before going on to heap lavish praise on all the neo-impressionists.47 He singled out Signac's works as "belle," giving special attention to the artist's Saint-Tropez landscapes: "Port de Saint-Tropez is as seductive as possible. I' ve hardly seen the Mediterranean light rendered with more finesse and fidelity."48 [13] Fontainas, who in 1897 had cried "Why M. Signac?", who in 1899 had declared the Independents "almost dead," and concluded "nothing on the walls arouses even the slightest interest,"49 would do an abrupt about-face in 1901. He positively situated the neo-impressionists' "community of means" as having "a combination of refined and effective procedures" which "create a very special atmosphere." His praise extended to most of the neo-impressionists, but especially to Signac, who "makes the sparkling and powderiness of the Southern lights sing; nobody excels like he does when he lights up the whiteness of a sail against the shimmering colors of the Mediterranean."50 There were certainly many factors leading to the renewed value of the Independents but, in 1901, the works of Signac seem to have been central. [14] Signac also exhibited four large oil sketches, collectively titled Projet pour la décoration de la salle des fêtes de la mairie d'Asnières (Project for the Asnières City Hall Decoration) (Figs. 1, 2), which were much discussed in significantly new ways.51 They are perhaps the clearest, but by no means the only, example of the shared concerns around 45 Verhaeren, "Les Salons," 688: "technique n'est plus discutée comme une gageure et une gaminerie; lentement, elle a pris place dans l'art et ceux qui s'en servent, au moins quelques-uns, sont en passé d'affirmer leur maîtrise." 46 Coquiot, "Les Indépendants," 2: "l'âme meme de cette admirable Société." 47 Ivan, "Le Salon des Indépendants," L'Encyclopédie Contemporaine 15, no. 464 (20 May 1901), 79-80, here 79: "le célèbre pointilliste." 48 Ivan, "Le Salon des Indépendants," 79: "Port de Saint-Tropez est séduisant au possible. Je n'ai guere vu la lumière méditerranéenne rendue ave plus de finesse et de fidelité." Further enthusiastic praise is found in Sedeyn, "Les Artistes Indépendants," 69, where the seascapes are described as being "d'un éclat, d'une fraicheur et d'une harmonie remarquable." Guinaudeau, "Le Salon des Indépendants," 2, similarly praised Signac: "La lumière chante merveilleusement dans ces voiles, dans ces arbres, dans ces fuyantes lignes de quais et de bâtisses." 49 Fontainas, "Art Moderne," in: Mercure de France 32, no. 120 (Dec. 1899), 811-817, here 816: "rien aux murs à present ne suscite mème un pale intérêt." 50 Fontainas, "Les Artistes Indépendants," 355: "communauté de moyens"; "une alliance de procédés épurés et effectifs" which "crée une atmosphère bien special"; "fait chanter l'étincellement et la pulvérulence des lumières méridionales; nul n'excelle comme lui à allumer la blancheur d'une voile aux chatoiements colorés des eaux méditerranéennes." 51 They are held in private collections but were reproduced in Cachin, Signac, as catalogue numbers 355-358: Esquisse des cinq fenêtres, 1900, oil on canvas, 49 x 224 cm; Esquisse du paneau central no.2, 1900, oil on canvas, 49 x 112 cm; Esquisse du panneau central no. 3, 1900, oil on canvas, 49 x 224 cm; Esquisse de la voûte unique, 1900, oil on canvas, 49 x 120 cm. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" 1900 of the neo-impressionists and the symbolists, especially regarding the functions of decorative art, which Katherine Kuenzli has shown to be central to defining modernism in the first decade of the 20th century.52 1 Paul Signac, Projet pour la décoration de la salle des fêtes de la mairie d'Asnières: Esquisse du panneau central no. 3 (Project for the Asnières City Hall Decoration: Sketch for the Central Panel no. 3), 1900, oil on canvas, 49 x 224 cm. Private Collection (© Archives Signac, photo J. Hyde. Reprod. from: Françoise Cachin, Signac. Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre, Paris 2000, p. 127, cat. 357) 2 Paul Signac, Projet pour la décoration de la mairie d'Asnières: Esquisse de la voûte unique (Project for the Asnières City Hall Decoration: Sketch for the Single Vault), 1900, oil on canvas, 49 x 120 cm. Private Collection (© Archives Signac, photo J. Hyde. Reprod. from: Françoise Cachin, Signac. Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre, Paris 2000, p. 127, cat. 358) [15] Signac's canvases had first been exhibited the Hôtel de Ville de Paris, in December 1900, with more than 100 other submissions done for a public contest to win the commission to decorate the Salle des Fêtes of the Mairie d'Asnières.53 He did not expect to win the commission, but asked in his diary, "Has one the right to complain of not having walls to decorate if one does nothing to obtain them?"54 Signac did not even make the short-list, despite widespread support for his work. The commission was awarded to Marseillais painter Henry Bouvet (1859-1945), and the jury was roundly denounced for 52 Katherine M. Kuenzli, The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin- de-Siècle, Burlington 2010, 25 and passim. On the evolving concept of the decorative see the ground-breaking work by Gloria Groom, ed., Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890-1930, exh. cat., New Haven, 2001, and especially the essays therein: Nicholas Watkins, "The Genesis of a Decorative Aesthetic," 1-28, and Gloria Groom, "Into the Mainstream: Decorative Painting, 1900-30," 143-168; on the decorative's relation to neo-impressionism, see Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 5-6 and 162-166. 53 Discover Asnières-sur-Seine: A guide of heritage tourism, http://en.calameo.com/read/00044651974cbea6a0930 (accessed 1 May 2012). 54 Paul Signac, Journal, t. VI, 11 Nov. 1900, Archives Signac; as quoted and translated in Richard Thomson, "Henri Martin at Toulouse: terre natale and juste milieu," in: Framing France: The Representation of Landscape in France, 1870-1914, ed. Richard Thomson, Manchester 1998, 147-172, here 168. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en http://en.calameo.com/read/00044651974cbea6a0930 RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" its decision. In the words of Coquiot: "It is good to call odious, a second time, the judges of the contest."55 In La Revue Blanche, Félicien Fagus too singled out Signac's proposal, praising it for two full paragraphs, and he concluded that "for the first time, the theories that gave rise to it will be controlled in a full, dazzling, decisive way."56 [16] In recent literature, including that of Gloria Groom, Nicholas Watkins and Katherine Kuenzli, the decorative's importance for 20th century art has been highlighted, with a focus on the Nabis. However, as Signac's letters, texts, and the primary criticism makes clear, the neo-impressionists were also deeply invested in the ideals of the decorative. The concept of the decorative was not delimited by style but most commonly implied a contrast with easel painting, and its bourgeois associations; it could relate to an ideal of an elevated, public art or, paradoxically, could suggest the breakdown of hierarchies through the reuniting of the arts and crafts.57 For the neo-impressionists, it implied both the large-scale paintings associated with architecture, as well as the more intimate associations that could be created by an easel painting's formal qualities. The decorative was strongly associated with classicism, and both were deeply connected in the French imaginary to the Mediterranean, as revealed by the fact that immediately upon moving to the Saint-Tropez, Signac made his first effort at a large, decorative work: Femmes au puits. Opus 238 (Jeunes provençales au puits: décoration pour un panneau dans la pénombre) (Women at the Well. Opus 238 [Young Girls from Provence at the Well: Decoration for a Panel in the Shadows], 1892, oil on canvas, 194.8 x 130.7 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris). He followed with an even larger and more clearly decorative work, his manifesto of anarchist ideals, Au temps d'harmonie: L' âge d'or n' est pas dans le passé, il est dans l' avenir (In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age Is Not in the Past, It Is in the Future, 1893-1895, oil on canvas, 300 x 400 cm, Mairie de Montreuil, Montreuil) (Fig. 4).58 Even though these works were not very well received, Signac persisted, as the Asnières canvases reveal. As he had explained in his 1898 book: The effect sought by the neo-impressionists, and ensured by divisionism, is a maximum of light, color, and harmony. Their technique thus seems very well suited to decorative compositions, which some of them have sometimes done. But, being excluded from official commissions, and having no large walls to decorate, they wait for the time when they will be allowed to carry out the great undertakings of which they dream.59 55 Coquiot, "Les Indépendants," 2: "Il est bon de rendre odieux une seconde fois les juges d'un concours." 56 Félicien Fagus, "Décoration de la Mairie d'Asnières," in: La Revue blanche (Jan.-Apr. 1901): 61-63 here 62: "pour la première fois les théories qui le suscitèrent seraient contrôlées d'une façon pleine, éclatante, décisive." 57 Watkins, "The Genesis of a Decorative Aesthetic," 18-19. 58 Dymond, "A Politicized Pastoral," 358-363. 59 Paul Signac, D'Eugène Delacroix au neo-impressionnisme, 3rd edition, Paris 1921, 84: "L'effet recherché par les néo-impressionnistes et assuré par la division, c'est un maximum de lumière, de coloration et d'harmonie. Leur technique semble donc convenir fort bien aux compositions décoratives, à quoi, d'ailleurs, certains d'entre eux l'ont quelquefois appliquée. Mais, exclus des commandes officielles, n'ayant pas de murailles à décorer, ils attendent des temps où il leur sera License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" 3 Paul Signac, Femmes au puits (Women at the Well), 1892, oil on canvas, 195 x 131 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris (© RMN Musée d'Orsay. Reprod. from: Françoise Cachin, Signac. Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre, Paris 2000, p. 110, cat. 234) 4 Paul Signac, Au temps d’harmonie (In the Time of Harmony), 1894-1895, oil on canvas, 300 x 400 cm. Mairie de Montreuil, Montreuil (Photo: Jean- Luc Tabuteau. Image kindly provided by the Mairie de Montreuil) permis de réaliser les grandes entreprises dont ils rêvent." License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" [17] The decorative had been central to neo-impressionism since its founding, as Roslak has shown, yet there was a renewed enthusiasm for its potential in the 20th century. [18] The artistic success of Signac's Asnières proposal (despite his lack of success in the competition) seems to have encouraged critics to recognize anew neo- impressionism's decorative qualities. Puy, for example, praised the installation of paintings by both Van Rysselberghe and Signac at the Independents in terms that emphasized their decorative potential: They would light up the walls of village halls magnificently; they have understood modern architecture, in the simplicity of its great lines, and are ready to decorate bright rooms and distinguished rooms, where their vibrant luminosity would balance out; they would bring different qualities than those of Puvis de Chavannes, but derived from him: they see widely and know how to compose, a rare gift.60 [19] Puy also took a swipe at the artist who had most successfully used the neo- impressionist technique in the public sphere: Henri Martin (1860-1943).61 Puy lamented Martin's "pillaging" of neo-impressionist style,62 presumably for similar reasons as those decried by Signac, who complained that Martin's use of the technique had been supported by the government, yet drained of its advantages, especially coloristic brilliance.63 As Richard Thomson has made clear, Martin's successful mainstreaming of the technique in such well-known commissions as the Capitole of Toulouse relied on draining it not only of its color, but also of its radical associations.64 [20] Verhaeren went even further than most in condemning the choice of the jury: he demanded to know why, when Signac's works had already entered into the German state museum, they were not yet in the collection of the Musée du Luxembourg, France's national museum for living artists.65 This call for Signac to be officially recognized and nationally represented would not be answered until 1905, when one of his watercolors was purchased by the Luxembourg. Nevertheless, these calls for national recognition marked a significant shift in the reception of Signac. [21] In a longer article on the 1901 spring art season, Roger Marx concluded with a tribute to the Independents that repeatedly linked it to freedom. Noting the promising 60 Puy, "Les Indépendants," 211: "Ils éclaireraient magnifiquement des murailles de salles des fêtes; ils ont compris l'architecture moderne, dans la simplicité des ses grandes lignes, et sont préparés pour la decoration des halls clairs et des salles élevées, où s'équilibrerait leur vibrante luminosité; ils y apporteraient des qualités différentes de celles de Puvis de Chavannes, mais dérivées de lui: ils voient largement, et don rare, savent composer." 61 On Martin, see Thomson, "Henri Martin at Toulouse," which is also one of the few examinations of Signac's Asnières works. 62 Puy, "Les Indépendants," 210. 63 Signac, D'Eugène Delacroix au neo-impressionnisme, 110; noted in Thomson, "Henri Martin at Toulouse," 166-167. 64 Thomson, "Henri Martin at Toulouse," 166-68. 65 Verhaeren, "Les Salons," 689. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" newcomers to the Independents, Marx singled out the former students of Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), including Henri Matisse (1869-1954). Their works, he suggested, "denounce by their presence the incomprehension or the arbitrary harshness of juries."66 The Belgian artists showing, including Van Rysselberghe, were said to be honored "to share the asylum of free art and militant originality with the outcasts."67 In this, Marx made this tradition of freedom a national one, French but not Belgian. Marx's final paragraph is worth quoting at length: Overall, the exhibition of the Independents is more and better than the protesting Salon des Refusés; it gives the example of an open society where the rights of all are equal, where everyone is answerable only to himself and remains individually responsible. The artist admits and shows himself as he is, openly without pretense; the viewer, meanwhile, receives no watchword from the jury, follows the inclination of his preferences and decides, in his own way, from beginning to end. Fortunate training for the will, is it not true, that which accustoms man to use his independence to act, to think by himself and for himself, consulting no-one, in the blissfulness of free will!68 [22] Marx's text, more than any other in 1901, made it clear that the Society's radical artistic and political history was what gave it its power, for the benefit of both the artist and viewer. Marx took it even further, however, in arguing that the Independents' trained the viewer to exercise his free will and that this would benefit all society. His viewpoint was very close to that of Signac, who had been long working toward a decorative art that could transform the public, and help to bring about a new society (see also Katherine Brion's article in this Special Issue).69 [23] These shifts in the critical reception of both the neo-impressionists and the Salon des Indépendants from 1898 to 1901 have made me reconsider why so many young artists were attracted to neo-impressionism and an art of color in the 20th century. After the first flurry of responses at its publication, there were very few published references to Signac's D'Eugène Delacroix, and it was not reprinted in France until 1911.70 Instead of being explained by a two-year old book, it seems that the renewed success in 1901 was 66 Marx, "La Saison d'art," 652: "dénonçaient par leur présence l'incompréhension ou les rigueurs arbitraires des jurys." 67 Marx, "La Saison d'art," 652: "de partager avec les proscrits l'asile de l'art libre et de l'originalité militante." 68 Marx, "La Saison d'art," 652: "Au total, l'exposition des Indépendants est plus et mieux que le Salon protestataire des refusés; elle donne l'exemple d'une société ouverte, où les droits de tous sont égaux, où chacun ne relève que de soi-même et demeure individuellement responsable. L'artiste se confesse et se livre tel qu'il est, sans fard ni feinte; le spectateur, de son côté, ne reçoit point le mot d'ordre des jurys, suit l'inclination de ses préférences et se prononce, à sa guise, en premier et dernier ressort. Heureuse école pour la volonté, n'est-il pas vrai, celle qui habitue ainsi l'homme à user de son indépendance, à agir, à penser par lui-même et pour lui-même, sans prendre conseil de personne, dans la plénitude du libre arbitre!" 69 On Signac's earlier major decorative efforts and their relation to anarchism, see Anne Dymond "A Politicized Pastoral: Signac and the Cultural Geography of Mediterranean France," in The Art Bulletin 85 (June 2003), 353-370; Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 155-167. 70 The 1911 edition was published by Henry Floury, who would publish a third edition in 1921. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" owed both to the administrative facts of better timing, site and organization, and, in no small measure, to the neo-impressionists' newly-valued capacity for harmonious decorative art, which had been a pictorial and social goal held by Signac and Cross throughout the latter part of the 1890s. As Roslak has persuasively argued, Signac and Cross had been attempting, since their move to southern France in the early 1890s, "to elevate [their beloved land of the sun] to the level of a decorative monument."71 Signac's proposal for the Mairie d'Asnières won over many critics. For the first time, it seems, critics such as Roger Marx, who had long preferred symbolism, could see and applaud both the ideals of the neo-impressionists and their execution. Indeed, the primary critical literature makes evident that it was neo-impressionist art, increasingly esteemed from 1901, that led to a renewal of interest in the book, visible around 1904. "Towards a New Classical Canon": 1902-1904 [24] Response to the 1902 Salon des Indépendants was similar to that of the previous year, with both the exhibition and the group receiving much praise. For example, this year's Independents was praised as one the society's more important,72 and Fagus would exclaim "Here is the real Salon!"73 However, three new trends emerged: Signac was increasingly given the lead position in reviews; the neo-impressionists were more often recognized as having distinctive personal styles within the technique; and the importance of the south, with its associations of freedom, the decorative arabesque, and its links to classicism came to the fore in much criticism. [25] Like many critics, after a laudatory introduction, Henry Bidou turned immediately to discuss Signac.74 His effusive praise for Saint-Tropez (1901, oil on canvas, 131 x 161.5 cm, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo) is precise and detailed, noting specific lines and colors in the work.75 After some appreciative description, Bidou turned to method: "Signac proceeds by pure tones juxtaposed, that is well known. But his art is more delicate."76 Bidou went on to closely analyze Signac's touch, noting the individual marks as well as their harmony within the whole.77 He instructed viewers: "Examine also the 71 As translated in Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 167, note 8. 72 Henry Bidou,"Le Salon des Indépendants," in: L'Occident 1, vol. 5 (Apr. 1902), 255-64, here 255. See also Fontainas, "Art moderne," in: Mercure de France 42, no. 149 (May 1902), 523-31, here 526. 73 Fagus, "Les Indépendants," in: La Revue Blanche (Apr. 1902): 623-626, here 623: "Voici le vrai Salon!" 74 For other reviews beginning with Signac, see also François Hoffmann, "L'exposition de la Société des Artistes Indépendants," in: Journal Des Arts (5 Apr. 1902), 2-3, here 2. Even when not discussed first, Signac was given much attention in 1902, as was his solo exhibition in June at Siegfried Bing's Salon de l'Art Nouveau. 75 Cachin, Signac, 249. 76 Bidou, "Le Salon des Indépendants," 255-6. 77 Bidou, "Le Salon des Indépendants," 256: "que dans le meme coup de pinceau le blanc paraisse près de la couleur, sans s'y fonder et sans l'alourdir, et la laisse vivante et brillante, au lieu de la faire plâtreuse." License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" way each touch is laid, combined with the canvas which appears here and there, how it is placed for the pleasure of the eye, the beauty of the matter and for its role in the whole."78 This kind of close attention to individual works, even to specific marks, was rare enough in art criticism, but it was unparalleled in discussions of Signac and the neo- impressionists, who had often been discussed as having lost their individuality to a 'system.' While Bidou went on to discuss each individual neo-impressionists at length, Edmond Pilon, in Aujourd'hui, directly compared Signac's and Van Rysselberghe's differing use of the technique. This recognition that the neo-impressionist method allowed for individual temperament and had evolved greatly since the early 1890s, was noted by Signac in his diary as early as 1895,79 but only became more widely admitted in the 20th century. [26] Even François Hoffmann, critic for the conservative Journal des Arts, was positive about Signac in 1902, and he too began his discussion of specific artists with Signac: Mr. Signac, who for fifteen years has been in the breach as an impressionist painter, in terms of the way of painting, cannot of course please everybody but it is nevertheless true that he still retains his great enthusiasm and increasingly forces himself to simplify and to synthesize according to his caprice, he carries his easel from Passy to Samois and from Samois to Saint-Tropez, noting, here and there, that which speaks to his imagination.80 [27] Hoffmann thus recognized Signac as grounded in specific locations, but also saw the artist's use of imagination; this balance between the real and the imagined, the objective and the subjective, represents a significant rhetorical move away from the situating of the neo-impressionists as mere technicians following a rulebook. While this was never true of the neo-impressionists, it was only intermittently recognized (see Young's analysis of such rhetorical gambits after Seurat's death in 1891 in this Special Issue). The more negative criticism of the later 1890s tended, however, to blunt the movement's complex negotiation of such issues. Hoffmann and others recognized that the imaginative was not the sole purview of the symbolists. This balanced recognition of technique, imagination, and synthesis, all filtered through the individual artist would recur frequently in the coming years. [28] By 1902, the importance of the Côte d'Azur, both for the neo-impressionists and modern art, was also frequently mentioned. Signac had been visiting the Mediterranean 78 Bidou, "Le Salon des Indépendants," 256: "Examinez aussi la façon dont chaque touche est posée, combine avec la toile qui paraît çà et là, comment elle est accrochée pour le plaisir de l'oeil, la beauté de la matière et pour son rôle dans l'ensemble." 79 Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 191. 80 Hoffmann, "L'exposition de la Société des Artistes Indépendants," 2: "M. Signac, depuis une quinzaine d'années sur la brèche est un peintre impressionniste, dont la façon de peindre, peut bien ne pas plaire à tout le monde, mais il n'en est pas moins vrai que l'artiste conserve toujours sa belle ardeur et qu'il s'efforce de plus en plus à simplifier et à synthétiser au hasard de son caprice, il promène son chevalet de Passy à Samois et de Samois à Saint-Tropez, notant, ici et là, ce qui parle à son imagination." License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" coast regularly since the late 1880s, and settled in the small coastal village of Saint- Tropez in 1892.81 Cross was similarly ensconced in the south, and both had seen Provence as a location that would be conducive to their desired anarchist future. The art critic Edmond Pilon began his review of the 1902 Independents by praising Cézanne's depictions of "the Provencal countryside" which he said "offers sites that are limpid and rugged by way of its contrasts. Great artists know it and go there. Among them are Messrs. Théo Van Rysselberghe, Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross."82 The sunlit port of Saint-Tropez, discussed above, was widely praised as "one of the best works by Paul Signac."83 But the southern location, this "strange enchantress,"84 was not just visual; it had important cultural connotations, often linked to ideals of French classicism and, by the neo-impressionists, to ideals of freedom and anarchism.85 Fagus made the link between the location, the decorative arabesque, and classical ideals explicit. After some complaints about what neo-impressionism lacked, he exclaimed about Cross's works: "but the quivering of these Provençal pines, the beautiful rise towards the arabesque, towards the beautiful line, towards a new classical canon!"86 The depiction of the south, captured by the beautiful arabesque line, and thus linked to the decorative, was leading to a new classicism. Classicism was the central terrain being fought over in the 20th century, and as I have argued elsewhere, Signac did not relinquish it to the conservatives, but instead tried to claim it for the anarchist movement.87 [29] Fagus would take up this effusive praise for the neo-impressionist style and again link it to the classical and the decorative even more forcefully in his review of the group show at Durand-Ruel that fall. In a long discussion of the importance of decorative arts, including much praise for Van Rysselberghe's decorative ensemble for Victor Horta's Hotel 81 On his southern experiences, see Dymond, "A Politicized Pastoral," 357-363; Roslak, Neo- Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 141-167; Françoise Cachin, "L'Arrivée de Signac à Saint-Tropez," in: Françoise Cachin, Jean-Paul Monerey, and Marina Ferretti-Bocquillon, eds., Signac & Saint-Tropez, 1892-1913, exh. cat., Saint-Tropez 1992, 11-15; Cachin, ed., Méditerranée de Courbet à Matisse, exh. cat., Paris 2000. On Cross see Tania Woloshyn, "Marking out the Maures: Henri-Edmond Cross on the Côte d'Azur," in: Tania Woloshyn and Nicholas Hewitt, eds., L'Invention du Midi: The Rise of the South of France in the National and International Imagination (Nottingham French Studies 50.1, Special Issue), Nottingham 2011, 57-71. 82 Edmond Pilon, "XVIIIme Exposition des Indépendants," in: Aujourd'hui 2 (15 May 1902), 42-45, here 43: "la terre provençale offre par ses contrastes, des sites limpides et tournmentés. De grands artistes le savent et y viennent. Du nombre sont MM. Théo Van Rysselberghe, Paul Signac et Henri-Edmond Cross." 83 Tristan Klingsor, "Les Salons de 1902," in: La Plume (Jan.-June 1902), 566-571, here 567: "des meilleures toiles de Paul Signac." 84 Pilon, "XVIIIme Exposition des Indépendants," 43: "étrange enchanteresse." 85 Dymond, "A Politicized Pastoral," 352-357 and passim; Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 97-108 and 146-154; and for an account that emphasizes how it is viewed by those in the political right, see James D. Herbert, Fauve Painting: The Making of Cultural Politics, New Haven 1992, especially 122-124. 86 Fagus, "Les Indépendants," 625: "mais le vibrement de ces pins de Provence, la belle ascension vers l'arabesque, vers la belle ligne, vers un nouveau canon classique!" 87 Dymond, "A Politicized Pastoral," 364-365. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" Solvay, Fagus argued that "the universal momentum of painting towards harmony through light and clarity, necessarily led to the logical division of tone."88 Fagus went on to describe a new generation (not a school, he says, since they have more diverse sensibilities) of painters, inspired by Seurat, including both the neo-impressionists and the symbolists. As proof of its move toward universality, Fagus noted that they were even followed by academicians such as Henri Martin. And what, Fagus asked, were they moving towards? Towards a new décor, a new harmony through light and eloquence: towards style. Towards something else; that could only lead to splendor too soon frozen of a classicism, of another academy […] Supreme naivety attained through supreme love, this was the sublime beauty of the Middle Ages and ancient works, and it is towards this that our young renewed art strives without knowing it, and that makes it so alive, so moving, so edifying.89 [30] This praise for both symbolists and neo-impressionists recognized their shared interests in the decorative and the classical, and it indicates the neo-impressionists' new- found success in the opening years of the 20th century at claiming the arabesque, the beautiful line, and the classical. [31] Signac followed his success at the 1902 Independents with his first solo exhibition, at Bing's gallery. This large show included 9 canvases, 12 oil notations, 2 pastels and 100 watercolors.90 Response was overwhelmingly positive and often showed a renewed interest in situating Signac's 'science' in a positive light. Many critics noted how much the neo-impressionist technique had changed: Octave Maus, for example, described the technique as having undergone "a pleasing evolution."91 Fontainas, only recently favorable to neo-impressionism, argued that Signac had productively synthesized art and science: for him, science did not extinguish spontaneity; on the contrary, science is a great help to him; it teaches him to see and to express with more freedom and ease. These are not the cold school rules based on more or less authentic traditions that make up the method of Mr. Signac; no: he captured a secret of nature, neglected by previous painters.92 88 Fagus, "L'Art de demain," in: La Revue Blanche (Sept.-Dec. 1902), 542-546, here 545: "l'élan universel de la peinture vers une harmonie par la lumière et la clarté, nécessairement mena à la division logique du ton." 89 Fagus, "L'Art de demain," 545-546: "Vers un nouveau décor, une nouvelle harmonie par la lumière et le nombre: vers le style. Vers autre chose; cela seul mènerait à la splendeur tôt figée d'un classicisme, d'une autre académie […] Atteindre par le suprême amour la suprême naïveté, cela fit la beauté sublime des oeuvres du moyen âge comme des oeuvres de l'antiquité, et c'est vers cela que s'évertue à l'insu de lui notre jeune art renouvelé, et qui le fait si vivant, si émouvant, si édifiant." 90 Cachin, Signac, 373. 91 Octave Maus, "Exposition Paul Signac," in: L'Art Moderne (3 June 1902), 196-197, here 196: "une évolution heureuse." 92 Fontainas, "Art moderne," in: Mercure de France 43, no. 151 (July 1902), 243-247, here 245: "science n'a pas éteint chez lui la spontanéité; au contraire, elle lui est d'un grand secours; elle lui enseigne à voir et à s'exprimer avec plus de liberté et d'aisance. Ce ne sont pas de froides règles License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" [32] Maurice Denis, reviewing Signac's watercolors, dismissed concerns about the method, concluding, "Like the constructors of the thirteenth century, of which he has the same lucid spirit, he doesn't oppose, but much to the contrary, he reconciles art and science in the same conscious and reflective manner."93 Both critics praise neo- impressionist technique as something that was 'found' rather than 'made' (to invoke Richard Shiff's observation) through synthesis, and thus classic, and this view echoed throughout the early 20th century reception of the neo-impressionists.94 [33] This success of Signac's would be magnified at the next Independents. If the Gazette des beaux-arts was the bell-weather of success, its first review of the Independents in 1903 marked their coming of age.95 In the journal's review of the show, Henry Cochin was able to find individuality and individual expression, which he situated as art's highest goal, within the pointillist style. He praised Signac, but honored him even more by reproducing a drawing after Signac's Sisteron (1902, oil on canvas, 89 x 117, private collection, New York).96 [34] The first Salon d'Automne, in 1903, was organized in the wake of this resurgence of the Independents. Despite its successes, the Salon d'Automne represented, at its founding, a middle path between, on one hand, the conservatism of the Société des artistes français and the Société nationale des beaux-arts and, on the other hand, the anarchism of the Independents.97 As one critic quipped in 1910, "The Salon d'Automne, – the Independents have arrived."98 Its immediate success resulted in changes both within the Independents and in how the group was viewed. As with most post-1900 Independents exhibits, critics continued in 1904 to begin their reviews by noting the democratic governing principles of the group.99 In the wake of the founding of the newest Salon, the trend toward situating the Independents as a by-now well-established institution gathered force. As André Mellerio wrote, "There is no longer any need to explain to the readers of the Revue Universelle the goal of the Independents, and even d'école, basées sur les traditions plus ou moin authentiques, qui composent la méthode de M. Signac; non: il a surpris un secret de la nature, négligé des peindres antérieurs." 93 M.D. [Maurice Denis], "Aquarelles de Paul Signac," in: L'Occident 2, no. 8 (July 1902), 53-54, here 53. 94 Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art, Chicago 1984. 95 Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle France, 136, points out the importance of the Gazette des beaux-arts, and notes that it did not review the Independents. 96 Henry Cochin, "Quelques réflexions sur les salons," in: Gazette des Beaux-Arts 29 (1903), 441- 464, here 456. 97 See Roger Marx's interpretation of its founding, "Le Salon d'Automne," in: Gazette des Beaux- Arts 32 (1904), 458-474. 98 Anonymously quoted in Gérard Monnier, L'art et ses institutions en France: de la Révolution à nos jours, Paris 1995, 273: "Le Salon d'automne, ce sont les Indépendants arrivés." 99 For example, the reviews of the Independents that year in: Le Petit Sou, Le Mercure de France, L'Aurore, Les Annales de la Jeunesse Laique, Les Temps Nouveaux, Le Grand National, and La Dépêche. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" less of a need to plead the case of the artists who, not wanting to make any concession to the taste of the day, prefer the freedom they enjoy here to the partial constraints of the official Salons."100 Maurice Le Blond, in L' Aurore, began by noting that even though the President of France was not visiting the Independents, they had achieved the status of classic.101 If the Independents was situated as classic, the neo-impressionists continued to be seen as tightly linked to the society and, in parallel fashion, were now typically read as established masters, even veterans.102 "The Independents gather proudly around the valiant phalanx of the Luces and the Signacs, the Crosses and the Van Rysselberghes," Le Blond continued.103 Mellerio praised the salon for its associations with liberty, before moving directly on to discuss the neo-impressionists, and linking them to the promised land of the Mediterranean: "Besides, Saint-Tropez and Antibes are increasingly becoming the promised land for neo-impressionist painters, who find in the opposition of the sky and the sun, the colored sea, powerful trees, motifs with chromatic variation and beautiful linear arabesques."104 [35] But 1904 also marked a shift toward less positive reviews, with a renewed sense of neo-impressionism's end that has been much noted in art historical literature. Marcel Fouquier in Le Journal, for example, suggested that the exhibit clearly showed that the neo-impressionist school was nearly finished: "Its influence can be found almost everywhere but its doctrinal authority is in visible decline. Its methods are no longer applied save by a small group of intransigent artists led by Mr. Signac, for whom the Vues d'Antibes, in its ever prestigious charm is more outrageous than ever."105 However, even this negative assessment admitted the continued influence of the movement, and was relatively positive about Signac. Louis Vauxcelles, who would become one of the most important pre-war critics, was never a fan. Yet even he grudgingly conceded that Signac's seascapes vibrated, but complained that the effect tired and hurt the eyes.106 Charles Morice remained supportive of the Independents, even predicting that, along with 100 André Mellerio, "Les Petites Expositions," in: Revue Universelle 4, 108, (15 Apr. 1904), 215-216, here 215: "Il n'est plus besoin d'expliquer aux lecteurs de la Revue Universelle le but des Indépendants, et encore moins de plaider la cause des artistes qui, n'entendant faire aucune concession au goût du jour, préfèrent la liberté dont ils jouissent ici à la demi-contraite des Salons officiels." 101 Maurice Le Blond, "L'Exposition des Indépendants," in: L'Aurore (21 Feb. 1904), 2. 102 G.M. "Glanes du matin" in: La Gazette de France (21 Feb. 1904), 2. 103 Maurice Le Blond, "L'Exposition des Indépendants," 2: "Les Indépendants se groupent avec fierté autour de la vaillante phalange des Luce et des Signac, des Cross et des Van Rysselberghe." 104 Mellerio, "Les Petites Expositions," 215: "Au reste, Saint-Tropez et Antibes deviennent de plus en plus la terre promise des peintres néo-impressionnistes, qui trouvent dans les oppositions du ciel et du sol, da la mer colorée, des arbres puissant, motifs à variations chromatiques et à belles arabesques linéaires." 105 Marcel Fouquier, "Les Petits Salons," in: Le Journal (21 Feb. 1904), 5: "Son influence se retrouve un peu partout, mais son autorité doctrinale s'affaiblit visiblement. Ses procédés ne sont plus appliqués que par un petit groupe d'artistes intransigeants, qui ont pour chef M. Signac, dont les Vues d'Antibes, en leur charme toujours prestigieux sont plus outrancières que jamais." 106 Louis Vauxcelles, "Le Vernissage des Indépendants," in: Gil Blas (21 Feb. 1904), 1. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" the Salon d'Automne, it would outlast the official Salons. Nevertheless, Morice poked gentle fun at neo-impressionism, suggested of their irradiated landscapes that one might get a sunburn "if the sun weren' t so cold!"107 and then he trotted out some old tropes by criticizing the members as having become formulaic. [36] Despite some negative criticism, in 1904, Signac and the neo-impressionists were positioned in much criticism as more than merely having achieved a brief second wind; they were seen to be at the height of their powers, as established masters, who through perseverance had mastered their technique. They were rarely described as followers of Seurat, as indeed their style was recognized as having evolved significantly in the more than ten years since his death. They were consistently positioned as the equals to the symbolists, and as similarly striking a decorative balance between the objective and subjective, and, in the case of Cross and Signac, as concerned with the light and color of Provence above all else. The turning point came at the moment of the Independents' resurgence, in 1901, and was concomitant with Signac's attempt to move into large-scale public decorative works. If neo-impressionism in the 20th century has been primarily studied to understand its impact on later artists, it should be recognized that the movement, now twenty years old, had changed dramatically, and was still at the forefront of artistic debates in Paris. In the case of Matisse, it seems especially ahistorical to suggest the influence was brief. Matisse had two sustained periods of interest in neo- impressionism: from 1898 to 1900 he clearly studied Signac's text; then in 1904, he became immersed in the neo-impressionist world, working with and alongside them for a period that did fully end until the completion of Le Port d'Abaill (1905-06, oil on canvas, 60 x 148, private collection) – begun during the 'Fauve summer' of 1905, incomplete at the time of that year's Salon d'Automne, and finished by the time of its exhibition in the spring of in 1906.108 Given the relative speed at which significant art movements came and went in the 20th century – even Matisse's Fauve period lasted at best three years, roughly equal to his neo-impressionist periods – the high esteem in which Signac and other neo-impressionists were held in the years leading up to 1904 needs to be recognized. Only then can we understand that the definitions of the classical, the decorative, and the French tradition were wide and open to Independents of many stripes. 107 Charles Morice, "Le XXe Salon des Indépendants," in: Mercure de France 50, no. 173 (May 1904), 405-419, here 408: "Mais que ce soleil est froid!" 108 Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Early Years, 1869-1908, Berkeley 1998, 330. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0046 | 14 July 2012 | Special Issue "New Directions in New-Impressionism" License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en Introduction The Independents and Neo-Impressionists in the 1890s The Turning Point: 1901 "Towards a New Classical Canon": 1902-1904 work_6glii24ggfhvxhtuezunxlsica ---- PII: 0898-1221(86)90135-5 Comp. & Maths. with Appls. Vol. 12B. Nos. I/2, pp. 1-17, 1986 0886-9561/86 $3.00+ .00 Printed in Great Britain. © 1986 Pergamon Press Ltd. L I M I T S O F P E R F E C T I O N ISTVAN H A R G I T T A I t Institute o f Materials Science and Departments o f Chemistry and Physics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06268, U.S.A. A b s t r a c t - - T h i s personal narrative is an introduction to a collective effort by a number o f scientists and artists to examine the role and significance of symmetry in the most diverse domains of nature and human activity. Material symmetry, devoid o f the rigor o f geometrical symmetry, is viewed applicable to material objects as well as abstractions with limitless implications. To mark the 350th anniversary of Johannes Kepler's death, the Hungarian Post Office issued a beautiful memorial stamp (Fig. 1 ). Next to Kepler's portrait his famous model o f the planetary system is shown. This was fitting since of all o f Kepler's discoveries this is the best known to the general public, although it is viewed by some as his most spectacular failure[l]. A closer look at Kepler's activities, however, justifies the selection o f the Hungarian Post Office. Although he is most famous for his three laws of heavenly mechanics, there is another piece of work that was also a milestone in a different branch o f science, crystallography. If one is astonished by the depth of his understanding o f the physics o f the sky with the then available data, it is not less astonishing that Kepler could discuss the " a t o m i c " arrangement in crystals two hundred years before Dalton and three hundred years before X-ray crystallography began. In his new year's gift of the hexagonal snowflake Kepler[2] not only examines the hexagonal symmetry of the snow crystals but lays the foundation o f the principle o f densest packing in crystal structures. Densest packing is then, of course, the key to the symmetry o f crystal habit. The planetary model from the regular solids is also a densest packing model. Kepler's search for harmony was the bridge between his two lines o f activities. Although the snowflake paper seems to be almost an accident on the background o f his astronomy, the Hungarian stamp gave more credit to the complete Kepler than was probably envisioned by the planners of the stamp themselves. According to the regular solids model, taking the six planets, known to Kepler, in order, the greatest distance of one planet from the Sun stands in a fixed ratio to the least distance o f the next outer planet from the Sun. There are, of course, conveniently five ratios for the six planets. A regular solid can be interposed between two adjacent planets so that the inner planet, when at its greatest distance from the Sun, lies on the inscribed sphere o f the solid, while the outer planet, when at its least distance, lays on the circumscribed sphere. There are molecular structures which can be best described by polyhedra enveloping other polyhedra. The structure of [ C o 6 ( C 0 ) 1 4 ] 4 - is shown is Fig. 2: an omnicapped cube of carbonyl oxygens envelopes an octahedron formed by cobalt atoms[3]. One of today's most successful models in structural chemistry is based on extremely, simple considerations of space distribution. The valence shell electron pair repulsion (VSEPR) model[4] postulates that the geometry of the molecule is determined by the space requirements o f the electron pairs in the valence shell of its central atom. The bond configuration around atom A in an AX, molecule is such that the electron pairs in the valence shell be at maximum distances from each other. Thus the arrangement may be visualized so that the electron pairs occupy well-defined parts of the space about the central atom. In a different concept, these space segments are called localized molecular orbitals. It is easy to demonstrate the three-dimensional consequences of the VSEPR model. Only a few balloons have to be blown up and connected at their narrowing ends in groups o f two, three or four[5]. The linear, equilateral triangular, and tetrahedral arrangements o f these as- semblies are what the VSEPR model predicts for the electron pairs. Another beautiful analogy is found on walnut trees[6]. As two, three, or four walnuts grow sometimes together, the above tVisiting Professor (1983/85). Permanent address: Hungarian Academy o f Sciences, P.O. Box 117 Budapest, H-1431, Hungary. CAMWAI 2 : 1/2 (B) -B I ISTVAN HARGITTAI . . f - ' " ° " " \ ~ ~ .......... ],-.v ..... Fig. 1. Kepler memorial stamp. (Hungarian Post Office, 1980.) arrangements occur unfailingly (see Fig. 3). The soft balloons and hard walnuts may even be viewed as representing weaker and stronger interactions and thereby represent even more subtle analogies for molecular structure. Can molecular geometry be so simple? There is obvious oversimplification in the model. Of the many effects determining molecular structure, one is taken into account and all the others are ignored. The model is applicable where this particular effect, to wit the repulsions o f the electron pairs due to their space requirements, is dominant. The VSEPR model is successful because this effect is important enough in extensive classes o f compounds. In comparing the complexity of planetary motion and molecular structure, the real analogy is in the possibility of selecting a dominant effect and ignoring the others. This approach works much better for the planetary motion where the dominant effect is the gravitational attraction of the Sun while the others are perturbations. In the world of molecules, the dominant effect may change from one compound to another. In spite of the tremendous amount o f accumulated knowledge about molecular structure, its basic principles are still being clarified. One o f the characteristics of the forces keeping the molecule together is that they are very strong, whereas the gravitational forces are very weak. To discover the law of gravitational interactions, the observations had to be made on a large scale. The laboratory was the planetary system itself. As we compare the symmetries of molecules and crystals, a striking difference is that there are no limitations for molecules and there are well-defined limitations for crystals. A consequence is the finite number (32) of symmetry classes for crystal habit with no such limits for molecules. ~ O Fig. 2. The structure o f [Co6(CO)~41 +- , the omnicapped cube o f the carbonyl oxygens envelopes the cobalt octahedron. (After[3].) Limits of perfection 3 Fig. 3. Walnut clusters with two, three, and four walnuts with linear, equilateral triangular, and tetrahedral arrangements. (Photographs by the author following the idea of Niac and Florea[6].) 4 ISTVAN HARGITTAI T h e m o l e c u l e s are a m o r e fundamental building unit in the hierarchy o f structures than the crystals and m a n y crystals t h e m s e l v e s are built f r o m molecules. Unfortunately, m o l e c u l e s are usually not to be seen b y the n a k e d e y e whereas the crystals are. T h e y are so a p p e a l i n g l y s y m m e t r i c a l that they h a v e b e c o m e a sort o f idol for s y m m e t r y . For the BEla Bart6k centenary a couple o f years ago (1981), Victor Vasarely p r o d u c e d a limited edition o f ten serigraphs created for ten o f B a r t 6 k ' s musical pieces. Each serigraph was a c c o m p a n i e d b y a p o e m , each written b y a different living Hungarian poet. M o r e than once the w o r d crystal was related to B a r t r k ' s music. I f one considers their s y m m e t r y properties in a strictly technical sense, h o w e v e r , they could not be farther f r o m each other. B a r t r k ' s music is i n t e r w e a v e d throughout b y the Fibonacci n u m b e r s and the golden section. T h e s e s y m m e t r i e s characterize for e x a m p l e the scattered leaf arrangements o f m a n y plants and are o m n i p r e s e n t in other d o m a i n s o f the a n i m a t e world as well. On the other hand, " c r y s t a l l i z a t i o n is d e a t h " , as crystallographers t h e m s e l v e s like to point out. Incidentally, pentagonal s y m m e t r y is con- spicuously present in primitive o r g a n i s m s and crystailographer Nikolai Belov[7] suggested that it was their m e a n s o f self-defense against crystallization. T h e restrictions on crystal s y m m e t r y start with the fact that, strictly s p e a k i n g , it exists only theoretically• Its main characteristic is translational s y m m e t r y , i.e. infinite periodic rep- etition, and in reality, o f course, crystals a l w a y s end s o m e w h e r e ; but apart f r o m this, there is no five-fold s y m m e t r y axis, nor are there axes with higher order than six. Considering the m o r e easily visualized t w o - d i m e n s i o n a l surface o f the regular p o l y g o n s , only the equilateral triangle, the square and the regular h e x a g o n can be used to c o m p l e t e l y c o v e r an area without gaps, w h e r e a s the regular p e n t a g o n , h e p t a g o n , etc., can not. Similar limitations extend to the third dimension. In spite o f the limitations in crystal s y m m e t r y , the crystals have a unique appeal and are widely used also in analogies. Q u o t e the C z e c h writer Karel (~apek[8] on his visit to the mineral collection o f the British M u s e u m • . .But I must speak again about crystals, shapes, colors. There are crystals as huge as the collonade of a cathedral, soft as mould, prickly as thorns; pure, azure, green, like nothing else in the world, fiery, black; mathematically exact, complete, like constructions by crazy, capricious scientists, or reminiscent of the liver, the h e a r t . . . There are crystal grottos, monstrous bubbles of mineral mass, there is fermentation, fusion, growth of minerals, ar- chitecture and engineering a r t . . . Egypt crystallizes in pyramids and obelisks, Greece in Fig. 4. Illustration for phyllotaxis. (Photograph by the author.) Limits of perfection columns; the middle ages in gilly-flowers; London in grimy c u b e s . . . Like secret mathe- matical flashes of lightning the countless laws of construction penetrate the matter. To equal nature it is necessary to be mathematically and geometrically exact. Number and phantasy, law and abundance--these are the living, creative strengths of nature; not to sit under a green tree but to create crystals and to form ideas, that is what it means to be at one with nature! This is then exactly the point where Bart6k and the crystals meet. While the c o m p o s e r invariably refused to discuss the technicalities o f his work, he liked to state " W e create after N a t u r e " and he meant it literally. As a crystal is being built from molecules, and the energetically most favorable arrangement is being achieved, the molecules c o m e into close, touching range with each other. C o m p a r e d with the free molecules, their interactions m a y have perturbing effects on their structures. One o f the simplest consequences m a y be the lowering o f their original symmetry. Discussing the structural consequences o f densest packing in molecular crystals, the following explanation is attributed to crystallographer Aleksandr Kitaigorodskii, " T h e molecule also has a body. W h e n this b o d y is hit, the molecule feels hurt all o v e r . " This analogy emphasizes the importance o f spatial requirements o f the molecules in building the molecular crystal rather than the peculiarities o f its electronic structure which would be o f greater importance in a more chemical behavior as in a chemical reaction. Personifying the molecule obviously had an appeal to the scientist, and it also has an appeal for children who generally like to do so with various objects. W h e n some years ago the a u t h o r ' s daughter was asked in the kindergarten about her father's occupation, she said he cured sick molecules. The tendency to make metaphors, however, seems to diminish with c o m i n g o f age. S o m e valuable things m a y be lost in the educational process. It is much easier to get through to children the notion that there is much more to s y m m e t r y than what we call bilateral s y m m e t r y . Adults seem to be more narrow-minded and more indoctrinated. Not everything is perfect, however, even with the most symmetrical molecules. Concerning their s y m m e t r y , that is. W h e n the s y m m e t r y o f a molecule is described, it is usually the motionless, frozen molecule that is meant. This structure would correspond to the m i n i m u m energy. The molecules are never motionless, however. Even if they could be cooled to the absolute coldest temperature o f 0 K or - 2 7 3 . 1 6 ° C , they would not c o m e to a standstill. The molecular vibrations often lead to some instantaneous distortion or lowering o f the molecular s y m m e t r y . This is true for the relatively rigid molecules and even more so for the very flexible molecules. Intramolecular motion m a y even lead to a continuous permutation o f the atoms in the molecule. Imagine a ring molecule o f five atoms with four being in one plane and the fifth atom sticking out o f the plane. This arrangement lowers the s y m m e t r y o f the five-member ring to a Fig. 5. Henri Matisse: Dance. (The Hermitage, Leningrad.) Reproduced by kind permission from The Hermitage. 6 IsTVAN HARGrVrAI mere symmetry plane. The point is that this molecule may be performing such intramolecular motion that during every second a million times or more the sticking out position switches from one atom to the next and to the next and so on. Consider now five dancers in a circle instead o f the five atoms (see Fig. 5). Let them make a j u m p one after the other in a quick succession. I f we take photographs with very short exposures, we can catch various configurations, including even the most symmetrical one in which all the five dancers are on the ground. On the other hand, a longer exposure leads to a blurred picture all around the circle. The apparent symmetry of the dancing group obviously depends on the length o f the exposure used, and also, of course on the speed of their movement. The molecular structures and crystal structures represent two well-separated cases from the point o f view o f their symmetry properties. The molecule is characterized by point-group symmetry as it has at least one unique point in the whole structure. Crystal structures are characterized by space-group symmetry or translational symmetry as they have no unique point in their structure. When point-group and space-group symmetries are compared, it is not obvious how to distinguish between higher and lower symmetries. Within each domain, however, and the molecules and crystals are merely examples, there is a hierarchy o f symmetries. Increasing the symmetry beyond some limits may lead, however, to sterility and certainly diminishes the information content. Scientific instruments with ever increasing perfection may filter out important peculiarities which do not conform with the general pattern. Perfect symmetry may be aimless, and it irritates many. Perhaps symmetry considerations could facilitate relating the perception o f structures and the world of emotions? On the level of analogies this seems to be possible as is illustrated by a poem by Ann Wickham[9]: GIFT TO A JADE For love he offered me his perfect world. This world was so constricted and so small It had no loveliness at all, And I flung back the little silly ball. At that cold moralist 1 hotly hurled His perfect, pure, symmetrical, small world. Geometrical symmetry is strict: it allows for no " d e g r e e s " o f symmetry. Something is either symmetrical or not. What may be called material symmetry., on the other hand, implies a continuous spectrum o f the degrees o f symmetry. The term material symmetry here refers generally to non-geometrical symmetry and may be applied to real material objects as much as to any abstraction. The human face is an obvious example o f bilateral symmetry. However, none o f us has a perfectly symmetrical face (Fig. 6). It may be a matter o f flattery on the part of the painter to show more perfect symmetry than there is, or this may even be demanded by the paintee. Old religious paintings or contemporary political portraits may show more facial symmetry than there is. Any personality cult produces very symmetrical face images. However, minor asym- metries may have a strong appeal and the notion about the beauty of a face may also be changing. There was a minor uproar some time ago when a Budapest theater critic praised the acting o f an actress and remarked also on her pretty, modern face. In fact, hers was conspicuously asymmetric, so people were wondering whether their faces were modern or old-fashioned. There is considerable interest currently in the origin and meaning of facial asymmetry. Another fascinating s y m m e t r y / a s y m m e t r y relationship exists between our hands (Fig. 7). Distinguishing between left and right has definite connotations in almost all fields o f human activity. The importance o f chirality is ever growing in the sciences. Even human attitude toward handedness is evolving. Figure 8 shows two pictures from classrooms o f the University o f Connecticut. The older classrooms of the Chemistry Department have homochiral chairs only, designed for right-handed students. The more contemporary classrooms o f the Mathematics Department are furnished with heterochiral chairs to accommodate both the right-handed and the left-handed students. Limits of perfection 7 Fig. 6. Eszter Hargittai in front of a shop-window, 1984. (Photograph by the author.) Fig. 7. Tomb in the Jewish cemetery, Prague. (Photograph by the author.) 8 ISTV,/tN HARGITTAI Fig. 8(a). Classroom in the Chemistry Department, University of Connecticut. 1984. Fig. 8(b). Classroom in the Mathematics Department, University of Connecticut, 1984. (Photographs by the author.) A r t i s t i c c r e a t i o n as r e f l e c t i o n m a y v a r y in a l i m i t l e s s range. The two p h o t o g r a p h s in F i g . 9 illustrate this point. C o n s t r u c t i o n m a c h i n e r y on the b a n k o f the D a n u b e is shown in one o f the p h o t o g r a p h s . Its r e f l e c t i o n in the D a n u b e is c a p t u r e d in the other. I m a g i n e a m i r r o r - p e r f e c t w a t e r surface with much m o r e l i k e n e s s , o r g a l e c o n d i t i o n s d e s t r o y i n g any trace o f r e s e m b l a n c e . The o r i g i n o f r e f l e c t i o n i t s e l f as seen by Jean Effel is d e p i c t e d in Fig. 10. The s c i e n c e s o f the 20th century have o p e n e d up a new w o r l d , one which had p r e v i o u s l y been i n a c c e s s i b l e to m a n ' s instruments, let alone his senses. To p a r a l l e l this d e v e l o p m e n t , artistic e x p r e s s i o n is c o p i n g , o r is at least a t t e m p t i n g to do so, in reflecting o u r w o r l d on an Limits of perfection 9 Fig. 9(a). Building construction machinery on the bank of the Danube. Fig. 9(b). Reflection of the building construction machinery in the Danube, (Photographs by the author.) entirely new level. It is not that the artist is expected to bend over the screen o f an electron microscope and paint " a f t e r n a t u r e " , but the newly discovered domains and p h e n o m e n a must and do find their reflections in artistic expression. It may be considered symbolic that X-ray crystallography and the Black Square o f Kazimir Malevich were born about the same time. The picture from 1915 is reproduced in Fig. 11 along with the title page o f a later Malevich work. Current progress mandates the expansion o f the well-established frameworks o f the sym- metry concepts, One o f the cradles o f modern s y m m e t r o l o g y , crystallography is transforming itself to embrace all structural science on the atomic level(10]. Liquids, colloids, amorphous 10 ISTVAN HARGITrAI ( / - Institution du reflet L e s r i v e r a i n s a u r o n t , g r a c i e u s e m e n t , p o r t r a i t ~t l ' a q u a r e l l e . . . l e u r Fig. 10. The creation of reflection, by Jean Effel. [La Creation du Monde]. ("Those who dwell by the river will have their portrait, gracefully, in water c o l o r s . . . " ) . (Reproduced by kind permission from Mme. Jean Effel.) solids c a n n o t be put into the e x i s t i n g " p e r f e c t " systems even t h o u g h t h e y are not without structure. W e are w i t n e s s i n g their e m a n c i p a t i o n . We quote A n n W i c k m a n [ 9 } again: THE WOMAN AND HER INITIATIVE Give me a deed, and l will give a quality. Compel this colloid with your crystalline. Show clear the difference between you and me By some plane symmetry, some clear stated line. These bubblings, these half-actions, my revolt from unity. Give me a deed, and 1 will show my quality. John Bernal was the p i o n e e r o f g e n e r a l i z e d c r y s t a l l o g r a p h y , and B e l o v noted in his o b i t u a r y " . . . h i s last e n t h u s i a s m was for the laws o f l a w l e s s n e s s . " Did A n n W i c k h a m ' s m e t a p h o r s p a r a l l e l B e r n a l ' s d i s c o v e r i e s ? A l t h o u g h several d i s c i p l i n e s apart, g e o g r a p h i c a l l y and c h r o n o - l o g i c a l l y t h e y o p e r a t e d in c l o s e range ( L o n d o n ) . In a n y c a s e the n o n - c l a s s i c a l , i r r e g u l a r , u n s t a b l e , u n u s u a l , u n e x p e c t e d are g a i n i n g i m p o r - Limits of perfection , i 11 Fig. 1 l(a). Kazimir Malevich: Black square (1915?). crn . m Blfl'm~K Ig20 Fig. 1 l(b). Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism, 34 drawings, UNOV1S, Vitebsk, 1920, Title page. 12 ISTVAN HARGrVrAl tance in the sciences. The " m o r p h o l o g y o f the amorphous" is being investigated and " m a p p e d " [ l 1]. The 1978 Nobel laureate physicist Philip Anderson stated that ~'the next decade is very likely to be the most 'disordered' decade in theoretical physics. "112] The increasingly recognized importance o f non-periodic structures makes even more con- spicuous the absence or near-absence o f the three-dimensional space groups outside the world o f crystals. The h o n e y c o m b built by the bees is a notable exception. Its regular hexagonal structure is then partially copied by the construction o f the concrete base o f off-shore oil platforms. There is unmistakable similarity to the h o n e y c o m b in the hexagonal joints o f basaltic sheets resulting from contraction during cooling. These are examples that meet the eye and there m a y be others hidden. H o w much visible and how much less visible s y m m e t r y is there in the arts? There is a lot o f visible s y m m e t r y in B a c h ' s music and there is also a lot in B a r t 6 k ' s - - n o t so visible but well- established by research. There is a wealth o f s y m m e t r y p h e n o m e n a in other music as well as in other arts, not only in paintings and sculptures whose s y m m e t r y properties are most c o m m o n l y considered. One o f the less frequently perceived symmetries is inversion, a combination o f applying a two-fold rotation axis and a s y m m e t r y plane. Here is an example from Hungarian author Frigyes K a r i n t h y ' s short story entitled " T h e same in m a n " [ 1 3 ] represented by some edited fragments. There are three characters: Bella the beloved lady, Fox the e m p l o y e e and Bella's suitor S~indor w h o is also F o x ' s boss. The editing means to present the two meeting in a parallel w a y rather than consecutively. BELLA FOX Sometimes 1 just gaze before me without Sometimes I just gaze before me without thinking of a n y t h i n g . . , thinking of a n y t h i n g . . . S,~NDOR/BOSS Bella! If only you knew how beautifully you expressed y o u r s e l f . . . BELLA Sometimes I have the feeling that I'd like to be somewhere else than I am. 1 can't say where, somewhere I haven't been be- fore. On my money? Then you'd better go to a lunatic asylum, that's where cases like you are t r e a t e d . . . FOX 1 often have the feeling that I'd like to be somewhere else than I am. I don't know where, anywhere, somewhere, 1 haven't been before. S,~NDOR/BOSS Bella, how true, how w o n d e r f u l . . . How The nuthouse, man, the nuthouse. That's did you put it? Let me engrave it in the where you belong. records of my m i n d . . . There is inversion in James R e s t o n ' s description o f New Zealand in his Letter from Wellington, Search for End o f the Rainbow[14]: Nothing is quite the same here. Summer is from December to March. It is warmer in the North Island and colder in the South Island. The people drive on the left rather than on the right. Even the sky is different--dark blue velvet with stars of the Southern Cross--and the fish love the hooks. Wellington and Madrid are approximately connected by a straight line going through the center o f the Earth which is then the inversion center for them. It is too bad that the journalist did not date his letter from Madrid. The black-and-white ,variation is the simplest case o f color s y m m e t r y and it is also the simplest example for antisymmetry (see Fig. 12). The relationship between matter and antimatter is another example. " O p e r a t i o n s o f antisymmetry transform objects possessing two possible values o f a given property from one value to the o t h e r " [ 15]. According to this general definition antisymmetry can be given broad interpretation and application. Geometrically less strict but in their atmosphere truly black and white antisymmetries are presented in Fig. 13. Another literary example is taken from K a r i n t h y ' s writing, this time to illustrate antisym- metry. It is edited from a short story entitled " T w o D i a g n o s e s " [ 1 6 ] . The same person Dr. Same goes to see a physician at two different places. At the recruiting station he would obviously Q ] C | -,, s 14 ISTVAN HARGITTA~ • ii Fig. 13(a). Victor Vasarely: "P62-Basilan", 1951. (Reproduced by kind permission from the artist.) Fig. |3(b). Neizvestnii: N. S. Khrushchev's tomb, Novodevichi cemetery, Moscow. Limits of perfection 15 Fig. 14. Two restaurants in downtown Washington, D. C.: the Sans Souci and a McDonald's. (Photograph by the author.) Fig. 15. Logo of sporting goods store in downtown Boston, MA. (Photograph by the author.) 16 ISTVAN HARGITTAI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~ !~i 1 Fig. 16. A breed apart. Poster. (Reproduced by kind permission from Merrill Lynch Company.) Fig. 17. Military jets and a sea gull, off Bod0, Norway. (Photograph by the author.) Limits of perfection 17 like to a v o i d b e i n g d r a f t e d , w h i l e at the i n s u r a n c e s o c i e t y he w o u l d like to a c q u i r e the b e s t p o s s i b l e t e r m s f o r his p o l i c y . H i s a n s w e r s to the i d e n t i c a l q u e s t i o n s o f the t w o p h y s i c i a n s are r e l a t e d b y a n t i s y m m e t r y . DR. SAME PHYSICIAN DR. SAME At the recruiting station At the insurance society Broken-looking, sad, ruined human Young athlete with straightened back, wreckage, feeble masculinity, haggard flashing eyes. eyes, wavering movement. How old are you? O l d . . . very old, indeed. Coyly, On, my gosh, I ' m almost ashamed of i t . . . I ' m so s i l l y . . . Your I.D. says you're thirty two. With pain. To be old is not to be far from To be young is not to be near the cradle, the c r a d l e - - b u t near the coffin, but far from the coffin. Are you ever dizzy? D o n ' t mention dizziness, please, Doctor, Quite often, sorry to say. Every time I ' m or else i'11 collapse at once. I always aboard an airplane and it's up-side-down, have to walk in the middle of the street, and breaking to pieces. Otherwise, because if 1 look down from the curb, I n o t . . . become dizzy at once. T w o r e s t a u r a n t s s t a n d side b y side in d o w n t o w n W a s h i n g t o n , D. C. O n e is t h e o n e - o f - a - k i n d e x c l u s i v e S a n S o u c i , the o t h e r is a M c D o n a l d ' s o f the f a m o u s f a s t - f o o d c h a i n . T h e a n t i s y m m e t r y p l a n e a p p e a r s p h y s i c a l l y as a v e r t i c a l wall b e t w e e n t h e t w o r e s t a u r a n t s ( F i g . 14). A n t i s y m m e t r y m a y b e p o w e r f u l in f o c u s i n g a t t e n t i o n , s h o w i n g c o n t r a s t , e m p h a s i z i n g a p o i n t . F i g u r e 15 s h o w s t h e l o g o o f a s p o r t i n g g o o d s store in d o w n t o w n B o s t o n . T h e a n t i s y m m e t r y p l a n e e m p h a s i z e s that b o t h w i n t e r a n d s u m m e r sport f a n s are w e l c o m e . A p o s t e r o f t h e M e r r i l l L y n c h i n v e s t m e n t c o m p a n y is r e p r o d u c e d in F i g . 16. T h e r e is a h o r i z o n t a l a n t i s y m m e t r y p l a n e in " a b r e e d a p a r t " . M i l i t a r y j e t s a n d a sea g u l l f l y o n the t w o sides o f a n i m a g i n a r y a n t i s y m m e t r y p l a n e in o u r u l t i m a t e e x a m p l e (Fig. 17). REFERENCES 1. A. Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, The University Library. Grosset and Dunlap, New York (1963). 2. J. Kepler, Strena, seu De Nive Sexangula, t61 I. English translation, The Six-cornered Snowflake. Clarendon Press, Oxford (1966). 3. R. E. Benfield and B. E G. Johnson, The structures and fluxional behaviour of the binary carbonyls; A new approach. Part 2. Cluster carbonyls Mm(COL (n = 12, 13, 14, 15, or 16). J. Chem. Soc. Dalton Trans., 1743- 1767 (1980): 4. R. J. Gillespie, Molecular Geometry. Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., London (1972). 5. H. R. Jones and R. B. Bentley, Electron-pair repulsions, a mechanical analogy. Proc. Chem. Soc., 438-440 (1961). 6. G. Niac and C. Florea, Walnut models of simple molecules. J. Chem. Educ. $7, 429-429 (1980). 7. N. V. Belov, Ocherki po strukturnoi mineralogii. Nedra, Moskva (1976). 8. K. (~apek, Anglick~ Listy. (~eskoslovensk# Spisovatel, Praha (1970). The English version cited here was kindly prepared by Dr. Alan L. Mackay, Birkbeck College (University of London), 1982. 9. A. Wickham, Selected Poems. Chatto and Windus, London (1971). 10. A. L. Mackay, Crystallography--the continuous re-definition of the subject. Indian J. of Pure and Appl. Phys. 19, 765-768 (1981). 11. B. B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Freeman, New York (1983). 12. V. F. Weisskopf, Contemporary Frontiers in Physics. Science 203, 240-244 (1979), 13. F. Karinthy, Grave and Gray, Selections from his Work. Corvina Press, Budapest (1973). 14. J. Reston, Letter from Wellington. Search for end of the rainbow. International Herald Tribune, Thursday, May 7, 4-4 (1981). 15. A. L. Mackay, Expansion of Space-Group Theory. Acta Cryst. 10, 543-548 (1957). 16. E Karinthy, Selected Works (in Hungarian). Sz6pirodalmi, Budapest (1962). The English translation was kindly checked by Dr. R. B. Wilkenfeld, Professor of English, University of Connecticut, 1984. 17. Gy. Lengyel, Handiwork. New Techniques--New Solutions (in Hungarian). Kossuth, Budapest (1975). CAH~I~12~I/2(B)-C work_6ojmtoiigfb4doujn3hueyngw4 ---- untitled Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjar20 The Journal of Architecture ISSN: 1360-2365 (Print) 1466-4410 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20 Drawing the female nude Penelope Haralambidou To cite this article: Penelope Haralambidou (2009) Drawing the female nude, The Journal of Architecture, 14:3, 339-359, DOI: 10.1080/13602360903027863 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602360903027863 Published online: 17 Jun 2009. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 37260 View related articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjar20 https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20 https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/13602360903027863 https://doi.org/10.1080/13602360903027863 https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rjar20&show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rjar20&show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/13602360903027863 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/13602360903027863 Drawing the female nude Penelope Haralambidou The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK Introduction Taking the theme of this special edition quite literally, I am going to look at a painting and a build- ing, which share as a common trait the drawing of a female nude: Euan Uglow’s Nude, from Twelve Regular Vertical Positions from the Eye, 1967 and Adolf Loos’s design of a house for the performer Josephine Baker, 1928. In the painting the nude is meticulously drawn as a figure, but absent as an erotic object, whereas in the building the figuratively absent nude is drawn forth in the imagination through a reading of the erotically charged architec- tural design. However, by bringing the two works together, it is not the aim of the essay to force a link between them. Apart from deriving from distinct practices, they clearly belong to different historical and cultural backgrounds. Rather, their dialectical presentation will help focus on a discus- sion about drawing spaces and bodies, which pertains to the two works analysed here — but also to painting and building in general. In 1972, one of the most extraordinary paintings by Euan Uglow, Nude, from Twelve Regular Vertical Positions from the Eye, 1967, won the prestigious John Moores prize with mixed critical response. The model is Daphne Todd, a portrait painter and ex-President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, who at the time of the sittings was a student at the Slade. The painting shows a female nude figure in a classical pose, with her arms behind her back and her left leg forward, standing in front of a wall (Fig. 1). The wall is divided into twelve segments by dark coloured horizontal bands and the body is strangely elongated and separated by dagger- shaped bands of lighter colour. Uglow’s aim was to represent the female body devoid of the perspec- tival distortions that the single fixed viewing point creates. To overcome these distortions he devised a way of sliding up the model’s body and scanning it in sections from twelve vertical positions. According to Richard Kendall the picture brings to the forefront Uglow’s merging of mathematics and geometry with the representation of the female nude ‘in an unforgettable and — for many — discon- certing fashion’.1 Mieke Bal in Looking In: The Art of Viewing suggests that the main viewing tradition in Western culture ‘has the female nude as its favoured subject, [and] voyeurism as its dominant semiotic mode’.2 Although most of Uglow’s other nude paint- ings could be seen to fit comfortably within a voyeur- istic viewing tradition, Nude, from Twelve Regular Vertical Positions is surprisingly un-erotic. The desire that fuels its construction is a desire to see, a desire accurately to record the ideal female form. ‘Visually engrossing and technically spectacular’ for some, or ‘over-cerebral’ and even ‘masochistic’, for others, the resulting image turns the depiction of flesh into a geometric design.3 The incisions of the analytic gaze and coded rendering of depth make Nude, from Twelve Regular Vertical Positions a geometric construction, akin to the conventions of architectural drawing, which is rarely connected with eroticism. 339 The Journal of Architecture Volume 14 Number 3 # 2009 The Journal of Architecture 1360-2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360903027863 One of these rare occasions, when architectural drawing fits comfortably within a voyeuristic viewing tradition with the female nude as its favoured subject, is an unrealised design for a house in Paris by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos. Loos designed the house in 1928 for the performer Josephine Baker, famous for her erotic dancing and for appear- ing practically naked on stage (Fig. 2). Although there is little evidence of how and when Loos met Baker, 340 Drawing the female nude Penelope Haralambidou Figure 1. Euan Uglow, Nude from Twelve Regular Vertical Positions from the Eye, 1967. (University of Liverpool Art Gallery and Collections.) Figure 2. Josephine Baker, 1927. (Postcard, private collection.) and even of whether Baker was aware of the design’s existence, the architect considered it one of his best.4 Loos’s design depicts an extravagant domestic interior, full of voyeuristic contraptions that long for the appearance of Baker’s nude figure. Farès el-Dahdah in his ‘The Josephine Baker House: For Loos’s Pleasure’ has seen the Baker House as a ‘bachelor machine’ and a love letter that was never sent. This essay argues that rather than a love letter, as el-Dahdah suggests, the design for the Baker House can be compared to a drawing of a female nude. Similar to the Renaissance practitioners’ con- struction of pictorial architectures in perspective where bodies are framed, Loos draws this imaginary architectural structure to hold the image of Baker. Lynda Nead in The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality claims that the female nude ‘symbolises the transformation of the base matter of nature into the elevated forms of culture and the spirit’.5 Nead discusses the female nude in terms of ‘containment’ aimed to define femininity and female sexuality: ‘out- lines, margins and frames — procedures and forms that regulate both the ways in which the female body is shown and the proper conduct of the pros- pective viewer’.6 As we will see, Loos’s design clearly aims to contain the exotic femininity of Baker in a theatrical domesticity for his voyeuristic pleasure, and Uglow’s painting dictates a way of looking at the female body beyond perspective distortion. Additionally, in response to Nead’s central argu- ment of the role of the female nude as containment of femininity, the main voice of this essay will be ‘interrupted’ by short fragments of another account.7 This secondary voice — by a female architect posing for a nude painting — will attempt to present the experience of drawing the nude from the point of view of the model. Furthermore, this account puts forward the idea that drawing — before its traditional definitions in art and architec- ture, and even before any physical act or trace — is a way of looking and a desire to understand and measure the fleeting nature of visual space. The Baker House The house that Loos designed for Baker, when he was fifty eight and she was twenty two, was to be sited in Paris, where she had moved three years earlier, in 1925, to join La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. According to el- Dahdah the house may have been intended to replace two adjacent houses she owned on Avenue Bugeaud.8 Loos’s design consists of four floor plans, two sections and a detailed model, currently held in the Loos Archive, at the Albertina Museum in Vienna (Fig. 3). It describes a corner building composed by simple geometric volumes. The plain white volume of the ground floor follows the outline of the site, while the top floors are contained within a large parallelepiped and a tall cylindrical tower above the main entrance, both wrapped in a dramatic, striped, black and white skin. The surviving drawings of the Baker House are not spectacular as images.9 They are typical examples of simple architectural plans and sections, which do not always have an immediate visual impact, especially for an audience not trained in architectural design. Loos himself insisted that ‘a true building makes no impression as a picture, reduced to two dimensions’.10 Embedded in the manner in which architectural drawings communicate, is a form of 341 The Journal of Architecture Volume 14 Number 3 reading, a journey guided by the lines on the paper. This imaginary journey and a comparative evaluation of both plans and sections slowly unfold the rep- resented spaces in the mind. Similar to a narrative hidden in the unread words on a page, the drawings’ lines can be silent; the meaning and essence of the space does not become apparent until the story of the building has been interpreted into a three- dimensional imagined experience. Furthermore, in architectural drawing the human body is absent. The drawing weaves a narrative of occupation around an imagined inhabitant but the figure is hardly ever there. 342 Drawing the female nude Penelope Haralambidou Figure 3. Adolf Loos, architectural plans and sections of the Baker House, Paris, 1927. (Albertina, Vienna.) The Baker House project, however, only exists through a series of drawings. Although never built it has an enduring allure and has inspired and influ- enced many architects, architectural theorists and students, not as a space that can be visited and photographed, but as a spectre created in the mind through a careful reading of the architectural drawings. It is perhaps the lack of any subsequent development of the scheme, of fleshing it out in the material construction of a building, that frees its existence as a narrative structure inviting a spon- taneous imaginary occupation and the possibility of alternative interpretations. By reading Loos’s drawings for the Baker House and following a journey within the space they describe, a spectacular setting full of surprises is revealed. A large theatrical staircase greets the visitor and marks the start of the public realm of the house. It leads to the grand salon on the first floor, where a second dramatic semi-circular stair- case connects to the second floor, where the dining room is found. Beyond this main public journey an ingenious weaving of spaces of different sizes and heights creates secret pockets and passages: spaces for services, two master bedrooms, but also a cylindrical café and a large internal top-lit swimming pool surrounded by a dark corridor. Although Baker never mentions the project in her memoirs, apparently Loos considered it one of his favourite designs. But what made this design so special for Loos? Perhaps in this ‘theoretical’ project he was uninhibited in exploring the full potential of a complex internal spatial arrangement, often known as the Raumplan. The term Raumplan — the resolution of the plan in space — was intro- duced by Heinrich Kulka to describe Loos’s ‘new and more elaborate conception of space’ (Fig. 4).11 Loos’s invention was an ingenious spatial distribution of rooms that would vary in height, as well as size. Loos’s use of the Raumplan derived from treating the section of the building in a way analogous to how another architect might treat a plan, leading to a greater complexity and ‘quantity of habitable space’. Efficiency and economy, more space within the same volume, seems to be the main value of Loos’s spatial organisation of the section, according to Kulka. However, as we will see, in the extravagant and scopophilic allocation of spaces in the Baker House, it is clear that the primary gain of the Raum- plan is not economy, but pleasure. It is a sunny morning and I am lying in the bath. Patterns of light, from the window immediately above the bath, merge with the warped shapes of my legs and feet. The image of the rest of the room, mirrored in the flat surface of the water, is deep. I enter it visually and flicker my focus 343 The Journal of Architecture Volume 14 Number 3 Figure 4. Adolf Loos, model of the Dice House showing internal distribution of spaces, 1928 – 29. (Albertina, Vienna.) between two illusions: the window reflected and my feet refracted. Nude, from Twelve Regular Vertical Positions from the Eye According to Martin Golding, Uglow’s work ‘takes the most sensual and immediately interesting object, the human body, and puts it out of reach of time and desire; it takes the most purely rational concept of which mankind is capable, mathematical order, and makes it a delight to the senses’.12 What works is ‘right’ not ‘like’, Uglow insisted.13 Correct- ness is not a matter of representing the appearance faithfully but of the whole image becoming harmo- nious and readable. So he arranges his poses to convey the image he has in mind. A battle between appearances and idea finds an extreme in Summer Picture, 1972 and is manifest in both the nude figure and the table on which she sat (figs 5, 6). Uglow had to wait 45 minutes in every hour for the model to relax her back into the ‘unnatural’ pose, matching his idea of the perfect curve of her back. Furthermore, he changed the shape of the table, the simple frame staging her pose, because he found the observed perspective too ‘violent’.14 His ‘correction’ of the physical form of the table makes it appear closer to the ideal, the ‘right’ one. The tactile idea of the solid shape of the table, as a rec- tangle with parallel sides, is more resilient than the tra- pezoid that foreshortening renders visually. The natural binocular perception of the table from the pos- ition of the painter would also be less violent. There- fore, Uglow physically cut the table into an inverted trapezoid that would render a straighter appearance from his observing position, to fit into the mould of the right image: the perceptual residue of the table in the mind, which is both visual and tactile. Uglow’s acute sense of the ideal as expressed through geome- try, proportion and harmony negotiates an excessive scrutiny of perception. According to Golding, Uglow’s most single-minded investigation is the Nude, from Twelve Regular Pos- itions from the Eye. Making this painting involved building an apparatus, a throne-like structure of variable height which allowed Uglow to view the model from twelve different levels (Fig. 7): 344 Drawing the female nude Penelope Haralambidou Figure 5. Euan Uglow, Summer Picture, 1971 – 72. (Private collection.) Figure 6. Euan Uglow, Still Life with Model Marks, 1971 – 72. (Uglow estate.) (Drawn by the Author: the white lines linking the edges of the table with the vanishing point reveal its inverted trapezoid shape.) My painting of a girl standing against a wall was painted in an effort to cancel the distortion (that of an elongated lemon) which had occurred in a previous painting. . . To overcome this distortion, I painted from twelve equal vertical positions of the eye and at a constant distance from the flat vertical wall surface. I also wanted to explain the three dimensional relationship between the wall the girl and my eye as I moved from one regular position to another. These relationships I tried to interpret onto the flat surface of the painting. In trying to do this, a completely different form of distortion took place — not unlike some of the interpretations of the globe we see in an atlas.15 Uglow’s representation of the nude departs from the normal visual perception of it: he splits the view into twelve segments which correspond to his changing position on a vertical axis. By ‘dissect- ing’ vision, the resulting painting, a two-dimensional image, becomes a composite drawing offering precise geometric information about the spatiality of the nude. Uglow asserted that one should be able to work out the form just by studying the dagger-shaped triangles that separate the painted areas. Indeed, these triangular shapes describe depth and accurately render the three-dimensional volume of the nude in two dimensions, similar to the effect of combining the information of plan and section in architectural drawing. Uglow’s gaze measures the body as the vertical movement of his single eye, on the relocating contraption, scans its form. The picture describes the contours of the figure, but also the painter’s pres- ence as a body looking from regulated positions in space like a surveying tool. The machine reduces the distortions of one-point perspective by placing the eye nearer to each segment and attempts to grasp the fleeting purity of a body as it exists theoretically, without these distortions. Consequently, the view is closer to a tactile than a visual evaluation. His depic- tion pins down the nude like a captured butterfly, but bestows on her the coded blossoming of volume. The artist explained that the distance of the projec- tion of the body from the back plane is expressed by the ochre bands, the wider the band the further the 345 The Journal of Architecture Volume 14 Number 3 Figure 7. Uglow on his repositioning device surveying the model for Nude from Twelve Regular Vertical Positions from the Eye, 1967. (Uglow archive.) body projects at that point. Consequently, the dagger- shaped bands are the gaps resulting from the repositioning of the gaze and rendering the image on a flat surface. The body appears severed by the observing eye in a similar way to that in which archi- tectural drawing conventions sever the body of the imagined architectural building. According to Golding: [Although] the whole enterprise might be described as an experiment in a rigidly literal mon- ocular vision, the upshot is in effect a conceit, which gives the model a majestic presence which reverberates. The arrow-headed interventions — the gaps occasioned by the apparatus — become her properties; armed with which she remains separate and whole, unaffected by the lesions the analytic vision opens. The scrutiny of that analytic eye, with its deliberate separation of the familiar whole into unfamiliar parts, creates an image which is barbarically strange. . . .16 I close one eye. Then I open it again, and close the other. I observe the lines of the tiles shifting with a jolt behind the two taps. Both eyes open again cast the single view. Apart from a lime- scale mark on the rim of the left, and a white spot of paint on the top of the right, the images of the two taps are iden- tical. Hot water on the right, cold on the left. I decide to mix them: focus on the image of the right tap with the left eye, and the image of the left tap with the right eye. A monstrous single tap appears devoid of acceptable perspective distortion. I close both eyes and watch the impossible image fade. Bachelor machine Susan R. Henderson discusses the importance of ‘bachelor culture’ in Loos’s work, which emerged as a reaction to the more fluid gendered identities embedded in Jugendstil.17 According to Henderson ‘Loos maintained that strict gender distinctions were basic to the ordered logic of modern society, and he decried the ambiguous gender roles that had invaded art and culture.’18 The two orders of the feminine and masculine are clearly defined in the design of the flat he shared with his first wife Lina. The outer room, the public realm occupied by Loos, is furnished in an architectural language reflecting the scarce ‘medieval and Germanic notions of comfort’, with solid surfaces and sharp edges formed by heavy beams, and a brick fire- place.19 Conversely in his wife’s bedroom, which he called Lina’s Room, the feminine prevails in the form of soft covers, flowing silk curtains for the walls and a massive stretch of angora sheepskin rugs that hide the edge of the bed and cover the whole of the floor creating a sea of sensuous furriness (Fig. 8). Loos maintained that woman belonged solely to the private realm; the family house, therefore, 346 Drawing the female nude Penelope Haralambidou Figure 8. Bedroom of Loos’s wife, Lina, Loos flat, 1903. (Albertina, Vienna.) was the perfect frame of femininity.20 The Baker House, however, is far from familial. Farès el- Dahdah uses Marcel Duchamp’s term ‘bachelor machine’ to describe an architecture of pleasure connoting a kind of trap that orchestrates reversible roles akin to those played in seduction.21 According to el-Dahda the house is: an epistolary attempt to detail her image in ‘various points’ through a kind of writing that stretches a third skin between the body of the architect and that of the dancer. The house is an apparatus (like the note) through which one can somehow rub against, or trap, a dancer’s exoti- cised body. It is a building designed as a tactile enterprise, as the imaginary ‘prose’ of an amorous conquest in between whose lines (in between the stripes of its façades and the distri- bution of its rooms) one is to decode a longing to signify desire.22 Hidden in the heart of the building is a volume of water, a piscine (swimming pool). The presence of this feature in the design implies a sense of fantasy. If not unfeasible, the construction of a container able to support such a large, suspended volume of water would be at least challenging, especially in a relatively moderate residential project, such as this. The swimming pool occupies the space of a normal room, but is full of water and therefore, uninhabitable. This fantastical dimen- sion of the design is not without a hint of danger. What if the building were to give way under the weight of the water? The house’s very safety is put at risk by the compulsive urge to include in its core a watery vessel, a frame awaiting a reverie of Baker’s naked swimming body.23 A secret passage wraps around the volume of water, which is suspended in the heart of the house. Accessible from the salon, it seems to derive from a splitting of the surrounding walls allowing an inhabitation of the inner flesh of the building. Although relatively inconspicuous from the interior, the passage is marked with windows on either side, looking out, towards the street, and looking in, towards the water. The ingenious appli- cation of the Raumplan, far from being economical, creates uninhabitable spaces and hidden passages, only useful to a voyeur. He is looking at me. I am looking back, but he does not see me. His focus moves from the canvas towards me and back again. His eyes — following the contour of my shoulder, the edge of water around my left arm and the submerged forearm leading to my fingers on my thigh — are empty. Architectural painting Although clearly painterly, Uglow’s work is also dependent on drawing, a logical, single-minded and precise description of form. More specifically, I see Nude, from Twelve Regular Positions from the Eye as a drawing rather than painting; a drawing that as we have seen can also be described as architectural. Uglow used to often repeat to friends and students a quotation from Henri Matisse: ‘Making a picture would seem as logical as building a house, if one proceeded on sound principles. One should not bother with the human side. Either one has it or one hasn’t. If one has, it colours the work in spite of everything.’24 So for Matisse and also Uglow the 347 The Journal of Architecture Volume 14 Number 3 process of making a painting is similar to building a house. Implied in this suggestion is the lack of an intentional attempt to infuse the painting with emotional or intellectual values, but to follow a see- mingly neutral procedure based on ‘sound principles’. However, according to Golding, Matisse’s metaphor has a further relevance in regards to Uglow’s paint- ings. Architectural is a term one might apply to his work, and the artist’s discerning eye resembles the architect’s desire to shape spatial configurations. Uglow’s fascination with the mathematical framing of bodies in space was influenced by his interest in the painters of the Italian Renaissance, especially Piero della Francesca, whose painstaking method of measuring the human form has been unparalleled since.25 During the Renaissance, art and architecture, painting and building, merged under a common novel understanding of visual space: perspective construction, which was ‘invented’ as a true represen- tation of natural vision. For the first time, pictorial space lost the floating quality of previous two-dimen- sional depictions and derived from mathematical observation combined with careful use of projective geometry. This structural background was disguised as architecture, turning the horizontal and vertical grids of the perspectivists to squared floor patterns and colonnades. So in painting, perspective construc- tion became synonymous with architecture, organis- ing the placement of the portrayed human figures like puppets suspended within pictorial depth by invisible strings, the projection lines. A few highly conscientious theorists had the patience to apply perspective construction rules to the depiction of human figures (Fig. 9). One of the most determined accurately to represent the human body with the new technique was Piero. Robin Evans suggests: ‘Painters like Botticelli and Raphael found a different type of liberty in Alberti’s central perspective. Architecture (plotted) is mar- shalled by the system of projection, while figures (intuited) move freely in its measured space. In Piero’s art people and things seem to be more alike’ (Fig. 10).26 Piero’s method depends on ortho- graphic projection and the dissolution of surfaces into constellations of dots (Fig. 11). According to Evans, the perspective result was achieved entirely by orthographic means, just like architecture: ‘Piero’s other method makes pictures of light paths 348 Drawing the female nude Penelope Haralambidou Figure 9. Unknown artist, Codex Huygens, fol. 126, c. 1570. between points in exactly the same way that archi- tects make pictures of buildings’.27 Similarly, space and body are interdependent in the structure of Uglow’s paintings. Geometry regulates their conception and execution. The proportions of the rectangle of the canvas, the figure and the dimensions of the real space it occupies, all contribute to the design of a precise geometrical construct that Uglow often called the ‘idea’ of the painting. For instance, Double Square, Double Square, 1980 – 82 is a double square rec- tangle, and double square in space (Fig. 12). Uglow maintained that he was trying to paint ‘a structured painting full of controlled, and therefore, potent, emotion.’28 Uglow’s painstaking process of rendering the image of the body, through accurate measuring and precise colour matching, results in a picture that at first encounter, although spectacu- lar, is impenetrable. The transfer from observation to marks on the canvas involves the creation of a cipher that the viewer’s astounded eye cannot immediately decode. In the same way that an architectural drawing needs to be read before the space it depicts acquires volume in the imagination, Uglow’s paintings demand time. A longer physical presence in front of the picture initiates a slow unfolding of the true dimensions of the image, and the body flowers in the viewer’s mind at a space between them and the canvas. Delayed and trapped, caught within Uglow’s painstaking tran- scription of the veil of appearance, the female figure is there fully blossomed; she is brought to life bathed in luminous colour. 349 The Journal of Architecture Volume 14 Number 3 Figure 10. Piero della Francesca, Flagellation of Christ, 1455 – 60. (Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino.) Figure 11. Piero della Francesca, orthographic projections, elevations and plans, of a tilted head, from De prospectiva pingendi, c. 1474 – 82. The water holds me and keeps me warm. Parts of the body emerge from the surface of the water like islands. I can see three: a curve around my right breast and arm forms the coast of the first, my knees are the mountaintops of the second, and the third, the smallest one, consists of the caves between my toes. The skin above the coastline is cold. Nude Descending a Staircase Uglow had an enduring attraction to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No.1, 1911, of which he kept a photograph in his studio (Fig. 13). In an interview with Andrew Lambirth, Uglow explains his interest in Duchamp’s painting. To Lambirth’s question ‘What about movement?’ he responds that many of his pictures are concerned with movement. Yet, he suggests that his work is more about implied movement and he dismisses the Futurist’s depiction of movement as too concep- tual: ‘I have more sympathy for Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, because it is more analytical, it’s more to do with trapping movement.’29 Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase is an aggregate of superimposed images of a body in motion observed from a static position. The images of the nude succeed each other according to the intervals defined by the staircase. Nude, from Twelve Regular Positions from the Eye is also 350 Drawing the female nude Penelope Haralambidou Figure 12. Euan Uglow, Double Square, Double Square, 1980 – 82. (Private collection.) Figure 13. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 1, 1911. (Photograph from Uglow’s studio.) a composite image, an aggregate of twelve different views of the nude that succeed each other accord- ing the intervals defined by the painter’s viewing armature. Here the nude is static and the painter’s eye ascends and relocates itself in twelve steps. Both works use an ordered succession of images to describe in a composite coded picture the geometric spatiality of the naked female body. Furthermore, both could be seen as tributes to Ead- weard Muybridge’s Woman Descending a Stairway, 1887, one of his photographic experiments captur- ing the human figure in motion (Fig. 14). Muy- bridge’s nude was photographed by a series of cameras positioned in a row — parallel to the back- drop and the model’s course of travel — at regular horizontal intervals. As a consequence and similarly to the reposition- ing of the painter’s eye in Uglow’s set-up, there is no shift in perspective as expected from a single vantage point. Further than the measured description of the nude’s descent, implied in the photographs is the movement of the viewer. Accordingly, the implied movement in Uglow’s Nude, from Twelve Regular Positions from the Eye is twofold. On the one hand, the stillness of the figure’s pose standing solidly against the wall is accompanied by a compel- ling sensation that she might suddenly start moving, exaggerated by her forward left leg. More signifi- cantly though, on the other hand, implicit in the viewing of the work is the original movement of the painter’s eye that scans the female body incrementally. 351 The Journal of Architecture Volume 14 Number 3 Figure 14. Eadweard Muybridge, Woman Descending a Stairway and Turning Around, c. 1887. (From the book Animal Locomotion.) The water contains me. His gaze contains me. I can feel the boundaries of the rectangular canvas, the limits of his gaze, cutting the space around the bath: the lower edge of the window, the tiles behind my head, the lino on the bathroom floor and back to the upper part of the taps. This room contains us both. Striped optical models The frontispiece of Catherine Lambert’s catalogue raisonné shows a seated Uglow in his studio at Turnchapel Mews (Fig. 15). The photograph was taken during filming for a television programme in 1986.30 On a stool by Uglow’s feet, a peculiar object lies inconspicuously. At closer inspection, the object, an L-shaped base to which a scaled dummy of a female figure has been attached, reveals itself to be a three-dimensional scaled model of the spatial arrangement of Nude, from Twelve Regular Positions from the Eye (Fig. 16). Five holes drilled through a metal bar at the front of the model allow the viewer to study different sections of the figure straight on, while the backing is striped, marked with dark- and light-coloured bands at regular intervals, like a ruler. Lambert reveals that Uglow considered the idea behind this particular painting to be complicated and suggested that the best way of ‘getting it’ was looking at the little model he made depicting the studio set up.31 So, similarly to traditional architectural practice, Uglow built a model of the three-dimensional arrangement of the painting. The original purpose of the model is unclear, as well as whether it was built before, during or after the completion of the painting. Nevertheless, the model accentuates the voyeuristic aspect of the act of painting, and the metal bar with the five drilled holes makes it similar to a peep show. The wooden model’s peep- holes bring to mind another unmistakably voyeuristic work of art: Duchamp’s pornographic assemblage Given, 1st the waterfall, 2nd the illuminating gas. . ., 1946– 1966, which also features a dummy of a female nude viewed from two peepholes in a door, scanning the nude from ‘two regular horizontal positions’: the left and right eye.32 The spatial organisation of Given can also be compared to Loos’s scopophilic treatment of the pool. In the case of Given, the bachelor machine consists of an everyday architectural element, a door, while in the Baker House we find a hidden corridor with windows overlooking an internal pool suspended in the heart of the house that refracts the fleeting image of a body through 352 Drawing the female nude Penelope Haralambidou Figure 15. Uglow in his studio at Turnchapel Mews, London, 1986, during the course of being filmed by the Aquarius television programme team. water. In both layouts the voyeur/bachelor occupies a domain hidden from the nude — behind the door in Given and in the clandestine low passage surrounding the swimming pool in the Baker House — but exposed to the public: the gallery in Given and the street through windows in the house. Emblematic of the Baker House is the model fea- turing the design’s striking striped façade (Fig. 17). Photographs of the model do not reveal whether this is an empty box or whether the internal distri- bution of space is constructed within. However, if a truthful scaled version of the interior existed, then, the holes of the model’s windows would allow a view of the swimming pool brightly lit from a skylight on the roof. The act of looking through the model’s scaled windows would transform the model into yet another voyeuristic device: the stereoscope, infamous for its association with pornography.33 Accordingly, the swimming pool would be the equivalent of a watery three-dimensional stereo- scopic slide, and peeping into the model would render a fantasy image of a naked Baker swimming. So both models — Uglow’s for a painting, and Loos’s for a building — frame the female nude with a striated surface. The bands in Uglow’s model are clearly a measuring device, they form a ruler organis- ing the vertical repositioning of the male gaze attempting to capture a composite pure image of the female body. Muybridge’s photographic exper- iments of capturing the human body in motion feature a similar ruled background, this time in the form of a grid. Such a grid offers a scientific status to representing the movement of the naked human body. The smooth shifting of the female flesh is gauged against a lined background. There have been many interpretations of the significance of the striking striped façade of the Baker House.34 Were the façade a measuring device, Baker’s spectre of nudity would be projected and accessed against the sharp contrast of the black and white bands, framing her wild, exotic femininity. It is a sunny morning and I am lying in the bath, in the same position, for the seventh time. Everything 353 The Journal of Architecture Volume 14 Number 3 Figure 16. Detail of Fig. 17. Figure 17. Adolf Loos, model of the Baker House, Paris, 1927. (Albertina, Vienna.) is the same, the taps, the tiles, the reflected patterns of light. Everything, apart from my body, which is changing; the measure is evident in the different curvature of the waterline. Within the same room, the same absent gaze, delineated by the rectangle of the canvas, I carry her nebular image swimming inside me in black and white. Embodied drawing Loos was very suspicious of architectural drawing. In his essay ‘Architecture’, 1910, he accuses the contemporary architect of reducing ‘the noble art of building to a graphic art’.35 He believed that draftsmanship and what he called the ‘fluent hand’ had alienated the architect from the honest craftsman. He was disappointed that architectural forms were no longer dictated by the craftsman’s tools but by the architect’s pencil.36 Loos’s reaction has to be viewed relative to the contemporary pre- vailing architectural style, the Jugendstil and the Viennese Secession. The name Jugendstil (‘Jugend- style’) derives from the magazine Jugend (‘Youth’), which was an illustrated weekly magazine, estab- lished in 1896 and instrumental in promoting Art Nouveau in Germany, especially the forms of organic typography and graphic design. Indeed, Secessionist architecture was often dependant on graphics, which found their way into not only archi- tectural drawing, but even into the final building itself. One of the most celebrated examples is Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze for the 14th Vienna Secessionist Exhibition in 1902 (Fig. 18).37 The form of the nude human body, consistently absent from architectural representations, here appears etched into the internal skin of the Secession building (Fig. 19). Although Loos was against the graphic quality of architectural drawing, he depended on the structure of architectural drawing conventions to conceive his designs’ distribution of space. I would like to argue that without the use of the architectural convention of the section, as ‘invented’ during the Renaissance, Loos would not have been able to formulate his own ‘invention’ of internal volumetric manipulation, the Raumplan. Furthermore, Loos was against the practice of indicating dimensions graphically on measured drawings. He believed the process of doing so 354 Drawing the female nude Penelope Haralambidou Figure 18. Gustav Klimt, detail of The Beethoven Freeze, 1901 – 02: The Hostile Powers; The Three Gorgons. (Albertina, Vienna.) dehumanised design and preferred to decide on interior details, magnitudes and proportions in situ: ‘I stand there, hold my hand at that certain height, and the carpenter makes his pencil mark’.38 Then Loos would step back and look at a detail from different angles to try to visualise the finished result: ‘this is the only human way to decide on the height of a wainscot, or the width of a window’. Loos’s ‘drawing from life’, far from being Modern, is similar to mediaeval drawing techniques.39 Loos put forward architectural design as an embodied experience that cannot be sufficiently described in drawing, but ironically the Baker House, one of his most iconic projects, only exists in drawn form. Loos’s need physically to enter the space of rep- resentation resonates with Uglow’s commitment to painting from life. Uglow’s practice involves mark- making both on canvas but also on the setting. The act of looking is not a merely removed perform- ance from a distance. Before marking the flat surface of the canvas, the painter enters the deep space of the depicted scene and touches it with his brush leaving a trace. However, not only the setting but also the model’s body is physically regis- tered. Todd, the model for Nude, from Twelve Regular Positions from the Eye, recalls being marked with indelible ink and ordered into shallow baths for the duration of the pose.40 This practice of marking is reminiscent of the fields of marks on Piero’s drawing of a head; an abstract geometric armature anchoring the relation- ship between the real and its image, on which he erected the architecture of the painted flesh. In Uglow’s case, the setting and the body are infested with a multitude of marks, thus dividing the act of drawing into two domains: the three-dimensional setting at the studio and its image on the canvas (Figs. 20). Uglow performs a transcription of this three-dimensional net of points touching the depicted scene into its correspondent limits and coordinates on the flat canvas. Although deriving from distinct practices — paint- ing and building — the two works presented in this essay are similar in that they both stage the male gaze and set up spatial apparatuses, or ‘bachelor machines’, to capture an apparition of female nudity. More specifically, rather than belonging to traditional definitions of painting or building, I have analysed Nude, From Twelve Regular Vertical Pos- itions from the Eye and the Baker House as drawings, which — beyond the obvious figuration of the female nude — describe a space of desire, whether erotic desire, or the desire to measure and to tame the fleet- ing nature of vision. Indeed the aim of the essay has been to discuss the rôle of drawing in the production of architecture and art, and more specifically, drawing as an underlying structure interlinking the 355 The Journal of Architecture Volume 14 Number 3 Figure 19. View of Klimt Room at the Fourteenth Secession Exhibition, 1902. (Albertina, Vienna.) figure of the body with the space it occupies. We have seen how in Uglow’s paintings, the nude’s pose orders, and is ordered by, the specifically designed ‘stage’ on which it is displayed, as well as, the rectangle of the canvas. Equally, Loos’s use of the Raumplan allows each room to acquire the right volume around the occupant in relation to use and significance. The rooms become an extension of the body, spatial frames of different sizes deriving from, and matching, the occupant’s activities. Nevertheless, space in both works is not only commanded by the female body as subject matter, but perhaps more so, by the body of the author. In Nude, From Twelve Regular Vertical Positions from the Eye, we have seen how, in transcribing the image of the model, the painter portrays his gaze 356 Drawing the female nude Penelope Haralambidou Figure 20. Set-up for Double Square, Double Square with the painting in the foreground, Uglow’s studio, Turnchapel Mews. (Photograph by Steve Pocklington, 2000.) codifying depth by the incremental repositioning of his own body. Accordingly, in the Baker House the client is seemingly Baker, but it can be argued that in fact the architect designs a house for himself, his own body looking at her imaginary apparition, fulfilling a voyeuristic daydream. Therefore, both works presented in this essay endeavour to capture an image of the female body, but what they primarily communicate is an embodied act of drawing. The trace of the painter’s observation, and the architect’s imaginary occupation, is etched on the surface of their drawings. Their embodied act of drawing conduces a similar observation and imaginary occupation to the viewer. We are drawn into the space of the representation, and we are suddenly there, looking at them looking. Bibliography Mieke Bal, Looking In: The Art of Viewing (London, Routledge, 2001). Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architec- ture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass, The MIT Press, 1994). Beatriz Colomina, ‘Sex, Lies and Decoration: Adolf Loos and Gustav Klimt’, in, Gustav Klimt, Painting, Design and Modern Life, eds, Tobias G. Natter and Cristoph Grunenberg (London, Tate Publishing, 2008), pp. 42 – 51. Farès el-Dahdah, ‘The Josephine Baker House: For Loos’s Pleasure’, Assemblage, no. 26 (April, 1995), pp. 72–87. Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries (Cambridge, Mass, The MIT Press, 1995). Martin Golding, ‘Euan Uglow’s Nudes’, in Euan Uglow (London, Whitechapel, 1989), pp. 9–26. Susan R. Henderson, ‘Bachelor Culture in the Work of Adolf Loos’, in Journal of Architectural Education, v. 55, n. 3 (February, 2002), pp. 125–135. Andrew Lambirth, ‘Snatches of Conversation’, in Euan Uglow (London, Whitechapel, 1989), pp. 57–60. Catherine Lampert, ‘Uglow in His Eartly Observatory’, in Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, catalogue raisonné by Catherine Lampert (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007), pp. xix–xxix. Richard Kendall, ‘Uglow at Work: The Formative Years’, in Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, catalogue raisonné by Catherine Lampert (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007), pp. ix–xvii. Adolf Loos, On Architecture, eds, Adolf and Daniel Opel, trs., Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA, Ariadne, 2002). Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, ed., Adolf Opel, trs., Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA, Ariadne, 1998). Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexu- ality (London and New York, Routledge, 1992). Jan Svanberg, Master Masons (Stockholm, Carmina, 1983). Panayotis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos (New Jersey, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002). Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, catalogue raisonné by Catherine Lampert (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007). Notes and references 1. Richard Kendall, ‘Uglow at Work: The Formative Years’, in Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, catalo- gue raisonné by Catherine Lampert (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007), p.xii. 2. Mieke Bal, Looking In: The Art of Viewing (London, Routledge, 2001), pp.79 – 80. According to Bal: ‘the way we perceive and interpret images is based on fantasy, and fantasy is socially based. Thus there is a dissymmetry between men and women when they 357 The Journal of Architecture Volume 14 Number 3 look at male and female figures. This dissymmetry is also unstable, varying according to which aspects of the unconscious are more or less strongly implicated in the act of looking’. 3. Kendall, op. cit., p. xii. 4. Based on an account by Claire Loos, Adolf Loos Privat (Vienna, Herman Böhlaus, 1985): quoted in Farès el-Dahdah, ‘The Josephine Baker House: For Loos’s Pleasure’, Assemblage, no. 26 (April, 1995), p.76. 5. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London and New York, Routledge, 1992), p.2: Nead’s book is a feminist response to Kenneth Clark’s classic survey of the subject in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York, Pantheon Books, 1956). 6. Ibid., p. 6. 7. The fragmented description is a partly remembered, partly constructed, account of my experience posing for a nude painting by my husband, the painter James Lloyd, in 2004. James was a student under Uglow’s tutelage at the Slade School of Art, University College London, 1994 – 95. The painting, entitled Penelope in the Bath, was shown at ‘Being Present’, a group exhibition at Jerwood Space in 2004. At the time of the pose I was in the first stages of pregnancy with our first daughter Iris. 8. El-Dahdah, ‘For Loos’s Pleasure’, op. cit., p.76. 9. Small inconsistencies between the plans, sections and the model, reveal that the design must have been at a preliminary stage when abandoned. 10. Adolf Loos, On Architecture, eds, Adolf and Daniel Opel, trs., Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA., Ariadne, 2002), p.78. 11. Panayotis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos (New Jersey, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), p.180. 12. Martin Golding, ‘Euan Uglow’s Nudes’, in Euan Uglow (London, Whitechapel, 1989), p.9. 13. Ibid., p.17. 14. Ibid. 15. Competition brochure (anon.), John Moores 8, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 27th April – 2nd July, 1972. 16. Golding, ‘Euan Uglow’s Nudes’, op. cit., p.19. 17. Susan R. Henderson, ‘Bachelor Culture in the Work of Adolf Loos’, in Journal of Architectural Education, v.55, n. 3 (February, 2002), p.125. 18. Ibid., p.125. 19. Ibid., p.130. 20. Ibid., p.130. 21. El-Dahdah, ‘For Loos’s Pleasure’, op. cit., p. 74. For more on the notion of the ‘bachelor machine’ see: Hilary Robinson, Feminism-art-theory: An Anthology, 1968 – 2000 (London, Blackwell, 2001), p.379. 22. El-Dahdah, ‘For Loos’s Pleasure’, op. cit., p.75. 23. In a note, Henderson mentions what was publicised as the ‘Loos-Skandal’ in 1928, when he was arrested for the seduction of three minor-aged girls. He was found guilty of a lesser charge and paroled. See Burkhardt Rukschcio and Roland Schachel, Adolf Loos: Leben und Werk (Vienna, Resindenz Verlag, 1982), pp.339 – 342. Disturbingly, 1928 is when he designed the Baker House, which might explain why the house was never completed and was never mentioned by Baker in her memoirs. 24. Henri Matisse, Matisse on Art, ed., Jack D. Flam (Berke- ley, University of California, 1995), p.132. 25. Uglow was greatly influenced by Bernard Berenson’s Piero della Francesca or: The Ineloquent in Art, 1954: ‘There’s something in that title — the fact that there’s more force in controlled passion than in exuber- ant passion. That’s the idea I like. I like it slowly to creep out on you.’: quoted in Catherine Lampert, ‘Uglow in His Earthly Observatory’, in Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, catalogue raisonné by Catherine Lampert 358 Drawing the female nude Penelope Haralambidou (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007), p.i. 26. Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1995), pp.151 – 152. 27. Ibid., p.151. 28. Andrew Lambirth, ‘Snatches of Conversation’, in Euan Uglow (London, Whitechapel, 1989), p.57. 29. Ibid. 30. The programme was filmed by the Aquarius television team. 31. Lampert, Euan Uglow, op. cit., p.96. 32. For more on my analysis of Given see: Penelope Haralambidou, The Blossoming of Perspective: A Study (London, Domobaal Editions, 2006) and http://www.domobaal.com/exhibitions.html (accessed 16th March, 2009). 33. See Jonathan Crary’s analysis in Jonathan Crary, Tech- niques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1996). For more on my analysis of Given as a stereo- scope, see: Penelope Haralambidou: ‘The Stereoscopic Veil’, Architectural Research Quarterly, v.11, n.1 (March, 2007), pp.118 – 129. 34. For instance, see el-Dahdah, ‘For Loos’s Pleasure’, op. cit., pp.75, 77. 35. Loos, On Architecture, op. cit., p.76. 36. Ibid., p.78. 37. Colomina wonders why Loos’s objections to ornament in architecture were never directly focused on Klimt: Beatriz Colomina, ‘Sex, Lies and Decoration: Adolf Loos and Gustav Klimt’, in, Gustav Klimt, Painting, Design and Modern Life, eds, Tobias G. Natter and Cristoph Grunenberg (London, Tate Publishing, 2008), p.42. 38. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Archi- tecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1994), p.269. 39. Jan Svanberg, Master Masons (Stockholm, Carmina, 1983), p.124. During the Middle Ages, in addition to scaled drawings of façades and details on parchment, the master builder had also to make full-scale draw- ings of individual parts of the building like traceries of windows or ribs vaults. These were drawn with a large pair of compasses onto a layer of plaster of Paris on the floor of the lodge’s ‘tracing house’. Instead of an abstract projection plane, later consoli- dated on paper, the drawing is inhabited. The act of design is not a removed intellectual procedure but a physical act, a performance involving the whole body, linked with the etymology of geometry: the measuring of the earth, the marking of ground. 40. Todd’s recollection described in Lampert, Euan Uglow, op. cit., p.96. 359 The Journal of Architecture Volume 14 Number 3 work_6gu5gx47urgpnlzz4uyj4fgunm ---- Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities: The International Geography of the Avant-Gardes in the Interwar Period (1918–1940) HAL Id: hal-01975703 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01975703 Submitted on 9 Jan 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- entific research documents, whether they are pub- lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities: The International Geography of the Avant-Gardes in the Interwar Period (1918–1940) Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel To cite this version: Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel. Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities: The International Geogra- phy of the Avant-Gardes in the Interwar Period (1918–1940). Visual Resources, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2018, pp.1-28. �hal-01975703� https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01975703 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities. The International Geography of the Avant-Gardes in the Interwar Period (1918–1940) Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel This paper questions the common historiography about the avant-gardes in the Interwar period, in which Paris is often considered the international avant-garde capital city, with surrealism as its perfect model. It starts with the idea that the history of the avant-gardes (artists and artists’ groups who considered themselves or who were considered innovative), could be studied as “a social field”, but also an international field structured by mobility. It focuses on the circulation of avant-garde artists and their works, as well as the social, economical, financial, geopolitical and colonial bases of these circulations, to understand how some groups, artists, stories and centers managed to establish themselves better than others. Contrary to the regular narrative based on Parisian domination, a circulatory approach highlights that Paris isolated itself from avant-gardes in the 1920s, unlike the opening of Germany and Central Europe, and that the surrealists themselves were not so international until 1929. Looking at social groups, at their movements and circulation, as well as the various strategies deployed and the underlying geopolitical positions taken by artists after 1929, it shows that from 1929, the Parisian scene, and the surrealist movement in particular, very slowly became a new focus for new artistic generations. Paris only became a global centre of avant-garde circulation after 1934 and surrealism then gradually became the focus of international artists’ careers. In this process, artists coming from the peripheries of Europe and the Americas, cultural transfers and resemanticization processes played a central role. Keywords: Modern Art History; Twentieth Century; Central Europe; Latin America; Spain; Paris; Transnational Art History; Modernism; Canon; Surrealism; Centers and Peripheries; Avant-gardes; Cultural Transfers; Circulation of Art In the common historiography of the avant-gardes in the Interwar period, Paris is often considered to be the international avant-garde capital, with surrealism as its perfect model. This Parisian centrality in the 1920s and 1930s is supposed to have declined in the 1940s and vanished in the 1950s, a narrative that continues to the benefit of New York. According to the majority of books and articles which never question this idea, with the exile of the leaders of the surrealist movement in 1939-1940, modernity left Paris and Europe with New York subsequently becoming the new world capital of modernism 1 . This canon is questionable. It is based on the assumption that history was guided by a principle of progress and systematic negation, and that this progression took place in one single location. It introduces aesthetics as monoliths, whereas, in reality, artists would go from one movement to another. In other Joyeux-Prunel words, it naturalizes “isms” which actually took several years to gain recognition. 2 It also justifies the international domination of a small Parisian elite who are seen as the model of cultural, ethical, and political progress in the history of modern art and culture. This canon produces an incomplete history: it omits avant-gardes born in remote areas, the so-called “peripheries” of modern art history, or those who were not part of canonical groups, such as the abstracts of the 1930s. The history is even more incomplete in regard to those who were considered outside the avant-garde. Finally, the idea of a Parisian centrality in the history of modernism before 1940 is a prerequisite for the idea that New York “stole” modernism from Paris after the 1940s – an interpretation of the global history of art that relies almost exclusively on sources from New York. 3 According to this assumption, Europe invented nothing new after the 1940s. Neither did anywhere else, in particular, the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain and Latin America, not to mention the African, Asian or Austral no man’s land. A new historiography denies this canon, and demands better recognition for the artistic peripheries. 4 Some might even claim the superiority of these peripheries over European and US avant-gardes, especially the avant-gardes of Latin America. 5 However, whether we choose this canon or its opposite, the map in the background remains binary: a center and its peripheries. An axiological analytical grid is also used to characterize the avant-garde: political and social commitment, moral emancipation, new aesthetic and artistic propositions, social and political intelligence of the political and gendered power games of the time, political engagement, etc. This grid has favoured the historiography of surrealism and Dada since the 1930s and the 1950s. It conceals the economic and social spread of the groups that were considered to be the vanguard which was supported by a real, solid international and sustainable market; a dynamic, international artistic press; an elitist, financial, industrial and often colonialist social stance. For example: why did surrealist artists live so comfortably during the Great Depression, while their abstract peers were starving? It is interesting to re-examine how this canon, which is both celebrated and defended today, has established itself and established a certain geopolitics that has much to answer for. To start with, one can ask how might the mobility of the avant-gardes have led to the victory of Paris and surrealism in art history? International mobility was a means for artists to negotiate their esthetic affiliations in order to claim their place in the art world; this had repercussions on individual, collective, local and global scales. This paper thus starts with the idea that the history of the avant-gardes could be studied as “a social field”, 6 but a field structured by mobility. This field has always been international despite the interference of national, local, and regional forces on the one hand, and despite the diversity of political and economic issues on the other, which can be contradictory. By focusing on the circulation of avant-garde artists and their works, as well as the social, economical, financial, geopolitical and colonial bases of these circulations, and on the cultural transfers and resemanticizations that took place in the circulation, we can understand how some groups, artists, stories and centers managed to establish themselves better than others. Contrary to the regular narrative based on Parisian domination, a circulatory approach highlights the isolation of Paris in the 1920s. It demonstrates that the French capital isolated itself from avant-gardes, unlike Germany and Central Europe wich were more open, and confirms that the surrealists themselves were not so international until 1929. Looking at social groups, at their movements and circulation, as well as the various strategies deployed by artists and their underlying Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities geopolitical positions it also shows how the Parisian scene, and the surrealist movement in particular, slowly became the focus for new artistic generations after 1929. Paris became a global centre of avant-garde circulation only after 1934. In this process, the role of artists from the peripheries of Europe and the Americas was central, especially for the progressive domination of surrealism in international artists’ careers. The international avant-gardes in the 1920s: a relative centrality of Paris The international field of the avant-gardes can be reconstituted through tracking the global circulation of artists and their art. A collective study of artists’ biographies and trajectories, an analysis of their references and preferences, and an exhaustive cartography of the foundation of modernist journals in the 1920s brings into question the idea of a Parisian centrality. The results of the distant, geographic global approach have been published elsewhere, based on prosopographic and cartographic indicators applied to comparable sets of sources, mainly journals, exhibition catalogues and artists’ biographies taken from the 1920s. 7 This paper will focus instead on a complementary approach, that of the middle-scale and micro-scale level. Artists’ Movements and Parisian Disappointment after 1920 In the aftermath of the 1914–18 war, the idea of the centrality of Paris was entrenched among the European avant-gardes. The avant-garde artists who had left Paris in 1914 returned or came from all over the world, including Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) from The Netherlands, Joan Miró (1893–1983) from Catalonia, Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973) from Brazil, Joaquín Torres García (1874–1949) from Uruguay, Max Ernst (1891–1976) from Germany, Man Ray (1890–1976) from the USA. Their aim was to learn up-to-date modern art, to become avant- garde artists, and to gain renown. They were inspired by one model: Pablo Picasso (1881– 1973) who became the most well-known artist from the avant-garde in Europe from 1912. 8 But from 1920, more and more artists became disillusioned, especially foreigners who faced too many obstacles in Paris. In February 1920 Mondrian decided to stop painting. 9 Miró, marginalized from the Parisian art scene, joined other artists who were revolted by cubism and its narrowness, – this included André Masson (1896–1987), Élie Lascaux (1888–1968), and Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) among others. Painters lived in a serious crisis of generational renewal in Paris, like writers. 10 Among newcomers, the Parisian Dada group experienced this crisis when they were about to fight for the etiquette of “surrealism” after 1924. From 1923–1924, the turmoil was at its peak: young poet André Breton (1896–1966) announced that he would not write anymore; his friend Paul Éluard (1895–1952) disappeared; Dubuffet gave up painting and returned to the family wine trade near Bordeaux; in 1923 Mondrian, discouraged because he had to paint flowers to survive (Figure 1), decided to give up painting and return to his homeland. His friends managed to make him change his mind after organizing a “Mondrianlotterie” in Holland to gather money for the penniless painter. 11 Some left Paris altogether such as the Dutch painter Theo Van Doesburg (1883–1931), the Russian sculptor Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964), the Mexican painter Diego Rivera (1886–1957), and his Uruguyayan colleague Torres García. Please insert Figure 1 here Mondrian, flower Joyeux-Prunel In the early 1900s, it had been possible for Parisian artists to have an international career with the help of critics, poets, and dealers, but without fully depending on them. Yet now the main Parisians linked to the international scene were either dead, such as the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), in exile (art dealers Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979) and Wilhelm Uhde (1874–1947), artists Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)), or were dedicated to furthering their own careers. Germany, which had been the main international channel and outlet for Parisian modernism in the 1900s and 1910s, 12 was an inaccessible country after the war. Henceforth, Parisian artists had to take their first steps in new galleries which were rarely open to innovation and preferred a “classic” modernity, and they had to settle for their limited international network. Art dealers were looking for tame modern art, like the conservative fauvism of André Derain (1880– 1954), the worldly colours of Kees Van Dongen (1877–1968), or the consolidated cubism of Georges Braque (1882–1963). 13 The marketplace also started to favor “primitivism” and “naïve art”. Innovation did not sell. Artists who had money would pay for the right to exhibit, in particular in Montparnasse. It was better to be rich such as the Brazilian Tarsila do Amaral, who could adapt to the new fashions and pictorial trends of the period thanks to the profits of her family plantations. 14 The social spaces of the literary or national community, such as restaurants and small galleries, were accessible to artists without money, but rarely helped them sell. Many preferred to return home, to the so-called peripheries, where markets were already established.This was the case for Berlin, Brussels, Barcelona, Mexico, and Buenos Aires, and soon for an increasing number of metropolises. Many former foreign cubists, who remained in Paris, gave up Fine Arts for architecture, interior design and the decorative arts, cinema, sets, photography, and graphic design. 15 From 1920, the circulation of European avant-gardes was no longer centered on Paris. People would travel to discover which places were most suitable to establish themselves. The abstract painter Theo van Doesburg's circulation was evidence of this trend (Figure 2). By 1923, after months of travel and artistic encounters in Europe, Van Doesburg wrote to his friend Piet Mondrian: “In Paris everything is completely dead (…) For me it is certain that the new cultural zone is the North”. 16 Many artists, such as Van Doesburg, went to Germany, oscillating between Weimar and Berlin. From 1922 to 1924, Van Doesburg frequently returned to Weimar and the Bauhaus, where debate was alive. Van Doesburg settled there in his own studio, established a course, attracted students and followers and recruited contributors for the magazine De Stijl. After 1924, his international activism became more oriented toward Berlin, Hannover and Central Europe. With the Soviet persecution of the avant-gardes, there were more and more Russians in Berlin from 1922–23 and constructivist gatherings and groups were dynamic. However, it was also a time of constant mobility, according to the opportunities presented. The circulation of Alexander Archipenko illustrates this transitional situation. The Russian sculptor arrived in Paris in 1909, he joined the cubist network and his career became internationalized from 1912 onwards. However after 1918, his most interesting exhibitions took place outside Paris. 17 In 1921, Archipenko went to Berlin where he opened a school, got married, and found help and support from critics, dealers, and artists. 18 He was popular even in Hungary and Croatia. 19 Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities However, in 1923 Archipenko sailed to New York, where he settled permanently. He declared upon his arrival: America is the only country not jaded and rent by war. It is the land where the great art of the future will be produced. America fires my imagination more than any other country and embodies more of that flexibility, that yeastiness, which means life and vitality and movement. 20 Thanks to the extensive network of art collector Katherine Dreier (1877–1952), Archipenko set up a school in Manhattan. He was not the only one who no longer needed Paris; neither did Duchamp, Rivera, nor Van Doesburg and many others. Many artists decided to go where artistic innovation was thriving. They would travel more frequently between Weimar, Berlin, and the capitals of Central Europe, which were more open to abstract innovation than Paris. These cities offered an alternative and social model to that which dominated Paris: Whereas the Parisian market was focused on unique works and signatures, the new European cities formed an integrated chain of schools (such as the Bauhaus and its Hungarian equivalent), workshops, and shops, which led to orders of architectural designs and decorations. The work was then collective. The aim was to pass on, serve, and make oneself understood. Please insert Figure 2 here (Map of Van Doesburg’s circulation) The Dynamism of the Peripheries Outside Paris, the so-called peripheries were likely to be more open to new groups and innovative artists than the Parisian little modernist milieu. Indeed, the geography of the European vanguardist nebula in the Interwar period, with its careers, rivalries, and networks, is very polycentric, as shown by the successive cartographies which correspond to the creation of modernist journals in the 1920s. 21 For Paris, innovative activity remained important but was not predominant. Whereas the avant-garde journals related to the Dadaist vogue were buried in Paris in 1922, they abounded in Cologne, Hanover, Zurich and Berlin, and in Cracow, Munich, Vienna, Prague and Zagreb. The persistent creation of new journals in the so-called peripheries until the end of the 1920s occurs in parallel with the social and commercial setting of avant-gardism in these different places, despite the arrival of conservative regimes in many cases. Even in Brazil, a market started for artistic innovation. In Paris, on the contrary, avant-gardism became banal. The Dadaists repeated in their correspondence and their journals: the audience is tired, it doesn’t expect anything. 22 The Parisian artistic circle, with certain exclusions, did not even seem to have the desire to be avant-garde anymore, except from some new titles: Esprit nouveau, led by Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966) and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier, 1887–1965), the founders of the Purism movement. As for the future surrealists (better known as Dadaist or as the Groupe de Littérature), they were and considered themselves primarily a literary movement. An analysis of the content of international modernist magazines’ and their geopolitics confirms the isolation of Parisian groups and the non-Parisian orientation of peripheral journals’ references and contributors. 23 The list of the most shared contributors and most Joyeux-Prunel reproduced artists by the Central European reviews does not show a domination of references coming from Paris. The pool of reproduced artists is aesthetically and geographically varied, from the Bauhaus to the Dutch neoplacticist avant-garde, from cubism and purism to Russian suprematism, to Dada, and to the German “New Objectivity”. The careers of the most cited artists in Central European journals led sometimes to Paris, but more often to Berlin, Weimar, and even Moscow. Among the Parisians, those who were most mentioned by Central European journals were Fernand Léger (1881–1955), Archipenko, and also Russian-born painter Louis Marcoussis (1878–1941). These artists were actually leaving the Parisian scene to go abroad, because of insufficient exposure in Paris. Moreover, on this international map, the French scene was isolated along with surrealism. The Parisian movement most closely linked to the international avant-garde were the purists. Some described their journal, Esprit nouveau, as “The cosmopolitan body well appreciated by the people of Montparnasse and widespread in the Bolshevik friendly circles from all over the world” 24 . Esprit nouveau indeed depended on an international readership. 25 Its publishers were willing to expand with an American version in 1921. 26 However, the purists were marginalized in Paris. Maybe their interest in foreign art and architecture was too strong in the xenophobic context of Parisian modern art. Almost every issue featured a special article on a foreign country – mostly towards the East, as can be seen from the 1924 section untlitled « à l’étranger », which included articles on Hungary (No. 21, 1924), Russia (No. 22), Rumania (No. 23), Latvia (No. 25), and Germany (No. 27) – and exposed a list of partner- journals disseminated all over Europe (Figure 3). Insert Figure 3 here (page of Esprit nouveau) As for the surrealists, until 1926 they were still obsessed with literary and political strategies, hence their weak international exposure (except from the French-speaking parts of Belgium after 1926). For the international avant-gardes, Germany was quickly considered the most dynamic region: the industrial and fine arts held the promise of a revolution, which would be formal, social, and political and also provide a potential marketplace. Germany also opened institutions dedicated to the transmission of vanguard knowledge. In 1923 Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack (1893–1965), a former student of the Bauhaus, discussed the matter with Parisian painter Fernand Léger: France, which was democratic for a long time, came out victorious from the war, and the avant-garde movement was born there; so why couldn’t the French open an institution as strong as the Bauhaus, Hirschfeld Mack wondered. Léger’s answer was that the chauvinism and the reactionary spirit of a country intoxicated by its victory, led to a situation which could not be favorable to innovation. Léger also highlighted how much the French avant-gardes envied the German situation. 27 Some, from Picasso to Miró, would keep on working within the traditional Paris- centered system, which was organized by a mercantile society which liked collecting and was convinced of the high value of easel paintings. They had the support of art journals which praised “the love of art” (such as the magazine L’Amour de l’Art); their ultimate goal would be a place in a museum. Others would turn towards a second international field, where values, institutional and industrial support, and artists’ ambitions were very different from what was known in Paris. This other field was polycentric, led by circles which were considered “peripheral”. Artists became members of a group and the group mattered more than the artist Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities him/herself. Artists were to serve the people. The aim was also to nurture future generations of artists, through the creation of workshops, the organization of conferences, exhibitions, and showing-rooms. From 1922 until 1928, visual artists who did not come from Paris and who wanted to hold a position as avant-gardes clearly increased the value of the transnational space of constructivism. Works, Texts, and Receptions: The Appeal of the Peripheries The non-centrality of Paris is confirmed by the study of works and aesthetics, where we can see the importance of references coming from “the peripheries” of the modernist Europe. Around 1926, artists based in Berlin, Weimar, Cologne, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Milan, but also Barcelona drew their inspiration from De Chirico’s Pittura Metafisica, Italian futurism, geometrical abstraction, the Bauhaus, Russian constructivist art reproductions seen in various reviews, and the constructivist iconography of “the machine age”, and even from the German New Objectivity. They did not need Parisian cubism anymore, and fauvism even less. In Paris, plastic arts were not innovative, unlike the literary, musical or decorative arts. The Parisian inner circle remained very self-centered, as can be seen from modern journals of that time. Indeed with the exception of Le Corbusier’s journal, Esprit Nouveau, these journals were very patriotic, hostile to German arts, jealous of Italian artists, rarely interested in Russian arts, and ignorant of foreign arts. In Spain, even Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), then a vanguardist in training, living between Madrid and Barcelona, was influenced as much by Valori Plastici and New Objectivity as he was inspired by Picasso. In Paris, despite the International Exhibition of decorative arts held in 1925, innovative artists struggled to gain recognition. In 1925, the closing of the review Esprit Nouveau deprived the abstracts of a forum. 28 In the French capital, constructivist art exhibitions remained few. They were organized by small unestablished galleries 29 and were not well received, eventhough the art market was expanding. In Paris, only a few painters were welcomed by André Breton and his surrealist group and this was only after 1926,when they had managed to carve out a place for themselves in the right galleries. As for Central European artists, Kristztina Passuth’s book on the Central European avant-gardes ends with a litany of names of those who tried to be part of the Parisian life without any success: The Hungarians Lajos Kassák (1887–1967) and Béla Uitz (1887–1972); the Romanians Marcel Janco (1895–1984), and Ion Vinea (1895–1964); the Polish Henryk Berlewi (1894–1967); the Croatians Ljubomir Micić (1895–1971) and Virgil Poljanski (1898–1947). The xenophobic atmosphere of that time also fostered the isolation of foreigners in Paris. 30 The art market disliked cubism and abstract forms. Many former cubists, even among the French, ended up adopting naturalist, figurative trends, which was the case with the Hungarian sculptor József Csáky (1888–1971), 31 the Russian-Born painter Léopold Survage (1879–1968), and the former cubist painter Jean Lurçat (1892–1966), and even for Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier and their purist colleague Ozenfant. 32 The foreign abstract artists who stayed in Paris tried to join forces: in 1929, van Doesburg met the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García for that reason and together they founded Cercle & Carré. 33 They could only gather artists who were not well established in the Parisian market. French (or French-speaking) abstract artists who stayed with them in Paris were outnumbered and very young like Michel Seuphor (1901–99). By 1930 it was too Joyeux-Prunel late for abstraction. Neither Cercle & Carré nor the subsequent abstract group Abstraction- Création had the appeal of surrealism that had suddenly become the most interesting vanguardist position in the international field of modernism. The victory of Surrealism and Paris: cultural transfers, resemanticizations, and social adaptations In art histories, the birth of surrealism is often set in 1924. However in 1924 everyone claimed to be a “surréaliste” in literary Paris. André Breton and his friends had to fight, in both senses of the word, to confiscate the label until 1925. Moreover, barely any artist held any interest in surrealism until 1929. The movement was primarily a literary one, and it was seen as an extremely demanding label, which only a few plastic artists were willing to be affiliated to. When artists joined surrealism, which was the case of Joan Miró and Max Ernst, it was a matter of chance, or it could even be by default or failure. These artists did not want to be associated too long with the Surrealists. However, with the help of the Surrealist writers, Miró and Ernst were able to gain acceptance into the most selective networks of Paris and both painters benefited from the growth of the art market after 1925. The combined influence of entrance to an elite social network and a buoyant art market trigged an interest in surrealism among some artists. Salvador Dalí’s dazzling career also contributed especially during the Great Depression, after 1932. Salvador Dalí, from the Pittura Metafisica to Surrealism The trajectory ofo Dalí’s career can be seen as an accelerated version of the history of art. In the catalogue raisonné of his works, we can see him, although always late, moving from impressionism to futurism, then to cubism before embracing purism. 34 In 1918, he was still admiring “the great French impressionists, Manet, Degas, Renoir”. 35 He realized only around 1921 that impressionism, fauvism, and the cubism of Cézanne had become outmoded. In 1922, he gained admission to the Academy of Madrid and joined the Residencia de Estudiantes, where Luis Buñuel (1900–1983) and Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) led a small group of young modern artists and writers. But at the Academy, Dalí painted his cubo- futuristworks in secret. He would read the French communist newspaper L’Humanité, and would walk around with Esprit nouveau and Valori Plastici tucked under his arm because it looked good. In Madrid, the literary avant-garde gathered under the banner of the Ultra movement. Among its leaders, the poet Gillermo de Torre (1900–1971), “our equivalent of Marinetti”, as Dali would later say. The ultraists admired Marinetti’s futurism, its centrifugal and dynamic compositions and praised a constructivist-type art (iron towers, aeroplanes, and transatlantic liners). This was far removed from the Parisian version of modernity. Indeed, whereas Freudian ideas were making their way into Spain, surrealism when it started to be known was considered a literary group, without any proper plastic art proposals. In 1925–26 Dalí was still swaying from one style to another: cubist still lives, Venus inspired by the neo-classical French painter Jean-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), portraits reminiscent of those from the German New Objectivity 36 , Italian Pittura Metafisica inspired by Giorgio De Chirico (1888–1978)... Having ended up leaving the Academy, Dalí gradually planned to become famous, encouraged by his friends Buñuel and Lorca. He came to Paris in April Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities 1926, 37 visited Picasso, and realized that classicism was old-fashioned. Right after his trip to Paris, he imported elements from Miró’s style into his own paintings. However, Dalí did not cross the line towards surrealism. He would still borrow from a range of artistic styles: New Objectivity, cubism, Jean Arp’s (1886–1966) and Mirós’ abstract forms, De Chirico, 38 “machine age” and ocean liners, architectures from Le Corbusier, and Picasso, as in his 1926 Composition avec Trois personnages (Acadèmia neocubista) (Figure 4). 39 In 1927, he reproached García Lorca for forgetting to mention airplanes in his poetry. 40 In March 1928, he signed an eclectic “Anti-artistic Manifesto”, reminiscent of Futurism and Dada. 41 Dalí read La Révolution surréaliste as well. He analyzed its reproductions, especially those by Yves Tanguy (1900–55): skies on desert lands, levitating objects, smoke, ectoplasmic shapes, phallic fingers. He later admitted “I snitched everything from Uncle Yves” 42 , but at that time he snitched from every modern trend in Europe. He also began to add to all of these a proper libidinal and scatological repertoire including flying breasts, severed arms, putrefying asses, “apparels” and gadgets, allusions to masturbation and sodomy. In Barcelona, the colleagues of l’Amic de les Arts saw Dalí as “the archetypal anti-surrealist”. 43 They were hostile to the Parisian surrealists whom they saw as a “small and sterile group" and as "sad lovers of scandal for scandal sake [sic].” Dalí also underlined his “clear distance between [himself] and surrealism” 44 . Insert Figure 4, Dalí, Acadèmia neocubista When Joan Miró came back to Catalonia during the summer of 1927 and paid a visit to Dalí with his gallery owner Pierre Loeb (1897–1964), Dalí’s ambitions to gain recognition increased. The young painter was suddenly contaminated by a mimetic desire oriented towards Paris: his desire for fame was positively influenced by new mediators and models he did not know before. 45 Dalí wrote to Lorca: [Miró] thinks I am much better than all the young painters in Paris. He wrote to me to tell me that I have everything needed to make a great success. As you may know, he was financially very successful over there. 46 This is where everything happened: Miró promised him a “great career […] in Paris” – according to Dalí. Indeed, Miró’s dealer Pierre Loeb advised Dalí not to sway from one trend to another. In his articles for Spanish journals, Dalí started then to endorse surrealism, as if he was hoping to be co-opted by the group. The turning point happened when his painting Dialogue sur la plage was refused from the Autumn Show in 1928 in Barcelona, and when the art dealer Josep Dalmau (1867–1937) stopped supporting Dalí because he was worried about having to close for gross indecency. At this time Dalí referred to himself as a surrealist for the first time on Barcelonese scene. For Dalí, becoming a surrealist was part of an international strategy: “my main goal is to contribute to the extinction of the artistic phenomenon and gain international prestige”, he said to the Spanish press. 47 Around 1929, allegiance to surrealism suddenly seemed to be a quicker way to achieve “international prestige” than through abstract art or cubism. Things had changed on the international market. The surrealists had become famous (or infamous), albeit disturbing. A couple of other artists were starting to take the same direction, such as the Joyeux-Prunel Romanian painter Victor Brauner (1903–66) who was also gradually turning towards surrealism and setting aside constructivism. In March 1929, during a trip to Paris, Dalí confirmed his official conversion to surrealism. He came for the filming of Un Chien Andalou, – we know the rest of the story. With this scandal, Dalí simultaneously joined the surrealist network, the worldly circles of lovers of novelties, and the same mercantile network as Miró. In 1929 the new art dealer Camille Goemans (1900–60) offered him a contract. The surrealist adoption of Dalí was not as easy as it seemed. Dalí indulged in outrageous behaviour and his work was disgustingly provocative; even Breton disliked it. But Dalí was impressive and gaining attention, and he succeeded in turning the “demoralizing project” of surrealism into reality. Papers would talk about it. The public reacted. When he rallied the movement he renewed immediately surrealism which had been in crisis for many years. 48 Dalí’s paintings broadened the horizons of the “pictorial automatism”, which were not very conclusive. They shed light on occult obsessions. They were easy to understand and mysterious at the same time. Indeed, he used figurative representation, which was very neat and detailed, along with compositions mixing objects and hybrid bodies, which were both dreamlike and disturbing. They made a lasting impression. Dalí was immediately noticed by the great art lovers. Charles and Marie Laure de Noailles (1891–1981 and 1902–70) bought the most shocking painting from Dalí, Le Jeu Lugubre (private collection). It was the beginning of an unexpected career, which was very profitable for the surrealist group. Indeed, in December 1929, the journal La Revolution surréaliste published the “Second Manifesto” after months of inactivity and internal crisis. The surrealist machine was at work again. The Dubbing of Surrealism by the International Cream of the Crop Dalí was able to survive the economic crisis in the 1930s, thanks to the support of patrons who had started to be interested in surrealism around 1927. 49 The Noailles paid him well for a new movie, L’Âge d’Or (The Golden Age). 50 Dalí managed to live comfortably during the Great Depression due to the “Zodiaque Group”, which was founded in 1932 by rich aristocrats, real estate owners, and owners or shareholders (or heirs) of oil companies, who were not really affected by the crisis. 51 The Parisian cosmopolitan aristocracy’s support for avant-garde plastic arts was not new. Since the war, avant-garde music, dance, haute-couture, painting and literature, had found their place in this circle, populated by people who loved masked balls, beautiful decorations, collecting, and who competed to achieve greater social distinction. Until 1925, those same patrons had preferred Matisse, Derain or Russian fauvist artists. Then they had turned shortly to the Art déco style. 52 They would buy carpets, tapestries and hangings made in Algeria for low prices after works by Georges-Henri Rouault (1871–1958), Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Lurçat, Léger, and Le Corbusier – and, after 1927, after Miró. 53 In theory, the surrealist artists condemned the ideas and aristocratic practices of this circle, as well as the capitalist and colonial sources of their wealth. However some members or former members were very well received, like the writer René Crevel (1900–35). When Miró and Ernst agreed to design the ballet set of Romeo and Juliet for Diaghilev, Louis Aragon (1897–1982) and André Breton protested. 54 But they themselves had been depending on the funding of the fashion designer Jacques Doucet (1853–1929). They also made a good living from their sales of manuscripts to Charles and Marie Laure de Noailles, and from their Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities own brokering activities. 55 The haute couture also enhanced surrealist paintings since 1927. The Maison Norine of Brussels, for example, introduced Max Ernst’s paintings in their catalogue of summer 1927. 56 Dalí remembered his trip to Paris in 1929, when Miró told him: You have to get yourself a tailor-made tuxedo. We will have to go out in the worldly circles. […] When I had my tuxedo, Miró took me for dinner at the Duchess de Dato’s. (…) Among the numerous guests, I can only remember the Countess of Cuevas de Vera, who was to become a great friend of mine. 57 The Countess’s Grand Father was John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), the founder of the Standard Oil Company, then the richest man in the world, and probably the most unbridled capitalist. Some of Ernsts’ or Miró’s works could also be found at prestigious collectors’ houses. Those collections were exhibited in dealers’s galleries, which could foster a mimetic process among collectors. In spring 1929 for instance, the German dealer Alfred Flechtheim (1878– 1937) exhibited Max Ernst in Berlin and Düsseldorf. Known as the specialist of cubism, who had no interest for other aesthetics, Flechtheim still justified why he had chosen to exhibit Ernst whose painting was so different: Currently the most famous private collections of Paris possess works from the painter of Cologne […] : [you can find his artworks in the] private collections of Alphonse Kann, Count de Beaumont, Viscount de Noailles, Baron Napoleon Gourgaud, Raoul La Roche, Kelekian, Jacques Doucet, [in] all those who collect Picasso’s and other great cubists’ works, who also added some of Paul Klee’s art pieces, [and also in the collection of] Felix Fénéon who discovered Seurat […]. 58 Soon surrealism became a way of life, which was not exclusive to artists. For example, the Noailles were filmed by Man Ray in their villa (Mystères du Château de dé, 1929), with their heads covered with silk tights, exhibiting their prowess as athletes, and with intermittent extracts of poems between these images. At dinner parties held at the Noailles’, people would talk like the surrealists, with twisted, even “slimy” vocabulary. After the scandal of L’Âge d’or (The Golden Age), the surrealists understood that they could obtain their strongest support from the “beau-monde”, meaning the social elite. The Dalínian Internationalization of Surrealism Whereas in the 1920s the Parisian reference had not been central to painters working outside French-speaking countries, at the beginning of the 1930s however, it became useful to refer to Paris in order to define oneself as avant-garde in the local context; and with a reference to and reverence for surrealism. This new state of affairs was due to various reasons, both negative and positive. On the one hand, futurist and constructivist references were becoming outmoded in Europe. On the social and economic front, constructivism had lost its momentum as its figureheads became Joyeux-Prunel ever more integrated into professional structures as teachers, designers, architects, etc. Referring to the Bauhaus was also less subversive than it had been earlier. Croatian vanguardist leader Ljubomir Micić (1895–1971), for instance, who had championed a nationalist version of constructivism until the end of the 1920s and had to realize his marginalization with the crisis of European constructivism, claimed a Parisian affiliation when he published his novel Chevaliers de Montparnasse in 1931. 59 Moreover, political factors added to the general disaffection felt among young Constructivist artists throughout Europe. Very often, modernists had fled from conservative or protofascist regimes, especially in Germany and Central Europe. A positive reason for the new Parisian appeal was that it soon became very intriguing and useful to call oneself “surrealist”, especially outside France. The surrealist soon became a marker of Parisian approval, justifying the questioning of a local equilibrium. Following Dalí and Brauner who had joined surrealism in 1929, artists that were formerly cubists or constructivists began to call themselves surrealists in other countries in the early 1930s. In Belgrade, Marko Ristić (1902–84) declared himself to be surrealist in 1931. In 1932, a surrealist exhibition was organized in Prague. And on the same year, Argentinian artist Antonio Berni (1905–81) organized an exhibition of surrealist paintings and collages in Buenos Aires 60 . Berni had jumped, suddenly in 1932, from a quite conventional style of modern painting with postcubist inspiration (for instance in his post-1925 matierist nudes and in a 1926–27 Naturaleza muerta con guitarra, prívate collection) and from an art drawing from the German New Objectivity and De Chirico (for instance Toledo y el religioso o El fraile, 1928, private collection), to making pictures of cut-off or ripped out bodies, and paintings of murderers. In 1932 he also added, to his bleeding torsos and trepanned skulls, the evident Dalinian limestone petrification of the body (Figure 4). Around 1934, surrealism won the symbolic competition among international avant-gardes: Artists from South America to Central Europe to Japan to South America started their vanguardist carreer as surrealists. Insert Figure 5 here : Antonio Berni’, Landru Transnational Crossed Legitimization Processes: Essential Peripheries More often, these non-Parisian surrealists were Dalinian surrealists, a phenomenon that cannot be observed in Paris. This gap in the international map of surrealism triggered a global diffusion that had not been possible before, due to Breton’s authoritarism and to the group’s dissensions – as I shall investigate in this last section. Despite Breton’s attempt to define a Surrealist painting, a claim he reassessed with the publication of Le Surréalisme et la Peinture in 1928, 61 the so-called “surrealist artists” in Paris stood in defiance of Breton’s version of surrealism. They preferred indeed not to be labeled surrealists, and exhibited in many different places on the Parisian scene, not hesitating to exhibit with abstract or figurative painters. 62 Furthermore, claiming to be a surrealist was easier outside Parisas no one would check if Breton had approved the label or not. The surrealist label instantly gave rise to local scandal hence its attractiveness outside France. Reciprocally, foreign self-proclaimed surrealist artists gradually became more useful to the Parisian surrealists as they could help them conquer new marketplaces and because the Parisian surrealists themselves needed wider foreign legitimization. Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities The case of Spanish Óscar Domínguez (1906–57) is very telling. In 1933, the painter went back to the Canaries from Montparnasse where he had been well integrated in the École de Paris. He organized a surrealist exhibition in Santa Cruz in Tenerife, independently from the Parisian Surrealists who did not know him. If at the time he lived in Montparnasse, Óscar Domínguez had introduced himself to the surrealists, as a “montparno” they would have rejected him, manu militari. When he had painted in Montparnasse his work represented everything the surrealists had dismissed – young, well-dressed people playing cards in Parisian restaurants, in flashy citrus-inspired colors with cezannesque faces (Los jugadores de cartas, 1928, private collection); or musicians playing geometric instruments, (Los Musicos, 1928, private collection) (Figure 6). His work exuded a sort of inferiority complex, as if the necessary painting of Parisian subjects and the writing of “PARIS” in capital letters under his own signature on top of the canvas, had been necessary to add value to his weak postcubist painting. At that time Domínguez had probably no other way to associate himself with the successful École de Paris. He was among the sort of painters André Breton had disparaged since 1926 in his articles “Le Surréalisme et la peinture” for La Révolution surréaliste, which had been published as a book in 1928. 63 At the end of the 1920s he was still part of what Breton called “the continuous scandal of cezanism, of neo-academism or machine age [machinisme]”. 64 But Dalí’s example was inspiring. Having organized a local surrealist exhibition in Tenerife, and having found a real audience with his Dalí-like deliquescent paintings (such as the melting Piano, 1933, private collection, or the half-donkey surmounted by a melting female body in L’épingle de sûreté, 1934, Figure 7), in 1934 Domínguez felt confident enough to make contact with the surrealists. André Breton gladly designated him a surrealist and agreed to open a second, official surrealist exhibition in Santa Cruz. 65 In May 1935 Breton himself came to Tenerife and underlined the “poetic communion” that linked him to his “dear Óscar Domínguez”. 66 Afterwards, Domínguez came back to Paris where he was now part of the elite surrealist group. In the wake of the Tenerife 1935 exhibition, Breton understood that he had to put in place a systematic internationalization strategy if he wanted to control the spread of the surrealist label. That was the beginning of his systematic planning of international surrealist exhibitions and lectures all over Europe. 67 Insert Figure 6 and Figure 7 When it comes to plastic arts and styles, an interesting gap can be noted between Paris and abroad. In Paris, surrealism would praise “the return of automatism” – as Breton and his associates had finally agreed since 1925–26 to define a “surrealist painting”. But abroad, things were different: “dalinism” was the trend. Why dalinism? Already in 1929, in Spain, a critic explained that part of the Catalan youth who was amazed by the instant success of their compatriot, had turned into “dalinism”: What is tragic in the question is the influence Salvador Dalí is starting to have, not upon himself, but upon other creatures. Today, there are youths who turn to Dalínism and play at surrealism. The results are terrible. So far all the imitations in the style and design of J.V. Foix we read, were a calamity. Young theorists, when they talk about art, cannot but copy Dalí’s "putrefactions." Everyone who wants is younger. And now, above all, to reach the Dalí Joyeux-Prunel painting style or the literary style of Foix, a preparation is needed that does not require four days. 68 These young Catalan painters had understood, despite the critic’s dismissal, that dalinism enabled one to efficiently convert an academic career into an avant-garde one. To paint as Dalí indeed, one needed to be trained in the most traditional techniques of representation. But four days could be sufficient after four years of academic training. In Paris, the situation was totally different. Dalinism as a new pictorial practice remained rare. Neither Ernst, nor Miró, nor Magritte and even less Tanguy wanted to imitate the unbearable Dalí. The “anxiety of influence” which is so characteristic of the avant- gardes 69 was strong in Paris since everyone knew everyone. Abroad, on the contrary, it was not shameful to imitate Dalí. And it was easy. Reproductions of Dalí’s works circulated and the dalínian style was very easy to imitate for a good technician: soft objects, blue skies and deserts, telluric shapes, scatology, photographic realism and smooth fractures. Above all, using the dalinian style enabled one to gain instant recognition as a surrealist, which had become synonymous with avant-garde, just as visual perversion meant immediate public scandal. It also enabled one to recycle academic skills. Dalínian Peripheral Reconversions, Parisian Adaptation In the international avant-garde, then, the production of surrealist figurative paintings increased substantially, from the so-called peripheries to the so-called Parisian center whose vanguardist leaders could no longer control what was happening. Many paintings became extremely detailed, and landscaped were built in a classical way, under a theatrical spotlight and with obsessing objects, as artist could see in Dalí’s artworks and their reproductions . Art historian José Vovelle made an inventory and counted 394 “dalinian” plastic works produced by 28 Spanish, Dutch and Swedish artists over the peak growth period between 1935–36. 70 As her inventory was made at the beginning of the 1990s, much more could be counted today, very probably. In Vovelle’s sample, 72% of works were produced between 1934–38. For Spanish artists who remained in the country, the peak of growth occurred between 1928–36. For Spanish people who emigrated, the peak occurred between 1933–40. For Dutch artists it occurred between 1931–34; for Danish and Swedish people between 1934–40. The dalinian period for the Japanese was spread between 1936–40. . This internationalization was confirmed by the increasing numbers of foreign visitors coming to Dalí in Paris during the artistic season and in his village Cadaqués during Easter and the summer. Dalínism became a selling trend – the dalínian flag among the world of fashion and cosmopolitan aristocracy was envied, between Paris and New York, from the trustees’ evenings at MoMA, to Elsa Schiaparelli’s fashion shows. 71 Dalí’s international influence demonstrated a divergence of logic between the Parisian and the international field of modernism. It was not André Breton’s original Parisian movement that gained influence. This soon became a problem for Breton. Beyond a probable jealousy, the internationalization of dalínism, which was the main factor for the internationalization of surrealism, revealed the fragility of the central position of the Parisian group and its dependence upon its “peripheries”. Dalí’s repeated pranks, escapades, and Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities gaffes, his pro-fascist declarations, and his refusal to even consider complying with the group’s discipline, would oblige Breton to exclude him. However, neither in February 1934 (Surrealist trial against Dalí) nor the following years, the group could not decide whether to exclude Dali. Dalí’s international reputation counted too much – and he was the main figurehead in the so-called “peripheries” of the Parisian movement, that is to say everywhere outside Paris. Whereas in Paris his position-taking was dismissed and being deliberately controversial, he was praised abroad. At the end of the 1930s, Dalí had become the most visible agent of surrealism, and stood internationally as the movement’s representative. Dalí’s famous declaration in 1940 sums up this point: “The difference between the surrealists and me, is that I am a surrealist.” 72 Nothing seemed to scare Dalí, even antifascism, however much Breton and his friends relied on the clear moral superiority of this political position. In the following years, Breton could not stop the growing tension between Dali's statements in support of Hitler and his central vanguardist position in the international artistic field. The painter was officially expelled from the Parisian movement in January 1939. The Symbolic Victory of Surrealism and Paris Notwithstanding these contradictions, Parisian surrealism won the symbolic battle of the international avant-garde. In Paris, the Surrealists were galvanized by Dalí’s contribution. In 1930, in a letter written to abstract painter Theo Van Doesburg, his colleague Joaquín Torres García expressed the desire to “do something” against surrealism: “We have to take a clear stance against surrealism […] What we need is an organization that actually does something…” 73 Indeed Surrealism was doing something; it even made other avant-gardes think they weren’t doing anything. By trying to unite against the domination of surrealism, the geometrical abstracts confirmed their marginalization in Paris and the international peripheries. Everywhere in Europe, people started to leave the abstract movement and by 1934, the movement Abstraction-Creation became a distant memory. The abstract artists were cleared from the landscape, which could also be seen in the press at the time. Dalí described the situation in a very cruel way in his memoirs, backdating the destruction process of the abstract movement to 1929: In only one single night [after Un Chien andalou], ten post-war years of pseudo-intellectual avant-gardism [were destroyed]. This horrible thing that used to be called abstract art or non-figurative art fell apart under our feet. It was wounded to death and couldn’t stand up on its feet anymore after seeing the eye of a young girl being cut in half by a razor, at the beginning of our movie. There was no more room for M. Mondrian’s small maniac diamonds in Paris. 74 Of course, artistic circulations and imitations, and Dalí’s impact were not the sole factors for surrealism’s victory in Paris. After 1934, the redistribution of the French cultural Joyeux-Prunel field according to political affinities had a favorable impact on the preservation of the surrealist purity. It contributed to strengthen their Parisian domination. To be against the surrealists, was to be pro-fascist. From this point on, the avant-garde, the social elite, money and left-wing politics were closely linked. In 1931, for instance, it could be difficult to justify the link between the sale of Paul Éluard’s and Breton’s collections, and the Colonial Exhibition. Surrealists were known as the leaders of “the colonial counter-exhibition”, 75 but their private collections contained “primitive objects” bought at low prices, which the surrealists sold and contributed to the promotion of 76 However, from 1934 the presence of these objects in the market was considered normal. In a letter to his dealer written in 1934, Miró admitted that: André Breton loved a pastel very much. I thought it was politically judicious to be in good terms with him, because surrealists became official key figures in Paris. [My dealer] Pierre agreed with me, so I offered Breton this pastel. 77 Internationally, the recognition of surrealism by international museums came at the expense of the abstract movement. In 1934, the works of the surrealists were exhibited at the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts, in the United States, and in the Kunsthaus of Zurich. 78 In Zurich, the 1934 exhibition was entitled Abstrakte Malerei und Plastik: Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, José Gonzalez, Juan Miró; not a single abstract geometric painter was represented, suggesting that geometrical abstraction had no importance in the international artistic field of the time. With the Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936, surrealism became part of History. It was then known as the movement which followed Dada directly, as if Dada had not had also abstract and constructivist offspring. This genealogy was scientifically introduced. It ensured the legitimating process of the surrealist story. As for geometrical abstraction, it disappeared a long time from art history: Few art historians have been interested in writing on Abstraction- Creation, and no museum dedicated proper exhibitions to it, except in 1978 and 2013. 79 When Max Ernst painted his L’Ange du foyer (Le Triomphe du Surréalisme) in 1937, surrealism had indeed won the competitive battle of symbolic domination over the international avant-garde field (Figure 8) With no barriers on the horizon and no obstacles in sight, the Parisian surrealists could henceforth forget the peripheral and very recent origin of their international ascendency. Insert Figure 8 here Conclusion The centre-periphery approach, which is so essential to the canonical narrative of avant- garde art in the 20 th century, is based on dubious but common methodologies that dominate our discipline: the monograph, nationalism and ethnocentrism, and evolutionist formalism. Other methods can afford decentred and more historically complex narratives. Combining global, circulatory, and local scales, we can study the history of artistic centralities in the Interwar period outside the myth of Paris as A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway) 80 where the most innovative forms of creation were supposed to take place. A global, transnational Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities history of modern art in the 1920s, which begins by measuring, comparing, and charting objects of study at a global and horizontal 81 level, before looking at the transnational/ translocal circulation of artworks and artists, and finally analyzing the works and texts themselves, leads to the conclusion that there was a general disenchantment vis-à-vis Paris among international innovative artists until the end of the 1920s. Not only was the constructivist transnational field more attractive, but also artists could find real markets for modern art and applied arts locally. After 1930, growing disinterest in constructivism gained artistic networks in countries where this tendency had reached a peak of recognition and professionalization. In addition, conservative and fascist tendencies discouraged many artists from staying in their home- country. Gradually, peripheral artists got interested in Parisian surrealism which had remained until then an exclusively French-speaking literary movement. In the context of the Great Depression, Dalí’s success in Paris and abroad triggered soon more interest in surrealism. Whereas in 1929, a majority of European artists still sought to place themselves amongst the avant-garde by way of cubism, futurism, or constructivist practices, by 1934, surrealism had replaced these currents to become a sure-fire route to the avant-garde. But artists sought to imitate the Catalan Dalí more than any other. They followed a Spaniard, not a Parisian. This reversal in symbolic and geocultural fortunes points to various phenomena linked to international circulation and a series of fascinating processes of resemanticization, wherein the ‘periphery’ manipulated the ‘centre’ and the losers of the past but close history of modern art asserted themselves as the victors of the avant-garde. The internationalization of dalinism generalized an interesting social and aesthetical process which was not expected in the 1930s: formerly academic artists from the ‘peripheries’ could suddenly transition overnight to members of the avant-garde and therefore to the ‘centre’, and all this without a gradual conversion or the blessing of avant-garde leaders. This was a symbolic revolution that represented nothing less than the revenge of the provinces and of the petit-bourgeois, a revolution that proved that desires for aesthetic quick recognition and local efficient scandal could carry just as much weight in the aesthetic arena as sophisiticated artistic theories and practices. Here was a revolution that was fuelled by everything but the monocentric ideology and the canon of the avant-garde. This work has received support of TransferS (laboratoire d’excellence, program “Investissements d’avenir” ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL* and ANR-10-LABX-0099). BÉATRICE JOYEUX-PRUNEL is maître de conferences in modern and contemporary art at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris / université Paris Sciences Lettres, with an Habilitation à diriger les recherches – an equivalent of Professor in Modern and Contemporary Art History. She teaches and works on the history of nineteenth and twentieth century art, the global history of the avant-gardes, the visual culture of petroleum, and the digital turn in the humanities with a special focus on social, global, quantitative, and digital approaches. Joyeux- Prunel has founded and manages Artl@s since 2009 (www.artlas.ens.fr). Amongst her publications, the books: Nul n’est prophète en son pays ? l’internationalisation de la peinture des avant-gardes parisiennes, 1855–1914 (Paris: Nicolas Chaudun/ Musée d’Orsay, 2009 – Prix du musée d’Orsay); L’Art et la mesure : histoire de l’art et et méthodes quantitatives, http://www.artlas.ens.fr/ Joyeux-Prunel sources, outils, bonnes pratiques (Paris: Editions Rue d’Ulm, 2010); Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, ed., Circulations in the Global History of Art (New York: Routledge, 2015). More recently she published a pocket-book transnational and social reassessment of modern art history – Les Avant-gardes artistiques. Une histoire transnationale – Vol. 1: 1848–1918 (Paris: Gallimard, Folio Histoire Series, 2016); Vol.2 : 1918–1945 (Paris: Gallimard, Folio Histoire, 2017); Vol. 3: 1945–1968 (Paris, Gallimard, Folio Histoire, forthcoming 2018). 1 Very representative, and often quoted to endorse this idea, is the book written by Martica Sawin, Surrealism in exile and the beginning of the New York school (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). 2 See, Anna Boschetti, Ismes. Du réalisme au postmodernisme (Paris : CNRS Éditions, coll. « Culture & société », 2014). 3 Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 4 James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? (New York; London: Routlegdge, 2007); Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme, World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008). 5 Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, eds., Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 6 The Social field is defined, after Pierre Bourdieu, as a relatively autonomous sector of the social world, a site of constant negotiation and conflict driven by its own logics, hierarchies, values, legitimization and reproduction processes. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Original version : Les règles de l’art : genèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris : Le Seuil, 1992). 7 Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Géopolitique des avant-gardes artistiques 1919–1939. Thèse d’Habilitation à diriger les recherches, Paris, Sciences Po, 2015 ; and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Provincializing Paris. The Center-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantitative and Transnational Approaches,” Artl@s Bulletin, 4, N. 1 (2015): Article 4 ; http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol4/iss1/4/. 8 Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “¿Exponer al cubista sin cubismo? De cómo Kahnweiler llegó a convencer a Alemania —e incluso al mundo entero— del aura de Picasso mediante su pedagogía expositiva (1908–1914)”, Picasso. Registros Alemanes (exh. cat. Malagá: Picasso Museum (Fall 2015)), 258–273. 9 Piet Mondrian, letter to Theo van Doesburg, 9 Februrary 1920, quoted by Susanne Deicher, Piet Mondrian: Protestantismus und Modernität (Berlin: Reimer, 1995), 197. 10 Norbert Bandier, Sociologie du surréalisme (Paris : La Dispute, 1999). 11 Susanne Deicher, Piet Mondrian. Protestantismus und Modernität (Berlin: Reimer, 1995), 197. 12 Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Les avant-gardes artistiques 1848–1918. Une histoire transnationale (Paris : Gallimard, 2016, Folio Histoire Series N. 149). See also Catherine Dossin and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “The German Century. Towards a Geopolitical Art History”, in: Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol4/iss1/4/ Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities eds., Circulations. Writing the Global History of a Globalized Art (New York: Routledge, 2015), 183–201. 13 See Kenneth Silver, Esprit De Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). 14 Correspondência Mário de Andrade & Tarsila do Amaral, (São Paulo: EdUSP, 1999); and Tarsila Viajante / Viajera, exhibition catalogue São Paulo, Pinacoteca, Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, Governo do Estado de São Paulo, 19 January–16 March 2008, Buenos Aires, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, 27 March–2 June 2008, Regina Texeira de Barros ed. (C mara Brasileira do Livro, Malba, Fundación Costantini, 2008). 15 Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Géopolitique des avant-gardes artistiques 1919–1939. See also Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Les avant-gardes artistiques. Une histoire transnationale 16 “À Paris tout est totalement mort, [...] C’est pour moi un fait certain que la nouvelle zone de culture est le Nord.” Théo Van Doesburg, letter to a friend. Michel Seuphor, Piet Mondrian (Paris: Séguier, 1987), 127. 17 He took part in the collective exhibition in 1919 (August-September) in London (“Exhibition of French Art 1914–1919,” Mansard Gallery, Heal & Son, Ltd., London ) ; personal touring exhibition in Geneva, Dresden, Munich, Düsseldorf, and New York (November 1919–December 1921 : “Tournée de l’exposition de sculptures, sculpto-peintures, peintures, dessins de Alexandre Archipenko”), before a personal exhibition in the Russian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 1920. 18 Art critic Theodor Däubler wrote several texts on Archipenko who exhibited at Fritz Gurlitt’s Gallery in Berlin, and with other German artists such as Lyonel Feininger in Frankfurt am Main in May 1922. 19 His architectonic art found echoes in the works of Central European sculptors, such as Katarzyna Kobro. The first issue of the constructivist journal MA, edited by László Moholy- Nagy after his arrival at the committee of the hungarian vanguardist journal was dedicated to Archipenko (MA, N. 6, Vienna 1921). Archipenko’s works were displayed at the Zenit 1922 exhibition in Zagreb and in Belgrade (1923). See Krisztina Passuth, Les Avant-gardes de l’Europe centrale 1907–1927 (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 183 and 219. 20 Donald H. Karshan, ed., Archipenko: international visionary, (Washington: Published for the National Collection of Fine Arts by Smithsonian Institution Press, 1969),72. 21 Detailed research presented in Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Provincializing Paris...”. 22 See for instance Francis Picabia’s and André Breton’s letters to Tristan Tzara, in Michel Sanouillet ed., Dada à Paris, revised and reedited by Anne Sanouillet (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 2005). 23 This is the result of a study of 27 modernist magazines available in the Centre Pompidou Library, concentrating on three important years, 1924-–6. See Béatrice Joyeux- Prunel, “Provincializing Paris…” 24 Camille Mauclair, L’Architecture va-t-elle mourir ? (Paris : Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue critique, n. d.) 36. Quoted in Yves Chevrefils Desbiolles, Les revues d’art à Paris 1905-1940 (Paris : Ent’revues, 1993), 95. 25 Macel, Otakar, “L’Esprit nouveau à Prague”, in Stanislaus von Moos, ed., L’Esprit nouveau. Le Corbusier und die Industrie 1920–1925 (Berlin : W. Ernst und Sohn, 1987) 160– 163, and Jean-Louis Cohen, “Avant-gardes et revues d’architecture en Russie, 1917–1941”, Revue de l’art, N. 89, 1990, 29–38. 26 The plan to send Fernand Léger to establish contacts was not fulfilled and the American edition project was abandoned. Mardges Bacon, Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid (Cambridge, Mass.; the MIT Press, 2001). Joyeux-Prunel 27 Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, The Bauhaus. An Introductory Survey (Croydon: Victoria, Longmans Green, 1963), 2–3, quoted by Igor Naoumovitch Golomchtok, L’art totalitaire: Union soviétique, IIIe Reich, Italie fasciste, Chine (translated from the English by Michèle Levy-Bram. Paris : Carré, 1991), 27. 28 Marie-Aline Prat, Peinture et avant-garde au seuil des années 30 (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1984). 29 Such as the galleries Povolozky, Viscontin, galerie d’Art contemporain, Le Sacre du Printemps, Marck… 30 On this xenophoby see L'École de Paris 1901–1929, exh. cat., Sophie Krebs ed., Paris, Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2000 (Paris: Réunion des Musées nationaux, 2000). 31 Félix Marcilhac, József Csáky: du cubisme historique à la figuration réaliste : catalogue raisonné des sculptures (Paris: Éditions de l’Amateur, 2007). 32 On this naturalist shift see Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). 33 See Cercle et Carré and the International Spirit of Abstract Art, exh. cat. Athens, Georgia, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 12 October 2013–5 January 2014 (Athens, Georgia: Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 2013). 34 http://www.salvador-dali.org/cataleg_raonat/ 35 Salvador Dalí, Letter to his uncle Anselm Domènech, Summer 1919, quoted in Ian Gibson, The shameful life of Salvador Dali (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 104. 36 Dalí, Personnage à la fenêtre, 1925, Madrid, Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. 37 Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 172. 38 Dalí, Nature morte (invitation au sommeil), 1926, present whereabouts unknown. 39 Salvador Dalí, Académie néo-cubiste, 1926, Museo de Montserrat, Montserrat. Specialists have recognized an inspiration from Picasso’s Atelier à la tête de plâtre (1925) that Dalí saw in Picasso’s studio while visiting the Parisian painter in Spring 1926. But one has also to point out the constructivist and post-cubist inspirations of the painting, which also includes a clear reference to Jean Arp’s arbitrary color shapes. 40 Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 200. 41 The final list of referencial personalities (a theoretical obligation for a manifesto) is the following: Picasso, Gris, Ozenfant, de Chirico, Miró, Lipchitz, Brancusi, Arp, Le Corbusier, Reverdy, Tzara, Éluard, Aragon, Desnos, Maritain, Raynal, Zervos, Breton, Cocteau, Stravinsky, García Lorca. 42 Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 212. 43 Guash dans L’Amic de les Arts, October 1926, quoted in Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 220. 44 L’Amic de les Arts, quoted in Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 221. 45 See René Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953– 2005, Robert Doran ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). For instance, in December 1929, the “Collection of our nowadays paintings, which belong to Serge Lifar”, which included works from Miro, was shown in the Madeleine quarter. Introduction written by Jean Cocteau. 46 Miró to Dalí, November 1927, in Joan Miró 1917–1934: la naissance du monde, exh. cat. Paris, Centre Pompidou, 3 March–28 June 2004, Agnès de la Beaumelle ed. (Paris : Centre Pompidou, 2004), 333. 47 Interview for Estampa, 6 November 1928, quoted in Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 239 http://www.salvador-dali.org/cataleg_raonat/ Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities 48 The most detailed history of surrealism is Gérard Durozoi, Histoire du mouvement surréaliste (Paris: Hazan, 2004). 49 In 1927 Marie Laure de Noailles boughtMax Ernst’s painting Monument aux oiseaux just after completion. See Laurence Benaïm, Marie Laure de Noailles : la vicomtesse du bizarre (Paris: Grasset, 2001), 170. 50 See Luis Bu uel, L’ ge d’or : correspondance Luis u uel-Charles de Noailles : lettres et documents, 1929–1976, Jean-Michel Bourhous and Nathalie Schoeller eds., Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993), 31. 51 See Marijke Verhaar, Salvador Dalí et le mécénat du Zodiaque, unpublished doctoral thesis (Utrecht University, 2008). 52 The Noailles first commissioned De Stijl’s artists to design the interior of their house Villa Saint-Bernard ; then, they commissioned a renewed interior for their private Parisian mansion, Place des États-Unis, from Jean-Michel Frank. 53 Dominique Paulvé, Marie Cuttoli: Myrbor et l’invention de la tapisserie moderne (Paris: Norma, 2010). 54 Louis Aragon and André Breton, “PROTESTATION,” La Révolution surréaliste N. 7 (June 1926), 31. 55 Shane Maree Dunworth, The de Noailles as collectors and patrons, unpublished PhD thesis (London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 1984), 36; Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics, and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market Between 1910 and 1930 (New York: Garland Publishings, 1981); Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Les avant-gardes artistiques 1918–1945. Une histoire transnationale. 56 “L’Envol.” Un remarquable ensemble-sport, créé par Norine. Psyché, August 1927, Brussels, Photograph by Robert De Smet. Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique. In the background, a Max Ernst painting, Forêt, is displayed behind the fashion model (1927). 57 Translated from the French, Salvador Dalí, La vie secrète de Salvador Dalí, Salvador, Michel Déon ed. (Paris: La Table ronde, 1952), 161. 58 “Actuellement les collections privées les plus célèbres de Paris possèdent des œuvres du peintre de Cologne [...], celles d’Alphonse Kann, du comte de Beaumont, du vicomte de Noailles, du baron Napoléon Gourgaud, de Raoul La Roche, Kélékian, Jacques Doucet, tous ceux qui collectionnent Picasso et les autres grands cubistes, auxquels ils ont joint Paul Klee, Félix Fénéon qui découvrit Seurat [...].” Quoted in Werner Spies, Max Ernst: les collages, inventaires et contradictions, translated from the German by Eliane Kaufholz (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 129 (note 656). 59 Lioubomir Mitsitch [sic], Les Chevaliers de Montparnasse (Paris: aux Arènes de Lutèce, 1932). 60 This exhibition is not well known. I thank Gabriela Francone for introducing me to the work of Antonio Berni. 61 André Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture, avec 77 photogravures d’après Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, Georges Braque, Arp [sic], Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Paris, libr. Gallimard, 1928 (New edition Paris: Gallimard Folio Essais, 2002) ; English translation by Simon Watson Taylor, Surrealism and Painting (London: Macdonald and Co., 1972). 62 On this question see Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Les avant-gardes artistiques 1918– 1945. Une histoire transnationale . 63 André Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture, avec 77 photogravures d’après Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, Georges Braque, Arp [sic], Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, André Masson, Yves Tanguy (Paris: librairie Gallimard, 1928 ; new edition Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio essais n° 399, 2002). Joyeux-Prunel 64 André Breton, “Le surréalisme et la peinture », La Révolution surréaliste N ° 6, Year 2, 1 March 1926, 20. « Le scandale continu du cézannisme, du néo-académisme ou du machinisme ». 65 La part du jeu et du rêve: scar Dom ngue et le surréalisme, 1906–1957 (exhibition catalogue, Marseille, Musée Cantini, 25 June - 2 October 2005 ; Paris: Paris, Hazan, 2005). 66 André Breton, talk at the Circulo de amistad XIV abril, Tenerife, 23 May 1935. Manuscript p. 2. Archive André Breton. 67 The planning can be found in Breton’s Archive: André Breton, “Projet de cycle de conférences – L'heure nous paraît venue d'interrompre en public… », June 1925. http://www.andrebreton.fr/work/56600100453590. 68 “El tràgic de la question és la influència que Salvador Dalí comença de tenir, no damunt d’ell mateix, sinó damunt d’altres criatures. Avui hi ha xicots que passen el dalinisme I juguen a surrealism. Els resultants són terribles. Fins ara totes les imitacions a l’estil i la concepció de J. V. Foix que hem llegit, eren una calamitat. Els teoritzadors joves quan parlen d’art, d’En Dalí només saben copier-ne les “putrefaccions”. De jove n’és tothom que vol. I, sobretot, que per arribar a l’estil pictòric de Dalí o a l’estil literari de Foix cal una preparació que no s’adquireix amb quatre dies.” XXX, « Dalinisme », La Nova Revista, vol. VII, n°28, April 1929, 310. 69 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975; 2 nd ed. 1997). 70 José Vovelle, “Une Europe surréaliste: Dalinisme et Daliniens”, in L’Europe surréaliste, contributions au colloque de Strasbourg (Septembre 1992), Henri Béhar ed. (Lausanne: l’Âge d’Homme : Mélusine: cahiers de recherches sur le surréalisme, N.14, 1994), 111-120. 71 See some fashion pictures made by photographer Cecil Beaton (1904-1980), for instance his “Models wearing wool suits by Elsa Schiaparelli with Salvador Dalí-inspired bureau-like pockets”. Vogue (US edition), 15 September 1936. 72 Dictionnaire général du surréalisme et de ses environs, Adam Biro and René Passeron ed. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France ; Fribourg: Office du livre, 1982), 114. 73 “Il faut absolument que nous prenions contre-position [...] ce qu’il nous faut est un groupement qui fait quelque chose…”. Letter, undated, archives of the Torrès family, quoted by Marie-Aline Prat, Peinture et avant-garde au seuil des années 30 (Lausanne: l’Âge d’Homme, 1984, 34 and 43 note 25). 74 Salvador Dalí, La Vie secrète de Salvador Dalí, 171. 75 Sophie Cazaumayou, Objets d’Océanie. Regards sur le marché de l’art primitif en France (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), 107–108. 76 Sophie Leclercq, “The Surrealist Appropriation of the ’indigeneous’ art”, Arts et Sociétés, 23 November 2006. http://www.artsetsocietes.org/a/a-leclercq.html 77 Miró to Pierre Matisse, Barcelona, 17 December 1934 (Joan Miró la naissance du monde, 1917–1934, 368). 78 Abstrakte Malerei und Plastik: Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, José Gonzalez, Juan Miró, 11 October–14 November 1934. 79 Abstraction-Création, 1931-1936, exh. cat. Münster, Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe, Münster, 2 April–4 June 1978, and Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 16 June–17 September 1978 (Münster:Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte des Landschaftverbandes-Lippe, 1978); Cercle et Carré and the International Spirit of Abstraction (Georgia Museum of Art, 2013). 80 Ernest Hemingway, A moveable feast (New York : C. Scribner's sons, 1964). http://www.andrebreton.fr/work/56600100453590 http://www.artsetsocietes.org/a/a-leclercq.html Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities 81 To quote the late Piotr Piotrowski in his introduction to In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009). work_6paqa7gsprf3xmsbi7cjmdeh6q ---- a5 img miida - 1 - Aleksander Woźniak A conversation with Seiichiro Miida. At the turn of April and May of 2018, I conducted an interview with the Japanese printmaking artist and associate professor of the Print Department of the Tokyo University of the Arts, Mr. Seiichiro Miida1. One of the most interesting aspects of Seiichiro Miida’s creative work is his ability and methods of composing graphical and drawing series. Authorial alla prima 1The first time I met Seiichiro Miida was in 2014, during International Mokuhanga Conference, where I had the chance to see part of the graphical performance Klopfzeichen, organized in collaboration with professor Michael Schneider. My true fascination with Miida’s art, however, began later, when I first experienced the artist’s graphical works. In 2016, during the artistic residency MLab, I visited the workroom in the Tokyo University of the Arts, where I had the opportunity to, among other things, also see his drawings and sketchbooks. Series, such as Little Story, and especially his later ones – unending prototype series of sketches – always came with a number of puzzling plastic solutions. His art, using traditional techniques, while at the same time being fresh and unusual, became a source of deliberation, as well as an inspiration in my own work. For a couple of years now, I have been observing Seiichiro Miida’s craft on Facebook, simultaneously publishing my own drawings. In this social media environment, we developed a dialogue-like setting, where we would alternatingly publish drawing series. The publishing of those sketches, drawings, and other artistic activities online became somewhat of a non- verbal form of communication, which both brought bilateral satisfaction and became almost a game. However, Seiichiro Miida’s work always brought up questions – which I had hoped to ask during my stay in Japan. The conversations unfolded at the Tokyo University of the Arts, as well as in the professor’s workshop in Hamamatsu, in Shizuoka Prefecture. During one of the meetings, we had our own drawing session, where we made series of sketches, referred to in one of the segments of this interview. (author’s note) - 2 - compositions used by the artist in combination with his excellent drawing abilities are phenomenal and have especially attracted my attention. The images from the Little Story series, as well as the pages of his seemingly unending sketchbooks, imposed a lot of questions relevant to my research project, to which the answers I had hoped to find during the mentioned interview. I am grateful to my interviewee for the exceptionally warm greeting and a very valuable talk. Due to the organizational nature of my visit, I have, of course, not asked everything I wanted to. I am convinced that the core of the problematics of creative composition can never be fully caught by its verbal expression, as, in this case, it is art itself that is the inspiration. *** - 3 - Place of meeting: Tokyo University of the Arts - I would like to ask you about the way literature has influenced your work – are there any links between what you make and literature? Literature is, of course, a very common source of inspiration for me. I have recently been reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses – it is a very interesting gathering of myths. However, above all, I am enchanted by Ovid’s capricious, scintillating style. He never ceases to surprise the reader – and he never looks back. Another book that had a great influence on my creative work is Écrits et propos sur l'art by Henri Matisse. In the publication, Matisse deducts that the most important topic for an artist should be to add new symbols to the history of painting. It is an interesting concept, and it has impacted by work significantly. Adding new symbols to the history of art is an intriguing, albeit extremely difficult task. Do you think it can be done? - Do you have any remarks regarding my assumptions on drawing using the drawing stream method? Well, I do not think that it is applicable to my work – I do not have any particular goal I aim for when drawing, apart from drawing itself. When I create, I try not to look back, I just draw with the belief that I am simply going with my flow. - So, you never look back – what happens if you do? I told you that I try to never look back, though that is very difficult. Sometimes I do look behind my shoulder, but I do try not to. When I draw, I try never to correct my drawings, never to spoil their original nature and composition. - 4 - - What can you say about your last works? About 6 years ago, my creative work saw a great change. I drastically changed my style and the way I approach images. The result of this change came in the form of the Little Story series, which you had the chance to see in my book2. My last drawings have mostly been small sketches, drawn in sketchbooks and notebooks, as well as woodcuts. One time, when I was traveling by train, I was observing as the landscapes through my window passed much too quickly to capture and draw them. I then started looking at the clouds. And I thought to myself – what if you could use the rhythm of passing clouds to draw other objects? The resulting drawn object would encompass two (or, more than one) qualities – this led me to the concept of the polyphony of lines and of drawings, ones containing a combination of multiple simultaneous elements. This idea is still present in my drawings, and especially in my recent sketches and notes. 4 V 2018 – place of meeting – Hamamatsu, Shizuoka - Miida san, please tell me something about variation in your images. Does it have to do with the “Ma” 3 aesthetic? 2 Little Story – a series of graphical works, paintings and drawings, presented in the form of a gallery at the Print Department of the Tokyo University of the Arts. Seiichiro Miida published a rare catalog of all his works from this series, which, thanks to the author’s kindness, I had the chance to see. 3 "Ma" – is a Japanese word defining the negative space of reality, in a broad sense of the word. “The Japanese spatial concept is experienced progressively through intervals of spatial designation. In Japanese, ma the word for space suggests interval. It is best described as a consciousness of place, not in the sense of an enclosed three- - 5 - I think that “Ma” is only a replacement term – there is no goal to what I do, I simply want to draw! - Your drawings fall into series, sets, visual stories. Is that something you do intentionally, or is it simply coincidence? I know that you are interested in comics. You have asked about them. When I started to draw about 6 years ago, around when my son was born I started using the comic style. This is one of my woodblocks in which I put that style to use (ref. pg. 6). In the 70s, Japan had a lot of interesting comic artists, which had an impact on my drawing style. A very interesting experimental comic magazine was, for example, Garo4 - especially for the 1970s. I think that this is where I got my drawing style. - The comic is a very unique medium. It uses sequences of images, which are, however, made subordinate to a plot. In your series of images and sketches, there is no plot. Something else is propelling them. What is it? Yes, our images are closer to poetry. For me, a very important element of drawing is believing in what you are doing, as well as believing in what paper and ink can do. In truth, all of my dimensional entity, but rather the simultaneous awareness of form and non-form deriving from an intensification of vision. Ma is not something that is created by compositional elements; it is the thing that takes place in the imagination of the human who experiences these elements. Therefore ma can be defined as experiential place understood with emphasis on interval.” Sourced from: Ma – The JapaneseSpatial Expression. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/ealac/V3613/ma/. Accessed: 29.VII.2018. 4 Garo – a monthly manga-style comic book published in Japan between 1964 and 2002. It was founded by Katsuichi Nagai. Garo was focused on alternative and avantgarde comic styles. - 6 - Seiichiro Miida, woodblock on Japanese paper, 2016. (Photo, courtesy of the author) - 7 - creative work is based on this irrational belief. Look at my drawings – I cannot even seem to draw a straight line… - I have seen your book, “Little Story”. Michael Schneider told me that I should see it, that it will help me better my understanding of your work. What I noticed is that, to some degree, it is a set of images that are completely distant from each other. What made you arrange the “Little Story” gallery in this particular way? I invited my friends to arrange the gallery, and I was not part of the process. You know Fernando Saiki – he was one of the ones who prepared the exposition. Images from the Little Story series reflect the turbulent times I was going through when they were made. - An interesting aspect of “Little Story” is your approach to painting surfaces. The series includes many types of paper, as well as various standalone textiles, canvases, and drawings on textile surfaces. What made you use such unusual configurations of materials? It is hard to say. I simply decided that I will be a painter. And I was more fond of painting on canvases that were not mounted on stretchers. - Please, tell me about your work before the “Little Story” series. Before Little Story, I created abstract art for many years. - So, in your case, you have taken the path from abstraction to figuration. What is abstraction to you? Is it how Francis Bacon described it, too shallow to ever express anything meaningful? - 8 - My abstract work was not minimalistic in the strict sense of the word. Of course, I had an awareness of minimalism, but it was not fully integrated into my world. I felt that abstraction will allow me to better see the shape of the soul. If I had used figurative, realistic art at that time, it would feel wrong to me. That is simply how I felt. I accept and see some potential in abstract work, though. If we consistently keep developing abstract art, we will need to also develop new creative grammar. When it comes to minimalism, I think that I would have more than enough of it after a week. It should always be remembered that minimalism is only one of the aspects of the mentioned grammar. - You are talking about creative grammar – this topic is also brought up in the “Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden”, correct? Yes – The „Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden” is a textbook, a book about the grammar of Chinese painting. Artists, such as Paul Klee, Matisse, and Kandinsky were also known for developing new creative grammars. If you think about it, this is already the third generation to use the language created by these artists in their works. - How do you see the creative grammar in your work? I think about tools as different rhythms that I can use. I also think that if a given grammar has already been used, it can still be utilized. These days, modern artists use something known as “context”, which requires active input from critics and institutions. I am convinced, that this is a different grammar. We still have the option to draw and paint with only a small dose of so-called context. Of course, we also need context for - 9 - our own work, but that is not an element that conditions it. I would very much like artists such as Hokusai and Durer to write commentaries and descriptions for their drawings. That would be fascinating. Perhaps we have already lost the need to understand the meaning of grammar in drawings. And drawings are one of the languages of art - we can attempt to describe something using the language of drawing or painting. Matisse once said that, if you decide to become a painter, you should cut your tongue off – this implies that Matisse also saw painting as a language. (...) In the case of Japanese artists, I must mention that I know two similar examples of graphical artists – the first of whom is the printmaker Hiroshige Ando. He signed up to learn woodworking at the workshop of master Utagawa Toyokuni. In response, he was told that he is late and that he will never be able to become a good woodworker. He was forced to leave. The other example is Kawase Hasui, who, at the age of 20, wanted to begin practicing the art of woodworking with master Kaburagi Kiyokata. The master did not accept the young man, stating that it was now too late for him. And I keep wondering, why “too late”? Perhaps their hands were already too old. Perhaps if they had come to their masters at the age of 10 or 15, they might have been able to learn their craft? I do not know… - The history of the art of painting has had cases where the artists only began their creative work very late in life… That is true, and Hokusai was one of those cases. Before he became an artist, he was well known as a qualified craftsman, carving woodcut plates. He had fantastic technical abilities, which he later used when designing woodblocks. Some artists, such as Durer, Hokusai, and Rembrandt, were capable of - 10 - making drawings that were good enough to place on engraving plates without making any prior corrections. 7 V 2018 – place of meeting - Tokyo University of Arts - What can you tell us about rhythm in your works? Where does it come from? I remember when we were drawing the ocean using multiple seemingly different rhythms. Do those rhythms come from listening or from thinking? I found your ocean drawings very interesting when I saw them on Facebook. I do not know how to draw the ocean. Last summer, I tried to copy some very old Asian drawings, especially ones from Japan and China. I was trying to find the rhythm of the ocean. - I, in turn, copied some of Hokusai’s drawings during the “Hokusai Water Wonderland” 5 exposition. Well, Hokusai is probably not the best example to follow. I think that H okusai’s ornaments are overly emotional. - So, you think that, in his waves, Hokusai tunneled emotions that were too strong? Was he too hysterical? Yes. - That is very interesting. Perhaps I should take a look at the other artists you mentioned. Indeed, in the 15th century, Japanese Buddhist artists developed 5 Special Exhibition Phantasmagoric! Hokusai’s Water Wonderland, Sumida Hokusai Museum, Tokio 24 IV 2018 - 10 VI 2018 - 11 - stylistically fantastic recreations of the ocean, as well as rivers, characterized by a beautiful, flat, and smooth rhythm. There are also very interesting depictions of this type on Chinese porcelain from the Ming era. It is those rhythms I was trying to capture during my drawing workshops. - Is that something you can see in Tokyo? No, not really. It is mostly found in books. - I do not live by the ocean myself, but I sometimes do travel to the Polish Baltic Sea, both to relax and admire the phenomenon of the sea wave. I wonder, is it even possible to truly find the form and shape of a wave based on a real ocean, river or other natural water reservoir? - What do you think? Sometimes I see certain details, touches, but what you create is simply just an image. The artists I mentioned developed certain ornaments and patterns. And these patterns might be real. - More real than nature? Yes. - Can you explain to me in what sense plastic works are connected to composing patterns? Composition can be very important. We can, of course, use patterns, similarly to how a patterned material does. However, when creating an image, we also need a second, a third - 12 - element, for it to be complete. We need fact. Yes. A wave, sand, a cloud – a figurative image. You, my son, etc.… we need one. - Do you think that entirely imaginative painting is possible? No, I think it is not. I have so many real images, as well as rhythms in my memory. - So, it is a matter of memory? If I started drawing from imagination, imagining images, I would naturally start inserting and using what I have in my memory. Look: (add drawing). Is saw the ocean, but I could not draw it. (ref. I) But combining it with you helped me draw it a little (ref. II). Then, I started drawing my son, with wind and waves as the background. At this point, the image contained already three or four facts (ref. III, IV, V). I would probably not be able to create using only one topic, one pattern. It is a very difficult thing. Old Japanese designers have likely created all possible patterns, and they are very hard to develop further. - I do not see your drawings as patterns. I rather see the way you go about drawing them. I see the gesture, the hand movement, a dance unfolding on the canvas. You are right. I do give up. I fail to develop further. You can also see that not all of the lines I place are part of a figure. They are only waves, only directions. - When I look at this drawing (ref. V), I hear the hum of the ocean. The form is somehow united with the nature. So, first there is the ocean, then there is a figure, and then they start to - 13 - harmonize? Yes. But we cannot fully separate the human figure and the ocean. And that is the problem! - And that does fit in with your previous thesis that it is very difficult to extrapolate an image directly from nature. However, I do believe that it is possible. Well. I want to draw precisely, with an elegant touch, but that is not possible! Sometimes I just do not have enough time. And sometimes I know that if I continue working on this drawing, I will damage the final result. Here I saw a real place (ref. XV), and this is from memory. Hajime6 was not looking at me, but I did draw him doing so – from memory (ref. XIX). The form of a tree. This is bad, and this is good. I do not know, bad – this is bad, is that true or not? - Is that the last one? Fantasy (ref. XX). This is my feeling. I did not plan this – I usually do not have an exact plan. - Was this drawing created as a deliberate and conscious end to an ongoing series of drawings? Yes. - I think that your drawings are proof that you are, in fact, able to draw, despite what was said before. Drawing is very difficult. It is also very difficult to start painting to begin with. But, despite all this, I would still love to begin drawing. 6 Hajime is Mr. Seiichiro Miida’s son. - 14 - - But it is also difficult to stop drawing. Is it not? I do not think that is the difficult part. The way of life, the lack of time, can stop me with ease. Let’s go!; Breakfast!; Dinner!; etc. Those are all things that make me stop. - I would like to ask you once more about the abstract period in your works. You told me that you wanted to touch the soul. Perhaps your art still revolves around that concept? Probably, yes. - Is the current state of your art some form of continuation of your abstract period? I am aware that my abstract works are less complex. They cannot be seen as a standalone creative grammar. They are closer to singular poetic words. The images from my abstract period are like very simple words. - Please, tell me about the blank spaces in your images. You often use linear drawing of varied density. The drawings you mentioned are very light, very bright, but still do not seem to reflect boredom or monotony. I imagine this is a matter of my drawing style. Perhaps it is rooted in my fascination with the art of Henri Matisse. Matisse utilized a compositional formula, comparable to a net with very large mesh size. Many artists later used this style when composing their own images. - Your works often include the heavenly realm. One led to by nature, flowers, plants… - 15 - My world is very closed. When I started painting and drawing some 30 years ago, I was deliberating about the images of Botticelli. He used so many unknown types of plants. I did not know the species at all, but he probably did, likely very well. Oriental painters from the Nihonga movement were similar in their knowledge of plants and tree species. The names are quite helpful during the construction of a conceptual apparatus for use in drawing or painting. The names help you remember things, such as the shape of a shamrock flower. Perhaps it even is something of a lead in regard to what we said about imagination and memory. - Yesterday evening, as I was drawing in the metro, I started noticing things through a mirror of repeating patterns. Perhaps it was due to the tiredness I felt after an entire day of drawing. I started putting everything in the same category into drawers – heads, legs, etc. I was not looking at reality anymore at that point, I did not feel the need to. Suddenly, I had some more freedom in terms of composition. Perspective lines became the canvas, and I placed those elements: heads, legs, as segregated by class, onto it (ref. pg. 16). The whole situation reminded me of Giacometti, because the drawing I came up with is quite similar to some of his works. This was, of course, not planned. Do you think that Giacometti saw reality as categories of patterns? A very famous episode in Giacometti’s creative work was when he went to the cinema. He was watching a movie. He was, however, completely unable to decode its meaning – he only saw moving shapes. He was completely shocked – but also intrigued by the impact of a screen. He saw film as abstract patterns, as color. Back then, film was, of course, black and white – what he really saw was blacks, greys and whites. - 1 -- 16 - Aleksander Woźniak, Omotesando, drawing from Tokyo Sketchbook. 2016 - 17 - - It is said that Giacometti was fascinated with observing a model, that he worked purely with nature, even though his drawings deviate from realistic scenes. Why did Giacometti need a model? I believe that Giacometti kept focusing on the model because he needed some concept of measurement, of direction, of distance. In short, a point of reference. - Perhaps he was observing reality in a way different from what we are bound to? Did Giacometti focus on some very specific aspects of reality? Let us assume that this is his canvas. Your face is around this big. It is simple, you just notice how big things are. If you, however, move, say, 5 meters away from me, your face will be much smaller. It is a very simple concept. - But if the concept was too simple, Giacometti would not have been able to constantly face it and develop it. He would not have been able to create. I think that he likely could not create. Which is why he kept attempting to perfect his own works. - Do you know anyone who draws and can be considered a role model for newer generations? I think that O Jun7 is a good example. He is a very good drawer and a painter. He also uses the patterns we talked about. Apart from him, I also greatly value the creative works of classical artists, such as Michelangelo. In his works, he used rhythms. 7 O Jun’s profile on the Artsynet platform: https://www.artsy.net/artist/o- jun. Accessed: 13.VIII.2018 - 18 - Rhythms were also used by Leonardo in his works, however I think that, in his case, the most interesting paintings are images of wader and plants. - I would once more like to ask you about the materials you use in your works. Well. The materials you use are a very important motivation to create. For me, the paper, the textile, the ink are often great reasons to start painting. The specificities of artistic materials are also a way to connect to a certain tradition, to many other painters, also to ancient masters. Whenever I pick up a European pen, my imagination drifts towards European masters. If I, however, pick up an Oriental brush, a Japanese one, for example, I start to imagine Japanese paintings and drawings, as well as Sumi-e paintings. - What do you think about Japanese paper? Following the request of the dean, I opened a workshop for hand-making Japanese paper in Toride. Now, the department allows the students to make Japanese paper by themselves. Hand-making paper is a very beautiful, though very difficult, process. Sometimes the best way to get professional Japanese paper is to simply buy it. I think that the biggest problem with Japanese paper is simply that it is becoming insanely expensive. - What are your thoughts on publishing drawings in social media? In the case of my works, which are often very personal, publishing on Facebook8 has an embarrassing, awkward aspect 8 Seiichiro Miida’s Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/seiichiro.miida. Accessed: 13.VIII.2018 - 19 - to it. But Facebook is also very exciting, as it greatly extends our ways of reaching the receiver. 20 years ago, the network of social media was not nearly as advanced. The only thing we could do back then was organize expositions. This is a very difficult and often very ineffective task. I try to use social media to present my works just as much as I try to publish them the traditional way. *** Seiichiro Miida / Aleksander Woźniak SKETCHBOOKS 5.V.2018 Images: I - XX Seiichiro Miida 五月五日 (5.V.2018) Sketchbook Shizuoka Prefecture Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - I - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - II - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - III - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - IV - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - V - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - VI - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - VII - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - VIII - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - IX - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - X - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - XI - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - XII - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - XIII - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - XIV - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - XV - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - XVI Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - XVII - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - XVIII - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - XIX - Seiichiro Miida, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 (photo courtesy of the author) - XX - Images: XX-XLV Aleksander Woźniak Saturday (5.V.2018) Sketchbook Shizuoka Prefecture → Tokyo Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXI- Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXII- Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXIII - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXIV - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXV - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXVI - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXVII - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXVIII - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXIX - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXX - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXXI - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXXII - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXXIII - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXXIV - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXXV - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXXVI - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXXVII - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXXVIII - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XXXIX - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XL - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XLI - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XLII - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XLIII - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XLIV - Aleksander Woźniak, sketchbook, ballpoint pen on paper. 2018 - XLV - The above text was created as a result of a research project entitled Looking at Tokyo - Creative Imaging using Drawing Streams Project leader: dr. hab Aleksander Woźniak This entry comprises a (1/3) part of documentation of the project. Implemented in 2018 at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn Funded by the National Science Center. Poland Application registration no.: 2017/01 / X / HS2 / 00676 Translation : Julian Beesche - Hansen Picture above: Aleksander Woźniak and Seiichiro Miida, intaglio studio, Tokyo University of Arts. Photo courtesy of Fernando Saiki, 2018. work_6uxydnor4necxamvzyscb7ivtq ---- Original Article Copyright © 2016. The Korean Society for Radiation Oncology www.e-roj.org This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 135 Radiat Oncol J 2016;34(2):135-144 http://dx.doi.org/10.3857/roj.2016.01760 pISSN 2234-1900 · eISSN 2234-3156 Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of art therapy to control fatigue in cancer patients during course of radiotherapy and its impact on quality of life (QoL). Materials and Methods: Fifty cancer patients receiving radiotherapy received weekly art therapy sessions using famous painting appreciation. Fatigue and QoL were assessed using the Brief Fatigue Inventory (BFI) Scale and the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy-Fatigue (FACIT-F) at baseline before starting radiotherapy, every week for 4 weeks during radiotherapy, and at the end of radiotherapy. Mean changes of scores over time were analyzed using a generalized linear mixed model. Results: Of the 50 patients, 34 (68%) participated in 4 sessions of art therapy. Generalized linear mixed models testing for the effect of time on mean score changes showed no significant changes in scores from baseline for the BFI and FACIT-F. The mean BFI score and FACIT-F total score changed from 3.1 to 2.7 and from 110.7 to 109.2, respectively. Art therapy based on the appreciation of famous paintings led to increases in self-esteem by increasing self-realization and forming social relationships. Conclusion: Fatigue and QoL in cancer patients with art therapy do not deteriorate during a period of radiotherapy. Despite the single-arm small number of participants and pilot design, this study provides a strong initial demonstration that art therapy of appreciation for famous painting is worthy of further study for fatigue and QoL improvement. Further, it can play an important role in routine practice in cancer patients during radiotherapy. Keywords: Cancer, Radiotherapy, Art therapy, Fatigue, Quality of life, Oncology Art therapy using famous painting appreciation maintains fatigue levels during radiotherapy in cancer patients Woong Sub Koom, MD, PhD1,2*, Mi Yeon Choi, MA3*, Jeongshim Lee, MD1, Eun Jung Park, BA3, Ju Hye Kim, BS3, Sun-Hyun Kim, PhD3†, Yong Bae Kim, MD, PhD1† 1Department of Radiation Oncology, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul; 2Cancer Information Center, Yonsei Cancer Center, Yonsei University Health System, Seoul; 3Graduate School of Clinical Art Therapy, CHA University, Pocheon, Korea Received 1 April 2016, Revised 22 April 2016, Accepted 9 May 2016. Correspondence: Yong Bae Kim, MD, PhD, Department of Radiation Oncology, Yonsei University College of Medicine, 50-1 Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul 03722, Korea. Tel: +82-2-2228-8115, Fax: +82-2-2227-7823, E-mail: ybkim3@yuhs.ac Sun-Hyun Kim, PhD, Graduate School of Clinical Art Therapy, CHA University, 120 Haeryong-ro, Pocheon 11160, Korea. Tel: +82-31-881-7026, Fax: +82-31-881-7077, E-mail: kshcat1210@hanmail.net *Woong Sub Koom and Mi Yeon Choi are contributed for this work equally. †Yong Bae Kim and Sun-Hyun Kim are contributed for this work equally. Introduction Fatigue, which is defined as deficits in energy, mental capacity, and psychological status, is more commonly observed in cancer patients than others [1]. The majority of patients with advanced cancer experience fatigue as the most prevalent symptom [2,3]. Fatigue may be caused by cancer itself as well as pre-existing physical and psychological factors [3,4]. In http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.3857/roj.2016.01760&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2016-06-30 Woong Sub Koom, et al 136 www.e-roj.org http://dx.doi.org/10.3857/roj.2016.01760 addition, cancer treatments are clearly one cause of fatigue [5]. During anti-neoplastic treatment, 100% of patients become fatigued [6]. Radiotherapy is performed over a period of several weeks, resulting in side effects impairing nutrition and general condition [7]. Fatigue occurrence increases over the course of radiotherapy [8,9]. Irrespective of the cause, fatigue is frequently associated with anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance, and low degrees of physical functioning [10,11]. Overall quality of life (QoL) and the patient’s ability to cope with their illness also decrease [12]. Furthermore, severe fatigue may lead to discontinuation of treatment [9,13]. Art therapy is defined as a mind–body intervention supporting the ‘power of the mind to influence the body in ways which encourage and stimulate health and well-being’ [14,15]. As a form of cancer management, art therapy can contribute to cancer patients improving their ability to cope with the difficulties of cancer treatment and adapt to stressful conditions from cancer care [16,17]. Psychological benefits of art therapy have been suggested in empowering individuals to recalibrate their sense of self, the adjustment process, and perceptions of stress [17-20]. Some of the effects can reduce negative symptoms regarding anxiety and depression, as well as increase feelings of energy [15,21,22]. Only half of cancer patients with fatigue from radiotherapy were recommended for an intervention, such as relaxation therapy and group psychotherapy [12]. Although recognition and caring for fatigue is an important and fundamental aspect of cancer management [3], only a few studies have quantified the impact of fatigue in cancer patients receiving radiotherapy. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of art therapy to control fatigue in cancer patients during course of radiotherapy and its impact on QoL. We hypothesized that art therapy would prevent the deterioration of fatigue during radiotherapy. Materials and Methods 1. Study population This trial was conducted at the Yonsei Cancer Center, Yonsei University College of Medicine in collaboration with faculty from the Graduate School of Clinical Art Therapy, CHA University. We used a prospective design and received approval from the Institutional Review Boards of the Yonsei Cancer Center, Yonsei University College of Medicine. We recruited adult ambulatory patients of the Department of Radiation Oncology between January 2015 and April 2015. Eligibility criteria included the following: scheduled to receive 4 or more weeks of external-beam radiotherapy, older than 20 years, and able to understand questionnaires. Exclusion criteria included uncontrolled co-morbid medical or psychiatric illness, metastatic disease, poor performance (Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group [ECOG] > 2); and severe anemia (hemoglobin < 9 g/dL). 2. Art therapy The therapy program utilized in this study involved the following elements: art therapy based on the appreciation of famous paintings conducted across four 15-minutes sessions once a week, as well as a one-to-one interview between the therapist and patient in a separate therapy room prior to radiotherapy. In order to reduce an anxiety for treatment room, art therapy was started before 30 minutes of radiotherapy appointment. The art therapy was conducted at least once a week for 4 weeks. The therapists and patients were randomly assigned in the first session, and the assigned pairs did not change throughout the program unless the patients had special wishes. Seventeen students, who major in art therapy, conducted art therapy and interviewed patients. In each session, one of the artworks was preselected as the object of therapy for that session. The patient expressed the feelings aroused by images of the painting, and the therapist inferred the patient’s emotional, affective, and mental states based on his/her predilection when choosing the artwork and expression of the emotions aroused by the image of the painting. Art therapists led the process of artistic expression and interviewed the patients with the following processes: first introduction part, 1) viewing famous paintings to arouse interest in paintings and explore the images offered by them; 2) talking about the experiences of seeing paintings similar to the one chosen by the patient; 3) talking about the reasons for choosing the painting. Second activity part, 1) exploring the aesthetic elements used in the painting (colors, lines, and spatial composition); 2) imagining the artist’s intention expressed through the painting; and 3) talking about the patient’s feelings on seeing the painting. Third conclusion part, 1) talking about the emotions felt before and after the activities. The famous paintings were selected by an expert panel of three and clinical art therapists who had experience of implementing three or more art therapy sessions. An important selection criterion was that paintings were easy to understand and interesting for patients. Questions to aid selection were as follows: Is the painting related to the topic? Are the expression techniques and contents related to the topic? Is the painting easy for the patients to understand? Can Art therapy for fatigue during RT 137www.e-roj.orghttp://dx.doi.org/10.3857/roj.2016.01760 the painting attract patients’ interest? Can the painting evoke patients’ internal motives? Are aesthetic elements clearly expressed? The famous paintings consisted of a landscape painting in the first session, a figure paintingin the second session, a color-centered painting in the third session, and a Christian painting in the fourth session. Table 1 lists the selected paintings. A total of 21 famous paintings were used as therapy materials for the 4 sessions of the program. They were printed in resolutions of 300 dpi or higher and offered in real-size frames. The illumination of the therapy room was kept at the same level throughout the program. The paintings were placed at a distance of 50 cm from the patient, facing the therapist and patients in the same direction. 3. Assessment All the patients were asked to fill the questionnaires at baseline before starting radiotherapy, every week for 4 weeks during radiotherapy, and at the end of radiotherapy. Fatigue and QoL was assessed using the Brief Fatigue Inventory (BFI) and the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy-Fatigue (FACIT-F). The BFI was used for fatigue assessment and consists of 9 items that ask participants to rate the severity of current, usual, and worst fatigue and how much it interfered with their lives during the previous 24 hours. Fatigue and its interference are measured on a 0–10 scale, where 0 represents “no fatigue” and 10 denotes “as bad as you can imagine.” The BFI score is calculated from the mean of the 9 items. Higher scores on the BFI represent worse fatigue. The validity and reliability of the BFI has been established [23,24]. The FACIT-F contains 40 items, where are the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy (FACT-G) instrument and additional fatigue–specific items [25,26]. The FACT-G consist of 4 primary QoL domains: physical well-being (PWB; 7 items), social/family well-being (SWB; 7 items), emotional well-being (EWB; 6 items), and functional well-being (FWB; 7 items). The fatigue subscale (FS) contains 13 items. It generates FACIT-F trial outcome index (TOI), FACT-G total score, and FACIT-F total score. The total FACT-G score is obtained by summing individual subscale scores (PWB + EWB + SWB + FWB). The TOI is the sum of the PWB, FWB, and FS score. Total scores for FACIT-F are obtained by summing all subscale scores (PWB + EWB + SWB + FWB + FS score). Higher scores for the scales and subscales indicate better QoL. 4. Statistics A change was defined as the baseline value minus the value at each week during radiotherapy for each scale. Means and standard deviations were used to present the results. The overall impact of art therapy over time was evaluated using generalized linear mixed modeling for the BFI and each score from the FACIT-F. The mean values for scores at specific time points were plotted graphically. No adjustments for missing data were made beyond the use of generalized linear mixed modeling. All statistical tests were two sided, with significance level of 0.05. Results 1. Compliance and baseline characteristics Between January 2015 and April 2015, 50 patients were eligible and willing to participate in the study. Of these, only 34 (68%) participated in 2 or more sessions. Sixteen patients withdrew this study due to lack of interest. All 34 patients completed 4 sessions of art therapy. We analyzed the data of these 34 patients, which were appropriate for evaluate the effect of art therapy. Baseline characteristics are presented in Table 2. Table 1. List of the selected paintings Session Paintings 1. Landscape painting 2. Figure painting 3. Color-centered painting 4. Christian paint- ing Field with Poppies (Vincent Van Gogh, 1889) Houses at Argenteuil (Claude Monet, 1873) Banks of Seine Vetheuil (Claude Monet, 1880) Poplars on the Bank of the River Epte Tree Lake (Claude Monet, 1891) View of l’Estaque and the If Castle (Paul Cézanne, 1885) The Child’s Bath (Mary Cassatt, 1884) Motherhood (Mary Cassatt, 1890) Woman with a Parasol-Madame Monet and Her Son (Claude Monet, 1875) Love at First Sight (Arthur John Elsley, 1874) Meadow at Bezons, (Claude Monet, 1874) Ask Me No More (Lawrence Alma Tadema, 1906) Sunflowers (Vincent Van Gogh, 1888) Polynesia, the Sea (Henri Matisse, 1946) Squares with Concentric Rings (Wassily Kandinsky, 1913) Water Lily Pond, Symphony in Green (Claude Monet, 1899) The Infant Samuel (Joshua Reynolds, 1776) Praying Hands (Albrecht Durer, 1508) A Riverside Where I Can Rest (Yong Sung Kim, 2005) The Good Shepherd (Anonymous) The Virgin in Prayer (Il Sassoferrato, about 1640–1650) Woong Sub Koom, et al 138 www.e-roj.org http://dx.doi.org/10.3857/roj.2016.01760 The median age was 50 years (range, 34 to 68 years) and patients had a good performance status (ECOG, 0 or 1). Breast cancer patients were most common. There was no recurrent cancer patient and most patients had cancer treatment duration of less than 1 year. All patients received radiotherapy for curative, not palliative purposes. Baseline fatigue was mild to moderate with a mean BFI score of 3.1 (max, 10) and FS score of 39.1 (max, 52). However, 50% answered that they had fatigue irrespective of severity. There was no significant relationship between baseline fatigue and clinical factors. 2. Assessment of the impact of art therapy on fatigue over time Table 3 demonstrates change scores at weekly time points during radiotherapy. Fig. 1 and Table 4 show these findings for the BFI and each FACIT-F domain. Generalized linear mixed modeling testing for the effect of time on mean change scores showed no significant worsening of scores from baseline for BFI and FACIT-F. Although statistical significance was not reached, art therapy decreased mean BFI scores during radiotherapy (from 3.1 to 2.7). For the FACIT-F, most summed scores (FACIT-F TOI, FACT-G, and FACIT-total) showed a similar pattern. No statistically significant change was observed. However, 4 primary QoL domains of FACT-G and FS showed a different change patterns during radiotherapy. PWB and FS slightly decreased, indicating worse QoL. On the contrary SWB, EWB, and FWS slightly increased, indicating better QoL. There were no associations between clinical factors and change in fatigue score at any time point in generalized mixed model. 3. Perceptions of art therapy After the art therapy program was completed, a survey was conducted with the 34 patients who participated in all four art therapy sessions. The exit-interview questionnaire showed that all of patients indicated that the art therapy program was helpful and that they would recommend it to others. The item, “What is the most important thing that has happened?” in Table 5 was analyzed using the session notes that were used to record the progress of the art therapy program. It was found that the number for “express inner emotion” and “enhance and explore self-expression” were higher than those for other items, at 73 (24.8%), and 71 (24.2%), respectively. This indicates that the patients utilized the art as a medium through which they could reflect on their own mentality or situation, provide an opportunity for internal self-expression, and facilitate self- expression. However, “help take mind off pain or discomfort” (2.7%) was shown to be lower than most other items. The Table 2. Baseline characteristics of the study population (n = 34) Variable Value Sex Male 6 (17.6) Female 28 (82.4) Age (yr) 50 (34–68) ECOG performance status 0 18 (52.9) 1 16 (47.1) Body mass index (kg/m2) 23 (18.4–31.6) Marital status Married 32 (94.1) Unmarried 2 (5.9) Living status Living together 34 (100) Not co-habiting 0 (0) Primary cancer Breast 22 (64.7) Rectal 11 (32.4) Prostate 1 (2.9) Stage 0 4 (11.8) I 11 (32.4) II 7 (20.5) III 12 (35.3) White blood cell (/µL) Before RT 5,756 ± 2,086 After RT 4,602 ± 1,639 Hemoglobin (g/dL) Before RT 12.9 ± 1.7 After RT 12.9 ± 1.5 Total dose of RT (Gy) 52.5 (50.4–60.4) Fraction number of RT 28 (21–33) Fraction dose of RT (Gy) Fraction dose 1.8 (1.8–2.4) 1.8–2.0 21 (61.8) >2.0 13 (38.2) Site of RT Breast or chest wall with/without 22 (64.7) regional LN, lymph node; area Pelvis 12 (35.3) Surgery Before RT 23 (67.6) No 11 (32.4) Chemotherapy Before RT 10 (29.4) Concurrent 11 (32.4) No 13 (38.2) Hormone therapy Before RT 21 (61.8) Concurrent 21 (61.8) No 13 (38.2) Values are presented as median (range) or number (%) or mean ± standard deviation. ECOG, Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group; RT, radiotherapy. Art therapy for fatigue during RT 139www.e-roj.orghttp://dx.doi.org/10.3857/roj.2016.01760 Ta bl e 3. S co re s fo r qu es ti on na ir e of B FI a nd F A C IT -F a t ba se lin e an d ch an ge f ro m b as el in e B as el in e sc or e Vi si t 1 Vi si t 2 Vi si t 3 Vi si t 4 En d of R T M ea n SD M ea n SD M ea n SD M ea n SD M ea n SD M ea n SD B FI a ve ra ge s co re FA C IT -F s co ri ng P W B S W B E W B F W B F S FA C IT -F T O I FA C T- G T S FA C IT -F T S 3. 1 22 .8 16 .8 16 .5 15 .6 39 .1 77 .4 71 .6 11 0. 7 2. 4 5. 2 8. 1 4. 6 6. 8 7. 2 15 .7 18 .0 23 .4 0. 2 –0 .5 0. 1 –0 .3 0. 0 –2 .4 –2 .9 –0 .7 –3 .1 1. 8 5. 0 6. 7 5. 1 7. 9 8. 8 18 .7 19 .1 26 .6 0. 0 –2 .3 1. 6 0. 7 1. 7 –2 .1 –3 .8 0. 7 –1 .4 2. 3 5. 2 9. 7 4. 7 8. 2 8. 3 17 .8 20 .3 26 .0 –0 .2 –0 .5 0. 9 1. 1 2. 0 –0 .5 0. 8 3. 3 2. 8 2. 8 5. 0 8. 0 5. 1 8. 4 8. 1 17 .6 20 .3 26 .7 –0 .4 –1 .4 1. 1 1. 7 2. 6 –1 .0 –0 .4 3. 4 2. 3 2. 6 6. 4 8. 4 4. 8 7. 5 8. 0 16 .7 19 .5 25 .4 0. 0 –3 .1 0. 6 0. 0 1. 7 –1 .7 –3 .7 –1 .3 –3 .0 2. 4 5. 7 7. 0 5. 0 8. 8 9. 8 19 .2 18 .5 26 .4 B FI , B ri ef F at ig ue In ve nt or y; F A C IT -F , F un ct io na l A ss es sm en t of C hr on ic Il ln es s Th er ap y- Fa ti gu e; R T, r ad io th er ap y; S D , s ta nd ar d de vi at io n; P W B , p hy si ca l w el l- be in g; S W B , s oc ia l/f am - ily w el l- be in g; E W B , e m ot io na l w el l- be in g; F W B , f un ct io na l w el l- be in g; F S, f at ig ue s ub sc al e; T O I, tr ia l o ut co m e in de x; F A C T- G , F un ct io na l A ss es sm en t of C an ce r Th er ap y- G en er al ; T S, to ta l s co re . Ta bl e 4. G en er al iz ed li ne ar m ix ed m od el e st im at es f or le as t- sq ua re s m ea ns B as el in e Vi si t 1 Vi si t 2 Vi si t 3 Vi si t 4 En d of R T p- va lu e M ea n SE M ea n SE M ea n SE M ea n SE M ea n SE M ea n SE B FI a ve ra ge s co re FA C IT -F s co ri ng P W B S W B E W B F W B F S FA C IT -F T O I FA C T- G T S FA C IT -F T S 3. 1 22 .8 16 .8 16 .5 15 .6 39 .1 77 .4 71 .6 11 0. 7 0. 4 0. 9 1. 4 0. 8 1. 2 1. 2 2. 7 3. 1 4. 0 3. 3 22 .3 16 .9 16 .2 15 .6 36 .7 74 .6 70 .9 10 7. 6 0. 3 0. 7 1. 0 0. 7 1. 0 1. 5 2. 8 2. 5 3. 6 3. 1 20 .4 18 .4 17 .2 16 .2 37 .0 73 .6 72 .3 10 9. 3 0. 3 1. 0 1. 1 0. 7 1. 1 1. 6 3. 4 3. 0 4. 4 2. 9 22 .2 17 .7 17 .6 17 .4 38 .6 78 .2 74 .9 11 3. 5 0. 3 0. 7 1. 0 0. 7 1. 1 1. 3 2. 8 2. 8 3. 9 2. 7 21 .4 17 .9 18 .2 17 .6 38 .1 77 .0 75 .0 11 3. 0 0. 3 0. 7 1. 1 0. 6 1. 0 1. 2 2. 4 2. 8 3. 7 2. 7 20 .3 17 .4 17 .3 16 .7 37 .5 74 .5 71 .7 10 9. 2 0. 4 1. 1 1. 1 0. 8 1. 2 1. 9 3. 9 3. 4 5. 1 0. 77 3 0. 27 5 0. 91 0 0. 31 5 0. 60 8 0. 82 2 0. 85 3 0. 84 3 0. 86 9 R T, r ad io th er ap y; S E, s ta nd ar d er ro r; B FI , B ri ef F at ig ue In ve nt or y; F A C IT -F , F un ct io na l A ss es sm en t of C hr on ic Il ln es s Th er ap y- Fa ti gu e; P W B , p hy si ca l w el l- be in g; S W B , s oc ia l/f am ily w el l- be in g; E W B , e m ot io na l w el l- be in g; F W B , f un ct io na l w el l- be in g; F S, f at ig ue s ub sc al e; T O I, tr ia l o ut co m e in de x; F A C T- G , F un ct io na l A ss es sm en t of C an ce r Th er ap y- G en er al ; T S, to ta l s co re . Woong Sub Koom, et al 140 www.e-roj.org http://dx.doi.org/10.3857/roj.2016.01760 item “enhance coping mechanism” was also found to be lower than other items. The art therapy based on the appreciation of famous paintings led to increases in self-esteem by increasing self-realization and forming social relationships. Discussion and Conclusion This was a study assessing the impact of art therapy on fatigue during the radiotherapy period. Although some patients B F I a ve ra ge s co re ( m ea n ± 2S E ) (S co re r an ge 0 -1 0) Time point A Baseline, before RT Visit 2 0 2 8 6 10 4 Visit 1 Visit 3 Visit 4 End of RT S W B s co re ( m ea n ± 2S E ) (S co re r an ge 0 -2 8) Time point C Baseline, before RT Visit 2 0 5 25 15 30 10 Visit 1 Visit 3 Visit 4 End of RT 20 F W B s co re ( m ea n ± 2S E ) (S co re r an ge 0 -2 8) Time point E Baseline, before RT Visit 2 0 5 25 15 30 10 Visit 1 Visit 3 Visit 4 End of RT 20 P W B s co re ( m ea n ± 2S E ) (S co re r an ge 0 -2 8) Time point B Baseline, before RT Visit 2 0 5 25 15 30 10 Visit 1 Visit 3 Visit 4 End of RT 20 P W B s co re ( m ea n ± 2S E ) (S co re r an ge 0 -2 8) Time point B Baseline, before RT Visit 2 0 5 25 15 30 10 Visit 1 Visit 3 Visit 4 End of RT 20 E W B s co re ( m ea n ± 2S E ) (S co re r an ge 0 -2 4) Time point D Baseline, before RT Visit 2 0 5 20 15 25 10 Visit 1 Visit 3 Visit 4 End of RT F S s co re ( m ea n ± 2S E ) (S co re r an ge 0 -5 2) Time point F Baseline, before RT Visit 2 0 10 40 30 50 20 Visit 1 Visit 3 Visit 4 End of RT Art therapy for fatigue during RT 141www.e-roj.orghttp://dx.doi.org/10.3857/roj.2016.01760 F A C IT -F T O I s co re ( m ea n ± 2S E ) (S co re r an ge 0 -1 08 ) Time point G Baseline, before RT Visit 2 0 20 100 60 40 Visit 1 Visit 3 Visit 4 End of RT 80 F A C IT -F to ta l s co re ( m ea n ± 2S E ) (S co re r an ge 0 -1 60 ) Time point I Baseline, before RT Visit 2 0 20 160 100 80 Visit 1 Visit 3 Visit 4 End of RT 60 40 120 140 F A C T -G to ta l s co re ( m ea n ± 2S E ) (S co re r an ge 0 -1 08 ) Time point H Baseline, before RT Visit 2 0 20 100 60 40 Visit 1 Visit 3 Visit 4 End of RT 80 Fig. 1. Overall mean scores over time. (A) Brief Fatigue Inventory (BFI) score, (B) physical well-being (PWB) score, (C) social/family well-being (SWB) score, (D) emotional well-being (EWB) score, (E) functional well-being (FWB) score, (F) fatigue subscale (FS) score, (G) Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy- Fatigue (FACIT-F) trial outcome index (TOI) score, (H) Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-General (FACT-G) total score, and (I) Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy-Fatigue (FACIT-F) total score. RT, radiotherapy; SE, standard error. Table 5. Survey assessing perceptions of art therapy (n = 34) Exit interview questions No. (%) Was art therapy helpful? 1. Yes 2. No Would you recommend art therapy? 1. Yes 2. No What is the most important thing that has happened?a) 1. Express inner emotion 2. Enhance and explore self-expression 3. Communicate emotions 4. Enhance treatment or life will 5. See the importance of living and appreciate present living 6. Help improve relationship with other people: which could control anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem 7. Help control symptoms (anxiety, depression, and pain) and increase quality of life 8. Help take mind off pain or discomfort 9. Enhance coping mechanism 34 (100) 0 (0) 34 (100) 0 (0) 73 (24.8) 71 (24.2) 37 (12.6) 32 (10.9) 22 (7.5) 22 (7.5) 22 (7.5) 8 (2.7) 7 (2.4) a)Multiple choice question. Woong Sub Koom, et al 142 www.e-roj.org http://dx.doi.org/10.3857/roj.2016.01760 dropped out, enrolled patients seemed to be interested in the appreciation of famous painting to control fatigue and emotional distress. Most patients demonstrated no deterioration of fatigue and found the weekly art sessions to be relaxing during the radiotherapy. Fatigue is considered one of the most frequent side effects in cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy [27-29]. The proportion of patients expressing fatigue during radiotherapy is increasing in various cancer types [30,31]. The fatigue starts increasing from the second week onwards and decreases subsequently at around 4 weeks after completion of radiation [9,12]. It is also closely related to acute radiation effects, which alter the patient’s nutrition and blood parameters such as anemia, leading to aggravation of baseline fatigue [9]. Its prevalence can reach up to 80% when patients are undergoing radiotherapy [32]. This may cause a decrease in self-esteem as well as in social activities, becoming a factor that negatively affects patients’ QoL [29]. Despite its high prevalence, fatigue has not been measured routinely in cancer patients [24]. In a Korean study, compared with the normal group, the cancer patient group showed higher fatigue scores [24]. In this study, current fatigue, usual fatigue, and worst fatigue on the BFI were comparable to those previously reported in studies on Korean cancer patients. However, the fatigue levels of our participants on the FACIT-F subscale (FS) were better than those published for patients with breast cancer receiving radiotherapy [5]. Based on this observation, fatigue is problematic for patients preparing radiotherapy, and appropriate clinical interventions are needed. Art therapy is a form of psychotherapy aimed at increasing well-being and psychological functioning, and it has a significant benefit for cancer patients, providing a mind– body interaction for communication and expression [20]. It is also an attribute of self-care and self-management empowerment for those living with cancer [20,33]. Wood et al. [20] reported quantitative and qualitative evidence for the use of art therapy in the management of emotional, physical, functional, social, and spiritual symptoms in adults with cancer [17]. The most notable benefits from art therapy were spiritual and psychological well-being [17]. Moreover, there have been several reports that art therapy reduced the severity of a broad spectrum of symptoms common in cancer patients, including decreased levels of anxiety, depression, and stress; significant improvement of social functioning; and improved QoL [15,21,22]. In oncology outpatient clinics, there have been few reports of clinical trials of art therapy intervention [11]. Bar-Sela et al. [11] demonstrated that art therapy improves depression and influences fatigue levels in cancer patients on chemotherapy [11]. Art therapy interventions differ in their approaches (e.g., anthroposophical, art pedagogical, and art- based) and in their applied methods and materials as well as the context in which they take place (e.g., facilities, length of the intervention). Generally, art therapy interventions are led by art therapists [34]. Considerable stress related to the diagnosis, surgery, and treatment was observed in many breast cancer patients. Almost 50% women with early breast cancer suffered from depression, anxiety, or both in the first year after diagnosis [35]. In radiotherapy, higher levels of stress have been observed among women than among men, and women with breast cancer reported the highest levels [36]. More women than men participated in this study. This phenomenon, which prefers art therapy in women, has been described [11]. The art therapy used in this study was based on appreciation of famous paintings. The participants could discuss the pictures with the art therapist leading to more free-flowing communication regarding their current physical and emotional state. Although art therapy did not significantly improve fatigue or QoL, generalized linear mixed models showed that there was no deterioration of fatigue or QoL during radiotherapy. Art therapy is worth considering as a positive influence on cancer patients receiving radiotherapy. The main obstacle to accrual was poor insight for art therapy. At first impression, participants seem to find art therapy to be strange. Some of the participants said it hard to find additional time for art therapy. Self-selection to participate in art therapy is another limitation. The participants might already have positive thoughts about art therapy. We used several famous paintings as art therapy. However, the variations in the content of art therapy could also cause difficulty in determining efficacy and reliability. In terms of site for radiotherapy, breast or chest wall was most common site in this study. Various site of radiotherapy is needed to confirm role of art therapy. This is the single-arm study. Non-specific placebo effects cannot be excluded as possible explanations for the results. Therefore, a randomized controlled trial with more restrictive eligibility criteria is warranted. In conclusion, fatigue and QoL in cancer patients with art therapy did not deteriorate during the radiotherapy period. Given the single-arm small number of participants and the pilot design, our studies provide a good basis demonstrating that art therapy of appreciation for famous paintings is worthy of further studies on fatigue and QoL improvement. This therapy can play an important role in routine practice among cancer patients during radiotherapy. Art therapy for fatigue during RT 143www.e-roj.orghttp://dx.doi.org/10.3857/roj.2016.01760 Conflict of Interest No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported. Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank So-Jeong Woo, Eunjung Kim, Changbea Shon, Yun Sun Oh, So Jung An, Jieun Jeong, Soyeon Park, Yunjeong Park, Soo Bin Choi, Sun Ok Kang, Jeom Im Jeong, Yoojung Kang, and Da Un Sun at CHA University for helping with the art therapy. References 1. Forlenza MJ, Hall P, Lichtenstein P, Evengard B, Sullivan PF. Epidemiology of cancer-related fatigue in the Swedish twin registry. Cancer 2005;104:2022-31. 2. Richardson A. 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An overview of art therapy interventions for cancer patients and the results of research. Complement Ther Med 2010;18:160-70. 35. Burgess C, Cornelius V, Love S, Graham J, Richards M, Ramirez A. Depression and anxiety in women with early breast cancer: five year observational cohort study. BMJ 2005;330:702. 36. Sehlen S, Hollenhorst H, Schymura B, et al. Psychosocial stress in cancer patients during and after radiotherapy. Strahlenther Onkol 2003;179:175-80. work_3y2rhoskqjhtvo2fy4zlszsmga ---- CURRICULUM FOR SCULPTURE OF THE HUMAN FIGURE IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS: AN HISTORICAL, CRITICAL, AND STUDIO APPROACH by Agness P h i l i p p s B. Ed., The U n i v e r s i t y o f B r i t i s h Columbia, 1971 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS i n THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES Department o f V i s u a l and P e r f o r m i n g A r t s i n E d u c a t i o n We a c c e p t t h i s t h e s i s as c o n f o r m i n g t o t h e r e q u i r e d s t a n d a r d THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA A p r i l 1984 (6) Agness P h i l i p p s , 1984 In presenting t h i s thesis i n p a r t i a l f u l f i l m e n t of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of B r i t i s h Columbia, I agree that the Library s h a l l make i t f r e e l y a v a i l a b l e for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of t h i s thesis f o r s c h o l a r l y purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by h i s or her representatives. I t i s understood that copying or publication of t h i s thesis f o r f i n a n c i a l gain s h a l l not be allowed without my written permission. The University of B r i t i s h Columbia 1956 Main Mall Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Y3 >E-6 (3/81) ABSTRACT T h i s s t u d y i s t o s e r v e as c u r r i c u l u m r e s o u r c e f o r the t e a c h i n g o f s c u l p t u r e i n secondary s c h o o l s . The programme was d e v e l o p e d t o a i d a c u r r i c u l u m based on h i s t o r i c a l and c r i t i c a l d i s c u s s i o n s o f a r t , and on s t u d i o a c t i v i t i e s i n t h e a r e a o f s c u l p t u r e o f the human f i g u r e . I t i s t o f u r t h e r the 1984 i m p l e - m e n t a t i o n o f the P r o v i n c i a l A r t C u r r i c u l u m f o r Secondary S c h o o l s , grades 8 t o 12. To a s c e r t a i n the u s e f u l n e s s o f such a r e s o u r c e , a s u r v e y o f B r i t i s h Columbia a r t t e a c h e r s was c a r r i e d out i n F e b r u a r y 1980 which c o n f i r m e d t h i s need. A r e a c t i o n t o and e v a l u a t i o n o f the major a r e a s o f t h e s t u d y : t h e h i s t o r y o f a r t , i m p o r t a n t con- c e p t s and s e v e r a l themes o f s c u l p t u r e , and s t u d i o p r o c e s s e s f o r t h e making o f s c u l p t u r e o f the human f i g u r e were sought from B r i t i s h Columbia a r t t e a c h e r s i n F e b r u a r y 1983, and from Burnaby a r t t e a c h e r s i n October 1983. Respondents c o n f i r m e d the u s e f u l - ness o f t h i s c u r r i c u l u m r e s o u r c e . The s t u d y makes use o f a s e t o f 431 s l i d e s i n which the h i s t o r y o f s c u l p t u r e o f the human f i g u r e i s i l l u s t r a t e d , from P r e h i s t o r y t o the p r e s e n t t i m e . Examples a r e p r e s e n t e d o f a l l c u l t u r e s o f the w o r l d , which p e r m i t the use o f t h e human f i g u r e as a s u b j e c t . Such broad coverage was c o n s i d e r e d i m p o r t a n t i n view o f t h e m u l t i c u l t u r a l r o o t s o f B r i t i s h Columbia secondary s c h o o l s t u d e n t s . I n o r d e r t o d e l i m i t a t e t h e s t u d y , the theme o f the human f i g u r e was chosen f o r s e v e r a l r e a s o n s : i t i s the most common image i n sculpture; i t consists of great complexities of form; i t i s a most expressive tool for the portrayal of the human con- d i t i o n . Adolescence i s a time of considerable growth and sen- s i t i v i t y and i s therefore an appropriate time for the formation of self-concept which i s greatly influenced by physical appear- ance. It i s posited that the study of a great variety of sculp- ture of the human figure furthers adolescents' self-acceptance. Although the study deals with sculpture of the human f i g - ure, the same methodology might be used for other areas of the v i s u a l arts. It i s meant to provide viable and p r a c t i c a l ass- istance to art teachers i n the discussion of the history of art as related to the history of humankind, i n the c l a r i f i c a t i o n of major concepts of sculpture, i n the c r i t i c a l analysis of themes of sculpture, and i n the production of creative works by students. i v . TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT i i LIST OF TABLES v i i LIST OF PLATES v i i i LIST OF SLIDES i x LIST OF NAMES AND NATIONALITY OF SCULPTORS IDENTIFIABLE ON SLIDES x x x i x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . x l i v Chapter I . INTRODUCTION 1 Need f o r the Study: Survey R e s u l t s o f B.C. A r t Teachers R e g a r d i n g T e a c h i n g o f S c u l p t u r e i n Secondary S c h o o l s 1 The Purpose of t h e T h e s i s 4 Why Teach S c u l p t u r e o f the Human F i g u r e t o A d o l e s c e n t s ? 11 I I . DEVELOPMENT OF THE CURRICULUM RESOURCES 16 Purpose o f S l i d e s 16 U n i t P l a n s 16 I n t r o d u c t i o n t o S c u l p t u r e 18 H i s t o r i c a l Overview o f S c u l p t u r e o f t h e Human F i g u r e Based on 398 S l i d e s 24 Anatomy of the Human F i g u r e : The S k e l e t o n 36 . V. Chapter Page Study of Movement and Proportions Through Figure Drawing 45 Studio A c t i v i t i e s for the Making of Sculpture of the Human Body, Methods and Materials 49 The Maquette i n Clay 4 9 Terra-Cotta Sculpture 5 3 Metal Sculpture: Cold Wire Bending . . . . 58 Papier Mache Sculpture 61 Plaster of Paris on Armature 65 Plaster of Paris for Carving 68 Concepts of Sculpture 74 Threedimensionality 74 Form, Shape, Mass, Volume, Monumentality . . 77 C r i t i c i s m and Interpretation of Representations of the Figure 82 Linear Sculpture 82 Block Sculpture 85 Super-realism 89 Pathos i n Sculpture 93 Religious Sculpture 99 Commemorative Sculpture 104 Everyday Sculpture 109 I I I . CONCLUSION 114 Response to Needs, the 19 8 3 Survey of Art Teachers 114 Recommendations for Use Within Other Areas of Art Education 116 V i Page BIBLIOGRAPHY 117 APPENDIX 1: Needs Assessment - Sculpture Survey 123 APPENDIX 2: Evaluation 128 APPENDIX 3: Slides No. 1 - 431 130 v i i . LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. A Selection of 140 Slides for a B r i e f Overview of the History of Sculpture of the Figure for Senior Secondary Students 30 2. A Selection of 86 Slides for a More Condensed Overview of Sculpture of the Figure Throughout the Ages, Around the World, for Junior Secondary Students 34 v i i i . LIST OF PLATES Plate Page 1. Half L i f e - s i z e Figures Under Construction i n the Art Room 8 2. Enlargement of the Maquette with Plaster of Paris on Armature 9 3. Display of Student Work 10 4. Proportions of the Skeleton . 42 5. Gesture Drawing with the Skeleton 4 3 6. Gesture Drawing with the Skeleton 44 i x . LIST OF SLIDES S l i d e 1. Venus o f W i l d e n m a n n l i s l o c h bone, N e a n d e r t h a l , c. 70,000 B.C. 2. Venus o f W i l l e n d o r f l i m e s t o n e , Ah i n . , P a l e o l i t h i c , c. 21,000 B.C. 3. Venus o f W i l l e n d o r f l i m e s t o n e , Ah i n . , P a l e o l i t h i c , c. 21,000 B.C. 4. Venus o f W i l l e n d o r f l i m e s t o n e , Ah i n . , P a l e o l i t h i c , c. 21,000 B.C. 5. Venus o f L a u s s e l l i m e s t o n e , 17 i n . , P a l e o l i t h i c 6. Venus o f Lespugue i v o r y , 6 i n . , M a g d a l e n i a n ( P a l e o l i t h i c ) , c. 15,000 B.C. 7. Venus o f Lespugue i v o r y , 6 i n . , M a g d a l e n i a n , c. 15,000 B.C. 8. Venuses o f : (from l e f t t o r i g h t ) W i l l e n d o r f , Indus V a l l e y , C y p r u s , A s l a s h , S y r i a . 9. M a r b l e F i g u r e C y c l a d i c , E a r l y Bronze Age 10. S t a t u e t t e s C y c l a d e s , end o f 3rd m i l l e n n i u m B.C. m a r b l e , 20 i n . 11. D e i t y F i g u r e 12 i n . , M i c r o n e s i a n . 12. Bearded F i g u r e 32 i n . , M i c r o n e s i a n . 13. Neck Rest wood, lh i n . , Congo, A f r i c a . 14. T r a i t o r wood w i t h r a f f i a s k i r t , 30 i n . , Congo, A f r i c a . 15. F e t i s h F i g u r e wood w i t h t e x t i l e , 9% i n . , Congo, A f r i c a . 16. Mother & C h i l d 15 i n . , N i g e r i a , A f r i c a . S l i d e 17. Mother & C h i l d 45 3/4 i n . , Congo, A f r i c a . 18. S t a n d i n g F i g u r e wood, w i t h s h e l l and human h a i r , 17 3/4 i n . , M a o r i , New Zealand. 19. Wood C a r v i n g (Mother & C h i l d ) 33% i n . , M e l a n e s i a n , New Guinea. 20. Female F i g u r e human h a i r , canes, woven s t r i n g , beads, 104 cm. M e l a n e s i a n , New Guinea. 21. Male & Female F i g u r e s wood and r a t t a n , M e l a n e s i a n , New Guinea. 22. A n c e s t r a l F i g u r e s t r e e f e r n , 50 i n . - 40 i n . , P o l y n e s i a n , F i j i . 23. Goddess 14 7/8 i n . , P o l y n e s i a n , Tonga. 24. A n c e s t r a l F i g u r e wood, 17% i n . , P o l y n e s i a n , E a s t e r I s l a n d . 25. Crowned God s o l i d g o l d , p r e c i o u s s t o n e s , 15 3/4 i n . x 8% i n . , I n c a , South A m e r i c a , P e r u . 26. S e a t e d Maiden t e r r a - c o t t a , 11 3/8 i n . , C o l i m a , c. 300-1000 A.D., M i d d l e A m e r i c a , Mexico. 27. E f f i g y p o t t e r y , 12 i n . , C o l i m a , M i d d l e A m e r i c a , Mexico. 28. A d o l e s c e n t s t o n e , 112.5 cm., H u a d i a c , 700-1000 A.D., M i d d l e A m e r i c a , Mexico. 29. Chac Mool l i m e s t o n e , 58% i n . l o n g , Mayan, 948-1697 A.D., M i d d l e A m e r i c a , Mexico. 30. B a l l p l a y e r t e r r a - c o t t a , 17 3/8 i n . , J a l i s c o , c. 300-1000 A.D., M i d d l e A m e r i c a , Mexico. 31. Dancer earthenware, 2 2/3 i n . , Z a p o t e c - M i x t e c , c. 1200-1400 A.D., M i d d l e A m e r i c a , Mexico. x i . S l i d e 32. Three F i g u r e s and Walrus s t o n e , N o r t h American, I n u i t . 33. Hunter w i t h Harpoon s t o n e , N o r t h American, I n u i t . 34. Hunter w i t h S e a l s t o n e , N o r t h American, I n u i t . 35. Mother & C h i l d s t o n e , N o r t h American, I n u i t . 36. ' Mother & C h i l d s t o n e , N o r t h American, I n u i t . 37. P i p e F i g u r e s t o n e , 8 i n . , c. 1000-1700 A.D., N o r t h American I n d i a n . 38. Great Totem P o l e wood, N o r t h American I n d i a n , B.C. 39. Two Mourners wood, 5 f t . 6 i n . , and 5 f t . 3 i n . , N o r t h American I n d i a n , S a l i s h . 40. Two House P o s t s wood, 5 f t . 2 i n . , and 5 f t . 9 i n . , N o r t h American I n d i a n , K w a k i u t l . 41. K w a k i u t l C h i e f wood, 45 i n . , N o r t h American I n d i a n , B.C. 42. T s i m s h i a n Dancing Shaman F i g u r e wood w i t h a b a l o n e s h e l l eyes and h o r s e h a i r , 24 i n . , N o r t h American I n d i a n , B.C. 43. Shaman wood, 19 i n . , N o r t h American I n d i a n , H a i d a . 44. Woman on a Sea Monster wood, 12 i n . , N o r t h American I n d i a n , H a i d a , 1810. 45. Naked Dancer copper, Ah i n . , c. 3000-1500 B.C., I n d i a . 46. Naked Dancer c o p p e r , Ah i n . , c. 3000-1500 B.C., I n d i a . 47. V i s n u b r o n z e , 8h x 10 3/8 i n . , c. 9th c e n t u r y , I n d i a ( f r o n t ) x i i . S l i d e 48. V i s n u b r o n z e , 8% x 10 3/8 i n . , c. 9th c e n t u r y , I n d i a ( r e a r ) 49. Y a k s h i s t o n e , 1 s t c e n t u r y B.C., I n d i a . 50. Buddha sandstone, 5th c e n t u r y A.D., I n d i a . 51. Buddha b l a c k c h l o r i t e , 32 x 18 i n . , l a t e 8 t h t o 9th c e n t u r y , I n d i a . 52. Raj r a n i Temple sandstone, c. 1100 A.D., I n d i a . 53. Goddess T a r a (Mother & C h i l d ) s t o n e , 11th c e n t u r y A.D., I n d i a . 54. The J i n a s (conquerors) 68 cm., 12th t o 13th c e n t u r y , I n d i a . 55. S h i v a as N a t a r a j a b r o n z e , 12th t o 13th c e n t u r y A.D., I n d i a . 56. Vasudhara b r o n z e , 18% x 15 3/4 i n . , c. 13th t o 14th c e n t u r y A.D., I n d i a . 57. F a s t i n g Buddha 2nd o r 3rd c e n t u r y , P a k i s t a n . 58. Seated Buddha s t o n e , 9th c e n t u r y , J a v a . 59. C e l e s t i a l Dancer sandstone, 10th c e n t u r y A.D., V i e t Nam. 60. Goddess Tara g i l d e d b r o n z e , 142.5 cm., 10th t o 11th c e n t u r y , S r i Lanka ( C e y l o n ) . 61. C o l o s s a l Buddha 45 f t . , c. 450-500 A.D., C h i n a . 62. Female F i g u r i n e t e r r a - c o t t a , 618-907 A.D., C h i n a . 63. M u s i c i a n s t e r r a - c o t t a , 10 3/4 i n . , 618-906 A.D., China x i i i . S l i d e 64. G u a r d i a n F i g u r e s t o n e , 618-907 A.D., C h i n a . 65. K n e e l i n g Worshipper mud w i t h s t r a w and h a i r , 7 t h c e n t u r y A.D., C h i n a . 66. Old Man i v o r y , Ming, C h i n a . 67. Kuan-Yin p o r c e l a i n , l a t e Ming, C h i n a . 68. Kuan-Yin wood, C h i n a . 69. Amida Buddha b r o n z e , 37 f t . 4 i n . , c o l o s s a l , Japan. 70. F i g u r e wood, 27% i n . , 13th c e n t u r y A.D., Japan. 71. Buddha S a t u e t t e b r o n z e , 17th c e n t u r y A.D., T h a i l a n d 72. P r a y i n g F i g u r e b r o n z e , 12 3/5 i n . , 17th t o 18th c e n t u r y A.D., T h a i l a n d . 73. H a r i - H a r a c. 7th c e n t u r y A.D., Cambodia. 74. Dancers s t o n e , 12th c e n t u r y , Cambodia, Angkor Thorn ( " C a p i t a l C i t y " ) 75. R e l i e f o f P r o c e s s i o n o f Troops B e f o r e t h e K i n g s t o n e , Cambodia, Angkor Vat ( " C a p i t a l Temple") 76. Female D i e t y 11th c e n t u r y A.D., Cambodia. 77. M u c a l i n d a Buddha 35% i n . , 12th c e n t u r y , Cambodia. 78. The God Abu m a r b l e , 3000-2500 B.C., Mesopotamia. 79. S t a n d i n g Gudea d i o r i t e , c. 2400 B.C., Chaldean-Sumerian. 80. Winged Goddess t e r r a - c o t t a , 2000-1800 B.C., Neo-Sumerian. XIV. S l i d e 81. K i n g Hammurabi b l a c k b a s a l t , 1800-1700 B.C., Neo-Sumerian. 82. Goddess A s t a r t e b r o n z e , 1400-1200 B.C., P h o e n i c i a n . 83. K i n g A s s u r n a s i r p a l I I a l a b a s t e r , 9 t h c e n t u r y , A s s y r i a n . 84. The Hero Gilgamesh a l a b a s t e r , 8th c e n t u r y , A s s y r i a n . 85. F i g u r i n e t e r r a - c o t t a , Sumerian. 86. F u n c t i o n a r y & H i s Wife wood, 44 cm., 4 t h Dynasty, 2900-2750 B.C., Egypt, 87. Seated S c r i b e g r a n i t e , c. 2750 B.C., Egypt. 88. K i n g M y c e r i n u s and W i f e s l a t e , c. 2680 B.C., Egypt. 89. Woman G r i n d i n g G r a i n l i m e s t o n e , C. 2650 B.C., Egypt. 90. The Stubborn Donkey l i m e s t o n e , c. 2650 B.C., Egypt. 91. Seated S c r i b e l i m e s t o n e , 29 i n . , c. 2680-2540 B.C., Egypt. 92. Seated S c r i b e l i m e s t o n e , 29 i n . , c. 2680-2540 B.C., Egypt. 93. Seated S c r i b e l i m e s t o n e , 29 i n . , c. 2680-2540 B.C., Egypt. 94. The Mayor wood, C. 2600 B.C., Egypt. 95. I n s p e c t o r o f S c r i b e s and Wife l i m e s t o n e , C. 2565 B.C., Egypt. 96. S e r v a n t G i r l wood, c. 2000 B.C., Egypt. 97. F u n e r a l - boat wood, c. 1900 B.C., Egypt. XV. S l i d e 98. Amenemhet I I I (pharaoh) g r a n i t e , c. 1820 B.C., Egypt. 99. S t a t u e t t e o f Imeret-Nebes c. 1800 B.C., Egypt. 100. C a r p e n t e r s , Brewers, M u s i c i a n s wood, c. 1780 B.C., Egypt. 101. Tuthmosis I I I grey b a s a l t , c. 1570 B.C., Egypt. 102. God Amon g o l d , c. 1460 B.C., Egypt. 103. The C o l o s s i o f Memnon q u a r t z i t e , 57 f t . 9 i n . , c. 1411-1372 B.C., Egypt. 104. Torso o f Armana P r i n c e s s r e d q u a r t z i t e , 29 cm., 1375-1350 B.C., Egypt. 105. Amenhotep IV (Echnaton) l i m e s t o n e , c. 1370 B.C., Egypt. 106. P a i n t e d Wood F i g u r e s (Pharaoh i n lower c e n t e r ) c. 1360 B.C., Egypt. 10 7. S t a t u e o f Woman c. 1350 B.C., Egypt. 108. Goddess S e r k e t , P r o t e c t o r o f t h e Dead c. 1334-1325 B.C., Egypt. 109. Tutankhamun the Harpooner wood ( g i l d e d ) , 29% i n . , c. 1334-1325 B.C., Egypt. 110. Tutankhamun the Harpooner wood ( g i l d e d ) , 29% i n . , c. 1334-1325 B.C., Egypt. 111. C o l o s s a l S t a t u e s from Abu-Simbel s a n d s t o n e , c. 1250 B.C., Egypt. 112. C o l o s s a l S t a t u e s from Abu-Simbel sandstone, c. 1250 B.C., Egypt. 113. F u n e r a r y F i g u r e o f Lady wood ( g i l d e d n e c k l a c e ) , 11% i n . , c. 1580-1090 B.C., Egypt. 114. Queen Karomana b r o n z e , 59 cm., 22 Dynasty, 950-730 B.C., Egypt. x v i . S l i d e 115. B l o c k - s t a t u e o f P r o p h e t s l a t e , c. 945 B.C., Egypt. 116. B l o c k - s t a t u e of P r i n c e c. 570 B.C., Egypt. 117. K n e e l i n g P r i e s t c. 55 0 B.C., Egypt. 118. "The D a t t a r i S t a t u e " o f a P r i e s t b l a c k d i o r i t e , c. 400 B.C., Egypt. 119. A p o l l o o f Piombino b r o n z e , 76 i n . , c. 475 B.C., Greece. 120. A p o l l o o f Piombino b r o n z e , 76 i n . , c. 475 B.C., Greece. 121. W a r r i o r from t h e Temple o f A p h a i a . . m a r b l e , c. 475 B.C., Greece. 122. F l u t e P l a y e r , from t h e L u d o v i s i Throne m a r b l e , c. 470-460 B.C., Greece. 123. Harmodius and A r i s t o g e i t o n by A n t e n o r , b r o n z e , Greece. 124. Zeus from A r t e m i s i o n b r o n z e , 82 i n . , c. 460 B.C., Greece. 125. Zeus from A r t e m i s i o n b r o n z e , 82 i n . , c. 460 B.C., Greece. 126. Zeus from A r t e m i s i o n b r o n z e , 82 i n . , c. 460 B.C., Greece. 127. Torso by P o l y k l e i t o s , b a s a l t , c. 450 B.C., Greece. 128. D i s c o b o l o s by Myron, (Roman Copy), m a r b l e , l i f e s i z e , c. 450 B.C., Greece. 129. D i s c o b o l o s by Myron, (Roman Copy), m a r b l e , l i f e s i z e , c. 450 B.C., Greece. 130. Athena P a r t h e n o s by P h i d i a s , m a r b l e , c o v e r e d i n i v o r y and g o l d , copy, 447-438 B.C., Greece. x v i i . S l i d e 131. Dione & A p h r o d i t e , from the P a r t h e n o n by P h i d i a s , m a r b l e , 4 f t . 1 i n . , 442-438 B.C., Greece. 132. R e l i e f , from the P a r t h e n o n by P h i d i a s , marble, 41 i n . , 442-438 B.C., Greece. 133. I l i s s o s m a r b l e , c. 438 B.C., Greece. 134. A p h r o d i t e o f K n i d o s by P r a x i t e l e s , m a r b l e , Greece. 135. Youth from A n t i k y t h e r a b r o n z e , 6 f t . 5 i n . , c. 350 B.C., Greece. 136. Youth from A n t i k y t h e r a b r o n z e , 6 f t . 5 i n . , c. 350 B.C., Greece. 137. Youth from A n t i k y t h e r a b r o n z e , 6 f t . 5 i n . , c. 350 B.C., Greece. 13 8. Marsyas, t h e S a t y r c 300 B.C., Greece. 139. V i c t o r y o f Samothrace m a r b l e , o v e r l i f e - s i z e , c. 200 B.C., Greece 14 0. V i c t o r y o f Samothrace m a r b l e , o v e r l i f e s i z e , c. 200 B.C., Greece. 141. A p h r o d i t e o f Melos (or Venus de M i l o ) m a r b l e , 6 f t . 8 i n . , c. 100 B.C., Greece. 14 2. Laokoon m a r b l e , 95 i n . , c. 100 B.C., Greece. 143. The Borghese G l a d i a t o r m a r b l e , c. 100 B.C., Greece. 144. Naked L a n c e r b r o n z e , 5 t h c e n t u r y B.C., E t r u s c a n . 14 5. Ombra b r o n z e , E t r u s c a n . 146. A p h r o d i t e b r o n z e , 33 cm., 4 t h c e n t u r y B.C., E t r u s c a n . X V I X I . S l i d e 147. D i o n y s i o s and t h e Graces m a r b l e , e a r l y 2nd c e n t u r y A.D., Roman. 148. A p o l l o t e r r a - c o t t a , 69 i n . , c. 500 B.C., E t r u s c a n . 149. Gemma Augustae s a r d o n y x , 8 i n . x 9 i n . , 1 s t c e n t u r y A.D., Roman. 150. P a t r i c i a n w i t h B u s t s o f A n c e s t o r s m a r b l e , l i f e s i z e , 1 s t c e n t u r y A.D., Roman. 151. Augustus m a r b l e , 8 0 i n . , c. 20 B.C., Roman. 152. C h r i s t B l e s s i n g i v o r y , l O t h - l l t h c e n t u r y A.D., B y z a n t i n e . 153. C r u c i f i x o f A r c h b i s h o p Gero polychromed oak, 969-971 A.D., Romanesque. 154. C h r i s t i n G l o r y c. 1090 A.D., Romanesque. 155. The P e n t e c o s t s t o n e , 35% f t . , c. 1132 A.D., Romanesque. 156. C h r i s t i n G l o r y , d e t a i l from t h e P e n t e c o s t s t o n e , c. 1132 A.D., Romanesque. 157. Eve w i t h F o r b i d d e n F r u i t 1120-1135 A.D., Romanesque. 158. L a s t Judgment e a r l y 12th c e n t u r y , Romanesque. 15 9. Adam & Eve Romanesque. 16 0. Adam & Eve G o t h i c . 161. Tomb o f Duke & Wife c. 1230-1250 A.D., G o t h i c . 16 2. The Synagogue s t o n e , c . 1230-1250 A.D., G o t h i c . 16 3. The B l a c k P r i n c e copper g i l d e d , 1380, G o t h i c . 164. P i e t a wood, 34% i n . , e a r l y 14th c e n t u r y , G o t h i c . x i x . S l i d e 165. V i r g i n and C h i l d i v o r y , 14 i n . , 14th c e n t u r y , G o t h i c . 166. The B e a u t i f u l Madonna c. 1400 A.D., G o t h i c . 167. P i e t a c. 1400 A.D., G o t h i c . 16 8. A Mourner by C l a u s S l u t e r , Dutch, 1404-1410 A.D., G o t h i c . 16 9. Four S a i n t s i n C o n v e r s a t i o n by Nanni d i Banco, I t a l i a n , 1408-1413 A.D., G o t h i c . 170. Madonna and C h i l d s t o n e , c. 1420 A.D.,.Gothic. 171. Madonna w i t h Apple c. 1420 A.D., G o t h i c . 172. Adam and Eve by R i e m e n s c h n e i d e r , German, G o t h i c . 17 3. P e n i t e n t Mary Magdalene by Gregor E r h a r t , German wood, l a t e G o t h i c . 174. The V i r g i n w i t h the L a u g h i n g C h i l d by A n t o n i o R o s s e l l i n o , I t a l i a n , t e r r a - c o t t a , 20 i n . , mid-15th c e n t u r y . 175. S t . George by D o n a t e l l o , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 7 f t . , 1415-1417 A.D. 176. D a v i d by D o n a t e l l o , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 75% i n . , 1408-1409 A.D. 177. D a v i d by D o n a t e l l o , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 64 i n . , 1434-1438 A.D. 178. D a v i d by D o n a t e l l o , I t a l i a n , b r o n z e , 60% i n . , 1438-1443 A.D. 179. Gates o f P a r a d i s e by Lorenzo G h i b e r t i , I t a l i a n , g i l d b r o n z e , 1425-1452 A.D. XX . S l i d e 180. Gates of P a r a d i s e , The S t o r y o f Jacob and Esau by Lorenzo G h i b e r t i , I t a l i a n , d e t a i l . 181. Madonna and C h i l d by Luca d e l l a R o b b i a , I t a l i a n , enamelled t e r r a - c o t t a , 1450-1460 A.D. 182. D a v i d by Andrea d e l V e r r o c c h i o , I t a l i a n , b r o n z e , 4 f t . 1 i n . , c. 1475 A.D. 183. Eve by A n t o n i o R i z z o , I t a l i a n , b r o n z e , c. 1485 A.D. 184. K i n g A r t h u r by P e t e r V i s c h e r , German, b r o n z e , 1513 A.D. 185. A p o l l o F o u n t a i n by Hans V i s c h e r , German, b r o n z e , 1532 A.D. 186. Perseus by Benvenuto C e l l i n i , I t a l i a n , b r o n z e , 1545-1554 A.D. 187. P e r s e u s by Benvenuto C e l l i n i , I t a l i a n , b r o n z e , 1545-1554 A.D. 188. V i r t u e Overcoming V i c e by Benvenuto C e l l i n i , I t a l i a n , b r o n z e , 9% i n . , 16th c e n t u r y A.D. 18 9. V i r t u e Overcoming V i c e by Benvenuto C e l l i n i , I t a l i a n , b r o n z e , 9% i n . , 16th c e n t u r y A.D. 190. V i r t u e Overcoming V i c e by Benvenuto C e l l i n i , I t a l i a n , b r o n z e , 9% i n . , 16th c e n t u r y A.D. 191. Diana o f Anet by J e a n Goujon, F r e n c h , m a r b l e , 1548-1555 A.D. 19 2. Nymph, from F o u n t a i n i n P a r i s by Jean Goujon, F r e n c h s t o n e , 1548-1549 A.D. x x i . S l i d e 193. Mercury by G i o v a n n i da B o l o g n a , F l e m i s h - I t a l i a n , b r o n z e , 1564 A.D. 194. Juno by G i o v a n n i da B o l o g n a , F l e m i s h - I t a l i a n . 195. Nymph by Bartolommeo Ammanati, I t a l i a n , b r o n z e , 1563-1575 A.D. 196. C h a r l e s V. & I s a b e l l a by Pompeo L e o n i , I t a l i a n , R o y a l Mausoleum, E s c o r i a l , g i l d e d b r o n z e , 1597 A.D. 197. Study f o r F o u n t a i n F i g u r e by G i o v a n n i da B o l o g n a , F l e m i s h - I t a l i a n , t e r r a - c o t t a , L. 19 i n . , c. 1600 A.D. 198. Study f o r F o u n t a i n F i g u r e by G i o v a n n i da B o l o g n a , F l e m i s h - I t a l i a n , t e r r a - c o t t a , L. 19 i n . , c. 1600 A.D. 199. P i e t a by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 60 i n . , 1498-1500 A.D. 200. P i e t a by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 69 i n . , 1498-1500 A.D. 201. Torso o f a Youth by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , t e r r a - c o t t a , 4 5/8 i n . , c. 1489 A.D. 20 2. D a v i d by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 18% f t . , 1501-1504 A.D. 203. D a v i d by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 18% f t . , 1501-1504 A.D. 204. D a v i d by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 18% f t . , 1501-1504 A.D. 205. C h r i s t by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1513-1516 A.D. x x i i . S l i d e 206. Bacchus by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1513-1516 A.D. 207. Moses by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1 5 1 3 - 1 5 1 6 , 1542-1545 A.D. 208. S l a v e by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 90% i n . , 1513-1516 A.D. 2 0 9 . S l a v e by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 86% i n . , 1513-1516 A.D. 210. S l a v e by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , marble 211. V i c t o r y by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 8 f t . 6 3/4 i n . , c. 1520 A.D. 212. V i c t o r y by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 8 f t . 6 3/4 i n . , c. 1520 A.D. 213. S q u a t t i n g F i g u r e by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1519-1534 A.D. 214. Tomb o f G i u l i a n o de M e d i c i by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1519-1534 A.D. 215. Day by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , t e r r a - c o t t a , H. 7 i n . , L. 12% i n . , c. 1524 A.D, 216. Day, Tomb of G i u l i a n o de M e d i c i by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1519-1534 A.D. 217. N i g h t , Tomb o f G i u l i a n o de M e d i c i by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1519-1534 A.D. 218. Tomb o f Lorenzo de M e d i c i by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1519-1534 A.D. x x i i i . S l i d e 219. R i g h t Hand o f Lorenzo de M e d i c i by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , t e r r a - c o t t a , 4 3/4 i n . , c. 1524 A.D. 2 20. Dawn by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , t e r r a - c o t t a , h. 7 i n . , 1. 8% i n . , c. 1524 A.D. 221. Dawn, Tomb o f Lorenzo de M e d i c i . by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1519-1534 A.D. 222. L e f t Arm, S h o u l d e r & P a r t o f Back by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , t e r r a - c o t t a , L. 10 3/4 i n . , c. 1524 A.D. 223. Dusk, Tomb of Lorenzo de M e d i c i by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1519-1534 A.D. 224. Madonna and C h i l d by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1530-1534 A.D. 225. P i e t a o f F l o r e n c e by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 7 f t . 8 i n . , 1550-1556 A.D. 2 26 . P i e t a - o f F l o r e n c e by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , d e t a i l . 227. P i e t a o f F l o r e n c e by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , d e t a i l . 228. R o n d a n i n i P i e t a by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 6 f t . 4 i n . , 1550-1564 A.D. 229. The M e r c i f u l C h r i s t by Juan M a r t i n e z Montanez, S p a n i s h , polychromed wood, c. 16 0 3 A.D. 230. P i e t a by G r e g o r i o Fernandez, S p a n i s h , polychromed wood, 1616-1617 A.D. 231. The A b d u c t i o n o f P e r s e p h o r e by G i a n Lorenzo B e r n i n i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1621-1622 A.D. x x i v . S l i d e 2 32. David by G i a n Lorenzo B e r n i n i , I t a l i a n , d e t a i l , m a r b l e , 1623 A.D. 2 33. A p o l l o & Daphne by G i a n Lorenzo B e r n i n i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1624 A.D. 234. A p o l l o & Daphne by G i a n Lorenzo B e r n i n i , I t a l i a n , d e t a i l , m a r b l e , 1624 A.D. 235. The E c s t a s y o f S t . Teresa by G i a n Lorenzo B e r n i n i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1645-1652 A.D. 236. S t . Jerome by G i a n Lorenzo B e r n i n i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 6 f t . 4 i n . , 1661-1663 A.D. 237. S t . Susanna by F r a n c o i s Duquesnoy, F l e m i s h , m a r b l e , o v e r - l i f e s i z e , 1629-1633 A.D. 238. S t . Andrew by F r a n c o i s Duquesnoy, F l e m i s h , m a r b l e , 14 f t . 11 i n . , 1627-1639 A.D. 2 39. F o u n t a i n o f t h e Four R i v e r s (Danube, N i l e , Ganges, R i o de l a P l a t a ) by G i a n Lorenzo B e r n i n i , I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1648-1651 A.D. 240. M i l o o f C r o t o n a by P i e r r e Puget, F r e n c h , m a r b l e , 8 f t . 10 i n . , 1671-1683 A.D. 241. The Garonne ( r i v e r ) by A n t o i n e Coysevox, F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1685-1686 A.D. 242. The Assumption o f the V i r g i n by E g i d Q u i r i n Asam, German, s t u c c o , l i f e s i z e , 1718-1725 A.D. 243. S t . G e r t r u d e by J a c i n t o V i e i r a , P o r t u g u e s e , p a i n t e d wood, c. 1725 A.D. 244. L ' A m i t i e (Madame de Pompadour) by J e a n - B a p t i s t e P i g a l l e , F r e n c h , marble, 5 f t . 2 i n . , 1750-1751 A.D. XXV. S l i d e 245. B a t h e r by E t i e n n e - M a u r i c e F a l c o n e t , F r e n c h , m a r b l e , 2 f t . 7 i n . , 1757 A.D. 246. B a t h e r by E t i e n n e - M a u r i c e F a l c o n e t , F r e n c h , m a r b l e , 2 f t . 7 i n . , 1757 A.D. 24 7. Venus by Johan T o b i a s S e r g e i , Swedish, marble, l i f e s i z e , 1770s A.D. 248. P i e t a by Franz Ignaz Gunther, German, wood, 64 i n . , 1774 A.D. 249. P e t e r the G r e a t by E t i e n n e - M a u r i c e F a l c o n e t , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1766-1777 A.D. 250. S t . Bruno by J e a n - A n t o i n e Houdon, F r e n c h , s t u c c o , 1776 A.D. 251. Diana by J e a n - A n t o i n e Houdon, F r e n c h , marble o r i g i n a l , c. 1776 A.D. 25 2. Diana by J e a n - A n t o i n e Houdon, F r e n c h , bronze v e r s i o n , c. 1776 A.D. 253. George Washington by J e a n - A n t o i n e Houdon, F r e n c h , m a r b l e , 1785-1791 A.D. 254. The Bad T h i e f by 0. A l e i j a d i n h o , B r a z i l i a n , c. 1798 A.D. 255. F e a s t i n g d e t a i l o f 18th c e n t u r y p r e s e p i o , wood , t e r r a - c o t t a and c l o t h . 256. Venus V i c t r i x ( P a u l i n e Bonaparte) by A n t o n i o Canova, I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 1808 A.D. 257. P e r s e u s by A n t o n i o Canova, I t a l i a n , m a r b l e . xxv i . S l i d e 258. Venus I t a l i c a by A n t o n i o Canova, I t a l i a n , m a r b l e , 5 f t . 8% i n . , 1805-1812 A.D. 259. Young N e a p o l i t a n Fisherman P l a y i n g w i t h a T o r t o i s e by F r a n c o i s Rude, F r e n c h , m a r b l e , 1831-1832 A.D. 26 0. Mercury A t t a c h i n g H i s Wings by F r a n c o i s Rude, F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 8 f t . 2 i n . , 1828-1834 A.D. 261. La M a r s e i l l a i s e by F r a n c o i s Rude, F r e n c h , s t o n e , 1833-1836 A.D. 262. O p h e l i a by Auguste P r e a u l t , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 29% i n . x 79% i n . , 1843 A.D. 263. U g o l i n o by J e a n - B a p t i s t e Carpeaux, F r e n c h , p l a s t e r , 6 f t . 5% i n . , 1860-1862 A.D. 264. The P r o d i g a l Son by C o n s t a n t i n M e u n i e r , B e l g i a n , 265. H e r c u l e s the A r c h e r by A n t o i n e B o u r d e l l e , F r e n c h , 266. The S t a t u e o f L i b e r t y by F r e d e r i c - A u g u s t e B a r t h o l d i , F r e n c h , hammered copper, 90 m., 1886 A.D. ( c o n s t r u c t i o n p r o c e s s ) . 267. The S t a t u e o f L i b e r t y by F r e d e r i c - A u g u s t e B a r t h o l d i , F r e n c h , hammered copper, 90 m., 1886 A.D. ( c o n s t r u c t i o n p r o c e s s ) . 26 8. The Age o f B r a s s by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1876 A.D. 269. The Age o f B r a s s by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1876 A.D. 270. l ' E v e i l by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , 271. S t . John the B a p t i s t P r e a c h i n g by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1878 A.D. x x v i i . S l i d e 272. S t . John the B a p t i s t P r e a c h i n g by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1878 A.D. 273. S t . John t h e B a p t i s t P r e a c h i n g by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1878 A.D. 274. The T h i n k e r (from the Gate o f H e l l ) by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1880 A.D. 275. The T h i n k e r (from t h e Gate o f H e l l ) by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1880 A.D. 276. The T h i n k e r (from the Gate o f H e l l ) by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , s t o n e , 1879-1900 A.D. 277. The Three Shadows (from t h e Gate o f H e l l ) by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1880 A.D. 278. A Shadow (from the Gate o f H e l l ) by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1880 A.D. 279. The C a r y a t i d by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1880-1881 A.D. 2 80. Eve by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1881 A.D. 2 81. Eve by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , 1881 A.D. 282. Study f o r a Burgher o f C a l a i s by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , bronze 28 3. Three Fauns by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , p l a s t e r , 1882 A.D. 284. The Once B e a u t i f u l H e a u l n i e r e by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , 1885 A.D. x x v i i i . S l i d e 285. Danaid by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , m a r b l e , 1885 A.D. 286. The K i s s by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , m a r b l e , 1886 A.D. 287. The K i s s by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , m a r b l e , 1886 A.D. 288. The B a t h e r by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , 1888 A.D. 289. The P r o d i g a l Son by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1889 A.D. 290. B a l z a c by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , p l a s t e r , 1897 A.D. 291. The A t h l e t e by Auguste Rodin', F r e n c h , 1903 A.D. 292. By t h e Sea by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h , p l a s t e r , 1906-1907 A.D. 293. S c u l p t u r e e x h i b i t e d a t the E x p o s i t i o n o f 1900 Grand P a l a i s , P a r i s . 294. F l o r a by A r i s t i d e M a i l l o l , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1912 A.D. 295. A c t i o n i n C h a i n s by A r i s t i d e M a i l l o l , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 7 f t . , 1905-1906 A.D. 296. T a l l Venus ( d e t a i l ) by A r i s t i d e M a i l l o l , F r e n c h , 297. La S e r p e n t i n e by H e n r i M a t i s s e , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 22% i n . , 1909 A.D. x x i x . S l i d e 298. Venus V i c t o r i o u s by Auguste R e n o i r , F r e n c h 1914 A.D. 299. Dancer by Edgar Degas, F r e n c h , bronze & t u l l e s k i r t , 1921 A.D. 300. Eve by Roger de l a F r e s n a y e , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1910 A.D. 301. K n e e l i n g F i g u r e by W i l h e l m Lehnbruck, German, c a s t s t o n e , 5 f t . 9 i n . , 1911 A.D. 302. T h i n k e r by W i l h e l m Lehnbruck, German, 1913-1914 A.D. 303. Young Man S t e p p i n g Up by W i l h e l m Lehnbruck, German, b r o n z e , 1913-1914 A.D. 304. Dancer by Jacques L i p c h i t z , L i t h u a n i a n , b r o n z e , 1913 A.D. 305. Unique Forms o f C o n t i n u i t y i n Space by Umberto B o c c i o n i , I t a l i a n , b r o n z e , 44 i n . , 1913 A.D. 306. Seated Man w i t h G u i t a r by Jacques L i p c h i t z , L i t h u a n i a n , b r o n z e , 23 i n . , 1918 A.D. 307. Woman w i t h C h i l d on Her Lap by Kathe K o l l w i t z , German 39 cm. 308. R u s s i a n Beggar Woman by E r n s t B a r l a c h , German, 2 3 cm., 19 0 7 A.D. 309. S i n g i n g Man by E r n s t B a r l a c h , German, b r o n z e , 1928 A.D. 310. Boy w i t h F l u t e by Renee S i n t e n i s , German, XXX . S l i d e 311. The Runner by Renee S i n t e n i s , German. 312. S t a n d i n g G i r l by Ludwig K a s p e r , German. 313. O l d Man Reading by Gerhard Marcks, German. 314. The Stone, Arm o f the P r o l e t a r i a t by Ivan D. Shadre, R u s s i a n . 315. Torso by I v a n M e s t r o v i c , J u g o s l a v . 316. Torso by Gustav V i g e l a n d , Norwegian. 317. T a l l Eve by C h a r l e s D e s p i a u , F r e n c h . 318. Woman Combing H e r s e l f by P a l P a t z a y , H u n g a r i a n . 319. S p r i n g by Eugen S z e r v a t i u s z , H u n g a r i a n . 320. Death o f P e t o f i by T i b o r S z e r v a t i u s z , H u n g a r i a n . 321. S m a l l I d o l by T i b o r S z e r v a t i u s z , H u n g a r i a n . 322. Woman w i t h Cat by A l e x a n d e r A r c h i p e n k o , R u s s i a n , b r o n z e , H. 34 cm., 1910 A.D. 323. The K i s s by C o n s t a n t i n B r a n c u s i , Roumanian. 3 24. The Embrace by C a r l o s B r a c h o , Mexican. 325. Torso by Jean (Hans) A r p , F r e n c h . 326. Onward by A l e x a n d e r A r c h i p e n k o , R u s s i a n , H. 55 cm., 1925 A.D. S l i d e 327. Don Q u i z o t e by J u l i o G o n z a l e s , S p a n i s h , welded i r o n , 1929 A.D. 328. M o n t s e r r a t by J u l i o G o n z a l e s , S p a n i s h , b r o n z e , 1937 A.D. 329. Seated F i g u r e by E m i l i o Greco, I t a l i a n . 330. S t a n d i n g F i g u r e by Gaston L a c h a i s e , F r e n c h - A m e r i c a n , b r o n z e , 1932 A.D. 331. Young G i r l by M a r c e l Gimond, F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 1934 A.D.. 332. Man w i t h Sheep by P a b l o P i c a s s o , S p a n i s h , b r o n z e , 86% i n . , 1944 A.D. 333. The Storm by Germaine R i c h i e r , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 69 i n . , 1949 A.D. 334. Venus by Marino M a r i n i , I t a l i a n , 1945 A.D. 335. Pomona by Marino M a r i n i , I t a l i a n , 1949 A.D. 336. W r e s t l e r by Marino M a r i n i , I t a l i a n . 3 37. Madonna and C h i l d by Jacob E p s t e i n , A m e r i c a n - E n g l i s h , 1952 A.D. 338. Young G i r l on a C h a i r by Giacomo Manzu, I t a l i a n , b r o n z e , c. 43 i n . , 1955 A.D. 339. Lady o f V e n i c e , I by A l b e r t o G i a c o m e t t i , S w i s s , b r o n z e , 1956 A.D. 34 0. F a m i l y by Gunnar N i l s s o n , Swedish, b r o n z e , 1959 A.D. x x x i i . S l i d e 341. Maquettes by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , i n h i s s t u d i o . 342. R e c l i n i n g and Seated S m a l l F i g u r e s by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , b r o n z e . 343. R e c l i n i n g F i g u r e s by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , b r o n z e . 34 4. The Northhampton Madonna by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , 1943-1944 A.D. 345. F a m i l y Group by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , b r o n z e , H. 16 i n . , 1947 A.D. 346. K i n g and Queen by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , b r o n z e , 6% f t . , 1951-1953 A.D. 34 7. W a r r i o r w i t h S h i e l d by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h b r o n z e , H. 60 i n . , 1953-1954 A.D. 348. The Making o f : W a r r i o r w i t h S h i e l d by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , H. 60 i n . 349. R e c l i n i n g F i g u r e : A r c h Leg by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , b r o n z e , 174 i n . , 1969-1970 A.D. 350. R e c l i n i n g F i g u r e : A r c h Leg by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , b r o n z e , 174 i n . , 1969-1970 A.D. 351. R e c l i n i n g F i g u r e : A r c h Leg by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , b r o n z e , 174 i n . , 1969-1970 A.D. 352. W a l k i n g Man by George S e g a l , A m e r i c a n , p l a s t e r , m e t a l & wood, 1966 A.D. 353. Man i n C h a i r by George S e g a l , A m e r i c a n , p l a s t e r & wood, H. 50 i n . , 1969 A.D. x x x i i i . S l i d e 354. G i r l P u t t i n g on S c a r a b N e c k l a c e by George S e g a l , American, p l a s t e r , wood, m e t a l , g l a s s , 84 x 45 x 45 i n . , 1975 A.D. 355. G i r l U n d r e s s i n g by Reg B u t l e r , E n g l i s h , b r o n z e , 1953-1954 A.D. 356. Nude by Reg B u t l e r , E n g l i s h , p a i n t e d b r o n z e , 296 cm., 1976-1977 A.D. 357. A S t a t e o f P e r i l by K a r o l B r o n i a t o w s k i , P o l i s h , mixed media, l i f e s i z e . 35 8. Women and Dog by M a r i s o l , F r e n c h , wood, p l a s t e r , c l o t h e s , 72 i n . , 1964 A.D. 359. Three G i r l s : S i t t i n g by R i c h a r d A. M i l l e r , A m e r i c a n , b r o n z e , 22 i n . , 1966 A.D. 360. M i l o r d l a Chamarre by Jean D u b u f f e t , F r e n c h , p a i n t e d f a b r i c and p o l y e s t e r r e s i n costume, 1972 A.D. 361. Embracing L o v e r s by D a v i d Wynne, E n g l i s h , m a r b l e , 36 i n . , 1970 A.D. 36 2. Embracing L o v e r s by D a v i d Wynne, E n g l i s h , marble, 36 i n . , 1970 A.D. 363. G i r l w i t h D o l p h i n by D a v i d Wynne, E n g l i s h , e r e c t i n g the s t a t u e , 1973 A.D. 364. G i r l w i t h D o l p h i n by D a v i d Wynne, E n g l i s h , b r o n z e , 192 i n . , 1973 A.D. 365. Dancer w i t h B i r d by D a v i d Wynne, E n g l i s h , p l a s t e r f o r b r o n z e , 96 i n . , 1974 A.D. 366. Dancer w i t h B i r d by D a v i d Wynne, E n g l i s h , p l a s t e r f o r b r o n z e , 96 i n . , 1974 A.D. x x x i v . S l i d e 36 7. P o r t r a i t o f Paddy by Bruno L u c c h e s i , I t a l i a n - A m e r i c a n , b r o n z e , c a s t from t e r r a - c o t t a , H. 14 i n . , 1970 A.D. 368. B r u s h i n g H a i r by Bruno L u c c h e s i , I t a l i a n - A m e r i c a n , t e r r a - c o t t a , H. 18 i n . , 1974 A.D. 36 9. Nude by Bruno L u c c h e s i , I t a l i a n - A m e r i c a n , bonded b r o n z e , c a s t from c l a y o r i g i n a l , 1975 A.D. 370. A f t e r t h e B a t h by Bruno L u c c h e s i , I t a l i a n - A m e r i c a n , b r o n z e , c a s t from t e r r a - c o t t a , H. 22 i n . , 1976 A.D. 371. Repose by Bruno L u c c h e s i , I t a l i a n - A m e r i c a n , b r o n z e , c a s t from t e r r a - c o t t a , H. 15 i n . , 1976 A.D. 3 72. Nude by Bruno L u c c h e s i , I t a l i a n - A m e r i c a n , b r o n z e , c a s t from t e r r a - c o t t a , H. 11 i n . , 1976 A.D. 373. Arden Anderson & Nora Murphy by John de Andrea, A m e r i c a n , p o l y e s t e r and f i b r e g l a s s , polychromed i n o i l , 1972 A.D. 374. F l o r i d a Shopper by Duane Hanson, A m e r i c a n , mixed media, l i f e s i z e , 1973 A.D. 375. Woman B a t h i n g by D a r i o M o r a l e s , Columbian, b r o n z e , 48 x 48 x 31 cm., 1979 A.D. 376. Woman B a t h i n g by D a r i o M o r a l e s , Columbian, b r o n z e , 48 x 48 x 31 cm., 1979 A.D. 377. Torso by D a r i o M o r a l e s , Columbian, b r o n z e , 113 x 84 x 40 cm., 1979 A.D. 378. Torso by D a r i o M o r a l e s , Columbian, b r o n z e , 113 x 84 x 40 cm., 1979 A.D. 379. T a b l e , Leonard by Andre B a r e l i e r , F r e n c h , b r o n z e , 110 x 100 x 80 cm., 1974 A.D. XXXV. S l i d e 380. September 1975 by C o l e t t e W h i t e n , Canadian, mixed media, c. 91 x 33 i n . , 1975 A.D. 381. L o v e r by Mary F r a n k , E n g l i s h - A m e r i c a n , u n g l a z e d c e r a m i c , 23 x 44 x 25 i n . , 1977 A.D. 382. S t a n d i n g Nude O l d Woman by F r a n c e s c o Z u n i g a , C o s t a R i c a n - M e x i c a n , b r o n z e , 1974 A.D. 383. D i a l o g by F r a n c e s c o Z u n i g a , C o s t a R i c a n - M e x i c a n , b r o n z e , 1979 A.D. 384. G i r l w i t h M i r r o r by Joseph E r h a r d y , A m e r i c a n - F r e n c h , b r o n z e , H. 140 cm., 1980 A.D. 385. L o u i s S t . L a u r e n t by E l e k Imredy, H u n g a r i a n - C a n a d i a n , b r o n z e , one & h a l f l i f e s i z e , 1976 A.D. 386. G i r l i n W e t s u i t by E l e k Imredy, H u n g a r i a n - C a n a d i a n , b r o n z e , l i f e s i z e , 1972 A.D. 387. G i r l i n W e t s u i t by E l e k Imredy, H u n g a r i a n - C a n a d i a n , the c l a y s c u l p t u r e , l i f e s i z e , 1972 A.D. 388. C h r i s t the Teacher by E l e k Imredy, H u n g a r i a n - C a n a d i a n , f i r s t maquette. 389. C h r i s t the Teacher by E l e k Imredy, H u n g a r i a n - C a n a d i a n , s c a l e model o f armature, Armature and S e c t i o n o f f i b r e g l a s s c a s t s . 390. C h r i s t the Teacher by E l e k Imredy, H u n g a r i a n - C a n a d i a n , c l a y s c u l p t u r e , d e t a i l s . 391. C h r i s t the Teacher by E l e k Imredy, H u n g a r i a n - C a n a d i a n , assembly o f f i n a l s c u l p t u r e , f i b r e g l a s s , 16 f t . , 1961 A.D. 392. J e n n i f e r by E l e k Imredy, H u n g a r i a n - C a n a d i a n , b r o n z e , 14 i n . , 1970 A.D. x x x v i . S l i d e 393. J e n n i f e r by E l e k Imredy, H u n g a r i a n - C a n a d i a n , b r o n z e , 14 i n . , 1970 A.D. 394. J e n n i f e r by E l e k Imredy, H u n g a r i a n - C a n a d i a n , b r o n z e , 14 i n . , 1970 A.D. 395. Goddess o f J u s t i c e by E l e k Imredy, H u n g a r i a n - C a n a d i a n , b r o n z e , 12 f t . , 1981 A.D. 396. Goddess o f J u s t i c e by E l e k Imredy, H u n g a r i a n - C a n a d i a n , . Armature on t u r n t a b l e and upper p a r t i n c l a y , 397. Goddess o f J u s t i c e by E l e k Imredy, H u n g a r i a n - C a n a d i a n , b r o n z e , 12 f t . , 1981 A.D. 39 8. S c u l p t o r Robert I p o u s t e g u y , F r e n c h , w o r k i n g on p l a s t e r f i g u r e s , 1981 A.D. 399. Male Nude by M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n , d r a w i n g . 400. F i g u r e Drawing by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h . 401. F i g u r e Drawing by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h . 402. F i g u r e Drawing by Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h . 403. Seated Woman drawing by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , 1921 A.D. 404. S e a t e d F i g u r e drawing by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , 1923-1924 A.D. 405. S t a n d i n g Man drawing by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , 1921 A.D. 406 . S e a t e d Nude drawing by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , 1927 A.D. x x x v i i . S l i d e 4 0 7 . Mother and C h i l d drawing by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , 1927 A.D. 4 0 8 . F a m i l y Groups drawing by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , 1941 A.D. 4 0 9 . S h e l t e r Scene drawing by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , 1941 A.D. 4 1 0 . P i n k & Green S l e e p e r s drawing by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , 1941 A.D. 4 1 1 . Women Winding Wool, The P r e s e n t a t i o n drawings by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , 1942-1943 A.D. 412. The F a m i l y , p r o j e c t f o r s c u l p t u r e , drawing by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h , 1944 A.D. 4 1 3 . Two R e c l i n i n g F i g u r e s drawing by Henry Moore, E n g l i s h 1966 A.D. 414. The S k e l e t o n f r o n t and r e a r view. 4 1 5 . S k e l e t o n and M u s c l e s f r o n t view. 4 1 6 . S k e l e t o n and M u s c l e s r e a r view. 4 1 7 . Muscles o f the Body s i d e v i e w . 4 1 8 . A d u l t body p r o p o r t i o n s s i d e v i e w . 4 1 9 . The g r o w i n g body's p r o p o r t i o n s 4 20. Two views o f the s k u l l 4 2 1 . The Movements o f the Neck by Jeno B a r c s a y , H u n g a r i a n . 4 2 2 . S t u d i e s o f a Hand by Jeno B a r c s a y , H u n g a r i a n . x x x v i i i . Slide 423. Studies of Feet by Jeno Barcsay, Hungarian. 424. The Skeleton i n motion. 425. The Skeleton i n motion. 4 26. The Skeleton i n motion. 4 27. The Skeleton i n motion. 4 28. The Skeleton i n motion. 429. The Skeleton i n motion. 4 30. Study of Foreshortening by Jeno Barcsay, Hungarian. 431. Study of Foreshortening by Jeno Barcsay, Hungarian. x x x i x . LIST OF NAMES AND NATIONALITY OF SCULPTORS IDENTIFIABLE ON SLIDES S l i d e 123. A n t e n o r , Greek 127. P o l y k l e i t o s , Greek 128. Myron, Greek 12 9. Myron, Greek 130. P h i d i a s , Greek 131. P h i d i a s , Greek 132. P h i d i a s , Greek 134. P r a x i t e l e s , Greek 16 8. C l a u s S l u t e r , Dutch 16 9. Nanni d i Banco, I t a l i a n 172. Riemenschneider, German 173. Gregor E r h a r t , German 174. A n t o n i o R o s s e l l i n o , I t a l i a n 175 - 178. D o n a t e l l o , I t a l i a n 179 - 180. Lorenzo G h i b e r t i , I t a l i a n 181. Luca d e l l a Robbia, I t a l i a n 182. Andrea d e l V e r r o c c h i o , I t a l i a n 183. A n t o n i o R i z z o , I t a l i a n 184. P e t e r V i s c h e r , German 18 5. Hans V i s c h e r , German 186 - 190. Benvenuto C e l l i n i , I t a l i a n 191 - 192. Jean Goujon, F r e n c h 193 - 194. G i o v a n n i da B o l o g n a , F l e m i s h - I t a l i a n S l i d e 197 - 198. G i o v a n n i da B o l o g n a , F l e m i s h - I t a l 195. Bartolommeo Ammanati, I t a l i a n 196. Pompeo L e o n i , I t a l i a n 199 - 228. M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n and 399. M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , I t a l i a n 229. Juan M a r t i n e z Montanez, S p a n i s h 230. G r e g o r i o Fernandez, S p a n i s h 231 - 236. G i a n Lorenzo B e r n i n i , I t a l i a n and 239. G i a n Lorenzo B e r n i n i , I t a l i a n 237 - 238. F r a n c o i s Duquesnoy, F l e m i s h 240. P i e r r e Puget, F r e n c h 241. A n t o i n e Coysevox, F r e n c h 24 2. E g i d Qunin Asam, German 243. J a c i n t o V i e i r a , P o r t u g u e s e 244. J e a n - B a p t i s t e P i g a l l e , F r e n c h 245 - 246. E t i e n n e - M a u r i c e F a l c o n e t , F r e n c h and 249. E t i e n n e - M a u r i c e F a l c o n e t , F r e n c h 24 7. Johan T o b i a s S e r g e i , Swedish 248. Franz Ignaz G i i n t h e r , German 250 - 253. J e a n - A n t o i n e Houdon, F r e n c h 254. 0. A l e i j a d i n h o , B r a z i l i a n 256 - 258. A n t o n i o Canova, I t a l i a n 259 - 261. F r a n c o i s Rude, F r e n c h 26 2. Auguste P r e a u l t , F r e n c h 26 3. J e a n - B a p t i s t e Carpeaux, F r e n c h 264. C o n s t a n t i n Meunier, B e l g i a n x l i S l i d e 265. A n t o i n e B o u r d e l l e , F r e n c h 266 - 26 7. F r e d e r i c - A u g u s t e B a r t h o l d i , F r e n c h 268 - 292. Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h & 400 - 402. Auguste R o d i n , F r e n c h 294 - 296. A r i s t i d e M a i l l o l , F r e n c h 29 7. H e n r i M a t i s s e , F r e n c h 29 8. Auguste R e n o i r , F r e n c h 299. Edgar Degas, F r e n c h 300. Roger de l a F r e s n a y e , F r e n c h 301 - 303. W i l h e l m Lehnbruck, German 304 & 306. Jacques L i p c h i t z , L i t h u a n i a n 305. Umberto B o c c i o n i , I t a l i a n 307. Kathe K o l l w i t z , German 308 - 309. E r n s t B a r l a c h , German 310 - 311. Renee S i n t e n i s , German 312. Ludwig K a s p e r , German 313. Gerhard Marcks, German 314. I v a n D. Shadre, R u s s i a n 315. I v a n M e s t r o v i c , J u g o s l a v 316. Gustav V i g e l a n d , Norwegian 317. C h a r l e s D e s p i a u , F r e n c h 318. P a l P a t z a y , Hungarian 319. Eugen S z e r v a t i u s z , H u n g a r i a n 320 - 321. T i b o r S z e r v a t i u s z , Hungarian 322 & 326. A l e x a n d e r A r c h i p e n k o , R u s s i a n 323. C o n s t a n t i n B r a n c u s i , Roumanian x l i i S l i d e 324. C a r l o s Bracho, Mexican 3 25. Jean A r p , F r e n c h 327 - 328. J u l i o G o n z a l e s , S p a n i s h 329. E m i l i o Greco, I t a l i a n 330. Gaston L a c h a i s e , French-American 3 31. M a r c e l Gimond, F r e n c h 332. P a b l o P i c a s s o , S p a n i s h 333. Germaine R i c h i e r , F r e n c h 334 - 336. Marino M a r i n i , I t a l i a n 337. Jacob E p s t e i n , A m e r i c a n - E n g l i s h 338. Giacomo Manzu, I t a l i a n 339. A l b e r t o G i a c o m e t t i , Swiss 340. Gunnar N i e l s s o n , Swedish 341 - 351. Henry Moore, E n g l i s h .•403 - 413. Henry Moore, E n g l i s h 352 - 354. George S e g a l , American 355 - 356. Reg B u t l e r , E n g l i s h 357. K a r o l B r o n i a t o w s k i , P o l i s h 358. M a r i s o l , F r e n c h 359. R i c h a r d A. M i l l e r , American 360. Jean D u b u f f e t , F r e n c h 361 - 366. David Wynne, E n g l i s h 36 7 - 372. Bruno L u c c h e s i , I t a l i a n - A m e r i c a n 373. John de Andrea, American 374. Duane Hanson, American 375 - 378. D a r i o M o r a l e s , Columbian x l i i i . S l i d e s 379. Andre B a r e l i e r , F r e n c h 380. C o l e t t e W h i t e n , Canadian 381. Mary Frank, E n g l i s h - A m e r i c a n 382 - 383. F r a n c e s c o Z u n i g a , C o s t a R i c a n - M e x i c a n 384. Joseph E r h a r d y , A m e r i c a n - F r e n c h 385 - 397. E l e k Imredy, Hungarian-Canadian 398. Robert I p o u s t e g u y , F r e n c h 421 - 423. Jeno B a r c s a y , H u n g a r i a n 430 - 431. Jeno B a r c s a y , H u n g a r i a n x l i v . ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would l i k e t o thank the members o f my t h e s i s committee, P r o f e s s o r Penny Gouldstone and P r o f e s s o r Roy Lewis and, i n p a r - t i c u l a r , t h e chairman o f my committee, P r o f e s s o r Graeme Chalmers, whose h e l p and guidance was v i t a l t o the c o m p l e t i o n o f t h i s t h e s i s . I w i s h t o acknowledge t h e Burnaby S c h o o l Board, whose gen- e r o s i t y o f g r a n t i n g me f i v e months e d u c a t i o n a l l e a v e made the r e s e a r c h f o r t h i s t h e s i s p o s s i b l e . I would a l s o l i k e t o thank my dear f r i e n d s L i z z i e J e n s e n , A l i c e Edstrom, and Joan G a m b i o l i f o r t h e i r p r a c t i c a l h e l p w i t h s l i d e s , t y p i n g and p r o o f r e a d i n g , and f o r moral s u p p o r t and en- couragement from them as w e l l as o t h e r f r i e n d s . I d e d i c a t e t h i s t h e s i s t o the memory o f my l a t e g r a n d f a t h e r , G y u l a P h i l i p p , who brought me, when I was 12 y e a r s o l d , the f i r s t lump o f c l a y which I t u r n e d i n t o a f i g u r e . 1. Chapter I INTRODUCTION Need f o r t h e S t u d y : Survey R e s u l t s o f B.C. A r t Teachers R e g a r d i n g t h e T e a c h i n g o f S c u l p t u r e i n Secondary S c h o o l s S c u l p t u r e i s an a n c i e n t a r t , and because o f i t s t h r e e d i m - e n s i o n a l i t y and t e c h n i c a l c o m p l e x i t y , a d r a s t i c a l l y d i f f e r e n t branch o f t h e v i s u a l a r t s . R e c o g n i t i o n o f i t s v a l u e i n the t e a c h i n g o f secondary s c h o o l s t u d e n t s i n B r i t i s h Columbia has been e s t a b l i s h e d by i t s i n c l u s i o n i n t o the Secondary A r t C u r r - i c u l u m by the M i n i s t r y o f E d u c a t i o n . However, a r t t e a c h e r t r a i n i n g a t u n i v e r s i t y may n o t i n c l u d e t h e s t u d y o f c o n c e p t s and t e c h n i q u e s o f s c u l p t u r e . S t u d i o work i n s c u l p t u r e i s a l e n g t h y and complex p r o c e s s . The need, t h e r e f o r e , t o s e l e c t a r e a s o f u s e f u l l e a r n i n g a c t i v i t i e s , and p r o v i d e p r o f e s s i o n a l development f o r t e a c h e r s e x p e r i e n c e d i n a r e a s o f t w o d i m e n s i o n a l a r t , seemed d e s i r a b l e . At the a n n u a l c o n f e r e n c e o f B r i t i s h Columbia a r t t e a c h e r s , i n A p r i l 1980, a q u e s t i o n n a i r e was d i s t r i b u t e d by t h i s w r i t e r t o g a i n feedback on p o s s i b l e needs and a t t i t u d e s t o the t e a c h - i n g o f s c u l p t u r e . The t e x t o f t h i s s c u l p t u r e s u r v e y q u e s t i o n - n a i r e appears as Appendix 1 o f t h i s t h e s i s . The q u e s t i o n n a i r e was t o seek answers t o t h r e e q u e s t i o n s . F i r s t l y , s h o u l d s c u l p t u r e be t a u g h t and i s i t t e c h n i c a l l y r e a l - i s t i c t o do so i n secondary s c h o o l s ? S e c o n d l y , how i s i t or 2. s h o u l d i t be p r e s e n t e d ? Are a r e a s o f s t u d i o , c r i t i c i s m , a r t h i s t o r y (Western o r m u l t i c u l t u r a l ) , and c o n c e p t s t o be i n c l u d e d ? T h i r d l y , are t e a c h e r p r e p a r a t i o n and r e a d i n e s s t o t e a c h i t ade- quate o r i s more t r a i n i n g needed e i t h e r a t u n i v e r s i t y l e v e l o r t h r o u g h p r o f e s s i o n a l development? The number o f r e s p o n d e n t s were t h i r t y - t w o . R e s u l t s were t a b u l a t e d t o the q u e s t i o n whether i t s h o u l d be t a u g h t , and 32 o u t o f 32 answered i n the a f f i r m a t i v e . Whether t e a c h e r t r a i n i n g s h o u l d i n c l u d e p r e p a r a t i o n f o r the t e a c h i n g o f s c u l p t u r e was answered yes by 30, no by 2. The q u e s t i o n o f adequate t r a i n i n g i n t h i s a r e a was broken down t o j u n i o r and s e n i o r secondary l e v - e l s . The r e s p o n s e s t o j u n i o r grades were 12 o u t o f 32 not ade- q u a t e l y p r e p a r e d and 20 y e s , but t o s e n i o r grades 25 out o f 32 not a d e q u a t e l y p r e p a r e d and o n l y 7 s a i d t h a t t h e y f e l t competent. I n s p i t e o f t h e s e r e s u l t s , o r perhaps because o f l a c k o f know- l e d g e , equipment and f a c i l i t i e s were not c o n s i d e r e d problems. Methodology as t o how t h e respondent a r t t e a c h e r s t a u g h t s c u l p t u r e , l e a n e d h e a v i l y towards s t u d i o a c t i v i t i e s . They con- c e n t r a t e d on methods such as how s c u l p t u r e was made. T h i s was f u r t h e r s u p p o r t e d by t h e i r answers t o the "Quick Q u i z " which was t o t e s t t h e i r own s t u d i o p r o f i c i e n c y . A m a z i n g l y , a l t h o u g h as s t a t e d e a r l i e r , 25 out o f 32 d i d not f e e l a d e q u a t e l y t r a i n e d t o t e a c h s c u l p t u r e i n s e n i o r g r a d e s , they d i d p r o f e s s t o be a b l e t o do most complex t e c h n i q u e s o f s c u l p t u r e , some o f w h i c h , i n t h i s w r i t e r ' s o p i n i o n , a r e not n e c e s s a r y o r r e a l i s t i c f o r use i n pub- l i c s c h o o l s . The p o s s i b i l i t y p r e s e n t s i t s e l f t h a t due t o t h e emphasis on s t u d i o work, many t e a c h e r s might have endeavoured t o g a i n knowledge from "how t o " books, p r e v a l e n t i n many a r e a s o f the a r t s and c r a f t s . J u s t as emphasis on s t u d i o work emerged from the responses t o the q u e s t i o n n a i r e , i t became c l e a r how a r e a s o f c r i t i c i s m and a r t h i s t o r y were n e g l e c t e d . None o f the r e s p o n d i n g a r t t e a c h e r s t a u g h t c o n c e p t s such as mass, form, monumentality, nor d i d they use s c u l p t u r e f o r d i s c u s s i o n o r c r i t i c i s m . They d i d not d i f f e r e n t i a t e between t h e use o f p h o t o g r a p h s , f i l m s , s l i d e s and the " l i v i n g " s c u l p t u r e w i t h i t s t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l i t y when viewed from a l l s i d e s . Furthermore none seemed t o i n d i c a t e a need f o r v i e w i n g and d i s c u s s i o n o f s c u l p t u r e from a l l c u l t u r e s o f the w o r l d w h i c h would have i n d i c a t e d a s e n s i t i v i t y t o t h e s t u d e n t s ' m u l t i c u l t u r a l r o o t s . On the o t h e r hand, t h e y d i d n o t use examples o f Western a r t ! A t p r e s e n t , w i t h the advent o f a new Secondary A r t C u r r i c u l u m , t h e s e answers might have r e f l e c t e d new needs i n the a r e a s o f h i s t o r y and c r i t i c i s m . I n the a r e a o f why s c u l p t u r e s h o u l d be t a u g h t and what i t has t o o f f e r t h a t o t h e r forms o f the v i s u a l a r t s do not p r o v i d e , many r e s p o n d i n g t e a c h e r s p r o v i d e d s e n s i t i v e and i n t e r e s t i n g ob- s e r v a t i o n s . These v a r i e d from t h e g e n e r a l , such as " c h i l d r e n seem t o e n j o y t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l work," and t h a t they "don't g e t enough such e x p e r i e n c e , " o r t h a t "most a r t programmes emphasize o n l y t w o d i m e n s i o n a l forms," t o s p e c i f i c s , such as s c u l p t u r e b e i n g "more p h y s i c a l , " t h a t i t p r o v i d e s " o p p o r t u n i t y t o g a i n s k i l l i n use o f new t o o l s , " t h a t i t i s a " t a c t i l e e x p e r i e n c e " which encourages the "use o f senses i n t o u c h , " and t h e " u s i n g o f hands f o r o t h e r t h a n c u t , p a s t e , c o l o u r , " o r even f o r " b l i n d 4. e x e r c i s e s . " One respondent o b s e r v e d t h a t s c u l p t u r e "teaches dimensions and p r o p o r t i o n s " but d i d not e l a b o r a t e i n which way t h i s might be more so t h a n any o t h e r form o f t h e v i s u a l a r t s . Another p e r s o n wrote t h a t s c u l p t u r e " g i v e s t h e t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l a s p e c t t h a t drawing o r p a i n t i n g c a n ' t d e v e l o p , CthatH p e r s p e c - t i v e becomes more e a s i l y u n d e r s t o o d and a p p r e c i a t e d , [ t h a t ] o v e r a l l p e r c e p t i o n improves due t o added a p p r e c i a t i o n o f depth (from a l l s i d e s , t o p and bottom).." Two i n t e r e s t i n g f u r t h e r com- ments p o i n t t o o t h e r l e a r n i n g outcomes, namely, t h a t s c u l p t u r e a s s i s t s i n " d e v e l o p i n g the a d d i t i v e / s u b t r a c t i v e t h i n k i n g p r o - c e s s , " and t h a t by d o i n g i t , s t u d e n t s " l e a r n s u s t a i n e d a r t i s t i c stamina." One o f the more c o n t r o v e r s i a l comments s t a t e s t h a t s c u l p t u r a l a c t i v i t y " i s a n a t u r a l development o f a t t r i b u t e s CthatH the human mind p o s s e s s e s . " I n c o n c l u s i o n , I quote t h o s e t e a c h e r s who gave what c o u l d be r e g a r d e d as the most fundamental r e a s o n f o r t h e t e a c h i n g o f s c u l p t u r e i n secondary s c h o o l s . One s a i d t h a t s c u l p t u r e i s " i m p o r t a n t i n making s t u d e n t s aware o f the t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l environment," a n o t h e r t h a t "the w o r l d i s not t w o d i m e n s i o n a l , " and a t h i r d s i m p l y s t a t e d t h a t s c u l p t u r e " g i v e s s t u d e n t s an i d e a o f t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l form w h i c h i s what t h e y see." The Purpose o f t h e T h e s i s The o r i g i n a l r a t i o n a l e f o r the p r e p a r a t i o n o f t h e s e c u r r i - culum m a t e r i a l s was based on a p e r c e i v e d l a c k o f p r e p a r a t i o n f o r 5. i n s t r u c t i o n i n s c u l p t u r e . Inasmuch as t h e t e a c h i n g o f s c u l p t u r e i s s u p p o r t e d i n the new P r o v i n c i a l Secondary A r t C u r r i c u l u m s c h e d u l e d f o r f u l l i m p l e m e n t a t i o n i n September 1984, the problem became a c u t e . One o f t h e f i v e v i s u a l e x p r e s s i o n a r e a s o f t h a t c u r r i c u l u m d e a l s w i t h t h e t e a c h i n g o f s c u l p t u r e t h r o u g h the s t u d y o f a r t h i s t o r y , the p r a c t i c e o f a r t c r i t i c i s m , and the making o f s c u l p t u r e . T h i s t h e s i s i s meant t o p r o v i d e v i a b l e and p r a c t i c a l s u g g e s t i o n s t o t e a c h e r s o f a r t f o r the i m p l e m e n t a t i o n o f t h e s c u l p t u r e s e c t i o n o f the new c u r r i c u l u m . S c u l p t u r e d e a l s w i t h themes such as t h e human f i g u r e , p o r - t r a i t u r e , a n i m a l s , n a t u r a l forms and g e o m e t r i c shapes i n ab- s t r a c t s c u l p t u r e , and m a n i f e s t s i t s e l f i n two t y p e s o f work: s c u l p t u r e i n the round o r as a r e l i e f . I n o r d e r t o d e l i m i t a t e t h i s s t u d y , a d e c i s i o n had t o be made as t o which theme and which type o f s c u l p t u r e t o use. S c u l p t u r e i n t h e round was chosen; i t i s more d i f f i c u l t because o f i t s f u l l t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l q u a l i t y , and i t s g r e a t e r c o n t r a s t t o a l l t h e o t h e r t w o d i m e n s i o n a l e x p r e s s i o n s i n a r t . The theme o f t h e human f i g u r e was s e l e c t e d , a g a i n f o r i t s . r e l a t i v e d i f f i c u l t y and c o m p l e x i t y o f form, and f o r i t s p o t e n t i a l f o r p s y c h o l o g i c a l growth i n a d o l e s c e n t s . Exposure t o t h e m u l t i t u d e o f r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s o f t h e human f i g u r e o r i g i n a t i n g i n d i v e r s e c u l t u r e s , d i f f e r e n t time p e r i o d s , and by a g r e a t v a r i e t y o f a r t i s t s s h o u l d communicate t h e v a l u e p l a c e d on t h e human body as a wondrously e x p r e s s i v e t o o l f o r the p o r t r a y a l o f the human c o n d i t i o n . The broad use and the mani- f o l d appearance o f the human f i g u r e c r e a t e d by s c u l p t o r s h i s t o r - i c a l l y and c r o s s - c u l t u r a l l y s h o u l d a i d a d o l e s c e n t s i n a c c e p t i n g 6. themselves as they a r e , even i f they do not conform t o the i d e a l which t h e i n f l u e n c e o f the media makes them want t o resemble. To s t r e n g t h e n t h e s e l f - e s t e e m o f a d o l e s c e n t s a t t h i s s e n s i t i v e s t a g e o f t h e i r development i s one o f the g o a l s o f t h i s c u r r i c u - lum r e s o u r c e . At the same t i m e , a n o t h e r g o a l may be a c h i e v e d t h r o u g h t h e s t u d y o f a r t h i s t o r y , which w i l l e n a b l e s t u d e n t s t o l e a r n t o r e c o g n i z e time p e r i o d s , p l a c e s o f o r i g i n , and s t y l e s o f g i v e n a r t i s t s t h r o u g h s t u d y o f the works on t h e s l i d e s . Men and women a r e p o r t r a y e d i n s c u l p t u r e o f the f i g u r e , and t h e i r hopes, a s p i r a t i o n s , sorrows and d e s p a i r , as w e l l as achievements f i n d e x p r e s s i o n t h e r e , and c a l l f o r i n t e r p r e t a t i o n . R e f l e c t i n g on what t h e work t e l l s us about t h e s o c i e t a l and p e r s o n a l v a l u e s o f i t s t i m e , d e v e l o p i n g empathy w i t h the f e e l - i n g s and i n t e n t i o n s o f t h e a r t i s t who made the f i g u r e , w i l l p r o - v i d e the v o c a b u l a r y f o r reasoned c r i t i c i s m , as w e l l as an ap- p r e c i a t i o n o f t h e a r t i s t ' s r o l e i n s o c i e t y . Such d i s c u s s i o n w i l l b r i d g e t h e gap between d i v e r g e n t c u l t u r e s , and span d i f f e r - ences i n t i m e . Examples o f c r i t i c i s m based on a number o f themes a r e p r o v i d e d as s u g g e s t i o n s o f how t o approach such c r i t - i c a l a n a l y s i s . S t u d i o a c t i v i t i e s were c a r e f u l l y s e l e c t e d f o r t h e i r s u i t a - b i l i t y i n t h e secondary s c h o o l s e t t i n g . A l l u n i t p l a n s have been t h o r o u g h l y and r e p e a t e d l y t e s t e d by m y s e l f i n the c l a s s r o o m . P r e p a r a t o r y a c t i v i t i e s i n c l u d e f i g u r e d r a w i n g , the study of an- atomy, and the making o f a maquette; a l l c o n s i d e r e d i m p o r t a n t p r i o r t o i n v o l v e m e n t i n s t u d i o work. Suggested methods and m a t e r i a l s a r e d e t a i l e d and s p e c i f i c , but they i n c l u d e fewer i n 7. number t h a n the P r o v i n c i a l c u r r i c u l u m . T h i s i s a d e l i b e r a t e o m i s s i o n , as many o f t h e m a t e r i a l s and p r o c e s s e s suggested i n the g u i d e seem, i n my e x p e r i e n c e , beyond the scope o f t h e s e c - ondary s c h o o l t i m e t a b l e and f a c i l i t i e s and beyond t h e t e c h n i c a l e x p e r t i s e o f most a r t t e a c h e r s . However, as photographs o f some s t u d e n t work demonstrate (see P l a t e s 1, 2 and 3 ) , most s a t i s - f a c t o r y outcomes can be a c h i e v e d b o t h a t t h e b a s i c and the ad- vanced l e v e l w i t h t h e s e s t u d i o a c t i v i t i e s . S t u d e n t s w i l l g a i n knowledge o f the p r o p o r t i o n s o f the body, t h e y w i l l come t o p e r - c e i v e i t as u n i f i e d form, t h e r e b y overcoming t h e i r f r e q u e n t l y fragmented view of the body. S t u d e n t s w i l l use t h e t a c t i l e s e n s e s , and g a i n s k i l l s w i t h t o o l s and m a t e r i a l s o f s c u l p t u r e . F u r t h e r m o r e , t h e y w i l l e x t e n d t h e i r a t t e n t i o n span t h r o u g h l e n g t h i e r i n v o l v e m e n t , w h i c h such work i n s c u l p t u r e n e c e s s i t a t e s . A l t h o u g h t h i s t h e s i s d e a l s w i t h the human f i g u r e o n l y , much o f the methodology might be t r a n s f e r r e d t o o t h e r a r e a s o f s c u l p t u r e . P l a t e 1 H a l f l i f e - s i z e f i g u r e s under c o n s t r u c t i o n i n the a r t room P l a t e 2 Enlargement o f the maquette w i t h p l a s t e r o f P a r i s on armature P l a t e 3 D i s p l a y o f s t u d e n t work 11. Why Teach S c u l p t u r e o f the Human F i g u r e t o A d o l e s c e n t s ? We a r e surrounded by a n a t u r a l and man-made environment o f t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l i t y . Indeed, the c e n t r e o f our p e r s o n a l u n i - v e r s e , t h e m a n i f e s t a t i o n o f our e x i s t e n c e , i s our v e r y t h r e e - d i m e n s i o n a l body. I n t e r e s t i n , and awareness o f the p h y s i c a l appearance o f t h e body i s h e i g h t e n e d i n a d o l e s c e n c e . Through- out l i f e we may a t t i m e s l o v e o r hate our b o d i e s but always p a r t o f our s e l f - i m a g e i s d e t e r m i n e d by t h e p e r c e p t i o n o f t h e appearance o f i t . A d o l e s c e n c e , a t i m e o f tumultuous growth and g r e a t s e n s i - t i v i t y , i s a good time t o o p e n l y d e a l w i t h a s p e c t s o f a r t i s t i c i n t e r e s t s and concerns w i t h t h e human f i g u r e . V i e w i n g and d i s - c u s s i n g s l i d e s o f s c u l p t u r e made by a m u l t i t u d e o f s c u l p t o r s , o r i g i n a t i n g from v a s t l y d i f f e r e n t c u l t u r e s and time p e r i o d s o f human h i s t o r y but a l l e x p r e s s e d t h r o u g h the f i g u r e , a f f o r d a b r o a d e n i n g o f t h e spectrum i n which the human body i s viewed i n our s o c i e t y . I n d i v i d u a l f a m i l y customs and taboos v a r y g r e a t l y i n our m u l t i c u l t u r a l s o c i e t y but a s i d e from t h i s , the i n f l u e n c e o f the media t h r o u g h t e l e v i s i o n and a d v e r t i s i n g i s c l e a r l y t o - wards "youth c u l t u r e " and the b e a u t i f u l , s l i m body o f a " C h e r y l T i e g s . " Our a d o l e s c e n t s who do not measure up t o the i d e a l o f our N o r t h American s o c i e t y c o u l d be s e r i o u s l y damaged i n t h e i r s e l f - e s t e e m u n l e s s c o n c e p t s o f the human body, o t h e r t h a n media- h e l d and appearance-based, a r e i n t r o d u c e d t o them. S u b j e c t areas such as p h y s i c a l e d u c a t i o n o r b i o l o g y no doubt make con- t r i b u t i o n s t o t h e p e r c e p t i o n o f t h e body as a m i r a c u l o u s l y e f f i c i e n t c r e a t i o n . Y e t t h e v i s u a l a r t s , and i n p a r t i c u l a r s c u l p t u r e , can add a most v a l u a b l e d i m e n s i o n . Feldman (197 3) compares s c u l p t u r e t o o t h e r forms of v i s u a l a r t s when he says t h a t , "The c a p a c i t y o f s c u l p t u r e , no m a t t e r what i t s m a t e r i a l s , t o occupy r e a l space and t o compel b e l i e f i n i t s a l i v e n e s s d i s t i n g u i s h e s i t from p a i n t i n g and g r a p h i c a r t i n g e n e r a l " (p. 328). T h i s a l i v e n e s s o f s c u l p t u r e i s p a r t i c u - l a r l y e f f e c t i v e when i t d e a l s w i t h t h e human f i g u r e . S c u l p t u r e , as a r u l e , s t a n d s by i t s e l f and does not i n c l u d e the environment as p a r t o f t h e work. I f i t uses the s u b j e c t o f the human f i g u r e , we o f t e n see o u r s e l v e s i n i t , and i n t h i s sense i t may become "everyman." The s c u l p t o r may choose from the young o r the grow- i n g f i g u r e , t h e mature or t h e d e c a y i n g f i g u r e , t h e h e a l t h y o r the i l l , and from many body t y p e s o f d i f f e r i n g p r o p o r t i o n s . I n a d d i t i o n t o t h e s e , t h e r e a r e the i n f i n i t e v a r i e t i e s o f p o s e s , t h e body i n motion o r a t r e s t , the use f o r t h e e x p r e s s i o n o f emotions, t h o u g h t and a c t i o n s . D e s p a i r o r hope, h a p p i n e s s o r sorrow, d e p r e s s i o n o r e l a t i o n , h e r o i s m o r c o w a r d i c e , boredom o r t r a n q u i l l i t y , e x c i t e m e n t o r a c t i o n , a r e among t h e many moods which can be e x p r e s s e d w i t h t h e human f i g u r e t h r o u g h the h e i g h - t e n e d s e n s i t i v i t y o f the a r t i s t . I n a d o l e s c e n c e many o f t h e above f e e l i n g s a r e s t r o n g l y m a n i f e s t and r a p i d l y a l t e r n a t i n g , t h e r e f o r e exposure t o the s t u d y o f s c u l p t u r e o f the f i g u r e a t t h i s time t h r o u g h h e i g h t e n e d empathy, can l e a v e a l a s t i n g im- p r e s s i o n . The i m p r e s s i o n g a i n e d from t h e study o f s c u l p t u r e o f the f i g u r e from d i f f e r e n t p e r i o d s and p l a c e s can be l i b e r a t i n g f o r our a d o l e s c e n t s . L o o k i n g a t , and t a l k i n g about how the nude or draped body e x p r e s s e s b e l i e f s and customs o f the time and c u l - t u r e can be i n t e r e s t i n g and i n s i g h t f u l . At the same t i m e , w h i l e v i e w i n g and d i s c u s s i n g a m u l t i t u d e o f s l i d e s , the s t u d e n t s a r e bound t o p e r c e i v e t h a t each body type o r age has i t s e x p r e s - s i v e f o r c e , i t s d i g n i t y and use, and t h e r e f o r e a c e r t a i n "beauty" which i s much more t h a n s k i n - d e e p . They w i l l a l s o l e a r n o f t h e acceptance o f t h e f i g u r e as a m a n i f e s t a t i o n o f our humanity, worldwide and as o l d as mankind, and a r e bound t o be f a v o u r a b l y a f f e c t e d i n the a c c e p t a n c e o f t h e i r own appearance and o f them- s e l v e s . The p s y c h o l o g i c a l impact o f h i s t o r i c a l o v e r v i e w and c r i t - i c a l d i s c u s s i o n o f the f i g u r e may be f u r t h e r broadened by s t u d i o a c t i v i t y . They seem t o p r e p a r e t h e ground f o r e x p r e s s i o n and c r e a t i o n o f s c u l p t u r e o f t h e f i g u r e by the s t u d e n t s t h e m s e l v e s . T h i s p r o v i d e s the o p p o r t u n i t y t o d i r e c t l y and o p e n l y d e a l w i t h a f i g u r e o f t h e i r own making not o n l y i n v o l v i n g the t a c t i l e senses b u t a c t i v a t i n g a l e a r n i n g p r o c e s s r e g a r d i n g t h e p r o p o r - t i o n s o f the body which l e a d s away from a fragmented p e r c e p t i o n o f t h e body t h e y seem t o p o s s e s s , t o a u n i f i e d image o f i t . As an example, a d o l e s c e n t s p e r c e i v e t h e i r arm and hand but most f r e q u e n t l y don't know how i t r e l a t e s p r o p o r t i o n a t e l y t o t h e i r body. They a r e o f t e n s u r p r i s e d t o f i n d the arm l o n g e r t h a n they would have t h o u g h t , the elbow near the w a i s t and the hand e n d i n g not f a r above the knee. Or e l s e they know t h a t t h e y have s h o u l - d e r s but do not know how t h e arm i s a t t a c h e d t o t h e body. D i s - c o v e r i e s o f t h i s n a t u r e a r e f r e q u e n t w h i l e t h e y are w o r k i n g on 14. a f i g u r e . A t t h i s p o i n t marked d i f f e r e n c e s may be o b s e r v e d be- tween j u n i o r and s e n i o r secondary s c h o o l s t u d e n t s . I t i s o b s e r v a b l e i n my own c l a s s e s t h a t grade 8 o r 9 s t u d - e n t s have l e s s apparent i n h i b i t i o n s but a l s o l e s s knowledge o f p r o p o r t i o n s o r even l a c k knowledge o f c e r t a i n p a r t s o f the body. They seem m o s t l y t o s t r u g g l e t o a c h i e v e a l i k e n e s s t o a body. I t i s i n t e r e s t i n g t o observe t h a t they o f t e n l e a v e o u t t h e a r e a between w a i s t l i n e and l o i n s and a t t a c h the l e g s t o the w a i s t . L e a v i n g out the lower t r u n k might suggest i n h i b i t i o n s r e l a t e d t o t h e i r s e x u a l i t y . T h i s p o i n t might be f u r t h e r suppor- t e d by t h e tendency o f b o t h g i r l s and boys t o choose t o c r e a t e a male f i g u r e . Those who choose t h e female f i g u r e e x p e r i e n c e g r e a t d i f f i c u l t i e s m o d e l l i n g t h e b r e a s t s e i t h e r from i n h i b i t i o n o r s i m p l y because o f l a c k o f knowledge. F u r t h e r , t h e r e i s a g e n e r a l p u p p e t - l i k e s t i f f n e s s and l a c k o f i n v e n t i v e n e s s o f move- ment i n the work o f t h i s age group, e s p e c i a l l y o b v i o u s when one views t h e work o f a whole c l a s s . S e n i o r s t u d e n t s , i n c o n t r a s t , even i f w i t h o u t p r e v i o u s t r a i n i n g i n a r t , seem t o have a b e t t e r knowledge o f and f e e l i n g f o r t h e body. They m a n i f e s t a much i n c r e a s e d i n t e r e s t i n spend- i n g a g r e a t l e n g t h o f time w o r k i n g on s c u l p t u r e o f t h e f i g u r e . They t e n d t o demand a c c u r a c y i n d e p i c t i n g t h e body r e a l i s t i c - a l l y , and t h e y use a g r e a t v a r i e t y o f p o s e s . The b r o o d i n g , s t i f f e r poses o f j u n i o r s t u d e n t s g i v e way now t o f r e q u e n t i n - t e r p r e t a t i o n s o f a t h l e t e s i n a c t i o n . However, r e g a r d l e s s of the s u b j e c t chosen t o be e x p r e s s e d w i t h the f i g u r e , o t h e r impor- t a n t l e a r n i n g outcomes a r e t h e l e n g t h e n e d a t t e n t i o n span, the 15. s t a y i n g power w i t h one p r o j e c t e x t e n d i n g o v e r s e v e r a l weeks, and the i n t e r e s t and p r i d e t h e y t a k e i n t h e q u a l i t y o f the f i n - i s h e d p r o d u c t . These i n d e e d a r e c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s o f a r t c r e a t e d by mature a r t i s t s . Our dependence on and r e l a t i o n s h i p t o our b o d i e s forms an i m p o r t a n t p a r t o f how we cope w i t h l i f e i t s e l f . An i n c r e a s e d u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f the s t r u c t u r e and the e x p r e s s i v e q u a l i t y o f t h e human body, whether our own o r t h a t o f our f e l l o w men can o n l y enhance t h e q u a l i t y o f our l i f e . A d o l e s c e n c e i s an a p p r o p r i a t e time t o g a i n such knowledge. Chapter I I DEVELOPMENT OF THE CURRICULUM RESOURCES Purpose o f S l i d e s The s l i d e s a r e o f paramount importance as a l l u n i t p l a n s use them as l e s s o n a i d s . A major p a r t o f the r e s e a r c h was de- v o t e d t o t h e s e l e c t i o n o f s c u l p t u r e , and s l i d e s o f t h e s e had t o be made f o r i l l u s t r a t i o n o f a l l t h e f a c e t s o f s c u l p t u r e e x p l o r e d i n t h i s t h e s i s . Beyond t h i s , t h e s l i d e s have t h e p o t e n t i a l t o be used i n many o t h e r l e s s o n s . The f i r s t c o n s i d e r a t i o n i n the s e l e c t i o n o f works f o r s l i d e s was an a l l - e n c o m p a s s i n g purpose: t o i l l u s t r a t e the en- t i r e h i s t o r y o f s c u l p t u r e o f t h e human f i g u r e from P r e h i s t o r y t o t h e 1980's, w o r l d w i d e , and from a l l c u l t u r e s which produced s c u l p t u r e s o f t h e f i g u r e . To a c h i e v e such c o v e r a g e , t h e r e l e - v a n t h i s t o r y o f a r t was d i v i d e d i n t o c o n v e n i e n t c h a p t e r s . P r e - h i s t o r y was f i r s t , then came P r i m i t i v e A r t , f o r which t h e d e c i s - i o n was made t o keep i t as a group f o l l o w i n g P r e h i s t o r y . A l - though c h r o n o l o g i c a l l y i t would not b e l o n g t h e r e , i t was p l a c e d t h e r e f o r t h e sake of the s t y l i s t i c and f u n c t i o n a l c o n n e c t i o n s ; the w i l l i n g n e s s t o d i s t o r t t h e f i g u r e f o r t h e e x p r e s s i o n o f r i t - u a l b e l i e f s . F u r t h e r g r o u p i n g o f the s l i d e s f o l l o w s g e o g r a p h i c a l a r e a s such as the F a r E a s t , the M i d d l e E a s t , and Egypt. From t h i s p o i n t t h e s l i d e s c o v e r t h e major a r e a s o f the h i s t o r y o f Western a r t . By the 17th c e n t u r y , the g r o u p i n g becomes c h r o n o l o g i c a l . The many movements i n Western a r t o f the 20th c e n t u r y a r e not c o n s i d e r e d i n d e t a i l , a l t h o u g h t h e r e i s s u i t a b l e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f s t y l e s , so t h e s l i d e s might be used f o r t h i s purpose. The f i n a l s l i d e s i l l u s t r a t i n g the h i s t o r y o f a r t i n - c l u d e s c u l p t o r s o f t h e f i g u r e from b o t h Europe and N o r t h Amer- i c a , up t o and i n c l u d i n g 1981. C o n s i d e r a t i o n was g i v e n t o r e p - r e s e n t i n g s e v e r a l l o c a l Lower M a i n l a n d s c u l p t o r s o f t h e f i g u r e . T h i s b r o a d e r but more s u p e r f i c i a l coverage was abandoned i n f a - vour o f an i n - d e p t h approach t o one Vancouver s c u l p t o r , E l e k Imredy, whose work s e r v e s t o i l l u s t r a t e beyond the h i s t o r i c a l a s p e c t , many o t h e r a r e a s o f t h i s c u r r i c u l u m . Lower M a i n l a n d s c u l p t o r s are f e a t u r e d i n d e t a i l i n Susanne McFeely's t h e s i s e n t i t l e d , "Teaching S c u l p t u r e : a r a t i o n a l e and r e s o u r c e k i t " (1983). As w e l l as g i v i n g an o v e r v i e w o f t h e h i s t o r y o f a r t , t h e 398 s l i d e s a l s o p r o v i d e the u n d e r p i n n i n g s f o r t h e i l l u s t r a t i o n o f c o n c e p t s o f s c u l p t u r e such as t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l i t y , form, mass, volume, m o n u m e n t a l i t y , as w e l l as f o r t h e s u b j e c t a r e a s chosen f o r c r i t i c a l d i s c u s s i o n . The t o p i c s which a r e used f o r a r t c r i t i c i s m and i n t e r p r e t a t i o n a r e a sample o f many more p o s s i b i l - i t i e s . One c o u l d choose o t h e r s c u l p t u r a l themes, o r make com- p a r i s o n s between s t y l e s o r a r t i s t s . The s l i d e s c o u l d s e r v e as a r e s o u r c e and as l e s s o n a i d s i n many a r t t e a c h i n g s i t u a t i o n s . S t u d i o a c t i v i t i e s are a l s o enhanced by the use o f t h e s l i d e s , and 33 s l i d e s a r e i n c l u d e d t o h e l p w i t h t h e t e a c h i n g o f a r t anatomy and f i g u r e d r a w i n g . I n a d d i t i o n t o a l l the a f o r e c i t e d p r a c t i c a l p u r p o s e s , the s e l e c t i o n o f s c u l p t u r e s was a l s o made w i t h the c o n s t a n t purpose 18. i n mind t h a t t h e y a r e t o be viewed by a d o l e s c e n t s . Works were i n c l u d e d , and some were l e f t o u t , w i t h the aim o f s p a r k i n g the i n t e r e s t o f a d o l e s c e n t s . I n v a r i a b l y , works o f i m p o r t a n c e might have been m i s s e d . For t h e sake o f l i m i t i n g the t o t a l number o f s l i d e s , o t h e r s were e x c l u d e d . I t i s p o s i t e d t h a t what i s i n - c l u d e d w i l l be used, and u s e f u l , i n t h e t e a c h i n g o f s c u l p t u r e o f t h e human f i g u r e i n secondary s c h o o l s . U n i t P l a n s I n t r o d u c t i o n t o S c u l p t u r e R a t i o n a l e : To p r e s e n t a g e n e r a l o v e r v i e w o f s c u l p t u r e , i t s unique q u a l i t i e s as opposed t o o t h e r a r e a s o f t h e v i s u a l a r t s , t h e con- c e p t s i t i n v o l v e s , and the methods and m a t e r i a l s used i n i t s making. G o a l : S t u d e n t s w i l l comprehend t h e d i f f e r e n c e between s c u l p t u r e and most o f the t w o d i m e n s i o n a l v i s u a l a r t s . O b j e c t i v e s : - An i n t r o d u c t o r y knowledge o f c o n c e p t s such as t h r e e d i m e n - s i o n a l i t y and monumentality. - A g e n e r a l knowledge o f p o s s i b l e d i f f e r e n c e s between o u t - door and i n d o o r s c u l p t u r e . - An o v e r v i e w o f methods and m a t e r i a l s used i n o u t d o o r and i n d o o r s c u l p t u r e . Resources: S l i d e s : No. 211 and 213 No. 139 and 140 No. 3 and 4 No. 388 and 391 No. 215 and 216 No. 51 and 6 9 No. 39, 42, 45 and 46 No. 251 and 252 Lesson a i d s : Endeavour t o purchase a good q u a l i t y r e p l i c a o f a s c u l p - t u r e such as the "Venus de M i l o " o r the " T h i n k e r " by R o d i n , o f which you need t o have a photograph o f a t l e a s t 8" by 11" i n s i z e , t a k e n from one a n g l e , u s u a l l y the f r o n t a l p o s i t i o n , and mounted on c a r d b o a r d . M a t e r i a l s f o r s t u d e n t use: Notebook t o t a k e n o t e s . D i s c u s s i o n : - H o l d up a p i e c e o f paper t o demonstrate what a t r u l y t w o d i m e n s i o n a l o b j e c t l o o k s l i k e . Ask s t u d e n t s t o g i v e you examples o f o t h e r t r u l y o r n e a r l y t w o d i m e n s i o n a l o b j e c t s i n our environment, such as b i l l b o a r d s , r e c o r d s , pancakes. Not many can be found. We are o u r s e l v e s t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l and most t h i n g s s u r r o u n d i n g us a r e 3 D. These have h e i g h t , w i d t h and depth. - Whereas a r t i s t s w o r k i n g on a 2 D s u r f a c e m o s t l y t r y t o c r e a t e t h e i l l u s i o n o f shape, d i s t a n c e and d e p t h , i n s c u l p t u r e shape and form a r e m a t e r i a l l y p r e s e n t . 20. - S c u l p t u r e w h i c h i s f u l l y t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l i s r e f e r r e d t o as " s c u l p t u r e i n t h e round." H o l d up the r e p l i c a o f a s c u l p t u r e you have a c q u i r e d , o r an o r i g i n a l one i f you have i t , and t h e photograph o f i t , both f a c i n g the s t u d e n t s from the same a n g l e . Ask them t o keep t h e i r eyes on t h e s c u l p t u r e which you now v e r y s l o w l y s h o u l d t u r n , c o m p l e t i n g a f u l l c i r c l e . Draw a t t e n t i o n t o t h e d i f f e r e n c e i n appearance o f t h e s c u l p t u r e from t h e many o t h e r a n g l e s seen. W e l l known s c u l p t u r e s such as the "Venus de M i l o " o r M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s " D a v i d " a r e sometimes not r e c o g n i z e d i f a photograph i s shown o f them t a k e n from a d i f f e r e n t a n g l e . S c u l p t u r e i n t h e round must l o o k d i f f e r e n t and s a t i s f a c t o r y from a l l a n g l e s . I t c o u l d be photographed from up t o 36 0 a n g l e s . T h e r e f o r e the s c u l p t o r must work on i t from a l l a n g l e s , p r e f e r - a b l y d e v e l o p i n g i t e v e n l y w h i l e t u r n i n g i t c o n s t a n t l y . - C o l o u r i s the l i f e b l o o d o f p a i n t i n g ; i t i s i t s most im- p o r t a n t d e s i g n element. C o l o u r i s seldom used i n s c u l p t u r e ; i t s major d e s i g n element i s form. Form can appear changed by l i g h t and shadow. A s c u l p t u r e completed can be, and must be sub- j e c t e d t o c h a n g i n g l i g h t and shadow but w h i l e i t i s c r e a t e d , and i n o r d e r t o ensure t h e p u r i t y and completeness o f form as the s c u l p t o r w i s h e s i t t o e x i s t , i t must be made i n even l i g h t and p r e f e r a b l y n o r t h e r n l i g h t w h i c h i s l e a s t l i k e l y t o c a s t s t r o n g shadows. Form can t r u l y be comprehended not o n l y by t h e eye but a l s o by t o u c h . I t s h o u l d be p o s s i b l e t o t o u c h a l l s c u l p t u r e t o e n j o y i t more c o m p l e t e l y . - Photographs o f s c u l p t u r e can not r e a l l y convey the f u l l impact o f i t s p r e s e n c e i n space. As we have seen, many photo- graphs would have t o be seen t o do j u s t i c e t o the c h a n g i n g forms 21. and shapes. But the s i z e o f a s c u l p t u r e i s a l s o o n l y a guess i f we see i t on a photograph. Some s c u l p t u r e l o o k s v e r y l a r g e on a photograph even i f i t i s s m a l l i n a c t u a l i t y . T h i s i s what i s r e f e r r e d t o as "monumentality." The word o r i g i n a t e s from monument, and monuments were commonly l a r g e . The s i z e o f a s c u l p t u r e i s i m p o r t a n t t o t h e s c u l p t o r when he p l a n s a p i e c e , so he must know whether i t i s g o i n g t o be l o c a t e d o u t d o o r s o r i n - d o o r s . - Outdoor s c u l p t u r e i s s u r r o u n d e d by open a i r , sky above, and o f t e n b u i l d i n g s nearby. I t s s c a l e must be r e l a t e d t o the l a r g e f e a t u r e s o f b u i l d i n g s and o f n a t u r e . I t must be b i g t o be seen. I t a l s o must be o f d u r a b l e m a t e r i a l s as i t i s exposed t o the weather y e a r around. Indoor s c u l p t u r e can be o f any ma- t e r i a l and, depending on t h e room, m o s t l y o f s m a l l e r s i z e . D i s c u s s w i t h t h e s t u d e n t s any outdoor s c u l p t u r e i n your a r e a . I f i n the Lower M a i n l a n d o f B r i t i s h Columbia, examples can be d i s c u s s e d , o r v i s i t e d i f f i e l d t r i p s are a p o s s i b i l i t y . Examples a r e : "Gassy J a c k " i n Gastown; the " F a m i l y " by J a c k Harman i n f r o n t o f the P a c i f i c P r e s s b u i l d i n g ; " B a n n i s t e r and Landy" by J a c k Harman a t t h e P a c i f i c N a t i o n a l E x h i b i t i o n ; the " K n i f e ' s Edge" by Henry Moore on L i t t l e Mountain; t h e "Crab" by George N o r r i s i n f r o n t o f t h e P l a n e t a r i u m , and many more. S u i t - a b l e m a t e r i a l s f o r o u t d o o r s c u l p t u r e depend on t h e c l i m a t e . I n t h e Lower M a i n l a n d m e t a l i s a p r i o r i t y , a l t h o u g h l o n g l a s t i n g m a t e r i a l s g e n e r a l l y i n c l u d e stone and, more r e c e n t l y , f i b r e g l a s s . - Major groups o f m a t e r i a l s a r e as f o l l o w s : Stone, c o n s i s t i n g o f t h e h a r d e s t , g r a n i t e ; t h e most p o p u l a r , marble; and s o f t e r ones such as l i m e s t o n e , sandstone and soap- s t o n e . Stone i s q u a r r i e d ; i t i s p a r t o f a mountain. The most famous q u a r r i e s f o r marble a r e i n I t a l y . S c u l p t o r s o f t e n go t o q u a r r i e s t o p i c k out a p a r t i c u l a r b l o c k o f s t o n e . M i c h e l a n g e l o d i d t h i s i n h i s time i n I t a l y . Those famous q u a r r i e s s t i l l ex- i s t — V e r o n a r e d marble o r C a r r a r a w h i t e marble a r e examples. Wood i s a n o t h e r i m p o r t a n t group o f m a t e r i a l s f o r s c u l p t u r e and t h e r e a r e many k i n d s o f woods used. The h a r d e s t wood comes from A f r i c a : ebony which i s b l a c k , o r " l i g n u m v i t a e , " t h e "wood o f l i f e . " The s o f t e s t wood i s b a l s a , and t h e r e a r e many i n between M e t a l i s the t h i r d most i m p o r t a n t group o f m a t e r i a l s used f o r s c u l p t u r e . The most f a v o u r e d by s c u l p t o r s i s b r o n z e , which i s an a l l o y , and can be t r e a t e d t o become c o l o u r e d green o r g o l d o r dark brown. Other m e t a l s used are s t e e l , aluminum, g o l d and s i l v e r , among o t h e r s . Copper i s r a r e l y used by i t s e l f as i t o x i d i z e s and even d e t e r i o r a t e s o u t d o o r s . The M i s c e l l a n e o u s group o f m a t e r i a l s i n c l u d e s the.:modern p l a s t i c s such as f i b r e g l a s s o r r e s i n s , p l a s t e r o f P a r i s , con- c r e t e o r c a s t s t o n e , t h e a l l i m p o r t a n t c l a y o r t e r r a - c o t t a s c u l p t u r e , and s e v e r a l more. Some o f t h e s e m a t e r i a l s can be used i n more t h a n one way. T h i s l e a d s t o t h e f i n a l c o n s i d e r a t i o n , t h a t o f methods used t o make s c u l p t u r e . - Two f u n d a m e n t a l l y opposed methods c o v e r most s t u d i o work i n s c u l p t u r e . The p r o c e s s e s a r e : b u i l d i n g up o r a d d i n g , and t a k i n g away o r c a r v i n g . B u i l d i n g up, o r a d d i n g may be done i n c l a y , o r p a p i e r mache, o r p l a s t e r o f P a r i s on w i r e , o r m e t a l p i e c e s s o l d e r e d o r welded t o g e t h e r , o r c o n s t r u c t e d from b a l s a wood, c a r d b o a r d , e t c . Claywork may be l e f t i n c l a y , f i r e d i n a k i l n and t h u s t r a n s - formed i n t o t e r r a - c o t t a (baked e a r t h ) s c u l p t u r e , o r i t may be c a s t i n t o p l a s t e r o f P a r i s o r b r o n z e , o r o t h e r m a t e r i a l s . Wax i s a l s o used t o b u i l d up s c u l p t u r e but i f l e f t w i t h o u t c a s t i n g i n t o a more permanent m a t e r i a l , i t c o u l d e a s i l y d e t e r i o r a t e due t o h e a t . T a k i n g away, s u b t r a c t i n g o r c a r v i n g t a k e s p l a c e when a b l o c k o f s t o n e , wood, o r p l a s t e r o f P a r i s i s reduced t o a s c u l p t u r e by, q u o t i n g M i c h e l a n g e l o , "removing the m a t e r i a l which i s s u p e r f l u - ous." V i s u a l i z i n g t h e f i n a l s c u l p t u r e i n o r d e r not t o remove what i s needed can be g r e a t l y a i d e d by t h e m o d e l l i n g o f a s m a l l v e r s i o n o f t h e s c u l p t u r e i n c l a y , r e f e r r e d t o as a "maquette." -Demonstrate t h e f o l l o w i n g a s p e c t s o f t h e u n i t w i t h the a p p r o p r i a t e s l i d e s . S l i d e s No. 211 and 213, " V i c t o r y , " by M i c h e l a n g e l o , as seen from t h r e e a n g l e s , and No. 139 and 140, " V i c t o r y o f Samothrace," seen from two a n g l e s , t o demonstrate the v a r i e d views p r e - s e n t e d by 3 D. S l i d e s No. 3 and 4, the "Venus o f W i l l e n d o r f , " t o show i t s un- e x p e c t e d s m a l l s i z e . No. 388 and 391, " C h r i s t t h e Teacher," by Imredy, and No. 215 and 216, "Day," from the M e d i c i tomb by M i c h e l a n g e l o , t o show maquette and f i n a l s c u l p t u r e . S l i d e s 51 and 69, b o t h "Buddha" f i g u r e s o f s t o n e and b r o n z e , t o demonstrate inadequacy o f photographs t o guess s i z e o f work, 32 i n c h e s t o 37 f e e t r e s p e c t i v e l y . S l i d e s No. 39 and 42, B r i t i s h Columbia I n d i a n s ' wood f i g u r e s , the f i r s t 5 f t . 6 i n c h e s and 5 f t . 3 i n c h e s , the second 24 i n c h e s . A l s o s l i d e s No. 45 and 46 o f the "Naked Dancer made o f c o p p e r , from I n d i a , and o n l y 4% i n c h e s i n s i z e . These i l l u s t r a t e the l a r g e d i f f e r e n c e s i n s i z e not v i s i b l e from the photographs. S l i d e s No. 251 and 252, "Diana," by Houdon, the f i r s t the marbl o r i g i n a l which needed t h e v e g e t a t i o n as s u p p o r t f o r the f i g u r e , and the l a t e r bronze v e r s i o n which c a r r i e s the up- r i g h t f i g u r e w i t h o u t s u p p o r t w i t h the i n n a t e s t r e n g t h o f the m e t a l . H i s t o r i c a l Overview o f S c u l p t u r e o f the Human F i g u r e Based on 398 S l i d e s R a t i o n a l e : I n s c u l p t u r e , a r t i s t s have c o n s i s t e n t l y d e p i c t e d the human f i g u r e . An o v e r v i e w o f t h e h i s t o r y o f humankind can be t r a c e d t o some e x t e n t t h r o u g h t h e h i s t o r y o f s c u l p t u r e o f t h e human f i g u r e , as most c u l t u r e s p e r m i t t e d r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s o f i t . To l o o k a t such work d a t e d from 70,000 B.C. t o 1981 A.D., w o r l d - wide, t h r o u g h the eyes o f p r e h i s t o r i c , p r i m i t i v e , and s o p h i s t i - c a t e d a r t i s t s , expands h o r i z o n s and may make the s t u d e n t s t a k e p r i d e i n t h e i r humanity. G o a l : S t u d e n t s w i l l be g i v e n an o v e r v i e w o f the d i v e r s i t y o f hu- man images from t h e Ice Age o f t h e N e a n d e r t h a l e r s t o the urban d w e l l e r s o f p r e s e n t day N o r t h A m e r i c a , from p r i m i t i v e s o c i e t i e s o f p a s t and p r e s e n t , and from c u l t u r e s e x t i n c t as w e l l as from those s u r v i v i n g and t h r i v i n g t o d a y . O b j e c t i v e s : S t u d e n t s w i l l grow i n u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f humanity's s t r u g g l e f o r s u r v i v a l , and o f a r t used f o r the e x p r e s s i o n o f f e e l i n g s and b e l i e f s t h r o u g h o u t t h e c e n t u r i e s . They w i l l a l s o d e v e l o p the a b i l i t y t o r e c o g n i z e h i s t o r i c a l epochs, s t y l e s , c o u n t r i e s o f o r - i g i n , and s p e c i f i c s c u l p t o r s ' works as a r e s u l t o f v i e w i n g and d i s c u s s i n g t h e s l i d e s . Lesson a i d s : The complete l i s t o f s l i d e s i s a r r a n g e d a c c o r d i n g t o p e r - i o d s and s t y l e s o f a r t h i s t o r y . T h i s w i l l e n a b l e s t u d e n t s t o s t u d y a r t h i s t o r y i n d e t a i l , as seen t h r o u g h s c u l p t u r e o f the human f i g u r e , p r e s e n t e d o v e r s e v e r a l l e s s o n s . S l i d e s a r e grouped t h e f o l l o w i n g way: 1. P r e h i s t o r i c - from 70,000 B.C. 21,000 B.C. 15,000 B.C. 3,000 B.C. S l i d e No. 1 - 1 0 2. P r i m i t i v e M i c r o n e s i a n (11, 12) A f r i c a n (13 - 17) M e l a n e s i a n (18 - 21) P o l y n e s i a n (22 - 24) South American (25) M i d d l e American (26 - 31) 26 . I n u i t (32 - 26) N o r t h American I n d i a n (37 - 44) S l i d e No. 11 - 44 3. F a r E a s t e r n I n d i a (45 - 56) P a k i s t a n (57) J a v a (58) V i e t Nam (59) S r i Lanka (60) China (61 - 68) Japan (69 - 70) T h a i l a n d (71 - 72) Cambodia (73 - 77) S l i d e No. 45 - 77 4. Near and M i d d l e E a s t e r n Mesopotamian (78) Chaldean-Sumerian (79) Neo-Sumerian (80 - 81) P h o e n i c i a n (82) A s s y r i a n ( 8 3 - 8 4 ) Sumerian (85) S l i d e No. 78 - 85 5. E g y p t i a n S l i d e No. 86 -• 118 6. Greek S l i d e No. 119 - 143 7. E t r u s c a n S l i d e No. 144 - 148 8. Roman S l i d e No. 149 - 151 9. B y z a n t i n e S l i d e No. 152 10. Romanesque Slide No. 153 - 159 11. Gothic Slide No . 160 - 173 12. Renaissance Slide No. 174 - 198 13. Mannerism Slide No. 199 - 228 14. 17th and 18th Century Slide No. 229 - 255 (Baroque & Classical) 15. 19th Century Slide No. 256 - 293 16. 20th Century Slide No. 294 - 398 19th and 20th century art were purposely s i m p l i f i e d and movements such as Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cub- ism, Futurism, Dada, Formalist, C o n s t r u c t i v i s t , S u r r e a l i s t , Conceptualism were omitted, as they were f e l t to be outside the scope of t h i s t h e s i s . However, i f either a preliminary overview i s to be given to the students, or the history of art through the figure not to be taught i n depth, two shortened l i s t s of slides follow, as Tables 1 and 2. These are recommended for study for Senior or Junior Secondary students respectively, and w i l l permit an overview of sculpture of the figure both h i s t o r i c a l l y and c r o s s - c u l t u r a l l y . Discussion: Show the s l i d e s , a group at a time. Where applicable d i s - cuss the h i s t o r i c a l and geographical setting, and the national and s o c i a l background of the a r t i s t s . Students should do t h e i r own research, and be prepared to p a r t i c i p a t e i n the discussion of the works. An example of such a class discussion might be as follows. 28. P r e h i s t o r i c a r t : t a l k about the e n v i r o n m e n t a l c o n d i t i o n s o f E a r l y Man. N e a n d e r t h a l s l i v e d d u r i n g the I c e Age as w e l l as d u r i n g the somewhat warmer I n t e r - G l a c i a l P e r i o d . N e a n d e r t h a l a r t was found m o s t l y i n c a v e s , and seemed t o have begun about 35,000 y e a r s ago, peaked 15,000 y e a r s ago, and faded 10,000 y e a r s ago. More t h a n 200 caves were f o u n d , many o f t h e s e i n t h e South o f F r a n c e and the N o r t h o f S p a i n , but a l s o i n the Near and M i d d l e E a s t , as w e l l as i n A f r i c a . F o s s i l r e c o r d s o f N e a n d e r t h a l man were f i r s t found i n 1856 A.D., i n t h e v a l l e y o f the Neander R i v e r i n Germany. The v e r y f i r s t cave was d i s c o v e r e d due t o an a c c i d e n t , when a h u n t e r ' s dog f e l l i n t o i t a t A l t a m i r a , S p a i n . D u r i n g t h e dog's r e s c u e , the cave was f i r s t seen w i t h i t s w a l l s f u l l o f superb p a i n t i n g s . The owner o f the l a n d where A l t a m i r a l i e s e x p l o r e d t h e c a v e s , and p u b l i c i z e d h i s f i n d i n g s . He d i e d b e f o r e t h e a r t o f the cave was b e l i e v e d t o be made by E a r l y Man. I t was not a c c e p t e d because o f the supreme s k i l l s o f i t s a r t i s t s . Only when e v i d e n c e mounted w i t h the d i s c o v e r y o f many caves was cave a r t a c c e p t e d as genuine. S e v e r a l s o - c a l l e d "Venus" f i g u r e s were found a t p r e h i s t o r i c s i t e s ; t h e o l d e s t c a r v i n g o f bone d a t e d as f a r back as 70,000 y e a r s ago ( S l i d e No. 1 ) , which i s r e m a r k a b l e and most moving i n i t s "modern" s i m p l i c i t y . D a t i n g from a l a t e r p e r i o d , more such f i g u r e s were found; t h r e e o f t h e s e d a t e d from 21,000 B.C. t o 15,000 B.C. ( S l i d e No. 2 - 7 ) . However, more p a i n t e d cave a r t and fewer f i g u r e s s u r v i v e d , which might be a t t r i b u t e d t o the s m a l l s i z e o f t h e s e f i g u r e s , and which s u g g e s t s t h a t they were c a r r i e d around as a m u l e t s . Because o f t h e e x a g g e r a t e d f e m i n i n e p r o p o r t i o n s o f t h e s e f i g u r e s , t h e y a r e presumed t o be f e r t i l i t y f i g u r e s . The h a r s h c o n d i t i o n s o f c l i m a t e made the s u r v i v a l o f E a r l y Man p o s s i b l e o n l y i f he/she e x i s t e d i n r e a s o n a b l e numbers. N e a n d e r t h a l man might not have u n d e r s t o o d how c h i l d r e n were c r e a t e d b u t he knew women bore them and, t h e r e f o r e , the group's s u r v i v a l depended on them. "Sympathetic magic" was used t o b r i n g about s u c c e s s i n the h u n t , t h e r e f o r e the a n i m a l p a i n t i n g s on t h e cave w a l l s . S i m i l a r l y , the female f e r t i l i t y f i g u r e s were used f o r t h e c o n t i n u a t i o n o f the r a c e . N e a n d e r t h a l f o s s i l r e c o r d s d a t e E a r l y Man as a p p e a r i n g about 100,000 y e a r s ago, d u r i n g t h e somewhat warmer i n t e r g l a c i a l p e r i o d o f 130,000 - 70,000 y e a r s ago. Human p o p u l a t i o n e n t e r e d N o r t h A m e r i c a , p o s s i b l y from S i b e r i a , when g l a c i a t i o n l o w e r e d the sea l e v e l and t h e y c o u l d c r o s s t h e B e r i n g S t r a i t . T h i s might have begun 40,000 y e a r s ago. They r e a c h e d South America a t l e a s t 20,000 y e a r s ago. G r a d u a l l y , i n most p a r t s o f t h e w o r l d , t h e h u n t i n g - a n d - g a t h e r i n g way o f l i f e was r e p l a c e d by a g r i c u l t u r e . T h i s began i n some p a r t s o f t h e w o r l d as much as 10,000 y e a r s ago, and i n the Americas about 5,000 y e a r s ago. The cave a r t o f E a r l y Man was r e p l a c e d by a g e o m e t r i c s t y l e o f a r t w h i c h becomes e v i d e n t i n t h e l a t e r C y c l a d i c f i g u r e s d a t e d about the t h i r d m i l l e n i u m B.C. ( S l i d e No. 9 and 10). A c o m p a r i - son between the s t y l e s o f the P r e h i s t o r i c and C y c l a d i c "Venus" f i g u r e s can be seen on S l i d e No. 8. 30 . T a b l e 1 ^ , J ^ ,^ A S e l e c t i o n o f 140 S l i d e s f o r a B r i e f Overview o f t h e H i s t o r y o f S c u l p t u r e o f the F i g u r e f o r S e n i o r Secondary S t u d e n t s 1 P r e h i s t o r i c S l i d e No. 60 S r i Lanka 3 61 China 4 it 64 P r i m i t i v e : 69 Japan 16 N i g e r i a 71 T h a i l a n d 19 New Guinea 72 I I 24 E a s t e r I s l a n d 76 Cambodia 26 Mexico Near E a s t : 27 H 83 A s s y r i a 28 i i 86 Egypt 29 H 89 30 n 91 33 I n u i t 92 35 95 » 39 N. Am. I n d i a n S a l i s h 96 •• 41 K w a k i u t l 102 F a r E a s t : 104 45 I n d i a 105 49 n 108 » 51 I I 109 » 57 P a k i s t a n 110 116 3 1 . Greco-Roman: S l i d e No. 121 Greek 123 125 130 133 134 138 139 14 0 141 142 144 E t r u s c a n 146 14 9 Roman 150 155 156 157 159 160 166 167 Romanesque 12th C. G o t h i c 13th C. " . 14th C. 168 G o t h i c 15th i 172 i i i i 173 L a t e G o t h i c 176 D o n a t e l l o 178 I I 179 G h i b e r t i 180 I I 182 V e r r o c c h i o 187 C e l l i n i 188 H 189 I I 190 I I 199 M i c h e l a n g e l o 202 I I 203 I I 204 I I 215 I I 216 218 219 it 222 it 223 H 228 232 B e r n i n i S l i d e No. 294 M a i l l o l 233 i i 303 Lehmbruck 2 34 I I 309 B a r l a c h 240 Puget 311 S i n t e n i s 242 As am 314 Shadre 243 V i e i r a 319 S z e r v a t i u s z 249 F a l c o n e t 323 B r a n c u s i 251 Houdon 324 Bracho 252 336 M a r i n i 256 Canova 339 G i a c o m e t t i 262 P r e a u l t 340 N i l s s o n 264 Meunier 345 Moore 266 B a r t h o l d i 347 I I 267 I I 354 S e g a l 268 Rodin 355 B u t l e r 269 „ 356 It 271 358 M a r i s o l 272 359 M i l l e r 273 365 Wynne 275 » 366 284 » 367 L u c c h e s i 287 » 371 I I 293 P a r i s E x h i b . 1900 A.D. 372 I I Slide No. 373 374 375 376 377 382 383 388 391 de Andrea Hanson Morales I I Zuniga I I Imredy T a b l e 2 A S e l e c t i o n o f 86 S l i d e s f o r a More Condensed Overview o f S c u l p t u r e o f t h e F i g u r e Throughout the Ages, Around the W o r l d , f o r J u n i o r Secondary S t u d e n t s S l i d e No. 1 P r e h i s t o r i c Near E a s t : 4 S l i d e No. 84 A s s y r i a P r i m i t i v e : 89 Egypt 15 Congo 91 11 18 New Zealand 92 H 26 Mexico 102 I I 28 i t 108 I I 33 I n u i t 110 i t 35 I I 116 I I 41 N. Am. I n d i a n Greco-Roi F a r E a s t : 123 Greek 49 I n d i a 125 t i 51 I I 135 t i 57 P a k i s t a n 136 I I 60 S r i Lanka 137 i t 64 C h i n a 141 i i 65 146 E t r u s c a n 69 Japan 149 Roman 71 T h a i l a n d 151 i i 35. S l i d e No. 171 G o t h i c S l i d e No. 174 " 15th C. 178 D o n a t e l l o 193 da Bologna 199 M i c h e l a n g e l o 202 208 215 216 222 232 B e r n i n i 251 Houdon 252 25 8 Canova 2 71 Rodin 272 275 287 294 M a i l l o l 309 B a r l a c h 310 S i n t e n i s 311 329 Greco 336 M a r i n i 338 Manzu 339 G i a c o m e t t i 345 Moore 347 353 S e g a l 355 B u t l e r 364 Wynne 366 367 L u c c h e s i 370 374 Hanson 375 M o r a l e s 376 379 B a r e l i e r 384 E r h a r d y 386 Imredy 387 388 389 390 391 392 395 397 39 9 M i c h e l a n g e l o drawing 40 4 Moore " 406 . " 412 36. Anatomy o f the Human F i g u r e : The S k e l e t o n R a t i o n a l e : The s k e l e t o n i s o f v i t a l importance t o a r t i s t s i n t e r e s t e d i n d e p i c t i n g t h e human f i g u r e as i t i s the "armature" w h i c h h o l d s i t up, governs i t s p r o p o r t i o n s , e n a b l e s and r e s t r i c t s i t s m o t i o n s . Study o f t h e s k e l e t o n i s a n e c e s s a r y i n t r o d u c t i o n t o w o r k i n g w i t h the f i g u r e i n t h e v i s u a l a r t s , and can be o f p a r - t i c u l a r advantage t o a d o l e s c e n t s who do not see p r o p o r t i o n s and who l a c k knowledge o f t h e i n n e r s t r u c t u r e o f t h e i r own bod- i e s . G o a l : S t u d e n t s w i l l g a i n knowledge o f anatomy o f t h e human f i g u r e . O b j e c t i v e s : S e e i n g and drawing t h e s k e l e t o n i n terms o f : - p r o p o r t i o n s - p h y s i c a l f u n c t i o n s - s t r u c t u r a l s t r e n g t h - l i m i t a t i o n o f movement. Resources: S l i d e s No. 414 t o 420. P l a t e s No. 4, 5 and 6. L e s s o n a i d s : 1. P r e p a r e l a r g e (23" by 36") drawing on M a n i l l a Tag from P l a t e No. 4 i n s i m p l i f i e d form by f i r s t d i v i d i n g the paper i n e i g h t h o r i z o n t a l s e c t i o n s . The t o p s e c t i o n , number 1, r e p r e s e n t s the head w i t h o u t the neck and i s the measure used f o r t h e r e s t o f t h e body. 37. 2. Prepare large (24" by 36") drawing on Manilla Tag of two views of the s k u l l i n s i m p l i f i e d form by using Slide No. 4 20, two views of the s k u l l , f r o n t a l and the side. 3. Obtain X-rays of the s k u l l , chest, p e l v i s , hands, feet, etc. from a laboratory and display taped on to the windows. Try to get adult and c h i l d X-rays to demonstrate difference i n size. Materials for student use: Graph paper 12" by 18" P l a i n paper (manilla or cartridge) Pencils Discuss by using the large v i s u a l of Plate No. 4. - Function of the skeleton as the i n t e r n a l framework which "holds us up" and enables movement. Compare skeleton to inner structure of wood frame for houses and s t e e l frame for high-rise buildings. We forget i t s role because i t i s hidden from view. - S k u l l : point to r a t i o of f a c i a l area to rest which i s about 1 to 2. Emphasize domelike structure which houses and protects the brain. Point to brow area which protrudes and pro- tects deeper set eyes. Point to shortness of nose bone which allows great differences i n the size and shape of noses. - Spine: explain that vertebrae are smallest i n the neck and grow i n size downward u n t i l the tailbone. The cortex i s thickest i n the neck as the greatest number of nerves lead to the hands i n order to enable them to do a multitude of movements unmatched anywhere i n the body. - Chest: i t s shape resembles a basket. Individual ribs 38. are f r a g i l e but t h e i r number and shape g i v e s s t r e n g t h and f l e x i - b i l i t y t o p r o t e c t v i t a l organs such as the h e a r t and l u n g s , and a l l o w f o r e x p a n s i o n and c o n t r a c t i o n when b r e a t h i n g . - P e l v i s : the o v e r a l l shape resembles a bowl, i t accommo- d a t e s v i t a l organs such as the s o u r c e o f l i f e . P o i n t t o the f u n c t i o n a l d i f f e r e n c e s i n s i z e between male and female p e l v i s . T h i s i s one o f the means o f i d e n t i f i c a t i o n o f an unknown s k e l e - t o n . - Arms: demonstrate y o u r s e l f and on t h e v i s u a l and have s t u d e n t s f i n d t h e i r elbow a l o n g t h e i r body which i s a t t h e w a i s t l i n e , and t h e whole arm i n c l u d i n g the hand r e a c h e s c l o s e t o the knee. T h i s i s an i m p o r t a n t p r o p o r t i o n most s t u d e n t s do not see and i s b e s t demonstrated by h a v i n g t h e s t u d e n t s s t a n d up. E x p l a i n about the s h o u l d e r j o i n t which i s l i k e a b a l l - b e a r - i n g ; i t e n a b l e s c i r c u l a r m o t i o n , and t h e elbow w h i c h has r e - s t r i c t e d m o t i o n . Demonstrate and have s t u d e n t s s t u d y t h e i r hand and the many movements and a c t i o n s i t i s c a p a b l e o f making. I t i s the most s o p h i s t i c a t e d t o o l i n t h e w o r l d . P o i n t t o the s i z e of the hand and demonstrate y o u r s e l f and w i t h s t u d e n t s t h a t by p u t t i n g the base o f the hand near the w r i s t t o one's c h i n , and by s t r e t c h i n g the f i n g e r s o v e r one's f a c e , you w i l l f i n d the s i z e of t h e hand about e q u a l t o t h e h e i g h t o f one's f a c e from c h i n t o h a i r l i n e . J u s t as s t u d e n t s o f t e n make the arms t o o s h o r t , t h e y a l s o make the hands f a r t o o s m a l l . - Legs: the l e n g t h o f l e g s needs t o be emphasized. They s t a r t a t t h e end o f the t r u n k and a r e the h a l f w a y p o i n t o f the body between s e c t i o n s 4 and 5. From the h i p j o i n t t h e l e g s a n g l e i n w a r d t o t h e ground i n o r d e r t o b e t t e r c a r r y the w e i g h t o f t h e body. The h i p j o i n t i s the l a r g e s t j o i n t i n t h e body and i t t o o resembles a b a l l - b e a r i n g l i k e t h e s h o u l d e r . The knee, l i k e the elbow, a l s o has r e s t r i c t e d movement but the d i r e c t i o n a l move- ment o f the knee i s e x a c t l y o p p o s i t e t o the one o f t h e elbow. - Hands and F e e t : they a r e composed o f many s m a l l bones and j o i n t s w h i c h e n a b l e s a g r e a t e r range o f movement, and f o r the f e e t , an i n c r e a s e d c a p a c i t y t o c a r r y w e i g h t . Emphasize t h a t f e e t a r e l a r g e r than one's hands, a n o t h e r p a r t o f the body w h i c h i s o f t e n d e p i c t e d as much s m a l l e r by s t u d e n t s . - Neck: i t resembles a column t h a t h o l d s up the head. M e n t i o n t h a t dancers must have l o n g necks which t h e y use f o r ex- p r e s s i o n o f emotions by moving the head. There are two i m p o r t - ant s e t s o f muscles which move the head. One s e t i s v e r t i c a l l y i n t h e nape o f the neck, the o t h e r two s t a r t each b e h i n d t h e e a r and c r o s s d i a g o n a l l y f o r w a r d t o meet a t the base of t h e t h r o a t , l e f t and r i g h t o f t h e h o l l o w below the "Adam's a p p l e . " T h i s second s e t has t h e l o n g e s t L a t i n name o f a l l the m u s c l e s : " s t e r n o c l e i d o m a s t o i d e u s . " - P r o p o r t i o n s : as seen on the v i s u a l , t h e a d u l t body i s d i v i d e d i n t o e i g h t p a r t s , t h e head w i t h o u t t h e neck b e i n g t h e measure; i t goes seven t i m e s i n t o t h e h e i g h t o f t h e body, o r sometimes o n l y s i x and a h a l f t i m e s . The growing body's p r o p o r - t i o n s a r e d i f f e r e n t , as seen on S l i d e No. 419, because t h e head grows v e r y l i t t l e a f t e r b i r t h . A c t i v i t i e s : 1. S t u d e n t s draw on 12" by 18" graph paper o r , i f not o b t a i n - a b l e , on p l a i n paper, d i v i d e d i n t o e i g h t h o r i z o n t a l s e c t i o n s 40. t h e f r o n t v i e w o f the s k e l e t o n and the s i d e v i e w o f t h e body on the same paper, as d i s p l a y e d on the l a r g e v i s u a l . 2. S t u d e n t s draw the s k u l l from t h e f r o n t and s i d e v i e w on t h e same s h e e t o f paper as d i s p l a y e d on the second l a r g e v i s u a l . These a c t i v i t i e s i n v o l v e t h e r e d u c t i o n i n the s i z e o f the drawings compared t o the v i s u a l s but a r e o t h e r w i s e c o p i e d . Y e t t h e y are most i m p o r t a n t as an e x e r c i s e which f a m i l i a r - i z e s t h e s t u d e n t s w i t h t h e p r o p o r t i o n s , h e i g h t and w i d t h o f the body. F o l l o w above a c t i v i t i e s by showing s l i d e s f o r more d e t a i l e d s t u d y o f neck movements, hand and f e e t move- ments, on S l i d e s No. 421, 422 and 423. F o l l o w w i t h f u r t h e r s l i d e s o f t h e s k e l e t o n i n m o t i o n , S l i d e s No. 4'24 t o 429. Assignments : P r o v i d e w r i t t e n d e s c r i p t i o n o f s p e c i f i c a c t i v i t i e s p e r - formed by a p e r s o n , such a s : - c l i m b i n g a l a d d e r - f a l l i n g o f f the r o o f o f a house - s i t t i n g on a c h a i r and d r i n k i n g a cup o f t e a - p l a y i n g s o c c e r o r any o t h e r s p o r t . S t u d e n t s a r e t o draw s e v e r a l a c t i v i t i e s w i t h t h e s k e l e t o n o n l y , o r choose one a c t i v i t y and make i t by r e p e t i t i o n o f s t a g e s o f the movement i n t o a " f l i p " book. Encourage s i d e v i e w s f o r an e a s i e r assignment. See P l a t e s No. 5 and 6 f o r examples. F u r t h e r d i s c u s s i o n : E x p l a i n the concept o f " f o r e s h o r t e n i n g " w i t h a s t u d e n t model o r y o u r s e l f . Show: 1. f r o n t a l view of an arm s t r e t c h e d s t r a i g h t f o r w a r d , 2. f r o n t a l view o f the upper l e g o f a s i t t i n g f i g u r e , 3. view S l i d e s No. 430 and 431 t o s t u d y f o r e s h o r t e n i n g o f t h e r e c l i n i n g f i g u r e . F u r t h e r a c t i v i t y : Borrow f u l l - s i z e r e a l s k e l e t o n from your Resource C e n t r e and a r r a n g e on t a b l e i n s i t t i n g o r r e c l i n i n g pose w i t h some d r a p e r y o r a h a t t o l e s s e n any r e p u l s i o n o r f e a r , and h e i g h t e n i n t e r e s t and humour. S t u d e n t s a r e t o p i c k a d e t a i l o r p o r t i o n o f the s k e l e t o n such a s : t h e s k u l l , a t h i g h , t h e p e l v i s , t h e r i b c a g e , a f o o t o r a hand, and make a d e t a i l e d , t o n a l study i n p e n c i l o r i n k . You may w i s h t o assemble t h e s e p a r t s i n t o a ( p o s s i b l y d i s t o r t e d ) c o l l a g e o f a l l t h e s t u d e n t s ' work as a group p r o j e c t . 42. P l a t e 4 P r o p o r t i o n s o f the S k e l e t o n P l a t e 5 G e s t u r e Drawing w i t h t h e S k e l e t o n P l a t e 6 Gesture Drawing w i t h the S k e l e t o n Study o f Movement and P r o p o r t i o n s Through F i g u r e Drawing R a t i o n a l e : F i g u r e drawing from l i v e models has been, and s t i l l i s an a c t i v i t y engaged i n by s c u l p t o r s . I t p r o v i d e s an o p p o r t u n i t y f o r c l o s e r o b s e r v a t i o n o f the g r e a t range o f body s t r u c t u r e s i n humans as w e l l as f o r s t u d y o f p r o p o r t i o n s o f the body, and o f movements s u i t a b l e f o r r e p r e s e n t a t i o n i n s c u l p t u r e . An a p p r o x i m a t i o n o f t h i s s t u d i o a c t i v i t y can be a c h i e v e d i n the p u b l i c s c h o o l system by u s i n g "works o f a r t " which r e v e a l the nude body i n s u i t a b l e poses a l t h o u g h seen t h r o u g h the eyes o f a s c u l p t o r . G o a l : S t u d e n t s w i l l l e a r n t o c a p t u r e on a t w o d i m e n s i o n a l s u r f a c e , one o r more views o f a human body i n m o t i o n , u n d e r s t a n d i t s p r o - p o r t i o n s , l e a r n about body t y p e s and g e n e r a l l y have an o p p o r t u n - i t y t o work as i f from a nude model i n a s t u d i o s e t t i n g . Obj e c t i v e s : - An a l t e r n a t e method t o the maquette i n c l a y f o r p l a n n i n g a s c u l p t u r e o f the f i g u r e . - An o p p o r t u n i t y t o p u t i n t o e f f e c t knowledge g a i n e d o f t h e p r o p o r t i o n s o f the body t h r o u g h the study o f anatomy. - O b s e r v a t i o n o f m u l t i p l e body t y p e s and ages as t h e y a f - f e c t the f i g u r e . - C o n c e n t r a t e d " l o o k i n g " a t t h e f i g u r e as an image f o r a r t - i s t i c e x p r e s s i o n . By c o n t r o l l i n g the l e n g t h o f time f o r each pose, a c h i e v i n g a s p e e d i n g up o f the p e r c e p t i o n o f mass and movement, and r e - c o r d i n g i t on paper. Resources: S l i d e s number: 26, 28, 60, 89, 91 and 92, 96, 109 and 110, 125 and 126, 135 and 137, 143, 187, 195, 202, 213, 215, 232, 245 and 246, 252, 256, 259, 268"and 269, 271, 272 and 273, 274 and 275, 283, 287, 291, 292, 294, 296, 300, 301, 303, 309, 310, 311, 313, 314, 318, 329, 330, 331, 333, 336, 338, 340, 355, 367 t o 372, 383, 392 and 394, 399 t o 408. Lesson a i d s : P r e p a r e as examples some l a r g e s i z e g e s t u r e d r a w i n g s , p r e - f e r a b l y 18" by 24", o f f i g u r e s from s l i d e s o r from models. Use conte o r c h a r c o a l t o a c h i e v e w i d e r l i n e s and i n some i n s t a n c e s i n d i c a t i o n o f s h a d i n g w i t h touches o f c h a r c o a l . Show S l i d e s No. 399 t o 413 as examples o f drawing s t y l e s o f M i c h e l a n g e l o , Rodin and Moore. M a t e r i a l s f o r s t u d e n t use: 18" by 24" drawing b o a r d f o r each s t u d e n t 18" by 24" n e w s p r i n t and m a n i l l a paper B u l l d o g c l i p s Conte c r a y o n i n brown, b l a c k , e t c . D i s c u s s i o n and d e m o n s t r a t i o n : - Set up room f o r p r o j e c t i n g s l i d e s . Have s t u d e n t s s i t f a c i n g t h e s c r e e n but not t o o f a r t o the l e f t o r r i g h t o f the s c r e e n , o r t h e image w i l l appear d i s t o r t e d . - Demonstrate t h e need t o f a c e s c r e e n where s l i d e s w i l l 47. appear j u s t as one would f a c e the model. A v o i d i n g t u r n i n g one's head f u r t h e r s r e t e n t i o n o f image and o n l y one's eyes need be l i f t e d t o the s c r e e n and down t o the paper. - Each s t u d e n t s h o u l d have a drawing board w i t h s e v e r a l s h e e t s o f paper c l i p p e d t o i t . A f f i x b u l l d o g c l i p away from ex- a c t c e n t r e o f board o t h e r w i s e i t c o u l d i n t e r f e r e w i t h f u l l use o f t h e paper. Emphasize importance o f t h e a n g l e between t h e eye and the paper which i s t o be a t about 6 5.° T h e r e f o r e the paper s h o u l d be c l i p p e d t o the drawing board w i t h the b u l l d o g c l i p and t h e board i n an u p r i g h t p o s i t i o n r e s t i n g on one's l a p and l e a n - i n g a g a i n s t a t a b l e or t h e back o f a c h a i r . I t must be h e l d up- r i g h t o r l e n g t h w i s e , depending on the shape o f the image o f each s l i d e . - P r e p a r e c o n t e c r a y o n s t i c k s by b r e a k i n g them i n h a l f . T h i s i s i m p o r t a n t as i t w i l l d i s c o u r a g e use o f the c o n t e as a p e n c i l . Show how t o use i t on i t s s i d e w h i c h i s a u s e f u l p r o - cedure f o r q u i c k l y mapping out t h e whole image. Encourage s t u - dents t o draw as l a r g e as t h e paper w i l l a l l o w , w i t h f r e e and sweeping m o t i o n s , c o n c e n t r a t i n g t o c a p t u r e t h e m o t i o n o f t h e f i g - ure w i t h o u t any d e t a i l s . As t h e y become more e x p e r i e n c e d , t h e y w i l l succeed not o n l y i n g e t t i n g the movement b u t managing the space on t h e paper so t h a t t h e whole f i g u r e i s l o c a t e d on i t . I n the b e g i n n i n g i t i s more i m p o r t a n t t o draw l a r g e s i z e f i g u r e s even i f some p a r t s o f t h e f i g u r e w i l l not f i t on t h e paper. - F i r s t p r o j e c t S l i d e s No. 399 t o 408, which a r e examples o f drawings by M i c h e l a n g e l o , Rodin and Moore. P o i n t out the many l i n e s which s e a r c h out the form and movement, t h e b r o a d e r ones i n d i c a t i n g some s h a d i n g t o emphasize shapes, and the 48. g e n e r a l l a c k o f "one p e r f e c t l i n e . " - Now b e g i n p r o j e c t i n g s l i d e s from t h e l i s t . D i s c u s s each s l i d e and encourage o b s e r v a t i o n f o r s e v e r a l minutes b e f o r e b e g i n - n i n g drawing a c t i v i t y . P o i n t t o t h e g e n e r a l shape o f the image which o f t e n f i t s a t r i a n g l e o r s q u a r e , t o the l o c a t i o n o f the head r e l a t e d t o o t h e r p a r t s o f the body depending on the move- ment, t o the w e i g h t o f t h e body i f o n . one s u p p o r t i n g l e g and t h e r e s u l t i n g r i s e o f t h e p e l v i s and l o w e r i n g o f the s h o u l d e r on the s i d e o f t h a t l e g , t o the p o s i t i o n o f hands and f e e t r e l a - t e d t o each o t h e r , and such s i m i l a r a n a l y s i s as t h e p a r t i c u l a r s l i d e s u g g e s t s t o you. - Demonstrate how t o rough o u t g u i d e l i n e s i n t h e s t y l e o f a " s t i c k man" t o ensure t h a t the whole f i g u r e w i l l be accommo- d a t e d on t h e paper. Encourage s t u d e n t s t o draw l a r g e , w i t h a r e l a x e d arm sweeping o v e r t h e paper even i f a t t h e b e g i n n i n g i t might r e s u l t i n not g e t t i n g a l l t h e f i g u r e on t h e paper. T h i s i s more d e s i r a b l e t h a n a s m a l l , t i m i d drawing on the l a r g e paper. As s t u d e n t s p r o g r e s s t h r o u g h s e v e r a l days o f d r a w i n g , do t r y t o make them g e t t h e whole f i g u r e w e l l p l a c e d on t h e paper. Draw- i n g a c t i v i t y such as t h i s seems v e r y d i f f i c u l t t o s t u d e n t s a t f i r s t , but amazing p r o g r e s s i s made t h r o u g h days o f e x p e r i e n c e . - T i m i n g the l e n g t h o f p r o j e c t i n g each s l i d e i s v i t a l . Ex- p l a i n t h a t t h i s a p p r o x i m a t e s the s t u d i o s i t u a t i o n where t h e model h o l d s each pose f o r a l i m i t e d l e n g t h o f t i m e . Vary the time from v e r y s h o r t warm-up s k e t c h e s o f no more t h a n two min- u t e s , t o f i v e o r t e n m i n u t e s , and l a t e r t o an o c c a s i o n a l study d e v e l o p e d w i t h s h a d i n g , o f f i f t e e n o r twenty m i n u t e s . S k i l l grows w i t h volume, and s t u d e n t s w i l l have many u n f i n i s h e d l o o k i n g d r a w i n g s . C a t c h i n g t h e movement o f the s c u l p t u r e - m o d e l must be done f a s t , l i k e a g e s t u r e d r a w i n g . - Student s h o u l d use n e w s p r i n t f i r s t and, w i t h more e x p e r - i e n c e , m a n i l l a o r c a r t r i d g e paper. - D i s c u s s work each day towards end o f p e r i o d , and a t l e a s t one example o f a l l s t u d e n t s ' work. A l s o walk around d u r i n g d r a w i n g a c t i v i t y t o h e l p w i t h s u g g e s t i o n s . At the end o f t h e day o f f i g u r e drawing have s t u d e n t s se- l e c t , w i t h y o u r h e l p , perhaps f o u r t o f i v e d r a w i n g s . These, i f g i v e n e x t r a t i m e , may be f u r t h e r d e v e l o p e d w i t h c o n t e w i t h o u t p r o j e c t i n g t h e s l i d e s . H o l d a c l a s s d i s c u s s i o n o f t h e s e draw- i n g s a f t e r you have had t i m e t o mark them. S t u d i o A c t i v i t i e s f o r t h e Making o f S c u l p t u r e o f the Human Body, Methods and M a t e r i a l s The maquette i n c l a y . R a t i o n a l e : I n s c u l p t u r e t h e maquette may be viewed as an a l t e r n a t i v e t o drawing because i t i s i m p o r t a n t t o p l a n a p i e c e o f s c u l p t u r e i n a t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l medium c o n s i s t e n t w i t h t h e t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l q u a l i t y o f the f i n a l p i e c e . Drawing, even from s e v e r a l a n g l e s , as a p r e p a r a t i o n f o r the l a r g e r p i e c e , may be found l e s s r e l a t e d t o the c o n c e p t s o f , s c u l p t u r e , such as form, shape, mass and volume. G o a l : S t u d e n t s w i l l be a b l e t o p l a n a p i e c e o f work i n a f l e x i b l e medium such as c l a y by r o u g h i n g o u t i t s shape from a l l a n g l e s . 50. Resources f o r s t u d e n t use: M a t e r i a l : c l a y w i t h grog ( s c u l p t u r e c l a y ) T o o l s : - wooden m o d e l l i n g t o o l s - s m a l l m e t a l t u r n t a b l e s ( f i n i s h i n g wheels) as used i n c e r a m i c s - p l a s t i c bags - spray b o t t l e f o r water ( p l a n t m i s t e r ) L e s s o n a i d s : S l i d e s No;. 197 and 198 No. 201, 215, 216, 220, 221, 219, 222 No. 341 No. 388, 389, 390 and 391. D i s c u s s i o n : P r o j e c t s l i d e s and e x p l a i n the advantage o f p l a n n i n g a l a r - ger p i e c e o f s c u l p t u r e , o f t e n c r e a t e d s u b s e q u e n t l y i n a d i f f e r - ent m a t e r i a l , i n the round. Show S l i d e s No. 19 7 and 19 8 by G i o v a n n i da B o l o g n a , w h i c h i s 19 i n c h e s l o n g and i s roughed out from c l a y , s e r v i n g as an approximate p l a n f o r a much l a r g e r f i g u r e . I t l a c k s the f i n i s h and d e t a i l o f a f i n a l p i e c e but has been f i r e d i n a k i l n and t h e r e b y t r a n s f o r m e d i n t o a more perman- ent m a t e r i a l c a l l e d t e r r a - c o t t a , meaning baked e a r t h . T h e r e f o r e t h e a r t i s t may use i t a t any l a t e r s t a g e t o e n l a r g e i t i n any m a t e r i a l he w i s h e s . Such a " p l a n " i n c l a y i s c a l l e d a maquette. - M i c h e l a n g e l o a l s o used t h i s t e c h n i q u e t o p l a n t h e work he l a t e r c a r v e d i n marble l i f e - s i z e o r l a r g e r . S l i d e s No. 201, 219 and 222 a r e such s t u d i e s . S l i d e s No. 215 and 216, as 220 and 221, show two works by M i c h e l a n g e l o , the f i r s t o f each the maquette i n f i r e d c l a y , t e r r a - c o t t a , and the second the f i n a l work i n marble. The maquettes a r e 7" by 12", the f i n a l s l i f e - s i z e . - S l i d e No. 341 shows maquettes by Henry Moore which are not always made o f t e r r a - c o t t a , b u t a l s o c a r v e d from p l a s t e r o f P a r i s . N e v e r t h e l e s s , t h e y are t h e s m a l l s i z e models f o r l a r g e p i e c e s i n s t o n e o r b r o n z e . - S l i d e s No. 388 t o 3 9 1 , a work by the Vancouver s c u l p t o r , E l e k Imredy, show the development o f a 16 f t . s c u l p t u r e from i t s p l a n n i n g s t a g e as a maquette t o e r e c t i o n on s i t e i n Edmonton, A l b e r t a . D e m o n s t r a t i o n : - Open a bag o f f r e s h c l a y . Use a c l a y c u t t e r t o s l i c e o f f a t h i c k p i e c e . P l u c k a p a r t and show how c l a y i n good c o n d i - t i o n " s t i c k s " t o g e t h e r . I t does not crumble o r c r a c k , nor i s i t so wet t h a t i t would become muddy. Pass some b i t s o f c l a y around t o make s t u d e n t s f e e l the c o n s i s t e n c y o f good c l a y . Ex- p l a i n t h a t the heat o f one's hand tends t o d r y out c l a y , as w e l l as t h e a i r i f i t i s exposed t o i t f o r some l e n g t h o f t i m e . T h e r e f o r e the c l a y one i s w o r k i n g w i t h s h o u l d be k e p t i n s i d e an open p l a s t i c bag and the s t u d e n t s s h o u l d r e a c h i n f o r t h e smal- l e r p i e c e s t h e y need. To p r e v e n t e a r l y d r y i n g o f t h e c l a y i t s h o u l d not be h e l d i n one's hand i n l a r g e r amount t h a n needed f o r p r e s e n t work. S t r e s s t h a t c l a y i s a m a t e r i a l one b u i l d s up w i t h . The s c u l p t u r e must s l o w l y grow from the i n s i d e outward by the a d d i t i o n o f s m a l l lumps. I t i s not t o be squeezed i n t o shape by h o l d i n g a l a r g e lump i n one's hand. - Take the m e t a l t u r n t a b l e and p l a c e the board on i t . S i t down a t the l o w e s t c h a i r and s t r e s s t h e importance o f the s c u l p - t u r e b e i n g viewed a t e y e - l e v e l . You may have t o r a i s e t h e t u r n - t a b l e f o r t a l l e r s t u d e n t s w i t h a n y t h i n g from a box t o an u p s i d e - down b a s i n i n o r d e r t o b r i n g i t c l o s e r t o e y e - l e v e l . Take a lump o f c l a y , p l a c e i n an open p l a s t i c bag and, by p l u c k i n g s m a l l lumps from i t , p r o c e e d t o b u i l d up the s c u l p t u r e e v e n l y from a l l a n g l e s by t u r n i n g t h e t u r n t a b l e f r e q u e n t l y . Only when t h e whole p i e c e i s roughed o u t , s t a r t u s i n g m o d e l l i n g t o o l s on the s u r f a c e . - Spray t h e s c u l p t u r e w i t h a f i n e m i s t o f water and p l a c e i t i n the p l a s t i c bag. Demonstrate how i t i s t o be w e l l t u c k e d i n so a i r cannot e n t e r t h e bag and d r y o u t t h e s c u l p t u r e between c l a s s e s . - D i s t r i b u t e one p l a s t i c bag p e r s t u d e n t . G i v e a s m a l l p i e c e o f masking tape t o each s t u d e n t f o r t h e i r name t o be w r i t - t e n on and a t t a c h e d t o t h e o u t s i d e o f the p l a s t i c bag. T h i s w i l l e a s i l y i d e n t i f y the i n d i v i d u a l p i e c e s w i t h o u t h a v i n g t o l o o k i n s i d e t h e bag. S t r e s s the importance t h a t o n l y the s c u l p - t u r e goes i n t o t h e bag a t t h e end o f each p e r i o d . L e f t o v e r c l a y goes back i n t o t h e c l a y b i n (metal garbage can w i t h l i d ) o r a s t r o n g p l a s t i c bag, as i t c o u l d damage the s c u l p t u r e . A l s o , the c l a y can be k e p t i n b e t t e r c o n d i t i o n i n a common c o n t a i n e r . Ap- p o i n t m o n i t o r s t o check a t t h e end o f each p e r i o d whether the c l a y i s b r o k e n i n t o s m a l l e r lumps and w e t t e d i n the c l a y b i n and the l i d w e l l c l o s e d ; a l s o t h a t t h e c l a y i s wiped o f f t h e model- l i n g t o o l s ( i n o r d e r n o t t o p l u g the s i n k ) , then washed a n d d r i e d . - S t o r e i n d i v i d u a l s c u l p t u r e w e l l wrapped i n t h e p l a s t i c bag and m i s t e d w i t h w a t e r u n t i l f i n i s h e d . Then do not wet any- more, and dry v e r y s l o w l y t o p r e v e n t c r a c k i n g . T h i s i s b e s t a c c o m p l i s h e d i f i n the b e g i n n i n g i t i s s t i l l l e f t i n the bag, b u t the bag i s l e f t a j a r . Then g r a d u a l l y remove from t h e bag and l e a v e t o d r y i n the open. Depending on the s i z e o f the maquette (anywhere from 4 t o 6 i n c h e s ) , i t s h o u l d be l e f t t o dry f o r about two weeks. I t must be c o m p l e t e l y dry t h r o u g h o u t b e f o r e i t i s f i r e d i n the k i l n . - Maquettes need no mounting o r f i n i s h i n g i n any way on t h e s u r f a c e as t h i s p r o c e s s i s b e s t r e s e r v e d f o r the l a r g e r , f i n a l s c u l p t u r e . T e r r a - c o t t a s c u l p t u r e . R a t i o n a l e : W e l l f i n i s h e d t e r r a - c o t t a s c u l p t u r e p r e s e n t s an a t t r a c t i v e and d u r a b l e work o f a r t , and i s v e r y s u i t a b l e i n secondary s c h o o l s where the time t o work on a p i e c e i s l i m i t e d by t h e p e r i o d ' s l e n g t h , as w e l l as by t h e o v e r a l l a v a i l a b l e time f o r t h e s c u l p t u r e u n i t s w i t h i n the t o t a l a r t programme. G o a l : S t u d e n t s w i l l complete a medium-sized s c u l p t u r e o f t h e hu- man f i g u r e which t h e y w i l l f i r e , f i n i s h , and mount i n a p r o f e s - s i o n a l manner. Resources f o r s t u d e n t use: M a t e r i a l : c l a y w i t h grog ( s c u l p t u r e c l a y ) T o o l s : - a s s o r t e d wooden m o d e l l i n g t o o l s 54. - boards (plywood) - s m a l l m e t a l t u r n t a b l e s (as used i n c e r a m i c s ) - p l a s t i c bags - s p r a y b o t t l e ( p l a n t m i s t e r ) - wax paper Lesson a i d s : S l i d e s : No. 26, 27 No. 367-372 D i s c u s s i o n : Show S l i d e s No. 26 and 27, and s t a t e the s c u l p t u r e s ' ages and e x p l a i n how and why they have s u r v i v e d i n such good c o n d i - t i o n ( t e r r a - c o t t a f i g u r e s from C o l i m a ) . Show S l i d e s No. 36 7-372 by the p r e s e n t day A m e r i c a n - I t a l i a n s c u l p t o r L u c c h e s i , who works i n c l a y and produces t e r r a - c o t t a s c u l p t u r e o f medium s i z e (around 12 t o 14 i n c h e s ) which are some- times, a l s o c a s t i n b r o n z e . E x p l a i n the advantages o f w o r k i n g i n t e r r a - c o t t a . These a r e : 1. w o r k i n g w i t h a f l e x i b l e medium such as c l a y which a l l o w s f r e q u e n t a l t e r a t i o n s , 2. u s i n g the human f i g u r e on a s c a l e o f around 12 i n c h e s i n l e n g t h which p e r m i t s w o r k i n g w i t h o u t armature. A l s o due t o the s t r u c t u r e o f the human body, which has no g r e a t d i f f e r e n c e s i n volume, h o l l o w i n g out i s not neces- s a r y , 3. by f i r i n g the c l a y work i t becomes e x t r e m e l y d u r a b l e ; i t does not c r a c k o r a l t e r ( u n l e s s i t i s d r o p p e d ) . Remind the s t u d e n t s o f your d e m o n s t r a t i o n o f the maquette i n c l a y , o r p l e a s e r e f e r t o i t i f you d i d not do a maquette w i t h t h e same s t u d e n t s . I t i s even more i m p o r t a n t t o h a n d l e the c l a y t h e same way, as i t must remain m o i s t as t h i s p r o j e c t t a k e s a l o n g e r time t o complete. A t t h e same time a t t e n t i o n must be g i v e n e v e r y day t o t h e c l a y i n the b i n (garbage can on w h e e l s , w i t h l i d ) t o see t h a t i t remains i n s m a l l p i e c e s and t h e r e f o r e can e a s i l y be k e p t wet. The work must a g a i n be k e p t a t e y e - l e v e l and be f r e q u e n t l y t u r n e d . Make s t u d e n t s s t a n d up from time t o time so t h a t t h e y a l s o examine and work on t h e i r s c u l p t u r e as viewed from above. I t s h o u l d a l s o be l i f t e d up, and w h i l e c a r e f u l l y s u p p o r t e d i n one's hand, worked on from below. I f a s i t t i n g f i g u r e i s n o t completed from t h e u n d e r s i d e , i t w i l l r e s u l t i n a p a r t i a l f i g u r e as i f i t would have been s l i c e d o f f . T h e r e f o r e the development o f the s c u l p t u r e from a l l a n g l e s i s e x t r e m e l y i m p o r t a n t , p a r t i c - u l a r l y when i t s s u b j e c t i s t h e human f i g u r e . Encourage your s t u d e n t s t o p i c k one o f t h e many, many pos- s i b l e poses f o r a s i t t i n g f i g u r e o r a f i g u r e r e c l i n i n g . I t i s p o s s i b l e but d i f f i c u l t t o complete a s t a n d i n g f i g u r e i n t e r r a - c o t t a , as one does not use an armature. I f a s t a n d i n g f i g u r e i s d e s i r e d , i t must be s u p p o r t e d w i t h a column o f c l a y w h i l e worked on. When f i n i s h e d , double check t h a t i t w i l l be a b l e t o s t a n d on i t s f e e t and b a l a n c e , b e f o r e i t i s d r i e d . Once d r y and f i r e d , i t w i l l s t a n d i f a t t a c h e d t o a base. D u r i n g t h e days o f c o m p l e t i n g t h i s s c u l p t u r e i t must be s t o r e d on i t s own s m a l l b o a r d , the same one which t h e s t u d e n t works on d u r i n g c l a s s . T h i s w i l l p r o t e c t t h e r e l a t i v e f r a g i l i t y o f t h e f i g u r e w h i l e m o i s t . B e f o r e p u t t i n g i t away f o r the n e x t p e r i o d , i t not o n l y must be s p r a y e d w i t h a f i n e m i s t o f water but i n t h e advanced stage o f work t h e narrower p a r t s such as arms, l e g s o r head s h o u l d be wrapped g e n t l y i n wet paper t o w e l so d r y i n g o f t h e s e p a r t s does not get ahead o f the t h i c k e r t o r s o . T h i s r e t a r d i n g o f t h e d r y i n g p r o c e s s s h o u l d a l s o be done when the p i e c e b e g i n s i t s f i n a l d r y i n g p r o c e s s b e f o r e i t i s f i r e d . B e f o r e t h e f i g u r e on t h e b o a r d i s p u t i n t o t h e p l a s t i c bag and t u c k e d i n f o r the next day, s l i d e a s m a l l p i e c e o f wax paper between t h e s c u l p t u r e and t h e board as even a s h e l l a c k e d board might soak up m o i s t u r e from the s c u l p t u r e p r e m a t u r e l y . Remove t h e paper when you work on t h e f i g u r e . Do not a l l o w s t u d e n t s t o wet the s u r f a c e o f t h e f i g u r e w h i l e t h e y work. T h i s r e s u l t s i n a t o o smooth, t e x t u r e l e s s f i n - i s h . I f a r e l a t i v e l y smooth f i n i s h i s d e s i r e d , i t i s b e t t e r t o s c r a p e the " l e a t h e r - h a r d " c l a y s u r f a c e w i t h a w i r e l o o p t o o l l a t e r . S h o u l d p a r t s o f a s c u l p t u r e break w h i l e i n p r o g r e s s , i t i s i m p o r t a n t t o f o l l o w t h i s p r o c e s s : 1. check t h e anatomy. F o r example, a head may not s t a y on t h e f i g u r e i f t h e two major s e t s o f muscles (one p a i r i n the neck, the second s e t coming from b e h i n d the ear d i a g o n a l l y f o r w a r d t o t h e base o f the neck i n f r o n t ) a r e not b u i l t up i n c l a y . 2. I f a c r a c k a p p e a r s , do not r e p a i r on t h e s u r f a c e o n l y as i t w i l l r e o c c u r . D i g i n a l o n g t h e c r a c k and f i l l w i t h s l i p . S l i p i s the same c l a y as you are u s i n g , o n l y mixed w i t h water t o a v e r y t h i c k , creamy c o n s i s t e n c y . 3. I f a l e g , arm o r head b r e a k s o f f , rough up the two s u r - f a c e s o f the breakage w i t h a p o i n t e d t o o l t o c r e a t e " t o o t h marks." Load some s l i p on one s u r f a c e and p r e s s t o g e t h e r w i t h t h e second s u r f a c e . Smear t h e e x c e s s s l i p around the j o i n t ; i t w i l l a c t as g l u e . When t h e f i g u r e s are completed, f o l l o w the s l o w p r o c e s s o f d r y i n g as o u t l i n e d f o r the maquette i n c l a y . Thorough d r y i n g , two weeks p e r h a p s , i s i m p o r t a n t t o p r e v e n t blow-up i n the k i l n . F i r e work as you would greenware i n c e r a m i c s . F i n i s h i n g s u g g e s t i o n s f o r the b i s q u e d s c u l p t u r e : M a t e r i a l s : - w h i t e p a s t e f l o o r wax - a s s o r t e d c o l o u r s o f shoe p o l i s h - o l d t o o t h b r u s h e s - j a r s - v a r i o u s s i z e wood p i e c e s f o r base o f s c u l p t u r e - f e l t ( b l a c k o r brown) - "Weldbond" g l u e - sand paper - l i n s e e d o i l , s t a i n , v a r n i s h Cover each s c u l p t u r e w i t h a l a y e r o f p a s t e wax, u s i n g t h e t o o t h b r u s h w i t h a c i r c u l a r m o t i o n , u n t i l i t w i l l not soak up any more. T h i s s e a l s the p o r e s and p r o t e c t s i t from d u s t . Mix each c o l o u r o f shoe p o l i s h w i t h w h i t e f l o o r wax i n a j a r t o reduce s t r e n g t h o f c o l o u r . Use v a r i o u s c o l o u r s o f brown o r b l a c k where d e s i r e d on t h e f i g u r e , w i t h a s e p a r a t e t o o t h b r u s h 58. k e p t f o r each c o l o u r . You need t o r e s e r v e some f o r the c l e a n f i r s t l a y e r o f f l o o r wax. W i t h dry e x t r a t o o t h b r u s h e s , p o l i s h up t h e h i g h p o i n t s o f the s c u l p t u r e t o g i v e i t h i g h l i g h t s . P i c k a square o f wood a p p r o p r i a t e i n s i z e and o f the r i g h t h e i g h t so t h a t i t enhances, not dwarfs the s c u l p t u r e . J u s t as t h e frame i s t o a p a i n t i n g , the base i s i m p o r t a n t t o a s c u l p t u r e . You may have t o l a m i n a t e some wood t o g e t h e r t o g e t t h e r i g h t shape. L e f t o v e r wood from I n d u s t r i a l E d u c a t i o n c l a s s e s i s a good s o u r c e . "Weldbond" g l u e w i l l work t o l a m i n a t e t h e wood, and i s a l s o used f o r g l u e i n g t h e s c u l p t u r e t o the> base. P r i o r t o d o i n g t h i s , c u t and g l u e a p i e c e o f f e l t t o t h e bottom o f the wood, s t a i n o r o i l w i t h l i n s e e d o i l o r v a r n i s h the r e s t o f the wood base. Sandpaper the bottom o f the s c u l p t u r e where i t touches t h e base, and g l u e on t h e s c u l p t u r e . M e t a l s c u l p t u r e : c o l d w i r e b e n d i n g . R a t i o n a l e : M e t a l s c u l p t u r e w i t h w i r e b e l o n g s t o the b u i l d i n g - u p o r a d d i t i v e t e c h n i q u e s and i s p a r t i c u l a r l y s u i t a b l e t o p r o v i d e a t r a n s i t i o n from drawing t o s c u l p t u r e because w i t h w i r e one i s a b l e t o "draw" t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l l y . I t i s a l s o a d i r e c t method l e a d i n g s t r a i g h t t o the f i n a l s c u l p t u r e w i t h o u t i n t e r m e d i a t e s t e p s . As w e l l , due t o t h e i n n a t e s t r e n g t h o f t h e m e t a l , l a r g e r and more open p i e c e s can be c o n s t r u c t e d , and t h e s c u l p t u r a l con- c e p t o f volume as opposed t o mass can be a c h i e v e d . G o a l : S t u d e n t s w i l l u n d e r s t a n d t h e importance o f c h o i c e o f mater- i a l f o r a p l a n n e d p i e c e o f s c u l p t u r e , f o r example: w i r e e n a b l e s t h e a r t i s t t o c o n s t r u c t the f i g u r e i n extreme m o t i o n , such as r u n n i n g , f o r which c l a y , f o r i n s t a n c e , would not be s u i t a b l e . Obj e c t i v e : S t u d e n t s w i l l c o n s t r u c t a m e t a l s c u l p t u r e based on t h e hu- man f i g u r e from v a r i o u s t y p e s o f w i r e and copper s h e e t i n g , and mount i t on a wooden base. M a t e r i a l s f o r s t u d e n t use: - needlenose p l i e r s and o t h e r p l i e r s - w i r e c u t t e r s - s n i p s - C-clamps - hammers - s m a l l n a i l s - v a r i o u s square p i e c e s o f wood f o r base - s t o v e p i p e w i r e o r b l a c k a n n e a l e d w i r e - copper w i r e - w i r e c o a t hangers - copper s h e e t i n g - o u t d o o r t e l e p h o n e c a b l e : s o f t , m u l t i c o l o u r e d w i r e s on the i n s i d e ( i f o b t a i n a b l e ) D i s c u s s i o n and a c t i v i t i e s : B e g i n w i t h a s e s s i o n on c o n t i n u o u s l i n e drawing as an i n - t r o d u c t i o n t o , and w i t h emphasis on, "drawing" t h r e e d i m e n s i o n - a l l y w i t h w i r e . D i s t r i b u t e a l e n g t h o f s o f t w i r e , a p p r o x i m a t e l y two metres per s t u d e n t . G i v e out needlenose p l i e r s and o t h e r p l i e r s t o each s t u d e n t , i f p o s s i b l e . Have s t u d e n t s b e g i n e x p e r i m e n t i n g 60. w i t h the w i r e by bending o r l o o p i n g i t , o r making s p i r a l s o v e r p e n c i l s but p u l l i n g t h e s e a p a r t , always c o n s c i o u s l y t u r n i n g i t and w o r k i n g w i t h depth t o get away from t w o d i m e n s i o n a l i t y . A f t e r the i n i t i a l s e s s i o n o f e x p e r i m e n t a t i o n w i t h w i r e and p l i e r s , g e t the s t u d e n t s t o p l a n on paper t h e approximate f i g - u r e t h e y w i s h t o make. Encourage s t r o n g movement f o r t h e i r f i g u r e , as we would see i n v a r i o u s s p o r t s o r i n dance, as t h i s t e c h n i q u e i s most s u i t a b l e f o r open form, r e l a t i v e l y p r e c a r i o u s b a l a n c e , and the o p p o s i t e o f b u l k . Some s t u d e n t s have the t e n d - ency t o wind the w i r e t o o t i g h t l y , which not o n l y uses up a l o t o f unnecessary m a t e r i a l ( w i r e ) , b u t i s c o n t r a r y t o the b e s t e f - f e c t a c h i e v e d w i t h i t . Note: N e g a t i v e - p o s i t i v e spaces are most c a l l e d f o r w i t h t h i s t e c h n i q u e and " s e e - t h r o u g h , " X-ray images. As s t u d e n t s f i n a l i z e t h e i r p l a n s by drawing on paper, d i s - t r i b u t e t h e f o l l o w i n g m a t e r i a l s : C-clamps, c o a t h a n g e r s , o r d i n - a r y p l i e r s , rough p i e c e s o f wood f o r "working" base, hammer and n a i l s . I n s t r u c t the s t u d e n t s who want t o make f i g u r e s e i t h e r i n extreme m o t i o n and/or l a r g e r t h a n about 10 i n c h e s h i g h , t o open up t h e w i r e c o a t h a n g e r s , clamp them i n the C-clamp, and f a s h i o n what would c o r r e s p o n d t o a s i m p l i f i e d v e r s i o n o f t h e s k e l e t o n f o r t h e i r s c u l p t u r e . The h e a v i e r w i r e o f t h i s s k e l e t o n w i l l s u p p o r t t h e f i g u r e b e t t e r and w i l l add i n t e r e s t t h r o u g h con- t r a s t . T h i s s k e l e t o n s h o u l d be n a i l e d down on a temporary (work- ing) wooden base, i n o r d e r t o see whether i t s t a n d s i n t h e de- s i r e d pose, o r perhaps i t needs a d d i t i o n a l s u p p o r t . Having i t on a temporary base i s a l s o v e r y i m p o r t a n t i n o r d e r t o f r e e b o t h hands f o r w o r k i n g w i t h the t h i n n e r , s o f t e r w i r e . 61. ' S t u d e n t s who a r e d o i n g s m a l l e r f i g u r e s do not need the s t r e n g t h o f t h e c o a t hanger w i r e but s h o u l d n e v e r t h e l e s s use the s o f t w i r e , perhaps d o u b l e d , t o c o n s t r u c t a s k e l e t o n f o r v i s u a l s t r e n g t h . The remainder o f the f i g u r e can be attempted as c l o s e l y ap- p r o x i m a t i n g the human anatomy as d e s i r e d by u s i n g k n o t s made w i t h needlenose p l i e r s t o i n d i c a t e j o i n t s , " o u t l i n i n g " shapes and muscles t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l l y , o r even s h a p i n g i n t e r n a l organs o r bones such as r i b c a g e . F i n a l l y , e m b e l l i s h m e n t s can be added w i t h the s o f t , c o l o u r e d w i r e from t e l e p h o n e c a b l e s which can even be woven, and/or w i t h copper s h e e t i n g . f r o m which h a t s , h e l - mets, weapons, u m b r e l l a s , e t c . can be f a s h i o n e d . The f i n a l f i g - ure o r f i g u r e s must t h e n be removed from the rough wooden base and a t t a c h e d t o a w e l l - f i n i s h e d base. Use s t a i n , v a r n i s h o r l i n s e e d o i l t o f i n i s h the wood, s t a p l e " w i t h g u n t a c k e r or. n a i l down s c u l p t u r e and g l u e a p i e c e o f f e l t under the base. E l a b o r - a t e wooden bases combined w i t h copper s h e e t i n g may be attempted i f s u i t a b l e f o r the s u b j e c t m a t t e r o f the f i g u r e i n w i r e . Papier-mache s c u l p t u r e . R a t i o n a l e : Newspaper and w a l l p a p e r p a s t e a r e the cheapest a v a i l a b l e m a t e r i a l s f o r the c l a s s r o o m t e a c h e r , y e t l a r g e s i z e , l i g h t w e i g h t s c u l p t u r e can be c o n s t r u c t e d from i t by b o t h j u n i o r and s e n i o r s t u d e n t s . I t p r o v i d e s t h e chance t o make l a r g e s c u l p t u r e more e a s i l y w i t h t h e a d d i t i v e o r b u i l d - u p p r o c e s s , c u l m i n a t i n g i n t h e most i n d e s t r u c t i b l e p i e c e o f s c u l p t u r e which can be made w i t h ease w i t h i n t h e l i m i t a t i o n s o f t h e Secondary S c h o o l . G o a l : S t u d e n t s w i l l g e t i n v o l v e d i n the b u i l d i n g o f l a r g e r s c u l p - t u r e and be encouraged by the r e l a t i v e ease o f m a n i p u l a t i n g t h e m a t e r i a l w i t h o u t t h e n e c e s s i t y o f k e e p i n g t o a d e f i n i t e p r i o r p l a n or u s i n g an armature. Papier-mache a l l o w s f o r more spon- t a n e i t y than c l a y , w i r e o r p l a s t e r . Obj e c t i v e : S t u d e n t s w i l l b e g i n w i t h a s m a l l c l a y maquette as a p l a n but w i l l be a b l e t o d e p a r t from i t and produce a l a r g e r s i z e d s c u l p t u r e t h a n t h e y would have d a r e d t o attempt i n o t h e r s c u l p - t u r a l m a t e r i a l s where armatures f o r l a r g e r p i e c e s would be i n - d i s p e n s a b l e . They w i l l be a b l e t o choose a f i n i s h which w i l l i n c l u d e s e v e r a l c o l o u r s , not recommended f o r use i n o t h e r s c u l p - t u r e . M a t e r i a l s f o r s t u d e n t use: - w a l l p a p e r p a s t e - b i t t e r alum ( p o t a s s i u m aluminium' s u l f a t e ) - t i s s u e paper i n a s s o r t e d c o l o u r s - p a i n t s - s h e l l a c o r v a r n i s h - paper c u t t e r - b u c k e t - s m a l l c o n t a i n e r s w i t h l i d s - newspaper - wax paper A c t i v i t i e s : The making o f a c l a y maquette i s a d v i s a b l e as a s t a r t i n g p o i n t , a l t h o u g h d e p a r t u r e from t h e o r i g i n a l p l a n may o c c u r , i n d e e d i t s h o u l d be encouraged. D i s t r i b u t e newspaper t o each s t u d e n t , as w e l l as l o n g , narrow s t r i p s o f newspaper c u t w i t h the paper c u t t e r . These l o n g s t r i p s w i l l be t u r n e d i n t o s h o r t e r p i e c e s , as needed d u r - i n g c o n s t r u c t i o n . Mix i n a b u c k e t , a box o f w a l l p a p e r p a s t e and water a c c o r d - i n g t o the r e c i p e on the box, o r s i m p l y add the powder t o the water t o g e t a t h i c k cream c o n s i s t e n c y . You may use a s t r a i n e r f o r a d d i n g the powder t o a v o i d c l o t s . Mix w i t h a wooden spoon o r , b e t t e r s t i l l , w i t h your hand t o get a smooth p a s t e . Now add a good p i n c h o f alum t o t h e p a s t e , mix, and d i s t r i b u t e i n t o s m a l l e r c o n t a i n e r s w i t h l i d s . The alum p r e v e n t s the w a l l p a p e r p a s t e from g o i n g bad and cheesy, and l i d s keep i t from d r y i n g o u t . Cover w o r k i n g s u r f a c e s w i t h wax paper t o which w a l l p a p e r p a s t e i s l e s s l i k e l y t o s t i c k . S t u d e n t s must t a k e s h e e t s o f newspaper, crumple i t t h o r - o u g h l y and rub i t v i g o r o u s l y i n o r d e r t o break down the f i b r e , and make the newspaper p l i a b l e . Then s t u d e n t s form l a r g e clumps o f shapes, v a g u e l y a p p r o p r i a t e f o r the p l a n n e d s c u l p t u r e , s p r i n - k l e w a l l p a p e r p a s t e among t h e crumpled form, and a t t a c h clumps t o each o t h e r w i t h newspaper s t r i p s t o h o l d them t o g e t h e r . They s h o u l d a v o i d u s i n g t o o many s t r i p s e l s e i t w i l l l o o k l i k e i n d i v - i d u a l packages, i n s t e a d o f l a r g e forms used t o b u i l d up the g e n e r a l shape. As w a l l p a p e r p a s t e does not s t i c k u n t i l i t h a r d - ens, a t the d a i l y c l e a n - u p each work i n p r o g r e s s must be sup- p o r t e d t o h o l d i t s d e s i r e d shape u n t i l i t d r i e s o v e r n i g h t . The more p a s t e used, the s l o w e r i t d r i e s and the h e a v i e r i t becomes. However, once d r i e d , the s c u l p t u r e becomes s t o n e h a r d i n what- e v e r shape i t d r i e d i n , w i t h o u t the p o s s i b i l i t y o f c h a n g i n g i t . When the whole f i g u r e i s roughed o u t , t h e r e i s g r e a t need t o go over t h e e n t i r e s u r f a c e , f i l l i n g i n unnecessary d i p s w i t h s m a l l amounts o f crumpled paper w i t h p a s t e . T h i s w i l l c r e a t e i n n e r t e n s i o n o f t h e form and a smooth s u r f a c e . S u r f a c e t e x - t u r a l e f f e c t s , such as h a i r made o f t h i n l y c u t s t r i p s o f news- paper, may be added. F i n a l f i n i s h o f the work may be chosen from t h e s e a l t e r n a - t i v e s : l e a v e s c u l p t u r e made o f newspaper, and add i n t e r e s t i n g touches by c u t t i n g out from t h e paper images such as e y e s , o r even words as t h e y are a p p r o p r i a t e . A t h i n l a y e r o f v a r n i s h o r s h e l l a c may be a p p l i e d t o s e a l the s u r f a c e . Other p o s s i b i l i - t i e s a r e e i t h e r u s i n g p a i n t t o c o v e r s c u l p t u r e i n one, o r many c o l o u r s , o r e l s e t i s s u e paper i n c o l o u r s , t o r n i n t o p a t c h e s and u s i n g o v e r l a p p i n g t o c r e a t e a d d i t i o n a l c o l o u r s o r shades. The l a t t e r tends t o u n i f y the s c u l p t u r e more t h a n t h e use o f s e v e r a l p a i n t e d s e c t i o n s . T i s s u e paper c o n t a i n s dyes w h i c h c o l o u r hands o r a n y t h i n g e l s e i n c o n t a c t w i t h i t , and i t i s h a r d t o remove even from hands t h e same day. I t does come o f f hands e v e n t u a l l y . Lack o f armature l e n d s g r e a t e r freedom t o t h i s t e c h n i q u e w i t h papier-mache, and because o f t h e s t r e n g t h o f the m a t e r i a l i t i s even p o s s i b l e t o b u i l d an u p r i g h t f i g u r e i n the h o r i z o n t a l p o s i t i o n , and s t a n d i t up when d r y . P l a s t e r o f P a r i s on armature. R a t i o n a l e : S c u l p t u r e made w i t h a t h i n l a y e r o f p l a s t e r o f P a r i s upon an i n t e r n a l w i r e armature can y i e l d t h e l a r g e s t s i z e work p r a c - t i c a l w i t h i n the Secondary S c h o o l s e t t i n g w i t h i t s f a c i l i t i e s and t i m e t a b l e . I t can be s e t a s i d e and worked on from day t o day, w i t h o u t s p e c i a l c a r e t a k e n between s e s s i o n s . Very l a r g e s c u l p t u r e remains s t i l l l i g h t enough i n w e i g h t t o be e a s i l y h a n d l e d by a l l s t u d e n t s . G o a l : S t u d e n t s w i l l have t h e o p p o r t u n i t y t o work on a v e r y l a r g e p i e c e o f s c u l p t u r e , u s i n g t h e a d d i t i v e , b u i l d - u p p r o c e s s w i t h a s t i l l r e l a t i v e l y f l e x i b l e m a t e r i a l a l l o w i n g g r a d u a l development and a measure o f change. O b j e c t i v e : S t u d e n t s w i l l p l a n the l a r g e work by f i r s t d o i n g a c l a y ma q u e t t e . They w i l l have more freedom i n c h o o s i n g a pose f o r the f i g u r e as t h e s t r o n g w i r e armature they w i l l c o n s t r u c t w i l l p e r m i t movement o f the f i g u r e and extended e x t r e m i t i e s , i f d e s i r e d Depending on the s i z e o f the f i g u r e , time f o r c o m p l e t i o n w i l l be c o n s i d e r a b l e , t h u s e n c o u r a g i n g s t u d e n t s t o p e r s e v e r e w i t h a p r o j e c t . M a t e r i a l s f o r s t u d e n t use: - p l a s t e r o f P a r i s , t o be used w i t h c a u t i o n - c h i c k e n w i r e - s t o v e p i p e w i r e - i r o n o x i d e s o r powder tempera p a i n t t o c o l o u r the p l a s t e r - b u r l a p - r u b b e r b a l l , c u t i n h a l f - s c i s s o r s , p l i e r s , spoon, k n i f e - n a i l s , hammer - s m a l l b a s i n - wooden board - f l e x i b l e c o n t a i n e r f o r d r y p l a s t e r - wax paper o r t a r paper - m e t a l s p a t u l a s , l a r g e t o v e r y s m a l l A c t i v i t i e s : Have s t u d e n t s p r e p a r e a c l a y maquette as a d e t a i l e d p l a n f o r the l a r g e s c u l p t u r e . C o n s i d e r a b l e freedom t o choose the pose f o r the f i g u r e i s p o s s i b l e b u t extreme m o t i o n , such as a r u n n i n g f i g u r e , w i l l need a h e a v i e r armature, p a r t l y o f wood, f o r s t r e n g t h . The armature, however, must remain i n t e r n a l , cov- e r e d c o m p l e t e l y by the p l a s t e r o f P a r i s . S t u d e n t s must d e c i d e the s i z e o f the work t h e y want t o do. H a l f l i f e s i z e o r even f u l l l i f e s i z e f i g u r e s a r e e n t i r e l y p o s s - i b l e b u t , o f c o u r s e , are more s u i t a b l e f o r s e n i o r s t u d e n t s t h a t a r e fewer i n number, r e d u c i n g d a y - t o day s t o r a g e space needs. A board i s needed as a w o r k i n g base. I f wood i s used as p a r t o f t h e a r m a t u r e , i t must be n a i l e d t o t h e base. P a r t s o f the f i g u r e must be formed from c h i c k e n w i r e which can be squeezed i n t o t h e shapes needed f o r v a r i o u s p a r t s o f t h e f i g u r e , then p l i e r s and s t o v e p i p e w i r e used t o a t t a c h t h e p a r t s t o each o t h e r s e c u r e l y , and a l s o f i n a l l y n a i l e d t o the w o r k i n g base. The l a t - t e r i s n e c e s s a r y t o keep b o t h hands f r e e f o r work. The armature must s t a n d f i r m l y on the base so t h a t the f i g u r e does not t o p - p l e when l a t e r weighed down w i t h p l a s t e r . Cut b u r l a p s t r i p s 1% t o 2 i n c h e s wide and 4 t o Ah i n c h e s l o n g . Make p l e n t y as i t w i l l be used t o c o v e r the whole f i g u r e as i f i t was bandaged from hand t o f o o t . Make a s m a l l amount o f t h i n p l a s t e r o f P a r i s m i x t u r e i n h a l f r u b b e r b a l l . Dip each s t r i p o f b u r l a p i n t h e p l a s t e r and p r o c e e d t o c o v e r a l l o f the c h i c k e n w i r e armature w i t h o v e r l a p p i n g s t r i p s . T h i s w i l l form t h e base t o w h i c h the f i n a l l a y e r o f p l a s t e r w i l l adhere. Now d e c i d e on the d e s i r e d c o l o u r o f the s c u l p t u r e . White g i v e s a l i f e l e s s appearance t o the human f i g u r e , but i t might be appro- p r i a t e f o r the p l a n n e d s c u l p t u r e . I f c o l o u r i s d e s i r e d , e x p e r i - ment w i t h r e d o r b l a c k i r o n o x i d e s o r powder tempera p a i n t s by m i x i n g w i t h d r y p l a s t e r . Make p a t c h e s o f sample c a s t s t o de- c i d e on c o l o u r . Wait u n t i l d r y as c o l o u r i s l i g h t e r t h e n . Hav- i n g d e c i d e d on t h e c o l o u r , mix a b u c k e t f u l l o f dry p l a s t e r f o r a h a l f l i f e s i z e f i g u r e w i t h c o l o u r , s t o r e w e l l s e a l e d i n a p l a s - t i c bag o r o t h e r c o n t a i n e r . P l a s t e r exposed t o a i r w i l l l o s e i t s a b i l i t y t o s e t . S t u d e n t s s h o u l d use t h e h a l f r u b b e r b a l l o r a s m a l l b a s i n t o make s m a l l b a t c h e s o f p l a s t e r t o v e r y t h i c k cream c o n s i s t e n c y and s l o w l y c o v e r the e n t i r e work w i t h a t h i n l a y e r . The advantage o f u s i n g the r u b b e r b a l l i s f o r t h e ease w i t h w h i c h i t can be c l e a n e d by t u r n i n g i t i n s i d e out i n t o the garbage. Use a spoon and o r d i n a r y t a b l e k n i f e t o smooth on the f i r s t l a y e r o f p l a s t e r . As the work p r o g r e s s e s , s t u d e n t s s h o u l d use m e t a l s p a t u l a s f o r s u r f a c e t e x t u r e and d e t a i l s . F i b r e , s t r i n g , wool o r any m a t e r i a l can be used f o r h a i r o r c l o t h i n g when f i r s t d i p p e d i n p l a s t e r , i f such a f i n i s h i s d e s i r e d . 68. P r o v i d e wax paper s h e e t s o r t a r paper t o c o v e r w o r k i n g s u r - f a c e . T h i s can be shaken o f f i n t o the garbage f r e q u e n t l y and, o f c o u r s e , r e u s e d . Very l a r g e work does not need a base as much as s m a l l e r p i e c e s do. However, e x h i b i t i n g l a r g e work can t r u l y be a c h a l - l e n g e . F o o t n o t e t o a n o t h e r use o f p l a s t e r o f P a r i s , namely, t h a t o f c a s t i n g n e g a t i v e and p o s i t i v e molds from i t . Use o f so- c a l l e d "waste molds," where the n e g a t i v e i s d e s t r o y e d when the p o s i t i v e i s c a s t , i s a r e l a t i v e l y s i m p l e p r o c e s s when t h e r e a r e o n l y two h a l v e s t o t h e n e g a t i v e mold. Such i s m o s t l y the case f o r p o r t r a i t s . The human f i g u r e i s f a r more complex, w i t h u n d e r c u t s and n e g a t i v e s p a c e s , and a l m o s t always n e c e s s i t a t e s the making o f a p i e c e mold. T h i s i s a v e r y complex p r o c e s s and not p r a c t i c a l w i t h i n s h o r t c l a s s p e r i o d s i n Secondary S c h o o l s . A l s o , j u s t i f i c a t i o n f o r making p i e c e molds l i e s m a i n l y i n i t s use f o r c a s t i n g i n m e t a l , o r o f making a number o f c o p i e s o f the o r i g i n a l , and i s t h u s h a r d l y f e a s i b l e i n the Secondary a r t p r o - gramme. P l a s t e r o f P a r i s f o r c a r v i n g . R a t i o n a l e : P l a s t e r o f P a r i s i s a most e c o n o m i c a l m a t e r i a l t o use f o r t h e s u b t r a c t i v e p r o c e s s o f c a r v i n g . I t i s s u i t a b l e t o i m i t a t e t h e c o l o u r s and the shape o f stone b l o c k s but i t i s a much eas- i e r m a t e r i a l t o c a r v e . I t y i e l d s t h e f i n a l work by the d i r e c t method, and needs l i t t l e s p e c i a l f i n i s h i n g t o a c h i e v e a..durable p i e c e o f s c u l p t u r e . By c a r v i n g i n p l a s t e r o f P a r i s , s t u d e n t s can e x p e r i e n c e the e x c i t e m e n t o f t h e emerging s c u l p t u r e h i d d e n i n the b l o c k . G o a l : S t u d e n t s w i l l be encouraged, and w i l l f i n d i t i n c r e a s i n g l y n e c e s s a r y t o v i s u a l i z e the f i n a l s c u l p t u r e b e f o r e t h e y b e g i n t o c a r v e , as what i s removed can not be r e p l a c e d . They w i l l produce a w e l l f i n i s h e d , s o l i d p i e c e o f s c u l p t u r e . O b j e c t i v e : S t u d e n t s w i l l p r e p a r e a s u i t a b l e maquette i n c l a y as a p l a n and n e c e s s a r y g u i d e f o r t h e c a r v i n g o f a l a r g e r p i e c e . D u r i n g the p r o c e s s o f c a r v i n g , a c c i d e n t s may happen which w i l l n e c e s s i - t a t e a d a p t i n g the o r i g i n a l maquette and t o f i n d an a l t e r n a t e s o l u t i o n . S t u d e n t s w i l l e x p e r i e n c e g r e a t l y i n c r e a s e d d i f f i c u l - t i e s i n h a n d l i n g an i n f l e x i b l e m a t e r i a l such as p l a s t e r , but w i l l h o p e f u l l y a l s o l e a r n t o e n j o y the s o l i d i t y and s t r e n g t h i n h e r e n t i n i t . M a t e r i a l s f o r s t u d e n t use: - c l a y f o r the maquette - p l a s t e r o f P a r i s - i r o n o x i d e s and powder tempera t o c o l o u r the p l a s t e r - c h i s e l s - m a l l e t s - o l d l i n o c u t t i n g t o o l s - p a r i n g k n i v e s - o l d d e n t a l t o o l s 70. - m i l k c a r t o n s , s t r o n g p l a s t i c bags or s i m p l e wooden boces f o r molds - l i q u i d soap - b u c k e t s - p l a s t i c , f l e x i b l e - wax paper o r t a r paper - t h i n foam r u b b e r p i e c e s - m i l k L e s s o n a i d s : S l i d e s No. 215 and 216, 220 and 221, 251 and 252, 282 and 285, 310, 311, 308 and 309, 322 and 324. D i s c u s s i o n and a c t i v i t i e s : Show s l i d e s o f M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s t e r r a - c o t t a models (No. 215 and 220), and t h e l i f e s i z e marble s c u l p t u r e s based on them (No. 216 and 221) . D i s c u s s the need f o r t h e maquette as an a i d t o p l a n t h e f i n a l s c u l p t u r e , and the h e l p i t p r o v i d e s by u s i n g i t from each s i d e as a g u i d e t o what might be removed from t h e p l a s t e r b l o c k . The maquette a l s o s e r v e s i n d e t e r m i n i n g t h e shape o f t h e b l o c k t o be c a s t . Emphasize t h e i n h e r e n t s t r e n g t h and weak p o i n t s o f p l a s t e r o f P a r i s as a m a t e r i a l , namely, the i m p r e s s i o n o f s t r e n g t h and h e a v i n e s s o f form i t conveys when the s c u l p t u r e i s k e p t as a compact d e s i g n , but i t s u n s u i t a b i l i t y f o r p r o t r u d i n g shapes o f l e s s e r t h i c k n e s s than t h e r e s t o f the form. R e l a t e d t o the hu- man f i g u r e , poses must be chosen o f the body a t r e s t , not i n movement, and arms and l e g s must be k e p t c l o s e t o t h e body. S u i t a b l e poses a r e numerous s i t t i n g ones, o r even l y i n g down as w e l l , b u t n e g a t i v e space between p a r t s o f t h e body must be k e p t a t a minimum. Show s l i d e s o f Rodin's work, No. 282, a bronze f i g u r e u n s u i t a b l e f o r c a r v i n g , b u t No. 2 85 most a p p r o p r i a t e . S i m i l a r l y , No. 310 and 311, by S i n t e n i s , u n s u i t a b l e ; on t h e o t h e r hand, No. 308 and 309, by B a r l a c h , No. 322 by A r c h i p e n k o and No. 324 by Barlach e f f e c t i v e . A l s o show Houdon's "Diana," on S l i d e No. 251, i n m a r b l e , c a r v e d w i t h t h e n e c e s s a r y s u p p o r t o f p l a n t s a t her f e e t , and No. 252, the bronze v e r s i o n , w i t h o u t any s u p p o r t e x c e p t i n t h e s t r e n g t h o f the m e t a l . A f t e r the s t u d e n t s p r e p a r e the maquette, p r e p a r e f o r c a s t - i n g the b l o c k . Suggest c o l o u r s t o i m i t a t e s t o n e , such as p a l e p i n k , p a l e grey o r p a l e green and, i f any o f t h e s e i s chosen, use r e d o r b l a c k i r o n o x i d e — f r o m g l a z e m a t e r i a l s — o r powder tempera p a i n t t o mix w i t h the dry p l a s t e r . Make s m a l l sample c a s t s , l e t d r y , t o determine s u i t a b i l i t y o f c o l o u r . S t u d e n t s might o p t t o remain w i t h w h i t e p l a s t e r , a l t h o u g h i t l o o k s r a t h e r l i f e l e s s f o r the human f i g u r e . I f a c o l o u r i s chosen, mix a much l a r g e r amount o f d r y p l a s t e r w i t h i t than you a n t i c i - p a t e u s i n g , as i t i s not p o s s i b l e t o match the c o l o u r c l o s e l y enough. F o r the s t a n d a r d s i z e bucket you c o u l d be h e e d i n g 10-15 kg o f p l a s t e r (about h a l f o f the s t a n d a r d s a c k ) . Keep t h e c o l - oured dry p l a s t e r i n a s e p a r a t e c o n t a i n e r ; b a s i n s o r b u c k e t s are s u i t a b l e . Choose t h e c o n t a i n e r s f o r t h e i r s i z e and shape. M i l k c a r t o n s a r e f o r l i m i t e d s m a l l s i z e s c u l p t u r e . S t r o n g p l a s t i c bags can be used t o pour the l i q u i d p l a s t e r i n t o and by t y i n g i t , and a l s o p l a c i n g i t w i t h the bag i n t o a n o t h e r c o n t a i n e r from w h i c h i t can be removed when i t hardens, more f l e x i b i l i t y i s o b t a i n e d t o a c h i e v e a d i f f e r e n t shaped b l o c k as w e l l as a l a r g e r s i z e d one. Wooden boxes need be hammered t o g e t h e r f o r l a r g e r b l o c k s o f p l a s t e r but they have t o be w e l l p r e p a r e d w i t h sev- e r a l b r u s h i n g s o f l i q u i d soap t o p r e v e n t the p l a s t e r from f u s - i n g w i t h t h e wood. B e f o r e you pour p l a s t e r i n t o a box, s e a l t h e seams o f the box from t h e o u t s i d e w i t h f r e s h c l a y , p o u r i n g s l o w l y so l i t t l e p l a s t e r w i l l escape a t the seams. As t h e p l a s t e r s e t s , i t no l o n g e r l e a k s from weak p o i n t s o f the box. To mix t h e p l a s t e r f o r p o u r i n g , p r o c e e d as f o l l o w s : f i l l the bucket t h r e e - q u a r t e r s f u l l w i t h c o l d w a t e r . P l a c e on news- paper t o ease c l e a n i n g . I f you work near a s i n k , make v e r y s u r e t h a t not even the s m a l l e s t amount o f p l a s t e r o f P a r i s g e t s i n t o the s i n k because i t w i l l q u i c k l y b l o c k the d r a i n . S l o w l y add the d r y p l a s t e r - b y the h a n d f u l , s h a k i n g i t w i t h an open palm i n t o the w a t e r . Keep a d d i n g u n t i l d r y peaks form on the w a t e r ' s s u r f a c e and the p l a s t e r no l o n g e r s i n k s i n t o the w a t e r . Only a t t h i s time s h o u l d you s t i r i t t o e l i m i n a t e lumps. S t i r r i n g speeds up the s e t t i n g o f the p l a s t e r which i s a c h e m i c a l p r o c e s s and i s i r r e v e r s i b l e . Have your c o n t a i n e r ready t o pour the p l a s t e r , now a t v e r y t h i c k cream c o n s i s t e n c y , b e f o r e i t s o l i d i - f i e s . P l a s t e r s e t s w i t h i n a few hours and f e e l s warm t o the t o u c h d u r i n g t h i s p r o c e s s . Set a s i d e c o n t a i n e r s , and immediat- e l y c l e a n up e v e r y t h i n g w i t h p l a s t e r on i t , by s c r a p i n g i t i n t o t h e garbage can f i r s t , and l a t e r use wet paper t o w e l s t o wipe e v e r y t h i n g c l e a n . A v o i d washing t h i n g s w i t h p l a s t e r on them i n the s i n k . I f you do, l e t a l o t o f water r u n t h r o u g h the s i n k t o p r e v e n t p l u g g i n g i t . P r o v i d e l a r g e p i e c e s o f wax paper o r t a r paper t o c o v e r the t a b l e s where s t u d e n t s work. These can be shaken i n t o the 73. garbage and r e u s e d each t i m e . C a r v i n g must b e g i n w i t h the maquette i n s i g h t . S t u d e n t s might use a p i e c e o f c h a r c o a l t o s k e t c h on t h e p l a s t e r b l o c k b u t i t might be d i f f i c u l t i f i t i s m o i s t . However, the p l a s t e r b l o c k must be k e p t wrapped i n p l a s t i c w h i l e work i s i n p r o g r e s s as i t i s e a s i e r t o c a r v e a m o i s t b l o c k t h a n a wet one. S t u d e n t s s h o u l d use l a r g e r c h i s e l s and h e a v i e r m a l l e t s a t f i r s t , depend- i n g on the s i z e o f the s c u l p t u r e , and rough out the e n t i r e p i e c e from a l l s i d e s . S t u d e n t s must h o l d the c h i s e l a t a 45°angle and always hammer p i e c e s o f f from t h e i n s i d e towards the o u t s i d e o f t h e s c u l p t u r e , away from t h e i r hands. As t h e s c u l p t u r e emerges, t h e y s h o u l d use p r o g r e s s i v e l y s m a l l e r c h i s e l s and l i g h t e r m a l l e t s . E v e n t u a l l y no m a l l e t i s needed, and they can work w i t h o l d l i n o c u t t i n g t o o l s , p a r i n g k n i v e s and d e n t a l t o o l s i f you have them. Remind them t o keep t h e s c u l p t u r e t u r n i n g and t o d e v e l o p i t e v e n l y from each s i d e . To keep the p i e c e from s l i p p i n g around on the t a b l e , a p i e c e o f foam r u b b e r w i l l h o l d i t s t i l l . The f i n i s h e d c a r v i n g s h o u l d be mounted on a base, but be- f o r e s t u d e n t s do t h i s t h e y need t o s e a l t h e pores w h i c h w i l l keep the s c u l p t u r e c l e a n e r o v e r t i m e . Use whole m i l k t o b r u s h on the c a r v i n g ; i t i s t h i n enough not t o form a c o a t and d e t r a c t from the s u r f a c e t e x t u r e but f a t enough t o s e a l the p o r e s . I n c o n c l u s i o n , t e l l t h e s t u d e n t s the s t o r y about M i c h e l a n - g e l o who seemed t o c a r v e g r e a t b l o c k s o f marble i n t o b e a u t i f u l s c u l p t u r e w i t h ease. He responded t o h i s a d m i r e r s w i t h a s h r u g , s a y i n g t h a t he, a f t e r a l l , o n l y removed the s u p e r f l u o u s s t o n e , the s c u l p t u r e was t h e r e a l l a l o n g . Concepts o f S c u l p t u r e T h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l i t y . R a t i o n a l e : Most t h i n g s i n the environment a r e t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l . I n s c u l p t u r e d e p t h , which m a n i f e s t s i t s e l f i n form, i s a r e a l i t y , i n c o n t r a s t w i t h much o f t w o d i m e n s i o n a l work where i t i s an o p t i c a l i l l u s i o n . P e r c e p t i o n o f t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l i t y does not seem i n b o r n i n most p e o p l e i n s p i t e o f i t s f r e q u e n c y around us, t h e r e f o r e a t t e n t i o n needs t o be d i r e c t e d t o i t i n t h e l e a r n i n g p r o c e s s . G o a l : To f o s t e r awareness o f t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l i t y i n s t u d e n t s even as t h e y view s c u l p t u r e one s i d e a t a t i m e . O b j e c t i v e : S t u d e n t s w i l l d i r e c t t h e i r a t t e n t i o n t o t h e a c t u a l advanc- i n g and r e c e d i n g o f form, and i t s c h a n g i n g c h a r a c t e r as t h e same s c u l p t u r e i s viewed from d i f f e r e n t a n g l e s . L e s s o n a i d s : S l i d e s No. 2 and 3, 6 and 7, 45 and 46, 47 and 48, 91 and 92 and 93, 105, 109 and 110, 113, 124 and 125 and 126, 135 and 136 and 137, 139 and 140, 177, 186 and 187, 188 and 189 and 190, 197 and 198, 202 and 203 and 204, 211 and 212, 245 and 246, 258, 268 and 269, 271 and 272 and 273, 274 and 275 and 276, 280 and 281, 286 and 287, 75. 349 and 350 and 351, 361 and 362, 363 and 364, 365 and 366, 377 and 378, 386 and 387, 392 and 393 and 394. Small, actual sculpture, a r e p l i c a or student work, preferably, but not necessarily, of the human figure. Discussion: Hold up the sculpture, turn i t slowly around. Direct the students' attention to the changing image of the piece from d i f f e r e n t angles. Explain how i n many parts of the sculpture a p a r t i c u l a r form begins to grow out of another, leads the eye around to a new angle, and has another form emerge from i t . This phenomenon helps to unify a piece of sculpture, just as i t makes our body whole. The muscles connect each part of our body, observable to the eye, such as the head grows out of the neck which i n turn emerges from the shoulders; from there the arms continue i n one d i r e c t i o n , the trunk i n another. Simi- l a r l y , on the face, the nose or l i p s are not "tacked on" but the nose i s growing out of the cheeks with the upward swinging bridge of muscles, and the c i r c u l a r muscles of the mouth, con- nected to the cheeks and chin, have the l i p s only at the f i n a l t i p of the muscles. Introduce the s l i d e s by t e l l i n g the students that they w i l l see the same sculptures from two to three angles, but of course only one angle at a time. Thus the camera's lense has selected one angle for them and i t w i l l appear as a twodimensional image on the screen. Therefore they need to look for forms which l e a d t h e i r eyes around the work even i f t h e y w i l l not be a b l e t o t u r n t h e s c u l p t u r e t o see where i t l e a d s . The a c q u i s i t i o n o f such a f e e l i n g might be compared t o t h e c u r i o s i t y of what l i e s beyond a mountain o r the c u r v e o f a r o a d . Some o f t h e s l i d e s p r e s e n t e a s i l y r e c o g n i z a b l e f u r t h e r views o f the same work, o t h e r s a r e s u r p r i s i n g l y d i f f e r e n t . The complex forms o f t h e 17,000 y e a r o l d "Venus o f Lespugue" (No. 6 and 7) are e a s i e r p e r c e i v e d from the s i d e v i e w (No. 7) and need t o be viewed a g a i n , the second t i m e , from the f r o n t . The s t a t u e o f " V i s h u " from 9th c e n t u r y I n d i a (No. 47 and 48) i s i n - t e n t i o n a l l y d i f f e r e n t from f r o n t and back, r e f l e c t i n g m u l t i p l e r o l e s o f t h i s Hindu d e i t y . S l i d e No. 105 shows two views o f t h e Pharaoh Echnaton. T h i s s l i d e i s s u i t a b l e f o r study o f ad- v a n c i n g and r e c e d i n g form i n i t s h i g h l y r e a l i s t i c p o r t r a y a l o f a l e s s t h a n p e r f e c t body. Echnaton i n s t i t u t e d a new r e l i g i o n which d i d not s u r v i v e h i s r e i g n . A r t i s t s were d i r e c t e d t o p o r - t r a y him r e a l i s t i c a l l y which i s i n marked c o n t r a s t t o the i d e a l - i z e d d e p i c t i o n o f o t h e r E g y p t i a n Pharaohs. T h i s s l i d e , as S l i d e s No. 113, 177 and 258, have the added advantage t h a t they combine two views o f t h e same s c u l p t u r e s i m u l t a n e o u s l y . S l i d e s o f the Greek s t a t u e , t h e " V i c t o r y o f Samothrace" (No. 139 and 140), p r e s e n t the u s u a l s i d e v i e w and t h e b a r e l y r e c o g n i z a b l e and o b v i o u s l y d i s a d v a n t a g e o u s f r o n t a l v i e w . S i m i - l a r c o n c l u s i o n s might be a r r i v e d a t w i t h o t h e r c o m b i n a t i o n s o f views o f t h e same f i g u r e . One o f M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s s t a t u e s , " V i c - t o r y , " i s e x c i t i n g from one a n g l e (No. 211) but most awkward from two o t h e r s (No. 2 1 2 ) - - h a r d l y e x p e c t e d from a g r e a t master! 77. Rodin's " S t . John the B a p t i s t " (No. 271 and 272 and 273) p r e s e n t s an o p p o r t u n i t y t o s t u d y t h e movement o f w a l k i n g from d i f f e r e n t a n g l e s . Rodin's "The K i s s " (No. 286 and 287), on the o t h e r hand, b a r e l y s a t i s f i e s one's c u r i o s i t y o f the work's t o - t a l i t y . Henry Moore's " R e c l i n i n g F i g u r e : A r c h Leg" (No. 349 and 350 and 351) g i v e s a good account o f t h e s t r e n g t h t h r o u g h t h r e e d i f f e r e n t views o f h i s d e c e p t i v e l y s i m p l e forms. D a v i d Wynne's "Embracing L o v e r s " (No. 361 and 362) needs s p e c i a l s t u d y t o v i s u a l i z e t h a t the s l i d e s a r e a c t u a l l y o f the same work. F i n a l l y , E l e k Imredy's " G i r l i n W e t s u i t " (No. 386 and 387), so w e l l known i n Vancouver but m o s t l y from the one a n g l e o f the p o s t c a r d s , p r e s e n t s on S l i d e No. 387 t h r e e uncommon views o f the f i n i s h e d c l a y s t a t u e i n t h e a r t i s t ' s • s t u d i o . Form, shape, mass, volume, monumentality. R a t i o n a l e : Words such as form, shape, mass, volume, and monumentality a r e common i n d i s c u s s i o n s of s c u l p t u r e . Each s t a n d s f o r a con- c e p t d e s c r i p t i v e o f s c u l p t u r e and t h e r e f o r e an e x a m i n a t i o n o f each s h o u l d be a t t e m p t e d , i n o r d e r t o p r o v i d e a m e a n i n g f u l vo- c a b u l a r y f o r a d o l e s c e n t s . G o a l : To f a c i l i t a t e the usage o f above terms i n t h e d e s c r i p t i o n o f the q u a l i t i e s o f a g i v e n s c u l p t u r e , be i t t h e work o f o t h e r a r t i s t s o r the s t u d e n t s ' own work. O b j e c t i v e s : S t u d e n t s w i l l l e a r n t o u n d e r s t a n d some unique elements o f 78. s c u l p t u r e , and they w i l l be able to use these terms i n d i s c u s s - i o n . Lesson a i d s : S l i d e s No. 2 and 3 and 4, 6 and 7, 34, 51 and 69 and 77, 79, 83, 98, 199 and 200, 207, 210, 224, 225, 263, 286-7, 290, 308, 322, 324, 344 (Mass) S l i d e s No. 21, 33, 39, 45 'and 46 , 55, 109 and 110, 124-5-6, 129, 139, 143, 185, 187, 188, 235, 257, 265, 283, 289, 297, 311, 327, 345, 355 (Volume) S l i d e s No. 2 and 3 and 4, 6 and 7, 18, 28, 51 and 69 and 77, 79, 98, 107, 199 and 200, 215-6, 224, 228, 274-5-6, 290, 294, 309, 341, 342, 344, 349-50-51, 330 and 333 and 382 (335, 367), 404 and 406 and 407 (Monumentality) D i s c u s s i o n : Form as a m a n i f e s t a t i o n of depth has been d i s c u s s e d w i t h i n , the u n i t on t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l i t y . Form can be s o l i d or the v o i d between s o l i d s , s i m i l a r to negative and p o s i t i v e space i n twodimensional work. Form and shape are o f t e n used i n t e r c h a n g e a b l y , although form tends to be mostly a t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l element, whereas shape i s a l s o used as a twodimensional design element. In the d e s c r i p t i o n of the whole s c u l p t u r e , form i s b e t t e r used to d e s c r i b e the t o t a l o r g a n i z a t i o n o f a l l p a r t s , i n c l u d i n g i t s i n n e r s t r u c t u r e . The p a r t s of the whole work are b e t t e r c a l l e d shapes, thus shape would tend to be the s m a l l e r u n i t i n comparison with form. 79. A p a r t from t h e use o f form f o r t h e whole work, i t i s a l s o used t o d e s c r i b e t h e q u a l i t y o f form, e.g., dense, heavy, s o l i d , o r t h i n , f r a g i l e , outward t h r u s t i n g . As a l l s c u l p t u r e c o n s i s t s o f form, t h e r e a r e no s p e c i f i c s l i d e s recommended f o r i t s s t u d y . For the purpose o f e x p l a i n i n g t h e c o n c e p t s o f mass v e r s u s volume, i t might be u s e f u l t o imagine t h a t one would drape a s o f t c l o t h o v e r two s c u l p t u r e s such as t h e I n u i t works o f "Hunter w i t h Harpoon" (No. 33) and "Hunter w i t h S e a l " (No. 34). W i t h i n the c l o t h e n c l o s e d i s the volume o f each work. No. 33 would appear l a r g e r t h a n No. 34. "Hunter w i t h Harpoon" has o u t - ward t h r u s t i n g forms w i t h spaces between them, and thus appears t o be l i g h t e r and t o have g r e a t e r volume. "Hunter w i t h S e a l , " on the o t h e r hand, i s chunky, has g r e a t d e n s i t y o f form, no i n - t e r n a l s p a c e s , and g i v e s the i m p r e s s i o n o f heavy w e i g h t w h i c h i s c a l l e d mass. ( I f t h e r e a r e s u i t a b l e s c u l p t u r e s i n the c l a s s - room, s t u d e n t work o r r e p l i c a s , you might demonstrate t h i s w i t h a c l o t h draped o v e r them.) S i m i l a r l y , the "Naked Dancer" (No. 45-46), "Tutankhamun the Harpooner" (No. 109-110), and "Zeus from A r t e m i s i o n " (No. 124-5-6) c o n s i s t o f s l e n d e r , f r a g i l e , outward t h r u s t i n g shapes and l a r g e volumes, compared t o t h e " S t a n d i n g Gudea" (No. 7 9 ) , "Amenenhet I I I " (No. 9 8 ) , "Moses" by M i c h e l a n g e l o (No. 207), which a r e a l l o f compact, s o l i d mass. Rodin's two works, "The Three Fauns" (No. 283) and "The K i s s " (No. 286-7) a r e both a p y r a m i d l i k e c o m p o s i t i o n , but w h i l e the f i r s t has many v o i d s and open spaces (which c o n t r i b u t e t o the f e e l i n g o f l i g h t n e s s a p p r o p r i a t e f o r t h e i r d a n c e ) , and l a r g e volume, "The K i s s " i s much t i g h t e r o f form and o f s e e m i n g l y 80. heavy mass. Such comparison can a l s o be made o f two o f Henry Moore's works (No. 344 and 345), the f i r s t h a v i n g more mass, the second volume. Thus l a r g e r volume o f t e n means l i g h t e r , t h i n n e r forms e x t e n d i n g from a c o r e , o r i n t e r t w i n i n g but keep- i n g s p e c i a l v o i d s between them. The concept o f mass i s b e s t a p p l i e d when form i s so o r g a n i z e d t h a t i t i s k e p t dense, and i n t h e case o f t h e f i g u r e , the e x t r e m i t i e s a r e k e p t c l o s e t o the body. A c o m p o s i t i o n o f more t h a n one f i g u r e showing a l o t o f mass, might appear as i f c a r v e d from t h e same b l o c k . Compare the two G o t h i c P i e t a s (No. 164, 16 7) t o M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s (No. 199-200). See how he managed t o keep the c o m p o s i t i o n t i g h t and s i m p l e , and how t h e i n c r e a s e d mass l e n d s g r e a t e r w e i g h t t o t h e image d e p i c t e d . F o r a n a l y s i s o f the concept o f monumentality, i t might be u s e f u l t o l o o k a t t h e o r i g i n o f the word which i s "monument." Monuments a r e l a r g e . They a r e e r e c t e d t o commemorate w o r t h - w h i l e e v e n t s o r p e o p l e , t h e y d e p i c t t h e e s s e n t i a l s o f t h e ev- e n t s o r t h e p e o p l e , and are sometimes thought o f as most sue-. c e s s f u l when k e p t s i m p l e , w i t h l i t t l e movement, and s y m b o l i c g e s t u r e s . M o n u m e n t a l i t y i n a work i s not r e l a t e d t o s i z e . I n f a c t , what may i n r e a l i t y be v e r y s m a l l , w i l l appear l i f e s i z e o r b i g - g e r . Photographs o r s l i d e s a r e u s e f u l t o i l l u s t r a t e t h i s , be- cause t h e y can m i s l e a d about t h e s i z e o f the work, and make i t guesswork t o judge t h e s c u l p t u r e ' s a c t u a l s i z e . C o n s i d e r i n g some o f the P r e h i s t o r i c "Venus" f i g u r e s , t h e one from W i l l e n d o r f (No. 2 and 3 ) , t o t h o s e who do not know i t s a c t u a l s i z e , becomes 81. a g r e a t s u r p r i s e when they a r e shown S l i d e No. 4, where i t i s h e l d i n a hand and i t s a c t u a l s i z e o f 4% i n c h e s i s r e v e a l e d . L o o k i n g a t the "Venus o f Lespugue" (No. 6 and 7 ) , i t a l s o seems l a r g e , and h a v i n g no o t h e r s c a l e , l i k e the hand f o r the former t o compare i t w i t h , i t i s d i f f i c u l t t o b e l i e v e t h a t i t i s o n l y 6 i n c h e s h i g h . Monumentality i s p r e s e n t i n some s c u l p t o r s ' work and ab- s e n t i n o t h e r s ' . Henry Moore's maquettes (No. 341 and 342), i f they were each viewed s e p a r a t e l y , c o u l d not be d i s t i n g u i s h e d from h i s v e r y l a r g e work, such as t h e " R e c l i n i n g F i g u r e : A r c h Leg" (No. 349-50-51); j u s t as M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s "Dawn" appears l i f e s i z e on t h e maquette (No. 220), as i t i s i n f a c t on t h e mar- b l e f i g u r e (No. 221). Monumentality g i v e s t h e appearance o f l a r g e s i z e . Monumentality i s conveyed by s i m p l i c i t y o f form, l a c k o f unnecessary d e t a i l , a s t a t i c s t i l l n e s s which may seem-timeless i n t h e sense t h a t we do not a n t i c i p a t e a f u t u r e m o t i o n , and seems "weighty" i n i t s i m p o r t a n c e . H e a v i n e s s o f mass, however, does not guarantee monumentality. There has t o be a c o n t e n t r e l a t e d t o the h e r o i c which i s e x p r e s s e d i n t h e work. To i l l u s - t r a t e t h i s p o i n t , M a r i n i " s "Pomona" (No. 335) and L u c c h e s i ' s " P o r t r a i t o f Paddy" (No. 367) have the mass o f heavy b o d i e s , but not t h e c o n t e n t o f h e r o i s m . I n c o n t r a s t , L a c h a i s e ' s "Stand- i n g F i g u r e " (No. 330), R i c h i e r ' s "The Storm" (No. 333), and Zuniga's " S t a n d i n g Nude O l d Woman" (No. 382) c o n t a i n the s t r e n g t h , t h e p r i d e , the s u f f e r i n g o f a l l women, which makes t h e s e works monumental. 82. C r i t i c i s m and I n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f R e p r e s e n t a t i o n s o f t h e F i g u r e L i n e a r s c u l p t u r e - t h e e l o n g a t e d , the e t h e r e a l body. R a t i o n a l e : T h i s a s p e c t o f s c u l p t u r e o f t h e f i g u r e endeavours t o con- vey man's i n n e r n a t u r e as concerned w i t h the s u p e r n a t u r a l o r s a c r e d , a sense o f a u s t e r i t y , o t h e r - w o r l d l i n e s s , perhaps even a l i e n a t i o n , by extreme l i n e a r e l o n g a t i o n o f t h e body w i t h min- i m a l t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l i t y . U n d e r s t a n d i n g o f such work from d i f - f e r e n t p e r i o d s o f h i s t o r y would f u r t h e r the a d o l e s c e n t ' s a p p r e - c i a t i o n o f the human c o n d i t i o n . G o a l s : S t u d e n t s w i l l l e a r n t o a n a l y z e s c u l p t u r e which i n appear- ance may seem t o them a t f i r s t r i d i c u l o u s o r even r e p u l s i v e but which communicates deep i d e a s and emotions w i t h which they can perhaps i d e n t i f y . O b j e c t i v e s : S t u d e n t s w i l l d e v e l o p ways o f u n d e r s t a n d i n g and d i s c u s s i n g t h e e x p r e s s i v e q u a l i t i e s o f s c u l p t u r e w h i c h , because o f an un- r e a l i s t i c and d i s t o r t e d appearance, they may a t f i r s t t e n d t o r e j e c t . Lesson a i d s : The f o l l o w i n g s l i d e s are suggested f o r d i s c u s s i o n : No. 71: "Buddha," T h a i l a n d , 17th c e n t u r y No. 144: "Naked L a n c e r , " E t r u s c a n , 5th c e n t u r y 83. No. 145 No. 14 6 No. 303 No. 320 No. 327 No. 339 No. 346 No. 355 "Ombra," E t r u s c a n " A p h r o d i t e , " E t r u s c a n , 4th c e n t u r y "Young Man S t e p p i n g Up," W i l h e l m Lehmbruck "Death o f P e t o f i , " T i b o r S z e r v a t i u s z "Don Q u i z o t e , " J u l i o Gonzales "Lady o f V e n i c e I , " A l b e r t o G i a c o m e t t i " K i n g and Queen," Henry Moore " G i r l U n d r e s s i n g , " Reg B u t l e r D i s c u s s i o n : B e g i n by drawing a t t e n t i o n t o the t e c h n i q u e and the mat- e r i a l , m e t a l , which makes such s l e n d e r and t a l l s c u l p t u r e p o s s - i b l e . As shown i n most o f t h e above s l i d e s , s c u l p t o r s used t h e most a t t r a c t i v e o f m e t a l s , b r o n z e . The o n l y e x c e p t i o n i s S z e r v a t i u s z 1 work (No. 320), which i s c a r v e d o f oak and i s 3h meters h i g h . The s k i l l o f t h e s c u l p t o r and the hardness o f t h e wood make t h i s l i n e a r work p o s s i b l e . Lead the d i s c u s s i o n t o the p r e s e n t day i d e a l o f h e a l t h and beauty, the s l i m n e s s c u l t u r e o f N o r t h A m e r i c a . Foremost r e p r e - s e n t a t i v e s o f t h i s a r e the h i g h l y p a i d , and admired r o l e models i n t h e f a s h i o n i n d u s t r y . The g r e a t c o n t r a s t between t h e i r h e i g h t and w e i g h t i s n e c e s s a r y f o r them i n o r d e r t o become mod- e l s . They l o o k g r e a t d r e s s e d , but we never see them w i t h o u t t h e d r a p e r y o f f a s h i o n a p p a r e l . An example o f extreme s l i m n e s s was t h e s u c c e s s f u l but g r o t e s q u e - l o o k i n g B r i t i s h model, Twiggy, some y e a r s ago. Reg B u t l e r ' s " G i r l U n d r e s s i n g " (No. 355) c o u l d be i n t e r - p r e t e d , i n t h e above sense, as a r e p r e s e n t a t i v e o f the N o r t h 84 . American i d e a l of youth and beauty. Butler succeeds i n making us forget the lack of appeal i n her proportions, and to convey, as she stretches and undresses, the awkwardness, the innocence, the awakening sexuality of youth. Giacometti 1 s "Lady of Venice I" (No. 339), on the other hand, appears to have a shrunken, emaciated body. The sculptor succeeds i n the portrayal of the human body with a minimum of mass but considerable volume. The surface texture's roughness conveys a sense of suffering, fear, v u l n e r a b i l i t y , and combined with the e f f e c t of her slimness, she seems to shrink from the world. Lehmbruck1s "Young Man Stepping Up" (No. 303) seems at f i r s t glance smooth and longlimbed, and suggests pure elegance. But the p o s i t i o n of the arms and head suggest a f r a g i l i t y , a s e n s i t i v i t y , an introverted man. The pose of stepping up may further indicate youth, upward bound, towards the future. In contrast to Lehmbruck's youth, i t i s hard to discern from the body of Szervatiusz' work, perhaps only from the head, that we are looking at the death of a young man. Petofi i s the foremost poet of the Hungarian language, and he died during the Revolution of 1848 which he helped to i n c i t e , lead, and f i g h t i n against the Austrian opporessors of Hungary. The sculpture, through the shrunken body, c l e a r l y shows suffering and death, but the elongated body, with i t s 3% meters height towering over ordinary man, becomes the symbol of youthful patriotism to which the a r t i s t wants us to look up to. Moving from the 19th century back to the 5th and 4th 85. c e n t u r y B.C., and E t r u s c a n a r t , as shown on S l i d e s No. 145 and 146, i n p a r t i c u l a r , we can but i n t e r p r e t w i t h 20th c e n t u r y eyes what the a r t i s t wished t o e x p r e s s . R e l a t i v e l y l i t t l e i s known about E t r u s c a n c u l t u r e , as i t was o f s h o r t d u r a t i o n and was e v e n t u a l l y absorbed i n t o the Roman Empire. Of t h e w e l l known bronze s c u l p t u r e o f the f o u n d i n g o f Rome, d e p i c t i n g a s h e - w o l f and the t w i n s Romulus and Remus s u c k l i n g h e r , we know t h a t t h e s h e - w o l f i s o f E t r u s c a n o r i g i n form c i r c a 500 B.C. and t h e t w i n s a r e l a t e r a d d i t i o n s from the 16th c e n t u r y . The r e a l i s m and workmanship o f t h e she-wolf suggest t h a t i t was not a l a c k o f a b i l i t y which made t h e E t r u s c a n s c u l p t o r s d e p i c t t h e body as s t y l i z e d and e l o n g a t e d , t o the p o i n t o f i n f i n i t e l i g h t n e s s . Man, as he appears i n "Ombra" and " A p h r o d i t e , " i s a mere sha- dow o f h i m s e l f . Reaching t o the s k y , he i s not o f t h i s w o r l d . H i s head i n t h e c l o u d s , i s he the e x p r e s s i o n o f p r o f o u n d r e l i g - i o u s symbolism, o r o f the p a i n and d e s p a i r o f a d i s a p p e a r i n g r a c e ? Such a r e examples o f d i s c u s s i o n on d i s t o r t e d , l i n e a r s c u l p - t u r e o f t h e f i g u r e . They l e a d us from p r e s e n t day s l i m n e s s c u l - t u r e w h i c h , i f p e r v e r t e d , can l e a d t o a n o r e x i a n e r v o s a , t h e i l l n e s s o f the young and r i c h , t h r o u g h o c c a s i o n a l s t a t e s o f a l i e n a t i o n from s o c i e t y , o r the w i t h d r a w a l e x p e r i e n c e d i n p a i n and s h y n e s s , t o s p i r i t u a l h e i g h t s , a l l o f t h e s e e x p r e s s e d by some s c u l p t u r e o f the human f i g u r e . B l o c k s c u l p t u r e - t h e compact, t h e e a r t h y body. R a t i o n a l e : A c e r t a i n k i n d o f s c u l p t u r e o f t h e human f i g u r e uses 86 - maximum mass, a minimum of n e g a t i v e shapes w i t h i n the o v e r a l l form, and might r e q u i r e d i s t o r t i o n o f the f i g u r e i n o r d e r t o keep i t compact. T h i s e x a g g e r a t e d s o l i d i t y conveys i d e a s , such as f i r m n e s s , r e l i a b i l i t y , t i m e l e s s n e s s , s t r e n g t h , o r earthboundness which need t o be d i s c u s s e d i n o r d e r t o be a p p r e c i a t e d by a d o l e s c e n t s . G o a l s : S t u d e n t s w i l l l e a r n t o c o n s i d e r p o s s i b l e meanings o f s c u l p - t u r e o f the human f i g u r e w h i c h they l i k e l y would have a t f i r s t r e j e c t e d as a b s u r d , o r even d i s g u s t i n g , and would t h e r e f o r e not have u n d e r s t o o d t h e i d e a s t h a t t h e s c u l p t o r w i s h e d t o e x p r e s s . O b j e c t i v e s : S t u d e n t s w i l l be a b l e t o d i s c u s s p o s s i b l e meanings and i d e a s e x p r e s s e d i n s c u l p t u r e o f t h e f i g u r e w h i c h , a l t h o u g h not r e a l i s t i c , convey fundamental f e e l i n g s and i d e a s common t o man from the dawn o f h i s t o r y t o the p r e s e n t . L e s s o n a i d s : The f o l l o w i n g s l i d e s a r e some o f t h o s e s u i t a b l e t o d i s c u s s b l o c k - l i k e , compact s c u l p t u r e : No. 2 and 3: "Venus o f W i l l e n d o r f " No. 27 No. 3 3 No. 3 5 No. 115 No. 116 No. 30 8 " E f f i g y , " C o l i m a "Hunter w i t h Harpoon," I n u i t "Mother and C h i l d , " I n u i t " B l o c k S t a t u e o f P r o p h e t , " Egypt " B l o c k S t a t u e o f P r i n c e , " Egypt " R u s s i a n Beggarwoman," E r n s t B a r l a c h 87. No. 309 No. 321 No. 322 No. 323 No. 324 "Singing Man," Ernst Barlach "Small Idol," Tibor Szervatiusz "Woman with Cat," Alexander Archipenko "The Kiss," Constantin Brancusi "The Embrace," Carlos Bracho No. 361 and 362: "Embracing Lovers," David Wynne Discussion: Consider f i r s t the materials and methods used i n t h i s group of sculpture. With one exception, that of Archipenko's "Woman with Cat," which i s made of bronze, a l l these works are made of natural non-man-made materials. Clay i s used in•only one, the Colima " E f f i g y , " which i s modelled. A l l others are carved, hewn from wood and stone, a physically more demanding process. These materials are more suitable to use for convey- ing heaviness, and compactness of form. This weightiness t i e s these works to the earth and conveys meaning, the opposite of asceticism. Ernst Barlach, a German sculptor, was greatly influenced by his travels i n Russia. His work, made of wood, can be re- lated to Inuit stone carvings. Both deal with ordinary man, his struggles to l i v e i n an h o s t i l e environment, cold climate, vast landscape of the tundra, where only the strongest survive. These stocky men must stay close to the earth, must relate and blend with i t , and carry the burden of survival i n the harshest of environments. The difference between these two people and t h e i r circumstances i s r e f l e c t e d i n the choice of topics de- picted by the a r t i s t s . Russia i s densely populated, and Barlach 88. s y m b o l i z e s i t s poor t h r o u g h t h e beggar woman, and t h e l o n g i n g , the j o y s and sorrows o f s i m p l e man t h r o u g h s i n g i n g out h i s s o u l . I n c o n t r a s t , t h e I n u i t s a r e few i n the v a s t l a n d s c a p e . T h e i r t i e s are c l o s e r t o n a t u r e and t h e e a r t h , w h i c h p r o v i d e s , t h r o u g h t h e s k i l l o f h u n t e r s , and t h e c a r e o f mothers f o r t h e i r c h i l d - r e n , c o n t i n u e d s u r v i v a l . Another comparison might be made between t h e "Venus o f W i l l e n d o r f , " and the " S m a l l I d o l " o f S z e r v a t i u s z on the one hand, and B r a n c u s i ' s "The K i s s , " B r a c h o 1 s "The Embrace," and Wynne's "Embracing L o v e r s " on the o t h e r . A l l o f t h e s e works d e a l w i t h what might be c a l l e d t h e " s u r v i v a l o f the s p e c i e s . " The fundamental urge f o r s u r v i v a l i s i n a l l o f us. I t i s our approach t o i t which changed as we compared the p r e h i s t o r i c w i t h p r e s e n t day e x p r e s s i o n s o f the i n g r e d i e n t f o r c o n t i n u e d l i f e , which i s l o v e . I n 21,000 B.C. l i f e must have been p r e c a r i o u s f o r man. Moving t o where the c l i m a t e a l l o w e d f o o d f o r s u r v i v a l , and b a t - t l i n g w i t h t h e f o r c e s o f n a t u r e , man's s t r e n g t h l a y i n h i s num- b e r s . The environment must have p r e s e n t e d a c o n s t a n t c h a i n o f u n p r e d i c t a b l e e v e n t s , where the o n l y c o n s t a n t p o s i t i v e f a c t o r was woman, who produced o f f s p r i n g . So t h e p r e h i s t o r i c a r t i s t c a r v e d a pregnant woman, c o n c e n t r a t i n g on t h o s e p a r t s o f the body i n which the c h i l d grew. He c a r v e d i t i n s i m p l e , b a s i c shapes, monumental i n i t s p r o p o r t i o n s , but s m a l l i n s i z e , so i t c o u l d e a s i l y be c a r r i e d , l i k e an amulet, wherever they went, t o i n s u r e t h e magic needed f o r fundamental and c o n t i n u e d e x i s - t e n c e . S z e r v a t i u s z ' " S m a l l I d o l " seems no d i f f e r e n t from t h e 89 . "Venus o f W i l l e n d o r f , " o n l y t h e y are made 23,000 y e a r s a p a r t . As t h e above two works d e a l d i r e c t l y w i t h c h i l d b e a r i n g , how might t h e y be c o n n e c t e d w i t h t h e second group o f works by B r a n - c u s i , Bracho and Wynne, w h i c h d e a l w i t h m a n i f e s t a t i o n s o f phys- i c a l l o v e , even i f s y m b o l i c a l l y ? T h i s i s where the s i g n i f i c a n c e o f t h e b l o c k - l i k e , compact form o f t h e s e s c u l p t u r e s i s of g r e a t i m p o r t a n c e . Here, i n the f u s i o n o f t h e s e e a r t h y b o d i e s , u n i t e d i n e a r t h l y j o y so c l e a r l y f a r removed from any s u g g e s t i o n o f o t h e r w o r l d l i n e s s , t h e a r t i s t s convey man's dependence on t h e e a r t h , and our dependence on each o t h e r f o r t h e c o n t i n u a t i o n o f l i f e t h r o u g h t h e symbolism o f the l o v i n g embrace d e p i c t e d i n t h e s e s t a t u e s . S h o u l d t h e r e be a need t o f u r t h e r i l l u s t r a t e the d i r e c t i o n t h e s e works p o i n t t o , Rodin's " K i s s " ( S l i d e No. 286 and 287) may be viewed f o r c o n t r a s t , where the a r t i s t de- p i c t s the c l o s e n e s s o f two l o v i n g s o u l s w i t h a g e n t l e p h y s i c a l t o u c h . S u p e r - r e a l i s m - the contemporary, and polychromed body. R a t i o n a l e Some f i g u r e s c u l p t o r s o f the 20th c e n t u r y t e n d t o remain r e a l i s t i c i n t e r p r e t e r s o f the human body. Of the over f i f t y contemporary s c u l p t o r s whose work i s i n c l u d e d i n t h i s t h e s i s , o n l y f i f t e e n have a b s t r a c t e d the f i g u r e . A l t h o u g h the m a j o r i t y , i n c l u d i n g younger and o l d e r a r t i s t s , have remained w i t h r e a l - i s t i c p o r t r a y a l s o f man, a few i n the p a s t decade a c h i e v e d a s u p e r - r e a l i s t i c r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . T h e i r work appears a t f i r s t g l a n c e t o be a l i v i n g p e r s o n w i t h whom i d e n t i f i c a t i o n becomes 90 . u n a v o i d a b l e . T h i s i n n o v a t i v e approach e n a b l e s t h e s e a r t i s t s t o make s o c i a l comments which c a l l f o r d i s c u s s i o n and i n t e r - p r e t a t i o n . G o a l : S t u d e n t s w i l l r e a l i z e t h e r o l e a r t i s t s can p l a y i n p o i n t - i n g t o s o c i a l and p e r s o n a l v a l u e s o f s o c i e t y , and l e a r n t o c r i t i c a l l y a s s e s s t h e s e v a l u e s . O b j e c t i v e s : S t u d e n t s w i l l d i s c u s s the purpose o f making s c u l p t u r e com- p l e t e l y l i f e l i k e , the a b i l i t y o f such work t o u p h o l d o r c r i t i - c i z e o r d i n a r y o c c u r r e n c e s i n our l i v e s . Lesson a i d s : S l i d e s No. 353, 353, 354: S e g a l 355, 356: B u t l e r 367 t o 372: L u c c h e s i 373: de Andrea 374: Hanson 380: Whiten D i s c u s s i o n : E x p l a i n , a t f i r s t , the d i f f e r e n c e between c r e a t i n g a s c u l p - t u r e o f the human f i g u r e from i m a g i n a t i o n , o r by sometimes l o o k - i n g a t a l i v i n g p e r s o n as a model, and t h e mechanics o f t a k i n g a c a s t from a l i v e p e r s o n , w h i c h i s c a l l e d a " l i f e - c a s t . " T h i s method might have o r i g i n a t e d i n an o l d t r a d i t i o n o f making a death-mask o f an i m p o r t a n t , o r b e l o v e d p e r s o n who has j u s t d i e d . However, i f g r e a s e i s a p p l i e d t o t h e s k i n and gauze on top o f i t , p l a s t e r c a s t s can be t a k e n o f l i v e p e o p l e , made i n s e c t i o n s which are s u b s e q u e n t l y assembled f o r the purpose o f c a s t i n g t h e p o s i t i v e , which i s t h e f i g u r e . The r e s u l t becomes an e x a c t r e p l i c a o f t h e model, and l e s s an i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f i t . I n l i f e - c a s t i n g , who i s used, i n what pose he or she i s used, what f i n i s h i s a p p l i e d , and what, i f any, environment i t i s p l a c e d i n , become the a r t i s t i c d e c i s i o n s Examples o f two a r t i s t s ' work can be seen on S l i d e s No. 352, 353, 354 and 380, who chose t o l e a v e them i n w h i t e p l a s t e r Whiten w i t h a smooth, S e g a l w i t h a rough s u r f a c e t e x t u r e . B o t h a r t i s t s use an environment which forms an i n t e g r a l p a r t o f t h e s c u l p t u r e . A d o l e s c e n t s might r e l a t e b e t t e r t o George S e g a l ' s l o n e l y f i g u r e s , one p a c i n g up and down l a d e n w i t h w o r r y , an- o t h e r s i t t i n g h e l p l e s s l y and f o r l o r n i n a c h a i r , w a i t i n g f o r l i f e , o r perhaps i t s p a s s i n g , or the g i r l who might be t r y i n g t o break out o f h e r l o n e l i n e s s by the s y m b o l i c a c t i o n of d e c o r - a t i n g h e r s e l f w i t h j e w e l l e r y , y e t s e e i n g o n l y her own image i n the m i r r o r . The rough s u r f a c e t e x t u r e and the g h o s t l y w h i t e - ness o f the f i g u r e s i s f u r t h e r emphasized by the o r d i n a r y ob- j e c t s and t h e r e a l i s t i c c o l o u r s which s u r r o u n d them. I t i s t h e v e r y l i f e l i k e q u a l i t y o f t h e f i g u r e s which f o r c e us t o see i n them o u r s e l v e s o r p e o p l e we know. They might t r i g g e r compas- s i o n i n us f o r the l o n e l i n e s s o f modern man, o r perhaps warn us o f emptiness l u r k i n g t o e n g u l f us i f we f a i l t o g i v e mean- i n g t o our l i v e s . Some a r t i s t s w i s h t o c a r r y the l i f e l i k e appearance t o t h e p o i n t where t h e i r f i g u r e s need t o be touched t o c o n v i n c e us t h a t they a r e s t a t u e s . To a c h i e v e t h i s e f f e c t they p a i n t t h e i r f i g u r e s i n r e a l i s t i c s k i n t o n e s , add r e a l h a i r t o them'.-and, i f c a l l e d f o r , use c a r e f u l l y s e l e c t e d c l o t h e s on them. Two s l i d e s (No. 355 and 356) show c o n v e n t i o n a l l y made s c u l p t u r e by Reg B u t l e r i n the mid-1950's, and p a i n t e d bronze made by him i n 1977, a s u i t a b l e comparison t o i l l u s t r a t e t h e e f f e c t o f the two o p p o s i n g t e c h n i q u e s . S u p e r - r e a l i s m can be a c h i e v e d w i t h o u t l i f e - c a s t i n g . For t h i s p u r p o s e , Bruno L u c c h e s i ' s work o f t h e 1970's ( S l i d e s No. 367 t o 372) i s i n c l u d e d h e r e . H i s work i s m o d e l l e d and e i t h e r f i r e d t o become t e r r a - c o t t a , o r c a s t i n bronze. The d i f f e r e n c e which the e f f e c t o f h i s work has compared t o l i f e - c a s t i n g , might be s t u d i e d h e r e , and seems t o r e l y on the c o l o u r o f the m a t e r i a l s he u s e s . I f one would be a b l e t o imagine h i s work polychromed i n r e a l s k i n t o n e s , w i t h human h a i r added, t h e n , a t l e a s t on photographs which c o n c e a l t h e s m a l l s i z e o f most o f h i s s c u l p t u r e , one would t h i n k them " r e a l . " B e i n g what t h e y a r e , warm bronzes and t e r r a - c o t t a s , they seem s o f t and t e n d e r , and i n p l a c e o f sharp s o c i a l commentary, we p e r c e i v e a c e l e b r a - t i o n o f t h e beauty o f the body. John de Andrea's and Duane Hanson's works ( S l i d e No. 373 and 374) a r e l i f e - c a s t , polychromed, and l i f e s i z e . The naked- ness o f the young c o u p l e i n de Andrea's work--the f a c t they are a s l e e p , uncovered, and remote from each o t h e r — s e e m s t o convey a sense o f v u l n e r a b i l i t y and the w o r s t k i n d o f l o n e l i n e s s , t h a t o f b e i n g l o n e l y even when t o g e t h e r . Hanson's " F l o r i d a Shopper," a f i x t u r e o f urban s o c i e t y ' s p r e o c c u p a t i o n w i t h s h o p p i n g , i s , a t the same t i m e , a c a r i c a t u r e o f someone f r e q u e n t i n N o r t h American s o c i e t y , who cannot grow g r a c e f u l l y o l d . Perhaps i t i s the f e a r o f d y i n g which makes t h i s o l d e r woman t r y t o t u r n t h e c l o c k back and wear a m i n i - s k i r t , heavy costume j e w e l l e r y and a wig which does not s u i t h e r . The e x p r e s s i o n o f her f a c e i s h o s t i l e and unhappy and i t . p o w e r f u l l y b r i n g s home the f a t e o f so many o l d women who are perhaps widowed, as t h e y t e n d t o l i v e l o n g e r , and who, even i f they have f a m i l y , a r e o f t e n f a r away from them. Those who have n o t made a l i f e m e a n i n g f u l f o r t h e m s e l v e s i n t h e i r own r i g h t , b u t o n l y i n c o n t e x t o f o t h e r s who l e f t them b e h i n d , are l e f t i n t h e i r o l d age d e v o i d o f any j o y s e x c e p t t o spend time w i t h much n e e d l e s s s h o p p i n g . A d o l e s c e n t s s h o u l d be a b l e t o f e e l and u n d e r s t a n d the s o c - i a l messages i n t h e s e s u p e r - r e a l i s t i c , l i f e - c a s t works. They might be a b l e t o a p p l y them i n t h e i r own l i f e s t y l e , and t o t h e i r own p e r s o n a l v a l u e s , and f o r e s t a l l t h e sadness which emptiness and l o n e l i n e s s b r i n g . Pathos i n s c u l p t u r e - t h e human body by two m a s t e r s , M i c h e l a n g e l o and B e r n i n i . R a t i o n a l e : M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i i s a l m o s t u n i v e r s a l l y r e c o g n i z e d as the g r e a t e s t s c u l p t o r o f t h e human f i g u r e . H i s mastery and works had a p r o f o u n d i n f l u e n c e on Western a r t . T h e r e f o r e a c l o s e r l o o k a t h i s p a r t i c u l a r g e n i u s w i t h t h e f i g u r e seems t o be a p p r o p r i a t e . 94'. G i a n Lorenzo B e r n i n i was as admired as M i c h e l a n g e l o d u r i n g h i s l i f e t i m e , and a l s o l e f t a c o n s i d e r a b l e body o f work, but o v e r time h i s s c u l p t u r e o f the f i g u r e has perhaps not s t o o d up t o t h a t o f M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s . Both were masters i n c o n t r a s t i n g ways, and B e r n i n i ' s work can be used as a f o i l t o s e t o f f t h a t o f M i c h e l a n g e l o . G o a l : S t u d e n t s , who w i l l l i k e l y respond w i t h a d m i r a t i o n t o t h e s k i l l o f c a r v i n g marble and t h e c a p t u r e o f i n t e n s e emotions by B e r n i n i , w i l l be g i v e n the o p p o r t u n i t y t o e x p l o r e the depth o f e x p r e s s i o n i n M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s work. O b j e c t i v e s : S t u d e n t s w i l l compare and d i s c u s s t h e v i r t u o s o t e c h n i q u e o f B e r n i n i , h i s i l l u s t r a t i o n s of s t o r i e s which c a p t u r e a moment i n t i m e . These w i l l be c o n t r a s t e d w i t h the s i m p l i c i t y o f form and pathos i n M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s work which makes them t i m e l e s s . L e s s o n a i d s : S l i d e s No. 199 t o 228, M i c h e l a n g e l o , and No. 231 t o 235, and 239, B e r n i n i D i s c u s s i o n : T a l k about t h e l o n g l i f e o f b o t h , M i c h e l a n g e l o -• i n t o h i s 89th y e a r , and B e r n i n i i n t o h i s 82nd y e a r . The former l i v e d i n the 15th and 16th c e n t u r y , the l a t t e r m o s t l y i n t h e 17th c e n t u r y . D u r i n g those t i m e s a r t i s t s were employed f o r s p e c i f i c commissions by r u l i n g f a m i l i e s as w e l l as the pope, who was a r u l e r , w i t h the power and money t o pay f o r t h e s e works. A l - though a r t i s t s o f fame were admired, perhaps o n l y i n M i c h e l - a n g e l o ' s l i f e t i m e d i d t h e y become h i g h l y r e s p e c t e d , m a i n l y be- cause o f h i s example. He was not o n l y a g r e a t s c u l p t o r , but a l s o a g r e a t p a i n t e r , a r c h i t e c t and p o e t . They thought o f him as h a v i n g a d i v i n e spark and r e f e r r e d t o him l a t e r as t h e " d i v - i n e " M i c h e l a n g e l o , a g e n i u s i n t h e t r u e sense o f t h e word. M i c h e l a n g e l o was v e r y s u c c e s s f u l i n h i s l i f e t i m e and earned a g r e a t d e a l o f money. He gave most o f i t t o h i s f a m i l y i n o r d e r t o r e s t o r e them t o t h e i r p r e v i o u s h i g h s t a n d i n g i n so- c i e t y , which was p a r t l y l o s t f o r l a c k o f money by t h e time M i c h e l a n g e l o was b o r n . As much as he c a r e d f o r h i s f a m i l y ' s r e p u t a t i o n and w e l f a r e , he s p e n t l i t t l e on h i m s e l f . He l i v e d v e r y s i m p l y , w i t h l i t t l e m a t e r i a l c o m f o r t s and he devoted him- s e l f c o m p l e t e l y t o h i s a r t . D u r i n g h i s l o n g l i f e he e x p e r i e n c e d p r o f o u n d changes i n h i s p h i l o s o p h y , and t h e s e changes can be b e s t u n d e r s t o o d from t h e s c u l p t u r e he has c r e a t e d , o f which the human f i g u r e was the c e n t r a l t o p i c . The d i g n i t y o f man i s perhaps t h e s i n g l e most i m p o r t a n t c h a r a c t e r i s t i c o f a l l h i s s c u l p t u r e . A s p e c t s o f t h i s d i g n i t y m a n i f e s t themselves i n t h e h e r o i c , the proud, t h e s t r o n g , even t h e angry e x p r e s s i o n s he i m p a r t e d t o h i s f i g u r e s i n t h e f i r s t h a l f o f h i s c r e a t i v e l i f e . Good examples o f t h e s e t r a i t s are h i s "David" ( S l i d e s No. 202, 203, 204), and "Moses" ( S l i d e No. 207). The "David" i s more e x t e n s i v e l y d i s c u s s e d i n t h e u n i t p l a n on "Commemorative S c u l p t u r e - Heroes and V i l l a i n s , " but l o o k i n g a t i t h e r e , we can see t h e p r i d e , t h e s t r e n g t h o f the young man, h i s angry f a c i a l e x p r e s s i o n , h i s l a c k o f f e a r w h i c h makes him t r u l y h e r o i c . M i c h e l a n g e l o a c h i e v e d t h e s e c h a r a c t e r - i s t i c s w h i l e h a v i n g t o work w i t h a d i f f i c u l t p i e c e o f marble w h i c h o t h e r s c u l p t o r s t r i e d but c o u l d not h a n d l e . A b l o c k too narrow, y e t i t y i e l d e d t o M i c h e l a n g e l o an 18% f o o t h i g h s t a t u e o f the s l i m y o u t h , D a v i d . T h i s was a t e c h n i c a l f e a t b u t , j u s t as i m p o r t a n t , i t was a c c o m p l i s h e d w i t h o u t s a c r i f i c i n g a r t i s t i c e x p r e s s i o n . The "Moses" s t a t u e g i v e s an i n t e r p r e t a t i o n t o t h i s i m p o r t a n t f i g u r e from the O l d Testament, t h a t o f a s t r o n g l e a d e r , p h y s i c a l l y and m e n t a l l y s u p e r i o r , who l e d h i s p e o p l e out o f s l a v e r y from E g y p t , a man s u r e o f h i s b e l i e f s but a l s o g i v e n t o r i g h t e o u s anger. I t has been suggested t h a t t h e s e e a r l y works echo t h e M a s t e r ' s own sense o f s u p e r i o r i t y over t h e average man. Many o f the changes i n M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s o u t l o o k on l i f e were t h e r e s u l t o f h i s i n c r e a s e d u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f the s u f f e r i n g and o p p r e s s i o n man has t o endure. H i s works b e g i n t o r e f l e c t t h e s e and the commissions f o r the tombs o f t h e pope J u l i u s I I , and t h a t o f the M e d i c i b r o t h e r s , gave him the o p p o r t u n i t y f o r many f i g u r e s w h i c h e x p r e s s t h i s pathos and s t r u g g l e . The many v e r - s i o n s o f " S l a v e s " he c a r v e d ( t h r e e o f t h e s e shown on S l i d e s No. 208, 209 and 210) p o r t r a y a t t i t u d e s o f s u b m i s s i o n , o f s t r u g g l e , and o f r e b e l l i o n . The " V i c t o r y " s t a t u e ( S l i d e s No. 211 and 212) shows how the s t r e n g t h o f y o u t h t r i u m p h s o v e r the exhaus- t i o n o f age. The symbols o f e a r t h l y t i m e , "Dawn," "Dusk," "Day," and "Night!" ( S l i d e s No. 214 t o 223), o f the M e d i c i c h a p e l , seem t o embody the t r a p man i s caught i n i n t h i s l i f e which e v e n t u a l l y ends i n d e a t h . Yet the s o u l r i s e s and i s l i b - e r a t e d i n the C h r i s t i a n a f t e r l i f e s y m b o l i z e d by the c e n t r a l s t a t u e o f the c h a p e l , t h e "Madonna and C h i l d " ( S l i d e No. 224). The mature a r t i s t t u r n e d away from the h e r o i s m o f youth t o t h e i n n e r l i f e o f m i d d l e age, l e a r n i n g t o cope w i t h waning s t r e n g t h o f the body but w i t h i n c r e a s e d a c c e p t a n c e o f d e a t h ahead o f him As M i c h e l a n g e l o e n t e r e d r e a l l y o l d age, he became i n c r e a s - i n g l y a b e t t e r C h r i s t i a n but i n a p r o f o u n d , i n n e r , s p i r i t u a l sense, not i n outward o b s e r v a t i o n s o f r i t u a l . H i s F l o r e n t i n e P i e t a i s f a r removed from the serene beauty, b o t h i n t e r n a l and e x t e r n a l , o f h i s e a r l y P i e t a ( S l i d e s No. 225, 226, 227 and 199, 120). I n the F l o r e n t i n e P i e t a d e a t h i s a c c e p t e d w i t h j o y as an end t o s u f f e r i n g and i n the e x p r e s s i o n o f C h r i s t and Mary the a f t e r l i f e i s shown as the d i v i n e l o v e a w a i t i n g the f r e e d s p i r i t M i c h e l a n g e l o now seems t o have a c c e p t e d d e a t h . H i s l a s t work, on which he worked o n l y days b e f o r e h i s d e a t h , i s the R o n d a n i n i P i e t a ( S l i d e No. 228). The M a s t e r , who has sung t h e p r a i s e s o f the i n c o m p a r a b l e beauty o f t h e human body i n c o u n t l e s s s c u l p - t u r e s , l e f t us h i s f i n a l l e g a c y i n t h i s P i e t a . Here the body has l o s t a l l p h y s i c a l b e a u t y , t h e rough shapes t r a n s f o r m i t i n t o t h e s p i r i t , and M i c h e l a n g e l o g i v e s up the v i s i o n o f beauty on e a r t h f o r t h e v i s i o n o f d i v i n e g r a c e . Y e a r s a f t e r M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s d e a t h , the e x t r e m e l y g i f t e d a r t i s t G i a n Lorenzo B e r n i n i d i d not want t o walk i n t h e f o o t - s t e p s o f M i c h e l a n g e l o . He wanted t o be an i n n o v a t o r and cap- t u r e s t r o n g a c t i o n and emotion i n p l a c e o f the seeming p a s s i v - i t y o f M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s f i g u r e s . I f one views M i c h e l a n g e l o as 9 8. an i n t r o v e r t who showed us not what the eyes see but what i s happening i n s i d e o f man, B e r n i n i was the e x t r o v e r t who c a p t u r e d i n stone what t h e camera can now c a p t u r e on f i l m , f r o z e n a c t i o n and momentary s t r o n g emotions, not s u p p r e s s e d and c o n t e m p l a t e d , b u t f r e e l y e x p r e s s e d . He a c h i e v e d t h e s e e f f e c t s w i t h a mastery o f t e c h n i q u e never e q u a l l e d b e f o r e o r a f t e r him i n marble. W h i l e M i c h e l a n g e l o c a r v e d the f i g u r e s c o n t a i n e d i n the b l o c k o f m a r b l e , b u r s t i n g w i t h i n n e r energy and m a n i f e s t i n g outward t e n - s i o n , B e r n i n i used s e v e r a l b l o c k s o f marble t o add t o the f i g - u r e s and enable them t o move, t o g e s t i c u l a t e i n a h i g h l y t h e a t - r i c a l manner, h o l d i n g back n o t h i n g . He chose t h e moments o f h i g h drama, whether i n h i s "David" ( S l i d e No. 232) i n t h e moment o f t h r o w i n g t h e f a t e f u l s t o n e , o r i n m y t h o l o g i c a l s t o r i e s o f t h e " A b d u c t i o n o f P e r s e p h o r e " ( S l i d e No. 231), and o f A p o l l o p u r s u - i n g Daphne who, a moment b e f o r e c a p t u r e , t u r n s i n t o a t r e e t h u s e l u d i n g p e r p u r s u e r ( S l i d e No. 233, 234). B e r n i n i ' s r e l i g i o u s works show the same e x a g g e r a t e d emotions, such as i n t h e "Ec- s t a s y o f S t . T e r e s a , " o r " S t . Jerome" ( S l i d e No. 235, 236), and i t may w e l l show us, as i n d e e d he was, a v e r y r e l i g i o u s man who o b s e r v e d a l l t h e r i t u a l s and ceremonies o f h i s C h r i s t i a n f a i t h . He d i d not seem t o s t r u g g l e f o r h i s f a i t h nor s e a r c h f o r d e l i v - erance from e a r t h l y s u f f e r i n g . He found g r e a t enjoyment i n t h i s l i f e and l i v e d i n s p l e n d o r ; a r i c h and h i g h l y f a v o u r e d man. He spent a l m o s t a l l h i s l i f e i n Rome and because he dominated the a r t i s t i c community o f h i s time w i t h p r a c t i c a l l y a l l commis- s i o n s g o i n g t o him, he l e f t h i s mark t h r o u g h h i s works i n Rome t o such a degree t h a t some say t h a t Rome i s B e r n i n i . He a l s o 99.. was a famous a r c h i t e c t and made many f o u n t a i n s f o r Rome, such as " F o u n t a i n o f t h e Four R i v e r s " ( S l i d e No. 239) s y m b o l i z i n g the g r e a t r i v e r s o f h i s p o l i t i c a l t i m e . The mastery o f h i s s t y l e i s most s i g n i f i c a n t , however, i n t h e t o t a l l y l i f e l i k e b o d i e s and i n c r e d i b l e , s u p e r - r e a l i s t i c d e t a i l s o f t h e f a c e s on t h o s e b o d i e s . One must s t a n d i n awe o f h i s s k i l l w i t h t h e c h i s e l , and h i s a b i l i t y t o c a p t u r e the p r e c i s e f a c i a l e x p r e s s - i o n showing a p a r t i c u l a r emotion o f t h e moment. Y e t one might pose the q u e s t i o n , i s l i f e n o t h i n g but a s t a g e where we a c t out our g r e a t moments? Or i s t h e r e time f o r r e f l e c t i o n , a time t o s o r t t h i n g s o u t , t o come t o terms w i t h u n i n v i t e d o c c u r r e n c e s , a t i m e , f r e q u e n t l y , t o s u f f e r , t o s t r u g - g l e a g a i n s t s u f f e r i n g , t o seek f o r h i g h e r meaning i n our l i v e s , t o s e a r c h f o r s o l u t i o n s , and p r e p a r e f o r our i n e v i t a b l e end? F o r i n s p i r a t i o n on t h e s e i s s u e s we must t u r n t o M i c h e l a n g e l o who d e a l t w i t h them i n h i s own way, but h i s own way, t h r o u g h h i s g r e a t a r t i s t r y , was t r a n s f o r m e d i n t o the u n i v e r s a l c o n d i - t i o n of a l l men. R e l i g i o u s s c u l p t u r e - the body o f Buddha and C h r i s t . R a t i o n a l e : Man has g i v e n e x p r e s s i o n t o r e l i g i o n t h r o u g h making graven images. Whether "pagan," w o r s h i p p i n g many gods, o r monotheis- t i c , man has used s c u l p t u r e f o r r e l i g i o u s purposes t h r o u g h o u t human h i s t o r y . Few images have i n f l u e n c e d so many, and o v e r such l e n g t h o f t i m e , as Buddha has t h e r e l i g i o n o f t h e E a s t , and C h r i s t , t h a t o f t h e West. Whether we v i e w them as h o l y men 10 0 . o r p a r t o f and one w i t h God, i s a m a t t e r o f p e r s o n a l r e l i g i o n , but i n our m u l t i c u l t u r a l s o c i e t y we s h o u l d l o o k a t r e p r e s e n t a - t i o n s o f both Buddha and C h r i s t as examples o f the many w o r l d r e l i g i o n s p r e s e n t i n and m e a n i n g f u l t o members o f our s o c i e t y . G o a l s : S t u d e n t s w i l l broaden t h e i r u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f r e l i g i o n s , o t h e r t h a n t h e i r own, w h i c h are m e a n i n g f u l t o m i l l i o n s o f p e o p l e l i v i n g on t h i s e a r t h , some of whom l i v e r i g h t among us, and d e v e l o p a c o n c e p t i o n o f a r t as i m p o r t a n t i n c o n v e y i n g r e l i - g i o u s i d e a s . O b j e c t i v e s : S t u d e n t s w i l l l e a r n about Buddha the man, t h r o u g h major e v e n t s i n h i s l i f e , h i s impact on t h e l i f e o f m i l l i o n s from I n d i a t o Japan, and r e v i e w and compare J e s u s ' l i f e and i n f l u - ence on Western c u l t u r e t o t h a t o f Buddha, as e x p r e s s e d t h r o u g h s c u l p t u r e o f t h e f i g u r e . Lesson a i d s : S l i d e s on Buddha: No. 50 ( C h i n a ) , 51 ( I n d i a ) , 57 ( P a k i s t a n ) , 58 ( J a v a ) , 61 ( C h i n a ) , 69 ( J a p a n ) , 71 ( T h a i - land) , 77 (Cambodia). S l i d e s on C h r i s t , and C h r i s t w i t h the V i r g i n Mary: No. 152, 153, 154, 156, 205, 229, 388-391, C h r i s t No. 165, 166, 170, 171, 174, 181, 224, 337, 344, V i r g i n w i t h c h i l d i o i . No. 164, 167, 199 and 200, 225 and 226, 228, 230, 248, P i e t a D i s c u s s i o n : T a l k about Buddha, t h e man, h i s p r i n c e l y o r i g i n s , how he was s h e l t e r e d from s e e i n g a n y t h i n g u g l y , o r anyone s u f f e r i n g , and how he d i s c o v e r e d t h a t t h e r e were many who s u f f e r e d g r e a t l y from s i c k n e s s , from p o v e r t y , and from b e i n g members o f a l o w e r c a s t e w i t h o u t o p p o r t u n i t y f o r improvement. T a l k about the c a s t e system i n I n d i a , and compare i t w i t h European c l a s s d i f f e r e n c e s o f t h e M i d d l e Ages o r F e u d a l t i m e s , and w i t h our own N o r t h American freedom, which has h i d d e n rem- nants o f a c l a s s system, even i n our s o c i e t y . T a l k about how r a n k , money,, p r e s t i g e g a i n e d f o r achievement, can i n f l u e n c e a person's l i f e , and what i t must f e e l l i k e b e i n g w i t h o u t such o p p o r t u n i t y . Return t o t h e l i f e o f Buddha, who, h a v i n g seen t h e m i s e r y o f l o w l y p e o p l e , gave up h i s p r i n c e l y l i f e and devoted h i m s e l f t o the q u e s t f o r f i n d i n g the remedy t o human s u f f e r i n g . He be- came an a s c e t i c , gave up a l l t h a t was c o m f o r t a b l e and p l e a s a n t i n l i f e . He a l s o undertook a p e r i o d o f f a s t i n g , and a l m o s t d i e d o f i t ' , y e t s t i l l d i d not f i n d t h e s e c r e t t o man's h a p p i n e s s . F i n a l l y , he s e a t e d h i m s e l f under t h e famous f i g t r e e , c a l l e d the Bo, o r bodhi t r e e , a l a r g e t r e e which grows i n N o r t h e r n I n d i a , and vowed n o t t o r i s e u n t i l he found e n l i g h t e n m e n t . D u r i n g the 4 9 days he s a t t h e r e , he was a t t a c k e d by demons w i t h v i s i o n s o f t e m p t a t i o n o f t h e f l e s h and o f w o r l d l y power and w e a l t h (not u n l i k e C h r i s t i n t h e garden o f Gethsemane); he a l s o endured 102 . storms and e a r t h q u a k e s . He p e r s e v e r e d , and t h e t r u t h was r e - v e a l e d t o him which he s e t out t o p r e a c h t o h i s f e l l o w men: t o e x e r c i s e d i s c i p l i n e and m o d e r a t i o n i n w o r l d l y d e s i r e s , and compassion toward a l l o t h e r l i v i n g t h i n g s , i n o r d e r t h a t man may l i v e i n harmony w i t h the w o r l d . Buddha's t e a c h i n g s c r e a t e d a g r e a t f o l l o w i n g i n h i s l i f e - t i m e , and B u d d h i s t monks l e a d a l i f e a c c o r d i n g t o h i s example. Buddhism s p r e a d from I n d i a t o C h i n a and Japan, and t o o t h e r F a r - E a s t e r n c o u n t r i e s , and i t e x i s t s t o t h i s day i n those coun- t r i e s as w e l l as i n Western s o c i e t y . L o c a l l y , Lower M a i n l a n d s t u d e n t s c o u l d v i s i t the new B u d d h i s t temple i n Richmond, B.C. Some p a r a l l e l s can be drawn between Buddha, t h e h o l y man, and t h e l i f e o f J e s u s C h r i s t , the founder o f C h r i s t i a n i t y . Images o f Buddha and C h r i s t d i d not appear f o r many cen- t u r i e s a f t e r t h e i r d e a t h . I n Buddha's c a s e , he f o r b a d e h i s f o l - l o w e r s t o w o r s h i p him, but t h e y a l s o were r e l u c t a n t t o p i c t u r e him as e a r t h l y man, as he became o t h e r w o r l d l y t h r o u g h e n l i g h t e n - ment. " B o d h i s a t t v a s " were e a s i e r t o p o r t r a y , because t h e y have r e a c h e d e n l i g h t e n m e n t , y e t chose t o remain on e a r t h t o p r e a c h and do good. E a r l y C h r i s t i a n s were a l s o a f r a i d t o p o r t r a y C h r i s t who had r i s e n a f t e r d e a t h and r e t u r n e d t o God, h i s F a t h e r . L i v i n g so c l o s e t o the t i m e s when images o f pagan gods were everywhere, t h e y f e a r e d i d o l a t r y . To p r e s e n t t h e d i v i n e f i g u r e o f J e s u s as e a r t h l y man t h e y thought t o be s a c r i l e g i o u s . The E a s t e r n Church c o n t i n u e d i n i t s non-acceptance o f s t a t u e s but r e l u c t a n t l y a l l o w e d p a i n t i n g s . E v e n t u a l l y , b o t h Buddhism and C h r i s t i a n i t y r e c o g n i z e d t h e v a l u e o f commemorating i t s 103 . f o u n d e r s w i t h s t a t u e s f o r t h e sake o f t h e m u l t i t u d e o f p e o p l e who c o u l d not r e a d , and who needed t o see what was preached t o them. The s e l f - a f f l i c t e d s u f f e r i n g o f the Buddha t h r o u g h m o r t i f i - c a t i o n of the f l e s h and f a s t i n g t o near d e a t h , might s e r v e as a l i m i t e d comparison t o C h r i s t on the c r o s s . B o t h sought t o r e - l i e v e mankind from s u f f e r i n g , t o h e l p t h e l o w l y , the downtrod- den, and b o t h were w i l l i n g , and C h r i s t d i d , t o g i v e t h e i r l i f e t o t h i s cause. The B u d d h i s t p a t h t o h a p p i n e s s i s c l o s e l y r e l a - t e d t o the C h r i s t i a n d o c t r i n e o f l o v e . Both decree t h a t man s h o u l d not k i l l , l i e , s t e a l , commit s e x u a l m i s c o n d u c t , harm h i s f e l l o w c r e a t u r e s , o r t h i n k e v i l t h o u g h t , but spend time i n what one c a l l s meditation, t h e o t h e r p r a y e r . A l t h o u g h both Buddhism and C h r i s t i a n i t y e v e n t u a l l y commem- o r a t e d o t h e r h o l y men and women w i t h s c u l p t u r e s o f t h e f i g u r e , the V i r g i n Mary was chosen t o be i n c l u d e d i n t h i s c h a p t e r , w i t h s l i d e s d e p i c t i n g her w i t h e i t h e r t h e C h r i s t c h i l d , or the dead C h r i s t . These p o r t r a y a l s o f some h i s t o r i c a l l y known e p i s o d e s i n t h e l i f e o f J e s u s p r o v i d e us w i t h s i g n i f i c a n t s i g n p o s t s i n h i s b r i e f s t a y on e a r t h . P a i n t i n g s can i l l u s t r a t e many B i b l e s t o r i e s , b u t s c u l p t u r e seems t o be a b l e t o show us the essence i n t h e p o r t r a y a l o f the happy i n n o c e n c e o f t h e C h r i s t c h i l d i n c o n t r a s t t o the s u f f e r i n g and s a c r i f i c e o f C h r i s t on t h e c r o s s . A g a i n , on the l a p . o f t h e Mother, t h e V i r g i n Mary, t h e dead body o f C h r i s t b e f o r e i t has r i s e n becomes a symbol o f the u l - t i m a t e s a c r i f i c e . 104 . Commemorative s c u l p t u r e - heroes and v i l l a i n s . R a t i o n a l e : Man has the seeds o f b o t h n o b i l i t y and e v i l i n him. These q u a l i t i e s c o u l d t u r n him i n t o a hero or a v i l l a i n . Mythology and a n c i e n t h i s t o r y has many heroes and some v i l l a i n s . I n p r e s - ent day N o r t h American s o c i e t y i t sometimes seems t o be the r e - v e r s e . Yet y o u t h has a g r e a t need t o r e j o i c e i n and i d e n t i f y w i t h h e r o e s , and t o b e t t e r d e a l w i t h v i l l a i n s . T h i s need seems t o be borne out by the degree o f response t o T e r r y Fox, o r even t o the f i c t i t i o u s w o r l d o f J.R.R. T o l k i e n , the w r i t e r . I n s p i r a - t i o n f o r a b e t t e r l i f e and an improved u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f t h e r o l e o f a r t might be g a i n e d from t h e e x a m i n a t i o n o f heroes and v i l - l a i n s p e r s o n i f i e d i n some s c u l p t u r e o f the f i g u r e . G o a l s : S t u d e n t s w i l l g a i n u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f o t h e r s o c i e t i e s o f the p a s t and i n s p i r a t i o n f o r the p r e s e n t from i d e n t i f i c a t i o n w i t h heroes and v i l l a i n s o f the p a s t . They w i l l grow i n u n d e r s t a n d - i n g o f t h e r o l e a r t can p l a y i n r e f l e c t i n g v a l u e s o f a g i v e n c u l t u r e . O b j e c t i v e s : S t u d e n t s w i l l l e a r n t o d i s c u s s and c r i t i c a l l y e v a l u a t e s c u l p t u r e s o f the human f i g u r e on the themes o f heroes o r v i l - l a i n s . They w i l l l o o k a t s c u l p t u r e s from d i v e r s e s o c i e t i e s and a t work by a v a r i e t y o f a r t i s t s . 105. L e s s o n a i d s : The f o l l o w i n g c o m b i n a t i o n o f s l i d e s , r e l a t e d o r c o n t r a s t e d by t h e i r t o p i c , a r e suggested f o r d i s c u s s i o n : No. 14 and 41: " T r a i t o r " (Congo, A f r i c a ) , and " K w a k i u t l C h i e f " (North America) No. 54 and 123: "The J i n a s ( c o n q u e r o r s ) " ( I n d i a ) , and "Harmodius and A r i s t o g e i t o n " (Greece) No. 84 and 184 and 249 and 314 and 253 and 385: "The Hero Gilgamesh" ( A s s y r i a ) , " K i n g A r t h u r " by V i s c h e r , " P e t e r t h e G r e a t " by F a l c o n e t , "The Stone, Arm of t h e P r o l e t a r i a t " by Shadre, "George Washington" by Houdon, and " L o u i s S t . L a u r e n t " by Imredy No. 129 and 143 and 144 and 265 and 291 and 311: " D i s c o b o l o s " by Myron, "The Borghese G l a d i a t o r " ( G r e e c e ) , "Naked L a n c e r " ( E t r u s c a n ) , " H e r c u l e s t h e A r c h e r " by B o u r d e l l e , "The A t h l e t e " by R o d i n , and "The Runner" by S i n t e n i s No. 176 and 177 and 178 and 182 and 202 and 203 and 204 and 232: "David" by D o n a t e l l o , by V e r r o c c h i o , by M i c h e l a n g e l o , and by B e r n i n i No. 186 and 187 and 257: " P e r s e u s " by C e l l i n i and by Canova No. 121"and 347: " W a r r i o r " ( G r e e c e ) , and " W a r r i o r w i t h S h i e l d " by Moore No. 240 and 327: " M i l o o f C r o t o n a " by Puget, and "Don Q u i x o t e " by G o n z a l e s 106 . No. 207 and 271 and 272 and 273: "Moses" by M i c h e l a n g e l o , and " S t . John the B a p t i s t " by Rodin No. 119 and 120 and 185: " A p o l l o o f Piombino" ( G r e e c e ) , and " A p o l l o F o u n t a i n " by V i s c h e r No. 159 and 160 and 172 and 280 and 281: "Adam and Eve" (Romanesque),(Gothic), and by R i e m e n s c h n e i d e r , and "Eve" by Rodin No. 138 and 206 and 254 and 158: "Marsyas the S a t y r " ( G r e e c e ) , "Bacchus" by M i c h e l a n g e l o , "The Bad T h i e f " by 0. A l e i j a d i n h o , and " L a s t Judgement" (Romanesque) No. 263 and 264 and 289: " U g o l i n o " by Carpeaux, "The P r o d i g a l Son" by M e u n i e r , and "The P r o d i g a l Son" by Rodin No. 188 and 189 and 190 and 213 and 233 and 234: " V i r t u e Overcoming V i c e " by C e l l i n i , "The A b d u c t i o n o f P e r - sephore" by B e r n i n i , and " A p o l l o and Daphne" by B e r n i n i D i s c u s s i o n : I n t r o d u c e the t o p i c w i t h a g e n e r a l d i s c u s s i o n o f what a t - t r i b u t e s would q u a l i f y a p e r s o n f o r b e i n g c a l l e d a. hero o r a v i l l a i n . C o n s i d e r such heroes o f our p r e s e n t s o c i e t y i n Canada as T e r r y Fox, Wayne G r e t s k y o r Steve P o d b o r s k i . Compare them w i t h men o f the p a s t or o f o t h e r s o c i e t i e s , such as Winston C h u r c h i l l , M a r t i n L u t h e r K i n g , Mahatma Gandhi, Anwar Sadat, Pope John P a u l I I , Lech Walesa, Mohammed A l i , E l v i s P r e s l e y , John Lennon. G i v e a l s o examples o f v i l l a i n s , such as A d o l f 1 0 7 . H i t l e r , the A y a t t o l a h Khomeini, C l i f f o r d O l s o n the c h i l d k i l - l e r , A l i Agca the Pope's would-be a s s a s s i n . What have the heroes and v i l l a i n s i n common? They both might rouse the masses, become a symbol t o them, and a l e a d e r f o r good o r e v i l . What t e l l s heroes and v i l l a i n s a p a r t ? Her- oes o f t e n s e t g r e a t t a s k s f o r themselves i n the i n t e r e s t o f o t h e r s , and a c c o m p l i s h them t h r o u g h much p e r s o n a l s a c r i f i c e . They succeed a g a i n s t g r e a t odds, where v i l l a i n s f a i l when t h e g o i n g g e t s tough. Heroes' s e l f l e s s a t t i t u d e s are i n c o n t r a s t t o the s e l f - c e n t r e d egoism and d i s r e g a r d o f t h e i n t e r e s t o f o t h e r s by v i l l a i n s . Noble men may s u f f e r i n t h e i n t e r e s t o f a cause o r f o r the good o f t h e i r fellow-men i n c o n t r a s t w i t h t h e i n a b i l i t y o f e v i l men t o s t a n d p a i n o r d i s a p p o i n t m e n t . Heroes m a i n t a i n a humble a t t i t u d e w h i l e they p e r f o r m super-human deeds. V i l l a i n s f e e l the h e a d i n e s s o f power w h i l e engaged i n sub-human deeds. The b r i n g e r s o f j o y , freedom and h a p p i n e s s c o n t r a s t w i t h the b e a r e r s o f sorrow and s u f f e r i n g . B e g i n showing the s l i d e s ; and as you d e a l w i t h each exam- p l e , g i v e t h e h i s t o r i c a l o r p o l i t i c a l background, the r e l i g i o u s o r m y t h o l o g i c a l s t o r y , o r s o c i e t a l v a l u e s a p p l i c a b l e t o each work. By u s i n g the suggested s l i d e c o m b i n a t i o n s you would be d e a l i n g w i t h v a l u e s h e l d by p r i m i t i v e s o c i e t i e s , w i t h m i l i t a r y accomplishment, w i t h p o l i t i c a l l e a d e r s h i p , w i t h a t h l e t i c ach- ievement, w i t h b r a v e r y i n the f a c e o f g r e a t danger, w i t h the p r i c e p a i d f o r war, w i t h r e l i g i o u s d e d i c a t i o n , w i t h human f a i l - i n g s and t r a g i c m i s t a k e s , w i t h weakness o f t h e s p i r i t o r o f the f l e s h . F o r example: 108'. The s t o r y o f David and G o l i a t h , as d e s c r i b e d i n the O l d Testament, 1 Samuel 16 and 17, g i v e s the background knowledge t o the c o n t e s t between D a v i d , t h e young shepherd and G o l i a t h , t h e g i a n t P h i l i s t i n e , who f a c e d each o t h e r i n b a t t l e , each r e p r e s e n t i n g h i s own c o u n t r y and p e o p l e . Read i t t o the s t u d e n t s t h e n show them t h e s l i d e s (No. 176, 177, 178, 182, 202, 203, 204 and 232). I n M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s " D a v i d , " the s t r e s s i s on t h e head and t h e hands. A t t a c h e d t o t h e young body, t h e l a r g e hands o f a man i n d i c a t e not o n l y t h e e a r l y m a t u r i t y o f young D a v i d , and t h a t he a l r e a d y had k i l l e d b e a r s and wolves t o p r o t e c t h i s sheep, but p o i n t t o h i s f u t u r e p h y s i c a l growth. But beyond t h i s , t h e y draw a t t e n t i o n t o t h e reasons f o r h i s v i c t o r y . The head i s where the i d e a o r i g i n a t e d f o r the means t o s l a y the p o w e r f u l opponent. I n t h e s c u l p t u r e , D a v i d s t i l l seems t o a s - sess t h e i d e a and t o be i n t h e p r o c e s s o f making h i s d e c i s i o n w h i l e h i s hands appear t o get ready f o r t h e f a t a l s l i n g s h o t w i t h the "smooth s t o n e . " M i c h e l a n g e l o t e l l s us more about the c h a r a c t e r and h e r o i c q u a l i t y o f D a v i d the y o u n g s t e r , w i t h l e s s o b v i o u s means, t h a n the o t h e r s c u l p t o r s under c o n s i d e r a t i o n h e r e . I n c o n t r a s t t o M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s , i s B e r n i n i ' s " D a v i d . " B e r n i n i ' s i s most a c t i o n - p a c k e d , c a p t u r i n g the moment o f sup- reme p h y s i c a l e f f o r t c o u p l e d w i t h the h i g h e s t degree o f concen t r a t i o n , a t t r i b u t e s o f any o u t s t a n d i n g a t h l e t e . Thus, B e r n i n i "David" might be the most a p p e a l i n g t o a d o l e s c e n t s , e x c e p t o f t h o s e more t h o u g h t f u l s t u d e n t s , who might p e r c e i v e t h e absence 109. o f t h e h e r o i c as t h e r e are no i n d i c a t i o n s o f t h e v u l n e r a b i l i t y o f y o u t h f a c i n g a f o r m i d a b l e opponent i n heavy armour. What we see i s the h i g h l y t r a i n e d a t h l e t e , w e l l p r e p a r e d f o r the c h a l - l e n g e . D o n a t e l l o and V e r r o c c h i o b o t h d e p i c t e d the moment o f t r i - umph a f t e r the deed was a c c o m p l i s h e d by D a v i d . The e a r l i e s t D o n a t e l l o (No. 176) and the V e r r o c c h i o show a proud D a v i d seem- i n g l y a s k i n g f o r a p p l a u s e . T h i s a t t i t u d e i s n o t i n k e e p i n g w i t h t h a t o f a h e r o . The p h y s i c a l accomplishment e x i s t s w i t h o u t doubt but t h e r e i s a sense o f a Mohammed A l i , t h e p r o f e s s i o n a l , who e x p e c t s rewards. Y e t some p r o f e s s i o n a l a t h l e t e s p e r f o r m g r e a t deeds i n a s p o r t but remain as i f humbled by t h e i r own s u c c e s s . Perhaps t h i s i s t h e a t t r a c t i o n and t h e hero q u a l i t y i n our own Wayne G r e t s k y . D o n a t e l l o ' s l a t e r two " D a v i d s , " l e s s so the e a r l i e r marble t h a n t h e l a t e r bronze s c u l p t u r e , show D a v i d more as a h e r o . The t e n d e r y o u t h w i t h the o u t s i z e d sword o f G o l i a t h s t i l l i n h i s hand, eyes downcast, seems t o c o n t e m p l a t e the wonder o f h i s deed. I n w a r d - t u r n e d , r e l a x e d i n body, he appears as t h e i n s t r u - ment o f a h i g h e r power f u l f i l l i n g h i s f a t e . Thus D o n a t e l l o ' s bronze "David" might be the most t r u e t o h i s b i b l i c a l theme. Everyday s c u l p t u r e - d e p i c t i o n s o f the common man. R a t i o n a l e : Throughout the h i s t o r y of s c u l p t u r e on the theme o f the f i g u r e , a r t i s t s have sometimes t u r n e d away from commemorating i m p o r t a n t e v e n t s and o u t s t a n d i n g i n d i v i d u a l s i n f a v o u r o f the 110. mundane and o f o r d i n a r y man. These works can t e l l us something about t h e s o c i e t y t h a t t h e s e common men l i v e d i n , and o f t e n h e l p us, t h r o u g h the communication o f a c t i v i t i e s and f e e l i n g s , t o b r i d g e the gap t o a n o t h e r s o c i e t y , c u l t u r e , and age. G o a l : S t u d e n t s w i l l g a i n an u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f t h e a r t i s t ' s r o l e i n d e p i c t i n g a s o c i e t y ' s l i f e and v a l u e s t h r o u g h images o f t h e common man. T h i s w i l l h e l p them t o a s s o c i a t e w i t h c u l t u r e s f o r - e i g n t o them, and thus broaden t h e i r h o r i z o n and sense o f be- l o n g i n g t o a s h a r e d humanity. O b j e c t i v e s : S t u d e n t s w i l l d i s c u s s s c u l p t u r e showing o r d i n a r y man i n - v o l v e d i n a c t i v i t i e s o f p l a y o r work, and e x p r e s s i n g f e e l i n g s we a l l can a s s o c i a t e w i t h , and t h e y w i l l l e a r n t o r e c o g n i z e com- mon elements o f our l i v e s i n t h o s e o f o t h e r t i m e s and o t h e r s o c i e t i e s . They w i l l a l s o l e a r n t o see, i n works o f p r e s e n t t i m e s , v a l u e s and b e l i e f s t h a t we h o l d . The s e e m i n g l y common- p l a c e can be o f s i g n i f i c a n c e f o r commemoration. L e s s o n a i d s : S l i d e s No. 30 and 31 ( M e x i c o ) ; 32, 33, 34 and 35 ( I n u i t ) ; 45, 46, 63, 65 and 66 ( C h i n a ) ; 74 (Cambodia); 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97 and 100 ( E g y p t ) ; 122, 129 ( G r e e c e ) ; 168 ( G o t h i c ) ; 213 ( M i c h e l a n g e l o ) ; 255 (18th c e n t u r y P r e s e p i o ) ; 259 (Rude); 264 ( M e u n i e r ) ; 270, 276, 284, 288, 289, 291 and 292 ( R o d i n ) ; 299 (Degas); 111. 301 (Lehmbruck); 304 and 306 ( L i p c h i t z ) ; 308 and 309 ( B a r l a c h ) ; 310 and 311 ( S i n t e n i s ) ; 313 (Marcks)' ; 318 (Patzay) ; 322 (Archipenko); 324 (Bracho); 329 (Greco); 332 ( P i c a s s o ) ; 335 and 336 ( M a r i n i ) ; 338 (Manzu); 340 ( N i l s s o n ) ; 345 (Moore); 352, 353 and 354 (Segal); 355 and 356 ( B u t l e r ) ; 359 ( M i l l e r ) ; 367 to 372 (Lucchesi); 373 (de Andrea); 374 (Hanson); 375 and 376 (Morales); 379 ( B a r e l i e r ) ; 383 (Zuniga); 384 (Erhardy); and 392 (Imredy). D i s c u s s i o n : You might approach the d i s c u s s i o n by p o i n t i n g to some or- dinary a c t i v i t i e s under which some of the s l i d e s may be grouped. One such group might be under the general heading of "play." Included under "play" you might put musicians from China ( S l i d e No. 63), the f l u t e player from Greece ( S l i d e No. 122), L i p c h i t z ' s man w i t h g u i t a r ( S l i d e No. 306), Barlach's singer ( S l i d e No. 309), and S i n t e n i s 1 f l u t e p l a y i n g boy ( S l i d e No. 310). Compare the g r a c e f u l Greek g i r l deeply engaged i n the music she i s making w i t h the awkward, growing body of the boy by S i n t e n i s . He, too, i s f u l l y g i v i n g himself to the tunes he i s producing. Two d i f f e r e n t bodies, the g i r l and the boy, both s i t t i n g ; both could be anyone of today making music. S t i l l under "play" you might look at dancers or a t h l e t e s . Show the s l i d e s of the dancer from Mexico ( S l i d e No. 31) of 600 to 700 years ago, the one from I n d i a ( S l i d e No. 45, 46) of 3,500 to 5,000 years ago, from Cambodia ( S l i d e No. 74) from 112. the 12th century, and Degas' dancer (Slide No. 299) from the early part of our century. Point to the s i m i l a r i t y of pose and bearing between the g i r l from ancient India and the c l a s s i c a l b a l l e t dancer by Degas. On the topic of "sports" you can look at the ballplayer poised to throw the b a l l (Slide No. 30) from the Mexico of 300—1,000 A.D., then at Myron's "Discobolos" (Slide No. 129) from Greece i n 450 B.C., ready to throw the discus, and Sintenis' runner (Slide No. 311) of t h i s 20th century, a l l i n the moment of action. Rodin's athlete (Slide No. 291) from the beginning of this century, seems to be waiting for his turn of action, while Marini's wrestler (Slide No. 336) from our times, rests between rounds. A group of s l i d e s of t h i s century and of Western Art com- memorate mundane a c t i v i t i e s of washing and bathing, combing one's hair, checking i n the mirror for appearance or for put- t i n g on jewellery. These works use the female figure, and i t might be assumed that t h i s i s as much an i n d i c a t i o n of women's preoccupation with t h e i r appearance as i t i s an opportunity to portray the female nude. Show the following s l i d e s : No. 288, 318, 354, 355, 368, 370, 375, 376, 384, and 392, and ask the students to i d e n t i f y with these a c t i v i t i e s . Point out how graceful and beautiful these sculptures are, and how l i t t l e the average person might be aware of t h e i r own appearance when deeply engaged i n such t r i v i a l , routine a c t i v i t i e s . I t might be further added that keeping clean and well-groomed has not always been desirable i n society, and that the frequency of 113. choosing t h i s topic i s far more common i n our recent history, which r e f l e c t s our sense of values. Further comparisons might be made on the theme of the fam- i l y . P a r t i c u l a r l y i n t e r e s t i n g i s the lower status of women i n - dicated on two sculptures of couples from Egypt from c. 3,000 B.C. (Slides No. 86 and 95). After that, look at Nilsson's family group (Slide No. 340) showing an older and a younger woman and a c h i l d without the presence of the father. Then see Henry Moore's family (Slide No. 345) where man and woman are equal protectors of the children, and Lucchesi's young mother and c h i l d (Slide No. 371), seemingly a l l alone i n the world. How much these family portrayals, created 35, 25, and 7 years ago, r e f l e c t the ups and downs of the nuclear family, and the values and problems of our times, i s a worthwhile topic for discussion. Similar conclusions might be arrived at as r e f l e c - tions of s o c i e t a l values by the comparison of two works depict- ing old age. The graceful, d i g n i f i e d , self-confident old man from China's Ming Dynasty times (Slide No. 66) i s a figure of respect for old age. Rodin's old woman (Slide No. 284), on the other hand, i s a desperate, degraded person, and her wretched nakedness r e f l e c t s her lack of value, a symbol of our society. 114 . Chapter I I I CONCLUSION The r a t i o n a l e f o r the w r i t i n g o f a s c u l p t u r e c u r r i c u l u m r e s o u r c e was the need f o r i t i n secondary s c h o o l s . S c u l p t u r e i s not always t a u g h t as p a r t o f the a r t c u r r i c u l u m , and t h o s e t e a c h e r s who do i n c l u d e i t have o f t e n not s u f f i c i e n t background t o t e a c h a c o m b i n a t i o n o f "making s c u l p t u r e " and " t a l k i n g about s c u l p t u r e . " Teachers and s t u d e n t s need t o a c q u i r e an under- s t a n d i n g o f t h e v o c a b u l a r y o f s c u l p t u r e , w h i c h i s n e c e s s a r y f o r h i s t o r i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g and c r i t i c a l i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f works. The r e s u l t s o f t h e 1980 s u r v e y , c a r r i e d out a t t h e B r i t i s h C o l - umbia A r t Teachers' a n n u a l c o n f e r e n c e , c o n f i r m e d the need f o r t h i s s t u d y . R e i n f o r c e m e n t was f u r t h e r r e c e i v e d from t h e new Secondary A r t C u r r i c u l u m o f t h e M i n i s t r y o f E d u c a t i o n which c o n t a i n s s c u l p t u r e as one o f the f i v e v i s u a l e x p r e s s i o n a r e a s . I m p l e m e n t a t i o n o f the new c u r r i c u l u m i s s c h e d u l e d f o r September 1984, t h u s a d d i n g urgency t o t h i s s t u d y . Response t o Needs, t h e 198 3 Survey o f A r t Teachers A p r e s e n t a t i o n was g i v e n t o the F e b r u a r y 19 8 3 Annual Con- f e r e n c e o f t h e B r i t i s h Columbia A r t Teachers' A s s o c i a t i o n , en- t i t l e d "Ideas and t h r e e approaches t o the t e a c h i n g o f s c u l p t u r e , " w i t h e n c o u r a g i n g r e s u l t s . An o v e r v i e w o f t h e h i s t o r y o f s c u l p - t u r e o f t h e human f i g u r e was p r e s e n t e d t h r o u g h s l i d e s . U n i t 115. p l a n s i n the a r e a o f c o n c e p t s , a s t u d i o a c t i v i t y , and c r i t i c a l i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f a theme were d i s c u s s e d . Verne Smythe, as r e c o r d e r , wrote i n t h e J o u r n a l o f the B r i t i s h Columbia A r t T e a c h e r s ' A s s o c i a t i o n (June 1983, 2_3:1) t h a t "the s e s s i o n was e n j o y a b l e , s c h o l a r l y and u s e f u l , " and d e s c r i b e d t h e s l i d e s and the " t h r e e d i s t i n c t t y p e s of l e s s o n s , complete w i t h handouts." An e v a l u a t i o n q u e s t i o n n a i r e , i n c l u d e d as Appendix 2 o f t h i s t h e s i s , was d i s t r i b u t e d t o p a r t i c i p a n t s o f t h e s e s s i o n . The same e v a l u a t i o n form was used a f t e r a n o t h e r p r e s e n t a t i o n i n October 1983, t o t h e Burnaby A r t Teachers' A s s o c i a t i o n . A num- b e r o f r e s p o n d e n t s a t b o t h p r e s e n t a t i o n s c o n f i r m the u s e f u l n e s s o f t h e m a t e r i a l . The a c q u i s i t i o n o f c o p i e s o f s l i d e s i s r e - p e a t e d l y mentioned, and i t might be c o n s i d e r e d u s e f u l i n t h e f u t u r e t o produce such a k i t . Andy N e l s o n , A s s i s t i n g Teacher o f A r t i n Burnaby, w r i t e s , "we want a copy f o r t h e d i s t r i c t . . . so many g r e a t i d e a s ; you must share i t . " Another t e a c h e r w r o t e , " I hope you w i l l be p u b l i s h i n g your s l i d e s and l e c t u r e s , " and Ann H e a l y , an a r t t e a c h e r , s t a t e d t h a t "the i d e a s can be t r a n s f e r r e d t o any medium—and CareD as such v a l u a b l e t o e v e r y - one t e a c h i n g a r t . " Some a r t t e a c h e r s e x p r e s s e d s p e c i f i c needs t o which t h e s t u d y r e s p o n d s , e.g., "more s t u d i o t e c h n i q u e s " and more o f t h e theme approaches t o a r t h i s t o r y and " c u l t u r a l d i s c u s s i o n s . " A r t t e a c h e r s , June Oddson, emphasized t h e u s e f u l - ness o f " e s p e c i a l l y t h e concept o f t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l i t y , " as w e l l as t h e "uses o f m a t e r i a l s , " and N e i l MacDonald wrote i n c o n n e c t i o n w i t h t h e s l i d e s as r e s o u r c e s , t o i n c l u d e l i s t s o f the "names o f t h e a r t i s t s - names o f s c u l p t u r e , " which was done. 116. F u r t h e r d i s s e m i n a t i o n o f the m a t e r i a l might be p l a n n e d f o r the f u t u r e i n the form o f l o n g e r workshops, and w i t h a s e l e c t i o n o f s l i d e s as suggested i n the u n i t p l a n s . The c h o i c e o f s u b j e c t m a t t e r f o r t h i s s t u d y , the s c u l p t u r e o f t h e human f i g u r e , c o u l d be used i n s e v e r a l o t h e r ways f o r u n i t p l a n s , and might be adapted by t e a c h e r s t o s u i t the spec- i f i c c o m p o s i t i o n o f i n d i v i d u a l c l a s s e s . F u r t h e r themes might be chosen, such as "mother and c h i l d , " "comparison between pagan d e i t i e s from s e v e r a l c u l t u r e s , " o r "the r e l a t i v i t y o f the p e r c e p t i o n o f b e a u t y " as d e p i c t e d i n t h e s l i d e s . D i s c u s s i o n s may be based on s e l e c t e d works as s l i d e s , o r p h o t o g r a p h s , o r r e p l i c a s , o r s t u d e n t s ' s c u l p t u r e . Such l e s s o n s where s t u d e n t s can grow i n c r i t i c a l t h o u g h t , as w e l l as t h r o u g h o p p o r t u n i t y t o e x p r e s s what t h e y f e e l and p e r c e i v e can o f t e n l e a d t o u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f t h e ways a r t q u e s t i o n s and e x p r e s s e s s o c i e t y ' s v a l u e s and b e l i e f s . Recommendations f o r Use W i t h i n Other Areas o f A r t E d u c a t i o n The s u b j e c t a r e a o f t h i s s t u d y c o u l d be r e p l a c e d by p o r - t r a i t u r e , and much o f the methodology a p p l i e s i n a s i m i l a r man- n e r . S t u d i o a c t i v i t i e s and c o n c e p t s c o u l d a l s o be a p p l i e d t o a b s t r a c t s c u l p t u r e , and themes t o o t h e r a r e a s o f t h e v i s u a l a r t s . Once s t u d e n t s g a i n c o n f i d e n c e i n i n t e r p r e t i n g and c r i t i - c i s i n g t h e work o f a r t i s t s , t h e y can be b e t t e r persuaded t o c r i t i c i z e t h e i r own work, w h i c h i s so e s s e n t i a l t o t h e i r growth as young a r t i s t s and human b e i n g s . 117. BIBLIOGRAPHY BOOKS: A r n a s o n , H.H. H i s t o r y o f modern a r t . New York: H a r r y N. Abrams, I n c . , n.d. Anton, F., & D o c k s t a d e r , F . J . Pre-Columbian a r t and l a t e r I n d i a n t r i b a l a r t s . New York: H a r r y N. Abrams, I n c . , n.d. B a r a s c h i , C. S c u l p t u r e o f t h e nude. B u c h a r e s t : M e r i d i a n e P u b l i s h i n g House, 1970. B a r c s a y , J . Anatomy f o r the a r t i s t . London: Octopus Books L t d . , 1976. B a z i n , G. The h i s t o r y o f w o r l d s c u l p t u r e . Secaucus: C h a s t w e l l Books I n c . , 1976. Baynes, K. A r t i n s o c i e t y . 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Wynnewood: L i v i n g s t o n P u b l i s h i n g Company, 1971. Y o y o t t e , J . T r e a s u r e s o f t h e Pharaohs. C l e v e l a n d : The World P u b l i s h i n g Company, 196 8. 121. CATALOGUES AND PAMPHLETS: A b o r i g i n a l and M e l a n e s i a n A r t . E x h i b i t i o n a t A r t G a l l e r y o f New South Wales, 1973. A r t s o f I n d i a and N e p a l , The N a s l i and A l i c e Heeramaneck C o l l e c t i o n . B o s t o n : Museum o f F i n e A r t s , 1966. A r t s c a n a d a , 1978, XXV, 4-26. B a r l a c h / K o l l w i t z . C a t a l o g u e o f e x h i b i t i o n . The P e t e r S t u y v e s a n t T r u s t f o r t h e Development o f the A r t s , A u s t r a l i a , 1976-1978. Beaver, Magazine o f t h e N o r t h , The, 1958, S p r i n g , 40-47. B r i t i s h Columbia A r t Teachers A s s o c i a t i o n J o u r n a l f o r A r t T e a c h e r s , June 1983, 23(3) . Canadian Eskimo A r t . Ottawa: Queen's P r i n t e r , 1966. 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E x h i b i t i o n a t K u n s t h a l l e Bremen, 19 79. Northwest Coast I n d i a n A r t i f a c t s from the H.R. M a c M i l l a n C o l l e c t i o n s o f the Museum o f A n t h r o p o l o g y . Vancouver: The U n i v e r s i t y o f B r i t i s h Columbia P r e s s , 19 75. S i l v e r J u b i l e e E x h i b i t i o n o f Contemporary B r i t i s h S c u l p t u r e 1977, A. London: Mathews M i l l e r Dunbar, 1977. 122. Treasures of Tutankhamun, 1977, The. Calendar. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976. Treasures of Tutankhamen, The. Desk diary. New York: Ballentine Books, 1979. Weisberg, G.P., & Janson, H.W. Traditions and Revisions, Themes from the History of Sculpture. Cleveland: Exhibition held at The Cleveland Museum of Art, 19 75. Werke Europaischer P l a s t i k . Catalogue of exhibition at Haus der Kunst Munich, Munich: Carl Gabler, 1950. 123. APPENDIX 1 124. APPENDIX 1 A p r i l 1980 NEEDS ASSESSMENT - SCULPTURE SURVEY PLEASE F I L L OUT THIS QUESTIONNAIRE AND LEAVE AT THE REGISTRA- TION DESK IN THE BOX PROVIDED FOR IT. T h i s i n f o r m a t i o n i s r e q u e s t e d by me, Agness P h i l i p p s , a r t t e a c h e r a t A l p h a Secondary S c h o o l i n Burnaby, and g r a d u a t e s t u d e n t a t U.B.C. A r t E d u c a t i o n Department. Your i n p u t w i l l be u t i l i z e d i n my M a s t e r s T h e s i s and c o u l d f u r t h e r a r t e d u c a t i o n i n t h i s p r o v i n c e . You need not r e v e a l your name and where you t e a c h , u n l e s s you want t o , then you may be c o n t a c t e d by me a t a l a t e r d a t e . P l e a s e i n d i c a t e the grade l e v e l s you t e a c h , and answer w i t h "yes" o r "no." Thank you f o r your c o o p e r a t i o n . NAME ADDRESS GRADE LEVELS TAUGHT SCHOOL I . I n your o p i n i o n , 1. S h o u l d s c u l p t u r e be t a u g h t i n - e l e m e n t a r y grades - secondary grades - a l l grades - s p e c i f i c secondary c o u r s e s 2. Why? 3. I n which way c o u l d s t u d e n t s b e n e f i t from an e x p e r i e n c e i n s c u l p t u r e which o t h e r forms o f t h e V i s u a l A r t s do not p r o v i d e ? 125. 4. Does s c u l p t u r e t a k e more time p e r u n i t - t h a n a v a i l a b l e i n p u b l i c s c h o o l s - than o t h e r a r e a s such as p a i n t i n g 5. Does s c u l p t u r e need s p e c i a l f a c i l i t i e s and equipment? - Are t h e y a v a i l a b l e i n secondary s c h o o l s ? - A r e t h e y o b t a i n a b l e ? 6. Do you have adequate f a c i l i t i e s and equipment t o t e a c h s c u l p t u r e i n your s c h o o l ? - D i d you o b t a i n i t y o u r s e l f ? I I . Methods and M a t e r i a l s 1. Do you t e a c h s c u l p t u r e as p a r t o f c e r a m i c s ? 2. Do you t e a c h i t as an independent u n i t , not r e l a t e d t o c e r a m i c s ? 3. Do you i n t r o d u c e i t u s i n g v i s u a l a i d s such as s l i d e s , f i l m s , f i l m s t r i p s ? I f s o , a r e t h e y o r i e n t e d t o : - how s c u l p t u r e i s made - famous s c u l p t o r s ' work f o r d i s c u s s i o n - s c u l p t u r e as p a r t o f t h e h i s t o r y o f a r t - s c u l p t u r e examples from a l l c u l t u r e s o f t h e w o r l d - s c u l p t u r e examples f o r Western c i v i l i z a t i o n 4. Do you conduct f i e l d t r i p s t o s t u d y l o c a l s c u l p t u r e ( i f any)? 5. Do you d e a l w i t h s c u l p t u r a l c o n c e p t s , such as mass, shape, form, monumentality? - i f s o , how? 6. Do you t e a c h both methods, the b u i l d - u p and take-away p r o c e s s ? 7. What m a t e r i a l s do you use i n your t e a c h i n g ? - c l a y ( t e r r a - c o t t a , unglazed) - p l a s t e r o f P a r i s t o c a s t - p l a s t e r o f P a r i s t o c a r v e 126 • - p l a s t i c s - P a p i e r mache w i t h armature w i t h o u t armature - c o n s t r u c t i o n w i t h w i r e - c o n s t r u c t i o n w i t h paper - c o n s t r u c t i o n w i t h b a l s a - any o t h e r * I I I . Quick Quiz 1. Do you know what an armature i s ? 2. Do you know how t o make a piecemold? 3. Do you know why one makes a p i e c e m o l d ? 4. Can you c a s t a wastemold? 5. Can you f i n i s h p l a s t e r t o make i t l o o k l i k e bronze? 6. Can you t e a c h repousse? 7. Can you t e a c h welded s c u l p t u r e ? 8. Can you c a r v e from a b l o c k o f - p l a s t e r ? - stone? - wood? IV. Important G e n e r a l i t i e s 1. Do you b e l i e v e t h a t a r t t e a c h e r t r a i n i n g s h o u l d i n c l u d e p r e p a r a t i o n f o r the t e a c h i n g o f s c u l p t u r e ? 2. Do you f e e l a d e q u a t e l y t r a i n e d f o r t e a c h i n g o f s c u l p t u r e ? - i n j u n i o r grades? - i n s e n i o r grades? 3. Would you be i n t e r e s t e d i n more - i n - s e r v i c e i n s c u l p t u r e - hands-on workshops - l e s s o n p l a n s - v i s u a l a i d s - summer c o u r s e s - e v e n i n g c o u r s e s ' - C u r r i c u l u m f o r j u n i o r secondary - C u r r i c u l u m f o r s e n i o r secondary A d d i t i o n a l p e r t i n e n t comments you may w i s h make, p l e a s e note below. Thank you 128. APPENDIX 2 129. APPENDIX 2 EVALUATION B r i t i s h Columbia A r t T e a c h e r s 1 Annual C o n f e r e n c e F e b r u a r y 1983 "IDEAS AND THREE APPROACHES TO THE TEACHING OF SCULPTURE IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS." Agness P h i l i p p s , A l p h a Secondary S c h o o l , Burnaby, B.C. Evaluation/Recommendation Form 1. One o f the v a l u a b l e ' a s p e c t s o f t h i s s e s s i o n was: 2. Do you t h i n k t h a t i d e a s g a i n e d from t h i s s e s s i o n and the hand-outs on u n i t p l a n s based on t h e human f i g u r e c o u l d be t r a n s f e r r e d t o the t e a c h i n g o f o t h e r a r e a s o f s c u l p t u r e ? 3. I n terms o f i d e a s f o r t e a c h e r s , f u r t h e r a t t e n t i o n s h o u l d be g i v e n t o the f o l l o w i n g a s p e c t s o f s c u l p t u r e : 4. You d i d not ask Agness, but you s h o u l d know t h a t : APPENDIX 3 kj>l coloured slides in Special Collections, University of British Columbia Library. Address: Library - Special Collections 1956 Main Mall University of British Columbia Vancouver, B.C. Canada V6T 1Y3 work_6zmwsbf2ofgqzj4o3nh3gp6vce ---- untitled Distributed aggregation of heterogeneous Web-based Fine Art Information: enabling multi-source accessibility and curation FRANCES BUCHANAN1, NICCOLO CAPANNI1 and HORACIO GONZÁLEZ-VÉLEZ2 1School of Computing, Robert Gordon University, St Andrew Street, Aberdeen AB25 1HG, UK; e-mail: fabuchanan@lumison.co.uk; n.capanni1@rgu.ac.uk; 2Cloud Competency Centre, National College of Ireland, Mayor Street-IFSC, Dublin 1, Ireland; e-mail: horacio@ncirl.ie Abstract The sources of information on the Web relating to Fine Art and in particular to Fine Artists are numerous, heterogeneous and distributed. Data relating to the biographies of an artist, images of their artworks, location of the artworks and exhibition reviews invariably reside in distinct and seemingly unrelated, or at least unlinked, sources. While communication and exchange exists, there is a great deal of independence between major repositories, such as museum, often owing to their ownership or heritage. This increases the individuality in the repository’s own processes and dissemination. It is currently necessary to browse through numerous different websites to obtain information about any one artist, and at this time there is little aggregation of Fine Art Information. This is in contrast to the domain of books and music, where the aggregation and re-grouping of information (usually by author or artist/band name) has become the norm. A Museum API (Application Programming Interface), how- ever, is a tool that can facilitate a similar information service for the domain of Fine Art, by allowing the retrieval and aggregation of Web-based Fine Art Information, whilst at the same time increasing public access to the content of a museum’s collection. In this paper, we present the case for a pragmatic solution to the problems of heterogeneity and distribution of Fine Art Data and this is the first step towards the comprehensive re-presentation of Fine Art Information in a more ‘artist-centric’ way, via accessible Web applications. This paper examines the domain of Fine Art Information on the Web, putting forward the case for more Web services such as generic Museum APIs, highlighting this via a prototype Web application known as the ArtBridge. The generic Museum API is the standardisation mechanism to enable interfacing with specific Museum APIs. 1 Introduction A huge proportion of the adult population in the world now has access to digital technology and the Internet. This access brings with it the power to not only consume information but also the ability to publish it. Individuals, referred to by Shirky (2010: 64) as the ‘people formerly known as the audience’, have gone from merely consuming information in front of a television to actively contributing, creating and sharing all forms of digital media content. The current population has grown up with the Web and is adapting to its changes. Each new generation grows up familiar with the Web as it is in their time so that the growing interactivity becomes second nature. The infrastructure that facilitates this is the World Wide Web, commonly designated ‘the Web’. Although this was initially a repository of interlinked hypertext documents written by a small proportion of the Web population, the majority of Web users had only passive access to browse or read. This has changed considerably, and in respect of this paper, in three important ways. The Knowledge Engineering Review, Vol. 30:2, 220–236. © Cambridge University Press, 2015 doi:10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core First, hypertext has been enhanced with images, videos, multimedia applications and documents in various formats. Second, the introduction of Web applications has enabled information contribution on the same scale as information browsing; and third, Web services have opened up previously repository-centric data in a way that encourages others to analyse and augment that data. This change of approach to the Web is often referred to as ‘Web 2.0’ and in human terms is akin to a library being transformed into a community of authors (O’Reilly, 2007). A key component to the developing Web is users’ awareness of each other. Previously, a user browsing a Web resource would be unaware of any other users (see Figure 1). As participation increased so did awareness, through time filtered posting up to ‘instant’ communication, as shown in Figure 2. The tools of this new community range from the semi-individualist blogs, file hosting/sharing services ‘torrents’, through to highly interactive media sharing sites, multi-purpose Web applications, and the more com- munal wikis, mashups and social networks (see Figure 3). These tools create multiple sources of data, its associated meta-data as well as interpretations, contradiction and outright conflict in relation to the original materials. Crucial to permitting contribution is that anyone with access to the Internet is able to publish and distribute digital information for minimal effort and cost. Typically referred to as open data, the open source style contribution to Web data where access is (largely) without restrictions from licensing, patents or copyright has resulted in natural virtual groupings of individuals with the most diverse commonalities. Websites are taking on a more two-way conversa- tional and interactive role, facilitating the sharing of information, the establishment of communities of people with similar interests, and the creation of opportunities to comment and contribute. Such a culture of openness of information and data is spreading. There is a growing list of organisations that are opening up their previously repository-centric art-related data with a view to increasing transparency and dissemination, whilst encouraging others to analyse and add to that data. The list includes government agencies, the BBC, New York Times, The Guardian, and several universities, museums and archives. Of singular importance to this paper are the Web services providing Fine Art open data. The provision of programmable Web access to a museum’s archive of information is seen by these organisations as a new means of increasing the exposure of their collections whilst creating a digital dialogue with developers and the wider community. In the context of the present paper, it is seen as an opportunity to aggregate Fine Art Information in a more ‘artist-centric’, and therefore user-friendly, way. This paper seeks to examine the place of a Museum API (Application Program Interface) in the trend towards a more comprehensive aggregation of Fine Art Information. It begins, in Section 2, by taking a general look at the current state of Fine Art Information, highlighting the problems inherent therein, and describes the contributions of this project. It significantly extends our initial work (Buchanan et al., 2011) by reporting the introduction of the carefully designed user interface for ArtBridge as well as providing a holistic analysis of the application of large-scale Web-based systems to Fine Art. Section 3 discusses the method by which a solution can be provided, examining the issues limiting a centralised approach and favouring an open data approach. It then examines the transition from data to information via a review of a number of different Web applications that have been created using open data sources. In particular it highlights the way in which technology has improved the accessibility and quality of information currently available in the book and music domains. Examples from book and music domains can give valuable lessons in usability. Figure 1 Users are unaware of any other users Towards a generic Museum API 221 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core Section 4 presents ArtBridge, a Web application built using open data obtained via a number of Museum APIs. In Section 5, the technical implementation of ArtBridge is given and the case is made for the further aggregation of Fine Art Information and therefore the need for the provision of more Museum APIs. Finally, Section 7 adduces the findings for our research to validate our data-centric hypothesis for the design of Web-based Fine Art repositories and APIs. 2 Background Provenance is well understood in Fine Art and curators have typically got a well-established set of processes to determine the origins of a given artwork. However, such processes are not necessarily transferable, particularly when it comes to determine the necessary ‘meta-data’ to define electronic cata- logues and collections in distinct museums. Crawlers and search engines rely on the integrity of the data they are retrieving. Some progress has been made on this with the introduction of trust-based applications such as the ‘Web of trust’ (Artz & Gil, 2007), which is a community-based tool that offers feedback from user reviews and rating to increase the confidence in good data sources and reject ones that are poorly managed or actively destructive. This Web relies on human activity, after all there are millions of participants. It is open to abuse but the community contribution acts as a self-correcting mechanism. An alternative approach is to introduce Artificial Intelligence in the form of machine learning to improve the relevance of the information retrieved (Snásel et al., 2009). The Web is continually growing in data content and old data is often amended, replaced or deleted. The result is that the semi-intelligent software agents, which feed the search engines, usually referred to as Web crawlers, have an increasingly difficult task in gathering new data and confirming the relevance of previously indexed data. In short the Web is growing and changing faster than the indexing systems can keep up. Web crawlers and related approaches are currently incapable of full information gathering on the Web (Baeza-Yates, 2003) and building efficient meta-search engines remains a colossal endeavour (Meng et al., 2002). Crawler technology is of course also improving but there are restrictions on them from the Web hosters’ point of view. Anti intrusion, to prevent illegal access to resources, and subscription only data mean that a portion of the Web will remain out of crawler reach for the foreseeable future (Henzinger, 2001). Figure 2 Users are semi-aware through time-filtered posting up to ‘instant’ communications Figure 3 Interactive users through communal wikis, mashups and social networks F . B U C H A N A N , N . C A P A N N I A N D H . G O N Z Á L E Z - V É L E Z222 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core Hence, provenance-based retrieval of electronic data remains an open problem in computer science (Moreau et al., 2008). While semantic search tools (Uren et al., 2007) and ontology-based retrieval (Mayfield, 2002) have long been considered a suitable alternative, the indexing systems that currently dominate Web information retrieval are the generic search engines. These try to be all things to all surfers. Within the museographic domain, generic search engines are often used to implement an institute’s own search facilities. Although this allows specific tailoring of the indexing system, it has two drawbacks. First, the tailoring is customised to the specific institute, so inter-institute online cataloguing, curation and, in general, cooperation are tied to bilateral agreements. Second, the data indexed is restricted to the implementing institute so it does not allow the indexing of cross-institute data. The problem is akin to every museum independently building a catalogue system and API. The Dublin Core (Weibel, 1997) has long been considered a suitable alternative to homogenise meta- data and associated schemas to enable mapping of disparate cataloguing sources, without the requirement for a centralised data store. In theory, data can be widely dispersed across the Web in both location and format. Nevertheless, the result of the different mechanism for information retrieval is that specific rather than general APIs are being constructed for different organisations to index the same type of data. The BBC (Kobilarov et al., 2009), both curate data sets from external sources and allow access to their own content via an API. This data is now subject to the schema of the BBC API and this may result in incompatibility to indexing with other APIs that follow a different scheme to the BBC. A small number of specialised collaborative projects have specifically been funded that begin to demonstrate the possibilities for the aggregation of Fine Art Information. For example, the Google Art Project www.googleartproject.com is a website that brings together selected data from 17 different public galleries (Proskine, 2006). Each of those galleries has released high-resolution images of a selected group of artworks as a means to publicise both the content of their collections, and their physical gallery spaces (using the Google StreetView technology). It is not possible, however, to search this site by artist’s name—rather the main purpose of the site appears to be to provide highlights from each gallery’s col- lection. The information is gallery centric rather than artist centric, and indeed it includes only a small proportion of the artworks in each institution. Then there is Culture24 www.culture24.org.uk, a community aimed at supporting the cultural sector online. It aims to provide the ‘Latest news, exhibition reviews, links, event listings and education resources from thousands of UK museums, galleries, archives and libraries, all in one place’. Again this is not artist centric, this site’s data is more event related but it does provide a number of Web feeds that allow its data to be automatically included in other websites. The Europeana project goes a stage further in relation to aggregation of Fine Art Information (Haslhofer et al., 2010). Europeana was launched in 2008, with the aim of ‘making Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage accessible to the public’. The portal http://europeana.eu/portal gives access to different types of content from various cultural institutions throughout Europe, and is funded by the European Commission. The information presented via this portal is in fact artist centric in that it ‘makes it possible to bring together the works of a painter with, for example, relevant archival documents and books written about the artist’s life’. It is also greater in extent and coverage given the large number of institutions which have taken part by allowing the inclusion of their digital content. Each of these projects has been made possible as a result of the positive collaboration of the institutions, galleries and libraries involved. The information presented via each of these websites has been carefully selected and curated by the institutions that have ‘opted-in’ to the projects. With the exception of Culture24, it is not yet possible to programmatically retrieve the data available via each of these websites, for re-use. The data behind each of these websites is ‘open’ in the sense that the participating institutions have made it available for non-commercial use, but it is not freely available for programmatic consumption at large via an API or other form of Web service. This is in contrast to the domain of Books and Music where data is made available in machine readable formats, thereby lending itself to the creation of near-comprehensive Web catalogues of information. MusicBrainz.org, for example, is a site that acts as ‘a community music meta-database that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site’, and which provides data about music to many other Towards a generic Museum API 223 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at www.googleartproject.com www.culture24.org.uk http://europeana.eu/portal https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core websites and applications. The data which is aggregated on this site is then utilised by companies such as The Guardian and last.fm for their own music-related Web pages, and is augmented with additional and related data. This level of online data aggregation ultimately provides the Internet user with accurate, informative and high-quality information about music and sets a standard of online information provision that has become the expected norm in this domain. A similar situation has arisen in relation to the domain of books, largely as a result of Amazon’s book API. It is now possible, on many different websites, to view the complete catalogue of works by a particular author, related book reviews and other relevant data. Sites such as Librarything.com provide a near-comprehensive information service by combining open data from Amazon as well as hundreds of public libraries. Users can browse online the extensive book catalogues and can search by author’s name, book genre, titles, subject-matter and even on the basis of ‘most popular’. It is clear that the online user experience in relation to browsing Fine Art Data cannot currently match that experienced within these two domains, given that the information remains largely distributed; and the reason for this is the very particular set of problems presented by the nine distinguishing features of Fine Art Information, as identified above. 2.1 Contribution The aims of this project are based on the portion of the Web which is constructed from hyperlinked pages of visual information, text and images. Given that the original Web was for text-based document sharing, this is a considerable amount. These pages are either viewed online via HTML or word processor-based presentations, or can be downloaded in many formats. The retrieval of this Web information retrieval relies on the viewer being able to find it, usually through hyperlinked indexing systems. The challenge presented to information retrieval systems is to produce a reduced set of data from a larger collection to satisfy a user’s information need. Some institutions have tackled this directly, as reported by Cahill (2009). This may result in excellent institute systems but it is unlikely to be a global or even portable solution. There is a need for an indexing model based on the content users and purpose. Various virtual museum approaches have been addressed and implemented. Some are highly specific and based on a single institute as considered in Hertzum (1998) or institute groups as examined by Schweibenz (1998). Both these lead to individual efficiency and give valuable insight to the construction of a virtual museum. However, these approaches do not separate the institute from the data and therefore the portability of such models is limited to institutes with similar characteristics. An approach that is more compatible with the resources in question and more likely to remain viable with the ever growing and changing Web is one with a contextually broader view. It should be concerned with what it is indexing more than who holds the data. It must still examine the general needs of the relevant institutes, predict their future needs. All this must consider what is being indexed from a content perspective as discussed by Dyson and Moran (2000). Our proposal consists of an API that requires an index of documents to be assembled using standard Web crawlers or by using available APIs. Knowledge of the structure of Web documents, which are reliant on HTML or related languages, allows their content to be automatically indexed. The API must also be able to review previous content owing to the changing nature of the data, as previously mentioned. This paper reviews the available approaches, discusses the prototype Museum API ‘ArtBridge’ and presents the case for a generic Museum API. This gives the framework for interaction between indepen- dent Museum APIs that adhere to the generic one. 3 Motivation The Web as a source of reliable information has already become unwieldy and at times unreliable; it is the sheer scale of this resource that presents the biggest challenges for individuals, businesses, organisations and developers alike. Visiting individual web pages to look for information is an inefficient use of time and energy, and although search engines can speed up the process, there is a growing need for the intelligent aggregation of topic-related information. It is Web technology that is not only driving and facilitating the increasing culture of open data, but also enabling us to make sense of it via applications that combine and F . B U C H A N A N , N . C A P A N N I A N D H . G O N Z Á L E Z - V É L E Z224 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core enrich data from different sources including websites, databases, Web/news feeds and spreadsheets, thereby creating new digital content in the form of ‘mashups’ (Merrill, 2006). In essence, these applications transform raw data into understandable information by presenting it in a way that explains or visually maps out the story behind those facts or figures. Or as Rusbridger (2009) states, ‘The web has given us easy access to billions of statistics on every matter. And with it are tools to visualise that information, mashing it up with different datasets to tell stories that could never have been told before’. The domain of Fine Art Information, however, appears to have been neglected. Whilst it is relatively easy to find sites that aggregate event information related to exhibitions and what’s currently on in the art world, it is less easy to locate information about a particular artist and his or her work. Information about Fine Art itself is widely distributed, and difficult to find without very specific targeted searching. For example, how do we begin to answer questions such as ‘Where can I see artworks by the Scottish Artist Joan Eardley?’. A keyword search on Google for the name ‘Joan Eardley’ returns 293 000 results, including the following: 1. Aberdeen Art Gallery’s online collection has 162 images of paintings and drawings by the artist; 2. Google Images contained 5740 results—only the first 10 pages contained relevant information; 3. the BBC portal features the town ‘Catterline’ on the programme ‘Coast’, and referred to Joan Eardley having painted there; 4. Wikipedia—information about the village of Catterline and it’s ‘notable inhabitants’, which included Joan Eardley; 5. a Wikipedia biography of the artist; 6. Amazon.co.uk—a book about Joan Eardley by Cordelia Oliver; 7. the Scotsman newspaper published an article dated 2007 about the artist; and 8. the Press and Journal, a regional UK newspaper, published a newspaper article about the recent sale of an Eardley painting. This exercise demonstrates that to find the information required about this artist, it is necessary to browse at least eight different websites. The information is there, and exists on the Web, but is spread throughout distributed sources. This problem becomes more pronounced as the Artist’s notoriety increases: a keyword search in Google for the name ‘Pablo Picasso’ returns 21 200 000 results as of December 2011. This raises the question as to how to bring all of this information together to make it accessible from one place. (Ayers & Watt, 2005: 4–5) have aptly summed up this situation as follows—‘Most of us live in homes where water comes to us, rather than us having to travel to the water. It makes a lot of sense that information, too, should flow to us. It avoids the repetitive actions of going to visit individual Web sites and, if done well, achieves easier, more efficient and more effective access to information’. At the moment, information about visual artists and their work is held in separate sources such as in the proprietary archives of public galleries or museums, or in private galleries. These sources are distributed, heterogeneous and often unrelated (in the sense of not being linked together) (Baca, 2002). Some galleries only represent a handful of artists, whilst some artists exhibit their artworks at numerous galleries, spread throughout the world. There is no pooling of resources to provide a more comprehensive presentation of information in relation to: 1. the bibliography of the artist; 2. the images of the artists’ artworks; 3. the exhibitions in which the artist has taken part (and the artworks included in those exhibitions); 4. news articles of relevance to, or about, the artist or their exhibitions; 5. reviews of artists and exhibitions; and 6. information about the places that relate to the artist or the artwork. Fine Art Information is not ‘artist centric’ when taken as a whole. Although it is possible to search specific collections for artworks by a particular artist, it is not possible to find any one source that lists all of the artworks associated with a particular artist’s name, and where it currently resides. This is in contrast to Towards a generic Museum API 225 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core the domain of books, for example, where numerous online catalogues provide the means to search by author to find a full list of their works, related book reviews and even book-cover images. Librarything. com is one such catalogue—this not only brings together information from hundreds of distinct library catalogues, but also creates an online community of book lovers. The principal distinguishing feature between this domain and that of Fine Art is the ISBN number. This enables books to be uniquely identified and catalogued, and at the same time facilitates aggregation of related information. Whilst museums and galleries do catalogue artworks according to certain minimum standards, there is no ubiquitous standardised method of identifying a particular artwork that would be equivalent to the ISBN number (Baca, 2008). There are accordingly huge variations from gallery to gallery in terms of the quality and completeness of the data recorded. There are also problems associated with both differing formats of data and different languages. Whilst collaborative attempts have been made to specify a schema to support data interchange between public galleries, such as that devised by the Getty Institute1, but these schema are not universally adopted. Overall, Fine Art Information can be characterised by a number of distinguishing features, which, taken together, present a unique set of challenges in so far as ingathering and organising that information using traditional retrieval techniques is concerned. The information is characterised by: 1. its dispersed and distributed nature; 2. a huge variation in quality and quantity, depending on the artist’s notoriety and the source of the information; 3. transience, particularly in relation to contemporary art and living artists; 4. heterogeneous formats; 5. the restrictive nature of repositories or archives (i.e. the information is not freely available for re-use); 6. a lack of uniformity in relation to the classification of images and art terms; 7. the fact that words (usually the artist’s name and subject) are used in a non-standardised way to identify and search for images (Baca, 2002; Manning et al., 2009: 178); 8. incomplete or inconsistent data; and 9. restrictions related to copyright and re-distribution of images of artworks. In view of these difficulties, Art Information remains heterogeneous, distributed and difficult to aggregate except in relation to event information: for example, New York Art Beat (NYArtBeat.com) is a site devoted to listing all art and design events in New York, and claims to be a ‘Smart data organisation with events sorted by media, schedules, and location, as well as event lists like Closing soon, Most popular, Open late, and Free’. It aggregates relevant art reviews and operates an intelligent tagging system that permits users to search easily for events of interest to them. In the true spirit of open data, it also provides an API2 that permits the inclusion of its information in other websites. Given the above set of problems inherent in Fine Art Information, it is not possible as matters currently stand to aggregate it with the same ease with which event information is brought together. The question arises, then, as to how the problems of heterogeneity and distribution might be overcome in this domain, withstanding the inherent difficulties. It would not be desirable or practical to seek to create a comprehensive centralised database of Fine Art Information by its very nature, Fine Art Information is constantly changing. Every day artworks are created, purchased, sold, loaned and even discovered; news stories or reviews of exhibitions are constantly being published; Fine Art Information is not a static data set and as such does not lend itself to a permanent amalgamation. It takes time to put together a data set from a large public collection and often by the time that data set is established, it is already out of date. To carry out this task manually for each of the public galleries in the world would be a task without end. There are also issues related to copyright that would prevent the centralised storing of images without express permission from each copyright owner. 1 Available at http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic-publications/ cdwa/cdwalite.html 2 Available at http://www.nyartbeat.com/resources/doc/api F . B U C H A N A N , N . C A P A N N I A N D H . G O N Z Á L E Z - V É L E Z226 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic-publications/cdwa/cdwalite.html http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic-publications/cdwa/cdwalite.html http://www.nyartbeat.com/resources/doc/api https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core 3.1 From data to information via Web technology It has been said that good data visualisation starts with asking questions about what story the data can tell, and what is interesting about it (Fry, 2007: 4). If it can communicate the story told by the relative data, then the visualisation is considered to be a success. In the present case the aim would be to aggregate Fine Art Information in a more ‘artist-centric’ way, and therefore the question that needs to be answered is ‘where can I see artworks by’ a particular artist. This is the story that needs to be told by Fine Art Data if it is to be given the same online treatment as the domains of books and music. To demonstrate how Fine Art Data retrieved from museum APIs might be utilised, it is useful to examine the way in which other websites have aggregated open data in other domains, to tell a particular story. It is clear that visualisation can be much more than just a graphic representation of a static set of facts and figures—when one data set is combined with and enriched by another, with this newly combined information then being translated into a dynamic graphical format, the resulting application becomes a powerful communication tool capable of providing instant answers to the user’s specific query. The best way to highlight this is by way of example: the website mysociety.org is run by a charitable organisation that seeks to build websites to promote openness and democracy in public life. One of their most popular projects is TheyWorkForYou.com—this website takes the current list of Members of the British Parliament and maps that data to the UK postcode data set, allowing users to enter their own postcode to search for details of their parliamentary representatives. From there, users can see whether their MP has been present at a particular parliamentary debate and view details of what that MP has actually said in debates, this information being derived directly from Hansard, the official archive of daily Parliamentary debates. Users of the site can even choose to be alerted by e-mail whenever a particular MP speaks in Parliament and can e-mail the MP directly. The website also combines two further data sets—the Register of Members’ Interests and Expenses data—both of which can be searched at the click of a button. In bringing all of this public infor- mation together in a simple user-friendly interface, this website makes it easy for constituents to keep tabs on their Parliamentary representatives and, in doing so, increases their representatives’ accountability. This is a good example of Web technology being used to bring together publicly available data in a way that transforms it into a consumable story, and presents it in a more user-friendly way. As David Whiteland from mysociety.org said very succinctly during the writer’s discussions with him (in London in July 2010) technology changes ‘data to information’3. Data in isolation is just data, but data linked to other related data that is presented in a user-friendly way becomes useful information or knowledge. When that knowledge is made available via the Web, its potential audience is almost global. There are many different ways to present information via a Web interface, and a review of relevant websites suggests that there are four different levels of dynamism of data applications that range from simple graphical illustrations, to fully interactive websites. The four levels are as follows. First, there is the simple unchanging graphical representation of a static set of facts—the subway map being a good example of this. That simple image presents a very refined view of geographical information, station locations and routes in a way that makes it easy to plan a journey. The data set upon which this visualisation is based is relatively static over time (unless of course a rail line is extended or a new station built) as is the visualisation itself. An example of a Web-based visualisation at this level might be the Linked Open Data Cloud that is an interactive visualisation of all the linked data sets that exist at a certain point in time. This can be accessed online (at lod-cloud.net) and when clicking on any of the circles containing the name of a data set, the user is taken directly to the source of that data set. A simple yet highly effective visualisation of a large data set. The second level is a more dynamic graphical representation of a static set of facts. An example of this can be found on the website wheredoesmymoneygo.org. This website seeks to ‘promote transparency and citizen engagement through the analysis and visualisation of information about UK public spending’. Via its ‘Dashboard’4 application (see Figure 4), this website provides a stylish visual record, built using 3 In conversation in London, July 2010 at The Guardian offices, Kings Place, London. 4 The Dashboard can be found at www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/bubbletree-map.html#/~/grand- total--2010- Towards a generic Museum API 227 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/bubbletree-map.html#/~/grand-total--2010- www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/bubbletree-map.html#/~/grand-total--2010- www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/bubbletree-map.html#/~/grand-total--2010- www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/bubbletree-map.html#/~/grand-total--2010- https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core Flash, of where public money has been spent, by year. The data upon which the visualisation is based is historic in nature (i.e. unchanging) and ordinarily this set of financial figures would make for very dull reading to the majority of people. However, here we see the power of dynamic interactive graphics—the apparent simplicity of the coloured circles communicates a complex set of statistics that is capable of being understood by non-statisticians. It provides a timeline allowing for an easy visual comparison of spending by year, from 2003 to date, and allows users to click on each area of expenditure (such as Health) for a further breakdown of the spend involved that year. This is a very good example of technology and design working together to communicate the story being told by an otherwise overwhelming set of public data. The third level of visualisation is similar to the second in that it involves a relatively static data set, but with the addition of a further layer of interactivity that allows the user to modify the view of the infor- mation by entering search criteria, or choosing a refinement of the data from a list. An example of this would be the website nukeometer.com built by Adam Charnock that uses JQuery, Google Maps API and a data set comprising the locations of all nuclear warheads in the world, derived from a news article in The Guardian (Rogers, 2009). It provides a very simple interface into which the user enters their current city and country. From there the application lists the number and location of the warheads within range of that city on a deceptively simple screen which displays quite a shocking message. The fourth level of visualisation involves two distinguishing features—a non-static data set, that is, a set of facts or information that is constantly changing and which requires regular dynamic updates; and second, the participation of and contribution by the user (see Figure 3). Such applications are complex, often involving many different features and/or data sources, and even the creation of a community of interests or social network. They invariably involve writing scripts to dynamically update the appropriate web page, either directly from Web resources or from a database into which the information has previously been stored. This type of application or service has two main features—the ever-changing data set and user participation. One website which demonstrates such dynamism is LibraryThing.com, previously referred to. This is, in the writer’s view, a site that exemplifies what can be done using intelligent Web technologies—it brings Figure 4 The ‘where does my money go’ dashboard (screenshot from www.wheredoesmymoneygo. org) F . B U C H A N A N , N . C A P A N N I A N D H . G O N Z Á L E Z - V É L E Z228 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core together publicly available data about books whilst creating a community of people sharing a common interest in reading. At the same time it facilitates the creation of a comprehensive catalogue of book information that is constantly being augmented by the input of millions of users. This site makes use of data from Amazon’s book API, plus book catalogues from the Library of Congress in the United States and, according to the website, ‘690 other world libraries’5. In essence, this website is both a cataloguing facility and a social network for book lovers, requiring users to log in to their own profile page. It makes use of the constantly updating data stored by each of the source libraries, but enriches that data by linking them to other books, reviews, users, tags and images, thereby creating an enhanced database of books in addition to a social network of readers. It also provides recommendation services based upon other users’ reviews and even their conversations, in addition to a ‘zeitgeist’ recommendation feature that collates site statistics, using them as the basis for dynamic listings such as ‘most read’, ‘most reviewed’ and ‘top author’. With over one million users adding content to the site, and around 50 million books in its system, the data upon which LibraryThing is based, is constantly being augmented and updated. This website demonstrates how open data can be used in a very creative and dynamic way by bringing together disparate library catalogues of books, transforming them into a more comprehensive and updating repository of book and book-related information with a vibrant community of users. It has recently been argued that while catalogue records will continue to be the kernel of bibliography, thoughtful reviews will assume greater importance (Wagner & Weibel, 2005). Thus, applications that combine both data and social interaction can serve not only to present that data in a consumable form, but they can become platforms through which the data can be enriched by user interaction, thereby ‘acting as collective intelligence gatherers’ (Bell, 2009: 5). Such a situation is only made possible by Web technologies that permit both the dynamic aggregation and dynamic searching of vast and increasing amounts of open data. LibraryThing.com has access to a large array of online and trusted data sources relating to literature of all kinds, which enables it to provide a near-comprehensive online cataloguing facility in relation to books. If a similar volume of programmable Fine Art Data was made available online, there would be no barrier to providing a similar aggregation and cataloguing facility in relation to the works of art created by the artists of the world. This would ultimately improve the experience of those searching for Fine Art Information on the Web whilst at the same time would increase the accessibility of many museums’ online collections. 4 A possible solution: the Museum API It is the writer’s view that in order for the aggregation of Web-based Fine Art Information to be feasible, it is necessary to have a greater degree of machine capabilities of Fine Art Data. Most public and private art galleries have a publicly accessible website displaying digitised images of their artworks. The data is already in a format that would lend itself to inclusion in the world of open data. However, the means to automate the accurate processing and aggregation of this information is lacking. As previously indicated, the creation of a centralised repository of all Fine Art Information is neither feasible nor desirable given the fluidity of the data itself. A more pragmatic and dynamic solution is required, and it is the writer’s view that this could be provided by the creation of APIs to each digital repository of Fine Art Information, whether it is a public collection of art objects or a private commercial gallery. The provision of an API to a museum collection, or indeed to a commercial gallery, has a number of useful features for both the museum and the developer alike, which can be summarised as follows. First, the terms of use of the data are made clear from the outset by the institution providing the Web service. The images of artworks in respect of which public distribution is prohibited, are generally excluded from the API, or included with very low-resolution files. Further, there are limits on the purposes for which the data can be utilised, limits on the number of calls to the API that can be made per day, and terms requiring that specific permission be obtained in certain circumstances, for example, where the institution’s logo is to be used in an application. 5 http://www.librarything.com/ Towards a generic Museum API 229 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at http://www.librarything.com/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core Second, once a museum has carried out the work to set up the API, it need not spend any further time dealing with requests for, or putting together, specific datasets given that the information can then be obtained programmatically (and in the desired format) using appropriately constructed URLs. A very efficient use of resources all round, and a pragmatic means to overcome the hurdles posed by the lack of homogeneous formats. Third, as far as the developer is concerned, using carefully constructed URLs it is possible to retrieve only the data that is required, in the knowledge that as it comes from a trusted source, it is likely to be highly relevant and of reliable quality. There is the added advantage that where a Web service utilises persistent URLs, the resource at that specific address will always be up to date so long as the API is properly managed. And finally, for relatively minimal effort, the museum can automatically expose its collection to a greater audience on the Web by making its data available to enthusiastic Web developers as well as museography specialists. The result will invariably by a plethora of interesting and novel Web applications, each of which publicises (for no effort or cost to the institution) the content of the museum’s collection. It is only necessary to look at websites such as programmableweb.com to see this in practice—as at July 2011, this site indicated that there were 2243 Web applications utilising the Google Map API (available at code.google.com/ apis/maps/index.html). These figures speak for themselves. 5 Implementation: ArtBridge A simple example of what might be achieved in the domain of Fine Art is provided by the Web application ArtBridge (see Figure 6), a project of the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen (available at www.comp. rgu.ac.uk/ArtBridge). The system has been deployed using the MAMP 1.9 (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP http://www. mamp.info/) software stack under the Mac OS X 10.5 operating system. Our system has abstracted the connections to various Web resources to retrieve the results related to that search term, decoupling the logic of the query from the real infrastructure dependencies. The system processes the information, organising it into an artist-centric file containing relevant URLs that point to Web resources relevant to that artist. When a name is input via the Web interface, the system retrieves the file of relevant URLs and obtains the resources from those links, re-presenting them on the web page for that particular artist. In this way, the system aggregates relevant information in relation to artists and provides access to that information from each of the distinct sources, in one place. This application, written in Java, retrieves information from mainstream Fine Art sources: 1. New York’s Brooklyn Museum API; 2. London’s Victoria & Albert Museum API; 3. The Guardian’s Open-Platform; and 4. Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museum. It analyses the relevance of the data retrieved from each resource, and stores the URLs for the relevant resources in a separate XML file for each particular artist. The ArtBridge system allows the user to choose the name of a particular artist, and from there a Web application, written in ActionScript 3.0, then displays the relevant data retrieved from each of these four Web sources using the previously stored URLs. Each item of data is stored in a separate box within the display, and includes images from each of the Museums’ digital repositories, and relevant news articles from The Guardian’s Web service. All of these resources are retrieved dynamically from the URLs and therefore display the current information available at that particular URL. It is, however, designed in such a way that additional sources and formats of information can be incorporated in the system, without difficulty. The main application can be run from a simple GUI. Each option is managed by the StartApp class, which contains the main method. This class retrieves the input search terms from either the GUI or command line, and creates a new StartSearch object which is the kernel applicative object through which F . B U C H A N A N , N . C A P A N N I A N D H . G O N Z Á L E Z - V É L E Z230 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at code.google.com/apis/maps/index.html code.google.com/apis/maps/index.html www.comp.rgu.ac.uk/ArtBridge www.comp.rgu.ac.uk/ArtBridge http://www.mamp.info/ http://www.mamp.info/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core all of the information in the system flows. It creates the ‘BuildXXXSearch’ objects which manage the construction of the URLs for each API, and manages the XML output. This is illustrated in Figure 5. The system is designed so that a ‘BuildXXXSearch’ object is instantiated for each API (Guardian, Brooklyn, Victoria & Albert Museum, etc.), with its own class design being dependent upon the idiosyncrasies of each of the repository APIs but with common attributes being inherited. In this way the details of the construction of specific URLs for each API are encapsulated within separate classes, and it also means that the system can be easily extended to cope with additional APIs simply by creating a new ‘BuildXXXSearch’ derived class for that API, for example: ‘BuildGuardianSearch(String key, String artistName)’. Where key represents the authentication parametric values for a given API (in the above example, The Guardian’s) and artistName is a string which is then parsed and converted into a searchable artist entry (typically formed as a first–last name pairing). A correct parsing is crucial because otherwise a seemingly straightforward query on ‘Vincent Van Gogh’ could include details of all artists with a first or middle name of ‘Vincent’ or ‘Van’ as well as personalities with ‘Gogh’ as a surname (e.g. Theo Van Gogh). Furthermore, open non-qualified search terms can often return a number of seemingly random artist’s names (e.g. ‘La Oreja de Van Gogh’, a Spanish pop band). When the search term has been processed in this way, the BuildXXXSearch object then puts together a specific URL String to enable the system to query the API. It is noted that the relatively large number of string variables reflects the complexity of queries that can be made to the API of the different information repositories. Query refinement is API dependent and therefore the BuildXXXSearch objects must contemplate the subtleties of the repositories. For example, for The Guardian’s API, we could change the newspaper section in which the data might appear. In the present case we are interested in ‘artanddesign’ or ‘culture’, but there are over 50 different sections that could be queried. A typical query URL looks like: content.guardianapis.com/search? q=pablo+picasso§ion=artanddesign& format=xml Located immediately after the question mark, the tags part of the URL corresponds to The Guardian’s classification of news content. There are literally thousands of different tags by which queries can be Figure 5 Simple block diagram of the ArtBridge system Towards a generic Museum API 231 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at content.guardianapis.com/search? q=pablo+picasso&section=artanddesign&format=xml content.guardianapis.com/search? q=pablo+picasso&section=artanddesign&format=xml https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core refined. In the present case, the hard-coded query is for articles, reviews or news but not obituaries, but this could be changed to look for only reviews in a particular section, for example. The URL String is therefore assembled and from that, a new URL object is created. The public method getUrl() of the BuildGuardianSearch class returns the URL object in question to the calling StartSearch object. The BuildBrooklynSearch and BuildVnASearch classes operate in a similar way. The information returned by each API is then parsed, with the relevant segments of data being stored in custom data objects. What the data objects will be storing, in effect, is a list of URLs that point to resources relevant to the particular artist. Some of those URLs will be known in advance, such as the links to biographies and links to galleries with which the artist has an association. Others will be retrieved from searches to the relative APIs. The object is not to acquire and store the actual images or text in a centralised database, but rather the URLs that point to these resources. The reason for this is threefold. First, there are complex copyright issues attached to the storing of images of artwork; second, it is not usually permitted (in the applicable terms of use) to store or cache data retrieved via an API for longer than 24 hours; and third, given that information on the Web is capable of changing rapidly, it is necessary to ensure that any data displayed via the application is up to date and relevant. It would therefore be desirable, in view of these constraints, to access the resources dynamically as required to ensure that the information displayed is always up to date. Finally, after the information is retrieved from the given repository the information is then rendered as a Web interface that provides a degree of interactivity and manipulation of the views of the data in question. The user is able to choose an artist’s name from a list and view the relevant information. Consideration required to be given as to how that interface was to be built, what scripting languages were to be used, and how those were to be deployed and tested. Ultimately, the chosen method has to use XSLT/CSS stylesheets, applied to the appropriate XML document selected using PHP as the scripting language. 6 Evaluation It is important in this particular project to work with real data from the relevant APIs in order to obtain accurate feedback from the content of the results returned. Open data from a select group of artists has been used to test the operation of the system and indeed in the final evaluation of the overall system. The artists are Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Tracey Emin, Vincent Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Claude Monet, David Hockney and Andy Warhol, all of whom have data in at least one of the APIs used in the system. To evaluate the actual functioning of the system, each artist’s name has been input via the system GUI, and automatic searches were then carried out consecutively in the three APIs (The Guardian, Brooklyn Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum). For each artist, the results were output to the console so that an immediate assessment of the results could be made. As summarised in Table 1, the number of URLs are highly focused and relevant reporting actual references to the artwork and life of a given fine artist, as opposed to an assorted collection of loosely related pages. As an illustration, a simple Google search on Vincent Van Gogh on The Guardian site (guardian.co.uk) produces over 3000 results in stark contrast to the seven URLs reported. From the main display of information illustrated in Figure 8, the user can instantly see which of these three museums hold artworks by the particular artist chosen, and can view images of them if available. It is also possible to read relevant art reviews or news articles of relevance to that artist. A screenshot of the data relating to Henri Matisse as presented by ArtBridge user interface appears in Figure 8. Each image block, when hovered over by the mouse, displays the title of the artwork, and the city and name of the museum to which it belongs as shown in Figure 9. Clicking on the image displays either the full-sized image or the full news article. The information being brought together from these four distributed resources is re-organised in an artist-centric way, and avoids the need on the part of the user to separately visit these four different websites. However, given that the application is making calls to the relative APIs each time that an artist’s name is selected, it is increasing Web traffic to that Web service, whilst at the same time increasing public access to the content of each institution’s online digital collection. It also demonstrates a possible answer to such questions as F . B U C H A N A N , N . C A P A N N I A N D H . G O N Z Á L E Z - V É L E Z232 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core ‘where can I see artworks by Henri Matisse?’ and in doing so highlights the potential benefits of increasing the aggregation of Fine Art Data. 6.1 Discussion At the moment, the scope of the application is limited by the number of online data sources available, although it is designed so as to be capable of the modular addition of many more. As the number of data sources increases, so too will the quality, accessibility and usability of the Fine Art Information provided online (see Figure 7). If a project such as Europeana was to provide an API allowing for online access to its million-plus digitised items (and this is mentioned as a possibility on their website), the effectiveness and utility of applications such as ArtBridge would increase exponentially. Further, if every public museum or gallery in each of our major cities were to allow access to their online data via an API then it would be possible to imagine a situation where the Web of Fine Art Data is aggregated to such an extent that a near- comprehensive catalogue of many artist’s works could be viewed, reviewed and augmented at a single location rather than the thousands of websites over which it is currently distributed. These are big, but not inconceivable, ‘ifs’, which if realised would bring the quality of online infor- mation in this domain up to the standard currently enjoyed in the book and music domains. The Web technology needed to effect this transformation already exists but is under-utilised in this area of Fine Art Data. It is the writer’s view that the museum API can act as a knowledge bridge between the distributed online digital repositories of Fine Art Data by providing for programmatic access to that data, and in doing so it Table 1 System evaluation results using a set of eight Fine Artists with The Guardian, Brooklyn and Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) Application Programming Interface The Guardian Brooklyn V&A Pablo Picasso 25 10 3 Henri Matisse 8 0 4 Tracey Emin 11 1 1 Vincent Van Gogh 7 2 0 Jackson Pollock 1 0 0 Claude Monet 4 5 0 David Hockney 8 0 11 Andy Warhol 11 10 2 Figure 6 A representation of ArtBridge and the Museum API (Application Programming Interface) Towards a generic Museum API 233 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core can facilitate its aggregation and contribute to the improvement of the online experience in this domain. It provides a pragmatic solution to the problems inherent in this domain, whilst at the same time increasing the online accessibility of each of the sources of digital Fine Art Information. 7 Conclusions In this paper we have been concerned with the specific context of highly independent, heterogeneous and distributed sources of Web information on Fine Art and Fine Artists. The problems addressed were those Figure 8 ArtBridge user interface—Henri Matisse example Figure 7 Generic museum standardisation for interactive APIs (Application Programming Interface) Figure 9 ArtBridge image block F . B U C H A N A N , N . C A P A N N I A N D H . G O N Z Á L E Z - V É L E Z234 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core of large-scale information indexing and retrieval. The domain data occurs in various types; long term/static such as biographies and artworks, transient such as art collections and time specific such as exhibitions. The independence of the data naturally results in a heterogeneous organisation and structure so that separate data repositories cannot freely interact. This often creates duplication and contradiction in data. Contradiction is especially true when time dependence affects the relevance of the data. We established that the data is not the problem. The problem relates to different methods for infor- mation retrieval which result in specific, and non-interactive, APIs being created for the same type of data. Problem examples are shown through the need to source and filter data independently from multiple sites to obtain the required information. The paper established the continuity of data organisation in other domains, relating to pre-Web orga- nisation such as library systems. It highlighted distinguishing features such as ISBN and showed the contrast in universally accepted techniques within Fine Art cataloguing. In contrast to long-established methods, the rise Web participation in numbers and interaction is shown to be fundamental to data retrieval. We presented a proposal for the development of a solution in terms of the Museum API. This examined the Fine Art domain, presented the argument for a generic API and offered a prototype ‘ArtBridge’ that supports the aim of the Dublin Core to enable mapping of disparate data sources. This is supported by a review of different Web applications, which have been created using open data sources. A possible solution, The Museum API, is examined in terms of the current state of Fine Art Information, highlighting the problems. Support for our proposal ideas is currently observable through a small number of specialist, collaborative, aggregation projects. From the previous work, the requirements of the Museum API are established. Having already estab- lished that the data is not a problem, this shows that the data format is also not a problem; the means to aggregate is a central problem and a solution relies on automating an accurate process. The proposal is against a centralisation approach, which would be an impossible, never-ending task and would also require a top-down authority throughout the Fine Art domain. Instead, it supports a pragmatic solution of an API that encourages community participation and open source development. This approach allows the independent creation of APIs that can interact with each other. We obtained four solution steps from the requirements and these are; clarity of data and data use, API robustness (maintenance free), establishing trust in sources to validate the URL feeds, and automation of process to minimise the individual effort required for individual institutes to participate. Finally, the power of data visualisation, which will be obtained via such an API, is presented with examples in several different domains. This leads directly to our prototype solution, where we present ArtBridge as a Web app built using several Museum APIs. This counters the problems we have observed and fits the requirements of the solution. Future work will be establishing a full system that completes all four solution steps. Acknowledgements This research was partly supported by a Scott Trust Technology Bursary. The authors acknowledge use of the services and facilities of the School of Computing at the Robert Gordon University. References Artz, D. & Gil, Y. 2007. A survey of trust in computer science and the Semantic Web. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 5(2), 58–71. Ayers, D. & Watt, A. 2005. Beginning RSS and Atom Programming. ISBN: 978-0-7645-7916-5. Wiley. Baca, M. (ed.) 2002. Introduction to Art Image Access: Tools, Standards, and Strategies. ISBN: 0892366664. Getty Research Institute. Baca, M. (ed.) 2008. Introduction to Metadata, 2nd edition. ISBN: 0892368969. Getty Research Institute. Baeza-Yates, R. 2003. Information retrieval in the web: beyond current search engines. 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Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:16, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1008839 http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/apr/06/north-korea-nuclear-weapons http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/apr/06/north-korea-nuclear-weapons www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/mar/10�/�1 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888914000319 https://www.cambridge.org/core Distributed aggregation of heterogeneous Web-based Fine Art Information: enabling multi-source accessibility and curation 1Introduction Figure 1Users are unaware of any other�users 2Background Figure 2Users are semi-aware through time-filtered posting up to ‘instant’ communications Figure 3Interactive users through communal wikis, mashups and social networks 2.1Contribution 3Motivation 3.1From data to information via Web technology Figure 4The ‘where does my money go’ dashboard (screenshot from www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org) 4A possible solution: the Museum API 5Implementation: ArtBridge Figure 5Simple block diagram of the ArtBridge�system 6Evaluation 6.1Discussion Table 1System evaluation results using a set of eight Fine Artists with The Guardian, Brooklyn and Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) Application Programming Interface Figure 6A representation of ArtBridge and the Museum API (Application Programming Interface) 7Conclusions Figure 8ArtBridge user interface—Henri Matisse example Figure 7Generic museum standardisation for interactive APIs (Application Programming Interface) Figure 9ArtBridge image�block Acknowledgements ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS References work_733qb624cfhqlm2bth2ptsxw7u ---- Crossroads of seeing: about layers in painting and superimposition in Augmented Reality Vol.:(0123456789)1 3 AI & SOCIETY https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01060-5 O R I G I N A L A R T I C L E Crossroads of seeing: about layers in painting and superimposition in Augmented Reality Manuel van der Veen1 Received: 31 July 2019 / Accepted: 18 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020 Abstract Augmented Reality (AR) is itself a technology in which two ways of seeing are crossed. Our field of vision is thereby superimposed with digital information and images. But before this, the real environment is already perceived by machine seeing, it is redoubled by a 3D-model, scanned, located and linked. In this brief investigation, I will face the way of seeing in AR with traditional procedures, like ‘trompe-l’œil’ and the so-called ‘velo’, to distinguish between what remains classic and what has changed. It is important to examine this as layering, because it is a very thin stack of techniques, technology, materials and media, we seek to watch through. Subsequently, I shall analyze a painting of the contemporary artist Laura Owens in which both ways are crossed, the traditional one and the one concerning AR. Keywords Augmented Reality · (Digital) layering · Stack · Superimposition · Transparency · Trompe-l’œil · Velo (veil) 1 Introduction The field of vision in Augmented Reality (AR) challenges our way of seeing by registering digital images and objects onto the real environment. Sometimes these images and objects emerge as registered and sometimes, they blur the boundaries between the digital and the real area. It is my approach to face AR with its cognates in art history to sort out the specific strategies and procedures of layering. It is not the goal to prove some continuous development from ancient illusion techniques to newer technologies. Rather, the new should be divorced from the already known to examine our current way of seeing in AR more profoundly. The view through the glasses of AR enables a new perspec- tive onto the tradition. The technology merges various tech- niques and procedures; in particular, it crosses two ways of seeing: our view through the eyes and that of machine seeing. The latter processes the data, received by the sen- sors and cameras, within our field of vision to calculate a hybrid view. However, this leads into a double blindness, as each participant is blind to the other for a certain extent of the way. In general, AR may be defined as an operation of super- imposition. It overlays the real environment and one has to perceive them together. For this, there are various scenarios in earlier procedures. For example, Filippo Brunelleschi’s two experiments in front of the Baptistery San Giovanni and at the Piazza della Signoria, placing cut-out paintings surrounded by the movement of clouds or the living city. We must also think of the phantasmagoria, within which ghosts are projected into the real space and in real time (Elcott 2016). Furthermore, the schüfftan-process, perhaps less common, also establishes an interplay of real fragments with illusionistic complements. Finally, there are analogue panoramic boards that provide information about the loca- tion, at the location. All of these are relatives which are not the same, but are particularly suited to highlight differences. In this text, I would like to focus particularly on the layer of superimposition itself. It is placed between an imaginary and a real interface. To look at this at least semitransparent layer I suggest to investigate Leon Battista Alberti’s “how- to-do-it apparatus”, the so-called ‘velo’ (veil). * Manuel van der Veen M.vanderVeen@me.com 1 State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s00146-020-01060-5&domain=pdf AI & SOCIETY 1 3 2 Metaphor and apparatus: about the ‘velo’ as a layering procedure To analyze the ‘velo’ as an apparatus depends on the obser- vation that the device itself establishes a way of seeing. As noted above, AR tends to blur the boundaries between digital images and the real surroundings. In contrast to the career of immersion into the image, which is generally associated with virtual reality, in AR immersive images are placed. Their status as images is covered to appear as a part of reality, which connects the current view to the traditional proce- dure of ‘trompe-l’œil’. However, it has not yet been decided whether AR will pursue an all over camouflage. My research project ‘Augmented Reality. Trompe l’oeil and Relief as Technique and Theory’, of which the considerations here form an excerpt, suggests to describe ‘trompe-l’œil’ and sculptural relief as immersive and emersive1 images. Since the ‘velo’ provides a layer to think the technological implica- tions of AR and at the same time plays an important part in the interpretation of ‘trompe-l’œil’, it is particularly suitable for the following investigation. In 1435 Alberti wrote in his treatise on painting and per- spective ‘De pictura’ that the rectangular frame of paint- ings should be seen as an open window (‘aperta finestra’). This very well-known section from ‘De pictura’ also carries well-known difficulties. First, the solid and opaque surface of the canvas is denied. And second, what is seen through a window is the here and now; a painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries instead usually shows a somewhere and a sometime else of an ‘istoria’. The extensive discussion of the window metaphor cannot be pursued further here. For now, it seems more interesting to look up another passage from Alberti’s treatise in book two. Here, he does not only describe a metaphor, but also an actual apparatus, a device. This apparatus stretches out a semi-transparent cloth with a grid of threads as a layer between the artist and the motif (Fig. 1). It is precisely this cloth, which I proposed as a rela- tive of the information and object layer, that we are dealing with in AR. The technology circulates as a procedure, which places figures in the environment, as in the popular application ‘Pokémon Go’ (Niantic). But even before a figure, an image or an object occupies our field of vision, the technology per- ceives the environment, doubles or multiplies the pair of eyes through cameras and sensors to set up a (almost invis- ible) layer through which we perceive the environment. It might be helpful to quote Edmund Husserls ternary image theory, which consists of three layers of seeing: physical image—image object—image subject (Husserl 2005: 20). The physical image is for example the carrier, the physi- cal support. The images of AR and of ‘trompe-l’œil’ are problematic as such because they seem to have no carrier.2 Due to that lost carrier, the layer of projection and the performance of the machine are suppressed. And with them, the place is blurred where the two ways of seeing, of Fig. 1 Device for perspecti- val drawing of a landscape. Anonym, 1710. PD-Art/PD- old-100 = /1810/?; PD-US 1 Thanks to a productive conversation with Matthias Bruhn, about emersion and emersiv images, the parallel to the procedure of sculp- tural relief could be drawn. 2 The missed physical image in Augmented Reality in relation to Husserl’s image theory was mentioned during a presentation by Ste- phan Günzel in Weimar, Germany (Das Diorama: Durch…Denken) called ‘Augmented Reality: Zur (In)Transparenz des Bildes’. AI & SOCIETY 1 3 machine and body, are crossed. Everything that becomes visible through the glasses of AR is already processed. Hus- serl’s image theory is based on the difference between image and environment, the difference that is at stake in AR and ‘trompe-l’œil’. Thus, for Husserl, the image manifests itself in a conflict and this conflict is not caused by the realistic depiction (Husserl 2005: 51): “The appearance belonging to the image object is distinguished in one point from the normal perceptual appearance. This is an essential point that makes it impossible for us to view the appearance belong- ing to the image object as a normal perception: it bears within itself the characteristic of unreality, of conflict with the actual present. The perception of the surroundings, the perception in which the actual present becomes constituted for us, continues on through the frame and then signifies ‘printed paper’ or ‘painted canvas’.” If the carrier is lost, the conflict with the actual present disappears, which in turn leads to an uncertain image perception in AR. The motivation to look out for the carrier is not based on its status of being lost or hidden, which would end up in chasing a deception. Rather, it is due to the observation that the carrier is shifted instead. A ‘trompe-l’œil’ occupies a classical support, but only to be its alienation, because the procedure stacks other depicted supports onto the image support (e.g. planks of wood, papers, canvases, etc.). With each depiction, the physical support is pushed forward piece by piece (Fig. 2). Therefore, we could record that the carrier is suppressed by both, its multiplication and by its disappearance. In AR a carrier also exists as a (semi-transparent) display in the optical-see-through technique, which directs the image to the eye and as a touchable screen in the video-see-through technique of handheld devices. To call it see-through thus ties the technique directly with that of perspective as a see- ing through. But the carrier is already slipped. On one hand, the video-see-through technique shows both, the actual sur- roundings behind the screen and the superimposition on the screen. In the optical-see-through, on the other hand, the carrier is placed directly in front of the eyes to appear imaginarily over there, in the middle of the surroundings. The carrier is, therefore, no longer a background, but rather shifted forward. In ‘trompe-l’œil’ and AR, the three lev- els of image perception collapse: the environment seems to become the carrier and finally, determines image object and image subject. In summary, the physicality of the carrier, as well as the status as an image, become instable. However, the fact that the carrier is shifted, multiplied or transparent changes the way of seeing beyond a mere deception. In the following, I would like to introduce the ‘velo’ as a layer to think the lost carrier as a literal interface. Not as a background—but as a layer between the observer and the surroundings, which also requires a shift in perception. In AR we do not just look at an image, we also look at the world through a layer. A layer which organizes the complex of world and image and thus our way of seeing. With the ‘velo’, different ways of this organization are to be worked out. The layer of the ‘velo’ is first constitutive as a translation function, then it is perceived with its own materiality, only to finally give up its material- ity again and become an operation of structuring. 2.1 The ‘velo’: a layer for translation The ‘velo’ is a semi-transparent cloth with a gridded sur- face through which one can see into depths. Decisive for the change in mind is the transition from a metaphor of an open window to a real studio tool. The framework contin- ues inside the ‘velo’ and leads to the crucial difference to the metaphor, which is highlighted by Anne Friedberg: “but while Alberti suggested the rectangular frame and planar surface of a metaphoric ‘window’; as a device for geomet- ric calculation, his ‘velo’ did not require the calculation of orthogonals and vanishing points. It was, instead, depend- ent solely on its frame and its inset quadrants as a device to ‘map’; the three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional plane.” (Friedberg 2006: 38). Fig. 2 Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts, Quodlibet or “Vanitas-Stillle- ben”, 1675. oil on canvas. 41 × 34,5 cm. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Köln, Inv.-Nr. WRM 2828. Copyright: Rheinis- ches Bildarchiv Köln, Rolf Zimmermann, rba_c011283. https ://www. kultu relle s-erbe-koeln .de/docum ents/obj/05011 135 https://www.kulturelles-erbe-koeln.de/documents/obj/05011135 https://www.kulturelles-erbe-koeln.de/documents/obj/05011135 AI & SOCIETY 1 3 This mapping procedure is a translation and not a construction. If one looks through the ‘velo’, the image is already in the frame or better, within the many small frames—it just needs to be transferred onto the paper. Round bodies and their relief are already present on the surface, likewise to a projection. While turning the gaze back and forth, the artist translates what he sees, frame by frame onto the similar grid on the sheet of paper, watching the outside— not to orientate in the landscape but rather on the drawing. Emmanuel Alloa describes this translation, in reference to the ‘velo’, as a taming of the mobile. Contrary to this, he emphasizes the greater mobility of the individual elements in the grid, which causes the subdivision of the objects (Alloa 2011: 156). This description includes an important difference to AR, which does not translate an image onto a sheet of paper. It translates the actual view in real time, by superimposing data, also in real time—with that, it is rather an unleashing of the mobile. A popular effect of AR is to translate fixed images into moving ones. In doing so, these images are superimposed by themselves, but in motion. 2.2 The ‘velo’: a layer with its own materiality Regarding the translation function, it must be concluded that through the ‘velo’ only what is in situ can be perceived, what actually is placed behind the frame. Hence, behind that surface a fiction is impossible—but on the surface it can be reintroduced. ‘Trompe-l’œil’ as a procedure is related to the ‘velo’ in making its materiality visible and with this, a further function can be assigned to the layer. A ‘trompe- l’œil’ usually starts with a redoubling of the image carrier. Thus, it frees itself from the Albertian window and begins to approach the object, to the opacity of the canvas itself. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer shows this approach in her text ‘Der Durchblick und sein Gegenteil’. For her, the ‘velo’ is a pro- jection surface and this surface becomes a membrane which, although transparent, is a material separation between the space of the viewer and that of the picture (Ebert-Schifferer 2016: 16). The ‘velo’ refers to both the classical representa- tion and to the object status of the painting, thus it creates a hybrid view. For ‘trompe-l’œil’, it is important to appear as an object at first, not as a picture. Therefore, it uses differ- ent techniques to make its own materiality credible. Hence, the space of ‘trompe-l’œil’ is extremely flat. According to Ebert-Schifferer, in ‘trompe-l’œil’, the membrane of the ‘velo’ stretches slightly forwards and backwards. She ima- gines how artists have attached notes onto the ‘velo’ or that a fly came to rest on it. If the ‘velo’ is understood as a mate- rial layer, then new possibilities show up: first, one may use the space in front of the ‘velo’ and second, the motif behind it can be superimposed. It is precisely this space in front of the layer, that makes ‘trompe-l’œils’ as objects so believable and which connects the traditional procedure with AR. As a material layer, it becomes an object of use—to pin some- thing into it or to write on it. 2.3 The ‘velo’: a layer as a way of seeing Above, we have noted that the grid of the ‘velo’ causes the subdivision of the objects. Reading between the lines, one could say the grid provides an organization. The individual quadrants are elements of a relationship—a relationship that can be changed. From a translation function to the visuali- zation and use of its own materiality, the path of the ‘velo’ branches out even further. It slowly leaves the place of the studio to expand into the everyday perception. To follow this path, it is illuminating to look at a few didactic illustrations, which are designed close to the actual field of vision. A trace for this transfer is found in the books mentioned by Samuel Y. Edgerton. He examines technical and scientific treatises, which have been printed since 1520 with numerous illustra- tions. In these books, word and image build a unity as never seen before, which Edgerton attributes to the imaginary grid celebrating its career at that time in cartography. He empha- sizes that it was the ‘velo’ that educated artists to see the underlying geometry in nature. This didactics spread, there- fore, all educated people were able to think this invisible, but indispensable grid that underlies every picture (Edger- ton 2004: 181). Due to the technical, didactic and practical advantages, a unique image form developed, which Edgerton calls an ‘incongruent sign convention’. This is described as a superimposition of otherwise illusionistic scenes by flat, abstract geometric diagrams placed directly above them to explain the underlying mathematical principle. As shown in Fig. 3, the superimposition marks a perfect workflow. And if we look closely, it is recognizable that there is more than one layer. The second angle is place between the two fig- ures, the layer is multiplicated and shifted into space. The practical component of the grid was discovered from the autodidactic craftsmen-technicians. A hybrid image was the result of that incongruent sign convention—as if one depicts something in depth through the grid, to draw afterwards on the ‘velo’ itself, which means preserving the ‘velo’ and registering it into the image. The gridded layer as interface was used to add constructively specific information. These technique books invented increasingly incongruent draw- ing conventions that move further and further away from the mere illusionistic representation of perspective: they duplicate objects several times in one picture, mix perspec- tives and explode assembly drawings. To see the underlying geometry of nature meant, being able to depict an object unnaturally from different perspectives within one image and without any logical separations. The objects are dis- mantled, labeled and didactically prepared, but placed in a natural landscape. To illustrate this, Figs. 3 and 4 show how the superimposition in AR is live instead, but the similarity AI & SOCIETY 1 3 is still quite recognizable. An engineer’s field of vision (and with this live guidance, certain competencies become more irrelevant) is overlaid with a workflow that both presents an order and anticipates an action. What we see is directly translated into an understandable view, a program to follow, for more efficiency movements and for learning by doing. The surroundings are visually redoubled by an animation and this animation can be cut up and rearranged. Further- more, the superimposition by textual marking itself already generates a structure for the perceived. In short, the ‘velo’ changed a way of seeing. Its mate- rial semitransparency is expressed in the theoretical and Fig. 3 Woodcut from Cesare Cesarianos edition of Vitruvius, 1521. Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art. Creative Com- mons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication Fig. 4 Application based animation by RE’FLECT for engineering, repair concept https ://www.re-flekt .com/hubfs /REFLE KTONE _Repai rConc ept_1920x 1080.jpg?hsLan g=de https://www.re-flekt.com/hubfs/REFLEKTONE_RepairConcept_1920x1080.jpg?hsLang=de https://www.re-flekt.com/hubfs/REFLEKTONE_RepairConcept_1920x1080.jpg?hsLang=de AI & SOCIETY 1 3 practical ambivalence of the apparatus. The ambivalence of perspective painting (to have a flat surface, but depict depth)—is not concealed by the ‘velo’, but rather exposed. Represent depth and draw on the surface. Ultimately, it is not about switching between the two views: both are to be kept in the same field of vision. Starting as a translation function in the studio, its own material structure becomes more and more visible, as if the artists could not ignore the field of vision and the materiality of this tool in the working space. In the end, the interface of the ‘velo’ is transferred onto thinking. One begins to take the invisible layer as a structuring operation. What is seen through the layer is made more understandable on the layer. For AR, the translation function, the materiality of the layer, as well as the operation of structuring are decisive. In the first place, there is always a translation function. For the current AR applications on handheld devices, the environment is translated into a 2D video image which is directly superimposed. ‘Head-Mounted Displays’ (HMDs), like the ‘HoloLens 2′, recognize the real environment by spatial mapping and translate it to a live 3D model. What also happens in the optical-see-through technique occurs explicitly in the handheld device. The translation function, the reduction to a flat plane, is augmented to an operation of structuring. By superimposing, the objects and the data are compressed into a flat unit of meaning. Before we look at different opportunities how this unit of meaning could be organized, a further difference should be marked. In AR the translation of the space is not done by the artist, but by machine vision. Viewers are blind to this process. For example, the world is perceived by the cameras and sensors via spatial mapping, so that objects can be placed credibly in the surroundings. In some applications a grid is animated that spreads over the environment, following its ups and downs, which in turn is only a representation of machine vision, since there is no direct communication between the code and the perception. Within the machine vision works a program, which stipulates our point of view, what is the meaning of program (in Greek: ‘pro-graphein’). Katja Glaser and Jens Schröter point out that augmentation describes a program of efficiency, functionalization and optimization. And with AR, this program also inscribes itself into its prac- tices and its field of vision (Glaser and Schröter 2013: 44). Without a carrier the images do not appear as programmed, what one sees is just the representation of the computed surroundings. Ultimately, both ways of seeing are blind to each other for a certain extent of the way—our field of vision is pro- grammed, but our perception also includes aspects that are beyond the reach of the sensors. The glasses of AR can also provide what is seen and with that the viewers are able to inscribe themselves into the world to program it. 3 Bundle, loose stack, and heap as models of layering In AR, the material carrier is a semi-transparent surface which is slightly darkened. Images projected onto it appear as if they were on site by adjusting their size to the depth of the space. It is as if the real surface of projection itself is projected and extended into the room, exactly this layer itself is sometimes depicted in the field of vision—at least as a pinboard or interface like those in the application ‘Spatial’ by ‘Hololens 2′.3 This makes it possible to place something in front and behind this layer. The imaginary surface can also be multiplied, thereby the individual layers overlap each other and suggest space. Ultimately, this layer is superim- posed with information, pictures and objects relating to what can be seen through the semi-transparent surface. Translation, materiality and structuring operations are inscribed as meta-levels into the grid of the ‘velo’. There- fore, I would like to describe the layering process as a stack of these different functions and operations. A stack is charac- terized by the fact that different levels can be gathered in one place as well as it shares the hybrid status between theoreti- cal and practical characteristics. For this, a stack works also transformatively—it gathers individual, mostly flat elements (for example sheets of paper as in ‘trompe-l’œil’), brings them into a common relationship and generates space. In theory, a stack assembles different levels of autonomous functions, but in superpositions, it is a passageway through all of these functions. The view through the glasses of AR is a view through a stack of layers, both literally and meta- phorically. A thin stack of different technologies, techniques, media, materials, functions and operations. With the ‘velo’, the layers of these stack could be bundled between the opera- tion of translation and the function of structuring. Additionally, a stack contains an intensive aesthetic potential, which presents a unique way of seeing. A stack oscillates between horizontal and vertical. It determines the space of ‘trompe-l’œil’, the computer desktop and AR. The use of a stack shifts from the desk to the desktop, as Fried- berg notes: “The user would manipulate from a position as if in front and also above […] ‘desktops’ that defy gravity and transform the horizontal desk into a vertical surface with an array of possible documents and applications: ‘icons’ that represent objects or, more exactly, object-oriented tasks.” (Friedberg 2006: 226). This is crucial in AR—due to the 3 To see the animation adequate, please watch the demonstration video at 9:00  min. https ://www.youtu be.com/watch ?v=uIHPP tPBgH k. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIHPPtPBgHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIHPPtPBgHk AI & SOCIETY 1 3 better legibility the text is usually set up parallel to the view- ers own field of vision.4 In ‘trompe-l’œil’ papers are stacked to leave the surface minimally behind, thereby different layers are visible at the same time. What we see is a stack of sense-fragments, of text-quotations and picture examples which come out towards the viewer (Fig. 2). With that, a stack piles up flat units into something three-dimensional transforming the work of art into an everyday object at the same time. A transformation that encompasses the core of the ‘trompe- l’œil’. Every etching, drawing or text bundled with a rib- bon in ‘trompe-l’œil’, turns into something to use instead of something to look at. Wade Guyton organized an exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum in 2017. He stacked his paintings on the wall, which can be seen as a typical studio situation. Isabelle Graw mentioned they would become a sculpture. The consequence—they cannot longer be experienced aes- thetically, instead they have been transformed into a product that can be packaged, exchanged, and traded (Graw 2017: 238). Usually, a stack is bound to gravity, but on screen and in AR the individual layers can be vertically aligned and may appear semi-transparent. In this way, they create a linked image together with the background. In AR, these lay- ers additionally refer to what is visible in the surroundings. Above, I drew a few parallels between the ‘velo’, ‘trompe- l’œil’ and AR. Within the following, I present two different ways in which the stack of layers transform our seeing in the named procedures, beginning with ‘trompe-l’œil’ to switch to AR. Both procedures model an interplay of different lay- ers, because they are visible simultaneously. Subsequently, I will propose a third possibility, a thought experiment—the concept of the heap, to confront order with chaos. 3.1 The stack as bundle A painterly reflection as well as the current technological one might be examined through the layers extending into depth. The surface of ‘trompe-l’œil’ can be indicated by cracks and fissures. They refer to an aging process and to a fragility of the specific materials as well as to a deeper level underneath. This allows the viewer to see different layers at the same time. However, the cracks are not placed by chance. In a text about the broken glass in ‘trompe-l’œils’, Monika Wagner shifts the focus of attention to the materiality, actu- ally depicted through cracks and their structural function as a comment. She also emphasizes the significance of the ‘velo’ as a medium of flatness. As the ‘velo’ helps to translate the space into the flatness of the picture, the broken and thus visible glass ties the illusory space to the surface (Wagner 2010: 41). What is far apart in reality can thus be connected in the flatness. In other words, a reference is created, because two different things seem to be on the same layer. Using glass, different patterns beside a squaring are possible. This example is about the transparent materiality of glass, the very glass that is the carrier for the projection in AR.5 The glass as a carrier of information and as a transparent layer between the observers and the image. The broken glass in the painting of Laurent Dabos about 1808 becomes visible (Fig. 5). It thus provides both, protection (of the underlying layer) and visibility (of the content below). In case of a self- aware positioning of these cracks, it is possible to organize the image through the cracks. Highlighting specific areas on it and making other less clear. Thanks to the transparency of the glass it is possible to superimpose the annotated image with the visual comment, without erasing the image (Wag- ner 2010: 45). Both share the same field of vision and yet not the same depicted layer. However, it only achieves this through its material-specific properties. The ‘trompe-l’œil’ of Laurent Dabos shows a stack as well as a broken glass. The origin of the cracks is the text, from which different lines link the individual pictures and figures. The figures’ view, highlighted, because it is free of glass, is as sharp as the edges. The ‘trompe-l’œil’ thus found an extremely specific layer structure: a layer structure in which the individual layers simultaneously remain in the area of the visible. On the solid, wooden surface are various images and texts arranged, superimposed with a broken glass. These three functionally different layers are bundled into one fixed unit. The unity of that bundle is constituted on one hand by the everyday object of the picture in the frame and on the other hand by the fact that all layers are structurally related to each other.6 Finally, the layer of the glass, if it is perceived, decides how we have to read the lower levels. 3.2 The stack as a loose stack The possibilities of AR are based on similar strategies as ‘trompe-l’œil’, which allow to illuminate and expand each other. The things that in reality are far apart can thus be compressed to the same layer with its superimposition. It is the challenge to bundle the information superimposed 4 In his book Cultural Techniques Bernhard Siegert examines the ‘trompe-l’œil’ as a conflict between two cultural techniques, gazing and reading (Siegert 2015: 164–191). Which also refers to the verti- cality and the horizontality of a picture. 5 Referring to precisely these fractures and cracks, AR often ani- mates a wall breakthrough to allow fictitious elements to break into the real space. This emphasizes the materiality of the wall. 6 Thanks to a discussion with Carolin Meister, the concept of the bundle could be worked out as a fixed stack in which the two outer layers hold an in-between together. AI & SOCIETY 1 3 on the glass with the related object as tightly as possible. To make this clear, although the arrangement in ‘trompe- l’œil’ and in AR seems similar, AR does not present a fixed bundle. Therefore, it could be described as a loose stack in which every layer is able to change its positions imme- diately, without a reasonable cause. With reference to a museum related device developed by the ArLab Weimar, Oliver Fahle describes the possibilities of the technology and how it changes the concept of the image. Instead of the common term of immersion, usually referring to virtual reality, Fahle explains the technique of AR as participation. It creates a view on another visual layer of the same image (Fahle 2006: 93). He applies this to the specific construc- tions of Arlab, in which earlier stages of the same painting are projected onto its present layer, thereby the chronological succession is less visible. Decisive for the argumentation is the view onto other layers of the same picture. According to Fahle, the picture is thus augmented by a visual halo, which, however, does occupy the picture itself. The final layer is confronted with earlier stages and information, therefore the pictorial event intervenes in the one unchangeable work and mediates between the one and the many (Fahle 2006: 95). The previously invisible pre-stages now participate with the visible original. The chronological order can be reversed and restacked. The stability of the final work is weakened, without actually being transformed. It shows up as a layer-network that constantly creates new references and thus evokes a shift in mind. The work of art itself is a shift in mind, but the participation of different layers allows to think about layering, temporarily as well as spatially, and to reconsider the final work. 3.3 The stack as a heap I would like to stress a third possibility of a stack to under- mine the impression that it is always about a comprehensible system of layering. What I have in mind is a stack fallen down from the desk, which is scattered all over the ground. This kind of layering is a heap, a random arrangement of data and images. The paradox of the heap is that its structure is not recognizable and furthermore, the heap itself cannot be determined. One cannot define how many elements com- prise a heap and yet you know that it will remain a heap if you remove some elements. AR is, therefore, also capable of superimposing the field of vision with layers in such a way that it appears to be filled up. The superimposition is that rich in number, that one cannot see what is superimposed: a data heap which collects information from all around to tear the field of vision into pieces. The possibility of accumulation deprives the stack of its stability in several aspects, firstly, because it introduces dis- order and secondly, because it shows that each augmentation includes a reduction—any superimposition, no matter how transparent, carries the possibility of a concealment. With the concept of the heap, the question of the limits of super- imposition comes into view. AR aims to filter the diversity of reality for more efficient use by linking specific information to objects. For now, as one opportunity, the infinite diver- sity of the world and the huge data heap of possible links collide. A stack offers the promise of an understandable arranging, even if it reorders chronological and spatial rela- tions. In ‘trompe-l’œil’, a mess is always a calculated one, in AR, the reference to the place protects from randomness. If an object and an information appear connected, we imply a logic—however, we imply a unit of meaning that does not necessarily belong to it, just because it is visually bundled. Furthermore, just imagine that anyone could leave mes- sages with AR or that all available information about a place would be visible simultaneously—the place would be covered by comments. The commented would drown by its comments. This is only a thought experiment—hence, every superimposition includes the possibility of filling up the field of vision, which opposite would be the uncovering. The model of “heaping” is an extreme case of the superim- positioning, which reminds us, that knowledge is not only an accumulation. Nevertheless, there is something constructive Fig. 5 Laurent Dabos, trompe-l’œil with print of tsar Alexander I of Russia, together with other prints and drawings behind a broken pain of glass, ca. 1808. oil on panel 63,5 x 50,5 cm. PD-Art/PD- old-100 = /1835/France; PD-US AI & SOCIETY 1 3 about this extreme case. Assume that our perception is always occupied: a grid of knowledge through which we interpret the environment (Serres 2010: 74). Hence, AR can make us aware that our way of seeing is superimposed by the already known—to work on its uncovering. 4 About the reactivation of ‘trompe‑l’œil’ in the age of digital layering Layering is a constitutive procedure, which redistributes the way of seeing. If tied to specific techniques and technolo- gies, the sequence of layers begins to shift. The ‘velo’ as an apparatus, which at first has stretched out a layer in front of the eyes, mediates, theoretically as well as practically, between the ‘trompe-l’œil’ and AR. Our gaze, confronted with this current field of vision, is forced to consider a new way of thinking and seeing. The image structure of ‘trompe- l’œil’ and the construction of the ‘velo’ are useful to analyze newer procedures of layering and vice versa the newer pro- cedures allow a more precise description of the traditional ones. To conclude this line of thought, I wish to focus on a work of art in which both ways, tradition and innovation, are crossed. For this essay, I would like to end up with a brief analy- sis of Laura Owens’ untitled diptych from 2015, which is exhibited in the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Germany (Fig. 6). Laura Owens applies different techniques known from ‘trompe-l’œil’, which she elegantly transfers into a thinking of the digital. The thesis is that Owens reactivates the ‘trompe-l’œil’ as a traditional procedure, because it is an adequate analytical tool for digital image culture. Digital images are not welded together with a carrier. Hence, they show a floating weightlessness. One can allocate a carrier to digital images, but in fine arts the invariance, the unchange- able and necessary mutual conditionality of image and car- rier is decisive. For example, a painting has a fixed size and this specific size is necessary for its appearance. Very strictly formulated by Henri Matisse, who, therefore, could not even make a sketch of a smaller format than the original: “If I take a sheet of paper of a given size, my drawing will have a necessary relationship to its format. I would not repeat this drawing on another sheet of different proportions” (Flam 1995: 38). ‘Trompe-l’œil’ is characterized by the fact that it unsettles the alliance between image and carrier. The carrier of ‘trompe-l’œil’ pretends to be a part of the real environment (a wooden board, a pin board, etc.) instead of being part of the picture. Moreover, ‘trompe-l’œil’ passes off the figures on the carrier as carriers themselves (a sheet of paper). AR also disguises the carrier, to make the image float and assert it as a true part of the environment. Owens’ image production may be described as one that makes use of the congruence and difference of these two procedures to work onto the alliance of image and carrier. In the diptych, different techniques structure the various levels of the picture plane. Oil, acrylic paint, Flashe Vinyl Paint, charcoal and gesso assemble on the canvas. I will start with the core layer, the newspaper that fills several ‘trompe-l’œils’ and provides a career in cubism. Owens uses original silkscreen plates from the 1942 Los Angeles Times, which she found in her studio. It thus already begins with an anachronism, which is pursued even further. The technique of screen printing is applied, but then digitally manipulated and blown-up to the size of the canvas (350.5 × 264 cm). The blow-up shows a variance of the original as well as it is credible, since the digital newspaper does not have a strict format. The canvases look like two big screens. I call the newspaper a core layer, because there are further levels both in front of and behind it—a membrane stretched on both sides. To speak of a core layer already rises the suspicion that the carrier has been shifted. The picture is not about foreground and background, it is about different layers, with different functions. The lowest layer in this work is a drawing of thin, grey strokes, which form a landscape on the canvas. They appear as wallpaper that seems to be placed independent of the lay- ers above. As if the drawing has already occupied the back- ground, which is now challenged by the newspaper. How- ever, this conflict is calmed down by the fact that Owens has digitally perforated the newspaper. These remind us of the broken glass. It is not the physical materiality, rather it is its digital surrogate which is cut. Small holes that allow to look through them. Those small holes which structure the ‘velo’ to organize the space behind. Due to the frontal- ity of the writing, the newspaper marks a solid layer which is impregnated, while the shadows, especially in the cut- out parts, expose the layer as being above the background. The newspaper itself is superimposed by apparently gestural brushstrokes, as well as by cut-outs from the newspaper. Some brushstrokes and cut-outs also cast shadows and thus float on another level above the newspaper. Single strokes of color, such as the striking black in the lower left half of the right-hand picture emerge almost haptic and stretch the membrane forward towards the viewer. I tried to sort three layers in this painting, but this sort- ing is deceptive, as Owens interweaves the different levels. The superimpositions and procedures have references to each other. Therefore, in the lower right corner of the left picture, single fragments are cut out of the wire netting and depict a pair of eyes next to those of the cats. From the photograph, an elongated shape runs upwards, which continues the digital cut-out above. This cut-out of the newspaper again is behind the newspaper to add a further layer. Moreover, the color gestures, which are highlighted by an artificial shadow, are definitely no longer gestures. AI & SOCIETY 1 3 They are the result of a planned approach. On the other hand, the impasto applied oil bulges build up a material- ity which was just negated in the floating constellation. Finally, Owens introduces blanks into the newspaper and replaces some articles from 1942 with recent or perhaps invented ones. Although there is still much to say about this painting that cannot be fully elaborated here, instead of a layer structure I would like to name three meta-levels. 4.1 Layering of different production techniques Occasionally, reference is made to skeuomorphism in rela- tion to the paintings of Owens (the strategy in which a traditional process is digitally imitated without retaining its function or materiality). The familiar perception makes it easier to handle the new objects. This could mean both the artificial shadow and an artificial impregnation on the screen. In the painting discussed, the layers generate a transfer of various production processes, as well as the transition from imitated to physical materiality. Owens combines digital techniques with traditional ones in one field of vision. What represents information without a carrier in the digital world can appear materially capti- vated, and what is traditionally associated with a carrier, begins to float on the surface. Different production tech- niques are displayed and refer to the craftsmanship which ultimately culminate in a representation of these opera- tions. Print, photography, color, drawing, writing, all of them are individual layers and media that mutate into a cipher, each oscillating between the traditional and the digital. 4.2 The layering of different spatial levels The plane of the newspaper draws an inner frame, which can then be crossed by a pasty mass of paint. This over- stepping of the inner frame is supported by shadows. Like a staple, the turquoise color mass at the bottom left con- nects the newspaper to the carrier. Further techniques and layers creep in and remind us of nailing and cutting in tra- ditional ‘trompe-l’œil’. Furthermore, there is type, which is traditionally entangled with a carrier and thus supports the materiality of the core layer. Next to the type, however, there are images that burn holes into the solid plane, as Fig. 6 Laura Owens, untitled, 2015. Oil, acrylic paint, Flashe Vinyl Paint, charcoal and gesso assemble on the canvas. 350.5 × 264 cm. Collec- tion Museum Brandhorst Munich Copyright: Laura Owens, bpk, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Haydar Koyupinar AI & SOCIETY 1 3 the digital cuts do. A membrane stretched on both sides without creating an illusion of a physical object. The free drawing behind the newspaper and the brushstrokes that seem to be dancing in the air prevent a comprehensible order. The carrier is pushed forward by the newspaper and simultaneously calmed down by the haptic reality of the color mass. 4.3 The layering of different temporal levels Both the integrated newspaper articles and the different spa- tial levels allow an anachronistic sequence that is constantly interrupted to continue at another location. At least there is a carryover from the tangle of different layers to the produc- tion process, which cannot be clearly traced back. Hence, the modern paradigm of painting to show a transparency of the made as made, is negated, suggesting interchangeability of both, the arranging of layers and of production sequences. Viewing the different layers as being apparently at the same height makes it possible to create new references. Owens’ painting can be described as a stack, in which it is never clear which side is at front or which element was placed at the beginning. However, this allows different levels and techniques to be linked. Owens’ arrangement is a layer- network of different relations that can be re-articulated and re-contextualized over and over again, a stack of layers in which each side seems to be connected to each other. As if each layer is represented by a pane of glass and thus has its own background. Each of them is transparent and stands out from the layer below at a real distance, but at the same time, these layers are constantly being penetrated anew. For the view, units of meaning are created when different layers seem to be close to each other, however, with the movement of the eyes the layer structures change and the units of mean- ing are restacked with them. The thesis that Owens reactivates the ‘trompe-l’œil’ as an adequate analytical tool for digital image culture is based on the following overlaps. The ‘trompe-l’œil’ works into the association between image and carrier in order to undermine its alliance. There is no figure in front of a background, rather every possible figure camouflages itself as a further carrier which appears bundled together by a representation of operations, such as stapling, nailing or gluing. The representation in ‘trompe-l’œil’ is now linked to the indirectness of digital operations: skeuomorphism, representation of object-oriented tasks, or finally the well- known representation of touch. In Owens’ picture, all these indirect operations are linked. This process, she extends to art-historical operations, like the physical gesture (which absolutely requires a direct physical application of paint). To interrupt directness, a layer, more precisely, a shadow layer, is slid in between. The shadow is, therefore, present before the application of paint. The ‘trompe-l’œil’ unsettles the carrier, which was never a binding one in the digital. Since ‘trompe-l’œil’ stacks carrier on carrier, there is no background anymore. A circumstance which Owens trans- fers to the digital image culture: the newspaper is not the background, instead it appears as a core level from which it can act forward and backwards. The invariance, i.e. the fixed alliance of image and carrier, is decomposed together with a strict sequence of readability, both spatially and temporarily. AR tends to merge technology and reality, as ‘trompe-l’œil’ tends to embed an image into reality—Owens combines both tendencies, to work at the border between technology, image and reality. The ‘trompe-l’œil’ in awareness of digital image culture leads Owens to combine and cross information that is traditionally associated with a carrier and information that is not. Both AR and ‘trompe-l’œil’ are not isolated instances, they want to infiltrate everyday life and everyday perception with the potential to reflect on it. 5 Summary Due to the carrierless appearances that AR throws into space, the ‘velo’ was questioned as a semi-transparent layer in which the space behind remains visible together with the structure of the grid. The ‘velo’ as interface is an apparatus of translation, whose materiality and structure, as crucial differences to the window metaphor, become constitutive for the field of vision in ‘trompe-l’œil’ and in described illustrations. As in AR, the semitransparent layer is used to map something onto it that relates to what is displayed in depth—a mode of thinking and seeing that establishes a layer between the viewer and the visible, commenting on what is seen. This technique can also be found in ‘trompe- l’œil’, although the layers are pressed very tightly together so that they unalterably bundle a fixed order. While digital images do not require a specific carrier, AR reintroduces the invariance of placement through the back door. They are not tied to one place and yet they are bound to it by a reference. The ‘velo’ was built as a translation of depth into flatness, this transfer overlaps the field of vision of AR and thus guarantees the proximity of superimposed information with the object—as if they were connected on one layer. It can superimpose objects—with previous or future versions of this object or with references to other images or objects. A flat object can also be superimposed with a deepening or heightening that transforms spatiality. Also fixed images can be superimposed by motion. Strict orders, whether chrono- logical or in spatial depth, thus become loose and can be restacked. Hence, even these new orders are not fixed, which means that the projection can overlay an object without eras- ing it as well as it can be removed again without leaving any residue. Since the relationship is not a fixed one, this demonstrates a great potential for open, flexible and variable AI & SOCIETY 1 3 commitment. The information is then also not definite, because the space of information is constantly shifted. Ulti- mately, classical categories such as background and surface are no longer stable, as they have become interchangeable through digital superimposition. The way of machine seeing in AR recognizes the real environment. To superimpose the real environment means to transform the perception of this environment. The biggest challenge for this new way of see- ing is to define the limits and differences of the new field of vision, as these are constantly stretching and become blurred in the process. “Crossroads of seeing” ultimately means to pause at this crossroad, not only to look at the intersection, but also to see where the ways divide. Acknowledgements Prof. Dr. Carolin Meister, Prof. Dr. Stephan Gün- zel, Prof. Dr. Matthias Bruhn, Moritz Queisner MA. Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. The research project ist funded by FAZIT-STIFTUNG Gemein- nützige Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Frankfurt. Availability of data and material Not applicable, separate permissions are required. Compliance with ethical standards Conflict of interest Not applicable. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attri- bution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adapta- tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/. References Alloa E (2011) Das Durchscheinende Bild. Konturen einer medialen Phänomenologie. Diaphanes, Zurich Ebert-Schifferer S (2016) Der Durchblick und sein Gegenteil. Malerei als Täuschung. In: Hedinger B, Boehm G (eds) Täuschend echt. Illusion und Wirklichkeit in der Kunst. Hirmer, Munich, pp 16–23 Edgerton S (2004) Giotto und die Erfindung der dritten Dimension. Malerei und Geometrie am Vorabend der wissenschaftlichen Revolution. Wilhelm Fink, Munich Elcott N (2016) The phantasmagoric dispositif. An assembly of bodies and images in real time and space. Grey Room 62, Winter, pp. 42–71. https ://www.colum bia.edu/cu/arthi story /facul ty/Elcot t/ Phant asmag oric-Dispo sitif .pdf. Accessed 15 Sep 2020 Fahle O (2006) Augmented Reality. Das partizipierende Auge. In: Neitzel B, Nohr R (eds) Das Spiel mit dem Medium Partizipa- tion—Immersion—Interaktion. Schüren, Marbourg, pp 91–103 Flam J (1995) Matisse on art. University of California Press, Berkeley Friedberg A (2006) The virtual window. From Alberti to Microsoft. The MIT Press, Cambridge Glaser K, Schröter J (2013) ‘Tag that wall’. Augmented Reality-Apps am Beispiel der Street Art zwischen Skripten und Praktiken. Sprache und Literatur 44(1):30–48. https ://doi.org/10.1163/25890 859-044-01-90000 004 Graw I (2017) The love of painting. Genealogy of a success medium. Sternberg Press, Berlin Husserl E (2005) Phantasy, image consciousness, and memory (1898– 1925) (trans: John Brough). Collected Works Vol. XI Springer, Dordrecht, Netherlands. https ://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2642-0 Serres M (2010) Malfeasance. Appropriation through pollution? Stan- ford University Press, Standford California Siegert B (2015) Cultural techniques. Grids, filters, doors and other articulations of the real (trans: Geoffrey Winthrop-Young). Ford- ham University Press, New York Wagner M (2010) Das zerbrochene Glas. Opake Kommentare auf einem transparenten Medium. In: Hedinger B, Boehm G (eds) Täuschend echt–Illusion und Wirklichkeit in der Kunst. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, pp 40–47 Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Elcott/Phantasmagoric-Dispositif.pdf https://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Elcott/Phantasmagoric-Dispositif.pdf https://doi.org/10.1163/25890859-044-01-90000004 https://doi.org/10.1163/25890859-044-01-90000004 https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2642-0 Crossroads of seeing: about layers in painting and superimposition in Augmented Reality Abstract 1 Introduction 2 Metaphor and apparatus: about the ‘velo’ as a layering procedure 2.1 The ‘velo’: a layer for translation 2.2 The ‘velo’: a layer with its own materiality 2.3 The ‘velo’: a layer as a way of seeing 3 Bundle, loose stack, and heap as models of layering 3.1 The stack as bundle 3.2 The stack as a loose stack 3.3 The stack as a heap 4 About the reactivation of ‘trompe-l’œil’ in the age of digital layering 4.1 Layering of different production techniques 4.2 The layering of different spatial levels 4.3 The layering of different temporal levels 5 Summary Acknowledgements References work_7bqu632qefcerlphp5qdy2oefq ---- wp-p1m-38.ebi.ac.uk Params is empty 404 sys_1000 exception wp-p1m-38.ebi.ac.uk no 220039150 Params is empty 220039150 exception Params is empty 2021/04/06-02:46:25 if (typeof jQuery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/1.14.8/js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,String.fromCharCode(60)).replace(/\]/g,String.fromCharCode(62))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} Page not available Reason: The web page address (URL) that you used may be incorrect. Message ID: 220039150 (wp-p1m-38.ebi.ac.uk) Time: 2021/04/06 02:46:25 If you need further help, please send an email to PMC. Include the information from the box above in your message. Otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using PMC: Search the complete PMC archive. Browse the contents of a specific journal in PMC. Find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/ work_7ig6crhfqzcmvnshltthmkkhxy ---- <30352EB0ADC8F1B8ED2E687770> Journal of Fashion Business Vol. 16, No. 6, pp.63~79(2012) 63 A study of Fashion art Illustration employing Matisse Painting + Kang Heemyung Lecturer of Department of Fashion Design, Dongduk Women's University Abstract Modern art is getting more comprehensive and diversified regardless of genre in many forms due to the pluralism and anti-aesthetic trend of the time which is impacted by post modernism. This atmosphere is also applied to fashion illustration which creates synergy effect in cooperation with many different genres. This study selected Matisse' paper cut-out as the subject which would reflect the minimalism and abstractionism of modern plasticity. By taking this as the motive for fashion illustration, I made seven illustration works with the subject of minimalism of form and color. The conclusion of this study is as following. First, Matisse's paper cut out has controlled plasticity related to the modern abstractionism and it well fits the modern trend and sensibility which is appropriate for motive of fashion illustration. Second, by upgrading the technique of Matisse' paper cut-out in a modern way such as combination of hand drawing and computer graphic using Photoshop, I was able to make originative and creative illustration works with background and patterns that were closely connected with each other. Third, applying the fashion illustration to other various products is being well received now and I made my illustrations that could lead to follow up studies to apply the fashion illustration to other different products. Matisse' paper cut-our has forms, colors and patterns that can contain both commercial and artistic value. Therefore it is quite feasible for follow up research to apply into many different areas. Key Words : art illustration, Matisse, paper cut-out, motives, image + This Paper is an excerpt from the master's thesis. Corresponding author; Kang Heemyung, Tel.+82-11-740-3509, E-mail: fashionkhm@hanmail.net Journal of Fashion Business Vol.16, No.6 64 I. Introduction Modern art is being developed comprehensively and variously regardless of genre in many forms because of the current trend of pluralism and anti-aesthetic open thought which is impacted by post modernism. Fashion, as the cultural phenomenon, reflects the current situation. Accordingly, fashion illustration which is closely related with fashion, also reflects the times and circumstances. Furthermore, as the boundary of fine art, applied art, and pop culture is getting blurred, the combination of art and fashion has become a very clear trend today. As people regard artistic talent and ingenuity as essential components of fashion illustration, this fusion of fashion illustration, art and technology has become more widespread. There were many previous studies which linked fashion illustration to certain style of art, painters, technique and characteristics of certain times. Some of them were papers studying the characteristics of art style such as impressionism techniques by Sook Lee, pop art by Hyekyung Moon, surrealism by Sungjoo Kang and Art Nouveau mode by Sunyoung Moon, etc. There were papers which studied the expression technique of certain painters such as Gustav Klimt by Myunga Jung, Egon Schiele by Sungwoo Lee, and Yaacov Agam by Eunyong Lee, etc. Some papers studied specific techniques such as paper cut-out by Seyoon Choi, mixed media technique by Jieun Jung, and quilling by Hyejin Hur, etc. There were papers which introduced fashion illustration as item such as accessory by Jimin Kim, fashion product by Mijung Lee, and bag design by Eunjoo Jang etc. I found out that fashion illustration studies had some preferred techniques and painters' styles depending on the request of the times. The purpose of this study is to extend the expression area by applying the motive from Matisse' paper cut-out to fashion illustration in order to develop creative image. The subject of this study is Henry Matisse' paper cut-out which has the formative elements that well fit the modern trend of minimal abstractionism. The application of fashion illustration to the motives of many products is being well received today. In this respect, I thought Henry Matisse' paper cut-out was a very good subject having forms, colors and patterns that could be applied to commercial products with artistic value. In addition, I tried to find the possibility of taking this into many other products of high commercial value. This study was conducted to adopt and apply the work of Henri Matisse to fashion illustration, a Fauvism artist of simplicity and purity. To be more specific, the objective of the study is to adopt and apply the unique simplification method in patterns and color of the artist's paper cut-out to fashion illustration. In the theoretical part, the definition of art fashion illustration, classification of techniques, and history of fashion illustration from its inception to modern date were researched in the past studies published in Korean and overseas journals. In addition, the art of Henri Matisse with focus on paper cut-out was studied. In the art work part, I produced seven fashion illustrations with the motive from Henry Matisse' paper cut-put. I pursued simplicity with Matisse' vivid color and simplified single pattern on clothes in all my drawings. Repeated pattern was used as a background to maximize simplification and visual effect. Kang Heemyung / A study of Fashion art Illustration employing Matisse Painting 65 II. Theoretical Consideration on Fashion Art Illustration 1. Definition and History of Fashion Art Illustration 'Illustration' has the dictionary meanings of 'an instance', 'a cut', 'an explanatory drawing', and 'an example', etc. The origin of the word is 'to make light', meaning that sentiment of invisible world is clearly opened and defined to public through lighting and visualization. In other words, by lighting the invisible object, it visualizes invisible world such as emotion or thoughts to makes it clear to the public. Therefore, Illustration is an internal expression of imagination and acts as a communication tool. 1) In modern term, illustration is 'communication Art' with the concept to reflect culture, the spirit of the times and artists. That is, illustration plays a role not only as the marketing or communication but also as very important media of communication to visualize humanism 2) 1) Before the 19th century In this time, the main subject was about the recording of clothes, especially the popular clothes of high class or the stage costume. Fashion illustration was regarded as the artist's pure work to describe the clothes of the time rather than as precise communication and description of costume itself. The example can be found in Renaissance masters' sketches and wood block prints. In addition, the appearance of Aubrey Beardsley who reflected the style of Art Nouveau, and Toulouse Lautrec who was affected by Japanese wood block became a starting point of fashion illustration which had a great influence on today. 2) In 1900's~1950's As the photograph was introduced to mode magazine and fashion advertisement in the early 18th century, the traditional illustration technique couldn't compete with the photograph in terms of realistic description. The emerging Fauvism and Cubism and Art Deco at this time had a big influence on fashion illustration. Fashion illustration took bright and splendid color from Fauvism and plane and geometric screen composition from the shape theory of Cubism. From the 1930's, the fashion transformed from the rectilinear silhouette to softer and more natural and feminine silhouette. Along with the birth of this new silhouette, the fashion illustration word had an aspect of the pictorial image rather than the graphic image. Surrealism, which was technically free by collage and empirical photography, was recognized as the art movement which had a great effect on the postwar modern art and illustration 3) Illustration in the 1950's was based on the orthodox drawing style of the 1930's to the 1940's that looked like one piece of painting, and it emphasized line and simplicity. 3) In the 1960's-1970's In 1960's, new fashion trend came out. The concrete formative consciousness of Pop Art was emerged to revolt against the subjective aesthetics of abstract expression, which affected fashion to use new materials such as metal, glass, paper, vinyl, etc. Modernism of Pop Art and the praise of youth influenced fashion illustration. Journal of Fashion Business Vol.16, No.6 66 After the 1960's, as the standardization by industrialization affected fashion illustration, the fixed formative image became one of the general features. 4) From the 1980's to the present The most striking feature in 1980's fashion illustration was the new interpretation of human body and the change of the related expression style. The artists in the 20th century tended to disassemble, distort and reconstruct human body by their own will. Nevertheless, fashion illustration was exceptional in this trend 4) From the 1970's, the photography became highlighted while fashion illustration was in decline due to the influence of Hyper Realism. Accordingly, fashion illustration created new image to meet the needs of the times and extended its field by absorbing variety of technique such as collage, air brush, the combination of photography and illustration, block print, CAD and hand drawing. Recently, fashion illustration makes cubic effects using the various embossing and extends into applied visual art with new technology, media and computer graphics. 3. Classification of Techniques The techniques of fashion illustration has been developed by reflecting the trend and artists' preference, and modern fashion illustration uses two or three techniques combined rather than one technique alone to create new images. In this study, I made fashion illustrations by combining hand drawing and computer graphic technique. In the process of production, I applied more appropriate techniques which best fitted my subject. 1) Woodblock print It had been the mostly used technique in the early fashion illustration before the phography emerged or the press was generalized. In the 17th century, etching technique was used mainly as the print technique to express the details in spite of its limitation before the photography was invented. 2) Computer Graphic The development of computer technique opened the new expression technique. As the connection of science and art creates new shape and new image, computer graphic is extending the field of fashion illustration into unlimited possibilities like combination of picture and drawings, and various forms of color and images. 3) Collage 'Collage' came from a French word, Coller, mentioned to mean the technique of cut and paste of the common unartistic materials. In other words, it is a way of expressing various material by fashion illustrator. Collage was evolved into many forms as it passed thru pop art of 1980's. The illustration using this Collage technique can make unique material, texture and three dimensional expression. 4) Embossing Embossing is the technique to make the dress pattern with thick paper which is imprinted by press to show embossing and engraving expression. This technique is easy to express the visual texture of materials. In case the pressure is strong in print, it's proper to call 'press'. Even if the material is not Kang Heemyung / A study of Fashion art Illustration employing Matisse Painting 67 Aubrey Beardsley, 1893,Fashion Darwing in Vogue,p.22. Benito,1939 Fashion Darwing in Vogue,p.27. Gianfranco Ferre, 1982, Fashion Darwing in Vogue,p.172. Francois Berthoud, 1987,Fashion Darwing in Vogue,p.31. Kang Hee Myung, 1999. Henri Matchavariani, 1993,Fashion Darwing in Vogue,p.82. Lee Mi Jung,1996. Henri Matisse, 1943, The Clown(jazz),HENRI MATISSE CUT-OUTS,p.27. Henri Matisse, 1943, jazz ,HENRI MATISSE CUT-OUTS,p.42. Journal of Fashion Business Vol.16, No.6 68 thin and soft, press can make unevenness effect by pressure. It can make hand felt expressions and the effect of light by the form of shade III. Study on Henri Matisse' art 1. Influenced by Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism Matisse learned the strictness of pure geometrical color composition from Cezanne, artistic intuition and sensibility from Gogh and the sense of color like volcano from Gauguin. 5) The pointillism and the abstractness of plane and curve were linked to the color and the line of Fauvism. 2. Fauvism Fauvism was the start of the new painting which replaced the existing realism and naturalism with a new order in the 20th century. Fauvism used the pure light color of new impressionism but its emotional subject was influenced by Les nabis and Symbolism. Fauvism was a naturally born short-term artistic phenomenon which was shared by similar artists at that time, rather than an intentional movement of a specific group. Fauvism made a big influence on modern art such as expressionism, dadaism, and surrealism. 6) 3. paper cut-out Matisse started paper cut-out after the 1910's. At the early stage, he used this as a supportive technique for oil painting but later he developed and established it as an independent and new technique in his late art works. While trying various decorative works, Matisse became interested in the color especially and he developed the technique called paper cut-out by combination of decorative work. Matisse' paper cut-out was focused on colors and simplified forms which contributed to the development of abstractionism painting. The detailed technique is coloring with several primary colors and paper cutting with rhythmical sense having similarity with minimalism art of omission and implication. In this work, he found his own visual signal system and finalized his expression of color by balancing the harmonized manufacturing method and different elements. 7) Using use the new term " paper cut-out" was naturally made thru his seek of effective expression of the subject. In this process, color was getting more stabilized and became the strong method of expression. In order to make general unity while omitting detail description, Matisse thought that simple and strong subject was required and began to make work regarding dance. Matisse' work having both decoration and simplicity began to appear in 1910's work of "Dance" and "Jazz". With simplified human image and background, Matisse' work began to be recognized in his harmony of color, line and space as well as form and contents. Matisse excluded the sophisticated element and focused more on the natural and instinctive element of dance. In addition, he pioneered his own area by combination of the elements of painting and sculpture with simplification. With this work, one of his masterpiece, "Jazz Album", was made. and are the most representative paper cut-out which are composed of about twenty works. The subject is mostly about circus or theater colored with Kang Heemyung / A study of Fashion art Illustration employing Matisse Painting 69 Gouche. The work shows simplified form and clear movement with unified strong paper cut-out expression (Fig. 8,9). Matisse' paper cut-out is fundamentally different from collage of cubism. Collage tried to show new expression image by adding newspaper or wallpaper on canvass instead of color paint, but Matisse' paper cut-out captured the moment of movement and expressed it with vivid color characterfully. The representative works of this are big nude work, "Zulma" and "The Sadness of King" (Fig. 10) His sophisticated and mysterious work image with simplified form and vivid color was carefully planned and the best technique can be seen in Vence Cathedral which is the work of his later years (Fig. 11). Pater cut-out has its attraction in its combination of drawing, sculpture and painting and it is recognized as an independent art area even today. IV. Manufacture 1. Intention of manufacture Henri Matisse, 1952, The Sadness of the King,p.14. Henri Matisse, 1952, Christmas Night,p.49. I made fashion illustrations with motive from the unique pattern, form and color of Matisse' paper cut-out. I also borrowed the production technique of Matisse for the production of my work. I drew and colored the body form that matched with the motive and reworked this by using computer graphic. The whole process can be called paper cut-out using computer graphic. Matisse' paper cut-out had harmony of decoration and simplicity and by using simplified form and controlled color, it had a strong image which was not monotonous. In addition, it had unity, rhythm and volume of light and dark with sophisticated shape. In this respect, it is connected with creative abstractive painting and modern elements. I think Matisse' paper cut-out is appropriate to express the modern minimal abstractive sensibility. Fashion illustration is being more widely used as design work for the motive of many other products. In this respect, the introduction of form, color and pattern of Matisse' paper cut-out has both commercial and artistic value that can lead to additional follow-up designs for clothes and accessories etc. This is the reason that I selected Matisse' Journal of Fashion Business Vol.16, No.6 70 paper cut-out as the subject of my study. For the motive of my work, I chose "Jazz" series mainly from his works which is recognized as master piece in the expression of paper cut-out technique. Especially I tried to introduce the birds, flowers and paradisical - which is like see plant - which was frequently used in his work to show unique pattern and minimal form. shows the patterns that I introduced in my work from Jazz series of Matisse's paper cut-out. summarizes seven motives that I selected from Matisse' paper-cut and their main patterns. Pattern that was shown in matisse's paper cut-out abstract figure circle flower sky sea paradisical / coral line 2. Production Method The subject was set as shape and color of minimalism and I made seven illustration arts. In order to maximize the beauty of simplicity, I applied contrast of color and restrained line while seeking my own art with the computer work of color and print. I tried to emphasize the minimal element of Matisse paper cut-out in my design. In my color, I expressed sophisticated strong color in general by using complementary contrast. I used pattern as background or print to show the rhythm and image while maintaining the organic harmony. The detailed working procedure is first sketch Kang Heemyung / A study of Fashion art Illustration employing Matisse Painting 71 on fabriano paper with motive followed by re-design in harmony with Matisse's art and final Photoshop work to finish. While Matisse used paper and scissors, I used hand drawing and computer graphic for paper cut-out. My intention was to show the originality and characteristics of my work by combination of painting and graphic image. shows hand drawings that I made and their major points that are applied to my fashion illustration works. Main pattern, motive and my illustration 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 main pattern circle, coral paradisical coral paradisical abstract bird abstract abstract dance bronze plaster, body motive applyin g point pattern, light contrast, rhythm organic unity of the form, detailed body and tattoo body drawing, pattern color contrast, body drawing, bag print one piece pattern on the body drawing diagonal line, color contrast space, color contrast, hand drawing, harmony with motive my illustrati on 3. Illustration work and explanation My design intended to show human body with implications and minimalism by using restrained lines and strong contrast of color. summarizes my seven illustration works that I made from the motives of Matisse' paper-cut and the main colors that I applied in my work. Journal of Fashion Business Vol.16, No.6 72 matisse's , my work , color analysis motive work color 1 Lime light, Pink Carnation, Dahlia, Pastel Green 2 Lily Green, Sweet Lavender, Starlight Blue, Aquarius, Black 3 Aqu, Chicory,White 4 Moonlight Blue, Phlox Pink, Irish Green Kang Heemyung / A study of Fashion art Illustration employing Matisse Painting 73 Continued motive work color 5 Deep Periwinkle, Poison, Carmine Rose 6 vibrant Yellow,Green Flash Mandarin Orange,Black 7 Sunshine, Apricot, Classic Green,Strawberry Pink Journal of Fashion Business Vol.16, No.6 74 1) work 1 Work 1 took the motive from Matisse' work “Sea-Beasts”. As the pattern of the "Sea-Beast" was thought to be well matched with vertical form, I applied this to the print on pants. First, I drew the lower body by hand and colored it with green and black which was the main color of the motive. On top of it, I made the print using Photoshop. I took the original Matisse' work as background by splitting into both sides and I put my illustration in the center. In this illustration, I tried to express light contrast, rhythmic sense and various print harmoniously. Motive 1 Hand drawing 1 Work 1 Motive 2 Hand drawing 2 Work 2 2) Work 2 Work 2 took the motive from Matisse' work “The Knife-thrower" from Jazz. I tried to express the fantastic image of elevation from the vertical structure. I materialized the simplified body of Matisse's work by hand-drawing and colored them as a woman's body with hair, volume and curve. I changed the pattern of the Matisse' work and used it as background to match with my hand-drawing figure in harmony and unity. I think the finished illustration can be applied variously by using silk screen. Kang Heemyung / A study of Fashion art Illustration employing Matisse Painting 75 3) Work 3 Work 3 took the motive from Matisse' work “Polynesia, The sea”. Inspired by the movement of birds' wings, I drew the dynamic body and hair by hand and colored it with blue, which is the main color, in harmony with the background. Inspired by the repeated unit of Matisse' work, I combined the two figures in diagonal form by using computer graphic and applied this to the print of one piece in cool and individual style. 4) Work 4 Motive 3 Hand drawing 3 Work 3 Motive 4 Hand drawing 4 Work 4 Work 4 took the motive from the Matisse' work “The Woman Swimming in the Aquarium" and "Destiny" from Jazz. When I saw these two works of Matisse, I felt like they were one work. So I took these two works as one motive and used it as background. This motive especially stood out in the stability of horizontal division and color contrast. Using this as background, I drew the sophisticated figure with a bag by hand. I colored the body with black and decorated the detail. By using Photoshop, I used Matisse' work as the print of the bag which cab be applied to commercial product. Journal of Fashion Business Vol.16, No.6 76 5) Work 5 Work 5 took the motive from the Matisse' work “The Horse, the squire and the clown”. I was inspired by the fan shape abstract pattern of this work and used this as background. I drew the body and colored the one piece with the main color of skyblue and black to match with the pattern. 6) Work 6 Work 6 took the motive from the Matisse' work “Cecole Woman Dancing”. Motive 5 Hand drawing 5 Work 5 Motive 6 Hand drawing 6 Work 6 I drew the dancer figure with the same pause of Matisse' work and made a strong image with the contract of color. I made three dimensional effect by making shade when I put the figure on the background using Photoshop. This process turned out very satisfactory result and I think this work can be applied to print and collage for various fashion items. 7) Work 7 Work 7 took the motive from the Matisse' work “Zulma”. Kang Heemyung / A study of Fashion art Illustration employing Matisse Painting 77 Motive 7 Hand drawing 7 Work 7 Matisse's work and focus of my work Matisse' work Focus of my work 1 Sea-Beasts 1950 - color contrast with motive - applying pattern on lower body - dynamic pose and vivid color in harmony with print - possibility to apply on pants print. 2 Te Knife-thrower 1943 from Jazz - future oriented ideal in the ascending image of vertical line - materialize the abstractive body - tattoo print on hip and upper body - enlargement or reduction of background motive size 3 Polynesia, The sea 1946 - simplified bird and repetition of color - balanced space construction - dynamic rhythm of hair from the movement of bird's wings 4 The Woman Swimming in the Aquarium 와 Destiny 1946 from Jazz series - two motives that can be combined as one - sophisticated image by complementary color - bag design from the motive of Destiny 5 The Horse, the squire and the clown 1943 from Jazz series - asymmetrical expression - vivid fan shape motive on one piece with symmetrical pattern, color contrast and unity 6 Cecole Woman Dancing 1950 - repetitive arrangement of motive - dynamic movement and color contrast 7 Zulma 1950 - divide the Zulma into both sides - hand drawing figure in the center with similar color to show organic unity. - vertical line and color contrast to show stability and strong image Journal of Fashion Business Vol.16, No.6 78 By using the Photoshop, I divided the Matisse' work vertically into both sides. By taking the idea from Matisse who shaped the nude from bronze, I re-interpreted Zulma's nude in a modern way and completed the figure and put it in the center of the divided background in harmony. I maintained the stable vertical structure and made strong and harmonious illustration by using complementary colors. shows the main focus of my work for each motive. V. Conclusion This study was conducted to adopt and apply the work of Henri Matisse to fashion illustration, a Fauvism artist who realized liberalization and independence of color, whose work is characterized by autonomy, simplicity, purity. To be more specific, the objective of the study is to adopt and apply the unique simplification method, pattern and color of the artist's paper cut-out to fashion illustration. The conclusion drawn from this study is as follows.: First, Matisse's paper cut-out has controlled plasticity related to the modern abstractionism and it well fits the modern trend and sensibility which is appropriate for motive of fashion illustration. It was also found that the color of Matisse's Paper cut-out that emphasizes beauty of simplicity and vividness through contrast of colors matches well with the sensibility of today that seek creativity and minimalism. Second, by upgrading the technique of Matisse' paper cut-out in a modern way such as combination of hand drawing and computer graphic using Photoshop, I was able to make originative and creative arts having background and patterns that were closely connected with each other. Specifically, I changed Matisse' work to be modern by adjusting the color and pattern. Through this work, I completed new modern fashion illustrations while maintaining the identity of Matisse' work. Third, applying fashion illustration to other various products is being well received now and I made my illustrations that would lead to follow up studies to apply the fashion illustration to other different products. Matisse' paper cut-our has forms, colors and patterns having both commercial and artistic value. In my work, I used the pattern for fashion clothes and bags limitedly but by taking this motive, I think it is possible to produce various items in various ways. Therefore it is quite feasible for follow up research to apply into many different areas. Fourth, the development of new technologies and multi-media leads to many varieties in regards to the means of expression, and a new chapter is opened to all sectors of art. One of the newly introduced tools is the computer graphic. The use of computer graphic in creating the background and patterns can bring an unlimited world of possibility in expression enabled by new techniques and instruments. Reference 1) Jang Andrew(1993), The world of Illustration, Design house, p.80. 2) Young Sun Yoo(2000), "A study on the method of express for fashion illustration visual image after 1980", Kyung Hee University, p.11. 3) William Packer(1983), Fashion Drawing in Kang Heemyung / A study of Fashion art Illustration employing Matisse Painting 79 vogue, London: Thames and Hudson, p.26. 4) Mi Rae Park (1987), Fashion Illustration, Kyungchunsa, p.9. 5) Keun Joon Yoo(1974),Collection of World Western Art, vol 17, Hankook Daily News, P.120. 6) Kwang soo Oh(1976), Seoul Modern Painting History, Ilji Publishing Company, p87. 7) Young bang Im(1983),Understanding of Modern Art. Seoul National University. P,133. 8) Heung Mi Kim(1984), “Study on Matisse' plan painting with focus on life philosophy”, Hon gik University, p.16. 9) Nicholas Darke (1987), Fashion Illustration Today, London: Thames and Hudson. 10) Richard Martin (1989), Fashion and Surrealism, London: Thames and Hudson. 11) Gilles Neret (1994),NHENRI MATISSE CUT-OUTS, London: Benedikt Taschen. 접수일(2012년 11월 2일), 수정일(1차 : 2012년 11월 23일, 2차 : 12월 7일), 게재확정일(2012년 12월 14일) << /ASCII85EncodePages false /AllowTransparency false /AutoPositionEPSFiles true /AutoRotatePages /All /Binding /Left /CalGrayProfile (Dot Gain 20%) /CalRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CalCMYKProfile (U.S. Web Coated \050SWOP\051 v2) /sRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CannotEmbedFontPolicy /Warning /CompatibilityLevel 1.4 /CompressObjects /Tags /CompressPages true /ConvertImagesToIndexed true /PassThroughJPEGImages true /CreateJobTicket false /DefaultRenderingIntent /Default /DetectBlends true /DetectCurves 0.0000 /ColorConversionStrategy /LeaveColorUnchanged /DoThumbnails false /EmbedAllFonts true /EmbedOpenType false /ParseICCProfilesInComments true /EmbedJobOptions true /DSCReportingLevel 0 /EmitDSCWarnings false /EndPage -1 /ImageMemory 1048576 /LockDistillerParams false /MaxSubsetPct 100 /Optimize true /OPM 1 /ParseDSCComments true /ParseDSCCommentsForDocInfo true /PreserveCopyPage true /PreserveDICMYKValues true /PreserveEPSInfo true /PreserveFlatness true /PreserveHalftoneInfo false /PreserveOPIComments false /PreserveOverprintSettings true /StartPage 1 /SubsetFonts true /TransferFunctionInfo /Apply /UCRandBGInfo /Preserve /UsePrologue false /ColorSettingsFile () /AlwaysEmbed [ true ] /NeverEmbed [ true ] /AntiAliasColorImages false /CropColorImages true /ColorImageMinResolution 300 /ColorImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleColorImages true /ColorImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /ColorImageResolution 1200 /ColorImageDepth -1 /ColorImageMinDownsampleDepth 1 /ColorImageDownsampleThreshold 1.00000 /EncodeColorImages true /ColorImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterColorImages true /ColorImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /ColorACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /ColorImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000ColorACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000ColorImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasGrayImages false /CropGrayImages true /GrayImageMinResolution 300 /GrayImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleGrayImages true /GrayImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /GrayImageResolution 1200 /GrayImageDepth -1 /GrayImageMinDownsampleDepth 2 /GrayImageDownsampleThreshold 1.00000 /EncodeGrayImages true /GrayImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterGrayImages true /GrayImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /GrayACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /GrayImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000GrayACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000GrayImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasMonoImages false /CropMonoImages true /MonoImageMinResolution 1200 /MonoImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleMonoImages true /MonoImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /MonoImageResolution 2400 /MonoImageDepth -1 /MonoImageDownsampleThreshold 1.00000 /EncodeMonoImages true /MonoImageFilter /CCITTFaxEncode /MonoImageDict << /K -1 >> /AllowPSXObjects false /CheckCompliance [ /None ] /PDFX1aCheck false /PDFX3Check false /PDFXCompliantPDFOnly false /PDFXNoTrimBoxError true /PDFXTrimBoxToMediaBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXSetBleedBoxToMediaBox true /PDFXBleedBoxToTrimBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfile (None) /PDFXOutputConditionIdentifier () /PDFXOutputCondition () /PDFXRegistryName () /PDFXTrapped /False /CreateJDFFile false /Description << /ARA /BGR /CHS /CHT /CZE /DAN /DEU /ESP /ETI /FRA /GRE /HEB /HRV /HUN /ITA /JPN /LTH /LVI /NLD (Gebruik deze instellingen om Adobe PDF-documenten te maken voor kwaliteitsafdrukken op desktopprinters en proofers. De gemaakte PDF-documenten kunnen worden geopend met Acrobat en Adobe Reader 5.0 en hoger.) /NOR /POL /PTB /RUM /RUS /SKY /SLV /SUO /SVE /TUR /UKR /ENU (Use these settings to create Adobe PDF documents for quality printing on desktop printers and proofers. Created PDF documents can be opened with Acrobat and Adobe Reader 5.0 and later.) /KOR >> /Namespace [ (Adobe) (Common) (1.0) ] /OtherNamespaces [ << /AsReaderSpreads false /CropImagesToFrames true /ErrorControl /WarnAndContinue /FlattenerIgnoreSpreadOverrides false /IncludeGuidesGrids false /IncludeNonPrinting false /IncludeSlug false /Namespace [ (Adobe) (InDesign) (4.0) ] /OmitPlacedBitmaps false /OmitPlacedEPS false /OmitPlacedPDF false /SimulateOverprint /Legacy >> << /AddBleedMarks false /AddColorBars false /AddCropMarks false /AddPageInfo false /AddRegMarks false /ConvertColors /NoConversion /DestinationProfileName () /DestinationProfileSelector /NA /Downsample16BitImages true /FlattenerPreset << /PresetSelector /MediumResolution >> /FormElements false /GenerateStructure true /IncludeBookmarks false /IncludeHyperlinks false /IncludeInteractive false /IncludeLayers false /IncludeProfiles true /MultimediaHandling /UseObjectSettings /Namespace [ (Adobe) (CreativeSuite) (2.0) ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfileSelector /NA /PreserveEditing true /UntaggedCMYKHandling /LeaveUntagged /UntaggedRGBHandling /LeaveUntagged /UseDocumentBleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /HWResolution [2400 2400] /PageSize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice work_7o5vcdq4frblpbcmzvgvtuh5nq ---- DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 263 www.ulakbilge.com 20. YÜZYIL RESİM VE HEYKELLERİNİN YUNAN MİTOLOJİSİ VE İKİCİLİK KAVRAMI AÇISINDAN DEĞERLENDİRİLMESİNE YÖNELİK BİR ARAŞTIRMA Gül ERBAY ASLITÜRK1, Ecem KÜÇÜKGÜNEY2 ÖZ Mitoloji düşünüldüğünde, akla ilk gelen Yunan mitolojisidir. Yunan mitolojisi ile ilgili konular; tuvalde ve heykelde yüzlerce yıllık bir geçmişe sahiptir. Bu anlamda literatür tarandığında; Yunan mitolojisi içeriğine sahip resim ve heykellerin, zihin felsefesinin alt kollarından biri olan ikicilik (dualizm) kavramı yönünden incelenmediği görülmüştür. Bu yüzden çalışmada; Yunan mitolojisinin betimlendiği resim ve heykeller, 20. yüzyıl ile sınırlandırılarak, ikicilikleri yönünden ele alınmıştır. Bu çalışmanın amacı; 20. yüzyıl resim ve heykel sanatında, Yunan mitolojisi kahramanlarının yer aldığı eserleri inceleyerek, ikiciliğin olduğu eserleri değerlendirmektir. Çalışma yöntemi olarak; ikicilik kavramı, mitoloji ve Yunan mitolojisi ile ilgili doküman incelemesi ve literatür taraması yapılmıştır. Yunan mitolojisi içerikli resim ve heykeller, müze koleksiyonlarından ve özel koleksiyonlardan araştırılarak deskripsiyonları hakkında bilgi toplanmıştır. Envanter çalışması yapılarak eserler kronolojik sıralandırılmıştır. Çalışmada altı heykel, on tablo ve bir de duvar freski olmak üzere toplam onyedi eser irdelenmiştir. Bu eserlerde ikiciliğin varlığı analiz edilerek, çalışma; resim ve heykele konu olan ikiciliğin, insan yaşamının bir parçası olduğunun vurgulanmasıyla sonlandırılmıştır. Anahtar kelimeler: Yunan mitolojisi, 20. yüzyıl resim ve heykel sanatı, ikicilik 1Yrd. Doç. Dr. Adnan Menderes Üniversitesi, Turizm Fakültesi, Aydın, gerbay(at)adu.edu.tr 2Adnan Menderes Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Turizm İşletmeciliği Anabilim Dalı Yüksek Lisans öğrencisi, gnyecem(at)gmail.com Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 264 AN INVESTIGATION ON DUALISM IN 20TH CENTURY PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURES ABOUT GREEK MYTHOLOGY ABSTRACT When considering mythology, Greek mythology is the first that comes into mind. The history of Greek mythology is written on sculptures and canvas for hundreds of years. A literature review on paintings and sculptures of Greek mythology reveals absence of mind dualism, a sub-branch of Greek phylosophy. This study concentrates on the dualism aspect of the 20th century paintings and sculptures about Greek mythology. Specifically, works of art which include heroes of Greek mythology were examined in respect to dualism. As working method; document analysis and review of the literature were conducted about dualism, mythology and Greek mythology. Greek mythology paintings and sculptures from museum and private collections were investigated and their description were gathered. An inventory of the works were made in which they were listed chronologically. As a result of this study, seventeen art works were examined: six sculptures, ten paintings and a wall fresco. These works were analyzed for the presence of dualism. This study concluded with emphasis that dualism as described in paintings and sculptures are part of human life. Keywords: Greek mythology, 20th century painting and sculpture art, dualism Erbay Aslıtürk, Gül. Küçükgüney, Ecem.“20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma”. ulakbilge 4. 8 (2016): 263-298. Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 265 www.ulakbilge.com Giriş Mitoloji sözcüğü ‘myth’ ve ‘logia’ sözcüklerinin bir araya gelmesiyle oluşmuştur. Mtyh; söylenen söz, anlatılan hikâye anlamlarına gelirken, logos; bilim ve akıl anlamındadır (Tökel, 2000:5-6). Mitoloji ise ‘’mitoslar bilgisi, mitosların sistemli bir şekilde toplamı’’ demektir (Necatigil,1973:7). Mitoloji, bilimin henüz olmadığı zamanlarda, olayları açıklayamayan toplumların gerçek ile hayali harmanlayarak yarattıkları, evrenin yaradılışı ve sonu, tanrılar ve insanlarla ilgili olağandışı tüm öyküleri inceleyen bilim dalı şeklinde tanımlanmaktadır (Kaya, 2003:19). Mitolojilerdeki kişiler, doğaüstü varlıklardır ve temsil ettikleri nitelikleri ile tanınırlar. Mitoloji; insanların, etrafındaki olayların sebebini araştırmaya sevk eden içgüdüsel bir ihtiyaçtan doğmuştur. Yaşanılan bir geçmişin betimlenmesi ile ortaya çıkmaktadır (Köktan, 2014:262). Şefik Can’a göre her milletin kendine göre bir mitolojisi vardır. Bunlar Türk, Mısır, Hint, İran, Yunan vb. şeklinde örneklendirilebilir. Bu sayılan ulusların içerisinde, en çok incelenmiş ve üzerinde en çok fikir yorulan, Yunan mitolojisidir (Can, 2015:17). Yunan Mitolojisi, Eski Yunan’da oluşmuş mit ve öykülerden meydana gelen, tanrılar, tanrıçalar ve kahramanlar hakkındaki hikâyelerden oluşan, sözlü edebiyatla destanlaştırılmış ve yaygınlaşmış mitoloji şeklinde tanımlanmaktadır. Çalışmada, Yunan mitolojisi içeriği taşıyan 20. Yüzyıl resimleri ve heykelleri, ikicilik ile değerlendirilmiştir. Zihin felsefesinin inceleme alanlarından biri olan ikiciliği açıklamadan önce, zihin felsefesini tanımlamak gerekmektedir. Zihin felsefesi; zihin, zihinsel olaylar, zihinsel işlevler, zihinsel özellikler, bilinç ve bunların fiziksel beden ile özellikle de beyin ile ilişkisini inceleyen felsefenin alt araştırma koludur. Bedenin zihinle ilişkisi bakımından zihin-beden sorunu, zihnin doğası ve onun fiziksel bedenle ilişkili olup olmadığı gibi başka sorunlara rağmen, zihin felsefesinin odağında yer alan bir sorun olarak görülmektedir. İkicilik (dualizm) ve tekçilik (monizm) zihin-beden sorununun çözümüne yönelik ortaya çıkan iki büyük düşünce akımıdır (Schaffer, 2005’den akt. Beyaz, 2014:3). Zihin felsefesinin çözümüne yönelik akımlar içinde yer alan ikicilik; Hançerlioğlu’na göre, herhangi bir alanda birbirlerine indirgenemeyen iki karşıt ilkenin varlığını ileri sürmektir (Hançerlioğlu, 1985:32). Bayraktar’a göre ise ikicilik; birbirinden bağımsız, birbirinden farklı, birbirine dönüştürülemeyen, yan yana ya da birbirinin karşısında olan iki ilkeden bahseden, felsefi görüş olarak tanımlanmaktadır (Bayraktar, 2003:30). Hançerlioğlu; ikiciliğin, temelde tanrılık yer (Öte dünya) ile insanlık yer (Dünya) ayrımından oluşan, dinsel ikicilikten yansımış olduğunu ileri sürmektedir (Hançerlioğlu, 1985:38). İkicilik ile ilgili olan temel çalışma alanları teoloji (tanrıbilim) ve felsefedir. Dinsel alanda ikicilik, güçlüler ve güçsüzler yanında iyilik ve kötülük karşıtlığına http://www.mitolojitarihi.com/2014/01/mit-nedir.html https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahraman Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 266 dayanmaktadır. Ölümsüz ruh inancıda ikicilik ile uyum içerisindedir (Beyaz, 2014:19). Hançerlioğlu, Sümerlerin yer ve gök tanrılarını, Eski Mısır’ın iyilikçi ve kötülükçü tanrılarını, İran’ın aydınlık ve karanlık ilkelerini bu karşıt ikiliklerin dile getirilmesi şeklinde ifade etmiştir (Hançerlioğlu, 1985:38). Hıristiyanlıkta, monofizit ve diofizit olarak görüş ayrılığına giden kiliselerden, diofizit görüşü savunanlar ikicilik kavramı içinde yer almaktadır. Çünkü diofizitler, monofizitlerin İsa’nın tek tabiatta birleştiği görüşünü reddeder. Onlara göre İsa, hem tanrı hem de insandır. Felsefede ikicilik; bilginin kaynağını ve doğasını tartışan bir dal olarak değerlendirilmektedir. Felsefe alanında ilk ikici, antik çağ Yunan düşünürü Anaxagaros (M.Ö 500- 428)’tur. Anaxagaros (M.Ö 500-428), varlık ile ruhu birbirinden ayırmış ve sonsuza kadar da birbirlerinden ayrı olarak kalacaklarını ifade etmiştir (Hançerlioğlu, 1985:38). Efesli Heraklitus (M.Ö 535-475)’a göre karşıtların savaşı, var olmak için zorunludur ve bu da tek koşuldur. Ona göre evren zıt elementlerden oluşmaktadır. Leicippus (M.Ö 450 civarında)’a göre her şey zorunlu olarak bir sebeple meydana gelmiştir. Varlık olduğu gibi yokluk da vardır. Yokluk, varlığın kaçınılmaz olan şartıdır. Sokrates (M.Ö 469-399), iyi ve kötü kavramları ile ilgili söylemler oluşturmuştur. Bu kavramların ruhta olduğunu savunmuştur. Platon (M.Ö 427-347) ruh ve beden ayrılığına temel oluşturmuştur. Platon (M.Ö 427-347)’a göre bedene karşıt olarak ortaya atılan ruh ölümsüzdür ve idealar dünyasından gelmektedir; bedene hapsolan ruh ölümle birlikte bedenden ayrılıp tekrar idealar dünyasına dönecektir. Aristoteles (M.Ö 384-322) ruh ve beden ikilisiyle ilgili, ruhun form, bedenin ise madde olduğunu söylemiştir (Kuriş, 2008:5). Aristoteles’den sonra bir süre duraklamaya giren felsefi gelişim, 17. yüzyıla kadar Plotinus (M.S 204-270), St. Augustinus (M.S 354-430) ve St. Thomas (1225-1274)’ın ruh ve beden hakkında düşünceleri ile devam etmiştir (Kuriş, 2008:6). 17. yüzyıla gelindiğinde Fransız düşünürü Descartes (1596-1650), karşımıza çıkar (Cevizci, 2001:41). Ona göre evrendeki bütün gerçekler, birbirine indirgenemeyen zihin - beden veya ruh - madde ikiliğinde toplamıştır (Altuner, 2013:58). Descartes (1596-1650)’ın ortaya koyduğu şekliyle ruh, bedenden tamamıyla ayrıdır ve beden var olmasa dahi ruh var olmaya devam eder. Leibniz (1646-1716) de ruh-beden ilişkisine katılarak dualist bir tutum sergilemiştir. Leibniz (1646-1716)’in ikiciliği, Descartes (1596-1650)’ın ikiciliğinden farklı olarak ruh ve beden arasındaki etkileşime değil, ruh ve beden paralelliğine dayanmaktadır. Düşüncelerini ikicilik üzerine oluşturmuş diğer bir filozof Henri Bergson (1859-1941)’dur (Aslıtürk, 2013). Bergson (1859-1941)’a göre ruhsal olgularla fiziksel olgular arasında, her basamakta karşılıklı bir ilişki bulunur (Timuçin, 2000:133). Katmanlı bir yapı ile ruh anlayışını dile getiren Bergson (1859- 1941)’un bu yaklaşımında, madde ve ruh birbirine indirgenemez gerçeklerdir. DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 267 www.ulakbilge.com İkiciler; dualiteyi akıl ve bedenle sınırlandırmışlardır (Robinson, 1935’den akt. Aslıtürk, 2013). Maddenin karşısında birde ruhsal yapı olduğunu kabul ederler, bu yüzden ikicilerin tümü düşüncecidir yani idealisttir (Hançerlioğlu, 1985:38). İkicilik Çerçevesinde Ele Alınan Resim ve Heykeller 20. yüzyıl resim ve heykel sanatında Yunan mitolojisi içeriği taşıyan eserler, kronolojik sıra ile yer almaktadır. Eserlerin, mitolojik öyküleri anlatılarak, ikicilikleri yönünden değerlendirmeleri yapılmıştır. Eros ve Psyche Eros ve Psyche, Yunan mitolojisinin aşk kahramanlarıdır. Eros (aşk), Aphrodite’in oğludur. Taşıdığı oklarla ve sırtında kanatlarıyla tasvir edilir. Oklarını atarak tanrıların ve insanların kalbinde aşk ateşini yakar. Psyche (ruh) ise güzelliği ile Aphrodite’e benzetilen bir ölümlüdür. Onun güzelliğini duyan Aphrodite, oğlunu çağırarak: - Eros, oğlum, yapılacak bazı şeylerim var, bana yardım edeceğinden eminim. Bazı erkekler, benim güzelliğimle ölümlü bir kızın güzelliğini karşılaştırıyorlar. Oğlum, git; güzellikte bana eş saydıkları o kızın kalbini yarala ve onu dünyanın en çirkin erkeğine âşık et, der. Eros, annesinin isteği üzerine Psyche’nin yanına gider, kalbini yaralamak için okunu atmak üzere iken, onun güzelliğine hayran olur. Psyche’yi başkasına âşık etmek isterken kendisi âşık olur. Eros, Psyche’yi çok güzel ve ıssız bir saraya götürür. Geceleri sevgilisinin yanına gelerek hoş zamanlar geçirir. Psyche, sevgilisinin yüzünü aydınlıkta göremediği için tedirgindir. Eros’dan yüzünü göstermesini ister. Eros ona: - Aşkımızın sırrını kalbinde sakladığın sürece mutlu olacaksın; beni görmeyi aklından bile geçirme, benim kim olduğumu öğrenme. Bilmeden sev beni. Senden gizlenen şeyleri öğrenmeye çalışarak kendini ıstırap ateşi ile yakma, mutluluğunu bozma, diyerek cevap verir. Fakat Psyche bir gün kız kardeşlerinin söylemlerinden etkilenerek, sevgilisinin yüzünü görmeye karar verir. Eros, gece geldiğinde onun uyumasını bekler. Eros uyuyunca, sakladığı lambayı alarak onun yüzüne doğru tutar. Tarif edilemeyecek derecede güzel olan sevgilisini görünce, aşkı daha da alevlenir ve onu öpmek ister. Eğilirken elindeki lamba kayarak, içinden akan yağ Eros’un omzuna damlar. Eros, uyanır uyanmaz oradan kaybolur. Pscyhe gözyaşlarına boğulur. Tekrar bulurum umuduyla dünyayı dolaşmaya başlar. Bitkin halde, Eros’u kendisine göstereceğini sanarak Aphrodite’nin sarayına gider. Fırsatı değerlendiren Aphrodite onu kölesi yapar. Psyche her şeye katlanır. Eros kendisine bu derece bağlı sevgilisini kurtarmak için Olympos’a giderek baştanrı Zeus’a yalvarır. Psyche’nin kendisine eş olarak verilmesini ister. Zeus bu isteği kabul Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 268 ederek Psyche’nin Olympos dağına getirilmesini emreder. Olympos dağına gelen Pscyce ve sevgilisi Eros, tanrılar huzurunda evlenirler (Kozanoğlu, 1992:26-28). Eros ve Psyche tablosu, dışavurumculuk akımının en önemli temsilcilerinden olan, Norveçli Ressam Edvard Munch (1863-1944) tarafından, 1907 yılında yapılmıştır. Resim 1: Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Eros ve Psyche, 1907 Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway 119,5 x 99 cm, Tuval üzerine yağlı boya Kaynak:http://www.edvard-munch.com/gallery/love/amor&psyche.htm Yunan mitolojisinin aşk kahramanları Eros (aşk) ve Psyche (ruh), Edvard Munch (1863-1944)’ın eserine konu olmuştur. Eser, renkli çizgisel dokunuşların, kadın ve erkek figürlerini ortaya çıkarmasıyla oluşturulmuştur. Hikâyede Eros, kanatlı olarak betimlenmektedir. Fakat resimde, kanatlı haliyle görülmemektedir. Böylece eserde, fiziksel özelliklere vurgu yapılmadığını söyleyebiliriz. Eserde göze çarpan tek nokta, bakışlarla hissettirilen sevgidir. Sevgiyi yansıtan kadın ve erkek, resimdeki ikiciliği meydana getirmektedir. Hikâyeye göre; Psyche’nin, Eros’un yüzünü görmesiyle ayrılan âşıklar bir zaman sonra tekrar kavuşurlar. Böylece aşk, ruhun sonsuza kadar yoldaşı olur. Ayrılığın meydana getirdiği hüzün, kavuşmanın meydana getirdiği mutluluk, hikâyedeki ikicilik kurgusuna atıf oluşturmaktadır. DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 269 www.ulakbilge.com Hera Kronos ve Rheia’nın üç kız (Hestia, Demeter, Hera), üç erkek (Hades, Poseidon, Zeus) olmak üzere, altı tane çocuğu olur. Kronos’un büyük kızı ve Zeus’un kız kardeşi olan Hera aynı zamanda Zeus’un da karısıdır. Zeus ıssız bir yerde dolaşan Hera’yı, guguk kuşu şekline girerek kendisiyle evlenmeye razı eder. Bu evlilik, iki kardeş ve iki tanrısal varlığın birleşmesidir. Hera, kocasının kölesi olmaz. İlahi otoriteyi kocasıyla birlikte sağlar. O, Olympos’ta oturan bütün tanrıçaların en güzeli, en hürmet gösterileni ve en büyüğüdür. Onun hiddeti, kocası Zeus’un hiddeti gibi korkunçtur. Sinirlendiği zaman bütün Olympos’u titretir. Zeus’un çapkınlıklarına rağmen Hera, hiddet ve kıskançlıktan deliye dönse de kocasına hep sadık kalmıştır. Bu yönüyle tanrıça Hera; evlilik tanrıçası, evli kadınların ve evlilik bağının temsilcisidir (Agızza, 2006:36). Hera, 1929 yılında Dadaizm’in ve Sürrealizm’in en önemli temsilcilerinden sayılan Fransız ressam, heykeltıraş, grafik sanatçısı ve yazar Francis Picabia (1879- 1953) tarafından yapılmış bir tablodur. Resim2: Francis Picabia (1879-1953), Hera, 1929 Özel Koleksiyon, Paris 103,4 x 74,9 cm, mukavva üzerine yağlı boya, guaş boya, karakalem Kaynak:http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/drawings-watercolors/francis-picabia-hera-5532312- details.aspx Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 270 Francis Picabia (1879-1953)’nın tablosu Hera, şeffaf olarak betimlenen figürlerden oluşmaktadır. Tek bir sanat eseri yaratılması için üç ayrı görüntü ve farklı duygu ifadeleri kullanılmıştır. Hera’nın; hem tanrıça, hem Zeus’un eşi, hem de Zeus’un kız kardeşi olması üç ayrı yüz ifadesini açıklıyor olabilir. Şeffaf ve ışık geçirgen olarak resmedilen Hera görüntüleri dışında görülen erkek figürünün de, Zeus olduğunu söyleyebiliriz. Yüzlerin arkasında görülen sırtı dönük çıplak kadın bedeni ve dokunma hissi veren eller, iç arzuları yansıtır niteliktedir. Mavi, yeşil ve mor renklerin kullanımının, resme hüzün kazandırdığı görülmektedir. Resmin temasını oluşturan kadın ve erkek figürleriyle, eril - dişil ikiciliği vurgulanmaktadır. Hikâyeye göre; baştanrı Zeus, karısı Hera’yı defalarca aldatmıştır. Buna rağmen Hera kocasına sadık kalmayı bilmiştir. Zeus ve Hera arasındaki sadakat ve sadakatsizlik ilişkisi ikiciliğin varlığını kanıtlar niteliktedir. Hera ve Zeus’un hem kardeş hem de eş olması ikiciliğin bir başka göstergesidir. Prometheus Titan İapetos ve Klymene’nin dört oğlu olur (Atlas, Menoitos, Prometheus, Epimetheus). Oğullarından Prometheus; bir Titan oğlu olduğu halde, Titanların isyanları sırasında kurnazlığını kullanarak Zeus’a başkaldıranlar arasında yer almaz. Zeus Prometheus’u ölmezler arasına, yani tanrıların yaşadığı Olympos dağına kabul eder. Fakat Prometheus, kendi ırkını mahveden Zeus ve çevresine kin beslemektedir. İnsanı yaratarak öcünü almayı düşünür. Prometheus ilk insanı, kendi gözyaşı ile kardığı balçıktan yaratır. Prometheus’un biçimlendirdiği insana, Athena’nın ruh vermesi sonucu, insan evrende varlığını sürdürmeye başlar. Bir gün tanrılar ve insanlar Mekone’de, kurbanın paylaşılıp yenmesi için toplanırlar. Prometheus kesilen kurbanı ikiye böler, bir tarafa kurbanın etini koyup gösterişsiz olsun diye üzerini deri ile örter. Diğer tarafa da kemikleri koyup dikkat çeksin diye üzerini yağ ile örter. Zeus, yağlı görülen kısımdan alıp kemiği yiyince öfkelenir ve insanlardan ateşi alarak onları cezalandırır. İnsan güçsüz, çıplak ve aciz kalır. Yarattığı insana acıyan Prometheus, onlara ateşi yeniden vermeyi düşünür. Hephaistos’un ocağına giderek kıvılcım çalar. İnsanlar tekrar ateşe kavuşmuştur. Bunu gören Zeus sinirlenir ve Prometheus’u zincirle kayalara bağlatarak karaciğerini kartala yedirtir. Kartal yedikçe karaciğer yeniden çıkar. Prometheus’un bu işkencesi otuz sene sürer. Daha sonra Zeus, Prometheus’a acır ve onu tekrar ölmezler arasına alır (Can, 2015:26-27 ve Grimal, 1953:40). Prometheus duvar freski, Meksikalı Ressam Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) tarafından, 1930 yılında yapılmıştır. DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 271 www.ulakbilge.com Resim 3: Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), Prometheus, 1930 Pomona College, Frary Hall, Claremont, California, USA (Merkez Panel) 610 x 869 cm, duvar freski Kaynak:https://www.pomona.edu/museum/collections/jos%C3%A9-clemente-orozcos-prometheus Yunan mitoloji kahramanı Prometheus’un hikâyesi, Orozco’nun duvar freskine konu olmuştur. Bu freskte Prometheus, insanlığa getirmek istediği ateşe uzanırken gösterilmiştir. Prometheus’un ellerinin ateş ile birleştiği yerde ortaya çıkan kırmızılığın ateş izlenimini vermesi, ateşin etrafındaki ölümlülerde şaşkınlık, kargaşa, ayaklanma, çatışma, çileli haller, dua eder gibi ellerini kavuşturan kadınlar, kucaklaşmalar freskte diğer kısımları oluşturmaktadır. Siyah, kül rengi, ateş rengi ve toprak tonlarının kullanılması, eserin kurgusunda tamamlayıcı rolleri üstlenir. Mitos’a göre; Zeus, insanlardan ateşi mahrum etmişti, fakat Prometheus ateşi insanlara tekrar verdi. Yasak olan bir şeyden faydalanılması karşıtlıkların ikiciliğine yapılan bir atıftır. İnsanlığa verilen ateş hem iyilik ve aydınlanma, hem de bir lanettir. Çünkü aydınlanmaya ve iyiliğe sebep olan ateş, aynı zamanda felaketlere de sebep olabilir. Bu da iyi - kötü ikiciliğini vurgulamaktadır. Deniz Kabuğundaki Venüs Evrenin yaradılışında önemli rol oynayan Gaia (yer), doğurduğu her çocuğunun, kocası Uranos (gök) tarafından yerin dibine gönderilmesine dayanamayarak, öcünü almaya karar verir. Göğsünde taşıdığı çeliği çıkartarak, ondan keskin bir tırpan yapar. Çocuklarını da haberdar ederek yardım etmelerini ister. Sadece, en son doğan oğlu Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 272 Kronos annesine yardım edeceğini söyler. Akşam olduğunda Uranos uykuya dalar. Annesi tarafından çağrılan Kronos gelir, babasını tırpanla biçer ve et parçalarını denize atar. Dalgalar nedeniyle çalkalanan et parçalarından, deniz yüzeyinde beyaz köpükler meydana gelir. Bu beyaz köpüklerden güzel bir tanrıça doğar. Çok güzel olan bu tanrıçaya, denizköpüklerinden doğduğu için Yunanca Aphrodite, Latince Venüs denilmektedir. Doğar doğmaz Aphrodite’i, dalgalar bir deniz kabuğu içinde çiçeklerle süsleyerek Kıbrıs adasına götürürler. Ölümsüzlerin en güzeli Aphrodite; aşk, güzellik ve bereket tanrıçasıdır (Erhat, 1996:42ve Kozanoğlu, 1992: 22-23). Deniz Kabuğundaki Venüs, Fransız Ressam, Heykeltıraş Henri Matisse (1869-1954) tarafından 1930 yılında yapılmış bir heykeldir. Aphrodite; heykelde, deniz kabuğu içinden çıkışı ile tasvir edilmiştir. Resim 4: Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Deniz Kabuğundaki Venüs, 1931 The Museum of Modern Art, New York 31 x 18,3 x 20,6 cm, bronz Kaynak:http://www.moma.org/collection/works/81451?locale=en DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 273 www.ulakbilge.com Deniz Kabuğundaki Venüs heykeli, Yunanca adıyla Aphrodite’nin doğuşunu tasvir eder. Efsaneye göre Aphrodite, köpüklerden doğar ve deniz kabuğu içinde götürülür. Bu heykelde Venüs, deniz kabuğu içindeki haliyle betimlenmiştir. Heykelde tek başına kadın betimlendiği için, biçimsel olarak ikicilikten söz edemeyiz. Fakat hikâyeye baktığımızda; Uranos oğlu tarafından öldürülmüş ve et parçaları denize atılmıştır. Çalkalanan et parçalarından meydana gelen köpükler, Venüs’ün doğmasına sebep olmuştur. Ölüm ve doğumun aynı anda yaşandığı bu hikâye, ikiciliğin göstergesidir. Minotaure Minotaure; Yunanca ‘Minos’un boğası’ anlamına gelen, baş kısmı boğa, gövde kısmı insan biçiminde olan, Yunan mitolojisi yaratığıdır. Efsaneye göre; Girit’te hüküm süren kral Minos, Helios ve Crete’in kızı olan Pasiphae ile evlidir. Bu evlilikten de dört kız, dört erkek çocukları olur. Kral Minos bir gün denizler tanrısı Poseidon’dan, kurban etmek üzere kendisine bir boğa vermesini ister. Poseidon, kral Minos’a beyaz bir boğa gönderir. Boğa Minos’un hoşuna gidince, Minos boğayı kurban etmekten vazgeçer. Onun yerine, başka bir boğayı kurban eder. Poseidon bunu anlayınca sinirlenir ve Minos’un karısı Pasiphae’yi boğaya âşık eder. Minos’un karısı Pasiphae, boğa ile birlikte olunca boğa başlı, insan bedenli Minotaure doğar. Minotaure başlangıçta diğer çocuklarla birlikte büyür. Zaman geçtikçe vahşileşerek insan eti ile beslenmeye başlayınca babası Minos, içinden çıkılması imkansız bir labirent inşa ettirir ve Minotaure’ı oraya kapattırır (Erhat, 1996:201 ve Ergüven, 2010:178). Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Minotaure maketini, 1933 yılında kolaj olarak hazırlamıştır. Picasso (1881-1973) bu maketini, yapmış olduğu diğer Minotaure resimlerini toplayacağı kitabının kapağı için tasarlamıştır. Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 274 Resim 5: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Minotaure, 1933 (Minotaure kapağı için maket) The Museum of Modern Art, New York 48,5 x 41 cm, kolaj Kâğıt üzerine kalem, ipek kurdele, duvar kâğıdı, oluklu kâğıt, sararmış yapraklar, gümüş Kaynak:http://www.moma.org/collection/works/34095?locale=en Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), yapmış olduğu bütün Minotaure resimlerini toplayacağı kitabı için bir kapak tasarlar. Kolaj olarak hazırlanan kapağın temasını, kağıt üzerine çizilen minyatür Minotaure oluşturmaktadır (Resim 5). Minotaure, fiziksel özelliği ile hem hikâyede hem resimde ikiciliği oluşturur. Ölümlü olan annesinin boğa ile birleşmesi, bu birleşme sonucunda insan gövdesine, boğa başına ve kuyruğuna sahip efsanevi bir varlığın doğması, hikâyedeki ikiciliğe atıf yapmaktadır. Resimde Minotaure, aynen hikâyede anlatıldığı gibi boğa başı ve kuyruğu ile betimlenmiştir. Eserde ki Minotaure figürünün yanında, ipek kurdele, gümüş, duvar kâğıdı, oluklu kâğıt ve sararmış yaprakların kullanılması, hayatı karmakarışık olan Minotaure’u simgeler niteliktedir. Başka bir ifadeyle, fiziksel özelliği ile dışlanmış ve izole edilmiş olan korkutucu Minotaure, birbirinden değişik nesneler arasında betimlenerek, güzel gösterilmek isteniyor olabilir. Güzelliklerin, çirkinliğin etrafını sarması, resimdeki biçimsel ikiciliğin göstergesidir. DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 275 www.ulakbilge.com Narcissus’un Metamorfozu Narcissus, çok yakışıklı bir avcıdır. Kendisine âşık olanlara aldırmaz ve onların aşklarını karşılıksız bırakır. Peri Ekho bir gün dağlarda dolaşırken geyiklerin peşinde koşan bir avcı görür. Bu avcı Narcissus’dur. Ekho, avcıya ilk görüşte âşık olur. Ancak Narcissus bu sevgiye karşılık vermez. Ekho, bu durum karşısında günden güne eriyerek ölür. Kendisinden geriye kemikleri ve sesi kalır. Vücudundan kalan kemikleri kayalara, sesi ise kayalarda ‘eko’ olarak bilinen yankılara dönüşür. Bu durum Olimpos dağındaki tanrıları kızdırır. Tanrılar Narcissus’u cezalandırmaya karar verirler. Narcissus bir gün susamış halde nehir kenarına gelir. Buradan su içmek için eğildiğinde, suda yansıyan kendi yüzünün ve vücudunun güzelliğini görür. Daha önceden fark etmediği kendi güzelliği karşısında büyülenir ve kendine âşık olur. Nehir kenarında, yerinden kalkamaz bir halde günden güne erimeye başlar. Sadece kendini seyrederek ömrünü tüketir. Öldükten sonra da vücudu nergis çiçeklerine dönüşür (Soylu, 2014). Narcissus’un Metamorfozu, Katalan sürrealist Ressam Salvador Dali (1904- 1989)tarafından 1937 yılında yapılmış resimdir. Resim 6: Salvador Dali (1904-1989),Narcisus’un Metamorfozu, 1937 Tate Museum, Londra 51,2 x 78,1 cm, tuval üzerine yağlı boya Kaynak:http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dali-metamorphosis-of-narcissus- t02343 Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 276 Narcissus’un Metamorfozu, yakışıklı genç Narcissus’un nergis çiçeğine dönüşmesinin, Dali (1904-1989) tarafından yorumlandığı eserdir. Tabloda, bir grup insan topluluğu, satranç tablasında bir erkek heykeli ve el figürleri görülmektedir. Ana figürler, diğer objelerden soyutlanarak daha belirgin bir şekilde, ön plana çıkarılmıştır. Eserin asıl kurgusu, ön plana çıkarılan figürler üzerine oluşturulmuştur. Resimde, karlı dağların ve kaya parçalarının arasında, su birikintisi yanına diz çöken Narcissus, kafasını dizine dayamış şekliyle tasvir edilmiştir. Narcissus’un bükülmüş görüntüsü çaresizliği ve ölümü anımsatır. Çünkü Narcissus, suda kendini görüp hayran olmuş ve yerinden kalkamaz halde, kendi güzelliğini seyrederek eriyip gitmiştir. Öldükten sonra, nergis çiçeğine dönüşmüştür. Narcissus’un karşısında betimlenen, taştan bir elin tuttuğu yumurtadan çıkan nergis, hikâyeyi vurgular niteliktedir. Dikkatle bakıldığında bu el, aslında Narcissus’un yansıması şeklindedir. Gerçek ve yansımanın aynı anda kullanılması, resimdeki ikiciliği oluşturmaktadır. Narcissus’un öldükten sonra nergise dönüşerek hayat bulması da hikâyedeki ikiciliğin göstergesidir. Pgymalion Pygmalion, Kıbrıs adasında bulunan Karpasia kentinin kurucusudur ve bir heykeltıraştır. Mermerden heykeller yaparak vaktini bu heykeller arasında geçirir, canlı insanlardan, özellikle de kadınlardan nefret ederdi. Kadınların bulunduğu yerden hep kaçardı. Hayalindeki ideal kadını beklerdi. Bir gün mermerden hayalindeki kadının heykelini yaptı. Bu heykel o kadar güzel olmuştu ki, Pygmalion yaptığı heykele âşık oldu ve her geçen gün heykele olan aşkı büyüdü. Ona çiçekler, deniz kabukları, değerli taşlar hediye etti. Pygmalion, bir gün cansız ve soğuk bedenli heykelini kolları arasında sıkar ve öperken, Aphrodite bu garip aşığın durumuna üzülerek, ıstırabına son vermek istedi ve Pygmalion’un heykeline can verdi. Pygmalion, heykelinin sevgi dolu gözlerle ona baktığını gördü ve beyaz tenli kadınına ‘beyaz’ anlamına gelen Galatha adını verdi. Sevdiğine kavuşan Pygmalion, Galatha ile evlendi (Milbourne&Stowell, 2011:286 ve Can, 2015: 120). Pygmalion tablosu 1939 tarihinde, Belçikalı gerçeküstücü ressam Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) tarafından yapılmıştır. DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 277 www.ulakbilge.com Resim 7: Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) , Pygmalion,1939 Royal Museums Of Fine Art s Of Belgium, Brüksel 117 x 148 cm, ahşap üzerine yağlıboya Kaynak:https://www.fine-arts-museum.be/fr/la-collection/paul-delvaux-pygmalion Pygmalion, Yunan mitolojisinde yer alan bir heykeltıraştır. Yaptığı kadın heykelinin canlanması, ressam Delvaux (1897-1994)’un tablosuna konu olmuştur. Eserde, hikâyenin aksi yönüne yapılan betimleme dikkat çekmektedir. Hikâyeye göre; kadınların yaptıklarından nefret eden Pgymalion, onlarla birlikte olmamış ve hep hayalindeki kadını beklemiştir. Hikâyede ki Pgymalion’a göre kadınlar kötü iken, Delvaux (1897-1994)’un tablosundaki yorumuna göre hayal edilmesi gereken kişi erkektir. Sanatçı, cinsiyetleri yer değiştirerek, resme kendi yorumunu katmıştır. Hikâyenin tersine yapılan bu atıf, ikiciliği vurgulamaktadır. Tablonun ana temasını oluşturan erkek heykel figürü ve ona sarılmış olan kadın ile birlikte, arkası dönük başka bir erkek ve bitkilerle betimlenmiş başka bir kadın ile eril - dişil ikiciliği oluşturulmuştur. Arkada yer alan küçük kulübe içinde masa ve lambanın görülmesi ile iç - dış, gökyüzü ve üzerinde küçük taşların var olduğu zemin ile yer - gök kurgusu, ikiciliği oluşturan diğer betimlemelerdir. Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 278 Aphrodite II Aphrodite efsanesi daha önceki eser tanıtımında anlatılmıştır (bkz. Deniz Kabuğundaki Venüs). Anlatılan efsaneye ek olarak Aphrodite; yunus, ayna, deniz kabuğu ve güvercin ile sembolize edilmiştir (Ergüven, 2010:142). Aphrodite II heykeli, İngiliz Heykeltıraş Sir Charles Wheeler (1892-1974), tarafından 1943 yılında yapılmıştır. Heykelde Aphrodite; ayakucunda, sembolize edildiği hayvanlardan olan yunus ile görülmektedir. Resim 8: Sir Charles Wheeler (1892-1974), Aphrodite II, 1943 131,5 x 38,5 x 26,5 cm, Portland taş The Tate Gallery, London Kaynak:http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wheeler-aphrodite-ii-n05559 DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 279 www.ulakbilge.com Sir Charles Wheeler (1892-1974)’ın eserine konu olan Aphrodite; heykelde, sembolize edildiği hayvanlardan biri olan yunus ile tasvir edilmiştir (Resim 8). Yunus, Yunan mitolojisinde doğurganlığı simgelemektedir. Yunus için ‘ana rahmi’ anlamına gelen Yunanca ‘Delphys’ sözcüğü kullanılmaktadır. Aphrodite doğumun bir parçası olarak düşünüldüğünden yunus ile ilişkilendirilmiştir. Güzelliğin, asaletin ve doğurganlığın simgesi olarak, ayakta betimlenen Aphrodite, biçimsel ikiciliği oluşturmamaktadır. Fakat ölüm ve doğumun aynı anda yaşandığı Aphrodite’nin Yunan mitolojisindeki hikâyesi, ikiciliğe bir atıftır. Çünkü Aphrodite, ölen Uronos’un, et parçalarının meydana getirdiği köpüklerden doğmuştur. Odysseus ve Kalypso Kalypso, Odysseus destanında adı geçen peridir. Yunanca ‘gizlemek’ anlamına gelen Kalypso, görenleri büyüleyecek kadar güzeldir. Odysseus ise Troia savaşı kahramanlarındandır. Evine ve karısı Penolope’ye kavuşmak için Troia savaşı sonunda eve dönüş yolculuğuna başlar. Bu yolculuk sırasında felaketler Odysseus’un peşini bırakmaz. Gemisi batar ve yanındaki tüm arkadaşlarını kaybeder. Odysseus bir süre denizde sürüklendikten sonra, kendini Kalypso’nun adasının kıyılarında bulur. Bir gün Kalypso, denizi seyrederken kıyıda Odysseus’u görür ve onu mağarasına götürür. Kalypso hemen ateş yaktırır ve yiyecek bir şeyler hazırlattırır. Odysseus, yemek yerken başından geçenleri anlatmaya başlar. Kahramanın ses tonuna hayran olan Kalypso’nun kalbinde büyük bir sevgi başlar. Odysseus’da, Kalypso’nun güzel kokan saçlarına ve büyüleyici bakışlarına hayran olmuştur. Odysseus ve Kalypso, kendilerini yedi yıl sürecek olan aşk macerasının içinde bulurlar. Fakat Odysseus yedinci yılın sonunda Kalypso’nun güzelliğinden bıkar. Gözyaşları dökerek karısını düşünmeye başlar. Tanrılar Odysseus’un haline acırlar ve Kalypso’ya, onu yurduna göndermesi için emir verirler. Kalypso’da tanrıların emrine boyun eğmek zorunda kalır. Odysseus’a sal yapması için yardım eder. Odysseus’un salını tamamlamasıyla Kalypso, gözyaşlarıyla yedi yıl geçirdiği misafirini uğurlar (Kahl, 2008:2 ve Can, 2015:390-392). Alman ressam, çizer, heykeltıraş ve aynı zamanda da yazar Max Beckmann (1884-1950), 1943 yılında Odysseus ve Calypso resmini yapmıştır. Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 280 Resim 9:Max Beckmann (1884-1950), Odysseus ve Calypso, 1943 Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle 150 x 115,5 cm, tuval üzerine yağlı boya Kaynak:http://www.wikiart.org/en/max-beckmann/odysseus-and-calypso-1943 Odysseus ve Kalypso, Yunan mitolojisinde yolları tesadüfen kesişen aşk kahramanlarıdır. Max Becmann (1884-1950)’ın tablosuna konu olmuşlardır (Resim 9). Resimde Kalypso; bilezik, halhal ve tüylerden yapılan kolyesi, siyah saçları, pürüzsüz bedeni ile çıplak olarak resmedilmiştir. Odysseus’un önünde çıplak şekilde oturur durumdadır. Odysseus, kollarını başında birleştirmiş, arkasında duran kalkanına ve kılıcına yaslanmıştır. Kafasında miğfer, bacaklarında ise koruyucu parçalar vardır. Tabloda, Odysseus ve Kalypso dışında üç hayvan figürü dikkati çekmektedir. Odysseus, mürettebatını ve gemisini kaybedip denizde sürüklendikten sonra, Kalypso’nun adasına çıkar ve misafirliği karışık bir aşk esaretine dönüşür. Yılan, Odysseus’un bacağına dolanarak karışık olan ilişkilerini simgelemektedir. Yunan mitolojisinde perilere eşlik eden kuşlar olduğu söylenir. Efsaneye göre; Odysseus, Kalypso’yu ilk gördüğünde kendisiyle uyum içinde olan bir kuş, kafasının üstünde durmaktaydı. Resimde, kuşun gagası ve Odysseus’un sakalı aynı renkte betimlenmiştir. Resmin diğer figürünü oluşturan bu kuş, Odysseus’un esaretten kurtulmak istemesini simgeler niteliktedir (Kahl 2008:4). Kedi, nankörlük ile bağdaştırılmıştır. Çünkü Odysseus, çıkarı için yıllar süren esarete katlanmıştır. Hikâye DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 281 www.ulakbilge.com ile paralel olarak resmedilen eserin ana kahramanları Odysseus ve Kalypso, eril - dişil kurgusu bakımından ikiciliği vurgulamaktadır. Uyuyan Venüs Yunanca adıyla Aphrodite’in, Latince adıyla Venüs’ün hikâyesi daha önceki eser tanıtımında anlatılmıştır (bkz. Deniz Kabuğundaki Venüs). Uyuyan Venüs, 1944 yılında, Belçikalı gerçeküstücü ressam Paul Delvaux (1897- 1994) tarafından yapılmış resimdir. Delvaux (1897-1994)’un en ünlü tablosu olarak nitelendirilmektedir. Resim 10: Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), Uyuyan Venüs, 1944 The Tate Gallery, London 199 x 173 cm, tuval üzerine yağlı boya Kaynak:http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/delvaux-sleeping-venus-t00134 Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 282 Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) Uyuyan Venüs adlı eserinde, gözleri kapalı ve çıplak şekilde uzanırken, kâbus gören Venüs’ü betimlemektedir. Eserde; Venüs’ünde içinde yer aldığı altı çıplak kadın, modern giyimli bir kadın ve ölümü simgelediği düşünülen iskelet figürü yer almaktadır. Dikkati çeken nokta; Antik Roma mimarisinin varlığı ve yarım ay görüntüsüyle sezdirilen gecedir. Delvaux, resmi hakkında şöyle demiştir(Wilson, 1982:23’den akt. İşman,2007:72): İnancıma göre, belki de bilinçaltından gelen bir dürtüyle, bu temanın içine gizemli ve elle tutulamayan bir huzursuzluk koydum. Tapınakları ay ışığı ile aydınlanmış klasik bir kent, at başları olan garip bir bina (Brüksel’deki eski Kraliyet Sirki’nden esinlendim), bir iskelet ve bir terzi mankeninin izlediği sakince uyuyan Venüs... Venüs’ün ruh hali, etrafındaki huzursuz figürlerle çelişki içindedir. Bu resimde, karşıtlık ve gizem yaratmaya çalıştım. O dönemin psikolojisinin, çok sıra dışı, dramatik ve acılı olduğunu da eklemeliyim. Delvaux’un bu söyleminden yola çıkarak; Venüs’ün uyurken betimlendiği sakin haline karşılık, etrafındaki kadın figürlerinin telaşlı halleri biçimsel ikiciliğe yapılan bir atıftır. Ayrıca eserdeki canlılık hissi veren kadın figürleri ve ölümü hissettiren iskelet figürü, yaşam - ölüm ikiciliğinin göstergesidir. Leda Leda, Aetolia kralı Thestios'un kızı ve Sparta Kralı Tyndareos'un eşidir. Baş tanrı Zeus bir gece Olympos’dan çıkarak, gönül verdiği kız için Taygetos dağına iner. Karısı Hera’nın kıskançlığından korunmak için de bir kuğu şekline dönüşür. Leda’nın yanına geldiğinde kız uyumaktadır. Kuğu kanatlarını birbirine çırparak etrafa güzel kokular yayar. Bu sırada Leda uyanır, beyaz renkli ve parlayan kuğuyu görür. Kuğu, Leda’ya ‘’hiç bir şeyden korkma ben aydınlık tanrısıyım ve istiyorum ki, sen birbirinin eşi olan iki çocuğumun annesi ol’’ der. Kuğu şeklindeki Zeus ve Leda birlikte olurlar. Aynı gece Leda kocasıyla da birlikte olduğu için iki tane yumurta yumurtlar. Troia savaşına neden olacak olan, dünyanın en güzel kızı Helen ve Pollux’un babaları Zeus iken, Kastor ve Klytaimnestra’nın babaları Tyndareos’tur (Ergüven, 2010:123, Erhat, 1996:188 ve Can,2015:51). Leda, Belçikalı gerçeküstücü ressam Paul Delvaux (1897-1994)tarafından, 1948 yılında yapılmış resimdir. DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 283 www.ulakbilge.com Resim 11:Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), Leda, 1948 The Tate Gallery, London 152,7 x 95 cm, tahta üzerine yağlı boya Kaynak:http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/delvaux-leda-t03361 Leda adlı resim, Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) tarafından yapılmıştır. Resimde çıplak kadın olarak betimlenen Leda, beyaz bir kuğuya sarılmaktadır. Elektrik telleri ve fabrikayı andıran bacalar, modern kent yaşamını anımsatmaktadır. Yüzyıllar önce yazılmış bir hikâyenin modern görünüm ile birleştirilmesi, eski - yeni arasındaki Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 284 ikiciliği meydana getirmiştir. Tabloda; Leda ve kuğunun üzerinde durduğu yüzey, bacaların yükseldiği ve bulutlarla da netleştirilen gökyüzü, yer - gök ikiciliğine bir atıf oluşturmaktadır. Aynı zamanda Leda’nın ve kuğunun üzerinde durduğu kareli yüzey, siyah - beyaz renkleriyle ikiciliği oluşturmuştur. Hikâye düşünüldüğünde, kuğunun kılık değiştirmiş baştanrı Zeus olduğu anlaşılmaktadır. Kuğu şeklindeki Zeus ve ona sarılan Leda, hikâyedeki eril - dişil ikiciliğinin göstergesidir. Hektor ve Andromache’nin Kucaklaşması Andromache, Mysia bölgesindeki Thebai şehrinin kralı olan Eetion’un kızıdır. Troia kralı Priamos ve kraliçe Hekabe’nin en büyük oğlu olan Hektor ise, Troia savaşı kahramanlarındandır. Andromache ve Hektor evlidir. Onların bir oğlu olur, adını ‘şehrin efendisi’ anlamına gelen Astyanaks koyarlar. Efsaneye göre, Hektor’un kardeşi Paris, baştanrı Zeus’un emri ile Aphrodite, Athena ve Hera arasındaki güzellik yarışmasına jüri olur. Üzerinde ‘en güzele’ yazılı olan elmayı üç güzelden birine vererek en güzel olanı seçecektir. Paris elmayı, kendisine dünyanın en güzel kadınını vermeyi vadeden Aphrodite’e verir. En güzel olarak Aphrodite’i seçer. Aphrodite’de bunun üzerine dünyanın en güzel kadını olan Helen aşkını Paris’in gönlüne koyar. Paris, hiç görmediği Helena’yı bulmak için Sparta şehrine doğru yola koyulur. Helena, Sparta kralı Menelaus ile evlidir. Paris, Helena’yı bulur ve kaçırır. Bunun üzerine Menelaus, Troia’ya savaş açar. Troia ordusunun başına Hektor geçecektir. Andromache kocasının bu savaşta yer almasını istemez, çünkü onun öleceğinden korkar. Hektor, karısı ile vedalaşmaya geldiğinde Andromache gözyaşlarıyla kocasının ellerine sarılarak: - Hektor, bu cesaretin seni benden alacak. Bana acı ve çocuğunu düşün. Ne olur kendini tehlikeye atma. Beni yalnız, çocuğunu da yetim bırakmak istemiyorsan bu surlardan dışarıya çıkma, der. Hektor karısının bu sözlerinden sonra ona: - Karıcığım, korkak gibi savaştan kaçarsam, içine düşeceğim durumu düşünmek bile beni korkutuyor. Korkak gibi yaşamaktansa ölmeyi tercih ederim, diyerek cevap verir. Hektor oğlunu kucağına alır, onu öper ve ona sarılır. Andromache gözleri yaşlı, kocasına bakar ve gülümser. Karısının bu hali Hektor’u üzer. Andromache’yi okşar, elini tutar ve ona: - Andromache, kendini böyle kederlere kaptırma. Ecelim gelmeden önce beni kimse mezara sokamaz. Hiç kimse olacakların önüne geçemez. Güzel karıcığım şimdi sen beni düşünme, her gün yaptığın işlerinle uğraş ve hizmetçilerine emirler ver. Savaşın acılarını bırak erkekler çeksin, der. Hektor bunları söyleyerek karısının yanından ayrılır ve savaş meydanına doğru yol alır (Can, 2015:306). Hektor ve Andromache’nın Kucaklaşması heykeli; Yunanlı sürrealist ressam Giorgio De Chirico (1888-1978) tarafından, 1966 yılında yapılmıştır. DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 285 www.ulakbilge.com Resim 12: Giorgio De Chirico (1888-1978), Hektor ve Andromache’nın Kucaklaşması, 1966 Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico, Rome 40 x 16 x 21 cm, bronz Kaynak:http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/collezione/sculture/?lang=en Chirico (1888-1978)’nun eserine konu olan Hektor ve Andromache, Yunan mitolojisinin hüzünlü aşk kahramanlarıdır. Chirico (1888-1978)’nun heykeli, kahramanların hikâyeleri ile örtüşmektedir. Eserde; yansıtılmak istenen hüzün, izleyiciye açıkça gösterilmektedir. Savaşa katılmak isteyen Hektor ve kocasının ölmesinden korktuğu için, onun gitmesini istemeyen Andromache; hikâyedeki veda anlarıyla eserde yer almaktadır. Hikâyedeki ikicilik, gitme ve kalma duygusu ile ön plana çıkmaktadır. Heykelde ise; kadın ve erkek figürünün varlığı, Andromache’nin Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 286 hüznünü yansıtan başı eğik duruşuna karşılık, Hektor’un dik ve kuvvetli duruşu ikiciliğin göstergesidir. Halüsinasyon Gören Toreador İspanyolca Toreador, Türkçe adıyla ‘boğa güreşçisi’ olarak bilinir. Dali (1904- 1989) bir gün sanat merkezi için alışveriş yaparken Venüs marka kalem kutusu satın alır. Kalem kutusunda gölgelerin içindeki Venüs’ü görür. Kalem kutusu, Dali (1904- 1989)’ye ilham kaynağı olmuştur (Salvador Dali Museum, 2016). Dali (1904-1989), Venüs heykellerine yer verdiği resminde, Türkçe adıyla ‘boğa güreşçisi’ olarak bilinen Toreador’u kullanarak, yaşadığı ülke İspanya’ya da atıf yapar. Birden çok özelliği kullanarak karmaşık tablolarından birinin oluşmasını sağlar. Halüsinasyon Gören Toreador, Katalan sürrealist ressam Salvador Dali (1904- 1989) tarafından 1968 yılında yapılmış resimdir. Resim 13: Slavador Dali (1904-1989), Halüsinasyon Gören Toredor, 1968 Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida 398,8 x 299,7 cm, tuval üzerine yağlı boya Kaynak:http://thedali.org/exhibit/hallucinogenic-toreador/ DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 287 www.ulakbilge.com Halüsinasyon Gören Toreador, Salvador Dali (1904-1989) tarafından yapılan karışık bir tablodur. Eserini, sol üstte portresi bulunan eşi Gala’ya ithaf etmiştir. Eser sağ altta bulunan küçük çocuğun bakış açısını yansıtır nitelikte ele alınmıştır. Küçük çocuğun Dali olduğu düşünülmektedir. Resmin üst tarafında yer alan sahne, sarı kırmızı renkler ile ele alınmıştır. Bu renkler İspanyol bayrağını oluşturmaktadır. Sol altta, ölen bir boğanın başı betimlenmiştir. Boğanın ağzından akan kanlar; minik, sarı insan figürünün de girebildiği bir koy meydana getirmiştir. Boğanın üzerinde, Dali’nin İspanya’da yaşadığı yerleşim yerinden, bir dağ manzarası yer almaktadır. Resmin sağ tarafında dağ figürü tekrar ele alınmıştır. Buradaki dağ, Dali’nin çalışma stüdyosunun yakınındaki dağ ile benzerlik taşımaktadır. Eserde; kalem kutusundan esinlenerek yaptığı yirmi sekiz tane Venüs heykeli yer almaktadır. İkinci Venüs heykelinin vücudu; Toreador’un yüzünü, ikinci ve üçüncü Venüs heykelinin eteği; Toreador’un gömleğini, birinci Venüs heykelinin eteği ise Toreador’un kırmızı pelerinini oluşturmaktadır. İspanyol askerlerinin betimlendiği üst taraftaki sinekler, Toreador’un şapkasını meydana getirmiştir. Sağ taraftaki küçük noktalar da insan figürlerini anımsatmaktadır. Birden fazla özelliğin bir araya getirilmesi ile oluşturulan resimde; Toreador ve Venüs, eril - dişil bakımından ikicilik kurgusunu meydana getirmektedir (The Hallucinogenic Toreador, 2015). Paçavraların Venüs’ü Yunanca adıyla Aphrodite efsanesi daha önceki eser tanıtımında anlatılmıştır (bkz. Deniz Kabuğundaki Venüs). Paçavraların Venüs’ü heykeli, İtalyan ressam, eylem ve nesne sanatçısı, sanat kuramcısı Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933- ) tarafından 1974 yılında yapılmıştır. Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 288 Resim 14: Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933- ), Paçavraların Venüsü,1974 The Tate Gallery, London 212 x 340 x 110 cm, mermer ve tekstil Kaynak:http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/pistoletto-venus-of-the-rags-t12200 Michelangele Pistoletto (1933- ), Venüs heykelini, canlı renklerle dolu bir paçavra yığınıyla birleştirir. Eserde Venüs, arkası dönük bir şekilde, paçavralardan oluşmuş bir yığının önüne yerleştirilerek kurgulanmıştır. Bir zamanlar hayranlık uyandıran, aşk ve güzellik tanrıçası olarak bilinen Venüs’ün, Pistoletto (1933- ) tarafından paçavralar arasında betimlenmesiyle, günlük hayatta kullanılan nesneler sanat eserleri içinde yer almıştır. Paçavraların Venüs’ü eserinde; değerli olan, estetik değeri olan ve tek renkten oluşan nesne (Venüs), değersiz olan, estetik değeri olamayan ve çok renkten oluşan nesneler (paçavralar), birbirlerinin tam tersi olmaları ile ve hareketlilik - durgunluk izlenimleri ile ikiciliği oluşturmaktadır. DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 289 www.ulakbilge.com Pegasus’un Doğuşu Medusa güzelliği ile herkesi kıskandıran bir ölümlüdür. Kendisini tanrılara adayan Medusa, Zeus’un en sevdiği kızı olan Athena’ya ait bir tapınakta yaşardı. Denizler tanrısı Poseidon da Medusa’nın güzelliğinin farkındadır. Ona olan ilgisi tutkuya dönüşünce, gizlice girdiği Athena’nın tapınağında Medusa ile zorla birlikte olur. Bunu öğrenen Athena, Medusa’yı yılan saçlı yaratığa çevirerek cezalandırır. Siniri geçmeyen Athena, ona yine de bakmaya çalışan olursa diye, Medusa’nın gözlerine bakan herkesi taşa çevirmesini sağlar. Athena bunun ile de yetinmeyerek Yunan mitolojisindeki kahramanlardan biri olan Zeus’un oğlu Perseus’dan, Medusa’nın kafasını keserek kendisine getirmesini ister. Perseus, Athena’nın isteğini yerine getirmek için kılıcı ile Medusa’nın başını bedeninden ayırır. Medusa’nın, kafasından toprağa akan kanlardan, kanatlı at olarak bilinen Pegasus doğar (Erhat,1996:234). Kanadalı Ressam Andre Durand (1947- ), Pegasus’un Doğuşu resmini 1980 yılında yapmıştır. Resim15: Andre Durand (1947- ), Pegasus’un Doğuşu, 1980 Mucizeler ve Metomorfoz Sergisi, Edinburgh Festivali 120 x 110 cm, tuval üzerine yağlı boya Kaynak:http://www.maicar.com/GML/000PhotoArchive/Durand/slides/durand008.html Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 290 Andre Durand (1947- )’ın Pegasus’un Doğuşu tablosu, Medusa’nın başının kesilerek öldürülmesi ve akan kanlardan da Pegasus’un doğması teması üzerine kurulmuştur (resim 15).Tabloda; başı kesilen Medusa’nın bedeni, Medusa’nın kesilen başı, Pegasus ve Perseus görülmektedir. Tablodaki Medusa ve Perseus, kadın - erkek ikiciliğini oluşturmaktadır. Kafasında saç yerine yılanların dolaştığı Medusa, geleneksel insan tanımlamasına aykırı olması sebebiyle biçimsel olarak ikiciliğe vurgu yapmaktadır. Hikâye düşünüldüğünde ise; Medusa’nın öldürülmesiyle doğan Pegasus, ölüm ve doğum ikiciliğini temsil etmektedir. Uzay Venüs Yunanca adıyla Aphrodite’in, Latince adıyla Venüs’ün hikâyesi daha önceki eser tanıtımında anlatılmıştır (bkz. Deniz Kabuğundaki Venüs). Uzay Venüs, Katalan sürrealist Ressam Salvador Dali (1904-1989) tarafında, 1984 yılında yapılmış bir heykeldir. Dali (1904-1989), diğer resimlerinde kullandığı figürlerini bu heykelinde tekrar kullanmıştır. Karınca, yumurta ve saat Dali (1904- 1989)’nin diğer eserlerinde yer verdiği figürlerdir. Resim16: Salvador Dali(1904-1989), Uzay Venüs, 1984 Fine Arts Museums Of San Francisco, de Young Museum, San Fracisco, CA 65,5 x 35,5 x 35 cm, bronz döküm Kaynak:https://art.famsf.org/salvador-dali/space-venus-201066 DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 291 www.ulakbilge.com Salvador Dali (1904-1989) Uzay Venüs heykelinde, diğer eserlerinde kullandığı unsurları ekleyerek bir kadın figürü yaratmıştır (Resim 16). Güzelliğin simgesi olan tanrıça Venüs’ü temel alarak, üç unsur ile birleştirmiştir. Bu unsurlar eriyen bir saat, yumurta ve karıncalardır (THE DALI UNIVERSE, 2016). Eriyen saat ve karıncalar; Dali (1904-1989)’nin ‘Belleğin Azmi’ tablosunda yer almaktadır. Eserde, yumuşak formda akan saat, zamanın akıp gittiğini vurgulamaktadır. Aynı resim içinde bulunan, ters çevrilmiş cep saati üzerindeki karıncalar, zamanı yiyerek ölümü ve aynı zamanda da üremeyi simgelemektedir. Yumurta figürü ise, Dali (1904-1989)’nin birçok resminde (Narcissus’un Metamorfozu, Yeni İnsanın Doğuşunu İzleyen Jeopolitik Çocuk, vb.) bulunmaktadır. Ona göre yumurta önemli bir metafordur. Çünkü içinde hayat vardır ve kabuğu kırıp dışarıya çıkmak, doğmak anlamına gelir. Salvador Dali (1904-1989) Uzay Venüs’ü eserinde; bu unsurları, diğer resimlerindeki anlamlarına paralel olarak kullanmıştır. Uzay Venüs heykelindeki eriyen saat figürü; zamanın ilerlemesiyle güzelliğin geçiciliğini, karınca figürü; ölümü ve aynı zamanda çoğalmayı, yumurta figürü ise; yaşamın devamını ve geleceği temsil etmektedir. Heykelde biçimsel ikicilik genel hatlarıyla görülmez. Fakat kullanılan unsurlar incelendiğinde, ölümün ve çoğalmanın betimlendiği karınca figüründe ölüm - doğum ikiciliğine vurgulama yapılmıştır. Gaia Evren yaratılmadan önce hiç bir şekil almamış Khaos, uçsuz bucaksız boşluğu ve karanlığı tanımlar. İlk olarak Khaos’dan her şeyin dayanağı olarak Gaia (yer) meydana gelir. Aynı zamanda Gaia ilk tanrısal varlıklardan biridir. Gaia, Uranos (gök)’u doğurur. Evren şekil almaya başladıktan sonra, onun üstünde yaşayacak olanları meydana getirmek gerekmektedir. Bunun içinde Gaia kendi öz oğlu Uronos ile birleşerek evrende yaşayacak canlıları meydana getirirler. Bu birleşmeden, on iki Titanlar, devler, yüz kolu ve elli başı olan değişik türde çocukları olur (Mılbourne&Stowell, 2011). Gaia ve Uranos, Yunan mitolojisinin ilk çifti olma özellikleriyle de bilinmektedir. Gaia heykeli, Mısırlı heykeltıraş William Tucker (1935- ) tarafından 1985 tarihinde yapılmıştır. Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 292 Resim17: William Tucker (1935- ), Gaia, 1985 Sanatçının koleksiyonu 221 x 140 x 127 cm, bronz Kaynak:Norbert Lynton (2015:342), Modern Sanatın Öyküsü William Tucker’in Gaia adlı çalışmasında (Resim 17), biçimsel olarak ikicilik göze çarpmazken, hikâyesine baktığımızda ikiciliğin varlığı net olarak görülmektedir. Gaia ve Uranos, hikayedeki eril - dişil ikiciliğini vurgulayan ilk noktadır. Yer veya toprak olarak da bilinen Gaia, ilk yaratılan tanrısal varlıklardandır. Uranos’u doğurarak evrende hüküm sürecek olanların meydana gelmesini sağlamıştır. Burada yer - gök birleşmesi, aynı zamanda birlikteliğin anne - oğul ilişkisine dayanması karşımıza ikicilik olarak çıkmaktadır. DOI: 10.7816/ulakbilge-04-08-06 ulakbilge, 2016, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, Volume 4, Issue 8 293 www.ulakbilge.com Sonuç Bu çalışmada, Yunan mitolojisi içeriği taşıyan 20. yüzyıl eserleri, mitolojik hikâyeleri anlatılarak ele alınmıştır. Eserler ve hikâyeler, hem biçimsel hem de içerik olarak ikicilik açısından değerlendirilmiştir. Değerlendirmeler sonucunda eserlerdeki ve hikâyelerdeki ikiciliğin, insan yaşamı izlerini taşıdığı görülmüştür. İlk olarak görülen ikicilik; ölüm ve doğumdur. Bu ikicilik; Deniz Kabuğundaki Venüs (1931) (Resim 4), Aphrodite II (1943) (Resim 8), Uyuyan Venüs (1944) (Resim 10) ve Pegasus’un Doğuşu (1980) (Resim 15) eserlerinde karşımıza çıkmaktadır. İkinci olarak yansıyan ikicilik; iyiliğe ve kötülüğe sebep olan ateşin betimlenmesidir. Orozco (1883-1949) ateşin iyiliğini ve kötülüğünü Prometheus (1930) (Resim 3) adlı eserinde vurgulamıştır. Görülen diğer bir ikicilik ise; kadın - erkek arasındaki aşk olgusudur. De Chirico (1888-1978), Hektor ve Andromache (1966) (Resim 12) eserinde; Munch (1863-1944), Eros ve Psyche (1907) (Resim 1) tablosunda; Delvaux (1897-1994), Pgymalion (1939) (Resim 7) ve Leda (1948) (Resim 11) adlı tablolarında; Francis Picabia (1879-1953), Hera (1929) (Resim 2); Max Backmann ( 1884-1950) ise, Odysseus ve Kalypso (1943) (Resim 9) adlı eserlerinde kadın ve erkeği açıkça göstererek, aşkın varlığını hissettirmişlerdir. Sanatçıların kendi bakış açıları ve üslupları ile yaklaştıkları eserlerde, üzerinde durulan ikiciliğin; iyi - kötü, ölüm - doğum ve çoğunlukla da eril - dişil olduğu görülmektedir. Ayrıca sanatçılar, insan yaşamının başrolü olan bu kavramlar dışında; fiziksel olarak farklı olan bedenlere (Resim 5), yer - gök formuna (Resim 7-10-11), karşıtlıkları çağrıştıran siyah - beyaz renge (Resim 11), yansıma ve gerçeğe (Resim 6), güzelliğe ve güzelliğin geçiciliğine (Resim 16), değerli ve değersiz olana (Resim 14) da değinmişlerdir. İkicilik düşüncesini yansıtan resimler; çağdaş sanatın her evresinde varlığını korumuştur. Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 294 KAYNAKLAR Agızza, Rosa. Antik Yunan'da Mitoloji. Gözden geçirilmiş 2. baskı. Çeviren Z. Zühre İlkgelen. İstanbul: Arkeoloji ve Sanat Yayınları, 2006. Altuner, İlyas. ‘’Kartezyen Dualizm ve Ruhun Kavramsal Değişimi’’. Iğdır Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 4 (Ekim 2013): 55-67. Bayraktar, Levent. Bergson' da Ruh-Beden İlişkisi. Yayımlanmamış doktora tezi. Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi, 2003. Beyaz, Mehtap. ‘’Monizm ve Dualizme Karşı Biyolojik Doğallık: John Searle’’. Yayımlanmamış yüksek lisans tezi. Yyy: Yıldırım Beyazıt Üniversitesi, 2014. Bulfinch, Thomas. Klasik Yunan ve Roma Mitolojisi. Çev. Özgür Umut Hoşafçı. İstabul: İnkılap Kitabevi, 2012. Can, Şefik. 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(ty) 26 Mayıs 2016)http://www.thedaliuniverse.com/en/sculpture- for-sale/space-venus-sculpture The Museum of Modern Art. (ty) 9 Mayıs 2016. http://www.moma.org/collection/works/34095?locale=en The Museum of Modern Art. (ty) 11 Mayıs 2016) http://www.moma.org/collection/works/81451?locale=en Timuçin, Afşar. Felsefe Sözlüğü. Genişletilmiş 5. baskı. İstanbul: Bulut Yayınları, 2000. Tökel, Dursun Ali. Divan Şiirinde Mitolojik Unsurlar. Ankara: Akçağ Yayınları, 2000. WikiArt. (ty) 24 Mayıs 2016. http://www.wikiart.org/en/max-beckmann/odysseus-and- calypso-1943 Erbay Aslıtürk, G. Küçükgüney, E. (2016). 20. Yüzyıl Resim Ve Heykellerinin Yunan Mitolojisi Ve İkicilik Kavramı Açısından Değerlendirilmesine Yönelik Bir Araştırma. ulakbilge, 4 (8), s.263-298. www.ulakbilge.com 298 WIKIPEDIA The Free Encyclopedia. (21 Ekim 2015) 24 Mayıs 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallucinogenic_Toreador Yunan Mitolojisi. (ty) 10 Mayıs 2016. http://www.yunanmitolojisi.com/tags/prometheus- kimdir.html work_7qslytfy7nad3nx2aruejnbcpm ---- IESE Business School-University of Navarra - 1 A BUSINESS MODEL FOR CULTURAL SERVICES: JOINT DESIGN AND PRODUCTION OF A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Beatriz Muñoz-Seca IESE Business School – University of Navarra Av. Pearson, 21 – 08034 Barcelona, Spain. Phone: (+34) 93 253 42 00 Fax: (+34) 93 253 43 43 Camino del Cerro del Águila, 3 (Ctra. de Castilla, km 5,180) – 28023 Madrid, Spain. Phone: (+34) 91 357 08 09 Fax: (+34) 91 357 29 13 Copyright © 2011 IESE Business School. Working Paper WP-941 November, 2011 A BUSINESS MODEL FOR CULTURAL SERVICES: JOINT DESIGN AND PRODUCTION OF A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Beatriz Muñoz-Seca1 Abstract Culture has grown remote from the general public and needs to be recaptured. Social and economic recognition of the role culture plays is essential and can only come about if culture is for all, not just for the few. New audiences, new demands, new business models: the sector needs to open and reinvent itself. In this article we consider culture as a service that needs to be designed from the point of view of a customer experience. A customer experience looks beyond the specific cultural performance to design an interrelated set of events that will give each customer full exposure to activities and situations that enhance his or her understanding of the artistic endeavor. An integrated service experience must come from a portfolio of institutions, or companies, working together to design and deliver a complete customer experience. A cultural service is a co-production among a group of institutions and the customer, resulting in a customer experience. This conveys a new business model for culture. This notion of a “cultural service experience” makes culture accessible to new audiences by providing new facets that plunge the audience into the creative process. To attain this goal, cultural institutions and enterprises must take two steps. First, they must design their own separate customer experience. Second, they must join forces with one another to jointly design and produce cultural services. Both steps require a deeper understanding of the institutions’ operational structure and a frame of reference to assist them in the separate and joint design of the customer experience. This article presents the Service Activity Sequence, or SAS as an operational framework that will serve this purpose. The SAS describes the activities involved in designing a customer experience and analyzes the operational structure required to bring several complementary players together to produce an integrated customer experience Keywords: culture, business model, service design, experience design, service operations, customer experience. 1 Professor, Production, Technology and Operations Management, IESE IESE Business School-University of Navarra A BUSINESS MODEL FOR CULTURAL SERVICES: JOINT DESIGN AND PRODUCTION OF A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Introduction Culture has many facets: it can be a source of personal development, a tool of social cohesion, and a driver of economic development. In this article we present an approach that will help manage the contribution of culture to economic development. For culture to be able to enhance development, it must become an intrinsic part of everyday life. The concept of culture as an “amusement” for an elite or as a treasure to be jealously guarded by self-serving custodians is obsolete. In the current economic scenario the divorce of culture from common people calls the very existence of culture into question. The world of culture needs to recapture its essence and go back to its roots as an expression of the human soul. To do that, culture needs to offer something that appeals to all segments of society, which it can only do by transforming its offer. Giving culture back to common people will create a market that is capable of enhancing economic development. This objective can only be achieved though the creation of new business models that will sustain the development of cultural entities. In this article we consider culture as a service that needs to be designed from the point of view of a customer experience. A customer experience approach looks beyond the specific cultural performance to design an interrelated set of events that will give each customer full exposure to activities and situations that enhance his or her understanding of the artistic endeavor. The notion of a “cultural service experience” makes culture accessible to new audiences by providing new facets that plunge the audience into the creative process. Thus, a painting becomes much more than a painting: it becomes an understanding of the historical moment in which the picture was painted, the biography of the artist, the environment that produced the artwork, along with complementary activities such as gastronomy. All this becomes part of the experience. To attain this goal, cultural institutions and enterprises must take two steps. First, they must design their own separate customer experience. Second, they must join forces with one another to jointly design and produce cultural services for an integrated customer experience. These steps require a deeper understanding of the institutions’ operational structure and a frame of reference to assist them in the separate and joint design of the customer experience. This article IESE Business School-University of Navarra ty. presents the Service Activity Sequence, or SAS (Muñoz-Seca, 2011), as an operational framework that will serve this purpose. The SAS describes the activities involved in designing a customer experience and analyzes the operational structure required to bring several complementary players together to produce an integrated customer experience. A business model: Culture as a service The world of culture is in upheaval. Whatever its sources of funding1, it faces a tremendous scarcity of resources. All across Europe cultural institutions are suffering as a result of huge cuts in government expenditure2 (France and Germany are the only countries in the EU that have increased government spending on culture, France by 2.7% and Germany by 2.4%). Europe is starting to look to the US sponsorship model for new ideas, yet the United States model itself seems to be in need of readjustment. Orchestras such as the renowned Philadelphia Orchestra3 are facing tremendous funding difficulties. The main topics of discussion in the cultural sector in the United States are the creation of new business models and the dichotomy of supply versus demand. In Latin America there is a need to make culture a part of people’s daily lives in order to foster social cohesion and personal development. The common theme at the Fourth Congress of Latin Culture (IV Congreso Iberoamericano de Cultura), held in September 2011 in Mar del Plata, Argentina, was the need to give culture a critical role in the development of society, rather than the ornamental function it seems to have acquired in some parts of the world. Numerous efforts to achieve this are currently under way in Latin America, including the work done by SESC4 in Brazil and the renowned “El sistema” youth orchestra program5 in Venezuela. In this article we define culture as a “service world”. To clarify the meaning of a cultural service, let us start by defining a service as “pay for performance” [Spohrer, J. and P. Maglio, 2008]. Every discipline in the cultural sector (visual, performing, audiovisual, graphic or applied arts) delivers a “performance” in the form of a painting, play, musical score or book. If we confine ourselves to this definition, a cultural service is merely the performance. We need to look further, however. The output of culture is wider than that. It has three dimensions: an educational dimension, an aesthetic dimension, and the search for beauty through the development of curiosity. Cultural services deliver knowledge and so educate. They generate a sensitivity or awareness that develops a person’s aesthetic capability and ability to detect dissonant elements6. Last but not least, by opening new perspectives and prompting a search for beauty in any form, they enhance curiosi 1 In continental Europe, Canada and Australia public funding predominates, while in the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan non-profit cultural organizations receive substantial contributions from private sources. 2 United Kingdom 30%, Ireland 12%, Portugal 9%, Netherlands 20%, and Spain 12.3% (source: Public Funding of Culture 2011, Arts and Business, United Kingdom 2011. 3 The Philadelphia Orchestra, founded in 1900, is one of the “Big Five” American orchestras. 4 SESC (Serviço Social do Comércio), an institution created with contributions from small and medium-sized enterprises, promotes community development through education and culture. The funds come from compulsory contributions – 1.5 per cent of the payroll – from trade and services businesses. 5 El Sistema is a system of youth orchestras in Venezuela designed to save the lives of under-served children through intensive and fun participation in music. Founded in 1975 by Jose Antonio Abreu, el Sistema has become a paradigm for social action through quality music-making. 6 I always say to be able to value a smooth working production line you need to have an aesthetic sensibility. 2 - IESE Business School-University of Navarra So we need a different definition of service. Let us take the following: “a service is a time- perishable, intangible experience performed for a client who is acting in the role of co-producer to transform the state of the client” [Spohrer, J. and P. Maglio, 2008]. The key element in this definition is the fact that the customer is transformed through the service. Service is dynamic. Repeated experience of culture transforms its customers by causing them to grow in the educational, aesthetic and curiosity dimensions. This transformation is closely linked to the idea that the customer experience is the core of a service, and that service co-creation7 [Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004] is a critical aspect. In a service experience, the customer co-constructs his experience through joint problem definition and problem solving. These ideas are a far cry from culture as practiced today. Research [Hume at al., 2005] shows that cultural managers concentrate their efforts on performance as the means of delivering artistic value and content, often minimizing the importance of service. In the performing arts there is little attempt to design a service around the customer experience. Service design8 itself is rare in cultural organizations [Stuart and Tax, 2004]. According to research [Hume at al., 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010], most companies working in the field of service design in the performing arts specialize in the design of infrastructure and other technical means of delivering a good performance, such as lighting, acoustics, or stage design. Managers perceive technical delivery as the main driver of customer satisfaction and place more emphasis on it than on the delivery of augmented features. Customers, in contrast, divide the offering into two distinct phases: the cultural offering (core service and technical elements of the show) and the service offering (entire experience). Emotional and experiential aspects have been found to be the key drivers of repeat consumption in the performing arts [Hume at al., 2010]. Customers evaluate the offering as a whole, taking the costs and all the activities that make up the service into account in their assessment of the value of the service. Cultural institutions need to abandon the idea that the intrinsic value of their assets is sufficient for them to subsist. Of course, if you are the Musée de l’Orangerie9 and your collection includes several of Monet’s Water Lilies paintings, then you play in the top league. We all have to agree that the mise en scène of the Water Lilies murals at the Orangerie is spectacular. But the scope of the offer needs to be expanded. A full customer experience would include a deeper understanding of Monet’s intentions, acquired through an exploration of the context of the paintings and the circumstances in which they were produced10. It would provide a complete journey, offering a comprehensive experience built around a portfolio of learning situations. An embryonic example of this idea can be found at the Oakland Museum of California, which aims to reinvent itself as a model institution supported by strong community engagement. The museum has ambitious goals for increasing the number of local visitors from its highly diverse neighborhood. Its education department has been working with curators, researchers, and designers to share knowledge about visitor needs and to design projects that encourage visitor participation. 7 Cocreation refers to the joint creation of value by the company and the customer, allowing the customer to co- construct the service experience to suit his context through joint problem definition and problem solving. It creates an experience environment in which consumers can have active dialogue and co-construct personalized experiences. [Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004]. 8 To further explore the service design concept see Muñoz-Seca and Arenas “An overview of service design” July 2011, IESE, Technical Note 478. 9 The Musée de l’Orangerie is an art gallery of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings located on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Though most famous for being the permanent home for eight Water Lilies murals by Claude Monet, the museum also contains works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Pierre- Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, among others. 10 Wouldn’t it be wonderful to include a trip to his Giverny gardens to develop a fuller understanding of the experience? IESE Business School-University of Navarra - 3 The need to change Why should a cultural institution embark on such a journey? For two clear reasons: because the demand for culture is changing, and because financial resources are becoming scarce. This is an explosive combination, forcing institutions to tread new paths in order to survive. It has to be acknowledged that the cultural sector’s needs will never be fully met by an increase in demand. The sector depends for its survival on private or public funding. All the same, while cultural institutions cannot subsist on their own, they could increase their revenues by attracting more customers and so reduce their funding requirements. So what are the trends in cultural audiences? Let’s look at some data. In the United States the profile of the arts visitor is changing and visitor numbers are falling compared to other leisure activities.11 Figure 1 Percentage of United States adults who attended a performing arts event or other arts activity at least once in the previous 12 months (%) 2002 2008 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% H is to ric s ite s Ar t/c ra ft fa irs a nd fe st iv al s… Ar t M us eu m s/ G al le rie s … Pe rfo rm in g ar ts fe st iva ls M us ic al p la ys N on -m us ic al p la ys C la ss ic al M us ic Ba lle t O pe ra 31.6% 33.4% 26.5% 21% 17% 17.1% 12.3% 11.6% 3.9% 3.2% 2% 9% 25% 25% 23% 9% 3% 2002 2008 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% H is to ric s ite s Ar t/c ra ft fa irs a nd fe st iv al s… Ar t M us eu m s/ G al le rie s … Pe rfo rm in g ar ts fe st iva ls M us ic al p la ys N on -m us ic al p la ys C la ss ic al M us ic Ba lle t O pe ra 31.6% 33.4% 26.5% 21% 17% 17.1% 12.3% 11.6% 3.9% 3.2% 2% 9% 25% 25% 23% 9% 3% Source: 2002 and 2008 Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2008 one in three adults, i.e., more than 81 million Americans, had visited a museum or attended an art performance during the twelve months preceding the survey. Attendance at cultural events in 2007-2008 was lower than in previous years and particularly low in opera (2.1%) and ballet (7%). The number of visitors to museums and historical monuments was also lower than in previous years (up to 21% lower than in 2002). 11 The 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) collected arts participation data and other information from more than 18,000 adults (aged 18 and above) across the United States. 4 - IESE Business School-University of Navarra In Europe, around 30 per cent of the population participates in an average of one cultural activity per year. Cinema and historical monuments are the only activities where participation exceeds 50 percent. The average age of audiences at cultural events has risen from 39 in 1982 to 45 in 2008. Thirty-nine per cent of daily Internet users use the Internet to listen to or download music, see paintings or sculptures, or publish their own artistic creations. Figure 2 Percent of respondents who participated in cultural activities at least once in the previous 12 months, EU-27, 2002 and 2007 (%) 2002 2007 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% Been to the cinema Been to the theater Been to a concert Visited museums or galleries Visited historical monuments Seen a ballet, a dance performance or an opera 37% 55% 54% 46% 41% 46% 44% 67% 51% 32% 37% 18% 2002 2007 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% Been to the cinema Been to the theater Been to a concert Visited museums or galleries Visited historical monuments Seen a ballet, a dance performance or an opera 37% 55% 54% 46% 41% 46% 44% 67% 51% 32% 37% 18% Source: Eurobarometer 67.1, 2007 (http://www.aulaintercultural.org/IMG/pdf/eurostat.pdf); and Spadaro, Rosario (2002): “Europeans’ participation in cultural activities. A Eurobarometer Survey carried out at the request of the European Commission, Eurostat” (http://ec.europa.eu/culture/pdf/doc967_en.pdf). Besides age, another very important social factor in the segmentation of the arts market is the ethnic make-up of the audience. In the United States12 in 2008 non-Hispanic white Americans made up 67 per cent of the total United States population and 80 per cent of museum visitors, while the remaining 36 per cent of the population, consisting mainly of Hispanics/Latinos and African Americans, accounted for only 9 per cent of museum visitors. In 25 years’ time these latter two groups will account for almost 50 per cent of the total United States population. Similar trends can be observed in Spain, which, according to an OECD report, is the world’s second largest recipient of immigrants. This data clearly demonstrates that the current offer does not meet customer demands. A transformation is needed. According to Radbourne [2007], the new arts consumer is in search of a cultural experience which fulfills a need that has very little to do with the traditional arts marketing plan, demonstrating that audiences will be fiercely loyal if they can experience fulfillment and realization in the arts experience. 12 Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums, B. Farrell and M. Medvedeva, The AAM Press, 2010. IESE Business School-University of Navarra - 5 http://ec.europa.eu/culture/pdf/doc967_en.pdf How are cultural institutions addressing these changes? They seem to have adopted a piecemeal, trial-and-error approach. But their efforts do not seem to be aimed at achieving an integrated customer experience. Leipzig’s Spinnerei, for instance, a former cotton mill, has become the epicenter of contemporary art in the city, with more than a hundred artists living and working there. The huge complex includes 14 galleries, engraving workshops, architectural studios, an arthouse cinema, and so on. The Spinnerei is also the venue for British artist Jim Whiting’s Bimbotown Parties, mixing music and performance with samples of European art. Also in Leipzig, art connoisseurs can sleep in the “Paris Syndrome” Hotel, a hotel/apartment designed by the artist Jun Yang and installed in the Museum of Contemporary Art. Another example comes from the Times Square Alliance13 in NYC, featuring an outdoor exhibition of four sculptures, in partnership with the Armory Art Show. This joint initiative gave the galleries taking part in the Armory Arts Week 2011 a chance to explore New York City’s public spaces and bring their artists to the attention of a wider audience. These are examples of attempts to attract new audiences, but they do not take into account all the activities that a customer experience requires. Designing and producing a customer experience requires a frame of reference, a sort of “bookcase” in which to organize ideas and actions. We propose the Service Activity Sequence, or SAS [Muñoz-Seca, 2011], as such a framework. The SAS has been conceived with the aim of helping managers understand the dynamics of their service operations. Problem solving and the design of a customer experience are at the core of the SAS. In the following section we will describe the SAS. We will give examples of cultural institutions that have already taken steps to develop a different approach by reinventing some of the SAS activities. This is a strong starting point. The SAS framework will help to identify other activities that will contribute to the complete customer experience. The Service Activity Sequence as an operational construct for the business model The SAS comprises seven activities (see Figure 3), in three groups: service design, operational infrastructure, and delivery and sustainability. Service design goes from concept development and prototyping to service engineering. Operational infrastructure deals with the configuration of the service’s operational structure and the definition of service performance indicators. Delivery and sustainability addresses the requirements for the actual service delivery. It also covers service improvement requirements and extracts new features to meet customers’ unmet needs. These new features are then fed back to the design chain, giving rise to the service innovation loop. Service delivery agents have a treasure of information that belongs to them, not to the company. The service innovation loop creates a path for knowledge materialization and organizational learning. 13 The Times Square Alliance, founded in 1992, works to improve and promote Times Square. It promotes local businesses and encourages economic development and public improvements (www.timessquarenyc.org). 6 - IESE Business School-University of Navarra Figure 3 The SAS Prototyping The operational variables and performance indicators Service improvements New features demand Service delivery Service design Operational infrastructure Concept development Delivery and sustainability Service engineering Prototyping The operational variables and performance indicators Service improvements New features demand Service delivery Service innovation loop Concept development Service engineering Prototyping The operational variables and performance indicators Service improvements New features demand Service delivery Service design Operational infrastructure Concept development Delivery and sustainability Service engineering Prototyping The operational variables and performance indicators Service improvements New features demand Service delivery Service innovation loop Concept development Service engineering Source: Own elaboration. The design of the customer experience starts with concept development. Experience design as a first step in service design is illustrated by the Finnish Theatre Academy’s “Tourism Drama”, a project in which the methods of playwriting and staging are used as a model for designing tourism experiences. Tourism professionals brainstorm ideas for the “theme” and “plot”, engage in creative writing, plan the “roles”, build the “stage” and “props”, and so on. Ideas for the script and for the staged experience are sought in local stories, anecdotes and the social or cultural history of the place or event. Tourists are then brought to the “stage” and play an active part in the “play”, co-creating their tourism experience with the help of professional facilitators or “stagers”. Concept development needs to address the essence14 of the service, i.e., the core message the service is intended to deliver. Customers experience a service through all five senses, and concept development crafts a set of activities that will create emotional connections through an engaging, compelling and consistent context (Zomerdijk and Voss, 2009, 2011). In the “Shaman’s Drum” event for tourists in Lapland [Kokkinen, 2006], an audience silently carrying lanterns creates the atmosphere that the performers need. At bakery/restaurants in the Le Pain Quotidien chain, the design of the physical environment, including the façade and the rustic interior, conveys the impression of eating in a farmhouse, which is an important part of the customer experience. Virgin Atlantic’s new Clubhouse at Heathrow airport is designed for different moods, from “business” to “play” to “relax”, and has a variety of sensory features to support those moods, including olive trees, an outdoor space, and a water wall. Virgin Atlantic operates a mood lighting system on several of their aircraft to get passengers in the right mood 14 According to Webster’s dictionary, the essence of a thing is the properties or attributes by means of which that thing can be placed in its proper class or identified as being what it is. IESE Business School-University of Navarra - 7 for take-off, eating, and sleeping. In a recent overview of the world’s best airlines, customers chose Virgin as number one. Prototyping helps turn ideas into services through testing, tuning, and refinement. The basic idea is to detect all the initial flaws in the service experience. Rehearsals in the performing arts are a classic example. Customer experience design requires simulations of the whole experience in order to anticipate possible problems. The third activity, service engineering, serves two purposes. First, it sets up structures to assist in the service delivery problem-solving process. These problem-solving structures are based on an understanding of the mechanisms of any problem-solving process. Second, it defines the meta- processes15 that determine the functional specification of the service. These meta-processes have a duality: on the one hand, they must provide the big chunks of knowledge that are required in order to materialize the service concept, providing a first definition of its components; on the other, they must set up the macro-processes required for delivering the service. The operational infrastructure describes the activities that are required in order to bring a service to a mass market. It concentrates in the configuration of the operational variables, The setup of the operational variables16 defines the way the service must be constructed. It addresses questions such as how many people are needed, how processes will behave, what the operational rules should specify, or what type of information is needed. These activities are complemented by the creation of service performance indicators. Much of the cultural indicator literature presents data on outputs (such as participation rates), but not on outcomes or impacts [Selwood, 2003; York, 2003]. The purpose of the indicators should not be to control, but to assess performance, in order to help choose preventive measures. Indicators will give objective measures of deviations, providing data to each agent. In the context of customer experience design, they must provide data that can be used to analyze and assess customer satisfaction with the overall experience [Muñoz-Seca and Llerena, 2011]. Delivery and sustainability starts with service delivery. The main pillar of this activity is human interaction and everything that is required in order to deliver a five-star service. Agents require clear problem-solving skills and knowledge. They are “brain workers” [Muñoz-Seca and Riverola, 2008], so the agent’s knowledge profile17 will be crucial [Muñoz-Seca and Riverola, 2004]. Agents need three types of competences [Muñoz-Seca 1998, Muñoz-Seca and Riverola, 2004], namely domain competences, task competences, and inference competences. Domain and task competences relate to the knowledge needed to perform the task. Inference competences relate to problem-solving capabilities. In order to deliver a satisfactory customer experience, agents must develop these competences for dealing with situations. Tacoma Art Museum [Ferguson et al., 2006] hires employees and volunteers to fill three basic service roles, namely, Visitor Service 15 “Meta-” (from Greek: μτά = “after”, “beyond”) is a prefix used to indicate that a concept is an abstraction from another concept. 16 Processes, the capacity required in order to deliver the service, the structure of the flows and the configuration of the time structure, the human resources profile including problem-solving skills, the structure of information for the constant problem-solving activity, and lastly, the rules that govern the service. For a more in-depth discussion of these concepts, see Muñoz-Seca and Riverola (2004, 2008). 17 The idea behind the structure of the agents’ knowledge profile is simple: in order to prevent frustration when an agent is faced with an excessively challenging task, we must diagnose the knowledge gaps that may cause such frustration. Where there is a high degree of frustration, the agent will become blocked. An agent’s knowledge gaps can be determined by measuring his level of knowledge in the areas that are relevant to the problem at hand. 8 - IESE Business School-University of Navarra Representative, Museum and Café Personnel, and Gallery Attendant. The primary role of service personnel is to provide friendly, helpful information to customers while positively influencing customers’ experience by solving their problems. The visitor service representative is expected to serve as a “concierge”, informing customers where to grab lunch, what other areas to visit, and how to get to certain locations. Gallery attendants are also expected to serve as a resource, answering questions pertaining to the exhibits. In service delivery, special attention must be paid to the impact that the existence of other customers can have on the customer experience18. Some services are individual and so are individually interfaced. In others, such as culture, the impact of other customers can be devastating. A theater on Broadway, with hordes of people queuing to get in, needs to take this into account. Technology can help. Using a CAVE19 virtual reality environment, Juarez et al. [2010] developed a conceptual design for an exhibition by the Nationaal Historisch Museum in the Netherlands. The exhibition consisted of a virtual museum tour that reproduced events from the history of the Netherlands. Each visitor had his or her own audio and was able to interact with characters in the virtual world through a handheld device. Having separate audio and shared visuals in the virtual world meant that visitors could have both individual and group experiences. In the interactive exhibition, visitors could walk around and interact in a dynamic virtual world recreating sixteenth-century Holland, meeting people (avatars) with whom they could interact. The avatars would respond to the questions selected by the visitor. Where once audiences were seen as primarily passive [Wheeler, 2004; Boorsma 2006], now they contribute to the “co-creation of value” [Etgar, 2008]. The service improvement activity deals with the constant need to polish the customer experience. A “thousand small improvements” is the way to constantly improve services. Sometimes, small problems result in small solutions that have a tremendous impact. We should not underestimate little things: as Arthur Rubinstein, the great pianist, said, “God can be found in little details”. A five-star service is based on an array of perfect little details. For a service to improve, three things are required. First, the agents must have the competences mentioned above (task, domain, and inference competences). Second, the service provider must understand that learning is its most critical asset, to be cherished above all. It must therefore value individual problem-solving and have mechanisms that guide problem-solving toward strategic goals. Third, there must be an acceptance of the possibility of failure, as learning is achieved not only through problem solving but also through generating and implementing new ideas, which can result in failure. Failure is the best way to learn and every failure is a learning opportunity for the whole company. The important thing is to erase the negative connotation. To improve means to change, and change is always a risk. Services are living things, and the best input point for changing demands is the agent that delivers the service. The New features demand activity is focused on getting feedback from the service delivery. Its main purpose is to relay that feedback to the service design chain. This input is transformed, through concept development, into new features and service components, launching a new cycle of development of activities in the SAS. The output of this model should be a cultural offer that is more in tune with customers’ unmet needs. Opera houses taking their 18 This idea is taken from one of the characteristics of experience-centric services [Zomerdijk and Voss, 2009]. 19 A Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) is an implementation of a virtual reality system consisting of a physical installation for image or video projection and the software that controls the installation. IESE Business School-University of Navarra - 9 performances to unusual spaces such as garages are an example. According to OPERA America20 CEO Marc A. Scorca21, “Right now there’s a very interesting developing trend – I can report on it in Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas – where the big opera company is reducing the number of productions and performances that it does in the big opera house in order to start doing some productions like the smaller ensembles of artists: smaller productions, in unusual spaces, of unusual repertoire. One of the things that we have found is that this new idea attracts new philanthropy.” And he continues, “In the opera business you start thinking about the customer when they are in the opera house. But in the entertainment business you think about where they had dinner beforehand and what club they will go to afterward. That challenges a lot of companies, although some of them do pay attention to this, like the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, where they have a beautiful tent outside of the theater in the garden, where people have dinner beforehand and have a reception with artists afterwards. You don’t go from 8 o’clock pm to 11 o’clock pm; you go from 6 pm till midnight.” New features and new ways of meeting changing demands are incorporated in the offer. However, the concept development of a customer experience will need to consider the whole experience and probably add other activities. The examples given in this section provide us with an up-to-date view of how many cultural institutions are trying to change. They are aware of the need for change. They are experimenting with new elements, without really understanding all the effects these new measures may have on their customers’ experience of the service. The SAS is intended as a framework to facilitate this endeavor. A change in any one activity has an effect on all the others. And a customer experience is created by implementing all seven activities. A company that attempts to change its service without understanding the whole impact may be missing opportunities or, worse, creating a dysfunctional output. Our business model goes a step further. For a single company or institution to create a customer experience is not sufficient. The cultural sector as a whole needs to create an integrated customer experience, basing its differentiated proposal on the joint contributions of several partners. Economic growth will come from attracting new audiences who find in culture a proposition that enhances their personal dimensions and provides alternative options for leisure. Cooperation to jointly design and produce an integrated customer experience The idea is simple. An integrated service experience must come from a portfolio of institutions, or companies, working together to design and deliver a complete customer experience. A cultural service is a co-production22 among a group of institutions and the customer, resulting in a customer experience. This conveys a new business model for culture. 20 OPERA America provides members with tools to maximize the effectiveness of financial and human resources, expand the scope of repertoire and programs, and extend their reach to new and diverse audiences. Founded in 1970, OPERA America has an international membership that includes nearly 150 Professional Company Members, 300 Associate and Business Members, 2,000 Individual Members and over 16,000 subscribers to its electronic news service. 21 Personal interview, June 2011. 22 Co-production [Lengnick-Hall et al., 2000] means engaging customers as active participants in the organization’s work, providing a functional [Bettencourt et al., 2002] collaborative involvement in the production of services. Customers must possess the ability to perform the behaviors that are expected of them (Groth 2005, Bowen 1986). It 10 - IESE Business School-University of Navarra To attain this goal, each individual institution needs to assess its separate SAS activities and, together with other institutions, jointly design complementary actions. This approach cuts across sectors that could work together proactively. Culture thus becomes an integrating factor among sectors, playing a key role in the customer activity choice. This idea is not totally original. Various initiatives combining culture with tourism already exist, such as the Hay Festival, and honors such as European Capital of Culture23 [Muñoz-Seca and Rodriguez, 2011]. The Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts is a very successful literary festival that has been held each year since 1988 in the Welsh village of Hay-on-Wye, attracting numerous personalities from the worlds of literature, art and politics. Since 2006 it has expanded its brand by creating Hay festivals in Bogota, Cartagena de Indias, Segovia and Granada, offering its know-how and a direct relationship with thousands of writers. In Liverpool’s year as capital of culture, the city’s arts venues and events received 15 million visits, 30% more than the previous year24. The numbers indicate a degree of economic success; but the lack of an integrated design may have diminished the impact. The economic impact of festivals is a fact. In 2010 the Edinburgh International Festival25 welcomed approximately 396,000 visitors, of which 27% spent an average of seven nights in the city. Ticket revenues topped an all-time high of 2.6 million pounds. The Avignon Theatre Festival creates about 600 jobs during the event and attracts between 100,000 and 150,000 spectators in the payment shows and an average of 30,000 in the free shows. With a budget of 10.5 million euros in 2009, more than half from government, it generated 23 million euros of economic benefits for the city. The Classical Music Festival in Salzburg generates enough income to cover 73% of its costs and has negligible financial aid from the public sector.26 Its economic impact in Austria is around 225 million euros [Gaubinger, 2006]. The Rock in Rio pop festival held in Lisbon in 2008 had an economic impact of 87.5 million euros. Some festivals are attempting to add to the experience. The Houston iFest music and culture festival [Rosenstein, 2009] chooses a different country or culture as its focus each year and produces a comprehensive education program for students from elementary to high school level. The cultural heart of the festival is the Living Museum, which offers a variety of iconic structures, demonstrations, and interactive hands-on exhibits, immersing festival attendees in the chosen theme. An outdoor international market offers shopping experiences involving more than 500 artists from all over the world. The international food program features cuisines from other countries, while the international music and dance program includes groups performing in diverse styles and genres. Service design could support these efforts by providing a more comprehensive customer experience and generating new service proposals. By diagnosing all the SAS activities, is vital that consumers understand what they are expected to do [Bowen 1986; Bowen and Waldman 1999; Lengnick-Hall et al., 2000] and are willing to contribute to various organizational activities [Escher M.C., 2007]. 23 The European Capital of Culture program, sponsored by the European Commission since 1985, is intended to encourage cooperation between Member States and promote mutual understanding between European citizens through culture. Each year one or two cities are designated as cultural capitals, placing them at the center of cultural activity in Europe for one year. 24 Nosheen Igbal, “Liverpool culture venues welcome 15m visitors in 2008”, guardian.co.uk, Thursday, 11 December 2008. 25 Launched in 1947 and a pioneer among theater festivals. 26 The 2010 budget amounted to 49.5 million euros. The revenue comprised ticket sales (50%), sponsorship (11%), grants from the circle of friends and patrons (4%), and other sources such as allowances for radio and TV Festival, the hiring of venues, program sales, and advertising (8%). IESE Business School-University of Navarra - 11 managers could find gaps and unmet demands that offered opportunities. Our proposal is to push for this type of initiative, but using systematic analysis to produce a customer experience. We present the SAS as the basis for developing this joint design and production. A customer experience starts the moment the customer first thinks about the service. Customer experience analysis needs to look at the whole span of activities and provide answers for each one of them. Each individual provider, regardless of its size, needs to design its service experience. But not all companies can afford to have fully developed SAS activities. SMEs are “abnormal” in that they lack the required body of knowledge to tackle all customer requirements. Their size may limit their capacity to fully deal with all service requirements [Muñoz-Seca 1992]. There is no shame in this, but there is a need to understand the situation and provide alternative solutions. The answer lies not in growth but in collaboration. Companies can collaborate in individual SAS activities or concentrate on a group of activities in order to join forces and co-create a customer experience. Governments can play a crucial role in promoting this model by helping find partners to create integrated experiences and by providing sources of knowledge for companies that lack resources. Designing and producing a joint customer experience is only one step beyond what companies are already doing today, but it could make a tremendous difference to customer appreciation of the service. A trip to Tuscany is always wonderful, but a fully developed customer experience that combines cultural assets, the performing arts, food, history, and a deeper understanding of the local way of life could be a glorious experience. Concluding remarks Culture should not be only for an elite. Culture is an intrinsic part of humankind and should be part of daily life. It has grown remote from the general public and needs to be recaptured. Social and economic recognition of the role culture plays is essential and can only come about if culture is for all, not just for the few. New audiences, new demands, new business models: we need to open the whole sector and reinvent it through alternative approaches. Our proposition focuses on the customer experience and how to design and produce such an experience. The Service Activity Sequence (SAS) can accomplish that task. The SAS provides a guiding framework for developing a customer experience. It also allows for joint design of an integrated service experience among multiple institutions. Research is needed in order to promote this idea. But cultural companies and institutions do not have much time. They need to try new approaches in order to meet their survival challenge. I hope this article will provide them with some guidance. 12 - IESE Business School-University of Navarra References ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (2010), Creative Economy Report Card. April 2010. Baker, M. and G. Sweeney (1999), Business Process Reengineering in the Hospitality Industry: Process Improvement in ALPHA Flight Services. Information Technology & Tourism 2, pp. 45-55. Boorsma, M. (2006), A Strategic Logic for Arts Marketing: Integrating Customer Value and Artistic Objectives, International Journal of Cultural Policy 12 (1), pp. 73-92. Brown, T. (2008), Design thinking, Harvard Business Review. Escher, M. C. 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Abstract Introduction A business model: Culture as a service The need to change The Service Activity Sequence as an operational construct for the business model Cooperation to jointly design and produce an integrated customer experience Concluding remarks References work_7zk47jio5vavdm2bbahnhktane ---- Tourists’ walking rhythms: ‘doing’ the Tunis Medina, Tunisia Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rscg20 Social & Cultural Geography ISSN: 1464-9365 (Print) 1470-1197 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rscg20 Tourists’ walking rhythms: ‘doing’ the Tunis Medina, Tunisia João Sarmento To cite this article: João Sarmento (2017) Tourists’ walking rhythms: ‘doing’ the Tunis Medina, Tunisia, Social & Cultural Geography, 18:3, 295-314, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2016.1174283 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1174283 Published online: 26 Apr 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 350 View Crossmark data Citing articles: 2 View citing articles http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rscg20 http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rscg20 http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/14649365.2016.1174283 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1174283 http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rscg20&show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rscg20&show=instructions http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/14649365.2016.1174283&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2016-04-26 http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/14649365.2016.1174283&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2016-04-26 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/14649365.2016.1174283#tabModule http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/14649365.2016.1174283#tabModule Social & cultural GeoGraphy, 2017 Vol. 18, No. 3, 295–314 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1174283 Tourists’ walking rhythms: ‘doing’ the Tunis Medina, Tunisia João Sarmentoa,b  aGeography Department, university of Minho, campus de azurém, Guimarães, portugal; bcentre for Geographical Studies, university of lisbon, lisbon, portugal ABSTRACT The contemporary medina of Tunis is intimately connected to the various urban development stages of the city at large. Despite its UNESCO status and undisputable attractions, the medina is peripheral to Tunisian tourism development. Yet its maze of streets is walked on a daily basis by numerous tourists, who bring flair, choreographies and rhythms which also constitute the medina. While there are a growing number of studies focusing on tourists’ movements, using technologies that allow for accurate mapping of timespace trajectories, I argue that we have much to learn from the embodied ways in which tourists move in an unknown terrain. Inspired by Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, this paper explores tourists’ rhythms and modes of walking, including their performances, body languages, stops and advances, and gaze interactions. Drawing on a combination of mobile methodologies, interviews and online comments, I argue that tourists engage in many different walking rhythms, which shift quickly according to the situation. It is the complex manner in which tourist bodies, rhythms and urban forms intersect within the contemporary city that contributes to the construction of the city itself. Rythmes des touristes à pied: promenade dans la Medina à Tunis, en Tunisie RÉSUMÉ La médina contemporaine de Tunis est étroitement liée aux différentes étapes de l’ensemble du développement urbain de la ville. Malgré son statut d’UNESCO et ses attractions touristiques incontestables, la médina est secondaire par rapport au développement touristique tunisien. Pourtant, au quotidien, de nombreux touristes se promènent dans le dédale de ses ruelles et apportent une touche de style, des chorégraphies et des rythmes, qui eux aussi constituent la médina. Bien qu’il y ait un nombre croissant d’études qui se concentrent sur les mouvements des touristes, en utilisant des technologies qui permettent une cartographie exacte des trajectoires spatio- temporelles, je soutiens que nous avons beaucoup à apprendre des façons incarnées dont les touristes se déplacent sur un terrain inconnu. Inspiré de l’analyse du rythme de Lefebvre, cet article explore les rythmes et les modes de promenade des touristes, incluant leurs comportements, langage corporel, arrêts et progrès, ainsi que les © 2016 informa uK limited, trading as taylor & Francis Group KEYWORDS Walking; rhythm; lefebvre; tourists; tunisia; tunis Medina MOTS CLÉS Marche; rythme; lefebvre; touristes; tunisie; Médina de tunis ARTICLE HISTORY received 29 July 2014 accepted 4 March 2016 CONTACT João Sarmento j.sarmento@geografia.uminho.pt PALABRAS CLAVE andar; ritmo; lefebvre; turistas; túnez; Medina de túnez http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4770-2427 mailto:j.sarmento@geografia.uminho.pt http://www.tandfonline.com 296 J. SarMENTO Viewed from a certain angle, the geography of the city merges with the equally indistinguishable geography of thought and its very (im)possibility. a labyrinth city, a rhizome city, the Medina is the perfect reflection of thoughts that are intertwined, step by step, as one follows its paths. (Bensmaïa, 2003, p. 30) Introduction On a sunny morning, a group of tourists just arrived from Palermo, Sicily, step off the MCS Preziosa, a luxurious resort-like cruise ship docked in the port of La Goullete, Tunisia. Having read a glossy coloured brochure which describes the medina as a ‘colourful world (…) a lively district for shopping, arabian style (…) a shopper’s delight’ (MSC Cruises, 2014), they make the 18-km journey to Tunis by taxi. apparently prepared for an ‘oriental’ adventure – sunny hat on the head, sturdy shoes on, camera wrist straps in place – the medina is on the cruise shore excursions menu, one of the sights to be collected, firmly established as a ‘must see’ in their imagination. They are joined by many other western tourists coming from nearby resorts and hotels, and will literally bump into numerous others in the medina. as they ramble the ‘exciting labyrinth laden with secrets, narrow alleyways, small shops, huge interactions de leurs regards. En m’appuyant sur un ensemble de méthodologies modernes, d’entretiens et de commentaires en ligne, je soutiens que les touristes pratiquent de nombreux rythmes de déambulations, qui changent vite selon la situation. C’est la façon complexe dont les corps des touristes, les rythmes et les formes urbaines se croisent dans une grande ville contemporaine qui contribue à la construction de la ville même. Los ritmos de caminar de los turistas: ‘haciendo’ la Medina de Túnez, Túnez RESUMEN La medina de Túnez contemporánea está íntimamente conectada con las diferentes etapas de desarrollo urbano de la ciudad en general. a pesar de haber sido reconocida como patrimonio mundial por la UNESCO y de sus atractivos indiscutibles, la medina se mantiene periférica al desarrollo turístico de Túnez. Sin embargo, su laberinto de calles es transitado diariamente por numerosos turistas, que aportan estilo, coreografías y ritmos que también constituyen la medina. Si bien hay un número creciente de estudios que se centran en los movimientos de turistas, utilizando tecnologías que permiten obtener una cartografía precisa de las trayectorias de espacio y tiempo, se argumenta que tenemos mucho que aprender de las formas corporales en la que los turistas se mueven en un terreno desconocido. Inspirado por el análisis del ritmo de Lefebvre, este trabajo explora los ritmos y modos de caminar de los turistas, incluyendo sus actuaciones, lenguajes corporales, paradas y avances e interacciones de miradas. Sobre la base de una combinación de metodologías móviles, entrevistas y comentarios en línea, se argumenta que los turistas se involucran en muchos ritmos para caminar diferentes, que cambian rápidamente de acuerdo a la situación. Es la manera compleja en la que los cuerpos de los turistas, los ritmos y las formas urbanas se cruzan dentro de la ciudad contemporánea lo que contribuye a la construcción de la propia ciudad. SOCIaL & CULTUraL GEOGraPHY 297 mosques and palaces’ (MSC Cruises, 2014), as they are confronted by the city fabric, they will also encounter sellers, guides and passing-by locals and, for some time during that day, multiple choreographies will blend in rhythmic and arrhythmic ensembles. The movement of bodies in the city, their textures and empirical sensitivities, at times denoting fear, joy, determination, objectivity or aimless performance, will result in dynamic intersections that themselves constitute the city. as Sassen (1999) argued, cities are places where different temporalities of action come into friction. as a practice, walking involves various paces and rhythms, and has always been central to the production and experience of cities (Crang, 2001; de Certeau, 1984; Featherstone, 1998; Lefebvre, 2004; Wunderlich, 2008). at the same time, walking has long been one of the key ways in which tourists move through and negotiate space. Walking is a significant means by which tourism and tourism spaces are constructed (Edensor, 2010; Solnit, 2000), from the promenade anglaise to hiking trails and heritage sites. To grasp the walking rhythms of tourists visiting the medina of Tunis, Tunisia, this paper draws on Lefebvre’s (2004) unfinished work on rhythmanalysis, with its emphasis on the relativity of rhythms, and the subtleties of regarding rhythm as a focus for analysis. In an attempt to complement some of Lefebvre’s concepts, I also take on board de Certeau (1984) notions of strategies and tactics, which are useful to unravel some of the specific ways in which the medina is constructed. Strategies and tactics help us to think about tourist spaces and tourists’ movements and pauses. Since the medina is a place almost exclusively visited on foot, understanding tourists’ walking rhythms and their experience in what can, for them, be considered a novel and strange place of alleys and obscure streets is central to the under- standing of the medina itself. Thus, I also make use of Wunderlich (2008) descriptive cate- gories of different types of urban walking. In an attempt to bridge the abstraction of concepts and a more concrete analysis of the medina, I employ four main methods of data collection and experience, which are detailed further below. I follow tourists throughout the medina – a novel strategy which I call ‘shadowing-at-a-distance’ – observing their interactions and encounters; I contrast their rhythms with my own when we roam the alleyways and streets; I interview them informally at one of the medina’s entrances; and I interlace these experiences and remarks with various comments about their visits left on Trip advisor, an online forum for travellers. This combination of methods allows me to arrive at a more concrete rhyth- manalysis of the medina of Tunis, offering a new perspective on tourists’ modes of walking and contingent urban choreographies, in a way that challenges rigid categories. What follows is divided into four main sections. First I look at conceptual issues raised by Lefebvre in his quest to grasp rhythmanalysis; second I take a close look at the medina of Tunis and at the ways in which it has been constructed through time; third I proceed to explain the methodological strategies used to empirically analyse tourist rhythms in the medina; fourth I discuss and analyse the tourists’ co-creation of the medina’s daily rhythms and relate these back to Lefebvre’s work. Rhythmanalysis and tourist walking There is a long history of work addressing body rhythms and walking in the city. In the 1960s, Time Geography attempted to escape ‘the flat map with its static patterns and think in terms of a world on the move (…)’ (Hägerstrand, 1982, p. 323), and to investigate the pulsing of the city and the flows of people through its networks. While this research dealt with people’s 298 J. SarMENTO constraints and possibilities when moving, it focused on the measurable and the mappable, emphasizing a ‘geography of traces of action’ (Crang, 2001, p. 194). Its linear understanding of time, presenting people as unsensual and disembodied (Edensor, 2010) has echoes in contemporary research that attempts to track and map tourists’ movements (see below). Lefebvre’s (2004, p. 28) discussion of the ‘multiplicity of noises, murmurs, rhythms’ from his apartment view at rue rambuteau, contrasts with the Lund School and time geographic perspectives, as for him ‘no camera, no image or series of images can show these rhythms’ (pp. 30, 31). In Elements of Rhythmanalysis (2004), Lefebvre attempted to develop an aware- ness and appreciation of rhythm, seeking to turn it into a general theory or even a science, in a quest to understand the everyday, as part of a project that started more than two decades earlier with the Critique of Everyday Life. although criticized for not pointing to any clear method for its execution (Crang, 2001), Lefebvre not only developed the idea that (different) cities have different rhythms and distinct temporalities, but he also emphasized the notion that plural rhythms coexist in the city and structure everyday life (Crang, 2001). Furthermore, Lefebvre argued that rhythm, as a relational concept, involves an ensemble of time and space. Expressed slightly differently, rhythm implies a temporalized place, and calls for an attentive look at the particular properties of place. On the one hand, it all starts with the rhythmanalyst drawing ‘on his [sic] breathing, the circulation of his blood, the beatings of his heart and the delivery of his speech as landmarks’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 21). On the other hand, a rhythm is slow or lively only in relation to other rhythms. The conjunction of all these rhythms results in an unstable and dynamic polyrhythm ensemble, which is underlined by irreproducible cyclical (days, seasons, years) or linear repetitions (the noise of an engine, the blows of a hammer). Studying and understanding these ensembles, the interactions and interferences between rhythms, is the task of the rhythmanalyst. Tourism involves a particular rhythmic way of being in the world, and tourists produce varied rhythms in urban space, orchestrating, adapting, blending their movements with pre-existing others, building transient and cyclical movements, and temporarily inhabiting fleeting identity formations in a particular time and place (Solnit, 2000). The figure of the tourist as a walker takes us back to Baudelaire’s/Benjamin’s flâneur, the observer and outsider who walks aimlessly, attempting to immerse ‘himself ’ in the sensations of the city, alternating between crowded streets and quiet places so as to record notes and impressions, charting an ever-changing rhythm of involvement and detachment (see Featherstone, 1998). Yet the flâneur is not common in the medina. Thus, I would also like to engage here with Wunderlich (2008) three different types of walking practices: ‘purposive walking’, which refers to a need, a task, a walking to or walking towards, performed at a rapid and constant pace; ‘discursive walking’, which, like urban roaming, is spontaneous, varying in pace and rhythm, and in which the route is more important than the destination; and ‘conceptual walking’, which is prepared and reflective, in which walking is more important than the journey. These three categories may help us to think about tourists in the medina, not only how they walk, move and engage with an unknown terrain, but also the extent to which they look for or avoid interaction and encounter. Tourists move and walk in distinct fashions (Edensor, 2000, p. 338). Sometimes they do so independently, in more or less controlled places, such as theme parks, bazaars or festivals; other times tourists follow the rigid directions of tour guides (Edensor, 1998, 2000). While in the last decades, tourist mobilities have diversified significantly (Hop on – hop off bus sys- tems, balloons and helicopters, cable cars, bicycles, tuk-tuks, amphibious buses, and so on), SOCIaL & CULTUraL GEOGraPHY 299 allowing tourists to engage with urban space with varying degrees of detachment, walking is the only way to visit the medina of Tunis. Yet walking, involving slower rhythms than those offered by many other modes of mobil- ity, and encompassing direct contact with the crowd in unknown landscapes, requires certain skills. as Edensor (2000) emphasizes, places and obstacles encountered when walking may render space hostile. Knowing where to turn, which route to follow, how to circle obstacles, and so on, demands preparation and instinct. Walking the medina is as much linked to its morphology as to the ways in which tourists think and imagine this space. Thus, to grasp tourists’ rhythms it is important to contextualize the medina of Tunis in the urban arab world. This is to consider its development within the broader urban context, the tourism environ- ments and contours or, in Lefebvre’s words, its temporalized space. as Lefebvre (2004, p. 89) has remarked ‘rhythm is always linked to such and such a place, to its place, be that the heart, the fluttering of the eyelids, the movement of a street or the tempo of a waltz’. This is the focus of the following section. The medina of Tunis It is not a surprise that the medina of Tunis conjures fear and creates anxiety among western tourists. ‘The word “arab City” evokes a multitude of images, preconceptions and stereotypes’ (Elsheshtawy, 2008, p. 3). Despite its many variations, Bianca (2000) claimed there is a distinct urban tradition in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean and in the Balkans, sustained by the separation of public and private spaces and by the social value attached to privacy and safety. Historically, arab-Islamic urban spaces were characterized by organic growth, the absence of geometric land division, as well as by formal open public spaces. While these conceptions may certainly be questioned as being part of Orientalist generalizations about the arab city (abu-Lughod, 1987), in the tourism industry there is a particular and established way of thinking the Islamic-arab city which, as Timothy and Daher (2009) argue, is Orientalist in nature. Fashioned as unchanged since antiquity, with endless and confusing winding streets and cul-de-sacs, exotic, unknown and dangerous, this view intersects with Said’s (1978, p. 201) argument of ‘a fairly constant sense of confrontation felt by Westerners dealing with the East’, and is connected to a wider image of the arab world constructed in the western popular media. This image, as aziz (2001, pp. 151, 152) describes, revolves around ‘a palette consisting mostly of stereotypes of patriarchal oppression, harsh environments, religious fundamentalism, political unrest, cultural intolerance and irrational violence’. Stambouli (1996) illustrated how the intense transformation of Tunis in previous decades made it obsolete to think of the city in its classical tripartite way. The medina (the old arab, medieval quarter of the city, often walled); the European city or Ville Nouvelle (as in other North african cities, this refers to the modern city outside the medina, built in colonial times); and the gourbiville or bidonville (the informal city or shantytown), are no longer the only three elements of the city or metropolis. Particular Tunis’ peripheries became the ‘main the- atre and the city region as its future horizon’ (Stambouli, 1996, p. 55), and as in many other cities in the Middle East and North africa, the medina lost its functional and symbolic cen- trality with the colonial encounter and with the construction of the Ville Nouvelle. These twin processes led to the departure of many wealthy families, who established themselves outside the historic city in newer villas or in peripheral areas of the city (McGuinness, 2000). From the 1930s a great influx of rural people occupied various empty buildings, 300 J. SarMENTO counterbalancing the significant numbers that had left the medina (25% by the country’s independence in 1956). Of the 28,776 Europeans living in the medina in 1956, only 1280 were left 10 years later (Sebag, 1998). By 1968, two-thirds of the population was of rural origin (Stambouli, 1996), maintaining close links with their regions and traditional ways of life, as manifest in their clothing, food habits and dialect. Urban pressure led to the rise of collective housing, or oukalas, which accommodated 90% of the medina population by 1985. Eventually, the urban decay led to a population decline: from 168,000 in 1956, to 109,000 in 1995 and then to around 100,000 by the early 2000s (Yaiche, 2004).This profound transformation was accompanied by a degradation of the physical fabric and built heritage, which was considered to be in a bad state of conservation or almost in ruins (UNESCO, 2013). Yet, in 1979 a property of nearly 300 ha was inscribed in the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites, a classification which, together with the role of the Association de Sauvegarde de la Médina (aSM), promoted a few one-off operations, which attempted to reverse decline (abdelkafi, 1989; McGuinness, 1997). Today, in tune with the geography of poverty of many other historic medinas (Daher, 2007), there is a large urban poor population living in the midst of areas of former historic splendour (Cernea, 2008, p. 133), areas which are still off-route to most tourists. The touristic city also changed and a good example of that is the successful town of Sidi Bou Saïd, 17 km from the old city, but now part of Greater Tunis. Its development is based upon and linked to the very opposite characteristics that contribute to the recent decline to Tunis Medina. Sidi is an old settlement, which firstly grew as a holy site, and later, from the late nineteenth century, as a refuge for artists and intellectuals, a kind of Tunisian Montmartre, among whom were Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Baron rodolphe d’Erlanger and andré Guide, and later Michel Foucault in the 1960s.1 Located on a hill and having full open views of the Mediterranean – fitting with Lefebvre’s (2004) description of the solar Mediterranean cities – it has an irregular medieval morphology but also wide streets with plenty of light. It ‘recently’ adopted a white wash and blue doors and windows style (from the original yellow or greenish), which became the idiosyncratic ‘traditional’ Tunisian. In the 1970s and 1980s, several wealthy families traded the medina for Sidi, and today the so-called ‘charming fishing village’ (MSC Cruises, 2014) is a highly successful and touristified space, with dozens of craft shops, fine restaurants and cafes, some boutique hotels, and a relaxed attitude towards the many tourists that arrive on organized tours. The medina is made of various daily cyclical rhythms (Lefebvre, 2004). These are intimately connected to temporalities that depend on binaries such as day/night and the opening and closure of schools, mosques, businesses, various workshops and the administration (the Hotêl de Ville [Town Hall], as well as the government and some ministries are located in the Kasbah). Despite these rich rhythmic ensembles, to a large degree the medina’s centrality has been lost2 to Carthage, a suburb of Tunis where the presidential palace is located (Saidi, 2012); to Bardo, where the reinforced post-constitution National assembly operates; and to avenue Habib Bourghiba, in the Ville Nouvelle, the heart of the revolution and demonstrations. There is a certain authenticity which contributes to an inescapable unease of tourists. Unlike the riad fever in Morocco (Lee, 2008), gentrification, as well as foreign-owned prop- erty, is almost unknown in the medina, and there is ‘little evidence of the global dynamics that is currently characterizing many old towns of the arab world’ (Escher & Schepers, 2008, p. 130). Saidi (2012, p. 83) argues that particularly among the Tunisian elite there has been SOCIaL & CULTUraL GEOGraPHY 301 a growing interest in the medina, but the examples of converting ageing palaces into art galleries, key salons, and small upscale boutique maison d’hôtes which provide safe harbours for tourists are just too few. The aSM refers to the district composed of the rue du Tribunal and end of rue du Pacha as a quartier culturel, while McGuinness (2000, p. 116) points to this ‘chic urban enclave’ as just one possible scenario. Sidi Ben arous street, perhaps the most ‘gentrified’ street (including one boutique hotel which doubles as cafe and upmarket res- taurant, one design handicraft shop and two other restaurants) is paradoxically absent in all official tourist routes. During the French protectorate (1881–1956), transport improvements (roads, railways, ports) allowed for smoother travel throughout the country. During the 1960s a more coherent tourism policy was directed at a mass market focused around the package tour concept (Poirier, 1995) aspiring to concentrate, invest and develop coastal cities like Hammamet, Sousse, Monastir and to a lesser extent Djerba (Bleasdale, 2006; Saidi, 2012). They all became part of the quintessential landscape of Mediterranean tourism (Obrador Pons, Crang, & Travlou, 2009). Tourism grew steadily from 46,110 tourists in 1961 to over a million in 1975 (Sebag, 1998). From the late 1980s throughout the 1990s there was an attempt to diversify tourism, and other regions were developed, such as Tozeur for ‘Sahara tourism’, new resorts in the north of the country, and golf and heritage tourism (Bleasdale, 2006). This move did not manage to balance the heavy tourism concentration on the already established coastal destinations. Despite the tourism growth of the last 10 years (Saidi, 2012), the 2011 Jasmine revolution brought considerable falls in tourism arrivals. at the same time, while Tunis remains the main entry point in the country, and retains numerous key tourist attractions – such as the UNESCO Carthage or the worldwide famous Bardo museum3 – the city always remained peripheral to this tourism growth. It is rather uncanny how 10 years ago, a totally new private development, undertaken by Société Poulina, created a collage medina south of Hammamet – in Yasmine Hammamet. Elements and motifs from the medinas of Tunis, Sousse, Kairouan, and other tourist places like Sidi Bou Said or Seville are here combined (see Barthel, 2004), producing an artificial and sanitized tourism space. Yet at the same time, the Tunis UNESCO medina is in severe need of physical and social restructuring. Hammamet’s 278-ha development (almost the same size as Tunis Medina), comprises 4 km of coastline which reminds us that the great exhibitions are not over. The 1900 ‘Ville arabe’ of the Paris World Exhibition, Çelik (1992, p. 92) wrote, was an agglomeration of architecture from Tunisia: a replica of a fountain from the rue Sadun in Tunis, a minaret from the Great Mosque of Sfax, a copy of the Mosque of Sidi-Maklouf from Kef, a zawiya (Sufi convent) from the Casbah Square in Tunis, the Bab al-Jadid gate from the walls of Tunis, and another old town gate from Soussa-all surrounding a large court (…) In sum, this village represented ‘all the towns of Tunisia’. The tourism model based on large resorts and on all inclusive packages, coupled with the growth of cruise tourism, means that the medina of Tunis is just one of the many quick tours/ experiences squeezed in between sun bathing or other heritage attractions: ‘one hour max- imum, slotted between a morning at the Bardo Museum and an afternoon at Carthage’ (McGuinness, 2000, p. 104). Visits are short and most tourists rush and zoom through shops and take quick snapshots. Others prefer to visit the recreated elements of Hammamet, a sanitized version of the dilapidated Tunis Medina, which provides an easier and friendlier experience. 302 J. SarMENTO Shadowing, gazing and interviewing recent years have witnessed a significant growth in ‘digital panopticon’ methodologies, which use various technologies and instruments to track, map and measure people’s time- space trajectories through streets and cities, often functioning as a kind of electronic stalking. From early remote observation with cameras (Hartmann, 1988), there is now sophisticated research that provides important insights into tourists’ movement and walking, such as statistical data, pedestrian counts, movement cartography and the like (Grinberger, Shoval, & McKercher, 2014; McKercher & Lau, 2008; Shoval & Isaacson, 2007, 2010; Tchetchik, Fleischer, & Shoval, 2009). Despite the success and popularity of these approaches, this paper follows a distinct epistemological avenue, as it focuses on tourist rhythms in the medina of Tunis, and on tourists’ sensual, emotional, and embodied engagements with space (Middleton, 2010). as Lefebvre (2004) argued, rhythm contains movement and gestures, and walking is here understood as an almost instinctively performed way of experiencing the city (Wunderlich, 2008), constitutive of David Seamon’s (1980) ‘place ballets’. This not only involves placing one foot after the other, but also encompasses other embodied practices, such as dressing behaviours and codes. With this in mind, I adopted various methodologies and strategies that fit in with the mobilities turn (Büscher, Urry, & Witchger, 2010; Cresswell, 2006; Sheller & Urry, 2004; Urry, 2007) and which focus on the fluid, the fleeting, and aim to develop new empirical sensitiv- ities. as a rhythmanalyst, my strategies were both pre-planned as well as opportunistic. One of the main strategies used was a covert method of ‘shadowing-at-a-distance’ a form of non-participatory ethnographic observation. In contrast to many forms of observation in public spaces, ‘shadowing-at-a-distance’ does not depend upon the informed consent of tourists. In seeking to observe the behaviours and movements of tourists, while following a similar path to them through urban space, it respects privacy and does not involve any direct interaction. although it is not possible to dogmatically state that no one felt they were being followed, all efforts were taken to follow tourists at a certain distance and on no occa- sion did I notice tourists’ discomfort. However, as Lefebvre put it when observing daily life from his Parisian apartment (and he did not ask the consent of people he observed), the observer is implicated in whatever is being observed: ‘to grasp a rhythm it is necessary to be grasped by it’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 27). ‘Shadowing-at-a-distance’ allowed me to follow tourists’ spatial itineraries, without precise tracking and itinerary mapping, and without tour- ists’ consciousness of being part of a study, which could lead to reflexive behaviours. at the same time, the method enabled me to observe, from close range, tourists’ detailed interac- tions with other people, with places, and with events, including particular and fleeting deci- sion-making processes. To some extent this empirical approach follows early work by Goffman (1971) and Lefebvre (2004), as it regarded my own body, respiration, pulse, heart- beat, and so on, as one indication of other people’s rhythms. During the month of May 2013, I used this method to follow 32 tourist parties (roughly 326 tourists). Starting from Place Bab Souika, the surroundings of Bab Mnara and Place de la Kashbah (Figure 1), was considered too time-consuming, due to the small numbers of tourists entering the medina through these gates. Tourists were instead followed from Place de la Victoire and their routes as well as their stops, interactions, and various behaviours (photo taking, looks, drawings, and so on) were recorded. ‘Shadowing-at-a-distance’ was aborted when tourists went into a restaurant, café or shop for more than 20 min. at times it SOCIaL & CULTUraL GEOGraPHY 303 was possible to resume the interaction at a later stage. Whereas on many occasions it was possible to establish the origin of the tourists, their age group, whether they were accom- panied by a guide, etc., the approach adopted here did not seek to gather more precise data. ‘Shadowing-at-a-distance’ is a time-consuming method, the advantage of which is to observe without being seen and without changing tourists’ behaviour. In the narrow lanes of the medina, where GPS does not work (2013), other observation methods would prove difficult. Shadowing-at-a-distance was complemented by several short semi-directed interviews with different tourists. This was also a time-consuming method, as the advantage of my Mediterranean or even North african physiognomy in passing unnoticed while following tourists turned into a disadvantage when attempting to interview them. Most of the time I was mistaken for someone who was harassing tourists, pressing them to purchase certain goods. at these moments I had to compete with numerous sellers and the initial approach was challenging. Most interviews were conducted in Place the France as tourists were leaving the medina, and ranged from a few minutes (when tourists were in a rush) through, to about 20 min in duration. Figures 1(a–d). tourist walking circuits. Sources: (a): tiles in Souk el Bey; (b): lonely planet (2008, p. 78); (c): leaflet, tunisian National tourism office (n.d.); (d): leaflet, Dar el Medina (2008). 304 J. SarMENTO The interviews were complemented by the analysis of tourists’ comments on Trip advisor, an online travel review forum (see ayeh, au, and Law (2013) for an account of the credibility of user generated content). From a total of 431 available comments under ‘Medina of Tunis’, 279 were analysed (comments in languages other than English, French, Spanish and Figures 1(a–d). (Continued). SOCIaL & CULTUraL GEOGraPHY 305 Portuguese were excluded). The 279 comments were posted between May 2008 and May 2014 by variety of tourists (in groups, independent travelers, different nationalities, etc.), and ranged from a few lines to half an a4 page in length. rather than analysing the frequency of comments or seeking to review them by nationality or type of tourists, or to analyse experiences related to shopping, bargaining and prices, the approach taken was to look for any indication of walking practices and body cues in the medina. In what follows, relevant online comments are reported by indicating the year in which they were posted online. Figures 1(a–d). (Continued). 306 J. SarMENTO Strategies for walking in the medina In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Certeau distinguished between strategies, which are urban disciplinary structures that form the basis for generating relationships, and tactics, as freedoms constructed by the everyday walker which depend on the ‘art of timing’, and which require a person to be ‘on the watch for opportunities that must be “seized on the wing”’ (p. xix). although Certeau outlined a rigid dichotomy between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ and between ‘official’ and ‘the everyday’, these concepts are a useful resource for thinking about the ways in which several tourism entities attempt to regulate and channel tourist flows in a city, and the various ways in which tourists use tactics to elude what they perceive as difficulties. a brief analysis of the daytrip programmes offered by major tour operators (First Choice, Thomson, ClubMed) reveals that many excursions to Tunis exclude the medina. Those excur- sions which do not take in the medina typically combine other attractions (Carthage or Sidi Bou Said). a common daytrip for a tourist on a cruise (stopping 8–12 h at La Goullete4) may also include a visit to the medina. Some tourists travel independently from their resorts in the zones touristiques (Hammamet especially) or from the cruise ship to visit the medina, but again combine this visit with other sites in the city at large. Independent tourists who are on a more flexible and open agenda may spend more time in the medina. Following Certeau, marked tourist routes can be understood as strategies which attempt to regulate, discipline and channel tourists. These graphic representations of the city, some- times accompanied by textual descriptions and/or by physical signposting, suggest particu- lar ways of seeing the city, emphasizing certain angles, views and smells, while discarding others, often memorializing certain valuable buildings while neglecting others. They may influence tourists to follow a pre-determined path, encouraging them to visit particular sites and often in a specific order. Four common tourist routes were identified (Figures 1(a)–(d)): one, promoted by the municipality, is painted on tiles at two locations of the medina (rue des Libraires and Souk El Bey) and three were printed and suggested by different entities (the well-known guide The Lonely Planet Tunisia, now in its 4th edition5; the Tunisian National Tourism Office, easily accessible at places such as the airport or the tourism office; and the Hotel Dar El Medina). a quick analysis of these routes reveals interesting ideas. Firstly, the route represented on tiles, with two circuits (cultural and commercial), only reproduces the central part of the medina, therefore not encouraging visitors to explore other less central parts of the medina. Secondly, the route proposed by the Tunisian National Tourist Office duplicates the one just described (only a very small section is different at El ariane street), despite reproducing on paper the whole of the medina and including a few sites which are not on the tourist routes. It is the only route that indicates Place de la Kasbah as the starting point. Thirdly, both the Lonely Planet guide and Dar El Medina propose more comprehensive routes, which include four and six gates of the medina, respectively, and which guide visitors through some less touristified streets. Fourthly, all routes include Zitouna street, leaving out Kasbah street. as Saidi (2012, p. 83) argues, this is ‘the main circuit that is most frequented by tourists’. Paradoxically, the streets of Sidi Ben arous and its continuation to rue du Pacha or Dar El Jeld, which are increasingly commodified (see Escher & Schepers, 2008), are not included in any of the official routes proposed. SOCIaL & CULTUraL GEOGraPHY 307 ‘Twist, duck, bend and turn sharply’: walking, sensing and tactics Place de la Victoire is the most important gateway to the medina (Figure 2). Some guides who accompany groups from the resorts leave tourists here to stroll independently; other groups walk the length of avenue Bourguiba where buses park. It is one of the key sites from which to gaze and photograph. Most tourists photograph the square, the arch and adjacent buildings, especially the former British Embassy which played part in the well-known Hollywood film The English Patient. Key to these disciplined rituals (Edensor, 2000) are the tourists themselves: some make selfies, others ask someone to take a picture of them, ‘insti- tutionally’ framed by the square (albers & James, 1988; Edensor, 1998). Ingold (2008, p. 124) argued that ‘all forms of walking (…) are invariably constrained and enabled by a range of factors, including the characteristics of the terrain moved across, and the particular regulatory regimes that overtly or more subtly coerce normative modes of movement’. With almost no exception, all the groups I observed followed the crowd and did not venture into any of the perpendicular alleys or streets until the Mosque. de Certeau (1984) had already considered a structural view of urban space and walking, in which spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities and interdictions that the walker moves and actualizes, increasing the number of possibilities and restrictions. In Zeituna street, these restrictions seem to coincide with the street itself. Most of the tourist parties (25) made a relatively short trip inside the medina (<1 h), and most (27) walked up Zeituna street (in conformity with Saidi’s, 2012 analysis). These patterns of movement occurred either because the guide led them through this street, or because it was the street facing Place de la Victoire (the interviews with other tourists confirmed this idea) or even because it was marked in most maps and guides as the street to ‘do’. Most tourist parties under 4–5 people looked tense and entered the medina at a sturdy pace, engaging in ‘purposive walking’ (Wunderlich, 2008) in a vivace movement as Lefebvre (2004) put it. It was as if they were aiming for a specific destination, attempting to ignore vendors’ frequent interactions. This was a common tactic, in line with the advice of an Figure 2. exploring the medina of tunis. Source: author, place de France, 27 May 2013 (mobile phone photograph). 308 J. SarMENTO experienced tourist in Trip advisor: ‘Just walk purposefully, smile and decline any invitation to enter’ (2008). Not many tourists had a guidebook or map in view, but most had a camera or mobile phone, to which they held firmly. apart from large groups (more than 8–9 people), only a few people did not fit into this profile. Yet, when talking to tourists, many argued that visiting the medina brought them closer to the scents, sounds and people of Tunisia. They contrasted the Medina to other tourist spaces in which they moved, which were to a certain extent insulated, pre-arranged and regulated: the resort, the hotel, the restaurant, the beach, the bus, the entertainment show, and so on. at times groups and some individual tourists who interacted with people looked serenely at shops and objects, entered and discussed prices and bought a few items. although many tourists prefer rambling and meandering, none mentioned a desire for impromptu vivid encounters or the preconceived notion of making new friends. Very few mentioned that they had allowed themselves to be drawn in by the attractions of the terrain in a Debordian dérive. after reaching the Mosque, tourists’ movement became a little more unpredictable, and did not follow a particular dominant pattern. The steps on rue des Libraires were often used to pause, relax and gaze at the crowd. One tourist, walking alone, spent some time sketching the area. Most made a few more selfies or photographed each other, with the mosque for background and whenever possible catching some of the people passing by. Groups often leaned towards the camera screen and commented on the shot, especially if a veiled woman or an old man was captured. at this site the tiled route map was only used by group guides (three guides in four used it) or by locals who attempted some interaction with the tourists. Occasionally locals managed to convince tourists to follow them to some back alleys and shops. afterwards, tourists walked the various adjacent streets that include a combination of people and shops, before making their way back to Place de La Victoire, normally following the same route. Tourist guides made short non-stopping itineraries through small lanes with groups of 15–40 tourists, and took parties to roof-terraces. Many tourists referred to these vantage points as perfect places from which to gaze at the daily life of the medina, observing others without being seen. The tourists drank tea or coffee at western prices, but for many with whom I spoke these visits were often a source of stress, as they were pressed into buying. a minority of small parties sat quietly for some time in small cafes in the covert bazaar; others had lunch in small restaurants. Tight schedules imposed fast rhythms for tourists, who then had to race between sites, and sellers, who knew they only had fleeting moments to do business. On several occasions tourists hesitantly ventured into narrow alleys with no people or shops, only to reticently return after a few metres. Cul-de-sacs are not signposted and disorientation was feared. Pleasurable walking, understood in the romantic and poetic sense of wandering unconsciously (Solnit, 2000), seemed to be absent. The very few groups that did not fit into this dominant pattern ventured into the medina through various narrow lanes. I managed to follow three of these parties for 3–4 h (I stopped ‘Shadowing-at-a-distance’ a fourth group who entered a restaurant for more than 20 min, although our paths crossed again after about 2 h). Despite visiting the gate at Place de la Kasbah (north side), only one party (a young couple) exited the medina through a gate other than the entry point (Place Bab Souika). Judging by the conversations with various tourists in the Place de France and the comments posted on Trip advisor, it was precisely those tourists that ventured into the nooks and crannies of the medina that reported being more satisfied with the experience: ‘we spent 5 h there just wandering (…)’ (2012);6 ‘just to wander and ‘get lost’ on purpose’. These individuals spoke of shopkeepers who had ‘internalised the SOCIaL & CULTUraL GEOGraPHY 309 ‘official route’ and even ‘gently told us that we were going the ‘wrong direction’, but did not bother us as we thanked them for the information and kept going’ (2012). These individuals also drew a distinction between what they understood as tourist and local spaces: ‘It’s impor- tant to explore beyond the tourist section. The streets on the left cater to tourists and the streets to the right cater to natives (…) tourists will not be hassled by vendors in the markets that cater to natives’ (2010). For these tourists, and in a similar vein to Edensor’s (1998) find- ings in agra, the medina with all its idiosyncrasies, experiences and novelty, made an exciting experience, distinctive from other enclave environments they experienced. They also walked at a much slower pace: ‘try exploring slowly the area to the right (north) of the rue de la Kasbah, or that to the left (south) of the rue de la Grande Mosquée (2009); ‘(…) a taste for a slow pace is essential’ (2012). Goffman’s (1971, p. 14) analysis of walking as a visual activity is useful here. In the crowded streets tourists tended to feel uneasy. In Goffman’s terms, they ‘twist, duck, bend and turn sharply’, avoiding touching and bumping into other people, in a ‘step-and-slide’ choreogra- phy. Face-to-face interaction between unacquainted persons seems not to work, and for some tourists these choreographies were just too complex: ‘the crowds were so thick in some places that we just had to go along with the flow’ (2012). apprehensively, walking was about touching and feeling the environment with the whole body (rodaway, 1994). While stress, anxiety and fear led to quick movement and fast pace, as if tourists were running away from what they came to see, the juxtaposition of the daily rhythms of those working in the medina and hectically walking or passing with carts, bicycles and even motorcycles, produced a varied polyrhythmic ensemble of beats. Men in suits walked by, not in a rush, but determined, knowing where to step; children from a nearby school chased a football. I would not go as far as Lefebvre in his digression on seeking the secret of rhythms around the Mediterranean, but as these multiple temporalities collided (Crang, 2001), the emerging ensemble could be the start point for an analysis of shared rhythms in North africa and Middle East medinas. Often, tourists avoided looking at objects, since they had quickly learnt that any prolonged look would cause vendors to react and to engage in an interaction. as one explained, ‘[y]ou can’t even look at merchandise without the risk of being hassled into buying stuff you don’t really want or need’ (2013). Yet, their attempts were often in vain, as vendors typically had considerable lengthy experience and were able to detect even the most disguised look. The slightest move – such as Lefebvre’s fluttering rhythm of the eyelids – provoked a reaction. When targeted, tourists’ tactics ranged from a few defensive footsteps and raised hands, to struggles to avoid confrontation and physical proximity, and even rushing up or down the main streets or running a dozen metres. Vendors may also chase down tourists and fleeting choreographies emerged, contributing to a particular theatricality that constituted the poly- rhythmic city. Wunderlich’s ‘discursive walk’ could quickly become a ‘purposive walk’ and even transform into a sort of ‘panic/escape’ walk, moving from adagio to vivo in just a few seconds. From observation and conversations with tourists, various finales also occurred. On one side of the spectrum, distressed tourists swore they would not come back, while on the other end, tourists laughed together about these adventurous and fleeting moments and continued their journeys. Their tourist performances were certainly an interactive and contingent process, always re-enacted under different conditions (Edensor & Holloway, 2008). Quite a few tourists mentioned being ‘dragged’ into shops and noted the importance of resisting ‘being dragged’. These tactics of resistance, which some described as stressful, often derived from a fear of being cheated or of ending up buying something they did not want. 310 J. SarMENTO In various comments in Trip advisor, particular tactics were shared: ‘wear sunglasses so shop sellers don’t know if you are looking at them’ (2012); ‘if you want to appreciate the medina, walk like the mules, always ahead and looking at the ceiling’ (2013). This is in line with Edensor’s (1998) observations of some tourists in agra, for whom physical contact, the appeals to inspect goods, and so on, resulted in panic. During the interviews at Place de France, I came across many fearful tourists. They have been influenced by a long tradition of ideas claiming and preserving the view that a medina is like a living ‘oriental’ museum; enter- ing it is like stepping back in time (Bleasdale, 2006; Daher, 2007; Porter, 2000). In fact, many tourists who are dropped off in Place de France, after the routine photographs, prefer to have a crêpe or cappuccino in a café along the nouvele ville avenue Bourgiba, gazing at the passing people, rather than ‘doing’ the ‘gloomy, treacherous medina’, as one tourist put it. Just like the flâneur, who sought to move through the crowds with a sense of invisibility, but who ended up being spotted by ‘cab-drivers, office messengers, newspaper sellers, flower girls, the prostitutes and homeless, who worked and lived on the streets’ (Featherstone, 1998, p. 913), tourists’ bodies are conspicuous. Even in May, many tourists sweat perceptibly in the crowds, despite the shady streets. Their skin, eye and hair colour, their obvious outfits, hats, caps, cameras and maps, backpacks (often held it in front) and purses, their language, all seem to denounce them. Walking is inseparable from clothing and footwear, and it frequently involves dressing codes and notions of comfort, mobility and speed. Many tourists men- tioned that they dressed differently to ‘do’ the medina. This was not only a matter of com- fortable shoes for walking – ‘Make sure you wear flat shoes: the walkways are made of uneven stone, and even with flat shoes, you have to be careful where you are walking’ (2010) – but also of having appropriate clothes, such as hillwalking shorts and zipped pants. all together, this attire supported a greater sense of independence and self-assurance, so that tourists could ‘battle’ against the ‘unknown challenges’ of the physicality and dangers of the medina. anticipating visits to conservative sites, many tourists carried scarves, pareos or shawls in their bags (to which they held tightly). Yet for others this was a remote cultural game. Several female tourists (notably russian), made strong dress code ‘transgressions’, considering the relatively traditional medina. While some change their beach slippers to running shoes (as there are various uneven slabs, dirt and water), many did not, and instead stayed in high heels, enduring what Certeau acknowledged as bodily experiences of pain, when they strug- gled to beat the uneven and steep slope of Zeituna street. Many tourists were aware of cultural differences that they wanted to respect, but this was not the case for all. as one individual expressed it, ‘if you don’t want to attract unwanted attention, then cover up, from your wrists to your ankles. I didn’t have any problems but the only other Europeans I saw in Tunis attracted a lot of attention since they were in beachwear. It’s the equivalent of turning up on Oxford St in your bikini’ (2013). The medina is mostly experienced by tourists during the day, from Monday to Saturday, with a different pattern on Friday. Nocturnal rhythms are unknown to most tourists, and those who have experienced them talk of fear, danger and uncomfortable movements: ‘The Medina is completely different at night. It’s not well lit and it’s very dangerous. With all the shops closed, it looks completely different and can be slightly easier to get lost. Be on your guard. This is the one place I’ve visited where I wished I had a whistle’ (2013). None of the people I interviewed had experienced the medina at night, and I also did not follow any tourists after dark. There is a need to continue to excavate and examine these temporal variations in the rhythms and use of urban spaces (Lefebvre, 2004). SOCIaL & CULTUraL GEOGraPHY 311 Conclusion Despite its physical and social dilapidation, and being peripheral to tourism both nationally and in Tunis itself, the medina attracts numerous visitors who walk its streets as part of a collection of signs (Urry & Larson, 2011). although the medina is far from being a ‘museumi- fied’ heritage city, or the ‘orientalised’ open-air museum that many tourists imagine, to a large degree its functioning and atmosphere depend on the presence of tourists, and on their choreographies and rhythms. In comparison to the successful Sidi Bou Said, the medina is labyrinthine and rhizome-like (Bensmaïa, 2003). It is signposted in different ways from western cities or even from the ‘tourist friendly’ yet anaesthetized Yasmin Hammamet. The complex genealogy of the arab-Islamic city in western minds results in geographical imag- inations connected with danger and unpredictability, and these both limit tourists’ experi- ences and condition their performances. Most tourists seem not to look for encounters, but for bargains, as consumption is central to Tunisian tourism and to visiting the medina (Bleasdale, 2006). Tourism strategies and tourists’ time pressures reinforce this way of seeing. Encouraging tourists to visit a wider range of sites or to enter through other gates (perhaps with a multi-site ticket similar to that used in Carthage or Kairouan) would likely disrupt the choreographies and rhythms described here. although quantitative studies that map and accurately track the movements of tourists in the medina would have value, it is important to explore in detail how tourist bodies cir- culate, and how they are part of the ensemble of rhythms in the city. I have not engaged with Lefebvre’s work that relates walking rhythms to our own internal polyrhythmic nature, in terms of the perpetual cadence of internal organs and functions. In Lefebvre’s (2004, p. 89) proposition, rhythms should not be measured as the speed of a moving object on its trajectory, since a ‘rhythm is only slow or fast in relation to other rhythms with which it finds itself associated in a more or less vast unity’. The medina is almost exclusively visited on foot, and tourists move slowly when compared to the speeds of inbound flights or bus excursions. Yet walking in the medina entails a subjective feeling of rushing, as people, objects, words and sounds all move rapidly. Tourists describe themselves as attentive to all moves and looks, as they glimpse danger in every corner. Tourists’ movements are often random and improvised (Edensor, 2000), but as I followed tourists weaving paths through the lanes of the medina, negotiating obstacles, coping with hassle, touts and vendors, remaining alert to motorcycles and carts, and being aware of the pavement, I encountered some patterns. Most tourists followed the main route, the one with more people and more shops. Here they followed the flow of others, as doing so appar- ently felt safer. This is how one ‘does’ the medina. But at the same time, tourists appeared to feel very uneasy when walking in the crowd. Behavioural codes and rules that normally worked at home did not seem to work in the medina. Bumping into others occurred fre- quently but was unwelcome. Most groups moved in an orderly and regulated manner, and I observed relatively few improvisational pedestrian rhythms. The medina harbours different types of walking practices and engagement. The field practices used in this study suggest that independent tourists or small groups adopt one of two strategies: either walking fast, without stopping much and avoiding eye contact, or wandering quietly and almost aimlessly, looking with interest to people and objects for sale. although Wunderlich (2008) categories are useful here, when applied to tourists in the medina they appear too rigid. Except for tourists in organized groups, which move fast and 312 J. SarMENTO at the pace of the tour leader, most tourists employed more than one type of walking rhythm when visiting the medina. Very often tourists interchanged ‘purposive walking’ when fearful with ‘discursive walking’ when relaxing a little, and vice versa. Walking the medina involves rich, dynamic and contingent choreographies that challenge rigid categories. Notes 1. To a smaller degree than Morocco and algeria, Tunisia became a popular destination for artist travellers (Benjamin, 2003), and in the late nineteenth century, after a certain popularization of Carthaginian heritage with Flaubert’s novel Salammbô (1862), artists like Victor Prouvé or Paul Klee, made trips to Tunisia in search of the Orient, new lifestyles, landscapes and colours (see Benjamin, 2003, p. 138). Study trips to El Jem were frequent. 2. On this topic see also Escher and Schepers (2008, p. 139), who argue that ‘The Medina is preserved, shaped and promoted as a symbol of national identity’. 3. reopened in 2012 after a 10 million euro facelift funded by the World Bank. 4. In 2012, 582,601 tourists arrived at La Goulette, a number on the rise (cruise industry news, accessed March 2014 http://www.cruiseindustrynews.com). 5. The 5th and last edition does not include this map but only a textual description of it. 6. all used quotes are from Trip advisor. 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Issues, diagnosis and recommendations] (pp. 104–113). rabat: UNESCO. http://www.msccruises.co.uk http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/36 Resumen Introduction Rhythmanalysis and tourist walking The medina of Tunis Shadowing, gazing and interviewing Strategies for walking in the medina ‘Twist, duck, bend and turn sharply’: walking, sensing and tactics Conclusion Notes Acknowledgements Disclosure statement References work_ace7uyi4izcplibjw53sf5xquu ---- CCR-13-2847 6352..6352 From the Editor On Masterpieces and Breast Cancer Research The artist Henri Matisse captured the essence of a problem we often have in science—those landmark discoveries that bench- mark the type of progress we think we should be continuously making. This edition of CCR Focus presents instead an alter- native view of discovery and progress, one in which a steady expansion of our understanding of the biology of breast cancer has led to progress on multiple fronts. In the past decade, we have come to see breast cancer not as one disease but as comprising multiple diseases, a significant step over the 1970s era classification as estrogen receptor (ER)–positive or –negative. A breast cancer diagnosis of luminal A or B, HER2, basal-like, or normal-like subtype may eventually be more important than ER status. Notably, the gene expression profiles of all the molecular subtypes can be found within the triple- negative category, and additional profiles identified, as dis- cussed by Turner and Reis-Filho. To reach its potential, such classification needs, of course, separate therapies for each subtype. Tabchy and colleagues note that the PIK3CA muta- tion is most common in ERþ/luminal tumors, highlighting a potential target in that subset for which drugs are already in development. Progress in other areas is discussed as well— Bardia and Baselga argue for pathologic complete response as an early endpoint in neoadjuvant therapy to evaluate new therapies. Two articles put renewed emphasis on the tumor microenvironment. Zhang and colleagues look at potential targets in the microenvironment that support tumor dorman- cy, allowing metastatic disease to emerge years after all evi- dence of the tumor has disappeared. Disis and Stanton move beyond the evidence that the infiltration of a breast tumor with immune effector cells portends an improved outlook to show how we might engage the immune system in breast cancer therapeutics. Lin and colleagues discuss the problem of central nervous system recurrence in breast cancer. This represents an emerging problem that can be directly tied to success in controlling or eradicating systemic disease. Introduced by our expert Guest Editor, Carlos Arteaga, these articles highlight the many challenges that remain in developing truly effective breast cancer treatment. For now, the collective efforts in breast cancer represent a work in progress. Someday, these advances will constitute a masterpiece. Susan E. Bates Deputy Editor, CCR Focus National Cancer Institute I was very embarrassed when my canvases began to fetch high prices, I saw myself condemned to a future of painting nothing but masterpieces. —Henri Matisse Figure 1. Cambodian postage stamp, issued in 1999, showing Crockery on a Table by Henri Matisse (1869–1954), � Blue Moon/Fotolia. Published online December 2, 2013. doi: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-13-2847 �2013 American Association for Cancer Research. CCR FOCUS Clin Cancer Res; 19(23) December 1, 20136352 on April 5, 2021. © 2013 American Association for Cancer Research. clincancerres.aacrjournals.org Downloaded from http://clincancerres.aacrjournals.org/ 2013;19:6352. Clin Cancer Res Susan E. 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No fueron pocos los pintores e ilustradores que pretendieron retratar sus cuentos y poemas. Su legado trascendió su lugar de origen y se extendió en Europa, en parte, gracias a las traducciones hechas por autores como Stéphane Mallarmé, quien manifestó gran admiración por el escritor norteamericano. En consecuencia, el propósito de este artículo es analizar la forma en que los textos de Poe fueron plasmados por artistas clásicos, modernos y contemporáneos. El foco de atención está puesto en la identificación de las similitudes y diferencias de las obras entre sí, así como también de su acercamiento a la letra de los textos seleccionados. Palabras clave​: Influencia de Poe- ilustraciones- “El Cuervo”- cuentos ABSTRACT Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) had a great influence on works of art of different times. Not few painters and illustrators were inspired by his short stories and poems. His legacy transcended its place of birth and extended all over Europe, partly thanks to the translations made by writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), who showed great admiration for the American author. The purpose of this article is to analyze the way Poe’s texts were captured by classic, modern, and contemporary artists. The focus of attention is put on the identification of the similarities and differences between their works, and their approximation to the selected texts. Keywords​: Poe’s influence- illustrations- “The Raven”- short stories I. Introducción Indudablemente, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) ha sido la musa inspiradora de muchos otros artistas que intentaron reflejar su espíritu creativo en las más variadas disciplinas a lo largo del tiempo, lo que demuestra que los textos de Poe no solo influyeron en escritores, sino también en pintores, escultores e ilustradores. Henri Matisse (1869-1954), por ejemplo, creó un retrato de Poe al estilo de una caricatura para acompañar el elogiado poema de Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) “The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe” (“La tumba de Edgar Allan Poe”). En 1875, Édouard ​Manet (1832-1883) realizó dibujos que ilustraron la versión francesa de “The Raven” (“El cuervo”), a cargo del mismo escritor. Sobre la base de estas consideraciones, el propósito de este trabajo es efectuar un recorrido por las principales ilustraciones que se han hecho de la obra del autor americano, para indagar acerca de las similitudes y diferencias entre sí y respecto de los textos. El análisis comienza con el poema “El cuervo” (en adelante EC) y sus ilustraciones a cargo de prestigiosos artistas de la época. Posteriormente, se continúa Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución – No Comercial – Sin Obra Derivada 4.0 Internacional. Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución – No Comercial – Sin Obra Derivada 4.0 Internacional. con otros textos reunidos en la célebre colección ​Cuentos de imaginación y misterio, que también ha sido materia de diversas interpretaciones artísticas. A los efectos de un mejor seguimiento del artículo, se estima de utilidad reproducir distintos párrafos de los textos de las obras de Poe seleccionadas, así como las imágenes respecto de las cuales surgen los comentarios ​. 1 II. La obra de Poe Muchas son las cualidades que podrían atribuírseles al escritor americano y a su interesante obra. En honor a la brevedad, se sintetizan a continuación algunas de sus principales características. Se destaca su composición poética, de estilo romántica, que enfatiza el gusto morboso por la muerte y lo sobrenatural. Además, este recurso le valió para convertirse en el antecesor inmediato del simbolismo literario francés, en parte, gracias a la devoción que Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) hiciera de su obra. Su escritura en prosa lo ubica como referente del relato corto y maestro del sólido modelo de literatura de horror. Poe ha sido considerado el inventor del género policíaco gracias al personaje de Auguste Dupin, protagonista de “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (“Los crímenes de la calle Morgue”) (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (“El misterio de Marie Rogêt”) (1842) y “The Purloined Letter” (“La carta robada”) (1845); y a otros relatos de investigación criminal como “MS. Found in a Bottle” (“Manuscrito hallado en una botella”) (1833) y “The Gold-Bug” (“El escarabajo dorado”) (1843). Incluso, el método analítico-deductivo empleado para resolver los crímenes configuró la base teórica fundamental de un género que encontró entre sus discípulos a Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) y Agatha Christie (1890-1976). Cabe 2 mencionar que otro rasgo característico de Poe es la narración en primera persona, como protagonista o como testigo privilegiado de los hechos. Pero lo realmente interesante es que el narrador coincide, en muchos casos, con el criminal del relato “de modo que Poe focaliza la historia mediante una perspectiva siniestra, perversa, obligando al lector a enfrentarse directamente con la subjetividad inmoral, incluso demente, del narrador y forzar la posibilidad de una identificación imposible con un punto de vista psicopatológico” (Cuéllar 210). Se incluyen, asimismo, dos aspectos que son propios de su obra y que representan grandes aportes: la neutralidad moral y el distanciamiento emocional, ya resaltadas por Howard Lovecraft (1890-1937). Esto se comprueba en la ausencia de juicios morales de Poe hacia sus personajes. Cuéllar Alejandro (2009) destaca dos características habituales en las obras que se inspiran en Poe: 1.El uso de Poe como marca de prestigio, entendido como garantía comercial asegurada. 2.El carácter sincrético de las nuevas creaciones. En este sentido, las obras pretenden condensar la esencia temática, narrativa y estética de Poe a través de la reunión de diferentes relatos en una única obra. Esta característica es comprobable en el ámbito fílmico. Tal el caso de ​La chute de la maison Usher (Jean Epstein, 1928) donde, como mínimo, se unen en su argumento los relatos “The Fall of the House Usher” (“La caída 1 Todas las ilustraciones y pinturas a las que se hace referencia a lo largo del texto se encuentran en el Anexo ubicado al final del trabajo. 2 Basta con recordar el método empleado por Sherlock Holmes en sus investigaciones, afamado detective al que dio vida Arthur Conan Doyle. 2 Silvia Sartelli de la Casa Usher”) (1839) y “The Oval Portrait” (“El portarretrato oval”) (1844); y el film estadounidense ​The Mask of the ​Red Death​ (​La máscara de la muerte roja​ ) (Roger Corman, 1964) en la que el guionista funde inteligentemente las narraciones “The Mask of the Red Death” (1842) y “Hop-Frog” (1849). III. “El Cuervo” por Redon, Manet, Doré y Rosetti El poema original de Edgar A. Poe, EC, fue publicado por primera vez el 29 de enero de 1845 en el diario neoyorquino ​Evening Mirror​ . De acuerdo con el texto, un joven estudiante, sentado en un sillón observa cómo un cuervo entra en su habitación, en una fría noche. A lo largo del poema se observa que, junto a la realidad material, se hace presente un espacio imaginario al que sólo se accede a través del dolor y de la tristeza tras la muerte de Lenore (Romero López 207). El cuervo -animal mitológico- anuncia un mensaje aterrador del más allá, con su famosa frase “Nevermore” (“Nunca más”). Podría decirse que el cuervo de Poe es viejo, siniestro, lúgubre, espectral y posee unos ardientes ojos, particularidad que, como más adelante se verá, ha sido exaltada por el simbolista Odilon Redon. Al final, el propio narrador de esta historia lo define como profeta, cosa diabólica o pájaro ​. 3 La estructura del poema se destaca por su carácter fuertemente rítmico, con un contenido variante, aunque homófono, valiéndose de la repetición (Zarandona Fernández, 2012). ​De allí, la existencia de versos tales como “Only this and nothing more”, “Darkness there and nothing more”, “Then the bird said ‘nevermore’” ​. Como se 4 observará, estas frases se retoman en muchas de las pinturas e ilustraciones que efectuaron los artistas aquí incluidos. La obra de Poe llegó a la pintura de la mano de Odilon Redon (1840-1916). La reputación de Poe en Francia ha sido alta gracias a las traducciones que de sus trabajos hicieron, en primer lugar, Baudelaire y más tarde Mallarmé. Su influencia en la generación de escritores, artistas y compositores simbolistas, también, ha sido enorme. En sus diseños para el autor -así como para Baudelaire y Gustave Flaubert- el pintor no ilustró el texto con exactitud, sino que produjo lo que él mismo llamó “correspondencias”. En sus propias palabras, Redon explica que se permitió un estado de inconciencia y de libertad, en el cual cada palabra o frase caía dentro de su mente nerviosamente receptiva, para luego comenzar una sucesión de imágenes las que, casi sin su ayuda, se estampaban en el papel. En otras ocasiones, hacía variaciones sobre esta automaticidad de los dibujos por medio de estudios minuciosos de la naturaleza. Después de haber realizado un cierto número de ellas, dejaría a un lado las representaciones para, rápidamente, crear su propia versión (Hauptman 74). Entre sus trabajos se encuentra ​A Edgar Poe (1882),​ nombre que recibió el álbum compuesto por seis litografías y un frontispicio dedicado al escritor, en el que se demuestra la influencia recibida. Como se dijo, no pretenden ser una ilustración directa de la obra, sino que en una tarea de libre asociación el pintor inventó los títulos de las 3 Los vocablos empleados varían según las traducciones. Por ejemplo, en la versión que Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde realizó en 1887, se alude a profeta, ave o diablo; en la versión de Carlos Arturo Torres de 1910, se menciona al profeta, diablo e infausto cuervo. Finalmente, Cordero Palacios (en prosa literal) se refiere a profeta, ser diabólico, ave o demonio. 4 “Eso es todo y nada más”, “Sombras solo y nada más”, “Dijo el Cuervo: ‘nunca más’”. Las traducciones del poema incluidas en este artículo corresponden a la versión en español a cargo de J. B. Pérez Bonalde. 3 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 imágenes a la manera de su propio creador​. ​A continuación, se enumeran los nombres de las obras realizadas: 1. Frontispicio. 2. ​El ojo como una pelota extraña se dirige hacia el infinito (figura 1). 3. D​elante del negro sol de la melancolía, Lenore, aparecía. 4 ​. ​Una máscara toca a muerte (figura 2). 5. ​En el horizonte, el ángel de las certidumbres y, en el cielo oscuro, una mirada interrogativa. 6. E​l soplo que guía a los seres está también en las esferas. 7. La locura. En prácticamente la totalidad de sus dibujos, se destacan los ojos, sean del cuervo o de Lenore. Incluso, la figura 1 muestra a un globo con forma de ojo en vuelo hacia el cielo. El artista simbolista, en la figura 3, realiza una representación realista del cuervo, asomado en la ventana. La desproporción evidente del animal respecto de la abertura es utilizada como un “signo que indica la presencia de lo fantástico como intruso que perturba la normalidad” (Cuéllar 212). La maravillosa extrañeza de las imágenes de Redon evoca, perfectamente, las propias sensibilidades góticas de Poe. A su turno, Édouard Manet tuvo en sus manos la ilustración de EC en la versión francesa que realizó Mallarmé (“Le Corbeau”), publicada en una edición de lujo limitada de 240 copias firmadas por el pintor impresionista en 1875 y que, generalmente, es considerada uno de los primeros y mejores ejemplos de los modernos libros de artista ( ​livre d’artiste​ ). Las ilustraciones de “Le Corbeau” fueron transferidas en litografías e impresas en papel vergé o papel chino. Cuatro ilustraciones de páginas completas estaban insertadas entre los textos en inglés de Poe y, en los reversos, aparecía la traducción de Mallarmé. Asimismo, se incluyeron una cabeza de cuervo de perfil, usada para el poster que publicitaba la obra (figura 4) y un cuervo volando para ​ex-libris (figura 5) (Wilson-Bareau et al. 258; Reed). Por su parte, también Baudelaire, en 1853, tradujo EC, texto que, de esa forma, tiene la nota distintiva de haber sido traducida por dos de los más grandes poetas del siglo XIX. La interpretación que realizó Manet del poema se caracteriza por ser de un estilo moderno y por alejarse de una interpretación literal del texto. A modo de ejemplo, en la ilustración del pasaje relativo al momento en que el narrador abre las persianas para dejar entrar al cuervo, se deja ver, en el horizonte, una moderna ciudad. Muy diferente es la versión de Paul Gustave Doré (1832-1883), en la que se comprueba una sobrecarga de detalles victorianos y una atmósfera de melodrama que rodea la escena. En los trabajos de Manet se aprecia un uso intenso del negro, líneas de gran precisión y cierta falta de terminación en los dibujos, todo lo cual le valió un gran reconocimiento por parte de la crítica especializada. Tal como se adelantó, en el poema de Poe, el poeta, atormentado por la muerte de su amada Lenore, es visitado por un cuervo que presagia la enfermedad, pero también al ​alter ego​ del propio poeta. El ave se posiciona sobre un busto de Pallas Atenea, la diosa de la sabiduría, y su repetida respuesta a las preguntas del poeta sobre la difunta es una constante “nevermore”, recordándole así su irrevocable pérdida. Las cuatro ilustraciones de Manet retratan al narrador en distintas situaciones, que se corresponden con diversos pasajes del texto: 1. En su estudio, de características claustrofóbicas (figura 7). 4 Silvia Sartelli 2. Abriendo las persianas para permitir el ingreso del cuervo, revelando una ciudad parisina en el fondo (figura 8). 3. Mirando fijo al animal desde su silla (figura 9). 4. En la última ilustración, el poeta ha desaparecido o, quizás, está asimilado con la sombra del cuervo reflejada en el piso, desde la cual su alma “shall be lifted-nevermore” (figura 10). El ilustrador resalta la simbiosis entre la oscuridad y la claridad por su significado simbólico. En ninguna de las ilustraciones se alude al otro lado de la realidad. Únicamente, están presentes los tres sujetos materiales del poema: el poeta, el cuervo y el busto de Pallas. Dolores Romero López señala que el uso abierto de la carbonilla y la falta de completitud de la página sugiere que las escenas fueran observadas por alguien desde el más allá (24). Especial atención merece la última ilustración de Manet, la cual se vincula con las líneas finales del poema​:​ “And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor/ And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/ Shall be lifted – Nevermore” ​. Aquí, la particularidad radica en la remoción de la presencia física 5 del narrador. Se optó, en cambio, por evocar la presencia de su alma o espíritu resignificada en la sombra del cuervo. La modernidad y originalidad de la interpretación de Manet se aprecia mejor cuando se las compara con los tallados en metal de Doré, publicados en 1883. Si bien contemporáneos, lo trabajos de Doré significan un retorno a la obra de ilustradores anteriores, pertenecientes a la generación romántica, e incluso a los trabajos anteriores del propio Doré, ya que se enfatiza la atmósfera supernatural del poema. Esto es comprobable cuando retrata el “seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor ​” 6 -omitido por Manet-, o al resaltar el cuerpo del estudiante en la sombra del cuervo, aspecto que el pintor impresionista prefirió no incluir en su ilustración (figuras 10 y 15) (Reed). También, es de destacar la figura 14 en la que se aprecia al animal desde el busto de Pallas Atenea con actitud amenazante, imagen que ha sido retratada en diversas ocasiones por los otros ilustradores. Repárese en que los destellos de la lámpara tras el busto hacen las veces de abanico de luz en el que se replica el rostro de Lenore. Indudablemente, el trabajo de Doré es mucho más rico en detalles que el de Manet. La crudeza es notoria por el contraste que logra con el uso del color negro y la simplicidad de líneas que resaltan la aspereza del relato. Por otra parte, es, en las ilustraciones del primero, donde mejor se percibe “el tránsito de la misteriosa figuración romántica al evocador símbolo” (Romero López 26). Se observa, entonces, la presencia de los dos mundos: el de aquí y el de allá, el de la vida y el de la muerte, el del amante y el de la amada, la tumba y los ángeles. Esto se logra desde la primera ilustración donde aparece la figura del estudiante, de espaldas al lector, buscando entre las cortinas un pasadizo que le conduzca hasta su amada (figura 11). La palabra ​nevermore parece representada gráficamente para acentuar la lectura ecfrástica del poema. Aunque publicadas ​post mortem y ocho años después que las de Manet, las ilustraciones de Doré son más cercanas a los cuatro dibujos inéditos realizados por 5 ​“Y la luz sobre él cayendo, sobre el suelo arroja trunca su ancha sombra funeral, y mi alma de esa sombra que en el suelo flota… nunca se alzará, nunca jamás”. 6 “…que un querube columpiase de mi alcoba en el santuario perfumado…” 5 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), los que fueron producidos casi cuarenta años antes y se cuentan entre sus primeros trabajos (Reed). Rosetti también muestra al poeta rodeado de ángeles y espíritus, y el estilo de sus dibujos varía desde una composición gótica libre y descontrolada, más al estilo de Fausto, a descripciones más etéreas de ángeles que se acercan a un prerrafaelismo. José María Mesa Villar (2009) señala que las ilustraciones que Rosetti realizó para EC le permitieron poner su imaginación al servicio de un programa estético propio que examinaba la relación entre la mente creativa y la trascendencia. A diferencia de lo que ocurre con Manet, en sus ilustraciones aparecen los dos ámbitos del poema: el real, representado por el estudiante obsesionado por la muerte de su amada, y el trascendente, ilustrado con seres fantasmagóricos con formas de mujeres o ángeles (139). Sus ilustraciones refieren a varios pasajes del poema, pero cada dibujo tiene la particularidad de abarcar la concepción central del texto, según interpretación del pintor. Debido a ello, por ejemplo, se aprecia que el encantamiento no solo aparece en el espíritu de Lenore, sino a través de la construcción imaginativa de ese espíritu: de ahí que la presencia del retrato de la difunta en la pared sea un aporte propio de la creatividad de Rossetti y no se encuentre en el poema de Poe (figuras 18). IV. Otras historias, otros ilustradores: Beardsley, Clarke, Rackham y Miller La influencia de Poe no sólo fue una cuestión de artistas románticos ni se limitó a su afamado poema EC. Por el contrario, muchos de los contemporáneos representaron otras de sus obras. Tal es el caso de Aubrey Beardsley ​(1872-1898), artista inglés considerado el líder del movimiento estético Art Nouveau​ . Tal como lo manifiesta ​Piepenbring (2015), favoreció lo grotesco y lo erótico en sus dibujos y tuvo una gran influencia en artistas posteriores. Además de cuentos de Poe, ilustró trabajos de Oscar Wilde y Alexander Pope. Si bien las ilustraciones que realizó sobre la obra de Poe fueron encargadas en 1894 por Herbert S. Stone and Company (Chicago) para decorar una colección multi-volumen de los trabajos del autor, aquellas no fueron publicadas hasta después de la muerte del artista. Aunque El Gato Negro (figura 19) es su ilustración más reproducida debido al éxito alcanzado, el resto de su producción replica la misma calidad y exquisitez (Marshall). En verdad, Beardsley no demostraba total afinidad con la atmósfera de horror que envuelve a las historias de Poe. De hecho, en la figura 20, tanto el orangután que lleva puesto un aro en su oreja derecha -se recuerda que en el texto (“Crímenes de la calle Morgue”) se menciona la existencia de un aro de topacio- así como el mobiliario que lo circunda (figura 20) poco dejan entrever el desenfreno del simio asesino que forma parte de la historia. El relato de Poe parece ser más descarnado que la ilustración: Era una minuciosa descripción anatómica y descriptiva del gran orangután leonado de las islas de la India oriental. La gigantesca estatura, la prodigiosa fuerza y agilidad, la terrible ferocidad y las tendencias imitativas de estos mamíferos son bien conocidas. Instantáneamente comprendí todo el horror del asesinato. (246) 6 Silvia Sartelli http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/author/dpiepenbring/ Posteriormente, en 1919 se lanzó una edición de lujo de ​Tales of Mystery and Imagination con las ilustraciones de Harry Clarke (1889-1931), las que adicionaron una cuota extra de horror a las historias. La obra recolecta los cuentos más recordados de Poe​, ​incluyendo​ “La máscara de la muerte roja”, “El pozo y el péndulo”, “Corazón delator” y “La caída de la casa Usher”. Fue publicada casi 60 años después de la muerte del escritor, por George Harrap & Co., e incluyó 24 hojas de ilustraciones de Clarke. Una segunda edición se publicaría en ​1923 con 8 láminas en color y más de 24 monocromáticas, también de su autoría. Sin embargo, con figuras elongadas, las ilustraciones de Clarke son mucho más macabras que las de Beardsley. A ello contribuye el uso más extendido del negro en un intento por acompañar la atmósfera de misterio de los textos. Se puede establecer una comparación entre las figuras 21 y 23 sobre el cuento “La máscara de la Muerte Roja”. El dibujo de Beardsley se centra en resaltar lo que se conoce como el hedonismo decadente de fin de siglo (​fin-de-siecle​ ) y, en consecuencia, pone el acento en lo siniestro y sensual. En efecto, se destacan las figuras del bufón en ánimo festivo hasta lujurioso y los disfraces y máscaras a los que alude la obra y, también, sobresalen las pequeñas imágenes que aparecen en la vestimenta de la figura central simulando ángeles endemoniados o diablillos. Esta postura burlona que adopta puede deberse, en parte, a que Beardsley fue un gran crítico de la sociedad victoriana (Burdett). En palabras del Poe: “el príncipe había reunido todo lo necesario para los placeres. Había bufones, improvisadores, bailarines y músicos; había hermosura y vino. Todo eso y la seguridad estaban del lado de adentro. Afuera estaba la Muerte Roja” (90). A su turno, el trabajo de Clarke retrata el hecho de la muerte misma, representada en una figura esbelta con la máscara en mano. Detrás, aparecen los invitados a la fiesta abarrotados en uno de los salones, como si pudieran escapar de esa amenaza latente. Resalta también el reloj: En este aposento, contra la pared del poniente, se apoyaba un gigantesco reloj de ébano. Su péndulo se balanceaba con un resonar sordo, pesado, monótono. (91) ... Su figura, alta y flaca, estaba envuelta de la cabeza a los pies en una mortaja. La máscara que ocultaba el rostro se parecía de tal manera al semblante de un cadáver ya rígido, que el escrutinio más detallado se habría visto en dificultades para descubrir el engaño. (…) Pero el enmascarado se había atrevido a asumir las apariencias de la Muerte Roja. Su mortaja estaba salpicada de sangre, y su amplia frente, así como el rostro, aparecían manchados por el horror escarlata. (92) ... Reuniendo el terrible coraje de la desesperación, numerosas máscaras se lanzaron al aposento negro; pero, al apoderarse del desconocido, cuya alta figura permanecía erecta e inmóvil a la sombra del reloj de ébano, retrocedieron con inexpresable horror al descubrir que el sudario y la máscara cadavérica que con tanta rudeza habían aferrado no contenían ninguna figura tangible. Y entonces reconocieron la presencia de la Muerte Roja. (93) 7 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%B1o_1923 Entre los trabajos de Clarke, además, aparece una ilustración de “El tonel de amontillado” (figura 24). Aparentemente, esta ilustración capta el momento en que Montresor, con un claro perfil calculador, goza de su tan esperada venganza, al tiempo que Fortunato, entre los efectos del alcohol, advierte la real intención de su compañero. Destacan en la imagen el gorro con los cascabeles, las cadenas que atrapan a Fortunato, la pila de rocas que el narrador eleva y la excesiva humedad y salitre. Se reproducen algunos párrafos del texto que se estiman de interés para valorar esta obra: Acercóseme con excesiva cordialidad, pues había estado bebiendo en demasía. Disfrazado de bufón, llevaba un ajustado traje a rayas y lucía en la cabeza el cónico gorro de cascabeles... (85) ... ¡Mira cómo el salitre va en aumento! -dije-. Abunda como el moho en las criptas. Estamos debajo del lecho del río. Las gotas de humedad caen entre los huesos... Ven, volvámonos antes de que sea demasiado tarde. La tos... (87) ... En un instante llegó al fondo del nicho y, al ver que la roca interrumpía su marcha, se detuvo como atontado. Un segundo más tarde quedaba encadenado al granito. Había en la roca dos argollas de hierro, separadas horizontalmente por unos dos pies. De una de ellas colgaba una cadena corta; de la otra, un candado. Pasándole la cadena alrededor de la cintura, me bastaron apenas unos segundos para aherrojarlo. Demasiado estupefacto estaba para resistirse. Extraje la llave y salí del nicho… (88) También se ocupó de este relato Arthur Rackham (1967-1939), ilustrador inglés asociado a la era de oro de la ilustración, quien tuvo a su cargo no solo la obra de Poe, sino también otras obras literarias como ​Alicia en el país de las maravillas, Peter Pan​ y los Cuentos de los hermanos Grimm.​ El trabajo de ilustración de ​Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1935) consistió en trabajos en color y en blanco y negro que acompañaron la colección de historias del autor norteamericano (Massey). En las figuras 27 se retratan dos momentos de “El tonel de amontillado”: la entrada a las catacumbas de Fortunato y Montresor, con sus antorchas y botellas en mano, el disfraz burlesco del primero con sus cascabeles sonoros y una mirada un tanto perdida, quizás como resultado de una embriaguez notoria. En el fondo, restos óseos y barriles de vino y el moho presente en las paredes, como complementos de la escena. La restante figura conserva algunas de las características de la primera; pero aquí se observa el semblante triunfante de Montresor, quien con pala en mano se dispone a terminar su plan. Fortunato, por su parte, aparece notablemente desmejorado con rasgos de decrepitud e insalubridad en su rostro. También, en el fondo, aparecen esqueletos, tal como se lee en el texto de Poe. La imagen parece coincidir con el siguiente pasaje: “​La pared me llegaba ahora hasta el pecho. Detúveme nuevamente y, alzando la antorcha sobre la mampostería, proyecté sus débiles rayos sobre la figura allí encerrada” (88). Podría aseverarse, entonces, que las figuras responden a un estilo distinto del logrado por Clarke, autor que puso más énfasis en la macabra idea de Montresor y en la hostilidad del sitio. En parte, el uso de color ayuda a una versión más amena de la historia. 8 Silvia Sartelli Así como Beardsley retrató la historia de “Los crímenes de la calle Morgue”, Clarke, también, tuvo a su cargo la ilustración de ese cuento en la edición de lujo ya mencionada. Aquí vale un comentario sobre la forma en que ambos artistas ilustran el mismo cuento. Por una parte -como ya se ha indicado-, Beardsley optó por un trabajo de líneas más finas y con menos exaltación del horror de los crímenes; en tanto que Clarke hizo un dibujo mucho más descarnado (figura 22), donde muestra al orangután con toda la crudeza que Poe le asigna en el relato. Basta con reparar en el pelaje que la bestia ostenta para comprobar que coincide exactamente con la descripción dada por el escritor: “Sólo un orangután, entre todos los animales existentes, es capaz de producir las marcas que aparecen en su diseño. Y el mechón de pelo coincide en un todo con el pelaje de la bestia descrita por Cuvier” (246). Asimismo, se traduce con claridad en la ilustración el estado de desorden en que se encontró la escena del crimen: El aposento se hallaba en el mayor desorden: los muebles, rotos, habían sido lanzados en todas direcciones. El colchón del único lecho aparecía tirado en mitad del piso. Sobre una silla había una navaja manchada de sangre. (235) ... Si ahora, en adición a estas cosas, ha reflexionado usted adecuadamente sobre el extraño desorden del aposento, hemos llegado al punto de poder combinar las nociones de una asombrosa agilidad, una fuerza sobrehumana, una ferocidad brutal, una carnicería sin motivo, una grotesquerie en el horror por completo ajeno a lo humano (245). Otros detalles del cuento también se retratan: Los vecinos se introdujeron en un pequeño patio pavimentado de la parte posterior del edificio y encontraron el cadáver de la anciana señora, la cual había sido degollada tan salvajemente que, al tratar de levantar el cuerpo, la cabeza se desprendió del tronco. (235) ... Era evidente que la garganta [de la madre] había sido seccionada con un instrumento muy afilado, probablemente una navaja. (238) ... La garganta de la anciana señora no solamente estaba cortada, sino que la cabeza había quedado completamente separada del cuerpo; el instrumento era una simple navaja. (245) ... Además, el cabello de un loco no es como el que ahora tengo en la mano. Arranqué este pequeño mechón de entre los dedos rígidamente apretados de madame L’Espanaye. ¿Puede decirme qué piensa de ellos? -¡Dupin... este cabello es absolutamente extraordinario...! ¡No es cabello humano ​! -grité, 7 trastornado por completo. (246) ... Navaja en mano y embadurnado de jabón, habíase sentado frente a un espejo y trataba de afeitarse, tal como, sin duda, había visto hacer a su amo espiándolo por el ojo de la cerradura. (249) 7 Resaltado en el original. 9 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 ... En el momento en que el marinero miró hacia el interior del cuarto, el gigantesco animal había aferrado a madame L’Espanaye por el cabello (que la dama tenía suelto, como si se hubiera estado peinando) y agitaba la navaja cerca de su cara imitando los movimientos de un barbero. (250) Estos párrafos demuestran que el dibujo de Clarke es fiel al texto de Poe: la navaja en la mano del mono, su expresión de furia, la ventana cerca del respaldo y el marinero asomado con ojos desorbitados ante la escena de espanto, el cuello ensangrentado de unas de las víctimas, el colchón doblado en el piso y el brazo alargado de la mujer, indicando un forcejeo que terminaría en la extracción de un mechón de pelo del animal. Otra atrapante historia sobre la que trabajaron estos artistas fue “El pozo y el péndulo”. En este caso, Clarke puso el énfasis en la tensión que el texto de Poe describe. Aparece el narrador, con una expresión de horror ante la muerte inminente, los roedores que lo circundan y el péndulo intimidante. El efecto de desolación se logra con un uso excesivo de negro, dejando muy poco claros en la obra (figura 26). El trabajo de Rackham (figura 28, izquierda) presenta mayor cantidad de claros que el de su colega, sin embargo, es igualmente palpable el efecto de desesperación que invade al personaje, quien intenta librarse de las ataduras con el brazo izquierdo. El espanto que tiñe su mirada habla de la intensidad del texto: ​“Bajaba... ¡Seguro, incansable, bajaba! Ya pasaba vibrando a tres pulgadas de mi pecho. Luché con violencia, furiosamente, para soltar mi brazo izquierdo, que sólo estaba libre a partir del codo” (45). Igualmente, se reiteran otros detalles como la proximidad del péndulo que se balancea sobre el cuerpo, los animales a su alrededor y el pozo que da, parcialmente, nombre al relato. En conclusión, puede decirse que ambas ilustraciones se asemejan y resultan fieles al texto que intentan retratar: Yacía ahora de espaldas, completamente estirado, sobre una especie de bastidor de madera. Estaba firmemente amarrado por una larga banda que parecía un cíngulo. Pasaba, dando muchas vueltas, por mis miembros y mi cuerpo, dejándome solamente en libertad la cabeza y el brazo derecho, que con gran trabajo podía extender hasta los alimentos, colocados en un plato de barro a mi alcance. (43) ... Un ligero ruido atrajo mi atención y, mirando hacia el piso, vi cruzar varias enormes ratas. Habían salido del pozo, que se hallaba al alcance de mi vista sobre la derecha. Aún entonces, mientras las miraba, siguieron saliendo en cantidades, presurosas y con ojos famélicos atraídas por el olor de la carne…. (46); Salían del pozo, corriendo en renovados contingentes. Se colgaron de la madera, corriendo por ella y saltaron a centenares sobre mi cuerpo. El acompasado movimiento del péndulo no las molestaba para nada. Evitando sus golpes, se precipitaban sobre las untadas ligaduras. Se apretaban, pululaban sobre mí en cantidades cada vez más grandes. (46) ... Pero lo que me perturbó fue la idea de que el péndulo había descendido perceptiblemente. Noté ahora -y es inútil agregar con cuánto horror- que su 10 Silvia Sartelli extremidad inferior estaba constituida por una media luna de reluciente acero, cuyo largo de punta a punta alcanzaba a un pie. Aunque afilado como una navaja, el péndulo parecía macizo y pesado, y desde el filo se iba ensanchando hasta rematar en una ancha y sólida masa. Hallábase fijo a un pesado vástago de bronce y todo el mecanismo silbaba al balancearse en el aire. (44) La restante ilustración (figura 28, derecha), realizada a color, refiere a una de las últimas partes de la historia, cuando el narrador libre de las ataduras contempla el pozo: En estos momentos pude advertir por primera vez el origen de la sulfurosa luz que iluminaba la celda. Procedía de una fisura de media pulgada de ancho, que rodeaba por completo el calabozo al pie de las paredes, las cuales parecían -y en realidad estaban- completamente separadas del piso… (47) Un detalle interesante de este trabajo es la forma en que se capta la multiplicidad de ojos rojos que el personaje menciona en su relato, con rasgos diabólicos y aterradores. Incluso se llega a visualizar un cadáver en uno de los extremos, que suma más consternación al ya de por sí exasperante relato. Poe lo expresa así: Pero ahora esos colores habían tomado un brillo intenso y sorprendente, que crecía más y más y daba a aquellas espectrales y diabólicas imágenes un aspecto que hubiera quebrantado nervios más resistentes que los míos. Ojos demoníacos, de una salvaje y aterradora vida, me contemplaban fijamente desde mil direcciones, donde ninguno había sido antes visible, y brillaban con el cárdeno resplandor de un fuego que mi imaginación no alcanzaba a concebir como irreal. (47) El último dibujo que se ha elegido del ilustrador irlandés es el correspondiente al cuento “El Corazón delator ​”​ y la selección obedece al hecho de ser uno de los pocos realizados en color y en el cual el artista se aleja de la crudeza que caracteriza a sus otros trabajos. Aquí se constata la existencia del narrador acechando al viejo en su lecho, la linterna como elemento conductor de la historia, el ojo del anciano –que tanto perturbaba a su asesino y que en algún pasaje lo llama “ojo de buitre” (figura 25). Se comparten algunos párrafos del texto: Me parece que fue su ojo. ¡Sí, eso fue! Tenía un ojo semejante al de un buitre... Un ojo celeste, y velado por una tela. Cada vez que lo clavaba en mí se me helaba la sangre. (70) ... Y entonces, cuando tenía la cabeza completamente dentro del cuarto, abría la linterna cautelosamente... ¡oh, tan cautelosamente! Sí, cautelosamente iba abriendo la linterna (pues crujían las bisagras), la iba abriendo lo suficiente para que un solo rayo de luz cayera sobre el ojo de buitre. (70) ... El viejo clamó una vez... nada más que una vez… (71) La ilustración a color de Rackham muestra una escena muy distinta de la elegida por Clarke y reúne varios aspectos del cuento. Aquí, aparecen los tres oficiales 11 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 -cruzando entre sí miradas sospechosas- y el narrador, quien, envuelto en un estado de locura, termina confesando el crimen cometido. La silla ocupa un lugar central en el dibujo como elemento que fue escogido para cubrir el cuerpo enterrado y el corazón, sostenido en una de las manos del asesino. En la parte inferior, se observa al viejo descuartizado con su ojo latente y el cuchillo utilizado para seccionar sus miembros (figura 29). V. Resignificaciones de Poe en artistas contemporáneos Se ha optado por presentar, al final, una breve referencia al trabajo de un grupo de artistas contemporáneos que fueron reunidos con motivo de una exhibición realizada en Londres en honor al poeta norteamericano. El evento tuvo lugar en 2008 en London’s White Cube y se conoció bajo el nombre de “You Dig the Tunnel, I’ll Hide the Soil” ​. Su mentor -el artista y escritor 8 Harland Miller (1964)- envió diversas historias de Poe a un variopinto grupo de artistas y les pidió que crearan piezas influenciadas en esos textos. El resultado de la convocatoria fue, finalmente, expuesto en esa exhibición que recogió 34 exposiciones y, entre los participantes, se incluyó a Anselm Kiefer, Tracey Emin y Fred Tomaselli (Strasnick). Entre los trabajos recibidos, destaca el realizado por ​Damien Hirst (1965) que consiste en un lienzo caleidoscópico y una cama pintada colocada debajo del cuadro (figura 30). Lo particular de esta obra -además de no implicar una ilustración inmediata de un texto de Poe, sino una representación artística basada en uno de sus relatos- está dada por diversos factores. Uno de ellos es la multiplicidad de elementos utilizados: el lienzo donde se ha incrustado una pequeña calavera rodeada de un estallido del color en el que, al mismo tiempo, genera un efecto de dramatismo, el cuervo situado en el respaldo de la cama y el oso de peluche sobre la colcha. Pero lo interesante es cómo se han nucleado varias historias en una sola obra. Si bien estuvo inspirada en la perturbadora “The Startling Effects of Mesmerism on a Dying Man” (también conocida como “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” – “La verdad sobre el caso del señor Valdemar”), la aparición del cuervo induce a pensar que el poema del escritor se hizo presente en este trabajo contemporáneo. La obra estuvo acompañada de la siguiente frase: “For God's sake - quick! - quick! - put me to sleep - or quick! - waken me! - quick! - I say to you that I am dead!” ​. 9 La fotógrafa Cindy Sherman (1954) también se hizo presente con un trabajo inspirado en “La máscara de la muerte roja” (figura 31). Por su parte, la artista Abigail Lane (1967) realizó un corazón de cera con un ojo de acrílico, que capta, enormemente, la atención del visitante, obra que puede considerarse una muy buena y fidedigna representación de la esencia de “Corazón delator”. VI. Conclusiones 8 “Tu cava el túnel, yo esconderé la tierra” (traducción de la autora). 9 ​“Por el amor de Dios - ¡rápido! - ¡rápido! – ponme a dormir – o ¡rápido! -¡despiértame! - ¡rápido! – Te digo que estoy muerto (Traducción de la autora). 12 Silvia Sartelli http://www.damienhirst.com/ El recorrido transitado en este artículo, a través de las obras analizadas, demuestra, con claridad, la enorme influencia que el escritor norteamericano ejerció en talentosos artistas que, de diversas formas y estilos, pretendieron homenajearlo. Su notable trascendencia se visualiza en la forma en que ilustradores y pintores dieron vida a sus textos mediante el uso de técnicas disímiles y, asimismo, en la interpretación -a veces libre- que hicieron de sus cuentos y poemas. Un aspecto que merece destacarse es la creatividad desplegada por los artistas para retratar diversos pasajes de sus escritos, en algunos casos de forma más trágica y con cierto apego a la letra y en otros, innovando por el uso de colores y formas grotescas que relativizan la tragedia ínsita a las historias de Poe. La influencia temporal es otro punto de relevancia. Los artistas que han encontrado en Poe una musa inspiradora no se han limitado a los existentes en el siglo XX. Como se ha visto, en la actualidad, se continúan realizando muestras en las que el disparador creativo resulta la extensa obra del autor estadounidense. La genialidad del escritor es un legado que aún sigue presente y que tiene el valor de exceder el aspecto literario para inmiscuirse en otras ramas artísticas. La riqueza de las obras pictóricas aquí incluidas reafirman esta interrelación y enaltecen sus escritos. Referencias bibliográficas Alastair I. Grieve. “Rossetti’s illustrations to Poe” en ​Apollo Magazine​ , 97, pp. 142-45. Burdett​, Carolyn. “Aestheticism and decadence”, British Library, 23 June 2012. Web. 15 de abril de 2016. . Cuéllar Alejandro, Carlos. “El artista como musa: la influencia de Edgar A. Poe en el arte” en ​Ars Longa, Cuadernos de Arte​ . 18 (2009), pp. 207-217. Web. 22 de abril de 2016. <​www.uv.es/dep230/revista/PDF639.pdf​>. Hauptman, Jodi. ​Beyond The Visible: The Art Of Odilon Redon​ , New York: MoMA, 2005. Marshall, Collin. “​Aubrey Beardsley’s Macabre Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories (1894)​” en ​Open Culture​ , 30 Sep. 2015. Web. 20 de abril de 2016. . Massey, Laura. “​The Golden Age of Illustration: Arthur Rackham ​” en ​Peter Harringhton​ , 23 Nov. 2012. Web. 15 de abril de 2016. . Mesa Villar, J. M. “‘Me atrajo su mirada tan suave como mi aliento’: La influencia de los aparecidos de Edgar Allan Poe en el perfil místico virginal de Dante Gabriel Rossetti” en ​The Grove. Working Papers on English Studies​ , 16 (2009), pp. 129-150. Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York. ​Catalogue of the Manet exhibition​ , September, 10th – November 27th 1983. Open Culture. “Gustave Doré’s splendid illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’” en ​Open culture​ , 10 Apr. 2014. Web. 25 de marzo de 2016. 13 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/aestheticism-and-decadence#authorBlock1 http://www.uv.es/dep230/revista/PDF639.pdf http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/aubrey-beardsleys-macabre-illustrations-of-edgar-allan-poes-short-stories-1894.html http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/aubrey-beardsleys-macabre-illustrations-of-edgar-allan-poes-short-stories-1894.html http://www.peterharrington.co.uk/blog/the-golden-age-of-illustration-arthur-rackham/ . Piepenbring​, Dan. “Beardsley’s Poe” en ​The Paris Review​ , 21 Aug. 2015. Web. 17 de marzo de 2016. < ​www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/08/21/beardsleys-poe/ ​>. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Raven”. ​New York Evening Mirror​ , ​9 Jan.​ ​1845​. Poe, Edgar Allan. ​Tales of Mistery and Imagination​ . London: George Harrap & co., 1919. Poe, Edgar Allan. ​Cuentos de imaginación y Misterio​ , Trad. Julio Cortázar, Ilust. Harry Clarke. Bs. As.: Libros del Zorro Rojo, 2009. Poe, Edgar Allan. ​Poe Cuentos​ . Trad. Julio Cortázar. Bs. As.: Alianza Editorial, 2010. Reed, Susan. “Some flights of Poe’s Raven – Mallarmé and Manet, Doré, and Rossetti” en ​European Studies blog​ , British Library, 6 March 2015. Web. 23 de marzo de 2016. <​blogs.bl.uk/european/2015/03/some-flights-of-poes-raven.html ​>. Romero López, Dolores. “El trasfondo ocultista del cuervo: desde su simbolismo poético a los topoi modernistas” en ​Ilu. Revista de Ciencias de las Religiones.​ 18 (2013), pp. 201-218. Web. 25 de abril de 2016. . Strasnick​, Stephanie. “That’s so raven: artistic visions of Poe” en ​Arts News​ , 26 Set. 2013. Web. 20 de abril de 2016. <​www.artnews.com/2013/09/26/edgar-allan-poe-in-art/​>. Universidad de Cuenca. “El Cuervo – The Raven” (varias traducciones) en ​Revista de la Universidad de Cuenca​ , Serie 1, No 2 (1924) pp. 226-261. Web 15 de marzo de 2016. . W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies, “Baudelaire and Poe” exhibition at the Vanderbilt University Library, April ninth to thirtieth, 1969. Wilson-Bareau, Juliet et al. “Tales of a Raven. The Origins and Fate of Le Corbeau by Mallarmé and Manet” en ​Print Quaterly​ , vol. 6, no. 3, Sep 1989, pp. 258-307. Zarandona Fernández, Juan Miguel. “El cuervo de Edgar Allan Poe, en traducción de Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde (1887)”, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. Web. 27 de noviembre de 2016. . 14 Silvia Sartelli http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/author/dpiepenbring/ http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/08/21/beardsleys-poe/ https://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=New_York_Evening_Mirror&action=edit&redlink=1 https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/29_de_enero https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/1845 http://blogs.bl.uk/european/2015/03/some-flights-of-poes-raven.html http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ILUR/article/view/43048 http://www.artnews.com/author/stephaniestrasnick/ http://www.artnews.com/2013/09/26/edgar-allan-poe-in-art/ Anexo Ilustraciones de Odilon Redon​ (figuras 1 a 3) Figura 1 Figura 2 Figura 3 15 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 Ilustraciones de Édouard Manet ​(figuras 4 a 10) Figura 4 Figura 5 Figura 6: frontispicio 16 Silvia Sartelli Figura 7: “Once upon a Midnight Dreary” Figura 8: “Open here I flung the shutter” 17 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 Figura 9: “Perched upon a bust of Pallas” Figura 10: “That shadow that lies floating on the floor” 18 Silvia Sartelli Ilustraciones de Gustave Doré ​(figuras 11 a 17) Figura 11 Figura 12: “Something at my window lattice” ​Figura 13: “Open here I hung the shutter” 19 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 Figura 14: “Perched upon a bust of Pallas” Figura 15: “And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted – nevermore” Figura 16: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping​, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “‘T is some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door- Only this, and nothing more.” 20 Silvia Sartelli Figura 17: “Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, “Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;— Darkness there, and nothing more” Ilustraciones de Dante Rossetti ​(figuras 18) Figuras 18: The Raven: Angel Footfalls (derecha: 1846; izquierda y debajo: 1848) 21 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 22 Silvia Sartelli Ilustraciones de Aubrey Beardsley ​(figuras 19 a 21) Figura 19: El gato negro Figura 20: Los crímenes de la calle Morgue Figura 21: La máscara de la muerte roja 23 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 Ilustraciones de Harry Clarke ​(figuras 22 a 26) Figura 22: Los crímenes de la calle Morgue Figura 23: La máscara de la muerte roja 24 Silvia Sartelli Figura 24: El tonel de amontillado Figura 25: Corazón delator Figura 26: El pozo y el péndulo 25 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 Ilustraciones de Arthur Rackham ​(figuras 27 a 29) Figuras 27: El tonel de amontillado 26 Silvia Sartelli Figuras 28: El pozo y el péndulo Figura 29: Corazón delator 27 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 Obra de Damien Hirst​ (figura 30) The Startling Effects of Mesmerism on a Dying Man 28 Silvia Sartelli Obra de Cindy Sherman ​(figura 31) The masque of the red death Obra de Abigail Lane​ (figura 32) 29 Revista de Culturas y Literaturas Comparadas. Volumen 6 - Año 2016 work_52zqxwdayrfclchz2qt3qdtd6m ---- This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. SPELLS OF OUR INHABITING: TRANSITIONING FROM THE SPECTRE OF GNOSTIC ESTRANGEMENT TO A PHILOSOPHY OF ENTANGLED OVERFLOWING Clara SOUDAN PhD in Philosophy The University of Edinburgh 2019 This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the au- thor, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. SIGNED DECLARATION I declare that this thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy has been composed solely by myself and that it has not been submitted, in whole or in part, in any previous application for a degree. Except where stated otherwise by reference or acknowledgment, the work presented is entirely my own. ABSTRACT This doctoral thesis explores the cardinal importance of cosmological and the- ological narratives in our engagement with the contemporary ecological transition. Drawing upon the analyses of political philosophers Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin, I argue that the category of Gnosticism provides a fruitful angle from which to approach the present environmental issue as well as the challenge of an ecological inhabiting of the earth. Originally referring to a variety of religious systems which bloomed in early Christianity, the concept of Gnosticism gravitates around the cardinal theme of a cul- tural estrangement from the world. While Hans Jonas’ study of Gnosticism elucidates the nihilistic dimension of the structural dualism pervading modern cosmology by re- lating the latter to a deep-ingrained tendency to escape from the world – which his environmental ethics of responsibility famously attempted to remedy –, Eric Voegelin focuses on the political manifestations of this spiritual inclination. Voegelin’s insights and his developments around the platonic concept of metaxy contribute to unravel what modern gnostic movements struggle to contain: the irreducible in-betweenness of be- ing in the world. This enduring and ubiquitous in-betweenness of worldly processes, I submit, is what simultaneously moves and resists the dualistic structure of modern cosmology: it also lies at the core of what is being unveiled along the ecological mu- tation, what remains unthought and yet must be thought. The perspective of Gnosti- cism thus enables both Jonas and Voegelin to reach a greater analytical depth as well as a critical distance from within the system of thought they intend to approach. Fo- cusing on the notion of inhabiting, the “hermeneutics of Gnosticism” developed in this research aims to further illuminate some of the cosmological tropes framing our un- derstanding of and involvement in the present ecological mutation. It uncovers for in- stance such pervasive ideas as that of an abyssal alienation from the world, a perpetual yearning to overcome the conditions of our inhabiting, or a radical dualism between God and the world as compelling cultural spells cast upon our inhabiting of the world. As I draw attention to some of these spells and how they bewitch the way we inhabit the world, I hope for the tropes of our inhabiting to be reclaimed on the path to a resilient and peaceful inhabiting of the earth. My analysis of the spectre of Gnosticism in our cosmologies brings into relief the relevance of alternate ways of dwelling and of engaging with the present ecological transition. These are mobilized by alternate narratives which, from process philosophy to ecofeminist thought through the poetics of créolité, recount a hopeful entanglement with the world, the resilient openness of our inhabiting, and a joyful, vernacular overflowing of our Gaian becomings. LAY SUMMARY Why and how are stories crucial in order to properly engage with the present challenge of an ecological transition? What is the legitimacy of a philosophical inquiry in this issue yet so worldly, traditionally ranging from earth sciences to political ecol- ogy? To what extent do the narratives we both inherit and perpetuate condition the way we inhabit this world? Such are the interrogations which prompted this doctoral research. The present work arises from the intuition that our relationship to the earth and involvement within the ongoing ecological collapse have everything to do with the constellation of myths, tropes, paradigms, ideas and discourses which weave our conceptual landscape. With the ecofeminist author Starhawk, I propose to approach this constellation of narratives as “cultural spells”. As I confront some of these spells and uncover some of the ways they bewitch us, I unfold the cardinal thought according to which our inhabiting of the world – comprising of the many mundane ways in which we work, consume, eat, dress, travel, dwell and relate to other earthlings – ultimately relies upon powerful and contingent stories. Stories which we must reflect upon if we wish to transition toward a more sustainable model of inhabiting. Drawing upon the work of two political philosophers of Modernity, Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin, I identify in the mythology of Gnosticism a key to approach contemporary inhabiting. The term Gnosticism refers to an obscure syncretism of spiritual movements blooming in early Christianity and converging towards an experience of the world as a hostile place from which humanity is radically estranged. I argue that delving into the cos- mology of Gnosticism illuminates a cultural estrangement from the earth along with the dualistic architecture of thought around which this imaginary of alienation is en- forced. Luckily, the contemporary pathologies of the inhabiting unveiled by the lens of Gnosticism can be addressed, and a resilient relationship with the world reclaimed as we allow ourselves to tell different stories. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this doctoral dissertation has been a journey in entanglements and overflowings. As I reach the end of this research, I feel both deeply indebted to the manifold entanglements that have rooted me this past three years and overflowed with gratitude for what they gave birth to: a peaceful abundance exceeding the academic scope of a doctoral research. Among these entanglements, I must express my gratitude to my dedicated su- pervisor Pauline Phemister and to my inspiring friends Michael Northcott and Bruno Latour. Their unwavering trust and presence combined with the gift of their insurrec- tional thought were invaluable sources of confidence and nurturing in the process of completing this work. I also gratefully acknowledge the funding received by the School of Divinity of the University of Edinburgh. To my devoted parents, my beautiful friends Marion, Dario and Cesco, and to my love Adrien, whose luminous beings made everything so much lighter: thank you! TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1. HANS JONAS’ ANALYSIS OF GNOSTICISM: SUBVERTING DUALISM TO IN- HABIT THE WORLD ..................................................................................................... 27 A. The primary experience of the alienness of the world ................................. 37 The fall into and the escape from the world ....................................................... 39 The alien and the home ....................................................................................... 42 The abyss, the rift and cosmic anxiety ................................................................ 44 B. Gnosticism as acosmic dualism ....................................................................... 48 The cosmo-ontological unfolding of an existential dualism ............................... 48 A pivotal theological dualism ............................................................................. 50 The eschatological tension contained in temporal dualism................................ 56 C. The Gnostic estrangement from the world as nihilism ................................ 60 Gnosticism as negation of the world: an acosmic nihilism ................................ 61 The relation to transcendence is the relation to the world ................................. 64 The relation to the world is paradigmatic of ethics ............................................ 68 Conclusion: thinking the abyss of worldly being ............................................... 70 CHAPTER 2. ERIC VOEGELIN’S CONCEPT OF GNOSTICISM AND THE PNEUMO-PA- THOLOGY OF POLITICAL MODERNITY ....................................................................... 73 Introduction: Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism in his philosophy .................. 73 A. The Gnostic Revolution: overcoming a godless world ................................. 84 An eternal revolution .......................................................................................... 85 The knowledge that shall redeem us ................................................................... 86 Escaping the world ............................................................................................. 88 B. Modernity as immanent political religion ..................................................... 90 The modern political religion ............................................................................. 90 The Immanentization and the unworldly world .................................................. 92 C. Inhabiting in-between the world .................................................................... 98 The leap in the abyss of Being ............................................................................ 98 Dwelling in the metaxy ..................................................................................... 100 The gnostic loss of the world ............................................................................ 104 Conclusion: .......................................................................................................... 107 CHAPTER 3. WHAT GNOSTICISM UNCONCEALS: AN ENVIRONMENTAL HERMENEU- TICS OF GNOSTICISM FOR THE PRESENT TIMES ...................................................... 109 Introduction – A Hermeneutics of Gnosticism for the environmental transition .............................................................................................................................. 109 A. Uncovering the worldless inhabiting of modern politics ............................ 114 B. The abyss and the dualistic closure of the world ........................................ 127 A worldless dualism .......................................................................................... 127 The tension beneath dualism and its concealment............................................ 129 C. Subverting the tropes of our inhabiting ...................................................... 138 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 141 CHAPTER 4. ROOTS, WAVES AND FOLDS OF THE WORLD: TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY OF ENTANGLED OVERFLOWING ............................................................................... 145 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 146 A. Process thought for an ecology of the open ................................................. 150 B. Gaian ontology for a créole world ................................................................ 160 The roots of the waves: worldly entanglement as blurring of dualistic boundaries .......................................................................................................................... 160 The créolité of the world: inhabiting in-between the world ............................. 167 C. A baroque world of overflowing .................................................................. 170 Between the folds: the origami universe ........................................................... 170 The world as entangled overflowing ................................................................. 174 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 180 CHAPTER 5. HOW TO DWELL? POLITICS OF THE INHABITING AND LOVE OF THE WORLD ..................................................................................................................... 183 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 184 A. Politics of the ecological apocalypse ............................................................. 187 Politics in the end-time ..................................................................................... 189 The time that remains ....................................................................................... 192 For an eschatology of the present..................................................................... 196 The apocalyptical imperative of politics in the open ........................................ 203 B. What we are bound to: ethics and politics of the earthbounds ................. 206 For an Ethics of entangled responsibility ......................................................... 209 From Gnostic towards Gaian politics .............................................................. 213 C. Politics of radical love: the subversion in reclaiming a loving inhabiting of the world .............................................................................................................. 216 Dwelling with the trouble: embracing the world as home ............................... 216 Weaving an intimacy with the world ................................................................ 218 In praise of weeds: clearing a space for hope in the world .............................. 223 COUNTERSPELLS FOR A RESILIENT INHABITING OF THE WORLD ........................... 227 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES ............................................................................ 239 1 INTRODUCTION 1. Foreword A world of tales and spells – why stories matter Studying the tales told and spread in our world, the writer and activist Star- hawk, a prominent voice in contemporary earth-based spirituality and ecofeminism, defines a spell as “a story we tell ourselves that shapes our emotional and psychic world”. A story, she adds, “so pervasive that most people mistake it for reality”. 1 Drawing attention to the powerful spells cast by various institutions of authority such as corporate media or public universities, Starhawk leans upon the cultural anthropol- ogist Clifford Geertz’s definition of culture as « the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves »2, to approach culture ultimately as a set of tales and spells. In Dreaming the Dark, Starhawk thus enquires into the irrational, the unseen and obscure that un- derlies the modernist paradigm of rationality, uncovering its “other side” as she reveals its rootedness in spiritual, mythical, symbolical and metaphorical narratives. I am in- debted to her enquiry into the dark as I approach the contemporary, urgently empirical event of a global ecological crisis from an interrogation about the cultural narratives, tales, spells and metaphors that frame and condition our engagement with it. 1 STARHAWK, “Spells and Counterspells: Why Act Now?”, 2001, p.1. URL:https://starhawk.org/Activism/activism%20writings/Globalization/Spells%20and%20Counter- spells-Why%20Act%20Now.pdf Accessed 27.03.2019. 2 Clifford GEERTZ, The interpretation of cultures: selected essays, New York, Basic Books, 1973, p. 448. https://starhawk.org/Activism/activism%20writings/Globalization/Spells%20and%20Counterspells-Why%20Act%20Now.pdf https://starhawk.org/Activism/activism%20writings/Globalization/Spells%20and%20Counterspells-Why%20Act%20Now.pdf 2 Following Starhawk, who emphasizes the necessity of naming the narratives structuring our political landscape – notably the dreams of conquest and the pursuit of progress – the ecofeminist philosopher Emilie Hache proposes to reclaim the founding tales of our cosmologies. She offers to underline the power of narratives in our lives, their ability to connect us to a form of powerlessness as well as to empower us, their ability to make us disappear, to make us doubt our own existence or, on the contrary, to give us confidence; their ability to help us imagine other worlds just as to make them impossible.3 Emilie Hache signals the embeddedness of the concrete world in a constellation of narratives: these assume a radical power over the course of our mundane trajectories and pervade the sphere of intimacy as they infuse our ability to imagine and act. Which stories, which tales, which patterns of thought did we inherit from the evolving tissue of the world? Which tropes colonize our imaginary – upon which narratives do we lean as we think, co-create and become with the world? Who is this world populated with tales, “promiscuous mixtures of thinking and becoming-with”4? More precisely, which thinking of the world enables us to, or prevent us from, inhabiting the world? Could certain images and narratives impoverish our relationship to the world, thus hindering us from dwelling as well and fully as we may aspire to? What is summoned, what is brought to life and what remains unthought when we speak of “the world”? This preliminary interrogation is crucial. In Donna Haraway’s words, 3 Emilie HACHE, « Se réapproprier le champ de la longue durée. Contribution écoféministe à une histoire après l’anthropocène ». Conference given in Brussels on the 23.02.2017, for the research seminar « Esthétiques et pratiques de la terre » organized by Thierry Drumm and Aline Wiame, GECo, ULB. I translate from French: « Pour souligner la puissance des récits dans nos vies, leur pouvoir de nous connecter a une forme d’impuissance comme de nous rendre puissantes, leur pouvoir de nous faire disparaitre, de nous faire douter de notre propre existence comme à l’inverse de nous donner confiance ; leur pouvoir de nous aider a imaginer d’autres mondes comme de les rendre impossibles. » 4 Joseph WEISS, “The Erotics of Destruction and the End of the Anthropocene”, Society for Cultural Anthropology, Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights, October 2019. URL: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/godzilla-and-camille-the-erotics-of-destruction-and-the-end-of- the-anthropocene Accessed 02.02.2020. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/godzilla-and-camille-the-erotics-of-destruction-and-the-end-of-the-anthropocene https://culanth.org/fieldsights/godzilla-and-camille-the-erotics-of-destruction-and-the-end-of-the-anthropocene 3 It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties.5 Emphasizing the processes through which matters and stories coevolve with each other, Donna Haraway reveals the inextricable bond between word and world. Her thought discovers a network of bodies and discourses composing a “material-semiotic” world.6 Approaching the literary and discursive as a mode of the bodily, the perspec- tive of New Materialism might guide our attempt to think the words of the world with- out falling into dichotomous patterns of thinking. The New Materialist approach sheds light on the production of meaning within world processes and the ways through which such processes come to express themselves. In this regard, being attentive to and weav- ing the many stories through which the world tells itself is a way to celebrate its intel- ligibility. Echoing the biosemiotics insight that “the natural world is perfused with signs, meanings and purposes which are material and which evolve”7, this thesis at- tends to the perpetual emergence of the world through matter and meaning. Conscious of the permeability between inside and outside, it approaches our enmeshmed pro- cesses of inhabiting the world as a creative conversation between narratives and mate- rial processes. The reflections unfolded in this dissertation emerge in the consciousness of the philosophical challenge to unthink “the world” as conceptual construct. Entangled in mystery, they intend to both elucidate the world-making – or world-alienating – di- mension of our symbolic systems and embrace the processes in the world giving birth to new stories and ideas. Not an accumulation of inert objects, not a totality, not a 5 Donna HARAWAY, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016, Duke University Press, Durham and London, p. 12. 6 Donna HARAWAY, Simions, Cyborgs and Women, Free Association Books, New York, 1991. 7 Wendy WHEELER, “The Biosemiotic Turn: Abduction, or, the Nature of Creative Reason in Nature and Culture”, in Ecocritical Theory. New European Approaches, ed. Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville and London, 2011, p.279. 4 “container”8, the world is not either absorbed in the stories that weave and recount it. Hence, our unthinking of the world should also acknowledge the perpetual opening of new ways of inhabiting and becoming-with that arise from our encounters with the trajectories of others: not a solipsistic fiction, not either a scenic space where to per- form a dance of intersubjectivity, the world is to be thought as a co-creative process, an engagement in creation. The notion of “worlding”9 embraced by New Materialism provides a welcome perspective through which open processes of human-non-human enmeshment can be considered: removing boundaries between subject and environ- ment, it draws our attention to the world as an ontological process and an active in- volvement in events. The environmental transition as philosophical event I propose to consider the complex entanglement of multidimensional phenom- ena commonly referred to as a global ecological crisis as an event in thought: namely, as an event which disrupts the ways we have been thinking, a historical contingency which, as it arises, overflows the conceptual and symbolical framework that fails to contain it. This suggests that something is happening here and now that provides us with a wonderful opportunity to think: think anew the worlds we live in, the ones we fail to inhabit, the ones collapsing alongside the exhaustion of an energetic regime based on a logic of extraction – and those worlds whose blossoming we could witness. This event is rooted in narratives as much as it requires alternative ones: it bears an unexpected potential for reclaiming and reshaping the narratives which condition our inhabiting of the world. The kaleidoscopic event of the present ecological mutation sanctions a wonderful intertwinement of ecology, politics, geology, earth sciences, ethics, economics, sociology, philosophy, religion, poetics, even arts! It is as dramati- cally concrete as it is abstract, something so immense comprehension struggles to 8 Ibid, p.14. 9 See Helen Palmer and Vicky Hunter’s contribution to the definition of the term “worlding” in the Almanac of New Materialism, March 2018. URL: https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/w/worlding.html Accessed 20.02.2020. https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/w/worlding.html 5 reach; as global as it is local, intimate and public; past, present and future; an omni- present loss. There is no way to ignore it. The environmental mutation engages our whole being in the world and concerns the very perpetuation of this being: contained and involved within it, we have to think through it. “Think we must”, Virginia Woolf insisted in her Three Guineas. As an ultimate resource in resisting the banality of evil that is being lived and witnessed, think we must.10 The insurrectional thought invoked by Virginia Woolf arises from a movement of suspension, a pause observed amidst our daily activities so as to suspend our passive involvement in processes we did not agree to feed and sustain. It also implies a certain refusal to submit ourselves to disci- plinary confinements that claim to dictate our thoughts and our engagement within the world. The Woolfian injunction is thus an invitation to think and live beyond cosmo- logical segregations. In order to think, we must disobey: the work of Virginia Woolf testifies to a philosophical thought embraced as an act of disobedience, expression and creation, committed to weaving subversive ties across separations and to reclaiming an alienated sense of our embeddedness in the world. The threshold we have crossed: what era have we plunged into? What I wish to suggest here is that the ecological issue contains a deeply un- settling element touching upon the way we live and think in the world. Something which should not be understated, in that it represents a crack in a cosmological and civilizational edifice. This crack, uncovering the profound embeddedness of our sys- tems of thought in the world, and vice-versa, is exemplified by the concept of the An- thropocene. The latter is but one common attempt to name the specificity of the epoch we inhabit, “to name what is happening in the airs, waters, and places, in the rocks, 10 The prominent feminist sciences scholar Donna Haraway compares the contemporary urgency to think in the time of the environmental mutation to the ethical injunction described by Hannah Arendt to resist what the philosopher called “the banality of evil”, rooted in an “incapacity to think” and a disen- gagement from the world that is being lived. See Donna HARAWAY, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble”, 05.09.2014. URL: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/ Accessed 11.03.2019. http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/ 6 and oceans, and atmospheres.”11 First coined by the biologist Eugene F. Stoermer and popularized by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, the term “Anthropocene” des- ignates the unprecedented scope of human action upon the earth’s ecosystems, so sig- nificant as to constitute a new geological epoch succeeding to the Holocene. The An- thropocene states indeed that human processes have become the major geological force influencing earthly processes. Shedding light upon a multiplicity of geological forces and processes responding to human agency, the framework of the Anthropocene sum- mons us to study the ecological crisis from within the entangled complexity of its abundant intersections. One major criticism formulated against the concept of Anthropocene was that it essentializes human action and unifies humanity into a homogenous force, thereby obscuring major discrepancies in the way humans live, produce and consume, along with the social contingency of dynamics that are internal to a capitalist model of de- velopment. Doing so, it naturalizes and depoliticizes a mode of production specific to a certain sociohistorical context and conceals the role of the capital as politically heg- emonic force in the present geological mutation. The term Capitalocene therefore al- lows for more depth, nuance and fairness in the treatment of human processes and the question of our responsibility towards the present environmental collapse12. Capitalist infrastructures of production and consumption, as well as the energy industry sustain- ing them, are causing powerful, self-amplifying, irreversible planetary processes and contribute to reshape nonhuman forces such as climate patterns, species evolution, drought zones, the ocean conveyor system, glacier flows or hurricanes. As Emilie Hache observes, conceiving capitalism as an amplifying geological force also contains a great potential of astonishment: The madness of capitalism has thus not only attacked and destroyed both the human species and “nature”, but it went so far as to modify the regimen of existence of an earth’s system that has been our home 11 Ibid. 12 Andreas MALM, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, Versobooks, 2015. 7 for 10 000 years. Such a scale of human action totally exceeds our frames of thought.13 Another way to get to grips with the present era was proposed by Donna Har- away through the term of “Chtulucene”. Pointing towards something that overflows the scope of the Anthropos, the Chtulucene “sneaks in and through” to survive both capitalism and human presence on earth. It designates the tentacular always growling beneath the earth, the dreadful earthly processes that in the mythology of the moderns had been relegated to the traditional past – what would have been conquered and de- feated by a promethean Anthropos. The Chtulucene therefore embodies the realization of an obstinate persistence of earthly processes amidst what we perceive as an apoca- lypse, “a thick kind of ongoingness at stake” manifesting the victory of the tentacular, relentlessly composing the world even amidst the ruins of capitalism. As an alternative storytelling apparatus offering to complement that of the Capitalocene, the Chtulucene embraces the sneakiness of ongoing earthly processes of worlding, and the permanent composition of the world. “Simultaneously about past, present and what is to come”14, the thought of the Chtulucene introduces some hope and resilience in the story of the environmental collapse. A tale of estrangement This story often crystallizes as a tale of estrangement. The environmentalist and process philosopher John B. Cobb asks “why civilized human beings, and espe- cially those in the modern West, have become so alienated from nature”. 15 Many ac- counts of the environmental crisis, including within deep ecology, perpetuate the 13 Emilie HACHE, « Tremblez, tremblez, les sorcières sont de retour ! », in Pensez l’Anthropocène, dir. Rémi Beau and Catherine Larrère, p.118. 14 Donna Haraway interviewed by Juliana Fausto, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski, 21.08.2014, Os Mil Nomes de Gaia. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x0oxUHOlA8 Accessed 27.03.2019. See also Donna J. HARAWAY, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016. Chapter 2: “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene”. 15 John B. COBB Jr, “Deep Ecology and Process Thought”, Process Studies, pp. 112-131, Vol.30, Number 1, Spring-Summer, 2001. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x0oxUHOlA8 8 Rousseauist idea according to which the modern civilizing of humanity on the path to progress proved a deepening alienation from both the self and the world. Emphasizing ecological interdependence over the isolation of individual agents set against each other in the struggle for survival, most debates in environmental thought provide a critical account of this civilizational alienation. A major contribution of environmental studies thus lies in the deconstruction of the terms of this tale of estrangement, such as proposed by Bruno Latour who, in We Have Never Been Modern, argues that the divi- sion between nature and culture or between object and subject is but one concept sus- taining deceptive dualistic cosmologies. This realization fuels repeated attempts to mend the modern gulf between the world and the selves by weaving a tangled web of earthly, hybrid interconnections that cannot be solved within a dualistic pattern of thought. Starhawk thus understands ecology as the science of relationships16, and a precious start for unraveling the estrangement from and commodification of the world as the cultural and spiritual bases for a capitalist exploitation of resources. More re- cently, Latour describes in Facing Gaia the active process of dis-animation required to empty the material world from all meaning and value. Emilie Hache proposes to recover from such a culture of distance and detachment by cultivating our ability to feel, to be touched, moved and met by what comes to us.17 She thereby suggests that the resolution of the ecological crisis should imply a renewed engagement with the sensory world. But where may we meet the world and reconcile with it? In “The Liminal Space between Things. Epiphany and the Physical”18, Timo- thy Morton draws from the artist James Turrel’s understanding that art happens in the liminal space between things to define the field of ecocriticism as the thinking of the relations between things coexisting. He pleads for the development of ecocriticism as 16 Conference “Permaculture and the Sacred: A Conversation with Starhawk”, Harvard Divinity School URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV-MsQYrW0g Accessed 27.03.2019. 17 Emilie HACHE, « Se réapproprier le champ de la longue durée. Contribution écoféministe à une histoire après l’anthropocène ». art. cit. 18 Timothy MORTON, “The Liminal Space between Things. Epiphany and the Physical”, in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella IOVINO and Serpil OPPERMANN, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV-MsQYrW0g 9 a care for the attunement between beings – human and non-human – and for their mu- tual emergence in liminality. Their arising, Morton argues, always full of the absence surrounding them, should be received as an epiphany: Ecocriticism should enable a caring attunement to the irreducibility of a red wheelbarrow, a plum, a blade of grass, a field of grass, a cluster of gardening tools, the Earth on which they sit, the garden in which they reside. Things are a kind of liminal space made of other things. Art happens in and as this liminal space, this between, which is just what a thing is: a meeting place of other beings (“thing is Old English for “meeting place”). This meeting place is not ontically given (…). Rather, it is shot through and through with nothingness. It is given in the way that beauty is given: an epiphany that coexists anarchically alongside us, physically before us, and despite us.”19 Failing to care for this epiphany and to attune ourselves to it appears to coincide with a political as well as cultural alienation from the world. How might we begin to resolve an issue that fails to be acknowledged? The disturbing obscurity, subterranean dimension of the environmental issue is such that the greater part of today’s politicians, along with those with the power to implement immediate structural changes, agree to deny it altogether. This denial, if not the full-blown conscious negation of the most urgent concern of our time reveals a deep-ranging, pathological indifference to the planetary paving our collective subconscious – or those of the elites ensuring the per- petuation of a collapsing system. Popular culture provides an invaluable insight into this “collective subconscious”, as well as an abundant source of illustrations of the way it is constructed through the diffusion of certain narrative structures, ideological tropes and metaphors. The cosmological propaganda spread by some Hollywood blockbusters is par- ticularly conspicuous in a movie like Interstellar. Christopher Nolan’s highly success- ful sci-fi production offers indeed a crystal-clear demonstration of the political nega- tionism as well as the disdain for the world conveyed in the dominant approach to the contemporary ecological crisis. While the plot is set in a dystopian future where the 19 P. 279. 10 earth has become uninhabitable, and humanity is struggling with the consequences of what we recognize as a now familiar ecological crisis, the film carefully avoids any political treatment of the catastrophe. A global crop blight along with severe dust storms are depicted, but the causes and origins of these violent climate disruptions, and of course the political responsibility for them remain unmentioned: the earth seems to be ontologically, eternally hostile to humans, who can conceive of no other solution than leaving this planet and finding a new one to colonize. The film thus totally depo- liticizes the ecological issue by actively concealing its anthropic origin and the respon- sibility of a capitalist system sustained by decades of neoliberal policies. Not only does it de-responsibilize the governments involved in these policies, Interstellar also mys- tifies the humanist, colonialist posture of a space conquest succeeding to the “discov- ery” and colonization of the earth and its inhabitants, thereby perpetuating a predatory relationship to the world. As it fails to envision the end of capitalism and the peaceful inhabiting of the earth that might succeed from it, the film represents the ultimate stage of a capitalist logics of consumption and exploitation: the world an obsolete vessel from which all profit has been exhausted, and whose overcoming represents human- ity’s only chance for salvation.20 As much as it is cultural, the climate negationism illustrated in Interstellar is also, and perhaps most importantly political. It is therefore essential to understand what is often depicted as a global indifference or unconsciousness to the ecological issue as a deliberate choice, an institutionalized posture of contempt for that which ties us to the world. In Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Bruno Latour ar- gues that, for the last thirty years, the whole political landscape has been organized around the dedication of the economic elites to escape from the common world. Ex- ploding inequalities, massive deregulation and the intensification of a neoliberal glob- alization all illustrate this commitment from the powerful few to live offshore and abandon the earth. This posture of disengagement from the world we inhabit and co- 20 For a more exhaustive analysis of the political culture underlying the movie, see: Paul RIGOUSTE, “Interstellar: l’homme du passé est l’homme de l’avenir”, in Le Cinéma est Politique, 27.11.2014. URL: http://www.lecinemaestpolitique.fr/interstellar-2014-lhomme-du-passe-est-lhomme-de-lavenir/ Accessed 27.03.2019. http://www.lecinemaestpolitique.fr/interstellar-2014-lhomme-du-passe-est-lhomme-de-lavenir/ 11 create also requires a massive investment in the organization of climate change denial. Deconstructing the narrative of a global unconsciousness often mobilized to justify the institutional inertia regarding the ecological issue and unveiling it as a rhetorical strat- egy of climate denial, Latour’s approach to the present climate mutation uncovers the interests of a certain oligarchy to purposely ignore what constitutes a colossal threat to a system of production and consumption that benefits them. Not only does Latour thereby assert the ultimate political dimension of the ecological issue, he also draws our attention to a fantasized posture of emancipation from the bonds of the world and reveals the deep-ranging dream to escape the earth underlying this stance21. Elucidating the embeddedness of this cultural and political alienation from the world is one of the root-questions of this research. It resumes an interrogation in which ecology arose: an interrogation about our inhabiting, our dwelling, our relationship to the intimate alterity we have come to call the world, and which the modern cosmology baptized nature. The reflections unfolded in this research draw upon Bruno Latour’s account of Modernity. Latour analyses Modernity first and foremost as an epistemo- logical regime, a cosmological order segregating reality along structural binaries such as nature and culture, object and subject, facts and their interpretations, secular and religious. This purifying practice of the Moderns, along with their devotion for the god of reason, amounts for Latour to a matter of faith. In We Have Never Been Modern, he deconstructs the Modern narrative and exhibits a deceptive dualism failing to contain a world populated by “hybrids”22. The philosophy of Bruno Latour uncovers Moder- nity as a political hegemony enforcing its order across the globe through an all-present modernization front of which the advocates of progress are the missionaries23. His in- depth investigation of Modernity as a mode of worlding elucidates what it means to inhabit the earth from within the cosmology of Modernity. While the common word “modernity” refers loosely to the historical era that arose in the wake of the European 21 Bruno LATOUR, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Polity Press, 2018. 22 Bruno LATOUR, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, La Découverte, Paris, 1998. 23 Bruno LATOUR, Down to Earth, op. cit. 12 Renaissance, each occurrence of the word “Modernity” in this thesis shall summon Bruno Latour’s legacy. How do we inhabit the earth, and how should we inhabit it? How to cohabit with those inhabiting this same, common world? How to dwell peacefully in a world into which, as we learn from the Abrahamic tales that infuse our modern western cos- mology, we have fallen? How to engage with what surrounds us? Coined by XIXth century German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, the science of ecology deals with this riddle of the inhabiting, understood as the relationship of living things to their environments. The prefix “eco” from the Ancient Greek οἶκος refers indeed to the house as dwelling place, habitation, suggesting that ecology wonders about the relationship to our home, and the ecological crisis therefore points toward a crisis of our inhabiting. As the loss of habitat threatens a whole variety of species, it materializes an ecological crisis con- temporary to a not less criminal refugee crisis. In June 2018, the Dutch NGO United for Intercultural Action (UNITED) recorded the death of 34,361 migrants in the pro- cess of travelling to Europe from the early 1990s. The report reveals that not all deaths occur at sea, but also in detention blocks, asylum units, factories and town centres.24 Meanwhile, the sixth mass extinction of life on earth, monitored as the most devastat- ing event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, also finds its roots in anthropogenic causes.25 Elizabeth Kolbert equates the current disbelief surrounding this issue, i.e. the fact that certain human behaviours may lead to the mass extinction of whole species, to a cultural posture of denialism. In Imagining Extinction26, Ursula Heise also approaches extinction as a cultural predicament. Her analysis of extinction discourses acknowledges the primacy of nar- ratives and unravels biodiversity as a cultural as well as a political issue. Approaching the concern of multispecies justice through the prism of cultural imagination, Heise 24 Niamh MCINTYRE, Mark RICE-OXLEY, “It's 34,361 and rising: how the List tallies Europe's migrant bodycount.”, The Guardian, 20.06.2018. URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/the-list-europe-migrant-bodycount Accessed 11.03.2019. 25 Elizabeth KOLBERT, The Sixth Extinction. An Unnatural History. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. 26 Ursula HEISE, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meaning of Endangered Species, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/the-list-europe-migrant-bodycount 13 draws our attention to the stories which structure the way cultures care or not about other species. Her literary approach to extinction thereby also invites us to think inter- sectional structures of oppression encompassing both humans and non-humans, lead- ing us to wonder how we may negotiate difference and extend our respect to other beings and species. What conditions our perception of ecological abundance and bio- logical diversity? Which are the narratives that, conveying a cultural alienation from the outer world, are the heralds of a twofold crisis of the home and others? Which narratives might on the contrary enable us to share a world with innumerable entangled forms of life and embrace our obligation toward a more than human world?27 This I aim to explore in the present dissertation. 27 See also Deborah Bird ROSE, Thom van DOOREN and Matthew CHERLEW, Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death and Generations, Columbia University Press, New York, 2017. Acknowledging the ecological, cultural and ethical dimensions of extinction, this collective volume dives into the “entangled significance of extinction” (p.3) and seeks to engage the complexity of specific sites of loss. Exploring modes of response those of us who remain might give to the lives lost to extinc- tion, the different chapters articulate an effort to inhabit and pay tribute to an incredible biological and cultural diversity. The authors reassert the immense power of narratives as they claim that “it matters which stories we use to tell and think other stories with” and commit to “tell stories in ways that are open and accountable to these diverse others” (p.4). In the afterword, Vinciane Despret further unravels the cardinal idea according to which we populate the earth with stories. She wonders about the absence left by extinction: what is lost with the presence of extinct species? Who suffers? What is lost, she argues, is a part of the world. We as humans can mourn the loss of extinct species, but ultimately, “the world dies from each absence”. She writes: “every sensation of every being of the world is a mode through which the world lives and feels itself, and through which it exists. And every sensation of every being of the world causes all the beings of the world to feel and think themselves differently. When a being is no more, the world narrows all of a sudden, and a part of reality collapses. Each time an exist- ence disappears it is a piece of the universe of sensations that fades away.” Before adding: “but what the world has lost even more is the unique, sensual, living, warm, musical, and colourful point of view that the passenger Pigeons created upon it and with it. This unique point of view to which the world owed the sensations of so many things, is no more.” (p.220). 14 2. Methodological approach Thinking beyond disciplinary structures Wherefrom and how do I proceed? The methodological approach adopted in this doctoral research is inherent to the object of its study: the environmental crisis as a radically complex, entangled and kaleidoscopic event which can hardly be reduced to a single discipline. My research thus evolves within a deeply transdisciplinary frame- work, one blurring the boundaries between the traditional academic disciplines of en- vironmental philosophy, religious studies, political science, cosmological anthropol- ogy or the anthropology of worlds, ecofeminist studies and even literary hermeneutics. The transdisciplinary stance embraced in this research is appreciated as a condition for analysing and subverting the modern episteme, its disciplinary structures and its regime of truth. Michel Foucault describes the latter as “a system of ordered proce- dures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and functioning of state- ments”, reminding us thereby that truth “is produced by virtue of multiple constraints” and relies upon a complex disciplinary apparatus of separation.28 The notion of regime of truth invites us to approach the production of truth and knowledge as a political, economic and institutional regime of power, shedding light on the entanglement of scientific discourses with the exercise of power. Ecofeminist philosopher Val Plum- wood thus identifies the “standpoint of mastery” in a series of epistemological dual- isms conditioning beliefs about the self and its relationship to others. She argues that the modern dualism between reason and nature infuses an infrastructure of domination manifest in sexism, racism, capitalism, colonialism and the exploitation of nature, where women, racialized people and non-humans are subordinated to the representa- tives of reason.29 28 Michel FOUCAULT, Surveiller et Punir, Gallimard, 1975, p.113. My translation. 29 See Val PLUMWOOD, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Routledge, 1992. and Environmental Culture: the Ecological Crisis of Reason, Routledge, 2002. 15 Reclaiming the theologico-political Drawing upon these considerations, the methodological approach adopted in this dissertation is one sensitive to the profound link between the religious and the political. The reflection unfolded in this research proposes to restore the radical power of theo- logical conceptions in the political culture of modern western secularized societies. It is indebted to Carl Schmitt’s notion of the politico-theological and his now famous insight into the theological foundation of the modern state: “all significant concepts of the state are secularized concepts of God.” “Only by being aware of this analogy”, Schmitt pursues, “can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.”30 Attempting to define it, religion arises as a problematic category, difficult to de- limit and translate into non-European languages. How does it differ from the similarly vast spheres of culture, spirituality or even ideology? Moreover, how does the “return of spirituality” relate to institutional religion and to the consensus of the secularization of western societies? The research field of critical religion analyses the category of religion as cardinal to the ideological arsenal of western Modernity. Timothy Fitzger- ald thus deconstructs the concept of religion, disguised as an unproblematic and ubiq- uitous universal, as a modern fiction underlying the production of a fantasized secular. According to him, the religious, being removed to a marginal, privatised domain, serves to delineate and mystify the proclaimed rationality and universality of the sec- ular order. In this regard, the blooming of contemporary spiritualities appear as an outgrowth of this dynamic of marginalization of institutional religion. As the binary opposition between religious and secular tends to neutralize the discourses that divert from the prescribed secular, it reveals a political agenda of legitimation of an ideolog- ical (neoliberal capitalist) order. Following Latour’s intuition of the radically political dimension of the cosmological regime of Modernity anchored in cardinal binaries, 30 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, Mass.: MIT, Cambridge, 1985. p.36. 16 Fitzgerald therefore argues that the modern invention of religion was simultaneously the invention of modern politics.31 I suggest that both the analysis of the current ecological crisis as well as our con- crete involvement in it would greatly benefit from the inclusion of the “religious” and the “spiritual” into the reflection. Here the emerging category of spirituality, as popular as it is versatile, arises as a contemporary subvertion of the modern binary between religious and secular. In a conference on Permaculture and the Sacred she gave at Har- vard Divinity School, Starhawk argues that bringing together spirituality, ecology and politics creates a rich hinge allowing a more fertile look at the contemporary systems of thought which presently frame the environmental issue.32 She maintains, along with cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, that “religion” is constitutive of culture for it creates a cultural ethos that defines the core values of a society and the persons living in it.33 Starhawk consistently formulates the urgency to disclose and cultivate the link between the spiritual and the political34, emphasizing how much religion, concepts of God and the sacred not only determine and reinforce socio-political relationships, but also are connected to and reveal metaphors deeply embedded in our language and thought. She notably observes that goodness and value were traditionally associated with things outside and beyond the world, while the down-below of the material world and anything embodied were devalued as dirty, obscure, inherently flawed and cor- rupted (such associations, as Val Plumwood also observed, underlying and reinforcing sexist, racist and specist structures of domination). Starhawk then reminds us of the depreciative meaning of dirt – this very dirt without which we cannot live. 35 31 Timothy FITZGERALD, “Critical religion and critical research on religion: Religion and politics as modern fictions”, Critical Research on Religion, 2015, 3 (3), pp.315-319. 32 STARHAWK, “Permaculture and the Sacred: A Conversation with Starhawk”, Harvard Divinity School, URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV- MsQYrW0g&list=PLg3dQRY8HYBsZIpl0zETJ8bbG4pUaSYG4 Accessed 27.03.2019. 33 Jone SALOMONSEN, Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco, 2002, Routledge, p.143. 34 STARHAWK, The Spiral Dance, Harper & Row, San Francisco, Special 20th Anniversary Edition, 1999 (1979), Introduction. 35 STARHAWK, “Permaculture and the Sacred: A Conversation with Starhawk”, Harvard Divinity School, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV-MsQYrW0g&list=PLg3dQRY8HYBsZIpl0zETJ8bbG4pUaSYG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV-MsQYrW0g&list=PLg3dQRY8HYBsZIpl0zETJ8bbG4pUaSYG4 17 Identifying these deeply ingrained structures of thought and language allow us to distance ourselves from them and potentially subvert them with alternative beliefs: hence, for example, the subversive potential of the belief in the sacredness of the earth, or the neopagan cult of the Goddess, for 1970s environmental and ecofeminist activ- ism. It also sparks and rehabilitates a reflection around the sacred, understood as what we care about, that for which we care36, what is most important to us, what mobilizes us, what moves us. The cultures which we inherited from have indeed located the sa- cred outside the world, thus devaluating the latter as a worthless place. Starhawk de- nounces a “great bewitchment, a spell cast upon the world to enforce the belief that the economic profit of a few stands above the living system of the earth”.37 Which conception of the sacred entitle us to destroy the living system that supports our life and other forms of life? Delving into the mythology of our inhabiting – for an environmental hermeneutics of metaphors This thesis is concerned with the obscure power of myths, symbols and meta- phors in dictating the way we dwell in the world. It approaches the crisis of the home and of the inhabiting manifested by the environmental mutation through a lens that unfolds the intimate union of poetics and poiesis: the marriage of literary forms and discourses with a transformative action in the world – in other words, of myths and politics. Emphasizing the belief that current policies are informed by an ideological structure which itself draws upon an array of theological and mythical narratives means going against the methodological paradigm of rationalism which postulates that empirical reality obeys an intrinsically logical structure of truth. It implies to embrace URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV- MsQYrW0g&list=PLg3dQRY8HYBsZIpl0zETJ8bbG4pUaSYG4 Accessed 27.03.2019. 36 Emilie HACHE, Ce à quoi nous tenons. Propositions pour une écologie pragmatique. Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2011. 37 STARHAWK, “Permaculture and the Sacred: A Conversation with Starhawk”, Harvard Divinity School. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV- MsQYrW0g&list=PLg3dQRY8HYBsZIpl0zETJ8bbG4pUaSYG4 Accessed 27.03.2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV-MsQYrW0g&list=PLg3dQRY8HYBsZIpl0zETJ8bbG4pUaSYG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV-MsQYrW0g&list=PLg3dQRY8HYBsZIpl0zETJ8bbG4pUaSYG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV-MsQYrW0g&list=PLg3dQRY8HYBsZIpl0zETJ8bbG4pUaSYG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV-MsQYrW0g&list=PLg3dQRY8HYBsZIpl0zETJ8bbG4pUaSYG4 18 the slippery mode of speculation and interpretation, even amidst an event so concrete as the global ecological mutation. In his introduction to Facing the Planetary, William E. Connolly argues that “the mythic today expresses that which circulates below the threshold of official ex- pression”, and suggests that the study of myths might both enable an in-depth under- standing of official narratives and cosmologies and inform an alternative, resilient en- gagement with the latter: “the turn to myth is a turn toward an insurrection of voices straining to be heard beneath the clamor of dominant stories.”38 The political theorist draws upon the mythological potential of the Book of Job to interpret the intensifica- tion of support for neoliberal ideology after it led to the economic meltdown of 2008, or the radicalization of climate denialism in face of growing evidence supporting cli- mate change. He thereby summons the hermeneutical potential of cultural myths and metaphors in order to approach contemporary events otherwise difficult to grasp. As the present ecological transition confronts us with the colossal challenge to develop new categories of thought, new words and new ideas to express unprecedented realities, the creativity of speculative philosophy is called for. It appears indeed that the environmental crisis reawakens philosophy to its most essential task: that of dwelling amidst the openness of thought, cracking open a conceptual framework rendered obsolete and unable to channel emerging thought processes, and thinking on the edge of a vacillating world. Applying the methods and resources of the field of hermeneutics to the current environmental issue, I argue, honours the task of philosophically engaging with the present world and its plural becomings insofar as it confronts and embraces our inescapable involvement – notably interpretative, but not only – in these same becomings. The task of hermeneutics is one of interpretation understood as mediation and creation of meaning: it is a task of connecting and engaging with the world by embracing the ontological blurring of object and subject. In this perspective, I propose in this doctoral dissertation to delve into the metaphors of our inhabiting so as to gain a new insight on the current environmental crisis. The metaphor of the root, for instance, might be worth investigating as it is, Cathy Wampole observes, “constantly evoked in situations of cultural rupture, ecological 38 William E. CONNOLLY, Facing the Planetary, Duke University Press, 2017, p.1. 19 alienation, and technophobic angst.”39 Hans Blumenberg developed his own “paradigms for a metaphorology”, emphasizing the methodological benefit of studying the metaphors grounding our cosmologies: metaphorology seeks to burrow down to the substructure of thought, the underground, the nutrient solution of systematic crystallizations.40 3. Research problem, apparatus and potential outcome A Hermeneutics of Gnosticism for the present environmental transition Throughout this introductory chapter, I have wondered about an ambient es- trangement from the world and the pervasive ways in which it is conveyed in our cos- mologies, narratives and metaphors. This defines the general interrogation leading this doctoral research. As we ponder over this question and attempt to answer it, I propose to investigate the imaginary of Gnosticism as an original, unexpected resource in the field of environmental humanities. Whence the alienation from the world? How to inhabit this unruly world? The root questions of ecology, I argue, are the same as those formulated by Gnosticism, an obscure name given by modern historians to describe a variety of ancient religious ideas and systems which arose in the Mediterranean world of early Christianity. A heterogenous corpus of beliefs and narratives which strikes however by the unity of their experience: that of the utter alienness of the world, the absence of sacredness in the world, and the burning desire to escape worldly existence. Two German political philosophers of the XXth century, Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin, delved into the perplexing category of Gnosticism and analysed in their own 39 Cathy WAMPOLE, Rootedness. The Ramifications of a metaphor, University of Chicago Press, 2016, p.31. 40 Hans BLUMENBERG, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trad. Robert Savage, Cornell University Press, 2010 (1960), p.5. 20 respective ways the political modernity of the West in light of these gnostic cosmolo- gies. While both view Gnosticism as a key to diagnose the modern predicament, their diagnoses of Modernity are characterized by parallels and contrasts which the first two chapters of this dissertation aim to explore. In many regards, Hans Jonas’ philosophy appears to have anticipated the issues related to the ecological crisis: committed to overcome the ethical nihilism pervading modern thought and politics, his ethics of responsibility for the technological age laid the groundwork for the field of environ- mental ethics, while his philosophy of biology and his critique of modern dualism an- ticipated contemporary developments in ecological ontology. Eric Voegelin’s philo- sophical project focused on what he called the pneumo-pathological condition of mo- dernity, manifest according to him in the rise of totalitarian ideologies within modern political movements. Emphasizing the organic link between politics and religion, Voegelin aimed to identify the spiritual disorders of political modernity. Both philos- ophers diagnosed at the heart of Modernity an attitude of contempt for the world which echoes greatly with the contemporary ecological issue. Drawing upon their original and somehow still unacknowledged insights, this research attempts to unfold the potential of Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin’s analyses of Gnosticism for approaching the contemporary ecological mutation. The research apparatus building this project proposes to transpose Jonas and Voegelin’s diagnoses of modern Gnosticism to the burning political context of the ecological issue – which in many regards appears as the crowning event of political modernity –, thereby as- sessing their relevance from a contemporary perspective. This thought apparatus in- tends in a way to submit Jonas and Voegelin’s insights on Gnosticism to the test of the present, asking whether the contemporary event of the ecological mutation confirms, disproves, alters or even prolongs their hypotheses, and vice-versa, to illuminate the riddle of the ecological issue with the unexpected help of their concept of Gnosticism. What does the perspective of Gnosticism, as endorsed by Jonas and Voegelin, teach us about the advent of the ecological crisis? Reciprocally, what does the contemporary context add to their diagnosis of Modern Gnosticism? The specificity of my approach is therefore to aim at a cross-fertilization between the concept of Gnosticism and the present advent of the ecological crisis. This experimental thought apparatus resembles in this regard what Hans Georg Gadamer described as a hermeneutic circle. A decisive 21 figure in the rise of twentieth century hermeneutics, the German philosopher developes a dialogic approach grounded in Heideggerian thinking and characterized by the notion of interpretative interdependence. Gadamer conceives interpretation as a dialogical and practical activity, based on a set of prior conceptions, experiences and concerns defining a prior hermeneutical situatedness. More particularly, his development of the concept of hermeneutic circle suggests that neither the object nor the subject of the interpretation can be understood without reference to one another. In the specific con- text of this doctoral research, the idea of hermeneutic circle allows us to appreciate the fact that neither the perspective of Gnosticism nor the contemporary event of the eco- logical mutation could be regarded as independent entities: they should instead always be approached as the contingent products of interpretations entangled with each other along a hermeneutic process engaging a kaleidoscope of perspectives. Gadamer’s re- thinking of traditional hermeneutics moreover emphasizes how the act of interpreta- tion always involves the prospect of application, for it is oriented toward present con- cerns and interests which condition our entrance into the hermeneutic dialogue in the first place41. The hermeneutics of Gnosticism I propose to develop in this research is in- tended as an attempt to renew the traditional engagement with the present ecological issue. Drawing upon the analyses of Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin, I suggest that the concept of Gnosticism may unveil cardinal metaphors of our inhabiting, thereby ena- bling a renewed understanding of contemporary politics’ involvement in the present ecological mutation. I argue that the concept of Gnosticism provides an invaluable hermeneutical key allowing us to think through the present environmental crisis. More specifically, the perspective of Gnosticism allows us to explore the religious, spiritual and cosmological origin of what is often depicted as a contemporary indifference for the world and the terrestrial. Something in the gnostic understanding – or misunder- standing – of the ideas of immanence and transcendence appears to condition the mod- ern engagement with the world, itself greatly determined by a dualistic concept of na- ture. In this dissertation, I propose to explore the ways in which the hermeneutics of 41 Hans Georg GADAMER, "Hermeneutics and Social Science", Cultural Hermeneutics, 2 (4), December 1975, pp. 307–316. 22 Gnosticism might illuminate our current understanding of the ecological issue, as well as the ways in which this new light might enable a rediscovery of the world we inhabit. How legitimate is the category of Gnosticism? The hermeneutical investigation of parallels between the cosmologies of an- cient Gnosticism and the modern era falls within a certain tradition of thought em- braced by other contemporary thinkers such as Hans Blumenberg42, Ludwig von Bart- alanffy, Hans Urs von Balthasar43, Jacob Taubes44 or even Carl Jung. This tradition perceives strong echoes between both systems of thought and therefore emphasizes the outstanding relevance of the gnostic insights for the study of key aspects of modern cosmology and its predicaments. The gnostic ethereal insistence on the other world and the beyond would parallel for instance Modernity’s tendencies toward political and cultural millenarianism. The present research distinguishes itself radically from a genealogical enquiry into the historical generation of modern cosmologies. Well aware of the cultural contingency of this construct, it recognizes Gnosticism as a hermeneu- tical concept of political philosophy rather than a legitimate historiographical category. Throughout this project, I propose to handle the concept of Gnosticism as a conceptual invention particularly sensitive to the presence of certain symbolic structures in our narratives. This requires our perpetual and dutiful attention against the temptation to essentialize this hermeneutical perspective and to mistake Gnosticism for an objective reality. I explore Gnosticism as a lens, one amongst many others, to approach the pre- sent world and the ways in which we inhabit it – conceptually, symbolically, but also in the most embodied way, empirically, daily, politically, ecologically – unfolding this conceptual invention initiated by Jonas and Voegelin to throw light upon something that might otherwise remain undisclosed, unformulated, unthought. 42 Hans BLUMENBERG, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1976. 43 Hans URS VON BALTHASAR, The Scandal of the Incarnation. Irenaeous against the Heretics, Ignatus Press, 1990 (1981). 44 Jacob TAUBES, Abendländische Eschatologie, Berlin, Matthes und Seitz, 2007. 23 4. Thesis outline A brief overview of how the different chapters of this dissertation fold into one another and how they articulate my argument will prove helpful before delving into the heart of our hermeneutics of Gnosticism. The dissertation can be divided into two main parts: the first, composed of the first three chapters, draws upon the respective analyses of Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin to elaborate my own hermeneutics of Gnos- ticism. The second part intends to articulate the contribution of this hermeneutics for the contemporary thought of the environmental transition, displaying how a reflection around the metaphors of our inhabiting disclosed by the perspective of Gnosticism might inform a renewed cosmological as well as political engagement with the present ecological issue. Chapter 1 engages Hans Jonas’ concept of Gnosticism and the ways in which his diagnosis of a worldless dualism might illuminate the contemporary context of the ecological crisis. Jonas identifies in gnostic narratives a “tripartite dualism” where the figure of God crystallizes a radical rupture between humanity and the world, thus dic- tating a structural dynamic of escape from the world, or Demundanization (Entwelt- lichung). Jonas’ study of Gnosticism from an existential perspective unveils dualism as a worldless, nihilistic form of engagement with the world articulated around the belief that the worldly and the divine are two irreconcilable poles of a definitive rup- ture. I propose to delve into the figure of the abyss to approach this gnostic dualism and articulate its dynamic as one of sealing, or closure of the world. Chapter 2 elucidates Eric Voegelin’s insights on Gnosticism, originally aimed at a diagnosis of the pneumo-pathological element pervading the political and ideological movements of the XXth century. Suggesting that Gnosticism stems from the difficulty of dwelling in-between, Voegelin’s analyses provide a key to approach the present challenge of inhabiting a world of collapse and emergence, destruction and 24 creation, and of sustaining hope in the face of irreparable loss. At the roots of the gnostic rebellion against worldly being, the philosopher identifies a feeling of alienation from the world, an incapacity of dwelling translating into a perpetual revolt and the belief that politics is the privileged means to overcome this alienated condition. Voegelin qualifies this gnostic inhabiting as Anoia – a forgetfulness of the co- penetration and co-creation involved in the process of common worlding45. His understanding of the platonic idea of metaxy allows us furthermore to conceptualize the pathology of Gnosticism as an incapacity to sustain the overflowing tension of worldly being. This inaugurates a cardinal theme that will be further explored in later chapters. Following these preliminary explorations, chapter 3 synthetizes my reflections around Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin’s analyses of Gnosticism in the purpose of lay- ing down the main features of my hermeneutics of Gnosticism. My reflections pivot as this third chapter harvests the fruits which emerged from my study of the work of Jonas and Voegelin and draws the first conclusions of a hermeneutics of Gnosticism for the present ecological crisis. What does the perspective of Gnosticism illuminate about the contemporary context? What key tropes of our contemporary inhabiting does the hermeneutics of Gnosticism unveil? Key ideas that arose along my study of Jonas and Voegelin indicate the pathology of a worldless inhabiting, a tragedy of the home ordaining an eminently political crisis. As the chapter proceeds, I propose to under- stand this worldless inhabiting as resulting from a dualistic closure of the world. Both Jonas and Voegelin point indeed toward the idea of an ontological tension, an open in- betweenness characterizing worldly becoming, whereby I reconceptualize Gnosticism as the dualistic reduction of the ontological tension of the world. I argue that a herme- neutics of Gnosticism reveals precisely what the pathological inhabiting diagnosed by Jonas and Voegelin is committed to conceal, absorb and escape from: the tension of being in the world. 45 Voegelin, Eric, Order and History – In Search of Order, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1987, p.43. 25 Chapter 4 inaugurates the most speculative and creative side of this disserta- tion, flowing from the analyses laid out along the first part. It observes a shift in my approach as I propose to draw upon the hermeneutics of Gnosticism elaborated in the earlier chapters to unfold the ramifications of my hypothesis and develop original re- flections about the cosmological mutation induced by the contemporary ecological cri- sis. One key challenge of this fourth chapter is to delve deeper into the metaxic tension identified at the heart of Gnosticism to uncover the central concern of dwelling in- between – in between species, people, borders, times, political systems, disciplines, paradigms – in order to mend the alienated inhabiting of the Gnostics. To this end, I explore alternative metaphors that might inform a resilient inhabiting for the present. Along the way, as I attempt to bridge the notion of planetary entanglement with the openness of worldly processes of becoming, I introduce the idea of rooted overflowing as a way to think the irreducible metaxy of the world disclosed anew by the present ecological mutation. Lastly, chapter 5 embraces the eminently political dimension of my hermeneu- tics of Gnosticism and articulates the modalities of a possible alternative, sustainable and creative inhabiting to support present political action. This concluding chapter presents itself as the deliberately more concrete development of the cosmo-ontological speculations unfolded in the previous chapters, and blooms into a reflection on the consequences of a hermeneutics of Gnosticism for contemporary political philosophy as well as for a resilient politics of the present. I approach the political as the art of inhabiting a world of entangled becomings, and the ecological crisis as therefore ar- chetypical of the political. I explore some of the ways in which the advent of the eco- logical mutation summons us to redefine the conceptual framework of present politics, and how our hermeneutics of Gnosticism might support one such redefinition. This mutation of political philosophy is addressed from three angles: the apocalyptic scope of politics unveiled by the ecological crisis, illuminating its profound liminality as well as its eschatological density; the imperative of an ethics of entangled responsibility, 26 and the mission of inhabiting the world with love to heal the alienated inhabiting di- agnosed under Gnosticism. 27 CHAPTER 1 HANS JONAS’ ANALYSIS OF GNOSTICISM: SUBVERTING DUALISM TO INHABIT THE WORLD Introduction 1) The significance of Gnosticism in Hans Jonas’ philosophy: a reflection on the inhabiting of the world In his study of the work of Hans Jonas justly entitled Habiter le Monde, Robert Theis argues that Jonas’ whole philosophical thought follows from his study of Gnos- ticism – the existential analysis of his young years laying the groundwork for his future philosophy of nature, his environmental ethics of responsibility, and even the more speculative theological developments presented in The Concept of God after Ausch- witz. Robert Theis goes on to suggest that Jonas’ work is led by a key idea: that of inhabiting the world. Micha Brumlik characterizes indeed Jonas’ philosophy as a “re- volt against the escape from the world”46. In the present chapter, I wish to further Theis’ claim, arguing that Jonas’ early works on Gnosticism condition the later devel- opment of his thought, characterized by an ontology of the world inscribing the ethical 46 Micha BRUMLIK, "Revolte wider die Weltflucht. Zum Tode des Philosophen Hans Jonas," Frankfurter Rundschau, 8 February 1993, 8. 42. 28 duty of dwelling in the world. To the discovery in his early research on Gnosticism of a deep anti-cosmic dualism pervading modern cosmology, Jonas shall answer with a philosophy of life offering to think the “deep rootedness of the spirit and freedom in the very web of a nature that carries in itself the tendency towards life and conscious- ness.”47 The Imperative of Responsibility thus represents the philosopher’s attempt to establish the conditions of a new ethics for the technological civilization which would ground the moral imperative of preserving worldly being. Doing so, Jonas goes against the gnostic contempt for the world and deliberately commits the sin of “naturalistic fallacy”, characterizing the transition from Being to Ought, or from ontology to ethics. Jonas’ ethical thought illustrates the quest for an ethical principle rooted in a solicitous, sensitive and response-able engagement with worldly being, thereby fully embracing the entanglement of ontology and ethics. Impregnated with the problematic of the the- odicy which he confronted in the Concept of God after Auschwitz, the Jonassian ethics of responsibility displays a metaphysico-theological dimension, manifest notably in the will to ground the moral imperative within a cosmological system. While Jonas does not explicitly refer to this theological, more freely specula- tive dimension of his thought when recounting the stages of his intellectual journey, it is our intention to demonstrate how this dimension operates as a latent, if essential aspect of his philosophy: Initially came my study of the Gnosticism of late antiquity from the perspective of existential analysis; then my encounter with the nat- ural sciences on my way to formulating a philosophy of the organ- ism; and finally my turn from theoretical to practical philosophy – that is, to ethics – in response to the urgent challenge of technology that could no longer be ignored.48 47 Robert THEIS, Habiter le monde, Michalon, 2008, p.10. My translation. 48 Hans JONAS, “Wissenschaft as Personal Experience”, Hastings Center Report, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 2002), p.28. 29 Jonas draws the generation of his ethical philosophy as stemming from a philosophy of worldly being, itself rooted in an existential analysis. His ethical thought succeeds first to an original exploration, from the existential-gnostic perspective, of what mod- ern cosmology refers to as the “subjective”, then to a study of the world, of “natural” and “objective” being, approached through the lens of the philosophy of organism. Led by the ambition to overcome the gnostic divorce between humanity and the world, Jonas thus goes from the subject to the object and concludes on the ethical, where he attempts to bridge these two poles of modern dualism. Confronted by the colossal task of formulating an ethics for a secular civilization in dire need to contain its hubristic action on the beings of the world, the Imperative of Responsibility raises the interro- gation whether, without restoring the category of the sacred, the category most thoroughly destroyed by the scientific enlightenment, we can have an ethics able to cope with the extreme powers which we pos- sess today.49 What may ground the perfectly immanent transcendence of that which calls for the protection of worldly being(s)? Jonas’ ethical thought is infused with the profound intuition that “no “secularization” may go so far that we forfeit the awareness or intu- itions of transcendence which religion has made accessible and from which an inalien- able content can be salvaged into the post-religious perspective”50, and radiates the strong belief in the immanent transcendence of the moral imperative: “religion in eclipse cannot relieve ethics of its task”51. Jonas’ work thus manifests the acute con- sciousness of the overlap of ethics and religion, as well as the intuition of a deep on- tological entanglement of worldly being that overflows a dualistic structure of thought. 49 Hans JONAS, The Imperative of Responsibility, In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1987, p.23. 50 Hans Jonas to Ernst Simon, 7 February 1981, Hans Jonas Papers, HJ 7-13-16. 51 Ibid. 30 Jonas’ interpretation of Gnosticism appears to be a paramount element in his critique of modern dualistic cosmology, as well as a decisive step on the way to a renewed thought of nature. In his early work, Jonas proposes to uncover the presence within existentialist thought of an underlying dualism – the same dualism which he thinks to have unveiled throughout his hermeneutical study of Gnosticism. This origi- nal hermeneutical enquiry seems to have determined the whole of his philosophical project, identifiable by a thought of the “mediation between nature and the other of nature”52 - between the modern concept of nature and that which overflows it: the spirit, the creative consciousness, or the immanent openness of the world. Such a pro- ject implies an alternative ontology of the world which Jonas, inspired by the thought of Alfred North Whitehead, contributed to sketch and which still remains to be fully embraced and unfolded by contemporary philosophy. The advent of the ecological crisis only exacerbates the inadequacy of the modern dualistic cosmology in approach- ing the ontological entanglement of worldly beings manifested by present events. The pivotal problematic of dualism, which Jonas first identified in the light of his analysis of Gnosticism, reflects itself with a particular intensity in the present ecological crisis: This situation is magnified in the case of the impact of contemporary humankind's technology on the natural environment. And indeed, as this phenomenon – namely, the threat we pose to the planet's ecol- ogy – became more and more apparent during the second half of this century and finally even came to the attention of philosophers, sud- denly one of the oldest philosophical questions, that of the relation- ship between human being and nature, between mind and matter – in other words, the age-old question of dualism – took on a totally new form. Now this question is no longer something to meditate on in the calm light of theory; it is illuminated by the lightning flashes of an approaching storm, warnings of a crisis that we, its uninten- tional creators, have the planetary duty of trying to avert. Thanks to this exceedingly practical aspect of the problem, the reconciliation between our presumptuous special status as humans and the uni- verse as a whole, which is the source of our life, is becoming a cen- tral concern of philosophy. I see in this an urgent task for philosophy 52 Robert THEIS, Habiter le monde, op. cit., p.32. 31 to address, both at the present moment and into the coming cen- tury.53 Attempting to address the gnostic element pervading modern thought, Jonas had to proceed to an Aufhebung of the nihilistic tendency in Heideggerian philosophy, upon which his analysis focuses. In a proper dialectical movement, Jonas’ philosophical thought intends to preserve the gnostic intuition of an existential tension, a dwelling in between, while overcoming the nihilistic tendency to a withdrawal from the world, a Demundanization of our thought and inhabiting. This project relies upon a unique approach to and conceptualization of the category of Gnosticism. 2) The Jonassian approach to Gnosticism A controversial category Hans Jonas’ approach to Gnosticism is a controversial one. While several scholars have discarded Jonas’ study of ancient Gnosticism, converging on the obso- lescence of his analysis, some have come to question the legitimacy of the very cate- gory of Gnosticism. Present scholarly research in religious historiography tends indeed to challenge the validity of the category of Gnosticism, denouncing its pretention to characterize a monolithic religious phenomenon, while the term appears to cover a wide range of heterogeneous traditions that fail to even converge on a specific set of features. Michael Williams’54 work thus contributes to uncover the category of Gnos- ticism, which Jonas largely contributed to define, as a Modern construct, with no reli- able evidence in ancient sources to support the unification of a profusion of mytholog- ical narratives, leading him to plead for the dismantling of the category of Gnosticism. 53 Hans JONAS, “Philosophy at the End of the Century: A Survey of Its Past and Future”, Social Re- search, Vol. 61, No. 4, Sixtieth Anniversary 1934-1994: The Legacy of Our Past (WINTER 1994), pp. 813-832. Here p.826. I emphasize. 54 Michael Allen WILLIAMS, Rethinking Gnosticism: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996. 32 In an article on Jonas’ construct “Gnosticism”55, Michael Waldstein provides a con- densed insight into the scholarly criticism raised around the Jonassian use of the term, and proposes to investigate the intellectual generation of the concept by Jonas. He notably highlights the seminal influence, along with the hermeneutic principles inher- ited from Heidegger’s existential analytic, of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, as well as Hegel’s philosophy of history. These idealistic influences seem to have crys- tallized the main critiques formulated against the Jonassian category of Gnosticism, its legitimacy having been assessed along a pure historical perspective: Jonas’ theses are fascinating in their insightful soaring above the de- tails of the earth. But they tend to misrepresent the actual history suggested by the texts from Nah Hammadi. In this respect there is surely much merit in Williams’ plea for dismantling the category “Gnosticism” as inherited from Jonas.56 It is quite interesting to notice here that the critiques raised against Jonas’ ap- proach to the category of Gnosticism tend to reproduce the dualism which the Jonas- sian understanding of Gnosticism precisely contributes to unveil, and which the phi- losopher invites us to critically consider: namely, that opposing the “ideal”, or “con- ceptual”, to the “historical” or “empirical”. So that Jonas’ analysis of the structural dualism of gnostic systems of thought appears to anticipate the critique that would stigmatize his perspective on Gnosticism as too “ideal”, “conceptual”, “existential”, “ethereal” or “spiritual”, therefore failing to relate the pure historical, factual, empiri- cal reality of Late Antiquity spiritual movements. If we consider the main critiques formulated against Jonas’ analysis, and while we cannot but acknowledge the con- structed nature of his concept of Gnosticism, we might also deem such critiques tar- geted at the too “ideal” dimension of his interpretation irrelevant to the concern lying at the core of the present chapter and thesis. The critique of the excessive idealism of one’s thought only bears relevance to one who accepts the postulate of a dualistic sys- tem opposing the ideal to the factual, which the present dissertation intends to chal- lenge. What is more, Jonas’ interest in ancient Gnosticism is an “ideal” one indeed, 55 Michael WALDSTEIN, “Hans Jonas’ Construct “Gnosticism”: Analysis and Critique”, Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2000, pp. 341-372. 56 Ibid, p.370. 33 and therein, I wish to argue, lies its significance – at least to the humble extent of a philosophical, hermeneutical endeavour. As Arthur Darby Nock had already sensed in 1936, “Jonas’ real interest lies in an attempt to make a synthesis. (…) He is a meta- physician trying to shake off the yoke of history and to lead us to a higher level of comprehension.”57 To this extent, Jonas’ interpretation of Gnosticism must be re- garded as a speculative exercise in systematic and hermeneutical philosophy. His doc- toral research, undertaken under the joint supervision of Martin Heidegger and Martin Bultmann and aptly entitled “The Concept of Gnosis”58, was led by the quest for a cardinal idea underpinning the profusion of spiritual and mythological innovations arising in the Late Antiquity period. Jonas’ approach to Gnosticism is a particular one, insofar as it does not dwell on its genealogical, nor even historical dimension. While aware of the strong syncretism characterizing gnostic movements, gathering elements stemming from Jewish, Babylonian, Egyptian, Syriac, or Iranian milieus, Jonas re- mained attentive to the potential presence of a common idea, a common posture to- wards the world and towards existence. His study is that of a mythological, mystical, cosmological, conceptual, philosophical Gnosis, and ought therefore to be treated as such. Drawing upon the existential analytic formulated by his professor in Sein und Zeit (1927), Jonas’ early analysis of gnostic narratives focused more specifically on the existential attitude characterizing these religious experiences. He thus offered to study Gnosticism as a phenomenon that demands to be interpreted along an existential analysis delving into some fundamental experience of our being in the world. The light he shed on ancient Gnosticism was reflected into a fruitful hermeneutical circle with existential philosophy, thereby unfolding some of the hermeneutical potential of the category of Gnosticism. 57 Arthur DARBY NOCK, “Review of Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist I,” Gnomon 12 (1936): 605– 12; reprinted in Nock, Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, ed. Zeph Stewart, 2 vols. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1972), p. 444. 58 Hans JONAS, Der Begriff der Gnosis, Hubert, Göttingen, 1930. 34 The Hermeneutical circle between Gnosticism and Existentialism Jonas’ approach to Gnosticism is characterized by the fecund hermeneutical association of the gnostic and existentialist thoughts. Waldstein mentions an “intense mirroring between historiography and existential philosophy”59 distinctive of Jonas’ work on Gnosticism, while Jonas himself admits to “a certain circularity in procedure”, proceeding from the realization that “what I had learnt out there [about the gnostic existence] made me now better understand the [existentialist] shore from which I had set out.”60 The Heideggerian existential analytic provided indeed Jonas with the con- ceptual tools which then allowed him to elucidate what first appeared as a highly het- erogeneous thought movement. This proved a methodological success, as Jonas re- garded the existential perspective to constitute a hermeneutical key to unlock Gnosti- cism and to make sense out of the profusion of gnostic expressions. According to Jo- nas, Gnosticism thus represents “the new discovery of the Self which showed the Self’s incommensurability with all world-nature” and stands for the realization that such dis- covery occurs “through a break with the world”, thereby achieving “a cosmic turning- point of the Spirit”61 – which might be understood here as an avatar of the Heideggerian category of Being. Jonas’ hermeneutic approach to Gnosticism con- verges on the colossal task of retrieving the self-understanding of human existence from its objectivation in mythological projections. As we shall see, the self-under- standing characteristic of Gnosticism lies in a strong dualism opposing humanity to the world and locating salvation in a movement of liberation and escape from the world – what Jonas conceptualized under the term Entweltlichung, literally Demundaniza- tion. Jonas soon realized however that such hermeneutical success might rely on some previously unnoticed, if essential, affinity between both systems of thought. What if the object of study became in itself a hermeneutical tool? Jonas sensed that his concept of Gnosticism might as well provide a key to unlock existentialism. This cardinal in- 59 Michael WALDSTEIN, art. cit., p.370. 60 Hans JONAS, “Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism”, Epilogue to the Gnostic Religion, Beacon Press, Boston, 2001, p.320. 61 Hans JONAS, Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist I, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1993, pp.170- 171. 35 sight came with another realization, namely that of the utter contingency of the exis- tential approach, thereby deconstructing the latter’s claim to universality. This acknowledgement of the ontological and epistemological situatedness of the thinker’s perspective led Jonas to pay critical attention to the intellectual influences he had in- herited from his professors, whose profound “Gnosticism” he shall later become more and more aware of62. “What was there between Existentialism and Gnosticism which made the latter open up at the touch of the former?”63 Jonas asks. In “Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism”, the thinker returns to the “elective affinity” which had disclosed itself throughout his early study of Gnosticism, and which lays at the heart of the hermeneu- tical circle involved in his analysis. When studying gnostic texts, Jonas was “stuck by the familiarity of the seemingly utterly strange”64, and came to identify a community of inspiration between contemporary existentialist philosophy and the phenomenon of late antiquity gnosis. The philosopher notes that both thoughts emerged in an analo- gous historical context characterized by an atmosphere of civilizational decay and dis- played an existential posture towards the world one might qualify as estranged or ni- hilistic. Jonas thus formulates the hypothesis that the hermeneutical affinity and the conceptual echo between both movements might be due “to the very kind of “exist- ence” on either side”65 – thereby furthering the existential analysis inherited from his contemporaries. Gnostic writings may resemble more mythological imagination than the strict conceptual analysis led by Heidegger or Sartre; not to mention the explicitly religious dimension of Gnosticism, when contemporary existentialism thrives on the thought of the death of God. Yet such divergences should not occult the essential anx- iety stemming from both the gnostic and existentialist self’s being-in-the-world. Both movements offer indeed the expression of the imprisonment of the self in a world it did not choose to dwell in and an alienation from which it is longing to break free. The themes of the alien world, of the absent God and of the resulting feeling of existential isolation manifest a common nihilistic tendency unfolding into a worldless and dual- istic system of thought. While Jonas interprets the modern age as the manifestation of 62 Hans JONAS, “Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism”, art. cit., p.321. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid, p.320. 65 Ibid, p.321. 36 a nihilistic crisis of meaning and orientation, he identifies the beginning of such a crisis in Pascal’s depiction of the existential isolation of humanity, plunged amidst the infin- itude of the universe. From Pascal unto his own existentialist professors, Jonas distin- guishes the articulation of a deep existential anxiety with the depiction of an ontolog- ical alienness infusing a posture of ethical indifference to the world. For him, the es- sence of such “gnostic” nihilism lies in a dualistic cosmology recounting an estranged relationship between humanity and the world. 3) Towards a concept of Gnosticism as dualistic and acosmic cosmology Attempting to extract the ontological network of the gnostic symbolism, Jonas finds a deep tendency of rupture with the world, a cosmological estrangement which he conceptualizes under the term of Demundanization – Entweltlichungstendenz66. Jonas interprets this tendency of withdrawal from the world as both a modality of being in the world, a mode of existence and inhabiting, and a perspective of salvation. Hence, the gnostic Demundanization roots itself in an eschatological, anti-cosmic dualism articulated around the trinomial cosmos – humanity – God67. This essential acosmism or worldlessness of the gnostic system of thought, illustrated through the motives of the negation of and escape from the world, characterizes the gnostic self-understanding and affects all perceptions of the self and the world. Focusing on a Demundanization tendency which draws upon an onto-theological dualism between God and the world, Jonas’ conceptualization of Gnosticism thus allows a greater awareness of the acosmic tendency of modern cosmology, similarly blossoming within a dualistic structure of thought. 66 Hans JONAS, Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist, op.cit., p.2. 67 Hans JONAS, The Gnostic Religion, op. cit., p.32 sq. 37 A. The primary experience of the alienness of the world Jonas’ account of Gnosticism roots itself in the diagnosis of a primary experience of alienation in and from the world. The gnostic experience of estrangement in the world is characterized by the sense of a cureless ontological lack, the absence of God in the world – which resonates in Modernity through the motive of the death of God –, both feelings resulting into an overwhelming desire to overcome the modalities of mundane existence. The dynamic of Demundanization, identified by Jonas as central feature of Gnosticism, thus proceeds from a particular mode of existence, a type of dwelling, a gnostic being-in-the-world characterized by a tremendous cosmic anxiety. This study of the gnostic inhabiting of the world allows Jonas, drawing upon the existential analytic of his peers, to identify elemental features of the gnostic profile amidst a profusion of mythological narratives. For Jonas, the theological, cosmological, anthropological and soteriological dimensions of Gnosis all proceed from an original and traumatic experience of being in the world. Jonas identifies various leitmotivs both running through the numerous mythological systems he studied and pervading modern narratives of the condition of the self, whose being in the world is determined by the notion of a primordial fall intended to express the constrained character of our worldly existence. Eric Pommier summarizes the gnostic dramaturgy outlined by Jonas in four acts68: the absence of god in the world, the figure of the Demiurge, Humanity’s entrance onto the stage of the world, and the escape from the world. Before delving any deeper into the tropes of a gnostic inhabiting, let us very briefly present the main stages of this dramaturgy. - The trope of the absence of god in the world is crucial in the development of the gnostic inhabiting. Gnostic narratives depict the divine as extramundane, otherworldly, located in some undetermined beyond the world: this topological dimension bears an immediate ontological signification as it unfolds into the cardinal distinction between god and the world. In the gnostic cosmology indeed, god and the world are from radically different essences, ontologically stranger to each other. One 68 Eric POMMIER, Jonas, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 2013, p.34 sq. 38 epistemological consequence of this ontological divorce pronounced by the radical transcendence of the divine lies in Humanity’s unovercomeable state of ignorance: as prisoners from a stranger world, we cannot know God. The idea of the otherworldliness of God, his absence and ontological alterity from the world thus lays the foundation of the gnostic doctrine of knowledge. The latter lays the accent on an epistemological lack and proceeds from the urge to know God as the Void-of-the- World, Other-than-the-World. In this respect, Gnosticism appears as one of the sources of negative theology – primarily conceiving God in its negativity, here indeed in its non-being in the world. - The figure of the Demiurge pops in the gnostic drama of worldly creation to justify the existence of an alienating world. It appears in gnostic narratives as either a caricature of the God of the Ancient Testament – despotic, arrogant and malevolent – or as a wandering figure subject to remorse for creating a world of imperfections and sufferings. The Demiurge arises from a break of the divine auto-sufficiency, a movement of auto-differentiation of the Absolute reminiscent of the mechanism of cell-division. This idea of a crack in the divine allowing for the emergence of the world appears essential in Jonas’ analysis of Gnosticism as well as in the later development of his thought. In gnostic mythology, this mytheme unfolds into a polytheist theology intended to unify the extreme and paradoxical transcendence of the divine with its constitutive weakness, from which the world would proceed. - Humanity’s entrance onto the stage of the World results from another sinister design: the archons’ – servants of the Demiurge – presumptuous attempt at imitating the divine. Throughout the several stages of the gnostic decay relating the drama of the divine exile from the world, humanity still manages to preserve a fragment of the divine, which endures in the spirit. The human spirit represents the ultimate stage of God’s exile in the world, and as such embodies its last chance for redemption. Gnostic narratives convey a sense of the deep ambiguity of human existence, figuring the enslavement of a divine fragment cast into an ontologically alien world. The human condition of ignorance and blindness is key to understand the gnostic dynamic of 39 achieving redemption through a knowledge that would release humanity from its enslavement in the world. - The perspective of an escape from the world marks the ultimate act of the gnostic dramaturgy, articulated around the achievement of Gnosis. Gnosis is the revealed and revelatory knowledge of Humanity’s supra-natural, otherworldly, divine origins. It is a performative knowledge that, by breaking the forgetfulness in which human existence was blindly dwelling, achieves the simultaneous salvation of Humanity and God. Both destination of the gnostic exile and provenance of the call, Gnosis is the liberating knowledge allowing Humanity to tear itself away from the world and to be born again in the consciousness of its divine roots. Amidst this gnostic dramaturgy, I identified three themes, three tropes that might operate as hermeneutical keys and allow us to elucidate the nature of gnostic inhabiting, both in its antique and its more contemporary declinations: the Fall into and Escape from the world, the Alien and the Home, and the Abyss. The Fall into and Escape from the World The gnostic Being-in-the-World is characterized by the twofold expression of an original fall into the world, and the ensuing urge of a redemptive escape from the world. Jonas describes the notion of the fall as one of the fundamental symbols of Gnosticism: “a pre-cosmic fall of part of the divine principle underlies the genesis of the world and of human existence in the majority of gnostic systems”69. The mytheme of the fall has widely pervaded the development of Judeo-Christian cosmologies, which make sense of human existence as following from an original fall into the world. The Heideggerian notion of throwness (Geworfenheit) provides an illustration of the persistency in contemporary thought – even in a thinker notoriously critical of the 69 Hans JONAS, Gnostic Religion, op. cit., p.62. 40 western philosophical tradition – of this representation of a fall, a sinking into the world emphasizing the arbitrary and sinister nature of worldly existence. Always attentive to the existential dimension of narratives, Jonas notes that in both cases “to have been thrown” is not merely a description of the past but an attribute qualifying the given existential situation as determined by that past. It is from the gnostic experience of the present situation of life that this dramatic image of its genesis has been projected into the past, and it is part of the mythological expression of this experience.70 Just like the gnostic fall, the Heideggerian Geworfenheit figures a way for the self to represent the anxious wandering of its existence in the world: the gnostic Being-in- the-World is a being-thrown, a being-fallen (Verfallenheit), a passive sinking into worldly existence. Displaying the passivity of the soul cast and lost into the world against its will, the gnostic myth depicts the fall as a degeneration. The gnostic trope of the fall represents indeed the progressive loss of the divine as it descends into the world, and the dispersion of divine sparks, along with the call arising from the ethereal voice of “a stranger whose coming constitutes an entering of the beyond into the world”71. The idea of the fall as a movement of dispersion of divine sparks into the obscurity of the world conveys a depreciation of the latter, perceived in its ontological opposition to the realm of light. Worldly being embodies a break in the purity of the luminous being whose integrity was jeopardized by the creation of the world. As we shall see further in the following chapters, this gnostic conception of the breaking open of the cosmic confinement through a divine transcendence might also potentially evoke the presence of the possible within the world and its overflowing through its openness. In this respect, the Heideggerian concept of the openness of Being appears to prolong the gnostic thought of an ontological break within worldly being, leaving it open to the potential irruption of a transformative transcendence. 70 Ibid., p.64. 71 Robert THEIS, Jonas, op. cit, p.18 41 Succeeding to the original fall, the gnostic yearning is led by the desire to escape the modalities of mundane existence, and the gnostic salvation lies in a triumph over the world: “the world must be overcome”72. Gnosticism thus conceives of salvation as an extramundane event leading humanity away from the world. In this respect, the gnostic complaint for a way out of the world is re-enacted in Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Anywhere out of the world?”, as well as in the reaction of the Moderns to the environmental crisis as portrayed by Bruno Latour73: “free at last, finally we are getting rid of this rotten earth!”. The end of the gnostic mythology lies indeed in Humanity’s redemption through the overcoming of the world and the restauration of the divine – lost, dispersed, misled and wounded by worldly being. As they project the redemptive escape from the world along an ascensional movement towards the super-mundane, gnostic narratives weave an ethical and eschatological structure infused with a vertical imaginary in which the world is depicted as the below and the divine as the beyond the world. The movement of a divine transcendence breaking the world open is thus conceived of as vertical, stemming from an otherworldly, supernatural source that is not already present in worldly being. Worldly being on the contrary tends to be referred to in the language of horizontality and immanence, the interdependence entailed in worldly bounds conceived in terms of an enslavement from which man is yearning to break free. The mytheme of the torpor is recurrent in gnostic narratives and is employed to describe the condition of humanity enslaved in the world, inciting men to “wake up from their sleep”74 and regain the memory of their origins. To the realization of the state of worldly alienation succeeds the gnostic complaint, which may also appear as an indignation, an accusation. Expressions of such complaint manifest the spirit’s attempts to escape the closed world, to flee from time and space, both considered as elements of a demoniac system preventing the spirit from finding home. Voltaire thus formulates one modern declination of such loathing of worldly existence, illustrating the gnostic hatred of our rootedness: “one is angry to have been born, one is indignant to be a man”75. Gnostic 72 Hans JONAS, Gnostic Religion, op.cit., p.329. 73 Bruno LATOUR, « Comment s’orienter? Réflexions sur la possible canalisation de quelques affects politiques », Unpublished draft for Down To Earth, p.38. 74 Hans JONAS, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist I, op.cit., p.127. 75 VOLTAIRE, Concerning conspiracies against people, or proscriptions, 1766. URL: http://societe-voltaire.org/voltaire-conspiracies.pdf http://societe-voltaire.org/voltaire-conspiracies.pdf 42 narratives from then and from today are filled with expressions of the existential anxiety, some cosmic unease prompted by an ontological spatio-temporal adversity. An essential element of the Jonassian concept of Gnosticism, this urge to escape the world largely echoes our second theme, for it often converges with the experiences of the alienness of the world and the yearning for home. The Alien and the Home Another essential element of the Gnostic thought lies in the feeling of a home- sickness76 erected to a cosmic level and manifesting an existential crisis of the rooted- ness. Gnostic narratives express indeed the feeling of an ontological strangeness at the origin of some profound unease and discontent towards this world to which the self does not belong. Jonas relates various expressions in Mandean texts of “the frightened and nostalgic state of the soul forlorn in the world”77, “the forlornness of the Life from beyond sojourning in the world”, and the “feeling of having been forgotten in the for- eign land”78. The philosopher identifies essential features of Gnosticism in the repre- sentation of a life lost in the alien world, the ensuing feelings of homelessness and restless wandering and the “plight of the Soul in the labyrinth of the hostile world”79. The Strange, das Fremde appears as another key aspect of the concept of Gnos- ticism, drawing upon an elementary experience of life in the world. From this primary experience of alienness proceeds the conception of the absolute transcendence of God, embodied in the figure of the Alien God, which contributes to further anchor the radi- cal dualism opposing the divine to the worldly: “the Divine is alien to the World”, is “the totally Other”.80 The texts studied by Jonas cultivate the notion of the deep al- ienness of life on earth, thereby emphasizing the ontological strangeness of human life, Accessed 11.03.2019. 76 Hans JONAS, Gnostic Religion, op. cit., p.65 sq. 77 Ibid. p.65 78 Ibid. p.66. 79 Ibid. p.67. 80 Ibid, p.327. 43 from divine origin, arising amidst a world of death and chaos. Coming from elsewhere, the spirit feels a stranger in the world in which it was cast: gnostic narratives recount the sufferings which come with the lot of the stranger: wandering, loneliness, lack of understanding. The notion of the Alien is still present in the gnostic experience of a worldly alienation, where the “dispersal” of the divine light translates on an existential level into the manifold distractions arising from the worldly chaos surrounding it.81 This radical experience of worldly alienation, along with an incapacity of finding home within the world, conditions the perception by the gnostic mind of the ontological hos- tility of the World. Jonas finds in Mandean literature the recurrent theme of a life that was thrown into a world that is ontologically strange, namely from a different nature than human existence. And yet, as Levinas reminds us, we are in the world82: here we must dwell, we must find home. The strangeness of the worldly habitation and the exigency to inhabit the hos- tile make the love of the home suspicious to the Gnostics. In contrast to the Greek thought that situates humanity within a complete and harmonious cosmos, thereby al- lowing for meaning and sense to be conferred upon existence, the gnostic cosmology is articulated around the feeling of an existence in exile, wandering in an alien world and yearning for a home. Whereas the Greek representation of humanity’s place in the cosmos is characterized by intimacy and feeling at home in the world, illustrated by Hellenistic cosmopolitanism, the Gnostic cosmology conceives of the world as what is alien to humanity. While the Hellenistic cosmos is intelligible, entails intrinsic value, and displays the union between consciousness and the world, the gnostic conscious- ness is homeless, aches from the hostile indifference of an alien world and asks to divorce from it. In this respect, the gnostic metaphors of the alien and the home con- tribute to further convey the cosmological dualism between humanity and the world, which we will approach in our next section. As Susan Taubes rightfully notes in an article on the gnostic essence of Heidegger’s nihilism, the framing of the ontological strangeness of the world and the radical alterity of the divine in dualistic terms con- tributes to enshrine the closeness, finitude and hopelessness of the world: « the notion of strangeness engenders that of a beyond that limits and confines the world into a 81 Ibid, p.62. 82 Emmanuel LEVINAS, Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’Extériorité, Livre de Poche, 1987, p.21. 44 closed system: all that is, is locked and lost within the world. 83» Gnosticism conceives god and the world in radical, mutually exclusive, dualistic terms where the world is the unhomely home of the strange and god the intimate other of the world. The Abyss, the Rift, and Cosmic Anxiety Condemned to wander in an alien world, the lamentations of the gnostic soul merge into the expression of a general Weltschmerz, thereby defining our third theme identified among the Jonassian account of Gnosticism. The cosmic anxiety appears indeed as an essential, perhaps most manifest feature of Gnosticism, primarily characterized by the “feeling of an absolute rift between man and that in which he finds himself lodged – the world.”84 Jonas finds in gnostic narratives the manifold expressions of a tremendous existential anxiety erected to a cosmic level, a Weltangst over the inescapability of our being-in-the-world. Here again, the existentialist wording of Jonas’ contemporaries serves as a privileged access to the gnostic mind, whose existential crisis Jonas links to the emphasis in existentialist philosophy on the feeling of an abyss opposing the self to the universe. The philosopher identifies indeed both in gnostic texts and in modern thought a similar sense of the hostile indifference of the universe to the aspirations of the self85, its modern counterpart finding a prodigious expression in Blaise Pascal’s writings: “cast into the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened.”86 Imbued with the theme of the abyss, the gnostic- 83 Susan TAUBES, “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism”, The Journal of Religion, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Jul., 1954), p.159. 84 Hans JONAS, The Gnostic Religion, op.cit., p.327. 85 Ibid, p.322. 86 Blaise PASCAL, Pensées, Brunschvieg, p.205. Quoted in Hans JONAS, The Gnostic Religion, op.cit., p.322. “When I see the blind and wretched state of man. When I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.” 45 existentialist prose revolves around the attempt to express the bottomless depth disclosed by our existence in the world, by our standing on the edge of the groundless, and the feeling of vertigo that comes with the consciousness of the infinite openness of worldly becomings. The gnostic being-in-the-world studied by Jonas suffers similarly from the perception of this abyss, and its expressions are infused with the notion of an extreme, hopeless loneliness, an unfathomable ignorance, along with the feeling of being abandoned in the void of a world filled with an eternally silent indifference. There is no escape out of a deserted world where the complaints of the self are left unheard: the world has ceased to speak, its voice inaudible to the forgotten orphans of an absent God. Pervading gnostic imaginaries, the trope of the abyss conveys a sense of radical rupture between the self and the world, which Jonas identifies as an elemental feature of gnostic cosmologies. The latter express an indignation towards the ontological dependency of human existence to the world, and the feeling of man’s insignificance disclosed by it. The cosmic anxiety identified by Jonas in both ancient and contemporary forms of Gnosticism thus manifests itself through a despisal of worldly bonds, leading the self to deplore the liability “to be crushed at any moment by the forces of an immense and blind universe in which his existence is but a particular blind accident, no less blind than would be the accident of his destruction.”87 Jonas highlights the underlying dualistic premise of gnostic narratives, assuming that “as a thinking reed, however, [humanity] is no part of the sum, not belonging to it, but radically different, incommensurable: for the res extensa does not think, so Descartes had taught, and nature is nothing but res extensa – body, matter, external magnitude.”88 The radical strangeness and contingency of human existence prevents the thinking subject to find any meaning within a nature deserted by sense. Jonas uncovers the presence in Gnosticism of a strong man-world dualism, emphasizing the exceptional character of consciousness amidst worldly being: “[humanity] alone in the world thinks, not because but in spite of his being part of nature”89. The why to our existence remains an enigma, and Gnosticism asserts our estrangement from the natural world, 87 Hans JONAS, The Gnostic Religion, op.cit., p.322. 88 Ibid. I emphasize. 89 Ibid, p.323. 46 our distance from God and the gap within ourselves.90 In this respect, the mytheme of the abyss, along with the feeling of a cosmic anxiety it elicits, appears as a crystallization of the dualistic approach to the world characteristic of Gnosticism, filled with the feeling of an “unbridgeable gulf”91, namely an “estrangement between man and the world”92. Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Abyss” (Le Gouffre) is full of the gnostic lexicon of the cosmic anxiety, and illustrates perfectly this idea of a rift separating the self from the world: Le Gouffre Pascal avait son gouffre, avec lui se mouvant. — Hélas! tout est abîme, — action, désir, rêve, Parole! Et sur mon poil qui tout droit se relève Mainte fois de la Peur je sens passer le vent. En haut, en bas, partout, la profondeur, la grève, Le silence, l'espace affreux et captivant... Sur le fond de mes nuits Dieu de son doigt savant Dessine un cauchemar multiforme et sans trêve. J'ai peur du sommeil comme on a peur d'un grand trou, Tout plein de vague horreur, menant on ne sait où; Je ne vois qu'infini par toutes les fenêtres, Et mon esprit, toujours du vertige hanté, Jalouse du néant l'insensibilité. — Ah! ne jamais sortir des Nombres et des Êtres!93 The last verse – “Ah! Not to ever come out of the Numbers and Beings!” – expresses the regret of being in the world - as opposed to being the world -, of having been thrown into this life, while the poet “envies the insensitivity of the nothingness”. But 90 Eric POMMIER, op.cit, p.40. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid, p.325. 93 Charles BAUDELAIRE, “Le Gouffre”, Les Fleurs du Mal, Gallimard Flammarion, Paris, 1964 (1857), p.201. 47 it also conveys the idea of an ontological difference, unbridgeable - of a radical dualism opposing human life to the rest of worldly being, here referred to as “numbers and beings” and “the awful and captivating space”, thereby perpetuating the idea of worldly existence as primarily captive, imprisoned into an infinite yet confined space. Baudelaire’s poem thus provides a paradigmatic expression of modern Gnosticism in its depiction of an existential dualism articulated around the image of the abyss. This expression suggests, in the continuity of Jonas’ interpretation of Gnosticism, that a certain existential gulf builds the foundation for the dualistic structure of thought diagnosed by Jonas both in gnostic narratives and in modern cosmology. *** In this first section dedicated to the existential dimension of Jonassian Gnosticism, I explored some fundamental modalities of the gnostic being-in-the- world. I outlined the existential framework of a gnostic alienation from the world, primarily manifested through the themes of the fall, the strange, and the abyss. This portrait of the gnostic existence should allow us to now approach the cosmology which Jonas describes as gnostic, as well as enable a perceptive understanding of Jonas’ hermeneutical approach to Gnosticism – flowing from the existential to the cosmo- ontological. In retracing Jonas’ own intellectual path towards the conceptualization of Gnosticism, I intend to demonstrate how the dynamic of Demundanization, identified by Jonas as driving force of Gnosticism, is closely tied to an estranged mode of existence in the world and unfolds into a dualistic cosmological system. 48 B. Gnosticism as acosmic dualism In the Gnostic Religion, Jonas writes that “the cardinal feature of gnostic thought is the radical dualism that governs the relation of God and world, and correspondingly that of man and world”94. This second section proposes to delve into the gnostic cosmology, identifiable according to Jonas by a structural acosmic dualism. While doing so, I propose to pay attention to the unfolding within gnostic cosmology of the existential dualism previously outlined, as well as the centrality of the theological dimension of such dualism. Jonas’ examination of gnostic systems of thought is led indeed by the identification of a threefold opposition of man and the world, spirit and soul, and god and the world, thereby uncovering a structural, deep- ingrained dualism, defined by Jonas as “anthropological acosmism”. The cosmo-ontological unfolding of an existential dualism Jonas’ account of Gnosticism emphasizes the existential generation of gnostic cosmological systems, characterized by a structural acosmic, or worldless dualism. Jonas considers such dualism as the key, unifying feature of the gnostic thought, and situates its origin in the experience of a divorce between the self and the world: This dualistic mood underlies the whole gnostic attitude and unifies the widely diversified, more or less systematic expressions which that attitude gave itself in gnostic ritual and belief. It is on this primary human founda- tion of a dualistic mood, a passionately felt experience of man, that the articulated dualistic doctrines rest.95 94 Hans JONAS, Gnostic Religion, op.cit., p.42. 95 Ibid, p.251. I emphasize. 49 Jonas’ understanding of the existential roots of the cosmological dualism in Gnosti- cism might remind us the approach advocated by Michael Jackson’s existential an- thropology96. Drawing upon the legacies of phenomenology and existentialism, the anthropologist proposes to approach human experience through a perspective combin- ing collective worldviews and individual lifeworld, thereby offering to bridge the tra- ditional epistemological opposition between individualism and holism. Jonas’ ap- proach to the gnostic cosmology resembles indeed an anthropological one, emphasiz- ing the existential experience lying at its core, as well as shedding light on its historical contingency. Hence, Jonas argues that an existential estrangement between humanity and the world underlies the development of an anthropological dualism conceiving of humanity as made of two substances – body and mind, but also soul and spirit. This anthropological dualism unfolds unto a cosmological level with the thought of a Pas- calian “gulf” simultaneously separating mankind from its most authentic divine es- sence and from the world. The notion of a rupture between logos and cosmos brings such conception to a deeper level of abstraction and is consumed in the gnostic repre- sentation of a redemptive knowledge releasing humanity from its worldly bonds. The world and the worldly beings that populate it – to which humanity does not belong –, figures the utter absence of sense and meaning, and from the spirit’s incapacity to dwell in it proceeds the gnostic drama of being in the world. As we know now, the gnostic doctrine of knowledge is what mediates the engagement of the gnostic self with the world, or more exactly, what mediates its escape from the world – the Gnosis comes indeed to relieve the sufferings of the self cast into an alien world. In this per- spective, the only way to make sense out of the world is to deny its meaning and to escape from it. From the necessity of mediation, the gnostic thought derives the onto- logical divergence of humanity from the world, these building two distinct realms of reality. This opposition between humanity and the world overlaps that between logos and cosmos, spirit and matter, and God and the world. The concept of the logos allows us to approach the dualism of gnostic cosmologies as articulated around a cardinal theological dualism: “the dualism between man and world posits as its metaphysical counterpart that between the world and God”97. 96 Michael JACKSON, Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and Effects, Berghahn Books, 2005. 97 Ibid. 50 A pivotal theological dualism Hans Jonas’ conceptualization of Gnosticism is articulated around a theological dualism distinguishing between, and ultimately opposing, God to the world. This dualism is so paramount within Jonas’ understanding of Gnosticism that it seems to crystallise, initiate and organize the gnostic cosmology as a whole. The Jonassian interpretation of Gnosticism as acosmic dualism, in other words, as a structure of dualistic narratives articulating a profound dynamic of rejection of the world, manifests itself most clearly in the systematic opposition between divine and worldly being. Gnostic dualism appears indeed condensed in the theological dualism opposing God to the World. More precisely, the gnostic cosmology outlined by Jonas might be interpreted as the unfolding of a thought of the otherworldliness of God, from which the adivinity of the world is then derived – or is this the other way around? The otherworldliness of God and the adivinity of the world, both constituting essential features of the Jonassian concept of Gnosticism, soon appear as two sides of the same coin, proceeding from the same gnostic impulse of ontologically opposing the divine to the worldly. In this respect, and as we shall see further on, the Jonassian account of Gnosticism might be interpreted as the cosmological unfolding of an original, twofold hypostatization of god and the world as two irreconcilable poles of one primordial duality. The theological and ontological differentiation between god and the world conditions the representation of the divine as other-wordly and reciprocally, of the world as non-divine. The gnostic theology thus considers God as a stranger to the world, as the complete other which cannot be comprehended in worldly terms, and insists on a vertical axis opposing the worldly here below to the divine beyond. The high/low antithesis systematically structures in gnostic narratives the distance between terrestrial and divine worlds, and while gnostic theologies sometimes display some sense of a divine interiority unfolding within the dramatic history of the world, they also retain a strong interiority/exteriority, or spirit/incarnation dualism, thereby perpetuating an essential god/world dualism. 51 The gnostic emphasis on the absolute transcendence of God from the world may find an echo in the tradition of apophatic theology. Introduced in Christian theology by the early sixth-century author Dionysius the Areopagite, the terminology of apophatic and cataphatic theologies distinguishes between the use of positive or negative statements to approach God. The ways of affirmation or negation refer to an already well-established theological practice reaching back into the traditions of the Hebrew scriptures and classical Greek philosophy. Central in Christian Mysticism, where it celebrates a mystery beyond expression, apophatic theology conveys the sense of an overwhelming transcendence of God and allows, in Andrew Louth’s words, “an engagement that leaves a sense of withdrawal”98. The obscurely felt presence of God combined with its radical incomprehensibility result in a richness of experience that overflows any attempt to articulate it. In apophatic theology, God is therefore experienced as a beyond: beyond being, beyond intellect, beyond words, concepts and images. In this regard, the gnostic experience of God as a beyond is reminiscent of the posture of apophatic theology, which offers a way to channel the gnostic intuition of the ineffability of a divine only manifesting itself in a movement of withdrawal from worldly being. But the apophatic language should not be equated with a gnostic posture of desolation in the face of the absence of God in the world: it can also recount the experience of a divine saturation99, an overwhelming presence of God even manifest in her absence. Still, Jonas insists that the God of the Gnostics is primarily apprehended in its negative relation to the world, Basilides speaking of a non-being God. This leads Jonas to qualify Gnosticism as a “nihilistic theology”100. He explains: the gnostic God, as distinct from the demiurge, is the totally different, the other, the unknown. Like his inner-human counterpart, the acosmic self or pneuma, whose hidden nature also reveals itself only in the negative experience of otherness, of non-identification and of protested indefinable freedom, this God has more of the nihil than the ens in his concept.101 98 Andrew LOUTH, “Apophatic and Cataphatic Theology” in A. Hollywood & P. Beckman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, Cambridge Companions to Religion, 2012, pp. 137-146 99 Jean-Luc Marion’s theory of saturated phenomena insists on the overwhelming presence of a beyond which excesses our perception and understanding, thus calling for a phenomenality of excess. He men- tions divine revelation as one such saturated phenomenon. See notably Jean-Luc MARION, De surcroît : études sur les phénomènes saturés, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2010 (2001). 100 Hans JONAS, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist I, op.cit, p.250. 101 Hans JONAS, Gnostic Religion, op.cit, p.332. 52 Jonas describes the gnostic god as ultimate negation of the world: defined negatively in relation to the world, it endorses a nihilistic function towards all mundane bond. Gnostic theology thus asserts the radical a-mondanity, if not anti-mundanity of God: the gnostic God is absolutely transcendent, its transcendence understood here in the sense of an extra-mundanity. It is an absent, alien, unknown, hidden and withdrawn God. In Modernity, the gnostic thought of the otherworldliness of God declines itself in the concept of the deus absconditus and culminates in the motive of the Death of God. This gnostic idea of the absence of the divine in the world particularly shines through modern thought in concepts such as the deus absconditus, present in the theology of Martin Luther, and the motive of the death of god, mobilized in philosophy by figures such as Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche or Heidegger. The notion of deus absconditus and the motive of the death of god arise as two modern instances of a theology rooted in the experience of the absence of God from the world. The deus absconditus, or hidden God expresses the experience of a God who discloses itself primarily through the mode of withdrawal. Emphasising the abstrudity, incomprehensibility and ineffability of a God revealing neither its being, intentions nor commands, it perpetuates the gnostic imagery of the unknowability of the one true God, standing outside of the world, as well as the gnostic trope of humanity’s condition of ignorance. Spelling out the fundamental barrier to the human cognition of God, the notion of deus absconditus “confirms the abysmal separation between the human and the divine, which constitutes this-worldly existence and has devastating consequences for the ability of human beings to experience God as a god of love”.102 Following the analogy between the God-World and the Humanity-World dichotomies, the apophatic thought endorsed in Gnosticism suggests that the spiritual dimension of our selves is just as undefinable as the divine, or only definable in 102 Sasja Emilie MATHIASEN STOPA, “’Seeking Refuge in God against God’: The Hidden God in Lutheran Theology and the Postmodern Weakening of God”, Open Theology, 4, 2018, p. 663. 53 negative terms, as it first signals itself in its alterity from the world – an alterity that brings it closer to a god defined in its “pure acosmic alterity”103. This echoes the modern idea, particularly developed in existential philosophy, of the incomprehensibility of human existence in the world (Pascal), its unassimilable character within the whole of worldly being, along with the representation of a certain original virginity of the human mind, prone to becoming stained by the history of the world (Rousseau). Conceptions such as these maintain a dualistic structure of thought, systematically asserting the ontological divergence between Humanity and the World. In gnostic cosmologies, this is most conspicuously manifested in the thought of God’s utter alterity and exteriority from the world, condensed in the idea of the radical transcendence of the divine. Jonas’ interpretation of Gnosticism suggests that the relationship of divine transcendence to the world, as well as that between this transcendence and humanity, also conditions that between Humanity and the world. In this way, the apophatic timbre of gnostic theology appears to ground a nihilistic relationship to the world – an engagement with worldly being determined by the sense of the radical absence of the divine, a deep-felt absence whose perception was only enabled by the sporadic introduction in the world of an absolute transcendence through human existence. Humanity is indeed considered as the privileged medium of the awareness of an ontological perversion in the world. If the Gnosis retains the concept of god, it therefore portrays the figure of an absent god, a god that deserted the world and filled it with its absence. In this respect, the gnostic god is diametrically opposed to the divinities of Hellenistic cosmology and proclaims the dismissal of the latter – in Jonas’ words: “the God of the cosmos is dead”104. The Gnostic god is not from this world. And this world is not from the one true God – rather, it is the product of lower powers. To the extent to which the gnostic god is the negation of the world105, gnostic thought perceives worldly being as a negation of the divine. 103 Eric POMMIER, op.cit, p.38. 104 Hans JONAS, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist I, op.cit, p.331. 105 Ibid, p.332. 54 It appears clearly how a modern motive such as the death of god might resonate with the nihilism of gnostic theology. Both merge into the thought of the absence of god in the world, and in the consecration of a latent opposition between worldly and divine. As Jonas reminds us, Heidegger’s analysis of the Nietzschean exclamation of the death of God states that “the names God and Christian God are in Nietzsche’s thought used to denote the transcendental (supra-sensible) world in general”106. This corroborates the hypothesis, inferred from Jonas’ conceptualization of Gnosticism, of a central theological dualism distinguishing between the immanence of the world and the transcendence of the divine, and therefrom pervading the whole of gnostic cosmologies along a structural dualism. Heidegger’s rephrasing of the Nietzschean announcement highlights indeed the implicit eviction of the transcendental, or the supra-sensible, from worldly being, and the underlying dynamic of Demundanization in a shift of focus towards the divine acosmic Self. Susan Taubes observes in an article reflecting on the gnostic roots of Heideggerian nihilism that all interest is introverted in the contemplation of the negative acosmic self. The fullness of the god is finally emptiness. The emphasis is on an emotional relation to this emptiness.107 Here, Susan Taubes uncovers the negative nature of the gnostic relation to transcendence, arising from the primal perception of an ontological emptiness, a lack, or absence of God. From this negative relation to the divine, she draws the nihilistic implications of the gnostic cosmology, as she further notes that: the negativity of the gnostic god serves to undermine totally the positive empirical reality of the world and its claim to any value or validity108 Uncovering the gnostic conception of a non-relationship of the divine to the world contributes to outline the question of how the cosmological understanding of the presence of the divine within the world conditions our intellectual, sensuous and 106 Martin Heidegger in Holzwege, quoted by Jonas in The Gnostic Religion, op.cit, p.331. 107 Susan TAUBES, art. cit., p. 160. I emphasize. 108 Ibid. 55 ethical engagement with worldly being. The nihilistic implications of the gnostic thought of the absence of God in the world, or the death of God, seem indeed to merge into the conception of the ontological and irredeemable a-divinity of the world. The gnostic concept of the radical transcendence of God, or in other words, the otherworldliness of the divine, reciprocally unfolds within the wider gnostic system of thought in the idea of the a-divinity of world. The otherworldliness of the divine and the a-divinity of the world appear indeed to be closely tied together in gnostic cosmologies, where the death of the cosmic God simultaneously figures the death of the Greek cosmos: the world has ceased to be divine and to bear ultimate, intrinsic moral values109. The cosmic chaos is now devoid of meaning or final aims, unable to usher human existence in the world, nor to accompany it along its wandering. The gnostic world is confined to the realm of immanence, deserted of any divine transcendence, so that the gnostic systematic movement of demundanization of God is mirrored in a parallel movement of de-divinization of the world. While we will have the opportunity to reflect more in depth on the gnostic thought of immanence and transcendence, it is noteworthy to specify here that the gnostic concept of immanence bears the meaning of alienation and worldly entrenchment, while the concept of transcendence is understood as what breaks open the constraint of the world and allows to escape from it, perpetuating the dualism between worldly immanence and divine transcendence. By concentrating divine being in the non-worldly (and by conceiving of humanity as ontologically other-worldly), the gnostic idea of God, conceived as “nothingness of the world”110, deprives the world of its divinity, and of whatever qualities are contained in such term - transcendence, infinity, freedom, creation, openness. Crucially here, the gnostic concept of God is a negative one, for the gnostic god is fathomed first and foremost as what is not the world, what is other. The development of gnostic theology therefore unfolds along a structural dynamic of demundanization of the divine, which manifests itself primarily as a dedivinization of the world. 109 Hans JONAS, The Gnostic Religion, op. cit., p.331 110 Hans JONAS, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist I, op. cit., p.151. 56 This original and pivotal movement of Gnosticism then unfurls into a cosmology which Jonas identifies as “cosmic nihilism”111, consisting in a systematic enterprise of negation, reduction and devaluation of world being. Analysing the Gnosticism underlying Heidegger’s philosophy, Susan Taubes observes how “the variety and manifoldness of the empirical world is bracketed out”112, somehow reminding us of the anti-worldly echoes in modern narratives of nature. The eschatological tension contained in the gnostic temporal dualism The gnostic conception of time offers yet another illustration of both the acosmic dualism of gnostic cosmology and its ultimate theological character. Characterized by a strong dualism, the gnostic temporality displays a twofold contrast between past and present, and present and future. By constantly opposing the present to the non-present, this temporal dualism manifests another instance of the gnostic dynamic of demundanization, discernible in the motive of the vacuity of the present. Out of time, the gnostic temporality is led by a movement of escape from a past fall and directed towards a future salvation, thereby leaving no space for a thought of the presence of the present. The diagnosis of a temporality without present thus provides Jonas with another opportunity to draw a hermeneutical parallel between the gnostic and existentialist systems of thought. Jonas’ analysis of antique and modern nihilism suggests indeed that gnostic nihilism takes roots in the devaluation of the present, conceived as that against which ultimate aspirations are targeted. Gnosticism understands humane existence as an accidental event situated within an ontological tension between past and future, in which the present loses all focus and signification. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as temporal conceptions appear to be so often inherited from, or at least intimately entangled with theological ones, this turning away from the 111 Ibid, p.150. 112 Susan TAUBES, art.cit., p.160. 57 present and the dynamic perspective of gnostic temporality are determined by eschatological conceptions: there is past and there is future, from which we stem and towards which we hasten, and the present only is the moment of knowledge itself, the incident from one to another in the supreme crisis of the eschatological now.113 The eschatological dimension of the gnostic temporal dualism further illustrates the centrality of the theological in gnostic dualism. The gnostic eschatology presents itself as the project of an inversion of Humanity’s original fall into the world, thereby setting up the dynamical perspective of gnostic becoming, starting with a fall and ending with an ascension. The depiction in gnostic narratives of the present as an ontological state of crisis is supported by the theological representation of the drama of worldly being, conceived as a degeneration which started with the creation of the world, and which is to end in its overcoming. Being is firstly experienced by the gnostic self as a catastrophe which ought therefore to be overcome – temporarily as well as spatially: anywhere out of the world, anywhen but now. The gnostic eschatology thus situates the eschaton, or the ultimate ends, in the future, figuring an “out of the present world”. Following Jonas’ observation of the presence of a gnostic temporality in modern thought, we could identify such motive in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s depiction of the present as degenerate state of being, or more evidently in the modern dogma of progress, constantly exhorting to overcome the present. The proximity of existentialism and Gnosticism also manifests itself in their common depreciation of the present, primarily experienced and conceived as a state of crisis, an insignificant passing through, signalling the legacy of a dramatic past and leading us at best to a future destination. Susan Taubes thus sees in Heidegger’s thought of authenticity the illustration of such gnostic depreciation of the present, conceived as a devalued and inauthentic mode of existence in which we cannot dwell. Taubes reminds us that Heidegger’s conception of the present as bound to two 113 Hans JONAS, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist II, op. cit., p. 375. I emphasize. 58 temporal “ekstases” reflects the projective dimension of time: the present, a drama, has no value in itself and only makes sense when approached from the perspective of the temporally ecstatic structure of existence. The ecstatic nature of time conceptualized by Heidegger thus declines the gnostic drive to escape the present mode of existence, and perpetuates the gnostic dualism between the self and the present world, the here below and the beyond, interiority and exteriority: Man, standing outside the immediate, spatially surrounding present (stasis), stands in time. Because man stands outside the present, he is able to gather and concentrate himself within. The beyond is introverted; it is more inner than the inness of the world.114 The expression in gnostic narratives of a drive to escape from the present and the devaluation of the present thus appears as a manifestation of a wider devaluation of the world, referred to by Jonas as Demundanization. As the gnostic eschatology fails to think the presence of the eschaton in the innerness of the world, locating it in a future and otherworldly horizon, it contributes to further negate the (eschatological) presence of the world. This fundamental negation of the world builds for Jonas the roots of an acosmic nihilism, which the next part proposes to elucidate. *** In this second section, we endeavoured to delve into the cosmological dualism characterizing the Jonassian concept of Gnosticism. We thus explored and retraced the overarching presence of a dualistic structure of thought, pervading from the existential to the theological dimensions of Gnosticism, and culminating into the dualistic apprehension of the eschaton, which the gnostic eschatology situates in a “beyond the world”. In so doing, we wished to point towards the essentially theological dimension 114 Susan TAUBES, art.cit, p.162. I emphasize. While Taubes’ particularly insightful analysis of the Heideggerian philosophy appears to anticipate the problematic of immanentization of the beyond which Eric Voegelin would later theorize, let us focus for now on the denigration of the world manifested here, implying a theological dualism where the presence of a transcendent beyond is found exclusively within the self, and not in the otherness of worldly being. 59 of gnostic dualism, crystallized in the thought of the otherworldliness of God and the adivinity of worldly being. Such theological dualism, we argued, lies at the core of a cosmological dualism which appears to articulate, on a structural level, the essential dynamic of Demundanization infusing gnostic narratives. It thus appeared to us that the dualistic structure of gnostic thought, not only manifested but also organized a cosmological estrangement lying at the roots of the Jonassian concept of Gnosticism, whose existential generation we examined in the first part of this chapter. From the experience of an existential estrangement from the world, the fundamental experience of the acosmicity of the self, to its cosmological articulation throughout a dualistic structure of thought, we now wish to complete our elucidation of the Jonassian concept of Gnosticism by examining the development on an ethical level of the dynamic of Demundanization identified by our author as the sap of Gnosticism. The essential acosmism of gnostic narratives, Jonas’ analysis suggests, unfolds in a nihilistic mode of being in the world, which he relates to the ethical failure of contemporary thought. 60 C. The Gnostic estrangement from the world as nihilism Jonas’ diagnosis of a gnostic nihilism pervading contemporary existential thought is closely tied to his analysis of the acosmism of gnostic narratives. His understanding of nihilism, both antique and contemporary, is informed by a conceptualization of Gnosticism as an acosmic system of thought. Consecrating the yearning for an escape from worldly being, Gnosticism would indeed enfold into an ethical nihilism which completes the scission between humanity and the world. Jonas’ critical analysis of nihilism thus articulates itself around the cardinal idea that ethical nihilism blossoms upon acosmic, worldless cosmologies, his philosophy suggesting in return that ethics may only find its roots within the world. In the following and final section of this chapter, I propose to explore Jonas’ hypothesis of the generation of ethical nihilism in the fundamental acosmicity of gnostic cosmologies. Jonas describes how the acosmism of gnostic thought, also referred to as cosmic nihilism, acts as a systematic depreciation and ultimately leads into a negation of the world. This acosmism typically manifests itself through a gnostic temporality that figures a structural escape out of the present, where the self constantly yearns for another time, past or future. As we shall see, Jonas notably identifies this acosmic temporality in the utopianism of modern politics and holds a general “worldlessness” to lie at the root of the nihilistic tendency of modernity, where cosmic nihilism enfolds into a diffuse ethical nihilism. For Jonas, this is particularly exemplified by the failure of Heideggerian philosophy, built upon an acosmic ontology of the Dasein. This observation, along with the early diagnosis of a gnostic acosmism, shall determine the philosophical task to recover, through the Imperative of Responsibility, the ontological generation of an ethics grounded in worldly being. 61 Gnosticism as Negation of the World: an acosmic Nihilism Jonas defines gnostic ethics as acosmic: just like the whole of gnostic cosmol- ogies, it stems from a deep ingrained contempt for and revolt against the world. In the Gnostic Religion, he states that gnostic morality is distinctively “determined by hos- tility toward the world and contempt for all mundane ties”115. From this acosmic pos- ture proceeds the Gnostic anomism, illustrated either through an antinomian libertin- ism, or through ascetic morals116. Jonas mentions Plotin’s critique of the distinctive anomism of the Gnostics, defined by the absence of norms or values: for the ancient philosopher, the Gnostics would “lack a theory of virtue”117 as they fail to find any good in the world. Plotin condemns indeed Gnosticism’s opposition to the antique, Hellenist metaphysic of the cosmic order. The Gnostics do not feel obligated to a world which they experience as ontologically strange, only inspiring in them a posture of utter detachment and non-accountability118. The dualistic acosmism of the Gnostics, consuming the divorce between the self and the world, evolves into a cosmic nihilism which then prolongs itself into an ethical nihilism. Jonas therefore posits that acos- mism, which he most often refers to as Demundanization, the movement of disengage- ment from and ultimate negation of the world, constitutes the very sap of Gnosticism and contains as such the seeds of nihilism. This acosmic nihilism identified by Jonas as lying at the heart of gnostic narratives shall indeed allow him to draw together Gnos- ticism and Existentialism and to extend further the analogy on an ethical level, where the existential and ontological affinities of both systems of thought uncover similar nihilistic developments. In fact, this is on the ethical level that the similarity between gnostic and existentialist narratives appears for Jonas to be strongest: both recount the self’s anxious and wandering inhabiting of a disenchanted world, and the despair that comes along with the lack of any meaning or value within worldly being. The depreciation of the world thus arises as a central feature of gnostic ethics, proceeding from an original posture of estrangement from worldly beings. We find 115 Hans JONAS, The Gnostic Religion, op. cit., p.46. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid, p.266. 118 Robert THEIS, Hans Jonas: Habiter le Monde. op.cit., p.21. 62 that this depreciation of the world is common to both Gnosticism and Existentialism which, if in different ways, merge in their dualistic apprehension of worldly being: while antique Gnosticism thinks the cosmos as the hostile creation of a demiurge, Ex- istentialism depicts nature as indifferent, and embodies in this regard a more desperate variation of nihilism. In both cases, the gnostic and existentialist subject defines itself primarily through its opposition to this alternatively hostile or indifferent world. Exis- tentialist philosophy conceives indeed of nature as an absolute alterity which cannot be reached, nor even fathomed, and which represents in Jonas’ words “an absolute void, the true bottomless well”119. This conception of the world, along with the ethical implications it bears, is what crystallizes Jonas’ dismissal of the Heideggerian philos- ophy.120 It also conveys a temporal nihilism, besides an existential and ontological one: as mentioned earlier, the dynamic dimension of the temporal posture found in gnostic as well as existentialist narratives orients existence away from the present, and con- tains as such the danger of annihilating present being – this annihilation arising as another manifestation of the gnostic tendency to Demundanization. The idea of a throw out of nowhere moreover implies an unrestrained leap forward, whose direction is to be determined amidst the ethical vacuum of a world devoid of any value. Not only has the gnostic mind been thrown, but it must also therefrom project itself into a future which no predetermined value enlightens. However, a certain asymmetry between the 119 Hans JONAS, Prinzip Verantwortung, op.cit., p.236. 120 In this regard, we may wonder whether Jonas is being too quick on condemning Heidegger’s thought of the world. The latter attempted indeed to overcome an objectifying view of nature that would fail to recognize the ontological withdrawing of worldly being. Did he not find in the presocratic concept of phusis a force that gives all the while withdrawing? Besides, Heidegger’s later thought of the world represents the attempt to turn away from a modern, dualistic and anthropocentric apprehension of na- ture, which the ontological turn of his philosophy embodies. The concept of the quadripartite further conveys the representation of man, god, sky and earth as contemporaneously emerging into one deter- minate world (see Raphael Winkler, “Heidegger and the Beyond”). This conception of the unsurpassa- ble entanglement of the Dasein within worldly being might have led Heidegger to assert that “man is nature” (Martin HEIDEGGER, Einleitung zur Philosophie, GA, 27, § 37, p.328). While Jonas appears to hold on tight to the transcendence within the concept of nature, blaming Heidegger for his hubristic disregard for the finitude of human knowledge and arguing for a cosmological thought based on a pat- tern of the whole and the parts, Heidegger’s philosophy strives to think the emergence of openness within worldly being. This might well represent one fundamental difference between the two philoso- phers, as Jonas seems indeed to prolong the modern concept of nature, while Heidegger tends to oppose it through a thought of worldly being. 63 gnostic and existentialist forms of nihilism ought to be noted, in that ancient Gnosti- cism regards the world as anti-divine, while modern existentialism sees it as utterly indifferent, and appears in this respect as a more radical, more desperate form of ethical nihilism. Unless one understands the divine or religious in the terms proposed by Michel Serres: namely, as a kind of care, a deep-rooted concern, a scrupulous attention to what summons our responsibility and fears our negligence.121 While the word “care” echoes Heidegger’s notion of Sorge, Jonas throws light on the implicit theological background underlying modern Existentialism, most manifest in the notion of a being- thrown into the world, as he asks: “what is the throw without the thrower?” How could the a-teological, indifferent substance of nature engender the concerned being-in-the- world of the Dasein? Jonas identifies in the removal of a thought of the presence of an ontological care in nature, or, following Serres’ etymology of the world religion, the removal of a thought of God in the thought of the world, the paramount manifestation of modern nihilism: That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contin- gency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation122 Not only does Jonas bring our focus to the structural inconsistency of the modern system of thought, exemplified in Existentialism, but his concept of Gnosticism also suggests to approach the modern cosmology as a dualistic structure of thought which would have been amputated from one of its poles – the divine one. One such amputa- tion would have resulted into the evacuation of all purpose and value from nature, and eventually from man: “as a product of the indifferent, its being must be indifferent too.”123 Secular Modernity thus arises as what Robert Theis describes as a “monist dualism”124, preserving a dualistic structure of thought while seemingly abolishing one 121 Michel SERRES, Statues. Le Second Livre des Fondations, Flammarion, 2014, p.47. 122 Hans JONAS, “Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism”, art. cit., p. 45. 123 Hans JONAS, GSG II, p.378. 124 Robert THEIS, Hans Jonas: Habiter le Monde, op.cit, p.32. 64 of its poles – the “divine” one. Seemingly because, as we shall later see, such a dual- istic scheme of thought can only endure thanks to the irreducible tension upon which it is erected. In this sense, the death of God did not contribute to make Modernity more secular, or more monist, it only made it more nihilistic. Jonas is concerned about find- ing a third way, away from the temptation to reduce the dualistic tension, either through a naturalistic (inherited from the “worldly” pole”) or idealistic (inherited from the “divine” pole) form of monism. This third way should “avoid the dualistic aliena- tion” 125 in which western Modernity found itself caught, failing to seize the simulta- neously immanent and transcendent presence of the world. The relation to transcendence is the relation to the world Before further expanding on the ethical nihilism of Gnosticism, let us take a provisory step towards a deeper understanding of Jonas’ argument on the origin of ethical nihilism in the acosmicity of gnostic thought, by examining an idea which emerged from my study of the Jonassian concept of Gnosticism. From my earlier considerations on both the existential and cosmological variations of Gnosticism, it appears indeed that the gnostic relationship to the world is essentially tied to the gnostic relationship to transcendence. More specifically, Jonas’ analysis suggests that the gnostic conception of transcendence conditions the gnostic engagement with the world, thereby drawing together being-in-the-world and being-to-God. At the root of the acosmic nihilism identified by Jonas in gnostic narratives, we might find the absence of positive relationship between God and the world. Jonas observes in the gnostic conception of transcendence the roots of an acosmic nihilism denying the presence of any value, and therefore of any moral command binding us to the world: a transcendence withdrawn from any normative relation to the world is equal to a transcendence which has lost its effective force. In other words, for all purposes of man’s relation to the reality that surrounds him this hidden God is a nihilistic conception: no nomos 125 Hans JONAS, GSG II, p.379. 65 emanates from him, no law for nature and thus none for human action as part of the natural order.126 Our philosopher’s analysis of gnostic theologies suggests that the radicality of divine transcendence bears nihilistic implications that unfold on an ethical level into an acosmic nihilism. Contained in the yearning for an escape out of the world, the gnostic relationship to the world is a negative one. An antinomian posture inevitably follows from the gnostic premises that the world is a critical manifestation of being that ought to be overcome in order to reunite with the divine: the gnostic mind does not indeed feel accountable to the world, nor to anyone, in any way. Rather, it might feel accountable to an acosmic god that legitimates a contempt for the material world. These considerations only further the analogy drawn between Gnosticism and Existentialism, both systems of thought meeting in an approach to the divine characterized once again by a situation of rupture between god and the world. While Gnosticism stands in opposition to the antique metaphysic of the cosmic order, Existentialism prolongs western Christian metaphysics and blossoms on the thought of the death of God. Both appear as manifestations of the Nietzschean observation, understood by Heidegger as the loss of higher values and of the effectiveness of ideas, the supra-sensitive, the Ideal. Even when the Gnosis retains the idea of God, it is one that does not have any positive relationship to the world and results in the nihilistic depreciation, if not negation of the world. Jonas takes it further as he states that “the “death of God” means not only the actual devaluation of highest values, but also the loss of the very possibility of obligatory values as such.” For him, the motive of the death of God identifies a nihilistic tendency pervading Modernity, by which “the very concept of law was negated in all its aspects”. 127 Nietzsche’s idea of the death of God intended indeed to designate the devaluation of supreme values, and above all the loss of their possible foundation in an absolute. This simultaneous phenomenon of loss of the divine, transcendent pole of being, along with the dynamic of loss of the world (Demundanization), I argue, points towards something essential in the concept of Gnosticism. 126 Hans JONAS, GR, p.332. I emphasize. 127 Ibid. 66 The narratives considered by Jonas as gnostic, and this includes existentialist philosophy, convey the joint representation of a rupture with the world and a rupture with God. The devaluation of the cosmos, which appears in gnostic texts primarily as a dedivinization, as well as the feeling of being thrown and lost into an alien world, are for Jonas the result of the failure of the antique doctrine of the whole and the parts, present notably in pantheism and in post-aristotelician physico-theology128. The pursuit in existentialist philosophy of the motive of the insignificance of our existence in the world, along with the expression of a wandering without belonging within the infinitude of an indifferent universe, illustrate the collapse of a cosmological framework providing our dwelling in the world with a ground, a meaning and an orientation. Jonas’ analysis of Gnosticism, and the later developments of his thought towards philosophical biology and moral philosophy, suggest that the dissolution of the link to the whole results in a weakening of the normative bond tying us to the world. His concept of Gnosticism thus appears to embody this situation of rupture of the onto-ethical link to the world. The dereliction of moral norms of action, as well as of a visceral sense of responsibility binding us to our fellow beings of the world, arise as the direct consequences of the rupture of this umbilical link with the rest of worldly being. Jonas had already sensed that moral collapse of Modernity is being manifested, with an unprecedented intensity and scale, through the advent of the environmental issue, which consecrates a cosmological as well as ethical rupture of our civilization with the world. As we shall see again in chapter 3, Jonas’ appraisal of a parts and whole kind of cosmology might be problematic insofar as it appears as another declination of a dualistic and reductive approach to worldly being. Jonas seems indeed to assimilate the death of God with the death of a holistic cosmology – and this is legitimate, as the God whose death Nietzsche announced was indeed a holistic, almighty one, embodying a being superior to the world and characterized by an infinite power over its lower, subordinated creation. In Facing Gaia, Bruno Latour suggests that we should not mourn the loss of a holistic cosmology, which not only subsides through the 128 Hans JONAS, Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist II, p.369. 67 modern cosmology of nature, but also perpetuates obsolete patterns of engagement with worldly being that fail to approach the simultaneous immanence and overflowing of its agency. A Gaian approach to the world would, on the other hand, allow to catch even just a glimpse of the submerging complexity of worldly being, whose planetary entanglement overflows any dualistic cosmology. These considerations corroborate one central hypothesis of my research, according to which a specific thought of the tension between transcendence and immanence governs our understanding of and therefore our dwelling in the world. Robert Theis identified something crucial as he noted that what was common to both the gnostic assertion of God’s absolute transcendence and the existentialist claim of its death laid in the absence of God within the world, as well as any kind of positive relationship between the divine and the worldly. Unfolding this reflection leads me to the following hypothesis: namely, that the disappearance of the idea of God, the eclipse and discard of a thought of God along the development of western Modernity, was contemporaneous with a failure to think worldly being. Jonas’ concept of Gnosticism brings to light this joint failure to think the divine and the world. My interpretation suggests more particularly that this twofold disappearance manifests itself jointly through the disappearance of a thought of transcendence of the world, and of the immanent divinity of wordly being. This follows Jonas’ postulate, implicit in his analysis of antique and modern nihilism, that a godless world is an ethically empty world, and that the gnostic expression of the absence of god in the world – resulting in a Dedivinization of the world –, amounts to a loss of world, which Jonas conceptualized in the notion of Demundanization. Arguing that modern nihilism blossomed upon the spiritual emptiness established by modern science129, Jonas implies that the depreciation of nature is one manifestation of the Death of God. His diagnosis of a Gnostic acosmism infusing modernity and enabling the triumph of nihilism directly associates our attachment to the world with the realm of ethics, suggesting that the transcendence of the moral imperative finds its roots within the world. 129 Ibid, p. 377. 68 The relation to the world is paradigmatic of ethics Jonas’ analysis of Gnosticism and his interpretation of both antique and contemporary forms of nihilism convey an understanding of ethics as world-bound. Not only does the philosopher relate the quest for and exercise of a moral imperative to our belonging to the world, a cosmos, but his thought also suggests that this moral imperative arises from worldly being itself, thus going against the gnostic, modern representation of an otherworldly, transcendent ground of ethics. While the spirit of the Gnosis tears humanity away from the cosmos, thus making it a cosmic stranger or an apatrid, the Heideggerian Dasein presents it as that which projects itself freely, independently from any given essence. In the continuity of the existentialist tradition, Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” argues that Man does not belong to an objective or essential order, thereby not only suggesting a divorce from the world, but also a radical independence from any immanent, groundless origin. Existentialism thus represents the challenge, and blatant defeat, of groundless ethics: it stands for the attempt to anchor moral responsibility in the utter groundlessness, openness of being. In this respect, while Gnosticism figures a Demundanization of God, Existentialism represents a Demundanization, or an evacuation altogether, of the idea of transcendent ground – a notion constitutive of the modern concept of God. We saw earlier how the Gnostics’ acosmism, their worldlessness, unfolds itself into nihilistic ethics. This is manifestly what conditioned Jonas’ allegiance to a somewhat holistic cosmology, leading him to link the idea of cosmos to an ontological normativity, and proclaim that “that which has no nature has no norm”.130 Jonas opposes indeed the mechanistic approach to nature, which would result in the abandoning of the idea of finality in nature, and hence of a teleological perspective on worldly being. This presumed link between finality and value builds the central argument of the Jonassian ethics, deducing a certain hierarchy of values from the presence of ends identifiable in the beings of nature. Jonas, for whom values proceed from being and are manifested through finality, argues that the collapse of this axiological worldview allowed an acosmic nihilism to triumph. The indissoluble link between ontology and ethics 130 Hans JONAS, Prinzip Verantwortung, op.cit, p.232. 69 present in Jonas’ thought crystallizes the philosopher’s resistance to the modern dualistic paradigm: it allows him to refute Gnostic antinomianism by asserting a primordial, ontological link between our being-in-the-world and our being-ethical- bound, morally responsible. Jonas’ philosophy points as such toward an understanding of ethics as that which morally binds us to the world. Here, a crucial issue appears in the assimilation of this moral bond to the world, namely the entanglement of ethics and worldly being, to the presence of a ground for moral action. Such a ground was traditionally found in the concept of nature, providing the modern subject with a firm, objective, immutable terrain, indeed a frozen landscape for human action. Now what the present environmental crisis enjoins us to think, lies precisely in the contingency and precariousness of this natural (back)ground: that the world can be unfathomable and yet ethically full at the same time appears as one central lesson of environmental and moral philosophy. Full of the existential imperative of grounding moral responsibility amidst the bottomless, Jonas anticipated the thought of the contingency of natural being in his philosophy of biology, environmental ethics and even the more speculative-theological dimension of his work, suggesting that the ethical imperative transcends the groundless contingency of worldly being, all the while being immanent to it. In a Whiteheadian circle, the immanence of the ethical imperative transcends the contingency of worldly being: ethics stems from the abyss of immanence and transcends it. This of course subverts the gnostic dualism structuring modern narratives, the latter strictly distinguishing between the amoral immanence of nature and the subjective transcendence of culture. In opposing gnostic cosmologies, Jonas’ thought contributes to blur the dualistic lines organizing the way we conceive of and engage with the world, and his philosophy of nature particularly points toward the obsolescence of the immanence-transcendence divide when it comes to think the imperative of moral responsibility amidst the perpetual emergence of worldly being. 70 Conclusion: thinking the abyss of worldly being What can we learn from Jonas’ concept of Gnosticism, and how does this relate to the present environmental crisis? Hans Jonas’ largely hermeneutical engagement with the Gnostic religion was infused with the political and intellectual challenges of his own time, ranging from the ethical void left by the Second World War to the increasing concerns surrounding the advent of a technological civilization. Surely did the German philosopher think his way through an intense time which witnessed the onset of global environmental devastation succeed to the genocides of the Second World War. In this perspective, the concept of Gnosticism proved a fruitful hermeneutical tool to approach a world involved in violent waves of transformations. It is my postulate that a thought of Gnosticism might enlighten our path through the no less intense times we live in. Jonas’ understanding of Gnosticism is articulated around the unifying feature of dualism, which shall later infuse his whole speculative work. We saw how Jonas identifies at the core of gnostic narratives a tripartite dualism, where the figure of God crystallizes a radical rupture between Humanity and the World and manifests a structural dynamic of Demundanization. Through the concept of Gnosticism, Jonas unveils dualism as a type of engagement with the world, characterized by the primordial experience of a profound duality and reflected in the gnostic theological dualism between god and the world. Jonas analyzes this demundanized type of engagement with the world, along with the nihilistic posture it elicits, as existential before being cosmological. In this first chapter I proposed to approach this dynamic of Demundanization as manifesting a joint movement of Demundanization of God and Dedivinization of the world, thereby highlighting a primordial tension structuring gnostic dualism. Such a tension notably shines through the modern representations of the otherworldliness of God, but also and mostly of the adivinity of the world: as recent developments in environmental philosophy suggest (Latour, Stengers, Hache), modern cosmology deprives the world of its intrinsic value, agency, creativity, openness and transcendence – in a sense, from its divinity. Jonas’ diagnosis of the radical dualism governing the relation of God and the world as a cardinal feature of gnostic thought thus points toward the hermeneutical potential of the category of Gnosticism in approaching modern cosmology, and the advent of the 71 environmental crisis within it. More specifically, the Jonassian analysis of Gnosticism indicates how both movements of Demundanization and Dedivinization merge into the same dynamic of reduction of a primordial tension. Jonas’ concept of Gnosticism embodies indeed the crucial idea that God and the World are different entities, two irreconcilable poles of an inescapable dualism. I wish to suggest that this gnostic dualism between God and the World, resulting into a structural dynamic of Demundanization, is based upon an ontological tension whose reduction operates as an obstruction and sealing of the openness of worldly being. What Heidegger theorized under the “Forgetting of Being”, and what I propose to think in terms of sealing of the openness of the world, thus appears as a consequence of the dynamic of Demundanization observed by Jonas. This sealing, or closure of the world, notably manifests itself in the gnostic notion of the abyss. We saw in the first part of this chapter that the gnostic narratives studied by Jonas are articulated around the thought of an abyss, alienating the self from the world and eliciting a primordial experience of cosmic anxiety. The motives of the alienness of worldly being and the yearning for a home thus outline the figure of a pivotal abyss organizing gnostic cosmologies along a structural dualism. In this sense, the abyss appears to designate that which stands between the dualistic boundaries erected by gnostic systems of thought, and that which is simultaneously being reduced by them. The thought of such an abyss and what it might contain, I argue, bears great potential for approaching the openness of worldly being. This latter notion of openness, which I wish to uncover as underlying the concept of Gnosticism, shines through the gnostic theme of an ontological crack in divine being allowing the creation of the world.131 Within the gnostic mythology itself, unfolding the original experience of a crack in divine being, we can thus anticipate the thought of an ontological openness conditioning worldly being. We might also discern, in the thought of the radical transcendence and alterity of the divine, the opportunity to reflect upon the presence of this transcendence and alterity within the world itself – yet without thereby giving in the dualistic opposition of the divine to the worldly. This tension that we are starting to outline, and that Jonas’ concept of Gnosticism contributes to unveil, dwelling 131 Eric POMMIER, op.cit, p.34. 72 somewhere within the openness of worldly being, amidst the abyss, between the alien and the home, nature and culture, the divine and the worldly… seems to be crystallized in the immanence-transcendence duality. But these are merely preliminary considerations, which should introduce us to the more speculative and hermeneutical reflection that is to blossom in the following chapters of this dissertation. For now, I wish to conclude on the persisting presence of Gnosticism in contemporary systems of thought, that is, in the very narratives that are conditioning our engagement with the world and the way we presently inhabit it. Jonas’ analysis of the Gnostic religion contributes indeed to throw light on the worldless dualism structuring contemporary narratives. In her article on the Gnosticism of Heideggerian philosophy, Susan Taubes writes that “the gnostic speculative system may become totally immanent in its structure and yet retain at its centre the principle of transcendence”132. She thereby points toward the secularisation of the gnostic mythology in Modernity and suggests that the supposed immanentization of theological contents might obscure, but not evacuate the element of transcendence implied in the very notion of immanence. Immanence and transcendence, just as secular and theological, build an inextricable tension which is always contained in either of its poles. Any claim about the secular implies a reciprocal claim about the theological. Therein lies, it seems to me, the main lesson of Hans Jonas’ concept of Gnosticism: in the deep-ingrained dualism of our cosmologies, we can find a tension, like a mirror. That this tension is worth rediscovering, as we are today summoned to a renewed encounter with the world, builds the postulate of this research. 132 Susan TAUBES, art. cit., p.61. 73 CHAPTER 2 ERIC VOEGELIN’S CONCEPT OF GNOSTICISM AND THE PNEUMO-PATHOLOGY OF POLITICAL MODERNITY Introduction: Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism in his philosophy Eric Voegelin’s prolific works have not benefited from the same recognition as the philosophy of Hans Jonas. His subversive political thought, informed by subtle developments in philosophy of consciousness, appears to have been somewhat omit- ted, if not discarded by orthodox political science. Known as one of the severest critics of Modernity, Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism played a central role in his theoriza- tion of the modern predicament and modernity’s dismissal of the transcendent dimen- sion of reality. He understood Gnosticism as the expression of a revolt against the structure of existence in the world, led by the belief that humans could fundamentally alter it through the implementation on a socio-political level of an esoteric knowledge. His use of the term Gnosticism reinvests three essential features which to a certain extent overlap with Jonas’ concept: namely, (1) a strong feeling of existential aliena- tion, incompleteness and unfulfillment, resulting in (2) a revolt against human condi- tion, and – that is where Voegelin distinguishes himself from previous understandings of Gnosticism – (3) a belief in the transformative power of esoteric knowledge and political action to overcome this alienated condition. Attentive to the evolution of our 74 ability to symbolize and communicate the adventures and discoveries of conscious- ness, the Voegelinian approach to Gnosticism proposes to rehabilitate in political phi- losophy a thought of consciousness and its symbolic manifestations. Voegelin’s inter- pretation of Gnosticism stands out through the originality, subtlety and perceptive depth of his analysis, thereby delivering a contribution to the philosophy of modernity whose paramount importance, this chapter aims to show, is yet to be acknowledged. A Philosophy of Transcendent Order The philosophical thought of Eric Voegelin is one of order-disorder (as illus- trated by the title of his multi-volume magnus opus Order and History). Indebted to the legacy of classical and Christian philosophy, whose key tenets were laid by authors such as Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, his thought reflects the conviction that the order of being discernible within the world is surmounted by a transcendent source of being. Voegelin’s philosophy thus postulates the world-trans- cendent origin of the order of being, and somehow appears to manifest an obsessive concern with the radically transcendent character of this order – in this concern, we might identify the source of his fervent opposition to the Gnosticism of Modernity. The Voegelinian analysis of Gnosticism revolves indeed around the polarity between transcendence and immanence, and lies more particularly in its definition as a dynamic of Immanentization, on which the present chapter shall further expand. But as Voege- lin links the acknowledgement of the transcendent nature of the order of being to an existential posture of “loving openness”, he reveals the subtlety of his understanding of transcendence, thereby also suggesting the complexity of his concept of Gnosticism. In Science, Politics and Gnosticism, he writes that: The prerequisite of analysis is still the perception of the order of being unto its origin in transcendent being, in particular, the loving openness of the soul to its transcendent ground of order.133 133 Eric VOEGELIN, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. An Essay on Late Modernity, Gateway Editions, Washington, 2003 (1968), p.14. I emphasize. 75 The approach to being outlined here, both epistemological and existential, along with an understanding of philosophy as “the love of being through love of divine being as the source of its order”134, reveal Voegelin’s fundamentally anti-gnostic stain, charac- terized by a loving openness in and to the world. This being open to the transcendent ground of being, or to the transcendence in being, chimes with Voegelin’s later use of the concept of metaxy, and thus determines what he considers to be the cardinal prob- lem of philosophy. The same postulate of the transcendent ground of politics lies at the heart of the Platonic-Aristotelian paradigm of political science, whose tradition Voegelin intends to perpetuate. The pervasive intuition of the transcendent order of being thus characterizes the Voegelinian philosophy as a whole, and provides us with a key to approach Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism, as well as how it relates to his political thought. Voegelin set himself the goal of specifying the character of the mod- ern crisis while uncovering its spiritual origin: as such, the purpose of his thought im- plied an “elucidation of the symbolism and psychology of the mass movements of our times”135, which the concept of Gnosticism is intended to illuminate. Voegelin’s anal- ysis of Gnosticism thus falls within a pneumatological approach to political sciences, one that explores the deep-ranging relationship between ideas and politics. Politics of the noetic In Science, Politics and Gnosticism, Voegelin emphasizes the “pneumopatho- logical” nature of the gnostic revolt, shedding light upon the link between the pneu- matic, or spiritual dimension of Gnosticism, and its pathological character. According to Thomas Lordan, the philosophy of Voegelin aims at “recovering the experiences that engendered the symbols of western order”136. His approach to Gnosticism calls for an elucidation of the spiritual roots of gnostic movements, requiring an analysis 134 Eric VOEGELIN, Order and History I – Israel and Revelation. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rougem 1957, p.xiv. I emphasize. 135 Eric VOEGELIN, Foreword to the American Edition of Science, Politics and Gnosticism, p. xix. 136 Thomas LORDAN, “Eric Voegelin and Henri de Lubac: The Metaxy and the Suspended Middle (Part I)”, Voegelin View, May 2016. URL: https://voegelinview.com/eric-voegelin-henri-de-lubac-metaxy-suspended-middle/ Accessed 11.01.2019. https://voegelinview.com/eric-voegelin-henri-de-lubac-metaxy-suspended-middle/ 76 particularly attentive to this subtle element Voegelin intended to unveil in the pneu- mopathological, which we propose to approach here through a perspective we might characterize as “noetico-politic”. Voegelin’s political philosophy reflects a concern for the noetic, that is, for the way beliefs, ideals, thoughts and intentions affect the world. Infused with the postulate that political science depends upon a study of the noetic, his analysis of modern politics is crucially informed by a philosophy of consciousness: The problems of human order in society and history originate in the order of consciousness. The philosophy of consciousness is there- fore the centerpiece of a philosophy of politics.137 Voegelin’s preoccupation with the problem of the metaxy, which I propose to explore in this chapter, illustrates his belief that consciousness is of paramount importance to the unfolding of history. James Wiser reminds us that the idea that political science is conditioned upon specific existential accomplishments is central to Voegelin’s under- standing of theoretical thought.138 While Voegelin considers theory primarily as a mode of existence, Wiser describes our author’s intellectual inquiry as relying upon the “discipline of an existential love”139, whereby we recognize his intrinsically anti- gnostic posture, committed to a loving and welcoming openness toward worldly being and resisting the gnostic motive of a perpetual revolt against it. Voegelin argues indeed that reality is best rendered by the noetic expressions of a soul “who is attuned to the divine order of the cosmos, not [one] who exists in revolt against it”140. 137 Eric VOEGELIN, The New Science of Politics, University of Chicago Press, 1952, p. 1. 138 James L. WISER, “From Cultural Analysis to Philosophical Anthropology: An Examination of Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism”, The Review of Politics, Vol.42, 1, January 1980, p.98. 139 Ibid. 140 Eric VOEGELIN, “Reason: The Classic Experience”, in Anamnesis, On the Theory of History and Politics, ed. Gerhart Niemeyer, University of Missouri Press, 1978. p.97. 77 The Concept of Gnosticism as a diagnosis of the modern predicament Wiser argues that a correct understanding of the Voegelinian approach to the- ory is crucial for seizing the meaning of the concept of Gnosticism for modern political science. Voegelin employs and develops the category of Gnosticism for the purpose of throwing light onto the elements that are constitutive of the modern predicament: Gnosticism is to qualify Political Modernity, and diagnose the pathological substance pervading it. In Science, Politics and Gnosticism, Voegelin thus extends and deepens the thesis he formulated in The New Science of Politics (1952), according to which “the essence of modernity is Gnosticism”. Voegelin contends that modern ideological mass movements and the dominant philosophical schools are in some sense continua- tions of the various anti-Christian, gnostic sects. He argues for both a historical conti- nuity and an experiential equivalence between the ancient movements and such mod- ern phenomena as positivism, Marxism, Freudianism, existentialism, progressivism, utopianism, revolutionary activism, fascism, communism, national socialism… as well as all other “isms”. Voegelin seemed aware however to be engaged in the hazy enterprise of illuminating Modernity from within, as he concedes that “the struggle against the consequences of Gnosticism is being conducted in the very language of Gnosticism.”141 With these words indeed, Voegelin points toward the latent character of deep ingrained gnostic elements in our cosmologies. He thereby indicates the need to uncover the presence of Gnosticism in the structures of thought and language that condition our existence in the world, before attempting to develop an alternative thought. Voegelin’s philosophy is a speculative “work in progress”142, one that stands on the edge of thought, and which therefore perpetually requires our contribution. An apophatic thought of our dwelling in the open I propose to approach Voegelin’s analysis of Gnosticism as embedded in an apophatic thought, revolving around the notion of an existential openness of our being in the world. While the adjective “apophatic” is usually employed in a theological context to describe a discourse which concedes an unovercomeable ignorance of God, 141 Eric VOEGELIN, Foreword to the American Edition of Science, Politics and Gnosticism, p.xx. 142 Ibid. 78 aware of the impossibility to reach a definite grasp of the divine, it can also be applied to a speculative thought that departs from a propositional logics and proceeds with an epistemological humility. In this perspective, Heidegger’s thought of the withdrawal of Being can be qualified as apophatic. Likewise, we could describe Voegelin’s thought as apophatic in the sense that it opposes the positivist project of a possessive knowledge of the world and renounces the quest for a definite seize upon being. In Plato and Aristotle, he warns us against the attempts to achieve possessive knowledge by formulating doctrines leading to the “desecration of a mystery”143, whereby he re- veals his apophatic conception of truth. As he denounces the “failure of immanentist metaphysics”, he describes indeed truth as an “orientating force in the soul, about which we can speak only in analogical symbols.”144 Echoing Plato’s way of accessing the “ultimate realities”, Voegelin’s approach to truth promotes a non-propositional, symbolic and analogical discourse, giving way to the myth as legitimate medium for communicating the fundamental experiences of being in the world. Voegelin is envisaging another notion of veracity as he states that “a myth can never be ‘untrue’ because it would not exist unless it had its experiential basis in the movements of the soul which it symbolizes”. He considers myths as the “legitimate expressions” of existential experiences and traces their evolution from a collective enterprise to a tool for representing “spiritual movements...of the individual soul”.10 Commenting on the cosmic myth of the Egyptians, the philosopher maintains indeed that the “truth” of their story “will arise from the unconscious, stratified in depth into the collective unconscious of the people.” Human beings, Voegelin argues, “are engaged in the creation of a mytho-speculative symbol that will satisfy their desire to express”145. The reduction by a positivist paradigm of such essential mytho-specu- lative attempts at fulfilling a longing for expression would only result in a sterility all the more disastrous as it claims the ultimate monopoly of “objective” truth. In an en- lightening article about Voegelin’s concept of Metaxy, James Rhodes explains that, 143 Eric VOEGELIN, Order and History III – Plato and Aristotle, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1957, p. 19. 144 Ibid, p.363. 145 Eric VOEGELIN, “The Moving Soul”, in What is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings, 1990, p.165. 79 because the myth symbolizes the “fundamental movements in the soul”, Voegelin in- veighs mightily against handling it with a literalism that would “split the symbol from the experience by hypostatizing the symbol as a proposition on objects.”11 From here on and throughout the present chapter, I would like to draw our attention to the pres- ence in modern thought of a certain movement of hypostatization, of hypostatizing or essentializing reduction, and to the defiance manifested by Voegelin towards it. The condemnation of a hypostatizing way of thought, I wish to argue, is a crucial element in Voegelin’s critical understanding of Gnosticism and follows from the apophatic ori- entation of his thought towards the “open”. The rehabilitation of the mythical or symbolic language manifested in Voege- lin’s thought throws light on his approach to the concept of Gnosticism, as well as on the role it plays in his philosophy. Employed by Voegelin, the perspective of Gnosti- cism appears subversive, notably in its epistemological postulate of a mythical lan- guage that might uncover things left unseen by the rational scientific paradigm of Mo- dernity. Stephen McKnight notes indeed that the gnostic pattern identified by Voegelin in the modern world is “crucial for analysts to explore because these elements of mo- dernity are usually claimed to be derived from science and secularization and not from ancient esoteric religions.146 Defined in these terms, the perspective of Gnosticism echoes with the very approach I wish to promote in this dissertation. The apophatic character of Voegelin’s philosophy seems directly related to the idea of openness, which appears to stand at the centre of Voegelin’s approach. As already mentioned, his thought is infused with a posture, epistemological just as much as existential, of “loving openness” towards Being. From this being-open in the world results a philosophy in the open, one that embraces the speculative breadth of thought and claims its legitimacy as well as its urgency: Reason has the definite existential content of openness towards re- ality (…) In face of the breakdown of philosophy in modern Western 146 Stephen MCKNIGHT, “Eric Voegelin and the Changing Perspective on the Gnostic Features of Mo- dernity.”, in International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin, ed. Stephen A. McKnight and Geoffrey L.Price. University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1997. 80 society, the bond between reason and existential philia, between rea- son and openness toward the ground must be made thematically ex- plicit.147 As I hope to demonstrate in the present chapter, this idea of openness is all the more crucial as it connects with the concept of metaxy, absolutely pivotal in Voegelin’s thought and which, I wish to argue, provides a key to unlock his concept of Gnosticism. It is my intuition that both the concepts of openness and metaxy express Voegelin’s “insight concerning the divine presence and operation in the cosmos”148, which only a speculative, hermeneutical, and poetic language may provide, resorting notably to the resources of mythical expression. Voegelin depicts life in openness as an existential posture allowing a better knowledge of reality, characterized by a conscious, creative and illuminating participation within worldly being. The philosopher, therefore, is called to wander in the openness of the in-between, in the “erotic tension” of her ex- istence in the world, torn between the being and the beyond, and by the persisting experience of the joint presence of God and the world. A reclaiming of Jonas’ analysis Although Voegelin’s philosophy distinguishes itself radically from Jonas’, manifesting different sensitivities and different concerns, his resumption of the Jonas- sian analysis of Gnosticism seems to converge on the original diagnosis of the gnostic character of at least some elements of Modernity. Both thinkers identify significant analogies between ancient Gnosticism and the modern condition, and demonstrate in their political analysis a particular sensitivity to the existential and spiritual condition of modern societies: The collapse of the ancient empires of the East, the loss of independ- ence for Israel and the Hellenic and Phoenician city-states, the pop- ulation shifts, the deportations and enslavements, and the interpene- 147 Eric VOEGELIN, “Reason: The Classic Experience”, art. cit, p.101. 148 James RHODES, “What is the Metaxy? Diotima and Voegelin”, Voegelin View, June 2013. URL: https://voegelinview.com/what-is-the-metaxy-diotima-and-voegelin/ Accessed 11.01.2019. https://voegelinview.com/what-is-the-metaxy-diotima-and-voegelin/ 81 tration of cultures reduce men who exercise no control over the pro- ceedings of history to an extreme state of forlornness in the turmoil of the world, of intellectual disorientation, of material and spiritual insecurity. The loss of meaning that results from the breakdown of institutions, civilizations, and ethnic cohesion evokes attempts to re- gain an understanding of the meaning of human existence in the given conditions of the world.149 Among the “profusion of gnostic experiences and symbolic expressions” already acknowledged by Jonas, Voegelin distinguishes what he considers along with his col- league as the central feature of Gnosticism, namely “the experience of the world as an alien place into which man has strayed and from which he must find his way back home to the other world of his origin.”150 For Voegelin too, who sees in Hegel’s alien- ated spirit or Heidegger’s being-thrown contemporary expressions of a gnostic being in the world, the great mythopoems of Gnosticism revolve around questions of the origin, of an original having been flung and the perspective of a liberating escape from the world. Voegelin thus shares with Jonas an existential perspective on Gnosticism, assuming that this similarity in symbolic expression results from a homogeneity in experience of the world [and that] the homogeneity goes beyond the experience of the world to the image of man and salvation with which both the modern and the ancient gnostics respond to the con- dition of “flungness” in the alien world.151 Both philosophers converge moreover in their observation that modern thought is at least partly rooted in a gnostic mode of inhabiting the world, the latter hinges upon the twofold experience of an alienation from a world deemed hostile, and a rebellion against the ground of being – whose divinity both Voegelin and Jonas seem to agree on. While Jonas’ analysis of contemporary forms of Gnosticism aimed primarily at an enhanced understanding of the nihilistic element pervading modern thought through 149 Eric VOEGELIN, Science, Politics and Gnosticism, op. cit., p.6. My emphasis. 150 Ibid, p.7. My emphasis. 151 Ibid, p.8. My emphasis. 82 existentialism, Voegelin’s concern focuses on providing an articulated account of the political expressions of modern Gnosticism in order to develop “a new interpretation of European intellectual history and of modern politics”, thereby uncovering the pneu- mopathological condition of political modernity152. Voegelin’s thought distinguishes itself however by a political conservatism, led by the notion of order and the idea that the disorders of society were caused by attempts at overcoming the transcendent order of being: The structure of the order of being will not change because one finds it defective and runs away from it. The attempt at world destruction will not destroy the world, but will only increase the disorder in so- ciety.153 Opposing the gnostic posture of an existential revolt against worldly being, Voegelin’s interpretation of Gnosticism rather suggests renewing the order of the world through actions grounded in the love of the world, thereby reminding us of Jonas’ radical con- cern for the perpetuation of worldly being. Some critical considerations James Wiser brings our attention to Voegelin’s own detachment from his early statements about the nature of Modernity such as formulated in the New Science of Politics, in Science, Politics and Gnosticism, and in the Political Religions. In more recent statements, Voegelin indicated that Gnosticism, although certainly a major force in the development of contemporary society, should not be considered as its es- sence. Modernity revealing itself as more complex than his original position would suggest, and appearing rather as a composite of several traditions, he indicated the need to enlarge the “investigation of contemporary consciousness so as to include an examination of its Gnostic, Hermetic and Alchemistic conceits”.154 Gnosticism ought 152 Ibid, p.5. 153 Ibid, p.9. 154 Eric VOEGELIN, "Response to Professor Altizer," Journal of the American Academy Religion, 6 (1975), 762-65, quoted by James WISER in “From Cultural Analysis to Philosophical Anthropology: An Examination of Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism”, art. cit., p.93. 83 to be considered not as the exclusive source of modern cosmologies, but along other factors, such as the “metastatic apocalypse” or the process of immanentization with its origins in the revival of neo-Platonism. Stephen McKnight thus argues that the themes that enter modern thought through Renaissance Neoplatonism and Hermeticism have a thrust profoundly different from those associated with ancient and modern Gnostic nihilism. A mode of esoteric saving knowledge in particular, emphasizing human dom- inance over nature and the transformation of the natural and social order into paradise, would have gained attention in the Renaissance and grown to become a pattern in mo- dernity and play a key role in the development of modern utopian political ideologies. This pattern would have notably contributed to the modern belief that an epistemolog- ical breakthrough separates the new age from the past and equips modern humanity with the power to master nature and perfect society.155 In this light, Wiser rightfully notes that “Voegelin’s partial disclaimer of his own concept raises a question as to the importance of the term [of Gnosticism] itself”, asking whether Gnosticism is a “useful conceptual tool in our attempt to understand the modern condition”.156 My insight is that the interest in Gnosticism, purely herme- neutic here, lies not so much in the concept itself but, rather, in what it contributes to unconceal. Following Wiser, one of the claims of this chapter is that Voegelin’s anal- ysis of the gnostic phenomenon does provide an important theoretical insight, one that might be “usefully extended beyond the realm of cultural analysis for which it was originally developed”.157 155 Stephen MCKNIGHT, “Eric Voegelin and the Changing Perspective on the Gnostic Features of Modernity”, in The Allure of Gnosticism: The Gnostic Experience in Jungian Psychology and Contemporary Culture, ed. Robert A.Segal, June Singer and Murray Stein, Open Court, 1995. 156 Ibid. 157 Ibid, p.94. 84 A. The Gnostic Revolution: overcoming a godless world Like Jonas, Voegelin’s philosophy of Gnosticism falls into an understanding of the gnostic impulse as a longing for the overcoming of the world: the gnostic drive is one for a revolution against the world. More precisely, Voegelin situates the source of the gnostic revolt in the condition of alienation by and from a de-divinized world. “The de-divinization of the world through Christianity and the creation of a god-empty world”, Voegelin argues, “are the prerequisites for Western existence as a whole” 158 In the New Science of Politics, Voegelin maintains that the de-divinization of the tem- poral sphere of power was historically followed by a process of re-divinization, char- acteristic of the late Middle Ages and the subsequent modernity. 159 With the process of de-divinization, a spiritual vacuum was cast upon the world, which various ideolo- gies attempted to alleviate. Gnosticism, for Voegelin, is not only the most prominent and explicit of these attempts, but also takes on an archetypal dimension for the flow- ering in Modernity of liberalism, capitalism, positivism, progressivism, socialism, and all forms of totalitarianisms draining the world as they claim the exhaustion of truth. Voegelin drew strong parallels between Gnosticism and the utopian dreams of scien- tism and political revolution characterizing modern times. What unites all these mod- ern enterprises, and what thus defines Gnosticism in its core, I argue, is the rejection of the world. Three features in particular are characteristic of Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism: the claim of a radical, ontological break with the times past; the claim that the source of this rupture is an extraordinary epistemological breakthrough providing humanity with both the knowledge and the ability to perfect society; and the conviction that this epistemological advance allows humanity to alter the conditions of existence and shape its own destiny. 158 Eric VOEGELIN, “The Spiritual and Political Future of the Western World”, quoted by Harald Bergbauer in “Eric Voegelin on the Early Christianity: Philosophical, Theological, and Political Implications”, 2010, p.9. URL: https://sites01.lsu.edu/faculty/voegelin/wp-content/uploads/sites/80/2015/09/Bergbauer.pdf Accessed 11.03.2019. 159 Eric VOEGELIN, The New Science of Politics, op.cit. https://sites01.lsu.edu/faculty/voegelin/wp-content/uploads/sites/80/2015/09/Bergbauer.pdf 85 An eternal revolution The notion of a radical rupture with the present world appears essential to Voegelin’s understanding of Gnosticism. The ideological and political movements he characterized as gnostics share indeed a common posture of rupture with the world, and claim the introduction of an epochal break, instigated by an epistemological one. Among the conceptual imaginary of Modernity, Voegelin identifies one gnostic sym- bol in particular expressing this idea of an epochal rupture: the notion of the “Three Ages”, separating western history into ancient, medieval and modern times, each very distinctively characterized by specific epistemological landscapes. The gnostic tempo- rality is thus a purely linear one, proceeding from the cursed times of the fall to the redemption of the end of times. But this end of times, the actualization of the over- coming, the final completion of the rupture, appears to never really happen: rather, it is perpetually postponed, so that nothing ever seems to fulfil the gnostic revolution. The latter embodies an eternal dissatisfaction with the present world: it is an eternal revolution. The modern dogma of progress and its declination in the sanctity of eco- nomic growth illustrate for example the gnostic movement of a perpetual overcoming, or escape out of present worldly being, and finds its epistemological roots in a science Thomas Kuhn described as “post-normal”, evolving along successive paradigmatic breaks. The gnostic impulse amounts to a perpetual, insatiable, ontological yearning for an overcoming of the world in its present manifestation. As we know, Voegelin proposed to investigate the existential pendant of this yearning by digging more spe- cifically into its spiritual roots. While most thinkers of Modernity have linked the epis- temological leap of Scientism to the process of secularization160, Voegelin interprets Gnosticism as a movement instigated by the “de-divinization” of the world throughout the development of Christianity. What matters to us for now is the notion of a break, rupture and rejection of the world characterizing Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism: Gnostics are wishing to put an end to this world, breaking from one world to another, and this ontological rupture is motivated by a profound unease in, dissatisfaction with, 160 See Emilie HACHE (dir.), De l’univers clos au monde infini, Dehors, 2014. 86 and hatred of the world. This fantasized rupture with the present world may only hap- pen through the possession of a specific kind of knowledge. The knowledge that shall redeem us A second feature of Gnosticism is the notion of a redemptive knowledge, which Voegelin recognizes in the modern phenomenon of ideologies. The philosopher refers to modern ideologies as various attempts to re-divinize a temporal order otherwise experienced as devoid of meaning and purpose.161 More specifically, his analysis of Gnosticism draws a parallel between ancient Gnosis, defined as both “the knowledge of falling captive to the world” and “the means of escaping it” 162, and modern concep- tions of scientific knowledge. Voegelin articulates the concept of Gnosticism around the idea of a saving knowledge. The elevation of knowledge to the rank of privileged mean to salvation is notably apparent in the gnostic belief in the redeeming effect of the identification of the sources of worldly alienation. Voegelin identifies that same belief in the modern concept of science, and sees in the prodigious advancement, since the XVIIth century, of this new instrument of cognition, the symbolic vehicle of the gnostic truth. The philosopher considers indeed scientism as one of the strongest gnostic movements in- volved in the development of Western society. Against the widely acknowledged the- ory of secularization, and the more specific idea that modern science blossomed upon the secularization of knowledge and society, Voegelin witnesses the evolution of sci- ence into the equivalent of an esoteric religion, called upon by various social and po- litical reformers. He thereby undercuts a basic tenet of modernity: in arguing that such root-concepts as that of knowledge or history are religious in origin and function, he challenges the hypothesis of secularization as a fundamental modernist theme. 161 Eric VOEGELIN, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, The University of Chicago Press, 1952, p.107. 162 Eric VOEGELIN, Science, Politics and Gnosticism, op.cit, p.9. 87 Because it considers it possible to fully grasp some knowledge that until then had remained concealed, and yearns for the possession of this knowledge, the gnostic un- derstanding of truth is a possessive, as well as a systemic one. It aims at achieving an integral, exhaustive form of knowledge that would conquer ignorance by disclosing the ultimate principles of Being. Voegelin rises against such attempts, which he rec- ognizes in the modern philosophies of Thomas More, Thomas Hobbes or Georg Wil- helm Friedrich Hegel. In identifying the human logos with the divine one, the latter intends indeed to make the process of history fully comprehensible. In the three cases, for Voegelin, “the thinker suppresses an essential element of reality”, lying in the con- sciousness that “the constitution of being remains beyond the reach of the thinker’s lust for power”163 For this forgetting, Voegelin blames the libido dominandi typical of Gnosticism, appearing in philosophy by means of systems construction and dogmatic certitude. As the construction of systems relies on the obstruction of reality and the reduction of a perpetual mystery in Being, the “suppression” that goes with the various attempts at achieving systematic knowledge amounts for Voegelin to a closure against reality. Against the claim to actual knowledge (wirkliches Wissen) present in Hegel’s phenomenology and ranging through modern science, Voegelin reminds us that phi- losophy dwells in the love of wisdom, not its possession. His conception of philosophy is one that opposes the gnostic hatred of worldly being infusing the desire of dominion that is manifest in the urge to system construction: Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man’s loving endeav- our to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it. Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the gnostic constructs his system. The building of systems is a gnostic form of reasoning, not a philosophical one.164 163 Ibid, p.106. My emphasis. 164 Ibid, p.30. My emphasis. 88 Escaping the World If Gnosticism conceives knowledge as the way to achieve salvation, wherein exactly lies this salvation? The gnostic yearning for salvation arises from a condition of alienation, experienced as an unovercomeable entanglement with and entrapment in worldly being. The Gnostic myth of the “Hymn of the Pearl” thus expresses entrap- ment as the fundamental condition of mankind, an entrapment characterized by a con- dition of ignorance of our origin and ultimate purpose – hence the gnostic idea that knowledge is the means to redemption. Voegelin finds this element in the narratives of modern political revolutionaries like Auguste Comte or Karl Marx, who sought to use scientific knowledge in order to overcome an alienated state of existence. He ar- gues that the development of the “social science project” took science far beyond its boundaries, disregarding its own limitations and using it in the same way ancient Gnos- tics used esoteric knowledge – as a means for escaping worldly alienation and trans- forming existence. For Voegelin, who shares with Jonas the common understanding of Gnosticism as pessimistic and dualistic view of the world, the gnostic soteriology sees redemption in the alteration of the conditions of existence through the mastering of worldly being. The aim of the gnostic revolution is therefore the plain transfiguration of the world: “the gnostic revolution has for its purpose a change in the nature of man and the estab- lishment of a transfigured society”165 Voegelin stands firm on the ground prepared by Plato, Aristotle and St Augustine against those who dream of changing the world: “the nature of a thing cannot be changed; whoever tries to ‘alter’ its nature destroys the thing.”166 Gnosticism thus arises as a revolted answer to the imperfection of the world through an attempt at its salvational fulfilment. While the Christian posture finds re- demption through grace in death, the Gnostics situate redemption in the death of the present world and the advent of a new one: “the aim is destruction of the old world 165 Eric VOEGELIN, The New Science of Politics, op. cit, p.211. 166 Eric VOEGELIN, Science, Politics and Gnosticism. op.cit. p. 43. 89 and passage to the new. The instrument of salvation is gnosis itself – knowledge.” 167 If Jonas interprets this yearning for another world as a dynamic of Demundanization, Voegelin defines the gnostic rebellion against worldly being as a process of Imma- nentization. As we expand further on the notion of Immanentization, we shall see that these two terms are not necessarily opposed, but rather converge in a sense of closure of the world. Both philosophers meet indeed in their analysis of a dualistic concept of salvation, understood in a radical opposition to worldly being as it is presently experi- enced. In the gnostic idea of redemption through revolution, we find indeed an abso- lutely crucial ontological postulate proceeding from the existential experience of being as inherently flawed, whose conditions therefore have to be overcome. The gnostic self has to be saved from present, mundane being. Voegelin’s definition of Gnosticism distinguishes itself with the particular idea that the labour of salvation, entailing the dissolution of the worldly constitution of being, falls to mankind, and materializes in modern ideological and mass political movements. The latter would indeed exhibit “a definite animosity towards the very structure of existence itself.”168 Voegelin’s analy- sis of these political movements therefore proposes approaching the whole project of modern western society as a political religion. 167 Ibid. p.8. 168 James L. WISER, “From Cultural Analysis to Philosophical Anthropology: An Examination of Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism”, art. cit., p.95. 90 B. Modernity as Immanent Political Religion The Modern Political Religion In the fifth chapter of the New Science of Politics, Voegelin presents the hy- pothesis according to which what lies at the heart of the modern predicament is a “pe- culiar pneumopathological state”169. In order to understand modern civilization, the philosopher argues, we must descend to the symbolic representation of our existential experience in the modern world. Voegelin’s political philosophy displays an enhanced sensitivity to the existential dimension of political phenomena. Like Jonas, Voegelin submits an existential definition of Gnosticism, in which he recognizes the core fea- tures of modern existence, underlying all modern political projects. Voegelin’s analy- sis of Gnosticism is first and foremost an analysis of gnostic consciousness: one that experiences the world as fundamentally flawed, and longs for an overcoming of this alienated condition. It is essential to acknowledge this existential focus, in order to prevent any misunderstanding of the Voegelinian approach to Gnosticism and there- fore also his analysis of political modernity. Intending to elucidate the depths of its consciousness, Voegelin proposes to disclose Modernity as a Political Religion. In the light of his analysis of consciousness, the civilizational process of modernity appeared to him as the historical manifestation of a “mystical work of self-salvation”170: Gnosticism most effectively released human forces for the building of a civilization because on their fervent application to intramundane activity was put the premium of salvation.171 Voegelin thus interprets the whole unfolding of the modern civilizational process as ultimately led by a gnostic consciousness yearning for a redemption in the overcoming of the present world. At the core of this progressive endeavour lies the discovery of the gnosis, a precious type of knowledge that shall unlock the development of the 169 Eric VOEGELIN, The New Science of Politics, op.cit, p.139 170 Ibid, p.129. 171 Ibid, p.130. 91 modern political project and lead societies to a greater stage of civilization. We might recognize here echoes of the narratives of progress and growth, both falling into the ideological framework of modern civilization. To the hegemonic development of the modern civilizational process and its ideological dogmas, Voegelin only sees a limit in totalitarian political projects. “Totalitarianism”, which manifests itself in all-encom- passing ideologies promoting a systematic conception of truth, “is the end form of progressive civilisation”172. Voegelin’s condemnation of modern ideologies and their gnostic dimension allows us to approach the concept of ideology as a systemic, possessive type of knowledge claiming to seize the total realm of being. Closely tied to the phenomenon of ideologies, which he understands as modern avatars of the gnosis, Voegelin’s defi- nition of totalitarianism overlaps with his analysis of Gnosticism. He thus considered liberalism, scientism, positivism, progressivism and democratism – among others “isms” – to be gnostic ideologies, revealing the presence of Gnosticism all over the modern age. Ranging through the political ideologies which emphasize movement to- ward a goal rather than the nature of the goal pursued, its magnitude is colossal. It follows from Voegelin’s teaching that, despite the defeat of Nazi Germany and the containment of Soviet aggression, western societies have by no means exorcised the demon of ideological totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt had yet warned us against the latent danger of silent forms of totalitarianism infusing our civilization, remaining un- conscious, concealed under the aegis of growth, progress or development, and the per- spective of a redemptory end to history. In this context, Voegelin’s approach to Mo- dernity as political religion provides an acute insight into modern narratives, beyond their claim to an enlightened and non-ideological secularism. Against the widely es- tablished thesis of secularization, Voegelin refers to ideologies as attempts to re-divi- nize the temporal order173 and offers an interpretation of Modernity as a process of Immanentization. 172 Ibid, p.132. 173 Ibid, p.107. 92 The Immanentization and the unworldly world In some regards, Voegelin’s notion of Immanentization, defining the core dy- namic of Gnosticism and thereby also Modernity, may appear as a variation of the secularization thesis. It acknowledges indeed to a certain extent that modern societies and cosmologies did not exactly expel all theological content, but rather internalized them, incorporating them into their structures of thought. Such a dynamic would in- deed succeed to a prior process of de-divinization. According to Voegelin, one major consequence of the development of monotheistic Christianity is that it created a “world emptied of gods”, reducing a plurality of divinities to a metaphysical god which was transferred from this earthly world to an indeterminate and absent beyond. The process of de-divinization itself would have succeeded to the primary experience of a world full of a divine presence manifesting a cosmological order complete in itself, and oc- curred as a decisive consequence of what Voegelin called the “leap in being” – on which the next point shall expand. The emergence of a dynamic of de-divinization thus refers to the experience, and the progressive noetic realization, that the divine is a “be- yond” transcending the world, never encountered in worldly existence. In philosophi- cal terms, what the event of de-divinization implies is that the origin, ground and pur- pose of being are not perceived as contained in the world, but as lying “beyond” worldly being: the world is experienced as the groundless vestige of a divine principle absent from its creation, orphan of a god who fled174. What Voegelin conceptualized under the term of “de-divinization” appears to have elicited dualistic repercussions on the development of modern cosmology, thereby recalling Jonas’ analysis of Gnosticism. As worldly being was dissociated from divine being, the structure of being itself was altered and on it was super-imposed a dualistic architecture of being. As I suggest in the next chapter, the ontological indi- ces of immanent and transcendent are archetypal of a dualistic ontology articulated around the divorce between God and the world, and the yearning to bridge the imma- nence of worldly being to the transcendence of a divine beyond. Another manifestation 174 See the entry “De-divinization” from Jack Elliott’s Dictionary of Voegelinia Terminology. URL: http://watershade.net/ev/ev-dictionary.html#de-divinization_of_the_world Accessed 11.03.2019. http://watershade.net/ev/ev-dictionary.html#de-divinization_of_the_world 93 of this structural dualism concurrent to the dynamic of de-divinization is found in the modern process of political secularization: the latter consists in the dissociation of pre- viously unified spiritual and temporal powers, henceforth to be represented by the church and by the empire and then the state, thereby ensuring a “double representation of man in society” 175. Both events of the de-divinization of the world and the devel- opment of a dualistic cosmology prepare and condition the process of Immanentization described by Voegelin: the Immanentization characterizing modern societies occurs in a de-divinized, dualistic world. Now what does that term cover? Lying at the core of modern Gnosticism, the process of Immanentization iden- tified by Voegelin is first and foremost an eschatological phenomenon: it has to do with modern conceptions of salvation and the end of the world, and is defined as an Immanentization of the eschaton. In his lecture on the link between politics and reli- gion in Voegelin’s thought, Bruno Latour offers a perceptive insight into the subtle relevance of Voegelin’s essential idea for our time.176 The philosopher suggests indeed that Voegelin’s concept of immanentization provides a key to understand the modern aversion for immanence. But let us first have a closer look at this immanentization thesis. In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin argues that XIIth century Italian the- ologian Joachim de Flore initiated a tradition of philosophies and political movements locating the advent of end of time in the linearity of time. He identifies in the Joa- chimist idea of the Third Realm the burgeoning urge to transform the world and to draw its historical course to a close, which would later evolve into modern utopianism. The “fallacious immanentization of the eschaton” thus designates the political drive to realize the eschaton within history, thereby putting an end to time. What is lost how- ever in the belief that the end of time, the advent of the eschaton, is in our hands, Latour 175 Linda C. RAEDER, “Voegelin on Gnosticism, Modernity, and the Balance of Consciousness”, in Anamnesis Journal, November 2013, Online Essays. URL: http://anamnesisjournal.com/2013/11/voegelin-on-gnosticism-modernity-and-the-balance-of- consciousness-by-linda-c-raeder/ Accessed 11.01.2019. 176 Bruno LATOUR, “Politics and Religion. A Reading of Eric Voegelin”, Universitaet zu Koeln, 27th July 2015. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgyrnecHWMg&t=1960s Accessed 11.03.2019. See also Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Harvard University Press, 2017. http://anamnesisjournal.com/2013/11/voegelin-on-gnosticism-modernity-and-the-balance-of-consciousness-by-linda-c-raeder/ http://anamnesisjournal.com/2013/11/voegelin-on-gnosticism-modernity-and-the-balance-of-consciousness-by-linda-c-raeder/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgyrnecHWMg&t=1960s 94 argues, is some ontological hiatus, the suspension of linearity, the discontinuous irrup- tion of the world as something perpetually overflowing any historical course or frame- work. In the attempt to make politics fulfil the eschaton and thus bring the world to a closure, something crucial about worldly being was lost – its persistent openness. What motivates this political ambition? “What specific uncertainty was so dis- turbing that it had to be overcome by the dubious means of fallacious immanentiza- tion?”177 Voegelin argues that the dynamic of immanentization appeals to those anx- ious about the impending, uncertain course of history, eager to achieve certainty about the meaning, essential “eidos” of history. In a de-divinized culture erected upon a world deserted by the gods, only the tenuous bond of faith remains to guide our exist- ence, which few prove able to sustain: the attempt at immanentizying the meaning of existence is funda- mentally an attempt at bringing our knowledge of transcendence into a firmer grip that the cognito fidei.178 From the High Middle Ages onwards, Voegelin describes a constant descent into Gnosticism through a process of immanentization resulting in the progressive evacua- tion of all transcendence from the world. As the transcendence is immanentized, the tension contained in both immanence and transcendence is lost. The irruption of the Leviathan to pacify political instabilities, embodying the figure of the state as ultimate authority, evacuates in the same way the inherent volatility and contingence of politics by inscribing them into timeless and immutable “laws of nature”. The result, Latour argues, is the loss of two essential instabilities, whose elemental connection was ob- scured by modernity: that of the religious mode of existence, and that of the political. Reduced to the application of a transcendent plan onto reality, politics has become the substitution of a non-world, a utopia, to the present world. What succeeds to the failure of the successive attempts at the immanentization of the eschaton manifested by mod- 177 Eric VOEGELIN, The New Science of Politics, op.cit, p.187. 178 Ibid, p.189. 95 ern politics, Latour explains, is the rejection of an immanence despised for, well, des- pised for its transcendence! The immanence of the world does not let itself be har- nessed to fit into an ideal of what it should be: it is self-transcendent. Here we discern the crux of a problem I wish to elucidate in the coming chapters; for now let it suffice to say that the attempt at immanentizing a transcendent eschaton, that is, in the realm of politics, at shaping the world into an idea of what it should be, resulted in a posture of perpetual discontent with the world, which, following Latour’s reasoning, it appears fair to connect to the present environmental crisis. In the tradition of Heidegger’s loss of being, or Jonas’ forgetting of life, Latour links more specifically the ecological issue with the loss of matter along the development of modernity. According to him, the irruption of the ecological crisis, as the study of the earth’s critical zone reacting to human actions reveals, proclaims an end to the inertness of matter, and thereby offers an opportunity to re-encounter the agency of worldly beings – an agency lost with the loss of immanence. Although I shall further expand on this, it is important to under- stand here that Voegelin’s notion of immanentization refers to a loss of both the im- manent and the transcendent dimensions of worldly being, as these may only subsist together: any attempt at reducing their tension, for instance by absorbing one into an- other like in the immanentization (which presents itself as an immanentization of a transcendent eschaton), results in their coincident loss. This becomes particularly per- ceptible in the light of Latour’s analysis of modern dualism, which, focussing on the most archetypical nature-culture divide, taught us to consider dualistic polarities as one concept instead of two distinct ones. The challenge outlined by Voegelin and ar- ticulated by Latour lies therefore in the resistance to the dualistic urge to reduce the ontological tension in the world. Especially, it summons us to embrace the tension of politics, by preserving its indomitable instability, the uncertainty of its outcome, and by dwelling in the precariousness of worldly being as it is being manifested by the present environmental crisis. This challenge takes on an eschatological meaning, and Voegelin’s concept of immanentization contributes indeed to uncover the way modern conceptions of escha- tology decisively affect the structure of modern politics.179 In chapter 4 of the New 179 Jacob TAUBES, Occidental Eschatology, Stanford University Press, 2009 (1947). 96 Science of Politics, Voegelin describes the process of immanentization of the Christian notion of eschatological fulfilment, and argues that teleological and axiological com- ponents of Christian symbolism reappear in modern variants of immanentization such as Progressivism or Utopianism. Prolonging this reflection into the present context of the ecological issue, Latour argues that secularized societies cannot take in the advent of the ecological mutation, as it would represent a second apocalypse. The ecological crisis figures the actual irruption of an unprecedented, unexpected eschaton, both transcending, interrupting modern conceptions of eschatology and arising from the transcendent immanence of worldly beings. Despite the many warnings of climate sci- entists, “the Moderns” stand after the apocalypse, after the ultimate revelations of the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution and the resulting process of secularization, bringing about the much-desired end of history. The truth has been revealed, the end of time has come as the eschaton was absorbed into the colossal project of moderniza- tion. If Voegelin’s analysis of Gnosticism as Immanentization appears as a variation of the secularization thesis characterized by a focus on the eschatological dimension of modern political movements, it also presents a declination of the motive of the death of God: “the death of God is the cardinal issue of gnosis, both ancient and modern.”180 Recalling Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx’s interpretation of the Judeo-Christian transcendent God as the projection into a hypostatic beyond of the best of humanity, Voegelin interprets the promethean yearning of modern humanism as another mani- festation of the process of immanentization181. He thus depicts Marx as a “speculative gnostic”, who “construes the order of being as a process of nature complete in itself” by evacuating all transcendence from the world. The purpose of this speculation, Voegelin argues, is indeed “to shut off the process of being from transcendent being and have man create himself”182. In this evacuation of transcendence from worldly 180 Eric VOEGELIN, Science, Politics and Gnosticism, op.cit., p. xx. 181 As James Wiser reminds us, Voegelin was convinced that the modern process of immanentization, manifesting itself in the divinization of the profane spheres of the scientifico-political, “[was] not motivated primarily by a desire to celebrate mundane existence as such”, but rather was “based upon a prior rejection of reality’s transcendent grounding.” He concludes that “immanentization was only the first step towards the attempted construction of a second reality – a construction motivated by the fundamental rejection of historical existence.” James L WISER, “From Cultural Analysis to Philosophical Anthropology: An Examination of Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism”, art. cit., p.95. 182 Eric VOEGELIN, Science, Politics and Gnosticism, p.16. 97 being, Voegelin sees the main danger of a process of immanentization leaving “an unworldly world” emptied of its transcendence: When consciousness of the cosmic bond of being as the background of all philosophy declines, there arise the well-known dangers of the dedivinized world and the unworldy God, the unworldly world as nothing but a nexus of relations between immanent things, and the dedivinized God reduced to mere existence.183 Here, Voegelin offers a wonderful expression of what he fundamentally rejects in Gnosticism: namely, the way it obstructs and seals off the creative process of worldly being in the attempt to seize it fully, thereby exhausting its self-transcendence. That towards which Voegelin seems to point here is that transcendence is impaired when it is conceived as otherworldly, or worse, nonworldly. That is to say that the open process of worldly being does not need to be grounded in a radical, otherworldly transcend- ence, and the transcendent dimension of a being does not exclude its resilient, imma- nent creativity. Perhaps this depiction of an unworldly world might echo Jonas’ inter- pretation of the gnostic dynamic of loss of the world: both Jonas’ concept of De- mundanization and Voegelin’s Immanentization refer indeed to a common negation of the world in its own ontological, self-transcending openness. For Voegelin, this occurs through a dynamic of reduction of the tension that defines our being in the world. 183 Eric VOEGELIN, Anamnesis, op. cit., p.79. My emphasis. 98 C. Inhabiting in-between the worlds The leap in the abyss of Being In the first volume of Order and History - Israel and Revelation, Voegelin men- tions “a change in the order of Being and existence itself184 following the introduction, inherent to the process of immanentization, of the idea of an otherworldly transcend- ence. The “leap in Being” describes indeed the realization that the source of cosmic order and creation is not located within the cosmos itself, but ‘beyond’ it, therefore opening a breach in worldly being separating the divine principle from the world. Ac- cording to Voegelin, this conceptual discovery was only clearly articulated in the Greek and Judeo-Christian symbolics. In Neolithic agricultural societies, the divine is not fully differentiated from a world infused with wonder and enchantment, neither is the world as creation distinguished from its creators. The representation of a single order encompassing the natural worlds and the realm of human experience conveys a deep sense of attunement to the cosmos. In this context, the event identified by Voege- lin as a leap in being symbolizes the encounter with a creation whose cause or origin could not be found within the world, thus setting off a quest for the original cause characterizing a metaphysical engagement with the world. As the single ordering, orig- inating, and preserving source of being is experienced in its absolute transcendence beyond the world, the leap of being figures the sense of a gulf in the hierarchy of being, separating divine from mundane existence. The development of monotheism thus cor- responds to the discovery and experience of an absolute transcendent force located “beyond Being in tangible existence”185. Voegelin further argues that the discovery which plunged humanity into the abyss of being proclaimed a whole new historical mode of existence: one that divides the stream of time into the before and after of the great leap and unites all humans into a universal humanity. Thus, he analyses both the linear temporality and the universalism of modern cosmology as the legacy of the leap 184 Eric VOEGELIN, Order and History I – Israel and Revelation, op.cit, p. 47. 185 Ibid. 99 in being and the insights it released, establishing a new aeon of history that still con- ditions modernity’s narratives and self-understanding. “The discovery of a transcendent source of Being beyond existence”, Thomas Hollweck notes, “radically alters man’s understanding of his place in the cosmos from his previous experience of consubstantiality”.186 On an ontological level, one main consequence of such a discovery is the separation of humanity from the consubstanti- ality of the world, symbolized by the theological motive of the fall from the garden of Eden. Like the original fall from a place of union, the leap in being insulates human existence from worldly being, and results in the devaluation of its participation in the world. It is a leap in the abyss of being, leaving humanity in-between a divine world from which it has fallen, and an alien world in which it was thrown. Voegelin’s phi- losophy proposes to investigate on an existential level the disorienting consequences of the leap, experienced as an exile from both God and the world. It suggests that the leap in being engendered a tensional in-between a creative force from beyond and ex- istence in the world, an in-between whose conscious recognition and symbolic repre- sentation provides a key to approaching the development of modern cosmology. By overlooking this element, Voegelin argues, contemporary philosophy has ignored an essential aspect of human existence that is the life in between. 186 Thomas A. HOLLWECK, “Cosmos and the ‘Leap in Being’ in Voegelin’s Philosophy”, 106th American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, 26th Eric Voegelin Society Annual International Meeting, org. by Ellis Sandoz, Washington, D.C., Sept. 2-5, 2010. URL: https://sites01.lsu.edu/faculty/voegelin/wp-content/uploads/sites/80/2015/09/Thomas- Hollweck.pdf Accessed 11.01.2019. https://sites01.lsu.edu/faculty/voegelin/wp-content/uploads/sites/80/2015/09/Thomas-Hollweck.pdf https://sites01.lsu.edu/faculty/voegelin/wp-content/uploads/sites/80/2015/09/Thomas-Hollweck.pdf 100 Dwelling in the Metaxy In Plato’s Symposium, the philosopher and priestess Diotima defines Eros as “a great daimon,” understanding the daimonic187 as a “between (metaxy) god and mor- tal”.188 Voegelin read in this line a major platonic insight and treated the term “metaxy” as a substantive category whose meaning proved paramount to his philosophy. He con- fided indeed to his doctoral student Ellis Sandoz that the greatest issue of his work was “to restore the problem of the Metaxy for society and history.”189 If the philosopher only fully explored and elaborated the idea of Metaxy in the volume V of his Order and History, it seems to pervade the whole of his thought. Voegelin defines the Metaxy, or In-Between, as the meeting-ground of the human and the divine in a consciousness of their distinction and interpenetration190 In the present section, I propose to elucidate how the problem of the metaxy relates to his analysis of Gnosticism, and how the experience of an original tension precedes any gnostic movement. At the core of the thought of an ontological in-between, Voegelin identifies a theophanic process of differentiation of consciousness, referring to the sharpened con- sciousness of an existential tension, experienced as a being-torn between two poles. This differentiating event thus discovers the metaxic nature of human consciousness: suspended over a gulf, dwelling between the divine and the worldly, participating in 187 In his doctoral dissertation about the daimonic, Stephen A. Diamond states that it is “as much con- cerned with creativity as with negative reactions”. He claims that “a special characteristic of the dai- monic model is that it considers both creativity on one side, and anger and rage on the other side, as coming from the same source”. Stephen A. DIAMOND, “Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psy- chological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity”. Foreword. 188 Plato, 202d13-e1. 189 Eric Voegelin to Ellis Sandoz, December 30, 1971. Quoted by Sandoz in his introduction to Voege- lin, Order and History V – In Search of Order, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1987, p. 12. 190 Eric VOEGELIN, Collected Works Vol. 12 - Published Essays, 1966-1985, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, p. 233. 101 both but fixed in neither. This discovery coincides with the distinction of a single cre- ative force, an absolutely transcendent source of Being symbolized in the concept of the One God. As Voegelin identifies the development of a sense of an ontological schism, referring in particular to the distinction between the transcendent, divine ground of Being and the world of immanence191, he seems to point toward the birth of modern dualism, articulated around such ontological divides as that between nature and culture, natural and supernatural, or God and the world. But the thought our phi- losopher wishes to rehabilitate in the idea of metaxy is one of the in-between, of the middle ground, of that which overflows binary polarities and thereby subverts modern dualism. Voegelin’s concept of metaxy thus points towards exactly that which a dual- istic cosmology misses about our being in the world: the tensional structure of exist- ence, of an existence in-between the worlds. In the essay “Eternal Being in Time” (Ewiges Sein in der Zeit) published in his Anamnesis, Voegelin defines the “philosophical experience” as a pair of tensions in the soul, the first of which being that “between time and eternity.”192 He argues there that humans “experience in [themselves] the tension to divine being”193, standing in- between poles of being symbolized by the divine and the worldly. Voegelin defines this inbetweenness as an existential tension, and summons us to embrace the “erotic tension towards the ground of being” by: consciously exist[ing] in the tension of the in-between (metaxy), in which the divine and the human partake of each other. 194 The concept of metaxy does not refer to “an empty space between immanent and trans- cendent objects”, merely indicating the void between dualistic poles, but designates 191 Eugene WEBB, Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History, University of Washington Press, Seattle, Washington, 1981. 192 James RHODES, “What is the Metaxy? Diotima and Voegelin”, art.cit. 193 Eric VOEGELIN, Anamnesis, op.cit, pp. 128, 129. 194 Ibid, p. 154. My emphasis. 102 rather “the area of mutual participation of divine and human reality”.195 The metaxic tension is one actively, positively experienced, and opening up the possibility of a fruitful and mutual participation (metalepsis) in and with the world. Voegelin’s intui- tion is that Eros, the mediator of the metaxic tension, symbolizes either an attraction or a pull in opposite directions – between time and eternity, divine and worldly, being and nothingness etc.196 That which stands in between, and which Voegelin’s concept of metaxy intends to unveil, should not be hypostatized as an object on which propo- sitions could be formed: it first arises as the experience of an existential tension char- acterizing the human condition. Voegelin argues that the anthropological dimension of the metaxy reaches its fullest symbolic achievement in the Pauline vision of the Transfiguration, which expresses both humans’ ascent toward the creative force, and the descent of the creative force toward them in a tensional co-penetration of imma- nence and transcendence. Voegelin thus fills the term “metaxy” with new meanings by treating dualistic polarities as symbols of experiential poles. He thereby provides a deeper interpretation of Plato, suggesting that the antique philosopher is conscious of existing not only between god and man, but also in between all other pairs of poles grounding modern philosophy – the one and the unlimited, the one and the many, con- sciousness and unconsciousness, time and eternity… all platonic symbols of an inbe- tweenness unfolding from the primary metaxy, understood as an existence in tension. 197 Bridging the poles of a manifold experience in the world, the existential tension described by Voegelin is no human prerogative: it arises from and is grounded in worldly being: “there is no flux of presence in the Metaxy without its foundation in the biophysical existence of man on earth in the universe.”198 The tensional structure of existence unveiled by the concept of metaxy thus expands to the world in all the concreteness of its overwhelming and eerie presence: it is a cosmic metaxy. Voegelin 195 Ibid, p.176. 196 Eric Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle, op.cit, p. 127. 197 James RHODES, art. Cit. 198 Eric VOEGELIN, The Ecumenic Age, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974, p. 333. 103 challenges the founding postulates of modern dualism as he suggests that the unfath- omable element in cultural processes is inseparable from that of natural processes: the Mystery of the historical process is inseparable from the Mystery of the reality which brings forth the universe and the earth, plant and animal life on earth, and ultimately man and his consciousness.199 Brendan Purcell thus proposes to approach the “metaxic issue” in terms of cosmic emergence, instead of limiting it to the realm of strictly anthropological, existential experience.200 The immanence of the “hierarchy of being” described by Voegelin as composed of different “stratas of reality participating into one another”201 coexists in- deed with the transcendent openness of a cosmic metaxy, illuminated by the experi- ence of our being in the world as an existence in between. The inbetweenness con- tained in the concept of metaxy is as ontological as it is existential: once the truth of man’s existence had been understood as the In- Between reality of noetic consciousness, the truth of the process as a whole could be restated as the existence of all things in the In- Between of the One and the Apeiron.202 Voegelin saw in the forgetting of the cosmic community of the metaxy, what Andrew Hoffman calls the “full metaxic partnership in the community of Being”203, a modern disease of consciousness manifested through a “withdrawal into existential solitude”204 – the anoia. Voegelin’s concept of metaxy is closely tied to the thought of the commu- nity and consubstantiality of worldly beings, imprinted by the intuition that “God, man, 199 Ibid. 200 Brendan PURCELL, “Human Emergence as Cosmic Metaxy”, Voegelin View, March 2009. URL: https://voegelinview.com/human-emergence-as-cosmic-metaxy-i/ Accessed 11.01.2019. 201 Eric VOEGELIN, The Ecumenic Age, op. cit, p. 335. 202 Ibid, p. 185. 203 Andrew HOFFMAN, “Eric Voegelin’s Leap of Being.” Voegelin View, April 2017. URL: https://voegelinview.com/eric-voegelins-leap-part/ Accessed 11.01.2019. 204 Charles Warren BURCHFIELD, Eric Voegelin’s Mystical Epistemology and Its Influence on Ethics and Politics, The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical Col., 1994, p.183. https://voegelinview.com/human-emergence-as-cosmic-metaxy-i/ https://voegelinview.com/eric-voegelins-leap-part/ 104 world, and society form a primordial community of Being”205 in which “consciousness occurs as an event of participation between partners in the community of Being” 206. Voegelin’s thought of the metaxy describes the depth of our being suspended in be- tween the worlds, the breadth of our being simultaneously reaching through other worldly beings, and the potential luminosity of our wandering as we become conscious of our participation in the mysterious and creative process of being. But as the trans- cendent openness is separated from the immanent process of being, the creators from their creation, and our existential wandering amidst the abyss from the yearning emer- gence of worldly beings, something is lost. The fall from the conscious dwelling in the metaxy results for Voegelin in a “loss of being”. The Gnostic loss of the world Voegelin was well aware of the difficulty in embracing and maintaining the metaxic tension of existence. The philosopher read in the strong sense of anomie and estrangement pervading the consciousness of his time, traditional symptoms of Gnos- ticism resulting from the restlessness of our being caught in-between. Drawing a par- allel with Henri de Lubac’s thought of the “suspended middle”207, Thomas Lordan argues that Voegelin’s philosophy evokes experiences of “longing for something that one knows is not here, that it is not in the gift of the world to give.”208 As he reflects on the forgetfulness of the “partnership in the community of Being209”, Voegelin joins in the tradition of thought initiated by the Heideggerian diagnosis of a Forgetting of Being consumed along the development of western philosophy. According to him, the gnostic loss of the world manifests itself in the loss of consubstantiality, which Andrew Hoffman refers to as a “fall from the grace of consubstantiality”210, or which we could 205 Eric VOEGELIN, Order and History I – Israel and Revelation, op. cit., p.1. 206 Eric VOEGELIN, Order and History V – In Search of Order, op.cit, p.15. 207 John MILBANK, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatu- ral, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005. 208 Thomas LORDAN, “Eric Voegelin and Henri de Lubac: The Metaxy and the Suspended Middle (Part I)”, art.cit, p.5. 209 Eric VOEGELIN, Order and History I – Israel and Revelation, op.cit., p.11. 210 Andrew HOFFMAN, art.cit., p.5: “Whereas man was previously at home in the world, when Adam and Eve become aware of a separate God outside of their existence, consubstantiality is lost, everything 105 approach in terms of a process of disentanglement from the world. How does such a loss relate to the metaxic tension brought to light by Voegelin? In Science, Politics and Gnosticism, Voegelin argues that “border experiences” of the metaxy are prone to be reduced by a possessive approach to knowledge, led by the “temptation to fall from uncertain truth into certain untruth”.211 Such an approach to knowledge, as we know, is a traditional feature of Gnosticism, but is also character- istic of a metaphysico-scientific type of engagement with the world, aiming at propo- sitional pronouncements about a reality that one ought to reduce in order to grasp. The main danger arising from the metaxy thus resides in its potential reduction through a movement of hypostatization. The hypostatization of the metaxic tension refers to its disjointing, its dismantling through the essentialization of its poles into two distinct substances or entities, leading for example to the distinction between transcendence and immanence, the worldly and the beyond, nature and culture, self and other… But attempts at reducing any event in the metaxy to an object of propositional knowledge result in its evasion: the tensional structure of the metaxy also indicates its evanes- cence, and the impossibility to ultimately capture it. The annihilation of the primal tension in a movement of hypostatization results indeed in what Voegelin eloquently called a “decapitation of Being”. If Voegelin’s “decapitation of Being”, or loss of con- substantiality, appears as another postmodern variation on the Nietzschean theme of the Death of God, alongside Heidegger’s Forgetting of Being and Jonas’ Forgetting of Life, it also provides an original insight into the metaxic context in which Modernity’s founding loss occurred. Voegelin’s interpretation suggests that being was “beheaded” as it was divided into distinct realms – worldly, divine, natural, cultural, objective, subjective, transcendent, immanent etc. In this regard, the gnostic dynamic of imma- nentization constituted an absorption, an abortion of the transcendent openness of the world as well as a quelling covering of the organic creativity of immanence212, and the murder of God was at the same time a murder of the world. Voegelin’s analysis of falls apart and they are no longer at home in the garden but cast out into a world of alienation.”. My emphasis. 211 Eric VOEGELIN, Science, Politics and Gnosticism, op. cit., p.75. 212 Voegelin’s conception of transcendence stands for the metaxic openness of being. 106 Gnosticism thus indicates that worldly being was lost as the metaxic tension that ties all these ontological realms together and open them up to another was obliterated, the possibility for translation evacuated and their openness sealed. Negating the metaxy was like closing the door of the world – it negated its liminality, openness and thus creativity. In this sense, “the eclipse of transcendence constitutes the ultimate devalu- ation of the world”213. Therein, I argue, lies an essential teaching of Voegelin’s concept of Gnosti- cism, as well as the culminating point of his contribution to the philosophy of Moder- nity: the identification of a movement of reduction, closure, or sealing of an ontologi- cal tension between immanence and transcendence constitutive of worldly being. The gnostic mythology provided a rich palette of symbols expressing the restlessness and the alienness of a wandering felt by those who were cast inbetween, and the movement described by Voegelin as gnostic is one that aims to put an end to the metaxic edginess. But the unease of this tensional inbetweenness, as turbulent as it might be, is part of our being in the world. Attempting to remove it is losing the world. *** 213 Wolfgang SMITH, Teilhardism and the New Religion. A Thorough Analysis of the Teachings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, TAN Books, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1988. 107 Conclusion Eric Voegelin’s account of Gnosticism glows with the originality, subtlety and depth of his philosophical thought. Aimed at a diagnosis of the pneumopathological element pervading the political and ideological movements of the XXth century, his conceptualization of Gnosticism provides a key to approach the present challenge of thinking our dwelling in between worlds both collapsing and emerging. Voegelin’s analysis suggests that Gnosticism stems from the difficulty of dwelling in-between: at the roots of a pervasive rebellion against worldly being, the philosopher identifies an existential restlessness, a feeling of alienation in and from the world. The incapacity of feeling at home within the world would translate into a perpetual revolt, informed by a conception of salvatory knowledge and politics as a means to overcome the con- ditions of existence in the world. The dualistic scheme of modern cosmology and pol- itics identified by Jonas thus appears infused with an original posture of gnostic rejec- tion of the world, manifest in the political project of perfecting society through the mastering, draining and exploitation of worldly beings. Voegelin qualifies this patho- logical inhabiting of the world as Anoia, referring to the forgetfulness of the co-pene- tration and co-creation implied in our inhabiting the world. This forgetting of what our dwelling in-between includes chimes with Jonas’ diagnosis of a loss of response-abil- ity, in Donna Haraway’s orthography214 – with our incapacity to communicate with the worlds between which we reside. Voegelin’s thought of Gnosticism suggests that the cure to such a pathological being in the world should include a rediscovery of our being in-between, with and with-in the worlds. This involves bridging the abyss sepa- rating God from the world, and embracing our dwelling in the metaxic gulf as well as our participation into the process of worldly becoming. David Walsh considers Voegelin to be one of the great figures of XXth century political philosophy, in that his thought is “warning us and calling our attention to the abyss which was opened up by that sense of unlimited human power” 215. An abyss 214 Donna J. HARAWAY, When species meet. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008. Donna J. HARAWAY, “Awash in urine: DES and Premarin® in multi-species response-ability”. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 40(1-2), 2012, pp. 301-316. 215 David WALSH in “Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of Consciousness, Part II.” Documentary on the life of German philosopher Eric Voegelin. 108 was opened and persists indeed in our perception of, and thus engagement with the world: that segregating nature from culture, worldly from divine, object from subject, economics from politics, politics from religion, being from possible. Voegelin’s thought of the metaxy draws attention to the disastrous effects of such a segregation, and endeavours to bridge realms of thought that Modernity has set apart. Politics stand right in the middle of the metaxic challenge: it summons us to preserve the possible amidst the instability of times manifesting the precariousness of the world. It calls for a posture of caring humility and responsibility as it reminds us of its ultimately apoc- alyptic dimension: here and now, perpetually in between the worlds, we are emerging. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHPLBfZ045Y Accessed 11.01.2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHPLBfZ045Y 109 CHAPTER 3 WHAT GNOSTICISM UNCONCEALS: TOWARDS AN ENVIRONMENTAL HERMENEUTICS OF GNOSTICISM FOR THE PRESENT TIMES Introduction – A Hermeneutics of Gnosticism for the Environmental Transition As a relatively recent invention of modern political philosophy, the concept of Gnosticism is hermeneutic in nature: both in Jonas and in Voegelin’s analyses, it aims at uncovering the cultural and philosophical ramifications of a pathological being in the world characteristic of Modernity, and focuses on its manifestations in modern cosmology and politics. Hans Jonas thus considered the concept of Gnosticism to pro- vide “an enlightening help” 216 in addressing Modernity’s elusive and yet deeply in- grained nihilism, which he approached from an existential perspective inherited from Heidegger’s Daseinsanalyse. Eric Voegelin diagnosed in the political millenarianism of Modernity the manifestation of a gnostic obsession with the other world, unfolding 216 Hans JONAS, Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man, University of Chicago Press, 1980, p.xix. 110 into the denial of the present world. Both authors approached the concept of Gnosti- cism in the attempt to achieve a greater understanding of Modernity. In this third chap- ter, I wish to elucidate the ways in which Jonas and Voegelin’s respective concept of Gnosticism is articulated to their critique of Modernity, how they echo with each other, and how we might harvest the fruits of their analyses in the perspective of a reflection around the contemporary context of the ecological mutation and the challenge of in- habiting a collapsing world. This shall represent the first step towards unfolding an environmental hermeneutics of Gnosticism for the present times. What may Jonas and Voegelin’s respective analysis of Gnosticism teach us about the times we live in, and the advent of the environmental crisis they witness? This doctoral research arises from the postulate that the environmental issue provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to rethink the world, worldly beings, our own being in the world, and the way we inhabit amidst the dazzling reflections of a collaps- ing and burgeoning diversity of beings. I propose to approach it as a kaleidoscopic event bathing worldly being in a bouquet of new colours, which might then be illumi- nated from different perspectives. The hermeneutical perspective on environmental philosophy embraced in this dissertation thus feeds upon a play of light and shadow around what the environmental crisis might reveal of worldly being that had previously remained unthought. It asks how to articulate that which remains unthought with that which must be thought, and how to sustain its clearing. Drawing upon Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin’s conceptualizations studied in the two previous chapters, I mobilize the hermeneutical potential of the category of Gnosticism to throw new light on the envi- ronmental crisis as a philosophical issue. I raise the hypothesis that the amazing inter- twinement of politics, science, ethics, religion, arts, myths and cosmology which the environmental issue crystallizes, rests upon founding symbols and metaphors condi- tioning our engagement with the world – mostly expressions of an unrooting and of an abyssal distance keeping the self away from the world. I argue that it is crucial to acknowledge these tropes of our being in the world to gain a deeper understanding of the way we conceive and inhabit worldly being. Crystalizing such tropes, a Herme- neutics of Gnosticism contributes to illuminate our being in the world as well as its particular configuration in the present environmental crisis. The hermeneutical poten- tial of the perspective of Gnosticism thus unfurls upon contact with the contemporary 111 context of the environmental mutation, which reciprocally illuminates Gnosticism as a distinct way of inhabiting the world. Both ultimately deal with the way we dwell, the way we are in the world and inhabit amidst worldly beings. What does this hermeneu- tical circle disclose about our inhabiting? What is being revealed, and which tropes of our inhabiting might enlighten our path as we journey through the uncanny obscurity of the environmental issue? Before we deploy the breadth of hermeneutical specula- tion, let us first return to Jonas and Voegelin’s respective thought of Gnosticism, and to the preliminary conclusions we already drew from them. Like the rest of his philosophical thought, Jonas’ analysis of Gnosticism re- volves around the key idea of a cosmological dualism cultivating a demundanized en- gagement with the world: the Jonassian idea of Gnosticism crystallizes a dualistic, worldless, and ethically nihilistic variation of our inhabiting. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I proposed to approach the “dynamic of Demundanization”, identified by Jonas at the core of the gnostic system of thought, as disclosing a primordial tension caught in a dualistic structure of thought. Upon asking ourselves what was being “de- mundanized” in the gnostic worldview, it was suggested that the Demundanization (of God) conceptualized by Jonas manifested a simultaneous Dedivinization (of the world). In other words, Jonas’ concept of Gnosticism embodies the cardinal experience of a tragic chasm separating God and the world into two separate entities, two irrecon- cilable poles of an inescapable dualism. The hypothesis I formulated, and which I now wish to explore in the present chapter, is that the gnostic dualism analyzed by Jonas discloses a tension which also shines through modern dualism. More precisely, the acosmism identified by Jonas as the essence of Gnosticism is articulated around an ontological tension whose systematic reduction into a dualistic structure of thought operates as an obstruction, or sealing, of the openness of worldly Being. Throwing light upon the worldless dualism structuring contemporary narratives, Jonas’ analysis of the Gnostic Religion thus also points toward the tension within this deep-ingrained dualism. Unfolding Jonas’ intuition, this chapter proposes to elucidate the worldless- ness pervading our cosmologies by researching the tension lying beneath dualism. In many respects, Eric Voegelin’s analysis of Gnosticism appears to unfold the Jonassian insights with the intention of a deepened philosophical critique of modernity. 112 More explicitly than Jonas, who had limited his reflections to the identification of a certain elective affinity between Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism, repeatedly highlighting the merely analogous character of an eventual presence of Gnosticism in Modernity, Voegelin’s understanding of Gnosticism is led by the desire to diagnose the “pneumopathological” element in modern societies. The critical potential of Voegelin’s philosophy, including his interpretation of the concept of Gnosticism, thus appears to be more glaring, definitely more elaborate than Jonas’. Still, our interpretation of Voegelin’s analysis of Gnosticism has emphasized the same tension which also appeared in Jonas’ reflections. Voegelin’s thought, I argued, strives indeed to conceptualize the modern reduction of an ontological tension, for which the political philosopher finds a fortunate expression in the platonic idea of metaxy – inbetweenness. Voegelin’s analysis suggests that Gnosticism stems from the difficulty of being in the world as dwelling in-between. At the roots of a pervasive rebellion against worldly being, which would characterize the modern political being in the world, the philosopher identifies the same existential restlessness, a feeling of alienation in and from the world, also described by Jonas. The gnostic failure to feel at home in the world would then translate into a perpetual revolt, which Voegelin notably identifies in the modern conception of science as salvatory knowledge and politics as a means to overcome the conditions of existence in the world. Less acknowledged, and, as I hope to show, perhaps even more relevant for addressing the politico-philosophical issues of our time, is Voegelin’s interpretation of the gnostic being in the world as Anoia, referring to the forgetting of the co-penetration and co- creation implied in our inhabiting in-between the world. Without delving any deeper into the interpretation of Jonas and Voegelin’s ideas of Gnosticism, which we have already explored in the first two chapters, I wish to draw your attention toward two common themes infusing their philosophical thoughts – two potential hermeneutical keys that may bridge their understandings of Gnosticism. These two recurring themes, I submit, are those of an alienation from worldly being unfolding itself in a dualistic structure of thought, and of an ontological tension, formulated in terms of an existential inbetweenness which modern dualism would fail to think. I suggest that these two motives enable us to bridge the two 113 philosophers’ ideas of Gnosticism and to draw connections between their analyses of Modernity, in order to gain a clearer insight into contemporary issues related to our inhabiting. Maybe the “metaxic gulf” entailed in our existence in the world, signalling the poles of a ubiquitous inbetweenness and thus unbridgeable distance, chimes with the structural dualism of Modernity. Jonas and Voegelin’s reflections on the concept of Gnosticism both seem to indicate the primordial experience of a breach, some deeply felt alienated condition lying at the core of a gnostic engagement with the world, and expressed in the trope of an existential abyss. Ultimately, across the widely recognized feature of dualism, their analyses of Gnosticism both shed light on some obscure ontological tension around which gnostic systems of thought appear to be articulated, and whose reduction would lie at the heart of the modern predicament. In order to develop a hermeneutic of Gnosticism suited to contemporary issues in political philosophy, gravitating toward questions of inhabiting, I propose to delve into these two tropes of a dualistic alienation, and the ontological tension it encloses. What might a renewed understanding of Gnosticism enlighten of our contemporary being in the world? The first manifestation of Gnosticism, or the first feature it illuminates of contemporary cosmologies, is the worldlessness of our inhabiting – an unrooted inhabiting alienated from the world. The second teaching revolves around the implications of a dualistic engagement with the world, approached here in terms of a closure, or condemnation of the world. The third lesson we might draw from the perspective of Gnosticism lies in the politically subversive potential of reversing the tropes of our inhabiting. 114 A. Uncovering the worldless inhabiting of modern politics As they reinvest the trope of a disdain for the world, manifest in feelings of an existential alienation, profound homesickness, and in the yearning for another world that would absolve this condition, both Jonas and Voegelin’s analyses of Gnosticism emphasize the worldlessness of modern cosmology. In the following section, I suggest that the current environmental crisis, allowing a rediscovery of our earth-boundedness, presents us with an exceptional opportunity to reflect upon the worldlessness of mod- ern cosmology as disclosed by the concept of Gnosticism. Or could it be the other way around? The gnostic worldlessness might illuminate our own inhabiting of the world as well as how the latter shapes our treatment of the ecological issue. Either way, the concept of Gnosticism and the contemporary context of the environmental crisis dove- tail into a fruitful hermeneutical couple that points toward the problematic worldless- ness of our inhabiting. Throwing light upon the way we dwell in the world, the perspective of Gnos- ticism adopted by Jonas and Voegelin designates a pathological form of inhabiting characteristic of the modern predicament, and of which the present environmental cri- sis offers a phenomenal manifestation. I argue indeed that a hermeneutics of Gnosti- cism points toward a crisis of our inhabiting, which should be understood as an emi- nently political crisis. By emphasizing the experience of being in the world as being homeless, and formulating the drama of the unrooting of the self as a tragedy of the home, the category of Gnosticism allows us to consider the worldlessness infusing modern cosmology and politics. Jonas and Voegelin’s concepts of Gnosticism both provide a diagnosis of the essential worldlessness of modern politics, thus allowing us to reflect upon the ecological issue in terms of the relationship between present politics and the world. One of their most perceptive insights lies in their analysis of the funda- mentally utopian dynamic of modern politics, which the two philosophers interpret as the manifestation of a desire to escape worldly being. How so? Jonas’ critique of Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope analyzes utopianism as the idolatrous pursuit of a technicist 115 dynamic, led by a nihilistic drive to overcome worldly being and failing thereby to exert the ethical responsibility binding us to the present world217. Echoing Jonas’ po- sition, Voegelin’s diagnosis of the fallacy of immanentization denounces the patho- logical blindness of modern political movements towards the structure of worldly be- ing.218 Both political philosophers thus ultimately draw upon the concept of Gnosti- cism to diagnose the modern failure to anchor one’s political existence into the present world, and portray the condition of the modern political subject as having been thrown into a world whose overcoming is a pre-requisite for salvation. Still organizing contemporary political narratives, the dogma of progress as neoliberal capitalist development and economic growth offers a concrete articulation of this being in the world embracing the yearning for a perpetual escape from the pre- sent modalities of worldly existence. Crystallized in the recent discipline of Geo-engi- neering, the modern concept of technique tends to perpetuate the understanding of hu- man action in the world in terms of an objectifying, mastering, and overcoming of an alienated “natural world”, thereby assuming a dualistic opposition between humanity and nature that denies the very agency of the many other beings left in-between. An 217 Remnants of the revolutionary Gnosis, Christian Wiese argues, do appear to permeate Ernst Bloch’s utopianism, notably his vision of a messianic future in which humanity will truly be at home in the world. Jonas’ dismissal of Bloch’s principle of hope thus roots itself in a distrust for the modern tem- porality of messianism, oriented toward a transcendent future and therefore interpreted as a form of escapism. Jonas fears that the Blochian ontology of the not-yet-being might lead to a devaluation of being in relation to non-being. Nevertheless, the common opposition between Hans Jonas and Ernst Bloch – Jonas dedicated indeed several chapters of his Imperative of Responsibility to the critique of the Principle of Hope – should not obliterate the presence of a common aim within the philosophers’ intellectual journey, namely their commitment to the refoundation of contemporary ethics through the overcoming of nihilism. Avishag Zafrani demonstrates indeed that for both Bloch and Jonas, the re- sistance against nihilism is conditioned by the quest for a founding principle – the hope to emancipate ourselves from economic and social alienation for the former, for the latter, the imperative of anchoring ethics in the presence of the world. See Christian WIESE, The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions, Brandeis University Press, Waltham, 2007, p.106. And Avishag ZAFRANI, « Ernst Bloch et Hans Jonas : refondation de l’Éthique », Alter, 22 | 2014. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/alter/29 Accessed on the 10.02.2020. 218 "The truth of Gnosticism is vitiated… by the fallacious immanentization of the Christian eschaton. This fallacy is not simply a theoretical mistake concerning the meaning of the eschaton, committed by this or that thinker, perhaps an affair of the schools. On the basis of this fallacy, Gnostic thinkers, lead- ers, and their followers interpret a concrete society and its order as an eschaton; and, insofar as they apply their fallacious construction to concrete social problems, they misrepresent the structure of im- manent reality." Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics, The University of Chicago Press, 1987 (1952), p.166. http://journals.openedition.org/alter/29 116 extreme development of Geoengineering and the modern dream of redemption through the domestication of, and ultimately escape from the laws of nature, can be found in the “Mars One” mission,219 whose proclaimed goal is to establish the “first human settlement on Mars”. The project brings together the modern dogma of progress, the colonialist impetus of humanist universalism, and the gnostic trope of the obsolescence of the earth in the depiction of the conquest of Mars as “the next giant leap for human- kind” towards salvation. In the fictional realm also, we find ourselves surrounded by contemporary illustrations of the modern worldlessness. The hit web series Stranger Things created by the Duffer brothers thus deploys the science fictional trope of the alien, obscure and threatening, as well as the hostility of the abyssal world swarming under our feet. The series holds a surprisingly rich symbolic potential for a reflection around the condition of human civilization in the age of the Anthropocene, and we shall indeed expand further on its prolific hermeneutics for environmental philosophy in the next chapter. The theme of the worldlessness of our condition appears to be relatively wide- spread in modern political philosophy: while Hans Jonas identified a Demundanization tendency (Entweltlichungstendenz) spreading from modern existentialism up to polit- ical utopianism, Hannah Arendt in the prologue to her Human Condition deplores the worldless inhabiting of those who, despite being “earth-bound creatures”, “have begun to act as though [they] were dwellers of the universe” 220. Günther Anders’ and Ar- endt’s joint reflections on Rilke’s Duineser Elegien develop the theme of the world- estrangement of contemporary human beings further (Weltfremdheit des Menschen)221. Contemporary philosopher Bruno Latour lingers too over this key idea of a modern worldlessness, as he summons the earthlings to land (atterrir)222 and be grounded in a common world in order to face the political challenge arising with the 219 See the website of the Mars One project: https://www.mars-one.com/ Accessed 11.03.2019. 220 Hannah ARENDT, The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, 1998 (1958), p.3. 221 Gunther ANDERS, Hannah ARENDT, “Rilke’s Duineser Elegien”, Internationale Günther Anders Gesellschaft, 1930. URL: http://www.guenther-anders-gesellschaft.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Arendt-Stern-1930- Rilkes-Duineser-Elegien.pdf Accessed 22.01.2019. 222 Bruno LATOUR, Où atterrir ? Comment s’orienter en politique, La Découverte, 2017. https://www.mars-one.com/mission http://www.guenther-anders-gesellschaft.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Arendt-Stern-1930-Rilkes-Duineser-Elegien.pdf http://www.guenther-anders-gesellschaft.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Arendt-Stern-1930-Rilkes-Duineser-Elegien.pdf 117 advent of Gaia. Günther Anders and Bruno Latour’s thoughts are both concerned with the implications of the ecological crisis for political philosophy and anthropology. As they provide us with two beautiful formulations of the worldlessness of modern poli- tics, I argue that their analyses support a hermeneutical approach to the contemporary ecological issue from the symbolic perspective of Gnosticism. Günther Anders’ intellectual engagement in political ecology and his critique of the technological civilization coincide largely with the philosophical concerns of his close friend Hans Jonas. As one of Heidegger’s most rebellious children, the polit- ical philosopher critically analysed contemporary figures of worldlessness in an an- thropological philosophy defining human beings as unworldly and worldless223. An- ders diagnosed the “burdensome extraterritoriality” of modern humans as a “pathol- ogy of freedom” inflicted upon a being which, “in contrast to animals, is not fitted into any world, but must always first create a world for himself “224. Further on this pathol- ogy of freedom, he writes that: Abstraction – the freedom in front of the world, the fact of being made for generality and indeterminacy, the detachment from the world, the practice and the transformation of this world – is the fun- damental anthropological category, which reveals both the meta- physical condition of the human being, and its logos, its productiv- ity, its interiority, its free will, and its historicity.225 As Anders suggests, this notion of abstraction from the world as fundamental anthro- pological category is a modern philosophical trope which may be found again notably in George Bataille226, who defines humanity as both a negation and overcoming of the world. Interestingly, Heidegger appears to simultaneously perpetuate and reverse this 223 Günther ANDERS, Mensch ohne Welt, Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, C.H. Beck, Munich, 1984. 224 Konrad Paul LIESSMANN, “Despair and Responsibility: Affinities and Differences in the Thought of Hans Jonas and Guenther Anders”, in The Legacy of Hans Jonas: Judaism and the Phenomenon of Life, ed. Hava TIROSH-SAMUELSON, Christian WIESE, p.137. 225 Günther ANDERS, « Pathologie de la liberté. Essai sur la non-identification », in Recherches Philosophiques, 6, pp.22-54. English traduction by K. Wolfe, Deleuze Studies, 3, 2009, pp.278-310. 226 Georges BATAILLE, L’Erotisme, Editions de Minuit, 2011 (1957). 118 trope as he states that (worldly) Being withdraws itself from us and first occurs as a concealment of itself: That which is to be thought turns away from us. It withdraws from us. But how can we have the least knowledge of something that is withdrawn from the outset? How can we even give it a name? What- ever withdraws refuses arrival. But–withdrawing is not nothing. Withdrawal is event [appropriation, ereignis]. In fact, what with- draws may even concern and claim man more essentially than any- thing present that strikes and touches him. 227 Both perspectives, whether they focus on the human or the world, on beings or Being, emphasize the distance which insulates one from the other. Heidegger’s per- ception of the distance between the Dasein and Being is however sensitive to the pres- ence in the absence and sees in the withdrawal of Being a positive distance that gives and resists: not an absence, not a desertion, nor a mere hiddenness. Heidegger was condemned by many for the lack of concreteness of his thought and the well-known moral compromise permitted by a philosophy disjoined from the world, insulated by an existential as well as ontological solitude. But his philosophy only brought to a masterly synthetized formulation the worldlessness which has been infusing modern thought, and attempted indeed to conceptualize the unbridgeable distance characteriz- ing our engagement with a world from which we are abstracted. That the world is never fully present to us, or that we never really belong to it, arises as an existential expres- sion of the widespread paradigm of “negative anthropology”, stating that human free- dom, culture and historicity stem from our not being fully immersed in, or adjusted to the world – from a fortuitous alienation. Dismissing the doctrines of humanity’s invar- iant characteristics, the school of negative anthropology refuses to essentialize human- ity and instead reasserts the radical contingency of its fate. But in this abstraction from judgment and the dedication to inscribe humanity in a nexus of socio-cultural relations, the modern paradigm of negative anthropology appears to rely on the assumption that the non-human world ontologically differs from an exclusively human condition – 227 Martin HEIDEGGER, What is called thinking? Translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, Harper & Row, New York, 1968. 119 contingent, resilient, hopeful. In Modernity, the human condition is indeed appre- hended in its radical, ontological as well as existential opposition to the world – a world of essence, rigidity, immutability and inescapable natural laws. As Günther An- ders envisioned, the modern paradigm of negative anthropology thus appears closely tied to the gnostic trope of world-estrangement. In Mensch ohne Welt, Günther Anders acknowledged the worldlessness of Mo- dernity as he saw it more concretely condensed in the class condition of the proletariat, dispossessed of the means of production through which they ensure the perpetuation of the world of the dominant class. If members of the proletariat are in the world, they are not at home in it.228 Anders further identifies such a sense of being without a world in the condition of the unemployed, “key-figures of our age” who are “not even al- lowed to carry [their chains]”229. What stigmatizes according to Anders the worldless- ness of advanced-industrial societies is indeed the juxtaposition, instead of integration, of its members, only allowing a shallow participation in culture as producer-consumers – thereby echoing Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of the one-dimensional man230. The fig- ure of the unemployed thus embodies the ultimate failure of integration into a capitalist world, of those prevented to act in it either as a producer or as a consumer. Anders’ belief in the modification of reality through the projection of an alternate world by new media constantly overfeeding its coerced consumers with pre-digested images and ide- ological systems (Weltanschauugen and Weltbilder), thereby superseding the need for a genuine engagement with the worlds surrounding us, prolongs his thought of the worldlessness of our civilization. This diagnosis of a cultural worldlessness echoes one of Günther Anders’s main contributions to the political philosophy of the ecological crisis: the “Promethean Gap” he identified between our capacity of producing and our capacity of imagining the consequences of our productive and consumptive activity – the abyssal gap be- tween the concrete relations of production and the ideological narratives that frame 228 Günther ANDERS, Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, Beck, München, 1984, p.ii. 229 Ibid, pp. xiii–xiv. 230 Herbert MARCUSE, L’Homme unidimensionnel. Etudes sur l’idéologie de la société industrielle. Edi- tions de Minuit, Paris, 1968. 120 them, between knowledge and consciousness, doing and feeling, action and imagina- tion231. In other words, Anders’ Promethean Gap resides in the diagnosis of the patho- logical discrepancy characterizing our technological civilization, and the identification of an abyss opposing the fictional world it elaborated (the unlimited inert universe of Modernity) to the ones effectively suffering from the consequences of our activity. Anders’ analysis of the technological civilization is thus infused with the acute aware- ness of a hubristic gap separating human action from the world we inhabit, exemplified by the unconceivable width of our nuclear power. If we now read Anders’ depiction of contemporary civilization from a gnostic lens, then the unprecedented scale of the threat posed to the earth’s ecology and worldly being by nuclear power may appear as the extraordinarily material manifestation of a gnostic alienation from worldly being, and the ultimate historical embodiment of a gnostic failure to inhabit a world from which humans have divorced. The second volume of the Obsolescence of Man – On the Destruction of Life in the Age of the Third Industrial Revolution addresses this crucial question of the jeopardizing of the world understood as the transcendental con- dition to our existence, and unveils the issue of being grounded in a common world as essential to our political dwelling on earth. *** Resuming this problematic of inhabiting and composing a common world in the “new climatic regime”, Bruno Latour offers to elaborate the first principles of Gaian Politics. In his most recent book, Où atterrir? Comment s’orienter en poli- tique232, the philosopher attempts to make sense out of the present geo-political land- scape. Focusing on three phenomena which he identifies as the key events organizing contemporary geo-politics – the amplified deregulation of the economy, the explosion of inequalities and the systematic denial of climate change – Latour argues that the present situation is characterized by the crucial realization that there is no inhabitable 231 Günther ANDERS. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten indus- triellen Revolution, 1956, Munich: C. H. Beck, p.18. 232 Bruno LATOUR, Où atterrir ? Comment s’orienter en politique, La Découverte, 2017. 121 world suited to the modern civilizational project. No inhabitable world, and a world not inhabited: Latour suggests that contemporary times might be better understood from the perspective of an escape from the world, thereby throwing light on the world- lessness characterizing our treatment of the ecological issue. Throughout this text, Latour’s language strongly resonates with the gnostic symbolism of cosmic exile and yearning for an escape from the world. His description of the modern condition ideally expresses the gnostic being in the world studied in the first two chapters, articulating the twofold dynamic of cosmic alienation and the desire of emancipation from the world: To get out, to escape, to emancipate ourselves – finally! Breathing in the fresh air of the universe, abandoning the cosmos. First picture. To suffocate, to lack air, to pant, to search for a shelter, a protection, a cosmos. Second picture.233 Latour interprets the recent events of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election as illustra- tions of the utter disorientation of a globalized civilization witnessing the collapse of its order and the loss of all landmarks. As he depicts the wandering of a worldless civilization and the exile of the modern people, disoriented amidst the deserted infini- tude of the universe, he reports the modern uprooting and waves toward the contem- porary challenge of inhabiting the world. The Latourian considerations on the journey of an acosmic Modernity and the necessity of its landing all perpetuate the gnostic metaphor of an original uprooting to express a being in the world experienced as an exile and describe the subsequent quest for a home to land on. The philosopher narrates the political shipwreck of our times as the drama of a loss of the world, reminding us of what Jonas had called Demundanization: the impression of vertigo, of panic almost, which goes through con- temporary politics, comes from the collapsing of the ground beneath our feet.234 233 Bruno LATOUR, Ibid, p.38. 234 Ibid, p.10. 122 In so doing, Latour presents us here with an outstanding opportunity to link the gnostic symbolism to the environmental issue. What is being revealed in this hermeneutical circle, and what Latour’s thought particularly illuminates, I argue, is the close entan- glement of the dualism and worldlessness of modern cosmology. While the “gnostic spirit” analysed by Hans Jonas situates redemption in the overcoming of the world, resulting in fantasized ideas of a beyond-the-world and unfolding into a dualistic cos- mology ultimately opposing God and the World, Eric Voegelin’s interpretation fo- cuses on the ways in which a gnostic engagement with the world corrupts a very fragile sense of the ontological inbetweenness, subtle metaxic tension and eschatological openness of worldly being. In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour famously decon- structed the illusion of modern dualism as concealing the ontological hybridation of worldly beings populating the world from the entangled multiplicity of their modes of existence or, as I propose to call them, modes of inhabiting. His critique of the modern fantasy of a universal objectivity targets in particular the perspective of the global. The so called “view from Sirius” would have enabled the Moderns to access the world from afar, from an isolated point of view preserved from all worldly entanglement by a her- metic ontological divide between object and subject, nature and culture – really, be- tween humanity and the world. As we know, the gnostic dynamic of Demundanization identified by Jonas takes root in the original experience of the deep otherness, onto- logical alterity of the world. This feeling of alienation from the world fuels a gnostic mythology unfolding into a dualistic architecture of thought. The latter rests upon the ontological opposition between humanity and the world. Jonas’ insights direct our at- tention to the presence of a gnostic type of engagement with the world pervading mod- ern cosmology – a cosmology both dualistic and worldless. The structural dualism opposing humanity to the world thus illuminates the feeling of loss of the world de- scribed by Latour – a world whose intense complexity neither the concepts of Nature nor that of Culture allow us to approach. Latour has extensively criticized the modern construct of Nature, which conditions our treatment of the ecological issue, for con- 123 veying misleading conceptions of the materiality, homogeneity, amorality and atem- porality of world beings235. The concept of Nature would indeed define the world as Uchronia as well as Utopia – a timeless, spaceless fiction: no wonder that the Moderns are worldless if all they are left with to think to the world is the concept of Nature! Operating within a dualistic framework opposing humanity to this fictional world, the anthropocentrism of modern thought maintains the gnostic narrative of an ontological rupture with the world – whereby it becomes clear that the metaxic tension of our existence in the world, which Voegelin summoned us to preserve, was broken and erected into a divorce. The dualistic narrative of Modernity seems to operate as if all dualistic distinc- tion presupposed in its very structure the hegemony of one pole over another, thereby inducing a systematic disdain for the “weaker pole”. At least this appears to be the case for the pivotal dichotomy between humanity and the world. This dualistic opposition manifests itself on an epistemological level through the domination of the positivist paradigm proclaiming the legitimacy of “natural”, or “objective” sciences over against more “subjective”, “socially-constructed” or “immanent” ways of knowing. In We Have Never Been Modern and more recently in Facing Gaia, Bruno Latour incrimi- nates such an epistemological paradigm, arguing that the ontological dualism on which it relies is not only contradicted by the strong hybridity of scientific practices, but also eclipses much of the complexity of the world, thereby proving inaccurate as well as ineffective even on a strictly epistemological level. The systematic praising of a fan- tasized objectivity – as “objective”, “positivist”, “rational”, or “universal” as they might proclaim themselves, scientists still stand in the world, interacting with the very facts they wish to observe -, and the valorisation of the perspective of a fictional global appears alongside a certain depreciation, if not disdain, for the perspectives that would stem from within the world, as opposed to a view from the outside, or from a beyond the world. This very modern suspicion towards the immanence of the “subjective”, of the socially constructed, thereby intangible, contingent, impermanent, I suggest, is closely tied to the gnostic repression of what we might call the mundane, the worldly, 235 Bruno LATOUR, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, La Découverte, Paris, 1998. 124 the earthly, the terrestrial as opposed to the otherworldly, the global or the universal. The perspective of Gnosticism thus allows us, beyond the mere analogy between two dualistic structures of thought, to understand the modern epistemological depreciation of the subjective as a form of repression of the immanence of the earthly over against the transcendence of the universal. In other words, it provides a symbolic framework which illuminates the simultaneous dualism and worldlessness of a modern cosmology articulated around the repression of the worldly. This repression was also sensed by ecofeminist thought – in many regards an- ticipated by Virginia Woolf’s insights on modern industrial civilization236 – inasmuch as it throws light on the systematic organization in patriarcho-capitalist societies of the repression of the feminine alongside that of the natural world. In relating the oppres- sion of women to that of nature, the ecofeminist approach draws attention to the ex- ploitative dimension of a dualistic structure of thought, overarching the nature-culture divide as well as binary gender categories. Emphasizing the intersectionality of mod- ern dualism, the ecofeminist approach helps to unveil the cosmological architecture of a deep-ingrained repression of our rootedness and a strong desire of emancipation from what engendered us. The ecofeminist perspective thus appears to corroborate the hy- pothesis arising from our approach to modernity through the lens of Gnosticism: namely, that modern civilization is grounded in the repression of the engenderment, of our ontological dependency, hence, of our rootedness in the world. Latour’s diagnosis of modern and present times as being drawn by a desire of emancipation from the earthly, from the terrestrial towards the global and universal, only elaborates this idea further. Eric Voegelin’s interpretation of modern gnosticism also echoes Latour’s anal- ysis of the modern condition: the perpetual quest for the emancipation from the present world described by Latour recalls indeed the immanentization of the eschaton into a fantasised world, resulting from a desperate attempt to survive the unbearable absence of meaning within the world. Voegelin’s as well as Jonas’ concepts of Gnosticism lay emphasis on the devaluation of the present world in favour of a depiction of a fictional 236 Virginia WOOLF, Three Guineas, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 1938. 125 non-world, a utopia, a beyond-the-world. With Latour, they affirm the eminently po- litical character of this worldless dwelling. Jonas, Voegelin and Latour’s insights on Modernity thus converge toward the political nature of the issues arising from a De- mundanization of our cosmology and the structural dualism articulating it. The con- temporary advent of the environmental issue, as an event revealing the worldlessness of a system of thought which must now confront the “return of the Earth”, the earthly, or rather, of the earthling, only enhances the pertinence of their diagnosis. Latour’s interpretation of contemporary geopolitics237 suggests indeed that, yearning for an emancipation from the world, a worldless Modernity would now meet the world again, the earthlings relentlessly reminding it of its original engenderment and ontological interdependency. As we fail to inhabit it and dwell within its precarious and entangled becomings, the world, in a beautiful irony, now seems to fail us, falling away beneath our incredulous, disorientated feet. It is a shipwreck – the shipwreck of a civilization that needs to accoster, to dock as the world threatens to sink. But what stands between us and the world? Our interpretation of Anders’ and Latour’s diagnoses of the worldlessness of contemporary politics in the light of Gnosticism emphasized the image of a far- reaching, all embracing gap. The abyss separating the Moderns from the world seems indeed to articulate both the worldlessness of their inhabiting and the structural dualism of their engagement with worldly being. The next section will delve into this trope which, I argue, unifies two ideas and raises them together to achieve a greater understanding of the modern inhabiting: it uncovers along a chiastic pattern the worldlessness of a dualistic engagement with worldly being as well as the dualist unfolding of a worldless inhabiting. The Gnostic symbolism allows us indeed to bridge two essential characteristics of the modern being in the world, worldless and dualistic. The cosmological unrooting illuminated by our hermeneutics of Gnosticism, the modern alienation from the worldly as well as the crisis of the inhabiting unveiled as an eminently political crisis, thus all appear to be tied up into a dualistic structure of 237 Bruno LATOUR, Où atterrir ? Comment s’orienter en politique, op.cit. 126 thought. Let us now see what our hermeneutics of Gnosticism may uncover of this worldless dualism as I propose to delve into the depths of its abyss. 127 B. The Abyss and the dualistic closure of the world A worldless dualism One widely recognized feature of Gnosticism emphasized by both Jonas and Voegelin is its tendency towards dualism. Although the connection does not seem to have been particularly acknowledged before, I suggest that this cosmological feature is closely tied to the more existential sense of worldlessness previously highlighted. The theme of dualism is significantly present throughout Jonas’ study of Gnosticism as well as in the rest of his philosophical thought, identifying it as a core challenge for contemporary philosophy to address. Reflecting upon the philosophical ramifications of the modern political predicament, particularly the technological hubris characterizing our civilization, Jonas pinpoints the issue of cosmological dualism and bridges it with the concern for an ethical inhabiting and a pacified relationship between human beings and their environment: This situation is magnified by the impact of contemporary humankind’s technology on the natural environment. And indeed, as this phenomenon – namely, the threat we pose to the planet’s ecology – became more and more apparent during the second half of this century and finally even came to the attention of philosophers, suddenly one of the oldest philosophical questions, that of the relationship between human being and nature, between mind and matter – in other words, the age-old question of dualism – took on a totally new form. Now this question is no longer something to meditate on in the calm light of theory; it is illuminated by the lightning flashes of an approaching storm, warnings of a crisis that we, its unintentional creators, have the planetary duty of trying to avert. Thanks to this exceedingly practical aspect of the problem, the reconciliation between our presumptuous special status as humans and the universe as a whole, which is the source of our life, is becoming a central concern of philosophy. I see in this an urgent task for philosophy to address, both in the present moment and into the coming century.238 238 Hans JONAS, Mortality and Morality: A Search for Good after Auschwitz, Northwestern University Press, 1996, p.51. I emphasize. 128 Jonas suggests here that the present ecological crisis brings back to the fore “the age-old question of dualism”, which he also had diagnosed at the heart of gnostic cosmologies. Both present and gnostic times thus share this common feature of a deep- ingrained dualistic system of thought, infused with the sense of an abyss separating human beings from the world. But as the question of dualism arises again with the advent of a global ecological crisis, it assumes a whole new dimension, namely a very material one calling the thinking subject back to their worldly embodiment and close involvement with other earthly beings. The planetary entanglement illuminated by the environmental crisis thus appears to challenge the modern representation of a clean divide between nature and culture, object and subject, actions and ideas, humans and the world etc239. In a splendid ambiguity, suspended over the abyssal cliff of worldly being, it also brings the gnostic worldlessness of Modernity to a close: by threatening life on earth, it consecrates the gnostic yearning for the end of the world, and yet offers us an ideal opportunity to reconcile (to use Jonas’ term) with the world and the many beings populating it. While Voegelin’s analysis of Gnosticism focused on the dynamic of immanentisation characterizing modern politics and the precious metaxic tension they conceal, it also illuminated their abhorrence of the world and our incarnate condition. In so doing, Voegelin highlighted a particular form of dualism embodied by modern political and ideological movements, namely immanentizing ones, also conveying a polar opposition between the present world and the ones hoped for. We can thus acknowledge a permanent feature of Gnosticism, as it was analysed by Jonas and Voegelin, in the feeling of alienation from the present world, the yearning for a deliverance from it, and the dualistic engagement with the environment such feelings foster. The concept of Gnosticism laid out by Jonas and Voegelin throws light on the unresolved persistence of some cosmological dualism in the modern system of 239 While this cosmological dualism is grounded in the Cartesian tradition, alternative philosophies were elaborated at the dawn of modern thought by thinkers such as Spinoza or Leibniz, who figure as the heralds of a subterranean heterodoxy of Modernity. See Michael MACK, Spinoza and the Spectres of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud, Continuum, 2010. 129 thought, hypothetically arising from the original experience of an existential estrangement from the world. The existential stance adopted by our two philosophers suggests indeed that a deep-rooted experience of the self over against the alterity of the world was hypostatized into a structural dualism organizing our being in the world. I argue that the hermeneutical perspective of Gnosticism exposes this cosmological dualism as a conceptual structure of thought for the worldlessness or estrangement identified earlier as a feature of Modernity. The gnostic trope of the abyss allows us to bridge these two features of worldlessness and cosmological dualism in that it symbolizes the gap opposing human beings to the world and therefrom systematically segregating worldly being. I mentioned before that the perspective of ecofeminism, in calling our attention to the systematic and intersectional dimensions of our culture, contributes to highlight the enmeshment in modern cosmology of a dualistic structure of thought with a radical estrangement from the world. The dualistic worldlessness illuminated by the concept of Gnosticism and rendered even more acute with the ecological crisis also manifests a cosmological crisis of modernity as it reveals the boundaries of binary structures of thought which fail to contain a perpetually overflowing and apophatically complex world. What characterizes this cosmological crisis? In the following section, I suggest that the dualistic paradigm of modernity is articulated around the repression of an ontological tension similar to that described by Voegelin through the vocabulary of metaxy, thus operating as a closure of the openness of worldly being. The tension beneath dualism and its concealment What ties together the cosmological dualism and worldlessness of modernity, and what lies beneath the estranged dualistic structure of our thought? This I regard as one crucial question for contemporary philosophy - one which the perspective of Gnosticism allows us to formulate. I see it lying in abeyance within many metaphysical developments of the philosophy of modernity, pointing toward the underlying presence of an ontological tension which various philosophers, from Hegel240 to 240 Friedrich HEGEL, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Reclam, Ditzingen, 2004 (1807). 130 Heidegger241 through Voegelin and William Desmond242 today, have encouraged us to consider. Approaching this tension, I would like to draw the reader’s attention again to the image of an abyss: an abyss which the Gnostics believed would define our worldly condition, and illustrate the tragedy of our separation from a divine and absent other. Let us picture this abyss: it opens a deep, obscure and groundless gap insurmountably isolating human beings from God, God from the world, the world from the beyond, the self from others – it is an abyss that ultimately insulates the self from anything in the world. It also designates the space delineated by these borders of segregation: that which stands between dualistic boundaries and which is simultaneously being obscured by them. Now this abyss might be seen either as hermetically sealed, setting apart, like our interpretation of gnostic dualism has suggested so far, two absolutely impenetrable realms of being; or it might also be thought of as a porous space which, if abyssal, can also be perpetually crossed and dwelt in. This precious space of porosity and translation between edges set apart but also put in relation by an abyss of inbetweenness, is what garners our ontological tension. This, Voegelin would argue, is where we stand: in the abyssal inbetweenness of the world, in the metaxic tension of being. I argue that the cosmological dualism common to the gnostic and modern systems of thought, attempting to overcome this tension, segregates the realms of being and hermetically seals the abyss between them: in so doing, it tends to condemn the openness of worldly being. You may recall that my conclusion to the first chapter had aimed to emphasize the presence of an ontological tension underlying the structural dualism analysed by Jonas - I had then approached the abyss in the Heideggerian sense of an openness of worldly being. I suggested indeed that the gnostic dualism between God and the World was grounded upon an ontological tension whose reduction operates as an obstruction and sealing of the openness of worldly being. In the conclusion to chapter II, it was mentioned how Voegelin’s thought of the metaxy draws attention to the disastrous 241 Martin HEIDEGGER, Beiträge zur Philosophie. Vom Ereignis. Vol. 65 of the. Gesamtausgabe. Ed. F.- W. von Herrmann, Vittorio Klosterman Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1989. 242 William DESMOND, Being and the Between, Suny Press, 1995. 131 effects of the segregation, or hypostatization, of the ontological abyss: I suggested that the dualistic paradigm of modernity operates as a negation of the inbetweenness of worldly being. This leaves us with the idea of an ontological abyss, and the open inbetweenness of worldly being disclosed by it. Whatever holds the abyssal inbetween open, appears both in Jonas and Voegelin as a pivotal keystone apopathically articulating gnostic cosmologies – hidden by them and yet revealed by them, all the more so present as they are concealed. The gnostic cosmologies studied by Jonas and Voegelin are grounded indeed upon a structural dualism which systematically hypostatizes the poles of an irreducible tension – self and other, divine and worldly, nature and culture… The hypothesis I would like to raise now is that the dualism illuminated by the perspective of Gnosticism is articulated upon the obliteration of this ontological tension: it does not strive, in a dialectical impetus, to overcome it by resolving it. Rather, it seems to obscure it altogether, insisting that being is inescapably divided into two hermetic realms and that, somehow, we are caught in the middle and yet perpetually fail to bridge these two poles. We drowned in the abyss. More precisely, I argue that the concepts of Gnosticism developed by Jonas and Voegelin, by throwing light upon the pervading narrative of humanity’s existential exile and the resulting experience of an ontological tension between self and world, enlighten modernity’s dualistic engagement with worldly being and the particular kind of pathological inhabiting it fosters. Such an engagement, I suggest, is characterized by a dualistic closure of worldly being. Jonas and Voegelin’s analyzes of Gnosticism merge indeed into the perception of a dualistic reduction, or closure, of an ontological tension, an open in-betweenness constitutive of worldly beings. A synthetic approach to their thought of Gnosticism enables us to conceptualize this modern concept of political philosophy as a dualistic reduction of the ontological tension of the world, resulting into a worldless inhabiting. If Gnosticism is to signify the obstruction of a primordial tension, it is because the movement of hypostatization of the tension leads to its eviction: in the attempt to think the poles independently from each other and essentialize them into two ontologically distinct realms of being, as exemplified in the dualistic structure of its system of thought, it obliterates the tensional, suspended and 132 yet open inbetweenness of worldly being – on which the next chapter shall expand further. This interpretation of Gnosticism as dualistic reduction of the metaxy of worldly Being would allow us to reformulate the closure by modern metaphysics of the openness of Being theorized by Heidegger243, and to approach alongside the condemnation of the possible as well as the actual threatening of the perpetual overflowing of the world manifested in an eminently material dimension by the present environmental crisis. The latter event arises indeed as a very literal condemnation of the becoming of worldly being, a sealing of its openness as the most concretely colossal consequence of the dualistic reduction of its ontological tension. The dualistic paradigm of Modernity thus acts as a closure of the ontological openness of worldly being, and the gnostic engagement with the world operates as a pathological concealment of worldly being – a criminal forgetfulness of its metaxic essence, of its perpetual withdrawal, and of our ontological involvement in its processes of becoming. In this process of closure, the world was also silenced, as Jonas witnesses in (the first, existentialist) Heidegger’s objectifying treatment of worldly being as merely present, vorhanden, “stripped and alienated to the mode of mute thinghood”244. The gnostic concealment of the world is not one that embraces the apophatic nature of worldly being, but rather denies it and obscures its manifestation. Against the concealment operated by the positivist paradigm, Jonas argues therefore that “we must remain open to the idea that natural sciences do not deliver the whole truth about nature” 245, claiming thereby a posture of epistemic openness toward the ever-ongoing epiphany of the world. Something inevitably escapes our comprehension, and worldly being perpetually overflows any attempt to seize it. This tensional structure of worldly being, which dualism, while articulated around it, fails to sustain, is particularly manifest in the polarity between immanence 243 Around Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and more specifically the closure of the openness of Being, see also Mary Jane RUBENSTEIN, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Open- ing of Awe, Columbia University Press, New-York, 2008. 244 Hans JONAS, The Gnostic Religion, p.337. I emphasize. 245 Hans JONAS, Prinzip Verantwortung. Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1986 (1979). p.30. 133 and transcendence246: as we linger over this particular declination of modern dualism, we soon realize that both terms only bear meaning in relation to each other, and ultimately seem to gravitate around a movement piercing through the boundaries of the self, overflowing them. What is transcendence transcending? And what is immanence immanent to? If we remove these terms from their common striving, if we extract them from their inextricable tension and try to define them independently from one another, then we fail and their meaning escapes us. If we try to hypostatize, or essentialize them into strictly hermetic categories, then we lose both. This suggests that immanence and transcendence, united in a radical intimacy, are two sides of the same coin, two ways on a same path running across ontological boundaries. Alfred North Whitehead proposes a model for thinking immanence and transcendence in which neither realm is full without the other, for both are involved in common creative processes. The Whiteheadian characterisation of immanence and transcendence thus forgoes the traditional separation of the two terms and incriminates their “vicious separation” for the rupture between God and the world. Whitehead refuses to associate transcendence with a divine, static eminence and immanence with a worldly, fluent deficience: The vicious separation of the flux from the permanence leads to the concept of an entirely static God, with eminent reality, in relation to an entirely fluent world, with deficient reality247 246 In “The Idea of Transcendence” Ingolf Dalferth draws a categorical distinction between theological and non-theological forms of transcendence, where the former surpasses the latter, always confined within immanence. Diverting from his account, my engagement with the concepts of immanence and transcendence eschews isolating theological from non-theological thinking. My understanding of the tension binding transcendence to immanence suggests moreover that the “confinement in immanence” is not a condition that could nor should ever be overcome. By this I suggest, as we shall see further, that being in immanence does not reciprocately imply an exile from transcendence. Ingolf U. DALFERTH, “The Idea of Transcendence”, in The Axial Age and Its Consequences, ed. Robert N. Bellah & Hans Joas, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2012, pp. 146-188. 247 Alfred North WHITEHEAD, Process and Reality, The Free Press, New York, p.346. 134 Whitehead considers creative processes of becoming as part of transcendence as well as immanence. Commenting on the Whiteheadian account of immanence and transcendence, James Williams echoes Whitehead’s concern for “the denial of the priority of one or the other term in their separation”248 and argues that the two realms ought to be approached as complementary and therefore inseparable processes. As Williams reminds us, the Whiteheadian metaphysics is one of essential relation and mutual dependency, where the play of immanence and transcendence mirrors the relationship between God and the world. This thought is also endorsed by Gilles Deleuze, for whom “any thought of a pure or absolute realm” is banished in the “adventure of immanence in transcendence”249. Because they belong together, both immanence and transcendence suffer from their separation and should be considered as essentially and indivisibly related processes. James Williams explains: For Whitehead, separated transcendence is pure stasis, meaningless because no change whatsoever can take place within it, a timeless and momentum free block. Yet pure immanence is equally nonsen- sical, since as pure flux we cannot explain its valued forward mo- mentum and novelty, it becomes free of any realities and without sense.250 While the tensional nature of modern dualism shines particularly through this immanence-transcendence dichotomy, the philosophy of Whitehead suggests that this reflection applies to other polarities and culminates in the opposition between God and the World: In our cosmological constructions we are, therefore, left with the fi- nal opposites, joy and sorrow, good and evil, disjunction and con- junction – that is to say, the many in one – flux and permanence, greatness and triviality, freedom and necessity, God and the World.251 248 James WILLIAMS, “Transcendence and Immanence as Inseparable Processes: on the Relevance of Arguments from Whitehead to Deleuze Interpretation”, in Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 2010, 4 (1), p.97. 249 Gilles Deleuze, « Les plages d’immanence » in Deux régimes de fous, ed. David Lapoujade, 2003, Minuit, Paris, p.245. 250 Ibid, p.98. 251 Alfred North WHITEHEAD, Process and Reality, op.cit., p.341. 135 Because it concentrates the tension I have been striving to highlight in this section, the immanence-transcendence polarity appears archetypal of the modern dualistic structure of thought. It captures indeed an essential movement of overflowing, on which we shall expand in the next chapter, an overflowing of boundaries between worldly and godly, between self and other, boundaries unable to contain the experience of a world of abundance. This emphasis on the dualistic hypostatization of an ontological tension disclosed by our hermeneutics of Gnosticism reminds us of Whitehead’s diagnosis of the modern “bifurcation of nature”, along with his notion of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”252. Incriminating the structural dualism of modern science and its segregation between “causal” and “apparent” components of being, the philosopher identifies a crucial fallacy in the reflection that mistakes the abstraction of the concept from the concreteness of worldly being. This fallacy echoes and perpetuates what he identifies in the Concept of Nature as the “fallacy of bifurcation”: Another way of phrasing this theory which I am arguing against is to bifurcate nature into two divisions, namely into the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness. The nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature. The meeting point of these two natures is the mind, the causal nature being influent and the apparent nature being effluent.253 Whitehead pinpoints here a gnostic trope of modern science in the central belief that the human mind stands between the two ontologically distinct realms of spirit and matter. In Latour’s words: 252 Alfred North WHITEHEAD, Science and the Modern World. Free Press, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997 [1925], p. 52. 253 Alfred North WHITEHEAD, The Concept of Nature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1964 (1920), p.21. I emphasize. 136 Bifurcation is what happens whenever we think the world is divided into two sets of things: one which is composed of the fundamental constituents of the universe – invisible to the eyes, known to science, yet real and valueless – and the other which is constituted of what the mind has to add to the basic building blocks of the world in order to make sense of them.254 Against modern dualism, Whitehead’s metaphysics describe a world in which all be- ings, all entities – and not only self-conscious or human ones – experience worldly being in a process of entanglement and incorporation, emphasized by his term of “pre- hension”. His philosophy of nature summons us to resist the dualistic reduction of modern cosmology and to embrace our entanglement within worldly being: Natural philosophy should never ask, what is in the mind and what is in nature. To do so is a confession that it has failed to express relations between things perceptively known, namely to express those natural relations whose expression is natural philosophy.255 Emphasizing the deep relationality of our perception of nature, Whitehead’s philosophy contributes to unveil the inbetweenness of our being in the world, and in- vites us to dwell in the tension disclosed by modern dualism. The next chapter shall explore the cosmological and ontological implications of a thought that would embrace this tension, and endeavour to draw the conclusions of our hermeneutics of Gnosticism for a contemporary philosophy of the world. The purpose of this section was to unfold the gnostic trope of an ontological abyss and an existence in between, in order to draw our attention to the presence of something in the world that perpetually resists a dual- istic approach to being – something lying beneath dualistic boundaries, an inbetween 254 Bruno LATOUR, Preface to Isabelle STENGERS’ Thinking with Whitehead, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. xii. 255 Alfred North WHITEHEAD, The Concept of Nature, op.cit. p.30. 137 that “somehow precedes the binaries which it distinguishes256”. Before attempting to unfold this metaxic inbetweenness sensed by the Gnostics, let us suspend our objecti- fying engagement with the world: let us instead consider the vertiginous idea that that which is being offered to our prehension endlessly overflows it, let us embrace the thought that what is worth being thought in the world is precisely what is being con- cealed by our present cosmology. In this play of light and shadow mentioned before to qualify our hermeneutical approach, the perspective of Gnosticism unveils precisely that which it intends to escape from: the abyssal groundlessness of our being in the world, which the Existentialists would later also express, along with – and this remains to be thought – the abundant overflowing of such an abyss which no dualistic segre- gation of being could contain. The gnostic closure of the world thus appears as that which epistemologically obscures and prevents the overflowing of the world, and which translates today into the so urgently concrete threatening of worldly becoming. Therein lies also the exceptional character of the present environmental mutation: in its beautiful incarnation of our being suspended over an abyss of nothingness and pos- sibility, death and birth, despair and hope; and in the consecration of the inbetweenness of our being in the world: in between concerned beings, in between entangled organ- isms, in between times of transition, in between shifting, collapsing and emerging worlds. In this regard, the environmental crisis outlines the manifold challenge of dwelling in between, both philosophically and ontologically, as we shall see in chapter 4, and politically and existentially, as we shall see in chapter 5. Untied from an obsolete cosmology and summoned to think and inhabit the world anew, as we find ourselves diving into the openness of the world, metaphors appear redeeming. Unlike concepts, they offer the breadth of imagination required by the depth of our being in the world, and the space for poetic and poeitic subversion invoked by the task ahead. 256 Drew HYLAND, “First of All Came Chaos”, in Heidegger and the Greeks, ed. Drew Hyland and John Panteleion Manoussakis, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006, p.13. 138 C. Subverting the tropes of our inhabiting What is the concrete unfolding of these metaphysical speculations? How could these reflections upon the cosmological and ontological possibly bear any political implications? Any philosophical enquiry and, as the reader may have noted already, ours in particular, arises from the awareness that ideas shape the world. And the world shapes our ideas. Or, to be even more accurate, that ideas and world are so entangled into each other that a dualistic understanding of the ideal and the material, the ethereal and worldly, abstract and concrete… fails to engage with their ontological co-penetra- tion. Surely has the development of phenomenology in the 20th century emphasized our sensory experience of worldly being, and the bio and eco-phenomenological ap- proaches in particular have offered to focus on the material embeddedness of the en- counter between our consciousness and the world. But the context of the Anthropo- cene, or Chtulucene257, namely the advent of a new geological era, suggests that some- thing in the relationship between consciousness and what it encounters remains to be thought. As we become aware of the dramatic entanglement of our destiny with that of the world and the worldly beings inhabiting it, we are summoned to reflect not only upon the material origin of our ideas, but also on their destination: namely on their worldly embodiment, now encrusted into the earth’s geology, stamped upon the many hearts that have ceased to beat because of the way our civilization chose to inhabit the world. How do our ideas materialize into the world? How are they embodied in our inhabiting? Our attempt to deconstruct modern dualism through the hermeneutic lens of Gnosticism has thrown light on the symbolic dimension of our culture. The perspec- tive of Gnosticism laid out by the analyses of Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin invites us indeed to elucidate the symbolic expression of the repression of an existential tension – the metaxic structure of our being in the world as being in between. Our reflection 257 Donna J. HARAWAY “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”, art.cit. 139 has proposed to enquire about the ways in which the symbolic expression of Gnosti- cism articulates modern cosmologies, or how the elucidation of the gnostic tropes pro- vides at least a way to approach them in a new, opportune light. Our hermeneutics of Gnosticism thus offers to study the articulation of narratives, symbols and metaphors infusing our engagement with the world – it aims at disclosing tropes of our inhabiting. Because it aims at uncovering the symbolism underlying political rhetoric, cultural narratives and metaphysical structures of thought, all so central in the construction and maintenance of our political agency, this endeavour is in itself political. It suggests identifying the mechanisms at work in the ways symbolic tropes govern our engage- ment with the world and our ability to envision possibilities. The environmental issue plunges us into an ocean of metaphors and tends as such to reveal the omnipresence and subconscious power of images in the way we engage with the world surrounding us. As Stefano Velotti notes in his study of Günther Anders’ Weltbilder: “images (…) do not cover the world, but rather make it visible by discovering features of it that would remain invisible without them.” 258 Yet not all images disclose worldly being in the same way. If images are integral to our dwelling and engagement with worldly being, some have come to cover the world more than they discover it: let us therefore try to digest the tropes we are fed and eventually re- appropriate them. I wish to draw awareness towards the politically subversive potential of reversing the tropes conditioning our inhabiting, in the perspective of repopulating our symbolic universe with alternate metaphors – alternate images for alternate thought structures grounding alternate socio-political realities. Our hermeneutics of Gnosticism contributes to uncover the mythical, symbolical or metaphorical dimen- sion of our being in the world, thus shedding light on certain recurring images shaping our engagement with worldly beings. One main challenge that ensues from the identi- fication of these gnostic tropes is to reverse them as deep-rooted symbols conditioning our being in the world. Let us now venture into the galaxy of symbols we inhabit as we delve into the gnostic tropes of our inhabiting. 258 Stefano VELOTTI, “Guenther Anders: Weltbilder, “Models of Enticement”, and the Question of Praxis”, Humana.Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2011, Vol. 18, pp. 169. 140 Our hermeneutics of Gnosticism has mentioned many times already the image of an abyss to define the gnostic expression of our worldly condition. Studying Hans Jonas’ existential analysis of the historiographical construct of Gnosticism, my first chapter identified the trope of the abyss as one allowing us to elucidate the various declinations of a gnostic inhabiting. In the gnostic dramaturgy, the groundless depth of the abyss illustrates indeed the tragedy of our separation from a divine, absent other. It represents a chasm fatally insulating God from the world, therefore also the human self from the world, and symbolizes the cosmic anxiety characteristic of the gnostic being in the world: motives of the alienness of worldly being and the yearning for a beyond-the-world further contribute to delineate the figure of an abyss keeping the self away from its true home. The metaphor of the abyss indicates the condition of being thrown into a life experienced as an absence, between the presence of a world felt as alien and the absence of a home so remote. Insofar as it expresses the gnostic condition of an existential as well as ontological exile, the trope of the abyss has enabled us to think both the structural dualism of modern cosmology and the sealing of worldly being it operates in the process of hypostatization of an existential inbetweenness. Also expressed in gnostic narratives in terms of a cosmogonical “crack” in divine being allowing the creation of the world259, the figure of the abyss bears the additional meaning of an ontological openness, or opening of worldly being as it is being split into two opposite realms. As we saw earlier in this chapter, the metaphor of the abyss not only provides a symbolical way to approach the strong dualism of gnostic cosmologies, but also offers a way to conceive the ontological openness concealed by this dualism. The figure of the abyss embodies indeed the distance between worldly beings – a distance which may be felt as a tragedy, that of the unmournable loss of an original connection, drawing an unbridgeable line between two absolutely impenetrable realms of being. In this first, gnostic interpretation of this distance, the abyss is hermetically sealed. But the metaphor of the abyss also designates a distance, just as bottomless as the first, which could be felt this time as an openness, a redeeming space for creation, resilience and exchange, drawing lines of 259 Éric POMMIER, Jonas. Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 2013, p.34. 141 connection that gather worldly beings thirsty for a fertile encounter. In her article “Lines in the Innumerable: Enmity, Exceptionalism and Entanglement”260, Catherine Keller explores the potential of a “theology of entangled difference” for present politics. She reminds us that some lines are lines of separation, and trace divisions, while others are lines of relation and trace affiliations. As she contends that “there is nothing politically innocent about interdisciplinarity”, she invites us to break free from the disciplinary structure imposed upon academic thought and draws our attention to the subversive potential of tracing sandy lines of relation – between disciplines, but also between cultures, people, species, beings… The same applies, I suggest, to the gnostic trope of the abyss: the latter can be subverted if one resolves to dwell in the precious space of inbetweenness opened up by it. The abyss of inbetweenness characterizing our inhabiting, as Voegelin’s analysis suggests, is what garners the ontological tension of the world – a fertile tension of creativity, if difficult to maintain. This metaxic tension unveiled by the perspective of Gnosticism summons us to dwell further, even deeper within the tropes of our inhabiting, so as to pursue or recover what Susanne Claxton calls a “full dwelling”.261 Here I have unfolded the gnostic trope of the abyss, whose various declinations we may find again in the leitmotivs of the gap, the rift, the separation, the distance etc, but we could as well identify other gnostic tropes of our inhabiting in the themes of the Fall, the Escape, the Alien, the Home, the Yearning… All of these might be reversed if one intends to dwell in the tension contained in them. In the abyss, we discern an opening. The condition of being-thrown into the world expressed in the theme of the Fall may as well be interpreted as an offering of the world, thus converting the curse of the Fall into an original Gift. The familiar feeling of alienness may be embraced as home, and the absence as indicating an overwhelming presence. Clearing a space for creation and world-making, the distance setting us apart from the elsewhere may be felt as salvatory – “a certain degree of ‘worldlessness’”, Stefano Velotti reminds us, “is a necessary condition for imagining the world” 262. There is hope in our 260 Catherine KELLER, “Lines in the Innumerable: Enmity, Exceptionalism and Entanglement”, Literature & Theology, 2018, pp.1-11. 261 Susanne CLAXTON, Heidegger’s God. An Ecofeminist Perspective, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017, p.150. 262 Stefano VELOTTI, art.cit., p. 165. 142 languor. In our yearning springs a fountain of possibility, and our abundant thirst is one that overflows. But to be able to perceive this overflowing presence of the world, one must dwell in the feelings of absence expressed in the gnostic complaints. Perhaps William Bronk’s approach to worldly inhabiting in his book The World, the Worldless could enlighten our way as we wander through this paradox: his poetry begins with an acceptance of the fact that, despite our peregrinations, we are always here – a claim that echoes Levinas’ answer to Rimbaud’s complaint that life is elsewhere: and yet we are in the world. We are in the world amidst other worldy beings and amidst a galaxy of metaphors. These help us inhabit the world as we wander in the pursuit of a full dwelling. Conclusion What does Gnosticism eclipse, and what does it reveal? This chapter has at- tempted to outline the potential contribution of a hermeneutics of Gnosticism for reimagining our inhabiting in a time of environmental mutation. Drawing upon our study of the concepts of Gnosticism in Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin’s philosophies, I discerned in the dualistic alienation from the world and in the concealment of an ontological tension, two hermeneutical keys allowing us to bridge the authors’ anal- yses of Gnosticism, and to extend it to the present politico-philosophical context of the environmental crisis. In so doing, I outlined a redefinition of the concept of Gnosticism as a sealing of worldy being, and thus laid out the foundations for a hermeneutics of Gnosticism aiming at the elucidation of our contemporary being in the world. I sug- gested that the dualistic worldlessness of modern cosmology illuminated by the per- spective of Gnosticism results in a sealing of the openness of worldly being – a reduc- tion of the ontological tension of the world. Manifest in the condemnation of the pos- sible and the threatening of the creative overflowing of the world, this sealing of worldly being is embodied today in the environmental crisis. What this sealing implies for an ontology of the world, I propose to elucidate in the next chapter. For now, let us 143 contemplate what a hermeneutics of Gnosticism discloses about the way we inhabit the world. Here is why we initially summoned the concept of Gnosticism in our philo- sophical treatment of the ecological issue: because it designates a pathological inhab- iting of the world, and as such informs us about the way we ourselves inhabit the world. In Jonas as well as in Voegelin, the concept of Gnosticism involves the diagnosis of a pathological being in the world, led by the yearning to escape the present conditions of worldly being, and resulting in a political crisis. Echoing with their political philos- ophy of Modernity, their analyses of Gnosticism point toward a political crisis of the modern inhabiting. As it emphasizes the worldlessness of modern cosmologies and throws light on the political consequence of this pathological inhabiting, the perspec- tive of Gnosticism thus raises the question of politics as inhabiting. We shall explore in chapter 5 the unfolding of our hermeneutics of Gnosticism for political philosophy, gravitating around the problematic of inhabiting the inbetweenness or, as I propose to call it, the eschatological liminality of worldly being. In this notion of liminality, which the next two chapters will explore in differ- ent ways, lies a paramount contribution of our hermeneutics of Gnosticism. The limi- nal designates the space where we dwell – in the metaxic inbetween, the suspended tension, the abyssal openness of worldly being. The perspective of Gnosticism unveils indeed our being in the world as a standing amidst an ontological abyss, bordering on the familiar alienness of the world as an on the edge of a cliff. A metaxic inhabiting of the world thus arises as an existential-political challenge as well as a philosophical one: how to sustain the tension of worldly being? How to preserve the precarious open- ness disclosed by our hermeneutics? In the pursuit of a resilient, ecological dwelling that would embrace the limi- nality of our inhabiting, rather than perpetually organizing its overcoming, the contri- bution of poets might prove a saving grace. Fulfilling the challenge of a full dwelling implies a perpetual rediscovery of the world, which a poetic engagement with worldly being incarnates. While the openness of worldly being appears beyond words, poets attempt to say the ineffable and, struggling to express in words what overflows prosaic 144 language, reawaken the world to its ontological overflowing. The redeeming character of a poetic dwelling in the world thus arises from its standing right within the openness of being and yet resisting the gnostic reduction of the ontological tension of the world – of our being perpetually on the edge of an abyss. Similarly, the subversive potential of poetic-metaphorical language lies in its subversion of the linguistic structure of sys- tems of thought subduing a world that cannot be contained. Poets call us back to the eminently symbolic dimension of our cosmologies, including those grounded in the fanciful claim of their unwavering rationalism. Who are the poets? “Those who co- respond to the wonderfully all-present””263, answers Heidegger. Those embracing worldly being in its vertiginous, precarious, chaotic openness, and receiving the waves, successively overflowing and deserting, of our inhabiting. Those who perpetually feel and re-feel, tell and re-tell the world, as if born anew every time it is felt. Those who, like the Gnostics, feel the ontological abyss, the cosmic anxiety, the eternal unrooting and the yearning for a home – but choose to dwell in it. The danger of the gnostic yearning lies in the illusory attempt to resolve the tension by overcoming it: the gnostic hypostatization of a beyond the world confines indeed the latter into a closed system, thereby negating its ontological openness. In his poem “The Raising of Lazarus”264, Rainer Maria Rilke calls those experiencing the gnostic yearning and summons them to embrace their existential thirst instead of vainly attempting to quench it – as if worldly being could ever cease to overflow: “That you should thirst. Submit to it.” And drink the waves of a world that overflows. 263 Martin HEIDEGGER, Elucidations on Hölderlin’s Poetry, Translated by Keith Hoeller. New York: Humanity Books, 2000, p.78. 264 Rainer Maria RILKE, Selected Poems with parallel German text, trans. Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland, Oxford University Press, 2011, p.109. 145 CHAPTER 4 ROOTS, WAVES AND FOLDS OF THE WORLD: TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY OF ENTANGLED OVERFLOWING Humans and the earth are unexhausted and undiscovered. Wake and listen! Verily, the earth shall yet be a source of recovery. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra The world always overflows nature. Nature is what is established; the world, what comes. — Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia. I am rooted, but I flow. — Virginia Woolf, The Waves. 146 Introduction A flood of the world Let us contemplate again the idea that the ecological crisis arises as a disclo- sure, an apocalyptical epiphany throwing light upon a world we had not yet perceived. A phenomenology of the environmental crisis would reveal our deepening attachment to the earth, along with the precarious contingency of our inhabiting, and summon us to exercise greater modesty in relation to the non-human beings of this world. Doing so, the environmental issue would present us with a chance for a Remundanization – a re-encounter with the world confronting the Gnosticism of modern cosmology. In order to recover a philosophy alive to the earth, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari pro- pose to assemble in a Thousand Plateaus a “Geophilosophy” that would acknowledge the earth as the real topos of philosophical inquiry and reorient philosophical thought to the contingencies and complexities of terrestrial life265. Latour similarly defines the political task imposed by the ecological mutation as one of landing – atterrir –, coming down to earth to meet the earthlings and, with them, inhabit a common space266. De- constructing the modern concept of nature as central foundation of an obsolete cosmo- logical structure267, Latour argues that the present climatic mutation challenges our understanding of the world as monolithic globe: the old idea of the earth conceived as globe, the old idea of matter, has nothing left to do with the world we have to inhabit.268 Rising from the ashes of the concept of nature and appearing in the new light of the Anthropocene, the world facing us now is one to be encountered. It requires a 265 Gilles DELEUZE, Felix GUATTARI, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 : Mille Plateaux, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1980. 266 Bruno LATOUR, Où atterrir? Comment s’orienter en politique, La Découverte, Paris, 2017. 267 Bruno LATOUR, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, op. cit. 268 Bruno LATOUR, “Sur une nette inversion du schème de la fin des temps », paper for a conference on Les défis écologiques à la lumière du bien commun, Institut Catholique de Paris, April 2018, my tran- slation. 147 thought able to articulate the recent discovery, variation of the Galilean claim, that “the earth is crying”269, that “the earth is moved”270 by our inhabiting. In other words, what a philosophy of the present world needs to process is the realization that the gnostic abyss, which modern dualism had dug between humanity and the world, was crossed: suddenly we find ourselves deeply involved within an astounding web of worldly be- ings from which there is no escape, “with thousand rootlets reaching deep into the soil of life”271. If the ecological crisis rises as a flood, it is the flood of a world overflowing in an abundance, complexity and intensity which the modern philosophy of nature could not seize, and to which we must now render ourselves sensitive. In Facing Gaia272, Latour explores ideas and figures to embrace multiple modes of existence, experience and agency which the modern concept of nature has thus far failed to acknowledge within earthly beings. As we shall see in the present chapter, the devel- opment of a Gaian thought of the world involves a shift in perception, a reversal of the gnostic dynamic of “plus extra” [further beyond] exhorting humanity to emancipate itself from the world, and engages indeed a movement of “plus intra” [further inward] towards the recognition of our earth-boundedness. Back to the earth, in with the old world of the immanence as we enter a new geological era, discover the unprecedented dimension of its emergence, and endeavor to dwell in an entangled infinity.273 What our preliminary analysis of Gnosticism may teach us in this journey towards the world, this fourth chapter intends to articulate. 269 POPE FRANCIS’ Encyclical letter « Laudato Si », 2015. 270 Michel SERRES, The Natural Contract, Translated by E. Macarthur and W. Paulson, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1995, p.86. 271 Rainer Maria RILKE, Selected Poems with parallel German text, op.cit. « Das ist mein Streit », from Advent, p.2. My translation. 272 Bruno LATOUR, Face à Gaïa: Huit Conférences sur le Nouveau Régime Climatique, La Découverte, 2015. 273 Emilie HACHE (ed.), De l’Univers Clos au Monde Infini, Editions Dehors, 2014. 148 From the hermeneutics of Gnosticism towards a philosophy of the world How may our hermeneutics of Gnosticism contribute to the philosophical re- newal called upon by the present environmental crisis? How may alternative meta- phors of our inhabiting inspire an alternative perception of worldly being? This chapter explores the cosmo-ontological unfolding of the reflection outlined in the first part of this dissertation, and focuses on the ways in which our hermeneutics of Gnosticism could inform an alternative thought of worldly being. A thought that would avoid the gnostic pitfalls of modern cosmology – namely, its dualistic worldlessness and the resulting sealing of worldly being. The previous chapter has suggested that the present ecological mutation discloses something which cannot be contained by the cosmology witnessing its advent, thereby requiring new mental tools, new categories of thought, new images, new philosophical approaches offering to embrace the ontological tension of the world and therefore supporting an alternative way of dwelling. It has pointed towards a twofold movement of sealing and overflowing, a wide cosmological enter- prise of subjection and domestication of a worldly being resolutely untamable and ir- reverent. In this chapter, I propose to elucidate the meaning of this “ontological tension” obscured by modern dualism and offer conceptual as well as metaphorical ways to undo its sealing. This implies unfolding the tension which both Jonas and Voegelin had sensed would lie beneath modern Gnosticism, and delving into the metaxic dimen- sion, or ontological inbetweenness of worldly being. The Voegelinian notion of metaxy allows us to reflect upon the interconnectedness of earthly beings evolving in- between various poles of the world, thus informing a thought of worldly entanglement. To this extent, the metaxy of worldly being might provide a conceptual framework to approach a deep ontological complexity which appears to overflow from a common space of in-betweenness. A key-issue of this chapter shall then be to bridge, drawing upon the notion of metaxy, these two essential ideas of planetary entanglement and 149 overflowing of the world. The reflections unfolding in this chapter should ultimately uncover the ethical and political concern of dwelling in-between, to be examined in chapter five. What does the environmental crisis disclose of worldly being, which had until then remained unthought by modern cosmology, and which our hermeneutics of Gnos- ticism might help uncover? Which philosophical, symbolic and metaphorical tools might support this recovery? The reflection I propose to conduct in this chapter unfolds along three key ideas, sustained by three sets of metaphors, to contribute towards a renewed philosophy of the world in times of ecological mutation. The first, led by the trope of the openness, examines the promising contribution of process thought for a philosophy of the world that would engage the precarious, contingent and eventful processes of creation at work within an emerging worldly being. The second delves into Gaian ontologies of planetary entanglement, and leans upon Glissant’s term of créolité to think the luxuriant ramifications of worldly beings and the plural rootedness of their creative agency. The third explores the Deleuzian metaphor of the origami universe and attempts to bridge the openness of worldly being with its entanglement. I then propose to approach, through the metaphor of the overflowing of the world, the process by which worldly beings are both entangled in each other while involved in an open becoming. The reflections gathered in this chapter towards a renewed philosophy of the world arise from the overarching metaphors of the roots and the waves. They are indebted to Virginia Woolf’s prophetic, aquatic consciousness of our being rooted in the world, ineluctably embedded in and with other beings, and of the uncontainable overflowing of our being. Her experience of the waves of the world, I argue, provides an inspiring reversal of the gnostic being in the world. 150 A. Process thought for an ecology of the openness “Everything flows” — Heraclitus “There is no harmony in this contingent stream of unforeseen events.” — Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia. The Gnostics inhabit the world haunted by the anxious awareness of its vola- tility: their being in the world is infused with an acute sense of the inconstancy and restlessness of worldly processes. As we journey through a time of environmental cri- sis and witness a global ecological and civilizational collapse involving drastic pro- cesses of eco-systemic disruption, geological mutation and mass extinctions, we might ourselves feel the groundlessness of a world crumbling beneath our feet. Emphasizing becoming over static being, event over entity, movement rather than substance, the tradition of process thought captures the impermanence of the world and its propensity for perpetual change. In this regard, the philosophy of process, and the work of its defining figure Alfred North Whitehead in particular, provides environmental philos- ophy with interesting tools to sustain the renewed thought of the world called upon by the advent of the Anthropocene. This philosophy of the world should acknowledge the precariousness, contingency and eventfulness of worldly being such as unveiled by the present ecological mutation. In his Natural Contract, Michel Serres crystallizes the paradigmatic break induced by environmental change around the pivotal realization that “the earth is moved”. Herald of the unprecedented scope of the environmental crisis, the realization of the instability and vulnerability of the Earth echoes the ap- proach of process thought: 151 In our turn, we are appealing to an absent authority, when we cry, like Galileo, but before the court of his successors, former prophets turned kings: "the Earth is moved." The immemorial, fixed Earth, which provided the conditions and foundations of our lives, is mov- ing, the fundamental Earth is trembling.274 The trembling of the immemorial soil described by Serres reflects the findings of process philosophy all the more so as it is accompanied by the acknowledgement of the profound reciprocity and reactivity characterizing our relationship to the “natural world” – on which the next sections shall dwell further. The term Anthropocene artic- ulates indeed the awareness that the earth is affected by human actions and answers to it in unpredictable ways. To this extent, it invites us to think the historical contingency of the world, along with the instability of planetary processes which the modern con- cept of nature had conceived as fundamentally immutable. The environmental crisis thus ultimately reveals worldly being as a worldly becoming: intensifying and accel- erating some processes, it opens the world to vertiginous perspectives of becoming and non-becoming, possible beings and possible unbeings. Within Jewish mysticism, the medieval tradition of the Lurianic Kabbalah – which inspired Hans Jonas’ theological reflections around the concept of God after Ausch- witz275 - offers a seminal contribution to the theology of process. The Kabbalah devel- oped by Isaac Luria presents a doctrine of creation unfolding in the three stages of divine being: its primordial contraction (tzimtzum), the shattering of the vessels (chevi- rat ha-kélim) with the chaotic eruption of divine light into the world, and the final repair of the world (tikkun). The notion of Tzimtzum is paramount to the theo-cosmogonic process described by the Lurianic Kabbalah. Jonas explains: 274 Michel SERRES, The Natural Contract, trans. E. Macarthur and W. Paulson, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1995, p.86. 275 Hans JONAS, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: a Jewish Voice”, in The Journal of Religion, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Jan. 1987), The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp.1-13. 152 Tzimtzum means contraction, withdrawal, self-limitation. To make room for the world, the En-Sof, (Infinite; literally, No-End) of the beginning had to contract himself so that, vacated by him, empty space could expand outside of him: the “Nothing” in which and from which God could then create the world. Without this retreat into himself, there could be no “other” outside God, and only his contin- ued holding-himself-in preserves the finite things from losing their separate being again into the divine “all in all”.276 The primordial contraction of the divine at the origin of cosmic creation may be ap- proached both as a withdrawal into the depths of her interiority and as a concession to the openness of cosmic being. The first dimension of the Tzimtzum thus presents cre- ation as a fold within, a deepening towards the inside rather than an emanation or a dispersion. Gerschom Sholem thus describes a God who “descended deeper into the recesses of His own Being, who concentrated Himself into Himself, and had done so from the very beginning of creation.”277 This divine contraction is perpetually renewed in the process of creation, so much so that the becoming of the world is defined and conditioned by this primordial fold within: “every new act of emanation and manifes- tation is preceded by one of concentration and retraction”278. In this regard, the Tzimtzum recounts a substantive connection between God and the world, an ontolog- ical dance where each creative emergence of the world arises as an inner folding of the divine. God’s withdrawal may also be apprehended as an eclipse where the divine, con- ceding room for otherness to emerge, opens herself up to a world of possible. This connection between God’s creative withdrawal and the emergence of the other re- sumes interestingly the themes of the open and the alien, emphasizing the open entan- glement of creative processes of becoming with the emerging presence of others. For creation to occur, room must be made for an unknown other to emerge. God’s with- drawal in the Tzimtzum is also consubstantial of a radical exposure conceding the possibility of non-being and therefore putting divine being at stake. From the Tzimtzum on, creation totters on the edge of an abyss, a primordial space freed for the 276 Ibid, p.12. 277 Scholem p.296 278 Ibid. 153 universe to unfold. For God to put herself at stake in the chaotic course of cosmic creation, for her to give birth to unpredictable trajectories of becoming, there must be a place of openness. With this primordial withdrawal, God concedes in creation the possibility of her negation. The Tzimtzum thus arises as an inspiring tale of openness combining the idea of an ontological intimacy between God and a creation that emerges within her, with the sense of a primordial abyss, a mysterious chaos and cre- ative depth within her. Breaking with the traditional attribute of God’s omnipotence, the doctrine of the Tzimtzum also bears a potential for thinking God’s presence in her absence from the world, the latter’s perpetual emergence being conditioned by a sus- tained act of loving withdrawal.279 In Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming280, Catherine Keller deviates from the dominant theory of creation ex nihilo and explores the hypothesis of a creation ex profundis for an alternative representation of the cosmic creative process. Her under- standing of the watery depths of creation draws too upon Hebrew myths of creation and discloses tehomophobic tendencies (fearful of the deep) in Western Christian tra- dition, which she connects to the repression of feminized abysses and divine maternity. Keller argues that this fear of a beginning out of chaos, of darkness, of wild nature and of the feminine depth infuses the patriarchal paradigm and motivates the systematized oppression of the feminine. This cultural repression of an impenetrable depth at the heart of the divine creative process reminds us of what discloses itself as we lean over the edge of the abyss described in gnostic narratives: an obscure openness, an unfath- omable entanglement in the world, and the untamable creative overflowing of the deep. Drawing attention to worldly processes of emergence and extinction that had been suspended, petrified in the realm of nature, the ecological mutation also illuminates how such chaotic processes involve human actions, which were contained as an empire 279 This idea of a loving withdrawal from Being conditioning the unfolding of the world is also present in Jean-Luc Marion’s God without Being. See Jean-Luc MARION, Dieu sans l’être, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2013 (1982). 280 Catherine KELLER. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. Routledge, London, 2003. 154 within an empire under the aegis of the realm of culture. Doing so, it brings to light the complexity of worldly processes overflowing the framework of dualist ontology. John Cobb, a major figure of process philosophy who has consistently explored its links with environmental philosophy while emphasizing ecological interdependency, argues that the recognition of the “intimate interconnectedness of all things”281 brings together environmental consciousness and Whiteheadian philosophy. The architecture of Whitehead’s process metaphysics provides indeed illuminating insights to the con- temporary thought of planetary entanglement and worldly becoming. The notion of “concrescence” expresses the process of creative internalization, feeling and expres- sion by worldly beings of their relatedness to other event-like entities of the world, units of worldly becoming which Whitehead names “actual occasions”. This dual pro- cess of internalization and externalization of the world by the world appears to articu- late perfectly the metaxy of worldly being which gnostic cosmologies had failed to integrate. Drawing upon Whitehead’s thought of the chaotic emergence of events, po- litical philosopher William Connolly contends that we live in a world of becoming282 and contribute to the processes of its emergence, co-creating it as we dwell in it. The philosopher presents the attunement to a world of becoming as an eminently political issue and argues that the acceptance of the contingency of worldly being would prevent the hegemonic imposition of a monolithic worldview upon plural horizons of becom- ing. Likewise, the acknowledgement of our being intimately involved in processes of worldly becoming would command an ontological responsibility towards such pro- cesses and the many beings involved in and affected by them. The account by process philosophy of the contingency of worldly being and of our involvement within worldly processes of becoming is set against approaches which 281 John COBB, “Deep Ecology and Process Thought” URL: https://www.religion-online.org/article/deep-ecology-and-process-thought/ Accessed 23.01.2019. 282 William E. CONNOLLY, Pluralistic Sense-Making: A World of Becoming, Duke University Press, 2011. https://www.religion-online.org/article/deep-ecology-and-process-thought/ https://www.religion-online.org/article/deep-ecology-and-process-thought/ 155 tend to freeze these processes. While a world of becoming holds within itself an elu- sive, ever-flowing transcendence sustaining the perpetual emergence of worldly pro- cesses – therefore unable to ground any fixed ideology –, gnostic cosmologies tend to reduce this immanent transcendence – which we analyzed in the preceding chapter as constitutive of the ontological, metaxic tension of worldly being. Through promoting an approach of the world as becoming rather than being, the philosophy of process dwells in the fluidity of processes which overflow dualistic partitions between being and non-being, thereby embracing the dynamic tension that infuse worldly processes of becoming. Process thought thus allows us to articulate the ontological tension of the world identified in our analysis of Gnosticism, and to integrate it within a philosophy of the world which engages the possibilities of becoming and non-becoming arising from worldly being. Following Hegel’s dialectic or Nietzschean philosophy, process thought provides a philosophical way to espouse the movement inherent to life and resist the gnostic “mummifying”283 of worldly being. If the present ecological crisis unveils the Gnosticism in modern cosmology, the philosophy of process appears as an answer to the challenge of an alternative perception of the world. Captured in the idea of the Anthropocene, the environmental mutation engages indeed a transition from an ontology of substance to an ontology of process which focuses on becoming and move- ment as radical dimensions of worldly being, rather than perpetuating the gnostic de- piction of a world condemned to the cage of the eternal here below. Exposing the pre- cariousness and contingency of eco-systems and terrestrial life, the Anthropocene manifests the impermanence of processes of worldly becoming continuously emerging and fading. It also brings to the fore the interconnectedness and interdependency of this worldly becoming, thereby pointing toward the ultimate responsibility that binds us to processes of perpetuation and renewal of the world: in so doing, process thought defies the gnostic divorce of the human self from the non-human world. A third po- tential contribution of process philosophy for a philosophy of the world resisting the 283 See Friedrich NIETZSCHE, Twilight of the Idols, tr. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968 (1889), p.35. He writes of philosophers, draining life out of ideas while they should extract ideas out of life: “There is […] their hatred of even the idea of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are doing a thing honour when they dehistoricise it, sub specie aeterni—when they make a mummy of it. All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped their hands alive. They kill, they stuff, when they worship, these conceptual idolaters—they become a mortal danger to everything when they worship. Death, change, age, as well as procreation and growth, are for them objections—refutations even.” 156 gnostic stance lies in its unfolding of the idea of openness of worldly becoming, which might allow us to approach the eventfulness of the environmental crisis. It might seem surprising at first, if not indecent, to propose to think the environ- mental crisis in terms of openness. Is not the global environmental degradation we are presently witnessing rather about irreversible loss? Do not phenomena of eco-systemic collapse, mass extinctions, depletion of resources, loss of biodiversity, habitat destruc- tions… point towards some kind of condemnation, a closure of the manifold processes of worldly becoming? Drawing upon the philosophy of process, I suggest that the pre- sent environmental mutation might be approached in terms of an ambiguous openness – a metaxic clearing of possibilities that we might benefit from engaging with as we stand on the abyssal edge of worldly becoming. Threatening the perpetuation of many life-forms on earth and witnessing the irreversible disappearance of species at the un- precedented rate of 1,000 to 10,000 times the background extinction rate284, the present environmental crisis acts as a phenomenal reminder of the precariousness and imper- manence of worldly becoming. The manifold processes of worldly becoming involve dynamics of both destruction and creation, extinction and emergence, death and birth. The image of the abyss mentioned in the previous chapter illuminates again this met- axic dimension of processes of worldly becoming, and the world’s wandering amidst a profusion of possible horizons whose actualization is never guaranteed, only ever enabled or threatened – always open. The philosophy of openness I advocate for, while indebted to Martin Heidegger’s intuitive awareness of the self-emergence of Being, insists that openness should not be understood as an existential prerogative of the human Dasein – thrown into the world and consecutively projecting itself onto the possible trajectories open before it. I rather propose to approach openness as an ontological disposition of all multispecies trajec- tories of becoming. Heidegger’s lexical field of the clearing and the concealing might still lead us as we reflect upon this ontological openness of the world. In an essay on 284 E. CHIVIAN, A. BERNSTEIN (eds.), Sustaining life: How human health depends on biodiversity. Centre for Health and the Global Environment. Oxford University Press, New York, 2008. 157 the Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger draws a distinction between the world and the earth which, I suggest, echoes the profoundly metaxic dimension of our inhabiting: The world is the self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of an historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continu- ally self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing. World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth just through world. But the relation between world and earth does not wither away into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another. The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, how- ever, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there. The opposition of world and earth is a striving.285 Heidegger depicts a twofold movement of self-disclosure and self-sheltering, where “the world” opens and “the earth” conceals, describing an organic relationship between poles of being intimately drawn to another and thus engaged in an active, tensional, birth giving metaxy. Heidegger’s metaxic thought of the world points toward the ne- cessity for contemporary philosophy to distance itself from the modern concept of na- ture in order to acknowledge the striving complexity that is the world. The tension which Heidegger describes between the clearing and the concealing, the delicate dance of sheltering and disclosure shines a light upon the unthought of the modern concept of nature, which crystallizes overflowing processes of becoming into the fiction of an eternal, immovable materiality. Engulfing its dynamic tension along with its ontolog- ical openness, the concept of nature does not enable us to think the world as what “strives to surmount” or “cannot endure anything closed”. It eclipses the haunting con- cern for its precarious becomings, the longing that moves within its depths and the yearning that infuses its wandering. The “self-opening” of the world described by Heidegger is in gnostic cosmologies a prerogative of the human-self, of the existential 285 Martin HEIDEGGER, Basic Writings, “On the Origin of the Work of Art”, 1st Harper Perennial Modern Thought Edition, ed. David Farrell Krell, New York, Harper Collins, 2008, p. 174. 158 and divine pole of being. Ontologically closed, hermetically sealed, nature does not yearn. It is not moved by encounters with fellow trajectories giving birth to burgeoning possibilities of becoming, nor does it ever wander amidst flourishing and sinking ho- rizons of becoming. The unthought openness I wish to emphasize characterizes the world in its diverse processes of becoming, in the intimate enmeshment between earth- lings and their environment which makes it difficult to even distinguish them. For all earthlings, being in the world means to be engaged in manifold processes of becoming- with the world – of worlding – which are fundamentally open. Worlding is an enmesh- ment in the open. For the Pacific Walruses, for Tigers, Giant Pandas and Mountain Gorillas, for Antarctic glaciers, seeds non-patented by Monsanto corporation as well as for collapsing capitalist societies, becoming means being open to their not-becom- ing-anymore. Far from merely disclosing the abyssal nothingness that threatens the becom- ings of the world, the ontological openness of our worldings is also the condition for their advent. While gnostic metaphysics leave no room to think the perpetual and im- manent self-creation of the world, environmental philosophy requires a thought of emergence which the idea of openness might initiate. The trope of the openness allows us indeed to think both the arising and evanescence of multispecies processes of worlding, both the emergence and extinction of beings described by Jonas as “onto- logical surprises”286. In the present environmental crisis, it bridges the world’s end with its possible birth, and echoes the image of an abyss to clear a space for what is not yet, what is not anymore, what comes and might not arrive, what is becoming. Translating a Turkish saying into French, the philosopher of complexity Edgar Morin writes that « les nuits sont enceintes, et nul ne connaît le jour qui naîtra » - the nights are pregnant, and no one yet knows the dawns to break287. The world is pregnant with an abyssal openness giving birth to ontological surprises whose becoming, arising or extinction, we are ontologically involved with. The acknowledgement of the openness of the world might thus prevent any ideology from claiming the end of history and 286 Hans JONAS, The Phenomenon of Life, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001, p.79. 287 Edgar MORIN, « Les nuits sont enceintes, et nul ne connaît le jour qui naîtra », Le Monde, 08.01.2011. URL: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2011/01/08/edgar-morin-les-nuits-sont-en- ceintes_1462821_3232.html Accessed 22.01.2020 https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2011/01/08/edgar-morin-les-nuits-sont-enceintes_1462821_3232.html https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2011/01/08/edgar-morin-les-nuits-sont-enceintes_1462821_3232.html 159 thereby jeopardize processes of becoming together. Calling upon our faculty to care for the emergence of the world and preserve a space of resilience, a blank space for creation, it ensures that the end is always where we start from. The end we start from, disclosing the openness of worldly being and the many beginnings that arise from plural perspectives of becoming. The provisory, ever-post- poned end of times. The end of the world as we knew it, the end of the Holocene, the end of species, the end of a civilization – all porous entities enmeshed in other trajec- tories of becomings – and the beginning of what in the world, from this ontological openness of being, overflows. Outlining the finitude of our precarious being in the world, the environmental mutation also throws light on the porous boundaries of our selves: they too are open, overflowing in each other. The image of the openness thus conveys a thought of the world as contingent event and untamable becoming, as well as it opens up a thought of our deep ontological entanglement with worldly processes of becoming. In this light, the openness appears indeed as the very condition of our encounter with other worldly becomings. Being, or becoming in the world is being opened by other becomings, penetrated and fecundated by their alterity. Shifting from the gnostic posture of a divorce from the world, and its emphasis on the abyssal gap insulating the human self from the radical ontological alterity of the world, the idea of openness embraces the metaxic in-between of worldly being as a space of encounter and creation. What kind of ontology might allow us to dwell in the openness of the world and account for such a process of fecundation? 160 B. The ontology of Gaia for a créole world Our lives extend beyond our skins, in radical interdependence with the rest of the world. — Joanna Macy, Working through Environmental Despair. Each is a crowd — Mona Chollet288 The roots of the waves: worldly entanglement as blurring of dualistic boundaries Emphasizing the perpetual and dynamic emergence of the world, process phi- losophy conveys a perception of worldly becoming as waves and allows us to approach the ontological flood arising with the environmental mutation. But this fluidity is an- chored, the watery dimension of the world rooted: the streams of worldly becomings perceived by process thought are embedded in a web of connections, a fertile soil of encounters, and can only overflow what they are rooted in. Drawn from the eponymous hypothesis formulated by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock and evolutionary bi- ologist Lynn Margulis, the development of the figure of Gaia in environmental hu- manities marks the progressive articulation of a complexified thought of the rootedness of worldly beings. Before delving deeper into the Gaia hypothesis and the conse- quences of its introduction for environmental philosophy and the ontology of the 288 Mona CHOLLET, “L’emploi du temps”, Périphéries, 2007. URL: https://www.peripheries.net/article309.html Accessed 22.01.2020. https://www.peripheries.net/article309.html 161 world, I would like to pause and draw some preliminary reflections from the contem- plation of the trope of the root. In her book Rootedness, Christy Wampole investigates the omnipresent meta- phor of rootedness throughout the history of Western thought and how it pervades today’s philosophical, cultural and political narratives. As she contends that “figura- tive language is the outlet for a deep-seated apprehension about permanent estrange- ment from the context whence we came” and unfolds “the chronicle of a species at odds with itself”289, Wampole channels the gnostic trope of an existential estrangement resulting from an original rupture from Humanity’s true home. From the metaphor of the roots, she draws the primordial myth of a lost connection, a broken link: “if people think of themselves as rooted beings, it is due to an umbilical memory of an attachment to the earth, a memory that has been severed in more ways than one.”290 The author thus identifies in the image of the root “a figure of vital will and yearning – as it pushes through the soil, reaching for what it needs”291 prone to express the “nearly universal” longing for one’s home and the wandering towards an ultimate reunion. But as she perceives in the image of the root an integrating metaphor, Wampole proceeds to an interesting inversion of the gnostic trope of the unrooting. The image of the root, she argues, serves not only to express the drama of an estrangement from the world, but also weaves a wide web of belongings that “allows for connections to be made between past, present, and future, between remote geographic spaces, between neighbors, be- tween the human and its ecosystem.292” Thus, the trope of the root may express both the existential alienation from one’s true home, so deeply felt by the Gnostics, and the umbilical connections binding one to the world through a plurality of ties. Wampole’s analysis even appears to echo the insights fostered by process thought, as she bridges the depiction of an arborescent structure of attachments with the complex entangle- ment of trajectories of worldly becoming: 289 Christy WAMPOLE, Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor, University of Chicago Press, 2016, p.15. I emphasize. 290 Ibid, p.18. I emphasize. 291 Ibid, p.22. 292 Ibid, p.15. 162 the root may serve as a metaphorical anchor to a geographic space … its structure approximates a map of countless unexploited possibili- ties latent in each set of circumstances a person encounters.293 Wampole suggests here that the metaphor of the root may describe a subterranean net- work of attachments sustaining processes of worldly becoming. In this light, coupled with the consciousness of the fluidity of processes of worldly becoming, the botanical metaphor challenges modern notions of selfhood and agency as conceived within the framework of atomic individuality. Unfolding Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s in- tuition of the “rhizomic”294 nature of worldly being, philosophers Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour have developed the figure of Gaia as a subversion of a dualist on- tology unfitted for addressing planetary processes of becoming295. As it reformulates a thought of the world away from the dualist cosmology of Modernity, Gaia also ap- pears to solicit and reframe the metaphor of the root. Let us now examine this idea more closely. For Bruno Latour, “at first sight, nothing is simpler than the Gaia hypothesis: the living do not only reside in an environment, they shape it … the Earth’s whole biochemistry is the product of living organisms”296. What are the implications of this claim? Sébastien Dutreuil explains that the progressive acknowledgement of Gaia as a new scientific entity presides over the constitution, from the 1980s onwards, of the Earth system science. He writes: 293 Ibid, p.16. I emphasize. 294 In their project Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972 – 1980), the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have developed the botanical concept of rhizome to oppose Modernity’s dualistic struc- ture of thought and apprehend multiplicities in a non-hierarchical way. The rhizomic process thus des- ignates an ecology of beings not subordinated to a higher entity, not organized by a set of transcendent laws, or gravitating around a center. 295 See Isabelle STENGERS, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. Goffrey A. Ann Arbor, Open Humanities Press, London, 2015 (2009). and Bruno LATOUR, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Harvard University Press, 2017. 296 Bruno LATOUR, “Comment j’ai rencontré l’homme qui a inventé Gaïa”, in Le Nouvel Observateur, 5th May 2018. 163 the label “Earth system science” designates an important and pro- found reconfiguration of earth sciences, aiming at bringing together disciplines which had thus far been kept separated – such as geo- chemistry, climatology, global ecology, oceanography etc. –, by gathering them around the study of a same object: the Earth sys- tem.297 Gaia therefore appears as a figure of connection, bringing together processes and en- tities set apart from each other – most notably, organisms and their environment. Doing so, it undermines the dualist edifice upon which modern sciences are erected – which Whitehead had diagnosed as a “bifurcation of nature” – and proposes to approach life phenomena in their overflowing complexity. To this extent, the framework provided by the Gaia hypothesis may offer a scientific articulation of Whitehead’s claim accord- ing to which, in natural philosophy, “we may not pick and choose”. The author of the Concept of Nature writes indeed: For natural philosophy everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon. It is for natural phi- losophy to analyze how these various elements of nature are con- nected.298 Whitehead defines here the task of philosophy of nature as an analysis of connections, an indepth inquiry into worldly processes and modes of existence entangled in one another. The responsibility of natural philosophy resembles one of translation that would allow the red glow of the sunset and the electric waves to correspond with each other. This work of translation echoes Latour’s AIME project299 – An Inquiry into 297 Sébastien DUTREUIL, "James Lovelock and the Gaia hypothesis: ’a new look at life on Earth’ ... for the life and the Earth sciences." in M. Dietrich & O. Harman (Eds), Dreamers, Romantics and Vision- aries in the Life Sciences, University of Chicago Press, 2017. I translated from the original manuscript in French. 298 Alfred North WHITEHEAD, The Concept of Nature, p.29. 299 See the AIME website : http://modesofexistence.org/ http://modesofexistence.org/ 164 Modes of Existence –, which aims at displaying the diversity of types of “veridiction” and expressions of experiences cohabiting within Modernity itself. Latour’s approach points toward an untamable tendency for connection – singular modes of existence, modes of expression and experience resolutely waving towards each other, fecundat- ing each other as they evolve around each other. Latour identifies this yearning for connection in the “endless blurriness” of living organisms – the latter manifesting a strong objection to the bifurcation of nature. In the foreword to Stengers’ Thinking with Whitehead, he writes: if nature really is bifurcated, no living organism would be possible, since being an organism means being the sort of thing whose pri- mary and secondary qualities – if they did exist – are endlessly blurred. Since we are organisms surrounded by many other organ- isms, nature has not bifurcated.300 In Facing Gaia, Latour interprets Whitehead's bifurcation of nature as a diagnosis of the dis-animation of one section of the world, declared objective and inert, and the sur- animation of another section, declared conscious and free.301 He presents Gaia as a figure of subversion that, overflowing Modernity's ontological dualism, summons us to think the connections between the plural agencies of the world without thereby yielding to a holistic conception of totality.302 In this sense, Gaian philosophy channels an ontological pluralism acknowledging the coexistence of a plurality of modes of ex- istence, or ways of inhabiting overflowing the frontiers of modern dualism. Embody- ing the Deleuzian realization of the rhizomatic interconnectedness of worldly beings, Latour's Gaia furthermore articulates the idea of a dispersion of worldly agency and intentionality, and the dissolution in this process of the distinction between organism and environment.303 In this sense, the figure of Gaia submerges the distinction between Accessed 11.03.2019 300 Bruno LATOUR, Foreword to Isabelle Stengers’ Thinking with Whitehead, p.xiii. I emphasize. 301 Bruno LATOUR, Face à Gaïa, op.cit, p.107. 302 Ibid, p.129. 303 Ibid, p.133. 165 inside and outside, culture and nature, organism and environment, individual and sys- tem, thereby subverting the dualistic structure of modern cosmology: “there is no Earth superior to its Parts. And there are no Parts either."304 These words from Latour may remind us of Whitehead's oxymoronic litany on the relationship between God and the World: It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World. It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.305 As we can see, Whitehead's constant emphasis on relatedness in his philosophy of the organism also infuses his doctrine of God, where God and the world are described as two unalienable, interdependent poles of a common process of creative prehension. Isabelle Stengers, who brilliantly analyzed the centrality of Whitehead's theological speculations in his wider thought, seems to echo his antithetical insights as she de- scribes Gaia as an “unprecedented or forgotten form of transcendence” 306 and presents the brutal intrusion of ticklish planetary processes as stemming from within the imma- nence of the world. Thus, for Stengers too, the ontological entanglement and blurring of boundaries figured by Gaia subverts traditional conceptual polarities, including the- ological ones. Gaia appears indeed as that which garners both the roots and the waves of worldly being, that which conditions its overflowing, a “constant improvisation”307 from the many processes of worldly becoming, a primordial and chaotic force of open- ness, connection and eventful creation. She designates a plural rootedness that dis- solves the modern narrative of nature and culture and discloses an unsettling propen- sity for connections underlying worldly entanglement. 304 Ibid. 305 Alfred North WHITEHEAD, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, New York, Free Press, 1978 (1929). 306 Isabelle STENGERS, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, op.cit. 307 Bruno LATOUR, Face à Gaïa, op.cit., p.144 166 Before dwelling further on the créolité of Gaia, fed by her yearning for con- nection, let us shortly summon the contribution of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's bio-phe- nomenology for a Gaian thought of the intertwining of worldly beings. The project of phenomenological inquiry envisions the possibility of disclosure of being as embedded in the relationship between consciousness and phenomena – in other words, between the self and the world. Phenomenology proposes to think the ontological entanglement of consciousness, its self-transcendence stemming from its being enmeshed in the con- sciousness of others, and the immanence of an alterity that is always experienced and thus internalized. By establishing the primordiality of one such entanglement with other co-inhabitants and suggesting that there is no escape from this ontological rela- tionship, which we have to confront and from which we must proceed, it points toward the embeddedness of consciousness in other processes of worldly becoming. In an ar- ticle about the “living body”308, Carl B. Sachs confronts the intuitions of Hans Jonas developed in his philosophy of life with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the embodiment of consciousness. He shows how the perspective of bio-phenomenology articulates the inter-subjectivity of worldly beings with their inter-corporeality, thereby offering a serious way to bypass the Cartesian dichotomy between res extensa and res cogitans. Against this legacy, the coincidence of inwardness with outwardness manifested in the living body compels indeed an alternate way of thinking the world. This essential intuition of phenomenology, which Merleau-Ponty formulated in terms of the entanglement of the open life with the alien life309, I suggest, is crucial for the philosophical reflections initiated by the environmental crisis. One of these was for- mulated by Bruno Latour, whose analysis of the ecological issue indicates that there is no Nature outside of Culture – a realization which had also been expressed in phenom- enological terms as “there is no phenomena outside consciousness” – and vice versa. We dwell in between and amongst each other. In this light, the environmental crisis 308 Carl B. SACHS, “Thinking of the Living Body in Hans Jonas and Merleau-Ponty”, The University of New Mexico. URL: https://philosophy.unm.edu/news-events/sw- seminar/seminar/files/living%2520body.doc&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwiaybbPlb3bAhWCW8AKHYSkB nEQFggEMAA&client=internal-uds- cse&cx=002339348054261203620:nmul0lyyfju&usg=AOvVaw3LKW1ZXFxWGlqmS1XUpYxM Accessed 05.06.2018. 309 Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, New York: Routledge, 2002, p.412. https://philosophy.unm.edu/news-events/sw-seminar/seminar/files/living%2520body.doc&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwiaybbPlb3bAhWCW8AKHYSkBnEQFggEMAA&client=internal-uds-cse&cx=002339348054261203620:nmul0lyyfju&usg=AOvVaw3LKW1ZXFxWGlqmS1XUpYxM https://philosophy.unm.edu/news-events/sw-seminar/seminar/files/living%2520body.doc&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwiaybbPlb3bAhWCW8AKHYSkBnEQFggEMAA&client=internal-uds-cse&cx=002339348054261203620:nmul0lyyfju&usg=AOvVaw3LKW1ZXFxWGlqmS1XUpYxM https://philosophy.unm.edu/news-events/sw-seminar/seminar/files/living%2520body.doc&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwiaybbPlb3bAhWCW8AKHYSkBnEQFggEMAA&client=internal-uds-cse&cx=002339348054261203620:nmul0lyyfju&usg=AOvVaw3LKW1ZXFxWGlqmS1XUpYxM https://philosophy.unm.edu/news-events/sw-seminar/seminar/files/living%2520body.doc&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwiaybbPlb3bAhWCW8AKHYSkBnEQFggEMAA&client=internal-uds-cse&cx=002339348054261203620:nmul0lyyfju&usg=AOvVaw3LKW1ZXFxWGlqmS1XUpYxM 167 would signify the dissolution of boundaries and any ultimate authority contained in their confines, borders of sovereign empires to which we could have surrendered the unbearable course of our becoming. This dissolution of the boundaries discloses a worldly entanglement, a process of swarming310 characterized by a profusion of roots and trajectories. To this extent, the environmental crisis compels us to no longer phi- losophize about the world, but within a plurality of worldly becomings. What remains once frontiers of worldly being are tumbling down, and old ontological boundaries are proclaimed obsolete? It seems that processes of becoming do not have anywhere to dwell but in the liminality of the world. The créolité of the world: inhabiting in-between the world Manifesting the obsolescence of modern dualistic cosmology, the ontological entanglement disclosed by the environmental crisis points toward the challenge of dwelling in-between. Dwelling in between worldly beings, their compelling presence and haunting absence, in between geological eras, times, continents, national borders, ecosystems, cultures and languages, to inhabit the world and embrace its manifold processes of becoming. Particularly sensitive to the overwhelming presence of the other, the Martiniquais poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant developed a Poetics of Relation311 which attempts to think the complexity, hybridity and nomadity of our re- lationships, along with the particular sense of belonging that proceeds from them. Glis- sant’s thought of the créolité thus engages with the event of the encounter as arising within the littoral, or liminal zones of being – across cultural and territorial frontiers, here and elsewhere, inside and outside, and across the porous boundaries of the self. In a particularly fruitful formulation, Jean Bernabé, a seminal figure of the créolité literary movement, writes: 310 William CONNOLLY, Facing The Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming, 2017. 311 Edouard GLISSANT, Philosophie de la Relation. Poésie en étendue, Gallimard, Paris, 2009. 168 the literature of créolité is a literature that unveils the Here from the inside, without cutting it from its relationship to the Elsewhere.312 Unveiling the Here through the immanent presence of the Elsewhere, the créolité movement echoes the Gnostic yearning for an Elsewhere, a beyond only determined by the desire to overcome the Here. Dominated by anxieties of place and belonging, the Carribean poetics of location and dislocation appears indeed to channel the gnostic being in the world. For Glissant, the trope of the island provides the symbol of home as a floating inbetweenness, surrounded by the threat of estranging seas. The créolité, however, seems to answer the nihilism of the Gnostic lament with an ethics of relation that teaches us to dwell in the sandy, intermediate space between island and sea, amongst worldly beings as well as in the liquid borderland between the here and the elsewhere. “Originally stamped with the wish of being domiciliated in the here of our being”313, the Créoles radically distinguish themselves from the Gnostics in that they aim to recover an alienated sense of situatedness, hanging on to the specific density and opacity of the locale314. Emphasizing littoral zones, the thought of créolité decon- structs the idea of an absolute belonging and suggests that identity is constructed in relation – in the encounter with others. Edouard Glissant draws upon Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of « rhizome » to think the diversity of our rootedness and the entan- glement of our identities: the poet defines the rhizome as a root that grows towards other roots, without repressing them but rather strengthening itself in the company of others. This image fosters an understanding of identity as a sharing rather than an iso- 312 Jean BERNABE, « De la Négritude à la Créolité : éléments pour une approche comparée », L’Amé- rique entre les langues, Volume 28, numéro 2-3, automne–hiver 1992, p.37. « La littérature de la créolité est une littérature qui dévoile l’Ici de l’intérieur sans le couper de sa relation avec l’Ailleurs. » My translation. 313 Jean BERNABE, Patrick CHAMOISEAU & Raphaël CONFIANT, Eloge de la Créolité, 1993, Paris: Gallimard, p.20. « Originellement saisie du vœu de nous domicilier dans l’ici de notre être » My translation. 314 J. Michael DASH in “Farming Bones and Writing Rocks: Rethinking a Caribbean Poetics of (Dis)Location”, p.67. URL : http://www.shibboleths.net/1/1/Dash,Michael.pdf Accessed 11.01.2019. http://www.shibboleths.net/1/1/Dash,Michael.pdf 169 lation and prepares us to approach the intense complexity unveiled along the creoliza- tion of the world315. The authors of Eloge de la créolité describe the latter as "an an- nihilation of false universality, monolinguism, and purity."316 The idea of créolité thus points towards an ethics of belonging rooted in relationality and hybridity, which J. Michael Dash calls a « relational rootedness »317, and which shall inspire our political reflection in chapter 5. If we dwell in littoral zones associated with indeterminacy and exposure, and if, for Glissant, the sense of place is uncircumventable318, then “où at- terrir?” asks Bruno Latour319. Where should we dwell? Which land should we inhabit? We shall go back to this question as we engage in our next chapter with the political dimension of dwelling in-between. For now, let us focus on its philosophical unfold- ings. As Glissant identifies a process of “archipelization of the world”, he describes the world as a profusion of islands floating amidst an ocean of inbetweenness. Being in the world as in an archipelago would thus imply to embrace its oceanic, abyssal inbetweenness. This thought echoes Voegelin’s analysis of Gnosticism, which sug- gested that the cure to the gnostic pathological being in the world should include a rediscovery of our metaxic being in the world, that is, of our being in-between, with and within the world. Such a recovery involves bridging the gnostic abyss separating God from the world, as well as embracing our dwelling in the metaxic gulf, so as to mend the Voegelinian anoia – the forgetting of our ontological participation into the process of worldly being. This pursuit of a dwelling in-between in order to inhabit the world points toward the idea of wandering, so often praised in philosophical thought. Edouard Glissant conceives of wandering not as a boundless dispersion, but rather as the becomings and encounters we had not foreseen: 315 Institut du Tout-Monde, Mondialité – Répertoire vidéo E. Glissant, 08.01.2013, URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttqh1iIk_pc Accessed 11.01.2019. 316 Jean BERNABE, Patrick CHAMOISEAU & Raphaël CONFIANT, op. cit., p.28. 317 J. Michael DASH, art. cit., p.67. « La créolité est une annihilation de la fausse universalité, du monolinguisme et de la pureté. » My translation. 318 Edouard GLISSANT, Tout-Monde, Gallimard, 1993, p.29 : « Le lieu est incontournable. » 319 Bruno LATOUR, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Polity Press, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttqh1iIk_pc 170 The thought of wandering is not the distraught thought of dispersion, but that of our unforeseen rallies, through which we migrate from the absolutes of Being to the variations of Relation, where Being reveals itself as beings, and where essence and substance, dwelling and movement are undistinguished. Wandering is not exploration, colonial or not, nor it is the abandoning to misguided ways. It knows how to be immobile, and how to carry away. Through the thought of wandering we refuse the unique roots that kill around them: the thought of wandering is that of solidary rootings and rhizomic roots. 320 Edouard Glissant offers here a compelling reflection tying together the thoughts of créolité, rhizomic rootedness and an apophatic philosophy of wandering. Wanderers are uncanny: unknowable, unclassifiable, undisciplined, they dwell in-between and perpetually overflow the borders of being as they overcome their origins and embrace the paths of their becoming. From their perpetual dwelling in-between, and from their créole resistance to identitary confinements, we might learn that worldly becoming discloses itself as an oceanic wandering and an overflowing of ontological segrega- tions. C. A baroque world of overflowing Between the folds: the origami universe The reflections which inaugurated the present chapter focused on the potential contribution of process thought for a philosophy of the present environmental muta- tion, and how the idea of openness might inform an alternative ecological thought for present times. The second section has explored the resources of Gaian ontologies to 320 Edouard GLISSANT, Philosophie de la Relation. op.cit, p.61-62 : « La pensée de l'errance n'est pas l'éperdue pensée de la dispersion mais celle de nos ralliements non prétendus d'avance, par quoi nous migrons des absolus de l’Être aux variations de la Relation, où se révèle l’être-comme-étant, l’indistinction de l’essence et de la substance, de la demeure et du mouvement. L’errance n’est pas l’exploration, coloniale ou non, ni l’abandon à des errements. Elle sait être immobile, et emporter. Par la pensée de l’errance nous refusons les racines uniques et qui tuent autour d’elles : la pensée de l’errance est celle des enracinements solidaires et des racines en rhizome.» My translation and emphasis. 171 think the planetary entanglement disclosed by a global ecological crisis: we thus went from the openness of worldly becoming to its entanglement. From the manifold pro- cesses of becoming, ontologically open to unforeseen trajectories of being, to their creolization, their fertile or infecund encounters, ambiguous enmeshment with each other. Are not these two ideas of open becoming and Gaian creolization both about openness? The former manifests a processual openness to trajectories of becoming, while the latter sanctifies an ontological openness to other beings or becomings of the world. Both the processes of becoming and the creolizing encounters with others are indeed conditioned by an openness which appears absolutely primordial to worldly being. How to articulate both movements? Which metaphor, which image might allow us to bridge the créole entanglement of the world, with its precarious, contingent, wa- vering processes of becoming? Contemporary environmental scientists as well as philosophers of the ecological mu- tation have pointed toward a shared process of creation at stake in the world. The evo- lutionary biologist Lynn Margulis has thus coined the term of holobiont to designate ecological units as a superposition of beings folded into one another, all entangled into a common process of symbiosis321. More recently, Eric Bapteste has argued in his book Tous entrelacés322 that biological entities are all intertwined in each other, thereby challenging the notion of individual and even species. Pointing toward a complex pro- cess of collective evolution, Bapteste’s work implies to recompose disciplines around these collaborative networks and thus to redefine the terms of the evolution theory. In Facing Gaia, Bruno Latour lays the groundwork for a political philosophy of the world embracing this pivotal realization of a shared, intermingled agency of worldly beings, which no figure of totality nor individuality could ever capture. In a lecture on the body politic, he writes: living forms are folded many times over because they have engulfed the outside world inside the provisional border of their selves. Fold is another name for overlap.323 321 Lynn MARGULIS, Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1991. 322 Eric BAPTESTE, Tous entrelacés. Paris, Belin, 2018. 323 Bruno LATOUR, “Does the Body Politic Need a New Body?”, Yusko Ward-Phillips lecture, Univer- sity of Notre Dame, 3rd of November 2016. 172 Before him, Gilles Deleuze had drawn upon the legacy of Leibniz’s thought and argued in The Fold that Baroque philosophy provides tools for analysing contem- porary arts, politics and sciences. Deleuze argues that Leibniz anticipates contempo- rary developments of philosophy, notably those in process thought and the philosophy of the event – Alfred North Whitehead indeed was inspired by the works of Leibniz. I suggest that the Leibnizian metaphor of the fold might enrich a reflection on the pro- cess of creation happening in the liminal space between entangled worldly beings. The image of the fold articulates indeed the idea of a littoral interface between inside and outside, thereby echoing the debate on modern dualism and the irreducible process of co-penetration disclosed by the ecological crisis. In the first pages of the Fold, Deleuze thus calls for the contribution of someone “who can at once account for nature and decipher the soul, who can peer into the crannies of matter and read into the folds of the soul.”324 He contends further that the Fold intends to “fashion a way of representing what Leibniz will always affirm: a correspondence and even a communication between the two levels, between the two labyrinths, between the pleats of matter and the folds in the soul.”325 In this perspective, the Deleuzian-Leibnizian enterprise appears to merge with Whitehead’s wish to mend the bifurcation of nature, as well as with Latour’s dedication to bypass the modern nature-culture cosmology. As a metaphor of connection, the fold “radiates and ramifies everywhere in the geography of experience, such that we can imagine movement of light and sound, together, as folds of ethereal matter that waft and waver”.326 This omnipresence of the fold, leading Deleuze to de- scribe the world as an origami universe, was also felt by the origami artist Paul Jack- son, who notes in the Peabody Award-winning documentary Between the Folds that: If you look around the room or out of the window, and list how many things fold: this sweater, the skin, if I talk to you then the air is fold- ing, even the galaxy wheeling around and folding itself over years 324 Gilles DELEUZE, The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, Continuum, 2006 (1988). p.3. 325 Ibid, p.4. 326 Ibid, xiii. 173 as it goes around. Mountains and valleys go through the same pro- cess, even DNA is folded. You and I were born from folding.327 For Deleuze too, the earth moves in flows and folds: the whole universe is a process of folding, unfolding and re-folding where inside and outside co-penetrate each other in a baroque process of creation. He sees in Leibniz a philosopher of habitat and ecol- ogy, winding through organic and inorganic worlds. Through the Leibnizian metaphor of the fold, “an exquisitely sensuous view of the world”328 is thus obtained, or recov- ered: it fosters indeed a sense of the world particularly sensitive to the creativity of beings folding each other into an “origami universe”, as well as an understanding of creation as arising from the porous space where inside and outside collide. The art of origami illustrates a direct engagement with this process, embracing the creative artic- ulation of inside and outside and revealing its metamorphic dimension. Origami sim- ultaneously exhibits the facts that all is tied together, and creation is entangled. In a revealing manner, the artists and scientists interviewed for Between the Folds consist- ently draw upon the lexical fields of the possible, creation, complexity, chaos and co- penetration as they reflect on the art of origamis. One of them observes that “the paper wants to fold itself”, noting the immanence of the creative process and the entangle- ment of agencies in such a process. Throughout the documentary, and from the open- ing quotation by Henri Matisse329, it is repeatedly suggested that limits, boundaries, entanglement are liberating and even condition the process of creation itself, folding and unfolding its way from nothing to something. The metaphor of the fold thus provides a way to think the twofold experience of an ontological entanglement and of an open, perpetual and reciprocal movement of 327 Paul JACKSON in Between the Folds, dir. Vanessa GOULD, PBS Independent Lens, 2:12. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFrDN5eYPOQ Website : https://www.betweenthefolds.com/ Accessed 23.01.2019. 328 Gilles DELEUZE, The Fold, op.cit, xiii. 329 “Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.” Henri Matisse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFrDN5eYPOQ https://www.betweenthefolds.com/ 174 creation. It also appears as a particularly fruitful tool to articulate the form of connec- tions woven by worldly beings and arising from the liminal, metaxic space of inbe- tweenness in which they gravitate. The image of the fold points indeed toward an en- tangled process of co-creation occurring in between, within or beyond boundaries of the inside and the outside. Doing so, it echoes the blurring of dualistic boundaries wit- nessed by thinkers of the ecological crisis and outlines a dynamic of overflowing of such boundaries – just picture the movement of a sheet of paper folding itself and suddenly liberating an unforeseen dimension, disclosing a side which had until then remained hidden. In Clouds of the Impossible330, Catherine Keller bridges the aware- ness of our planetary entanglement with the idea of an apophatic open, articulating the knowledge of a possibly catastrophic outcome with the haunting hope of an alternative and convivial inhabiting. An apophatic thought might indeed support our understand- ing of the metaxic tension between entanglement and openness in which we find our- selves. Keller’s approach reminds us of Glissant’s thought of a wandering conditioned by our créole rootedness. The metaphor of the overflowing, I suggest, ties together the density of our vernacular entanglement to the world with the open, indeterminate tra- jectories of our becoming. Perpetually, indomitably, we overflow our roots as much as we are overflowed by them. Telling the world as rooted overflowing “The world always overflows nature”331 writes Bruno Latour. In Facing Gaia, he argues against the cosmology of nature as a holistic reduction of worldly beings’ agency. The concept of nature, as well as the whole cosmology built around it, would prove incapable to seize worldly processes of becoming and the creation at stake in them. The modern technicist and mechanist metaphors were indeed applied by modern cosmology to qualify the being of the earth, the living organisms and all life processes. 330 Catherine KELLER, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement, Co- lumbia University Press, New-York, 2014. 331 Bruno LATOUR, Facing Gaia, op.cit., p.122. 175 For Latour, the climate mutation calls for an alternative thought of the world, away from the dualistic pitfalls of the modern concept of nature. More precisely, the advent of a new climatic regime would summon us to think anew the connections between worldly agencies without thereby giving in to a holistic thought of totality. What is there more to the world than nature? What overflows in the world, and wherefrom? Other philosophers have pointed toward a thought of the overflowing before. Drawing from his thought of the créolité, Edouard Glissant contends that we are “un- circumventable”, and thus cannot be contained. Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of dis- enclosure similarly describes a process of “dismantling and disassembling of enclosed borders, enclosures, fences” waving toward a “deconstruction of property – that of man and that of world.” 332 The French débordement literally designates a movement of going beyond the borders, of overcoming them, thereby indicating an irrepressible crossing of boundaries. In the introduction to this chapter, I proposed the metaphor of the flood to approach the present environmental crisis as an event overflowing our conceptual boundaries and submerging us with worldly beings and processes we had insulated ourselves from. The metaphor of the overflowing echoes and prolongates these introductory reflections. It flows from our analysis of the newly disclosed open- ness, then créole rootedness of the world, and outlines alongside them a metaphorical trio for an alternative thought of the world: rooted in créolité, the world overflows through its ontological openness. A philosophy of the rooted overflowing, I argue, would reverse a gnostic being in the world primarily characterized by unrooting and thirst. As we learnt in the three previous chapters, the gnostic drama of being in the world is led by an unquenchable yearning for a beyond-the-world and is embodied by the existential posture of a devouring thirst. The gnostic narratives thus illustrate an incapacity to dwell in a world perceived as ontologically deficient – the gnostic theol- ogy depicts indeed a world doomed by an original rupture from God and therefore 332 Jean-Luc NANCY, Dis-Enclosure. The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Fordham University Press, 2008. p.160-161. 176 agonizing under the absence of divine being. The gnostic cosmogonies recounted by Jonas and Voegelin are thus dominated by the lexical and metaphorical fields of the thirst, the yearning, the absence, the beyond, the elsewhere – as well as that of the strange and hostile. Yet, as Levinas noted with much perceptiveness, if « real life is elsewhere », « we are in the world »333. In the strange we must dwell, and from this groundless engenderment we were born. Emmanuel Levinas’ endeavor to locate the romantic desire for a beyond within the world itself echoes the gnostic expression of an existential in-between, which Voegelin proposes to illuminate through the classical concept of metaxy. Stuck between the world and the home, the gnostic wandering il- lustrates what Voegelin defines as “the existence in the tension of the in-between”334. Insofar as it manifests the pitfalls of cosmological dualism and expresses a metaxic experience of an existence in the abyss, stuck in between isolated poles of being, it might point the way out of the dualist reduction while maintaining a sense of being in the world as tension and mediation. Both Jonas and Voegelin emphasize in their anal- ysis of Gnosticism, as well as in the rest of their philosophical thought, a duality which should not be reduced but rather bypassed: between god and the world, spirit and mat- ter for the former, between immanence and transcendence, time and eternity for the latter. Bruno Latour’s philosophical treatment of the nature-culture, object-subject, in- dividual-whole, and even global-local polarities appears to fall within the same pattern. All three philosophers suggest that dualism simultaneously obscures and discloses a metaxic tension which resolutely overflows dualistic boundaries. In this light, far from expressing a thirst, the metaxic being in the world illustrated by the Gnostics manifests a metaxic overflowing: an overflowing of the in-between, a flood of the world sub- merging the borders of being. This reversal of the gnostic being in the world, this sim- ple transition from the trope of the thirst to that of the overflowing might turn out fruitful. It immediately unveils the world as an overwhelming presence rather than an excruciating absence. But then again, what overflows in the world? 333 Emmanuel LEVINAS, Totalité et Infini, Éditions Le Livre de Poche, Paris, 1961, p. 21 334 Eric VOEGELIN, Anamnesis, op. cit, p.294. 177 As he expands on the imperative of finding home amidst the present disorien- tation and the problems of scale arising with the ecological mutation, Bruno Latour writes in Down to Earth that “we all are overflowed twice: by the too large as by the too small”335. Both the infinite complexity of our entanglements with the world and the perspective of its precarious becoming are overflowing the cosmological bounda- ries of nature. Just as the Gnostics and their modern Existentialist siblings had sensed, the abyss of the world leaves no ground, no essence, no eternal landscape or still-life, no ultimate authority to which one could surrender – in a word, no nature. Being in the world is vertiginous in at least two ways: we are simultaneously rooted in a network of attachments and belongings, overflowed by the unrenderable créolité of our entan- glements, and open to unprecedented trajectories of becoming. We are rooted and overflowed. The thought of such a rooted overflowing might enable us to better ap- proach an environmental crisis which confronts us to a planetary entanglement and an utter openness in the possibility of the collapse of capitalist civilization or the extinc- tion of life on earth. The ecological mutation manifests indeed at the same time our engenderment and co-dependency with worldly beings, as well as the openness and contingency of worldly becoming, standing on the edge of non-being as we approach global catastrophes. This emerging tension between two poles which I propose to name “rooted- ness” and “overflowing” draws upon the words of Virginia Woolf, who expressed this dwelling in-between as she wrote in The Waves: « I am rooted but I flow »336. Unfold- ing the metaphor of the liquidity of worldly existence, The Waves breaks down bound- aries and blurs distinctions in quest for a fuller dwelling in the world: between worlds organic and mundane, between the characters’ lives entangled in one another, between childhood and adulthood, between natural and cultural rhythms. As the characters’ lives unfurl, framed by depictions of coastal scenes, Woolf illuminates with the meta- phor of the waves the porosity of consciousness and deconstructs modern conceptions of self and community, along with the segregation between natural and cultural worlds. 335 Bruno LATOUR, Où atterrir ? Comment s’orienter en politique, La Découverte, 2017, Paris. p.27. 336 Virginia WOOLF, The Waves. Cambridge Press, New York, 1987 (1931), p.259. 178 Johnny Flynn leans upon the same watery metaphor as he sings in The Water: « the river is always my home », thereby conveying the sense of finding home amidst the fluidity and impermanence of worldly existence. This echoes again with the symbol mobilized by Romain Gary’s Goncourt winning novel, The Roots of Heaven, relating the story of a crusading environmentalist which takes on the dimension of a quest for the salvation of humanity: against the gnostic intuition of the otherworldliness of the divine, Gary’s novel suggests that the numinous takes roots in the world and distillates hope amidst the destructions left behind the procession of Modernity. While he pre- sents the romantic yearning for an elsewhere as ingrained in the “human soul”, Romain Gary suggests that such aspirations – the roots of heaven – stem from the world: The roots were countless and infinite in their variety and their beauty, and some were deeply ingrained in the human soul – an un- remitting and tormented aspiration oriented towards the heights – a need for the infinite, a thirst, a sense of elsewhere, an unlimited yearning.337 Unfolding the metaphor of the root, the symbol of the tree furthermore appears to be particularly expressive: while its roots tend to entangle themselves around each other, the tree, rooted in the soil of the earth, overflows these roots as its spores are led to impregnate other beings beyond the porous boundaries of its own being. The roots of heaven might thus also symbolize this metaxic tension newly disclosed by the envi- ronmental crisis – the rooted overflowing we have been reflecting on. To land, as we are summoned by Bruno Latour, in a world bathed in the new light of the environmental crisis, and thereby mend the gnostic alienation from the world, implies to preserve this metaxic tension which I propose to approach as a rooted 337 Romain GARY, Les Racines du Ciel, Paris, Gallimard, « Folio », 1972 (1956), p.266. My translation. « Les racines étaient innombrables et infinies dans leur variété et leur beauté et quelques-unes étaient profondément enfoncées dans l’âme humaine – une inspiration incessante et tour- mentée orientée en haut et en avant – un besoin d’infini, une soif, un pressentiment d’ailleurs, une attente illimitée. » 179 overflowing. A tension which, as I hope to have shown in chapter three, gnostic cos- mologies tend to hypostatize into two separate entities – God and the World, Culture and Nature, Spirit and Matter, Object and Subject, Eternity and History, etc. Latour thus identifies the necessity to be bound to a soil while preserving and cultivating the abundance of our attachments. The créolité of our attachments, connections and root- edness oversteps the boundaries of the self, nations, species or cultures: it overflows an engenderment that cannot be contained within the monolithic borders of a single origin, but is perpetual and plural. Mending the alienated gnostic being in the world thus frames the challenge of a resilient inhabiting as that of dwelling in a rooted over- flowing: to simultaneously root ourselves in the overflowing of worldly becomings, and to be overflowed by our créole rootedness. A rooted overflowing designates there- for the type of metaxy unveiled by the present environmental crisis: a being suspended amidst a multiplicity of modes of existence, interlaced with worldly beings, interwo- ven with their trajectories of becoming, a worldly entanglement blended with a worldly openness, a being penetrated and fecundated by beings who sow the world with us, a being in the world disclosed as a being and creating with the world. Ultimately, the ecological mutation also indicates the overflowing of sterile ontological categories which had intended to seize and crystallize a process of creation of the world by the world. 180 Conclusion What worlds are coming with the flood of the world? The reflections unfolded in this chapter have drawn upon the idea that the environmental mutation uncovers something about the world which has until then remained unthought by modern cos- mology. Through the lens of a hermeneutics of Gnosticism, I have intended to draw from the phenomenological potential of the ecological crisis and approached the latter as an event embodying a mutation in the way we conceive of, and therefore also are in the world. The pivotal idea I attempted to articulate about the cosmological mutation induced by the environmental crisis arose as a paradox: something major about worldly being and our being in the world is being eclipsed by modern cosmology, which has intensified, if not engendered the advent of the present ecological crisis, the latter re- veals precisely what had been obscured by the cosmology which gave rise to it. This cosmology, which I refer to as modern dualism, finds itself overflowed by what the ecological crisis so concretely manifests: the end of an ontological segregation which justified a monolithic, hegemonic and imperialist inhabiting, the dissolution of the frontiers of being between the self and the world, nature and culture, inside and out- side, immanence and transcendence… and, through this dissolution, the opening to a créolité of worldly beings amidst whom we must inhabit. How can we learn to encoun- ter all the beings which modern dualism had reduced and cohabit with them? Edouard Glissant claims that the contemporary “creolization of the world” is such that it re- quires a change of narratives. Because the complexity of our entanglements is inextri- cable and, to a certain extent, ineffable, the Martiniquais philosopher convokes the poets to work towards alternative imaginaries. A poetic dwelling might indeed pre- serve the tension of our rooted overflowing, for poets encounter worldly beings and merge with their becoming without thereby diluting and losing themselves to the al- terity of the world. 338 The cosmological challenge of preserving the metaxy of the world against the gnostic tendencies of Modernity thus appears closely tied to the act 338 Institut du Tout-Monde, Mondialité – Répertoire vidéo E. Glissant, 08.01.2013, URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttqh1iIk_pc Accessed 11.01.2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttqh1iIk_pc 181 of inhabiting the world, and thereby unveils the political dimension of an ontological system. In an article on the Inquisition and the Disenchantment of the World, the his- torian Andrew Keitt suggests that the development by religious and political authori- ties of an ontological segregation between natural and supernatural realms coincided with a socio-political order committed to enforcing discipline upon its members: [The] conflation of the natural and the supernatural was a standard complaint of the Inquisition as well. The religious enthusiast was in essence guilty of a category mistake; by confusing causal categories the enthusiast threatened an ontological order increasingly dedicated to policing the boundary between the natural and the supernatural realms and at the same time a social order increasingly dedicated to policing the behavior of its members.339 This observation reveals the theologico-political dimension of the modern concept of nature, arising from a theological segregation between worldly and divine realms of being, and thereby compelling an inhabiting of the world characterized by a sense of boundaries, rupture and disconnection – a being in the world previously referred to as gnostic. Mending the dualist rift between nature and culture, building bridges across the abyssal openness of worldly being and weaving the web of our planetary entangle- ments thus appear as an eminently political task. Likewise, the consciousness of the contingency and precariousness of worldly processes of becoming compels an ethics of responsible inhabiting in the open, informed by the realization that being in the world is also becoming and creating with the world. What might be the contribution of alternative metaphors of worldly being like those presented in this chapter for a concrete, alternative inhabiting? What political potential bear metaphors of the open- ness, the Gaian créolité, the fold or the rooted overflowing? For Bruno Latour, the 339 Andrew KEITT, “Religious Enthusiasm, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Disenchantment of the World”, in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.65, No. 2, April 2004, pp.231-250, University of Pennsylvania Press, p.246. 182 figure of Gaia abolishes the idea of kingdom and shakes modern representations of power, order and authority: After Gaia, literally, there is no kingdom left: no living or animated being obeys a superior order which would dominate them or to which they ought to adapt – this is true of bacteria, lions as well as human societies. This does not mean that all living are free in the simplistic sense of individualism, for they are interlaced, folded, in- tricated in each other. This means that the key-question of freedom and dependency equally concerns humans and the other partners of the natural world.340 Gaia thus rises as the conveyor of a political as well as cosmological anti-imperialism. The sense of anarchist equality it carries, along with the subversive energy channelled by metaphors such as those of openness, créolité or overflowing, challenge not only modern perceptions of the world, but also the way we inhabit: “it is not about ecology: merely about the politics of the living”.341 340 Bruno LATOUR, « Comment j'ai rencontré l'homme qui a inventé Gaïa », Bibliobs, May 2018. Own translation. « Mais après Gaia, littéralement, il n’y a plus de royaume : aucun vivant, aucun animé, n’obéit à un ordre supérieur à lui et qui le dominerait ou auquel il lui suffirait de s’adapter – cela est vrai des bactéries, comme des lions ou des sociétés humaines. Cela ne veut pas dire que tous les vivants sont libres au sens un peu simplet de l’individualisme puisqu’ils sont entrelacés, pliés, intriqués les uns dans les autres. Cela veut dire que la question clef de la liberté et de la dépendance vaut également pour les humains comme pour les partenaires du ci-devant monde naturel. » URL : https://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/idees/20180504.OBS6207/comment-j-ai-rencontre-l-homme- qui-a-invente-gaia-par-bruno-latour.html Accessed 22.01.2019. 341 Ibid. https://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/idees/20180504.OBS6207/comment-j-ai-rencontre-l-homme-qui-a-invente-gaia-par-bruno-latour.html https://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/idees/20180504.OBS6207/comment-j-ai-rencontre-l-homme-qui-a-invente-gaia-par-bruno-latour.html 183 CHAPTER 5 HOW TO DWELL? POLITICS OF THE INHABITING AND LOVE OF THE WORLD “The love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world.” — Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality. “Love is a touch and yet not a touch” — J.D. Salinger, The Heart of a Broken Story. “The world is a verb” — Donna Haraway, SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far. 184 Introduction Gnosticism and the political task of inhabiting How might our hermeneutics of Gnosticism inform present politics in the con- text of the environmental crisis? Our reflection has thus far focused on the cosmolog- ical dimension of Gnosticism, emphasizing how certain metaphors condition our per- ception of the world, and thereby also our being in the world. Both in the analyses of Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin, Gnosticism embodies an alienated relationship between humanity and the world, and designates a pathological inhabiting of the world. Draw- ing upon their understanding of Gnosticism, I have suggested in chapter 3 that the lens of Gnosticism illuminates the way Modernity inhabits the world – throwing light upon one amongst many ways to inhabit, and articulating many dimensions of our inhabit- ing: existential, spiritual, cosmological, poetic, ethical, political… Maintaining this focus on the inhabiting provided by the perspective of Gnosticism, I have then pro- posed in chapter 4 some alternative metaphors of worldly being, this in the purpose of approaching the world through a lens different than Gnosticism and opening other ho- rizons of thought, perception and experience that might nurture an alternative inhabit- ing. This last chapter intends to uncover the eminently political dimension of Gnosti- cism, by articulating the modalities of this alternative inhabiting. It presents itself as the political development of the cosmo-ontological approach proposed in the previous chapters, unfolding into a reflection on the consequences of a hermeneutics of Gnos- ticism for contemporary political philosophy and for a politics of the present. I argue that the hermeneutics of Gnosticism, focusing on the liminal, tensional and kaleido- scopic nature of our inhabiting, also reminds us of its inalienable political dimension, thereby redefining the art of politics as one of proper inhabiting of the common world. In this light, the environmental issue appears archetypical of the political: it raises in- deed in the most acute manner the challenge of composing and inhabiting a world of precarious becomings amidst an overflowing alterity of worldly beings. I therefore 185 propose to explore the ways in which the advent of the present ecological crisis sum- mons us to redefine the conceptual framework of politics, and how our hermeneutics of Gnosticism might support such a redefinition. This mutation of political philosophy can be broken into three main ideas which proceed from our ontological reflections: firstly, the environmental crisis un- veils the apocalyptic scope of politics, laying emphasis on its profound liminality, its eschatological density and pointing toward the delicate task of inhabiting the event. Secondly, the imperative of an ethical thought and action amidst the entangled open- ness of worldly beings calls out for politics as the art of responsibility, seizing the challenge of inhabiting with(in) others. Lastly, the gnostic complaint of a worldless wandering indicates the concern of finding home amidst the aquatic processes of worldly becoming, and ultimately uncovers politics as the art of inhabiting the world with love. Inhabiting the event of the environmental crisis, with other beings of the world and with love, all appear as attempts to dwell in the liminality of the world. In this chapter, I propose to explore different meanings this notion of liminality may take on, and examine its potential contribution for a political thought of the inhabiting. I shall prolong our reflection on the inbetweenness of worldly becomings and approach the political challenge of inhabiting the world as one of dwelling in transitions: between shifting times, places, borders, civilizations, species, beings of the world. A political thought of the liminal suggests that politics arises within a space of open inbetween- ness allowing the encounter with an alterity – the space between worldly beings, be- tween us and the world. It thereby also frames the challenge of metaxic inhabiting as a political task, where it falls upon the political to sustain the precarious tension of being in the world, and to secure a space of openness for this tension to abide. We may find in Bruno Latour’s notion of critical zones a variation of this idea. Referring to “a 186 spot on the envelope of the biosphere” 342, ticklish spots on Gaia’s skin reacting promptly to our actions, critical zones might offer a less paralyzing account of political processes than an essentializing notion like the Anthropocene. Insofar as they redis- tribute the fluxes and cycles of various heterogeneous agencies without unifying them into single entities, critical zones “open politically many alternative courses of action that the face-to-face of Human and Nature does not allow.”343 The notion of critical zones also “entails an attention, a capacity to feel what happens and the necessity to be cautions, careful, clever and informed in a way that would be different if the zone was just a chunk of “space”.”344 The question of how to live in these critical zones and how to inhabit them could thus redefine the issue of political action in a context of environmental mutation with dominant political systems resistant to addressing it. Learning to inhabit critical zones with resilience and embrace the metaxic inbetween- ness of the world in the catastrophic times of the ecological crisis situate political ac- tion in the here and now of an event summoning us, against the gnostic worldlessness, to inhabit the world. 342 Bruno LATOUR, “Some advantages of the notion of “Critical Zone” for Geopolitics”, Geochemistry of the Earth’s Surface meeting, GES – 10. URL: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/P-169-GAILLARDET-pdf.pdf Accessed 11.01.2019. 343 Ibid. p.2. 344 Ibid. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/P-169-GAILLARDET-pdf.pdf 187 A. Politics of the ecological Apocalypse “The end is where we start from” — T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets. The Apocalypse seems a widespread mytheme in the narrative structure of civilizations, of which modern cosmology offers many variations. In environmental literature, ranging from environmental humanities to political ecology and sci-fi, the trope of the end of the world is omnipresent and allows us to bestow a cosmological meaning upon the contemporary political context. Which meaning does the trope of the Apocalypse convey for present politics? Why should we approach the present times through the lens of the Apocalypse, and how could a hermeneutics of the ecological Apocalypse contribute to the political philosophy of the environment? The theme of the Apocalypse articulates an organic link between politics and religion, and entails many possible configurations – some more reactionary than subversive. To this extent, and following Carl Schmitt’s famous claim according to which “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”345, it invites us to mobilize the potential resources of the theologico-political for approaching the present ecological crisis. While the etymology of the word crisis, from the Ancient Greek κρίσις, indicates both a disruption and the paroxysmal instant of judgement and decision, the term “apocalypse”, from the Ancient Greek ἀποκάλυψις, refers to an event of unveiling and revelation. Endemic to the narratives of modernity, the theme of the crisis conveys the widespread idea that crises open opportunities in disruptions, resilience in 345 Carl SCHMITT, Political Theology, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1985 [1934], p.36. 188 collapse346. In her Schock Doctrine, Naomi Klein thus argues that capitalism exploited national crises and disasters such as the Iraq war for the pursuit of controversial measures and to ensure the implementation of neoliberal free-market policies347. In this light, the contemporary ecological crisis seems to bear a rich potential for our politico-theological hermeneutics. What does the ecological crisis reveal when approached through the apocalyptical prism? What could a hermeneutics of the Apocalypse allow us to understand about the political landscape surrounding the ecological crisis? A hermeneutics of the ecological Apocalypse, I argue, might notably contribute to restore the present as ultimate political time and as framework for political action. It summons us to renew the thought of how we inhabit the present world and dwell in events and transitions. To this extent, the apocalyptic and eschatological themes confer to politics an ethical dimension which is radical in that it stems from the eschatological density of the present. The ecological apocalypse also redefines the temporality in which politics takes place, described by Günther Anders as endless end-times. In Theses for the Nuclear Age, the German philosopher called on his readers to “fight this man-made Apocalypse” by “doing everyting in our power to make the End Time endless” 348. In his Endtime and the End of Times, Anders even presents the scope of political action and human freedom as condensed in a perpetual deferral of the Apocalypse: “To delay the end, to win the fight against the end of time again and again, that is to say, to make the end times endless”349. From now on, such is the political task. How to do politics in an ending world? 346 Willem SCHINKEL, “The image of crisis: Walter Benjamin and the interpretation of ‘crisis’ in mo- dernity”, Thesis Eleven 2015, Vol. 127(1) 36–51. 347 Naomi KLEIN, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Knopf Canada, 2007. 348 Günther ANDERS, “Theses for the Nuclear Age”, in The Massachusetts Review, Vol.3, No.3, Spring 1962, p.493-494. 349 Günther ANDERS, Endzeit und Zeitende, München: C.H. Beck, 1993, p.205. 189 Politics in the end-time How late is it? According to the Doomsday Clock, we are two minutes away from the end of the world. The conceptual clock was created in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to represent the threat of global nuclear war. While originally focused on the threat linked to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the clock has since evolved to also reflect the ecological crisis along with recent techno-scientific devel- opments threatening to inflict irrevocable harm to humanity – ranging from climate change to the hydrocarbon industry and the geopolitics of oil, through developments in life-sciences and biotechnologies. The Doomsday Clock uses the analogy of the countdown to midnight to symbolize and denounce the growing danger of an anthro- pogenic global catastrophe. Since January 2018, the clock is set at two minutes to mid- night, the closest it has ever been to Doomsday, following “the failure of world leaders to address tensions relating to nuclear weapons and climate change issues”350. How to act with the urgency required? The Doomsday clock seems to bear witness to a global political inertia, an incapacity to act and adapt to a fiery context that compels large-scaled actions. Francis Fukuyama had anticipated this state of po- litical lethargy in the End of History and the Last Man351, in which he argued that the worldwide advent of neo-liberal democracy and free market capitalism realizes the ultimate stage of humanity’s sociocultural development and the final form of political government. The end of history he describes, insofar as it repeals historical contin- gency, thereby also abolishes the horizon of all political action: it represents an apoc- alypse of the political. And yet burning events require our immediate political and ethical involvement to prevent a global catastrophe. Isabelle Stengers’ In Catastrophic Times captures her concern to resist the violence of the “coming barbarism” that rises with the convergence of illegitimate governance and political impotence towards the 350 Science and Security Board Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Ed. John Mecklin, “It is two minutes to midnight”, 2018 Doomsday Clock Statement. P.7. URL: https://thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/2018%20Doomsday%20Clock%20Statement.pdf Accessed 11.01.2019. 351 Francis FUKUYAMA, The End of History and the Last Man, Penguin Books, 1992. https://thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/2018%20Doomsday%20Clock%20Statement.pdf 190 organization of a global impasse. For Stengers, the expansion of capitalist regimes of extraction and private accumulation, along with the collateral destruction of ecosys- tems and societies, constitutes the real barbaric catastrophe. “That things are ‘status quo’ is a catastrophe”352 claims Walter Benjamin. But if the world is ending, its end seems to have no end: “the end times have come, but that time is lasting!”353 The Apocalypse is coming and everything goes on. In End-time and the End of Time, Günther Anders analyses the temporality of the nuclear era as a perpetual end-time, unappealable condition under the irreversibil- ity of the atomic threat. According to the German philosopher, the pending threat of the nuclear bomb interrupts the process of history and, by preserving eternally the pos- sibility of the Apocalypse, puts humanity forever “just in the deadline of the end-time”. He writes: “Permanently” means that the time that remains is forever an end- time: it can no longer be relieved by another time, only by the end.354 This Apocalypse, which Anders radically differentiates from the original theological concept, is realized, “verweltlicht” – literally mundanized, “worldlified”. Engendered by men, it is an “Apocalypse without a kingdom”355, which fails to open any new horizons – neither the way forward of modern progress, nor the perspective of a revo- lutionary utopia. For Anders, the only alternative offered by the nuclear era is a world or no world: the absolute threat of the nuclear holocaust reduces indeed the diversity of the possible worlds arising from the world, standing today on the edge of an abyss of non-being. Anders’ focus on the end-time and the ubiquitous threat of the annihila- tion of worldly being does not leave any room for hope, nor even for the life that abides 352 Walter BENJAMIN, Das Passagen-Werk. Gesammelte Schriften, Band V - I & II. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1982. 353 Bruno LATOUR, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Harvard University Press, 2017, p.173. 354 Günther ANDERS, Endzeit und Zeitende, München: C.H. Beck, 1993, p.116. 355 Günther ANDERS, La menace nucléaire (1981), trans. Christophe David, Le Serpent à plumes, Paris, 2006 (1981), p. 294. 191 in the end-time356. The condition for practical resistance to the advent of the end lies in a concerned fear for the world, which inspired Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s enlightened catastrophism as a tool to absorb the presence of the Apocalypse and delay its occur- rence357. Living in the end-time of a prophylactic apocalypse thus means caring for the indefinite postponement of the end of history. Walter Benjamin, Günther Anders’ cousin, finds in history the “angel” that comes from the present to break with the status quo: for him, redemption is possible in the preservation of history358. Against the mechanized, unidirectional conception of time disseminated by Modernity and the evolution of the modern procession along the hegemonic itinerary of progress, Benjamin pleads for a deliverance from the catastro- phe of an unending crisis as unsurpassable modern condition. The return of the apoc- alyptical theme in the political sphere, first with the threat of a nuclear holocaust and then with the intensification of ecological issues, thus seems to bear a re-enlivening potential for the realm of politics. The scheme of the end of the world has indeed borne a wonderful dimension of liberation and emancipation, and movements such as liber- ation theology, permaculture or transition towns can illustrate an ending world’s swarming potential for resilience. Away from Anders’ enlightening pessimism, Sten- gers’ and Benjamin’s reflections simultaneously suggest that the end of the world sometimes appears disguised as a continuation, and that the end of a world and the disruption of the temporality sustaining it might prove a saving grace allowing for the emergence of resilience and creation. In this light, the horizon of politics in the end- time would arise from the restoration of history as emergence and the immersion in the events born from it. 356 Margret LOHMANN, Philosophieren in der Endzeit: zur Gegenwartsanalyse von Günther Anders, 1996, Fink Verlag, München. p.44-46. 357 Jean-Pierre DUPUY, Pour un catastrophisme éclairé: quand l’impossible est certain. Seuil, 2002. 358 Walter BENJAMIN, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, Gesammelte Schriften, Band I - 2. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1982. Translated by Dennis Redmond. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm Accessed 25.01.2020. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm 192 The time that remains If we do live in an apocalyptical as well as ecological crisis – in the disruption, the assault that suspends a precedent continuity –, then it would seem like we are in history as Walter Benjamin conceived it, and that the end-time described by Anders, while offering a welcome insight on the present temporality, is not definitive in the sense of an absolute end of history. Against the modern conception of a “mythical history”, reducing history to a continuity, factuality and a “mortified past knowable only by its surviving victors”359, Benjamin offers an idea of history as single events and experiences which could not be essentialized or rationalized, a collection of here- and-nows gathered by the angel of history: Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet [...] That which we call progress, is this storm.360 A single storm, a catastrophe repeating itself over and over again and bringing about new here-and-nows and new disruptions. Amidst this apocalyptical process, Benja- min’s messianism consists of a preservation of creation and revelation, of the multi- plicity and discontinuity within history. “It is grounded in an awareness of ‘in-be- tweenness’”, as William Schinkel puts it, the metaxic intuition “of existing in-between revelation and redemption”361. This in-betweenness of our historical existence further echoes Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Paulinian messianism, where the Italian philos- opher describes the gap opened by the resurrection of Christ as a time in-between, a 359 Walter BENJAMIN, Das Leben der Studenten., Gesammelte Schriften, Band II – 1, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, p.75. 360 Walter BENJAMIN, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, Gesammelte Schriften, op.cit., p.697-698. 361 Willem SCHINKEL, art.cit. p.40. 193 threshold which he also refers to as the “time that remains”362. In The Time that Re- mains, Agamben investigates the metaphor of the threshold to articulate two tempo- ralities – the time preceding Jesus’ resurrection and the time of the Second Coming – around a third one – the “remnant”, the messianic time of the present: The remnant is, according to Agamben, an indefinite and indetermi- nate portion of life in which what is at stake is nothing other, and nothing less than the reconstitution of a life which can only be fully experienced in another time.363 Agamben’s analysis of the remnant does not fail to evoke our own time of ecological crisis, stamped by an enhanced sense of responsibility towards the perpetuation of life for future generations. It alludes indeed to a life that stands beyond our time and yet which we must enable, revealing the crucial agency characterizing life in the remnant. In between what do we stand? What time shall our time engender, what world shall our world give birth to? Between past and present, a border and another, creole beings of the world, ecological thresholds, planetary boundaries and critical zones…: as the environmental crisis summons us to dwell in liminal times and spheres, it re- minds us of the metaxic tension described by Voegelin, who struggled to embrace the perpetual in-betweenness of our existence. The concept of liminality expresses a sim- ilar tension and might also assist us as we reach the spheres of transition and in-be- tweenness characterizing the present environmental mutation. Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner first explored the idea of liminality during his fieldworks on rites of passage within the Ndembu tribe in Zambia, before delving into the importance of liminal experiences for a broader anthropological context. Turner argues that certain 362 Giorgio AGAMBEN, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Trans. Patricia Dailey, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. 363 Paolo BARTOLONI, “The Threshold and the Topos of the Remnant: Giorgio Agamben”. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 13(1), 51-63, Taylor and Francis, 2008. p. 57. 194 rituals or celebrations put participants in liminal states insofar as they interrupt rou- tinized spheres of everyday life and suspend their social status, thus allowing to either reaffirm or reorganize social relations (this is the case for instance of Carnival cus- toms). In contexts of political or cultural changes, the concept of liminality describes a similar process of temporary dissolution of social hierarchies and structures clearing space for either the reinforcement of the established order, or the emergence of alter- nate organizations. Laying emphasis on these precious times of transition as constitu- tive of social phenomena, the concept of liminality calls into question the traditional representation of a linear development of societies and the myth of a great course of history. It allows us indeed to conceive of change not as a pathology of social order, nor as the exceptional interruption of a linearity which should have been preserved, but as an integral part of social and political life. Liminal times and spaces thus fulfil a social function of re-organization and re-integration, and the dissolution of order appears in this light as a fluid process, reminiscent of Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of liquid Modernity364,365. Turner’s analyses of the liminal might therefore inform the thought of our own transitional experience as we wander in a cultural limbo amidst the disso- lution of former ideological and institutional structures, between decomposition and emergence. The unprecedented dimension of the present ecological crisis plunges in- deed contemporary societies into an anomic situation where no rule applies, and no ethical norm has anticipated the present dilemma: it falls to us to elaborate new reflec- tions to sustain new ways of inhabiting in common. Liminal states shelter beings in transition and becomings in creation which cannot be contained within fixed, pre-established structures and thus come to subvert them. To this extent, liminality takes on the fundamental, potentially fertile ambiguity of the interim between the not-anymore and the not-yet, clearing a space for the emer- gence of what overflows categories and institutions. In Tools for Conviviality, the phi- losopher Ivan Illich explores the potential for vernacular resilience in the pathological 364 Zygmunt BAUMAN, Liquid Modernity, John Wiley & Sons, 2013 (1999). 365 Here it must be noted that, while Victor Turner attributed a rather univocally positive connotation to liminal situations, perceived as ways of renewal, Zygmunt Bauman’s reflections on the liquidity of late Modernity recount increasing feelings of uncertainty, disorientation, a fleeting sense of self, and the unbearable burden of individual responsibility caused by a chaotic Nomadism. 195 context of an alienated institutionalization of society where technocratic elites have come to exert a radical monopoly, thus freezing the fluid liminality of life in society366. In this light, a rigid institutionalized society would prevent an apocalyptical dwelling in the event as kairos – the opportune time for action – and inhibit an engaged inhab- iting of the present: staying in the openness of worldly being requires the perpetual break-down of socio-political institutions, in order to clear a space of vernacular com- monality and resilience in which politics are embedded. If the ecological mutation appears as one such liminal state of transition, then what does it end? What is the environmental apocalypse breaking down, and what is it bringing about? The present crisis is named as such – a crisis – because it arises as an event which disrupts established processes and suspends unrestrained rhythms of extraction, production and consumption. How can we dwell amidst this disruption, and engage political actions rooted in the present event, within the time that remains? For Bruno Latour, the environmental mutation raises the radical question of durability and sustainability, and how to dwell in that which ends and continues: How can we manage to last, to maintain ourselves through existence, how can we master the time that flows? If there is a secret everyone desperately tries to solve, it is that of how to manage to dwell, to maintain, to obtain a continuity, a sus- tainability of societies against the end of the world.367 How to last in that which passes, and dwell in the time that remains? Such seems to be the present political challenge. In A World of Becoming, William Connolly describes the “human predicament” as the condition, both tragic and redeeming, whereby human 366 Ivan ILLICH, Tools for Conviviality, Boyars, 1973. 367 Bruno LATOUR, “Sur une nette inversion du schème de la fin des temps », paper for a conference on Les défis écologiques à la lumière du bien commun, Institut Catholique de Paris, April 2018. « Comment parvenir à durer, comment se maintenir en existence, comment discipliner, dompter le temps qui passe. » « S’il y a des secrets que tout le monde cherche un peu désespérément à trouver, c’est celui de parvenir à durer, à maintenir, à obtenir une continuité, une soutenabilité des sociétés contre la menace d’une fin du temps. » My translation. 196 agency is driven by a feeling of an inert restlessness amidst the unpredictable becom- ing of the world. Against this paralysis of our agency, Connolly reasserts the “urgency of today” and proposes developing our ability for “creative suspension”368 as a way to inhabit the unsettling pace of the perpetual apocalypse of the world. He thereby sug- gests embracing the disruption introduced by the environmental crisis as a welcome space of resilience and creation, whose disclosure is enabled by the advent of the pre- sent. For an eschatology of the present What type of eschatology do contemporary politics incarnate? Following the theologico-political postulate, modern secular political systems are the heirs of theo- logical systems, the latter include eschatological developments concerned with the fi- nal ends of history and the ultimate purposes of human actions. In both theological and secular cosmologies, eschatology is often closely linked to soteriology, the doctrine of salvation. Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin’s analyses of Gnosticism indicate for instance that gnostic eschatologies situate redemption in the annihilation of the present world, preceding the final advent of the realized eschaton – the post-historic world of God's apocalyptic reign. The two philosophers highlight the tendency of gnostic eschatolo- gies to escape the present world, and their failure to anchor the advent of the final ends in it. In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin notoriously conceptualized Gnosti- cism as the drive to immanentize the eschaton, that is, the desire to implement a policy in the purpose of overcoming the disorder of the world and fulfilling history. Voegelin identified indeed the root of the Gnostic impulse in the belief that lack of concord within society is the result of an inherent evil in the world, and that the disorder of the world can be transcended and finally overcome by the implementation of a certain policy or the consecration of a specific political realm. While the understanding of the 368 William CONNOLLY, A World of Becoming, op. cit., p.104. 197 immanentization of the eschaton as an attempt to “bring heaven down to earth” has served politically conservative purposes, as its popularization by conservative spokes- man William F. Buckley can illustrate369, there seems to be more subtlety to Voege- lin’s insight than what the latter formulation suggests. The Voegelinian claim ex- presses the diffuse feeling that modern politics, reduced to the application of a trans- cendent plan onto reality, has become the substitution of a non-world, a utopia, for the present world. But what exactly is wrong in the immanentization, the becoming-im- manent of something transcendent such as the Christian eschaton? For Voegelin, whose political philosophy is infused with a concern for the preservation of the met- axic tension of existence, the immanentization of the eschaton is another name for the pathological belief in an eidos of history, a meaning of history as an objectified whole370. For him, the problem of the eidos of history lies in the reduction of a matter of faith – the unknown course of history, the Christian transcendental fulfilment – to an immanent rationalization, thereby subjugating the mystery of existence and losing the metaxic tension between immanence and transcendence. As we have seen in chap- ter 2, the immanentization of the eschaton aborts the metaxic tension insofar as it ab- sorbs the transcendent in the immanent, thus putting an end to the tenuous tension of worldly existence. As we engage with this difficult insight of Voegelin’s, we should avoid at all costs the gnostic pitfall of interpreting the fallacy of the immanentization of the escha- ton as lying in the movement of immanentization itself: incarnation, embodiment, worldly being is not evil. It is an inescapable grace and miraculous condition, of which immanence and transcendence are two irreducible and indivisible dimensions. The im- manentization of the eschaton is indeed fallacious because it annihilates the transcend- ence in the eschaton: but the transcendentization of the eschaton would be as fallacious in subsuming its immanence! The illusion in the immanentization of the eschaton is thus precisely the belief that it needs to be immanentized, which implies that it is not 369 See William KRISTOL, “The Indispensable Man”, New York Times, 3.03.2008. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/opinion/03kristol.html Accessed 11.01.2019. 370 Eric VOEGELIN, The Collected Works, Vol.5: Modernity without Restraint, The New Science of Politics, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 2000, p.185. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/opinion/03kristol.html 198 immanent yet. But the eschaton, the ultimate end is immanent as much as it is trans- cendent to the world: it is eternally, perpetually present. Hans Jonas’ critique of modern nihilism, enriched by his perception of the lin- gering spectrum of ancient Gnosticism, also draws upon an analysis of the eschatology of modern politics. His need for a reflection on the meaning of worldly being – why should there be a world and how should it be?371 – leads him to foster a philosophy of finality maintaining the presence of ends within nature. The Jonassian teleology of nature thus proceeds from a critique of modern dualistic eschatology, which he be- lieves was inherited from a gnostic temporality opposing past fall and future redemp- tion and resulting in an escape from the present.372 Jonas’ ethics of responsibility forces us to break with a nihilist temporality pervading modern philosophy and systematically opposing present and non-present, whether the latter is idealized into a glorious past or a future redemption. Such an eschatology, Jonas suggests, insofar as it perpetuates an understanding of human existence as projected into a non-present, prevents us from perceiving the eschatological openness of the present world, and thereby also from experiencing the imperious sense of responsibility binding us to it. The dualistic es- chatology of modern cosmology thereby sanctions a rupture between the sphere of an incomplete present and the horizon of a future – necessarily non-present – redemption. It thus situates the telos, the ends in a future world whose only determination is to not- be. But this eschatological temporality opposing a vitiated present to a redemptive fu- ture is not inherent to all eschatological reflection on the final ends of worldly being. Jonas pleads for an eschatological thought which would not surrender to a gnostic conception of time, and summons us to bypass the binary opposition between present and non-present through a thought of eternity. In his lecture on “Immortality and the modern temper”, Jonas maintains that an eschatological thought of eternity conditions the necessary revalorization of the present against the contemporary “evanescence of 371 Hans JONAS, Philosophische Untersuchungen und Metaphysische Vermutungen, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, p.136. 372 According to my analysis of Gnosticism as the dualistic reduction of the metaxic tension of the world, the gnostic eschatology conveys a dualistic temporality opposing past and future, thereby subsuming the category of the present. 199 the present as the holder of genuine content”373, for “the loss of eternity justifies the loss of an authentic present” 374. The Jewish philosopher aims to maintain the impera- tive of an eschatological thought while overcoming the nihilistic, inherently gnostic temporality of modern eschatology exemplified in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger375. This modern eschatological dynamic highlighted by Jonas is particularly man- ifest in utopianism, which the philosopher assimilates to the modern ideology of pro- gress and therefore analyses as the pursuit of a fundamentally technicist and totalitar- ian enterprise. Jonas criticizes above all the paralyzing effect of utopianism which, perpetually projecting fulfilment into an idealized future, renders it unable to anchor one’s existence in, and to exert one’s responsibility towards, the present world. Uto- pian ideologies not only situate the eschaton in the future, that is, in a world non- present, a non-place, but also approach the final ends of worldly being as projected and implemented by human agency, thereby displaying a twofold nihilistic stance. Jo- nas denounces the danger of utopian idolatry in its blindness to the presence of the eschaton within the world, as well as in its totalitarian tendencies obscuring the funda- mental openness and perpetual emergence of worldly being. This idea can be found again in the philosophy of Jacques Ellul who, drawing upon Gabriel Vahanian’s cri- tique of technique, compares the techno-scientific utopia to a “fraudulous ersatz of eschaton”376 hindering its irruption in the present. In substantializing the yearning for 373 Hans JONAS, “Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism”, Epilogue to The Gnostic Religion, Beacon Press, Boston, 2001, p.338. 374 Hans JONAS, « Immortality and modern temper: the Ingersoll Lecture, 1961 », The Harvard Theo- logical Review, Vol. 55, No.1, Jan. 1962, pp.1-20. p.6. 375 Jonas argues that Heidegger’s existential analysis, borrowing its temporality from an eschatological scheme characteristic of modern thought, contributes to an escape from the present and ultimately leads to its annihilation: “The same cause which is at the root of nihilism is also at the root of the radical temporality of Heidegger's scheme of existence, in which the present is nothing but the moment of transience from past to future. If values are not beheld in vision as being (like the Good and the Beautiful of Plato), but are posited by the will as projects, then indeed existence is committed to constant futurity, with death as the goal; and a merely formal resolution to be, without a nomos for that resolution, becomes a project from nothingness into nothingness.” Hans JONAS, “Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism”, op,cit, p.338. 376 Jacques ELLUL, Théologie et technologie, Labor et Fides, Genève, 2014, p.240. 200 another world and situating the latter in a future beyond, utopianism would condemn the metaxic openness of worldly being and subsume the tension between immanence and transcendence. The mistake of utopian ideologies would lie in their failure to per- ceive, behind the realm of injustice dissimulating it, the hopeful eschatological pres- ence of the world. Jonas’ insight suggests that modern utopianism is driven by a gnos- tic hatred of the present world rather than by a loving concern for the world or a thirst for justice towards it. Utopianism embodies in Jonas’ eyes the gnostic yearning for a beyond-the-present-world, which he analyses as an escape from the responsibility to- wards a world thirsty for our caring inhabiting. As we elucidate Jonas’ critique of uto- pianism as an instance of modern nihilism, it becomes clear that his opposition to Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of hope is not radical, but rather suggests that the principle of re- sponsibility conditions the hope for future generations, and that no better world could ever arise without the committed exercise of an ethical responsibility towards the pre- sent world. In “Immortality and Modern Temper”, Jonas unfolds an eschatological thought conferring upon human action an eternal reach which transcends a merely linear per- ception of history. He thereby goes against a certain historical conception of eschatol- ogy, as promoted by Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel or Karl Marx, who all situate the irruption of the eschaton in the horizon of a future time.377 In asserting the eternity of historical action, Jonas’ eschatology dissolves the dualistic opposition between time and eternity and unveils the eschatological tension of the present. Jonas proposes in his lecture an understanding of the present as emerging at the crossroads between a horizontal, immanent time and a vertical, transcendent eternity. For the philosopher of the ethics of responsibility, the contemporary context of the end-time offers an unprec- edented opportunity to seize this eschatic dimension of the present: And in [the agony of infinite risk], eternity and nothingness meet in one: that the 'now' justifies its absolute status by exposing itself to the criterion of being the last moment granted of time. To act as if in 377 Hans JONAS, Prinzip Verantwortung, op. cit., p.227. 201 the face of the end is to act as if in the face of eternity, if either is taken as a summons to unhedging truth of selfhood.378 The only moment granted of time – the present –, as the vertiginous moment of reve- lation, decision and action, is the eschatological event. While the experience of the banality of absolute evil abolishes the idea of providential justice, Jonas takes on the urgent task of conceiving an eschatology of the present committed to this present world by unveiling its eschatological tension.379 This revalorization of the present in Jonas’ eschatological thought directly leads to a heightened sense of ethical responsi- bility towards the world and the preservation of one such tension. We find in the the- ological thought of Jacques Ellul the same idea of an « eschatic present »380 invested with an eschatological eminence and imminence in light of the unprecedented reach of our technical power. Unfolding the Jonassian legacy, Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s “enlight- ened doomsaying” also pleads for a rupture with Modernity’s linear temporality, ren- dered urgent by an ecological crisis summoning us every day to clear space for an eschatological action within an apocalyptical present381. Drawing upon Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin’s analyses, my reading of Gnos- ticism shines a light on contemporary political phenomena as variations of a common negation of the eschatological presence of the world, in the wake of the modern man- ifestations of Gnosticism identified by our two philosophers in utopian and totalitarian movements. While progressist utopias tend to externalize the eschaton into a trans- cendent beyond disengaged from the present world, as exemplified in the ideology of 378 Hans JONAS, « Immortality and modern temper: the Ingersoll Lecture, 1961 », art.cit., p.8. 379 Caterina REA, « Retrait de Dieu et question du mal, une lecture éthique du mythe de Hans Jonas. » in Revue Philosophique de Louvain. Quatrième série, Tome 100, N°3, 2002, p.546. 380 Jacques ELLUL, Théologie et technique, op. cit., p.242. 381 Jean-Pierre DUPUY, “Enlightened Doomsaying and the Concern for the Future” URL: http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/acd/re/k-rsc/lcs/kiyou/pdf_24-4/RitsIILCS_24.4pp.7-13DUPUY.pdf Accessed 11.01.2019. “The prophet of doom is not heard because his words, even if they issue from sound knowledge and true information, do not manage to penetrate the system of beliefs held by those to whom they are addressed. It is not enough to know in order to accept what one knows and then to act on it.” http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/acd/re/k-rsc/lcs/kiyou/pdf_24-4/RitsIILCS_24.4pp.7-13DUPUY.pdf 202 growthism, other forms of modern totalitarianism internalize it within the rationalized course of a strictly immanent history, as manifest for instance in the liberal dogma of development. I have highlighted the gnostic repression on a political level of a tension concurring with its existential and cosmological correlates, which I argue both Jonas and Voegelin’s accounts of Gnosticism emphasize in their respective ways. This po- litico-ideological repression of the metaxic tension lying at the core of Gnosticism, I suggested, reveals itself in the eschatological narratives conveyed in contemporary politics – for instance in the political ideologies of progress, development, or economic growth382. Contemporary political eschatologies, I argue, are motivated by and articu- lated around a radical yearning to escape the present world and the eschatological pres- ence of the world. As such, they cultivate a numbness towards the wild and perpetual emergence of worldly beings which results in an existential, cosmological and political alienation from the world. But such worldless ideologies thereby also wave toward the perspective of dwelling within a tensional present, embracing its apophatic unveiling and rooting ourselves deep into the obscure wilderness of the world as an alternative, subversive, potentially resourceful and resilient way of inhabiting, grounded in the fertile soil of the here and now. 382 The post-development theory provides a critical perspective upon the ideology of development, ex- hibiting the colonial origins of development policies and analysing the imperative for countries to “de- velop” as an imperialist dynamic aiming at the expansion of a western, neo-liberal agenda. See: Aram ZIAI (dir), Exploring Post-Development: Theory and Practice, Problems and Perspectives, 2007, Taylor & Francis e-Library. Arturo ESCOBAR, Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995. James FERGUSON, “The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development"”, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. 1990, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wolfgang SACHS, The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge as Power, 1992, London: Zed Books. 203 The Apocalyptical Imperative of Politics in the Open Dwelling in the open present “You have no right to despise the present” wrote Charles Baudelaire as a pre- cept in his famous essay “The Painter of Modern Life”383. As he advises his contem- poraries not to succumb to a modern temperament of disdain for the present world, the poet appears to capture the very existential stance of Modernity. This modern spleen of the present, as well as what it entails for contemporary politics, I have been striving to approach throughout this dissertation from the symbolic framework of Gnosticism. I have argued that gnostic forms of eschatology condition a political inhabiting deter- mined by the longing to escape present worldly being, and that one such longing shines a light on our involvement in the present ecological crisis. I have further suggested in the first section of this chapter that a return to the theologico-political category of the Apocalypse might enlighten our engagement with contemporary political mutations and inform an alternative inhabiting of a world of becoming focused on the present. “Proche est l’instant” – near is the moment that comes: in his translation of the Apocalypse of St John384, Jean-Yves Leloup interprets the revelation of the Apoca- lypse as the unveiling of what comes amidst the destructions, what arises in the col- lapse. His reading of St John’s Apocalypse highlights a hopeful and untameable pres- ence in the ever-nearing catastrophe, ever-advening apocalypse of the present ecolog- ical crisis. This presence revealed by the Apocalypse, I wish to illuminate as the topos and telos of politics. The question of belonging to this present is one that arises from the gnostic mal-être au monde, and the failure to dwell within worldly being and em- brace its metaxic becomings. Reflecting on Michel Foucault’s project to capture the task of modern philosophical thought, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari observe that 383 Charles BAUDELAIRE, Le peintre de la vie moderne. Œuvres complètes, tome III : L'art romantique , Calmann Lévy, 1885. 384 Jean-Yves LELOUP, L’Apocalypse de Jean, Albin Michel, 2014. 204 when Foucault admires Kant for posing the problem of philosophy in relation not to the eternal but to the Now, he means that the object of philosophy is not to contemplate the eternal or to reflect History but to diagnose our actual becomings: a becoming-revolutionary that, according to Kant himself, is not the same thing as the past, present, or future revolutions. 385 What is this « becoming-revolutionary », distinct and irreducible to past, present or future revolutions? « What becomings pass through us today? 386 ». Dwelling in the open presence of the world implies at once to embrace this interrogation while accept- ing that the answers to such questions shall always elude us. It therefore implies re- nouncing the gnostic appetite to conquer revolutionary becomings of worldly being – to rationalize, anticipate or implement them. A politics of the open present would ra- ther summon our capacity to care for the perpetual collapse, advent and blooming of the world. Therein lies the revolutionary character of its becomings: in its perpetual ending and emerging. Dwelling within the revolutionary processes of worldly being would thus foster an apocalyptical openness to the presence of the Now – the Kairos which eschews the sequential, historical Chronos – and might thereby restore a digni- fied, eschatological dimension of our inhabiting. For Bruno Latour, the apocalyptic turn of the ecological mutation brings us back to an eschatological present as it sum- mons us to “be in time and therefore in a condition of possibility”, to reclaim the pre- sent as time of the action, “against the idea of duration imbedded in practices of pro- gress.”387 The eschatology of the ecological mutation thus not only brings us down to earth, but also back to the present. Acting nonetheless Following his critique of Gnostic nihilism as generating an ethical disengage- ment and a tendency to escape the world, Jonas’ philosophy faces the major challenge 385 Gilles DELEUZE and Felix GUATTARI, What is Philosophy? London: Verso, 1984. p. 112-113. 386 Ibid. p.113. 387 “Anthropologists are Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology and Apocalypse”, in Bruno LATOUR, Isabelle STENGERS, Anna TSING & Nils BUBANDT, Ethnos, 2018, 83:3, pp. 587-606. Here p.18. URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2018.1457703 Accessed 11.01.2019 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2018.1457703 205 of elaborating an ethical thought that includes a reflective confrontation of evil without thereby falling into a rejection of the world. Namely, how to think an “ought” without denying the “is”, and how to condemn the evil deeds of this world without falling into the utopian pitfall that would celebrate an alternate world? Such is the challenge that arises from the Jonassian critique of dualistic eschatology mentioned earlier. Jonas intends indeed to think the immanence of the eschaton so as to grasp the intrinsic value of the earthly. The ethical transcendence of the eschatological imperative sketched in Jonas’ reflections roots itself indeed in the immanent presence of the world. The thought and implementation of one such ecological eschatology appears conditioned by a posture of caring openness towards the unceasing emergence and fulfilment of the ultimate purposes of worldly agency, this openness preventing the imposition of a monolithic ethics disengaged from the presence of the world and at odds with the al- ways unprecedented conditions of worldly being. Now – how to act and what to do? How to not despise the present, and how to resist the urge to break with it in order to escape a vitiated world? In a World of Be- coming, William Connolly presents the postmodern project as an effort to reach what Frank Chouraqui terms “an ambiguous awareness”388, and which we could understand as the metaxic experience of our inability to ground our actions into certainty, while gathering the strengths and hope necessary to act nonetheless. So how do we maintain such an awareness and move from our eschatology of the present to practical ethics informing a concrete inhabiting? The politics of the Apocalypse laid out in the first part of this chapter points toward a reconfiguration of the modern dialectic of imma- nence and transcendence. For Bruno Latour, the task is to “combine anew the figures of immanence and imminence, the ancestral sanctity of the world and the new urgency of not letting it disappear.” 389 This recombination of the figures of immanence and transcendence in an eschatology of the present arises along a blurring of the inside- 388 Frank CHOURAQUI, Review of “Pluralistic Sense-Making: A World of Becoming”, by William E. Connolly, The Agonist, Journal of the Nietzsche Circle, Fall 2011. p.3. 389 Bruno LATOUR, « Sur une nette inversion du schème de la fin des temps », art.cit. « Combiner à nouveaux frais les figures de l’immanence et celles de l’imminence, la sainteté ancestrale du monde et l’urgence nouvelle de ne pas le faire disparaître. » My translation. 206 outside polarity manifested with a particular intensity by the environmental crisis. Re- vealing acutely the deep entanglement of our actions and horizons of becoming, pre- sent ecological phenomena challenge the categories of our ethical thought – such as what defines the individuality and freedom of an agency, or how to frame the perimeter of its repercussions. With his imperative of responsibility, Jonas thus presented an eth- ical framework for the entangled agencies of worldly being. His contribution to an ethics for the technological age anticipates some of the challenges of Gaian politics in the ecological apocalypse: what should we do when the spectrum of our actions over- flows our capacity of representation, and the framework of traditional ethics is ren- dered obsolete by the unprecedented magnitude of our actions? How to act ethically from within an entanglement that overflows us? B. What we are bound to: ethics and politics of the earthbound390 While embracing the ethical imperative stemming from worldly being, the idea of the apocalyptical presence of the eschaton in the world does not evict the unbearable ethical question of how to inhabit the latter. Rather, it radicalizes it by perpetually renewing it. The politics of the apocalypse laid out in the previous section contains indeed the twofold challenge of avoiding both: -the temptation of a gnostic parousianism, understood as the expectation of the deliverance from evil through the advent of a superior state of immanent being – a second coming that would absolve the sins and sufferings of the present world, but also justifying a posture of apathy towards the latter. 390 In his Gifford Lectures, Bruno Latour coins the term « earthbound » to designate those beings whose attachments lie in the Gaian processes of the earth. He thereby aims to bypass the cosmological segre- gation between humans and non-humans, and unveil the political divisions and conflicting concerns dissimulated behind the notion of a unified humanity. See Face à Gaïa, op.cit, p.320. 207 -and the moral indeterminacy that follows from the abyssal openness of the present, as incarnated in the experience of an existential vertigo and threatening to descend into an ethical relativism. Both possibilities exemplify a common ethical nihilism rooted in a disentanglement of the self from the rest of the world, an alienation conveyed in the gnostic trope that worldly being is ontologically flawed, lacking goodness, structure or meaning. This dilemma outlines the eminent challenge of recovering the ontological generation of ethics within the openness of worldly being – in other words, of recovering a sense of ethical responsibility, an ethical bond across the abyss separating the modern self from the world, bridges built upon an endless river. Again, a major risk in this colossal enterprise would be to crystalize worldly becomings into an immutable ground for ethics, thus ignoring the latters’ radical open- ness and perpetual overflowing. Hypostatizations of the world and of a “non-world” alike exemplify variations of a same nihilism: some justifying the current state of the world as standing beyond all moral consideration, for the “laws of nature” provide themselves a standard of ethics, thereby falling into a blind and corrupted inertia solely preoccupied with the perpetuation of a deceptive worldview; others driven by the dream of a world that does not exist and committed to its advent – all failing to per- ceive the ethical call of the present world. This offers a glimpse of the difficulty of Donna Haraway’s injunction of “staying with the trouble”391 – of not escaping the ethical tension whilst the interpellation of worldly beings reaches through us. In this light, the grounding of ethics simultaneously appears as its failure for it also means its closure, a mummification draining all life out of an unremitting process of tying ethical bonds. And yet the omnipresence of the callings – irrepressible, which cannot be kept quiet. How to respond to them? What can we possibly answer to the funerary proces- sion of the bereaved orca who relentlessly carried the corpse of her dead infant for weeks through a sea of shameful indifference? How to honour the memory of the Ar- gentine farmworker Fabian Tomasi, who succumbed on the 7th of September 2018 to 391 Donna HARAWAY, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. op.cit. 208 the severe toxic polyneuropathy he contracted after a life-long exposure to agrochem- ical agents, including the popular glysophate-based herbicide “Roundup” widely com- mercialized by the agrochemical firm Monsanto? How to accept the judgment pro- nounced by the International Criminal Court of LaHaye, condemning Ecuador to in- demnify the multinational oil corporation Chevron as the latter refuses to claim re- sponsibility for the irreversible environmental and social damaged caused by oil spill- age and the contamination of water in Amazonia? The Constitutional Court of Ecuador had indeed endorsed a court decision in favour of a collective of indigenous villagers engaged in a legal fight against the oil company for 25 years.392 Examples of calls like these summoning our responsibility abound and pour every day. For William Connolly, responsibility arises as the only response to this pre- vailing moral nihilism. The political theorist summons us to face the planetary so as to “counter the “passive nihilism” that readily falls into place after people reject climate denialism”, by which he means “the formal acceptance of the fact of rapid climate change accompanied by a residual, nagging sense that the world ought not to be orga- nized so that capitalism is a destructive geological force.”393 Connolly does not fail to emphasize the organized dimension of such a nihilistic posture, interwoven into a web of various systematized strains as he indicates that “passive nihilism folds into other encumbrances already in place when people are laden with pressures to make ends meet, pay a mortgage, send kids to school, pay off debts, struggle with racism and gender inequality, and take care of elderly relatives.”394 Strains and alienations which turn us away from our worldly entanglements and prevent us from recovering a ver- nacular inhabiting. Connolly denounces the political organization of an estrangement from worldly processes along with the institutionalized obliviousness of our planetary entanglement through systematized mechanisms of distraction: “it is easy to become 392 Courrier International, “L’Equateur perd la bataille contre la multinationale Chevron”, 10.09.2018. URL: https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/lequateur-perd-la-bataille-contre-la- multinationale-chevron El Teléfrago, « Corte de La Haya falló a favor de Chevron en laudo contra Ecuador », 07.09.2018. URL: https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/politica/3/chevron-fallo-favorable-ecuador-lahaya Accessed 11.03.2019. 393 William CONNOLLY, A World of Becoming, op. cit., p.9. 394 Ibid. https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/lequateur-perd-la-bataille-contre-la-multinationale-chevron https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/lequateur-perd-la-bataille-contre-la-multinationale-chevron https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/politica/3/chevron-fallo-favorable-ecuador-lahaya 209 distracted from the implacable imbrications of capitalist and planetary processes as TV scandals, terrorism, action films, economic meltdowns, electoral circuses and ugly im- perial wars draw attention away.”395 Connolly thereby reports a process of coloniza- tion of our capacity for moral judgment and action – our response-ability –, an es- trangement similar to the mechanism of alienation and exploitation Marx described in the “reserve army of labour”, ensuring the workers’ submissive obedience to the cap- italist organization of labour. Connolly suggests here that the imperative of responsi- bility follows from our planetary entanglements, and that a recovered sense of these entanglements conditions a morally responsible inhabiting of the world. For an ethics of Entangled Responsibility I propose to consider the notion of responsibility as a potential resource in the immense challenge of responding to the moral interpellation stemming from our fellow worldly beings in the contemporary context of the Anthropocene. I argue that the idea of responsibility might prove an essential pillar for Gaian politics, and point toward a cardinal virtue to be cultivated in our times. Hans Jonas’ ethics of Responsibility fol- lows indeed from a realization of the extended scope of our actions and from a recov- ered sense of both the interconnectedness and precariousness of life on earth. For Bruno Latour, the “irruption of Gaia” in the Anthropocene acts as a colossal interpel- lation by heterogenous beings reminding us of our entanglement and stating their claim to existence. Furthering this perspective, Donna Haraway’s notion of response-ability expresses the urgency for us to become able to respond to what we add to, or take away from this Gaian world. Her emphasis on the overlapping subjectivities of the multi- species beings of a “wounded Terra” 396 suggest an alternative ethical paradigm artic- ulated around the imperative of co-presencing, remaining open and responsive to the sufferings of the others. Haraway’s ethics of response-ability thus implies to cultivate 395 Ibid, p.13. 396 Donna HARAWAY, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, p.115. 210 sensitivity towards the others, a “praxis of care and response”397 in the fragile contin- gency of our plural encounters. Donna Haraway summons us indeed to “make kin”398 – to become and compose with, tying ties with other earthlings. In this light, the ethics of responsibility appears as an ethics of alterity, ap- proaching the uncanny presence of unexpected Gaian others by embracing their trans- cendent immanence, the entanglement of their alterity with our identity, and the strange intimacy arising from our encounters. Like in Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of alterity, which explores the empirical experience of a transcendence stemming from face-to-face encounters and approaches it as transcendence-in-immanence399, the tran- scendence of the ethical imperative of responsibility is alive and arises in the interper- sonal confrontation with worldly others. Embracing the immanence of the other and the transcendence of the self, the Gaian ethics of responsibility proposes to dwell fur- ther in the abyssal depth of our worldly entanglements without succumbing to their reduction in polarities of immanence and transcendence, inside and outside. Amidst the abyssal openness unveiled in the Anthropocene and the climate of “indecisive ag- itation”400 it arouses, the ethics of Gaian response-ability ties bonds, weaves the earth- lings closer together and celebrates the ontological surprises of their embroideries. Such Gaian ethics might thus bridge the overwhelming ontological interdependency of worldly beings with their vertiginous openness, espousing in our engagements with other earthlings both the intimacy, alienness and openness of Gaian becomings. I wish to suggest that this idea of the joint intimacy, alienness and openness of Gaian entan- glements offers a refuge to the junction between eco-philosophy and theology. It res- onates indeed with an approach to the religious in terms of connection, embracing one of its potential etymological roots in the Latin “religare” – to bind, to tie together. Michel Serres proposes adding to this meaning another etymology in the Latin “reli- giens” – care, as opposed to neglect –, thus orientating religion towards a concern for 397 Ibid. 398 Donna HARAWAY “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”, En- vironmental Humanities, vol.6, 2015, pp.159-165. 399 Emmanuel LEVINAS, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, La Haye, Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. 400 Kim Stanley ROBINSON, 2312, London: Orbit, 2012. 211 the worldly.401 This concern for worldly entanglements thus convoked by the term religion – the concern to bridge the gap and mend the intimate distance firstly experi- enced in our engagements with worldly beings, and simultaneously caring for that very distance as the condition for a vital alterity – seems to concentrate the problematic of Gnosticism as I have proposed to approach it throughout this dissertation. The Gnos- tics faced the task of inhabiting a metaxic world of open entanglements as much as the Gaian beings of the Anthropocene now do. As they attempt to clarify the yet-to-be acknowledged complexity and originality of Gaia, Bruno Latour and Timothy Lenton qualify Lovelock and Margulis’ invention as apophatic402 – a term usually employed to express the ineffable and yet so intimate, so deeply felt distance from the divine. It appears that the same question of the link to the world, and how to inhabit this entan- glement, haunts the Gnostics as much as it haunts the Gaians. Much of the ethical question arises from this interrogation – how am I to act when I am entangled? Latour and Lenton suggest that the figure of Gaia renews the dialectic between freedom and necessity, thereby reframing traditional debates in ethics: Any human trying to situate oneself as “part” or “participating” in [the history of Gaia] can no longer be defined only as “free”, but, on the contrary, as being dependent on the same sort of intricate and intertwined events revealed by Gaia. More freedom in the domain of necessity is fully matched by more necessity in the domain of free- dom.403 In the light of Gaian entangled becomings, free and dependent do no longer appear as antonyms. Like any modern dualism targeted by Latour’s philosophy, they are one. Consequently, “freedom” can no longer be understood as a burden weighing upon the shoulders of the humans, alone emancipated from the realm of necessity. The paradig- matic shift introduced by Gaia lies indeed in its confluence of what I have proposed to think in terms of entanglements and their overflowing – a rooted openness merging 401 Michel SERRES, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson, 1995, pp. 47-48. 402 Bruno LATOUR and Timothy M. LENTON, “Extending the Domain of Freedom, or Why Gaia is so hard to understand”, to appear in Critical Inquiry. 403 Ibid, p.22. My emphasis. 212 intimacy with distance, inside with outside, alterity with identity. Only their conjunc- tion justifies the ethical imperative of responsibility in our entanglements: without a link, without an echo to our being, nothing to be responsible for – without a distance, no one to respond to. In their article, Latour and Lenton depict the distance between Gaian life forms not as the one, hermetic and paralyzing, erected between the realms of nature and culture, but the delicate, shifting and creative distance allowing for earth- lings to meet and do politics.404 I propose that an ethics of entangled responsibility – an ethics embracing the metaxic experience of our interdependent freedom and inti- mate distance – might bridge the apocalyptico-political imperative of an eschatology of the present with the rooted overflowing of Gaian becomings. Emphasizing a free- dom that blossoms upon our entanglements and along the extended scope of our agency – no longer approached in terms of individual entities but rather as ever un- folding connections – the ethics of entangled responsibility unleashes a breadth of ac- tion, and thus also of moral accountability, unanticipated by traditional ethics. It re- stores the abyssal depth and apocalyptical meaning of our inhabiting – without para- lyzing us with the existential burden of an unbearable responsibility, but spreading it onto all earthlings and thereby empowering us as the fellow weavers of Gaian becom- ings. The threads we contribute to weaving – we are responsible to. It is a collective, entangled responsibility. It is an ethics that proposes to redraw the connection, to mend the segregation of Gaian becomings interwoven into each other, to build bridges across worldly processes, and to care for the roots of the overflowing. In a reflection in moral philosophy published in the anthology Responsibility and Judgment, Hannah Arendt argues that evil has no roots. More specifically, it is the absence of roots and the failure to sustain and nurture a link which would allow evil to arise: The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back. For human beings, thinking of past mat- ters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur - the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has 404 Ibid, p.23. 213 no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and weep over the whole world.405 Arendt points here towards an ethics of the roots as what binds, what grounds and “stabilize”, what imposes limits to our actions. Surely the consideration of other Gaian becomings and the consequences of our trajectories upon them would provide certain ethical limits to our agency. Like the present day’s evils, the “greatest evil” Arendt struggled to think was a political one, one that still engages a collective responsibility. What kind of politics could assume the responsibility of entangled becomings – sus- taining the roots of their overflowing? From Gnostic towards Gaian politics In many regards, Gaia inaugurates a new definition of politics and polity, rais- ing anew some of its fundamental questions: what constitutes a political entity, what cohesive force brings its participants (human and non-human) together, to what extent fellow citizens of the world are bound to each other, which processes should we be attentive to? What is to be cared for, and by whom? The founding interrogation of political philosophy always revolves around the challenge of inhabiting a common world. Today the figure of Gaia revives such an interrogation. The task of unfolding the political meaning of a Gaian paradigm and its diverse consequences for the way we think and do politics goes way beyond the ambition and scope of this doctoral research. However, I do sense that the intrusion of an alternate cosmological paradigm, along with the proclamation of a new geological era, has to do with the unsustainability of the gnostic way of inhabiting the world which has been prevailing throughout Mo- dernity. The metaphor of Gaia shakes indeed modern representations of power, order and authority in so far as it abolishes the idea of dominion often conjured in modern 405 Hannah ARENDT, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn, Schoken books, New York, 2003. p.95. My emphasis. 214 systems of thought. Latour and Lenton thus remind us that the trope of the global is integrated into a political cosmology articulated around the medieval metaphor of the Body Politic: Any allusion to the Global is immediately fused with a social and political metaphor of the Body Politic. To see the polity as a big organism made of parts obeying the dictates of the whole, will be conjured at once in every description of order and system.406 Against this backdrop, Gaia disseminates the anarchist and radically democratic sense that living beings, while intricated with another, neither obey nor tend toward any su- perior order. In Gaia, living beings are proclaimed free and interdependent all at once, and are left to navigate the subtle and profound distance between each other. Accord- ing to its originator Lovelock, Gaia summons us to learn how to be “partners in a very democratic entity”407 – a very non-anthropocentric democracy. Gaia puts an end to man’s dominion over the earth and suggests instead a politics of the earthlings in- formed by an ethics of entangled responsibility and infused with the awareness of the créolité of worldly processes of becoming which untameably overflow borders of be- ings, species, nations, territories. Lynn Margulis fought relentlessly against the idea of isolated individual life forms, arguing with her holobionts that life forms cannot be separated from their outside, nor can life be approached as an atomic entity within its own distinct boundaries.408 Subverting political boundaries as well as cosmological segregation, Gaia as a figure of anti-imperialism provides a conceptual resource for cultural resistance to what erects walls and enforces an order that thrives on enclosures and confinements. As it unveils the presence of an overflowing profusion of complex- ity and alterity in the world, Gaia dismantles the construction of uniformity institution- alized in modern societies, along with the repression of alterity, the dis-animation of worldly being and the prosecution of all deviances. It invites us to sustain the presence of an unsettling alterity and to maintain the creative tension of our entanglement with 406 Bruno LATOUR and Timothy M. LENTON, art.cit., p.19. 407 James LOVELOCK, Gaia: A new look at life on Earth, Oxford University Press, 1979, p.145. 408 Lynn MARGULIS, Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1991. 215 them. Doing so, the figure of Gaia echoes the anticolonialism of Glissant’s philosophy of creolité, as well as his critique of the monolithism of European civilization409: against the monolithic hegemony of the Global spreading a diffuse alienation from the world, Gaia inspires a politics of belonging and inhabiting rooted in hybridity and re- lationality. The approach of micro-politics might notably assist those committed to mobilize such entangled agencies to recover their vernacular political power and sub- vert a centralized, uniform and unrooted source of authority. Summoning us to “immerse ourselves in instead of emancipating ourselves from the world”, Gaia rises as a metaphor of the anti-Gnostic as it reverses the gnostic yearning for a deliverance from our worldly entanglements and calls us to “learn to depend”410 on such processes. Unveiling an “emerging attachment to a multiplicitous world that exceed the stories” narrated in Modernity, Gaia entices a “creative rebel- lion”411 against the gnostic narratives which debilitate our engagement with and im- poverish our inhabiting of the world. 409 On Edouard Glissant’s critique of Europe’s monolithism and its systematic failure to integrate the other, see his interview by Rue89, 26.05.2008. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCMvmY7qaRA Accessed 11.01.2019. 410 Bruno LATOUR, “Sur une nette inversion du schème de la fin des temps », art.cit. 411 William CONNOLLY, A World of Becoming, op.cit., p.8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCMvmY7qaRA 216 C. Politics of radical love: the subversion in reclaiming a loving inhabiting of the world "Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.” — John 2:15-16 “Love will save this place” — Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything Dwelling with the trouble: embracing the world as home In this final section I wish to elucidate a hypothesis that has been emerging from the present research: the idea according to which the love of the world, in a cul- tural landscape so influenced by Gnosticism, is insurrectional insofar as it reverses the pervasive gnostic being in the world described in the first three chapters of this disser- tation. I suggest that loving the world and weaving an intimacy with it across the gnos- tic estrangement appears as a condition for reclaiming a resilient inhabiting. This love of the world may take on diverse forms. I propose to see one of them in the commit- ment to dwell – a verb I summon multiple times in this chapter: dwelling amidst worldly becomings, dwelling in transitions, dwelling in the endtimes… Dwelling in the sense of finding home in a world of estrangement, depletion and exile, in an earth which Donna Haraway describes as “full of refugees, human and not”, awaiting the 217 times that shall “replenish refuge” 412. In her account of the pioneering rewilding pro- ject that took place in West Sussex, Isabella Tree echoes this claim as she writes that “our skies have emptied” and “we are living in a desert”.413 To dwell, also, as becom- ing present to an ongoing Gaian process of inhabiting as co-penetration, as becoming sensitive to what we are inhabiting and what is inhabiting us. The verb itself appears to contain a certain polysemy. The meaning I propose to explore here lies in the action of staying: staying with the trouble, staying and accepting to be overflowed by the vertiginous openness of unknown worldly becomings, between the not-anymore and the not-yet. This kind of dwelling echoes the metaxic being in the world described by Eric Voegelin, one that resists the temptation to seize, to conquer, to reduce, to petrify and thereby escape the mystifying wilderness and confounding alterity that character- ize processes of worldly becoming. According to William Connolly, “the challenges of today solicit both an embrace of this unruly world and new political assemblages to counter its dangers.”414 – I submit that a major challenge to our contemporary inhabit- ing lies precisely in the urgency of our involvement in the world and the simultaneous surrendering to its overflowing trajectories of becomings. This echoes the reflections on the apocalyptic configuration of contemporary politics laid out in the first section of the present chapter: if the ecological apocalypse calls us to action, it also summons us to some extent to stop acting, to suspend some of the processes we have been in- volved in so as to clear a space for what is being unveiled. This idea, to which I will return later, sheds light upon the tension contained in the kind of dwelling that is being called for. This tension, I suggest, is to be dwelt in: namely, the urgency to act and stop acting. The necessity of our active commitment to the cessation of destructive behav- iours and of our complicit involvement in them. In this venture, dwelling with the trouble – to echo Donna Haraway’s invitation to stay with the trouble and making kin in the Chtulucene – also means resisting the gnostic urge to escape this unruly world by substituting for its enduring presence the quest for another world. Through con- sciously deciding to dwell within tumultuous worldly becomings, we might find that we need not domesticate, master, or subdue the world in order for another world to 412 Donna HARAWAY “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”, Environmental Humanities, vol.6, 2015, p.2. 413 Isabella TREE, Wilding. The return of nature to a British farm. Picador, 2018. p.4&10. 414 William CONNOLLY, A World of Becoming, op.cit, p.9. 218 arise: rather, the world is already full of the many worlds it contains, awaiting our involvement, full of an insurrectional love for the world, to blossom. Eschewing the gnostic ecophobia manifested in a globalized distrust for anything earthbound, envi- ronmental thinkers and activists have unanimously called for a re-localization of our inhabiting, a “coming down to earth” notably in our agricultural activity, as the per- maculture model illustrates. Based on an ethics of care and fair share, the core tenet of permaculture is to cultivate a sustainable, self-sufficient and harmonious engagement with local ecosystems. The model developed by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison thus provides a concrete example of an inhabiting fuelled with a love for the world and the diverse life forms that bloom with it. Ecovillages and transition towns offer further examples of an alternative inhabiting anchored in grass-roots community projects and aiming to achieve resilience and self-sufficiency in the fulfilment of fundamental needs such as housing, food-and energy- sovereignity, social interaction, work and leisure while preserving natural ecosystems. Their inhabitings represent fruitful at- tempts to reclaim a peaceful and sovereign engagement with worldly processes across the gnostic estrangement from the earth and the pervasive conception of the hostility of nature. Weaving an intimacy with the world “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” — John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir How to inhabit the world without thereby falling into an objectifying reduction of overflowing processes of worldly becoming into a monolithic and petrified concept? The pitfalls of the modern concept of nature warn us against one such temptation. The 219 figure of Gaia, on the other hand, proposes to take again into account the complex agencies of earthlings which the concept of nature had dis-animated as a prelude to the modernization project. One crucial challenge arising from the confrontation of the cos- mology of nature with a Gaian perspective thus lies in the renegotiation of our inhab- iting and the deployment of our agencies now that the agency of others is to be acknowledged and respected. It is not only a matter of finding a sense of home and belonging amidst the abiding strangeness of worldly processes of becoming, in a world suddenly filled with the enduring presence of others. It is rather a deep movement of co-penetration and co-inhabiting which the figure of Gaia reveals. Of this world of becoming, William Connolly writes that it is “neither our oyster nor our servant. Ra- ther we inhabit it, and we are inhabited by its multiple stabilities and volatilities” 415. In the Chtulucene, Gaia is not only asking: “what and who do we inhabit?” but also “what and who inhabits us?”. What does it mean to find ourselves contained in and overflowing planetary processes which are reciprocally also contained in and over- flowing our own trajectories of becoming? How to dwell in this chaos? Edouard Glis- sant argues that the modern colonial enterprise of globalization is driven by the fear of the dissolution and absorption of the self into the other. He proposes to subvert the subjugating dynamic of the mondialisation through the idea of mondialité, or worldli- ness, which dismantles the myth of a monolithic self and embraces differences and diversity as what brings us together in the Tout-Monde. Glissant thus claims that “we will have to come to this idea that, going to the others and changing with the others is not losing oneself, is not corrupting oneself”, before adding: “I believe the poets are leading this fight”.416 Inhabiting the créolité of a Gaian world suggests a form of mutual inhabiting somehow reminiscent of the relationship between the divine and the world described by process philosophers and theologians as one of creative co-fecundation bypassing the traditional polarity between immanence and transcendence. Whitehead expresses 415 Ibid, p.7. I emphasize. 416 Edouard GLISSANT, interview with Laure Adler, 2004. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttqh1iIk_pc. Accessed 11.01.2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttqh1iIk_pc 220 this tension inherent to cosmological dualism in his famous formulation of the ultimate contrasts characterizing the relationship between the concepts of God and the world: It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World. It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.417 I submit that the figure of Gaia today translates Whitehead’s intuition about the mutual inhabiting of God and the World into the terms of planetary, intra-worldly processes: this may appear even more clearly if the reader substitutes “God” by “the self” in the former quotation (which per se does no more than simply unveil the repartition in modern cosmology of divine attributes to the human self). Like Whitehead’s philoso- phy of process, the Gaia hypothesis provides a way out of the traditional issues of modern dualism, the latter struggling to characterize the miraculous interactions be- tween the hermetic realms of nature and culture, necessity and freedom, visible and invisible, rationality and morality etc. It suggests that these difficulties stem from the erroneous postulate of an estranged relationship, an estranged cohabitation between concepts perceived as antithetical. Hans Jonas thus advocates for an unsuspectedly “more intimate relationship between inside and outside which has to be imagined at the root of modern dualism”418. Likewise, when Donna Haraway imagines her Ter- rapolis, she creates a world in which “natures, cultures, subjects and objects do not pre-exist their intertwined worldings”419 – a world in which Terran processes of “be- coming with”, of “kin-making” are freed from such segregational conceptual struc- tures. The multi-species worlding she describes thus appears as a commitment to em- brace an ontological intimacy with all things and attune to processes of world-com- posing, to “the old-art of terraforming”420 in which companion-species are engaged. 417 Alfred North WHITEHEAD, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, New York, Free Press, 1978 (1929). p.348. 418 Hans JONAS, Organismus und Freiheit: Ansätze zu einer philosophischen Biologie, Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1973, p.184. 419 Donna HARAWAY, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, op.cit., p.13. I emphasize. 420 Donna HARAWAY, SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far, Acceptance speech for the Pilgrim Awards, 07.07. 2011. P.10. 221 The “always too much connection”421 of Donna Haraway’s Terrapolis directly con- fronts the sterility of a segregational structure of thought articulated around a cardinal abyss, a primordial rupture at the roots of dualism. Hers is an inter- and intra-inhabiting bridging the estranged being in the world of the Gnostics and echoing Virginia Woolf’s account of the fluidity and permeability of being in the world. According to Alan Chih-Chien Hsieh, Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out ima- gines an alternative mode of inhabiting set against the colonial context of the early 20th century and the ambient narrative of Western triumphalism. The literary critic analyses in the protagonist Rachel and her relationship to the world the embodiment of an “es- tranged intimacy with the world”422: By estranged intimacy, I mean a close relationship with the world, a togetherness, that is at the same time estranged because this being- in-the-world, emerging from encounters with others, is never an en- closed space but an open whole. Rachel’s estranged intimacy with the world thus anticipates the unexpected possibilities of life arising from our being-in-the-world, our situatedness within the living- world, our embodied experiencing of the world. It is always an intimacy, a coming-together, and at the same time an estrangement, an openness, that keeps the singularity of each being and retains contingency of every encounter. In her novels, Woolf is always in search of an interpersonal (even transcendental) connec- tion that does not curb the singularity of each being, a connection that I term an estranged intimacy with the world. Alan Chih-Chien Hsieh suggests that Rachel’s experience of life and her quest for connection registers a planetary love which embraces the process of becoming with the others, of both affecting and being affected by them, and remaining open to the URL: https://people.ucsc.edu/~haraway/Files/PilgrimAcceptanceHaraway.pdf Accessed 11.03.2019. 421 Ibid. 422 Alan CHIH-CHIEN HSIEH, “An Estranged Intimacy with the World: The Postcolonial Woolf’s Planetary Love in The Voyage Out”, in Virginia Woolf: Writing the World. Ed. Pamela L. Caughie and Diana L. Swanson. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015. pp.116-21. p.119. https://people.ucsc.edu/~haraway/Files/PilgrimAcceptanceHaraway.pdf 222 contingency of these becomings. Rachel’s initiation into colonial civilization ex- presses the irreducible experience of the indissolubility between interior and exterior: as she walks through a native village, Rachel’s encounter with the natives collapses the self-other binary. The planetary love Alan Chih-Chien Hsieh describes goes be- yond the restraints of traditional romantic love and the suffocating conception of bour- geois marriage: it arises rather from the estranged intimacy with the world, an “inter- connected yet indeterminate relationship with the world”423. Chich-Chien Hsieh draws upon the notion of “planetary” proposed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose Death of a Discipline urges us to imagine ourselves as planetary creatures rather than un- rooted global agents. She writes: “the globe is on our computers. No one lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan.”424 Mais nous sommes au monde425. Spivak’s thought of the planetary affirms the ineluctable alterity of that which we inhabit and which inhabits us in return, a transcendental alterity which “re- mains underived from us” but “contains us as much as it flings us away426”. Her ap- proach thereby reverses the gnostic posture of an ontological estrangement of the self, isolated amidst the radical strangeness of the world, and reasserts our embeddedness in the strangeness which contains us, which we contain and to which we belong. In- habiting the planetary is to be “intended toward the other”427, and the planetary love Alan Chih-chien Hsieh suggests is binding Rachel to the world is one rooted in her indeterminate relationship with other beings and the radical openness of worldly be- comings emerging from it. It is indeed a metaxic love embracing the twofoldness of our open entanglement with other planetary becomings and summoning us to maintain an estranged intimacy with those we inhabit. 423 Ibid, p.220. 424 Gayatri CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, Death of a Discipline, 2003, p.72. I emphasize. 425 Emmanuel LEVINAS, Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’extériorité, Poche, 1987, p.21. 426 Gayatri CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, op.cit., p.73. 427 Ibid. 223 In praise of weeds: clearing a space for hope in the world “We can have hope only in what is without remedy” — Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community. On January 17, 2018, French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe officially an- nounced that the French government had given up on pursuing the highly controversial project of building a new airport in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, western France. This de- cision came as the crowning achievement of five decades of a political, economic, legal and environmental struggle to protect a 2,000 acres-land of preserved forests and wetlands from awaiting colossal urban development projects. The site became a Zone a Défendre (ZAD)– zone to defend: what began as a small protest camp grew into a rural space of resistance and autonomous experimentation around a self-sufficient and sustainable inhabiting. Kept at bay for years by the collective movement, unprece- dented operations of destruction of the ZAD and eviction of its residents were launched by the government during the night of the 9th April, deploying an immoderate appa- ratus of militarized state violence illustrated in interminable lines of armored vehicles, tear gas, and some 11,000 offensive grenades thrown by the police within less than a week. The police announced that reporters were strictly forbidden throughout the op- eration and blocked their access to the site. What might possibly legitimate the deployment of such a disproportionate vi- olence against a thriving community drawing upon permaculture to harvest the land and restore a flourishing biodiversity? How could a grassroots community with its own bakery, cheesemonger, brewery, a weekly pay-what-you-want market, theatre spaces, newspaper, library and even a pirate radio station, represent such a threat to the state authority that it required to be repressed through one of the largest military operations deployed on the French territory since the students-protest of 1968? According to Da- 224 vid Graeber, what emerged from the ZAD was unbearable for it manifested the persis- tence of hope. A symbol of resistance to infrastructural projects and centralized power, the ZAD developed a laboratory of social experimentation on what a post-capitalist inhabiting could look like. In the violent repression of this peaceful and resilient in- habiting, the French state exhibited the totalitarian magnitude of its intolerance to any alternative form of inhabiting. Reciprocally, the commitment to live freely in a disci- plinary society uncovers the pervading omnipresence of oppressive structures. In “Hope in Common”, David Graeber describes the organized destruction in our cultural imaginary of all alternative trajectories to that consistently pursued by the global ne- oliberal governance for the past few decades. The anthropologist claims that the failure to imagine an alternative to the present status quo draws upon the edification of a vast bureaucratic and ideological apparatus ensuring the permanence of hopelessness.428 Against this institutionalization of hopelessness, the ZAD sowed hope and bloomed like weeds inside the walls of bureaucratic governance – resilient, persisting, local, versatile, free. Other weeds like the ZAD swarm everywhere, relentlessly overflowing the web of standardization and uniformization which, maintaining that there is no al- ternative, struggles to repress their presence. In praise of weeds, their manifesto calls for the spirit of resilience to spread with “the desire to open cracks everywhere”, em- bodying thereby the politics of the apocalypse which had introduced this final chapter: Cracks in the frenzy of security measures, cracks in the ecological disaster, cracks in the tightening border regimes, cracks in the om- nipotent surveillance, cracks in a world that puts everything up for sale. In these disenchanted times, the ZAD and all that it represents, like the struggles of yesteryear and elsewhere, is a glimmer of hope in the here and now.429 428 David GRAEBER, “Hope in Common”, 2008. URL: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-hope-in-common Accessed 11.03.2019. 429 “Defending the ZAD”, digital booklet written by the inhabitants of the ZAD. My emphasis. URL: https://mauvaisetroupe.org/spip.php?article143 Accessed 11.01.2019. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-hope-in-common https://mauvaisetroupe.org/spip.php?article143 225 The hope sowed by the resilient inhabiting of the ZAD is a hope that bloomed in what was without remedy, mending an alienated relationship with the world in the face of the irreparable and reinventing horizons of possible in the absence of alternative. The love of the world embodied in their inhabiting appears as a faith in the world, a “loving openness” in Voegelin’s words, an unyielding hope trusting worldly becomings to re- cover and create again. In Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, Isabella Tree recounts the leap of faith cardinal to the “Knepp experiment”, the pioneering rewilding project of her farm in West Sussex using free-roaming grazing animals as a way to restore an extraordinary flourishing wildlife. Stepping back from unsustainable prac- tices of intensive farming degrading the land’s biodiversity, Isabella Tree proposes to explore alternative forms of inhabiting informed by a posture of letting be, withdrawal and surrendering. “Rewilding”, she explains, “is restoration by letting go”, a process the author describes as “full of surprises”. “Extremely rare species, including turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons, woodpeckers and purple emperor butterflies, are now breeding at Knepp, while populations of other species are rocketing. The de- graded agricultural land has become a functioning ecosystem again, heaving with life – all by itself.” 430 Isabella Tree’s Wilding presents the love of the world as a posture of trust, faith and hope in its capacity for resilience, a love embracing the estranged intimacy of our inhabiting and clearing a space for other worldly becomings to emerge. In chapter 10 of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, Naomi Klein investigates local communities’ growing distrust towards the fossil fuel industry, sus- tained by a cultural concern before the extractive threat and the damages it would in- flict to the ecosystem. She quotes a goat-rancher from Montana, working together with indigenous people for the anti-fracking movement and their fight to protect south-east- ern Montana from mining companies such as Arch Goal: that connection to this place and the love that people have for it, that’s what Arch Goal doesn’t get. They underestimate that. They don’t understand it, so they disregard it. And that’s what in the end 430 Isabella TREE, op.cit. 226 will save that place. It is not the hatred of the coal companies, or anger, but love will save that place.431 As she engages with local communities involved in the fight for divestment, Naomi Klein uncovers a common concern arising across traditional political boundaries, a land-care pledged to the place they inhabit, and finds that what drives the people united against the oil pipeline project is a radical love for the world. Realizing the subversive power of this love, she warns those who might underestimate our attachment to the world: “when the extractive industry’s culture of structural transience bumps up against a group of deeply rooted people with an intense love of their homeplace and a determination to protect it, the effect can be explosive.”432 Politics begin in this love of the world, in the commitment not to resign from it: love is where we start from. 431 Naomi KLEIN, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2014, p.296. 432 Ibid, p.297. 227 CONCLUSION: COUNTERSPELLS FOR A RESILIENT INHABITING OF THE WORLD The counter-spell is simple: tell a different story — Starhawk, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising In a talk about the potential contribution of ecofeminism to the thought of the Anthropocene433, Emilie Hache affirms the need to relate differently the world we in- habit, what is happening to us, how we came to this point. With ecofeminism, she proposes to tell different stories. Stories, she claims, weave the world, constitute our inner architecture, make us stand. But sometimes stories fail to make us stand or be- lieve: they sometimes prevent us from moving as they distillate the belief that “there 433 Emilie HACHE, « Se réapproprier le champ de la longue durée. Contribution écoféministe à une histoire après l’anthropocène ». Séminaire « Esthétiques et pratiques de la terre » organisé par Thierry Drumm et Aline Wiame (GECo, ULB), Bruxelles, 23th of February 2017. URL : http://www.academia.edu/32922365/_Se_r%C3%A9appro- prier_le_champ_de_la_longue_dur%C3%A9e._Contribution_%C3%A9cof%C3%A9min- iste_%C3%A0_une_histoire_apr%C3%A8s_l_anthropoc%C3%A8ne_Bruxelles_ULB_2017 Accessed 23.01.2019 http://www.academia.edu/32922365/_Se_réapproprier_le_champ_de_la_longue_durée._Contribution_écoféministe_à_une_histoire_après_l_anthropocène_Bruxelles_ULB_2017 http://www.academia.edu/32922365/_Se_réapproprier_le_champ_de_la_longue_durée._Contribution_écoféministe_à_une_histoire_après_l_anthropocène_Bruxelles_ULB_2017 http://www.academia.edu/32922365/_Se_réapproprier_le_champ_de_la_longue_durée._Contribution_écoféministe_à_une_histoire_après_l_anthropocène_Bruxelles_ULB_2017 228 is no alternative”, no way but forward, no other path than the one we have been walk- ing. Stories paving our imaginary tell us that history is over434 - that there will be no more stories, that everything has been told. Doing so, they dictate a posture of obedi- ence, conformity and resignation. As we are prevented from recounting or inventing other stories, we are also prevented from inhabiting the world as well, as fully and as freely as we could aspire to. This thesis embraces the belief that new narratives and practices can arise from and through thought. It emerges as a celebration of poiesis, the creative potential of our intertwined worldings, unexpected encounters becoming fecund, resilient wander- ings. It has sought to investigate the significance of this creative potential for political life. Karl Marx taught us to always consider the primordiality of the material structure of society, social change being conditioned by specific modes and relations of produc- tion. His dialectical materialism emphasizes the radical entanglement of historical pro- cesses of emergence in a practical network of socio-economic ties. It thereby also re- asserts how much of our individual as well as collective trajectories is affected by the diverse constraints imposed upon us by a politico-juridical superstructure serving the interests of the dominant class. Yet this indisputable entanglement, our metabolic root- edness in worldly processes, as I have suggested in this thesis, is one that overflows dualistic thought patterns and could not as such discriminate the material from the ideal435. In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton thus contends that ecology dis- turbs the old regime of mind and matter.436 The dialectical dance between the concrete conditions of our inhabiting and the stories that both weave and recount them unveils a radical intimacy between the cultural and the ecological – an ontological hybridity 434 Francis FUKUYAMA, The End of History and the Last Man, Penguin Books, 1992. 435 The Marxist theory of social change identifies a dialectical relationship between structure and super- structure, or between matter and ideas, which is perpetually overflowed by the advent of transformation. Far from describing a deterministic and unidirectional relationship between discrete entities, where the economic base would exclusively dictate the political and cultural superstructure, Marx and Engels an- alyse a dialectical process of historical change involving “innumerable intersecting forces” in a recip- rocal causality : as violent as our enslavement to material conditions of subsistence may be, it remains nonetheless, at least to some extent, open to the contingent emergence of things that have never been. Friedrich ENGELS to Joseph Bloch in Königsberg, London, September 21, 1890, in Historical Materi- alism (Marx, Engels, Lenin), Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, p. 295. 436 Timothy MORTON, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2010. 229 that resists modern practices of purification. A reduction of this playful intimacy to the idealism – materialism debate would reveal a failure to appreciate the entangled com- plexity and creativity of processes of becoming, where thoughts arise with matter: through their surprising and enmeshed unfolding. Emphasising the immanence of spirit in matter and refusing their opposition in the binaries of Cartesian metaphysics, the New Materialist approach invites us to explore the monism of Baruch Spinoza as a fecund philosophical way. My engagement with the environmental transition pro- poses to dwell amidst the ruins of collapsing dualisms – including the one between idea and matter – and embrace the inextricable mystery of our metaxic worlding. An- alyzing the complex interrelations between discourse and matter, the discipline of Ma- terial Ecocriticism thus postulates that “all matter is a storied matter” and argue that material phenomena can be read and interpreted as stories437. The world both inspires our stories and emerges from them, as manifested in the way modern tales of progress are now inscribed in the sedimentary layers of the earth438. In this regard, the environ- mental crisis illuminates the kaleidoscopic dimension of our inhabiting in-between realms, where ideas meet matter, and summons us to explore unpaved roads in thought as well as on earth. What have we learnt from this hermeneutical journey in Gnosticism? Through- out this dissertation, I hope to have suggested something similar to what Emilie Hache is pointing toward in her talk: that it is possible to tell other stories. As it bathes our present cosmologies in an unexpected light and emphasizes the importance of meta- phors and narratives in our engagement with the environmental crisis, my hermeneu- tics of Gnosticism indicates that it is possible to renew the structures and categories of our thought. The perspective of Gnosticism contributes indeed to unveil both the 437 Serenella IOVINO and Serpil OPPERMANN (ed.), Material Ecocriticism, op.cit, p.1. 438 Jan ZALASIEWICZ, Colin N. WATERS, Juliana IVAR DO SUL, Patricia L. CORCORAN, Anthony D. BARNOSKY, Alejandro CEARRETA, Matt EDGEWORTH, Agnieszka GAŁUSZKA, Catherine JEANDEL, Reinhold LEINFELDER, J.R. MCNEILL, Will STEFFEN, Colin SUMMERHAYES, Michael WAGREICH, Mark WILLIAMS, Alexander P.WOLFE, Yasmin YONAN, “The geological cycle of plastics and their use as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene”, in Anthropocene, 13, 2016, pp. 4-17. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2016.01.002 Accessed 02.02.2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2016.01.002 230 strength and the contingency of the narratives ordering our inhabiting of the world. Throwing light upon a cultural imaginary of contempt for and estrangement from the world organized around a dualistic cosmology, my hermeneutics of Gnosticism invites us to reclaim the power of tropes both in uncovering present narratives and creating ones able to subvert the present order. If, as Bruno Latour and Timothy Lenton note while contemplating “why Gaia is so hard to understand”439, it appears as difficult to invent objects as it is to dis-invent them in order to repopulate the earth with new ideas, such seems to be the task of philosophy: to invent, dis-invent, and invent anew, to un- think and then start thinking again. The Gaian philosopher and the professor of Earth System Science write together: That we have no good concepts to describe [the present] situation is a proof that we relied too much on the usual repertoire coming from older amalgamation of political and biological order.440 The frustration that comes with the difficulty of telling new stories from within the tales of an obsolete order signals the limits of these narratives and the presence of a looming idea that is arising with the ecological mutation. In Gnosticism as in Gaia, what is worth thinking is precisely what eludes us: the fluttering tension, the unspeak- able riddle. In this chiaroscuro arise the monsters441, Gramsci tells us. But what do 439 Bruno LATOUR and Timothy M. LENTON, “Extending the Domain of Freedom, or Why Gaia is so hard to understand”, art. cit. 440 Ibid. 441 Antonio GRAMSCI, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoared, trans. Geoffrey Nowell Smith, New York, International Publishers, 1992. p.175-176. This popular quote by Gramsci is a liberal translation from the original Italian: “La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati”. A more literal translation would read as such: “Crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears”. While Gramsci’s reflection was written between 1926 and 1935 during his incarceration by the Italian fascist regime in Turi’s prison, his words do not fail to evoke the present ecological transition arising along contemporary phenomena of collapse and burgeoning, of lingering fascist tendencies across the world, declining state authority and rising popular protests, environmental loss and resilience, decomposition and recomposition. The open horizon described by Gramsci in a time of political inbetweenness echoes the liminality of the present times, as environmental destruction suspends the trajectory of many worldly beings over an abyss of uncertainty. The term “monsters” is particularly evocative of the tentacular creatures of the Chthulucene, uncanny more-than-human companions of chaos with whom we must learn to dwell within the precarious multi-species worldings left open by the environmental crisis. 231 these monsters tell us between an old world and the new? My approach to the present ecological mutation through the mythological perspective of Gnosticism is also a way to divert from a certain tendency to hold on to reason as the only way to possibly engage with the world. Taking one step back from the rationalist paradigm infusing modern approaches to the environment, my hermeneutic approach to the ecological issue suggests embracing another type of engagement with the world, informed by an apophatic posture. Latour and Lenton thus observe that studying Gaian phenomena parallels the study of God, notably in the feeling of awe-inspiring ignorance they might arouse: Strangely, defining such a phenomenon requires a sort of “negative geology” reminiscent of the apophatic ways that theologians had recourse to when trying to probe God’s uniqueness. Just like God, the Gaian world disclosed along the environmental mutation cannot be quite said, nor can it be exhausted. A major profanation of the gnostic cosmology I hope to have at least instigated in this dissertation is thus to bring together these two unreconcilable poles that are God and the world. This radical dualism between God and the world is indeed one main tenet of Gnosticism which I argue needs to be deconstructed and overcome. As Latour’s study of Gaia shows, when opponents to Gaia discard Lovelock’s invention for adding life, agency or even divinity to earth processes, they betray their own preceding operations of dis-animation and de- divinization of the world – what Voegelin described as a beheading of being. What makes the divinization of the world so blasphemous to the contemporary opponents of Gaia? Could it be the ethical imperative that would directly flow from this reconciliation, that of a radical responsibility binding us to the world? In her foreword to the French translation of John Baird Callicott’s Genesis442, environmental philosopher and ethicist Catherine Larrère mentions Modernity’s estrangement from both the ideas of God and the world. She suggests that the contemporary reluctance to engage with these two ideas indicate the explosive and subversive potential held by 442 John Baird CALLICOTT, Genèse. La Bible et l’écologie, Wildproject, 2009. 232 the possibility of their union. For Gilles Deleuze, the remedy and “our most difficult task” 443 is “to discover and restore belief in the world, before and beyond words” 444. A transcendental belief in the miracle of life on earth, a faith, an intimacy, a hope, a love of the world that was lost somewhere along the way. My research raises this question: how did we lose faith in the world? How might the hermeneutics of Gnosticism provide an answer? Against a gnostic culture of rupture, distance and estrangement, a systematic devaluation of the world and a permanent, insatiable longing for an elsewhere, I have proposed to embrace what is overflowing in the world through a resumption of the modern dialectic of inside and outside. « A more intimate relationship between outside and inside has to be imagined at the beginning of dualism445 » advises Hans Jonas. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et l’Obstacle, the literary critic Jean Staro- binsky formulates the hypothesis that western Modernity is driven by a hatred of me- diation, of the abyss separating the meaning from the sign.446 This hatred of mediation resembles the Gnostics’ fear of the opacity, of the space left open, the distance between things and the liminality characterizing our inhabiting of the world. I have suggested in this thesis that what is repressed in Gnosticism indicates the potential resources of the in-between, of the metaxic, the queer – everything that overflows and subverts modern binaries. The significance of the hermeneutics of Gnosticism presented in this research unfolds right there, hinges on the gnostic aversion to our metaxic entangle- ment in the world. Proposing to elucidate the gnostic obsession with dualistic segre- gations, with a systematic practice of purification between the sacred boundaries of being, the hermeneutics of Gnosticism dives in the abyss of metaxy and offers to delve in the obscure liminality abhorred by the Gnostics. The hermeneutics of Gnosticism thus becomes creative and resilient when it offers to explore what gnostic narratives 443 Gilles DELEUZE and Felix GUATTARI, What is Philosophy? London: Verso, 1994 (1991), p.75. 444 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London: Athlone Press, 2000, p.172. 445 Hans JONAS, Evolution et liberté, Payot & Rivages, Paris, 2000, p.236. My translation. 446 The biography examines the life and writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau through the prism of the tension between the quest for transparency and the necessity of obstruction, that is, between the open- ness towards the other and the withdrawal within, between the pull towards social life and the familiar exile into inner life. 233 tend to obstruct, when it lingers over the cosmological repression disclosed in Gnosti- cism. What I have termed the hermeneutics of Gnosticism investigates gnostic tropes which reveal as they conceal, asks how they might cooperate, lending themselves to perpetual reinterpretation to perhaps illuminate the present allegories of our inhabiting. The Hermeneutics of Gnosticism presented in this research aims to offer an interpretation of Modernity where the gnostic tropes of a radical estrangement from the world reveal an obsessive fear of the in-between and our intimate involvement in it. A major contribution of my analysis is to connect the gnostic contempt for the world with a cosmological dualism organizing a structural estrangement between worldings, traditionally isolated in polarized realms (such as nature/culture, object/subject, organ- ism/environment, self/other etc). I have suggested that the segregative tropes pervad- ing modern dualism disclose the ever-present challenge of inhabiting in-between these realms, in other words, of dwelling in the watery trajectories of becoming through which the world is being created. In this regard, the reflections unfolded through the prism of Gnosticism inquire into the depth of the dualistic abyss and what it gathers – revealing as it aims to conceal the depth of a world of chaos and creation. Gnosticism invites us to a mirror game, a play of light and shadow around polarities and what they both disclose and obstruct: with Jonas, it draws our attention to the issue of dualism as one of inhabiting the world; with Voegelin, it helps us to diagnose a cultural repression of the “metaxic tension”, shedding light upon a cosmological inhibition which also arises as an obsession. The hermeneutics of Gnosticism thus tells a story of the queer, a deeply-felt in-betweenness, omnipresent in the modern imaginary – albeit under the mode of repression. Following Catherine Keller, who dwells upon the watery depths of creation and exposes a cultural fear of the deep pervading the western Christian tradition447, I suggest that gnostic narratives disclose a fear of the in-between. Leaning over the edge of an abyss, mesmerized by an obscure openness, Gnosticism draws our attention to our unfathomable entanglement in the world and the creative overflowing of the deep in-between. 447 Catherine KELLER, Face of the Deep: a Theology of Becoming, op.cit. 234 The movement embraced by the Hermeneutics of Gnosticism is therefore not a beyond, nor an overcoming: rather, it digs deeper within, chooses to stay with the trouble, to dwell further in the tension and inhabit this ubiquitous in-between. It com- mits to explore a chaotic openness as the dark side of modern dualistic cosmology, to venture in the obscure and embrace the repressed. I regard the figure of Gaia as one eminent example of the alternative stories which can arise to embrace a radical experience of entanglement which Gnosticism abhors. Gaia offers an alternative to the gnostic narratives of estrangement from the world: an enthusiastic decomposition of the traditional categories of dualism, it tells the dissolution of the boundaries between life and its environment. For Bruno Latour, Gaia is a figure of pluralism superseding the nature-culture dichotomy with the prolif- eration of non-human and hybrid agencies. Dispersing intentionality and eventfulness beyond the human realm, Gaia embodies the resistance to the dis-animation of the earth. Doing so, it collapses the political cosmology of nature along with its truncated vision of the alterity of the world. The tale of Gaia therefore provides a prominent illustration of a narrative that dwells in the chaotic inbetween and embraces the limi- nality approached in our hermeneutics, specifically unraveling the organism-environ- ment, parts-whole and inside-outside dichotomies. It articulates the queerness, the con- fuse profusion of our attachments and the hybridity of our entangled worldings. An allegory of heterarchy – an organization where the elements are unranked or possess the potential to be ranked different ways –, Gaia also allows to politically navigate this liminality through weaving anarchist reflections into the collective challenge of an ecological transition. The hermeneutics of Gnosticism and Gaia are thus complementary narratives. The former modestly presents a diagnosis, points toward a few cosmological mechanisms that hinder the unfolding of a sustainable inhabiting, suggests the ubiquitous challenge of inhabiting in-between and summons the cardinal dimension of metaphors for think- ing through this perpetual challenge. The prism of Gnosticism also teaches us to dis- mantle unmoveable certitudes and appeals to a collective and continuous movement of creation renewing the modalities of our inhabiting at the edge of uncertainty. Gaia 235 initiates a cosmological reconstruction through a reconfiguration of the figures of earthly agency, away from the modern order of nature. The treatment of Gaia by au- thors such as Bruno Latour or Isabelle Stengers exemplifies what a metaphor or a mythological figure can summon in terms of philosophical and political reflections around the ecological transition. Through the metaphor of a rooted overflowing, I also submit my own trope in the hope of expressing the tensional condition from which and through which we emerge and inhabit these Gaian trajectories of worlding – in a cloud of possible, deep entangled and wide open. I have also argued that a transdisciplinary approach to a complex world of overflowing was required to subvert the disciplinary structures dictated by modern dualism and resist the pervading ways in which we are being continuously divided. Disciplinary confinements are political, insofar as they sustain segregational infra- structures of power. One of these confinements, as we have seen, isolates the religious from the secular. I have suggested throughout this thesis that religious and spiritual modes of inhabiting assume a cardinal role in generating new narratives and practices in response to the ecological transition. Committed to a re-sacralization of the world – human and non-human – and embracing the language of metaphors, contemporary pa- ganism cultivates diversity in the perception of the divine. Goddess-centered religions subvert for instance the templates of patriarchal oppression through the celebration of a divinity that divert from the traditional attributes of patriarchal authority – unique, distant, abstract, disciplinarian, transcendent – to offer a figure of abundance, healing, nurturing, diversity, immanence and sensuality. In her Gaia and God448, Rosemary Radford Ruether draws upon the legacy of the Christian cultural heritage to illuminate an “ecofeminist theology of earth healing”, summoning the transformative and biophi- lic elements in this heritage as a precious legacy that should be isolated from the fall into patriarchy and sacralized domination. When they engage morally and politically for the ecological transition, contemporary spiritualities as well as mainstream reli- gious traditions bear the potential for a substantive subversion to the secular order. The 448 Rosemary Radford RUETHER, Gaia and God. An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing, Harper- Collins Publishers, New York, 1992. 236 Alliance of Religions and Conversation was thus founded in 1995 with the aim of fostering collaborations between the world’s major faiths and key conservation organ- isations, encouraging the development of faith-based environmental programmes re- flecting a diversity of beliefs and practices. Empowering religious institutions and peo- ple of faith to advocate for the changes they wish to implement in society, the Green- faith coalition claims furthermore that “protecting the Earth is a sacred act, and that environmental stewardship is a moral responsibility”.449 Initiatives like these illustrate the potential for resilience held in religious and spiritual modes of inhabiting: they display a recovered sense of our common earthboundedness and operate at the junction between ideas and practices. As the ecological transition opens a space for dialogue where opportunities arise for fecund encounters between beliefs contained on the fringe of the secular order, it also summons a diversity of traditions and modes of inhabiting – as illustrated in multi-faith climate gatherings – to crusade for that to which they hold dear. Their ecospiritual commitment to “reconnecting with the sacred and the earth”450, provided it sustains a dedicated care to preserve a diversity of ways of inhabiting and resists the modern tendency to unify the earth, appears as a vow to Gaian worldings. Ecofeminism arises as another successful attempt to address the gnostic suspi- cion toward mediation through its dedication to weaving knots and building bridges across a culture of distance. The Women’s Pentagon Action in November 1980 is em- blematic of this movement of mending, as some 2.000 women peace activists marched to the Pentagon to weave yarn across the entrances of the building to symbolically reweave the web of life. This peaceful weaving constituted an ultimate act of defiance to the workplace of an imperial and nuclear power threatening life on earth through a predatory relationship to the world. In their aptly named unity statement, the women who rose to defend and protect an endangered world declare: “we understand that all is connected… we are connections made of blood and bone. We women are gathering because life on the precipice is intolerable.”451. The women of the Pentagon Action 449 Greenfaith website. URL: https://greenfaith.org/mission# Accessed 02.02.2020 450 Ibid. 451 Unity Statement of the Women’s Pentagon Action, November 1980. URL: http://www.wloe.org/WLOE-en/background/wpastatem.html https://greenfaith.org/mission http://www.wloe.org/WLOE-en/background/wpastatem.html 237 appear to have fully embraced the subversion of reclaiming their connection to the world and their caring love of life. Rising to celebrate and defend what binds us to- gether and to the world, they sought to literally heal the rupture organized from within the Pentagon and recover from an alienated relationship to the earth. “Life on the prec- ipice is intolerable” – life on the edge of the abyss, in the ruins of capitalist destruction, life in the end-time. As she reflects on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins and the modalities of inhabiting these ruins through collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, Anna Tsing proposes to see the present environmental collapse as a love affair gone bad between humans and plants452. What a perfect depiction of the impos- sible love affair between Gnosticism and the world! Our dwelling in the world is a continuous love affair – one that can be resumed and mended, one we can grow from. How to “create hope on the edge of the abyss”453? Uncovering the gnostic time of progress as one of constant projection into the non-present, my reflections culminate into a call to heal our estranged inhabiting through reconnecting to the world we in- habit here and now. This call is echoed today notably by ecofeminists and people iden- tifying as witches. The ecofeminist witches presented by Emilie Hache454 as a figure of redemption for our times propose to reclaim a connection with what was separated by capitalism in order to dissolve its power, finding and recreating a proximity with the world we live in. She writes: reactivating the history of the burning of witches during the Inquisi- tion as a way of engaging the Anthropocene reminds us that the dou- ble denigration of women and nature lies at the heart of th[e] chang- ing world [of Modernity]. It reminds us that capitalism does not like women – free, independent, powerful; nor does it like us to sacralise the earth – the whole earth, not only a few spaces deemed “virgin” or “wild”455 Accessed 26.01.2019. 452 Anna LOWENHAUPT TSING, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2015. 453 Isabelle STENGERS, « Fabriquer de l'espoir au bord du gouffre. A propos de l'œuvre de Donna Haraway », La Revue Internationale des Livres et des Idées n°10, mars-avril 2009. 454 Emilie HACHE, « Tremblez, tremblez, les sorcières sont de retour! Ecrivaines, philosophes, activistes et sorcières écoféministes face au dérèglement climatique. Récit écoféministe de l’anthropocène », Col- loque Comment penser l’Anthropocène?, 5‐6 novembre 2015. 455 Ibid, p.6. I translate. 238 For Emilie Hache, the figure of the witch embodies the survival of a resistance against the stories and practices imposed upon us, namely against the modern imagi- nary enforced by the Inquisition and the alienated relationship to the world it dictates. In her words, the ecofeminist witches claim that « the phobias of the Moderns and of Capitalism are not ours, and do not correspond to anything anymore. Everything is to invent again in the new ecological situation that is ours. 456» With her and with them, I summon us to resist the barbarous becomings of today and create other possibles by casting counter-spells against the gnostic imaginary that pervades a toxic inhabiting of the world: by reclaiming our power to think, create and tell other stories. 456 Ibid, p.7. I translate. 239 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES For more clarity and consistency, I chose to organize this bibliography by chapters. 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Videographic resources: Institut du Tout-Monde, Rue 89 – Edouard Glissant, 2009, 31.01.2013, URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCMvmY7qaRA Accessed 11.01.2019. Other resources: The inhabitants of the ZAD, “Defending the ZAD”, digital booklet. URL: https://mauvaisetroupe.org/spip.php?article143 Accessed 11.01.2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCMvmY7qaRA https://mauvaisetroupe.org/spip.php?article143 work_3lpbwiog5ncxjhy3arrkag3cs4 ---- E U R O - P O P : T H E M E C H A N I C A L B R I D E S T R I P P E D B A R E I N S T O C K H O L M , E V E N by P A T R I K L A R S A N D E R S S O N B . A . , The U n i v e r s i t y of B r i t i s h C o l u m b i a , 1991 M . A . , The U n i v e r s i t y of B r i t i s h C o l u m b i a , 1993 A T H E S I S S U B M I T T E D I N P A R T I A L F U L F I L L M E N T O F T H E R E Q U I R E M E N T S F O R T H E D E G R E E O F D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y i n T H E F A C U L T Y O F G R A D U A T E S T U D I E S (Department of Fine Arts) W e accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F B R I T I S H C O L U M B I A February, 2001 © Patrik Lars A n d e r s s o n , 2001 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of ff^^ A^-T^ The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada DE-6 (2/88) A B S T R A C T The f o l l o w i n g dissertation concerns the emergence of a new 'open art' i n N e w Y o r k , Paris and Stockholm between the years 1954 and 1966. I look at three artists i n particular; N i k i de Saint-Phalle, Jean T i n g u e l y and P e r - O l o f Ultvedt, whose w o r k has v a r i o u s l y been categorized as N e o - D a d a , Assemblage A r t , N e w R e a l i s m , N o u v e a u Realisme and Pop A r t . In m y reconsideration of these movements, a number of 'different' interests emerge w h i c h challenge existing histories of this p e r i o d . By opening u p an international perspective from the m a r g i n of this c u l t u r a l discourse — specifically the fraught p o s i t i o n of a m u s e u m of m o d e r n art i n S w e d e n — I show that by 1962 a number of European and A m e r i c a n artists and intellectuals h a d not o n l y managed to construct a collaborative environment for international avant-garde art, but some h a d also begun to reject this institutionalization o n the grounds of difference. B y focusing o n the d y n a m i c curatorial strategies of Pontus H u l t e n at Stockholm's M o d e r n a Museet, I explore the difficulties inherent i n the institutionalization of P o p A r t . In this process, the reintroduction of M a r c e l D u c h a m p p l a y e d a crucial role i n establishing a n e w canon of m o d e r n art i n both Europe and the U n i t e d States. A s I reveal, it was i n S t o c k h o l m — what m a n y considered the p e r i p h e r y of the art w o r l d — where D u c h a m p ' s w o r k was most clearly a n d r i g o r o u s l y articulated for a larger discursive realm i n Paris and N e w Y o r k . T r a c i n g a range of p h i l o s o p h i c a l a n d p o l i t i c a l differences between artists, critics a n d curators, I show h o w the activities initiated at M o d e r n a M u s e e t were central i n rearticulating the postwar avant-garde for the centre. i i TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract i i Table of Contents i i i List o f Illustrations v A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s x Introduction 1 Chapter O n e Intending Utopia or Expressing Depression: H o w to F i n d M o v e m e n t i n A r t 8 O u t e r Spaces: D r e a m s o f C o l l e c t i v i t y i n P a r i s a n d S t o c k h o l m 8 I n n e r S p a c e s : I n d i v i d u a l E x p r e s s i o n s a n d t h e I d e o l o g y of P r e p a r e d n e s s 23 H u l t e n ' s A n a r c h i s t T h r e a d : S t i r n e r , D u c h a m p a n d T i n g u e l y 36 A N e w M u s e u m a n d a N e w R e a l i s m 60 Chapter T w o M o v e m e n t i n A r t Goes Pop 82 A r t i n M o v e m e n t a n d H u l t e n ' s A c a d e m y o f P l a y 83 S t o c k h o l m ' s N e w Y o r k C o n n e c t i o n a n d The Art of Assemblage 95 L a b y r i n t h s o r L a b o r a t o r i e s : C o l l a b o r a t i o n s a n d t h e Dylaby D i v i d e 114 A m e r i c a n i z i n g t h e N e w O p e n A r t : N e o - D a d a G o e s ' P o p ' 123 S p a c e s o f M a s q u e r a d e : G e t t i n g the S t o r y " S t r a i g h t " 135 i i i Chapter Three T h e Mechanical Bride Stripped Bare i n Stockholm, E v e n 143 L o v e and Despair: The C o m p r o m i s i n g Success of M o d e r n a Museet 1961-1965 144 N e u t r a l i t y , Independence, Internationalism: The C u l t u r a l F o r m a t i o n of C o l d W a r Politics i n S w e d e n 154 F o u r Articles: U l f Linde's C r i t i q u e of O p e n A r t 159 Icarus and Fighter Planes: T o w a r d s an Inner and Outer Space She: a Cathedral: The Striptease Begins 183 Epilogue Connections, Rejections and M o d e r n a Museet's Collection. 208 Illustrations B i b l i o g r a p h y 213 316 i v LIST O F I L L U S T R A T I O N S Fig. 1 Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages, 1913 Mixed media assemblage, p. 213 Fig. 2 Gouache renditions by Rudolf Persson of Gunnar Asplund's Fairground at the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, 1929. p. 214 Fig. 3 Otto Carlsund, Composition for the Einstein Observatory in Potsdam, 1924-25 Oil on Canvas 141x75 cm. p. 215 Fig.4 World Sports Exhibition, Stockholm, 1949. p. 216 Fig. 5 Olle Bonnier, Theme, 1949 Oil on Canvas 120x150 cm. p. 217 Fig. 6 Lennart Rodhe Paket i langa banor The Postal Office, Ostersund, 1952. p. 218 Fig. 7 Cover Design of Art d'aujourd'hui by Olle Baertling. p. 219 Fig. 8 V i k k i n g Eggeling, Diagonal Symphony, [detail] 1921, film-roll. p. 220 Fig. 9 Michel Ragon's article on Swedish and French Stamps in Cimaise. p. 221 Fig. 10 Torsten Renqvist, Windswept Bush, O i l on Canvas 31x51 cm. p. 222 Fig. 11 Martin Holmberg, Traffic Milieu: Human Near a Wide Stretching Boulevard with Heavy Traffic, 1952, Bronze Sculpture, p. 223 Fig. 12 Sebastian Roberto Matta Echaurren, The Being Opens Itself, 203x295 cm O i l on Canvas, p. 224 Fig. 13 Jean Fautrier, Otage, 1944 O i l and Mixed Media on Canvas, p. 225 Fig. 14 Pontus Hulten's balancing act. p. 226 Fig. 15 Le Mouvement, Galerie Denise Rene. p. 227 Fig. 16 Bruno Munari, Useless Machine, 1951 Mixed Media, p. 228 Fig. 17 Jean Tinguely, Meta-Malevich, 1955. p. 229 Fig. 18 Kasmir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, ca. 1915. p. 230 Fig. 19 Henri Michaux Bataille, 1952. p. 231 Fig. 20 Jean Tinguely, Meta-matic Drawing Machine, 1955. p. 232 v Fig. 21 Pontus Hulten and Hans Nordenstrom, Scenes from En Dag i Staden, 1955-58. p. 233 Fig. 22 Per-Olof Utlvedt, Geometric Mobile Ballet Decor, Spiralen, 1954. p. 2 3 4 Fig. 23 Per-Olof Ultvedt, Nam Ogat, Stills from film. p. 235 Fig. 24 The Exercise House, Moderna Museet. p. 236 Fig. 25 Moderna Museet, front facade, p. 237 Fig. 26 Sebastian Matta at Moderna Museet. p. 238 Fig. 27 John Cage performing at Moderna Museet, 1960. p. 239 Fig. 28 Jean Tinguely, Hommage a New York, 1960 Mixed Assemblage, p. 2 4 0 Fig. 29 Nouveau Realiste Manifesto, p. 241 Fig. 30 Jacques de la Villegle Boulevard St Martin, 1959 Decollage. p. 2 4 2 Fig. 31 Daniel Spoerri, The Trash Basket is Not Arman's 1 9 6 1 , Mixed Media Assemblage, p. 243 Fig. 32 Arman, Large Bourgeois Trash, 1960, Mixed Media Assemblage, p. 2 4 4 Fig. 33 Invitation Card/Can for Arman's exhibition Full-Up at Iris Clert Galerie. p. 245 Fig. 34 Yves Klein walking in Le Vide at Iris Clert Galerie. p. 246 Fig. 35 Jean Tinguely throwing his manifesto Fur Statik out an airplane window, p. 247 Fig. 36 N i k i de Saint-Phalle shooting/creating one of her paintings, p. 2 4 8 Fig. 37 N i k i de Saint-Phalle Tir Mixed Media Assemblage Painting, p. 249 Fig. 38 Bewogen Beweging at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1 9 6 1 . p. 2 5 0 Fig. 39 Rorelse i konsten at Moderna Museet, 1 9 6 1 . p. 251 Fig. 40 U l f Linde and Marcel Duchamp putting the finishing touches to The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1961. p. 2 5 2 Fig. 41 Oscar Reutersvard, U l f Linde, Carlo Derkert, Pontus Hulten and Marcel Duchamp. p. 253 v i Fig. 42 Robert Rauschenberg shooting one of Niki de Saint-Phalle's Tir paintings in Stockholm, 1961. p. 254 Fig. 43 Alexander Calder's giant mobile outside the entrance of Moderna Museet. p. 255 Fig. 44 Robert Miiller, The Bicyclist's Widow Mixed Media Assemblage, p. 256 Fig. 45 Harry Shunk Yves Klein, The Painter of Space Throws Himself into the Void, 1960 photomontage, p. 257 Fig. 46 Museum goers looking baffled at the opening of 4 Amerikanare at Moderna Museet, 1962. p. 258 Fig. 47 Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-58. p. 259 Fig. 48 Robert Rauschenberg, Door, 1961. p. 260 Fig. 49 Ingemar Johansson and Floyd Patterson, Life Magazine, p. 261 Fig. 50 Concert/Performance at the Theatre de l'Ambassade des Etats- Unis, Paris, 1962. p. 262 Fig. 51 N i k i de Saint-Phalle and Jasper Johns at Saint-Phalle's opening at Galerie J . , Paris, 1962. p. 263 Fig. 52 Robert Rauschenberg, This is a Portrait of Iris Clert if I Say So, 1961. p. 264 Fig. 53 Edward Kienholz, The Psycho-Vendetta Case, 1960 Mixed Media 58.5x56.5x43 cm. p. 265 Fig. 54 Jean Tinguely, Study for the End of the World , No.], Performance/spectacle at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 1962. p. 266 Fig. 55 Jean Tinguely, Study for the End of the World, No. 2, in the Nevada Dessert, 1962. p. 267 Fig. 56 N i k i de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and John Cage exchanging pleasantries before Saint-Phalle's shooting performance, M a l i b u , California, 1962. p. 268 Fig. 57 N i k i de Saint-Phalle and Edward Kienholz, Malibu, California, 1962. p. 269 Fig. 58- Niki de Saint-Phalle, O.A.S., 1962, Mixed Media, p. 270 Fig. 59 Niki de Saint-Phalle, Autel du chat mort, 1962, Mixed Media, p. 271 Fig. 60 Participants in The Construction of Boston, 1962. p. 272 v n F i g . 61 S a i n t - P h a l l e , T i n g u e l y and a s s i s t a n t i n s i d e S a i n t - P h a l l e ' s s h o o t i n g g a l l e r y at Dylaby, S t e d e l i j k , A m s t e r d a m , 1962. p. 273 F i g . 62 N i k i de S a i n t - P h a l l e , King Kong, 1962, M i x e d M e d i a . p. 274 F i g . 63 The New Realists e x h i b i t i o n at S y d n e y Janis. p. 275 F i g . 64 L e t t e r f r o m S a i n t - P h a l l e and T i n g u e l y to U l t v e d t . p. 276 F i g . 65 P e r - O l o f U l t v e d t , Manhattan, 1962. p. 277 F i g . 66 P e r - O l o f U l t v e d t , C a r o l y n B r o w n and R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g i n Pelican, 1962. p. 278 F i g . 67 N i k i de S a i n t - P h a l l e , Pirodactyl de New York (New York Alp), 1962, M i x e d M e d i a A s s e m b l a g e , p. 279 F i g . 68 N i k i de S a i n t - P h a l l e on the c o v e r o f Life Magazine. p. 2 8 0 F i g . 69 The Museum of Our Wishes, 1963-64. p. 281 F i g . 70 American Pop Art: 106 Forms of Love and Despair, M o d e r n a M u s e e t , 1964. p. 282 F i g . 71 Poster for American Pop Art: 106 Forms of Love and Despair, 1964. p. 283 F i g . 72 M e r c e C u n n i n g h a m ' s D a n c e C o m p a n y p e r f o r m i n g Summer space at M o d e r n a M u s e e t , 1964. p. 284 F i g . 73 R a u s c h e n b e r g p e r f o r m i n g i n The Elgin Tie at M o d e r n a M u s e e t , 1964.p. 285 F i g . 74 D e m o n s t r a t i o n a g a i n s t A m e r i c a n i n v o l v e m e n t i n V i e t n a m , S t o c k h o l m , 1965. p. 286 F i g . 75 A m e r i c a n H e l i c o p t e r L a n d i n g i n V i e t n a m , 1966. p. 2 8 7 F i g . 76 D e t a i l f r o m U l f L i n d e ' s first a r t i c l e i n Dagens Nyheter. p. 288 F i g . 77 A b s t r a c t d r a w i n g s b y Jean T i n g u e l y a n d Y v e s M i c h a u x . p . 2 8 9 F i g . 78 James R o s e n q u i s t , F-lll, 1965 28 x 2.5 m . , o i l on canvas and sheet m e t a l , p . 2 9 0 F i g . 79 P a b l o P i c a s s o ' s Guernica at M o d e r n a M u s e e t , 1956. p. 291 F i g . 80 The Inner and Outer Space: an Exhibition Devoted to Universal Art, 1965. p. 292 F i g . 81 N i k i de S a i n t - P h a l l e Nana Power seriegraph, 1970. p. 293 F i g . 82 N i k i de S a i n t - P h a l l e , Clarice, 1965. p. 294 v i i i Fig. 83 Jean Tinguely at work on Eureka 1964. p. 295 Fig. 84 Jean Tinguely, Dissecting Machine 1965. p. 296 Fig. 85 Per-Olof Ultvedt, Hommage a Christopher Polhelm, 1965. p. 297 Fig. 86 Robert Rauschenberg and Oracle, 1963-66. p. 298 Fig. 87 Cover of Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, 1951. p. 299 Fig. 88 Niki de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Per-Olof Ultvedt, Hon-en katedral, 1966 Mixed Media Assemblage, p. 300 Fig. 89 Jean Tinguely, Machine for the Production of Broken Glass, 1966 * Mixed Media Assemblage, p. 301 Fig. 90 Utlvedt working inside of Hon-en katedral, 1966. p. 302 Fig. 91 Three Spreads from Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects New York: Bantam Books, 1967. p. 303 Fig. 92 U l f Linde's Fake Paintings and art gallery inside Hon's leg. p. 304 Fig. 93 Exhibition catalogue/newspaper for Hon - en katedral, 1966. p. 305 Fig. 94 Duchamp's Plan and Elevation for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1913. p. 306 Fig. 95 Destruction of Hon-en katedral, 1966. p. 307 Fig. 96 Jean Tinguely, Radio Stockholm,\966 Mixed Media, p. 308 Fig. 97 Marcel Duchamp Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1948-49, Painted Leather on plaster relief 50x31 cm Collection of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, p. 309 Fig. 98 Marcel Duchamp The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [reconstructed copy by U l f Linde, 1961. p. 310 Fig. 99 Martial Raysse Elle, 1962. p. 311 Fig. 100 N i k i de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Per-Olof Ultvedt Hon - en katedral, 1966. p. 312 Fig. 101 Hulten removing Hon's head, 1966. p. 313 Fig. 102 Marcel Duchamp, Why Not Sneeze, 1921. p. 314 Fig. 103 N i k i de Saint-Phalle and Jean Tinguely, he Paradise fantastique on the roof-top of the French Pavillion at Expo '67 in Montreal, Canada, p. 315 i x A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S This dissertation owes its existence to the encouragement, insight and critical comments p r o v i d e d by numerous people. In particular, I w o u l d like to thank m y thesis advisor Serge G u i l b a u t for trusting a Swede to write his o w n bit of art history. Guilbaut's k n o w l e d g e of E u r o p e a n and A m e r i c a n postwar culture has been stimulating and crucial. This topic got its start i n a seminar class at the U n i v e r s i t y of B r i t i s h C o l u m b i a taught b y John O ' B r i a n . O ' B r i a n ' s r i c h comments a n d patient support since this time has been u n w a v e r i n g . M a u r e e n Ryan's excellent advice and critical approach to d i s c i p l i n a r y questions of art history has equally kept me o n m y toes. I also want to thank m y colleagues i n the Fine A r t s department at U . B . C . for their h e l p f u l comments. In particular I want to thank Joseph M o n t e y n e and Shep Steiner for their ability to balance p h i l o s o p h i c a l rigor w i t h a critical sense of h u m o r w h e n reading earlier drafts of this paper. I am most grateful to J u d i t h Steedman for her support. N o t o n l y d i d she p r o v i d e valuable comments on each draft of the dissertation, but she kept me sane throughout the process. For their help and encouragement at early stages of this paper I w o u l d also like to thank G r a n t A r n o l d and S y l v i a M u s t o . I must also thank Mary-Jane C o w a n for her valuable comments at the last stage of this project, a n d special thanks to Josephine Jungic at C a p i l a n o College for first i n t r o d u c i n g me to this discipline w e call A r t H i s t o r y . M o s t of m y information regarding the subject was acquired d u r i n g m y visits to Stockholm i n 1992, 1993 and 1999. This research c o u l d never have been accomplished w i t h o u t M a r i e and A n d e r s Selin, along w i t h C h r i s t i n e R y d g r e n , w h o not o n l y p r o v i d e d accommodation, but friendship and support. I think ultimately it was because of them that I chose to write from the 'margin' rather than the 'centre.' A l s o i n S t o c k h o l m , the generous hospitality p r o v i d e d by A n n - M a r i e and P . O . U l t v e d t can not be overstated. I also want to thank U l f L i n d e for g i v i n g me his o w n 'inside' perspective i n t o - - D u c h a m p ' s w o r k . F i n a l l y , a n d b y far most importantly, I w o u l d like to thank m y parents, U l l a and C a r l - D a v i d , for their continued support. Patrik A n d e r s s o n N o v e m b e r 2000 x: I N T R O D U C T I O N Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist o n the one hand, and o n the other the spectator w h o later becomes the posterity. To a l l appearances, the artist acts like a m e d i u m i s t i c being w h o , from the l a b y r i n t h b e y o n d time and space, seeks his w a y out to a clearing. (Marcel Duchamp The Creative Act, 1957) In 1914, M a r c e l D u c h a m p completed Three Standard Stoppages [fig. 1], a 'readymade' art w o r k w h i c h came to function as his o w n m e a s u r i n g system.. for future w o r k — i n particular The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23). B y h o l d i n g a one meter l o n g thread i n a straight h o r i z o n t a l line at the height of one meter, and a l l o w i n g it to freefall three times onto canvas, each time p r o d u c i n g a slightly differently s w e r v i n g line, D u c h a m p illustrated his understanding of the 'creative act' w h i c h he called "the coefficient of art" — an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed. M e t a p h o r i c a l l y speaking, the thread 'falls' into the w o r l d of representation m u c h as speech falls into language. P r o d u c i n g three chance configurations, Three Standard Stoppages afforded D u c h a m p the tension necessary to b u i l d a bridge between the rational w o r l d of scientific methods and the poetic accidents of everyday life. It is not b y accident, however, that D u c h a m p chose to repeat this creative operation three separate times. A s D u c h a m p once e x p l a i n e d , "For me the number three is important" ... "one is unity, t w o is double, d u a l i t y , a n d three is the rest."1 O r p u t another w a y : "1 a unit / 2 o p p o s i t i o n / 3 a series." 2 ^Francis M . N a u m a n n " M a r c e l D u c h a m p : A Reconciliation of Opposites" i n D e D u v e , T h i e r r y The Definatively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp C a m b r i d g e : M I T Press, 1991, p.55. 2 Ibid.. 1 The f o l l o w i n g dissertation is also b u i l t around the number three. This is partly intended, partly by accident. Just as D u c h a m p chose three threads i n order to question the accepted authority of the meter, m y three chapters act as threads that r u n parallel to accepted standard accounts of the emergence of a new 'open art' i n N e w Y o r k , Paris and Stockholm between the years 1954 and 1966. I look at three artists i n particular: N i k i de Saint-Phalle, Jean T i n g u e l y and Per-Olof U l t v e d t , a l l of whose w o r k has v a r i o u s l y been categorized as N e o - D a d a , Assemblage A r t , N e w R e a l i s m , N o u v e a u Realisme and P o p A r t . These artists and movements have, of course, been discussed by a plethora of art historians and biographers whose vocations range from connoisseurship to social criticism. W h i l e m y three chapters weave their w a y t h r o u g h m a n y of these accounts, i n the end, they arrive at a different historical understanding. In fact, some of m y readers may want to argue that I haven't got the story 'straight.' By rearranging the material found i n the archives of this history of art, as w e l l as i n t r o d u c i n g n e w material, m y account challenges existing histories of this p e r i o d b y o p e n i n g u p an international perspective from the edge of this c u l t u r a l discourse. B y stressing the centrality of the m a r g i n i n the formation of the center, this narrative reintroduces p h i l o s o p h i c a l a n d p o l i t i c a l tensions w h i c h have, u p u n t i l n o w , been reduced, covered u p , or s i m p l y ignored. A t the center of m y thesis is Stockholm's M o d e r n a Museet, an institution w h i c h , soon after opening its doors i n 1958 to its S w e d i s h p u b l i c , found itself at the center of a highly-charged contemporary debate about the post-war position of the avant-garde. B y fostering an 'open art' distinctly 2 m o d e r n and international i n character, the m u s e u m found itself f l y i n g straight into the bright spotlight of international recognition o n l y to find out, like Icarus, that the s u n can b u r n like napalm. B y piecing together the historical fragments this passage left b e h i n d , I show h o w and w h y M o d e r n a Museet, d u r i n g the early sixties, was transformed into a tightrope suspended between E u r o p e a n and A m e r i c a n c u l t u r a l institutions. It was o n this precarious 'string' that a European and A m e r i c a n postwar avant-garde w o u l d find an early meeting place but also discover its differences. In order to set the stage for the s u d d e n institutionalization of international avant-garde art i n Stockholm d u r i n g the early sixties, m y first chapter, entitled "Intending U t o p i a or Expressing Depression: H o w to F i n d M o v e m e n t i n A r t , " brings to the surface a thick discursive context w h i c h h a d , by the early fifties, a l l o w e d numerous intellectuals i n S w e d e n to enter into a cultural dialogue w i t h continental Europe — i n particular the P a r i s i a n art w o r l d . The central issue i n this exchange was art's ability to either be integrated into a collective social environment or w i t h d r a w n into an expression of the i n d i v i d u a l psyche. F o l l o w i n g this debate i n S w e d e n directly before and after W o r l d W a r II, the first part of this chapter gives an o v e r v i e w of the p r o v i n c i a l isolation w h i c h S w e d i s h as w e l l as other disenfranchised intellectuals i n Paris were forced to confront. But it was also w i t h i n this p o l e m i c a l context that independent positions were b r o k e n free. B y the m i d - fifties, the activities of S w e d i s h art historian a n d curator Pontus H u l t e n stood out as an exception. In fact, b y the early sixties H u l t e n , as director of a n e w and h i g h l y v i s i b l e m u s e u m of m o d e r n art i n S t o c k h o l m , managed to t u r n the S w e d i s h art w o r l d 'upside d o w n ' and open the door for anarchic artistic 3 practices that q u i c k l y s p i l l e d over into an international p u b l i c arena of m o d e r n art. Starting w i t h H u l t e n ' s s m a l l but significant 1954 e x h i b i t i o n Le Mouvement at Galerie Denise Rene i n Paris, and e n d i n g w i t h his first large- scale blockbuster e x h i b i t i o n Movement in Art at M o d e r n a Museet i n 1961, the second part of m y first chapter explains h o w and w h y an independent space managed to be carved out in between the art w o r l d ' s centre and periphery. In this process, the reintroduction of M a r c e l Duchamp's particular form of D a d a w o u l d serve as a genre-breaking tool box. H i s interest i n machines, movement, i r o n y a n d chance encouraged not o n l y H u l t e n , but artists such as T i n g u e l y , Saint-Phalle and U l t v e d t , to develop a dialectical framework in w h i c h their o w n i n d i v i d u a l identities c o u l d emerge against the state of m o d e r n art. This posturing, I propose, was historically g r o u n d e d i n the writings of M a x Stirner, a mid-19th century radical i n d i v i d u a l i s t whose obscure and o n l y book The Ego and His Own (1845) was an early a n d p o w e r f u l anarchist critique of representation. Just as this w o r k h a d become a s t u m b l i n g block for 19th century social Utopian thinkers such as M a r x and Engels, I show h o w Stirner's rejection of revolution i n favour of rebellion became the l i n k between D u c h a m p and a number of his 'bachelors.' M y second chapter, entitled Movement in Art Goes Pop, opens w i t h a c o m p a r i s o n of t w o 1961 exhibitions: Movement in Art, at Stockholm's M o d e r n a Museet, a n d The Art of Assemblage, at N e w Y o r k ' s M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t . Movement in Art w i l l be l o o k e d at as H u l t e n ' s first major attempt at m a k i n g p u b l i c i n d i v i d u a l forms of c u l t u r a l p r o d u c t i o n p r e v i o u s l y located in the 'gap' between art and life. This exhibition was v i t a l to b r i n g i n g 4 the private discourse of a small m a r g i n a l i z e d postwar avant-garde into the broader c u l t u r a l arena of international art. O f specific interest to me is the w a y this new 'open' art was defined and argued over i n S w e d e n a m o n g an ' o l d guard' at the S w e d i s h R o y a l A c a d e m y of A r t , an emerging y o u t h culture informed by the p o p u l a r press, and an increasingly v o c a l N e w Left. Contrasting this S w e d i s h institutionalization of open art w i t h N e w Y o r k ' s M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t ' s Art of Assemblage e x h i b i t i o n , I s h o w h o w these two p i v o t a l events, despite their similarities, were motivated by different p o l i t i c a l and p h i l o s o p h i c a l agendas. W h i l e exhibitions such as these brought A m e r i c a n s like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage into collaboration w i t h Europeans such as Saint-Phalle, T i n g u e l y and U l t v e d t , it also led to unresolvable conflicts w h i c h were rooted i n social, p h i l o s o p h i c a l and sexual differences. Just as M o d e r n a Museet and The M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t c o u l d be said to have entered into a battle over the 'gap' i n m o d e r n art, the aforementioned artists w o u l d find their i n d i v i d u a l a n d collective identities contested. A t the center of this chapter is the role these various forms of open art h a d i n the s u d d e n institutionalization of a distinctly A m e r i c a n P o p A r t i n 1962. M y t h i r d chapter, The Mechanical Bride Stripped Bare in Stockholm, Even, brings into clear relief the connection between this aforementioned O p e n A r t and C o l d W a r politics i n Sweden between the years 1962 and 1966. For artists like Saint-Phalle, T i n g u e l y and U l t v e d t , to balance o n the tightrope that had been suspended between E u r o p e a n a n d A m e r i c a n c u l t u r a l institutions i n 1961 w o u l d b y 1962 have become a h i g h l y precarious act. Just as these artists were forced to retreat back to their E u r o p e a n roots as a response to seeing their i n d i v i d u a l identities falling into collective positions 'fixed' b y 5 an increasingly N e w Y o r k centred art w o r l d , M o d e r n a Museet, under the leadership of Pontus H u l t e n , was pressured to change direction. W h i l e this institution appeared to have achieved reputable international attention and strong p u b l i c support from its S w e d i s h audience, the o p t i m i s m that h a d s u r r o u n d e d i n i t i a l exhibitions s u c h as Rorelse i konsten and Four Americans w o u l d soon be understood by insiders as a false start. A s we w i l l see, as the S w e d i s h - A m e r i c a n conflict over V i e t n a m began to heat u p i n 1965, M o d e r n a Museet found itself forced to reconcile its artistic activities w i t h the p o l i t i c a l reality outside its o w n doors. T a k i n g a particularly close look at four articles published i n the S w e d i s h press i n opposition to the N e w Y o r k avant-garde by art critic and D u c h a m p historian U l f L i n d e , I show h o w significantly different and strenuous the personal, p o l i t i c a l and p h i l o s o p h i c a l interests i n the avant- garde had become b y the spring of 1965. The second half of this chapter considers two exhibitions: Inner and Outer Space: An Exhibition Devoted to Universal Art a n d She - a Cathedral. A s I w i l l show, the former exhibition served as an attempt to 'clean house' after the false start H u l t e n recognized M o d e r n a Museet to have taken between 1961 a n d 1965. She - a Cathedral returns us to the collaborative w o r k of Saint-Phalle, T i n g u e l y and U l t v e d t w h o i n 1966 constructed their m o n u m e n t a l , albeit tongue-in-cheek, attack against collective A m e r i c a n experiments i n art and technology. M e a s u r i n g 23.5 x 6 x 10 meters, "She" [Hon] was a giant female figure that lay headless o n her back inside M o d e r n a Museet. W i t h her legs spread and knees pointed u p w a r d s , She was entered for a p e r i o d of three months by a continuous c r o w d that l i n e d u p to see and experience the 'spectacle' she embodied i n the form of a three-storied amusement park. 6 C e n t r a l to this discussion is the sexual politics She embodied. I use this sculpture n o t ' o n l y to show h o w these three artists, along w i t h M o d e r n a Museet, h a d engaged i n a critical masquerade i n order to reorient their i n d i v i d u a l identities, but also to show h o w Sweden had, i n embracing a new - set of sexual politics, by the mid-sixties managed to reconstruct its 'inner and outer spaces' towards a new sexualized c u l t u r a l image that made it distinct from an A m e r i c a n liberal ideology. In other w o r d s , this dissertation is as m u c h about sex and politics as it is about art. 7 C H A P T E R I I N T E N D I N G U T O P I A OR EXPRESSING DEPRESSION: H O W T O FIND M O V E M E N T IN A R T To set the stage for the s u d d e n institutionalization of international avant-garde art i n Stockholm d u r i n g the early sixties, I need to b r i n g to the surface parts of the thick discursive context w h i c h , by the early fifties, a l l o w e d numerous S w e d i s h intellectuals to enter into dialogue w i t h others from continental Europe and the U n i t e d States. W h i l e the idea of m o d e r n art may have been stolen by N e w Y o r k after the Second W o r l d W a r , Paris remained for Europe the p r o u d centre for an art tied to both historical avant-gardism and p o l i t i c a l resistance. Sweden may not have h a d such a grand part i n either this historical or heroic history, but by the fifties it was being u p h e l d as a m o d e l by m a n y o n the Left for h a v i n g established a strong economy and international perspective under a Socialist government a n d it was also recognized for a m o d e r n art and architecture representing a functioning collective space. U s i n g m y o w n critical searchlight, I illuminate a history w h i c h w i l l s h o w that there were intellectuals i n Sweden w h o were part of this dialogue, but w h o also p u t into question this colourful picture. Outer Spaces: Dreams of C o l l e c t i v i t y i n Paris and S t o c k h o l m A s early as 1949 A l v a M y r d a l , one of the more influential social engineers of folkhemmet (The Peoples' Home), went so far as to argue that Sweden h a d , since the late-nineteenth century, always i m p r o v e d its "culture and education before ... [it] i m p r o v e d ...[its] i n d u s t r i a l m e t h o d s . " 3 A l t h o u g h 3 A l v a Myrdal, "Development of Population and Social Reform in Sweden" in Th.Plaenge Jacobson and Sven Silow (Eds.) Ten Lectures on Swedish Architecture, Stockholm: Victor Petterson's Bokindustriaktiebolag, p.19. During the 1930s, under the Social Democratic 8 this might be a rather extreme argument, slogans such as vackrare vardagsvara (more beautiful things for every day use) h a d by the late forties been inscribed into a national m y t h o l o g y that was historically g r o u n d e d and internationally revealed i n such welfare state rhetorical gestures as the 1930 Stockholm exhibition. Here, under the leadership of Gr e gor y Paulsson, the S w e d i s h A r t s and Crafts A s s o c i a t i o n Svensk Form h a d p r o v i d e d international m o d e r n i s m w i t h an architectural breakthrough b y p r o d u c i n g a functionalist fairground designed by G u n n a r A s p l u n d [fig. 2]. A large part of this e x h i b i t i o n was devoted to an exploration and experimentation i n such social aspects as full sized apartment solutions designed by numerous S w e d i s h architects. A s one architect put it, " F r o m h a v i n g been generally l o o k i n g b a c k w a r d and socially passive, architecture i n Sweden l o o k e d to the future and l o o k e d socially f o r w a r d . " 4 . leadership of Per Albin Hansson, the term 'folkhemrnet' was used to express a future vision of social democracy and became synonymous with national social reforms in Sweden which sought to create equality through a social security system and better housing accomodations. Alva and Gunnar Myrdai became the main spokesmen for this utopic vision with books such as Kris i befolknignsfrdgan [Crisis in the Population Question] (1934) in which they addressed Sweden's low population. A better society, they proposed, could only be formed by increasing the national birth rate and establishing a modern socially engineered collective living environment. The central place where these reforms could take place was the 'home.' There was a dark subtext to this optimistic vision of collectivity. In the last few years, critics of this social democratic legacy have gone back to the writings of the Myrdals and looked at the consequences of the collectivism and social engineering that manifested itself. For example, numerous historians point at the eugenics practiced and espoused by this idea of folkhemmet. In these inflamatory studies, the Left is shown to have practiced eugenics on a scale matched only by the Fascists in Germany. For a cursory overview of this issue, see Samuel Siren's web article "Konsekvenser av social ingenjorskonst" [The Consequences of the Art of Social Engineering] at www.algonet.se/~stampede/socmg.htrnl. For a more detailed analysis, see Maija Runci's doctoral dissertation Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1996 and Gunnar Broberg och Mattias Tyden's Odnskade i folkhemmet Stockholm: Gidlunds, 1991. ^Hakan Ahlberg quoted in G.E. Kidder Smith Sweden Builds London: The Architectural Press, 1957 (2nd edition), p.16. As Eric Hobsbawm has stressed, after the Socialists came to power in 1932, Sweden's economy "roared ahead" and reached almost twice the pre-slump level of production by the end of the 1930s. See Eric Hobsbawm The Age of Extremes: The Short History of the Twentieth Century. London: Abacus, 1995, pp.101-104. It should also be mentioned that 9 http://www.algonet.se/~stampede/socmg.htrnl Partly as a result of Sweden's ability to sustain social and economic o p t i m i s m throughout the depression and Second W o r l d W a r , its welfare state architecture c o u l d be u p h e l d to the external w o r l d as an image of a functioning socialist Utopia and thereby w o u l d r e m a i n the international architectural and social p a r a d i g m w e l l into the fifties. 5 The F i n n i s h architect A l v a r A a l t o described this o p t i m i s m i n rather p u r i f y i n g terms, s a y i n g that Sweden's image at the Stockholm E x h i b i t i o n was: ...not a c o m p o s i t i o n i n stone, glass and steel as the Functionalist-hating e x h i b i t i o n visitor m i g h t imagine, but rather a c o m p o s i t i o n in-houses, flags, searchlights, flowers, fireworks, happy people and clean tablecloths—a w h o l e new k i n d of j o y . 6 In other w o r d s , the fair stood as an announcement for a n e w type of International Style architecture that presented itself as social rather than technocratic. W h i l e architectural m o d e r n i s m stood relatively t r i u m p h a n t at the 1930 Stockholm E x h i b i t i o n , the attempt to catapult S w e d i s h modernist art alongside it left a more shattered and embarrassing legacy. The year p r i o r to the exhibition, the S w e d i s h painter Otto G . C a r l s u n d , together w i t h the D u t c h Theo v a n D o e s b u r g a n d French H e l i o n , founded " A r t Concret," a modernist the Stockholm Exhibition was the first of a series of major international expositions during the Depression years that, as Susan Buck-Morss has noted, was "seen as a means of enhancing business, creating jobs for the unemployed, and providing state-subsidized, mass entertainment that was at the same time public 'education.'" Susan Buck-Morss The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Massachussetts: MIT Press, 1989, p.323. ^Richard Weston. Modernism London: Phaidon, 1996, pp.183-184. Sweden was the first country to work itself out of economic depression in the 1930s. This achievement, largely attributed to the Social Democrat's willingness to embrace the large social reforms associated with folkhemmet, provided the Social Democratic government with a legacy that helped keep them in power until the 1970. 6 Ibid.. 1 0 project a i m e d at p u s h i n g p a i n t i n g past the ontological confines of N e o - Plasticism and p u r i s m i n order to integrate pure abstraction w i t h architecture [fig. 3]. A s art historian and critic H a n s L . C . Jaffe has pointed out, the importance of the Manifeste de Vart concret, was its p r o n o u n c e d rejection of dominant forms of new nationalism and the i d o l i z a t i o n of b l o o d and s o i l w h i c h expressionist and figurative art frequently represented. 7 W i t h its roots i n M a l e v i c h ' s Suprematism and M o n d r i a n ' s N e o - P l a s t i c i s m , a "social" contract was understood to be inherent i n Geometric Abstraction. Because of his considerable reputation w i t h i n these types of avant-garde circles, and the promise of a somewhat more international and Bauhaus style fair, C a r l s u n d managed to convince some of Europe's most renowned contemporary artists to send their w o r k to an International Exhibition of Post-Cubist Art that was to be h e l d at A s p l u n d ' s fairground. W i t h o u t consulting the artists, w h o i n c l u d e d Leger, A r p , Ozenfant, M o n d r i a n , Pevsner, M o h o l y - N a g y , v a n Doesburg, H e l i o n , T a u b e r - A r p and Vantogerloo, C a r l s u n d used their artwork as collateral for loans necessary to fund the event. 8 Things d i d not fare w e l l for C a r l s u n d . In the w o r d s of the art critic E u g e n W r e t h o l m , w h e n the creditors came a r o u n d , - " C a r l s u n d was a dead m a n i n P a r i s . " 9 W h i l e the larger circumstances for this failure of collective u n i t y of artistic creation were financial, for Sweden the devastating consequence of this fiasco was that its ^Hans L . C . Jaffe "Geometric Abstraction: its Origin, Principles and Evolution" in Art Since Mid- Century: The New Internationalism Vol.1 Abstract Art; Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1971. ^The one artist who seemed to forgive Carlsund was his former teacher and friend Fernand Leger who in 1934 spent considerable time with Carlsund during his visit to Stockholm for his exhibition at Galerie Moderne. Along with Andre Lhote's school of cubist painting, Leger's school became a very popular educational retreat for Swedish modern artists. Karin Bergqvist Lindegren, Carlo Derkert, K . G . Hulten Leger. Stockholm: Tryckeri A B Bjorkmans Eftr, 1964. ^Eugen Wretholm Svenska konstndrer frdn 1940, 50 och 60-talet Uddevalla: Bokforlaget Forum AB,1969, pp.4-5. 1 1 artists w o u l d again f i n d themselves m a r g i n a l i z e d from international debates and exposure. W i t h the exception of a few s m a l l exhibitions such as Ferdinand Leger at Galerie M o d e r n e and the more significant s h o w i n g of Picasso's Guernica and graphic w o r k s i n 1938, it was not u n t i l after the second w o r l d w a r that Swedes re-emerged i n the modernist discourses centralized a r o u n d Paris. W i t h M o n d r i a n ' s death i n 1944, C a r l s u n d felt it necessary (and possible) to come out of h i d i n g and present i n 1947 a series of compositions intended as m u r a l designs for restaurants and bars w h i c h inspired a number of younger S w e d i s h artists to p i c k up geometric abstraction as a viable m o d e r n expression of a social v i e w of the postwar w o r l d . A s was the case i n continental European discourses, i n the context of S w e d i s h Socialism, Geometric Abstraction, like Bauhaus architecture, meant a possibility to reorganize Europe o n a n o n - i n d i v i d u a l foundation based o n Socialism rather than A m e r i c a n l i b e r a l i s m . 1 0 In the fall of 1947, the contemporary e x h i b i t i o n space Farg och F o r m presented Ling Konst (Young Art), an e x h i b i t i o n w h i c h critics were quick to h a i l as a t u r n i n g point i n S w e d i s h art. A s the d a i l y newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reported: 1 0 A f t e r the war, as a result of its role in the resistance movement against Fascism, Socialism and Communism had a very different popular appeal in Europe than in the United States where it was socially and politically suppressed. A n insightful discussion of the economic, military and diplomatic tensions between the United States and Europe directly after the Second World War is found in Pascaline Winand's Eisenhower, Kennedy and the United States of Europe New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1993. In particular Winand considers the idea of a 'united Europe' which was started under the Roosevelt administration and continued by Truman as a means to develop a multilateral economic plan to pave the way for liberalized trade which favoured the United States. The most visible outcome from these plans were the 1947 Truman Doctrine, which provided economic and financial aid to Europe, the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Pact. Both these helped to establish a divided Europe. 1 2 W h a t strikes us w h e n standing i n front of this first group gathering is that we stand i n front of a n e w generation.... A feeling w e haven't had as strong since the early thirties...." 1 1 A t this time, the d o m i n a n t discussion a r o u n d non-figurative geometric abstraction w o u l d also become localized around a s m a l l group of artists w h o , despite their differences, shared a preoccupation w i t h issues of space, movement and the perception of time. Increasingly referred to as Konkretisterna (The Concretists), the painters and sculptors i n this g r o u p , w h o i n c l u d e d O l l e Bonnier, Lage L i n d e l l , E g o n M o l l e r N i e l s e n , Pierre Olofsson and Lennart Rodhe, sought to make art a part of the l i v i n g environment, or as the Functionalists w o u l d say, "adapt art to the r o o m . " 1 2 It was to be an objective art subjectively created for a collective environment that was international i n character. This latter aspect was crucial i n order to break the isolation i n w h i c h they saw regional expressionist and figurative art to be. In 1949, it was a number of these artists' turn to collaborate w i t h architects to construct an exposition g r o u n d , this time for the S t o c k h o l m — W o r l d Sport E x h i b i t i o n [fig. 4] w h i c h , architect E r i k Thelaus succinctly described i n the L a b o u r organ Byggmastaren : The W o r l d Sports E x h i b i t i o n ... w i t h its h a p p y color scheme and its p l a y f u l symbols ... returns, just as the Stockholm E x h i b i t i o n , directly to international sources of inspiration, a n d i n that sense they are v e r y closely related despite the time gap.... The Sport E x p o s i t i o n is especially noteworthy for its collaboration between architecture, sculpture and painting... It is the first time that a more or less a l l embracing and a l l 1 1 I b i d . , p.6. 1 2 L o u i s e L y b e r g A History of Swedish Art: 1880-1980 U d d e v a l l a : B o h u s l a n i n g e n s B o k t r y c k e r i A B , 1987 p.229. 1 3 encompassing collaboration of this k i n d has taken place... One w o u l d like to see these collaborations between different artists, that have been tried w i t h fluctuating but considerably good results w i t h i n the experimental frame of an exhibition, continue i n less temporal c i r c u m s t a n c e s . . . " 1 3 W i t h this optimistic appraisal of the exhibition, Thelaus also o u t l i n e d some of the tendencies w h i c h he understood w o u l d make or break this i n t e r d i s c i p l i n a r y environment: ...profitable collaboration is always g o i n g to be dependent o n the w i l l i n g n e s s a m o n g i n d i v i d u a l practices to try n e w w o r k i n g methods and treat a l l artistic problems. A m o n g m a n y of the l e a d i n g artists i n question exists certain paradoxical inhibitions and rejections of the artistic field of v i s i o n such as material judgments and a dogmatic embrace of the "picturesque," even w h e n it is inappropriate. It is at the very least a l i v i n g interest i n the m e d i u m r a n g i n g from colour pigment to the u n b o u n d m e d i u m of sculpture and the artworks' new roles and functions w h i c h is necessary for a successful collaboration w i t h a r c h i t e c t u r e . 1 4 In other w o r d s , Thelaus was not naive enough to ignore the conflicts that w o u l d arise i n this type of gesamtkunstwerk. Nonetheless, for Concretist artists such as O l l e Bonnier, the possibility of w o r k i n g i n p u b l i c spaces meant a chance to set i n m o t i o n a relationship between the picture plane's stable surface (form and movement set i n a state of e q u i l i b r i u m ) a n d the perceptive v i s i o n of social beings. In his murals, as w e l l as canvases such as 2950 Theme (1950), Bonnier set up a d y n a m i c p r i s m a l intersection for the street-like forms of M o n d r i a n ' s Boogie-woogie paintings a n d the kinetic plasticity of M o h o l y - N a g y ' s constructions [fig. 5]. A s k e d to define the purpose of this artistic project, Bonnier responded s i m i l a r l y to other Concretists b y stating that 1 3 " 1 0 ars k o n s t l i v i S t o c k h o l m " Konstrevy 1 (1957), p.7. 1 4 I b i d . . 1 4 "there can be no other w a y to understand this type of picture than as a creation of t i m e . " 1 5 By pictorially and verbally breaking up the concrete surface of the canvas to introduce the more metaphysical aspect of time, these artists met fierce opposition. After a l l , geometrical abstraction favored universalized concepts such as time and space over chance and i n d i v i d u a l circumstances. One of the critics of this "cold" abstraction was G o t t h a r d Johansson w h o s e article Ren och oren konst (Pure and Impure Art) i n Svenska Dagbladet (a liberal/conservative S w e d i s h daily) w a r n e d that these artists "want to r i d art of i n d i v i d u a l i t y and replace it w i t h a language that is reduced, objective and geometrical...." 1 6 In other w o r d s , they wanted to "replace [art] w i t h a mystical v i s i o n based i n the phenomenology of t i m e . " 1 7 In a w a y , this argument was n o t h i n g n e w or s u r p r i s i n g as it had p r e v i o u s l y been leveled - internationally against M o n d r i a n a n d nationally against modernist artists such as G A N (Gosta A d r i a n - N i l s s o n ) . 1 8 But it was insistent. D u r i n g that same year, the liberal left d a i l y Dagens Nyheter p u b l i s h e d its c r i t i c i s m , simultaneously d e n o u n c i n g and defending the Concretists under the same rubric of " R e n och oren konst." In this exchange, V i l h e l m Bjerke-Petersen, himself a S w e d i s h Concretist painter, argued w i t h Torsten Bergmark, the editor of the Goteborg based art journal Paletten, w h o h a d accused these " y o u n g " artists of being n o t h i n g more than "pretentious mystics" espousing ^Sydhoff, Beatte Bildkonsten i Norden: Var Egen Tid Lund: Berglingsta Boktryckeriet, 1973, p.84. l 6 I b i d . . 1 7 I b i d . . 1921 G A N had encouraged this link between geometric abstraction and mysticism in his book Den Gudomliga Geometrin. His paintings of this period can be said to be typical of Swedish modernist paiting in that it mixed Cubism and Futurism. What made GAN's work rather sureal was his interest in Kandinsky's writings on the spiritual in art. See Louise Lyberg's A History of Swedish Art Uddevalla: Bokforlaget Signum, 1987, p.209. 1 5 universal values associated w i t h the c o l d rationalism of S w e d i s h social e n g i n e e r i n g . 1 9 To some extent these critics were right. Concretist art was increasingly used as if it was the 'modern' look. By the fifties, Concretist murals were spread a l l over Sweden i n places as diverse as factory l u n c h rooms, post offices, schools and apartment houses [fig.6]. This was an aesthetic w h i c h increasingly signified the social and collective v i s i o n of Sweden's People's H o m e (Folkhemmet).20 W h i l e being criticized i n the press, these artists not o n l y discovered their brand of M o d e r n i s m forefronted i n public debates about art, but they also received a p p r o v a l from a number of art critics and historians such as R o l f Soderberg, Bo Wennberg, and the freelance writer U l f L i n d e w h o must have figured that a 'public' art that c o u l d generate a debate about international issues to this degree and s t i l l be labeled mystic and pretentious c o u l d not be a l l that b a d for Sweden's cultural life. In fact, this new w o r k seemed to break through the i n v o l u n t a r y isolation from the continent that Swedes h a d found themselves i n d u r i n g the Second W o r l d W a r . 2 1 In 1951, i n an attempt to strengthen the Concretists' l i n k to continental aesthetic discourses a n d make a p i t c h for geometric abstraction at home, a number of S w e d i s h architects, artists, curators and professors organized a l^Sydhoff, p.85. Like Gotthard Johansson's article, this one was also titled "Ren och oren konst." 2 0 A s OUe Granath has pointed out, Folkhemmet's vision was partly spread by the distribution of cheap 'quality art' affordable to most people. The most common media was lithography and the most common artists were those who had made a name for themselves between the wars. In return, Concretists who were asked to produce murals received one percent of the cost of their projects. See Olle Granath Another Light: Swedish Art Since 1945 Malmo: Svenska Institutet, 1975, p.14. 2 1 D u r i n g the forties and fifties, Paris was a pilgrimage site for a large number of Swedish artists trying to learn contemporary techniques. Going to study with modern masters such as Fernand Leger or Andre Lhote became, as in other countries, the thing to do. See Granath, p.10. 1 6 committee to produce a contemporary survey of m o d e r n art to be h e l d i n S t o c k h o l m at Liljevalchs konsthall. Klar Form, (Clear or Pure Form), as it was named, opened i n M a r c h of 1952 w i t h Parisian support from Galerie Denise Rene and the magazines Art d'Aujourd'hui and XX:e Siecle. W i t h critical texts written by the French art historians and critics L e o n D e g a n d and R . V . Gindertael, Klar Form introduced w o r k by an international array of artists i n c l u d i n g H a n s A r p , A n d r e Bloc, A l e x a n d e r Calder, J.Dewasne, Cicero Dias, Auguste H e r b i n , Robert Jacobsen, L e Corbusier, Fernand Leger, A . M a g n e l l i , Robert Mortensen, Serge Poliakoff, M a r i e R a y m o n d , Sophie T a e u b e r - A r p , and V i c t o r Vaserely. Despite the l u k e w a r m reception at home, the e x h i b i t i o n was extremely important i n p r o v i d i n g inroads into continental debates for S w e d i s h a r t i s t s . 2 2 Klar Form also represented a glimpse of new hope, a "northern light," for someone like L e o n D e g a n d whose attempts at spreading the gospel of International style geometric abstraction had since 1946 consistently been short circuited. For example, Degand-'-s distancing from Socialist R e a l i s m and the School of Paris i n favour of contemporary forms of abstraction b y w r i t i n g numerous articles a r g u i n g against what he v i e w e d as an anemic crisis i n both camps, h a d as early as 1947 left h i m sacked from the C o m m u n i s t Party journal Lettres frangaises.23 Serge G u i l b a u t has described i n detail the pathetic nature of Degand's attempt to b r i n g m o d e r n art to B r a z i l i n 1947. If his c u l t u r a l i n v a s i o n into South A m e r i c a h a d the look of a "failed firecracker," then his support of Klar Form represented one of his last attempts at 2 2 T h i s less optimistic response from gallery goers has been noted by Teddy Brunius in Baertling: mannen, verket Uddevalla: Bohuslaningens boktryckeri, 1990, p.87. 2 3 Serge Guilbaut How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp.131-132. 1 7 p r o v i d i n g a spark for geometric abstraction and the collective v i s i o n it stood to represent. 2 4 In his catalogue text for Klar Form, D e g a n d took the opportunity to pronounce that the "crisis i n belief, of a plastic conception and of language from w h i c h it is appropriated" stemmed from a lack of participation i n "a larger creative b i r t h process." 2 5 Here, Sweden c o u l d heroically represent a new frontier for the k i n d of "conquering art," as he called it, that w o u l d ultimately redirect preoccupations w i t h the past and the stasis of "laboratory art" t o w a r d a contemporary "acceptable formal l a n g u a g e . " 2 6 Degand's optimistic and militant s o u n d i n g appraisal of S w e d i s h geometric abstraction s h o u l d not o n l y be read against the C o m m u n i s t Party's support of Socialist Realism. B y the time D e g a n d had vacated his office at the C o m m u n i s t press, a larger threat to his p o s i t i o n h a d emerged i n the form of gestural abstraction. A s early as 1947 w h i l e Degand was busy sending his "conquering art" to B r a z i l , a series of groundbreaking exhibitions h a d taken place i n Paris w h i c h p r o v e d the a r r i v a l of "informal" p a i n t i n g i n close connection w i t h existentialist literary m o v e m e n t s . 2 7 By the late forties the Parisian art scene resembled more of a battlefield than a unified center for m o d e r n art. B y the early fifties, "cold" geometric abstraction was not o n l y a 2 4 Guilbaut, Serge "Dripping on the modernist parade: The failed invasion of abstract art in Brazil, 1947-1948" in Patrocinio, coleccion y circulation de las artes, XX coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte, U N A M , Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, 1997, pp. 807-817. 2 5 T h e catalogue for Klar Form came in the form of an entire issue of Art d'aujourd'hui devoted to it. This was published a few months prior to the exhibition opening in Sweden. See Leon Degand "Klar Form" Art d'aujourd'hui no.l (December 1951), p.2. 2 6 I b i d . . 2 7 See Guilbaut, Serge "Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick" in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964 Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990, pp.30-79. 1 8 stance against the "hot" gestural abstraction and the somewhat luke w a r m Ecole de Paris, but it had to contend w i t h an Abstract Expressionist p u s h from accross the A t l a n t i c . 2 8 F a m i l i a r w i t h this p o l e m i c a l atmosphere and particularly aware of the contemporary state of S w e d i s h art, curator and art historian Pontus H u l t e n was quick to nurture a potential sud-nord alliance. H a v i n g recently finished his graduate studies i n art history w i t h a thesis o n Vermeer and S p i n o z a , H u l t e n was spending as m u c h time i n Paris as he was i n S t o c k h o l m d u r i n g the early fifties. A w a r e of the Parisian art scene centred a r o u n d its a n n u a l Salon des Realities, and perhaps recognizing attempts b y D e g a n d and Rene to promote a Geometric International Style abstraction i n Paris b y t y i n g it to remote exotic locales such as L a t i n A m e r i c a and Scandinavia, H u l t e n managed to f i n d his w a y into the inner circle of Galerie Denise Rene. This k i n d of connection was indeed important for anyone interested i n n o n - figurative abstraction. The A m e r i c a n painter J o h n - F r a n k l i n K o e n i g , w h o was an intimate part of this scene, describes it thus: The gallery scene, i n the early 1950s, was v i r t u a l l y closed to nonfigurative art and especially to younger artists d o i n g this type of art.... Denise Rene was certainly the most important nonfigurative gallery. A s early as 1946 she h a d a s h o w entitled La Jeune Peinture Abstraite w i t h H a r t u n g , Schneider, D e y r o l l e , Dewasne, Jacobsen, and M a r i e R a y m o n d (mother of Y v e s K l e i n ) . In 1948 she s h o w e d M a x B i l l , G o r i n , M a g n e l l i , Schneider, Dewasne, Jacobsen, H e r b i n , M o n d r i a n , K a n d i n s k y , Mortensen, and Marcelle C a h n . V i c t o r Vaserely was her 2 8 B y 1954 it was p a r t i c u l a r l y S a m Francis a n d Jean-Paul R i o p e l l e w h o d o m i n a t e d this discussion. A c c o r d i n g to H u l t e n , P o l l o c k was not really k n o w n outside very specific circles u n t i l later. See Pontus H u l t e n Jean Tinguely: A Magic Stronger than Death N e w Y o r k : A b b e v i l l e Press Publishers, 1987, p.27. 1 9 chief advisor. A n d r e Bloc, the editor of Architecture d'aujourd'hui and Art d'aujourd'hui, was a p o w e r f u l a l l y of Denise R e n e . 2 9 Himself, K o e n i g was closely connected to this scene as he helped edit the increasingly important art journal Cimaise w h i c h was started by the b i b l i o p h i l e Jean-Robert A r n a u d whose a i m was to m a i n t a i n an organ through w h i c h artists on the fringes of this scene c o u l d become k n o w n . N o t only d i d H u l t e n become familiar w i t h this c r o w d , but by 1953, together w i t h Rolf Soderberg and the artist/critic Oscar Reutersvard, H u l t e n had managed to be o n friendly enough terms w i t h Denise Rene to suggest a f o l l o w - u p e x h i b i t i o n to Klar Form. Exposition d'Art Suedois Cubiste, Futuriste, Constructiviste, as it became k n o w n , opened at Galerie Denise Rene i n the fall of 1953 w i t h each of the three curators contributing substantial texts to a special S c a n d i n a v i a n issue of Art d'aujourd'hui, the gallery's unofficial mouthpiece [fig. 7]. W i t h a "hard edge" composition b y O l l e Baertling o n its cover, the magazine directed the reader through a history of S w e d i s h abstraction starting w i t h first and second generation S w e d i s h Futurists and Cubists such as G A N , S i r i Derkert, Otte S k o l d and Otto G . C a r l s u n d l e a d i n g to a younger generation of contemporary artists such as R o d h e , Bonnier, and Baertling. W h i l e the texts by Soderberg and Reutersvard rationalized contemporary geometric abstraction v i a the purist tendencies of C u b i s m and F u t u r i s m , H u l t e n discerned a less obvious heritage i n the w o r k of painter and filmaker V i k i n g E g g e l i n g w h o , before his death i n 1925, managed to produce his o w n r e v o l u t i o n w i t h i n the D a d a movement: 2 9 J o h n - F r a n k l i n K o e n i g " A b s t r a c t i o n chaude" i n G u i l b a u t , Serge E d . Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964 C a m b r i d g e , Massachusetts: The M I T Press, 1990, p.8 (pp.1-16) 2 0 It seems that V i k i n g E g g e l i n g w o u l d be the first representative of m o d e r n art to consciously put his images i n direct relationship w i t h time.... the first artist of images i n the history of film..., E g g e l i n g broke w i t h the tradition of the image l i m i t e d b y the rectangle. 3 0 A s H u l t e n ' s expose made clear, w i t h f i l m rolls such as Diagonal Symphony (1921) [fig. 8], E g g e l i n g had realized his idea of moving images by u s i n g images non-figuratively and w i t h real movement: By methodical w o r k , he tried to free the rules of plastic counterpoint from an abstract syntax. H i s f i l m rolls are composed like pieces of music, isolated images resemble measures, variants o n a theme, m u l t i p l e measures constitute a phrase i n w h i c h certain parts can be found i n other phrases.... B y the gradual transformation of different figures he a r r i v e d at creating an uninterrupted movement and a continuous transformation of stages of non-figurative movements. The f i l m made the beauty of i n d i v i d u a l images disappear, to be replaced b y those of real movement i n a l i v i n g f o r m . 3 1 W h i l e p o i n t i n g to Eggeling's attack o n the cult of 'beauty,' it was H u l t e n ' s ability to foreground Eggeling's kinetic sensibility as an early example of both S w e d i s h and international abstraction that must have pleased Denise Rene as w e l l as her advisor V i c t o r Vaserely whose o w n interests i n movement needed historical g r o u n d i n g and contemporary currency. A l t h o u g h Eggeling's commitment a n d experimentation w i t h a n e w v i s u a l syntax h a d i n m a n y ways been as strict as M o n d r i a n ' s or M a l e v i c h ' s , his w o r k also broke d o w n this structure w i t h an obsession w i t h movement. A s w e w i l l see, this dialectical p o s i t i o n of flux w o u l d become a central aspect of H u l t e n ' s movement. 3 0 K a r l G . [Pontus] H u l t e n " V i k i n g E g g e l i n g " Art d'Aujourd'hui serie 4, no.7 ( O c t - N o v , 1953), p.3. 3 l I b i d . . 2 1 A picture from 1954 of Denise Rene s m i l i n g and p o i n t i n g enthusiastically at a tension point i n one of O l l e Baertling's compositions characterizes the general excitement m o u n t i n g i n 1954 t o w a r d Scandinavia, where non-objective art was increasingly supported by the state. 3 2 M a k i n g an even stronger caricature of these Franco-Swedish relations, M i c h e l Ragon, i n an article p u b l i s h e d i n Cimaise entitled "Aesthetique actuelle d u timbre- poste," described France as retrograde i n its "official" reluctance to integrate non-figurative abstract art into utilitarian objects such as money and stamps [fig. 9]. C o m p a r i n g the conservative figurative representations o n three French stamps w i t h three futuristic designs o n S w e d i s h stamps (produced to celebrate the national telegraph company's c o m m u n i c a t i o n capabilities), Ragon observes that the electro-geometric abstractions o n the latter stamps can be referenced to S w e d i s h Concretist artists such as Bonnier or Rhode: ...we salute w i t h pleasure the stamp series put out b y the S w e d i s h post system. If two of them are content to make telephone lines and l i g h t n i n g bolts look abstract, then the [third] is b y contrast authentically composed of abstract forms [reminicent] of a truer expression of S c a n d i n a v i a n non-figurative a r t . 3 3 It seems ironic that w h i l e Scandinavian artists and curators were desperately l o o k i n g south to Paris for a p p r o v a l and stimulus, a part of Paris was projecting its desires n o r t h t o w a r d Sweden (as w e l l as the rest of Scandinavia) as an assurance that socialism and non-figurative art c o u l d function i n a collective state. For defenders of geometric abstraction such as Denise Rene, 3 2 T h i s abstract art's tie to a social democratic architecture was noted in both L'Architecture dAujourd'hui and Art d'Aujourd'hui. See the section on Sweden in the special nordic issue "Pays Nordiques" L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui 54 (May - June 1954), ppl8-37. Also, "Synthese des Arts: L'art est un service social" Art d'Aujourd'hui no.4-5 serie 5 (June 1954), pp.19-31. 3 3 M i c h e l Ragon "Esthetique actuelle du Timbre-Poste Cimaise (March 1955), p.25. It should be mentioned that Ragon was by this time also a main supporter of gestural abstraction. 2 2 the ability to stay "cool" despite the onslaught of gestural abstraction was becoming difficult enough that she saw the need to open up n e w curatorial possibilities for someone like H u l t e n . Inner Spaces: I n d i v i d u a l Expressions and the Ideology of Preparedness N o t o n l y w o u l d H u l t e n take advantage of this precarious situation i n Paris, but he may very w e l l have filtered his o w n socio-political ideas about art through the concerns of another S w e d i s h intellectual. C h a l l e n g i n g the u t o p i a n i s m of a socialist collective culture that was increasingly being read i n the majority of non-figurative abstractions, the surrealist poet and critic Ilmar Laaban had, since 1952, written a series of articles p u b l i s h e d i n the S w e d i s h popular press and leftist journals, arguing for an artistic p o s i t i o n not o n l y distinct from the dogmatism of Social Realism, but also from the three potential "traps" he saw i n the geometric (non-organic abstraction that is calculated: eg. M a l e v i c h , M o n d r i a n ) , the non-geometric (organic, instinctual and chance r i d d e n : eg. A r p , Brancusi) and the emotive (emotional expressions: eg. K a n d i n s k y ) . In his 1952 articles "Abstract or Concrete" and " A n a l y s i s and Synthesis i n M o d e r n A r t " Laaban observes that artists i n v o l v e d i n neo-plastic abstraction have painted themselves into a cul de sac, and the best that the post-war school of neo-expressionism can d o is " r u n around i n a s n o w y l a n d s c a p e . " 3 4 W a r n i n g that even surrealist a n d anarchist d y n a m i s m can t u r n as c o l d and calculated as abstraction was b e c o m i n g mechanized, Laaban points toward a potential art able to speak about both an inner and outer reality w h i c h constantly interpenetrate, re-form and i n f o r m each other. 3 4 I l m a r Laaban " A n a l y s och syntes i m o d e r n konst" Samtid och Framtid ( A u g u s t 1952), p. 49. 2 3 A c c o r d i n g to Laaban's prognosis, artists needed to produce a "psycho- p h y s i c a l " space of resistance b y returning to the "chance-ridden dynamics" of D u c h a m p ' s readymades and Surrealism's found objects, where the form found i n the everyday, he felt, had been "undressed" of its functional qualities. For Laaban, an intellectual choice connected to chance c o u l d offer a d y n a m i c position that w o u l d p u s h beyond the i m m o b i l i t y he saw facing artists. C h a l l e n g i n g the abstract geometric e x h i b i t i o n Klar Form, L a a b a n observed that "the Concretises sole interest appears to be i n concretizing something w h i c h is b y nature not concrete," a fact that he found paradoxically located next to their c l a i m to " p u r i t y , integrity, logic, etc. w h i c h ... depends and plays o n the fancy of the beholder through its 'decorative' q u a l i t i e s . " 3 5 Artists such as Baertling, he continues, w h o resist a direct l i n k w i t h architecture i n favour of something more 'pure,' consciously or unconsciously produce decorative w o r k that is i n the end technically tied to the very technocratic society from w h i c h their constructive " o p e n " forms c l a i m to escape: Just as the technocratic w o r l d does not o n l y organize w o r k camps and construct atom bombs, but also attracts people w i t h its evangelical chrome and soft plastic, so does the technocratic art have b o t h its aggressive and comfortable side. If at times it does not accept this type of abstraction it is because it reveals its logic m u c h too c l e a r l y . 3 6 If Laaban's argument maintained that the language of geometric abstraction was being turned into a technocratic language of industry, the F u n k t i o n a l i s t architects' c l a i m had always been not to forefront specific aesthetic agendas or 3 5 I l m a r L a a b a n "Abstrakt eller konkret" Samtid och Framtid ( A u g u s t 1952), p.42. 3 6 I b i d . , p.46. 2 4 artistic problems i n their modernist d r i v e to produce 'machines to l i v e i n . ' L i k e w i s e , Laaban observed, most of the Concretist artists refused to discuss a move towards the 'zero degree' (noli laget) and discuss a future. Artists like Jacobsen and Dewasne (both represented by Denise Rene) refused to talk about a future 'move.' To Laaban, this suggested that art was i n need of a major catharsis. But despite Laaban's warnings, by the mid-fifties, a fertile meeting ground between geometric abstraction and modernist architecture had been established both p h y s i c a l l y and intellectually i n S w e d e n . 3 7 To a large extent this was the result of the construction of F o l k h e m m e t under the country's Social Democratic government. In 1954 the art j o u r n a l Konstrevy p u b l i s h e d "Farg over stan—en enkat," a series of articles set up as a forum to address the sudden, and what some considered "shocking," interest i n geometric abstraction by government authorities, large i n d u s t r i a l corporations and "daring private businesses." Here, seven artists and architects were asked to present their v i e w s o n the subject of the painted facade. C o m m e n t i n g o n this relationship between m u r a l p a i n t i n g a n d architecture, E r i k a n d Tore A h l s e n , two architects k n o w n for c o m b i n i n g their functionalism w i t h decorative m u r a l experiments at suburban s h o p p i n g centres such as Arsta outside of Stockholm, suggested that p a i n t i n g c o u l d indeed function w i t h i n the p s y c h o l o g i c a l area that the technological and economic side of functionalist architecture had so far failed to address: "Where as i n past epochs of Stockholm, red or y e l l o w c o l o u r functioned 3 7 S t a f f a n H o g b e r g . Stockholms Historia: Smdstaden, Fabrikstaden, Storstaden. S t o c k h o l m : Bonniers, 1987, pp.267-268. 2 5 a r c h i t e c t o n i c a l l y , n o w a d a y s the m u r k y g r a y has b e c o m e the w o r t h l e s s l y d e p r e s s i n g whatever."38 R e j e c t i n g w h a t t h e y s a w as a b o u r g e o i s t r a d i t i o n o f " d e t a l j - k r i t i k u t a n h e l h e t s s y n " ( d e t a i l c r i t i c i s m w i t h o u t o v e r s i g h t ) , the A h l s e n s a r g u e d for a t o t a l a r c h i t e c t u r e b u i l t o n a n u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f t e c h n o l o g y , e c o n o m y a n d p s y c h o l o g y . A s a r e s p o n s e to t h i s i n t e g r a t i o n a l o p t i m i s m ( g e s a m p t k u n s t v e r k ) , a r c h i t e c t a r i d p r o f e s s o r S v e n I v a r L i n d b e g a n h i s a r g u m e n t b y a c c u s i n g the A h l s e n s of b e i n g c a u g h t u p i n r o m a n t i c e n l i g h t e n m e n t i d e a l s . L i n d p r o p o s e d that, l i k e the p u r i s t t e n d e n c i e s f o u n d i n the Klar Form e x h i b i t i o n , the a t t e m p t to i n t e g r a t e g e o m e t r i c a b s t r a c t i o n i n t o a r c h i t e c t u r e c o u l d be n o t h i n g m o r e t h a n " a n i n t e r n a t i o n a l f a s h i o n p h e n o m e n a : " M a n y s e e m to be c o m p l e t e l y a c c e p t i n g o f the " s o d e r o r t s a r k i t e k t e r n a s " w a y s o f u s i n g the p a i n t e r l y m e d i u m as a w a y to k i l l b o r e d o m w i t h a n a r t i f i c i a l r e c y c l a b l e m a t e r i a l w h i c h i s a k i n d o f aesthetic d r u g l i k e m u s i c [by a] c o n v e y o r belt. T h i s f u n c t i o n is " p u r i s t " p a i n t i n g s c u r r e n t l y b i g c h a n c e , w h i c h t h e C o n c r e t i s t s h a v e n o t b e e n late to p i c k u p o n . . . . 3 9 A l t h o u g h L i n d d i d n o t see a p r o b l e m w i t h the i n t e g r a t i o n o f the arts as a m e a n s t o w a r d s a f u n c t i o n a l e n d , h e d i d fear a r c h i t e c t u r e m i g h t f a l l i n t o the s e r v i c e o f a r t r a t h e r t h a n v i c e v e r s a . T h e c o n c l u s i o n d r a w n f r o m t h i s b e c a m e that the g o a l i t s e l f " s h o u l d n o t be to i n t e g r a t e the s e v e n arts w i t h e a c h o t h e r a n d c e r t a i n l y n o t to h a v e aesthetic j u d g m e n t d o m i n a t e t h e t h e o r e t i c a l o r r a t i o n a l as i n a k i n d o f u n r e a l i s t i c r o m a n t i c e n l i g h t e n m e n t . " 4 0 B a l a n c i n g these t w o a r c h i t e c t s ' o p i n i o n s , f o u r artists r e s p o n d e d w i t h t h r e e d i s t i n c t p o s i t i o n s o n t h e subject. P i e r r e O l a f s s o n w h o h a d just f i n i s h e d a n 8 m e t r e 3 8 E r i k and Tore Ahlsen "Farg over stan—en enkat" Konstrevy nr.2 (1958), p.78. 3 9 S v e n Ivar L i n d "Farg over stan—en enkat" Konstrevy nr.2 (1958), p.77. (pp.77-81) 4 0 I b i d . . 2 6 m u r a l for Sandvikens L a r o v e r k (Sandviken's School Board) argued that the artist s h o u l d subordinate h i m / h e r s e l f to the form of the b u i l d i n g : C o l l a b o r a t i o n between architects and artists s h o u l d naturally not begin u n t i l the b u i l d i n g has taken form.... If the artist has based his c o m p o s i t i o n o n the architecture's r h y t h m and construction he w i l l be able to play more w i t h line and colour w i t h o u t an effect that is w o r r i s o m e or anti-architecture. 4 1 O l l e Bonnier, o n the other hand, was more optimistic about collaboration based o n equal status and proposed a combined effort by aesthetic and architectural specialists. The most vehemently opposed to this integration of the arts, as Laaban noted i n 1952, was O l l e Baerling. T a k i n g a h i g h modernist stand, Baertling argued that the different arts must first meet o n a " s p i r i t u a l " level w h i c h only then w o u l d have the potential to eventually lead to the k i n d of integration he saw being espoused b y the Belgian G r o u p e E s p a c e . 4 2 W h i l e he was not necessarily excited about a general ' p o p u l a r i z a t i o n ' of geometric abstraction, he d i d consider its potential i n reaching a broader p u b l i c . It was this o p t i m i s m that he, perhaps more than any other S w e d i s h Concretist, shared w i t h Denise Rene a n d the group around Art d'Aujourd'hui. 4 1 Pierre Olafsson "Farg over start—en enkat" Konstrevy nr.2 (1958), p.79. 4 2 A n d r e Bloc, director of Art d'Aujourd'hui and Edition de VArchitecture d'Aujourd'hui, urged painters like Baertling to take serious Group Espace's attempts to set up collaborations between specialists in architecture and art: "If painting and sculpture often suffer from a complex of inadaptability in the face of architecture, it is also true that architecture is often handicapped by a terrible misunderstanding of the plastic arts." In this debate, Bloc, with his journals and connections to architecture and art, had put himself in the positioned of advisor and assessor for this 'synthesis.' See, E. Pillet "Groupe Espace" Art d'Aujourd'hui no.8 serie 4 (December 1953), p.18; and Pierre Gueguen "Une demonstration du Groupe Espace: l'exposition 'architecture couleur formes' a Biot (Cote d'Azur) Art d'Aujourd'hui no.6 serie 5 (September 1954), pl8. 2 7 If Klar Form had p r o v i d e d S w e d i s h Concretists w i t h a Cartesian o v e r v i e w and context i n w h i c h to appear contemporary a n d continental i n 1952, the f o l l o w i n g year 12 Contemporary American Painters and Sculptors (also h e l d at Liljevalchs konsthall) w o u l d help S w e d i s h Neo-Expressionists - legitimize a more psychoanalytically g r o u n d e d international art. The loss of subjectivity and techno-optimism, that both Johansson and L a a b a n had accused h a r d edge abstraction of h a v i n g fallen v i c t i m to, n o w found its expression i n an art that was figurative and often informel as the French art critic M i c h e l Tapie w o u l d say. One of the strengths b e h i n d this 'neo- expressionism' (nyexpressionism) was that it was not a l l that n e w but h a d strong roots i n the w o r k from the 30s of S w e d i s h artists such as S i r i Derkert and V e r a N i l s s o n as w e l l as more obvious ties to i n d i v i d u a l i s t forms of abstraction abroad ranging from Fautrier, P o l l o c k , W o l s , K l i n e , Dubuffet and the various artists tied to C o B r A . In fact, it was u p o n his return from Denmark, where he h a d been loosely i n v o l v e d w i t h C o B r A , that a y o u n g S w e d i s h painter b y the name of Torsten Renqvist w o u l d trigger the anti-Concretist debate to w h i c h I have alluded. Paintings such as Windswept Bush (1950) [fig. 10] were read as both aggressive, subjective and i n t r o s p e c t i v e . 4 3 It seemed to connect more w i t h the angst and anger found in the existentialist w r i t i n g s of a group of writers k n o w n as Fyrtiotalisterna (The M e n of the Forties) than with the constructive o p t i m i s m found in architectural circles. In fact, the Utopian social welfare state that was being concretized both as surface and structure was to find its counter culture in expressionist p a i n t i n g , existentialist w r i t i n g and f i l m 4 3 T o r s t e n Bergmark, editor of Paletten up u n t i l 1954, was the most voiciferous supporter of neo- expressionism. H e credited Torsten Renqvist w i t h h a v i n g created w o r k w i t h b o t h " o r i g i n a l i t y " and " i n d i v i d u a l i t y . " See his r e v i e w of Renqvist's w o r k i n Paletten N r . 2 (1954), p.60-62. 2 8 w h i c h r e v e a l e d itself as w e e d s g r o w i n g t h r o u g h the c o n c r e t e c r a c k s of these c o l l e c t i v e spaces. Just as S t o c k h o l m a n d P a r i s w e r e b o t h a n c h o r i n g g e o m e t r i c a b s t r a c t i o n i n e a c h o t h e r ' s i m a g e , n o r d i c e x i s t e n t i a l i s m f o u n d its w a y s o u t h v i a K i e r k e g a a r d ' s r e l i g i o u s o v e r t o n e s a n d n o r t h v i a Sartre's m o r e C a r t e s i a n r a t i o n a l i s m a n d p h i l o s o p h y o f resistance. O n e c o u l d s a y that e x i s t e n t i a l i s m r e t u r n e d to S w e d e n i n the forties as a s p r e a d i n g v i r u s g e r m i n a t i n g as a g u i l t r i d d e n c o m p l e x a s s o c i a t e d w i t h the c o u n t r y ' s so c a l l e d n e u t r a l i t y status d u r i n g the w a r a n d the n e w f o r m s o f a l i e n a t i o n a c c o m p a n y i n g a s t r u c t u r a l t r a n s f o r m a t i o n o f S w e d e n i n t o a c o l d e r , m o r e r a t i o n a l l i v i n g a n d w o r k i n g e n v i r o n m e n t . A s T h u r e S t e n s t r o m h a s s u g g e s t e d i n h i s s u r v e y o f e x i s t e n t i a l i s t w r i t i n g i n S w e d e n , Existentialismen i Sverige: mottagande och inflytande 1900-1950 ( 1 9 8 4 ) , h a v i n g b e e n c u t off to a l a r g e d e g r e e f r o m c o n t a c t w i t h c o n t i n e n t a l t h o u g h t d u r i n g the s e c o n d w o r l d w a r , m a n y S w e d e s felt a n e e d to " t a k e - b a c k " the lost y e a r s after the b o r d e r s r e o p e n e d for c u l t u r a l e x c h a n g e . T h e r i g o r w i t h w h i c h this " e n g a g e m e n t " t o o k p l a c e w a s often f u e l e d b y the g u i l t o f h a v i n g to o w e u p to the c o m p r o m i s e s m a d e d u r i n g the w a r w h i l e c l a i m i n g n e u t r a l i t y . H e r e i n lies the attempt, to m a r k o u t a n a d h e r e n c e w i t h the R e s i s t a n c e i n the w i n n i n g d e m o c r a c i e s : . T o p l a y Sartre i n a S w e d i s h theatre c o u l d i n t h i s s i t u a t i o n b e c o m e a w a y to ease one's c o n s c i e n c e , a s i g n that d e s p i t e G e r m a n - S w e d i s h t r a d e to N a z i w e a p o n s factories i n the R u h r — o n e c o u l d n e v e r t h e l e s s s t a n d o n the r i g h t e o u s s i d e . 4 4 4 4 T h u r e Stenstrom Existentialismen i Sverige: mottagande och inflytande 1900-1950 Uppsala: University of Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell international, 1984, p.15-16. 2 9 One of the writers w h o projected this feeling of S w e d i s h neutrality guilt was Stig Dagerman w h o expressed pessimism and skepticism through his discovery and engagement i n the w r i t i n g s of Sartre and K i e r k e r g a a r d . H i s 1945 debut n o v e l Ormen (The Snake) struck a nerve w i t h m a n y Swedes w h o read it as a critique of the "ideology of preparedness" (beredskapsideologi) wherein the country's social body was understood as circumscribed by an idealization of bravery and harmony of the soul i n an attempt to account for the m o r a l and psychological fiber of neutrality politics. The major tenor of w o r k s such as Ormen and Dom dodas 6 was motivated b y the existentialist claustrophobia he shared w i t h authors such as Lars A h l i n . 4 5 D r a w i n g from the Fyrtiotalisterna, Ingmar Bergman w o u l d produce existentialist films w h i c h indeed gained currency outside of Sweden. One aspect of this success was the p u s h i n g of n u d i t y and sex boundaries. Despite their 'artistic intentions' and lack of complaints from the S w e d i s h board of censors, films such as Summer with Monica (1953) helped spread the r u m o u r of S w e d e n as a society not o n l y intellectually forward, but sexually l i b e r a l i z e d . 4 6 A s w i l l be s h o w n , i n the sixties, this new image of Sweden w o u l d be fully exploited o n various social, p o l i t i c a l and artistic fronts. But most important to remember about the fifties is that Sweden was becoming envied abroad because of its open embrace of both Capitalist a n d Socialist collectivity. F o r B e r g m a n this social democratic m i l i e u bred films w h i c h sought to p r o v i d e an outlet for a 4 5 L a r s Ahlin's book title Om (If) most literally calls up this psycho-social idea of 'prepardness.' See also Stig Dagerman's Ormen Stockholm: Vingforlaget, 1964. 4 6 B y 1961 Bergman had won two Oscars for best foreign film and established his international reputation. Despite these credentials, films such as The Silence (1961) were cut in several countries. But it was not until 1967, with films such as Vilgot Sjdman's I'm Curious - Yellow, that Sweden's sexualized liberal identity was in full bloom. See Henrik Emilson's "Full Frontal Nudity" Merge No.9 (Summer 2000), pp.19-22. 3 0 more i n d i v i d u a l , reclusive and repressed social p s y c h e . 4 7 In the process he managed to create a stereo-typed S w e d i s h existentialist. W h i l e there is always a portayal of class differences i n his films, there is never 'productive' class conflict depicted. A s Bergman w o u l d comment i n the seventies w h e n asked about his relationship to social democracy: O u r social behaviour pattern — both o u t w a r d and i n w a r d s — has p r o v e d a fiasco. The tragic thing is that we have neither the ability nor the w i l l , nor the energy to change direction. It is too late for revolutions, and i n m y heart I no longer believe i n their beneficial effects. A r o u n d the corner there is an insect w o r l d w a i t i n g , and one day it w i l l w a s h i n over our h i g h l y i n d i v i d u a l i z e d existence. Otherwise I'm a good social d e m o c r a t . 4 8 Dagerman w o u l d not be catapulted out of obscurity and into the dark collective psyche of S w e d i s h culture and international acclaim to the same extent as Bergman, but he w o u l d become nationally recognized after his suicide i n 1954. A s a fragment from his last written w o r d s announce, not everyone was r i d i n g the optimistic w a v e of technology, i n d u s t r y and s o c i a l i s m : I leave s o l i d dreams and loose connections. I leave a p r o m i s i n g path that has offered me self-despise and c o m m o n recognition. I leave a poor reputation and the promise of an even worse. I leave a few h u n d r e d thousand w o r d s , some w r i t t e n i n rapture, most w r i t t e n i n b o r e d o m a n d for money. I leave a lousy economy, a w a v e r i n g stand towards the questions of the day, a better used doubt and a hope of l i b e r a t i o n . 4 9 4 7 A s Leif Furhammar has observed: "It is amazing to see how almost every meaningful film produced in the post-war period in Sweden has to do with the individual in conflict with the collective (family, class, gangs or society). Leif Furhammar Filmen i Sverige Stockholm: Wiken, 1993, p.229. 4 8 Q u o t e d in Maria Bergom-Larsson Film in Sweden: Ingmar Bergman and Society trans, by Barrie Selman London: The Tantivy Press, 1978, p.8. 4 9http://hem.passagen.se/iblis/dagerman.html 3 1 http://hem.passagen.se/iblis/dagerman.html Shortly after his death, the S w e d i s h government, through the traffic c o m m i s s i o n , w o u l d help canonize Dagerman and capitalize o n this i n d i v i d u a l angst i n as socialist and collective a manner as possible by p u b l i s h i n g his short story Att dbda ett barn (To Kill a Child) i n h i g h s c h o o l text books. M e a n t as a campaign against reckless d r i v i n g , To Kill a Child urges people to " s l o w d o w n " by telling three parallel stories set i n the context of a sunny Sunday m o r n i n g i n three villages. The three narratives tragically meet w h e n a m a n from the first village goes for an innocent d r i v e to the seaside w h e n he by chance meets a c h i l d i n the third village w h o has been asked by its mother to r u n across the street to b o r r o w sugar from a neighbour. D r i p p i n g w i t h emphatic realism, the story is as p o w e r f u l as any Expressionist or Social Realist p a i n t i n g c o u l d hope to become at this moment, and poetically cries out for a collective social conscience: Afterwards it is a l l too late. Afterwards a blue car stands o n the road and a screaming w o m a n removes her h a n d from her m o u t h and the hand is bleeding. Afterwards a m a n opens a car door and tries to stand upright a l t h o u g h he has a p i t of horror w i t h i n himself. A f t e r w a r d s a few l u m p s of sugar lie r a n d o m l y scattered i n b l o o d and gravel and a c h i l d lies u n m o v i n g o n its b e l l y w i t h its face tightly pressed against the ground. Afterwards two pale-faced people w h o have not yet had their coffee r u n out of a gate and see a sight o n the road that they shall never forget. F o r it is not true that time heals a l l w o u n d s . T i m e does not heal a dead child's w o u n d and it heals very p o o r l y the p a i n of a mother w h o has forgotten to b u y sugar and sends her c h i l d across the road to b o r r o w some and just as p o o r l y does it heal the grief of the once h a p p y m a n w h o has k i l l e d it. For he w h o has k i l l e d a c h i l d does not go to the sea. H e w h o has k i l l e d a c h i l d goes quietly home and beside h i m he has a silent w o m a n w i t h her h a n d bandaged and i n a l l the villages they pass they see not one happy person. A l l the shadows are very dark a n d w h e n they part it is s t i l l under silence and the m a n w h o has k i l l e d the c h i l d k n o w s that this silence is his enemy and that he w i l l need years of his life to defeat it by shouting that it wasn't his fault. But he k n o w s that is a lie and i n 3 2 his nights' dreams he shall instead w i s h his life back so he c o u l d make this single minute different. But so uncaring is life against the m a n w h o has k i l l e d a c h i l d that everything after is too l a t e . 5 0 A year after this story was p u b l i s h e d nationwide, Picasso's Guernica returned to Stockholm for a second time i n two decades. To be sure, Guernica c o u l d be read as a reminder and counterpoint to Sweden's supposedly passive neutrality d u r i n g the w a r w h i c h had left S w e d i s h intellectuals out i n the c o l d , w h i l e the 'popular front' fought a hot resistance battle; v i s u a l l y , verbally and literally. A n d just asurely, one c h i l d r u n over by a car c o u l d not compare to the death of an entire village i n Spain (not to speak of the atrocities of W o r l d W a r II). But this time, Swedes had at least some k i n d of c l a i m of their o w n to existentialism. In its call for 'prepardeness,' a short story l i k e Dagerman's To Kill a Child c o u l d , after a l l , also be read as an attempt of a nation to b a n d together against social 'accidents.' W h i l e informed b y both Sartre and Kierkegaard, this stance w o u l d be m a r k e d b y a difference that replaced resistance w i t h a s o c i o - i n d i v i d u a l responsibility. It was the responsibility of the citizen i n this social welfare state to be constantly prepared. After a l l , if one c o u l d have asked "what if?" before the c h i l d ran across the street to be k i l l e d b y a car, then the accident m a y not have happened. B y s l o w i n g d o w n , rational behavior m a y have defeated chance. The idea of defeating chance is of course ridiculous. Accidents do happen. A fitting image for this n e w S w e d i s h social-psyche w o u l d therefore be the Rodin-and-Giacometti inspired bronze sculpture b y M a r t i n H o l m b e r g , e x h a u s t i b l y t i t l e d Trafikmiljo. manniskan nara vidstrdkt boulevard med tung 5 0 h t t p : / / h e m . p a s s a g e n . s e / i b l i s / d a g e r m a n . h t m l 3 3 http://hem http://passagen.se/iblis/dagerman trafik [Traffic Milieu: Human Near a Wide Stretching Boulevard with Heavy Traffic] (1952-53).5 1 L i k e its title, the w o r k is i n the end laboriously o v e r w o r k e d [fig. 11], a kitschy attempt to make v i s u a l a s o c i o - i n d i v i d u a l angst that makes us responsible if something happens. D e v o i d of Utopian spirit and lacking any sense of self-conscious i r o n y , there is no r o o m for the k i n d of energetic movement H u l t e n was l o o k i n g for — a movement reliant o n chance. Despite the failure of H o l m b e r g ' s sculpture to "move" us, the new social psyche it tried to express w o u l d nonetheless become appropriate for a socialist country increasingly asked to define itself between C a p i t a l i s m and C o m m u n i s m . 5 2 A s we w i l l see i n Chapter three, just as Picasso had been asked if he was a card-carrying C o m m u n i s t i n the forties, the S w e d i s h state w o u l d soon be asked b y its public to declare its allegiances w i t h i n international politics and be forced to define its o w n p o s i t i o n between the superpowers of the C o l d War. ^See Lars-Erik Astrom "Manniskari i nuet" Konstrevy Nr.2 (1957), pp.60-62. As Astrom's article points out, Holmberg was mainly concerned with the human subject's predicament in a mechanized urban environment, depicting automobile and vespa drivers as "human beings caught up in hard machine-forms made of glass and metal" pointing to a "new vital contact between abstract and human forms." p.60. 5 2 A l r e a d y in 1948, in an article entitled "Sartre and the Concept of Responsibility," literary critic Osten Sjostrand argued in the Western daily Goteborgs Morgonpost that Sartre's attempt to link individualism with a concept of responsibility fails as it miss uses the word 'tradition': "Tradition is not only that which is orally passed from generation to generation. It is also the deep under currencies of blod relations which are to a large part unconscious. It is in the now that we are united with past and future generations. The feeling of responsibility which comes out of this human experience is a completely different one from Sartre's. The responsibility which tradition determines, allows the individual to realize that culture's essential sacrifice is not the obstacle for his ability to live, but on the contrary, the condition why; the sacrifice of culture, what is it other than a consideration of our fellow-being! This responsibility is capable of realizing people and thereby culture, it is a responsibility which in most cases makes a person conservative. This is after all the goal to make the sacrifices of culture connect with tradition. It is this tradition which must be delivered and carried on if culture shall survive. But just as much as this culture can be misused by individuals, it can also be missused by a power hungry state. In this sense, to be conservative is foremost to be conscious of the personal responsibility over the protection of culture. A n d it is here where where we distance ourselves as far as possible from Sartre." Osten Sjostrand "Sartre och ansvarsbegreppet Goteborgs morgonpost (February 14, 1948), p.4. 3 4 In terms of v i s u a l art, what we see s l o w l y d e v e l o p i n g i n S w e d e n by the mid-fifties is a set of attitudes towards the inner and outer spaces of a "new c ity" w h i c h ranged from expressed depression to a belief i n a concretized utopia. A s a l l u d e d to earlier, for Ilmar Laaban, the psycho-physical space of resistance to both these "traps" was to be found outside the partisan polemic. In 1952, the artist w h o Laaban saw come closest to his o w n interest i n everyday life, space and mass culture was the C h i l e a n Surrealist Sebastian Roberto M a t t a Echaurren w h o by 1954 w o u l d become i n v o l v e d w i t h the International M o v e m e n t for an Imaginist Bauhaus together w i t h the D a n i s h C o B r A artist Asger Jorn [fig. 12]. Here, some felt, the struggle between aesthetics and politics were carefully elaborated. In an interview for the N e w Y o r k based magazine Reality that year, M a t t a defined his o w n collective a n a r c h i s m : A r t serves to arouse one's i n t u i t i o n to the emotion latent i n e v e r y t h i n g a r o u n d one, and to show up the emotional architecture w h i c h people need i n order to be and to live together. Important emotion is a menace to those w h o l i v e for their o w n selfish interest; so they have invented the p h i l a n t h r o p i c lie, a n d w i t h that p h i l a n t h r o p i c lie have reduced the artist to the c o n d i t i o n of a hostage. They have instituted an " A r t P o l i c e , " a police w h i c h operates against deep-rooted h u m a n emotion. I identify myself w i t h this hostage. The philanthropist-masters' comfort is menaced and they "shoot" the hostage. This new poet-hostage is always c o n s p i r i n g against their selfishness. To be this hostage one must p u t poetry at the center of one's life. True poetry is deeply h u m a n . A n d the true poet is stubborn about not forgetting that " m a n " is at the center of everything a n d that a l l d e v i a t i o n towards anti-human action s h o u l d be denounced. To revive the k i n d of m a n that a poet always was. (Byron d i e d for the liberty of the Greeks.) I k n o w that an artist w i l l o n l y be actual if his w o r k enters the t w o - w a y traffic of receiving from h i s people the consciousness of needs they have detected i n themselves, a n d , as an artist, charges this consciousness w i t h an i n t u i t i o n of important emotion, thus sending it back to w i d e n their picture of reality. For the 3 5 r conscious painter the "subject" is the same as for Cimabue—to make the m a n of his time think w i t h s e n t i m e n t . 5 3 For Laaban, Matta's paintings represented a progressive step out of Fautrier's heavy informel lead-clad hostages [fig. 13] but not necessarily into the seductive co lo u red structures of technocratic urban environments. Instead he saw i n them a responsive dialectical play between an inner and outer architecture — a hint of "movement" that c o u l d represent an escape from philantropic prisons i n A r t and life. Hu lte n's A n a r c h i s t Thread: Stirner, D u c h a m p a n d T i n g u e l y Laaban's cry for an art able to set free this "hostage" and p u t i n m o t i o n dialectical p l a y must have been heard by Pontus H u l t e n w h o was f i n d i n g his w a y out of a s i m i l a r l y perceived cultural crisis. L i k e Laaban, H u l t e n was attempting to stay out of the cross-fire between communists and anti- communists. But u n l i k e h i m , H u l t e n w o u l d d o w n p l a y Surrealist and C o B r A inspired interest i n folk and popular traditions. H u l t e n instead energetically focused his attention o n a more pop oriented critique of contemporary life's throw-away culture a n d machines as w e l l as locating " m o v e m e n t " i n an art intellectually a n d aesthetically situated between the social(ist) Utopian ideals of A r t Concrete (and its Bauhaus variants) and the more romantic i n d i v i d u a l i s t positions f o u n d i n Neo-expressionism. I n the fall of 1954 H u l t e n o r g a n i z e d Le Mouvement at G a l l e r i e Denise Rene, an e x h i b i t i o n 5 3 Echaurren (also known as Sebastian or Roberto) Matta "On Emotion" Reality No.2 New York (Spring 1954), p.12. The fact that Matta published this statement in the New York based journal Reality is noteworthy as it positions his paintings in an awkward relation to both 'Realism' (his work is abstract), and Abstract Expressionism (this journal stood in oposition to Gestural Abstraction). 3 6 w h i c h was to show both an aggressive, d y n a m i c and ironic side of contemporary art that refused to "slow d o w n . " Rather than be bogged d o w n by peasant culture a n d / o r internal existential conflicts, H u l t e n appropriated the dynamic side of F u t u r i s m as a springboard for his o w n ideas w h i c h , unlike C o B r a , for example, s h o w e d a renewed interest i n m o d e r n urban culture — the future is i n the city! H u l t e n was by no means the o n l y curator attempting to establish his o w n post-war canon. M i c h e l Tapie's Art Autre and Charles Estienne's Tachisme were but a few of the "movements" w o r k i n g alongside H u l t e n ' s trajectory. A photograph taken of H u l t e n i n Paris d u r i n g the mid-fifties shows h i m precariously balanced o n a chair as if to metaphorically hint at his carefully staged curatorial activities [fig. 14] w h i c h aimed to support an art tied to an historical avant-garde that was neither nihilistic nor n a i v e l y optimistic about an engagement w i t h p o p u l a r culture a n d / o r h i g h art. It also points to his resistance to being represented as a " f i x e d " identity. A s H u l t e n himself w o u l d later comment: W h a t d i s t i n g u i s h e d Le Mouvement from other exhibitions a n d earned it widespread p u b l i c i t y was its presentation of a n e w outlook i n art. A great deal of the art of the 1950s h a d been pessimistic, defeatist and passive. A lot of people were surprised to learn that there was another k i n d of ' m o d e r n ' art, d y n a m i c , constructive, joyful, deliberately b e w i l d e r i n g , ironic, critical, teasing a n d aggressive. 5 4 ^4Ponrus Hulten Jean Tinguely: Meta. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1972, p.35. Hulten has also described the art situation at the time as "still dominated by the opposition between abstract and naturalistic art, figurative and non-figurative. Along with this antagonism came the constructive, abstract art and the 'informel.'" This 'unformed' art was at this time a mainly American product. Although it did exist in Paris, Sam Francis and Jean Paul Riopelle were the most discussed 'drip painters' (peintres degoulinants). Pollock was still relatively unknown except inside a very small circle of people. Fautrier and Dubuffet seem to have received more attention in New York than Paris at this time. This was probably because they were still considered 'figurative,' which was seen as old and traditional. Ibid., p.28. 3 7 This "play" w h i c h H u l t e n claims was initiated by Le Mouvement, was carefully orchestrated. The exhibition consisted of three elements: an historical section w i t h m o v i n g sculptures b y A l e x a n d e r C a l d e r and M a r c e l D u c h a m p , contemporary w o r k by V i c t o r Vasarely and Robert Jacobsen, and w o r k by four younger artists [fig. 1 5 ] . 5 5 A s anchors i n Denise Rene's elegant stable of international kinetic art, C a l d e r a n d Vasarely were n o doubt i n c l u d e d as m u c h for their experiments w i t h movement as they were i n c l u d e d to massage Rene's ego. But C a l d e r and Vasarely's w o r k h a r d l y offered H u l t e n m u c h conceptual weight. S a n d w i c h e d between Calder's c h i l d - like naivite and Vasarely's pseudo-scientific arrogance, H u l t e n i n c l u d e d D u c h a m p w i t h his Rotary Demisphere (1925), an o p t i c a l experiment w h i c h a l l o w e d h i m to open up an intellectual avant-garde direction rooted i n the anarchism of D a d a . If Calder's and Vasarely's organic a n d geometric abstractions set i n m o t i o n the viewer's b o d y (either w i t h p h y s i c a l or v i s u a l tricks), Duchamp's optical w o r k destabilized the m i n d i n order to activate the intellect. F r o m an array of international backgrounds came some of the younger artists i n the exhibition such as Yaacov A g a m (Israel), P o l B u r y (Belgium), Jesus-Rafael Soto (Venezuela) and Jean T i n g u e l y (Switzerland). For someone like B u r y , w h o h a d exhibited w i t h C o B r A u p u n t i l that group's breakup earlier i n that same year, H u l t e n ' s n e w "movement" was distinctly more international than the School of Paris. This was no doubt the case for the rest of them. M o r e than Vasarely and the other household names at Galerie Denise Rene, these four y o u n g artists seemed to p u s h k i n e t i c i s m past the 5 5 A . J . A r n a u d " L e M o u v e m e n t " Cimaise ( M a y 1955), pp.17-18. 3 8 confined borders of p a i n t i n g and sculpture into a more ambiguous realm of sound and movement as perceived by the spectator. 5 6 A g a m went as far as to try to dissolve form and matter altogether b y setting up a series of visible stages for the v i e w e r that led to an optical effect similar to D u c h a m p ' s Rotary Demisphere. W h i l e the effects of these "metapolyphonic p a i n t i n g s " are i n many ways comparable w i t h both B u r y and Soto's kinetic reliefs i n c l u d e d i n the show, it was T i n g u e l y ' s w o r k w h i c h H u l t e n w o u l d find most "free" i n its particular embrace of Dada's ability to sustain a critical edge through h u m o u r and irony. U n l i k e the pseudo-scientific seriousness exhibited by the majority of the artists at Denise Rene, T i n g u e l y seemed to share D u c h a m p ' s pataphysical playfulness. W h i l e exhibiting i n M i l a n at Studio d'architettura b.24 i n December of 1954, T i n g u e l y encountered the Futurist designer and artist B r u n o M u n a r i w h o appears to have p r o v i d e d h i m w i t h an early v i s i o n of h o w he c o u l d direct his o w n art a w a y from functionalism towards movement. Since the early thirties, M u n a r i h a d been p r o d u c i n g what he described as "theoretical constructions of i m a g i n a r y objects" and Useless Machines [fig. 1 6 ] . 5 7 In 1952, M u n a r i h a d p u b l i s h e d a w h o l e series of manifestos such as Macchina-arte Macchinismo, Arte Organica, Disintegrismo, arte totale, w h i c h argued that: artists are the o n l y ones w h o can be truly interested i n machines; ... they have to learn to k n o w the mechanical anatomy, the mechanical language, must understand the nature of the machines a n d preoccupy themselves w i t h machines b y m a k i n g them function i n an irregular 56Some of these younger artists w o u l d r e m a i n tied to the circles a r o u n d Denise Rene's gallery. For example, Soto w o u l d have his first solo show i n Paris i n 1956 for w h i c h L e o n D e g a n d w o u l d write a catalogue i n t r o d u c t i o n . See L e o n D e g a n d Mouvement, Nouvelle Conception de la plastiaue, Aujourd'hui, P a r i s , 1956. 5 7 T a n c h i s , A l d o Bruno Munari: Design as Art Massachusetts: M I T Press, 1987, p. 35. 39 manner. Thereby creating w i t h these same machines and w i t h their o w n methods an art w o r k . 5 8 A p p r o p r i a t i n g both the anarchic aesthetic and propagandistic language he found i n M u n a r i , T i n g u e l y ' s activities were met w i t h enthusiasm b y H u l t e n w h o q u i c k l y realized h o w similar their i n d i v i d u a l practices were i n relation to the long-standing conflict between idealists and materialists i n p h i l o s o p h y as w e l l as politics. For both, this translated into a contemporary polemic about intentionality and spontaneity i n art w h i c h H u l t e n w o u l d later reflect u p o n : A n a r c h i s t theory had to face [this] dialectic. The assumption that h u m a n beings freed from the constraints of a r i g i d system possessed enough judgment and insight to choose what is right contradicts C h r i s t i a n teaching, founded o n the p r i n c i p l e of o r i g i n a l s i n . W a s n ' t it absurd, moreover, to deny the value of any intentional expression of the w i l l whatsoever, the w a y P o l l o c k h a d done, equating m o r a l i t y w i t h life and m a k i n g chance the o n l y v a l i d form of b e h a v i o r ? 5 9 A l t h o u g h H u l t e n ' s dialectical understanding of a crisis i n m o d e r n art w o u l d be particular, it was b y no means unique. A s the historian of the Left, M a r k Poster has commented, the immediate post-war years i n France were a k i n d of " H e g e l Renaissance." Whereas o n l y off-beat intellectuals like the surrealists and y o u n g Marxists appear to have been interested i n H e g e l before the war, post-war France was revitalized by a reintroduction of H e g e l b y such i n d i v i d u a l s as A l e x a n d e r Kojeve and Jean H y p p o l i t e w h o translated, p u b l i s h e d and lectured o n H e g e l . Whereas for m a n y M a r x i s t s H e g e l represented a renewed p o s i t i o n able to fight S t a l i n i s m , Existentialists found 5 8 H u l t e n (1972), p. 16. 5 9 Pontus Hulten "The Man and His Work" Museum Jean Tinguely, Basel. Berne: Basel and Benteli Publishers Ltd., 1996, p.36. If this reading of Pollock's work as lacking intention appears naive, it should be remembered that the myth constructed around Pollock was that his work represented a 'freedom of expression' that relied on his individual relation to chance. 4 0 H e g e l i a n dialectics a means by w h i c h to fight N e o - K a n t i a n i s m . Ironically, theologians such as M . A . C o u t u r i e r i n France and Reverend Walter H u s s e y i n E n g l a n d w o u l d also use Hegel's dialectic to set up a mystical u n i o n between m a n and the absolute. 6 0 Reading H e g e l not o n l y p r o v i d e d a p h i l o s o p h y of alienation i n history, but a dialectical p h e n o m e n o l o g y of consciousness. By understanding history as a continually u n f o l d i n g dialectic meant that one c o u l d not o n l y ask ' W h o is man?,' but ' H o w d i d m a n become s o c i a l ? ' 6 1 Since H e g e l , m a n y conflicting attempts had been developed to answer questions about the relation of the i n d i v i d u a l to society. F o r S i g m u n d F r e u d , such questions c o u l d o n l y be answered through a consideration of his p r o p o s i t i o n that c i v i l i z a t i o n is based o n the permanent repression of h u m a n instincts. B y stressing the importance of the pleasure principle (pleasure, joy, the absence of repression), the Surrealists had since the 1920s tried to release the i n d i v i d u a l from this 'cage' w h i c h F r e u d h a d called the reality principle (restraint of pleasure, t o i l , productiveness, security...). A r g u i n g against this "permanent repression," b y the 1950s Neo-Freudians such as Herbert M a r c u s e and N o r m a n O . B r o w n , w o u l d for different reasons, approach the relationship between these two principles b y focusing o n Freud's meta- psychology, the d y n a m i c struggle between b i o l o g i c a l a n d sociological 60Rev. Hussey was the first commissioner in England to recruit contemprary avant-garde artists into English Church services. In France, there was a modernist movement within the Dominican Church led primarily by M . A . Couturier who commissioned artists such as Fernand Leger, Le Corbusier, Henri Matisse, and others. These commissions took place as a result of the Church's post-war rebuilding programs. See M . A . A . Couturier's Sacred Art Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989) and Patrik Andersson's "The Dialectical Cross: Graham Sutherland, Herbert Read and The Modern Churchman" Collapse no.l (1995), pp.37-57. 6lFor a historical and philosophical overview of the French Communist Party, see David Caute's Communism and the French Intellectuals: 1914-1960 New York: Macmillan, 1964, and Mark Poster's Existential Marxism in Postwar France: from Sartre to Althusser Irvine: University of California Press, 1975. 4 1 i n s t i n c t s . 6 2 Parallel to these projects, a disenfranchised member of the Left, H e n r i Lefebvre, w o u l d develop his concept of everyday life through a meta- philosophy of l i n k i n g theory and practice. Interestingly enough, it was i n this context of 'meta-languages' that H u l t e n was p o n d e r i n g his o w n w a y out of the polemical spell he understood contemporary art to be under. But for H u l t e n it was M a r c e l D u c h a m p w h o was the central p h i l o s o p h i c a l figure w h o a l l o w e d h i m to break free a flexible avant-garde position from art w o r l d polemics. The central artist he found able to activate this new d y n a m i c position was Jean Tinguely. In T i n g u e l y ' s ' m o v i n g machines,' w h i c h b y 1955 i n c l u d e d a large b o d y of mechanically and h a n d - d r i v e n reliefs, sculptures a n d paintings, H u l t e n saw what seemed like a perfect u n i o n of the different artistic positions available. O n H u l t e n ' s recommendation, T i n g u e l y , from this point f o r w a r d , decided to name his sculptural machines "meta-mechanics" analogous to metaphysics, metaphor and m e t a m o r p h o s i s . 6 3 A w o r k such as Meta- Malevich [fig. 17] p u t constructive open forms i n a movement unpredictably determined b y a motor d r i v e n cycle of cogs and wheels h i d d e n b e h i n d the surface of the w o o d e n stretcher. E m b r a c i n g chance (something w h i c h was not readily embraced b y the rationalism of Bauhaus pedagogy), T i n g u e l y produced w o r k s w i t h similar ironic gestures as D u c h a m p ' s assisted readymades and m o b i l i z e d the mechanomorphic language of the D a d a painter Francis Picabia. In a l l of Tinguely's w o r k , the v i e w e r was asked to participate b y activating or freezing the abstract compositions and resulting 6 2 S e e i n p a r t i c u l a r H e r b e r t M a r c u s e ' s Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud N e w Y o r k : V i n t a g e Books, 1955 and N o r m a n O . B r o w n Life Against Death N e w Y o r k : Vintage Books, 1959. 6 3 H u l t e n (1972), p.16. 4 2 concrete music. By p u s h i n g a button or s i m p l y m o v i n g a r o u n d the w o r k , the viewer became part of the creative process i n a more literal w a y than both Picabia and D u c h a m p ' s works afforded. By p u t t i n g chance-ridden mechanical movement into w o r k s such as Meta-Malevich (1954) and Meta-Kandinsky (1956), this early w o r k b y T i n g u e l y set i n m o t i o n geometric and gestural abstraction, activating a dialogue that could be read against the grain of Bauhaus rhetoric. A s early as 1938, L a s z l o M o h o l y - N a g y , i n his book The New Vision, had set forth to " w o r k out an educational p r i n c i p l e w h i c h strives for the closest connection between art, science, and t e c h n o l o g y . " 6 4 C o n t i n u i n g this project after the w a r w i t h renewed rigor, and concentrating o n the w o r k p r o d u c e d at the n e w Bauhaus Institute of A r t i n C h i c a g o , M o h o l y - N a g y p u b l i s h e d Vision in Motion, a survey of m o d e r n art's ties to i n d u s t r i a l m o t i o n w h i c h served both as an argument for k i n e t i c i s m i n contemporary art and a w a y to centralize Russian constructivism and Bauhaus pedagogy w i t h i n a history of the avant-garde. 6 5 Read by H u l t e n , as w e l l as a number of younger artists such as T i n g u e l y , Vision in Motion opened u p an important alternative history to the School of Paris w h i l e at the same time it "whetted" their curiosity for D u c h a m p , whose w o r k was more or less t r i v i a l i z e d by M o h o l y - N a g y w i t h w h a t H u l t e n recently described as "the nastiest [of] r e m a r k s . " 6 6 6 4 Q u o t e d from Benjamin H.D. Buchloh "Cold War Constructivism" in Serge Guilbaut, ed. Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964 Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990, p.85. ^Laszlo Moholy-Nagy Vision in Motion Chicago: Paul Theobald, id Book, 1947. ^Pontus Hulten "The Blind Lottery of Reputation: or The Duchamp Effect" Marcel Duchamp: Works and Life Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993, p.14. 4 3 H o w nasty M o h o l y - N a g y ' s remarks were can be debated, but he d i d d o w n p l a y Duchamp's central role i n debates about the creative act by o n l y briefly m e n t i o n i n g his name and referring to his ready-made objects t h r o u g h the voices of critics w h o saw them as "debasing" and " t r i v i a l . " 6 7 A s he made clear i n his foreword, M o h o l y - N a g y was foremost interested i n presenting his o w n 'standards' w i t h w h i c h to measure and balance "the interrelatedness of art and l i f e . " 6 8 The m a i n thrust of his argument was that since the i n d u s t r i a l r e v o l u t i o n , c i v i l i z a t i o n had not managed to cultivate intellectual and emotional standards to the same degree as its technological progress. A s a result, d i v i s i o n s of labour and general alienation had steadily been on the increase and was leading to the decline of c i v i l i z a t i o n : These i l l s , w i t h their resultant monopolistic and fascist tendencies, finally led to repeated w o r l d wars w h i c h were cruel attempts to w i n capitalistic competition and to check the u p w a r d spiral of the social progress so v i g o r o u s l y undertaken b y the A m e r i c a n and French revolutions. O u r generation must stop the recurrence of these wars b y understanding the hazards of a planlessly expanding i n d u s t r y w h i c h , b y the b l i n d dynamics of competition and profit, automatically leads to conflicts o n a w o r l d s c a l e . 6 9 Just as someone like Piet M o n d r i a n had d e v o l p e d a pseudo-scientific p i c t o r i a l blue-print from w h i c h to e n v i s i o n a more balanced society, M o h o l y - N a g y saw a potential reduction of conflict and e q u a l i b r i u m reached b y reconnecting intellectual and emotional spheres w i t h industry's technological a n d economic developments. The artist, he argued, s h o u l d stand at the crossroad 6 7 Q u o t e d from footnote i n M o h o l y - N a g y , p.58. S u r p r i s i n g l y , i n this book w h i c h e m p h a s i z e d experimentation i n a l l m e d i u m s , but especially f i l m , there was no discussion of D u c h a m p ' s f i l m i c experiments such as Rotary Relief or Anemic Cinema. 6 8 M o h o l y - N a g y , p.5. 6 9 I b i d . , p.14. 4 4 of the different disciplines — experimenting u n t i l a "sociobiological sythesis' is r e a c h e d . 7 0 O n the one h a n d , M o h o l y - N a g y ' s interest i n m o d e r n culture and enthusiastic support for the contemporary artist must have appealed to i n d i v i d u a l s such as H u l t e n and T i n g u e l y , w h o were t r y i n g to define their own dialectical positions w i t h i n the same post-war terrain. O n the other hand, the r i g i d p l a n n i n g of M o h o l y - N a g y ' s new society and the m y t h i c role the artist p l a y e d i n this planned social Utopia must have appeared rather doctrinal to them as it was increasingly becoming an academic formula in rationalized social welfare states such as S w i t z e r l a n d and Sweden: It is the artist's duty today to penetrate yet-unseen ranges of the b i o l o g i c a l functions, to search the new dimensions of the i n d u s t r i a l society and to translate the new findings into emotional orientation. The artist unconsciously disentangles the most essential strands of existence from the contorted and chaotic complexities of actuality, and weaves them into an emotional fabric of c o m p e l l i n g v a l i d i t y , characteristic of himself as w e l l as of his epoch. This ability of selection is an outstanding gift based u p o n intuitive p o w e r a n d insight, u p o n judgement and knoweledge, and u p o n inner responsibility to fundamental b i o l o g i c a l and social laws w h i c h p r o v o k e a reinterpretation i n every c i v i l i z a t i o n . This i n t u i t i v e p o w e r is present i n other creative workers, too, i n philosophers, poets, scientists, technologists. They pursue the same hopes, seek the same meanings, and — although the content of their w o r k appears to be different — the trends of their approach and the b a c k g r o u n d of their activity are identical. They a l l must d r a w from the same source, w h i c h is life i n a certain society, i n a certain c i v i l i z a t i o n . This basic identity is the c o m m o n denominator, the desire today to f i n d and investigate the fundamentals i n every field so that they can become constructive parts of a new c i v i l i z a t i o n . The p r o b l e m of our generation is to b r i n g the intellectual and emotional, the social and technological components into balanced play; to learn to see and feel them i n r e l a t i o n s h i p . 7 1 7 0 I b i d . , p.31. 7 1 I b i d . , pp.11-12. 4 5 A s anarchists, not o n l y w o u l d H u l t e n and T i n g u e l y have reacted against this idea of the artist being used as a "tool" to normalize society, but n o t i c i n g M o h o l y - N a g y ' s subtle exclusions of pataphysical strands w i t h i n avant-garde history, they must also have wanted to rebel against his reconstruction of a new c i v i l i z a t i o n based o n the h o m o g e n i z i n g notion of "balanced play." A t t e m p t i n g to distance his o w n project form this deterministic Vision in Motion, H u l t e n w o u l d shift the terms of the discussion ever so s l i g h t l y from motion to the more metaphorical possibilities of movement. S l o w l y d e v e l o p i n g his o w n concept of "movement i n art," H u l t e n d i s t i n g u i s h e d the difference between the two w o r d s i n his o w n l i m i t e d edition anarchist j o u r n a l Kasark p u b l i s h e d i n S t o c k h o l m i n 1955. W h e n y o u want to talk about movement, S w e d i s h is an unpractical language. E n g l i s h is m u c h more convenient since it distinguishes between motion and movement. M o t i o n appears to i m p l y m o v e m e n t i n general; for example a body's transfer from one place to the next, movement i m p l i e s movement itself; for example the m o v e m e n t of the fingers i n relation to each other w h e n u s i n g a type writer. This belongs to this century's b i g events to a l l o w an art w o r k to move w i t h i n itself like a motor or the w a y a tree moves i n the w i n d . 7 2 D e v e l o p i n g his o w n history of "movement art" p a r a l l e l to M o h o l y - N a g y ' s history "motion art," H u l t e n increasingly understood M a r c e l D u c h a m p ' s v i s u a l and conceptual experiments to function as a genre- breaking toolbox w h i c h "messed up" the rational and technocratic o p t i m i s m of Bauhaus r h e t o r i c . 7 3 For this reason, as T i n g u e l y w o u l d later recall, H u l t e n 7 2 H u l t e n , Pontus " D e n stallforetradande friheten" ["The Substitutive Freedom"] Kasark N r . 2 (October 1955), p . l . 7 3 H u l t e n d r e w a c u r i o u s historical lineage starting w i t h the t u r n of the century Italian Ettore Bugatti's automobile to the Futurists' interest i n speed, D u c h a m p and A l e x a n d e r Calder's kinetic experiments, the constructivist tendencies of G a b o , Pevsner, T a t l i n and the early w o r k of 46 "had to fight for D u c h a m p at Denise Rene" as his tongue-in-cheek critique of scientific rationalism was read, if not always appreciated or u n d e r s t o o d . 7 4 Perhaps it was this resistance from Rene, Vasarely, D e g a n d and others w h i c h made H u l t e n realize that his interest i n D u c h a m p c o u l d be used to define his o w n position as both different and powerful. After a l l , w i t h the help of intellect and h u m o u r , D u c h a m p forged a path between naive o p t i m i s m and expressed depression; a road less travelled but full of opportunity. A s mentioned, d u r i n g preparations for he Mouvement, H u l t e n had discovered that his interest i n D u c h a m p was shared by the Swiss kinetic sculptor T i n g u e l y . W h i l e w o r k i n g i n Z u r i c h directly after the war, T i n g u e l y had been intensely i n v o l v e d i n the anarchist circle a r o u n d H e i n e r K o e c h l i n whose dissertation o n the Paris C o m m u n e he designed a cover for (this was p u b l i s h e d by the K o e c h l i n ' s private p u b l i s h i n g house, D o n Q u i c h o t t e ) . 7 5 N o t only was he l i v i n g i n the city k n o w n for its historical connection to D a d a , but he, like H u l t e n i n Sweden, began to formulate his o w n p o l i t i c a l position by reading an array of p h i l o s o p h i c a l tracts: — . I read Stirner, M a r x , Bachofen, H e g e l , K r o p o t k i n , B a k u n i n , P r o u d h o n and others; I pondered certain questions a n d discussed them w i t h friends w h o were p o l i t i c a l refugees and others w h o were students of K a r l J a s p e r s . 7 6 Moholy-Nagy, to the Italian Bruno Munari to finally arrived at Tinguely's metamechanical sculptures. 7 4 Q u o t e d from a 1988 interview with Dieter Daniels in Violand-Hobi, p.41. 7 5 H u l t e n (1996), p.262. 7 6 T i n g u e l y quoted in Heidi E.Violand-Hobi Jean Tinguely: Life and Work. New York: Prestel, 1995. Niki de Saint Phalle has also referred to Tinguely's interest in Max Stirner: "At that time you were reading Max Stirner's The Individual and His Property[sic]. You wanted me to read it too... You were also influenced by the Austrian philospher Wittgenstein. You told me about his life. He was the richest man in town. He decided he didn't want to be rich anymore and thought a long time about what he should do with his money. He decided to give it to the next richest man of the city, because he didn't want to disturb the lives of the poor. He then 4 7 By the fifties it was M a x Stirner's w r i t i n g i n particular that fascinated T i n g u e l y , and most l i k e l y H u l t e n w h o w o u l d have appreciated his emphasis o n a freedom tied to both w i l l and instinct rather than reason. A s a Y o u n g H e g e l i a n d u r i n g the mid-19th century, Stirner had advocated a r a d i c a l i n d i v i d u a l i s m based o n the p r i n c i p l e of rebellion rather than r e v o l u t i o n . A s a subjectivist defense against the p o w e r of state authority, The Ego and His Own (1845), Stirner's o n l y major p u b l i s h e d w o r k , is an early formulation of an attack o n representation w h i c h anticipates not just Freud's stress o n the force of the desires to influence the intellect, but also the challenges to Enlightenment epistemology offered u p b y the poststructuralist. 7 7 P u t t i n g forward the idea that the i n d i v i d u a l loses uniqueness i n the face of being understood w i t h i n a generalized and fixed concept of " M a n , " Stirner argued against the k i n d of ontological culture of "being" proposed b y other anarchists and y o u n g Hegelians where human nature was i d e a l i z e d . 7 8 For example, whereas Peter K r o p o t k i n attacked the idea of the nation state and the economic logic of capitalism t h r o u g h an evolutionary u n d e r s t a n d i n g of went penniless and installed himself in Sweden as a gardener." quoted in N i k i de Saint Phalle. "A Little of M y Story with You, Jean" in Hulten (1996), p.25. 7 7 F o r a close study of the relationship between Poststructuralism and the anarchist attack on representation offered up by Stirner's Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (the German title of Stirner's book), see Andrew M . Koch's "Poststructuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism" Philosophy of Social Sciences Vol.23, No.3 (September 1993), pp.327-351: "Rather than focus on a competing model of human nature, Stirner was concerned with showing the linkage between ideas and the context in which they are generated. This method is similar to that labeled "genealogy" by Nietzsche and the poststructuralists." p.333. 78ln one of the most comprehensive accounts of anarchist thought, Peter Marshall has discussed Stirner as "the conscious egoist" who "offered a root-and-branch attack on existing values and institutions. Like Kierkegaard, he celebrated the unique truth of the individual and sought to liberate him from the great barrel organ of Hegelian metaphysics. In his attack on Christian morality and his call for the self-exaltation of the whole individual, he anticipated Nietzsche and atheistic existentialism. But while there are nihilistic and existentialist elements to his work, Stirner is not merely a nihilist, for he does not set out to destroy all moral and social values. Neither is he, strictly speaking, a proto-existentialist, for he rejects any attempt to create a highter or better individual." See Peter Marshall's Demanding the Impossible: a History of Anarchism London: Fontana Press, 1993, p.220. 4 8 cooperation rather than a D a r w i n i a n m o d e l of competition, and P r o u d h o n proposed liberty, as a form of social organization to be constructed out of a rational scientific i n q u i r y , Stirner rejected a l l forms of social organization and revolutionary processes for their ability to " b r i n g u p against us a w h o l e army of fixed ideas such as morals, C h r i s t e n d o m and nationalism" w h i c h he refered to as "spectres:" M a n , y o u r head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! Y o u imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole w o r l d of gods that has an existence for y o u , a spirit realm to w h i c h y o u suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to y o u . Y o u have a fixed idea! (my i t a l i c s ) 7 9 For Stirner, if the w o r l d as we k n o w it (representation, thought, and ideas) is i n a constant state of flux due to its constructed aspect (as L u d w i g Wittgenstein w o u l d later name it), truth has to be understood as n o t h i n g more than a fleeting moment. S h o w i n g the l i n k between ideas and the context i n w h i c h ideas are generated, Stirner's project rejects a l l grand narratives of his day and is at the very heart of later attempts b y philosophers to formulate what Nietzsche (and post-structuralists after him) w o u l d label a "genealogy." A s Roberto Calasso has proposed i n his anarchic fiction The Ruin of Kasch: They [the universities] pay no attention to these facts. They have forgotten that it was Stirner w h o disfigured them once and for a l l w i t h his strokes. They consider his w o r k a good dissertation topic. But to treat M a x Stirner o n l y w i t h i n one of the countless histories of the neo- Hegelians or of anarchism is already an i n v i t a t i o n to the w r i t e r to a v o i d this monstrosity. Stirner then becomes a " p o s i t i o n , " always an ^ S t i r n e r , p.45. T h i s quote is taken from a section i n The Ego and His Own entitled "Wheels i n the H e a d . " N o t o n l y is this v i s u a l l y l i t e r a l i z e d i n T i n g u e l y ' s machines, b u t w e can also think of the m e c h a n o m o r p h i c wheels i n Francis Picabia's w o r k a n d M a r c e l D u c h a m p ' s readymades. Both these artists h a d been i n t r o d u c e d to Stirner's w r i t i n g s as early as 1912. 4 9 extreme one, the ultimate of something.... Stirner announces them, explains them. A n d immediately he becomes ghostly. Stirner's presence is thus clearest i n two authors, the first of w h o m does not mention h i m at all and the second of w h o m speaks of h i m i n a text he w i l l never p u b l i s h : Nietzsche and M a r x . 8 0 W h i l e Nietzsche carefully e m p l o y e d silence to a v o i d being accused of h a v i n g plagiarized Stirner, M a r x and Engels, i n the first draft of The German Ideology, spent two-thirds of their thesis tackling the p r o b l e m of "Saint M a x " whose argument against revolutionary socialism was decisively based i n a critique of l a n g u a g e . 8 1 In a private letter to M a r x dated N o v e m b e r 19, 1844, Engels went as far as to admit that: what is true i n his principles w e , too, must accept. A n d what is true is that before w e can be active i n any cause we must make it our o w n , egoistic cause — and that i n this sense, quite aside from any expectations, we are communists i n virtue of our egoism, that out of egoism w e want to be h u m a n beings and not merely i n d i v i d u a l s . 8 2 SORoberto Calasso The Ruin of Kasch. Harvard: Harward University Press, 1994, pp. 259. 8 l A p r o p o s Nietzsche's silence, Calasso quotes Ida Overbeck, a close friend of Nietzsche: "Once, when my husband was out, Nietzsche stayed and talked to me for a while, telling me about two strange characters he was dealing with at that time—people with whom he felt a certain kinship. As is always the case when one finds some internal rapport, he was animated an happy. Some time later he found a book by Klinger in our house. M y husband had not found Stirner in the library. ' A h , ' said Nietzsche, T was mistaken about Klinger. He was a Philistine; I feel no affinity at all with him. But Stirner—with him, yes.' A grave expression darkened his face. A n d as I looked attentively at his features, they changed again. He waved his hand, as if to drive away or repel somethin, and murmured: 'Now I've told you, and I didn't want to speak of it. Forget it all. They will talk of plagiarism, but I know you won't." quoted in Calasso, p.278. For Duchamp, Hulten and Tinguely, Stirner must have appeared as an alternative to the Nietzchean 'superman' Picasso (for example) had embraced. This different genealogy allowed them to embrace Alfred Jarry's 'supermale' instead. See Alfred Jarry's The Supermale Cambridge, M A : New Directions Publishing Corp., 1999. I would argue that this text was the basic inspiration for Duchamp's mechano-sexual readymade, the Bicycle Wheel (1913). 8 2 Q u o t e d from Sidney Hook's From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1961 (orig. pub. 1950), p.173-174. 5 0 A l t h o u g h "Saint M a x " w o u l d be edited out of the p o p u l a r i z e d versions of The German Ideology, Stirner's impact o n its conception can not go unmentioned i n m y study as a specific group of i n d i v i d u a l s i n the 1950s attempted to find a s i m i l a r p h i l o s o p h i c a l m o b i l i t y . In Stirner, T i n g u e l y w o u l d find a w a y towards auto-critique i n the most mechanical sense of that w o r d . In w o r k s such as Meta-Malevich an attempt is made to a v o i d 'fixed' readings b y c o n t i n u o u s l y creating uncertainties. These m a c h i n e - d r i v e n forms move repetitively (like the wheels Stirner describes), albeit inconsistently, s t r i v i n g c o n t i n u o u s l y to communicate, to become. The moment their verbality cease and their forms are announced as signs, symbols, shapes and objects, these beings fall into the very language trap Stirner h a d discovered a century before: If the point is to have myself understood and to make communications, then assuredly I can make use o n l y of human means, w h i c h are at m y c o m m a n d because I a m at the same time man. A n d really I have thoughts o n l y as man; as I, I a m at the same time thoughtless. H e w h o cannot get r i d of a thought is so far o n l y man, is a thrall of language, this h u m a n institution, this treasury of h u m a n thoughts. Language or "the w o r d " tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a w h o l e a r m y of fixed ideas. Just observe yourself i n the act of reflection, right n o w , a n d y o u w i l l f i n d h o w y o u make progress o n l y b y becoming thoughtless and speechless every moment. Y o u are not thoughtless and speechless merely i n (say) sleep, but even i n the deepest reflection; yes precisely then most so. A n d o n l y b y this thoughtlessness, this unrecognized "freedom of thought" or freedom from the thought, are y o u y o u r o w n . O n l y from it do y o u arrive at p u t t i n g language to use as y o u r property %3 W e can hereby look at T i n g u e l y ' s meta-mechanical sculptures b u i l t l i k e entropic i n d u s t r i a l ruins out of the throw-away excesses of an automated 8 3 S t i r n e r , p.364-65. 5 1 universe, as rationally constructed attempts to produce portraits of " m a n , " or perhaps more accurately, as different versions of " m o d e r n m a n . " If, as Nietzsche had suggested, "truth is a mobile a r m y of tropes," by 1955, T i n g u e l y had assembled his o w n mechanomorphic troops constructed out of the shadows cast by C a l d e r ' s organic mobiles, M a l e v i c h ' s geometric Suprematism [fig. 18], as w e l l as H e n r i M i c h a u x ' s gestural 'diagrams of the soul' [fig. 19]. R i s k i n g to remain an outsider i n a Parisian art w o r l d l o o k i n g for s o l i d or gestural 'truths,' T i n g u e l y w o u l d go o n creating and p a r a d i n g his parodies like D u c h a m p i a n bachelors set free from the Large Glass or the spectres of truth Stirner h a d once confronted: Truths are phrases, ways of speaking, w o r d s ; brought into connection, or into an articulate series, they form logic, science, p h i l o s o p h y . For t h i n k i n g and speaking I need truths and w o r d s , as I do foods for eating; w i t h o u t them I cannot think nor speak. Truths are men's thoughts, set d o w n i n w o r d s a n d therefore just as extant as other things, although extant o n l y for the m i n d or for t h i n k i n g . They are h u m a n institutions and h u m a n creatures, a n d , even if they are g i v e n out for d i v i n e revelations, there s t i l l remains i n them the quality of alienness for me; yes, as m y o w n creatures they are already alienated from me after the act of creation.84 T i n g u e l y found a brief escape from the confined space of this Parisian art w o r l d i n the fall of 1955 b y traveling n o r t h w i t h H u l t e n to S t o c k h o l m where he was i n v i t e d to set u p a w o r k s h o p i n the office of Blandaren, an anarchist j o u r n a l p u b l i s h e d b y architecture students at Stockholm's R o y a l Institute of T e c h n o l o g y . 8 5 Stirner's i n d i v i d u a l i s t b r a n d of anarchism h a d been introduced into S w e d e n t h r o u g h the Y o u n g Socialist Party (Ungsocialistiska Partiet) as early as 1908 but h a d soon come into conflict w i t h socialists and 8 4 I b i d . , p.367. ^Blandaren was p r o d u c e d b y students as a response to the institute's pedagogical focus o n Bauhaus t h i n k i n g . 5 2 c o m m u n i s t a n a r c h i s t s w h o u n d e r s t o o d this r a d i c a l i n d i v i d u a l i s t s t a n c e to r e p r e s e n t a threat to state d e v e l o p m e n t . 8 6 A s a r e s u l t o f the s u c c e s s o f s o c i a l i s m , b y the fifties, r a d i c a l i n d i v i d u a l i s m h a d to a l a r g e extent g o n e u n d e r g r o u n d w i t h a few e x c e p t i o n s , s u c h as H u l t e n . 8 7 I r o n i c a l l y , T i n g u e l y ' s i n c r e a s i n g l y s e l f - d e s t r u c t i v e m a c h i n e s w e r e n o w t r u l y p l a y i n g a r o u n d w i t h base a n d s u p e r s t r u c t u r e as t h e y w e r e b e i n g c o n s t r u c t e d i n the b a s e m e n t o f the S w e d i s h B a u h a u s . B y this t i m e , T i n g u e l y h a d f u l l y d e v e l o p e d h i s m e t a - m e c h a n i c d r a w i n g m a c h i n e s w h i c h w o u l d act as g e o m e t r i c r o b o t i z a t i o n s o f abstract p a i n t e r s [fig. 2 0 ] . B y the p u s h o f a b u t t o n , the artist o r a u d i e n c e c o u l d set i n m o t i o n a n e v e r p r e d i c t a b l e , a l w a y s o r i g i n a l , p r o d u c t i o n o f abstract d r a w i n g s . U n d e r s t a n d i n g b o t h g e o m e t r i c a b s t r a c t i o n a n d abstract e x p r e s s i o n i s m as a d e c o r a t i v e a n d m e c h a n i z e d e x t e n s i o n o f a t e c h n o c r a t i c w o r l d , H u l t e n p r o v i d e d T i n g u e l y w i t h a n e x h i b i t i o n at the s m a l l , b u t n o t e w o r t h y , G a l l e r i S a m l a r e n o w n e d a n d o p e r a t e d b y A g n e s W i d l u n d . F o r the o c c a s i o n , H u l t e n c o n t r i b u t e d a l e n g t h y c r i t i c a l text i n h i s l i m i t e d c i r c u l a t i o n j o u r n a l Kasark, w h i c h c a r e f u l l y o u t l i n e d T i n g u e l y ' s ties to b o t h a n h i s t o r i c a l a v a n t - g a r d e (by w a y o f D a d a a n d D u c h a m p ) a n d the s u s t a i n e d c r i t i q u e o f r a t i o n a l i s m o f f e r e d t h r o u g h a n a r c h i s m . ^6htt^://www.gro.o.se/arkiv/ana/sti/stimer2.h1ml "Egoister: Max Stirner och individualanarkism i den ungsocalistiska rorelsen. The most contemporary history of the Young Socialist Party and Stirner published at the time of Tinguely's stay in Stockholm was Tage Lindbom's Den socialdemokratiska ungdomsrorelsen i Sverige. Stockholm: Tidens forlag, 1952. ^ 7 In an interview conducted on May 18,1999, Ulf Linde confirmed my suggestion that Stirner was a powerful philosophical figure in Sweden for individuals like himself and Hulten who were interested in defending individuality without falling into the trap of "individualism." In fact, in this interview, Stirner functioned as a 'key' to open up a dialogue about Duchamp's relationship with Linde. 5 3 http://www.gro.o.se/arkiv/ana/sti/stimer2.h1ml R e a l i z i n g the potential connection between Tinguely's art and his o w n reading of the history of ideas, H u l t e n formulated his o w n Stirner-inspired i n d i v i d u a l freedom v i a D u c h a m p : Jean T i n g u e l y ' s art is b u i l t around the idea of the wheel. The wheel's circular movement is i n its continuity an eternal repetition. But it is also an eternal renewal.... In practical machines the goal is to reduce irregularities as m u c h as possible. T i n g u e l y seeks the opposite. H e seeks mechanical disorder. The cogs i n his wheels are made as to constantly produce inconsistent chance r i d d e n movement. H i s connections lack a l l precision except that of chance, his wheels have kept their character as symbols for an eternal transformation. They are chance i n function. They are a new and o r i g i n a l formulation of M a r c e l D u c h a m p ' s idea to use chance intentionally.... These new creatures of the art w o r l d live i n an enviable freedom. They stand outside a l l laws a n d are not b o u n d by systems. This art exemplifies pure anarchy w h e n it is most beautiful. It is an art w h i c h is thoroughly revolutionary, t h o r o u g h l y d y n a m i c , freer than we c o u l d ourselves ever hope to become.... It is a piece of pure existence, forever changing, that doesn't need to mean or hint at something just as a flower or a rat doesn't have to mean.. But one is mistaken to believe that their artistic message is innocent or harmless. It is, actually, loaded w i t h a freedom like a bomb w i t h trotyl. It is a s m a l l latent attack against a l l established order, it is a s y m b o l for an enormous freedom and s h o u l d scare a l l righteous thinkers if they c o u l d understand its power. It is a s y m b o l for an absolute, d i z z y i n g and unbelievable freedom. It personifies a freedom w h i c h otherwise w o u l d not exist, and therein lies its value. These machines are more anti-machines than machines.... M i l i t a r y technology and scientific knowledge is constantly a direct threat against our i n d i v i d u a l existence.... A l r e a d y w i t h D a d a w e saw a clear skepticism against the technological w o r l d . D u c h a m p ' s ready-made, the artwork chosen from mass reproduction, contains m u c h i r o n y against machines, and gets its potency not u n t i l it is p a r a d o x i c a l l y freed from its function. A s I see it, [Tinguely's w o r k ] represents one of the most conscious expressions for a n e w type of m o d e r n art.... This art is an anti-social expression. One has to attack machines i n their o w n territory[my italics].... The w e a p o n of T i n g u e l y ' s machines is i r o n y . 8 8 ^Pontus Hulten "Den stallforetradande friheten eller om Rorelse i konsten och Tinguely's Metamekanik" ("Vicarious Freedom: or Movement in Art and Tinguely's Metamatics") Kasark #2 (October 1955), pp.26-31. In a 1982 interview on Belgian radio, Tinguely would clarify his own position by saying that: With Dada I... have in common a certain mistrust toward power. We don't like authority, we don't like power. To me art is a form of manifest revolt, total and complete. It's a political attitude which doesn't need to found a political party. It's not a 5 4 In this rather lengthy quote it is clear that H u l t e n had enough "wheels" i n his o w n head to understand Tinguely's w o r k as a tongue-in-cheek gesture against the constructive social goals of A r t Concrete, but i n more general terms representing a Stirnean attack o n "established order." A s Francis M . N a u m a n n has significantly suggested, d u r i n g a stay i n M u n i c h i n 1912 D u c h a m p had also discovered M a x Stirner's w r i t i n g s . N a u m a n n goes as far as to propose that Stirner's w r i t i n g s " m a y have p r o v i d e d the most extensive theoretical basis for his n e w f o u n d artistic f r e e d o m . " 8 9 In a M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t questionnaire filled out i n the late fifties regarding his Three Standard Stoppages [fig. 1], D u c h a m p recalled Stirner's book as h a v i n g specifically influenced its p r o d u c t i o n . Just as Stirner's w o r k can p r o v i d e significant inroads into D u c h a m p ' s t h i n k i n g , Three Standard Stoppages is central to u n l o c k i n g key aspects of D u c h a m p ' s ceuvre as it functioned as a measuring device i n his systematic formulation of an "art coefficiency" — the arithmetical relationship between the intentionally unexpressed a n d expressed unintentionality. For D u c h a m p , the "creative act" existed i n this 'gap' or 'difference' between a rational and irrational side of the equation. This was the abstract reality of movement, chance and i r o n y . In this sense, D u c h a m p creative act took into account the accidental chance encounters w h i c h d o m i n a n t artistic a n d scientific 'reason' matter of taking power; when you are against it, you can't take it. We're against all forms of force which aggregate and crystallize an authority that oppresses people. Obviously this is not a characteristic of my art alone—it's much more general, a basic political attitude. It's a clear intention, more necessary today than ever, to oppose all forms of force emanating from a managing, centralising political power." Violand-Hobi, p.16. 8 9 Francis M . Naumann "Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites" in Thierry de Duve, ed.. The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 54. 5 5 refused to a c k n o w l e d g e . 9 0 C o m i n g from Sweden and S w i t z e r l a n d , two exemplary rational societies, H u l t e n and T i n g u e l y no doubt appreciated Duchamp's "standard joke." C o m m e n t i n g o n the i n d i v i d u a l artists role i n relation to this type of collective society, D u c h a m p w o u l d i n 1963 say that: . . . M u c h as he w o u l d like to, the artist cannot help another m a n . It's each one for himself, for I don't agree at a l l w i t h the a n t h i l l that waits for us i n a few h u n d r e d years. I still believe i n the i n d i v i d u a l and every m a n for himself, like i n a s h i p w r e c k . 9 1 V i e w i n g themselves as s h i p w r e c k e d outsiders i n a Paris, H u l t e n and Tinguely were busy b u i l d i n g a raft of their o w n i n S t o c k h o l m o n w h i c h they sought to escape the p o l e m i c a l , and often generic, debates i n contemporary art. A s it turned out, by the early sixties, the seeds planted i n Stockholm i n the form of exhibitions, debates and contacts w o u l d soon become a part of an internationally recognized c u l t u r a l phenomenon k n o w n as N e o - D a d a and Pop A r t . In S t o c k h o l m T i n g u e l y was g i v e n a number of opportunities to poke fun at myths about the creative artist. Besides exhibiting his meta-matics at G a l l e r i Samlaren, T i n g u e l y w o u l d also contribute 40,000 " o r i g i n a l paintings" to a special box e d i t i o n of Blandaren. P r o d u c e d b y p o u r i n g and s p u r t i n g paint over a p r i n t i n g press r u n n i n g at top speed, each p u b l i s h e d print was i n d i v i d u a l l y treated w i t h hands and feet and placed i n a k i n d of Boite en 9 u A c c o r d i n g to Jacques D e r r i d a , this is exactly the arithmetical series of oppositions M a r x h a d reproached Stirner for. See Jacques D e r r i d a Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. L o n d o n : Routledge U n i v e r s i t y Press, 1994, p.134. 9 1 D u c h a m p q u o t e d i n Jean-Marie Drot's f i l m feu d'echecs avec Marcel Duchamp (1963) w h i c h contains interviews g i v e n i n N e w Y o r k and Pasadena o n the occasion of D u c h a m p ' s retrospective. I have taken this quote from M o l l y Nesbit's "Last W o r d s ( R i l k e , Wittgenstein) (Duchamp)" i n Art History V o l . 2 1 N o . 4 (December 1998), pp.556-557 (546-564). 56 Valise.92 W h i l e art historian and critic O l l e G r a n a t h has p o i n t e d out its D u c h a m p i a n reference, I propose that it was also a direct response to the "nasty remarks" M o h o l y - N a g y s l i p p e d into Vision in Motion. Referring to Duchamp's box of notes, M o h o l y - N a g y brushed it off as a "typical" Dadaist gesture i n w h i c h D u c h a m p had "emptied the contents of his desk — notes, drawings and photographs of the last twenty-five years — into a cardboard box.... L e a v i n g the 'mess' to be disentangled by the reader." 9 3 W h i l e M o h o l y - N a g y seemed uninterested i n this process, H u l t e n , T i n g u e l y , a n d a few others, understood this reconstructive act as a means to a new end. The notes, i n other w o r d s , were 'open' for i n d i v i d u a l , rather than collective, interpretation. But perhaps the most ambitious project T i n g u e l y w o u l d become i n v o l v e d i n d u r i n g this Stockholm residency was the m a k i n g of En dag i staden [A D a y i n the C i t y ] , a f i l m p r o d u c e d b y Pontus H u l t e n and H a n s N o r d e n s t r o m i n w h i c h T i n g u e l y p l a y e d the role of police officer [fig. 21]. W h i l e N o r d e n s t r o m has ascribed the title to the M a r x Brothers, one m a y more poignantly describe it as a l y r i c a l sabotage of A r n e Suckdorff's 1946 d o c u m e n t a r y Manniskor i stad (People in the City) w h i c h presents a " c i t y s y m p h o n y " p i c t u r i n g Stockholm street life i n a h y b r i d of post-war angst and v i s u a l i m p r e s s i o n i s m . 9 4 In fact, at the v e r y same time and place that En dag i staden was being montaged together as a dadaistic travelogue of S t o c k h o l m (ending i n total destruction), Suckdorff was editing a nature documentary 9 2 G r a n a t h (1975), p.50. 9 3 M o h o l y - N a g y , p.338. 9 4 S i e g f r i e d K r a c a u e r Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. P r i n c e t o n : Princeton U n i v e r s i t y Press, 1997 (originaly p u b l i s h e d 1960), p.246. See also L e i f F u r h a m m a r Filmen: Sverige S t o c k h o l m : W i k e n , 1993, p.229: "It is m i n d b o g g l i n g to see h o w almost every considerable f i l m d u r i n g the post-war era deals w i t h the i n d i v i d u a l i n confict w i t h the collective (family, class, gangs, or society), p.229. 5 7 next d o o r . 9 5 Included i n the Brussels W o r l d ' s Fair f i l m festival i n 1958, En dag i staden gained a substantial amount of notoriety from critics such as A m o s V o g e l w h o , w r i t i n g i n Evergreen Review, noted: The A n g r y Y o u n g F i l m Makers: H u l t e n - N o r d e n s t r o m ' s A Day in Town (winner of the 1958 Creative F i l m F o u n d a t i o n A w a r d for exceptional merit) is a w i l d , dadaist explosion that starts as a typical Fitzpatrick travelogue of Stockholm and ends i n the city's total destruction b y fire and dynamite i n one of the most hilarious and anarchic f i l m experiments of r e c o r d . 9 6 What these critics m a y also have recognized was the close p r o x i m i t y this film had to D z i g a Vertov's 1929 Man with a Movie Camera w h i c h also presents a day i n the city. Redirecting Vertov's productivist montage techniques a w a y from narrative towards a more fractured Dadaist picture, En Dag i Staden shows an acute awareness of the historical, conceptual and aesthetic p l a y i n g field into w h i c h its key participants were entering i n their specifically urban dialogue about modernity. P l a y i n g the central character i n En dag i staden was the F i n i s h b o r n Swede P e r - O l o f U l t v e d t , an artist whose o w n w o r k embraced sabotage as a starting point for creation. P r o d u c i n g geometric mobile ballet decor such as Spiralen (1954) [fig. 22] and i n d i v i d u a l art w o r k such as Collage (1957), U l t v e d t , t h r o u g h v a r i o u s dysfunctional methods of movement, d i s s o l v e d more or less a l l of his w o r k into a territory of total formal anarchy. H a v i n g met T i n g u e l y i n Paris at H u l t e n ' s he Mouvement e x h i b i t i o n , U l t v e d t f o u n d both the chance a n d w o r k i n g class sensibility he was l o o k i n g for i n T i n g u e l y ' s technically crude meta-mechanic embrace of movement. B y 1957 U l t v e d t had ^ H a n s N o r d e n s t r o m " P r e l u d e r pa 50-talet" i n Moderna Museet 1958-1983, p.26. 9 6 A m o s V o g e l " A D a y i n T o w n " Evergreen Review nr 6 (1958). 5 8 fully developed his o w n formal vocabulary not s i m p l y out of T i n g u e l y ' s meta-matics and D u c h a m p ' s coefficiency of art, but also Soto's mobile reliefs, Eggeling's symphonies and his o w n barn m e n t a l i t y . 9 7 A s Sandro K e y - A b e r g was to describe Ultvedt's practice i n 1958: P . O . [Per-Olof] has learned from many and does not try to deny it—it w o u l d not be a good idea. H i s ability to learn is great but so is his ability to place a l l forms of k n o w l e d g e under a new light. E v e r y t h i n g w h i c h is v i t a l and m o v i n g , that fight i n time and the w o r l d , interests h i m . F u t u r i s m ' s celebration of speed and movement and w h o l e hearted s u s p i c i o n against a l l institutions and authorities interests h i m . D a d a i s m and surrealism is for h i m a huge joy as w e l l . But what he has appropriated is not the angst and s u i c i d a l thoughts from the dead nor the grotesque and literary of Surrealism. Their attempt to gestalt the unconscious is for h i m estranged. It is their revolt, mockery and grimace against the accepted, against social and artistic conventions and judgments w h i c h engages h i m m o s t . 9 8 In L u c r e t i a n fashion similar to D u c h a m p and T i n g u e l y , U l t v e d t ' s "freedom" . was founded o n an artistic m i s p r i s i o n . 9 9 H i s 1957 short f i l m Nara ogat (literally "close to the eye" but also meaning "to have just missed the target") [fig. 23] is a perfect example of h o w U l t v e d t tackled the formal influence of Eggeling's r e d e m p t i o n d r i v e n " c o m m u n i c a t i o n machines" w i t h i r o n y , w i t and entropic c o n s t r u c t i o n s . 1 0 0 H e r e , geometric forms are brought together not so m u c h as a s y m p h o n y , but to fall into a p l a y f u l formal chaos. B y the late 97T use the word "barn" as it means "child" in Swedish but also references Ultvedt's 'farmhand' vernacular in English. 9 8 S a n d r o Key-Aberg "P.O. Ultvedt" Konstrevy Nr.4 (1958) " H a r o l d Bloom book The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973 outlines a theory of misprision that can be applied to artistic practice. Calling up the Atomistic model of Lucretius' "clinamen principle," Bloom embraces influence and misreading so as to clear an imaginative space for the poet/artist. lOOj^jg "communication machines" were meant to make visible a transcendental, metaphysical state of existence through a dialectically structured composition. A most comprehensive study of Viking Eggeling is Louise O'Konor Viking Eggeling 1880-1925: Artist and Film-maker, Life and Work. Stockholm: Tryckeri A B Bjorkmans Eftertradare, 1971. 5 9 fifties then, U l t v e d t had developed an artistic vocabulary of his o w n w h i c h brought h i m into a particularly close w o r k i n g relationship w i t h H u l t e n and Tinguely. By the early sixties, this relationship w o u l d p r o p e l h i m into the international arena of contemporary art. In 1958, Ndra ogat, Diagonal Symphony a n d En dag i staden were a l l i n c l u d e d i n Apropa Eggeling: Avant-Garde Film-Festival, an event conceptualized by H u l t e n , N o r d e n s t r o m a n d the A m e r i c a n a r t i s t / f i l m a k e r Robert Breer for the opening of a new m u s e u m of m o d e r n art i n S t o c k h o l m . 1 0 1 U s i n g his curatorial reptuation at home and abroad, and opening a door into M o d e r n a Museet by o r g a n i z i n g this f i l m festival, H u l t e n w o u l d find himself i n a position to start f i l l i n g the intellectual c u l t u r a l gap he had perceived i n Stockholm and Paris as early as 1954 w i t h artists such as T i n g u e l y and U l t v e d t . W h i l e interested i n the ephemeral side of collage, montage and the readymade, as an art historian H u l t e n also saw the need for a new k i n d of m u s e u m able to retain and maintain a d y n a m i c sense of p l a y and anarchic v i t a l i t y . The important t h i n g was to make this p u b l i c m u s e u m his own property. W h i l e H u l t e n managed to convert M o d e r n a Museet into a v i t a l center of his o w n , he and his artists w o u l d , i n the end, f i n d their w o r k p l u n g e d into the center of discourses o n contemporary international art i n w h i c h Duchamp's w o r k and legacy was increasingly b e c o m i n g "invaded, c o l o n i z e d lOlover forty films were screened at Avant-Garde Film Festival and included work by an international array of artists such as Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, Rene Clair, Peter Weiss, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter, Robert Breer, Bruno Munari, Jean Cocteau, Fernand Leger, Norman MacLaren, Luis Bunuel, and others. For more details, see Pontus Hulten Apropa Eggeling: Avant-garde film festival. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1958. This catalogue was designed and edited by Hulten. 6 0 and exploited" (to quote A m e r i c a n critic H i l t o n K r a m e r ) . 1 0 2 A s H u l t e n and these artists w o u l d find out, they were b y no means the o n l y ones d i s c o v e r i n g D u c h a m p at this t i m e . 1 0 3 A N e w M u s e u m and a N e w R e a l i s m D u r i n g the 1930s, a large s u m of money was donated to the N a t i o n a l M u s e u m i n S t o c k h o l m by philanthropist E m m a Spitzer i n order for a m o d e r n m u s e u m to be built. The reason given for this donation was not that she appreciated m o d e r n art, but that she wanted to see it removed from the N a t i o n a l M u s e u m . 1 0 4 Throughout the 1930s and 40s n o t h i n g was done w i t h the money, or the idea. But b y the mid-50s the N a t i o n a l M u s e u m was r u n n i n g out of storage space for i n c o m i n g art. A t this time, a reorganization of the S w e d i s h m i l i t a r y system began a process of decentralization whereby its training grounds, p r e v i o u s l y located inside the capital city, were relocated to the outskirts of Stockholm. In this process, a former n a v a l g y m n a s i u m , b u i l t i n the m i d d l e of the nineteenth century and located o n the i s l a n d of Skeppsholmen i n the central part of Stockholm, was made available to house m o d e r n art [fig. 24]. A l t h o u g h the museum's first exhibition took place under construction i n 1956 w i t h a two m o n t h s h o w i n g of Picasso's Guernica, the official opening w o u l d not occur u n t i l M a y of 1958 w i t h K i n g G u s t a v V I A d o l f i n ceremonious attendance. M o d e r n a Museet, as it was n a m e d , hereby 1 0 2 H i l t o n K r a m e r "Pop A r t S y m p o s i u m " Arts ( A p r i l 1963), p p , 35-45. 1 0 3 I n 1959 U l t v e d t w o u l d even travel to Paris where he w o u l d be further aquainted w i t h D u c h a m p through Robert Lebel's D u c h a m p exhibition at L a H u n e Bookstore. H e w o u l d also help introduce D u c h a m p ' s w o r k to a S w e d i s h p u b l i c v i a exhibitions a n d lectures. A l o n g w i t h U l f L i n d e he w o u l d also begin to produce replicas of Duchamp's w o r k . 1 0 4 P o n t u s H u l t e n "Fern fragment ur m o d e r n a museets h i s t o r i a " i n G r a n a t h , O l l e a n d N i e c k e l s , M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983, p.30. 6 1 restocked its former army barracks with an increasingly powerful arsenal of contemporary art [fig. 25]. The museum's early form took shape under the supervision of the aging cubist painter Otte Skold. While the inaugural exhibition lacked the contemporary direction that the museum would become known for by the sixties, showing only Nordic and international work transferred over from the National Museum's collection, Hulten's avant-garde film festival Apropa Eggeling made an important connection with Stockholm's non-commercial film club which since the mid fifties had grown into a few thousand members.105 The first large exhibition of international modern art, however, opened in August, 1958 with a large retrospective of Le Corbusier's work as architect, painter and sculptor. Unlike the museum's film festival, the exhibition did not show much initiative from the part of the museum as it was purchased readymade from a Swiss architecture firm. It was, nonetheless, an important success in that it gained a substantial number of visitors and a great deal of attention in the popular press.106 A big asset was the fact that Corbusier himself came to Stockholm for the occasion, seduced north by the promise of a life-time achievement medal awarded by the King of Sweden.107 When Skold died a few months later, his widow Arna Skold, along with Pontus Hulten, was given the task of organizing a retrospective of her husband's work to open in January, 1959. By the end of that year, having showed his skill for curating exhibitions at commercial galleries throughout 1 0 5 H u l t e n (1983), p.35. ! 0 6 A f t e r the L e C o r b u s i e r exhibition, M o d e r n a M u s e e t c o u l d boast that 41,000 visitors h a d found their w a y t h r o u g h their doors. See L i n d e , U l f "Memoarer" i n G r a n a t h , et al., p.76-78. 1 0 7 p o n t u s H u l t e n "Fern fragment u r m o d e r n a museets h i s t o r i a " i n G r a n a t h , N i e c k e l s , et al. eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983, p.32. 6 2 the fifties, H u l t e n was hired o n a shoe-string budget as the first director of M o d e r n a Museet. O n the advice of the N a t i o n a l M u s e u m ' s director C a r l Nordenfalk, H u l t e n was sent to Paris to find out from its galleries w h i c h direction contemporary art was taking. K n o w i n g full w e l l that Paris was no longer the centre it once had been, H u l t e n w o u l d instead find out where and h o w to acquire his o w n place i n the history of m o d e r n art. In October 1959, Stockholm was g i v e n a taste of H u l t e n ' s history and the m u s e u m was p r o v i d e d w i t h a new trajectory. Interestingly it was to be the "psycho-physical" spaces Illmar Laaban h a d described earlier i n that decade w h i c h H u l t e n used to p u t the M u s e u m back o n course. Sebastian Matta: Fifteen Forms of Doubt was the C h i l e a n artist's first large solo e x h i b i t i o n and showed commitment and initiative o n the part of M o d e r n a M u s e e t to redirect itself away from Paris-centered discourses (represented b y L e Corbusier) towards an art that suggested the centrality of the m a r g i n [fig. 26]. It is noteworthy that Matta had w o r k e d for Le Corbusier i n the 1930s before rejecting architecture i n favour of his painted p s y c h o l o g i c a l morphologies, or "inscapes," as he called them. D u r i n g the thirties he h a d also discovered D u c h a m p whose w o r k he was obssessed w i t h to the point of p u b l i s h i n g w i t h Duchamp's p h i l a n t h r o p i c friend and collector Katherine Dreier an " A n a l y t i c a l Reflection" o n the Large Glass.108 B y 1959, Matta's w o r k must have represented an important post-war intersection for H u l t e n — a site situated somewhere just outside the collective movements d e v e l o p i n g out of C o B r A and the M o v e m e n t T o w a r d s an Imaginiste Bauhaus. A s w e w i l l see, 1 0 8 K a t h e r i n e S. D r e i e r a n d M a t t a E c h a u r r e n , Duchamp's Glass: La Mariee mise a nu par ses celibataires, meme. An Analytical Reflection. N e w Y o r k : Societe A n o n y m e , Inc., 1944. See also John Tancock's "The Influence of M a r c e l D u c h a m p " i n D ' H a r n o n c o u r t , A n n e and M c S h i n e , K y n a s t o n , Eds.. Marcel Duchamp. P h i l a d e l p h i a : P h i l a d e l p h i a M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t , 1973, pp.160-178. 6 3 H u l t e n and others w o u l d end up favouring collaborative experiments that stopped short of the collective revolutionary Situationist dreams. W h i l e there w o u l d be compromises and confusion i n their early agenda, M o d e r n a Museet d i d produce throughout 1959 and 1960 a series of exhibitions w h i c h further articulated the institution's foundation and direction. A l o n g w i t h retrospective exhibitions of S i r i Derkert and A n n a Kasparsson (two S w e d i s h w o m e n w i t h ties to continental as w e l l as local m o d e r n i s m but w h o h a d remained m a r g i n a l i z e d w i t h i n a male d o m i n a t e d art w o r l d abroad and at home), H u l t e n u t i l i z e d his friendships from Paris to produce large scale exhibitions of Robert Jacobsen as w e l l as Sam Francis, whose w o r k was s h o w n alongside m u s i c a l performances by John Cage, K a r l H e i n z Stockhausen, and D a v i d T u d o r [fig. 27]. This aggressive move towards a contemporary avant-garde focus secured an important audience for the m u s e u m w i t h the help of the experimental music society F y l k l i n g e n , w h i c h i n c l u d e d such important members as p o e t / p a i n t e r O y v i n d Fahlstrom. In many ways, F y l k l i n g e n p r o v i d e d H u l t e n w i t h a ready-made audience for avant-garde activities. In turn, M o d e r n a Museet p r o v i d e d avant-garde art to an entirely n e w generation of museum-goers whose interests were rooted i n art as w e l l as p o p u l a r culture. It was this enthusiastic y o u t h audience w h o w o u l d eventually convince f u n d i n g agencies to sponsor H u l t e n ' s m u s e u m . 1 0 9 A n early example of h o w the n e w activities of the m u s e u m were catching the attention of funding agencies was the decision i n 1960 b y the ! 0 9 I refer to M o d e r n a Museet as 'Hulten's museum' i n order to emphasize h o w m u c h the m u s e u m had become associated w i t h his v i s i o n . 6 4 S w e d i s h Institute to turn to M o d e r n a Museet for help i n b r e a k i n g the isolated position i n w h i c h it saw S w e d i s h contemporary art to be caught. S p o n s o r i n g a collection of S w e d i s h w o r k s to be sent to the Sao Paulo Biennale, the S w e d i s h Institute put their trust and money i n H u l t e n w h o used this trip not o n l y to exhibit w o r k s by Fahlstrom and others, but also to make an important stop- over i n N e w Y o r k . Here he made a number of significant connections w i t h N e w Y o r k artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, A l f r e d Leslie and Richard Stankiewicz a n d others t h r o u g h his friendship to the S w e d i s h engineer B i l l y K l i i v e r . A t this stage of his career, the ideas of the N e w Y o r k avant-garde K l i i v e r introduced h i m to must have represented an interesting alternative to the stagnating debates H u l t e n had confronted i n Europe. W o r k i n g for B e l l Laboratories d u r i n g the day and collaborating w i t h artists o n art w o r k d u r i n g the evenings, K l i i v e r p r o v i d e d H u l t e n w i t h an 'inside' v i e w into an art w o r l d that c o u l d balance that of Continental E u r o p e a n discourses. W i t h this k n o w l e d g e , H u l t e n c o u l d t u r n Stockholm's M o d e r n a M u s e e t into a centre o n the margins where a cross-Atlantic avant-garde c o u l d emerge out of collaborations. For T i n g u e l y , H u l t e n ' s connection w i t h K l i i v e r turned out to be crucial, as he was i n v i t e d to N e w Y o r k i n January of 1960 for a solo exhibition at the Staempfli G a l l e r y . In N e w Y o r k T i n g u e l y was reacquainted w i t h M a r c e l D u c h a m p ( w h o m he h a d p r e v i o u s l y met i n Paris) and travelled w i t h h i m to the P h i l a d e l p h i a M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t to look at and discuss the w o r k s i n its D u c h a m p c o l l e c t i o n . 1 1 0 H e also introduced himself to K l i i v e r , w h o h a d p r e v i o u s l y helped Johns and Rauschenberg realize w o r k s a n d n o w offered to help T i n g u e l y construct his largest assemblage to that date. T i n g u e l y h a d been 1 1 0 H u l t e n (1972), p.126. 6 5 approached by Sam H u n t e r from the M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t i n N e w Y o r k to b u i l d an assemblage i n their sculpture garden. This p r o v i d e d T i n g u e l y w i t h an o p p o r t u n i t y to produce his first m o n u m e n t a l auto-destructive meta- mechanic — Homage a New York [fig. 2 8 ] . 1 1 1 W h i l e K l i i v e r offered T i n g u e l y technical advice o n constructing his destruction, his largest contributions were the visits to the d u m p s of N e w Jersey to p i c k up bicycle wheels; for T i n g u e l y a s t r i k i n g l y Stirnian and -- D u c h a m p i a n motif. Homage a New York., as the seven b y eight meter giant sculpture w o u l d become k n o w n , was assembled out of everything from a bathtub to a piano to Robert Rauschenberg's Money-thrower that released and scattered silver d o l l a r s . 1 1 2 A s Rauschenberg w o u l d later recall, he felt " p r i v i l e g e d to be able to h a n d [Tinguely] a screwdriver. There were so m a n y different aspects of life i n v o l v e d i n the b i g piece. It was as real, as interesting, as complicated, as vulnerable, and as gay as life i t s e l f . " 1 1 3 W h i l e the i r o n y i n this statement w i l l become increasingly apparent, at this point i n m y narrative the important thing to note is the collaborative atmosphere T i n g u e l y was afforded i n N e w Y o r k , because of the connections that H u l t e n was establishing th o u g h the M o d e r n a Museet i n Stockholm. A s w e w i l l see, b y 1962 the perspective artists such as T i n g u e l y thought they h a d o n this collaborative international scene w o u l d t u r n out to be a devastating i l l u s i o n . Between 7:30 and 8:00 p m o n M a r c h 17th, Homage a New York made the transformation from an assembled heap of rubbish to an entropic suicide machine desperately struggling to produce abstract paintings b y the metre, but m I b i d . . 1 1 2 B i l l y K l i i v e r " G a r d e n Party" i n H u l t e n (1972), p.130-143. 1 1 3 V i o l a n d - H o b i , p.37. 6 6 falling short. Painted white to stand out against the night sky like a mechanical ghost, T i n g u e l y ' s magnum opus became, for a brief moment, a spectacularized meditation o n a circumscribed spectre that w o u l d come back to haunt modernist and avant-garde artists alike throughout the sixties' m a n y failed r e v o l u t i o n a r y m o m e n t s . 1 1 4 A s a l i v e l y , ephemeral, and pathetic, m o n u m e n t to this spirit i n the form of an i n d u s t r i a l r u i n , Homage a New York returned, u n l i k e Raushenberg's w o r k , to the garbage d u m p from w h i c h it had materialized. W h i l e dematerialized through engineered chance, l o u d noise, smoke and movement, Homage a New York collapsed into an allegorical state(ment) of its Self, but also larger C o l d W a r anxieties and abstract expressions. In this act, N e w Y o r k ' s new found c u l t u r a l and p o l i t i c a l identity and p o w e r is stripped bare to reveal its internal hubris. Recalling his homage to N e w Y o r k i n 1971, T i n g u e l y c o n c l u d e d that the assemblage: remained a good thing because it was p u r e l y ideological, w i t h o u t commerce. The o n l y m e m o r y is the photo, but the picture guarantees another transformation, because...there is also the m y t h , what people tell w h o saw it or w h o d i d n ' t see it, or w h o read a n d think they saw it or w h o see the photos and imagine h a v i n g seen it. There are inevitable transformations. It's a form of treason w h i c h takes place, a n d that's a l l r i g h t . 1 1 5 his 1968 essay, "The Death of the Author," Roland Barthes critiques representation on the basis of a refusal of authorship and originality. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau has pointed out: "For Barthes, the refusal of authorship and originality was an innately revolutionary stance 'since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.' Similarily, the dismantling of the notion of unique subjectivity Barthers understood as a salutary blow struck against an ossified and essentially retrograde bourgeois humanism." M y suggestion is that Tinguely had by this time formulated a simular critique of representation while salvaging "his own" to use a Stirnean phrase. After all, Tinguely, with his proper name, keeps his own career "moving" within his dialectically formulated construction-destruction. Abigail Solomon-Godeau "Photography After Art Photography" pp.75-87 in Brian Wallis, ed. Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. New York: David R. Godine, Publishers, 1984. p.81. 1 ^Quoted from a 1971 lecture at the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris. See Violand-Hobi, p.40. 6 7 W i t h Homage a New York, T i n g u e l y had not o n l y gained a great deal of international press but had also actualized auto-destruction o n a new monstrous s c a l e . 1 1 6 R e t u r n i n g to Paris, T i n g u e l y was as obsessed as ever w i t h D u c h a m p , p r o d u c i n g , a m o n g other w o r k s , his Homage a Marcel Duchamp, a k i n d of updated v e r s i o n of M u n a r i ' s Useless Machines. But b y this time, T i n g u e l y was not alone i n his D u c h a m p i a n obsession. N o r was H u l t e n the o n l y curator w h o had seen the appropriation of D u c h a m p i a n strategies as c a r r y i n g w i t h it a potential for opening u p a conceptual space out of the c u l t u r a l stalemate percieved b y many i n the late fifties. W i t h the help of Robert Lebel's catalogue raisonne p u b l i s h e d o n D u c h a m p i n 1959, access into the logic of this p r e v i o u s l y obscure figure was made more a c c e s s i b l e . 1 1 7 B y the late fifties a s m a l l number of galleries h a d begun s h o w i n g D u c h a m p as w e l l as a younger generation of artists w o r k i n g w i t h i n this intellectual ' g a p . ' 1 1 8 O n e of the most energetic and dramatic figures to p i c k u p o n this D u c h a m p i a n renaissance was Pierre Restany, a Frenchman w h o emerged o n the curatorial scene i n the early sixties to embrace this new attitude m a n y labelled "Neo-Dada." W o r k i n g out of Paris, Restany h a d spent the latter half of the fifties searching for his o w n p o s i t i o n from w h i c h to establish "the next b i g l-^As Allan Kaprow has noted, while this work could be read as a critique of M o M A ' s activities, "Homage to New York, a marvelous contraption of junk that partially and intentionally destroyed itself in performance, was, besides being a work of art by a known innovator, a publicity gesture on the part of the Museum of Modern Art that benefited both parties." Allan Kaprow "The Artist as a Man of the World" (1964) published in Allan Kaprow Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 1 1 7 S e e Robert Lebel Marcel Duchamp New York: Grove Press, 1959. 118po r example, a gallery such as Galerie Rive Droite was by 1959 showing Jasper Johns alongside Jackson Pollock, Sam Francis, and Marcel Duchamp. 6 8 movement" not too d i s s i m i l a r from Hulten's. By the late fifties, Restany had established himself as a k i n d of provocateur w i t h i n the French art scene, w r i t i n g articles such as " U . S . go home and come back later" for Cimaise, w h i c h precariously encouraged the radical i n d i v i d u a l gestures of Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and the 'spirituality and mysterious inwardness' of someone like M a r k Tobey, w h i l e t r y i n g to a v o i d a wholesale support of a distinctly A m e r i c a n i z e d form of m o d e r n art. In a d u a l attempt at c r i t i c i z i n g A m e r i c a ' s reluctance to acknowledge Paris as an artistic centre and Europe's stubborn refusal to recognize that N e w Y o r k had managed to steal the idea of m o d e r n art from Paris, Restany reviewed the t r a v e l l i n g exhibition Jackson Pollock and the New American Painting: ...from here o n , h o w can w e help but to repeat a l o n g w i t h P o l l o c k that 'the fundamental problems of contemporary p a i n t i n g are not the prerogative of one single country.' This Yankee rendez-vous was not useless. It gave proof to those w h o didn't k n o w or w h o didn't want "to k n o w , that from n o w o n there exists o n the other side of the A t l a n t i c a s p i r i t u a l climate that is capable of b r i n g i n g some o r i g i n a l solutions to the essential necessitites of A r t . So go back home, A m e r i c a n s , a n d come back to see us w h e n y o u have something n e w to astonish us w i t h : for instance, a second P o l l o c k . 1 1 9 W i t h a " D o n K i n g " curatorial attitude and support of an internationally- reconfigured post-war avant-garde, Restany's support of cross-Atlantic project's such as Tinguely's Homage a New York was w e l c o m e d b y a b r o a d range of otherwise ignored artists. R e t u r n i n g from N e w Y o r k to Paris after h a v i n g taken the piss (as D u c h a m p m i g h t say) out of A m e r i c a n Abstract Expressionism, T i n g u e l y was n o w w i d e l y embraced b y artists and critics w h o saw a w i d e r , more open, arena available to them. 1 1 9 P i e r r e Restany " U . S . G o back home a n d come back later" Cimaise V I no.3 ( M a r c h 1959), pp.37. 69 The collaborative spirit T i n g u e l y had encountered i n N e w Y o r k was n o w more than ever before evident u p o n his return to Paris. W i t h encouragement from Restany, a number of p r e v i o u s l y disenfranchised members of the Paris art scene w o u l d get together to sign a manifesto w h i c h at the time must have read as a 'collaborative' act. Whereas H u l t e n had been careful to 'choose' artists that c o u l d support his o w n interests, Restany w o u l d briefly overshadow his activities by q u i c k l y assembling as m a n y of these artists as possible under one roof. In the fall of I960, the " N o u v e a u Realiste Manifesto" was signed b y Restany and the artists A r m a n , Dufrene, R a y m o n d H a i n s , Y v e s K l e i n , M a r t i a l Raysse, D a n i e l Spoerri, T i n g u e l y , and Jaques de la V i l l e g l e , w i t h the joint, but ambigous, declaration that "Thursday, October 27, 1960 The N o u v e a u x Realistes became conscious of their collective singularity. N o u v e a u Realisme = new approaches to the perception of the real." [fig. 29] A l t h o u g h the group was centered i n Paris and was p r e d o m i n a n t l y made up of French ( K l e i n , Raysse, Dufrene, V i l l e g l e , and of course, Restany himself), the group soon became more international i n character. The B u l g a r i a n C h r i s t o , Italian M i m m o Rotella a n d F r a n c o - A m e r i c a n N i k i de Saint-Phalle were soon a d d e d to the roster. A r m a n , Dufrene, H a i n s , K l e i n , T i n g u e l y and V i l l e g l e h a d already i n M a y of that year participated i n an exhibition curated b y Restany under the title of Les Nouveaux Realistes, a n d were n o w b e i n g 'packaged' as a distinctly n e w E u r o p e a n art movement. F o r Restany, these artists, joined b y association w i t h D u c h a m p i a n w i t and a Dadaist anti-art attitude, represented a third generation School of Paris s t r i v i n g to be released from the confined 7 0 problematics of hot and c o l d a b s t r a c t i o n . 1 2 0 W h a t I do not think m a n y of them realized at the time of signing the manifesto, was h o w h o m o g e n i z e d and fixed their identities w o u l d become under the 'collective singularity' (rather than collaborative diversity) Restany h a d labelled N o u v e a u Realisme. In this regard, H u l t e n w o u l d have the upper h a n d i n securing a w o r k i n g relationship w i t h T i n g u e l y and Saint-Phalle b y affording a space where i n d i v i d u a l desires c o u l d be accomodated w i t h o u t a collective goal. A s we have seen w i t h the case of T i n g u e l y , many of these artists had, despite Restany's c l a i m to h a v i n g 'discovered' them, been p r o d u c i n g a n d exhibiting w o r k for quite some time. To discern just h o w problematic this 'naming' w o u l d become for artists like T i n g u e l y and others, it is necessary to consider just h o w differently i n d i v i d u a l artists were w o r k i n g . V i l l e g l e , H a i n s and Dufrene, for example, had, since the late forties, been e v o l v i n g their o w n form of dialectical attacks o n both h i g h art and mass culture. Their acts of artistic intervention of lacerating advertisements to produce decollages brought attention to the seemingly endless urlandscape made u p of the debris of a commercial spectacle that enveloped q u o t i d i a n life [fig, 30]. Benjamin B u c h l o h has argued that these lacerated billboards were embraced i n a surrealist attraction to the o u t m o d e d . 1 2 1 In reading these decollages as originating i n urban spaces left open as ruins as a result of the a r r i v a l of a new, A m e r i c a n i z e d , c o m m o d i t y spectacle, B u c h l o h fails, despite his insightfulness, to account for their p o l i t i c a l effectiveness as open rebellion. A s Thomas M c D o n o u g h has noted, these spaces were not fully evacuated a n d 1 2 ^ S u s a n H a p g o o d Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62 N e w Y o r k : The A m e r i c a n Federation of A r t s i n association w i t h U n i v e r s e P u b l i s h i n g , 1994, p.49. 1 2 1 S e e Benjamin Buchloh's " F r o m D e t a i l to Fragment: Decollage A f f i c h i s t e " October (1988), pp.99-110. 7 1 were open to "ludic-constructive behaviours" such as those of V i l l e g l e and H a i n s . 1 2 2 A s a deconstructive 'gesture,' these decollages d i d map the city i n a new allegorical manner. A s Walter Benjamin h a d understood the process of collage earlier i n the century: The m e m o r y of the ponderer holds sway over the disordered mass of dead knowledge. H u m a n knowledge is piecework to it i n a particularly pregnant sense: namely as the heaping up of arbitrarily cut up pieces, out of w h i c h one puts together a puzzle.... The allegoricist reaches n o w here, n o w there, into the chaotic depths that his k n o w l e d g e places at his disposal, grabs an item out, holds it next to another, and sees whether they fit: that m e a n i n g to this image, or this image to that meaning. The result never lets itelf be predicted; for there is no natural m e d i a t i o n between the t w o . 1 2 3 In this sense, just as by the late fifties R o l a n d Barthes, w i t h his Mythologies, had developed a semiotics able to deconstruct French c o l o n i a l i s m i n A l g e r i a , the decolagistes were able to m i l i t a r i l y , through language, take-back the streets. U n l i k e the Situationists w h o w o u l d attack the streets w i t h collective zeal, these artists, w o r k i n g collaboratively w i t h a n o n y m o u s v a n d a l s , w o u l d wait u n t i l later i n their studios to sign their fragments of "dead knowledge." A s it often turned out, these trapped compositions revealed a most immediate history of subjective and collective fantasies. One of the most dramatic (and dangerous) of these archeological 'openings' took place i n 1961 at Galerie J. i n Paris under the name of Affiches lacerees marouflees sur toile. Here, H a i n s ' strategically returned his decollages to p u b l i c w a l l s where they became unified b y references to A l g e r i a . A t a moment w h e n bombs planted b y the O . A . S . c o u l d be heard e x p l o d i n g i n the washrooms of the Paris Stock 1 2 2 T h o m a s M c D o n o u g h "Situationist Space" October 67 (Winter 1994), p p . 59-77. 1 2 3 S u s a n B u c k - M o r s s The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. M a s s a c h u s e t t s : M I T Press, 1989, pp.240-241. 7 2 Exchange, a decollage such as Paix en Algerie — w h i c h title derives from the torn out remains of graffitti — c o u l d semiotically turn typographic fragments into h a n d - g r e n a d e s . 1 2 4 E v e n more i n v o l v e d i n language games p l a y e d out i n the urban streets, the R u m a n i a n artist D a n i e l Spoerri turned his attention t o w a r d the debris of Capitalism's throw-away culture w h i c h he used to construct typographies of chance. Initially trained as a classical dancer i n Z u r i c h before a r r i v i n g i n Paris i n the early fifties, Spoerri concocted q u o t i d i a n "traps" that w o u l d interest both H u l t e n and Restany. B y the late fifties Spoerri was m a k i n g what he termed "tableaux-pieges" (snare-pictures) w h i c h i n Rousselian fashion turned tables into tableaux, t r a p p i n g f o u n d debris w i t h fixatives and cutting the legs off the tables before hanging them o n the w a l l [fig. 31]. A s psycho-geographical mappings of the everyday, these assisted readymades engaged indifferently i n a meta-philosophy of everyday life similar to that argued for b y H e n r i Lefebvre. If M a r x , through H e g e l , h a d focused o n the mastery of nature and the external w o r l d ( w h i c h for them defined the h u m a n being), and Nietzsche h a d turned i n w a r d s to the transformation of self through desire a n d 'jouissance,' then Lefebvre was b y the sixties a r g u i n g for a combination of M a r x i s t and N i e t z c h e a n construction of k n o w l e d g e i n order to promote a "connaissance" that i m p l i c a t e d agency and reflexivity i n the p r o d u c t i o n of k n o w l e d g e b y the subject. 1 2 5 V i a these Trappings of the l i v e d , phenomenological traces, Spoerri managed to 1 2 4 A s H u l t e n has discussed i n reference to T i n g u e l y ' s Baluba sculptures, d u r i n g 1960 A f r i c a gained seventeen n e w independent states through the process of decolonization. In response, the r i g h t - w i n g terrorist organization O . A . S . (Organisation armee secrete) began to explode bombs a l l over the country. See H u l t e n (1972), p.231. 1 2 5 S e e Introduction b y Elenore K o f m a n a n d E l i z a b e t h Lebas, Trans, and Eds. i n Henri Lefebvre: Writings on Cities O x f o r d : B l a c k w e l l P u b l i s h e r s , 1996. 7 3 produce a p u b l i c image through anon-fixed and h i g h l y self-reflexive system of knowledge. By the early sixties, Spoerri w o u l d collaborate o n various projects w i t h H u l t e n , Saint-Phalle, T i n g u e l y and U l t v e d t . C o m m e n t i n g o n the N e w Realist label that Restany h a d placed o n this diverse group of artists, T i n g u e l y w o u l d later distance it from his o w n practice by suggesting that "the true N e w Realists are D a n i e l Spoerri and A r m a n . E v e n Y v e s -Klein d i d not really belong t h e r e . " 1 2 6 For A r m a n , accumulation h a d become a serious strategy as he p r o d u c e d archeological displays of people's d a i l y d y i n g , i n the form of vitrines filled w i t h consumer trash [fig. 32]. M e e t i n g Yves K l e i n i n N i c e i n the early fifties, A r m a n h a d mustered u p his o w n m y t h o l o g y i n w h i c h the universe was d i v i d e d between himself and K l e i n . Y v e s supposedly l o o k e d into the blue v o i d of the Mediterranean s k y a n d took possession of an i m m a t e r i a l w o r l d , w h i l e A r m a n was to embrace a material one through a process of accumulation and destruction. The strategic reference point here seems to once again have been D u c h a m p as they each took positions w i t h i n the larger picture — The Large GlassM7 This n e w generation of artists became m a i n l y supported b y an intimate and new gallery scene i n Paris centered around Galerie J. (owned a n d operated b y Restany's partner Jeanine Goldschmidt) as w e l l as the Iris C l e r t Galerie w h i c h exhibited some of the more 'difficult' w o r k b y the younger generation of artists. In A p r i l of 1960 she helped A r m a n i n s t a l l Le Plein (Full 1 2 6 V i o l a n d - H o b i , p.43. 1 2 7 T h e Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is d i v i d e d i n t w o halves: the b o t t o m representing the m a t e r i a l r e a l m of the bachelors, a n d the i m m a t e r i a l realm of the bride. 7 4 Up), an exhibition w h i c h consisted of garbage accumulated from a one block radius of Iris Clert's gallery [fig. 33]. F i l l e d w a l l to w a l l , floor to ceiling, this materialist excrement filled the gallery to the point of k e e p i n g visitors from being able to enter the gallery. Le Plein was presented i n dialectical oposition w i t h Y v e s K l e i n ' s Le Vide: La sensibilite picturale a Vetat de matiere premiere, an e x h i b i t i o n two years p r i o r i n w h i c h K l e i n presented n o t h i n g but "immaterial space" [fig. 34]. A s T i n g u e l y w o u l d report the event to H u l t e n i n a letter sent to Stockholm, the event was an enormous m e d i a stunt: Yves K l e i n had an enormous opening at Iris Clert betwen 21:00 and 24:00. The republican garde—firebrigade, thousands of people (entrance fee of 1.500 franc) and a l l white walls! It was very beautiful and w i l l continue for fifteen days. People drank a " c o c k t a i l " and t o m o r r o w m o r n i n g w i l l piss blue!!! Y v e s also wanted to i l l u m i n a t e the O b e l i s k but due to its announcement leaking out o n radio and i n newspapers it d i d n ' t w o r k out. The first opening I have e n j o y e d . 1 2 8 W h a t T i n g u e l y and K l e i n shared w i t h each other (perhaps more than w i t h the other N o u v e a u x Realiste artists) was an interest i n the dematerialization of the object to such a degree that it went against the o p t i m i s m of C o n s t r u c t i v i s m and the Bauhaus school. If A n t o i n e Pevsner a n d N a u m Gabo h a d i n the twenties claimed to have freed themselves from the idea of art as "static rhythms," a n d the Bauhaus teacher M o h o l y - N a g y h a d w a n t e d to "put i n the place of the static principle of classical art the d y n a m i c p r i n c i p l e of universal life," then T i n g u e l y w o u l d twist their tongues, so to speak, and introduce his o w n understanding of movement a n d "static." W r i t i n g against the grain of these past manifestos, T i n g u e l y wrote his o w n manifesto Fur Statik [For Statics] w h i c h was disseminated b y being t h r o w n out of an airplane h i g h above Diisseldorf to announce his exhibition i n 1959 [fig. 35]: 1 2 8 L e t t e r quoted i n H u l t e n (1972), p.63. 7 5 E v e r y t h i n g moves continuously. I m m o b i l i t y does not exist. Don't be dominated by out-of-date concepts of time. Get r i d of hours, seconds and minutes. Stop resisting change. L I V E I N T I M E — B E S T A T I C — B E S T A T I C W I T H M O V E M E N T . For Statics, for a present t a k i n g place i n the Present. Resist anxious spells of weakness to halt m o v i n g things, to petrify moments and to k i l l what is alive. Stop c o n t i n u o u s l y setting up 'values' w h i c h cannot but break d o w n . Be free, l i v e ! 1 2 9 This gesture of d r o p p i n g the manifesto from an airplane was no doubt an exagerated hommage to D u c h a m p ' s Three Standard Stoppages. After a l l , he had no idea w h o their audience w o u l d be. This spectacular self-advertisement was also something that interested Y v e s K l e i n . H a v i n g collaborated w i t h T i n g u e l y o n the e x h i b i t i o n Vitesse pure et stabilite monochrome [Pure Speed and M o n o c h r o m e Stability] a year prior, K l e i n gave a lecture i n D i i s s e l d o r f i n w h i c h he stressed the importance of their "collaboration" and rejection of the Utopian goals set forth by the Bauhaus: I w i s h to propose to those w h o w i s h to hear: C O L L A B O R A T I O N . C o n s i d e r the etymology of the w o r d . To collaborate is to w o r k i n c o m m o n o n the same project. The project for w h i c h I propose collaboration is Art....This evening, I am p r o p o s i n g collaboration to artists w h o already k n o w about it, and w h o perhaps already k n o w that they s h o u l d mock their possessive, egotistical, egocentric personalities by the aggravation of the M e i n a l l their 'portrayals' i n the theater — like the w o r l d (the tangible, p h y s i c a l , ephemeral w o r l d ) where they k n o w very w e l l h o w to exist b y p l a y i n g a part. I propose to them to continue to say ' m y work,' each separately, w h e n s p e a k i n g to the l i v i n g dead (who surrounds us i n everyday life) of the c o m m u n a l w o r k w h i c h was realized through collaboration. I propose that they continue joyously to say M e , I, M y , M i n e , not the hypocritical U s , O u r — but o n l y after solemnly s i g n i n g the pact of C O L L A B O R A T I O N . . . . I p u s h the point to this perhaps eccentric extreme to make it clear that the collaboration w h i c h I a m p r o p o s i n g means p l a y i n g y o u r w a y out of the psychological w o r l d i n order to make yourself really free. I do not speak as a U t o p i a n this evening i n p r o p o s i n g this n e w form of collaboration and t r y i n g to get a new and perfect ' B A U H A U S ' u n d e r w a y i n 1959; 1 2 9 H u l t e n (1972), p.112. 7 6 rather, I speak from experience.... Jean T i n g u e l y and I, w o r k i n g together for the last six months, have m i n e d a constantly new and w o n d e r f u l thing, the c o m m o t i o n of 'the fundamental static movement of the universe.' In conclusion, i n p r o p o s i n g C o l l a b o r a t i o n i n art to artists of the heart and head, I am i n fact propos ing that they bypass art altogether and w o r k i n d i v i d u a l l y o n the return to real life, the life i n w h i c h a m a n no longer feels that he is the center of the universe, but where the universe is the center of every m a n . W e w i l l then k n o w a magical honor [prestige] where i n the past we k n e w o n l y vertigo [vertige]. In this w a y , we w i l l become aerial men; we w i l l k n o w the force of u p w a r d attraction toward space, t o w a r d nothing and everything at the same time; the force of terrestrial attraction h a v i n g been mastered, we w i l l literally levitate i n total p h y s i c a l and s p i r i t u a l f r e e d o m . 1 3 0 A t t e m p t i n g to suspend themselves between the past and the future, the material and the immaterial, K l e i n and T i n g u e l y concocted this "hyper- Futurist" language as a rhetorical gesture to counter both the o p t i m i s m and pessimism of the post-war w o r l d . C o n s i d e r i n g Franco-German relations at this time, the speech reads as a reactionary return to the conservativism of the Futurists. A l o n g w i t h their s i m i l a r interest i n machines, movement, a n d destruction, K l e i n and T i n g u e l y saw i n the Futurists an u n r e m i t t i n g defence of the Ego. K l e i n was, perhaps even more than T i n g u e l y , obsessed w i t h "his own," as Stirner w o u l d say. If F r e u d h a d located h u m a n consciousness i n a state of vertigo due to a dialectical struggle between Eros, the life force, and Thanatos, the death w i s h , then K l e i n proposed to suspend his o w n Ego w i t h the help of "magical honor [prestige]." Despite the fact that K l e i n h a d , like T i n g u e l y , tried to balance his ego- maniacal approach w i t h the introduction of chance a n d i r o n y , even his 1 3 0 Y v e s K l e i n "Discourse o n the Occasion of T i n g u e l y ' s E x h i b i t i o n i n Dusseldorf, January 1959" i n Yves Klein 1928-1962 A Retrospective H o u s t o n : Institute for the A r t s , Rice U n i v e r s i t y , 1982, p.233-234. 7 7 closest friends often failed to see the h u m o u r i n his w o r k . This was something w h i c h was m u c h more apparent i n Tinguely's w o r k . D u c h a m p w o u l d later comment o n Tinguely's h u m o u r : "I feel w i t h h i m a closeness and a rapport that I have felt w i t h few other artists.... H e has this great thing, a sense of h u m o r — something I have been preaching for artists a l l m y life. Painters u s u a l l y think they are the last w o r d i n d i v i n i t y ; they become like grands pretres. I believe i n h u m o r as a thing of great d i g n i t y , and so does T i n g u e l y . " 1 3 1 T i n g u e l y and K l e i n were i n the end quite different as K l e i n i n many ways took o n this 'divine' role of a painter to the n t h degree. F o r m a n y of the other N o u v e a u x Realistes, K l e i n ' s "extreme" r a d i c a l i n d i v i d u a l i s m became almost unbearable as he even went so far as to declare himself leader of their g r o u p . 1 3 2 A s Restany w o u l d say, "he d i d n ' t paint to paint, but to reveal his truth....To grasp it, one has to ...enter into his g a m e . " 1 3 3 For the most part, K l e i n ' s game i n v o l v e d an embrace of a l l of the art w o r l d ' s inner truisms. A l t h o u g h this game was u s u a l l y p l a y e d w i t h a D u c h a m p i a n tongue- in-cheek attitude, b y the late-fifties it had developed into an intricate labyrinth of myths tied not o n l y to the art w o r l d but also to associations w i t h 1 3 1 C a l v i n Tomkins The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde: Duchamp, Tinguely, Cage, Rauschenberg, Cunningham New York: Penguin Books, 1981 (orig. 1965), p. 168. ^ ^ A r m a n has commented on Yves Klein's "big ego" did get in the way of a unified movement, but this was not the only problem keeping them together: "Klein excommunicated Restany in the same Surrealist manner experienced earlier by Andre Breton by his peers. Now, remember, the New Realists was made up of three groups of artists: the Parisians, or poster artists; the Swiss, including Jean Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri, and by association to Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle; and the Nicois, to which Klein tacked on Martial Raysee. Raysse did not really fit in with the group at the beginning. There was a big brouhaha about him. The poster artists, especially Raymond Hains, did not want to accept Raysse because they were not familiar with his work. They went to the attic of the house where Martial lived to see his work and they shouted, "This is Surrealism not New Realism. We do not accept it!' This turned into a heated discussion and Klein struck Hains. The movement was dissolved twenty minutes later, after everyone had signed the manifest by Restany stating New Realism equals new perspectives and approaches to the real." Interview with Arman in Hapgood, Susan Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62 New York: The American Federation of Arts in association with Universe Publishing, 1994, p.108. 1 3 3 Q u o t e d in Thomas McEvilley "Yves Klein: Conquistador of the Void" Yves Klein 1928-1962 A Retrospective: Houston: Institute for the Arts, Rice University, 1982, p.20. 7 8 the M a s o n i c Rosicrucian O r d e r of Saint Sebastian — o n l y by d y i n g (and w i t h a lot of help from the art market) i n 1962 w o u l d K l e i n be elevated into the p o s i t i o n of Sainthood. Despite expected questions and quarrels w i t h i n a group of diverse "individuals" such as these, and despite his willingness to let K l e i n p l a y their "leader," Restany's salesman-like approach to the art w o r l d d i d h o l d them together to some degree b y p r o v i d i n g a significant international platform and exposure. O n February 12, 1961, Restany incorporated the F r a n c o - A m e r i c a n artist N i k i de Saint-Phalle into the group [fig. 36]. A s the first and o n l y w o m a n i n the group, the 'gun carrying' member Saint-Phalle must have h a d a difficult time putting u p w i t h the general patriarchal structure of the group, and the misogynist activities of K l e i n i n particular. By this time Saint-Phalle was l i v i n g w i t h T i n g u e l y w h o m she first met i n 1956. The occasion that triggered her i n c l u s i o n into the N o u v e a u x Realistes was her spectacular p r o d u c t i o n of n e w w o r k i n v o l v i n g e m b e d d i n g cans of spray paint and s m a l l p o p or soup containers (filled w i t h l i q u i d paint) into plaster o n w o o d w h i c h w o u l d subsequently be fired at w i t h a rifle, either b y herself or an i n v i t e d audience member, p r o d u c i n g the effect of a bleeding or an abstract expressionist p a i n t i n g [fig. 37]. If before the shooting these unexpressed assemblages resembled Jean Fautrier's i n f o r m e l Hostages, afterwards, they made a s t r i k i n g reference to N e w Y o r k school abstraction a l a Jackson P o l l o c k . T h r o u g h the r i t u a l act of shooting these figures, t h r o w - a w a y consumer culture was transformed into the latest h i g h art currency. M a s q u e r a d i n g as a tomboy w i t h i n Restany's arsenal of D u c h a m p i a n bachelors, N i k i aimed her phallic g u n at her o w n abstracted forms of Self. 7 9 T h r o u g h this transformative act, Saint-Phalle not o n l y staged her o w n passage from her previous career as a m o d e l to artist, but catapulted herself into the international art w o r l d of the 1960s. A s early as 1959, Saint-Phalle had been introduced to w o r k b y Jasper Johns, W i l l e m de K o o n i n g , Jackson P o l l o c k and Robert Rauschenberg at the Musee d ' A r t M o d e r n e de la V i l l e de Paris. A m a l g a m a t i n g these different approaches into her o w n h y b r i d iconography consisting of targets, drips, disgarded objects and rhetorical 'actions,' Saint-Phalle set up a representational dialogue i n w h i c h her o w n gendered and sexualized identity c o u l d challenge the m y t h of masculinity dominant not o n l y i n Abstract Expressionism but also i n Restany's army of artists. L i k e Johns and Rauschenberg, Saint-Phalle w o u l d a r m herself not o n l y w i t h artistic tropes, but also w i t h a D u c h a m p i a n tongue-in-cheek wit. Pontus H u l t e n seems to have appreciated Saint-Phalle's strategy considerably more than Restany d i d . Introduced to her by T i n g u e l y i n 1960, H u l t e n d e c i d e d to include Saint-Phalle i n the most significant e x h i b i t i o n he was w o r k i n g o n to that date. Since being h i r e d o n the staff of M o d e r n a Museet, H u l t e n h a d been busy p l a n n i n g a large scale 'thematic' exhibition of contemporary international art to f o l l o w the f o r m and function of his 1954 e x h i b i t i o n Le Mouvement at Galerie Denise Rene. T h i s larger e x h i b i t i o n was g o i n g to give Stockholm's new m u s e u m its real kick-start. Rorelse i konsten (Movement in Art) opened i n S t o c k h o l m i n M a y of 1961 w i t h a w o r k i n g committee consisting of the museum's energetic docent C a r l o Derkert, D a n i e l 8 0 Spoerri, and B i l l y K l i i v e r w h o under H u l t e n ' s s u p e r v i s i o n organized 230 art works by 72 artists to be i n c l u d e d i n M o d e r n a Museet's first b l o c k b u s t e r . 1 3 4 A s this first chapter has s h o w n , by 1961 M o d e r n a Museet h a d been equipped w i t h a director deeply entrenched i n continental p h i l o s o p h i c a l and aesthetic discourses, a l l o w i n g S w e d i s h art and its public to confidently engage w i t h a broader international art scene. If Sweden had i n the fifties been looked up to for its rationalist and socialist embrace of time and space through art and architecture, i n the sixties we see a shift t o w a r d a v i s i o n of Sweden as an open space for an avant-garde art not o n l y tied to a consumer culture but a new sexualized liberal identity. The alternative artistic positions w h i c h defined themselves t h r o u g h anarchism and avant-gardism i n the fifties, w i l l i n the sixties merge w i t h larger institutional and p o l i t i c a l attempts to define culture. In this new context, M o d e r n a Museet p l a y e d an important role as it not o n l y pushed definitions and p u b l i c boundaries of contemporary art, but also created a forum w h i c h highlighted a v i t a l dialogue between the centre and the periphery. O f the ups and d o w n s to follow for M o d e r n a Museet and the artists i n question, Hulten's Movement in Art was to be the most optimistic s i g n of this n e w f o u n d collaborative environment. 1 3 4 A s i n A m s t e r d a m , the e x h i b i t i o n i n S t o c k h o l m broke attendance records w i t h seventy- thousand vistors. Derkert, the museum's docent, w o u l d from this point f o r w a r d become a crucial and p o p u l a r mediator between the m u s e u m a n d its p u b l i c ; k n o w n for his o d d b a l l tactics of teaching and h a n g i n g exhibitions such as h a n g i n g soft w o r k s to the left a n d h a r d w o r k s to the right as a s u b l i m i n a l association w i t h left a n d right w i n g politics. 8 1 C H A P T E R II M O V E M E N T IN A R T GOES POP C o n t e m p o r a r y art is often pessimistic, defeatist and passive; quite a natural phenomena, one c o u l d argue. But there is also another type of m o d e r n art. It is some of this that [the Movement in Art E x h i b i t i o n ] wants to show (dynamic, constructive, exciting, confusing, ironic, critical, j o k i n g , aggressive...). It is also definitely of our time. D u r i n g the 19th century, art exhibitions were visited b y the same curious and interested mass audience w h o are n o w g o i n g to automobile expos. But can they i n the end find what they seek? A p o l l i n a i r e wrote i n 1913 i n regards to M a r c e l D u c h a m p that o n l y an art w h i c h is freed from being v i e w e d aesthetically and w h i c h is i n v o l v e d w i t h energy as a pictorial material can stand a chance to 'reunite art w i t h people.' The camera is a p i c t u r e - m a k i n g machine w i t h i n everyone's reach. But there are also other art machines, more independent perhaps, w h i c h also speak to us and tells us w h o we are. They appear i n m a n y forms and material; sometimes they come close to science or disguise themselves as toys. K i n e t i c art has d u r i n g the 20th century developed i n m a n y different directions, taking at least as many v a r y i n g forms as static art. To use p h y s i c a l movement as a means of expression p r o v i d e s an u n b o u n d freedom (obundenhet) w h i c h art has l o n g strived for. Pontus Hulten introduction to Movement in Art Exhibition, 1 9 6 1 1 3 5 Let us consider that some opinionated persons, whose interests are i n fine peculiarities, agree to make some p u b l i c exhibitions. Besides people w h o can afford the expenses, there is also a need for those w h o can constantly come u p w i t h n e w inventions. But since too m a n y people i n charge w o u l d w i t h o u t doubt create chaos, I think it w o u l d be best to o n l y have two or three conspirators g i v e n special priveleges, a n d that the others are p a i d b y them or are received against certain conditions, or were designated certain assignments for a certain time, or for as l o n g as their supervisors find fit, or u n t i l one h a d satisfied them according to their investment. The people w h o w o u l d be engaged s h o u l d be painters, sculptors, clockmakers, etc.. M o r e o v e r , one c o u l d assign mathematicians, engineers, jugglers, charlatans, musicians, poets, book sellers, typographers, etchers and others, a l l eventually i n due time. 135 pontus H u l t e n " I n t r o d u c t i o n " Rorelse i konsten Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1961, p . l . 8 2 The exhibitions s h o u l d , for example, include magic lanterns...fireworks, water arts, ships i n strange forms,... rare plants. O d d and rare animals... C a v a l r y Excercises. M i n i a t u r e sea battles i n a canal. Rarely seen concerts. U n u s u a l instruments. Speaking trumpets. A hunt... One c o u l d have m a r c h i n g figures, i l l u m i n a t e d from inside, too be able to see what they became... A r t machines, such as the ones I have seen i n G e r m a n y . Demonstrations of b u r n i n g mirrors. Gregois de C a l l i n i c u s fire. A new k i n d of chess game w i t h m e n o n a theatre... F l y i n g fire dragons, etc. They w o u l d consist of o i l e d and painted paper. W i n d m i l l s w h i c h rotate w i t h a l l w i n d s . Boats w h i c h cruise against the w i n d . . . Attempts to make a glass crack by screaming... The use one c o u l d have of this k i n d of company is m u c h greater than one imagines, both for the general audience and the i n d i v i d u a l . . . . A n y o n e w h o h a d made an i n v e n t i o n or a thoughful construction w o u l d come there to earn their keep, make their i n v e n t i o n k n o w n , profit from it; the w h o l e w o u l d be a public address administration for inventors... A l l curious w o u l d come there... distinguished ladies w o u l d ask to be taken there (more than one time).... I almost forgot one last thing: one c o u l d also establish the A c a d e m y of P l a y there. O r more generally, a Pleasure A c a d e m y . . . . 1 3 6 Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, 1675 A r t i n M o v e m e n t a n d Hulten's A c a d e m y of P l a y For Pontus H u l t e n , what better text c o u l d there have been than Leibniz's description of an A c a d e m y of P l a y to p h i l o s o p h i c a l l y g r o u n d Movement in Art, his o w n large scale anarchic exhibition? Together, Hulten's a n d L e i b n i z ' s texts read to sanction historically the embrace of a discursive chaos into the p u b l i c realms of A m s t e r d a m , S t o c k h o l m a n d H u m l e b a e k . A l o n g w i t h its u n u s u a l a n d impressive catalogue, the exhibition's i n a u g u r a t i o n at W i l l e m Sandberg's Stedelijk M u s e u m h a d a t w o f o l d function. First of a l l , it anchored H u l t e n ' s v i s i o n of a triangular institutional l i a i s o n between M o d e r n a Museet, the Stedelijk, a n d K n u d 1 3 6 G o t t f r i e d W i l h e l m v o n L e i b n i z i n " D r o l e de pensee touchant une n o u v e l l e Sorte d e representation" [ A n U n u s u a l Idea R e g a r d i n g a N e w F o r m of Representation] p u b l i s h e d i n journal des Scavans 25 Oct. 1675 and quoted i n H u l t e n , et al. Rorelse i konsten S t o c k h o l m : M o d e r n a Museet, 1961, p.2. 8 3 Jensen's n e w l y opened L o u i s i a n a M u s e u m . Secondly, it a l l o w e d H u l t e n to introduce his i n d i v i d u a l i s t i c anarchist convictions into a status quo liberal public sphere i n Sweden. A s H u l t e n w o u l d later comment, "to s h o w it to an unprepared S w e d i s h p u b l i c at Stockholm's M o d e r n a Museet as its o w n product w o u l d have been too s h o c k i n g . " 1 3 7 A n o t h e r fact w h y the connection w i t h Sandberg's anarchic m u s e u m was so important was that it stood out as a particularly p o w e r f u l counter m o d e l to N e w Y o r k ' s M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t . A s H u l t e n p o i n t e d out i n his catalogue Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam besoker Moderna Museet Stockholm, a collection exchange between the two museums i n 1962, M o M A "may have come to existence before Sandberg arrived at the Stedelijk, but d i d not manage before the w a r to completely break d o w n the w a l l of money, elitism and great deal of snobbery w h i c h it has to thank its existence f o r . " 1 3 8 Since b e c o m i n g director of the m u s e u m i n 1945, Sandberg, trained as a typographer and graphic designer, had established a v i t a l discursive space for experimental music, dance, cinema, discussion, readings, demonsrtations, and art i n w h i c h emphasis was placed o n the contemporary rather than the p a s t . 1 3 9 H i s strong support of C o B r A , for example, emphasized for H u l t e n the possibility to m o b i l i z e rather than paralyze radical anarchist expressions w i t h i n an i n s t i t u t i o n that h a d an international s c o p e . 1 4 0 S i m i l a r i t y , K n u d i^Tpontus Hulten "Fern fragment ur Moderna Museets historia" in Granath, Olle and Nieckels, Monica eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: Moderna Museets Press, 1983, p.p.36. The risk factor in showing this radically individualist work in the context of a museum located in a country known for its social democratic embrace of collectivism. 1 3 8 p o n t u s Hulten Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam besoker Moderna Museet Stockholm. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1962, p.5. 1 3 9 M a f a l d a Spencer "Willem Sandberg: Warm Printing" Eye Vo.7 (Summer 1997), pp.70-77. 140per_oiof Ulvedt has confirmed and emphasized the important role played by Sandberg as a model for Hulten. Like Sandberg, Hulten would stress the importance of good catalogue designs 8 4 Jensen had inititiated an ambitious contemporary m u s e u m i n H u m b l e b a e k , Denmark, w h i c h opened i n 1958 w i t h a similar artistic v i s i o n . In a collaborative spirit, Stedelijk and the L o u i s i a n a i n v i t e d H u l t e n to organize Movement in Art. In A m s t e r d a m Bewogen Beweging (as Movement in Art w a s translated) broke attendance records w i t h an audience a l l too h a p p y to be physically able to participate i n m u c h of the art [fig. 38]. A s the first large scale international historical survey of kinetic art, the e x h i b i t i o n brought into contact a broad range of artistic v a l u e s . 1 4 1 A s T i n g u e l y biographer H e i d i E . V i o l a n d - H o b i has noted, this range was so broad that a "serious d i v i s i o n occurred among the contemporary artists i n c l u d e d i n the s h o w . " 1 4 2 M o s t noteworthy was the conflict "between the neo-dadaists and those i n c l i n e d to C o n s t r u c t i v i s m . T i n g u e l y ' s status as primus inter pares was a t h o r n i n the side of the Constructivist f a c t i o n . " 1 4 3 W h a t must have stood out as a distinct and posters to function as a communicative expansion of the museum's activities. Interview with Per-Olof Ultvedt. Lidingo, Sweden, June 10,1992. 1 4 1 Works by the following artists were represented (number of works in brackets): Yaacov Agam (12), Giovanni Anceschi (1), Jon Gunnar Arnason (1), Roy Ascott (1), Giacomo Balla (1), Hans Bellmer (2), Harry Bertoia (1), Davide Boriani (1), George Brecht (1), Robert Breer (3), Camille Bryen (1), John Burnside II (1), Pol Bury (5), Alexander Calder (32), Gianni Colombo (1) , William N . Copley (1), Siegfried Cremer (1), Carlo Cruz Diez (1), Narciso Debourg (1), Gabriele Devecchi (1), Marcel Duchamp (10), Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1), Viking Eggeling (2) , Enguerrand (2), Yolande Fievre (2), Naum Gabo (1), Herbert Gesner (1), Alberto Giacometti (3) , Rube Goldberg (4), Gloria Graves (1), Raymond Hains (1), Hans Hellstrom (1), Philippe Hiquily (1), Einar Hoste (1), Robert Jacobsen (1), Jasper Johns (1), Allan Kaprow (1), Yasuhide Kobashi (1), Gyula Kosice (1), Harry Kramer (3), Alfred Leslie (1), Walter Linck (3), El Lissitsky (1), Len Lye (1), Heinz Mack (1), Kasimir Malevich (1), Franck J. Malina (3), Enzo Mari (1), Marisol (1), Kenneth Martin (2), Lazlo Moholy-Nagy (1), Ira Moldow (1), Robert Muller (4), Bruno Munari (7), Jack Nelson (1), Erik-H. Olson (3), Julio Le Pare (1), Francis Picabia (3), Otto Piene (1), Robert Rauschenberg (1), Man Ray (10), George Rickey (1), Jose de Rivera (1), Diter Rot (7), Niki de Saint Phalle (1), Nicolas Schoffer (7), Jesus Raphael Soto (11), Richard Stankiewicz (1), Shinkichi Tajiri (2), Takis (4), Paul Talman (1), A . Van Tienen (1), Jean Tinguely (27), Luis Tomasello (1), Gunter Uecker (1), Per-Olof Ultvedt (4), Isabelle Waldberg (1), Stan Vanderbeck (1), Grazia Varisco (1), Robert Watts (2), Mary Vieira (1), Thomas Wilfred (1), Yvaral (1). 1 4 2 V i o l a n d - H o b i , p.50. l 4 3 I b i d . . 8 5 canonical reframing at the time, was Hulten's decision to insert a twenty- eight piece retrospective of Tinguely's w o r k w h i c h not o n l y dominated the m u s e u m entrance and its interior exhibition halls, but was matched only i n numbers by veteran artist A l e x a n d e r Calder's thirty-two w o r k s o n display. In contrast to C a l d e r ' s quietly p l a y f u l mobiles, T i n g u e l y ' s machines, along w i t h large w o o d e n contraptions by U l t v e d t , produced, through the participation and movement of the spectators, concrete music that was v e x i n g i n contrast to the more 'pure' or 'constructive' w o r k i n the show. The most insightful, although at times too literal, critique of the exhibition came from A m e r i c a n art critic George Rickey w r i t i n g for Arts Magazine. For h i m , Hu lten 's succes de scandale h a d managed to trick not just the exhibitions artists, but also its audience: Instead of the comprehensive and objective survey one m i g h t fairly expect of a famous m u s e u m i n such an international exhibition, what met the eye outside the front door i n A m s t e r d a m was a fifty-foot machine b y T i n g u e l y , i n the p o o l outside the back door, a twenty-five foot fountain b y T i n g u e l y , and o n the title page of the catalogue... none other than — y o u guessed it — Tinguely. N o r is that a l l : inside was a complete gallery of T i n g u e l y pure, and another gallery of T i n g u e l y m i x e d half-and-half w i t h others. The catalogue listed twenty-eight Tinguely's a n d — noble gesture! — twenty-nine Calders (out of w h i c h twenty were very small).... O f seventy-five contemporary exhibitors, forty-five, some of w h o m are world-famous, were represented b y one w o r k each.... The fraudulent conversion of this international to a v i r t u a l one-man s h o w is scandalous enough. But worse yet is the h i g h h a n d e d and erroneous i m p l i c a t i o n that neo-Dada w o r k s ( w h i c h h a p p e n sometimes also to move, though m a n y i n the e x h i b i t i o n emphatically do not!) must be accepted as the characteristic and important aspect of contemporary kinetic a r t . 1 4 4 1 4 4 G e o r g e Rickey "The Kinetic International" Arts Magazine (September 1961), p.16 (16-21). 8 6 But as Rickey apparently realized, it was too late to put a stop o n Hulten's "trick" as he had already managed to elevate T i n g u e l y and so called "neo- Dada" into the canon of m o d e r n art by s h o w i n g at the reputable Stedelijk museum. A s he was even forced to admit, " H u l t e n is an historian ... and i n that role a good one. This shows i n the pains he has taken to assemble a thorough documentation of kinetic art over the last h a l f - c e n t u r y . " 1 4 5 In M a y of 1961, the same exhibition opened i n S t o c k h o l m as Rorelse i konsten, an event w h i c h domestically activated a l i v e l y p u b l i c debate about Sweden's role i n contemporary art but also catapulted M o d e r n a Museet into the bright spotlight of the international art w o r l d [fig. 3 9 ] . 1 4 6 H e l p i n g to initiate this discussion, Konstrevy, a m o n t h p r i o r to the e x h i b i t i o n , devoted its entire issue to N o u v e a u Realisme, i n v i t i n g D a n i e l Spoerri to w r i t e the i n t r o d u c t i o n : W i t h this selection of pictures, biographical information a n d texts, the S w e d i s h public is presented w i t h a group of artists w h o have existed independently for many years, but have recently p r o d u c e d a more cohesive association t h r o u g h the initiative of Pierre Restany w h o also named it. Besides the fact that their different experimental forms can be exceptionally distanced from each other, these artists agree o n two points: the i n t r o d u c t i o n of raw reality into their w o r k a n d the avoidance of essentializing i n d i v i d u a l creation. W i t h reality they mean the w o r l d that surrounds us, but instead of c o p y i n g a la trompe l ' o e i l i n two dimensions (ie. an abstraction), they are h a p p y to expose it and have it expose itself. The consequence of this idea is that everything can be v i e w e d as an art work.... The v i e w e r finds himself standing eye to eye w i t h everyday reality w h i c h s u d d e n l y forces h i m to discover this through the perspective of an artistic w i t n e s s . 1 4 7 1 4 5 I b i d . , p.18. 1 4 6 T h i s debate extended b e y o n d the m u s e u m a n d art journals and into the pages of N e w Left literary journals l i k e Bonniers Litterdra Magasin, newspapers s u c h as Dagens Nyheter, Stockholmstidningen, Svenska Dagbladet, Aftonbladet, Expressen, as w e l l as r a d i o . 1 4 7 D a n i e l S p o e r r i "Les N o u v e a u x Realistes: E n sarnmanstallning av D a n i e l S p o e r r i " Konstrevy no.2 (1961), p.42. 8 7 Spoerri's endorsement of an 'open' objectivity tied to collaborative subjectivities paralleled the structure of the exhibition at the m u s e u m . O p e n i n g its doors to what w o u l d turn out to be a rather naive readymade notion of "everything can be v i e w e d as art," M o d e r n a Museet, under the supervision of Spoerri and H u l t e n , set out to realize a v e r s i o n of L e i b n i z ' s 'academy of play.' Importantly, this academy w o u l d not o n l y reorient the history of m o d e r n art i n Sweden, but it w o u l d reconfigure the history of N o u v e a u Realisme, as it had p r e v i o u s l y been defined, to an international audience b y Pierre Restany. This was partially achieved b y i n t r o d u c i n g p r e v i o u s l y m a r g i n a l i z e d Scandinavian artists such as P e r - O l o f U l t v e d t and Hans N o r d e n s t r o m into his' international avant-garde. A n o t h e r means was to d o w n p l a y Restany's idea of a ' N e w Realism' i n favour of a broader category of 'open art.' In a strategic sense, Rorelse i konsten presented H u l t e n w i t h an opportunity to construct his o w n story of m o d e r n art a i m e d at securing a new contemporary direction centralized and read through a perspective from the margins. In order to 'unfix' existing canons of m o d e r n art, a n d introduce his o w n ideas concerning i n d i v i d u a l movements i n art, art history a n d contemporary studio practices, H u l t e n set out to strip them bare of what he saw as sentimentalizing r o m a n t i c i s m and i n s t i t u t i o n a l i z e d bourgeois illusions. A s was the case i n 1954 i n Paris, it was D u c h a m p w h o p r o v i d e d the standard measurements necessary to reinvent the wheel. W i t h an i n v i t a t i o n from the m u s e u m , D u c h a m p a r r i v e d i n Stockholm a few days p r i o r to the exhibition opening to put the finishing 8 8 touches to a number of replicas produced b y art critic U l f L i n d e of his readymades and the Large Glass [fig. 4 0 ] . 1 4 8 A few weeks later i n Paris, D u c h a m p w o u l d praise L i n d e ' s effort: U l f L i n d e , an art critic w h o isn't a painter at a l l , undertook to make an exact copy of La Mariee [The Large Glass] ... o r i g i n a l size and i n color, o n two b i g pieces of glass set one above the other, as i n mine, and he copied it exactly (without h a v i n g seen the Glass i n P h i l a d e l p h i a ) , u s i n g the same technique that I used. H e took three months to do what I had done i n eight years. A n d I think what he d i d is very good, because the replica is a full-size replica, and it gives enough of an echo of the real thing, very close, to the point that I signed it on the back and added pour copie conforme.1^9 A s the enthusiasm of this quote suggests, and as a photograph [fig. 41] s h o w i n g D u c h a m p comfortably seated and surrounded b y a committee of S w e d i s h avant-garde "bachelors" confirms, D u c h a m p was more than w i l l i n g to p l a y the maternal father figure for this N o r t h e r n a v a n t - g a r d e . 1 5 0 N o t o n l y that, D u c h a m p was also w i l l i n g to double as a k i n d of secular messiah — blessing his reproduced Readymades w i t h his signature touch. F r o m this point forward, M o d e r n a Museet became a sanctified avant-garde pilgrimage 1 4 8 W i t h Duchamp's permision and the assistance of Per-Olof Ultvedt, Linde had not only produced a replica of The Large Glass, but also Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel, Fresh Widow, Rotary Glass Plates, Bottle Rack, Fountain, and more. Perhaps even more than Hulten, Linde had since the late fifties become obsessed with Duchamp's work. Through the initiative of Ultvedt and Hulten, Linde helped introduce Duchamp to Sweden by publishing seminal texts on his work and bringing Robert Lebel's 1959 Duchamp exhibition from La Hune Bookshop in Paris to Stockholm's Bokkonsum bookstore in 1960. • 1 4 9 Qutoed in Francis M . Naumann's Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Amsterdam: Ludion Press, 1999, p.219. The quote originates from Alain Jouffroy "Une revolution due regard: a propos de quelques peintres et sculpteurs contemporains" Paris, 1964. 1 5 0 T h e "bachelors" surrounding Duchamp in this picture represent various strategic positions within Sweden's art scene at the time. Included are the artist Oskar Reutersvard, the docent Carlo Derkert, the critic Ulf Linde and the curating director Pontus Hulten. No doubt flattered by the serious attention given to his work in Stockholm, and aware of the precariously low budget Hulten had to work with, Duchamp helped defray some of the cost of bringing him to Scandinavia by signing 125 copies of his Fluttering Hearts, a limited-edition serigraph issued in commemoration of the exhibition. 8 9 site — relics and a l l . 1 5 1 For the audience of a s m a l l m u s e u m i n Sweden, this must have seemed like a miracle. A l t h o u g h D u c h a m p had by the late fifties achieved cult status w i t h i n avant-garde circles elsewhere, w i t h his appearance i n S t o c k h o l m he h a d finally come out i n public. This was two years p r i o r to his first retrospective i n the U n i t e d States at the Pasadena M u s e u m of A r t i n L o s Angeles. Thomas C r o w , i n his West Coast (rather than East Coast) A m e r i c a n perspective o n the history of N e o - D a d a and Pop art, has argued that "nowhere else w o u l d the connection l i n k i n g practice to the scholarly recovery of D u c h a m p ' s inheritance be nearly as close" as at Walter H o p p s ' Los Angeles exhibition. W h i l e s h e d d i n g a n e w light o n C a l i f o r n i a , he unfortunately casts yet another shadow o n the activities we have witnessed o c c u r r i n g i n Scandinavia. F r o m m y perspective, D u c h a m p had as early as 1961 received close p h i l o s o p h i c a l scrutiny and a considerable artistic f o l l o w i n g i n S t o c k h o l m . 1 5 2 A s w e w i l l see, the Pasadena exhibition w o u l d i n fact benefit greatly from the k n o w l e d g e and replicas accumulated by U l f L i n d e . 1 5 3 1 5 1 U l t v e d t had already in the fifties made a "reduced" copy of the Large Glass for an exhibition in Stockholm. The 1961 copy was signed "Certifie pour copie conforme Marcel Duchamp Stockholm 1961" by Duchamp himself. It could be argued that The Large Glass is the single most important piece in the Museum's vast collection of modern art. In May of 1992,1 "witnessed" the unveiling of a new, and "more precise" replica of the original copy. This copy was also produced by Linde, but this time it was authorized by Mrs. Tini Duchamp who was flown to Stockholm in place of her late husband. After this unveiling the copy was sent to Bonn, Germany where it was on loan for five years while Moderna Museet in Stockholm was being rebuilt. Thus, today the museum has two copies of the Large Glass, one that stays on site and one that travels. Duchamp's aura seems still very much alive and well. IS^Thomas Crow The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent New York: Harry N . Abrams, 1996, p.84. Crow's account of the fifties and sixties is significant in that it shifts the vantage point from which to read this history from New York to Los Angeles. While I find his position interesting and noteworthy, Crow's account is still limited by resources that are in the end very centred in the United States. Working in Vancouver, Canada, and utilizing archives in Stockholm, Sweden, my account aims to strike up a dialogue in tension with writers such as Crow, Benjamin Buchloh, Cecile Whiting, and others. i ^ T h i s is evident by the fact that Linde wrote the major text for Walter Hopps' exhibition catalogue. By 1961 Linde had written a series of interpretive texts on Duchamp's work for 9 0 B e s i d e s h i s m a n y articles o n D u c h a m p i n the S w e d i s h art p r e s s , L i n d e h a d i n 1960 p u b l i s h e d a s u r v e y o f m o d e r n art e n t i t l e d Spejare [Spies] w h i c h s o u g h t to d e f i n e " s o m e t h i n g other" [nagot annat] i n art t h a n that o f p u r e a b s t r a c t i o n : W h e n o n e d r i v e s the d o c t r i n e o f p u r e f o r m to its s h a r p e s t e d g e , o n e a r r i v e s at a c r i t i c a l p o i n t w h e r e o n e is either f o r c e d to a c c e p t that a n art w o r k is a p u r e t r i v i a l i t y , o r that the f o r m i n a p i c t u r e is n e v e r neutral [ o b e r o e n d e ] . T h a t is, the f o r m is a l w a y s r e a d as a s i g n . T h i s latter a l t e r n a t i v e is the o n l y o n e a c c e p t a b l e if w e w a n t to b e able to s p e a k a b o u t ' a r t . ' 1 5 4 L o o k i n g at art as a s e m i o t i c s y s t e m , L i n d e p r o p o s e d that b y u s i n g o n c e o w n c o n v e n t i o n s o n e c a n n o t o n l y alter the m e a n i n g o f s i g n s , b u t c o n t i n u e to p l a y a n e v e r e n d i n g g a m e o f r e p r e s e n t a t i o n : T h e s e t h o u g h t s c o m e c l o s e to [ L u d w i g ] W i t t g e n s t e i n ' s a n a l y s i s of v i e w i n g — b u t w e s h o u l d b e a w a r e that t h i s p h i l o s o p h e r ' s a r g u m e n t a r o u n d 'the d a w n i n g o f a n aspect' a l r e a d y e x i s t e d l o n g b e f o r e a n d w a s d e m o n s t r a t e d b y the p e c u l i a r D u c h a m p a n d h i s r e a d y - m a d e s — r i g o r o u s l y d i s c u s s e d i n The Green B o x . 1 5 5 In Spejare, L i n d e m a d e a n a r g u m e n t for a n a n t i - a e s t h e t i c v i e w o f art w h i c h rejects the " p r e t e n t i o u s n e s s " o f aesthetic j u d g m e n t w h i c h h e felt " r i s k s g e t t i n g s t u c k i n c o n v e n t i o n s w h i c h t h r e a t e n to s t e r i l i z e art t o d a y . " 1 5 6 C o n s i d e r i n g m o s t m o d e r n i s t t r a d i t i o n s " d r i e d u p " a n d artists l i k e V a s a r e l y Konstrevy, a magazine whose editors supported, to a large degree the activities of Moderna Museet. In the fall of 1961 they published an issue devoted to the art presented in Rorelse i konsten. Included was an interview with Duchamp by Linde, texts by John Cage and Oyvind Fahlstrom on Rauschenberg, and a review of the Museum of Modern Art's Art of Assemblage exhibition. As this issue of the magazine, along with every other issue at this time, suggests, there was a great deal of debate about Duchamp specifically, and contemporary international art in general. 1 5 4 U l f Linde Spejare Stockholm: Bonniers, 1960, p. 93. 1 5 5 I b i d . , p.94. 1 5 6 I b i d . . 9 1 "too serious," Linde proposed art more open to subjectivity which could escape both 'purism' and 'realism.'157 Important ingredient in this recipe was the irony, cynicism and silence he claimed to have found in artists like Picasso and Duchamp. What Spejare shows is that by the time Duchamp arrived in Stockholm in 1961, there had developed a substantial interest in and sophisticated discussion about his work. The activities around Duchamp at the Movement in Art exhibition not only provided a historical stability and public respectability, but also supplied local and international contingency . with an avant-garde license to return to anarchic play. In as puerile a manner typographically possible, the invitation card for Rorelse i konsten set the tone for the exhibition's reception, promising a "colossal party" consisting of anti-fireworks by Tinguely and Ultvedt, a boat cruise, theatre, drama, music, a formal dinner and most prominently, the production of abstract drawings by Tinguely's Meta-Matic #17. The exhibition as a whole included works by artists from twenty different countries ranging in scope from turn-of-the-century avant-gardism to contemporary works made on sight by, for example, Rauschenberg, Tinguely, Kaprow, Calder and Spoerri. For her part, Niki de Saint-Phalle produced the "world's largest abstract painting" by having the visitors dance on top of paint pellets carefully 1 5 7 I b i d . . 9 2 0 sandwiched between an area rug and a c a n v a s . 1 5 8 The f o l l o w i n g day, artists such as Rauschenberg collaborated i n shooting a number of her new paintings at a nearby quarry [fig. 42]. O v e r a l l the exhibition projected a great deal of o p t i m i s m for an international realignment of the post-war avant- garde into a " d y n a m i c understanding of art and life" (as H u l t e n w o u l d r e c o l l e c t ) . 1 5 9 The w a l l s of the traditional m u s e u m h a d been b r o k e n d o w n (or at least opened up) w i t h site-specific w o r k p r o d u c e d for public spaces around the city of Stockholm. T i n g u e l y , for example, excecuted his Narva w h i c h was installed at the central p u b l i c square of Nybrokajen. There were also films screened, light plays activated, happenings and concerts performed. A s the visitor approached the m u s e u m entrance, h e / s h e was greeted by The Four Elements, a m o n u m e n t a l mobile b y C a l d e r w h i c h h a d o r i g i n a l l y been designed for the 1939 W o r l d ' s Fair [fig. 4 3 ] . 1 6 0 W i t h its organic metal forms shifting r h y t h m i c a l l y against each other, the vertical shapes rotated and broke against the o v e r a l l horizontality composition. Indeed, l i k e this metaphorical w o r k i n metal, the m u s e u m was t r y i n g to catch a s u d d e n gust of w i n d to propel its w a y out of a p r o v i n c i a l i z e d c u l t u r a l maelstrom. A s the poet A r t u r 1 5 8 R e c o u n t e c j D y BiUy Kliiver and Robert Rauschenberg in "Rorelse i konsten - en kombinerad minnesbild" in Granath, Olle and Nieckels, Monica eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: Moderna Museets Press, 1983, p.148. !5 9 Hulten has also pointed out that Moderna Museet had through exhibitions such as Rorelse i konsten managed to "develop a new public who wished that the museum would continue in the proposed direction — ie. offer a broad offering of information in regards to contemporary art.... This new public was younger than the traditional museum going public, it was curious, innocent, dynamic, and it represented all the best things from the optimistic side of the sixties." Pontus Hulten "Det lilla museets stora roll" in Granath and Nieckels, eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: Moderna Museets Press, 1983, p.39. 1 6 0 B i l l y Kliiver and Robert Rauschenberg "Rorelse i konsten—en kombinerad minnesbild" in Granath, Olle and Nieckels, Monica eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: Moderna Museets Press, 1983, p.146. Hulten had been given the miniature model of this a decade earlier and asked Calder for the permission to actualize it in Stockholm. The large-scale sculpture was publically displayed outside the museum entrance until 1997 when questions arose regarding Calder's permission. 9 3 L u n d k v i s t w o u l d observe i n his r e v i e w of the e x h i b i t i o n for Bonniers Litterdra Magasin (BLM), C a l d e r ' s mobiles stood to represent the meeting place between organic and geometric abstraction i n a poetic, passive acceptance of the w a y interpretive winds b l o w , u n l i k e T i n g u e l y ' s machines w h i c h adhered to: the c h i l d w i t h i n all of us w h i c h plays w h i l e it destroys — creates through negation. O r they ignite a spark of i n d i g n a t i o n from the viewer, wake restricted temptations to erupt and devastate. Perhaps they speak of a secret, stored up hatred against machines, i n their misunderstood roles as tyrants and seductive symbols, or of a first seed to those machine storms w h i c h i n a g i v e n situation can break out u n c o m p a r a b l y more violent than those w h i c h appeared d u r i n g E n g l a n d ' s i n d u s t r i a l r e v o l u t i o n . 1 6 1 In m a n y w a y s , Rorelse i konsten acted l i k e a s u d d e n gust of w i n d w h i c h broke against the calm w h i c h had persisted a r o u n d the artistic activities i n Sweden to date. A s a result of this Movement in Art, debates w o u l d intensify a r o u n d the new international 'open' art to such a degree that S t o c k h o l m found itself centrally located w i t h i n a cross-Atlantic c u l t u r a l discourse. W h i l e the vernissage and exhibition broke attendance records a n d h a d the effect of successfully establishing a new, younger and energetic audience tied to an emerging international y o u t h culture, not everyone was h a p p y . H u l t e n has recalled that this L e i b n i z i a n orgy of mechanical entropy (many of the events p l a n n e d for the opening, such as T i n g u e l y ' s fireworks, failed), 1 6 1 A r t u r Lundkvist "Rorelse i konsten" BLM no.7 (September 1961), p.539. (pp.538-540). It is also worth noting how close this description sounds to Max Stirner's individual: "In childhood liberation takes the direction of trying to get to the bottom of things, to get at what is T âck of things; therefore we spy out the weak points of everybody, for which, it is well known, children have a sure instinct; therefore we like to smash things, like to rummage through hidden corners, pry after what is covered up or out of the way, and try what we can do with everything." Stirner, p.9. 94 brought "thunderous criticism" from the national n e w s p a p e r s . 1 6 2 Some of the voices w h i c h objected the most came from S w e d i s h modernist artists such as Sven E r i x s o n , an expressionist w h o felt that the e x h i b i t i o n was derogatory, not o n l y for the m u s e u m , but for art i n g e n e r a l . 1 6 3 E v e n more serious was the attempt b y the N a t i o n a l M u s e u m ' s chief superintendant C a r l Nordenfalk to close d o w n the exhibition altogether. In the end he was satisfied w i t h the r e m o v a l of a w o r k by Robert M i i l l e r ' s The Bicyclist's Widow [fig. 44], a w o r k consisting of a stationary bicycle whose seat is repetitively penetrated by a phallic object w h e n put into u s e . 1 6 4 But the nastiest assault against the M u s e u m was launched at the annual meeting of the S w e d i s h R o y a l A c a d e m y of A r t two weeks after the exhibition opening. In a speech delivered b y art historian Rabbe E n c k e l l entitled "Icarus and the Tightrope W a l k e r (in defence of classicism)," M o d e r n a Museet was accused of p r o m o t i n g art politics (konstpolitik) rather than 'art.' O b s e r v i n g that "today, the artist stands freer than ever before against tradition," E n c k e l l w a r n e d that the contemporary artist was also "more dependent o n aesthetic judgements w h i c h , i n the name of progress, demand h i m to be contemporary and n e w . " 1 6 5 For E n c k e l l , this external pressure posed a threat to the artist: "Radicals today have a noticeable 1 6 2 H u l t e n (1983), p.36. 1 6 3 I b i d . . 1 6 4 I b i d . . This work had also caused a great deal of trouble in Amsterdam. As George Rickey observed in his review for Arts Magazine, "In Amsterdam the vice squad was sent for by an outraged visitor, and, as reported in the city's Her Vaterland, 'an obscene instrument was removed from the exhibition.... Civil charges are being brought against the director of the museum, Mr. Sandberg.' The instrument was Robert Mueller's sculpture, The Widow of the Bicyclist. A review, headed 'Circus in Arts and Crafts,' said: "The Stedelijk Museum has finally succeeded in becoming the madhouse it has been called many times before.' Another described the bliss, in a museum, of being allowed at last to touch everything. Attendance exceeded even the record of 'Family of Man.' Rickey, p.16. 1 6^Rabbe Enckell "Ikaros och lindansaren (ett forsvar for klassicismen) BLM 31 No.7 (Summer 1962), p.550. (550-554) 95 position. Connoisseurs and critics are g i v i n g advance applause to art w o r k w a i t i n g to be executed." W h i l e there was some truth to this, Enckell's position failed to acknowledge arguments from the other side of the "open art" debate. In fact, Enckell's reluctance to accept the k i n d of post-war avant- garde offered up o n display by M o d e r n a Museet presents us w i t h a similar, albeit more reactionary, argument to that of future critics of this w o r k , such as Peter Burger. In his controversial Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), Burger argues against what he calls the "neo-avant-garde," an artistic phenomena i n w h i c h he includes artists as diverse as D a n i e l Spoerri to A n d y W a r h o l . For Burger, artists w o r k i n g i n this neo-avant-garde m a y have critical intentions, but ultimately their claims do n o t h i n g but "institutionalize the avant-garde as art and thus negate genuinely avant-gardiste i n t e n t i o n s . " 1 6 6 H o l d i n g a rather romanticized n o t i o n of an avant-garde, Burger sets out to p r y apart this neo- avant-garde from an historical avant-garde w h i c h had the ability to shock through originality. W h i l e not sharing Burger's nostalgia for a once critical avant-garde such as D a d a , E n c k e l l d i d differentiate between a pre and post- w a r avant-garde: This understanding and attention [given b y an institution such as M o d e r n a Museet] was unthinkable d u r i n g the twenties w h e n the most radical art s t i l l bore the unpretentious, misunderstood, but honest, name " i n s a n i t y . " 1 6 7 1 6 6 p e t e r B u r g e r The Theory of the Avant-Garde trans. M i c h a e l S h a w M i n n e a p o l i s : U n i v e r s i t y of M i n n e s o t a Press, 1984 (originally p u b l i s h e d i n G e r m a n i n 1974), p.58. 1 6 7 K . G . H u l t e n " E n c k e l l s f o r v i r r i n g a r " BLM no.7 (September 1962), p.550 (550-554) 96 U s i n g the example of Yves K l e i n ' s 1960 photomontage Leap into the Void [fig. 45], E n c k e l l finds a v i s u a l demonstation of the k i n d of " d y n a m i c l e v i t a t i o n " contemporary artists and institutions try to maintain. FOr h i m , the hubris represented by the post-war avant-garde is n o t h i n g but a m i s g u i d e d o p t i m i s m i n the future; a senario, he points out, that the classics understood through the story of Icarus w h i c h they represented as a 'tragic' fall. This speech d i d not go unnoticed or unanswered for long. D u r i n g the summer of 1962, Bonniers Litterara Magazine, the mouthpiece for a g r o w i n g N e w Left i n Sweden (published by A l b e r t Bonniers F o r l a g ) 1 6 8 presented its readers w i t h a translation of Leo Steinberg's defence of " C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t and the P l i g h t of its P u b l i c , " followed i n the next issue w i t h a transcription of Enckell's speech along w i t h a critical response from H u l t e n w h o at this point i n time was b l i n d l y optimistic about the museum's 'leap' into this new open territory. A s k i n g if art academies must always function as reactionary institutions, H u l t e n presented his counter-argument: C a n one never change this? This is the second year i n a r o w that dirt has been t h r o w n at m o d e r n art from the speaker throne of the R o y a l A c a d e m y ' s annual meeting. I have read E n c k e l l ' s speech but not understood m u c h of it. It seems to me to be full of contradictions.... I felt a little sick, perhaps because of m y inexperience, this was, after a l l , not the k i n d of article one usual bothers to r e a d . 1 6 9 1 6 8 A great deal of support for the activities in the museum came from the Bonnier family who, it should be mentioned, not only donated a great deal of their own collection of modern art to its permanent collection, but own(ed) the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter and the evening tabloid Expressen who gave the it much needed public exposure. The political affiliations between the Swedish press and political affiliations such as the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (L.O.) and the Social Democratic Party is discussed in Stig Hadenius Swedish Politics During the Twentieth Century: Conflict and Consensus Stockholm" Svenska Institutet, 1997, p.94. 1 6 9 K . G . Hulten "Enckells forvirringar" BLM no.7 (September 1962), p.554. 9 7 H u l t e n points out that a central thought i n Enckell's speech seems to be "the act of creation and the role of the audience's participation i n m a k i n g the art w o r k a p p e a r . " 1 7 0 If he can c l a i m this, H u l t e n charged, h o w can he at the same time entitle his talk "a defense of classicism:" W h a t does he mean by classicism? H e says that 'it is the idea and life decision as to where the essential are to be found w h i c h means the most.' It becomes just as clear w h e n one speaks of 'quality.' Is, for example, Ingres 'classic'? Is Rauschenberg 'classic'? U l f L i n d e , w h o E n c k e l l attacks has recently s h o w n i n an article h o w close Ingres and Rauschenberg, the originator of 'The M a d e Bed,' are to each other and h o w m u c h they have i n c o m m o n i n form, u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the h u m a n and i n their relation to objects i n the w o r l d . H o w does Icarus compare to a Sputnik? Does it become 'classic' w h e n one w r i t e about Icarus but not w h e n one writes about Sputnik?.... The sentence that surprised me the most reads as follows: 'It is the past, not the contemporary, that creates the largest space.' Isn't it, after a l l , the future w h i c h presents us w i t h the most s p a c e ? 1 7 1 By the time this defense was p u b l i s h e d , M o d e r n a Museet h a d fortunately managed to secure a y o u n g p u b l i c h u n g r y for change and movement w i t h i n c u l t u r a l institutions. After a l l , i n an economically prosperous c o u n t r y whose y o u t h culture was being defined between A m e r i c a n c o n s u m e r i s m a n d socialist democracy, M o d e r n a Museet, u n l i k e other state r u n art institutions at this time, appeared to be v i t a l l y engaged i n popular culture. Internally, however, M o d e r n a Museet was t r y i n g to set i n m o t i o n a critical awareness of pop culture. It was never interested i n a wholesale embrace of it. Stockholm's N e w Y o r k C o n n e c t i o n a n d The A r t of Assemblage 1 7 0 E n k e l l , p.555. 1 7 1 K . G . H u l t e n "Enckells f o r v i r r i n g a r " BLM no.7 (September 1962), p.554. 9 8 N o t o n l y d i d Rorelse i konsten entice a large y o u n g audience to the m u s e u m , but the e x h i b i t i o n p r o v i d e d a contemporary p o s i t i o n from w h i c h H u l t e n c o u l d continue to b u i l d bridges. Between M a r c h and M a y 1962, H u l t e n presented 4 Amerikanare, an e x h i b i t i o n devoted to paintings, sculptures and combines b y Jasper Johns, A l f r e d Leslie, Robert Rauschenberg and R i c h a r d Stankiewicz [fig. 46]. O r g a n i z e d alongside this e x h i b i t i o n was The New American Cinema — New York Film, featuring c o n t e m p o r a r y e x p e r i m e n t a l avant-garde films by Leslie, Robert Frank, Jonas M e k a s , John Cassavetes, Shirley C l a r k e , and others. To a d d to these activities, John Cage was i n v i t e d to the m u s e u m to give a talk ("Where are we going? and what are we doing?") for the presentation of New American Music and Poetry. F r o m this itinerary we can see that M o d e r n a Museet h a d w i t h i n a very short p e r i o d of time strengthened its ties to a N e w Y o r k avant-garde. W h i l e d r a w i n g a large audience, and despite the alternative nature of these activities, for many Swedes these activities read as an i n v a s i o n of A m e r i c a n activities. A s c o u l d be expected, this w o u l d initiate a heated p u b l i c d e b a t e . 1 7 2 In his catalogue essay for 4 Amerikanare, H u l t e n once again took a i m at E n c k e l l and other critics' attempts to position his post-war avant-garde as a d i l u t e d and repetitive form of Dada: But it is really just as unrealistic to speak of "neo-dada" (nydadaism) as to speak of, for example, "neo-parents" (nyforaldrar). D a d a was neither a style nor a sport. D a d a i s m d i d not exist o n formal grounds, even less so than, for example, cubism; it is a w a y of seeing, a v i s u a l i t y and for that matter, a v i s u a l i t y o n w h i c h a l l current aesthetics is based. One can l 7 2 A s k e d b y a reporter from Dagens Nyheter about the risk to s h o w the p u b l i c this n e w w o r k from the U n i t e d States, H u l t e n r e p l i e d that " W e t h i n k it is unnecessary to w a i t twenty years. After the second w o r l d w a r the biggest adventures i n v i s u a l art have p l a y e d themselves out i n the U n i t e d States; the most interesting p a i n t i n g takes place i n N e w Y o r k . " M e r a M a l i c e "konstigheter: N e w y o r k a r e t i l l M o d e r n a museet" Dagens Nyheter (13 February, 1962), p.2. 9 9 therefore not speak of a "neo-dada" because dada never ceased to f u n c t i o n . 1 7 3 But neither d i d H u l t e n want to label these contemporary artists " D a d a . " D u c h a m p , he felt, had done away w i t h the "art vs. anti-art" p r o b l e m w h i c h represented a c o m m o n g r o u n d for Dada: The Dadaists wanted to make anti-art and thereby crush traditional art. D u c h a m p makes his w o r k necessitate that "everything is art," and hereby dissolves the problem. It is from this new g r o u n d that Rauschenberg starts out. Rauschenberg says that he wants his artwork to teach us to v i e w everything around us artistically . But h o w does this happen? H e uses magic like a l l artists. H e takes an object and gives it new meaning, says its something else, and wakes our interest through a slippage. H e is a magician w h o transforms what w e see. But he is simultaneously the magician's assistant w h o comes out of the audience and delivers the utensils. A l l of w h i c h look l i k e the most regular of objects. 1 7 4 But not everyone likes a magic trick. Just as Rorelse i konsten h a d been heavily c r i t i c i z e d , 4 Amerikanare d i d not escape skepticism. W h i l e the m u s e u m as a w h o l e was accused of w e a r i n g the Emperor's n e w clothes, the w o r k that bore the brunt of criticism and indeed became the "scapegoat" i n the e x h i b i t i o n was Rauschenberg's Monogram [fig. 4 7 ] w h i c h a professor A r o n Borelius from L u n d used p u b l i c l y o n radio as an example of w h y m o d e r n art at the m u s e u m s h o u l d be b o y c o t t e d . 1 7 5 H a d he actually v i s i t e d the exhibition he w o u l d have realized that the artwork he had described as a " l i v e goat" was not o n l y taxidermied, but combined w i t h other discarded objects i n a complex allegorical c o m p o s i t i o n . 1 7 3 P o n t u s H u l t e n " F o r o r d " 4 Amerikanare S t o c k h o l m : M o d e r n a Museet, 1962, p.6. 1 7 4 I b i d . , p.7. 1 7 5 H u l t e n (1983), p.40 1 0 0 It was not o n l y the m u s e u m staff w h o was busy defending its institution against these ignorant, but harmful, p u b l i c attacks. Rauschenberg had already at the opening of Rorelse i konsten been confronted by reactions from audience participation i n combines such as Black Market and Door [fig. 48], but he treated this w i t h a great degree of i n d i f f e r e n c e . 1 7 6 B i l l y K l i i v e r described a situation d u r i n g the opening w h e n Rauschenberg was approached by a y o u n g w o m a n w h o , not k n o w i n g w h i c h w o r k was his, had pointed to his Door and said: "That one c o u l d have been done b y Ingmar Johansson" A s K l i i v e r tells the story: I saw Bob rush towards the painting w i t h a p e n i n his h a n d and he started to write i n the m i d d l e of the canvas: 'This is Johansson's...' The g i r l j u m p e d at h i m and pushed h i m aside. ' Y o u can't do that!' Bob d i d n ' t answer and they continued w a l k i n g . W h e n I l o o k e d at the p a i n t i n g the next day I saw that he h a d added the w o r d ' p a i n t i n g ' w i t h another p e n . 1 7 7 This Brechtian moment i n w h i c h the controlled intention of the artist was meant to give w a y to the participation of the audience was triggered as m u c h b y Rauschenberg's 'open' art as b y a S w e d i s h - A m e r i c a n encounter that h a d just taken place i n the U n i t e d States. G a i n i n g even greater international p u b l i c i t y than H u l t e n ' s exhibition, the S w e d i s h boxer Ingmar Johansson h a d just failed i n his attempt to defend the W o r l d H e a v y W e i g h t C h a m p i o n s h i p against F l o y d Patterson; an event described b y Life Magazine as a "historic ^^Black Market was made especially for the exhibitions in Amsterdam, Stockholm and Humlebaek and consisted of a painting attached to a suitcase lying on the floor, inside the open suitcase four objects had been placed with four rubber stamps with texts "Rauschenberg 1,2,3,4" and a stamp pad. According to instructions (written in various languages), the audience should/could choose an object and exchange it for an object of their own choosing. By opening night at the Stedelijk all the objects were gone and none replaced. 1 7 7 K l i i v e r quoted from a conversation between Billy Kluver and Robert Rauschenberg in "Rorelse i konsten — en kombinerad minnesbild, in Moderna Museet 1958-1983 Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1983, p.148. 1 0 1 thriller" [fig. 4 9 ] . 1 7 8 L i k e this title bout, Movement in Art h a d engaged i n a bout of its o w n — the battle of the avant-garde. Stepping into center r i n g of international art from one s m a l l corner of the w o r l d , M o d e r n a Museet found its anarchic direction challenged by N e w Y o r k ' s M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t w h i c h i n October of 1961 opened its doors to The Art of Assemblage; a s i m i l a r l o o k i n g , but p h i l o s o p h i c a l l y different, p o s i t i o n i n g of contemporary art. Before we get to The Art of Assemblage, w e s h o u l d consider a few interesting collaborative off-shoots w h i c h had resulted i m m e d i a t e l y after Rorelse i konsten. After their trip to S t o c k h o l m , Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Saint-Phalle, and T i n g u e l y were asked to take part i n a concert/performance by D a v i d T u d o r of John Cage's Variations II at the Theatre de l'Ambassade des Etats-Unis i n Paris [fig. 5 0 ] . 1 7 9 D u r i n g the event, Saint-Phalle shot her Tir de l'Ambassade Americaine, T i n g u e l y constructed a 'striptease machine' w h i c h lost a l l its various parts d u r i n g the performance u n t i l it was stripped bare to reveal the motor; Johns created a target made of roses (no doubt a homage to the F r a n c o - A m e r i c a n Gertrude Stein), w h i l e Rauschenberg w o r k e d o n a p a i n t i n g w h i c h the audience was kept from seeing. In this loaded context of the A m e r i c a n Embassy, each artist realized pictorially, or otherwise, a set of different socio-political attitudes towards the U n i t e d States' role i n E u r o p e . 1 8 0 W i t h international economics m o v i n g into 1 7 8 " p j c t u r e s Reveal Fight as a Historic Thriller" Life Magazine (March 24, 1961), p.148. 1 7 9 S e e Oyvind Fahlstrom's New York diary "En gata full av presenter" in Konstrevy no. 5-6 (1961), pp.176-181. l 8 0 W h i l e all these artists were in some way responding to the latest stage of capitalism (call it American capitalism), they were all negotiating their own very different identities through this socio-political and cultural landscape. Art historians such as Moira Roth and Kenneth Silver, for example, have argued that artists such as Johns, Rauschenberg and Cage were specifically trying to find a representational space in the gap between their own private social and sexual politics and a public life tied to the socio-economic reality of Cold War America. See, Moira Roth's Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1998; and Kenneth Silver's "Modes of Disclosure: The 1 0 2 a distinctly A m e r i c a n capitalist phase, the consumer landscape was increasingly surveyed by different eyes and n e w intentions. Ten days after this " d i p l o m a t i c " staging of avant-garde art, Jeannine de G o l d s c h m i d t opened N i k i de Saint-Phalle's first one-woman e x h i b i t i o n , curated at her Galerie J. by her husband Pierre Restany. A g a i n , a set of Tir paintings were p r o d u c e d by the i n v i t e d audience w h i c h this time i n c l u d e d Johns, Rauschenberg, Leo Castelli, Jean Fautrier, Frank Stella, and others [fig. 51]. Saint-Phalle seems to have been particularly amused b y Jean Fautrier's interest i n her Tirs since they, i n m a n y ways, re-represented his Hostage series from the forties and f i f t i e s . 1 8 1 E v e n more significant for Saint-Phalle's immediate career was the interest p a i d to her w o r k by Robert Rauschenberg. B y n o w , Saint-Phalle and Rauschenberg h a d realized their shared contestation of the twin-towered bourgeois principles of autonomous art and expressive artist w h i c h extended into a sense of c o m m u n i t y and collaboration between other artists and Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art" in Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955-1962 Los Angeles: M o C A , 1993, pp.179-203. What is rarely discussed, and what my dissertation in the end touches on, is the very different sexual politics espoused by the Europeans involved in this dialogue. This, in the end, would lead to a decisive split in the international art community. 1 8 1 Saint-Phalle has recalled that: "An hour before the show opened an elderly man with a degenerate face came in and asked, "when can I shoot?" I explained he would have to wait a bit until we had finished hanging the show. "Why don't you come back in a little while?" "No, I'm not going to leave. I'm going to stay right here until I can shoot." Every ten minutes he would ask, "Can I shoot Now?" I finally got annoyed and went over quietly to Jeannine and implored, "Can't you find some nice way of getting rid of that guy. He's a nuisance." Jeannine declared, "Are you kidding? That is Fautrier!" I was a fan of Fautrier's work even though his preoccupation with paint and space were very far from mine. I came back to him and said, "O.K. you can start shooting." Later, when the crowd started arriving, he had difficulty giving up the gun. He kept shooting at the center and was trying to make one of his own paintings out of the shooting. When someone else was taking a shot he would scream, "The center, the center? Shoot at the center!'" Saint-Phalle quoted in Pontus Hulten's retrospective exhibition catalogue Niki de Saint Phalle Bonn: Verlag Gerd Harje, 1992, p.263. 1 0 3 curators w o r k i n g i n N e w Y o r k , Paris and Stockholm. For Saint-Phalle, the combine paintings by Robert Rauschenberg must have appeared to i n v o l v e similar aesthetic indifference t o w a r d material d r a w n from everyday life as her tir paintings a n d / o r T i n g u e l y ' s recycled meta-matics. C o n v e r s e l y , Rauschenberg seemed to have appreciated Saint-Phalle's ironic p l a y w i t h her Self as he went so far as to purchase one of her Tirs.182 One can say that a l l these artists h a d put a freeze frame around gestural abstraction w h i l e at the same time a d d i n g both a Brechtian and kinetic d i m e n s i o n to objective abstraction. Furthermore, they must have thought their interest i n D u c h a m p arrived from a m u t u a l understanding of artistic intentionality. The most direct D u c h a m p i a n gesture from Rauschenberg had, after a l l , come d u r i n g his stay i n Stockholm w h e n he sent off a telegram to his Parisian gallerist Iris Clert stating: "This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so—Robert Rauschenberg" [fig. 5 2 ] . 1 8 3 W i t h i n two years, it was their i n d i v i d u a l understandings of humor, play, and intentionality that w o u l d separate their projects. In October of that same year, shortly after their participation i n Bevaegelse i kunsten at the L o u i s i a n a (the final destination for the Movement in Art exhibition), these artists met u p o n the other side of the Atlantic to take part i n the Art of Assemblage e x h i b i t i o n o r g a n i z e d b y W i l l i a m Seitz at N e w Y o r k ' s M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t . O p e n i n g i n early October w i t h more 'academic' pretenses, this exhibition established an equally extensive history of some 252 heterogeneous w o r k s w h i c h fell under a 1 8 2 H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint Phalle B o n n : V e r l a g G e r d Hatje, 1992, p.288. 1 8 3 S u s a n H a p g o o d Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-1962 N e w Y o r k : The A m e r i c a n Federation of A r t s , 1995, p.16. A s the title of this b o o k and e x h i b i t i o n suggests, the p r o b l e m w i t h most accounts of the p e r i o d a n d w o r k that I deal w i t h i n this dissertation is that they fail to complexify terms such as "Neo-Dada." T o give H a p g o o d some credit, her book does address the problematic nature of this term. Nonetheless she fails to reach a c o n c l u s i o n about the p o l i t i c a l and p h i l o s o p h i c a l differences that makes it such an a k w a r d label. 1 0 4 general category of a s s e m b l a g e . 1 8 4 A s art historian Rebecca Solnit has noted, the exhibition attracted considerable attention and controversy either because of its content or lack thereof. 1 8 5 A s Solnit suggests, Seitz was establishing an extensive history of assemblage techniques used i n the history of m o d e r n art i n order to pave an international a n d historical path for the distinctly N e w Y o r k p h e n o m e n o n that was soon to become k n o w n as P o p A r t . W i t h this agenda i n m i n d , Solnit suggests that the West Coast was relegated to the margins: Assemblage p a v e d the w a y for pop, and pop superseded it i n the hearts of N e w Y o r k dealers and curators. Casting about for a suitable successor to abstract p a i n t i n g i n the late fifties, they flirted w i t h art form a l l over the w o r l d — the Californians, the N o u v e a u x Realistes — then settled o n p o p , w h i c h emerged just about the time of the A r t of Assemblage exhibition. P o p was a N e w Y o r k phenomenon, w i t h precursors i n E n g l a n d , France, and the West Coast, and it seems N e w Y o r k was h a p p y to have the annointed avant-garde i n its o w n back y a r d again. After 1961, few M o M A curators came to C a l i f o r n i a l o o k i n g for new talent, a n d H e d r i c k , DeFeo, H e r m s , K i e n h o l z , Jess were left alone a g a i n . 1 8 6 1 8 4 A p p r o p r i a t i n g the t e r m i n o l o g y of Roger Shattuck's 1958 b o o k The Banquet Years, Seitz described the p h e n o m e n o n of assemblage as "the m o d e of juxtaposition" w h i c h he felt w a s an "appropriate vehicle for feelings of disenchantment w i t h the s l i c k i n t e r n a t i o n a l i d i o m that loosely articulated abstraction has tended to become, a n d the values that this situation reflects." W i l l i a m C . Seitz The Art of Assemblage N e w Y o r k : M o M A , 1961, p.87. l8!5Rebecca S o l n i t The Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era San Francisco: C i t y L i g h t Books, 1990, pp.83-88. 1 8 6 S o l n i t , p88. 1 0 5 But at least Seitz had showed an interest i n C a l i f o r n i a w h e n he was asked to curate his distinctly A m e r i c a n survey of contemporary international art. H e , like other A m e r i c a n curators, never d i d show u p i n S t o c k h o l m despite M o d e r n a Museet's interest i n activities occurring i n their back y a r d . For this reason, geographically m a r g i n a l i z e d artists such as U l t v e d t , N o r d e n s t r o m and Fahlstrom had to make their pilgrimage to the centre w h i c h h a d n o w shifted from Paris to N e w Y o r k . In 1961 the concrete poet, painter and performer O y v i n d F a h l s t r o m had emigrated to N e w Y o r k were he was not only p r o d u c i n g w o r k of his o w n , but participating i n H a p p e n i n g s and w r i t i n g art criticism for S w e d i s h journals and newspapers such as Konstrevy and Dagens Nyheter.187 In his review of The Art of Assemblage e x h i b i t i o n i n Konstrevy , F a h l s t r o m noted the h i s t o r i c i z i n g and stifling effect the exhibition had i n contrast to what he v i e w e d as the "path b r e a k i n g " potential of the Movement in Art e x h i b i t i o n : W h a t has been presented here is a l o n g w a y from b r e a k i n g n e w paths. The fact that this has not been made apparent is one of the exhibition's weaknesses. It is (like Seitz's book The Art of Assemblage) r i c h i n content a n d therefore important, but it is academic: historical, descriptive, chronological and somewhat meaningless. R a d i c a l seekers such as K a p r o w , D i n e , W h i t m a n and O l d e n b u r g are mentioned i n the text but left out of the exhibition. Europe is unevenly represented w i t h s m a l l objects b y T i n g u e l y and K a l i n o w s k i and n o t h i n g b y U l t v e d t . In this light, M o d e r n a Museet's Rorelse i konsten s u r p r i s i n g l y stands out as i n i t i a t i n g a n d 'up-to-date.' 1 8 8 C r i t i c a l responses to the exhibition were not l i m i t e d to disenfranchised Swedes w r i t i n g for m a r g i n a l art journals i n Scandinavia. W r i t i n g for Art ^ T h o m a s M . Messer, ed.. Oyvind Fahlstrom New York: The Salomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1982, p.110. 1 8 8 0 y v i n d Fahlstrom "Art of Assemblage" Konstrevy no.5-6 (1961), p. 227 (224-227). 1 0 6 News i n the U n i t e d States, Thomas B. Hess labeled M o M A a "collector- sanctifying bureaucracy [that] latches o n the past w i t h relish, tidies it u p , makes a package and covers it w i t h neat g u m m e d labels," and perceived The Art of Assemblage exhibition as a clever w a y for M o M A to legitimate a new vanguard by p l a c i n g it i n context w i t h more canonical art w o r k such as collages by Picasso, Schwitters, K l i n e , and D e K o o n i n g . 1 8 9 But i n the process, he claimed, "this exhibition seems censored" as the "healthy side of that release w h i c h collage triggered from the subconscious—from Ernst and D a l i to Rauschenberg to Conner—[was] b l a n k e d o u t . " 1 9 0 Bruce C o n n e r w o u l d later recall that Seitz, w h o had looked h i m up before the e x h i b i t i o n to familiarize himself w i t h the Bay A r e a , d i d not consider m a n y of the Beat assemblagists he was introduced to, such as Wallace B e r m a n more than "off-beat." 1 9 1 T r a v e l i n g south to L o s Angeles d i d , however, a l l o w h i m to 'discover' artists such as E d w a r d K i e n h o l z m a k i n g n e w figurative assemblages such as The Psycho-Vendetta Case (1960) [fig. 53] w h i c h h a d a distinct p o l i t i c a l edge to t h e m . 1 9 2 1 8 9 T h o m a s B. Hess "Collage as an Historical Method" Art News (Nov. 1961), p.31. 1 9 0 I b i d . , p.71. 1 9 1 S o l n i t , p.83. 1 9 2 A s Kienholz has suggested, this political edge was rooted in the very landscape of Los Angeles. "That's one of the reasons I like Los Angeles, because Los Angeles throws away an incredible amount of value every day. I mean, it's just discarded, shitcanned. From automobiles, to clothes, to desks, to paint a — to, you know, half-bags of concrete that are hardened up. I mean, whatever it is, there is an increadible waste in the city of Los Angeles, and if you are living on the edge of the economy like that, all the waste filters through your awareness and you take what you want." 1977 Kienholz interviewed by Lawrence Weschler quoted by Anne Barttlett Ayres in "Berman and Kienholz: Progenetors of Los Angeles Assemblage" Tuchman, Maurice Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum, 1981, p . . Work such as The Psycho-Vendetta Case point to a shared anarchist interest with Tinguely and Saint-Phalle. The work specifically refers to the 1927 execution of two Italian immigrants who had been wrongly convicted for their anarchist political beliefs. In the fifties and early sixties this particular history could address a contemporary Cold War reality in which individual expression was circumscribed. A good example of the implementation of this threat was the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee which sought to rid the United States of political (as well as socio-sexual) dissent. 1 0 7 The catalogue for the exhibition begins w i t h a careful historical chronicle of "the liberation of w o r d s " and "the liberation of the object" that took place p r i o r to W o r l d W a r II. This historical o v e r v i e w is f o l l o w e d b y a description of "the collage environment" out of w h i c h the w o r k is created. W h i l e g i v i n g historical credit to the "naturally a r r i v e d at... accumulation and agglomeration of materials...[by]...primitives and folk artists" (such as the immigrant tile setter S i m o n R o d i a outside Los Angeles), Seitz suggests that: nevertheless, from c u b i s m and futurism, D u c h a m p and Schwitters, to the present, the tradition of assemblage has been p r e d o m i n a n t l y urban i n emphasis... The city — N e w Y o r k above a l l others — has become a s y m b o l of m o d e r n existence. The tempo of Manhattan, both as subject and c o n d i t i o n i n g m i l i e u , has been instrumental i n f o r m i n g the art of our t i m e . . . . 1 9 3 In this formulation, not o n l y is N e w Y o r k u p h e l d as the natural creative environment for contemporary art, but for Seitz, the secret to the success of the best assemblage w o r k of the moment appears to be that it is locked into dialogue w i t h abstract expressionism: The connection of N e w Y o r k w i t h w o r l d art d u r i n g a n d after the second W o r l d W a r has become history. N e w Y o r k ' s vernacular power, its garish affront to tranquillity and taste, was a major component of abstract expressionism.... W h e n he placed a l i p s t i c k e d m o u t h c l i p p e d from a color advertisement i n the center of a sheet that was to become an o i l study, de K o o n i n g set the tone of the new collage.... In his totally committed battle between pure art and the street, i n his examination of h y p n o t i z i n g details i n tabloid photographs, and i n the transfer of newsprint to pigment, de K o o n i n g recorded the impact of c o m m e r c i a l culture o n postwar art. A l t h o u g h he was surely not an isolated voice, he intensified the interest i n "pop culture" — i n the expendable art and literature that became so important as a subject matter for Rauschenberg, Johns, Conner, and so m a n y subsequent, but u s u a l l y less s k i l l f u l , painters and assemblers. For a new generation and i n 1 9 3 S e i t z , p.73. 1 0 8 another spirit, de K o o n i n g ' s adulterative gesture may have h a d an effect not u n l i k e Picasso's i n 1 9 1 2 . 1 9 4 H a v i n g established this heroic rite of passage for an avant-garde art tied to international trends but g r o u n d e d i n the very "copious waste of an i n d u s t r i a l society" w h i c h even "non-artists" such as the i m m i g r a n t tile- maker S i m o n R o d i a h a d "naturally", discovered i n Watts, C a l i f o r n i a , Seitz went o n to d o w n p l a y the influence of Europe: Yet more than forty years after D u c h a m p ' s first "readymades" and Schwitter's discovery of the loveliness of refuse, b y an unconscious acceptance of the dada proposition of reversibility, the caustic portrayal of the city presented b y H e n r y M i l l e r ' s Air Conditioned Nightmare of 1945, has become, for a new generation of artists, a fulfillment of the glittering M E R Z environment of Schwitter's i m a g i n a t i o n . Such an inversion, from ugliness to beauty, can transpose sociological and u t i l i t a r i a n reformism into complete aesthetic acceptance. The w o r l d of artifacts can be seen (as M o n e t sought to see nature) w i t h a v i s i o n freed from conceptual p r e c o n d i t i o n i n g . The peeling decollage o n abandoned billboards i n the blighted neighborhoods of C h i c a g o or Jersey C i t y , accented b y the singing colors and clean edges of emblems intended to sell cigarettes and beer, or the rubble of fallen N e w Y o r k tenements p i l e d between w a l l s patterned i n flowered p i n k s and blues, can take o n an intense beauty more poignant than that of the lacerated posters and graffiti that cover the o l d w a l l s of Rome and P a r i s . 1 9 5 In this totalizing description, an abstracted taxonomic v i s i o n of A m e r i c a as a picturesque, natural, and continuously m o d e r n 'decollage' is defined against Europe's ransacked o l d w o r l d ruins aesthetically scavenged b y the decollagists. But as we saw earlier o n , if Seitz w o u l d have l o o k e d closer at the 'pictures' b y Dufrene, H a i n s and V i l l e g l e he w o u l d have discovered that these spaces represented a new, not an o l d , reality tied to an international and 1 9 4 S e i t z , p.74. 1 9 5 S e i t z , p.76. 1 0 9 domestic touristic g a z e . 1 9 6 In other w o r d s , Euro-trash s t i l l carried meaning despite the totalizing solicitation by the M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t w h i c h sought to v i t a l i z e its o w n hegemonic v i s i o n of post-war culture. Perhaps most surprising, and revealing, is the fact that Seitz turned a b l i n d eye to the obvious connection between Saint-Phalle's new w o r k and his o w n interest i n Abstract Expressionism, "copious waste," S i m o n R o d i a , and other things he had used to justify an art of assemblage. Saint-Phalle w o u l d later recall that Seitz h a d made the comment that her "attitude was harmful to art and that [she] h a d set back modern art b y 30 y e a r s ! " 1 9 7 Seitz appeared to have been s l i g h t l y more interested i n Tinguely's w o r k w h i c h he noted as h a v i n g been "influenced b y Rauschenberg and S t a n k i e w i c z . . . . " 1 9 8 Seitz academic remodeling of the avant-garde w o u l d not have been complete w i t h o u t a p u b l i c forum for discussion. The Art of Assemblage: A Symposium opened at M o M A o n October 19, 1961 w i t h an impressive list of panelists i n c l u d i n g Lawrence A l l o w a y , M a r c e l D u c h a m p , R i c h a r d Huelsenbeck, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roger Shattuck, w i t h W i l l i a m Seitz as the moderator. W i t h the exception of A l l o w a y w h o w o u l d soon j o i n the M o M A staff, a l l of the participants were at the time l i v i n g i n N e w Y o r k . Shattuck, the author of The Banquet Years (1958), w o u l d later recall that the s y m p o s i u m h a d the d u a l purpose of associating contemporary assemblage w i t h 'the ethos of D a d a ' before and after the W a r and reveal a 'coherent 1 9 6 T h i s is the line of argument taken b y Thomas M c D o n o u g h w r i t i n g against Benjamin Buchloh's m u c h more pessimistic account of this avant-garde. See his "Situationist Space" October 67 (Winter 1994), pp.59-70. 197Niki de Saint Phalle B o n n : V e r l a g G e r d Hatje, 1992, p.265. 1 9 8 S e i t z , The Art of Assemblage, p.89 1 1 0 theory' able to rationalize 'new developments' embraced by the m u s e u m . 1 9 9 These developments, one can argue, were necessarily serving to legitimize N e w Y o r k as the centre for avant-garde experiments and an avant-garde market place for art. W i t h i n d i v i d u a l s like Seitz and an institution like M o M A strongly b e l i e v i n g i n this v i s i o n , N e w Y o r k w o u l d , once again, steal the idea of m o d e r n art. W r i t i n g a history from D u c h a m p and Huelsenbeck to Rauschenberg the M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t p r o d u c e d an opportune environment for a new N e w Y o r k School independent from, but i n dialogue w i t h , p r e v i o u s l y dominant A m e r i c a n and E u r o p e a n artistic models. This w o u l d end up serving the function of a s p r i n g board for an emerging A m e r i c a n art rooted i n its o w n p o p u l a r consumer culture. In hindsight, the transcripts from the s y m p o s i u m clearly point to the reluctance of both Huelsenbeck a n d Rauschenberg to p l a y this game. U n l i k e H u l t e n , w h o i n his defense of Rauschenberg against E n c k e l l had argued that "dada never ceased to function," Shattuck considered the shock value that h a d existed for an historical avant-garde to n o w be neutralized, a thought w h i c h was not favorably received b y a l l s y m p o s i u m participants: Shattuck: The permanence of art was sacrificed for the excitement of a performance that w o u l d either shatter or repulse. It is this aspect of c u l t u r a l fireworks that cannot be recaptured today, a n d there are few new sparks to replace the o l d . To set side b y side w o r k s w h i c h shorted out years ago and w o r k s whose tension of forces w i l l not lessen w i t h the years damages both the historic interest of the former a n d the aesthetic values of the latter. A s the Smithsonian Institute houses 1 9 9 R o g e r Shattuck "Introduction: H o w C o l l a g e Became Assemblage" The Art of Assemblage: A Symposium N e w Y o r k : M o M A , 1961, p.121. 1 1 1 airplanes that no longer fly, we may soon need a repository for w o r k s that have l i v e d for a day. That w o u l d be a m u s e u m w i t h o u t a r t . 2 0 0 Huelsenbeck: A r e y o u against Dada? A n d against neo-Dada, as far as I understand it? Shattuck: I'm not trying to be cryptic. I am for the spirit of D a d a , but I believe that D a d a was p r i n c i p a l l y an historical m o v e m e n t . 2 0 1 W i t h these remarks, Shattuck stood counter to H u l t e n w h o understood D a d a as m a i n t a i n i n g its currency through a D u c h a m p i a n "way of seeing, a visuality... o n w h i c h a l l current aesthetics is based." Just as Movement in Art had represented a n e w start for M o d e r n a Museet, N e w Y o r k ' s M u s e u m of M o d e r n art was also i n need of a renewal. W h i l e both exhibitions used D u c h a m p to l i n k contemporary activies to an historical avant-garde, Seitz focused his attention o n Dada's ability to incorporate the t h r o w a w a y side of consumer culture into i n d i v i d u a l aesthetic gestures, whereas H u l t e n was more interested i n its ability to rub against bourgeois habits and norms. D u r i n g the A r t of Assemblage s y m p o s i u m , D u c h a m p addressed this visuality that H u l t e n had observed b y suggesting that it represented a "choice...based o n a reaction of v i s u a l indifference w i t h at the same time a total absence of good or b a d taste...in fact a complete anesthesia." A r t , i n other w o r d s , remained a matter of i n d i v i d u a l choice, rather than a collective shock.202 O p e n i n g u p "this [self-described] egomaniac's discourse" to the context of M o M A (where the battle was no doubt s t i l l between homo and heterogeneous w o r k ) , D u c h a m p c o n c l u d e d that "since the tubes of paint used 2 0 0 i b i d . , p.130. 201lbid.. 2 0 2 M a r c e l D u c h a m p " A p r o p o s of Readymades" i n The Art of Assemblage A Symposium, pp.135-136. 112 by the artist are manufactured and readymade products, we must conclude that all the paintings i n the w o r l d are 'Readymades A i d e d ' — and also w o r k s of a s s e m b l a g e . " 2 0 3 W i t h a S o l o m o n R. G u g g e n h e i m M u s e u m e x h i b i t i o n of recent paintings by A r s h i l e G o r k y , A d o l p h Gottlieb, Barnett N e w m a n , C l y f f o r d S t i l l and other abstract painters just a few blocks away, the i r o n y of Duchamp's w o r d s c o u l d not have been missed by those w h o realized h o w closely D u c h a m p was equating art objects to consumer objects. 2 0 4 The Art of Assemblage exhibition, as Solnit has suggested, d i d pave the w a y i n the U n i t e d States for an emerging post-war avant-garde centred i n N e w Y o r k . Whether or not the exhibition was consciously set u p to introduce Pop A r t specifically is u n l i k e l y . But what is important is that it d i d end up serving this function b y 1962. Solnit has also noted that the N o u v e a u x Realistes, w h i c h i n c l u d e d Saint-Phalle and T i n g u e l y , h a d "a k i n d of w i t and irreverence t o w a r d the art w o r l d that is reminiscent of the Californians, and their w o r k too tended to consist of unmarketable urban debris, rather than salable representations of i t . " 2 0 5 W h i l e I w o u l d not agree that these artists were attempting to produce 'unmarketable' assemblages — just difficult art — I do think Saint-Phalle and T i n g u e l y found their o w n p o s i t i o n as outsiders i n N e w Y o r k s i m i l a r to that of Bruce C o n n e r and E d w a r d K i e n h o l z , to name but a few of the artists they came into contact w i t h through this e x h i b i t i o n . 2 0 6 2 0 3 I b i d . . 2 ° 4 W e should remember that in the United States, and increasingly in Europe, Abstract Expressionism was the undisputed champion of modern art. Recoginizing this, The Art of Assemblage represented an attempt to "fix" all those artistic practices which where caught in the gap between "high" modernism and "low" popular culture. 2 0 5 I b i d . , p.87. 2 ^ 6 Ibid.. Solnit points out that "Niki de St.Phalle's work from the early sixties... includes triptychs displaying bats and guns and crucifixes, which make an assault on organized religion in a spirit akin to Conner's" who, along with other California artists "in comparison to the eastern artists, seem a hermetic tribe of icon-makers." 1 1 3 Labyrinths or Laboratories: Collaborations and the D y l a b y D i v i d e In February 1962, Saint-Phalle and T i n g u e l y traveled to C a l i f o r n i a to visit S i m o n Rodia's Watts Towers to w h i c h they h a d been introduced to v i a the Art of Assemblage exhibition. The towers, over ninety feet h i g h , h a d been erected out of b r o k e n plates, bottles, shells and tiles b y the i m m i g r a n t laborer S i m o n R o d i a (1879-1965) as a monument to himself o n his o w n property. For Saint-Phalle and T i n g u e l y , this c o u l d just as w e l l have been b u i l t b y an ego anarchist such as M a x Stirner, or artists like themselves. The towers seemed to illustrate the potential of l i v i n g i n the midst of society's copious waste o n the edge of the e c o n o m y . 2 0 7 W h i l e exhibiting at the Everett E l l i n G a l l e r y i n L o s Angeles, T i n g u e l y was asked b y a producer for N B C to stage an event for David Brinkley's Journal. Just the previous September, T i n g u e l y h a d staged a large scale p y r o t e c h n i c a l performance entitled Study for the End of the World for L o u i s i a n a ' s Bevaegelse i kunsten, the t h i r d a n d final venue for the Movement in Art e x h i b i t i o n [fig. 54]. This h a d taken place at the very height of the C o l d W a r arms race between the Soviet U n i o n and the U n i t e d States. O n September 1, the Soviet U n i o n had exploded a nuclear b o m b i n the atmosphere to end a 34 m o n t h interruption of atomic weapons tests b y a l l nuclear powers. W h i l e President K e n n e d y w o u l d p u b l i c a l y c o n d e m n this resumption of testing, u n d e r g r o u n d nuclear testing had b e g u n i n the N e v a d a 2 0 7 I n the seventies both artists w o u l d construct their o w n i n d i v i d u a l towers to l i v e i n a n d it w o u l d s p a w n inspiration for a m o n u m e n t a l sculpture i n S t o c k h o l m that we w i l l discuss at length i n the next chapter. 1 14 desert by the m i d d l e of that month. U n d e r this atomic light, Tinguely's self- contained destructions participated metaphorically as m u c h i n C o l d W a r politics as i n a w a r between hot and c o l d abstraction. W h i l e i n C a l i f o r n i a i n 1962, both these wars were still o n and T i n g u e l y had received the opportunity to execute Study for the End of the World No.2., this time i n the N e v a d a desert, the heartland of nuclear testing [fig. 55]. A s k e d by W i l l i a m B y r o n of The Saturday Evening Post whether his w o r k c o u l d be considered a practical joke on art and life, T i n g u e l y made clear his intentions: These things are serious for me. A b s u r d i t y can be carried a l o n g w a y , and w h e n it's carried far enough its effect is to make conventional values r i d i c u l o u s , cut them d o w n to size, cast some b a d l y needed doubt o n the "wonderful age" we're l i v i n g i n . "Century of the C o m m o n M a n ! " M a n today is ill-treated, h u m b l e d as he has never been before. I take the noise and b l o o d and brutality and make a w o r k of art of them. That makes them d o u b l y ironic, to be raised to the level of art. I feel a tremendous relief that the whole thing is going to be destroyed, because it's like a lunatic end to everything monstrous i n the w o r l d . 2 0 8 A s this quote confirms, if Tinguely's realisme was increasingly taking a turn towards violence and destruction, it corresponded directly w i t h a certain political reality that was facing artists o n both sides of the A t l a n t i c . B y early A p r i l of 1962, Saint-Phalle's w o r k was also b e g i n n i n g to take o n a new form as w e l l . Whereas her w o r k up u n t i l that time h a d incorporated an eclectic m i x of consumer waste into indistinct c o m p o s i t i o n a l arrangements, b y n o w her w o r k s were more sharply defined figurative compositions assembled out of store-bought plastic children's toys s u c h as guns, bats, and dinosaurs. This shift i n Saint-Phalle's w o r k can best be seen by 2 0 8 T i n g u e l y quoted i n W i l l i a m R. B y r o n " W a c k y A r t i s t of Destruction" The Saturday Evening PostI ( A p r i l 21, 1962) cited i n V i o l a n d - H o b i , p.52. 1 15 c o m p a r i n g her shooting o n l y a m o n t h p r i o r outside gallerist V i r g i n i a D w a n ' s beach house i n M a l i b u . D u r i n g Tinguely's exhibition i n Los A n g e l e s , the Everett E l l i n G a l l e r y sponsored this first shooting i n the U n i t e d States, witnessed b y an impressive audience that i n c l u d e d John Cage [fig. 56]. O n l y a m o n t h later, i n early A p r i l , another shooting event was executed i n the h i l l s o v e r l o o k i n g M a l i b u , w i t h assistance from L o s Angeles assemblagist E d w a r d K i e n h o l z whose dark social satires appear to have impressed the Europeans [fig. 57]. N o t o n l y had interest i n Saint-Phalle escalated to being fashionable enough so that the audience i n c l u d e d m o v i e personality Jane F o n d a , the director John H o u s e m a n , and H e n r y G e l d z a h l e r , a representative from the M e t r o p o l i t a n M u s e u m of A r t i n N e w Y o r k , but more interestingly, w e can also see h o w her compositions were n o w changing into more clearly articulated forms. O n her return to Europe i n early 1962 Saint-Phalle exhibited ten n e w w o r k s i n a one-woman show at Paris's Galerie R i v e Droite. A s mentioned i n chapter one, France was at this time not o n l y fraught w i t h c o l d w a r tension, but it was also experiencing extreme domestic and colonial conflict related to A l g e r i a n independence. O n an epic scale (252 x 241 x 41 cm), O.A.S. [fig. 58] presented a N o u v e a u Realiste v e r s i o n of Picasso's Guernica. Here, the black and w h i t e cubist comment o n u n i v e r s a l h u m a n injustice, suffering, a n d death filtered through a contemporary event has been transformed into a tripartite g o l d assemblage filled w i t h religious icons, bats, boars and guns creating an ambiguous critique of the right w i n g terrorists, Organisation armee secrete. U n l i k e her other assemblages such as Autel du chat mort (1962) [fig. 59], w h i c h deals more specifically w i t h her o w n Catholic 1 1 6 u p b r i n g i n g , O.A.S. remains unshot as if to comment o n the i n a b i l i t y of France to k i l l off its colonialist past. By this time Saint-Phalle and T i n g u e l y were not o n l y revealing a heightened sense of p o l i t i c a l awareness, but had gained enough connections and currency i n the U n i t e d States, traveling a r o u n d like a Bonnie and C l y d e art team between the East and West Coasts. Earlier that year i n N e w Y o r k they met w i t h Rauschenberg to organize another collaborative performance that they named The Construction of Boston. This time they a p p o i n t e d a script writer by the name of K e n n e t h K o c h and enlisted an ensemble consisting of H e n r y G e l d z a h l e r , Frank Stella, Paris Review w r i t e r M a x i n e Groffsky, and the dancers from the M e r c e C u n n i n g h a m Dance C o m p a n y . A s Rauschenberg, T i n g u e l y and D u c h a m p biographer C a l v i n T o m k i n s have recollected, the entire performance, w h i c h took place i n front of a s o l d out audience at the "off-broadway" M a i d m a n Playhouse, lasted o n l y fifteen minutes but managed to include a plethora of 'anti-happening' gestures [fig. 60]. In the play, T i n g u e l y was responsible for the architecture w h i l e Saint-Phalle was to b r i n g Boston culture and war. Rauschenberg made the set like a furnished apartment w h i c h i n c l u d e d t w o dancers going about their banal routines and being rained o n occasionally. In an updated D u c h a m p i a n fashion, T i n g u e l y was dressed u p as a 'maid-man' M a e West look-alike a n d constructed a cinder-block w a l l across the stage w h i c h effectively separated audience and performers. W i t h this company, Saint-Phalle made her entrance s t r i d i n g d o w n the centre aisle through the audience, s l i m and c o l o u r f u l i n the uniform of a N a p o l e o n i c artillery o f f i c e r . 2 0 9 A n assistant w h e e l e d a plaster 2 0 9 I n this context this must have been read as a rather abrasive act "against" the Brechtian Happenings of Kaprow and the activities of Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and others. 1 17 copy of the V e n u s de M i l o out o n stage, and another assistant h a n d e d M i l e , de Saint-Phalle the rifle w i t h w h i c h she posed against the kitsch r e p r o d u c t i o n classically ordered beauty. Tinguely's anti-Brechtian gesture of separating the audience from the stage s h o u l d have been a sign for the N e w Yorkers that their attitude towards art and life was indeed different. Despite the different attitudes that became apparent at this event, another major collaboration w o u l d soon take place between the Europeans and A m e r i c a n s . Between the Bewogen Beweging e x h i b i t i o n a n d The Construction of Boston, Rauschenberg, Saint-Phalle and T i n g u e l y along w i t h D a n i e l Spoerri, M a r t i a l Raysse and Per-Olof U l t v e d t had been i n v i t e d back to the Stedelijk M u s e u m i n A m s t e r d a m where W i l l e m Sandberg offered them a ready-made setting to produce a 'dynamic labyrinth.' Dylaby, as the exhibition w o u l d be acronymned, w o u l d end up being the last collaboration between Rauschenberg and T i n g u e l y . O n A u g u s t 30th, just a m o n t h after the s u d d e n death of Y v e s K l e i n , Dylaby opened w i t h seven constructed environments i n t r o d u c i n g the m u s e u m goer to different sensory experiences not u n l i k e that of a funny house at an amusement park. U l t v e d t p r o d u c e d a r o o m filled w i t h machines made of w o o d activated b y the audience's movement through the space; Spoerri made an u p s i d e - d o w n version of a r o o m ; M a r t i a l Raysse i n t r o d u c e d a Raysse -Beach, w i t h neon signs, a jukebox, s w i m m i n g p o o l and plastic toys; Saint-Phalle constructed a shooting gallery where opening-night visitors could assassinate her large white relief filled w i t h prehistoric monsters [fig. 61]; Rauschenberg filled a r o o m w i t h caged combines; w h i l e T i n g u e l y made 1 1 8 the visitor exit the 'party' through a tunnel filled w i t h balloons. These balloons, as we w i l l see, w o u l d soon 'pop.' By most p u b l i c accounts the event was a success. P r i v a t e l y , however, Dylaby d i d not result i n the k i n d of Utopian collaborative moment some might have expected. A s U t v e d t recalls, the events leading up to a 'cold war' between the five Europeans and the sole A m e r i c a n , Rauschenberg w o u l d become frustrated b y the reluctance of T i n g u e l y and others to communicate i n E n g l i s h . 2 1 0 Rauschenberg w o u l d later tell his biographer, C a l v i n T o m k i n s , that he had b y this time become "irritated and d i s i l l u s i o n e d b y the others' reluctance to collaborate o n a single w o r k , and by T i n g u e l y ' s penchant for g i v i n g orders and generally r u n n i n g the s h o w . " 2 1 1 For Rauschenberg, this e x h i b i t i o n s h o u l d have represented a collective w o r k i n g environment, but what he found was i n d i v i d u a l artists w i l l i n g to w o r k collaboratively, but refusing collectivity: N i k i , Jean, U l t v e d t and I w o r k e d i n d i v i d u a l l y together as a team. This [Rorelse i konsten] was a situation w h i c h i n s p i r e d n u m e r o u s other collaborative projects.... But the altruistic energy's innocence w o u l d not s u r v i v e Dylaby.... Professional maturity t r i u m p h e d over the collective joy of just m a k i n g a r t . 2 1 2 2 1 0 m an interview conducted o n June 10,1992, P e r - O l o f U l t v e d t recalled Rauschenberg's "irritation:" "I remember sitting at the dinner table. N o matter h o w h a r d w e a l l tried to speak English, w e ended up speaking French w h i c h Bob d i d not understand. I guess he must have felt quite alienated...." 2 1 1 C a l v i n T o m k i n s Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time N e w Y o r k : D o u b l e d a y a n d C o . , 1980, p.225. 2 1 2 R a u s c h e n b e r g quoted i n B i l l y K l i i v e r and Robert Rauschenberg's "Rorelse i konsten — en kombinerad minnesbild, i n Moderna Museet 1958-1983 S t o c k h o l m : M o d e r n a M u s e e t , 1983, p.148. 1 19 W i t h our understanding of the European's anarchist roots i n a p h i l o s o p h y of radical i n d i v i d u a l i s m , we can surmise that this moment represented a fork i n the road leading either to i n d i v i d u a l collaboration or m u t u a l collectivity. Interestingly enough, i n his historical o v e r v i e w of these events, C a l v i n T o m k i n s refers to Dylaby as a "dynamic laboratory." The slip from labyrinth to laboratory is significant. It w o u l d not surprise us if Rauschenberg interpreted the a c r o n y m differently and thereby p i n p o i n t e d a major difference between the A m e r i c a n s and Europeans. W h i l e the Europeans i n question understood "dynamic labyrinth" to reference the Situationist Constant N i e w e n h u y s ' s anarchic constructions such as Ambiance de feu (Environment for Play) and New Babylon; and b y extension u p d a t i n g the acronym " C o B r A " to "Dylaby." Rauschenberg, through his correspondence w i t h T o m k i n s , suggests a collaborative experiment for art and s c i e n c e . 2 1 3 In other w o r d s , the Europeans were p r o p o s i n g a very different m o d e l of anarchic p l a y rebelling against the o p t i m i s m and structures of new technologies. U n l i k e them, Rauschenberg was optimistically open to new medi a as a revolutionary and M c L u h a n e s q u e extension of l i f e . 2 1 4 A s w e w i l l see i n chapter three, Rauschenberg, w i t h the S w e d i s h B e l l Laboratory scientist B i l l y K l i i v e r , w o u l d develop* this more optimistic embrace of technology into c the laboratory E . A . T . (Experiments i n A r t and Technology). 2 l 3 p o r Spoerri this connection to Constant must have been most relevant. As mentioned in chapter one, Spoerri's ludic constructions were closely related to Henri Lefebvre's writings. In turn, Lefebvre was highly influenced by Constant's wring Pour une architecture de situation (1953). Constant had by 1960 left the Situationist International which they found too polemically positioned under Debord's leadership. See Eleonore Kofman's and Elizabeth Lebas's "Introduction" Henri Lefebre: Writings on Cities Blackwell Publishers, 1996, pp.11-12. 2 1 4 F o r McLuhan, the medium was not only the message, but it could function as the extension of the human nervous system. 1 2 0 A t her o p e n i n g i n Paris that spring, Saint-Phalle had been i n v i t e d by the A m e r i c a n art dealer A l e x a n d e r Iolas to exhibit at his N e w Y o r k gallery i n the fall. This w o u l d p r o v i d e Saint-Phalle w i t h an o p p o r t u n i t y to clarify her ambivalent p o s i t i o n i n relation to the U n i t e d States and the N e w Y o r k art scene. In the brochure for this solo s h o w , Saint-Phalle reprinted her astrologer's findings w h i c h points the direction she was determined to take w i t h her w o r k : " Y o u w i l l adorn death w i t h the enchantments of c h i l d h o o d . " 2 1 5 T y i n g rubber lizards to doll-babies' bellies, shooting real .22's at cans, bottles and balloons filled w i t h paint, Saint-Phalle kept p l a y i n g "Fun House" w i t h the utmost artistic seriousness u n t i l her creation/assassination was complete. In the N e w Y o r k show, Saint-Phalle h a d exhibited studies towards King Kong, [fig. 62] a larger w o r k to be executed i n L o s Angeles i n early '63 w i t h the help of V i r g i n i a D w a n ' s gallery. W r i t i n g from L . A . , W h o l d e n made the f o l l o w i n g acute observations: King Kong, b u i l t and bulleted this summer under the aegis of the D w a n G a l l e r y , represents a consolidation of both thematic and pictorial experiences for N i k i . It is her largest continuous narrative, a "Tableau M o u r a n t " deliberately engineered for permanence. Because N i k i de Saint-Phalle has gained notoriety largely through p u b l i c acts of destruction, the autonomy of King Kong as a finished art object needs to be emphasized. It is a demonstration picture, l i k e Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus.216 2 1 s T h i s was true of her work as Rosalind Wholden pointed out in her review of the exhibition in Artforum. See Rosalind G. Wholden "Puerealism: "The End' With Innocence" Artforum Vol.2 No.3 (September 1963), pp,30-33. 2 1 6 I b i d . , p.32. 1 2 1 If this can be v i e w e d as a "demonstration picture," then what was Saint- Phalle demonstrating? A s W h o l d e n hints near the end of her r e v i e w , this image, like the O.A.S. picture, is a subjective demonstration s i m i l a r to Picasso's Guernica. A r r a n g e d a r o u n d a central s u n / g o d , the black and white King Kong is subtly d i v i d e d into two halves. Read counter-clockwise from its top left h a n d corner, Saint-Phalle leads the v i e w e r from b i r t h to death. The left side of the c o m p o s i t i o n includes scenes of a mother g i v i n g b i r t h , c h i l d r e n p l a y i n g , a heart representing teenage love, a m a n o n a motorcycle, a church, masks representing various p o l i t i c a l figures, and a m a r r i e d couple standing next to an A m e r i c a n f l a g . 2 1 7 B e l o w the sun, replacing Picasso's t w i s t i n g horse and b u l l , a Tyrannosaurus Rex functions as a G o d z i l l a like stand-in for " K i n g K o n g " w h o is not literally i n c l u d e d i n the picture. This monster, m o v i n g from the center to the right side of the composition, appears to be d r a g g i n g a l l of Saint-Phalle's personal references towards a N e w Y o r k cityscape located o n the far right. This storyboard can thus be said to d i v i d e E u r o p e / P a r i s (left side) from the U n i t e d S t a t e s / N e w Y o r k (right side) to illustrate her o w n personal experiences through a potent m i x of h i g h art and p o p u l a r culture references. A s if to w a r n the v i e w e r (or artist, monster) against the i m m i n e n t danger of entering N e w Y o r k . B y returning to her o w n personal m y t h o l o g y , Saint- Phalle shows the city's skyscrapers attacked b y fighter planes a n d missiles conveying as m u c h the fictional story of K i n g K o n g as it represents the real hubris of C a p i t a l i s m , consumerism, and a C o l d W a r culture. A s W h o l d e n 2 l 7 Saint-Phalle had been married to the American poet Harry Mathews and in this sense this picture could represent the story of her failed relationship with both him and her former country. 1 2 2 states, this picture, like her other w o r k from this time, is an allegorical representation of death: A s allegories of death the Saint-Phalle constructions are a k i n d of sideshow. Life is precious, short and irreversible. Sometimes the o n l y w a y to bear the strain of mortality is to try s a m p l i n g death, as if practice c o u l d make perfect. Romanesque Last Judgement, Goya's Disasters of War, Guernica, even films l i k e Hiroshima Mon Amour and On the Beach are death shows scaled for the adult w o r l d ; the price of a d m i s s i o n to the B i g Top is seriousness. N i k i ' s Punch-and-Judy massacres embody the disbelief of T o m Sawyer, home just i n time to stare at his o w n funeral. She conjures last laughs, not last r i t e s . 2 1 8 A n d as we w i l l see, "sampling death" is exactly what Saint-Phalle w o u l d continue to do u n t i l she established a death mask of her o w n . A m e r i c a n i z i n g the N e w O p e n A r t : N e o - D a d a Goes 'Pop' B y the time W h o l d e n ' s Artforum article was p u b l i s h e d , a number of significant events h a d just taken place. It was becoming increasingly clear for A m e r i c a n critics and curators that a n e w type of art was being absorbed into the art industry partly as a result of the Seitz assemblage exhibition. Particularly noteworthy was the s u d d e n increase i n interest i n p o p u l a r consumer objects as subjects for artists o n both the East and West Coasts. In September of '62, The Pasadena A r t M u s e u m p i c k e d u p o n what it must have perceived as a possible bridge between the East and West Coast. New Paintings of Common Objects i n c l u d e d J i m D i n e , R o y Lichtenstein, A n d y W a r h o l , E d w a r d Ruscha, Robert D o w d , P h i l l i p Hefferton, Joe G o o d e , and W a y n e T h i e b a u d . U n a b l e to give a coherent group 'name' to these A m e r i c a n 2 1 8 W h o l d e n , p.32. 1 2 3 artists, art critic Jules Langsner c o u l d nonetheless suggest i n his "Los Angeles Letter" to Art International that the e x h i b i t i o n brought an e m e r g i n g n e w tendency into "sharp f o c u s . " 2 1 9 W i t h i n the art market, the confirmation of this new trend's passage into the realm of 'high art' came w i t h Sidney Janis' decision at the end of October, 1961, to carrel the artists he saw representing the latest avant-garde generation. U p u n t i l this time, Janis had been d e a l i n g w i t h blue-chip m o d e r n artists ranging i n generation from M o n d r i a n and Leger to leading Abstract Expressionists such as W i l l e m de K o o n i n g , M a r k R o t h k o a n d Robert M o t h e r w e l l . N o w he was i n t r o d u c i n g a younger generation of artists w h o appeared to reject the tradition and seriousness of the modernist avant-garde. O n October 31, Janis's two-gallery e x h i b i t i o n The New Realists opened to include the Pop artists (as they w o u l d soon become k n o w n as) W a r h o l , Lichtenstein, and Rosenquist alongside Nouveaux Realistes Y v e s K l e i n , Jean Tinguely, Per-Olof U l t v e d t , M a r t i a l Raysse, and A r m a n [fig. 63]. U n l i k e the Pasadena exhibition, this survey was commercial, international, and controversial. A s C a l v i n T o m k i n ' s recalls, a number of the Abstract Expressionists, a m o n g them Rothko, M o t h e r w e l l , Gottlieb, and Baziotes, were so angry w i t h this merger that they resigned from Janis's gallery i n p r o t e s t . 2 2 0 Sidney Janis w o u l d later recall the i r o n y of this situation: Here w e had been s h o w i n g P o l l o c k cheek-by-jowl w i t h Leger, and de K o o n i n g w i t h M o n d r i a n , and K l i n e w i t h K l e e , but w h e n w e took u p the next generation our artists were furious. They didn't want to be associated w i t h these people w h o became artists o v e r n i g h t . 2 2 1 2 1 9 J u l e s Langsner " F r o m L o s A n g e l e s Letter" Art International (September 1962), p.49. 2 2 0 C a l v i n T o m k i n s Off the Wall: The Art World of Our Time N e w Y o r k : D o u b l e d a y & C o . , 1980, pp.184-185. 2 2 1 I b i d . , p.185. 1 2 4 In his exhibition catalogue, Janis elaborates its central theme a n d provides a w o r k i n g d e f i n i t i o n of the New Realist: C i t y bred, the N e w Realist is a k i n d of urban folk artist. L i v i n g i n N e w Y o r k , Paris, L o n d o n , Rome, S t o c k h o l m , he finds his i n s p i r a t i o n i n urban culture. H e is attracted to abundant everyday ideas and facts w h i c h he gathers, for example, from the street, the store counter, the amusement arcade or the home.... In the u n p l a n n e d transformation the o r d i n a r y become extraordinary, the c o m m o n , u n c o m m o n , a transposition i n w h i c h the spirit of the c o m m o n object becomes the c o m m o n subject for these artists. Thus the traditional artist-invented w o r k of art n o w is supplanted unceremoniously b y a true product of mass culture, the ready-made. Artists w o r k i n g i n this direction form the central theme of the exhibition. A l s o dead center to the idea of the exhibition is w o r k colored b y other qualities i n mass media. The b i l l b o a r d , magazine, comic strip, d a i l y newspaper, very directly have been the inspiration of a variety of facts and ideas introduced by the n e w g e n e r a t i o n . 2 2 2 Sidney suggests i n particular that D u c h a m p ' s Readymades "remain today art works of v i s i o n and of particular significance and inspiration to the N e w R e a l i s t s . " 2 2 3 W h i l e g i v i n g significant attention to the ' o l d guard's' disgust, and p i n - p o i n t i n g this e x h i b i t i o n as "the event that capped P o p A r t ' s l i g h t n i n g - l i k e 2 2 2 J a n i s , Ibid.. In his i n t r o d u c t i o n , Janis also makes sure that he sidesteps W i l l i a m Seitz's attempt to define the contemporary art scene i n A r t of Assemblage w h i l e at the same time u s i n g his achievement to b u i l d his o w n brand of avant-garde art: "These are the categories u p o n w h i c h the e x h i b i t i o n concentrates. T o a v o i d confusion, peripheral, or closely related w o r k s of quality, but whose techniques are less factual than they are poetic or expressionist, have been omitted as outside the scope of the exhibition. In this sense, the paintings of Rivers a n d Rauschenberg come to m i n d . Johns, an established Factualist, also is, unfortunately, not i n c l u d e d . T o r e m a i n w i t h i n the idea of the e x h i b i t i o n , the important directions of Collage a n d Assemblage are omitted." A s w i t h both H u l t e n a n d (to a lesser degree) Seitz, D u c h a m p is the central figure i n Janis's construction of a movement. 2 2 3 I b i d . . 125 triumph," T o m k i n s , i n his historical account, manages to ignore the fact that this exhibition c o u l d also be rendered problematic for artists i n the show. For N i k i de Saint-Phalle w h o was not i n c l u d e d i n the show, and for Jean T i n g u e l y and P e r - O l o f U l t v e d t w h o were i n c l u d e d , the fallout of the exhibition w o u l d be devastating. The public success of the e x h i b i t i o n took o n the most p o i s o n e d form i n B r i a n O'Doherty's enthusiastic r e v i e w for The New York Times: It's m a d , m a d , w o n d e r f u l l y m a d . It's also (at different times) g l a d , b a d and sad, and it m a y be a fad. But it's welcome. It is called New Realists, and it opens today at 4 p m i n the Sidney Janis G a l l e r y (N.Y.) ... A l t h o u g h the standard vocabulary of such antique art movements as surrealism and dada is used, the intent is entirely different; a fresh w i n d is b l o w i n g across the vast b i l l b o a r d wasteland, and anarchy is out.224 A l t h o u g h this statement c o u l d have been read as a w i t t y announcement that anarchy had come "out" of obscurity, for the foreign artists that concern us here, it was more l i k e l y read literally as a declaration that anarchy was "out." After a l l , O ' D o h e r t y also announced that " w i t h this show, 'pop' art is officially h e r e . " 2 2 5 F o r O ' D o h e r t y and other defenders of A m e r i c a n modernist abstraction, the critique of mass culture w h i c h an historical avant-garde h a d leveled against the bourgeois w i t h shock h a d n o w been turned back o n itself: H e [Janis] has p r o v i d e d what must be the year's most entertaining show.... A m e r i c a has been a pioneer i n t h r o w a w a y cups and saucers, m i l k containers and tablecloths. N o w it is a pioneer i n t h r o w a w a y art.... Since the very essence of [ N e w Realism] is c o m p o u n d e d lightness, irreverence and w i t , it w o u l d be ridiculous to take it w i t h deep p h i l o s o p h i c a l seriousness. This w o u l d perform the nice trick of 2 2 4 B r i a n O ' D o h e r t y The New York Times (October 31, 1962), p . 2 2 5 I b i d . . 1 2 6 m a k i n g mass culture esoteric... It is, of course, founded o n the premise that mass culture is bad, an expression of s p i r i t u a l poverty. So perhaps this is the o l d story of the avant-garde g i v e n the opportunity to seize o n the bourgeois again, this time through its packaged products. O r , more a m u s i n g l y , things may have reversed themselves, and n o w it may be the bourgeois that shocks the a v a n t - g a r d e . 2 2 6 It was under these a w k w a r d circumstances that the term "Pop A r t " gained recognizable currency. Inflated w i t h some D u c h a m p i a n Paris Air, Pop had popped. O n the 13 of December 1962, the M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t announced A Symposium on Pop Art w h i c h came at the heel of not o n l y the Sidney Janis exhibition, but also the Art of Assemblage S y m p o s i u m the previous year. In an attempt to justify the phenomenon of P o p art w i t h i n a context w h i c h to this point had p r e d o m i n a n t l y represented modernist h i g h art practices, H e n r y G e l d z a h l e r argued that Pop d i d not "fall from the heavens" but h a d g r o w n "naturally out of the art of the recent past." It s h o u l d be l o o k e d at as "two- dimen si o n al landscape painting" and was not a threat to the idea of the ' i n d i v i d u a l ' or I n d i v i d u a l i s m . Instead it was to be understood as a natural response to the artist's v i s u a l environment w h i c h d i d not forego the idea of art for art's sake: Both Greenberg and H a r o l d Rosenberg have w r i t t e n that increasingly i n the twentieth century, art has carried o n a dialogue w i t h itself, art leads to art, and w i t h internal sequence. This is true s t i l l , even w i t h the external references pop art makes to the observed w o r l d . 2 2 7 2 2 6 I b i d . . 2 2 7 H e n r y G e l d z a h l e r quoted i n A Symposium on Pop Art w i t h Peter Selz, H e n r y G e l d z a h l e r , Dore A s h t o n , L e o Steinberg, a n d Stanley K u n i t z at the M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t , N e w Y o r k . P u b l i s h e d i n Arts ( A p r i l 1963), pp.35-45.Reprinted i n Steven H e n r y M a d o f f (Ed.) Pop Art: A Critical History Berkeley: U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a Press, 1997, p.66 (pp.65-81). 1 2 7 W h i l e these artists may d r a w on a "common body," he suggests that their: ...style and decisions...are unmistakable. The choice of color, composition, the b r u s h stroke, the hardness of edge, a l l these are personal no matter h o w close to a n o n y m i t y the artist m a y aspire i n his desire to emulate the material of his inspiration, the anonymous mass media. [In the end] the pop artists remain i n d i v i d u a l . 2 2 8 New York Times critic H i l t o n K r a m e r , a supporter of A m e r i c a n abstraction, was outraged. To K r a m e r , P o p art represented n o t h i n g more than a "charade" dependent o n the juxtaposition of cliches: Pop art carries out a moderately successful charade — but a charade o n l y — of the two kinds of significance we are particularly suckers for at the present moment: the Real and the H i s t o r i c a l . P o p art seems to be about the real w o r l d , yet it appears to its audience to be sanctified by tradition, the tradition of D a d a . W h i c h is to say, it makes itself dependent u p o n something outside art for its expressive meaning, and at the same time makes itself dependent u p o n the myths of art history for his aesthetic integrity. In m y o p i n i o n , both appeals are f r a u d u l e n t . 2 2 9 For Kramer, the m a i n threat Pop art carried was the reconciliation of art and what he called "the dishonesties of contrived p u b l i c symbols and pretentious c o m m e r c e . " 2 3 0 Its social effect, he continued, "is s i m p l y to reconcile us to a w o r l d of commodities, banalities and vulgarities — w h i c h is to say, an effect indistinguishable from advertising a r t . " 2 3 1 Pop art, then, represented more than a bridge b u i l t between art and life, it represented a h i g h w a y filled w i t h masses of consumers i n their style-obsolescent cars w h o couldn't care less 2 2 8 i b i d . . 2 2 9 I b i d . , p.68-69. 2 3 0 I b i d . , 68. 2 3 1 I b i d . . 1 2 8 about the i n d i v i d u a l as they were collectively joined b y ' I n d i v i d u a l i s m . ' Ironically, this threat was also taken seriously by artists like T i n g u e l y , Saint- Phalle and U l t v e d t w h o a l l of a s u d d e n were labeled P o p artists. The difference, however, between K r a m e r and the Europeans was i n their i n d i v i d u a l defenses. Whereas K r a m e r argued for a retreat into an i v o r y tower based o n an art for art's sake, Saint-Phalle, T i n g u e l y , and U l t v e d t , I suggest, were retreating into a tower b u i l t o n D u c h a m p i a n i r o n y and silence. Whether K r a m e r saw this is beside the point. H i s m a i n concern was keeping A m e r i c a n institutions like the M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t from negotiating a deal w i t h a new 'popular front' aesthetics. To k i l l off P o p , K r a m e r k n e w very w e l l that he had to k i l l off its father figure — M a r c e l D u c h a m p : B e h i n d its pretensions looms the legendary presence of the most overrated figure i n m o d e r n art: M r . M a r c e l D u c h a m p . It is D u c h a m p ' s celebrated silence, his d i s a v o w a l , his abandonment of art, w h i c h has here — i n p o p art — been i n v a d e d , colonized and exploited. For this was never a real silence. A m o n g the majority of m e n w h o p r o d u c e d no art, and experienced little or none, Duchamp's d i s a v o w a l was d e v o i d of a l l meaning... it is o n l y i n the context of a school of p a i n t i n g w h i c h has radically d e p r i v e d art of significant v i s u a l events that p o p art has a m e a n i n g . 2 3 2 M o r e diplomatic, but still critical of the Pop artists, was Dore A s h t o n , a critic w h o understood the movement to represent a p o l e m i c a l rejection of Abstract Expressionism. For A s h t o n , this n e w contemporary artist was "weary and perplexed b y the ambiguities of idealism" that Abstraction represented. A s a supporter of 'Neo-Dada' artists like Rauschenberg, the p r o b l e m w i t h the 2 3 2 I b i d . . 1 2 9 new 'Pop' art was its seeming dismissal of metaphor, w h i c h she suggested was "necessarily a c o m p l i c a t i n g device, one w h i c h insists o n the play of more than one element i n order to effect an i m a g e . " 2 3 3 The P o p artist, she observed, "wants no such elaborate and oblique obligation. H e is engaged i n an elementary game of n a m i n g t h i n g s . " 2 3 4 U n l i k e D u c h a m p w h o equated chance w i t h the distance between intention and expression, the P o p artists, A s h t o n felt, r e l i n q u i s h e d responsibility: In the emphasis o n randomness and chance, o n the v i r t u a l object divested of associations, o n the audience as participant, a n d i n his rebellion against metaphor, the p o p artist generally begs the question of reality. H e refuses to take the responsibility of his c h o i c e s . 2 3 5 W h i l e a d d i n g that she considered P o p art to be an important sociological phenomenon that responded to contemporary life, she nonetheless concluded that "to the extent that it shuns metaphor, or any deep analysis of complex relations, it is an i m p o v e r i s h e d genre and an imperfect instrument of a r t . " 2 3 6 But as I have tried to suggest, certain artists were weary of P o p A r t ' s leap into the giant b a l l r o o m of consumerism and were p u s h e d into n e w strategic territory. O b s e r v i n g w i t h great interest the formation of an art movement to w h i c h he was being credited the seminal father figure, D u c h a m p made the f o l l o w i n g observation about the phenomenon as a w h o l e and T i n g u e l y i n particular: 2 3 3 I b i d . , p.70. 2 3 4 I b i d . . 2 3 5 I b i d . . 2 3 6 I b i d . . 1 3 0 I ' l l tell y o u what's going to happen... The p u b l i c w i l l keep o n b u y i n g more and more art, and husbands w i l l start b r i n g i n g home little paintings to their w i v e s o n their w a y home from w o r k , and we're a l l going to d r o w n i n a sea of mediocrity. M a y b e T i n g u e l y and a few others sense this and are t r y i n g to destroy art before it's too l a t e . 2 3 7 U n d e r s t a n d i n g , as D u c h a m p o b v i o u s l y d i d , the conflicting v i e w s about this sudden institutionalization of Pop A r t i n the U n i t e d States is crucial to understanding the direction the Europeans (and certain A m e r i c a n s ) 2 3 8 w o u l d take from this moment forward. It also provides us w i t h greater insight into the conflict at Stedelijk's Dylaby e x h i b i t i o n w h i c h h a d ultimately resulted i n U l t v e d t , Saint-Phalle, T i n g u e l y and Raysse discussing a n e w collaborative project — this time without Rauschenberg and w i t h the help of Pontus H u l t e n i n S t o c k h o l m . A l t h o u g h this n e w m o n u m e n t a l e x h i b i t i o n w o u l d have to wait u n t i l 1966 to take place at the M o d e r n a Museet (chapter three w i l l deal w i t h this i n detail), this time the object of the exhibition w o u l d be more strategically executed. Letters written between 1963 and 1966 from Saint- Phalle and T i n g u e l y to U l t v e d t and H u t l e n stress the importance of not turning this exhibition into a 'Pop' event [fig. 64]: S a i n t - P h a l l e : 2 3 7 D u c h a m p q u o t e d i n C a l v i n T o m k i n s The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde N e w Y o r k : P e n g u i n Books, 1981 (originally p u b l i s h e d 1965), p.15. 2 3 8 A s k e d by Susan H a p g o o d i n 1993 if he fled N e w Y o r k i n 1963 to L o s Angeles because of "the effects of the b u r g e o i n i n g art market a r o u n d 1962 Claes O l d e n b u r g answered that he felt the N e w Y o r k scene was "exhausted b y '62." H a p g o o d : " W h i c h is just the point w h e n the m e d i a p i c k e d u p o n it?" O l d e n b u r g : "Yeah, that's a l w a y s a sign that it's over. T h e n I went to Los A n g e l e s where things started a l l over again; it was l i k e v i r g i n territory. It was c o o l , a n d N e w Y o r k was hot. The p e r i o d from the end of '59 u n t i l '62 was so intense i n N e w Y o r k , so complicated, that I just wanted to get away from it. But after a w h i l e y o u r u n out of places to go." "Claes O l d e n b u r g " Interview conducted by Susan H a p g o o d , N e w Y o r k C i t y , M a r c h 1,1993 p u b l i s h e d i n Susan H a p g o o d ' s Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62 N e w Y o r k : The A m e r i c a n Federation of A r t s , 1994, p.129 (123-129). A s w e w i l l see i n chapter three he, l i k e T i n g u e l y a n d Saint-Phalle, w o u l d see S t o c k h o l m as one of these places to r u n to. 1 3 1 I'm glad that y o u like the idea of an enormous collaboration. But there are problems.... it w o u l d have to be an enormous Castle. Jean a n d I both feel that this collaboration w o u l d be something sufficient i n itself. T i n g u e l y : What's the use i n a large Pop hot dog? Don't y o u feel the four of us w o u l d be enough since the castle w o u l d become a unity. W h y have an enormous hamburger next to it? Saint-Phalle: Rauschenberg also may be u n n e c e s s a r y . 2 3 9 A n o t h e r letter from T i n g u e l y and Saint-Phalle suggests to U l t v e d t that it w o u l d be best to keep B i l l y K l i i v e r uninformed of their plans. W h a t w i l l be revealled to be significant i n m y next chapter, this friendship between K l i i v e r and Rauschenberg w o u l d by 1966 result i n the Experiments i n A r t and Technology. Spaces of Masquerade: Getting the Story 'Straight' In establishing an international name for himself, this conflict c o u l d not have come at a worse time for Ultvedt. Throughout Dylaby, U l t v e d t had tried to find a 'neutral' position. P r i o r to Dylaby U l t v e d t h a d become quite a close friend of Rauschenberg w i t h w h o m he traded w o r k s as late as the 1962 Venice Biennale where he was represented at the N o r d i c P a v i l l i o n . W h i l e h a v i n g a solo exhibition at A l e x a n d e r Iolas N e w Y o r k G a l l e r y the f o l l o w i n g S p r i n g , U l t v e d t p r o d u c e d the installation Manhattan, his o w n p l a y f u l environment a k i n to Jacques Tati's critical comedies. This was constructed w i t h assistance from K l i i v e r a n d Rauschenberg w h o "supported w i t h ^ ^ T r a n s l a t i o n of these "coded" letters were p r o v i d e d by P e r - O l o f U l t v e d t d u r i n g an i n t e r v i e w conducted o n June 10,1992 at Lfndingo, Sweden. A l t h o u g h undated, U l t v e d t confirmed that they were a l l written between 1963 a n d 1966. 1 3 2 addresses and h e l p f u l a d v i c e . " 2 4 0 Manhattan 'trapped' the v i e w e r into participation b y r i g g i n g doors, chairs, lamps and utensils i n such a w a y that they were compositionally rearranged by the audience [fig. 65]. A s he w o u l d soon realize, U l t v e d t was himself trapped between his o l d and n e w friends. N o t o n l y had U l t v e d t been asked b y Illena Sonnabend (Rauschenberg's N e w Y o r k art dealer) to j o i n her gallery, but the camaraderie between U l t v e d t and Rauschenberg was by this time good enough that U l t v e d t accepted a request by Rauschenberg to perform w i t h C a r o l y n B r o w n and himself i n the ballet Pelican to take place that M a y . A s a part of Washington's G a l l e r y of M o d e r n A r t ' s Concert of Dance Number Five, Pelican took place at A m e r i c a o n Wheels skating rink. U l t v e d t and Rauschenberg, w i t h roller-skates o n their feet and large circular parachute contraptions o n their backs, performed a dance w i t h B r o w n that resembled something between astronauts l a n d i n g o n the m o o n and recreational sports. A l l this was accompanied b y a collage of music b y H a n d e l , H a y d e n and light entertainment music [fig. 6 6 ] . 2 4 1 After this performance o n M a y 9th, U l t v e d t w o u l d also w i t h d r a w from further p a r t i c i p a t i o n w i t h the A m e r i c a n s . 2 4 2 H a v i n g w r i t t e n to S w e d e n describing his activities to close friend and art critic U l f L i n d e , U l t v e d t received an acidic letter back a short w h i l e later w h i c h again points to a fear of Pop. H a v i n g up to this point defended Rauschenberg's w o r k p u b l i c a l l y i n the 2 4 0 U l v e d t i n P.O. Ultvedt: Tvivel och overmod: Arbeten fran 1945 till 1988 M a l m o : M a l m o K o n s t h a l l , 1988, p.48. 2 4 1 A s U l t v e d t claims i n m y interview w i t h h i m i n 1992, he was i n the end not interested i n being "boxed i n " by Sonnabend and to this day does not consider himself a "Pop Star w h o travels a r o u n d to p l a y p o p u l a r music." N o t unoteworthy, U l t v e d t is often s h o w n i n photographs of this performance but is very rarely mentioned. 2 4 2 W h e n Rauschenberg repeated the Pelican performance at the First N e w Y o r k Theater R a l l y i n 1965, U l t v e d t was replaced b y A l e x H a y . 1 3 3 S w e d i s h p o p u l a r p r e s s , L i n d e , l i k e H i l t o n K r a m e r at the Pop Art Symposium, p r i v a t e l y d e f i n e d h i m as f r a u d u l e n t . A f t e r y o u r d e s c r i p t i o n o f the W a l l Street d o m i n a n c e I h a v e b e e n c o n v i n c e d that a s o c i a l i s m m u s t take o v e r e v e r y w h e r e ( s a r c a s m ) . T h i s is the o n l y w a y to e n d " n e w r e a l i s m , " s i n c e this m o v e m e n t o b v i o u s l y has to d o w i t h artists h a v i n g a h a r d t i m e g e t t i n g r i d of t h e i r garbage.... T h e fact that R a u s c h e n b e r g h a s b e g u n w o r k i n g w i t h s i l k - s c r e e n stuff I f i n d u p s e t t i n g . It is, after a l l , A n d y W a r h o l w h o h a s the p a t e n t o n s i l k s c r e e n i n g . Is there n o R e s t a n y o v e r there to k e e p a n e y e o n w h a t artists are d o i n g ? [ m y b r a c k e t ] 2 4 3 S h o w i n g a n a c u t e a w a r e n e s s o f r e c e n t a c t i v i t i e s c o n c e r n i n g N e w R e a l i s m a n d P o p A r t , L i n d e , u n l i k e K r a m e r , s h o w s c o n t i n u e d i n t e r e s t i n D u c h a m p . B u t l i k e K r a m e r h e s o u n d s w o r r i e d , e v e n s c a r e d , a n d p r e s e n t s R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d the n e w P o p artists i n e x t r e m e l y n e g a t i v e a n d h o m o p h o b i c t e r m s : Y o u [ U l t v e d t ] h a v e w r i t t e n a b o u t N e w Y o r k i n a s t r a n g e w a y i n the letter I r e c e i v e d t o d a y . Y o u a l m o s t s o u n d l i k e a n e w b e i n g — a n d to t h i n k that I s t i l l l i k e the o l d o n e so m u c h . . . . I h a v e b e e n s m e a r i n g o i l o n c a n v a s for the ' s t o p p a g e s ' [replica's o f D u c h a m p ' s S t a n d a r d S t o p p a g e s ] . I h a v e m e s s e d a n d s m e a r e d , s t r o k e d a n d r u b b e d — I ' m b e g i n n i n g to u n d e r s t a n d t h o s e homo-painters ( m a l a r b o g a r n a ) . It's w o n d e r f u l , the h e a d is c o m p l e t e l y e m p t i e d . . . . I p r o m i s e y o u , as m u c h w o r k as I h a v e p u t i n t o this e x h i b i t i o n ( T h e P a s a d e n a D u c h a m p r e t r o s p e c t i v e ) , n o d a m n h o m o - p a i n t e r w o u l d b o t h e r to d o . ... [By the w a y ] , the o n l y t h i n g I'm r e a d i n g r i g h t n o w ... is L e o n a r d o [ D a V i n c i ] . H e is fantastic. T h i s is w h a t h e w r i t e s : ' O n e s h a l l n o t u s e the b r u s h u n l e s s s i t t i n g i n front of n a t u r e a n d f e e l i n g as t h o u g h y o u h a v e c r e a t e d it y o u r s e l f . ' I t h i n k this is d a m n g o o d — a n d it is e x a c t l y the shit o f art t o d a y : T h o s e w h o w o r k w i t h ' p o p ' are too p r e c i o u s (fina o m n y p o r n a ) — y o u can't t e l l m e that L i c h t e n s t e i n feels l i k e h e d r e w t h o s e c a r t o o n s . I ' m t i r e d o f this " i r o n i c d i s t a n c e . " 2 4 4 2 4 3 P . O . Ultvedt: Tvivel och bvermod: Arbeten fran 1945 till 1988 M a l m o : M a l m o K o n s t h a l l , 1988, p.53. 2 4 4 I b i d . . 1 3 4 The reference to D u c h a m p ' s Standard Stoppages helps us determine that this undated letter was written shortly before the Pasadena M u s e u m ' s D u c h a m p retrospective w h i c h opened o n October 8, 1963. L i n d e , w h o contributed w i t h a major catalogue text and numerous replica's of D u c h a m p ' s w o r k , was from this time forward so 'anti-American' that he a v o i d e d traveling to L o s Angeles for the v e r n i s s a g e . 2 4 5 The letter is particularly interesting i n that it reveals a clear understanding of the sexual differences at play between artists such as U l t v e d t and Rauschenberg and suggests an attempt to distance one project from the other by emasculating the N e w Y o r k artists and labeling their 'openness' h o m o s e x u a l . L i n d e ' s references to messing, smearing, stroking and r u b b i n g s h o u l d have been understood by U l t v e d t as relating to an "excremental v i s i o n " apparent i n A m e r i c a n s ' such as Rauschenberg's w o r k . W i d e l y circulated by the early sixties, N o r m a n O . Brown's Life Against Death was enthusiastically read b y artists such as Rauschenberg w h o found i n it a social pathology of everyday life related to his artistic v i s i o n . W h i l e L i n d e and U l t v e d t m a y not have been familiar w i t h N o r m a n O . B r o w n (who was most readily available w i t h i n N e w Y o r k ' s intellectual underground), they were, v i a a F r e u d i a n psychoanalytical m o d e l , familiar enough w i t h Rauschenberg's w o r k to be able to interpret his combines and prints as signs and gestures related to an interest i n a different erotic 'instinct.' 2 4 5 l n an interview w i t h L i n d e o n M a y 18,1999,1 asked L i n d e if he h a d ever made the p i l g r i m a g e to P h i l a d e l p h i a to see the D u c h a m p collection a n d , i n particular, D u c h a m p ' s Etant Donnes. T o this he responded that he h a d never been to the States a n d w o u l d never go: " W h y s h o u l d I go to see w o r k w h e n D u c h a m p left perfect instructions o n h o w to make on m y own?" H e then proceeded to s h o w me his recently completed, fully functioning, scaled replica of Etant Donnes constructed i n his l i v i n g room. 1 3 5 A s early as 1918, Freud's biographer Ernest Jones had described this anal-erotic character traits as: ...any d i r t y material, street-filth (including of course dung), soiled l i n e n and other things, dust, coal, house or garden refuse, waste-paper, and, indeed, waste material of a l l descriptions, for i n the unconscious the ideas denoted b y the w o r d s 'waste' and 'dirty' seem to be s y n o n y m o u s — the tertium comparationis doubtless b e i n g that of 'refuse.' Either disgusting or waste matter relating to the b o d y is especially apt to become thus associated. The former of these m a y be illustrated b y the material of loathsome diseases — e.g., purulent and other secretions — and this is also the reason w h y a corpse is often a s y m b o l of feces. Examples of the latter one are hair and nails, parts of the b o d y that are apt to get dirty and w h i c h are periodically cast off. Books and other printed matter are a curious s y m b o l of feces, presumably through the association w i t h paper and the idea of pressing (smearing, i m p r i n t i n g ) . 2 4 6 A t this moment w h e n the N e w Y o r k avant-garde's i n s t i t u t i o n a l i z e d p o s i t i o n needed to be questioned, a w o r k such as Rauschenberg's Monogram [fig. 47] c o u l d function as a scapegoat not just b y the popular press (as mentioned earlier), but b y someone like L i n d e w h o turned these scatological signs into a distancing device between artists like U l t v e d t and Rauschenberg. Jonathan Weinberg, i n his study of Jasper Johns provides a useful F r e u d i a n screen through w h i c h to read Monogram as an emblem, or indeed a 'monogram,' of Rauschenberg's gay identity: The connection between excrement and money to w h i c h psychoanalysis gives such weight is dependent o n the idea that the y o u n g c h i l d , k n o w i n g n o t h i n g of the genital functions and of the w o m b and h a v i n g o n l y the experience of his o w n b o d y , i n i t i a l l y believes that he was b o r n out of his mother's stomach t h r o u g h the anal canal. In this process, excrement, w h i c h i n [Norman] O . Brown's w o r d s 'incorporates the body's d a i l y d y i n g , ' is transformed from dead 246-rhis quote is taken from, a n d is discussed i n , Jonathan Wienberg's article "It's In the C a n : Jasper Johns and the A n a l Society" Genders 1 (Spring 1988), p.42. 1 3 6 matter into something of value, the l i v i n g , breathing entity of the self's o w n b o d y . 2 4 7 Monogram, whose very title is a reference to a s i g n of identity for Rauschenberg, can accordingly be interpreted: the tire a r o u n d the stuffed goat (literally a dead b o d y standing o n the discarded or excremental signs and materials from pop-consumer culture) is deciphered as a r i n g (the w o r d 'anus' derives from the L a t i n w o r d anus m e a n i n g ring) t h r o u g h w h i c h the 'dead' goat penetrates and is transformed into the c o m m o d i t y A r t object (represented by the abstract drips o n the goats face. B y 1963, L i n d e , U l t v e d t , T i n g u e l y , and Saint-Phalle w o u l d a l l turn their attention away from this 'death defying act' w h i c h was increasingly read as an uncritical embrace of an increasingly A m e r i c a n consumer culture and avant- garde. Instead their interest i n the act of destruction and death w o u l d become p r o n o u n c e d . Whether Rauschenberg's roller-skate dance performance Pelican h a d been planned as early as 1962 is uncertain, but i n hindsight, N i k i de Saint- Phalle's 1962 assemblage Pirodactyl de New York (also referred to as The New York Alp) [fig. 67] can be read as a hubris w a r n i n g for U l t v e d t . In this 250 x 310 c m large d i p t y c h , a h a l f - c h i l d / h a l f - p i r o d a c t y l o n roller-skates is f l y i n g o v e r / t o w a r d s N e w York's c i t y s c a p e . 2 4 8 T r y i n g to escape the burdens of 2 4 7 J o n a t h a n W e i n b e r g "It's In the C a n : Jasper Johns a n d the A n a l Society" Genders 1 (Spring 1988), p.47. 2 4 8 A s N a n c y Spector has described the costumes U l t v e d t and Rauschenberg were w e a r i n g i n the Pelican performance: "Strapped to their backs, these parachute forms l o o k e d at once l i k e prehistoric w i n g s a n d futuristic, aerodynamic extensions of the body." H e r s u m m a r y , w h i c h is interesting here o n l y so far as it makes the connection between Saint-Phalle's p i r o d a c t y l a n d U l t v e d t , is p a r t l y d e r i v e d from E r i c a Abeel's account "Daedalus at the R o l l e r d r o m e " i n Saturday Review ( N e w Y o r k ) V o l . 48 N o . 3 5 ( A u g . 28, 1965), p.53. This helps strengthen m y 1 3 7 European tradition, history and r e l i g i o n (represented b y kitsch religious icons on the left panel), the Icarus-like figure has been set up to be shot at b y Saint- Phalle's spectators. W h e n hit, the sun, located above the E m p i r e State B u i l d i n g i n the upper right hand corner, bleeds black. C o n s i d e r i n g its production at the height of the C u b a n M i s s i l e C r i s i s , this cross-Atlantic scene looks more like a nuclear holocaust than a pop-oriented artistic exchange. Saint-Phalle's w o r k began to take new form and subject matter by 1963. D u r i n g what she has called her 'white period' between 1963 and 1964, Saint- Phalle created a large b o d y of w o r k devoted to brides, mothers g i v i n g birth, heads and hearts, but also d e v o u r i n g mothers, witches and whores. B y this time, she had m o v e d i n w i t h Jean T i n g u e l y at a former auberge, the 'Auberge d u cheval blanc,' at Soisy-sur-Ecole near Essonne. This n e w focus o n female stereotypes went hand-in-hand w i t h a n e w m a s c u l i n i z e d 'black-period' i n Tinguely's w o r k w h i c h consisted of p a i n t i n g a l l his w o r k matte black and exaggerating their violent characteristics. Read together, as they often w o u l d through their collaborations from n o w on, Saint-Phalle and T i n g u e l y h a d joined i n d i v i d u a l forces i n order to masquerade their carefully engineered w o r k i n g r e l a t i o n s h i p . 2 4 9 Icarus r e a d i n g of b o t h Saint-Phalle's Tir and the Pelican performance — a p a r t i c u l a r l y s t r i k i n g motif used both i n the States and Europe to discuss the new "open" art. See N a n c y Spector "Rauschenberg and Performance, 1963-67: A Poetry of Infinite Possibilities" Robert Rauschenberg Retrospective N e w Y o r k : H a r r y N . A b r a m s , Inc., p.234-235 (226-245). Note: N o t k n o w i n g what to d o w i t h U l t v e d t w h o has since the sixties become m a r g i n a l i z e d w i t h i n international art histories, Spector makes the very c o m m o n mistake of n a m i n g h i m a F l u x u s artist — a "label" w h i c h U l t v e d t t o l d me he never associated w i t h himself, despite h a v i n g participated i n a few F l u x u s events. 2 4 9 E v e n w h e n Saint-Phalle and T i n g u e l y were p r o d u c i n g separate w o r k they w o u l d often be in dialogue. T i n g u e l y ' s Hannibal (1963) w h i c h appears to respond to Saint-Phalle's reference to H a n n i b a l crossing the A l p s i n her New York Alps; a n d T i n g u e l y ' s Hong Kong is a follow up to Saint-Phalle's King Kong(1963). In both cases we have the stories of great m y t h o l o g i c a l figures reenacted, brought from one w o r l d to another only to become fugitives. 1 3 8 I suggest that a masquerade and 'playful repetition' was increasingly e m p l o y e d b y Saint-Phalle and T i n g u e l y to expose the construction of both masculinity and femininity i n their critique of Pop A r t . This critical strategy is not far removed from the feminist arguments made later b y L u c e Irigaray. In her book This Sex Which is Not One (1985), Irigaray discusses the transgressive possibilities w i t h i n the spaces of the masquerade. For her, the act of mimesis i n these spaces carries w i t h it the possibility for w o m e n to make visible constructions of a masculine logic: To play w i t h mimesis is thus, for a w o m a n , to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, w i t h o u t a l l o w i n g herself to be s i m p l y reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself... to ideas about herself, that are elaborated i n / b y a masculine logic, but so as to make 'visible,' b y an effect of p l a y f u l repetition what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine i n l a n g u a g e . 2 5 0 M u c h has been made i n recent art history of the fact that A n d y Warhol's ability to m i m i c the w o r l d of advertising, fashion and art came from his b a c k g r o u n d i n graphic design. W h a t historians have failed to recognize i n Saint-Phalle's case is her similar ability turn this masquerade into a critical tool to reveal the patriarical, misogynist, and masculinist side of culture. B y the time Saint-Phalle entered into her 'public' role as artist, she had already had lots of experience i n dressing up. This experience can be traced back to her early years as a top international m o d e l . By the age of 19 she h a d graced the covers of not o n l y Vogue magazine, but also Life [fig. 68] where she o b v i o u s l y learned the art of objectification and what it meant to 'pose' for an 2 5 0 L u c y Irigaray This Sex Which is Not One (1977) trans. Catherine Porter Ithaka: C o r n e l l U n i v e r s i t y Press, 1985.1 w o u l d like to acknowledge C e c i l W h i t i n g ' s useful discussion of gender constructions w h e n a p p l y i n g Irigaray's understanding of mimesis to the w o r k of M a r i s o l . 1 3 9 anonymous p u b l i c that is i n m a n y ways parallel to that of the art w o r l d . 2 5 1 By the time she was 30 she h a d not o n l y divorced her first husband (the A m e r i c a n writer H a r r y M a t h e w s ) , but developed an artistic practice centred o n 'her o w n ' p u b l i c execution of the Self. In a s i m i l a r w a y to m y o w n understanding of N i k i de Saint-Phalle's masquarade, historian of P o p A r t Cecile W h i t i n g has located mimetic strategies i n the w o r k of M a r i s o l Escobar: ...between 1961 and 1966 ... M a r i s o l assumed i n this manner different roles of w o m e n p r i m a r i l y of the m i d d l e and u p p e r - m i d d l e classes.... H e r figures — her selves — portray brides, mothers, and w i v e s ; these w o m e n promenade w i t h their families or socialize w i t h other w o m e n . In these sculptures, M a r i s o l appropriated and p l a y e d w i t h various female identities, i n c l u d i n g her o w n . 2 5 2 Rereading M a r i s o l ' s w o r k after decades of neglect by art historians and feminist historians alike, W h i t i n g proposes that M a r i s o l s h o u l d be "reread ... as a feminine subject i n control of the processes of representation and self- representation, rather than as entirely determined b y t h e m . " 2 5 3 W h i l e I w o u l d want to agree w i t h W h i t i n g , I w o u l d hesitate to argue that M a r i s o l , or Saint-Phalle, were fully i n 'control' of these defining processes. A s w e have seen i n the case of Saint-Phalle, these self-representational strategies were partly determined b y a h i g h l y charged socio-political context. 2 5 1 N o t the fitting b y l i n e o n the Life cover w h i c h b y chance points at her later embrace of a m b i g u i t y . 2 5 2 C e c i l e W h i t i n g " F i g u r i n g M a r i s o l ' s F e m i n i n i t i e s " i n A Taste For Pop: Pop Art, Gender and Consumer Culture C a m b r i d g e : C a m b r i d g e U n i v e r s i t y Press, 1997, p.188. 2 5 3 I b i d . 189. 1 4 0 A majority of critiques of Pop A r t have ignored its potential to be read as critical since its superficial 'look' appears to go hand-in-hand w i t h a v i s i o n tied to consumer culture. In a more interesting w a y , Irigaray has opened up a critical understanding of this issue of v i s u a l i t y by i l l u m i n a t i n g the patriarchal nature of this appearance: In our culture, the predominance of the look over s m e l l , taste, touch, hearing has brought an impoverishment of b o d i l y relations. It has contributed to d i s e m b o d y i n g sexuality. The moment the look dominates, the b o d y loses i n materiality....The male sex becomes the sex because it is very visible, the erection is s p e c t a c u l a r . 2 5 4 W h i l e D u c h a m p had obliquely tried to illustrate the w o r k i n g s of this erotically charged v i s u a l culture through an anti-retinal art tied to the language of industry, T i n g u e l y and Saint-Phalle w o u l d , t h r o u g h acts of mimesis, make visible this phallic s p e c t a c l e . 2 5 5 Just as A r m a n and K l e i n h a d d i v i d e d u p the universe into material and i m m a t e r i a l space, T i n g u e l y and Saint-Phalle w o u l d d i v i d e up D u c h a m p ' s Large Glass. In this reading, Tinguely's m o v i n g machines occupied the l o w e r material region of D u c h a m p ' s m a s c u l i n i z e d construction, w h i l e Saint-Phalle's increasingly feminized forms and actions w o u l d respond to The Bride's i m m a t e r i a l upper-region of "fantasy." A s we have n o w seen, the events related to the emergence of Pop A r t i n 1962 had serious consequences for the s u r v i v a l of an avant-garde tied to anarchist politics rooted i n a radical form of i n d i v i d u a l i s m . If this moment 2 ^ 4 L u c e Irigaray Les Femmes, la pornographie, Yerotisme ed. M a r i e - F r a n c o i s e H a n s a n d G i l l e s Lapouge (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p.50 cited i n Jones, p.285. 255se e M o l l y Nesbitt's "The Language of Industry" i n T h i e r r y de D u v e , ed.. The Definatively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Massachusetts: M I T Press, 1992, p p . 351-384. 14 1 has p r e v i o u s l y been celebrated as the emergence of an international P o p A r t connected v i a the seminal influence of M a r c e l D u c h a m p , I suggest that it was also at this moment that collaborative experiments initiated by artists, critics and curators i n France, Sweden and the U n i t e d States collapsed. Rather than seeing i n d i v i d u a l forms of expressions united as one institutionalized happy family, we can n o w see the dysfunctional side of this u n i o n w h i c h forced various i n d i v i d u a l s into c o m p r o m i s e d positions and new aesthetic territory. T u r n i n g back to consider the a w k a r d p o s i t i o n Stockholm's M o d e r n a Museet found itself i n between 1963 and 1966, we w i l l n o w consider h o w this awkwardness was not o n l y i n response to debates w i t h i n the art w o r l d , but must also be read against the precarious p o s i t i o n Sweden found itself i n w i t h i n international politics. It seems to me that just as S w e d e n w o u l d be asked to define its neutrality politics between the C o l d War's superpowers, M o d e r n a Museet found itself forced to address its relation to an A m e r i c a n avant-garde. A s I suggest, the direction M o d e r n a Museet had taken since Movement in Art i n 1961 must increasingly after 1963 have been understood as a 'false start' by H u l t e n and others. The f o l l o w i n g discussion sets out to provide a discursive l i n k between art and politics. C e n t r a l to this i n q u i r y w i l l be the role of sexual politics i n a l l o w i n g these independent attempts to surface and declare the centrality of the margins. 1 4 2 C H A P T E R III T H E M E C H A N I C A L BRIDE STRIPPED B A R E IN S T O C K H O L M , E V E N By reading the history of the post-war avant-garde from the margins (Stockholm) rather than the centre ( N e w Y o r k and Paris), m y first two chapters expose a crisis i n representation w h i c h by the mid-sixties had led to splintered relations between artists, curators, and critics engaged i n cross- Atlantic cultural collaborations. If, b y 1962, the meeting place for this international exchange can be described as h a v i n g occurred o n a tightrope suspended between E u r o p e a n and A m e r i c a n c u l t u r a l institutions, by 1963, i n d i v i d u a l artists such as N i k i de Saint-Phalle, Jean T i n g u e l y , and P e r - O l o f U l t v e d t found their identities falling into 'fixed' positions defined w i t h i n an increasingly dominant N e w Y o r k centred art w o r l d . A s this t h i r d chapter w i l l show, at the moment these artists were forced to regroup and redefine their i n d i v i d u a l and collaborative artistic projects, M o d e r n a Museet, under the leadership of Pontus H u l t e n , w o u l d also be forced to re-negotiate its position. W h i l e o n the outside M o d e r n a Museet appeared to have achieved reputable international attention and strong p u b l i c support from its S w e d i s h audience, the o p t i m i s m that h a d s u r r o u n d e d i n i t i a l exhibitions s u c h as Rorelse i konsten a n d Four Americans w o u l d soon be understood b y insiders as an abortive b e g i n i n g . A s the S w e d i s h - A m e r i c a n conflict over V i e t n a m began to heat up i n 1965, M o d e r n a Museet found itself forced to reconcile its artistic activities w i t h the p o l i t i c a l reality outside its o w n doors. This last Chapter w i l l s h o w just h o w deeply i n v o l v e d M o d e r n a Museet h a d become i n a love affair w i t h A m e r i c a . B y 1966 the S w e d i s h m u s e u m had managed to w i t h d r a w its affection a n d found its o w n identity. But as w e k n o w , breaking u p is h a r d to do. 1 4 3 Love and Despair: The C o m p r o m i s i n g Success of M o d e r n a Museet 1961 - 1965 F u n c t i o n i n g as an extension of the N a t i o n a l M u s e u m , the M o d e r n a Museet had, by 1958, managed to introduce contemporary international art to over 40,000 visitors on a shoestring b u d g e t . 2 5 6 If these attendance figures were not impressive enough to convince state funding agencies of the p u b l i c demand for m o d e r n art, the exhibitions p r o d u c e d under H u l t e n ' s direction between 1961 and 1964 w o u l d arrest their attention. N o t o n l y d i d Movement in Art b r i n g i n over 70,000 visitors, but the exhibition also initiated a l i v e l y public debate about the social role of the m u s e u m [see chapter two]. Between 1962 and 1964 the m u s e u m continued to attract attention w i t h an extensive host of artists to w h o m H u l t e n had been introduced i n N e w Y o r k b y B e l l Laboratory engineer B i l l y K l i i v e r and the concrete poet a n d artist O y v i n d Fahlstrom. F a h l s t r o m had been particularly important i n b r i n g i n g awareness of N e w Y o r k ' s art scene and u n d e r g r o u n d culture to a S w e d i s h p u b l i c . A regular contributor throughout the sixties to the d a i l y Dagens Nyheter, Fahlstrom managed to produce a v i v i d picture of an alternative lifestyle and e x p e r i m e n t a l c u l t u r a l e v e n t s . 2 5 7 E x h i b i t i o n s such as 4 Amerikanare, The New American Cinema: New York Film, and New American Music and Poetry, Ben Shahn, a n d Jackson Pollock, not o n l y b r o u g h t these experimental and exciting events to Stockholm, but they helped redirect discussion of contemporary art a w a y from a p r e v i o u s l y Eurocentric Paris towards a more 2 5 6 I n 1958 the Museum had a budget of 30,000 Swedish Crowns [approx. 6,000 Cdn Dollars] to buy art with. Ulf Linde "Memoarer" in Granath, et. al., p.65. 2 5 7 See for example Fahlstrom's "Orgiernas Brooklyn" [The Brooklyn of Orgies] in Dagens Nyheter (April 17, 1965), p.4 which reviews the American author Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn. The detailed description of existence in Brooklyn's slum district includes discussion of prostitution, homosexuality, alcoholism and drugs. 1 4 4 'popular' N e w Y o r k . In this exchange, Stockholm's m u s e u m came to p l a y a m e d i a t i n g role. Perhaps this exhibition p r o g r a m was not so m u c h a shift i n attention from Europe to the U n i t e d States as it was a diplomatic move to balance Hulten's interest i n transcontinental discourses. Whatever the case m a y have been, the activities were considered successful by S w e d i s h f u n d i n g agencies w h o increased M o d e r n a Museet's purchasing budget to 100.000 C r o w n s by 1964, and significantly granted a one time s u m of 5,000,000 C r o w n s [1 m i l l i o n Dollars] to help purchase new w o r k for its c o l l e c t i o n . 2 5 8 It appears that the government was finally starting to realize the role the m u s e u m c o u l d play i n c u l t u r a l d i p l o m a c y . This extraordinary amount of money h a n d e d d o w n from the state was a direct response to The Museum of Our Wishes, an e x h i b i t i o n o r g a n i z e d between December of 1963 and February 1964 b y H u l t e n and M o d e r n a Museets V a n n e r [fig. 6 9 ] . 2 5 9 B o r r o w i n g from an international range of collectors a n d dealers, a w i d e assortment of 20th C e n t u r y Western artwork (available for purchase) was presented to the museum's n e w f o u n d p u b l i c as a visible p r o p o s a l of what the m u s e u m c o u l d look l i k e if o n l y it h a d sufficient funds to f i l l perceived 'gaps' i n its collection. A donation box was set u p inside the m u s e u m to a l l o w the gallery visitor to feel a part of this c u l t u r a l investment. A n outline and explanation of its avant-garde history was 2 ^ ^ U l f Linde "Memoarer" in Granath, et. al., p.60. 2 ^ 9 A membership club initiated in 1953 as an extension of Nutida Konst [Contemporary Art], a club which had been existence since 1925. See Gerard Bonnier "Fdretal" Moderna Museet's Vanner Onskemuseet Stockholm: Tryckeri A B Bjorkmans Eftr., 1963, p . l . whose name translates to "Friends of Moderna Museet." The initial idea came from Osten Fagerlind, one of the board members, who with Linde expanded the idea into a large scale exhibition. 1 4 5 p r o v i d e d i n the form of a lengthy catalogue written b y U l f L i n d e (who had by this time established himself as a w e l l - k n o w n art critic for Dagens Nyheter, the largest of the S w e d i s h dailies). This was accompanied by reproductions of the art w o r k a n d the introduction " A r t w o r k H a s N o Price" by H u l t e n . In his text, H u l t e n stressed the democratic nature of m o d e r n art b y p r o p o s i n g that despite the monetary value society has placed o n art, "that w h i c h is meaningful i n art [still] belongs to a l l . " 2 6 0 This said, H u l t e n urged the reader to support their m u s e u m i n its attempt to wrestle some of the most innovative m o d e r n art away from private collectors: E v e n if prices for art are high, one has to attempt to b r i n g together a collection of art b y the innovators of m o d e r n art before it is too late. It is legitimate for a m u s e u m to pay a h i g h price for an art w o r k . Since art i n a m u s e u m w i l l belong to a l l , it can never be said to be too expensive. If integrated into the m u s e u m collection the art w o r k gets r i d of its resale value since it w i l l not be s o l d . 2 6 1 H a v i n g m o r a l l y positioned the economic side of the museum's collecting activities outside — yet at an arms-length distance from — the private interests of the art market, H u l t e n continued to offer reasons w h y it was necessary for a S w e d i s h p u b l i c institution to have an international art collection: ...The role of art is increasingly becoming larger as the content of our times is b e c o m i n g incomprehensible, confused, a n d frightening. A country must have a place to store this m y t h - i n s p i r i n g material, one has to produce a reference system and a source of inspiration. Especially i n a l a n d o n the periphery, where major art events are rare a n d the i m p o r t of foreign art is l i m i t e d , where one risks b e i n g placed outside what happens i n the centre. O n l y through k n o w l e d g e about what is 2 6 0 p o n r u s Hulten "Konstverk har inget pris" Moderna Museet's Vanner Onskemuseet Stockholm: Tryckeri A B Bjorkmans Eftr., 1963, p.8. 2 6 1 I b i d . , pp.8-9. 1 4 6 h a p p e n i n g c a n o n e p r o d u c e one's o w n c o n t r i b u t i o n . . . . T h e t i m e h a s c o m e to m a k e a s e r i o u s c o m m i t m e n t to b u i l d i n g a r e p r e s e n t a t i v e c o l l e c t i o n o f i n t e r n a t i o n a l art. L e t u s w i s h e a c h o t h e r s u c c e s s i n t h i s p r o j e c t . 2 6 2 B a c k i n g u p H u l t e n ' s p l e a for a c o l l a b o r a t i v e p u r c h a s e o f h i s t o r y , U l f L i n d e o f f e r e d h i s h i s t o r i c a l a c c o u n t of the d i f f e r e n t m o v e m e n t s i n m o d e r n art r e p r e s e n t e d i n the e x h i b i t i o n . S e v e n c a t e g o r i e s o f p r e - W o r l d W a r II art w e r e d e f i n e d : F a u v i s m a n d E x p r e s s i o n i s m , C u b i s m , F u t u r i s m , D a d a , A b s t r a c t A r t , C l a s s i c i s m a n d O b j e c t i v i t y , S u r r e a l i s m . C o n n e c t e d to these "roots i n m o d e r n i s m ' s past," b u t m o v i n g b e y o n d t h e m , f o u r g e n e r a l c a t e g o r i e s o f p o s t - 1945 art w e r e d i s t i n g u i s h e d : P e i n t r e s de T r a d i t i o n F r a n c a i s e , C o l d [Strang] A b s t r a c t i o n , T h e U n f o r m e d , a n d f i n a l l y N e w R e a l i s m r e p r e s e n t e d b y T i n g u e l y , K l e i n , R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d J o h n s . I n L i n d e ' s a c c o u n t , the l a t t e r t w o m o v e m e n t s a i m to d i s s o l v e c e r t a i n a s p e c t s o f m o d e r n i s m : [For these p o s t - w a r artists] the b e l i e f s h e l d b y the p i o n e e r s [of m o d e r n art] i n f o r m a l i s t m a g i c a p p e a r s to h a v e d i s s i p a t e d , a n d n e i t h e r c a n [today's] y o u t h u n d e r s t a n d art as a t o o l to r e a c h b o u r g e o i s t r u t h s . L e a s t of a l l c a n t h e y a c c e p t that art s h o u l d f u n c t i o n l i k e a s t o c k m a r k e t c e r t i f i c a t e . B u t w h a t p u r p o s e d o e s art h a v e t h e n ? T h i s q u e s t i o n c a n l e a d to d e s p a i r — b u t i t d o e s n o t n e c e s s a r i l y d o so. It c a n a l s o b e u s e d as a s e a r c h l i g h t to e x p l o r e u n k n o w n t e r r i t o r i e s w h e r e n e w v a l u e s are b e g i n n i n g to g r o w . 2 6 3 R e a d i n g t h i s , i t a p p e a r s that L i n d e , l i k e H u l t e n , w a n t e d to s e v e r the u m b i l i c a l c o r d o f g o l d t i e d to a b o u r g e o i s e l i t e a n d r e p l a c e i t w i t h a m o r e e g a l i t a r i a n c u l t u r a l l i f e - s u p p o r t s y s t e m t h a t r a n parallel to s o c i a l d e m o c r a c y . A s a n t i c i p a t e d , t h i s a p p a r e n t l y ' c o l l e c t i v e ' m a n d a t e a p p e a l e d to t h e S o c i a l i s t 2 6 2 I b i d . , p.8. 2 6 3 U l f Linde "Efter Kriget" Moderna Museet's Vanner Onskemuseet Stockholm: Tryckeri A B Bjorkmans Eftr., 1963, p.63. 1 4 7 government's Department of C u l t u r e w h o responded g e n e r o u s l y . 2 6 4 M o d e r n a Museet h a d thus b y 1964 not o n l y managed to m a i n t a i n an active space for contemporary art, but had also established a strong historical collection o n w h i c h they c o u l d b u i l d their o w n contemporary t r a d i t i o n . 2 6 5 In his description of N e w Realism, U l f L i n d e p r o p o s e d that w h i l e one may despair of the c o m p l i c i t role artists explicitly p l a y i n the art market (and we can o n l y presume that he is referring to the Pop artist), this 'other' new realism or 'unformed' art c o u l d function as a searchlight to explore u n k n o w n territories where n e w values were g r o w i n g . By 1964, M o d e r n a Museet h a d discovered a new path away from P o p art, but because of earlier commitments its p u b l i c i n t r o d u c t i o n w o u l d have to w a i t another year. Before this avenue c o u l d actively be explored, the m u s e u m h a d to fulfil its earlier commitments to a N e w Y o r k centred avant-garde. Between February 29 and A p r i l 12, 1964, M o d e r n a Museet presented the first large-scale P o p A r t exhibition i n Europe. A p t l y titled American Pop Art: 106 Forms of Love and Despair, the e x h i b i t i o n i n c l u d e d a w i d e selection of w o r k by N e w Y o r k artists J i m D i n e , R o y Lichtenstein, Claes O l d e n b u r g , James Rosenquist, George Segal, A n d y W a r h o l , and T o m W e s s e l m a n [fig. 70]. For the catalogue cover a n d exhibition poster, Lichtenstein designed one of his 2 6 4 F o r more information on the government's funding of Modern Museet, see Roland Palsson's article "60-talet 'in nostalgiam'" in Granath and Niekels, pp.141-142. Palsson took over as head for the Department of Ecklesiastik's newly formed Department of Culture in 1961 and remained a vital supporter of Hulten's activities throughout the sixties. 265ft should not go unmentioned that Onskemuseet did, despite its public success, receive criticism. Reviewing the exhibition in Konstrevy, Eugen Wretholm made clear that it "reflects a 'Paris centred overview'" that did not include work by pioneers of the informel such as Hans Hartung, Englishmen such as Ben Nicholson and Graham Sutherland, the Portugese Vieira da Silva, nor any abstract German paintings. Wretholm, Eugen "Utstallningar i Stockholm: Hosten 1963" Konstrevy No. 1 (1964), p.32. 1 4 8 signature graphic images of a salesman's h a n d p o i n t i n g directly at the v i e w e r i n the manner of "Uncle Sam Wants Y o u ! " [figs. 71] A fitting image at a moment w h e n some artists and intellectuals felt that they were being drafted against their o w n w i l l into the w r o n g aesthetic camp. W h a t must have read as an o d d introduction to the exhibition, Hulten's text d i d not p r o v i d e the usual enthusiastic sales p i t c h one w o u l d have expected to read i n a m u s e u m catalogue. In fact, considering h o w m u c h time and effort H u l t e n had invested i n p r o m o t i n g an art tied to i r o n y and humor, this introduction casts a rather dark shadow o n an otherwise eye- p o p p i n g experience: It is a c o m m o n mistake to believe that there is a great i r o n y p o i n t e d at mass culture embedded i n Lichtenstein's or Warhol's pictures.... This is i n m a n y w a y s a n e w art created from a different point of o r i g i n . It is the creation of a generation w h o feels powerless to transform the w o r l d ... and i n order to survive is forced to accept it.... They partake i n m u c h of the w o r l d a r o u n d them i n a meaningless, unengaged manner. In relation to society and its problems they stand passive. Politics do not interest t h e m . 2 6 6 Hulten's description of these artists' 'apolitical' attitude a n d lack of i r o n y m a y be an outrageously false accusation. Nevertheless, it d i d serve to distance P o p A r t from a more apparently engaged and historical E u r o p e a n avant-garde. B y p o i n t i n g to the former artists' "middle-class u p b r i n g i n g " i n the U n i t e d States, H u l t e n positioned them squarely i n the lap (it is tempting to say "shopping cart") of a consumer-based mass culture: 2 6 6 p o n t u s H u l t e n " F o r o r d " Amerikansk pop-konst: 106 former av karlek och fortvivlan Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1964, p.15 (pp.15-16). 149 They are not bohemians. They have never had to confront real external pressures. M o s t of them are too y o u n g to have participated i n the war. A s artists they have reached success and economic security w i t h a speed rarely seen before. This economic success is what they strive for. They are not especially intellectual, nor do they have a deep interest i n anything but pure personal experience.... Their w a y to respond to society is personal, not s o c i a l . 2 6 7 Despite his o w n distinct interest i n radical i n d i v i d u a l i s m , H u l t e n had never advocated an anti-social position. After a l l , even if he d i d not see himself as a socialist, it was w i t h i n social spaces such as M o d e r n a M u s e e t where anarchist 'play' c o u l d be activated. W i t h this i n m i n d , Hulten's image of Pop A r t reads as one of despair — a position to be a v o i d e d . Scrambling to make something positive of the exhibition, H u l t e n , w i t h o u t suggesting that the w o r k was socially critical, proposed that the 106 forms of love and despair on display were desperate attempts at obtaining the freedom to experience life: Pop A r t is not social criticism. Instead one can say that it shows a l o n g i n g for relaxation. It is desperately t a k i n g part i n an unavoidable environment, and being subtly optimistic about the p o w e r of v u l g a r i t y and banality. O n a personal level, one object is not better than the next. If there is something of interest one can manage to f i n d i n these often s i m i l a r copies of objects, it is the t r i u m p h of feelings. The P o p artists do not ask any questions and have no agendas. W h a t they w a n t to offer us, is b y a l l accounts, a new w a y of f e e l i n g . 2 6 8 W i t h h o l d i n g a p u b l i c judgment of P o p art, H u l t e n c o n c l u d e d his introduction w i t h the rhetorical question i n brackets: " W i l l [these artists] be 2 6 7 I b i d . . 2 6 8 I b i d . . 1 5 0 s u c c e s s f u l i n f u l f i l l i n g that p a r t o f the e x p e r i e n t i a l v a c u u m w h i c h is the b o m b ' s u l t i m a t e r e a s o n ? " 2 6 9 If H u l t e n ' s text c o u l d f u n c t i o n as a m e a n s to d i s t a n c e the i r o n y a n d s o c i a l c r i t i q u e o f a E u r o p e a n a v a n t - g a r d e f r o m the i n d i v i d u a l i s m h e felt w a s p a r t a n d p a r c e l w i t h a N e w Y o r k v a n g u a r d , t h e n the A m e r i c a n art c r i t i c A l a n R. S o l o m o n ' s a c c o m p a n y i n g e s s a y " T h e N e w A m e r i c a n A r t " a c h i e v e d the s a m e s e p a r a t i o n b u t w i t h o p p o s i t e i n t e n t i o n s . C o u n t e r i n g H u l t e n ' s i m a g e o f " d e s p a i r , " S o l o m o n s u g g e s t s that these artists m a n a g e d to w o r k t h e i r w a y o u t of the c o n f i n e d h i s t o r i c a l c i r c u m s t a n c e s f a c e d b y b o t h the A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s a n d N e o - D a d a i s t s . A w a r e of the activities of artists l i k e R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d J o h n s , a n d free f r o m a d e p e n d e n c e o n the E u r o p e a n a v a n t - g a r d e ' s r o o t s , the n e w g e n e r a t i o n o f A m e r i c a n P o p artists a p p r o a c h e d t h e i r e n v i r o n m e n t " s p o n t a n e o u s l y " a n d " i n d e p e n d e n t f r o m e a c h o t h e r . " 2 7 0 A c c o r d i n g to S o l o m o n , P o p art h a d n o t b e e n s e r i o u s l y c o n s i d e r e d b y c r i t i c s w h o f u n d a m e n t a l l y m i s r e a d the w o r k as e i t h e r a f o r m o f s o c i a l p r o t e s t o r c y n i c i s m : I h a v e a r g u e d e l s e w h e r e h o w e x t r e m e l y w r o n g this u n d e r s t a n d i n g is b y s h o w i n g h o w these artists are a l l w o r k i n g f r o m p e r s o n a l e x p e r i e n c e s w h i c h h a v e n o interest o r c o n n e c t i o n to s o c i a l o r p o l i t i c a l m a n i f e s t a t i o n s . It is w i t h great r e g r e t that o n e h a s p u t the l a b e l P o p A r t o n t h i s g r o u p ' s w o r k . R e g r e t f u l , s i n c e t h i s h a s c r e a t e d s u c h great c o n f u s i o n a m o n g s t its p u b l i c . T h e t e r m P o p A r t w a s c o i n e d i n E n g l a n d a m o n g s t a g r o u p o f artists w h o w e r e m o s t i n t e r e s t e d i n e x p r e s s i n g t h e i r s o c i a l d i s s a t i s f a c t i o n a n d felt a s t r o n g n e e d to c h a n g e e s t a b l i s h e d s t a n d a r d s . T h e s e p r o b l e m s c a r r y n o i n t e r e s t for the A m e r i c a n p a i n t e r s w h o a c c e p t life as it is a n d i n s t e a d o f d o w n p l a y i n g a n d d u m p i n g o n o u r 2 6 9 i b i d . . 2 7 0 A l a n R. S o l o m o n " D e n N y a a m e r i k a n s k a konsten" Amerikansk pop-konst: 106 former av karlek och fbrtvivlan S t o c k h o l m : M o d e r n a M u s e e t , 1964, p.19 (pp.17-23). 15 1 v u l g a r c i v i l i z a t i o n , they celebrate it o p t i m i s t i c a l l y w i t h n e w standard measures they themselves have i n v e n t e d . 2 7 1 In Solomon's construction, the Pop artist was u n i q u e l y A m e r i c a n precisely because he refused to acknowledge his w o r k i n an historical c o n t i n u u m . Read against Hulten's understanding of Pop art as a movement rooted i n despair, Solomon's text detects an A m e r i c a n love affair free from a E u r o p e a n historical consciousness. This nicely explains the title of the exhibition and points to the former's fear of losing i r o n y and the latter's celebration of its loss. D u r i n g the fall of 1964, M o d e r n a Museet w o u l d once again p l a y host to N e w Yorkers. This time it was M e r c e C u n n i n g h a m ' s Dance C o m p a n y w h o , d u r i n g its w o r l d tour, received an i n v i t a t i o n to v i s i t S t o c k h o l m for a summer vacation. Put u p at Ultvedt's country house just outside S t o c k h o l m , the performers (who i n c l u d e d Rauschenberg, Steve Paxton, John Cage, D a v i d Tudor, C a r o l i n e B r o w n , A l e x and Deborah H a y , Robert M o r r i s , Y v o n n e Rainer, and Trisha Brown) were also i n v i t e d to organize at the m u s e u m a series of "happenings" at the m u s e u m w h i c h became k n o w n as 5 New York Evenings.272 In Hulten's w o r d s , this w o u l d be "the last b i g o r g a n i z e d event i n what had been the springtime of collaborations w i t h the N e w Y o r k a r t i s t s . . . . " 2 7 3 2 7 1 I b i d . , p.23. 2 7 2 I n light of what w e k n o w from the private correspondence between L i n d e a n d U l t v e d t , the fact that they stayed at U l t v e d t ' s place seems a w k w a r d . 2 7 3 H u l t e n "The N e w Y o r k C o n n e c t i o n " G r a n a t h , et. al., p.56. 1 5 2 A m o n g the m a n y performances, 5 New York Evenings i n c l u d e d M e r c e C u n n i n g h a m ' s Summers-pace [fig. 72], Robert M o r r i s a n d Y v o n n e Rainer's Olympia and Check, Steve Paxton's Jag vill gdrna telefonera [I Would Gladly Make a Phone Call], a n d Rauschenberg's The Elgin Tie [fig. 73]. For H u l t e n this must have been an a w k w a r d moment. A s an early avant-garde matchmaker, H u l t e n was n o w witnessing "the end of a l o n g beautiful summer" of collaborations w h i c h had started off as an anarchist's collaborative affair but was n o w e n d i n g i n collective despair. Despite this apparent conflict, i n M a r c h of 1965 Rauschenberg's Illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy were presented w i t h m u c h p u b l i c attention. For H u l t e n and the m u s e u m , a Rauschenberg e x h i b i t i o n shortly after his international success at the Venice Biennale i n the s u m m e r of 1964 (he was the first A m e r i c a n to w i n the L i o n d'Or) was no doubt an important feather i n their respective caps. But this engagement must also have been an extremely uncomfortable compromise for someone i n H u l t e n ' s shoes as he attempted not to fall from the tightrope he himself h a d helped to stretch between v a r i o u s i n d i v i d u a l factions. B y the s p r i n g of 1965, Pontus H u l t e n w o u l d be "grounded;" forced into a position where he c o u l d not do another N e w Y o r k event w i t h o u t fearing p u b l i c and private execution. W i t h its n e w found p u b l i c v i s i b i l i t y , M o d e r n a Museet was n o w not o n l y being pressured b y a s m a l l group of intellectuals to sever ties w i t h the U n i t e d States, but was increasingly attracting c r i t i c i s m from a broader p u b l i c responding to politics related to A m e r i c a n m i l i t a r y interventions i n V i e t n a m . B y February of 1965, a n t i - A m e r i c a n sentiments were reaching a peak. To understand what this escalation meant for the 1 5 3 museum, as w e l l as the country as a whole, w e have to position S w e d i s h foreign politics next to the history of the post-war avant-garde i n the first chapters. N e u t r a l i t y , Independence and Internationalism: The C u l t u r a l F o r m a t i o n of C o l d W a r Politics i n Sweden, 1958-65. P a r a l l e l to Hulten's attempt to forge an independent c u l t u r a l position between Paris and N e w Y o r k i n Stockholm, Sweden was by the late fifties struggling to define its identity between the C o l d W a r superpowers. Just as we have seen i n the c u l t u r a l history of this p e r i o d , Sweden has also, u n t i l recently, largely been ignored i n d i p l o m a t i c history. W i t h a p o p u l a t i o n of o n l y approximately 8 m i l l i o n , but covering the fourth largest l a n d area i n Europe, S w e d e n occupied an interesting p o s i t i o n w i t h i n a post-war p o l i t i c a l terrain. A l t h o u g h relatively isolated geographically, and c l a i m i n g p o l i t i c a l neutrality, S w e d e n was nonetheless an active player i n international politics and p l a y e d an important role i n foreign relations. W e have seen i n the first chapter h o w Sweden was considered a m o d e l society b y m a n y o n the Left i n the early fifties. B y the early 1960s, Sweden was s t i l l l a u d e d b y m a n y countries, i n c l u d i n g the U n i t e d States, for the h i g h standard of l i v i n g it h a d achieved and the "middle-way" it h a d successfully forged. W h i l e being governed b y a Socialist government since 1932, S w e d e n h a d become one of the most A m e r i c a n i z e d countries i n Europe, a n d h a d , even according to L y n d o n Johnson, achieved "happy and honorable bonds" w i t h the U n i t e d States." 2 7 4 2 7 4 F r e d r i k L o g e v a l l "The S w e d i s h - A m e r i c a n C o n f l i c t O v e r V i e t n a m " Diplomatic History (Summer 1993), p.424. 1 5 4 The apparently comfortable relationship that literature has constructed of this time and place, w o u l d however soon be put into question, for there were significant u n d e r l y i n g tensions w h i c h w o u l d lead to heated controversy by the summer of 1965. Sweden's public refusal to join defense pacts such as the Brussels Treaty O r g a n i z a t i o n , and its later version N o r t h A t l a n t i c Treaty O r g a n i z a t i o n ( N A T O ) , coupled w i t h its attempt to set up independent defense pacts w i t h other Scandinavian countries, had irritated the U n i t e d States for a number of years. W h a t undercut this irritation was a secret alliance forged between N A T O and the S w e d i s h g o v e r n m e n t . 2 7 5 G e o p o l i t i c a l l y caught between the two superpowers of the Soviet U n i o n and The U n i t e d States and recognizing its l i m i t e d sovereignty i n this context, the S w e d i s h government increasingly realized its role w i t h i n international politics as that of a buffer s t a t e . 2 7 6 In this balancing act, w h i c h is paralleled i n H u l t e n ' s m u s e u m activities, the Social Democratic government, led b y P r i m e M i n i s t e r Tage Erlander, was publicly f i r m i n its stand that S w e d e n c o u l d o n l y remain neutral b y a v o i d i n g explicit ties to the West. B y the mid-sixties, just as the M o d e r n a M u s e e t h a d become intimately connected and associated w i t h an A m e r i c a n form of art, a v o i d i n g explicit ties 2 7 5 T h i s was revealed during the summer of 1992 when the newly elected conservative government, in an attempt to strengthen its relations with the European Union (EG), admitted to Sweden's ties to N A T O during the 1950s and '60s. This "secret" appeared in documents related to the trial of the Swedish general Stig Wennerstrom who was revealled to have been a Cold War spy for Russia while simultaneously being involved in linking the Swedish War Intelligence Centre (Svenska stridsledningscentralen) with N A T O centres in Norway and Denmark. See "Hyckleri?" in Expressen (May 27, 1992), p.2; and "Spionforhor bekraftar N A T O kontakten" Dagens Nyheter (May 27, 1992), p.l&6; These issues can also be followed in the Parlamentary debates regarding Swedish Neutrality. See Riksdagen Protokol (1991-1992, May 25, 1992), in answer to interpellations, p.2-16. 2 7 6 M y use of the term "buffer state" is in reference to a study edited by John Chay and Thomas E. Ross entitled Buffer States in World Politics Colorado: Westview Press, 1986 in which a buffer area is defined as "an area...controlled by one or more small states and located between two opposing — and much greater — powers... The buffer system dictates that neither (great power) can dominate the system." p.90. 1 5 5 to the West was becoming increasingly difficult for a country t r y i n g to remain o n the economically profitable road to democracy that an American-based consumer culture p r o v i d e d . Increasingly, S w e d e n was b e g i n n i n g to look 'explicitly' A m e r i c a n i z e d , an uncomfortable fact for m a n y o n the Left i n Sweden and abroad. In the s p r i n g of 1965, at a moment w h e n S w e d i s h liberalism under a Socialist government was being pressured to find some w a y to m a r k out its p o l i t i c a l differences from A m e r i c a n liberalism, an escalation of major A m e r i c a n g r o u n d forces into V i e t n a m w o u l d p r o v i d e Sweden w i t h an opportunity to reposition and redefine its neutrality politics. B y February of 1965, A m e r i c a n b o m b i n g of N o r t h V i e t n a m had begun. N o t o n l y d i d it p u s h the w a r into a new phase, but it shifted m u c h international o p i n i o n against the U n i t e d States' i n v o l v e m e n t . 2 7 7 This was particularly the case i n Sweden where d i p l o m a t i c tensions m o u n t e d r a p i d l y and had erupted o n an alarming scale b y June w h e n a series of p u b l i c demonstrations took place i n the streets of Stockholm [fig. 74], p u t t i n g pressure o n the government to respond. Speaking at a July 30 meeting of the C h r i s t i a n Democrats i n 1965, O l o f Palme, then M i n i s t e r of Transport and C o m m u n i c a t i o n s , declared his objections to A m e r i c a n i n v o l v e m e n t i n V i e t n a m b y stating that "it is i l l u s o r y to believe that demands for social justice can be met w i t h violence and m i l i t a r y f o r c e . " 2 7 8 "The Social Democrat's basic m o r a l value," he continued, "forces us at each t u r n to stand o n the side of the repressed against oppressors, o n a miserable and poor 2 7 7 A n escalation of major American ground forces into Vietnam took place during the spring of 1965. See Fredrik Logevall's "De Gaulle, Neutralization, and American Involvement in Vietnam, 1963-1964" Pacific Historical Review (February 1992), pp.69-102. 2 7 8 Y n g v e Moller Sverige och Vietnam: ett unikt kapitel i svensk utrikespolitik Stockholm: Tidens Forlag, 1992, p.39. Moller's book is the most thorough discussion of Palme's speech and along with Logevall's article gives an excellent overview of the Swedish-American conflict over Vietnam. 156 peoples side against their users and l o r d s . " 2 7 9 Palme's cutting remarks d i d not go unnoticed by A m e r i c a n Embassy officials w h o were quick to voice their objections to what they understood as a direct attack o n U . S . foreign politics. F o l l o w i n g suit, the State Department i n W a s h i n g t o n d e m a n d e d "clarification" from the S w e d i s h G o v e r n m e n t as to whether or not they supported Palme's statements. A l t h o u g h S w e d i s h o p i n i o n was not u n i f o r m , Erlander and foreign minister Torsten N i l s s o n p u b l i c l y supported Palme's p o s i t i o n . 2 8 0 In the s p r i n g of 1966 further irritation for the U n i t e d States w o u l d be added to the w o u n d caused b y Sweden's position regarding V i e t n a m w h e n Erlander decided to a l l o w the Bertrand Russell International W a r C r i m e s T r i b u n a l to be h e l d i n Stockholm the f o l l o w i n g year. The tribunal, w h i c h i n c l u d e d celebrated opponents to the V i e t n a m W a r such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaac Deutscher, and others, h a d been banned from Paris by Charles de G a u l l e . R e s p o n d i n g to this decision, the Swedes were informed by the S w e d i s h Embassy that President Johnson was "disappointed and d i s t u r b e d . " 2 8 1 A s historian Frederik L o g e v a l l and others have s h o w n , the summer of 1965 h a d been the t u r n i n g point m a r k i n g a n e w direction i n S w e d i s h foreign p o l i c y , e m b o d y i n g a more activist approach to international issues and a greater determination to stake out a p o s i t i o n between the 2 7 9 I b i d . , p.38-39. 280g e e Dagens Nyheter "Vi star fast om Vietnam" (August 3, 1965), p.5. Erlander is quoted as saying that "I have nothing more to say today. The Government's view regarding the Vietnam conflict has been criticized by America. We have had our say. A n d this we stand by." The intense Swedish press debate concerning American involvement in Vietnam during the summer of 1965 has been the focus for a doctoral dissertation from the University of Lund. See Eva Queckfeldt 'Vietnam': Tre svenska tidnignars syn pd vienam fragan Phd. Lund Universitet: Bibliotheca Histroica Lundensis, 1981. The articles from this press debate have also been collected in book form under the title Vietnam i svensk press debatt Sommaren 1965. Stockholms Universitet. 2 8 1 L o g e v a l l (1993), p.429. 1 5 7 s u p e r p o w e r s . 2 8 2 This new direction by Sweden, w h i c h sought to forge a more sovereign path for itself, ultimately strained S w e d i s h - A m e r i c a n relations to the point where both the Johnson a n d N i x o n administrations issued numerous threats of i m p e n d i n g economic s a n c t i o n s . 2 8 3 A l t h o u g h Y n g v e M o l l e r , former S w e d i s h ambassador to the U n i t e d States, i n his impressive study Sverige och Vietnam Kriget (1992) has stressed the important role p l a y e d by S w e d i s h intellectuals i n forging national o p i n i o n by v o i c i n g their strong objections to A m e r i c a n i n v o l v e m e n t i n V i e t n a m , he, l i k e other historians, fails to discuss the intense c u l t u r a l politics that were being p l a y e d out next to these so called 'hard' politics. In m y reconstruction of this time and place, these two parallel histories must both be recognized i n order to account for the c u l t u r a l politics at p l a y [see figs. 73 and 75]. A s described earlier, o n M a r c h 19,1965, precisely w h e n A m e r i c a n i n v o l v e m e n t i n V i e t n a m escalated and what has been called the " S w e d i s h - A m e r i c a n conflict" intensified, M o d e r n a M u s e e t opened its exhibition of 34 illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy b y Robert Rauschenberg. A week later, at the v e r y moment S w e d i s h p o l i t i c a l commentators began attacking A m e r i c a ' s role i n V i e t n a m i n the d a i l y press, art critic U l f L i n d e wrote the first of what w o u l d become four 'seminal' articles d e n o u n c i n g the N e w Y o r k avant-garde i n the liberal d a i l y Dagens Nyheter.2** 2 8 2 I b i d . , p.427. 2 8 3 I b i d „ p.444. 2 8 4 T h e r e are four articles i n total. See U l f L i n d e ' s " D e n O p p n a konsten: A r v e t fran M u n c h e n " Dagens Nyheter ( M a r c h 26, 1965), p.4; "Den O p p n a konsten: M y t e n o m d e n historielosa formen" Dagens Nyheter ( M a r c h 30, 1965), p.4; "Den O p p n a konsten: D e n b i l d 'man' har" Dagens Nyheter ( A p r i l 4, 1965), p.4; " D e n O p p n a konsten: D i a l o g u e utan slut" Dagens Nyheter ( M a y 13, 1965), p.4. 158 Four Articles: U l f Linde's C r i t i q u e of O p e n A r t H a v i n g for years supported M o d e r n a Museet and h a v i n g been one of the earliest defenders of the new "open art" from N e w Y o r k i n the p o p u l a r press, L i n d e ' s first article "Den O p p n a konsten: A r v e t fran M u n c h e n " (The O p e n A r t : the Inheritance from M u n i c h ) shifts his support of the A m e r i c a n vanguard to a critique of it w i t h o u t contradicting his past judgments i n the process [fig. 76]. To achieve this, L i n d e focused his attention o n the 'Pop A r t phenomenon' not by dealing directly w i t h the artists and their w o r k , but by s h o w i n g h o w the 'meaning' of the w o r k has been created "outside the studio" to produce a series of misunderstandings. H e finds the best example of this external c o r r u p t i o n i n an article by A l a n R. S o l o m o n , p u b l i s h e d o n l y a few months earlier i n Art International. It s h o u l d be p o i n t e d out that S o l o m o n h a d just served as the U . S . C o m m i s s i o n e r for the V e n i c e Biennale, an event i n w h i c h Rauschenberg h a d 'stolen' the international p r i z e from the Europeans for an unprecedented first t i m e . 2 8 5 "Jim D i n e and the Psychology of the N e w A r t " was published i n October, 1964, and as i n his essay for M o d e r n a Museet's P o p A r t exhibition earlier that year, S o l o m o n aimed to secure a distinctly A m e r i c a n interpretation of P o p : A series of exhibitions i n E u r o p e d u r i n g the past twelve months, first i n L o n d o n and Stockholm..., has o n l y succeeded i n extending the confusion abroad, since E u r o p e a n critics have consistently 2 8 ^Laurie Monahan has revealed the cultural engineering that took place behind the scenes of Rauschenberg's victory at the Venice Biennale. Contextualizing this art in relation to the Kennedy Administration's rhetoric of the New Frontier, Monahan links the rise of Neo-Dada and Pop Art in the United States to American cultural and political expansionism. See Laurie Monahan's "Cultural Cartography: American Designs at the 1964 Venice Biennale" in Guilbaut, Serge Ed. Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1945-1964 Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990, pp. 369-416. 1 5 9 misunderstood the work. The American exhibition at the Venice Biennale has been described in the European press as an invasion of Pop, and Rauschenberg, the International Prize winner, has been crowned King of Pop Art, despite the fact that none of the artists in the exhibition regards himself, or should be regarded, as a Pop Artist."286 As he had argued in his earlier text for Moderna Museet's Pop Art exhibition, Solomon maintained that Pop was distinct from the assemblage art of someone like Rauschenberg. This enabled him to sever any potential ties to European art and make the argument that Pop artists responded to their immediate lived environment in a natural and "original" way. Reacting to the anti-European thrust of Solomon's article, Linde, while choosing not to quote the above paragraph as an example of Solomon's pro-Americanism, picked the following few sentences as a "typical" example of the attitude adopted by American critics — as well as the Pop artists themselves: Instead of protesting, or satirizing, they are telling us that anything goes, and that the mystery of art does not depend on any imaginable preconception. This openness, so much a determinant in the attitude of the new American generation, comes not from indifference, but from a desire for a new esthetic and a new morality. Such a point of view is absolutely incomprehensible to Europeans, except for a few who have had some taste of contemporary American life. Oriented toward Cartesian rationalism by a long and rich tradition, the ambiguity of attitude and the apparent absence of familiar disciplines (there is, of course, a new discipline) annoy and distract them.2 8 7 For Linde, the first and last sentence in this quote sufficed to illustrate what he saw as an inherent contradiction in Solomon's thinking. If a new discipline is established, he asked, "doesn't this prevent a series of things 2 8 6 A l a n R. S o l o m o n "Jim D i n e a n d P s y c h o l o g y of the N e w A r t " Art International (October 1964), p.52 (52-56). 2 8 7 S o l o m o n quoted i n L i n d e Linde's " D e n Oppna konsten: A r v e t fran M u n c h e n " Dagens Nyheter ( M a r c h 26, 1965), p.4. 1 6 0 from h a p p e n i n g w h i c h w o u l d have been possible p r i o r to the establishment of the discipline?" In other w o r d s , can "anything" s t i l l happen i n the new order of an "open" art? U n d e r s t o o d as a major contradiction, this was an aspect of his o w n w r i t i n g that S o l o m o n must have understood and tried to cover u p . L i n d e found proof of this awareness (what he referred to as his "slightly larger intelligence") i n a text by S o l o m o n from 1963 o n Rauschenberg's Monogram i n w h i c h he d i s t i n g u i s h e d between a "rational" and "utterly unexplainable" level of meaning: Its [Monogram's] "rightness" and clarity can not be denied, and yet the goat absolutely defies any k i n d of rational explanation; it has no meaning, i n the conventional sense. Yet there is a certain justness i n the i l l o g i c a l association of the two elements w h i c h makes the object eminently satisfying to us, o n a p u r e l y intuitive and utterly inexplicable p l a n e . 2 8 8 This passage for L i n d e was a clear example of Solomon's m a n y contradictions. In his former argument, S o l o m o n h a d p r o p o s e d that "a 2 8 8 Q u o t e d in Linde's article but here sited from the original text (for translation purposes): Alan R. Solomon Robert Rauschenberg New York: The Jewish Museum, 1963 reprinted in Steven Henry Madoff (Ed.) Pop Art: A Critical History Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, pp.22 (19-24). In this longer text, Solomon describes Rauschenberg as "a kind of esthetic tightropewalker." Continuing he proposes that Rauschenberg is "easing his way along with a solid sense of balance above the pitfalls of ugliness, vulgarity or slickness. The sureness of his performance depends on taking chances; his absolute tact and his impeccable taste are concealed beneath the facility and the abandon of the performance.... He might seem to depend too much on the bizarre encounter and the happy accident, on excessive statements and out- landish propositions. However, a more careful look at his intentions and at his way of working makes the absolute refinement of his position clear enough." (my italics). Solomon adds that Rauschenberg's ideas "have widely influenced the new generation of artists, as well as some of Rauschenberg's contemporaries, so that Tinguely's constructions with radios [for example]... have become almost commonplace." p.24. The concluding paragraph is completely devoted to separating Rauschenberg from the European representative in New York, Marcel Duchamp: "Rauschenberg has often been compared with Duchamp.... The fact is that Rauschenberg was not particularily conscious of Duchamp until quite late, until his own position had been for the most part defined." Ibid.. 1 6 1 certain relationship between the parts of an artwork, a certain structure" can through intuition prepare the v i e w e r for an "unexpected satisfaction." A g r e e i n g w i t h S o l o m o n o n the order of things up to this point, L i n d e however observed that since w r i t i n g this i n 1963, the w o r d intuition had been subtly replaced w i t h instinct. M o r e precisely, S o l o m o n was n o w a r g u i n g for "an u n c h a n g i n g instinct, g r o u n d e d i n h u m a n nature," something distinctly different from i n t u i t i o n tied to an intentional w i l l . 2 8 9 Here w e have the crux of the p r o b l e m for L i n d e . After a l l , if a l l of "us" (to use Solomon's w o r d ) have instinctual capabilities of u n d e r s t a n d i n g something (such as Rauschenberg's Monogram), but not a l l of us understand things the same w a y , w o u l d this not suggest that some viewers (perhaps the Europeans i n question) were res ponding to the w o r k i n an "unnatural" way? For L i n d e , this was indeed Solomon's argument and it h i n g e d o n a p r o p o s i t i o n w h e r e i n : ...some people have h a d their aesthetic sensibilities r u i n e d . B y insisting o n u n n a t u r a l value systems i n their thought processes, they have managed to repress their instincts — they quite s i m p l y suffer from p s y c h o l o g i c a l conflicts.... The person w h o does not share Solomon's value system is i n this sense an u n n a t u r a l i n d i v i d u a l a n d a neurotic. This is u n d o u b t e d l y a curious conclusion — considering that it was reached w i t h an argument defending total o p e n n e s s ! 2 9 0 This said, P o p A r t , despite its declared "openness," h a d subtly (through the w r i t i n g s of someone l i k e Solomon) i n t r o d u c e d a 'fully d e v e l o p e d doctrine' defining P o p A r t as a natural c u l t u r a l phenomena: 2 8 9 L i n d e " D e n O p p n a konsten: A r v e t fran M u n c h e n " Dagens Nyheter ( M a r c h 26, 1965), p.4. 2 9 0 l b i d . . 1 6 2 Solomon's opinions are shared by most writers d e a l i n g w i t h the new A m e r i c a n p a i n t i n g — one meets almost everywhere o p i n i o n s m a r k e d b y an anti-intellectual position coupled w i t h a belief i n some mystical quality i n the w o r k , an 'order' w h i c h releases instinctual — and therefore 'correct' — feelings i n the b e h o l d e r . 2 9 1 The d o m i n a n t source for this 'anti-intellectual' and 'mystical' argument for instinct was to be found i n John Cage's book Silence (1961), a text familiar to A m e r i c a n artists as w e l l as to S w e d i s h readers of Konstrevy w h o had read it translated by O y v i n d Fahlstrom as early as 1961 2 9 2 For readers of Art International, the seminal influence of Cage (rather than D u c h a m p ) h a d also been p r o m o t e d by numerous influential writers i n a d d i t i o n to S o l o m o n . For example, i n a text from 1963, Barbara Rose suggests that John Cage had been one of the first to "understand the deadness of Europe, and [had tried] to f i n d some w a y out of i t . " 2 9 3 L i k e S o l o m o n , Rose h a d a m b i t i o u s l y constructed a distinctly A m e r i c a n o r i g i n for what she called the " N e w Dada," a construction w h i c h separated these artists from the historical b u r d e n of Europe: 29irbid.. 292See Cage, John "Om Robert Rauschenberg, konstnar, och hans arbete" Translated by Oyvind Fahlstrom. Konstrevy No.5-6, 1961, pp.166-174. In this text, Linde finds a clear example of why John Cage had become known as the 'mentor of the pops': "People's feelings are constantly woken up in confrontation with nature. Doesn't a big mountain evoke a feeling of wonder — whether we want it to or not? — ... What is more tremendous than Hghming and sound of thunder? These reactions in response to nature are mine... — feelings exist amongst those who have them. A n d sounds, if you let them be themselves, do not demand that those who hear them do so without feeling something. — Not an attempt to understand something which has been said, because if something had been said, the sounds would have been formed into words. Only an awareness of the activity of sound." [sic], Ibid.. 2 9 3 B a r b a r a Rose "Dada, Then and Now" Art International (January, 1963), pp. 23-28 reprinted in Steven Henry Madoff's Pop Art: A Critical History Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, p.63. 1 6 3 That European D a d a d i d not bear root i n A m e r i c a , and that the A m e r i c a n experience was not describable i n D a d a terms, is illustrated by the fate of the Dadaists w h o came to settle i n this country: D u c h a m p , still the revered pontiff of the avant-garde, paints no more; G r o s z , the fervent 'Propagandada' experienced a b r e a k d o w n i n A m e r i c a and returned to G e r m a n y to spend his last days: Hulsenbeck, credited w i t h b r i n g i n g D a d a from Z u r i c h to B e r l i n , is a psychiatrist i n N e w York.... W e must therefore try to find an A m e r i c a n and not a E u r o p e a n source for new Dada.... [The] c o m m o n origin... is i n the ideas and experiments of the avant-garde composer, John Cage. Cage ... e v o l v e d theories about music that were very o r i g i n a l , very A m e r i c a n and very adaptable to the v i s u a l arts.... In Silence, his recently p u b l i s h e d lectures and papers, w e find the seeds of many, if not a l l , new D a d a concepts — the use of the o r d i n a r y and the commonplace, the familiar and the banal i n art, the consecration of the unique, unrepeatable moment, the juxtaposition of a n o m a l i e s . 2 9 4 U n l i k e S o l o m o n , Rose admitted that " N e w D a d a was often a p e c u l i a r l y and often c h a u v i n i s t i c a l l y A m e r i c a n s o l u t i o n to the p r o b l e m of where to go...." 2 9 ' Despite this a d m i s s i o n , Rose's p o s i t i o n represented the same c h a u v i n i s m as W i l l i a m Seitz had before her (in the Art of Assemblage catalogue) a n d S o l o m o n thereafter. To contradict a l l of them, L i n d e needed to answer a question of his o w n : if Cage, rather than D u c h a m p , was being constructed i n A m e r i c a n art c r i t i c i s m as the o r i g i n a l "father" of these ideas, "just h o w o r i g i n a l were these v i e w s o n art; had there really been no one to think like Cage before C a g e ? " 2 9 6 It didn't take m u c h effort for L i n d e to answer his o w n question. Cage himself, he observes, h a d admitted that he h a d outside influences. But w h i l e Cage sometimes referred to D a d a , E r i k Satie, and occasionally A r n o l d Schonberg, he more often p l a y e d out Eastern and Z e n influences against his ^ I b i d . , 62. 2 9 5 I b i d . , p.63 2 9 6 I b i d . . 1 6 4 European ties. L i n d e believed that this revealed a reluctance by Cage to acknowledge his connection to Schonberg. After a l l , ...during the thirties Cage was a student of Schonberg w h o was at the time l i v i n g i n L o s Angeles. It is of course difficult to k n o w exactly what was said d u r i n g these lessons — but one thing is for sure: nothing that Cage w o u l d ever write w o u l d mean something new for A r n o l d S c h o n b e r g ! 2 9 7 To l i n k Cage historically to Schonberg was no doubt a clever attempt at contradicting writers like S o l o m o n and Rose, but L i n d e d u g an even deeper historical hole for the A m e r i c a n avant-garde by p r o v i d i n g Schonberg w i t h roots i n the m y s t i c a l 'spirituality' of K a n d i n s k y ' s expressionist paintings and w r i t i n g s . Just as Cage h a d begun to k n o w (and understand) Schonberg i n L o s Angeles d u r i n g the thirties, Schonberg, he notes, had befriended K a n d i n s k y i n M u n i c h a r o u n d 1916. Since Rauschenberg was taught b y Cage at Black M o u n t a i n , L i n d e c o u l d see a clear historical lineage o r i g i n a t i n g i n E u r o p e a n E x p r e s s i o n i s m . C o n s i d e r i n g this K a n d i n s k y — S c h o n b e r g — C a g e — Rauschenberg historiography, L i n d e suggests that the s i m i l a r i t y between Cage's w r i t i n g s i n Silence a n d K a n d i n s k y ' s w r i t i n g On the Spiritual in Art are u n a v o i d a b l e : B o t h get their examples from nature, from everything w h i c h surrounds humans w h e n they want to describe h o w feelings arise. It is this total awareness, or openness, that b o t h understand as a k i n d of deep innocence... It is i n people's nature where the s a v i n g p o w e r s are h i d d e n — i n that w h i c h is spontaneous, irrational, a n d instinctive i n her. (Far a w a y i n the labyrinth of the history of ideas one can imagine Rousseau being brought to tears).... Cage often demands that s o u n d 2 9 7 L i n d e , p.4. 1 6 5 s h o u l d just b e itself. K a n d i n s k y d e m a n d s the s a m e o f c o l o u r a n d f o r m . In h i s Liber das Geistige in der Kunst. h e s a y s that t h e y s h o u l d n o t r e p r e s e n t a n y t h i n g . . . . W h i l e C a g e ' s Silence... is v i t a l a n d f u l l o f h u m o u r i n a l m o s t e v e r y w a y , I t h i n k it is p o i n t l e s s to try to f i n d a s i n g l e o r i g i n a l t h o u g h t i n the b o o k . C o n s i d e r i n g the i d e a s i n it, it is clear that t h e y c o u l d h a v e b e e n w r i t t e n b y a n y o l d s u b s c r i b e r to Der Sturm.298 H a v i n g t h u s g r o u n d e d the P o p A r t p h e n o m e n o n i n e a r l y 20th c e n t u r y E x p r e s s i o n i s t d o c t r i n e s , L i n d e c o n c l u d e s h i s first of f o u r articles b y m a k i n g it clear that h e is n o t i n t e r e s t e d i n d e b u n k i n g i n d i v i d u a l a r t w o r k , b u t r a t h e r a n x i o u s to q u e s t i o n the ' d i r e c t i o n ' c e r t a i n i n t e r p r e t a t i o n s h a v e t a k e n d u e to " d o c t r i n e s " i n art h i s t o r y . T h e s e d i r e c t i o n s , h e a d m i t s , are n e c e s s a r y to d e f i n e w h a t art is, " a n d g i v e art n e w life w h e n the o l d m e a n i n g s e e m s d e a d . " B u t o n e s h o u l d a l s o r e a l i z e that " e v e r y d e f i n i t i o n is d o o m e d to b e p r o v i s i o n a l . " 2 9 9 F o r a E u r o c e n t r i c i n d i v i d u a l i s t s u c h as L i n d e , S o l o m o n ' s a r g u m e n t s m u s t h a v e r e a d as a n a t t e m p t to "fix" i n d i v i d u a l c r e a t i o n s w i t h i n a l a r g e r " o p e n " t e r r a i n t i e d to a d e f e n s e o f A m e r i c a n i n d i v i d u a l i s m r a t h e r t h a n the r a d i c a l i n d i v i d u a l p o s i t i o n w h i c h L i n d e u n d e r s t o o d the E u r o p e a n artists to b e s t r i v i n g for v i a D u c h a m p a n d S t i r n e r . Just as S o l o m o n w a s d i s t a n c i n g h i s a v a n t - g a r d e f r o m E u r o p e i n o r d e r to a r g u e for a c o l l e c t i v e A m e r i c a n art m o v e m e n t , L i n d e w a s d i s t a n c i n g h i s a r m y o f artists f r o m the U n i t e d States i n o r d e r to p r o t e c t t h e m f r o m f a l l i n g o u t o f i n d i v i d u a l c o l l a b o r a t i o n i n t o m o r e ' p o p u l a r ' a n d " o p e n " f o r m s o f c o l l e c t i v i t y . I n o r d e r to r e t u r n i n t e n t i o n a l i t y to artistic p r a c t i c e s , L i n d e h a d to retreat i n t o a p h i l o s o p h i c a l g a m e o f w i t a n d 2 9 8 I b i c L It is w o r t h n o t i n g that L i n d e feminizes the instinctual side of h u m a n nature by referring to "her." W e w i l l see i n his later articles that he masculinizes reason and intellect. 2 9 9 i b i d . . 1 6 6 irony just as w e have seen Saint-Phalle, T i n g u e l y , and U l t v e d t p l a y i n the previous chapter. U n l i k e the arguments w h i c h developed i n the U n i t e d States, the S w e d i s h counter-arguments had a v e r y different "public" form as it was not just disseminated i n art journals, but discussed v e r y seriously i n the popular press. This was no doubt a crucial ingredient to M o d e r n a Museet's impressive attendance records and success. I w o u l d suggest that b y 1965 it had also been p r o v i d e d w i t h a h i g h l y informed p u b l i c o p i n i o n that c o u l d t u r n against the m u s e u m . . A t the e n d of M a r c h , the second of the four articles appeared under the title "Den O p p n a konsten: M y t e n o m den historielosa formen" ("The O p e n A r t : The M y t h S u r r o u n d i n g the A h i s t o r i c a l Form"). Here L i n d e b u i l d s o n his previous argument w h i c h suggested that through an expressionist tradition, artists as diverse as Cage, Rauschenberg and the Pop artists h a d been u n w i l l i n g to differentiate between art and nature. Q u o t i n g T.S. Eliot's anti- expressionist sentiment from 1917, L i n d e agreed that: no art can exist without a dialogue w i t h the past — nor can any artist exist. One can o n l y create an artwork through the conscious energy that is released b y the actual w o r d art; something else is not possible. This is w h y the thought of an art w h i c h relies o n l y o n instinct is i n itself a l i e . 3 0 0 To s i m p l i f y this point to the lay reader, and simultaneously to make a D u c h a m p i a n p u n to a more informed audience, L i n d e suggests that K a n d i n s k y (and b y extension Schonberg, Cage and Rauschenberg) was w r o n g to suggest that y o u need to empty out meaning from colour i n order to achieve an instinctual response. After a l l , wasn't K a n d i n s k y "forced to steal" 3 0 0 i b i d . , p.4. 1 6 7 from each coloured form its history? "The w a y he wrote about it suggests that it doesn't matter if he painted the form w i t h a brush and water colour, or a dog happened to have let go of his urine. W h a t purpose w o u l d be served to call the spot made by a d o g art?" C o n t i n u i n g to poke away at the A m e r i c a n vanguard, L i n d e created both a formal and a historical l i n k between Rauschenberg's and D a d a artist K u r t Schwitters' w o r k . The purpose for a l l this, he declared, was to show that the A m e r i c a n critics "myth of an ahistorical form — w i t h a l l its anti-intellectualism — is i n itself as m u c h an intellectual construction" as it is an historically given theory like any other artistic p r o g r a m i n the twentieth c e n t u r y . 3 0 1 This said, L i n d e c o n c l u d e d that "despite its claims of l a c k i n g preconditioned direction, this [myth] is i n fact one of the most absolutist t h e o r i e s . " 3 0 2 W h a t L i n d e constructed w i t h these first two articles is a rather questionable picture of a N e w Y o r k avant-garde tradition w h i c h he argued had emerged as a fully developed doctrine b y the mid-sixties. In his f o l l o w i n g two articles L i n d e developed the other, European, side of this picture. A s a counter-image to an emasculated A m e r i c a n avant-garde tied to concepts of nature and instinct, L i n d e n o w m a s c u l i n i z e d a contemporary E u r o p e a n avant-garde p o s i t i o n b y t y i n g it to a social tradition and the more intellectual concept of intuition. If the former avant-garde was understood to be historically 'locked' into an Expressionist tradition v i a J o h n Cage, the latter was conceptually 'free' v i a the seminal influence of M a r c e l D u c h a m p . 3 0 1 I b i d . . 3 0 2 I b i d . . 1 6 8 "Den O p p n a konsten: D e n b i l d 'man' har" ("The O p e n A r t : The Picture ' O n e / M a n ' Has"*), was p u b l i s h e d o n A p r i l 4, 1965, and began Linde's reconstruction of an avant-garde position that c o u l d recover tradition b y p u t t i n g emphasis o n i n t u i t i o n rather than instinct. This d i s t i n c t i o n w o u l d become crucial for L i n d e i n his attempt to salvage an intentional m o r a l position for the i n d i v i d u a l i n society. This critical play between an inner and outer space (as Wittgenstein h a d put it), w o u l d i n m a n y ways echo the preparedness ideology of S w e d i s h Existentialists (who as w e saw i n chapter 1 had formulated their o w n s o c i o - i n d i v i d u a l responsibility to replace a resistance leveled into a p o p u l a r front mentality). In formulating this distinction, L i n d e understood w e l l that a defense of intentionality against the 'openness' of interpretation c o u l d be i n the end read as a return to the archism w h i c h Rabbe E n c k e l l had lamented i n his "Defence of C l a s s i c i s m " a few years earlier. W h a t L i n d e needed to preserve i n his o w n argument for 'competence' and responsibility was a self-conscious individual expression that c o u l d reject the collective consciousness w h i c h he saw argued for i n the n e w open art, the latter representing a fall into a state of false consciousness. For L i n d e , this self-conscious p o s i t i o n depended o n a p l a y between the i n d i v i d u a l a n d society. Situated i n this in between space, art, for L i n d e , p r o d u c e d language problems similar to what L u d w i g Wittgenstein i n his Philosophical Investigations c a l l e d 'language-games.' R e l y i n g h e a v i l y o n * Although the subtitle to this article appears simple enough in English: "The Picture 'One' Has," the title is much more ambiguous and loaded in Swedish. The Swedish word "man" can mean "one" (as in "The Picture 'One' Has"), or it could mean "Man" (As in "The Picture 'Man' Has"), and being aware of Linde's interest in Max Stirner, "Man" can also read as the "fixed" concept of "Man" described in The Ego and His Own. 1 6 9 Wittgenstein's late theories, L i n d e understood w o r d s and pictures (bilder) of language as h a v i n g m e a n i n g o n l y insofar as there exists some p u b l i c criteria for their proper use. In this line of reasoning, a completely private language (one w o u l d o n l y be used to speak of one's o w n inner experience) was not possible. Wittgenstein, however, d i d not dismiss inner experiences. H a v i n g been skeptical of both the idea of an art completely 'open' or 'closed' to interpretation, the last two articles precariously set out to balance L i n d e ' s o w n position. To do this he w o u l d have to keep his line of argument straight. W i t h a reproduction of an abstract d r a w i n g by the French Expressionist H e n r i M i c h a u x (an artist w h o had declared that his pictures were "diagrams of his soul") contrasted w i t h a picture of similar appearance d r a w n b y one of Jean Tinguely's Meta-matic machines, L i n d e illustrated that w h i l e the two images "looked" the same, it w o u l d of course be absurd to suggest that both w o r k s l o o k e d the w a y they d i d because of an expression of their "soul" intentions [fig. 77]. After a l l , the energy necessary for Tinguely's machine came from a motor, not some k i n d of inner soul. L i n d e admitted that his skepticism t o w a r d complete artistic a u t o n o m y was not something new. H e suggested that P a u l V a l e r y , i n a text o n Leonardo da V i n c i , h a d revealed a s i m i l a r skepticism towards the idea that the artist c o u l d convey his 'inner life.' P a r t i c u l a r l y interesting for L i n d e was V a l e r y ' s use of the term Tesprit d u publique,' rather than 'spectator' as the former describes a less determined i n d i v i d u a l , a less determined subject. For L i n d e , determination r i s k e d b e c o m i n g too subjective: I do not think that there can be an isolated subject w h o interprets the picture, the mark — or whatever is being interpreted. The act of 1 7 0 u n d e r s t a n d i n g something as something, to understand a m e a n i n g i n some k i n d of p h y s i c a l w a y (factum), is an act w h i c h as far as I can understand takes place above the i n d i v i d u a l . . . . I can perhaps put it this way: There can not be an 'I understand' that is not at the same time 'this is h o w one/man can understand' — a n d i n this case 'man' suggests other people: l i v i n g , dead, or not yet born. To interpret a s y m b o l — such as a s y m b o l for a feeling, or a plastic s y m b o l — is a social activity. It is not a unique subject w h o finds meaning, but it is 'man' i n yourself — 'the generalized other,' to b o r r o w a w o n d e r f u l expression from the turn of the century A m e r i c a n philosopher George H . Mead.303 H a v i n g made his argument against the idea of an i n d i v i d u a l so unique as to be able to create meaning i n isolation from the social w o r l d , L i n d e w o u l d n o w dialectically shift his position to show that this u n a v o i d a b l e "openness" of representation s h o u l d not be read as a critique of the unique i n d i v i d u a l . There exists after a l l , "that w h i c h has 'a part i n others,' but also something w h i c h addresses itself as T." If V a l e r y p r o v i d e d L i n d e w i t h an historical understanding of an "l'esprit d u publique," T.S. E l i o t w o u l d p r o v i d e h i m w i t h an extreme counterpoint to balance this understanding of intentionality. "I w o n d e r what is meant b y intention?" E l i o t h a d once pondered, "One tries to express something, but y o u never k n o w what it is u n t i l it is e x p r e s s e d . " 3 0 4 For L i n d e , T.S. E l i o t was not the o n l y artist or writer i n the twentieth century to have been forced to come to terms w i t h the "unique Ts" role i n the artistic process. H e n r i Matisse, for example, was another. B y a c k n o w l e d g i n g a n d l a y i n g c l a i m to both the historical avant-garde and modernist traditions, L i n d e was attempting to attain a levitated p o s i t i o n between h i g h art and mass culture. 3 0 3 U l f L i n d e " D e n O p p n a konsten: D e n b i l d 'man' har" ("The O p e n A r t : The Picture ' O n e / M a n ' H a s " ), was p u b l i s h e d o n A p r i l 4, 1965, p.4. 3 0 4 i b i d . . 17 1 A s c u l t u r a l historian A n d r e a s H u y s s e n has noted about this ' h i g h / l o w ' relationship, " i n relation to gender and sexuality, the historical avant-garde was by-and-large as patriarchal, misogynist, and masculinst as the major trends of m o d e r n i s m . " 3 0 5 A s L i n d e ' s f o l l o w i n g line of argument makes clear, i n constructing his defense of intentionality, he w o u l d e x p l i c i t l y rely o n gendered psychoanalytical tropes: Thought, like the thought process — this includes the plastic or m u s i c a l f o r m u l a t i o n — builds its self i n the darkness of one's Self like an u n b o r n c h i l d i n a w o m b . The b l o o d w h i c h fills the c h i l d is a different one from that w h i c h pulsates through the muscles and veins of the w o m b . For the T i n an artwork to become, the same rules a p p l y — w i t h the important difference being that the artist's offspring can never s u r v i v e o n it o w n . Its life depends every second o n a b l o o d transfusion — o n that b l o o d from "man." ... F r o m these thoughts one can reason that an artist can o n l y control his o w n w o r k to the extent that he controls the language of others; and o n l y so far as he stands w i t h i n a t r a d i t i o n . 3 0 6 W h a t L i n d e was attempting to suture was, of course, a v i t a l connection between p u b l i c and private — an attempt to salvage for the artist an unfixed p o s i t i o n between an 'impure' mass culture and a 'pure' A r t . If the debate i n Sweden over open art h a d i n i t i a l l y (1961-62) been understood as a p o l i t i c a l fight between the Left and the Right, b y 1965 these polemics c o u l d n o longer make the same sense to L i n d e . A s he w o u l d later admit: I felt partially split; above a l l because — as I saw it — a number of the v i e w s I h a d seen to m y 'right' i n the 1962 controversy [over open art] n o w seemed to be appearing o n the left instead — ie., a m o n g the 3 ° 5 A n d r e a s H u y s s e n After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism Indianapolis: Indiana U n i v e r s i t y Press, 1986. pp.60-61. 3 0 6 I b i d . . 1 7 2 'radicals.' If y o u can't differentiate between the right and the left it is o b v i o u s l y difficult to orient y o u r s e l f . . . . 3 0 7 W h i l e defenders of a pure art maintained that an artwork s h o u l d not necessarily mean a n y t h i n g but just 'be,' and supporters of an impure art insisted o n being open to any meaning ("anything goes!"), both, L i n d e argued, had refused to acknowledge the v i t a l tension that exists between intention (the p r i v a t e / i n n e r space) and expression ( p u b l i c / o u t e r space). O b s e r v i n g that both camps c l a i m e d to find i n art "its o w n life" or a certain "magical quality," L i n d e concluded that an embrace of either position c o u l d be "nothing but a confused m i r r o r gesticulation" of each o t h e r . 3 0 8 W h a t I want to suggest is that despite this valiant attempt by L i n d e to figure out the "right" from "left," and despite his strenuous effort to keep the tightrope between meaning and interpretation taut, L i n d e was h i m s e l f trapped i n a Wittgenstinian language-game characterized b y one-dimensional gender inscriptions. A clear example of this is L i n d e ' s c o n c l u d i n g paragraph i n his t h i r d article: The h u m a n becomes what she becomes t h r o u g h her culture; she carries w i t h her the mark of solidarity. It is true that her c o m p l i c i t y must always be partial — no single being can, after a l l , contain the extensive experiences of a family. But s t i l l , it is o n l y t h r o u g h what she shares w i t h others that she is able to express herself; through that w h i c h is 'man' w i t h i n h e r . 3 0 9 3 0 7 l J l f L i n d e Fyra artiklar S t o c k h o l m : Bonniers, 1965. T h i s confusion was also c o m m e n t e d o n i n relation to L i n d e ' s four articles b y f e l l o w art critic O l l e G r a n a t h w r i t i n g for Dagens Nyheter later that year. See O l l e G r a n a t h " U l f L i n d e : K r i t i k e r n s korrelat" Dagens Nyheter (June 16, 1965). 3 0 8 l b i d . . 3 ^ 9 L i n d e "Den O p p n a konsten: D e n b i l d 'man' har" ("The O p e n A r t : The Picture ' O n e / M a n ' H a s " ), was p u b l i s h e d o n A p r i l 4, 1965, p.4. 1 7 3 Despite h o w conservative this statement m a y s o u n d , what L i n d e had managed to do was to connect meaning to key participants and defenders of an A m e r i c a open art. Despite what critics like S o l o m o n c l a i m e d , L i n d e showed that these artists were tied to tradition and politics. They had intentions. If L i n d e had been able to show h o w their 'anti-intellectual' claims were fraudulent, he had also, i n the process, constructed a d e v i r i l i z e d position for them by s h o w i n g h o w their intention depended o n a concept of instinct tied to nature, rather than an i n t u i t i o n tied to intellect and social praxis. The distinction between instinct and i n t u i t i o n was c r u c i a l for L i n d e if he was to be able to salvage a European avant-garde p o s i t i o n from being absorbed into the A m e r i c a n i z e d liberal politics i n w h i c h he understood P o p A r t to be participating. In "Den O p p n a konsten: D i a l o g u e utan slut" (The O p e n A r t : A D i a l o g u e W i t h o u t an End"), his last of the four articles, L i n d e addresses the confusion between the different terms as evidenced i n the w a y D u c h a m p and Cage had become almost interchangeable i n the w r i t t e n history of Pop A r t : Cage's w o r k has correctly been considered one of the most essential influences o n today's "open" art. But o n the list erected to the progenitors of ideas one can also find another name, almost as often as Cage — M a r c e l D u c h a m p . That D u c h a m p has been g i v e n this role to share seems almost incomprehensible; as far as I can see, this must have occurred because of some k i n d of deep and b r o a d c o n f u s i o n . 3 1 0 3 l ° " D e n O p p n a konsten: D i a l o g u e utan slut" Dagens Nyheter ( M a y 13, 1965), p.4 1 7 4 Yes, h o w c o u l d these two "fathers" of m o d e r n art be married? H o w c o u l d they possibly have given b i r t h to the same avant-garde w h e n their intentions were so different? What L i n d e needed to do was to rescue his E u r o p e a n avant-garde heritage by d i v o r c i n g D u c h a m p from Cage. D u c h a m p , he needed to show, was not the same "feminized" father that P o p A r t sprang from; D u c h a m p was a father w i t h clear intentions: If one wants to show h o w incompatible Cage's and D u c h a m p ' s positions are, it's enough to read Duchamp's short reply to the jury w h o i n 1917 refused his Fountain — one of his most famous ready- mades, the signed u r i n a l : Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view — created a new thought for that object.311 N o t o n l y h a d D u c h a m p stressed his interest i n artistic intentionality b y c a p i t a l i z i n g ' C H O S E , ' but the last sentence i n this apparent defense for an 'open' art — where a u r i n a l c o u l d be transformed into an art object — s o u n d e d v e r y s i m i l a r to Wittgenstein's late theories o n m e a n i n g . 3 1 2 In both cases the object i n question (a u r i n a l , a word...) was 'open' to 'a n e w thought.' But as L i n d e understood D u c h a m p , this was not to be any n e w thought. It was to be a thought dependent o n a relationship between an i n t e n d i n g private subject w h o 'chose' the object/form and an interpretive p u b l i c spectator w h o i n t u r n chose to create a n e w thought. A s L i n d e w o u l d make even clearer i n a speech at the R o y a l A c a d e m y of A r t the f o l l o w i n g year, he h a d never 3 1 1 I b i d . . 3 1 2 I t should be mentioned that Linde was not the only intellectual in Sweden whose concerns were centered on intentionality. The abstract artist Ulrik Samuelson had as early as 1962 written an article outlining the difference between mstinct and intuition as it relates to the creative gap between intension and expression. This, however, was not published until the Spring of 1966 in Konstrevy. See Ulrik Samuelson's "Den skapande processen" [The Creative Act] Konstrevy Nr.2 (1966), pp.50-52. 1 7 5 intended to c l a i m that there existed an essential o p p o s i t i o n between the artist and spectator (the inner and outer spaces). Instead he was interested i n an endless play between them: I have never — i n spoken or written form — c l a i m e d that there is a spectator-artist opposition; so that the spectators can o n l y be found o n the side of critics and the public. E v e n less have I claimed that a l l public reaction has the same w o r t h . The opposite — such attempts to democratize the concept of art appear irresponsible to me. I have a difficult time understanding those attempts as a n y t h i n g but reactionary pranks; since — if they are i n fact seriously intended — they must i n the end lead to a legitimation of incompetence, and its consequences; to the s h a l l o w sensations, w h i m s and superficiality of the status quo.313 A s p r e v i o u s l y noted, b y the end of 1965, L i n d e w o u l d himself admit that positions he h a d p r e v i o u s l y considered to be p o l i t i c a l l y situated o n the political left were n o w appearing o n the right (close to the p o s i t i o n that E n c k e l l had argued from at the R o y a l A c a d e m y i n 1961). A s he understood it, a certain aspect had changed. In light of the socio-political context of the m i d - sixties and the controversial circumstances under w h i c h P o p A r t emerged i n relation to a E u r o p e a n avant-garde tradition rooted i n specific anarchist politics, w e can see h o w L i n d e must have felt a certain vertigo (in the most F r e u d i a n sense of that w o r d ) as he tried to achieve his o w n p h y s i c a l , intellectual and s p i r i t u a l e q u i l i b r i u m . In a w a y , L i n d e h a d been forced, despite his earlier embrace of chaos a n d 'movement i n art,' back i n 1961, to return to order. It n o w seems ironic that he, rather than Rabbe E n c k e l l , w o u l d take to the p o d i u m of the annual meeting of the S w e d i s h R o y a l A c a d e m y of A r t . Whether he l i k e d it or not, L i n d e was n o w forced to be 'right' as it was his 3 1 3 U l f L i n d e " F o r m s o m socialitet i praxis" BLM Vo.35 N o . 6 (Summer 1966), pp.435-438. 1 7 6 turn to question the openness of art. A s we w i l l see, he w o u l d accept this new position by t u r n i n g it into an 'ironic order.' Icarus and Fighter Planes: T o w a r d s an Inner and Outer Space. A t the same time as Linde's four 'seminal' articles were being p u b l i s h e d i n the d a i l y press, and at a time w h e n a n t i - A m e r i c a n sentiments were g r o w i n g stronger i n Sweden each day, M o d e r n a Museet found itself i n the spotlight nationally and internationally as a site where A m e r i c a n p o p culture was advocated. Representing this type of art was not o n l y an a w k w a r d activity for i n d i v i d u a l s outside the U n i t e d States. In A p r i l of 1965, H u l t e n found out that James Rosenquist, one of the most prominent A m e r i c a n P o p artists, h a d just produced an epic scale painting that clearly articulated a critique of both America's consumer culture and foreign politics. C o u l d it be, that despite Hulten's c l a i m i n '64 that "Pop A r t is not social criticism," a few of its artists were critically engaged i n their culture after all? This w o u l d certainly help H u l t e n save his o w n face i n light of p u b l i c a n t i - A m e r i c a n sentiments. ¥-111, as Rosenquist's p a i n t i n g was called, was a 28 meter-long p a i n t i n g o n canvas and a l u m i n u m w h i c h was first s h o w n i n A p r i l of 1965 at Leo Castelli G a l l e r y i n N e w Y o r k [fig. 7 8 ] . 3 1 4 I n the fall of 1965, Rosenquist w o u l d make his o w n p u b l i c statement about the w o r k ' s p o l i t i c a l message i n an i n t e r v i e w w i t h Partisan Review: 31 4 A number of the American events at Moderna Museet such 4 Americans had been made possible with the help of Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. The F-lll was bought from Castelli by the New York collector Robert Scull who in turn lent it to Moderna Museet. For a description of the controversy it caused in New York, see Robert C.Scull "Re The F-lll: A Collector's Notes" in Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (March 1968), p.282-283; and in turn, Hilton Kramer "Art: A New Hangar for Rosenquist's Jet-Pop F-lll" New York Times (February 17, 1968), p.25. 1 7 7 The picture is m y personal reaction as an i n d i v i d u a l to the heavy ideas of mass media and c o m m u n i c a t i o n and to other ideas that affect artists.... [ W i t h F-lll] I wanted to relate the idea of the n e w m a n , the new person w h o appreciates things, to this p a i n t i n g v i s i o n . One piece of this p a i n t i n g w o u l d have been a fragment of a machine the collector was already m i x e d up w i t h , i n v o l v e d i n whether he k n e w it or not. The person has already bought these airplanes by p a y i n g income taxes or being part of the c o m m u n i t y and the economy. The present m e n participate i n the w o r l d whether it's good or not and they m a y p h y s i c a l l y have bought parts of what this image represents m a n y t i m e s . 3 1 5 N o t wasting a second, H u l t e n arranged for the p a i n t i n g to be s h o w n at M o d e r n a Museet i n September that same year. A s art critic E u g e n W r e t h o l m noted i n his r e v i e w of the one p a i n t i n g e x h i b i t i o n i n Konstrevy, b e h i n d the glossy "pop" surface of the p a i n t i n g , frequent visitors to the m u s e u m must have had flashbacks to the first art exhibition h e l d o n the former n a v a l base island Skeppsholmen w h e n Picasso's Guernica [fig. 79]was exhibited exactly ten years e a r l i e r . 3 1 6 In Rosenquist's updated version, the b o m b i n g of Guernica is replaced by the F-lll A m e r i c a n fighter plane responsible for b o m b i n g V i e t n a m . D i v i d e d into sections ( w h i c h enveloped the v i e w e r i n the Leo Castelli G a l l e r y , F-222 presented a billboard-size painted collage made up of images of canned spaghetti, an umbrella, an atomic bomb's m u s h r o o m c l o u d , and more. A l l this was superimposed o n the side of an A m e r i c a n fighter-bomber w h i c h stretched the f u l l twenty-eight meters. W i t h a logo o n its side w h i c h clearly read "U.S. A I R F O R C E , " i n F-222 the A m e r i c a n v i e w e r was meant to be r e m i n d e d of the m a n y m i l l i o n s of U . S . tax dollars this plane 3 1 5 j a m e s Rosenquist "The F-lll : an Interview w i t h James Rosenquist b y G . R . Swenson" Partisan Review ( F a l l 1965), pp.590-595 (589-561). 316p_2H resembled Guernica both i n size a n d content. Just as Guernica acted to inaugurate the new m u s e u m i n 1956, Rosenquist's one painting exhibition, as we shall see, w o u l d act as a wedge to forge a n e w d i r e c t i o n i n M o d e r n a Museet's activities. E u g e n W r e t h o l m "Utstallningsrond" Konstrevy 6 (1965), P.223-224. 1 7 8 (which was introduced i n 1965 under m u c h heated controversy) represented. "Every A m e r i c a n , " as W r e t h o l m suggested i n his review, is i n that w a y part owner and partly responsible for its horrible e x i s t e n c e . 3 1 7 H a v i n g recognized his museum's 'false start,' H u l t e n h a d momentarily managed to distract his critics of A m e r i c a n Pop b y p l a y i n g the socio-political w i l d card of Rosenquist's F-lll. But something more dramatic was needed to stay ahead i n this game. W h a t H u l t e n needed to do was to clean house and re-suspend his m u s e u m along a slightly reoriented international avant-garde art w o r l d . W h i l e state funding for M o d e r n a Museet dropped substantially i n 1965 (perhaps as a direct result of the tensions inside and outside the museum) as s u d d e n l y as it h a d been gained, H u l t e n organized what he w o u l d later refer to as the two most representative exhibitions for the m u s e u m : Den inre och yttre rymden (The Inner and Outer Space ) and Hon - en katedral (She - a Cathedral). The Inner and Outer Space: an Exhibition Devoted to Universal Art was the first of these two events [fig. 80]. W h i l e i n t r o d u c i n g artists from a broad range of countries o n an epic scale s i m i l a r to Movement in Art, this exhibition was formulated v e r y differently. U n l i k e M o d e r n Museet's recent blockbusters, this one was less v i s i b l y chaotic. W i t h the exception of a White Painting from 1951 b y Rauschenberg, it was also notably v o i d of any so called N e o - D a d a or P o p A r t . E v e n the p r o d u c t i o n of the catalogue can be understood as rejection of the machine sensibility associated w i t h P o p A r t as it was quite literally made to look 'out of this w o r l d . ' M a d e w i t h various types of cardboard and paper, the catalogue was laboriously 'constructed' w i t h 3 1 7 W r e t h o l m . 1 7 9 i n d i v i d u a l elements w h i c h were hand stamped and 'bolted' together before being packaged into a square box). In his introductory essay, a w k w a r d l y but accurately titled " A C o n c l u d i n g Beginning," H u l t e n made his intentions even clearer b y announcing that this exhibition was meant to reorient the history of m o d e r n art i n such a w a y as to redirect the m u s e u m : The motive b e h i n d this exhibition is ... to d r a w a historical line through the history of m o d e r n art, from the second decade of the 2 0 t h century and forward, w h i c h has not p r e v i o u s l y been noted. This type of art uses negation as a mode of expression. It is an art whose motif is emptiness, space, spaciousness, quietness, u n i f o r m i t y , atonality, stillness, contemplation, supersensually simple. It is an art w h i c h is easier to define b y saying what it is not, rather than what it is: This art is not constructivist — that is to say, its pictures are not composed as a collaborative play between w e i g h e d tensions i n w h i c h things are brought together to form a c o m m o n good. It does not very often express itself w i t h the help of composition — if b y that we mean collaboration between opposites, and it also does not i n any w a y take a m o r a l position. But this art can sometimes come close to the emotive qualities of C o n s t r u c t i v i s m . Its general state is closer to something religious, if we accept this w o r d i n its broadest meaning. It has a strong tendency towards a transcendental mystic side. This art has very little to do w i t h the optimistic, w o r l d l y , factual, and concrete type of art w h i c h was made d u r i n g the thirties at the Bauhaus. N o r does it have m u c h to do w i t h the Concretism of the forties and fifties. It has v e r y little to do w i t h optical art (Op art) w h i c h i n most cases does n o t h i n g more than entertain the s l i m y surface of the retina. Instead it is an art w h i c h puts people's ability to feel, imagine, and their ability to l i v e , at the absolute center — to such a degree that the actual art w o r k has at times the tendency to disappear. This is partly because the desire for p u r i t y can become so strong that the material substance burns away, is consumed. The actual decision about the art w o r k is the artistic w o r k , the creative act. The simple act of m a n u a l execution decides a part of the object's magnificence. The decision is thus w h a t the w o r k is; i n a s i m i l a r w a y as w h e n M a r c e l D u c h a m p chose a factory made object to be an artwork, a "ready-made." 3 1 8 3 1 8 P o n t u s H u l t e n " A v s l u t a n d e i n l e d n i n g " Den innre och yttre rymden: en utstallning rbrande en universiell konst S t o c k h o l m : M o d e r n a Museet, 1965 (pages not numbered) 1 8 0 This 'negation,' or turn away from the street-smart realism of P o p A r t towards a more contemplative ' m i n i m a l ' and 'mystical' abstraction, was, it seems to me, a strategic return to order, necessary to start over. Carefully organized a r o u n d three separate sections devoted to the w o r k .of K a s i m i r M a l e v i c h , N a u m Gabo, and Y v e s K l e i n , The Inner and Outer Space presented w o r k by thirty-six post-war artists w h o h a d i n different w a y s v i s i b l y demonstrated a return to "degree 0." This return was a necessary move o n the part of H u l t e n in order to protect the dialectic play he had helped to set i n motion as early as 1954. By t u r n i n g back to a H e g e l i a n tradition of negative dialectics, H u l t e n was h o p i n g to salvage art's 'social' responsibility w i t h o u t being tied d o w n b y its politics. A s the catalogue essay b y Joost Baljeu entitled "The H e g e l i a n Romantic N e g a t i o n i n M o d e r n Picture M a k i n g " made clear, the exhibition's three p i l l a r artists were chosen for their three different types of Utopian impulses, as w e l l as their ability to illustrate a H e g e l i a n p h i l o s o p h y of a r t . 3 1 9 W h i l e a l l three artists "dreamed of a better w o r l d — U t o p i a , " their romantic negation of the w o r l d a r o u n d them were differently manifested. W h i l e M a l e v i c h h a d attempted to escape what he v i e w e d as the confines of space (rummet) and time through a s p i r i t u a l understanding of symbols, N a u m G a b o h a d c l u n g to the material w o r l d through a "constructive p r i n c i p l e " closely related to the Bauhaus. U n d e r s t a n d i n g these two conflicting philosophies of art, Y v e s K l e i n , Joost argues, h a d tried to suspend himself in between these two romantic approaches towards abstraction b y m a k i n g himself a n d his art the synthesis of the material and i m m a t e r i a l w o r l d . This is the levitated p o s i t i o n 3^9Joost Baljeu "Den hegelianska romantiska negationen i den moderna bildkonsten" Den innre och yttre rymden: en utstallning rbrande en universiell konst Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1965 (pages not numbered) 1 8 1 that his blue mo n o ch ro me paintings sought to achieve and his Leap Into the Void illustrated. Neither soaring towards the heavens nor crashing to earth, K l e i n represented that "magical" p o s i t i o n between heaven and earth, reality and fiction. By p o s i t i o n i n g Yves K l e i n as the central post-war artist able to reach a synthesis between the inner and outer space, H u l t e n had i n effect white washed (or more literally blue washed) his recent engagement w i t h P o p A r t . C o n s i d e r i n g K l e i n ' s extreme conservativism, it appears that H u l t e n , l i k e L i n d e , was also reorienting his p o l i t i c a l p o s i t i o n w i t h a n e w posture. If Hu lte n's m u s e u m h a d m o m e n t a r i l y let D u c h a m p ' s Air de Paris escape d u r i n g its m a i d e n voyage across the A t l a n t i c , it was n o w g i v e n back some of this aura i n the form of Y v e s the M o n o c h r o m e . For H u l t e n , this extremely conservative, but nonetheless intellectual, 'copy-cat' c o u l d s t i l l represent a rebellious spirit i n art w h i c h remained both social and i n d i v i d u a l : A r t i n this day and age has an important part to play and is often made into an object of interest to the state. A t the same time, o u r society and nation lacks a place for it and shows little interest i n f i n d i n g a place for it. W h i l e art m a y have a p u r e l y decorative role to p l a y , the programatically anti-decorative art w e are t a l k i n g about here suggests an u n w i l l i n g n e s s to let itself be caught i n this unclear situation. B y p r o d u c i n g pictures that are so b i g , or so b o r i n g , that they h a r d l y ever can be put u p i n a home, a m u s e u m , or anywhere else, the artists show an u n w i l l i n g n e s s to contribute to the decorative and extroverted 'artist's life' a n d even that c o m m e r c i a l i z a t i o n (to that m u n d a n e cocktail-like atmosphere) that i n some cases h i g h l i g h t m o d e r n art's appearance. Consequently, one often avoids considering this detachment. The picture of space (rymdens b i l d ) i n art is a picture of our ability to use fantasy to penetrate the universe. Since each a n d every one carries w i t h us our o w n universe w i t h i n ourselves, these images also become images b y / o f (av) o u r s e l v e s . 3 2 0 3 2 0 P o n t u s H u l t e n " A v s l u t a n d e i n l e d n i n g " Den innre och yttre rymden: en utstallning rorande en universiell konst S t o c k h o l m : M o d e r n a Museet, 1965 (pages not numbered) 1 8 2 F o l l o w i n g Hegel's example, H u l t e n argued for an art b o u n d as m u c h by the social as it was made free by the i n d i v i d u a l . This had been what L i n d e argued for at the end of his four articles earlier that year. W i t h this i n m i n d , it s h o u l d come as no surprise to find i n the catalogue an essay p r o v i d e d by L i n d e w h i c h furthered the idea of a dialectical "fourth dimension." In this d i m e n s i o n , where three-dimensional objects c o u l d m e t a p h o r i c a l l y and metaphysically become the shadows of a mystic fourth d i m e n s i o n , the i n d i v i d u a l was formulated as the synthesis of inner and outer space. Here, i n this reformulated space, L i n d e suggested that movement w o u l d always be possible: "If y o u can even just m o v e a millimeter i n a direction, the w h o l e universe has been left b e h i n d y o u ! " 3 2 1 In m a n y ways, this last quote b y L i n d e gave M o d e r n a Museet a k i n d of renewed license to move f o r w a r d . C o n s i d e r i n g the mystical, even s p i r i t u a l , side of this move towards an u n k n o w n fourth d i m e n s i o n , w e can say that M o d e r n a Museet found itself born again. She: a Cathedral: The Strip Tease Begins B y the end of 1965, t h r o u g h The Inner and Outer Space e x h i b i t i o n , H u l t e n h a d managed to clear a space at M o d e r n a Museet for the return of N i k i de Saint-Phalle, Jean T i n g u e l y and P e r - O l o f U l t v e d t to S t o c k h o l m . In the s p r i n g of 1966 they began collaboration o n a single sculptural assemblage w h i c h became k n o w n as Hon - en katedral [She - a Cathedral]. B y as early as 1963, then these three artists h a d , i n their o w n ways, re-oriented their artistic 3 2 1 L i n d e , U l f " D e n fjarde d i m e n s i o n e n " i n Den innre och yttre rymden: en utstallning rorande en universiell konst S t o c k h o l m : M o d e r n a Museet, 1965 (pages not numbered) 1 8 3 production a w a y from collective projects w i t h members of the N e w Y o r k avant-garde and were l o o k i n g at alternative collaborations. By 1965, the w o r k of a l l three artists had taken o n s t r i k i n g l y new and exaggerated forms. N i k i de Saint-Phalle, for example, was b y this time almost exclusively p r o d u c i n g what she called her Nanas — larger than life-size representations of "every w o m a n " w h i c h differed from her past figurative sculptures i n that they were increasingly b e c o m i n g decorative a n d colourful. O n the advice of her dealer A l e x a n d e r Iolas, she was n o w also f o l l o w i n g the steps of the Pop artists b y m a k i n g hard-edged figurative screen prints [fig. §1] 322 p l a y i n g off stereotypes of fertility goddesses through the ages, sculptures s u c h as Clarice, La Waldaff, Benedicte, Black Rosy, and Black Venus, used roles r a n g i n g from V e n u s of W i l l e n d o r f to contemporary bathing beauties [fig. 82]. A s discussed i n Chapter T w o , the forms of Tinguely's w o r k were also exaggerated. B y p a i n t i n g his machine sculptures matte black, he presented his w o r k as the masculine counterpart to Saint-Phalle's increasingly soft and colourful figures. In 1963 he began w o r k o n Eureka (1964), a m o n u m e n t a l sized sculpture for the Swiss N a t i o n a l E x h i b i t i o n i n Lausanne [fig. 83]. A s its title suggests, and the c o m m i s s i o n confirms, T i n g u e l y h a d not o n l y discovered his o w n private identity, but he h a d also managed to turn his dysfunctional scrap-metal machines into Swiss 'gold.' C a s h i n g i n o n his success, T i n g u e l y managed to return to S w i t z e r l a n d for five exhibitions i n 1964. W h i l e a w o r k such as Eureka was m o n u m e n t a l i n size, the most 3 2 2 H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle B o n n : K u n s t - u n d - A u s s t e l l u n g s h a l l e der B u n d e s r e p u b l i k Deutschland, 1992, p.289. 1 8 4 extreme of his masculartized matte-black painted metal machines was p r o d u c e d for a t w o - m a n exhibition i n N e w Y o r k called Two Kinetic Sculptors held at the Jewish M u s e u m . O r g a n i z e d b y Sam H u n t e r , Two Kinetic Sculptors took the form of a retrospective for T i n g u e l y and the H u n g a r i a n N i c o l a s Schoffer w h o both s h o w e d o l d and new w o r k . The catalogue for Two Kinetic Sculptors i n c l u d e d an essay by H u l t e n w h i c h emphasized the recent changes i n Tinguely's w o r k . To d i s t i n g u i s h his sculptures from Schoffer's ( w h i c h H u n t e r described as t a k i n g "the engineer's optimistic v i e w of the possibilities of a technological society... for a more rational f u t u r e " 3 2 3 ) , H u l t e n returned to the ideas r e g a r d i n g movement and freedom that he h a d presented i n his anarchist journal Kasark a decade earlier: Tinguely's point of departure is mechanical disorder. In his early w o r k s change and movement obeyed o n l y the l a w of chance. H e pitted the emancipated machine against the functional one, a n d conferred o n his creations a glorious life of i m p r o v i s a t i o n , h a p p y inefficiency and shabbiness, expressing t h r o u g h his i n s p i r e d inventions an indestructable freedom. H i s sculptures of later years convey the meaninglessness of u t i l i t a r i a n mechanical function more p o n d e r o u s l y and w i t h sharper definition. The movements of his structures have become more deliberate and dramatic: their different parts are more clearly differentiated and personified. They seem c o n d e m n e d to a prisoner's life, always operating i n the same place a n d repeating the same movements. A s d i d Sisyphus, they strenuously lift a heavy weight w h i c h must inevitably be returned to its o r i g i n a l position.The behaviour and deportment of these sculptures possess a traumatic fatality. The sense of the absurdity of the mechanical environment w h i c h expressed itself comically i n the past has n o w taken o n sober and even tragic overtones. A l s o the movements of m a n , even his more intimate operations and performances w o u l d seem sometime to be p a r o d i e d , h e l d up for ridicule and at the same time made more m o n u m e n t a l . . . . 3 2 3 S a m H u n t e r Two Kinetic Sculptors N e w Y o r k : The Jewish M u s e u m , 1965, p.11. 1 8 5 Tinguely's w o r k s today express great pessimism regarding the machine's actual efiency and w o r t h . A t the same time, however, they are basically optimistic w i t h regard to the machine's irrational and religious potential. Indeed, his art radiates an o p t i m i s m w h i c h is u n u s u a l i n contemporary art, an o p t i m i s m directed t o w a r d m a n , the creator of m a c h i n e s . 3 2 4 W h i l e the m o n u m e n t a l and religious side of this creative act w o u l d soon be v i s u a l i z e d i n S t o c k h o l m , the most conspicuous example of this "deliberate and dramatic" shift was The Dissecting Machine (1965) w h i c h brought special attention from the audience and press [fig. 84. A s H u l t e n has described the w o r k , it "cuts, saws, and d r i l l s holes i n a w o m a n (a shop w i n d o w d u m m y ) , w h o retains its affected smile t h r o u g h o u t . " 3 2 5 A s a w r y comment o n the o p t i m i s m s u r r o u n d i n g audience p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n so called 'open art,' this extremely violent and misogynist machine was activated b y the viewers themselves w h o h a d the o p p o r t u n i t y to set i n m o t i o n this p u b l i c execution w i t h a p u s h of a button. A s k e d b y The New York Times to comment o n this particular w o r k , T i n g u e l y suggested that it h a d "started out as a b a l l - p l a y i n g machine for the ladies w h o come here... but w h e n I saw them they didn't quite look as if they'd stop to p i c k up a b a l l . So I turned it into this, to scare t h e m . " 3 2 6 A week after this interview w i t h T i n g u e l y , H i l t o n K r a m e r wrote a f o l l o w u p article i n the same newspaper. R e m e m b e r i n g Kramer's anti- 3 2 4 P o n t u s H u t l e n "Jean T i n g u e l y " i n Two Kinetic Sculptors N e w Y o r k : The J e w i s h M u s e u m , 1965, p.12. 3 2 5 H u l t e n (1972), p.282. 3 2 6 T i n g u e l y quoted i n The New York Times ( N o v . 21, 1965), p.25. 1 8 6 D u c h a m p i a n lambastatiorts at M o M A ' s Pop A r t s y m p o s i u m , his interest i n d e b u n k i n g T i n g u e l y s h o u l d come as no surprise: Between the computerized constructions of M r . Schoffer — a l l light, movement, and infinities of i l l u s i o n i s t i c space — and the mechanized sculptures of M r . T i n g u e l y — w h i c h s i m p l y animate the neo-Dada imagery of junk-constructions already familiar to any observer of the art scene d u r i n g the last two decades — there y a w n s something more than a gap i n theory. There is the fundamental difference between an inventive intelligence e x p l o r i n g untried ideas and a gadgeteer m a n i p u l a t i n g the materials of accepted esthetic practice. M r . Schoffer is a true o r i g i n a l . . . M r . T i n g u e l y is the expression of a m i n o r pasticheur r u m m a g i n g a r o u n d the debris of fashionable ideas.... To this pastiche of contemporary forms, M r . T i n g u e l y brings — what? H i s little motors, and the mechanical ingenuity required to make a l l the separate parts of these constructions function more or less according to p l a n . H e brings also a certain h u m o r — a m u s i n g w h e n one first encountered it a few years ago, but n o w already dated and tiresome. F o r even v i s u a l h u m o u r requires some i n d i v i d u a l formal i n v e n t i o n to sustain itself, and M r . T i n g u e l y deals entirely w i t h a second-hand s c u l p t u r a l v o c a b u l a r y . 3 2 7 A s close as K r a m e r comes to accurately describing Tinguely's w o r k , he neglected (or perhaps avoided) to note the shift i n T i n g u e l y ' s h u m o u r towards a darker critique of the k i n d of technological o p t i m i s m Schoffer's w o r k stood for. The interesting thing about this exhibition was the ability of Sam H u n t e r to curate a show w h i c h o u t l i n e d k i n e t i c i s m as a n e w p o l e m i c i n the art w o r l d , replacing geometric a n d gestural abstraction. W i t h this i n m i n d , it is not s u r p r i s i n g that he asked H u l t e n ( w i t h his o w n investments i n 'movement') to p r o v i d e one of the t w o catalogue essays. Just as T i n g u e l y had i r o n i c a l l y managed to establish a reputation i n his very rational home country of S w i t z e r l a n d b y becoming famous elsewhere, 3 2 7 H i l t o n K r a m e r "One Inventor, O n e Pasticheur" New York Times ( N o v e m b e r 28, 1965). 1 8 7 U l t v e d t had by 1965 established his status at home b y exhibiting abroad. N o t o n l y w o u l d he receive numerous p u b l i c commissions i n S t o c k h o l m , i n c l u d i n g a collaboration w i t h U l f L i n d e o n En tidnings ansikte [The Face of a Magazine] (1964) and a neon sign for the S w e d i s h candy manufacturer M a r a b o u (1965), but he w o u l d also be i n v i t e d b y Stedelijk's former director W i l l e m Sandberg to travel to A m s t e r d a m to construct Hommage a Christopher Polhem (1965) for an e x h i b i t i o n of m o n u m e n t a l sculpture h e l d at the city's V o n d e l p a r k [fig. 85]. In its size and s t r i k i n g form, Polhem was i n many w a y s i n dialogue w i t h Tinguely's Eureka. W h i l e T i n g u e l y ' s metal construction can be read against the c l o c k w o r k of Swiss rationalism, Ultvedt's w o o d e n assemblage was devoted to P o l h e m , an early 18th century S w e d i s h inventor k n o w n as m u c h for his practical inventions as for his ability to invent useless machines and brew b e e r . 3 2 8 C o n s i d e r i n g that Polhem's most famous i n v e n t i o n was the 'Scandinavian padlock,' w e can read U l t v e d t ' s sculpture as a significant reminder of the doors that were being locked, separating artists such as himself a n d Rauschenberg. For those outside this metalanguage, these references to U l t v e d t ' s disengagement from collaborations w i t h N e w Y o r k ' s avant-garde were not so obvious. A t the end of 1965, U l t v e d t received an i n v i t a t i o n from Rauschenberg a n d B i l l y K l i i v e r to participate i n a s y m p o s i u m o n art and technology. O r g a n i z e d b y F y l k l i n g e n , the S w e d i s h society for experimental music, Nine Evenings — as the event was called — was i n i t i a l l y g o i n g to take 3 2 8 I n 1962 Ultvedt had been involved in a minor controversy at the Venice Biennale where he represented Sweden. In his assemblage Signal, which was installed just outside the entrance to the newly constructed Bauhaus inspired Nordic Pavillion, Ultvedt included a number of beer bottles that functioned as chimes when viewers neared the sculpture. In a similar way to Tinguely, Ultvedt's sculptures always have a certain 'working class' vocabulary attached to them. 1 8 8 place i n S t o c k h o l m . 3 2 9 W h i l e the project w o u l d i n the end be relocated to N e w Y o r k because of a lack of interest from S w e d i s h sponsors and artists such as U l t v e d t ("I d i d n ' t want to be some k i n d of 'waffle maker'"), i n i t i a l o p t i m i s m a r o u n d the event was tied to the S w e d i s h - A m e r i c a n d u o of K l i i v e r and R a u s c h e n b e r g . 3 3 0 Since 1963, K l i i v e r had collaborated o n Oracle, a large scale m u l t i - m e d i a installation b y Rauschenberg [fig. 86]. T h r o u g h this major investment of time, money and effort, the collaboration between artist and scientist had b y 1966 e v o l v e d into E . A . T . , the organization whose a c r o n y m stood for Experiments i n A r t and Technology. In M a r c h of 1966, Konstrevy p u b l i s h e d "Technology for L i f e , " a lengthy article w r i t t e n b y K l i i v e r describing the virtues of his collaboration w i t h Rauschenberg o n the m u l t i - m e d i a installation Oracle.331 This project, he proposed, served to show what role the artist c o u l d serve i n a society that "shall s u r v i v e thanks to — not inspite of — t e c h n o l o g y . " 3 3 2 W h a t was necessary, he argued, was an u n l i m i t e d exchange of ideas between artists and technicians i n order to produce a "medium" capable of c a r r y i n g the "message" needed to stimulate not just technological progress, but social progress. K l i i v e r ' s text, w h i c h i n m a n y w a y s reads as a manifesto for E . A . T . , is 3 2 9 F o r a brief history and lengthy inventory of events related to Nine Evenings, see the "Inventory of the Experiments in Art and Technology Records 1966-1993" compiled by Lynda Bunting for The Ghetty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities web site http:/ /www.getty.edu/gri/research/main.htm. 3 3 0 I n the program suggested for Nine Evenings, Ultvedt was asked to aquire, and be in charge of, a large number of waffle makers that would, one presumes, represent the democratic nature of the planned 'happening.' Considering his disillusionment with Pop art, the symbolic value of waffle making must have appeared too close to the symbolic value of hamburgers and hot dogs. 3 3 1 O r a c / e is more an installation than a specific medium. Filling an entire room, its five free- standing parts are each mobile, but does not move. Each piece contains a radio and speaker operated by remote control from a main console. 3 3 2 B i l l y Kliiver "Teknologi for livet" [Technology for Life] Konstrevy 2 (1966), p.56. (pp.56-61) 1 8 9 http://www.getty.edu/gri/research/main.htm directly m o d e l e d after M a r s h a l l M c L u h a n ' s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) i n w h i c h M c L u h a n presented a v e r y optimistic 'pop' interpretation of the process of c o m m u n i c a t i o n from the "Gutenburg Galaxy" to the electronic a g e . 3 3 3 To make this point clear, K l i i v e r based the structure of his essay o n M c L u h a n ' s first Chapter, "The M e d i u m is the Message." Describing the p h y s i c a l details of Oracle under the subheading "The M e d i u m , " K l i i v e r explained h o w artistic and technological m e d i u m s h a d , i n this new collective w o r k i n g environment, managed to merge into a h y b r i d form that opened itself up to n e w sensory experiences. G r o u n d i n g his argument not o n l y i n M c L u h a n ' s c l a i m that technology is "an expansion of our nervous system," but also i n the psychoanalytic readings of history p r o v i d e d b y N o r m a n O . B r o w n , K l i i v e r saw a l i n k between a "mechanical and organic stand point," respectively characterized as "for death" a n d "for l i f e . " 3 3 4 For O . B r o w n , the "hard truth" that psychoanalysts needed to deal w i t h was : the acceptance of death, its reunification i n consciousness w i t h life, cannot be accomplished b y the discipline of p h i l o s o p h y or the seduction of art, but o n l y b y the abolition of repression. M a n , w h o is b o r n a w o m a n and destined to die, is a b o d y , w i t h b o d i l y instincts. O n l y if Eros — the life instinct — can affirm the life of the b o d y can the death instinct affirm death, a n d i n affirming death magnify l i f e . 3 3 5 3 3 3 M a r s h a l l M c L u h a n Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man T o r o n t o : M c G r a w - H i l l Paperbacks (first paperback edition), 1965, pp.7-21. 3 3 4 K l u v e r here quotes N o r m a n O . B r o w n from his 1959 b o o k Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History N e w Y o r k : V i n t a g e B o o k , 1959. 3 3 5 0 . B r o w n , pp.108-109. 1 9 0 This argument for "life against death/' as the title of his book declared, i n many ways stood counter to the arguments for death that Saint-Phalle, Tinguely, and U l t v e d t had by n o w e m b r a c e d . 3 3 6 One c o u l d say that w h i l e K l i i v e r and Rauschenberg were affirming Eros by e x p l o r i n g new sensory experiences through collective experiments w i t h art a n d technology, the former artists were less optimistic about collaborations and technological progress and h a r d at w o r k creating their o w n death masks i n a ritualistic 'dance of death.' F r o m the perspective we have established to v i e w these private discourses, we can see that both sides of the 'open art' debate were at w o r k to reveal the logic of their age of mechanical reproduction. But w h i l e the Europeans i n question were d o i n g so b y 'dressing up,' K l i i v e r , i n his article, argued that technology needed a very different sort of artist: "an analyst, a stimulant, a provoker, and an u n d r e s s e r . " 3 3 7 For K l i i v e r , Rauschenberg was increasingly w i l l i n g to take o n this task as evident i n w o r k such as Oracle: Oracle shows that a completely n e w relationship between the artist and engineer (and perhaps even between the artist and scientist) is a possibility. [This is a] relationship i n w h i c h the artist seeks to take advantage of the incredible resources offered u p b y technology and science i n order to reach his goals... [which] s h o u l d lie w i t h i n areas that technology and science have not yet explored: i n order to create new sensual experiences, n e w enjoyments, n e w w a y s to relate to each other, new w a y s to experience light, darkness, c o l d and heat, as w e l l as new ways to sleep, to be, to eat. E v e r y engineer today is w e l l aware of the fact that technology has unimaginable capacities. But at the same time, the engineer's ability to invent new w a y s to use technology is l i m i t e d by his o w n comfort, one-sidedness and p s y c h o l o g i c a l determinations.... 3 3 6 N o r m a n O. Brown suggests that this embrace is a very common trope in Hegel's writings as well as Existentialist philosophy in general: "It takes the greatest strength to accept death, says Hegel. Following Hegel, the existentialist philosophers have returned to the wisdom of Montaigne, that to learn philosophy is to learn how to die." O'Browh, p.108. 3 3 7 K l u v e r , p.61. 1 9 1 Engineers have a difficult time i m a g i n i n g that technology can be used to create disorder. But this is something that the artist can imagine. The artist, and o n l y the artist, can show engineers h o w technology can be used to its full c a p a c i t y . . . . 3 3 8 For K l i i v e r , Oracle h a d managed to present this m e d i u m i s t i c "message." Constructed i n five parts (like an opera or a play), Oracle consisted of movable parts o n wheels a l l o w i n g the composition to change i n relation to the r o o m it occupied. F r o m each of the five sections, m e d i u m wave radio signaled report sound from different parts of the city where it was located — ranging from the voice of a rock-and-roll D J to the news announcer to a d v e r t i s e m e n t . 3 3 9 The central images i n the five parts also relate to the city: a car door connected to a typewriter table; a tub w i t h an air-ventilation shaft; a w i n d o w frame w i t h another ventilation shaft; a ventilation pipe o n top of p r a m wheels; an enlarged staircase i n a l u m i n u m . W h i l e the o v e r a l l effect is that of a rather nostalgic l o o k i n g 'scrap-assemblage,' as some critics noted, K l i i v e r points out that the m e d i u m was taken from the immediate urban environment: "It is impossible to f i n d something nostalgic or precious i n the different parts. They were torn out of the city y e s t e r d a y . " 3 4 0 N o t o n l y that, but the radio transmission ensures that the w o r k is kept up-to-date. In its m a n i f o l d aspects, Oracle can be said to be an inverted gesamptkunstwerk, o p e n i n g u p an interdisciplinary space for art and technology as w e l l as for b u r g e o n i n g new subjectivities. A s an engineer w i t h an interest i n m a k i n g a l i n k between the psychoanalytic realm of art and technology, K l i i v e r rejected the idea of 3 3 8 I b i d . , p. 60. 3 3 9 I b i d . , p.58. 3 4 0 I b i d . , p.57. 1 9 2 turning away from science; particularly at a time w h e n "our lives have become tied to technology" and he recognized h o w unavoidable this meeting place was: There is not a country o n earth w h o has raised its voice against this 'development.' Technology is an 'extension of our nervous system' as M a r s h a l l M c L u h a n suggests.... John Cage [has made] us aware that technology has a quality w h i c h allows people to come into agreement. The fact is that amongst a l l the m a n y agreements that are made between different countries ... the ones concerning technical areas, more than often, override a l l other agreements w i t h i n politics, commerce, etc. Technology forces us to eliminate personal feelings. W h e n experiences from space research approach our society's needs, w e w i l l be gifted w i t h a whole new type of w o r k leader and w o r k e r — someone w h o is totally responsible for his w o r k . President Johnson has g i v e n the assignment of s o l v i n g the p r o b l e m of poverty i n certain areas of A m e r i c a to the electronic industry. A s a matter of fact, these are the same companies that take care of the space program.... W i t h the computer it is no longer a question of what we can make a computer do, but h o w our unconscious decides to use it. It is a question of synthesis a n d not the use v a l u e . 3 4 1 In many w a y s this argument for b r i d g i n g not just art and life, but more specifically the 'mechanical' and the 'instinctual' side of existence, is reminiscent of the more constructivist arguments of the Bauhaus school of art and architecture w h e r e i n the i n d i v i d u a l o p t i m i s t i c a l l y h o p e d to be collectively synthesized into a democratic p u b l i c sphere. A s w e w i l l n o w see, shortly after K l i i v e r ' s article was p u b l i s h e d , a sculptural m o n u m e n t to this idea of unification w o u l d be constructed at M o d e r n a Museet — but for reasons w e have just seen, its creators d i d this w i t h a great deal of irony. In the late s p r i n g of 1966, the "Mechanical Bride," as M c L u h a n named the desired mechanisms of the 20th century [fig. 87], w o u l d be stripped bare i n 3 4 1 i b i d . , p. 60-61. 1 9 3 S t o c k h o l m . 3 4 2 O n the 27th of A p r i l , T i n g u e l y and Saint-Phalle a r r i v e d i n Stockholm where they began an intense p e r i o d of discussion together w i t h U l t v e d t and H u l t e n regarding the collaborative project that h a d i n i t i a l l y been discussed at Dylaby.343 If we consider K l i i v e r ' s optimistic appraisal of Rauschenberg's Oracle, the i n i t i a l titles for this E u r o p e a n assemblage hint at its direct relationship w i t h the former w o r k . T i n g u e l y , for example, suggested an opera or a k i n d of mechanical theatre w h i c h w o u l d have i n v o l v e d a number of episodes such as: Woman Seizes Power, A Public Relations Man Commits Suicide Because of a Failure, The Assassination of LB], The Pope in New York, An Airplane Crash in the Jungle....34* S a i n t - P h a l l e m a i n t a i n e d that the w o r k s h o u l d be a giant cathedral, and finally H u l t e n proposed "a giant supine figure, o n the lines of N i k i de Saint-Phalle's Nanas, w h i c h was at once called Hon - en katedral [She - A Cathedral]."345 O n the t h i r d of June, M o d e r n a Museet opened its ticket gate to reveal Hon, a giant female figure whose p r o d u c t i o n h a d been kept secret d u r i n g five weeks of p l a n n i n g , construction, and painting [fig. 88]. M e a s u r i n g 23.5 x 6 x 10 meters, 'She' lay headless o n her back inside M o d e r n a Museet, w i t h her legs spread and knees pointed u p w a r d s . U p o n entering through the v a g i n a of this giant N a n a , b u i l t and painted like an Easter egg b y N i k i de Saint-Phalle, the visitor encountered a plethora of amusements s i m i l a r to that of an amusement park: a C o c a - C o l a bar, lookout tower, slide, t u n n e l of love, several "Fake Paintings" i n an art gallery, a number of automatic vendors for 3 4 2 S e e M a r s h a l M c L u h a n ' s The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man N e w Y o r k : V a n g u a r d Press, 1951. 3 4 3 D u e to an unexpected i n v i t a t i o n to participate i n the V e n i c e Biennale, M a r t i a l Raysse, w h o h a d also been considered for the project, was forced to cancel. 3 4 4 H u l t e n (1972), p.289. 3 4 5 I b i d . . 1 9 4 various kinds of goods, service personnel, a s m a l l plant for the p r o d u c t i o n of broken glass, a public telephone, a gold-fish p o n d , a m o v i e theater s h o w i n g a soundless Greta G a r b o movie, and m u c h more. Entering through her 'gate of life,' one was first confronted w i t h a large, g r i n d i n g , black and white wheel [fig. 89]. This was one of Tinguely's dark contributions to the 'amusements' that She e m b o d i e d . S t a n d i n g o n a foam floor, the visitor was led to question its function as the s o u n d of crushing glass c o u l d be heard from inside. The function became more apparent w h e n v i s i t i n g the C o c a - C o l a bar i n one of her breasts. Standing at this bar, one c o u l d not o n l y listen to lovers' secrets transmitted through speakers from a h i d d e n microphone i n the 'love seat' installed i n Hon's left leg, but h a v i n g consumed y o u r 'pop,' the p h a l l i c nature of this A m e r i c a n consumer icon was effectively castrated b y being discarded into a shoot leading d o w n to Tinguely's machine for the p r o d u c t i o n of b r o k e n glass. In this gesture, the technological o p t i m i s m that defined itself as masculine through a variety of consumer icons, was here s y m b o l i c a l l y emptied and broken d o w n . A l o n g the lines of Tinguely's D u c h a m p i a n castration, U l t v e d t p r o d u c e d a mobile piece i n Hon's stomach w h i c h featured a m a n b e i n g massaged b y numerous hands w h i l e seated precariously o n a chair as he watches a television screen projecting images of waves o n a stormy ocean [fig. 90]. In Ultvedt's absurdist contribution to this p o p cathedral, the motif of the 'oceanic' F r e u d h a d once described as the ' p r i m i t i v e pleasure-ego' u t i l i z e d b y religions, became l i n k e d to the massage of consumer culture and technology 1 9 5 as M c L u h a n h a d a n a l y z e d . 3 4 6 W h i l e M c L u h a n may not have been aware of the critical i r o n y the three artists were p l a y i n g w i t h , he d i d find out about Hon and responded w i t h a four page spread i n his 1967 book The Medium is the Massage [fig. 9 1 ] . 3 4 7 M c L u h a n probably understood Hon to represent a good example of the new open art of the sixties where art c o u l d be "anything y o u can get away w i t h . " 3 4 8 In a d i s p l a y of self-conscious h u m o u r , the art critic L i n d e ended up taking a jab at the idea of originality i n art b y contributing a series of "Fake Paintings" w h i c h were h u n g i n an art gallery located i n one of Hon's legs and c o u l d only be v i e w e d superficially as one flew by them o n the w a y d o w n a children's slide [fig. 92]. A l o n g w i t h a l l these contraptions, assemblages, and happenings, there was also a f i l m screening of Greta Garbo's first silent move Luffar-Tetter from 1922 i n w h i c h S w e d i s h w o m e n are s h o w n bathing i n a N o r d i c landscape. In the context of Hon, G a r b o represented the c o m m o d i f i c a t i o n of the sexualized S w e d i s h w o m a n w h o h a d been exported to the U n i t e d States where she h a d 346"The true source of religious sentiment... consists of a peculiar feeling... present in millions of people.... This feeling which he [a patient] would like to call a sensation of 'eternity,' a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded — as it were, 'oceanic' This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; ... it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by various religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted by them." Sigmund Freud Civilization and its Discontents New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961, pp.11-12. For the makers of Hon, Freud's concept of an oceanic feeling that can control masses of people must have been considered a perfect analogy to the blind optimism they understood members of the New York avant-garde to be investing in art and technology. •^McLuhan's inclusion of a four page section on Hon in his 1967 book The Medium is the Massage is an incredible irony in the history of this exhibition if we consider what I would describe as Saint-Phalle's, Tinguely's, and Ultvedt's 'anti-McLuhanesque' position. Typographically and pictorially spaced out, the pages read "Art — is anything — you can get away with." Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects New York: Bantam Books, 1967, pp.132-136. 3 4 8 f b i d . . 1 9 6 become a sex s y m b o l i n A m e r i c a n p o p u l a r culture. B y the sixties this w o m a n had been g i v e n an existentialist twist by Ingemar Bergman whose films were n o w popular enough to w i n Oscars at the A c a d e m y A w a r d s . By 1966, Sweden had established an international reputation for h a v i n g an abundance of sexually 'liberated' w o m e n . By the 1960s, the one image that distinguished Swedish democracy from others was the liberal sexual politics it espoused. For example, by the mid-sixties, Sweden h a d among other things introduced the P i l l , legalized abortion, the I U D , and the sex-role equality c a m p a i g n . 3 4 9 Partly due to Europe's and the U n i t e d States' reticence w h e n it came to these issues, Sweden managed to develop its o w n m y t h o l o g y tied to this image of sexual freedom. This image that was presented to the outside w o r l d and w h i c h increasingly stereotyped S w e d i s h culture was embraced b y domestic and foreign post-war y o u t h alike to w h o m sexual freedom was equated w i t h p o l i t i c a l emancipation. It was to this generation of Swedes that Hon-en katedral was presented . S u p r i s i n g l y , critics and reporters d i d not p i c k - u p o n the most obvious literary and filmic reference. In 1965, a seventh filmic version of She had been released b y H a m m e r - S e v e n A r t s starring U r s a l a A n d r e s s as 'She-who-must- be-obeyed.' Based o n R i d e r Haggard's sixth n o v e l (published i n 1887), She is the story of a 2,000 year o l d white queen w h o reigns over her people w h i l e 3 4 9 I n 1974 the Swedish Health Education Committee observed the down side of this liberalization process by noticing that it "has been overtaken by an increasingly raw commercial exploitation of sexuality with emphasis on consumption, performance and depersonificationn.... Development in recent years presents the paradox of a society that increasingly stands up for equality between the sexes in various fields at the same time as the sexual exploitation of women becomes more and more brazen in, for example, the mass media and advertising. The anti-human and, in the deepest sense, anti-sexual attitudes that youth encounter today in commercial messages cannot be over emphasized." Scott, Hilda Sweden's 'Right to be Human': Sex-Role Equality: The Goal and the Reality New York: M . E . Sharpe, Inc., 1982, p.86. 1 9 7 w a i t i n g for the reincarnation of her E g y p t i a n l o v e r . 3 5 0 H e r y o u t h is renewed by 'bathing' i n a magical flame, but w h e n she tries to make her lover i m m o r t a l , she goes to the flame of eternal y o u t h once too often and ends up s h r i n k i n g and s h r i v e l i n g to death. In this w a y , Haggard's She must have functioned as alternative m y t h to that of Icarus. But as the S w e d i s h evening paper Expressen reported, to most Swedes, Hon resembled n o t h i n g more than an art w o r k masquerading as the F u n n y H o u s e at G r o n a L u n d (Stockholm's amusement p a r k ) . 3 5 1 In this same newspaper article it was reported w i t h astonishment that the e x h i b i t i o n had: ...opened o n Saturday and there is already a rush of people to get there. O n opening day there were 2,000 visitors, the next day 1,500, and each f o l l o w i n g day another 2,000. This is the exceptional part: N o t one person has been shocked (unless we count an A m e r i c a n tourist w h o d r o p p e d i n by accident and thought that this was the w a y Swedes celebrated their m e m o r y of Q u e e n C h r i s t i n a [that e x h i b i t i o n was o n simultaneously at Nationalmuseet]. W i t h o u t f i n d i n g the large female figure (honan) i n good order or morals, we report that six to seven thousand people, half of them y o u n g , have n o w entered between H E R thighs and i n through H E R w i d e open s e x . 3 5 2 A s this quote attests, Hon was also a box-office success along the lines of 'The B l o n d e V e n u s ' i n E m i l e Z o l a ' s n o v e l N a n a . 3 5 3 The event was not o n l y noted i n the S w e d i s h p o p u l a r press and journals. Time Magazine cited Hon as "one 3 5 0 p f t j i j p Leibfred's article " H . R i d e r H a g g a r d o n the Screen" i n Films in Review (September/October 1995) V o l . X L V I N o . 7 / 8 Issue 5, pp.20-29. 3 5 ! " H o n : skotte-synd pa M o d e r n a " Expressen June 8,1966). 3 5 2 I b i d . . 3 S 3 I n Zola's n o v e l , N a n a represented the desires a n d threats of an increasingly e m p h e m e r a l class stucture. Starting out as a clandestine prostitute, N a n a slept her w a y u p the s o c i a l latter. E m i l e Z o l a Nana N e w Y o r k : The M o d e r n L i b r a r y , 1955 (orig. 1880). 1 9 8 of the most uproarious, outrageous — and incredibly p o p u l a r — exhibits to make its debut i n Sweden's capital i n y e a r s . " 3 5 4 A s informed spectators, however, w e can n o w look b e h i n d this seemingly frivolous p o p surface to see that everything i n the presentation of Hon was been carefully planned and executed. The references to Haggard's She and Zola's Nana were by no means the o n l y historical reference points. Picasso's classical Bathers from the 1920s also come to m i n d . Just as Picasso's painted w o m e n h a d signified 'Mother France,' Hon c o u l d here be seen to represent a fashionable and sexy 'Swedish M a m m a . ' But along w i t h this h i p and comforting n e w look, this female figure is also clearly raped by the culture w h i c h surrounds her. The p a y i n g visitor to this enormous p o p culture courtesan was also s u p p l i e d w i t h an exhibition guide (a newspaper i n c l u d i n g chronological histories of each artist), as w e l l as documentation of Hon's construction. Just as Picasso and other 20th century avant-gardists h a d used Stephen M a l l a r m e ' s contempt for p o p u l a r culture to position their o w n ambiguous practices, the makers of Hon p l a y e d u p o n his dislike of the n e w s p r i n t m e d i u m w h i c h he had likened to a clandestine prostitute. P r o d u c e d w i t h the same anti-aesthetic obsolescence as a C u b i s t or Dadaist collage, the handout's cover s h o w e d a d r a w i n g of Hon's inner and outer spaces i n the v e r y architectural language of i n d u s t r y that D u c h a m p h a d used w h e n p r e p a r i n g his Bride Stripped Bare [figs. 93 and 94]. 3 ^ 4 T i m e Magazine (June 17, 1966). 1 9 9 Just as this newspaper w o u l d gradually be destroyed, the life of Hon w o u l d also come to an end. After two months of "fun-filled action," a three day destruction p e r i o d was scheduled, announced and executed [fig. 95]. She apparently withered away and died. To emphasize the importance of this final act, a f i l m was p r o d u c e d d o c u m e n t i n g the very violent and misogynist act of destruction. A c c o m p a n i e d by carnivalesque music, the f i l m not o n l y serves as an archival reminder of Hon's inner spaces where we f i n d , for example, T i n g u e l y ' s Radio Stockholm [fig. 96] (a sculpture w h i c h can refer to the radio transmitters i n Rauschenberg's Oracle), but w e also get a v i v i d picture of the darker side of Hon as C o c a - C o l a bottles are repeatedly seen being crushed, f o l l o w e d b y scenes of her final destruction. The violence of this latter part is particularly disturbing and I w o u l d say that it is not by accident that particular scenes are s h o w n . For example, scenes such as the r e m o v a l of one of Hon's breasts by an a l l male crew, force the viewer to adress h o w gender has been constructed and a d r e s s e d . 3 5 5 Just as i n Tinguely's earlier w o r k such as The End of the World, and Hommage a New York, a n d Dissecting Machine, celebration was f o l l o w e d by very deliberate destruction. T h r o u g h this "creative act," as D u c h a m p called it, the European bachelors h a d hereby stripped the mechanical bride of its "article of dress," to re-quote M c L u h a n , and revealed an image similar to the contemporary disaster series b y A n d y W a r h o l . Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Hon is that it p r o v i d e d its audience w i t h an early v i e w of D u c h a m p ' s last w o r k Given: 1. The Waterfall, 355-rhe destruction of Hon is w e l l documented not o n l y i n the N a t i o n a l m u s e u m ' s 1967 catalogue of the exhibit and i n n u m e r o u s books about Saint-Phaile and T i n g u e l y , but also i n a 16 m m f i l m entitled Hon b y M a g n u s W i b o m p r o d u c e d i n 1966. This f i l m is the best d o c u m e n t available of the activities that occurred inside Hon. I w o u l d l i k e to acknowledge M o n i c a N i c k e l s effort at M o d e r n a Museet for f i n d i n g the f i l m i n its archives a n d screening it for me o n A u g u s t 18,1992. 200 2. The Illuminating Gas (1946-66), the finished w o r k w h i c h w o u l d not be seen u n t i l his death two years later, but had been 'given' a w a y i n the form of a 'sketch' [fig. 97]. A s w o u l d become clear m u c h later, D u c h a m p had here revealed the 'social realism' behind his 'abstract' art [fig. 98]. A n x i o u s to realize Duchamp's "delay i n glass," these bachelors managed to see the mechanical bride stripped bare i n Stockholm — even before P h i l a d e l p h i a . A s w o u l d be the case i n the U n i t e d States w h e n Etand Donne was finally revealed, the w o r k d i d produce some "shock" i n S w e d e n as w e l l . A s N i k i de Saint-Phalle recalled the event: There was n o t h i n g pornographic about the Hon. She was painted like an Easter egg w i t h the very bright colours I have always used and l o v e d . She was like a grand fertility goddess reclining comfortably i n her i m m e n s i t y and generously receiving thousands of visitors w h i c h she absorbed, devoured, and gave b i r t h to again. The shock of Hon was so enormous that we got away w i t h it. A l s o one must remember that this was Sweden, where there had been for some time an atmosphere of sexual liberty. This joyous huge creature represented for m a n y people the dream of the return to the great M o t h e r Goddess.... The b i r t h rate of Stockholm went u p the year of the Hon, and this was attributed to h e r . 3 5 6 W h i l e Saint-Phalle's recollection carefully sidesteps any m e n t i o n of the darker side of Hon w h i c h we have just seen, we s h o u l d , I propose, read her second from last sentence i n this quote i n u n i s o n w i t h someone like T.S. E l i o t w h o h a d remarked earlier i n the century that: "Totalitarianism appeals to the desire to return to the w o m b . " 3 5 7 If this was the global game being played, these artists wanted to make sure that they got to p l a y the part of 3 5 6 S a i n t - P h a l l e quoted i n H u l t e n (1972), p.168. 3 ^ 7 Q u o t e d i n A n d r e a s H u y s s e n After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism Indianapolis: Indiana U n i v e r s i t y Press, 1986, p.58. 2 0 1 M a c h i a v e l l i . Democracy was for them perhaps too fraught w i t h i l l u s i o n s and c o m p r o m i s e s . One part of Saint-Phalle's quote that w e can perhaps read more literally is her reference to Sweden's liberal attitude towards sexuality d u r i n g the sixties. This exhibition, I w o u l d agree, c o u l d not have taken place anywhere but at a m u s e u m like Hu lten 's i n Sweden. Just as i n d i v i d u a l s l i k e H u l t e n , L i n d e , and U l t v e d t were attempting to carve out a s o c i o - i n d i v i d u a l p o s i t i o n parallel to (but crucially different from) S w e d i s h and A m e r i c a n ideals of collectivity and i n d i v i d u a l i s m , the S w e d i s h state, as w e have seen w i t h regard to the V i e t n a m W a r , was attempting to differentiate its image from that of an A m e r i c a n i z e d liberal democracy. A liberal attitude towards sexuality d i d i n the end p r o v i d e Sweden w i t h at least an image of a new type of democratic "freedom." But what k i n d of image of sexual and democratic freedom c o u l d be read into this giant female G u l l i v e r l y i n g o n the floor of M o d e r n a Museet? Despite its p l a y f u l scale, colour, and content, Hon was after a l l an enormous prostitute used and abused b y the visitors w h o entered her. Refusing to skirt a r o u n d this issue, Claes O l d e n b u r g , the Swedish-born Pop artist whose solo exhibition was to f o l l o w Hon at M o d e r n a Museet, made the f o l l o w i n g aggressive connection between the pornographic side of Hon a n d Sweden's 'new look:' I, a passionate a n t i - A m e r i c a n , think it's good to accept a n d to look closely at the C u n t , an entrance, an exit. In the s m a l l i s h magazines i n Sweden, focus falls u p o n the C u n t . In the U . S . A . , there is always something i n the w a y , the C u n t is obstructed. F r o m m y studio i n the 2 0 2 M . M . , I looked straight up Hon's C u n t . E v e r y day, very clearly, I saw the citizens go i n and come o u t . . . . 3 5 8 A s O l d e n b u r g observed, there was a distinct difference between A m e r i c a n and S w e d i s h liberal attitudes toward sexuality. Since p l a y w i t h ambiguity is often e m p l o y e d by O l d e n b u r g , the exaggerated v u l g a r i t y of his description makes one question whether he is i n fact p a i n t i n g a positive picture of 'her' emancipation. L i k e O l d e n b u r g , a number of commentators saw H o n as representative of the new emancipated w o m a n of the s i x t i e s . 3 5 9 "She" was, after a l l , seen everywhere b y this time. M a r t i a l Raysse, w h o w e w i l l remember h a v i n g been forced to drop out of the collaboration o n H o n , had treated this subject matter w i t h a s i m i l a r ambiguous 'pop' surface i n his 1962 Elle — a w o r k whose title referred to the French fashion magazine b y the same name w h i c h had successfully cashed i n o n this image of a sexually liberated 'new w o m a n ' [fig. x]. In Raysse's w o r k , it is h a r d to tell if 'She' is a beautifully made-up m o d e l or a b r u t a l l y bruised housewife. In this sense w e can read his w o r k as raising questions about this n e w popularized image of w o m a n . Read alongside Raysse's w o r k , Hon presents us w i t h a s i m i l a r l y ambiguous gender construction w h i c h t h r o u g h an act of mimesis and sacrifice reveals the violent and patriarchal logic b e h i n d consumer d r i v e n democratic freedom. But not a l l critics saw H o n as a gender or c u l t u r a l critique. Critics like G u d r u n Ekeflo and Barbro Backberger read the sculpture as taking a very 3 ^ 8 0 1 d e n b u r g quoted i n Barbro S y l v a n , Pontus H u l t e n and John M e l i n eds. Hon-en katedral/historia S t o c k h o l m : N a t i o n a l m u s e u m , 1967, p.167. 3 ^ 9 S e e for example Bengt O l v a n g ' s article " H o n " i n the socialist e v e n i n g paper Aftonbladet (June 9,1966). 2 0 3 "traditional" and "reactionary" position against the liberated female subject. 3 6 0 Setting up an imaginary two-page dialogue presumably between U l f L i n d e (using L i n d e ' s description of Hon from Dagens Nyheter) and herself i n Bonniers Litterdra Magasin, Backberger set out to reveal the male chauvinist side of Hon : voice I: She b i l l o w s i n front of y o u like a washed up whale o n the beach. Y o u stand below — i n front of her like G u l l i v e r i n the l a n d of Giants. She is a cathedral. A l l cathedrals ought to be like this.... Voice II: O h , I see — a cathedral this time. It doesn't matter what w e call it, it's the same o l d passive w o m a n a n y w a y . Voice I: She is the sister of V e n u s of W i l l e n d o r f f and L o r e n z o n ' s cosmic mother. Requests and censorship buzzes about her like insignificant mosquitoes. Their tiny voices are o v e r p o w e r e d by the life machinery that chews, beats, creeks, squeaks, and turns and toss inside of her. V o i c e II: A s expected! W e are back to the thirties again. P r i m i t i v i s m ' s v i e w o n woman.... A w o m a n w h o wholeheartedly identifies herself w i t h her o w n sexuality. A pleasant and w a r m l o v e r . . . . 3 6 1 The dialogue continues at length u n t i l V o i c e II (Backberger) asks: "Is there never a n y t h i n g n e w i n art? For example, a w o m a n w h o stands o n her o w n two l e g s ? " 3 6 2 N o t o n l y was Hon offensive to m a n y because of her r e c l i n i n g pose, but the fact that her head was constructed as n o t h i n g more than a tiny extension of her enormous b o d y was more than some c o u l d tolerate [fig. 100]. Ekeflo, i n an article for the Leftist's d a i l y Stockholms Tidningen p r o p o s e d that: 3 6 ° G u d r u n Ekeflo "Varfor ar Hon en katedral?" Stockholms Tidningen. A response to Olvang's article reproduced in in the catalogue Hon-en katedral/historia Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1967, p.155. 3 6 1 B a r b r o Backberger "Hon" Ord & Bild 4 (Summer, 1966), pp.324-325. Ord & Bild is a literary journal that during the sixties positioned itself with the New Left. 3 6 2 I b i d . , p.325. 2 0 4 If one is to interpret this m o n u m e n t a l w o r k symbolically... [Hon] is an enormous s w e l l i n g , a sensual female b o d y topped off w i t h a tiny bulb for a head. One can stroll a r o u n d i n this body, but after h a v i n g h a d some refreshments at the bar underneath the breasts y o u don't get any farther — the head is apparently totally uninteresting and contains, according to the handout, an 'inferno m a c h i n e . ' 3 6 3 W h i l e Ekeflo's critique is entirely justified, I suggest that Hon's head was not entirely uninteresting to the producers of the w o r k . O n the contrary, the size, shape, and function of the head appears intentionally stunted as if to suggest that 'intellect,' that very necessary part of intentions, c o u l d not fully be developed under circumstances where the rest of the social body is left w i d e open for interpretation. A s l o n g as visitors c o u l d be kept from seeing what was i n her head (what L i n d e had patriarchally referred to i n his four articles as "what is him i n her), the intentionality of the i n d i v i d u a l artist c o u l d be protected. One of the strangest and most interesting events to occur d u r i n g Hon's destruction was the careful severing of the head from the rest of her body. In the end, the head, w h i c h Ekeflo had referred to as a tiny b u l b , w o u l d remain the o n l y part saved from total destruction [fig. 101]. R e m o v e d from the m u s e u m , the head was transported to an abandoned o l d p r i s o n at O s t e r m a l m i n S t o c k h o l m . 3 6 4 Just as the marble sugar cubes i n D u c h a m p ' s Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy? (1921) were cooped u p i n a b i r d cage, the interior motifs of D u c h a m p ' s ready "maids" i n S t o c k h o l m w o u l d be l o c k e d up and protected from p u b l i c c o n s u m p t i o n [fig. 1 0 2 ] . 3 6 5 3 6 3 E k e f l o , p.155.1 w o u l d venture to suggest that this 'inferno machine' refers to Rauschenberg's prints of Dante's Inferno s h o w n at M o d e r n a Museet i n 1965. 3 6 4 A n interesting p r i s o n location for this decapitated P o p star as O s t e r m a l m is one of Stockholm's oldest, and snobbiest, upper-class neighbourhoods. 3 6 ^ D i s c u s s Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy? from 1921. 205 A s we have seen, w h i l e M o d e r n a Museet by 1961 had managed to position itself at the center of post-war avant-garde discourses b y opening its doors to a variety of anarchistic forms of freedom, by the mid-sixties this flight into the bright light of international success w o u l d be recognized as premature. W h i l e M o d e r n a Museet's cross-Atlantic connections h a d opened up new avenues for artists, critics and curators to celebrate difference p u b l i c l y , privately artists such as Saint-Phalle, T i n g u e l y , and U l t v e d t understood their i n d i v i d u a l identities c o m p r o m i s e d as if i n a T o w e r of Babel. W i t h exhibitions such as The Inner and Outer Space, M o d e r n a Museet cleared a space for an art of enlightened false consciousness. B y erecting a colosal m o n u m e n t to the increasingly technological w o r l d order they sought to critique, Saint-Phalle, Tinguely and U l t v e d t produced an art w o r k w h i c h was directly engaged w i t h socio, psycho, a n d p o l i t i c a l representation of everyday life. In D u c h a m p i a n fashion, Hon was a tongue-in-cheek critique of both an A m e r i c a n a n d S w e d i s h consumer culture that despite its liberal 'look' was technocratically totalitarian. A s B r i a n O ' D o h e r t y described the n e w artistic environment at the moment P o p A r t 'popped' i n 1962, "a fresh w i n d is b l o w i n g accross the vast b i l l b o a r d wasteland, and anarchy is o u t . " 3 6 6 W h a t was 'given' to their audience was the sexualized social b o d y Duchamp's Large Glass h a d always referred to through the language of industry and w h i c h M a r s h a l l M c L u h a n had named "the mechanical bride." A year after Hon, M c L u h a n , i n The Medium is the Massage, w o u l d also c a l l for n e w approaches to expressing technological m o d e r n i t y . W h i l e his c a l l was for the creation of contemporary myths related to the machinery of consumer culture, he d i d g r o u n d himself i n M e d i e v a l art where he "saw the fear of the n e w p r i n t technology expressed 3 6 6 B r i a n O ' D o h e r t y The New York Times (October 31, 1962), p. 2 0 6 i n the theme The Dance of Death." W h a t I have s h o w n i n this last chapter is that this dance of death was s t i l l happening i n 1966 at M o d e r n a Museet. 207 EPILOGUE Connections, Rejections, and M o d e r n a M u s e e f s Collection In the preceding three chapters I have o u t l i n e d something of the history of the post-war avant-garde, and i n the process disentangled some of the conceptual confusion w h i c h took place a r o u n d the issue of a so called 'Open A r t ' between the years 1954 and 1966. W h a t I have found is an intricate and significant history s u r r o u n d i n g M o d e r n a Museet's activities d u r i n g this time w h i c h has since been obscured by a number of m y t h - m a k i n g factors. Between 1966 and 1973 (the year H u l t e n left M o d e r n a Museet to become the first artistic director of the Centre P o m p i d o u / B e a u b o u r g i n Paris), the m u s e u m continued to produce large-scale exhibitions w i t h both A m e r i c a n and European artists. It c o u l d be said that M o d e r n a Museet h a d become k n o w n as a site for 'Euro-Pop' i n the international artistic arena. Despite the great efforts w e have seen that went into separating i n d i v i d u a l collaborations from collective identities and interests i n rebellion versus r e v o l u t i o n , large scale exhibitions of A m e r i c a n artists such as Claes Oldenburg (1966) and Andy Warhol (1968) were increasingly organized alongside a E u r o p e a n avant-garde tradition represented b y exhibitions such as John Heartfield (1967), The Language of Revolution (1968) a n d Poetry Must Be Made By All (1969). If, as we have seen, exhibitions such as Inner and Outer Space and She - a Cathedral h a d been aimed at a v o i d i n g polemics b y engaging i n either a critical p h i l o s o p h y or tounge-in-cheek irony, the f o l l o w i n g events h a d a d e c i d e d l y more cynical twist. Just as Saint-Phalle and T i n g u e l y h a d embraced failure by becoming what they rejected and despised, H u l t e n w o u l d , after 1966, embrace the very art he h a d p r e v i o u s l y rejected. 2 0 8 Just p r i o r to leaving M o d e r n a Museet i n 1973, H u l t e n made a last desperate attempt to 'fix' the history of M o d e r n a Museet as the most 'open' and progressive site for contemporary art i n the sixties — l e a v i n g a heroic (albeit questionable) legacy i n place for generations to come. W o r k i n g w i t h B i l l y K l i i v e r and E . A . T . , H u l t e n h e l p e d purchase The New York Collection for M o d e r n a Museet w i t h the help of state funding. C o n s i s t i n g of thirty w o r k s of art by 29 a r t i s t s , 3 6 7 The New York Collection not o n l y filled gaps i n the collection from the sixties, but it helped seal the idea that M o d e r n a Museet, d u r i n g the sixties, not o n l y h a d a d y n a m i c relationship w i t h the N e w Y o r k art scene, but also a comfortable o n e . 3 6 8 Since the early seventies, M o d e r n a Museet and its collection have aquired a p o w e r f u l m y t h o l o g y w h i c h depends o n a nostalgic l o n g i n g for a time w h e n i n d i v i d u a l s i n S t o c k h o l m f o u n d themselves at the centre of artistic discourses. Simultaneously, artists w o r k i n g from the centre found a discourse a n d 'edge' o n the margins. M o r e recently, people have come to reject this history as part of the shift away from a patriarchal and canonical tradition of Western art. By shifting m y attention a w a y from questions about this art's postwar status as either a heroic A v a n t - G a r d e or failed N e o - A v a n t - Garde, m y text utilizes a perspective from the m a r g i n of this c u l t u r a l discourse i n order to re-surface tensions w h i c h made this moment i n history 3 6 7 L e e Bontecou, Robert Breer, John Chamberlain, Walter de Maria, Mark di Suvero, Jim Dine, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Dan Flavin, Red Grooms, Hans Haacke, Alex Hay, Elsworth Kelly, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Morris, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Richard Stankiewicz, Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and Robert Whitman. 3 6 8 I n Barbro Schultz Lundestam's 1998 documentary Amerikanarna och Pontus Hulten, Hulten jokes about the fact that the museum was during the sixties accused of being 'leftist' when they in fact "avoided politics." As we have seen, the politics of this time and place could not be avoided and Hulten, Linde and the artists in question were highly motivated and aware (although not always in control) of their political positions. 2 0 9 so important. B y centering m y discussion o n the activities of a few- i n d i v i d u a l s and a particular institution, I hope to have revealed the precarious side of the historical make up of N o u v e a u Realisme, N e o - D a d a and Pop A r t . B y p i n p o i n t i n g specific social, p h i l o s o p h i c a l and sexual interests, a picture of this history emerges that is not necessarily 'fixed,' but takes into account conflicting attempts at c o l o n i z i n g the 'gap' between art and life. So w h y p r i v i l e g e S t o c k h o l m as the place where this alternate v i e w of art history has been constructed? I was b o r n a few miles outside of Stockholm i n M a r c h of 1966 (the year of Hon) after h a v i n g been conceived i n N e w Y o r k . I suppose this risks m a k i n g m y dissertation appear either cathartic or ironic. M y intention is neither. Despite the disclaimer, I have to admit that m y interest i n this subject stems from m y frequent visits to Stockholm's M o d e r n a Museet o n w o r k i n g holidays to S w e d e n over the past fifteen years. Each time before entering the m u s e u m o n the i s l a n d of Skeppsholmen, I have been confronted by Le Paradise fantastique, a collaborative w o r k by Saint-Phalle and T i n g u e l y p r o d u c e d for the 1967 W o r l d E x p o s i t i o n i n M o n t r e a l [fig. 103]. Relocated to a park opposite the entrance to M o d e r n a Museet, the prominence of this w o r k fascinated me — the violent gestures it p l a y f u l l y presented disturbed me, and I began to question the meaning of this w o r k w h i c h continues to annoy Sweden's K i n g and Q u e e n i n their castle across the water. It was w h i l e researching the origins of this sculpture that I was led to the 'mother' of these mechanomorphic 'children' a n d there I discovered the roots of a history of h o w the m u s e u m had become internationally acclaimed i n the sixties, but h a d since the mid-seventies gradually d i m i n i s h e d o n the international art scene. 210 Claes Britton, w r i t i n g for the magazine Stockholm New, has described M o d e r n a Museet's recent d i l e m m a : Since Pontus H u l t e n left i n 1973 to become the first director of the Centre P o m p i d o u i n Paris, M o d e r n a Museet hasn't come anywhere near the astonishing achievements of the '60s. The museum's d a i l y operations ... [have] settled d o w n to a slower-paced trot, w i t h the international collection g l i m m e r i n g like a set of crazy jewels a r o u n d the neck of a weary m u l e . . . . 3 6 9 Since m y o w n interest i n the history of these 'jewels' began, the C i t y of Stockholm announced i n 1992 that the Spanish architect Rafael M o n e o had w o n a competition to r e b u i l d M o d e r n a Museet. The m a i n argument b e h i n d this 350 m i l l i o n kr. r e b u i l d i n g project — a proposal that hit m a n y Swedes as h a r d to s w a l l o w at a time of a major national recession i n the early nineties — has been to combat the presently unfavorable conditions w h i c h "Pontus Hulten's w o r l d r e n o w n e d collection" is h o u s e d . 3 7 0 The larger subplot, of course, was to establish Stockholm as a major E u r o p e a n c u l t u r a l tourist centre. W i t h H u l t e n gone from the S w e d i s h art scene, the p l a n was to hire a new director w h o w o u l d be able to return the m u s e u m to the center of avant- garde discourses i n time for 1998 w h e n it was Stockholm's turn to be the " C u l t u r a l C a p i t a l of Europe," a dubious, but clever, title offered to help boost t o u r i s m i n Europe. U n t i l this c u l t u r a l m a g i c i a n was found (the E n g l i s h curator D a v i d E l l i o t t was eventually hired) and the n e w m u s e u m was 3 6 9 C l a e s B r i t t o n "The Second C o m i n g of M o d e r n a Museet" Stockholm New N o . 5 (1997), p.54 (54-104). 3 7 0 T h e quote is Raphael Moneo's..., b y c a l l i n g the M o d e r n a Museet's collection "Pontus Hulten's," M o n e o acknowledges the important role H u l t e n is recognized for h a v i n g p l a y e d i n f o r m i n g that collection. See Rebecka Tarschys' interview w i t h M o n e o : Fulltraffar for M o n e o . " Dagens Nyheter (June 25, 1992), p . l . 21 1 completed, a new and "more precise" replica of D u c h a m p ' s Large Glass was constructed under the direction of U l f L i n d e . In M a y of 1992, I 'witnessed' its u n v e i l i n g i n front of M r s . Teeny D u c h a m p w h o was f l o w n to S t o c k h o l m from N e w Y o r k to authorize it i n Duchamp's absence. This copy, made for travel, was then transported to B o n n , G e r m a n y where it was o n loan for five years at H u l t e n ' s K u n s t u n d A u s s t e l l u n g s h a l l e . 3 7 1 T o d a y M o d e r n a Museet has two Large Glasses i n its collection, ensuring that their D u c h a m p can both travel and stay at home. W h i l e She has been destroyed, 'He' has been kept alive for posterity by a culture industry still c l i n g i n g to its origins. The quesion is, who k n o w s why? 3 7 1 H u l t e n ' s first exhibition at this new museum was a large N i k i de Saint-Phalle retrospective. 2 1 2 F i g . 1 M a r c e l D u c h a m p , Three Standard Stoppages, 1913 M i x e d media assem- blage (Source: H o p p s , Walter, et al. M a r c e l D u c h a m p Ready-Mades, etc. (1913- 1964), M i l a n o , Galleria Schwarz, 1964). 213 F i g 2 Gouache renditions by R u d o l f Persson of G u n n a r A s p l u n d ' s Fairground at the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, 1929 (Source: Rudberg, E v a Stockholmsutstallningen 1 9 3 0 : Stockholm: Arkitekturmuseet, 1999). 2 1 4 F i g . 3 Otto C a r l s u n d , Composition for the Einstein Observatory in Potsdam, 1924- 25 O i l o n Canvas 141x75 c m (Source: Lyberg, Louise A History of Swedish Art: 1880-1980 U d d e v a l l a : Bohuslaningens Boktryckeri A B , 1987). 215 Fig.4 W o r l d Sports E x h i b i t i o n , Stockholm, 1949 (Source: Konstrevy, N r . l , 1957). 216 F i g . 5 O l l e Bonnier, Theme, 1949 O i l o n Canvas 120x150 c m (Source: Granath, O l l e Another Light: Swedish Art Since 1945 M a l m o : Svenska Instituted 1975). 2 1 7 F i g . 7 C o v e r D e s i g n of A r f d'aujourd'hui b y O l l e Baertling (S jourd'hui Serie 4 N o . 7 Oct - N o v 1953). 219 F i g . 8 V i k k i n g Eggeling, Diagonal Symphony, [detail] 1921, f i l m - r o l l (Source: Art d'Aujourd'hui serie 4, no.7 Oct-Nov, 1953). !W * * * * 4.»':.i« ^g*f«*M* « | S | . k* t t m t i * lit 2 8* « S ' J « r ! > * - s « < . ^ k WHfcSI* f * J ^ »*••»*. * * * * * M » R * '< «•«'*# It&M *** * « * P*>.* H > H mi )<»J»i•.«».• M «s» >•>«•«,.•« ttt --.im-irsi-m • 4 I tfcStWSi**"*,. e . ^ S i H l f S J f>s»»i* i f M l «:s C«*?< «< ^«i**f> ttn&f* ««t» F i g . 9 M i c h e l Ragon's article o n S w e d i s h and French Stamps i n Cimaise (Source: Ragon, M i c h e l "Esthetique actuelle d u Timbre-Post Cimaise M a r c h 1955). 221 F i g . 10 Torsten Renqvist, Windswept Bush, O i l o n Canvas 31x51 c m (Source: Lyberg, Louise A History of Swedish Art: 1880-1980 U d d e v a l l a : Bohuslaningens Boktryckeri A B , 1987). " 222 F i g . 11 M a r t i n H o l m b e r g , Traffic Milieu: Human Near a Wide Stretching Boulevard with Heavy Traffic, 1952, Bronze Sculpture (Source: L a r s - E r i k Astrom "Manniskan i nuet" Konstrevy N r . 2 (1957). 223 Fig. 12 Sebastian Roberto Matta Echaurren, The Being Opens Itself, 203x295 Oil on Canvas (Source: Granath, Olle and Nieckels, Monica eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: Moderna Museets Press, 1983). 2 2 4 F i g . 13 Jean Fautrier, Otage, 1944 O i l and M i x e d M e d i a on Canvas (Source: Jean Fautrier: Gemalde, Skulpturen und Handzeichnungen, Cologne: Josef-Haubrich- Kunsthalle, 1980). 225 F i g . 14 Pontus Hulten's balancing act (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 226 F i g . 15 Le Mouvement, Galerie Denise Rene (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Jean Tinguely: Meta. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1972). 227 Fig. 16 Bruno M u n a r i , Useless Machine, 1951 M i x e d M e d i a (Source: Tanchis, A l d o Bruno Munari: Design as Art Massachusetts: M I T Press, 1987). 228 F i g . 17 Jean Tinguely, Meta-Malevich, 1955 (Source: Hulten, Pontus Jean Tinguely: Meta. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1972). 229 Fig. 18 K a s m i r M a l e v i c h , Suprematist Composition, (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Jean Tinguely: Meta. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1972). 230 F i g . 1 9 H e n r i M i c h a u x Bataille, 1952 (Source: Agnes A n g l i v i e l de L a Beaumelle and Alfred Pacquement, eds. Henri Michaux, N e w York: The Solomon, R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1978). 231 F i g . 20 Jean Tinguely, Meta-matic Drawing Machine, 1955 (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Jean Tinguely: Meta. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1972). 232 F i g . 21 Pontus H u l t e n and Hans Nordenstrom, Scenes from En Dag i Staden, 1955- 58, Figures at top-right and bottom-left are P.O. U l t v e d t and J. Tinguely. (Source: Granath, Olle and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: Moderna Museets Press, 1983). 233 F i g . 2 2 Per-Olof Utlvedt, Geometric M o b i l e Ballet Decor, Spiralen, 1954 (Source: Springfeldt, Bjorn P.O. Ultvedt: Tvivel och overmod: Arbetenfrdn 1945 till 1988 M a l m o : M a l m o K o n s t h a l l , 1988). 2 3 4 F i g . 23 Per-Olof Ultvedt, Nam Ogat, Stills from film (Source: Springfeldt, Bjorn P.O. Ultvedt: Tvivel och overmod: Arbeten fran 1945 till 1988 M a l m o : M a l m o K o n s t h a l l , 1988). 235 F i g . 24 The Exercise House, interior of M o d e r n a Museet p r i o r to 1956 (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 236 F i g . 25 M o d e r n a Museet, front facade (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 237 F i g . 26 Sebastian Matta at M o d e r n a Museet (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 238 F i g . 27 John Cage performing at M o d e r n a Museet, 1960 (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 239 F i g . 28 Jean Tinguely, Homage a New York, 1960 M i x e d Assemblage (S Konstrevy Nr. 3 , 1 9 6 6 ) . 2 4 0 F i g . 29 Nouveau Realiste Manifesto (Livingstone, M a r c o , Pop Art: an International Perspective N e w York: R i z z o l i , 1991). 241 F i g . 30 Jacques de la Villegle Boulevard St Martin, 1959 Decollage (Source: H a p g o o d , Susan Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62 N e w York: The A m e r i c a n Federation of A r t s i n association w i t h Universe P u b l i s h i n g , 1994). 242 F i g . 31 D a n i e l Spoerri, The Trash Basket is Not Artnan's 1961 M f g j j ^ Assemblage (Source: H a p g o o d , Susan Neo-Dada: ^ W ^ ™ ^ ™ York: The A m e r i c a n Federation of A r t s i n association w i t h Universe P u b l i s h i n g , 1994). 243 Fig. 32 A r m a n , Large Bourgois Trash, I960, M i x e d M e d i a Assemblage (Source: H a p g o o d , Susan Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62 N e w York: The A m e r i c a n Federation of A r t s i n association w i t h Universe P u b l i s h i n g , 1994). 244 Fig. 33 Invitation C a r d / C a n for A r m a n ' s exhibition Full-Up at Iris Clert Galerie (Source: H a p g o o d , Susan Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62 N e w York: The American Federation of A r t s i n association w i t h Universe P u b l i s h i n g , 1994). 245 F i g . 34 Yves K l e i n w a l k i n g i n Le Vide at Iris Clert Galerie (Source: H a p g o o d , Susan Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62 N e w York: The A m e r i c a n Federation of Arts i n association w i t h Universe P u b l i s h i n g , 1994). 246 F i g . 35 Jean Tinguely t h r o w i n g his manifesto Fiir Statik out an airplane w i n d o w (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Jean Tinguely: Meta. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1972). 247 F i g . 36 N i k i de Saint-Phalle shooting/creating one of her paintings (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: K u n s t - u n d - Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 248 F i g . 37 N i k i de Saint-Phalle Tir M i x e d M e d i a Assemblage P a i n t i n g (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: K u n s t - u n d - Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 249 F i g . 38 Bewogen Beweging at the Stedelijk M u s e u m , A m s t e r d a m , 1961 (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: K u n s t - u n d - Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 250 F i g 39 Rorelse i konsten at M o d e r n a Museet, 1961 (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 251 F i g . 40 U l f L i n d e and M a r c e l D u c h a m p putting the finishing touches to The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1961 (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 252 F i g . 41 Oscar Reutersvard, U l f L i n d e , C a r l o Derkert, Pontus H u l t e n and Marcel D u c h a m p (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 253 F i g . 42 Robert Rauschenberg shooting one of N i k i de Saint-Phalle's Tir paint- ings i n Stockholm, 1961 (Source: H a p g o o d , Susan Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62 N e w York: The A m e r i c a n Federation of A r t s i n association w i t h Universe P u b l i s h i n g , 1994). 254 Fig. 43 Alexander Calder's giant mobile outside the entrance of M o d e r n a Museet (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 255 F i g . 44 Robert M i i l l e r , The Bicyclist's Widow M i x e d M e d i a Assemblage (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 256 F i g . 45 H a r r y Shunk Yves K l e i n , The Painter of Space Throws Himself into the Void, 1960 photomontage (Source: Den innre och yttre rymden: en utstallning rorande en universiell konst Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1965). 257 F i g . 46 M u s e u m goers l o o k i n g baffled at the opening of 4 Amerikanare at M o d e r n a Museet, 1962 (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 258 F i g . 47 Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-58 (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 259 F i g 48 Robert Rauschenberg, Door, 1961 (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 260 flit* *<*«> t'S** « O V » * <* Sportswriters called Floyd-lngo dull but . . . PICTURES REVEAL FIGHT AS A HISTORIC THRILLER F i g . 49 Ingemar Johansson and F l o y d Patterson (Source: "Pictures Reveal Fight as a Historic Thriller" Lf/e Magazine M a r c h 24,1961, p.148). 261 F i g . 50 Concert/Performance at the Theatre de l'Ambassade des Etats-Unis, Paris, 1962. (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: K u n s t - u n d - Auss'tellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 262 F i g . 51 N i k i de Saint-Phalleand Jasper Johns at Saint-Phalle's opening at Galerie J., Paris, 1962 (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: Kunst- u n d - Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1 9 9 2 ) . 2 6 3 F i g . 52 Robert Rauschenberg, This is a Portrait of Iris Clert if I Say So, 1961 (Source: H a p g o o d , Susan Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62 N e w York: The A m e r i c a n Federation of A r t s i n association w i t h Universe P u b l i s h i n g , 1994). 2 6 4 F i g . 53 E d w a r d K i e n h o l z , The Psycho-Vendetta Case, 1960 M i x e d M e d i a 58.5x56.5x43 c m (Source: Thomas C r o w The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent N e w York: H a r r y N . A b r a m s , Inc., 1996). 265 Fig. 54 Jean Tinguely, Study for the End of the World , No.l, Performance/spectacle at the Louisiana M u s e u m of M o d e r n A r t , 1962 (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Jean Tinguely: Meta. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1972). 266 F i g . 55 Jean Tinguely, Study for the End of the World, No. 2, i n the N e v a d a Dessert, 1962 (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Jean Tinguely: Meta. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1972). 267 F i g . 56 N i k i de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and John Cage exchanging pleas- antries before Saint-Phalle's shooting performance, M a l i b u , C a l i f o r n i a , 1962 (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: K u n s t - u n d - Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 268 F i g . 57 N i k i de Saint-Phalle and E d w a r d K i e n h o l z , M a l i b u , C a l i f o r n i a , 1962 (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: K u n s t - u n d - Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 269 F i g . 58 N i k i d e S a i n t - P h a l l e , O.A.S., 1962, M i x e d M e d i a A s s e m b l a g e (Source: H u l t e n , P o n t u s Niki de Saint-Phalle B o n n : K u n s t - u n d - A u s s t e l l u n g s h a l l e d e r B u n d e s r e p u b l i k D e u t s c h l a n d , V e r l a g G e r d H a t j e , 1992). 270 Fig. 59 Niki de Saint-Phalle, Aute/ du chat tnort, 1962, Mixed Media Assemblage (Source: Hulten, Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: Kunst-und- Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag Gerd Harje, 1992). 271 F i g . 60 Participants i n The Construction of Boston (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: K u n s t - u n d - Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 272 F i e 61 Saint-Phalle, Tinguely and assistant inside Saint-Phalle s ^ o t i n g gallery at Dylaby, Stedelijk, A m s t e r d a m , 1962 (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus N i k . de Saint-Phalle Bonn: K u n s t - u n d - Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepubhk Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 273 Fig. 62 N i k i de Saint-Phalle, King Kong, 1962, M i x e d M e d i a Assemblage (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: K u n s t - u n d - Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 274 1 Fig. 64 Letter from Saint-Phalle and Tinguely to U l t v e d t (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Jean Tinguely: Meta. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1972). 276 Fig. 65 Per-Olof Ultvedt, Manhattan, 1962 (Source: Springfeldt, Bjorn P.O. Ultvedt: Tvivel och overmod: Arbetenfran 1945 till 1988 M a l m o : M a l m o Konsthall, 1988). 277 F i g . 66 Per-Olof Ultvedt, C a r o l y n B r o w n and Robert Rauschenberg i n Pelican, 1962 (Source: Springfeldt, Bjorn P.O. Ultvedt: Tvivel och overmod: Arbetenfrdn 1945 till 1988 M a l m o : M a l m o Konsthall, 1988). 278 Fig. 67 N i k i de Saint-Phalle, Pirodactyl de New York (New York Alp), 1962, M i x e d M e d i a Assemblage (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: Kunst-und- Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 279 . 68 N i k i de Saint-Phalle on the cover of Life Magazine (Source: gazine September 26,1949). 280 F i g . 69 The Museum of Our Wishes, 1963-64(Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 281 F i g . 70 American Pop Art: 106 Forms of Love and Despair, M o d e r n a Museet, 1964 (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958- 83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 282 F i g . 71 Poster for American Pop Art: 106 Forms of Love and Despair, 1964 (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 283 F i g . 72 Merce Cunningham's Dance C o m p a n y performing Sumtnerspace at M o d e r n a Museet, 1964. Decor b y Robert Rauschenberg (Source: Konstrevy, N r . 1, 1966). 284 Fig. 73 Rauschenberg performing i n The Elgin Tie at M o d e r n a Museet, 1964 (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 285 F i g . 74 Demonstration against A m e r i c a n involvement i n V i e t n a m , Stockholm, 1965 (Source: Y n g v e M o l l e r Sverige och Vietnam: ett unikt kapitel i svensk utrike- spolitik Stockholm: Tidens Forlag, 1992). 286 F i g . 75 A m e r i c a n Helicopter L a n d i n g i n Vietnam, 1966 (Source: Y n g v e M o l l e r Sverige och Vietnam: ett unikt kapitel i svensk utrikespolitik Stockholm: Tidens Forlag, 1992). 287 uen oppna mmkn A R V . H T F R A N M U N C H E N -Ax -.v.v <̂ on. .* •« : ^ S » - V M f l J M ^ M ̂ * •Sy x*.; *W *» :<>\ ;* JMftftff vx**x- <)(V-*>v *w **M4#fe* i-x-» J * **•* JJI**^. frwwi—(t»i» •>» •»«•:•>>>' v> ^ygattMM "MWst: >>**»•»>; •*y« :w> • • I t . ^ v - W ! • A S3 , 'x$* v jjgĵ njA' J • x* * »X, «r« * * » . . . . . . *t ^ y c w*; >»«• m# *!*»!K*efcw <• A # --x-xx- x; • * » MIMM -ftk-x- . x - w » ~ «M -:>:*»»w< » y > . i \ ; ' ; < N *c*x * *•>*. jt «x* > »:'*• **.yv v . <*>' ^ — i * . : N ^ W A / N I M V . W - . - m N»? -v. *v >-.v Sir #:>»ot oc.o- : Jf, i * - *—>«t»<~ «M«a» : '•'Af <>v>*. *«•'* t V v 4* : -.v< -io*^* N>» * * * * * * * aw ! « R stoat 4s*> *n> M* >• »̂ĉ # •_*••>•• -\; ±.> »;*•»<•;; :> if* 4% >* ' * : *<•' "W> ^>.* ; ••**••( «4<4VK> < V < :s.jt-. • . . s s V w w ^ v w . v . : « * - . - v - ^ w.s-v. >• > | J » V . V \ - tMfdAto >:<. "̂<*> H # N K f l u * v . *v- vi*- *i »> • v(- Xi« vsmtv* x* xf>: w *x-:\ x. * * * .'• .*»; .y.f . . run, nfc am >X^« * * > > Jfe* F i g . 76 Detail from U l f Linde's first article i n Dagens Nyheter against the new 'Open A r t . ' L i n d e is pictures on the left, Schonberg and K a n d i n s k y i n the middle, and Cage o n the far right (Source: L i n d e , U l f "Den O p p n a konsten: Arvet fran M u n c h e n " Dagens Nyheter (March 26,1965), p.4). 288 F i g . 77 Abstract drawings by Jean Tinguely [top] and Yves M i c h a u x [bottom] used to illustrated U l f L i n d e ' s article o n " O p e n A r t " (Source: L i n d e , U l f Fyra artiklar Stockholm: BLM, 1965). 289 F i g . 78 James Rosenquist, F-lll, 1965 28 x 2.5 m., o i l o n canvas and sheet metal (Source: Madoff, Steven, H . Pop Art: A Critical History Berkley: California Press, 1997). 290 F i g . 79 Guernica at M o d e r n a Museet, 1956 (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 291 F i g . 80 The Inner and Outer Space: an Exhibition Devoted to Universal Art, 1965 (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 292 F i g . 81 N i k i de Saint-Phalle Nana Power seriegraph, 1970 (Source: Images S.A. editeurs//45700 L o m b r e u i l , France, 1995). 293 F i g . 82 N i k i de Saint-Phalle, Clarice, 1965, (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: K u n s t - u n d - Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 294 F i g . 83 Jean Tinguely at w o r k on Eureka 1964 (Source: Konstrevy, Nr.3,1966). 295 F i g . 84 Jean Tinguely, Dissecting Machine 1965 (Source: V i o l a n d - H o b i , H e i d i , E. Jean Tinguely: Life and Work M u n i c h : Prstel, 1995). 296 Fig. 85 Per-Olof Ultvedt, Hommage a Christopher Polhelm , 1965 (Source: Springfeldt, Bjorn P.O. Ultvedt: Tvivel och dvermod: Arbetenfran 1945 till 1988 M a l m o : M a l m o K o n s t h a l l , 1988). 297 F i g . 86 Robert Rauschenberg and two of the five parts that make u p Oracle, 1963-66. Oracle was constructed i n collaboration w i t h B i l l y K l i i v e r and B e l l Laboratories [E.A.T.: Experiments i n A r t and Technology], 1963-66 (Source: Konstrevy, Nr.2,1966). 298 F i g . 87 C o v e r of M a r s h a l l M c L u h a n ' s The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man N e w York: Vanguard Press, 1951. 299 F i g . 88 N i k i de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Per-Olof U l t v e d t , lion-en katedral, 1966 M i x e d M e d i a Assemblage (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 300 F i g . 89 Jean Tinguely, Machine for the Production of Broken Glass, 1966 M i x e d M e d i a Assemblage (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: Kunst- u n d - Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 301 Fig. 90 Utlvedt w o r k i n g inside of Hon-en katedral (Source: Springfeldt, Bjorn P.O. Ultvedt: Tvivel och overmod: Arbetenfrdn 1945 till 1988 M a l m o : M a l m o Konsthall, 1988) 302 F i g . 91 Three Spreads from M a r s h a l l M c L u h a n and Q u e n t i n Fiore The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects N e w York: Bantam Books, 303 F i g . 92 U l f Linde's Fake Paintings and art gallery inside Hon's leg (Source: Barbro Sylvan, Pontus H u l t e n and John M e l i n eds. Hon-en katedral/historia Stockholm: N a t i o n a l m u s e u m , 1967). 304 Fig. 93 E x h i b i t i o n catalogue/newspaper for Hon - en katedral Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1966. 305 Fig. 94 Duchamp's Plan and Elevation for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1913 (Konstrevy, N r . l , 1963). 306 F i g . 95 Destruction of Hon-en katedral, 1966 (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Jean Tinguely: Meta. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1972). 307 F i g . 96 Jean Tinguely, Radio Stockholm 1966 M i x e d M e d i a Assemblage (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Jean Tinguely: Meta. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1972). 308 Fig. 97 Marcel D u c h a m p Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1948- 49, Painted Leather o n plaster relief 50x31 c m Collection of the M o d e r n a Museet, Stockholm (Source: M i n k , Janis Marcel Duchamp: Art as Anti-Art Collogne: Taschen, 1995). 309 Fig. 98 M a r c e l D u c h a m p The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [recon- structed copy by U l f L i n d e , 1961 (Source: Granath, O l l e and Nieckels, M o n i c a eds.. Moderna Museet 1958-83. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museets Press, 1983). 310 F i g . 99 M a r t i a l Raysse Elk, 1962 (Source: Livingstone, M a r c o , P o p A r t : an International Perspective N e w York: R i z z o l i , 1991). 311 F i g . 100 N i k i de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Per-Olof U l t v e d t Hon - en kate- dral, 1966, (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: K u n s t - u n d - Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 312 F i g . 101 H u l t e n removing Hon's head, 1966 (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Jean Tinguely: Meta. Stockholm: M o d e r n a Museet, 1972). 313 F i g . 102 M a r c e l D u c h a m p , Why Not Sneeze, 1921 (Hopps, Walter, et al. Marcel Duchamp Ready-Mades, etc. (1913-1964), M i l a n o , Galleria Schwarz, 1964). 314 F i g . 103 N i k i de Saint-Phalle and Jean Tinguely, Le Paradise fantastique o n the roof-top of the French P a v i l l i o n at Expo '67 i n Montreal, C a n a d a , M i x e d M e d i a Assemblage, Stockholm (Source: H u l t e n , Pontus Niki de Saint-Phalle Bonn: K u n s t - u n d - Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Verlag G e r d Hatje, 1992). 315 BIBLIOGRAPHY A b e e l , E r i c a "Daedalus at the R o l l e r d r o m e " Saturday Review ( N e w Y o r k ) V o l . 48 No.35 ( A u g . 28, 1965), p.53. A h l s e n , E r i k and A h l s e n , Tore " F a r g over stan — en enkat" Konstrevy nr.2 (1958), pp.77-81. A m e l i n e , Jean-Paul Les Nouveaux Realisme Paris: Centre Georges P o m p i d o u , 1992. 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Selected L i b r a r y Sources: Fine A r t s L i b r a r y , U n i v e r s i t y of B r i t i s h C o l u m b i a , V a n c o u v e r , C a n a d a Yale A r t and Architecture U n i v e r s i t y L i b r a r y , Yale U n i v e r s i t y , N e w H a v e n , Connecticut, U S A Konstbiblioteket, N a t i o n a l m u s e u m , S t o c k h o l m , S w e d e n K u n g l i g a Biblioteket, S t o c k h o l m , S w e d e n Riksdagsbiblioteket, S t o c k h o l m , S w e d e n Stadsbiblioteket, S t o c k h o l m , S w e d e n 3 3 6 work_7fusxj7so5dgppgwmnq5vpfdxu ---- Parameterization, Analysis, and Risk Management in a Comprehensive Management System with Emphasis on Energy and Performance (ISO 50001: 2018) energies Article Parameterization, Analysis, and Risk Management in a Comprehensive Management System with Emphasis on Energy and Performance (ISO 50001: 2018) P. Pablo Poveda-Orjuela 1,*, J. Carlos García-Díaz 2 , Alexander Pulido-Rojano 3 and Germán Cañón-Zabala 4 1 ASTEQ Technology, 53 Street No. 53-15, Barranquilla 080020, Colombia 2 Centre for Quality and Change Management, Universitat Politècnica de València, Camino de Vera, s/n. 46022 Valencia, Spain; juagardi@eio.upv.es 3 Industrial Engineering Department, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Av. 59 No. 59-92, Barranquilla 080020, Colombia; apulido3@unisimonbolivar.edu.co 4 QUARA Group, 157 Street No. 13 B-20, Bogotá 110121, Colombia; gcanonz@quaragroup.com * Correspondence: pedpoor@doctor.upv.es or ppoveda@asteqtech.com; Tel.: +57-3008897111 Received: 7 September 2020; Accepted: 13 October 2020; Published: 26 October 2020 ���������� ������� Abstract: The future of business development relies on the effective management of risks, opportunities, and energy and water resources. Here, we evaluate the application of best practices to identify, analyze, address, monitor, and control risks and opportunities (R/O) according to ISO 31000 and 50000. Furthermore, we shed light on tools, templates, ISO guides, and international documents that contribute to classifying, identifying, formulating control, and managing R/O parameterization in a comprehensive management system model, namely CMS QHSE3+, which consists of quality (Q), health and safety (HS), environmental management (E), energy efficiency (E2), and other risk components (+) that include comprehensive biosecurity and biosafety. By focusing on the deployment of R/O-based thinking (ROBT) at strategic and operational levels, we show vulnerability reduction in CMS QHSE3+ by managing energy, efficiency, and sustainability. Keywords: risks and opportunities management; comprehensive management system; parameterization; vulnerability; energy efficiency; ISO 31000; sustainable success 1. Introduction. Problem Analysis, Research Objectives, and Study Approach 1.1. Vulnerability and Low Sustainability of Entrepreneurship Efforts In the 1950s, no one could have imagined that the first few decades of the new millennium would give companies a harsh confrontation for survival due to the acute economic situation caused by COVID-19 [1–9]. Statistics between 2000 and 2019 revealed that more than 80% of SMEs declared bankruptcy within 5 years of operation due to issues related to profitability, external environment, and internal decision-making, planning, the execution of good management practices [5–9], or the weight of what Phillipe Kottler called the “marketing war” [10]. The problem is exacerbated by the difficult conditions that entrepreneurs face in a changing market, i.e., increasingly demanding customers, aggressive and unfair competitors, a voracious financial sector, more expensive resources including water and energy, as well as a level of experience and skills that makes them more vulnerable because they do not have the methods or tools to organize themselves and make the right decisions based on information intelligence and good QHSE3+ practices to effectively address the swarm of risks and the context of potential opportunities, for the sustainability of their businesses [2,4–10]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579; doi:10.3390/en13215579 www.mdpi.com/journal/energies http://www.mdpi.com/journal/energies http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5559-7110 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5599-7977 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/en13215579 http://www.mdpi.com/journal/energies https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/21/5579?type=check_update&version=2 Energies 2020, 13, 5579 2 of 43 Moreover, the failure rate of ICT projects and the implementation of management systems until 2019 was above 60% in countries with the highest vulnerability [4,7–9]. The root causes of failure in these entrepreneurship efforts are directly related to competencies, discipline, culture, and the application of simple and effective tools to facilitate comprehensive risk management (CRM) by identification, immediate response, containment, evaluation, and treatment. This is precisely the question that justifies the research efforts that this work supports: What to do to contribute to the sustainable management of SMEs and entrepreneurs? The authors’ commitment is linked to the configuration of a Reference Framework for Comprehensive Risk Management (CRM), within the Comprehensive Management System CMS-QHSE3+, with tools that facilitate its application to entrepreneurs, supported by Good Practices of related ISO international standards. It is important to note that the research uses the expressions Comprehensive Risk Management Model (CRM), and Comprehensive Management System (CMS), instead of Integrated Risk Management, or Integrated Management System, for the following reasons: In the first place, management in both cases is integral and holistic, since regardless of the scope or level they are managed in, its unit, its principles and strategic focus, as in DNA, are maintained. Furthermore, the integrated expression, in its etymology and definition of the DRAE, would limit the scope of the system to the sum of its parts, or to the sum of the response to the standards used in each component. Finally, it is emphasized that it is possible to have an integral management, even if it works or if it is certified with one, two, or three standards, to the extent that the dynamics around the strategy and all the processes are focused on the characteristics, priorities, interests, risks, and opportunities of the organization [4,7,11]. Previously, our research gave rise to the article entitled “ISO 50001: 2018 and its application in a Comprehensive Management System with an energy performance approach”, in which the CMS Model QHSE3+, the Route, the Task Breakdown Structure and the products to be generated in a CMS QHSE3+ Implementation Project, with emphasis on the E2 energy component, were discussed. This paper focuses on the framework of reference for Comprehensive Risk Management CRM, and on the tools for its identification, analysis, and treatment at a strategic and operational level [11–13]. 1.2. Objectives (1). To present a CRM model using CMS QHSE3+ through the applications of best practices to identify, analyze, address, monitor, and control risks and opportunities (R/O), taking into account the guidelines of the families of ISO 31000 standards and ISO 50000, as well as tools, templates, and references to international ISO guides, documents that contribute to the classification, identification, formulation of controls, and parameterization for the deployment of R/O-based thinking (ROBT) at strategic and operational levels. (2). To present the results obtained on vulnerability reduction at strategic and operational levels through energy efficiency management and business sustainability. These two objectives are directly linked to the purposes of the present research, which seeks to respond to the need among entrepreneurs and SMEs for tools, models, and instruments that facilitate the application of Good Practices of the families of standards related to the QHSE3+ components, and with Risk Management, to contribute to the sustainable development of entrepreneurship projects, and in the comprehensive generation of value for stakeholders. 1.3. Article Outline Section 2 presents the basic elements of the study, including (Section 2.1) the presentation of concepts, principles, and advances for comprehensive R/O management; (Section 2.2) energy efficiency; (Section 2.3) comprehensive biosecurity; and (Section 2.4) the integration of requirements associated with high-level hierarchical structure (HLS). Section 3.1 presents the main objectives and methods of the research, and Section 3.2 the classification matrix of the types of QHSE3+ R/O, including those related to comprehensive biosecurity, Energies 2020, 13, 5579 3 of 43 which can also be applied to health and safety (HS), environment, quality (Q), or the strategic analysis of risks and provisions to ensure business continuity. Section 3.3 describes the R/O integral management model incorporated into CMS QHSE3+, and Section 3.4 shows its flow and parameterization to facilitate its application through computer tools. Section 3.5 includes the achievements and general benefits obtained with the application of the tools and models presented in this study for the implementation/consolidation of CMS. Section 3.6 presents a discussion on the results obtained in terms of energy efficiency and vulnerability reduction for business sustainability. Section 4 includes the conclusions. The Appendices include the logical structure and references to tools, guides, and best practices contained in the families of ISO 31000 (Figure A1), ISO 9000 (Figure A2), ISO 45000 (Figure A3), ISO 14000 (Figure A4), and ISO 50000 (Figure A5). Figure A6 presents the approach taken for the continuity plan to govern the COVID-19 pandemic based on the best practices of the ISO 22300 family of standards in a services company. Figure A7 includes the chronology corresponding to the development of the QHSE3+ Standards in correlation with the milestones of musical, artistic, and transcendental expression of man, under a holistic approach. Figures A8–A14 presents the detail of the classification of internal and external R/O, according to the layers indicated in Sections 2.4 and 3.2. 2. Materials and Inputs for Research 2.1. Concepts and Principles of CRM 2.1.1. Risks, Risk Management, Intelligence, and Decision-Making Based on the definitions of ISO 31000: 2018, the ISO 73: 2009 Guide, the Guide for Comprehensive Risk Management published by the Standardization and Certification Body ICONTEC, from the perspective of the ILO, and the approach given by the US Federal National Security Agency to concepts related to danger, threats and risks, in its “Security Lexicon”, as illustrated in Figure 1, the terms on risk management, the intelligence cycle, and the decision-making cycle can be correlated around the Protection of the Integrity of Resources and the Creation of Value, which is the reason of being of Risk Management [13–18]. In Figure 1, concepts associated with intelligence, risk and security are correlated, in the context of Management Systems, taking into account the vulnerability of organizations generated by various sources of risks, which combine the possibility or severity, and that have an impact or consequences, on the achievement of objectives, on capital, or on the integrity of resources. Oriented from bottom to top of Figure 1, there is an Axis ID which brings together the Intelligence Cycle and the Decision-Making and Actions Cycle, to illustrate the sequence of Knowing (understanding), Reasoning, Deciding, and Acting with Intelligence. In the area to the right of Figure 1, the flow of the Risk Management Process is proposed, in accordance with the ISO 31000: 2018 approach; the Axis RMP with the same name has been established. The process comprises a sequence of the following actions: (i) Establish the strategic, organizational and risk management context, scope and related criteria; (ii) Identify the risks, that is, determine what can happen and how; (iii) Analyze the risks. This implies analyzing the possibility, the consequences, and sometimes the degree of exposure; And (iv) Assess Risks, which involves listing risks according to their priority. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 4 of 43 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 4 of 44  The concept of risk is directly associated with uncertainty and constitutes the conjugation of the possibility of an event that may have a positive or negative impact on the achievement of objectives or the integrity of resources. Chance is the source of risk, and in some contexts, it is associated with the term “risk factor” [14,15,19,20]. Figure 1. Relationship between the concepts of risk, risk management, intelligence, and decision- making, based on ISO 31000, ISO Guide 73: 2009 and DHS USA, 2008 [13,14,19,20].  Uncertainty is the “state generated by the deficiency of information to understand or know an event, its consequences, and probability of occurrence” [16,19,20].  Vulnerability is the condition of design, location, or operation that makes an asset, organism, product, service, process, or system susceptible to an attack [14,15,19,20]; its reduction can be assessed in terms of the proportion or percentage of reduction of the risk level, as indicated by Equation (1) [11], where DismVul denotes the percentage decrease in vulnerability after implementing antirisk measures, Poi and Goi are the initially assessed possibility and gravity, respectively, and Pfi and Gfi are the final possibility and gravity after adopting the planned measures, respectively. %𝐷𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑉𝑢𝑙 = 𝑃𝑜 𝐺𝑜 − 𝑃𝑓 𝐺𝑓 / 𝑃𝑜 𝐺𝑜 (1)  The decisions cycle plays a fundamental role in the activities of any organization. This cycle includes the intelligence cycle, as it considers the phases of capturing information, classifying it, analyzing it, and understanding its context and behavior to guide decision-making [13].  In the intelligence cycle, identification, analysis, and evaluation must be integrated into risk assessments. The union of the two cycles brings together know (understand), reason, decide, and act with intelligence, linking “intelligence” with decision-making and the orientation of actions with reliable information and the criteria for analyses of the matter to be decided. Thus, with the intelligence of the information, it is possible to reduce the uncertainty linked to decisions.  The result or impact of R/O is the effect an event can have on the integrity of the resources and objectives. As the impact or consequences can be economic, personal, or missionary, R/O management brings together “the coordinated actions to direct and control the organization concerning its risks and opportunities” [14,17], which focus on reducing their possibility of occurrence and impact, or enhancing opportunities, thereby leading to the creation or protection of value. Figure 1. Relationship between the concepts of risk, risk management, intelligence, and decision-making, based on ISO 31000, ISO Guide 73: 2009 and DHS USA, 2008 [13,14,19,20]. So far, the steps mentioned in the Intelligence and Risks Cycle correspond to Knowing, Reasoning, and initiating the actions to Decide, based on priorities. Next, there is the stage of Acting with Intelligence. In the process, this corresponds to Treating Risk and Control, i.e., planning and implementing measures to eliminate, reduce, mitigate, or take contingency actions. Next comes the action of Monitoring the control system, and the status of the risk, to close the cycle with the action of Communicating and Consulting, which involves interacting with various parties to obtain a maximum of information about each risk and its context. Finally, all actions and risk treatment consider the Report and Record. In this approach, the following points stand out: � The concept of risk is directly associated with uncertainty and constitutes the conjugation of the possibility of an event that may have a positive or negative impact on the achievement of objectives or the integrity of resources. Chance is the source of risk, and in some contexts, it is associated with the term “risk factor” [14,15,19,20]. � Uncertainty is the “state generated by the deficiency of information to understand or know an event, its consequences, and probability of occurrence” [16,19,20]. � Vulnerability is the condition of design, location, or operation that makes an asset, organism, product, service, process, or system susceptible to an attack [14,15,19,20]; its reduction can be assessed in terms of the proportion or percentage of reduction of the risk level, as indicated by Equation (1) [11], where DismVul denotes the percentage decrease in vulnerability after implementing antirisk measures, Poi and Goi are the initially assessed possibility and gravity, respectively, and Pfi and Gfi are the final possibility and gravity after adopting the planned measures, respectively. %DismVul =  n∑ i=1 (Poi)(Goi)− n∑ i=1 (P fi)(G fi) /  n∑ i=1 (Poi)(Goi)  (1) � The decisions cycle plays a fundamental role in the activities of any organization. This cycle includes the intelligence cycle, as it considers the phases of capturing information, classifying it, analyzing it, and understanding its context and behavior to guide decision-making [13]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 5 of 43 � In the intelligence cycle, identification, analysis, and evaluation must be integrated into risk assessments. The union of the two cycles brings together know (understand), reason, decide, and act with intelligence, linking “intelligence” with decision-making and the orientation of actions with reliable information and the criteria for analyses of the matter to be decided. Thus, with the intelligence of the information, it is possible to reduce the uncertainty linked to decisions. � The result or impact of R/O is the effect an event can have on the integrity of the resources and objectives. As the impact or consequences can be economic, personal, or missionary, R/O management brings together “the coordinated actions to direct and control the organization concerning its risks and opportunities” [14,17], which focus on reducing their possibility of occurrence and impact, or enhancing opportunities, thereby leading to the creation or protection of value. � Resilience is the adaptive capacity of an organization in a complex and changing environment [14,15,18]. The US Department of Homeland Security [19], expands this definition as a “systems’ capacity, infrastructures, government, companies, and citizens to resist, absorb, recover from, or adapt to an adverse event that may cause harm, destruction, or loss of national importance,” or the “capacity of an organization to recognize threats and dangers and make adjustments that improve future protection efforts and risk reduction measures.” � Threat [19] is a natural or man-made phenomenon generated by people, entities, or an action that has or projects potential damage to life, information, operations, the environment, or property. It considers the conditions of intent or unintentionality of the threat. � The scenario corresponds to a hypothetical situation composed of hazards, an entity affected, and the associated conditions, including consequences when appropriate [19]. An incident is a natural or man-made phenomenon, or an action that has or projects potential harm to damage life, information, operations, the environment, and/or property. 2.1.2. Scope of Risk Management in Society and Companies Many companies today face the difficulties of the market, competition, and sustainability, and see problems related to water, air, soil, energy, natural resources, global warming, and biosecurity. There are also multiple financial, social, and macroeconomic dangers related to the increase in interest rates, tax burdens, and the strengthening of the prevailing currencies. Thus, doing business is an increasingly difficult mission [12–15]. Changes in customs, habits, ways of doing business, and technological developments and restrictions on access to ICT also generate vulnerability. With this spectrum of adversities, the future of entrepreneurs and project leaders is marked by the need to make intelligent decisions that allow them to respond appropriately to adverse situations, opportunities, and contingencies. Therefore, it is essential to apply risk management and foresight in strategy and operational dynamics [12–14,21–24]. Thus, it is necessary to determine the tools and guides necessary for the application of the good management practices that underlie each component of CMS QHSE3+: � For Component Q, associated with the strategic and quality risks, the best practices of ISO 9001: 2015 and ISO 9000 family of standards, support this approach [25]. � For the HS component linked to occupational health and safety risks, the best practices of ISO 45001: 2018 and the ISO 45000 family of standards, also support this approach [26]. � For Component E of the environment related to risks due to contamination and deficiencies in environmental performance, ISO 14001: 2015 and the ISO 14000 family of standards, support the planning and application of best practices [27]. � For the energy efficiency component (E2), the best practices of ISO 50001: 2018 and the ISO 50000 family of standards, support a management approach which reduces the vulnerability associated with the use, consumption, and performance of energy [28]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 6 of 43 � The sign (+) at the end of the abbreviation corresponds to any other reference that may be applicable to, or required by the organization, such as ISO 22000: 2018. “Food safety management systems”, or ISO 27001: 2013 “Information Security Management Systems” [29,30]. � At this point, the risks related to corporate social responsibility can be considered part of the additional risks “plus (+)”, as well as the risk of not taking actions that contribute to sustainable development [31]. From the integral perspective of risk management, the approach of ISO 31000: 2018 risk management is applied, and the terms and definitions for risk management and QHSE3+ components are adopted from ISO 73 GUIDE, ISO 9000: 2015, ISO 45001: 2018, ISO 14001: 2015, ISO 14050: 2009, ISO 50001: 2018, and ISO/IEC 13273: 2015 [16,25–28,30–33] (See Figures A1–A5, and Figures A8–A14) Although there are no specific developments in Risk Management from a comprehensive QHSE3+ perspective, the work carried out by Aven T., Labodová A., the ISO Committee TC 262, ANDI, and ILO, among others, is highlighted [34–48]. See also Figure A1. 2.1.3. Principles of Risk Management Risk Management must be based on the application of several principles that support its application in the processes and functions of the organization in the context of a business culture that focuses on continuous improvement, the integral generation of value, and sustainable success. Figure 2 presents the principles of ISO 31000: 2018 [14] within a model in which its perspective is broadened, taking into account the critical factors that underlie the approaches of the previous paragraph regarding the scope and importance of the Management of Risks in companies and in society. For this reason, the illustration uses three versions of “La Danse”, a famous work by Henri Matisse [49], to highlight the holistic and social nature of Comprehensive Risk Management and its principles. Six basic perspectives are considered for its classification: Management and Leadership, Talent and Culture, Processes, Stakeholders, Decisions and Improvement. Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 6 of 44 Risk Management must be based on the application of several principles that support its application in the processes and functions of the organization in the context of a business culture that focuses on continuous improvement, the integral generation of value, and sustainable success. Figure 2 presents the principles of ISO 31000: 2018 [14] within a model in which its perspective is broadened, taking into account the critical factors that underlie the approaches of the previous paragraph regarding the scope and importance of the Management of Risks in companies and in society. For this reason, the illustration uses three versions of “La Danse”, a famous work by Henri Matisse [49], to highlight the holistic and social nature of Comprehensive Risk Management and its principles. Six basic perspectives are considered for its classification: Management and Leadership, Talent and Culture, Processes, Stakeholders, Decisions and Improvement. In a similar way to dashboards or strategy maps, Figure 2 is structured in terms of its perspectives, from the bottom up, in such a way that the foundations of the management of principles and values are based on Leadership and the example of the Management Team, which are reflected in Human Talent, Culture and capacities, to develop Processes, in interaction with Stakeholders, and are projected in the Decisions of the entire organization, to ensure Improvement, and Comprehensive Management of Risks on the factors associated with the dynamics of change. Figure 2. Principles of risk management based on ISO 31001 and ISO 22301 [13,14,50,51]. 2.2. Basic Principles and Management Approach for E2 Given that organizations require energy resources for the operation of their processes and interactions with stakeholders, continuous and systematic improvement of energy performance is imperative from strategic and operational standpoints, based on the best practices of the ISO 50000 family of standards, considering (See Figure 3, and Figure A5): 2.2.1. Aspects Related to Planning in Energy Management Systems (EnMS) Aspects related to planning in Energy Management Systems include the planning, design, and development of businesses, products, services, processes, and projects, according to parameters and technology, with specific objectives, plans, and challenges to improve savings, energy performance, the registration of energy data, analyses, and associated risk management. Figure 2. Principles of risk management based on ISO 31001 and ISO 22301 [13,14,50,51]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 7 of 43 In a similar way to dashboards or strategy maps, Figure 2 is structured in terms of its perspectives, from the bottom up, in such a way that the foundations of the management of principles and values are based on Leadership and the example of the Management Team, which are reflected in Human Talent, Culture and capacities, to develop Processes, in interaction with Stakeholders, and are projected in the Decisions of the entire organization, to ensure Improvement, and Comprehensive Management of Risks on the factors associated with the dynamics of change. 2.2. Basic Principles and Management Approach for E2 Given that organizations require energy resources for the operation of their processes and interactions with stakeholders, continuous and systematic improvement of energy performance is imperative from strategic and operational standpoints, based on the best practices of the ISO 50000 family of standards, considering (See Figures 3 and A5): Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 7 of 44 This stage also includes an analytical part called the “energy review”, in which readings, consumption, trends in parameters, flows, and losses are analyzed, and areas of significant use are determined. This is the starting point to register, prioritize, and formalize the possible fronts for improvement with relevant strategic impact [52]. 2.2.2. Aspects Related to the Execution of the Plans and the Operation of the EnMS Aspects Related to the execution of the plans and the operation of the EnMS include the execution of plans and provisions, and the implementation of established best practices, which also include the promotion of culture for energy management and the application of operational control (i.e., the management of the components of processes) through which it is possible to control parameters and address risks associated with energy efficiency (i.e., methods, competencies, maintenance, tuning, control of purchases, materials and contracts, and energy supply, among others). 2.2.3. Aspects Related to EnMS Feedback Aspects related to EnMS feedback include articulated feedback from the management of energy performance indicators (EnPI), the LBEn energy baseline, understood as the “quantitative reference that provides the basis for the comparison of performance in a given period,” the measurement with “energy models” to summarize and analyze the energy consumed by the system, monitoring, and other feedback and auditing mechanisms. Figure 3. Management approach to energy efficiency [28,52]. 2.2.4. Aspects Related to the Maintenance, Adjustment, and Improvement Actions of the EnMS Aspects related to the maintenance, adjustment, and improvement actions of the EnMS include actions for the adjustment, correction, maintenance, or improvement in energy performance, which also include lessons learned and the projection of decisions and challenges resulting from management reviews and determining the future of the organization in terms of energy efficiency management. 2.2.5. Developments Related to the Optimization and Improvement of EnMS Although there has been a fairly broad spectrum of technological developments and advances in the optimization and improvement of the rational and efficient consumption of energy, works related to awareness raising and EnMS are highlighted, e.g., works carried out by J. Wu, B. Cheng, M. Wang and J. Chen, as well as those related to ISO TC 301, and those of other researchers such as R. Uriarte and J. Cosgrove [52–59]. See also Figure A5. Figure 3. Management approach to energy efficiency [28,52]. 2.2.1. Aspects Related to Planning in Energy Management Systems (EnMS) Aspects related to planning in Energy Management Systems include the planning, design, and development of businesses, products, services, processes, and projects, according to parameters and technology, with specific objectives, plans, and challenges to improve savings, energy performance, the registration of energy data, analyses, and associated risk management. This stage also includes an analytical part called the “energy review”, in which readings, consumption, trends in parameters, flows, and losses are analyzed, and areas of significant use are determined. This is the starting point to register, prioritize, and formalize the possible fronts for improvement with relevant strategic impact [52]. 2.2.2. Aspects Related to the Execution of the Plans and the Operation of the EnMS Aspects Related to the execution of the plans and the operation of the EnMS include the execution of plans and provisions, and the implementation of established best practices, which also include the promotion of culture for energy management and the application of operational control (i.e., the management of the components of processes) through which it is possible to control parameters and address risks associated with energy efficiency (i.e., methods, competencies, maintenance, tuning, control of purchases, materials and contracts, and energy supply, among others). 2.2.3. Aspects Related to EnMS Feedback Aspects related to EnMS feedback include articulated feedback from the management of energy performance indicators (EnPI), the LBEn energy baseline, understood as the “quantitative reference that provides the basis for the comparison of performance in a given period,” the measurement with Energies 2020, 13, 5579 8 of 43 “energy models” to summarize and analyze the energy consumed by the system, monitoring, and other feedback and auditing mechanisms. 2.2.4. Aspects Related to the Maintenance, Adjustment, and Improvement Actions of the EnMS Aspects related to the maintenance, adjustment, and improvement actions of the EnMS include actions for the adjustment, correction, maintenance, or improvement in energy performance, which also include lessons learned and the projection of decisions and challenges resulting from management reviews and determining the future of the organization in terms of energy efficiency management. 2.2.5. Developments Related to the Optimization and Improvement of EnMS Although there has been a fairly broad spectrum of technological developments and advances in the optimization and improvement of the rational and efficient consumption of energy, works related to awareness raising and EnMS are highlighted, e.g., works carried out by J. Wu, B. Cheng, M. Wang and J. Chen, as well as those related to ISO TC 301, and those of other researchers such as R. Uriarte and J. Cosgrove [52–59]. See also Figure A5. 2.3. Basic Principles and Management Approach for Biosecurity and Biosafety 2.3.1. Biosecurity and Biosafety In this section, the concepts of and approach to comprehensive management for biosafety and biosecurity are raised as an additional input element from the perspective of the WHO, ILO, and CDC [60–64]. According to the WHO [61], biosecurity, is “the set of principles, standards, protocols, technologies, and practices that are implemented to avoid the risk to health and the environment that comes from exposure to biological agents, causes of infectious, toxic or allergic diseases, such as COVID-2019”. According to the CDC and the BMBL [62], biosafety, “is the discipline that addresses safety against microbiological agents and toxins and threats they pose to human and animal health, the environment, and the economy; the misuse, exposure, or deliberate or intentional release of these biological agents”. 2.3.2. Comprehensive Biosecurity Management Comprehensive biosecurity management (CBM) considers the synergy between biosafety and biosecurity, that is, it considers intentional and unintentional cases. For everything related to intentional cases or terrorism, the measures understood as Bioprotection Plans will be adopted. For the case in which companies are part of the food chain, as suppliers, processors, transporters, or distributors, the Food Defense Plans will be applied [60–64]. In line with the approaches described above, under the approaches of the CDC, BMBL, INSST, ILO, and WHO, Table 1 illustrates, as a conclusion, the three logical blocks corresponding to the What, What for, and Where, of the concept of Comprehensive Biosafety. With this perspective, it is proposed as a conclusion that Comprehensive Biosafety Management comprises the planning, application, feedback, and control required to ensure the vertical and transversal integration of the principles, norms, protocols, technologies, and practices required for the identification, prevention, containment, and response through good practices and infrastructure to the risks to health and the environment that come from exposure to biological agents that cause infectious, toxic, or allergic diseases, from or to the processes of an organization in their interaction with interest groups [60–64]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 9 of 43 Table 1. Characteristics of comprehensive management for biosecurity based on CDC, BMBL, INSST, ILO, and WHO [60–64]. COMPONENT KEY SENTENCE SUMMARY DESCRIPTION What? Thought, awareness, and action: PDCA with full awareness BE, DO, and MAKE IT DO Everything we do with full awareness in our work: Think, Know and PHVA of Principles, Norms, Protocols, Technologies, and Practices. This is: The planning, application, feedback, and control required to ensure the vertical and transversal integration of the required principles, standards, protocols, technologies, and practices... For What? Self-care, care and protect: TO EFFECTIVELY IDENTIFY, PREVENT, CONTAIN, RESPOND, AND REDUCE VULNERABILITY AGAINST RISKS TO HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT ... For the identification, prevention, containment, and effective response, through good practices, technology, and infrastructure, to risks to health and the environment... Where? In the face of biological, chemical, physical, or mechanical risks: Due to EXPOSURE TO AGENTS GENERATING INFECTIOUS, TOXIC OR ALLERGIC DISEASES, FROM OR TOWARDS THE ORGANIZATION’S PROCESSES In exposure to biological, chemical, physical and/or mechanical agents, from or to our activities and processes. In the interaction with areas, things, products, people, and internal and external environment; They can cause infectious, toxic, or allergic diseases. 2.3.3. Comprehensive Biosecurity and Biosafety Management: Risks, Strategy, and Business Continuity In this section, advances, and developments in four areas which are associated with governance and the need for a comprehensive management model, i.e., risks, biosecurity and biosafety, business continuity, and strategic prospective, are provided. In recent decades, the development of knowledge in risk management and biosecurity + biosafety has become vital for various fields and for technological development. This is reflected in the proliferation of management standards, such as the developments of the ISO TC 292 Technical Committee, that lead International Standards on Security and Resilience, including incident management, emergencies, contingency plans, and business continuity, e.g., ISO 22301: 2019, ISO 22313: 2020, and ISO 22317: 2015 [51,65,66]. Management for biosecurity and biosafety is a factor of mandatory consideration within CRM, for not only companies, but also for laboratories and the food chain, given the current context associated with COVID-19. The scope of biosecurity and biosafety management covers all processes, facilities, and products, and applies to workers or third parties who perform activities on behalf of companies and users who interact with them. The ILO, WHO, and other researchers have developed guides, standards, and resolutions of mandatory applications. These developments in technology, regulation, and knowledge are associated with the multiplication of potential risk factors determined by acute moments of economic depression and geopolitical crisis, terrorist attacks, biological weapons, and other critical events, such as COVID-19. With technological developments and regulations in the field of health, work, and well-being, management systems point toward integrality to support businesses; they require global management of intelligence in interactions with relevant parties and comprehensive management protection, which includes biosecurity and biosafety, with a transversal scope that covers ICT and generational change [67–75]. Figure A6 provides further information on www.sra.org (Society for Risk Analysis) and www.eird.org/americas/indexeng.html (UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction) as sources that contribute to safety, care, and protection in operations and projects through developments, tools, and information at the service of stakeholders. These references are complemented with articles, www.sra.org www.eird.org/americas/indexeng.html Energies 2020, 13, 5579 10 of 43 publications, and developments in the foundations and strategic and operational dimensions of risk management, resilience, and reliability [35,37,38,40,76,77]. It is a challenge for companies to choose the right tools to address the transformation of their processes and businesses under a CRM umbrella. This implies ensuring the relevance of services and processes and in a transversal way, self-care, care, protection, containment, and creative forms of response to the conjugation of contingencies which are maintained in crises under the premise of sustainability, health, and well-being [78–81]. In terms of strategic foresight, the developments have been led by French schools since 1990 by generating manuals, computer applications, and tools at the service of the community [82–85]. Despite these improvements and those mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, SMEs do not have simple and comprehensive tools that are grouped under the umbrella of strategic management, risk management, energy efficiency, business continuity plans, and response to potential and real crises such as COVID-19. In addition, they are mostly unaware of the best practices of the recognized international standards and guides [44–48,50,51] to respond to the basic needs that, for a CMS, and with regards to energy efficiency and biosafety, must apply to a company. Figure 4 illustrates that under contingency conditions, companies must attend to a systematic plan for different types of incidents, which may be associated with a business strategy, quality, safety and regulatory requirements of products and services, aspects of health, safety, and impact on the environment, energy efficiency, information security, networks, and communications, or any other types of combined or independent risks [44,47,48,50,65,66]. The materialization of risks translates into incidents with potential implications in terms of vulnerability due to the interruption of operations, the supply chain, or business continuity. Then, business continuity plans [50,65,66] must address incidents by prioritizing their impact and potentiality. Incidents, regarding their occurrence and association with QHSE3+ components, generate crises and situations associated with their implications and the collateral implications of the measures adopted to respond to them. The governance of these crises should be included in the organization’s management through the crisis management command bridge from where particular scenarios located in the “red” zone with the greatest probability, and their consequences, should be prioritized, and contingency plans should be formulated. Importantly, within the QHSE3+ framework, the objectives of comprehensive biosafety management with its business continuity and contingency plans for crisis scenarios include: Protecting the health and well-being of people and the organization with an emphasis on self-care; Adapting the promise of value and the product/service to the conditions of the situation, and complying with excellence; and Guaranteeing the continuity and sustainability of the business, supply, and supply chain (See also Figure A6). Energies 2020, 13, 5579 11 of 43 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 10 of 44 Incidents, regarding their occurrence and association with QHSE3+ components, generate crises and situations associated with their implications and the collateral implications of the measures adopted to respond to them. The governance of these crises should be included in the organization’s management through the crisis management command bridge from where particular scenarios located in the “red” zone with the greatest probability, and their consequences, should be prioritized, and contingency plans should be formulated. Figure 4. Crisis and Incident Management, and Business Continuity [65,66]. Importantly, within the QHSE3+ framework, the objectives of comprehensive biosafety management with its business continuity and contingency plans for crisis scenarios include: Protecting the health and well-being of people and the organization with an emphasis on self-care; Adapting the promise of value and the product/service to the conditions of the situation, and complying with excellence; and Guaranteeing the continuity and sustainability of the business, supply, and supply chain (See also Figure A6). 2.4. Integration of CMS QHSE3+ Requirements and HLS CMS QHSE3+ is a harmonious integration of the elements required to develop a management model that focuses on complying with agreements, requirements, and applicable legislation, preventing failures and risks, and having a proactive approach that shows the causes of failures and leads to continuous improvement in business performance. Since the end of the last century, a common structure has been envisioned in the required standards on management systems led by several standardization secretariats, such as BSI-England and AENOR-Spain, which generated UNE 66177:2005 and PAS 99:2012 [86,87], respectively. CRISIS QHSE3+ INCIDENTES QHSE3+ Continuity Plan Business and Continuity Plan in Supply chain SITUATIONS (Associated with crises determined by the Incidents Implications) Interruption Incidents CONTINUITY Command Bridge for the Crisis Government. Incidents Management Crisis management Priority in incidents that interrupt the operation Responding to the implications of incidents and the measures taken to address them Goals: 1. Care and Protect Health and Well-being. 2. Guarantee Continuity and Sustainability. 3. Fulfill with Excellence the Promise of Value and Adapt the Product / Service to the Context. Analysis and prioritization of crisis scenarios Contingency Plan for Particular Scenarios Figure 4. Crisis and Incident Management, and Business Continuity [65,66]. 2.4. Integration of CMS QHSE3+ Requirements and HLS CMS QHSE3+ is a harmonious integration of the elements required to develop a management model that focuses on complying with agreements, requirements, and applicable legislation, preventing failures and risks, and having a proactive approach that shows the causes of failures and leads to continuous improvement in business performance. Since the end of the last century, a common structure has been envisioned in the required standards on management systems led by several standardization secretariats, such as BSI-England and AENOR-Spain, which generated UNE 66177:2005 and PAS 99:2012 [86,87], respectively. See also, in Figure A7, under a holistic approach, the chronology corresponding to the historic development of the QHSE3+ Standards in correlation with the milestones of technology and the expression of man, throughout the ages. In 2013, HLS was defined to guide these standards since 2015. This reference became the “Appendix SL” of the Supplement to the ISO/IEC Directives on the hierarchical structure of management systems standards [86–90]. Figure 5 summarizes the HLS approach under the PDCA cycle with which the requirements and mandatory basic structure of the management systems standards are defined and integrated; this approach meets the requirements from Chapters 4 to 10, given that initials 1 to 3 are intended for Scope (1), Normative References (2), and Terms and Definitions (3). Chapters 4 to 7 with a yellow background belong to the P for Planning and include 4. Context of the Organization, 5. Leadership, 6. Planning, and 7. Support. In the H of Doing with a green background, Chapter 8. Operation; In V of Verify with a light red background, the feedback topics under Chapter 9. Performance Evaluation; and in A of Act with a light blue background, Chapter 10. Improvements are outlined. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 12 of 43 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 11 of 44 See also, in Figure A7, under a holistic approach, the chronology corresponding to the historic development of the QHSE3+ Standards in correlation with the milestones of technology and the expression of man, throughout the ages. In 2013, HLS was defined to guide these standards since 2015. This reference became the “Appendix SL” of the Supplement to the ISO/IEC Directives on the hierarchical structure of management systems standards [86–90]. Figure 5 summarizes the HLS approach under the PDCA cycle with which the requirements and mandatory basic structure of the management systems standards are defined and integrated; this approach meets the requirements from Chapters 4 to 10, given that initials 1 to 3 are intended for Scope (1), Normative References (2), and Terms and Definitions (3). Chapters 4 to 7 with a yellow background belong to the P for Planning and include 4. Context of the Organization, 5. Leadership, 6. Planning, and 7. Support. In the H of Doing with a green background, Chapter 8. Operation; In V of Verify with a light red background, the feedback topics under Chapter 9. Performance Evaluation; and in A of Act with a light blue background, Chapter 10. Improvements are outlined. As a convention, the requirements in purple italics have the same title for the standards of the QHSE3+ components, and are given in the extension of Chapters 4, 7, and 10. ISO 45001:2018 includes several additional exclusive numerals for this reference identified in red (HS): accountability (Numeral 5.3 partial), participation and consultation (Numeral 5.4), change management (Item 8.1.3), and emergency preparedness and response (Numeral 8.2) are also included by ISO 14001:2015 (E), in the same paragraph (Numeral 8.2). In Figure 5, under the criteria of affinity with risks and planning, numeral 8.2 Plans to Respond to Emergencies has been placed as part of the planning in numeral 6.1, i.e., Actions to address R/O. In its application, best practices for business continuity are considered both from a global strategic point of view, as well as for each service line and the supply chain. ISO 9001:2015 has requirements specific to this component identified with a blue letter (Q): planning of changes (Numeral 6.3) requirements for products and services (Numeral 8.2), design and development (Numeral 8.3), control of externally supplied processes, products and services (Numeral 8.4), production and service provision (Numeral 8.5), release of products and services (Numeral 8.6), and control of nonconforming outputs (Numeral 8.7). 5. LEADERSHIP 6. PLANNING 10. IMPROVEMENT 9. EVALUATION 8. OPERATION 5.1 Leadership and commitment 5.2 Comprehensive Police 5.3 Organization Roles, Responsibilities and Accountability. 6.1 Actions to address R/O + 8.2 y 8.2 Emergency preparedness and reponse (HSE). 7.1 Resource 7.2 Competence 7.3 Awareness 7.4 Communication 7.5 Documented Information 8.1 Operational Planning and Control9.1 Monitoring, Measurement, Analysis and Evaluation MMAE 9.2 Internal Audit 9.3 Management Review 10.1 Nonconformity and Corrective Action 10.2 Continual Improvement 4.1 Context of the organization 4.2 Needs of stakeholders 4.3 Scope of CMS 6.2 Objectives and Planning 6.3 Planning of Changes 8.3 Design and Development of Products and Services. (QE2) 8.4 Control of Externally Provided Processes, Products and Services (Acquisitions) (QE2) 8.5 Production and Service Provition 8.6 Release of Products and Services 8.7 Control of Nonconforming Output QHSE3+ Management 5.4 Consultation and participation. 6.3 a 6.6 Energy Review, KPI, Basline, y Planning for Data (APPROACH E2) 8.2 Change management (8.1.3) 8.2 Requirements for Products and Services 7. SUPPORT 4. CONTEXT 4.4 Comprehensive Management System Figure 5. Integration of the logical structure of the requirements of CMS QHSE3+. Perspective of Application to Comprehensive Biosafety Management [25–31,86–90]. As a convention, the requirements in purple italics have the same title for the standards of the QHSE3+ components, and are given in the extension of Chapters 4, 7, and 10. ISO 45001:2018 includes several additional exclusive numerals for this reference identified in red (HS): accountability (Numeral 5.3 partial), participation and consultation (Numeral 5.4), change management (Item 8.1.3), and emergency preparedness and response (Numeral 8.2) are also included by ISO 14001:2015 (E), in the same paragraph (Numeral 8.2). In Figure 5, under the criteria of affinity with risks and planning, numeral 8.2 Plans to Respond to Emergencies has been placed as part of the planning in numeral 6.1, i.e., Actions to address R/O. In its application, best practices for business continuity are considered both from a global strategic point of view, as well as for each service line and the supply chain. ISO 9001:2015 has requirements specific to this component identified with a blue letter (Q): planning of changes (Numeral 6.3) requirements for products and services (Numeral 8.2), design and development (Numeral 8.3), control of externally supplied processes, products and services (Numeral 8.4), production and service provision (Numeral 8.5), release of products and services (Numeral 8.6), and control of nonconforming outputs (Numeral 8.7). The ISO 50001: 2018 standard also includes particular requirements identified with the green letter petroleum (E2), the numerals: 6.3 energy review, 6.4 energy performance, 6.5 energy baseline, and 6.6 planning for the collection of energy data, as well as design (Numeral 8.2) and acquisitions (Numeral 8.3). To facilitate the comprehensive application of these requirements and additional ones such as ISO 27001: 2013, the authors provided reference [13], an excel application that is included in the approach of the structure of Figure 6, a checklist of common and uncommon requirements of the QHSE3+ standards in the support portal. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 13 of 43 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 12 of 44 Figure 5. Integration of the logical structure of the requirements of CMS QHSE3+. Perspective of Application to Comprehensive Biosafety Management [25–31,86–90]. The ISO 50001: 2018 standard also includes particular requirements identified with the green letter petroleum (E2), the numerals: 6.3 energy review, 6.4 energy performance, 6.5 energy baseline, and 6.6 planning for the collection of energy data, as well as design (Numeral 8.2) and acquisitions (Numeral 8.3). To facilitate the comprehensive application of these requirements and additional ones such as ISO 27001: 2013, the authors provided reference [13], an excel application that is included in the approach of the structure of Figure 6, a checklist of common and uncommon requirements of the QHSE3+ standards in the support portal. Figure 6. Classification matrix of topics related to the R/O of CMS QHSE3+ [25–30,91]. 3. Results, Achievements, and Discussion 3.1. Fundamental Purpose of the Research. Methodology The research that supports the results presented in this paper focuses on contributing to the effectiveness and sustainability of Entrepreneurship Projects and the Implementation of E.1. Macroeconomic E.6. Market and Competition E.2. Geopolitical E.3. Legal and Regulatory E.4. Natural phenomena E.8. Technology E.5. Contingencies. Epidemics E.9. Other external topics I.1. I.2. Corporate Project Management I.3. Behaviors. Culture, Discipline I.4. I.5.1 I.5. 2 I.6. I.6.1 I.6.2 I.6.3 I.6.4 I.6.5 I.6.6 I.6.7 I.7. I.7.1 I.7.2 I.7.3 I.8. I.8.1 I.8.2 Layer VIII Financial management 1.10 Layer IX Other Internal Topics 1.11 Other Specialized Risks And Opportunities Layer VII ICT Management 1.9 ICT planning, infrastructure, operation and control conditions. Financial and economic aspects. Layer V. Energy efficiency Conditions for the rational use of energy and for Energy Efficiency Rational Use of Energy Energy Performance. Layer VI Facilities 1,8 Adequacy of infrastructure and maintenance R/O Mechanical HS: R/O Environmental HS: Layer IV. Prevent Pollution and Protect the Environment. Conditions for the prevention of pollution and the protection of the environment Conditions related to WHAT IS USED (Resources) Conditions related to WHAT IS TRANSFORMED (Context, Land, Landscape) Conditions related to WHAT IS GENERATED (Emissions, Vertimientos, Residues, Radiations…) Layer II. Quality, Integrity and DNP Conditions for the conformity, integrity and safety of products, services and processes Planning and Development of New Products, Services and Processes. Layer III. People's Health and Safety Operational and environmental conditions for the health, safety and protection of people. R/O Physical HS R/O Chemical HS R/O Biological HS R/O Ergonomic HS R/O Psychosocial HS External R/O External General Block. E.7. Security and Public Order. Relationship with Interest Groups Internal R/O Layer I. Strategy, NBD, and Human Management Strategic management, Business Continuity and New Business Development NBD Decisions, Mistakes and Moments of Truth Figure 6. Classification matrix of topics related to the R/O of CMS QHSE3+ [25–30,91]. 3. Results, Achievements, and Discussion 3.1. Fundamental Purpose of the Research. Methodology The research that supports the results presented in this paper focuses on contributing to the effectiveness and sustainability of Entrepreneurship Projects and the Implementation of Comprehensive Management Systems QHSE3+, SMEs, and the business sector in general, through the design and preliminary application of instruments and tools that enable the understanding, implementation, and application of Good Practices for sustainable success, and, in the future, its massification, from a holistic perspective for the strategic and operational management of risks and opportunities (R/O). The following are the specific objectives in the field of Comprehensive Risk Management: the design of the Model and Reference Framework, the development of tools for the identification and classification of R/O, the parameterization of the Risk Management Process, and the initial application of the Model and its Tools in goods and services companies. The methodology used combined both applied and qualitative research: Energies 2020, 13, 5579 14 of 43 � The approach of the logical framework methodology developed by ECLAC and the IDB was applied in the formulation of this research project [92–94]. � The configuration of the model was carried out in a global and particular way for its main components, adapting the developments of the systemic design to the particular case of the functional, ergonomic, and formal design of a model of CMS [95,96]. � The applied research took place during consulting exercises in which the model and tools were validated and adapted to six cases of companies between 2014 and 2019, with positive results and the ratification of the approach. � In 2020, with the contingency of COVID-19, there was the opportunity to incorporate biosafety and business continuity plans into the model in the design and deployment of the governance plan in one of the six reference companies (See Section 2.3, Section 2.4, Section 3.2 and Figure 4, and the summary of the strategic and operational approach in Figure A6). The major results of this research include: (a) The structuring of the General Board of R/O QHSE3+ (See Section 3.2, Figure 6, and Figures A8–A14), (b) The configuration of the comprehensive R/O management model applicable to CMS QHSE3+ (See Section 3.3, and Figures 7 and 8), (c) The parameterization of the integral management of R/O of CMS QHSE3+ (See Section 3.4, and Figures 9 and 10), and (d) The general achievements obtained through the application of the model in different companies in terms of vulnerability reduction and energy efficiency (See Sections 3.5 and 3.6). Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 16 of 44 Figure 7. Model for the comprehensive R/O management of CMS QHSE3+. 3.3.2. Functional Approach of the R/O Model Applicable to CMS QHSE3+ Figure 8 illustrates the functional elements in the operation of the model, considering their visualization and interaction through a matrix of two inputs, which include four layers on the vertical axis: (1) Foundations in principles and values, (2) R/O strategic management, (3) QHSE3+ operational R/O management, and (4) complementary layer. On the horizontal axis, there are four levels of planning and action: (a) directive planning, (b) operational planning (including projects, product development, and processes), (c) contingency and emergency plans, and (d) responsibility and response actions (i.e., containment and correction, feedback, and lessons learned). The model matrix and its functional elements are analyzed below: Layer 1. Foundation in Principles and Values: Thought, Awareness, and Action for Prevention Transversal to the levels of planning and action, this layer includes the planning and development of strategies to develop skills and achieve the appropriation of the value of prevention associated with ROBT. Layer 2. Management to Decide on Strategic R/O This layer is divided into sublayers of change management to guarantee the integrity of the system, and a second sublayer to plan strategies according to each level: 11. Strategic R/O Management. Intelligence, context monitoring and decision making to consolidate and build the future of the organization. Product and business developments. R/O follow-up on strategy management. Reformulation of projects and definition of contingency actions, as necessary. 12. Culture, values and human talent for R/O management. Deployment and appropriation of the Principle corresponding to "R/O - BASED THINKING". 13. Operational Planning for R/O management. Technical management to determine R/O QHSE3+, and formulate control measures, in projects and operational and support processes. 14/18. Application of R/O Management in the QHSE3+ Arms Application of prevention measures and R/O management in the Quality, Safety and Health, Environmental Management, Energy Efficiency, and Other Applicable components. Implementation of contingency plans QHSE3+ Application of prevention measures before, during and after QHSE3+ events. Responsibility management and response to NC and QHSE3+ incidents 15. R/O Management and Feedback Axis. Feedback on the performance and approach of Comprehensive Risk Management. Risk Management during Feedback activities. 7. E2 (50k). 10. Innovation and Improvement 9. Feedback Management Core 16. R/O Management and Knowledge, Innovation and Improvement Axis. Lessons learned, Innovation and Improvement on the performance and approach of Comprehensive Risk Management. Risk Management during Innovation and Improvement activities. 7. E2 (50k). 9. Feedback 10. Innovation and Improvement Requirements and Environment Conditions. Risks Resources, Information. ¡CMS-QHSE3+… Products and processes WELL DONE, SAFE, HEALTHY, CLEAN, AND FRIENDS OF WATER AND ENERGY! Inputs R/O Management, Intelligence and Operational Planning Breastplate Heart of Talent .and Culture OPERATION OF THE CMS- QHSE3+, OPERATION, MANAGEMENT and EVOLUTION. Outputs: Sustainable Success. Decrease in Vulnerability and Progress.. , Heart of Talent .and Culture Figure 7. Model for the comprehensive R/O management of CMS QHSE3+. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 15 of 43 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 17 of 44 Figure 8. Functional matrix of comprehensive R/O management model layers and levels. o Executive: Market intelligence and the study of the context to formulate objectives, policies, projects, and strategic corporate plans. o Operational: R/O analysis for the formulation and development of new businesses, products, and projects in line with the strategic purposes of change. o Contingency: Cycle of decisions related to business continuity plan, biosecurity management, and emergency preparedness and response. o Containment, Feedback, Responsibility, and Response. Response to performance and MMAE. Decisions and challenges of business reformulation, projects, and strategy. Layer 3. Operational R/O Management QHSE3+ This layer considers the functions of business intelligence and the management of legal requirements, process planning, comprehensive biosafety management, nonconformity LEVELS OF PLANNING-ACTION: Planning Board LAYERS OF FOUNDATION AND APPLICATION Corporate Strategic Planning Planning and project management Planning and Development of Services / Portfolio Planning of Support and Operative Processes Before During Post ContainmentCorrection Feedback Learned lessons Knowledge 2. LAYER FOR RISK MANAGEMENT AND STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITIES: 2.1 MANAGEMENT OF THE CHANGE AND INTEGRITY OF THE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM. 2.2 RISK AND OPPORTUNITIES - BASED THINKING TO PLAN STRATEGIES BASED ON THE CONTEXT. Strategic decisions Decisions in Projects Decisions in Developments Decisions in Process Planning Business Intelligence and Good Practices Good Practices Good Practices Good Practices 3.2 SUB-LAYER FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF R/O OF INTEGRAL PHYSICAL SECURITY (HS). (It Include HS Biosecurity Risks) Integral Policy HS Policy HS Management in Projects HS Component Management System HS Programs 3.3 SUB-LAYER FOR R/O MANAGEMENT OF ENERGY EFFICIENCY AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT. (E3) (It Include Environment Biosecurity Risks) Integral Policy Sustainability Policy Environmental and Energy Management in Projects Management System Environmental and Energy Programs Environmental and Energy Programs 3.4 SUB-LAYER FOR ADDITIONAL R/O MANAGEMENT (+). For example: R/O FINANCIAL, R/O TIC, or RISK OF CORRUPTION, among others. Personal Data Protection Policy Other Specific Policies Management of additional R/O (+) Other components of the Management System required. Management vs. Habeas Data Law 4. COMPLEMENTARY LAYER LINKED TO OTHER MEASURES TO SUPPORT THE DEPLOYMENT OF THOUGHT BASED ON RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES Dynamics of Corporate Strategy FUNCTIONAL APPROACH OF THE CONCEPTUAL MODEL FOR THE COMPREHENSIVE MANAGEMENT OF R/O QHSE3+ . OBJECTIVE : To ensure the Intelligence for the making of individual, team and corporate decisions that allow to enhance opportunities and respond to threats and vulnerabilities, in harmony with the missionary purposes and the strategic goals of the organization. Thought, Consciousness and Action to Take Care of Yourself, Take Care and Protect the Well-being and Health of People and the Organization Operational Planning Contingency Plans Responsibility and Response Actions 1. FOUNDATION IN PRINCIPLES AND VALUES Values and elements of the corporate philosophy that support the application of the Principle corresponding to Risk and Opportunities - Based Thinking R/OBT throughout the organization. Be accountable to commitments (formal, implicit, law and word). Be respectful of others, of regulations and of the law, for a healthy coexistence Being committed to the strategic purposes and missionary role of the company Offer GOOD, SAFE and HEALTHY products and services, in accordance with the promise of value and the established requirements Understand the reality of processes and the environment and identify dangers and opportunities Ensuring that we learn from experience, mistakes, and the best that others can do. MAKE DECISIONS WITH INTELLIGENCE ... TO REDUCE VULNERABILITY AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OPPORTUNITIES Thought, Consciousness and Action to Take Care of youreself, Take Care, and Protect the Well-being and Health of People and the Organization OPERATIONAL CONTROL Management of Non-Conforming. Correction and Prevention Actions. Analysis of scenarios Consumer study Study of the competitors Goals. Strategic Management Corporate MMAE Integral Policy Specific Policies Study of opportunities, needs and formulation of Special Corporate Strategic Projects. Cutting-edge strategic developments Reformulation of the Promise of Value Analysis and Risk Management in Projects Project Management Plans Monitoring, Measurement, Analysis and Evaluation MMAE Operational Process Planning Change management: (Infrastructure, Projects, Processes and Services) Business Continuity Plan. Biosafety and Biosecurity protocols and Emergency plans I assume, I respond. Monitoring, Measurement, Analysis and Evaluation: MMAE Learned lessons and Knowledge Management Management System Review Business Reformulation, Products and Corporate Strategy New products development NPD New business development NBD Objectives and Projects. I decide on the Preparation and Response to Contingencies I decide, I learn and I manage the change 3. LAYER FOR OPERATIONAL R/O MANAGEMENT QHSE3+. Risk and Opportunity - Based Thinking (R/OBT) in Special Strategic Projects R/OBT in Innovation Projects: R/O studies Feasibility studies. Analysis of R/O during development. Legal Requirements Management Study R/OBT in Infrastructure Projects Operational Process Planning Change management. Comprehensive Biosecurity Management Protocols and Good Practices for Management and Treatment Not satisfied and Nonconformities Lessons Learned from Incidents, Events and News. Generation of Knowledge. Reformulation of Control measures Integrity Control - Comptroller (Corporate Audit vs COSO Internal Control System): (Decisions vs: Integrity of Resources, Non-application of Provisions, Achievement of Objectives and Goals) Cultural Management vs. Dynamic of R/O: (Immediate Decisions in Moments of Truth) 3.1 SUB-LAYER FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF R/O OF QUALITY, SAFETY OR OTHER APPLICABLE TECHNICIANS (Q) (It include Biosecurity in component Q) Policies and Decisions for the Management of Corporate Projects Quality Plans in Operations by Service Line Incident Management and Treatment of Non- conformities (TNC) MMAE and Reformulation vs (Product - Process - Quality Plans in Operations by line) Emergency and Contingency Preparation and Response Comprehensive Plan. Approach QHSE3+ MMAE and Reformulation vs INTEGRAL SECURITY MMAE and Management Review of the ENVIRONMENTAL COMPONENT MMAE and TIC Reformulation Figure 8. Functional matrix of comprehensive R/O management model layers and levels. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 16 of 43 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 19 of 44 Figure 9. Parameterization of the application of the comprehensive R/O management model. In Step (9), the effectiveness of the plan was evaluated, and incidents and events related to the R/O of CMS QHSE3+ were monitored. In Step (10), the residual risk and the changes in vulnerability were evaluated, and the cycle was resumed and reformulated according to the changes in the context. 7 . T O A P P R E - C IA T E . M A P R /O 8 . R /O T R E A T M E N T P L A N A N D B IT A C O R E O F F O L L O W - U P 9 . E V A L U A T E E F F E C - T IV E N E S S . M O N IT O R IN G 1 0 . R E S ID U A L R /O M M A E 0 y 1 . C O N T E X T . 2 , 3 y 4 . IN C ID E N C E A N D I M P A C T 5 . C O M P O N E N T S o f R /O a n d T Y P O L O G Y ( e x t - in t) 6 . T O I D E N T IF Y a n d D E F IN E R /O 0. Defining the Scope 3. To analyze incidence of processes in the achievement of the Business Objectives. R/O TREATMENT PLAN BITACORE OF FOLLOW - UP TO THE DE TREATAMENTP LAN 10. Perform the estimation of Residual R/O and changes in Vulnerability. Retake the cycle and reformulate depending on changes, scenarios, incidents and prospective. 1. Make a List of Objectives and Processes 6.2 To Identify and Define OPERATIONAL R/O (QHSE3+ vs OBJECTIVES OF EACH PROCESS) 9. To evaluate the effectiveness of the Plan. Make Track Events of R/O 9.1 Bitacore of follow up and Incident registry and Analysis of Implications, to modify or update the R/O Administration Plan. 9.2 Follow-up of implementation and effectiveness of the R/O Management Plan. 6.1 To Identify and Define STRATEGIC R/O (INTERNAL, EXTERNAL vs. STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES) 5. To analyze components of R/O vs QHSE3 + and Typology (External and Internal) 7. Appreciate R/O (ANALYZE, EVALUATE, CAUSE ROOT, POSSIBILITY, CONSEQUENCES / IMPACT, LEVEL OF R/O) DEGREE OR LEVEL OF IMPACT OF THE PROCESSES COMPONENTS AND TIPOLOGY: QHSE3+ and EXTERNAL-- INTERNAL INTEGRATION WITH MMAE AND THE INDICATORS BOARD RISK AND OPORTUNITIES MAP (Stratégic or Operational) 8. To Establish the R/O Treatment Plan LAYER 1: Prevention (Ms of the conditions of the process) LAYER 2: Control (Parameters linked to the R/O) LAYER 3: Reaction (Response to the Manifestation of R/O) LAYER 4: Mitigation (vs. Negative Consequences of R/O) LAYER 5: Change Management (Associated with measures) CRITERIA AND ESTIMATION SCALES OF RISK AND OPPORTUNITIES R/O, UNIFIED OR BY COMPONENTS. 4. To evaluate the impact of processes on the Performance and Success of the Business. LIST OF OBJECTIVES AND PROCESSES It include BIOSECURITY IT INCLUDE Emergency Response and Business Continuity Plan 2. To analyze the incidence of processes in the fulfillment of Requirements, Offer and Agreements with the Stakeholders. Figure 9. Parameterization of the application of the comprehensive R/O management model. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 17 of 43 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 20 of 44 Figure 10 represents an alternative set of criteria with which to perform the assessment of risks and opportunities R/O. Figure 10. Parameterization of the application of the comprehensive R/O management model. 3.5. General Achievements and Benefits of the Research The research gave rise to the following innovative products that contribute to entrepreneurship which is available to companies and stakeholders:  The presentation of the concepts related to security and with the processes of risk management and intelligence for decision-making, through a graph that correlates, orders, and explains them, facilitating their study and analysis, in the context of management systems (See Figure 1, and Section 2.1.1).  The explicit incorporation of the comprehensive biosafety management and contingency and business continuity plans to the model (See numeral 2.3 with the comprehensive approach and concepts; Figure 4 with governance in crisis; Figure 6 with the application of the integration of requirements to biosecurity and biosafety; and continuity management and response to the pandemic in Figure A6).  The presentation of the requirements of ISO 50001 and the ISO QHSE3+ standards as best practices, whose application contributes to reducing vulnerability and enhancing energy improvement and efficiency. For this purpose, the HLS was applied, and illustrated by a diagram that allows us to appreciate its logic and integration, and the blocks of particular requirements for each component See Sections 2 and 3, and Figures 3, 5, and A4, as well as the reference support portal [13] with a comprehensive checklist of best practices QHSE3+.  The generation of six matrices that present the thematic structure, approach, and projections of the ISO 31000 families of standards, and QHSE3+, which include ISO 50000. In each matrix, EXCEPTIONALLY OCCASIONALLY REGULARLY USUALLY FOREVER 1 2 3 4 5 5 EXTRAORDINARY Great benefits in the market, profitability, speed, innovation and strategic alliances 5 - LOW 10 - MODERATE 15 - HIGH 20 - HIGH 25 - VERY HIGH 4 HIGHER Significant increase in competitive capabilities and business performance 4 - LOW 8 - MODERATE 12 - HIGH 16 - HIGH 20 - HIGH 3 MEDIUM Low increase in competitive capabilities and business performance 3 - VERY LOW 6 - LOW 9 - MODERATE 12 - HIGH 15 - HIGH 2 LESS Low increase in business performance 2 - VERY LOW 4 - LOW 6 - LOW 8 - MODERATE 10 - MODERATE 1 INSIGNIFICANT Non-perceptible benefits 1 - VERY LOW 2 - VERY LOW 3 - VERY LOW 4 - LOW 5 - LOW 1 INSIGNIFICANT Minimum losses 1 - VERY LOW 2 - VERY LOW 3 - VERY LOW 4 - LOW 5 - LOW 2 LESS Moderate dissatisfaction and low performance 2 - VERY LOW 4 - LOW 6 - LOW 8 - MODERATE 10 - MODERATE 3 MEDIUM High dissatisfaction and losses that affect competitiveness 3 - VERY LOW 6 - LOW 9 - MODERATE 12 - HIGH 15 - HIGH 4 HIGHER Losses of customers under performance in products, economic, compliance and conflicts 4 - LOW 8 - MODERATE 12 - HIGH 16 - HIGH 20 - HIGH 5 CATASTROPHIC Large losses of customers and products, economic, delays and conflicts 5 - LOW 10 - MODERATE 15 - HIGH 20 - HIGH 25 - VERY HIGH CONSEQUENCES PROBABILITY CLASSIFICATION COMPETITIVENESS O PP O R TU N IT IE S R IS K S Figure 10. Parameterization of the application of the comprehensive R/O management model. 3.2. General Directory of R/O Topics Regarding QHSE3+ One of the greatest difficulties that organizations may have in terms of R/O management is associated with the competencies of people to determine and unify the criteria for classifying R/O in their operations and interactions with different interest groups. Given this circumstance, an investigation of the R/O taxonomy was carried out, not only from the point of view of the families of the QHSE3+ norms and their approaches, but also from the perspective of management schools and the cases of companies that have a longer track record of risk management. The conclusions reached by the work team after the two analyses, and later, during 2020, with the explicit incorporation of the topic of Biosafety, are as follows [13,23,24,35,38,48,51]: � To facilitate the application of the model, it is convenient to prepare a Matrix-Directory, which brings together the blocks of general topics associated with the R/O Management of companies. In this way, each company specifies its basic strategic R/O matrix and processes, based on the blocks of topics, which become a support tool. � From a general point of view, there will be R/O of external and internal origin. The external R/O come from the external environment of the company and have a direct impact on its operation and results. The internal R/O depend on the organization’s own management. � Within the categories of internal risks and opportunities, one can include, as illustrated in Figure 6, aspects related to: (i) Strategy, Business and Projects, (ii) Culture and Behavior, (iii) Decision Making, (iv) Conditions for Conformity Q, v. Conditions for the Safety and Health of People HS, (vi) Conditions for Pollution Prevention and Environmental Protection E, (vii) Conditions for the rational use of Energy and Energy Efficiency E2, (viii) Conditions and resources for the adaptation of infrastructure, maintenance and cleaning of facilities and equipment, (ix) Conditions Energies 2020, 13, 5579 18 of 43 and resources for Planning, Infrastructure and Resources, Control and Development of ICT, (x) Financial and economic elements, which include the planning, management and results of financial resources, in addition to the applicable tax, fiscal and regulatory component; (xi) Other specialized topics. There may be R/O simultaneously related to several QHSE3+ components, or external and internal topics. In the same way, for the integral biosafety management component that is part of the plus (+), it may be presented in many external and internal categories, such as strategy, culture, quality, safety, environment, infrastructure, financial elements, and even other specialized topics depending on the type of organization. Figures A8–A14 detail the topics related to the layers and particular items presented in Figure 7, for external R/O, and Layers I to IX of the internal R/O. 3.3. Conceptual Model for Comprehensive R/O Management Applicable to CMS QHSE3+ This section presents the approach of the model configured through the application of systemic design [11,91,95,96], taking into account the structural and functional elements, which are described in Sections 3.3.1 and 3.3.2, and their parameterization in Section 3.4. Figure 7 illustrates the set of the Comprehensive R/O Management Model, taking as a starting point the basic elements of the CMS QHSE3+ described in Table 2. Table 2. Basic elements of the CMS QHSE3+ Model [11,91]. PARTS DESCRIPTION 1. Management Core Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 14 of 44 adaptation of infrastructure, maintenance and cleaning of facilities and equipment, (ix) Conditions and resources for Planning, Infrastructure and Resources, Control and Development of ICT, (x) Financial and economic elements, which include the planning, management and results of financial resources, in addition to the applicable tax, fiscal and regulatory component; (xi) Other specialized topics. There may be R/O simultaneously related to several QHSE3+ components, or external and internal topics. In the same way, for the integral biosafety management component that is part of the plus (+), it may be presented in many external and internal categories, such as strategy, culture, quality, safety, environment, infrastructure, financial elements, and even other specialized topics depending on the type of organization. Figures A8 to A.14 detail the topics related to the layers and particular items presented in Figure 7, for external R/O, and Layers I to IX of the internal R/O. 3.3. Conceptual Model for Comprehensive R/O Management Applicable to CMS QHSE3+ This section presents the approach of the model configured through the application of systemic design [11,91,95–96], taking into account the structural and functional elements, which are described in Sections 3.3.1 and 3.3.2, and their parameterization in Section 3.4. Figure 7 illustrates the set of the Comprehensive R/O Management Model, taking as a starting point the basic elements of the CMS QHSE3+ described in Table 2. Table 2. Basic elements of the CMS QHSE3+ Model [11,91]. PARTS DESCRIPTION 1. Management Core “I decide with business intelligence on the aspects of management” The core of management represents the central component from where the strategic direction is developed, including business intelligence associated with the strategic decisions for differentiation and specialization based on the development of products and services for sustainable success with innovation. 2. Heart of Talent and Culture “I deploy the philosophy of R/O and develop skills and culture” This represents human management, associated with talent, competencies, and knowledge management. Culture addresses the dynamics of identification, appropriation, and experience of principles. 3. R/O Management, Intelligence, and Operational Planning Breastplate “I decide with intelligence and technique the operational aspects.” This brings together information intelligence and operational decision-making with the planning of prevention, mitigation, contingency, emergency, and R/O control measures for each component with the management of purchases and infrastructure. “I decide with business intelligence on the aspects of management” The core of management represents the central component from where the strategic direction is developed, including business intelligence associated with the strategic decisions for differentiation and specialization based on the development of products and services for sustainable success with innovation. 2. Heart of Talent and Culture Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 14 of 46 adaptation of infrastructure, maintenance and cleaning of facilities and equipment, (ix) Conditions and resources for Planning, Infrastructure and Resources, Control and Development of ICT, (x) Financial and economic elements, which include the planning, management and results of financial resources, in addition to the applicable tax, fiscal and regulatory component; (xi) Other specialized topics. There may be R/O simultaneously related to several QHSE3+ components, or external and internal topics. In the same way, for the integral biosafety management component that is part of the plus (+), it may be presented in many external and internal categories, such as strategy, culture, quality, safety, environment, infrastructure, financial elements, and even other specialized topics depending on the type of organization. Figures A8 to A.14 detail the topics related to the layers and particular items presented in Figure 7, for external R/O, and Layers I to IX of the internal R/O. 3.3. Conceptual Model for Comprehensive R/O Management Applicable to CMS QHSE3+ This section presents the approach of the model configured through the application of systemic design [11,91,95–96], taking into account the structural and functional elements, which are described in Sections 3.3.1 and 3.3.2, and their parameterization in Section 3.4. Figure 7 illustrates the set of the Comprehensive R/O Management Model, taking as a starting point the basic elements of the CMS QHSE3+ described in Table 2. Table 2. Basic elements of the CMS QHSE3+ Model [11,91]. PARTS DESCRIPTION 1. Management Core “I decide with business intelligence on the aspects of management” The core of management represents the central component from where the strategic direction is developed, including business intelligence associated with the strategic decisions for differentiation and specialization based on the development of products and services for sustainable success with innovation. 2. Heart of Talent and Culture “I deploy the philosophy of R/O and develop skills and culture” This represents human management, associated with talent, competencies, and knowledge management. Culture addresses the dynamics of identification, appropriation, and experience of principles. 3. R/O Management, Intelligence, and Operational Planning Breastplate “I decide with intelligence and technique the operational aspects.” This brings together information intelligence and operational decision-making with the planning of prevention, mitigation, contingency, emergency, and R/O control measures for each component with the management of purchases and infrastructure. 4–8. Five Arms of QHSE3+ “I apply what was planned in each component.” These symbolize the QHSE3 elements from which the strategic and operational planning is applied. In each arm, the R/O per component is managed, associated with nonconformities, “I deploy the philosophy of R/O and develop skills and culture” This represents human management, associated with talent, competencies, and knowledge management. Culture addresses the dynamics of identification, appropriation, and experience of principles. 3. R/O Management, Intelligence, and Operational Planning Breastplate Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 14 of 44 adaptation of infrastructure, maintenance and cleaning of facilities and equipment, (ix) Conditions and resources for Planning, Infrastructure and Resources, Control and Development of ICT, (x) Financial and economic elements, which include the planning, management and results of financial resources, in addition to the applicable tax, fiscal and regulatory component; (xi) Other specialized topics. There may be R/O simultaneously related to several QHSE3+ components, or external and internal topics. In the same way, for the integral biosafety management component that is part of the plus (+), it may be presented in many external and internal categories, such as strategy, culture, quality, safety, environment, infrastructure, financial elements, and even other specialized topics depending on the type of organization. Figures A8 to A.14 detail the topics related to the layers and particular items presented in Figure 7, for external R/O, and Layers I to IX of the internal R/O. 3.3. Conceptual Model for Comprehensive R/O Management Applicable to CMS QHSE3+ This section presents the approach of the model configured through the application of systemic design [11,91,95–96], taking into account the structural and functional elements, which are described in Sections 3.3.1 and 3.3.2, and their parameterization in Section 3.4. Figure 7 illustrates the set of the Comprehensive R/O Management Model, taking as a starting point the basic elements of the CMS QHSE3+ described in Table 2. Table 2. Basic elements of the CMS QHSE3+ Model [11,91]. PARTS DESCRIPTION 1. Management Core “I decide with business intelligence on the aspects of management” The core of management represents the central component from where the strategic direction is developed, including business intelligence associated with the strategic decisions for differentiation and specialization based on the development of products and services for sustainable success with innovation. 2. Heart of Talent and Culture “I deploy the philosophy of R/O and develop skills and culture” This represents human management, associated with talent, competencies, and knowledge management. Culture addresses the dynamics of identification, appropriation, and experience of principles. 3. R/O Management, Intelligence, and Operational Planning Breastplate “I decide with intelligence and technique the operational aspects.” This brings together information intelligence and operational decision-making with the planning of prevention, mitigation, contingency, emergency, and R/O control measures for each component with the management of purchases and infrastructure. “I decide with intelligence and technique the operational aspects.” This brings together information intelligence and operational decision-making with the planning of prevention, mitigation, contingency, emergency, and R/O control measures for each component with the management of purchases and infrastructure. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 19 of 43 Table 2. Cont. PARTS DESCRIPTION 4–8. Five Arms of QHSE3+ Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 15 of 44 “I apply what was planned in each component.” These symbolize the QHSE3 elements from which the strategic and operational planning is applied. In each arm, the R/O per component is managed, associated with nonconformities, incidents, potential uses, improvements, or greater value generation. 9 and 10. Feedback Axes and Model Improvement ”Through Monitoring, Measurement, Analysis, and Evaluation (MMAE), I learn, innovate, and improve”. These are the axes that ensure the dynamics of the model. Axis 9 brings together the MMAE, audit, and management review to analyze performance and pose challenges. Axis 10 corresponds to improvement, innovation, and response accordingly to incidents, nonconformities, and opportunities to generate greater value with corrective and preventive actions in full alignment with the requirements of the context and strategic purposes. 3.3.1. Structural Elements of the Comprehensive R/O Management Model in CMS QHSE3+ The following elements make direct reference to risk management:  The management nucleus has the first level of strategic risk management with product and business developments.  The operational planning QHSE3+ is carried out from the Operational Planning Breastplate of the Model, and includes planning processes, identification of R/O and determination of controls.  The Five QHSE3+ Arms apply what is planned and respond to incidents and moments of truth. Figure 7 shows the sketch of 16 components of the model, and the deployment of ROBT in a transversal way throughout the entire system for its foundation and appropriation through Components 11–16. “I apply what was planned in each component.” These symbolize the QHSE3 elements from which the strategic and operational planning is applied. In each arm, the R/O per component is managed, associated with nonconformities, incidents, potential uses, improvements, or greater value generation. 9 and 10. Feedback Axes and Model Improvement Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 15 of 44 4–8. Five Arms of QHSE3+ “I apply what was planned in each component.” These symbolize the QHSE3 elements from which the strategic and operational planning is applied. In each arm, the R/O per component is managed, associated with nonconformities, incidents, potential uses, improvements, or greater value generation. 9 and 10. Feedback Axes and Model Irovement ”Through Monitoring, Measurement, Analysis, and Evaluation (MMAE), I learn, innovate, and improve”. These are the axes that ensure the dynamics of the model. Axis 9 brings together the MMAE, audit, and management review to analyze performance and pose challenges. Axis 10 corresponds to improvement, innovation, and response accordingly to incidents, nonconformities, and opportunities to generate greater value with corrective and preventive actions in full alignment with the requirements of the context and strategic purposes. 3.3.1. Structural Elements of the Comprehensive R/O Management Model in CMS QHSE3+ The following elements make direct reference to risk management:  The management nucleus has the first level of strategic risk management with product and business developments.  The operational planning QHSE3+ is carried out from the Operational Planning Breastplate of the Model, and includes planning processes, identification of R/O and determination of controls.  The Five QHSE3+ Arms apply what is planned and respond to incidents and moments of truth. Figure 7 shows the sketch of 16 components of the model, and the deployment of ROBT in a transversal way throughout the entire system for its foundation and appropriation through Components 11–16. ”Through Monitoring, Measurement, Analysis, and Evaluation (MMAE), I learn, innovate, and improve”. These are the axes that ensure the dynamics of the model. Axis 9 brings together the MMAE, audit, and management review to analyze performance and pose challenges. Axis 10 corresponds to improvement, innovation, and response accordingly to incidents, nonconformities, and opportunities to generate greater value with corrective and preventive actions in full alignment with the requirements of the context and strategic purposes. 3.3.1. Structural Elements of the Comprehensive R/O Management Model in CMS QHSE3+ The following elements make direct reference to risk management: � The management nucleus has the first level of strategic risk management with product and business developments. � The operational planning QHSE3+ is carried out from the Operational Planning Breastplate of the Model, and includes planning processes, identification of R/O and determination of controls. � The Five QHSE3+ Arms apply what is planned and respond to incidents and moments of truth. Figure 7 shows the sketch of 16 components of the model, and the deployment of ROBT in a transversal way throughout the entire system for its foundation and appropriation through Components 11–16. 3.3.2. Functional Approach of the R/O Model Applicable to CMS QHSE3+ Figure 8 illustrates the functional elements in the operation of the model, considering their visualization and interaction through a matrix of two inputs, which include four layers on the vertical axis: (1) Foundations in principles and values, (2) R/O strategic management, (3) QHSE3+ operational R/O management, and (4) complementary layer. On the horizontal axis, there are four levels of planning and action: (a) directive planning, (b) operational planning (including projects, product development, and processes), (c) contingency and emergency plans, and (d) responsibility and response actions (i.e., containment and correction, feedback, and lessons learned). The model matrix and its functional elements are analyzed below: Layer 1. Foundation in Principles and Values: Thought, Awareness, and Action for Prevention Transversal to the levels of planning and action, this layer includes the planning and development of strategies to develop skills and achieve the appropriation of the value of prevention associated with ROBT. Layer 2. Management to Decide on Strategic R/O Energies 2020, 13, 5579 20 of 43 This layer is divided into sublayers of change management to guarantee the integrity of the system, and a second sublayer to plan strategies according to each level: o Executive: Market intelligence and the study of the context to formulate objectives, policies, projects, and strategic corporate plans. o Operational: R/O analysis for the formulation and development of new businesses, products, and projects in line with the strategic purposes of change. o Contingency: Cycle of decisions related to business continuity plan, biosecurity management, and emergency preparedness and response. o Containment, Feedback, Responsibility, and Response. Response to performance and MMAE. Decisions and challenges of business reformulation, projects, and strategy. Layer 3. Operational R/O Management QHSE3+ This layer considers the functions of business intelligence and the management of legal requirements, process planning, comprehensive biosafety management, nonconformity management, redefinition of control measures, and lessons learned vs. incidents and changes. It is divided into sublayers associated with each component of CMS QHSE3+, having the following at each of the levels: o Executive: R/OBT in special projects. Decisions and deployment of the comprehensive management policy and others. o Operational and Contingency: Application and adaptation of operational control plans and programs, emergency response, NC, and QHSE3+ incident management. o Feedback, Responsibility, and Response: Lessons learned, knowledge, review of control measures, MMAE, and managerial review by component. Layer 4. Other Measures for the Deployment of R/OBT From the strategic level, this layer considers the R/O, evaluating business alternatives, alliances, or structural changes in the organization resulting from the decisions to be made. Internal control measures based on the COSO model, with feedback, auditing, and controls to guarantee the integrity of the resources and the integral generation of value, including economic results, are highlighted in a transversal way for energy efficiency [17,55–58,66,97–99]. Another complement is related to the development of competencies to make decisions and react appropriately and in timely manner to events that lead to the presence of risk factors and dynamic opportunities, involving decisions in moments of truth or critical moments of change. 3.4. Parameterization of the Comprehensive R/O Management Model Sections 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 have made it possible to observe the breadth of comprehensive management in various aspects of external and internal R/O, considering the QHSE3+ components and their application in a transversal manner. With the tools associated with the QHSE3+ risk types directory (Figures A8–A14) and the R/O management conceptual model for CMS QHSE3+ with its functionality matrix (Figures 7 and 8), significant progress is made in the visualization of R/O. However, its generalized application requires a logical tool that facilitates its application, updating, and management in the processes, the strategic field, and the components in which this is required. Figure 9 contains the flow that illustrates the step-by-step to the parameterization of the R/O management process associated with the model. From this parameterization, diagrammed with machine language identifying reports and outputs, it is possible to structure computer applications that are very useful for companies in terms of the transversal, agile, and systematic application of R/O management under unified criteria, support guides, listings, reports, and statistics. In Figure 9, the parameterization considers 10 Steps (column on the left) in which the application context is initially defined, taking into account the definition of the scope of the system or exercise Energies 2020, 13, 5579 21 of 43 (Step 0), the components under analysis, and the list of objectives and processes (Step 1), and then proceeds to determine the priority processes based on the analysis of their incidence in the fulfillment of the requirements, obligations, strategic objectives, and the performance and success of the business (Steps 2,3, and 4). Next, the applicable R/O directory was determined by starting from the tool indicated in Section 3.2 and from each component, thus generating the list of the types of external and internal (R/O) by component QHSE3+ (Step 5). Based on the typology, a list of strategic R/O and QHSE3+ was determined and individualized, including those related to biosecurity and biosafety (Step 6). In Step 7, an assessment of the R/O was carried out, which generates the R/O map and proceeds to establish the contingency plans, business continuity, and, in general, the plan of treatment, which takes into account the layers of prevention, control, reaction, mitigation, and change management (Step 8). The Plan must be monitored in terms of its execution and results. In Step (9), the effectiveness of the plan was evaluated, and incidents and events related to the R/O of CMS QHSE3+ were monitored. In Step (10), the residual risk and the changes in vulnerability were evaluated, and the cycle was resumed and reformulated according to the changes in the context. Figure 10 represents an alternative set of criteria with which to perform the assessment of risks and opportunities R/O. 3.5. General Achievements and Benefits of the Research The research gave rise to the following innovative products that contribute to entrepreneurship which is available to companies and stakeholders: � The presentation of the concepts related to security and with the processes of risk management and intelligence for decision-making, through a graph that correlates, orders, and explains them, facilitating their study and analysis, in the context of management systems (See Figure 1, and Section 2.1.1). � The explicit incorporation of the comprehensive biosafety management and contingency and business continuity plans to the model (See numeral 2.3 with the comprehensive approach and concepts; Figure 4 with governance in crisis; Figure 6 with the application of the integration of requirements to biosecurity and biosafety; and continuity management and response to the pandemic in Figure A6). � The presentation of the requirements of ISO 50001 and the ISO QHSE3+ standards as best practices, whose application contributes to reducing vulnerability and enhancing energy improvement and efficiency. For this purpose, the HLS was applied, and illustrated by a diagram that allows us to appreciate its logic and integration, and the blocks of particular requirements for each component See Sections 2 and 3, and Figures 3, 5 and A4, as well as the reference support portal [13] with a comprehensive checklist of best practices QHSE3+. � The generation of six matrices that present the thematic structure, approach, and projections of the ISO 31000 families of standards, and QHSE3+, which include ISO 50000. In each matrix, explicit reference is made to the best practices which are most related to the integral management of risks for each component (Figures A1–A5). � The matrix “General Directory of topics for R/O QHSE3+”, which is a very useful and practical tool to make the inventory for R/O of companies. See 3.2 and Figures A8–A14. � The configuration of the R/O comprehensive management conceptual model with an energy performance perspective through the application of systemic design, which facilitates the logical and didactic presentation of its structural and functional elements. See Sections 3.3.1 and 3.3.2, and Figures 7 and 8. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 22 of 43 � The validation of the parametrization flow of the model as a base instrument with which to structure computer applications that support the administration of R/O comprehensive management in organizations. See Section 3.4 and Figures 9 and 10. � The model and its tools had were tentatively applied in six companies, where their practical utility and the benefit of their simple and logical approach were ratified to visualize and understand their structure, functionality, and operation. With one of the companies, it was possible to apply the model, considering the strategic and operational components in relation to business continuity and COVID-19. See Paragraph 3.6 and Figure A7. The achievements and results obtained will determine the course of research and subsequent actions to expand the generated instruments and promote sustainable success. 3.6. Results Obtained in Terms of Energy Efficiency and Vulnerability Reduction 3.6.1. Characteristics and Profile of the Companies in which the Preliminary Validation was Made Figure 11 presents the characteristics and profiles of six companies located in Colombia, in the Departments of Atlántico, La Guajira and Cundinamarca, where the preliminary application of the CRM Model was made, and the complete cycle of identification of R/O and of the formulation and implementation of actions to respond and address the R/O, within the framework of consulting projects for the consolidation of its Comprehensive Management Systems. Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 22 of 44 Figure 11. Characteristics of the companies in which the application of the comprehensive R/O management model was performed under CMS QHSE3+. 3.6.2. Presentation and Analysis of the Results obtained. Figures 12 and 13 summarize the results obtained in the R/O management as of December 2019 considering the contribution of opportunity management in achieving the objectives and the reduction of vulnerability for each QHSE3+ component. Some values result from projections and assumptions that were raised from the companies to consider force majeure stops or external factors that generate distortion in the handling of data. The 2020 records are not included, given their irregularity due to the confinement. Here are the most relevant aspects: A. Functionality of the Model and Appropriation of ROBT. o In the six organizations, the correct functionality of the model and the incidence indicators for the management of opportunities and the reduction of vulnerability were ratified. o The model applied and the tools that support it facilitate the management of the cycle of identification, analysis, evaluation, formulation of actions, monitoring, requalification, and reformulation of R/O through the key questions and the parameterization sequence. o In companies in which prevention and ROBT were adopted as a fundamental principle and value, it was much easier to ensure systematic continuity in the application of the model. B. Incidence of Opportunity Management in the Achievement of Strategic Purposes (Rows in Item 1). o The indicator of the incidence of opportunity management in the achievement of the objectives was valued from the different processes and positions with direct responsibility in the projects and associated actions from the estimated average percentage of the incidence of each relevant opportunity considered with evaluations agreed upon between the management and specific managers. o The average of the indicator of incidence was between 12% and 36% in the six companies. The opportunities related to ICT innovation and updating, the development of new products, new markets and businesses, renovation and investment in equipment, infrastructure and new facilities, development of new alliances, and human talent. TYPE OF ORGANIZATION Family Compensation Fund. Municipal Hospital (Health Services). Clínic (Health Services). Pharmaceutical Laboratory. Port Operation (Logistics Services). Manufacturing (Glass Containers) FOCUS OF THE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - ACCREDITATION and / or CERTIFICATION STATUS 1 Comprehensive Approach of the Management System. CMS focused on the Strategy. CMS focused on the Regulatory Framework and the Strategy. CMS focused on the Regulatory Framework and the Strategy. CMS focused on the Strategy. CMS focused on the Strategy. CMS focused on the Strategy. 2 Strategic Business Continuity Plan and Contingency Plans. With ISO 22313: 2020 approach and HS Contingency Plans HS Emergency Plans vs Law and Accreditation HS Emergency Plans vs Law and Accreditation HS, BASC and EMS Emergency Plans Continuity Plans with Special Clients HS, BASC and EMS Emergency Plans HS, BASC and EMS Emergency Plans Continuity Plans with Corporate Clients 3 Accreditation or Certification with ISO 9001: 2015. Q: ISO 9001: 2015 Q: Acreditación Q: Acreditación Q: ISO 9001: 2015 Q: ISO 9001: 2015 Q: ISO 9001: 2015 4 Certification with ISO 45001: 2018 (Formerly OHSAS 18001: 2007). No No No No HS: OHSAS: 180001:2007 No 5 Certification with ISO 14001: 2015 (Environmental). No No No E: ISO 14001: 2015 E: ISO 14001: 2015 E: ISO 14001: 2015 6 Certification with ISO 50001: 2018. No No No No No No 7 Certification with other ISO models for "+" components. No No No Yes: BASC 2019 Yes: BASC 2019, and ISPS Code for the Protection of Ships and Port Facilities Yes: BASC 2019, and ISO 22000 Food Safety Management System CATEGORIES OF ANALYSIS Figure 11. Characteristics of the companies in which the application of the comprehensive R/O management model was performed under CMS QHSE3+. The profile includes the comprehensive approach of the Management System, the status of accreditation or certification of its QHSE3+ components, and the existence of Business Continuity Plans or Emergency and Contingency Plans. All the companies have CMS based on the certified quality component and a strategic approach, which determines the priorities of each business directed to address strategic and operational R/O, Energies 2020, 13, 5579 23 of 43 giving priority to accreditation in the health sector in the case of the hospital and clinic, and in all cases, to the QHSE3+ risk components and the regulatory obligations of each sector. Although no company is certified in E2, 1 is certified in HS, and 3 are certified in the environmental component E, all made positive progress in the application of best practices and decided to be certified in the components indicated in Figure 11, according to their priorities and market interests. Particularly, in the “+” component of additional risks, all companies applied good information security practices and the physical and logical security of their platforms, under the R/O ICT approach in accordance with ISO 27001:2013. On the other hand, two were certified in the BASC component, and 1 in ISO 22000:2018. 3.6.2. Presentation and Analysis of the Results Obtained Figures 12 and 13 summarize the results obtained in the R/O management as of December 2019 considering the contribution of opportunity management in achieving the objectives and the reduction of vulnerability for each QHSE3+ component.Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 23 of 44 Figure 12. Indicators of vulnerability reduction and incidence of opportunity management in the achievement of strategic objectives: Companies 1, 2, and 3. C. Vulnerability Reduction for Strategic and Quality Risks Q (Rows of Items 2 and 3) o The reduction in vulnerability is calculated as the percentage of risk reduction after the application of the measures in the period to be calculated, as indicated in the algorithm of the definition in Section 2.1.1, which is set out again below: %𝐷𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑉𝑢𝑙 = 𝑃𝑜 𝐺𝑜 − 𝑃𝑓 𝐺𝑓 / 𝑃𝑜 𝐺𝑜 (2) where DismVul denotes the percentage decrease in vulnerability after implementing antirisk measures, Poi and Goi are the initially assessed possibility and gravity, respectively, and Pfi and Gfi, are the final possibility and gravity, respectively, after adopting the planned measures. o The reduction of vulnerability was between 8.5 and 27% in terms of strategic and quality risks related to vulnerability due to new requirements of corporate clients, liquidity and portfolio TYPE OF ORGANIZATION Family Compensation Fund. Municipal Hospital (Health Services). Clínic (Health Services). 1 IMPACT OF THE MANAGEMENT OF OPPORTUNITIES IN THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES. (Includes examples of addressed opportunities). 3.4%: 1. Innovation with ICT; 2. New Headquarters Project; 3. Management of Legal Requirements. 12%: 1. Accreditation Management 2. Human Development 18%: 1. Update ICT Modules for Finance; 2. Investments in Infrastructure. 2 REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY FOR STRATEGIC RISKS. (Includes the Q component of Quality) 3 EXAMPLES OF STRATEGIC, SIGNIFICANT BUSINESS RISKS WITH GREATER REDUCTION IN VULNERABILITY. 4 % REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY IN HS RISKS OF WORKERS 'ACCIDENTS AND WORKPLACE ILLNESSES. 5 EXAMPLES OF HS SAFETY AND HEALTH HAZARDS AT WORK, RELEVANT AND WITH A GREATER REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY. 6 REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY IN "E" RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT. 7 EXAMPLES OF RELEVANT AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS "E" AND WITH A GREATER REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY (Significant environmental aspects). 8 REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY IN "E2" RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH ENERGY EFFICIENCY. 9 EXAMPLES OF RELEVANT "E2" RISKS WITH GREATER REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY. (Risks due to inefficiency and energy losses). 10 EXAMPLES OF SIGNIFICANT RISKS WITH GREATER REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY, IN THE “+” COMPONENT OF "OTHER SPECIALIZED RISKS". 1. Information security Loss of information due to physical damage to Hardware and affectation of Software. 2. Food safety Risks of cross contamination due to non-application of Good Practices 1. Security of the information 1.1 Deficiencies of integrity in the information, due to unavailability and inconsistencies. 1.2 Vulnerability in the access to the data of Medical Records. 1. Security of the information 1.1 Cyber attacks on networks and interaction channels 1.2 Failures in operations and information integrity due to ICT inconsistencies # 9.3% 1. Thermal discomfort in rooms and cold areas. 2. Handling of cleaning chemicals. 3. Work position that requires standing. 8.7% 1. Risks associated with chemical and biological agents. 2. Exposure to sources of ionizing radiation. 13.6% 1. There is no protocol for the management of biological risks. 2. Risks of infection due to deficiencies in waste management. PERFORMANCE INDICATORS - EXECUTION 2019. 11.5% 1. Low response in call for events, 2. Low impact of marketing strategies. 16% 1. Vulnerability due to infection risks 2. High incidence of patients who migrate. 23% 1. Liquidity and delinquent portfolio. 2. Infection in white areas. 9.4% 1. Generation of solid and liquid waste. 2. Generation of noise and vibrations during events of the provision of services. 22.2% 1. Generation of non-domestic discharges with discharge to the sewers. 2. Contamination of water due to the spillage of hazardous waste. 17.4% 1. Vulnerability due to handling and handling of hazardous waste. 2. Generation of emissions from fixed sources of external combustion. 10.8% 1. Greater energy consumption at the Prado Headquarters, due to the non-optimal management of heat and cold. 2. Lack of energy saving mechanisms in lighting. 16.4% 1. Energy losses due to non- optimal heat and cold management in operations and services. 2. Absence of automatic control and saving mechanisms in lighting. 14.8% 1. Obsolescence of equipment and infrastructure. 2. Vulnerability due to the absence of control mechanisms and disciplinary provisions for energy saving Figure 12. Indicators of vulnerability reduction and incidence of opportunity management in the achievement of strategic objectives: Companies 1, 2, and 3. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 24 of 43 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 24 of 44 recovery, noncompetitive rates and costs, low call and market response, infection risks, and the high incidence of patients who migrate. Figure 13. Indicators of vulnerability reduction and incidence of opportunity management in the achievement of strategic objectives: Companies 4, 5, and 6. D. Vulnerability Reduction for HS Risk (Rows of Items 4 and 5) o The reduction of vulnerability in the risks of the HS component was between 8.7% and 16.5%. The related risks include chemical products, noise levels, exposure to chemical, physical, and biological agents, contaminated waste management, particulate material, work at heights and in confined spaces, and thermal discomfort. E. Reduction of Vulnerability for Risks E. (Rows of Items 6 and 7) o The reduction of vulnerability in the risks of component E was between 9.4% and 23%. The risks include consumption of natural resources such as raw materials, consumption and TYPE OF ORGANIZATION Pharmaceutical Laboratory Port Operation (Logistics Services) Manufacturing (Glass Containers) 1 IMPACT OF THE MANAGEMENT OF OPPORTUNITIES IN THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES. (Includes examples of addressed opportunities). 16% 1. New Business Development. 2. New products and markets. 25% Equipment and infrastructure renewal. 36% 1. Redefinition of portfolio. 2. Business partner approach. 2 REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY FOR STRATEGIC RISKS. (Includes the Q component of Quality) 3 EXAMPLES OF STRATEGIC, SIGNIFICANT BUSINESS RISKS WITH GREATER REDUCTION IN VULNERABILITY. 4 REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY IN HS RISKS OF WORKERS 'ACCIDENTS AND WORKPLACE ILLNESSES. 5 EXAMPLES OF HS SAFETY AND HEALTH HAZARDS AT WORK, RELEVANT AND WITH A GREATER REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY. 6 REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY IN "E" RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT. 7 EXAMPLES OF RELEVANT AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS "E" AND WITH A GREATER REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY (Significant environmental aspects). 8 REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY IN "E2" RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH ENERGY EFFICIENCY. 9 EXAMPLES OF RELEVANT "E2" RISKS WITH GREATER REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY. (Risks due to inefficiency and energy losses). 10 EXAMPLES OF SIGNIFICANT RISKS WITH GREATER REDUCTION OF VULNERABILITY, IN THE “+” COMPONENT OF "OTHER SPECIALIZED RISKS". 1. Information security 1.1 Inconsistencies and deactivation of computer applications. 1.2. Fines and penalties for inconsistencies in reporting information to the authorities. 1. BASC: Vulnerability of the physical integrity of the cargo due to violation of the security of the containers. 2. Food Safety: Cross contamination of cargo by the presence of birds and rodents 1. Information Security: Infrastructure restrictions for the Business Continuity Plan 2. Food Safety: Cross contamination in decoration, packaging and packaging. 11.4% 1. Affectation by noise in the area of blister-packing 2. Vulnerability due to non- application of protocols in the handling of chemicals. 11.6% 1. Health damage due to contact with particulate matter. 2. Vulnerability due to work at height and confined spaces. 16,5% 1. Affectation by contact with chemical products. 2. Affectation by high noise levels in operations. PERFORMANCE INDICATORS - EXECUTION 2019. 27% 1. Vulnerability due to new GMP / FDA requirements. 2. Low liquidity due to restrictions in portfolio recovery. 8.5% 1. Conditions of the access roads and cycle times above the average. 2. Non-competitive conditions of availability and rates. 17.8% 1. Market loss due to additional supply requirements. 2. Decrease in demand for non- competitive costs. 12,6% 1. Vulnerability in the management, control and disposal of hazardous waste. 2. Generation of non-domestic discharges with discharge to the sewer. 18,4% 1. Generation of industrial water contaminated with solid waste, oil and grease. 2. Generation of hydrocarbon spills or leaks in the operation. 23% 1. Consumption of limestone and raw materials. 2. Permanent use of fuel and energy to operate the furnace. 9,6% 1. Energy consumption peaks in operations, due to non- optimal management of heat and cold 2. Absence of energy saving mechanisms in the commissioning of the operating lines. 10,8% 1. Levels of energy consumption in machinery and equipment operations. 2. Inefficient handling of operating cycles, with higher fuel consumption for operation 9,4% 1. High levels of fuel consumption in the furnace during the start-up of each line. 2. Fuel consumption for the inbound and outbound logistics operation. Figure 13. Indicators of vulnerability reduction and incidence of opportunity management in the achievement of strategic objectives: Companies 4, 5, and 6. Some values result from projections and assumptions that were raised from the companies to consider force majeure stops or external factors that generate distortion in the handling of data. The 2020 records are not included, given their irregularity due to the confinement. Here are the most relevant aspects: A. Functionality of the Model and Appropriation of ROBT. o In the six organizations, the correct functionality of the model and the incidence indicators for the management of opportunities and the reduction of vulnerability were ratified. o The model applied and the tools that support it facilitate the management of the cycle of identification, analysis, evaluation, formulation of actions, monitoring, requalification, and reformulation of R/O through the key questions and the parameterization sequence. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 25 of 43 o In companies in which prevention and ROBT were adopted as a fundamental principle and value, it was much easier to ensure systematic continuity in the application of the model. B. Incidence of Opportunity Management in the Achievement of Strategic Purposes (Rows in Item 1). o The indicator of the incidence of opportunity management in the achievement of the objectives was valued from the different processes and positions with direct responsibility in the projects and associated actions from the estimated average percentage of the incidence of each relevant opportunity considered with evaluations agreed upon between the management and specific managers. o The average of the indicator of incidence was between 12% and 36% in the six companies. The opportunities related to ICT innovation and updating, the development of new products, new markets and businesses, renovation and investment in equipment, infrastructure and new facilities, development of new alliances, and human talent. C. Vulnerability Reduction for Strategic and Quality Risks Q (Rows of Items 2 and 3) o The reduction in vulnerability is calculated as the percentage of risk reduction after the application of the measures in the period to be calculated, as indicated in the algorithm of the definition in Section 2.1.1, which is set out again below: %DismVul =  n∑ i=1 (Poi)(Goi)− n∑ i=1 (P fi)(G fi) /  n∑ i=1 (Poi)(Goi)  (2) where DismVul denotes the percentage decrease in vulnerability after implementing antirisk measures, Poi and Goi are the initially assessed possibility and gravity, respectively, and Pfi and Gfi, are the final possibility and gravity, respectively, after adopting the planned measures. o The reduction of vulnerability was between 8.5 and 27% in terms of strategic and quality risks related to vulnerability due to new requirements of corporate clients, liquidity and portfolio recovery, noncompetitive rates and costs, low call and market response, infection risks, and the high incidence of patients who migrate. D. Vulnerability Reduction for HS Risk (Rows of Items 4 and 5) o The reduction of vulnerability in the risks of the HS component was between 8.7% and 16.5%. The related risks include chemical products, noise levels, exposure to chemical, physical, and biological agents, contaminated waste management, particulate material, work at heights and in confined spaces, and thermal discomfort. E. Reduction of Vulnerability for Risks E. (Rows of Items 6 and 7) o The reduction of vulnerability in the risks of component E was between 9.4% and 23%. The risks include consumption of natural resources such as raw materials, consumption and contamination of water, noise and vibrations, hydrocarbon spills, generation of dumping and contaminated waste, handling and manipulation of chemicals and hazardous waste stand out. F. Reduction of Vulnerability in Terms of E2 (General—Rows of Items 8 and 9) o The reduction of vulnerability in the risks of component E2 was between 9.4% and 16.4%. The risks concern losses and higher consumption due to the non-optimal management of heat and cold, loss, and greater consumption due to the lack of lighting savings, high consumption of fuel, and energy in logistics operations of the supply chains (see Section H). G. Reduction of Vulnerability in other components of Additional R/O (+) (Row 10) In this block, three factors stand out: Energies 2020, 13, 5579 26 of 43 � Information security: Physical damage to hardware, deterioration of software, limitations in availability, access, and integrity of information, cyberattack on networks and channels, inconsistencies and deactivation of computer applications, and infrastructure. � Food safety: Cross-contamination by the nonapplication of best practices or the presence of pigeons, rodents, and other pests in loading, unloading, and storage. � BASC: Physical integrity of cargo for violation of container security. H. Recent Developments in E2 Management o Compensation Fund (i). Basic energy-saving program in all its locations, (ii). Automatic control and programming of conditioning and refrigeration, (iii). Improvements in insulation to optimize refrigeration in cold rooms, (iv). Campaigns, training, and supervision, (v). Automation of energy control in accommodation, (vi). Automatic control and savings alternatives with adaptation of roofs, (vii). Optimization in ventilation and cooling, (viii). Luminaire change and automatic control. (ix). Reduction in per capita energy consumption (2019 vs. 2018): 8.1%. o Municipal Hospital (i). Savings program in all processes, (ii). Network design optimization, (iii). Automation of lighting and air conditioning, (iv). Use of secondary sources of natural light and solar panels. (v). Optimization of ventilation and conditioning systems in hospital and care areas, (vi). Conditioning and isolation in cold areas, (vii). Control of energy use in washing, sanitation, and patient care, (viii). Maintenance and adaptation of boilers and cold equipment, (ix). MMAE of monthly consumption vs. daily bed occupations, x. Reduction in per capita energy consumption (2019 vs. 2018): 18.2%. o Clinic (Health Services) (i). Water- and energy-saving plan in all processes, (ii). MMAE of consumption and baseline, (iii). Redesign and application of intelligent lighting and air conditioning systems, iv. Insulation of “hot” pipes, walls and ceilings, (v). Optimization of ventilation, conditioning, and refrigeration of clinical and service areas, (vi). Campaigns to position values and achieve the systematic application of best practices, (vii). New eco-efficient engine room and boilers, (viii). Reduction of energy losses due to transformation, adaptation of boilers and chillers, (ix). MMAE of monthly consumption vs. daily bed occupations, (x). Reduction in per capita energy consumption (2019 vs. 2018): 20.3%. o Pharmaceutical Laboratory (i). Savings and consumption reduction plan in all lines and pharmaceutical forms, (ii). Redesign of processes and product lines with lower energy consumption, (iii). MMAE on plans to reduce use and savings, (iv). Isolation of white areas and warehouses, v. Redesign of networks and facilities with intelligent air and lighting systems, (vi). Optimization and maintenance of ventilation and conditioning of gray areas, (vii). Training and disciplinary measures for the continuity in the application of good practices, (viii). Replacement of obsolete equipment for eco-efficient conversion (with investment incentive), (ix). Devices on doors and windows to prevent leaks, (x). Cleaning and replacement of filters in air conditioning units, (xi). Reduction in per capita consumption (2019 vs. 2018): 12.2%. o Port Operation and Logistics Services (i). Winery savings program, (ii). MMAE on consumption reduction and savings, (iii). Incorporation of energy efficiency in the strategy, (iv). Training. Supervision, and measures to apply good practices for E2, (v). Substitution of fuels and development of alternative mixtures (reduction of carbon footprint and consumption of kilowatt-hour per container), (vi). Greater control over own and subcontracted consumption. (vii). Measurement and reduction of electricity and heat Losses. (viii). Planning, execution, and control of maintenance and renewal of obsolete equipment, (ix). Efficient lighting, (x). Reduction in per capita energy consumption (2019 vs. 2018): 15.2%. o Manufacturing (Glass Containers) (i). Global corporate savings program with an emphasis on oven and training, (ii). MMAE on consumption reduction and savings, (iii). 10-year global strategic challenge to reduce consumption by 50%, (iv). Campaigns, training, and supervision for E2. (v). Planning, mastery of standardization, and control in setup and operation of furnaces, Energies 2020, 13, 5579 27 of 43 (vi). Eco-efficient packaging design. (vii). Automatic control and energy-saving alternatives in lighting. (Natural and solar panels). (viii). Optimization in ventilation and conditioning. (ix). Reduction of consumption in the supply chain. (x). Reduction in per capita energy consumption (2019 vs. 2018): 10.2%. 4. Conclusions We present a conceptual model for comprehensive R/O management and the tools to facilitate its application. This includes the results obtained and references to best practices for the deployment and application of the model, from Appendices A.1–A.8. The concepts associated with intelligence for decision-making and security were incorporated into the conceptual and principles framework of the model, from the perspective of the US Department Homeland Security lexicon (Section 2.1), as well as the concepts and best practices related to biosafety management and business continuity plans (Section 2.3). In this way, the perspective was broadened, adjusting the approach to the dynamic context. The integration of model requirements was carried out from the identification of the requirements common to each component according to the approach of the HLS [87–90], as illustrated in Figure 6 (Section 2.4), where the additional specific topics of each component were identified, and an analysis of the application of these requirements to the comprehensive biosafety management was carried out. On the reference support portal [13], the authors provided a checklist associated with these requirements in terms of best practices available to the public. The model was configured using graphic illustration and a matrix, which present the structural and functional design of each component, considering the different levels of planning and action, and the layers in which ROBT is deployed within CMS QHSE3+ (Section 3.2). Two key tools were designed to support and facilitate the application of the CRM Model: the matrix-directory for the classification of risk topics, and the parameterization of the ten stages of the process, i.e., definition of the context, determination of the scope, prioritization vs. objectives and processes, identification and assessment of R/O, formulation, execution, and follow-up in the execution of the plan, evaluation of residual risk and restart of the cycle. Holistic and strategic management gives an integral character to the system, which is not a simple combination or addition of components. CMS QHSE3+ is the harmonious integration of an organization’s processes and projects focused on the achievement of the strategic purposes of the business in the path toward sustainable success. For this purpose, the comprehensive management of R/O is a fundamental tool. The importance of the management of competencies and culture is highlighted to promote and advance the individual and collective appropriation of the values related to the alignment between thought, conscience, and action, i.e., to take care of yourself, take care, and protect the integrity of resources and the health of people and the organization. The development of culture and competencies must translate into the management of energy efficiency, biosafety, and the development of products, businesses, and processes being systematically reflected in the business continuity plans, maps, and R/O management plans of the business lines, corporate projects, and processes of the organization, and therefore, in the axes and strategic and tactical actions of the organization. With the application of the model and its tools, the results described in Section 3.4 were obtained, which confirmed the validity of the approach, its applicability and contribution to any type and size of organization, and the need to face the challenges of the future. A community of consultants, teachers, entrepreneurs, workers, and researchers related to CMS QHSE3+ will continue to develop tools and strategies to particularize the progress already made in a sectorial way and promote the massification and generalized use of best practices for project management, energy efficiency, and comprehensive management for sustainable success. In practice, the application of the model and its effective implementation is limited by the need to particularize and detail the tools for different sectors of the business activity, which constitute possible Energies 2020, 13, 5579 28 of 43 future lines of research. Another limitation is associated with the development of creative, analytical, and abstract thinking, and with the strengthening of the discipline, culture and organization of leaders and process managers, who become key actors in intelligence management and the strategic and operational decision making of businesses. From a technological point of view, there are also limitations generated by the difficulties of compatibility between interfaces of the information systems and process control, and the changes in priorities in the strategic approach to ICT developments. Notwithstanding the above, the figures and results show that in SMEs, this is possible. The facts support and confirm that investment and efforts are recovering significantly, also observing that there may be a behavior curve where the reduction of vulnerability is greater in the first periods. Author Contributions: Conceptualization, P.P.P.-O., J.C.G.-D., A.P.-R., and G.C.-Z.; Methodology, P.P.P.-O., J.C.G.-D., A.P.-R., and G.C.-Z.; Validation, P.P.P.-O. and G.C.-Z.; Formal analysis, A.P.-R. and P.P.P.-O.; Investigation, P.P.P.-O., J.C.G.-D., A.P.-R., and G.C.-Z.; Data curation, A.P.-R. and P.P.P.-O.; Writing—original draft preparation, P.P.P.-O.; writing—review and editing, P.P.P.-O., J.C.G.-D., A.P.-R., and G.C.-Z.; Visualization, A.P.-R. and G.C.-Z.; Supervision, P.P.P.-O., J.C.G.-D. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. Funding: This research received no external funding. Acknowledgments: We express our gratitude for the support from Cajacopi Atlántico, QUARA Technology, ASTEQ Technology, Universidad Simón Bolivar, Universitat Politècnica de València and to all the personnel and companies who offered us their contributions and their valuable points of view. Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest. Abbreviations ANSI American National Standards Institute BASC Business Anti-Smuggling Coalition BMBL Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (USA) CEM Clean Energy Ministerial CMS Comprehensive Management System Component E–14k Environmental Management—ISO 14001 Component E2–50k Energy Efficiency Management—ISO 50001 Component HS–45k Health and Safety Management Component—ISO 45001 Component Q–9k Quality Management Component—ISO 9001 CRM Comprehensive risk management E2 Energy efficiency EMAS Eco-Management and Audit Scheme EnB Energy Baseline EnMS Energy Management System EnPI Energy Performance Indicators GMP–FDA Good Manufacture Practices–Food and Drug Administration HLS High-Level Structure ICT Information and Communication Technologies IDB Inter-American Development Bank ILO International Labor Organization INSST National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (In Spain) IPEEC International Partnership for Energy Efficiency Cooperation ISO International Organization for Standardization ISO DIS ISO Draft International Standard (DIS) ISO FDIS ISO Final draft International Standard (FDIS) ISO TR Technical Report of ISO. IEC International Electrotechnical Commission ISO/TC Technical Standardization Committee ISPS International Ship and Port Facility Security KPI Key Performance Indicators MMAE Monitoring, Measurement, Analysis and Evaluation NBICE Convergence of Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno-Eco technologies OHSAS Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Specification PDCA Cycle Plan—Do—Check—Act, or Plan—Do—Check—Adjust PMBOK Project Management Body of Knowledge PMI Project Management Institute QHSE3+ Quality, Safety and Health in the workplace, Environmental management, Energy Efficiency, and other risk components R/O Risks and opportunities ROBT Risks and Opportunities R/O–Based Thinking rdis International Design Research Network SA/SNZ HB Handbook edited by National Standardization Organizations of Australia and New Zealand. SMEs Small and medium-sized enterprises UNIDO United Nations Industrial Development Organization WBS Work Breakdown Structure WHO World Health Organization Energies 2020, 13, 5579 29 of 43 Appendix A In Figure A1, the characteristics and structure of the family of ISO 31000 standards are presented, which include: The ISO IEC 73 Guide with the vocabulary, supplemented by Section 3 of ISO 31000:2018, which also contains, as the main axis of the family, the principles and guidelines, the frame of reference, and the process for risk management. As complementary standards, reference is made to the ISO TR 31004:2013 Implementation Guide and the ISO 31010:2019 Guide. Figures A2–A5, cut to August 2020, present a logic similar to that indicated here, adding in some cases the standards that are in the process of development, given their relevance in terms of the contribution in best practices for planning and risk management in QHSE3+ components. Figure A5 includes the ISO 50000 Family on E2, and in Appendix F, the illustration of the crisis management approach and strategic business continuity plan for the case of a family compensation fund in the event of the contingency generated by confinement and COVID-19. Figure A6 presents the global approach for governance, biosafety + biosecurity, and the business continuity plan. In Section 2.3 and Figure 4, the concepts, scope, and needs related to the objectives of comprehensive biosafety and biosecurity management are illustrated. In numerals 2.4 and 3.1, it is observed how this management is articulated within the components of CMS QHSE3+, and the typology of related risks. In the description of the comprehensive R/O management model (Section 3.2, an implicit reference is made to the strategic, operational, and human management for biosafety + biosecurity, contingencies, and business continuity plans. Figure A6 illustrates the strategic and operational approach in one of the 6 companies in which the model was validated: The Family Compensation Fund. Figure A7 presents the chronological and historical milestones related to the development of technology, QHSE3+ standards, and musical and artistic expression. Figures A8–A14 included in Appendix A.8, present the details of the classification of the different risk topics, for the layers considered in Section 3.2, starting from Figure 6. Appendix A.1 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 30 of 46 Appendix A.1 Figure A1. Approach and Logical Structure of the ISO 31000 Family of Standards. [14,20,50,51,65,66]. ISO IEC 73: 2009. Risk management. Vocabulary ISO 31000: 2018. Risk Management. Principles and Guidelines ISO TR 31004: 2013. Risk Management. Guidelines for the Implementation of ISO 31000 SECTION 4. Continuous improvement ISO 31010: 2019. Risk Management. Risk Assessment / Assessment Techniques SECTION 4. Core Concepts SECTION 5. SECTION 6. Implementing Risk Assessment SECCIÓN 7. Selecting RISK ASSESSMENT TECHNIQUES THE PRINCIPLES ESTABLISH THAT RISK MANAGEMENT SHOULD 1. Be Integral and Transversal to all the processes of the organization. 2. Be structured and exhaustive, to measure progress continuously. 3. Adapt to the context and be intimately related to the objectives. 4. Inclusive to involve the parties with direct information. 5. Dynamic, to anticipate and respond to changes. 6. Build on the best information available. Respect confidentiality. 7. Consider internal and external human and cultural factors. 8. Promote and direct continuous improvement, based on learning and the knowledge that experience gives. SECTION 6. RISK MANAGEMENT PROCESS - APPLICATION OF THE PRINCIPLES AND PROVISIONS OF THE FRAMEWORK TO: 1. The cycle of activities of: Definition of scope, context and criteria. Risk assessment (identification, analysis and assessment). Risk Treatment. Registration - Report. 2. The transversal activities of Communication - Consultation, Monitoring and Review. Uses of Risk Assessment Techniques RISK APPRECIATION TECHNIQUES SELECTION GUIDE ISO 31010 4.1 Uncertainty 4.2 Risk Objective: To provide guidelines for the selection and application of systematic techniques for risk assessment, considering the specific reference to other international standards, where the concept and application of techniques are described in greater detail. This standard is not intended for purposes of certification, nor for regulatory or contractual uses. The document has been very well accepted and widely used, due to its clarity and didactics in the annexes. 6.1 Plan the Assessment 6.2 Manage information and develop models 6.3 Apply Risk Assesment Techniques 6.4 Review the Analysis 6.5 Apply results to support decisions 6.6 Record and report risk assesment process and outcomes 7.1 General, 7.2 Selecting Techniques, . Annex A: CATEGORIZATION OF TECHNIQUES. PRINCIPAL AXIS OF GUIDELINES ISO 31000:2018 RISK MANAGEMENT HAS THREE KEY COMPONENTS: Framework - Principles - Risk Management Process. IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE TR 31004: 2013 SECTION 3. How to Implement ISO 31000 3.1 General: Presents the general approach of the section and the premises associated with the transversal implementation and maintenance of Risk Management. 3.2 How to Implement: Application of a generic and systematic approach that integrates risk management into the organization's processes, starting from a diagnosis of the needs, and then continuing with its planning, implementation, monitoring and review. 3.3 Integration of ISO 31000 to the Organization's Processes: Analysis of the sequence of stages, from the mandate and commitment; the design of the frame; the implementation of management; to monitoring and review. Objective: Guide organizations in relation to effective risk management through the application of the ISO 31000: 2009 standard, based on: a. The reinforcement and application approach of the concepts on risk management. (Annex A). b. Guidance on the Principles and Frame of Reference for Risk Management. (Annex A). c. Guidelines on Monitoring and Review for Risk Management (Annex D). d. Information on the integration of Risk Management to a Management System Identification of opportunities for improvement in the design of the process and / or the reference framework, based on feedback from monitoring and review, knowledge management, and the dynamics of change in the external and internal context. GUIDE ANNEXES. A. Concepts and Fundamental Principles: Extension of the concepts related to risks vs. objectives, uncertainty, control measures, frame of reference, criteria and managing risks. B. Application of the Principles: Conceptualization and Guidelines associated with the 11 principles proposed in 2009. (Valid for the 8 principles of the current version ISO 31000: 2018, insofar as they maintain the focus, and integrate in a more logical sequence And simple. OBJECTIVE: The ISO 31000: 2018 Standard aims to provide guidelines for managing risk in organizations. The application of these guidelines is adapted to any organization and its context. It can be used in any activity, considering decision-making at all levels. Includes in section 3. Terms and Definitions, with adjustments and simplification of vocabulary. Blocks of terms related to: Risk, Risk Management, Risk Management Process, Communication and Consultation, Context, Risk Assessment, Risk Identification, Risk Analysis, Risk Assessment, Risk Treatment; and Monitoring and measurement. Risk, Risk Management. Risk Management Process VOCABULARY Guide 73: 2009 See also, the Section 3 of ISO 31000: 2018 Communication and Consultation, Interested party, Perception of risk. Establishment of context, External context, Internal context. Objective: To provide definitions of generic terms related to risk management. To stimulate a common and homogeneous understanding and application of activities related to risk management, from a general perspective. The particular aspects of specialized topics are considered, as appropriate, in the initial section of other specific standards: Risk Criteria, Appreciation, Identification, Description, Risk Source, Event, Danger, Risk Owner. Risk analysis, Possibility (likehood), Exposure, Consequence, Probability (probability), Frequency, Vulnerability, Risk matrix, Risk level. Risk assessment, Attitude, Appetite, Tolerance, Risk aversion, Risk aggregation, Risk acceptance. Treatment, Control, Avoidance, Risk Sharing, Risk Financing, Risk Retention, Residual Risk, Resilience. Risk Tracking (Monitoring), Measurement, Risk Report, Risk Register, Risk Profile, Risk Management Audit. 2. Framework 3. Manegement Process THE FRAME OF REFERENCE INCLUDES: THE DIRECTIVE BASE (Policy, Objectives, Leadership and Commitment), and THE PROVISIONS (Accountability, Plans, Methods and Resources), FOR: 1. Promote Comprehensive, transversal and effective Risk Management. 2. Design, Implement and Improve the Management and the Framework, in coherence with the organizational dynamics, its context and its changes. 3. Systematically apply the process and ensure its impact on the Organization. PRINCIPLES FOR RISK MANAGEMENT. FOCUSED ON THE Protection and Integral Generation of Value. Figure A1. Approach and Logical Structure of the ISO 31000 Family of Standards. [14,20,50,51,65,66]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 30 of 43 Appendix A.2 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 30 of 44 Appendix A.2 Figure A2. Approach and Logical Structure of the ISO 9000 Family of Standards [16,25]. STANDARDS GROUP Main Block Complementary Block Observations VOCABULARY OR FRAMEWORK OF REFERENCE ISO 9000: 2015 Quality Management Systems - Fundamentals and Vocabulary Published in September 2015, this standard sets out the principles and vocabulary of the ISO 9000 family of standards, emphasizing risk management and taking up the vocabulary of ISO Guide 73. See also the definitions of ISO Guide 73: on risks, and the International Vocabulary of Metrology VIM. 1. Committee TC 176 was created in 1979 and published the first version of ISO 9000 and ISO 9001 in 1987. 2. Although SC1 is officially in charge of developing ISO 9000, the ISO standards include an official definition section, in which, as the case may be, ISO 9000 definitions are taken, or others are added, as appropriate. required. STANDARDS - REQUIREMENTS ISO 9001: 2015. Quality Management Systems. Requirements FRAMEWORK CERTIFICATION ISO / TS 9002: 2016 Quality Management Systems - Guidelines for the application of ISO 9001: 2015. ISO 9004:2018 Quality management. Quality of an Organization. Guide to achieve sustainable success ISO 10005: 2018 Quality management. Guidelines for Quality Plans. ISO 10006: 2017 Quality management - Guidelines for quality management in projects ISO 10007: 2017 Quality management. Guidelines for Configuration Management. Although these standards do not set out guidelines on Management Systems, they are in the field of Quality Management in three key issues for business: Planning of the quality of processes and products, Management Quality in Projects, and Configuration Management, applicable in the development of products, from their conception to final disposal. (The three standards are developed from SC2. ISO 10001: 2018 Quality management - Customer satisfaction - Guidelines for codes of conduct in organizations ISO / AW1 10009 [Under development] Quality management - Guidance for quality tools and their application ISO 10012: 2003 Measurement management systems - Requirements for measurement processes and measurement equipment c ISO / TR 10013: 2001 Guidelines for Quality Management in the Documentation System. At this time, the revision of this guide on document management is in the process of being revised in the WD Working Draft phase. ISO 10014: 2006 Quality management - Guidelines for obtaining economic and financial benefits. E Quality in the Documentation System. GUIDELINES AND GOOD APPLICATION PRACTICES IN SPECIFIC SECTORS, IN THE PHASE OF PUBLICATION, PREPARATION OR APPROVAL. (Documents by Subcommittee SC3) ISO 10008: 2013 Quality management - Customer satisfaction - Guidelines for electronic commerce transactions between businesses and consumers. ISO 10015: 2019 Quality management - Guidelines for Competency Management and Human Development. ISO DIS 10017 Guide to Statistical Techniques for ISO 9001. I n the ISO DIS phase, cut-off to August 2020. ISO 10018: 2020 Quality management - Guidance for people engagement ISO 10019: 2005 Guidelines for the selection of quality management system consultants and the use of their services. IS O 9 0 0 0 - T C 1 7 6 F A M IL Y O F S T A N D A R D S D o c u m e n ts a lr e a d y p u b li s h e d a s I n te rn a ti o n a l S ta n d a rd s I S O A W C o m m it te e W o rk in g D o c u m e n t. C D D ra ft C o m m it te e . D IS D ra ft I n te rn a ti o n a l S ta n d a rd . F D IS F in a l D ra ft I n te rn a ti o n a l S ta n d a rd It is emphasized that the ISO 9001: 2015 reference, developed since SC2, is focused on organizations that understand quality as a strategic factor for success. The deployment and application of Thought based on Risks and Opportunities (TBRO) stands out as a new requirement, from the process approach, the System approach and the strategic path of the organization. The fact that the Management System is framed in a context where stakeholders play a definitive role in the survival and transcendence of business and entrepreneurial efforts is underlined. GUIDELINES (General Guidelines) ISO / TS 9002: 2016 (TS by Technical Specification), provides guidance on the rationale and purpose of the requirements in ISO 9001: 2015, with examples of the possible steps that an organization can take to meet the requirements. It does not add, subtract, or modify those requirements in any way. It also does not prescribe mandatory approaches to implementation, nor does it provide any preferred method of interpretation. (Developed since SC2) ISO 9004: 2018 raises guidelines to improve the capacity of an organization, in order to seek sustainable success, under the approach of the universal quality principles presented in ISO 9000: 2015. It also contains a self-assessment tool to review to what extent the organization has appropriated these guidelines. It is applicable to any organization, regardless of its size, type and activity. (By SC2) OTHER GENERAL AND SPECIALIZED STANDARDS OF RECENT PUBLICATION OR FOR 2019-2020, SINCE TC 176 R e c e n t D o c u m e n ts o r in p ro c e s s o f G e n e ra ti o n GUIDELINES & GOOD PRACTICES OF GENERAL APPLICATION, IN THE PUBLICATION, PREPARATION OR APPROVAL PHASE (Documents by Subcommittee SC3) ISO 10002: 2018 Quality management - Customer satisfaction - Guidelines for handling complaints in organizations. ISO 10003: 2018 Quality management - Customer satisfaction - Guidelines for the resolution of conflicts external to organizations ISO 10004: 2018 Quality management - Customer satisfaction - Guidelines for monitoring and measuring Figure A2. Approach and Logical Structure of the ISO 9000 Family of Standards [16,25]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 31 of 43 Appendix A.3 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 32 of 46 Appendix A.3 Figure A3. Approach and Logical Structure of the ISO 45000 Family of Standards [26,60,64]. STANDARDS GROUP Main Block Complementary Block Observations VOCABULARY OR FRAME OF REFERENCE Although the TC 283 Committee has not published any specific standard on vocabulary, the terms, definitions and notes in Section 3 of ISO 45001 are mostly taken from the vocabulary of the ISO IEC 73: 2009 Guide, Risk Management Vocabulary, and ISO 9000: 2015 See also the publications of the Library of the International Labor Organization ILO, and the W orld Health Organization WHO, have been developed with ministries and regulatory entities in Spain and Latin American countries. (Guides and Good Practices at www.ilo.org./inform/online). 1. Reference is also made to the ISO 31000 standards on Risk Management, and to the ISO 31010 standard on Risk Assessment Techniques, which contain definitions that are also useful. 2. Legislation on occupational health and safety issued by the ministries and regulatory entities of the different countries also provides developments and definitions adopted from OHSAS documents and from ILO Library on Occupational Safety and Health OSH documents. REQUIREMENTS REQUIREMENTS ISO 45001: 2018 Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems. Requirements with guidelines For your application. CERTIFICATION FRAME OF REFERENCE OHSAS 18002: 2008 Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems - Recommendations for the Implementation of OHSAS 18001: 2007 GUIDELINES & GOOD PRACTICES OF GENERAL APPLICATION, IN THE PUBLICATION, PREPARATION PHASE O APPROVAL ISO / DIS 45003 (Under development) Management of safety and health at work - Health and psychological safety in the workplace - Guidelines. GUIDELINES AND GOOD APPLICATION PRACTICES IN SPECIFIC SECTORS, IN THE PHASE OF PUBLICATION, PREPARATION OR APPROVAL. ISO 12100:2010 Machine safety. General principles of design. Risk assessment and risk reduction. This guide was reviewed and ratified in its entirety in 2015, by Committee TC 199, Machinery Safety. It specifies the principles of risk assessment and risk reduction to help designers achieve this goal. These principles are based on knowledge and experience of the design, use, incidents, accidents and risks associated with machinery. (Replaces ISO 14121: 2007 Safety of machinery. Risk assessment) IEC 61508-5:2010 Parts 1 to5 Functional safety of electrical / electronic / programmable safety-related systems. Prepared from IEC TC 65, this is one of the codes for electrical and electronic safety. IS O 4 5 0 0 0 / T C 2 8 3 F A M IL Y O F S T A N D A R D S D o c u m e n ts a lr e a d y p u b li s h e d a s I n te rn a ti o n a l S ta n d a rd s I S O A W C o m m it te e W o rk in g D o c u m e n t. C D D ra ft C o m m it te e . D IS D ra ft I n te rn a ti o n a l S ta n d a rd . F D IS F in a l D ra ft I n te rn a ti o n a l S ta n d a rd The ISO 45001: 2018 reference, developed from TC 283, aims to contribute to the protection of companies and jobs, based on the definition of the requirements that a Management System must meet in Occupational Health and Safety OHSMS, based on the establishment and deployment of Thought based on Risks and Opportunities (TBRO), which focuses on the risks associated with incidents, accidents and occupational diseases. As the health and safety legislation of each country also becomes a requirement, it is important to bear in mind that the spectrum of requirements is expanded with the different Decrees, Resolutions and Codes that have the character of mandatory compliance. (Construction, Fire Protection Codes, Technical Regulations for Electrical Installations, Disaster Prevention Codes, among others). All this applicable or reference regulation constitutes an extension of the OHSMS requirements. GUIDELINES (General Guidelines) Due to its process approach, structural clarity and simple handling of the subject, this is one of the best guides that have been had in the matter of guidelines to interpret the requirements and implement an OHSMS, in the last twenty years, maintaining the international standard approach. It was developed under the coordination of BSI by the OHSAS project, with the participation of different standardization and certification institutions from Latin America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and entities from France, Spain, Holland, Sweden, Norway and England throughout Europe. (Germany, the United States, Canada, China and Italy were conspicuous by their absence). See also: 1. Annex A of ISO 45001, which presents guidelines and guidance on the interpretation of the requirements. 2. The progress that TC 283 has on the "" Implementation Handbook "" assigned to the W G3 W orking Group. 3. The Medical Standards in Health, specifically associated with the different risk factors considered, which in many cases give the technical guidelines to follow in terms of prevention, measurement and control measures. As of the closing date of this state-of-the-art study, unlike the majority of Committees, TC 283 has not submitted its Business Plan or its strategic approach for public review. There are also no significant advances regarding the ISO 45001 Implementation Manual, as a task assigned to the W G3 working group. OTHER GENERAL AND SPECIALIZED STANDARDS OF RECENT PUBLICATION OR FOR 2019-2020. D o c u m e n ts in p ro c e s s o f G e n e ra ti o n This Guide for Health and Psychological Safety, considers one of the key aspects for OSH Management: Psychosocial Risk in the work place. According to the records of Committee TC 283, it is in the phase of Draft International Standard ISO DIS, within the W orking Group (AW I). Figure A3. Approach and Logical Structure of the ISO 45000 Family of Standards [26,60,64]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 32 of 43 Appendix A.4 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 33 of 46 Appendix A.4 Figure A4. Approach and Logical Structure of the ISO 14000 Family of Standards [27,31]. STANDARDS GROUP M a i Main Block O b s Complementary Block Observations VOCABULARY OR FRAME OF REFERENCE Committee TC 207 published the standard ISO 14050:2009 Environmental Management. Vocabulary. This standard is found Under review, in its Draft phase or Committee Draft (CD). See also the terms and definitions of: 1. Section 3, and Annex A.3 - Clarification of Concepts of ISO 14001: 2015. 2. ISO 9000: 2015 Quality management systems - Fundamentals and vocabulary. 3. The Guide IS0 73: 2009 and ISO 31000: 2018. 4. The International Vocabulary of Metrology VIM. The ISO TC 207 Secretariat has directly the topics assigned to SC6, and with it the Revision of ISO CD 14050, which covers the vocabulary blocks on Management, EMS, Validation , verification and auditing, Product systems, Life Cycle, Labeling and GHG. The secretariat is additionally in charge of the following projects: ISO CD 14053. Material flow cost accounting - Guide for SMEs ISO NP TR 14055-2 Good practices to combat land degradation and desertification ISO AWI 14100 Evaluation of green financial projects IEC DIS 62959 Environmentally Conscious Design (ECD) - Principles, Requirements and Guidance. REQUIREMENTS ISO 1401: 2015. Environmental management systems. Requirements with Guidelines for its application. CERTIFICATION FRAME OF REFERENCE GUIDES AND PROJECTS OF THE SUB-COMMISSION SC1 Environmental management Systems (EMS) GUIDES AND PROJECTS OF THE SUBCOMMISSION SC2 Audit Environmental and Investigations Associated Environmental GUIDES AND PROJECTS OF THE SUB- COMMISSION SC3 Labeling Environmental GUIDES AND PROJECTS OF THE SUB- COMMISSION SC4 Environmental Performance Evaluation GUIDES AND PROJECTS OF THE SUB- COMMISSION SC5 Life Cycle Assessment IS O 1 40 00 F A M IL Y O F S TA N D A R D S - C O M M IT TE E IS O T C 2 07 In te rn at io na l S ta nd ar ds a nd P ro je ct s w ith G en er al R eq ui re m en ts a nd G ui de lin es S ta nd ar ds a nd S pe ci fic A pp lic at io n P ro je ct s A W C om m itt ee W or ki ng D oc um en t. C D D ra ft C om m itt ee . D IS D ra ft In te rn at io na l S ta nd ar d. F D IS F in al D ra ft In te rn at io na l S ta nd ar d The ISO 14001: 2015 standard establishes the requirements that an Environmental Management System must meet, and with them, good practices to improve environmental performance, prevent pollution, and protect the environment. The standard presents in Annex A guidelines and clarifying notes about the interpretation of the requirements, highlighting their purpose and rationale, in terms of good practices associated with each requirement. In some sections, there are examples associated with the scope or types of application of the requirements, specifying aspects related to the overall what associated with meeting the requirement ISO 14004: 2016 GHS - General implementation guidelines ISO 14005: 2019 EMS: Guidelines for a flexible phased implementation approach ISO 14006: 2011 Environmental management systems. Guidelines for the incorporation of eco-design. ISO 14008: 2019 Monetary valuation of environmental impacts and related environmental aspects. ISO CD 14009 SGA. Guidelines for incorporating redesign to improve the circulation of materials (In CD phase). ISO DIS 14002-1 SGA - Guidelines for using ISO 14001 - Part 1: General (In the Draft International Standard phase). ISO DIS 14006 Environmental management systems - Guidelines to incorporate eco-design (In the Draft International Standard phase). ISO DIS 14007 Environmental management - Guidelines for determining environmental costs and benefits (Also in the DIS phase). ISO 14015: 2001 Environmental Management - Environmental Assessment of Sites and Organizations (EASO) ISO DIS 14016 Environmental management - Guidelines for the assurance of environmental reports (Draft International Standard DIS) ISO 14020: 2000 Environmental labels and declarations. General principles. There are also the following projects and standards on labeling: ISO 14021: 2016 Self-declaration Type II; ISO 14024: 2018, Type I Labeling; ISO 14025: 2006 Type III environmental declarations; ISO 14026: 2017 Footprint information; ISO TS 14027: 2017 Product category rules for labeling. OTHER SPECIALIZED STANDARDS FROM SUBCOMMISSIONS SC4 (Performance), SC5 (Life Cycle), and SC7 (GEI) ISO 14031: 2013 Environmental management - Environmental performance evaluation - Guidelines ISO 14033: 2019 Environmental management - Quantitative environmental information - Guidelines and examples ISO 14034: 2016: Environmental management - Environmental technology verification (ETV). Additionally, the following are ongoing: ISO DIS 14030 Environmental performance assessment - Green debt instruments: Part 1: Process for green bonds, Part 2: Green Loan Process, Part 3: Taxonomy, Part 4: Verification ISO CDTR 14035 Environmental Technology Verification - ETV - Guidance for implementing ISO 14034 ISO 14040: 2006 Life Cycle Assessment - Principles and framework. Two addenda: The 1st in 2017, and the 2nd in CD phase. ISO 14044: 2006 Life cycle assessment - Requirements. Two addenda: The 1st in 2017, and the 2nd in CD phase. ISO 14045: 2012 Evaluation of the ecological efficiency of product systems: Principles, requirements and guidelines. ISO 14046: 2014 Water footprint: principles, requirements and guidelines. ISO TR 14073: 2017 Water footprint - Illustrative examples on how to apply ISO 14046. ISO TR 14047: 2012 Life cycle assessment - Illustrative examples on how to apply ISO 14044. ISO TS 14048: 2002 Life cycle assessment - Data documentation format. ISO TR 14049: 2012 Life cycle assessment - Application examples of ISO 14044 (Objectives and scope). ISO TS 14071: 2014 Life Cycle Assessment - Critical Review Processes and Reviewer Competencies. ISO TS 14072: 2014 Life cycle assessment - Requirements and guidelines for the organization cycle. GUIDES AND PROJECTS OF THE SUB- COMMISSION SC7 Greenhouse Gases ISO 14064-1: 2018 Quantification and reporting of GHG emissions and removals. Part 1. Parts 2 and 3 were published in 2019. ISO 14065: 2013 GHG. Requirements for validation and verification bodies. There is a revision in phase CD ISO 14066: 2011 GHG. Competence requirements for GHG validation and verification teams. ISO 14067: 2018 GHG. Carbon footprint of products. Requirements and guidelines for quantification. ISO TR 14069: 2013 GHG. Quantification and notification of emissions for organizations. Guidance for the application of ISO 14064-1. ISO 14080: 2018 GHG Management and related activities. Principles for methodologies on climate actions. ISO AWI 14082 Management of radioactive forcing - Guidance for quantification and reporting of climate footprints based on radioactive forcing and mitigation efforts ISO 14090: 2019 Adaptation to climate change - Principles, requirements and guidelines ISO DIS 14091 Adaptation to climate change. Vulnerability, impacts and risk assessment ISO TS 14092: 2020 Management of Greenhouse Gases GHG and related activities: Requirements and guidance of adaptation planning for organizations, including local governments and communities ISO DIS 14097 Framework and principles for evaluating and reporting investments and financing activities related to climate change ISO DIS 19694-1 Emissions from stationary sources. Determination of GHG emissions in energy-intensive industries. Part 1: General aspects. Figure A4. Approach and Logical Structure of the ISO 14000 Family of Standards [27,31]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 33 of 43 Appendix A.5 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 34 of 46 Appendix A.5 Figure A5. Approach and Logical Structure of the ISO 50000 Family of Standards [28,52–55,99]. Figure A5. Approach and Logical Structure of the ISO 50000 Family of Standards [28,52–55,99]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 34 of 43 Appendix A.6 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 35 of 46 Appendix A.6 Figure A6. Strategic and Operational Approach to Biosafety and Biosecurity Continuity Plan. [50,51,65,66]. Image Incidents and Others (+) Business and Product Incidents Health Incidents - SST Environ- mental Incidents Disruption Incidents E2 Incidents Incidents TI - SI J. Update and Improve. Lessons Learned. BUSINESS AND QUALITY (Q) HEALTH (HS) ENVIRON- MENT (E) COMPONENTS vs INCIDENTS and CONTINUITY ENERGY EFFICIENCY (E2) ICT (+) REPUTATION AND OTHERS (+) C ri s is M a n a g e m e n t C y c le A. Institutionalize the Command Bridge for the Governance of the Crisis B. Institutionalize the Matrix - Dashboard Situational Information C. Carry out a Census and Matrix of Status of each Person D. Identify and Analyze Risk and Impact of Crisis Scenarios E. Define Strategies and Actions vs. Risks F. Plan Contingency Plans, by priority scenario G. Implement the Contingency Plan H. Follow up on the Management and Results I. Verify compliance. 10. Respond to Changes in Context INPUTS OUTPUTS T A C T IC A L M A N A G E M E N T A N D O P E R A T IO N A L 1. Outputs from Strategic Addressing 2. Regulation by Service Line 3. New Legislation and Regulations vs. COVID 19. 4. Other experiences in management approach, in related entities. 5. Statistics, Internal Census vs COVID, 6. Good Practices and Guidelines ISO 22313 ANDI, WHO, ILO, and others. Health of the Organization and the people, Continuity in the Operation of the Lines of service. Excellence in Projects, Processes, Products and Services 1. Value Promise for Service Lines 2. Portfolio - Service Tree: (Paused, active and new) 3. Updating of Risk Maps and Measures of Control. 4. Review of product specifications, insu- mos, inbound services, packaging, packing and operation of each line vs COVID 19. 5. Protocols according to prevention and control measures 6. Governance and Continuity Plan S tr a te g ic L in e s o f A c ti o n 1. Governance of the Crisis and the Context 2. Comply with the Legal Requirements of Biosafety and Biosecurity (+) 3. Communicate Risk and its Impact 4. Preventing the Risk of Contagion 5. Manage Remote Work 6. Prevent Non-Conformities 7. Protect Information 8. Prevent Risk ofSupply and Inputs 9. Prevent Operational Risk INPUTS OUTPUTS OBJECTIVE C O R P O R A T IV E S T R A T E G Y 1. Study of Context and Actors 2. Previous Strategic Exercise - KPI 3. Scenario Analysis and Intelligence 4. Other corporate experiences 5. Study of the Regulations. 6. Analysis of Changes 7. Study of interruption incidents 8. Prioritization of incidents vs continuity 9. Good Practices: ISO 22300 Family Guidelines WHO, ILO, ANDI, INSST. 1. Reformulation of the R/OBT Prevention Value 2. Reformulation of the Comprehensive Policy (+ Bio) 3. Reformulation of the Strategic Map: Solidarity Presence, Caring and Protecting, ICT Competences and Culture for Contingency Reformulation of Product Lines 4. New PROMISES OF VALUE by Line 5. Projects, Developments and Deployment of Plans and Corporate Protocols 6. Governance and Continuity Plan 7. Results: Reduction of Vulnerability Health, Continuity and Excellence Command Bridge for Crisis Gobernanza Figure A6. Strategic and Operational Approach to Biosafety and Biosecurity Continuity Plan. [50,51,65,66]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 35 of 43 Appendix A.7 Timeline in Technology Development, QHSE3+ Standards and expression By observing the chronological development of different techniques of know-how and their deployment in daily life and work, construction, or manufacturing, or by analyzing the development of schools of control, quality assurance, and total quality, among others, the emergence of a large number of standards on management systems can be observed. In all cases, what has been standardized or established as the best solution at scale and concerted is fundamentally a set of requirements, which are named as best practices, the key tricks to develop activities with a lower possibility of failure. At the beginning, these good practices are the best-kept secrets of families and transmitted from parents to children by oral tradition. Later, they become the teachings of artisans in the family or the teacher to the apprentice and finally become the knowledge and know-how or the heritage of a conglomerate, an ethnic group, or a particular group. The reality is that, in one way or another, this knowledge has always been consolidated as a set of best practices that focus on reducing the different types of risks linked to failures, noncompliance’s, malfunctions, or ineffective performance, or conditions of vulnerability. Figure A7 summarizes the chronological milestones in the development of energy, knowledge, techniques, and concepts of quality (Q-ISO 9001, Family 9k), occupational health and safety (HS-ISO 45001, Family 45k), environmental management (E- ISO 14001, Family 14k), energy efficiency (E2-ISO 50001, Family 50k), risk management (ISO 31000 Family 31k), and standards on business continuity plans. This illustration comprehensively takes into account relevant actors, milestones, and parallel axes of significant events in the history of humanity, and with it, the history of art, music, technology, and mega-projects. The development of best practices is also associated with risk management in the history of mankind, the development and expansion of the frontier of knowledge, expression, significance, and the development of administrative thinking. In Figure A7, this approach is illustrated in detail, considering the chronology of the development of management systems in correlation with key milestones in the history of energy, humanity, and artistic expression, and combined with the projections, the convergent developments in NBICE technology [13,100] and its implications for businesses are on the horizon. Most of the approaches formulated in each of the requirements and best practices standards had a foundation generated well before the publication of the reference models in question, and this was taken into account directly and indirectly when formulating the concepts, definitions, blocks of terms and requirements, and guidelines for application and specific topics that lead the topics within the TC ISO Technical Commissions. This is illustrated in the lower right area referring to each TC of the families of standards (See Figures A1–A5), which develop each component of the QHSE3+ model and indicate the years in which the successive reviews were carried out. The ISO 22313: 2020 Standard have been added (guide for the application of ISO 22301: 2018 on business continuity management) as well as ISO 22320: 2018 on incident management, developed from TC 292, Security and Resilience, given its importance to support management systems and respond to crises and contingencies associated with COVID-19 or other types of emergencies. Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 37 of 46 Figure A7. Timeline in the development of QHSE3+ standards in correlation with the milestones of humanity [13,100]. -10000 0 1400 1776 1800 1900 1950 1975 2000 2010 . 2020 9k: TC 176 45k: TC 283 14k: TC 207 50k: TC 301 31k: TC 262 BCM 22,3k: TC292 CHOPIN 1810 TCHAIKOVSKY 1840 - 1893 LUIS A CALVO 1882-1945 ENIO MORRICONE 1928-2020 PIERRE BOULEZ 1925-2016 MARIO RIVEROS 1961- DUKE ELLINGTON 1899-1974 JA P A N 1 st E co n o m ic P o w er A n ci en t E g yp t 26 00 H am m u ra b i C o d e 17 28 Th e In du st ri al R ev ol ut io n. M A S S IV E P R O D U C TI O N . S Q C in In du st ry 19 47 : C re at io n of IS O 19 52 : D E M IN G IS H IK A W A J U R A N FE IG E N B A U M A w ar ds N A S A A M E F , 1 96 9 C O D E X B P M S H IN G O P o ka Y o ke A K A O - Q F D 19 88 : E F Q M m o d el P la tó n π οι ότ ης p o io te s, q u al it as G re ek s C la ss ic al A rt O th er C u lt u re s C ra d le o f C iv ili za ti o n Impressionism, Fauvism Manet, Monet, Sorolla, Vincent, Renoir, Gaugin, Matisse Renaissance Art Sistine Chapel Miguel Ángel Rafael - Sandro. 1500 Romanticism Delacroix Chopin 1770 - 1870 DEBUSSY 1860 W at er a n d E n er g y C ri si s. O il cr is is G R E A T W O R L D E C O N O M IC C R IS IS BACH 1685 MOZART 1756 BEETHOVEN 1772 BRAHMS 1833 GERSHWIN 1937 LOUIS AMSTRONG 1901-1971 From the manual and artisanal ... To the mechanized Approach focused on the detection and separation of nonconformity STATISTICAL CONTROL AND SAMPLING PLANS Consolidation from the War Industry NANO-BIO.ECO-INFO-COGNO-TECHNOLOGY: NBICE USA USSR Space Race ... Commerce - Tourism DIGITAL ERA- ICT-INTERNET-CELL PHONE 2 ISO 9001 1987, 1994, 2000, 2008 - 2015 ISO 14001 1996, 2004- 2015 IEC 1906 AFNOR 1926 IRANOR 1945 1 First and Second World Wars OHSAS ISO 45001 1999, 2007- 2018 ISO 50001 2011, 2018 ISO 31000: 2009 y 2018 ISO 22313: 2012 y 2020 COVID 19 "P ro m et h eu s" - F ir e (- 79 0. 00 0) P lo w (- 12 .0 00 ) عي را ش ب رك م (- 3. 00 0) O ld S ai lb oa t H id ra ul ic M ill R o m e (2 00 ) P hy si ca l M ea ni ng o f E ne rg y S te am M ac h in e A lt er n at o r. E le ct ri c P o w er 1979 Figure A7. Timeline in the development of QHSE3+ standards in correlation with the milestones of humanity [13,100]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 36 of 43 Appendix A.8 Classification matrix of topics related to external and internal R/O Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 38 of 46 Appendix A.8 Classification matrix of topics related to external and internal R/O Figure A8. Classification matrix of topics related to external R/O. [14,51,65,101]. Figure A9. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer I: I1 to I.4. [14,51,65,101]. E.1. Market and Competition Fluctuations and variations in the market associated with supply, demand, competitors, participation and portfolio acceptance. E.2. Geopolitical Implications linked to conflicts, new trends, political, economic and military relations between countries, groups or regions. E.3. Legal Variations in the legal and regulatory provisions related to the operation and the portfolio of the organization. E.4. Macroeconomic Fluctuations in inflation, exchange rates, monetary policies and interest rates at the local, regional and global levels. E.5. Technology Safe emergence of new tools, applications, platforms and technological developments for services and operations. E.6. Natural phenomena Possible occurrence of natural phenomena and non-anthropic disasters with an impact on the operation and on the supply/demand. E.8. Contingencies. Epidemics Implications in the behavior of the context, due to the irruption of contingencies, plagues or epidemics. E.9. Other External Topics Other types of external R / O with relevant impact on the organization and its sustainability. Topics related to External R/O External General Block. E.7. Security and Public Order. Relationship with stakeholders Public order and relationship with external interest groups that have impact on the operation, image and results of the organization. I.1. a. Intelligence for strategy formulation. b. PDCA for the NBD and the deployment of corporate strategy. I.2. a. Study of the Problem and Formulation of the scope, b. Planning and Allocation of Resources, c. Procurement and Management with contractors, d. Control of the project and its parameters of time, scope, costs and quality. e. Generation and delivery of the products object of the project. f. Project closure. g. Effective performance. I.3. a. Organizational behavior in office and its processes, and with the stakeholders. b. Appropriation of institutional values. c. Adherence to the principles and provisions. Degree of compliance with the requirements. I.4. a. Competences and Information Intelligence for decisions. b. Opportunity and ability to succeed in decision making. c. Ability to identify and respond appropriately in moments of truth. Topics related to Internal R/O Layer I: I.1 to I.4. Strategy, New Business Development (NBD), Projects and Human Management BUSINESS CONTINUITY: ISO 22301:2019; ISO 22313:2020; ISO 22317:2015. PROJECTS MANAGEMENT: ISO 21500:2012; ANSI/PMI PMBOK 99-001-2017) INNOVATION MANAGEMENT: ISO 56002:2019; IRAM 50501. SURVEILLANCE AND STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM: IRAM 50520: 2017, UNE 166006:2018 Strategic Management, Business Continuity and New Business Development (NBD) Corporate Projects Management Behavior. Culture and Discipline Decisions. Mistakes and Moments of Truth (General) Figure A8. Classification matrix of topics related to external R/O. [14,51,65,101]. Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 38 of 46 Appendix A.8 Classification matrix of topics related to external and internal R/O Figure A8. Classification matrix of topics related to external R/O. [14,51,65,101]. Figure A9. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer I: I1 to I.4. [14,51,65,101]. E.1. Market and Competition Fluctuations and variations in the market associated with supply, demand, competitors, participation and portfolio acceptance. E.2. Geopolitical Implications linked to conflicts, new trends, political, economic and military relations between countries, groups or regions. E.3. Legal Variations in the legal and regulatory provisions related to the operation and the portfolio of the organization. E.4. Macroeconomic Fluctuations in inflation, exchange rates, monetary policies and interest rates at the local, regional and global levels. E.5. Technology Safe emergence of new tools, applications, platforms and technological developments for services and operations. E.6. Natural phenomena Possible occurrence of natural phenomena and non-anthropic disasters with an impact on the operation and on the supply/demand. E.8. Contingencies. Epidemics Implications in the behavior of the context, due to the irruption of contingencies, plagues or epidemics. E.9. Other External Topics Other types of external R / O with relevant impact on the organization and its sustainability. Topics related to External R/O External General Block. E.7. Security and Public Order. Relationship with stakeholders Public order and relationship with external interest groups that have impact on the operation, image and results of the organization. I.1. a. Intelligence for strategy formulation. b. PDCA for the NBD and the deployment of corporate strategy. I.2. a. Study of the Problem and Formulation of the scope, b. Planning and Allocation of Resources, c. Procurement and Management with contractors, d. Control of the project and its parameters of time, scope, costs and quality. e. Generation and delivery of the products object of the project. f. Project closure. g. Effective performance. I.3. a. Organizational behavior in office and its processes, and with the stakeholders. b. Appropriation of institutional values. c. Adherence to the principles and provisions. Degree of compliance with the requirements. I.4. a. Competences and Information Intelligence for decisions. b. Opportunity and ability to succeed in decision making. c. Ability to identify and respond appropriately in moments of truth. Topics related to Internal R/O Layer I: I.1 to I.4. Strategy, New Business Development (NBD), Projects and Human Management BUSINESS CONTINUITY: ISO 22301:2019; ISO 22313:2020; ISO 22317:2015. PROJECTS MANAGEMENT: ISO 21500:2012; ANSI/PMI PMBOK 99-001-2017) INNOVATION MANAGEMENT: ISO 56002:2019; IRAM 50501. SURVEILLANCE AND STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM: IRAM 50520: 2017, UNE 166006:2018 Strategic Management, Business Continuity and New Business Development (NBD) Corporate Projects Management Behavior. Culture and Discipline Decisions. Mistakes and Moments of Truth (General) Figure A9. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer I: I1 to I.4. [14,51,65,101]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 37 of 43 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 39 of 46 Figure A10. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer II: I.5. [25,48,50,65]. Figure A11. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer III: I.6. [25,48,50,65]. I.5.1 a. Functional and performance specifications, b. Technical specifications for product / service and materials / tickets design, c . Specifications and contractual terms of packaging, packaging, and logistics, d . Specifications of planning conditions and process control. e. Training requirements, competencies and personnel assignment, f. Contractual conditions for reverse logistics. Fines and guarantees by NC. I.5.2 a . Planning of the design and development and Management of the Input Data. b . Review, Verification and Validation of Design and Development c . D&D Exit Data Management and Change Control. (Includes Biosecurity) d. Administration and management of Idea Banks, Concepts, Projects and Developments I.5.3 a . Standardization and Tuning of Processes. b . Metrological Management and Instrumentation c . Enlistment of inputs, supplies, organization and programming. I.5.4 COMPETENCES AND TRAINING, TO HANDLE CRITERIA AND SUCCESSFUL DECISIONS, in moments of truth during "hot" operations: Experience and criteria to act in case of contingencies in an immediate and adequate way. Example of response to unforeseen conditions by drivers on the highway. I.5.5 I.5.5.1 R/O Physical Safety By facilities, equipment, personnel, utensils, packaging, process or supply chain, in interaction with or from the organization's processes. I.5.5.2 R/O Chemical Safety Naturally generated by the conditions of the materials or incorporated from or to the processes of the organization I.5.5.3 R/O Biological Safety Generated by Bacteria, Fungi, Arachnids, Insects, Superior Animals and Protozoa, to or from the processes of the organization. Layer II. I.5 Conditions for the conformity and integrity of products, services and processes QUALITY: ISO 9001:2015; ISO 9000:2015; ISO 9004:2018 PRIMARY PACKAGING: ISO 15378:2017, RISK (MANAGEMENT AND ASSESSMENT) ISO 31000:2018, ISO 31010: 2019, SAFETY - FOOD CHAIN ISO 22000:2018; PHARMACEUTICAL, CLINICAL AND Y LABORATORIES+B33 FDA / GMP, GLP, GCP, ICH - GCP, MEDICAL DEVICES: ISO 13485:2016 Compliance with contractual conditions and terms agreed with the parties. (Include Biosecurity Requirements) Compliance with requirements in the design and development (D&D) of products, services, processes and projects. Setup and tuning of the operating conditions of lines and processes Successful automatic response associated with the management of moments of truth and decisions in operations. ("Dynamic" Risks and Opportunities) R/O associated with the integrity and safety of products / services (Includes the Biosafety Component) I.6.1 I.6.1.1 Noise and lighting. a. Vibrations that can generate discomfort, pain or involvement of the spine.b. Exposure to contrasts or high or low lighting peaks I.6.1.2 Temperature and Humidity a. Variations or peaks in temperature and humidity that are (20-22) ºC, can generate heat, cold or thermal stress. b. Variations or spikes in humidity or dryness outside (35-45)%. I.6.1.3 Ionizing Radiations. Electromagnetic waves by artificial sources such as X-rays, diagnostic or treatment techniques, and radioactive sources. I.6.2 a. Interaction with chemicals in the operation.. b. Exposure by inhalation, absorption or ingestion. I.6.3 Contact with pathogens carrying viruses, bacteria, fungi or parasites, from or to the organization's processes in the interaction with stakeholders and the context. I.6.4 Prolonged positions, inadequate postures, weight lifting, or repetitive movement. I.6.5 Work conditions related to: harassment, stress, fatigue, instability, monotony, job fatigue. I.6.6 a. Work at height, unsafe surfaces and confined spaces.b. Misuse of defective tools or equipment. I.6.7 For natural or anthropogenic causes, such as rains, floods or other types of disasters. Layer III. I.6 Operational and environmental conditions for the safety and protection of people SAFETY AND HEALTH AT WORK:: ISO45001:2018: BS45002:2018) BUSINESS CONTINUITY: ISO 22301:2019; ISO 22313:2020; ISO 22317:2015 R/O Physical HS (Noise, Illumination Temperature, Humidity, Ionizing Radiations) R/O Chemical HS R/O Biological HS R/O Ergonomic HS R/O Psychosocial HS R/O Mechanical HS R/O Environmental HS Figure A10. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer II: I.5. [25,48,50,65]. Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 39 of 46 Figure A10. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer II: I.5. [25,48,50,65]. Figure A11. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer III: I.6. [25,48,50,65]. I.5.1 a. Functional and performance specifications, b. Technical specifications for product / service and materials / tickets design, c . Specifications and contractual terms of packaging, packaging, and logistics, d . Specifications of planning conditions and process control. e. Training requirements, competencies and personnel assignment, f. Contractual conditions for reverse logistics. Fines and guarantees by NC. I.5.2 a . Planning of the design and development and Management of the Input Data. b . Review, Verification and Validation of Design and Development c . D&D Exit Data Management and Change Control. (Includes Biosecurity) d. Administration and management of Idea Banks, Concepts, Projects and Developments I.5.3 a . Standardization and Tuning of Processes. b . Metrological Management and Instrumentation c . Enlistment of inputs, supplies, organization and programming. I.5.4 COMPETENCES AND TRAINING, TO HANDLE CRITERIA AND SUCCESSFUL DECISIONS, in moments of truth during "hot" operations: Experience and criteria to act in case of contingencies in an immediate and adequate way. Example of response to unforeseen conditions by drivers on the highway. I.5.5 I.5.5.1 R/O Physical Safety By facilities, equipment, personnel, utensils, packaging, process or supply chain, in interaction with or from the organization's processes. I.5.5.2 R/O Chemical Safety Naturally generated by the conditions of the materials or incorporated from or to the processes of the organization I.5.5.3 R/O Biological Safety Generated by Bacteria, Fungi, Arachnids, Insects, Superior Animals and Protozoa, to or from the processes of the organization. Layer II. I.5 Conditions for the conformity and integrity of products, services and processes QUALITY: ISO 9001:2015; ISO 9000:2015; ISO 9004:2018 PRIMARY PACKAGING: ISO 15378:2017, RISK (MANAGEMENT AND ASSESSMENT) ISO 31000:2018, ISO 31010: 2019, SAFETY - FOOD CHAIN ISO 22000:2018; PHARMACEUTICAL, CLINICAL AND Y LABORATORIES+B33 FDA / GMP, GLP, GCP, ICH - GCP, MEDICAL DEVICES: ISO 13485:2016 Compliance with contractual conditions and terms agreed with the parties. (Include Biosecurity Requirements) Compliance with requirements in the design and development (D&D) of products, services, processes and projects. Setup and tuning of the operating conditions of lines and processes Successful automatic response associated with the management of moments of truth and decisions in operations. ("Dynamic" Risks and Opportunities) R/O associated with the integrity and safety of products / services (Includes the Biosafety Component) I.6.1 I.6.1.1 Noise and lighting. a. Vibrations that can generate discomfort, pain or involvement of the spine.b. Exposure to contrasts or high or low lighting peaks I.6.1.2 Temperature and Humidity a. Variations or peaks in temperature and humidity that are (20-22) ºC, can generate heat, cold or thermal stress. b. Variations or spikes in humidity or dryness outside (35-45)%. I.6.1.3 Ionizing Radiations. Electromagnetic waves by artificial sources such as X-rays, diagnostic or treatment techniques, and radioactive sources. I.6.2 a. Interaction with chemicals in the operation.. b. Exposure by inhalation, absorption or ingestion. I.6.3 Contact with pathogens carrying viruses, bacteria, fungi or parasites, from or to the organization's processes in the interaction with stakeholders and the context. I.6.4 Prolonged positions, inadequate postures, weight lifting, or repetitive movement. I.6.5 Work conditions related to: harassment, stress, fatigue, instability, monotony, job fatigue. I.6.6 a. Work at height, unsafe surfaces and confined spaces.b. Misuse of defective tools or equipment. I.6.7 For natural or anthropogenic causes, such as rains, floods or other types of disasters. Layer III. I.6 Operational and environmental conditions for the safety and protection of people SAFETY AND HEALTH AT WORK:: ISO45001:2018: BS45002:2018) BUSINESS CONTINUITY: ISO 22301:2019; ISO 22313:2020; ISO 22317:2015 R/O Physical HS (Noise, Illumination Temperature, Humidity, Ionizing Radiations) R/O Chemical HS R/O Biological HS R/O Ergonomic HS R/O Psychosocial HS R/O Mechanical HS R/O Environmental HS Figure A11. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer III: I.6. [25,48,50,65]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 38 of 43 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 40 of 46 Figure A12. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer IV: I.7. [27,40,47,56]. Figure A13. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer V: I.8, and Layer VI: I.9 [11,28,52–55,99]. I.7.1 I.7.1.1 Energy consumption a. Hydraulic, Electric, Nuclear, Natural Gas and Fuelsb. Renewable energy I.7.1.2 Water consumption. a. Pressure on the resource. Industrial Consumption for Business Processes.b. Domestic consumption for cleaning, toilets, washing, cooking and irrigation, am.ong others. I.7.1.3 Consumption of Fuels and Lubricants a. Consumption of solid, liquid and gaseous fuels, such as: Coal, Kerosene, Oil, Diesel; Gasoline and Natural Gas, among others. b. Liquid, gaseous, solid and semi-solid lubricants or additives; mineral, synthetic, vegetable or animal in nature. I.7.1.4 Consumption of inputs linked to natural resources a. Packaging material (Cardboard, strech, plastic, strap, wood ...), Stationery, or others. b. Inputs from natural resources of mineral origin (metals, stone or sand), vegetable (woods, fibers, cotton, linen, cork and paper), or animal, such as leather. I.7.2 I.7.2.1 Transformations of soil and the vegetal layer. By works and Interaction of the processes with the soil or the vegetal layer. I.7.2.2 Landscape transformations. a. For Constructions and Works.b. For advertising, fences or similar elements. I.7.2.3 Transformation of socioeconomic conditions. a. For indirect jobs, generation of direct jobs or generation of skills. b. By generating changes in behaviors, habits and types of interaction. I.7.3 I.7.3.1 Emissions. a. Gases and particulate,, b. Vibrations and noise, c. Thermal radiation,d. Ionizing radiation, and e. Non-ionizing radiation.. I.7.3.2 Vertimientos. a. Industrial wastewater, b. Domestic wastewater, c. Direct pouring. I.7.3.3 Solid Waste a. Usable Waste, b, Non-usable waste, c. Dangerous residues,d. Conventional Waste, and e. Special Waste. Layer IV. I.7 Conditions for the prevention of pollution and the protection of the environment ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: ISO 14001: 2015; ISO 14004: 2016. ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE EVALUATION: ISO DIS 14030:2020; ISO 14031:2013 Conditions related to WHAT IS USED: Conditions related to WHAT IS TRANSFORMED: Conditions related to WHAT IS GENERATED: I.8.1 a. Terms and context related to the organization's energy supply,b. Rationing associated with the supply of Energy, c. Volatility of prices and rates. I.8.2 a. Related to competencies,b. Related to adherence to the principles and culture for energy efficiency. I.8.3 a. R/O in the planning and development of projects for generation and cogeneration.b. R/O in the operation of the infrastructure associated with generation and cogeneration. I.8.4 a. R/O related to the management and uses of energy for the management of heat and cold. b. R/O in energy consumption, c. R/O related to the designs, creation and management of networks and systems for managing heat and cold. d. Good practices for the management of heat and cold. I.8.5 R/O related to the funding and financing capacity of investments and technological conversion projects for energy efficiency. I.8.6 R/O related to obsolescence, and damage, contingencies and contingencies of equipment for operation and key projects for energy efficiency. I.8.7 R/O related to the Planning and Development of actions, Good Practices and Controls for the Improvement in the uses, consumptions and energy performance. I.9.1 a. R/O in the Planning and Allocation of Resources for the Equipment and Infrastructure.b. R/O in the Maintenance Management of Equipment and Infrastructure. Layer V. I.8 Conditions for the rational use of energy and for Energy Efficiency ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: ISO 50001: 2018; ISO 50004: 2014. MEASUREMENT OF PERFORMANCE AND ENERGY SAVING: ISO 50006:2014; ISO 50047:2016 Conditions of Energy Supply. Conditions related to Talent and Behavior for Energy Efficiency. Conditions related to Generation and Cogeneration. Technical management for heat and cold management. Conditions related to Financial Leverage Resources. Obsolescence, Contingencies and Contingencies of the Infrastructure for Energy Efficiency. Internal management for Energy Efficiency. Layer VI. I.9 Conditions linked to infrastructure resources and equipment and facilities maintenance ASSET MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: ISO 55001: 2014; ISO 55002: 2014. Infrastructure Planning, Assignment and Maintenance Conditions. (Under Biosecurity requirements) Figure A12. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer IV: I.7. [27,40,47,56]. Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 40 of 46 Figure A12. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer IV: I.7. [27,40,47,56]. Figure A13. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer V: I.8, and Layer VI: I.9 [11,28,52–55,99]. I.7.1 I.7.1.1 Energy consumption a. Hydraulic, Electric, Nuclear, Natural Gas and Fuelsb. Renewable energy I.7.1.2 Water consumption. a. Pressure on the resource. Industrial Consumption for Business Processes.b. Domestic consumption for cleaning, toilets, washing, cooking and irrigation, am.ong others. I.7.1.3 Consumption of Fuels and Lubricants a. Consumption of solid, liquid and gaseous fuels, such as: Coal, Kerosene, Oil, Diesel; Gasoline and Natural Gas, among others. b. Liquid, gaseous, solid and semi-solid lubricants or additives; mineral, synthetic, vegetable or animal in nature. I.7.1.4 Consumption of inputs linked to natural resources a. Packaging material (Cardboard, strech, plastic, strap, wood ...), Stationery, or others. b. Inputs from natural resources of mineral origin (metals, stone or sand), vegetable (woods, fibers, cotton, linen, cork and paper), or animal, such as leather. I.7.2 I.7.2.1 Transformations of soil and the vegetal layer. By works and Interaction of the processes with the soil or the vegetal layer. I.7.2.2 Landscape transformations. a. For Constructions and Works.b. For advertising, fences or similar elements. I.7.2.3 Transformation of socioeconomic conditions. a. For indirect jobs, generation of direct jobs or generation of skills. b. By generating changes in behaviors, habits and types of interaction. I.7.3 I.7.3.1 Emissions. a. Gases and particulate,, b. Vibrations and noise, c. Thermal radiation,d. Ionizing radiation, and e. Non-ionizing radiation.. I.7.3.2 Vertimientos. a. Industrial wastewater, b. Domestic wastewater, c. Direct pouring. I.7.3.3 Solid Waste a. Usable Waste, b, Non-usable waste, c. Dangerous residues,d. Conventional Waste, and e. Special Waste. Layer IV. I.7 Conditions for the prevention of pollution and the protection of the environment ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: ISO 14001: 2015; ISO 14004: 2016. ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE EVALUATION: ISO DIS 14030:2020; ISO 14031:2013 Conditions related to WHAT IS USED: Conditions related to WHAT IS TRANSFORMED: Conditions related to WHAT IS GENERATED: I.8.1 a. Terms and context related to the organization's energy supply,b. Rationing associated with the supply of Energy, c. Volatility of prices and rates. I.8.2 a. Related to competencies,b. Related to adherence to the principles and culture for energy efficiency. I.8.3 a. R/O in the planning and development of projects for generation and cogeneration.b. R/O in the operation of the infrastructure associated with generation and cogeneration. I.8.4 a. R/O related to the management and uses of energy for the management of heat and cold. b. R/O in energy consumption, c. R/O related to the designs, creation and management of networks and systems for managing heat and cold. d. Good practices for the management of heat and cold. I.8.5 R/O related to the funding and financing capacity of investments and technological conversion projects for energy efficiency. I.8.6 R/O related to obsolescence, and damage, contingencies and contingencies of equipment for operation and key projects for energy efficiency. I.8.7 R/O related to the Planning and Development of actions, Good Practices and Controls for the Improvement in the uses, consumptions and energy performance. I.9.1 a. R/O in the Planning and Allocation of Resources for the Equipment and Infrastructure.b. R/O in the Maintenance Management of Equipment and Infrastructure. Layer V. I.8 Conditions for the rational use of energy and for Energy Efficiency ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: ISO 50001: 2018; ISO 50004: 2014. MEASUREMENT OF PERFORMANCE AND ENERGY SAVING: ISO 50006:2014; ISO 50047:2016 Conditions of Energy Supply. Conditions related to Talent and Behavior for Energy Efficiency. Conditions related to Generation and Cogeneration. Technical management for heat and cold management. Conditions related to Financial Leverage Resources. Obsolescence, Contingencies and Contingencies of the Infrastructure for Energy Efficiency. Internal management for Energy Efficiency. Layer VI. I.9 Conditions linked to infrastructure resources and equipment and facilities maintenance ASSET MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: ISO 55001: 2014; ISO 55002: 2014. Infrastructure Planning, Assignment and Maintenance Conditions. (Under Biosecurity requirements) Figure A13. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layer V: I.8, and Layer VI: I.9 [11,28,52–55,99]. Energies 2020, 13, 5579 39 of 43 Energies 2020, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 41 of 46 Figure A14. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layers VII: I.10, VIII: I.11 and IX: I.12 [17,29,30]. References 1. Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development OECD. SDBS Business Demography Indicators. 6 September 2018. Available online from OECD. Available online: https://stats.oecd.org /index.aspx?queryid=70734 (accessed on 30 June 2020). 2. Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development OECD. 24 June 2020. The World Economy on a Tightrope. OECD Economic Outlook, June 2020. Latest Economic Projections. Available online: http://www.oecd.org/economic-outlook/ (accessed on 28 June 2020). 3. DG GROW. Strategic Plan 2016–2020. Bruxelles: CEE. 2017. Available online: www. https://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2016/august/tradoc_154919.pdf (accessed on 26 June 2020). 4. Zapata, E. SMEs, and Their Business Problems. Case Analysis. School of Business Administration Magazine, Vol. September–December 2004; No 52, pp. 118–135. (In Spanish). Available online: https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/206/20605209.pdf (accessed on 20 October 2020). 5. Muñoz, P. The distinctive importance of sustainable entrepreneurship. CUOCIEnt 2013, 2, 1–6. 6. Parrish, B.D. Sustainability-driven entrepreneurship: Principles of organization design. J. Bus. Ventur. 2010, 25, 510–523. 7. The Standish Group. Chaos Report 2015. Available online: http://www.laboratorioti.com /2016/05/16/ informe-del-caos-2015-chaos-report-2015/ (accessed on 25 June 2020). 8. Arévalo, G. Cluster Support Programs in Latin America: Lessons Learned from the IDB Experience; Fourth Latin American Cluster Congress; CLAC TCI-Mendoza Government: Mendoza, Argentina, 2009; pp. 1–16. (In Spanish). Available online: https://publications.iadb.org/es/publicacion/15838 (accessed on 24 June 2020). 9. Fernández, V.; Vigil, J. Clusters, and territorial development. Theoretical review and methodological challenges for Latin America. Econ. Soc. Y Territ. 2007, 6, 859–912. 10. Kottler, P.; Lane, K. Dirección de Marketing. Ciudad de México: Pearson and Prentice Hall, 12a Edición; 2009. ISBN 970.260763-9. (In Spanish). Available online: http://biblio.econ.uba.ar/opac- tmpl/bootstrap/tc/148262_TC.pdf (accessed on 20 October 2020). I.10.1 R/O associated with the organization, competencies, culture and management of Planning Operations, Feedback, Control and Improvement of ICT. I.10.2 R/O regarding systems acquisition, development and maintenance. Interaction with suppliers and stakeholders. I.10.3 a. R/O regarding the operation and opportunity of the services, b. R/O n the management and response to contingencies and inconsistencies in ICT developments for operation and services, c. R/O in the Planning, Development and Control of ICT Maintenance. I.10.4 a. R/O regarding the update status in Information Technology and Communications. b. R/O regarding consistencies between interfaces. I.10.5 R/O in Logical Security Management (Use of software and system assets, data protection, processes and programs). I.10.6 R/O in Physical, Environmental and Operations Security, with the use of information assets and physical conditions for information dynamics. I.10.7 a. R/O in Network Information Transfers.b. R/O in the interaction to and from platform, channels and servers. I.11.1 a. R/O specific to topics related to Planning of financial resources,b. R/O in the allocation, management and control of financial and economic aspects. Associated with the purchase of Systems, the development and maintenance of ICT. Layer VII. I.10 ICT planning, infrastructure, operation and control conditions. MANAGEMENT FOR INFORMATION SECURITY AND CYBER SECURITY: ISO 27001: 2013; ISO 27002: 2013; ISO 27000: 2018; ISO 27103:2018 Associated with the General Management of ICT Conditions related to Financial Management Layer IX. I.12 OTHER SPECIALIZED RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES (+) RISK MANAGEMENT: ISO 31000: 2018. OTHER RISKS LINKED TO THE NATURE OF THE ORGANIZATION.. Associated to the State of Operation and ICT Operation Associated with the Status of ICT Updates Associated with Logical Security Associated with Physical, Environmental and Operations Security. Associated with Communication Security Layer VIII. I.11 Conditions linked to Financial Management RISK MANAGEMENT: ISO 31000: 2018. Figure A14. Classification matrix of topics related to internal R/O. Layers VII: I.10, VIII: I.11 and IX: I.12 [17,29,30]. References 1. Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development OECD. SDBS Business Demography Indicators. 6 September 2018. Available online from OECD. 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Electronic Book Proceedings; Ortuño, B.H., Ed.; Universitat Politècnica de València: Valencia, Spain, 2016; pp. 651–664. (In Spanish) 92. ISO. ISO 21500:2012, Guidance on Project Management; ISO/IEC: Geneva, Switzerland, 2012. 93. Ortegón, E.; Pacheco, J.F.; Prieto, A. ECLAC Manuals: Logical Framework Methodology for Project Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation; ECLAC UNIDO: Santiago de Chile, Chile, 2005. (In Spanish) 94. Rosato, M. Go Small for Project Success. PMWJ 2018, 7, 1–10. 95. Hernandis Ortuño, B.; Briede Westermeyer, J.C. An educational application for a product design and engineering systems using integrated conceptual models. Ingeniare. Revista Chilena de Ingeniería 2009, 17, 432–442. [CrossRef] 96. Guerrero, M.; Hernandis, B. An approach to the representation of a product’s form and appearance: Study on design attributes. Innovar 2018, 28, 25–39. 97. ISO. ISO 17741: 2016, Energy Savings. 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Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). http://dx.doi.org/10.18566/puente.v7n1.a03 https://andrewtmarlow.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/pas-99-second-draft-1-7.pdf www.iso.org/directives-and-policies.html http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0718-33052009000300017 https://revistas.javeriana.edu.co/index.php/signoypensamiento/article/view/4530 https://revistas.javeriana.edu.co/index.php/signoypensamiento/article/view/4530 http://ehss.moe.gov.ir/getattachment/f7de1f2a-7559-49b5-8b97-c69b13fa17a9/31010-FDIS-(Risk-Assessment-Technics) http://ehss.moe.gov.ir/getattachment/f7de1f2a-7559-49b5-8b97-c69b13fa17a9/31010-FDIS-(Risk-Assessment-Technics) http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Introduction. Problem Analysis, Research Objectives, and Study Approach Vulnerability and Low Sustainability of Entrepreneurship Efforts Objectives Article Outline Materials and Inputs for Research Concepts and Principles of CRM Risks, Risk Management, Intelligence, and Decision-Making Scope of Risk Management in Society and Companies Principles of Risk Management Basic Principles and Management Approach for E2 Aspects Related to Planning in Energy Management Systems (EnMS) Aspects Related to the Execution of the Plans and the Operation of the EnMS Aspects Related to EnMS Feedback Aspects Related to the Maintenance, Adjustment, and Improvement Actions of the EnMS Developments Related to the Optimization and Improvement of EnMS Basic Principles and Management Approach for Biosecurity and Biosafety Biosecurity and Biosafety Comprehensive Biosecurity Management Comprehensive Biosecurity and Biosafety Management: Risks, Strategy, and Business Continuity Integration of CMS QHSE3+ Requirements and HLS Results, Achievements, and Discussion Fundamental Purpose of the Research. Methodology General Directory of R/O Topics Regarding QHSE3+ Conceptual Model for Comprehensive R/O Management Applicable to CMS QHSE3+ Structural Elements of the Comprehensive R/O Management Model in CMS QHSE3+ Functional Approach of the R/O Model Applicable to CMS QHSE3+ Parameterization of the Comprehensive R/O Management Model General Achievements and Benefits of the Research Results Obtained in Terms of Energy Efficiency and Vulnerability Reduction Characteristics and Profile of the Companies in which the Preliminary Validation was Made Presentation and Analysis of the Results Obtained Conclusions References work_aj72oub6uzbztkyiyfiqi623we ---- Le Livre d'Artiste: Louis Brocquy and The Tain (1969) Le Livre d'Artiste: Louis Brocquy and The Tain (1969) Ailbhe Ni Bhriain New Hibernia Review, Volume 5, Number 1, Earrach/Spring 2001, pp. 69-82 (Article) Published by Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas DOI: For additional information about this article [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] https://doi.org/10.1353/nhr.2001.0014 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23975 https://doi.org/10.1353/nhr.2001.0014 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23975 Louis le Brocquy, “Raven (Morrigan),” The Tain (1969), full plate, p. [98]. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 68 In September, , Liam Miller published The Tain, a translation of the Táin Bó Cuailnge by Thomas Kinsella, with ink brush drawings by the Irish painter Louis le Brocquy. This ninth Dolmen Edition is an Irish equivalent of the livre d’artiste. The involvement of Kinsella and le Brocquy in the making of The Tain shows it to be an undertaking personal to both writer and artist. The for- mal design elements of the book demonstrate its aesthetic values and parallels it with the livre d’artiste. The interplay between Kinsella’s text and le Brocquy’s images underlines the integral role of the illustrations. In turn, the style and medium of those illustrations reveal a number of influences upon le Brocquy and references to his earlier paintings. Likewise, The Tain has influenced le Brocquy’s later work, thus establishing this Dolmen commission as central to the artist’s career. Although le Brocquy has thus far illustrated ten books, his experience in graphics is seldom referred to in critical studies of his work. That neglect high- lights a lack of appreciation in Ireland for the illustrator’s role and for the book as an aesthetic medium. Because the Dolmen Press closed after the death of Liam Miller in , the Dolmen Editions can be found only in specialist book- stores and in such special collections as the National Irish Visual Arts Library, thus limiting the aesthetic study of the Dolmen Editions and of The Tain as a livre d’artiste. The livre d’artiste, an almost exclusively French art form, was conceived by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard in . Vollard’s publication of Paul Verlaine’s poems Parallelement, illustrated by Pierre Bonnard, remains one of the most successful examples of the union of author and artist.1 The form stemmed, however, from the strong history of the illustrated book and the artist’s “album” in France. In Ireland, however, art itself is seen to “occupy the gate lodge to the literary Big House.”2 The Dolmen Press was unique in its treat- ment of the book as an equally literary and visual device. Founded by Liam Ailbhe Ní Bhriain � Le Livre d’Artiste: Louis le Brocquy and The Tain () . Gordon N. Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book, – (New York: Dover Publications, ), p. . . Brian O’Doherty, quoted in Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy (Dublin: Ward River Press, ), p. .    ⁄   , : ( ⁄ , ), – 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 69 Miller in , the press was originally a literary forum and employed an ele- mentary hand press and a single Caslon font.3 But by its third year, Dolmen Press publications began to show Liam Miller’s preference for type design, art- ful margins, and illustrations on a generous page—all distinctive elements of the livre d’artiste. The Irish poet Thomas Kinsella was involved with the Dolmen Press from the start, and his translation of the Táin Bó Cuailnge, which had been com- missioned by Liam Miller in , was one of the press’s principal projects. The Exile of the Sons Uisliu, the first part of the Táin saga, was published in an edi- tion of twenty-five copies illustrated by Mia Cranwell in November, , fif- teen years before The Tain was completed.4 The Táin Bó Cuailnge—táin, meaning the gathering of people for a cattle raid—is a prose epic with verse passages and forms the centerpiece of the cycle of Ulster heroic stories. It tells of the exploits of King Conchobar and his chief warrior Cúchulainn (“The Hound of Ulster”) and of the invasion of Ulster by Queen Medb of Connacht in an attempt to capture the Brown Bull of Cuailgne. Dating as far back as the twelfth century in manuscript form, this legend has been treated both academically by scholars and linguists and romantically by such Revival writers as Yeats and Lady Gregory. The Dolmen Edition of the saga was to give, in Kinsella’s words, the first “living version of the story,” a version true to its blunt and brutal Gaelic character.5 Kinsella noted that “[a] strong element in the sagas is their directness in bodily mat- ters: the easy references to seduction, copulation, urination, the picking of ver- min, the suggestion of incest. . . .” (T ). In refining this, earlier translations, such as Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (), lost something of the essence of the legend. In Kinsella’s Tain, the wise warrior Scathach instructs her daughter, on their first meeting with Cúchulainn: “Take him to bed with you tonight and sleep with him, if that is what you want.” To that Uathach replies, “It would be no hardship” (T ). According to Lady Gregory, however, Scathach tamely remarks, “I can see this man has pleased you,” and Uathach nobly admits, “There would be great grief on me indeed if he were not to return alive to his Louis le Brocquy and The Tain ()  . Liam Miller, Dolmen XXV: An Illustrated Bibliography of the Dolmen Press, –, Dolmen Editions XXV ( Dublin: The Dolmen Press, ), p. . . The Sons of Usnech, trans. Thomas Kinsella (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, November ). This title was reprinted with designs by Bridget Swinton in March, . Miller, . . The Tain, trans. Thomas Kinsella, Dolmen Edition IX (September, ), p. vii; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (T vii). All versions of Kinsella’s translation give the title simply as The Tain, without the fada. The Táin with the fada refers the Old Irish saga Táin Bó Cuailnge. 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 70 own people.”6 Similarly, Gregory’s Deirdre behaves like a damsel in distress in this version, crying “Naoise. . . . are you going to leave me?”7 In contrast, Kinsella’s Derdriu demands, “Are you rejecting me?” before “rushing at him and [catching] the two ears of his head” (T ). Kinsella’s language creates characters stronger than the meek creatures created by Lady Gregory. Brutality is expressed with honesty in Kinsella’s translation of the Táin, a raid started “for the sake of a whore’s backside” (T ). We are told of heads smashed together so that “each was stained grey with the other’s brains” (T ), of “limbs leaping from their sockets” (T ), of eyes burst, livers split, and of the “blood of men in multitudes” (T ). While both Gregory and Kinsella use the Táin mythlogy to represent Ireland, Kinsella belongs to a school of poets who abandoned the romanticism of the “Celtic Twilight,” believing, as Austin Clarke suggests, that “before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.”8 Le Brocquy’s art cannot be accurately described as “brutal,” yet le Brocquy does echo these ideals in using mythology to escape what he has described as the “picturesque images” and “social irreality” of Irish art.9 Le Brocquy’s early paintings of Ireland’s itinerant “travellers,” like Travellers Making a Twig Sign (), are partly infuenced by Synge’s descriptions in his prose of the wildness and vitality of the travelling and island communities and resemble studies of a primitive ancestral culture.10 In his early paintings, this ancestral search can be related to landscapes in Famine Cottages ().11 By the early s, the ancestral search had taken the form of depicting the human head in paintings “reconstructing” and “evoking” images of such Irish rebels as Wolfe Tone in Evoked Head of an Irish Martyr ().12 While wholly Irish in content, le Brocquy’s art has always been French in its formality and style. Le Brocquy admired Georges Rouault and Pierre Bonnard, artists responsible for some of the finest livres d’artiste, and both were strongly represented in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art set up by le Brocquy in .13 More importantly, le Brocquy spent extended periods in France and, indeed, he resided there from the s onward. There, in close Louis le Brocquy and The Tain ()  . Lady Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster (; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smyth, ), p. . . Gregory, p. . . Austin Clarke, Poetry in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Cultural Relations Committee, ), p. . . Walker, p. . . Brenda McPharland et. al., ed., Louis le Brocquy’s Painting – (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, ), p. . . Walker, p. . . McPharland, p. . . McPharland, p. . 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 71 contact with Henri Matisse and Alberto Giacometti, he absorbed the tradition of the livre d’artiste and the painter-illustrator. By , the year in which Liam Miller commissioned drawings for The Tain, le Brocquy had already illustrated two books: Austin Clarke’s Poetry in Modern Ireland () and J. J. Campbell’s Legends of of Ireland ().14 He had also worked once with the Dolmen Press: he designed the head and tail piece for Donagh MacDonagh’s broadside Love Duet ().15 Several years prior to The Tain commission, le Brocquy approached Liam Miller with the idea of producing an illustrated book. The project of The Tain was, then, one person- al to both artist and translator, and should be seen as a collaborative effort fos- tered by Liam Miller, the maître d’oeuvre. In its design, the Dolmen Edition Tain echoes the livre d’artiste in every way. Unfortunately, the book’s familiar form as a standard Oxford University Press paperback, published in  and still in print today, may confuse this impression. The text of the  edition is complete and the page numbers correspond to the Dolmen Editions original, but the paperback measures only  by  inches and contains only  of le Brocquy’s original  ink drawings reproduced by photolithography. The Dolmen Press produced two versions of The Tain as Dolmen Edition IX (September, ).16 One of these is a slip-cased, cloth edition of  copies containing color plates and maps. It is printed on paper specially made by Swiftbrook Paper Mills in Dublin. The font used is ten and fourteen point Pilgrim, with Perpetua and Felix titlings in red, as the colophon indicates (T []). All Dolmen Editions give a detailed colophon, which is one hallmark of the livre d’artiste and is known as an achève d’imprimer. This printing has an  by . inch page and each page has top and bottom margins of . and . inches respectively, with center and side margins of . and . inches. The sec- ond version of The Tain is a collector’s deluxe edition of  copies. These were bound in vermilion Oasis Niger goatskin at the Irish University Bindery, with le Brocquy’s shield images (T –) embossed in gold on the front and back covers. Each copy in this deluxe binding comes individually boxed. Each copy is signed by Kinsella, le Brocquy, and Miller. Each contains an extra suite of the Warp Spasm drawings. The production of a deluxe and routine copy is stan- dard practice in the production of the livre d’artiste. The  Oxford University Press trade edition of The Tain is itself an illustrated book, but it is not an artist’s book. The Oxford Tain provides a Louis le Brocquy and The Tain ()  . J. J. Campbell, Legends of Ireland (London: Batsford, ). . Miller, p. . . The  boxed edition of The Tain was also marked in North America by Irish University Press, the distiguishing feature being the IUP mark in red and the bottom of the wrap’s spine. 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 72 contrast that helps us better appreciate the Dolmen Edition printing as an artist’s book. Most striking is the difference in size, which highlights the importance of spatial considerations in our reading of text, a topic first explored by the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. The livre d’artiste uses the page as an aesthetic and expressive element in itself, and that use is charac- trized by the presence of generous margins, like those found in The Tain. This has the effect of clearing space for the impact of the text and creating a répos or white area to rest the eye. The provision of a répos created by generous margins also provides phys- ical space for illustration, which, in the case of The Tain, is in-texte, or found throughout the text; hors-texte, or full plate; and en-marge, or in the margins. In total, the Dolmen Edition presents  départs-de-chapître, illustrations that fall at the end of a story;  débuts-de-chapître, illustrations that come at the head of a story;  cul-de-lampes, images at the bottom of a page;  full-page plates; and one double spread (T [–]). At times, the reader sees an image (the “Sixfold Slaughter”) spill from one full plate into the opposite page (T ); or a single illustration (running boys) spread across the bottom of two pages, creating a feeling of continuity (T –); or one figure (Ferdia) facing another (Medb) from opposite margins, implying opposition or dialogue (T –). Overall, the Dolmen Editions printing displays great inventiveness in design, with Liam Miller using the restrictions of the book format expressively. Louis le Brocquy and The Tain ()  Louis le Brocquy, Shield Drawing, The Tain (), p. . Reproduced by kind permis- sion of the artist. 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 73 Louis le Brocquy and The Tain ()  Louis le Brocquy, “Birds,” The Tain (1969), debut-de-chapître, p. 21. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 74 The en-marge illustrations can be extremely playful, like the images of Sétanta (the young Cúchulainn) playing hurley in “Cuchulainn’s Boyhood Deeds” (T ). The presence of marginal illustrations throughout the Dolmen Edition sil- houettes the text. The Oxford printing offers no marginal illustrations, and is limited to  drawings: the débuts-de-chapître, départs-de-chapître, and the full plate. In this context, le Brocquy’s drawings have a less expressive, more deco- rative role reminiscent of the artist’s earlier illustrations for the Clarke and Campbell books and do not integrate fully with Kinsella’s text. The fine paper of the original printing, having no grain, also creates a much sharper image, thus giving each of le Brocquy’s  drawings a stronger impact. Unity of image and text in the livre d’artiste is traditionally achieved through a correspondence between the fonts of type—in this case, Pilgrim, Perpetua, and Felix—and illustrations, as can be seen in The Tain. In process and final appearance, the medium of the ink brush drawing is one sympathetic with a literary text. The reader can perceive both simultaneously without being distracted by the intrinsic, graphic qualities of the drawings. The strong linear quality of le Brocquy’s illustrations coheres with the upright, unfussy Pilgrim font, which is also suited to the direct tone of Kinsella’s translation. The let- trine, or initial letter, plays an important function in the livre d’artiste, and it can be seen here as a strong integrating element, as it is applied to the initial word of each tale.17 The bold font of the lettrine echoes the dense black of le Brocquy’s images, creating a fine balance between the literary and the visual symbol. These formal elements make it clear that The Tain is a production of carefully choreographed visual information, one comparable with the unity of Verlaine’s language, Bonnard’s arabesques, and the floral font in Parallelement. In The Tain, le Brocquy employs an interpretive type of illustration also employed in Vollard’s setting of Parallelement. Unlike literary or decorative illustration, intepretive illustration implies a style that is figurative without being directly descriptive of the text.18 Most often used to represent themes of archetypal significance, interpretive illustration is well suited to evoking the spirit of The Tain in a suggestive, symbolic manner. The début-de-chapître illustration plays an important role in setting tone and atmosphere, and a good example of this is the ink drawing of a flock of hovering birds set over the introduction to “How Cúchulainn Was Begotten,” set in red capitals (T ). Le Brocquy’s image refers to the birds that ate the plain of Emain Macha bare: Louis le Brocquy and The Tain ()  . Titles of the main sections of The Tain, of parts of the appparatus, and of several individual tales are also given in red, following a design pattern on the wrap and the title page. . W. J. Strachan, The Artist and the Book in France (London: Peter Owen, ), p. . 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 75 Pleasant and lovely was the flight of the birds, and their song. There were nine scores of birds with a silver chain between each couple. Each score went in its own flight, nine flights altogether, and two birds out in front of each flight with a yoke of silver between them. (T ) The birds have a strange and prophetic presence in the strange story of Deichtine’s impregnation and its suggestion of incest. By focusing his ink drawing on the shapes of the birds’ flight and on the shapes of their wings, le Brocquy evokes the forboding mood rather than describing realistic detail. As practised by le Brocquy, this sort of drawing effectively creates a picto- rial symbolism that corresponds well with the wealth of strange visions and prophesies in The Tain. A most powerful instance of this is le Broquy’s full- page image of the raven facing the speech of the Morrígan to the Brown Bull (T []). The raven image presages disaster. It appears first in the “Exile of the Sons of Uisliu” where a raven drinking blood on snow aniticipates Noisiu’s death (T ); again in the “Death of Maenén” where Morrígan speaks of “ravens ravenous among the corpses of men” (T ); and finally in “The Last Battle” in a lament: “Ravens gnawing / men’s necks / blood spurting / in the fierce fray” (T ). The repetition of the raven symbol in the text and in le Brocquy’s crude rendering in black ink (T , T , T ) establishes a mood of fore- boding and tragedy. That the image appears three times—the first and last en- marge and the second as a full plate—is also important, as such repetitions are a favorite device in the sagas. In a very similar way, the textual and graphic image of the bull immediately comes to represent conflict. The two bulls in the saga are the Brown Bull of Cuailgne—“horrific, overwhelming, ferocious”—Finnbennach, “born to bear victory, bellowing in greatness” (T –). Following their fearsome descrip- tion, they are graphically represented facing each other mirror-wise at the bot- tom of the page—the first a départ-de-chapître, the second a début-de-chapître (T –[]). In the rough, gestural marks of these drawings, le Brocquy cap- tures a powerful, unmoving strength, and the feeling of their opposition is intensified by the obstruction implied by the page break. These illustrations have the tension and strength to launch the reader into the main narrative of The Tain. As a symbol of brutality central to the saga, the bull appears twice more (T , ), but on the final page, the image has different role. The two bulls appear prostrate, one above the other, as a cul de lampe conveying visu- ally a sense of finality. Many of le Brocquy’s brush drawings for The Tain have an elusive, enig- matic quality that leads to sensitive symbioses between verbal text and visual image. Le Brocquy’s images often seem to rise implicitly from abstract, calli- graphic marks as they are described in Kinsella’s text; once recognized, how- Louis le Brocquy and The Tain ()  06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 76 ever, they shape our reading of the text. This interrelationship is especially evi- dent in the départ-de-chapître. For example, the image falling at the end of “The Death of Aife’s One Son”—a brutal account of Cúchulainn’s killing of his own seven-year-old son by “bringing his bowels down around his feet” (T )—is at first unrecognizable. Following the tale’s final line—“For the space of three days and three nights no calf in Ulster was let go to its cow on account of his death” (T )—le Brocquy’s image becomes identifiable, like the psychologist’s inkblot, as a cow suckling a calf. The role of the départ-de- chapître is to arrest the reader’s attention before he moves on to the next story, and, as a final visual meditation on “The Death of Aife’s One Son,” this image lays emphasis on the tragedy, rather than the brutality, of the text. The importance of the enigmatic quality of le Brocquy’s illustrations to The Tain is highlighted by the shield image as a cover design (T ).19 Extremely abstract and suggestive, the shield image chosen by Miller as the frontispiece epitomizes an element central to the book. Le Brocquy describes this as a rep- resentation of the “virtual shield of the fabulous hero Cúchulainn and, indeed, of this archetypal Celtic warrior himself,” and notes that “paradoxically this explosive emergent image can also be interpreted as implosive, immergent, accretive.”20 If we look at le Brocquy’s early paintings, we see that these immergent and emergent qualities are inherent in the artist’s work from the start. In the  painting Famine Cottages, le Brocquy captures, in the words of Earnan O’Malley, “the dual quality in the landscape that can induce a merging or withdrawal” as fragments of the cottages appear and retreat into atmospheric color.21 The same qualities become more apparent in the elusive vestiges of le Brocquy’s “presences” series—as in the oil painting Male Presence ()—and in the later series of “ancestral heads”—as in Evoked Head ()—where the head is barely released from the surface that enevlops it.22 In his Tain illustrations, the ability of le Brocquy’s drawings to emerge and dissolve gives fitting expression to the peculiar marriage of mysticism and raw physicality contained in Kinsella’s text. Like gestures of primeval fear, strength, or passion, the “explosive” energy of the brushwork captures the physical exu- Louis le Brocquy and The Tain ()  . The abstract shield emblem (T ) appears stamped in gold on the red front cover of the deluxe edition of The Tain. The cloth edition of  copies has a front cover giving the bull emblem, stamped in white, in the bottom right corner. The cloth trade edition issued by Oxford University Press () presents the shield emblem, stamped in white, in the center of the front board. . Walker, p. . . Walker, p. . . Walker, p. ; McPharland, p. . 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 77 berance of the text, as can be seen in the images of “bodily matters” and of vio- lence, as in the several drawings of Cúchulainn’s “warp spasm” (T , , ). The earthiness of the narrative is, however, dislocated by its fantastical elements: Nes’s pregnancy lasts three years and three months (T ); Medb’s “gush of blood” fills “three great channels, each big enough to take a house- hold” (T ); Cúchulainn’s liver flaps in his mouth and throat (T ). In retaining a certain abstraction, le Brocquy’s drawings suggest the magical, the fantastical character of the Ulster saga. In Liam Miller’s setting, Kinsella’s text and le Brocquy’s images function together as a whole, the illustrations form- ing in le Brocquy’s words “an extension of the text,” thus qualifying The Tain as a livre d’artiste. Louis le Brocquy and The Tain ()  Louis le Brocquy, “Cúchulainn’s Warp-Spasm,” The Tain (), en marge, p. . Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 78 Numerous Continental influences on the style of le Brocquy’s drawings for The Tain can be traced. For example, the artist spent time in Spain in  where he was “tremendously struck by the way shadow there looked more real than the substance it was cast by.”23 It is likely that le Brocquy saw the brush drawings of Picasso there, and their influence may be detected in, for example, le Brocquy’s drawings of the brown and white bulls of the saga (T ). Le Brocquy’s drawings also possess qualities of Japonisme, specifically the style of “boneless painting,” which aspires to capture the spirit of the object or subject through simplicity and understatement. The economical, calligraphic brush- work of le Brocquy’s depictions of Queen Medb (T , ), for example, com- municates the strength and determination of her character. Writing in , the Irish poet John Montague compared the mescaline drawings of the French poet Henri Michaux to le Brocquy’s rendering of the “hosting” or battle scenes in The Tain (T –), and le Brocquy may well had been influenced by Michaux, who had exhibited in Dublin in .24 Le Brocquy attaches great importance to the unconscious element of his work—to the “significant acci- dent.”25 That approach also links le Brocquy’s artistry to that of such Abstract Expressionists as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Appropriately, le Brocquy’s Tain drawings relate equally well to ancient and native Irish processes of animation as seen in the Corlech Head or the Celtic Crosses, where the subject is suggested with as little imposition and interefer- ence as possible. The act of painting is, of course, a reversal of the process of stone carving, but the brushwork of le Brocquy’s painting expresses a similar feel for material and avoids a literary art through, in his own words, “the trans- mutation of the image into paint.”26 The Tain drawings can be seen then as a natural response to the medium of brush drawing in ink. Just as his landscapes reflect the subtlety of watercolors, and his “presences” make use of the expres- sive texture of oil paint, so too do these drawings adhere to the inherent nature of the ink. Le Brocquy’s images for The Tain have the immediacy and sureness of the calligraphic mark, yet they retain also the feel of the splash of ink. Indeed, the restrictions of the medium help display the qualities that penetrate all of le Brocquy’s work. The Tain drawings were themeselves exhibited at the International Exhibition of Modern Drawing in Yugoslavia in . The following year, le Brocquy took the key images of the book and translated them into a series of large-scale lithographs. In , he took up the Tain theme again in his tapes- Louis le Brocquy and The Tain ()  . Walker, p. . . John Montague, “Ulster Bull Fight” [Rev. of Kinsella’s Tain], The Guardian, 27 November . . George Morgan, Louis le Brocquy: The Head Image (Cork: Gandon Editions, ), p. . . Walker, p. . 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 79 Louis le Brocquy and The Tain ()  Louis le Brocquy, “The Brown Bull of Cuailnge,” The Tain (), debut de chapître at bottom of page under title in red, p. [51]. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Pablo Picasso, “Bull,” The Sketchbooks of Picasso, ed. Arnold and Marc Glimcher (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, ), p. . 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 80 try for the Carroll’s cigarette factory in Dundalk. Titled The Hosting of the Táin, this tapestry portrays a series of faces or “heads” in many colors that sug- gest a “gathering” for the cattle raid and, viewed at a distance, merge into waves of color, and then appear again as a distinctive massed image.27 This tapestry and later Táin tapestries—like the yellow-and-black Men of Connaught ()28—achieve the same effect as the double-spread battle scene in The Tain (T –), a primitive evocation of a mass presence. These tapestries may be seen as anticipating le Brocquy’s recent “presences” paintings, like River Run, Procession with Lilies, IV ().29 Following the publication of The Tain in , le Brocquy illustrated six books, all of which form a coherent body of work. For Liam Miller and the Imprint Society in , le Brocquy depicted characters from J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World as “masks.” These six faces, each distinguished by a vivid combination of two colors, resemble the vividly colored heads in The Hosting of the Táin tapestry, as in the case of Orange Mask for the Widow Quin.30 Le Brocquy again turned to ink brush drawing in  for the Dolmen Edition of Desmond O’Grady’s The Gododdin, a series of poems adapted from the Welsh telling of the annihilation of the Gododdin tribe; these drawings use variations of the raven symbol from The Tain.31 In , Le Brocquy illustrat- ed Seamus Heaney’s Ugolino, translated from an Dante’s Inferno, which can be linked both to Kinsella’s The Tain and O’Grady’s The Gododdin, for all deal with ancient myths, feuds, and themes that “mesh with and house the equiva- lent destructive energies at work, say, in contemporary Belfast.”32 The long conflict in Northern Ireland is a theme in le Brocquy’s painting Northern Image ().33 The “Troubles” find direct expression in le Brocquy’s cover design for Kevin Cahill’s Irish Essays (), a proposal of possible solutions for the situation in Northern Ireland. There the artist depicts two groups of Louis le Brocquy and The Tain ()  . Walker, p. . . Walker, p. . . George Morgan, Louis le Brocquy: Procession (Cork: Gandon Editions, ), p. . . J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, ed. Stanley Sultan (Barre, MA: Imprint Society, ), p. []. Signed by le Brocquy, this slip-cased edition of Synge’s drama offers six polychrome brush drawings, or”masks,” portraying the characters of the drama, the Yellow Mask for Christy Mahon (p. []) repeated as a frontispiece and stamped in gold on the yellow front board of the binding. . Desmond O’Grady, The Gododdin, a Version, Dolmen Editions XXVI (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, November ). The title page terms le Brocquy’s illustrations “ink paintings,” and le Brocquy’s preface calls the bird images “rooks.” . Seamus Heaney, Ugolino (Dublin: Andrew Carpenter, ). Seamus Heaney, “On Irish Expressionist Painting,” The Irish Review,  (), . . Walker, p. . 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 81 Louis le Brocquy and The Tain ()  people, in the style of the Tain battle scene (T –) converging to represent a single society.34 In , le Brocquy produced a series of color lithographs portraying eight Irish writers—including James Joyce—published by Andrew Carpenter as a portfolio of unbound images.35 In one of the very last Dolmen Editions, le Brocquy illustrated Joyce’s Dubliners (), and again with ink brush drawings.36 The illustrations for The Tain prove centrally important to le Brocquy’s artistry. They represent a revitalizing of Irish mythology that brough to Irish writing a necessary vitality and to Irish art an alternative to “images of thatched cottages arranged like dominoes under convenient hills.”37 The pub- lication of the Dolmen Edition itself had a revitalizing effect on Irish art. The  Tain proved to be an inspiration for artists like Conor Fallon, Brian Bourke, and the sculptor John Behan, who cast his first bull wile working alongside le Brocquy in . Liam Miller’s formal design for the Dolmen Tain integrates Kinsella’s text with le Brocquy’s drawings, thus creating an aesthet- ic object that itself deserves Buckland Wright’s description of the livre d’artiste as an “asset of intrinsic value . . . no less worthy of attention than any other artistic production.”38 In the context of le Brocquy’s art, the project of illus- trating Kinsella’s translation of the Táin Bó Cuailnge reveals the character of his earlier work, influences on his later output, and the often ignored literary nature of le Brocquy’s art. The Dolmen Editions Tain, then, is a uniquely Irish equivalent of the French livre d’artiste and must be seen and valued as much for its artistic as for its literary interpretatiuon of the Ulster saga. � C R AW F O R D C O L L E G E O F A RT A N D D E S I G N , C O R K . Irish Essays, ed. Kevin Cahill (London: Batsford, ). . Louis le Brocquy, Eight Irish Writers, ed. Andrew Carpenter (Dublin ). . James Joyce, Dubliners, Dolmen Editions (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, ). This last Dolmen Edition was published in an edition of . It has the same proportions as The Tain (), is bound in Irish linen with embossed decorations on the cover, and is boxed in a tan, cloth-covered slipcase. . Walker, p. . . Strachan, p. . 06-nibhriain 3/27/01 11:08 AM Page 82 work_ajubuv5u7jgbnfhv27sh3ju2ju ---- EXPT 17.1_f5_31-46.indd © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/221173011X611815 Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 brill.nl/expt EXPERIMENT ЭКСПЕРИМЕНТ The Legacies of the Ballets Russes Lynn Garafola Professor of Dance, Barnard College-Columbia University lg97@columbia.edu Abstract This essay traces the multiple legacies of the Ballets Russes during the 100 years following the company’s fijirst performances in 1909. Dividing the intervening cen- tury into four periods (“The Lifetime of the Ballets Russes,” “1930-1954,” “1954-1987: Glamor and Revival,” and “1987 to the Present: Historicity and the End of the Cold War”), it analyzes the dispersal, migration, transformation, and assimilation of its repertory, choreographic methodologies, cultural narratives, aesthetics, and historiography. Keywords legacies of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes; impact on post-Diaghilev emigré or interna- tional companies; influence of Ballets Russes on Sadler’s Wells-Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, Jofffrey Ballet, and post-Diaghilev Ballet Russe companies; national identity, gender, and collaboration in dance; history of choreography in ballet; music and visual art commissioned by Ballets Russes; impact of Cold War on ballet and ballet historiography; books, fijilms, exhibitions, and television programs inspired by the Ballets Russes; changing historiography of the Ballets Russes On the evening of 17 May 1909, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, a com- pany of dancers, singers, and musicians from the Theaters of St. Peters- burg and Moscow enjoyed one of the great triumphs of theatrical history. It was the répétition générale of the 1909 Saison Russe, the latest season of artistic marvels that “Monsieur Serge de Diaghilew,” as he styled himself in France, was pulling out of his familiar top hat. No stranger to Paris, Diaghilev had already staged an exhibition of Russian art, a series of Rus- sian concerts, and the fijirst Boris Godunov seen outside Russia. Now it was 32 L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 the turn of ballet to bask in the international spotlight. Today, we know the company that descended on Paris in the spring of 1909 as the Ballets Russes (although this became its name only a few years later). We also know that by the time the curtain fell on that fijirst performance of Le Pavil- lon d’Armide, the Polovtsian “scenes and dances” from Prince Igor, and Le Festin, the audience was in rapture. It was the start of a romance that would endure for twenty years, although there were times when the par- ties fell in or out of love, or found more dazzling partners elsewhere. Those two decades transformed virtually every aspect of ballet practice in the West. Nothing was left untouched, save for the company’s technical foundation, which remained the danse d’école. Diaghilev was a man of ferocious will and discerning taste, encyclopedic knowledge and passion- ate curiosity—a Napoleon of the arts and a Renaissance man, a mafijioso unafraid of exercising power in the service of beauty. As the founder and director of the Ballets Russes throughout its twenty-year life, he had a profound and far-reaching influence on twentieth-century ballet. Under his aegis, the fijirst of the century’s classics came into being—works such as Firebird, Petrouchka, Les Noces, Les Biches, Apollo, and The Prodigal Son. He nurtured outstanding choreographers, including Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, and George Balanchine, and through them influenced ballet choreography until the 1970s. Unlike its nineteenth-century predecessors, the Ballets Russes was a choreogra- pher’s theater, a laboratory for experiment that explored new technolo- gies of the body and defijined the art of choreography as the quest for new forms, infused with a subjective vision. Diaghilev believed that classicism was not a static entity but something that evolved, and that continuity with the past was not a matter of replicating the late Imperial repertory, but of recreating in a modern way an older dance theater grounded in multiple art forms and the corporeal expressiveness of highly trained dancers. He plucked Stravinsky from obscurity, and through this fijirst “son,” as he called the composer of The Rite of Spring, altered the course of twentieth-century music. Many composers enjoyed Diaghilev’s largesse, some already celebrated, others barely out of school. He conjured scores from baroque music, long before this was popular, and redefijined—not once but on a continuing basis—the relationship between music and dance. At the same time he brokered remarkable marriages between dance and the visual arts. He hired only “real” artists, who ranged from virtuoso L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 33 colorists of Russo-Orientalist fantasies to fauves, futurists, cubists, surreal- ists, and others whose art spanned a broad spectrum of international modernism. With Diaghilev the stage became a total visual environment, set off from everyday life even as it resonated with the forms and colors of contemporary art. He accomplished this in part because he viewed bal- let as a preeminently collaborative art, in which choreographer, composer, and designer contributed equally to the whole. Yet fusion was not always his goal, and in later years, he often preferred the ironic juxtaposition of the parts of a ballet to their mystical melding or fusion. Finally, Diaghilev was a gay man, and to the extent that the Ballets Russes was an expression of his personal creative vision, his sexual orientation left a mark on the company’s aesthetics. For Diaghilev, ballet was not a meditation on femi- ninity performed by women for an audience of men, as it had been for much of the nineteenth century, but an art infused with queer sexuality and spotlighting men. The influence of the Ballets Russes was far-reaching. Even today, a cen- tury later, it remains a touchstone of aesthetic trends and ideas, its author- ity invoked, its history and historiography offfering a lens through which to read the march of twentieth-century dance. This essay tracks some of these echoes and reverberations during the hundred-year era that has just ended and speculates for a moment about the future. It divides this cen- tury into four periods. The fijirst coincides with the lifetime of the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929. The second opens in 1930, with the collapse of the Bal- lets Russes, and concerns the initial dispersal, migration, transformation, and assimilation of its various legacies. The third runs from 1954, the year of Richard Buckle’s hugely successful Diaghilev Exhibition at the Edin- burgh Festival, to the mid-1980s, and focuses on the rediscovery of “origi- nal” Ballets Russes artifacts, choreographies, and narratives. The fourth opens in 1987, when Millicent Hodson staged her reconstruction of The Rite of Spring for the Jofffrey Ballet, and ends today. It focuses on histori- cism and the implications of the end of the Cold War. Opening Movement: The Lifetime of the Ballets Russes The impact of the Ballets Russes was immediate. It rippled quickly through the world of fashion, leaving its mark on magazines, couturier styles, and the revels of the rich and famous. Feted, toasted, and imitated, Ballets 34 L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 Russes dancers performed, for enormous fees, at private gatherings and soirées. Impresarios laid siege to them and within months of the fijirst Diaghilev season the most ambitious began to fijind their way into the global marketplace, seduced by lucrative contracts and opportunities undreamt of at home. This fijirst wave of Russian dancers who passed through the turnstile of the Ballets Russes to international careers was followed by many others. Indeed, throughout its twenty-year existence, the Ballets Russes incubated a host of dance professionals who trans- formed the era’s dance world. Most parted ways with Diaghilev on artistic grounds, although, in some cases, the rupture was personal. Whatever the cause, these former Diaghilev artists were catalysts for the assimilation of Ballets Russes artistic practices and ideas well beyond the immediate reach of the company’s activities. This assimilation process was abetted, in no small part, by the new cul- tural and intellectual heft of ballet. Neither Paris nor London had lacked for dance, even during the years of so-called “decline.” But until the advent of the Ballets Russes, only a handful of dance soloists such as Isadora Dun- can and Loie Fuller had fijired the intellectual imagination. With Diaghilev ballet lost both the stigma of low cultural origins and the wages of artistic inconsequence. His works tapped into the dreams and anxieties of succes- sive generations, the discourses of symbolism and decadence refracted through a Russian prism during the prewar years; those of modernism and neoclassicism charged by the experience of exile in later years. Some of the most respected critics of the age wrote about the company. Numerous books about it were published, many lavishly illustrated, as if to prolong the impressions of a ballet, the memory of a performer or the images of an eminent designer. This new respect on the part of the era’s elites acted as a catalyst for change throughout the dance world. Western European opera houses did not lack for works to dance, but the new Ballets Russes repertoire made ballets like La Korrigane, La Maladetta, Phryné, and Les Deux Pigeons seem as fusty and old-fashioned as the dancers who embodied them. In Monte Carlo the Ballets Russes actually displaced the Franco-Italian troupe that had danced for years in the season’s operas and galas. More typical was the engagement of former Diaghilev dancers, designers, and choreogra- phers to jumpstart the process of modernization. Thus, among Jacques Rouché’s early actions, on taking up the reins of the Paris Opéra, was to L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 35 hire several prewar Diaghilev luminaries and even to revive Giselle, which had disappeared from the Opéra’s boards in the late 1860s. Charles B. Cochran did much the same in London, employing Massine and later Balanchine to give his revues an up-to-date choreographic touch. The dancers, too, changed. With so many men in the Ballets Russes, the nine- teenth-century tradition of the female travesty dancer fijinally came to an end. After seeing so many real men on stage, spectators had a hard time accepting women dressed as men partnering other women. In addition to raising its status as an art form, the Ballets Russes “nation- alized” the idea of ballet, as this was perceived in the West. Ballet had flourished for centuries throughout Europe, so that by 1900 it consisted of a multiplicity of elite, popular, and mainstream practices. These practices transcended national identities. With movement as their lingua franca, dancers and choreographers had long crossed national borders, creating as early as the eighteenth century something akin to an international rep- ertory. This international circulation accelerated in the Romantic and post-Romantic eras, as French ballet-pantomimes and subsequently Ital- ian spectacle ballets became the coin of global exchange. Although ballet continued to use French terminology, Italy was the nursery of its virtuoso practitioners. All the great ballerinas of the era seemed to hail from La Scala and they seemed to be everywhere—from the Paris Opéra and the Maryinsky to the Folies-Bergère, Niblo’s Garden in New York, and Lon- don’s Alhambra Theatre of Varieties. Ballet was defijinitely not Russian. In fact, it is hard to say what was Russian about ballet even in Russia. To be sure the dancers were Russian, as were most of the production personnel, and the court system that supported it so lavishly. However, there was nothing specifijically Russian about the subject matter of all but a tiny handful of ballets. Diaghilev’s export campaign changed this. His enterprise traded on Russianness in almost every way—its name, the nationality of a majority of its artists, and much of its subject-matter. Peo- ple talked about the company as a uniquely Russian phenomenon, even if its technique derived from the universal idiom of the ballet studio and the company itself never performed in Russia. Now companies as well as movements were likely to be identifijied by nationality. Thus, Rolf de Maré’s “Ballets Suédois” (or Swedish Ballet), La Argentina’s “Ballets Espagnols” (or Spanish Ballet), Lincoln Kirstein’s “American Ballet,” and the movement known as “British Ballet.” In part, this was a reaction against the success 36 L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 of the Ballets Russes; in part an attempt to capitalize on its model. But nobody challenged the notion that ballet in general had acquired a national identity, and that this identity was Russian. Second Movement: 1930-1954 In 1929, Diaghilev died, and his company collapsed. His passing left a void. Where would ballet be without him? Yet even if Diaghilev himself was irreplaceable, ballet was far from dead. Within three years the fijirst of the post-Diaghilev Ballets Russes companies would spring into existence. Var- iously known as the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Covent Garden Russian Ballet, and Original Ballet Russe (among others), they toured everywhere, scattering the seeds of their art like Johnny Appleseed. They traded on the glamor of the Diaghilev name, even as they jettisoned most of his ballets, while holding aloft an increasingly spurious banner of Russianness. In fact, by the 1930s most “Russian” dancers were émigrés, trained (if not born) in the West. And many weren’t even Russian at all, but Americans, Canadians, and Britons dancing under a variety of Russifijied names. To be sure, the post-Diaghilev Ballets Russes companies carried on cer- tain aspects of their Diaghilev predecessor. One was the emphasis on col- laborations, especially in the area of the visual arts. Massine, the leading choreographic fijigure of the 1930s, commissioned many eminent painters, including Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, André Masson, and Salvador Dalí, as well as up-and-coming American designers such as Irene Sharafff, Stew- art Chaney, and Oliver Smith and an eclectic group of composers that included Paul Hindemith and Richard Rodgers. Because of this emphasis on new work and collaborations with living artists, these post-Diaghilev enterprises—at least in the initial decade of their existence—were genu- inely contemporary companies. They took an essentially contemporary approach to revivals as well, tailoring them to the needs at hand rather than aiming for scrupulous historical accuracy—not unlike Diaghilev’s approach when he revived The Sleeping Beauty. However, a number of diffferences also existed between the Diaghilev company and its “international” successors. Unlike Diaghilev, neither Col- onel Wassily de Basil or Sergei Denham, the long-time directors of the major post-Diaghilev Ballet Russe enterprises, had any interest in experi- L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 37 ment. They pitched their art to the mainstream, to audiences on the end- less, innumerable tours that kept their companies solvent. Thus, apart from a handful of Massine ballets, all but the most innocuous works were dropped from the repertoire. In this group were Nijinska’s ballets (after a few performances in the 1930s), all of Balanchine’s Diaghilev-era works, and most of Massine’s. Thus, the Diaghilev repertoire that emerged from this process consisted of a handful of Fokine ballets (Les Sylphides, Fire- bird, Schéhérazade, Petrouchka, Le Spectre de la Rose), Nijinsky’s L’Après- midi d’un Faune, Massine’s La Boutique Fantasque and Le Tricorne (although the latter tended to come and go), and the Petipa-Nijinska Aurora’s Wed- ding. Everything else was shelved. Also shelved was Diaghilev’s erotic revolution. His successors had little interest in extending what Peter Stoneley has called Diaghilev’s “queer iconography.”1) Men might be spotlighted (and were, especially in Massine’s ballets), but new works were more likely to center on the ballerina than her consort. Although these post-Diaghilev companies included gay dancers, heteronormativity became the order of the day. The post-Diaghilev Ballets Russes companies were not alone in carry- ing on Diaghilev’s legacy. However, because of the multiple, sometimes contradictory facets of that legacy, a process of “splitting” seemed to occur, with diffferent heirs laying claim to diffferent legacies. Thus, if the Ballet Russe companies ultimately “contained” Diaghilev experimentalism within a mainstream, multi-purpose repertoire, the Vic-Wells/Saddler’s Wells enterprise headed by Ninette de Valois, took heart from Diaghilev’s revival of late Imperial works, especially The Sleeping Beauty. During the 1930s she produced the three Tchaikovsky masterworks from that reper- toire (Beauty, Swan Lake, and The Nutcracker), in addition to Coppélia and Giselle. Like Diaghilev, she took music as a litmus test of artistic worth: hence the absence of La Bayadére (Ludwig Minkus) and Don Quixote (Cesare Pugni) from her list. But she went considerably further than Diag- hilev not only in the quest for authenticity, defijined by her as fijidelity to the Maryinsky version, but also, as Beth Genné has shown, in claiming 1) Peter Stoneley, A Queer History of the Ballet (London/New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 69. 38 L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 canonical—indeed, classical—status for her choices. “I wanted a tradi- tion,” she later wrote, “and I set out to establish one.”2) Experiment was a cornerstone of Diaghilev’s practice. However, with the partial exception of Massine’s symphonic ballets of the 1930s, semi- plotless, allegorical works to masterpieces of the Western musical canon, the quest for new forms did not fijit easily with the goals of the era’s ballet companies. Rather, it was Balanchine, working until 1948 with short-lived, transitory groups in the United States, who extended the reach of Diaghi- lev’s experimentalism into the 1960s. Balanchine’s ballets of the 1940s were critical in this regard, not only because the greatest of them jetti- soned narrative, but also—and more importantly—because they melded ideas of modernism and neoclassicism circulating since Diaghilev’s time. Balanchine continued Diaghilev’s passionate engagement with modern music. He choreographed numerous ballets to Stravinsky and commis- sioned scores from any number of European and American composers. Although music was central to Balanchine’s vision, by the early 1950s, when he “undressed” several ballets, he regarded the Diaghilev collabora- tive model—and the visual arts in general—as disposable. A far more radical challenge to the idea of artistic synthesis came from John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who argued that duration was all that collaboration need entail. Fusion and synthesis were irrelevant. No sooner had Diaghilev died than the process of historical recupera- tion began. Beginning in 1930 with Tamara Karsavina’s Theatre Street, the fijirst wave of Ballets Russes memoirs and biographies began to roll offf the presses. Thus began the process of reconstructing a usable history from the fragments and contradictory messages of the recent past. Two major biographies of Diaghilev appeared: Arnold Haskell’s Diaghilefff: His Artistic and Private Life, in collaboration with Walter Nouvel, in 1935, and Serge Lifar’s Serge Diaghilev: His Life, His Work, His Legend: An Intimate Biogra- phy, published in English translation in 1940. Lifar’s biography was fol- lowed a year later by another foundational text, Alexandre Benois’ Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet, also in English translation. The other focus of this early publishing activity was Nijinsky. In 1934 Romola Nijin- sky published a controversial biography of her husband, followed three 2) Ninette de Valois, Step by Step: The Formation of an Establishment (London: W.H. Allen, 1977), p. 189. L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 39 years later by her equally controversial edition of his diaries. Anatole Bourman’s The Tragedy of Nijinsky came out in 1937 as well. The vast majority of these volumes were published in London, followed by publica- tion across the Atlantic. With Soviet archives inaccessible, human mem- ory and personal recall—those infijinitely fallible resources—were left to document the Russian lives of their subjects. During the 1930s and 1940s the fijirst Ballets Russes-inspired feature fijilms appeared. Fictions, they turned—not unlike the published volumes—on the Diaghilev-Nijinsky relationship, emphasizing the former’s Svengali- like powers and his all-consuming passion for art. In The Mad Genius, a 1931 Warner Brothers potboiler, John Barrymore, the crippled son of a bal- lerina, discovers a boy with a genius for dance and after guiding him to stardom, brings about his downfall because he has fallen in love with a dancer and wants to marry her. In Ben Hecht’s 1946 Specter of the Rose, Michael Chekhov played an aggressive but impecunious impresario (“sus- piciously rose-watered,” in the words of a critic),3) while “a magnifijicent but murderously maniacal ballet star” (in the words of another critic)4) plots to kill his ballerina wife while dancing Le Spectre de la Rose. Finally, in 1948 came The Red Shoes, that most beloved fijilm classic, in which the radi- ant young ballerina, Victoria Page, forced to choose between love and dance, gives a heteronormative twist to the mentor-protégé relationship. By the 1950s, the Ballets Russes companies had fallen on hard times. However, a core group of Diaghilev works had passed into the repertory of newly energized “national” companies, such as the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, (American) Ballet Theatre, and New York City Ballet. This group included Fokine’s Firebird, Les Sylphides, and Petrouchka, Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune, Massine’s La Boutique Fantasque and Le Tricorne, and Bal- anchine’s Apollo, now stripped of its decor, and Prodigal Son, which he revived, ironically, for Jerome Robbins, Fokine’s last Petrouchka. Although the Diaghilev repertory had been dramatically reduced, these works con- tinued to be performed on a regular basis, and they were considered vital to the canon of modern ballet. 3) T.M.P., “The Screen: Ben Hecht’s Revolt,” The New York Times, 2 Sept. 1946, p. 12. 4) Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: For Adults,” The New York Times, 15 Sept. 1946, p. 21. 40 L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 1954-1987: Glamor and Revival In 1954 Richard Buckle’s Diaghilev Exhibition opened at the Edinburgh Festival. With hundreds of designs, caricatures, costumes, portraits, unre- alized projects, and even fashion installations, the exhibition was a huge success, and soon reopened in London. It was the fijirst major Diaghilev show since Lifar’s 1939 Paris exhibition, a splendid tribute overshadowed by the gathering clouds of war, and sparked widespread interest in the Ballets Russes. After languishing unseen for years in private collections and artists’ studios, the works gathered by Buckle told the story of a com- pany whose influence had rippled far beyond the realm of ballet. They spoke of adventure and artistic daring, glamor, celebrity, and high style, of an art that pleasured the senses even as it sought new forms. “The glory of Diaghilev and interest in his period and his achievement is on the increase,” Buckle would subsequently write.5) The years that followed The Diaghilev Exhibition witnessed a wave of books about the Ballets Russes, including Buckle’s own, lavishly illustrated catalogue of the show, In Search of Diaghilev. In the early 1960s Fokine, Massine, Lydia Sokolova (alias Hilda Munnings), Ninette de Valois, and Mathilde Kschessinska joined the list of major Ballets Russes memoirists. Recordings of Diaghilev ballets appeared on British television, many in versions staged by Diaghilev’s long-time régisseur Serge Grigoriev and his wife, Lubov Tchernicheva, and coached, in some instances, by members of the original cast. Directed by Antony Asquith (whose mother had been one of Diaghilev’s society enthusiasts), Paul Czinner, Margaret Dale, and Edmée Wood, these recordings, some of which were later released on home video, constitute the single most important repository of Fokine’s early works. Although the choreographer himself had passed away, other members of Diaghilev’s London-based “family” were alive and well, happy to share their memories of Diaghilev with John Drummond, whose splen- did BBC documentary aired in 1968. Buckle’s exhibition had revealed the enormous stock of art works gen- erated by the Ballets Russes. In the late 1960s caches of Ballets Russes costumes began to emerge—fijirst, from Serge Grigoriev’s collection, and 5) Richard Buckle, “Introduction,” Diaghilev Ballet Material: Costumes, Costume Designs and Portraits, Sotheby’s (London), 13 June 1967, p. IV. L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 41 subsequently from a Paris warehouse where virtually the entire stock of Diaghilev costumes as well as drops and curtains had come to rest. They soon found their way to Sotheby’s, where a series of highly publicized sales in 1967 and 1968 demonstrated that there was indeed a market for Diaghilev memorabilia and that this market was rapidly growing. Celebri- ties, fans, and even flower children crowded those fijirst Diaghilev sales where Nijinsky’s costumes for Le Dieu Bleu and Giselle, virtually all of Mat- isse’s costumes for Le Chant du Rossignol, and costumes for numerous other productions could be had for a song. Institutions such as the The- atre Museum (London) came away with major purchases, and individuals with glamorous “retro” or exotic party wear. In 1978-79, when the Metro- politan Museum marked the fijiftieth anniversary of Diaghilev’s death with an exhibition of costumes and designs curated by Diana Vreeland, the Ballets Russes—like ballet itself during those boom years—had become high chic. At the opening night party socialites mingled with former Diag- hilev stars, as Mitsuko perfume, which Guerlain had created for Diaghilev, wafted through the atmosphere.6) The hoopla carried over to the stage. In 1969, Robert Jofffrey, who had fallen passionately in love with the Ballets Russes as a Seattle teenager, produced the fijirst of the more than half-dozen ballets that came to con- stitute his company’s highly regarded Diaghilev repertoire. His goal as a producer was fijidelity to the original, a work that in some cases he knew only by reputation and from books in his fabled library. With one excep- tion (of which more later), these stagings were not reconstructions, but rather revivals of memory-based versions carefully and lovingly set either by the choreographer or someone with an intimate knowledge of the original work. His initial projects all involved Massine, who staged not only Le Tricorne, Parade, and Pulcinella—works unknown in the United States or unseen for decades—but also Fokine’s Petrouchka, in what many consider its most authoritative version. (Petrouchka, with Massine in the title role, was the fijirst ballet in which Jofffrey himself had performed.) In 1979 he added Le Spectre de la Rose and L’Après-midi d’un Faune, thus shifting the focus from Massine to Nijinsky. 6) Manuela Hoelterhofff, “A Potpourri of (Non-Tut) Met Exhibits,” Wall Street Journal, 4 Jan. 1979, p. 12. 42 L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 Although Jofffrey was hardly alone in reviving classics of the Diaghilev repertory, he was one of the very few to add to it. Indeed, without him, Parade would have become another lost ballet. Another hero was the cho- reographer Frederick Ashton, on whose watch as artistic director of the Royal Ballet in the 1960s, Nijinska’s Les Biches and Les Noces returned to active repertory. Ashton (who had danced for her in the Ida Rubinstein company while in his early twenties) not only brought the choreographer to London to stage those ballets but also made sure they were notated. The scores made it possible to revive them after Nijinska’s death in 1972 and above all after the publication nine years later of the choreographer’s Early Memoirs, the last major volume of reminiscence by a Diaghilev-era fijigure. Originally titled My Brother Vaslav Nijinsky, Nijinska’s memoir added to a growing wave of interest in Nijinsky. This was reflected in numerous ways: in books such as Richard Buckle’s new biography of the legendary dancer and Lincoln Kirstein’s Nijinsky Dancing, in theatrical works such as Maurice Béjart’s Nijinsky, Clown of God and fijilms like Nijinsky, which brought the dancer’s life to the silver screen. The gay movement hailed him as a hero, while the Russian superstar defectors Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, graduates of the school that Nijinsky had attended, added the luster of his celebrity to their own, by dancing or producing his works. Although Buckle followed his biography of Nijinsky with one of Diaghilev, the latter failed to recapture the spotlight from Nijinsky. Diag- hilev had always shied from public attention; he had been the man behind the scenes, everywhere but nowhere. Now, he seemed to disappear into his proverbial top hat. The publication of Nijinska’s memoirs, which coincided with the sec- ond wave of feminism, stirred enormous interest in arguably ballet’s great- est female choreographer. Thanks to Ashton’s foresight, Les Noces and Les Biches enjoyed a renaissance, briefly acquiring something akin to reper- tory status. A major exhibition by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco further revealed the breadth of Nijinska’s achievement, her embrace of abstraction in Kiev during the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, her pioneering collaborations with Alexandra Exter and members of her stu- dio, and her early experiments in neoclassicism with Diaghilev. All this prompted a shift in thinking about the genesis of neoclassicism, suggest- ing that it began to crystallize well before the premiere of Apollo in the L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 43 late 1920s. Equally eye-opening was the publication a few years earlier of Yuri Slonimsky’s reminiscence of Balanchine during the years just after the Revolution until he sailed for Western Europe in 1924. Written by the Soviet Union’s leading ballet historian, Slonimsky’s essay revealed the enthusiasms of the budding choreographer—his passion for Fokine and the influence of Kasian Goleizovsky and Fedor Lopukhov, leading avant- garde choreographers working in the ballet medium during the 1920s. These new sources underscored the long-term epistemological conse- quences of the political divide. In 1987 a catalogue raisonné of productions of The Rite of Spring for a Dance Critics Association conference documented forty-four versions of the ballet. Since then the number has quintupled—and the numbers keep growing. Rechoreographing old ballets is hardly a new practice. However, since 1953 when Jerome Robbins reconceived L’Apres-midi d’un Faune (which he renamed Afternoon of a Faun) by setting it in a ballet studio rather than a sylvan grove, the stories have changed along with the cho- reography. Thus, in 1959, on the very eve of the 1960s, Maurice Béjart reconceived The Rite of Spring as a communal fertility rite shorn of ethno- graphic trimmings, while in 1975, at the height of the women’s liberation movement, Pina Bausch shifted the ballet’s focus to emphasize sexual violence and female pain. Increasingly, these new versions bore only a tenuous connection to Nijinsky’s original; many were by modern or post- modern choreographers appropriating the aura of the ballet’s long and controversial history as an icon of modernity. By the end of the decade, too, even the idea of collaboration was being appropriated, as one-time minimalists like Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs began a series of large- scale theatrical productions that enlisted prominent visual artists, com- posers, and musicians. With the Ballets Russes now an elite commodity on the ballet stage and auction block, Diaghilev’s artistic ideas took root among the moderns. 1987 to the Present: Hi�oricity and the End of the Cold War In 1987 Millicent Hodson produced the fijirst of her Diaghilev-era recon- structions, The Rite of Spring. This event signaled the arrival of a new kind of historicism in the fijield of Diaghilev studies. This was evident in the 44 L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 rigor of the books that began to appear with increasing frequency in the years that followed. Written for the most part by scholars trained within the academy as opposed to the critic-fans of an earlier generation, they viewed the Ballets Russes through the lens of contemporary scholarship and within a broad range of cultural contexts. Among this new scholar- ship I would include my own book, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, published in 1989, Joan Acocella’s unexpurgated edition of Nijinsky’s diaries, Peter Ost- wald’s saga of Nijinsky’s years in mental institutions, and Vicente García- Márquez’s biography of Massine—all published in the 1990s. From the music fijield came Richard Taruskin’s magisterial Stravinsky and the Rus- sian Traditions, published in 1996, followed by Stephen Walsh’s biography of the composer, David Nice’s biography of Prokofijiev, and Prokofijiev’s journals—volumes that have transformed how we view the relationship of Diaghilev to his fijirst and second “sons.” John Richardson’s biography of Picasso and Hilary Spurling’s of Matisse make clear the centrality of the Ballets Russes to the visual arts, while Stephanie Jordan has called on us to view the relationship of music and dance in a fresh light. Many of these works are indebted to the opening of formerly closed Soviet archives. In 1982 Ilya Zil’bershtein published a pioneering two- volume collection, Sergei Diagilev i russkoe iskusstvo (Sergei Diaghilev and Russian Art), that suggested the breadth of resources about Diaghilev and his early collaborators that had survived decades of anti-formalist attacks. Glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union opened these archives to foreigners and Russians alike, inspiring a new wave of dance publications that sought to heal the breach between the two Russias—Soviet and émi- gré. The memoirs of Mathilde Kschessinska and Bronislava Nijinska fijinally saw the light of day in their native language, while volumes such as Eliza- beth Souritz’s study of Mikhail Mordkin bridged for the fijirst time both his Russian and his American careers, giving full value to both. A new gen- eration of scholars has arisen, and in Perm, the Urals city where Diaghilev spent his childhood and teenage years, conferences, exhibitions, and pub- lications have explored the man and his legacy. Sjeng Scheijen’s new biog- raphy of Diaghilev not only utilizes sources from three continents, but also conceptualizes its subject in a fully international way. The new historicity has also left its mark on performance. Since Hod- son’s reconstruction of The Rite of Spring in 1987, she and Kenneth Archer have recreated nearly a dozen Diaghilev-era works, including Nijinsky’s L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 45 Jeux and Jean Borlin’s Skating Rink, using sophisticated historical research to resurrect ballets that barely outlived the decade of their creation. Ann Hutchinson Guest’s version of L’Après-midi d’un Faune, based on the score Nijinsky notated while under house arrest in Budapest in 1915, reveals a similar obsession with text-based sources. In Russia, where the anti- formalist campaigns of the 1930s expunged the modernist repertoire of the 1910s and 1920s, a reconstructionist impulse could also be discerned, above all in effforts to introduce works by once-proscribed artists of the modernist diaspora. Thus, long unseen ballets by Fokine and never seen works by Nijinska, Balanchine, and Massine were danced by former Soviet companies, in an avid search to see what had been missed during decades of cultural isolation. In 1979, critic Alastair Macaulay reminisced in the New York Times not long ago, “you could point to a number of Ballets Russes works, either staged that year or in recent repertory.”7) Today, he continues, most of those ballets are all but unknown to dance audiences, and few of the pre- war ones have more than “mere keepsake status.” Changing tastes are partly responsible for this precipitous decline. Who, after all, can take Schéhérazade seriously today? So, too, are declining budgets. To do Les Noces right one needs not only thirty-odd dancers, drilled to perfection, but also a full chorus, four solo singers, four concert pianists, and various percussionists—a huge investment of time and money. In Petrouchka there are dozens of dancers, each with a character that needs rehearsing and a costume that can cost hundreds of dollars, an investment that only generously funded ballet companies can affford. YouTube, iPods, and Wikipedia may have challenged ideas of cultural ownership, but we live in a post-Sonny Bono world policed by trusts and increasingly expansive notions of artistic property. Isabelle Fokine’s decision to take the Fokine estate in hand, imposing very high license fees and appointing herself the sole guardian of her grandfather’s artistic legacy, has had a disastrous efffect on his ballets: they are now seldom danced. Profijit-minded media conglomerates have made it prohibitively expensive—if the rights can be secured at all— to screen treasures produced decades ago for television, often with public monies. If works are not danced, they lapse from the 7) Alastair Macaulay, “Century-Old Revolution in Ballet Still Dazzles,” The New York Times, 8 Feb. 2009, AR1. 46 L. Garafola / Experiment 17 (2011) 31-46 dancer’s muscle memory; if works are not seen, they disappear from the public’s viewing memory. So what will be left of the Diaghilev repertoire twenty-fijive years from now? The composer William Schuman once observed, “It is not an exag- geration, I believe, to claim that the great patron of twentieth-century music has been the art of dance.”8) Although he wrote this about modern dance, it applies with even greater validity to Diaghilev’s musical legacy. Even today when most of the dances that Diaghilev brought into the world have gone, a part of them survives through their music and the art works that both inspired and were inspired by them. This, then, is the tragedy of ballet’s ephemerality: the dance can only be recaptured as an act of imagination. Yet the idea of artists collaborating and making work together, imagining new forms, contemporary images of beauty, and richly expressive ways of moving is the stufff, I believe, of a renewable legacy, one that will engender unknown wonders and keep the legacy of the Ballets Russes, if not its works, alive and well. 8) William Schuman, “Foreword,” Dance Perspectives 16 (Composer/Choreographer), 1963, p. 3. << /ASCII85EncodePages false /AllowTransparency false /AutoPositionEPSFiles true /AutoRotatePages /None /Binding /Left /CalGrayProfile (Dot Gain 20%) /CalRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CalCMYKProfile (U.S. Web Coated \050SWOP\051 v2) /sRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CannotEmbedFontPolicy /Error /CompatibilityLevel 1.3 /CompressObjects /Off /CompressPages true /ConvertImagesToIndexed true /PassThroughJPEGImages true /CreateJDFFile false /CreateJobTicket true /DefaultRenderingIntent /Default /DetectBlends false /ColorConversionStrategy /LeaveColorUnchanged /DoThumbnails false /EmbedAllFonts true /EmbedJobOptions true /DSCReportingLevel 0 /EmitDSCWarnings false /EndPage -1 /ImageMemory 1048576 /LockDistillerParams true /MaxSubsetPct 100 /Optimize false /OPM 1 /ParseDSCComments true /ParseDSCCommentsForDocInfo true /PreserveCopyPage true /PreserveEPSInfo true /PreserveHalftoneInfo false /PreserveOPIComments false /PreserveOverprintSettings true /StartPage 1 /SubsetFonts false /TransferFunctionInfo /Apply /UCRandBGInfo /Remove /UsePrologue false /ColorSettingsFile (None) /AlwaysEmbed [ true ] /NeverEmbed [ true ] /AntiAliasColorImages false /DownsampleColorImages true /ColorImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /ColorImageResolution 300 /ColorImageDepth -1 /ColorImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeColorImages true /ColorImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterColorImages true /ColorImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /ColorACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /ColorImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000ColorACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000ColorImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasGrayImages false /DownsampleGrayImages true /GrayImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /GrayImageResolution 300 /GrayImageDepth -1 /GrayImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeGrayImages true /GrayImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterGrayImages true /GrayImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /GrayACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /GrayImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000GrayACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000GrayImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasMonoImages false /DownsampleMonoImages true /MonoImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /MonoImageResolution 2400 /MonoImageDepth -1 /MonoImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeMonoImages true /MonoImageFilter /CCITTFaxEncode /MonoImageDict << /K -1 >> /AllowPSXObjects false /PDFX1aCheck false /PDFX3Check false /PDFXCompliantPDFOnly false /PDFXNoTrimBoxError false /PDFXTrimBoxToMediaBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXSetBleedBoxToMediaBox false /PDFXBleedBoxToTrimBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfile (GWG_GenericCMYK) /PDFXOutputCondition () /PDFXRegistryName () /PDFXTrapped /False /DetectCurves 0.000000 /EmbedOpenType false /ParseICCProfilesInComments true /PreserveDICMYKValues true /PreserveFlatness true /CropColorImages true /ColorImageMinResolution 150 /ColorImageMinResolutionPolicy /Warning /ColorImageMinDownsampleDepth 1 /CropGrayImages true /GrayImageMinResolution 150 /GrayImageMinResolutionPolicy /Warning /GrayImageMinDownsampleDepth 2 /CropMonoImages true /MonoImageMinResolution 550 /MonoImageMinResolutionPolicy /Warning /CheckCompliance [ /PDFX1a:2001 ] /PDFXOutputConditionIdentifier () /Description << /CHS /CHT /DAN /DEU /ESP /FRA /ITA /JPN /KOR /NLD (Gebruik deze instellingen om Adobe PDF-documenten te maken die zijn geoptimaliseerd voor prepress-afdrukken van hoge kwaliteit. 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In Paris, he studied painting and architecture, and worked as a professional illustrator. He can also be linked with a circle of artist-travellers, who searched for new sources of inspiration in the Orient. In 1879 and 1881, Sandoz travelled in Algeria. He described his impressions from the first journey in vividly written memoires published by the Krakow journal Czas. His travels inspired several genre paintings, including: Interior of a House in Biskra, Dancer from the Uled Nail Tribe, Arab Woman by a Cradle, Morning in the Sahara, Evening in the Sahara, Oasis, On the Oued Riverbank at El Kantara Oasis, and Sheik Mistress of El Kantara. At present, his works emerge at art auctions, are known from reproductions, or only from descriptions. Sandoz exhibited in Paris, Warsaw, Krakow, and Lviv, where he was appreciated by art critics. The aim of this article is to introduce Sandoz’s journey to Algeria, analyse his paintings with exotic subject matter, and locate them within a wider context of orientalist painting. It will also present the history of artistic travel to Algeria undertaken by 19th-century painters, including those from Poland. Contents Introduction Painters in Algeria in the 19th century Polish painters in Algeria in the 19th and early 20th century Adolf Sandoz's travels to Algeria Adolf Sandoz's paintings from Algeria Adolf Sandoz's work from Algeria and orientalist painting of the second half of the 19th century Introduction [1] In the early 1880s, critics visiting exhibitions in Krakow, Lviv, and Warsaw noted with interest works presenting scenes from the life of inhabitants of North Africa. These seemed interesting both for their subject matter, as well as for their form. Curiosity was also raised by their author, Adolf Karol Sandoz (Fig. 1), a RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 promising young artist, about whom it was said in Poland that he was equally talented as a painter, an architect, and a musician.1 The paintings exhibited were results of Sandoz's recent travels to Algeria. The painter achieved additional publicity for his works by publishing descriptions of them as well as excerpts of his vividly written travel journals, in which he insisted that his journey to Africa was "a magical journey to the land of sun and colours […] which outran anything I could have imagined. It seems to me those were the most beautiful days of my life".2 1 Photograph of Adolf Sandoz (b. 1845), 4th quarter of the 19th century (reprod. from: Emmanuel Swieykowski, Pamiętnik Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie 1854–1904, Kraków 1905) [2] At present, Sandoz's oriental works are in private collections and are known only from reproductions or descriptions, for which reason their author is rarely included in studies on Polish and European orientalist painting. The aim of this text is to present the history of the discovery of Algeria by painters and to introduce Sandoz's journey, to conduct analysis of his paintings with exotic subject matter 1 Adolf Sandoz (b. 1845) came from Podolia and was educated in Switzerland. Later, he went to Paris, where, since 1866, he studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris. His graduation work involved a project of the building of the Academy of Sciences in Paris. He also studied painting under the supervision of Jules Élie Delaunay and Puvis de Chavannes. He travelled around Germany, Austria, and Italy. Finally, he settled in Paris, where he worked as an illustrator. Cf. "Adolf Karol Sandoz", in: Polski Słownik Biograficzny, Wrocław, Warszawa and Kraków 1993, vol. 34, n. 142, 462. 2 "Z listów Adolfa Sandoza", in: Czas 271 (1880), 1. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 and confront them with works by other orientalist artists, and, finally, to locate Sandoz's works in the wider context of orientalist painting in the second half of the 19th century. Painters in Algeria in the 19th century [3] Until 1830, for Europeans Algeria was an overseas land full of mysteries and fairy-tales. It was “discovered” only after the conquest by the king of France, Charles X. This event opened it for painters seeking exotic inspirations. The very first military excursions were accompanied by artists. A team of draughtsmen was commissioned to create records of the conquest, depict the topography of the land, the movements and clashes between the two armies as well as portraits of the commanders. The group of draughtsmen-chroniclers included: Théodore Jung, Gaspard Gobaut, Pierre Julien Gilbert, Jean Antoine Théodore Gudin, Antoine Léon Morel-Fatio, and Eugène Isabey.3 In 1839, the painter Adrien Dauzats followed the army of the Prince Ferdinand-Philippe d’Orleans to Algeria. The goal of this excursion was to pacify the province of Constantine, while its route went from Oran to Algiers. Artistic results of this journey included Dauzats' watercolours of the army's passage through a mountain pass called the Iron Gates. The artist displayed his works from Algeria in 1841 at the Paris Salon. They also illustrated the Journal de l’expédition des Portes de Fer by Charles Nodier, who also accompanied the expedition.4 [4] Dramatic war events in Algeria became an impulse for presenting contemporary history in a sublime form. The conquest of North Africa became one of the leading propaganda motifs used by King Louis Philippe I. The ruler engaged famous artists to produce a series of battle scenes from French history intended for display at Versailles. Pictures of the struggle in Africa adorned the Room of Constantine. They were made by Horace Vernet, who visited Algeria in 1833, 1837, and also later in the 1850s. An important moment in the campaign in Algeria, which broke resistance, came with the Prince d'Aumale's capture of the French's vehement opponent Abd al-Qadir. This event was depicted by Vernet in a gigantic, over twenty metres large canvas. Battle scenes from the conquest of Algeria also featured in works by French painters of the early 20th century (Denis Auguste Raffet, Hippolyte Bellangé, Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux, Alphonse Chigot, Jules Monge, Édouard Detaille).5 3 Élisabeth Cazenave, Les artistes de l'Algérie. Dictionnaire des peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, 1830–1962, Paris 2001, 16-20; Marion Vidal-Bué, ed., Les peintres de l'autre rive. Alger 1830-1930, ex. cat., Marseille 2003, 8; Marion Vidal-Bué, L'Algérie des peintres. 1830–1960, Paris 2002, 19. 4 Gérard-Georges Lemaire, The Orient in Western Art, Paris 2008, 156; Lynne Thornton, The Orientalists. Painter-Travellers, Paris 1994, 55; Vidal-Bué, L'Algérie des peintres, 20. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 [5] For artists, Algeria became a new territory of exotic exploration, an oriental land filled with mystery and mysticism as well as a repository of irrational wisdom and reconciled contradictions. Such image of the Orient can explain the painters' interest in Islam and Muslim religious rituals – prayers, pilgrimages to Mecca etc. The Orient is also a space located as if beyond the real world, outside moral norms. Hence, on the other hand, the artists' fascination with the vast desert landscape, as well as their frequent depictions of harems, invested with eroticism and violence. The East is also a space for a cognitive journey, an element of cultural education, a stage in an artistic journey – yet another step made by painters after visiting classical Italy. The East is a synonym of internal experience, a space of exploration of unknown aspects of the human psyche and its dark side. Those explorations were facilitated by “eastern poisons” – opium and hashish – offering new sensations and experiences. The East stands also for picturesque decadence, “a sinking world”, for such negative reading can be found in compositions featuring declining ruins of ancient civilisations, scenes of the slave trade or slaughter. Artists presenting battle scenes from the history of oriental countries tended to see the East as a picturesque stage of wars and political struggles, a background for romantic epic.6 An encounter with the Orient – opening up a variety of thematic possibilities – pushed artists to take up formal experiments. [6] In the first half of the 19th century, Algeria was visited by several major Romantic painters – Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Chassériau, and Eugène Fromentin. Their works and memoirs popularised the image of Algeria as a land full of fairy-tale harems, sun-scorched landscapes, and oriental horsemen. In the years to follow, Algeria was visited by a vast number of orientalist painters who represented a variety of tendencies, including the Romantics, Realists, as well as Impressionists. Artists were attracted by the remnants of ancient cultures, picturesque cityscapes, phenomenal desert landscapes, intense light and saturated colours, as well as the inhabitants of Algeria, their clothing, daily life, and customs. French artists dominated this group, to mention such figures as Théodore Frère, Charles de Tournemine, Fabius Brest, Georges Washington, Narcisse Berchère, Charles Landelle, Paul Leroy, Auguste Renoir, and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Travelling to Algeria was made possible by scholarship programmes; this kind of support, received in 1884, brought to Algeria Étienne Dinet, to give one example.7 Apart from the French, Algeria was also visited by English artists (William Wyld, Barbara Bodichon, Frederick Leighton, Arthur Melville), Americans 5 Cazenave, Les artistes de l'Algérie, 20-22, 24; Christine Peltre, Orientalism in Art, New York 1998, 55, 58; Vidal-Bué, L'Algérie des peintres, 22. 6 Maria Piwińska, "Orientalizm", in: Słownik literatury polskiej XIX wieku, ed. Józef Bachórz and Alina Kowalczykowa, Wrocław 1991, 655-657. 7 Cazenave, Les artistes de l'Algérie, 34. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 (Frederick Arthur Bridgman, Addison Thomas Millar, Edwin Lord Week), often students of the French masters fascinated with travelling and oriental subject matter (Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, Gustave Boulanger), as well as Germans, Belgians, Swiss, and Italians.8 [7] From a land untouched by Western civilisation Algeria soon changed in many locations into a resort, where winter months could be comfortably passed in a mild climate. Tourists from all around Europe came to the ports in Philippeville (today Skikda), Bougie (today Béjaïa) and Bône (today Annaba) to take horses and then the train to Biskra. There, hotels offered Western standards as well as restaurants, cafes, and even casinos, often erected and decorated in Mauritanian style. The most important tourist attractions were described in guides to Africa and travel journals, for instance Lady Herbert's L’Algérie contemporaine illustrée (1881) or Albert S. Gubb's From Cloud to Sunshine. Notes on Algiers and Algeria as a Winter Resort (1920s). Many painters coming to Algeria spent their time in luxurious conditions; for instance Charles Landelle and Paul Leroy lived in a villa in Biskra and organised trips to nearby oases.9 Algeria saw the rapid emergence of a local art scene. In the 1830s, first painting exhibitions were organised, and in 1881, the first university-level art school was opened.10 [8] An approach slightly different from that of painters who came as tourists was manifested by Realists, who sought a faithful depiction of the life of the local inhabitants of Algeria and encounters with an authentic culture barely touched by colonisation. For this purpose, they often travelled to the south of the country. This group included painters such as Gustave Guillaumet, Paul Delamain, Adolf Schreyer, Henri Rousseau, Félix Ziem, and Étienne Dinet.11 An important example is Guillaumet who first travelled to Algeria in 1862 to go back for nine or ten more times. In the 1860s, he exhibited in Paris desert landscapes full of colour contrasts and chiaroscuro effects as, e. g., Evening Prayer in the Sahara (1863) and The Desert (1867). In the 1870s, by travelling to Algeria, Guillaumet attempted to escape Western civilisation – he travelled to the most remote places and was interested in locations such as Bou-Saâda (today Bu Sa’ada), El Kantara or Laghouat (today Al-Aghwat). At the time, he started painting naturalist scenes with women carrying water, horsemen, camels, wild dogs, etc.12 Guillaumet recorded his memories from Algeria in a series of texts entitled “Tableaux algériens”, published in La Nouvelle Revue (1879–1884).13 8 Vidal-Bué, Les peintres de l'autre rive, 12; Vidal-Bué, L'Algérie des peintres, 14. 9 Villebrun, L'appel du désert, 48-57. 10 Vidal-Bué, Les peintres de l'autre rive, 11. 11 Vidal-Bué, L'Algérie des peintres, 12. 12 Thornton, The Orientalists. Painter-Travellers, 108-109. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 [9] However, an artist who tied his life most closely to Algeria, its inhabitants, culture and religion, was Étienne Dinet. He visited Algeria for the first time in 1884. Eventually, in 1904, after several travels, he settled permanently in the Bou- Saâda oasis. He had learnt Arabic some time earlier, and in 1913 he became a Muslim. In 1929, he made a pilgrimage to Mecca and received the name of Hadj Nasr Ed Dine Dini. At the same time, he was an active member of the art scene of Paris and Algeria. His paintings reveal his fascination with intense light and Africa's vivid colours. His thorough knowledge of the country helped him capture moments of happiness, sadness and reverie of the inhabitants of Algeria. Dinet published also several books illustrated with his work, including Antar (1898), Mirages (1906), El Fiafi Oua el Kifar, ou Le désert (1911).14 Polish painters in Algeria in the 19th and early 20th century [10] The first Polish artist-travellers came to Algeria as late as the second half of the 19th century. Before that time, echoes of the conquest of Algeria could be found in works by Polish artists such as January Suchodolski (Poles in the French Foreign Legion in Algiers Reading a Letter from their Homeland, 1835) and Piotr Michałowski (Clash between French Infantry and Arab Cavalry – Episode from the War in Algeria, 1844–1845).15 Perhaps under the influence of a journey to Algeria, the amateur painter Karol Cybulski made his Morning in Algeria and Evening in Algeria, exhibited in 1858 at the Krakow Society of Friends of Fine Arts.16 Another Polish painter-traveller emerges as late as twenty years later. In 1878, Walery Brochocki, who had arrived in Paris a year earlier, went to Algeria, where, commissioned by the Society for Colonisation, he was to paint panoramas. 17 This journey resulted in a painting titled View from Tipaza in Africa.18 Perhaps it is identical with a landscape reproduced in a publication on the climate of Algeria in 1877.19 13 Villebrun, L'appel du désert, 42-45; Thornton, The Orientalists. Painter-Travellers, 108- 109; De Delacroix à Renoir. L'Algérie des peintres, ed. Stéphane Guégan, exh. cat., Paris 2003, 181-185. 14 Denise Brahimi and Koudir Benchikou, Étienne Dinet, Paris 1984. 15 Orientalizm w malarstwie, rysunku i grafice w Polsce w XIX i 1. połowie XX wieku, eds. Anna Kozak and Tadeusz Majda, exh. cat., Warsaw 2008, 316, 317, 373. 16 Swieykowski, Pamiętnik Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie 1854-1904, Kraków 1905, 23. 17 Janusz Derwojed, "Walery Brochocki", in: Słownik artystów polskich i obcych w Polsce działających, vol. 2, Wrocław 1975, 236-237. 18 Swieykowski, Pamiętnik Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie 1854–1904, 17. 19 Edward Landowski, L’Algérie au point de vue climato-thérapique dans les affections consomptives, Paris 1877, 69, 70. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 [11] A painter from Warsaw, Julian Maszyński, spent the turn of the year 1882 and 1883 in Algeria.20 After his return, he exhibited works with oriental subject matter, such as: Lion/Marabou, Final News, Animal Dealer in Algiers, Arab Woman, Praying Arab, Algerian Shoemaker, and Street in Algiers. His Lion/Marabou was particularly well received.21 For this painting, Maszyński received the second prize in a competition organised by the Society of Friends of Fine Arts. The work was reproduced in Tygodnik Ilustrowany and accompanied by Maszyński's commentary where he discussed the significance of lions, venerated in Algeria, and marabous, that is, scholars of Quran capable of taming lions.22 [12] Around 1890, Algeria was visited by the painter and sculptor Wincenty Trojanowski. This journey resulted in paintings exhibited at the Krakow Society of Friends of Fine Arts in 1891 (Arab Girl, Arab Street in Algiers) and 1892 (Inside a Seraglio, In the Desert)23 and at the Warsaw Society of Friends of Fine Arts in 1891 (Arab) and 1892 (Dervish).24 Oriental subject matter featured also in Trojanowski's sculptures. In 1895, Trojanowski exhibited in Krakow his Praying Dervish and Oriental Type, while his bust of a Dervish was shown at the Warsaw Zachęta the previous year.25 [13] In 1892, Wacław Pawliszak visited Algeria during his grand oriental tour. Yet his route is not known in details. Few pieces of information in the press suggest that in October that year "Pawliszak, who left for Algiers several weeks ago, is now working there on landscapes of the areas around Oran, Constantine, and Blida". 26 A month later he was already in Morocco.27 Algeria has possibly inspired works such as From Algiers and In the Desert.28 [14] In the early 20th century, Algeria was visited by Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski. Remarks in the press suggest that on February 19, 1903 the painter "left for Africa 20 “Wiadomości bieżące”, in: Kurier Warszawski 138b (1883), 3. 21 Janina Wiercińska, Katalog prac wystawionych w Towarzystwie Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie w latach 1860–1914, Wrocław 1969, 223-225. 22 Juliusz Maszyński, "Lew Marabut", in: Wędrowiec 13 (1885), 149-152. 23 Swieykowski, Pamiętnik Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie 1854–1904, 168, 169. 24 Wiercińska, Katalog prac wystawionych w Towarzystwie Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie w latach 1860–1914, 385. 25 Swieykowski, Pamiętnik Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie 1854–1904, 221; Wiercińska, Katalog prac wystawionych w Towarzystwie Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie w latach 1860–1914, 385. 26 "Silva Rerum", in: Tygodnik Ilustrowany 148 (1892), 287. 27 "Silva Rerum", in: Tygodnik Ilustrowany 152 (1892), 351. 28 Joanna Białynicka-Birula, "Wacław Pawliszak", in: Słownik artystów polskich i obcych w Polsce działających, vol. 6, Warsaw 1998, 446. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 for a long time". Yet his journey did not take long, for on April 11 the Kurier Warszawski reported that the painter had come back to Warsaw.29 Only several years after his travels, exhibitions in Munich, Warsaw and Krakow included Kowalski-Wierusz's paintings with oriental subject matter, ex. g. Street Scene at the El-Wad Oasis in the Sahara (displayed in 1909 at the Glaspalast in Munich), By a Well in the Atlas Mountains. Algiers and Hunting with Falcons. Algiers (displayed in 1908 in Warsaw and Krakow).30 [15] Algeria was also extensively explored by the St. Petersburg-based painter and avid traveller Jan Ciągliński. In 1909, he travelled in the Sahara desert and visited Biskra, among other places. His works from this journey are kept in the National Museum in Krakow.31 This long, yet incomplete list of Polish travelling artists is closed by Adam Styka, who in 1911, during his studies in Paris, went to Algiers and Tunis. Thanks to this journey, he painted Orientalist, a work with which he debuted at the Salon. In the years to follow, Styka specialised in oriental scenes, which he exhibited at the Paris Salons and at exhibitions of the Society of Orientalist Painters in Paris. He received a scholarship that allowed him further travels in North Africa.32 Adolf Sandoz's travels to Algeria [16] Detailed information about Adolf Sandoz's first journey to Algeria can be found in excerpts from his letters published in the Krakow-based magazine Czas. Most probably, those were memoirs rather than letters, which Sandoz edited into letter form. Sandoz presents his impressions from his travels with much literary talent and expression. For that reason, the Polish artist can be counted among orientalist painters who were also skilled writers. Apart from the already mentioned Fromentin (who published Un été dans le Sahara, 1856 and Une année dans le Sahel, 1858), Guillaumet and Dinet, this group included also Narcisse Berchère (Le Désert de Suez, 1863) and Frederick Arthur Bridgman (Winters in Algeria, 1890).33 29 Eliza Ptaszyńska, Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski, 1849-1915, Warsaw 2011, 163, 164. 30 Ptaszyńska, Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski, 165; Wiercińska, Katalog prac wystawionych w Towarzystwie Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie w latach 1860-1914, 171; Sprawozdanie Dyrekcyi Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie z czynności za rok 1908, Kraków 1909, 13. 31 Kozak and Majda, Orientalizm w malarstwie, rysunku i grafice w Polsce w XIX i 1. połowie XX wieku, 149, 150. 32 Kozak and Majda, Orientalizm w malarstwie, rysunku i grafice w Polsce w XIX i 1. połowie XX wieku, 218. 33 Villebrun, L'appel du désert, 42. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 [17] Sandoz departed from Paris in the evening of February 27, 1879, arriving in Marseilles the following day. The same day he boarded a ship destined for Philippeville. His trip was uneventful and lasted only one day and two nights. On March 2, Sandoz put his feet on the African soil. He took a train from Philippeville to Constantine. Next, he took a horse carriage to Balha. This part of the trip took fourteen hours and was particularly tiring. The route took him across hilly terrain, at that time of the year still covered with snow, which the artist recorded with much surprise. Still travelling with the postal carriage, he went from Balha towards El Kantara gorge. Only then he saw the face of Africa that he expected and admired: "shadow-casting palm trees, gigantic cacti, and blooming fig trees". He encountered inhabitants of an oasis, who threw flowers into his carriage, and he noted Arab women, who glanced curiously at the travellers. Sandoz wrote: "I forgot about my fatigue, about four sleepless nights, for my soul was filled with delight at this sight".34 [18] He reached Biskra, his destination, on March 8. He stayed there for two months. Biskra was an oasis particularly often visited by artists. The town had a French regiment, whose officers eagerly hosted painters. The list of painters who worked there includes Fromentin, Gustave Guillaumet, Charles Landelle, Leroy, Maurice Bompard, Henri Matisse, and Maurice Denis. After the construction of train lines in 1889, Biskra became an European-style tourist location, providing a convenient starting point for tourists visiting the Sahara desert. Sandoz spent all his days in Biskra, painting in plain-air. He took with him a young black servant named Ahmed.35 He favoured painting in an old Turkish fort called Old Biskra. This place was also a favourite among other artists (e.g. Frederick Leighton, Gabriel Ferrier).36 [19] Sandoz made a horse trip from Biskra to the oases of Ziban accompanying a caravan. He had a chance to visit the oases of Lichana, Zatscha, Foughala, El Abadia, El Bordj, Sheima and Sidi Okba. Those excursions offered him new experiences. He learnt new customs and experienced living in a tent. On the way back, his caravan was hit by a sand storm, a so-called samum. It made a great impression on the painter, who described his experience as follows: Suddenly, it gets dark, the sand makes it impossible to see further than two steps ahead, one is blinded, the eyes are filled with sand […]. The hair and clothes are filled with sand. One has to lie down on the sand and is unable to find one‘s companions, the only thing left is to trust your horse will find the way.37 34 "Z listów Adolfa Sandoza", in: Czas 271 (1880), 1. 35 "Z listów Adolfa Sandoza", in: Czas 271 (1880), 1. 36 Vidal-Bué, L'Algérie du Sud et ses peintres. 1830-1960, Paris 2002, 67-75; Villebrun, L'appel du désert, 57-59. 37 "Z listów Adolfa Sandoza", in: Czas 271 (1880), 1. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 Sandoz noted also powerful emotional sensations. He was fascinated with the variety of landscape, clothing, and people's physiognomy. He wrote: Each step you take in the wilderness or in an oasis, a new view occurs, always poetic, sometimes even varied: types, people, clothing, animals, tents, buildings – everything is characteristic, everything attracts the painter's brush and calls to his imagination so to speak.38 The painter admired the intensity of light in Africa. He wrote that "the wonderful daylight in the sky with no single cloud" made him exclaim: "What a country! This is paradise for painters". The artist's attention was captured especially by the Arabs' attires. Men wore white burnous and turbans, while women wore draped fabrics in blue or white-red, fastened with pins. There were belts in bright colours around their waists, while married women would have woollen braids on their heads, in black, red, and blue. The painter was also interested in the clothing, jewellery, and make-up of women from the Zuled tribe. He wrote about it: "I have just started several sketches, but how should I describe all those gauds, jewels, embroideries, and those tattooed and red painted faces, hands painted with ochre and nails covered in colourful varnish".39 [20] Sandoz left Biskra on May 3. On his way, he stopped in Constantine, where he did not paint, but followed his other passion – playing the violin. Because of bad weather, his return voyage across the Mediterranean took a week; the ship had to stop in Sardinia.40 [21] After his first journey to Algeria, the painter grew a passion for travelling, and in the first weeks of 1881 he departed for Africa again. He stayed longer at the El Kantara oasis, called the gate to the desert. He was hosted by a local sheik. 41 The precipitous slopes of the gorge where the oasis is located and the picturesque river banks covered with oriental vegetation attracted numerous artists in the 19th century. El Kantara was visited and portrayed by Leroy, Guillaumet, Washington, Karl Girardet, Landelle, Bridgman and others.42 Unfortunately, Sandoz did not leave any records of this journey that could provide an interesting commentary on his work. 38 "Z listów Adolfa Sandoza", in: Czas 271 (1880), 1. 39 "Z listów Adolfa Sandoza", in: Czas 271 (1880), 1. 40 "Z listów Adolfa Sandoza", in: Czas 271 (1880), 1. 41 "Kronika", in: Gazeta lwowska 207 (1881), 3. 42 Vidal-Bué, L'Algérie du Sud et ses peintres, 57-64. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 Adolf Sandoz's paintings from Algeria [22] Sandoz presented works featuring Algeria in Poland in 1880. At the Lviv Society of Friends of Fine Arts he presented Interior of a House in Biskra (also known as Interior of a Saharan Hut; Fig. 4)43 and Dancer from the Uled Nail Tribe. The former had already been exhibited at the Paris Salon the same year.44 At the Krakow Society of Friends of Fine Arts Sandoz made his debut with these paintings as well as with Arab Woman by a Cradle (Fig. 5), Morning in the Sahara and Evening in the Sahara.45 The two latter works were also exhibited a year later at the Warsaw Krywult's Salon.46 Interior of a House in Biskra (Fig. 4) and Dancer from the Uled Nail Tribe were also presented to the Warsaw public in 1880 at Ungier's Salon.47 Sandoz displayed artistic results of his second exotic excursion in the following year at the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Lviv and in Krakow. The public could see: On the Oued Riverbank at El Kantara Oasis (Fig. 6), Sheik Mistress of El Kantara (Fig. 2), Spinner on a Terrace, Highlander Woman from Auris.48 Sandoz came back to Krakow's Society of Friends of Fine Arts in 1883 when he presented Caravan of Camels in the Sahara (Fig. 7).49 At the Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Lviv in 1913 he showed his work The Saharan Woman. This painting was probably Arab Woman by a Cradle (Fig. 5).50 Apart from the works displayed in Poland, well-known are also other works by Sandoz with Algerian subject matter, such as Oasis (1879) and Arab Woman from El Kantara (1881; Fig. 3). 43 Property of the Lviv Gallery of Art. 44 Explication des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravure, et lithographie des artistes vivants, Paris 1880, 338. 45 Swieykowski, Pamiętnik Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie 1854–1904, 139; Gazeta lwowska 207 (1881), 3. 46 Swieykowski, Pamiętnik Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie 1854-1904, 139. 47 Treść obrazów Adolfa Sandoza podolanina z podróży artystycznej po Afryce, odbytej w r. 1879. Wystawione w Salonie Szt. Piękn. J. Ungra w Warszawie, Warsaw 1880. 48 Swieykowski, Pamiętnik Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie 1854–1904, 139. 49 Swieykowski, Pamiętnik Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie 1854–1904, 139. 50 Katalog wystawy sztuki współczesnej, Lwów 1913, 16. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 2 Adolf Sandoz, Sheik Mistress of El Kantara, 1881 (reprod. from Tygodnik Ilustrowany 41 [1913], 805) 3 Adolf Sandoz, Arab Woman from El Kantara, 1881 (reprod. from Tygodnik Ilustrowany 41 [1913], 805) RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 4 Adolf Sandoz, Interior of a House in Biskra, 1879 (reprod. from: Tygodnik Ilustrowany 41 [1913], 805) [23] A closer look at Sandoz's paintings of Algeria reveals that he chose several popular motifs present also in the works of other painter-travellers fascinated with North Africa. He described Interior of a House in Biskra (Fig. 4), presented in Paris and later also in Poland, in the following fashion: The painting shows an interior of a house painted from nature, a room supported by four columns roughly hewn from palm trees, resembling with its structure a Roman atrium. It is a common room that serves as a kitchen, a room for work, as well as for hosting guests. Several low doors lead to other parts of the building. The light falls through an opening in the ceiling […]. This allows for the smoke to escape, which makes the ceiling black with soot. The room is occupied by an Arab family: the man is idle, slumbering, sits leaning on one of the pillars in a white burnous that covers him completely. Deeper inside, next the chimney three women are seated, one of them spinning wool, another killing flies with a palm, the third idle. Another woman standing in the centre of the painting is also spinning. In the foreground, a small girl is playing with black goats.51 The interior of an Arab house, apart from being an interesting topic for genre painting, offered a possibility of producing intriguing formal effects. The artist contrasted the shadow-cast interior with flickers of light falling through the opening in the roof. Thus he emphasised colours and details of the Arab clothing. Other orientalist painters also took up the subject matter of Algerian interiors. Bridgman painted an Interior in Biskra (1881), while Landalle a Scene from Arabs' Life – Weavers in Biskra (1891). However, closest to Sandoz's work, both in terms of form as well as subject matter, are paintings by Guillaumet included in the 51 Treść obrazów Adolfa Sandoza podolanina z podróży artystycznej po Afryce, 3-4. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 collection of the Musée d’Orsay among others, depicting scenes inside a house at Bou Saâda or Biskra. They contain the same amount of realism and intimacy captured by the artist in situ. [24] Sandoz also chose a quiet interior of an Arab home as a scene for his Arab Woman by a Cradle (Saharan Woman). This work is known from a reproduction in an exhibition catalogue from 1913 (Fig. 5).52 A young woman is sitting on carpets spread on the floor, dressed in an attire typical for people of the region, one that Sandoz took such liking to – a draped vesture fastened with pins. As a married woman she wears braids made of wool covered with a light veil, while her picturesque clothes are complemented with jewellery. The Arab woman is nursing a child sleeping in a cradle suspended from the ceiling. Sandoz addressed here the always popular subject of motherhood, originating from the iconography of the Virgin Mary, as well as Saint Anne, translated however into Oriental reality. The topic of motherhood was also addressed by orientalist painters such as Chassériau, Jean-Baptiste Huysmans, Leroy and Landelle.53 A figure of a seated Algerian girl in traditional clothing, looking ahead in a melancholy pose, can be found in Louis Ernest Barrias' sculpture adorning Guillaumet's tomb at Montparnasse cemetery. 5 Adolf Sandoz, Arab Woman by a Cradle, 1879 (reprod. from: Katalog wystawy sztuki współczesnej, Lviv 1913, 16) 52 Katalog wystawy sztuki współczesnej, Lwów 1913, 16. 53 Vidal-Bué, L'Algérie des peintres, 47-48. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 [25] During his first journey to Algeria Sandoz made a painting titled Dancer from the Uled Nail tribe. At present, neither the location nor reproduction of this work are known. Therefore, its form and content need to be deduced from a description in the catalogue of Unger's Salon: Judging from the dancer, women from that tribe are characterised by richness of costume and beauty. The painting shows one of them dancing on an oriental carpet. Her open arms hold the folds of a white dress with small fingers. A large turban on her head, with a long haik or veil, reaching her feet, gold chains cover the headpiece made of plaits of red and blue wool. Her coral necklace has silver adornments, clasps and earrings are also silver, of significant size. The dancer's face is typically Arabic, white with distinct deep-set eyes and painted eyelashes and brows. In the background, on her left-hand side, there is a group of musicians, on the right, an Arab man smoking tobacco and two women, one of whom is playing with a gazelle, another is daydreaming leaning on a red curtain which covers the room from sunlight that pierces it and gives it the colour of flames […] The depicted dance is characterised by a distinct movement of the figure who moves barefoot on the carpet as if she was sliding on the floor.54 The scene was depicted in the Sidi Okba oasis. Women from the Ouled Naïl tribe came from the south of the country and often worked as dancers and prostitutes. While staying in larger cities they lived in specially reserved districts or streets. After making money for a dowry, they returned to their native region, where they enjoyed respect and got married. European artists viewed them as biblical courtesans, embodiment of oriental voluptuous beauty and eastern sensuality. Painters created images of the Ouled Naïl dancers resembling fantastic opera singers (Georges Clairin), they showed them swirling in dance (Rousseau, Jules van Biesbroeck) or dancing during the Feast of the Night, m’bita (Etienne Dinet, Maurice Potter), or they painted their portraits emphasising their large, dark eyes and sumptuous jewellery (Landelle, Eugène Deshayes).55 [26] Sandoz's paintings Morning in the Sahara and Evening in the Sahara were described as "two small and modest views of African nature, which nevertheless attracted popular attention".56 The press noted that: In the morning, a group of Arab nomads is making its meal, before they move on with their journey, while the smoke rises vertically upwards, proving complete calmness of the air. The smoke is so light that it seems it would float away any 54 Treść obrazów Adolfa Sandoza podolanina z podróży artystycznej po Afryce, 6-7. 55 Vidal-Bué, L'Algérie des peintres, 34, 35, 36; Villebrun, L'appel du désert, 60, 62; Vidal- Bué, L'Algérie du Sud et ses peintres, 46-51. 56 "Przegląd sztuk pięknych", in: Tygodnik Ilustrowany 304 (1881), 271. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 minute, disperse, and reveal again a distinct shape of the rocks that close the horizon.57 This painting is most probably a work described at a more recent antiquities’ auction under the incorrect title Prayer at Sunset (1880).58 For the pendant of the Morning in the Sahara, though, the lost painting entitled Evening in the Sahara, researchers must rely exclusively on its description. The Tygodnik Ilustrowany wrote: In the evening, wild goats are grazing among the green plants of the oasis, with sun-scorched rocks around them, with colours and nature resembling the others. Here and there, the sky stretching above them with no sign of clouds, ruthless, somewhat dim, seemingly panting with heat and bearing distinct characteristics of tropical zones.59 Morning in the Sahara shows more than a camp of Arabs preparing a meal. The group of Muslims in the foreground is occupied with morning prayer. Behind them, there is a tent, with more groups of nomads in the distance, camels, and horses. A mountain landscape is in the background. The painter divided the composition into two contrasting zones. The bottom one is dominated by dim grey and beige juxtaposed with intense blue, pink, and orange of the morning light cast onto the mountains. The topic of Muslim prayers, mystical concentration, and contact with the absolute fascinated the majority of orientalist painters. Among those interested in Algeria it was taken up by Bompard, Dinet and van Biesbroeck, among others. Nineteenth century artists depicted prayers in mosques or on the roofs of houses, yet scenes of prayer in the remote desert brought a more powerful message, for they allowed for a juxtaposition of religious focus with the absolute of nature while playing on the effusion of colours of the sunrise and sunset. Apart from Sandoz, prayers in the desert in Algeria were painted by Guillaumet (Evening Prayer in the Sahara, 1863) and Girardet (Prayer in the Desert).60 [27] Sandoz's impressions from his second stay in Algeria at the El Kantara oasis found their expression in the painting On the Oued Riverbank at El Kantara Oasis, known from a reproduction (Fig. 6). 57 "Przegląd sztuk pięknych", in:Tygodnik Ilustrowany 304 (1881), 271. 58 http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot/adolf-karol-sandoz-prayer-at-sunset-outside- 4881964-details.aspx?from=searchresults&pos=3&intObjectID=4881964&sid=01745513- cffb-4159-b9f9-28052fccc4dc (accessed 10 April 2015). 59 "Przegląd sztuk pięknych", in: Tygodnik Ilustrowany 304 (1881), 271. 60 Vidal-Bué, L'Algérie du Sud et ses peintres, 36-38. http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot/adolf-karol-sandoz-prayer-at-sunset-outside-4881964-details.aspx?from=searchresults&pos=3&intObjectID=4881964&sid=01745513-cffb-4159-b9f9-28052fccc4dc http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot/adolf-karol-sandoz-prayer-at-sunset-outside-4881964-details.aspx?from=searchresults&pos=3&intObjectID=4881964&sid=01745513-cffb-4159-b9f9-28052fccc4dc http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot/adolf-karol-sandoz-prayer-at-sunset-outside-4881964-details.aspx?from=searchresults&pos=3&intObjectID=4881964&sid=01745513-cffb-4159-b9f9-28052fccc4dc RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 6 Adolf Sandoz, On the Oued Riverbank at El Kantara Oasis, 1881 (reprod. from: Tygodnik Ilustrowany 41 [1913], 805) The painter showed women and girls from the family of the sheik of El Kantara washing clothes on the river bank. Women are wearing traditional clothing and rich abundant jewellery. Sandoz depicted them in various poses – leaning over the water, carrying the washing, talking, hanging the fabrics. Very clear is his fascination with the grace and picturesque quality of the Algerian women's clothing and beauty. The landscape of El Kantara is seen in the background – its rocky banks covered with palm trees. Water, the miracle emerging in the midst of the desert, concentrated all life – this is where people would find their water, bathe, and wash their clothes. Those daily chores, performed by Arab women, attracted the attention of painters travelling to Algeria: Women washing on the river bank were also depicted by Dinet, Jules Taupin and Francisque Noailly.61 [28] In 19th-century painting, images of caravans amounted to symbols of the desert. In Algeria, they were painted by William Wyld, Jules-Édouard Magy, Fromentin, Victor Pierre Huguet, Gustavo Simoni, Emile Bertrand, Washington, and Ziem, among others.62 Perhaps it was during his second stay in Algeria when Sandoz created a watercolour titled Caravan of Camels in the Sahara (Fig. 7). 61 Vidal-Bué, L'Algérie du Sud et ses peintres, 32-35. 62 Vidal-Bué, L'Algérie du Sud et ses peintres, 12-19. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 7 Adolf Sandoz, Caravan of Camels in the Sahara, 1881 (reprod. from: Kłosy 917 [1883], 58) This work was reproduced in Kłosy magazine, accompanied by the painter's interesting recollections in which he explained the scene taking place in the desert. Sandoz had an unexpected encounter with a caravan near Biskra. He described this event in the following fashion: I was coming back from the desert with my companion, carrying my painting equipment; both tired, we plodded along on the sand, repeatedly stopping to look with emotion on this amazing landscape and admire breathtaking views. Suddenly, we heard a thud resounding deep in the mountains, spreading over the desert like thunder from the distance. In this uninhabited land one gets so used to silence that this rising noise filled us with uncontrolled terror. […] trembling a little, we ran towards the mountains […]. Quickly, we reached Segia […]. We saw a caravan emerging from beyond the sandy hills […]. The caravan consisted of four hundred camels, making it an orchestra of four hundred double basses with occasional high-pitched shrieks of cameleers and thrusts of their sticks. […] cameleers often sing throughout the entire journey, while the leading camel announces each smallest obstacle with a grim roar, while all the other animals repeat his signal. This horrifying bellow […] fills one with irresistible terror. The caravan was led by a white camel of the mearis breed, carrying a richly adorned, tightly closed sedan with […] a wife for the Sheik of Touggourt […]. It was followed by other camels with packages and sacks laden with the bride's riches.63 The caravan stopped for the night in the vicinity of Biskra. At night, the white camel died. The next day, Sandoz observed the caravan's departure and most probably this was the moment he depicted in his watercolour. Sandoz's work can be compared with other representations of caravans majestically travelling across the sun-scorched vastness of the Algerian desert (e.g. Paul Lazerges, Caravan near Biskra, 1892). Yet, Sandoz's work finds its closest artistic counterpart in Léon 63 Adolf Sandoz, "Karawana wielbłądów w Saharze", in: Kłosy 917 (1883), 58. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 Belly’s masterpiece Pilgrims Going to Mecca (1861). Perhaps in his placing a dead camel in the foreground, Sandoz was inspired with Guillaumet's Desert (1867), a poignant and symbolic image of a dead camel shown on the background of the desert. Adolf Sandoz's work from Algeria and orientalist painting of the second half of the 19th century [29] Contrary to the conventional aesthetic interpretation of orientalist artworks – as exemplified by the exhibition catalogue Orientalism. The Near East in French Painting, 1800–1880 published in 1982 – Linda Nochlin, in an article in 1983, set a new direction for research on Orientalism in 19th-century painting. The author followed a mode of interpretation set forth by Edward Said and emphasised the need for a critical analysis of such paintings.64 According to Nochlin, many painters had adopted the Western view on Oriental lands that vindicated the imperialist expansion of European states to the East and to the South. In this perspective, inhabitants of the Islamic lands were depicted as passive, dormant, idle and promiscuous and their rulers as cruel and not bound by laws, constituting a complete opposite of the Europeans. This theory found its confirmation in the analysis of paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme – The Snake Charmer, Turkish Bath, and The Slave Market. The new perspective allowed for reading scenes of harems, oriental baths, slaughters, slave markets, and other oriental dramas as expressions of Europeans' repressed erotic fantasies, emanations of perverse stereotypes of the Orient, and attempts at the West's domination over the East. [30] Nochlin's theses were criticised by John MacKenzie. The latter sought to prove that motivations of artists who took up oriental subject matter were more ambiguous and complex. Citing historical sources, MacKenzie argued that there was no correlation between the development of Orientalism in painting and imperialist policies of England and France. He also concluded that the representation of the inhabitants of the Orient as cruel or promiscuous, far from an attempt to define them through stereotypes, was meant as an escape from the contaminated culture of industrial Europe through embracing primeval ideals and truths.65 64 Orientalism. The Near East in French Painting, 1800–1880, ed. Donald A. Rosenthal, exh. cat., Rochester/New York 1982; Edward Said, Orientalism, New York 1979; Linda Nochlin, "The Imaginary Orient", in: Art in America 71/5 (1983), 119-131 and 187-191; reprinted in: Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision. Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society, New York 1989, 33-59. 65 John MacKenzie, Orientalism. History, Theory and the Arts, Manchester/New York 1995; see also: Alexander Lyon Macfie, "MacKenzie versus Nochlin", in: Macfie, Orientalism, London 2002, 66-72. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 [31] How, then, to evaluate the group of truthful depictions of the East in numerous examples of genre painting and landscape to which Sandoz's work belongs? I suggest that his work does not manifest influence of imperialism. Sandoz was one of many painter-travellers who visited oriental lands in search of inspiring motifs, landscapes, colours, and light. The lack of drama, plots, and erotic content in Sandoz's work was noted by contemporary critics who expected such elements. In Tygodnik Ilustrowany his scenes from Algeria were accused of lacking a deeper message, and described as follows: "His beautifully finished works would benefit from some idea, if, rather than a faithful photographic record of a quiet moment, they included some human drama, or at least some action that could involve the viewer".66 [32] Said's theory proves instructive, however, in the consideration of the meaning of Orient for Sandoz. His statements suggest that in his opinion the people and nature of Algeria retained an element of primeval primitivism that Europe had already lost. Encountering it offered energy and inspiration. The painter noted: "Taken together, all this is dirty and wild, but also very much fit for a painting". 67 At the same time, as a man of Western culture, Sandoz viewed Algeria and the Muslims through stereotypes. He reproduced clichés about the Arab approach to life. When studying an Arab man, his clothing, gestures and physiognomy, he concluded that the needs of a Muslim man "are so limited that his modest and monotonous life knows no desires, he lives sadly and patiently, awaiting happiness in the other world".68 The artist thought that inhabitants of the Orient fell easily into melancholy and displayed a passive approach to life. This way, he shared misconceptions about the people of the Orient that were identified by Said: "Orientals or Arabs are thereafter gullible, ‘devoid of energy and initiative’ […], they are ‘lethargic and suspicious' and in everything oppose the clarity, directness, and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon race."69 To conclude, it can be said that Sandoz was to some degree inclined to embrace those stereotypes, yet they did not prevent him from carefully observing the inhabitants of Africa and becoming fascinated with Algeria. [33] Orientalist painting of the second half of the 19th century was dominated by the realist approach, defined even as ethnographic. Théophile Gautier saw it as a revival of this genre. Artists were rarely satisfied with one journey to the East. Thanks to the development of transport and tourism they travelled to oriental countries on multiple occasions, spending there many months and staying for extended periods of time, which gave them the possibility of gaining deeper 66 "Sztuki piękne", in: Tygodnik Ilustrowany 266 (1881), 70. 67 "Z listów Adolfa Sandoza", in: Czas 271 (1880), 1. 68 "Z listów Adolfa Sandoza", in: Czas 271 (1880), 1. 69 Said, Orientalism, 38. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 knowledge of the Orient and making studies from nature. The realist perspective on the East was made popular also by artists who participated in research excursions and documented views, historical monuments and people. Their works were reproduced in magazines and albums, this way popularising the image of the Orient. Works such as Edward William Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, published in 1836, allowed many artists to understand the customs of the inhabitants of the Orient. There were also published works that presented racial differences, including the Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1854–1855) by Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, a man who theoretically founded racism. Differences in facial features were also interesting for artists – early studies of psychological types were painted by Charles Gleyre.70 [34] Two major tendencies can be distinguished within realist orientalist painting. The first one involved realism with the ambition of a possibly faithful depiction of scenes, landscapes as well as physiognomies of the Orient. The second may be defined as pseudo-realism. Photographically accurate scenes and very precisely depicted details made an impression of truth, yet insightful scholars have pointed out numerous mistakes or perhaps intended alterations made by painters. Among those are Gérôme's canvases with scenes of prayer in the mosque. François Pouillon identified elements incompatible with Muslim religion and customs, such as figures of people praying with their shoes on, half-naked men inside the mosque, and pigeons in the sanctuary. Other painters mixed in one scene objects coming from various epochs or fragments of a number of interiors.71 This way, they achieved scenes with more interesting compositions including more interesting details; sometimes however they simply made mistakes stemming from a lack of knowledge of Oriental art and customs. [35] Sandoz's work of Algerian subject matter can be identified with the first of the mentioned orientalist trends of realist painting. Already in the 19th century critics appreciated Sandoz's scenes for their faithful depictions of Oriental life, with Czas magazine writing that: "very distinct is his faithful depiction of costumes, 70 Peltre, Orientalism in Art, 154-167; Peter Benson Miller, "Un orientalisme scientifique? L’ethnographie, l’anthropologie et l’esclavage", in: L’orientalisme en Europe de Delacroix à Matisse, ed. Davy Depelchin and Roger Diederen, Paris 2011, 117-130. 71 François Pouillon, "L’ombre de l’Islam. Les figurations de la pratique religieuse dans la peinture orientaliste du XIXe siècle", in: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 75 (1988), 24-34. See also Walter B. Denny, "Quotations in and out of Context: Ottoman Turkish Art and European Orientalist Painting", in: Muqarnas 10 (1993), 219-230; Sophie Makariou and Charlotte Maury, "The Paradox of Realism: Gérôme in the Orient", in: The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), ed. Laurence Des Cars, Dominique de Font-Réaulx and Edouard Papet, Paris 2010, 259-265. RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 accessories, and architecture that gives the painting a particular value". 72 Critics noted that Sandoz's works allow viewers to get to know remote cultures and landscapes, while the artist reveals "mysteries of the life of a distant, poorly known people and records the details of their life with the meticulousness of exquisite observation".73 The painter proudly emphasised that Interior of a House in Biskra was painted: in the same room it shows in the picture. I only added some insignificant changes in Paris, so it shows what I saw while painting. […] it is very difficult to get inside those houses. It was only because of my persistence that I had a chance to work there. When they tried to send me away, I would gesticulate that I don't speak Arabic until they considered me a madman, and since they see madness as God's blessing, I gained a lot of respect.74 [36] Sandoz's work was appreciated especially for its attention to detail. Dancer from the Uled-Nail Tribe included details such as "shoes dropped on the floor next to a musician, a fan next to a woman playing with a gazelle, a violin held by one of the musicians […]. There is a red clay hand print on one of the columns. It belongs to the owner of the house and symbolises his property of the house".75 Art critics admired the painter's technical skill. They noted that his paintings "were characterised by an incredible delicacy of the paintbrush and good finish to the details, reaching almost the level of miniatures".76 Sandoz's mastery in the depiction of details comes to the fore in his Oasis (1879).77 With a jeweller's precision he chiselled details of the figures' clothing, the figure of the horse, and the landscape. At the same time, he chose harmonious colours for the entire scene. [37] In Africa, Sandoz sought to find freshness that Europe had lost. As Gustave Flaubert wrote, the Orient offered "gorgeous colour, in contrast to the greyish tonality of the French provincial landscape. It meant exciting spectacle instead of humdrum routine, the perennially mysterious in place of the all too familiar".78 Sandoz hoped that Algeria would provide themes, compositional patterns, and figures that had never been exhibited before. With satisfaction he wrote about 72 "Z wystawy obrazów", in: Czas 264 (1880), 1. 73 "Adolf Sandoz", in: Tygodnik Ilustrowany 41 (1913), 805. 74 "Z wystawy obrazów", in: Czas 264 (1880), 1. 75 Treść obrazów Adolfa Sandoza podolanina z podróży artystycznej po Afryce, 6. 76 "Z wystawy obrazów", in: Czas 264 (1880), 1. 77 http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/adolf-karol-sandoz-at-the-oasis-5636660- details.aspx?from=searchresults&pos=3&intObjectID=5636660&sid=01745513-cffb-4159- b9f9-28052fccc4dc&page=1&lid=1 (accessed 10 April 2015). 78 Said, Orientalism, 185. http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/adolf-karol-sandoz-at-the-oasis-5636660-details.aspx?from=searchresults&pos=3&intObjectID=5636660&sid=01745513-cffb-4159-b9f9-28052fccc4dc&page=1&lid=1 http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/adolf-karol-sandoz-at-the-oasis-5636660-details.aspx?from=searchresults&pos=3&intObjectID=5636660&sid=01745513-cffb-4159-b9f9-28052fccc4dc&page=1&lid=1 http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/adolf-karol-sandoz-at-the-oasis-5636660-details.aspx?from=searchresults&pos=3&intObjectID=5636660&sid=01745513-cffb-4159-b9f9-28052fccc4dc&page=1&lid=1 RIHA Journal 0149 | 01 April 2017 Interior of a House in Biskra that: "It is an interior of a very common house, yet I don't think anyone has painted anything like that before".79 For him, Algeria was a catalogue of motifs to which one could reach out for inspiration. In Africa, Sandoz wanted to refresh his own work, or perhaps even find a new artistic path to follow. He must have certainly recognised that at the turn of the 1870s and 1880s orientalist painting was very popular. Works by orientalist painters were sold for thousands and even tens of thousands of franks, often becoming part of collections of bankers and industrialists from the East Coast of the United States. The leader within the Paris circles was Goupil & Cie, a company dealing in art works and reproductions.80 Financial success allowed artists working with this company, such as Gérôme and Stanisław Chlebowski from Poland, to live opulent lives in Paris, collect eastern crafts and undertake more oriental travels. Paintings from Algeria were perhaps to open up a new career path for Sandoz, which would respond to the contemporary Salon trends and demands of the art market. This aspect was recognised by contemporary critics who indicated that due to the unusual, exotic subject matter and high formal qualities, his works became more than realist records of his impressions from Algeria, but also attractive decorations that could find their way to the most opulent Paris boudoirs.81 Sandoz's apparent pursuit of the fashion for exotica was noted by a reporter from Kurier warszawski, who wrote: At the time when the public yearns for objects from the most remote parts of the world, when for collectors and travellers China is already too familiar and accessible, while Japan is fully exhausted, a painter who depicts scenes from the life of the nomadic peoples of the Sahara and inhabitants of African oases comes right on time.82 [38] Nevertheless, at the Paris Salon in 1880, a small-scale work like Interior of a House in Biskra, came unnoticed. Most possibly, this was the reason why Sandoz decided to show his Algerian works in Poland, where they did, in fact, gain some publicity. However, in the 1880s, the artist did not follow the path of orientalist painters, but collaborated with the publishing houses Hachette, Quantin, and Delagrave. His illustrations can be found, among others, in books such as Raphaël by Alphonse de Lamartine (1884), Mont Salvage by Stella Blandy (1885), Pharos by Adriana Piazzi (1886), Héritiers de Montmercy (1886) and Un déshérité by 79 "Z wystawy obrazów", in: Czas 264 (1880), 1. 80 Hélène Lafont-Couturier, "La maison Goupil ou la notion d’oeuvre originale remise en question", in: Revue de l’art 112 (1996), 59-63; Hélène Lafont-Couturier, "Mr Gérôme Works for Goupil", in: Gérôme & Goupil. Art and Enterprise, ed. Hélène Lafont-Couturier, Paris 2000, 13-29; DeCourcy E. McIntosh, "Goupil and the American Triumph of Jean-Léon Gérôme", in: Gérôme & Goupil. Art and Enterprise, Paris 2000, 31-44. 81 "Z wystawy obrazów", in: Czas 264 (1880), 1. 82 "Malarz-turysta", in: Kurier warszawski 280 (1880), 2. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction Painters in Algeria in the 19th century Polish painters in Algeria in the 19th and early 20th century Adolf Sandoz's travels to Algeria Adolf Sandoz's paintings from Algeria Adolf Sandoz's work from Algeria and orientalist painting of the second half of the 19th century work_asooqphl2za3bostk6uorwuxqy ---- Revista de Filosofía nro 72 Revista de FilosoFía Volumen 72 (2016) 25-35 EN TORNO A EL ORIgEN DE LA OBRA DE ARTE DE MARTIN HEIDEGGER1 François Fédier 2 Resumen / Abstract Es necesario distinguir entre útil, cosa y obra de arte. Lo que nos circunda en la óptica de un “para” apunta al conjunto de los útiles. La cosa es aquello de lo que se habla. Aunque las relaciones entre útil y cosa son estrechas, es posible hablar de las cosas que nos circundan desde perspectivas que no se reducen a la óptica del “para”. Una cosa no se reduce a ser para algo. Una obra tiene un tipo de presencia singular; ella no está ahí sino para aquellos que, por su lado, están expresamente abiertos a ella. El origen de la obra de arte es la verdad. Ésta no tiene que entenderse como la adecuación de lo que nosotros decimos a lo que es en realidad. Heidegger invita a escuchar el nombre griego de la verdad –alétheia. Ἀλήθεια [alétheia] hace reparar en el alfa privativa y el tema que deriva del verbo λανθάνω [lantháno]: escapar. PalabRas clave: Heidegger, origen, obra de arte, cosa, útil, verdad como alétheia. ON HEIDEggER’S THE ORIgIN OF THE wORK OF ART It is necessary to distinguish between useful thing, thing and work of art. What surrounds us in the optics of a “for” points at the totality of useful things. Thing is what we talk about. Even though the relationships between useful thing and thing are narrow, it is possible to talk about the things that surround from perspectives that are not restricted to the optics of “for”. A thing is not restricted to be for something. A work of art has a singular type of presence; it is not there but for those who, on their side, are expressly open to her. The origin of the work of art is the truth. It must not be understood as the adequacy of what we say to what it is in reality. Heidegger invites to listen to the greek name of truth –alétheia. Ἀλήθεια [alétheia] makes you pay attention to the privative alpha and the theme deriving from the verb λανθάνω [lantháno]: escape. KEY wORDS: Heidegger, origin, work of art, thing, useful thing, truth as alétheia. 1 En L’art en liberté, Pocket, París, 2006; pp. 295-309. Es el texto empleado por el autor en una conversación organizada por Didier Laroque el 23 de marzo de 2005 en el Museo de Bellas Artes de Orléans. El resumen y las notas son del traductor. 2 François Fédier es filósofo. Nació en 1935. Ha sido discípulo de Jean Beaufret desde 1955. Se consagra, a partir de 1958, a la traducción de textos de Heidegger. Dirige la traducción, en curso, de la Edición Integral (Gesamtausgabe) de Heidegger en la editorial Gallimard. Ha sido docente en primera superior (Khâgne) en el liceo Louis Pasteur (Neuilly-sur-Seine), hasta su retiro en 2001. Revista de Filosofía François Fédier 26 Vamos a intentar hablar de la conferencia que redactó Martin Heidegger en 1935 bajo el título El Origen de la obra de arte. Hablar así a propósito de algo es exponerse, siempre, al riesgo de caer en el parloteo. Uno de los parapetos que nos puede preservar de ello consiste en hablar juntos acerca de ese algo. Por eso empleo ese “nos”, que no es un plural de majestuosidad sino que con él se expresa mi entrañable deseo de que, viniendo esta tarde ante ustedes, la palabra no se quede en un único sentido. Lo sé bien: habitualmente, esperar que vengan preguntas de un auditorio, más que suscitar el aflujo de preguntas, lo bloquea. También voy a intentar decir algunas cosas que, así lo espero, puedan disponernos a interrogarnos en conjunto. El Origen de la obra de arte es el primer texto del libro Caminos / que no llevan a ninguna parte. El título de este libro es, en alemán, Holzwege. Wege son los caminos. Holz es el bosque. René Char nos ha hecho un día el reproche de no haber dado al libro, en su versión francesa, el título literal: Caminos del bosque. En cierto sentido, él tiene razón, indiscutiblemente. Pero, por otro lado, no se puede ocultar que en alemán corriente la palabra Holzweg hace pensar, indefectiblemente, en la locución “auf dem Holzweg sein”, mediante la cual se alude al hecho eminentemente penoso de estar en un callejón sin salida –y, más aún, de estar bloqueado en un atolladero, de no saber ya cómo librarse para salir de él. Me acuerdo que preparando la edición de esta traducción, he dado con un poema de Rainer Maria Rilke que forma parte de las Cuartetos valaisanos. Rilke ha escrito en francés estos Cuartetos, alrededor de los años 20. Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part entre deux prés, que l’on dirait avec art de leur but détournés, chemins que souvent n’ont devant eux rien d’autre en face que le pur espace et la saison. Caminos que no llevan a ninguna parte entre dos prados que, con arte se lo diría, de su meta desviados, caminos que a menudo no tienen ante ellos nada más que, enfrente, el puro espacio y la estación3. 3 Véase, Poemas franceses, Ed. Pre-Textos, Madrid, 1997, p. 117. Ed. bilingüe. Trad. de Tomás Segovia. Acojo esta traducción con ligeras variaciones. En torno a El Origen de la obra de arte de Martin Heidegger Revista de Filosofía 27 Que Heidegger haya elegido denominar Holzwege 4 el primer libro que publicó después de más de veinte años de ausencia editorial es, con seguridad, un indicio al que conviene prestar un poco de atención. Indicio, ante todo, del hecho de que él sabe que ha tomado un itinerario muy insólito –pudiendo dar a más de uno la impresión de haber partido hacia regiones poco frecuentadas, de haberse perdido en ellas, si es que no, inclusive, de haberse extraviado inextricablemente en una especie de arenas movedizas. Ahora bien, lo que dice aquí Rilke describe de maravilla aquello delante de lo cual ha llevado el camino seguido por Heidegger: el espacio puro y la estación –nada tangible, pero, sin embargo, algo en el seno de lo cual todo lo que se puede tocar necesariamente viene a tomar algún lugar. Como he dicho al comienzo, El Origen de la obra de arte data de 1935, es decir, del momento en que Heidegger ha comenzado de veras ese movimiento de regreso río arriba, que, cabalmente bien considerado, no es sino una vuelta hacia la cúspide, en la medida en que se interna en otra parte, otra parte en la que la distinción entre lo alto y lo bajo ya no puede proporcionar las marcas geodésicas de una partición espacial. El Origen de la obra de arte es, así, antes que nada, un texto en el que Heidegger alcanza una especie de “punto de no-retorno”. Habría mucho que decir sobre esta idea del punto de no-retorno. Veo en ella en primera instancia algo así como una figura emblemática en la que es la existencia humana como tal quien toma un relieve que deja pasmado. ¿Por qué –a propósito de esto– se pone en cuestión la obra de arte? Intentemos encontrar la respuesta considerando el texto, comenzando por ahí donde Heidegger pone en relación la obra [œuvre], con la cosa [chose], por una parte, y con el producto [produit], por otra parte –al menos es así como se lo puede leer en la traducción francesas de este texto5. Desde ahora precisemos exactamente lo que está en cuestión; para eso, volvamos a la formulación original, en lengua alemana; no porque el alemán sea una lengua privilegiada –están bien persuadidos de eso–, sino, muy simplemente, porque ninguna lengua habla completamente como otra. Obra se dice en alemán das Werk (como en inglés se dice work –pero hay una ligera diferencia de registro entre el inglés y el alemán). Cosa se dice en alemán das Ding (como en inglés se dice a thing). Producto se dice en alemán das Zeug. 4 Véase, ahora, Gesamtausgabe (Edición Integral), Vol. 5: Holzwege, V. Klostermann, Frankfurt a. M., 1977. Ed. de Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Primera ed.: 1950. 5 “L’origine de l’œuvre d’art”. En Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part, Gallimard, París, 1962. Trad. de Wolfgang Brokmeier. Edición de François Fédier. Versión en español, en Caminos de bosque, Ed. Alianza, Madrid, 1995. 10ª ed., 2010. Trad. de Helena Cortés y Arturo Leyte. Otra versión se debe a Francisco Soler Grima; ha sido recogida en su libro El origen de la obra de arte y la verdad en Heidegger, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, 1953. Revista de Filosofía François Fédier 28 Aquí, a propósito de este último término, conviene detenerse un momento. Porque das Zeug es en alemán una palabra singular (en todos los sentidos del término, y, ante todo, porque es una palabra que no tiene plural). Eso plantea un terrible problema de traducción. El traductor, Wolfgang Brokmeier –en ese tiempo, un joven alemán que había pasado la mayor parte de su infancia y de su adolescencia en Francia– se resignó a verter Zeug por producto. ¿Por qué digo que “se resignó”? Porque eligiendo esta solución perdía contacto con todo un lado del análisis del Zeug, precisamente, análisis efectuado por Heidegger en Ser y Tiempo, el libro clave de 19276. Voy, pues, a exponer a grandes rasgos lo que este análisis tiene de esclarecedor para nuestro propósito. Abandonemos desde la partida la referencia a la lengua alemana e instalémonos en medio de los recursos de nuestra lengua. Lo que designa directamente, en alemán, la palabra Zeug es lo que podemos hacer que se entienda en castellano recurriendo a la paráfrasis: lo que nos circunda, donde quiera que miremos, en la óptica de un “para”. Así, la sala donde nos encontramos, si la aprehendemos (inclusive sin decírnoslo explícitamente) como lugar para hacer, por ejemplo, conferencias. O bien la hoja de papel que tengo bajo los ojos, y que veo, de entrada, como lo que sirve para anotar lo que intento explicar. O bien, además, la línea de ferrocarril París-Orléans: para unir rápida y cómodamente las dos ciudades. Esta pluma: para escribir. La ventana: para dejar entrar la luz. Se podría continuar indefinidamente dando ejemplos, porque esta óptica en la que se ve lo que es como siendo para…, esta óptica, digo, nos es casi congénita. Es una de las caras capitales bajo las cuales nos aparece lo que nos circunda. No es que todo nos aparezca necesariamente en esta óptica. Es aquí donde comenzamos a entrever la razón de la distinción que constituye el comienzo de la conferencia de Heidegger. Nuestra palabra “cosa” –lo sabemos bien– nos viene derivada de causa, una palabra típicamente latina, cuya etimología es desconocida, pero cuyo sentido es perfectamente patente: es aquello que está en cuestión (y especialmente en un proceso: aquello de lo que se debate). La cosa es: aquello de lo que se habla. En este momento les hablo de El Origen de la obra de arte, en el marco de una conversación. Importa poco que la palabra alemana das Ding no cubra exactamente la acepción de nuestra palabra. Es posible hablar de las cosas que nos circundan desde perspectivas que no se reducen a la óptica del “para”. ¿Hay, inclusive, una óptica específica que corresponda a la manera en que nos aparecen las cosas? Dejemos la pregunta abierta. Lo esencial por el momento es que aquello que es puede aparecer también como cosa [chose], y que una cosa no se reduce a ser para algo [pour quelque chose]. Como dicen los filósofos, una cosa no es comprendida, primeramente, en el seno de una finalidad. 6 En castellano: Ser y Tiempo, Ed. Universitaria, Santiago de Chile, 1997. 5ª ed., 2015. Trad. de Jorge Eduardo Rivera Cruchaga. En torno a El Origen de la obra de arte de Martin Heidegger Revista de Filosofía 29 Pensar que el Loira fluye para irrigar el campo, que el árbol en el jardín crece para dar sombra, o bien que el melón presenta hendiduras para ser comido más fácilmente en familia, eso nos parece, con toda razón, un poco ingenuo, o más exactamente: demasiado pueril. Pero, en cambio, no es pueril en modo alguno –al contrario–, calcular por ejemplo la estructura de un puente para atravesar un valle profundo, que es el objetivo de un trabajo muy complejo de ingenieros altamente especializados que ponen en juego saberes muy reales. Si hay, incuestionablemente, cierta ingenuidad en imaginar una finalidad que gobierna discretamente todo lo que nos circunda, todo el trabajo humano, sin embargo, está orientado por una finalidad, hasta el punto, inclusive, que cuanto más lo sea, ese trabajo tiene más oportunidades de efectuarse con eficacia y éxito. Eso es lo que hace resaltar la distinción entre “cosa” y “producto”, distinción que hallamos en el comienzo de la conferencia. Recupero la palabra producto; en primer lugar, porque es la palabra que encontrarán en la traducción francesa; pero también, para mostrar fehacientemente que esta traducción no es en modo alguno aberrante. Porque lo que es producido, es sobre todo lo que es “producido para” tal o cual uso [“faite pour” tel ou tel usage], como lo dice tan bien la locución. Notemos, sin embargo, que puede haber muy bien tal finalidad sin fabricación, en el sentido estricto del término. Agrego esta advertencia adrede, porque el objetivo de Heidegger –cuando distingue la “cosa” del “producto”– no consiste tanto en oponer un mundo natural a un mundo humano. Es, mucho más finamente, distinguir entre dos perspectivas de sentido: en primer lugar, ésa donde el sentido es lo más inmediatamente articulado gracias a la utilidad (donde los productos del ingenio humano proporcionan, por así decirlo, espontáneamente los ejemplos de referencia); en seguida, ésa donde el sentido se articula con el lenguaje, el cual es mucho más diversificado que la utilidad. De paso, aprovecho la ocasión de recordar que en la traducción de Ser y Tiempo que ha proporcionado François Vezin, y que ha aparecido en la editorial Gallimard7, la palabra Zeug no es traducida por “produit” [“producto”], sino por “util” [u-t-i-l; pronúnciese: util –para distinguirlo del outil 8, que es algo más restringido que el género más amplio de los utils [útiles]. El outil es un utensilio. El util puede ser algo diferente de un utensilio. En términos lógicos: todos los outils son utils; pero no todos los utils son, necesariamente, outils]. 7 Être et Temps, Gallimard, París, 1986. En las pp. 546 ss., Vezin redacta una nota, con la colaboración de W. Brokmeier, para explicar por qué traduce Zeug por util (primera nota a la p. 68 de la edición en alemán, paginación que aparece en los márgenes de la versión francesa). 8 Rudolf Boehm y Alphonse de Waelhens traducían Zeug por outil. Cfr., L’Être et le Temps, Gallimard, París, 1966, § 15. Véanse pág. 92 y pág. 289, 2ª nota a la p. 68 (de la edición en alemán). En este último lugar los traductores advierten “que se debe hacer notar que la palabra “outil” se toma aquí en el sentido amplio de “objeto de uso”, y no solamente en el de “instrumento”. Sin embargo, la mayor parte de los ejemplos citados a continuación conciernen a instrumentos. Revista de Filosofía François Fédier 30 Util no es una invención del traductor, sino una palabra de la que Montaigne, por ejemplo, hacía uso, y que designa, simplemente, todo aquello que es útil [utile], todo aquello que aparece claramente como siendo para…, es decir, al servicio de algo. Así, en alguna parte de Ser y Tiempo dice Heidegger que un camino es un util (mientras que decir que es un outil chocaría con el espíritu de la lengua francesa). A partir de tales ejemplos se puede ver la calidad de una traducción reflexiva, es decir, de una traducción que se empeña en ponerse a reflexionar sobre sí misma. Efectuada esta primera distinción, ya es hora de interrogarnos sobre el tercer término: la obra de arte. ¿Qué viene a hacer aquí la obra de arte? Déjenme dar un salto para ganar tiempo. Haciendo esto resumo un desarrollo que, sin embargo, se efectúa –a propósito–, paso a paso. Por eso será preciso evitar entender lo que acabo de decir como una declaración dogmática; hay que tomarlo, más bien, como invitación a plantearse preguntas. Lo que acaba por exponer Heidegger es que muy posiblemente no estaríamos en condiciones de hacer la distinción entre cosa y útil si no hubiese obras. Tal distinción, repito, no es del todo simple, ni, sobre todo, fácil de pensar. Lo recién enunciado, dicho de esa manera, es casi incomprensible. Por tanto, vamos a intentar avanzar de otra manera. ¿Qué pasa con una obra de arte? Entendamos bien: ¿después de haber puesto al descubierto –tan poco como haya sido– lo que pasa, desde el punto de vista del sentido, con una cosa y con un útil, preguntamos lo que pasa con una obra? Para decirlo un poco apretadamente: estando frente a una obra, no estamos ya ni en el mundo de las cosas, ni en el mundo de los útiles. Si esto es así, se trata de algo que no descubrimos de entrada, como ocurre en el mundo del útil –gracias a la evidencia, en este último caso, que se manifiesta apenas captamos para qué está hecho. ¡Tampoco nos ayuda extendernos acerca de esto –inclusive, y sobre todo, si nuestro objetivo es llegar a decir algo esencial! La presencia de una obra nos pone a quienes la tomamos en consideración en otra parte respecto de donde estamos corrientemente. Esta es una observación que no es nueva, pero que debemos examinar con toda la seriedad que merece. Cuando Matisse declara, por ejemplo: “No trabajo sobre el lienzo, sino sobre aquel que lo mira”, su declaración no es menos desconcertante que lo que acabamos de afirmar. Porque, medida con el mismo rasero de lo que nos parece obvio en el mundo habitual, casi no tiene sentido hablar como lo hace Matisse (en la medida en que ningún pintor ha pintado “realmente” una obra sobre un espectador). En situaciones de este tipo, recurrimos a la escapatoria que consiste en tachar de “metáfora” tal manera de hablar. Pero, más que hablar como se habla habitualmente, tomémosles la palabra a las cosas, y digamos: el mundo de la obra es un verdadero mundo, como lo es el mundo en que vivimos habitualmente. La única diferencia con este mundo consiste en que no estamos en él sino de manera efímera, por poco tiempo cada vez. Hay, pues, una diferencia de tiempo. En el mundo de las cosas estamos “todo el tiempo” [“tout le temps”] –mientras que en el mundo de la obra estamos solamente de cuando en cuando [de temps en temps]. En torno a El Origen de la obra de arte de Martin Heidegger Revista de Filosofía 31 Una nueva declaración desconcertante. Pero ¿está permitido siquiera hablar así? Con la condición, tal vez, de que precisemos que por “mundo” es preciso no entender subrepticiamente el conjunto de las cosas –dicho de otro modo, aquello que los doctos llaman el universo. Resumamos, pues, para estar en condiciones de avanzar. Resumir, aquí, es reunir en orden lo que hemos visto. Establezcamos esto: el término mundo debe ser entendido aquí como designando un conjunto que presenta una unidad característica. Hay así un mundo de la utilidad cuando hay una totalidad de útiles. Este mundo es, de alguna manera, la matriz donde se experimenta primordialmente la idea de conjunto. De este hecho, a partir de la idea de sentido, que ilustra con toda claridad la utilidad (ser-útil, es decir, ser como hecho para…), se pasa a la idea global de sentido, entendido ahora no como dirección sino como significación; de modo que el conjunto de todo aquello de lo que se puede hablar, de manera más o menos sensata, es el conjunto de lo real. De donde se ve que las relaciones entre útil y cosa son estrechas. La cosa aparece así como lo que es, inclusive al margen de toda utilidad. Esto, por lo demás, concuerda con la observación hecha antes sobre el tiempo. Mientras que el carácter de utilidad viene a primer plano mientras se hace uso de un útil [de una manera, por lo demás, extraordinariamente sorprendente, puesto que la utilidad de mi pluma penetra completamente en el acto de escribir mientras escribo con ella, hasta el punto de unificarse con él], ocurre, frente a eso, que el carácter de cosa toma un aspecto de permanencia inalterable, una permanencia que tiende a aparecer como independiente de nuestra relación con las cosas. Es esta permanencia lo que llega a ser, así, el carácter más manifiesto del mundo de las cosas. En lo sucesivo, solo el mundo de las cosas se admite como el único verdadero mundo –hasta el punto de que se tiene, espontáneamente, la ilusión de no hablar ya sino metafóricamente desde que se menciona otro mundo diferente al de las cosas. Esto llega a ser particularmente impresionante desde que se es confrontado con las obras. Constantemente, somos tentados a tomar a estas últimas –por cierto lado– como cosas que se pueden encontrar entre otras cosas en alguna parte dentro del seno del mundo habitual. No obstante –ya lo hemos señalado antes– un indicio muy sorprendente debería habernos alertado: una obra tiene un tipo de presencia completamente singular, en la medida en que ella no está ahí sino para aquellos que, por su lado, están expresamente abiertos a ella. Si observamos bien, es exactamente lo que dice la declaración de Henri Matisse que hemos citado. “No trabajo sobre el lienzo, sino sobre aquel que lo mira”. ¿Esto es decir que el pintor no da pinceladas de color sobre un lienzo? Con seguridad, sí las da. ¡Pero ese trabajo no es su verdadero trabajo! Trabajar como pintor no es trabajar como artesano. Esta advertencia nos debe incitar a ser, del todo, particularmente circunspectos –por poco que nos recordemos de lo que dice Heidegger en otro texto que la conferencia que nos retiene en este momento. Los griegos, escribe, Revista de Filosofía François Fédier 32 no distinguen el arte de la artesanía, no teniendo para los dos sino un único nombre, τέχνη [téchne]9. ¿Esto quiere decir que comprendían implícitamente el arte a partir de la artesanía? O bien, a la inversa, ¿la artesanía a partir del arte? O bien, aún, ¿algo diferente? Hay poderosos motivos para apostar que es por el lado de la tercera posibilidad por donde es preciso indagar. ¿Cuál es la acepción griega de τέχνη [téchne]? A propósito de esto, Heidegger da una indicación preciosa. En griego, esta palabra significa que se es entendido en lo que se hace. “Hacer”, aquí, debe ser tomado en la significación precisa de hacer ser, hacer venir a ser. Y ahí palpamos, por así decirlo, la razón por la cual en Grecia no hay confusión al no distinguir entre artesanía y arte. Porque el ebanista que trabaja como carpintero una mesa, tanto como el escultor que moldea una estatua, hacen, cada uno, venir a ser algo que no estaba antes que ellos, ambos, comenzaran su trabajo. Porque cada uno trabaja ayudándose de todos los conocimientos que han podido acumular –no siendo estos conocimientos del todo teóricos, sino, más bien, lo que llamamos: el oficio, es decir, todo aquello que en el ejercicio sostenido de su trabajo le ha permitido a cada uno enriquecerse, de modo que en lo sucesivo, en el oficio correspondiente, como dice muy bien nuestra locución, es alguien entendido en el asunto. Seguramente, este rasgo común es el que llamó la atención de los griegos, y no la diferencia que separa, a pesar de ello muy claramente –pero bajo la condición de mirar en una dirección muy diferente–, una mesa, por ejemplo, de una estatua de Poseidón. Veamos esto un poco más de cerca. Una mesa es hecha, por ejemplo, para ser el soporte de los cubiertos, de la vajilla, en una palabra, de todo aquello que permite sentarse a la mesa para ingerir una comida. Pero ¿una estatua de Poseidón? Manifiestamente, no está ahí para algo, lo que sea –al menos, en el sentido preciso de la “utilidad” tal como la hemos circunscrito. Porque decir que la estatua de Poseidón está ahí para representar al dios sería un contrasentido. Ante todo, porque en la visión griega originaria la estatua en cuestión es el dios: ella lo hace aparecer a él mismo, en todo el esplendor de su majestad. No hay aquí ninguna necesidad de extenderse sobre ideas estrafalarias: los griegos no “creen” que ese bronce sería, por una suerte de transferencia fetichista, el dios del mar. Al contrario, por la estatua ellos están directamente en relación con la modalidad de aparición del dios (¡una modalidad que también es extremadamente pasajera!). Con la obra, en consecuencia, vemos manifestarse tanto la no-utilidad de la cosa como la no-permanencia del útil. Pero hablar así es aún –inclusive si no es más que negativamente– tomar la cosa y el útil como referencias. 9 “La pregunta por la técnica”, Filosofía, Ciencia y Técnica, Ed. Universitaria, Santiago de Chile, 5ª ed., 2007. Trad. de Francisco Soler Grima. Edición de Jorge Acevedo Guerra. Véase también, F. Fédier: “Étude de la τέχνη [téchne]”; en L’art en liberté, ed. cit., pp. 40-90. En torno a El Origen de la obra de arte de Martin Heidegger Revista de Filosofía 33 Sin duda, no es posible hablar directamente de la obra, a menos que tengamos el hilo de Ariadna gracias al cual mantenemos contacto con su inverosímil inmediatez. Aquí las artes plásticas, a pesar de lo que son, nos obnubilan. Por eso debo evocar otro arte. Por lo demás ¿se puede hablar aquí de otro arte? El solo nombre de la poesía –puesto que se trata de ella– indica claramente hasta qué punto los antiguos griegos entendían del asunto del arte. Poesía, en efecto, es en ellos el sinónimo estricto de τέχνη [téchne], al menos en esto que dice ποιεῖν [poieîn]: hacer venir a ser. ¿Cómo se presenta la poesía? “En Grecia, escribe Rimbaud, versos y liras ritman la Acción”10. Para entender esto enteramente es preciso, por ejemplo, pensar en Píndaro, cuyas Odas triunfales11 son una celebración de una solemnidad que para nosotros resulta casi irrepresentable. No solamente un texto, sino un texto cantado y acompañado por la lira y las flautas; no solamente un canto, sino un canto cuyas alternancias rítmicas eran subrayadas por la danza de un coro. Si agrego que la métrica de las odas es de un extremo refinamiento, y que todo, desde entonces, refleja ese refinamiento, se puede comenzar a entrever la obra poética como un acontecimiento al cual el hecho de asistir pide, de una manera o de otra, que se tome parte en él. Las mismas observaciones pueden ser hechas a propósito de esta otra cara de la poesía que es, al lado de la poesía lirica, la tragedia. Ahí también, no solamente poema, sino danza (ahí también bajo una forma eminentemente coreográfica, es decir, codificada). En pocas palabras: la poesía es música, del mismo modo que la música es poesía. Es ahí donde podemos entrever, en la integridad de su contenido real, la íntima relación entre la obra y el tiempo. Decía antes que estamos en el mundo de las obras de una manera efímera. Ahora es preciso traer a colación la precisión decisiva: efímero no significa que estemos allí solo por “poco tiempo” –mientras que, frente a eso, estaríamos “todo el tiempo” en el mundo de las cosas. El tiempo verdadero como también el espacio verdadero no son eso que habitualmente creemos que son. El tiempo verdadero tiene lugar –literalmente– de cuando en cuando; de la misma manera, el espacio no se abre sino cuando hay espaciamiento del espacio. Son las obras las que hacen ser al tiempo verdadero y al espacio verdadero. Así hemos llegado ante la última observación por hacer esta tarde. Concierne al título completo de la conferencia: El Origen de la obra de arte. Tomamos habitualmente la palabra origen entendiéndola así: aquello de donde proviene algo –sin preguntarnos, más allá de eso, sobre la modalidad de esta proveniencia. 10 “Segunda carta: De Arthur Rimbaud a Paul Demeny, 15 de mayo de 1871”, Una temporada en el infierno, seguido de Iluminaciones, seguido de Cartas del vidente. Introducción, traducción y notas de Ramón Buenaventura. En la página electrónica de homenaje de Ramón Buenaventura al joven poeta Arthur Rimbaud; consultada: junio de 2015 (http://rimbaud. rbuenaventura.com). Véase, también: M. Heidegger: “Rimbaud vivant”, Experiencias del pensar (1910-1976), Ed. Abada, Madrid, 2014. Trad. de Francisco de Lara. 11 Píndaro. Odas y fragmentos, Biblioteca Básica Gredos, Madrid, 2002. Introducción general de Emilia Ruiz Yamuza. Trad. y notas de Alfonso Ortega. Revista de Filosofía François Fédier 34 Así se nos escapa el secreto del origen, a saber, que no puede dar a luz a menos que él mismo desaparezca. Dicho de otra manera: no hay “origen” si no es a favor de eso que ha sido originado, sin una desviación que, en adelante, va a separar lo originado del origen. Esta desviación puede, inclusive, tomar la figura de una liberación, en la cual, en adelante, se juega toda posibilidad tanto de conservar el origen como, ante todo, de tener una relación con él. El origen de la obra de arte, dice Heidegger, es la verdad. Apenas avanzaremos mientras tengamos una idea vaga y convencional de la verdad. Esta última no es sino la definición tradicional de la verdad como adecuación, y más precisamente: adecuación de lo que nosotros decimos –o, más en general, de nuestra representación– a lo que es en realidad. No es de esta verdad de la que habla Heidegger. Él invita a escuchar el nombre griego de la verdad, y a entender lo que dice ese nombre. Ἀλήθεια [Alétheia] –todavía es necesario repetirlo, más de sesenta años después de que Heidegger lo publicó por primera vez; esta palabra habla directamente a todo oído que sepa un rudimento de griego, y le hace reparar en el alfa privativa y el tema que deriva del verbo λανθάνω [lantháno]: escapar. Lo que dice ἀλήθεια [alétheia] es tan simple como directo: la verdad, tal como se ha dicho aquí, es esta situación precisa donde el movimiento de escapar es interrumpido. La experiencia griega de la verdad está completamente gobernada por el sentimiento propiamente trágico en que se encuentra el ser humano, quien debe rendirse a la evidencia de que todo lo que sabe o cree saber es vacilante, siempre a punto de escapársele, pero para quien, de cuando en cuando, esta escapada es interrumpida, y a quien, en el lapso de un relámpago, hace frente lo que es. Esta verdad, que no aparece sino para desaparecer enseguida –lo que no implica en modo alguno que no podamos guardarla en la memoria–, es lo que, según Heidegger, constituye el origen de la obra de arte. Toda obra de arte, podemos agregar, es precisamente una de las modalidades en las que se guarda en la memoria el relampaguear. Evidentemente, habría aún muchas cosas que decir después de esta exposición, de la que no me oculto su carácter demasiado abrupto. Pero, como les he dicho al comenzar, deseo verdaderamente que, juntos, podamos ahora plantearnos preguntas que –así lo espero– hayan brotado en nosotros. Estas preguntas conciernen a la obra de arte y a su origen. Tal vez la manera más simple de ponernos en una buena disposición para entablar nuestra conversación consiste en dejar la primera palabra a un poeta. René Char ¿no habla a partir del origen de la obra de arte cuando enuncia cómo se ha confiado a su lealtad? Oigamos bien el acento optativo de su declaración: L’éclaire me dure El relámpago me parece largo En torno a El Origen de la obra de arte de Martin Heidegger Revista de Filosofía 35 (“L’éclaire me dure”; en La bibliothèque est en feu (La biblioteca en llamas), Pléiade, p. 378). El texto XXIV de À la santé du serpent (A la salud de la serpiente), Pléiade, p. 266, abre un horizonte de comprensión; dice: “Si nous habitons un éclair, il est le cœur de l’eternel”. “Si nosotros habitamos un relámpago, él es el corazón de lo eterno”. Traducción de Jorge Acevedo Guerra Universidad de Chile joaceved@gmail.com work_awuaiypxevbbrkuvv7uz4dejca ---- None work_axsmcnxvfncmnltqwc734epwoi ---- Monet's Painting under the Microscope Monet’s Painting under the Microscope Paula Dredge,1 Richard Wuhrer,2* and Matthew R. Phillips2 1Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery Road, The Domain, Sydney, NSW, 2000, Australia 2University of Technology, Sydney, Microstructural Analysis Unit, P.O. Box 123, Broadway, NSW, 2007, Australia Abstract: An oil painting by Claude Monet, Port-Goulphar, Belle-Ile 1887 ~collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales!, was examined to determine both the identity of the pigments used by the artist in this painting and his technique of mixing colors and laying paint on the canvas. The extremely complex construction of the painting was revealed by optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy ~SEM!, energy dispersive X-ray analysis ~EDS!, and X-ray mapping ~XRM! analysis of cross sections of paint flakes excised from damaged regions of Port-Goulphar, Belle-Ile. Nine different pigments were found on the painting. Many of the identified colors were modern pigments that became available only late in the 19th century as a result of scientific advances in pigment chemistry. Although similar colors were available in a natural mineral form, they lacked the vivid color of their manufactured counterparts. The use of these new synthetic metallic oxide colors by Monet accounts for the brilliance of his paintings. In addition, a separation between successive paint layers was observed in some areas of paint chip cross sections, indicating that oil-based paint was applied to paint that had dried, and consequently, Port-Goulphar, Belle-Ile was painted over a long period of time. This observation is contrary to the general perception of Monet’s technique of painting freely and quickly. Key words: Claude Monet, optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive spectroscopy, X-ray mapping INTR O DUCTI ON The Art Gallery of New South Wales is conducting a com- parative study of the painting techniques of Claude Monet ~1840–1926!, John Russell ~1858–1930!, and Henri Matisse ~1869–1954!. This work has focused on two artistic encoun- ters between these three painters; the first in 1886, when John Russell met Claude Monet while they were both paint- ing at Belle-Ile, an island in Brittany off the northwest coast of France, and the second in 1896–1897, when the young Matisse visited Belle-Ile and was befriended by John Russell, who moved permanently to the island in 1887. The aim of our on-going study is to determine if these two encounters between the painters influenced the painting style and tech- nique of each painter. The Art Gallery of New South Wales has a number of works by John Russell in its collection which have been previously studied, as well as a painting by Claude Monet, Port-Goulphar, Belle-Ile ~Fig. 1!. It is this painting by Monet which is the subject of this collaborative research project by the authors. Energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry ~EDS! is an estab- lished technique for the analysis of the chemical composi- tion of paint layers in a scanning electron microscope ~SEM!. X-ray mapping ~XRM! is the collection of character- Received September 27, 2002; accepted April 16, 2002. *Corresponding author. E-mail: Richard.Wuhrer@uts.edu.au Microsc. Microanal. 9, 139–143, 2003 DOI: 10.1017/S1431927603030198 MicroscopyAND Microanalysis © MICROSCOPY SOCIETY OF AMERICA 2003 Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 1. Port-Goulphar, Belle-Ile painted by Claude Monet in 1887 from the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Figure 2. A magnified section of the lower right-hand side of the painting in Figure 1 showing the complexity of color used by Monet in this painting. Figure 3. Optical micrograph with visible incident illumination of the cross section of a paint chip excised from the rock in the lower right-hand corner of the painting in Figure 1. Width of field is 360 mm. Figure 4. Optical micrograph of the same paint chip in Figure 3 with ultraviolet incident illumination. Width of field is 360 mm. 140 Paula Dredge et al. istic X rays as a function of the position of the scanning electron beam on the specimen. This analysis provides a high magnification image related to the distribution and relative abundance of elements within a given specimen. This capability makes X-ray mapping particularly useful to ~i! identify the location of individual paint layers, and ~ii! map the spatial distribution of specific paint pigments within each layer. MA TERI ALS AND ME THODS Sample Preparation Samples of the painting were taken from the edges of preexisting damaged regions. Tiny paint chips ~approximate- ly 400 mm in diameter! were embedded in polyester resin ~Struers Serifix!, matching the hardness of an aged oil paint film. These were sectioned with a microtome to reveal a cross section through all the paint layers. Optical Microscopy A high magnification light microscopy image ~Fig. 2! of the lower-right area of the Port-Goulphar, Belle-Ile reveals the enormous variety of color within a small area of the paint- ing. The exposed sections were examined by optical micros- copy under both incident visible and ultraviolet illumination ~Leitz Laborlux 12 Pol X; see Figs. 3 to 6!. The light microscopy study shows that some colors are mixed from a number of different pigments, while others are laid onto the canvas straight from the paint tube. For example, under normal visible ~incident illumination! mi- croscopy, the two types of blue used by Monet cannot be distinguished ~Fig. 5!. However, through the use of ultra- violet illumination, the two types of blue can be distin- guished due to each blue pigment having its own characteristic fluorescence. For example, in Figure 6, French ultramarine appears very dark ~area A!, while cobalt blue appears pale in color ~area B!. Scanning Electron Microscopy and Energy Dispersive X-Ray Analysis Prior to imaging and analysis in the SEM, the microtomed resin blocks containing the cross section of each paint chip were coated with 30 nm of carbon to prevent localized charging under the electron beam, using a Balzers CEA010 carbon thread evaporation attachment connected to a Bal- zers SCD020 sputter coating unit. Each specimen was analyzed using a JEOL 6300F field emission gun ~FEG! SEM equipped with a thin window Kevex light element EDS X-ray detector with Moran Scien- tific X-ray analysis and mapping system. Backscattered elec- tron mode imaging at 25 kV was used to locate each paint layer as well as the various pigments within each layer. Quantitative EDS spot-mode X-ray analysis was used to identify each pigment type ~Feller, 1986; Fitzhugh, 1997; Roy, 1993!. All X-ray maps were acquired at 25 kV in the JEOL 6300 FEG SEM. The beam current was set at 0.15 nA, providing a total X-ray count rate of 3000 cps. The FEG tip was “flashed” ~cleaned! and allowed to stabilize for 20 min prior to the collection of each map. The probe current was measured before and after each X-ray acquisition to ensure that a relative change of less than 10% in the beam current was observed. X-ray maps were collected with 256 3 256 pixel resolution and a dwell time per pixel of 100 ms to obtain good counting statistics within the required beam stability requirement. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION An optical image ~visible incident illumination! of the cross section of the Monet painting sample is shown in Figure 3. The optical cross section reveals that this section of painting was painted by applying wet paint over dry paint, as re- vealed by the separation at the interface between the two ^ Figure 5. Optical micrograph with visible incident illumination of the cross section of a paint chip excised from the rock in the lower right-hand corner of the painting in Figure 1 from a region close to the paint flake in Figure 3. Note the noticeable difference in pigment distribution. Width of field is 360 mm. Figure 6. Optical micrograph of the same paint chip in Figure 5 with ultraviolet incident illumination. Utraviolet illumination shows the presence of two different blue pigments, French ultramarine ~region A! and cobalt blue ~region B!. Width of field is 360 mm. Monet’s Painting under the Microscope 141 layers. This observation indicates that Monet worked on this painting over a long period of time, as oil paints take a long time to dry, and this is contrary to the generally held belief that Monet painted quickly and freely. However, the optical images ~Figs. 3, 4, 5, and 6! also show regions with no separation between the paint layers, indicating that these areas were painted wet paint over wet paint, while mixing the paints directly on the canvas. A SEM backscattered electron image ~Fig. 7! of a paint cross section shows the abundance of pigments used within a small section of painting. A high magnification backscat- tered electron image of a yellow region of the painting re- veals that the areas contain rod-like pigments ~Fig. 8!, which contain lead, chromium, and oxygen. This pigment is known as chrome yellow, a lead chromate ~PbCrO4 and PbCrO4{ PbSO4!. Interestingly, the chrome yellow pigment was re- placed by cadmium yellow late in the 19th century. However, Port-Goulphar, Belle-Ile seems to have a mixture ~blended! of the two types of yellow pigment ~chrome and cadmium!. Background corrected X-ray maps for aluminium, sili- con, calcium, chromium, cobalt, copper, cadmium, mer- cury, and lead from a representative paint chip are shown in Figure 9. These maps, as well as extensive spot mode EDS analysis, were used to identity the following pigments: lead white @basic lead carbonate 2PbCO3{Pb~OH!2# , vermilion @mercuric sulphide HgS# , cadmium yellow @cadmium sul- fide CdS# , chrome yellow @lead chromate PbCrO4 and PbCrO4{PbSO4 # , viridian @hydrated chromium oxide Cr2O3{2H2O or Cr2O~OH!4# , emerald green @copper aceto- arsenite 3Cu~AsO2!2{Cu~CH3COO!2# , cobalt blue @cobalt aluminate CoO{Al2O3# , and French ultramarine @approxi- mately Na6–10Al6Si6O24S2–4# . The complex distribution of these pigments within a paint chip cross section from the painting is shown in Figure 10. Two organic lake colors ~a dye precipitated onto an inert base! were also found in Port-Goulphar, Belle-Ile; a red lake ~presumably madder! on an aluminium hydroxide base, and a yellow lake ~unidentified! on a base of natural chalk sphericals. This present work shows that Monet worked on Port- Goulphar, Belle-Ile with a limited number of pigments; two reds, three yellows ~the yellow lake may be an impurity added by the color merchant to enhance the color of the cadmium yellow!, two blues, two greens, and white. These pigments were premixed in an impressive number of com- binations to give enormous variation in color on the paint- ing. Some single brush strokes, such as those in the dark rocks, contained all 10 pigments mixed together. Subtle variations in color were achieved by slight alterations in the proportions of each pigment in the paint mix. CONCLUSIONS The combination of these microscopy methods used in this study enabled ~a! the identification of each of the pigment types used in the painting, and ~b! an insight into the paint application techniques used by Monet, in particular whether the paint was premixed or applied pure from the tube and mixed wet-in-wet on the canvas. The complex construction of the paint layers studied in this work confirmed that Figure 7. A backscattered electron image of the paint chip cross section excised from the lower right-hand corner of the painting showing the abundance of pigments used by Monet in this work. Width of field is 340 mm. Figure 8. Backscattered electron image of a yellow section of the painting containing a rodlike pigment known as chrome yellow, a lead chromate ~PbCrO4 and PbCrO4{PbSO4!. Width of field 23 mm. 142 Paula Dredge et al. Monet possessed a mastery of color through a deep under- standing of the pigments available at that time. In addition, contrary to popular belief, certain sections of Port-Goulphar, Belle-Ile were painted over intervals long enough for the previously painted area to dry. ACKN O W LEDGME NTS The authors gratefully acknowledge the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the University of Technology, Sydney for their support. REFER ENCES Feller, R.L. (Ed.). ~1986!. Artists’ Pigments. A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, vol 1. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art. Fitzhugh E.W. (Ed.). ~1997!. Artists’ Pigments. A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, vol 3. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art. Roy, A. (Ed.) ~1993!. Artists’ Pigments. A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, vol 2. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art. Figure 9. X-ray maps ~XRM! for aluminum, silicon, calcium, chromium, cobalt, copper, cadmium, mercury, and lead from a representative paint chip cross section. Maps were collected at an accelerating voltage of 25 kV, beam current of 0.15 nA, 256 3 256 pixels and a dwell time per pixel of 100 ms. Width of field, 110 mm. Figure 10. Optical micrograph image showing the complex distribution of pigments identified using EDS spot mode analysis. Width of field 50 mm. Monet’s Painting under the Microscope 143 Thomson lSI - Journal Search Results THOMSON +: http://www.isinet.comlcgi-bin/jrnIst/jlresults.cgi?PC=MASTER&I ... 11i'Wfij'i: _tH·be_Mlde'_iShiilW'&, SEARCH RESULTS 1 of 1 lSI Master Journal List SEARCH RESULTS Search Terms: 1431-9276 Total [ournals founej: 1 The fcHovdng titJe(s) marcneo your request: Jcumats ~-1 (of 1) I-t; , I fORMAT fOR PRHH ~....HCROSCOPY AND ~.MCROANALYSIS 8imc'n!t1Iy ISSN: 1431·9275 CA~...1BRIDGEUNIV PRESS, 40 WEST 20TH ST. NEW '{ORK. USA. NY. , 0011·4211 Journals: ~-1 (of 1) I FORMAT FOR PlUtH Horne i Sfte Mac I About Us I Press Room Careers Contact Us iThomson corn SliWOf1 ; Joumal Lists IS; Links I !SI Essays I HGt Research 3110312004 2:53 PM http://www.isinet.comlcgi-bin/jrnIst/jlresults.cgi?PC=MASTER&I work_b7cwv4jn75bozbnft4vlwqq5cy ---- Yale ICF Working Paper No. 04-46 September 15, 2004 BEAUTY IS IN THE BID OF THE BEHOLDER: AN EMPIRICAL BASIS FOR STYLE William N. Goetzmann Johan Walden International Center for Finance Yale School of Management Mauro M Maggioni Peter W. Jones Yale Department of Mathematics This paper can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection: http://ssrn.com/abstract=621821 Beauty is in the Bid of the Beholder: an Empirical Basis for Style∗ William N. Goetzmann† Peter W. Jones‡ Mauro Maggioni‡ Johan Walden† September 15, 2004 Abstract We develop a method for classification of works of art based on their price dynam- ics. The method is in the same spirit as factor models commonly used within financial economics. Factor models assume that price dynamics of assets are related to underlying fundamental characteristics. We assume that such characteristics exist for works of art, and that they are associated with what we intuitively think of as style. We use a recently developed clustering algorithm to group artists that represent similar styles. This algo- rithm is specifically well-suited for situations where statistical distributions are far from normal – A description we believe fits well with markets for art. We test the method empirically on a ten-year sample of price data for paintings by 58 artists. Even with this limited data set, we clearly identify five groups and show that these are related to a standard classification of style. ∗We thank ArtNet, Inc. for the use of historical data for research. †International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management, 56 Hillhouse Avenue, P.O. Box 208200, New Haven, Connecticut 06520. ‡Yale Department of Mathematics, 10 Hillhouse Avenue, P.O. Box 208280, New Haven, Connecticut 06520. 1 Introduction Style has long been the basis for classification in the history of art, however a precise definition of style, and a consistent basis for grouping works of art into styles has eluded scholarship. Style as applied to works of art is necessarily based upon not only a large variety of visual and material attributes of an object, but also upon the manner in which these attributes are executed and assembled. If engineers are only now beginning to develop optical recognition tools that can consistently identify the same face in front of a camera, imagine how long it will take to use optical data to distinguish say, a Renaissance from a Baroque painting, or to understand the subtleties of visual allusion and allegory. Given that works of art from the 20th Century were often, by their very nature, crafted to challenge stereotyping or easy classification, it is hard to imagine that style recognition will ever be meaningfully automated. It could happen, just as we have seen Gary Kasparov’s chess prowess equaled by an IBM computer. However the limited dimensionality and the clarity of the rules of chess make it more susceptible to analysis. Aesthetic development has often taken place by breaking rules and replacing them. As Morse Peckham suggests, the most influential works of art are those that are initially perceived as chaotic. Art, in Peckham’s view, ... serves to break up orientations, to weaken and frustrate the tyrannous drive to order, to prepare the individual to observe what the orientation tells him is irrelevant, but what may every be relevant.1 A difficult challenge indeed, for a tool trained on patterns to detect regular, logical structure. Recent research by economist David Galenson has suggested an economic basis for the identification and the analysis of quality in works of art (Galenson 2002). Rather than using the visual characteristics of works of art as the grounds for evaluating which works are the most important, Galenson uses auction prices. In effect, he projects the vast, complex dimensionality of the visual and physical and historical characteristics of works of art down to two dimensions, price and time. This allows hypothesis testing about which works of art, for example, are 1Peckham (1967), Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior and the Arts, Patrick Wilkinson, editor, Maison- neuve Press, University Park Maryland, reprint of the 1967 edition. 1 perceived as most important, and the identification of a few basic career trajectories of successful artists. In this paper, we propose adopting this economic approach to the problem of identification of style. Rather than construction an automaton and feeding it the world’s books on the history of art and training it ultimately to synthesize visual and physical input into stylistic classification, we propose to use auction prices. The use of price data has the potential to employ the cognitive and aesthetic capacities of the world’s art auction market participants in order to define aesthetic styles. By relying upon the bidding behavior of market participants, under some simplifying assumptions, we can interpret the world’s auction markets as a continually active and constantly changing market for opinions about the relative value and associations of works of art. The proposal in this paper is to use auction data in an econometric model to uncover “associations” among the works of artists, and these associations one could label “style.” While we cannot claim that this approach uncovers style as an art historian might understand it, we would claim that it can, when executed with the proper econometrics, approximate the idea of style as collectors and dealers might understand it. Since collectors and dealers necessarily rely upon art historical scholarship and interpretation as the basis for value, this approach may then, at least secondarily, reflect expert opinion. An important limitation of using market information to define style is that it displaces the specialists – the connoisseur and the art historian – from the definition of style, and replaces them with the customers for works of art, few of whom are likely to be trained in art evaluation. In asset pricing, where object values are common values, this problem is addressed through the processes of arbitrage in expectations. The Arbitrage Pricing Theory (Ross 1976) for example shows that the existence of a single risk-neutral investor with unconstrained borrowing capacity – the expert – can enforce efficient pricing. This person can drive the value of two economically equivalent assets to the same price by bidding up the price of shares of the undervalued asset and shorting the shares of the over-valued asset until these values align themselves according to the “Law of One Price.” A tricky aspect of this theory is that two such financial titans cannot agree to permanently disagree on the economic equivalence of the assets, or else they would furiously and infinitely bid their views without driving the prices towards some common value. 2 In a sense you would get two equally powerful invisible hands arm wrestling with no resolution. Thus, even in the world of asset pricing models there must be some agreement on style. In the example, of course, at least one of the financial titans must be wrong, for, in an economic framework of objective values are equivalent to expected sums of future discounted cash flows. In the world of art, this need not be the case. There is no ultimate economic value for objects apart from the tastes of those with the money to indulge them. Curiously, recent scholarship in financial economics has found the term “style” useful in the analysis of asset values and investor behavior. Barberis and Schelifer (2003), Chan, Chen, and Lakonishok (2002), Brown and Goetzmann (1997), Sharpe (1992) among many others use the term style to describe common strategies of investors and/or common characteristics of investment securities. In doing so, they implicitly assume that broad market perceptions, behavior and perhaps even tastes are important in the world of assets. Indeed, Kumar and Lee (2002) and Kumar (2002), explore the pricing implications of style investing and find empirical evidence that common perceptions – not just the perceptions of the well-capitalized arbitrageur – may affect prices. Thus, an interesting implication of recent asset pricing theory and empirical evidence is that subjective style “factors” exist in the investment world and that they matter. The suggestion that financial economics has begun to profitably borrow from the concepts of art historical scholarship may be a slim motivation for art historical scholarship to borrow the tools of modern finance. After all, in a private values market, in which personal taste, not expected sums of future discounted cash flows, drive market prices, the law of one price does not necessarily hold. Theoretically, tastes for works of art could be orthogonal. There might be no agreement on what is good or bad art, or what objects are meaningful substitutes for each other in the collector’s imagination. In fact, we know this is not the case. A by-product of the construction of art price indices (Anderson (1974), Goetzmann (1993) and Mei and Moses (2002)) is a measure of the variance in price changes explained by the common factor – the art index. The index explains a lot; typically half of the price change in a painting’s purchase then re-sale over long holding periods can be attributed to broad market movements. Even if some of this can be explained by the shifting economic fortunes of collectors (Goetzmann and Spiegel (1995), Ait-Sahalia, Parker, and Yogo (2002)), there remains a common component of 3 value to works of art that reflects the degree to which a set of auctioned objects are regarded as substitutes for each other in collector utility functions. Formalizing this result, and expressing the idea of style in terms that will eventually allow estimation, will require some algebraic notation. The next section develops a more formal framework for defining a relationship between style and prices, and for estimating styles from observed prices. In the third section, we use this framework to empirically analyze art styles. In a limited data set of auction prices over ten years, we clearly identify five groups of artists. These groups fit quite well with a standard classification of art style. The fourth section concludes. 2 Defining style There are two steps in developing a method for empirically estimating styles from observed prices. The first step is to assume a model of the relationship between styles and prices: Consider an hedonic valuation model of a work of art j for collector i at time t. We assume a functional, f, that is conditioned upon the stochastic state of the world, where ω is the wealth of the collector and γ is the percentage of that wealth the collector wishes to invest in art. This model generalizes the model in Goetzmann and Spiegel (1995). The characteristics of the artworks; the artist [a], the size [s], the date [d] and other characteristics [x] all figure into the price, Pijt, the collector is willing to pay at that time, and are represented by a vector X. We simplify the valuation to a linear model Xj βit for which the βit represent factor loadings at time t and the Xi represent perceived factors that are associated with the definition of style, for example, landscape subject matter, pointilist technique and so forth. These are scaled by the value of the investor’s art investment at a given point in time ωitγit: Pijt = fit(aj, sj, dj, xj) = [ Xjβit ] ωitγit. (1) In an auction, the bidder with the highest valuation at time t obtains the work of art. If all bidders had the same wealth and the same preference for art, then the determinant of the winning bid would rely solely on the characteristics Xj and the factor loadings βit. If everyone 4 had the same aesthetic tastes as well as the same wallet, then the highest priced item would be determined solely by the characteristics Xj. If these common sets of tastes evolved through time, prices of objects would change according to their characteristics. So how does this models help us with style? Style can be thought of as classifying work of art, j = 1, . . . , N, into K < N styles, according to the characteristics, Xj. Notice that although we are actually interested in Xj, Pijt can make this classification problem easier, since the biggest challenge to classification of works of art using characteristics is the mispecification problem – we may mismeasure or leave out key variables, or not be able to correctly capture them in our functional form. If we only had Xj we would be back to the problem of programming the subtleties of the Baroque into a computer – with no way to check our work except by asking a human expert! In a setting in which tastes evolve, however, the dynamics of object prices can help differentiate styles. We observe PI,j,t = XjβItωItγIt. In this case, the capital I subscript indicates the winning bidder. For example, as factor loadings for some works of art decrease, their relative prices will decline. Without dynamics, the classification is infeasible unless an econometrician is willing to specify X and estimate a classic hedonic regression. With dynamics, it is not necessary to separately estimate Xj and βit. This leads us to the second step in empirically classifying styles from observed prices, which is to use an algorithm to group together artworks with similar price dynamics. Input to such a classification algorithm will be price changes of artworks through time; output will be a number of clusters - a parsimonious set of groups with artists in the same clusters representing the same style. Brown and Goetzmann (1997) exploited this idea to estimate styles of mutual fund investment managers, applying a clustering algorithm to the time-series of returns of funds. Each observation consisted of the time-series of monthly returns of a single fund. The algorithm groups funds so as to minimize the within-group sums of squared residuals from the group center. This is a so-called K-means algorithm. It requires ex ante specification of the number of groups – as long as K < N there will be squared residuals to minimize. More general algorithms allow for hierarchical clustering – the estimation of a graphic tree expressing the distance among subgroups of observations. They relieve the investigator from the burden of guessing the number of appropriate styles. In recent years, new algorithms 5 have been developed that have attractive robustness characteristics. Traditional methods often depend on the “noise” in the model being close to normal (Gaussian) and relationships being linear. The new methods also work well when “noise” is far from normal and relationships are nonlinear – a reasonable assumption on the relationship between art styles and prices. We shall use a specific such algorithm, the Laplacian eigenmap method, and we will see that it performs better than standard methods when applied to our art data set. 3 Style classification – an example In order to exploit the dynamics of taste to classify works of art into styles, it is necessary to observe a time-series of prices for each individual work of art. Alas, individual works of art do not sell every day – the illiquidity would seem to be a hopeless barrier. One approach, which we will follow, is to specify subgroups – that is, to lump the works of a single artist into one category and then apply a classification algorithm at the level of the artist, rather than the artwork. We do this for a specific data set provided by ArtNet.2 3.1 Data ArtNet identified the 100 most widely represented artists in their database of auction prices over the period 1984-1995, according to how many works of art by the artist were sold in the time period. The raw data consisted of 115,812 reported paintings and other works of art. For each artist, we constructed an index of the median sales price of the artist’s works each year. The median is better than the mean, of course, because it eliminates the effects of extreme sales prices. Bought in prices were not recorded as transactions. This is an admittedly crude measure of the price dynamics of the artist’s works. Heterogeneity of quality alone is likely to cause fluctuations in the median price – Fluctuations in Xj due to changing works of art will be misconstrued as changes in βit. Many artists did not have any reported sales for 1984-1985, so these years were not included 2http://www.artnet.com 6 in the sample. Furthermore, some artists were dropped from the sample because they did not have at least one painting sold in each of the remaining years. This left us with 10 years of data for 58 painters and altogether 20,700 observations. The bulk of the the remaining artists are late 19th century and early 20th century painters, represented by giants like Picasso, Renoir and van Gogh. “Younger” artists, like Warhol and Lichtenstein are also well represented, whereas only five artists in the sample were born before 1840 – the oldest being Jean Babtiste Corot (born 1796). The prices varied a lot between different types of art. We therefore identified three subtypes: Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings that were treated separately. Yearly returns (defined as relative increase in median price) were calculated for each subtype. For each year, the return was defined as the average of the returns of the three subtypes. For a specific subtype, if observations were lacking for any of the two years used to calculate return, this subtype was excluded. In Table 1, we show summary data for the 58 remaining artists, i.e., total number of paintings sold and average price over the entire time-period for the three subtypes. We see that there are large variations between artists within a specific type, e.g., paintings, from a low average median price of $22,000 for Alexander Calder (Artist 27), to a high of $1,903,000 for Vincent van Gogh (Artist 4). Moreover, the average median price for paintings is typically, but not always, signicantly higher than for the other two types – A notable exception is Henri Matisse (Artist 6) whose median price for paintings were $540,000, compared with $1,333,000 for watercolors. 7 Artist name Paintings Watercolors Drawings # P, [$1,000] # P, [$1,000] # P, [$1,000] 1 Picasso, Pablo 460 528 123 155 712 38 2 Renoir, Pierre Auguste 588 239 19 63 118 113 3 Monet, Claude 198 1698 0 21 162 4 Gogh, Vincent van 46 1903 5 511 37 245 5 Chagall, Marc 238 572 263 145 179 19 6 Matisse, Henri 109 540 13 1333 331 51 7 Degas, Edgar 51 393 5 83 329 195 8 Miro, Joan 188 262 135 83 148 31 9 Pissarro, Camille Jacob 198 557 89 140 198 6 10 Cezanne, Paul 64 1553 54 206 35 31 11 Leger, Fernand 220 280 272 36 126 21 12 Dubuffet, Jean 310 201 85 47 223 14 13 Gauguin, Paul 59 666 14 157 48 18 14 Vlaminck, Maurice de 574 98 127 26 118 7 15 Modigliani, Amedeo 58 1058 7 107 109 31 16 Bonnard, Pierre 209 293 21 55 92 5 17 Braque, George 138 280 35 26 36 61 18 Warhol, Andy 475 56 66 7 139 4 19 Kandinsky, Wassily 62 515 55 192 32 48 20 Utrillo, Maurice 473 132 147 56 30 15 21 Klee, Paul 58 298 157 159 111 30 22 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 55 355 10 678 120 291 23 Sisley, Alfred 105 678 0 17 42 24 Dufy, Raoul 266 118 324 38 250 4 25 Dongen, Kees van 208 191 71 35 38 10 26 Foujita, Tsuguharu 166 150 76 44 190 18 27 Calder, Alexander 62 22 401 8 90 7 28 Bacon, Francis 42 1369 0 1 8 29 Buffet, Bernard 467 72 48 30 71 10 30 Magritte, Rene 108 394 68 118 99 10 31 Lichtenstein, Roy 134 185 1 244 25 51 32 Rouault, Georges 171 155 83 42 11 29 33 Laurencin, Marie 248 126 184 34 140 8 34 Signac, Paul 70 493 264 16 40 11 35 Fantin-Latour, Henri 182 160 0 38 2 36 Chirico, Giorgio de 228 110 34 44 68 10 37 Dali, Salvador 94 222 97 38 203 10 38 Gris, Juan 59 513 12 94 50 28 39 Boudin, Eugene Louis 389 80 74 13 66 9 40 Stella, Frank 389 80 74 13 66 9 41 Nolde, Emil 35 594 231 74 16 15 42 Ernst, Max 173 129 16 104 58 17 43 Derain, Andre 214 28 50 14 109 2 44 Francis, Sam 246 131 78 53 0 45 Redon, Odilon 59 215 10 50 73 198 46 Corot, Jean Baptiste Camille 247 83 0 42 4 47 Kisling, Moise 357 78 14 9 14 5 48 Morandi, Giorgio 76 357 11 48 45 11 49 Marquet, Albert 223 98 47 9 73 1 50 Kline, Franz 71 212 9 14 39 16 51 Jawlenskij, Alexej von 170 114 15 26 12 13 52 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 31 405 62 34 191 7 53 Poliakoff, Serge 163 104 102 25 3 5 54 Martin, Henri 250 68 3 0 9 3 55 Le Sidaner, Henri Eugene Augustin 223 57 4 6 21 11 56 Delvaux, Paul 30 689 28 37 69 21 57 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 240 44 9 8 81 9 58 Nicholson, Ben 128 74 25 31 59 11 Total 10917 4158 5625 Table 1: Summary data for 58 artists in sample. For each type of painting (Painting, Watercolor and Drawing), the total number of works sold and the average price over the 10 year period is shown. 8 3.2 The clustering algorithms Formally, a clustering algorithm applied to a set of points aims at dividing the set into K clusters. Here, K can either be endogenously determined or exogenously specified. Points within a cluster are “similar,” whereas points in different clusters are “different.” In this paper, the aim is to cluster artists with similar styles by observing price dynamics of sold works of art. There are a large number of traditional clustering algorithms, including parametric ap- proaches, like Gaussian mixture methods and K-means methods, and non-parametric ap- proaches, like hierarchical clustering algorithms. For a survey article, see Jain, Murty, and Flynn (1999). We will use two such traditional algorithms, the K-means algorithm and a hierarchical tree algorithm. Inspired by the recent interest in the learning community about nonlinear methods for dimensionality reduction and data mining (Tenenbaum, de Silva, and Langford 2000, Donoho and Grimes 2002, Roweis and Saul 2000, Belkin and Niyogi 2001, Coif- man and Lafon 2002), we also decided to use a third, recently developed algorithm. Various constructions have been proposed that seek to nonlinearly embed a set of data points in a lower dimensional space while minimizing distortion. These algorithms can be directly applied to clustering problems, as solutions in lower-dimensions offer advantages in terms of stability, interpretability and speed. The algorithm focus on local estimations of properties of the data, and have different ways of incorporating these local structures into a global structure. We will use the Laplacian eigenmap method, as a representative for these new types of methods (Belkin and Niyogi 2001). By focusing on local similarities, the Laplacian eigenmap algorithm has the potential to outperform Gaussian probabilistic models, when probability distributions are highly non-normal. We give a brief description of the three algorithms that we shall use: The first algorithm is the K-means algorithm (also used in Brown and Goetzmann (1997)). It works as follows: Given a set of N points, X, with a distance d (inversely related to a similarity measure), and a fixed integer K, it returns a partition of X into K subsets S1, . . . , SK. The partition is constructed by finding the K “best” centroids, and then by assigning each point of X to the closest centroid. 9 The minimization problem solved by K-means is argmin{S1,...,SK} K∑ i=1   ∑ x∈Si d(x, xi)   over all partitions {S1, . . . , SK} of X, where xi is the centroid of Si. The expression in the round bracket is a measure of dissimilarity of each cluster, hence K-means tries to minimize the sum of these measures, over all possible K-partitions of X. Common choices for d, are the squared Euclidean distance, or one minus the cosine of the angle between points viewed as vectors. The second algorithm is a hierarchical clustering algorithm. It works as follows: Given a set of N points, X, with a distance d (inversely related to a similarity measure), it returns a (usually binary) tree. The root of the tree is the whole set X, the leaves are the single elements of X. The other nodes are sets that are union of the sets associated to the children nodes. Each level of the tree simulates the structure of X by means of a certain partition into clusters. Hierarchical clustering algorithms can work either bottom-up, by agglomerating points and clusters of points into new, coarser level nodes, or top-down, by partitioning X recursively until singletons are reached. In the agglomerative approach, the key ingredient is the similarity measure between two clusters. This is computed between any pair of clusters, at each level, in order to decide which two clusters are the most similar. These will be joined into a new cluster. Common measures of similarity between clusters include the following: Nearest distance : min xi∈Xi,xj∈Xj d(xi, xj), Average distance : avexi∈Xi,xj∈Xjd(xi, xj), Complete distance : max xi∈Xi,xj∈Xj d(xi, xj). The third algorithm is the Laplacian eigenmap algorithm. It rests upon more complicated mathematics than the previous two algorithms. We give a detailed description of the algorithm in Appendix A. Here, we show how it works with an example: We are given a set of N points, X, each point being a vector of M numbers. This could, e.g., be the value over M consecutive years for N paintings. We wish to divide these into K clusters. For simplicity, let us assume 10 that we have N = 2, 000 vectors of length M = 2, as shown in Figure 1. It is trivially clear to the eye that there are two distinct clusters of points in Figure 1. However, as the mean and covariance terms between points in the two clusters are zero, it is also clear that any method based on a normal distribution of points will fail to separate the two clusters, even if means, variances and covariances are known! Another way of stating this, is that there is simply no way to separate the two clusters with a straight line, which is what standard Gaussian methods do. A similar argument also applies to the K-means algorithm. A method for separating the −5 −4 −3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3 4 5 −5 −4 −3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3 4 5 x 1 x 2 Figure 1: Set of points with highly non-Gaussian distribution. There are 2,000 points that form two separated groups (“ring” and “blob”). two sets needs to rely on more local measures than what is provided by means and variances. Phrased differently, we need a method that uses the fact that points that are close to neighbors of a specific point, are close to that specific point too, whereas not “bothering” too much of the distance of points that are far apart. The Laplacian eigenmap method starts with a symmetric similarity matrix Q ∈ RM×M , where Qij defines the similarity of points i and j. Thus, a large value of Qij implies that point i 11 and j are similar. The similarity measure must be accurate for points that are close, but it does not have to be very accurate for points that are far apart as long as it is small – These points will typically not end up in the same cluster anyway. The measure is thus defined in a way such that a focus on locality is introduced. We can now view each point as an element in RM . In the example, we have embedded each point in R2 in R2,000! The key here is that even though we now have a much larger space to work with, our embedding is a low-dimensional manifold in (ideally, two-dimensional). If we make an eigenvector decomposition of this mapping, the two eigenvectors corresponding to the second and third largest eigenvalues will provide a good representation of this manifold (the first eigenvector does not provide any information at all – it is a constant). The eigenvector decomposition is a nonlinear map. Finally, by looking at the eigenvector representation of a specific point, we can determine which cluster it belongs to. We do this for the points in Figure 1. The resulting plot of the coefficients for the second and third eigenvectors are shown in Figure 2. We see that there is a perfect separation between the two sets, and that they can easily be separated by a straight line. In general, clustering algorithms can be expected to be more efficient when working in the image of the points under the Laplacian eigenmaps. A heuristic argument for why this works, and how the similarity mapping should be chosen, is given in Belkin and Niyogi (2001). Now, although there are many other traditional clustering algorithms that would also succeed in separating these two clusters, there are more complicated distributions where the Laplacian eigenmap is superior, e.g., when the two sets are “spirals”, see Coifman and Lafon (2002). 3.3 Results 3.3.1 K-means algorithm We run K-means clustering with Euclidean distance. After trying different numbers, we arrive at specifying 5 clusters (remember that the number of clusters must be exogenously given to the K-means algorithm). The resulting clusters are shown in Table 2. The resulting clusters are unbalanced – the smallest cluster containing 3 artists and the largest containing 22. Ideally, we would want the first number – the average distance between artists within the same cluster – to 12 −0.03 −0.025 −0.02 −0.015 −0.01 −0.005 0 0.005 0.01 0.015 0.02 −0.05 −0.04 −0.03 −0.02 −0.01 0 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 φ 2 φ 3 Figure 2: Decomposition of points with Laplacian eigenmap method. A separation is achieved, with “ring” points forming a line (left part of figure), and “blob” points forming a cone (right part of picture). 13 be as small as possible, whereas we would want the nondiagonal elements of columns two to six – the minimal distance between artists in two different clusters – to be as large as possible. We see that, except for cluster K1, this is by no means the case for the other clusters. Especially, cluster K5 has an average distance of 40.5 between elements within cluster K5, whereas the minimum distance to each of the other clusters is less than 10. This is a clear indicator that this cluster contains scattered elements that did not fit into the other clusters. This suggests that the K-means algorithm is not very well suited for our dataset. Distance: Within K1 K2 K3 K4 K5 Artists K1 2.3 - 3.3 6.5 3.9 9.1 2,11,15,18,21,25,26,27,31,32,33, 35,36,39 ,40,42,43,44,45,50,51,58 K2 8.9 3.3 - 5.7 3.0 7.4 1,6,10,17,30,37,38,41,57 K3 17.2 6.5 5.7 - 5.4 8.4 4,22,48 K4 6.6 3.9 3.0 5.4 - 5.6 5,8,9,12,13,14,16,19,20,24,28, 34,46,47,49,52,53,54,55 K5 40.5 9.1 7.4 8.4 5.6 - 3,7,23,29,56 Table 2: Clusters identified with K-means algorithm, K1-K5. The clusters are unbalanced, and it is difficult to visualize how separated they are. The artist associated with respective number is given in Table 1. 3.3.2 Hierarchical tree algorithm We next run a hierarchical clustering algorithm. As discussed, there are two degrees of freedom when running this algorithm: the choice of similarity function between points, and the choice 14 of similarity between clusters. We tried several combinations: most led to highly unbalanced trees, with one or two very large clusters, and the rest of the clusters consisting of a single artist. The choice that gave the best result was using the angle (cosine) distance function, and the complete distance among clusters at different levels in the hierarchy. The results with this choice are shown in Figure 3. The vertical axis describes the distance between different branches in the tree. To separate, e.g., 5 clusters that minimize the distance between elements within a cluster, we should start from the top, and proceed downwards until the tree is split into 5 branches. This level is represented by the horizontal line in Figure 3. We see that, even with this parameter choice, such a procedure produces even more unbalanced clusters than the K-means algorithm, with cluster H3 containing 3 elements, and cluster H4 containing 30! Thus, hierarchical tree algorithms also seem quite poorly suited for our data. 3.3.3 Laplacian eigenmap algorithm Finally, we run the Laplacian eigenmap method. The results are shown in Figure 4. We see that five clearly separated clusters can be identified. These clusters are also identified when we run a K-means algorithm on the transformed two-dimensional dataset. The clusters are relatively well balanced, ranging in size between 7 and 15 artists. Also, we note that the representation in Figure 4 offers a nice two-dimensional visualization of the dataset (Coifman and Lafon 2002). We now have three suggestions for how artists should be clustered. In some cases they agree: For example, the impressionists Claude Monet and Edgar Degas (# 3 and 7 respectively) are put in the same cluster by all three methods. In other cases they do not: For example, the Laplacian eigenmap method groups Vincent van Gogh (# 4) together with Paul Klee (# 21, expressionist) and Pierre August Renoir (# 2, impressionist). The hierarchical tree algorithm on the other had chooses to put these three artists in separate clusters, rather focusing on the connection between Renoir and Max Ernst (# 42), and between Klee and Alexander Calder (# 27). Finally, the K-means algorithm agrees with the Laplacian eigenmap method that Renoir and Klee should be in the same cluster, but puts Van Gogh in a small cluster together with Henri de Toulouse Lautrec (# 22) and Giorgio Morandi (# 48). Now, the situation is 15 −0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 18 31 44 36 43 51 15 40 25 26 35 2 32 33 42 45 21 27 50 1 8 3 54 13 39 46 53 7 56 9 24 20 47 23 49 14 29 52 16 34 48 55 5 11 12 28 58 4 22 6 17 41 30 38 10 19 57 37 H1 H2 H3 H4 H5 Figure 3: Tree built by hierarchical clustering algorithm with cosine distance and complete similarity measure. The horizontal line represents the similarity level at which there are 5 clusters: H1-H5, shown in bottom part of Figure. The clusters are unbalanced. The artist associated with respective number is given in Table 1. 16 −0.2 −0.15 −0.1 −0.05 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 −0.25 −0.2 −0.15 −0.1 −0.05 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 φ 3 φ 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 L1 L4 L2 L3 L5 Figure 4: Clusters identified with Laplacian eigenmap algorithm. The clusters are fairly well balanced. The artist associated with respective number is given in Table 1. 17 analogous to having three art connaisseurs in the same room, and having as many opinions on what constitutes style. However, the point of our exersize is to try to objectively measure what constitutes style, or at least market substitutes, from observed price data. We should therefore be able to pick one of the three methods, solely based on the price dynamics and then compare if it relates to what we think of as style. We would like an objective way of measuring which method gives the best clusters for this dataset. The different degrees of balancedness of the clusters gives us some indication, but we would also like an “objective” measure of how “similar” artists within a cluster are, and how “different” artists in different clusters are. Right now, we are comparing apples and pears, as the three methods have different measures of what constitutes a cluster. Unfortunately, it is almost a folk theorem that for any method, one can define a measure of success and a data distribution, such that the method is optimal (for a semi-serious article, see Laloudouana and Tarare (2003)). For example, we compared the methods with their own “measures of success,” i.e., comparing the Laplacian eigenmap clusters with the K-means clusters, with the K-means algorithm’s measure of similarity, etc. Not surprisingly, each method outperforms the others when its own measure of success is used. We have performed, but do not report the details of, these tests. A more objective, frequently used, measure is the N-Cut criterion, Shi and Malik (2000). It measures how close points within a cluster are, compared with points in different clusters, by summing distances within clusters, and dividing over total distances, in a way such that a scale-free parameter is achieved. The measure has some optimality implications. Furthermore, it is not immediately related to any of our algorithms. In this sense, the N-Cut measure is like calling for an outsider to judge which of three paintings has the highest quality, instead of letting one of the three painters decide. For our data, the points represent price returns, and a high N-Cut measure means that returns for artists within a cluster are highly correlated, whereas returns for artists in different clusters have low correlation. It therefore fits well with the factor model described in Section 2. We compare the N-Cut-measure for the three algorithms in Table 3. Here, a higher number means that the algorithm is more successful. We see that the K-means algorithm and the Laplacian eigenmap algorithm outperform the hierarchical tree 18 algorithm, and that even though it is a close call, the Laplacian eigenmap algorithm has a higher score than the K-means algorithm. Thus, in addition to the balancedness, we have a Algorithm K-means Hierarchical tree Laplacian eigenmap N-Cut 10.2% 6.3% 10.9% Table 3: Comparing the three algorithms with the N-Cut criterion of success. The Laplacian eigen- map method has highest score, closely followed by the K-means algorithm, both outperforming the hierarchical tree algorithm. quantitative indication that the Laplacian eigenmap algorithm is to prefer. Finally, we prefer the visualization provided by the Laplacian eigenmap algorithm compared with the distance matrices provided by the K-means algorithm. We therefore focus on the clusters identified by the Laplacian eigenmap method. The aim with this paper is, of course, not to find the ultimate clustering algorithm – rather we wish to show that there is a connection between style as an economist and as an art historian might define it. In the next section, we analyze the clusters, L1-L5, identified by the Laplacian eigenmap method, and how they relate to style. For completeness, we also give a brief summary of the (weaker) results for the clusters identified by the K-means algorithm (K1-K5) and by the hierarchical clustering algorithm (H1-H5). 3.4 Relationship with style What do the clusters in Figure 4 represent? To answer this question, we first study the price dynamics for the different clusters, then we compare the clusters with “style” as it might be classified by an Art historian. There is not much relationship between price level and clusters. For example, average price for each artist (shown in Figure 6 in Appendix B, where size of price is represented by the area of each ring), seems fairly evenly distributed across clusters. 19 Returns for different artists on the other hand (shown in Figure 7 in Appendix B) have a clear relationship with the clusters - from large returns for cluster L1, and then decreasing, with the lowest returns for cluster L5. Thus, average returns partly explain the different clusters. However, this is just one dimension – Let us now see if the clusters do in any sense represent how the art historian might classify style. We naturally have to choose a very simple classifica- tion: One comparison is to look at the year of birth for respective artist and see if it is related to our clusters: We would expect artists that were active in the same time-period to be more similar in style. This comparison is shown in Figure 8 in Appendix B. It seems like clusters L1 and L4 on average contains “older” artists, whereas cluster L5 contains “younger” artists. We test whether these hypotheses bear any statistical significance. We count the number of artists in each group that are older and younger than the median age of the sample respectively. We use a χ2-test to see whether these groups have a random distribution. The hypothesis is rejected at the 5% level (Table 5b), and thus the clusters do not seem to have a random age distribution. We also perform a two-sample t-test to see whether the artists in clusters L1 and L4 are significantly older than the rest of the sample. Finally, we test whether the artists in cluster L5 are significantly younger than the rest of the sample. These results are shown in Table 5a. We can conclude that the artists in cluster L5 are younger than the rest of the sample at the 5% significance level. We do not get 5% significance for either of the separate hypotheses that clusters L1 and L4 are older than the rest of the sample, although the hypotheses that artists in clusters L1 and L4 are older than the rest of the sample is supported at the 1% level (not shown in table). Thus, we have at least an indirect indicator that the clusters are related to style. A direct test can be performed by comparing the clusters with a style classification. We use Artcyclopedia3 as a primary source to associate one style with each artist. When no clear clas- sification was given by Artcyclopedia, we used The-Artists.org4 as a secondary source. Artists that were not classified by either of these sources were defined as “Unclassified”. The resulting 3http://www.artcyclopedia.com 4http://www.the-artists.org 20 (admittedly very rough) classification is shown in Figure 5. The results are mixed, but there −0.2 −0.15 −0.1 −0.05 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 −0.25 −0.2 −0.15 −0.1 −0.05 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 C I I PI S F I S PO PI C U PI F E I C PaE C E PI I F F U U E U S Pa E U PO R eS S C eI M E S F U eS R U U F AE E E U U I S Pa U φ 2 φ 3 AE = Abstr. Expressionism C = Cubism eS = Early surrealism eI = Early impressionism E = Expressionism F = Fauvism M = Minimalism Pa = Popart PI = Post impressionism PO= Pointalism R = Realism S = Surrealism U = Unclassified L1 L2 L3 L4 L5 Figure 5: Style for artists. Hypotheses: Impressionists are over-represented in cluster L1, Post- impressionists are overrepresented in clusters L2 and L4, Expressionists dominate cluster L4, Surreal- ists are well represented in cluster L3, as are Popart painters in cluster L5. seems to be some structure: • Impressionists are mainly in cluster L1. • Cluster L2 is small, but contains two out of four Post-impressionists, as does cluster L4. • Cluster L3 is mixed, but has a high representation of Surrealists. • Expressionists dominate cluster L4. • Two out of three Popart painters are in cluster L5. 21 We use an exact contingency test5 with the null hypothesis that our identified structures are random. In doing this, look at the following styles: Impressionism, Post-impressionism, Ex- pressionism, Surrealism and Popart. Artists that do not belong to any of these are grouped into Other. A frequency table is shown in Table 4b. The hypotheses and the significance level a. Cluster L1 L2 L3 L4 L5 Older than median 4 4 10 1 10 Younger than median 10 4 4 6 5 Total 14 8 14 7 15 b. Cluster L1 L2 L3 L4 L5 Style Impressionism 4 1 0 1 0 Post-impressionism 0 2 0 2 0 Expressionism 2 1 0 3 2 Surrealism 1 1 3 0 1 Popart 0 0 1 0 2 Other 7 3 10 1 10 Total 14 8 14 7 15 Table 4: a) Number of artists in each cluster that are born before and after median year of birth. b) Number of artists in each cluster that represent different styles. that the respective alternative hypothesis can be rejected at are shown in Table 5b. We see that we can reject that the clusters are random at the 1% level. The hypotheses on Impres- sionists, Post-impressionists and Expressionists are all supported at the 5% level or better (i.e., the alternative hypothesis is rejected). The hypotheses on Surrealists being over-represented in 5Rather than a χ2-test, as the frequency table contains several zeros. 22 cluster L3, and popart painters in cluster L5 are not significant. a) Hypothesis χ2/t-statistic Supported with p-value Cluster L1 born earlier than rest of sample -1.64 0.10 Cluster L4 born earlier than rest of sample -1.50 0.14 Cluster L5 born later than rest of sample 1.97 < 0.05∗ b) Hypothesis χ2-statistic Degrees of freedom Supported with p-value Age-distribution is not random 10.38 4 < 0.05∗ Style-distribution is not random < 0.007∗∗ Cluster L1 more Impressionists 6.61 1 < 0.025∗ Cluster L2 more Post-impressionists 5.82 1 < 0.025∗ Cluster L3 more Surrealists 2.44 1 < 0.2 Cluster L4 more Expressionists 5.66 1 < 0.025∗ Cluster L4 more Post-impressionists 4.74 1 < 0.05∗ Cluster L5 more Popart 2.75 1 < 0.1 Table 5: Statistical tests of style distribution of identified clusters: a) two-sample t-test for the year of birth of artists in different clusters. b) χ2-test for the relationship between age, styles and different clusters. We also perform the same tests with the clusters identified by the K-means algorithm. The results are somewhat weaker – summarized in what follows: The test does not reject that the clusters are random with respect to style at the 5% level, although it is close (p = 0.052). Neither does it, reject randomness with respect to age (χ2 = 3.6 with 4 degrees of freedom). Furthermore, no cluster has a t-statistic higher than 1.15 when testing whether age distribution of the specific cluster differs from the rest. For styles within individual clusters, the two small 23 clusters (K3 and K5) contains statistically significant overrepresentation of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists respectively – similar to what was found by the Laplacian eigenmap method. However, no relations (not even weak) are identified for Expressionists, Popart and Surrealism, with highest χ2 statistics of about 1.2. Thus, it seems like the K-means algorithm does a decent job in separating out Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, in the two small groups K3 and K5, but fails to separate styles among the rest. Finally, we test the clusters identified by the hierarchical algorithm. Here, we are not even close to reject randomness of either age or style. The p-value for randomness of style is p = 0.30, and for randomness of age, χ2 = 1.6 with 4 degrees of freedom. Thus, there does not seem to be any relationship between style and the clusters identified by the hierarchical tree algorithm. 4 Conclusions We have empirically verified a connection between price dynamics and style of works of art, using a clustering algorithm. The Laplacian eigenmap algorithm identified five clusters (L1-L5) and we could reject that these clusters were random with respect to style and age of artist. Furthermore, we found support for: 1. Impressionists being overrepresented in cluster L1. 2. Post-impressionsists being overrepresented in clusters L2 and L4. 3. Expressionists being overrepresented in cluster L4. Our results should, of course, not be over-stated. We realize that we are using post hoc hypotheses that were identified from the data. A Bonferroni correction of the p-values for the individual hypotheses (in Table 5), to take this into account, would destroy statistical significance, except for the overall hypotheses that the clusters are not random over age and style. Moreover, the clusters are noisy and the correspondence with what we call style is far from one-to-one. Our interpretation is therefore that there is a relationship between price dynamics of artwork and style, and that a richer data-set would permit us to further explore and refine this relationship. 24 A Description of Laplacian eigenmap method We are given a set of points and their pairwise distances representing similarities (the smaller the distance, the more similar two points are). These distance are assumed to be rather accurate when they are small (i.e. the two objects being compared are very similar) but they may become unreliable when they are big (i.e. the two objects being compared are quite not similar). This a rather common situation in many applications. We look for a representation of the set of points in as low a dimension as possible, while preserving the important, reliable distances (the small ones), and allowing distortion for less- important distances (the large ones). Geometric harmonics (Coifman and Lafon 2002) and the related eigenmaps are non-linear maps that try to preserve local distances while in general distorting non-local distances. Moreover, these maps have the property of pulling clusters apart, automatically detecting possible good cuts for separating different clusters. Geometric Harmonics have a scaling parameter, which allows for looking at different level of details in the data set. We want to look at the geometric harmonics on a data set X ⊂ RN, each point being, in out particular case, one of the time series described above. We get the Laplacian eigenmap when we choose kernel K(x, y) = e−‖x−y‖ 2/δ2 (2) for some choice of δ and normalized as follows: let D(x) def = ∑ yi K(x, yi), (3) and consider the (normalized) Laplacian operator on the data set given by L = D−1(D − K). (4) We compute the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of this operator: Lϕi = λiϕi, (5) for i = 1, 2, . . ., where the λi’s are ordered in nondecreasing order. It is always the case that λ1 = 0 (since the operator is identity minus averaging). The first few eigenvectors are 25 particularly interesting. For any fixed k we can consider the map Φk : X → Rk, defined by Φk(X) = (ϕ2(x), . . . , ϕk+1(x)). (6) This map minimizes the distortion as defined by N − tr(ϕKϕT ) = k+1∑ i=2 (1 − λi) = 1 2 k+1∑ i=2 ∑ x,y ( ϕi(x) − ϕi(y) )2 K(x, y), (7) among all “projection maps” (AKAT with A orthogonal and AKAT = I). Since the kernel K(x, y) is larger for x, y close, the emphasis in the distortion of Φk is in keeping close points close. Observe that the matrix P = D−1K is a Markov matrix, whose (i, j)-entry defines the transition probability of jumping from point xi to point xj, thus defining a random walk on X, which we think of as a heat diffusion. Also, observe that the eigenvectors of P are exactly {ϕi}i and that the eigenvalues of P are just 1 − λi. Hence the eigenvectors {ϕi}i are also the eigenfunctions of the heat operator on X. Now observe that two clusters in X would by definition be weakly linked together, where weakly is measured with respect to the strength of the connections between points inside each cluster. Then the heat diffusion will be slow along the links connecting different clusters, compared to the speed of diffusion inside the clusters. We expect the second eigenfunction ϕ2 of the heat operator to have its 0-level set in the middle of these weak connections, and be of different sign on different clusters. Along these lines, it can for example be proved that the second eigenfunction ϕ2 arises from the relaxation of a (NP- hard) clustering problem (Shi and Malik 2000). In the example in Figure 1, the eigenfunction ϕ2 is negative in the core cluster and positive in the annulus around it, as one can clearly see in Figure 2, and its 0 level set is a good cut in the graph determined by the set of points. 26 B Clusters vs styles – Additional figures from Section 3.4 −0.2 −0.15 −0.1 −0.05 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 −0.25 −0.2 −0.15 −0.1 −0.05 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 1819 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 φ 2 φ 3 L1 L2 L3 L4 L5 Figure 6: Average prices over ten year period. There is no clear relationship between prices and clusters. The artist associated with respective number is given in Table 1. 27 −0.2 −0.15 −0.1 −0.05 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 −0.25 −0.2 −0.15 −0.1 −0.05 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 φ 2 φ 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 L1 L2 L3 L4 L5 Figure 7: Average returns over ten year period. There is a clear relationship between prices and clusters Basically, the average return increases in the second eigenvector φ2. The artist associated with respective number is given in Table 1. −0.2 −0.15 −0.1 −0.05 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 −0.25 −0.2 −0.15 −0.1 −0.05 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 φ 2 φ 3 1881 1841 1840 1853 1887 1869 1834 1893 1830 1839 1881 1901 1848 1876 1884 1867 1882 19281866 1883 1879 1864 1839 1877 1877 1886 1898 1909 1928 1898 1923 1871 1885 1863 1836 1888 1904 1887 1824 1936 1867 1891 1880 1923 1840 1796 1891 1890 1875 1910 1867 1880 1900 1860 1862 1897 1961 1894 L1 L2 L3 L4 L5 Figure 8: Year of birth for artists: Cluster L1 and L4 contain “Old artists”, cluster L5 contains “young artists”. Average birthyear: Cluster L1 – 1867, Cluster L2 – 1878, Cluster L3 – 1883, Cluster L4 – 1864, Cluster L5 – 1891. 28 References Ait-Sahalia, Y., J. A. Parker, and M. Yogo, 2002, Luxury goods and the equity premium, Princeton University, Economics Discussion Paper No. 222. Anderson, R. C., 1974, Paintings as an investment, Economic Inquiry 12, 13–26. Barberis, N., and A Schelifer, 2003, Style investing, Journal of Financial Economics 68, 161– 199. Belkin, M., and P. Niyogi, 2001, Laplacian eigenmaps for dimensionality reduction and data representation, University of Chicago, Department of mathematics, Working Paper. Brown, S. J., and W. N. Goetzmann, 1997, Mutual fund styles, Journal of Financial Economics 43, 373–399. Chan, L. K. C., H. Chen, and J. Lakonishok, 2002, On mutual fund investment styles, Review of Financial Studies 15, 1407–1437. Coifman, R. R., and S. Lafon, 2002, Geometric harmonics, Tech Report, Dept. of Computer Science, Yale University. Donoho, D. L., and C. Grimes, 2002, Hessian eigenmaps: locally linear embedding techniques for high-dimensional data, Technical Report 2002-27, Dept. of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Galenson, D. V., 2002, Painting Outside the Lines: Patters in Creativity in Modern Art (Har- vard University Press, Cambridge). Goetzmann, W., 1993, Accounting for taste: An analysis of art returns over three centuries, American Economic Review 83, 1370–1376. , and M. Spiegel, 1995, Price value components and the winner’s curse in an art market, European Economic Review 39, 549–555. 29 Jain, A. K., M. N. Murty, and P. J. Flynn, 1999, Data clustering: A review, ACM Computing Surveys 31, 264–323. Kumar, A., 2002, Style switching and stock returns, Working paper, University of Notre Dame. , and C. M. C. Lee, 2002, Individual investor sentiment and comovement in small stock returns, Working paper, Cornell University. Laloudouana, D., and M. D. Tarare, 2003, Data set selection, Conference paper, NIPS 2003. Mei, J., and M. Moses, 2002, Art as an investment and the underperformance of masterpieces, American Economic Review 92, 1656–1668. Peckham, M., 1967, Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior and the Arts, Patrick Wilkinson, editor (Maisonneuve Press, University Park Maryland) Reprint of the 1967 edition. Ross, S., 1976, The arbitrage theory of capital asset pricing, Journal of Economic Theory 13, 341–360. Roweis, S. T., and L. K. Saul, 2000, Nonlinear dimensionality reduction by locally linear em- bedding, Science 290, 2323–2326. Sharpe, W. F., 1992, Asset allocation: Management style and performance measurement, Jour- nal of Portfolio Management 18, 7–19. Shi, J., and J. Malik, 2000, Normalized cuts and image segmentation, IEEE. Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 22, 888–905. Tenenbaum, J. B., V. de Silva, and J. C. Langford, 2000, A global geometric framework for nonlinear dimensionality reduction, Science 290(5500):22, 2319–2323. 30 work_akchoj64rzaonfacx6etoiyo2i ---- Microsoft Word - Feder Thesis.docx     1               LLOYD  NEY’S  NEW  LONDON  FACETS:  ABSTRACTION  AND  REBELLION  IN  THE   SECTION  OF  FINE  ARTS         A  Thesis   Submitted  to   the  Temple  University  Graduate  Board           In  Partial  Fulfillment   of  the  Requirements  for  the  Degree   MASTER  OF  ARTS           by   Louise  Howard  Feder   May  2013                           Thesis  Approvals:     Dr.  Gerald  Silk,  Thesis  Advisor,  Department  of  Art  History   Dr.  Susanna  Gold,  Department  of  Art  History     i     ABSTRACT     Lloyd  Raymond  “Bill”  Ney’s  mural  New  London  Facets  was  commissioned  for   the  New  London,  Ohio  post  office  through  the  Treasury  Department-­‐run  New  Deal   program,  the  Section  of  Fine  Arts  (the  Section),  and  is  the  only  mural  that  program   officials  considered  abstract.  An  examination  of  the  mural  today  reveals  that  the   label  of  “abstract”  may  be  a  bit  extreme;  objects  in  the  piece  have  been  abstracted   but  the  mural  as  a  whole  is  not  at  all  strictly  non-­‐representational.  This  discrepancy   and  the  ensuing  controversy  over  Ney’s  mural  reveal  much  about  the  sensitivity  of   Section  officials  to  abstraction  and  to  subjects  outside  genre  or  allegorical  scenes   typical  of  Section  commissions.  Correspondence  between  Ney  and  Section  officials   indicate  a  fear  in  the  Section  that  the  public  would  reject  and  fail  to  understand  or   relate  to  anything  outside  of  the  representational  norm,  a  belief  against  which  Ney   adamantly  and  successfully  argued.    As  a  result,  the  Section  made  its  lone  exception   in  the  case  of  Ney  and  New  London  Facets.   While  Ney  did  not  achieve  national  renown  as  an  artist  within  his  lifetime,  his   work  is  still  exhibited  and  auctioned  relatively  regularly  in  his  hometown  of  New   Hope,  Pennsylvania.  With  the  exception  of  Karal  Ann  Marling’s  description  of  the   New  London  Facets  incident  in  her  book  Wall  to  Wall  America:  A  Cultural  History  of   Post-­‐Office  Murals  in  the  Great  Depression,  there  is  nothing  significant  published  on   Ney  or  his  mural.  With  this  thesis  I  hope  to  raise  awareness  of  Ney  as  an  artist,   provide  readers  with  a  complete  understanding  of  the  New  London  Facets   commission  and  approval,  and  explore  the  relationship  between  abstraction  and  the   New  Deal  art  programs.       ii   ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS     So  many  people  have  been  kind  enough  to  help  me  with  my  Master’s  Thesis.   First  and  foremost  I  want  to  thank  my  advisor  Dr.  Gerald  Silk  who  has  been   unendingly  patient  and  understanding  in  the  face  of  a  multitude  of  delays  and   persistent  computer  troubles.  He  was  also  incredibly  helpful  to  me  as  I  edited  this   thesis  and  I  could  not  have  completed  it  without  his  guidance.  My  second  reader,  Dr.   Susanna  Gold,  has  overseen  my  research  since  I  became  interested  in  Lloyd  Ney  in   her  course  The  Modern  American  Experience.  Her  encouragement  and  insights   throughout  this  process  have  been  exceedingly  helpful.  I  owe  them  both  my   warmest  thanks.   I  would  also  like  to  thank  Lloyd  Ney’s  grandchildren,  Odile  and  Michel   Laugier  for  welcoming  me  into  their  homes,  their  insights  about  their  grandfather’s   work,  and  unprecedented  access  to  their  family  archive  and  art  collection.  Birgitta   Bond  and  Pam  Sergey  at  the  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum  were  also  indispensible   in  tracking  down  a  plethora  of  archival  sources.  Without  all  of  their  help  I  could  not   have  explored  Ney’s  career  to  the  extent  I  did  for  this  thesis.   Finally  thank  you  to  my  family  and  friends  who  have  supported  me  through   every  part  of  this  process.  From  Philadelphia  to  Doylestown  to  New  Hope  to   Coaldale  they  have  helped  me  keep  my  head  clear  and  spirits  high.  Thank  you  all   very  much.       iii   TABLE  OF  CONTENTS   PAGE   ABSTRACT……………………..……………………………………………………………………………………..i   ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………….…………………………………………………………………….ii   LIST  OF  IMAGES………………………………………………………………...………………………………..iv     CHAPTER   1. ABSTRACTION  WITHIN  THE  SECTION  OF  FINE  ARTS  AND  AMERICA  AT   LARGE  ……………………………………………………………………………………………………...1     2. LLOYD  RAYMOND  “BILL  NEY  AND  HIS  CAREER  PRIOR  TO  THE  NEW   LONDON  FACETS  COMMISSION  ……………………………………………………………….18     3. NEY,  NEW  LONDON  FACETS,  AND  FRICTION  WITH  THE  SECTION……………..43     BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………………………….67       iv   LIST  OF  IMAGES     Image                          Page     1. Lloyd  Ney,  New  London  Facets,  New  London,  Ohio  post  office,  1941.  Oil  on   canvas.  Photo  courtesy  of  Michel  Laugier…………………………………………………………1     2. Kindred  McLeary,  Modern  Justice,  Pittsburgh  Post  Office  and  Courthouse,  1937.   Oil  on  canvas………………………………………………………………………………………………......4     3. Howard  Cook,  Steel  Industry,  Pittsburgh  Post  Office  and  Courthouse,  1936.  Oil  on   canvas…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….4     4. Stuyvesant  Van  Veen,  Pittsburgh  Panorama,  Pittsburgh  Post  Office  and   Courthouse,  1937.  Oil  on  canvas………………………………………………………………..........4     5. Alexander  Calder,  Mobile,  circa  1935.  Metal  and  steel……………………………………….7     6. Alexander  Calder,  Form  Against  Yellow,  1936.  Painted  metal  and  wood…………….7     7. Mark  Rothko,  Untitled,  1940.  Oil  on  canvas………………………………………………………8     8. Frank  Mechau,  Dangers  of  the  Mail,  Post  Office  Departmental  Building,   Washington,  D.C.,  1937.  Oil  on  canvas……………………………………………………………10     9. Victor  Arnautoff,  City  Life,  Coit  Tower,  San  Francisco,  California,  1934.  Fresco...11     10. Arshile  Gorky,  Mechanics  of  Flying  from  Aviation:  Evolution  of  Forms  under   Aerodynamic  Limitations,  1936-­‐1937.  Oil  on  canvas……………………………………….12     11. Minetta  Good,  Retrospection,  United  States  Post  Office,  Dresden,  Tennessee,   1938.  Oil  on  canvas……………………………………………………………………………………….15     12. Lloyd  R.  “Bill”  Ney.  The  Lloyd  Raymond  Ney  Papers,  1902-­‐1987,  Archives  of   American  Art,  Smithsonian  Institution.  [4234-­‐4235]………………………………………18     13. Lloyd  Ney,  The  Drinkers,  1924-­‐25.  Oil  on  canvas…………………………………………….22     14. The  Mechanic  Street  Bridge  Towpath  House.  The  Lloyd  Raymond  Ney  Papers,   1902-­‐1987,  Archives  of  American  Art,  Smithsonian  Institution.  [4234-­‐4235]….24     15. Lloyd  Raymond  Ney,  Mechanics  Street,  New  Hope,  1934.  Oil  on  canvas.  Gift  of   Marguerite  and  Gerry  Lenfest,  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum……………………….24         v   16. Lloyd  R.  “Bill”  and  Jean  Ney.  The  Lloyd  Ney  Papers,  The  James  A.  Michener  Art   Museum,  Doylestown,  PA………………………………………………………………………………25     17. Lloyd  Ney,  The  Canal,  1935.  Oil  on  canvas.  Photo  Courtesy  of  Michel  Laugier…..26     18. William  Langston  Lathrop,  Chilmark  Moor,  1930.  Oil  on  canvas.  Gift  of   Marguerite  and  Gerry  Lenfest,  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum……………………….26     19. Joseph  Pickett,  Coryell’s  Ferry,  1776,  1914-­‐1918.  Oil  on  canvas.  Whitney  Museum   of  American  Art…………………………………………………………………………………………….29     20. Lloyd  Ney,  Construction,  1958.  Wood,  iron,  steel  on  wood………………………………30     21. Lloyd  R.  “Bill”  Ney.  Joe  Masick  and  Bill  Dwyer  for  the  Delaware  Valley  Scrapbook,   1946.  The  Lloyd  Ney  Papers,  The  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum,  Doylestown,   PA………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...31     22. Lloyd  Ney,  Untitled,  circa  1930s.  Oil  on  canvas……………………………………………….36     23. Lloyd  Ney,  Abstract,  1939.  Oil  on  canvas.  Private  collection…………………………….37     24. Lloyd  R.  Ney,  Sketch  for  the  St.  Louis,  Missouri  competition,  Record  Group  121-­‐ MS,  National  Archives,  College  Park,  MD………………………………………………………...39     25. Lloyd  R.  Ney,  Sketch  for  the  St.  Louis,  Missouri  competition,  Record  Group  121-­‐ MS,  National  Archives,  College  Park,  MD………………………………………………………...40     26. Trew  Hocker,  The  Louisiana  Purchase  Exposition,  Saint  Louis,  Missouri  Post   Office,  1940.  Fresco……………………………………………………………………………………….41     27. New  London  Facets  in  Lloyd  Ney’s  studio  in  New  Hope,  PA  with  studio  visitor.   The  Lloyd  Raymond  Ney  Papers,  1902-­‐1987,  Archives  of  American  Art,   Smithsonian  Institution.  [4234-­‐4235]……………………………………………………………43     28. Howard  Cook,  Steel  Industry,  Pittsburgh  Post  Office  and  Courthouse,  Pittsburgh   Pennsylvania.  1936.  National  Archives…………………………………………………………..44     29. William  Gropper,  Construction  of  a  Dam,  1939.  Oil  on  canvas………………………….45     30. Ward  Lockwood,  Consolidation  of  the  West,  1937.  Oil  on  canvas……………………...46     31. Early  plan  for  New  London  Facets.  The  Lloyd  Raymond  Ney  Papers,  1902-­‐1987,   Archives  of  American  Art,  Smithsonian  Institution.  [4234-­‐4235]…………………….49         vi   32. Early  plan  for  New  London  Facets.  The  Lloyd  Raymond  Ney  Papers,  1902-­‐1987,   Archives  of  American  Art,  Smithsonian  Institution.  [4234-­‐4235]…………………….50     33. Early  plan  for  New  London  Facets.  The  Lloyd  Raymond  Ney  Papers,  1902-­‐1987,   Archives  of  American  Art,  Smithsonian  Institution.  [4234-­‐4235]…………………….50     34. Lloyd  R.  Ney,  Simplified  visualization  of  outstanding  subject  matter.  Record   Group  121-­‐GA,  National  Archives,  College  Park,  MD……………………………………….52     35. Lloyd  R.  Ney,  Color  study  for  the  New  London,  Ohio  post  office.  Record  Group   121-­‐GA,  National  Archives,  College  Park,  MD………………………………………………….52     36. Lloyd  Ney,  Key  West  #1  C,  1939.  Watercolor.  Private  Collection………………………55     37. Lloyd  Ney,  Key  West  #3  C,  1939.  Watercolor.  Private  Collection………………………55     38. Lloyd  Ney,  Study  for  New  London  Facets,  1940,  charcoal,  graphite,  and  tempera   on  wood  panel.  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum……………………………………………..58     39. Lloyd  Ney,  New  London  Facets,  1941,  Oil  on  Canvas.  New  London,  Ohio  post   office.  Photo  courtesy  of  Michel  Laugier…………………………………………………………59     40. Lloyd  Ney,  Red  Center,  1941.  Oil  on  canvas.  Private  Collection………………………...61     41. Lloyd  Ney,  Untitled,  circa  1940s.  Oil  on  canvas……………………………………………….61     42. Lloyd  Ney,  Untitled,  1941.  Oil  on  canvas.  Private  Collection…………………………….61     43. Lloyd  Ney,  Composition  No.  9,  1950.  Watercolor  on  paper.  Photo  courtesy  of   Michel  Laugier………………………………………………………………………………………………62     44. Lloyd  R.  “Bill”  Ney,  watercolor  of  planned  Ney  Museum.  Watercolor  and  charcoal   on  canvas.  Private  Collection.  Photo  by  Edwin  Hild………………………………………...64     45. Lloyd  Ney,  untitled  and  undated  sculpture.  Painted  metal.  Collection  of  Michel   Laugier…………………………………………………………………………………………………………65     46. Lloyd  Ney,  Self-­  Portrait,  1962.  Watercolor  on  Paper………………………………………65     47. Lloyd  Ney,  Untitled,  1963.  Oil  on  Canvas.  Private  Collection…………………………….65     48. Lloyd  Ney,  Apple  Orchard,  1950s.  India  ink  on  arch  paper.  Collection  of  Steven   Hochberg.  Photo  courtesy  of  the  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum  archive………..66     1   CHAPTER  1   ABSTRACTION  WITHIN  THE  SECTION  OF  FINE  ARTS  AND  AMERICA  AT  LARGE       Figure  1:  Lloyd  Ney,  New  London  Facets,  New  London,  Ohio  post  office,  1941.  Oil  on   canvas.  Photo  courtesy  of  Michel  Laugier.     Lloyd  Ney’s  mural,  New  London  Facets  (figure  1),  has  long  been  described   both  in  New  Deal  and  art  historical  literature  as  the  only  abstract  mural  created   through  the  Treasury  Department-­‐run  Section  of  Fine  Arts.1  Though  Ney’s  work  is   certainly  abstracted  in  form,  unusual  in  subject  matter,  and  unnatural  in  color,   christening  the  mural  with  such  an  exclusive  title  is  misleading.  Observation  of  the   work  reveals  that  Ney’s  style,  however  unconventional  for  murals  commissioned   through  the  New  Deal  program,  remains  rooted  in  representational  treatments  of   figures,  objects,  and  parts  of  the  surrounding  environment.  In  addition  to  being   disingenuous,  the  label  has  also  limited  research  on  Ney  and  New  London  Facets  to   issues  of  abstraction  within  the  Section  of  Fine  Arts  leading  to  scholarly  neglect  of                                                                                                                   1  Karal  Ann  Marling,  Wall  to  Wall  America:  A  Cultural  History  of  Post  Office  Murals  in   the  Great  Depression  (Minneapolis:  University  of  Minnesota  Press,  1982),  293-­‐5.   Marlene  Park  and  Gerald  E.  Markowitz,  Democratic  Vistas:  Post  Offices  and  Public  Art   in  the  New  Deal  (Philadelphia:  Temple  University  Press,  1984),  21.   Richard  D.  McKinzie,  The  New  Deal  for  Artists  (Princeton:  Princeton  University  Press,   1973),  54.       2   much  of  the  rest  of  the  artist’s  career.  Over  the  course  of  this  thesis  I  hope  to  remedy   this  omission  and  examine  issues  of  abstraction  within  the  Section  of  Fine  Arts  as   found  in  New  London  Facets  within  the  larger  context  of  Ney’s  career.  A  detailed   probe  of  Ney’s  oeuvre  will  provide  a  broader  and  deeper  understanding  of  the   controversy  surrounding  his  New  Deal  mural  and  shed  vital  light  on  the  conscious   choices  of  style  and  subject  matter  that  the  artist  made  for  the  sake  of  his   composition’s  audience.  However,  before  delving  into  the  affect  of  Ney’s  rich  and   varied  career’s  affect  on  New  London  Facets,  it  is  important  to  first  investigate  the   New  Deal’s  Section  of  Fine  Arts’  thorny  relationship  with  abstraction.   The  New  Deal  spawned  a  great  many  new  federal  art  programs,  so  many  that   participants  sometimes  did  not  know  who  was  actually  in  charge  of  their  position,   commission,  or  work.2  This  may  have  been  due  to  the  fact  that  many  of  the  art   programs  were  designed  as  temporary,  experimental  projects  while  other  programs   lasted  for  years  in  order  to  create  as  many  jobs  as  possible,  and  still  more  programs   were  solely  concerned  with  creating  art  as  opposed  to  jobs.  Confusing  the  matter   further  for  artists,  nearly  all  of  the  New  Deal  programs  were  charged  with   representing  the  “American  scene”  in  art  for  American  citizens  in  the  midst  of  the                                                                                                                   2  Lloyd  Ney,  the  artist  discussed  in  this  thesis,  often  wrote  that  the  WPA  employed   and  commissioned  him  to  paint  a  mural  in  the  New  London,  Ohio  post  office.  In  fact,   Ney  was  never  approached  by  the  WPA  and  only  spoke  with  Section  officials.  Ney’s   confusion  has  led  to  numerous  mistakes  in  the  literature  about  his  time  working  on   his  New  London,  Ohio  commission.  The  most  noticeably  incorrect  example  of  this   was  the  label  formerly  accompanying  the  cartoon  for  Ney’s  final  mural,  New  London   Facets,  located  in  the  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum,  which  named  both  the  WPA   and  PWAP  as  the  institutions  in  charge  of  the  commission.  It  has  since  been   corrected  with  the  assistance  of  this  author.       3   Great  Depression.3  These  already  similar  programs  also  had  seemingly   interchangeable  acronyms  and,  in  this  confounding  sea  of  bureaucratic   abbreviations,  many  artists  simply  began  to  refer  to  all  New  Deal  art  programs  as   the  WPA.4          One  of  these  programs  was  the  Section  of  Painting  and  Sculpture,  later  the   Section  of  Fine  Arts,  and  always  called  simply,  “the  Section.”  The  Section  lasted  the   longest  of  the  New  Deal  art  organizations,  running  from  October  of  1934  through   1943.  Different  perhaps  from  the  more  widely  known  need-­‐based  Works  Progress   Administration’s  (WPA)  Federal  Art  Project’s  (FAP)  and  the  Public  Works  of  Art   Program’s  (PWAP),  both  of  which  gave  thousands  of  unemployed  artists  work,  the   primary  mission  of  the  Section  was  to  provide  artists  unable  to  obtain  large   commissions  on  their  own  with  jobs  that  would  jump-­‐start  their  careers  while   simultaneously  decorating  federal  buildings.5                                                                                                                                     3  Park  and  Markowitz,  Democratic  Vistas:  Post  Offices  and  Public  Art  in  the  New  Deal,   139-­‐142.   4  This  practice  was  has  not  only  made  archival  work  on  New  Deal  artists  and  their   commissions  understandably  confusing,  but  the  label  was  also  actually  incorrect.   The  WPA  was  an  umbrella  organization  responsible  for  organizations  such  as  the   Federal  Arts  Project  (FAP)  that  employed  needy  artists.   5  While  Section  commissions  were  not  awarded  based  on  financial  need,  many   artists  who  participated  in  Section  projects  did  qualify  for  and  often  took  part  in   need-­‐based  programs  like  the  FAP  and  PWAP.  However,  in  spite  of  the  presence  of   financially  troubled  artists,  the  Section  was  conceived  as  a  means  for  artists  of  any   background  to  compete  for  large,  public,  paid  commissions.       4               Figure  2:  Kindred  McLeary,  Modern            Figure  3:  Howard  Cook,  Steel  Industry,    Justice,  Pittsburgh  Post  Office  and                Pittsburgh  Post  Office  and  Courthouse,   Courthouse,  1937.  Oil  on  canvas.                      1936.  Oil  on  canvas.       Figure  4:  Stuyvesant  Van  Veen,  Pittsburgh  Panorama,  Pittsburgh  Post  Office  and   Courthouse,  1937.  Oil  on  canvas.       The  most  frequently  commissioned  motifs  in  Section  murals  include  imagery   of  farms,  family  scenes,  episodes  from  local  history,  or  allegories  that  allude  to   topical  concepts  such  as  “freedom,”  “American  progress”  or  “work.”  For  example,   the  Section  awarded  three  mural  commissions  in  the  Pittsburgh  Post  Office  and   Courthouse  to  artists  Kindred  McLeary,  Howard  Cook,  and  Stuyvesant  Van  Veen   who  won  with  submitted  sketches  that  depicted  Justice,  the  local  steel  industry,  and   a  panoramic  view  of  the  city  (figures  2-­‐4)  respectively,  all  of  which  were  subjects       5   suggested  by  Section  officials  in  the  commission  competition’s  initial   announcement.6     Terms  such  as  avant-­‐garde,  modern,  and  abstract  would  be  appropriate  for  a   far  fewer  number  of  such  murals.  Indeed,  a  general  accounting  of  New  Deal  murals   located  across  the  United  States  in  post  offices,  hospitals,  schools,  and  other  very   public  buildings  may  tempt  a  viewer  into  assuming  that  art  in  America  during  the   1930s  was  solely  concerned  with  depicting  the  American  landscape  in  a  pseudo-­‐ Regionalist  style.7  Of  course,  should  one  leave  the  post  office  and  seek  out  non-­‐New   Deal  commissioned  examples  of  American  painting  and  sculpture  from  the  1930s   and  1940s,  as  much  of  the  subject  matter  would  seem  almost  intentionally  at  odds   with  contemporary  New  Deal  works.     Simultaneously  with  the  Section’s  commissions,  artists  like  Alexander  Calder   were  creating  abstract  works  recognizable  by  flat,  colorful  shapes  and  imbued  with   movement.  Calder’s  Mobile  (figure  5),  for  example,  from  1935  consists  entirely  of   hanging  geometric  shapes.  Completely  abstract,  the  kinetic  sculpture  cannot  be   associated  with  any  recognizable  objects  outside  of  pure  geometrical  forms  and  is   entirely  concerned  with  shape,  line,  and  motion.  Calder’s  fascination  with  pure   abstraction  can  also  be  seen  in  1936,  the  same  year  Cook  completed  his  previously   mentioned  Section  commissioned  mural  for  the  Pittsburgh  post  office  and   courthouse,  in  Form  Against  Yellow  (figure  6).  Though  no  longer  literally  in  motion,                                                                                                                   6  Section  announcement  for  the  Pittsburgh  Post  Office  and  Courthouse  Contest,   1935.  Pittsburgh  Post  Office  and  Courthouse,  Textual  Records  Division,  National   Archives.   7  Marling,  Wall  to  Wall  America:  A  Cultural  History  of  Post  Office  Murals  in  the  Great   Depression,  68-­‐69.       6   the  work’s  energetic  lines  and  three-­‐dimensional  forms  imply  movement  in  a  lively   manner.  With  Form  Against  Yellow,  Calder  also  plays  with  the  viewer’s  ideas  of   traditional  artistic  categories  with  the  work’s  liminal  placement  between  painting   and  sculpture.  Though  Calder  was  simultaneously  working  in  a  style  still  concerned   with  the  figural  and  representational  during  the  same  years  he  produced  Mobile  and   Form  Against  Yellow,  the  pure  abstraction  present  in  these  two  works  is  far  removed   from  the  type  of  painting  being  commissioned  by  the  Section  in  the  1930s.8     Outside  of  sculpture,  artists  like  Mark  Rothko  strived  towards  pure   abstraction  in  painting  during  the  1930s  and  1940s,  where  forms  existed  solely  as   forms  as  opposed  to  abstracted  versions  of  recognizable  objects.9  In  Rothko’s   Untitled  (figure  6)  from  1940  for  instance,  the  artist  has  painted  an  ambiguous,   orange  shape  in  front  of  a  red,  black,  yellow,  and  beige  background.  The  orange   shape,  though  perhaps  familiar  in  its  organic  form,  cannot  be  readily  identified  as  an   abstracted  version  of  a  specific  object.  This  type  of  non-­‐objective  abstraction,  which,   as  we  will  see,  was  of  much  of  interest  to  Ney,  was  completely  out  of  bounds  for   Section  officials.10  While  many  American  artists  seemed  far  more  interested  in                                                                                                                   8  Representational  and  figural  works  created  during  the  1930s  by  Calder  include   Cirque  Calder  and  associated  circus  wire  sculptures  and  drawings,  among  others.   9  During  this  period  Mark  Rothko  was  also  painting  urban  themes  including   paintings  of  street  scenes,  buildings,  and  portraits.   10  It  is  important  to  note  that  Rothko  viewed  himself  as  equal  parts  Surrealist  and   abstract  painter  during  the  early  1940s.  As  Jacob  Baal-­‐Teshuva  points  out  on  page   37  of  his  book,  Mark  Rothko  1903-­1970:  Pictures  as  Drama,  “The  war  had  caused  a   number  of  European  Surrealists  to  emigrate  to  New  York…The  great  pioneer  of   abstract  art,  Piet  Mondrian,  had  moved  to  New  York  back  in  1940.  The  critical   discussion  of  his  works  and  the  arrival  of  the  Surrealists  were  decisive  steps  in  the   rise  of  Abstract  Expressionism.  Rothko  and  Gottlieb  saw  themselves  as  the  new,   independent  successors  to  the  European  avantgarde.  They  sought  to  unite   Surrealism  and  abstract  painting.”       7   incorporating  these  modern  styles  and  techniques  into  their  work,  the  head  of  the   Section  dismissed  the  trend  as,  “that  Abstract  art  stuff.”11     Figure  5:  Alexander  Calder,  Mobile,  circa  1935.  Metal  and  steel.       Figure  6:  Alexander  Calder,  Form  Against  Yellow,  1936.  Painted  metal  and  wood.                                                                                                                     11  Marling,  Wall  to  Wall  America:  A  Cultural  History  of  Post  Office  Murals  in  the  Great   Depression,  25,  293-­‐5.       8     Figure  7:  Mark  Rothko,  Untitled,  1940.  Oil  on  canvas.     This  interest  became  so  significant  that  in  1937  a  small,  select  group  of   artists  committed  to  abstraction  organized  and  formed  a  group  called  the  American   Abstract  Artists  (AAA).  Members  of  the  AAA  met  regularly  and  struggled  to  find   nomenclature  that  would  suit  the  varied  approaches  and  styles  of  all  involved.  Given   their  differing  uses  of  abstraction,  the  group  struggled  to  cohesively  define  “abstract   art”  as  a  term.12  Eventually  the  AAA  members  gave  up  on  this  precise  definition  and   decided  instead  to  embrace  a  liberal  interpretation  of  the  word  abstract.  The  term   was  used  generally  for  abstracted  works  and  purely  non-­‐objective  works  alike,   which  proved  useful  in  creating  an  environment  where  artists,  critics,  and,  later,   government  officials,  felt  comfortable  using  the  term  often,  and  for  very  different                                                                                                                   12  Elaine  D.  Gustafson  and  Susan  E.  Strickler,  The  Second  Wave:  American  Abstraction   of  the  1930s  and  1940s,  Selections  from  the  Penny  and  Elton  Yasuna  Collection   (Worcester:  Worcester  Art  Museum,  1991),  8-­‐9.       9   works  of  art.13  Unfortunately,  as  the  practice  of  using  abstract  as  a  broad  term   spread  outside  of  the  artistic  community,  it  began  to  be  applied  to  works  and   situations  that  were  not  abstract  at  all,  even  in  the  AAA’s  general  sense.   For  instance,  in  defending  Frank  Mechau’s  1937  mural,  Dangers  of  the  Mail   (figure  8),  officials  in  the  Section  program  repeatedly  called  the  several  nude  women   in  the  piece  “impersonal”  and  “almost  abstract”  in  an  attempt  to  pacify  the  public’s   concern  about  the  presence  of  nudity.  The  Section  officials’  logic  appears  to  have   been  that  if  a  recognizably  nude  figure  could  be  thought  of  in  any  way  as  abstract,   then  it  surely  cannot  exist  in  reality  and  can  therefore  be  acceptable  on  a  post  office   wall.  It  is  also  possible  that  the  Section  officials  hoped  that  having  a  discussion  about   the  nudes  would  keep  the  public  from  fretting  about  Mechau’s  otherwise  extremely   violent  painted  central  scene  in  Dangers  of  the  Mail.  Unfortunately  for  the  Section,   their  “abstract  vocabulary”  strategy  backfired;  the  publicity  surrounding  the   “scandalous”  D.C.  murals  fused  a  link  between  federally  funded,  accepted,  and   defended  “almost  abstract”  art  and  nudity,  immorality,  and  modernism.14                                                                                                                     13  Ibid.   14  Marling,  Wall-­to-­Wall  America:  A  Cultural  History  of  Post  Office  Murals  in  the  Great   Depression,  24-­‐25.       10   Figure  8:  Frank  Mechau,  Dangers  of  the  Mail,  Post  Office  Departmental  Building,   Washington,  D.C.,  1937.  Oil  on  canvas.     This  new  correlation  among  styles  and  subjects  in  the  wake  of  Dangers  of  the   Mail  caused  subsequent  Section  commissions  that  contained  hints  of  nudity  to  be   labeled  “modern  art,”  which  made  Section  officials  nervous  about  further   controversy.  It  is  important  to  note  that  the  Section  was  commissioning  art  in  a   country  that  had  already  witnessed  and  condemned  the  creation  of  “modern,”  so-­‐ called  “Red”  art  under  the  auspices  of  the  WPA’s  FAP  and  PWAP.15  The  most   infamous  episode  was  that  of  the  Coit  Tower  murals  painted  under  the  Public  Works   of  Art  Program  (PWAP)  by  artists  Victor  Arnautoff,  Bernard  Zakheim  and  Clifford   Wight  in  1934  (figure  9).                                                                                                                     15  Marling,  Wall-­to-­Wall  America:  A  Cultural  History  of  Post  Office  Murals  in  the  Great   Depression,  24.       11     Figure  9:  Victor  Arnautoff,  City  Life,  Coit  Tower,  San  Francisco,  California,  1934.   Fresco.     These  murals  included  subtle  references  to  the  Communist  beliefs  of  these   artists,  such  as  a  painted  magazine  stand  holding  copies  of  the  Daily  Worker.  When   asked  to  explain  these  references,  Zakheim  famously  stated  that  Communism  was   simply  an  alternative  to  the  “American  scene”  requested  in  the  PWAP  commission.16   The  public  was  outraged  and  became  mistrustful  of  artists  employed  in  PWAP.  Then,   adding  to  the  flames  of  public  resentment  towards  abstract  art,  controversy  erupted   three  years  later  over  Arshile  Gorky’s  murals  painted  for  the  WPA.   Gorky  was  commissioned  to  paint  ten  large  murals  between  1936  and  1937   for  the  Newark  Airport  Administration  Building  in  New  Jersey.  His  assigned  subject                                                                                                                   16  Marling,  Wall-­to-­Wall  America:  A  Cultural  History  of  Post  Office  Murals  in  the  Great   Depression,  46.       12   was  “aviation,”  a  topic  WPA  officials  deemed  appropriate  and  non-­‐controversial  for   an  airport  setting.  However,  upon  its  completion  Newark  locals  were   overwhelmingly  negative  about  the  newly  installed  murals.  Though  Gorky  had   created  a  series  of  murals  based  on  aviation  as  instructed,  his  forms  were  severely   abstracted.  His  work  referenced  photographs  taken  by  Gorky’s  friend  Wyatt  Davis   throughout  the  airport.  At  times  objects  in  the  source  photos  were  used  in  their   entirety  and  for  other  parts  of  the  murals  the  original  photos  were  combined  into  a   photo-­‐collage  that  in  turn  was  represented  in  the  murals.         Figure  10:  Arshile  Gorky,  Mechanics  of  Flying  from  Aviation:  Evolution  of  Forms   under  Aerodynamic  Limitations,  1936-­‐1937.  Oil  on  canvas.     The  resulting  mural  series,  Aviation:  Evolution  of  Forms  under  Aerodynamic   Limitations  (figure  10),  is  an  amalgamation  of  forms,  colors,  and  lines  that  reference   parts  of  planes  and  airports  without  representing  objects  directly.  As  Kim  S.   Theriault  writes  in  Rethinking  Arshile  Gorky,  “The  composition  bridges  time  and   space  to  form  an  idea  of  flight  and  quotes  fragments  of  modern  life.  Just  as  one  can       13   fly  from  one  place  to  another,  thereby  compressing  time  and  shifting  easily  from   space  to  space  and  culture  to  culture,  Gorky’s  abstraction  dislocates  and  reattributes   elements  from  one  composition  or  location  to  another.”17   This  effect  created  by  the  disorienting  abstracted  forms  was  lost  on  the   murals’  audience  and  local  papers  were  quick  to  make  fun  of  Gorky’s  style.   Ultimately,  public  disapproval  became  so  strong  that  a  group  of  area  citizens   attempted,  unsuccessfully,  to  remove  the  murals  from  the  airport  in  the  middle  of   the  night.18  Though  Gorky  had  followed  the  WPA’s  directive  regarding  a  subject,  his   inclusion  of  abstracted  objects,  however  recognizable  they  were  in  parts,  and  use  of   compressed  space  proved  too  modern  for  citizens  in  Newark.  This  episode  when   combined  with  the  Coit  Tower  incident  led  officials,  concerned  about  funding  and   public  reception,  to  become  exceedingly  careful  about  artists’  “modern”  styles  in   later  commissions.19   As  Karal  Ann  Marling  points  out  in  her  seminal  book,  Wall  to  Wall  America:  A   Cultural  History  of  Post  Office  Murals  in  the  Great  Depression,  the  more  the  terms   “abstract,”  “modern  art,”  and  “the  contemporary  manner”  were  used  in  popular   reports  on  murals  that  communities  found  displeasing,  the  more  the  terms  became   catchalls  for  art  that  failed  to  please  or  was  deemed  in  bad  taste.20  Since  the  Section   was  intended  to  eventually  evolve  into  a  Federal  Department  for  the  Arts,  officials  in                                                                                                                   17  Kim  S.  Theriault,  Rethinking  Arshile  Gorky  (University  Park:  Penn  State  Press,   2009),  94-­‐95.     18  Theriault,  Rethinking  Arshile  Gorky,  96.   19  Marling,  Wall-­to-­Wall  America:  A  Cultural  History  of  Post  Office  Murals  in  the  Great   Depression,  48.   20  Marling,  Wall-­to-­Wall  America:  A  Cultural  History  of  Post  Office  Murals  in  the  Great   Depression,  24.       14   charge  of  commissions  such  as  Edward  Bruce  and  Edward  Rowan  wanted  to  avoid   serious  controversy  in  order  to  guarantee  the  organization’s  permanence.  This   meant  that  even  if  Section  judges  and  officials  personally  took  no  issue  with   abstraction,  Cubism,  non-­‐objectivity,  Surrealism  or  any  other  Modern  art  style,   technique  or  movement,  it  did  not  make  sense  in  the  long  run  to  antagonize  the   public  with  modern  styles  or  unconventional  subjects.21   And  yet  Bruce,  Rowan  and  their  compatriots  desperately  did  not  want  to   become  stuck  too  deeply  in  the  past.  Rowan  in  particular  was  known  for   immediately  dismissing  submissions  that  were  too  academic  or  derivative  of  “old   masters”  works.22  The  Section  hoped  to  decorate  post  offices  with  American   subjects  painted  in  a  style  not  overly  dependent  on  European  academicism.  This  did   not,  of  course,  keep  the  Section  from  commissioning  a  number  of  murals  that   contained  unexplained  angels,  as  in  Karl  Free’s  Columbia  Under  the  Palm,  or   gestures  that  relied  relying  heavily  on  or  copied  directly  from  Renaissance  or   classical  sculpture  and  painting,  as  in  Edmond  Archer’s  Captain  Eppes  Making   Friends  with  the  Appomattox  Indians.23     With  officials  wary  of  modernistic  submissions  and  frustrated  with  academic   imitations,  the  Section  was  often  left  with  art  commissioned  and  painted  in  a  strange   middling  style.  The  majority  of  the  works  were  not  quite  Regionalist  in  nature,  but                                                                                                                   21  Ibid,  25.   22  Ibid,  312-­‐3.   23  Ibid,  307-­‐309.  Marling  further  remarks  that,  “According  to  the  minutes  kept  by   Bruce’s  private  secretary,  the  Section  was  struck  collectively  dumb  by  Captain  Eppes   Making  Friends  with  the  Appomattox  Indians.  Small  wonder!  The  most  stunning   feature  of  the  work  was  Archer’s  implicit  contention  that  Bernini  was  alive  and  well   and  working  in  Virginia.  And  Tiepolo  lived  in  the  neighborhood  too.”  309.       15   many  did  depict  scenes  from  American  life.  There  were  no  history  paintings  in  the   19th  century  sense  of  the  word,  but  there  certainly  were  a  large  number  of  murals   depicting  staged  historical  events.  Minetta  Good’s  1938  mural  Retrospection  (figure   11)  is  one  example  of  this  awkward  in-­‐between  categorization.  Good  has  painted   scenes  from  the  town  of  Dresden,  Tennessee’s  local  history;  on  the  left  pioneers   settle  the  land,  on  the  right  stagecoaches  arrive  bringing  the  mail,  and  in  the  middle   of  the  composition  there  is  a  representation  of  the  town  during  its  prosperous   antebellum  period.  Though  she  is  careful  in  representing  Dresden  accurately  in   terms  of  historical  events,  she  does  not  frame  the  place  as  an  alternative  to  urban,   modern  living  as  would  a  Regionalist  painter  nor  does  she  attempt  to  endow   Dresden  with  a  sense  of  greatness  or  gravity  as  one  would  in  a  19th  century  history   painting.       Figure  11:  Minetta  Good,  Retrospection,  United  States  Post  Office,  Dresden,   Tennessee,  1938.  Oil  on  canvas.     This  safe  middling  style  in  submissions  ultimately  produced  a  collection  of   murals  that  do  not  accurately  represent  current  artistic  trends  in  painting  and   sculpture  in  America.  This  is  not  to  say  that  the  Section  failed  to  produce  interesting       16   or  successful  murals;  on  the  contrary  a  great  number  of  Section  murals,  like  Ney’s   New  London  Facets,  are  fascinating  in  terms  of  subject  matter,  composition,  and   style.  We  simply  must  acknowledge  that  an  artist  with  a  distinctive  or  progressive   style  hoping  to  obtain  a  Section  commission  had  to  fight  for  the  composition,   persuade  Section  officials  to  leave  the  comfortably  safe  and  established  aesthetic   style  behind,  and  to  take  a  significant  risk  in  terms  of  public  opinion  and  federal   support.   However,  in  spite  of  these  restrictions,  Section  officials  successfully  awarded   1400  contracts  to  artists  from  all  over  the  country  during  the  institution’s  tenure   from  October  of  1934  through  1943.24  The  Section  became  a  means  through  which   artists  across  the  country  could  obtain  large-­‐scale  commissions.  It  especially  favored   artists  who  were  either  just  starting  their  careers  or  were  not  well  known,  and   emerging  artists  became  ideal  candidates  for  the  Section’s  commissions.  If  a  Section   commission  could  launch  an  artist’s  career,  and  if  the  public  liked  his  or  her  art,  then   that  was  the  ultimate  success  both  for  the  artist  and  for  the  Section  as  an  institution.   That  said,  Section  officials  were  entirely  unprepared  for  a  public  that  might   favor  public,  abstract  art,  as  in  the  case  of  the  New  London,  Ohio  commission.  In  a   series  of  events  that  baffled  officials,  Ney,  whose  proposed  mural  for  New  London’s   post  office  was  initially  rejected  by  the  Section,  rallied  the  people  of  New  London  to   his  side.  Ney  presented  himself  to  the  public  as  an  artist  attempting  to  paint  America   in  his  own  individual  style,  not  as  someone  intentionally  engaged  in  an  elitist,                                                                                                                   24  Dows,  “The  New  Deal’s  Treasury  Art  Program:  A  Memoir,”  20.  The  Section  faded   out  because  of  budget  constraints  necessitated  by  the  advent  of  World  War  II   beginning  in  1941  and  then  finally  ending  the  program  altogether  in  1943.         17   incomprehensible,  foreign  style  of  painting.  Ney’s  passion  for  abstract  art  and  his   struggle  with  the  Section  was  then  viewed  by  New  London’s  citizens  as  an  example   of  an  American  standing  up  for  his  rights  in  the  face  of  the  government,  and  they   excitedly  defended  his  art  to  the  Section.   The  details  of  Ney’s  life  prior  to  his  New  London  appointment  are  outlined  in   detail  in  Chapter  Two.  There,  I  will  discuss  how  Ney’s  philosophies  about  painting   and  abstraction  changed  over  the  course  of  his  career,  leading  to  his  passionate   defense  of  his  New  London  mural.  Then,  in  Chapter  Three,  I  explore  Ney’s   interactions  with  the  Section  officials  and  how  his  relationships  with  them  affected   both  Ney’s  career  and  the  Section’s  attitude  towards  abstract  art.  As  the  Section   named  Ney’s  mural  as  the  only  abstract  mural  they  ever  commissioned,  the  incident   provides  a  case  study  in  the  Section’s  attitude  towards  abstraction.  An  analysis  of   Ney’s  art,  career,  and  relationship  with  Section  officials  throughout  the  incident   offers  important  insights  into  how  the  Section  felt  about  commissioning  art  outside   of  its  regularly  accepted  style.         18   CHAPTER  2     LLOYD  RAYMOND  “BILL  NEY  AND  HIS  CAREER  PRIOR  TO  THE  NEW  LONDON   FACETS  COMMISSION         Figure  12:  Lloyd  R.  “Bill”  Ney.  The  Lloyd  Raymond  Ney  Papers,  1902-­‐1987,  Archives   of  American  Art,  Smithsonian  Institution.  [4234-­‐4235].     Before  examining  the  controversial  circumstances  surrounding  the  New   London  Facets  commission,  I  shall  discuss  the  artist,  Lloyd  Ney,  and  his  body  of  work   prior  to  beginning  work  on  the  mural.  Past  accounts  of  Ney’s  important  clash  with   Section  officials,  such  as  those  by  Karal  Ann  Marling  in  Wall  to  Wall  America  and   Richard  D.  McKinzie  in  A  New  Deal  for  Artists,  focus  on  Ney’s  notorious  mural  and   information  about  his  relationship  with  the  Section.  As  important  as  these  accounts   are  in  regard  to  this  episode  within  the  Section’s  broad  and  at  times  confusing       19   history,  they  ignore  the  valuable  context  that  Ney’s  larger  career  provides.  Thus,  my   research  will  expand  upon  prior  accounts  to  consider  why  the  mural  was  so   important  to  Ney  and  why  he  was  adamant  that  the  final  mural  not  be  changed  from   his  original  conception  for  the  work.     Lloyd  Raymond  “Bill”  Ney  was  born  to  Sadie  Maidenford  and  William  W.  Ney   in  1893  in  Friendensburg,  Pennsylvania.  The  family  had  virtually  no  connection  to   the  arts,  although  Lloyd  claimed  that  he  was  related  to  Marshall  Ney,  a  general   under  Napoleon,  and  Elisabet  Ney,  “a  courtesan  to  Kings,”  both  of  whom  he   considered  creative.25    Despite  his  lack  of  exposure  to  the  arts,  Ney  became   interested  in  art  at  a  young  age  and  painted  often  without  the  aid  of  classes  or  a   teacher.  Recognizing  their  only  child’s  passion  for  the  arts,  Ney’s  parents  allowed   him  to  leave  high  school  in  1913  to  study  in  Philadelphia  at  the  Industrial  School  of   Art,  now  the  University  of  the  Arts,  where  he  specialized  in  cast  drawing.26  Ney   flourished  in  his  classes  and  transferred  to  the  Pennsylvania  Academy  of  Fine  Arts   in  Philadelphia  (PAFA)  in  1914  where  he  studied  under  Henri  McCarter  until  he                                                                                                                   25  Avant-­‐Garde  Gallery,  Ltd.  Ney  (New  York:  Avant-­‐Garde  Gallery,  Ltd.,  undated),  1.   Ney’s  relationship  to  Marshall  and  Elisabet  Ney  is  mentioned  in  a  biographical  essay   accompanying  his  solo  exhibition  at  the  Avant-­‐Garde  Gallery  in  New  York  City.  The   author’s  name  is  not  included  in  the  catalog,  but  we  can  assume  that  Ney  aided  the   author  in  writing  the  essay  as  it  contains  several  anecdotes  repeated  by  Ney  in   unpublished  essays  and  in  his  personal  papers,  now  located  in  the  Archives  of   American  Art.     26  Lloyd  R.  Ney,  “Art  Appreciation  For  The  People!  How  To  Look  At  Paintings!  What   Constitutes  a  Work  of  Art!”  (book  manuscript,  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum,   undated),  1a.  Ney’s  daughter,  Gretchen  Ney  Laugier,  wrote  on  March  26,  2003  in  a   letter  to  the  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum  that  she  thought  her  father  finished  the   manuscript,  “around  November  27,  1949.”  Unfortunately,  the  manuscript  itself  is   not  dated,  so  we  cannot  know  for  sure  that  it  was  completed  in  1949.  We  may   however,  assume  that  Ney  wrote  it  around  that  time  as  the  only  date  referenced  in   the  manuscript  older  than  the  date  provided  by  Gretchen  Ney  Laugier  is  1950.       20   graduated  in  1918.27  Though  Ney  became  more  technically  precise  in  his  painting,   he  found  his  experience  in  school  lacking  in  creative  inspiration.  He  later  wrote   disparagingly  about  his  time  at  PAFA:     My  creative  and  inventive  spirit  continued  to  lie  dormant.  The  process   of  making  me  an   imitative  painter  was   stepped  up   in   tempo  –   full   length  casts,  nude  and  draped  with  many  folds,  hair  and  beards  full  of   large  and  small  curls,  each  curl  having  its  light,  half  tone  and  dark  to   challenge  accuracy.28     In  spite  of  Ney’s  reservations  about  his  academic  training,  the  staff  and   faculty  had  such  faith  in  his  work  that  he  was  awarded  the  prestigious  Cresson   Travelling  Scholarship  in  1920,  which  he  used  following  a  brief  tour  in  Europe  at  the   end  of  World  War  I.  Ney  utilized  the  scholarship  to  travel  throughout  Europe  where   he  was  exposed  to  and  quickly  admired  the  work  of  Pablo  Picasso,  Wassily   Kandinsky,  and  William  Blake.  While  living  in  the  Hotel  de  Versailles  in   Montparnasse,  Ney  made  the  acquaintances  of  painters  such  as  Jules  Pascin,  Moïse   Kisling,  Léonard  Fujita,  Henry  Ossawa  Tanner,  and  Frederick  Frieseke,  all  of  whom   helped  Ney  to  think  about  painting  in  ways  markedly  different  from  his  training  at   the  Industrial  School  of  Art  and  PAFA.29  His  four-­‐year  trip  in  Europe  proved  so   instrumental  to  his  style  and  career  that  the  majority  of  articles  and  biographic                                                                                                                   27  Avant-­‐Garde  Gallery,  Ltd.  Ney,  1-­‐2.   28  Ney,  “Art  Appreciation  For  The  People!  How  To  Look  At  Paintings!  What   Constitutes  a  Work  of  Art!”  1a-­‐2b.   29  Avant-­‐Garde  Gallery,  Ltd.  Ney,  2.  The  essay  also  mentions  that,  while  in   Montparnasse,  Ney  also,  “helped  ‘Shorty’  Lazar  form  a  basketball  team,  played  chess   with  Walter  Pach  and  Roger  Fry  in  St.  Tropez.”       21   essays  in  exhibition  catalogs  discuss  it  in  detail.30    Ney  himself  later  wrote  about  the   trip  as  a  type  of  cure  for  his  academic  training:   I  had  to  learn  the  hard  way  by  trial  and  error;  experimentation,  travel   in   Europe,   seeing   the   masterpieces   of   the   world.   I   lived   in   Paris…surrounded  by  abstract  painting,  sympathetic  but  not  knowing   how  to  understand   it  always  searching   for  an  approach  to  painting   that  suited  by  particular  temperament.  I  read  Clive  Bell  and  Roger  Fry   thereby  gaining  my   first   real  understanding  and  was   tremendously   stimulated,  gradually  forming  a  philosophy  about  fine  art  in  painting.     About  the  year  1924-­‐25  I  started  painting  a  good  sized  canvas…My   theme  was  two  men  sitting  at  a  marble  top  table  in  one  of  the  small   bistro  eating  places  in  a  working  man’s  section  of  Paris  (figure  13).   Every  part  of  the  painting  was  completed  but  the  marble  top  of  the   table.   I  had  great  difficulty,  and  spent   in   time  at   least   four  months   trying  to  paint  the  top  of  that  table.  Somehow  I  couldn’t  get  it  right.   Out  of  desperation  one  day  I  mixed  together  cobalt  blue,  white  and  a   little  black  with  a  palette  knife  and  furiously  brushed  that  muted  color   tone  over  the  tabletop  surface  and  in  five  or  ten  minutes  my  canvas   was  completed!  A  perfect  relationship.  That  was  the  beginning  of  my   becoming   conscious   of   painting   relationships   instead   of   painting   things.   That   was   the   kind   of   intuitive   feeling   I   had   the   day   before   entering   art   school.   That   kind   of   understanding   at   its   highest   is   a   referential   approach   which   offers   some   creative   and   inventive   liberties.   So   if   I   am   embittered   with   organized   art   schools   and   the   standards  they  impose  bear  with  me…31                                                                                                                     30  Charles  Shaw,  “Bill  Ney  lives!  Retrospective  show  of  New  Hope  artist  reveals  his   artistry  and  prolificness,”  New  Hope  Gazette  (New  Hope,  PA),  October  12,  1978,  3,   10.  Shaw’s  article  is  perhaps  most  notable  among  the  articles  and  essays  as  it   accompanied  Ney’s  first  major  retrospective  exhibition.  Shaw  attempted  to   document  the  artist’s  evolution,  highlighting  the  most  important  events,  one  of   which  was  Ney’s  time  in  Paris.   31  Ney,  “Art  Appreciation  For  The  People!  How  To  Look  At  Paintings!  What   Constitutes  a  Work  of  Art!”  2b-­‐4d.       22     Figure  13:  Lloyd  Ney,  The  Drinkers,  1924-­‐25.  Oil  on  canvas.  Photo  courtesy  of   Odile  Laugier.     Ney’s  daughter  remembered  after  his  death  that  her  father  never  promoted   art  school  or  painting  as  a  sole  career.  She  wrote  that  Ney  “would  say  stand  guard  in   a  museum,  dig  a  ditch,  drive  a  taxi  for  money,  but  paint  for  love.”32  It  is  by  no  means   an  understatement  to  say  that  Ney  left  the  United  States  a  traditional,  academically   trained  painter,  but  returned  committed  to  a  new,  more  abstracted  style  of   painting.33   Ney  left  Paris  and  settled  in  New  Hope,  Pennsylvania  in  1925  where  he  lived   next  door  to  close  friend  Harry  Rosin,  a  sculptor  whom  he  had  met  in  Paris.  The   town  of  New  Hope,  considered  a  center  of  the  Pennsylvanian  Impressionist   movement,  was  also  an  artist’s  colony  populated  by  a  new  wave  of  Modernists                                                                                                                   32  Gretchen  Ney  Laugier,  “Stream  of  consciousness,  thoughts  and  facts  about  Lloyd   R.  Ney,  my  father,  March  26,  2003,”  Lloyd  R.  Ney  Files,  James  A.  Michener  Museum,   Doylestown,  PA.   33  Avant-­‐Garde  Gallery,  Ltd.  Ney,  2-­‐5.       23   interested  in  moving  beyond  Impressionism  during  the  late  1920s  and  throughout   the  1930s.34  Ney  became  a  fixture  within  this  new  group  of  artists  and  was  friends   with  painters  such  as  Charles  Frederic  Ramsey,  Charles  Evans,  and  Louis  Stone.   Together  they  formed  a  group  appropriately  called  “The  New  Group,”  later  known   as  “The  Independents,”  and  strove  to  create  art  in  response  to  what  they  considered   the  dull,  staid  work  of  the  Pennsylvania  Impressionist  school,  still  very  active  in  the   late  1920s.35  Ney  bought  a  home  now  known  as  the  Towpath  House,  located  on   Mechanic  Street,  which  grew  into  a  thriving  artist’s  community  dubbed  the  “Latin   Quarter”  populated  by  this  new  wave  of  New  Hope  Modernist  painters  (figures  14   and  15).36                                                                                                                                   34  Roy  Pedersen,  “The  New  Hope  Modernists,”  in  New  Hope  Modernists,  1917-­1950,   ed.  Roy  Pedersen  and  Barbara  A.  Wolanin  (New  Hope,  PA:  The  New  Hope  Modernist   Project,  Inc.,  1991),  8.   35  Sarah  Langham,  A  Modernist  Experiment:  Visual  Jazz,  The  Cooperative  Painting   Project  and  Modernist  Works  (New  York:  Langham  Leff  Gallery),  3.   36  Shaw,  “Bill  Ney  lives!  Retrospective  show  of  New  Hope  artist  reveals  his  artistry   and  prolificness,”  10.       24                           Figure  14:  The  Mechanic  Street  Bridge              Figure  15:  Lloyd  Raymond  Ney,     Towpath  House.  The  Lloyd  Raymond                    Mechanics  Street,  New  Hope,  1934.  Oil     Ney  Papers,  1902-­‐1987,  Archives  of                        on  canvas.  Gift  of  Marguerite  and  Gerry         American  Art,  Smithsonian  Institution.            Lenfest,  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum.   [4234-­‐4235]     Ney  painted  with  his  New  Group  peers  in  relative  quiet  over  the  course  of  the   following  five  years,  leaving  intermittently  to  take  teaching  positions  in  institutions   such  as  Converse  College  in  Spartanburg,  South  Carolina,  Ogontz  Junior  College  in   Abington,  Pennsylvania,  a  government  teaching  project  located  in  Saint  Thomas,   Virgin  Islands,  and  the  Kansas  City  Art  Institute  where  he  served  as  head  of  the   painting  school.37     In  1930  a  number  of  things  changed  for  Ney.  First,  he  left  his  position  at  the   Kansas  City  Art  Institute  to  return  home  to  New  Hope  where  he  continued  painting   with  the  New  Group  circle.  Then,  on  July  12  of  the  same  year,  he  married  his  fiancée   Jean  (figure  16).  Finally,  later  that  year,  Ney  was  dramatically  turned  down  from  the   annual  Phillips’  Mill  exhibition  held  in  New  Hope.                                                                                                                       37  Avant-­‐Garde  Gallery,  Ltd.  Ney,  2-­‐5.       25     Figure  16:  Lloyd  R.  “Bill”  and  Jean  Ney.  The  Lloyd  Ney  Papers,  The  James  A.   Michener  Art  Museum,  Doylestown,  PA.The  Phillips’  Mill  exhibition  was  first  held  in   the  summer  of  1929,  where  one  hundred  twenty  five  works  were  displayed  and   judged  by  famous  area  Pennsylvanian  Impressionists  such  as  John  Folinsbee,  Daniel   Garber,  and  Rae  Sloan  Bredin.38  When  Ney  submitted  his  painting  of  a  bridge  over   the  Delaware  Canal  in  New  Hope  the  exhibition  was  only  in  its  second  year,  was  still   a  young  “tradition”  in  the  community,  and  the  jurors  had  not  yet  encountered   anything  remotely  Modern  until  Ney’s  piece.  The  jury  concluded  that  the  painting  of   the  New  Hope  canal  did  not  fit  with  their  vision  for  the  exhibition;  Pennsylvanian   Impressionist  and  tonalist  William  Lathrop  told  Ney  that,  specifically,  his  use  of  red   on  a  bridge  was  too  garish  and  disturbing  for  the  exhibition.39                                                                                                                     38  Pedersen,  “The  New  Hope  Modernists,”  9.   Phillips’  Mill  Community  Association,  “Art  Exhibition:  History  of  the  Phillips’  Mill  Art   Exhibition,”  http://www.phillipsmill.org/art-­‐exhibition/.     39  Unfortunately,  the  name  of  the  actual  work  submitted  to  the  Phillips’  Mill   exhibition  has  been  lost  along  with  any  image  of  the  work.  Ney  painted  so  many   canvases  during  his  career,  and  so  many  of  them  abstract,  that  it  has  been  all  too   easy  for  names  of  paintings  and  reproductions  to  become  lost.  However,  based  on       26     Figure  17:  Lloyd  Ney,  The  Canal,  1935.  Oil  on  canvas.  Photo  Courtesy  of  Michel   Laugier.       Figure  18:  William  Langston  Lathrop,  Chilmark  Moor,  1930.  Oil  on  canvas.  Gift  of   Marguerite  and  Gerry  Lenfest,  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum.     Given  Lathrop’s  own  style,  this  rejection  should  not  have  been  a  complete   surprise  for  Ney  and  the  New  Group.  Lathrop’s  work  featured  portraits,  still  lives,                                                                                                                   the  described  subject  matter,  we  may  assume  that  the  painting  submitted  to  the   Phillips’  Mill  Competition  was  similar  to  The  Canal  in  figure  17.       27   and  landscapes,  such  as  Chilmark  Moor  (figure  18),  rendered  in  the  muted  color   palette  and  hazy  brushstrokes  typical  of  Pennsylvania  Impressionist  painters.  The   style  was  still  rampantly  popular  in  1929,  but,  with  an  influx  of  modernist  painters   in  New  Hope,  formerly  home  to  impressionist  painters  only,  Lathrop  and  the  other   Phillips’  Mill  judges  were  probably  feeling  a  bit  threatened.  It  is  also  likely  that  the   members  of  the  judging  committee,  working  in  the  traditional  academic  style   championed  by  PAFA,  disapproved  of  Ney  and  the  New  Group’s  decidedly  anti-­‐ academic  feelings.  Looking  outside  of  New  Hope,  the  judges  may  have  also   recognized  hints  of  European  modernists  such  as  Henri  Matisse  and  Paul  Gaugin  in   Ney’s  submitted  work  with  its  expressive  use  of  color,  thick  black  lines,  and   flattened  perspective.  This  influence  would  not  have  been  welcomed  and  may   account,  in  part,  for  Ney’s  immediate  rejection  from  the  exhibition.   Frustrated,  Ney  and  his  New  Group  peers,  in  the  spirit  of  the  history  of   alternative  exhibitions  in  modernism,  quickly  put  together  a  display  of  Modern   paintings  to  rival  the  selection  of  traditional,  safe,  Impressionist  paintings  at  the   Phillips’  Mill.    Their  exhibition  was  held  in  a  local  abandoned  prison  and  opened  the   day  before  Phillips’  Mill,  thereby  stealing  most  of  the  initial  press  attention  and   publicity.40   The  rival  exhibition  significantly  raised  the  New  Hope  Modernists’  profile   within  the  art  world  as  a  whole,  but  perhaps  even  more  so  for  Ney  individually.  His   work  began  to  be  noticed  and  reviewed  by  critics,  publications,  and  galleries  outside   of  the  New  Hope  area.  He  started  exhibiting  almost  annually  in  major  group                                                                                                                   40  Pedersen,  “The  New  Hope  Modernists,”  9.       28   exhibitions,  first  in  the  College  Art  Association  International  Exhibition  in  1932,   then  the  “Little  International  Show”  in  the  Mellon  Galleries  in  Philadelphia,  and   again  in  the  Pickett  Galleries  locally  in  New  Hope  in  1934.41     The  Pickett  Galleries  is  especially  significant  for  Ney’s  career.  It  was  Ney  who   opened  and  ran  the  gallery  space,  demonstrating  his  dedication  to  establishing  new   homes  for  Modern  art  within  New  Hope.  Ney  also  named  the  gallery  after  Joseph   Pickett,  an  artist  whose  work  he  discovered  while  living  on  Mechanic  Street;  Ney   viewed  Picket  as  an  important  influence  on  his  own  work.  Ney  never  stated   explicitly  what  he  found  so  inspiring  in  Pickett’s  art  except  that  his  style  was,   “primitive.”  Extant  examples  of  his  work  are  extremely  rare,  but  in  Coryell’s  Ferry,   1776  (figure  19)  we  may  see  why  Pickett’s  painting  so  attracted  Ney.  Pickett’s   painting  style  is  flat  with  little  attention  to  actual  perspective,  scale,  or  shading,   similar  to  Ney’s  work  in  Canal.  Though  Coryell’s  Ferry,  1776  depicts  a  real  place   within  New  Hope  in  a  real  year,  the  scene  relates  very  little  to  actual  events  or  to  a   realistic  depiction  of  the  area.  In  Pickett’s  simplified  style,  Ney  may  have  found  a   local  inspiration  for  his  modern  way  of  painting.  Though  Ney  had  already  learned   about  modern  artists  finding  inspiration  in  non-­‐Western  “primitive”  objects  while   studying  in  Europe,  discovering  a  local,  untrained,  American  painter  from  which  he   could  draw  further  inspiration  must  have  been  exhilarating.                                                                                                                     41  The  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum  Bucks  Country  Artists  Database,  “Lloyd  (Bill)   Ney:  Career,”   http://www.michenermuseum.org/bucksartists/artist.php?artist=164&page=664.         29     Figure  19:  Joseph  Pickett,  Coryell’s  Ferry,  1776,  1914-­‐1918.  Oil  on  canvas.  Whitney   Museum  of  American  Art.     Additionally,  one  may  also  surmise  that  Pickett’s  reported  technique  of   introducing  textured  materials  into  his  paintings  like  sand  and  shells  was  exciting  to   Ney,  who  also  incorporated  nontraditional  materials  into  some  of  his  later  works   like  Construction  (figure  20).  Additionally,  his  assertion  that  Pickett’s  work  was   “primitive”  reinforced  Ney’s  disdain  for  the  academic  world;  in  seeking  out  the  pure,   untouched,  and  primitive  he  followed  in  the  footsteps  of  modern  artists  such  as   Gaugin,  Picasso,  and  Modigliani,  to  mention  but  a  few,  who  were  fascinated  with   “primitive”  art.  When  his  interest  in  Pickett  first  arose,  Ney  reportedly  bought  two   Pickett  paintings  for  $15  and  later  sold  them  to  Moore  Price,  a  local  collector.42  The                                                                                                                   42  New  Hope  Gazette  (New  Hope,  PA),  April  2,  1953.         30   episode  so  captivated  area  newspapers  that  Ney  was  later  the  subject  of  an  editorial   cartoon  (figure  21).     Figure  20:  Lloyd  Ney,  Construction,  1958.  Wood,  iron,  steel  on  wood.         31     Figure  21:  Lloyd  R.  “Bill”  Ney.  Joe  Masick  and  Bill  Dwyer  for  the  Delaware  Valley   Scrapbook,   1946.   The   Lloyd   Ney   Papers,   The   James   A.   Michener   Art   Museum,   Doylestown,  PA.     His  interest  and  investment  in  Pickett  also  indicates  that  Ney  was  deeply   attentive  to  matters  of  art  history  and  artistic  relevance.  In  establishing  a  space  to   display  Pickett’s  work  as  well  as  his  own,  Ney  was  carefully  building  a  reputation  for   both  artists  that  would  hopefully  result  in  critical  attention,  fiscal  reward,  and  the   legitimatization  of  style.  Ney  also  vigilantly  documented  his  opinions  on  connections   between  art,  education,  and  the  public  throughout  his  career  and  came  closest  to       32   collecting  them  all  in  an  unpublished  manuscript  entitled,  “Art  Appreciation  for  the   People!  How  to  Look  at  Paintings!  What  Constitutes  a  Work  of  Art!”43  In  the   manuscript  Ney  drew  upon  different  episodes  throughout  his  career  in  order  to   instruct  the  reader  in  how  to  appreciate  works  of  art  within  their  own  historical   context  and  how  to  distinguish  between  commercial  art  and  great  and  true   masterpieces.     Ney’s  writing  is  at  times  difficult  to  follow  and  perhaps  not  fully  developed.  It   is  possible  that  Ney  was  waiting  to  edit  the  manuscript  carefully  only  after  he   obtained  a  publisher,  which  ultimately  never  happened.  In  spite  of  its  lack  of  flow   and  cohesion,  “Art  Appreciation  for  the  People!  How  to  Look  at  Paintings!  What   Constitutes  a  Work  of  Art!”  laid  out  what  Ney  thought  differentiated  abstraction   from  his  eventual  proclaimed  personal  style  of  the  Nonobjective.  According  to  Ney,   all  art  can  be  placed  into  one  of  three  groups:  Imitative,  Abstract,  or  Nonobjective.     The  Imitative  refers  to  any  art  that  relies  upon  artistic  convention  in   portraying  the  real;  as  Ney  writes,  “Imitative  painting  is  the  usual  readable  surface   aspect  of  perfection.”44  This  broad  definition  means  that  everything  from  academic   painting  to  history  painting  to  photography  falls  within  this  category  and  is   ultimately  problematic  as  realism  is  not  every  viewer’s  idea  of  perfection.  Ney  went   on  to  write  that  the  difficulty  with  Imitative  painting  is  that  in  imitating  the  masters                                                                                                                   43  A  copy  of  this  unpublished  manuscript  is  located  in  the  James  A.  Michener  Art   Museum’s  archives  in  Doylestown,  Pennsylvania  as  well  as  in  the  personal   collections  of  Michel  and  Odile  Laugier.   44  Ney,  “Art  Appreciation  For  The  People!  How  To  Look  At  Paintings!  What   Constitutes  a  Work  of  Art!”  21.       33   every  imitation  gets  a  bit  worse,  as  if  every  artist  within  this  group  is  only  producing   a  poor  copy  of  what  someone  had  completed  before  them.   Abstract  painting  is  defined  in  the  manuscript  as,  “a  natural  sequence  from   referential  painting,”  which  took  place  when  Picasso  began  painting  in  the  beginning   of  the  twentieth  century.45  In  his  chapter  on  the  Abstract,  Ney  emphasizes  that  the   style  is  a  drastic  improvement  over  the  sameness  present  in  the  Imitative,  but  that   Abstract  painters  still  work  within  the  same  framework  as  their  predecessors.   Nevertheless,  Ney  reminds  his  reader  that  even  though  Abstract  artists  work  within   the  same  tradition  as  the  Imitative  the  end  result  is  so  different  that  viewers  must   interact  with  Abstract  works  in  an  entirely  different  way,  thereby  making  the   Abstract  vastly  superior  for  contemporary  viewers.   Finally,  Ney  writes  about  the  Nonobjective,  which  is  described,  as  one  might   expect  of  a  self-­‐proclaimed  practitioner,  to  be  the  superior  style.  Kandinsky  is   credited  with  starting  the  style  in  1911,  painting,  “for  the  first  time  in  the  history  of   painting  where  the  usual  life  and  nature  forms  aren’t  used  as  a  theme.”46  In  writing   his  own  treatise  on  art,  Ney  likely  had  read  and  drew  heavily  on  Kandinsky’s   Concerning  the  Spiritual  in  Art.  Kandinsky’s  comparison  of  humanity  to  a  pyramid   with  the  artist  leading  viewers  up  to  its  peak  is  reminiscent  of  Ney’s  three   progressive  stages.  Further  aligned  with  Kandinsky’s  writings,  Ney  goes  on  to   explain  how  the  Nonobjective  is  the  one  style  that  will  finally  allow  art  to  move   forward,  past  subject  and  theme  and  illusionistic  space  and  into  explorations  of                                                                                                                   45  Ney,  “Art  Appreciation  For  The  People!  How  To  Look  At  Paintings!  What   Constitutes  a  Work  of  Art!”  26.   46  Ney,  “Art  Appreciation  For  The  People!  How  To  Look  At  Paintings!  What   Constitutes  a  Work  of  Art!”36.       34   relationships  involving  a  spiritual,  fourth  dimension  of  inner  reality.  This  “inner   reality”  bears  a  striking  relationship  to  the  spiritual  in  Concerning  the  Spiritual  in   Art,  conscious  homage  to  Kandinsky  as  the  painter  that  Ney  believed  most   committed  to  this  approach.47   Perhaps  the  most  telling  aspect  of  Ney’s  passionate  belief  in  the  superiority   of  the  Nonobjective  is  his  description  of  it  as,  “the  beginning  of  a  new  wave  length,   [standing]  alone  as  a  beacon  for  all  time.”48  Ney’s  written  philosophy  of  artistic   styles  as  laid  out  in  “Art  Appreciation  For  The  People!  How  To  Look  At  Paintings!   What  Constitutes  a  Work  of  Art!”  –  along  with  his  teaching  history  –  informs  his   passionate  defense  of  New  London  Facets,  which  I  will  explore  in  more  detail  in   Chapter  Three.  For  Ney,  the  New  London  commission  was  not  just  a  simple  post   office  mural;  it  was  a  means  through  which  he  could  communicate  a  sample  of  his   aesthetic  beliefs  with  the  public.     In  1936,  Ney  had  his  first  major  solo  show  in  New  York  City  at  a  gallery  on   57th  Street.49  Though  the  exhibition  was  small,  the  noted  critic  Lewis  Mumford  in                                                                                                                   47  Among  Ney’s  papers  in  Odile  Laugier’s  family  archives  were  second  edition  copies   of  Kandinsky’s  Point  and  Line  to  Plane  and  Concerning  the  Spiritual  in  Art.  Both  were   inscribed  to  Ney  as  a  gift  from  the  Baroness  Hilla  von  Rebay,  a  staunch  advocate  of   Non-­‐Objectivism,  who  wrote  the  introduction  in  each  volume  and  was  involved  with   planning  the  new  Guggenheim  Museum,  originally  called  the  Museum  of  Non-­‐ Objective  Painting  when  it  opened  in  1939.  While  it  is  tempting  to  assume  Ney  only   read  Kandinsky’s  work  through  this  gift,  he  and  Rebay  did  not  know  each  other  until   the  early  1940s.  As  Ney’s  “Art  Appreciation  For  The  People!  How  To  Look  At   Paintings!  What  Constitutes  a  Work  of  Art!”  is  so  closely  related  to  Kandinsky’s   written  work,  it  is  much  more  likely  that  Ney  had  already  read  both  volumes  and   simply  kept  those  given  to  him  by  Rebay  because  they  were  beautifully  bound   volumes  from  a  friend.   48  Ibid.   49  Unfortunately,  though  the  artist’s  papers  mention  that  Ney  had  a  show  in  a  gallery   on  57th  Street  in  New  York  City  in  1936,  the  name  is  not  given.  Reviews  of  the  show       35   The  New  Yorker  enthusiastically  described  Ney  as  an  artist  capable  of  depicting   America  within  a  new  imaginative  style:   Ney’s   imagination,   while   intoxicated   with   this   world   of   color,   has   nevertheless  been  nibbling  at  the  daily  incidents  of  commonplace  life   in  a  Pennsylvania  village  –  New  Hope,  to  be  exact…Ney’s  paintings  are   as  much  paintings  of  the  American  scene  as  the  more  stridently  native   kind.   Ney’s   pictures   have   even   got   into   circulation   in   his   own   community:  he  has  three  murals  in  the  village  newsstand,  and  he  has   decorated   the   entrance   to   one   of   the   garages.   That   seems   to   me   a   healthy  sign.  Americana  should  show  us  fireworks  on  a  clear  Fourth  of   July  night  as  well  as  exploded  paper  and  charred  Roman  candles  and   empty  bottles  of  soda  pop  lying  on  the  grass  in  the  dull  drizzle  of  the   next  morning.50     Though  Mumford  does  not  directly  reference  Ney’s  use  of  abstraction,  Mumford  was   most  likely  reviewing  a  selection  of  abstracted  canvases  like  that  of  Untitled  (figure   22)  and  Abstract  (figure  23).  In  Untitled,  Ney  produced  a  fantastical  landscape,   complete  with  mountains  riding  from  a  blue  field  or  body  of  water,  a  multicolored   foreground,  two  possible  figures,  one  seated  and  the  other  peeking  in  at  the  lower   right  corner  with  a  partially  covered  face,  and  a  bunch  of  bright  red  flowers,   possibly  poppies,  in  the  lower  left  corner.  Just  as  Mumford  stated  in  his  review,  Ney   has  become  by  the  mid  1930s  completely  intoxicated  with  color.  In  Abstract,  it   becomes  more  difficult  to  discern  specific  forms.  Aside  from  some  potential  flowers   in  the  lower  left  corner,  the  entire  composition  is  an  assortment  of  shapes,  some   geometric  and  others  more  organic.  Clearly  Ney  had  begun  to  think  about  the   direction  his  painting  will  go  in  during  the  1930s,  with  a  slow  progression  towards                                                                                                                   do  not  mention  the  gallery  name  either  as  it  is  included  among  many  in  a  few   reviews  of  “group  shows.”   50  Lewis  Mumford,  “Group  Shows  and  Solos,”  in  Mumford  on  Modern  Art  in  the  1930s,   ed.  Robert  Wojtowicz  (Berkeley  and  Los  Angeles:  University  of  California  Press,   2007),  186.       36   pure  abstraction.  Ney  still  has  not  completely  become  a  Nonobjective  painter  as  he   would  following  New  London  Facets,  but  paintings  like  those  Mumford  reviewed   show  a  progression  away  from  the  strict  academic  representation  Ney  called   Imitative  and  towards  the  imaginative  Abstract.   Figure  22:  Lloyd  Ney,  Untitled,  circa  1930s.  Oil  on  canvas.           37     Figure  23:  Lloyd  Ney,  Abstract,  1939.  Oil  on  canvas.  Private  collection.     Such  a  positive  review  by  a  prominent  critic  like  Mumford  seems  to  have   given  Ney  the  confidence  to  pursue  his  “charred  Roman  candle”  of  a  style  and  he   began  to  apply  for  a  number  of  large,  public  commissions.  Mumford’s  mention  of   “the  American  scene”  may  have  also  struck  a  chord  with  Ney  and  prompted  him  to   create  and  submit  a  design  for  the  Section’s  St.  Louis  post  office  competition.  As   mentioned  earlier,  PWAP  called  for  artists  who  would  explore  aspects  of  “the   American  scene,”  a  recommendation  that  permeated  all  subsequent  New  Deal  art   programs,  including  the  Section,  and  would  have  been  a  familiar  phrase  for  Ney.51   Mumford’s  review  echoed  everything  Ney’s  written  beliefs  about  art  and   encouraged  him  even  further;  Ney  has  been  charged  with  bringing  his  new,  colorful,                                                                                                                   51  Marling,  Wall-­to-­Wall  America:  Post  Office  Murals  in  the  Great  Depression,  43-­‐5.       38   imaginative  work  to  regular  American  citizens  outside  of  the  gallery-­‐going  crowd  in   New  York.  If  Mumford  applauded  Ney’s  casual  work  on  the  garages  of  New  Hope,  a   post  office  wall  would  serve  equally  well  if  not  better  as  a  podium  from  which  Ney   should  spread  his  own,  new  style.   Before  receiving  the  New  London,  Ohio  commission  (to  be  discussed  in   chapter  three),  Ney  submitted  a  proposal  for  a  Section  mural  in  1939  for  Saint  Louis,   Missouri.  The  Saint  Louis  commission  called  for  ten  panels:  nine  long  and   rectangular  and  one  large  and  square  to  be  mounted  above  the  others.  52  Ney’s   square  panel  is  a  striking  painting  of  a  man  whose  head  pensively  leans  against  his   propped  arm  and  hand,  looking,  presumably  at  post  office  patrons  below  the   mounted  canvas  (figure  24).  Behind  the  figure  is  a  collection  of  ambiguous   geometric  shapes  that  suggest  a  corner  of  a  picture  frame  and  part  of  a  chair,  though   one  cannot  distinguish  what  they  are  with  certainty.     The  lower  nine  panels  depict  various  modes  of  transportation,  presumably  in   the  act  of  delivering  mail  (figure  25).  Space  in  each  of  the  panels  has  been   compressed  in  the  same  manner  as  the  square  top  panel.  In  such  a  shallow  plane,   objects  are  stacked  on  top  of  each  other  and  activity  appears  chaotic  as  people,   animals,  plants,  and  vehicles  co-­‐exist  in  severely  altered  space.  This  is  seen  best  in   the  lower  right  panel  that  depicts  barges  carrying  livestock  on  a  canal  much  like  the   one  behind  Ney’s  house  in  New  Hope  and  depicted  in  The  Canal.  With  a  large  barge                                                                                                                   52  Lloyd  R.  Ney,  Sketch  for  the  St.  Louis,  Missouri  competition,  Record  Group  121-­‐ MS,  National  Archives,  College  Park,  MD.  Unfortunately,  the  only  surviving  images  of   Ney’s  submission  for  the  Saint  Louis  competition  are  in  black  and  white;  therefore  I   cannot  discuss  his  use  of  specific  colors,  only  tones.  This  is  a  terrible  loss  since  an   understanding  of  Ney’s  expressive  use  of  color  is  integral  to  a  complete  discussion  of   his  work.       39   located  in  the  middle  of  the  panel’s  foreground,  poles,  shores,  and  figures  have  been   cast  far  out  to  the  side  or  above  the  boat  in  order  to  fit  all  activity  into  the  panel.   Additionally,  Ney  has  included  a  crowded,  abstracted  skyline  of  a  town  in  the   background,  similar  to  the  ambiguous  shapes  present  in  the  top  square  panel.  While   the  town’s  skyline  has  a  somewhat  recognizable  silhouette  in  the  background’s   center,  it  becomes  less  delineated  closer  to  the  panel’s  corners  until  it  fades  into   amorphous  shades  of  gray.     Figure  24:  Lloyd  R.  Ney,  Sketch  for  the  St.  Louis,  Missouri  competition,  Record  Group   121-­‐MS,  National  Archives,  College  Park,  MD.         40     Figure  25:  Lloyd  R.  Ney,  Sketch  for  the  St.  Louis,  Missouri  competition,  Record  Group   121-­‐MS,  National  Archives,  College  Park,  MD.     Ney’s  panels  are  characteristic  of  his  work  during  the  1930s;  while  certain   elements  are  abstracted  his  subjects  are  mostly  recognizable  and  essentially   representational.  Similar  to  The  Canal,  in  which  Ney  painted  just  what  the  title   suggests  with  various  abstracted  elements  and  expressive  colors,  the  panels  depict   recognizable  sites,  objects,  and  activities,  but  with  dynamic,  angular  lines  and,   presumably,  similarly  energized  colors.  As  it  is  more  conservative  than  works  Ney   would  have  classified  as  Abstract  like  Untitled,  it  appears  that  Ney  was  conscious  of   his  audience.  While  Ney  was  ready  to  bring  his  style  to  the  public,  he  seems  aware   that  both  the  Section  and  his  work’s  eventual  audience  would  receive  abstract       41   works  skeptically.  Clearly  Ney  wanted  to  win  the  commission  and  yet  still  stay  true   to  his  style,  and  so  adjusted  his  composition  accordingly.   Though  the  Saint  Louis  commission  jury  was  intrigued  by  Ney’s  submission   and  style,  the  mural  contract  was  awarded  to  Trew  Hocker’s  The  Louisiana  Purchase   Exposition  (figure  26).  With  such  a  large  commission  the  Section  only  seemed   prepared  to  select  a  safe  composition  painted  in  the  type  of  nondescript  style   described  in  chapter  one  and  seen  in  Good’s  Retrospection.  Even  though  it  is  toned   down,  Ney’s  work  most  likely  was  too  progressive  in  style  for  the  Section  and  would   have  been  a  risky  choice  for  a  highly  publicized  commission  in  an  urban  center,   especially  when  compared  to  Hocker’s  nostalgic  depiction  of  the  Louisiana  Purchase   Exposition.     Figure  26:  Trew  Hocker,  The  Louisiana  Purchase  Exposition,  Saint  Louis,  Missouri   Post  Office,  1940.  Fresco.     Following  the  Section’s  selection  of  The  Louisiana  Purchase  Exposition  in   April  of  1939  the  St.  Louis  jury  decided  that  Ney  should  be  allowed  to  create  a   design  for  another  location  as  a  sort  of  runner-­‐up  prize.  The  available  mural  site  was       42   the  newly  constructed  post-­‐office  in  the  small  town  of  New  London,  Ohio.  Not  as   glamorous  or  high  profile  as  Saint  Louis,  a  commission  in  New  London  was  far  less   risky  in  stirring  up  serious  national  controversy  and  yet  would  still  provide  Ney   with  a  venue  to  introduce  the  public  to  his  style.     It  is  relatively  unclear  whether  jury  members  and  artists  Howard  Cook,  Ward   Lockwood,  and  William  Gropper  described  Ney’s  style  to  upper-­‐level  Section   officials  when  they  made  this  decision.  Regardless  of  what  they  disclosed,  Ney   received  a  letter  from  the  Section  in  September  of  1939  informing  him  of  the  New   London  commission  paying  $800.53  Ney’s  acceptance,  relationship  with  the  Saint   Louis  jury  as  he  worked  on  New  London  Facets,  and  his  ensuing  battle  with  the   Section,  permanently  changed  the  artist’s  later  career  as  well  as  the  Section’s   attitude  towards  abstraction.  This  will  be  the  subject  of  chapter  three.                                                                                                                       53  Rowan  to  Ney  Sep.  26,  1939       43   CHAPTER  THREE     NEY,  NEW  LONDON  FACETS,  AND  FRICTION  WITH  THE  SECTION       Figure  27:  New  London  Facets  in  Lloyd  Ney’s  studio  in  New  Hope,  PA  with  studio   visitor.   The   Lloyd   Raymond   Ney   Papers,   1902-­‐1987,   Archives   of   American   Art,   Smithsonian  Institution.  [4234-­‐4235].       Ney  was  understandably  thrilled  to  receive  the  New  London,  Ohio   commission  from  the  Saint  Louis,  Missouri  jury,  but  it  appears  that  the  jury   members  were  equally  as  excited  about  Ney’s  style.  The  mere  fact  that  Howard   Cook,  Ward  Lockwood,  and  William  Gropper  took  the  initiative  to  award  Ney  a   surprise  commission  speaks  to  their  faith  in  his  work,  but  the  jury  members’  careers   and  relationship  with  the  Section  must  have  also  contributed  to  their  decision.     At  that  time  Howard  Cook  was  already  a  Section  veteran,  having  completed   murals  for  the  Pittsburgh  Post  Office  and  Courthouse  as  well  as  the  post  office  in  San   Antonio,  Texas.  While  his  style  was  far  more  representational  than  Ney’s,  Cook       44   habitually  compressed  space  and  action  in  a  manner  similar  to  Ney’s  submitted   sketch,  as  seen  in  his  Pittsburgh  mural,  Steel  Industry  (figure  28).  Cook  was  also   intensely  interested  in  Mexican  mural  painting,  which  he  saw  as  pushing  the   boundaries  of  what  murals  could  be.  It  is  possible  that  in  Ney’s  sketch  he  recognized   a  kindred  spirit  who  would  also  be  able  to  compress  a  meaningful  narrative  within  a   mural.54     Figure   28:   Howard   Cook,   Steel   Industry,   Pittsburgh   Post   Office   and   Courthouse,   Pittsburgh  Pennsylvania.  1936.  National  Archives.     William  Gropper  was  a  well-­‐known  cartoonist  in  the  1930s  but  he  was  also  a   book  illustrator  and  painter.  Famous  for  documenting  and  depicting  social  upheaval   through  his  drawings  and  prints,  at  the  time  of  the  Saint  Louis  jury,  he  had  recently   completed  a  mural  for  the  Interior  Department  through  the  Section  titled   Construction  of  a  Dam  (figure  29).  Though  his  style  in  the  Interior  Department  mural   is  much  more  polished  than  Ney’s,  Gropper  may  have  recognized  and  appreciated                                                                                                                   54  Robert  L.  Gambone,  “Howard  Cook:  From  Drawings  to  Frescoes,  January  28  –   March  19,”  Georgia  Museum  of  Art  Bulletin  14  no.  3  (1989):  4.         45   how  Ney’s  sketch  diverged  from  conventional  Section-­‐approved  styles  and  subjects.   As  Gropper  later  wrote,  “The  beauty  of  all  this  art  that  we  have  is;  it’s  challenging   and  you  cannot  disprove  it.  All  of  these  are  little  worlds  and  it  is  a  part  of  our   world.”55     Figure  29:  William  Gropper,  Construction  of  a  Dam,  1939.  Oil  on  canvas.     The  third  jury  member,  Ward  Lockwood,  had  already  completed  Section   murals  in  the  Lexington,  Kentucky  post  office  and  two  for  the  new  Post  Office   Department  Building  in  Washington,  D.C.  (figure  30).  Lockwood’s  themes  in  his   Washington  D.C.  murals  also  dealt  with  travel  through  the  post,  similar  in  subject   matter  to  Ney’s  scenes  in  his  nine  smaller  panels  submitted  for  the  Saint  Louis   commission.  Lockwood,  who  lived  in  Taos,  New  Mexico  along  with  Howard  Cook,   may  have  shared  Cook’s  interest  in  Ney’s  innovative  use  of  space.  In  any  event,   Lockwood,  whose  work  in  the  Section  had  been  praised  time  and  again  for  its   dramatic  historical  scenes  and  use  of  allegory,  also  gave  his  approval  for  Ney’s   commission  in  the  New  London,  Ohio  post  office.56                                                                                                                   55  William  Gropper,  “William  Gropper:  His  Statements,”  in  William  Gropper:   Retrospective,  ed.  August  L.  Freundlich  (Los  Angeles:  The  Ward  Ritchie  Press,  1968),   28.   56  Charles  C.  Eldridge,  Ward  Lockwood:  1894-­1963  (Kansas  City:  Kansas  Museum  of   Art,  1974),  74.       46     Figure  30:  Ward  Lockwood,  Consolidation  of  the  West,  1937.  Oil  on  canvas.     Ney  was  thrilled  with  the  jury  members’  interest  in  his  work  and  to  have   been  awarded  this  “runner-­‐up”  commission.57  While  he  had  hoped  to  receive  the   much  larger  Saint  Louis  competition  as  it  provided  the  winner  with  more  money,  he   still  saw  this  new  opportunity  in  the  small  community  of  New  London  as  a  chance  to   explore  and  experiment  more  fully  with  abstraction  in  a  public  venue.  He  said,  “In   my  competitive  sketches  for  the  St.  Louis  job  I  consciously  compromised  with  my   approach,  but  since  the  definite  New  London  assignment  was  on  hand  I  wanted  to   have  as  much  freedom  as  possible  to  express  myself.”58  Ney  viewed  his  newly   obtained  commission  as  a  sure  thing  and  did  not  assume  that  his  sketches  might  be   judged  harshly  before  final  approval.59       Ney  immediately  set  to  work  on  a  fresh  sketch  for  his  new  site.  Unprompted   by  the  Section,  he  drove  to  New  London  to  learn  as  much  as  he  could  about  the                                                                                                                   57  Rowan  to  Ney  Sep.  26,  1939.   58  Lloyd  R.  Ney  with  Frederick  Walker,  “My  Fight  With  Officialdom”  (book   manuscript,  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum,  undated),  5.   59  Ney  with  Walker,  “My  Fight  With  Officialdom,”  1-­‐3.       47   community,  its  people,  history,  and  landmarks.  It  seems  that  Ney  immersed  himself   effectively  in  the  town  life;  in  later  correspondence  with  Section  officials,  Ney   mentioned  the  specific  opinions  and  comments  of  individual  townspeople.  Among   his  many  encounters,  Ney  allied  himself  with  the  town’s  “oldest  resident,”  William  B.   Thom  who  provided  the  artist  with  a  detailed  summary  of  New  London’s  history.60       According  to  Thom,  New  London  was  established  as  part  of  the  “fire  land”   grants  during  the  revolutionary  war.  When  New  London,  Connecticut  was  burned  to   the  ground,  land  in  Ohio  was  set-­‐aside  for  those  who  had  lost  everything  in  the  fires,   which  led  to  the  founding  of  New  London,  Ohio.  The  town  was  also  deeply  proud  of   the  C.E.  Ward  factory  that  made  mail-­‐order  uniforms  and  that  it  was  the  site  of  the   first  hippopotamus  ever  shown  in  the  United  States.  Ney  was  inundated  with  stories   about  eccentric  townspeople  such  as  doctors  who  wore  shawls  instead  of  white   coats  and  a  man  who  drove  by  New  London  the  same  time  every  month  shouting,   “How  far  to  Belle  Fontaine?”  as  some  type  of  joke.61     Ney  was  deeply  affected  and  inspired  by  the  town  and  people  of  New   London,  Ohio  as  a  whole  and  decided  that  he  could  not  dismiss  the  local  flavor   completely  in  favor  of  a  Nonobjective  design.  At  the  same  time,  Ney  was  unwilling  to   forsake  his  abstract  style  in  favor  of  a  simple,  representational  scene,  typical  of   other  Section  commissions.  As  a  result,  Ney  presented  a  plan  to  town  members,  “of   doing  a  composite  painting  depicting  many  ideas  or  scenes  in  one  setting  similar  to   the  photo  montages  shown  in  every  moving  picture  house  at  the  beginning  of  a                                                                                                                   60  Marling,  Wall-­to-­Wall  America:  Post  Office  Murals  in  the  Great  Depression,  300-­‐321.   61  Ney,  “My  Fight  with  Officialdom,”  3.       48   newsreel.”62  While  the  plan  called  for  a  composition  that  was  certainly  much  more   narrative  than  his  other  works,  Ney  was  excited  to  work  within  an  abstracted  style   while  producing  something  the  people  of  New  London  could  understand  and   appreciate.  Ney  noted  that  when  he  explained  his  style  and  plan  to  the  citizens,   “Everyone  there  at  that  time  was  pleased  in  the  first  place  because  I  had  come  to   them  with  my  ideas.  They  said  go  ahead  as  it  sounded  alright  [sic]  to  them.  It  was  a   happy  experience.”63     The  people  of  New  London  were  not  only  excited  about  Ney’s  openness  and   the  opportunity  for  their  input,  but  also  must  have  quickly  realized  that  Ney’s  design   was  unique  and  distinct  from  most  Section  commissions.  According  to  their  local   newspaper,  citizens  were  proud  that,  much  like  the  first  unveiling  of  a   hippopotamus,  New  London  would  be  home  to  the  “first  abstract  mural”  in  the   United  States.64  Rather  than  feeling  alienated,  as  Bruce  had  always  feared  small   communities  would  be  by  abstract  art,  New  London  was,  as  a  whole,  thrilled  to   receive  something  new,  unique,  and  modern.     Ney’s  early  sketches  show  how  he  planned  the  mural  around  three  essential   geometric  shapes:  a  square,  triangle,  and  circle.  Ney  wrote  that  the  shapes  would   provide  a  divided  grouping  of  New  London’s  past  and  present,  both  of  which  were   connected  formally  to  a  triangle  that  represented  the  “pioneer  spirit”  (figure  31).65                                                                                                                     62  Ibid.   63  Ibid.   64  The  New  London  Record,  “$1,000.00  Mural  is  Placed  in  the  Postoffice  Lobby,”   December  2,  1940.   John  L.  O’Hara  to  Rowan,  December  2,  1940.   65  It  is  also  possible  that  the  triangle  was  another  allusion  to  Kandinsky’s  described   pyramid  in  Concerning  the  Spiritual  in  Art.       49   Figure  31:  Early  plan  for  New  London  Facets.  The  Lloyd  Raymond  Ney  Papers,  1902-­‐ 1987,  Archives  of  American  Art,  Smithsonian  Institution.  [4234-­‐4235].     Ney  then  adjusted  his  plan  to  incorporate  recognizable  aspects  of  New  London,  all   seen  from  the  town’s  Main  Street.  He  began  loosely,  working  from  his  original  three   shapes  to  break  up  the  picture  plane.  By  this  stage  in  the  planning  process,  however,   the  circle  and  square  gradually  disappeared  as  the  central  triangle  became  more   prominent  and  the  spirit  of  the  pioneers  was  relegated  to  one  side  of  the   composition  (figures  32  and  33).       50       Figure   32:   Early   plan   for   New   London   Facets.  The  Lloyd  Raymond  Ney  Papers,   1902-­‐1987,   Archives   of   American   Art,   Smithsonian  Institution.  [4234-­‐4235].     Figure   33:   Early   plan   for   New   London   Facets.  The  Lloyd  Raymond  Ney  Papers,   1902-­‐1987,   Archives   of   American   Art,   Smithsonian  Institution.  [4234-­‐4235].     While  Ney’s  interactions  with  the  citizens  of  New  London  went  smoothly,  his   later  correspondence  with  the  Section  proved  more  difficult.  Following  completion   of  his  initial  watercolor  plan  for  the  mural,  Ney  sent  the  work  along  with  a   “simplified  visualization  of  outstanding  subject  matter”  (figure  34)  to  Bruce  and  Ed   Rowan,  another  Section  official  who  handled  the  bulk  of  the  Section’s   correspondence  with  artists.  The  difference  between  Ney’s  simplified  visualization   and  his  color  plan  (figure  34)  for  the  post  office  mural  is  extreme;  had  the  two   sketches  not  arrived  in  the  mail  together  it  is  entirely  possible  that  Rowan  and   Bruce  could  have  assumed  they  were  intended  for  two  different  sites.     A  close  examination  of  Ney’s  color  study  for  New  London,  Ohio  reveals  few   similarities  with  his  submitted  panels  for  the  Saint  Louis  commission.  Both  plans   utilize  compressed  space  for  the  sake  of  the  painted  subject  matter  and  narrative.   Whereas  the  action  in  Ney’s  submission  for  Saint  Louis  was  spread  across  nine   panels,  each  of  which  had  its  own  unified  subject  matter,  the  New  London  color       51   study  has  just  as  much  activity  on  one.  A  pioneer’s  covered  wagon  appears  in  the   upper  left  corner  on  top  of  an  ambiguous  mass  of  figures.  The  central  triangle   remains  from  Ney’s  earlier  sketches,  but  it  is  full  of  strange  geometric  shapes,  what   appears  to  be  an  eye,  and  an  envelope.  Off  to  the  right,  Ney’s  color  study  becomes   even  more  difficult  to  decipher,  with  a  clock  tower  as  the  only  recognizable  object  in   the  midst  of  a  jumble  of  abstracted  forms  and  shapes.  Ney’s  plan  for  New  London   was  visually  more  unruly  than  his  original  regimented  sketches  for  Saint  Louis,  but   also  was  a  much  better  representation  of  Ney’s  personal  painting  style.   Following  his  submission  of  the  color  study  and  then  watercolor  plans  for   New  London’s  post  office,  Ney  suddenly  left  New  Hope  to  winter  in  Key  West  with   his  wife  and  four-­‐year-­‐old  daughter,  Gretchen.66  Ney  remembered  that,  “Back  in  my   subconscious  mind  I  knew  Bruce  spent  some  time  every  winter  in  Key  West,”  which   prompts  one  to  wonder  whether  Bruce  and  Ney’s  wintering  simultaneously  in  Key   West  was  pure  coincidence.  Or  did  it  result  from  Ney’s  worries  that  the  Section   would  take  issue  with  his  design  and  that  he  might  need  to  plead  his  case  to  Bruce   personally  and  directly?67  Surely  even  Ney,  who  believed  that  the  citizens  of  New   London  would  welcome  his  final  design  submitted  to  the  Section,  realized  how   unconventional  his  sketch  was  for  the  Section  and  how  little  it  looked  like  his   simplified  plan.                                                                                                                     66  Unfortunately  the  original  watercolors  have  been  lost,  but  we  can  assume  that   they  are  similar  to  Ney’s  color  study,  which  is  included  here  as  figure  29.   67  Ney,  “My  Fight  with  Officialdom,”  5-­‐6.       52     Figure   34:   Lloyd   R.   Ney,   Simplified   visualization   of   outstanding   subject   matter.   Record  Group  121-­‐GA,  National  Archives,  College  Park,  MD.       Figure  35:  Lloyd  R.  Ney,  Color  study  for  the  New  London,  Ohio  post  office.  Record   Group  121-­‐GA,  National  Archives,  College  Park,  MD.     As  it  turned  out,  whether  subconscious  or  planned,  Ney  needed  to  be  in  Key   West  to  plead  his  case  with  Bruce.  By  December  27,  1939,  less  than  three  months   after  Ney  was  selected  for  the  commission,  Rowan  returned  Ney’s  watercolor  and   rejected  the  design.  He  stated  that:         53   It  is  our  feeling  that  you  have  not  presented  the  material  in  a  way  that   will  be  acceptable  to  the  general  public.  First  of  all,  the  palette  is  so   extremely  vivid  that  it  is  our  feeling  the  mural  would  not  harmonize   with  the  architecture,  and  secondly  that  the  combination  of  the   objective  and  the  abstract  would  find  very  few  supporters  in  the   town…Your  design  seemed  more  fitting  as  a  theatrical  back  drop  than   as  a  single  mural  decoration  in  a  Federal  building.  It  is  our  feeling  that   it  would  have  absolutely  no  meaning  for  the  people.68     Typically,  when  Rowan  or  another  Section  official  rejected  a  design,  the   commissioned  artist  would  comply  with  the  critique  and  adjust  his  or  her  design   until  it  was  approved.  In  some  cases  this  could  take  a  great  deal  of  time;  in  one   extreme  case  artist  Stuyvesant  Van  Veen  was  forced  to  alter  his  submitted  design   over  the  course  of  a  full  year.69  Therefore,  when  Ney  refused  to  change  his  design,   Rowan  was  surprised  and  at  a  complete  loss  as  to  what  he  should  do.   Unbeknownst  to  Ney,  Bruce  had  been  largely  ignorant  of  the  whole  affair,  up   until  that  January.  Rowan,  most  likely  nervous  about  Ney’s  appointment  by  the  St.   Louis  judges  and  Ney’s  previous  work,  had  hoped  that  Ney  would  produce   something  “appropriate”  for  New  London  and,  barring  complications,  would  not   need  to  worry  Bruce.  However,  after  seeing  Ney’s  watercolor,  Rowan  decided  it  was   time  to  inform  Bruce  of  their  troublesome  artist,  writing,  “When  you  are  in  Key  West   you  will  no  doubt  be  bombarded  by  one  Lloyd  R.  Ney  of  515  Fleming  Street,  Key   West.  For  your  information  in  order  to  help  you  be  prepared,  I  attach  photographs   of  the  work  which  he  submitted  for  the  decoration  of  the  New  London,  Ohio,  Post   Office  and  which  the  Section  was  unable  to  accept.”70  Rowan  also  mentioned  that  he                                                                                                                   68  Rowan  to  Ney,  December  27,  1939.   69  Louise  Feder,  “New  Deal  Murals  in  the  Pittsburgh  Post  Office  and  Courthouse”   (Honors  thesis,  Dickinson  College,  2010),  51.   70  Rowan  to  Bruce,  Jan  26,  1940.       54   had  sent  the  same  photographs  to  the  St.  Louis  jury  members  to  get  their  comments   on  Ney’s  recent  work.     Bruce  needed  Rowan’s  warning;  aided  by  staff  at  the  Key  West  post  office,  a   furious  Ney  discovered  Bruce’s  address  and  went  to  plead  his  case  at  Bruce’s  home   in  Key  West  twice  that  January.  Ney  later  described  his  visits  as  arguments  between   “an  English  limey  [Bruce]  and  a  Pennsylvania  Dutchman  [Ney]…stalled  and  very   angry  with  each  other…I  was  the  little  man  against  officialdom  but  my  strength  was   backed  by  the  people  of  New  London,  Ohio.”71  According  to  Ney,  his  disagreement   with  Bruce  always  came  back  to  the  abstract  portions  of  the  mural  and  its  not  being   “academic”  enough,  even  though  Ney  retained  figures  in  his  composition.72   Apparently,  in  the  heat  of  one  of  their  aesthetic  debates,  Bruce  exclaimed  to  Ney,  “[I]   wouldn’t  allow  a  Picasso  in  any  one  of  [my]  post  offices,”  and,  when  Ney  reminded   him  that  the  people  of  New  London  wanted  his  design,  Bruce  supposedly  replied,  “to   hell  with  the  people  of  New  London,  Ohio!”73   While  his  discussions  with  Bruce  insured  attention  from  the  Section,  Ney  was   not  any  closer  to  getting  his  design  approved.  Looking  for  help,  Ney  turned  to  his   acquaintances  in  New  London,  who  started  a  petition  through  the  local  Rotary  Club                                                                                                                   71  Ney,  “My  Fight  with  Officialdom,”  9.   72  The  use  of  the  word  “academic”  is  certainly  surprising  given  Bruce’s  proclaimed   disinterest  in  true  academic  painting  as  he  thought  it  another  kind  of  extreme  not   appropriate  in  American  post  office.  As  discussed  in  chapter  one,  Bruce  was  as   opposed  to  academic  painting  as  he  was  to  abstract  works.  It  is  possible  that  Ney   remembers  the  particular  word  incorrectly  and  he  is  not  always  a  reliable  source,   which  is  evident  in  a  number  of  contradictions  in  his  papers  both  in  the  Archives  of   American  Art  and  the  archives  at  the  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum.  The  most   likely  truth  is  that  either  Bruce  or  Ney  used  “academic”  here  as  a  synonym  for   “representational”  or  “realistic.”   73  Ney,  “My  Fight  with  Officialdom,”  9-­‐10.       55   to  bring  Ney’s  mural  to  their  town,  which  they  sent  to  the  Rowan  at  the  Section.74   Most  likely  with  New  London  on  his  mind,  Ney  took  to  painting  Key  West  in  the   same  abstracted  style  that  he  had  planned  for  his  Section  mural  during  this  period   (figures  36  and  37).  Whether  he  depicted  Key  West  in  this  style  simply  to  calm  his   nerves  or  to  serve  as  visual  evidence  for  his  meetings  with  Bruce  is  unclear,  but  the   similarity  in  terms  of  color  and  line  to  the  New  London  mural  and  Ney’s  Key  West   work  is  striking.       Figure  36:  Lloyd  Ney,  Key  West  #1  C,  1939.  Watercolor.  Private  Collection.       Figure  37:  Lloyd  Ney,  Key  West  #3  C,  1939.  Watercolor.  Private  Collection.                                                                                                                     74  Rotary  Club  to  Rowan,  1940.       56   Ney  also  wrote  Rowan  and  Bruce  numerous  times  throughout  that  January   and  February,  continuously  stating  that  the  community  of  New  London  needed  and   wanted  his  mural  as  did  the  nation,  emphatically  ending  nearly  every  sentence  with   an  exclamation  point.  Ney  summarized  his  argument  in  a  letter  to  Bruce  on   February  12,  1940:   I  enjoyed  the  Privilege  of  meeting  you,  and  talking  with  you;  however   I   feel   that   you   are   turning   down   my   Work,   Presented   to   You   and   wanted  by  the  People  of  Ohio  because  it   is  an  abstract  approach  to   Painting,  my  St.  Louis  sketches  were  abstract  approaches  to  Painting!   The  St.  Louis   jury  designated  my  being  a  capable  artist,  when  they   gave  me  the  right,  to  Paint  the  mural  For  New  London.   When  the  People  of  New  London  request  you  to  allow  me  to  continue   developing   that  Particular  mural,   the  other  half  of   the   Idea  will  be   accomplished!  I  am  capable!  And  the  People  want  it!  Mr.  Bruce  You   represent,  a  medium!  Of  serving  the  People.   Mr.  Bruce  there  are  two  schools  of  thought  concerning  Painting  –  You   are  using  only  one  of  the  schools  of  thought!  You  are  only  using  half  of   an  idea!  in  what  you  are  presenting  to  the  People.   Mr.  Bruce  You  tell  me…that  you  will  have  to  stick  to  your  ideas!   …Mr.  Bruce  if  your  visualization  of  your  Section  of  Fine  Arts,  serving   the  People  as  a  whole  –  would  combine  all  the  creative  Forces  in  this   country,   combine   Modern   Art   and   Conservative   Art,   you   would   combine  a  full  force,  You  would  combine  a  Whole  idea,  not  half  an  idea   –  to  give  to  the  People.   Mr.  Bruce  it  isn’t  Fair  to  Mr.  Roosevelt!  It   isn’t  Fair  to  the  artists!  It   isn’t  Fair  to  your  self!  And  it  isn’t  Fair  to  the  People!   Why  don’t  you  show  good  sportsmanship!  My   last  pull  –   is   to   that   inner  man  in  all  mankind!75     Luckily  for  Ney,  his  emotional  letter  was  delivered  to  the  Section  close  to  the  same   time  that  the  institution  received  letters  of  support  for  Ney  from  the  St.  Louis  jury   members,  which  proved  to  be  exceptional  timing.  76  Adding  to  Ney’s  campaign  on   behalf  of  the  mural  all  three  jurors  stood  by  their  initial  decision  to  award  Ney  the                                                                                                                   75  Ney  to  Bruce,  February  12,  1940.   76  In  Ney  to  Rowan,  April  1,  1940,  he  mentions  that  he  enjoyed  the  letters  forwarded   by  the  Section  written  by  Cook,  Lockwood,  and  Gropper  at  an  earlier  date.       57   New  London  commission.77  By  this  point  the  whole  affair  had,  in  Bruce’s  opinion,   involved  too  many  people  and  taken  up  too  much  of  the  Section’s  time  away  from  its   other  commissions.  Therefore,  on  February  22,  1940  Bruce  gave  Ney  his  approval   and  informed  the  artist  that  he  would  convince  the  rest  of  the  Section  officials  to   accept  the  design.       Ney  was  overcome  and  told  Bruce  that  he  wanted,  “to  state  with  tears  in  my   eyes  to  you,  you  will  never  regret  giving  me  this  opportunity.”78  Indeed,  Bruce  may   have  been  correct  when  he  wrote  to  Forbes  Watson,  art  critic  and  Section  official,   that  he  feared  Ney  might  have  “cracked  up”  if  his  design  had  been  finally  turned   down.  Bruce  ended  his  letter  to  Watson  describing  his  final  decision  casually,   exclaiming,  “what  the  hell!”79  The  statement,  while  certainly  offhand,  may  have   indicated  a  shift  in  the  Section’s  attitude  toward  abstraction.  It  is  possible  that  by   February  of  1940,  following  his  extended  correspondence  with  Ney,  Bruce  was  able   to  relax  his  stylistic  standards  for  the  Section.  Perhaps,  after  witnessing  the   community  support  of  Ney’s  design,  Bruce  recognized  that  abstract  art  was  not  a   passing  trend.       After  all,  Ney’s  submission  for  the  New  London  post  office  was  not  pure   abstraction;  it  was  not  part  of  Ney’s  own  Nonobjective  category  of  painting.  The   charcoal  study  that  Bruce  approved  (figure  38)  was  abstracted,  but  in  the  midst  of   Ney’s  chaotic  composition,  a  viewer  could  still  identify  features  of  New  London’s                                                                                                                   77  Bruce  informed  Ney  by  letter  on  February  22,  1940  that  all  three  jurors  continued   to  support  his  appointment  and,  in  varying  degrees,  Ney’s  plan  for  the  New  London   post  office.  Bruce  also  mentions  that  Ney  has  a  “very  loyal  rooter”  in  Ward   Lockwood  and  that  Ney  was  “not  lacking  in  enthusiastic  friends.”   78  Ney  to  Bruce,  Feb  23,  1940   79  Bruce  to  Watson,  February  24,  1940.       58   landscape  and  history,  even  if  they  were  strangely  composed  and,  in  the  final  mural,   vibrantly  colored.  The  shawl  wearing  doctors,  famous  within  New  London,  were   clearly  depicted  on  the  left  of  the  central  stabilizing  triangle,  the  town’s  clock  tower   was  to  the  triangle’s  right,  and  in  the  midst  of  the  jumble  of  geometric  shapes  inside   the  triangle  are  two  envelopes.  Ney  had  created  and  Bruce  had  approved  a  sort  of   middle-­‐ground  abstraction,  one  that  incorporated  purely  abstract  shapes  and  colors   alongside  images  from  the  “American  scene”  that  the  Section  and  all  New  Deal   programs  looked  for  in  their  commissions.     Figure  38:  Lloyd  Ney,  Study  for  New  London  Facets,  1940,  charcoal,  graphite,  and   tempera  on  wood  panel.  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum.       Further,  in  giving  Ney  his  commission  Bruce  demonstrated  to  the  artistic   community  and  the  country  as  a  whole,  that  the  federal  government,  through  the   Treasury-­‐funded  Section,  had  begun  to  think  about  public  art  and  abstraction  in  a   new  way.  After  years  of  relatively  safe  subjects  commissioned  through  New  Deal  art   programs,  Bruce  and  the  Section  started  to  bend  and  allow  submissions  with  new,   Modern  styles:  “why  not,  what  the  hell!”       59       Figure  39:  Lloyd  Ney,  New  London  Facets,  1941,  Oil  on  Canvas.  New  London,  Ohio   post  office.  Photo  courtesy  of  Michel  Laugier.     Following  the  installation  in  1941  of  Ney’s  mural,  eventually  titled  New   London  Facets  (figure  39),  the  Section  only  ran  for  two  more  years,  during  which  it   was  not  able  to  award  many  commissions.  With  the  United  States’  involvement  in   World  War  II  fast  approaching,  Ney’s  mural  in  Ohio  and  the  Section’s  attitude   towards  abstraction  were  simply  not  newsworthy  at  the  national  level.  Ney’s  hopes   that  New  London  Facets  would  ignite  a  new  movement  in  art,  as  well  as  Bruce’s   initial  fears  that  public  abstract  murals  would  shock  American  citizens,  were  never   realized.  What  was  controversial  for  the  Section,  its  artists,  and  communities   surrounding  commission  sites  in  1940  was  a  non-­‐event  nationally  by  the  time  of  the   mural’s  completion  and  installation  in  1941.       New  London  Facets  still  hangs  in  the  New  London,  Ohio  post  office,  while   many  other  Section  murals  were  destroyed  or  misplaced  following  the  disbanding  of   the  Section  in  1943.  While  Ney’s  abstracted  vision  of  New  London  may  have  not   received  much  national  publicity,  the  local  community  was  delighted  that  they       60   owned  the  first  and  only  so-­‐called  abstract  Section  mural.80  When  presented  with   abstraction,  the  small  town  of  New  London  surprised  the  government  with  its   acceptance  of  what  must  have  been  a  new  style  of  painting  for  this  community,   choosing  not  to  reject  what  they  did  not  immediately  understand.  This  reaction  to   Ney’s  work  was  a  revelation  for  a  government  institution  previously  fixated  on  the   traditional  and  representational.  One  wonders  if,  following  the  success  of  New   London  Facets,  the  Section  would  have  accepted  more  abstract  murals  had  the   Section  been  reinstated  following  World  War  II.     In  what  may  have  been  surprising  for  Ney,  Rowan  took  a  genuine  interest  in   the  artist  following  the  New  London  commission.  Rather  than  attempt  to  forget  the   troublesome  and  opinionated  Ney,  Rowan,  at  the  artist’s  request,  went  out  to  New   Hope  in  August  of  1940  to  visit  Ney  and  view  some  of  his  more  abstract  and   nonobjective  paintings  most  likely  similar  to  Red  Center,  Untitled,  and  Untitled   (figures  40-­‐42).  Rowan  was  apparently  so  impressed  by  what  he  saw  that  he  wrote   to  Alfred  Barr,  Director  of  the  Museum  of  Modern  Art,  and  to  Baroness  Hilla  von   Rebay,  art  buyer  and  member  of  the  board  of  directors  at  the  Solomon  R.   Guggenheim  Museum.81  Rowan’s  introduction  led  to  a  close  working  relationship   between  Ney  and  Rebay.                                                                                                                     80  “$1,000.00  Mural  is  Placed  in  the  Postoffice  Lobby,”  New  London  Record,   November  28,  1940,  1.   81  Rowan  to  Barr  and  Rebay,  August  6,  1940.       61     Figure  40:  Lloyd  Ney,  Red  Center,  1941.  Oil  on  canvas.  Private  Collection.       Figure  41:  Lloyd  Ney,  Untitled,  circa  1940s.  Oil  on  canvas.  Photo  courtesy  of  Michel   Laugier.       Figure  42:  Lloyd  Ney,  Untitled,  1941.  Oil  on  canvas.  Private  Collection.       62     It  remains  unclear  whether  Ney  realized  that  the  reason  Rebay  first  wanted   to  preview,  exhibit,  and,  ultimately,  buy  his  work  for  the  Guggenheim’s  permanent   collection,  was  all  thanks  to  Rowan’s  influential  letter.  In  Ney’s  unpublished   manuscript,  “My  Fight  With  Officialdom,”  the  introduction  to  Rebay  and  the   Guggenheim  is  not  mentioned  even  in  passing  in  an  otherwise  detailed  account  of   his  relationship  with  the  Section.  Ultimately,  though  Ney  resented  the  Section’s   initial  reluctance  to  let  him  paint  what  he  wanted  in  Ohio,  it  was  only  thanks  to   Section  officials  that  his  career  genuinely  took  off  both  nationally  and   internationally.  Rowan’s  introduction  enabled  Ney  to  show  his  work  in  group   exhibitions  at  the  Guggenheim’s  Museum  of  Non-­‐objective  Art  in  1941,  1942,  and   1956  where  Ney’s  Composition  No.  9  (figure  43)  was  selected  by  Rebay  for  the  cover   of  the  catalog.82  The  introduction  also  led  to  Ney’s  induction  into  the  museum’s   permanent  collection  in  1946.       Figure  43:  Lloyd  Ney,  Composition  No.  9,  1950.  Watercolor  on  paper.  Photo  courtesy   of  Michel  Laugier.                                                                                                                   82  Museum  of  Non-­‐objective  Painting,  Museum  of  Non-­objective  Painting  Exhibition   Catalog,  1956,  1.       63     Ney  also  had  a  solo  exhibition  at  the  Delgado  Museum  in  New  Orleans,   Louisiana  in  1948  and  the  Salon  des  Réalités  Nouvelles  in  Paris  in  1947,  as  well  as  a   number  of  group  exhibitions  in  France,  Germany,  Switzerland,  and  Italy  in  the  years   from  1947-­‐1955.83  Surely,  Ney’s  work  would  not  have  been  exhibited  as  readily,  let   alone  at  locations  as  experimental  as  the  Salon  des  Réalités  Nouvelles,  had  he  not   shown  at  the  Guggenheim  previously.  Even  as  his  career  expanded  and  Ney’s  art   grew  more  nonobjective,  he  still  considered  New  London  Facets  to  be  one  of  his   greatest  works.  When  Ney  began  to  conceive  of  and  organize  a  self-­‐run  Ney  Museum   in  New  Hope  in  the  years  before  his  death  in  1965  he  painted  a  watercolor  of  what   he  wanted  to  include  in  the  first  exhibition  (figure  44).  Featured  prominently  in  the   very  middle  of  the  largest  wall  and  above  all  other  paintings,  Ney  reproduced  his   cartoon  for  New  London  Facets,  which  he  had  carefully  preserved  in  his  home  in   New  Hope.  Even  if  Ney  did  not  realize  how  much  the  New  London  commission  had   helped  him  both  in  reputation  and  professional  connections,  he  did  recognize  its   importance  within  his  oeuvre.                                                                                                                   83  Again,  unfortunately,  the  names  and  locations  of  many  of  these  exhibitions  are  not   listed  in  Ney’s  papers  held  by  his  grandchildren,  Odile  and  Michel  Laugier.  Only  the   countries  and  years  have  survived.       64     Figure  44:  Lloyd  R.  “Bill”  Ney,  watercolor  of  planned  Ney  Museum.  Watercolor  and   charcoal  on  canvas.  Private  Collection.  Photo  by  Edwin  Hild.     In  the  decades  following  New  London  Facets  Ney  continued  to  paint  and   occasionally  sculpt  (figure  45)  in  his  home  and  studio  in  New  Hope,  Pennsylvania.84   As  his  health  deteriorated  Ney  began  to  produce  work  rapidly  in  the  hopes  that  his   wife  and  daughter  would  have  enough  work  to  fill  his  planned  museum.  Ney’s  work   in  the  1950s  ranged  greatly  in  terms  of  style  and  subject;  he  produced  a  vast   number  colorful  of  self-­‐portraits  (figure  46)  and  portraits  of  friends,  many   geometrically  based  and  linear  Nonobjective  paintings  (figure  47),  and  a  multitude                                                                                                                   84  Little  is  known  about  Ney’s  sculptures.  Michel  Laugier,  the  artist’s  grandson,  owns   the  undated  and  untitled  metal  sculpture  seen  in  figure  35  but  knows  nothing  about   its  conception  or  Ney’s  process.  However,  the  work  is  included  in  Ney’s  drawings  for   the  Ney  Museum,  so  we  may  assume  that  Ney  considered  it  one  of  his  important   works,  worthy  of  exhibition  alongside  a  slew  of  his  better-­‐known  nonobjective   paintings.       65   of  watercolors  that  illustrated  his  planned  museum.  Ney’s  work  never  attempted  to   replicate  or  reference  the  New  London  mural;  instead  he  produced  hundred  of   purely  abstract  paintings,  at  times  incorporating  material  other  than  paint,  such  as   sand  or  working  on  textured  surfaces  to  physically  enliven  the  picture  plane  (figure   48).                             Figure  45:  Lloyd  Ney,  untitled  and  undated                    Figure  46:  Lloyd  Ney,  Self-­   sculpture.  Painted  metal.  Collection  of                                      Portrait,  1962.  Watercolor  on   Michel  Laugier.                              Paper.  Collection  of  Odile  Laugier.       Figure  47:  Lloyd  Ney,  Untitled,  1963.  Oil  on  Canvas.  Private  Collection.           66     Figure  48:  Lloyd  Ney,  Apple  Orchard,  1950s.  India  ink  on  arch  paper.  Collection  of   Steven  Hochberg.  Photo  courtesy  of  the  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum  archives.     Though  the  Ney  Museum  was  never  realized  in  his  lifetime,  it  did  open  briefly   for  a  few  years  in  the  later  1960s,  and  was  run  by  his  widow  Jean  and  daughter   Gretchen  before  closing  and  being  converted  into  apartments.  A  number  of  his   works  are  part  of  the  permanent  collection  at  the  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum,  a   museum  in  Bucks  County  that  specializes  in  art  by  the  Pennsylvania  Impressionists   and  New  Hope  Modernists.  The  cartoon  for  New  London  Facets  is  displayed   prominently  in  the  museum’s  lobby,  acknowledging  the  commission’s  importance  in   the  life  of  one  of  Bucks  County’s  greatest  Modernists,  Lloyd  Ney.  It  also  echoes  the   actual  mural’s  presence  in  New  London,  Ohio,  still  on  the  post  office  wall,  a   permanent  reminder  of  the  community’s  surprising  passion  for  abstraction  within   the  Section.       67   BIBLIOGRAPHY     Alterman,  Jim  M.  New  Hope  for  American  Art:  A  Comprehensive  Showing  of  Important     20th  Century  Painting  from  and  Surrounding  the  New  Hope  Art  Colony.   Lambertville:  Jim’s  of  Lambertville,  2005.     Archives  of  American  Art.  Lloyd  Raymond  Ney  Papers.  1989,  Reels  4234-­‐4235.     Avant-­‐Garde  Gallery,  Ltd.  Ney.  New  York:  Avant-­‐Garde  Gallery,  Ltd.,  undated.     Baal-­‐Teschuva,  Jacob.  Mark  Rothko  1903-­1970:  Pictures  as  Drama.  Cologne:  Taschen,     2003.     Bowman,  Ruth.  Murals  Without  Walls:  Arshile  Gorky’s  Aviation  Murals  Rediscovered.     Newark:  Newark  Museum,  1978.     Coaldale,  PA.  Michel  Laugier  family  archives,  Lloyd  Ney  files.     Doylestown,  PA.  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum  Archives,  Lloyd  Ney  Files.     Eldridge,  Charles  C.  Ward  Lockwood:  1894-­1963.  Kansas  City:  Kansas  Museum  of  Art,     1974.     Feder,  Louise.  “New  Deal  Murals  in  the  Pittsburgh  Post  Office  and  Courthouse.”  B.A.     honors  thesis,  Dickinson  College,  2010.     Fold,  Thomas  C.  The  Pennsylvania  Impressionists.  Cranbury:  Associated  University     Presses,  1997.     Gambone,  Robert  L.    “Howard  Cook:  From  Drawings  to  Frescoes,  January  28  –  March     19.”  Georgia  Museum  of  Art  Bulletin  14  (1989):  1-­‐28.     Gropper,  William.  “William  Gropper:  His  Statements.”  In  William  Gropper:     Retrospective,  edited  by  August  L.  Freundlich.  Los  Angeles:  The  Ward  Ritchie     Press,  1968.     Gustafson,  Elaine  D.  and  Susan  E.  Strickler.  The  Second  Wave:  American  Abstraction     of  the  1930s  and  1940s,  Selections  from  the  Penny  and  Elton  Yasuna  Collection.   Worcester:  Worcester  Art  Museum,  1991.     Kandinsky,  Wassily.  Concerning  the  Spiritual  in  Art.  Translated  by  M.T.H.  Sadler.     Toronto:  Dover,  1977.     Knott,  Robert,  ed.  American  Abstract  Art  of  the  1930s  and  1940s:  The  Donald  Nichols     Collection.  Winston-­‐Salem:  Harry  N.  Abrams,  Inc.,  1998.         68   Langham,  Sarah.  A  Modernist  Experiment:  Visual  Jazz,  The  Cooperative  Painting     Project  and  Modernist  Works.  New  York:  Langham  Leff  Gallery.     Marling,  Karal  Ann.  Wall  to  Wall  America:  Post  Office  Murals  in  the  Great  Depression.     Minneapolis:  University  of  Minnesota  Press,  2000.     McKinzie,  Richard  D.  The  New  Deal  for  Artists.  Princeton,  N.J.:  Princeton  University     Press,  1973.     Mumford,  Lewis.  “Group  Shows  and  Solos.”  In  Mumford  on  Modern  Art  in  the  1930s,     edited  by  Robert  Wojtowicz.  Berkeley  and  Los  Angeles:  University  of  California   Press,  2007.     O’Connor,  Francis  V.,  ed.  Art  for  the  Millions:  Essays  from  the  1930s  by  Artists  and     Administrators  of  the  WPA  Federal  Art  Project.  Greenwich:  The  New  York     Graphic  Society,  1973.     -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐.  Federal  Support  for  the  Visual  Arts:  The  New  Deal  and  Now.     Greenwich:  The  New  York  Graphic  Society,  1969.     -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐.  The  New  Deal  Art  Projects:  An  Anthology  of  Memoirs.     Washington:  Smithsonian  Institution  Press,  1972.     Park,  Marlene  and  Gerald  E.  Markowitz.  Democratic  Vistas:  Post  Offices  and  Public     Art  in  the  New  Deal.    Philadelphia:  Temple  University  Press,  1984.     Pedersen,  Roy.  “The  New  Hope  Modernists.”  In  New  Hope  Modernists,  1917-­1950,     edited  by  Roy  Pedersen  and  Barbara  A.  Wolanin.  New  Hope,  PA:  The  New   Hope  Modernist  Project,  Inc.,  1991.     Phagan,  Patricia  E.  For  the  People:  American  Mural  Drawings  of  the  1930s  and     1940s.  Resource  Library  May  2008.       Rand,  Harry.  Arshile  Gorky:  The  Implication  of  Symbols.  Berkeley:  University  of     California  Press,  1991.     Records  of  the  Public  Buildings  Service.  RG  121,  Records  Concerning  Federal  Art     Activities,  Textual  Records  of  the  Section  of  Fine  Arts,  Public  Buildings     Administration,  and  Its  Predecessors,  Biographical  Data  File  Concerning     Artists,  1940,  Box  No.  1,  Entry  136.     -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐.  RG  121,  Records  Concerning  Federal  Art  Activities,  Textual  Records  of  the     Section  of  Fine  Arts,  Public  Buildings  Administration,  and  Its  Predecessors,   Correspondence  of  Edward  Bruce  1934-­‐43,  Box  No.  8.           69   -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐.  RG  121,  Records  Concerning  Federal  Art  Activities,  Textual  Records  of  the     Section  of  Fine  Arts,  Public  Buildings  Administration,  and  Its  Predecessors,     Case  Files  Concerning  Embellishments  of  Federal  Buildings,  1934-­‐43,  OH,     Newcomerstown  -­‐  Portsmouth,  Box  No.  84,  Entry  133.     -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐.  RG  121-­‐CMS,  Prints:  Completed  Murals  and  Sculptures,  Painting:  New  York     to  Pennsylvania,  Box  4  of  8.     -­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐.  RG  121-­‐GA,  Prints:  Photographs  of  Paintings  and  Sculptures  Commissioned     by  the  Section  of  Fine  Arts,  1934-­‐1943.  Newell,  J.M.  –  Nyquist,  Carl,  Box  40.     Saab,  A.  Joan.  For  the  Millions:  American  Art  and  Culture  between  the  Wars.     Philadelphia:  University  of  Pennsylvania  Press,  2004.     Stahl,  Joan.  “American  Abstract  Artists  Tackle  the  Big  Question.”  American  Art    12     (1998):  89-­‐91.     Sydney,  Patricia  Tanis.  “The  Visual  Artists.”  In  The  Genius  Belt:  The  Story  of  the  Arts     in  Bucks  County,  Pennsylvania,  edited  by  George  S.  Bush,  129-­‐133.     Doylestown:  James  A.  Michener  Art  Museum,  1996.     Taylor,  Michael  T.,  ed.  Arshile  Gorky:  A  Retrospective.  New  Haven:  Yale  University     Press,  2009.     Theriault,  Kim  S.  Rethinking  Arshile  Gorky.  University  Park:  Penn  State  Press,  2009.     Wycombe,  PA.  Odile  Laugier  family  archives,  Lloyd  Ney  files.     work_bdgouxk4a5fqve3cmyifkucwra ---- Artificial Intelligence, Deepfakes and a Future of Ectypes EDITOR LETTER Artificial Intelligence, Deepfakes and a Future of Ectypes Luciano Floridi1,2 Published online: 1 August 2018 # Springer Nature B.V. 2018 The art world is full of reproductions. Some are plain replicas, for example the Mona Lisa. Others are fakes or forgeries, like the BVermeers^ painted by Han van Meegeren that sold for $60 million (Kreuger and van Meegeren 2010). The distinction between a replica and a fake is based on the concept of authenticity. Is this artefact what it claims to be?1 The answer seems simple but, in reality, things are complicated. Today, the paintings of the forger John Myatt are so famous that they are valued at up to $40,000 each, as Bgenuine fakes^ (Furlong 1986). They are not what they say they are, but they are authentically painted by him and not by another forger. And they are beautiful. A bit as if one were to utter a beautiful lie, not any ordinary lie. And an artist like Magritte seems to have painted not only false Picassos and Renoirs during the Nazi occupation of Belgium (Mariën 1983), but also faked his own work, so to speak, in the famous case of the two copies of the painting BThe Flavour of Tears^ (1948), both by Magritte, but one of which he passed off as false—partly as a surrealist act and partly to make money. In this mess, and as if things were not confusing enough, digital technologies further reshuffle what is possible and our understanding of it. Thanks to digital technologies, today it is much easier to establish the authenticity of a work. There are databases where you can check authors’ signatures, and millions of images that can be viewed with a few clicks. Selling a fake is more difficult. Figure 1 shows a reproduction of the BLodge on Lake Como^ by Carl Frederik Peder Aagaard (1833–1895), a Danish landscape painter and decorative artist. It was on sale in 2016 on eBay. The painting is very popular on the web, and there are plenty of good replicas. Nothing wrong with them. However, if you check Fig. 1 carefully, you will notice that this is sold as an unsigned Boriginal^, which is misleading to say the least. Both the quality of the painting and the price are suspicious, and a Google image search quickly Philos. Technol. (2018) 31:317–321 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0325-3 1I have discussed the nature of questions and epistemic relevance in (Floridi 2008). * Luciano Floridi luciano.floridi@oii.ox.ac.uk 1 Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK 2 The Alan Turing Institute, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, UK http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s13347-018-0325-3&domain=pdf mailto:luciano.floridi@oii.ox.ac.uk reveals that this is a mere replica. At the time of writing, the painting was no longer available and the seller did not seem to be active on eBay anymore. Of course, fakes are not always reproductions; they can also be Bnew works^ by a famous artist, like Pollock or Van Gogh. In this case, sophisticated scientific techniques to establish authenticity include tests run using AI. A research paper, published last November by Ahmed Elgammal, Yan Kang and Milko Den Leeuw (Elgammal et al. 2017) proposed Ba computational approach for analysis of strokes in line drawings by artists^, based on neural networks. The training collection consisted of a dataset of 300 digitised drawings with over 80,000 strokes, by Pablo Picasso, Henry Matisse and Egon Schiele, and a few works by other artists. By segmenting individual strokes, the system learned to quantify the characteristics of individual strokes in drawings, thus identifying the unique properties for each artist. The software managed to classify Bindividual strokes with accuracy 70%-90%, and aggregate over drawings with accu- racy above 80%, while being robust to be deceived by fakes (with accuracy 100% for detecting fakes in most settings)^. It turns out that the way in which individuals draw lines is as unique as their fingerprints or their gait, and AI can help one to discover it, as if it were a microscope. But AI is not just for identifying fakes. Let us stay in the Netherlands, a very interesting project2 by Microsoft, in collaboration with the Rembrandt House Museum, has led to the creation of a portrait of a gentleman, which both is and is not a Rembrandt (see Fig. 2). Figure 1 A fake, the original is BLodge on Lake Como^ by Carl Frederik Peder Aagaard (1833–1895) 2 See https://news.microsoft.com/europe/features/next-rembrandt/ 318 L. Floridi https://news.microsoft.com/europe/features/next-rembrandt/ Analysing the known works of Rembrandt, an algorithm identified the most com- mon subject (a portrait of a Caucasian man, 30–40 years old), the most common traits (facial hair, facing to the right, wearing a hat, a collar and dark clothing, etc.), the most suitable style to reproduce these characterising properties, the brushstrokes, in short, all the information needed to produce a new painting by Rembrandt. Having created it, it was reproduced using a 3D printer, to ensure that the depth and layering of the colour would be as close as possible to Rembrandt’s style and way of painting. The result is a masterpiece. A Rembrandt that Rembrandt never painted, but which challenges our concepts of Bauthenticity^ and Boriginality ,̂ given the painting’s strong link with Rembrandt himself. I do not know the value of the painting. My bet is that it would be quite expensive if it were auctioned as reliably authenticated as that unique Microsoft’s Rembrandt. We do not have a word to define an artefact such as Microsoft’s Rembrandt. So let me suggest ectype. The word comes from Greek and it has a subtle meaning that is quite useful here: an ectype is a copy, yet not any copy, but rather a copy that has a special relation with its source (the origin of its creation), the archetype. In particular, an ectype is the impression left by a seal. It is not the real thing, but it is clearly linked in a significant, authentic way with the real thing itself. Locke used Bectypes^ to refer to ideas or impressions that correspond, although somewhat inadequately, to some exter- nal realities (the archetypes) to which they refer (Locke 2008). Digital technologies are able to separate the archetypal source—what was in the mind of the artist, for example—from the process (style, method, procedure) that leads from the source to the artefact (Floridi 2017). Once this link is severed, one can have ectypes that are Bauthentic^ in style and content, but not Boriginal^, in terms of archetypal source, like Microsoft’s Rembrandt. But one can also have ectypes that are Boriginal^ in terms of archetypal source (they do come from where they purport to come) yet not Bauthentic^ in terms of production, performance, or method (they are not the ones used by the source to deliver the artefact). In other words, ectypes can be authentic but unoriginal artefacts, like Microsoft’s Rembrandt, or inauthentic but original artefacts. A great example of an inauthentic original ectype was provided in March by an audio recording of John F. Kennedy’s last speech. Despite being an ordinary speech from a decades-old campaign trail, it suddenly made headline news. Because it was the Dallas Trade Mart Fig. 2 The Rembrandt that is not a Rembrandt. Microsoft Project with the Rembrandt House Museum Artificial Intelligence, Deepfakes and a Future of Ectypes 319 speech of 22 November 1963, the text that JFK would have read, had he not been assassinated mere moments before, on his way to deliver it. The text is original: it comes from the source. But the voice that recites is inauthentic, because it was synthesised by software that analysed 831 recordings of Kennedy’s speeches and interviews, in order to Blearn^ how to speak like him. The software finally gave voice to JFK’s last speech 55 years late. So here is a Kennedy who is and is not a Kennedy, similar and yet different from the Rembrandt that is and is not a Rembrandt. They are both ectypes (see Table 1). We saw that the production of ectypes does not stop at the work of art, but involves any artefact, from texts to photos, from audio recordings to videos. It is well known that the history of manuscripts, printing, photography, cinema and television is paved with fakes. Expect more ectypes too. In particular, artists love to break boundaries and it is easy to imagine that, like Magritte faking his own painting, they will start producing their own ectypes. Imagine a painter using the software developed by Microsoft to produce her own new works. It would still be an ectype, and this would explain why (with qualifications) the process would capture some authenticity. The reproduction of the work of art by mechanical means will have acquired a new meaning (Benjamin 2008). With ectypes, we usually know where things stand. But someone could cheat. Last May, Google presented Google Duplex, a version of its AI assistant that simulates being human to help users with simple interactive tasks, like booking a restaurant table. The company was quick to state that it will not intentionally mislead anyone, and that it will make sure always to clarify when a user is interacting with an artificial agent. But someone else could use these technologies for criminal or evil purposes. This is what happens with Deepfake, a set of techniques used to synthesise new visual products, for example by replacing faces in the originals. The typical cases involve porn movies in which the faces of famous actresses like Gal Gadot or Scarlett Johansson (this is regularly about women’s faces) are used to replace the original faces. In this case too, large databases are needed to instruct the software (which is available for free, and there is also an app), so if you are not a public figure the risks are lower. Deepfake also concerns politicians, like President Obama, for example. What is the future ahead of us? Digital technologies seem to undermine our confidence in the original, genuine, authentic nature of what we see and hear. But what the digital breaks it can also repair, not unlike the endless struggle between software virus and antivirus. In our case, in addition to educating people, acquiring new sensitivities and having the right legal framework, there are at least a couple of interesting digital strategies. For artefacts that are already available, it is easy to imagine Table 1 Archetype, fake and ectypes Original source Authentic production Leonardo’s Mona Lisa Yes Yes Han van Meegeren’s forged Vermeers No No Microsoft’s Rembrandt No (Qualified) Yes JFK’s Trade Mart speech Yes No 320 L. Floridi AI systems that give us a hand. It would be interesting to analyse Microsoft’s Rembrandt and Kennedy’s speech with an artificial system to see whether it discovered them to be ectypes. Research is already available on methods to expose Deepfake videos generated with neural networks (Li et al. 2018). In short, let us remember the software developed to analyse drawings: there are plenty of sophisticated tools for detection of image forgery. And more are likely to be developed as the demand for them increases. Next, as regards new artefacts, because originality and authenticity are also a matter of provable historical continuity from the source to the product through the process of production, the much-vaunted blockchain, or a similar solution, could make a big difference. Blockchain is like a register that stores transactions in an accruable, safe, transparent and traceable way. As a secure and distributed register of transactions, blockchain is being explored as a means of reliably certifying the origins and history of particular products: whether in terms of securing food supply chains, or in recording the many linked acts of creation and ownership that define the provenance of an artwork. In the future, we may adopt the same solution wherever there is a need to ensure (or establish) the originality and authenticity of some artefact, be it a written document, a photo, a video or a painting. And of course, a future artist may want to ensure, through a blockchain, that her work of art as an ectype is really what it says it is. At that point we shall have travelled full circle, for we shall have Bgenuine ectypes^, like the Microsoft’s Rembrandt, or Kennedy’s speech. References Benjamin, W. (2008). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. London: Penguin. Elgammal, A., Kang, Y., & Den Leeuw, M. (2017). Picasso, matisse, or a fake? Automated analysis of drawings at the stroke level for attribution and authentication. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.03536. Floridi, L. (2008). Understanding epistemic relevance. Erkenntnis, 69(1), 69–92. Floridi, L. (2017). Digital’s cleaving power and its consequences. Philosophy & Technology, 30(2), 123–129. Furlong, M. (1986). Genuine fake : a biography of Alan Watts. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Kreuger, F. H., & van Meegeren, H. (2010). Han van Meegeren revisited : his art & list of works. Delft: F.H. Kreuger. Li, Y, Chang, M.-C., Farid, H., & Lyu, S. (2018). In Ictu Oculi: exposing AI generated fake face videos by detecting eye blinking. arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.02877. Locke, J. (2008). An essay concerning human understanding. New York Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mariën, M. (1983). Le radeau de la mémoire : souvenirs déterminés. Paris: Pré-aux-Clercs. Artificial Intelligence, Deepfakes and a Future of Ectypes 321 Artificial Intelligence, Deepfakes and a Future of Ectypes References work_awwathv6evcmneedcv2oh6p46u ---- i IN PLAIN SIGHT: QUEER SYMBOLISM ENCODED IN THE WORKS OF MARSDEN HARTLEY, ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, AND JASPER JOHNS A Thesis Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS by Vincent Forsell May 2019 Thesis Approvals: Erin Pauwels, Thesis Advisor, Art History Gerald Silk, Art History ii ABSTRACT Homoerotic images date back as early as 800 BCE in Persian art. Examples of homoeroticism in the arts continue in the works of the Greeks and Romans. A sharp decline in the subject coincided with the rise of Christianity and the demonization of homosexuality in Europe between 300-1000 CE. This notion of homosexuality as depraved and sinful behavior became embedded in European culture for over a millennium, and some parts of the world still believe this to be true. Criminalization of homosexuality forced most homosexual artists to hide any references to their own sexuality in their works, a practice known as “encoding,” which allowed for symbols to be hidden “in plain sight” and without context. Among the most prominent mainstream artists to utilize homosexual coding in his work was the modern American artist Marsden Hartley. Through the hidden symbols in the 1914-1915 “War Images” of his “Amerika” series, Hartley expressed his grief for his likely lover Karl van Freyberg, who had passed away following the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. Following in the footsteps of Hartley queer artists working in later generations utilized similar methods of encoding to express their sexuality in a guarded fashion. Operating in the 1950s and 60s, the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns used varying methods of encoding to disguise references to their sexuality in their work. Such encoding would become a major theme of the “queer aesthetic,” where queer artists encoded symbols through semiotic methods such as floating or dual signifiers to convey their homosexuality in a covert way. In pioneering the concept of encoding, Marsden Hartley gave several generations of artists a iii means of expressing their sexuality in their works without being fully “out of the closet,” or revealing their sexual identity. iv For my mother Carolyn and grandmothers Aila and Annette. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to extend special thanks to Dr. Erin Pauwels and Dr. Gerald Silk for their willingness to review and edit my thesis, as its completion would have been impossible without their valuable input. I would also like to give thanks to Dr. Melissa Geiger, whose captivating lectures first sparked my interest in this subject. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS….. ...................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................1 2. MARSDEN HARTLEY AND THE ENCODED ELEGIES IN THE “WAR IMAGES” OF HIS “AMERIKA” SERIES” .................................................................7 3. THE HIDDEN SEXUAL ELEMENTS WITHIN ROBERT RASUCHENBERG’S AND JASPER JOHNS’ CREATIVE COLLABORATIONS ................................................................................................27 Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Early Works ..........................................................30 Biography ...................................................................................................31 The White Paintings ...................................................................................33 The Combines ...........................................................................................37 The Early Queer Constructions of Jasper Johns ...................................................46 4. MOVING FORWARD: THE OBSOLETION OF QUEER ENCODING? ...............56 5. CONCLUSION ...........................................................................................................64 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..............................................................................................................71 APPENDICES A. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS .......................................................................................76 vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Image Page 2.1. Marsden Hartley, Walt Whitman’s House, 328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey, 1905. Oil on board, 25.4 x 20.32 cm. Private collection……………………………………………………………………76 2.2. Marden Hartley, Portrait of Berlin, 1913. Oil on canvas, 106 x 106 cm. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut………………………………………………………………………….77 2.3. Marsden Hartley, Indian Fantasy, 1914. Oil on canvas, 118.6 x 99.9 cm. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina………………...78 2.4. Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer, 1914. Oil on canvas, 173.4 x 105.1 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York…………………………………………………………………….79 2.5. Marsden Hartley, Painting No. 47, 1914-15. Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 81 cm. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C…………………………………………………………………………………..80 2.6. Marsden Hartley, Portrait, 1914-15. Oil on canvas, 81.9 x 54.6 cm. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota…………………………………...81 2.7. Marsden Hartley, The Iron Cross, 1915. Oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri…………………………………………………….82 2.8. Marsden Hartley, Eight Bells’ Folly, Memorial to Hart Crane, 1933. Oil on canvas, 80.33 x 100.33 cm. Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota…………………………………………………………….83 2.9. Marsden Hartley, Madawaska, Acadian Light-Heavy, Third Arrangement, 1940. Oil on board, 101.6 x 76.2 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois…………………………………………………………..84 3.1. Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting (Three Panel), 1951. Latex paint on canvas, 182.88 x 274.32 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California………………………………………………………85 viii 3.2. Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955. Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 191.1 x 80 x 20.3 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York…………………………………………………………….....86 3.3. Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59. Oil, paper, fabric, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber shoe-heel, and tennis ball on two conjoined canvases with oil on taxidermied Angora goat with brass plaque and rubber tire on wood platform mounted on four casters, 106.7 x 160.7 x 163.8 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden…………………………87 3.4. Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55. Encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, 107.3 x 153.8 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York…………………………………………………………………….88 3.5. Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955. Encaustic and collage on canvas with plaster casts, 129.5 x 111.8 x 9 cm. Private collection……………..89 4.1. Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962. Acrylic paint on canvas, 205.4 x 144.8 cm. Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom…………………………………90 4.2. AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Silence=Death, 1987. Color lithograph, 55.8 x 83.8 cm. Private collection………………………………..91 4.3. Gran Fury, Kissing Doesn’t Kill, 1989. Offset lithograph, 365.8 x 91.4 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom…………………92 4.4. Alireza Shojaian, Salad Season 1, 2012. Acrylic and color pencil on cardboard, 39.9 x 30 cm. Private collection…………………………………………93 4.5. Alireza Shojaian, Salad Season 2, 2012. Acrylic and color pencil on cardboard, 39.9 x 30 cm. Private collection…………………………………………94 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The term “encoding” was first used by the queer art historian Jonathan Katz in his discussion of the hidden homoerotic and homoexpressive symbolism found in the works of the queer artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. These artists, living and working during a period in American history known as the Lavender Scare, where homosexuals were blacklisted from government positions for their perceived Communist sympathies, risked damaging their reputations and livelihoods, if they revealed their queer sexualities to the public at large. This method of queer encoding allowed for artists such as Johns and Rauschenberg to hide these symbols representative of their queer sexualities “in plain sight,” so to speak. One of the ways they accomplished this was by utilizing semiotic instruments such as floating or dual/ambiguous signifieds. That is, they loaded the their works with symbols that either required the prior knowledge of their queer sexuality to fully understand, thus rendering these symbols inert to the average viewer, or with symbols that served a dual purpose, one that is understood by all who viewed the work, and another that is only understood by those who knew of the artist’s queer sexuality beforehand. For example, in his Monogram, Robert Rauschenberg loads his combine with symbols that act as signifiers for several equally viable signifieds (fig. 2.3). While the work could be read as an allegory for homosexual intercourse and Rauschenberg’s own feelings as a queer individual being the scapegoat for many of America’s woes during the Lavender Scare, it could also be read as being representative of the ram sacrificed in the biblical story of Isaac, or as an allegory for gravity itself. I will expand upon these arguments in Chapter Three of my thesis, but I have provided a 2 brief overview of them here to show how Rauschenberg’s work could exhibit or drive attention away from his own queer sexuality. In Chapter Three I will discuss the works created by Rauschenberg and Johns both before and during their romantic relationship from 1954-1961, as it is in these works that both artists’ respective uses of queer encoding can be explicitly displayed. I will provide new readings for several of the works by these artists to further display their own utilization of queer encoding, taking previous interpretations utilized by scholars and using these readings to better examine the queer symbols within these works of art. The main crux of this thesis, however, is tracing the history of the encoding methods Katz applied to Rauschenberg and Johns to the work of the modernist Marsden Hartley. Specifically, I will discuss Hartley’s use of encoding found throughout the “War Images” of his “Amerika” series, which spanned from late 1914 through 1915 and saw the artist exhibit possibly the greatest artistic output of his artistic career in the sheer number of works created. Having relocated to Germany from the United States in 1913, Hartley befriended and fell in love with the Prussian Lieutenant Karl von Freyberg in a country where homosexuality was both a social taboo and a crime punishable by hard labor. Following von Freyberg’s death in the Great War in October 1914, Hartley felt compelled to eulogize his fallen lover through his art. However, to avoid both legal and civil persecution, I believe that Hartley would utilize the same methods of encoding that Rauschenberg and Johns would come to use nearly forty years later. For example, in his Portrait of a German Officer, the number “24” appears at the bottom right of the piece, reflecting von Freyberg’s age at death (fig. 1.4). This symbol is placed opposite of the letters “Kv.F,” the deceased’s initials. These symbols act as floating signifieds in the 3 work in that, to those who did not know of Hartley’s sexuality or of his relationship with Karl von Freyberg, these symbols were utterly meaningless. While they might have suggested that there was some significance to these signifiers, without this prior knowledge mentioned earlier, casual viewers were unable to connect these signifiers to their intended singifieds. However, to the few that did know of Hartley’s sexuality and his relationship to von Freyberg, such a connection would be easy to make, thus transforming these referents from floating to connected. Examples of the dual signifieds within Portrait of a German Officer include the symbol of the Iron Cross, a medal von Freyberg would have worn on his uniform as an officer of the German Empire. Elsewhere in the work white tassels and a red spur flank the left and bottom of the previously mentioned “24” symbol, representing the ceremonial garb von Freyberg would have worn as a member of the Fourth Guard’s Regiment in the army. These symbols act as dual signifieds in that, to those who lacked the knowledge of both Hartley’s sexuality and his relationship to von Freyberg, these signifiers simply appear as celebrations of the pageantry of the Wilhelmine German military. However, to those few that did know of Hartley’s sexuality and relationship, these symbols were clearly indicative of the rank that von Freyberg served in the German army, with Hartley celebrating the lieutenant’s life through the regalia that he would have worn into combat on the day he ultimately fell. Such dual signifieds give meaning to the piece for those without prior knowledge of Hartley’s sexuality, while also allowing for Hartley to fully express both his sexuality and emotions in an abstract way that allowed for him to avoid both legal and civil persecution. 4 My closing chapters describe the uses of encoding that followed Rauschenberg’s and Johns’ own use of this method. Jonathan Katz has written at length about the homosexual themes encoded in the works of pop artist Andy Warhol, whom, despite being deemed “too swish” by artists such as Rauschenberg and Johns, who could be considered “straight acting” gays by some critics, was equally guarded about his sexuality.1 The artist “constantly warned people not to look any deeper than the surface of his art and life,” a tell-tale sign that his works were connected to his sexuality, a topic he often avoided when possible.2 Warhol was obsessed with fame and how celebrities, especially women, constructed their personas for public consumption, with one such example of this fascination in his works being his silkscreen Marilyn Diptych depicting famous actress Marilyn Monroe with her makeup emphasized by neon colors (fig. 4.1). Katz draws a line between this fascination and Warhol’s own construction of a bizarre public persona. Indeed, society at this time demanded that homosexual men manufacture an image more in-line with the dominant cultural norms and mores of society, lest they face public persecution or blacklisting. While Warhol’s image was bizarre, camp, and eccentric, it was not openly homosexual, as this would have likely hurt the artist’s career, especially when he was making his start in the art world. In images such as his Marilyn Dipytch, Warhol connects himself to these celebrities in that both he and they felt it necessary to construct a public image to market themselves successfully. 1. Alex Needham, “Robert Rauschenberg: ‘He Was Just Something to be Around,’” The Guardian, November 19, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/nov/19/robert-rauschenberg-just- something-be-around; Jonathan Katz, Andy Warhol (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 1-2. 2. Katz, Andy Warhol, 1. 5 Overall, it appears that the Stonewall Riots, which took place on June 28, 1969, ultimately altered the course for queer individuals living in America. Following the spark of the riots, as well as the gay liberation movement that followed it, came a belief that queer individuals should not, and would no longer, maintain the status quo in upholding manufactured public images that would make them more acceptable to public consumption. As the famous Queer Nation slogan rang, “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used to It” was very much the sentiments of the queer community at large following the riots and during the gay liberation movement. These sentiments were only strengthened by the advent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, where “Silence=Death” on the part of both queer individuals and on the part of the medical community at large. With all of these changes taking place, queer individuals began to move away from methods of encoding in favor of openly expressing their sexuality in order to establish themselves as queer individuals who were tired of hiding their sexual identities. However, that is not to say that queer encoding has become totally obsolete. While American society has become more accepting of queer sexualities in the sixty years since Johns and Rauschenberg created works while living as a couple, other conditions exist that might restrict a queer individual’s freedom to express their sexuality through their works of art without repercussions. For example, a queer artist might avoid openly expressing their sexuality in their art to avoid being ostracized by conservative family or friends who may be disapproving of such a lifestyle. We must also consider that there are queer artists living and working in societies that are antagonistic to their way of life. For example, the queer contemporary artist Alireza Shojaian attended school in Iran, where homosexuality remains punishable by death. While he found the courage to 6 express his sexuality through his works while attending school, and therefore risked punishment at the hands of the government in doing so, there is no doubt that many queer artists living in Iran or similarly conservative countries might not be willing to take such a risk in their art, and thus encode their sexuality within it to avoid such persecution. As long as stigma surrounding queer sexualities exist, so too will queer encoding exist to allow for artists to hide their sexuality in their works of art. 7 CHAPTER 2 MARSDEN HARTLEY AND THE ENCODED ELEGIES IN THE “WAR IMAGES” OF HIS “AMERIKA” SERIES I would like to begin by offering a concise biography of the artist Marsden Hartley, which is crucial for understanding why the artist was so guarded about his sexuality. It seems as though Hartley was always searching for his place in society. This feeling was perhaps encouraged by a sense of isolation stemming from the experiences of the artist’s childhood.3 He was born Edmund Hartley on January 4, 1877 in Lewiston, Maine, to parents Eliza, a homemaker, and Thomas, one of the many millworkers at the Bates Sugar Mill. According to Hartley, he began to feel alienated following the death of his mother in 1885, remarking in his autobiography that “I was to know complete isolation from that moment onward.”4 Following Eliza’s death, Thomas Hartley was unable both to care for his children and work his twelve hour shifts at the Bates Sugar Mill, and sent his younger children to live with their older siblings.5 While two of Hartley’s sisters moved in with family in Cleveland, he relocated only a few miles away to live with his 3. Ludington, Marsden Hartley, 15-18; Bruce Robertson, Marsden Hartley (New York: Abrams, 1995), 11. The Bates Sugar Mill was founded in 1850 by Bostonian entrepreneur Benjamin Bates, and was one part of the larger Bates Mill mall that also included a large textile mill that became one of the largest manufacturers of Union army uniforms during the American Civil War (Bates Mill Store, n.d.). It is also worth noting that, for over thirty years after its creation, the Bates Mill mall was the largest employer in the state of Maine (Bates Mill Store, n.d.). 4. Marsden Hartley, Somehow a Past – The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 48. I would like to note here that, although this work is indeed an autobiography authored by Hartley, it was not published until well after his death, when Dr. Susan Elizabeth Ryan, an art historian at Louisiana State University, edited these autobiographical writings and publish them as a complete work in 1997. 5. Ludington, Marsden Hartley, 15-18. Hartley was one of nine children of Thomas and Eliza to survive past the age of five, with two sons and one daughter passing away before this, making Hartley both their youngest child to survive into adolescence, as well as their only son (Robertson 1995, 11-12). 8 older sister, Elizabeth, in the neighboring town of Auburn, Maine.6 Such a short move allowed Hartley to regularly visit with his father, whom he ultimately resented for sending away his siblings and, thus, breaking apart the family.7 Hartley was not receptive to this relocation, despite the close proximity between his old and new homes, and began to separate himself from both friends and family growing increasingly timid and weak over time.8 In 1889, Thomas remarried an English woman eight years his junior, Martha Marsden, and relocated to Cleveland soon after to be near Hartley’s three sisters in the city. This act only made Hartley resent his father more, as he was not invited to come live with his father and stepmother following the couple’s nuptials.9 Hartley first began to take an interest in art during this period of separation brought about by his father’s relocation to Cleveland. He experimented with drawing by coloring illustrations from magazines, and enjoyed visiting his cousin’s theatre in Lewiston, where he was able to watch acts such as operas and vaudeville performances, both of which remained lifelong interests.10 At the age of fifteen, Hartley dropped out of secondary school to work in the offices of the Auburn shoe factory, but remained there 6. Robertson, Marsden Hartley, 12. The town of Auburn, Maine was well-known as an industrial powerhouse in the New England region, housing factories that produced such goods as: shoes, textiles, and iron goods (Ludington 1992, 15-18). It is also worth noting here that Hartley’s sister, Elizabeth, was born in 1859, and would come to informally adopt Marsden after marrying her husband at the age of twenty-seven in 1886 (Ludington 1992, 15). 7. Ludington, Marsden Hartley, 17-18. 8. Robertson, Marsden Hartley, 12. 9. Ludington, Marsden Hartley, 18. Although Thomas would have his eleven-year-old son accompany him to fetch Martha from England, Hartley would ultimately reside with his sister in Auburn until 1893. However, Hartley took a quick liking to his new stepmother, referring to her as “the littlest thinnest part of the reconstructed family,” which he had upon joining them in Cleveland in 1893 (Ludington 1992, 18). 10. Robertson, Marsden Hartley, 12. Hartley also enjoyed visiting the circus and attending pageants whenever they would come to Lewiston or Auburn (Robertson 1995, 12). 9 only a year before leaving Elizabeth’s residence to join his sisters, father, and stepmother in Cleveland.11 Hartley found work in a marble quarry soon after arriving in the city, and became fascinated with the varying veins of color found within the stone excavated at the site.12 While in Cleveland Hartley’s interest in art began to strengthen. He began visiting various art galleries in the city and his favorite was the collection of early Italian Primitive paintings in a gallery on the outskirts of the city.13 He also started taking painting lessons from a local landscape painter by the name of John Semon, eventually losing his job at the quarry after arriving late to work one too many times after instruction in Semon’s studio.14 It was also during this time in Cleveland that Hartley unofficially took his stepmother’s maiden name of “Marsden” as his own first name, honoring her for providing him with both motherly guidance and happiness. While studying under Semon, Hartley won a year’s scholarship to attend the Cleveland School of Art, now the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he trained with artists 11. Ludington, Marsden Hartley, 18. While working at the Shoe factory in Auburn, Hartley would only make approximately three dollars per week, enough to provide the young man with spending money until his next paycheck (Ludington 1992, 18). 12. Hartley, Somehow a Past, 55-56. 13. Robertson, Marsden Hartley, 13. This collection of early Italian Primitive paintings favorited by Hartley was the only such collection outside of the East Coast of America (Robertson 1995, 13). 14. Ibid, 14. John Semon (1852-1917) was a moderately successful landscape painter of the Barbizon style, which can more specifically be described as “a sort of self-invented cross between [the styles of] Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Théodore Rousseau” (Ludington 1992, 19). Hartley would later credit Semon with planting “the art virus in my soul,” as he both educated and encouraged Hartley in his artistic endeavors (Robertson 1995, 14). 10 Nina Waldeck and Cullen Yates.15 The latter saw such promise in Hartley that he convinced a friend and trustee of the Cleveland School of Art to provide the young artist with a stipend to study in either New York or Cincinnati for four years, with Hartley choosing the former.16 In 1900, at the age of twenty-two, Hartley relocated to New York City and enrolled in the National Academy of Design under the direction of the Neoclassical painter Francis Coates Jones, whom Hartley would later describe as his “only influence for he showed me much about the way of painting.”17 While living in New York, Hartley began to truly find himself for the first time in his life. He recalled: “I began somehow to have curiosity about art at the time when sexual consciousness is fully developed and as I did not incline to concrete escapades, I of course inclined to abstract ones.”18 In this passage Hartley reveals much about both his art making process and his life itself. Knowing now that Hartley was in fact a homosexual living in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century when, despite its illegality, there was a large gay subculture, we 15. Ibid. These two artist educators were Hartley’s favorites from his time at the Cleveland School of Art. He would describe Nina Waldeck (1868-1943), a landscape painter whose style somewhat resembled Semon’s, as both his “first German,” and his “lucky star in art” (Robertson 1995, 14). Waldeck would also be the one who introduced Hartley to the Transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, gifting him a collection of Emerson’s essays and sparking an interest in the Transcendentalist movement that would follow Hartley throughout his life (Robertson 1995, 14). Cullen Yates (1866-1945), was another landscape painter, although his style would more closely resemble that of Impressionism than the Barbizon school (Ludington 1992, 19). 16 Ibid. 17. Ludington, Marsden Hartley, 22. It is worth noting that Hartley was actually enrolled in the New York School of Art, now the Parson’s School of Design, before ultimately enrolling in the National Academy of Design (Robertson 1995, 14). At the New York School of Art, Hartley would study under the American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase, whom Hartley claimed taught him that “fine performance is the major part of good painting,” and “the majestic privilege of being an artist” (Robertson 1995, 14). 18. Hartley, Somehow a Past, 56. 11 might understand these “concrete escapades” as referring to his non participation in such a group that ultimately subverted the conservative American culture at this time.19 Perhaps stifled by his upbringing, which caused him to experience such crippling isolation and insecurity, Hartley was either unable or unwilling to participate in this queer subculture for one reason or another, and instead devoted his time and energy into the “abstract” escapades of art creation.20 This was indeed not the last time that Hartley would divert his isolated and stifled sexual proclivities into his art making process, a diversion that I address in greater detail later in this chapter. It appears that Hartley began to search for a means of expressive encoding during this time in New York. For example, consider his work of approximately 1905, Walt Whitman’s House, 328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey (fig. 2.1), with the added knowledge that Whitman was openly homosexual to those who knew him and his work. With this in mind, some scholars have made the case that in painting such a subject, Hartley was searching for a homosexual creative lineage within American history.21 The artist took a keen interest in the works of the transcendentalists after being gifted a copy 19. Ibid. At the center of this “gay subculture” in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century was the gay bathhouse, where homosexual men could go to engage in sexual relations in both a friendly and discreet manner. These gay bathhouses were covert, posing as normal bathhouses that functioned as places of relaxation and hygiene for the city’s men, and were often the subject of vice raids at the hands of the New York Police Department. The first such raid took place on February 21, 1903 at the Ariston Hotel Baths, which ultimately resulted in over thirty arrests and sixteen charges of sodomy (Donovan 2016, 150-151). 20. Ibid. I would postulate that perhaps Hartley, highly private about his sexuality, refused to participate in the gay subculture in New York City out of fears of being involuntarily outed, whether by fellow members of this subculture or arrested in vice raids by the New York Police Department against the gay bathhouses of New York City that provided the backbone of this gay subculture. However, it is entirely possible that perhaps Hartley was not totally forthcoming in his memoirs with information regarding his participation in New York City queer culture. 21. Patricia McDonnell, “Essentially Masculine: Marsden Hartley, Gay Identity, and the Wilhelmine German Military,” Art Journal 56, vol. 2 (1997): 68. 12 of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays by an instructor at the Cleveland Institute of Art, carrying the work around for “at least five ensuing years.”22 While there is little doubt that Hartley was partial to Whitman because of his participation in the transcendentalist movement, it is also likely that Hartley would have been attracted to the poet for the homoerotic elements in his works. For example, Whitman makes mention of the “manly love of comrades,” and “adhesiveness,” a term closely linked to same-sex relationships, throughout the “Calamus” chapter of his larger work Leaves of Grass.23 As scholar Jonathan Weinberg states, “for many homosexuals at the turn of the century, coming to terms with Walt Whitman was part of a process of coming to terms with their sexuality.”24 The case could be made then that Hartley’s interest in Whitman and creation of the work Walt Whitman’s House, 328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey, was part of the Hartley’s mediation of both the poet’s and, in turn, his own sexuality. On the surface, the painting appears to be a somewhat straightforward rendering of the famous poet Walt Whitman’s house, hardly a subject of controversy. Such safe subject matter allowed for any casual viewer of the piece to take it as simply a depiction of a famous poet’s home and nothing more. However, I believe it was Hartley’s intent to both celebrate Whitman as a famous homosexual in American history as well as a means of reconciling his own sexuality. In creating this work, I believe that Hartley 22. Robertson, Marsden Hartley, 14. 23. Walt Whitman, “For You, O Democracy,” in Leaves of Grass, ed. Jim Manis (State College: Electronic Classics Series, 2007), 137; Gary Schmidgall, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (New York: Dutton, 1997), 190-191. 24. Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 134. 13 experimented with expressing his sexuality within his works, a process that he further refined in the “War Images” of his “Amerika” series. However, Hartley’s sense of isolation grew while in New York City, as the artist found himself living on his own for the first time in his life without any family or friends to share his lodgings. Hartley remained enrolled in the National Academy of Design until he graduated in 1908, spending all of his holidays and breaks in Auburn. After graduating, Hartley relocated to an abandoned farmhouse in the town of Lovell, Maine, allowing him to live rent free and to spend as much money as possible on art supplies.25 Hartley began to experiment with his artistic style during this time, moving away from the muted academic approach drilled into him at the National Academy of Design in favor of a more modern, abstracted aesthetic. He also began to show his works at a small gallery in Lovell owned by Irish immigrant Shaemas O’Sheel, who took a liking to Hartley’s experimental works, praising them for their emotional content and unique nature.26 As luck would have it, O’Sheel happened to be an acquaintance of the famous photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who he convinced to travel to Maine to view these novel works by the young artist Hartley.27 After viewing them, Stieglitz offered Hartley a solo exhibition, believing that he might have just found the next great modernist painter. In his eagerness to appear nonchalant about the exchange, Hartley 25. Norma G. Berger “Oral History Interview with Norma G. Berger Regarding Marsden Hartley, 1973 June 28”, interview by Robert Brown, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, June 28, 1973, transcript, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-norma-g-berger- regarding-marsden-hartley-12829#transcript.; Ludington, Marsden Hartley, 55. Lovell, Maine is a small town that is located approximately forty miles west of Hartley’s sister’s residence in Auburn, Maine. Situated near the Vermont border, Lovell was and still is a fairly rural area, a stark contrast to the industrialized Auburn. 26. Ludington, Marsden Hartley, 55. 27. Ibid., 58. 14 nearly bungled the deal enraging Stieglitz to a large degree.28 Despite this tenuous first meeting, Stieglitz and Hartley became lifelong friends, sharing hundreds of letters over the years. Stieglitz went so far as to arrange for funding to send Hartley to Paris to live and study, as many wealthy art students did during this time.29 Upon arriving in the City of Lights in 1912, Hartley was introduced to the German modernist Arnold Rönnebeck, another acquaintance of Stieglitz’s who exhibited periodically at 291. Hartley also became acquainted with Rönnebeck’s younger cousin, the Prussian Lieutenant Karl von Freyberg, who happened to be visiting Paris at the time of Hartley’s arrival.30 It is unclear when exactly Hartley and von Freyberg began their romantic relationship and whether this was Hartley’s first serious homosexual relationship. The three traveled to Berlin together in January 1913, and Hartley fell in love with the imperial city almost instantly, 28. Ibid. As the story goes, Stieglitz was so enraged by Hartley’s behavior, which he took for arrogance, that he wrote the artist three scathing letters immediately following their first meeting, berating Hartley for not acknowledging the “significance of 291,” and insisting that he was only giving Hartley a show because he “believed in you and your work” (Ludington 1992, 58). It cannot be understated just how influential 291 was in helping Hartley find an art style that was uniquely his own. For example, in his Red Tree from 1910, Hartley experiments with a Fauvist color palette that he would have encountered during his visit to 291 the previous year, when he attended an exhibition focusing on Henri Matisse (Ludington 1992, 64-65). We see this again in his Abstraction from 1911, a work made in an Analytical Cubist style that he would have viewed at a 1910 exhibition at 291 that was headlined by a young Pablo Picasso (Ludington 1992, 70). 29. Ibid., 55. To accomplish this, Stieglitz arranged for his wealthy colleague, the American art collector and patron Lillie Bliss (1864-1931) to provide the money for Hartley’s travel, while New York gallery owner Newman Emerson (N.E.) Montross (1849-1932) provided the artist with a monthly stipend while he studied in Europe (Ludington 1992, 55). 30. Patricia McDonnell and Marsden Hartley, “Marsden Hartley’s Letters to Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, 1913-1914,” Archives of American Art Journal 29, no. 1/2 (1989): 35. Karl von Freyberg was a member of the House of Freyberg, a noble family from the region of Mecklenberg in northern Germany (Lüdeke von Weltzien 1989, 103). Born to the Prussian Major Paul von Freyberg, the family was well-known for recruiting their boys into the officers corps of the Prussian military, although Karl would be Paul’s only son and the last male born in the House of Freyberg, which died off completely by 1940 (Lüdeke von Weltzien 1989, 104). 15 considering it “without question the finest modern city in Europe.”31 The artist began planning his relocation to the German city, although he would need to return to Paris for several months before he could do so. On one of these trips back to Paris, Hartley encountered a Wassily Kandinsky exhibition in Munich that proved pivotal in further developing Hartley’s art style.32 He was fascinated by Kandinsky’s works almost instantly, calling them “the most constructive element in modern art.”33 Upon his return to Paris, Hartley began to personally correspond with both Kandinsky and his fellow Blaue Reiter artist Franz Marc.34 Hartley officially moved to Berlin in May 1913, when he and von Freyberg were likely involved romantically, lived in a small apartment near the city’s center.35 Between May 1913 and July 1914, Hartley was at his most prolific, producing works that blended a Fauvist color palette with Blaue Reiter subject matter to be displayed in Steiglitz’s 291 and Gertrude Stein’s Paris gallery, 27 Rue de Fleurus.36 Some believe Hartley’s “Amerika” series began with works such as his 1913 Portrait of Berlin (fig. 2.2) and his 31. Marsden Hartley to Alfred Stieglitz, February 1913, in My Dear Stieglitz – Letters of Marsden Hartley and Alfred Stieglitz 1912 – 1915, ed. James T. Voorhies (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 55. Although Hartley and Stieglitz remained both friends and pen pals for decades after meeting, their most active correspondence occurred while Hartley was abroad between 1912 and 1915, with Voorhies’ book providing nearly all of the letters the two shared during this time. 32. McDonnell and Hartley, “Marsden Hartley’s Letters,” 35. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Robertson, Marsden Hartley, 46-47, 49. 36. Ludington, Marsden Hartley, 103-104. Barbara Haskell commented that Hartley’s military pieces of 1913-1915 combined “the pictorial energy of the Blaue Reiter Expressionists with the tightly knit, collage format of the cubists” to achieve a “remarkable synthesis of the expressive with the structured” (Ludington, 106). The artist himself referred to the style of the pieces made during this time as “Cosmic Cubism,” “Intuitive Abstraction,” and “Subliminal Cubism” (Cooper 1986, 122). Hartley would even exhibit and sell six of these pieces at the 1913 New York Armory Show (Ludington 1992, 103-104). 16 1914 Indian Fantasy (fig. 2.3), both of which combine the spirituality of the Blaue Reiter movement with Hartley’s love of the city of Berlin. Assistant Curator of Modern Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Lauren Bergman, splits Hartley’s “Amerika” series into two distinct categories.37 The first is his “City Images,” done prior to the passing of von Freyberg. They combine the Blaue Reiter spirituality of European Modernism with Hartley’s understanding of the visual language of Native American art, celebrating Hartley’s love for both Berlin and the German Empire as a whole.38 The second category of Hartley’s “Amerika” series is his “War Images,” created following von Freyberg’s death that feature symbols representative of the pageantry of the Wilhelmine German military and, therefore, are representative of the Lieutenant Karl von Freyberg as well.39 I agree with using such a distinction, as classifying Hartley’s entire “Amerika” in any comprehensive way is hard due to the differences in both subject matter and style between the early and later works.40 However, it is no coincidence that Hartley engaged in his “City Images” as World War I drew closer, as the Lieutenant von Freyberg was forced to work longer 37. Lauren Bergman, “Navigating Marsden Hartley’s Symbols,” Unframed, September 10, 2014, https://unframed.lacma.org/node/1433. 38. Bergman, “Navigating Marsden Hartley’s Symbols.” It is believed that Hartley’s interest in the culture of Native Americans was influenced by his fascination with the Blaue Reiter movement. However, little is known about what research Hartley conducted about Native American tribes in North America, although we do see several references to Native American culture in Hartley’s letters to Alfred Stieglitz, writing to him in early 1915 about “wanting to be an Indian – to paint my face with the symbols of that race I adore go to the west & face the sun forever – that would seem the true expression of human dignity” (Luddington 1992, 124). 39. Ibid. It seems to make even less sense to refer to the later works of Hartley’s “Amerika” series as such due to the fact that the series takes its name from the blending of European Modernism and Native American spirituality only seen prominently in the works of this series that pre-date the death of Karl von Freyberg. From here on out, I will refer to these works made following von Freyberg’s death as Hartley’s “War Images.” 40. Bergman, “Navigating Marsden Hartley’s Symbols.” 17 hours to prepare for the war that loomed on the horizon.41 Hartley travelled alone to Paris and London where he peddled his paintings to any gallery owners he could, perhaps fleeing from the impending sense of isolation that the artist had escaped while living in Europe.42 Little did he realize that, within a year’s time, his entire world would be upended by tragedy. The year 1914 marked a series of great personal losses for Marsden Hartley. On August 4, 1914, Thomas Hartley passed away suddenly, although it is unclear how this death affected the artist, since he did not mention it in any of his correspondence from around this time.43 However, about three months later, Hartley learned of the death of his best friend and soulmate Karl von Freyberg, who was killed fighting in the Battle of Arras against French troops on October 7, 1914.44 Devastated by the loss of his lover, Hartley was outspoken about his grief, writing to Stieglitz that no one was “more beloved & more necessary to the social well-being of the world – in every way a perfect being – physically – spiritually & mentally beautifully balanced – 24 years young – and of all things – necessary.”45 Just as he had done while living alone in New York, Hartley again 41. Ludington, Marsden Hartley, 116-117. 42. Robertson, Marsden Hartley, 53. 43. Ludington, Marsden Hartley, 122. I would surmise that it is likely due to that Hartley never truly forgave his father for breaking up his family following the death of his mother in 1885. 44. Ibid. The Battle of Arras, also known as the First Battle of Arras, took place between October 1-4, 1914, with small skirmishes breaking out for several days following the battle until completely ending on October 9, 1914. A part of the German “Race to the Sea,” the Battle of Arras would ultimately conclude indecisively, as armies from both sides would move north to act as reinforcements for the Battle of La Bassée, which took place between October 10-November 2, 1914. Writing about von Freyberg’s death, Hartley described that he felt “eternal grief,” “unendurable agony,” and referred to von Freyberg’s death as “the most pathetic sacrifice of our time” (Robertson 1995, 56). 45. Ibid, 123. 18 channeled his inner strife and emotion towards the creation of artwork, this time with the intention of lamenting and eulogizing the death of his fallen lover.46 It was not Hartley’s aim to only lament the loss of Karl von Freyberg in the works following his death in 1914. Instead, this series also served to eulogize the fall of the Germany that so enamored Hartley upon visiting Berlin in early 1913. Hartley watched as his new home that he so admired fell to the destruction of war, just as his lover had fallen to this same destructive nature. This dual lament fueled Hartley’s “War Images” of his “Amerika” series: he worked on it following von Freyberg’s death in October 1914 up until January 1916, when the artist returned to America permanently, gradually shifting his painting style to a more regionalist aesthetic. Such a dual meaning allowed for those in Hartley’s inner circle, who knew of the artist’s sexuality, to view the works as grieving and honoring Van Freyberg, while simultaneously allowing others to view it similarly in relation to Germany as a whole. While Germany may have been more liberal in regard to homosexuality than America was at this time, at the very least it was still considered a crime that threatened to publicly out whomever was charged with acting in a homosexual manner.47 It is understandable that Hartley would need to conceal his sexuality as well as his relationship with von Freyberg in these works. Weinberg explains that, in order to avoid falling prey to these accusations or indictments, Hartley created a mask or method of concealment that was decorated with symbols of the Wilhelmine German military on the surface, while ultimately acting alluding in a veiled fashion to his true relationship 46. Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice, 159. 47. Robertson, Marsden Hartley, 14-15. Hartley would arrive in Germany only several years after homosexuality had first become a national issue in the country following the Harden-Eulenberg affair, which took place between 1907-1909 and saw several of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s cabinet members face accusations of homosexuality at the hands of prominent German journalist Maximilian Harden. 19 with von Freyberg.48 Hartley ultimately fashioned a method of encoding his sexuality within these works that allowed for him to fully express his feelings toward von Freyberg without risking accusations of being a homosexual in an ultimately anti-gay society. I would like to first examine what is perhaps the most well-known of the “War Images” of Hartley’s “Amerika” series, his Portrait of a German Officer, done just after von Freyberg’s death in 1914. I approach it from a semiotic perspective, to aid in uncovering what I believe are the true meanings, or signifieds, behind the symbols, or signifiers, of Hartley’s work. The work itself is laid out like the cuirass of a ceremonial Prussian Royal Guard, the personal bodyguards of the Emperor of Germany, of which von Freyberg was a member. It appears as if we are looking down at the deceased or dying body of the lieutenant himself, which has transcended from its natural state and into a more abstract one.49 The piece is dominated by various flags representing both the German Empire and several regions within it, which signify the country that both von Freyberg and Hartley loved, the one that the former gave his life to defend. The number “24” appears at the bottom right of the piece, reflecting von Freyberg’s age at death. This is placed opposite of the letters “Kv.F,” the deceased’s initials. In the center, the number “4” can be seen, representing the Fourth Guard’s Regiment in which von Freyberg served at the time of his death. Above this is a symbol of the Iron Cross, a medal von Freyberg would have worn on his uniform as an officer of the German Empire. White tassels and a 48. Weinberg, Speaking for Vice, 157. 49. Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West (London: Routledge, 1986), 122. Upon declaring war in August 1914, the Prussian Royal Guard would be broken up into several regiments to serve as officers corps on the frontlines of the war. Von Freyberg would be a member of the Fourth Guard’s Regiment, which itself was one of the several regiments created from the larger group of the Prussian Royal Guard. As a member of the Prussian Royal Guard, von Freyberg would have worn a cuirass to signify his status as one of the elite officers in the Prussian army as a whole. 20 red spur flank the left and bottom of the “24” symbol, representing the ceremonial garb von Freyberg would have worn as a member of the Fourth Guard’s Regiment. To the right, above the “Kv.F” symbol, we see white feathers hanging downwards, which would have adorned von Freyberg’s helmet as a member of the Prussian Royal Guard. As a whole, the piece appears to act as a celebration of von Freyberg’s life through the pageantry of his Fourth Guard’s Regiment uniforms, with these symbols perhaps best representing von Freyberg’s masculinity, idealized here as a member of the elite regiment of the Prussian Royal Guard. These symbolic representations of von Freyberg in Portrait of a German Officer appear throughout the “War Images” of Hartley’s “Amerika” series. In Painting No. 47 (fig. 2.5) dated either late 1914 or early 1915, Hartley placed the “Kv.F” symbol at the bottom right of the composition beneath a “24” that this time reads vertically. These symbols are just to the right of an Iron Cross, which is itself placed below the same “4” from his Portrait of a German Officer, and the new numeral “9.” As mentioned earlier, Hartley took an intense interest in the spiritual after viewing the works of Kandinsky at the exhibition in Munich in early 1913. Numerologically, “8” and “9” can represent “cosmic transcendence and regeneration.”50 Perhaps Hartley included these numbers to suggest that Freyberg is not conventionally deceased but has instead elevated to a plane that is more abstract. While mourning his death through this series, Hartley displays a 50. Cooper, The Sexual Perspective, 122. It is unknown exactly how Hartley became interested in numerology, as none of the Blaue Reiter artists utilized numerological symbols within their oeuvres. Still, numerology is a belief in the spiritual connection between numbers and events that dates back to the teachings of Pythagoras, although the term “numerology” itself would not be coined until the early twentieth century, perhaps suggesting some sort of resurgence in the interest in this esoteric system during this time (“Numerology,” n.d.). Regardless, it is more than likely that Hartley came across numerology after becoming involved in the spiritual and its applications in art after his encounter with Kandinsky’s work in early 1913, buying a copy of his Concerning the Spiritual in Art shortly after that. 21 sense of optimism that von Freyberg’s soul has rose to a higher plane of being, one that Hartley might attain upon his own death, where he could finally be reunited with his long-lost lover. In his Portrait (fig. 2.6), again dated to either late 1914 or early 1915, we again see the “4” representing von Freyberg’s membership in the Fourth Guard’s Regiment, here placed at the bottom right of the composition beneath the right and bottom facets of the Iron Cross. At the center, the number “8” again references “cosmic transcendence and regeneration,” here placed beneath a bundle of white tassels that are carried over from his Portrait of a German Officer. As Hartley progressed through the “War Images” of his “Amerika” series, he seemed to have used these numerological and initialized symbols less frequently in favor of the more abstracted flag forms that represented the different states of the German Empire at this time. In his 1915 work, The Iron Cross (fig. 2.7), the only symbols that have persisted from his earlier “War Images” are the “4” and the Iron Cross medal. There are other symbols here: the blue and white diagonal checkered flag seen to the right of the Iron Cross represent the states of the German Empire at this time, in this case Bavaria, and the various tassels, insignias, and patches indicate adornment on von Freyberg’s uniform. Hartley’s “War Images” continue in this manner until ending this series in January 1916, when the artist left Germany for the United States. Upon returning to America, Hartley discontinued the German War Images that had engrossed him for the previous one and a half years because of anti-German sentiment rampant in America at this time.51 Instead, Hartley embraced a more neutral style, depicting landscape and 51. Ibid. Upon returning to America, Hartley would move in with the American journalist John Reed, whose home was a common meeting place for such popular artists, writers, and actors from the Greenwich Village neighborhood as Carl Sprinchorn and Charles Demuth, both of whom Hartley would befriend after meeting (Cooper 1986, 125). 22 portrait subjects similar to the one seen in his “Amerika” series, albeit with less identifiable emotion. I would like now to offer a semiotic interpretation of the symbols in Hartley’s “War Images” in order to demonstrate that Hartley used a method of encoding that prominently utilized “floating signifiers,” or signifiers without any tangible signifieds, to covertly embed his sexuality within his “War Images.”52 First, we will consider Hartley’s Portrait of a German Officer, keeping in mind that, due to the guarded nature of Hartley’s homosexuality at this time, it is likely that viewers, apart from Hartley’s closest confidants, would have been unaware of the artist’s sexuality. With the benefit of hindsight, we see that the “24” symbol at the bottom right of the composition represents the age of von Freyberg at his death. In other words, the signifier, “24,” signifies von Freyberg’s age at death, with this concept acting as the signified. However, without knowing von Freyberg’s identity, the average viewer would be unable to connect the signifier with the signified, thus transforming it into a floating signifier, or one whose meaning cannot be established without further information. In this case, such further information was held only by Hartley and those who knew of his attachment to von Freyberg, implying that they would have been able to uncover these meanings behind these floating signifiers. Such is the method of encoding that Hartley applies throughout the “War Images” of his “Amerika” series, one that forces the viewers to assume that the signifiers such as “24,” “4,” and “Kv.F” have either no meaning or that their meanings cannot be established by simply viewing the work of art itself. Hartley’s use of letters and initials in his “War Images” could have been influenced by works by Cubist artists such 52. Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2001), 78. 23 as Pablo Picasso, whose Synthetic Cubist collages often contained words cut out of journals or magazines. As mentioned earlier, Hartley was no stranger to Picasso’s Cubist works, having viewed them while visiting 291 years earlier. Hartley leaves no clues for the viewer to uncover the true meaning behind these floating signifiers; for example, if we consider the name of the piece itself, we see that it is not Portrait of Lieutenant Karl von Freyberg, as it indeed was, but is instead Portrait of a German Officer, thus making the fallen von Freyberg anonymous to the average viewer.53 Looking at the other symbols found throughout Hartley’s “War Images,” we see that these signs do not act as floating signifiers, but rather as symbols that are open to a variety of equally correct interpretations. Hartley’s “War Images” eulogized both the death of his lover as well as the war tearing apart the country Hartley had come to know and love. If we look at the flag of the German Empire that dominates the lower portion of Hartley’s Portrait of a German Officer, we see a signifier that signifies both the country that von Freyberg gave his life to defend in World War I, as well as a symbol of the country that Hartley had come to admire in the year and a half he lived there prior to von Freyberg’s death. Behind this, we see the blue and white argyle-patterned flag of Bavaria, a signifier of both an area of Germany to which Hartley and von Freyberg loved traveling, as well as an area of natural beauty within the German Empire that World War I threatened to destroy.54 The Iron Cross medal, white tassels, and white could all signify either von Freyberg’ s garb as a member of the Fourth Guard’s Regiment, or the 53. Despite the fact that the painting’s title suggests that it is meant to reference a specific individual, I have been unable to find any sources that explain how audience’s contemporary to the painting’s creation and exhibition received this work. 54. Bergman, “Navigating Marsden Hartley’s Symbols.” Hartley and von Freyberg would travel to Munich, the capital of Bavaria, in 1913. It would be during this trip that Hartley would come across the Kandinsky exhibition being held at the Moderne Galerie Heinrich Thannhauser in Munich. 24 vestments of the elite soldiers of the German Empire as they entered combat. Obviously, those who knew of Hartley and von Freyberg’s relationship would have made the connections between these symbols and the memorialization of this fallen soldier. However, those who did not know of this relationship, rather than assuming these signifiers were floating as they would have done with the symbols just, would have simply assumed that the latter signifieds were the ones intended to be used by Hartley. Indeed, they would not have done so incorrectly, as I believe both signifieds tied to each signifier are equally correct in their applications. To utilize this method of encoding with these symbols, Hartley created a diversion, so to speak, in imbuing each signifier with dual signifieds, one relating to his relationship with von Freyberg, and one relating to either the German military to the German Empire itself. Hartley’s use of numerological symbols in the “War Images” are also present in several of his later works. His 1933 work Eight Bells’ Folly, Memorial to Hart Crane (fig. 2.8) uses similar numerological symbols to represent the fallen poet. Hartley would meet Crane, a homosexual who was as similarly guarded about his sexuality, while visiting Mexico, where Crane was studying on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The two immediately became fast friends, although this friendship would be short-lived as Crane died in 1932, committing suicide by throwing himself from a steamboat enroute to New York.55 This work presents an abstracted rendering of a sailboat at sea, the masts of which read the numbers “33,” Crane’s age at death. Here, however, the audience is given a means of linking signifier to signified as indicated by the title, Eight Bells’ Folly, Memorial to Hart Crane and by the “33,” the poet’s age at death. In the abstracted 55. Cooper, The Sexual Perspective, 122. It is unknown whether Hartley and Crane shared a romantic relationship or one that was purely platonic. 25 mountains in the background, the number “8” appears, representing the same concept of “cosmic transcendence and regeneration,” present twenty years earlier in several of his “War Images.” Although these symbols are not necessarily encoded in this later work, it is clear that Hartley again used numerological symbols to represent the memorialized. Several later works in Hartley’s oeuvre that can more readily be considered homoerotic deserve mention here too, such as his 1940 work Madawaska, Acadian Light- Heavy, Third Arrangement (fig. 2.9), done at the age of sixty-three. The piece depicts a man nude from the waist up, his hairy, chiseled torso dominating the bottom half of the piece in a homoerotic fashion that seems out of place for Hartley. After all, he felt the need to abstract any allusions to his fallen lover von Freyberg nearly twenty-five years prior. This work makes more sense once we consider that Hartley produced it as a commission for a local gym in the town of Madawaska, Maine.56 The man depicted is unknown, though the title provides some information about the subject. Acadian refers to the descendants of Frenchmen who settled America in the 18th century, of which Canada has the largest population. Light-Heavy indicates that the man pictured was a boxer fighting in the Light Heavyweight class. Although we can explain away some of the homoerotic elements of this piece by contextualizing its location and subject, one matter cannot so easily be dismissed. Hartley has depicted the man clad in only a jockstrap, an odd addition that seems unnecessary given the subject. While a boxer might wear a jockstrap during a fight, it would almost certainly be worn beneath a pair of shorts at this 56. “Madawaska – Acadian Light-Heavy,” Art Institute of Chicago, accessed February 8, 2019, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/70028/madawaska-acadian-light-heavy. Madawaska, Maine is a small town located on the border of the United States and Canada in northern Maine. It is worth noting that, in a letter to his friend Adelaide Kuntz, dated to February 1940, Hartley makes note of the fact that the model he used for his Madawaska, Acadian Light-Heavy, Third Arrangement was the first time he used a live nude male model in nearly twenty years, describing the man as a “magnificent young feller,” and that his “body is so fine and dear I could work almost without end from him” (“Madawaska – Acadian Light-Heavy,” n.d.) 26 time in history.57 Such an addition seems to have been made solely for the artist’s own enjoyment, an obvious homoerotic element that is a far cry from the methods of encoding that he felt that he needed to incorporate in the “War Images” of his “Amerika” series. Perhaps in his advanced age Hartley no longer felt constrained to hide his sexuality, as society had not yet progressed to the point that allowed for such overt depictions to be permissible, a point that I will expand upon in the next chapter. All we can surmise is that Hartley felt less compelled to encode his sexuality as he aged. 57. While it would have been uncommon for a boxer to wear such revealing clothing in the 1940s, Hartley’s boxer seems to be wearing a jockstrap that most resembles the attire worn by the subject of Thomas Eakins’ 1898 piece Salutat. Perhaps Hartley was referencing this more romantic depiction of the sport in his work. 27 CHAPTER 3 THE HIDDEN SEXUAL ELEMENTS WITHIN ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG’S AND JASPER JOHNS’ CREATIVE COLLABORATIONS The queer artists and lovers Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were introduced to each other by a mutual friend in 1954 while Rauschenberg was browsing for books at the Marboro Book Shop, where Johns worked stocking shelves.58 By this point, Rauschenberg had already made a name for himself in the art world, only three years removed from his White Painting (Three Panel) (fig. 3.1), a series of all-white-canvas panels that created a stir in the art world for their seeming lack of subject matter, made while studying at the experimental arts school Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina.59 The two became fast friends, and Rauschenberg went so far as to convince Johns to quit his bookstore job to help in doing some window display work. As business partners, they worked under the name Matson-Jones and earned up to five 58. Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Picador Publications, 2005) 99. Johns worked at the Marboro Book Shop located on the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street in the Midtown East section of Manhattan (Tomkins 2005, 99). The 106-year-old company, which specialized in selling publisher’s overstock at a fraction of their retail price, was sold to Barnes and Noble in 1979, with the latter company converting all five of Marboro’s Manhattan locations into Barnes and Noble stores. 59. Helen Molesworth, “Before Bed”, October 63 (Winter 1993): 68. Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 by the arts educator John Andrew Rice, his colleague Theodore Dreier, and several other educators and artists. The school was experimental in its structure, placing students and educators on equal footing and emphasizing art production and manual labor in addition to education. Black Mountain required all students, regardless of their field of study, to participate in art-making classes and manual farm work. Students were also put in charge of all aspects of their education, eliminating grades and course requirements and allowing for students to decide when they wanted to graduate. The school is now famous for its illustrious alumni, including: architect and founder of the Bauhaus school Walter Gropius; New York School painter Robert Motherwell; modern artist Cy Twombly; avant-garde dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham; avant-garde composer and musical theorist John Cage; the Abstract Expressionist artist Franz Kline; New York school painters Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and of course Rauschenberg, to name just a few. For more information on Black Mountain College see Helen Molesworth and Ruth Erickson, Look Before You Leap: Black Mountain College 1933-1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 28 hundred dollars each per job.60 Although it cannot be determined exactly when they began a romantic relationship, by the end of 1954 the two were living together, moving first into Johns’ apartment on Pearl Street in the Financial District neighborhood of Manhattan, and later several blocks away into an apartment on Front Street in the same neighborhood.61 During this time, both Rauschenberg and Johns began to accelerate their respective artistic outputs. Katz has suggested that the two collaborated creatively, bouncing innovative ideas for works off of one another.62 Both artists were very guarded about their queer identities: Rauschenberg remained so until his death in 2008 and Johns remaining so to this day. Such guardedness makes sense when we consider that the two homosexual lovers lived in an American society that by-and-large forbade them from being open about their sexuality as gays who especially feared persecution during the Lavender Scare of the McCarthy era in the early 1950s.63 The McCarthy era, named after the Republican Senator from Wisconsin who instigated it, signalled a resurgence of anti-Communism following the First Red Scare 60. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 101. At a time when department stores such as Macy’s and Lord & Taylor grew more popular, it was not uncommon for struggling artists to work for such companies designing and constructing large window displays used to entice customers into their stores. 61. Ibid, 101, 110. At the time Rauschenberg and Johns were living together in either their Pearl Street or Front Street apartments, the Financial District of Manhattan was, ironically, an economically depressed neighborhood in the city. This area of lower Manhattan was not revitalized into the bustling historical neighborhood it is today until the construction of the World Trade Center in 1973, with the area now experiencing a “renaissance” according to several journalists (Gordinier, 2015). 62. Jonathan Katz, “Lovers and Divers: Interpictorial Dialog in the Work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg,” Frauen, Kunst, Wissenschaft 25 (June 1988): 19-20. We cannot say for sure what kind of art Jasper Johns created prior to living with Rauchenberg in 1954, although Rauschenberg apparently recognized Johns’ interest in art, which lead him to convince Johns to quit his bookstore job to collaborate on designing department store window displays (Tomkins 2005, 100-101). 63. Moira Roth, “The Aesthetic of Indifference,” Artforum, November 1977, https://www.artforum.com/print/197709/the-aesthetic-of-indifference-37263. 29 after World War II.64 During this period of right wing zealousness, anyone straying from the norms of society could find themselves labeled a communist and blacklisted, unable to live any semblance of a normal lifestyle.65 Homosexuals were one of several groups targeted by this anti-Communist witch hunt. Many participants believed that homosexuals were more likely to be Communist sympathizers and were therefore a risk to American national security. Known as the “Lavender Scare,” this intense wave of homophobia brought on by McCarthy’s Second Red Scare saw many homosexual government employees lose their livelihoods at the hands of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, which explicitly banned homosexuals from working for the federal government and subsequently led to homosexuals being banned from working in state governments as well.66 As Katz writes in his article “Lovers and Divers: Interpictorial Dialogue in the Work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg,” this had a chilling effect on art within the queer community, since “expression, self- exposure, wasn’t refused so much as sequestered.”67 That is to say, queer artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns did not need to forego expressing themselves, and in turn their sexualities, in their work, but instead had to hide such qualities that could be read as homosexual and, therefore, pro-Communist, within the symbolism of their work. In a similar fashion to Marsden Hartley, Rauschenberg and Johns encoded their 64. Roth, “The Aesthetic of Indifference,” 47. 65. Ibid. 66. “Executive Order 10450, Security Requirements for Government Employment,” Executive Orders, National Archives, last modified August 15, 2016, https://www.archives.gov/federal- register/codification/executive-order/10450.html. This executive order remained active until being rescinded and replaced by the United States Military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for homosexual admittance by President Bill Clinton in 1995. 67. Katz, “Lovers and Divers,” 16. 30 sexualities within their works to keep their sexuality hidden from the public at large while engaged in artistic expression. This makes more sense when we consider that Rauschenberg and Johns both claimed to be colleagues and friends while carrying on their romantic relationship, never talking about their relationship openly until after their breakup in 1961.68 It is unknown exactly why Johns and Rauschenberg chose to remain so guarded about their sexualities, perhaps to avoid queer readings of their art or to avoid being labeled “queer artists” rather than simply “artists.” Nevertheless, both expressed their queer sexualities in their art made while living together as romantic partners, which is important in the understanding of their works of art as a whole. Throughout this chapter, I will consider how their sexuality operates in their art during this time period. Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Early Works I would like to reiterate that, for the sake of brevity, I will only be discussing the encoded queer symbols found in the works of Rauschenberg and Johns done shortly before and during the time the two artists were living as romantic partners. This is not to say that neither artist included such encoded symbolism in works produced after this partnership. I would like to begin by discussing the queer symbols encoded in the combines of Robert Rauschenberg created between 1951 and 1961, discussing at length the symbols found within the artist’s major works of this time. To start, I will briefly discuss Rauschenberg’s biography to provide a background for the artist. 68. Melissa S. Geiger, “Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns” (class lecture, The Visual Arts After 1945, East Stroudsburg University, East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, October 15, 2015). Either given the bitter nature of their breakup or their naturally guarded behavior, or perhaps both, neither artist has ever discussed their partnership in any detail, while still acknowledging their romantic relationship. While Johns and Rauschenberg often told people they were simply friends, those close to them knew the true nature of their partnership, similar to Marsden Hartley’s close friends’ knowledge of his homosexuality. 31 Biography Rauschenberg was, by and large, a transplant into the metropolitan lifestyle. He was born on October 22, 1925 in the rural eastern-Texas town of Port Arthur to Dora and Ernest Rauschenberg, devout Protestants who owned and operated a small cattle farm.69 In 1941, at the age of sixteen, Rauschenberg enrolled in the pharmacy program at the University of Texas, and studied at the school for two years before being drafted into the United States Navy.70 He served in the Navy for two years, mostly working as a medical hospital technician in California, before being discharged in 1945. After his discharge, Rauschenberg spent the next four years attending various art schools, including the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris, France.71 It was while studying in France that Rauschenberg met fellow art student Susan Weil, and shortly after meeting the two fell in love.72 In 1948, Rauschenberg followed Weil to Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, although he remained here for only a year before 69. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 13, 16-17. 70. Patricia Burstein, “In His Art and Life, Robert Rauschenberg is a Man Who Steers His Own Daring Course,” People, May 19, 1980, https://people.com/archive/in-his-art-and-life-robert-rauschenberg- is-a-man-who-steers-his-own-daring-course-vol-13-no-20/. 71. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 16-17, 19. While in the Navy, Rauschenberg attended boot camp in Farragut, Idaho before being assigned to the hospital corps and sent to the San Diego Naval Hospital for training (Tomkins 2005, 16-17). Rauschenberg spent six months training here before being assigned to work at Camp Pendleton, a military base about an hour’s drive north of San Diego, for the rest of his time in service (Tomkins 2005, 16-17). 72. Ibid, 20-21. Rauschenberg likely had the opportunity to study at these various schools due to the GI Bill, more formally known as The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, which subsidized Rauschenberg’s education in exchange for his service in World War II. 32 travelling to New York to study at the Art Student’s League.73 Despite this distance, Rauschenberg and Weil wed in October 1950, and had a son, Christopher, less than a year later in July 1951.74 Rauschenberg met the artist and fellow student Cy Twombly soon after arriving at the Art Students League of New York. It is unknown how soon after meeting that the two began a romantic relationship, although Katz asserts that their relationship started while Rauschenberg was “still married to his then pregnant wife.”75 At this point, Rauschenberg and Weil were living apart, as he and Twombly left the Art Students’ League to return to Black Mountain College, while Weil and their son remained in Manhattan.76 Rauschenberg sporadically visited his wife and child during breaks, much to the chagrin of Weil’s family who felt that he was absent both as a husband and a father.77 During this 73. Ibid, 23, 31. Founded in 1875, the Art Students League of New York is an art school that has provided art students with a more relax environment to nurture innovation and creativity. It is similar to Black Mountain College in that it does not have any course requirements or grades, nor does it offer any degrees. Notable alumni of the Art Students League of New York include: Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei; painter and muralist Thomas Hart Benton; abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler; art critic Clement Greenberg; abstract expressionist painter Lee Krasner, and pop artist Roy Liechtenstein, just to name a few. 74. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 48. Katz, “Lovers and Divers,” 22. Christopher Rauschenberg went on to become both a renowned photographer, with works currently in the collections of twelve internationally recognized museums, and an arts educator, teaching art at Marylhurst University in Lake Oswego, Oregon from 1982 to 1996. 75. Katz, “Lovers and Divers,” 21-22. Katz’s reasoning behind this assertion lies in the birthdate of Christopher, July 1951, which he backtracks to reveal that Rauschenberg and Weil must have conceived their son in either September or October of 1950 and their wedding was perhaps a product of this pregnancy. Rauschenberg met Twombly at the Art Students League soon after arriving at the school in late August 1950. While he does make a bit of a presumption to assume that Rauschenberg would have even known about his wife’s pregnancy before beginning his relationship with Twombly at some point in September 1950, it stands to reason that this scenario is most likely accurate. 76. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 59-60. 77. Ibid, 60. 33 time Rauschenberg made one of his first pieces of note, his plain, white panels known as his White Painting (Three Panel), famous for its lack of visible subject and form. The White Paintings One of the men that was perhaps the most inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting (Three Panel) is the avant-garde composer John Cage. Rauschenberg first met Cage while the latter was visiting the Betty Parsons Gallery in the spring of 1951.78 Thirteen years Rauschenberg’s senior, Cage was transfixed by the younger artist’s work, which was being exhibited and sold by Parsons at this time.79 One of the pieces Cage saw the day they met was the three large swaths of purely white canvas, devoid of any subject, form, or even brushstroke, known as Rauschenberg’s White Paintings. In these boldly bland canvases, Rauschenberg encodes the overbearing wishes of conservative 1950s society and the power these elements had over queer individuals living in America during the Lavender Scare. Rauschenberg’s White Painting (Three Panel), composed of three white canvases, each roughly two feet wide and nine feet tall, is meant to be displayed on a wall and lit by a bright frontal light that allows for the shadows of the viewers in front of the piece to be projected onto the work itself. These shadows become the forms that the work itself lacks, creating an ever-changing piece composed of ephemeral elements rather than paint. Scholars have interpreted this piece as Rauschenberg’s “thumbing his nose” at the Abstract Expressionists by purging it of any 78. Ibid, 59. 79. Ibid. Cage was so fascinated by Rauschenberg’s works that he asked Parsons to have one despite being unable to pay for it (Tomkins 2005, 59). The gallerist obliged, giving Cage an unknown pink and white collage created by Rauschenberg, which the artist later took the liberty of covering in black enamel while waiting for Cage to return to his home sometime later (Tomkins 2005, 59). 34 raw emotion, which was key to much Abstract Expressionist art.80 I believe that, while this is likely the case, Rauschenberg also encoded his own message that, if a queer individual such as the artist cannot be open about their sexuality, then they are forced into roles put onto them by others. Thus, the viewer’s own shadows are thrown into the canvas by light, making their shadows the subject of the piece.81 It seems possible that Rauschenberg was commenting here on his own feelings as a queer man, forced by society into the role of husband and father to avoid accusations of homosexuality when, in reality, the artist had no desire to be married to a woman or have children.82 What at first may appear to be vast expanses of plain white canvas, it becomes clear after viewing the work that this is not the case, as the shadows created by those who view the work impede such a reading. John Cage credited Rauschenberg’s White Painting with inspiring him to create his own musical version of this artwork, 4’33”, an experimental three-movement piece for piano that had the pianist play no notes, allowing for the random and awkward ambient noises created by the audience to become the 80. Robert S. Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 42-43. 81. Tom Folland, “Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Modernism: The Early Combines and Decoration,” The Art Bulletin 92, no. 4 (December 2010): 350. 82. Rauschenberg biographer Calvin Tomkins writes that the artist was likely pressured into marrying Weil by her family, most especially her father, who worried that “when two people were constantly together, as they were, without being married, there was bound to be talk” (Tomkins 2005, 48). He goes on to state that “on the spot, Rauschenberg proposed that they get married…It just had not occurred to him to ask before” (Tomkins 2005, 48). 35 composition itself.83 Just as the ephemeral shadows became the subject of Rauschenberg’s empty White Paintings, so too does the ephemeral silence become the subject of Cage’s 4’33”. Such an action allowed for the art making process to become democratic in a way, because the viewer participated in the reception of the work of art, rather than simply view or listen in the traditional sense. Many art historians have discussed the possible meanings behind Rauschenberg’s White Paintings; many believe that the artist was challenging the definition of fine art in a piece with no conceivable forms or subjects. Rauschenberg alluded to such a challenge in a letter to Betty Parsons in 1951, where the artist stated “it is completely irrelevant that I am making them—Today is their creater [sic].”84 Interestingly, his White Painting have been routinely repaired and repainted by hands other than his own, enlisting the help of assistants and even his own lover Twombly in maintaining the flawless white surface of his White Painting. This further emphasizes how Rauschenberg acted as a sort of vessel for a creative output rather than the sole and definitive author.85 Art historian Tom Folland provides a queer reading of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, asserting that the artist was “mapping the limits of representation of 83. Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with John Cage (New York: Routledge, 2003), 71. “Actually what pushed me into it was not guts but the example of Robert Rauschenberg. His white paintings [...] when I saw those, I said, ‘Oh yes, I must. Otherwise I'm lagging, otherwise music is lagging.’” Cage claims that another motivation behind his 4’33” came from visiting a sound-proof anethoic chamber at Harvard University in 1951, where, upon entering the room, the composer was able to hear two sounds, one high- pitched, and one low-pitched (Stein, 2004). When he asked the sound engineer what these sounds might be, he was told that the high-pitched sound was his nervous system in operation and the low-pitched sound was his blood in circulation (Stein, 2004). The composer realized that silence, much like the invisibility of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, was an impossibility. 84. Walter Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s (Houston: Houston Fine Arts Press, 1991), 230. 85. William McGee, “Some Memorable Personalities,” in Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds—An Anthology of Personal Accounts, ed. Mervin Lane (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 316. 36 homosexuality in the cold-war 1950s.” Folland believes that Rauschenberg was emphasizing the impossibility of queer expression in the conservative American society of the 1950s. Folland is not incorrect in such a reading. It does seem, however, that the artist is actually pushing this message further in these paintings: the shadows of the viewers projected onto the canvas they are viewing, make up for the lack of forms on the canvas itself. Should Rauschenberg have demanded that the piece not be lit from the front, and therefore not allowed for the shadows of the viewers to be displayed on the canvas exhibited before them, I might agree with Folland fully. With this in mind, the canvas cedes control over the forms placed onto it. Ever changing, non-permanent ephemeral auras are projected onto it from an outside source, leaving no trace behind as they enter and leave the flat plane of canvas. I believe that Rauschenberg did indeed mean for the plain white canvas to embody the queer individual living in conservative 1950s America. It represents the wish to live invisibly but the inability to do so, as society projects its cultural heteronormative norms and mores onto the queer individual, morphing them into something they never wished to be. To conform to the norms of the McCarthy era, Lavender Scare America, Rauschenberg felt forced as a queer individual to become a husband and father when he had no real desire to become either. Just as a queer individual’s will was not their own in McCarthy era America, with the idea of living invisibly an impossibility at this time, neither is the subject the canvas’ own in Rauschenberg’s White Painting. Critical reception of Rauschenberg’s White Painting focused more on the blankness of the canvas itself than on any tangible meanings. Having viewed the work at New York’s Stable Gallery in 1953, critic Hubert Crehan wrote that the piece was “con- 37 ceived [sic.] as a work of art, is beyond the artistic pale. If anything, it is a tour de force in the domain of ‘personality gesture,’ concluding that the work was nothing more than “dada shenanigans.”86 After seeing the piece in 1953, Clement Greenberg commented in his 1967 article, “Recentness of Sculpture,” that Rauschenberg’s White Painting was one of the works most responsible for “the advent of minimalism (against which Greenberg was principally arguing), but also for the rise of pop, op, assemblage and all those other manifestations of “Novelty art” that disavowed the role of taste and “aesthetic surprise” in legitimate artistic production.”87 Given the fact that Rauschenberg’s sexuality was largely a secret at this time, it is no surprise that none of the critics or scholars who viewed the work following its inaugural exhibition in 1953 picked up on such a meaning. Instead, these critics focused on their bold and apparently bland whiteness and emptiness, unaware and unreceptive to any homosexual connotations or commentaries. Just as the homoexpressive symbols encoded in Hartley’s “War Images” went undetected by those who lacked the knowledge of his homosexuality, so too did the possible social commentary of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings go undetected by contemporary scholars and critics. The Combines Rauschenberg, Twombly, Weil, and the infant Christopher traveled to Black Mountain College in 1952, although mother and child departed after only a few weeks.88 Rauschenberg biographer Calvin Tomkins asserts that “Rauschenberg’s bisexual nature 86. Branden W. Joseph, “White on White,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 1 (Autumn 2000), 92, 94. 87. Joseph, “White on White,” 95. 88. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 60. 38 was apparent to everyone concerned by now,” perhaps making it clear that Weil did in fact know of Rauschenberg and Twombly’s relationship at this point.89 However, he also makes mention that husband and wife were still very much in love with one another, and that, only at the urging of her family did Weil file for divorce in the autumn of 1952.90 Rauschenberg and Twombly remained romantically involved for a short time following the divorce, briefly traveling around Europe and Northern Africa before Twombly was drafted to fight in the Korean War.91 During Twombly’s absence Rauschenberg met and began a romantic relationship with Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg encouraged Johns to create art, convincing him to quit his job at the Marboro Book Shop, where the two originally met, in favor of working with Rauschenberg designing window displays for department stores around Manhattan, a vocation Rauschenberg picked up to make ends meet while Twombly was away. While living in Italy for a brief time with Twombly, Rauschenberg became interested in combining various forms of media into one cohesive work of art, thus birthing the artistic medium of the combine.92 Rauschenberg further experimented with combines upon returning to America, producing Charlene and Minutiae in 1954. However, the first combine he made during his relationship with Johns was Bed (fig. 3.2) in 1955. As Tomkins states, the story of Rauschenberg’s Bed begins as the artist awoke one morning: 89. Ibid, 69. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid, 73, 99. Following his service as a cryptographer in the Korean War, Twombly relocated to Italy in 1957, where he married Tatiana Franchetti of the wealthy Franchetti family in Venice, his wife until his death in 2011 (Tomkins 2005, 73). 92. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 72. 39 …wanting to paint, but with nothing to paint on – no canvas, and no money to buy any. His eyes lit on the old quilt that had come up with him from Black Mountain College… The colors and the patchwork pattern interested him. He made a stretcher for it, just as though it were a canvas. He tried painting on the quilt, but something was wrong. The pattern was too strong. He attached his pillow and part of a sheet to the top of the stretcher. This solved the problem – the quilt “gave up and became a bed, stopped insisting on itself”…93 In a similar fashion to Jackson Pollock, who painted canvases on the floor, Rauschenberg painted his bed on the floor, then tacked it to the ceiling, thus elevating the painted quilt, pillow, and sheet into the realm of high art just as Pollock had done with his oversized canvases, a technique known as the “90 degree shift.”94 The piece was not exhibited publicly until 1958, when it was received rather poorly, as some critics likened the work to the scene of a “bloody axe murder.”95 So horrified were those who viewed Rauschenberg’s Bed that the piece was banned from display when it traveled to Italy to be a part of the first Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto.96 Though many contemporary commentators objected the mixing of such unorthodox media and the rejection of artistic convention, Bed may have troubled spectators in the 1950s for another reason as well. Critics who likened the piece to murder scenes felt it was too grotesque to exhibit publicly. This could be evident in Rauschenberg’s own coy interpretation for Bed, stating later “I think of Bed as one of the 93. Ibid, 125. 94. Folland, “Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Modernism,” 353-354. 95. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 125. 96. Ibid. The Festival of Two Worlds, or Festival dei Due Mondi as it is known in Italy, is an annual summer music and opera festival founded by Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti in 1958 and held in Spoleto, Italy. First intended to function as a festival that occurred in both Spoleto and its twin city, Charleston, South Carolina, concurrently, growing disputes between the city of Charleston and the Menotti family caused a separation in 1973 and Charleston ceasing to hold its portion of the festival thereafter. 40 friendliest pictures I’ve ever painted … My fear has always been that someone would want to crawl into it.”97 It is possible, however, that, in dirtying his bedroom linens in such a way, Rauschenberg provides a unique commentary on the public opinion of homosexuality at this time. Rauschenberg depicted his bed, where homosexual acts with Johns took place, as a putrid mass of filth, mirroring right-wing conservative opposition to homosexuality and the location of homosexual acts. Given America’s conservative views at the time, much of what occurred in Rauschenberg’s own bed was considered dirty and vulgar by the public at large; Rauschenberg’s use of his own sheets, pillow, and quilt in this piece only heightened this theme. The artist utilized encoding so well in this piece that, without prior knowledge of Rauschenberg’s sexual identity the social commentary could not be understood by those who viewed it. Many critics were disgusted by the piece, likening it to a visual representation of a rape or murder instead of recognizing allusions to public opinion regarding homosexuality.98 Such a reading seems to have escaped the many art historians who have written about Rauschenberg’s Bed, whom place more emphasis on the artist’s use of non-traditional media such as nail polish and toothpaste, not to mention the used quilt and pillow, likening the work to a modern version of Duchamp’s Fountain in its challenge to the definition of fine art.99 But there may be more than one purpose for Rauschenberg’s Bed. Rauschenberg was both challenging modern definitions of fine art as well as commenting on current public opinions about queer culture. 97. Ibid, 125-126. 98. Ibid, 125. 99. Folland, “Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Modernism,” 350. 41 It appears that Rauschenberg’s interest in combines ultimately led to one of the greatest periods of artistic output in his career. Sometime during or after Bed, Rauschenberg was walking down a Manhattan street when he came across a secondhand office supply store with an oddly placed taxidermied Angora goat on display in the window.100 The artist immediately entered the store and inquired to buy the goat, bartering with the shopkeeper, who originally wanted thirty-five dollars upfront for the piece.101 The artist convinced the shopkeeper to part with the goat for fifteen dollars down, promising to return with the remaining twenty he owed when he could afford it, although the store went out of business shortly afterwards.102 This taxidermied goat went on to form the basis of Rauschenberg’s Monogram, worked on between 1955 and 1959 (fig. 3.3). Originally intending to place the goat on a wooden platform to function solely as the work of art, Rauschenberg was ultimately dissatisfied with the lack of artistic quality of this first iteration of Monogram, saying that the goat still “looked too much like itself.”103 To rectify this, Rauschenberg put a car tire around the goat to make it appear less normal and, in his mind, more artistic.104 He mounted the tire-encircled goat onto a 100. Robert Rauschenberg: Man at Work, DVD, directed by Chris Granlund (Chatsworth: Image Entertainment, 1997). 101. Robert Rauschenberg: Man at Work. 102. Ibid. 103. Graham Smith, “Rereading Rauschenberg’s Monogram,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History 85, no. 4 (2016), 273. 104. Rauschenberg has given different explanations for including the tire around the goat’s midsection in his Monogram, at times claiming that it was added so the animal had “something to do during the day,” while at other times claiming that it added a sense of fantasy to the artwork, and that, without it, the goat would appear to be too realistic (Stenström 2007, 48-59). 42 platform, which is often referred to as the goat’s “garden” or “pasture,” decorating it with various media and objects amalgamated into one work of art.105 In the first major interpretation of Rauschenberg’s Monogram art historians Roger Cranshaw and Adrian Lewis in 1981 attach sexual connotations to the work. In their article “Re-Reading Rauschenberg,” Cranshaw and Lewis assert that “the goat inside the tyre [sic] can be read as a sign of sexual penetration.”106 However, they only briefly discuss the tire’s function as an anus, making it clear that they believe Rauschenberg is referencing homosexual intercourse most specifically, and do not provide any tangible evidence in the work to support this rather bold claim.107 Around the same time, the art critic Robert Hughes discussed Monogram in his eight-part BBC television series, “The Shock of the New,” stating that the combine was “one of the wittiest images of sexual 105. Smith, “Rereading Rauschenberg’s Monogram,” 274. The platform is decorated with several cutouts from popular publications of this time. There are cutouts of four right footprints from an article titled “Air Force uses footprints for identification,” from the January 12, 1959 issue of Life, placed on the front center of the piece, perhaps establishing the presence of four separate figures in front of the goat (Smith 2016, 283). On the left of the platform, towards the rear of the goat, Rauschenberg puts the cutout of a photograph from the August 25, 1958 issue of Life depicting a tightrope walker high between the peaks of the Zugspitze in the Bavarian Alps (Smith 2016, 285-286). Near the rear of the goat, a tennis ball is pasted to the platform of the piece, perhaps representing a toy the goat might play with in its “pasture,” or it could be that the ball’s proximity to the goat’s rear-end represents the creature’s own excrement (Smith 2016, 284-285). Other cutouts of photographs on the platform include: a crowd from the Ohio State vs Iowa college football game on November 16, 1957 with white circles behind their heads adjacent to the footprints; the opulent lobby of the Morgan Guaranty Trust building in the front left corner of the platform; three executives from Guaranty seated at a conference table for a meeting near the left rear of the platform; Tennis player Earl Buchholtz standing dejected following his loss to Ashley Cooper in the finals of the New South Wales championship on November 29, 1958 near the previous cutout on the left side of the platform; an astronaut posing with a space capsule in the far rear left corner of the platform, and a snapshot of the calamity following an Army exercise that left five members of the 101st Airborne Division dead after many were dragged along the ground while parachuting in high winds placed on the rear of the platform (Smith 2016, 283-287). Rauschenberg loaded the left side of the platform with cutouts. The right side is painted brown, grey, and black, perhaps referencing the goat’s shadow, which would obfuscate any cutouts placed within it. The right rear side of the platform, which would not be covered by the goat’s shadow, is painted white, perhaps referencing the light that would lay along the platform in this area. 106. Roger Cranshaw and Adrian Lewis, “Re-Reading Rauschenberg,” Artscribe 29 (June 1981), 45. 107. Cranshaw and Lewis, “Re-Reading Rauschenberg,” 45. 43 penetration ever made by an artist,” and acknowledging that most of the works throughout Rauschenberg’s oeuvre contain some sort of sexual reference or motif, a claim with which I do not necessarily disagree.108 However, Hughes does not discern between references to heterosexual or homosexual intercourse in Rauschenberg’s work. The paint splatters on the goat’s nose supports Hughes’ argument this argument as well, as Rauschenberg often lampooned the Abstract Expressionist group in his works. Art historian Kenneth Silver explained that Rauschenberg “turned the high seriousness of abstract New York painting into ‘low’ comedy,” producing works of art that both lampoon the often masculine solemnity of the New York School and ironically conceal the artists’ own sexualities.109 If we see these splatters of paint on the goat’s nose as a jab at Abstract Expressionist macho gesturalism personified by Pollock, whose techniques have been called “ejaculatory,” then perhaps we could read them as mocking hypermasculinist action painting in Monogram as well.110 These splatters of paint on the goat’s face might be read as the ejaculatory splatters of paint used by the Abstract Expressionists, adding another layer of sexual reference to this work. It is unlikely that Rauschenberg was simply and solely thumbing his nose at the Abstract Expressionists with Monogram. I would first like to mention some of the other interpretations of Rauschenberg’s Monogram before circling back to this point. While some scholars have interpreted this work as having sexual connotations, with the goat’s 108. The Shock of the New, DVD, directed by David Lewis Richardson (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1980). 109. Kenneth Silver, “Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art,” in Hand Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62, ed. Russell Ferguson (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992), 181. 110. Helena Reckitt, Art and Feminism (London: Phaidon Press, 2001), 65. 44 penetration of the tire alluding to sexual intercourse, others find more religious foundations, believing that the goat instead references the ram in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac.111 Kenneth Binder argued in his 2006 article “The Sins of the World” that Rauschenberg’s Angora goat is meant to represent the scapegoat discussed in Leviticus 16:22. In this passage, a goat has the sins of all man placed upon it by a Jewish priest before being banished from the realm; tire encircling the goat may then refer to the wreath the Jewish priest would have placed on the goat’s head to represent the sins of the village being placed upon it.112 One could even take this argument further by positing that Rauschenberg himself felt like a scapegoat while living as a queer man during the Lavender Scare in 1950s America. During an era when queer individuals were being inanely labeled as Communists, and President Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 legitimizing such accusations one can understand why Rauschenberg might have felt like a scapegoat at this moment. Rauschenberg connects himself to the damned creature, as fully outing himself would have led to being ostracized from society like the scapegoat in Leviticus 16:22. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the piece itself contains a litany of equally viable interpretations, none seeming more correct than the other, which Rauschenberg probably intended for the artwork. Just as Marsden Hartley’s “War Images” contained symbols that could represent both Karl von Freyberg and the German Empire as a whole, so too does Monogram contain symbols that could represent both the artist’s homosexuality as well as a slew of other equally viable ideas, such as the ram in 111. Smith, “Rereading Rauschenberg’s Monogram,” 280. 112. Kenneth Bendiner, “The Sins of the World,” Apollo 164 (October 2006), 56-59. 45 the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, the scapegoat from the book of Leviticus, or the notion of gravity itself.113 While Hartley utilized dual signifieds in his “War Images” to divert the average viewer away from reading any homosexual elements in his works, so too does Rauschenberg utilize many equally viable signifieds in his Monogram to divert the average viewer away from interpreting the piece as a tongue-in-cheek reference to anal sex. It may seem that Rauschenberg was not quite successful in this diversion, as one of the first major interpretations of Monogram in 1981 by Cranshaw and Lewis uncovered the signified sexual connotations of the piece, but only decades after the work was first exhibited. Critical reception to Monogram following its first exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in April 1960 made no mention of the work’s sexual, or homosexual, connotations. Rauschenberg was indeed successful in masking the homoerotic and homoexpressive elements of his Monogram for over twenty years; these symbols were only first uncovered when open homosexuality was more accepted and no longer equated to accusations of anti-American, Communist sympathies. 113. In his 1981 article “Rauschenberg Re-Evaluated” art historian Michael Newman provides a more religious reading of Monogram, connecting it to the ram Abraham sacrificed in place of his son Isaac in Genesis 22. Newman compares the tire around the goat’s midsection, which would greatly inhibit the goat’s ability to move, to the thicket that hinders the ram in the biblical story, an obstacle that allows Abraham to capture it, and ultimately leads to the ram’s death (Newman 1981, 7-8). Rauschenberg possibly is referencing the sacrificial ram in Genesis 22 in Monogram, although it does seem to be a bit of a stretch, especially since a ram is a type of sheep, also known as a “big horn sheep,” and is not a goat like the one in this combine. In her 2010 chapter “A Conflict in Stockholm: The Rise and Fall of Monogram” from her book The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art, art historian Hiroko Ikegami believes that Monogram is structured around the conflict between gravity, which acts as a physical principle, and the artist, who actively seeks to fight against this force. However, this interpretation seems to relate more to the cutouts on the platform surrounding the goat, rather than the goat itself. Ikegami connects the tennis ball and cutout of four footprints to things that are inherently “earthbound,” or found on the ground due to the forces of gravity (Ikegami 2010, 102-151). She believes Rauschenberg identifies three separate groups in the cutout images that surround his Monogram, one of objects that are grounded, one of objects that attempt to fight gravity, and one of objects that have freed themselves of gravity altogether. This interpretation seems plausible, although it raises the larger question of the purpose of the goat and tire, considered the centerpiece and subject of the piece. She does not discuss these elements, which in my opinion seems a gross oversight. 46 Although I have only discussed three of the works created by Rauschenberg during his relationship with Jasper Johns throughout this chapter, I would emphasize that I do not believe these are the only pieces that contain encoded references to Rauschenberg’s own queer sexuality in the artist’s oeuvre. However, for the sake of time, these three main bookmarks that most evidently display Rauschenberg’s use of ambiguous signifieds suggest a persistent effort to divert attention away from his own sexuality from this time. Similar analyses could be applied to the hidden sexual and homosexual themes throughout his entire oeuvre, such as his 1955 Rebus, his 1968 Soundings, and his 1969 Carnal Clocks, to name a few, an undertaking too large for this thesis alone. However, the use of encoding is most evident in the pieces made while in his relationship with Johns. During this time, when the effects of the Lavender Scare still lingered, public outing of their relationship or sexual identities could have resulted in being ostracized and unable to lead a normal life. The Early Queer Constructions of Jasper Johns A brief biography of Jasper Johns is in order to aid in understanding his later works of art. A southern boy like Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1930, making him five years Rauschenberg’s junior.114 Following his parents’ separation soon after his birth, he lived between his grandmother’s house and his aunt’s house in Allendale, South Carolina.115 His grandmother taught him how to paint and draw, and eventually Johns attended art school at the University of South Carolina, although he only completed three semesters of coursework before traveling to New York City to attend the 114. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 99. 115. Ibid, 110. 47 Parsons School of Design in 1949.116 Johns’s time at Parsons was short-lived, and the artist was drafted into the United States Army to fight in the Korean War in 1952.117 He was first stationed in his native South Carolina before completing a tour of duty in Japan Upon returning to New York City in early 1954, Johns “destroyed every artwork he had made that he could find, so that nothing remained to provide evidence of his paintings’ evolution or put them into a context.”118 The artist later stated that he did this to provide himself with a fresh start in art making, although he admits that he was perhaps egged on by the negative reception many of his early works received from his colleagues.119 Lacking the funds to return to Parsons, Johns instead got a job at the local Marboro bookstore in Manhattan and spent his free time educating himself on the history of art, studying works by artists such as: Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, John Frederick Peto, Pablo Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci.120 As stated earlier, it was while working at the Marboro bookstore that Johns eventually came to meet, befriend, and fall in love with Robert Rauschenberg, who encouraged him to quit his job and pursue a more creative and lucrative job decorating department store windows with Rauschenberg.121 116. Nan Rosenthal, “Jasper Johns,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, last modified October 2004, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/john/hd_john.htm. 117. Riva Castleman, Jasper Johns, a print retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1986), 48. 118. Castleman, Jasper Johns, 48. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid. 121. Tomkins, Off the Wall, 100-101. 48 Sometime after meeting Rauschenberg in 1954, Johns claims he decided to “stop becoming and to be an artist.”122 The first work Johns did while living with Rauschenberg was his 1954-55 Flag (fig. 3.4). Using the somewhat unorthodox medium of encaustic, or beeswax mixed with pigment and applied to canvas while hot and melted, Johns has always been somewhat coy in explaining his motivations for creating Flag. Initially, Johns insisted that he made the work simply because he “intuitively liked to paint flags.”123 Later, Johns amended this statement, saying instead that he “dreamed one night of painting a large flag and afterwards began to paint one.”124 Johns shared with Rauschenberg a penchant for sometimes aggravatingly simple explanations for their works of art. Nevertheless, Johns saw some artistic potential in probing the image American flag in his art. As scholar Moira Roth points out, 1954 was a year of “hysterical patriotism,” in the United States in more ways than one.125 Between April 22 and June 17, 1954, Republican Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, then the Chairman of the Permanent Investigations Sub-Committee held the “Army-McCarthy Hearings,” which examined the supposed Communist infiltration of the Army and State Department.126 For the first time in history, a Senate investigation was broadcast to the nation on television, allowing for millions to witness the anti-Communist witch hunt perpetrated by McCarthy against 122. Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (London: Reaktion, 1994), 95. 123. Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns, 98. 124. Ibid. 125. Roth, “The Aesthetic of Indifference,” 43. 126. Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns, 101. 49 groups deemed to be “subversive,” including homosexuals.127 Prominently displayed during these hearings was the American flag, a reminder to the television audience watching at home that these individuals accused of Communist sympathies were working against the patriotism that the flag symbolized. Although congressmen from both sides of the aisle began to turn against McCarthy by the end of the hearings, going so far as to pass a vote censuring the Senator in December 1954, the anti-homosexual rhetoric of his hearings continued to reverberate.128 Even after McCarthy passed away while in office in 1957, his legacy haunted the United States government for decades, including President Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, which banned homosexuals from holding federal or state office until 1995. Coincidentally, the McCarthy-Army Hearings concluded three days after the inaugural Flag Day on June 14, 1954. President Eisenhower’s Flag Day proclamation of June 4, 1954 urged citizens to “honor their colors by displaying them … and by giving prayerful consideration to their duties as well as their privileges under this glorious banner.”129 November 11, 1954 marked the dedication of Felix de Weld’s sculpture at the Iwo Jima Marine Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, based on the famous Associated Press photograph of American soldiers raising the flag on Mount Suribachi in Iwo Jima almost ten years earlier130 With all of this in mind, one 127. Ibid. In his testimony during the McCarthy-Army Hearings, former Director of Central Intelligence Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter stated “The use of homosexuals as a control mechanism over individuals recruited for espionage is a generally accepted technique which has been used at least on a limited basis for many years” (Barrett 2009, 708). 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid. It is worth noting that on the inaugural Flag Day on June 14, 1954, President Eisenhower would sign into law the legislation that added the words “under God,” to the Pledge of Allegiance as a way of “reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource in peace and war” (Orton 1994, 101). 130. Ibid, 103. 50 might see why Johns might have had a dream about a large American flag sometime in 1954, as this symbol seemed so prominent during this time. In considering President Eisenhower’s words on the proclamation of the inaugural Flag Day, I found myself wondering what privileges did queer individuals such as Rauschenberg and Johns have to honor on such a day? They and individuals like them were unable to reveal their sexuality publicly for fear of being blacklisted and ostracized by society, as even those who were friends of suspected homosexuals often risked being fired for “guilt of association.”131 Johns is perhaps representing this impossibility, as much of the general public felt during this time, of being both homosexual and patriotic. Is his “Old Glory” a sloppy, dirty symbol of the anti-homosexual ideologies so rampant in the country during this time, and not a pristine symbol of American patriotism? In Flag, the wax is applied unevenly, producing a plane of shades alternating from dark to light rather than consistent tones of color, such that the white bars of the flag look especially dirty and dingy, as if dust had been rubbed into these areas. The stars in the upper left corner of the work appear uneven and imperfect, likely executed to the best of Johns’ ability while remaining imprecise due to the limitations of the medium itself. The flag, often appearing bright and clean when swaying on flagpoles, here appears dull, sloppy, and dirty by comparison, as if Johns’ Flag has been corrupted by the anti- homosexual ideologies of the American government. Flag is very much a product of the time in which it was created and may well be Johns’ own commentary on how those who do not fit into the cookie-cutter roles of heterosexual, Christian, Caucasian men might view such a symbol as indicative of a system that oppresses minorities. Johns’s 131. James Gleason, “LGBT History: The Lavender Scare,” National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, last modified October 3, 2017, https://www.nglcc.org/blog/lgbt-history-lavender-scare. 51 alternative depiction might be expressive of the flag as a symbol of oppression, (often in the name of “patriotism”), a view shared by the disenfranchised—homosexuals, African- Americans, and Muslims, and other minorities. While matters may have improved, American today is still riddled with troubling homophobic, anti-Muslim, ant-Semitic, and other hateful attitudes. The perception of Johns’s Flag as possibly anti-patriotic must have been evident when the piece was first exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. Alfred Barr, then the director of the Museum of Modern Art, intended to purchase the painting, but ultimately could not, fearing that it could be viewed as unpatriotic.132 Initial critical reception seemed to center around the debates regarding the nature of the work itself: is it merely a painting of a flag, or is it a flag itself? Can the piece be understood as a flag, or does its status as a piece of fine art interrupt the inherent meaning contained within a flag? Is it a sign or a referent? And these debates frame scholarly interpretations of Flag to this day. Still, we must consider that Flag, made while Johns and Rauschenberg were a couple, might be commenting on the impossibility of being both a queer man and a patriot in America and about fears of outing himself or being outed. In other words, Johns’ piece is divisive on purpose, diverting viewer’s attention away from any commentaries the artist is making on queer individuals and their views of America at the time the work was created. Johns’ first foray into the realm of the combine is his 1955 Target with Plaster Casts, in which he placed hinged boxes containing plaster cases of his own body parts: 132. Catherine Wagley, “Jasper Johns Wanted His Retrospective to Appeal to Young People. The Broad Complied – and Now It’s a Hit,” Artnet, February 22, 2018, https://news.artnet.com/art- world/jasper-johns-wanted-young-people-to-see-his-art-the-broads-retrospective-has-pulled-it-off-1228133. 52 foot, ear, face, hand, nipple, penis, and heel, atop a painting of blue and yellow circles, or targets, on a red background.133 This piece, despite appearing as a row of kitschy amusement park prizes, is rife with homosexual references that go unnoticed by the average viewer.134 The plaster casts of the artist’s various body parts are placed inside of hinged boxes, symbolizing how the artist had to hide his sexuality behind closed doors to avoid becoming a target during the Lavender Scare.135 The arrangement allows for the viewer to open these compartments, revealing the parts hidden inside, or literally “opening the closet” to view the pieces fully. In his psychoanalytic interpretation of Johns’ work, Weinberg hypothesizes that these targets are, in fact, abstract representations of anuses, claiming that “the target is nothing but rings within rings – a hole to aim at,” insinuating that these targets act as a place to aim, just as a homosexual man aims his genitals at another man’s anus.136 This interpretation appears rather simplistic as Johns was never known to be this vulgar or straightforward about his sexuality. Instead these targets could be understood to represent what the homosexual had become in 1950s American society, a target of oppression by the American government. Much of the initial critical reception of Target with Plaster Casts seemed to overlook homosexual undertones encoded in the work. Instead critics focused on its 133. Johns originally intended to make his Target with Plaster Casts incorporate electricity just as his lover Robert Rauschenberg had done in several of his combines (Orton 1994, 47). For more on the incorporation of electricity in the combines of Robert Rauschenberg, see Melissa S. Geiger, “Robert Rauschenberg’s Oracle, Soundings, and Carnal Clocks: A Sociohistorical Critique” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2005). In Johns’ own words, “the lids of the boxes would have been keys prepared in such a way that touching them caused noises from behind the painting” (Orton 1994, 47). 134. Jill Johnston, Jasper Johns – Privileged Information (New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 231. 135. Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns, 47. 136. Jonathan Weinberg, “It’s in the Can: Jasper Johns and the Anal Society,” Genders 1 (Spring 1988): 43. 53 “sinister overtones,” likening the plaster casts of body parts to a dismembered body just as they likened Rauschenberg’s Bed to the scene of a murder.137 Officials at the Jewish Museum in New York were so offended by the boxes containing a plaster cast of a penis and a bone that “looked like the female genitalia” that they refused to display the piece in the 1957 exhibition “Artists of the New York School: Second Generation” unless these two boxes remained closed, a request Johns refused.138 Johns also did not allow Barr to purchase the piece for the Museum of Modern Art after the curator confided that the box containing the plaster cast of a penis would need to remain closed “all of the time” for the museum to exhibit the work.139 As is clear, the plaster cast of a penis caused controversy, but the precise reasons why are not discussed by any critic in great detail. Nevertheless, the piece was not considered problematic because of homoerotic content; if it was nobody was willing to make such an accusation. I believe Johns knew that the penis would create difficulties and used it to his advantage by allowing for its very presence to overshadow any homosexual encoding he might have put into this work. He uses his targets to symbolize the feelings he had as a queer individual living in America during the Lavender Scare in a similar fashion to how Rauschenberg used a taxidermized goat in his Monogram. The former is a target, while the latter is a scapegoat. The plaster casts above the target are hidden behind closed 137. Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns, 49. 138. Ibid, 48-49. Jewish Museum officials tried to persuade Johns into closing the boxes containing the plaster cast of a penis and a bone resembling the female genitalia by saying that it would make the piece more “mysterious” to no avail (Orton 1994, 49). 139. Ibid, 49. Orton explains the dialogue between Johns and Barr in his chapter discussing Target with Plaster Casts: “…Barr asked him ‘Could we keep this one box closed?’ [referring to the box containing a plaster cast of a penis painted green] Jasper replied, ‘It all depends. All of the time or some of the time?’ Barr answered, ‘Well, to be quite honest, all of the time.’ Then Jasper said, ‘I’m afraid, Mr. Barr, that I wouldn’t find that acceptable.’” (Orton 1994, 49). 54 doors, hidden from sight like many closeted queer individuals during the Lavender Scare (and at other times, as well). When one opens these doors, they literally “open the closet” to reveal the figures that lie inside, freeing them from their oppression and allowing for them to express themselves on their own terms. Johns hides all of this behind depictions that he knew would be controversial in conservative 1950s American society, a move that diverts the viewer away from uncovering the true homosexual feelings Johns had encoded in the work. The year 1959 proved to be the beginning of the end for Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s relationship, as the latter relocated to Florida, where he would remain until his death in 2008, leaving Johns alone back in New York City.140 Speaking of their relationship in the years that followed, Rauschenberg admitted that his “sensual excessiveness” alienated Johns, who was a more shy, serious personality in opposition to Rauschenberg’s outgoing, clownish one.141 Nineteen sixty-one was the final breaking point with distance taking its toll along with mounting creative differences. Both took the breakup hard. Johns moved back to his native South Carolina where he made works such as his 1961 In Memory of My Feelings – Frank O’Hara; Rauschenberg constructed his combine Slow that same year, depicting a South Carolina license plate mounted atop a heap of mangled metal discarded as debris.142 Afterward, neither imbued their work with the same homosexual encoding they had during their relationship. In the words of Katz, 140. Jonathan Katz, “The Art of Code,” Queer Arts Resource, accessed March 11, 2019, http://www.queer-arts.org/archive/show4/forum/katz/katz_set.html. 141. Katz, “The Art of Code.” 142. Ibid. 55 “It is as if, without one another, Johns and Rauschenberg have lost the ability to represent themselves.”143 143. Ibid. 56 CHAPTER 4 MOVING FORWARD: THE OBSOLESCENCE OF QUEER ENCODING? To close, I would like to briefly discuss queer encoding and its applications following Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns’ breakup in 1961. Katz has argued that pop artist Andy Warhol’s works exhibit methods of queer encoding similar to that in the work Rauschenberg and Johns. Noting that both Rauschenberg and Johns found Warhol to be “too swish,” in comparison to their own somewhat “straight-acting” personalities, Katz believes that Warhol’s persona was manufactured to sell paintings and make money.144 For example, when the first potential collectors arrived at Warhol’s house to view his pieces, they were “greeted by the artist answering the door in an eighteenth-century mask, complete with jewels and feathers.”145 After offering the collectors similar masks, they entered the house and heard “a single loud rock song blar[ing]from the record player over and over again. He never changed the record nor turned down the volume during the length of the visit.”146 The collectors noted that Warhol was oddly silent, “not the usual behavior of someone trying to impress collectors,” yet they found themselves curiously attracted to Warhol’s eccentric personality, leaving with one or two pieces each.147 This manufactured, bizarre persona clearly attracted sales for Warhol, who would admit that his art practice was largely money-oriented. Katz proposes that Warhol fashioned this public face following the artist’s failures to market himself as a queer artist. Warhol seemed to be equally as guarded about 144. Needham, “Robert Rauschenberg”; Katz, Andy Warhol, 1-2. 145. Katz, Andy Warhol, 1. 146. Ibid. 147. Ibid. 57 his sexuality as were Rauschenberg and Johns.148 Warhol advocated for the superficiality of his art, warning “people to not look any deeper than the surface of his art and life,” as both were indeed connected in his encoded depictions.149 In 1957, at the age of twenty- nine, having worked as a commercial illustrator for several years prior, Warhol attempted to have works exhibited at the well-known avant-garde Tanager Gallery in New York City.150 These pieces, completed in the artist’s free time, depicted young, boyish men passionately kissing one another, a subject that even this avant-garde gallery did not want to exhibit, so Warhol’s works were quickly rejected.151 Crushed by this professional setback, Warhol began to cultivate an image that was significantly less queer, one that he knew he could market for mass appeal. Although Johns and Rauschenberg’s comments indicate that many of Warhol’s contemporaries understood his eccentric behavior in terms of queerness, the artist chose subject matter and a manner of self-presentation that could simultaneously be read by mainstream observers as asexual rather than explicitly queer. While his personality could be considered queer, his sexuality was presented publicly as being asexual, and was therefore non-threatening to a patriarchal, heterosexual society. Warhol seemed to be infatuated with the fabrication of public personas and how celebrities changed their image to appeal to a mass audience. For example, in his 1962 148. Ibid, 2. 149. Ibid, 1. 150. Ibid, 2. 151. Ibid. Warhol took this rejection so hard because it followed a success in completing his series of drawings of famous celebrities’ shoes, and one was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and six others were reproduced in Life magazine (Katz 1993, 2). To follow such success with this blunt rejection likely showed the artist that such outright homosexual works would not be successful even in the most avant-garde of art galleries. 58 silkscreen Marilyn Diptych, Warhol depicts a headshot of famous actress Marilyn Monroe repeated with swapped color palettes, exhibiting the reproducibility of her own image. He emphasized Monroe’s makeup, often coloring it as a foil to the surrounding planes of color to make it stand out in an almost clownish way. Indeed, the woman we see here is not the Norma Jeane Mortenson who worked in the Radioplane Munitions Factory in Burbank, California, but instead the Marilyn Monroe image that Mortenson would adopt to market herself in Hollywood.152 Perhaps Warhol is drawing a parallel between Mortenson’s image invention and his own. After all, Warhol was a queer man living in a society that demanded he create non-threatening self-images more in line with the norms and mores of the dominant patriarchal, heterosexual society. Warhol representing himself as who he truly was, a queer man interested in exploring his sexuality through his art, was unacceptable to the public at large at this time, evident in the Tanager Gallery’s refusal to exhibit his drawings of men kissing on the grounds of subject-matter. Therefore, Warhol was forced to establish a new self-image: bizarre to attract interested buyers, queer while also mysterious and neutering, and non-threatening, non-sexual, to market himself successfully as an artist. Moving forward, it appears as though Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol were the last of their kind in terms of utilizing queer encoding to hide their sexualities out of fear of societal ostracization or career sabotage. While gay liberation groups such as the Mattachine Society existed throughout the 1950s and 60s, it was the Stonewall Riots on June 28, 1969 that truly launched gay liberation into national discussion. The riots 152. Michael Beschloss, “Marilyn Monroe’s World War II Drone Program,” The New York Times, June 3, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/upshot/marilyn-monroes-world-war-ii-drone- program.html. 59 centered around the Stonewall Inn, a famous gay bar in Greenwich Village and followed a New York Police Department (NYPD) raid of the bar, which at this point had been occurring nearly once a month.153 However, this raid would not go as planned, as police, either accidentally or advertently, injured several queer individuals while exercising crowd control outside of the bar.154 The mob, composed of mostly gay people who frequented the bar, began to act violently toward police, throwing bottles at them and slashing the tires to their police wagons in retaliation.155 Ultimately, the crowd became so wild and violent that the police inside of the Stonewall Inn were forced to barricade themselves behind the bar until backup could arrive to quell the riot.156 While a backup brigade was able to calm the crowd somewhat so that police could enter and exit the bar without fear of violence, the riot lasted into the night on June 29, and protestors demonstrating outside of the bar as police dismantled its interior.157 This event is considered the linchpin of the gay liberation movement, and groups such as the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activist Alliance forming in the aftermath of the riots. On the one-year anniversary of the riots in 1970, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles would 153. Martin Duberman, Stonewall (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 183. Purchased by the Genovese crime family in 1956, three members of the mafia would invest $3,500 in 1966 to convert the Stonewall Inn into a gay bar to generate profits (Duberman 1993, 183). Operating with no liquor license, no running water, and no fire exits to keep costs low, the crime family would pay off the local cops weekly to keep them from hassling the bar (Duberman 1993, 181, 185). While police would raid the bar about once a month to keep up appearances, they often gave the bar owners a twenty-four-hour notice prior to avoid arrests.(Duberman 1993, 194). However, on the night of the Stonewall Riots, the bar owners had received no notice and many individuals such as drag queens and crossdressers werearrested for indecency (Duberman 1993, 194). 154. David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 154. 155. Carter, Stonewall, 155-156. 156. Ibid, 175. 157. Ibid, 184. 60 hold their first Gay Pride Parades.158 This development radically changed the stakes of expression for a generation of queer artists. Those who might have felt compelled to encode their sexualities within their works of art to hide their queer identities from the public instead began to feel an urgency to express their homosexuality fully and with pride. Nearly a decade after the Stonewall Riots sparked the gay liberation movement, a tragedy of epidemic proportions would further compel the queer community to express their sexuality freely. The AIDS epidemic officially began in the United States on June 5, 1981 with five confirmed cases of the disease affecting homosexual men in Los Angeles. First referred to as “gay-related immune deficiency,” or GRID, HIV and AIDS began to spread through the queer community like wildfire, as the disease was most easily spread through the mucous membrane of the inner-anus by means of seminal fluid.159 The Centers for Disease Control estimates that over 50,000 people died of AIDS in the United States between 1981-1987, and males represented 92% of these deaths.160 In the following years this number only rose, and over 200,000 people dying of AIDS between 1988-1992, with males representing 87.5% of these deaths.161 Despite the large number of casualties that resulted from the AIDS epidemic, many queer individuals felt that government organizations such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) largely 158. Duberman, Stonewall, 278-279. 159. Centers for Disease Control, “Pneumocystis pneumonia--Los Angeles,” MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 30, no. 21 (June 1981): 250-252. “Gay cancer” was another term used to describe GRID before the terms HIV and AIDS were coined. 160. “HIV and AIDS --- United States, 1981—2000,” MMWR Weekly, Centers for Disease Control, last modified June 8, 2001, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5021a2.htm. 161. Centers for Disease Control, “HIV and AIDS.” 61 ignoring the issue.162 President Ronald Reagan only first acknowledged the epidemic in a 1985 speech in which he promised that work on solving it would be a “top priority” before hypocritically cutting 11% of AIDS-research spending the following year.163 Activist groups that arose from this crisis, such as ACT UP and Gran Fury, often employed art to pressure the government to address the crisis. Works such as ACT UP’s “Silence=Death” poster (fig. 4.2) and Gran Fury’s Kissing Doesn’t Kill (fig. 4.3) played a pivotal role in this activism designed to appeal to a mass audience. Far from containing any encoded imagery, these works were graphic and clear, produced explicitly for public communication and consumption. Queer artists made works that dealt with the crisis and its general and personal effects: Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, and Félix González-Torres created works that addressed both their respective sexualities and HIV- positive diagnoses. In the years since Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol first made encoded art, American society has changed its attitudes about homosexuality, and one might think that queer encoding would have become less prevalent. For example, in 2015 the United States Supreme Court ruled that the ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional in the decision, Obergefell v. Hodges. Polls from 2018 estimate that 60% of American parents say they would not mind if their child married someone of the same gender.164 However, 162. United Press International, “Police Arrest AIDS Protesters Blocking Access to FDA Offices,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1988, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-10-11-mn-3909- story.html. 163. Hank Plante, “Regan’s Legacy,” San Francisco AIDS Foundation, February 6, 2011, http://sfaf.org/hiv-info/hot-topics/from-the-experts/2011-02-reagans-legacy.html. 164. Philip Bump, “Republicans would least like their kids to marry a transgender person. For Democrats? A Republican,” The Washington Post, February 21, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ politics/2019/02/21/republicans-would-least-like-their-kids-marry-transgender-person-democrats- republican/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.281b44fc81b6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obergefell_v._Hodges 62 a queer individual’s reasons for masking their sexuality in their works of art is not limited to fear of social stigma.not simply in response to social stigma. For example, many queer individuals find themselves living closeted lives behind manufactured self-images just as Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol did nearly sixty years ago, albeit for different reasons. Perhaps they conceal their sexuality in fear of their conservative family or friends ostracizing them, or out of an innate guilt that institutions such as the Catholic Church might foster in queer individuals from a young age. An accepting government and society does not necessarily mean that a queer individual can be free to express their sexuality fully without fear of repercussions from other factors. We might also consider queer individuals living in other countries where homosexuality is still illegal as those who might continue to use queer encoding in their works of art. For example, the contemporary queer artist Alireza Shojaian was born in Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death. Shojaian had the courage to create works such as his Salad Season 1 (fig. 4.4) and Salad Season 2 (fig. 4.5), in which the artist depicts himself peeling and cutting a carrot held in front of his groin to insinuate that he is performing these actions on his own penis “to show the pain of? someone that is not accepting his sexuality, his identity” while studying Fine Art at the Azzad Islamic Art and Architecture University in Tehran.165 While the artist’s classmates had their work exhibited throughout the halls of the university, Shojaian was forced to hide his work under kraft paper to be viewed solely by the professor, because he could be reported to the government and arrested for works containing homoerotic subject matter. Ultimately, Shojaian found himself unable to emigrate to the United States or Europe due to 165. Alexis Stergakis, “Portraits of Queer Love and Life in the Middle East,” Queer Here, November 30, 2018, https://wearequeerhere.com/queerart. 63 sanctions placed on Iran, and was instead forced to relocate to Lebanon, where laws surrounding homosexuals are more lenient, although society is still unaccepting of such a lifestyle.166 Encoding can surely be found in the works of countless other queer individuals living in countries where homosexuality is abhorred or illegal. Those who lack the courage Shojaian had in depicting his sexuality despite the possible legal ramifications are forced to encode their sexuality in their works of art to keep the status quo and avoid persecution.167 As these countries become more accepting of queer sexualities in time, or as queer individuals leave to find places that are more accepting of their lifestyle, the public will learn about the queer elements encoded in their works of art. However, until then, such elements will remain a secret to us, just as these elements were kept secret from the public in the War Images of Marsden Hartley’s “Amerika” series and the works created by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns during their furtive relationship. 166. Stergakis, “Portraits of Queer Love.” 167. This section lacks examples of queer encoding in Middle Eastern art because, just as critics contemporary to Rauschenberg and Johns were unable to decipher the queer elements within their works until revealing their respective sexualities, we are also unable to uncover the queer encoding in any works of a closeted individual living in countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran without prior knowledge of their sexuality. 64 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION The practice of encoding, a term first used by Katz in reference to the hidden sexual themes found in the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, is not a method that is unique to these two queer artists. Katz theorized that Rauschenberg and Johns used abstraction to hide symbols and references to their queer sexuality within their works, allowing for this subject considered taboo during this time in American history to be hidden “in plain sight,” so to speak.168 In this thesis, I have made an effort to demonstrate that, in the War Images of his “Amerika” series, the queer American modernist Marsden Hartley utilized a method similar of encoding. Hartley, living in a society that condemned homosexuality under legal penalty, was forced to hide any references to his own homosexuality in his art. To fully express himself creatively, Hartley hid allusions to his fallen lover, the Prussian Lieutenant Karl von Freyberg. Hartley created his “mask,” so-to-speak, by referencing his fallen lover through symbols such as his initials, age, regiment number, and military regalia. While these symbols held significance for Hartley, it is unlikely that the average viewer, who lacked knowledge of von Freyberg or the artist’s homosexuality, could have connected these symbols to their more private meanings. As mentioned earlier, these symbols referencing von Freyberg operated as floating signifiers to the general public, unable to connect these symbols with any tangible referent or signified. Those whom Hartley entrusted with the secret of his homosexuality, however, would have been able to understand these more personal referents. Other symbols that were not 168. Katz, “The Art of Code.” 65 as directly tied to von Freyberg—the flag representing Germany and Bavaria, the Iron Cross, the tassels—operated as dual signifiers, or signifiers with two intended signifieds. The general viewer with no knowledge of von Freyberg or Hartley’s sexuality could connect these signifiers to a signified that was representative of the German homeland and its military’s regalia, and therefore could view a piece such as his Portrait of a German Officer as a celebration of German troops and the Great War. This signified was a diversion from the true referent that Hartley was expressing in his War Images as symbols of von Freyberg’s attire and support for the German cause. Hartley’s method of encoding utilizes semiotics to deflect viewers from making any possible connections between homosexuality and the artist himself. Nearly half a century later, the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns found themselves living in a society that was nearly as antagonistic to their queer sexuality as was Hartley’s Germany. While both Rauschenberg and Johns expressed frustrations and commentaries as queer men living in an oppressive American society, they concealed their sexuality in an encoded way, as had Hartley. In his White Painting (Three Panel), Rauschenberg encodes ideas related to conservative 1950s society and its treatment of queer individuals during the Lavender Scare. In a disguised fashion, he implied that if a queer individual cannot be open about their sexuality for fear of punishment or alienation by society, then they are forced into roles placed on them by others. Such a commentary is evident in the fact that the viewer’s own shadows are thrown into the canvas by light, making these ephemeral areas of shade the subject of the piece for the brief moment they appear on its surface.169 I believe that Rauschenberg was 169. Folland, “Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Modernism,” 350. 66 commenting here on his own feelings as a queer man who was forced by society into the role of husband and father to avoid accusations of homosexuality. Just as Hartley encoded the his relationship with Karl von Freyberg in the War Images of his “Amerika” series, so too does Rauschenberg encode the relation his White Painting has with his own commentary on living as a queer man in a society antagonistic to his lifestyle. While the former created this diversion with both floating and dual signifieds, the latter accomplished the same goal in his White Painting by hiding this meaning beneath a surface that he knew would both enrage and captivate contemporary audiences. In Bed, Rauschenberg comments on the public opinion regarding homosexuality at this time. The artist depicted his bed linen, where homosexual acts with his lover Jasper Johns took place, as a mass of filth, just as how homophobes might have viewed the locus of homosexual activity. The artist utilized encoding well here. Without prior knowledge of Rauschenberg’s sexual identity, critics likened the work to a visual representation of a rape or murder rather than as social commentary on homophobia. Rauschenberg’s Monogram is perhaps one of the artist’s most sexually-loaded combines. The taxidermized goat’s penetration of the car tire was “read as a sign of sexual penetration” and the paint splatters on the goat’s face was likened to the ejaculatory drip paintings of the Abstract Expressionists, making this combine one of the his most sexually explicit works.170 However, I believe that the true meaning of the piece lies beneath the work’s surface in line with Bendiner’s assertion that the goat represents the scapegoat of Leviticus 16:22.171 I take this interpretation one step further in asserting 170. Cranshaw and Lewis, “Re-Reading Rauschenberg,” 45. Reckitt, Art and Feminism, 65. 171. Bendiner, “The Sins of the World,” 56-59. 67 that Rauschenberg himself felt like a scapegoat while living as a queer man during the aftermath of the Lavender Scare in a society where queerness was associated with Communist sympathies and even treason. The myriad of different interpretations centering around this work suggest that Rauschenberg did indeed encode this homosexual commentary. Rauschenberg’s lover and confidant, Jasper Johns, operated in a similar fashion, opting to comment on his role as a queer man living in a society antagonistic to his way of living through the encoded symbols in his art. In his Flag, Johns appropriated the image of the American flag and depicted it as a dirty, dingy symbol more representative of oppression than patriotism. Johns provides a powerful commentary on the conflict between homosexuality and patriotism in a society where queerness was equated with Communist sympathies, and therefore depicts his flag not as a pristine symbol of American patriotism, but as the sloppy, dirty symbol of the anti-homosexual sentiment. Johns hides this commentary within a depiction of a symbol so common that critics and scholars alike found themselves arguing the very nature of the work itself, rather than any possible homosexual commentaries found beneath the work’s surface. In much of the reception and scholarship surrounding this piece, a debate is waged between the work’s nature as either artform or flag, and whether this ontological nature interrupts the function of the flag depicted in the work itself. I believe Johns very much did this on purpose, hiding his encoded commentary beneath a familiar symbol depicted in a controversial way. In the final piece discussed in this thesis, Johns’ Target with Plaster Casts, we see that Johns is again commenting on his status as a queer man living in the aftermath of the 68 Lavender Scare utilizing a nearly universal symbol, the target. Johns’ depiction of the target is what the homosexual had become in 1950s American society. Atop this depiction Johns placed hinged boxes containing plaster casts of his own body: foot, ear, face, hand, nipple, penis, and heel, inviting the viewer to open these boxes and literally “open the closet” on the pieces contained within. These casts are hidden behind closed doors, away from sight just like many queer individuals who were forced to hide their sexuality behind closed doors during the Lavender Scare. When one opens these doors, they reveal the figures that lie inside, freeing them from their oppression and allowing for them to express themselves on their own terms. Johns hides these parts, including a plaster cast of a penis, a motif that would be controversial in conservative 1950s American society. Interestingly, the hidden penis diverts attention away for the target, which might allude to anal sex. In their uses of encoding, Hartley relied on semiotic elements such as floating and dual signifieds, and Johns and Rauschenberg relied more on hiding their encoded elements behind depictions they knew would either be controversial or so well-known that nearly any meaning could be brought to the piece. In his discussion of the encoded elements in the works of Rauschenberg and Johns, Katz insists that the former ‘s use was “explicit” and easily readable. In my readings of several key works by Rauschenberg to feature t encoding, I have not found any elements that would be considered “explicit” or easily readable to those who lacked the knowledge that the artist was, a queer individual. Katz also does not go into any detail as why they chose to hide their queer sexuality, only briefly proposing that the “Red Scare” may have been a cause, but never expanding upon such an assertion. I would surmise that this perhaps this relates to Rauschenberg’s own 69 guardedness about his sexuality, and Katz either chose to omit such connections out of respect for the artist, or because the artist himself offered little in the way of information regarding this topic. Nevertheless, I feel that the method of encoding he applies to Rauschenberg’s and Johns’ works is an important one that can be applied to many artists suspected of being homosexual throughout history. I have only provided one such example in this thesis, stretching the concept of encoding utilized by Rauschenberg and Johns to apply to the closeted queer artist Marsden Hartley nearly half a century prior. I believe that these methods of encoding could be utilized and applied to works by such artists whose sexuality has long been debated, such as the Baroque artist Caravaggio, or realist painter Thomas Eakins, both of whom lived in societies unaccepting of homosexuality and were suspected homosexuals themselves. I believe that reconsidering their works with queer encoding in mind could be useful in perhaps uncovering any homosexual expressions beneath the surfaces of their artworks, his would be an undertaking too large for this thesis alone. Andy Warhol also utilized queer encoding in his oeuvre. The advent of the gay liberation movement following the Stonewall Riots, as well as the epidemic of HIV/AIDS, largely compelled queer artists to forgo queer encoding in favor of a more direct and open visual language. However, conditions still exist that necessitate the utilization of queer encoding by artists who want to hide their sexuality either from conservative family or friends or by those in conservative societies where homosexuality is still punishable by prison, lashes, or even death. For these individuals, queer encoding is still very much a necessity in their art-making process. 70 To close, I would like to restate that I believe that queer will fall back on utilizing the methods of encoding when conditions dictate. I am not positing that Marsden Hartley was definitively the first queer artist to imbue his works with encoded queer symbolism, although he may be the earliest artist that we can say for certain utilized such a system of encoding. Should we reassess artists that have been considered queer individuals with these methods of encoding in mind to uncover the true nature of these artists’ sexualities and discover new meanings in their works. While Jonathan Katz first applied the method of queer encoding to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, I have now attempted to apply it to the earlier artist Marsden Hartley. Perhaps other scholars could enlist attempt to this method of queer encoding in examining art produced during earlier periods. 71 BIBLIOGRAPHY Art Institute of Chicago. “Madawaska – Acadian Light-Heavy.” The Collection. Accessed February 8, 2019. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/70028/madawaska- acadian-light-heavy. Barrett, David M. The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005. Bendiner, Kenneth. “The Sins of the World.” Apollo 164 (October 2006): 56-61. Berger, Norma G. “Oral History Interview with Norma G. Berger Regarding Marsden Hartley, 1973 June 28.” Interview by Robert Brown. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, June 28, 1973. Transcript. https://www.aaa.si.edu/ collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-norma-g-berger-regarding-marsden- hartley-12829#transcript. Bergman, Lauren. “Navigating Marsden Hartley’s Symbols.” Unframed, September 10, 2014. https://unframed.lacma.org/node/1433. 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Stenström, Emma. “Another Kind of Combine: Monogram and the Moderna Museet.” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History 76, no. 1-2 (2007): 48-59. Stergakis, Alexis. “Portraits of Queer Love and Life in the Middle East.” Queer Here, November 30, 2018. https://wearequeerhere.com/queerart. The Shock of the New. Directed by David Lewis Richardson. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1980. DVD. Tomkins, Calvin. Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg. New York: Picador Publications, 2005. 75 United Press International. “Police Arrest AIDS Protesters Blocking Access to FDA Offices.” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1988. https://www.latimes.com/ archives/la-xpm-1988-10-11-mn-3909-story.html. Wagley, Catherine. “Jasper Johns Wanted His Retrospective to Appeal to Young People. The Broad Complied – and Now It’s a Hit.” Artnet, February 22, 2018, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/jasper-johns-wanted-young-people-to-see-his- art-the-broads-retrospective-has-pulled-it-off-1228133. Whitman, Walt. “For You, O Democracy.” In Leaves of Grass, edited by Jim Manis, 137. State College: Electronic Classics Series, 2007. Weinberg, Jonathan. “It’s in the Can: Jasper Johns and the Anal Society.” Genders 1 (Spring 1988): 40-56. Weinberg, Jonathan. Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. 76 APPENDIX A LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 2.1: Marsden Hartley, Walt Whitman’s House, 328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey, 1905. Oil on board, 25.4 x 20.32 cm. Private collection. 77 Figure 2.2: Marden Hartley, Portrait of Berlin, 1913. Oil on canvas, 106 x 106 cm. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 78 Figure 2.3: Marsden Hartley, Indian Fantasy, 1914. Oil on canvas, 118.6 x 99.9 cm. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina. 79 Figure 2.4: Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer, 1914. Oil on canvas, 173.4 x 105.1 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. 80 Figure 2.5: Marsden Hartley, Painting No. 47, 1914-15. Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 81 cm. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. 81 Figure 2.6: Marsden Hartley, Portrait, 1914-15. Oil on canvas, 81.9 x 54.6 cm. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota. 82 Figure 2.7: Marsden Hartley, The Iron Cross, 1915. Oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri. 83 Figure 2.8: Marsden Hartley, Eight Bells’ Folly, Memorial to Hart Crane, 1933. Oil on canvas, 80.33 x 100.33 cm. Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota. 84 Figure 2.9: Marsden Hartley, Madawaska, Acadian Light-Heavy, Third Arrangement, 1940. Oil on board, 101.6 x 76.2 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. 85 Figure 3.1: Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting (Three Panel), 1951. Latex paint on canvas, 182.88 x 274.32 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California. 86 Figure 3.2: Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955. Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 191.1 x 80 x 20.3 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York. 87 Figure 3.3: Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59. Oil, paper, fabric, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber shoe-heel, and tennis ball on two conjoined canvases with oil on taxidermied Angora goat with brass plaque and rubber tire on wood platform mounted on four casters, 106.7 x 160.7 x 163.8 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. 88 Figure 3.4: Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55. Encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, 107.3 x 153.8 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York. 89 Figure 3.5: Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955. Encaustic and collage on canvas with plaster casts, 129.5 x 111.8 x 9 cm. Private collection. 90 Figure 4.1: Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962. Acrylic paint on canvas, 205.4 x 144.8 cm. Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom. 91 Figure 4.2: AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Silence=Death, 1987. Color lithograph, 55.8 x 83.8 cm. Private collection. 92 Figure 4.3: Gran Fury, Kissing Doesn’t Kill, 1989. Offset lithograph, 365.8 x 91.4 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom. 93 Figure 4.4: Alireza Shojaian, Salad Season 1, 2012. Acrylic and color pencil on cardboard, 39.9 x 30 cm. Private collection. 94 Figure 4.5: Alireza Shojaian, Salad Season 2, 2012. Acrylic and color pencil on cardboard, 39.9 x 30 cm. Private collection. work_bj3l4yocmzbuno6plcdg2jl43i ---- Yves Klein caminha no vazio55 Yve-Alain Bois A relevância de Klein hoje* Para se aproximar do trabalho de Yves Klein, o autor reproduz alguns argumentos de Theodor Adorno sobre a música de Wagner, formulados em dois momentos – em 1937-1938, sob a experiência do fascismo, e em 1963, com 30 anos de “distância”. No primeiro texto, Adorno mostrava, na obra de Wagner, os aspectos que traíam a gestação do fascismo. No segundo reconhecia que, com o novo momento histórico, outras camadas vinham à baila naquela obra; ela havia mudado, e a posição de Adorno em relação a ela tornava-se “ambivalente”. Partindo do paralelismo com Wagner, Bois revisita o trabalho de Klein buscando revelar, em seus ardis e encenações, para além da simples adesão aos expedientes da indústria cultural, uma espetacularização do próprio espetáculo, que acaba por esvaziá-lo. In order to approach the work of Yves Klein, the author recalls the arguments of Theodor Adorno in regard to the music of Richard Wagner, presented in two different texts – the first written in 1937-1938, under the experience of fascism, and the other in 1963, with a “distance” of 30 years. In the first text, Adorno highlighted, in the work of Wagner, the aspects that betrayed the birth of fascism. In the second one he recognized that, along with the new historical moment, other layers emerged in Wagner’s work; it had changed, and Adorno’s position toward it became “ambivalent”. Starting with a parallelism with Wagner, Bois reexamines the work of Yves Klein, trying to reveal, in his use of staging and artifice, beyond the mere acceptance of the expedients of the culture industry, a spectacularization of spectacle itself, that ends up by deflating it. palavras-chave: Yves Klein; Theodor Adorno; Richard Wagner; indústria cultural; espetáculo keywords: Yves Klein; Theodor Adorno; Richard Wagner; culture industry; spectacle ARS Ano 7 Nº 15 56 Em uma palestra realizada em Berlim, em setembro de 1963, Theodor W. Adorno revisitou seu In search of Wagner [Em busca de Wagner] publicado cerca de 10 anos antes. Escrito quando morava em Londres, entre o outono de 1937 e a primavera de 1938, esse livro pequeno e incisivo foi marcado pela experiência do fascismo. Adorno não estava preocupado com o uso da música de Wagner na propaganda nazista, mas, alinhado com o trabalho que completava, na época, com seus colegas do Institut für Sozialforschung1, ele pretendia mostrar como essa música, que surgiu das ruínas de uma cultura burguesa em plena crise, elucidava a lenta gestação do fascismo, revelando sua genealogia muda de um modo exemplar2. Embora Adorno negue, seu texto de 1963 é uma forma de autocrítica ou, no mínimo, uma declaração reveladora. Ele observa, em relação ao trabalho de Wagner, que não se pode, por certo não naquela época, “ignorar seu aspecto político”, mas que a situação na qual esse trabalho fora recebido havia mudado. Por um lado, “ganhamos distância nos últimos trinta anos. Wagner não representa mais, como em minha juventude, o mundo dos pais, mas o dos avós [...]. Ganhamos muita liberdade para com Wagner enquanto objeto de interesse: nosso laço afetivo com ele se afrouxou”3. Por outro lado, acontece que “o antiwagnerismo estético entrou na onda do chamado movimento neoclássico, [que não é] absolutamente progressista do ponto de vista político”4 (é bastante conhecida a tendência de Adorno a favor de Schoenberg e da Escola Vienense – e contra Stravinsky). O ponto mais destacado do argumento de Adorno encontra-se nas linhas que se seguem: Contudo, o que mudou a respeito de Wagner [...] não é meramente o impacto nos outros, mas seu próprio trabalho, o trabalho em si mesmo. Aí está a base da relevância de Wagner; não algum segundo triunfo póstumo ou a esperada derrota do neobarroco. Como entidades espirituais, obras de arte não são completas em si mesmas. Elas criam um campo magnético de todas as possíveis intenções e forças, de tendências internas e outras, opostas a estas, de elementos bem- sucedidos e necessariamente malsucedidos. Objetivamente, novas camadas se desprendem de modo contínuo, vêm à baila; outras se tornam irrelevantes e desaparecem. Relacionamo-nos com uma obra de arte não, como se diz amiúde, meramente adaptando-a a fim de ajustá-la a uma nova situação, mas decifrando, no interior dela, coisas com as quais temos uma reação historicamente diferente. A posição de consciência que experimento como propriamente minha em face de Wagner todas as vezes em que me deparo com ele, posição que não é só minha, é ainda mais merecedora do epíteto de “ambivalente” do que a posição anterior – uma oscilação entre atração e repulsa.5 O que se segue é uma definição de ambivalência: uma “relação acenada a algo que não se dominou; comportamo-nos de modo ambivalen- te em face de algo que ainda não compreendemos”. Adorno complementa: 1. O Instituto de Pesquisa Social [Institut für Sozialforschung] foi fundado em Frankfurt- sobre-o-Main, Alemanha, em 1923, e tornou-se conhecido como berço institucional da Escola de Frankfurt e da teoria crítica. Em 1930, Max Horkheimer passou a dirigir a instituição, da qual seria forte referência intelectual, editando a revista Zeitschrift für sozialforschung [Revista de pesquisa social]. Na década de 1930, a crescente influência dos nazistas levou os fundadores a decidir preparar a transferência do Instituto para fora da Alemanha. Em 1933, após a ascensão de Hitler, ele se transferiu para Genebra e no ano seguinte, 1934, para Nova Iorque. Em Nova Iorque afiliou-se à Universidade de Columbia, e sua revista Zeitschrift für sozialforschung passou a chamar-se Studies in philosophy and social science [Estudos em filosofia e ciência social]. Foi nesse contexto que muitos importantes trabalhos dos pensadores da Escola de Frankfurt começaram a ganhar espaço, sendo recebidos favoravelmente nas universidades inglesas e norte-americanas. O Instituto reabriu em Frankfurt em 1951. [Nota da revisora da tradução]. * Este texto foi originalmente publicado em October, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, n. 119, p. 75-93, inverno 2007. 57 Yve-Alain Bois A relevância de Klein hoje “Em resposta a isso, a primeira tarefa à vista seria simplesmente experimen- tar o trabalho wagneriano plenamente – algo que até hoje, apesar de todo o sucesso externo, não foi alcançado”6. Eu diria que ao defrontarmos Yves Klein hoje, estamos na mesma situação de Adorno quando defrontava Wagner há mais de quarenta anos. Evidentemente, o paralelo é reforçado pelo fato de que as duas obras têm muito em comum, como veremos. Mas o que é importante de se notar aqui é que o Klein de hoje não é o mesmo dos anos 1960. Isso decerto não significa – ao contrário do que Pierre Restany queria acreditar já há mais de vinte anos – que esse novo Klein, não mais do que o novo Wagner de Adorno, possa ser expurgado de todas as suspeitas envolvendo seu eu antigo ou a identidade que ele forjou para si mesmo (além disso, frequentemente usando Restany como um porta-voz). Restany em 1982: Quando penso que em 1969, na época da primeira retrospectiva de Yves Klein em um museu de Paris, Christiane Duparc ainda podia escrever: “O irritante a respeito de Yves Klein é o molho simbólico, o resíduo ao modo de Cristo, Santa Rita, os Rosacrucianos [...], Nostradamus, judô místico, a Ordem de São Sebastião [...]. Ele chafurdou em um tipo de religiosidade exasperante”, e quando eu comparo a mentalidade da mídia parisiense em 1982 a isso, mal posso acreditar no que vejo.7 Leal ao seu papel de defensor oficial, Restany parecia acreditar que as artimanhas espiritualistas de Klein não eram mais problema na época da retrospectiva do artista em 1983 no Musée National d’Art Moderne (em cujo catálogo essas frases foram publicadas). Bem ao contrário, um dos principais fatores de mudança que haviam ocorrido no legado de Klein era a análise crítica do “tempero” do artista – especialmente o estudo meticuloso do rosacrucianismo de Klein conduzido por Thomas McEvilley, justamente no catálogo dessa mesma exposição, para o grande desprazer de Restany! (McEvilley discute os numerosos empréstimos que Klein fez da filosofia rosacruciana antes de o artista perceber que apelar para a autoridade de Gaston Bachelard era mais respeitável do que invocar Max Heinel8). Para ser ainda mais severo com Restany – mas ele merece, ainda que postumamente, tal severidade, pelo desprezo que mostrou por seus sucessores –, sabemos hoje muito mais sobre Klein, agora que o monopólio quase exclusivo que esse crítico de arte teve sobre a obra do artista acabou. Não fossem os estudos de arquivo conduzidos por McEvilley (sobre o rosacrucianismo, mas também sobre a biografia e a patologia de Klein, em um ensaio mais longo e mais ambicioso, igualmente publicado no catálogo de 19839); Nan Rosenthal (veja o estudo fundamental, no mesmo catálogo, sobre aquilo que eu chamaria de fraudes ostensivas de Klein – o 2. ADORNO, Theodor W. In search of Wagner. Trad. Rodney Livingstone. Londres: Verso, 2005. Quatro capítulos do livro foram publicados em 1932, mas o volume, intitulado Versuch über Wagner, só foi publicado em 1952. 3. Idem, Wagner’s relevance for today. In: LEPPERT, Richard (Ed.). Essays on music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p. 584-585. 4. Ibidem, p. 586. Mais adiante, Adorno caracteriza o movimento antiwagneriano como “a primeira incidência em larga escala do ressentimento contra a arte moderna na Alemanha” (p. 587) 5. Ibidem, p. 586-587. 6. Ibidem, p. 587-588. Em 1963, segundo Adorno, Wagner era mais conhecido por certas peças na esteira de A valquíria (1856) do que pela arquitetura complexa de Siegfried (1871). Sua obra, em resumo, foi reduzida a alguns clichês: “As obras de Wagner que não lograram ganhar a apreciação do público são precisamente as mais modernas, aquelas com a técnica mais corajosamente progressista e, portanto, as mais afastadas das convenções.” (p. 588). 7. RESTANY, Pierre. Vignt ans après. In: Yves Klein. Catálogo de exposição. Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, 1983, p. 70. O texto segue com um ataque de má-fé ARS Ano 7 Nº 15 58 presente ensaio baseia-se fortemente nesse texto10); Sidra Stich (que em sua monografia-catálogo sustenta a hipótese de seus dois predecessores com documentação massiva11), e, por último, Denys Riout (que em seu notável e bem recente Yves Klein: manifester l’immatériel finalmente nos oferece uma descrição minuciosa do aparato parergonico12 que Klein invocou para suas intervenções e exibições públicas, transformando cada uma delas em um tipo de Gesamtkunstwerk grandioso13) –, não fossem os trabalhos persistentes desses quatro mosqueteiros da pesquisa (devemos também incluir a edição excelente dos escritos de Klein por Marie-Anne Sichère e Didier Semin14), nós ainda hoje estaríamos chafurdando no mesmo molho, para adotar uma vez mais a metáfora peremptória de Christiane Duparc. Voltemos a Wagner ou aos Wagner de Adorno. Para o teórico (que, não devemos esquecer, foi também um pianista e compositor, na tradição de seu professor, Alban Berg), Wagner é o artista que marcou o início do reinado daquilo que o filósofo chamou de indústria cultural: na música de Wagner, o modernismo promissor é o que se preserva contra tal veneno como um anticorpo, mas o que propicia o advento dele é a demagogia e o autoritarismo. Wagner representa uma guinada histórica: o momento em que, ao se tornar puro espetáculo, a arte não é, doravante, senão mercadoria, e o espectador, um consumidor passivo a quem se deve seduzir e absorver. Ao lermos o livro de Adorno, acabamos nos perguntando o que ele, de fato, poderia ter dito de diferente sobre Klein: por exemplo, quando fala do “caráter social” de Wagner (o rebelde que se tornou um mendigo, a criança mimada que se identifica com a ordem estabelecida contra a qual, todavia, está persuadida a lutar); de seu diletantismo (que, de acordo com Thomas Mann, é a marca da sua falta de educação formal e a base da ideia mesma de uma “síntese das artes”); da necessidade poética que Wagner tem da hipérbole; de como o trabalho é eclipsado em suas produções teatrais (essencial para o que Adorno chama de aspecto fantasmagórico do teatro em suas óperas, a meta de tal eclipse sendo criar “a ilusão da realidade absoluta do irreal”15); da fascinação com as possibilidades materiais da tecnologia e com os truques habilidosos envolvendo façanhas teatrais em mágica; da frequentemente sádica manipulação de seu público16, a qual se associa à sua obediência a ele (o sintoma mais pungente dela sendo, talvez, a busca pelo sucesso a qualquer preço); de seu ideal ascético (a autoimolação necessária para qualquer martirológio); da constante referência ao mito (mito de um retorno a um passado pré-histórico paradoxalmente visto como um presente eterno e, assim, como uma revogação do futuro17); do sonho, por fim, com uma época congelada que, no entanto, jamais encontra repouso. A acusação de Adorno, que gradual e imperceptivelmente transferi para Klein, não apenas me ajudou a entender o cerne de minha própria a McEvilley como um dos representantes da “disposição de espírito melindrada e meticulosa” da crítica de arte e da história da arte norte- americanas, contra a qual Restany opõe, demagogicamente, os depoimentos generosos oferecidos por artistas. O catálogo será citado, daqui em diante, como MNAM. 8. Os ensaios de Thomas McEvilley e de Nan Rosenthal foram publicados originalmente no catálogo das instituições norte- americanas que sediaram a retrospectiva de Klein (a Rice University, em Houston, o Museu de Arte Contemporânea, em Chicago, e o Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, em Nova Iorque), catálogo este anterior ao do Centre Pompidou. Cf. Yves Klein e o Rosacrucianismo. In: Yves Klein. Catálogo de exposição. Houston: Institute for the Arts, Rice University, p. 238-254, 1982. Esse catálogo será citado, daqui em diante, como Houston. 9. MCEVILLEY, Thomas. Yves Klein, conquistador of the void. In: Houston, op. cit., p. 19-87. 10. ROSENTHAL, Nan. Assisted levitation: the art of Yves Klein. In: Houston, op. cit., p. 89-136. 11. STICH, Sidra. Yves Klein. Stuttgart: Cantz, 1994. Essa monografia funcionou como um catálogo da retrospectiva itinerante de Klein, organizada por Stich, no Museum Ludwig (Colônia), no Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen 59 Yve-Alain Bois A relevância de Klein hoje resistência a certos aspectos do seu trabalho, sobretudo a seu exibicionismo [showcasing] (incluindo Restany), como também a resistência muito mais forte do meu caríssimo amigo e adorniano estrito, Benjamin Buchloh. Para ele, com efeito, Klein é o artista, por excelência, do capitalismo avançado; ele completa a apoteose da indústria cultural de que Wagner foi tão somente o início profético. Em uma Europa devastada pela guerra, Klein demonstrou, mais do que qualquer outro, que “a tentativa de redimir a espiritualidade por meios artísticos no momento da ascensão do controle universal da cultura de massa revestiria inevitavelmente o espiritual de uma sórdida (involuntária) paródia”. Buchloh prossegue: “Ao fazer sua obra dependente, de um modo manifesto, de todos os dispositifs previamente escondidos (por exemplo, os espaços da publicidade e os expedientes da promoção), Klein “se tornaria o [...] artista europeu do pós-guerra a iniciar não apenas uma estética da contingência discursiva e institucional total, mas também da espetacularização total”18. No entanto, se o livro que Adorno escreveu no exílio levou-me ao limiar de minhas reservas em relação à obra de Klein (ergon) e à sua embalagem elaborada (parerga), foi a conferência de 1963 que me deu uma chave, permitindo-me atravessar a barreira e ultrapassar aquele limiar. Há várias razões para isso, mas vou discutir aqui apenas as duas mais importantes. A primeira consiste na seguinte observação a respeito do que há de fraudulento em Wagner: Adorno nota que, na obra de Wagner, “o que é magnífico [...] não pode ser claramente separado do que é questionável. Um dificilmente pode ser alcançado sem o outro; seu conteúdo de verdade e aqueles elementos que a crítica legítima julgou questionáveis são mutuamente interdependentes [...]; não há como escapar a esse entrelaçamento do verdadeiro e do falso em sua obra”19. A segunda, que é, em essência, parcialmente relacionada à primeira, surge da análise que Adorno oferece do papel do mito na obra de Wagner (ele fala, mais especificamente, sobre mitos violentos, mas isso se aplica também ao restante, de modo notável a todas as referências à “natureza”). Por esse papel nunca ser ocultado, por se revelar em estado, “a obra, não obstante sua tendência mitificadora, é uma denúncia do mito, quer queira ou não”20. Desde o início, Yves Klein toca no tema do fraudulento – no que pode ser chamado seu ato de batismo. Nan Rosenthal foi a primeira a chamar a atenção para os pequenos “livros” que Klein “publicou” em Madri antes de optar definitivamente por uma carreira artística, Yves peintures e sua contraparte irônica, Haguernault peintures (“livro” é claramente um exagero, do qual Klein frequentemente lançou mão mais tarde, ao se referir a esses folhetos de cerca de quinze pequenas páginas; “publicação” é ainda mais incorreto: longe das 150 cópias numeradas anunciadas no cólofon, havia somente algumas e é muito provável que grande parte delas tenha sido produzida apenas postumamente, a partir dos materiais que Klein havia trazido da Espanha). (Dusseldorf), na Hayward Gallery (Londres) e no Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madri). 12. O neologismo deriva do grego ergon, trabalho; “par + ergon” significando, portanto, algo que se define como acessório em relação a um trabalho ou elemento principal. O termo é usado pelo filósofo Jacques Derrida para designar algo que se apresenta para além do trabalho (ergon), externo a ele, sendo, contudo, irrecorrivelmente parte dele. [Nota da revisora da tradução] 13. RIOUT, Denys. Yves Klein: manifester l’immatériel. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. 14. KLEIN, Yves. Le dépassement de la problématique de l’art et autres écrits. Ed. Maria-Anne Sichère; Didier Semin. Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 2003. Este livro será citado, de agora em diante, como DEP. 15. Adorno, citando o musicólogo Paul Bekker, em In search of Wagner, op. cit., p. 79. Esse aspecto “fantasmagórico” da produção de Klein não é em lugar algum mais impactante que em seus projetos arquiteturais, em especial toda a série de desenhos “urbanísticos” feitos para ele por Claude Parent, em que o enorme maquinário que ele visionava para sua “arquitetura de ar” e suas fontes de fogo está escondido no subsolo. ARS Ano 7 Nº 15 60 Yves peintures é um caderno de reproduções coloridas enfeitado com um prefácio, em sintonia com o bem estabelecido modelo do catálogo de exposição em galeria comercial chique (ilustrações coloridas, papéis encorpados, um prefácio: tudo conota luxo). O primeiro elemento surpresa encontra-se no “prefácio”: entre seu título genérico (“Prefácio”) e o nome do “autor” (Claude Pascal, amigo de infância de Klein e poeta que concordou em emprestar seu nome para esse ritual de deleção simbólico), o “texto” consiste apenas de listras horizontais imitando o layout tipográfico de um ensaio (linhas impressas, parágrafos), muito similar ao Poème optique publicado por Man Ray em 1924, que imita em código Morse a configuração de um soneto21. A segunda surpresa (na época, importante), é que as “reproduções” em cores são, claro, retângulos monocromáticos (o fato de esses pedaços de papel colorido serem colados à mão nas páginas brancas não era necessariamente uma extravagância; pelo contrário, imitar a prática da Skira, então considerada o mais alto padrão em publicação de livros de arte, acentuou a conotação de luxo). O terceiro aspecto incomum diz respeito às “legendas” abaixo dos recortes de papel [paper cutouts] (com o último termo refiro-me deliberadamente a Matisse, que devia estar no radar de Klein)22. Essas legendas saem todas do mesmo molde: à esquerda, o nome Yves; à direita, o nome de um lugar, seguido de uma data e de uma dimensão da “obra” entre parênteses. Por exemplo, “Yves/em Londres, 1950 (195 x 97)” ou “Yves/em Tóquio, 1953 (11 x 65)”. Como Rosenthal demonstrou de modo claro, as “obras” supostamente reproduzidas em Yves peintures não existiam ainda, e de fato nunca chegariam a existir, a menos que nós – tal é, provavelmente, a interpretação com a qual Klein teria assentido, caso alguém o tivesse pressionado a esse respeito – tivéssemos de considerar sua simples concepção uma condição necessária e suficiente para sua existência (a variação da data, de 1950 a 1954, pretendia, essencialmente, afirmar que o “artista” havia tido a ideia de pinturas monocromáticas já em 1950, muito antes que pudesse considerar-se a si mesmo um artista, o que, de fato, muitos documentos e relatos confirmam). Mas como Rosenthal também nota, e embora Klein se referisse a esse trabalho como uma “seleção de reproduções de sua obra” (removendo as aspas que ele originalmente havia usado em “reprodução de” no rascunho de uma carta que descrevia o pequeno volume)23, vários indícios nos levam, provocativamente, a suspeitar de algum truque: as frases mudas assinadas por Claude Pascal debocham, sem dúvida, da tradição das belles lettres que era popular no mundo da arte em Paris (e agora em Nova Iorque; o prefácio do catálogo da exposição é um exercício necessário para qualquer homem de letras que se preze, assim como o é esse suporte para qualquer artista emergente); a natureza monocromática das “obras” que se alegam reproduzidas é um 16. O lado sádico de Klein alcança o ápice em seus projetos teatrais; veja-se, por exemplo, o intitulado Pure sensibility e publicado no Dimanche, “o jornal de um dia só”, para o qual ele imaginou amordaçar e acorrentar cada espectador ao seu assento até o final da apresentação. Cf. DEP, op. cit., p. 182. 17. O Éden antes da Queda (onde todos vivem nus) é o lugar utópico ao qual Klein se refere constantemente em seus escritos. 18. BUCHLOH, Benjamin H. D. Plenty or nothing: from Yves Klein’s Le vide to Arman’s Le plein. In: Neo-Avantgarde and culture industry: essays on European and American art from 1955 to 1975. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000, p. 269. Ver também, do mesmo autor: The primary colors for the second time. October, n. 38, p. 41-52, verão 1986; Klein and poses. Artforum, 33, n. 10, p. 93-97; 130; 136, verão 1995. 19. ADORNO, op. cit., 2002, p. 596. 20. Ibidem, p. 589. 21. Ver o Poème optique de Man Ray, publicado em 391 (o periódico editado por Francis Picabia), n. 17, p. 3, jun. 1924. É perfeitamente possível que Klein tenha se familiarizado com o poema de Man Ray 61 Yve-Alain Bois A relevância de Klein hoje ataque frontal e um embuste irônico sobre o páthos burlesco da art informel que então dominava a cena (retornarei a este ponto); a repetição absurda da palavra “Yves” em cada legenda (um primeiro nome, por isso um termo genérico, aqui balbuciado como um leitmotiv, como que em uma repetição infindável – um processo wagneriano, se é que há um – era o único método de afirmar qualquer identidade); as anotações geográficas estranhas (em Paris, em Londres, em Madri, em Tóquio, em Nice: em todas as cidades onde Klein viveu e “trabalhou”)24, e, finalmente, as dimensões. Conforme escreve Rosenthal, “as dimensões de altura e largura em cada legenda são medidas que, no caso de pinturas, e na ausência da abreviação ‘cm’ ou da palavra ‘centímetros’, declaram significar centímetros; acontece que as dimensões de Klein não descrevem o que é presumivelmente miniaturizado pela reprodução, mas justo o que está lá, a altura e a largura em milímetros dos papéis coloridos”25. Essa correspondência exata entre as dimensões reais dos retângulos de papel colorido e as dimensões simbólicas (sem indicação de escala) das pinturas virtuais é essencial ao jogo de espelhos em que Klein nos submerge – essencial tanto para o “entrelaçamento do verdadeiro e do falso” quanto para a “denúncia do mito” de que Adorno fala com relação a Wagner. Talvez devêssemos enfatizar o fato de que o início de Klein foi pleno de fúria. Ele desprezava seus pais, ambos artistas (o pai, figurativo, e a mãe, bem conhecida entre o grupo dos abstratos), por terem-no negligenciado em favor de suas carreiras (frequentemente vivia com sua adorável Tia Rose, que arcou com seus caprichos até o fim); esteve presente no meio de vanguarda boêmio a que sua mãe pertencia e ficou rapidamente enjoado dos discursos de salão que ela fazia em suas “segundas-feiras”. Foi com o cinismo blasé de um adolescente, como um refinado etnologista, que ele observou as engrenagens do mundo da arte, a pompa dos críticos, a economia promocional; ele também aprendeu história da arte como por osmose. Acima de tudo, a “arte abstrata” rapidamente o repugnou, com as tendências geométricas pós- cubistas a que sua mãe aderiu (ela expôs na galeria Denise René), e também com a art informel (precocemente, e de modo perspicaz, ele associou ambas as tendências). Georges Mathieu atraiu sua atenção desde muito cedo: este se tornaria o arquétipo do qual desacreditar, mas também a se imitar (e, assim fazendo, a se ultrapassar)26. Foi apenas mais tarde que aprendeu a formular seu desprezo para com a art informel, que também era embaraçosa: “Eu desprezo artistas que se descarregam em suas pinturas, como ocorre hoje, com frequência. Que mórbido! Em vez de pensar no belo, no bom, no verdadeiro, eles vomitam, ejaculam, cospem toda a sua horrível complexidade, apodrecida e infecciosa, em suas pinturas, como se fosse para se desonerar e atirar o peso nos ‘outros’, ‘os espectadores’ do trabalho, com toda a carga através de François Dufrêne, um amigo de muitos anos, que era, então, um poeta letrista. Sobre Klein e o movimento letrista, ver STICH, op. cit., p. 31-34; 48-49. 22. Sobre Klein e Matisse, ver ROSENTHAL, op. cit, p. 132, nota 51. Em particular, ficamos sabendo ali que, em dezembro de 1953, a mãe de Klein, Marie Raymond, publicou um artigo sobre Matisse em que “os recortes são extensamente discutidos e são reproduzidos”. 23. Cf. ibidem, p. 98. Como nota Rosenthal, na versão final de uma carta enviada a Jacques Tournier em 5 de agosto de 1955, Klein procurou dar substância ao mito de que ele era um jovem pintor com um corpo de trabalhos, colecionadores e projetos em que colaborava com arquitetos. Yves peintures, ele escreve, está “esgotado no momento, mas a editora tem, creio eu, algumas poucas cópias avulsas”. Carta publicada em DEP, op. cit., p. 329. 24. A interpretação mais lógica dessas indicações geográficas (mas a menos convencional para um catálogo de exposição) seria a de que se referem ao lugar onde as “obras reproduzidas” foram feitas. Essa interpretação é reforçada pelo fato de ARS Ano 7 Nº 15 62 de sua frustração e amargura ressentida”27. Apenas a posteriori, depois de ter escolhido uma identidade como artista (mas, daquele ponto em diante, tudo aconteceria muito rápido, e cada vez mais rápido, até o momento de sua morte prematura) é que Klein seria capaz de entender exatamente o que odiava na cultura para a qual havia sido tragado. Não obstante o que disse mais tarde, seus primeiros monocromos eram, acima de tudo, gestos parricidas, que de modo algum haviam sido concebidos como trabalhos de arte. Em um de seus muitos relatos autobio- gráficos (que servem para fortalecer sua legitimidade, tal como Yves peintures), Klein menciona as superfícies monocromáticas que havia pintado em 1946 (aos dezoito anos), ao mesmo tempo em que fazia coisas como “cavalos no campo” e “cenas de praia”, ou “composições com forma e cor”, sob a influência de seu pai e de sua mãe, respectivamente. Conforme relata, era para “ver, ver com meus próprios olhos, o que era visível no absoluto. Eu não considerava esses esforços como uma possibilidade pictórica na época, até o dia, cerca de um ano depois, em que disse: ‘Por que não’ [...] Contudo, não mostrei nada ao mundo de imediato. Eu esperei”28. Céticos apontarão aí a edulcoração dos julgamen- tos retrospectivos – e parece que Klein pré-data em vários anos seu “por que não” metafísico, esse momento “que decide tudo na vida de um homem”, o “sinal para um artista promissor, a indicar que o arquétipo de um estado novo das coisas se havia configurado, amadurecido, podia aparecer no mundo”29 –, mas, entre outros ensaios monocromáticos precoces, este me parece corroborar o mito: em Londres, em 1950, quando trabalhava para um moldureiro (com quem aprendeu, entre outras coisas, a arte do douramento e a técnica de montar de que se serviria mais tarde), ele declarou o seguinte, ao mostrar pequenos monocromos em pastel a seu amigo Claude Pascal: “Encontrei o que quero fazer”. Uma eureca tão incerta quanto agressiva já que, depois de pendurar seus pastéis na parede do apartamento que ele dividia com Pascal, convidou o professor de inglês de ambos para rir de sua piada30. “Encontrei”: encontrei a maneira de obter o melhor de todos eles (seus pais, os amigos deles, críticos e pintores, a alta cultura); a maneira de obliterá-los obliterando suas obras. Quatro anos mais tarde, Yves peintures continuou a servir a essa lógica adolescente, do mesmo modo que o envio, deliberadamente provoca- tivo, ao Salon des Réalités Nouvelles de 1955 (o fórum anual de sua mãe), de Expression de l’univers de la couleur mine orange (o primeiro monocromo de grande formato, ostensivamente colorido à base de água e pigmento, com um rolo). Mais ainda do que o pequeno volume de 1954, foi tal eclosão no cenário público, intencionalmente escandalosa, que estava destinada a mais tarde tornar-se seu verdadeiro “por que não” (a pintura não foi admitida no Salon, como se esperava, e Klein provocou um alvoroço, de modo que seu status de “rejeitado” – como Manet! – entrasse devidamente para os anais da história). que, em Haguenault peintures, essas anotações geográficas são convenientemente complementadas por informações sobre a “proveniência” das “obras” – informações claramente fictícias, mas desta vez oferecidas de acordo com a convenção: “Haguenault/Paris, 1951 (162 x 97), coleção Raymond Hains”, por exemplo. 25. ROSENTHAL, op. cit., p. 99. Essas observações são baseadas na cópia que Rosenthal estudou nos arquivos de Klein (reproduzida em Houston, mas não em MNAM), assim como em uma outra cópia que teria sido enviada por Klein à mãe, recém-saída da pequena prensa pertencente ao seu amigo impressor de Madri (conversa com o autor, 15 jun. 2006). As outras cópias reproduzidas e exibidas desde a morte de Klein, em que as dimensões dadas nas legendas não correspondem de modo algum às dimensões reais dos retângulos de papel colado, são, segundo Rosenthal, incorretas e póstumas. Ver ibidem, p. 231, nota 43, e, do mesmo autor, Comic relief. Artforum, 33, n. 10, p. 93-97; 130; 136, verão 1995. Este último artigo, considerando a exposição organizada por Stich, critica esse autor por ter exibido uma das cópias incorretas e por se recusar a acreditar que a correspondência 63 Yve-Alain Bois A relevância de Klein hoje * Os críticos de Klein frequentemente o apresentaram como um ator afetado e patético, um tipo de mau palhaço protofascista, e é verdade que quanto mais ele era acusado de má-fé, mais exagerava seu personagem e sua bizarria. Mas Adorno, em sua discussão sobre Wagner, nos adverte tanto da armadilha que Klein constrói (e com a qual nos testa), como da crítica que seu discurso e cada uma de suas atividades implicaram, de modo paradoxal e astucioso. Porque Klein trazia à tona, com todo o savoir-faire de vanguarda acumulado desde Wagner, uma das condições essenciais da arte moderna, pelo menos desde Courbet e Manet (desde a crise de representação que norteou os trabalhos de ambos). É a consciência de que o risco da fraudulência, o risco de ser motivo de chacota e de se ver denunciado como um rei que está nu tornou-se um risco necessário, mas é, também, a consciência de que cada obra de arte deve confrontar esse risco – deve mesmo solicitá-lo, desafiá-lo – caso se trate de ser totalmente autêntica. Mais do que qualquer outro artista dos anos do imediato pós-guerra, Klein experimentou essa condição como se assombrado por ela (apenas Beuys chega perto; Warhol é muito cool). Daí, por exemplo, suas inúmeras fantasias sobre uma nova ordem econômica mundial, livre deste “medium fixante”31 que é o dinheiro (a economia sendo o domínio do valor por excelência); sua fábula brilhante sobre a série de monocromos azuis de dimensões idênticas, na mostra que realizou em Milão, em 1957 (a anedota que vingou: muitos hoje estão convencidos de que essas pinturas foram todas colocadas à venda por diferentes preços, embora a ideia só tivesse ocorrido a Klein mais tarde); sua obsessão paranoica por direitos autorais e cronologia. A mitomania de Klein é notória. Suas invencionices são várias – as registradas pelos historiadores começaram muito cedo, talvez porque ele tenha sido reprovado no exame de ingresso na universidade, tal como sugere McEvilley: ele disse que Klein frequentou a Academia da Marinha Mercante, que tocava com Claude Luther em clubes de jazz, que criava cavalos na Irlanda etc. A anedota que se segue – uma dentre milhares – tipifica o tom de suas inúmeras histórias. Para retornar orgulhoso do Japão, onde havia passado um ano e meio para aperfeiçoar sua prática de judô, ele precisou obter o título de “4º Dan de Kokodan” (“sem isso, não poderia retornar, teria perdido tudo”, escreveu à sua supremamente generosa Tia Rose). Mas o nacionalismo japonês foi um obstáculo poderoso (seus examinadores “decidiram não promover com o título um estrangeiro sem que ele tivesse vencido pelo menos dez vezes ou sem que eles fossem adulados com dinheiro”). Embora geralmente não tivesse vergonha de pedir dinheiro a sua tia, ele odiava a ideia de comprar o seu título (“tenho milímetro/centímetro era um aspecto importante da concepção de Klein, justificando por esse mesmo fato a produção descuidada das cópias póstumas. Na cópia recentemente exibida em Frankfurt e reproduzida no catálogo (BERGGRUEN, Olivier; HOLLEIN, Max; PFEIFFER, Ingrid. Yves Klein. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004, p. 12-13), não apenas essa correspondência de dimensões não é observada nas legendas, mas dois dos retângulos estão “assinados” à direita (assinatura impressa em itálico: “English” [Inglês]). Um desses retângulos assinados, alaranjado, parece prenunciar Expansion of the color orange [Expansão da cor laranja], de 1955 (o único monocromo que está assinado, ou melhor, carimbado com uma inscrição, também em itálico: “K. mai. 55”). Nenhuma das pranchas é assinada na “primeira” cópia reproduzida por Rosenthal, mas esse autor viu vários retângulos de cor nos arquivos de Klein, do mesmo tipo usado no livro, nos quais uma “assinatura” foi impressa. Isso parece indicar que, num dado momento enquanto fazia esse livro, o artista pensou em distorcer ainda outra marca de autenticidade institucional. Rosenthal nota que, “se Klein tivesse ajustado esses papéis coloridos ‘assinados’ aos ARS Ano 7 Nº 15 64 sido muito sincero no judô até agora; não quero qualquer envolvimento de tráfico de dinheiro para comprar minha posição”). No entanto, ele não teve escrúpulos para inventar um novo subterfúgio (“mas há um jeito de impressioná-los, de fazê-los entender que quando eu retornar serei uma figura muito poderosa na França, e será vantajoso para eles terem-me do seu lado, fazendo a mim esse favor especial de me dar o 4º Dan antes de minha partida”). Ele então solicitou a cumplicidade da sua inocente fada madrinha, convocada a escrever ao chefão do judô no Japão: “Escreva rápido, tantine [tiazinha], mas construa bem a sua carta...”32. A carta deve ter sido “bem construída”, porque funcionou in extremis – embora para dar em nada, já que a Federação Francesa de Judô se recusaria, no final, a ratificar o título dado pelo Kokodan. Mas importa notar aqui a parcela de verdade (de “sinceridade”) que Klein se empenhou em preservar, mesmo mediante a manipulação mais desonesta. Você pode mentir o quanto quiser, contar todo tipo de história, desde que os fatos alegados descrevam a realidade tal como deveria ser (quando a “verdade se torna realidade”)33 – a venalidade pura e simples, todavia, é um veneno capaz de corromper até o mito. Com referência à venda de “pinturas imateriais” “durante” a exposição Vazio na galeria Iris Clert, em 1958 (mais uma data antecipada), Klein afirmaria, em 1959: “Acreditem em mim, vocês fazem seu dinheiro valer quando compram pinturas assim. Sou eu que estou sendo enganado ao aceitar dinheiro”34. Ouro puro, o símbolo da inalterabilidade desde tempos imemoriais, ainda mais quando é jogado nas águas do Sena durante uma cerimônia de supremo potlatch (o ritual em que todos os compradores de “zonas imateriais de sensibilidade pictórica” teriam de participar), o ouro é o que apagaria a cicatriz da corrupção monetária (o texto que acabo de citar fala de uma exposição coletiva em Anvers, em março de 1959, na qual o ouro apareceu pela primeira vez na panóplia de Klein: ele estabeleceu o preço para sua obra virtual – existente somente através da presença e do gesto bombástico do artista – em uma barra de ouro de um quilo)35. Mas, durante sua visita a Nova Iorque, ele quase admitiria que a transfiguração fiduciária do nada puro em outro (que nesse meio tempo ele havia aperfeiçoado com suas “zonas de sensibilidade”) era charlatanismo e que sua alquimia eficiente resultava apenas da credulidade de seu público (ou antes, de alguns entusiastas). “Pode parecer incrível, mas realmente vendi vários desses estados imateriais pictóricos”36. Esse entrelaçamento de verdadeiro e falso em nenhum lugar é mais chocante do que nos textos de Klein sobre sua exposição da “época blu” (a mostra para a qual ele decidiu a posteriori fixar um preço diferente para cada pintura, todas de mesmo tamanho, todas pintadas com o International Klein Blue). A esse respeito, ele explicitamente faz referência ao valor “real” tamanhos variados das pranchas na versão correta, isso teria resultado no aparecimento de tamanhos variados de assinatura” (op. cit., 1982, p. 131, nota 46). Certamente, mas esse expediente teria assinalado talvez depressa demais o caráter fictício das assinaturas 26. Sobre Klein e Mathieu, ver, em particular, MCEVILLEY, op. cit., p. 67; ROSENTHAL, op. cit., 1982, p. 94; 124, e STICH, op. cit., p. 175; 189-90; 223. Klein escreveu um texto pequeno mas ambíguo sobre Mathieu, não publicado em vida, em que transparece certa admiração (In: DEP, op. cit., p. 343). Na sua palestra na Sorbonne, no entanto, embora ele não cite o nome de Mathieu (e ninguém na época deixaria de entender), é ele o alvo (ver KLEIN, Yves. Conférence à la Sorbonne. In: DEP, op. cit., p. 144-145 – toda a passagem sobre os imitadores da caligrafia japonesa e fanáticos por velocidade em pintura). 27. Idem, L’aventure monochrome. In: DEP, op. cit., p. 240-241. Há outras versões menos violentas (publicadas antes) dessa passagem. 28. Idem, Le dépassement de la problématique de l’art. In: DEP, op. cit., p. 80-81. 29. Ibidem. 65 Yve-Alain Bois A relevância de Klein hoje da obra (isto é, um valor “invisível” aos olhos, para o qual um preço todavia pode ser estabelecido) e ao problema genérico do falso na arte: Desse modo, estou à procura do valor real da pintura, isto é, suponhamos duas pinturas rigorosamente idênticas em todos os seus efeitos visíveis e legíveis, como linhas, cores, desenhos, formas, formato, espessura da tinta e técnica em geral, mas uma é pintada por um “pintor” e a outra por um “técnico” habilidoso, um “artesão”, embora ambos oficialmente reconhecidos como “pintores” pelo público; esse valor real invisível significa que um desses dois objetos é um “quadro” e o outro não.37 Em um dos manuscritos desse texto, Klein acrescentou, no final da passagem, entre parênteses, os nomes de Vermeer e do famoso falsificador Han van Meegeren, que havia sido surpreendentemente bem- sucedido em enganar peritos até que fosse levado, de modo espetacular, aos tribunais depois da guerra38. Talvez Klein tivesse desistido de aludir a van Meegeren, na versão final de “L’aventure monochrome” [“A aventura monocroma”], porque as imitações produzidas pelo último provaram ser demasiado dessemelhantes de seus modelos (portanto marcando uma diferença visível – embora não percebida pelos historiadores da arte, todos cegos, claro – e não o tipo que ele buscava especificar). Em todo caso, a dança do verdadeiro/falso é essencial para a posição do Klein: é o que lhe permitiu simultaneamente lamentar o desencantamento do mundo e, de modo irônico, haurir substância e subsistência dele (relembrando suas escapadas juvenis com Arman e Martial Raysse, ele declarou ter exclamado na época “que o kitsch, o estado de mau gosto, é uma nova noção em arte: ‘a grande beleza não é realmente bela se não contiver mau gosto, um elemento autoconsciente do artificial com um toque de desonestidade’”39). Como Rosenthal analisou soberbamente, Há, no mínimo, três tons de voz para o mesmo conjunto de palavras sobre o problema de discernir o “valor real” da pintura [na passagem citada acima]: o tom de um crítico que lamenta a situação em que historiadores da arte tenham motivos questionáveis para fazer atribuições e que pintores abstratos possam perpetrar fraudes; o tom de um impostor, que sugere poder estar compactuando com a atividade que critica; e o tom de um verdadeiro artista, que, ao quebrar os tabus dos artistas e permitir a imputação, mesmo a si próprio, de que alguns artistas podem ser hipócritas, mostra quão sincero ele é.40 Resumindo, em um mundo em que tudo se tornou mito e espetáculo, somente a espetacularização do mito e do espetáculo podem conter uma parcela de verdade: o ato de demonstrá-los. E aqui voltamos a Adorno e Wagner. 30. Cf. MCEVILLEY, op. cit., p. 30; ROSENTHAL, op. cit., 1982, p. 96, e STICH, op. cit., p. 23. 31. O autor alude, neste caso metaforicamente, ao fixador químico da cor IKB (International Klein Blue), que o artista patenteou. A cor resultava da mistura de pigmento puro com uma resina sintética, normalmente aplicada como fixador; tal mistura garantia adesão e estabilidade aos pigmentos sem perda de sua vibração luminosa. [Nota da revisora da tradução]. 32. MCEVILLEY, op. cit., p. 36-37. Essa carta foi publicada na íntegra por Stich em várias ocasiões; Klein não hesita em caracterizar a carta que ele pediu para que sua tia escrevesse como um blefe (a palavra até aparece em letras maiúsculas). STICH, op. cit., p. 35-36. 33. Os títulos da primeira parte de “L’aventure monochrome”, uma coleção de textos em que Klein trabalhou esporadicamente mas que não foi publicada na íntegra até recentemente, eram “Le vrai devient réalité ou pourquoi pas!”. 34. KLEIN. Le dépassement de la problématique de l’art, op. cit., p. 94. 35. Idem, Conférence à la Sorbonne, op. cit, p. 121. Ver, a respeito desse ponto, a análise muito boa de RIOUT, ARS Ano 7 Nº 15 66 Mas o meu desvio por Wagner não foi motivado apenas por esta questão da delegação da arte ao espetáculo. Se fosse esse o caso, um modelo teórico mais direto do que o oferecido por Adorno teria sido Guy Debord, com quem Klein teve (por um tempo) excelente relacionamento – chegou mesmo a oferecer-lhe um monocromo –, até que o chefe da Internacional Situacionista o insultasse em sua revista (por sinal, eles usavam a mesma retórica peremptória – e creio ser um equívoco denegrir as habilidades da escrita de Klein se celebram-se as de Debord)41. A busca obsessiva pela verdade, pelo que Klein chamou de “a marca do imediato”, concerne ainda a outro legado do pensamento wagneriano, que teve considerável importância na cultura francesa no final do século dezenove – isto é, o simbolismo (os membros desse movimento consideravam Wagner um de seus maiores heróis). Ao se ler os textos de Klein, não há como não ficar abalado pela extrema semelhança deles com aqueles textos escritos, por exemplo, por Georges-Albert Aurier, Gustave Moreau, Charles Morice e até mesmo por Gauguin. Klein, provavelmente, não tinha familiaridade com os escritos desses poetas e pintores42, mas o divertido Cosmogonie des Rose- Croix [Cosmogonia dos rosacrucianos], de Max Heindel, no qual ele esteve profundamente imerso por longo tempo, deu-lhe acesso (mediante uma completa indigestão, mas as consequências disso são irrelevantes), de modo indireto, ao que era a base comum de ambos, uma ideologia difusa, tangida por neoplatonismo e Schopenhauer43. Ao escrever que “a mente não se nutre, não absorve e não dá nada, não rejeita, compreende tudo, vibra com a vida, ‘é’”44, Klein (sem o saber) parafraseia o Uno de Plotino. Do mesmo modo, quando fala em emanação, em envolver a atmosfera, em radiação invisível, entusiasmo, êxtase, abolição do movimento, vaporização do eu, daquilo que está além do pensamento, de unidade absoluta, é vocabulário neoplatônico copiado com exatidão dos simbolistas. Mesmo seus contumazes fatos consumados (a racionalização a posteriori), que ele não tardou a manejar com desenvoltura, parecem ilustrar a doutrina de Plotino (de acordo com este, na criação artística “nada resulta de consequências lógicas, da reflexão; tudo acontece antes que se possa atinar com consequências, antes que se reflita; porque todas essas operações vêm depois, do mesmo modo que o raciocínio, a demonstração e a prova”45). A ideia mesma de uma “visão inteligível”, tão cara à filosofia neoplatônica, é bastante próxima daquela à qual Klein aspirava (ainda que, provavelmente, tivesse considerado a expressão um oximoro): algo como “a visão sensível da qual alguém teria removido precisamente tudo o que fosse sensível e representativo, isto é, todos os obstáculos, as divisões e traços de opacidade”, uma visão a remover “a distância que separa os objetos da visão sensível” e que “simultaneamente abole a distância que separa o sujeito que vê do objeto visto”46. op. cit., p. 88-89. 36. KLEIN, Yves. Chelsea Hotel manifesto. In: DEP, op. cit., p. 298, originalmente escrito em inglês com a colaboração de Neil Levine e John Archambault. O relato mais preciso das “zonas imateriais de sensibilidade pictórica” e sua análise mais rigorosa podem ser encontrados no livro de RIOUT, op. cit, p. 96-116. 37. KLEIN. L’aventure monochrome, op. cit., p. 235. Estou citando a tradução de Rosenthal (In: Houston, op. cit., p. 105). 38. Esses parênteses aparecem apenas como uma nota de rodapé na edição dos escritos. Encontram- se na publicação do mesmo texto em MNAM, op. cit., p. 173. Sobre o escândalo de van Meegeren, ver ROSENTHAL, op. cit., 1982, p. 133-34, nota 90. 39. “Klein, Raysse, Arman: des Nouveaux Réalistes” [Klein, Raysse, Arman: os Novos Realistas], debate moderado por Sacha Sosnowsky, 1960, transcrição publicada em MNAM, op. cit., p. 263. 40. ROSENTHAL, op. cit., 1982, p. 109. 41. Cf. BOURSEILLER, Christophe. Vie et mort de Guy Debord. Paris: Plon, 1999, p. 109-112. Foi Debord que escolheu uma pequena pintura 67 Yve-Alain Bois A relevância de Klein hoje Poderíamos sorrir, chamar isso de bugiganga idealista e obsoleta e perguntar como o débito (inconsciente) de Klein para com uma antiga filosofia ressuscitada há mais de um século pelos simbolistas poderia ter o mínimo interesse para a interpretação de sua obra, mas essa pergunta também poderia ser feita com relação aos próprios simbolistas – com exceção, talvez, de Mallarmé, que optou por Hegel (Klein cita o poeta, mas sem estar familiarizado com ele, tendo encontrado citações dele em Bachelard). A pergunta, de fato, não é sobre débito algum, mas sobre como este débito é usado. Como Pierre-Henry Frangne nota, “no neoplatonismo, o simbolismo encontrou os meios filosóficos de, simultaneamente, manter e reduzir a exigência de transcendência e imanência, como também a de dualismo e monismo (do uno e do múltiplo, de sujeito e objeto, de ver e visto, de alma e corpo, ideia e sensação). Tudo isso no interior de uma filosofia que procura desenvolver a ‘simplicidade do ver’ através de um processo de subtração e desatamento, uma vez que o divino, sendo invisível, não admite predicação ou determinação, mas apenas negações”47. Se substituirmos “divino” por “imaterial”, chegamos basicamente ao programa de Klein. No lado “transcendência” do livro de contabilidade, encontramos a busca pelo absoluto, a infinitude azul, a “sublimação” (uma das palavras favoritas de Klein, de acordo com Arman)48, obsessão pela morte e muitas outras características. No lado da “imanência”: a exortação constante à “presença”, o desafio de cada meditação, a paixão cega pelo efêmero, a preferência pelo fogo que faz arder a obra e o homem, mais do que pelos restos derrisórios de cinza. Entre os dois, ou antes, dialeticamente, no emaranhado de ambos, temos o conceito de obra de arte como marca material de uma força vital poderosa demais para ser domada, mas também demasiado difusa para ser representada ou intelectualmente apreendida. Em termos de dualismo, temos a organização inteira, extremamente complexa, das exposições de Klein, tão bem descritas por Riout, cada uma concebida como o triunfo do imaterial sobre um contexto material que age por contraste, cada uma encenando algo como uma encarnação antes da ascensão (ou pelo menos da levitação). Em termos de monismo e da “simplicidade do ver”, finalmente, temos todas as declarações de Klein contra a composição, as mais lúcidas do seu tempo (depois daquelas feitas por Wladyslaw Strzeminski e pouco antes daquelas feitas por Frank Stella e Donald Judd). Em suma, embora o pot-pourri sincrético dos textos de Klein não seja muito animador, ele é coerente. Mas essa consistência (que, conforme creio, deve-se ao viés neoplatônico do seu jeito de pensar, inconscientemente, por meio de Heindel) não teria interesse se não lhe tivesse permitido desenvolver, apesar de todos os seus defeitos, uma obra de impacto. Por um lado, esta obra levou ao limite uma proposta que havia atraído pintores pelo menos desde Malevich (a parousia da cor pura). Por outro lado, no cenário (para grande surpresa de Klein), “porque eu posso colocar no bolso do meu casaco de baeta”. Bourseiller dá bastante informação confirmando a amizade entre Klein e o grupo do futuro Situacionismo (notadamente, “em 1956, ele pintou uma peça a quatro mãos com [Asger] Jorn, Ralph Rumney e Wallace Ting”). Em 1952, Klein compareceu à exibição de Hurlements en faveur de Sade [Uivos para Sade], o primeiro filme de Debord (a tela permanece totalmente branca durante os diálogos e totalmente preta durante os longos intervalos de silêncio). Quando a amizade deles acaba, Debord acusa Klein de plágio. Mas as surpreendentes afinidades entre Klein e certas produções da Internacional Situacionista vão bem além da anedota, especialmente com relação às utopias urbanas e arquiteturais de Klein, que lembram incrivelmente as de Constant. 42. Ele leu muito pouco: histórias em quadrinhos (Tintin e Mandrake o Mágico); depois Cosmogonie dês Rose-Croix de Heindel, ao qual ele se referiu incansavelmente durante dez anos (entre 1946 e 1956); depois o diário de Delacroix, que ele preferia às suas pinturas, e, finalmente, começando em 1958, alguns capítulos de vários livros de Bachelard. 43. Para as páginas que se seguem, sou ARS Ano 7 Nº 15 68 da arte francesa (e europeia), ela representou um despojamento irreversível e sem precedentes. Gostaria de concluir detendo-me um instante nesses dois últimos pontos (cor pura e despojamento). * Sabemos do orgulho e do ciúme com que Klein guardava sua invenção do IKB, o International Klein Blue. Ele até o patenteou. Críticos e historiadores (com exceção de Restany, claro) tendem a usar o termo invenção cautelosamente, entre aspas, sob o pretexto, como Carol Mancusi-Ungaro confirmou há 25 anos, de que a fórmula química do IKB não havia sido desenvolvida pelo próprio Klein, mas por um empregado da Rhône-Poulenc: a resina sintética que permitiu a ele fixar os grânulos de pigmento puro sem que eles perdessem a saturação foi providenciada, a seu pedido, por um vendedor de tintas e ferramentas astuto que se havia interessado por seus experimentos (foi também graças a ele que Klein tropeçou nas esponjas)49. Mas é o “a seu pedido” que importa aqui: muitos artistas antes de Klein mostraram-se descontentes diante do fato de que, quanto maior o poder de fixação (lamentavelmente, em proporção inversa à sua fragilidade) de um meio (ou aglutinante), mais turva é a intensidade do pigmento que ele deve fixar (o pastel é uma técnica quase sem meios, quase pigmento puro – é extremamente frágil embora suas cores sejam muito saturadas; na extremidade oposta do espectro há a pintura a óleo, que é robusta mas cujas cores são alteradas pelo óleo aglutinante). Com sua inabilidade infantil para aceitar uma resposta negativa a qualquer dos seus desejos, para aceitar o fato de que obstáculos materiais podem, sim, existir (uma mentalidade utópica compartilhada por todos os inventores), Klein recusou o dilema “saturação-fragilidade/perda de intensidade- estabilidade”. Fascinado diante dos frascos de pigmento puro (em pó) na loja do vendedor de tintas, ele logo perguntou se ainda não se haviam descoberto meios técnicos para fixar, de modo permanente, a vivacidade da cor pura (“a matéria-prima da sensibilidade”). Daí a fórmula do IKB (que, além disso, não demoveu Klein de exibir uma bandeja trazendo pó de pigmento azul, solto, na galeria Collette Allendy, em 1957, como se prestasse homenagem à sua epifania diante dos frascos de pigmentos). O resultado da sua tenacidade é memorável: nenhum pintor antes dele havia sido tão bem-sucedido a ponto de obter tal riqueza, tal profundidade de cor sem recorrer ao expediente do contraste; nenhum artista havia encontrado os meios (contudo, bastava apenas perguntar) de manter a saturação máxima de uma única cor com tanta potência e em superfícies cada vez maiores (lembremo-nos dos murais no teatro de infinitamente grato ao livro de Pierre-Henry Fragne: La négation à l’oeuvre: la philosophie symboliste de l’art (1860-1905). Rennes: Presses Universitaire de Rennes, 2005. 44. DEP, op. cit., p. 325 45. Apud FRAGNE, op. cit., p. 81-82. 46. Ibidem, p. 83. 47. Ibidem, p. 87. 48. Apud MCEVILLEY, op. cit., p. 51. 49. MANCUSI-UNGARO, Carol. A technical note on IKB. In: Houston, op. cit., p. 258-259. 69 Yve-Alain Bois A relevância de Klein hoje Gelsenkirchen, alguns medindo 6,09 por 1,82 metros). Ele está longe de ter inventado o monocromo, mas ninguém antes havia conseguido – dessa maneira tão encantadoramente simples, com apenas uma única cor saturada – “revolver as profundezas sensuais nos homens”50. Bem a propósito, tomo de empréstimo essas palavras proferidas por Matisse, pois de certa maneira Klein realizou o sonho de seu predecessor. Deixemos que a lembrança relatada por Gino Severini guie nosso julgamento: Um dia, Matisse me mostrou um rascunho que havia feito “do natural” em uma rua de Tânger. No primeiro plano, uma parede pintada em azul. Esse azul influenciava todo o restante, e Matisse deu a ele a maior importância de que fora capaz sem comprometer a construção objetiva da paisagem. Apesar disso, ele teve de reconhecer que não havia capturado uma fração da “intensidade” do azul, isto é, a “intensidade sensorial” que esse azul produzira nele [...]. Ele me disse que, para descarregar essa sensação azul que predominava sobre todas as outras, teria de ter pintado a pintura inteira em azul, como um pintor de parede; mas se tivesse recorrido a essa reação impensada, que teria sido importante apenas no momento da sensação, ele não teria consumado a obra de arte.51 Este sonho não poderia se tornar realidade para Matisse, seja por causa das exigências da representação, seja em razão da necessidade de uma transposição (sem o que, conforme ele acreditava, não existiria arte). Mas aí reside o paradoxo: Klein alcançou o sonho de ter apenas cor, sem mediação, em uma intensidade máxima – de tal modo que esta pudesse ser experimentada tão somente no momento, no momento inarticulado da sensação – através de uma lógica mística que parecia estar em completa oposição à afirmação da cor. Porque a cor era, entre todos os elementos não miméticos que compõem as práticas pictóricas, o mais condenado pela estética idealista (em contraposição ao desenho, claro), como algo material e ordinário. Esse paradoxo, essa mudança do idealismo mais extremo para o seu mais estrito oposto não é novidade; é, mesmo, uma das mais fascinantes características do simbolismo – como Frangne demonstrou brilhantemente a respeito de Gauguin e a cor, e como o fez Jean Clay, para além da cor, a respeito de todas as manipulações não miméticas e da importância do material e do corpóreo mesmo para os pintores simbolistas mais enleados pelo inefável (para o católico Maurice Denis, por exemplo)52. O paradoxo não é novidade, mas foi exacerbado por Klein com uma ansiedade sem trégua (de modo notável, na textura de suas superfícies monocromáticas, a respeito das quais ele se tornou maníaco). Creio que essa mudança (do ideal para a matéria) governa toda a obra de Klein. Por um lado, quando ele lida somente com 50. MATISSE, Henri. Statements to Teriade: on the purity of the means. In: FLAM, Jack (Ed.). Matisse on art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. 122. Seria a expressão de Matisse “um centímetro quadrado de azul não é tão azul quanto um metro quadrado do mesmo azul” familiar a Klein? (MATISSE, apud ARAGON, Louis. Henri Matisse: a novel. vol. 2. Trad. Jean Stewart. Nova Iorque: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, p. 308). Seus murais oceânicos (wagnerianos) em Gelsenkirchen, em todo caso, provam que o antigo mestre estava certo no que tange a cor e expansão de superfície. 51. SEVERINI, Gino. La peinture d’avant-garde. Mercure de France, jun. 1917. Reimpresso em SEVERINI. Témoignages: 50 ans de réflexion. Roma: Éditions Art Moderne, 1963, p. 63. 52. FRANGNE, op. cit., p. 115-118; CLAY, Jean. Gauguin, Nietzsche, Aurier: notes sur le renversement matériel du Symbolisme. In: L’éclatement de l’Impressionnisme. Saint-Germain- en-Laye: Musée Départemental du Prieuré, p. 19-28, 1982. ARS Ano 7 Nº 15 70 a pintura, é ela que conduz a uma de suas invenções mais espetaculares (o próprio formato delgado de alguns de seus primeiros monocromos, na exibição de 1956 na galeria Collette Allendy, por exemplo, medindo 50 centímetros de altura e 2,5 centímetros de largura, uma proporção que não tinha precedentes na história da arte exceto em algumas das pinturas de Barnett Newman, de 1950, que não podiam absolutamente ser familiares a Klein). Por outro lado, assim que começou a explorar novos campos da atividade artística (ele não sentia embaraços quanto à sua habilidade para enfrentar quaisquer empreendimentos), foi essa mudança que o levou quase automaticamente para além de tudo o que os praticantes desse campo jamais haviam entrevisto. A música talvez seja o caso mais notável: ao despojar, na Symphonie monoton, o som “de uma eclosão [attack] e de uma culminação [ending]”, privando assim a música de suas propriedades usuais (do ritmo, até mesmo da melodia – afinal, o que é uma melodia sem começo ou conclusão?), atributos que ainda garantiam a ela uma função narrativa ou figurativa, Klein declarou o som como ele é, em sua própria materialidade, erradicado de suas conexões temporais (o que “cria uma sensação vertiginosa”, ele notou, com justeza53). Foi ainda nesse momento que ele, talvez o primeiro, junto com Cage, rompeu com Wagner, para quem, pelo contrário, a eclosão, o golpe do arco no violino (ou o golpe do sopro), era, de acordo com Adorno, o processo demagógico mediante o qual se fundava a autoridade com que encantava plateias54. O monoton é um equivalente brilhante do monocromo: o único acorde permitido consiste nos ecos harmônicos que o som isolado produz por si próprio, do mesmo modo que qualquer cor vibra apenas porque precipita o eco natural (fisiológico) de seu contraste simultâneo. O que importa é a abolição do contraste formal, da articulação composicional (polifônica, “policrômica”, “poliformal”) que está sempre relacionada a um conceito cartesiano, do artista como agente subjetivo, e à natureza arbitrária do gosto (do artista e do espectador). Klein foi muito perspicaz a esse respeito, e por isso estava em condições de empreender o processo de despojamento que mencionei há pouco. Permitam-me, primeiramente, destacar como ele tocou no ponto crucial – a posteriori – como de costume. A história é importante e Klein a repetiu várias vezes com algumas variações: Por que cheguei a esse período azul? Porque antes disso, em 1956, na galeria Collette Allendy e em 1955, [no Clube dos Solitários] na galeria Collette Allendy [sic], eu havia mostrado cerca de 20 superfícies monocromáticas, cada uma de cor diferente, verde, vermelho, amarelo, púrpura, azul, laranja... Meu objetivo era mostrar “cor” e percebi, na abertura, que os espectadores se mantinham prisioneiros de seu modo condicionado de ver: diante 53. KLEIN. Le dépassement de la problématique de l’art, op. cit., p. 82. 54. ADORNO, T. Gesture. In: In search of Wagner, op. cit., cap. 2, p. 18-32. Em contraste, ver a nota escrita à mão por Klein na partitura de sua Symphonie monoton: “nenhuma eclosão deve ser perceptível – os golpes do arco não devem ser ouvidos”. In: DEP, op. cit., p. 346, nota 3. 71 Yve-Alain Bois A relevância de Klein hoje de todas essas superfícies de cores diferentes apresentadas na parede, continuavam a reconstituir os elementos como decoração policromática. Não podiam imergir na contemplação da cor de uma única pintura de cada vez, e isso era decepcionante para mim, porque, precisamente, eu não admito, de modo categórico, ter até mesmo o jogo de duas cores em uma mesma superfície. Em minha opinião, duas cores contrastantes em uma única tela forçam o observador não a imergir na sensibilidade, no que é dominante, na intenção pictórica, mas, diferentemente, forçam-no a ver o espetáculo da luta entre as duas cores, ou sua perfeita harmonia. Trata-se de uma situação psicológica, sentimental e emocional que perpetua uma espécie de reino da crueldade.55 Por certo, tal posição é praticamente idêntica à de Strzeminski, formulada cerca de 30 anos antes (também em textos com os quais Klein não poderia ter tido familiaridade, mesmo que tivesse visto inúmeras pinturas do artista polonês) –, com uma diferença chave, todavia. Os esforços de Strzeminski revelavam um materialismo de base, eram mesmo “realistas” (ele queria abolir toda transcendência, toda referência a um a priori anterior e exterior à existência física, hic et nunc, da pintura)56 . Contudo, por um lado, a similaridade surpreendente entre a teoria do Unismo e a de Yves – o monocromo – sugere precisamente o quanto a fenomenologia de Strzeminski estava longe de escapar à metafísica (aprendemos com Derrida que não há nada mais metafísico do que “presença”); por outro lado, no contexto da pintura na França do pós- guerra, enfadonho a despeito da estridência existencialista, as exigências maximalistas de Klein tinham um efeito catalisador. (Nesse momento na França, como por toda parte na Europa, era como se ninguém mais lembrasse do trabalho efervescente das vanguardas dos anos 1920 e 1930; pelo contrário, junto aos últimos espasmos do surrealismo, dos vultos monumentais dos grandes totens do início do século – o “estilo tardio” de Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Léger et al. – caracterizavam o trabalho da “jovem escola” uma polidez composicional, o academismo pós-cubista dos artistas abstratos, tanto do gênero geométrico como do figurativo). Em um único lance, o trabalho de Klein tornou inservível toda uma arte pusilânime, a arte de salão que ele detestava em sua mãe – e jovens pintores tinham de escolher sua turma. Alguns poucos pintores abstratos que não se sentiram ultrajados e que compreenderam sua lição foram imediatamente colocados em quarentena57 por críticos beletristas (penso em Martin Barré, por exemplo)58. Mas esses artistas é que teriam a última palavra. *Podemos levantar o nariz para o teatro farsesco de Klein, enxergar de outro modo (na direção do sublime) e acreditar que ao agir assim seremos 55. Idem, Conférence à la Sorbonne, op. cit., p. 134-135. 56. Tomo a liberdade de remeter a meu ensaio: Strzeminski and Kobro: in search of motivation. In: Painting as model. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, p. 123-155, 1990. 57. No original: “... were put in the stocks”. O termo designa uma espécie de cavalete de madeira usado na ARS Ano 7 Nº 15 72 capazes de nos furtar de lidar com sua fanfarrice, mas creio que isto seria um grande erro. Pois seus truques eram expedientes populistas – algo repugnantes, sim, mas talvez ele não tivesse muitos outros à disposição – com os quais era capaz de lutar contra o espetáculo igualmente pomposo mas ainda mais vazio da alta cultura burguesa de seu tempo (mais vazio porque havia sido aplanado pela indústria cultural embora fingisse ignorar esse fato). Quem quer que se recuse a ver uma denúncia radical da art informel nas fotos que o exibem executando suas “pinturas a fogo” com um maçarico no Centre d’Essais de Gaz de France perdeu o trem. Entretanto, esse ato é virulento, em grande medida, porque é falso: o bombeiro que Klein pusera de pé a seu lado, supostamente para intervir em caso de incêndio, não era realmente um bombeiro, mas um amigo motivado a desempenhar o papel. Nisto reside a relevância de Klein hoje: ele nos mostra como desmoralizar o espetáculo da indústria cultural encenando um ardil ainda maior que o dela. Revisão técnica da tradução: Sônia Salzstein Europa medieval como instrumento de castigo. Era fixado ao redor dos pés, mãos, e, às vezes, da cabeça do condenado, forçando-o a permanecer sentado ou de pé em público. [Nota da revisora da tradução]. 58. A respeito da admiração de Martin Barré pelo trabalho de Klein no final da década de 1950, do efeito imediato que tal interesse teve sobre sua prática pictórica e do modo como foi acusado de traição por críticos que até então o apoiavam, ver minha monografia sobre esse artista: Martin Barré. Paris: Flammarion, 1993, p. 5-8. Ao lado, Yves Klein apresenta na Sorbonne a palestra “A evolução da arte para o imaterial”, em junho de1959. 73 Yve-Alain Bois A relevância de Klein hoje work_blnkiy37nrd2dblh35dqg6dd3q ---- YENİ TÜRK EDEBİYATI ARAŞTIRMALARI Modern Turkish Literature Researches Research Article / Araştırma Makalesi Ocak-Haziran 2019/11:21 (01-37) Makalenin Geliş Tarihi: 23.03.2019 Makalenin Kabul Tarihi: 01.04.2019 METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik Kubilay AKTULUM1 ORCID: 0000-0001-9929-937X ÖZ Yapısalcılığın bilinen ortak bir tutumuna koşut olarak söylersek, giysi de bir metin; bir başka anlatımla, özel bir dildir. Bir metafor olarak, Rus Biçimcilerinden başlayan, Ferdinand de Saussure’ün Genel Dilbilim Dersleri’ndeki kavram çiftlerinden (dil/söz, eşsürem/artsürem, dizisellik/dizimsellik vd.) esinlenen, göstergebilimcilerce sürdürülen ortak bir tutuma göre moda da bir dildir. Roland Barthes, Moda Dizgesi adlı yapıtında özel bir dilsel biçim olarak moda dilini yapısalcılığın verilerine yaslanan yazınsalın kavramsal alanında kullanılan kavramlarla betimleyip tanımlamaya uğraşır. Bu çalışmada, R. Barthes’ın söz konusu yapıtındaki yönelimlerini bir yana bırakarak, göstergebilimsel bir tutumla, bir iletişim nesnesi, özel bir dil biçimi olarak modanın, dolayısıyla giysinin türsellik ve metinlerarasılık görüngüsünde özgüllüğünü betimlemeye çalışacağız. Metinlerarası bir yaklaşımın verilerini tüketirken göstergelerarası bir yöne kayarak değişik söylem biçimlerinde (burada moda ve giysi) kullanıma sokulan yazınsal gerecin disiplinlerarası bir çözümlemeye katkısını kısaca göstermeye uğraşacağız. Modanın, yazın olduğu kadar sinema, resim, mimari vb. alanlarla alışveriş içerisinde olduğunu göz önünde bulundurduğumuzda böyle bir yaklaşımın fazlasıyla geçerlilik kazandığı kolaylıkla görülebilecektir. Anahtar Kelimeler: Göstergebilim, metinlerarasılık, türsellik, göstergelerarasılık, üstgiysisellik, moda, Alexander McQueen. 1 Prof. Dr., Hacettepe Üniversitesi, Edebiyat Fakültesi Fransız Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü. eposta: aktulum@hacettepe.edu.tr METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 2 TEXTUAL GENERICITY AND FASHION: INTERTEXTUALITY –INTERVESTIMENTALITY– ARCHIVESTIMENTALITY ABSTRACT In accordance with a common attitude adopted by the structuralists, we can argue that clothing is a text, to put it another way, it is seen as a specific language. As a metaphor, fashion is a language based on a common attitude inspired by the pairs of concepts (signifier/signified, language /speech, diachronic/ synchronic etc.) in the Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure, shared also by semiologists and Russian formalists. In the System of Fashion, Roland Barthes attempts to describe and define the language of fashion as a specific language form, making reference to concepts used in the conceptual field of the literary text. In this study, leaving aside the theoretical orientations of R. Barthes in his book, we will try instead to describe the specificity of fashion as a special language form, and therefore of clothing in an intertextual perspective. Drawing on the data of an intertextual approach, we will try to show briefly the contribution of the literary instrument used in different forms of discourse (including fashion and clothing) in an interdisciplinary direction. When we consider that fashion establishes close relations with literature, cinema, painting, architecture, etc., it is easy to see that such an approach is gaining validity increasingly. Keywords: Semiotics, intertextuality, genericity, intersemiotics, archivestimentality, fashion, Alexander McQueen. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire (Yazınsal bir tür nedir?) adlı kitabında tür (fr. genre) ve türselliği (fr. généricité) birbirinden ayırır. Söz konusu ayrıma göre, tür, artgörünümlü bir sınıflandırma kategorisine ilişkindir (bir türün tanımlanmış özellikleri zaman içerisinde yinelenir). Tür kavramından söz edebilmek için kimi koşulların olması gereklidir: Örneğin, birbiriyle az çok benzer söylemsel ürünlerin bir araya toplanması; bir araya toplanan ürünlerin tipleştirilmesi ya da durağanlaştırılması (özellikleri bakımından) gerekir. Dominique Maingueneau’nun da vurguladığı gibi, bir araya getirme/durağanlaştırma, toplumsal-tarihsel (artgörünüm) bir boyut içerir. Böylelikle türler, kültürel ve ideolojik olarak sınıflandırılırlar. Tarihin belli bir döneminden başlayarak günümüze gelinceye değin her biri özgün bir yazı modeli ve beklenti ufku olarak işlerlik kazanır. Türsellik ise metinsel bir etkidir. Gérard Genette, Introduction à l'architexte ve Palimpsestes adlı kitaplarında türsellik yerine, metinselaşkınlığın biçimlerinden birisi olarak gördüğü üstmetinsellik kavramını kullanır. Üstmetinsellik diğer iki kavramı içermektedir: söylem tiplerini ve sözceleme biçimlerini. Burada belli bir metni belli bir türe ya da türlere bağlayan ilişki/ler sorgulanır. Üstmetinsellik, anametinselliğin özel bir biçimi sayılır. G. Genette, türsellikten metinsel bir üretkenlik olarak söz eder. J.M. Schaeffer’e göre türsel bir okuma, çözümleme yapabilmek için farklı metinsel düzeylerde benzerlik özelliklerinin yan yana bulunması gerekir. Üstmetinsellik görüngüsünde, metnin birinde bir türün kimi özellikleri Kubilay AKTULUM 3 yinelenir, ötekinde bu özellikler dönüştürülür. Türsellikten ayrı olarak tür, yineleme ve dönüştürme ilişkilerini dikkate almaz. Bir başka anlatımla, tür, metinlerin ait oldukları kategoriler repertuarını belirtir. Bir diğer anlatımla, tür adlandırması bir sözceyi belli bir metinler kategorisine indirgemektir (örneğin, bu metin bir destandır demek, onu destan türlerinin toplandığı bir rezervuara dâhil etmektir). Türsellik ya da türsel etki kavramı ise daha dinamik bir sürece, söylemleştirme ve yorumlama sürecine vurgu yapar. Türsellik, bir metnin, ucu açık öteki türsel kategorilerle ilişkilendirilmesidir. Bu ilişkilendirme türsel etkilerin üretimine ve tanınmasına dayanır. Bir metin varsa bu metnin yarattığı türsel bir etki de vardır. Bir başka anlatımla, her defasında metni oluşturan sözcelerin belli bir söylem sınıfı içerisine katılımı söz konusudur. Şunu da eklemeliyiz: Bir metin bir türe kendiliğinden bağlanmaz; hem üretilirken hem alıntılanıp yorumlanırken bir ya da birden fazla türle ilişki kurabilir. Türsellik ayrıca toplumsal, bilişsel bir süreçte işlerlik kazanır. Türde, bir metin kategorisinin toplam özelliklerine, türsellikte bir metnin söylemleştirilme ve yorumlanma düzeylerine bakılır. Yazınsal bağlamda, şiir, roman, tiyatro akla hemen gelen türler olarak bilinirler. Yapıtlar onlara göre en kestirmeden sınıflandırılırlar. Bir repertuar düşüncesi içeren tür, durağan bir yapıdır. Türsellik ise daha devingendir. Bir metnin anlamı yalnızca belli bir etiket altında özellikleri belirlenmiş bir bilgi toplamıyla açıklanmaz. Bir metin birden fazla türsel kategoriye ait olabileceğinden başka türlerle ilişkileri içerisinde de açıklanabilir, bir yazarın ve okurun bakış açısına göre farklı biçimlerde algılanabilir. Kimi metinler birden fazla türün dönüştürülmesiyle oluşurlar (örneğin, postmodern kategorisinde yer alan metinler böyledir). Farklı söylem biçimleri, sözceleme biçimleri üzerine kurulu olabilirler. Farklı türler üzerine oturtulan bir metni (örneğin L. Aragon’un Théâtre/Roman’ı – Tiyatro/Roman - ya da Blanche ou l’Oubli’si –Blanche ya da Unutuş–) türsel olarak sınıflandırmak olanaksız olmasa da alabildiğine güçtür. Roland Barthes’ın yazdığı metinlerde göze çarpan söylemsel, yöntemsel çeşitlilik, bakış açılarındaki farklılıklar onları belli bir kategoriye indirgemeyi neredeyse olanaksızlaştırır (burada, bir metindeki – özellikle postmodern olarak nitelenen metinler– türsel çeşitliliğin toplumsal, siyasal, düşünsel, dilbilimsel, estetik vb. gerekçelerini tartışmayacağız; bu başka bir konu). Bir metin, yenidenyazmalar, yazarın yorumlarıyla zaman içerisinde değişikliğe uğrayabilir. Burada, yazar etkili (fr. auctorial) bir türsellikten; alımlama düzeyinde ise okur etkili (fr. lectorial) bir türsellikten söz edilir. İkinci durumda, bir metnin okurlarca değişik dönemlerde değişik yorumları söz konusudur. Aynı içerik farklı koşullarda farklı biçimlerde yorumlanabilir. Jean-Michel Adam’a bakılırsa, türselliği tanımlayan metnin bileşenlerinden birisi metinsellik, diğeri metinselaşkınlıktır. J.M. Adam, bu görüngüde, bir başka saptama daha yapar: “Türler ancak bütünceler halinde incelenebilirler.” “Bir metnin bileşenleri tek başlarına betimlenemez.” (Ablali 2013 :157-158) Türsellikten söz etmek bir normdan söz etmektir, norm ise bir sıklık, yineleme METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 4 sorununa bağlıdır. Bir metinde açık ya da kapalı bir biçimde türsel olarak belli bir geleneğe gönderme yapan, onu çağrıştıran özellikler yinelenir. Şimdi, bu kısa tanımlamaları yazın dışında bir başka disipline, modanın alanına aktaralım. Yapısalcıların görüngüsüne yerleşerek bir tanım önerirsek, moda’da her giysinin bir metne (metaforik anlamda) karşılık geldiğini ileri sürebiliriz. Her metnin de doğal olarak belli bir türe ilişkin olması beklenir. Bir tasarımcının tüm giysi tasarımlarını türsel olarak kategorize edebilmenin en etkili yolu, kanımızca, giysilerin belli bir anlatısallık mantığı üzerine oturtulan, belli bir düşünce ya da izlek çevresinde öbeklenen kavramsal moda tanımına uyan alandan seçilmesine bağlıdır. Gerçekten de belli bir anlatısallık mantığı üzerine oturtulan bir koleksiyonu oluşturan giysileri türsel olarak kategorize etmek ancak bu durumda kolaylaşır. Türsellik bir koleksiyondaki bir giysinin ya da giysiler toplamının değişik giysi türleri olduğu kadar sanatsal biçimlerin söylemleriyle ilişki kurarak yarattığı ayrışıklık özelliğine göre belirlenir. Alexander McQueen, bir ‘kavramsal modacı’ tanımlamasına oldukça uygun düşmektedir, çünkü onun her koleksiyonu belli bir içerik (izlek ve düşünce) üzerine oturtulmuş bir anlatı gibidir. Giysisel (metinsel) düzeyde ise, koleksiyonlarının en belirgin yanlarından birisi, bir giysinin başka giysilerle olduğu kadar değişik sanatsal biçimlerle (bir giysinin/koleksiyonun yazın, sinema, resimle olan alışverişleri) ilişkisini belirten ‘giysiselaşkınlık’tır (fr. transvestimentalité). Kanımızca, onun koleksiyonlarını belli bir türe, biçeme, söyleme biçimine göre değerlendirmek; her biri belli bir başlık altında bir araya getirilen, anlatısal bir boyut eklenen koleksiyonları bir bütün halinde incelemek, türsel olarak sınıflandırmak, gösteren ve gösterilen düzleminde bir dizi norma indirgenen sanatsal türlere, biçemlere ya da izleklere göre konumlandırmak olasıdır. Alexander McQueen’in giysi tasarımlarını, her biri kendi içinde bir dizi norma indirgenmiş, kurala bağlanmış, tanımlanmış, gelenekselleşmiş koşuluna uygun olan sanatsal biçimlere (grotesk, barok, gotik, trajik, yüce, iğrençlik), kurumlaşmış türlere ya da biçemlere göre konumlandırmak yanında izleksellikleri açısından değerlendirebiliriz (türsellik, biçem yanında izlekleri de kapsar). Türsellikten söz edebilmenin koşullarından birisi, şu ya da bu türün anlatım biçimi, yapıları vb. yanında izleksel bakımdan kendine özgü içeriğinin ne olduğunu dikkate almaktır. Her sanatsal biçim sınırlı sayıda izlekle ve biçemle belli bir türe aitliğini bildirir. Catherine Spooner’in vurguladığı gibi, “belli bir türe aitlik tam bir özdeşliği zorunlu kılmaz; yalın olarak türle belli bir ilişkiyi var sayar” (Spooner 2006: 26). Kullanılan kimi izlekler ve motifler şu ya da bu türü anımsatır, onun etkilerini sezdirir, anlamını söz konusu türe göre belli eder. Bir başka çalışmada A. McQueen’in giysi tasarımlarını söz konusu şu ya da bu türe göre konumlandırırken kimi temel izlekleri de ortaya koymaya uğraşacağız (Koleksiyonların özgüllüklerini kavramanın yollarından birisi budur). Ancak bu çalışmada öncelikle, metinselaşkınlık ilişkileri arasında sayılan üstmetinsellik kavramına koşut olarak üstgiysisellik kavramından ne anlamamız gerektiği üzerinde duracağız. Kubilay AKTULUM 5 A. McQueen’in giysi tasarımlarını üstgiysisellik bağlamında değerlendirirken en az iki kavramı gözden uzak tutmamak gerekir: Birisi “avangard, diğeri kavramsal moda/sanat. Kısaca değinelim: Önce bir askerlik terimi olarak kullanılan, daha sonra sanatın alanına aktarılan avangard kavramı XIX. yüzyılın başında ortaya çıktı. Kimi ütopist düşünürler, toplumsal bir özgürleşme bağlamında bu kavramı kullanmaya başladılar. Örneğin, 1825 yılında Saint-Simon, sanatçı ve onun toplumda özgürleştirme işlevi arasında bağ kurarak şunları söyler: “Avangard (öncü) rolü oynayacak olan bizleriz, yani sanatçılar.” Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant, Saint-Simon’dan esinlenerek şu tanımlamayı yapar. “Toplumun kendini ifade biçimi olan sanat, en ileri toplumsal eğilimlerden birisidir; öncüdür, açıklayıcıdır. Bir sanatçının gerçekten avangarda ait olup olmadığını bilmek için insanlığın nereye yöneldiğini ve insan türünün yazgısının ne olduğunu bilmek gerekir.” (Encyclopædia Universalis, 2019). Bu tanımlamalara bakılırsa, avangardın doğasında bir önceden haber verme düşüncesi vardır. Bizi ilgilendiren bir diğer özelliği şudur: Avangard sanatçı, akademik sanat anlayışına karşı çıkar. Kendince yeni bir değerler dizgesi oluşturur. Durmadan yenilik ve deneysellik peşinde koşar. Yetke kavramını, öncellerin koydukları kurallara sıkı sıkıya bağlanmayı reddeder. Uzlaşılara sırtını döner. Hatta, avangard sanatçının, çağının önünde giden kişi olduğu söylenir. Kuralların baskısıyla sanat yapılamayacağına, güzelliğin değişmeden kalmasının olası olmadığına inanan avangard sanatçı sınırları zorlar, hep şaşırtmak ister. Bitmiş bir yapıt anlayışına karşı çıkan avangard sanatçı kendi kendine yeten yapıt anlayışını ise benimsemez. Bu kısa tanımlamalardan şu sonucu çıkarmak son derece kolaydır: Avangard, yenilik, yaratıcılık, gelecek öngörüsü demektir. Sanatçı, tarihsel ve toplumsal bir rol aldığını düşünerek doğayı ve sanatın işlevini değiştirebileceğine inanır. Avangard sanat bir eylem sanatıdır, bireysel ve toplumsal bilinci etkilemeyi ve geliştirmeyi, herkesin algılama, söyleme, etkin olma biçimini değiştirmeyi hedefler. Avangard sanatçı, estetik ve varoluşsal değişim konusunda kendi geleneğini yaratmak arayışındadır. Avangard, insan bilincinin kendini yenileme ve onu yönlendiren koşulları dönüştürme, kendi sınırlarını aşma, imgelemi serbest bırakma, kendini keyfince gerçekleştirme çabasıdır. A. McQueen, avangard tanımlamalarına uyan bir tasarımcıdır. Geçmişe tümüyle yüz çevirmez, koleksiyonları tarihsel, söylensel, güncel, yazınsal göndermelerle doludur. Onları olduğu gibi yinelemez, her defasında kendince dönüştürerek yeniden yaratır. Jacques Derrida’dan esinlenerek söylersek, eskiyi söker ve kendince yeniden birleştirir. Değişik göndermeler aracılığıyla koleksiyonlarına değişik izleklerle anlatısal bir boyut katar. Öyleyse kavramsal sanattan söz edebiliriz. Bir düşünce sanatı olarak bilinen kavramsal sanatta sanatçı, ürettiği bir yapıt aracılığıyla bir düşünceye özgün bir biçim verir. Dolayısıyla yapıttan çok fikir öne geçer. Avangard’da olduğu gibi burada da geleneksel sanat anlayışının önüne geçilir. Alexander McQueen’in savunduğu görüşe METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 6 koşut olarak söylersek, sanat yapıtı tüketime yönelik, satılmak için üretilen bir değer nesnesidir, anlayışı yıkılmak istenir. Sanatsal bir ürün sanatsal bilgiye hizmet etmelidir, öyleyse kendinde bir amaç olmamalıdır. Alexander McQueen’in giysi tasarımları görsele seslenen birer giysi olmaktan öteye geçerek bir düşünce üzerine oturtulurlar. Koleksiyonlar izleyiciyi durmadan düşünmeye zorlarlar: “Defilelerim kışkırtıcıydı, nedeni ise dikkat çekme gereksinimiydi. Artık buna ihtiyacım kalmadı, ancak, insanların dikkatini çekmek için 20 dakikam olduğuna inanıyorum. Yaptığım şeyden belki hoşlanmıyorsunuz, en azından yaptığım şey size düşünmeye zorluyor.” A. McQueen için önemli olan izleyiciyi her adımda düşünmeye zorlamaktır (doğal olarak, A. McQueen, koleksiyonlarında sergilediği giysileri satmak arayışında olmamıştır. Önce bir sanatçı olduğunu söylemesi ise boşuna değildir). Ancak şunu da eklemeliyiz: A. McQueen, giysi tasarımlarını bir sanatçı gibi yaptığını söylese de genel olarak moda, sinema, resim gibi örtük anlamların yoğun olduğu, sözbilimsel ve şiirsel yanın baskın çıktığı bir uğraş değildir. Dolayısıyla kavramsal moda tanımına uyan tasarımlar dışında modada söz konusu diğer sanatsal biçimlerdeki gibi anlamsal bir çeşitlilik ve derinlik aramamak gerekir. Çünkü ilke olarak moda, düşündürmekten çok görsele seslenen, daha çok güzellik kavramının, düzanlamın öne çıktığı bir alandır. Gilles Lipovetsky’nin söylediği gibi, moda geçici olanla “estetik bir fantazi” mantığına dayanır (1987: 39). Olası anlamları arasında ağırlıklı olarak ben’in estetik olarak yüceltilmesi, özsever bir bireyselleştirme sayılabilir. Moda, bireysel bir özgürleşmeye kapı aralar. Gilles Lipovetsky’nin ona yüklediği birkaç anlam öncelikle bunlardır. Modern dönemlerde moda değişik sanatsal biçimlere gönderme yapmaktan, onlardan esinlenmekten geri durmaz: “Öte yandan modern sanat akımlarının Birinci Dünya Savaşı’ndan sonra modanın demokratik dönüşümü üzerinde gözle görülür etkisini nasıl görmezden geliriz? 1920’li yıllarda kadının doğru ve düz silueti açık ve açısal planlardan, dikey ve yatay çizgilerden, geometrik çevre ve yatay çizgilerden oluşan kübist resmin uzamıyla doğrudan ilişkilidir, Léger’in boru biçimli evrenine, Manet ve Cézanne’ın ardından Picasso’nun, Braque’ın, Matisse’in biçemsel incelemelerine anıştırma yapar. (…) Moda, modernist tasarıdan dersler çıkardı” (Lipovetsky 1987: 91). Kimi tasarımcıların biçemleri konusunda ise sanatsal göndermelere başvurulur: “Dior, terzilerin Watteau’su, Balenciaga, modanın Picasso’su sayılır. Moda kreasyonu kendiliğinden sanatsal alıntılara başvurur: Mondrian ya da Pop art giysiler, Yves Saint-Laurent’ın Picasso etekleri böyledir.” (Lipovetsky 1987: 96). Kimi moda tasarımcılarının, biçemlerine biçimsel olduğu kadar anlamsal bir derinlik katma yolu değişik sanatsal biçimlerin verilerini alıntılamak, onlara anıştırma ya da gönderme yapmak olmuştur. Alexander McQueen, koleksiyonlarında göndergeselliği estetik bir seçim durumuna getirenlerdendir. 1960’lı yıllardan başlayarak değişik sanatsal biçimler gibi moda da çoğullaşır; kolajlara, biçemsel çeşitliliğe oldukça fazla yer vermeye başlayan bir alan olur. Gerçekten de orada imgelem alabildiğine serbestleşir. Giysilerde biçimsel bakımdan bir “anlamsal ya da göstergebilimsel Kubilay AKTULUM 7 zenginlik” (Lipovetsky 1987: 196) yaratma çabasına girilir. Tasarımcı, durmadan ‘yenilik’ arayışında olan bir yarı tanrı konumuna gelir. Moda, yeni koşullarda, kendi olanaklarıyla yeni bir dil yaratmaktan, çoksesli bir gösterge durumuna gelmekten uzak değildir. Bu yeni yaklaşım moda dilini (ve öteki dilleri) belli kalıplara indirgeme, her şeyi dizgeleştiren, dizgeleştirirken yalnızca içsel verilerle yetinen göstergebilimcilerin ve yapısalcıların tutumlarından farklıdır. Gerçekten de Ferdinand de Saussure’ün Genel Dilbilim Dersleri’ndeki varsayımlarından ve kavramsal verilerinden yola çıkan kimi göstergebilimciler moda dilini göstergebilimsel bir görüngüde kalarak betimlemekten geri durmamışlardır. Örneğin, Roland Barthes, Système de la mode (Moda Dizgesi) adlı çalışmasında, yazıya geçirilmiş modanın özel bir dil dizgesi olarak işleyişini betimler, bir göstergeler dizgesi olarak moda dilinin özgüllüğünü belirlemeye girişir. Moda dilini bir göstergebilimci tutumuyla irdelemeye girişen başka araştırmacılar da olmuştur. Örneğin, A.J. Greimas, doktora tezinde göstergebilim ve moda arasında ilişki kurma çabasının bir düş kırıklığı yarattığından söz eder (1948). R. Barthes’ın girişimi bir başka düş kırıklığıdır: “Modayla yolunda gitmeyen nedir? Göstergebilimle yolunda gitmeyen nedir?” Sorunlardan birisi şudur: Modada göstergeler yazınsal alanda olduğu gibi arı simgeler değillerdir. Bu nedenle R. Barthes, çalışmasında moda yerine söylemden (moda söyleminden) söz eder. Doğrudan moda yerine moda üzerine kimi dergilerde yazılmış kısa yazıları çözümler. Bir başka anlatımla, modayı tümüyle yazıya indirger: “Şunu söyleyeceğim, Moda Dizgesi tümüyle şiirsel bir proje gibi tasarlanabilir, hiçbir şeyden, ya da çok az şeyden yola çıkarak, düşünsel bir nesne yaratmaya dayanıyor”(1981: 8). R. Barthes, biçimsel bir çözümlemeye giriştiği çalışmasında ne şiirselliğe gönderme yapan imgelerden ne de basmakalıplarla doldurulmuş gösterilenlerden söz eder. Modayı kuramsal bir imgeleme indirgemekten öteye geçmez. Birkaç aşamadan oluşacak bu çalışmada, R. Barthes’ın göstergebilimsel modelini benimsemeyeceğiz; bizim yaklaşımımız giysiyi bir göstergeler dizgesine indirgemek olmayacak. Önce, Gérard Genette’in metinselaşkınlık başlığı altında sınıflandırdığı üstmetinsellik (burada, üstgiysisellik, fr. architextualité ve archivestimentalité) kavramına koşut olarak üstgiysisellikten ne anlamamız gerektiği üzerinde duracağız (bir başka çalışmada A. McQueen’in, her birine bir anlatısallık boyutu kattığı kimi giysi tasarımlarını (koleksiyonlarını) kanonlaşmış biçemler, türler, sanatsal tarzlar karşısında ve kimi izleklere göre konumlandıracağız. İlişkiler bir yapıtla başka bir yapıt arasında gösteren ve gösterilen düzlemlerinde kurulabileceği için koleksiyonların giysisellik boyutlarının ötesinde ağırlıklı olarak türselliklerine (çağrıştırdıkları sanatsal türlere ve biçemlere), G. Genette’in adlandırmasıyla, üstgiysisellik boyutlarına yönelik belirlemeler yapacağız. Çalışmanın başlığına gelince : Roland Barthes, le Système de la Mode (Moda Dizgesi) adlı kitapta, Saussure’ün dil/söz ayrımına koşut bir biçimde, kostüm (fr. costume) ve giysi (fr. vêtement) arasında bir ayrım yapar. Giysi (dolayısıyla, giyinmek), “kostümün yapısal, kurumsal biçimidir METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 8 (dile karşılık gelir)”. Kostüm, bir yere, ülkeye, döneme, koşula vb. özgü giysi demektir, istenildiği gibi tasarlanabilir, istenilen parçalardan oluşturulabilir, bir topluma, bölgeye, yere, dine, kuruma vb. aitliğin simgesi olabilir. Bireysel olandan bağımsız, kurumsal olduğu kadar toplumsal bir gerçekliktir. Sözlük tanımına göre giysi, bedeni örtmeye yarayan, giyinme edimini oluşturan tüm parçaların toplamına verilen addır. Roland Barthes’ın tanımlamalarına koşut olarak söylersek, kostümün yapısal, kurumsal biçimi olan kostüm, bireyden bağımsız, kurumsal, toplumsal bir gerçekliğe ilişkinken giysi, genel bir kurum olarak, bireyin kendini belli bir görünüme soktuğu “biricik gerçekliktir” (Calefato 2004 :8). Giysi, psikolojik ya da morfolojik (biçimbilimsel) sorgulamalara açık olsa da, R. Barthes’ın söylediği gibi, tarihsel ya da toplumsal araştırmalara gerçekten konu olacak olan daha çok kostümdür. Giysi ve kostüm arasındaki ayrım Saussure’ün toplumsal, üzerinde uzlaşılmış bir kurum olan dil ve dilin belli bir zamanda ve uzamdaki özel kullanımı olan söz arasında yaptığı ayrıma benzer. Giyinme (fr. habillement) edimi giysi ve kostümün iç içeliğine bağlı olduğundan genel bir edime karşılık gelir. Her giyinme bir söz işlemi gerçekleştirmektir. Moda ise giysilerin, tanımlanmış, belli bir döneme karşılık gelen karakteristik özelliğidir. O özelliğe uyan bir model moda sayılır. Roland Barthes, modayı kostüm olgusu içerisinde konumladırır, ancak giysi ve kostüm arasında bir alışveriş olduğundan söz etmekten geri durmaz. Örneğin haute couture, geleneksel bir kostümden biricik bir giysi yaratabilir. Kısacası, bireyle toplum arasında bağ kuran giysi toplumsal bir uzlaşıya; giyinme, bir edime ve kostüm, bir sözceye (sözce durağandır) karşılık gelir. Moda ise (değişkendir ve metaforlaşabilir, örneğin dünyanın düzensizliğini bir metaforu olabilir) bir dizi özelliğin temsil edildiği bir döneme, bütüne (koleksiyona) gönderme yapar. Bu tanımlamalara göre Moda ve Metinlerarasılık genel başlığı altında konumlandırdığımız Metinsel Türsellik ve Moda ile aslında modanın (özellikle kavramsal modanın) dönemsel olarak göze çarpan bir özelliğinin başka söylemlerden alıntı yapmak olduğunu imliyoruz. Modanın söylemsel uçlarından birisinin metinlerarasılık (moda da değişik sanatsal biçimlerden, dönemlerden, tarzlardan vb. alıntı yapmak, onları yinelemek bilinen bir özelliktir) olduğu varsayımlarımızdan birisidir. Böyle bir adlandırma ile bir tasarımcının (burada, Alexander McQueen), kostümün yapısal, kurumsal bir biçiminden yola çıkarak yarattığı giysilerin dil düzleminde konumlandırılabileceğini ileri sürüyoruz (bir kez daha anımsatalım ki dil gibi metin de bir göstergeler dizgesidir savı yapısalcıların/göstergebilimcilerin paylaştıkları ortak bir savdır). Üstgiysisellik alt-başlığı ile vurgularımızdan birisi şudur: Yazınsalın alanında kullanılan metinlerarasılık yalnızca bir çözümleme modeli değil, aynı zamanda metinsel bir etki ve bileşendir. Bu tanımlamaya yaslanarak, A. McQueen’in giysi tasarımlarını hem metinlerarası Kubilay AKTULUM 9 çözümleme modelinin verilerini kullanarak irdelemek hem de onun giysi tasarım estetiğinin odağında büyük ölçüde metinlerarası/giysilerarası/göstergelerarası bir tutum olduğunu göstermek olasıdır. Bunlara ek olarak, A. McQueen’in tasarımlarında birer izlek olarak gündeme gelen kullanımları belli bir tür, tarz, biçem, izlek altında öbeklendirebilir ve kimi anlamlarını belirleyebiliriz. Öyleyse böyle bir çalışmada (ve sürecek çalışmalarda) amacımız onun kimi koleksiyonlarının biçimsel, biçemsel, içeriksel, izleksel, anlatısal boyutlarını dikkate alarak türsellikleri bakımından tanımlamak, böylelikle bir üstgiysisellik kategorisi içerisinde konumlandırmaktır. Bunu yaparken, değişik sanatsal biçimlerdeki metinlerarasılık/göstergelerarasılık olgularını belirlemek amacıyla kullandığımız yazınbilimin verilerini, dolayısıyla kavramsal alanına ilişkin terimleri burada kullanarak bir yazınbilimci gözüyle modadaki alışveriş sürecine yönelik kimi kuramsal tanımlamalar yapmaktan geri durmayacağız. Yine bir yazınbilimci gözüyle göstergelerarasılığa ilişkin uygulamalar yanında üstmetinsellikten türetilen üstgiysiselliğe uyan saptamalar yapacağız. Kuşkusuz burada amacımız belli bir alanın (moda) içeriğiyle oynamak değildir; onun üzerinde farklı bir algı yaratmaktır. Sinema ve Metinlerarasılık adlı çalışmada yazdıklarımızı burada modaya uyarlayarak yineleyelim: “Aynı nesneye (burada moda) alışılmışın dışında, başka bir açıdan bakmak onu anlamsal olarak yenilemeye, farklı bir biçimde algılamaya ve algılatmaya olanak sağlar. Bu çalışmada, modaya bir yazınbilimcinin gözüyle, anlatıbilimin yöntemsel verilerinden yararlanarak bakıldığında, alandan olanların (moda tasarımcıları) ve olmayanların karşısına hem yeni bir dil çıkarılmış olur hem de aynı nesnenin (şu ya da bu giysi) anlamsal bakımdan çoğullaşmasına olanak sağlanır. Disiplinlerarasılığın en temel getirisi budur. Disiplinlerarası bakış, “göçebe kavramlar” (burada değişik disiplinlere uyarlanabilen metinlerarası kavramlar) olarak adlandırılan bir dizi kavram üzerinden gidilerek ve alışılmış kalıpların dışına çıkılarak, bir imgenin, bir görüntünün, bir izleğin, bir durumun vb. değişik bakış açılarıyla zenginliğini, dolayısıyla karmaşıklığını ortaya koymayı hedefler. Bu çalışmada, “giysilerarası/göstergelerarası etkileşimler ve aktarımlardan” söz ederken, yazın diliyle moda dilini buluşturarak aynı zamanda “yeni” bir dil yaratma arayışında olduk. En az iki disiplin arasında kurduğumuz göstergelerarası boyuta iki ayrı dil biçimi arasında kurduğumuz ikinci bir dillerarası/göstergelerarası boyut ekledik. Tüm gerçekliğin karmaşık yapısını çözme yolunda atılması gereken adımlardan birisi bu değil midir?” (Aktulum 2018: 18) Kısacası; biçimsel, biçemsel ve içeriksel olarak ortak, benzer, ayırıcı özellikler ve belirgin kurallar içeren, bir yapıtı sınıflandırmaya yarayan basmakalıplaşmış özellikleriyle alıcının beklenti ufkuna yanıt veren, bir uzlaşı ve yazı modeli olarak işleyen tür dizgesi bir yanmetinsellik görüngüsünde, alıcı ve verici arasında ilk etkileşimi başlatan bir aşamadır. Bir öbeklendirme düşüncesi kapsar. Thomas Lepeltier’nin söylediği gibi, kültürel pratiklerin belirsiz yığını içerisinde bir düzene koyma işlevi görür (1999). METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 10 Wolfgang Iser’in bir edebiyat metninin çözümü konusunda önerdiği şu yaklaşımı sıklıkla yinelenmektedir: Iser’e göre bir edebiyat yapıtının anlamı metnin içinde hazır bir şekilde bulunmaz, metindeki bazı ipuçlarına göre okur tarafından okuma süresinde yavaş yavaş kurulur. (…) Oysa Alımlama Estetiğine göre anlam, sanıldığı gibi, metinde oluşmuş ve bütünleşmiş bir şekilde yatmaz, yalnız gücül halde vardır ve ancak okur tarafından alımlandığı süreç içinde somutlaşır ve bütünleşir. Öyleyse iki kutbu vardır bir yazınsal metnin: Yazarın yarattığı metin ve okurun yaptığı somutlama. (…) İser’e göre metinde yazar her şeyi söyleyemez ve ister istemez bir takım yerlerin doldurulması okura düşer. Yazarın okura bıraktığı bu boşluklara “boş alan” ya da “belirsizlikler” diyoruz (Moran 2004: 241). Öyleyse, bu tanımlamalara koşut olarak Alexander McQueen’in koleksiyonlarını, çağrıştırdıkları kimi türlere ya da biçemlere göre öbeklendirip değerlendirebiliriz. Bir başka anlatımla, W. Iser’in önerisini göz önünde bulundurarak birkaç dakikalık bir süre içinde sergilenen giysi tasarımlarını biçimsel ya da biçemsel çağrışımları bakımında bir üstgiysisellik başlığı altında konumlandırmaya; giysilerin potansiyel anlamını kavramaya ; tasarımcının açıkça söylemekten kaçındığı gizli anlamları, anlamsal kaçamakları, boş alanları, belirsizlikleri belli ölçüde doldurup giderebiliriz. Bu çalışmada öncelikle üstgiysisellik sorunsalı üzerinde odaklanacağız. Gerekçemizi T. Todorov’dan bir alıntı yaparak bildirelim: Her çağın kendi türler dizgesi vardır, bu dizge egemen ideolojiyle ilişkilidir. Bir toplum kendi ideolojisine oldukça yakın duran edimleri seçerek düzgüleştirir; bu nedenle bir toplumdaki kimi türlerin var olması, bir başka toplumda olmaması bu ideolojinin bir dışa vurumudur. (Todorov 1994: 4) Roland Barthes, Système de la Mode’u 1967 yılında, öğrencisi Julia Kristeva’nın henüz metinlerarasılık konusunda kuramsal tanımlamalar yapmadığı, Mihail Bahtin’in çalışmalarının ise Fransa’da henüz çok iyi bilinmediği bir dönemde yazdı. Dolayısıyla, çalışmasında, biraz önce anımsattığımız gibi, modanın göndergeselliği boyutuna şöyle bir değinmekle yetindi. Ancak, M. Bahtin’in söyleşimcilik kuramından esinlenen Julia Kristeva’nın girişimleriyle, verileri günümüzde sanatın değişik biçimlerinde kullanılan ve göstergebilimsel sorgulamaların bir parçası olarak üzerinde durulan metinlerarası yaklaşım hem bir çözümleme biçimi hem de ele alınan sanatsal türün yazınsallığının bir ölçütü olarak benimsendi. Yapısalcılığın ve göstergebilimin dayattığı kapalı yapıt anlayışı metinlerarasılıkla yerini açık yapıt anlayışına bırakmaya başladı. Söz konusu yaklaşımın verileri değişik sanatsal biçimlerin (resim, müzik, sinema) söylemsel düzeyde çözümlemeleri konusunda kullanıldı, kimileri, az da olsa, aynı verileri modanın alanına taşıdı. Bu konuda ilk girişimi Thomas F. Broden, le Tissu comme texte: l’intertextualité de la mode vestimentaire (Metin olarak kumaş: giysi modasının metinlerarasılığı) adlı yazısıyla başlattı. Şimdi, R. Barthes’ın tanımlamalarını göz ardı etmeden metinlerarasılık kavramını modayla/giysiyle ilgisi içerisinde kısaca konumlandırmaya çalışalım (burada moda ve metinlerarasılık konusunu tüm yönleriyle ve derinlemesine ele almak uğraşında olmayacağız.) Kubilay AKTULUM 11 “Herkesin nesneleri gördüğü yerde göstergebilimcinin gördüğü göstergelerdir” diyen Umberto Eco’nun tanımlamasına göre, bir bildiri aktarmak ereği olan her giysi istemli bir göstergedir. Moda giysileri belli bir toplumsal tutumu olduğu kadar bir kimliği (taracımcının kimliği) açığa vururlar. Dolayısıyla, moda ve iletişim iç içedir. R. Barthes için giysi iletişim nesnelerinden birisidir: “Giysi, yiyecek, jestler, tutumlar, konuşma (…) gibi iletişim nesnelerinden birisidir (…). Bu nesneler (…) benim için kendimi tanıma olasılığını temsil ederler (…) ayrıca düşünsel bir varoluşa sahiptirler ve biçimsel araçlarla dizgeli bir çözümlemeye olanak sağlarlar.” Système de la Mode, giysi dilini “biçimsel araçlarla dizgeli bir çözümleme” çabasının ürünüdür. U. Eco ve R. Barthes’ın öngörüsüne koşut olarak, kimi tasarımcılar belli bir bildiri vermek ereğiyle tasarımlarını birer göstergeye dönüştürürler. A. McQueen bunlardan birisidir. Koleksiyonları hem öznelliğin izlerini taşır hem de onlarda ortak kültürün izlerine yer verilir, değişik sanatsal biçimlerden alıntılar yapılır. Genel olarak bakıldığında, önceki ya da yeni, güncel sanatsal unsurları dönüştürerek dizgenin bir parçası yapmak yalnızca A. McQueen’in tasarımlarının değil, genel olarak özellikle çağdaş modanın göze çarpan bir özelliğidir. Hatta Jacques Derrida’nın tanımladığı biçimiyle yapısöküm (fr. déconstruction) kavramı bir metinlerarasılık görüngüsüyle ilişkilenerek modanın alanında kullanılır, dekonstrüksiyonist tasarım başlığı altında giysiler tasarlanır. Bu türden giysilerin doğasında bir yenidendönüştürme, dolayısıyla bir metinlerarasılık düşüncesi bulunur: “Yapısökümcüler, metin kendi ötesinde bir şeye göndermede bulunuyorsa eğer, bu göndermenin önü sonu başka bir metine gönderme olacağını söyleme eğilimindedirler. Tıpkı göstergelerin başka göstergelere göndermesi gibi, metinler de başka metinlere gönderirler. Yapısökümcüler belli bir kesişme noktasını imleyen, durmaksızın genişleyen böylesi bir ağı metinlerarasındalık diye adlandırırlar. Metne ilişkin yorumların sürekli çoğalması söz konusudur burada. Üstelik hiçbir yorum kendisinin en son ve doğru yorum oldugu savında bulunamaz." (Sarup 2004: 81) Jacques Derrida’nın öncülüğünü yaptığı yapısöküm/yapısökümcülük bir çözümleme yöntemi olarak bir metinde tek bir anlamın bulunduğu savını reddederken Saussure’ün Genel Dilbilim Dersleri’nde ileri sürdüğü kimi görüşlere karşı çıkar. “Gösterenler ile gösterilenlerin sürekli olarak yeni birleşimler içerisinde bulunduklarına”, “göstergenin başka bir göstergeye yol açtığına/gönderdiğine” ya da “gösterenlerin gösterilenler içerisinde karşılık olarak dönüştüklerini”, kısacası “anlamın sürekli olarak bir gösterenler zinciri boyunca devindiğini” ileri sürerken son aşamada metnin başka bir metne gönderme yaptığı görüşünü öne çıkarır. “Gösterge her zaman başka bir göstergeye yol açar/gönderir” ya da “her göstergede, göstergenin kendisi olmak için dışladığı başka sözcüklerin yanı sıra daha önce geçmiş olan sözcüklerin izleri de bulunur”, “anlam bağlamdan bağlama geçtiğinde asla aynı kalmaz” vb. tanımlamalar bu görüşe somutluk katar. Söz konusu bu ve benzer tanımlamalar metinlerarasılığın doğasındaki bulunan temel ilkeleri bir çırpıda özetler: Metinlerarasılık başka bir metinden alıntılanan unsurların, METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 12 unsurlardan izlerin yeni bir bağlamda anlamsal ve biçimsel olarak dönüştürülmesi, dolayısıyla yeni anlam olasılıklarının yaratılmasıdır. Metinlerarasılığı anlamsal çoksesliliğe yol açan elverişli bir uygulama olarak gören yapısöküm şu ya da bu nesnenin anlamın her dönemde olduğu gibi yinelenmediğini, yenilendiğini, anlam üretiminin devingen bir süreç olduğunu savlar. Eski anlamları yıkmaz, yeni koşullarda, yeni bir bağlamda yeniden değerlendirir. Yapısökümcülerin kısaca anımsattığımız söz konusu yaklaşımlarının verileri değişik sanatsal biçimler dışında neredeyse her alanda kullanılarak sıradanlaşır. Daha çok dil ya da metin dışında moda, yapısöküm kavramından esinlenen alanlardan birisidir. Yapısöküm kavramının modaya aktarımını inceleyen çok sayıda çalışma yapılmıştır. Bunlar arasında daha çok İngilizce kaleme alınmış şu birkaç çalışmayı sayabiliriz: Flavia Loscialpo, “Fashion and Philosophical Deconstruction: a Fashion In- Deconstruction”; Alison Gill, “Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Reassembled Clothes”; Agata Zborowska, “Deconstruction in contemporary fashion design: Analysis and critique”; Francesca Granata, “Deconstruction Fashion: Carnival and the Grotesque”; Gizem Kızıltunalı, “New Frameworks in Deconstructivist Fashion: Its Categorization in Three Waves, Application of the Notions of Plasticity, De-design and the Inclusion of Bora Aksu and Hussein Chalayan as the Third Wave Turkish Deconstructivist Designers”. Bu çalışmalara Birsen Çileroğlu ve Mine Balcı’nın Dekonstrüksiyon Kavramsalında Moda Tasarımı adlı yazılarını ekleyebiliriz. Burada yapısökümün modadaki karşılığını, “dekonstrüksiyonist moda” olarak adlandırılan giysi tarzının temel özelliklerini uzun uzadıya irdelemeden (bu çalışmalara gönderiyoruz), daha çok metinlerarası boyuta, özellikle yenidendönüştürme yöntemine ilişkin kimi belirlemeler yapmakla yetineceğiz. Söz konusu çalışmalarda metinlerarasılığa başlanan kimi saptamaları anımsatmaktan geri durmayacağız. Örneğin, Flavia Loscialpo’nın yazısında öne çıkardığı varsayımda yapısöküm kavramı üzerine oturtulmuş bir giysi tasarımının M. Bahtin’in söyleşimsellik kavramına koşut üretildiği, geçmişten beslendiği, geçmişte üretilen önceki bir ürünün bir dönüştürümü olduğuna vurgu yapılır: “Derrida'nın yapısökümünde olduğu gibi, yapısöküm yoluyla bir eserin oluşturulması, kapalı bir biçimde moda ile ilgili varsayımlarımızla ilgili soruları ortaya çıkarıyor, tarih dışında, fikirlerin, eski kavramların yanı sıra tezahürlerin ve temsillerin sökülerek yinelenip yeniden yorumlanabileceği nesnel bir bakış açısı olmadığını gösteriyor. Geçmişle olan bu sürekli söyleşi, tasarımcıların yapısöküm uygulamalarını yeni görünümlere yol almalarına olanak sağlıyor.” (Loscialpo 2011). “Dekonstrüktivist tasarım” anlayışına göre, her giysi önceki, eski bir giysiye gönderme yapar, onları düşünsel ve kavramsal olarak dönüştürerek yineler, yeni bir yapı/biçim ortaya çıkarır. Bu süreç tümüyle metinlerarasılıkla buluşur. G. Kızıltunalı’nın, çalışmasında yer verdiği bir söyleşide metinlerarasılığın Maison Martin Margiela’nın tasarımlarda egemen bir estetik özellik olduğuna vurgu yapılır: Kubilay AKTULUM 13 “- Metinlerarasılık yaratılarınızda nasıl bir rol oynuyor? - Metinlerarasılık, Maison Martin Margiela'nın anahtarıdır, çünkü 'Replica' parçalarımızla var olan yaratımları sürekli olarak yeniden yorumlayıp yeniden yaratıyoruz. Her mevsim, birçok ilham verici model parça alıyoruz ve kodlarımızı uygun olarak Maison’un dünyasında yeniden tasarlıyoruz. Tarih boyunca, moda gelişti ve bir önceki dönemin kültürel ve politik olaylarına uyarlanarak biçimler gelişti. Bu sanatın reaktif doğası, Maison Martin Margiela'nın tasarıma yaklaşımı için esastır.” (Kızıltunalı 2017: 407) Söz konusu söyleşide metinlerarasılığın göze çarpan birkaç özelliği açıkça vurgulanmıştır: Metinlerarasılık bir yenidenyorum ya da yenidenyaratım’dır. Replica, doğasında metinlerarasılığın uçlarından birisi olan bir taklit düşüncesi içerir. Esinlenme, belli bir düzgü içerisinde eskiyi yenidenyaratma, yenidenkurgulama metinlerarası bir yaklaşımın bilinen uygulamalarıdır. Ayrıca, alıcı açısından bağlamın değiştikçe biçimlerin de değiştiği, dolayısıyla eskinin yeni bir bağlamda (kültürel, siyasal vb. koşullar değiştikçe) biçimsel olduğu kadar anlamsal olarak dönüştüğü düşüncesi öne çıkarılır. Önceki dönemden tümüyle kopulmaz, önceki dönem yeniden yaratılır. Böylelikle eski ve yeni arasında bir etkileşim yaratılır. Eskiyi sürdürme düşüncesine bağlı kalınır ancak eskinin yeni anlam olasılıklarına kapı araladığı düşüncesine vurgu yapılır. Şunu da belirtelim, bilindiği gibi, her ne kadar metinlerarasılık kavramı 1960’lı yıllarda Kristeva’nın bir metin kuramı bağlamında ortaya attığı bir kavram olduysa da özellikle 1980’li yıllarda R. Barthes, ardından Gérard Genette’in Palimpsestes’teki tanımlamalarıyla alabildiğine yaygınlaşmıştır. Bu yıllar Yamamoto ve Kawakubo ile başlayan Martin Margiela ile süren, modada yeni eğilimlerin, tasarımların, anlamların arandığı, geleneksel metin tanımlamalarında olduğu gibi giysi tasarımında da geleneksel yaklaşımların bir yana bırakıldığı, bellek sorunu üzerinden eskiyle yeninin tartışmaya açıldığı, bitmişlik/kapalılık düşüncesinin karşısına açıklık düşüncesinin getirildiği bir dönemdir. Yapısökümcü tasarım anlayışı, metinlerarasılıktaki gibi, bir açıklık, bitmemişlik, sürerlilik estetiğine kapı aralar. Peki, yaklaşımın en belirgin yöntemi nedir? Metinlerarasılık yanında onunla neredeyse eşdeğerde kullanılan, kanımızca metinlerarasılıkta yenidenyazma uygulamasına karşılık gelen yenidendönüştürme/yenidendönüşüm moda bağlamında akla hemen gelen yöntemlerden birisidir. Alison Gill de anılan yazısının satır aralarında Martin Margiela’nın metinlerarası tasarım tekniğine anıştırma yaparken bu kavramı (ve onunla eşdeğer olan kimi başka kavramları, örneğin récupération) kullanır.1 Şimdi, sınırlı da olsa göstergebilimsel bir yaklaşım benimseyerek, bu kavramla ilgili genel bir tanımlama yapalım.2 Metinlerarası yöntemler arasında sayılan yenidenyazma kullanımına karşılık gelen yenidendönüştürme (fr. recyclage) işlemine giysi tasarımı konusunda sıklıkla rastlanmaktadır (anımsattığımız gibi, dekonstrüktivist tasarım bu yönteme dayanır). Ancak şunu unutmamak gerekir: Dönüştürülen yalnızca eski giysiler değildir, önceki kültürel unsurlar günün koşullarına METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 14 uygun olarak yinelenebilirler ya da onlara göndermeler, anıştırmalar yapılabilir. Toplumsal ve kültürel bir sürecin parçası olarak görülebilecek yeniden dönüştürme aracılığıyla önceki bir unsur belli (yeni) bir dizge içerisinde güncellenir. Öyleyse böyle bir işleyiş her defasında metinlerarasılıkla buluşur. Metinlerarası her kullanımın bilinen işlevi eskiyi yeniye taşımak, “yaşama döndürmek”, eskiyi unutulmaktan kurtarmaktır (müzeleşmenin önüne geçmenin yollarından birisi budur). Önceki giysiler alıntılanırken ya da değişik sanatsal biçimlerden unsurlar ödünçlenirken benzer bir işlem gerçekleştirilir: “Yenidendönüştürme zamansal bir odaktan kopuştur, bir yer değiştirmedir; nesne yeni bir şeye yönelerek gösterge durumuna gelir” (Pagliani 2014: 2). Söz konusu yöntemde, yalnızca zamansal değil, uzamsal bir kopuş da söz konusudur. Başka alanlardan, başka kültürlerden kimi özellikler, kesitler, parçalar vb. alıntılanır, yeni bir bütün içerisinde yeniden bir araya getirilir, böylelikle ayrı bir dizge oluşturulur. Yenilik düşüncesi yeni bir sözceleme durumu yaratılarak telkin edilir. Doğal olarak bir nesne, unsur alıntılanarak yeniden-sözcelenirken ona yeni bir değer yüklenir, başka bir bağlamda yeniden anlamlandırılır. Yenidendönüştürme, önceden üretilmiş olanı başka türlü yeniden üretmek, yeni bir anlam yaratmak, onunla yeni bir bildiri vermektir, yaşamın son noktasına varan nesneye yeni bir “yaşam” sunmaktır. Yenidendönüştürmenin değişik biçimleri vardır. E. Van Essche, genel olarak sanatın alanında üç tür dönüştürme olduğundan söz eder (2009: 34). Birincisi, gerecin, atık malzemenin yenidendönüştürülmesidir. Ondan aynı değerde başka bir ürün ortaya çıkarılır. Hatta bazen daha üst düzeyde ürün elde edilir. Kimi zaman da tersi olur: Yenidendönüştürme aşamasında asıl ürün kökensel değerini yitirir. Sanatın alanında ilk seçenek geçerlidir. Eski ürün yenidendönüştürülürken önceki değerinden ayrı, yeni bir değer kazanır. Nesnenin önceki görünümü olduğu gibi kalsa da ona yeni, artı bir değer, işlev yüklenir. Eski bir giysi, kumaş, görüntü yeni bağlamda değişik bir anlamla donatılır. Sanatın aracılığıyla malzeme, gereç her defasında şiirsel bir dönüşüme uğratılır. İkinci kategoride, doğrudan doğruya sanatın alanından yapılan alıntılar yer alır. Moda bağlamında söz konusu pratik, sinemada remake, müzikte ise sampling3 kullanımına benzer. Tüketim toplumunun en bilinen alışkanlıklarından birisi şudur: Eski ürünleri yenidendönüştürerek para kazanmak. Bu amaçla, eski biçemleri, ayrışık unsurları iç içe sokmaktan geri durulmaz. Üçüncü kategoride yer alan yenidendönüştürme biçiminde bir yapıtı ya da sanatsal bir uygulamaya yön veren bir konsepti yinelemek, yeniden kullanmak söz konusudur. Bir sanatçı önceki bir sanatçının yapıtını, konseptini dönüştürerek bir bakıma ona son biçimini vermek, anlamsal bakımdan tamamlamak ister. Böylelikle eski ve yeni yapıt arasında bir sürerlilik düşüncesi yaratılıp bağ kurulmaya çalışılır. Önceki bir sanatçıya, tasarımcıya “saygısını bildirmek”, “onu anmak” vb. işlemlere bu amaçla sıklıkla başvurulur. Sözceleme özneleri arasındaki ayrıma vurgu yapılarak ondan alıntı yapıldığı bildirilir. Kubilay AKTULUM 15 E. Van Essche’nin kategorileştirdiği yenidendönüştürme, kısacası, bir değerin bir alandan başka bir alana taşınması olarak anlaşılır. Böyle bir uygulamada dizgelerarası (örneğin, sanatsal bir dizge ile kültürel bir dizge arasında) bir geçiş söz konusudur. Kültürel dizge açıktır ve sürekli olarak evrilir. Toplumsal ve kültürel dizgeler arasındaki geçiş olayları moda alanında yoğundur. Kimi tasarımcılar, değişik sanatsal biçimlerden (özellikte resmin alanından) çok sayıda ayrışık unsuru alıntılamaktan, onları yenidenyazmaktan geri durmazlar. Peki, alıntılanan nedir? Nasıl alıntılanmaktadır? Burada, resim sanatından yapılan içerik yanında resimsel içeriğin nasıl alıntılandığı üzerinde kısaca duracağız. Önce, yenidendönüştürme işleminde çıkarılacak sonuçların dökümünü kısaca yapalım: Toplumsal ve kültürel bir olgu olarak yenidendönüştürmenin ilk özelliği dünyayı yeniden adlandırmak olarak özetlenebilir. Onun aracılığıyla, gerçeklikten bir unsur asıl anlamından ayrı bir anlamda yeni bir bağlamda yinelenir. Moda, başka alanlardan alıntıladığı unsurları dönüştürerek anlamı yenileme sürecine katılır. Eski unsurları yeni birleşim düzenleri içerisinde buluştururken, aynı yerdeşlik üzerinden benzer izleklerin çeşitlemelerini yaratmaya olanak sağlar. Her dönüşüm anlamsal değişimi de beraberinde getirir ve yeni bir alıcı kitlesine yönelir. Kuşkusuz yenidendönüştürülen her nesne gösteren olduğu kadar gösterilen düzleminde de değişikliğe uğrar, böylelikle her defasında yeni bir işlevle donatılır. Yeni bağlam yeni anlam demektir. Eski unsurları yeniden kullanmak çizgisel bir zaman anlayışını çevrimsel bir zaman anlayışına dönüştürmektir. C. Lévi-Strauss’un tanımladığı biçimiyle, yaptakçılık yeni bir zamansal boyuta kapı aralar. Aynı nesne üzerinde yeniden işlem yapılarak her defasında ortaya yeni bir ürün çıkarılır ya da eski ürün konusundaki yerleşik algı değiştirilerek alışılmışın dışında bir algı yaratılır. Sanki zamanı durdurmak, ona yeni bir boyut katmak söz konusudur. Sürekli dönüştürmeye elverişli bir nesnenin eski anlamını bulmak değil, yenilemek arayışına çıkılır. Bu süreç, bir metinlerarasılık sürecine uygundur. Şu noktayı bir kez daha anımsatarak konumuzu sürdürelim: Saussure’ün Genel Dilbilim Dersleri’ndeki kavramsal kategorileştirmelerden yararlanan anlatıbilimciler (J. Kristeva, R. Barthes, G. Genette) yazınsalın alanında kalarak, yenidendönüştürme kavramı yerine metinlerarasılık kavramını önermişlerdir (buna daha sonra göstergelerarasılık kavramı eklenir). Bu iki kavram 1980’li yıllardan başlayıp günümüze gelinceye değin hem yazınsallığın bir ölçütü olarak sayılmış, hem de bir çözümleme yöntemi olarak benimsenmiştir. Metinlerarasılığın verileri sanatın değişik alanlarına aktarılarak şu ya da bu yapıtın söyleşimsel, çokseslilik (M. Bahtin’in tanımladığı biçimiyle) özelliğini ortaya çıkarmak hedeflenmiştir. Yaklaşımın verileri değişik sanatsal biçimlere uyarlanarak söz konusu şu ya da bu nesne konusundaki klasikleşmiş algı METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 16 yenilenmiştir. Kuramsal düzlemde metinlerarasılığın kimi verilerini moda alanına uyarlama denemesine ilk kez Thomas F. Broden girişmiştir. Thomas F. Broden le Tissu comme texte: l’intertextualité de la mode vestimentaire (Metin olarak kumaş: giysi modasının metinlerarasılığı) adlı yazısında, pek çok kuramcı gibi, metni, metafor olarak bir örgü, kumaş4 biçiminde tanımlayan Roland Barthes’tan ayrı olarak, simgesel bir kültürel nesne sayılan giysiden bir metinlerarasılık görüngüsünde söz eder. Metinlerarasılık kavramını giysinin alanına uyarlayan Thomas F. Broden, metin yerine giysiyi koyarak, önceki bir giysinin (Genette’in söz dağarına uygun olarak söylersek, alt-giysi; gönderge-giysi) nasıl dönüştürüldüğünü, taklit edildiğini, uyarlandığını göstermeye çalışır. Popüler kültürden seçtiği örneklerle moda tasarımcılarının (örneğin Chanel ya da Dior’un) tasarımlarındaki kimi kültürel göndermeleri inceler. Gerekçesini haklı çıkaracak düşünceyi Bouchot’dan yaptığı bir alıntı üzerinden yineler: Taklit yetilerimizin temel bir olgusu olan moda – herhalde Darwin bir maymunun bize yüzyıllardır aktardığı şeyden söz ederdi – seçkin bir kopya yapıttır (Broden 2008: 389). Modanın doğasına içkin özelliklerden birisinin alıntı olduğunu bu biçimde hemen baştan özetler. Th. F. Broden, M. Bahtin’in söyleşimsellik, J. Kristeva, ve R. Barthes’ın metinlerarasılık kavramından yola çıkarak giysilerarasılık (fr. intervestimentalité) kavramını önerir. Metni bir kumaş olarak tanımlayan R. Barthes yanında J. Ricardou’nun tanımlamalarında ilgisini çeken örgü metaforudur: Metin, kumaş gibi bir örgüdür. Böylelikle, Th. F. Broden, hemen başından metin ve kumaş arasındaki ilgiye dikkat çeker. Bu konuda bilinen tanımlamaları giysinin alanına aktarır. Popüler kültür yanında güncel moda tasarımlarında metinlerarasılığın olası kimi izlerini sürer. Metinlerarasılık ve moda arasındaki ilişkiler konusunda öne sürdüğü varsayımlar metinlerarasılığın doğasına uygun varsayımlardır. Örneğin, moda bir taklit ilişkisi üzerinde kurgulanır, bir giysi özellikle yeni dönem tasarımlarında olduğu gibi başka bir giysinin üzerine oturtulur. Satmaya dönük giysileri bir dizi patronlar, kalıplar üzerinden üretmek taklidin aşamalarından birisidir. Modelden yola çıkarak giysi üretmek bilinen bir uygulamadır. Bir model doğrudan taklit edilmese de esinlenme, göze çarpan bir diğer uygulama olarak bilinmektedir. Bir giysinin biçimi yanında biçemini taklit etmek işlemine moda alanında sıklıkla rastlanmaktadır. Kılık değiştirmek, maskeli balolarda, halk eğlencelerinde şu ya da bu sanatçının görünümüne bürünmek, saç biçimini yinelemek, onun tarzında giyinmek ya da ona öykünmek vb. uygulamalar, giyinmek ediminin gerisindeki taklit olgusunu elen veren kimi ipuçlarıdır. XIX. yüzyılda, Fransa’da sahnede sergilenen kostümlerden çokça esinlenilmiştir. Örneğin, 1830 tarihli bir moda dergisinde kadın okurlara, o günlerde oldukça başarı elde etmiş Marino Faliero’nun kadın kahramanının giydiği giysiden uyarlanan bir giysi armağan edilmiştir (Broden 2008: 402). Giysilerin kesimi, renkleri, çizgileri, boyları, dekolteleri, kumaş desenleri vd. neredeyse aynıdır. Bir sanatçının giysini taklit etmek yalnızca yalın bir taklit işlemiyle sınırlı değildir. Marino Kubilay AKTULUM 17 Faliero’nun giysilerinin taklit edilmesi Restorasyon döneminde oldukça yaygın olan romantik duyarlılığın temel estetik bileşenlerinden birisini temsil etmektedir. Ötekini taklit etmek bir kimlik sorunsalına bağlanır. Taklit edenle taklit edilen arasında içten bir yakınlık kurulur. Büyücülerin, cadıların, ölülerin, şeytanın, canavarların, siyasetçilerin vb. kişiliklerinin ve giysilerinin taklit edilmesi benzer bir yakınlaşma içgüdüsüyle açıklanır. Kuşkusuz başka dönemlerin giysilerini taklit etmek söz konusu dönemin biçemi, kültürü konusunda birikimli olmayı zorunlu kılmaktadır. Giysilerarasılıktan söz edebilmenin koşullarından birisi budur. Bir giysiyi, giysinin yaratıcısını, tarzını taklit etmenin işlevlerinden birisi çoğunlukla yaratıcısına saygısını bildirmektir. Eski dönem ürünlerinden esinlenmek konusunda çoğunlukla bu işlev öne çıkarılır. Eski dönem giysilerini alıntılamak, taklit etmek aynı zamanda geçmişe duyulan özlem duygusuyla açıklanır. İki giysi arasında kurulan ilişki metin ve söylem arasındaki ilişkiye (ayrıma) benzer. Bir metin yüzeyinde somut olarak saptanabilen metinsel aktarımlar metinlerarasılığa ilişkinken, söylemlerarasılık iki metin arasında kurulan türsel bir ilişkiyi belirtir. 5 Dolayısıyla bir metinden ötekine aktarım yapılırken bir söylem biçimi de aktarılır. Öyleyse söylemlerarasılık, dilin toplumsal pratikleri ve işlevleri yanında dilin edimbilimsel ve sözbilimsel işlevlerini içermektedir. Giysilerarasılıkta metinlerarasılığın şu ya da bu yöntemine göre başka bir giysinin kullanılması giysiyi belli bir sınıfa ya da tipe dâhil etmek olarak anlaşılmalıdır. Aktarılan, taklit edilen, gönderme yapılan yalın bir giysi değil, bir giysi türü, biçimi, sınıfıdır. Onun söylem(e) biçimi, dili, izlekleridir. Th. F. Broden, Gérard Genette’in Palimpsestes’de önerdiği diğer metinselaşkınlık ilişkilerine bir giysi görüngüsünde kısaca değinir, ilişki biçimlerini giysinin alanına uyarlar. Buna göre, yorumsal üstgiysisellik (fr. métavestimentalité) ile giysi ya da bir koleksiyon üzerine yapılan yorumlar, değerlendirmeler anlaşılmalıdır. Bir giysi, koleksiyon vb. üzerinde yapılan yorumlar, değerlendirmeler açık ya da kapalı olabilmektedir. Yorumlar bir övgü yanında bir yergi işlevini kapsayabilmektedir ya da bu ilişki türünde, tasarımların özgüllüğünü öne çıkaran temel özelliklere vurgu yapmak söz konusudur. Rastgele bir örnek seçelim: “Açlık”, İlkbahar-Yaz, 1996 koleksiyonu / Tony Scott’un “Açlık” adlı filmi. McQueen’in karanlık yanlara olan düşkünlüğü korkunç olanı göstermesiyle somutluk kazanıyor. ‘Açlık’ adlı gösterisi Tony Scott’ın 1983 tarihli, başrollerde Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon ve David Bowie’nin oynadığı, aynı adlı kültleşmiş bir vampir filmini podyuma taşıyor. Mankenlerin üzerlerinden başlayıp ellerine kadar bulaşmış kan izleri ile gösteri bir vampir türü görünümüne sokulmuş. Filmdeki ölümlülük ve sonsuz yaşam izleklerine anıştırma en güzel biçimde içinde canlı solucanlar olan, transparan akrilik bir korsaj giymiş bir manken aracılığıyla yapılmış, böylelikle biz insanların vampirlerin kaçındıkları şeye mahkûm olduğumuzu anımsatılıyor. (Bowen 2019). METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 18 Bu ve benzeri değerlendirmeler tasarımcının yöntemleri konusunda hemen baştan ipuçları verirler. Söz konusu alıntı, sinema filmlerinden sıklıkla esinlenen, onlara gönderme yapan, onları yeniden yorumlayan A. McQueen’in söyleşimci eğilimine vurgu yapar. Yangiysisellik (fr. paravestimentalité) ilişkisinde, giysinin pazarlanmasına ya da sunumuna ilişkin olarak, tüm yan unsurlar: paketleme, adlandırma, logo kullanımı, marka adı, tanıtım, ilan vb. unsurlar incelenir. Alexander McQueen’in Savage Beauty başlığıyla 2015 yılında düzenlenen sergi için tasarlanan bu afişte The Horn of Plenty (2009-2010, Sonbahar-Kış) adlı koleksiyonda yer alan bir figüre yer verilmektedir: “V & A, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty adlı sergiyi tarihinde 2015 tarihinde Londra’da sunacağını bildirmekten mutluluk duyacaktır (…) McQueen’in desenleri dramatik bir sahneleme ve defileleriyle eşdeğerde olan bir gösteri biçiminde sunulacaktır.”6 Her ne kadar tasarımları satmaya yönelik olmasa da yangiysisel unsurlar aracılığıyla A. McQueen’in tasarım estetiğine ilişkin kimi özellikler afişten özetlenerek yansıtılır: A. McQueen, kişileri (kadınları) hayvanlaştırarak amazon bir kimliğe sokmaktan, grotesk, gotik ya da tekinsiz figürler, şiddet veya korku imgeleri yaratmaktan hoşlanır (bir başka çalışmada bu türler ve biçemler üzerinde duracağız). Th. F. Broden’in üzerinde durmadığı, oysa üzerinde daha fazla durulması gereken ilişki türü kanımızca üstgiysiselliktir (fr. archivestimentalité). Öteki giysilerin olduğu kadar sanatsal biçimlerin, türlerin özellikle bir ressamın resminin ya da tanımlanmış resimsel bir biçemin özelliklerini, izleklerini vb. yineleyen giysilerin (tasarımcıların) sayısı fazladır. G. Genette’in her özgün metnin bağlı olduğu aşkın ya da genel kategorilerin – söylem tipleri, sözceleme biçimleri, yazınsal türler vd. – toplamı olarak tanımladığı architextualité (üstmetinsellik), üstgiysisellik (fr. archivestimentalité) olarak önerilir.7 Bir metnin türsel olarak hangi yazınsal dizgeye, hangi uzlaşılara ait olduğunu bildiren, alıcının beklenti ufkunu ve yapıtın alımlanmasını yönlendiren bu kullanıma karşılık gelen tasarımlara moda alanında sıklıkla rastlanmaktadır. Üstgiysisellik, bir giysiyi ya da giysi bileşenini değişik tip kostümlere ya da giysi bileşenlerine bağlayan kapsayım ilişkisini belirtir. Bu ilişki türü modanın türsel anakalıplarını, genel sınıflandırmaları içermektedir: Haute couture, hazır giyim, ilkbahar yaz koleksiyonu, sonbahar kış koleksiyonu gibi adlandırmalar, ya da sabah, akşam, gece giysileri gibi sınıflandırmalar Kubilay AKTULUM 19 üstgiysisellik kategorisine ilişkindir. Giysilerin türsel çeşitleri (kayak kıyafeti, golf kıyafeti vb.) üstgiysisel bir okumayı zorunlu kılar (Roland Barthes da Moda Dizgesi adlı kitabında giysi türleri ve çeşitleri ayrımından söz eder). Daha özel giysi türleri ise, örneğin tarihsel göndermeleri kullanarak ayrı bir tür biçimine bürünürler. John Galliano’nun Dior için tasarladığı 2004 ilkbahar koleksiyonu eski Mısır giysilerinden esinlenir; sarkofajlarda, Ölüler Kitabı’nda resmedilen görüntüler ve aksesuarlar yinelenir. Isis’in, Anubis’in, Horus’un saç biçimlerine öykünülür. Benzer bir tutumla, başka tasarımlarda geleneksel Afrika ya da Çin giysilerinden esinlenilir. İspanyol boğa güreşçilerinin giysileri, Ortaçağ giysileri model alınan diğer birkaç kaynaktır (bu liste oldukça uzundur). Restorasyon dönemi kadın modası Yenidendoğuş dönemi giysilerinin biçemlerinden geniş biçimde yararlanır. Öykünme, giysilerde sıklıkla başvurulan bir yoldur. Kimi tasarımcılar özellikle resmin alanından fazlaca beslenir, değişik resimsel türlere öykünürler. Alt-giysi ile ana- giysi arasında çoğu zaman resim üzerinden kurulan ilişki biçimlerine rastlanmaktadır. Kısaca şunu söyleyelim; üstgiysisellik ile daha çok biçemsel ve içeriksel çözümlemelere girişilerek bir giysinin ait olduğu türün bilinen özellikleri dikkate alınarak alıcıda, izleyicide yarattığı etkiler ve beklentiler belirlenir. Üstgiysisellik tanımına uyan yüzlerce örnek sıralamak olasıdır. Bir tasarımcının değişik sanatsal biçimlere, onların biçemlerine öykünerek giysiler üretmesi moda alanında yinelenen bir uygulamadır. Belli bir sanatsal biçime ve biçeme öykünmek yazınsal bağlamda pastiş (öykünme) olarak adlandırdığımız kullanımdan kopuk değildir. Şu ya da bu sanatsal biçime ya da sanatçının biçemine gönderme yapan çok sayıda örnek bulmak olasıdır. Kanımızca, moda bağlamında, giysilerarasılık yanında göstergelerarasılık tanımına en uygun örnekleri bu ilişki türünde bulmaktayız. Bu aşamada, konumuza açıklık katacağını düşündüğümüz, üstmetin konusunda kuramsal birkaç anımsatma daha yapalım. Göndergenin özniteliğini söyleme aktarmak olarak tanımlanan üstmetin, örneklendirilmiş metin kategorisinde yer alır. Üstmetin kullanımında başka bir söylemin, bir türün biçimsel, biçemsel, sözcelemsel, izleksel, kimi unsurları yinelenir (üstmetinde bir türün tüm unsurları yinelenmez). Jean-Marie Schaeffer, üstmetinlerin ayrışıklık kategorisinde yer alan metinler olduğunu söyler. Dolayısıyla, başka bir türden yapılan alıntılar bir seçme işleminden geçirilirler. Her türden başka metnin kimi unsurları yinelenebilmektedir. Öteki unsurlar, türü belirleyen potansiyel özellikler olarak bir kenarda bekletilirler. Kimi durumlarda, aynı özellikler farklı biçimlerde kombine edilerek türsel bir çeşitlilik yaratılır. Öyleyse, her söylemsel özellik türsel olmaya elverişlidir. Her yapıt çok sayıda türe ilişkin olabilmektedir. Şu ya da bu özelliğiyle başka bir türe ait olabilir. Üstmetinlerin sayısı sınırsızdır. Her alıcı, okur, yorumcu söylemsel özellikler arasından bir seçim yapar. Üstmetni tanımlayan unsurları kullanır. METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 20 Üstmetin konusunda kısaca anımsattığımız söz konusu tanımlamaları moda alanına uyarladığımızda şunları söyleyebiliriz: Her tasarımcı, kanonlaşmış şu ya da bu türün öz- niteliklerini kendi söylemine (tasarım ürününe) aktarır. Böylelikle, önceden üretilmiş bir giysinin olduğu kadar, örneğin bir ressamın çalışmalarının biçimsel, izleksel unsurları yinelenir, gönderme yapılan resmin, resim türünün biçemi taklit edilir. Şu ya da bu tasarımcı, resmin potansiyel özelliklerini yeni bir birleşim düzeni içerisine sokarak ayrı türde tasarımlar yaratır. Resim sanat tarihinden alıntılanan unsurların her defasında yeni bir bağlamda kullanımıyla giysiler aracılığıyla yaratılan tasarım çeşitliği ortaya konulur. Her tasarım, ortaya konulan özgül özelliklerle şu ya da bu türe aitliklerini, bir türe ilişkin iyelerini ele verir. Bir türün basmakalıplaşmış özellikleri çoğunlukla bir dönemin gereksinimlerine indirgenen özelliklerdir. Öyleyse, bir giysinin belli bir türle ilişkisinde belleğin işlevini göz ardı etmemek gerekir (bir giysinin bir türle ilişkisinden söz etmek onda başka giysilerin özelliklerinin yinelendiğini kabul etmeyi gerektirmektedir). Michel Charles’ın söylediği gibi, metin incelemelerinde temel kavram bellektir (1995: 47). Giysilerarası olduğu kadar üstgiysisel bir okumada bellek aynı biçimde öne çıkar. Konumuz bağlamında iki tür bellekten söz edilebilir: metinlerarası bellek ve kültürlerarası bellek. Bir giysinin öteki giysiyle ya da türle ilişkisi metinlerarası (giysilerarası) bir belleğe gönderme yapar. Burada, bir giysinin öteki giysiyle ilişkilendirilmesi söz konusudur. İlişki, önceki bir giysiyle olduğu kadar önceki bir türle de kurulabilir. Bilindiği gibi, kültürel bellek bir toplumun hissetme, yargılama biçimini; ortak değerler dizgesini kapsar. Bir metne, giysiye gönderme yapılırken aynı zamanda bir kültüre, bir söylem biçimine, değerler dizgesine vb. gönderme yapılır. Orada belli bir deneyim, yaşanmışlık yinelenir. Metin gibi moda da mimetik bir etkinliktir. Orada her defasında belli bir deneyim temsil edilir. Kültürel bellek metinlerarası bir belleği yapılandırır. Bir metin, bir giysi kültürel bellek aracılığıyla bir üstmetin, üstgiysiyle ilişki kurar. Bir metni, okumayı koşullandıran kültürel birikimdir. Kültürel birikim bir metni üstmetin, bir giysiyi üstgiysi olarak sınıflandırmaya yarar. Her metin, her giysi belleksel bir birimdir. Yinelenen önceki bir yapıtın izleği, yapısı, tonu, biçemi, söyleme biçimidir. G. Genette, biçemin üstmetnin temel bir özelliği olduğundan söz eder. Önceki bir giysinin biçimsel iyeleri daha çok gösterene (biçim; giysinin çizgileri, rengi, kesimi vb.) ilişkin olabilmektedir. Biçem metaforlaştırıldığında, örneğin akıcı, delici, şiddetli vb. imgelerle belirtilir. Kişisel biçemlerde metaforlaştırmaların sıklıkla kullanıldığı görülmektedir. Her tasarımcı belli bir izlek çevresinde belli bir söylem biçimi yaratır. Üstgiysiye ilişkin olan tarzdır. Her tür, özgül bir söylem, içerik, görme ve temsil etme biçimi olarak tanımlanır. Bireysel biçemden başka her biri belli bir dönemi temsil eden klasik, romantik, gerçeküstücü, barok vb. estetik kategorilerden yine biçem çerçevesinde söz edilir. Her türün belleğimizde ayrı bir değergesi vardır; özgüllüklerini adlandırmalarıyla belli ederler. Çünkü her biri bir uzlaşının ürünüdür. “Genellikleriyle” öne Kubilay AKTULUM 21 çıkarlar. Birbirlerinden kopuk değillerdir, her estetik kategori diğerinden beslenip, onun izlerini taşıyabilir. Kısacası, üstmetin gibi üstgiysi, alıntısallık özelliğiyle kendini belli eder. Bir moda tasarımcısının tasarımlarını üstgiysisel olarak sınıflandırmaya olanak sağlayan çok sayıda örnek bulunmaktadır. Tasarımlar belli bir dönemde belli bir biçemi temsil eden bir sanatçıdan olduğu kadar ortak özellikleri üzerinde çoğunlukla uzlaşılmış, adlandırılmış şu ya da bu sanatsal biçimin içeriksel (izleksel) olduğu kadar biçemsel (örneğin, grotesk, gotik vb.) özelliklerinin yinelenmesiyle oluşturulmuştur. Burada, resmin verilerini yineleyen giysilerin bireysel ve estetik kategoriler başlığı altında bir sınıflandırmasını yapabiliriz. Matisse, Klimt, Velasquez, Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Lucas Cranash, Georges Braque, Bosch, Claude Manet, Paul Gauguin, El Greco, Vermeer, Renoir, Botticelli, Mondrian, Gaudi, Picasso vd.’den esinlenen giysiler; pop-art, gerçeküstücülük, kübizm, fovizm, postmodernizm, rokoko, Bizans sanatı, Afrika sanatı, Mısır sanatı, Eski Yunan, Eski Roma, tarih, maniyerizm, oryantalizm, ekspresyonizm, puantilizm, fluxus, fotogerçekçilik, İncil, Puritan sanat, gotik sanat, mitoloji vd.’den esinlenen giysiler. Ayrıca, kimi giysilerde sinemadan, müzikten, heykelden esinlenilir. Kimi giysi tasarımlarında ise fiziğin, matematiğin, heykelin, geometrinin izleri görülür. Giysilerde ayrıca doğadan alabildiğine fazlaca esinlenilir. Roland Barthes’ın vurguladığı gibi, modanın temel göndergeleri Doğa, Coğrafya, Tarih ve Sanattır. Sanatsal göndermeler ise ağırlıktadır. Sanat kategorisinde yer alan giysilere yüzlerce örnek verilebilir (burada birkaçı ile yetineceğiz). Gerçekten de resim sanat tarihi tasarımcılar için her zaman başlıca kaynaklardan birisi olmuştur. Pek çok tasarımcı ünlü sanatçıların resimlerini, onların resimlerinde baskın çıkan biçemsel özellikleri ve kimi içerikleri giysi tasarımlarında yinelemişlerdir. Bu aşamada, tarzlarına ilişkin çözümleme ve yoruma çok fazla girişmeden, resim sanatının akla hemen gelen, rastgele seçtiğimiz birkaç sanatçının kimi görsellerine kısa notlar ekleyerek, bir listeleme mantığına göre yer vereceğim: Resim 2. Henri Matisse METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 22 Resim 3. Yves Saint Laurent Resim 4. Valentino Resim 5. Dior Kubilay AKTULUM 23 Yves Saint Laurent, 1980 yılı sonbahar kış koleksiyonunda Henri Matisse’in resimlerinden esinlenir. H. Matisse’in 1953 tarihli la Gerbe ve yine aynı tarihlerde yaptığı bir kolaj çalışması olan l’Escargot adlı resimlerinin çizgilerini yineler. Yves Saint Laurent’dan başka Valentino, H. Matisse’in la Gerbe’inden esinlenenlerdendir. Valentino, H. Matisse’in başka resimlerini tasarımlarında kullanmıştır. Giyside, Matisse’in resmindeki renkler ve biçim neredeyse olduğu gibi yinelenmiştir. H. Matisse’ten esinlenenlerin listesine Dior’u da ekleyebiliriz. Matisse’in 1943 tarihli, la Chute d’Icare adlı resmi 2014 sonbahar/kış koleksiyonunda kullanılır. Giysinin rengi (mavi) ve biçimi (kırmızı yaka) Matisse’in çizgilerinin bir yinelenmesidir. Francisco Goya’nın resimleri, gravürleri tasarımcıların göndergelerinden birisi olmuştur. Diane von Furstenberg, 2007/2008 sonbahar/kış koleksiyonunda ondan esinlenir. F. Goya, başlıca göndergelerindendir. Yine aynı tarihte John Galliano, F. Goya’nın resimlerine bir saygı anlatımı olarak yer verir; onun bir motifini yineler. Dries Van Noten, 2014 ilkbahar/yaz koleksiyonunda F. Goya’nın La Maja desnuda adlı resmindeki kimi motifleri yineler. Emilio de la Morena, 2014/2015 sonbahar/kış koleksiyonunda F. Goya’nın Le portrait de la Duchesse d'Alba’sından (Alba Düşesi’nin Portresi, 1797) yola çıkar. Georgina Chapman’ın tasarladığı, Marchesa, 2013/2014 sonbahar/kış kolaksiyonunda F. Goya’nın Portrait de Maria Teresa de Vallabriga à cheval’ından (1783) esinlenir. Resimde, beyaz bir at üzerinde, XVIII. yüzyılda yaygın olarak kullanılan siyah saten giysili bir kadın görülür. Chapman’ın tasarımlarında Goya’nın resimlerindeki koyu ve üst üste nüanslar yinelenir. Alexander McQueen, Sarabande adlı 2007 ilkbahar/yaz koleksiyonunda Stanley Kubrick’in Barry Lyndon adlı filmini (1975), filmin müziklerinden birisi olan Georg Friedrich Handel’in 11 numaralı süitinden başka Goya’nın resimlerinden; ayrıca Luisa Marchesa Casati’nin alışılmadık biçeminden ve Edward tarzı modadan esinlenir. Romantik havaya bir melankoli ve çöküş duygusu karışmıştır. Çiçeklerle süslenmiş (resimdeki) giyside gerçek çiçekler kullanılır. Tasarımcısına göre bu çiçekler solmaya, çürümeye ve yok olmaya mahkûmdur. Giysi, romantik bir bildiri vermeye yöneliktir. Alexander McQueen, çalışmalarında giysiye romansı/anlatısal bir hava katar; ölüm izleğini giysileri aracılığıyla işler. Savaş, tecavüz, korku, yıkım gibi izlekleri birer ölüm göstergesi olarak kullanır. Kendi döneminin öteki tasarımcılarına göre ölüm düşüncesine en yakın duran o olmuştur (kendisi de intihar etmiştir). Çalışmalarında Resim 6. Francisco Goya - Alexander Mcqueen METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 24 uzlaşılmaz olanı uzlaştıran, karşıtlıkları buluşturan bir tasarımcıdır. A. McQueen, giysileri aracılığıyla ölüme bir “incelik” düşüncesi katar. Tasarladığı giysileri yalın birer “korunma” unsuru olmaktan tümüyle çıkarır; güzellikle çirkinliği, dinginlikle kaosu yan yana getirerek izleyiciyi kışkırtır, şok eder. Gülünç olanla korkunç olanı iç içe sokan A. McQueen’in çalışmaları “grotesk” tanımına uygundur. Hygeia, Yunan mitolojisinde sağlık ve temizlik tanrıçası olarak bilinir. İnsanlar yanında hayvanların sağlığından o sorumludur. G. Klimt’in Medicine adlı resminde elinde bir yılan tutan Hygeia, sırtını insanlığa dönmüştür. John Galliano, Christian Dior’un 2008 ilkbahar-yaz defilesinde simgeci ressamın söz konusu resmini yeniden yorumlar. Altın yaldızlı renklerle ünlenen Klimt’in diğer resimlerini tasarımlarında yine kendince yorumlamaktan geri durmaz. Judith et Holofernes (1901); Portrait d'Adèle Bloch-Bauer (1907); Portrait d'Eugénia Primavesi (1913); L'Attente (1905) model olarak kullandığı diğer resimlerdir.8 Galliano, Klimt’in resimlerinde baskın çıkan yaldızlı renkleri ve biçimleri yineler. Alışılmışın dışında makyaj ve saç tasarımı hem Klimt’in bilinenin dışındaki soyut resimlerine hem de Japon geişa biçemine bir göndermedir. Galliano, Edward Munch, Odilon Redon, John Singer Sargent’ın resimlerini tasarımlarında kullanır. Gabbana ve Dolce’nin 2012 yılında ilk “Alta Moda” koleksiyonlarını sergileyen İtalyan tasarımcılar, kadınları birer canlı sanat eserine dönüştürmek istediklerinden söz eder, bu amaçla en ünlü sanatçıların resimlerini incelerler. Van Gogh’un resimlerindeki ayçiçeklerini, leylaklarını ipek bir giyside yinelerler. Çiçeklerin bir çağrışım gücü ve dili olduklarına inandıklarını söyleyen tasarımcılar 2014 yılında yapılan bir defilede, giysilerde egemen olan çiçeklerle resmin beş yüzyıllık tarihinde öne çıkan ressamlara saygılarını anlatmak isterler. Her giysi bir resme gönderme yapar. Klimt’in le Tournesol’u (1905), Guido Cagnacci’nin les Fleurs dans un flacon’u (XVII. yy.), Auguste Renoir’ın Glaïeuls’ü (1885) yanında Manet, Cézanne ya da Van Gogh’un çiçekleri esinlendikleri ressamlar ve motiflerdir. Resim 8. Vah Gogh – S. Gabbana ve D. Dolce Resim 7. Gustav Klimt – Christian Dior Resim 8. Vah Gogh – S. Gabbana ve D. Dolce Kubilay AKTULUM 25 Koleksiyonun temel izleği çiçeklerin çağrışım gücü ve dilidir. Çiçekten yola çıkan her tasarımın bir anlamı vardır. Buket, önce tutku ve aşk anlamına gelir. Horoz ibiği çiçeği ölümsüzlük, salkımçiçeği dostluk demektir. Koleksiyonda kırk kadar çiçek türü kullanılır. Tasarımlar yapılırken Gauguin’in, Cézanne’ın, Renoir’ın değişik müzelerdeki izlenimci resimleri, Van Gogh’un Munich’te bir resim müzesindeki yapıtları istenir. Yetmişe yakın modelin sergilediği giysilerin her biri tek olma özelliğine sahiptir. Her giysi elde yapılmıştır. Bunlar gerçekten de izlenimci kumaşlardır, der Domenico Dolce. Resim 9-10. Van Gogh – Rodarte Laura ve Kate Mulleavy, 2012 yılı ilkbahar hazır giyim koleksiyonunu Van Gogh’un resimleri üzerine kurgularlar. Sanatla modayı ilk kez bu koleksiyonda buluştururlar. Tasarımları konusunda kardeşlerden birisi şunu söyler: “Van Gogh’un Los Angeles’a geldiğini size söyleseydim, pekâlâ ne demek istiyorsunuz? derdiniz. Van Gogh’un annesinin bir portresi olan - METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 26 baştan aşağı zehir yeşili- bir müzenin bulunduğu sokakta oturuyoruz, hep bu portreye baktık, sonra üzerinde bir gözlem evi bulunan ve adı Mount Wilson olan yakınımızdaki şu dağa. Bir teleskop vardı, onunla güneş lekeleri kaydediliyordu, Van Gogh koleksiyonumuzu hazırlarken, yaptığımız şeylerden birisi şuydu: Güneş lekelerini ayçiçeklerine dönüştürmek, bağlantıyı böyle kurduk.”9 Mulleavy kardeşler Van Gogh’un düşler dünyasında gezintiye çıkar; onun ayçiçeklerini, yıldızlarını, yıldızlı gökyüzü motiflerini yinelerler. Kimi giysilerde resimleri olduğu gibi kullanırlar. Kimilerinde ise daha flu bir hava yaratarak Van Gogh’un resimlerine örtük göndermeler yaparlar. Sanatçının resimlerine devingenlik katan yoğun renkleri, dokuları, canlı fırça darbelerini yansıtırlar. Van Gogh’un resimlerindeki izlenimci etkiyi yakalamaya uğraşır, kimi giysilerde canlı resme yakın bir etki yaratırlar: Van Gogh’un fırça darbeleri yaptığımız neredeyse her şeyin içine işlemişti. Renk paletimize, işlemelerimize, desenlerimize. Aldığımız her kararda kendimize şunu sorduk: Bu van Gogh’un bir resminin parçası olabilir mi? Tasarımları Van Gogh’a bir saygı anlatımıdır. Resim 11. Francis Bacon - Whyred Roland Hjort, Lena Patriksson ve Jonas Claso’nun kurucusu oldukları Whyred, Francis Bacon’ın resimlerinde bulduğumuz apokaliptik ya da kaotik havayı baskı giysilerinde yeniden yaratmak isterler. F. Bacon’un 1973 tarihli Self Portrait adlı resmi esin kaynaklarından birisidir. 2014 ilkbahar-yaz koleksiyonunda sergilenen giysilerde F. Bacon dışında kimi başka sanatçıların resimleri podyumda giysiler aracılığıyla temsil edilir. Örneğin, House of Dagmar’ın baskı giysilerinde Amerikalı sanatçı Mark Harrington’un resimlerinin izleri görülür. Tiger of Sweden’in tasarımlarında Piet Mondrian’ın resimlerine gönderme yapılır. Carin Wester, Alphonse Mucha’nın art nouveau yapıtlarından esinlenir. Marlene Abraham’ın tasarımları Claude Monet’nin izlenimci resimlerine birer göndermedir. Kubilay AKTULUM 27 Francis Bacon, başka tasarımcıların da esinlendiği bir ressam olmuştur. Örneğin, Eleonore L. Santos, Anna Metzel ile birlikte tasarladıkları koleksiyonda (2014 yaz koleksiyonu) Francis Bacon’ın figüratif çalışmalarından esinlenirler. Koleksiyonda kullanılan karmaşık dikim yöntemleri yanında kumaşlar F. Bacon’ın fırça vuruşlarındaki rastlantısal biçemi çağrıştırmaya yöneliktir. Renklerdeki yabansılık bir diğer ortak özelliktir. Resim 12. Georges Braque – Yves Saint Laurent "Bir nehir gibi, imgelemim Nietzsche’nin estetik hayaletler adını verdiği müzik, resim, heykel, yazınla sürüklendi hep, onlarsız yaşam çekilmez olurdu, varlığımı koruyan ve koleksiyonlarımda canlanan hayaletler onlar."10 Yves Saint Laurent sanatçılarla ve yapıtlarıyla gerçek bir söyleşiye dalan ilk moda tasarımcılarından birisidir. 1965 yılı sonbahar kış koleksiyonunda Piet Mondrian’a gönderme yapan giysiler sergiler. Onun resim dünyasını kendince, kendi gereçleriyle anlatır. Sonra, Fransız modernist ressam Serge Poliakoff ve Amerikalı pop art sanatçı Tom Wesselmann’ın resimlerini kullanan Yves Saint Laurent iki boyutlu resimleri üç boyutlu olarak tasarlar, resme hareket katar, onu canlandırır. Sanatçılarla olan söyleşisi Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Fernand Léger, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet ve Georges Braque ile sürer. METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 28 Resim 13. Claude Monet Resim 13. Christian Dior Tasarımlarında pek çok ressamın yapıtlarına gönderme yapan Y. S. Laurent, kimi tasarımlarında kuşlarla yakından ilgilenen Georges Braque'nin kübik fırça darbelerinden esinlenir. G. Braque, kuşları serbest bir el hareketiyle resmeder. Y.S. Laurent, her iki düşünceyi bir gece elbisesi yakasında birleştirir. Kuşa serbest biçimli bir kontur kazandırır. G. Braque’ın resmindeki oranlara uyan kanatlar ve sanatçının fırça vuruşlarına benzeyen işlemeli, boncuklu parçalar kullanır. Y.S. Laurent, Georges Braque’a gönderme yaptığı tasarımlarında sürekli olarak kuş motiflerine yer verir. Çünkü kuş hem sanatçının bir simgesi hem de bir gelecek umududur. Kubilay AKTULUM 29 Resim 14. Chanel Claude Monet’nin “izlenimci” resimleri Yves Saint Laurent’dan başka Christian Dior, Chanel gibi moda tasarımcılarının öncelikli esin kaynağı olmuştur. İzlenimciliğin renk ve ışık oyunları giysi tasarımlarında yinelenir. Örneğin, Ch. Dior’un 1949 yılında yarattığı ‘Miss Dior’ adlı giysi, Raf Simons’un 2012 sonbahar – kış koleksiyonu için tasarladığı bir başka giysi izlenimci resmin dokularını yineler. Monet’nin resimlerindeki lekelere, Seurat’nın punatilizmine (örneğin, Un Dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte, 1884) gönderme yapan Raf Simons’un çalışmasında çiçekler izlenimci resmin izlerini açıkça belli eder: Kadından sonra, çiçekler Tanrı’nın dünyaya kattığı en hoş şey, der Dior.11 Gerçekten de izlenimci resimde kadın yanında çiçekler temel izlekler arasındadır. 1947 yılından başlayarak kadın ve çiçeği özdeşleştirir. Seurat’nın Un dimanche après- midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte’ında, Monet’nin Femmes au jardin’inde ya da izlenimcilerin kadını odağa alan resimlerinde görülen kadınların bol kesimli giysilerini yineler. Işık ve hareket giysilere ve saçlara canlılık katar, aynı canlılık çiçek ve ağaç yapraklarında görülür. Dior’un tasarımlarında benzer bir devinim göze çarpar. İzlenimci resimde olduğu gibi, Dior, kadın konusunda “donuk” bir imge yaratmaktan kaçınır. Dans eden kadın imgesi hareketin en iyi simgesi olarak görülür. John Galliano’nun 2004 yılı sonbahar – kış koleksiyonunda yer alan ve Cygne noir adını verdiği giysi doğrudan baleden esinlenir. Hafiflikleriyle öne çıkan giysiler pudralı renkleriyle Degas’ın resimlerinde görülen dansçı kızların pileli eteklerini anımsatır. Akışkan kesimler Monet’nin Femmes à l’ombrelle’indeki (1886) hafif, rüzgarla salınan giysileri çağrıştırır. John Galliano’nun 2005 sonbahar-kış sezonu için tasarladığı Madeleine adını verdiği giysi Monet’nin resminin bir diğer versiyonudur. C. Monet’nin resimleri çok sayıda başka tasarımcı için esin kaynağı olmuştur. Onun resimlerine gönderme yapan giysilerin sayısı oldukça fazladır. Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 30 Alexander McQueen C. Monet’nin resimlerine gönderme yapan, onun verilerini kullanan birkaç başka tasarımcı arasındadır. Resim 15. C. Monet, tasarımcılar için sürekli bir gönderme olmuştur. Örneğin, Lüblanlı hazır giyim ve haute couture tasarımcısı Georges Hobeika, Monet’nin Midnight Stroll adlı resmindeki biçemi taklit eder. Renkler, açık koyu kullanımları C. Monet’nin etkisini güçlü bir biçimde duyurur. G. Hobeika, Monet’nin resimlerinin, tasarımlarına kusursuzluk kattığına inanır. Rodarte, 2015 ilkbahar – yaz koleksiyonunda C. Monet’nin Les Nymphéas (Nilüferler) adlı resmini yineler (Nilüferler dizisi 250 resimden oluşmaktadır). Monet’nin resmi başka tasarımcılar için de oldukça esinleyici olmuştur. Dolce & Gabbana, 2008 ilkbahar – yaz koleksiyonunda aynı resmi kullanır. Alexander McQueen, renklerin daha canlı olduğu bir başka nilüfer resmine gönderme yaparak modern moda ile izlenimci bir resmi buluşturur; amacı defileye bir gençlik ve enerji sansasyonu katmaktır. Kubilay AKTULUM 31 Resim 16. El Greco - Laskaris Laskaris’in 2014-2015 kış koleksiyonu Yunan asıllı İspanyol ressam El Greco’nun resimleri üzerine kurgulanmıştır. El Greco, hem resim sanatı hem de moda için sürekli gönderme yapılan bir sanatçı olmuştur. Laskaris, uzunca bir süre El Greco’nun resimlerini incelemiş, kumaş ve dokuma teknikleri konusunda araştırmalar yapmıştır: Benim için sorun bu yolculukta size eşlik edecek tüm bilgileri bir araya toplamaktı. Onları El Greco’nun yapıtlarında, okuduğum kitaplarda, yaşamı üzerine yapılan çözümlemelerde, yaptığı işte buldum. Haftalarca bu konuda çaba harcadım, esinimin anahtarı buydu. Örneğin, eğer siyah beyaz bir portre görüyorsanız, biliniz ki kimi önemli ayrımlarla, ressam benzer biçimde kendi döneminde moda olan onlarca beyaz yaka yapmıştır. Portrait d'un gentilhomme de la Casa de Leiva (1580)12 tasarımcının, en fazla esinlendiği resimlerden birisidir. Kullanılan kolyeler resimdeki malzemeyle üretilmiştir. Lascaris, özgün yapıta benzeyen tasarımlar yapmaya uğraşmıştır. Kullanılan deri aksesuarlar, meleklerin yüzleri ve kanatları vb. unsurlar resimlerdeki görüntülerin yansısıdırlar. Lascaris, resimlerdeki görüntüleri olduğu gibi yineler. Lascaris, El Greco’nun yaşamından ve resimlerinden esinlenerek yarattığı koleksiyonu ressamın ölümünün 400. yılı dolayısıyla tasarlamıştır. Koleksiyonda El Greco ve döneminin izleri açıktır. Resimlerde görülen kişiler giysi tasarımları aracılığıyla yaşama döndürülmüşlerdir. Siyah ve beyazın baskın çıktığı giysiler El Greco’nun bilinen portrelerini yansıtırlar. Keşişler, prensler, savaşçılar, resimlerde kullanılan aksesuarlar tasarımcının esininin ayrılmaz parçaları olmuşlardır. Giysiler aracılığıyla El Greco’nun resim serüveninin bir tür özeti yapılmıştır. Kullanılan dekorasyon, ışık, müzik, jestlerle onun dönemindeki atmosfer yeniden yaratılmıştır. METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 32 Tommaso Aquilano ve Roberto Rimondi için moda, sanattan bağımsız bir uğraştır. Moda bir iştir. Sanatla çalışıyorum, ancak bir sanatçı değilim, azimli bir işçiyim, der T. Aquilano.13 Modanın sanattan bağımsız olduğunu söyleseler de tasarımlarında yan yanalıkları açıktır. Sanat onlar için de bir esin kaynağıdır. Bir ürünü tamamlamanın, bitirmenin bir yoludur. Sanat, yaratıcı içgüdüyü harekete geçirir, farklı disiplinleri belli bir aşırılıkta birbirine karıştırmaya yarar. Buluşturulamaz olanı buluşturma olanağı yaratır. T. Aquilano ve R. Rimondi, Paul Gauguin’in uzak ülkelere (Tahiti’ye) yaptığı egzotik yolculukların bir tür « anlatısını » yaptıkları 2014 ilkbahar yaz koleksiyonunda sanki bir bilinç akışı örneği verirler. Giysiler, P. Gauguin’in resimlerinde görülen Tahitili kadınların giysilerini, havasını, egzotik çiçeklerini anımsatırlar. Çizgiler, konrast oluşturan çiçek desenleri, göz alıcı renkler, çağdaş çizgilerle yinelenmişlerdir. Valentino, 2013 sonbahar – kış koleksiyonunda Hollandalı ressam Vermeer’in, özellikle onun İnci Küpeli Kız adlı resmini kullanır. Kadını özel bir anda yakalamak arzusunda olduklarını söyleyen tasarımcılar (Maria Grazia Chiuri et Pierpaolo Piccioli) için kadının yüzü son derece önemlidir. Resmin en belirgin rengi olan maviyi yinelerler. Nilofer Shahid ise bir başka Hollandalı ressamın: Rembrandt’ın resimlerini tasarımlarında kullanır. Rembrandt Koleksiyonu’nda (2015) bir saplantı durumuna getirdiği ressamın etkisinden söz eder: Ya ben? Onun sanatında hareket eden her şey beni etkiliyordu; görülen ya da görülmeyen, gölgelerde gizli kalmış şeyler, tuvallerindeki ışık, yalnızca ona özgü bir ritimle dans eden ışık, her şey. Sanki saatlerce, günlerce, yıllarca hipnozite olmuştum. Ruhumun ta derinlerinden sarsılmıştım.14 N. Shahid’in tasarımları bir büyülenme, ustaya saygı anlatımıdır. Saplantısı, Amsterdam’da Rijks Museum’u gezdikten sonra başlar. Rembrandt Koleksiyonu bu gezinin bir ürünüdür. Resim 18. Paul Gauguin – Aquilano Ve Rimondi Resim 17. Paul Gauguin – Aquilano Ve Rimondi Kubilay AKTULUM 33 Koleksiyonda yer alan giysilerde Rembrandt’ın ışık ve gölge oyunlarına olabildiğince yakın bir etki yaratılmak istenir. Birbirini tamamlayan beş ayrı kesitten oluşan (gravür; açık-koyu, ışık- gölge; barok; askeri; melankoli) koleksiyonda sanatçının yaşamının ve sanatsal kariyerinin aşamaları betimlenir. Her kategorideki giysiler Rembrandt’ın en ünlü resimlerinin birer yansısıdırlar. Her giysinin bir öyküsü vardır; her giysi sanatçının yaratıcılığına bir saygı anlatımıdır. Örneğin, askeri döneme ilişkin giysilerde Rembrandt’ın Gece Devriyesi (1642) adlı resmine gönderme yapılır. Final bölümünde yer alan giysilerde koyu siyah renkler baskın çıkar, sanatçının yaşamındaki “karanlık dönem”, trajedi bu renklerle anlatılır. Altın rengi vurgular onun içsel bakımdan yüceliğine gönderme yaparken, en iyi çalışmalarından kimilerinin yaşamının en karanlık döneminde yapıldığını imler. Bir yaşamöyküsünün giysiler aracılığıyla kısa öyküsü izlenir. Nilofer Shahid, bir ressamın öyküsünü giysiler aracılığıyla anlatırken onunla özdeşleşir, içsel bir söyleşiye dalar. Başlangıçta bir Orta çağ Rus halk hikâyesi olan Bylina'nın ana karakteri Sadko’dan esinlenen, Rus tasarımcı Akhmadullina, 2016 ilkbahar yaz koleksiyonunda Japon ukiyo-e okulunun estamplarını, özellikle Katsushika Hokusai’nin gravürlerini neredeyse birebir kopyalayarak tasarımlarında kullanmıştır. Hokusai’nin The Great Wave dizisinde yer alan çalışmaları Akhmadullina dışında pek çok başka tasarımcının esin kaynağı olmuştur. Hokusai’nin resmettiği dalgalar ipek ve ipek muslin kumaşlar üzerine aktarılmış, giysiye sanki bedenin üst bölümünde dalgalanıyormuş hissi katılmıştır. Akhmadullina’nın gri renkli bir başka giysisinde yer alan dalgalar Hokusai’nin bir diğer çalışması olan Choshi dans la province de Shimosa adlı çalışmasına göndermedir. Moda alanında önceki yapıtlardan etkilenme, onları alıntılama, dönüştürerek şu ya da bu amaçla yineleme yeni bir buluş değildir. Taklit, alıntı vb. uygulamalara neredeyse her dönemde rastlanmaktadır. Gilles Lipovetsky, Avrupa’da XIV. yüzyıldan başlayarak ulusal nitelikli giysilerde etkilenmelerin ve ödünçlemelerin sıklıkla kullanıldığına dikkat çeker: Modanın bu beş yüzyıl boyunca büründüğü ulusal özelliğe karşın, ödünçlemeler ve etkilenmeler oldukça çoğalmıştır ve bunlar Devletlerin prestijlerine ve refah düzeylerine göre gerçekleştirilmiştir (1987: 49). Resim 19. Paul Gauguin – Aquilano Ve Rimondi METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 34 Birinci Dünya Savaşı’nın ardında, özellikle 1920’li yıllarda kadın silueti (doğru ve düz) kübist resmin doğrudan etkisiyle yenilenir. Çizgilerdeki açıklık ve açısallık, yatay ve dikey çizgiler, konturlar, geometrik aplalar Fernand Léger’in resimlerindeki boru formlu çizgilerine, biçemsel yalınlık (olabildikçe az gereç kullanma, teknikleri birbirine karıştırmama vb.) Manet ve Cézanne yanında Picasso, Braque, Matisse’e bir anıştırmadır: Moda, Manet ile başlayan modernist projeden dersler çıkarmıştır. Tasarımcı ise modern sanatsal ‘deha’ durumuna gelmiştir. Dior, terzilerin Watteau’sudur, Balenciaga ise modanın Picasso’su. Moda kreasyonu sanatsal alıntıyı bizzat kullanır: Mondrian’ın giysileri ya da Pop art, Yves Saint Laurent’ın Picasso etekleri birer alıntıdır (Lipovetsky 1987: 91-93-96). Ünlü modacı Madame Raimbaud ise “gazeteler tarafından “modanın Michelangelosu” olarak adlandırılır” (Lipovetsky 1987: 98). Bu ve benzeri yaklaştırmalarla tasarımcılar birer “sanatçı” kimliğine sokulurlar. Moda ürünleri ise betimlenmesi, çzöümlenmesi gereken birer estetik temsil olarak görülür. XIX ve XX. yüzyıllarda moda dergilerinde moda üzerine söylemler (tasarımlara yönelik üstdil) alabildiğine yaygınlaşır, yazarlar ise modayı göndergesel değeri nedeniyle dikkate değer bir alan olarak değerlendirmeye başlarlar. Örneğin Balzac, Traité de la vie élégante (1830), Barbey d’Aurevilly Du Dandysme et de Georges Brummell (1845)’de; Baudelaire ise Eloge du maquillage’da, Malarmé la Dernière mode’da, Paul Bourget, Goncourt, Maupassant moda çevresinin çözümlemelerine girişirler. Marcel Proust ise Saint- Germain salonlarında bu yaşam biçiminin psikolojik çözümlemelerine girişir. Modern bir kurum olarak haute couture moda anlayışının temel amacı ise bireysel farklılıkların anlatımını öne çıkarmaktır. Arayışı özgünlük olan moda özgünlüğü, özgüllüğü, öznel coşkuları baştacı eder. Böylelikle moda tasarım ürünleri tektipleşmekten uzaklaşır, üstgiysisel bir yöne kaymaya başlarlar. Manken göstergeleşerek kadın olur, Giysi gibi kadın melankolik, özgür, fantezist, romantik, neşeli, genç, spor vb. nitelemelerle psikolojik belirlemelere kapı aralar. Modern moda, eskiden olduğu gibi belli bir sınıfın ya da toplumsal hiyerarşinin göstergesi olmaktan kurtulup bireyselleşerek psikolojik çözümlemelere açık duruma gelir: Modern haute couture’ün çekiciliği lüks olanla bireysel olanı, “sınıfla” özgün olanı, bireysel kimlikle kendinin geçiciliğini yan yana getirmesine bağlıdır (Lipovetsky 1987: 113). Özgünlük arayışı bir zorunluluk durumuna geldiğinde, ticari kaygılar dışında, imgelem modada alabildiğine serbest bırakılır. Kuşkusuz söz konusu yeni dizge anlayışı ile moda geçmişle bağlarını koparmaz, tersine onu yeni koşullarda durmadan yeniden yaratır (sıraladığımız örnekler bu görüşü yeterince doğrulamaktadır). M. Bahtin’in tanımladığı biçimiyle çoksesli, söyleşimci dizgeler ortaya çıkarılır. Alexander McQueen’den başka örneğin J.P. Gaultier farklı dönemleri ve türleri iç içe sokan tasarımcılardandır: J.-P. Gaultier, hicvi, gülünç olanı, türlerin ve dönemlerin karışımını iç içe sokarak modanın korkunç çocuğu rolünü oynamaktadır. Japon tasarımcılar Issey Miyake ve Rei Kawakubo giysilerin geleneksel yapısını yıktılar. (Lipovetsky 1987: 130). Benzer biçimde, 1960’lı yıllarda moda dizgesinde görülmeye başlanan rock değerleri, yeni idoller, sanatçılar furyasıyla biçimlerde agresiflik belirgin bir duruma gelirken her biri metinlerarasılığın sorgulama alanına giren kolajlar, ayrışık biçemlerin yan yanalığı, tarzlardaki çeşitlilik, oyun (metinlerarasılık aynı zamanda biçimle Kubilay AKTULUM 35 oyun oynamaktır), beklenmedik coşkular modanın ayrılmaz parçası olurlar. Açık toplum anlayışı U. Eco’ya gönderme yaparak söylersek, açık moda anlayışı yaratır. Moda ayrışık bir yapıya bürünür. Önceki dönem ürünleri bambaşka bir biçimde yeniden sunulur: Modada “Önceki yüzyıllar başka bir tarza sunulur.” (Lipovetsky 1987: 150). Modada yerleşen, kişisel anlatımın, özgürlük düşüncesinin yansısı olan look anlayış modanın benzeşiklik anlayışına karşı çıkar. Basmakalıplar bir yana bırakılarak ayrışık biçemlerin yan yana geldiği yeni tasarım biçimleri benimsenir. Gilles Lipovetsky’nin şu saptamaları yeni modanın söyleşimsellik boyutunu yeterince özetlemektedir: En ayrışık tarzların yan yana gelmesiyle, görünüşteki kanyonların parçalandığı ve çoğaldığı bir çağda yaşamaktayız. Biçemlerin ironik iç içeliğinin (Gaultier) geçerli olduğu bir çağdayız. Artık yasak olan bir şey yok, bütün biçemler kabul görüyor ve dağınık bir düzende yaygınlaşıyorlar. Öyleyse artık moda yok, modalar var. Metinlerarasılık pek çok modacı için söz konusu ettiğimiz yeni anlayışın başat yöntemidir: Batı’da moda düzenli olarak yabancıl etkilere maruz kalmıştır, aynı biçimde 1960’lı yıllarda modada dünya kültürlerinden yapılan ödünçlemelere tanık oluyoruz. (…) Geleneksel giysiler modanın başlıca kaynaklarından birisidir.15 Modada yalnızca giysilerarası alışverişlerden değil, aynı zamanda değişik sanatsal biçimlerden şu ya da bu biçimde alıntı yapma sürecine gönderme yapan göstergelerarası bir boyuttan söz edilir. Alexander McQueen hem giysilerarası hem de göstergelerarası ödünçlemelere, alıntılara sıklıkla yer veren tasarımcılar arasındadır. Bir başka çalışmada bu konu üzerinde duracağız. NOTLAR 1 Sözcüğün Türkçe karşılığı: geri alma; toplama, toparlama; telafi etme. Yazı için bkz: Fashion Teory: The Journal of Dress Body and Culture 2: no 1, 1998. 2 Bu kavram konusunda bkz: Nanta Novello Paglianti, “Le recyclage: de l’art à la création vestimentaire contemporaine Les cas de Freitag et de Maison Martin Margiela”, Actes Sémiotiques, Numéro 117 | 2014. Tanım konusunda bu yazıdan yararlanıyoruz. 3 Bu kavramlar konusunda bkz: Kubilay Aktulum, Müzik ve Metinlerarasılık ve Sinema ve Metinlerarasılık. 4 Bu konuda bkz: Kubilay Aktulum, Parçalılık/Metinlerarasılık, s. 119-152 5 Bu ayrımlar konusunda bkz: Kubilay Aktulum, Folklor ve Metinlerarasılık. 6 https://www.vam.ac.uk/shop/alexander-mcqueen-savage-beauty-exhibition-poster.html 7 Bkz: Kubilay Aktulum, Metinlerarası İlişkiler. 8 G. Klimt’in modadaki izleri konusunda bkz: Duygu Erkan, “Günümüz Moda Tasarımında Gustav Klimt Etkileri”, idil, 2017, Cilt 6, Sayı 39, Volume 6, Issue 39. 9 https://www.artsy.net/article/editorial-rodartes-legendary-van-gogh-collection 10 https://museeyslparis.com/en/events/linfluence-de-lart-dans-luvre-dyves-saint-laurent 11 “Après la femme, les fleurs sont ce que Dieu a donné au monde de plus charmant”. Christian Dior, The Little Dictionary of Fashion, 1954 12 https://fashionart.patriciareports.nl/2014/11/the-world-of-el-greco-by-laskaris-haute.html 13 Fashion is a job. I work with art, but I’m not an artist, I am an hard worker” said Tommaso Aquilano. https://www.thefashioncommentator.com/2013/10/vogue-experience-talk-with.html 14 https://www.brandsynario.com/fpw-2015-nilofer-shahids-rembrandt-collection/ 15 https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/17844/22123#re1no2 https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/17844/22123#re1no2 METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODA Metinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik 36 Kaynakça Driss Ablali, (2013). Types, genres et généricité en débat avec Jean-Michel Adam, Pratiques, 157- 158. Adam, Jean-Michel (2014). “Enjeux discursifs de la généricité des textes”, Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, n° 13, juin 2014 Aktulum, Kubilay (2018). Sinema ve Metinlerarasılık, Çizgi, 2018. Aktulum, Kubilay (1999). Metinlerarası İlişkiler, Öteki, 1999. Aktulum, Kubilay (2017). Müzik ve Metinlerarasılık, Çizgi, 2017. Aktulum, Kubilay (2013). Folklor ve Metinlerarasılık, Çizgi, 2013. “AVANT-GARDE”, Encyclopædia Universalis: http://www.universalis-edu.com/encyclopedie/avant-garde/ (Erişim 22 Mart 2019). Barthes, Roland (1981). Système de la mode, Seuils, 1981. Bowen, Peter, “10 Films Behind Alexander McQueen's Fashion”, https://bleeckerstreetmedia.com/editorial/films-behind-alexander-mcqueens-fashion (Erişim 22 Mart 2019). Broden, Thomas F., (2008). “le Tissu comme texte: l’intertextualité de la mode vestimentaire”, Intertextualité, Interdiscursivité et Intermédialité, yayına hazırlayanlar: Louis Hébert et de Lucie Guillemette, les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2008. Calefato, Patrizia (2004). The Clothed Body, Berg, 2004. Charles, Michel (1995), Introduction à l’étude des textes, Seuil. Genette, Gérard (1979). Introduction à l'architexte, Seuil. Genette, Gérard (1982). Palimpsestes, Seuil. Greimas A. Julien (1948). La mode en 1830. Essai de description du vocabulaire vestimentaire d’après les journaux de mode de l’époque, thèse de l’université de Paris. Kızıltunalı, Gizem (2017). New Frameworks in Deconstructivist Fashion: Its Categorization in Three Waves, Application of the Notions of Plasticity, De-design and the Inclusion of Bora Aksu and Hussein Chalayan as the Third Wave Turkish Deconstructivist Designers, Manchester Metropolitan University. Lepeltier, Thomas, Revue de livres, juin 1999: http://thomas.lepeltier.free.fr/cr/schaeffer-genre-litteraire.html (Erişim 22 Mart 2019). Lévi-Strauss, Claude (2018). Yaban Düşünce, çev. Tahsin Yücel, YKY. Lipovetsky, Gilles (1987). l’Empire de l’éphémère, Gallimard. Lista, Marcella, (2017). “L'Œuvre d'art totale à la naissance des avant-gardes”, 1908-1914, Encyclopaedia Universalis. http://www.universalis-edu.com/encyclopedie/avant-garde/ https://bleeckerstreetmedia.com/editorial/films-behind-alexander-mcqueens-fashion http://thomas.lepeltier.free.fr/cr/schaeffer-genre-litteraire.html Kubilay AKTULUM 37 Loscialpo, Flavia (2011). ‘Fashion and Philosophical Deconstruction: A Fashion in-Deconstruction’ in Fashion Forward, edited by A. de Witt-Paul and M.Crouch, Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford. Maingueneau, Dominique, Charaudau, Patrick (2002). Dictionnaire d’Analyse du Discours, Seuil. Moran, Berna, (2004). Edebiyat Kuramları ve Eleştiri, İletişim. Paglianti, Nanta Novello (2014), “Le recyclage: de l’art à la création vestimentaire contemporaine Les cas de Freitag et de Maison Martin Margiela”, Actes Sémiotiques, Numéro 117 . Sarup, Madan, (2004). Post-Yapısalcılık ve Postmodernizm, çev. Abdülbaki Güçlü, Bilim ve SanatYayınları. Saussure, Ferdinand de, (20001). Genel Dilbilim Dersleri, çev. Berke Vardar, Multilingual. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie (1989). Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire, Seuil. Spooner, Catherine, (2006). Contemporary Gothic, Reaktion Books. Tzvetan, Todorov, (1994). “Les Formes du discours”, cité dans Michel Corvin, Qu'est-ce que la comédie, Dunod. Van Essche, Eric, (2009). “(Ré)création”, L’art du recyclage sous la direct. de E. Vandecasteele, PSE. Kubilay AKTULUM METİNSEL TÜRSELLİK VE MODAMetinlerarasılık – Giysilerarasılık – Üstgiysisellik TEXTUAL GENERICITY AND FASHION: INTERTEXTUALITY–INTERVESTIMENTALITY– ARCHIVESTIMENTALITY NOTLAR Kaynakça work_bmag6nnf4fd2zpweha7tgjnqqi ---- Contrafação e seus museus: observação das categorias estéticas do contrafeito a r t i g o ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 169-188 MAI./ago . 2013 Contrafação e seus museus: observação das categorias estéticas do contrafeito Contrafacción y sus museos: observación de las categorias estéticas de lo pirata Counterfeit and their museums: observation of the aesthetic categories of the pirate consumption Nicolás Llano Linares1 Eneus Trindade Barreto2 Lívia Silva de Souza3 Resumo O trabalho nasce das discussões sobre consumo e pirataria. Este texto busca refletir sobre os museus da contrafação e suas formas paradoxais de comunicar a ambivalência de sentidos e modalidades da pirataria comercial; fun- damentado no pensamento de Lipovetsky (2004; 2007), o artigo ilustra o debate em torno do consumo e da pirataria a partir dos casos de três museus na Tailân- dia, Itália e França. Palavras-chave: Consumo; Pirataria; Contrafação; Comunicação; Museus Resumen Este trabajo nace de las discusiones sobre el consumo y la piratería. El artículo busca refleccionar sobre los museos de la piratería y su paradójica forma de comunicar la ambivalencia de sentidos e modalidades de la piratería comercial; basado en el trabajo de Lipovetsky (2004; 2007), el texto ilustra el 1 Doutorando em Ciências da Comunicação pela Universidade de São Paulo – USP, São Paulo, SP, Brasil; nllano@usp.br 2 Pós-Doutor em Antropologia Visual pela Universidade Aberta de Portugal. Professor-adjunto da Graduação em Publicidade e Propaganda e do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciências da Comunicação da Escola de Comuni- cações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo – USP, São Paulo, SP, Brasil; eneustrindade@usp.br 3 Mestranda em Ciências da Comunicação pela Universidade de São Paulo – USP, São Paulo, SP, Brasil; livia.2s@ gmail.com ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 170 contrafação e seus museus debate en torno al consumo y la piratería por medio del análisis de 3 museos en: Tailandia, Italia e Francia. Palabras-clave: Consumo; Piratería; Falsificación; Comunicación; Museos Abstract This paper arises from discussions about consumption and piracy, analyzing the role of counterfeit museums, and their paradoxes in the way they communicating the ambivalences of meaning e types of commercial piracy; based on Lipovetsky’s thought (2004; 2007), the articles illustrates the debate about consumption and piracy with 3 museum cases in Thailand, Italy and France. Keywords: Consumption; Piracy; Counterfeiting; Communication; Museums Data de submissão: 22/08/2012 Data de aceite: 30/01/2013 a r t i g o nicolás linares | eneus barreto | lívia silva de souza 171 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 169-188 MAI./ago . 2013 Introdução Este trabalho nasce no seio das discussões do Grupo de Estudos Semió- ticos em Comunicação, Consumo e Cultura (GESC³) do CNPq/USP, sobre consumo e pirataria. Dentre os vários aspectos do consumo pirata, encontramos algumas experiências interessantes compreendidas como museus da pirataria ou museus da contrafação, como são chamados, que comunicam mensagens de sentido paradoxal: a crítica e a possibilidade de educação contra tal fenômeno do consumo; e o de se revelar como um espaço de exaltação à pirataria. Nesse sentido, este texto busca a reflexão sobre este aspecto do mundo do consumo contemporâneo e traz alguns subsídios, a partir do pensa- mento atual de Lipovetsky (2004 e 2007), ao passo que também funda- menta sua discussão a partir dos casos do Tilleke & Gibbins Museum of Counterfeit Goods da Tailândia, do Museo del Falso em Salerne-Itália e, com maior profundidade, da visita feita ao Musée de la Contrefaçon de Paris, como formas paradoxais de comunicar sentidos e valores da pirataria no contexto atual. Para tanto, consideramos que o ponto de partida para esta reflexão se dá justamente a partir da pesquisa das acepções do termo contrafação. Em inúmeros idiomas, notamos que a contrafação está relacionada à repro- dução, à imitação, à falsificação de qualquer espécie de bens industriais: seja de um produto, de uma assinatura ou de uma patente, por exemplo. Para tornar mais claro tal argumento, podemos buscar mais detalhes a respeito do termo contrafação, a partir do ponto de vista etimológico. A ação de contrafacere em latim, em sua declinação na ação subs- tantivada contrafactìo, ónis: “confrontação”, gera a acepção de imitação ilícita da obra de outro. O termo, ao ser incorporado na língua francesa, converte-se na expressão contrefaçon e, desde a sua incorporação a essa língua, persiste a ideia do termo como algo relacionado a todo tipo de produção por cópia ou imitação, de maneira fraudulenta, não se restrin- gindo a mercadorias, podendo assim aplicar-se a “qualquer ato ou coisa”. Juridicamente, ainda, a contrafação relaciona-se atualmente à viola- ção da propriedade intelectual, dos direitos de autor, da propriedade in- ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 172 contrafação e seus museus dustrial e de patentes. Segundo a Lei dos Direitos Autorais (Lei 9.610/98, Art. 5, do inciso VII4), temos: “contrafação: a reprodução não autorizada”. É correto, portanto, trabalharmos a contrafação como um termo guarda-chuva, seja a partir de sua definição nos dicionários das várias línguas, sua construção etimológica, ou a definição legal. É como se esse termo se referisse a um gênero, dentro do qual se encontram outros con- ceitos específicos, como pirataria, falsificação ou paródia, por exemplo, como iremos identificar a partir das categorias elaboradas por Giacomini Filho (2011). Podemos classificar como contrafação, dessa forma, desde as falsificações de documentos e moedas até as obras de artes em geral, roupas, remédios, produtos eletrônicos e softwares, bem como a utiliza- ção não autorizada de logomarcas e produção intelectual. No que diz respeito aos registros acadêmicos sobre este assunto, identificamos a partir das buscas com as palavras-chave “contrefaçon”, “counterfeit” e “contrafacción”, algumas centenas de produções científi- cas em inglês, espanhol e francês. São livros, artigos indexados em bases de dados que tratam basicamente da contrafação no setor farmacêutico, na área da Biogenética, na área do Direito (no campo das patentes, dos direitos autorais violados por plágios, falsidade ideológica, de cópias fal- sificadas, usos indevidos de marcas e de produtos entre outras ocorrên- cias), da falsificação ou plágio de obras impressas e de obras de arte, não cabendo aqui mencionar esses trabalhos. Mas no que se refere aos termos “museus” e “contrafação”, percebe- mos que existe um número considerável de artigos que tratam das cópias e falsificações de documentos históricos e de obras de arte, mas só um desses trabalhos registra uma discussão semelhante a nossa, todavia res- trita a descrever o Museo del Falso em Salerne, Itália. Trata-se do artigo de Laura Colby (1994, p. 44-47), publicado na Revista Museum Interna- tional de Paris, sobre o qual faremos comentários mais a diante. A partir desta constatação de que o consumo cotidiano manifesta-se permeado por uma série de produtos “contrafeitos”, popularmente conhe- 4 Disponível em: . Acesso em: 4 out. 2011. a r t i g o nicolás linares | eneus barreto | lívia silva de souza 173 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 169-188 MAI./ago . 2013 cidos como piratas, percebemos a configuração de três espaços sui generis que se referem aos museus de contrafação, objeto de discussão deste artigo. Tais lugares, como falamos no início deste artigo, configuram-se co- mo pontos de retaliação à pirataria e possibilitam uma forma de educar o consumidor quanto aos tipos de contrafação, bem como espaços de de- núncia para o reconhecimento da obra contrafeita, buscando evitar este tipo de consumo. Por outro lado, ao se intitularem como museus, estes espaços criam um lugar de apresentação e exaltação ao produto contra- feito. Isso demonstra o sentimento paradoxal que está no íntimo do sen- timento do consumo de toda produção pirata: é um produto que parece com o original e funciona como tal, além de ser mais barato. Todavia, se o produto original fosse mais barato, todos o comprariam. Desse modo, fica explícita uma correlação entre a aura da marca original que se transfere para o seu correlato pirata, o que justifica uma observação sobre o fenômeno dos museus da contrafação. Museus da contrafação e categorias estéticas do contrafeito Para tentar explicar estas manifestações, somos obrigados a retomar o assunto da definição legal da contrafação e seu marco histórico no âmbi- to da regulamentação da proteção à propriedade intelectual e industrial que remonta ao século XIX. Trata-se da atuação da Unifab – União dos Fabricantes, criada na França, em 1872, que inicialmente atendia aos interesses de empresas da indústria farmacêutica, justamente com a mis- são de atuar no desenvolvimento de tratados internacionais a esse respei- to na proteção de patentes para a produção de medicamentos. Nesse sentido, em 1883, a Unifab participou da elaboração da União Convenção de Paris para a Proteção da Propriedade Industrial e, em 1891, do Acordo de Madri, relativo ao Registro Internacional de Marcas de Comércio. Em 1951, a Unifab criou o Museu da Contrafação, em Paris (Musée de la Contrefaçon),5 que visitamos em julho de 2010 e a 5 Disponível em: . Acesso em: 2 out. 2011. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 174 contrafação e seus museus partir do qual identificamos exemplos de manifestações e categorias de produtos e marcas contrafeitos, que discutiremos mais a diante. O Musée de la Contrefaçon (Museu da Contrafação) de Paris foi criado com a função didática de ensinar aos seus visitantes a contrafação e suas modalidades. O espaço do museu dispõe de um grande número de itens originais e falsificados, tais como estátuas de bronze de Rodin, perfumes, softwares e tudo que represente um caso emblemático de pro- cessos de falsificação. Além de mostrar as peças falsificadas e seus respectivos originais, en- sinando aos visitantes como diferenciá-las, o museu também tem a mis- são de mostrar o grande impacto negativo da contrafação na economia internacional, e a importância de se respeitar a propriedade intelectual de itens como obras de arte, marcas e softwares. E, ainda, esclarece as possíveis sanções legais que existem para os indivíduos envolvidos nos processos de produção e distribuição de itens contrafeitos, e como elas podem ser aplicadas, no caso da legislação francesa. Outros dois museus dedicados à contrafação localizam-se respectiva- mente em Bangkok, Tailândia, e em Salerne, Itália. O Tilleke & Gibbins Museum of Counterfeit Goods foi criado em 1989 pelo Tilleke & Gib- bins, o maior escritório de advocacia do país, especializado justamente em propriedade intelectual.6 Assim como o Museu da Contrafação de Paris, o museu de Bangkok tem expostas mais de 3.500 mercadorias con- trafeitas, com o objetivo de mostrar aos visitantes as diferenças quanto à qualidade em relação aos produtos originais. Além disso, há também aqui um importante caráter educativo, ao mostrar os prejuízos econômi- cos e sociais causados pela produção em massa destes itens falsificados. Já o Museo del Falso nasceu em 1991 a partir do interesse acadêmi- co e financeiro do Prof. Dr. Salvatore Castillo, coordenador do Centro Studi sul Falso da Universidade de Salerne, Itália, que, com proposta se- melhante aos dois museus anteriormente citados, mantém o referido es- paço, por meio de trabalhos de sua empresa de consultoria, que também 6 Disponível em: . Acesso em: 2 out. 2011. a r t i g o nicolás linares | eneus barreto | lívia silva de souza 175 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 169-188 MAI./ago . 2013 está ligada ao seu centro de estudos sobre contrafação, bem como esta- belece parcerias da universidade com a prefeitura local. Neste museu são organizadas várias exposições temporárias que mostram a pirataria e a falsificação de vários setores produtivos da vida comercial. O artigo que descreve tal museu deu destaque à exposição intitulada “Falso food” (alimentos falsificados), ver COLBY, 1994. Não se tem registros de outros espaços semelhantes, mas sabe-se que outros museus se dedicam a exposições sobre obras artísticas verdadeiras e falsificadas. Contudo, os espaços aqui citados parecem ser os registros de museus mais contundentes da produção comercial contrafeita ou pi- rata no mundo ocidental. Quanto a esses exemplos de museus da contrafação, há que se obser- var alguns fenômenos característicos da hipermodernidade, conforme teorizou Gilles Lipovetsky (2004). A partir do final da década de 1970, assiste-se ao surgimento, sobretu- do no âmbito acadêmico, do conceito de pós-modernidade. A princípio ligado ao discurso arquitetônico, tal conceito passou a designar “ora o abalo dos alicerces absolutos da racionalidade [...], ora a poderosa dinâ- mica de individualização e de pluralização de nossas sociedades”. (LI- POVETSKY, 2004, p. 51). Para o autor, a pós-modernidade configura-se, na verdade, como um período de transição, que nos encaminhou à sociedade que agora viven- ciamos, a sociedade hipermoderna. Este atual estágio da modernidade caracteriza-se, sobretudo, por ser a era do hiper, do que é levado ao extre- mo, que é encabeçada pelo hiperconsumo. Cada domínio apresenta uma vertente excrescente, desmesurada, “sem limites”. Prova disso é a tecnologia e suas transformações vertiginosas nos referenciais sobre a morte, a alimentação ou a procriação. Mostram-nos também as imagens do corpo no hiper-realismo pornô; a televisão e seus espetáculos que encenam a transparência total; a galáxia Internet e seu di- lúvio de fluxos numéricos [...]; o turismo e suas multidões em férias; as aglo- merações urbanas e suas megalópoles superpovoadas [...]. (idem, p. 55). Outra característica é o fato de ser a era do paradoxo. Aspectos para- doxais aplicam-se a diferentes esferas da hipermodernidade: a relação ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 176 contrafação e seus museus com o tempo, com o passado, com o futuro, a formação da personali- dade etc. “É com os traços de um composto paradoxal de frivolidade e ansiedade, de euforia e vulnerabilidade, que se desenha a modernidade do segundo tipo.” (idem, p. 65). Quanto à relação do indivíduo com o tempo, esta é tomada justamen- te pelo paradoxo e pelos extremos, característicos da hipermodernidade. Ao contrário do carpe diem que pregava a era moderna, em um clima de tranquilidade e descontração quanto ao futuro, hoje “a hipermoder- nidade indica menos o foco no instante que o declínio do presentismo em face de um futuro que se tornou incerto e precário” (idem, p. 71). Com foco no futuro, mas de maneira preocupada, estamos o tempo to- do vivendo intensamente o presente, sempre em ritmo de urgência, e prevendo e prevenindo: exemplos disso são o culto à saúde, a prevenção, a longevidade. Por outro lado, vivemos uma era de celebração e recorda- ção do passado: Celebrando até o menos objeto do passado, invocando as obrigações da memória, remobilizando as tradições religiosas, a hipermodernidade não é estruturada por um presente absoluto; ela o é por um presente para- doxal, um presente que não para de exumar e “redescobrir” o passado. (idem, p. 85). Assim, em tempos de hiperconsumo e hipermodernidade, parado- xalmente vemos a vivência intensa da antecipação do futuro e o resgate saturado do passado: Logo não existirá mais nenhuma atividade, nenhum objeto, nenhuma localidade, que não tenha a honra de uma instituição museal. Do museu da crêpe ao da sardinha, do museu do Elvis ao dos Beatles, a sociedade moderna é contemporânea do tudo-patrimônio-histórico e do todo-come- morativo. (idem, p. 86). Voltando nosso foco aos museus da contrafação, notamos que esses museus se encaixam muito bem nesta última afirmação de Lipovetsky. Tudo é digno de ter um museu, de ser resgatado como patrimônio his- tórico, de ser celebrado, a exemplo dos museus de Paris e de Bangkok, com suas milhares de réplicas, imitações e falsificações, envoltas pelo superficial objetivo didático. a r t i g o nicolás linares | eneus barreto | lívia silva de souza 177 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 169-188 MAI./ago . 2013 Dizemos superficial, pois, por trás da declaração de que estes mu- seus existem para educar, paradoxalmente – e aqui entramos em outra característica da hipermodernidade – estas instituições prestam-se, em tempos de hiperconsumo, ao hiperencantamento por parte do público. A partir da experiência da visita ao Museu da Contrafação de Paris, pude- mos perceber exatamente este movimento: se por um lado estes museus trazem, de fato, um fundo didático, com o objetivo aparente de ensinar sobre a contrafação e suas modalidades, alertando aos visitantes desde os problemas relativos à qualidade até os graves problemas sociais e econô- micos gerados pela indústria da falsificação, por outro lado, eles podem também funcionar como uma espécie de apologia. A exibição destes pro- dutos, por vezes tão semelhantes aos originais, produz exatamente uma experiência de encantamento. Tal paradoxo vem, justamente, do fato de que nós, indivíduos hiper- modernos, estamos imersos em um estado constante de aflição, como quem agoniza, em constante medo, aqui particularmente em relação não simplesmente à pirataria, mas ao que o museu nos mostra como sendo seus maiores desdobramentos: a desobediência legal aos direitos do autor e suas correspondentes sanções, e a relação da contrafação com o financiamento de organizações criminosas. Contudo, paralelamente a isso, imersos também em um deslumbramento com a hiper-realidade, ficamos em êxtase ao contemplar mercadorias contrafeitas, por vezes tão perfeitamente semelhantes às originais, em seus menores detalhes e a preços mais acessíveis que os originais. A partir da reflexão apresentada sobre os paradoxos que apresenta o museu, e com o objetivo de fazer do relatório de visita ao Musée de la Contrefaçon de Paris uma fonte de pesquisa para estudos sobre consu- mo, marcas, bens culturais e processos de imitação industriais-culturais, esta segunda parte do artigo visa classificar os materiais expostos no mu- seu a partir das tipologias ligadas à imitação, identificadas por Gino Gia- comini Filho. (2011, p. 216-238). O uso das tipologias determinadas pelo autor (falsificação, pirataria, plágio, knockoff, adaptação e paródia) parte da justificativa de que es- tas não são exclusivas do plano estético publicitário, já que as mesmas ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 178 contrafação e seus museus particularidades operativas podem se encontrar tanto em diferentes di- mensões da indústria cultural quanto em uma variedade de gêneros dis- cursivos e que em um processo complexo como a imitação, as distintas tipologias permitem entender a variedade não só de processos industriais de consumo, mas as diversas produções de sentido simbólicas dos consu- midores e suas relações com as marcas e produtos. Antes de iniciar a classificação de acordo com a tipologia, vale a pena introduzir a arquitetura do museu: vários salões que abrigam diferentes vitrines com uma variedade de produtos compartilham a distribuição do espaço com informações escritas (banners, citações, placas com textos impressos) e telas de computador (material digital). O percurso inicia sob uma placa com uma citação de Jean-Jacques Rousseau sobre a arte do falso: “Le faux est susceptible d’une infinité des combinaisons, mais la vérité n’a qu’une manière d’être”.7 Tal afirmação por si só já justifica o argumento levantado neste artigo sobre a possibilidade de exaltação ao consumo pirata e mostra os paradoxos vividos na experiência estética na visita ao espaço que busca educar contra a contrafação e que, ao mesmo tempo, investe de certa aura admirável a apresentação do produto pirata, sobretudo as contrafações de boas qualidades em relação aos seus origi- nais. A partir do exposto, iniciamos nossa apresentação das categorias de contrafação e seus exemplos registrados no museu de Paris, para perce- bermos as nuanças de qualidades dos produtos contrafeitos nas manifes- tações dos tipos de contrafação. Falsificação A falsificação implica a cópia ilícita de um direito marcário, de forma que o bem imitador torna-se idêntico ou indistinto do original desres- peitando os respectivos direitos (Bian e Moutinho, 2009). Dois dos ele- mentos essenciais na falsificação comercial são a existência da fraude e a não autorização do fabricante (Strehlau, 2004). (GIACOMINI FILHO, 2011, p. 225). 7 “O falso é suscetível de uma infinidade de combinações, mas a verdade tem uma única maneira de ser”. a r t i g o nicolás linares | eneus barreto | lívia silva de souza 179 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 169-188 MAI./ago . 2013 Se analisarmos de forma mais detalhada os produtos falsificados que se encontram na exposição usando a classificação feita por Chaudhry e Walsh (1996) e resenhada no artigo de Giacomini Filho (2011), encon- tramos: produtos falsificados completamente, o que tem muita similitu- de, inclusive o uso da mesma marca do original; produtos duplicados do original, mas com marcas diferentes; reproduções que não são completa- mente exatas; imitações que se afastam do original e não criam o mesmo ethos do original, ou seja, que não são convincentes como falsificação. Em relação aos produtos falsificados que usam as marcas dos origi- nais, os brincos, broches, chaveiros e bolsas da marca Chanel (Figuras 1 e 2) são um exemplo perfeito para ilustrar a primeira classificação; os produtos duplicados com marcas diferentes constituem uma parte im- portante da mostra do museu, a exemplo dos aparelhos para barbear BIC e BIC Sensitive (Figuras 3 e 4). Neste caso, podemos notar que os apare- lhos são bicolores (branco e amarelo) e na falsificação são monocromáti- cos (amarelo). Já na linha BIC Sensitive, ocorre o contrário. Existe a BIC Figuras 1 e 2. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 180 contrafação e seus museus versus a BIG, mas a mascote não tem a caneta em seu traçado. Neste tipo de falsificação também encontramos bens culturais como pinturas e obras de arte, por exemplo, uma falsificação do quadro de Henri Matisse Les poissons rouges (Figura 5). De forma geral, as reproduções dos produtos apresentados na expo- sição não são cópias exatas dos originais; existem modificações nas em- balagens, nos nomes dos produtos, nas cores tanto do produto como das embalagens, ou simplesmente nas proporções que mudam do original para o produto falsificado. Para ilustrar este fenômeno, observemos o caso da batedeira da marca Moulinex (Figura 6). Percebemos que o design é diferente tanto no lugar de por a mão quanto nas colheres; no original o lugar de por a mão é liso e as colheres Figuras 1 e 2. Figuras 3 e 4. a r t i g o nicolás linares | eneus barreto | lívia silva de souza 181 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 169-188 MAI./ago . 2013 são ovais, e no falsificado não; além desses detalhes, no original os dese- nhos são mais delicados do que na falsificação. Entramos no último elemento que faz parte da classificação das fal- sificações: aquelas imitações mal feitas que não conseguem convencer o consumidor, exemplificadas no museu a partir das meias da marca Nike (Figura 7). A embalagem do produto falso é bem diferente da do produto original, não possuindo o nome da marca, nem referência ao tamanho da meia, o layout é bem díspar e o logo Nike é significativa- mente grosseiro na meia; outro caso deste tipo de falsificação são os óculos da marca Ray Ban (Figura 8). Neste produto percebemos que a imitação dos óculos é bem diferente do original, a armação é mais curvilínea na parte de cima, e notamos também que o material da contrafação é mais opaco. Finalmente o estojo é totalmente diferente e a própria assinatura também recebe outro tratamento tanto na cor quanto nos detalhes. Figuras 5, 6 e 7. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 182 contrafação e seus museus Existem muitos produtos que permitem entender como diferentes ca- racterísticas de cada tipo de falsificação são misturadas num produto só. Um exemplo desta mistura é o perfume Flower by Kenzo (Figura 9). Po- demos aqui identificar várias modificações entre o verdadeiro perfume e o falso. O nome do falso é Flower by Sellion, a flor gravada na tampa do falso está murcha e a do verdadeiro está cheia de vida, o tamanho da haste da flor também é facilmente percebido e as informações das em- balagens são diferentes. Resumindo, a falsificação é um processo de imitação ilícita que pre- tende apropriar-se dos atributos tangíveis de produtos que estão estabele- cidos e que são reconhecidos no mercado, com o objetivo de aproveitar comercialmente o valor marcário dos outros em seu benefício. Pirataria A pirataria não é só o resultado de um processo de imitação comer- cial tangível; ela envolve outras fases além da sua reprodução, “refere-se à reprodução e comercialização ilegal e em larga escala de obras legiti- Figuras 8 e 9. a r t i g o nicolás linares | eneus barreto | lívia silva de souza 183 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 169-188 MAI./ago . 2013 mamente criadas, envolvendo produtores, estabelecimentos comerciais, autoridades governamentais, fisco e receptadores”. (GIACOMINI FI- LHO, 2011, p. 227). No Museu da Contrafação de Paris podem-se encontrar documenta- ção e informação sobre os processos que fazem parte da pirataria, suas consequências e punições. Tanto fotografias que documentam a produ- ção, como usinas de fabricação de produtos falsos de couro, quanto ima- gens de apreensões de mercadoria falsa (couro e óculos) fazem parte da exibição. Embora todos os produtos apresentados façam parte de algum dos processos que constituem a pirataria, o museu também sublinha sua importância por meio de textos informativos e banners sobre este fenô- meno e sua ligação com os direitos autorais. Eis uma alusão explícita à pirataria, encontrada no museu: “De julho a agosto de 2006, 8,3 milhões de CDs e DVDs foram apreendidos na China. 3.000 lojas foram fecha- das e mais de 9.000 pequenos estabelecimentos foram punidos (Jornal Les êchos, agosto de 2006)”.8 Plágio Normalmente associado à falta de crédito ou permissão da proprie- dade intelectual, o plágio, como explicam Pereira (2001) e Giacominni Filho (2011) também [...] pode estar contido em falsificações, pirataria e imitações trazendo prejuízos a diferentes entidades que idealizaram originalmente as obras, caso de uma empresa que tem sua marca ou propaganda plagiada por concorrente, trazendo confusão ao consumidor. (GIACOMINI FILHO, 2011, p. 228). O plágio está representado em todos os exemplos apresentados no museu, já que as marcas são entidades legalmente constituídas e estas imitações violam seus direitos de copyright (à cópia ou direito de repro- dução). Ao usar o nome ou identidade corporativa de uma marca esta- 8 Museu da Contrafação, banner informativo “Droits d’auteur et piratage”. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 184 contrafação e seus museus belecida no mercado (legalmente e simbolicamente), está se cometendo um delito, pois sua produção, distribuição e venda estão sendo desen- volvidas sem autorização oficial das empresas fabricantes dos produtos originais. Knockoff Segundo Giacomini Filho, pautado em Carvalho (2006), o knockoff é um “Conjunto marca/produto alusivo a outro já estabelecido no mer- cado ou uma expressão promocional que arremeda outra já publicada, knockoffs são itens ligeiramente diferentes do original, mas não são ven- didos como artigos genuínos”. (GIACOMINI FILHO, p. 2011, 229). Neste caso específico, o imitador toma algumas características ou símbolos distintivos de produtos ou marcas reconhecidas (logomarcas, embalagens, cores, formas, figuras, tipografias, entre outros) e os aplica a um produto com um nome diferente. Este produto pode-se caracterizar como um híbrido, pois mesmo que utilize algumas características iden- titárias alheias, sua imagem também é constituída a partir de elementos próprios. Existem quatro grandes objetivos ou consequências ligadas aos knockoffs: 1. serem tomados como originais pelos consumidores que des- conhecem o verdadeiro original; 2. satisfazer seus consumidores, pois embora conheçam o original, julgam ter na imitação um benefício su- perior; 3. induzir seus compradores ao erro, uma vez que as similaridades acarretam confusão da imitação com o original; 4. prejudicar o concor- rente ou detentores dos direitos do bem original (GIACOMINI FILHO, 2011, p. 230). Para exemplificar este elemento da tipologia nos elementos presentes no museu, apresentamos dois casos: o primeiro, O Casa Café (Figura 10), utiliza-se de um layout visual que se aproxima bastante do produto Nescafé, apesar de modificar a cor da caneca, a cor do rótulo, o vidro que armazena o produto e a tampa. Essas modificações sutis em sua composição podem levar a uma dúvida no consumidor que já está acos- tumado com o Nescafé e gerar uma compra errada. a r t i g o nicolás linares | eneus barreto | lívia silva de souza 185 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 169-188 MAI./ago . 2013 O segundo caso trata-se do molho de pimenta Tabasco (Figura 11), que possui a sua falsificação com o nome de Tabaro, e aqui podemos notar a semelhança no layout dos produtos, sendo que o verdadeiro tem uma disposição mais equilibrada. No produto, porém, a cor do molho falso é bem mais escura, assim como o lacre. Adaptação As adaptações são ações que podem incluir diferentes tipos de pro- cessos, como adequações, transcrições, transmutações, reproduções, tra- duções e transplantes de conteúdo. Normalmente, as adaptações partem de uma obra original que serve como referência para inovar e criar uma nova obra. No caso dos produtos apresentados no percurso do museu, ca- be entender a adaptação no sentido dado por Schnaars (1997), que “[...] emprega o termo adaptações criativas para designar formas inovadoras de cópia, pois melhoram o modelo original ou fazem adaptações para novos contextos”. (GIACOMINI FILHO, 2011, p. 231). Os produtos culturais e artísticos não dependem somente da obra, mas também do contexto da leitura e da recepção que faz o autor, e as adap- tações podem ser celebradas como obras originais ou como leituras ino- vadoras, como se pode encontrar na indústria musical (MILLER, 2004). Na nossa visita não encontramos casos que exemplificassem claramente Figuras 10 e 11. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 186 contrafação e seus museus este elemento da tipologia, talvez porque não queiram fazer do ato da imi- tação industrial uma apologia da criatividade das indústrias num espaço didático, paradoxo que foi discutido anteriormente no artigo. Paródia Este conteúdo estético imita, de uma forma irônica e evidente, obra alheia. Johnson e Spilger (2000) conceituam a paródia como um tipo de sátira caracterizada por imitação que ironiza um trabalho em particular ou estilo de um determinado autor. Assim como acontece com a adap- tação, não existem produtos no museu que funcionem como exemplos deste elemento da tipologia. As imitações, de modo geral, tentam ser o mais semelhantes com as marcas originais para aproveitar as constru- ções simbólicas e seu posicionamento no mercado. Fazer uma paródia de uma marca reconhecida seria apagar alguns dos significados reconhe- cidos pelo público em virtude de criar novos, ou seja, construir e posicio- nar uma marca desde zero no mercado. No entanto, isto não significa que não existam marcas que realizam paródias e que apresentem as cinco características definidas por Johnson e Spilger (2000) e comentadas por Giacomini Filho (2011). É o caso de Abreacombi & Fecha em relação à marca original Abercrombie & Fitch. Usando a fonética da marca original, a adaptação junta um elemento característico da vida cultural e econômica do país (o veículo popular Kombi) e faz um jogo de palavras para criar uma identidade juvenil, humorística e descontraída. Considerações finais O passeio pelas manifestações das categorias criadas por Giacomini Filho (2011), associadas às manifestações encontradas no Musée da la Contre- façon de Paris, com as reflexões do consumo hipermoderno dada por Li- povetsky, nos auxiliam a repensar a força e o sentido estético do consumo pirata, sobretudo no seu aspecto fetichista como aponta Canevacci (2005), pois mostra novos caminhos para os sentidos do consumo, desvinculado a r t i g o nicolás linares | eneus barreto | lívia silva de souza 187 ano 10 vol. 10 n. 28 p. 169-188 MAI./ago . 2013 de um valor ou enaltecimento à propriedade e autoria, sugerindo inclusive o declínio de valores fundamentais ao sistema capitalista. Nesse sentido, em que medida podemos afirmar que estamos vivendo uma ruptura das mentalidades em efetivo em relação ao sistema capitalista moderno que se pautava no direito à propriedade, à privatização dos espaços? Ou tal pro- cesso se dá numa contiguidade das transformações do sistema capitalista na sua versão contemporânea, demarcada pelas mudanças nas formas de interação social, sobredeterminadas em parte, pela grande influência das mudanças tecnológicas e suas lógicas de participação e inclusão? Essas perguntas demandam novos artigos e aqui não encontram res- posta. Mas certamente o paradoxo apontado pelo fenômeno do consumo pirata e seus museus são reveladores de transformações e sentidos que aqui buscamos pontuar como nossa contribuição ao entendimento esté- tico do consumo pirata em suas manifestações de produtos, marcas e da publicidade. Referências BIAN, X.; MOUTINHO, L. An investigation of determinants of counterfeit purchase consid- eration. Journal of Business Research. v. 62, p. 368-378, 2009. CANEVACCI, M. Culturas extremas. Rio de Janeiro: DP&A, 2005. CARVALHO, A. O impacto negativo da pirataria no cenário mercadológico e as dificuldades de combate a falsificação. Revista IBRAC. São Paulo: Instituto Brasileiro de Estudos da Concorrência, Consumo e Comércio Internacional. v. 12, n. 3, p. 47-84, 2006. CHAUDHRY, P. E.; WALSH, M. G. An assessment of the impact of counterfeiting in inter- national markets: the piracy paradox persists. The Columbia Journal of World Business. Fall. p. 34-48, 1996. COLBY, L. Um vrai musée pour les contrefaçons: le Museo del Falso. In Revista Museum In- ternacional. Paris: UNESCO. v. 46, n. 4, p. 44-47, 1994. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 29 jan. 2012. GIACOMINI FILHO, G. Tipologia de imitação estética na propaganda. In: Revista Ma- trizes. Ano 4. v. 2, jan./jun., p. 216-238, 2011. JOHNSON¸ M.; SPILGER, U. Legal considerations when using parodies in advertisign. Jour- nal of advertising. v. 29, n. 4, p. 77-86, 2000. LIPOVETSKY, G. Os tempos hipermodernos. São Paulo: Editora Barcarolla, 2004. ppg co m – espm , com unicação m ídia e consumo a r t i g o 188 contrafação e seus museus . A felicidade paradoxal. Ensaio sobre sociedade de consumo. São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 2007. MILLER, P. D. Rhythm science. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. PEREIRA, M. A. M. Concorrência desleal por meio da publicidade. São Paulo: Ed. Juarez de Oliveira, 2001. SCHNAARS, S. P. Administrando as estratégias de imitação. São Paulo: Pioneira, 1997. STREHLAU, S. O luxo falsificado e suas formas de consumo. São Paulo: Fundação Getúlio Vargas de São Paulo. Tese de Doutorado em Administração. 2004. Websites Lei nº 9.610, de 19 de fevereiro de 1998. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 4 out. 2011. Musée de la Contrefaçon de Paris. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 2 out. 2011. Tilleke & Gibbins Museum of Counterfeit Goods. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 2 out. 2011. work_bnbvmodb6be2ppzezbtqjqw3fi ---- Color consilience: color through the lens of art practice, history, philosophy, and neuroscience Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. ISSN 0077-8923 A N N A L S O F T H E N E W Y O R K A C A D E M Y O F S C I E N C E S Issue: The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience Color consilience: color through the lens of art practice, history, philosophy, and neuroscience Bevil R. Conway Neuroscience Program, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts and Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts Address for correspondence: Dr. Bevil R. Conway, Wellesley College – Neuroscience, 106 Central St., Wellesley, MA 02481. bconway@wellesley.edu Paintings can be interpreted as the product of the complex neural machinery that translates physical light signals into behavior, experience, and emotion. The brain mechanisms responsible for vision and perception have been sculpted during evolution and further modified by cultural exposure and development. By closely examining artists’ paintings and practices, we can discover hints to how the brain works, and achieve insight into the discoveries and inventions of artists and their impact on culture. Here, I focus on an integral aspect of color, color contrast, which poses a challenge for artists: a mark situated on an otherwise blank canvas will appear a different color in the context of the finished painting. How do artists account for this change in color during the production of a painting? In the broader context of neural and philosophical considerations of color, I discuss the practices of three modern masters, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, and Claude Monet, and suggest that the strategies they developed not only capitalized on the neural mechanisms of color, but also influenced the trajectory of western art history. Keywords: cones; retina; V4; macaque monkey; Modernism; Matisse; Cézanne; Monet It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color—not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.1 A great modern attainment is to have found the secret of expression by color.2 Henri Matisse Introduction For Henri Matisse, painting was serious business. Naturally, he wore a suit to work. Matisse, an icon of modern art who “everyone agrees deserves the title of the century’s greatest colorist,”3 lived in the south of France and often painted with a smock to protect his formal attire from sticky oil paint. Wear- ing a smock was an easy decision. But what about the decisions that followed? As Matisse so bluntly states, “Anyone who paints has to make choices minute by minute.”4 Faced with a blank canvas, how did Ma- tisse decide what marks to apply where and with what color? And how did these decisions go on to shape the trajectory of art history? To some extent, the kind of marks one makes is inevitably deter- mined by body mechanics: our arms are attached at a fixed point, the shoulder, and so any attempt at a straight line invariably results in a gentle curve.5 The physical structure of our bodies therefore influences drawing practice—and these influences may extend to cognitive development, shaping how we think. Similarly, the way in which our nervous systems en- code light signals necessarily determines what we see and how artists paint. An emerging field of re- search, vision and art, explores the interface between the neural mechanisms of vision and art.6–10 An ex- tension of this field, which I take up here, concerns the interaction between visual processing and art practice: how do the mechanisms of vision influ- ence the decisions of the artist at work? And what do the strategies that artists employ in making their work tell us about brain function? While the work and comments of artists are not scientific docu- ments, with appropriate sensitivity to their limita- tions, these materials may be useful in informing doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2012.06470.x Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. 1 Color consilience Conway our understanding of how the brain works. In this essay, I take up the relationship between painting and color vision. People have been experimenting with paints and pigments for the entire history of human culture, and have therefore generated a lot of data. But the richest data has come relatively recently, following on the heels of the industrial revolution, which fu- eled the development of synthetic dyes and pigments and resulted not only in the wide availability of in- expensive pigments in the latter half of the 19th century but also in an expansion of the color gamut available to the artist11–14 (see also Ref. 15). With the development of synthetic pigments, the use of par- ticular colors was no longer restricted by the wealth of the artist or sponsor, who previously could flaunt their influence by commissioning pictures contain- ing rare pigments like gold, or better, ultramarine blue made from rare lapis lazuli rock. By 1830, syn- thetic pigments were widely available. For example, manufactured ultramarine was being churned out by factories across Europe, following the invention in 1826 of an inexpensive method of production by Jean Baptiste Guimet in France and, independently, by Christian Gottlob Gmelin in Germany.11 In the same way that a technical development, photogra- phy,a paved the way for one of the most creative periods of painting in art history, the development of synthetic pigments foreshadowed an explosion of possibilities for the use of color. In some sense, the only limitation on the use of color became our neural machinery. From this perspective, paintings can be inter- preted as the product of our brains, specifically as the product of all the complex neural circuits that translate physical light signals into behavior, experience, and emotion. The neural machinery of our brains has been sculpted by many influences, not only during a given individual’s development, but also during the history of evolution. By closely a Some argued that photography would herald the end of painting, which shows how incompetent we can be at pre- dicting the impact of technology on culture. “From today painting is dead,” the French painter Paul Delaroche al- legedly concluded in 1839 in response to the development of the daguerreotype photographic technique. Although there is no evidence that Delaroche actually said this, the sentiment has been repeated periodically ever since the middle of the 19th century.1 examining artists’ practices and the paintings they make, scientists and art historians can collaborate to uncover clues to how the brain works and thereby gain insight into how the brain has been influenced by cultural history and, in turn, has shaped that his- tory. Here, I describe some of the clever strategies that artists have used to paint in color, and examine how these strategies exploit and reveal the neural ba- sis for color. In this essay, I will consider three titans of color, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Claude Monet (1840–1926), and Henri Matisse (1869–1954). The work of these artists certainly influenced the direc- tion of art history. One theory, to which I return in the last section of this essay, is that the art-historical significance of these artists’ work derives from the dynamic interaction between the artist and his work during its production, an interaction that is con- strained by neural mechanisms of vision and vi- sual feedback. To fully understand the influence of these artists on art history, one may therefore benefit from knowledge of the neural mechanisms of color, which may themselves be better understood in light of art’s historical and philosophical considerations of color. One might then argue that art practice, art history, neuroscience, and philosophy have under- gone a kind of consilience, and are dependent upon each other for a complete account of color.b Color in the world and in our heads There are lively philosophical debates about color, concerning whether color is determined by some objective real-world criterion, or rather by the par- ticularities of the viewer.18 These debates have often boiled down to the uneasy question “do you see red like I see red?” Curiously, we rarely ask whether two people see an object as having the same shape. One standard account for the specialness of color rests on the argument that, unlike an object’s shape, it cannot be determined objectively by a physical measuring device like a ruler; the measurements of a penny, for example, reveal it to be round, confirm- b The term “consilience” was popularized by Wilson,17 and I use it to point to the productive intersection between arts and sciences. The various disciplines might not wholly agree, but it is not necessary that they do. Rather, my argument is that understanding will come through ap- preciation of the many facets of color revealed by many ways of knowing. 2 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. Administrator Highlight delete Conway Color consilience ing our perception of it as round. But this account is flawed on two counts: first, we actually can measure the physical basis for color almost as easily as we can for shape, by using a spectroradiometer to deter- mine the relative fraction of different wavelengths reflected or emitted from a colored object or source. And second, although we may be able to measure the diameter of a penny, rarely is the two-dimensional retinal projection of the penny round; it is almost al- ways an ellipse. Although the physical basis for both can be measured just as accurately, the relationship between these physical stimuli and the perceptions elicited by them would therefore seem to be as com- plicated in the case of shape as it is in the case of color. The question, then, is why our perception of the shape of the penny is considered universal (“it is round”), yet its color is up for debate (“do you see it as orange like I see it?”). I would argue that the discrepancy between our account of shape and color reveals something unique about color, but it is not that shape is physically measurable and color is not. The discrepancy suggests, instead, that color carries a qualitatively different behavioral valence than shape: we care more about the troubling re- lationship between the physical basis for color and our experience of it than we do about the relation- ship between the physics of object shape and our perception of shape. This special feature of color may rest on the fact that we come to know color only through our eyes and not through our mus- cles and fingertips, which are also used to ascertain shape. In any event, color’s specialness may account for the passionate debates that constitute the history of color vision research and continue to this day. What is so special about color? Scientific studies have shown that humans (with normal trichromatic color) possess extraordinary color detection and discrimination abilities;19 some claim that “color is what the eye sees best.”20 So we can conclude that color is an important part of our visual expe- rience.21 But for what, exactly, is color important? Answers often focus on the relevance of color for ob- ject recognition (the “ripe fruit” argument19,22–24) and occasionally on the use of color for intraspecific communication (the “your face is red, you must be angry” argument25,26). The seemingly unquantifi- able, qualitative aspect of color that these hypothe- ses miss is the fact that we like color.27 Color, unlike other aspects of vision (with the possible exception of pleasant faces), appears to have a direct impact on the limbic system. Although emotional reactions can be elicited from shapes (e.g., the outline of a snake), these associations are learned and do not have the same pop-out characteristic of color. Con- sider a field of 2s in which one “5” is distributed. To identify this unique character, people will typically use a time-consuming search strategy, interrogat- ing each letter (“is this a 5?”). But if the “5” is red (and the distractor 2s are black), the 5 will pop out instantly. For this reason, color is considered a “low- level” or basic visual feature. Color contributes directly to emotional state,28–31 which may account for why sports teams with red uniforms win more often.32 Moreover, people who lose color perception as a result of brain dam- age become profoundly depressed33 (although it is obviously unlikely that impaired color is the root cause of most depression). Evidence in support of the intimate relationship between color and emo- tion/reward fell out of a study examining experi- mental deep-brain stimulation (DBS) for the treat- ment of intractable depression. Mayberg and her colleagues found that DBS in humans of a brain region implicated in depression, Area 25, resulted in elevations in mood and enhancement of color perception. Following DBS of Area 25, “all patients spontaneously reported acute effects including . . . sharpening of visual details and intensification of colors in response to electrical stimulation.”34 The special status of color may underlie our use of color as a metaphor for emotion and a host of other in- effable experiences, such as musical timbre (often called “sound color”). Although debates rage on in contemporary phi- losophy, there are some facts concerning color about which we have consensus. First, with the exception of imaginary colors, color is dependent on the spec- tral content (wavelength) of light reaching the eye from the outside world. But, as we will see, the rela- tionship between our experience of an object’s color and this spectrum is not straightforward. While the color of monochromatic light viewed as a disc sur- rounded by black (“aperture color”) can be pre- dicted,c it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict c White light, when split by a prism, is divided into a series of monochromatic wavelengths, each of which can be as- signed a color term, from red, for the longest wavelengths, to violet, for the shortest wavelengths (ROYGBIV). Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. 3 Color consilience Conway a subject’s perception of a given stimulus given an objective physical measurement of the stimulus un- der natural viewing conditions. You might think that the color of an object could be determined by simply measuring the relative amount of each wavelength reflected from the object, but it cannot. Rather, the color we experience is contingent on the spatial and temporal context in which a stimulus is viewed, and these contextual relationships must be computed by the brain. This leads to a second conclusion of consensus: that our visual systems are implicated in encoding color. The responsible neural mechanisms not only transform light signals into electrical im- pulses that are the currency of the nervous system, but also generate spatial and temporal comparisons of the light signals across the visual scene and in- tegrate these data with the viewer’s expectations, shaped by development, experience, and cultural exposure. In coarse terms, these aspects of the neu- ral machinery have been referred to as “bottom– up” and “top–down”; the former term describes the feed-forward, sequential processing of light signals along the visual pathway from the retina, through the thalamus, and up through various visual cortical regions, and the latter term refers to the influences of cognition and prior experience on the brain’s calcu- lation of what color is assigned to the feed-forward signals.35 The neat division of processing mechanisms into bottom–up and top–down—a scheme that treats neural signals like batons passed from one runner to the next in a relay with a starting gun and a finish line—is a gross simplification that may turn out to be frankly wrong. Certainly, the spatial metaphor of a “line” of discrete “relays” is incorrect. Increasing evidence shows that brain regions are richly con- nected by feed-forward and feed-back connections that are engaged seemingly simultaneously,36–39 so placing any brain region at a discrete “stage” in the processing hierarchy is questionable. A more apt analogy might be one of making soup: visual signals contribute to the perceptual output of the brain just as additional ingredients would shape the flavor of a soup, but their contribution to perception and behavior is influenced by the previous state of the brain and how strong the visual signals are in that context, just as the added flavor of any new ingredi- ent is influenced by what else is in the soup. At the risk of pushing the analogy too far, spices would be the diffuse modulatory inputs, like those that regu- late attention and wakefulness, which set the tenor for the whole operation. How bottom–up relays and top–down feedback, or cortical soup making are ac- tually implemented in the brain in the service of color is anything but resolved. But once again there are areas of consensus, and new research using new techniques is shedding light on some stubborn ques- tions, as discussed in the next section. Neural mechanisms for color The retina contains three types of cone photorecep- tor cells that are the first steps in the feed-forward computation of color (Fig. 1A). These cells do not encode primary colors, and the brain does not mix the activity of the cones as a painter might mix pri- mary paints. Instead, to encode color, our brains have circuits that compute the relative amount of each type of cone activity across the visual scene. This spatial calculation enables the brain to achieve something called color constancy, the phenomenon that causes our experience of a given object’s color to be stable despite changing illumination condi- tions.27,40–43 Through color constancy, our brains enable us to see color as part of objects, not con- tingent on whether we are looking at them under a blue sky or a cloudy sky. These two different view- ing conditions would change the physical spectral signals received by the eye, yet our experience of the color of an object does not change that much— fair weather or foul, we consider the apple to be red. For the mathematically inclined, the problem of color constancy can be summarized in straight- forward terms:44 the spectral signals that the eye receives from an object are the product of two vari- ables, the spectral content of the illuminantd and the absorptive property of the object. As organisms that attained color vision for some selective advantage, the only thing we really care about is the property of the object—the ripe apple needs to be seen to be d The spectral content of the illuminant describes the rela- tive proportion of wavelengths across the visible spectrum that comprises an illuminant. A spectroradiometer can be used to measure the spectral content of the illuminant re- flected off a standard “white” card. Natural daylight on a cloudless day has relatively uniform levels of light across the visible spectrum, and will contain a higher proportion of short-wavelength light than tungsten light, which has relatively low amounts of short-wavelength light and a large proportion of long-wavelength light. 4 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. Conway Color consilience Figure 1. The first stages in the neural encoding of color. (A) Cone-absorption spectra of the three classes of cones (L, M, and S) in the retina. (B) Receptive-field of a double-opponent cell in primary visual cortex. Top panels show the spatial receptive- field map generated using sparse noise cone-isolating stimuli and reverse correlation; difference maps show the “+” maps subtracted from the “–” maps. The insets give an indication of the color of each stimulus (although the actual stimuli were pre- sented on a computer monitor and carefully color calibrated). Scale of the grid is 0.75◦ of visual angle. The receptive-field center was excited by an increase in L cone activity (L+) or a decrease in M activity (M–), and suppressed by a decrease in L (L–) or an increase in M (M+); the receptive-field surround gave the opposite pattern of chromatic tuning. The surround but not the center was modulated by S cones; the S response had the sign as the response to M cones. The diagram to the right provides a summary. Adapted from Refs. 50 and 51. ripe under all viewing conditions for the experience of color to be evolutionarily advantageous. Because the spectrum of the various lighting conditions can vary enormously; the spectrum coming from the same object under different lighting conditions also varies tremendously. That the brain extracts a more- or-less constant color signal bound to objects despite this changing illumination is a remarkable achieve- ment, one that even the most advanced cameras can only approximate. The three cone types in the retina are called “L,” “M,” and “S,” because they have peak sensitivities in the long-, middle-, and short-wavelength regions of the visible spectrum. Importantly, however, each cone type has a very broad absorption curve. In the case of the M and L cones, this means that light of virtually every wavelength from the shortest (or bluest) part of the spectrum all the way to the longest (or reddest) part of the spectrum can be effective at eliciting responses. The peak of both the M and L cone types, which historically have been loosely re- ferred to as the “green” and “red” cones, is actually in the yellow part of the spectrum. It is sufficient to say that the rich spectral information hitting the retina is reduced to three numbers at any given retinal loca- tion: the amount of activity in the L, M, and S cones. These three signals are compared by retinal bipolar cells just one synapse downstream of the cones, in a process that is thought to involve two channels: one comparing L and M signals and one compar- ing S signals to the sum of L + M signals. These two channels are still referred to as “red-green” and “blue-yellow,” but these short-hand terms are inac- curate because the chromatic tuning of the neurons does not map onto the basic perceptual categories of red, green, blue, and yellow. The optimal chromatic stimulus for the “blue–yellow” channel, for exam- ple, is actually lavender–lime. To date, the neural basis for the basic perceptual categories is still un- known,45,46 although there is some evidence that implicates specialized brain regions downstream of primary visual cortex in the visual processing hier- archy, as I will describe at the end of this section. The cone-comparison signals encoded by the bipolar cells are converted into a digital signal of action potentials by the retinal ganglion cells, whose axons constitute the optic nerve that courses out the back of the eye and terminates in the lateral genic- ulate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus, a structure composed of layers of neural tissue folding, or “gen- uflecting,” to form a peanut-sized structure located deep in the brain—you can almost touch it through the roof of the very back of your throat. Neurons of the LGN send their axons to primary visual cor- tex, the first cortical stage of visual processing, often called V-1 for short, and paradoxically located at the very back of your brain, as far away from the eyes as any part of the brain can be. Curiously, the LGN receives almost 10 times as many synapses from V-1 as it does from the retina.47 Each one of these feed- back synapses is wimpy in comparison to the retinal feed-forward synapses, but one can already begin to see the limits of the “relay” analogy described Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. 5 Administrator Highlight , Color consilience Conway earlier: feedback begins before retinal signals even enter the cerebral cortex. The cortex has already started its soup. Neurons in the LGN with color-coding properties were first described over 50 years ago in the macaque monkey, a creature who has virtually the same cone types and visual system as humans and has be- come the standard model of human color vision. Although LGN cells carry chromatic information, Hubel and Wiesel showed that the cells have a pecu- liar response property: they respond well to full-field colored light, but not to small spots of colored light on contrasting backgrounds. For example, a “red- on” cell would respond to full-field red but not to a red spot on a green background.48 This is puzzling because it is at odds with what we know about color perception, namely that the color of full-field color, a Ganzfeld, is not very salient, while a spot of color on a contrasting background pops right off the page (or screen). Evidence for a spatial transformation of the color signals that could mediate color contrast is first found in V-1, manifest by a specialized population of neurons called double-opponent cells.49,50 Double- opponent cells respond best to color boundaries, say a red region next to a green region. Each V-1 neuron receives inputs from a restricted patch of the retina which corresponds to a portion of the vi- sual field. This small window on the world is called the cell’s “receptive-field.” An example of a double- opponent receptive-field is shown in Figure 1B. The cell derives its name from the fact that it consists of two kinds of opposition: chromatic and spatial. The chromatic opponency is manifest by opponent re- sponses, excitation or suppression, to L and M cones, whereas the spatial opponency is manifest as oppo- nent responses to the same cone type in spatially off- set regions of the receptive-field. The cell shown in Figure 1B was excited most strongly by a reddish spot presented on a blue–green background. These cells encode local cone ratios, and their importance to color rests on the potential for them to mediate color constancy: note that the response of the cell is relatively unperturbed by a full field of light flooding both the receptive-field center and the receptive- field surround—any excitation caused by the stimulus in one receptive-field subregion is coun- teracted by suppression caused by the stimulus in the adjacent subregion. One can consider the spec- tral bias of an illuminant to be a full-field stimulus, affecting all parts of a scene; double-opponent cells, which do not react to full-field stimuli, are there- fore capable of discounting the spectral bias of the illuminant. Double-opponent cells represent a small fraction of the total population of neurons in V-1, which initially led investigators to miss them and then to overlook their significance.51 But importance is not always reflected in numbers: as Richard Gregory pointed out to me, a vivid chromatic signal was carried by a small fraction of the total bandwidth of the analog television signal (analog TV is now obsolete). The rest of the bandwidth of the analog signal was devoted to higher spatial resolution of black-and-white shapes. Neurons in V-1 besides double-opponent cells can also carry chromatic information (reviewed in Ref. 52), although it is less clear whether this in- formation is used by the brain to encode hue per se, or rather used in the service of object recog- nition and motion perception. One can imagine that there would be a selective advantage for an ability to identify an object boundary formed by colored regions without encoding the colors form- ing the boundary—this ability is required to defeat camouflage in which the hue of the various regions comprising the object is actually distracting. Many neurons in V-1 show responses to colored bound- aries regardless of the colors forming the bound- aries, providing a potential neural substrate for this ability. But very few neurons in V-1 show sharp color tuning; that is, V-1 cells do not tend to re- spond exclusively to one color. Even a given double- opponent cell is not narrowly color-tuned for small spots presented in the center of the receptive-field. Instead the response properties of these cells are de- termined by the cone-contrast of the stimuli, which does not correlate directly with color perception: the cell shown in Figure 1B shows L versus M + S opponency. A stimulus that increases the activity of the L cones or decreases that of M cones appears red (bright or dark), whereas a stimulus that decreases the activity of S cones appears lime green and one that increases activity of the S cones appears laven- der. The crescent-shaped receptive-field subregions of the cell shown in Figure 1B were excited by in- creases in the activity of M cones and decreases in that of L cones (both of which appear green), but also excited by increases in the activity of S cones (which appears lavender). The take-home message is that while these cells may contribute to color con- 6 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. Conway Color consilience trast calculations, clearly they are not by themselves encoding hue. The functional properties and organization of the relatively large region of cortex devoted to vision outside of V-1 are still very dimly understood in comparison to our knowledge of V-1.53–57 But broad consensus among experts is that V-1 is not the only cortical region involved in processing color: parts of the second visual area (V-2, immediately adjacent to V-1), large islands within the inferior temporal cortex (IT, a large swath of brain buried under the ears and on the bottom of the brain, which con- tains classically defined areas V-4, PIT, and poste- rior TEO), and regions of anterior TE (closer to the front of the brain) all contain neurons that re- spond preferentially to colored stimuli (Fig. 2A). But the first region beyond V-1 in which neurons with narrow hue tuning have been unequivocally de- scribed with single-unit recording (the “gold stan- dard”) is PIT (Figs. 2B and 2C), and these neurons are densely clustered in millimeter-sized islands of tissue, dubbed “globs.”53 Experimental estimates of the fraction of color-tuned neurons within the globs approach 90%, which represents a remarkable level of specialization. As a heuristic, one can consider each of the brain regions described here—retina, LGN, V-1, V-2, IT, and TE—to be involved in constructing a distinct aspect of the color percept.27,52 The three cone types are the basis for trichromacy; retinal ganglion cells that respond in an opponent fashion to activation of different cone classes are the basis for color oppo- nency; double-opponent neurons in V-1 generate local color contrast and are the building blocks for color constancy; glob cells in IT elaborate the per- ception of hue; and TE integrates color perception in the context of behavior. Certainly, this sketch is grossly simplified and likely inaccurate. We will need to make many more measurements to understand how the activity of neurons in the various stages relate to perception, and there will be much work unpacking how activity within the entire cortical color circuit influences the processing of incoming signals. But we are further ahead than we were 50 years ago when many scientists thought color could be read out directly from the response properties of LGN cells. Figure 2. (A) Simple hierarchical, feed-forward model of color processing in the macaque cerebral cortex. Regions of cortex shown in gray, which increase in spatial scale along the visual-processing hierarchy from primary visual cortex (V1) to TE, are implicated in color processing. The first region beyond V-1 in which neurons with narrow hue tuning have been unequivocally described with single-unit recording is PIT, where these neurons are densely clustered in millimeter-sized islands of tissue, dubbed “globs.” Panels B and C show the color tuning of a typical glob cell. (B) Poststimulus time histograms to an optimally shaped bar of various colors. Responses were determined to white and black (top two rows in histogram) and various colored versions of the bar that varied in brightness. Stimulus onset aligned with 0 ms; stimulus duration (step at bottom). Gray scale bar is average number of spikes per stimulus repeat per bin (1 ms). (C) The color tuning to each of the stimulus sets in polar coordinates. Adapted from Refs. 52 and 53. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. 7 Color consilience Conway Challenges in painting color Color poses an enormous challenge for artists be- cause the way a painted mark will ultimately appear is unpredictable. It may be this feature of color that led some artists, like Wassily Kandinsky, to ascribe mystical power to color. It led me to study the neural basis of visual perception in search of explanations. The difficulty of painting in color is juxtaposed with the relative ease with which novice students can ac- quire representational drawing skills, as Edwards’ now classic text attests.58 The challenge posed by painting in color is exacerbated by the fact that we of- ten conceive of color in simple terms, as a superficial glazing overlaid on an achromatic world. This mis- conception is perpetuated by children’s coloring-in books, which provide black outlines to relay the “important” information, and give deceptively sim- ple instructions to select the appropriate color but to “stay within the lines”; some neuroscientists have characterized the neural encryption of color in these terms.59 Curricula at traditional art schools often mirror this process: students are first taught to draw with achromatic pencil lines and then, after mastering black-and-white, to work with paint (as Matisse ad- vised in the epigram quoted at the beginning of this essay). Although this approach may make the prob- lem of representation seemingly tractable, it fosters a misunderstanding of the mechanics of color. The apple in the still life may appear red, but the redness, and our reaction to it, are not attributed solely to the pigment in the skin of the apple, nor can that redness be captured entirely (or even adequately) by matching that pigment with paint. Rather the color is attributed to an unconscious comparison that the visual system makes between the color of the apple, the color of the surrounding regions, and the con- text in which we see the apple—the very same com- parisons that form the basis for color constancy.e e The challenge was articulated by Matisse: “If upon a white canvas I set down some sensations of blue, of green, of red, each new stroke diminishes the importance of the preceding ones. Suppose I have to paint an interior: I have before me a cupboard; it gives me a sensation of vivid red, and I put down a red that satisfies me. A relation is established between this red and the white of the canvas. Let me put a green near the red, and make the floor yellow; and again there will be relationships between the green or For whatever reason, our visual system hides this computation from our awareness and leaves us only with an impression that the color is immutable and attached to the object that is the focus of our at- tention. The consequence is that when confronted with a blank sheet of paper and asked to paint—in color—the apple, we instinctively reach for the tube of red paint, and pay little attention to the back- ground and other viewing conditions. Art teachers find themselves perennially repeating the mantra: “Don’t forget about the background!” To which the student retorts: “I’ll get to it when I’m done painting the apple.” But the application of a background does not have a neutral effect on the work-in-progress, and the surprised and disappointed student is sud- denly grossly displeased with the color of the apple, a color that was perfectly satisfactory when floating on the raw white canvas. The experience reinforces the student’s resistance to painting backgrounds, and keeps alive the art teacher’s mantra. What accounts for the sudden decline of the painting, coincident with work on the background? The explanation must have something to do with the fact that the student has an impression in his or her mind’s eye, a color memory of the object pre- sumably stored deep in brain area TE, which does not match the painting in front of him or her. The dissatisfaction that the student experiences during this exercise underscores how important context is to our experience of color,f and how little we ac- knowledge context in anticipating our experience of color. In the case of color, the spectral bias of the illuminant plays a large role in establishing the yellow and the white of the canvas which satisfy me. But these different tones mutually weaken one another. It is necessary that the diverse marks [signes] I use be balanced so that they do not destroy each other.” (see Ref. 2, p. 40). f Color is determined by the context in which it appears, its relationship to the whole, and by the quantity of it within the picture (although this relationship does not bear in a straightforward way on the color). These con- siderations contribute to the “quantity–quality” calcula- tions described by Bois (1993), and as Bois argues quite compellingly, “The founding principles of Matisse’s art proceed from the fact that color relations, which deter- mine expression, are above all relations between surface quantities” (see Ref. 3, p. 23). Thus, Bois argues, Matisse’s drawing is determined by the same principles as his color, in service of the same goal of personal expression. 8 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. Conway Color consilience Figure 3. Color interaction depends on immediately adjacent colors. The “X” target in panel A has the same spectral reflectance in both panels, yet appears a different color because it is placed on a colored background (adapted from Ref. 75). This effect is demonstrated again in panel C (courtesy of Beau Lotto). Panels B and D show that the color induction effect is obliterated by insulating the target with an achromatic margin. context for color judgments, and as described ear- lier, we are virtually blind to the spectral content of the illuminant; this blindness is in very effective service of color constancy. The artist’s frustration is therefore a direct consequence of the fact that we evolved to see color, not to paint it. Matisse and other artists indicate cultural progress in this re- gard, as Matisse clearly acknowledged, “Each color in the painting was determined by and dependent on the others,”60 and as Bois goes on to reinforce, “Matisse was constantly forced to start from scratch because each color stroke implied a further disso- nance, ricochet-like, and necessitated an unsettling of the picture’s global color harmony.”61 The neglect of context is not unique to percep- tions of color: the anticipated emotional reaction we have to a given event is radically impacted by the context in which the event is experienced, al- though we rarely pay much attention to these ef- fects.62 Color, like a mental preview of a future event, is essentialized, defined by salient aspects and largely agnostic of context. We define color by its category (red, orange, yellow, green, and blue), one that may have behavioral or linguistic relevance. But the con- text, as the art student’s experience shows, is ignored despite the fact that context significantly shapes not only our color experience, but also our emotional reaction. This complexity makes the task of artists particularly difficult, for they must uncover the un- conscious mechanisms that underlie color in order to be able to paint in color.63 The context dependence of color means that the colored elements comprising the scene interact; and the neural basis for these interactions almost cer- tainly depends to some extent on the calculations made by double-opponent cells. The interaction of color constituted the primary focus of the artist and teacher Josef Albers (1888–1976), whose powerful images underscored the disjunction between what we think underlies a color and the role of context. Figure 3A shows one of Albers’ famous color induc- tion demonstrations. In this image, Albers is em- ploying a simple color contrast effect to alter the appearance of a line by placing the line against dif- ferent colored backgrounds. The image remains sur- prising even though we fully understand the power of color context to shape our color experience. And all the information in the world is still insufficient to stave off the question, “But what color is the line in reality?”—as if our eyes have deceived us on this rare occasion. Rather than deception, these demonstra- tions showcase what the visual system is constantly Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. 9 Color consilience Conway doing—and usually to great adaptive effect—by tak- ing context into account, and then discounting that very information. Such contrast effects continue to inspire the development of powerful demonstra- tions, like Beau Lotto’s cube shown in the Figure 3C. These contextual interactions continue to be mined for clues to the operation of the visual system.64–66 Why is it so difficult to learn how to render per- ceptually accurate color? There are probably several reasons, but I think the main one has to do with the fact that the color computation is effortless. The automatic nature of color leads us to believe that there is a straightforward relationship between the physical stimulus (photons off the apple, and paint in the artist’s case) and the color experience. This is reflected in the instructions often given to art stu- dents. Indeed, when I took art courses at university, this was the instruction I received: identify a patch of color in the scene, mix it on your palette, and ap- ply it at the appropriate location on the canvas. The instruction sounds logical but it is deeply flawed. One mixes the color on a gray or white palette and applies the paint to a canvas that is white or gray (at least to start) yet the color is ultimately viewed in a colored context. If one were asked to paint Lotto’s cube, one might logically begin by painting the yel- low squares with paint that appears yellow on the raw white canvas, instead of using paint that appears gray. This false start would influence all subsequent color decisions, and the outcome would consist of profoundly distorted color relationships. Painting color accurately requires access to infor- mation that is simply not available to our perceptual apparatus, which may be why paint-by-number kits are so compelling (Fig. 4). Putting a milky greenish- brown patch in the sky does not seem like the right thing to do at the outset of the project, yet some- how the color is appropriate in the context of the completed image. Working through the painting becomes a kind of joke, in which the punch line (what color the marks appear to have in the finished picture) is surprising. Color-master strategies So how do the painters we think of as masterful col- orists capture perceptually accurate color relation- ships, and what do their strategies tell us about how the nervous system functions? The very category of “colorist” was generated within modern art tend- ing toward abstraction. As painters turned from the Figure 4. Paint-by-number image, partially completed (top panel), and finished (bottom panel). strictures of representation that photography had mastered, they were liberated to focus on color, a more recondite aspect of perception. Perhaps we can get some insight into this conjoined project involv- ing both culture and the nervous system from the artists’ unfinished works. The left panel of Figure 5 shows a painting that Paul Cézanne was working on at the time of his death. What is striking about it is the lack of a defined subject. Unlike the aca- demic painters of his day, Cézanne does not begin with a well-resolved preparatory line drawing; in- stead, he begins the work almost immediately with intensely colored paint, and continues to develop the image with patches of color distributed over the surface of the painting. We can begin to make out the suggestion of tree trunks, foliage, sky, and earth—many of the cues to such suggestions are purely coloristic. Using this approach, Cézanne re- cruits his visual system as a meter of accurate color. Importantly, he has given up the natural conviction that the color of the patch is stable throughout the 10 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. Conway Color consilience Figure 5. The visual system as feedback device used to paint color: Paul Cézanne (1839–1906; French) Study of trees 1904 Oil on Canvas; Mont Ste.-Victoire seen from les Lauves [V.798; R.912] 1902–1906. development of the image. He is able to alter the color through adjacency, by adapting and modify- ing the painted context in which a colored patch ap- pears. Specifically, he alters the colors of his marks by adding surrounding colors, changing their appear- ance through changes in context. The approach al- lows a form of evolution: Cézanne creates a diversity of marks, and then progressively emphasizes those that are the most effective—that most accurately capture his perceptual color experience—and de- emphasizes those that are least effective, by chang- ing their context or occasionally covering a patch with a different color. As the marks on the canvas suggest, this is a dynamic and unpredictable process in which the decision of what colored patch to apply next is largely prescribed by local circumstances— what mark he makes is determined by what is needed to compensate for the change in color appearance of all the marks on the canvas caused by the mark just made. Although the trajectory of the painting may be set (a painting of trees), Cézanne does not seem to be attempting to reproduce a completed picture he has in his mind’s eye at the outset of the paint- ing. Rather, the precise combination of colors and marks he uses is made up on the spot and guided continually by visual feedback. Many colorists have worked in a similarly empir- ical fashion, developing paintings through trial and error. Perhaps the most famous is Claude Monet, an exemplar well known to Cézanne, who made paint- ing au plein air enormously popular in the 19th cen- tury. This approach to painting supposedly involves making pictures of scenery outside under natural light, directly looking at the subject being painted. On first blush, this appears to be a similar approach to that used by Cézanne for it would seem to en- courage direct visual feedback. So I was surprised to learn that most of Monet’s early finished paintings were completed in his studio. (This is, incidentally, a delightful historical example of how the rhetoric produced around art often precedes the art actually made that way.) The painting shown in Figure 6, for example, was begun au plein air, but completed some months later in his studio, in winter. With- out a real-life scene immediately before him, Monet completed the image through many local decisions, errors, and corrections reflected in the thick layers of paint of the finished picture. Beginning the image au plein air honed Monet’s observational skills and presumably refined his color memory, and it was this memory that provided stable feedback during the development of the painting in studio. Paradox- ically, this feedback might have been more stable than if the scene lay before him in life because real- world scenes are constantly changing, the light shift- ing throughout the day with a time course shorter than the time required to paint. In his later career, Monet would shift from canvas to canvas through- out the day actually painting au plein air before the same motif, making numerous sets of paintings of haystacks and cathedrals that document the passage of time and the changing play of light throughout the day. As a result of his careful observation, and the time spent in studio critically assessing the suc- cess of his attempts, Monet was able to reproduce color boundaries as they move through shadow in a way that reflects the cone ratios generated by real color boundaries moving in and out of shadow. It Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. 11 Color consilience Conway Figure 6. The visual system as feedback device used to paint color: Claude Monet (1840–1926). Femmes au jardin (Women in the Garden), started spring/summer 1866 open air in Ville-d’Avray, finished the following winter in studio Honfleur. Collection Musée D’Orsay, Paris (RF2773) Oil on canvas. is these local cone ratios that are encoded by the visual system and form the neural building blocks for color. It remains a testable hypothesis whether the cone ratios elicited by the color boundaries in Monet’s paintings are similar to those encoded by the nervous system, perhaps by double-opponent cells. I do not want to suggest that all masters of color work in the same way. Indeed, Monet’s early prac- tice is manifestly different than the later methods of Cézanne, although they lived at more or less the same time and painted some of the same motifs in France. In fact, it is the inventiveness of the artist’s solution to the problem of color that contributes to the visual interest of their work, and their lessons for neuroscience. Consider the artist with which we began, also recognized for his stunning use of color: Henri Matisse. A striking feature in many of Ma- tisse’s mature canvases, beginning in early 1904, is that he leaves portions of the raw canvas untouched. These white regions typically fall at the interface between two differently colored marks. Figure 7 shows three examples dating from 1905 to 1948; the spare use of paint, in contrast to the slathered thick overlapping marks deployed by Monet, was a consistent feature of Matisse’s process, one also 12 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. Administrator Highlight two Administrator Highlight 1912 Conway Color consilience Figure 7. The use of achromatic borders to separate colored regions in paintings of Henri Matisse. Henri Matisse (1869–1954; French): Intérieur à Collioure/La sieste (Interior at Collioure/The Siesta), Oil on canvas, 23 1/4;′′ × 28 3/8′′ Private collection, 1905 (left panel). Poissons rouges et sculpture (Goldfish and Sculpture) spring–summer 1912, oil on canvas 45 3/4′′ x 39 1/2′′ Museum of Modern Art, NY (right panel). exploited by Cézanne.g Moreover, most of Matisse’s canvases were signed, confirming for the art market that Matisse considered them finished works; the white omissions were clearly intended. What lay behind Matisse’s intention? A clue is provided by some classic psychophysical work re- viewed by Brenner and his colleagues:67 “It is known that chromatic induction is primarily determined by the color of directly adjacent surfaces. . .This is consistent with the idea that information at the bor- ders is critical in determining the perceived color.” Chromatic induction is the Yin of the chromatic contrast Yang: it is the phenomenon whereby a tar- get that appears an achromatic gray when placed g The importance of the white unfinished spaces to the color relationships was quite obvious to Cézanne, as demonstrated with his exchange with the art dealer and critic Vollard, as Bois recounts, “What Cézanne said to Vollard concerning the two small spots on the hands in his portrait that weren’t yet covered with pigment: ‘Maybe tomorrow I will be able to find the exact tone to cover up those spots. Don’t you see, Monsieur Vollard, that if I put something there by guesswork, I might have to paint the whole canvas over starting from that point?’ ” Bois goes on to emphasize that “Matisse was well aware that the ap- parently ‘unfinished’ quality of Cézanne’s canvasses had an essential function in their construction.”61 Figure 8. Color induction is eliminated when achromatic boundaries separate an otherwise achromatic target from the colored surround. The panel shows induction in the x direc- tion (red–green) of the cone space of MacLeod and Boynton as a function of the distance between the border of a target and the colored surround; similar effects are seen in the y direction (blue–yellow). Adapted from Ref. 68. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. 13 Administrator Highlight A. Color induction demonstration: see text for details B. Color induction is eliminated when ... Color consilience Conway Figure 9. The development of color in the later paintings of Henri Matisse accentuates their inherent flatness. Henri Matisse (1869–1954; French). on a white (or black) background will appear col- ored when surrounded by a color field; the induced color is the complementary color of the background. Figure 8A gives an example in which the “gray” cen- tral disc appears greenish; curiously, the induced color is often stronger as an afterimage: maintain your gaze on the black dot in the center of the disc, then after 10 seconds transfer your gaze to the black dot to the right. Most observers report the appearance of a striking red spot that is the af- terimage to the induced green. Figure 8B, adapted from an original paper by Ref. 68, shows that the degree of color induction (indicated along the y- axis) falls off precipitously if the target is separated from the surrounding colored field by an achro- matic margin. I have illustrated this observation us- ing the powerful Albers and Lotto demonstrations shown in Figures 3B and D. Given the importance of these local interactions, it is perhaps not surprising that Albers always painted his color fields immedi- ately adjacent to each other. The prediction from Albers is that color is dependent on neural calcula- tions that take place over small local spatial scales, comparable to the spatial scale of double-opponent receptive-fields, which compare the relative cone ratio in one part of visual space with the cone ratio in an immediately adjacent region of visual space. Let’s return to Matisse. Whether he was conscious of it or not, the small achromatic, white gaps left by Matisse would have insulated the appearance of the colors against color induction during the develop- ment of the image. As a result, the marks Matisse made remain largely the color he chose them to be at the time he made them. In this way, Matisse was liberated to use vibrant saturated colors, often right out of the tube, without the fear that his colors would become garish from chromatic contrast. The desire to use saturated colors is pervasive, suggesting deep roots in our neural hardware. And the consequence of Matisse’s strategy for protecting against induc- tion was, I wager in the next section, an important driving force in the trajectory of art history and the development of Modernism. Painting practice, new materials, and Modernism Beginning with his fauvist work in the early 1900s and extending for the rest of his career, Matisse’s output represents a pinnacle of Modernism and owes its success in large part to his innovative use of color.2,69,70 One consequence of Matisse’s ded- ication to color, in the reading of historians and theorists of modern art, is the accentuation of the inherent flatness of a painted surface. Compare two paintings that bookend Matisse’s long career (Fig. 9). In the early painting, Matisse seems to struggle to achieve a representation of perspective and depth; the colors he uses are subsidiary. In the later painting, the color is fundamental and more playful, but the image lacks depth, appear- ing instead as a decorative wall panel not unlike 14 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. Administrator Highlight Left: Small Door of the Old Mill (Petiteporte du viewx moulin), spring-summer 1898, Oil on canvas 18 7/8" x 14 1/8". Private collection. Right: Plum Blossoms, Green Background (La branche de prunier, fond vert), Vence, villa Le Reve [winter-spring], 1948. Oil on canvas 45 5/8"x 35". Private collection. Conway Color consilience Figure 10. The use of achromatic borders to separate colored regions in paintings of Max Beckmann. Max Beckmann (1884–1950; German): Self portrait in blue jacket 1950, 54 3/4′′ x 36′′ The Saint Lous Art Museum (right panel). Bequest of Morton D. May. Oil on Canvas Self Portrait in Florence, 1907 (left panel). a carpet with broad areas of uniform color en- livened by small graphical marks. Without address- ing the cultural considerations as to why Matisse might have sought this flatness, the consensus is that he achieved it. The development of color in this later work, as already described for the im- ages shown in Figure 7, involves a sparing use of paint that leaves bare portions of the underlying canvas, particularly at boundaries between colored regions. As described earlier, this strategy insulates Matisse’s color choices against color induction dur- ing the process of painting, so the colors we see in the final painting are presumably very close to the colors Matisse decided upon when the picture was being created. Matisse’s simple strategy of limiting color induction by leaving white margins around the colored marks was adopted by many other Mod- ernists, including Wassily Kandinsky, Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, and later Frank Stella, whose “pin- stripe” paintings launched his career in 1959 with their pulsating whispery white “breathing lines,” the remnant unpainted white buffers between broadly painted black stripes (Ref. 71 discussed in Ref. 72). Others, like Max Beckmann, employed a variant: the use of heavy black lines (Fig. 10), which serve the same purpose. Like Matisse, Beckmann began his career attempting to capture space and depth, but concluded by painting images whose color and flatness are central. In these cases, the vivid flat- ness of the work would seem to be attributed to an emphasis on color because color is for the most part a surface property: the surface of the painting is flat, a fact we come to be aware of through its color.h Indeed, the neural mechanisms of color are tied up with the neural mechanisms responsible for encoding surfaces and textures.73 This attribute of color may, incidentally, account for the philosophi- cal claim that color is tied to objects. Modernism characterizes a broad movement in thought and culture in Western society that culmi- nated sometime between the end of the 19th cen- tury and the middle of the 20th century. It is during this time that the role of subjective experience in art making and interpretation becomes significant. The grand subjects that were often the basis for pictures made during the Renaissance until the French Rev- olution, such as history, kings, queens, discoveries, h Some have argued for a different spatial register to ac- count for the visual experience of colors deployed in in- tangible screens, like the sky, a smoky sunset, or a cave wall indirectly illuminated by a fire; whether these colors are experienced as surfaces is perhaps debatable. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. 15 Color consilience Conway and conquests, are rarely the focus of Modernist pic- tures. (Modernists tended to break with the academy that persisted with those themes.) Instead, we find depictions of domestic life, intimate scenes that un- derscore the interaction of the artist and his subject. The work showcases the involvement of people with their new-found self-consciousness. These trends have been exhaustively described in the extensive literature on Modernism. Here, I shift focus to ques- tion the relationships between the artist, her ma- terials, and her artistic process—which I construe broadly to include the dynamic interaction between the artist and her work during its development, an interaction that is inextricably characterized by the neural mechanisms of vision and visual feedback. These relationships evolved during Modernism and have continued to be a central force in art making today. The flatness of Matisse’s work advanced the Mod- ernist agenda by drawing attention to the material properties of the work: Matisse’s work proclaims it- self to be objects made of paint and canvas, rather than mere depictions of scenes. As Wright sug- gests, Matisse “is becoming more interested in paint than in sight.”70 Matisse’s focus on color, and on the material properties of paintings, set the stage for high Modernist masters like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, whose mature canvases are en- tirely abstract, consisting simply of large swaths of bold uniform color. Matisse’s work is a bridge be- tween one side “the eye of Impressionism or Neo- Impressionism, all eager regard, scanning the shift- ing surfaces of the world, and on the other, the eye of modernist visuality, absorbed in the formal qualities of a the painting’s own surface.”70 I argue here, Ma- tisse’s accomplishment was brought about in part because of the particularities of his practice, one aspect of which sought to insulate color from in- duction. The result of this particular strategy, those vacant bits of canvas, revealed what the paintings were made of; and as a consequence, the making of paintings, rather than their content, took cen- ter stage. As Elderfield describes it, the “substance of painting itself came to fulfill the functions that form and structure had fulfilled earlier”;69 see also Ref. 74. Matisse’s paintings are not appreciated as illu- sions of real space, but rather as objects whose power to move us, much like the power of color itself, is difficult to pin down. The power of Matisse’s pic- tures surely rests on a successful use of color; and this use of color derives its success in part from the process Matisse adopted in making the pictures, a process that was contingent on the particularities of his practices, and their probing relation to the neu- ral mechanisms of color. In the case of the example described here, the decision to leave portions of the canvas unpainted may be attributed to a practical desire to mitigate color induction; but the conse- quence of this decision pulled back the curtain on the process of art making itself and emphasized the materials of art, thereby underscoring the subjec- tive experience of the artist as art maker, actively engaged in the making of an object. Matisse’s interest in color propelled his rejection of tradition, a tradition that aimed not only to rep- resent objects in space and depth but also to sub- jugate the materials of painting—brush, paint, and canvas—to the requirements of mimetic represen- tation. Matisse’s approach freed painting from this traditional requirement, and is justly celebrated for that liberation. The artist makes the painting self- conscious by underscoring its own making. The viewer cannot escape appreciating that the paint- ing is made of paint and canvas: we have direct evi- dence of these facts, revealed in many of his paintings by vacant white lines across their surfaces. Thus, it seems that Matisse’s sensitivity to color and the in- novative process he developed to make his pictures, helped to advance one important aspect of the Mod- ernist agenda: the desire to achieve an accurate rep- resentation of the artist’s subjective experience of color. Acknowledgments This work was supported by the Radcliffe Insti- tute for Advanced Study (Harvard University) and the National Science Foundation. I am grateful to Caroline Jones, Ann Jones, David Hilbert, Dale Purves, Alexander Rehding, and an anonymous re- viewer for helpful discussions and comments on the manuscript. I thank Rosa Lafer-Sousa for help in preparing the manuscript. Conflicts of interest The author declares no conflicts of interest. References 1. Wolff, T.F. Drawings of Matisse. N.Y. 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Sci. xxxx (2012) 1–18 c© 2012 New York Academy of Sciences. work_bs6wgrgacfawlm5lzi7pa5atma ---- Munich Personal RePEc Archive A new financial metric for the art market Charlin, Ventura and Cifuentes, Arturo VC CONSULTANTS, Santiago, CHILE, Financial Regulation Center Faculty of Economics and Business University of Chile Santiago, CHILE 23 September 2013 Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/50186/ MPRA Paper No. 50186, posted 25 Sep 2013 16:53 UTC 1 A NEW FINANCIAL METRIC FOR THE ART MARKET (Working Paper, September 2013 version) Ventura Charlin (1) VC Consultants Santiago, CHILE e-mail: ventcusa@gmail.com Arturo Cifuentes Financial Regulation Center Faculty of Economics and Business University of Chile Santiago, CHILE e-mail: arturo.cifuentes@fen.uchile.cl (1) author to whom all correspondence regarding this paper should be addressed. Comments are welcome mailto:arturo.cifuentes@fen.uchile.cl 2 Abstract This paper introduces a new financial metric for the art market. The metric, which we call Artistic Power Value (APV), is based on the price per unit of area (dollars per square centimeter) and is applicable to two-dimensional art objects such as paintings. In addition to its intuitive appeal and ease of computation, this metric has several advantages from the investor’s viewpoint. For example, it makes it easy to: (i) estimate price ranges for different artists; (ii) perform comparisons among them; (iii) follow the evolution of the artists’ creativity cycle overtime; and (iiii) compare, for a single artist, paintings with different subjects or different geometric properties. Additionally, the APV facilitates the process of estimating total returns. Finally, due to its transparency, the APV can be used to design derivatives-like instruments that can appeal to both, investors and speculators. Several examples validate this metric and demonstrate its usefulness. Keywords Art markets Hedonic pricing Paintings Auction prices JEL Classification A12 C23 G11 Z11 Note: The authors would like to thank Robert Yang whose technical expertise was instrumental in preparing the database. In addition, the useful suggestions of Professor James MacGee (University of Western Ontario) are greatly acknowledged. 3 Background In the last thirty years, the art market –and more precisely, the market for paintings--has received an increasing amount of attention from economists, financial analysts, and investors. They have brought to this field the quantitative techniques already employed in more conventional markets. Not surprisingly, one topic that has received a great deal of attention is returns, specifically, how to compute returns for the art market. This is a challenging task not only because this market is still rather illiquid, at least compared with equities and bonds, but also because of its heterogeneity: every painting is essentially a unique object. Several authors have employed hedonic pricing models (HPMs) to estimate returns (e.g., Chanel, Gerard-Vanet, and Ginsburgh, 1994; Chanel, Gerard-Vanet, and Ginsburgh, 1996; de la Barre, Docclo, and Ginsburgh, 1994; Edwards 2004; Renneboog and Spaenjers 2013). Such models are suitable to manage product variety and can use all the available data. Their drawback, however, is that their application is limited by the explicatory power of the variables selected and sometimes it is difficult to fit a good model to the data (the academic literature frequently reports models with values of R 2 around 60% or below). Moreover, if the data are sparse (a common situation, especially for individual artists) the application of HPMs might not be possible (Galbraith and Hodgson 2012). An additional disadvantage of HPMs is the lack of stability that often affects the computation of the hedonic regression coefficients, coupled with the reliability--not to mention the not-so-straightforward interpretation--of the time dummies (Collins, Scorcu, and Zanola, 2007). A second alternative to estimate returns is to rely on repeat sales regressions (e.g., Anderson 1974; Baumol 1986; and Goetzmann 1993). While this approach has the advantage of using price data referring to the same object it has two disadvantages: a potential selection bias and the fact that it only employs a small subset of the available information. Ginsburgh, Mei, and Moses (2006) provide an excellent discussion on the merits of each approach plus a fairly complete literature review. Mei and Moses (2002); Renneboog and Spaenjers (2011); Higgs and Worthington (2005); Agnello and Pierce (1996); and artnet Analytics (2012) have dealt with the construction of art indices based on the two above-mentioned techniques or hybrid combinations of them. The question of which approach is better to estimate returns still remains open. This issue is far more vexing than it appears. Superficially, it might be interpreted as a choice between two methods that lead to the same answer based on computational ease. However, 4 there is no assurance that this is indeed the case. In fact, they might lead to different answers and it is not always clear which answer is the right one. Ashenfelter and Graddy (2003) have stated this point more forcefully: “The hedonic index gives a real return of about 4 percent, while the repeat-sales index results in a real return of about 9 percent! Which is correct?” Previous researchers have also focused on other topics. Just to name a few: Galenson (1999); Galenson (2000); Galenson (2001); Galenson and Weinberg (2000); and Ginsburgh and Weyers (2006) have looked at the creativity cycle of several artists (that is, the age at which they produced their best work). Renneboog and Van Houte (2002); Worthington and Higgs (2004); Renneboog and Spaenjers (2011); and Pesando (1993) have compared the returns of certain segments of the art market vis-à-vis more conventional investments. Coate and Fry (2012) and Ekelund, Ressler, and Watson (2000) have investigated the “death-effect” in the price of paintings. Edwards (2004) and Campos and Barbosa (2009) have looked at the performance of Latin American painters. Scorcu and Zanola (2011) used a hedonic model approach to study Picasso’s paintings, while Higgs and Forster (2013) investigated whether paintings which conformed to the golden mean commanded a price premium. And, Sproule and Valsan (2006) questioned the accuracy of hedonic models compared with the appraisals of experts. Other issues that have been investigated, some of them still with inconclusive answers, are: whether the lack of signature affects the auction price of a painting; the importance of the auction house (in essence, Sotheby’s or Christie’s versus lesser known auction houses); whether masterpieces tend to underperform when compared to less “expensive” paintings; the correlation between the art market and the major equity and fixed income indices; whether an artist can be described, based on its creativity-cycle curve, as conceptual (early bloomer) or experimentalist (late bloomer); as well as the relationship between, withdrawing a painting from an auction, and its future sale price. All these analyses have relied on statistical and modeling techniques commonly used in financial and economic analysis. In summary, although a great deal has been learned about the financial aspects of the art market in recent years, much needs to be understood, especially, from the investor’s perspective. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to contribute to this effort by introducing a new financial metric that can facilitate the understanding of some of the issues already mentioned. In addition, we want to shift the focus towards the investor’s viewpoint and move away from the purely econometric models which, even though are interesting from an academic angle, offer little guidance to somebody concerned with pricing issues. Thus, our 5 goal is twofold: (i) to provide a new tool to enrich the analysts’ toolbox; and (ii) to facilitate the investors’ decision-making process by making it easier to assess the merits of a painting using some simple quantitative analyses. We should note that the application of HPMs and repeat sales regression models has so far focused, mainly, on estimating market returns aimed at building indices. Although these indices can be useful for performing econometric analyses and describing market tendencies, in general, they are less useful for investors. The chief reason is that investors are concerned with actual or realized returns (that is, total returns) instead of market returns (returns based on an “ideal” painting whose characteristics do not change over time). To put the point more forcefully: an investor has little use for an index that controls for quality and paintings’ characteristics. In fact, the investor wants information that actually captures these features as well as supply-demand dynamics. The metric introduced herein (a point we discuss in more detail later) captures exactly that. In the next section, we introduce and define the new metric. The following section describes the data sets employed in this study. After that we showcase several applications of the new metric, we then present a number of analyses to validate it, and finally, we suggest some future applications, before presenting our conclusions. A New Financial Metric Paintings, notwithstanding their artistic qualities, are essentially two-dimensional objects that can command--sometimes--hefty prices. Based on this consideration, it makes sense to express the value of a painting not using its price but rather a price per unit of area (in this study, dollars per square centimeter). We call this figure of merit Artistic Power Value or APV. By “normalizing” the price, the APV metric intends to offer the investor a financial yardstick that goes beyond the price, while not attempting to control for the specifics of the painting beyond its area. The intuitive appeal of this metric (which, no doubt, some purists might find distasteful) is obvious: simplicity, ease of computation, transparency, and straightforwardness. In fact, there is already a well-established precedent for this approach. For example, prices of other two-dimensional assets, such as raw land, are frequently quoted this way (e.g. dollars per acre, or euros per hectare). The same approach is sometimes used to quote prices of antique rugs. 6 More recently, many artisans, print makers, digital printing firms, and poster designers have started to quote price estimates using this same concept. Moreover, considering that the cost of materials (an important component of the production cost) employed in creating these two-dimensional objects is often estimated on a per-unit-of-area basis, the idea of extending the same notion to express the value of the final product is not far-fetched. Finally, the rationale for using the APV metric is not to negate the individuality of each painting or to trivialize the artistic process. It is really an attempt to synthetize in one parameter the financial value of a painting (or artists or body of work) with the goal of making comparisons easier. Additionally, many APV-based computations (a point treated in more detail in the subsequent section) can offer useful guidance for pricing purposes. Alternatively, we can think of the APV as an attempt to find a common factor to compare and contrast the economic value of otherwise dissimilar art objects. If we accept the thesis that two paintings --even if they are done by the same artist and depict the same theme- - are not only different but also unique, it is not possible to make a straight price-wise comparison. However, the APV metric, by virtue of removing the size-dependency, helps to make this comparison possible: in a sense the APV plays the role of “unitary price.” The Data Three data sets are employed in this study: Data Set A consists of 1,818 observations of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s paintings auction prices and their characteristics covering the period [March 1985; February 2013]. The database was built based on information provided by the artnet database (www.artnet.com). Data Set B consists of 441 observations of Henri Matisse’s paintings auction prices and their characteristics covering the period [May 1960; November 2012]. The database was built based on information provided by the artnet database (www.artnet.com) and was supplemented by additional auction data from the Blouin Artinfo website (www.artinfo.com). Finally, Data Set C consists of 2,115 observations of paintings covering the period [March 1985; February 2013]. This data set gathers information from six artists (Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Odilon Redon, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Signac) and was based on auction information provided by the artnet database. All prices were adjusted to January-2010 U.S. dollars (using the U.S. CPI index) and are expressed in terms of premium prices (when hammer prices were reported, they were 7 modified and expressed in terms of equivalent premium prices). Observations where the selling price was below US$10,000 or the APV was less than 1US$/cm 2 were eliminated. Sotheby’s and Christie’s dominate the data sets, as together they account for 86% of the sales. The selection of artists was somewhat arbitrary. The chief consideration was to effectively examine the merits of the APV metric without regard to the qualities of the painters selected. Renoir was an ideal choice because of the high number of observations available, which were distributed over a long period of time, and without time gaps. This situation facilitates the comparison between the APV metric and the HPMs (which require many data points to be built). Matisse data had the advantage of being distributed over a longer time span, but included less observations, and had a few time-gaps. Data Set C, despite its strong impressionist flavor, was not aimed at capturing in full the characteristics of the impressionist movement; it represents a group of painters who happened to live roughly at the same time and for which there were enough observations to make certain computations feasible. Nevertheless, and simply for convenience, in what follows we refer to this group as the Impressionists group. Renoir, despite his strong impressionist credentials was purposely left out of Data Set C. Otherwise, he would have dominated the group, making it highly correlated with Data Set A: an undesirable situation given the need to test the APV metric under different scenarios. In summary, the selection of artists was not done with the idea of deriving any specific conclusion regarding these painters or the artistic tendencies they represented; the leading consideration was to showcase the attributes and benefits of the APV metric. Table 1 summarizes the key features of the three data sets. Table 2 describes in more detail the characteristics of the painters in the Impressionist group (Data Set C). Notice that the APV distribution is far from normal: the differences between the arithmetic mean (average) values and the medians are manifest, with the means always higher than the medians. Additionally, the values of the skewness and kurtosis reveal a strong positively skewed distribution with “fat tails.” The Jarque-Bera (JB) statistic and its corresponding p- value (close to 0.000 for each of the three data sets) indicate that the APV is not normally distributed. These facts should serve as a warning against APV-based projections based on normality assumptions. Finally, the relatively high values of the coefficient of variation for several artists (Renoir and Matisse exhibit the most variability) are somehow evidence of what experts already know: even masters are uneven producers and their paintings differ 8 greatly in quality. Whether ranking artists by their average or median APV values is consistent with the critics’ assessment of their merits, it is a topic we leave for others to decide. Table 1. Description of the Three Data Sets and Key Statistics Data Set: A Data Set: B Data Set: C Artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir Henri Matisse Impressionists group Born–Died 1841–1919 1869–1954 NA Number of Sales 1,818 441 2,115 Period of Sales Mar 1985–Feb 2013 May 1960–Nov 2012 Mar 1985–Feb 2013 Average APV (US$/cm 2 ) 646 803 537 Standard Deviation (US$/cm 2 ) 1,331 1,332 786 Coefficient of Variation 2.06 1.66 1.46 Median APV (US$/cm 2 ) 377 308 311 Skewness 15.56 3.87 4.86 Kurtosis 344.06 19.83 31.87 Jarque-Bera 9,040,581.38 8,328.44 97,801.30 JB p-value 0.000 0.000 0.000 Table 2. Detailed Characteristics and Key Statistics of the Artists Included in Data Set C Artist Number of Sales Born–Died Average APV (US$/cm 2 ) Standard Deviation (US$/cm 2 ) Coeff. of Variation Median APV (US$/cm 2 ) Alfred Sisley 341 1839–1899 389 282 0.73 313 Camille Pissarro 586 1839–1903 432 335 0.78 338 Claude Monet 581 1840–1926 760 999 1.31 411 Odilon Redon 193 1840–1916 167 156 0.93 118 Paul Gauguin 167 1848–1903 1,138 1,631 1.43 465 Paul Signac 247 1863–1935 353 454 1.28 202 9 Applications of the APV Metric This section is intended to demonstrate the usefulness of the APV metric with the help of some examples. Comparisons among All Artists. The fact that the APV follows a highly non-normal distribution calls for comparisons to be based on the median rather than the average value. To this end we employ the median comparison test using the Price-Bonett variance estimation for medians (Price and Bonett 2001; Bonett and Price 2002), described in Wilcox’s (2005) review of methods for comparing medians. Table 3 summarizes the results of such comparison. The median values for each artist are shown along the diagonal with the values decreasing from top-left to bottom-right: Matissse 1 has the highest value (513 US$/cm 2 ) while Redon the lowest (118 US$/cm 2 ). The remaining entries in the table can be interpreted, using matrix notation, as follows: the (i, j) entry represents the median APV value of artist j minus the median APV value of artist i. Hence, Pissarro’s median APV exceeds that of Signac by 136 US$/cm2 while there is no significant difference between Gauguin and Matisse’s median APVs. Table 3. Comparisons among the APV Medians for All Artists (1985-2012 sales only) Median APV US $/cm 2 Difference among Medians Henri Matisse a Paul Gauguin Claude Monet Pierre- Auguste Renoir Camille Pissarro Alfred Sisley Paul Signac Odilon Redon Henri Matisse a 513 Paul Gauguin NS 465 Claude Monet 102** NS 411 Pierre-Auguste Renoir 136*** 88* 34* 377 Camille Pissarro 175*** 127** 73*** 39*** 338 Alfred Sisley 200*** 152** 98*** 64*** 25* 313 Paul Signac 311*** 263*** 209*** 175*** 136*** 111*** 202 Odilon Redon 395*** 347*** 293*** 259*** 220*** 195*** 84*** 118 NOTE: a : Median calculated from sales between 1985-2012 only; NS= Not Significant; *p<.10; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01 These calculations, trivial by all accounts, offer a convenient way to rank artists. They also offer useful guidance for pricing purposes. 1 In order to have similar periods for all comparisons among artists, we only considered the sales between 1985 and 2012 for Henri Matisse. 10 Portrait versus Landscape for a Given Artist. Certain painters, Modigliani for instance (although he is not part of this study) decidedly preferred the portrait (or “vertical”) orientation. Sisley and Signac, on the contrary, favored the landscape orientation. Table 4 compares, for all the artists considered here, the median APV as a function of the orientation using the median-comparison algorithm already described. The results are interesting and far from obvious. In the case of Sisley and Pissarro, the painting orientation does not affect the APV in a significant way. In the case of Matisse and Renoir, the difference in median APV values is highly relevant. More interesting is the fact that even though both were much “better” at doing portrait-oriented paintings, they did not seem to favor this orientation. They both painted-- at least according to these sets of observations--roughly the same number of portrait-oriented paintings and landscape-oriented paintings (203 and 237 in the case of Matisse; 843 and 949 in the case of Renoir). Finally, Monet and Signac were better at doing landscape-oriented paintings, at least as seen by the market. Table 4. Comparisons of APV Medians: Portrait (Vertical) versus Landscape (Horizontal) Oriented Paintings for each Artist Artist Portrait Landscape Portrait versus Landscape Difference US$/cm 2 P-Value Number of Sales Median APV (US$/cm 2 ) Number of Sales Median APV (US$/cm 2 )) Alfred Sisley 21 298 321 317 -19 NS Camille Pissarro 132 327 450 346 -19 NS Claude Monet 124 352 440 426 -74 <0.10 Henri Matisse 203 498 237 199 299 0.000 Odilon Redon 133 131 53 84 47 <0.01 Paul Gauguin 81 580 86 328 252 <0.05 Paul Signac 23 129 224 212 -83 <0.05 Pierre-Auguste Renoir 843 505 949 289 216 0.000 NOTE: Paintings with height=width are excluded from the table. NS: Not significant. In conclusion, the orientation of a painting, in most cases, has a definite influence on its market value. Comparisons of Different Subjects for the Same Artist. Tables 5, 6 and 7 display the median APV value, for each artist, as a function of three dummy variables, namely: (i) Still 11 life; (ii) Paysage 2 and (iii) People (whether the painting shows one or several human figures regardless of the amount of detail); 0 refers to the absence of the condition. Table 5. Comparisons of APV Medians: Still Life versus No Still Life for each Artist Artist Subject: Still Life=Yes Subject: Still Life=No Difference US$/cm 2 P-Value Number of Sales Median APV (US$/cm 2 ) Number of Sales Median APV (US$/cm 2 )) Alfred Sisley NA NA NA NA NA NA Camille Pissarro NA NA NA NA NA NA Claude Monet 59 279 522 424 -145 <0.05 Henri Matisse 69 335 372 308 27 NS Odilon Redon 58 214 135 86 129 0.000 Paul Gauguin 24 821 143 411 409 <0.05 Paul Signac NA NA NA NA NA NA Pierre-Auguste Renoir 364 302 1454 396 -94 0.000 NA: Not enough sales for this artist in this subject (<10 sales). NS: Not significant. Table 6. Comparisons of APV Medians: Paysage versus No Paysage for each Artist Artist Subject: Paysage=Yes Subject: Paysage=No Difference US$/cm 2 P-Value Number of Sales Median APV (US$/cm 2 ) Number of Sales Median APV (US$/cm 2 )) Alfred Sisley 282 311 59 321 -10 NS Camille Pissarro 325 342 261 340 2 NS Claude Monet 410 424 171 355 69 <0.10 Henri Matisse 143 161 298 459 -298 0.000 Odilon Redon 42 61 151 135 -74 0.000 Paul Gauguin 58 288 109 649 -361 0.000 Paul Signac 103 218 144 200 18 NS Pierre-Auguste Renoir 478 267 1340 429 -162 0.000 NS: Not significant. Clearly, certain artists did much better on certain topics: Redon (again, APV-wise; see Table 5) was more skillful when executing still lives while the opposite happened to Renoir. Matisse, Gauguin and Renoir (see Table 6) did much better when they avoided paysages. 2 For the sake of clarity we have used the French word (“paysage”) to refer to what in English is commonly termed “landscape” to avoid any misinterpretation since this term (“landscape”) was used in the context of the geometric orientation of the painting. 12 And Gauguin, Renoir and Matisse (see Table 7) commanded higher prices when their paintings included people. These considerations, again, are useful when appraising paintings. Table 7. Comparisons of APV Medians: People (one or many Persons) versus No People for each Artist Artist Subject: People=Yes Subject: People=No Difference US$/cm 2 P-Value Number of Sales Median APV (US$/cm 2 ) Number of Sales Median APV (US$/cm 2 )) Alfred Sisley NA NA NA NA NA NA Camille Pissarro 71 267 515 348 -82 <0.05 Claude Monet 12 338 469 415 -77 <0.10 Henri Matisse 190 586 251 206 381 0.000 Odilon Redon 25 56 168 124 -67 <0.01 Paul Gauguin 31 1115 136 388 727 <0.01 Paul Signac NA NA NA NA NA NA Pierre-Auguste Renoir 817 528 1001 285 243 0.000 NA: Not enough sales for this artist in this subject (<10 sales). Life-Cycle Patterns. The idea behind this concept is to explore how the quality of an artist's paintings (using the APV metric as a proxy) evolves over time. That is, as a function of the age at which the painting was executed. Or more precisely, identify the period(s) at which the artist produced its most valuable work (financially speaking). Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4 display the median APV values, as a function of the age-at-execution for Renoir, Matisse, Monet and Pissarro. That is, the artists for whom we had more than 400 observations. Figure 1. Pierre-Auguste Renoir Life-Cycle Creativity Curve 13 The patterns shown are interesting as they reveal quite different tendencies. Renoir (Figure 1) seems to have reached a peak around the mid-thirties and then experienced a slow decline. Matisse (Figure 2) enjoyed a strong peak in his early forties, and a minor peak around his late fifties followed by a sequence of peaks and valleys in his late years. Monet's career (Figure 3) is marked by two salient peaks: an early one (when he was thirty) and a later one (in his mid-sixties) while Pissarro's life (Figure 4) is characterized by a more jagged curve that exhibited no significant decline in his old age and is more "regular" than those of either Monet and Matisse. This situation is somewhat consistent with the fact that his coefficient of variation (0.78 from Table 2) is lower than that of Monet (1.31) and Matisse (1.66). Figure 2. Henri Matisse Life-Cycle Creativity Curve Figure 3. Claude Monet Life-Cycle Creativity Curve 14 Figure 4. Camille Pissarro Life-Cycle Creativity Curve Estimating Returns for Different Artists or Group of Artists. Tables 8, 9 and 10 present the year-to-year total returns for Renoir, Matisse and the Impressionists (based on the information provided by Data Sets A, B and C respectively) along with other key values. Notice the salient peak APV values (at year 1989 and then around 2007-2008) with their corresponding steep declines afterwards. They are consistent across the three data sets and are in agreement with trends already detected in the broader art market. The total return computation is straightforward. First, we compute for each year, the average APV value (avg-APV). This is simply the sum of the APV values of all the paintings sold during the year divided by the total number of paintings sold. Then, the year-to-year total returns are computed based on the average APV values for two consecutive years. In short, the return between years i and i+1 is simply [avg-APVi+1/avg-APVi] – 1. We have purposely carried out this calculation using the average (mean) APV-value instead of the median. In general, it is customary to rely on the mean to estimate returns (regardless of the type of distribution) since the mean captures better the influence of extreme values. 15 Table 8. Data Set A: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Key Statistics and Year-to-Year Total Returns Year of Sale Number of Obs. Average APV (US$/cm 2 ) APV Stand. Dev. (US$/cm 2 ) 95% Conf. Interval* Coeff. of Variation Year-to-Year Total Return (APV) 1985 32 360 347 241 - 479 0.96 1986 41 446 432 319 - 575 0.97 0.239 1987 83 588 541 477 - 702 0.92 0.317 1988 70 1,051 1,098 795 – 1,308 1.04 0.788 1989 103 1,845 3,730 1,135 – 2,551 2.02 0.756 1990 93 1,415 1,960 1,018 – 1,804 1.39 -0.233 1991 31 426 336 313 - 540 0.79 -0.699 1992 43 491 525 336 - 649 1.07 0.152 1993 55 534 593 372 - 691 1.11 0.088 1994 45 370 281 287 - 453 0.76 -0.308 1995 75 386 428 288 - 484 1.11 0.045 1996 69 328 298 256 - 401 0.91 -0.151 1997 75 606 1,033 379 - 831 1.70 0.847 1998 77 409 695 250 - 569 1.70 -0.325 1999 75 437 435 339 - 537 1.00 0.068 2000 75 499 544 378 - 621 1.09 0.143 2001 49 430 663 248 - 615 1.54 -0.140 2002 38 485 495 331 - 641 1.02 0.128 2003 44 445 536 298 - 591 1.20 -0.081 2004 63 431 467 318 - 544 1.08 -0.032 2005 79 422 241 366 - 477 0.57 -0.020 2006 73 539 378 454 - 624 0.70 0.276 2007 94 667 657 530 - 799 0.99 0.237 2008 62 956 3,320 129 – 1,780 3.48 0.433 2009 59 442 356 352 - 532 0.80 -0.537 2010 65 541 481 423 - 663 0.89 0.223 2011 66 510 471 393 - 625 0.92 -0.057 2012 84 533 582 412 - 656 1.09 0.045 *The 95% confidence interval was computed based on a bootstrapping technique where we took 1,000 samples with replacement with size equal to the total number of observation in each year and computed a sample mean. The average and the standard deviation (standard error of the mean) based on the 1,000 means for each year was then computed for each year. We required a sample size of at least 10 observations to compute the confidence interval. 16 Table 9. Data Set B: Henri Matisse, Key Statistics and Year-to-Year Total Returns Year of Sale Number of Obs. Average APV (US$/cm 2 ) APV Stand. Dev. (US$/cm 2 ) 95% Conf. Interval* Coeff. of Variation Year-to-Year Total Return (APV) 1960 2 70 34 NA 0.49 1961 1 76 NA NA NA 0.092 1962 4 101 53 NA 0.52 0.333 1963 2 73 35 NA 0.47 -0.277 1965 3 64 33 NA 0.52 -0.067 1966 4 128 44 NA 0.34 1.014 1968 4 127 38 NA 0.30 -0.007 1970 7 222 87 NA 0.39 0.325 1971 5 63 65 NA 1.03 -0.716 1972 10 275 155 182 - 369 0.56 3.362 1973 7 620 800 NA 1.29 1.256 1974 9 413 516 NA 1.25 -0.334 1975 5 184 118 NA 0.64 -0.554 1976 10 141 57 104 - 178 0.40 -0.237 1977 9 248 163 NA 0.66 0.767 1978 9 173 105 NA 0.61 -0.302 1979 16 290 232 185 - 397 0.80 0.674 1980 7 253 124 NA 0.49 -0.128 1981 11 180 138 99 - 260 0.77 -0.290 1982 10 162 113 92 - 232 0.69 -0.097 1983 8 294 127 NA 0.43 0.810 1984 8 240 126 NA 0.52 -0.185 1985 11 306 200 189 - 424 0.65 0.278 1986 10 363 296 182 - 543 0.81 0.185 1987 13 446 300 288 - 604 0.67 0.228 1988 12 669 793 226 – 1,104 1.19 0.501 1989 12 1,411 1,252 722 – 2,096 0.89 1.108 1990 13 1,391 1,422 645 – 2,134 1.02 -0.014 1991 5 652 476 NA 0.73 -0.531 1992 9 1,134 974 NA 0.86 0.740 1993 11 710 766 280 – 1,127 1.08 -0.374 1994 6 362 357 NA 0.98 -0.489 17 Table 9. Data Set B: Henri Matisse, Key Statistics and Year-to-Year Total Returns (continued) Year of Sale Number of Obs. Average APV (US$/cm 2 ) APV Stand. Dev. (US$/cm 2 ) 95% Conf. Interval* Coeff. of Variation Year-to-Year Total Return (APV) 1995 10 1,137 1,452 257 – 2,021 1.28 2.138 1996 6 227 113 NA 0.50 -0.800 1997 11 666 656 289 – 1,044 0.98 1.930 1998 12 406 441 164 - 651 1.09 -0.390 1999 12 701 616 355 – 1,045 0.88 0.725 2000 7 1,426 1,685 NA 1.18 1.035 2001 18 717 567 467 - 968 0.79 -0.497 2002 8 1,037 722 NA 0.70 0.446 2003 3 166 47 NA 0.29 -0.840 2004 9 2,034 2,440 NA 1.20 11.290 2005 7 1,127 1,632 NA 1.45 -0.446 2006 8 1,402 999 NA 0.71 0.243 2007 23 2,073 3,013 803 – 3,307 1.45 0.479 2008 20 1,371 1,314 789 – 1,951 0.96 -0.339 2009 8 1,865 3,031 NA 1.63 0.360 2010 11 3,090 2,208 1786 – 4,423 0.71 0.657 2011 7 844 1,181 NA 1.40 -0.727 2012 8 902 1,706 NA 1.89 0.069 *The 95% confidence interval was computed based on a bootstrapping technique where we took 1,000 samples with replacement with size equal to the total number of observation in each year and computed a sample mean. The average and the standard deviation (standard error of the mean) based on the 1,000 means for each year was then computed for each year. We required a sample size of at least 10 observations to compute the confidence interval. 18 Table 10. Data Set C: Impressionists Group, Key Statistics and Year-to-Year Total Returns Year of Sale Number of Obs. Average APV (US$/cm 2 ) APV Stand. Dev. (US$/cm 2 ) 95% Conf. Interval* Coeff. of Variation Year-to-Year Total Return (APV) 1985 60 227 190 177 - 275 0.84 1986 58 243 196 193 - 292 0.81 0.070 1987 84 397 483 299 - 498 1.21 0.637 1988 72 790 1,321 493 – 1,094 1.67 0.988 1989 146 1,045 1,024 877 – 1,218 0.98 0.323 1990 62 648 395 546 - 749 0.61 -0.380 1991 36 404 466 263 - 543 1.15 -0.377 1992 40 307 240 232 - 382 0.78 -0.239 1993 60 333 249 269 - 398 0.75 0.084 1994 61 306 294 232 - 378 0.96 -0.082 1995 81 405 684 262 - 551 1.69 0.325 1996 69 373 405 276 - 465 1.08 -0.079 1997 87 438 510 334 - 544 1.16 0.173 1998 90 394 656 260 - 526 1.67 -0.101 1999 109 439 638 324 - 555 1.45 0.116 2000 80 582 897 385 - 784 1.54 0.325 2001 71 546 876 346 - 749 1.60 -0.062 2002 67 406 565 273 - 540 1.39 -0.257 2003 50 444 538 297 - 590 1.21 0.094 2004 75 502 945 286 - 720 1.88 0.130 2005 86 447 623 312 - 585 1.39 -0.109 2006 89 604 888 414 - 795 1.47 0.351 2007 105 863 1,170 635 – 1,091 1.36 0.429 2008 89 771 1,198 520 – 1,022 1.55 -0.106 2009 62 482 591 336 - 629 1.23 -0.375 2010 73 528 820 342 - 708 1.55 0.094 2011 58 464 532 330 - 601 1.14 -0.120 2012 95 645 787 479 - 807 1.22 0.388 *The 95% confidence interval was computed based on a bootstrapping technique where we took 1,000 samples with replacement with size equal to the total number of observation in each year and computed a sample mean. The average and the standard deviation (standard error of the mean) based on the 1,000 means for each year was then computed for each year. We required a sample size of at least 10 observations to compute the confidence interval. 19 Leaving aside the ease of computation (undoubtedly an attractive feature) some valid questions need to be answered. First, what does this return mean? And second-- and perhaps more relevant-- does this APV-based return agree with estimates computed with more popular approaches? Regarding the first question: the APV captures both, art market trends and supply- demand dynamics for the artist or artists considered, as it is based on actual sales. It does not intend to control the actual prices observed for any factor other than the area of the painting. Hence, the APV-based returns are really total (actual or realized) returns for the artist or artists in question (inflation has been removed since prices are expressed in January-2010 dollars). Some academics might feel that these returns are “contaminated” since we do not—in purpose we might add—control for factors such as the type of painting (subject matter), geometric features beyond the area, and the host of other variables that hedonic models normally employ to “explain” the price (dependent variable). The following analogy is useful to make our point that controlling for this factors, at least from an investor perspective, is not relevant. Suppose you are looking at the possibility of buying IBM stock and you have computed the average return in recent years based on the observed stock price. This return would correspond to an actual (or total) return. Consider now that IBM’s revenue (broadly speaking) comes from three sources: hardware, software, and consulting. Would you then attempt to control for revenue composition to arrive at a return figure reflecting the “average” or “typical” return? That is, a return based on an “ideal” revenue composition? Probably not. In fact, in all likelihood, the opposite is true. You want a return metric that actually captures the revenue composition variation. Well, the same goes for paintings. Renoir, for instance (and strictly from a return estimation viewpoint) can be thought of as a company that sells multiple products (paintings), all with different features, and whose stock value is captured by the APV. Therefore, the idea of estimating returns based on APV figures (and not controlling for any other variable beyond the area) is not only reasonable but also very much in line with commonly accepted return estimate practices. Moreover, market returns typically estimated with the time-dummy coefficients of the HPMs (a topic we deal with in more detail in the next section) are analogous—continuing with the IBM stock example—to returns based on a market index such as the S&P 500. While this information is surely useful to detect broad market tendencies, it is less useful for somebody who wants to buy a particular 20 painting by a specific artist instead of taking a position on the market as a whole. In summary, the fact that APV-based returns do not control for any factors beyond the area rather than being a weakness of the metric is a source of strength. The second question--regarding the degree of agreement between APV-based returns and returns calculated with other approaches--requires more thought. This issue is treated in detail in the next section. Finally, Table 11 summarizes the return results: (i) average year-to-year total returns; and (ii) cumulative returns for the relevant time-periods. Table 11. APV Year-to-Year Total Returns: Averages, Standard Deviations, and Cumulative Total Return using the APV Data Set A: Renoir Data Set B : Matisse Data Set C: Impressionists Average Total Return APV 8.16% 45.72% 8.30% Standard Deviation Total Return APV 35.58% 175.40% 31.47% Cumulative Total Return APV* 148.02% 1295.65% 284.21% *Cumulative total returns computed for 27 years for Data Sets A and C [1985-2012] and 52 years for Data Set B [1960-2012]. Repeat Sales Vis-à-Vis the Entire Data Set. Many analysts have estimated returns, for individual artists and groups of them, using only data from repeat sales. As pointed out before, a concern with this approach is that there could be a risk of selection bias. Table 12 shows the median APV values for each of the artists considered using: (i) all the observations (Total); and (ii) the repeat sales sub-set. In two cases (Matisse and Renoir) the differences are significant at the 5% level. And in four of the remaining six cases the discrepancies are marginally significant (significant at the 10% level). All in all these results support the view that a selection bias cannot be ruled out when dealing with repeat sales data. Furthermore, return estimates based on repeat sales regressions (despite the claim that one has controlled for all the “relevant” factors) should be regarded with suspicion because of this bias. The same goes for any other estimate based on repeat sales information. 21 Table 12. Comparisons of APV Medians: Total Sales versus Repeat Sales for each Artist Artist Total Sales Repeat Sales Total versus Repeat Sales Difference US$/cm 2 P-Value Number of Sales Median APV (US$/cm 2 ) Number of Sales Median APV (US$/cm 2 )) Alfred Sisley 341 313 118 327 -14 NS Camille Pissarro 586 338 146 378 -40 <0.10 Claude Monet 581 411 176 476 -64 <0.10 Henri Matisse 441 308 160 249 59 <0.05 Odilon Redon 193 118 36 91 28 <0.10 Paul Gauguin 167 465 37 612 -147 NS Paul Signac 247 202 90 180 22 <0.10 Pierre-Auguste Renoir 1818 377 426 425 -48 <0.05 In conclusion, the examples discussed in this section show that the APV metric is a useful tool that can provide a potential investor with a great deal of insight regarding the merits of an artist, groups of artists, or a particular painting. Validation of the APV Metric A useful way to assess the validity of the APV metric is to compare the results of calculations based on this metric and those obtained with other (presumably more established) methods. HPMs, in spite of their shortcomings, constitute a sound basis on which we can build some tests to explore the reasonableness of the APV-based computations. Total (Actual or Realized) Returns. A first examination consists of comparing the returns estimated with the APV metric and the returns calculated using HPMs. In order to determine a fair yardstick for comparison purposes we carry out two steps. First, we estimate individual HPMs for each of the three cases (Renoir, Matisse, and the Impressionists) using the entire corresponding data set. And second, in each case, we evaluate the resulting HPM, for each year, using the average characteristics of the paintings sold during the year, to arrive at a “representative” price corresponding to each year, Pi (where i denotes a year index). The year-to-year HPM-based returns are computed based on these prices, using the expression (Pi+1/Pi) – 1. Thus, the idea is to use the HPM to estimate the total return. 22 The HPMs employ the natural logarithm of the painting selling price as the dependent variable. The independent variables (right-hand side of the regression equation) involve: (i) linear and higher-order polynomial expressions based on the age of the artist at the time the painting was executed; (ii) in the case of Data Set C a dummy (binary) variable to account for the identity of the painter; (iii) linear and higher-order polynomial expressions based on variables associated with the geometry of the painting (area, height, width, aspect ratio, and diagonal) plus binary dummy variables accounting for medium (canvas) and special topics (nudes, still lives, flowers, etc.); and (iiii) a sequence of dummy (binary) variables associated with the year the painting was sold. The corresponding adjusted R 2’s (Renoir, Matisse, and Impressionists) are as follows: 0.75 (F= 137.47, p<.0001), 0.72 (F=18.78, p<.0001), and 0.67 (F= 77.39, p <.0001) respectively. In addition, we used White’s (1980) test for heteroscedasticity and the null hypothesis of homoscedasticity in the least-squares residuals was not rejected in each of the three samples (results can be provided upon request). Table 13 shows the comparison between the average year-to-year total return estimated with (i) the APV metric; and (ii) the HPMs applied as described before. Both estimates, in all three cases, are in close agreement. This fact is also consistent with the high correlation values reported as well as the visual comparison presented in Figures 5, 6 and 7. Table 13. APV and HPM-based Year-to-Year Total Returns: Averages, Standard Deviations, and Correlations Data Set A: Renoir Data Set B : Matisse Data Set C: Impressionists Average Total Return APV 8.16% 45.72% 8.30% Standard Deviation Total Return APV 35.58% 175.40% 31.47% Average Total Return HPM 7.64% 48.74% 8.36% Standard Deviation Total Return HPM 38.12% 162.67% 33.35% Correlation Total Ret. APV - Total Ret. HPM 0.79 0.89 0.82 23 Figure 5. Year-to-Year Total (APV and HPM) Returns for Pierre-Auguste Renoir Sales Figure 6. Year-to-Year Total (APV and HPM) Returns for Henri Matisse Sales 24 Figure 7. Year-to-Year Total (APV and HPM) for Impressionists Group Sales It might not seem evident that this is a fair comparison. However, we should notice that by evaluating the HPMs for each year, with the typical features of the paintings sold that year, one is capturing the two effects that influence returns: the market trend (reflected in the HPM coefficients associated with the time-dummy variables) and the specific characteristics of the paintings sold on a given year. The APV metric comingles these two factors (market trends and paintings features) in one figure. Therefore, the hedonic model framework (applied in the modified manner just described) seems appropriate to double-check the validity of the returns based on the APV metric. Market Returns. Provided one has enough data, hedonic models can also be used to obtain an estimate of the market return (as opposed to total return) between two consecutive years using a model fitted just using the data corresponding to those two periods (unlike the previous section in which the returns were estimated using a HPM built based on the entire dataset). The market return, under this variation of the hedonic model framework (assuming a log-price dependent variable) is simply Exp(β) – 1, where β is the coefficient associated with the year-of-sale (dummy) variable (0 if the painting is sold during the first year, 1 if it is sold during the second year). This is, in principle, another test that can be used to verify the soundness of APV-based returns: does the APV metric render reasonable estimates of market returns? The only problem is that the APV metric, by its very definition, does not lend itself naturally to isolate the market effects and the supply-demand effects (specific features of the paintings actually sold) and therefore, one cannot estimate directly, using the APV metric, the 25 market returns between two consecutive years. Thus, some modifications are required to design a test to check if the market returns implied by the APV metric make sense. We tackle this in three steps. Let us assume that we have three consecutive years (i, i+1, i+2) each with several observations. First, we group in one set all the auction data for years i and i+1 and compute APV(a), the average APV value considering all these observations as if they were made in the same year. Second, we group the data corresponding to years i+1 and i+2 in another set and compute APV(b), the average APV value considering all these observations as if they were made in the same year. And third, we estimate the market return between year i+0.5 and i+1.5 as λ = [APV(b)/APV(a)] – 1. The rationale for these calculations and assumptions is not straightforward, but it can be explained appealing to intuition. By comingling in one set all the APV observations corresponding to two consecutive years (say, i and i+1) we are, in effect —if not nullifying— at least mitigating the influence of the variations in the individual paintings’ characteristics. Thus, we are letting the market effect dominate. Furthermore, since APV(a) and APV(b) are based on adjacent years that actually overlap (year i+1 is common), this also tends to minimize the effect of the differences in individual paintings’ characteristics and privileges the market effects. This computational trick, which is actually tantamount to applying a low-pass filter to the time- history of APV values, is by no means perfect. But “smoothing” the time-history of the average APV values achieves the goal of reducing the effect of the individual paintings’ characteristics. This estimated return corresponds to a (shifted) one-year period return simply because the “time-distance” between the center-points of two consecutive periods is (i+1.5) – (i+0.5) = 1. We now need to estimate the market return between years i+0.5 and i+1.5 using a different approach to be able to make a meaningful comparison. To this end, we introduce a technique based on the HPM-framework applied to observations made in two adjacent periods (de Haan and Diewert 2011; Brachinger 2003). Consistent with the approach described in the previous paragraph we proceed as follows. We group all the information related to the paintings sold in years i and i+1 in one set (keeping track of the “year-of-sale effect” by means of dummy binary variable) and fit a HPM to these data. The market return between year i and year i+1 is estimated by Ra= Exp(βa)-1 where βa is the coefficient of the time dummy variable. We turn now to years i+1 and i+2 and determine a HPM analogous to the one estimated in the i and i+1 case. Here, Rb= Exp(βb)-1, where βb denotes the 26 coefficient of the time dummy variable, captures the market return from year i+1 to i+2. Finally, ω = (Ra + Rb)/2 provides an estimate of the market return between years i+0.5 and i+1.5. The above-mentioned calculations can only be carried out for Renoir and the Impressionist group. The Matisse data set (described in Table 9) contains several time gaps and lacks sufficient observations in most years; thus, for most consecutive years, it is not possible to fit a HPM. Consequently, the comparison between λ and ω, or, alternatively, the year-to-year market return estimated by (i) the APV-metric and (ii) the adjacent HPMs was only done for the two cases with enough data (Renoir and the Impressionists). In the case of Renoir, the values of the adjusted R 2 for the adjacent-period HPMs range from 0.67 to 0.82. For the Impressionists the adjusted R 2 values vary between 0.48 and 0.82. Table 14 summarizes the key comparison values. Figures 8 and 9 compare graphically the time-history of year-to-year market returns for the two data sets considered. As in the case of the total returns the comparison validates the estimates provided by the APV metric as they show agreement with the estimates based on hedonic model techniques. This is also in agreement with the high correlation values reported (0.85 and 0.91). From Table 14, we appreciate that in both cases (Renoir and the Impressionists) the standard deviation of market returns estimated by the APV metric (27.93% and 26.21%, respectively) are higher than those given by the HPMs (18.99% and 23.70%). This is to be expected since the “smoothing” approach employed to derive market returns from APV data is only approximate (the HPM is better suited to separate these effects in a more clear-cut manner). In any event, the preceding comparison provides evidence that, again, in spite of its remarkable simplicity the APV metric can provide reasonable accuracy with an important economy of computation. Table 14. Average Year-to-Year Market Returns: Based on (i) APV and (ii) Adjacent HPMs, and their Correlations Data Set A: Renoir Data Set C: Impressionists Average Market Return APV 4.80% 6.61% Standard Deviation Market Return APV 27.93% 26.21% Average Market Return HPM 4.60% 6.26% Standard Deviation Market Return HPM 18.99% 23.70% Correlation Market Ret. APV – Market Ret. HPM 0.85 0.91 27 Figure 8. Year-to Year Market Returns for Pierre-Auguste Renoir Based on (i) APV Metric and (ii) Adjacent HPM Approach Figure 9. Year-to Year Market Returns for the Impressionists Group Based on (i) APV Metric and (ii) Adjacent HPM Approach It is interesting to notice that the standard deviation of the market returns (using either approach, APV or HPM) is markedly lower than the standard deviation of the corresponding total returns (35.58% and 31.47% from Table 11). Intuitively, this makes sense: total returns —by virtue of not controlling for the characteristics of the paintings— exhibit more variability. Life-Cycle Patterns. Hedonic models have also been used in the past to investigate the age at which an artist produced its most valuable work. Typically, a HPM is fitted to the entire 28 data available (which normally cover several years) and then the natural logarithm of the average price versus the artist’s age-at-the-time-the-painting-was-executed, based on such model, is plotted. That is, the hedonic pricing equation is evaluated, for each age, using the average characteristics corresponding to that age. Figures 10, 11, 12 and 13 compare the curves obtained: (i) using the above-mentioned approach; and (ii) plotting the logarithm of the average APV versus age-at-execution. (In this case we used the average APV rather than the median, since the HPM-based curves are normally done with the mean.) All four graphs show very consistent trends between the two curves. In essence, the HPM-curves do not seem to offer anything more than the simpler APV-based curves show. Figure 10. Life-Cycle Creativity Pattern Profile, Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Comparison between (i) Log of APV profile and (ii) Log of Price (from HPM) profile Figure 11. Life-Cycle Creativity Pattern Profile, Henri Matisse: Comparison between (i) Log of APV profile and (ii) Log of Price (from HPM) profile 29 Figure 12. Life-Cycle Creativity Pattern Profile, Claude Monet: Comparison between (i) Log of APV profile and (ii) Log of Price (from HPM) profile Figure 13. Life-Cycle Creativity Pattern Profile, Camille Pissarro: Comparison between (i) Log of APV profile and (ii) Log of Price (from HPM) profile A more interesting point becomes obvious when we compare these life-cycle curves with those displayed before in Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4, which were obtained using the median APV instead of the Log(average-APV) or Log(average-Price). Obviously, the first group of curves shows much more clearly the evolution of life cycle patterns. To some extent, this is to be expected, as the Log-function tends to mitigate the effect of peaks and valleys. On the other hand, this calls into question the benefits of building these curves using the Log- function (regardless of the underlying variable) instead of using the "real thing", that is, the actual variable--for example the APV (with no Log applied). To sum up, the APV-based calculations, in all cases considered, yielded very similar results to those obtained with the hedonic models. This provides good evidence that the APV metric, despite its simplicity, offers results consistent with conventionally accepted methods. 30 This high degree of consistency might seem surprising. However, the following two observations can explain, appealing partly to intuition, the success of the APV: (1) regressing the logarithm of the price on just the area of the painting, for the case of Renoir, Matisse and the Impressionists, we obtained adjusted R 2’s values equal to 0.37, 0.26 and 0.33 respectively. Remember that the R 2’s values of the corresponding hedonic models were 0.75, 0.72 and 0.67 respectively. Hence, the APV metric --for all its roughness and simplicity— was able to explain, just by itself, almost half of what all the factors of the HPMs did; and (2) if we compute the correlation between the area of the paintings and the logarithm of the price for all the artists considered (Sisley, Pissarro, Monet, Matisse, Redon, Gauguin, Signac and Renoir) we obtain the following (fairly high) values: 0.36; 0.65; 0.48; 0.51; 0.55; 0.59; 0.68 and 0.61 respectively. These observations provide some basis for making an argument that using the area of a painting as a "normalization" factor is not that eccentric or bizarre; it has some sound foundation. Suggestions for Future Applications APV-based Derivatives and Index Contracts. The market for paintings lacks a widely accepted index or indices that could be used to design derivatives contracts for hedging and/or speculative purposes. We reckon that the reason is that the most popular indices (Mei- Moses index, artnet.com family of indices, AMR indices, etc.) while effective for the purpose they were designed--namely, tracking broad market trends—are unsuitable for financial contracts. The reason is that they involve certain elements (proprietary databases, discretionary rules in terms of which sales should be included, ad hoc combinations of repeat sales techniques coupled with some undesirable features of HPMs) that make them opaque and –at least in theory—vulnerable to manipulation. In contrast, indices such as the S&P 500 or the Barclays Capital bond indices family--which are based on well-defined and transparent rules—are easy to reproduce and difficult to game. Not surprisingly, derivatives contracts based on these indices have enjoyed wide market acceptance. We think that the APV metric provides a natural tool to create well-defined indices that could be the foundation for a derivatives art market. If one wishes to design an index to represent a specific market segment-- for example, the Impressionists-- the main point is to agree on the painters that should be part of the index. Once this issue is settled –a rule that must stay unaltered over time– what remains to agree upon is simply a mechanistic recipe to calculate the value of the index. For instance, it could be the average APV value of all the 31 paintings sold in public auctions in the last twelve months as long as their values exceeded US$ 50,000. A contract built around an index of this type could be used to gain exposure to this market or short it, in amounts much smaller than the typical price paid for a masterpiece. In that sense, these types of contracts could help to expand the investor base, and contribute to improve market liquidity. The operational details are similar, for instance, to those encountered in the agricultural derivatives market or commodities markets. This topic is presently under investigation by the authors. Testing the CAPM Validity in the Art Market. Several authors have investigated the validity of the CAPM model within the context of the art market. Although the results have been mixed we also think they have been irrelevant. The reason is that most authors — erroneously in our view— have placed on the left-hand side of the equation estimates of the market returns (obtained, in general, via the time-dummy coefficients of a suitable hedonic model). We reckon that the correct approach is to place on the left-hand side of the CAPM equation estimates of total returns—not market returns. These returns, of course, can be easily obtained with the APV. This suggestion might sound strange until one realizes that, for instance, if we were to apply the CAPM model to, say, IBM’s stock (to go back to our initial analogy) we would place on the left-hand side of the equation the return computed based on the price of IBM stock over some time period: in short, the total return. We would never place on the left-hand side the IBM return computed after controlling for whatever market factors might influence it (composition of revenue, number of employees, technology changes, etc.) In summary, it is quite odd that the validity of the CAPM within the art market context has been carried out using returns that do not capture supply-demand changes from period-to- period. At present, we are investigating this topic. Conclusions We have introduced an easy-to-compute financial metric suitable for two-dimensional art objects that is both intuitive and transparent. It has several appealing features: it is difficult to game since not much discretion comes into its evaluation (unlike hedonic models that are data intensive and often exhibit lack of stability); it can be applied to artists for whom there are few observations, albeit with all the caveats appropriate for small data sets; it facilitates comparisons between artists, between different types of paintings by the same 32 artist, or, paintings done by the same artist at different life-periods; it is also appropriate to explore artists’ consistency, by looking at its standard deviation or coefficient of variation; and, finally, it can be employed to construct well-defined total-return indices to create financial derivatives. However, it must be emphasized that the main goal of this new metric is to offer an investor a useful yardstick that captures, after normalizing by the area, a representative price. It is not the aim of the APV to control prices for characteristics or to build a market index based on a time-independent ideal painting. For these reasons the APV metric is ideally suited to compute actual returns. In terms of estimating returns, the APV metric offers two attractive features; (i) unlike repeat-sales regression models, it can use all the available data; and, (ii) unlike HPMs, whose effectiveness can depend substantially on the variables chosen and the analyst’s skill to select them, it gives a unique value: the actual total return. The comparison between APV-based total returns (or for that matter, any other figure of merit based on the APV metric) and a similar figure of merit based on HPMs techniques deserves some attention. The rationale for these comparisons is simply that hedonic models are, more or less, accepted as valid tools within the art market. Accordingly, some reasonable degree of agreement with a calculation based on hedonic models provides comfort that the new tool (the APV in this case) is not outlandish. In this regard, the examples described in the paper give validity to the soundness of the APV metric. At the same time, it should be mentioned that the examples presented here should be taken as a “proof of concept” and not as a definite claim of superiority in favor of the APV. We hope that other researchers will conduct more tests using the APV metric (and devise new applications) which, in due time, will lead to a more complete picture in terms of its advantages and drawbacks. Thus, we see the APV as a complementary tool to the conventional models, not as a substitute. Although the topic of this paper has been to introduce a new tool to the analyst’s toolkit, rather than questioning the virtues of the HPMs in the context of the art market, one thing is obvious: hedonic models, considering how data-intensive they are plus the additional limitations already mentioned, do not seem to offer a lot more insight than the simple APV metric--at least for the examples discussed in this study. Moreover, the high correlation 33 observed between total returns computed using the APV and those based on HPMs reinforces this point. In summary, we hope investors, financial analysts, and future researchers will be able to explore—and exploit— the financial merits of the APV metric. Our goal has been simply to introduce the tool, showcase a few applications, and perform some validation tests. Finally, the main advantage of the APV is that it is a (financial) metric and not a modeling technique; therefore, it is what it is, and it can always be computed. 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Accounting and Finance, vol. 44, no. 2 (July): 257–272. work_c6ettxiwdbdpvj3yiirl456fay ---- Journal of Art Historiography Number 20 June 2018 The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier-Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer Csilla Markója The ‘Hungarian Fauves’ – what does it mean? ‘I long believed that Hungarian modernism began with the Eight, but it turned out that it started with the “Hungarian fauves”, around 1906,’ declared Krisztina Passuth, curator-in-chief to the newspaper Népszabadság. She went on to add: ‘Hungarian art history needs to be rewritten.’1 This euphoric pronouncement heralded the exhibition ‘Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914’,2 staged at the Hungarian National Gallery (2006). This show, which was afterwards displayed at three locations in France, prompting widespread interest in the media there,3 was accompanied in Hungary by debates regarding terminology. ‘Were the Hungarian fauves really fauves?’ asked art historians and art critics. During the discussions which followed, problems of cultural transfer – i.e. those of the acceptance, adoption, translation, and interpretation of a given segment of another culture, another narrative – were given a good airing, especially at the conference organised as just one of the events 1 The writing of this paper was funded by a János Bolyai Research Scholarship awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. ‘A “magyar Vadak” fölfedezése. Ismeretlen remekművek a Nemzeti Galériában. Varsányi Gyula riportja Passuth Krisztinával’ [Discovering the Hungarian Fauves. Unknown masterpieces at the HNG], Népszabadság, 27 February 2006 issue. 11. 2 The exhibition between 21 March and 30 June 2006 was organised by Krisztina Passuth, Gergely Barki, and György Szücs. 3 The international response to the exhibition was highly impressive, at least with regard to the statistics. The show featured 3 times on television and 6 times on radio. In addition, the French daily and weekly press (including Le Monde, L’indépendant, La Tribune, Paris Match, Elle, and Palette) reported on it – briefly or at greater length but almost invariably in illustrated articles – on 44 occasions and the monthly press on 74 occasions. The foreign press published 42 articles on the exhibition, along with invitations and snippets of news that together numbered more than these. Fifty Internet sites informed their readers concerning the travelling exhibition, which was augmented with works by French fauves. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 2 intended to augment and interpret the exhibition.4 Together with Gergely Barki, Péter Molnos, Zoltán Rockenbauer and Attila Rum, Krisztina Passuth, professor at the Institute for Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest and an eminent researcher of the Eight and the activists, investigated the years preceding the appearance of the Eight. The threads led to France. ‘A fine exhibition – perhaps this is the first feeling the visitor has on seeing the representative selection,’ wrote the correspondent of the periodical Új Művészet, summing up his impressions, ‘An exhibition like this can only be put together from works made in a great period of art. Can we say that the art of the Hungarian fauves counts as one of the exceptional moments in Hungarian painting?’ Passuth replied: ‘Yes. This was the moment – to be more exact, it was a period of few years, from 1906 to 1912 specifically – when modern Hungarian painting was born. For us today, what happened then seems for us fully amazing. An art was born that was absolutely in synchrony with European trends, even the most recent French and German ones, an art whose autonomous peculiarities and values were – and continue to be – characteristic only of the Hungarian fauves.’5 In his assessment of the exhibition’s significance in art history, Géza Perneczky went even further than this: ‘We should attach much more weight after this exhibition to the young Hungarian artists familiar with Fauvism who visited Paris after 1904 and who in some cases stayed there for a longer period. But as regards their role in Hungary, we should see these artists, whom their colleagues called ‘Neos’ (neoimpressionists), a label that stuck for decades, simply as representatives of the ferment that started at the Nagybánya artists’ colony and in the MIÉNK circle. More is needed. Although in the contemporary press the word chercheurs was voiced many times in connection with them (this term later found an echo in Károly Kernstok’s expression ‘Inquisitive Art’), it was they who found, and represented for a year or two, what later on already could only be spoilt. If we accept this, though, then we must move to an earlier date the fault line that separates the story of the direct influence of plein air painting (more specifically the Nagybánya school), and the secessionist endeavours in Hungary that were occurring almost in parallel with it, from the avant-garde, which was then knocking at the door. The start of the Hungarian avant-garde thus moves a few years earlier. But even this correction does not express entirely the full extent of the new recognitions. It is not simply that the Eight’s appearance around 1910 now seems not to have been the first avant-garde stirring in the history of Hungarian art. An additional factor is that our impression of the Eight as a classicising branch – one 4 The show was accompanied by a series of lectures, with the participation of György Szücs Krisztina Passuth, Anna Szinyei Merse, Gyula Kemény, László Jurecskó, Gergely Barki, Zoltán Rockenbauer, and Tamás Tarján. 5 Ernő P. Szabó, ‘A modern festészet ünnepi pillanatai. Beszélgetés Passuth Krisztinával a Magyar Vadak Párizstól Nagybányáig 1904–1914 című kiállításról’ [Festive moments of modern painting. Interview with KP], Új Művészet, 16 : 6, 2006, 8. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 3 more retrogressive than progressive in respect of innovation – of the stirring that had begun five or six years earlier may be growing.’ However, to his markedly unsympathetic opinion he immediately added: ‘Of course, it could be that we remember only erroneously what the Eight actually painted [...]. In this, a role is most certainly played by the fact that many of their works are in private collections; without these the Eight cannot be shown in a way that is truly fitting. [...] But however much we try to save the situation, this much is certain: a sea change has taken place.’6 After preparations lasting four years for the exhibition that gave rise to this ‘sea change’, another four years needed to pass for the same ‘research group’ to step forth with a ‘fitting’ presentation of the Eight, as an organic continuation of the earlier show. The group’s members undertook a task that seemed impossible, namely to reconstruct the three emblematic exhibitions staged between 1909 and 1912 at which members of the Eight (Róbert Berény, Béla Czóbel, Dezső Czigány, Károly Kernstok, Ödön Márffy, Dezső Orbán, Bertalan Pór, Lajos Tihanyi) – who were recruited from the much broader circle7 of the Hungarian fauves – took part along with friends they had invited (Artúr Jakobovits, Vilmos Fémes Beck, Mária Lehel, Anna Lesznai, Márk Vedres). We thus have an opportunity to ponder questions that Éva Forgács (eminent researcher of modernism in Pasadena) put in the columns of the journal Holmi: ‘Can concepts or artistic practices be transferred from one culture to another; and how much can another cultural context modify the meaning and function of a given artistic language, in the present case a language of painters?’ Forgács herself answers these questions, when in her nuanced analysis she points out that sometimes ‘cultures of forms and languages of images can be transferred from one culture to another’, ‘which, however, cannot be lifted across [...], the embeddedness in history of some modes of expression, in this case the context created by the French Enlightenment and French Revolution, in the frameworks of which the French viewer saw the pictures of the fauves, even when these were mediated, since antecedents of these pictures [...] “had given rise to unconscious associations.”’ According to Forgács, the historical context of early twentieth-century progressivism in Hungary is essentially different from the French: ‘Those Budapest intellectuals who served as the repository of progressivism did not hark back to the 6 Perneczky, Géza: ‘Revízió a magyar avantgárd kezdeteinek kérdésében’ [Revision concerning the beginning of Hungarian avant garde], Holmi, 19, 2007, 296–297. 7 The authors of the catalogue included under the collective term ‘Hungarian Fauves’ the following artists, by virtue of works they produced during a particular phase of their careers: Béla Balla, Rezső Bálint, Géza Bornemisza, Tibor Boromisza, István Csók, Dezső Czigány, Valéria Dénes, Sándor Galimberti, Gitta Gyenes, Vilmos Huszár, Béla Iványi Grünwald, Károly Kernstok, Nana Kukovetz, Ödön Márffy, András Mikola, József Nemes Lampérth, Dezső Orbán, Tibor Pólya, Bertalan Pór, Armand Schönberger, Lajos Tihanyi, János Vaszary, Sándor Ziffer. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 4 ideas – of 1848, let us say – relating to Hungarian attempts to secure bourgeois freedoms, but, turning against their liberal fathers, relied on the ideas of German philosophy, and wished to create a new metaphysics. As the early essays of György (Georg) Lukács, Béla Balázs, and Lajos Fülep show, these intellectuals wished to create a new and extensive Hungarian national culture in the spirit of German idealism, a culture for which they drew inspiration from Ady’s poetry, from the pathos of his New Verses that heralded a new age. Their rebellion was directed first and foremost against impressionism, which – having partly misunderstood – they considered art characterised by superficiality and subjectivism. Their ideal was Cézanne, in whose structured pictures they saw – likewise partly erroneously – the glorification of metaphysics.’8 At this point, Forgács quotes one of the authors of the catalogue, Péter Molnos, who in one of his studies speaks of how ‘at the birth of the new painting, at the starting out in Nagybánya of Czóbel, Berény, Perlrott, and their associates [...], it was problems purely to do with painting that were in focus of attention, independently of every element outside art’, and of how ‘conscious emphasising of structure and composition was basically alien from the colour- centred, deconstructing spontaneity of Fauvism’.9 Despite the labelling, the members of the research group evaluated – and formulated – the differences accurately. Gergely Barki, one of the organisers of the exhibition, declared to the periodical Műértő: ‘Seeing the pictures emerging in the art trade, one could guess even at the outset that something new would come together, and we were aware that if we began in a systematic way to dig out the pictures hidden away at public collections, there would be surprises for everyone. An appreciable part of the exhibition came from material that had been gathering dust in museum storerooms. The period between 1905 and 1909 had not been markedly represented in the specialist literature earlier on; the term itself ‘magyar Vadak’ [Hungarian Fauves] raised questions. For the time being, no one was able to come up with anything better, although I, too, did not consider this term entirely appropriate, nor in the end the expression ‘Hungarian Fauves’ either. Even now we know little. The exhibition at best called attention to the fact that there was a tendency that needed to be addressed.’10 One difference between the viewpoints related to the usefulness or harmfulness of the term ‘Hungarian Fauves’, which was declared unsatisfactory. ‘For strategic reasons’, Éva Forgács did not deem fortunate ‘the labelling of this painting, rich and encompassing different endeavours, with the expression ‘Hungarian Fauves’. The entirety of modern Hungarian painting, which began late, 8 Éva Forgács, ‘Vadak vagy koloristák?’ [Fauves or colourists] Holmi, 19, 2007, 310–312. 9 Péter Molnos, ‘The “Paris of the East” in the Hungarian Wilderness’ Krisztina Passuth and György Szücs, eds, Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya, Budapest: Hungarian National Gallery, 2006. 118. 10 Emőke Gréczi, ‘Vadak után, Nyolcak előtt. Beszélgetés Barki Gergely művészettörténésszel’ [After the Fauves, before the Eight. Interview with art historian GB], Műértő, 10 April 2007. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 5 has never been described using terminology other than that created by Western and Russian narratives, this giving no chance for any kind of distinctive quality, voice, or half-voice, or something original even, to be present in Hungarian art.’11 The situation was evaluated similarly by Ilona Sármány-Parsons: When local art histories began to be constructed as the history of a national art, an universal measure of a virtual kind dangled in the collective consciousness of the day: the path of French art, as a universal path. [...] When we read the exciting and interesting studies in the catalogue for the Hungarian Fauves, it becomes clear that the very same fire burned in the breasts of the young Hungarian art historians of 2006 as had burned in the breasts of those of 1906. The proof that we Hungarians managed to connect synchronically with the French experiments with form; in other words, we were modern and we did not lag behind in the race for new visual solutions. [...] In other words, Czóbel, Berény, Perlrott, etc. were there in the Salon d’Automne, alongside Matissse and in the company of Derain, with fresh, uniquely new pictures: in Paris and in the vanguard! [...] But did anyone notice us? Is it not illusory to hope that with this evidential material we can step, albeit afterwards, into the “centre” and integrate into the principal trends in the history of painting?12 According to Katalin Sinkó, we can move nearer to an understanding of the problem if we bear in mind that ‘cultural transfer differs essentially from comparison, since it builds on the premise that there are no national cultures that have developed in an autochthonous way. These cultures have formed in the wake of influences, co-habitation, and motif adoption of many different kinds. Investigation of cultural transfers, then, places the emphasis on similarities existing in the social memory and not on differences. This is because “common cultural elements ease movement from one context to another”, in other words, understanding.’13 In the case of the Hungarian Fauves, Sinkó analyses the process of cultural transfer as follows: The renaming of the “Neos” as “Hungarian Fauves” was, however, unable to take place until this change of designation had been legitimated by an exhibition in France. [...] The decisive step in this area was taken by the organisers of the show “Le fauvisme ou l’épreuve du feu”, which opened in 11 Forgács, ‘Vadak vagy koloristák?’, 313. 12 Ilona Sármány-Parsons, ‘Marginalizált magyar festők, avagy egy közép-európai festészeti kánon kérdései’ [Hungarian painter ont he margin, or questions of the canon of Eastern European painting], Holmi, 19:3, 2007, 324. 13 Katalin Sinkó, Nemzeti Képtár. A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria története. [Gallery of the Nation. The History of the Hungarian National Gallery] Budapest, 2009, 147. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 6 October 1999 at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. This exhibition, which dealt with painting in the period between 1905 and 1911, devoted a special section to artists working in Paris, Dresden, Munich, Prague, Budapest, and Moscow, as well as in Belgium, Switzerland, and Finland, who were in the circle of the French fauves or under their influence. [...] The fauve movement or trend was one that was built on the traditional centre–periphery approach taken by writings on French and European modern art. We can say that the modernisation of this concept has still not taken place.14 In essence, Sinkó agrees with Éva Forgács in that neither concept nor artistic practice can be transferred from one context to another without a modification of meaning. According to Sinkó: in the background of reformulations and new names there are the less conscious processes of cultural transfer. In the course of these, French culture and Hungarian culture alike have been placed in the role of receiver. While works by Hungarian artists that were created under French influence, and the names of these artists also, are perhaps fixed in the narratives of French modernisms, the different time-horizon and the special characteristics of Hungarian and Central European history remain considerably outside the processes of this transfer. Generalising from our example, for a real understanding of the situation only the understanding of the concepts – in the present case, the different meanings of the expression “fauves” – can help. [...] The frame of this can only be “crossed history” (histoire croissé, to use Bénédicte Zimmermann’s term), which can come into being through the bilateral investigation of processes. For the writing of history of this kind, it is necessary that in concrete situations the different national histories – in our case, the French art history and Hungarian art history – step out of the frames of national monocausality followed hitherto and, in the development of theories, take into account, in a multilateral way, the earlier or actual determinedness of the historiography of the other nation. For example, to what extent are the ongoing processes of historical interpretation mirrors of cultural transfers, or are they sensitive indicators of the already complete crisis of the Europe ideal in both Central and Western Europe, or perhaps harbingers of the new nationalisms strengthening in the West, too, in the current situation?15 This provocative question remains unanswered. But in order to understand the operation of cultural transfer, it is enough to think of a connection that develops 14 Sinkó, Nemzeti Képtár, 157. 15 Sinkó, Nemzeti Képtár , 159. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 7 between two strangers. To begin with, they measure their similarities and a possible common basis. They instinctively seek out in their own histories those points which they can offer to each other for identification. In this phase, the smallest similarity can be the source of immeasurable joy. But when there is a common denominator, already the differences, too, can give them pleasure. Of course, relations are never perfectly equal and never perfectly mutual. The art history of the time around 1900 has been recorded by way of the narrative of progressivism, in the paradigm of the centre and the periphery. The model itself is historical. We can and should remark upon on the material of past in its capacity as such and we may emphasise different aspects of it. Nevertheless, the material of the past is malleable only up to a certain limit. The historical marker of the art of the era under discussion is progressivism: we would be ahistorical were we to divest it of this tag. The expression ‘Hungarian Fauves’ is a proposal for a common denominator. Albeit differently and with different emphases, the Paris of Matisse was, at one and the same time, the Paris of the Hungarian painters, too. The name itself is a proposal; the meaning is already a variation on the name. However, as far as the history of the Eight is concerned, it is not the common denominator, but the delight in the distinctive and the different that matters. The reception of the Eight and the press As a fine arts example of the movements active in the different spheres of cultural life in Hungary between 1909 in 1912, the Eight group was a loosely organised, informal association, although its leader Károly Kernstok, who was known in the press largely on account of his organisational ability, mature years, and prestige, had clear views on what it represented and what its task should be in society. It was Ödön Márffy who, with hindsight, summarised its programme most succinctly: ‘The joint or kindred endeavours of these artists could perhaps be formulated as follows, namely that they tried to make pictures according to strict principles by placing emphasis on composition, construction, shapes, drawing, and essence.’16 Behind these endeavours, journalists and art critics, numbering just a handful but nevertheless highly effectual, organised and influenced the group’s growing middle-class public, which was primarily drawn from the ranks of the urban intelligentsia. In the absence of a real art market, this public purchased works by the group members on a patronage basis, measured their accomplishment in the light of its political-ideological alignment and intellectual preconceptions, which was at the same time the undertaking of a social role. The unique features of their art were for a long time engraved on the countenance of a small yet powerful public; in turn, the mimicry and gestures of this public influenced their art, and, through mediation, have – down to the present day – determined the artistic orientation and approach 16 Dévényi, Iván: ‘Márffy Ödön levele a Nyolcak törekvéseiről’ [Letter of ÖM about on the goals of the Eight]. Művészet, 10, 1969, 8. 10. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 8 to forms of generations. Éva Körner, who coined the term ‘avant-garde without isms’, considers convergence to be the main characteristic of the period under discussion, but also calls attention to the distinctively Hungarian features of the process of bourgeois transformation: In the 1910s, large-scale social co-operation was characteristic of intellectual life in Hungary, from the socio-political movements through the transformation of the system of philosophical thought to the fashioning of forms in art. For the time being, intellectual solidarity prevailed; the cracks, and later the splits, that emerge during times of ordeals in political life had not yet appeared. [...] It was not by chance that for the first time in Hungary culture acquired a new meaning, one orientated towards the living of life in a more just and true way, because never in Hungary did the system of middle-class values, and grounded in it the specialist branches of learning, taken root to such an extent that the desire for a different, more just and true life was erased.17 Nevertheless, cracks appeared well before the paths finally diverged. Intense solidarity characterised the Eight only at the end of 1910 and the beginning of 1911: many of the members failed to take part in the group’s third exhibition, which was held in 1912. Kernstok lost his leading role and left the group. When we speak of the Eight, in a certain sense we are speaking about an effective fiction, but this vision or fantasy regarding a community created ensembles of art works of emblematic significance, moreover with matchless vehemence for art as a whole. In connection with the Eight, it is primarily paintings that we think of, although the members displayed sculptures and even applied art creations. At their third show, Berény exhibited, in addition to a writing-case, eight women’s handbags, hangings, and eight pillow-case embroideries. From their circle, Anna Lesznai also produced high- standard embroideries. Capable of being pieced together from entries in her diary, her ideas concerning decoration were also significant. Many of the members of the Eight could play a musical instrument. Róbert Berény, an all-rounder in the group and the other leading figure besides Kernstok, not only understood mathematics, but also wrote music criticism; indeed, he also composed music, and not just on any level. Seen through today’s eyes, the press campaign surrounding the Eight reached enormous dimensions, even if ample contributions appeared by conservative writers. During the scientific preparations for the exhibition, Árpád Tímár published, in a three-volume collection of sources, more than 1500 pages of 17 Éva Körner, ‘Lovasok a vízparton – Fekete négyzet fehér alapon’ [Horsemen at the Water – Black square on a white surface] in Éva Körner, Aknai Katalin and Hornyik Sándor, Avantgárd – izmusokkal és izmusok nélkül. Válogatott cikkek és tanulmányok, Budapest: MTA Mu vésze o rténeti Kutatóintézet, 2005, 318. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 9 articles and reviews from the press response of the time to progressivism in Hungary in the early twentieth century. This huge amount was – leaving out of account the anonymous newspaper contributors on the subject – produced by a few dozen individuals, including such devoted or well-disposed supporters of the Eight as Aladár Bálint, Artúr Bárdos, György Bölöni, Andor Cserna, József Diner-Dénes, Géza Feleky, Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, Ödön Gerő, Géza Lengyel, Pál Relle, Béla Revész, and Dezső Rózsaffy. With regard to those in the field of theory, special mention may be made of Géza Feleky, who wrote the introduction to the Eight’s second catalogue, and György Bölöni, who followed their activity in Paris and from Paris and who organised exhibitions for them. The most powerful support, however, came from a poet and a philosopher respectively: Endre Ady and György Lukács represented a broad guarantee for the acknowledgement of the merits of their work. The reception of Matisse and the influence of German theory Behind György (Georg) Lukács was the sophisticated, distinguished figure of Leó Popper, a brilliant critic who died young, a few months after the Eight’s second exhibition. In the twenty-five years of his life, he published a total of twelve short pieces. Of these, only a few were on fine art subjects. These influenced neither Hungarian art, nor the Sunday Circle, which, continued, with philosophical force, the lines of thought begun by artists in the years of the First World War. On the other hand, he did exert an influence on his friend György Lukács, not only inspiring his thinking, but guiding, up to his death, the morality of that thinking by means of well-disposed criticisms, in the course of their correspondence, their joint articles, and their translations. Nevertheless, in 1919, at the time of the dramatic turn represented by the Hungarian Soviet Republic, there occurred what Popper had so much feared: For Lukács, art was apocalyptic power. It was exciting, but, for that very reason, dangerous. The recognition that the forms of art needed to be regulated was, therefore, a matter of time only. Popper – with his utopian notions – was, as we shall see, a man of liberty; in Lukács, however, there already lurked the commissar who dreamt of apocalyptic powers for himself, which, in due course, he would firmly withstand.18 One of the most sincere manifestations of this desire to regulate appears in Lukács’s work, ‘The roads parted’, a response to ‘Inquisitive Art’,19 Kernstok’s text setting out a programme for the Eight. In his article, Lukács defined form as follows: ‘Form is 18 Géza Perneczky, ‘Leó és a formák’ [Leo and the forms], Buksz, 5, 1993, 409. 19 Kernstok, Károly: ‘A kutató művészet’ [Inquisitive art], Nyugat, 3:1, 1910, 95. – Az Utak II, 288–292. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 10 the principle of evaluation, of differentiation, and of the creation of order.’20 In the best moments of his philosophical career, Lukács could have experienced how his thought sequences were dictated by a kind of inspired necessity: Lukács was capable of seeing this on a theoretical level, but never on an emotional one. Accordingly, the form concept, despite every endeavour on the part of his friend, from time to time degenerated in Lukács’s hands into a genre category, or else acquired the shape of a dogmatic metaphysical imperative. On the other hand, Leó Popper still knew that form involves risking, and that we can understand the independent and unbridled intentions of form only when we are capable of giving up the ‘security given by full understanding’ for ‘the type of uncertain adventuring’ which leads us to ‘the most secret and most unlikely realms of form, towards deeper truth’.21 On the other hand, philosophy – and in the given historical moment left- wing, bourgeois thinking, too – had no need more pressing than this ‘full understanding’. The Lukácsian demand for an exact discipline bent to the yoke of categorisations, systemicism, and definitions cannot be reconciled with any kind of adventuring that is risky and uncertain in outcome. Just as Popper’s ‘Let the will of form prevail’ and Lukács’s formal strictness denoted diverging paths, the Eight, too, cannot be reduced to a common denominator: the artists in question followed their inner lines of bearing. As regards reception and frame of interpretation, the Popperian liberty ideal was not a realistic alternative to the ideas of Lukács and his supporters, as, one by one, the Hungarian painters had their French orientation recoded through the influence of German theory, which in Hungary followed on from geopolitical and historical factors. Their reception in the country was determined by art critics who had read the German art historians, primarily Meier-Graefe. The German cultural circle held sway over Popper’s formulations, too, and decisively: the keenest indication of this was its criticisms in connection with Fauvism. However, all this does not mean that the political and artistic ideas of Kernstok, who was especially critical of German art, would have prevailed. The members of the Eight were autonomous artists who did not remain together for long, because their views and interests could not be lastingly reconciled. For each of them, Paris meant something different, principally a technique, i.e. acquisition of skills and the reinterpretation of means. It is no coincidence that it is precisely to this period and to Leó Popper that the so-called double-misunderstanding theory is connected. A summary of it has survived as a fragment, as follows: Proposition: The principal factor in the development of art is misunderstanding. 20 Lukács, György: ‘Az utak elváltak’ [The roads parted] , Nyugat, 3. 1910, I, 190–193. – Az Utak, II, 321. 21 Ottó Hévizi, ‘A forma mint szabadakarat. Popper Leó esztétikája’ [The forms free will in the aesthetics of Leo Popper], Világosság, 28, 1987, 397. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 11 Argument: Development consists of the influence (including inherited influences) of people and periods on each other. However, since man cannot know his fellow-man from within and cannot understand what it is that his fellow-man wants, across historical period to period still less (since finding out is impossible), when, nevertheless, he receives what he sees, he does so wrongly, misunderstanding it, and preparing the ground for new misunderstandings.22 Popper’s idea was processed by Lukács as follows: The existence of a work can be understood without confusion only when we regard the misunderstanding of it as the sole possible direct communication form: how a world comes into being from a double misunderstanding (from the misunderstanding of “term” and “understanding”) which on the one hand one cannot adequately achieve from one of them but which, however, is in a necessary, normative connection with both is already merely a problem that has to be solved, and not an incomprehensible phenomenon.23 Not long after Berény and his circle, we find Popper in Paris. The young man, who had contracted tuberculosis while young, certainly turned up and made sketches at the Matisse Academy, although his letters attest that he also took part in training more systematic and more thorough than this. On 20 May 1909, he informed his friend Lukács: ‘I have enrolled at the modelling department. And it was a clever thing to do, because I’m learning an incredible amount there: at one and the same time drawing and architecture, anatomy and painting, dynamics and metaphysics, and singing, and how to write articles and art history, as well as Swedish gymnastics, the theory of knowledge, and ju-jitsu.’24 A few weeks later he was already writing from Wengen in Switzerland: ‘I made a model of an amazing mulatto woman, a little creature from Martinique, who taught me more in a week that fifty Jean-Paul Laurenses or Matissses could have done.’25 Popper read forthwith the programme-announcing – or, more precisely, programme-changing – piece published by Matisse, the fauve-chef, in the journal Grande revue. This article appeared in Hungarian in 1911 entitled ‘Remarks by a Painter’, in the periodical A Ház.26 The text was of enormous importance from the point of view of Matisse’s reception in Hungary. In his ‘Letter from Paris’, a piece 22 Leó Popper, Esszék és kritikák. [Essays and criticisms], Budapest, 1983. 116 23 Popper, Esszék és kritikák, 46, 47. 24 Ottó Hévizi and Árpád Tímár, eds, Dialógus a művészetről. Popper Leó írásai. Popper Leó és Lukács György levelezése. [A dialogue on art. The writings of Leó Popper . The correspondence of Leó Popper and György Lukács], Budapest, 1993, 271. 25 Ottó Hévizi and Árpád Tímár, eds, Dialógus, 274. 26 Henri Matisse, ‘Egy festő feljegyzései’ [Notes of a painter], A Ház, 4, 1911, 187–200. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 12 written in early 1909 that likewise remained unpublished and which was probably shared only with Lukács, Popper sums up its lessons as follows: The path of today’s painting leads to peace. It leads out of the stylistic chaos of impressionism and towards a solidly based calm art which, no matter how it manifests itself, is the brother of architecture: it carries in itself the features of profound security and equilibrium of which it is the embodiment. And, on paths that are concealed, the old order returns: the immobile or mobile sacred order of the Greeks and the Oriental peoples.27 Here Popper makes reference to Matisse’s concept change, which the leader of the French fauves announced as follows: With colours, one can achieve beautiful effects, insofar as one relies on their belonging together or their lack of this. Often, when I start working, it is the new and superficial effects that I first catch. A few years before, I was content with this result [...]. I should like to achieve the condition stemming from the concentration of feelings that makes a picture a picture. [...] Earlier, I did not leave my pictures on the wall, because they reminded me of moments of overwrought excitability and I was not happy to look at them when I was in a calm state of mind. Now it is calm that I am trying to invest in them, and I shall get them out again and again until I achieve my goal. [...] Behind this succession of motifs, which constitutes the passing existence of living beings and things, and which lends them changing forms of appearance, we must seek a truer, more essential character, to which the artist will accommodate, in order to give a more enduring picture of what is real.28 Having read Matisse’s declaration, Popper winced. ‘Peace today is still present for people only in programmes. [...] It has not yet come – there is no “realm of peace” –, and it will not come at all as long as things go on as they are now: as long as the difference between the artist’s intentions and his deeds is greater than between his deeds and those of his opponent. In actual fact, this difference is such that we see as clear opposites things that in great art are one and the same: form and content. They are going towards the great peace with the form of great confusion.’29 Popper, who can be termed a liberal almost in the French sense in comparison with Lukács, found Matisse’s turn towards classicism unsatisfactory and instead considered the example of Cézanne and Aristide Maillol the one to follow. In a number of places, the authors of the Hungarian Fauves catalogue called attention to 27 Popper, Esszék és kritikák, 53. 28 Matisse, ‘Egy festő feljegyzései’, 188. 29 Popper 1983, Esszék és kritikák, 54. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 13 the fact that in Paris the Hungarians had encountered Matisse’s ‘tamed’ fauvism’ at the same time as they encountered cubism, which was then gaining more and more ground. The same process ran its course among Matisse’s German followers: ‘In the works of young painters liberated from the school of Matisse, during the time of cubism, Cézanne’s influence strengthened further in Paris. This occurred in Berlin, too, when in 1909–10 pictures by Cézanne featured at a number of exhibitions. Instead of loud colours, there were stable forms, and in an era of growing confusion discipline and concentrated picture-building received new emphasis.’30 However, this generally characteristic structural change meant different things in the different regions of Europe. Passing through a succession of cultural filters wedged not between intention and expression, but also between expression and understanding, very many opportunities for misunderstanding presented themselves. What a painter could acquire from Matisse was a mass of skills which could be understood as a kind of procedural system only in the context of the history of French visual culture. And at the same time this meant that the Hungarians arrived in Paris with a vision formed in advance by the procedural systems of their own visual culture. For their part, these systems determined in advance what they would acquire and receive. The restorator Gyula Kemény, an ‘honorary’ member of the research group, drew up a list showing – paradoxically – which French influences could have contributed to the preservation of Hungarian traditions: 1. They encountered brushwork with generous use of paint also on Van Gogh’s surfaces transubstantiated by way of expressivity; 2. Decorative, two-dimensional surfaces and calligraphic outlining, a tradition known from the Hungarian Secession, made Gauguinesque formal elements easily comprehensible; 3. The strong plastic approach did not appear as a necessarily outworn tradition, since after 1907, with the spread of cubism, Cézanne’s system of drafting spatially and organising mass again became topical.31 The reception of Cézanne Károly Kernstok, who cultivated an ever deepening friendship with Oszkár Jászi, the constantly self-renewing, politically very active leader of middle-class radicals 30 Éva R. Bajkay, ‘Magyar és német kapcsolatok Matisse nyomán’ [Hungarian – German connection int he footsteps of Matisse], in Ágnes Berecz, Mária L. Molnár and Erzsébet Tatai, eds, Nulla dies sine linea. Tanulmányok Passuth Krisztina hetvenedik születésnapjára, Budapest, 2007, 94. 31 Gyula Kemény, ‘Francia nyomvonalak a magyar Vadak és a neósok festészetében. Egy restaurátor feljegyzései’ [French tracks in the painting of the Hungarian fauves and ‘neos’. Notes of a restorer] in Passuth and Szücs, eds, Hungarian Fauves, 186. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 14 (who even gave a lecture on the Eight)32 was, after Berény, the other rallying point for the company of the Eight. In his memoirs, Lajos Bálint wrote of Kernstok as follows: In outer appearance and in his entire manner he was an attractive figure. When he appeared somewhere, he became, almost involuntarily, the centre of the company. With his blond beard, bright blue eyes, and irresistible smile, he was sometimes reminiscent of some legendary prophet. Had he utilised these qualities for his own purposes alone, he would, clearly, have enhanced his success as a painter. But – in the first half of his life at least – he was a rebel. I have often asked myself whether political life itself was of greater interest to him than his calling as a painter. [...] However many new principles or experiments appeared, with his lucid intelligence and his excellent professional training he immediately tried them out, but only for so long. Even in his most interesting phases, in his pictures depicting large equestrian groups, he was unable to remain in the experimental style long enough to cast the strongly outlined galloping nudes built on structures of bundles of powerful muscles in the form final. [...] He was already around thirty when, along with successes achieved, he abruptly turned his back on his entire output as a painter up until then and set out on his quest in the world of the ‘Neos’. If the Eight respected him as their leader, this esteem did not extend to their following him in his quick changes. [...] The reality is that without the assistance of the critics and that part of the public that stood behind them, they would never have obtained a hearing in the storm that they generated with their first appearance. I myself was present at that meeting of the Galileo Circle at which Kernstok delivered his lecture entitled ‘Inquisitive Art’. The essence of this canvassing address was the opposition between the art of the emotions and the art of the intellect. He established a connection between the radical programme of the Circle and the essence of the new art. [...] Increasing numbers of people were becoming interested in the art of the Eight, primarily that section of the public which was grouped around the Galileo Circle and the periodical Huszadik Század, and later on around the journal Nyugat. This section already celebrated Ady, attended with interest the musical manifestations of Bartók and Kodály, and subsequently the new developments in painting and sculpture, too.33 Having been obliged to leave Hungary following the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Károly Kernstok wrote from Berlin to Gyula Kosztolányi Kann on 31 October 1920: ‘Manet’s mission was to dismantle tradition, 32 ‘Felolvasás a Nyolcak kiállításán’ [Lecture at the exhibition of the Eight], Pesti Hírlap, 29 November 1912, 26 – Az Utak III, 496. 33 Lajos Bálint, Ecset és véső [Brush and chisel], Budapest, 1973, 118, 120, 122, 123. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 15 Delacroix’s to provide bold ideas, Cézanne’s to lead one to the specific in the individual, and those after him to show freedom of emotions and means in the interests of a goal. The rawest colour is permissible, the bluntest valeur is permissible, the most individual manner of drawing is permissible, and every synthesis is permissible, only there must be a goal.’34 It is worth stopping for a moment and pondering why it was that Kernstok stressed subjectivity in connection with Cézanne’s highly objective art. One of the most interesting products of the reception of Cézanne in Hungary was a study by the critic Géza Feleky entitled ‘The Legacy of Cézanne’. According to Feleky, at a time when art is no longer being produced socially but is instead individual discovery, and when every true artist is a revolutionary being on account of necessity and not of temperament, Eastern art is losing its exotic character and Western art – by virtue of its anthropocentric world-view a necessarily three-dimensional art – is acknowledging, in the most confused and most critical period of its history, the legitimacy of two-dimensional art. This is an indication and consequence of the fact that art is no longer an essential need of Western man, or rather that art, not longer performing its essential mission, is already a thing of pleasure and not a thing that is necessary.35 Behold an ‘end of art’ idea from 1911, one that is connected with the wish to surpass the ideas of subjectivity and individualism. In the centre of Feleky’s analysis of Cézanne is the problem of the two- dimensional plane and the three-dimensional space, and also that of the thrusting together of chaos and order: Cezanne, then, did not just create space, mass, and the structure-like fitting together of different masses from nothing, from shades of colour, from degrees of atmospheric moistness, and from other tonal differences; in his pictures, order emerges from disorder. But the acknowledgment of several points of view, deconstructs the picture only in one direction and leads only seemingly to disorder. [...] Hence, the picture surface is uneven, contradictory, anarchic, and chaotic. Nevertheless, it achieves its goal, because the vision appears in a clear way through the help of the unclear means. These visions are calm and logical: there are clear balances between the clearly outlined masses and also clear, counterbalanced movements. The technique, however, is intuitive; from time to time, very different means add 34 The repository holding the letter: MTA MKI Adattár, lsz.: MDK-C-I-17/2026. 35 Feleky, Géza: ‘Cézanne hagyatéka’ [The legacy of C.], in Könyvek, képek, évek. Budapest, 1912, 16. First published in the periodical Nyugat: 4: 1, 1911, 749–754. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 16 to the tonal differences.36 The ‘very different means’ and their various misunderstandings in the art of Hungarians, e.g. Tihanyi, are analysed by Gyula Kemény, in the course of picture analogies. In 2000, an outstanding Cézanne exhibition was staged at the Kunstforum Wien that bore the eloquent sub-title ‘Vollendet, unvollendet’.37 In the course of the different phases represented by the pictures, it was possible to observe how Cézanne struggled with the organising principle of organised chaos: what he left open and how much space he assigned to the accidental, what he attended to or constructed and how much, and whether from processes that were almost infinite he put together art works that could be described as finished. In the case of the Hungarian painters, instead of thinking oriented to the future, concentration on the past, on the completeness of the composition, was more characteristic: in this the rise of psychoanalysis in Hungary would have an increasingly significant role. Berény spoke rather of memories when he defined himself in comparison with the futurists: The increase in the elements of composition means the development of painting from now on. These elements – memories and emotions – are parts of the painter’s soul.’38 On the other hand, Kernstok, in ‘Inquisitive Art’, trusts in the preservation of traditions: ‘The reaction to our little exhibition just now was, as far as I know, much greater than the one we envisaged on the basis of its modest funding. The progressive ones among those who make up our public [...] felt that that if this was not the end, the final product, of a big journey, but rather the beginning of a long road on which we should go forward proceeding from traditions, in order to seek and find those new great values which in essence will be very much akin to those of the good art of every era.39 Nothing in the seemingly shared substructure shows better the different approaches of Berény and Kernstok than the difference in their works. In the field of graphic art, it was they, of all the members of the Eight, who created perhaps the most enduring works. It is worth looking at two drawings of heads by them one after the other. Both are fine works composed in a balanced way. The Kernstok work, kept at Sümeg, is a cool depiction showing an almost androgenic character and radiating timeless calm, while in the Berény piece the face of the female figure is 36 Feleky, ‘Cézanne’, 20. 37 Cézanne – vollendet, unvollendet,. Kunstforum Bank Austria, 2000. 38 Róbert Berény, ‘A Nemzeti Szalonbeli képekről’ [On the picture at the National Salon]. Nyugat, 6: I 1913, 197–198. 39 Kernstok, ‘A kutató művészet’, 288. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 17 disfigured by emotions; snake-like, her mouth is wincing, and she is looking at us contemptuously out of the corners of her eyes, which are in slits that are deliberately asymmetrical. Her whole being is torn asunder by tension. The difference is perhaps even more striking when we compare another work by Kernstok, a harmonious, classically calm depiction of a man with an expressive brow and folded arms, with a 1911 Berény seated female nude now kept in the Graphic Art Collection at Budapest’s University of Fine Arts. On the latter work, one can clearly see – besides the attempt at a closed composition – that Berény was more excited than any other member of the Eight by Cézanne-type superintended chaos; except that he focused chiefly on the psychic and emotional, that is the energy of pathos. When speaking of Kernstok’s drawings, again it was Feleky who named the difference between the two extremes the most tellingly: Bernard Berenson published, in two enormous volumes, beautiful reproductions of drawings of this kind by Florentine painters. Perhaps not even his keen eye and splendid critical sense would, at first glance, think Kernstok’s drawings of nudes out of place in this collection. What the drawings have in common is an undisguised emphasising of centres of movement and of intersections. Drawing is the art of and omission. At the end of their lives, one or two old masters – every true painter’s language of forms develops from complexity towards simplicity – contented themselves with dominant details. It seems that the great synthetic power manifest in their drawings is the stage preceding Kernstok’s highest synthesis, his ultimate simplification. But Kernstok commits to paper only the movement and structive nodes, and surrounds them with a one-stroke outlining. The Florentine way of seeing things cannot get that far. Behind Quattrocentro painting stood the sculptor Donatello: he, just like his painter colleagues, asserted the structural connection only within the decorative body unit, emphasising, so to speak, the organic nature of the decoration. For Kernstok’s manner of seeing, it is necessary to seek analogies in the work of the elderly Rodin or in that of Maillol. Even then there remains the affinity between the graphic art of Florence and that of Kernstok.40 At the end of his train of thought, in which he refers to Kernstok’s social commitment, Feleky tactfully quotes from a letter of Van Gogh: Giotto and Cimabue lived in an obelisk-like environment where everything was placed on architectonic foundations, where individual uniqueness was the stone of the building and where everything rested on everything else and created the monumental order of society. If the socialists would construct 40 Géza Feleky, ‘Széljegyzetek Kernstock képeihez’ [On the margin of Kernstok’s pictures]. Nyugat, 1910, I., 195–198. – Az Utak II., 325. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 18 their buildings in a logical way – today they are still a long way from doing this –, then this social order would revive again in a similar form. We, however, are living in the midst of complete anarchy and lack of discipline.41 The reception of Adolf Hildebrand – The Problem of Form in Fine Art (1893) A utopian ideology containing connections between structured picture-building and the restructuring of society – and between essence focused artistic form and man remaking himself – had by this time come into being in the hands of Kernstok, who operated with Hildebrand’s terminology. Kernstok’s famous speech – typically for an artist’s approach - offered only sensory-emotional connections. György (Georg) Lukács provided a concrete programme text, in which Popperian ideas were already to be found in a form that was a good deal more doctrinaire and aggressive, but undoubtedly more elaborated.42 Lukács, in his lecture The roads parted delivered to the Galileo Circle, practically quoted (without giving any kind of reference) the words written by Popper in his Matisse article, applying them to the works of Kernstok rather than to those of the French fauves: These pictures bring calm, peace, relaxation, and harmony – that they could shock anyone is completely incomprehensible. [...] Here it is not the success of a new art that is the issue, but the resurrection once again of old art, of art, and about the life-and-death struggle against the new, modern art that this resurrection brought about. Károly Kernstok has said what the issue is here. That those pictures that he and his friends paint (and those poetic works created by a couple of poets, and those philosophies brought into being by a couple of thinkers) want to express the essence of things. The essence of things! With these simple words, avoiding polemics, the material of the great debate is indicated, and also the point at which the paths diverge.43 Written in 1908 and already quoted, Popper’s words on equilibrium and calm art on a solid base were interpreted in 1910 by Lukács as follows: ‘This art is the old art, the art of order and values. Impressionism made everything a decorative surface [...]. The new art is architectonic in the old and true sense of the term. Its 41 Feleky, ‘Széljegyzetek’, 326. 42 For the connection between Popper and Lukács in more detail, see Csilla Markója, ‘Popper Leó (1886–1911)’, in Bardoly István and Markója Csilla, eds, “Emberek, és nem frakkok”. A magyar művészettörténet-írás nagy alakjai. Tudománytörténeti esszégyűjtemény, Enigma, 13: 48, 2006, 263–284. For quotations concerning Hildebrand: 270–271; 277–278. 43 Lukács ‘Az utak elváltak’, 320. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 19 colours, words, and lines are just means for the expression of essence, order and harmony, the weight and equilibrium of things.’44 One possible source for these ideas can be found in the introduction to Adolf Hildebrand’s successful 1893 book The Problem of Form in Fine Art (translated by János (Johannes) Wilde): While the issue here is the imitative, in fine art a kind of research into nature is concealed, and it is to this that the work of the artist is linked. The problems which form places before the artist in this are supplied by nature and dictated by perception. If just these problems happen upon solution, i.e. if just in this relation the work has existence, then also, as a work in itself, it has not become an independent whole which could speak in favour of nature or against it. In order to achieve this, its imitative content – in its development from the wider point of view – has to be raised to a higher realm of art. I would call this point of view architectonic, not concerning myself, naturally, with the ordinary specialist meaning of the word architecture. A dramatic play or a symphony has this kind of architecture, this kind of inner structure, an organic totality of relations, as does a picture or a sculpture, even when individual branches of art are living in completely separate worlds of form. Problems of form emerging in tandem with such an architectonic shaping of an art work do not arise from nature and are not self-evident; nevertheless, it is precisely these that are absolutely artistic. Architectonic shaping is that which creates a higher-order in art work from the artistic researching of nature.45 The passage quoted from Hildebrand is one of the nearest sources of another of Popper’s ideas, namely the notion of art as a mode of being ‘of a different God’, a mode of being in parallel with nature. Similarly to Károly Kernstok’s lecture, the title of which, too, ‘Inquisitive art’, was borrowed from Hildebrand: The arts, painting let’s say, always start out from nature. [...] That is to say, the means with which the painter works and those with which nature works are very, very, different. [...] In vain do we sit before nature in order to copy it like a camera obscura: there is no light-sensitive plate in us; in vain do we wish to paint the colours as we see them: we have no sunlight in us. There is, it is true, something that we have as human beings which in its significance is of equal value to these things, namely our intelligence. [...] This, this nature [i.e. those things that have bodies – Cs. M.] must be called upon to help and must be interpreted.46 44 Lukács ‘Az utak elváltak’, 322. 45 Adolf Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (1893), Hungarian translation, János Wilde, Budapest, 1910, 5. 46 Kernstok, ‘A kutató művészet’, 289, 290. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 20 As a matter of fact, the ideas of Lukács, who was conducting an ideological war, and Kernstok, who was seeking autonomous artistic solutions, were brought to a common denominator by their joint hostility to impressionism. The reclaiming of ‘old art’ (e.g. that of the Greeks) meant on the one hand the demand for tradition and continuity, and on the other an idealistic philosophy directed towards a metaphysics that hypothesised its own viewpoint in the absolute. After the failure of Simmel’s experiment to discover something of substance in impressionism (an example of this was Simmel’s first Rodin analysis, a critique of which was given by Popper in his essay ‘Sculpture, Rodin, and Maillol’; it is not a coincidence that in his obituary for Simmel in 1918 Lukács mentions their one-time teacher as follows: ‘He was the Monet of philosophy, whom so far no Cézanne has followed.’47), an equals sign was placed between impressionism and a metaphysics-free world. For example, so it was in the work of the above-mentioned Géza Feleky also, to whose Kernstok article published in Nyugat in 1910 Popper reacted in a letter written from Berlin on 6 February 1910: ‘As well as you, Géza Feleky writes very cleverly about the Kernstok things. Indeed, and this is the greatest acclamation, he says a couple of things which I myself wanted to write; instead of these, I shall now be forced to serve up something even more brilliant.’48 Here, Popper is perhaps referring to the article which he was to have written on the Eight’s exhibition in Berlin for the periodical Kunst und Künstler. This piece was, unfortunately, never produced (or, if it was, we do not know about it), although its basis would probably have been the ‘Impressionismus-Tektonismus’ difference. According to Tímár, this was precisely the term by means of which Popper could have contributed significantly to the art criticism of the day. In connection with the terminological debates that became more lively following the ‘Hungarian Fauves’ exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery, it is worth reminding ourselves that The name tectonism is very fortunate, on the one hand because the everyday meaning of the expression is in harmony with the essential characteristics of the artistic endeavours indicated, and on the other hand because this term isolates something for which contemporary criticism had no special term, and for which art history scholarship since then has had no special term either.49 47 György Lukács, ‘Georg Simmel’, Pester Lloyd, 2 October 1918. Republished in Lukács, 1977, 746–751, 748. 48 Hévizi and Tímár, eds, Dialógus, 328. For the article in question, see Géza Feleky, ‘Széljegyzetek Kernstok képeihez’ [On the margin of painting by Kernstok], Nyugat, 3:I 1910, 195–198. – Az Utak II.: 323–326. 49 Árpád Tímár, ‘Élmény és teória. Adalékok Popper Leó művészetelméletének keletkezéstörténetéhez’ [Experience and theory. On the origin history of Leo Popper.’s art Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 21 The place of the Eight In the differences between the theoretical and moral approaches of Popper and Lukács we can glimpse the essential difference between the open art of Cézanne and the art of the Eight which was soon closed. However, to analyse the approaches adopted by eight different artists in the theoretical force fields of two thinkers in itself an act of violence. ‘These people here did not come together in a school; it cannot be said of them that Kernstok is their teacher. [...] They are travelling on roads whose direction is still unknown and whose destination no-one can yet know,’ wrote the newspaper Népszava in connection with their first exhibition, namely ‘New Pictures’.50 Éva Forgács’s hypothesis quoted at the beginning of this study – this held that every artistic phenomenon can be understood only in its social embeddedness, in its own historical tradition, and in its cultural context – is especially warranted in the case of the Eight. Károly Kernstok’s strong political commitment to the middle-class radicals and the freemasons influenced the members of the group (to different degrees, admittedly), but his undertaking of this role, or the pathetic energy that stemmed from this choice, determined the contemporary reception of the works rather than the works themselves. The activity of Oszkár Jászi, cultivating friendly contacts with Károly Kernstok and with his sculptor relative Márk Vedres, has again come to the forefront of research. A characteristic of middle-class radicalism as a way of thinking is a metapolitical commitment, which means that the questions of practice are judged by philosophy, from the standpoint of theory. For this reason, a necessary concomitant of it is a “semantic rationalism”, which pictures reality in models, and wants to tailor concrete conditions and actors to these models. [...] Middle-class radicalism is a socialist standpoint, a left-wing critique which is directed towards the superseding of liberalism, and conducts the critique of capitalism from the position of a post-capitalist – in other words, a socialist – order. But here we shall make two necessary restrictions: both the concept of socialism and the picture of capitalism are flexible.51 The movement of the middle-class radicals failed, and, along with Kernstok, theory] in János Háy, ed., Lehetséges-e egyáltalán? Márkus Györgynek tanítványai (bibliography Ágnes Erdélyi and AndrásLakatos), Budapest, 1994, 429. 50 (vd) [Várnai, Dániel]: ‘Új képek’[New Pictures]. Népszava, 31 December 1909 issue. 5. – Az Utak II.: 230. 51 Gábor G. Fodor, Gondoljuk újra a polgári radikálisokat [Let us reconsider the radical middle- class], Budapest, 2004. 148-149. See also the relevant publications of György Litván. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 22 Oszkár Jászi, too, was obliged to emigrate after 1919. Both came into conflict with György (Georg) Lukács’s ideologemes put into effect at the time of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919). However, the ‘schematic rationalism’ of the middle-class radicals and their theoretical presuppositions developed together, in fruitful reciprocity with the progressive literary and artistic movements of the age. This historic exchange of ideas left its mark on Kernstok’s and his associates’ art, which was sometimes style-breaking, sometimes style-securing,52 sometimes schematic, and sometimes biddable. If we are to proceed from this approach, we must acknowledge that somewhere between the dead naturalist painting of nature and the reshaped presentation of phenomena given by nature runs a perilous borderland. We must acknowledge naturalist paintings that have inspired us and those that inspire us now, and we must acknowledge nature-altering, stylised pictures that have filled us with artistic joy. It does not, therefore, depend on the trend. But precisely from this we see that in the interpretation of nature vague boundaries lurk in some places, and we sense, too, that every artistic work that expresses truly noble joy in human beings takes shape between these limits that are vague and not precisely set by any aesthetic. But who dares to say to a painter “This far and no further”? For this there is only one forum enjoying full legitimacy: the painter’s talent, his fine feelings.53 The tact of the painter – Károly Lyka’s beautiful expression condenses in itself everything that is comprehensively characteristic of the Eight. Plastic art was theirs, powerful, bold, in the collision zone of two- and three-dimensionality, experimenting with the metaphysics of the body, with rhythm, decoration, primitivism, musicality, and abstraction: everything depended on their sense of proportion. Their art is neither avant-garde nor the sum or permutation of French or German influences. Instead, it is an organic local outcome of Hungarian capabilities, an art which had an antecedent, and which even achieved a paradoxical continuation in the Arcadian painting of the 1920s. In the history of Hungarian modernism since 1867, theirs was the change that finally liberated art from the constraints of mimetic, mapping, vision: in the nature seen and recomposed by them we can acquaint ourselves with our own creative strength and with the demons that threaten it. The introduction to the catalogue for the Los Angeles exhibition ‘Central 52 Gyula Kemény describes the first two ‘as an undoing and as a doing up’ in his above- mentioned study published in the present volume. 53 Károly Lyka, ‘A MIÉNK bemutatója’ [The show of MIÉNK]. Új Idők, 21 February 1909, 190–191. – Az Utak II.: 28. Csilla Markója The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier- Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer 23 European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation 1910–1930’,54 which was exemplary in its depiction of the ‘pan-European horizon’, was written by Péter Nádas, who spoke of the possibilities for cultural transfer. Its title of the introduction was itself eloquent: Cautious Determination of the Location. The sub- title, on the other hand, revealed what would later lie at the heart of the discussion: We thoroughly investigate a single wild-pear tree. The Eight group stands before us in the centre of one possible narrative of our own art history. It is rather like the Hungarian writer’s wild-pear tree that pushed its roots into the soil of a given garden, a given village, a larger district, and a historical region, while generating year-ring waves in an ever-extending space and time. Translated by Chris Sullivan (Pittsburgh) Csilla Markója, PhD, is Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Research Group on Art Historiography, Institute of Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, chief editor of the art historical journal Enigma (www.meridiankiado.hu), which is mainly devoted to publishing diaries, letters, and other sources (Anna Zádor I-IV, Tibor Gerevich I-III, János Wilde I-IV, János György Szilágyi I-III). She has published two monographs (László Mednyánszky 2008, Péter Nádas 2016), and her book on Hungarian art historiography 1910-1945 is forthcoming. She is a member of the ‘Hungarian Fauves and the Eight’ research group and researcher of the Sunday Circle. She edited vols. I-V of Great figures of Hungarian art historiography, and the bilingual edition of Ernő Kállai’s oeuvre. She has nearly 200 publications on, amongst others, György Lukács, Anna Lesznai, Arnold Hauser, Leó Popper. markoja.csilla@btk.mta.hu This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International License 54 Timothy O. Benson, ed., Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation 1910– 1930, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ work_ca4su7c6qvhwlc65xubezqbyci ---- PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE This article was downloaded by: [Bahill, A. T.] On: 22 August 2008 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 901818469] Publisher Taylor & Francis Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK International Journal of General Systems Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713642931 Valid models require defined levels A. T. Bahill a; F. Szidarovszky a; R. Botta b; E. D. Smith a a Systems and Industrial Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA b BAE Systems, San Diego, CA, USA First Published:October2008 To cite this Article Bahill, A. T., Szidarovszky, F., Botta, R. and Smith, E. D.(2008)'Valid models require defined levels',International Journal of General Systems,37:5,553 — 571 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03081070701395807 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03081070701395807 Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713642931 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03081070701395807 http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf Valid models require defined levels A.T. Bahill a *, F. Szidarovszky a , R. Botta b and E.D. Smith a a Systems and Industrial Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA; b BAE Systems, San Diego, CA, USA ( Received 9 January 2006; final version received 8 November 2006 ) A common mistake in modeling systems is mixing elements of different levels in the same model. This paper explains levels, shows how levels can be obtained with decomposition techniques and gives many examples of levels in models, architectures and frameworks. Examples are given that show the confusion that results when levels are mixed. The paper shows that complex models are usually composed of many aspects. Each aspect has levels and the levels of one aspect are different from the levels of another aspect. The model must be constructed using elements of the same level for each aspect. Keywords: modeling; abstraction; decomposition; hierarchy; systems science 1. Examples of levels in different disciplines Identifying levels in models is a basic modeling principle. This principle is not specific to any field of application: it applies to models in general. This paper shows many examples of levels in many fields of endeavour. The concepts presented in this paper are not restricted to engineering. A common mistake in modeling systems is mixing elements of different levels in the same model. Therefore, an important task in designing and modeling systems is identifying the level of the proposed model and its elements. However, the term level is often used rather cavalierly, so here we will give a definition, and several examples. First the dictionary definition: “level n. 1.a. Relative position or rank on a scale. 1.b. A relative degree, as of achievement, intensity, or concentration . . . 3. Position along a vertical axis; height or depth.” The concept of examining a system at many physical orders of magnitude was presented by Boeke (1957). Later Eames and Eames (1968) created a film of this concept and finally Morrison and Morrison (1977) popularized the idea with the book Powers of Ten. These authors treated physical decomposition as more and more levels of detail. We tried to create a canonical prescription for levels in systems, but the best we could do is present many examples of levels from many different fields. After our presentation of these examples we present half-dozen examples of failures that were caused by level mistakes. Then we present some generalizations that are meant to help modelers and designers to define levels and avoid mistakes in mixing elements of different levels. We also suggest some reasons why it so hard to keep levels consistent in a system. One of the primary reasons is that different aspects of a system have different levels. ISSN 0308-1079 print/ISSN 1563-5104 online q 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/03081070701395807 http://www.informaworld.com * Corresponding author. Email: terry@sie.arizona.edu International Journal of General Systems Vol. 37, No. 5, October 2008, 553–571 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Physical Decomposition is a commonly used decomposition technique. For systems engineers, physical decomposition often offers these levels (Morganwalp and Sage 2003) 1. Enterprise 2. Family of systems 3. Systems 4. Segment 5. Element 6. Subsystems 7. Components 8. Subassembly 9. Parts An army is divided into divisions, regiments, battalions, companies, platoons and solders. In Julius Caesar’s time there was a ten to one ratio of the sizes of these elements. That is, ten solders comprised a platoon and there were ten platoons in a company, which was commanded by a centurion. Functional Decomposition is another way to create various levels. MIL STD 499A said that the preferred way to design a system was functional decomposition. Start with the top-level system function and decompose it to lower and lower levels. Students used to query, “When do you stop decomposing?” We used to answer, “When you get a function small enough to be designed by a team of people.” However, we now answer, “When you get a function that can be implemented by a commercial off the shelf component (Botta et al. 2006).” Here is an example of functional decomposition for an automobile: Move people . Accommodate people † Provide seats † Entertain people – Provide auditory stimulation – Provide visual images † Provide comfortable environment – Heat interior – Cool humans in the car – Provide fresh air – Sound proof interior from exterior † Protect occupants – Deploy air bags in a crash – Absorb collision energy in crumple zones † Move the automobile † Overcome friction † Accelerate – Produce lateral acceleration – Produce translational acceleration @ Increase forward speed @ Decrease forward speed † Move in a smooth manner – Minimize shocks A.T. Bahill et al.554 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 In the Business community, a work breakdown structure (WBS) shows different levels of work packages. Project Management books (Kerzner 2003) describe the WBS like this: In system design, use cases describe the required functionality of a system. Cockburn (2001) says that an important slot in a use case is the level. His levels from top to bottom are Cockburn (2001) says that you raise the level by asking, “Why is the actor doing this?” and you lower the level by asking, “How is the actor going to do this?” J. D. Baker said, “A use case diagram with the use cases of Login and Play Global Thermonuclear War would be difficult to implement.” Login is at the lowest level, commonly called a sub-function or sub-goal. Play Global Thermonuclear War is an example of the highest-level use case, commonly called the Very-high summary level or an Essential use case. Use case diagrams should not mix use cases of different levels. The National Security Agency (2006) decomposes signals intelligence as Intelligence—applied knowledge Knowledge—facts relationships, context Information—discrete facts, entities Data—bit streams, receptacles Signals—electrical impulses, sensors The field of threat assessment has the following levels of abstraction: Situation and threat assessment Adaptive agents Template matching Feature extraction Database assimilation Fused multispectral images Sensor data Work breakdown structure levels Level Responsibility Example 1 Management Program 2 Project 3 Task 4 Technical Subtask 5 Work package 6 Level of effort Levels in use cases Design scope Goal level Icon Organization (black box) Very-high summary Cloud Organization (white box) Summary Kite System (black box) User goal Sea level System (white box) Subfunction Fish Component Too low for a use case Clam International Journal of General Systems 555 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 The lowest level is data from sources such as synthetic aperture radar, infrared detectors, GPS, electro-optical sensors and intelligence. Data from many sources are fused into multispectral images and these are condensed into a database (Waltz and Llinas 2000). Then particular features are extracted (features include things such as objects, heartbeats of an electrocardiogram, etc.). These features are matched against templates such as wing, wheel, QRS complex, etc. These templates are passed to agents (Ferber 1999). These agents support one or more of the relevant alternatives. These agents can trigger a preplanned sequence of activities. For example, one might recommend that if agent A does X and agent B does Y, then hypothesize Q, for which an appropriate sequence of actions might be to scan agent A with source R, launch airplane S and if source R shows that agent A did Z then launch weapon T. Science is organized in levels as shown in the following table based on Kang and Mavris (2005). The retina of the eye is arranged in layers. First, we will give an anatomical description (structure, what) of these layers and then we will give a physiological description (function, how). This example is included to show that the concept of levels is not restricted to models of man-made systems. Anatomically the retina has seven layers. The dark stained layers contain cell bodies and the white layers contain axons and dendrites. The photoreceptor layer contains the outer segments of the rods and cones. The outer nuclear layer contains the cell bodies of the photoreceptors. The outer plexiform layer contains the connections from the photoreceptors to the bipolar and horizontal cells and also the horizontal interconnections of the horizontal cells. The inner nuclear layer contains the cell bodies of the bipolar, horizontal and amacrine cells. The inner plexiform layer contains the connections from the bipolar cells to the ganglion cells and the amacrine cells and also the dynamic horizontal interconnections of the amacrine cells. The ganglion cell layer contains the cell bodies of the ganglion cells. And finally, the optic fiber layer contains the axons running from the ganglion cells to the brain (Warwick 1976). Physiologically each layer of the retina has a different purpose. The vertical signal pathway is from the rod and cone photoreceptors to the bipolar cells to the ganglion cells and then up to the brain. However, there are also horizontal signal processing layers (Kaufman and Alm 2002). Diffuse light excites a photoreceptor and turns it on. That photoreceptor excites its bipolar cell and that bipolar cell in turn excites its ganglion cell. However, the diffuse light also excites the neighboring photoreceptors. They excite their horizontal cells, which inhibit the central photoreceptor’s bipolar cell. Therefore, the central bipolar cell is silent. However, a small spot of light excites only the central photoreceptor and not its neighbors. Therefore, the central bipolar cell will not be inhibited by its neighbors. It will get excited and it will excite its Science is organized in levels Level (scientific field) Typical mechanisms Ecosystem (ecology) Predation, symbiosis, mimicry Organism (biology) Growth factors, apoptosis, morphogenetic operators Cell (biology) Mitosis, meiosis, genes Organelle (microbiology) Enzymes, membranes, transport Molecule (chemistry) Bonds, active sites, mass action Atoms (physics) Protons, neutrons, electrons Nucleus (physics) Quarks, gluons A.T. Bahill et al.556 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 ganglion cell, which will fire at a high rate. In summary, photoreceptors respond to individual points of light. Whereas, bipolar cells respond to static patterns of light. In the case described here, they respond to a small spot of light surrounded by darkness. Next, the bipolar cells excite their ganglion cells and also the surrounding amacrine cells. If the light pattern is moving then the amacrine cell modulation will affect the firing of the ganglion cells. Thus, the ganglion cells respond to dynamic patterns of light. There are many types of ganglion cells. We have just described on-center off-surround cells. There are also on-off cells and opponent color processing cells. In the retina, the photoreceptors respond to illumination. All other cells in the retina respond to patterns, movement and transients. The ganglion cells send their signals to the lateral geniculate nucleus and from there to the visual cortex. Our visual system sees borders and contours. We see the world as a pattern of lines. This system of lateral inhibition in the retina is the first step towards sharpening contours and picking up on borders between light and dark. The ganglion cell ignores diffuse light, but a specific pattern of light will turn it on. Higher up in the cortex, all these dots will be combined into lines, which will be combined into curves, etc. Other areas of the cortex of the brain have a similar layered structure. The Hearsay speech understanding system used the blackboard architecture (Erman et al. 1980). The key features of the blackboard architecture are multiple cooperating sources, multiple competing hypotheses, multiple levels of abstraction, feedback to the sources and the blackboard, which is an associative memory. In order to understand speech, the Hearsay system used the acoustic waveform to identify phonemes, which were then transformed into syllables. The syllables were used to generate word candidates and the words were used to hypothesize phrases. Finally the phrases were arranged into potential sentences. Each of these levels had its own specialized computer processor that communicated with other processors through the blackboard. Figure 1 shows an abstract blackboard with information being passed between levels in a speech understanding task. Artificial neural networks are hardware and software systems that are very good at pattern recognition, if many examples of correct categorization are available. There are a dozen common types of artificial neural networks. Most of the variation is in how the weights are adjusted. Back propagation is probably one of the most common types. Back propagation artificial neural networks typically have five layers: an input layer, the input-weight layer, the hidden layer, the output weight layer and the output layer. Often a second hidden layer and another layer of weights are added (Szidarovszky and Bahill 1998). Figure 1. Illustration of a blackboard with information being passed between levels in a speech understanding task. International Journal of General Systems 557 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Levels in digital computer simulations are summarized nicely in the following table derived from Zeigler et al. (2000). They write that systems analysis is a process for modeling and subsequently understanding existing systems. It is a process of going down through the levels. Whereas systems design is a process of climbing up through the levels. This compares well with Cockburn’s statement that you raise the level by asking, “Why is the actor doing this?” and you lower the level by asking, “How is the actor going to do this?” What seems to be common to all of these examples is that (1) there are about seven plus or minus two levels (Miller 1956), (2) each level addresses a different purpose and (3) the low- levels have detailed information and the high levels are abstract. 2. Related terms Abstraction. So now, let us try to describe abstraction. Here are some dictionary definitions: “abstract adj. 1. Considered apart from concrete existence . . . 4. Thought of or stated without reference to a specific instance.” “abstraction n. The process of extracting the underlying essence, removing dependence on real world objects.” Abstraction allows designers and modelers to describe a problem at a high level by hiding low-level information. In general, the higher the level of abstraction, the more things the system hides from the user. In 1945, Pablo Picasso made a wash drawing of a bull. A month later, he finished his 11th state of abstraction, which was composed of six lines. Célestin said, “When you stand before his eleventh bull, it’s hard to imagine the work that went into it” (Picasso 2006). At another time, he did an abstraction of his wife’s face in six stages. Picasso and Henri Matisse concurrently developed abstractionism in modern art. Digital computer simulations are written in levels Level Name What we know at this level 5 (highest) Coupled component systems Components and how they are coupled together. The components should be systems themselves, thereby producing hierarchical structures 4 State transitions How states are affected by inputs, that is, given an initial state we know the new state after the input is finished; what outputs are generated in each state 3 System experiments Given an initial state, every input trajectory produces a predictable output trajectory 2 Input/output behavior Time-indexed data collected from the source system, which consists of input/output pairs 1 (lowest) Source system Inputs to apply, variables to measure and how to observe them over time Figure 2. A sequence of images going from real to abstract that describe respectively a single person under certain circumstances, dozens of people, hundreds of people, thousands of people, millions of people and (almost) all people. Drawings are by Angelo Hammond. Copyright q, 2005, Bahill, from http://www/ sie.arizona.edu/sysengr/slides/ used with permission. A.T. Bahill et al.558 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 McCloud (1993) relates abstraction to universality. The more abstract a cartoon image is, the more people it will describe. The photograph in Figure 2 is singular: it describes one person. Whereas the smiley face cartoon is universal: it describes all people. Abstration is not just eliminating detail; rather abstraction focuses on and changes specific details. Depending upon the details you focus on, you will get different abstractions of the same object. For example in software you might be interested in a sequence of objects {a–f}. If all you want to do is extract or replace objects, then you can abstract this sequence as an array. But if you also want to insert and remove objects, then you should abstract it as a list. Therefore, low-pass or high-pass filtering is not abstraction. Abstraction may require human intelligence, not a digital filter. Figure 3 shows low-pass and high-pass filtering. Generalization is different from abstraction. Bjarne Stroustrup said, “There is always the temptation to provide just the solution to a particular problem. However, unless we try to generalize and see the problem as an example of a general class of problems, we may miss important parts of the solution to our particular problems and fail to find concepts and general solutions that could help us in the future.” Generalization usually goes from the bottom to the top. For example, you might start with a pile of data points. You could organize them into a scatter graph and then fit the data with a function (e.g. spline) or statistical technique (e.g. Poison distribution). To further generalize you could generate equations to describe the data. Finally, those equations could be organized into vectors and matrices. Each step up removes detail and increases the generality of the result. Going from the top to the bottom, there is a design method called consistent elaboration (Wymore 1993, pp. 178–180). In it, the designer starts with a high-level system model and then iteratively and systematically expands the input ports, output ports and state variables to create lower levels. In the unified modeling language (UML) (OMG 2006) generalization, which is related to inheritance, takes you up the hierarchy and specialization takes you down. Figure 3. An image of a person (left), a low-pass filtered version of that image (center) and a high-pass filtered version (right). Copyright q, 2005, Bahill, from http://www/sie.arizona.edu/sysengr/slides/ used with permission. CMMI Levels Level Characterization of the maturity of an organization’s processes 5 Optimizing Focus is on process improvement 4 Quantitatively Managed Process is measured and controlled 3 Defined Process is characterized for the organization and is proactive 2 Managed Process is characterized for projects and is often reactive 1 Initial Process is unpredictable, poorly controlled and reactive International Journal of General Systems 559 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 The capability maturity model integration (CMMI) categorizes organizations into five levels according to the maturity of their processes (Chrissis et al. 2003). The low-level processes are detailed and concrete. The high-level processes are more abstract. Organizations are supposed to build themselves up, adding levels as they mature. Granularity refers to the level of detail or the level of abstraction of each model. The analogy is to rocks. Tiny rocks are called sand, small rocks are called gravel, larger rocks are called pebbles, even larger ones are river stones and big ones are called boulders. A driveway is often paved with gravel, where each rock is of the same size. 3. Level of abstraction is usually relative Abstraction level is relative rather than absolute. It is a partial ordering over elements. We can say that one element is at a higher-level than another is, but we cannot describe that level absolutely. For example, a government agency might have the following WBS 1. Homeland Security 2. Navy 3. Aircraft carrier task force 4. Airplanes 5. Weapon systems 6. Missiles Whereas a missile manufacture might have 1. Family of missiles 2. Air-to-air missile 3. Ordnance 4. Safing system 5. Arming, firing and fuzing 6. Thermal batteries And the battery manufacture might have another WBS . . . An exception to the relativeness of decomposition is the open system interconnection (OSI) architecture for telecommunication. The OSI uses a seven-layer model where each successive abstract layer is built on top of a lower abstract layer (CISCO 2006). 1. The application layer contains user programs, such as Telnet, XML, HTTP, SSH and FTP. 2. Thepresentationlayerformatsandencryptsdatatobesentacrossanetwork.Protocolsatthis layer are part of the operating systems of each computer. 3. The session layer specifies how to establish a communication session with a remote computer. It specifies how to login to a remote computer and how to authenticate passwords. It provides a way of knowing where to restart the transmission of data if a connection is temporarily lost. 4. The transport layer hides details of network-dependent information from the higher layers. The transport layer sends packets from machine-to-machine and guarantees that packets arriveinthecorrectorderandnumber.TheTransmissionControlProtocol(TCP)isprimarily in this layer. 5. The network layer determines how messages are routed within the network. It transfers data sequences from source to destination. The Internet Protocol (IP) is primarily in this layer. A.T. Bahill et al.560 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 6. The data link layer is concerned with the transmission of blocks (frames) of data. At this layer, data packets are encoded and decoded into bits. It detects and possibly corrects errors that may occur in the physical layer. 7. Thephysicallayer transmitsabitstreamatthe electricalandmechanicallevel.Itprovidesthe hardware for sending and receiving data on a carrier. RS-232 is a standard in this layer. Entities in one level can communicate with entities in the same level and with entities one layer above and below: but that is it. Communications cannot skip a level. The OSI is only a model, not a standard. Therefore, it is not mandatory. The more modern universal serial bus (USB) Specification (www.usb.org) is an Open Standard. It only considers the lower three layers: Function Layer, USB Device Layer and USB Bus Interface Layer. Likewise the integrated services digital network (ISDN) operates in the lower three layers. Internet Reference Model has only five layers and they encompass all seven OSI layers (Comer 2004). Software is often designed with the following layered architecture (Evans 2004). User interface (or presentation) layer Application layer Domain layer Infrastructure layer Some interlevel interactions such as dependencies and action initiation may be unidirectional. This simplifies the implementation. 4. Why is defining levels important? Consider the activity diagram of Figure 4 from baseball for one pitch and responses to it. Assume (1) a groundball is hit into fair territory, (2) the ball is fielded and thrown to first base, (3) the fielder on first base catches the throw and (4) there are no other base runners. Now consider the Batter in this activity diagram. We could model the state of his mind with the following attributes and states: experience: rookie, veteran, imminent free agent salary: considered too low, considered too high, commensurate with earned respect physiology: age, health, on disabled list competition: other players at his position Does this model fit with the activity diagram? No, because it is at a different level. Let us reconsider the Batter in the activity diagram again. We could model the state of his mind with the following attributes and states: count: balls, strikes, outs mentalModels: speed of last pitch, umpire’s last call situation: runners on base signals: last signal from coach Does this model fit with the activity diagram? Yes, because it is at the same level. Figure 5 shows class diagrams for the Batter of the activity diagram in Figure 4. Class diagrams have three compartments: the top compartment contains the name, the middle compartment contains the attributes (things that are stored in memory) and the bottom compartment contains the operations or functions that the class performs. Figure 5 shows a class International Journal of General Systems 561 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 diagram at the salary negotiation level (left) and a class diagram at the batting level (right). The diagram on the right fits the activity diagram of Figure 4; whereas the one on the left does not. If in a single model one diagram is at one level and another is at a different level, then you should expect a failure to communicate. Figure 4. An activity diagram for one pitch and a partial response to it (Assuming it is a groundball hit into fair territory. The fielder on first base catches the throw. There are no other base runners.). Copyright q, 2004, Bahill, from http://www/sie.arizona.edu/sysengr/slides/ used with permission. A.T. Bahill et al.562 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Bahill has stated, “The most common student mistake in modeling that I have observed in four decades of teaching is creating elements at different levels in the same model; for example writing a use case at a high level and a creating a class diagram at a low level.” Scaling up an old design can cause levels mistakes. It would be easy to design a red brick arch to span a small creek, but if this same design were used for a bridge across the Grand Canyon, you should expect failure. A design that is successful at one level might not be successful at a higher-level. Bahill and Henderson (2005) studied two dozen famous failures and concluded that two of them were due to faulty scale up of an old design. The next four examples are based on this paper. The original Tacoma Narrows Bridge was a scale up of an old design. But the strait where they built it had strong winds: the bridge became unstable in these crosswinds and it collapsed in 1940. The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River in New Your City was built with the same design ten years earlier. It came in under budget and ahead of schedule. It currently carries 300,000 vehicles per day. It did not resonate and self-destruct. The George Washington Bridge had a Ratio of Length to Cross Section Area of about 4. For the Tacoma Narrows Bridge they increased the level of the Ratio of Length to Cross Section Area to about 63. This change in level caused the failure. Scaling up an old design often causes level mismatches. The French Ariane 4 missile was successful in launching satellites. However, the French thought that they could make more money if they made this missile larger. So they built the Ariane 5. It blew up on its first launch destroying a billion dollars worth of satellites. The designers faultily assumed that their design that worked at one level of physical size would work at the next higher-level. It did not. The software and the hardware were at different levels. The computer software was at the old level and the newer, bigger Ariane 5 missile was at a higher-level. The Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986. Beforehand, perceptive engineers were focused on the low-level risks: low temperature and possible failure of the O-rings (Feynman 1985, Tufte 1997). But the managers were so focused on the high-level political consequences Figure 5. Class diagrams for the Batter of Figure 4 at the incorrect (left) and the correct (right) level. Scale up of an old bridge design Bridge Length (m) Width (m) Depth (m) Ratio of length to cross section area George Washington Bridge 1450 37 10 4 Tacoma narrows Bridge 1800 12 2.4 63 International Journal of General Systems 563 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 of delaying the launch that they did not pay attention to low-level details like the effect of temperature on O-rings. One group was thinking a low-level and another group was thinking at a high level. On the Mars Climate Orbiter, the prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, used English units for the satellite thrusters while the operator, JPL, used SI units for the model of the thrusters. Therefore, there was a mismatch between the space-based satellite and the ground-based model. Every time the thrusters fired, error accumulated between the satellite and the model. This caused the calculated orbit altitude at Mars to be wrong. Therefore, instead of orbiting, it entered the atmosphere and burned up. Giving the units of measurement is a low-level modeling task. Using different levels of measurements is a fatal modeling flaw. The system designer must produce designs for both the product and the process that will produce it. In one of Bahill’s graduate system design classes, the best student project design contained the following requirements (Abadi and Bahill 2003, p. 112) 1. Acquisition Time (in months) baseline ¼ 3 months. The number of months required to complete the design in order to get the product to market. 2. Acquisition Cost (in dollars). The project should be completed within the budget established for this effort: $425,000. 3. Manufacturing Cost (in dollars/racket) Baseline ¼ $24. The tennis racket design must consider the expense of manufacturing. These three requirements were presented at the same level: this was a mistake. The second of these requirements is clearly a process requirement and therefore should not be in the product documents. They were presented at the same level, implying that they were siblings. In reality there should have been a trace relationship, a parent–child relationship, between them. In the UML community (OMG 2006) the process documents are called the Business Model, and they are separate from the product documents. In a requirements specification, tractability is very important (Daniels and Bahill 2004). Traceability is a manifestation of levels. Possible reasons for level mistakes. A typical system evolves through the following life cycle phases: State the Problem, Discover Requirements, Investigate Alternatives, Design the System, Implementation, Operation and Maintenance and Retirement. Different components will progress through their life cycle phases at different rates, which should produce the opportunity for level mismatches. Other potential reasons for level mismatches include not understanding levels in the initial formulation and organizational hierarchies that create havoc. Models with use cases at different levels of abstraction will be hard to understand. Furthermore some parts of the system will seem to be high priority just because they are elaborated more, whereas other parts will seem less important because they are modeled briefly (Övergaard and Palmkvist 2005). Mistakes in mixing elements of different levels are common in abstract systems, but not in physical systems, because such mistakes would be ridiculously obvious in physical systems. For example, a model railroader would never put an N-gauge tunnel in an HO gauge model railroad. Similarly a naval modeler would never put a 1:144 scale model of an F-22 on the deck of a 1:500 scale model of the U. S. S. Ronald Reagan. 5. Multiple aspects Not only do systems have multiple levels, but there are also multiple aspects that must be considered. In this paper, we have shown functional decomposition, physical decomposition and task decomposition (a WBS). There is also requirements decomposition (which we have not shown in this paper, see Hooks and Farry 2001 and Bahill and Dean 2007). We could look A.T. Bahill et al.564 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 at all four of these aspects for most systems. Previously, we discussed two aspects of the retina: anatomy and physiology. The Zachman (1987) framework uses the following aspects: Scope, Business Model, System Model, Technology Model, Detailed Representation and Real System (Bahill et al. 2006). These are aspects, not levels: a business model, for example, can have a lot of detail in it (Cohen 2003, Cohen and Wallace 2003). To help a team operate a complex system the documentation should address the following three aspects: equipment knowledge, task knowledge and team knowledge (Rouse et al. 1992). We will now show an explicit example of many levels for two different aspects of a system. The following table shows two aspects of a softball game played by an NCAA Women Softball team. These two aspects are orthogonal: contents of a box in the left column are not related to contents of a box in the right column, except at the level where they intersect: models for one pitch will be related to the spin, speed and deflection of the ball. A system should not contain models of the sweet spot and also models for the rotation of the moon. The levels in the decomposition of the performance aspect are independent of the levels in the decomposition of the physical aspect. Putting “One Career” and “Expansion of the universe” in the same model would make no sense. The only conjunction that makes sense is the intersection “One pitch” and “Spin, speed and deflection.” Naive students of physiology and anatomy are often confused, because they expect congruence between anatomical and physiological levels. But in general it does not exist. There is no one-to-one match in the levels that we have described for the retina of the eye. The UML uses the following diagrams to describe various aspects of a system: use case, use case diagram, communication diagram, sequence diagram, class diagram, state machine diagram, activity diagram and deployment diagram. The IDEF0 modeling scheme cleared up a lot of confusion when they separated inputs into two aspects: data and control. Ten levels in two aspects of a softball game Performance aspect Physical aspect One career Expansion of universe One season Rotation of sun One game Rotation of moon One inning Rotation of Earth: Coriolis forces One at-bat Weather: Gulf Stream, barometric pressure One pitch and subsequent activity Atmosphere: lift, drag, temperature, humidity, winds One pitch ( ) Spin, speed and deflection One collision 3D structure: four concentric shells The sweet spot Material: yarn, cork, rubber, horsehide One vibrational mode Atomic structure Martin Glinz’s (www.ifi.unizh.ch/,glinz) four aspects of abstraction Whole General High-level Type " composition " generalization " service " classification # decomposition # specialization # usage # instantiation Part Special Low-level Instance International Journal of General Systems 565 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Each aspect of a system will be decomposed into levels. But the levels for one aspect are independent of the levels of another aspect. A system has a physical decomposition, a functional decomposition and a requirements decomposition. It would be a mistake to allocate a high-level system function to a low-level part. It would be a mistake to link a detailed low-level requirement to a top-level system function. Developing requirements in the use cases helps keep the levels of the functions and the requirements the same (Daniels and Bahill 2004). 6. Generalizations about modeling All components in a model should be at the same level, but models can be broken into submodels that are arranged hierarchically in levels. Models should only exchange inputs and outputs with other models of the same level, or maybe one level higher or lower. In Figure 6, models 0, 1 and 2 are at one level. They exchange information with each other. In this figure, Model 1 has its own functions, has interface definitions and it uses submodels 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3. These submodels exchange information with each other, with model 1 in the level above and with models 1.3.1, 1.3.2 and 1.3.3 in the level below. However, as shown in Figure 6, models should not skip levels in exchanging information. Feedback loops are not an exception to this rule. Figure 6 applies to modeling, analysis, system design and organizational functioning. For all of these tasks it is important to pay attention to the levels of the communicating entities. For example, if Figure 6 were an organization chart, then person 1.3.1 would routinely communicate with 1.3.2, 1.3.3, 1.3.1.1, 1.3.1.2, 1.3.1.3 and 1.3. But if 1.3.1 were to communicate with 1.2, then he or she would have to be very careful to keep 1.3 informed, because the normal interfaces for that communication would not have been defined. You cannot skip levels in the judicial system. If a policeman gives you a traffic ticket, you cannot appeal it immediately to the US Supreme Court. You must first go through all of the lower courts. We now present a summary example of various levels in a task. This example is that of codebreaking and it comes from Kahn (1996). Tasks in different levels for codebreaking Level of abstraction Content Comments Proof Diplomatic tricks Prove that your translation is correct Translations If Captain Dreyfus has not had relations with you . . . Use the sentence and an Italian translator to get this translation Sentences Se Capitano Dreyfus non ha avuto relazione . . . Use individual words to get this sentence Words Dreyfus Use the plaintext and the Baravelli Codebook to get this word Plaintext 227 1 98 306 Use the ciphertext and the cipher to get this plaintext Ciphertext (Telegram) 527 3 88 706 Use the international Morse code message and a transcription table to get this cipher text International Morse code ††††† †† – – – – – ††† ††† – – – – – †† – – – †† – – ††† – – – – – – †††† This is the original transmission A.T. Bahill et al.566 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Information goes up and down this hierarchy, but it cannot skip levels. The right column in the above table describes the upward process. An example going downward is that cryptographers found that Dr at the word level would be coded as 227 in the plaintext level. Then they discovered that 227 of the plaintext level corresponded to 527 of the ciphertext level. This helped them to discover the cipher that was used. There are many aspects to codebreaking. In addition to the cryptology shown above, frequency analysis studies the rate of message traffic between network nodes. Spies aid the collecting of human intelligence. Photoreconnaissance missions gather imagery information. These aspects are all decomposed into their own independent levels. Most systems are designed as hierarchies of components. Interconnecting components adds complexity, problems and concerns. Typically a model will be interested in its inputs, outputs, functions and states: for simplicity let’s call these variables. When a model is interconnected with another model, it now becomes interested in some of the other model’s variables: but it cannot get away with that. It must contend with all of the other models variables. This is what adds complexity. A second problem produced by interconnecting components concerns the way the variables are described. The variables of low-level models will typically be designed with high accuracy. Whereas variables in higher-level models will be described with statistical distributions characterized by the type, mean, variance and multiple modes, which are all more uncertain than the variables in the low-level models. Merging high-accuracy variables of the low-level models with uncertain summary statistics of the higher-level models is dangerous: it could destroy the validity of the low-level models. A third consideration needed because of interconnecting components concerns inputs and outputs. When low-level models are integrated into higher-level systems the inputs and outputs of interest are changed. The low-level models are concerned with the interaction of high-accuracy low-level inputs and outputs. Whereas the higher-level system (and the external world) ignores these low-level inputs and outputs and is only concerned with the higher-level inputs and outputs. Resnick (1994) noted that many layered systems exhibit emergent behaviours. He documented how seemingly straightforward extrapolation from a lower level often fails to predict behaviour at a higher-level. This occurred in his simulation of an ant colony. No ant gives orders or tells other ants what to do. Instead, each ant reacts to stimuli and leaves behind a pheromone trail, which provides a stimulus to other ants. Each ant is an autonomous unit that reacts depending on its local environment and its genetically encoded rules. No single ant is intelligent, but ant colonies exhibit complex behaviour. Emergent behaviour means that the system is capable of doing something that was not planned in the design of the constituent parts. Figure 6. Models should be hierarchical. Models should not skip levels in exchanging information. Copyright q, 2004, Bahill, from http://www/sie.arizona.edu/sysengr/slides/ used with permission. International Journal of General Systems 567 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 It is a new concept in the system of systems architecture spawned by the DoD evolutionary acquisition life cycle model. Wilber (2000) in his Theory of Everything organizes things into levels of holons. He says that if a level of holons is completely destroyed, then all of the levels of holons above it are also destroyed, but none of the levels of holons below are destroyed. For example, a lesion in the lateral geniculate nucleus will stop image processing in the visual cortex, but the cells in the retina will continue to function correctly. In codebreaking, if we eliminate the language translators, then we will not be able to understand the messages, but the cryptologists will still be able to continue their low-level work. In the CMMI, if the Integrated Project Management Process (level 3) were destroyed then Quantitative Project Management (level 4) would be impossible, but Project Planning (level 2) could continue. We cannot describe in general what levels should be for systems that have evolved. However, in models where the levels were designed, we might be able to extract general principles. In this paper, we described two models where the levels were designed: the OSI seven-layer architecture model for telecommunication and the CMMI. The CMMI (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/) consists of industry best practices that address thedevelopmentandmaintenanceofproductsandservicesoverthetotalsystemlifecycle(Chrissis et al. 2003). In the CMMI, the five levels of institutional maturity are defined. Then it is explained which of the 25 process areas should be in each level. A process area is a collection of related processes. Each process area is a different aspect of the company. Each process area has a description, specific goals and generic goals. The description contains a purpose statement, introductorynotesandanexplanationofrelatedprocessareas.Thespecificgoalsareuniquetoeach process area: they vary in number and complexity from process area to process area. The specific goals are achieved by performing specific practices, which are supported by typical work products and subpractices. The generic goals are grouped according to common features. The statement of each generic goal is the same for all process areas. The generic goals are achieved by performing generic practices that must be individually elaborated for each process area. The process areas are at different levels of abstraction. For example, Causal Analysis and Resolution (level 5) is a more abstract process area than Supplier Agreement Management (level 2). A company implements a CMMI model by creating processes that satisfy each process area and assembling these into a model that describes how that company does business. This is an evolutionary procedure taking the company from level 1 through level 2, to level 3 and for a very well run company through level4all the way upto level 5.Aparticular process area wouldnot be added to the company’s model until after its lower-level process areas had already been included. A company’s implementation of any individual process area is usually hierarchical. Now, what general principles can we extract from the CMMI model? The levels are defined. Each process area is identified as belonging to a particular level. Each process area description states how each process is invoked. The model is arranged in a hierarchy and each process area is hierarchical. All process areas have the same general structure. However, process areas in the same level have greater similarities than process areas in different levels. The relationships between process areas are described. Of the 101 relationships that are listed, only 12 skip levels and these skip-level relationships are carefully defined. Processes at higher-levels are more abstract. The process areas are the aspects of the model. Why is it hard to get the level right? (1) Getting the correct level for a model of a component is a complex activity, because, for example, each component could be in a different phase of its life cycle. Therefore, at any one time, different components could exist at different levels of detail. A model may need to contain abstractions of these components. So each component might need a different amount of abstraction. (2) There is no known general principle by means of which levels may be established. (3) Many aspects of each component must be modeled. Each aspect has levels A.T. Bahill et al.568 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 and the levels of one aspect are different from the levels of another aspect. The model must be constructed using elements of the same level from the different aspects. 7. Summary Most systems are impossible to study in their entirety, but they are made up of hierarchies of smaller subsystems that can be studied. Simon (1962) discussed the necessity for such hierarchies in complex systems. He showed that most complex systems are decomposable, enabling subsystems to be studied outside the entire hierarchy. For example, when modeling the movement of a pitched baseball, it is sufficient to apply Newtonian mechanics considering only gravity, the ball’s velocity and the ball’s spin (Bahill and Baldwin 2007). One need not be concerned about electron orbits or the motions of the sun and the moon. Forces that are important when studying objects of one order of magnitude seldom have an effect on objects of another order of magnitude. Acknowledgements We thank Dave Baldwin and Donna West for pointing out the Picasso abstraction sequences and Jerry Swain for the police officer example. This paper was supported by AFOSR/MURI F49620-03-1-0377. Notes on contributors Terry Bahill is a Professor of Systems Engineering at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He received his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1975. Bahill has worked with BAE Systems in San Diego, Hughes Missile Systems in Tucson, Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, Lockheed Martin Tactical Defense Systems in Eagan MN, Boeing Information, Space and Defense Systems in Kent WA, Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory in Idaho Falls and Raytheon Missile Systems in Tucson. For these companies he presented seminars on Systems Engineering, worked on system development teams and helped them describe their Systems Engineering Process. He holds a US patent for the Bat Chooser, a system that computes the Ideal Bat Weight for individual baseball and softball batters. He received the Sandia National Laboratories Gold President’s Quality Award. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), of Raytheon and of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). He is the Founding Chair Emeritus of the INCOSE Fellows Selection Committee. His picture is in the Baseball Hall of Fame’s exhibition “Baseball as America.” You can view this picture at http://www.sie.arizona.edu/sysengr/ FerencSzidarovszky isProfessorofSystems&IndustrialEngineeringat the University of Arizona in Tucson. He was born in Budapest, Hungary and received his B.S., M.S. and PhD in numerical techniques from the Eötvös University of Sciences in Budapest. He received a second PhD in economics from the Budapest University of Economic Sciences in 1977. He was an assistant and an associate professor in the Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Sciences of the Eötvös University of Sciences.HeservedastheActingHeadoftheDepartmentofMathematics and Computer Sciences of the University of Horticulture and Food Industry. He was a professor with the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Sciences of the Budapest University of Economic Sciences. International Journal of General Systems 569 D o w n l o a d e d B y : [ B a h i l l , A . T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Rick Botta is the Director of Systems Engineering for BAE Systems in San Diego. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Rick has a quarter century experience in a wide variety of engineering, engineering management and program management roles involving development and integration of complex, software intensive systems. He is a member of INCOSE. Eric Smith earned a B.S. in Physics in 1994, an M.S. in Systems Engineering in 2003 and his PhD in Systems and Industrial Engineering in 2006 from the University of Arizona, Tucson. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, at the University of Missouri at Rolla, 65409. References Abadi, C.D. and Bahill, A.T., 2003. The difficulty in distinguishing product from process. Systems Engineering, 6 (2), 108–115. Bahill, A.T. and Baldwin, D.G., 2007. Describing baseball pitch movement with right-hand rules. Computers in Biology and Medicine, 37, 101–108. Bahill, A.T. and Dean, F.F., 2007. Discovering system requirements, Chapter 4. In: A. Sage and B. Rouse, eds. Handbook systems engineering and management. 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Bahill, A.T. and Henderson, S.J., 2005. Requirements development, verification and validation exhibited in famous failures. Systems Engineering, 8 (1), 1–14. 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T . ] A t : 1 9 : 3 9 2 2 A u g u s t 2 0 0 8 work_amysq7fbgjdxxddfnq2c57y2ju ---- THE THEORIES OF HANS HOFMANN AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON HIS WEST-COAST CANADIAN STUDENTS by ROGER LEE B.A., U n i v e r s i t y of B r i t i s h Columbia, 1964 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS i n the Department of Fine A r t s We accept t h i s t h e s i s as conforming t o the r e q u i r e d standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA A p r i l , 1966 In p r e s e n t i n g t h i s t h e s i s i n p a r t i a l f u l f i l m e n t o f t h e r e q u i r e m e n t s f o r an advanced degree a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f B r i t i s h C o l u m b i a , I a g r e e t h a t t h e L i b r a r y s h a l l make i t f r e e l y a v a i l a b l e f o r r e f e r e n c e and s t u d y . I f u r t h e r a g r e e t h a t p e r - m i s s i o n f o r e x t e n s i v e c o p y i n g o f t h i s t h e s i s f o r s c h o l a r l y p u r p o s e s may be g r a n t e d by t h e Head o f my Department o r by h i s r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s . It i s u n d e r s t o o d t h a t c o p y i n g o r p u b l i - c a t i o n o f t h i s t h e s i s f o r f i n a n c i a l g a i n s h a l l not be a l l o w e d w i t h o u t my w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . Department o f ^IXSL r \ V \<, The U n i v e r s i t y o f B r i t i s h C o l u m b i a V a n c o u v e r 8, Canada Date f \ ^ i l * 3 j -13 6 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I . HANS HOFMANN, A SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY . 1 I I . THE THEORIES OF HANS HOFMANN 8 I I I . THE WEST-COAST CANADIAN STUDENTS OF THE HANS HOFMANN SCHOOL OF ART 91 ILLUSTRATIONS 127 BIBLIOGRAPHY 131 ABSTRACT The t o p i c of my t h e s i s i s an a n a l y s i s of Hans Hofmann's t h e o r e t i c a l w r i t i n g s on a r t and t h e i r p o s s i b l e i n f l u e n c e on h i s West-Coast Canadian students. I have i n c l u d e d a short biography of Hofmann i n order that the reader may become aware of the events t h a t l e d up t o h i s t h e o r e t i c a l development. Through a l l a v a i l a b l e published m a t e r i a l on and by Hans Hofmann, I have endeavoured t o analyze and t o e x p l a i n h i s t h e o r i e s which are often quoted but seldom understood. Hofmann"s a r t was i n s p i r e d by nature. This i n s p i r a t i o n enabled him t o create on the canvas the p e r c e i v a b l e movements of "push and p u l l " and "expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n . " These movements are caused by form and c o l o r on a bare canvas which creates the combined e f f e c t of two and three d i m e n s i o n a l i t y . How- ever, the two d i m e n s i o n a l i t y of the p i c t u r e plane i s r e t a i n e d momentarily because v i s u a l l y i t appears two dimensional but past experience of the observer creates the e f f e c t of three d i m e n s i o n a l i t y . These movements of "push and p u l l " and "expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n , " which are perpendicular t o each other, are created by the simultaneous development of form and c o l o r . I f these movements are able t o re£lect the a r t i s t ' s mind, i i i s e n s i b i l i t y , temperament and past experience, a symphonic p a i n t i n g , a category of the f i n e a r t s , or a work of a r t w i l l have been created. The s p i r i t which has been captured, emits the a r t i s t ' s l i f e f o r the p h y s i c a l d u r a t i o n of the p a i n t i n g . Although t h e s e i t h e o r i e s were taught by Hofmann at h i s s c h o o l s , he d i d not expect h i s students t o accept them w i t h - out a second thought. He wanted h i s students t o develop from them as he had developed from o t h e r s . The e f f e c t of HofmannTs teachings on the contemporary t h e o r i e s of i n d i v i d u a l students was a s c e r t a i n e d by means of a s e r i e s of i n t e r v i e w s w i t h Hofmann's West-Coast Canadian students, L i o n e l Thomas, Takao Tanabe and Donald J a r v i s . L i o n e l Thomas was g r e a t l y i n f l u e n c e d by Hofmann's r o l e as an educator. Both Hofmann and Thomas stimulated t h e i r students and helped t o r a i s e the a r t i s t i c l e v e l of t h e i r i n d i v i d u a l environments. Takao Tanabe s a i d he had r e j e c t e d Hofmann's t h e o r i e s . I f Hofmann was i n f l u e n t i a l on Tanabe, the l a t t e r has c o n s t r i c t e d , denunciated or attempted t o f o r g e t that i n f l u e n c e . J a r v i s c o n t r a s t s both Thomas and Tanabe f o r he n e i t h e r accepts or r e j e c t s Hofmann's teach- i n g s . J a r v i s has, as Hofmann had f i f t y years e a r l i e r i n P a r i s , developed from what he l e a r n t from h i s teacher. Hofmann's i n f l u e n c e has not ended, f o r Thomas, Tanabe and J a r v i s are teachers and they, w i t h a r t h i s t o r i a n s i n f l u e n c e d by Hofmann, s t i l l propagate h i s t h e o r i e s . LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE PAGE I. "Fantasia," 1943, by Hans Hofmann . . . . 127 I I . "Effervescence," 1 9 4 4 , by Hans Hofmann, . . 127 I I I . "Magenta and Blue," 1950, by Hans Hofmann . 128 IV. "Le G i l o t i n , " 1953, by Hans Hofmann . . . 128 V. "Above Deep Waters," 1959, by Hans Hofmann . 129 VI. "Pre-Dawn," I960, by Hans Hofmann . . . . 129 VII. "Landscape of an I n t e r i o r Place," 1955, by Takao Tanabe 130 VIII. "Winter Evening," 1958, by Donald J a r v i s . . 130 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would l i k e t o express my g r a t i t u d e t o the Members of the Fine A r t s Department who aided me i n the p r e p a r a t i o n of t h i s t h e s i s . S p e c i a l acknowledgement should be accorded •Mr. W i l l i a m S. Hart, whose guidance and new i n s i g h t s i n t o Hans Hofmann, deepened the scope of my t h e s i s . I appreciate the a s s i s t a n c e given by Miss Melva Dwyer, Miss Diane Cooper and the members of the Fine A r t s D i v i s i o n L i b r a r y . My r e s e a r c h at the U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a at Berkeley was aided by Mrs. Mary Anne C r a f t , Museum R e g i s t r a r , who made the c o l l e c t i o n of Hans Hofmann"s catalogues a v a i l a b l e f o r my use. Also at Berkeley, I would l i k e t o thank Mr. L a r r y Denean, who showed me the U n i v e r s i t y ' s c o l l e c t i o n of Hans Hofmann p a i n t i n g s , and a l s o gave me new i n s i g h t s i n t o Hofmann, the teacher and the a r t i s t . Most of a l l , I would l i k e t o thank Hans Hofmann"s students, Mr. L i o n e l Thomas, Mr. Takao Tanabe and Mr. Donald J a r v i s f o r the time I spent w i t h them d u r i n g our i n t e r v i e w s . Last but not l e a s t , I express my g r a t i t u d e to Miss M a r i l y n M e i s t e r and Mr. Terry Lopston who read over my t h e s i s and t o a l l my f r i e n d s who encouraged and helped me w i t h the p u r s u i t of t h i s t o p i c . .CHAPTER I A SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY This t h e s i s concerns Hans HofmannTs t h e o r i e s and the p o s s i b l e i n f l u e n c e of h i s t h e o r i e s on a s e l e c t e d number of h i s West-Coast Canadian students. This t h e s i s has been d i v i d e d i n t o three chapters. The f i r s t presents a b r i e f b i o g r a p h i c a l account. The second discusses h i s t h e o r i e s . The t h i r d chapter presents i n t e r v i e w s w i t h L i o n e l Thomas, Takao Tanabe, and Donald J a r v i s , Hofmann's West-Coast Canadian Students. The career of Hans Hofmann has spanned at l e a s t two generations, two continents and many i n t e r n a t i o n a l borders. His place i n the f i e l d of modern a r t has been e s t a b l i s h e d as an a r t i s t , educator, and exponent of modern a r t . Having taught f o r f o r t y - f i v e years, h i s many students now disseminate throughout the world h i s enthusiasm f o r modern a r t , h i s teachings and h i s methods of t e a c h i n g . Hofmann's untimely death i n . February, 1966, ended t h i r t y - f i v e years on the American a r t scene. Often thought of as being American-born, he was i n f a c t born i n Weissenburg, Germany on March 21, 1880. He was the second son of a government o f f i c i a l . His youth was spent with h i s 2 f o u r brothers and s i s t e r s i n the German countryside which shone with the green grass and i r r i d e s c e n t sparkle of streams. The young Hans loved the summers he spent at h i s grandfather's farm. Hans was very attached t o h i s grand- f a t h e r who took on the r o l e of f a t h e r s u b s t i t u t e . By the age of s i x t e e n , Hans l e f t home t o work as an a s s i s t a n t to the D i r e c t o r of P u b l i c Works of the State of B a v a r i a . There he was able t o pursue h i s i n t e r e s t i n mathematics and science by using i t s l i b r a r y f a c i l i t i e s . Through science he was able t o survey nature broadly and o b j e c t i v e l y and t o supply h i m s e l f with the m a t e r i a l s f o r f u r t h e r c r e a t i v e s p e c u l a t i o n . During these y o u t h f u l y e a r s , s c i e n c e took up most of h i s time but he was s t i l l able t o continue h i s i n t e r e s t i n a r t and music, namely the v i o l i n , piano and organ. Hofmann*s c r e a t i v e bent l e a d him t o the i n v e n t i o n of an electromagnetic comptometer, a machine s i m i l a r t o the present day c a l c u l a t i n g machine. As he was s t i l l under age, h i s mother had t o s i g n the patent. His f a t h e r , much pleased w i t h h i s son's success, sent the boy a thousand marks, and w i t h t h i s small f o r t u n e , Hofmann embarked on h i s career i n a r t by e n r o l l i n g at a r t school. However, h i s s c i e n t i f i c career was not yet ended; h i s c r e a t i v e c u r i o s i t y l e a d him t o develop a submarine s i g n a l device, an , e l e c t r i c bulb that glowed independently of an e l e c t r i c source, and a portable f r e e z i n g u n i t , a l l of which produced no f i n a n c i a l p r o f i t s . While a t a r t s c h o o l , Hofmann mastered the lessons from a succession of teachers; Michailow, Apse, F e r e n z i and Grimwald. He s a i d that these teachers "had a humanizing r a t h e r than a t e c h n i c a l or conceptual i n f l u e n c e on (him)."''" L a t e r Hofmann re-emphasized t h e i r r o l e i n h i s development when he s a i d t h a t " t h e i r lessons were t o be the foundation- stone of h i s l a t e r teachings as w e l l as h i s own work." His teachers were unaware of what was happening i n P a r i s , the 3 v i t a l center f o r the development of modern a r t . Hofmann, however, became thoroughly acquainted w i t h the development of modern a r t . Because the lessons and methods of h i s teachers has not been r e v e a l e d , the statement t h a t h i s Munich teachers were i n f l u e n t i a l i n h i s development cannot be taken as f a c t . I t was through an acquaintance, W i l l i e Schwarz, that Hofmann became aware of P a r i s . W i l l i e t a l k e d of the I m p r e s s i o n i s t s s t a t i n g , "One must observe nature by means of l i g h t r e f l e c t e d from o b j e c t s , r a t h e r than be concerned w i t h t a n g i b l e existence of the objects themselves."^ These ideas 'greatly e x c i t e d Hofmann who became i n c r e a s i n g l y i n v o l v e d w i t h a r t . W i l l i e then introduced him t o a B e r l i n c o l l e c t o r who i n t u r n introduced Hofmann to P h i l i p Freudenberg "'"Ben Wolf, "The Art Digest Interviews Hans Hofmann," The A r t Digest, v o l . 19, no. 13, A p r i l 1, 1945, p. 52. 2 Hans Hofmann, Search f o r the Real and Other Essays, Andover,. Mass. , The Addison G a l l e r y of American A r t , 1948, p. 10. ^ I b i d . , p. 11. 4 Loc. c i t . 4 the c o l l e c t o r ' s wealthy uncle and a department store owner. This meeting must have been very encouraging, f o r P h i l i p be- came Hofmann's patron f o r the next ten years, a v i r t u a l l y unique s i t u a t i o n i n view of the f a c t t h a t most of the great innovators of modern t w e n t i e t h century a r t s u f f e r e d many years of poverty. Hofmann's patron sent him to P a r i s , the hub of the a r t world during t h i s c r u c i a l period f o r modern a r t ( 1 9 0 4 - 1 9 1 4 ) . This was the nascent period of Cubism and Fauvism, both important i n the development of Hofmann's l a t e r a r t . At the Cafe du<; Dome he a s s o c i a t e d w i t h George Braque, Pablo P i c a s s o , Juan G r i s , Munk, K a r s t e n , P a s c i n , and C a r l e s . Hofmann was s t r o n g l y i n f l u e n c e d by h i s close f r i e n d s Henri M a t i s s e and Robert Delaunay. Hofmann and Matisse attended the evening c l a s s e s at C o l o r o s s i ' s and painted the same view of the Seine from the same balcony at Hotel B i s s o n . Delauany l i v e d nearby on l a Rue des Grandes Augustins. Hofmann s t a t e d r e c e n t l y that he introduced the work of George Seurat to 5 Robert Delaunay; the l a t t e r ' s impact on Hofmann was h i s ^ W i l l i a m C. S e i t z , Hans Hofmann, New York, Museum of Modern A r t , 1963, p. 7. Dr. H.L.C. J a f f e , a f r i e n d and w r i t e r of Robert and Sonia Delaunay s a i d i n an i n t e r v i e w on February 2 5 , 1966, t h a t he does not b e l i e v e Hofmann brought George Seurat to the eye's of Robert Delaunay, Neo-Impressionist's works were i n P a r i s and could have been seen by Delaunay before Hofmann's a r r i v a l i n P a r i s i n 1 9 0 4 . 5 expressive p o t e n t i a l i n the use of pure c o l o r . ,Delaunay's a p p l i c a t i o n of c o l o r to the c u b i s t space f o r m u l a t i o n was adapted undoubtedly by Hofmann, though he d i d not say so. Art was not the only bond between these two p a i n t e r s . Madame Delaunay's knowledge of German made i t p o s s i b l e f o r her t o t r a n s l a t e f o r Hofmann when h i s French f a i l e d him. In s p i t e of the language b a r r i e r , Hofmann absorbed the c o l o r and f r e e - dom of the Fauves, the Cubist d i s c i p l i n e of George Braque and Pablo Picasso and the c o l o r and form of Delaunay's Orphism. In 1910 while Matisse was i n B e r l i n f o r the show given him by C a s s i r e r , he saw P h i l i p Freudenberg's c o l l e c t i o n of Hofmann's work and encouraged the patron to continue support. That same year, Hofmann was a l s o given a one-man show by C a s s i r e r . Support continued u n t i l the s t a r t of World War I i n 1914• Hofmann had returned home t o Munich before the outbreak of the war and remained there f o r the next s i x t e e n y e a r s . Because of a lung l e s i o n , ^ he was not c o n s c r i p t e d i n t o the army.. During the war, he opened h i s famous School of Modern A r t . " I opened my school i n Munich i n the s p r i n g of 7 1915 t o c l a r i f y the e n t i r e l y new p i c t o r i a l approach." ^During an i n t e r v i e w , L i o n e l Thomas has s a i d t h a t Hans Hofmann had t u b e r c u l o s i s and was q u i t e s i c k l y during t h i s p e r i o d . Sam Hunter i n h i s book on Hofmann has s a i d t h a t Hofmann had a weak lung. 7 'Hans Hofmann, Hans Hofmann, New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc ., 1963, p.12. 6 The school provided Hofmann w i t h f i n a n c i a l s t a b i l i t y and a l s o enabled him t o d i g e s t and r e s o l v e the problems and s o l u t i o n s which he had adopted during h i s P a r i s i a n sojourn. At the end of the war, the fame of h i s school spread, r e s u l t i n g i n an i n f l u x of f o r e i g n students t o 4 0 Georgen Strassen i n the suburb of Schwabing. Throughout t h i s post-war p e r i o d , Hofmann made frequent t r i p s to P a r i s i n order t o keep up w i t h new developments i n modern a r t . Hofmann a l s o e s t a b l i s h e d h i s w e l l known summer schools s u c c e s s i v e l y a t Y u g o s l a v i a , Capri and f i n a l l y St. Tropez. These summer schools were such a success t h a t when he came t o America he r e - e s t a b l i s h e d one at Provincetown, Massachusetts. Of the American students who attended h i s c l a s s e s i n Europe, Worth Ryder was the most important because he convinced the Regents of the U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a at Berkeley t o ask Hofmann t o teach summer school on t h e i r campus. Hofmann accepted the i n v i t a t i o n and remained i n America u n t i l h i s death. He d i d not r e t u r n t o Germany because h i s w i f e had warned him of the impending war and the u n a p p r e c i a t i v e a t t i t u d e of the N a z i s . She l a t e r j o i n e d him i n America. The l a c k of artworks previous to 1931 i s due to h i s escape from Nazi Germany. The works t h a t had remained i n Germany were e i t h e r destroyed i n the Second World War or have been l o s t . 7 In the s p r i n g of 1931, Hofmann taught at the Chouinard i n Los Angeles and that same year, the C a l i f o r n i a Legion of Honor gave him h i s f i r s t American one-man show. From the time of h i s a r r i v a l i n America, Hofmann was an educator. A f t e r teaching at Chouinard, he taught i n New l o r k at the A r t s Students League f o r two years. Then he opened h i s own well-known school i n 1933• F i r s t l o c a t e d at Lexington Avenue and F i f t y - s e v e n t h S t r e e t , the school l a t e r moved t o F i f t y - s e c o n d S t r e e t and Ninth Avenue and f i n a l l y t o Eighth S t r e e t i n h i s Greenwich V i l l a g e l o c a t i o n . Hofmann's presence i n New York has served t o r a i s e up a c l i m a t e of t a s t e among at l e a s t f i f t y people i n America?, t h a t cannot be matched f o r vigour or c o r r e c t - ness i n P a r i s or London. No matter how p u z z l i n g and ugly the new and o r i g i n a l w i l l appear—and i t w i l l i n - deed appear s o — t h e people who i n h a b i t t h i s c l i m a t e w i l l not f a i l t o perceive i t and h a i l i t . 9 Hofmann's long residence i n New York made him almost a legend on the American a r t scene;for over a quarter of a century he taught and supported young American a r t i s t s . His impact i s s t i l l being f e l t , both by second-generation students of h i s own students, and by those a r t i s t s at f i r s t u n f a m i l i a r w i t h h i s t h e o r i e s who learned about the a r t i s t through h i s q u i t e extensive w r i t i n g s on the theory of a r t . 9 Clement Greenberg, "The Present Prospects of Ameri- can P a i n t i n g and S c u l p t u r e , " Horizon, No. 93-4, October, 1947, p. 29. CHAPTER I I THE THEORIES OF HANS HOFMANN The t h e o r e t i c a l w r i t i n g s of Hans Hofmann extended over a p e r i o d of a h a l f a century. Although h i s ideas are o f t e n quoted, no study has attempted to break through h i s terminology f o r a thorough explanation of .his t h e o r i e s . In t h i s chapter, h i s w r i t i n g s w i l l be discussed i n r e l a t i o n t o the s t y l e of h i s w r i t i n g s and a c h r o n o l o g i c a l explanation and e l u c i d a t i o n of h i s t h e o r i e s . I f Hofmann wrote previous to 1931, those w r i t i n g s as were h i s p a i n t i n g s were l o s t or destroyed by the Nazis during the Second World War. Some of these w r i t i n g s could have found t h e i r way t o p r i v a t e c o l l e c t i o n s , but t h e i r whereabouts have never been d i s c l o s e d . Upon h i s a r r i v a l i n America i n 1931, Hofmann published four a r t i c l e s ; one f o r a Berkeley E x h i b i t i o n catalogue, two f o r F o r t n i g h t l y and one f o r the League. A f t e r the l a s t of t h a t s e r i e s there i s another gap of s i x t e e n years. I t i s p o s s i b l e t h a t Hofmann wrote d u r i n g t h i s p e r i o d , f o r there i s a c o l l e c t i o n of unpublished w r i t i n g s by Hofmann at the Museum of Modern A r t i n New York and at the U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a at Berkeley. I n 1948 the Hofmann one-man r e t r o s p e c t i v e saw the p u b l i c a - t i o n of a monograph at the Addison G a l l e r y of American A r t . This was the most comprehensive summation of Hofmann*s t h e o r i e s t o t h a t date and a l s o included newly developed ideas. In the f o l l o w i n g years Hofmann published r e g u l a r l y , e i t h e r through e x h i b i t i o n catalogue e x p l a n a t i o n s , magazine i n t e r v i e w s or w r i t i n g s f o r magazines. While some of the w r i t i n g s r e i t e r a t e d p r e v i o u s l y published m a t e r i a l , three s i g n i f i c a n t a r t i c l e s appeared; "Space P i c t o r i a l l y R e a l i z e d through the I n t r i n s i c F a c u l t y of Color t o Express Volume," (1951) "The R e s u r r e c t i o n of the P l a s t i c A r t s and The Mystery of C r e a t i v e R e l a t i o n s , " (1953) and "The Color Problem of Pure P a i n t i n g . " (1955) The s u b s t a n t i a l bulk of Hofmann1s t h e o r i e s i s culminated i n these a r t i c l e s although he s t i l l published up t o 1963, the date of the l a s t i n t e r v i e w . There were a l s o a l a r g e number of monographs and a r t i c l e s on Hofmann a f t e r he had achieved renown i n 1944. This paper w i l l include the published m a t e r i a l up t o the end of January, 1966, when t h i s t h e s i s was being completed. The s t y l e of HofmannTs t h e o r e t i c a l w r i t i n g s i s t y p i c a l l y German, d e t a i l e d and e x a c t i n g , w i t h complicated g r a m a t i c a l c o n s t r u c t i o n s . His e a r l i e s t known w r i t i n g was t r a n s l a t e d from the German by W i l l i a m C. S e i t z i n the Museum of Modern A r t catalogue f o r h i s one-man show there i n 1963. The a r t i c l e s published a f t e r h i s a r r i v a l i n America were t r a n s l a t e d by Glen Wessels and others at the U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a at Berkeley. Wessels' understand- 10 i n g of Hofmann's ideas enabled him t o t r a n s l a t e Hofmann's d i f f i c u l t Germanic usage i n t o f a i r l y e a s i l y read E n g l i s h . I t i s when he does h i s own t r a n s l a t i o n s that the d i f f i c u l t y of Hofmann's w r i t i n g s a r i s e s . In these l a t e r works, Hofmann's Germanic use of the E n g l i s h language creates a vagueness and i n c o m p r e h e n s i b i l i t y t o the unaccustomed read- er. In u s i n g "a cloudy metaphysical r h e t o r i c , " h i s communica- t i o n i s limited"!" This d i f f i c u l t y of Hofmann's w r i t i n g s does not a r i s e from h i s ideas but from the way he has presented them. As w i l l be seen l a t e r , Hofmann has con- s t r u c t e d h i s thoughts on German syntax and merely t r a n - s l a t e d them l i t e r a l l y i n t o E n g l i s h , the end product being anomalous t o the E n g l i s h reader. This l a s t statement i s not a c r i t i c i s m of Hofmann's w r i t i n g s f o r i t i s understood that he i s not a w r i t e r but a p a i n t e r . He himself undoubted- l y r e a l i z e d h i s ineptness i n expressing himself i n the E n g l i s h language when he s a i d t h a t an idea has i t s own 2 p e c u l i a r medium through which i t can be expressed. I f the idea happens t o be n o n - l i t e r a r y the person t r y i n g t o express such an idea w i l l be surmounting an overwhelming o b s t a c l e . Hofmann's ideas p a r t i a l l y f a l l i n t o t h i s category when he d i s c u s s e s s p i r i t u a l and metaphysical i d e a s , which are o f t e n . j — — — Harold Rosenberg, "Hans Hofmann's L i f e C l a s s , " P o r t f o l i o and A r t News Annual, no.6, Autumn, 1962, p.113. 2 Hans Hofmann, Search f o r the Real and Other Essays, Andover, Mass., The Addison G a l l e r y of American A r t , i y 4 8 , p.46. 11 a s s o c i a t e d w i t h a r t . His problem i s t o define h i s terms a c c u r a t e l y and to stay w i t h i n that d e f i n i t i o n w h i l e i n f a c t he' only vaguely d e f i n e s terms and there i s o f t e n change i n meaning 3 Hofmann's i n a b i l i t y to express himself d e r i v e s from the f a c t that E n g l i s h i s not h i s mother tongue and t h a t he i s not g i f t e d i n a v e r b a l sense. While h i s language i s p i c t o r i a l and v i s u a l , he has used the v e r b a l medium t o express to other a r t i s t s and h i s audience h i s t h e o r i e s and ideas concerning a work of a r t . Hofmann's t h e o r e t i c a l w r i t i n g s have been broadly grouped, c h r o n o l o g i c a l l y , i n t o three areas. Ideas from year t o year do not change r a d i c a l l y but go through a process of development and metamorphosis. The f i r s t group contains the Prospectus of 1915 and the w r i t i n g s of 1931 and 1932 because of the s i m i l a r i t y of ideas and the s c a r c i t y of m a t e r i a l previous t o h i s a r r i v a l t o America. This s e c t i o n i s a c t u a l l y the b a s i s of Hofmann's t h e o r i e s but the language i s not as r e f i n e d and sophistocated as w i l l be seen i n the l a t e r w r i t i n g s . The second group, or s i n g l e monograph discusses the Search f o r the Real of 1 9 4 8 . From t h i s p u b l i c a t i o n a general summation of a l l of Hofmann's t h e o r i e s i s undertaken, r e l a t i n g h i s ideas t o a few p e r t i n e n t p a i n t i n g s of the p e r i o d . The t h i r d group of works contains 3 The change i s due o f t e n to the development of i d e a s ; he has l o o s e l y defined the term at the o f f s e t and the development of the idea i s d i f f i c u l t t o a p p r e c i a t e . 12 the w r i t i n g s done a f t e r 194^. These themselves f a l l i n t o c a t e g o r i e s of time and s u b j e c t . The dominant aspect of the development of c o l o r as a formal element culminates i n the 1955 a r t i c l e , "The Color Problem i n Pure P a i n t i n g . " Hofmann's w r i t t e n m a t e r i a l w i l l be discussed i n r e l a t i o n to h i s e a r l i e r m a t e r i a l to show t h e i r development. Again a few chosen p a i n t i n g s w i l l be used t o i l l u s t r a t e Hofmann's ideas i n the a c t u a l realm of h i s p a i n t i n g s . Concluding the d e t a i l e d study of h i s w r i t i n g s w i l l be a general d i s c u s s i o n and summarization of the t h e o r i e s e l u c i d a t e d by Hofmann i n h i s w r i t i n g s . Hofmann's f i r s t group of w r i t i n g s date from 1915 and 1931 - 32. In these a r t i c l e s , Hofmann presented the ideas he absorbed from h i s P a r i s stay and defined h i s stand on a r t f o r h i s new American audience. The e a r l i e s t e x i s t i n g published w r i t i n g by Hofmann i s a prospectus f o r h i s Munich School of Fine A r t s i n 1915• This piece i s s i g n i f i c a n t f o r i t r e v e a l s at an e a r l y stage, h i s t h e o r i e s and teachings which w i l l vary only through development during h i s e n t i r e career. His i n i t i a l statement, "Art does not c o n s i s t i n the o b j e c t i v i z e d i m i t a t i o n of 4 r e a l i t y , " reveals at once h i s place i n the f i e l d of modern a r t . Already before him, Cezanne, M a t i s s e , P i c a s s o , Delaunay, and the members of the p a i n t e r s of P a r i s previous to 1914 were already working i n t h i s manner. Henri Matisse had ^"Hans Hofmann, "Prospectus f o r Munich School of Modern A r t , " 1915, c i t e d i n W i l l i a m C. S e i t z , Hans Hofmann, New York, Museum of Modern A r t , 1963, p. 56. 13 painted the "Green L i n e , " 1905, a p o r t r a i t of Madame M a t i s s e . Although h i s work e x h i b i t s an i m i t a t i o n of r e a l i t y , Matisse employed c o l o r f o r the c r e a t i o n of e f f e c t s . While the a c t u a l shape of the face i s a l i k e n e s s of Madame M a t i s s e , Henri Matisse painted the nose and the forehead green. H i s use of c o l o r was "to serve expression as w e l l as p o s s i b l e . " ^ Color i s expressive i n the formation of mood and the q u a l i t y of s p a t i a l r e c e s s i o n and p r o j e c t i o n . The c u b i s t d e r i v e d t h e i r t h e o r i e s from the p a i n t i n g s of Cezanne. The c u b i s t s * i n c l u s i o n of the conceptual approach of I b e r i a n and A f r i c a n s c u l p t u r e can be seen i n Picasso's "Les Desmoiselles d«Avignon," 1907. Hofmann's close f r i e n d Robert Delaunay had already painted h i s "Sun Disks," 1912, where o b j e c t i v e r e a l i t y cannot be seen at a l l . Delaunay played w i t h h i s d i s c o i d shapes and pure c o l o r s t o achieve a p e r c e i v a b l y luminous and v i b r a n t surface animation. HofmannTs non- o b j e c t i v e approach to a r t revealed a s i m i l a r i t y to h i s c l o s e P a r i s i a n f r i e n d s Henri Matisse and Robert Delaunay. This s i m i l a r i t y suggests t h e i r p o s s i b l e i n f l u e n c e on Hofmann. Hofmann's contact w i t h the P a r i s i a n a r t i s t ' s i s 'Henri M a t i s s e , "Notes of a P a i n t e r . " (1908) c i t e d i n A l f r e d H. Barr, J r . , M a t i s s e : His A r t and His P u b l i c , New York,. The Museum of Modern A r t , 195T7~p7T2"i. 14 6 s i g n i f i c a n t f o r they gave him the b a s i s of h i s i d e a l s . During h i s Munich p e r i o d Hofmann presented t o h i s students a coherently formulated theory of a r t derived from h i s P a r i s i a n f r i e n d s . These t h e o r i e s were n e c e s s i t a t e d by the mere f a c t of teaching. Students were eager f o r an organized system which he had developed over the years. Hofmann s t a t e d i n h i s Prospectus f o r the young a r t i s t s , that he h i m s e l f t r i e d t o "detach from schools and d i r e c t i o n s , t o 7 evolve a p e r s o n a l i t y of h i s own."' His Prospectus f o r the Munich School was h i s f i r s t concrete f o r m u l a t i o n of what he had l e a r n t i n P a r i s . In i t he discusses form and nature, c r e a t i v e expression, a r t i s t s , and a work of a r t . He b e l i e v e d t h a t form i n p a i n t i n g was stimulated by nature, though i t was not bound t o nature i n o b j e c t i v e i m i t a t i o n . Nature was the source of i n s p i r a t i o n f o r the s e n s i t i v e a r t i s t . He would a l s o be a f f e c t e d by the medium employed, through which the i n s p i r a t i o n was t r a n s - formed by him i n t o the r e a l i t y of the p a i n t i n g . " C r e a t i v e expression i s thus the s p i r i t u a l t r a n s l a t i o n of inner con- cepts i n t o form, r e s u l t i n g from the f u s i o n of these ^Who i s a c t u a l l y i n f l u e n t i a l and what were the b a s i s f o r these i n f l u e n c e s cannot be s t a t e d d e f i n i t e l y f o r Hofmann does not t a l k or w r i t e about h i s P a r i s years. When the un- published paper held by the Museum of Modern A r t , Glenn Wessels and the U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a at Berkeley are r e - vealed, i t may be p o s s i b l e t o a s c e r t a i n the a c t u a l f a c t s of t h i s p e r i o d . Without these papers, i t would be pure academic heresay to l i s t by whom and how Hofmann was a c t u a l l y i n f l u e n c e d . 7Hofmann, "Prospectus f o r Munich School...,"1915,P.56. i n t u i t i o n s w i t h a r t i s t i c means of expression i n a u n i t y of s p i r i t and form, brought about by i n t u i t i o n which i n t u r n r e s u l t s from the f u n c t i o n i n g of the e n t i r e thought and f e e l i n g complex accompanied by vigorous c o n t r o l of s p i r i t u a l means." The above sentence, c h a r a c t e r i s t i c of Hofmann*s w r i t i n g s t y l e , means i n essence that a p a i n t i n g (the c r e a t i v e expression) i s the combination of nature and the medium. Nature i n s p i r e s i n the a r t i s t a thought p a t t e r n which r e s u l t s i n s p i r i t and the form of the p a i n t i n g . These two q u a l i t i e s are then combined w i t h the medium and the i n s p i r a t i o n from the medium, a l l under the c o n t r o l of the mental processes. There r e s u l t s a f u s i o n of a mental process with the p h y s i c a l means of expression. "A work of a r t i s i n s p i r i t a s e l f contained whole, whose s p i r i t u a l and s t r u c t u r a l r e l a t i o n s h i p permit no i n d i v i d u a l parts despite the m u l t i p l i c i t y of depicted o b j e c t s . " ^ Hofmann*s d e f i n i t i o n of a r t i s a combination of the two systems of organism; the f i r s t system being an organic whole i n which "every element w i t h i n i t , i m p l i e s every other, ""^and the second being a system i n which "an L o c . c i t . 9 L o c . c i t . ^ S t e p h e n C. Pepper, World Hypotheses, a Study i n Evidence, Berkeley, U n i v e r s i t y of u a i i r o r n i a , 19V2, P.300. ... 16 a l t e r a t i o n or removal of any element would a l t e r every other n element or even d e s t r o y the whole system." T h i s o r g a n i s t i c s t r u c t u r e of Hofmann's theory of a r t i s , i n p a r t , one of the determinates of Hofmann's l o n g and complicated s t y l e of w r i t i n g . Once he has mentioned one aspect of the theory, i t i m p l i e s another and cannot be thought of as complete u n t i l i t has the other f a c t s added t o i t , In the s e r i e s of a r t i c l e s w r i t t e n a f t e r Hofmann's a r r i v a l i n America i n 1931, the o r g a n i s t i c s t r u c t u r e of h i s t h e o r y can be seen w e l l . While d e a l i n g with a l l aspects of a r t such as laws, r e a l i t y and appearance, s p i r i t u a l p r o j e c t i o n , medium of e x p r e s s i o n , f o r m a l and c r e a t i v e elements, depth and movement, t e a c h i n g , symphonic and d e c o r a t i v e p a i n t i n g , he a l s o t o l d of a r t s r e l a t i o n t o c u l t u r e . Any a r t form or c u l t u r a l p u r s u i t , he b e l i e v e d , "en- 12 r i c h e d and gave deeper content t o l i f e . " L i k e a r e l i g i o u s f e e l i n g , a r t a l s o searched " t o understand the essence of a l l t h i n g s . " ^ " A r t i s t i c e x p r e s s i o n and a p p r e c i a t i o n was necessary t o counter-balance l i f e . " * ^ A r t to him was an e s s e n t i a l t o l i f e as food i s . I t g i v e s power and " s a t i s f i e s the s o u l . " x ! L o c . c i t . 12 Hans Hofmann, " P a i n t i n g and C u l t u r e , " F o r t n i g h t l y , v o l . 1, no. 1, September 11, 1931, p.6. ^ L o c . c i t . ^Hofmann, " P a i n t i n g and C u l t u r e , " p.7. 17 Because of a r t ' s a b i l i t y to energize the observer, the aim of a r t i s t o " v i t a l i z e form by organic r e l a t i o n s h i p s between the formal elements, w i t h c o l o r and l i g h t i n t e g r a t e d 15 i n t o the planes." In p a i n t i n g , the e f f e c t of the v i t a l i z e d form must take i n t o account the Laws of P a i n t i n g , namely: 1. The e n t i t y of the p i c t u r e plane must be preserved. 2. The essence of the p i c t u r e plane i s i t s two dimension- a l i t y which must achieve three d i m e n s i o n a l i t y by means of the c r e a t i v e process. 3. In c o l o r i n g , the surface of the canvas should r e c e i v e the greatest p o s s i b l e r i c h n e s s i n l i g h t emanation e f f e c t s , and at the same time should r e t a i n the t r a n s - parency of a j e w e l . " These laws were founded on the b a s i s of our perception of r e a l i t y and appearances. Hans Hofmann discussed h i s concept of perception i n an A r t i c l e , " P l a s t i c C r e a t i o n , " published i n the League 1932. What one sees i n the e x t e r i o r world, "appearance," i s two dimensional while i n a c t u a l f a c t , that w o r l d , r e a l i t y , i s three dimensional. "We see r e a l i t y only through appearance which i n t u r n has the e f f e c t upon us of 17 being a three dimensional r e a l i t y . " The d i f f e r e n c e betwe "appearance" and " e f f e c t " i s t h a t the former i s based on I b i d . , p. 5. 16 Hans Hofmann, "On the Aims of A r t , " F o r t n i g h t l y , v o l . 1, no. 13, February.26, 1932, p. 10. 1 7 Hans Hofmann, " P l a s t i c C r e a t i o n , " (1932), c i t e d i n Hans Hofmann, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1963, p. 35. 18 seeing alone whereas " e f f e c t " i s the r e s u l t of the appearance from a certain experience. " E f f e c t s , " then, that come from an o i l painting, are independent of the o i l paints themselves but they produce these effects because "the; paints are set 18 together i n t h e i r s p i r i t u a l r e l a t i o n s h i p . " Their placement creates what Hofmann c a l l s a " s u p e r - r e a l i s t i c e f f e c t , " " ^ being i n f a c t an emotional reaction. The s u p e r - r e a l i s t i c i s con- tained i n the e f f e c t of a thing rather than i n a c t u a l i t y . "What i n a two-dimensional f i x a t i o n of appearance would perhaps only be the difference of a f r a c t i o n of a millimeter would as e f f e c t under certain circumstances mean an i n f i n i t y i n a work 20 of a r t . " The combination of the senses affords i n "our s p i r i t u a l projection the emotional experience (which) can be gathered together as an inner perception by which we can com- prehend the essence of things beyond mere bare sensory ex- perience. "21 This extended inward experience enables the viewer to get to the heart and c r u c i a l factors of the object and to see i t i n a l l i t s r e l a t i o n s and connections. "The s p i r i t u a l projection or contemplation develops the sense of space because a l l of our sensory apparatus i s required." -^Loc. c i t . ^ L o c . c i t . 2 Q L o c . c i t . 21 Hofman, " P l a s t i c Creation," p.36. 22 L o c . c i t . 19 The experience of space which i s d i s c l o s e d t o us by the sub- j e c t i v e s p i r i t u a l p r o j e c t i o n of the impulses i s a p l a s t i c and l i v i n g u n i t y . This l a s t statement r e f l e c t s Hofmann's aim of a r t — t h e v i t a l i z a t i o n of form. We experience space i n a p a i n t - i n g by the a c t i v a t i o n of our senses. Therefore, i f an a r t i s t wishes t o create a p a i n t i n g , he must s t r i v e t o a f f e c t the viewer w i t h a c t i o n and v i t a l i t y from the form and c o l o r p a i n t - ed on the canvas. The process of c r e a t i o n i s based upon the power t o present and to s p i r i t u a l l y p r o j e c t . The s p i r i t u a l i n t e r p r e t a - 23 t i o n of the medium of expression i s the r e s u l t of such power. In t h i s way expression medium i s a r e s u l t of such powers. In t h i s way, the c r e a t i v i t y of an a r t i s t depends on h i s general a b i l i t y t o p r o j e c t s p i r i t u a l l y and h i s s p e c i f i c a b i l i t y t o empathize and to r e c e i v e from the medium of expression. A more encompassing statement of c r e a t i o n by Hofmann appeared a year previous to the one sighted above. In the e a r l i e r one he s a i d t h a t c r e a t i o n was dependent on nature's law, the a r t i s t ' s s p i r i t u a l contact w i t h nature and the medium of expression. "The c r e a t i v e a r t i s t i s t o p a r a l l e l nature's c r e a t i v i t y by t r a n s l a t i n g the impulse received from nature i n t o the medium 2ZL of expression and thus v i t a l i z e t h i s medium." ^ The apparent 2 3 L o c . c i t . 2.L Hofmann, " P a i n t i n g and Culture," 1931, P«6. d i f f e r e n c e s w i t h these two statements i s the i n c l u s i o n i n the e a r l i e r v e r s i o n of "nature's law" and "medium of expression." While i t i s not s t a t e d i n the 1932 v e r s i o n , Hofmann does r e f e r to these two q u a l i t i e s when he s a i d that " c r e a t i v i t y i n the c r e a t i v e process i s based upon an experience (knowledge of nature's l a w s ) , which simultaneously a l s o s t i m u l a t e d the essence of the medium through which the a r t i s t i c expression 25 r e s u l t s . " ' Therefore the apparent d i f f e r e n c e a r i s e s only because of Hofmann's usage of the E n g l i s h language. A s l i g h t v a r i a t i o n i n language i s a l s o seen i n the d i s c u s s i o n of medium. This m o d i f i c a t i o n can be r e l a t e d , a s i n the previous case, probably t o Glenn Wessels' more f l u e n t t r a n s l a t i o n i n t o the E n g l i s h language. In both, the nature of the medium must be mastered. In the 1931 a r t i c l e , i t s t a t e s that "the medium can be made t o resonate and v i b r a t e when stimulated by the impulse coming d i r e c t l y from the 26 n a t u r a l world," while i n the 1932 a r t i c l e , the medium of expression can be set i n t o v i b r a t i o n and t e n s i o n by mastery of the p r i n c i p l e s and meaning of the nature of the medium, "which has has i t s own laws, which are t o be e x c l u s i v e l y mastered i n t u i t i v e l y out of the development of the c r e a t i o n . " ^ 2 5Hofmann, " P l a s t i c C r e a t i o n , " 1932,p.36. 2 6 Hofmann, "On the Aims of A r t , " 1 9 3 2 , p.7. 27 'Hofmann, " P l a s t i c C r e a t i o n , " 1 9 3 2 , p.3 6 . 21 The e a r l i e r a r t i c l e s t a t e s that the impulse of nature through the a r t i s t ' s mind can s t i r him t o c r e a t i v i t y i f he has mastered the medium w h i l e the l a t t e r says that the medium can be "mastered i n t u i t i v e l y out of the development of the c r e a t i o n . " The l a t e r a r t i c l e shows that the a r t i s t can s t i l l create a great work w h i l e searching the pos- s i b i l i t i e s of the medium, f o r the " p o s s i b i l i t i e s of the 28 medium are u n l i m i t e d . " In the 1932 s e c t i o n Hofmann broadened the range of p o s s i b i l i t i e s of a medium w h i l e i n the s e c t i o n concerning the elements of a p a i n t i n g he t i g h t e n e d up and f u r t h e r de- f i n e d . The two a r t i c l e s d i f f e r e n t i a t e between formal and c r e a t i v e elements. "The formal elements i n p a i n t i n g are l i n e , plane, volume and the r e s u l t i n g complexes. These are 29 elements of c o n s t r u c t i o n f o r a v i t a l i z e d a r t . " The v i t a - l i z a t i o n d e r i v e s from " l i g h t and c o l o r i n t e g r a t e d i n t o 30 planes." Color and l i g h t are c r e a t i v e elements f o r they v i t a l i z e the formal elements. The p e c u l i a r i t y w i t h i n these statements centers around the a d j e c t i v a l m o d i f i e r s , "formal" and " c r e a t i v e . " Within these two words there i s a u n i f y i n g f a c t o r f o r the elements of p a i n t i n g . Planes are discussed i n both formal and c r e a t i v e elements. I t appears as i f Hofmann has made an a r b i t r a r y d i f f e r e n t i a t i o n when i n f a c t 28 Hofmann, " P a i n t i n g and C u l t u r e , " 1931, p. 6. 29 'Hans Hofmann, c i t e d i n Hans Hofmann E x h i b i t i o n Cata- logue, Aug. 5-22, Berkeley, U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a , 1931. 30 T Loc. c i t . 2 2 t h e t w o a r e r e l a t e d ; o n e u s e s t h e f o r m a l e l e m e n t s f o r t h e c r e a t i v e a c t i n p a i n t i n g . I t s e e m s p e c u l i a r t o d i f f e r e n - t i a t e f r o m c r e a t i v e ^ a n d f o r m a l a s p e c t s o f a p a i n t i n g b y m e r e l y c o l o r a n d l i g h t , w h i l e t h e o t h e r q u a l i t i e s a r e i n - h e r e n t i n b o t h . " A r e n o t t h e s e d i s c r e p e n c i e s p o s s i b l y c a u s e d b y H o f m a n n ' s i n e p t n e s s w i t h t h e E n g l i s h l a n g u a g e a n d p o s s i b l y h i s t r a n s l a t o r s ' m i s i n t e r p r e t a t i o n ? H o f m a n n ' s f o r m a l e l e m e n t s a r e s i m i l a r t o P a u l K l e e ' s f o r m a t i v e e l e m e n t s . K l e e d i s c u s s e d t h e m o v e m e n t o f t h e p o i n t t o f o r m a l i n e a n d t h e l i n e ' s m o v e m e n t t o f o r m a 3 1 p l a n e . H o f m a n n a n d K l e e i n c o r p o r a t e d t h e l i n e a n d t h e p l a n e i n t o t h e i r r e s p e c t i v e f o r m a l e l e m e n t s . K l e e d i f f e r e d f r o m H o f m a n n b y s t a t i n g t h e o r i g i n o f t h e l i n e t o t h e p o i n t w h e r e a s H o f m a n n f u r t h e r d e f i n e d t h e p l a n e . I t j o i n s w i t h o t h e r p l a n e s t o f o r m v o l u m e s a n d f o r m a l c o m p l e x e s . A v a r i a t i o n o f t h e i r f o r m a l e l e m e n t s i s s e e n b e c a u s e e a c h h a s d e v e l o p e d e i t h e r t h e p o i n t o r t h e l i n e . B o t h , h o w e v e r , i n - c o r p o r a t e t h e l i n e a n d t h e p l a n e . T h i s s i m i l a r i t y a n d H o f m a n n ' s l a t e r d e v e l o p m e n t f r o m t h e l i n e a r c o n c e p t t o t h e p l a n a r c o n c e p t s u g g e s t s t h a t H o f m a n n k n e w o f K l e e ' s w r i t - i n g s . B o t h w r i t e r s a l s o d i s c u s s e d m o v e m e n t , t h e s u b j e c t i v e t h e o r y o f s p a c e a n d r e l a t i o n s h i p o f c o l o r s . N o p u b l i s h e d m a t e r i a l h a s a p p e a r e d c o n c e r n i n g a n y c o n t a c t b e t w e e n H o f m a n n 3 1 P a u l K l e e , " F r o m P o i n t t o L i n e , " c i t e d i n J u r g S p i l l e r , P a u l K l e e : T h e T h i n k i n g E y e , New Y o r k , G e o r g e W i t t e n b o r n , 1 9 6 1 , p p . 103 - 1 2 0 . 23 and Klee, but Hofmann did mention the Bauhaus with which Klee was associated. Hofmann used the formal and creative elements to create forms i n space. Unlike Renaissance painters he did not create a space, a hole-in-the-wall with forms placed within i t . But rather he, as h i s Parisian friends had done, solved the form problem i n r e l a t i o n to the picture plane 3 2 because "form exists through space and space through form." 3 3 "Form must be balanced by space," and vice versa. "What exists i n form must also exist i n space." 3 4 Space and form are i n t e r r e l a t e d i n that the "space i n an object incor- porates the objective world i n i t s l i m i t s , and space i n 3 5 front of and behind the object, i n f i n i t y . " The further r e l a t i o n s h i p between form and space can be seen i n Hofmann's discussion of p o s i t i v e and negative space. "The conception of the vacancy, the u n f u l f i l l e d space' as a negative form i s necessary to reconcile the p o s i t i v e form, the f u l f i l l e d space and i s therefore an object." The unity of form and space to the t o t a l space "exists i n three dimensions which corresponds to the two dimensional quality of the 3 7 picture plane." "The object world and the sum of a l l 3 2Hofmann, " P l a s t i c Creation," 1 9 3 2 , p. 3 7 . 3 3Hofmann, "On the Aims of Art," 1 9 3 2 , p. 1 0 . Lionel Thomas. Interview with writer, Jan. 1 6 , 1 9 6 6 . 3 5Hofmann, " P l a s t i c Creation," 1 9 3 2 , p. 3 7 . 3 ^Loc. c i t . 3 7Hofmann, "On the Aims of Art," 1 9 3 2 , p. 1 0 . 24 t h r e e dimensional elements g i v e s us i n the o p i t c a l manifes- t a t i o n , the two dimensional space f u l f i l l m e n t i n the ap- pearance of nature, the form and space problem i s i d e n t i c a l 38 w i t h the essence of the p i c t u r e p l a n e . " "We see the two dimensional (appearance by the q u a l i t y of the p i c t u r e plane) 39 but we comprehend the t h r e e dimensional ( e f f e c t ) . " There- f o r e the s o l u t i o n of a p a i n t i n g on the two dimensional p i c - t u r e plane i s p a r a l l e l e d ' t o o p t i c a l v i s i o n i n which a two dimensional appearance has the e f f e c t of a t h r e e dimensional m a n i f e s t a t i o n . In a c h i e v i n g the t h r e e dimensional e f f e c t , one must remember not to d e s t r o y the i n h e r e n t two dimension- a l i t y of the p i c t u r e plane, as s t a t e d i n Hofmann's P a i n t i n g Laws. "One can p l a c e t h r e e dimensional forms on the p i c t u r e plane without d i s t u r b i n g the two dimensional q u a l i t y of the p i c t u r e plane s i n c e the appearance and the p i c t u r e plane (both two dimensional) are i d e n t i c a l i n t h e i r e s s e n c e . " ^ In a c h i e v i n g a sense of the t h r e e d i m e n s i o n a l , depth, "a sense of movement d e v e l o p s . " ^ That movement i s merely i l l u s o r y . The a b i l i t y t o c r e a t e the i l l u s i o n determines the q u a l i t y of the work f o r "Movement does not e x i s t without l i f e [and] movement i s the e x p r e s s i o n of l i f e . . . . E n l i v e n - e d Hofmann, " P l a s t i c C r e a t i o n , " 1 9 3 2 , p. 3 7 . 3 9 I b i d . , p. 3 8 . 4 0 T . • Loc. c i t . ^ L o c . c i t . ment depends on the f a c i l i t y f o r emotional experiencing i n the a r t i s t , which i n i t s t u r n , determines the degree of s p i r i t u a l p r o j e c t i o n i n t o the medium of expression." These movements and depths can be achieved by the p s y c h o l o g i c a l expression of c o l o r , not merely as a mood or an emotional tone but by the j u x t a p o s i t i o n of c o l o r s t o achieve the p r o j e c t i o n of one c o l o r area i n r e l a t i o n t o the r e c e s s i o n of another. This theory of the dynamic q u a l i t y of c o l o r i s expanded i n the 1 9 5 1 a r t i c l e "Space P i c t o r i a l l y R e a l i z e d through the I n t r i n s i c F a c u l t y of the Colors t o Express Volumes," which w i l l be discussed l a t e r . In 1 9 3 1 , Hofmann set up two c a t e g o r i e s , the formal elements and the c r e a t i v e elements. Color was attached t o form. Formal elements c o n s i s t e d of l i n e s planes and the r e s u l t i n g formal complexes. C r e a t i v e elements c o n s i s t e d of l i g h t and c o l o r i n t e g r a t e d i n t o planes. These two c a t e g o r i e s of elements were synthesized i n 1 9 3 2 . Formal and c r e a t i v e elements became one. Hofmann s t a t e d , "Color i s only an e f f e c t of l i g h t on form i n r e l a t i o n t o form and i t s inherent t e x t u r e . . . . Form e x i s t s because of l i g h t and l i g h t by means of form."*4'3 Hofmann r e a l i z e d that c o l o r and ^ L o c . c i t . ^Hofmann, " P l a s t i c C r e a t i o n , " 1 9 3 2 , p.3 6 . 26 form had t o c o e x i s t . They were mutually dependent on each other. This dependence r e f l e c t s Hofmann's o r g a n i s t i c theory i n which each f a c t o r i m p l i e s another and no one f a c - t o r can be l e f t out. Formal elements imply c r e a t i v e e l e - ments, and v i c e versa. The two d i s t i n c t c l a s s e s of 1931 are combined t o form one i n 1932. The f u r t h e r i n c l u s i v e n e s s of h i s theory i s seen i n the r e l a t i o n s h i p between form and space i n which form ex- i s t s because of space and space e x i s t s because of form, which i n t u r n e x i s t s only by the means of l i g h t and v i c e versa. He then continues the u n i f i e d c o n f i g u r a t i o n by say- i n g t h a t the e f f e c t of l i g h t i n r e l a t i o n t o i t s form and i t s inherent t e x t u r e i s c o l o r . From t h i s i t can be seen that he r e l a t e s form w i t h space, l i g h t and c o l o r . A l l the above i n t e r r e l a t i o n s h i p s must be arranged so as t o be based on the concept of s p a t i a l u n i t y , the r e l a t i o n between form and space. Because l i g h t i s r e l a t e d t o form and form t o space, l i g h t u n i t y i s r e l a t e d t o s p a t i a l u n i t y . L i g h t u n i t y i s created by the understanding of the e f f e c t of l i g h t complexes and by the " c r e a t i o n of a c o l o r u n i t y " 4 4 achieved when the r e c e s s i o n and p r o j e c t i o n of c o l o r i s understood and when t o n a l gradations are taken i n t o account. 4 4 I b i d . , p. 37. 27 This incompassing outlook required, by the a r t i s t ' s t o t a l mental functioning i s a facet of Hofmann's i d e a l . Through the complete occupation of the mind, a s p i r i t u a l r e a l i z a t i o n can be attained by the sensitive a r t i s t . This r e a l i z a t i o n i s the only way of externalizing the mental function, or as Hofmann c a l l s i t , inner sensation. "When the impulses which emotionalize the a r t i s t , are integrated with the medium of expression, every motivation of the soul can be translated into a s p i r i t u a l motivation" 4 ^ as seen i n the entity of the painting. "This work of art i s the product of the a r t i s t ' s power f o r conscious f e e l i n g and of h i s s e n s i t i v i t y to l i f e i n nature and l i f e within the l i m i t s of his medium."4^ That work of art r e f l e c t s the "sensorial and emotional world i n f o r the a r t i s t . " It i s "sensory raw material blended to i d a s p i r i t u a l unity through the legitimate use of the medium." Through exaggerated d i f f e r e n t i a t i o n the painting acquires the highest enrichment of i t s surface. It becomes monumental "by the most exact and refined r e l a t i o n between /. Q the p a r t s . " ^ This type of painting i s known as Symphonic f o r by, with and from color, form i s i n t e n s i f i e d i n sub- L 5 ^Hofmann, Exhibition Catalogue, Berkeley, 1931. 4 6Hofmann, "Painting and Culture," 1931, p. 6. 4 7Hofmann, "On the Aims of Painting," 1932, p. 7. 4 8 I b i d . ' , p. 8. 4 9 I b i d . , p. 9. 2B ordination to s p a t i a l and s p i r i t u a l unity i n large present- a t i o n a l areas of l i g h t and form. Color i s the r e a l b u i l d i n g 50 medium i n symphonic painting."^ Hofmann says that i n t h i s way, color attains the greatest f u l l n e s s and form the great- 51 est richness as Cezanne achieved i n his work. Colors are made to project and to recede by the means of an i n t e r v a l , being "color planes standing i n greatest contrast as possible to a l l i t s neighbours within the balance of the whole."52 Hofmann*s use of the musical term, Symphonic, f o r a certain class of paintings could imply his knowledge of Wassily Kandinsky's Concerning the S p i r i t u a l i n Art, i n 53 which symphonic and melodic painting styles are discussed. Kandinsky and Hofmann also discussed Nature as the source of inspiration,inner feelings and the psychological and p h y s i o l o g i c a l effect of color to produce three dimensional space and form. Although Kandinsky's book was generally read by the avant garde, a f t e r i t s publication i n 1912, by that time Hofmann would have heard of the synesthetic idea of r e l a t i n g painting to music. Synesthesia had been f o r a long time a European t r a d i t i o n when Hofmann arrived i n 5QLoc.cit. ^ L o c . c i t . ^ ^ L o c . c i t . 5 3 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the S p i r i t u a l i n Art, (1912), New York, Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1947. 29 P a r i s i n 1904. P o s s i b l y i n P a r i s he heard of Kandinsky's Concerning the S p i r i t u a l i n Art though Hofmann never wrote or spoke of such a contact. I f Hofmann had read Kandinsky's book, i t was probably a f t e r h i s r e t u r n t o Munich i n 1914. However Clement Greenberg b e l i e v e s t h a t Kandinsky had no i n f l u e n c e on the t h e o r i e s of Hofmann be- cause by the time Hofmann had returned t o Germany i n 1914, h i s t h e o r i e s had already been formulated from the great 54 French masters of the t w e n t i e t h century. Hofmann was not consistent i n u s i n g musical terms t o c l a s s p a i n t i n g s . His other category of p a i n t i n g s was c a l l e d d e c o r a t i v e . Decorative p a i n t i n g employs some aspects of symphonic p a i n t i n g but the former emphasizes the greatest s i m p l i f i c a t i o n . I n t e l l e c t and emotion are used f o r the common end of s i m p l i c i t y . Often t h i s can l e a d to a b s t r a c t i o n when "rhythmic r e l a t i o n s conditioned by space and musical c o n t a c t s " ^ a r e taken i n t o account. Always the problem of space must be p e r f e c t f o r "the w a l l must remain a w a l l and the p i c t u r e must remain a p i c t u r e . " One must not create a h o l e - i n - t h e - w a l l as the p a i n t e r s of the Renainssance had p e r f e c t e d . This does not mean that ^^Clement Greenberg, Hofmann, P a r i s , George F a l l , 1961, p.16. 5 5Hofmann, "On the Aims of A r t , " 1932, p.10. - ^ L o c . c i t . 3Q o b j e c t i v e v a l u e s cannot be used f o r i t i s i n D e c o r a t i v e p a i n t i n g t h a t " o b j e c t i v e v a l u e s are made more e f f e c t i v e 5 7 by r h y t h m i c r e l a t i o n s . " ' These o b j e c t i v e v a l u e s are not m e r e l y t a s t e f u l l y and f a n c i f u l l y a r r a n g e d b u t r e q u i r e t h e same procedure as t h o s e of Symphonic p a i n t i n g . D e c o r a t i v e p a i n t i n g becomes a g r e a t d e s i g n i f t h e a r t i s t i s a b l e " t o s i m p l i f y t o t h e e s s e n t i a l s and t o e g o r g a n i z e t h e e v e r p r e s e n t l i f e e s s e n t i a l s . " "Great p i c t o r i a l c r e a t i o n i s a c h i e v e d by a h i g h l y d e v e l o p e d s e n s i b i l i t y as r e g a r d s the n a t u r a l w o r l d and upon s t r o n g p i c t o r i a l f e e l i n g . I t may c a r r y a d d i t i o n a l burden o f 5 9 t h e l i t e r a r y , dogmatic o r p o l i t i c a l , " but i t i s n o t n e c e s s a r y . Through a r t one i s a b l e t o become i m m o r t a l i f he i s " a b l e t o pervade h i s work w i t h h i s s o u l and s p i r i t . I t i s the s p i r i t u a l and m e n t a l c o n t e n t of the work o f a r t t h a t i s t h e q u a l i t y i n a p a i n t i n g and not t h e a l l e g o r y o r s y m b o l l i c meaning. B e s i d e s t h e above m a t e r i a l on t h e t h e o r y o f a r t i n p a i n t i n g , Hofmann b e i n g a t e a c h e r d i s c u s s e d h i s o t h e r p r o - f e s s i o n a l f i e l d , t e a c h i n g . A r t can o n l y be t a u g h t t o one 57Hofmann, "On t h e Aims o f A r t , " 1932, p.9. ^ L o c . c i t . ^Hofmann, "On the Aims of A r t , " 1932, p . l l . 60T L o c . c i t . 31 who possesses a " h i g h l y developed s e n s i t i v i t y f o r q u a l i t y . The laymen who understands a r t through a r e c e p t i v e ex- perience shares p a s s i v e l y what the a r t i s t out of product- ive experience f e e l s and c r e a t e s . " The teacher must d i r e c t students toward the "enrichment of t h e i r l i f e , guide t h e i r p e r s o n a l i t y and develop t h e i r s e n s i b i l i t y t o T f e e l i n t o ' ^ 2 animate or inanimate t h i n g s w i t h sympathy."^3 "By enforced d i s c i p l i n e , he shortens the road t o understand- i n g and develops the students n a t u r a l endowments."^4 The teacher most of a l l must have "the power of quick sympathy and understanding t o produce a r t i s t s , comprehending t e a c h e r s , a r t understanding and a r t enjoyment i n general. For the next f i f t e e n years Hans Hofmann d i d not p u b l i s h but i n the formative years of the "American-type p a i n t i n g " or "Abstract Expressionism" he f o l l o w e d h i s d i r e c t i o n s f o r a teacher and helped d i r e c t the new genera- t i o n of American a r t i s t s to t h e i r form of a r t . Although none of the members of the s o - c a l l e d New York School of 6lHofmann, " P a i n t i n g and C u l t u r e , " 1931, p.5. Zip " F e e l i n t o " could be a l s o t r a n s l a t e d as empathy because these two terms are t r a n s l a t e d i n t o the same German word, d i e Einfuhlung. HofmannTs l a t e r 1952 de- f i n i t i o n of word empathy i n c l u d e s a r t i s t i c r e a l i z a t i o n . ^Hofmann, " P a i n t i n g and C u l t u r e , " 1931, p.6. 6 4 I b i d . , p.7. 6 5 I b i d . , p..6. 32 Abstract Expressionism attended Hofmann's c l a s s e s , h i s presence i n v i g o r a t e d the New York a r t scene. He brought over from Europe the ideas of the Fauves and the Cubists which could be seen i n h i s work of t h i s p e r i o d . His weekly c r i t i c i s m s of student's work was o f t e n attend- ed by members of the a r t c i r c l e i n the Greenwich V i l l a g e area. He belonged to the "Club" whose members included the a b s t r a c t e x p r e s s i o n i s t s . During the m i d - f o r t i e s the a b s t r a c t e x p r e s s i o n i s t s began t o r e c e i v e a t t e n t i o n and r e c o g n i t i o n . I t i s i n t h i s p e r i o d , 1 9 4 4 , that Hans Hofmann had h i s f i r s t one- man show i n New York at Peggy Guggenheim's "Art of t h i s Century G a l l e r y . " He held e x h i b i t i o n s y e a r l y i n New York, mainly at the Sammuel Kootz G a l l e r y . Also d u r i n g the m i d - f o r t i e s , Hofmann taught a number of West-Coast Canadian a r t i s t s who w i l l be discussed l a t e r i n the paper. The most important event of t h i s period f o r Hofmann was perhaps h i s one-man r e t r o s p e c t i v e show at the Addison G a l l e r y of American Art i n Andover, Massachusetts. At that show, a monograph-catalogue was published c o n t a i n i n g some of h i s teachings, older essays, the new a r t i c l e "The Search f o r the Real i n the V i s u a l A r t s , " and h i s well-known theory 66 Donald J a r v i s , Interview w i t h w r i t e r , February 1, 1 9 6 6 . 33 of "push and p u l l . " As t h i s p u b l i c a t i o n was widely read by a r t i s t s and comprises the second period of Hofmann*s w r i t i n g s , a d e t a i l d i s c u s s i o n w i l l now be considered w i t h reference t o h i s e a r l i e r w r i t i n g s of 1931 and 1932. Fundamentally, The Search f o r the Real does not vary a great d e a l from Hofmann's e a r l i e r w r i t i n g s . The f i f t e e n years i n America has improved h i s w r i t i n g s t y l e and c l a r i f i e d h i s thought. This c l a r i f i c a t i o n was un- doubtedly r e i n f o r c e d by the a r t i s t i c community of New York and h i s n e c e s s i t y of an organized concept which was present- ed t o h i s students. In t h i s monograph Hofmann presented i n the now famous terms, "push and p u l l , " "expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n . " These movements, as seen i n a p a i n t i n g , are e x p l a i n e d i n r e l a t i o n t o the problem of form and c o l o r and t h e i r r e l a t i o n s h i p to the f i n e and a p p l i e d a r t s . These t h e o r i e s of Hofmann were then a p p l i e d t o two of h i s b e t t e r known p a i n t i n g s , "Effervescence" and " F a n t a s i a . " The f i n a l s e c t i o n of Hofmann's monograph are then discussed i n r e l a t i o n t o q u a l i t y i n a work of a r t . The idea of "the s i g n i f i c a n c e of a work of a r t being determined by the q u a l i t y of i t s growth,"^ 7 r e f l e c t s the organic and o r g a n i s t i c q u a l i t y of h i s t h e o r i e s as published i n the p r e v i o u s l y c i t e d m a t e r i a l . The work of 6 7 Hans Hofmann, Search f o r the Real, 1948, p. 46. 34 art, u s u a l l y p a i n t i n g or s c u l p t u r e , i s the p h y s i c a l c a r r i e r of something beyond p h y s i c a l r e a l i t y , the s u r r e a l . I t i s the task of the a r t i s t who r e c e i v e s the s u r r e a l f o r c e s to transpose these f o r c e s i n t o the p h y s i c a l c a r r i e r , the medium of expression. In t h i s way an a r t i s t - i c c r e a t i o n i s "the metamorphosis of the e x t e r n a l p h y s i c a l aspects of a t h i n g i n t o a s e l f s u s t a i n i n g s p i r i t u a l 68 r e a l i t y . " This " s p i r i t u a l r e a l i t y " i s not organic i n the sense of possessing an a c t u a l l i f e organism but does have a l i f e created i n i t perceivable to the viewer. This l i f e i s i n c i t e d by the a r t i s t ' s placement of form and c o l o r i n such a way as t o create the e f f e c t of move- ment and v i t a l i t y . "Movement does not e x i s t without l i f e . 69 Movement i s the expression of l i f e . " The c r e a t i o n of s p i r i t u a l r e a l i t y depends on "metaphysical perceptions, the search f o r the e s s e n t i a l 7 0 nature of r e a l i t y . " One cannot simply change a p h y s i c a l e n t i t y i n t o the realm of the s p i r i t u a l by mere placement. A fragment of thought i n i t s e l f i s meaningless u n t i l other fragments are r e l a t e d so as to form an i d e a . In the same 68 T Loc. c i t . 6 9 7Hofmann, " P l a s t i c C r e a t i o n , " 1932, p. 38. 7 0 Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1948, p. 46. way p h y s i c a l e n t i t i e s can be made meaningful by r e l a t i o n - ships t o other e n t i t i e s . The a c t u a l p h y s i c a l character- i s t i c s of a medium of expression d i f f e r e n t i a t e the various a r t s f o r "a p l a s t i c idea must be expressed with p l a s t i c means j u s t as a musical idea i s expressed w i t h musical 71 means, or a l i t e r a r y idea w i t h v e r b a l means."' In each case the expression of the idea i s achieved by p l a c i n g two e n t i t i e s i n an emotionally c o n t r o l l e d s i t u a t i o n which creates a t h i r d e n t i t y of higher order. This higher order i s s p i r i t u a l , a c r e a t i o n of the mind under those s p e c i a l circumstances. In such a r e l a t i o n there i s mutual r e - f l e c t i o n ; each e n t i t y a f f e c t s the other and v i c e versa. The l i m i t s f o r the r e l a t i o n s i n p a i n t i n g i s determined by the extent of the canvas or the piece of paper. Any act done t o the canvas n a t u r a l l y creates a c o n t r a c t i o n of the surface area but a l s o that act i s always answered back i n the opposite d i r e c t i o n . In t h i s way the canvas appears t o " c o n t r a c t and t o expand i n simultaneous e x i s t e n c e , a c h a r a c t e r i s t i c of s p a c e . " 7 2 The p i c t u r e plane appears t o have depth and space. This space i s not n a t u r a l i s t i c f o r t h a t i s a " s p e c i a l case, a p o r t i o n of what i s f e l t about three dimensional experience. Loc. c i t . Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1948, p.48. 36 This expression of the a r t i s t ' s experience i s thus 73 incomplete." The depth and space that appears on the p i c t u r e surface does not destroy i t s two d i m e n s i o n a l i t y f o r " i t i s the conceptual completeness of a p l a s t i c experience ( p l a s t i c c r e a t i o n without d e s t r o y i n g a f l a t surface) that warrants the p r e s e r v a t i o n of the 71 two d i m e n s i o n a l i t y . " The depth that i s created i s not achieved by the p e r s p e c t i v e system of the Renaissance p a i n t e r s but r a t h e r "by the c r e a t i o n of f o r c e s i n the sense of 'Push and Pull'. , ? 75 "Since one cannot create ' r e a l depth' by c a r v i n g a hole i n the p i c t u r e , and since one should not attempt t o create the i l l u s i o n of depth by t o n a l grada- t i o n , depth as a p l a s t i c r e a l i t y must be two dimensional i n a formal sense as w e l l as i n the sense of c o l o r . " In t h i s statement, Hofmann r e v e a l s that p a i n t i n g t o him e n t a i l s both form and c o l o r , whereas i n the 1932 a r t i c l e he s t a t e d that a r t v i t a l i z e d form. "To create the phenomena of push and p u l l on a f l a t s u r f a c e , one has t o understand that by nature the p i c t u r e plane r e a c t s a u t o m a t i c a l l y i n the opposite 7 3 I b i d . , p.49. 7^Loc. c i t . Loc. c i t . 7 6Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1948, p.50. 37 77 d i r e c t i o n of the stimulus r e c e i v e d . " When a square area of c o l o r i s placed on the bare canvas an equal f o r c e i s d i r e c t e d o f f the canvas, perpendicular t o the canvas. Hofmann's statement, though s i m i l a r t o movement and counter-movement of 1932, defines the d i r e c t i o n more ex- p l i c i t l y and the a c t u a l r e s u l t s of an a p p l i c a t i o n of p a i n t t o the p i c t u r e plane. When two areas are painted, a r e l a t i o n s h i p i s set up between them. Our eyes focus on each and on both causing one to become more accentuated and t h e r e f o r e p r o j e c t and the other to recede. When more than two areas are i n v o l v e d , the eye and the mind t r y t o solve the m u l t i p l e e n t i t i e s by p a i r i n g the areas t o create the s p i r i t u a l higher t h i r d . This higher t h i r d then can be f u r t h e r p a i r e d w i t h another area u n t i l the whole p a i n t i n g i s s t i m u l a t e d by the a c t i o n of p a i r i n g and c r e a t - i n g higher t h i r d s . In c r e a t i n g such t h i r d s , the canvas i s expanded and contracted. The two areas are u n i f i e d t o draw the edges of the canvas together or are separated t o a f f e c t an increase t o the surface area. "Push and p u l l " and "expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n " can now be seen as being f o r c e s perpendicular to each other w i t h push and p u l l , p e r p e n d i c u l a r t o the p i c t u r e surface and expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n , p a r a l l e l t o the p i c t u r e s u r f a c e . Loc. c i t . 38 Push and p u l l can be e a s i l y created by mere planes of d i f f e r e n t c o l o r s . Hofmann saw i n Cezanne's l a t e r works "an enormous sense of volume, b r e a t h i n g , p u l s a t i n g , expand- ed i n g - c o n t r a c t i n g through h i s use of c o l o r . " Mood i s created as i s the a c t i o n of push and p u l l . The p r o j e c t i o n and r e c e s s i o n of c o l o r i s only a t t a i n e d i f the a r t i s t i s s e n s i t i v e to the c r e a t i o n of t h i s s u r r e a l e f f e c t . He does 7Q not use c o l o r alone, f o r p a i n t i n g i s "forming w i t h c o l o r . " ' 7 Color i s an i n t e g r a l part of form. This form i s based on the planar concept as the Cubists had done. They recognized the value of the p i c t u r e plane's two d i m e n s i o n a l i t y as d i d the I m p r e s s i o n i s t s a l - though the l a t t e r were r e a l l y "searching f o r the e n t i t y of 80 l i g h t , expressed through c o l o r . " The use of form and c o l o r i s found i n the f i n e and a p p l i e d a r t s , the l a t t e r being commercial or decorative 81 as s t a t e d i n the 1931 a r t i c l e . The d i f f e r e n c e between the f i n e and a p p l i e d a r t s l i e s i n the way of regarding the medium of expression. The a p p l i e d a r t i s t arranges the p h y s i c a l expressive elements merely p l e a s i n g l y and t a s t e - f u l l y . The f i n e a r t i s t "empathizes and f e e l s the i n t r i n s i c 78 Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1948, p. 51. 7 < 7 L o c . c i t . Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1948, p. 52. Hofmann, "On the Aims of A r t , " 1932, p. 9-10. 39 q u a l i t i e s of the medium of expression." Hofmann b e l i e v e d t h a t the concept of the union of the f i n e and a p p l i e d a r t s a t the Bauhaus to be a tragedy, f o r the f i n e a r t s "concern man's r e l a t i o n t o the world as a s p i r i t u a l being, " ^ 3 whereas a p p l i e d a r t s have merely a u t i l i t a r i a n purpose. "The d i s c o v e r i e s of the Bauhaus were mainly d i r e c t e d t o - wards a v i t a l surface animation by a b s t r a c t design. " ^ The d e c o r a t i v e a r t i s t does not need to empathize, and the r e s u l t i s merely two dimensional. For a decorative a r t t o become a f i n e a r t , t h a t work of a r t must possess "the phenomena of p l a s t i c movement ( f o r that) determines whether or not a work belongs i n the category of f i n e a r t s or i n d r the category of a p p l i e d a r t s . " J This l a s t statement de- f i n e s p e r f e c t l y how Hofmann d i f f e r e n t i a t e s between the two and shows the development of the concept of movement and v i t a l i t y i n the f i n e a r t s . In the e a r l i e r a r t i c l e s , a r t was t o have " v i t a l i z e d form,"movement. While s t i l l r e t a i n i n g t h i s concept, he has defined the l i m i t s of h i s movements, expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n , push and p u l l and how t o create them i n a t h e o r e t i c a l way. g 2Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1 9 4 8 , p . 5 2 . 8 3 I b i d . , p.5 3 . ^ 4 L o c . c i t . ^ L o c . c i t . 40 The a b i l i t y to create t h i s s p i r i t of movement i n the work of a r t w i l l determine i t s q u a l i t y . Once t h i s v i t a l i t y i s achieved, the work of a r t l i v e s f o r e v e r . As s t a t e d i n the 1931 a r t i c l e , "that one i s immortal i n a r t who i s able t o pervade h i s work w i t h h i s s o u l and s p i r i t . " 0 The a r t i s t t r a n s f e r s the v i t a l i t y and energy of h i s i n s p i r e d s e l f t o the medium and t h i s energy r e t a i n s i t s momentum as long as the work remains i n the same p h y s i c a l s t a t e . "The r e a l i n a r t never d i e s because i t s 87 nature i s predominantly s p i r i t u a l . " ' Hofmann b e l i e v e s t h a t i f one i s able to v i t a l i z e a p a i n t i n g u n t i l i t be- comes s p i r i t u a l , the a r t i s t w i l l become immortal f o r the s p i r i t u a l i s d e r i v e d from the a r t i s t and h i s experience. While the "Search f o r the Real" i s only a p o r t i o n of the monograph, the r e s t of the book i s devoted t o a p r e v i o u s l y published and discussed a r t i c l e , " P a i n t i n g and C u l t u r e , " 0 0 and "Excerpts from the Teaching of Hans Hofmann." This l a s t a r t i c l e i s a l s o mainly derived from the p r e v i o u s l y discussed m a t e r i a l but new elements can be found. In the s e c t i o n d e a l i n g w i t h the l i n e and the plane, he says that "the p i c t o r i a l s t r u c t u r e i s based on the plane concept. The l i n e o r i g i n a t e s i n the meeting of two °~6Hofmann, "On the Aims of A r t , " 1932, p. 11. °*7Hofmann, 'Search f o r the R e a l , 1948, p. 54. °"°*Hofmann, " P a i n t i n g and C u l t u r e , " 193.1-,p. 5-7. 41 p l a n e s . n ^ In h i s a r t i c l e , " P l a s t i c C r e a t i o n " of 1932, he s a i d that "the l i n e was a f u r t h e r development of the probably due t o the i n c r e a s i n g awareness of the use of planes i n r e l a t i o n to c o l o r . Works of t h i s p e r i o d , 1940 t o 1950, show l e s s use of l i n e to f u r t h e r d e f i n e planes. In " F a n t a s i a , " 1943, and "Effervescence," 1944, l i n e g r a d u a l l y l o s e s i t s purpose as a d e f i n i n g s t r u c t u r e . The white d r i b b l e of p a i n t i n " F a n t a s i a " ( p l a t e I) over- l a y s areas of h e a v i l y pigmented s u r f a c e s . The l i n e , as s t a t e d i n the 1932 a r t i c l e , i s the smallest p a i n t i n g plane. The s p i r a l and c a l l i g r a p h i c designs of paint d r i p p r o j e c t from i t s b e a u t i f u l l y mottled y e l l o w , green, mauve and blue background. In the lower l e f t hand corner there i s s t i l l the t r a c e of the l i n e as a method of d e f i n i t i o n . The sideways " C " - l i k e formation painted i n b l u e - b l a c k , i s defined by a white dripped l i n e . The white sharpens the edge of the black against the mauvish receding area. A c a v e r n - l i k e formation i s created by the white d e f i n i t i o n . This small area c o n t r a s t s w i t h h i s t h e o r i e s of expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n and push and p u l l . For here a n a t u r a l i s t i c hole i s created on the surface of the canvas as Renaissance p a i n t e r s had done. The contrast of the " C " - l i k e shape and p l a n e — t h e smallest p a i n t i n g plane. TT 90 The change i s 89 Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1948, P»70. Hofmann, " P l a s t i c C r e a t i o n , " 1932, p.37. 90 42 the dark downward d i r e c t i o n a l device i n the center lead the eye to the base of the canvas. Hofmann manages to excape from the hole-in-the-wall e f f e c t by placing a small area of the same blue-black and an area of green to the l e f t center. The eye i s taken i n a r , U"-like route and gradually lead into areas of increased color i n t e n s i t y . A t r a n s i t i o n a l passage can be seen i n the upper l e f t hand corner green area where the green of the l e f t center has- been combined with the yellow of the upper area. The eye i s caught by the brightness of the upper yellow area and directed down to the lower l e f t hand corner. Black and green areas work the eye up to the t r a n s i t i o n a l green area and the eye cycle begins again. The movement of the eye i s not continuously r o t a t i n g , for the dripped l i n e a r white areas detract the eye i n an o s c i l a t i n g motion p a r a l l e l to the picture plane. This p a r a l l e l o s c i l l a t i o n i s what Hofmann meant by contracting and expanding forces. A s i m i l a r motion i s also set up perpendicular to the picture plane. The alternating projection and recession from the canvas of the yellow and white drip areas i s what Hofmann meant by push and p u l l . Push and p u l l and expansion and contraction d i f f e r because t h e i r d i r e c t i o n of forces are perpendicular -to each other. The multi-directions of the forces set up tension. The expanding and projecting forces of the yellow i s 43 contrasted and balanced i n a dynamic e q u i l i b r i u m by the more sombre and heavy lower areas. The overlays of white d r i p t i e the composition together and a l s o create a l i v e - l i n e s s of movement and d i r e c t i o n . The d r i p areas then, are used f o r both t h e i r l i n e a r and planar q u a l i t i e s . In "Effervescence", 1944, ( p l a t e I I ) there i s an absence of the l i n e a r elements. Each has been set or dripped as a planar u n i t . Lines created are the meeting of two planes of c o l o r . In the upper l e f t hand corner, the mauve i s blended over the green to hide the a c t u a l edges. Even the t h i n d r i p l i n e s i n the p a i n t i n g are not l i n e a r f o r they are placed against a c o n t r a s t i n g back- ground i n order f o r them t o p r o j e c t . In the lower l e f t hand corner, the black d r i p oozing from the c e n t r a l area c o n t r a s t s w i t h i t s red background. Though almost l i n e a r , the red on the y e l l o w background o v e r l a i d w i t h the black d r i p undulates and creates a push and p u l l e f f e c t . I f the y e l l o w p r o j e c t s , the red recedes and the eye does not focus on the black d r i p . I f the red p r o j e c t s , the black p r o j e c t s f u r t h e r - i t i s the focus - and the y e l l o w recedes. This whole composition i s b a s i c a l l y formed by the a l t e r a t i o n of focus t o create a v i t a l p a i n t i n g . The p a i n t - i n g i s composed semi-symmetrically w i t h a d i a g o n a l c r o s s i n g from the upper r i g h t t o the lower l e f t . The design on e i t h e r side of the s o - c a l l e d diagonal are not exact but 44 s i m i l a r shapes are represented i n the c o n t r a s t i n g c o l o r i n an obvious design f o r balance. The large c e n t r a l white mass w i t h i t s two h o r n - l i k e d r i p p i n g s i s r e f l e c t e d i n a s i m i l a r black area t o the r i g h t . As was s t a t e d e a r l i e r , the shapes are not e x a c t l y a l i k e f o r there i s a l s o a conscious attempt t o achieve a dynamic e q u i l i b r i u m . The l a r g e c e n t r a l black area at the top of the canvas bears l i t t l e resemblance t o the white area of the bottom center. Here one can see t h a t Hofmann has taken i n t o account the a t t r a c t i o n to the top black area and the b a s i c l e f t - r i g h t d i r e c t i o n of the base caused by the b r i g h t y e l l o w . The l a r g e black area can be followed through t o form a v e r t i c a l black blob. This appearance causes a h o r i z o n t a l and v e r t i c a l e f f e c t . I f the eye s h i f t s s l i g h t l y t o the top from the bottom, a d i f f e r e n t focus i s a t t a i n e d and the upper black blob expands o f f the canvas as does the yellow-white bottom area. The y e l l o w and mauve areas around the corners create movement i n the push and p u l l realm. At once the y e l l o w p r o j e c t s and the mauve recedes and v i c e versa. The motion i s not v i b r a n t or e l s e the eye would be shaken o f f the canvas. The area of green t o the upper l e f t balances the b l a c k e r area of r i g h t center. A c t u a l l y the mass of the green a t t r a c t s the eye to the mauve because the contrast i s so subtle and not b l a t a n t as i n the y e l l o w and black area. By means of the c o l o r planes ., . 45 o r i e n t e d to the d i r e c t i o n of force and t o balance, the 91 dynamic e q u i l i b r i u m of "Effervescence" i s achieved. The t o t a l e f f e c t created i n these p a i n t i n g s i s "a deep a r t i s t i c expression, the product of a conscious f e e l i n g f o r r e a l i t y . This concerns both r e a l i t y of nature and the r e a l i t y of the i n t r i n s i c l i f e of the medium of e x p r e s s i o n . " 9 2 Consciousness i s the main f a c t o r t h a t d i f f e r e n t i a t e s the work of an a r t i s t and the work of a c h i l d . Undoubtedly the work of Hans Hofmann and other A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s have been compared t o the a r t of the k i n d e r g a r t e n . The a r t of a c h i l d i s f r e e from a l l conscious i n h i b i t i o n s . The work i s the express- i o n of the c h i l d ' s subconscious and h i s emotion. The work created by an a d u l t a r t i s t i s s i g n i f i c a n t i f there i s "a consciousness of experience as the work develops and i s emotionally enlarged through the greater command of the 93 expression medium. n " "The work of a r t goes through many phases of development but i n each phase i t i s always a 94 work of a r t . " The a d u l t i s able to c o n t r o l and use the medium of expression t o express what he wants whereas the 9 The student d i d not see enough of Hofmann's work t o f e e l q u a l i f i e d t o d i s c u s s any more works, other than those seen by the student e i t h e r i n Toronto, New York, San F r a n c i s c o , Berkeley or Los Angeles. 9 2Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1948, p.67. 93 Loc. c i t . 94 _ Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1948, p.69. 46 child lacks the technical control and manual dexterity. The adult inclusion of the consciousness is dual in that sense that i t is intellectual and s p i r i t u a l . This s p i r i t - u a l , derived from the unconscious, has been brought to the conscious level and put under the control of the intellect thereby making i t an aspect of the i n t e l l e c t . The resulting "idea can only be materialized with the help of a medium of expression, the inherent qualities of which must surely be sensed and understood in order to 95 become the carrier of an idea."'^ "The work of art is finished from the point of view of the a r t i s t when feeling and perception have re- 96 suited in a s p i r i t u a l synthesis."^ The medium of ex- pression and the a r t i s t ' s translation of his "accumulation of experience gained from nature as the source of his 97 inspiration" y are combined to create the work of art; an entity above either of i t s two basis, a higher t h i r d . The a r t i s t has so f u l l y expressed his idea that he himself is self-satisfied. The satisfaction that the observer feels is aesthetic. "Aesthetic enjoyment is caused by the perception 9 5 I b i d . , p. 7 0 . 9^Hofmann, Search for the Real, 1948, p .69. 9 7 L o c . c i t . 47 of hidden laws. The aim of a r t i s always to provide such joys f o r us i n every form of expression. The f a c u l t y t o enjoy r e s t s w i t h the observer."98 An idea transformed by the a r t i s t i n t o the medium of expression i s presented to the observer. What i s a t t a i n e d from the work s o l e l y de- pends on the observer. Hofmann's t h i r d group of w r i t i n g s contains numerous short a r t i c l e s from e x h i b i t i o n s at the Sammuel Kootz G a l l e r y and at the U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s ' E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American A r t . Also included are i n t e r v i e w s and published a r t i c l e s . In t h i s l a s t group of w r i t i n g s , the r o l e of c o l o r i n p a i n t i n g i s r e a l i z e d and the previous- l y c i t e d aspect of a work of a r t are f u r t h e r d e f i n e d . The w r i t i n g s have not been organized s t r i c t l y c h r o n o l o g i c a l l y but grouped according to subject and theory development. In 1949, an i n t e r v i e w f o r A r t s and A r c h i t e c t u r e a appeared and i n 1951, an e x p l a n a t i o n f o r the U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American A r t . In both these a r t i c l e s , Hofmann r e p l i e d t o the question, what makes an A r t i s t ? and discussed the l i m i t a t i o n s of h i s senses and t h e i r e f f e c t on h i s perception of appearances. Hofmann r e a l i z e d t h a t when the a r t i s t i s able t o a f f e c t the observer because the a r t i s t has an inherent q u a l i t y w i t h i n h i m s e l f . I t has not been l e a r n t but was Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1948, p.74. 48 i n b o r n . The a r t i s t has a " c r e a t i v e i n s t i n c t , a searching oo mind and the highest e x h a l t a t i o n of the s o u l . " 7 7 With these t r a i t s he i s able t o "transpose the deepest and w e i g h t i e s t experience i n t o a new dimension of the s p i r i t . " - 1 " 0 0 The work of a r t he creates i s a new r e a l i t y , and a l s o r e f l e c t s "the whole behaviour of the man ( a r t i s t ) , e t h i c a l c o n v i c t i o n s , and h i s awareness of c r e a t i v e 101 r e s p o n s i b i l i t i e s . " Hofmann f e l t t h a t the humanistic 102 q u a l i t y of P a r i s allowed f o r h i s freedom of development. I n that atmosphere he could create w i t h "a f r e e and u n i v e r s a l i n t e r w o r k i n g of a l l contemporaries w i t h constant 103 reference to what he r e c e i v e d and l e a r n t from the past." J Although he held a reverence f o r the past the only v a l i d use, i n h i s o p i n i o n , of the past was the d e p i c t i o n of h i s own v i s i o n . What the a r t i s t sees around him has been a f f e c t e d by one's past experience. One has " d e f i n i t e ideas about the object i n s p i t e of the f a c t that the object may or 9 % a n s Hofmann, "Reply to Questionaire and Comments on a Recent E x h i b i t i o n , " A r t s and A r c h i t e c t u r e , v o l . 66, no. 11, Nov., 1949, p. 27. 100T .. Loc. c i t . 1 0 1 Hofmann, "Reply t o Questionaire ...," 1949, p. 45. 102- . -Loc. c i t . 1 0 3 Hofmann, "Reply t o Questionaire ...," 1949, p. 46. 104 may not have m u l t i - s u b o r d i n a t e p a r t s . " We see an o b j e c t at d i f f e r e n t times from d i f f e r e n t viewpoints and these f a c t s are a l l used i n the p e r c e p t i o n of t h a t o b j e c t a t a l a t e r date. " A l l p a r t s t o g e t h e r are summarized i n the i d e a of the o b j e c t and the idea of the category t o 105 which the o b j e c t belongs." As Hofmann s a i d i n a l a t e r a r t i c l e , "When I p a i n t a sunset, I p a i n t a thousand sun- s e t s of which I was a p a r t . " H i s accumulation of past experience i s brought f o r t h when he wishes t o use i t . When brought to the consciousness, t h i s accumulation too o f t e n can be d e t r i m e n t a l i n t h a t one may "act as s l a v e s to h a b i t , unfree and automatic, l i k e i n a mental 10? p r i s o n . " Hofmann b e l i e v e s t h a t accumulated thought should be i n c o r p o r a t e d but should not r u l e the order of thought and c r e a t i o n . The a r t i s t s mind should be f r e e t o experience nature c o n t i n u a l l y and s t i l l be able t o r e c e i v e a new s e n s a t i o n from i t each time. 104 Hans Hofmann, " ," c i t e d i n U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American P a i n t i n g , March 4 - A p r i l 1, 1951, Urbana, U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s , 19517 p. 1877~" 105 T , Loc. c i t . Hans Hofmann, " ," c i t e d i n U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American P a i n t i n g , March 7 - A p r i l 7, 1963, Urbana, U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s , 1963, p. 86. 107 Hans Hofmann, U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n ..., 1951, p. 187. 50 In a 1951 catalogue f o r h i s annual show at the Sammuel Kootz G a l l e r y , Hofmann published h i s a r t i c l e , "Space P i c t o r i a l l y R e a l i z e d Through the I n t r i n s i c F a c u l t y of Colors t o Express Volume." Dealing mainly w i t h c o l o r , he explained the p r o p e r t i e s of pure c o l o r and t h e i r e f f e c t on the a r t i s t and the observer. Unbroken pure c o l o r can be used by the a r t i s t without any d i s t u r b i n g e f f e c t s I f he t r a n s l a t e s a s p a t i a l experience of nature or the automatic response of the p i c t u r e plane i n t o a p l a s t i c statement and 108 places i t on the p i c t u r e s u r f a c e . In t h i s way, c o l o r from the s t a r t i s a formal problem which must be taken i n t o account as the other formal elements must. This statement i s a f u r t h e r development to the s o l u t i o n of the formal and c r e a t i v e elements. In 1931, the formal elements were the l i n e , the plane, volumes and the r e s u l t i n g complexes. His l a t e r l i s t of c r e a t i v e elements i n c l u d e d a l l the formal elements w i t h the a d d i t i o n of c o l o r and l i g h t . His s t a t e - ment of 1951 makes c o l o r and l i g h t a formal problem and p a r t of the formal elements. In f a c t , formal and c r e a t i v e elements have become one. In c r e a t i n g the work of a r t , pure c o l o r should be used. Pure c o l o r can be "any mixture of c o l o r as long as 1 n e t x u o H a n s Hofmann, "Space P i c t o r i a l l y R e a l i z e d through the I n t r i n s i c F a c u l t y of.Colors t o Express Volume,"cited i n Hans Hofmann E x h i b i t i o n Catalogue, Nov. 13 - Dec. 1, New York, Sammuel Kootz G a l l e r y , 1951. 51 such a mixture i s handled f l a t and unbroken. The t o t a l i t y of i t s formal extension a f f e c t s only one c o l o r shade and w i t h i t one l i g h t m e a n i n g . W h e n t h i s area of pure c o l o r i s juxtaposed onto another pure c o l o r area, "each c o l o r becomes t r a n s l u c e n t by depth p e n e t r a t i o n s , and w i t h i t , volume of v a r i e d degrees."'1""'"0 The volume created i s p r o p o r t i o n a l t o the depth r e q u i r e d t o b r i n g the canvas back t o two d i m e n s i o n a l i t y and on i t s placement on the canvas, both which are i n t e r r e l a t e d . "Any c o l o r shade must be i n the volume t h a t i t suggested, the exact p l a s t i c equivalent of i t s formal placement w i t h i n the 111 composition." From t h i s i t can be seen t h a t each c o l o r shade must be so placed i n the composition t h a t i t r e f l e c t s the volume t h a t i s to be depicted i n t h a t area. Small c o l o r areas should not be used f o r they would be blended by perception and be seen as a black and white f u n c t i o n , t o n a l . By using l a r g e r areas of separated c o l o r s , t h i s i n t e r v a l f a c i l i t y makes c o l o r a p l a s t i c means. The c o n t r a s t s between the c o l o r s w i l l create a l i v e l y and v i b r a n t volume suggestion. Also by the contrast of c o l o r s , a mystic express- i o n i s created. Contrasts are handled not haphazardly, 1 0 9 L o c . c i t 110T ' c i t Loc. c i t I l l Loc. c i t 52 but "only i n r e l a t i o n t o a s t r i c t mastery of the c o l o r s w i t h the composition through the placement of the c o l o r s . " H 2 Depending on placement, c o l o r and c o n t r a s t s , the i n t e r - r e l a t i o n s h i p between these q u a l i t i e s creates a p s y c h o l o g i c a l e f f e c t . Therefore, i f the composition i s a l t e r e d s l i g h t l y a new p s y c h o l o g i c a l rapport w i l l 113 develop. "This e x p l a i n s the magic of p a i n t i n g . " During 1952 two a r t i c l e s were published i n e x h i b i t i o n catalogues. As w i l l be seen i n the f o l l o w i n g paragraphs t h e i r contents overlap. The f i n e and a p p l i e d a r t s are d i s t i n g u i s h e d by t h e i r d i f f e r e n t approaches, empathy being the d i f f e r e n t i a t i o n between the two. Creat- ions dependence on experience w i l l i n the end determine what work of a r t can and w i l l represent. In c r e a t i n g such a work of a r t , Hofmann would employ h i s dual c a p a c i t y of e x p e r i e n c i n g . The f i r s t i s h i s r e a c t i o n t o time and the m a t e r i a l world around him. The second i s that which makes him an a r t i s t , " p r o f e s s i o n a l consciousness." What t h i s q u a l i t y a c t u a l l y i s , Hofmann d i d not c l e a r l y d e f i n e . I t e n t a i l s " a l l the b a s i c requirements of h i s p r o f e s s i o n which makes p i c t o r i a l r e a l i z a t i o n of a l l the other r e - Loc. c i t . 113 Loc. c i t . 53 quirements p o s s i b l e . " 1 1 4 In each experience there i s the presence of empathy, "the capacity of f i n d i n g and g i v i n g of i n t r i n s i c values of the things i n l i f e as well 115 as an a r t i s t i c r e a l i z a t i o n . " J The a r t i s t must be able to transpose himself into animate and inanimate objects. I t i s necessary f o r the act of creation. Creation i s based on an i n i t i a t i n g concept which i s derived from the experience of the world around, nature. Hofmann had made a similar statement i n the 1915 Prospectus. To experience deeply requires the power of empathy. Once a concept i s formed i t goes through a series of changes when the a r t i s t i s transposing i t into the physical e n t i t y of the medium. He must take into account the q u a l i t i e s of the medium by empathizing into i t . "The execution of the concept asks from the a r t i s t the penetration of the inner l i f e of the medium of ex- pression." The work of art created i s a new Reality for i t has a s o l i t a r y existence. It represents the personality of the a r t i s t , his soul, mind, s e n s i b i l i t y and temperment, **Hans Hofmann, " ," cited i n University of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American Painting, March 2 - A p r i l 15, 1962, University of I l l i n o i s , Urbana, 1952, p.199. 1 1 ^ L o c . c i t . 116 Hofmann, University of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n. . . , 1952, p.200. — ~~~ 54 I t i s the " g l o r i f i c a t i o n of the human s p i r i t , " f o r i t holds that s p i r i t i n a s t a t e of e t e r n a l r e j u v e n a t i o n i n answer t o an everchanging world. By h o l d i n g the s p i r i t of the a r t i s t , he becomes immortal. Art i s a l s o a " c u l t u r a l documentation of the time i n which i t was pro- 117 duced." (Harold Rosenberg has s t a t e d that "Hofmann 118 separated a r t from s o c i a l c o n f l i c t " during the middle t h i r t i e s . ) "Modern a r t i s a symbol of our democracy the a r t i s t through h i s a r t i s the p e r s o n i f i c a t i o n of democracy's fundamental p r i n c i p l e i n being the higher ex- ample of s p i r i t u a l freedom i n h i s performance of uncon- 119 d i t i o n a l , u n r e s t r i c t e d c r e a t i v e n e s s . " Because of the burdensomeness of everyday l i f e i n a democratic or other s o c i e t y , a r t i s a counter-balance t o i t . The r e l e a s e achieved from a r t can be a t t a i n e d i n both the f i n e and the a p p l i e d a r t s . The d i f f e r e n c e be- tween the f i n e and the a p p l i e d a r t s i s the E q u a l i t y 12D through which the image becomes s e l f - e v i d e n t . " There i s no b a s i c d i f f e r e n c e between t h i s d e f i n i t i o n and e a r l i e r ones d e a l i n g w i t h symphonic and decorative p a i n t i n g . Fine 117 Hans Hofmann, "A Statement by Hans Hofmann," c i t e d i n Hans Hofmann E x h i b i t i o n Catalogue, Oct. 26 --Nov. 22, New York, Sammuel Kootz G a l l e r y , 1952. 118 Harold Rosenberg, "Hans Hofmann's L i f e C l a s s , " P o r t f o l i o and A r t News Annual., no. 6, Autumn, 1962, p. 25. 1 1 9 Hofmann, "Reply t o q u e s t i o n a i r e ...," 1949, p. 45. 120 Hofmann, "A Statement ...," 1952. 55 a r t s or symphonic p a i n t i n g i s "the end product of an i n - tense accumulation of i n t r i n s i c values which have pre- conditioned each other a e s t h e t i c a l l y i n a step-by-step development t o summarize f i n a l l y i n the c r e a t i o n of t h i s a l l dominant s i n g u l a r , luminous and t r a n s l u c e n t volume t h a t makes the s p a t i a l t o t a l i t y and monumentality of the p i c t u r e . " The f l a t n e s s of the decorative a r t s i s d e r i v e d from the constant p i c t o r i a l balance which "depends on the formal placement of the c o l o r s w i t h i n the composit- i o n and c r e a t i o n of v a r i e d i n t e r v a l s that makes: c o l o r a p l a s t i c means of f i r s t o r d e r . " 1 2 2 In both, Hofmann has placed a greater emphasis on l i g h t and c o l o r . The length of the d e f i n i t i o n s e x h i b i t s Hofmann's wordy s t y l e of w r i t i n g but most i m p o r t a n t l y , shows the i n c l u s i v e n e s s and development of ,his t h e o r i e s up t o t h i s date. The a r t i c l e s j u s t c i t e d , as has been seen, are s t r a i g h t forward and do not a p p r e c i a b l y change or add t o Hofmann's theory. In J u l y of 1953, he published in New Venture h i s a r t i c l e "The R e s u r r e c t i o n of the P l a s t i c A r t s . " I t f u r t h e r d e f i n e d Hofmann's stand f o r movement on the p i c t u r e plane. As Hofmann s a i d , the R e s u r r e c t i o n of the 1 2 1 T Loc. c i t . 122 L o c . . c i t . 56 P l a s t i c Arts was the "rediscovery of the L i f e endowed p i c t u r e s u r f a c e . " 1 2 3 The p i c t u r e surface a u t o m a t i c a l l y responds t o "any p l a s t i c animation with an a e s t h e t i c e q u i v a l e n t i n the opposite d i r e c t i o n of the r e c e i v e d i m p u l s e s . " 1 2 4 When an area of paint i s a p p l i e d to the canvas, a p r o p o r t i o n a l area and f o r c e pushes away from the canvas towards the observer. The d i f f e r e n c e between the pushing i n t o and p u l l i n g out of creates a f e e l i n g of depth and space. "The e n t i r e depth problem i n the v i s u a l a r t s culminates i n t h i s way i n an emotionally c o n t r o l l e d a e s t h e t i c p r o j e c t i o n i n t o the hidden laws of the p i c t u r e 12 5 s u r f a c e . " J When one perceives as depth on a canvas p a i n t e d w i t h knowledge of the p i c t o r i a l surface's hidden laws, one i s a c t u a l l y seeing the " s h i f t i n g " back and f o r t h of planes. The depth created has volume f o r i t i s negative space or form. The combination of both p o s i t i v e and negative space or form creates the whole e n t i t y of space. In c r e a t i n g such an i l l u s o r y depth, one must take i n t o account formal placement ( l i n e , planes, volumes) 123 •^Hans Hofmann, "The R e s u r r e c t i o n of the P l a s t i c A r t s , " (1953). c i t e d i n Hans Hofmann, New York, Harry N. Abrams,-I 9 6 3, p.4 4 . 124 T Loc. c i t . 125T Loc. c i t . 57 and c o l o r s a t u r a t i o n on the formal elements. One does not separate these two aspects but solves them simultaneously w i t h r e l a t i o n t o the s p a t i a l problem f o r the concept t o be d e p i c t e d . The a r t i s t i s able t o work these two by r e a l i z i n g that the p i c t o r i a l surface can be experienced i n a way s i m i l a r to that of nature. Nature i s i n a c t u a l i t y three dimensional but the appear- ance to our eyes i s two dimensional. Due to past l e a r n - i n g and experience, the e f f e c t of the two dimensional appearance on our perception i s t h a t of three dimension- a l i t y . In a s i m i l a r way, the p i c t u r e surface i s two dimensional but because of the combined e f f e c t of p l a c e - ment and c o l o r s a t u r a t i o n , the p i c t u r e surface has the e f f e c t of three d i m e n s i o n a l i t y . Hofmann r e t a i n e d the theory of e f f e c t and appearances as stated i n the 1932 a r t i c l e , " P l a s t i c C r e a t i o n . " The i l l u s o r y p i c t o r i a l space a l t e r n a t e s between two d i m e n s i o n a l i t y and three d i m e n s i o n a l i t y c r e a t i n g the push and p u l l e f f e c t . The p i c t o r i a l space i s "an a e s t h e t i c a l l y created space, (and) an a c t i v a t e d f l u c t u a t i n g space balanced w i t h i n the periphery of the inherent laws of the p i c t u r e surface i n r e l a t i o n t o which a l l employed p i c t o r i a l means must f u n c t i o n p l a s t i c a l l y . " 1 2 6 The p i c t u r e plane has a d e f i n i t e l i m i t t o which p r o j e c t i o n and r e c e s s i o n can occur. 126_ Loc. c i t . 58 The amount depends on the surface's s i z e , shape, ground and the a r t i s t . Hofmann himself has not d e f i n e d and explained any one o f h i s p a i n t i n g s i n r e l a t i o n t o these l i m i t s . In an a r t i c l e f o r the Bennington Alumni Quarterly he was asked t o do j u s t t h a t , but i n s t e a d he discussed h i s a t t i t u d e when p a i n t i n g . A p a i n t i n g to him "means the immense s t r u g g l e through which the p i c t u r e has gone on i t s development to come to the r e s u l t which i s f i n a l l y o f f e r e d to the p u b l i c . E i t h e r h i s p i c t u r e s communicate or they communicate n o t . " 1 2 7 ^he observer's message i s a p i c t u r e and that i t was "created as 128 nature has created a f l o w e r . " This could appear t o be a g o d - l i k e approach t o p a i n t i n g . Hofmann even i m p l i e s i t when he suggested i n an e a r l i e r a r t i c l e that a r t i s a means to i m m o r t a l i t y . Such may be the case but Hofmann i s t r y i n g undoubtedly t o show the s i m i l a r i t y of the growth f a c t o r of both p l a n t s and p a i n t i n g s . He sees the bare canvas as the seed, the a r t i s t ' s i n s p i r a t i o n as i t s source of l i f e , the c r e a t i v e elements such as l i n e , plane, volumes, complexes and c o l o r as the f e r t i l i z e r and nourishment f o r the seed 127 'Hans Hofmann, "Hofmann E x p l a i n i n g h i s P a i n t i n g s , " Bennington College Alumnae Q u a r t e r l y , v o l . 7 , n o . l , Feb. 1, 1955, P.23. 128T Loc. c i t . 59 and the completed p a i n t i n g as the culmination of the p l a n t , i t s f l o w e r . Hofmann does not t r y to make you l i k e or d i s l i k e h i s completed p a i n t i n g s , p o s s i b l y one of the reasons why he does not e x p l a i n an i n d i v i d u a l p a i n t i n g . Each of h i s p a i n t i n g s , he b e l i e v e s , "has a l i f e of i t s own created by p i c t o r - i a l means. I f they are not understood today, they are understood tomorrow, maybe i n a hundred years, maybe i n two hundred years. But I know they w i l l be understood." 1 2 9 I f Hofmann means h i s p a i n t i n g s w i l l be understood, he undoubtedly b e l i e v e s that h i s w r i t i n g s w i l l f a c i l i t a t e t h e i r understanding. As s t a t e d before, he does not d i s c u s s h i s t h e o r i e s i n r e l a t i o n to any of h i s p a i n t i n g s . As i n h i s 1955 a r t i c l e "The Color Problem i n Pure P a i n t i n g , " a t h e o r e t i c a l d i s c u s s i o n i s undertaken. Color achieves prominence over form because of i t s a b i l i t y to form r e - l a t i o n s and i n t e r v a l s . "Push and P u l l " can a l s o be achieved by c o l o r but c o l o r development depends on form f o r which the c o l o r s e x i s t ; so i t must develop simultan- eously. Color can be used i n e i t h e r of two ways i n a p a i n t - i n g . I f c o l o r i s used s o l e l y as a black and white f u n c t i o n f o r the c r e a t i o n of form and volume, i t i s a t o n a l p a i n t - i n g . In another approach, pure p a i n t i n g , c o l o r i s used " f o r 129LOC. c i t 60 a p l a s t i c and p s y c h o l o g i c a l p u r p o s e . " 1 3 0 Hofmann's use of the word p l a s t i c i n connection w i t h c o l o r shows h i s increas- ed awareness of c o l o r ' s volume forming q u a l i t y as s t a t e d i n "Space P i c t o r i a l l y R e a l i z e d through the I n t r i n s i c F a c u l t y of Color to Express Volumes," 1951. Pure p a i n t i n g i s a "rhythmic interweaving of the c o l o r scale, " x 3 1 which r e s u l t s i n simultaneous c o n t r a s t s . These c o n t r a s t s create the l i g h t i n a p a i n t i n g . Colors are.placed on the canvas so that they r e l a t e t o each other i n a " c o l o r development" upon which t h e i r formal grouping u l t i m a t e l y depends."132 Hofmann now says t h a t "formal and c o l o r development go on s i m u l t a n e o u s l y . " 1 ^ i n the e a r l i e r a r t i c l e s Hofmann d i f f e r - e n t i a t e d between the two i n h i s d e f i n i t i o n of formal and c r e a t i v e e l e m e n t s . 1 ^ The simultaneousness of these two developments u n i t e the formal and c r e a t i v e elements i n t o one and the same category. In t h i s 1955 a r t i c l e he says 13 5 t h a t c o l o r ' s f u n c t i o n i s f o r m a l . Color i s t h e r e f o r e a 3 Hans Hofmann, "The Color Problem i n Pure P a i n t - i n g , " (1955), c i t e d i n F r e d e r i c k S. Wight, Hans Hofmann, B e r k e l e y , U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a P r e s s , 1957, p.51 1 3 1 I b i d . , p.52. 1 3 2 I b l d . , p.54. 1 3 3 I b i d . , p.52. 1 3 4 Hofmann, E x h i b i t i o n Catalogue Berkeley, 1931, Hofmann, " P l a s t i c Creation, 1 ? 1932, p. 35 - 38. 1 3 5 Hofmann, "The Color Problem ...," (1955), p.54. 61 f o r m a l and c r e a t i v e element, f u r t h e r u n i t i n g the two i n d i s t i n g u i s h a b l e c a t e g o r i e s . C o l o r , as used by i t s e l f , i s not c r e a t i v e . I t must be used as an i n t e g r a l p a r t o f forms. "Color becomes c r e a t i v e by f o r c e , by s e n s i n g the i n n e r l i f e by which c o l o r s respond t o each other through the c r e a t e d c r e a t - i v i t y of i n t e r v a l s . " 1 3 ^ These i n t e r v a l s are c r e a t e d by two p h y s i c a l c a r r i e r s on the canvas which cause the eye t o r e a c t t o each and t o both. These p h y s i c a l c a r r i e r s form w i t h i n the observer a n o n - p h y s i c a l e n t i t y which governs the ob server's v i s i o n of the two o b j e c t s . That n o n - p h y s i c a l e n t i t y , " h y p e r p h y s i c a l o v e r t o n e , " 1 3 7 i s what Hofmann c a l l e d 138 i n p r e v i o u s a r t i c l e s a h i g h e r t h i r d , which was used i n c o n n e c t i o n w i t h a r e l a t i v e meaning. I t can now be seen t h a t an i n t e r v a l and a r e l a t i o n are r e l a t e d t o Hofmann*s terms. "Both are u n i t e d t o c a r r y a meaning through t h e i r i n t e r - 139 a c t i o n . " The v a r i a t i o n of f o r c e between the two hyper- p h y s i c a l overtones i s the r e l a t i o n . T h i s r e l a t i o n i s a "simultaneous a c c e l e r a t e d i n t e n s i f i c a t i o n or d i m i n u t i o n " 1 4 0 o f two c o l o r s i n an i n t e r v a l . An i n t e r v a l shows an i n t e r - 1 3 6 I b i d . , p . 5 3 . 137 Loc. c i t . 1 od Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1 9 4 8 " , p . 4 7 . 1 3 9 Hofmann, "The C o l o r Problem ...," ( 1 9 5 5 ) , p . 5 3 . 1 4 0 T Loc. c i t . connectedness between two areas of c o l o r which can be j o i n e d t o form a higher t h i r d . The f o r c e between the c o l o r areas i s governed by the r e l a t i o n . Hofmann*s con- cept of an i n t e r v a l had changed from the 1931 a r t i c l e i n which he s a i d t h a t " i n t e r v a l s were c o l o r planes standing i n g r e a t e s t p o s s i b l e c o n t r a s t s t o i t s neighbours w i t h i n the balance of the whole."141 This idea leads t o the theory of expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n as discussed i n 1948 The d e f i n i t i o n of the i n t e r v a l of 1931 i s however able t o b r i n g a work of a r t together and u n i f y i t by the con- t r a s t c r e a t i n g a focus. The combination of the o v e r a l l c o n t r a s t s can create a l u m i n o s i t y on the canvas. As s t a t e d i n 1955, these i n t e r v a l s can a l s o operate between i n t e r v a l s themselves, " l i k e sound i n m u s i c . " 1 4 2 Because i n t e r v a l s amalgamate and grow, that "makes c o l o r a p l a s t means of f i r s t of o r d e r . " 1 4 3 From the p l a s t i c i t y which expands c o l o r monument- a l i t y and conversely c o n t r a c t s i t i n an c o u n t e r - a c t i o n , c o l o r can work w i t h the formal development of push and p u l l . Hofmann s a i d e a r l i e r that c o l o r i t s e l f p r o j e c t s and recedes much i n the same sense as "push and p u l l . " He now says that c o l o r combined w i t h the formal develop- 1 4 1 Hofmann, "On the Aims of A r t , " 1932,'p.9. 1 4 2 Hofmann, "The Color Problem ...," (1955), p.53 143 Loc. c i t . 63 ments of the work i s able t o increase or decrease the i n t e n s i t y of e i t h e r the push _or p u l l . I f one l a r g e area of red and a small area of y e l l o w were placed on a canvas, the l a r g e red area would p r o j e c t w i t h a stronger f o r c e than the y e l l o w . The "push" forward would a l s o be f a s t e r , as the red area catches the eye f i r s t . The eye focuses on the red area . f i r s t but i t a l s o sees the y e l l o w . By a l t e r i n g the focus to the yellow, the red would " p u l l " back and the yellow would push forward. This "push" of the y e l l o w i s not as strong as t h a t f o r the red f o r the y e l l o w as compared t o the white ground does not c o n t r a s t as sharply and has not an area as l a r g e as the red. Depending on the d i s t a n c e of separa- t i o n between the two c o l o r s , there i s the i n t e r v a l f a c u l t y which v a r i e s the i n t e r a c t i o n between the two, a f f e c t i n g t h e i r expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n , push and p u l l . I f the colored areas were on a dark ground the suggestion of depth would be g r e a t e r . Black would tend t o recede c r e a t i n g a greater volume and a l s o a darker canvas w i t h l e s s l u m i n o s i t y . I t i s the a b i l i t y t o synchronize the development of both c o l o r and form i n a p a i n t i n g which w i l l lead t o a s u c c e s s f u l work. In each case, they a f f e c t the p i c t u r e plane s i m i l a r l y i n t h a t there i s an automatic r e a c t i o n from the p i c t u r e plane whenever any of t h e i r 64 developments occur on the p i c t u r e plane. I t must be r e a l i z e d that c o l o r development leads c o n t i n u a l l y t o ever- changing m u l t i - i n t e r p r e t a t i o n s . Through c o l o r ' s s e l f - 144 s u s t a i n i n g development, form i s determined. Because c o l o r e x i s t s on a form, such as a plane or volume, how and where the c o l o r i s placed on the canvas determines i n the end how the formal development w i l l occur. This a t t i t u d e of Hofmann has developed since h i s f i r s t w r i t - ings when he s a i d that l i n e , plane and formal complexes 145 were the most important f a c t o r s f o r formal development. L a t e r i n a d i s c u s s i o n of formal and c r e a t i v e elements, 146 we see t h a t form i s a r e s u l t of l i g h t and v i c e versa. Hofmann now has placed l i g h t and c o l o r as the determinants of form. Color, because of i t s dual r o l e f o r i t s own develop- ment and formal development, creates the phenomena of push and p u l l which i s the b a s i s f o r p i c t o r i a l l i f e . Color by c o n t r a s t s w i t h neighbouring areas of c o l o r creates the v i b r a n t e f f e c t upon the v i s i o n of the eye f i r s t . The simultaneous contrast i s not t o n a l i n the sense that the c o l o r s merge together but t h a t " t h e i r meeting (to form c o n t r a s t s ) i s the consequence of the c o l o r and form 1 / f Z fHofmann, "The Color Problem ...," (1955), p.54. 1 4^Hofmann, E x h i b i t i o n Catalogue ...,Berkeley,1931. 146 Hofmann, " P l a s t i c C r e a t i o n , " 1932. 6 5 development of the work. Form and c o l o r operate each 1 4 7 i n i t s own sovereign rhythm." The l a s t statement seems t o c o n t r a d i c t Hofmann's other statement i n the same a r t i c l e t h a t " c o l o r development determines, f o r m . " 1 ^ What Hofmann probably means i s t h a t although form i s determined by c o l o r placement, the placement of form has i t s own set of laws which i t must f o l l o w and obey. Both form and c o l o r a r e , however, governed by the P a i n t i n g Laws, s t a t e d i n "On the Aims of A r t , " 1 9 5 2 . The grouping of colored areas i n t h e i r formal development r e s u l t s i n a u n i t c a l l e d a complex. "In ^spite of a m u l t i p l i c i t y of shaded d i f f e r e n c e s , t h e i r s y n t h e s i s presents i t s e l f as one c o l o r complex c o n t r a s t - ed w i t h another and a l l the other complexes w i t h i n the 1 4 9 p i c t o r i a l t o t a l i t y . " The i n t e r v a l l e d r e l a t i o n between the c o l o r s of that area react t o form a s o l i d p r o j e c t i n g and receding area. The r e l a t i o n s h i p between a l l the complexes w i t h t h e i r balance of push and p u l l , expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n presents the two d i m e n s i o n a l i t y of the canvas while the t e n s i o n a l f o r c e s create the depth and volume. I f one f o r c e i s greater than i t s counter-force i n the opposing d i r e c t i o n , the p a i n t i n g w i l l appear t o 1 4 7 Hofmann, "The Color Problem ...," ( 1 9 5 5 ) , p.5 4 . ^"4^Loc. c i t . ^"^Loc. c i t . have holes; areas of r e c e s s i o n i n which a p r o j e c t i o n i s not able to counteract i t . In a good p a i n t i n g t h i s i s not the case; the canvas i s a u n i f i e d whole. Each complex i s made up of s e v e r a l areas of c o l o r but, "as a j e w e l , r e f l e c t s one c o l o r i n every change of 150 normal l i g h t c o n d i t i o n . " I t i s through "the i n t e r - r e l a t i o n s h i p of the i n d i v i d u a l c o l o r s t o form one c o l o r r e f l e c t i o n and the t o t a l harmony between them (which) emanates the a s p i r e d c r e a t i v e intention."-*-51 j n d e c o r a t i v e p a i n t i n g the largeness of the f l a t areas of c o l o r does not permit such a close r e l a t i o n s h i p between the i n d i v i d u a l areas t o form groupings w i t h one l i g h t r e f l e c t i o n , but r a t h e r the large s i m p l i f i e d area i s a s i n g l e r e f l e c t i o n i n i t s e l f . The s i n g l e r e f l e c t i o n i s not as v i b r a n t and l i v e l y as the complexes of pure p a i n t i n g . I t i s the l i f e of a pure p a i n t i n g t h a t allows f o r p i c t o r i a l communication. A new r e a l i t y comes i n t o e x i s t e n c e , a created r e a l i t y . The c o l o r gives a e s t h e t i c enjoyment and a sense of emotional r e l e a s e which i s r e l a t e d t o the form of the p a i n t i n g . When these f a c t s are taken i n t o account and "awaken i n us f e e l i n g s t o 1 5°Hofmann, "The Color Problem ...," (1955),p.56. 151T ' ' Loc. c i t . 67 which the medium of expression responds a n a l o g i c a l l y , 152 we attempt t o r e a l i z e our experience c r e a t i v e l y . " The f i n i s h e d c r e a t i o n w i l l depend on the inter-meshing of a l l these ideas and l a c i n g them i n t o the p a i n t i n g . With the knowledge t h a t the p a i n t i n g must f i t together the a r t i s t i s f r e e t o use h i s imagination, i n v e n t i v e n e s s , s e n s i b i l i t y and the s e l e c t i v e c a p a b i l i t y of h i s mind. Man's mind and i t s e f f e c t from nature are d e a l t 153 w i t h i n Hofmann's 1958 p u b l i c a t i o n I t I s . The a f f e c t of nature and the a r t i s t ' s awareness w i l l determine the c r e a t i o n of the a r t i s t . The mind of the a r t i s t , surround- ed by nature, has a l s o been g r e a t l y i n f l u e n c e d by i t . He sees w i t h awareness, f o r "seeing without awareness, ( i s ) short of b l i n d n e s s . " 1 ^ Although there i s t h i s i n f l u e n c e , i t i s what the a r t i s t does w i t h these i n f l u e n c e s t h a t b r i n g s out a great work of a r t . "The i n t e r p r e t a t i o n of p i c t o r i a l means of what we see i s 15 5 'another a r t ' . " " O b j e c t i v i t y i s a l s o goose unless 1 5 2 L o c . c i t , 153 Hans Hofmann, "excerpt from I t Is,"(Winter - S p r i n g , 1959), c i t e d i n Los Angeles County Art Museum, New York School, The F i r s t Generation, Los Angeles, Members of the Board of the Los Angeles County A r t Museum, 1965, p.17. " ^ 4 L o c . c i t . x 155T ... ' Loc. c i t . ) 68 156 we make something out of i t . " "Nature's purpose i n r e l a t i o n t o the v i s u a l a r t s i s t o provide the stimulus stimulus through i t s c r e a t i v e behavior."157 Nature i n i t s c r e a t i v e way of b r i n g i n g l i f e t o the inanimate o b j e c t s , i n i t i a t e s i n the a r t i s t a s i m i l a r a c t i o n . The a r t i s t ' s mind i s s e n s i t i v e to the way i n which nature a c t s and r e f l e c t s t h i s i n h i s p a i n t i n g s . "Man's s e n s i t i v e mind can t h i n k and f e e l ; i t enables him to create t h a t i s t o impregnate p h y s i c a l substance w i t h 158 l i f e . " v By use of h i s conscious and unconscious f a c u l t i e s , the a r t i s t becomes aware of space i n every form of manifestation"159 of nature. Through the r e a l i z a - t i o n t h a t the two dimensional surface of the p i c t u r e plane can be made t o o s c i l l a t e t o the three dimensional, the r e s u l t i n g vibrancy and dynamism b r i n g s the l i f e t o the canvas. At each stage of the two dimensional and t h r e e dimensional there i s a s t a t i c s t a t e but the change t o the c o n t r a s t i n g dimension develops the sense of move- ment. Movement i s answered by a counter-movement and 156 y Hans Hofmann, "Nature and A r t , Controversy and Misconception,", c i t e d in,New P a i n t i n g s by Hans Hofmann, Jan. 7 t o 2 5 , New York, K o o t z . G a l l e r y , 1 9 5 8 . 1 5 7 L o c . c i t . 158 Loc. c i t . 159' Hofmann,"excerpt from I t I s , " 1 9 5 9 , p.17. 69 consequently develops rhythm and counter-rhythm. The pushing and p u l l i n g t o both the two and three dimension- a l create the sense of f o r c e s which because of t h e i r balance brings about t e n s i o n s . These forces r e s u l t i n g from the p i c t u r e surface and the c o l o r and form t h a t have been a p p l i e d , have a l i f e of t h e i r own. "Color and l i g h t are t o a great extent subjected to the form problem 160 of the p i c t u r e s u r f a c e . " This statement c o n t r a d i c t s the 1955 a r t i c l e i n which Hofmann s a i d that c o l o r i s the b a s i s f o r form and that the two developments, formal and .161 c o l o r , should be synchronized. Hofmann has appeared t o back down on h i s stand f o r the predominance of the c o l o r development. The l a s t s e r i e s of a r t i c l e s f o r the t h i r d group of Hofmann's published m a t e r i a l covers a period of f o u r years and includes f i v e separate p u b l i c a t i o n s . These a r t i c l e s are g e n e r a l l y quite short and repeat Hofmann's p r e v i o u s l y stated t h e o r i e s . He stands f i r m on the non- f i g u r a t i v e philosophy which i n c l u d e s h i s t o t a l s e l f . The mood of the work then w i l l represent h i s t o t a l being. Hofmann's general philosophy of a r t takes on h i s summation of the ideas he has presented over the years. His 160 Loc. c i t . l 6 l Hofmann, "The Color Problem ...," (1955), p. 51-56. 70 a t t i t u d e as a teacher i s not f o r g o t t e n f o r he has spent over h a l f h i s l i f e as one. Hofmann b e l i e v e s a teacher should not t e l l the student e x a c t l y which c o l o r or formal development p a t t e r n t o f o l l o w f o r i t i s the teacher's job t o "approach (his) students merely w i t h the human d e s i r e t o f r e e them of a l l s c h o l a r l y i n h i b i t i o n s . " This f r e e - dom w i l l e i t h e r b r i n g out that r e a l t a l e n t of a l l g i f t e d people or i t w i l l " k i l l a l l m e d i o c r i t y and f a l s e m y s t i - f i c a t i o n of one's r e a l n a t u r e . " 1 ^ In the l a t t e r ease, Hofmann says he has done j u s t t h a t many times. He be- l i e v e s that t a l e n t e d people take time t o develop. They must pass through stages of s e l f - d i s c i p l i n e and s e l f - enlightenment i n order t o become masters. Hofmann has not v a r i e d h i s statement about an a r t i s t being born; t h i s inborn q u a l i t y must be l e d along a c e r t a i n path i n order t o achieve success. His senses govern an inner eye or inner v i s i o n . The dependency of each sense on every other sense creates i n the mind combinations and r e l a t i o n s h i p s of great c r e a t i v e p o t e n t i a l and f a c i l i t a t e the imagination. Creat- ed r e l a t i o n s create a higher s p i r i t u a l t h i r d , and c r e a t i v e l 6 2 Hofmann, "excerpt from I t I s , " 1959, p.17. -i f.r> Hans Hofmann, " ," c i t e d i n U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American P a i n t i n g , March 1 - A p r i l 5, 1959, U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s , Urbana, 1959, p. 226. ' 7 1 combinations b r i n g about l i f e to the p i c t u r e surface by- push and pull,< expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n i n form and i n c o l o r . The medium i t s e l f i s only a c a r r i e r of the s i g n i f i c a n t meaning derived from the r e l a t i o n s and combinations which i s s p i r i t u a l , .hyperphysical. One can- not d i s c u s s or c r i t i c i z e a work of a r t on mere p h y s i c a l c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s alone f o r i t i s the s p i r i t u a l "which i s the only j u s t i f i c a t i o n o f a work of a r t . " x ^ 4 Hofmann had s t a t e d e a r l i e r i n the 1948, The Search f o r the R e a l , "the r e a l i n a r t never d i e s because i t s nature i s predominantly s p i r i t u a l . " x ^ 5 p a i n t i n g — i s i n s p i r e d by the s p i r i t of i t s c r e a t i o n and i t s s t r a i g h t forward appeal to the senses. The audience can i d e n t i f y the meaning and the mood of i t s c r e a t i o n . " The thoughts and a c t i o n s that are experienced i n c r e a t i n g that p a i n t i n g can be' seen by the observer. Hofmann, when questioned, whether h i s p a i n t i n g s r e f l e c t h i s mood or emotion, r e p l i e d that they r e f l e c t h i s "whole psychic make-up and convey nothing but 167 my own nature." His involvement w i t h the p a i n t i n g ^Hans Hofmann, " ," c i t e d i n Hans Hofmann, E x h i b i t i o n Catalogue, Jan. 5- 23, I960, New York, Kootz G a l l e r y , I960. : : l 6 5 Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1948, p.54. l 6 6 j j 0 f m a n r L j E x h i b i t i o n Catalogue New York,I960, x ^ 7 Hans Hofmann, " ," c i t e d i n Katherine Kuh, The A r t i s t ' s Voice, New York, Harper and Row, 1962,. p. 119. 72 makes him f o r g e t h i s own personal problems and leads t o a c o n t i n u a l optimism. This mood i s r e f l e c t e d i n the l i g h t h e a r t e d t i t l e s which Hofmann says he chooses from the f e e l i n g the p a i n t i n g suggests when i t i s completed. This 1962 statement seems t o be a development from the one made i n 1955 i n the Bennington College Alumnae Q u a r t e r l y . He s a i d that he f e l t each p a i n t i n g meant an immense s t r u g g l e through which the p i c t u r e has gone through i n the development." 'HofmannTs change of a t t i t u d e r e f l e c t e d h i s growing p o p u l a r i t y and the great- er time he had f o r p a i n t i n g since he had closed h i s a r t s c h o o l . The o p t i m i s t i c mood i s not a t t a i n e d as soon as one s t a r t s to p a i n t . Often Hofmann drew " i n order to f r e e himself so that he could understand the meaning of the c o m p o s i t i o n . " 1 ^ He becomes i n v o l v e d with formal development and f i n a l l y engrosses himself i n the p a i n t - i n g . He i s c o n t i n u a l l y aware of what i s happening on the canvas. A c c i d e n t s , planned or unplanned, are solved by the suggestion w i t h i n the work i t s e l f . No sketches are prepared f o r a p a i n t i n g , because each work of a r t i s developmental w i t h i n i t s e l f . At each stage, t h e p a i n t i n g or drawing i s a work of a r t . l 6 o Hofmann, "Hofmann E x p l a i n s ...," 1 9 5 5 , p.2 3 . l 6^Hofmann, c i t e d i n The A r t i s t ' s Voice. 1962,p.125, 73 The q u a l i t y of the work i s not dependent on whether a r e a l image can be seen f o r a " f i g u r a t i v e attempt i s condemned when made without c o n s i d e r a t i o n of the u n d e r l y i n g a e s t h e t i c p r i n c i p l e of a b s t r a c t i o n s because such mortal negligence w i l l n e c e s s a r i l y lead t o u n i n s p i r e d i m i t a t i v e and academic f o r m a t i o n . " 1 7 0 The a r t i s t must l e t h i s mind be open t o a l l forms of c r e a t i o n so t h a t h i s thoughts w i l l be f r e e t o express a e s t h e t i c p r i n c i p l e s which-are the b a s i s of a r t . Hofmann does not e x p l a i n what i s meant by " a e s t h e t i c p r i n c i p l e s . " "No one can give a c o r r e c t explanation of what a r t i s . " 1 7 1 This l a s t statement appears t o be a c o n t r a d i c t i o n t o Hofmann's w r i t i n g s . Has he not t r i e d t o d e f i n e c r e a t i o n and the p r i n c i p l e s upon which i t i s based? By a n a l y s i s of h i s own c r e a t i v e process, Hofmann developed h i s theory of c r e a t i v i t y . He r e a l i z e d t h a t a r t should not i m i t a t e p h y s i c a l l i f e f o r " a r t must have a l i f e of i t s own. A s p i r i t u a l l i f e . " 1 7 2 This idea of the n o n - f i g u r a t i v e and s p i r i t u a l q u a l i t y of a r t developed from h i s f i r s t w r i t i n g s . "A p a i n t e r must 1 7 0 H a n s Hofmann, " ," c i t e d i n U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American P a i n t i n g , Feb. 20 - A p r i l 2, 1961, U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s , Urbana, 1961, p. 116. 1 7 1 Hofmann, c i t e d i n The A r t i s t ' s Voice, 1962,p.118. 1 7 2 H a n s Hofmann. "Hans Hofmann on A r t . " The A r t J o u r n a l , v o l . 22, no. j, Spring, 1963, p. 180. 74 create p i c t o r i a l l i f e w i t h reference to the laws d i c t a t e d 173 by the medium.n , J Hofmann stated these laws a f t e r h i s a r r i v a l i n America i n 1931. Through the i n t u i t i v e f a c u l t y of h i s subconscious mind t o s t i m u l a t e h i s conscious mind, the a r t i s t i s able t o use h i s senses so he can " d i s - cover the i n t r i n s i c f a c u l t y and inner l i f e of e v e r y t h i n g . " 1 7 ^ He s t a t e d i n 1931 that "the work of a r t i s the product of the a r t i s t ' s power f o r f e e l i n g and of h i s s e n s i t i v i t y t o l i f e - i n - n a t u r e and l i f e w i t h i n the l i m i t s of the medium."176 Hofmann's concept of empathy and s p i r i t u a l p r o j e c t i o n d i d not change through the years. The mind of the a r t i s t i s able to perceive beyond the purely p h y s i c a l . His inner eye sees i n t o the inner l i f e of everything; "therefore every- " 177 t h i n g can serve as an expression medium." '' The q u a l i t y of the r e s u l t i n g work of a r t depends on the a r t i s t ' s a b i l i t y t o create a s p i r i t u a l r e a l i t y w i t h the p h y s i c a l medium of expression. S p i r i t u a l i t y i s d e r i v e d from the " s y n t h e s i s of a l l 178 r e l a t i o n s h i p s . " As e a r l y as 1948, Hofmann had s t a t e d l 73Hofmann, c i t e d i n The A r t i s t ' s Voice, 1962, p.118. ^Hofmann, "On the Aims of A r t , " 1932, p. 9 - 10. 1 7 5 Hofmann, "Hans Hofmann on A r t , " 1963, p.l&O. 1 7 6 Hofmann, " P a i n t i n g and C u l t u r e , " 1931, p.6. 177 "Hofmann, "Hans Hofmann on A r t , " 1963, p. 180. 1 7 ^ L o c • c i t . 75 t h a t "two p h y s i c a l f a c t s i n an emotionally c o n t r o l l e d r e l a t i o n s h i p always create the phenomenon of a t h i r d 179 f a c t of a higher order." 7 The s y n t h e s i z i n g of a l l r e l a t i o n s h i p s i s what Hofmann stated as " r e l a t i o n s under r e l a t i o n s being the highest form of a e s t h e t i c enjoyment," x o u Pleasure from such a work i s obtained by the perception of a u n i f i e d work of a r t . As i n an o r g a n i s t i c theory, a l l p a r t s are t i e d together and each part i m p l i e s another. The concept of p o s i t i v e and negative space i l l u s t r a t e s t h i s p o i n t . "Objects are 181 p o s i t i v e space" or form and empty space does not e x i s t f o r i t i s a negation of p o s i t i v e space or form. These two e n t i t i e s do not e x i s t s i n g u l a r l y f o r i n a t o t a l space, both e x i s t side by s i d e . To experience t h a t space i n a p a i n t i n g , one must f e e l the " f o r c e s and counter-forces that make a v i t a l f o r c e impelled dynamic 182 space," i . e . the opposing tensions of three dimension- a l and two dimensional. "Space i s a l l energy," f o r "space has volume and volume has mass." x^ 3 Hofmann's 1 7 9 Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1949, p.47. •) d o o u Hans Hofmann, "The Mystery of Creative R e l a t i o n s , " J u l y , 1953, c i t e d i n Hans Hofmann, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 19o3, p.45. 181 Hofmann, "Hans Hofmann on A r t , " 1963, p.182. l g 2 I b i d . , p.181. 1 5 3 I b i d . , p.182. 7 6 s c i e n t i f i c p e r s o n a l i t y of h i s l a t e teens l e d him t o the t h e o r i e s of E i n s t e i n who s a i d , t h a t energy i s derived from mass, t h e r e f o r e r e l a t i n g to space and energy. The knowledge of the inherent v i t a l f o r c e s of space and l i f e that these f o r c e s can c r e a t e , s t i r s the a r t i s t i c mind to greater imagination to create l i f e on the p i c t o r i a l surface f o r the viewer. " P i c t o r i a l l i f e i s based on t e n s i o n . Forces and counter-forces, rhythm and counter-rhythms." • Color i s one of the e a s i e s t and best means t o create these f o r c e s f o r i t i s able to pro- duce depth ( p u l l ) and l i g h t emanation (push) rphe f o r c e s of push and p u l l are mental i n that v i s u a l sensa- t i o n s are r e l a t e d t o past experience of tensions i n nature or t h a t these tensions are f e l t as a r e a c t i o n from the p i c t u r e surface. Rhythm, a time and i n t e n s i t y element of "push and p u l l , " i s derived from the a r t i s t ' s temper- • - 1 8 6 ament. P a i n t i n g s of the p e r i o d a f t e r Hofmann's r e t r o s p e c t - i v e at the Addison G a l l e r y of American Art f a l l i n t o three c a t e g o r i e s which r e f l e c t h i s t h e o r i e s at t h a t time. "Magenta and Blue," ( 1 9 5 0 ) r e t a i n s Hofmann's " c u b i s t 1 8 4 T Loc. c i t . 1 8 5 Loc. c i t . 1 8 6 Hofmann, "Hans Hofmann on A r t , " 1 9 6 3 , p. 1 8 0 . 77 trauma." While the p a i n t i n g e a r l i e r c i t e d r e f l e c t s h i s awareness of the p l a n a r concept, t h i s l a t e r work shows a minimal p e r s i s t e n c e of the l i n e a r concept i n t e g r a t e d w i t h the p l a n a r one as seen i n " F a n t a s i a " (1943). The f l a t canvas of "Magenta and B l u e " ( p l a t e I I I ) has been broken up i n t o f o u r quadrangles w i t h the lower ones l a r g e r . Red, b l u e , y e l l o w , magenta and green have been used t o f u r t h e r d i v i d e the quadrangles i n t o a semblance of a s p a t i a l area d e p i c t i n g a s t i l l l i f e . The b r i g h t n e s s of the canvas r e - f l e c t s Hofmann's e a r l y c o n t a c t w i t h the F a u v i s t , Henri M a t i s s e as i n h i s "Piano Lesson," (1916) . While the same g e n e r a l l u m i n o s i t y of the canvas i s achieved by both, M a t i s s e has used a more sombre red and a p a l e r and l e s s v i b r a n t b l u e . Each c o l o r t h a t Hofmann has p l a c e d on the canvas v i e s w i t h every other f o r the g r e a t e s t p r o j e c t i v e and dynamic power. I f , as i n the case of the b l u e , an a r e a of c o l o r does not match the dynamism of i t s neighbour- i n g c o l o r to form a s t a b l e r e l a t i o n , t h a t area of c o l o r i s i n c r e a s e d so t h a t the s i z e w i l l i n the end c r e a t e the same e f f e c t . The magenta t o the r i g h t of the blue and on the t o p l e f t corner of the canvas have a s m a l l area f o r t h e i r p r o j e c t i v e powers do not n e c e s s i t a t e a l a r g e and dominant area as does the b l u e . Even though they a r e at the s i d e of Clement Greenberg, A r t and C u l t u r e , Boston, Beacon P r e s s , 1961, p. 192. the canvas, they have the force to combat the blue. The use of color i n these planar areas i s further emphasized i n Hofmann's l a t e r works of I 9 6 0 , but l i n e s and dynamic planes are used here to achieve the e f f e c t of "push and pull," expansion and contraction. As i n the a n a l y t i c a l cubist works of Picasso and Braque, Hofmann has appeared to have taken d i f f e r e n t view points of the same s t i l l l i f e . The blue area to the lowe: r i g h t can be associated with the red, yellow and green s t i l l l i f e area to the upper l e f t . While Braque and Picasso took d i f f e r e n t views of the same object and t i e d them together i n t h e i r compositions, Hofmann here, seems to have taken a front and back view and separated them on the canvas. It must be r e a l i z e d that these two areas most l i k e l y do not represent the same objects from d i f f e r ent sides but the relationships between t h e i r forms and s p a t i a l displacement inherently cause the observer to unify them. A r e l a t i o n i s set up between them which causes the two areas to contract together yet the i n t e n s i t y of the yellow-red texture and the magenta cause the two to expand off the canvas. The plane of blue i s projected off the canvas by i t s f o r c e f u l color but most of a l l by the dynamic planes. The blue area of color, by being angled, appears to come out to the observer as the upper r i g h t yellow area recede 79 This blue does not p r o j e c t f l a t out but i s a l s o angled f o r the lower black areas p r o j e c t s the blue when the lower p o r t i o n of the canvas comes i n t o focus. The whole bottom area i s a l s o angled o f f by the slanted h o r i z o n t a l . The red o v e r l a y i n g the blue and the red to the l e f t center cause the eye to f o l l o w a r i g h t - l e f t d i r e c t i o n and the c o n t r a s t i n g w i t h the yellow-green r e s u l t i n an a c t i v a t e d l i f t and push. The y e l l o w a s s o c i a t e s w i t h the yellow-red t e x t u r e t o b r i n g the plane down only to be projected again by the blue area. The y e l l o w area t o the upper r i g h t does not have the vigour or energy of the other quadrangles. In r e l a t i o n t o the o t h e r s , i t appears u n f i n i s h e d , unsolved. The black and green l i n e a r d e f i n i t i o n of the planar object r a i s e d above i t l a c k form and s o l i d i t y as compared t o the objects placed above the b l u e . The c o n t r a s t between the f i n i s h e d , o v e r f i n i s h e d and u n f i n i s h e d aspects of the canvas i l l u s t r a t e s Hofmann's c u b i s t trauma. The overworked area to the upper l e f t shows Hofmann as a s y n t h e t i c c u b i s t w i t h the v i b r a n t t e x t u r e of red and y e l l o w . The l i n e a r q u a l i t y of the pineapple shape a t t a i n s only p a r t i a l planar concept i n the extreme r i g h t l e a f . By u s i n g the large area of c o l o r Hofmann has achieved the dynamism he c a l l e d f o r but i n d e p i c t i n g the smaller object the c o n t r a s t w i t h the l a r g e r areas only made them l i n e a r . The l i n e i s the smallest p a i n t i n g plane, but i n contrast t o a l a r g e planar area, i t becomes merely a l i n e . BO However i n a work such as "Le G i l o t i n , " 1953, ( p l a t e I V ) , the width of a p a i n t brush has been the b a s i c s i z e of the plane. Even the white area t o the upper r i g h t appears t o be subdivided i n t o three separate planes by the t e x t u r e of the a c t u a l pigment. While the length of each plane v a r i e s , the width remains constant so t h a t each brush stroke appears planar. Only seven l i n e s are used t o d e f i n e the f i g u r e but they are only superfluous: the f i g u r e could be seen without them. Hofmann's a b i l i t y t o use green i n a f r i v o l o u s mood d e t r a c t s from green's u s u a l sombre f e e l i n g . The paint has been a p p l i e d i n a r i c h creamy manner. The e f f e c t on the observer i s pure d e l i g h t . (This canvas now hangs i n the a d m i n i s t r a t i o n b u i l d i n g of the U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a at Berkeley. I t creates a l i v e l y and j o y f u l mood f o r the passer-bys and the working s t a f f . ) The l a v i s h amount of p h y s i c a l pigment and the h i g h l y t e x t u r e d surface creates a uniquely l i v e l y area of c o l o r which f o r e t e l l s the l a t e s t phase of Hofmann's p a i n t - ings i n which he uses l u x u r i a n t o i l s i n r e c t a n g u l a r plane of v i b r a n t c o l o r . This e f f e c t can be seen i n "Above Deep Waters," 1959, ( p l a t e V). The canvas has been d i v i d e d i n t o three h o r i z o n t a l areas; the upper s e c t i o n r e d , the middle, y e l l o w , and the bottom, mottled black and green. Though each c o l o r appears separate and d i s t i n c t , a l l c o l o r s are seen i n each of the three areas. T r a n s i t i o n a l zones between each area 81 are the most prominent place f o r the i n c l u s i o n of c o l o r from another area. Between the red and the y e l l o w there are patches of green and blue which stand out and sink i n t o the b o r d e r l i n e . The main area c o l o r i s also mottled w i t h a d i f f e r e n t shade 1 As can be seen on the upper y e l l o w edge, a darker l e s s v i b r a n t shade has been included t o f a c i l i t a t e the t r a n s i t i o n t o the red. Spots of blue are a l s o seen above the red area. These t r a n s i t i o n a l patch planes p r o j e c t and recede to form the "push and p u l l " e f f e c t . The darker shades at the b o r d e r l i n e s separate the c o l o r s i n an expanding d i r e c t i o n while the brightness of the red and y e l l o w contract the surface area. This con- t r a c t i o n i s caused by the extreme b r i g h t n e s s of both areas which form a s i n g l e b r i g h t area. This now s i n g l e area p r o j e c t s i n r e l a t i o n t o the black-blue area t o the bottom. With the a l t e r a t i o n of focus t o the r e d , the black appears t o p r o j e c t mainly because of the heaviness at the bottom of the canvas. The three areas then o s c i l l a t e p e r p e n d i c u l a r - l y and p a r a l l e l t o the p i c t u r e plane. Each area has been a p p l i e d i n a planar method of pure p a i n t i n g . The planes and areas of c o l o r each emit one c o l o r sense. Even the lower black area where green i s mottled i n t o the black has a s i n g l e c o l o r and r e f l e c t s not pure i n the sense of primary c o l o r s but pure i n Hofmann's sense of s i n g l e c o l o r r e f l e c t i o n . The c o l o r areas are not r e - d e f i n e d by black l i n e s as i n "Magenta and Blue" but are 82 defined by the edge of each plane of c o l o r against another. No l i n e a r d e f i n i t i o n i s required f o r the c o l o r s are loud and c o n t r a s t i n g enough t o d e f i n e t h e i r own l i m i t s . In t h i s work the c r e a t i v e and formal development have been combined i n t o a simultaneous development. The dark c o l o r s , blue over the b r i g h t ones, red, show t h a t the blue was placed on the red as a formal element w i t h f u l l r e a l i z a t i o n t h a t i t would p r o j e c t and recede. I t s formal r o l e as a t r a n s i t i o n a l and u n i f y i n g device were a l s o understood. A balance i s seen i n the two blue t r a n s i t i o n a l patch planes and the two red ones. This almost p o s i t i v e and negative j u x t a p o s i t i o n i s c l e a r l y shown i n the red and black areas. The areas t h a t j u t out from the black are p a r t i a l l y r e f l e c t e d i n the r e d . A complete t r a n s f e r i s not undertaken because the red would overpower the yellow. To give the idea of semblance,the minimum amount of r e p e t i t i o n i s able t o suggest the d u p l i c a t i o n of forms. This r e p e t i t i o n of forms was seen i n e a r l i e r works such as "Magenta and Blue," but here the prominence of c o l o r i s taken i n t o account so that area of red i s decreased t o a f f o r d an e a s i e r balance w i t h the r e s t of the canvas. While "Above Deep Waters" r e t a i n s a p a i n t e r l y and l u s h a p p l i c a t i o n of p a i n t , l a t e r works delve i n t o the realm of hard edges. "Pre-Dawn," I960, (plate VI) has a combination of the hard edge and p a i n t e r l y approach. The upper areas which are modeled w i t h heavy pigment appears 83 to contrast with r i g i d rectangular areas. Actually the rectangles, though t h e i r edges are hard, are also heavily pigmented with ice pick points of projection. The r e l i e f of paint creates added color and undulation of color to that area. The b u t t e r - l i k e f e e l of the upper portions does not represent a single color r e f l e c t i o n but a multitude i n spite of the mottled e f f e c t . Each color stroke i s bright enough to stand on i t s own and show i t s force. It i s a minature canvas i n i t s e l f and r e f l e c t s as well the entire canvas. Areas of pure color are juxtaposed to bring the canvas to l i f e by the v i b r a t i o n between these areas. The f i g h t f o r supremacy of color brightness i s fought by each and every color. Blue, normally taken to be a recessive and diminuative color, i s able to vie with red and yellow. By i t s surrounding a special color i n r e l a t i o n to the other color i t achieves a vibrancy seldom seen i n blue. Yellow areas are decreased i n size f o r the overly vibrant r e f l e c t - ion. Even though red i s a resounding color, the rectangles of red at the bottom of the canvas do not appear overly powerful. A dynamic equilibrium i s set up between the red rectangles on bottom and the red c i r c l e and rectangle and yellow square at the top. The yellow has been so charged that i t continually re-echos i t s strength. The energetic quality of the colors and the expressive application of paint are a source of invigoration and appeal for the ob- server. 84 This d i s c u s s i o n of a few of Hofmann's p a i n t i n g s has shown the u n i t y of h i s theory and p r a c t i c e . His p a i n t - ings r e f l e c t h i s t h e o r i e s and v i c e versa. This i n t e r - r e l a t i o n s h i p does not suggest t h a t p a i n t i n g n a t u r a l l y leads t o t h e o r i z i n g or v i c e versa, but r e f l e c t s t h e i r mutual dependence f o r Hofmann's development. Hofmann's t h e o r e t i c a l w r i t i n g s have extended over a period of f i f t y years. His w r i t i n g s have explained h i s approach t o a r t . Though t h i s theory changes from year t o year, these changes derive not from c o n t r a d i c t i o n but from h i s f u r t h e r explanation and c l e a r e r d e f i n i t i o n s . The f o l l o w i n g paragraphs w i l l summarize these t h e o r i e s and t h e i r changes. The a r t i s t has an inborn c h a r a c t e r i s t i c , an i n d e s c r i b - able s e n s i t i v i t y f o r q u a l i t y . With t h i s c h a r a c t e r i s t i c of hyper-awareness, h i s teacher i s able t o lead the young a r t i s t t o h i s n a t u r a l g i f t , not by prodding, but by sympathetic and understanding d i r e c t i o n . The a r t i s t l e a r n s to see i n nature the i n t r i n s i c values of animate and inanimate o b j e c t s . Hofmann f e l t t h a t an a r t i s t must have the a b i l i t y to empathize, to s p i r i t u a l l y p r o j e c t i n order t o c r e a t e . The a r t i s t f e e l s i n t o them and receives from nature i t s c r e a t i v e q u a l i t y . Nature, through the a r t i s t ' s n a t u r a l g i f t , i n s p i r e s and s t i m u l a t e s him t o create as nature does. Nature's r o l e as i n s p i r a t i o n f o r c r e a t i n g was dominant throughout Hofmann's w r i t i n g s . 85 This c r e a t i o n i s not an o b j e c t i v e i m i t a t i o n of nature f o r that would be photographic and shows nothing of the a r t i s t ' s temperament. He must have an open mind f o r the n o n - f i g u r a t i v e because that receptiveness allows the g r e a t e s t p o s s i b i l i t y f o r the p i c t o r i a l i z a t i o n of the a r t i s t h i m s e l f . As e a r l y as 1915, Hofmann had s a i d t h a t he would not i m i t a t e nature, but l e t form evolve from the " a r t i s t ' s experiences evoked by o b j e c t i v e r e a l i t y and the a r t i s t ' s command of the s p i r i t u a l means of the f i n e a r t s through which t h i s a r t i s t i c experience i s 188 transformed by him i n t o r e a l i t y i n the p a i n t i n g . " The a r t i s t r e a l i z e s the workings of h i s mind and senses. The a c t u a l p h y s i c a l l i m i t a t i o n of h i s senses leads him t o perceptions which are u n r e a l . In 1932, Hofmann r e a l i z e d t h a t o b j e c t i v e r e a l i t y , nature, had the appearance of two d i m e n s i o n a l i t y on the observers senses. The e f f e c t of o b j e c t i v e r e a l i t y on the observer i s not two dimensional as i n appearance but three dimensional as i n nature. Through the accumulation of the experience o f nature t o t h a t moment, the e f f e c t of o b j e c t i v e nature's appearance on the observer has the semblance of being three dimensional. Hofmann, "Prospectus f o r Munich School ...," 1915, p.56. The perceptual r e a c t i o n t o a p i c t u r e plane p a r a l l e l the perception of nature. The p i c t u r e surface w i t h pigment a p p l i e d i s de f a c t o , two dimensional. The e f f e c t on our perception i s three dimensional because of the 189 inherent laws of the p i c t u r e plane as s t a t e d i n 1931 and the volume forming q u a l i t y of c o l o r which was d i s c u s s - ed i n 1951. The p i c t u r e plane r e a c t s with an equal and opposite f o r c e t o t h a t which i s a p p l i e d . The a p p l i e d and r e a c t i o n f o r c e depends on the advancing and receding q u a l i t y of c o l o r and form. Luminous and c o n t r a s t i n g c o l o r s tend to advance as do l a r g e and dominant forms. The a r t i s t i s able t o achieve the q u a l i t i e s of appearance and e f f e c t by empathizing i n t o nature and i n t o the medium of expression. By empathizing i n t o nature, he i s stimulated and i n s p i r e d . By f e e l i n g i n t o the nature of the medium, i t s laws and i t s inherent q u a l i t i e s , the a r t i s t i s able to use the medium of e x p r e s s i o n t o i t s best ends. With an empathetie a t t i t u d e , the a r t i s t i s able t o f e e l i n t o anything and t o use i t as a means of expression. How and where the medium of expression i s a p p l i e d t o the canvas w i l l determine the form i n a p a i n t i n g . Hofmann s a i d i n 193.1 t h a t the formal elements c o n s i s t e d Hofmann, "On the Aims of A r t , " 1931, p. 7-11 87 of l i n e s , planes, volumes and the r e s u l t i n g formal 190 complexes. . In 1948 he became more attached to the planar concept and s a i d that the l i n e was only the meeting of two planes and that volumes were a r e g u l a t e d s e r i e s of planes. Hofmann's e a r l y w r i t i n g s do not consider c o l o r as a formal element but a c r e a t i v e one. During 1951 he developed the idea that because of c o l o r ' s volume form- i n g q u a l i t y , c o l o r i n c r e a s i n g l y became a formal element. Hofmann went so f a r as t o say that c o l o r was a formal element but q u i c k l y r e a l i z e d t h a t c o l o r e x i s t e d because of l i g h t on form. In the 1955 a r t i c l e , "The Color Problem i n Pure P a i n t i n g , " Hofmann r e s o l v e d the question of form and c o l o r ; they e x i s t together. The development of form and c o l o r must occur simultaneously. Through the i n t e r w o r k i n g of form and c o l o r , " i n t e r v a l s " are set up i n which two p h y s i c a l c a r r i e r s are v i s u a l l y r e l a t e d to form a non-physical higher t h i r d . This h y p e r - p h y s i c a l overtone governs the r e a c t i o n between the two separate c a r r i e r s . The " r e l a t i o n " between them i s a simultaneous a c c e l e r a t e d i n t e n s i f i c a t i o n or d i m i n u t i o n . The v a r i a t i o n of such f o r c e s over the whole surface of the canvas creates rhythms, a time and i n t e n s i t y f a c t o r which the a r t i s t governs w i t h h i s temper- Hofmann, E x h i b i t i o n Catalogue Berkeley, 1931. SB ament. The balance of the f o r c e s develops tensions and a sense of dynamic e q u i l i b r i u m . The a l t e r n a t i o n between an o v e r a l l t e n s i o n and d i r e c t e d f o r c e s , i n c i t e s w i t h i n the observer the f e e l i n g of movement. The observer perceives the change from two d i m e n s i o n a l i t y to three d i m e n s i o n a l i t y and v i c e versa. The balance of the "push" and the " p u l l " force i n opposite d i r e c t i o n s brings about s t a b i l i t y , w h i l e a d i f f e r e n t i a t i o n between them develops the e f f e c t of movement and dynamism w i t h i n the observer. This dynamic q u a l i t y i s caused by the observer's perception a l t e r n a t i n g between the two d i m e n s i o n a l i t y and the three d i m e n s i o n a l i t y . Push and p u l l i s the movement back and f o r t h , perpendicular t o the p i c t u r e s u r f a c e . I t i s created by the volume forming q u a l i t y of c o l o r and the r e l a t i o n s h i p of l a r g e , dominant and c o n t r a s t i n g forms. The movement p a r a l l e l t o the p i c t u r e surface i s "expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n . " This move- ment i s created w i t h i n the observer by i n t e r v a l s and r e - l a t i o n s between form and c o l o r . I n t e r v a l s play a l a r g e r r o l e because of t h e i r a b i l i t y to u n i f y or t o separate two areas of the canvas. The c r e a t i o n of "push and p u l l " and "expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n " i s the mean t o the c r e a t i o n of a r t . Art i s . v i t a l i z e d form. Movement i s the essence of L i f e ; L i f e does not e x i s t without movement. I f these movements r e - f l e c t the a r t i s t h i m s e l f , a work of a r t has been created. 89 Hofmann used p a i n t i n g t o d i s t i n g u i s h between the two f i e l d s of a r t , the f i n e and the a p p l i e d a r t s . Symphonic p a i n t i n g , a category of the f i n e a r t s , possesses the movements of "push and p u l l " and "expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n . " I t i n c i t e s w i t h i n the observer, v i t a l i t y and movement. In 1931, symphonic p a i n t i n g was d i s t i n g u i s h - ed by t h e i r sensory and emotional d i f f e r e n t i a t i o n which would b r i n g about the e f f e c t of increased monumentality upon the senses. "In symphonic p a i n t i n g , c o l o r i s the • • 191 r e a l b u i l d i n g medium." This 1948 statement by Hofmann r e f l e c t s the increased r o l e c o l o r developed i n h i s t h e o r e t i c a l w r i t i n g s . Symphonic p a i n t i n g s i s a l s o created by the a r t i s t who becomes e m p a t h e t i c a l l y "aware of the i n t r i n s i c q u a l i t i e s of the medium of expression."192 j n d e c o r a t i v e p a i n t i n g , a category of the a p p l i e d a r t s , the a r t i s t can a l s o empathize but he s t r i v e s mainly f o r great- er s i m p l i f i c a t i o n . The decorative p a i n t i n g w i l l lack the e f f e c t of p l a s t i c movement because i t s s i m p l i f i c a t i o n r e s u l t s i n a t o t a l l y two dimensional p i c t o r i a l space. The e f f e c t of p l a s t i c movement d i f f e r e n t i a t e s symphonic p a i n t i n g from decorative p a i n t i n g . Hofmann summarized these d i f f e r e n c e s i n 1952. He s a i d t h a t symphonic p a i n t - •^Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1948, p.73. 192 * I b i d . , p. 52. 9Q i n g and decorative p a i n t i n g d i f f e r " i n the c r e a t i o n of q u a l i t y through which the image created becomes s e l f - 193 evident." By " q u a l i t y " Hofmann incorporated the c r e a t i v e a c t . The c r e a t i v e act e n t a i l s Nature. An empathetic a t t i t u d e t o Nature enables the a r t i s t t o sense Nature's c r e a t i v i t y . Nature's c r e a t i v i t y i n s p i r e s the a r t i s t to create the p i c t o r i a l r e a l i z a t i o n of dynamic movements of o s c i l l a t i o n between the two and three dimensional planes. The two d i m e n s i o n a l i t y of the p i c t u r e plane i s r e t a i n e d because of the dynamic e q u i l i b r i u m that r e s u l t s from a balance of the f o r c e s of "push" and " p u l l " and those of "expansion"and "con- t r a c t i o n . " The r e s u l t i n g symphonic p a i n t i n g has an 194 i n t i m a c y , a l y r i c i s m and a r i c h o r c h e s t r a t i o n . This p a i n t i n g i s a c u l t u r a l documentation of the 195 time i n which i t was created. I t r e l e a s e s the observer from the monotonous schedule of everyday l i f e . I t has a new r e a l i t y of i t s own because i t i s based on the p e r s o n a l i t y of the a r t i s t ' s s o u l , mind, s e n s i b i l i t y and temperament. I t g l o r i f i e s the human s p i r i t and keeps i t i n a state of e t e r n a l r e j u v e n a t i o n . The humanistic and 193 Hofmann, "A Statement ...," 1 9 5 2 . 194 Loc. c i t . 195 Loc. c i t . 91 c u l t u r a l s p i r i t which t h i s p a i n t i n g captures, are r e t a i n e d i n t h i s work of a r t i f i t remains i n the same p h y s i c a l s t a t e . This s p i r i t i n the p a i n t i n g i s above the n a t u r a l world. I t e n d l e s s l y emits the l i f e experience of the a r t i s t to the viewer. I t i s t h i s s p i r i t which Hofmann t r i e d t o capture i n h i s own work and t r i e d t o i n c i t e i n h i s students. CHAPTER I I I THE WEST-COAST CANADIAN STUDENTS OF THE HANS HOFMANN SCHOOL OF ART During the l a t e f o r t i e s and e a r l y f i f t i e s , many Canadians attended the Hans Hofmann School of Art i n New York and Provincetown. Each attended at a d i f f e r e n t time and each of t h e i r r e a c t i o n s i s d i s t i n c t . Although Hortense Gordon, Alexander Luke, J.W.G. MacDonald and Joe P l a s k e t t attended the Hofmann School, only L i o n e l Thomas, Takao Tanabe and Donald J a r v i s are discussed here because these a r t i s t - t e a c h e r s were a v a i l a b l e f o r i n t e r - view. This chapter w i l l d i s c u s s the Hans Hofmann School of A r t i n New York and the summer school i n Provincetown i n respect t o the p h y s i c a l surroundings, the e d u c a t i o n a l approach and the p o s s i b l e e f f e c t on the p a i n t e r s of that p e r i o d . This e f f e c t w i l l be discussed i n r e l a t i o n t o Hofmann's West-Coast Canadian students, L i o n e l Thomas, Takao Tanabe and Donald J a r v i s . Their contemporary t h e o r i e s w i l l be analyzed i n r e l a t i o n t o Hofmann's t h e o r i e s which were taught at h i s New York and Province- town schools. Hofmann's a r r i v a l i n America i n 1931 marked the s t a r t of a twenty-seven year teaching career i n h i s 93 country of n a t u r a l i z a t i o n . F o l l o w i n g two years of teach- i n g at Berkeley, Los Angeles and New York, he s t a r t e d h i s own New York school i n 1933. In the f o l l o w i n g year he r e - e s t a b l i s h e d a summer school which had been such a success i n Europe. Hofmann's school i n New York was f i r s t l o c a t e d on F i f t y - S e v e n t h Street and Lexington Avenue. I t was moved to Fifty-Second S t r e e t and Ninth Avenue and f i n a l l y t o E i g h t h Street i n Greenwich V i l l a g e . His school d i d not have the t y p i c a l a r t school atmosphere w i t h set s t i l l l i f e s , c o l o r reproductions of the o l d masters or c o l o r charts hanging on the w a l l s . In contrast t o the v i t a l i t y and i n t e r e s t i n g f a c e t s of New York C i t y , the Eighth Street s t u d i o was s t a r k and lacked atmosphere."*" During the l a t e f o r t i e s the fees averaged twenty t o t h i r t y d o l l a r s a week 2 f o r a f u l l - t i m e student. At h i s day and night c l a s s e s i n New York, Hofmann attended each c l a s s at l e a s t two times a week e i t h e r t o d i s c u s s and t o c r i t i c i z e student work or to set up the ^Conversations w i t h Mr. W i l l i a m S. Hart, A s s o c i a t e P r o f e s s o r , U n i v e r s i t y .of B r i t i s h Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., A p r i l 14, 1966. 2 Interview w i t h Donald J a r v i s , Vancouver, B.C., February 1, 1966, In the f o l l o w i n g footnotes f o r m a t e r i a l obtained from i n t e r v i e w s only the name and date w i l l be given. The l o c a t i o n of the i n t e r v i e w were a l l i n Vancouver. 94 f i g u r e model f o r the week. Hofmann was a l o o f t o h i s students and i t was d i f f i c u l t to become acquainted w i t h 3 him. They however developed a vigorous interchange of ideas amongst themselves. Hofmann's concept of education e n t a i l e d l e s s work w i t h the i n d i v i d u a l student so t h a t a k group s p i r i t would develop. This " e s p r i t de corps" was " i n s p i r e d by the teacher, whose presence was r e q u i r e d only i n t e r m i t t a n t l y f o r c r i t i c i s m s and s u p e r v i s i o n on a p o l i c y 5 making l e v e l . " In the drawing c l a s s c h a r c o a l was l a r g e l y used be- cause of " i t s f l e x i b i l i t y , c h a n g e a b i l i t y , t r a n s f o r m a b i l i t y and w o r k a b i l i t y . The drawings were l i k e p a i n t i n g s f o r they o f t e n took two or three days t o complete."^ The students who attended the Hofmann school had d i f f e r e n t t r a i n i n g , background and enthusiasm f o r a r t . Hofmann, however, was able t o b r i n g out the true a r t i s t 7 and the i n d i v i d u a l i n each of h i s students. Hofmann e s t a b l i s h e d a sympathetic climate t o stimulate the l e s s e r 8 t a l e n t s . He "turned them on," not by l e c t u r i n g or ^ J a r v i s , Feb. 1, 1 9 6 6 . L Thomas B. Hess, Abstract P a i n t i n g , New York, The V i k i n g Press, 1 9 5 1 , p. 1 3 1 . ^Loc. c i t . 6 J a r v i s , Feb. 1, 1 9 6 6 . 7 J a r v i s , Feb. 1, 1 9 6 6 . °Jarvis, Feb. 1, 1 9 6 6 . i n s t r u c t i n g but by demonstrations, c r i t i c i s m s and h i s a u t h o r a t i v e p e r s o n a l i t y and presence. Students were awe i n s p i r e d by him. They would a l l stand when he entered the room; then, one student would take h i s hat while another 9 would take h i s coat. His a b i l i t y "to come t o the problem i n what was wrong w i t h a p a i n t i n g or d r a w i n g " 1 0 enabled him t o c r i t i c i z e thoroughly a piece of work done by a student. Hofmann would rework r i g h t on the student's work to the extent of r i p p i n g i t up and r e - p i e c i n g i t i n order t o 11 r e v e a l i t s new p o s s i b i l i t i e s . C r i t i c i s m s such as the one j u s t discussed were a l s o held monthly f o r the e n t i r e school. They were "an important ' t h i n g ' . " A r t i s t s who d i d not attend Hofmann's c l a s s e s were a l s o present. At these " c r i t s " Hofmann would i n h i s poor and broken E n g l i s h , "pick everything t o 12 p i e c e s " e i t h e r through demonstration or gesture. Only a few works were thoroughly commented upon w i t h h i s " b o l d - 13 stroke c r i t i c i s m s " and v i b r a n t p e r s o n a l i t y . Hofmann's summer school at Provincetown had much the same c l a s s s i t u a t i o n and approach as h i s New York ^Takao Tanabe, March 2 6 , 1966, Vancouver, B.C. 1 0 J a r v i s , Feb. 8, 1 9 6 6 . 11 L i o n e l Thomas, Associate P r o f e s s o r , U n i v e r s i t y of B r i t i s h Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., January 2 5 , 1 9 6 6 . 1 2 J a r v i s , Feb. 1, 1 9 6 6 . 1 3 J a r v i s , Feb. 1, 1 9 6 6 . 96 s c h o o l . In both, the students drew d i r e c t l y from the f i g u r e model. In New York they were more d i v e r s e and 14 i n t e r e s t i n g . Provincetown models tended t o be as f u l l 15 and Germanic as Rubenesque f i g u r e s . At the summer s c h o o l , models were employed f o r the morning s e s s i o n . Landscapes and s t i l l l i f e s could be used by the student i n the a f t e r - noon i f he so d e s i r e d . Landscapes were often chosen be- cause of t h e i r n a t u r a l dynamic q u a l i t y and the enjoyment d e r i v e d from nature. N i g h t l y c r i t i c i s m s were held on the day's work. These c r i t i c i s m s , u n l i k e those i n New York, were more i n t i m a t e and l e s s t h e a t r i c a l . The student could get t o know h i s teacher on a more personal b a s i s and exchange ideas w i t h him. The a r t c r i t i c , Harold Rosenberg, has 16 s a i d t h a t many s p i n s t e r s attended the summer school but L i o n e l Thomas, one of the students, s a i d there were only 17 a few "non-serious students." In any case, Hofmann f e l t t h a t the school provided them w i t h "an experience not other- 18 wise a v a i l a b l e t o them." 1 4 J a r v i s , Feb. 1, 1966. 15 Thomas, Jan. 18, 1966. "^Harold Rosenberg, "Hans Hofmann's L i f e C l a s s , " P o r t f o l i o and A r t News Annual, no.6, Autumn, 1962, p. 110. 17 Thomas, Jan. 18, 1966. 18 Rosenberg, "Hans Hofmann L i f e C l a s s , " p. 110. 97 I t i s d o u b t f u l that Hofmann's students understood h i s teachings on f i r s t attempt because of h i s metaphysical terminology and broken E n g l i s h . Donald J a r v i s , f o r example, s a i d t h a t he r e a l i z e d what Hofmann meant "by h i n d - C^zanne, Cubism, Fauvism and Expressionism were not d i s - cussed as such, but they were included i n Hofmann's new p i c t o r i a l approach f o r "teaching modern a r t as a 20 t r a d i t i o n . " Harold Rosenberg s a i d i n h i s 1962 a r t i c l e , "Hans Hofmann's L i f e C l a s s , " t h a t " n e i t h e r f i n a n c i a l l y nor as an i n i t i a t i n g f o r c e was -the Hofmann school a success be- 21 cause of the a d u l t e r a t i o n of time, place and s i t u a t i o n . " In s p i t e of the f a c t t h a t Hofmann's school d i d not emphasize a c u l t u r a l documentation of h i s time, i n the sense of s o c i a l r e a l i s m of the t h i r t i e s and f o r t i e s h i s school was able t o b u i l d up an i n t e l l e c t u a l b a s i s f o r the development of a b s t r a c t expressionism. While none of 22 the Abstract E x p r e s s i o n i s t s attended h i s s c h o o l , they s o c i a l i z e d w i t h a r t i s t s f a m i l i a r w i t h Hofmann's t h e o r i e s . s i g h t i n h i s own p a i n t i n g s . 19 The t h e o r i e s of Mondrian 19 J a r v i s , Feb. 1, 1 9 6 6 . 20 Rosenberg, "Hans Hofmann's L i f e C l a s s , " p. 28-. 21 I b i d p. 112. 22 I b i d p. 1 1 0 . 98 The i n t e l l e c t u a l and academic b a s i s f o r t h e i r work ' n a t u r a l l y a f f e c t e d the A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s . The A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s would not n e c e s s a r i l y accept or r e j e c t Hofmann's t h e o r i e s but r a t h e r , they would develop an i n t e l l e c t u a l and academic a t t i t u d e i n c r i t i c a l l y a n a l y z i n g t h e i r own works. Hofmann's t h i n k i n g "taught the act of c r e a t i o n i n p a i n t i n g by u p l i f t i n g the student's 23 s p i r i t while e n l i g h t e n i n g h i s mind." During the l a t e f o r t i e s and e a r l y f i f t i e s , Canadian students invaded Hofmann's c l a s s e s i n f o r c e . Hortense Gordon of Hamilton, Alexander Luke and Ronald Lambert of Oshawa, Joe P l a s k e t t of New Westminster and L i o n e l Thomas of Vancouver came i n 1947. J.W.G. MacDonald and Donald 24 J a r v i s attended c l a s s e s i n 1948 and Takao Tanabe i n 1951. Three West-Coast Canadians, L i o n e l Thomas, Takao Tanabe and Donald J a r v i s , a l l p r e s e n t l y a r t i s t s - t e a c h e r s , have each reacted d i f f e r e n t l y to h i s teachings. Although they attended the school at d i f f e r e n t periods and at d i f f e r e n t p l a c e s , t h e i r i n d i v i d u a l p e r s o n a l i t i e s and divergent s i t u a t i o n s account f o r t h e i r v a r y i n g responses. Each i n d i v i d u a l a r t i s t ' s contemporary t h e o r i e s of a r t w i l l now be discussed i n r e l a t i o n t o Hofmann's teachings at the New York and Provincetown schools. I b i d . , p. 113• 2 i fTanabe, March 29, 1966. 99 L i o n e l T h o m a s a t t e n d e d t h e H o f m a n n s u m m e r s c h o o l a t P r o v i n c e t o w n , i n 1 9 4 7 , f o r t w o a n d a h a l f m o n t h s t h e r e . P a r t o f t h i s t i m e w a s s p e n t a s a p r i v a t e s t u d e n t b e f o r e t h e r e g u l a r s u m m e r s c h o o l b e g a n . He b e c a m e p e r s o n a l l y a c q u a i n t e d w i t h H o f m a n n i n t h e i r m a n y d i s c u s s i o n s i n t h e e v e n i n g s a f t e r c l a s s e s . D u r i n g t h e s e c o n v e r s a t i o n s , T h o m a s came t o u n d e r s t a n d m o r e c l e a r l y H o f m a n n ' s i d e a l s a n d h i s t e a c h i n g s . H a n s H o f m a n n , t h e t e a c h e r , a n d L i o n e l T h o m a s , t h e s t u d e n t , b o t h b e l i e v e t h a t N a t u r e i s t h e s o u r c e o f i n s p i r a t i o n f o r t h e c r e a t i o n o f a w o r k o f a r t . B o t h t h e i r c l a s s e s e m p l o y t h e h u m a n m o d e l b e c a u s e o f i t s " i n h e r e n t 2 5 m o t i o n " t o g i v e t h e g r e a t e s t s t i m u l a t i o n i n t h e d i r e c t - i o n o f t h e e n e r g y e n d o w e d s p a c e , w h i c h i s p a r t o f N a t u r e . T h o m a s s a i d t h a t t h i s i n s p i r a t i o n w a s n o t a l w a y s p r e s e n t . H o w e v e r , w h e n h e d o e s h a v e t h e i n s p i r a t i o n , h i s w h o l e b e i n g c o m e s a l i v e a n d h e h a s t o e x p r e s s i t . T h e i n s p i r a t i o n c a n b e s t o r e d m e n t a l l y a n d l a t e r s u m m o n e d t o t h e c o n s c i o u s l e v e l . F o r e x a m p l e , w h e n h e p a i n t e d " R o c k F o r m o n a B o t t o m o f a P o o l , " h e h a d " a n a c t u a l e x p e r i e n c e 26 a n d p a i n t e d i t s u b j e c t i v e l y a w e e k l a t e r i n h i s s t u d i o . " 2 5 T h o m a s , J a n . IB, 1 9 6 6 . ? 6 L i o n e l T h o m a s , c i t e d i n " C o a s t t o C o a s t i n A r t : V a n c o u v e r . P a i n t e r W i n s I n t e r n a t i o n a l A w a r d , " C a n a d i a n A r t , v o l . 9, n o . 4, S u m m e r , 1 9 5 2 , p . 1 6 9 . 166 Hofmann stated s i m i l a r l y that "everything comes from nature; I too am a part of nature; my memory comes from 27 nature." Both received t h e i r i n s p i r a t i o n from nature and stored i t mentally f o r l a t e r use. The s i m i l a r i t y of these two statements does not n e c e s s a r i l y imply that Thomas adopted Hofmann's ideology. In t h i s case, as i n others t o f o l l o w , the b a s i c source of i n s p i r a t i o n and the idea of what a work of a r t i s , could w e l l have been developed by the a r t i s t before h i s a r r i v a l at the Hofmann 28 school and r e i n f o r c e d t h e r e . Thomas believes t h a t "the sources of a r t are 29 mysterious." , Hofmann's metaphysical and nebulous s t y l e of w r i t i n g and h i s a t t r i b u t e d q u a l i t y of a work of a r t a l s o e x h i b i t e d t h i s mysteriousness. Hofmann t r i e d to d i s c u s s and analyze t h i s mysterious source but Thomas b e l i e v e s i t cannot be v e r b a l l y expressed. Thomas i s more c o n s i s t e n t , f o r Hofmann c o n t r a d i c t e d himself by w r i t i n g on that mysterious source. Hofmann wrote t h a t an idea 27 Hans Hofmann, c i t e d i n E l i z a b e t h P o l l e t , "Hans Hofmann," A r t s , v o l . 31, no. 8, May, 1957, p. 30. 28 The problem of a c t u a l i n f l u e n c e can only be i n - f e r r e d except i n cases where the a r t i s t a c t u a l l y uses Hofmann's terms and t h e o r i e s d i r e c t l y . Q u a l i f i e d academic s p e c u l a t i o n must be used because an a r t i s t s e l - dom admits t h a t he has been i n f l u e n c e d by another a r t i s t . 29 Thomas, Jan. 19, 1966. has a c e r t a i n s p e c i f i c medium through which i t can be 30 expressed. His attempt t o express the s p i r i t u a l v e r b a l l y , forced him to w r i t e i n a nebulous, metaphysical s t y l e . Thomas does not attempt such a g o a l f o r he r e a l i z e s i t s u n a t t a i n a b i l i t y . Their b a s i c concept of a work of. a r t i s s i m i l a r but Hofmann had a more extensive d e f i n i t i o n . Thomas b e l i e v e s that the f i n i s h e d work of a r t contains a s i n g l e i d e a . 31 This i d e a , c a l l e d ""baraka" by the Arabs, i s t i m e l e s s . I t i n c l u d e s the a r t i s t ' s f e e l i n g f o r q u a l i t y . While Hofmann d i d not use the term "baraka," he expressed a s i m i l a r idea concerning an a r t i s t ' s " h i g h l y developed 32 s e n s i t i v i t y f o r q u a l i t y . " Hofmann's concept of a work of a r t i s f u r t h e r defined f o r he s a i d t h a t i t must appear t o possess a dynamic energy t o i n v i g o r a t e the viewer. Hofmann's " s i n g l e idea" has been w e l l defined w h i l e Thomas i s more vague and general. Both Hofmann and Thomas b e l i e v e that adult a r t i s t s r e l y on t h e i r consciousness of experiences; t h a t i s t h e i r senses. Thomas adds c r i t i c i s m s of the young a r t i s t s who o f t e n take drugs or a l c o h o l i n order to achieve unique and 3 Q Hans Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , Andover,Mass., The Addison G a l l e r y of American A r t , 1948, p. 46. 3 1Thomas, Jan. 19, 1966. J Hans Hofmann, " P a i n t i n g And C u l t u r e , " F o r t n i g h t l y , v o l . 1, no. 1, September 11, 1931, p. 5. u n n a t u r a l experiences. Hofmann makes no references t o t h i s method. Thomas p e r s o n a l l y f e e l s t h a t he does not need a r t i f i c i a l s t i m u l i i n order t o have an experience. By l i v i n g n a t u r a l l y , he i s able t o use these experiences t o depict h i s images to the viewer. Although i n 1949 he studied under Mark Rothko, an i c o n o c l a s t , Thomas s t i l l b e l i e v e s that man n a t u r a l l y sees images. He gave the example of Leonardo da V i n c i who s a i d t h a t man saw images i n stone w a l l s , and of Hamlet, who saw the image of h i s 34 f a t h e r i n the clouds. Thomas e x p l a i n s h i s murals and s c u l p t u r e s as symbols of c e r t a i n aspects of l i f e . His mural outside the Brock H a l l Extension e x e m p l i f i e s t h i s point c l e a r l y . Each r e c t a n g u l a r u n i t of the mural r e - presents one department of the u n i v e r s i t y . These images, as w e l l as the r e s t of Thomas' images, are d e r i v e d from h i s knowledge of cubism and the other "isms" of the t w e n t i e t h century. Thomas' image making q u a l i t y i s h i s personal development. Hofmann never wrote about the p o s s i b i l i t i e s of images and symbols. However, a few of h i s p a i n t i n g s present images which he d i d not c o n s c i o u s l y t r y t o achieve. Thomas, Jan. 19, 1966. Thomas, Jan. 18, 1966. 103'. Another personal q u a l i t y of Thomas t h a t d i f f e r s from Hofmann i s Thomas' h a b i t of mentioning names of w e l l known t w e n t i e t h century a r t i s t s . Hofmann who worked and s t u d i e d w i t h these f i g u r e s , r a r e l y mentioned t h e i r names. Thomas has read e x t e n s i v e l y on the subject and theory of t w e n t i e t h century a r t i s t s but he has not used the know- ledge t o h i s advantage. He only r e t a i n s a few outstand- i n g ideas and synthesizes them p o o r l y . Thomas f e e l s an academic a t t i t u d e can destroy an a r t i s t by too much i n t e l l e c t u a l i t y . Thomas i s i n agreement w i t h Hofmann f o r the l a t t e r s a i d t h a t there should be a blending together of the r a t i o n a l and the i r r a t i o n a l . Thomas attempts t o achieve t h i s w i t h h i s r a t i o n a l approach t o modern t w e n t i e t h century a r t but he does not completely under- stand these t h e o r i e s or has not made them a part of him- s e l f . He attaches himself t o them and uses them when he wishes, but they cannot do what he wants them t o do. This i s apparent i n Thomas' teaching when he uses a famous t w e n t i e t h century a r t i s t to e x p l a i n a c e r t a i n p o i n t to h i s students. He s t a r t s o f f w i t h an a r t i s t ' s theory but h i s i r r a t i o n a l p e r s o n a l i t y takes over and he l o s e s the students i n a contrast of terms, thoughts and a c t i o n s . Both Thomas and Hofmann b e l i e v e that a r t cannot be taught as such. The a r t i s t has an "inborn s e n s i t i v i t y , " as Hofmann would c a l l i t , or "baraka," Thomas' term. The teacher does not t e l l the student formulas and design "104 techniques f o r the s o l u t i o n of the bare canvas, but he must l e a d and d i r e c t the student to the use and expression of that inborn q u a l i t y . Thomas teaches i n a s i m i l a r manner as Hofmann d i d . Both leave t h e i r students alone to solve t h e i r i n d i v i d u a l problems. However, Thomas d i f f e r s from Hofmann i n that Thomas l e c t u r e s on technique and theory. Theory i s not 35 given at random but only t o " r e c e p t i v e students." Thomas f e e l s t h a t i f a design formula i s given t o any hack- neyed a r t i s t , the formula would be worked t o the ground and would a l s o be a f f e c t e d d e t r i m e n t a l l y . Thomas' t h e a t r i c a l p r e s e n t a t i o n of ideas r e s u l t s i n the same atmosphere as Hofmann achieved. Thomas, when i n the proper mood, i s v i b r a n t and a u t h o r a t i v e . He w i l l command a t t e n t i o n w i t h a l l means a v a i l a b l e , e i t h e r by shock, humour or awe. His ideas are u s u a l l y incomprehensible t o the unacquainted student but can be a means of expression f o r the student when he has grasped the concept. Thomas, a l s o l i k e Hofmann provides, an "experience to students not 36- otherwise a v a i l a b l e to them." In Thomas' drawing c l a s s e s he suggests s t a r t i n g w i t h the sphere, cone, cube and c y l i n d e r . Thomas d i f f e r s from 3 5 ^Thomas, Jan. 19, 1966. 3 6 Rosenberg, "Hans Hofmann's L i f e C l a s s , " 1962, p.110, 105 Hofmann*s approach i n that Thomas has taken objects which r e s u l t from the planar concept as Hofmann had taught. Thomas has to d e a l w i t h students w i t h l i t t l e or no b a s i c drawing background. He s t a r t s w i t h e a s i e r concepts and g r a d u a l l y introduces the idea of planar depth by j u x t a - p o s i t i o n and s h i f t i n g which are the same as those expound- ed by Hofmann. The above m a t e r i a l does not appear to show s t r i c t f a c t u a l s i m i l a r i t i e s between student and teacher. Having received a course i n "Basic Design" from Mr. Thomas, one 37 i s able to see these s i m i l a r i t i e s i n b e t t e r p e r s p e c t i v e . The most prominent aspect would be Thomas' teaching of the concept of "push and p u l l " and "expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n . " Thomas develops these concepts f i r s t i n the terms of form and then c o l o r . He, much l i k e Hofmann, brandishes these terms around without e x p l a i n i n g what he means. The students are stunned by h i s terminology. I f the student i s percept- i v e enough t o r e a l i z e what Thomas means, he w i l l apply i t c o r r e c t l y but the m a j o r i t y of students use the formula d i r e c t l y and present nothing of t h e i r own. The r e s u l t i s a classroom of the same poor s o l u t i o n s . When d i s c u s s i n g such f o r c e s as "push and p u l l " and "expansion and c o n t r a c t - i o n , " Thomas himself has not f u l l y grasped the meaning 37 The w r i t e r studied w i t h Mr .Lionel. Thomas i n 1962- 6 3 , at the U n i v e r s i t y of B r i t i s h Columbia. The course taken was Fine A r t s 228, Basic Design. 1 0 6 t h a t Hofmann a s c r i b e d t o each term. To Thomas, they are one i n the same term but i n f a c t t h e i r f o r c e s are perpendicular to each other. Thomas a l s o teaches the use of c o l o r t o achieve a s p a t i a l q u a l i t y which he l e a r n t from the Hofmann school. Hofmann s a i d that c o l o r has the i n t r i n s i c q u a l i t y t o create volume. Thomas has taken a s i m i l a r a t t i t u d e , f o r i n h i s i n t e r i o r designs, c o l o r i s "thought of as an element of a r c h i t e c t u r e and not 'decor'. I t i s three dimensional, 38 s p a t i a l and s t r u c t u r a l . " The s p a t i a l enhancement of a r c h i t e c t u r a l i n t e r i o r s w i t h c o l o r has enabled him to be- come more aware of i t i n h i s other a r t forms, such as s c u l p t u r e . Thomas' awareness of m a t e r i a l , a c t u a l l y empathizing i n t o i t , has made him " u n a f r a i d to work i n any medium."3 9 Thomas b e l i e v e s the a b i l i t y t o p r o j e c t i s c r e a t i v e . Empathy i s a q u a l i t y inherent w i t h i n the a r t i s t . Not only i s the conscious mind i n v o l v e d but t h e r e i s a backing from the unconscious, which enables a "quiet love between the a r t i s t and the medium."4 0 This empathetic a t t i t u d e i s not taught or suggested by Thomas. This f a c e t of the education ^ L i o n e l Thomas, c i t e d i n Rene Boux, "An A r t i s t Re- l a t e s h i s S k i l l to A r c h i t e c t u r e , " Canadian A r t , v o l . 1 3 , no. 1, Autumn, 1 9 5 5 , p. 2 0 3 - 2 0 5 . 39 ' L i o n e l Thomas, c i t e d i n Stephen F r a n k l i n , "Busy A r t i s t , " Weekend Magazine, v o l . 8 , no. 2 , 1 9 5 8 , p. 1 4 . 40 Thomas, Jan. 1 9 , 1 9 6 6 . 107 of the a r t i s t was however presented by Hofmann. He t r i e d t o i n c i t e w i t h i n h i s students the perception of the inner q u a l i t y of animate and inanimate o b j e c t s . What Thomas teaches should not t o be accepted as f a c t , although he can imply i t . He presents the ideas of "push and p u l l " and "expansion and c o n t r a t i o n " from Hofmann, the use of l i n e from K l e e , the p u r i t y of form and c o l o r from Mondrian, the images from P i c a s s o , the c o l o r from the German E x p r e s s i o n i s t s and the s c i e n t i f i c and p h i l o s o p h i c a t t i t u d e s of modern man. He has taken t w e n t i e t h century a r t and presented the best of i t s ideas to h i s p u p i l s . He has not developed a s y n t h e t i c theory as Hofmann has, but attempts t o present the b a s i s and the theory i t s e l f . However, Thomas has been i n f l u e n c e d by HofmannTs t e a c h i n g method. Both are not educators of set a r t i s t i c viewpoints and problem s o l u t i o n s , but are educators i n the sense of s t i m u l a t o r s of minds f o r the s o l u t i o n of problems set up by the p u p i l h i m s e l f . Guide posts and p o i n t e r s are a v a i l a b l e f o r the student, but what the student achieves i s dependent s o l e l y on h i s a b i l i t y to use h i s inborn a r t i s t i c q u a l i t i e s . G e n e r a l l y , Thomas, l i k e Hofmann, has helped , t o s t i m u l a t e h i s students, t o educate the p u b l i c and to b u i l d up an a r t i s t i c climate w i t h i n t h e i r i n d i v i d u a l environments. While the scope of Hofmann's i n f l u e n c e i s i n t e r n a t i o n a l , Thomas' has tended t o be p a r o c h i a l . 108 In c o n t r a s t t o the s i m i l a r i t i e s of L i o n e l Thomas and Hofmann, another West-Coast Canadian a r t i s t , Takao Tanabe, has reacted i n the opposite d i r e c t i o n . Having stayed at the Hofmann school f o r only s i x weeks and being of a d i f f e r e n t r a c i a l e x t r a c t i o n and personal outlook, the divergence between Tanabe and Hofmann i s e a s i l y d i s c e r n a b l e . However, i n s p i t e of these d i f f e r e n c e s , Tanabe may have been i n f l u e n c e d d u r i n g h i s stay at the Hofmann s c h o o l . Takao Tanabe heard of the Hofmann school from Joe P l a s k e t t . When Tanabe a r r i v e d i n New York i n 1951, he en- r o l l e d i n Hans Hofmann's n i g h t school drawing course while a t the same time a t t e n d i n g the day school of the Brooklyn Museum of A r t . The c o n t r a s t between the two schools must have been too much t o accept f o r Tanabe l e f t the Hofmann school a f t e r s i x weeks. Tanabe's p e r s o n a l i t y can be seen through a d i s c u s s i o n of the interviews. During the f i r s t i n t e r v i e w Tanabe s t a t e d t h a t he had disregarded Hofmann's ideas even before he s t a r t e d c l a s s e s there. I f such were the case, Tanabe's attendance at the 'School would have been l u d i c r o u s . Upon r e q u e s t i o n i n g , he s a i d that he was not e n t h u s i a s t i c about Hofmann's t h e o r i e s . By t h i s r e t r a c t i o n , Tanabe's p e r s o n a l - i t y can be understood. He does not l i k e t o acknowledge h i s teachers and f e l l o w a r t i s t s who have helped him i n h i s work. I n an i n t e r v i e w he s a i d that he i s not the most j u b i l a n t and b o i s t r o u s person. He i s almost always on an even k e e l . His 1Q9 i n t r o v e r t e d p e r s o n a l i t y c o n t r a s t s w i t h Thomas' e x t r o v e r t e d one. With the a d d i t i o n of an approach more i n keeping w i t h Tanabe's own p e r s o n a l i t y , at the day school i n Brooklyn, Hofmann's ideas d i d not have a chance t o j e l l . Hofmann»s i n f l u e n c e on Tanabe cannot be s t r e s s e d because of Tanabe's opposing p e r s o n a l i t y and the short d u r a t i o n at the s c h o o l . I t i s , however, s u r p r i s i n g t o f i n d that there are s i m i l a r i t i e s between t h e i r idea of p a i n t i n g l s i n s p i r a t i o n d e r i v i n g from nature. As was s t a t e d e a r l i e r , Hofmann be- l i e v e d t h a t nature was the source of s t i m u l a t i o n f o r the a r t i s t . S i m i l a r t o other West-Coast Canadian a r t i s t s , Tanabe has a " f e e l i n g f o r the country and f o r n a t u r e . " 4 1 H i s r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s of landscape are n a t u r a l , and are "not of a s p e c i f i c time and p l a c e . " 4 2 In contrast t o Hofmann's metaphysical landscape i n which the a r t i s t represents the unseen p o r t i o n of nature, (nature's c r e a t i v i t y ) Tanabe's landscape canvases are"not landscapes of the s o u l or 'inner 43 eye'." The quoted " i n n e r eye" i s undoubtedly a reference t o Hofmann who Tanabe says he r e j e c t e d long ago. 41 Joe P l a s k e t t , c i t t e d i n Takao Tanabe. P a i n t i n g s and Drawings, 1954 - 1957. (Catalogue), Vancouver Art G a l l e r y . 42 Robert F u l f o r d , "Tanabe". Canadian A r t , v o l . 18, no. 1, Jan./Feb., 1961, p. 50. I T Takao Tanabe: P a i n t i n g s and Drawings ..... (Catalogue), Vancouver A r t G a l l e r y . . 110: Takao Tanabe's landscapes are the product of conscious empathizing i n t o the landforms and nature of B r i t i s h Columbia. This empathetic a t t i t u d e could have been i n s p i r e d by Hofmann's c l a s s e s where one i s i n i t i a t e d i n t o seeing i n t o the essences of animate and inanimate o b j e c t s . However, empathy does not need t o be taught. I t can be acquired by a perceptive and s e n s i t i v e person such as Tanabe. His r a c i a l background would a l s o lead him t o such f e e l i n g s of the n a t u r a l world. (This l a t t e r f a c t should not be emphasized f o r Tanabe was brought up i n a western c u l t u r e and h i s contact w i t h the o r i e n t was h i s Japanese ancestory, p a r e n t a l t u t e l a g e at home and h i s recent t r i p t o Japan). Because i t i s not known what empathetic f e e l - ings Tanabe had before h i s s i x weeks at the Hofmann school, one cannot a t t r i b u t e h i s p r o j e c t i v e f e e l i n g s t o Hofmann. The i n f l u e n t i a l r o l e of Hofmann on Tanabe i s tenuous. Joe P l a s k e t t quotes Tanabe concerning c a l l i g r a p h y , " I have broken away from the d e f i n i t e plane extensions of form b u i l d i n g and volume d e f i n i n g of Hofmann." 4 4 When Tanabe was attending the school, Hofmann had not solved the problem of form and c o l o r . L a t e r i n h i s development, c o l o r and form develop simultaneously. Tanabe i n h i s own develop- Joe P l a s k e t t , "Some New Canadian P a i n t e r s and t h e i r Debt t o Hans Hofmann." Canadian A r t , v o l . x, no. 2 , Winter, 1 9 5 3 , p. 6 1 . ment a l s o achieves the same e f f e c t . "Landscape of an I n t e r i o r Space" ( p l a t e VII) e x h i b i t s a planar c o n t r o l of c o l o r . As i n Hofmann's "Le G i l o t i n " , Tanabe has used each stroke of the brush as a plane of pure c o l o r . D i f f e r e n t c o l o r s stand against i t s neighbouring ones t o define the edges, not by l i n e s , but by c o n t r a s t of c o l o r . While Tanabe's a p p l i c a t i o n of p a i n t i s not as l u s h as Hofmann's " G i l o t i n " or "Pre-Dawn", Tanabe i s able to create a r i c h creamy e f f e c t by the contrast of y e l l o w t o the white ground and j u x t a p o s i n g black planar l i n e s . The mottled areas of the, ground r e f l e c t the c o l o r s which are l a i d on top. The r h y t h m i c a l f l o w of the staccato y e l l o w and black v e r t i c a l s undulate the canvas. This achieves the e f f e c t of "push and p u l l " but Tanabe undoubtedly would not c a l l i t by Hofmann's terms. The contrast of organic shapes t o the lower l e f t and the v e r t i c a l play of rhythms across the canvas have a n a t u r e - l i k e f e e l . There i s a f e e l i n g of growth. Tanabe has f e l t nature's c r e a t i v e q u a l i t y and p i e t o r i a l i z e d i t i n an i n t e r p l a y of v i v i d l y harmonizing c o l o r s . This organic f e e l i n g f o r nature could be r e l a t e d t o t h a t of Hofmann, but Tanabe denies such a f f i n i t i e s . Though s i m i l a r ideas can be seen i n Takao Tanabe and Hans Hofmann, the teacher's i n f l u e n c e on the student cannot be s u b s t a n t i a t e d . I f Hofmann was i n an i n f l u e n t i a l p o s i t i o n t h a t aspect has been c o n s t r i c t e d , denunciated and f o r g o t t e n 112 by Takao Tanabe. In contrast t o Takao Tanabe, Donald J a r v i s has developed from the ideas of Hans Hofmann's school and formulated h i s own personal statement about a r t . These t h e o r i e s do not r a d i c a l l y d i f f e r from those of h i s teacher but r a t h e r are a personal r e a c t i o n t o those developed by Hofmann. Donald J a r v i s who heard of the Hofmann school from L i o n e l Thomas attended the morning c l a s s e s of Hofmann's N.ew York school i n 1948. He had j u s t graduated from the Vancouver Art School, and was l i m i t e d f i n a n c i a l l y when he a p p l i e d f o r admission. He t o l d Hofmann of h i s predicament and Hofmann gave him a job as a night monitor t o pay f o r the t u i t i o n . Harold Rosenberg has s a i d that "Hofmann and h i s wife got caught up i n the personal l i v e s of h i s 45 students." J a r v i s was such an involvement. His job as n i g h t monitor consisted of posing the model each night and making sure e v e r y t h i n g was i n order a f t e r the c l a s s was over. J a r v i s c a l l e d himself a " g l o r i f i e d j a n i t o r . " Through t h i s j a n i t o r i a l p o s i t i o n , J a r v i s was able t o experience and recognize the ideas of a modern master i n c o n t r a s t t o the overbearing a t t i t u d e i n the l a t e 1940's 47 of the Vancouver Art School. Although J a r v i s d i d not 45 Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object, New York, Horizon P r e s s , 1962, p. 151. 4 6 J a r v i s , Feb. 8, 1966. 47 J a r v i s , Feb. 1, 1966. 113 comprehend immediately the ideas of "push and p u l l " and "expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n , " through h i n d s i g h t i n h i s own p a i n t i n g s he r e a l i z e d the d i r e c t i o n a l d i f f e r e n c e between them. His concepts of a " r e l a t i o n " and an " i n t e r v a l " are s t i l l vague, while he understands " t e n s i o n " t o be a balance of f o r c e s and an i m p l i e d r e l a t i o n s h i p . Hofmann used the above devices t o achieve a v i b r a n t motion i n h i s p a i n t i n g s . J a r v i s f e e l s t h a t such an end i n p a i n t i n g i s narrow and makes f o r a l i m i t e d viewpoint. The idea of dynamism i s compelling and should be t r a n s l a t e d by the i n d i v i d u a l 48 a r t i s t . J a r v i s himself has taken ideas of Hofmann and r e - worked them w i t h h i s own p e r s o n a l i t y , e x a c t l y what Hofmann had t r i e d to i n s t i l l i n h i s students. A p a i n t i n g t o J a r v i s a f f e c t s the observer w i t h an infectuous v i t a l i t y , an idea derived from Hofmann. U n l i k e Hofmann who emphasiz- ed t h i s p o i n t , J a r v i s r e a l i z e s t h a t a work of a r t must a l s o be created w i t h a "backlog of t r a i n i n g . " 4 9 The a r t i s t i s presented w i t h problems formerly solved by o l d e r a r t i s t s . He solves these questions and develops h i s own problems and s o l u t i o n s . His s o l u t i o n s have to be worked on over a period of time u n t i l the culminating idea i s maturated. The a r t i s t 4 ^ J a r v i s , Feb. 1 , 1 9 6 6 . J a r v i s , Feb. 1, 1966. can achieve the end r e s u l t by t r i a l and e r r o r or experiment- a t i o n . J a r v i s f i n d s that h i s young students use the t r i a l and e r r o r method much more o f t e n than he would. He h i m s e l f , approaches the problem much i n the same way as Hofmann had 50 by " l e t t i n g i t grow from what has preceded i t . " J a r v i s does not c o n t i n u a l l y work at the same problem u n t i l he i s s a t i s f i e d that i t has been solved but pursues a problem u n t i l he has f e l t he has produced something. L a t e r he w i l l r e t u r n t o that same question. When he has come t o a f i n a l answer, he w i l l present t h i s t o the p u b l i c . J a r v i s , at t h i s p o i n t , i s so sure of h i s s o l u t i o n t h a t he i s able and prepared t o stand behind t h a t work. I t does not n e c e s s a r i l y have t o e x h i b i t a v e r b a l statement, such as s o c i a l r e a l i s m , 51 but can be " p a i n t e r l y means t o express p a i n t e r l y ideas." This statement by J a r v i s , i s p r a c t i c a l l y a word f o r word r e c a p i t u l a t i o n of Hofmann's statement formerly c i t e d . The s o l e act of u s i n g p a i n t e r l y means i s a l s o a f a c e t of a 52 p a i n t i n g . These means are used t o express an accumula- t i o n of past experience which w i l l r e s u l t i n form. S i m i l a r to Hofmann, J a r v i s uses experience t o d i f f e r e n t i a t e a d u l t a r t from c h i l d a r t . C h i l d r e n ' s a r t l a c k s a back-5 0 J a r v i s , Feb. 8, 1966. 5 1 J a r v i s , Feb. 1, 1966. 52 J a r v i s , Feb. 8, 1966. 53 ground of experience and "gets b o r i n g a f t e r a w h i l e . " An a d u l t p a i n t i n g by being r e l a t e d t o an a r t i s t ' s experience can a l s o r e f l e c t h i s mood at that time, and thus have more depth. A work of a r t i s r e l a t e d to l i v i n g much i n the same way as Hofmann defined a canvas as a humanistic and c u l t u r a l statement. In a r e p l y t o the question, "how should one approach a r t ? " J a r v i s answers that one must perceive t h a t work of a r t f o r "what i t i s . The observer must understand the p a i n t e r l y q u a l i t i e s . " In good and bad p a i n t i n g s of the past, one can see o b j e c t i v e nature c l e a r l y so i t i s " e a s i l y 55 pegged t o hang one's thought." In contrast t o past anecdotal p a i n t i n g s , a b s t r a c t ones r e q u i r e an i n c r e a s i n g l y prepared audience who w i l l shed t h e i r p r e j u d i c e i n order t o f u l l y experience that work. Modern a r t r e q u i r e s more of the observer. Hofmann, i n a s i m i l a r statement s a i d , "see- 56 i n g w i t h awareness i s another a r t . " The observer must create h i s own v i s i o n from h i s perception of the a r t i s t ' s p i c t o r i a l l y r e a l i z e d v i s i o n . He does not need t r a i n i n g 5 3 J a r v i s , Feb. 1, 1966. 5 4 J a r v i s , Feb. 8, 1966. 5 5 J a r v i s , Feb. 8, 1966. 56 J Hans Hofmann, exerpt from " I t I s , " 1959, c i t e d i n Los Angeles County A r t Museum, New York School, The F i r s t Generation of P a i n t i n g s of 1940's and 1950's. Los Angeles, Members of th"e Board of tEe Los Angeles County A r t Museum, 1965, p. 17. but only a w i l l i n g n e s s t o approach a p a i n t i n g w i t h an open mind. However, i f t r a i n i n g i s g i v e n , "educate i n seeing 57 what makes a p a i n t i n g ' t i c k ' . " I f the observer can see how these mechanisms work, he may be able t o t e l l how the a r t i s t was i n s p i r e d . What i n s p i r e s J a r v i s may be bewilderment, an observation or an i n s i g h t i n t o some aspect of o b j e c t i v e r e a l i t y . J a r v i s f e e l s t h a t t h i s i n s p i r a t i o n i s something he must express. The most important aspect I s , however, "the w i l l i n g n e s s of r g the a r t i s t to l e t t h i n g s grow out of the canvas." Hofmann a l s o b e l i e v e d i n the developmental process of a • p a i n t i n g . J a r v i s has a general idea of what w i l l happen on h i s canvas but he w i l l pursue any new idea t h a t occurs from a c e r t a i n s i t u a t i o n on the canvas. He does not s t i c k to-one conceptual approach l i k e Hofmann's planar one, but 59 employs a l l the t o o l s o f - " b a s i c v i s u a l language." In contrast t o Hofmann's s i n g l e approach, J a r v i s has many uses f o r c o l o r . I t may serve as an embellishment, an element, another dimension, a mood c r e a t o r or a c o n t r o l l - i n g device. U n l i k e Hofmann, who went through d i f f e r e n t stages of the r e l a t i o n s h i p between form and c o l o r , J a r v i s r e a l i s e s the p o s s i b i l i t i e s of both. Form can be "anything not t o do w i t h c o l o r , as i n K l i n e , or c o l o r i s form and form i s 57 J a r v i s , Feb. 8, 1966. J a r v i s , Feb. 8, 1966. J a r v i s , Feb. 8, 1966. 58 59 117 c o l o r , as i n M a t i s s e . T o t a l form i s the summation of a l l 60 the r e l a t i o n s h i p s w i t h i n a p a i n t i n g . " This statement i s s i m i l a r t o Hofmann*s simultaneous development of form and c o l o r i n which the p a r a l l e l development of form and c o l o r n e c e s s i t a t e s change when e i t h e r one i s extended. J a r v i s w i l l not s t a t e d e f i n i t e l y what the purpose of a completed p a i n t i n g i s , f o r he i s not sure he knows. I t can be a form of communication; t h a t i s , an e x t e r n a l - i z a t i o n of h i s experience i n t o some form. Hofmann express- ed a s i m i l a r idea of an inner f e e l i n g p h y s i c a l l y p i c t o r i a l - i z e d but J a r v i s goes f u r t h e r when he says that " i f the viewer i s responsive t o the p a i n t i n g , the f u n c t i o n of the 61 p a i n t i n g w i l l have been f u l f i l l e d . " Hofmann i n h e r e n t l y knew h i s p a i n t i n g s would be accepted, i f not now, then i n the near f u t u r e . The d i f f e r e n c e between Hofmann and J a r v i s i s that the teacher had achieved some degree of i n t e r - n a t i o n a l fame while h i s p u p i l i s s t i l l i n an i n f e r i o r p o s i t i o n of being known i n Vancouver and to a l e s s e r degree i n Canada. J a r v i s ' other purpose of a p a i n t i n g i s " s o c i a l i n a sense but i t does not have t o express the p l i g h t of 62 humanity." Hofmann b e l i e v e d that a p a i n t i n g should be £ c u l t u r a l statement. However, Harold Rosenberg s a i d t h a t 6 0 J a r v i s , Feb. 8 , 1 9 6 6 . 6 1 J a r v i s , Feb. 8 , 1 9 6 6 . 6 2 J a r v i s , Feb. 8 , 1 9 6 6 . 118 Hofmann d i d not get i n v o l v e d w i t h the s o c i a l climate of America during the l a t e t h i r t i e s . Hofmann's school may not have taught the expression of a c u l t u r a l statement, but upon J a r v i s ' r e t u r n from the s c h o o l , he painted s o c i a l r e a l i s t i c works. I t i s not u n t i l the l a t e f i f t i e s that h i s p a i n t i n g s depict the a r t i s t himself and the i n f l u e n c e of Hofmann. The purpose of p a i n t i n g as the c u l m i n a t i o n of experience to that moment was expressed by Hofmann and J a r v i s . This experience i s p i c t o r i a l l y communicated t o the observer by the p a i n t i n g . L i k e a radio-broadcaster, 63 the p a i n t e r does not know t o whom he w i l l communicate. J a r v i s however d i f f e r s s l i g h t l y from Hofmann by saying that the p a i n t i n g does not have to communicate t o the observer what the a r t i s t i s expressing. Hofmann's o p t i m i s t i c outlook f e l t t h a t i n time the audience would perceive what he wished to communicate. Both Donald J a r v i s and Hans Hofmann are teachers. They f e l t t h a t p a i n t i n g cannot be taught t o the person who has not that c e r t a i n g i f t of s e n s i t i v i t y . J a r v i s f u r t h e r extends the l i m i t s of teaching. He s a i d that one can teach a student about p a i n t i n g ; that i s mixing c o l o r s and priming. However, the teacher's greatest and J a r v i s , Feb. 8, 1966. 1 1 9 most i m p o r t a n t t a s k i s t o " t u r n s t u d e n t s o n " ^ 4 much i n the same way as Hofmann s t i m u l a t e d h i s s t u d e n t s t o c r e a t e by h i s s t r o n g c r i t i c a l approach and v i b r a n t p e r s o n a l i t y . Whereas Hofmann d i s c u s s e d t e a c h i n g a r t t o some e x t e n t i n many a r t i c l e s , J a r v i s l a t e r f e l t t h a t " t h e q u e s t i o n of A c t e a c h i n g a r t i s t o o g e n e r a l t o w a r r a n t an answer." y The a c t u a l t a s k of t e a c h i n g has t a k e n t i m e and energy f r o m b o t h Hofmann and J a r v i s . J a r v i s f e e l s t h a t s t u d e n t c o n t a c t added t o h i s own work i n t h e sense o f s t i m u l a t i o n and i d e a s . Hofmann, however, n e v e r s a i d t h a t s t u d e n t s e v e r a i d e d the development o f h i s own work; he t was a s e p a r a t e e n t i t y i n New York and was h e l d i n awe by h i s p u p i l s . I n c o n t r a s t , J a r v i s i s more down t o e a r t h and c o n v e r s e s more w i t h h i s s t u d e n t s . J a r v i s 1 c o n v e r s a b i l i t y has e n a b l e d him t o become more p e r s o n a l l y a c q u a i n t e d w i t h h i s s t u d e n t s because o f the s m a l l e r c l a s s e s and t h e h i g h s c h o o l - l i k e approach of t h e Vancouver A r t S c h o o l . Through h i s t e a c h i n g J a r v i s f e e l s t h a t h i s thought f o r c e r t a i n problems have been c l a r i f i e d . T h i s statement i s r e f l e c t e d i n Hofmann's 1 9 1 5 P r o s p e c t u s where he s a i d t h a t t h e s c h o o l would c l a r i f y t h e whole new p i c t o r i a l approach t o modern a r t . Hofmann o b t a i n e d t h e b a s i s o f h i s t h e o r i e s from h i s P a r i s s t a y 6 4 J a r v i s , Feb. 1 , 1 9 6 6 . 6 5 J a r v i s , Feb. 1 , 1 9 6 6 . (1904 - 1914) and resolved them from h i s own approach. His teaching n e c e s s i t a t e d o r g a n i z i n g a coherent theory f o r h i s students and d i s c u s s i n g i t w i t h them. While Hofmann never s t a t e d that h i s students aided h i s develop ment, "teaching helps to c l a r i f y ; that i s the v i r t u e of t e a c h i n g . " The teacher must be w i l l i n g t o l i s t e n t o h i s students and avoid a l l dogmatism. Hofmann had such a p e r s o n a l i t y . I t s r e s u l t s can be seen i n h i s many students. Each had an i n d i v i d u a l r e a c t i o n t o h i s teach^ ings. J a r v i s a l s o has a sympathetic a t t i t u d e towards h i students. He leads them i n t h e i r chosen d i r e c t i o n . He r e a l i z e s t h a t a b s t r a c t expressionism means nothing t o h i s young students so he approaches them with hard edge, Op and Pop a r t . Hofmann taught h i s students a c e r t a i n f i n a l end i n p a i n t i n g which the student was not forced to accept. J a r v i s as a true student of Hofmann reacted p a r t i a l l y f o r some of those teachings. He f e e l s that "Hofmann*s ideas are v a l i d f o r some ( a r t i s t s ) . Hofmann got people r o l l i n g " t o e s t a b l i s h t h e i r own p a r t i c u l a r d i r e c t i o n . Hofmann's a f f e c t on Canadian a r t i s i n d i r e c t because i t has been i n f l u e n c e d by the whole New York School of 6 6 J a r v i s , Feb. 8, .1966. 6 7 J a r v i s , Feb. 8, 1966. 121 68 A b s t r a c t Expressionism. However, i n J a r v i s * work i t i s p o s s i b l e t o see a r e l a t i o n s h i p between teacher and p u p i l . J a r v i s d i d not take over Hofmann*s i d e a s , but worked them out according t o h i s own p e r s o n a l i t y and from a r e a c t i o n t o h i s environment. Upon J a r v i s * r e t u r n from the Hofmann s c h o o l , he painted i n a s o c i a l r e a l i s t i c manner. S o l i t a r y f i g u r e s were i s o l a t e d i n a crowd. The dark and muddy c o l o r s take on a depressing atmosphere. L i n e i s used t o d e f i n e planes. This e a r l y period of h i s work does not show J a r v i s at h i s maturity of the ideas derived from Hofmann. The subject expresses the p l i g h t of humanity which he l a t e r d i s r e g a r d s . His use of c o l o r shows nothing of the v i t a l i t y and excitement that Hofmann had already e x h i b i t e d . I t i s i n the l a t e r works such as "Winter Evening" that J a r v i s uses h i s experience of the Hofmann school t o express h i s f e e l i n g and sentiments about the n a t u r a l landscape and flora,,, of the West Coast. "Winter Evening", ( p l a t e V I I I ) as i n Hofmann*s works, does not depict a n a t u r a l landscape, but a f e e l - i n g i n t o nature p i c t o r i a l l y r e a l i z e d . The e f f e c t of nature on J a r v i s i s the r e a l s u b j e c t , t h e r e f o r e o b j e c t - i v e r e a l i t y cannot be seen c l e a r l y . One can however p i c k out a t r e e - l i k e form, a man w i t h h i s arms out- __ u o J a r v i s , Feb. 1, 1966. 122 s t r e t c h e d and a p a r t i a l c i t y s c a p e . What J a r v i s f e e l s about the West Coast i s suggested t o the viewer. The oranges and the browns create a warm and enchanting f e e l i n g . Blue and white normally appear c o o l but here J a r v i s has juxtaposed i t t o the warm mauve and added pink and mauve t o the blue and white so that the r e s u l t i s an o v e r a l l warmness. The p a i n t has been a p p l i e d i n a planar concept w i t h each brushstroke a planar u n i t . Although one could say that there are short dark l i n e s t o the lower l e f t and r i g h t , these are i n f a c t the r e f l e c t i o n of the base c o l o r coming through the l i n e a r planes of white. Because the ground has not been t o t a l l y concealed l e v e l s of p i c t o r i a l depth have been achieved. Each brushstroke has been a p p l i e d w i t h a verve and a v i r t u o s i t y t h a t i s reminicent of o r i e n t a l c a l l i g r a p h y . The strokes are sweeping and are done w i t h an o r i e n t a l assuredness. Because the brush i s not loaded w i t h pigment, the c o l o r of the ground comes through the white and the r e s u l t takes on the appear- ance of " f l y i n g white" i n the negative. However, i n c o n t r a s t t o the o r i e n t a l c a l l i g r a p h i c brush, the equal w i d t h of each brushstroke, as the planar u n i t , i s used i n combination t o form l a r g e r u n i t s such as the s k y l i n e - l i k e shape t o the upper l e f t and the o v e r l a i d white which creates the e f f e c t of snow. 1 2 3 Upon f i r s t glance, the canvas i s f l a t and l a c k s any r e a l depth except f o r a s l i g h t depression i n the top blue area. Focusing on the lower white area, the mauve and blue upper area recedes while the orange and brown-like f i g u r e p r o j e c t s . Reversing the focus t o the f i g u r e , the brown and orange t r e e - l i k e shape pro- j e c t s and the white recedes, thereby c r e a t i n g a dynamic e f f e c t of "push and p u l l . " E q u i l i b r i u m i s a t t a i n e d , however, by the o v e r a l l l u m i n o s i t y of the canvas. The three sectioned composition can be compared t o Hofmann*s "Above Deep Waters," but J a r v i s has created a more o v e r a l l e f f e c t of c o l o r i n s t e a d of Hofmann's segmented areas. The c r u c i f o r m - l i k e shape to the center creates a breathing surface of c o n t r a c t - i n g and expanding f o r c e s . The lower p o r t i o n of white which i s separated by the stem of the cruciform tends t o u n i f y the base of the canvas and to contract i t . The stem however has the p r o j e c t i v e c o l o r of orange and the warmth of the brown t o separate the white areas and expand p e r p e n d i c u l a r l y and h o r i z o n t a l l y o f f the canvas. J a r v i s , then, has created the simultaneous e f f e c t of "push and p u l l " and expansion and c o n t r a c t i o n as Hofmann would have. These f o r c e s have been used t o create a p e r c e i v - a b l y p u l s a t i n g and l i v i n g canvas. The areas of white o v e r l a y the l u s h brown below l i k e snow over f r e s h l y 1 2 4 t i l l e d s o i l . The snow breaks and l i f e springs f o r t h w i t h j u b i l a n t outstretched arms. J a r v i s has captured the e f f e c t of Nature on man i n B r i t i s h Columbia. The contrast of seasons i s seen i n the contrast of the warm white and mellow tepidness of the orange and brown. J a r v i s ' empath- i z i n g i n t o nature has enabled him to depict i t s c r e a t i v e r o l e . The sweep of the brush suggests the movement of t r e e s and the energy surrounding o b j e c t i v e r e a l i t y . In "Winters Evening" J a r v i s has been able to capture nature i n r i c h f u l l c o l o r s and to r e f l e c t growth and l i f e by suggestive shapes and forms. He has employed the means taught by Hofmann and used them i n h i s own personal way t o d e p i c t h i s experience of the n a t u r a l landscape of B r i t i s h Columbia. The three West-Coast Canadian a r t i s t s , Donald J a r v i s , Takao Tanabe, and L i o n e l Thomas, attended Hofmann's School of Art and have been a f f e c t e d by him. Thomas's two and a h a l f month stay at the Provincetown summer school enabled him to understand Hofmann's t h e o r i e s and teaching methods. Because of the s i m i l a r i t i e s of t h e i r p e r s o n a l i t i e s and the added f e r v o u r of Thomas' enthusiasm f o r Hofmann's t h e o r i e s , p r e s e n t l y L i o n e l Thomas teaches as Hofmann had taught before. Hofmann's t h e o r i e s are employed as are other masters of the t w e n t i e t h century. 125 Takao Tanabe's p e r s o n a l i t y d i f f e r s from both Hofmann"s and Thomas". His quiet and i n t r o v e r t e d a t t i t u d e t o l i f e has or appears t o have no room f o r Hofmann*s t h e o r i e s . Tanabe f e e l s that h i s a r t has been self-developed. He does not accord r e c o g n i t i o n t o h i s teachers which undoubtedly have a f f e c t e d him. His short s i x week d u r a t i o n at the Hofmann school could account f o r h i s l a c k of enthusiasm for•Hofmann"s t h e o r i e s . Don J a r v i s ' r e a c t i o n to the Hofmann school f a l l s n e i t h e r i n t o t o t a l acceptance as Thomas or t o t a l r e j e c t - i o n as Tanabe. J a r v i s , as a t r u e student of the Hofmann s c h o o l , has understood Hofmann's t h e o r i e s and from them worked and developed h i s own approach as Hofmann had done f i f t y years e a r l i e r i n P a r i s . J a r v i s ' s i x month stay at the school allowed him t o be acquainted w i t h Hofmann's i d e a l s and at the same time t o develop h i s own t h e o r i e s . These t h e o r i e s were not resolved t o t a l l y by the time J a r v i s a r r i v e d home, but r a t h e r took years of work and development i n h i s p a i n t i n g s t o achieve the d e s i r e d end. J a r v i s , as a teacher i n h i s own r i g h t , now i s i n the p o s i t i o n t o a f f e c t h i s students as Hofmann a f f e c t e d J a r v i s eighteen years e a r l i e r . His students are not taught s p e c i f i c formulas and methods, but r a t h e r each student i s lead to the f u l f i l l m e n t of h i s own development. Hans Hofmann's a f f e c t i s not l i m i t e d to a r t i s t s f o r such w r i t e r s as A l l a n Leepa, Sheldon Cheney and E r i e 126 Loran have w r i t t e n books concerning c e r t a i n aspects of modern a r t and a l l have acknowledged t h e i r debt t o him f o r h i s concept and approach t o a r t . D i r e c t i n f l u e n c e from Hofmann has now ended since the t e r m i n a t i o n of h i s t e a c h i n g career i n 1958 and h i s death only t h i s year. I n d i r e c t i n f l u e n c e , however, i s s t i l l being f e l t because h i s students and second generation students are t r a n s - m i t t i n g h i s ideas to the new generation of young a r t i s t s . While a b s t r a c t expressionism i s no longer i n the f o r e - f r o n t of the a r t w o r l d , Hofmann's ideas are s t i l l v a l i d . He d i d not teach a c e r t a i n unrefutable formula f o r the c r e a t i o n of a work of a r t but r a t h e r the b a s i s of a work of a r t and the c r e a t i v e process. These ideas are not the d e f i n i t i v e w r i t i n g s on the c r e a t i o n of a work of a r t but r a t h e r Hofmann expected each i n d i v i d u a l a r t i s t t o develop from such concepts as he himself had done. With t h i s backlog of i n f o r m a t i o n , and an inborn a r t i s t i c s e n s i t i v i t y , the a r t i s t i s t o evolve the canvas from a f l a t and l i f e - l e s s surface t o one i n which the observer perceives the a r t i s t ' s l i f e , time and experience. The s p i r i t that the a r t i s t captures i s a non-physical e n t i t y , but yet a l i v i n g r e a l i t y d e r i v e d from the a r t i s t . That s p i r i t i n a work of a r t i s synonymous w i t h i t s q u a l i t y . The r e a l i n a r t never d i e s because i t s nature i s predominantly s p i r i t u a l . 6 9 Hans Hofmann, Search f o r the R e a l , 1948, p. 54• PLATE I "Fantasia,* 1 1943, by Hans Hofmann, U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a , Berkeley. PLATE I I "Effervescence," 1944, by Hans Hofmann U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a , Berkeley. "Le G i l o t i n , " 1953, by Hans Hofmann, U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a , Berkeley. PLATE V "Above Deep Waters," 1959, by Hans Hofmann U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a , Berkeley. PLATE VI "Pre-Dawn," I960, by Hans Hofmann, C o l l e c t i o n of Mr. P r e n t i s C. Hale, San F r a n c i s c o . 130 PLATE VII "Landscape of an I n t e r i o r P l a c e , " 1955, by Takao Tanabe, N a t i o n a l G a l l e r y of Canada, Ottawa. PLATE V I I I "Winter Evening," 1958, by Donald J a r v i s , Unknown c o l l e c t i o n . 131 BIBLIOGRAPHY I. WRITINGS BY HANS HOFMANN C a l i f o r n i a . University. Haviland H a l l . Hans Hofmann Exhibition Catalogue, Aug. 5-22, 1931. Berkeley: University of C a l i f o r n i a , 1931. Hofmann, Hans. "The Color Problem i n Pure Painting." 1955, c i t e d i n Wight, Frederick S., Hans Hofmann, Berkeley: University of C a l i f o r n i a Press, 1957. . "From 'It I s ' , " 1959, c i t e d i n Los Angeles, County Art Museum. New York School, The F i r s t Generation Paintings of 1940's and 1950's. Los Angeles: Board of the Los Angeles County Art Museum, 1965, pp. 17-18. "Hans Hofmann Explains His Painting.:" Bennington Alumnae Quarterly, Vol. 7, F a l l , 1955, p. 23. "Hans Hofmann On Art." The Art Journal, Vol. 22, No, 3, p. 180. . "Munich School Prospectus, 1915," c i t e d i n S e i t z , William G., Hans Hofmann. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1963, p. 56. "Mystery of Creative Relations," 1953, c i t e d i n Hofmann, Hans and Sam Hunter, Hans Hofmann. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1963, p. 45. "Nature and Art: Controversy and Misconception," c i t e d i n Sammuel Kootz Gallery, New York. New Paint- ings by Hans Hofmann, Jan. 7 to 25, 1958. New York: Sammuel Kootz Gallery, 1958, no paging. _ . "On the Aims of A r t , " Fortnightly, Vol. 1, No. 1 3 , February 2 6 , 1 9 3 2 , pp. 7-TTT . "Painting and Culture," Fortnightly, Vol. 1, No. 1, September 1 1 , 1 9 3 1 , pp. 5 - 7 . _ . " P l a s t i c Creation," 1 9 3 2 , c i t e d i n Hofmann, Hans and Sam Hunter, Hans Hofmann. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1 9 6 3 , pp. 3 5 - 3 8 . "Reply to questionnaire and comments on a recent e x h i b i t i o n , " Arts and Architecture, Vol. 66, No. 11, November, 1949, pp. 22-28. 132 . "The R e s u r r e c t i o n of the P l a s t i c A r t s , " 1953, c i t e d i n Hofmann, Hans and Sam Hunter, Hans Hofmann. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1963, p. 44. . Search f o r the Real and other Essays. Andover, Mass.: The Addison G a l l e r y of American A r t , 1948. . "Space P i c t o r i a l l y R e a l i z e d through the I n t r i n s i c F a c u l t y of Color t o Express Volumes," c i t e d i n Sammuel Kootz G a l l e r y , New York, Hans Hofmann E x h i b i - t i o n Catalogue, Nov. 13-Dec. 1, 1951. New York: Sammuel Kootz G a l l e r y , 1951, no paging. . "A Statement by Hans Hofmann, c i t e d i n Sammuel Kootz G a l l e r y , New York, Hans Hofmann E x h i b i t i o n Catalogue. Oct. 28-Nov. 22, 1952. New York: Sammuel Kootz G a l l e r y , 1952, no paging. I l l i n o i s . U n i v e r s i t y , College of Fine and Applied A r t s . U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American P a i n t i n g , March 4- A p r i l 15, 1951. Urbana: U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o u s , 1951, pp. 187-188. . U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American P a i n t i n g , March 2 - A p n l 13, 1952. Urbana: U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s , 1952, p. 199. . U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American P a i n t i n g , March 1 - A p r i l 12, 1953. Urbana: U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s , 1953, pp. 189-190. . U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American P a i n t i n g , Feb. 2 7 - A p r i l , 8, 1955. Urbana: U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s , 1955, pp. 207-208. . U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American P a i n t i n g , March 1 - A p r i l 5, 1959. Urbana! U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s , 1959, p. 206. . U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American P a i n t i n g , Feb. 2 0 - A p r i l 2, 1961. Urbana: U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s , 1961, p. 116. . U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s E x h i b i t i o n of Contemporary American P a i n t i n g . March 3 - A p r i l 7, 1963. Urbana" U n i v e r s i t y of I l l i n o i s , 1963, p. 86. 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Kees, Weldon. "Werber and Hofmann." P a r t i s a n Review, V o l . XVI, No. 5 , May, 1949, pp. 541-543. 140 Kepes, George. "Review of Hans Hofmann's 'Search f o r the R e a l ' . " Magazine of A r t , V o l . 45, No. 3, March, 1952, pp. 136-137. de Koonig, E l a i n e . "Hans Hofmann P a i n t s a P i c t u r e . " Art News, V o l . X L V I I I , No. 10, February, 1950, pp*TT8-41. K o z l o f f , Max. "The Problem of C o l o r - L i g h t i n Rothko." A r t - Fprum, V o l . IV, No. 1, Sept., 1965, pp. 38-44. Krapow, A l l a n . "The E f f e c t of Recent Art upon the Teaching of A r t . " The Art J o u r n a l , V o l . 23, No. 2, w i n t e r , 1963-64, pp. 1 3 6 - 1 3 8 . K r o l l , Jack. "Some Greenberg C i r c l e s . " Art News, V o l . 61, No. 1, March, 1962, p. 35. L i e d e r , P h i l i p . "The New York School i n Los Angeles." Art Forum, V o l . IV, No. 1, Sept., 1965, pp. 3-13. Los Angeles. County Art Museum. New York School, The F i r s t Generation. 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The Art Digest, Vol.25, No. 15, May 1, 1951, p. 13. 141 Norse, John D. "He Paints Big." Art i n America, No. 2, I960, pp. 76-78. Oeri, Georgine. "The Object of Art." Quadrum, No. 16, 1964, pp. 8-11. "The Passing Shows; Hans Hofmann." Art News, Vol. XLIII, No. 3, March 15 - 3 1 , 1944, p.~20~. "The Passing Shows, Hans Hofmann." Art News, Vol. XLIX, No. 5, A p r i l 15 - 3 0 , 1945, p. ~ 6 ^ "The Passing Shows; Hans Hofmann." Art News, Vol. XLV, No. 1, March, 1946, p. 53. Plaskett, Joe. "Some New Canadians Painters and t h e i r Debt to Hans Hofmann." Canadian Art, Vol. X, No. 2, Winter, 1953, pp. 59- 6 3 - Porter, F a i r f i e l d . "Hans Hofmann [Kootz: Nov. 13-Dec. 1 ] . " Art News, Vol. 5 0 , No. 7, November, 1951, p. 46. . "Hans Hofmann [Kootz: to Dec. 1 2 ] . " Art News, Vol. 53, No. 8, December, 1953, p. 41. P o l l e t , Elizabeth. "In the G a l l e r i e s , Hans Hofmann." Arts, Vol. 3 1 , No. 5, February, 1957, p. 57. . "Hans Hofmann." 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"Controversial Abstractions." The Saturday Review, Vol. 11, No. 32, August 10, 1957, pp. 14-15. Sanders, Irving H. "Hans Hofmann [Kootz]." Art News, Vol. 58, No. 10, February, I960, p. 13. . "Hans Hofmann [Kootz]." Art News, Vol. 60, No.2, A p r i l , 1961, p. 10. Sawyer, Kenneth B. "Largely Hans Hofmann." The Baltimore Museum of Art News, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, February, 1955, pp. 9-12. . "Painters over Seventy-five." The Hudson Review, V o l . X, No. 3, Autumn, 1957, pp. 440-446. . "Painting and Sculpture—the New York Season." Craft Horizons, Vol. XXII, No. 3, May/June, 1962, p. 53. Schwartz, Marilyn D. "Hans Hofmann at Kootz." Apollo, Vol. LXIX, No. 409, March, 1959, p. 93- Scott, Charles H. "New Tides i n West Coast Art." Canadian Art, Vol. 7, No. 2, Winter, p. 58. Shadbolt, J.L. "The Notebooks of Donald J a r v i s . " Canadian Art, Vol. 1, No. 1, Autumn, 1952, pp.8-10. Seattle. World's F a i r . Art Since 1950: American and Inter- national. Seattle: Seattle World's F a i r , 1962. Seckler, Dorothy. "Can Painting be Taught." Art News, Vol. 50, No. 1, March, 1951, p. 40. S i l v e r , Cathy S. "5 Star Show t h i s Winter: Hofmann." Art News. Vol. 60, No. 10, February, 1962, p. 4 3 . Solomon, Joseph. "Hofmann as Painter." Arts, Vol. 31, No. 9, June, 1957, p. 7. "Some Excerpts from Reviews of Hans Hofmann's Recent Exhibitions at the M.O.M.A., Sept. 9 - Dec. 1, 1963," c i t e d i n Sammuel Kootz Gallery, New York. Hans Hofmann Catalogue, Feb. 18 - March 7, 1964, New York: Sammuel Kootz Gallery, 1964. 143 Tanabe, Takao. Interviews w i t h the w r i t e r . March, 1 9 6 6 . Thomas, L i o n e l . " A r c h i t e c t u r e and S c u l p t u r e . " Canadian A r t , V o l . 1 9 , No. 3 , May/June, 1 9 6 2 , p. 2 2 . . Interviews w i t h the w r i t e r . January and February, T966. T i l l i m , Sidney. "Report on the Venice B i e n n a l e , " A r t s Magazine, V o l . 3 5 , No. 1 , October, I 9 6 0 , p p 7 ~ j 2 - 3 3 . "To John F. Kennedy—Homage by A r t i s t s . " A r t i n America, No. 5 , 1 9 6 4 , p. 9 1 . "Trapezoids and Empathy." Time, V o l . L V I I , No. 2 3 , December 3 , 1 9 5 1 , p. 7 2 . T y l e r , P o r t e r . "Hans Hofmann [Kootz: t o Dec. 1 1 ] . " A r t News, V o l . 5 3 , No. 8 , December, 1 9 5 4 , p. 5 1 . . "Hans Hofmann [Kootz: t o Dec 3 ] . " Art News, V o l . 5*4, No. 8 , December, 1 9 5 5 , p. 5 6 . Vancouver. Art G a l l e r y . P a i n t i n g s and Drawings, Don J a r v i s , Nov. 22-Dec. 1 1 , 1 9 4 9 . Vancouver: Vancouver Art G a l l e r y , 1 9 4 9 . . Takao Tanabe: P a i n t i n g s and Drawings, 1 9 5 4 - 5 7 . Vancouver: Vancouver Art G a l l e r y , 1 9 5 7 . Werner, A l f r e d . "Review of F r e d e r i c k S. Wight's 'Hans Hofmann*." C o l l e g e Art J o u r n a l , V o l . XVII, No. 2 , Winter, 1 9 5 8 , p. 2 2 3 . Wolf, Ben. "The Digest Interviews Hans Hofmann." The A r t D i g e s t , V o l . 1 9 , No. 1 3 , A p r i l 1, 1 9 4 5 , p. 5 2 . 144 SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS Plate I, "Fantasia," Plate I I , "Effervescence," and Plate IV, "Le G i l o t i n , " from Loran, E r i e . Recent G i f t s and Loans of Paintings by Hans Hofmann. Berkeley, Regents of the University of C a l i f o r n i a , 1964., Plates I, I I , and III respectively. Plate I I I , "Magenta and Blue," from Wight, Frederick S. Hans Hofmann. Berkeley , University of C a l i f o r n i a Press, 1957, 1957, p. 26. Plate V, "Above Deep Waters," Plate VI, "Pre-Dawn," from Hofmann, Hans, and Hunter, Sam. Hans Hofmann. New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., I 9 6 3, Plates 100 and 132 respectively. Plate V I I ? 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Raoult Medicine Clinical Microbiology and Infection 2015 2 View 1 excerpt, cites background Save Alert Research Feed References SHOWING 1-6 OF 6 REFERENCES What is a pandemic? David M Morens, G. K. Folkers, A. Fauci History, Medicine The Journal of infectious diseases 2009 107 PDF Save Alert Research Feed Rhinoviruses delayed the circulation of the pandemic influenza A (H1N1) 2009 virus in France. J. Casalegno, M. Ottmann, +5 authors B. Lina Medicine Clinical microbiology and infection : the official publication of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases 2010 116 Save Alert Research Feed Append the number of views to the record Detailed Description: Wikipedia contains many biographies of people. 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Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 3 Ardengo Soffici's The Room of the Mannequins: Primitivism, Classicism and French Modernism La sala de los Maniquíes de Ardengo Soffici: Primitivismo, clasismo y modernismo fracés Mariana Aguirre Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (México) aguirre81@gmail.com Recibido: 28/07/2016 Revisado: 22/08/2016 Aprobado: 27/09/2016 ABSTRACT Ardengo Soffici’s engagement with African art was mediated by French modernism and led him to articulate a painterly aesthetic at once ‘primitive’ and classical. Soffici moved to Paris in 1900, and after his return to Florence in 1907 devoted himself to updating Italian art by promoting French modernism. Specifically, the artist created a modern style that incorporated these advances as well as elements from the early Italian Renaissance. This paper analyzes his fresco cycle, The Room of the Mannequins (1914), which demonstrates his temporary adoption of the Parisian scene’s primitivism while recalling the decoration of ancient Roman and Renaissance villas. While Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) shattered academic conventions by relying on primitive art’s ‘savage’ nature, in Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 4 Soffici’s murals, the female figures are playful and non-threatening, bringing to mind the pastoral landscapes that informed both Henri Rousseau and Henri Matisse’s works. Though the Italian artist substituted African references in his later work with alusions to Tuscan folk paintings, his brief use of the former demonstrates the ways in which non-Western references interacted with Italian art even in the absence of direct colonial links to their places of origin. Finally, this consideration of Soffici’s frescoes and writings on primitivism serves as a pre-history of the ways in which art and visual culture under Fascism appropriated African sources to legitimize its colonial project by presenting them as inferior to classical culture. Keywords: Ardengo Soffici, Primitivism, Modernism, Cubism, Colonialism, Pastoral Landscape. RESUMEN Ardengo Soffici y su apropiación del arte africano fue mediado por el modernismo francés, y eventualmente articuló una estética pictórica tanto clásica como ‘primitiva.’ Soffici vivió en París de 1900 a 1907, y al volver a Florencia, se dedicó a renovar el arte italiano y promover el modernismo francés. En específico, el artista creó un estilo moderno que incorporara estos avances además de elementos del Renacimiento italiano. Este ensayo analiza sus murales, The Room of the Mannequins (La Sala de los Maniquíes, 1914), los cuales demuestran su adopción temporal del primitivismo parisino al mismo tiempo que recuerda las decoraciones pictóricas de las antiguas villas romanas y renacentistas. Mientras que en Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) Pablo Picasso rompió con el academicismo apoyándose al apoyarse en las cualidades ‘salvajes’ del arte primitivo, en las obras de Soffici, las figuras femeninas son lúdicas Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 5 e inofensivas y se remiten a los paisajes pastorales que influenciaron tanto a Henri Rousseau como a Henri Matisse. Mientras que el artista italiano sustituyó las referencias africanas en su trabajo con alusiones a la pintura popular en Toscana, su breve uso del exotismo demuestra la manera en que referencias no-Occidentales interactuaron con el arte italiano a pesar de no contar con vínculos coloniales directos a su lugar de origen. Esta consideración de los murales y escritos de Soffici en torno al primitivismo funciona como una pre-historia de la apropiación fascista de fuentes africanas para legitimar su proyecto colonial, pues en general eran presentadas como inferiores al clasicismo. Palabras clave: Modernidad. Comunidad. Festividad Tradicional. Given Ardengo Soffici’s key role in the development of Italian art, it is necessary to scrutinize his engagement with exotic primitivism. This was part of his broader primitivism, namely an interest in sources then outside of the canon, such as folk art, the early Florentine Renaissance, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Rousseau. While rooted in his country’s artistic heritage, his interest in these sources was influenced by figures such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso, reflecting his insider knowledge of advanced Parisian culture. 1 As such, Soffici’s primitivism was a complex blend of modernity and tradition that developed in a unique manner; while many European artists that turned to exotic primitivism did so in order to abandon the conventions upheld by 1 Mario Richter, La formazione francese di Ardengo Soffici 1900-1914, Prato 2 2000 ( 1 1969). For an analysis of images of Africans in Italian art and visual culture, see Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising Under Fascism, Minneapolis 1995, pp. 22-81. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 6 academic art and its reliance on classicism, Soffici blurred this antagonism in several frescoes, only to restore it after World War I. 2 The fresco cycle The Room of the Mannequins (1914), which he painted to decorate the philosopher Giovanni Papini’s country house in Bulciano, Tuscany, includes figures reminiscent of Picasso’s African women and inserted itself within the classical practice of decorating villa interiors with pastoral landscapes. 3 These paintings reveal that representations of Africans in Italian art before and during the war were initially mediated by French modernism and colonialism. For instance, the paintings include a number of formal references to Cubism and collage, and the dark-skinned figures recall Picasso and André Derain’s primitivist women. When analyzed alonside Soffici’s contemporaneous writings about African art and Cubism, the frescoes bring to focus Italian artists’ complicated response to French modernism. For instance, despite the fact that Italy had few colonial holdings at the time, its artists adapted France’s appropriation of non-Western sources according to their own concerns. Soffici’s visual and written primitivism points to important intersections and divergences between French and Italian modernism that have heretofore not been examined in depth. Though his early writings on African sculpture centered on its importance for Cubism, his nationalist turn led him to abandon this positive appraisal of non-Western art in favor of employing Italian folk art instead. Yet The Room of the Mannequins belies Soffici’s rejection of non-European primitivism in his art criticism, and displays further peculiarities present in the Italian approach to non-Western art. Since they were painted during World War I, these primitivist frescoes allowed Soffici to pose the superiority of Mediterranean culture over that of Germany, as will be seen below. 2 Giambattista Vico was the first to consider primitivism in relation to classicism, see Frances Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725-1907, University Park 1995. 3 Diana Spencer, Roman Landscape: Culture and Identity, Cambridge 2010. See also The Pastoral Landscape, conference proceedings Washington D.C. 1992, ed. by John Dixon Hunt, Hanover and London 1992. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 7 Finally, my analysis of The Room of the Mannequins points towards the need to examine primitivism in Italy after the end of the armed conflict. Though in 1914 they referenced Soffici’s debt to French art rather than Italian colonialism in Africa, during the late thirties, black bodies and faces appeared in numerous publications, murals and mosaics comissioned by the regime. They were used to highlight the purity of the classical body, and by extension, the superiority of Italian civilization and race, and were often tied to the regime’s colonial discourse. Due to this, Soffici’s primitivist works and writings must not only be read within the context of the artist’s defense of Mediterranean culture during World War I, but also in light of his eventual support of fascist colonialism during the late 1930s. Italian primitivism and the history of modern art The rise and subsequent erasure or suppression of exotic primitivism in Italy has yet to be adequately addressed. Specifically, the ways in which non-Western sources were processed in Italy have to be described on their own terms rather than according to French and/or German art and their respective colonial projects. Though Ezio Bassani’s essay in the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) catalog for the 1984 exhibition “Primitivism” in Modern Art: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern, traced Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carrà’s exposure to both African art and French primitivism, it unfortunately erased Soffici’s key role in this phenomenon.4 The fact that he also denied that primitivism did existed during Fascism is also problematic, and has unfortunately precluded a more sustained engagement with Italian developments related to this. More recent studies have dealt with this, such as Alessandro Del Puppo’s essays on Amedeo Modigliani, which are insightful contributions to the field, but mostly focus on the Parisian context his career developed in. Emily Braun’s work on Mario Sironi’s expressionism does not dwell on his exotic primitivism, which was mediated by German 4 Bassani (note 15). Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 8 Expressionism.5 Other accounts have focused on primitivism in terms of naïveté and the influence of the Italian primitive painters or have only considered the first two decades of the twentieth century.6 Rather than restricting the existence of non-Western primitivism in Italy to the years leading up to and including World War I, as several of these studies do, I argue in favor of analyzing this phenomenon and the discourse that emerged against it before and during Fascism. Tellingly, the artists that rejected the exotic sought out similar primordial qualities in native sources such as folk art, the Italian primitives, Etruscan and Romanesque art while retaining formal elements and qualities associated with non- Western objects. Thus, focusing on Soffici’s primitivism is a way to reconsider its reception and development in Italy as well as the ways in which it drew upon and diverged from its development in France. Beyond arguing for the need to reconstruct and analyze the development of primitivism in Italy by focusing on Soffici, it is necessary to insert this country within recent debates regarding modernist primitivism. Until the mid-1980s, the art historical discourse on this strand had mostly refused engage with Western imperialism and the racist assumptions that sustained it; additionally, most studies written about this topic have centered on the primitivism that arose in countries with substantial colonial holdings. For instance, Robert Goldwater analyzed this phenomenon as early as 1938, but he neither tied it to colonialism nor considered it beyond a formal approach. Moreover, he predominantly relied on French and German examples. 7 In many ways, his reading of non-Western art’s effect on modernism cast it as a passive source, as part 5 Del Puppo; Braun. 6 See Alessandra Borgogelli, Raffaella Bonzano, Francesco Cavallini, Pierluca Nardoni, eds. Aspetti del primitivismo in Italia, Dipartimento delle Arti visive, performative, mediali Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna, 2015; and Maria Grazia Messina, Le muse d’oltremare, Turin XXXX. 7 Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, New York 1967. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 9 of “an internal dialectic of liberation from narrative content towards an emphasis on material form.” 8 Goldwater’s focus on formal similarities or correspondences between non- Western and modern art has since been questioned, most notably in the harsh critical reception of the MoMA’s aforementioned exhibition. 9 A number of prominent art historians and anthropologists reproached the museum for displaying art from Africa and Oceania in order to highlight modernism’s formal innovations without analyzing the colonial context that made these sources available, their intended function, or the rise of modernist projects outside of Europe. As in Goldwater’s reading, the exhibition’s curator, William Rubin, admitted no real influence, claiming that modern art’s path towards formal experimentation was merely confirmed by non-Western sources, and emphasizing instead an ahistorical relationship between ‘tribal’ and modern art. In order to revise Italy’s role within Europe’s appropriation of African art, my essay considers Soffici’s reconfiguration of French primitivism and traces how he used African references in his frescoes and art criticism. Rather than focusing only on formal or stylistic elements, it seeks to demonstrate that his depiction of African women, despite being mediated by French art, responded to Italian artistic and political concerns. His representation of these figures as timeless and passive also fits within the European racial discourse that justified colonialism, an example of how artists whose countries were not colonial powers felt entitled to employ these sources according to their needs. In general, this artist diverges from an art historical narrative largely shaped by French art and imperialism, which suggests that a comparative approach to European 8 See Fred Myers, “‘Primitivism,’ Anthropology and the Category of ‘Primitive Art,’” in Handbook of Material Culture, Chris Tilley, Susanne Kuechler, Michael Rowlands, Webb Keane and Patricia Spyer, eds. Sage Press, p. 271. Emphasis in the original. 9 For an anthology that includes the most important responses to the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition on primitivism, see Jack Flam and Miriam Deutsch, eds. Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History, Berkeley 2003. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 10 primitivism presents a fuller picture of the variety of ways in which African art was received and reconfigured in this continent. Soffici’s art criticism, Cubism, and primitivism Soffici’s writings about primitivism were more accessible than his frescoes at Bulciano, since they appeared in the influential Florentine magazines La Voce (1908-1916) and Lacerba (1913-1915), the latter of which he directed alongside Papini. These articles were part of his campaign to update Italian art after having spent seven years in Paris (1900-1907). While in France, Soffici was part of Picasso and Apollinaire’s circle; though he is now largely forgotten outside of Italy due to his allegiance to Fascism, he promoted Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cézanne, Rousseau, Arthur Rimbaud, and Cubism in Italy before World War I through his paintings, the exhibits he organized, and his art criticism, which often attacked Italy’s artistic institutions and their outdated taste. Soffici’s role in Italy was akin to that of Alfred Stieglitz or Roger Fry in their respective countries, since each of them promoted European modernism and engaged with its primitivism during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Soffici was in Paris when French artists “discovered” African sources at the Trocadéro and other venues, and he began to write about this in 1911. His interest in African sculpture and its effects on modern painting was predicated upon his early appreciation of Cubism, and he was one of the first European intellectuals to evaluate this movement’s primitivism positively. However, his nationalism and belief in the supremacy of Italian culture increased in 1913, and he began to look at local sources, namely, Tuscan folk paintings and painted signs as an alternative. Thus, his return to African references in 1914 in the Bulciano frescoes marks his one of his last moments of cosmopolitanism and constitutes an important episode in the reception of Cubism and its primitivist tendencies outside of France. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 11 Even before his harsh denouncement exotic primitivism in his writings in 1914, Soffici valued it insofar as it could be inserted into a reading that privileged his country’s art. In the essay “Picasso e Braque,” published in La Voce in 1911 and perhaps one of the first accounts of Cubism to be published in Italy, Soffici praised this movement’s reliance on African sculpture while replicating stereotypes regarding its creators. At the same time, this account of Cubism considers African art’s importance for the French movement, and more importantly, describes it as an acceptable catalyst for the renewal of European painting. This indirect, or oblique primitivism depended on Cubism and its sources, but was ultimately tied to Soffici’s attempt to restore Italian art’s greatness by looking towards France. According to this article, Picasso had turned to African sculpture in his path towards Cubism and against Impressionism, an approach which Soffici did not yet see as a threat to his country’s artistic heritage. Rather, he noted that Cubism was able to incorporate Western and non-Western sources in order to return to Italian art’s plasticity. The following passage gives African sculpture a central role in this shift: Moreover, the decisive step, which would lead our artist [Picasso] to a much more advanced field of experiences, was not taken until two years later, that is, when after distancing himself progressively from the Impressionists’ vision, he found a more solid foundation for his later research in an art opposite to theirs. This art was the painting and sculpture of the antique Egyptians, and of the Africans—and perhaps even more natively synthetic—of the savage peoples of southern Africa. […] Picasso instead […] (unlike Gauguin)—even perhaps due to his somewhat Moorish origin—after he understood and loved that naïve and great art, simple and expressive, coarse and refined at once, immediately knew how to appropriate its essential virtues, and because these consisted in realistically interpreting nature by deforming its Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 12 aspects according to a hidden lyrical need in order to intensify its suggestive qualities, applied himself from then on to translate, in his works, the real, by transforming and deforming it, not as his masters had done, but—as each showed him with a particular example—by following his modern soul’s own ways. 10 While referring to their creators as “popoli selvaggi,” Soffici linked the sculptures to Picasso’s rediscovery of plasticity, a category which he claimed defined Italian art as well as making it superior to that of other nations’. 11 He also described African art as primitive and sincere, adjectives he had also applied to Cézanne, Rousseau and the Italian primitives, thus alluding to an expanded primitivism that incorporated both Western and non-Western sources. 12 In a sense, while many French artists sought primitive art in order to reject academicism, Soffici inserted it within a reading that valued Cubism’s plastic values and linked this to the Italian Renaissance. Soffici’s attitudes regarding African sculpture certainly reveal a Eurocentric bias, but it is important to note that at the time most Italian critics, art historians and anthropologists, would have refused to consider such works as art or as source for Europeans. Indeed, Soffici’s reading of this art was more or less in line with those of Apollinaire, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Carl Einstein, who either noted its status as art 10 Soffici, (note 5). The original text reads: “Tuttavia il passo decisivo, quello che doveva condurre il nostro artista in un campo di esperienze molto più avanzate, non fu fatto che, un paio d’anni più tardi, e cioè quando egli, dopo essersi progressivamente allontanato dal modo di vedere degli impressionisti, trovo; in un’arte opposta alla loro un fondamento più fermo alle sue ricerche ulteriori. Quest’arte fu la pittura e la scultura degli antichissimi egiziani, e quelle africani—e forse anche più nativamente sintetiche—dei popoli selvaggi dell’Africa meridionale. [...] Picasso invece [al contrario di Gauguin]—fors’anche in grazia della sua origine quasi moresca—una volta arrivato alla comprensione e all’amore di quell’arte ingenua e grande, semplice ed espressiva, grossolana e raffinata ad un tempo, subito seppe appropriarsene le virtù essenziali, e poiché queste consistono insomma nell’interpretar realisticamente la natura deformandone gli aspetti secondo un’occulta necessita lirica, affine d’intensificare la suggestività, egli s’applico d’allora in poi a tradurre, nelle sue opere, il vero trasformandolo e deformandolo, non peraltro al modo che facevano i suoi maestri, ma—com’essi gl’insegnavano ciascuno con un particolare esempio—seguendo i propri moti della sua anima moderna.” 11 Ardengo Soffici, “Picasso e Braque”, in: La Voce, 24 August 1911. 12 Soffici, “Paul Cézanne”, in: Vita d’arte, 8 June 1908; “Henri Rousseau”, in La Voce, 15 September 1910; and “Un libro su Rousseau”, in: La Voce, 30 November, 1911. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 13 or its key role for the development of Cubism. 13 One important difference between them and Soffici, however, is that the artist claimed that the sculptures had aided the cubist painters to reinstate the Renaissance’s plasticity. This dialogue between Italian nationalism and primitivism is also present in the frescoes and will be discussed below. Before painting these works, however, the artist reconsidered not only the pertinence of African sculpture for the development of Italian art, but also that of Cubism, a choice consistent with the continental rappel à l’ordre during and after World War I and the concurrent rise of Fascism. Soffici’s position on African art shifted in response to his views on Cubism and his temporary alliance with Futurism. This occurred in his magazine Lacerba from 1913 onwards, and he adopted an increasingly nationalistic perspective that was motivated by his strtegic adherence to Marinetti’s movement. 14 In “Cubismo e oltre (abecedario),” for example, he minimized the importance of African art; rather than praising primitivism’s role in Picasso’s recovery of plasticity, he stressed that the Italian Renaissance had anticipated it. 15 Additionally, he claimed that the Futurists were in fact developing ways 13 The most representative texts these authors wrote on African art are the following: Guillaume Apollinaire, Sculptures Nègres. 24 photographies précédées d'un avertissement de Guillaume Apollinaire et d'un exposé de Paul Guillaume, Paris 1917, which was based on “Mélanophilie ou mélanomanie”, in: Le Mercure de France, 1 April 1917; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, “L’arte nègre et le cubisme”, in: Présence Africaine, 2 March-April 1948, pp. 367-77; and Carl Einstein, Negerplastik, Leipzig 1915. For recent interpretations on Einstein, see Zeidler, Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art, Ithaca 2016; Carl Einstein und die europäische Avantegarde, ed. by Nicola Creighton and Andreas Kramer, Berlin 2012; and Conor Joyce, Carl Einstein in Documents: and his Collaboration with Georges Bataille, Philadelphia 2002. Needless to say, the scholarship on Einstein has grown in recent years and it is impossible to list all of them. 14 For a discussion of Soffici’s reconsideration of Cubism in Lacerba, see Del Puppo, “Lacerba” 1913-1915, Bergamo 2000, pp. 63-66. 15 Soffici, “Cubismo e oltre (abecedario)”, in: Lacerba, 15 January 1913. The original text reads: “Chi desiderasse nomi celebri di precursori del cubismo, anche senza risalire ai nostri primitivi, ai bizantini, agli egiziani, agli africani, si protrebbero citare quelli di Masaccio, del Greco, di Rembrandt, di Tintoretto Di tutti quei pittori che nelle loro opere hanno cercato di esprimere—anzichè l’incanto della luminosità iridata, delle linee soavi e diligenti, dell’elegante vaporosità—la sobria sodezza dei corpi e degli oggetti, il peso, la gravitazione delle masse, l’equilibrio dei pani e dei volumi.—La forza del chiaroscuro. (Noterò anzi, per incidente, che sotto questo aspetto la migliore arte italiana, il cui merito precipuo consiste appunto in questa sobrietà, sodezza, pesantezza, equilibrio, è d’essenza precisamente cubista—e il cubismo, perciò, specialmente consono alla nostra tradizione. Il che hanno capito alcuni critici francesi i quali accusano i cubisti di esotismo).” Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 14 to expand Cubism in order to lead it to its logical conclusion, further demonstrating that his shift towards Futurism movement modified his attitude regarding the French art and its primitivism. 16 As such, rather than measuring his primitivism against that of French artists, it is important to consider that his writings about it mediated between his waning appreciating for Parisian art and his belief that Futurism could lead Italian art to return to its lost greatness. While Soffici’s articles for Lacerba reassessed and relativized the importance of African sources for Cubism, his later articulated a clearer rejection of them. His anthology Cubismo e futurismo (1914) included a short piece entitled “L’antiarcaismo futurista,” which might have been written upon Carrà’s suggestion, who was then still a member of Futurism. 17 Here, arcaismo refers to artists’ reliance on African art or on art from the past, both of which he dismissed as excessive intellectualism, proposing instead the primitivism of the early Italian Rennaissance. 18 In this article, Soffici rejected African art as well as ancient Egyptian art, referring to the preference for them as excessive “refinement, intellectualism, literariness, smug snobbery, decadent mysticism.” 19 By rejecting African sources as archaic and using terms that could likewise be applied to symbolist art, Soffici sided with Futurism’s scorn for the past and aided this movement to distance itself from Cubism and France. This explains the artist’s insistence in relegating African art to a timeless era, a trope that had been prevalent in nineteenth-century anthropology and racial discourse and which continued to be employed well into the twentieth century. 20 16 ibidem. 17 See Soffici, Cubismo e futurismo, Florence 1914; and Del Puppo 2000 (note 9), p. 214. 18 Soffici 1914 (note 12), p. 77. For instance, Soffici returned to the primitivism of French symbolist artists, which was untainted by African art’s arcaismo: “[...] non si esce dalla ripetizione e in fondo dall’intellettualismo, ispirandosi ai primitivi dell’Egitto o del Congo di quel che non si faccia ispirandosi, come facevan Puvis de Chavannes de Maurice Denis ai nostri pittori del tre e del quattrocento.” 19 ibidem, p. 75. The original reads: “raffinatezza, d’intelletualismo, di letterarietà, di sufficienza snobbistica, di misticismo decadente.” 20 See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1893). Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 15 Soffici’s pictorial primitivism, Picasso, Rousseau and Matisse Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), which Soffici had seen in Paris, was his main source for the exotic primitivism present in the frescoes, especially with respect to the female figures. Besides that, they feature references to cubist collage and to works by Robert Delaunay, Marc Chagall, and Derain, demonstrating his, and by extension, Papini’s close ties to the French scene. 21 This synthesis confirms that African art’s influence on French painting was one of many elements that Italian artists and intellectuals grappled with after the turn of the century as they moved away from Post- Impressionism and Symbolism, leading towards an indirect primitivism. Though it is clear that Carrà, Boccioni and Soffici could have seen firsthand the same African sculptures that artists based in Paris adapted in their works, the Tuscan artist’s frescoes at Bulciano are an instance of cultural mediation. For instance, rather than presenting the women from Picasso’s Demoiselles as threatening figures, he minimized this aspect by lessening their mask-like features and by placing them within a playful atmosphere recalling classical pastorals. Though all the frescoes at Bulciano demonstrate the influence of Picasso, a portion of them is essentially a mirror image of Les Demoiselles. An earlier work by Soffici, I Mendicanti (1911), painted the same year he reviewed Cubism’s and African sculpture’s plasticity positively, also recalls Picasso’s canvas. In Bulciano, however, other than representing nude women, Soffici borrowed the crouching figure from Demoiselles as well as the left-most one. 22 The dancer in the middle recalls the standing figure on the right side of Picasso’s work; her features are not as clearly indebted to African masks, but her skin color signals her racial difference. While I mendicanti 21 See Franco Russoli, ed. Ardengo Soffici. L’artista e lo scrittore nella cultura del’900, Florence 1975, cited in Soffici. Immagini e documenti (1879-1964), ed. by Luigi Cavallo, Florence 1986, p. 234. Russoli identifies the influence of Picasso, Delaunay, Chagall, Derain, and Van Dongen. He sees this combination of Cubism and Expressionism as similar to that of Kirchner, Schmidt-Rotluff, and even Larionov. 22 The crouching figure also resembles Derain’s bathers, which were influenced by Cézanne’s late bathers. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 16 removed most of the exotic primitivism employed by Picasso by depicting clothed Italian peasants, and in a sense, anticipated his shift towards Tuscan folk art, Soffici’s frescoes retain a clear African identity without representing the women as dangerous ‘savages.’ Soffici’s reliance on Rousseau’s naïve style and fantastic jungle scenes likewise tempered Picasso’s violent representation of African women. This turn towards Rousseau coincided with Soffici’s previous art criticism, since he had written about this artist in 1910 and 1911 for La Voce by using terms akin to those with which he praised African art. 23 At Papini’s villa, Rousseau’s naïveté is evoked throughout The Room of the Mannequins and by the medium employed to paint the frescoes; for example, the artist chose materials commonly used by imbianchini (house painters or whitewashers) and was aided by Papini’s two young daughters, decisions which sought to give the works a sense of informality. 24 At the same time, the medium employed is in keeping with his growing interest in Tuscan folk art and painted signs, which eventually replaced exotic primitivism. Soffici’s depiction of the landscape and the women within it also incorporated a variant of primitivism tied to the pastoral landscape, a tradition harking back to antiquity that had been recently updated by Matisse. Despite his lukewarm opinion on this painter, Soffici’s frescoes adopted a classical aesthetic reminiscent of several of his seminal post-Fauve works. 25 The largest portion of The Room of the Mannequins resembles the composition and mood of one of Matisse’s most important pastorals, Joy of Life (1905-06). While the lines and geometric shapes in the fresco evoke Cubism, the 23 See note 6. 24 See Ardengo Soffici: vocazione e mestiere, la pittura murale dalla “Stanza dei manichini’ all’affresco di Fognano, ed. By Marco Moretti/Carlo Vanni Menichi, Pontedera 2010, p. 8; and Soffici, Fine di un mondo: autoritratto d'artista italiano nel quadro del suo tempo: IV. Virilità, Florence 1955, pp. 427-28. 25 Soffici included a landscape by Matisse lent to him by Bernard Berenson at the Prima mostra italiana dell’impressionismo, which he organized in 1910. See Soffici, “L’impressionismo a Firenze”, in: La Voce, May 12 1910, cited in Catherine C. Bock Weiss, Henri Matisse: A Guide to Research, London and New York 2014, p. 464. It is likely that the artist saw Matisse’s Dance in 1910 while in Paris, see Soffici and Giuseppe Prezzolini, Carteggio. Vol I 1907-18, ed. by Mario Richter, Rome 1977, p. 83, letter 92, Paris, 19 February 1910. In this letter Soffici mentions the retrospective of Matisse’s work at Bernheim-June gallery in 1910. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 17 subject matter in Bulciano is clearly pastoral given the presence of figures dancing, tending animals, and lounging. The three standing figures on the left likewise bring to mind Matisse’s canvas. Soffici’s debt to this artist is also evident in the figures’ flatness and stance, which recall those in Dance (1910); in these works, both artists appear to have taken their human figures from archaic red figure vases, yet another source that was associated with primitivism at the time. While looking at Rousseau had allowed Soffici to avoid the threatening nature of Picasso’s Demoiselles, his turn to Matisse established The Room of the Mannequins as a modern pastoral, enabling it to function as a refuge from the violence of World War I. Primitive and pastoral While pastoral landscapes illustrate peaceful scenes, such representations usually surface at times of chaos and strife. 26 In this particular case, Soffici’s frescoes depict a harmonious environment precisely at the beginning of World War I, when French, and by extension, Mediterranean culture was being endangered by Germany, at least according to the artist. 27 On a personal level, the war had interrupted his exchange with Apollinaire, one of the few Paris-based intellectuals he continued to value after returning to Italy and with whom he had hoped to create an Italo-French movement after the armed conflict alongside Giorgio de Chirico and Savinio. 28 This joint effort was 26 John Dixon Hunt, “Introduction: Pastorals and Pastoralism”, in The Pastoral Landscape, conference proceedings Washington D.C., ed. by Hunt, Hannover 1992, p. 15. 27 Del Puppo 2000 (note 9), pp. 244-48. 28 See Paolo Baldacci, De Chirico 1888-1919. La Metafisica, Milan 1997, p. 302ff; and Richter (note 1), pp. 258. Baldacci touches upon this project when he describes Savinio and de Chirico’s links with Apollinaire, Soffici and Papini but does not explore this within the context of Soffici’s career. See also Giorgio de Chirico, Penso all pittura, solo scopo della mia vita. 51 lettere e cartoline ad Ardengo Soffici 1914-1942, edited by Luigi Cavallo (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1987). Cavallo discusses the relationship between de Chirico and Soffici but does not explicitly describe their attempt to work with Apollinaire after the war or their competing aesthetics with respect to Valori Plastici. See also, De Chirico to Ardengo Soffici, 30 December 1914(?), in Baldacci, De Chirico, 303. The original text reads: “[...] noi infatti dobbiamo essere amici e dobbiamo amarci stimarci ed aiutarci, imperrocché siamo pochi, siamo una pleiade piccola, e ciò che facciamo e ciò che faremo è grande. Dopo la guerra noi dovremmo essere più uniti di prima poiché abbiamo i medesimi ideali. [...] Dopo la Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 18 discussed several months after the frescoes had been painted, which demonstrates that in 1914, Soffici was thinking about a pan-Mediterranean cultural project. Thus, these works revisit the exotic primitivism Soffici had rejected earlier in 1913 and 1914 in order to negate the effects of the war, since he included African women as a way to represent a Mediterranean Arcadia. Though there are no clear references to modern Italy in the paintings, the allusions to Matisse’s pastorals established a link to this country’s classical heritage. As in the pastoral tradition, Soffici’s frescoes provided a temporary refuge from the reality that threatened to destroy this idyll. In 1955, the artist mentioned in his autobiography the anxiety that Germany and its allies’ threat to France had caused him and Papini, noting that after the fresco was completed, they returned to Florence in the fall of 1914 and went on to advocate in favor of Italy’s entrance into the war. 29 Indeed, the contemplative mood evoked by both the frescoes and by the villa itself was at once an escape from the war and a reminder of the Parisian scene it seemed to threaten. At around the same time, other intellectuals interested in restoring Italy’s lost greatness relied on the opposition between Mediterranean and Nordic Europe in their landscapes related to the war. For example, the futurist leader and poet Marinetti used typography in order to condemn Germanic civilization and promote the expansion of Italy towards the Balkans; his work operated differently than the frescoes from Bulciano, however, since rather than seeking refuge from the chaos of war, he exalted it. Moreover, rather than return to the pastoral, the cultural agitator drew on French modernist poetry’s visual experiments in order to represent the war’s violence and confusion. Their different approaches to the conflict and to landscapes clearly illustrate that Soffici was working within the pastoral tradition and its resurgence in French modern painting. Additionally, his blend of exotic primitivism and classicism allowed him guerra insieme a lui (Apoll) ed a qualche altro potremo formare un circolo più solido, più forte e più puro di quella specie di riunione ridicola che erano ‘Les Soirées de Paris’” 29 Soffici 1955 (note 21), pp. 428-29. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 19 to depict an updated pastoral that alluded to the Mediterranean cultural project he sought to pursue as well. Soffici’s frescoes at Bulciano depended on racial difference in order to depict a peaceful atmosphere typical of pastorals, thus creating a distance between the viewer, in this case Papini, and the women represented. According to the conventions ruling the pastoral genre since antiquity, the peasants (or ‘natives,’ in this case) depicted are important insofar as their leisurely life in the country provides an escape for the educated viewer. At Bulciano, all the figures, whether African or not, allow the ideal viewer to fashion himself as a sophisticated observer, especially since several of them are naked. 30 This nakedness further separates the European viewer/creator from the non-European figures, exalting the difference between self and Other. Thus, while at first sight it appears that Soffici’s work has no clear racial bias, the dark-skinned figures at Bulciano are included because they portray uncivilized individuals whose dances were supposed to alleviate the artist and his friend’s anxieties by reminding them of Parisian art and their hopes to collaborate with Apollinaire. Moreover, despite the numerous references to French modernity, the cycle simultaneously evokes a timeless atmosphere, which emphasizes the figures’ racial difference, since in general, non- European cultures were relegated to an earlier temporal and cultural order than the West. As such, The Room of the Mannequin’s harmonious atmosphere, while rooted in the classical pastoral, depended on the racist attitudes that upheld French colonialism and that made African sources available to artists such as Soffici. Though Soffici’s frescoes processed recent developments in French painting, namely Cubism and Matisse’s works, an important precursor to this racially charged pastoral can be found in Paul Gauguin’s paintings, which rejected modern urban life by representing Tahitians within colorful, timeless landscapes. These tropical pastorals 30 For an analysis of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon from a feminist perspective that also considers colonialism, see Anna Chave, “New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race, and the Origins of Cubism”, in: The Art Bulletin, LXXVI (1994): pp. 596-611. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 20 were in turn preceded by his idealized representations of religious peasants, usually Breton women and children, and constitute one of modern painting’s earliest considerations of the “primitive”. 31 Gauguin himself inserted his works within the French classical landscape tradition; much like Cézanne and Matisse, his works set in Brittany and Tahiti revisited the ideal landscapes first developed by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Notably, both Matisse and Gauguin often relied on non-European “natives” rather than peasants, shepherds, or figures from classical mythology or history in order to reinforce the distance between the idylls represented and their intended viewers. This reveals that Soffici’s primitivism was rooted in the tradition of depicting the Other within a landscape that arose during the nineteenth century; at the same time, it harked back to the pastoral landscapes painted in Baroque Italy by French artists, which were in turn indebted to pastorals created during the classical antiquity and the Renaissance. Despite the fact that Soffici’s pastoral frescoes immediate precursors belonged to the French tradition, it is important to consider that they were equally indebted to his identity as a Tuscan artist intellectual, which he carefully crafted after his return to Italy in 1907 and throughout his career. Tellingly, The Room of the Mannequins is not the only example in which Soffici and Papini relied on “simple” folk to represent an ideal landscape or pastoral. For example, several passages in his proto-fascist novel Lemmonio Boreo (1911) and in Papini’s autobiographical account Un Uomo Finito (1913) relied on Tuscany’s countryside and its peasants as settings and supporting characters for their respective protagonists adventures. 32 While both intellectuals were 31 One of the first accounts analysis of Gauguin that considers him from a gendered approach is Abigail Solomon- Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism” in The Expanded Discourse: Feminism and Art History, N. Broude and M. Garrard (eds.). New York: Harper Collins, 1986. More recent scholarship has dealt with other aspects of this, see: Elizabeth C. Childs, Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism In Colonial Tahiti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Patty O'Brien, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Ruud Welten, “Paul Gauguin and the complexity of the primitivist gaze”, Journal of Art Historiography 7 n.12 (June 2015): pp. 1-13.; and Ralph Hajj, “Savage Strategies: Parisian Avant-garde and 'Savage' Brittany in the Definition of Paul Gauguin”, Third Text 16 n. 2 (June 2002): pp. 167-181. 32 Soffici, Lemmonio Boreo, Florence 1912. Soffici published a revised edition during the rise of Fascism, see Lemmonio Boreo, Florence 1921. See also Giovanni Papini, Un uomo finito, Florence 1913. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 21 extremely interested in their region’s countryside and its culture, they did not engage with its peasants or sought to denounce or improve their living conditions. Instead, Soffici idealized the exploitative sharecropping system prevalent in Italy during the nineteenth century, which had survived well into the twentieth century, mezzadria. In the frescoes, African figures substituted the Tuscan peasants included in the aforementioned pastoral accounts, and more importantly, functioned similarly, that is, as markers of timelessness and simplicity. Once Soffici returned to his representation of Italian peasants and proposed Tuscan folk art as a source, he abandoned non-Western primitivism and the depiction of Africans. Responses to The Room of the Mannequins Although Soffici’s frescoes were painted in an informal, lighthearted manner, written responses to this work reveal the intricate manner in which his primitivism operated as well as their respective authors’ attitude towards the African figures. Papini himself was the first to write about these frescoes in a prose poem from 1915 entitled “La sala dei manichini,” which the blend of primitive and European sources present in the frescos and retaining certain aspects related to the pastoral at the same time as he objectified them. 33 Soffici’s choice to depict dark-skinned figures distanced them from European viewers, while Papini’s poem further dehumanized them. For instance, the poet referred to these figures as mannequins, which likely led to the frescoes’ title and could be a potential link to de Chirico’s works and the widespread rise of humanoids, mannequins and mechanized men in modern art. The metaphysical painter began to depict mannequins in 1914, and eventually, objects such as store mannequins and automatons became common tropes in European art between the wars. This also resonated with Marinetti’s novel Mafarka le futuriste (1909), whose protagonist was a mechanized 33 Papini, “La sala dei manichini”, in: Cento pagine di poesie, Florence 3 1920 ( 1 1915). Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 22 African man that jointly embodied Futurism’s idealization of irrationality, savagery, and technology. 34 Finally, he fact that Papini refers to them as figures that are not quite human goes hand in hand with Soffici’s racist description of African sculptors as “popoli selvaggi” in 1911 even as he recognized their creations’ role in the rise of Cubism. In his poem, Papini erases any sort of temporal or cultural specificity, further relegating these women to a realm outside of European civilization while establishing these works as a pastoral. Indeed, he mentions Native Americans, Algerian Turks (sic), Noah’s rainbow, black women, and graceful natives despite the fact that not all of these figures or elements are present in the The Room of the Mannequins. 35 Through the writer’s description dancing “savages,” this prose poem further confirms that the scene is a pastoral playground for European intellectuals, since it begins and ends with references to an “unmoored soul” who might drown in such exotic places but nonetheless seeks them out in order to flee the middle classes’ “homicidal respectability” by imitating the “black doll that lengthens her bestial sadness along the wall, join the dance, until falling, in the resplandecent epilepsy of this prismatic banquet.” 36 In this passage, Papini’s description of a liberating dance unequivocally characterizes the frescoes as an escape, which reinforces their function as a pastoral scene. Thus, Papini’s poem described Soffici’s primitivism as a challenge to the Italian bourgeoisie, proposing instead an atmosphere that encourages loss of control through the representation and imitation of African individuals. Though Papini’s prose poem resonates with several aspects of Soffici’s adaptation of Picasso’s African women in the years leading up to the Great War, later accounts clarify primitivism’s place in Italian culture after World War II. Indeed, Soffici’s 34 Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, Mafarka le futuriste: un roman coloniale, Paris 1909. 35 Papini 1915 (note 30), the references are as follows: Native Americans and Algerian Turks, p. 109; Noah’s rainbow and black women, p. 110; and graceful natives, p. 111. 36 ibidem, pp. 109, 112. Papini refers to an “anima disancorata” that might escape the middle classes’ “omicida rispettabilità” by imitating the “bambola nera che allunga sul muro la sua bestiale tristezza, balla anche te, fino alla caduta, nell’epilessia rutilante di questo banquetto prismatico.” Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 23 eventual suppression of his non-European sources in his writings regarding The Room of the Mannequins should be considered in light of his art criticism before and after Fascism. Though he had considered it as key for Cubism, African art and exotic primitivism are all but ignored in his memoirs and accounts written after 1945; this occurred despite the fact that the artist focused exclusively on his experiences up to and including World War I given that they were untainted by Fascism and could help rehabilitate his career after the regime’s fall. Soffici’s autobiography, published in 1955, mentions the frescoes but does not acknowledge any direct or indirect engagement with non-Western sources or primitivism, referring instead to “sacred representations” as well as Greek and Etruscan vases. 37 This selective narrative calls to mind art history’s recognition of primitivism as crucial for the formal development of European modernism and its (until recently) concomitant refusal to further explore aspects such as colonialism or even problematize this appropriation. At the same time, this selective erasure suggests the challenges scholars face when exploring elements that are expunged from artists’ careers and/or subsequent autobiographies, as in the case of Soffici and Carrà’s suppression of their exotic primitivism during and after World War I. Despite the fact that Soffici omitted his reliance on primitivism in his biographical account of the creation of The Room of the Mannequins, a third account did recognize its presence within these frescoes. Viola Paskowszki Papini, one the philosopher’s daughters that had helped the artist paint the villa’s walls, described the frescoes in 1956 as an “alarming dance” in which a “a dark and unhappy Negress” rested near an ox while two men, who resembled lion tamers, observed the females dance like 37 Soffici 1955 (note 21), pp. 428-429. The original text reads: “Coprii [sic] il primo muro delle immagini figurate di uomini, donne, animali, piante, secondo il carattere, le forme, lo stile, il colore della mia più recente pittura; copersi la seconda parete di nudi danzanti, un po’ come si vede nelle raffigurazioni sacre e nei vasi greci ed etruschi; copersi la terza di bagnanti, femmine e maschi, in piedi asciugandosi, o sdraiati fra l’erba e i fiori della riva. Nei pannelli che restavano, allato alle finestre, dipinsi nell’uno, una danzatrice sola agitante un velo giallo; nell’altro una giovane donna seduta accanto a un banchetto di fruttaliola: e così tutta la stanza fu a posto.” Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 24 “beasts.” 38 Tellingly, Paskowszki Papini’s allusions to the African figures focus on their skin color and gender, and she likens women to dancing beasts, marking their difference from the peaceful “lion tamers.” Unlike her father, she does not see this as a space for freedom, but rather, as a frantic, disorienting scene. Her description incorporated common stereotypes regarding African rituals, which were regarded with fear by European colonizers well into the twentieth century. 39 While Paskowszki Papini emphasizes the African elements within the frescos, Soffici's autobiography, published one year before, removes such acknowledgement, rendering hers even more salient. Moreover, the philosopher’s daughter relies on common tropes regarding Africa while chronicling her childhood, and in a sense, reflects mainstream attitudes regarding non-Western populations and colonialism after the end of World War II. These attitudes also fit shed light on the development of primitivism in Italian art, since unlike in France, it did not usually lead to a more nuanced desire to engage with colonized peoples and their art, as in the case of Surrealism, for instance. Primitive and Italian? Soffici’s abandonment of Cubism seems to have announced the end of Italian primitivism, and correspondingly, has precluded a thorough evaluation of its development. Despite recent denials that Italian primitivism based on exotic sources existed at all, a number of his compatriots continued to rely on African sources and/or modernist primitivism after World War I, both in their writings and works of art. 40 This fraught reliance on exotic elements is typified by the mainly negative reception of the exhibitions of African sculpture and Modigliani’s work at the 1922 Biennale and by this 38 See Viola Paszkowski Papini, La bambina guardava, Milan 1956. Originally quoted in Papini and Mario Novaro, Carteggio, 1906-1943, ed. by Andrea Aveto, Rome 2002, p. 70, note 1. 39 Paszkowski Papini’s view of these frescoes contrasts with Einstein’s interest in African masks and rituals as part of his consideration of African sculpture. See Einstein (note 7) and Joyce Cheng, “Immanence out of Sight: Formal Rigor and Ritual Function in Carl Einstein’s ‘Negerplastik’”, in: RES, no. 55/56, Absconding (2009), pp. 87-102. 40 Braun, Journal of Modern Italian Studies. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 25 artist’s critical fortune in Italy after his death in 1920. The artist’s bohemianism and primitive sources were denounced by some critics (including Soffici) during the 1922 Biennale and were further rejected on the occasion of a second monographic exhibition of his works curated by Lionello Venturi for the 1930 edition of the Venetian exhibition. 41 The exhibition of African sculptures at the Biennale epitomizes this country’s complicated engagement with these sources as well as the exceptional nature of the Italian case. The organizers’ background reveals that it was approached from an ethnographic perspective, since Carlo Anti, an archaeologist, and Aldobrandino Mocchi, an anthropologist, selected the pieces. Previous exhibitions of African sculpture and modern art held in France and the United States, for instance, were usually held by artists or gallery owners such as Stieglitz and Paul Guillaume. Additionally, in the Biennale’s exhibition’s catalog, Anti recognized African sculpture’s role in European art but warned that it should not serve as an inspiration for Italian artists, while several of the critics who reviewed the Biennale denied the works’ beauty or status as art. 42 Indeed, Soffici’s abandonment of primitivism and the reception of the Biennale have led to a generalized refusal to reconstruct Italy’s primitivism and/or anti-primitivism. Nevertheless, this strand’s eventual links to fascist colonialism renders the reconsideration of this engagement with non-Western art an urgent task. The 1922 and 1930 Biennali established a continuing, if tense, engagement with primitivism, and this strand developed well into the late 1930s. Never fully excised from Italian culture, the relationship between African culture and modern art found itself at the center of fascist racial discourse, since magazines such as Il Perseo (1930-1939?) and 41 See Braun, “The Faces of Modigliani: Identity Politics under Fascism”, in: Modern Art and the Idea of the Mediterranean, ed. by Vojtěch Jirat-Wasiutyński, Toronto 2007, pp. 181-205; and Dominique Jarrassé and Maria Grazia Messina, “Introduction”, in: Expressionnisme: une construction de l'Autre/ Espressionismo: una costruzione dell'Altro, Paris 2012, pp.11-18. 42 See Carlo Anti, “Mostra di scultura negra”, in: Catalogo della XIII esposizione internazionale d’arte della città di Venezia, exh. cat. Venice 1922, Milan 1922, pp. 41-42; and “Scultura negra”, in: Dedalo I (1921), pp. 592-621, which preceded the exhibition. Others did not consider these works as art, for example, Francesco Sapori, “La XIII esposizione internazionale d’arte a Venezia. Introduzione con l’arte negra”, in: Emporium, LV (1922), pp. 275-280; and Deccio Buffoni, “La XIII Biennale di Venezia—Il ‘Palazzo dell’esposizione’”, in: Il Primato artistico italiano, IV (1922): pp.275-280. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 26 La difesa della razza (1938-1943) denounced the deformation present in primitivist works, noting that it threatened Italian culture and racial purity. Despite the fact that several of the artists accused of relying on African art and the deformation, elongation and distortion associated with it had created works for the regime and were dedicated fascists, they were blamed for denigrating the Italian race. 43 This position was certainly influenced by German initiatives such as the exhibition Entartete Kunst (1937), but it also built upon the discourse on African art that arose during the 1922 Biennale. Furthermore, its racism resonated with Soffici’s writings on African culture, fascist colonialism, and the need to recover Rome’s imperial greatness that he published during the mid to late 1930s. Thus, whereas in the Bulciano frescoes the artists had combined classical and exotic references in order to defend Mediterranean culture, he did the opposite once Italy launched in its own imperial project. Soffici’s primitivism in the Bulciano frescoes responded to the cultural and political context determined by the outbreak of World War I. Though there are no clear political allusions, The Room of the Mannequins evoked a pastoral scene as well as Picasso’s Demoiselles, creating a Mediterranean front that attempted to discredit German political and cultural hegemony. This anti-German sentiment was rooted in Giorgio Vasari’s approach to what he perceived as a decline in art due to the barbarian invasion of Rome, a view Soffici subscribed to after his return to Italy by attacking the symbolist artist Franz Stuck in his review of the 1910 Biennale. 44 During the war, the futurists as well as Soffici wrote articles against Germany and its culture in order to persuade the 43 See for example, Anonymous, “Le opere di certi modernisti è chiaro che denigrano la razza”, in: Perseo, 10 January 1938. The works criticized in this article were by Giorgio Morandi, Carlo Carrà, Arturo Martini, Marino Marini, Lucio Fontana and Corrado Cagli. 44 For a recent consideration of the classical-barbarian dichotomy in art history, see Eric Michaud, “Barbarian Invasions and the Racialization of Art History,” October no. 139 (Winter 2012): 59-76. Soffici reviewed the Biennale in four separate articles: see Soffici, “L’Esposizione di Venezia,” La Voce (4 November 1909); (11 November 1909); (27 October 1910); and (3 November 1910). Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 27 public to support the entrance of Italy into the armed conflict. 45 Since the dark-skinned figures were indices of the Parisian milieu that both Soffici and Papini valued, they were part of a pastoral meant to counteract a perceived danger coming from Europe itself, not from the African continent. Thus, the possibility that Germany would invade France led the artist to create a primitive pastoral that did not destabilize the classical, but rather, sought to maintain the superiority of Mediterranean Europe. During the 1920s and 30s, Soffici reinstated the opposition between the classical and the primitive, and eventually supported the fascist empire. Soon after the war ended, the artist repudiated his avant-garde experience in his magazine Rete Mediterranea (1920, itself a clear allusion to the Roman empire’s mare nostrum, a notion that Fascism recovered as part of its colonial project) and in his retrospective exhibition that same year. He also wrote negatively about the African sculptures and Modigliani’s works featured in the 1922 Biennale, advising artists to leave exotic sources behind. 46 Though Soffici stopped creating works inflected by exotic primitivism, his writings continued to depend on notions regarding the alleged cultural and racial inferiority of African individuals. In 1937, for example, Soffici sailed to Libya as part of a group of intellectuals that accompanied Mussolini on a tour of this colony. He eagerly chronicled this trip in La Gazzetta del Popolo and praised the dictator while characterizing the locals as animals and using an orientalizing language to refer to this country as timeless. 47 Whereas his earlier primitivism had opposed German imperialism, his depiction of Libyans as uncivilized peoples contributed to fascist colonialism. Two years later, he made multiple allusions to the Roman Empire in the conservative magazine Il 45 See Soffici, “Per la guerra,” Lacerba (1 and 15 September 1914); and “Sulla barbarie tedesca,” Lacerba (1 November 1915). 46 Soffici, “Gli italiani all’Esposizione di Venezia”, in: Il Resto del Carlino, XXXVIII, 16 June 1922, p. 3. Cited in Emanuele Greco, “L’arte negra all Biennale di Venezia del 1922. Ricostruzione del dibattito critico sulle riviste italiane”, in: Annali. Arte, musica e spettacolo, XI (2010), p. 365. 47 Soffici wrote several columns about his trip to Libya, see “Itinerario Libico”, in: La Gazzetta del Popolo, 25 April, 14 May, 28 May, 9 July, 31 August, and 10 September 1937; and “Paesaggio cirenaico”, ibidem, 24 December 1937. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 28 Frontespizio (1929-1940) while viciously attacking African culture. 48 Thus, while in 1914, Soffici’s African women relaxed within a classical pastoral to provide himself and Papini a momentary escape from the war, once Fascism consolidated its empire, his depiction of African individuals went hand in hand with the regime’s racial policies, in which they were to be dominated, segregated, and civilized so as to recover ancient Rome’s glory. Tellingly, in 1939, Soffici blamed the French Revolution for the demise of European civilization, since by then, Italians no longer needed this country’s mediation in order to access exotic sources, as they had succeeded in creating their own, if short lived, African empire in Libya, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. 49 Conclutions In general, art history has not paid attention to the rise and development of primitivism as well as its political implications in countries with few colonial holdings. Unfortunately, its first practitioners within the Italian milieu provoked the apparent erasure and subsequent disinterest in these sources. Soffici was the first to do this, as he recognized and then denied the importance of primitivism for Cubism, an operation that is replicated by the relative lack of research on his and other Italian artists’ reliance on African sources. Nevertheless, throughout the ventennio, artists and scholars did continue to engage with African sources and/or European primitivism. Others sought out domestic primitivisms as an alternative, which allowed them to retain certain formal characteristics as well as African art’s ‘sincerity’ and coarseness without directly relying on the exotic. Furthermore, Italian modernism’s debt to tradition and collaboration with Fascism has severely limited its primitivism’s visibility within art history. Despite these incomplete art historical narratives, the visual and textual evidence of an Italian primitivist turn (in)directly informed by African sources remains. More importantly, it challenges the art historical account that credits European artists with 48 Soffici, “Mediterranea”, in: Il Frontespizio, XI (1939), pp. 203-209. 49 ibidem. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 29 leading towards an acceptance of non-Western artifacts as artistic, not ethnographic objects between the wars. Whereas in France avant-garde artists’ appreciation and deployment of these sources led to debates regarding their potential entrance into art museums as early as 1914 and 1920, Italian artists’ primitivism did not subscribe to this, at least during Fascism. Besides, while the surrealists organized a counter-exhibition to denounce the Exposition international coloniale in 1931, artists associated with Futurism created artworks for the regime’s pavilion that drew upon French primitivism in order to promote fascist colonialism. Indeed, modernist primitivism became one of the several aesthetics used by the regime; most notably, it appeared in large-scale, public works such as Enrico Prampolini’s murals for the Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d'Oltremare in Naples. In other words, the use of African sources or representation of Africans in modern Italian art developed well into late Fascism and did not lead to nuanced debates that questioned racism or colonialism, as had occurred in France, and to a lesser degree in the United States and in Germany before Nazism. Soffici’s adoption and subsequent repudiation of primitivism is a notable part of Italian modernism, and should lead us to reconsider Italy’s eccentric contribution to European primitivism. As I have shown, the artist adapted French primitivism in order to present an alternative to German political and cultural hegemony in his pastoral frescoes at Bulciano and later refuted this integration of non-Western elements into a pastoral in order to support the fascist regime. More importantly, his later writings on Libya and on fascist imperialism prove that Italian primitivism survived well into late Fascism, revealing the need for a more thorough engagement with the ways in which this country deployed this strand. Rweferencias Alejandría, C. (1998) El pedagogo. Introducción de Ángel Castiñeira. Traducción y notas de Joan Sariol Díaz. Madrid. Editorial Gredos. Biblioteca Clásica # 118. Revista de Filosofía y Letras Departamento de Filosofía / Departamento de Letras ISSN: 1562-384X Año XXI. 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Número 71 Enero-Junio 2017 32 http://books.google.es/books?id=tS7OOe7quykC&pg=PR1&source=gbs_selected _pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Veyne, P. (1991) La elegía erótica romana. El amor, la poesía y el Occidente. Traducción de Juan José Utrilla. México. FCE. Vives, L. (1957) Tratado de alma. Madrid. Col. Austral. Espasa Calpe. Xirau, R. (1974) De ideas y no ideas. Cinco ensayos de filosofía contemporánea. México. Cuadernos de Joaquín Mortiz. work_dekvm2hchje3pl33tpeoosmn4e ---- Formation of zinc oxalate from zinc white in various oil binding media: the influence of atmospheric carbon dioxide by reaction with 13CO2 Simonsen et al. Herit Sci (2020) 8:126 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-020-00467-z R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E Formation of zinc oxalate from zinc white in various oil binding media: the influence of atmospheric carbon dioxide by reaction with 13CO2 Kim Pilkjær Simonsen1, Josephine Niemann Poulsen1, Frederik Vanmeert2,3, Morten Ryhl‑Svendsen1, Jesper Bendix4, Jana Sanyova3, Koen Janssens2 and Francisco Mederos‑Henry3* Abstract The formation of metal oxalates in paintings has recently gained a great deal of interest within the field of heritage science as several types of oxalate compounds have been identified in oil paintings. The present work investigates the formation of metal oxalates in linseed oil in the presence of the artists’ pigments zinc white, calcite, lead white, zinc yellow, chrome yellow, cadmium yellow, cobalt violet, and verdigris. The oil paint films were artificially photo‑aged by exposure to UVA light at low and high relative humidity, and afterwards analysed by attenuated total reflectance‑ Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR‑FTIR). The results showed that, compared to the other pigments inves‑ tigated, zinc white is especially prone to metal oxalate formation and that high humidity is a crucial factor in this process. Consequently, the reactivity and photo‑aging of ZnO in various oil binding media was investigated further under simulated solar radiation and at high relative humidity levels. ATR‑FTIR showed that zinc oxalate is formed in all oil binding media while X‑ray powder diffraction (PXRD) revealed it was mainly present in an amorphous state. To examine whether atmospheric CO2(g) has any influence on the formation of zinc oxalate, experiments with isotopi‑ cally enriched 13CO2(g) were performed. Based on ATR‑FTIR measurements, neither Zn 13C2O4 nor Zn 13CO3 were formed which suggests that the carbon source for the oxalate formation is most likely the paint itself (and its oil component) and not the surrounding atmosphere. Keywords: Metal oxalates, Zinc white, Zinc oxalate, Reaction with 13CO2, Oil containing binding media © The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creat iveco mmons .org/publi cdoma in/ zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Introduction Metal oxalates in oil paintings have recently attracted the attention of heritage scientists as their origin and mecha- nism of formation has not yet been fully elucidated [1–6]. Results published in the scientific literature suggest that different mechanisms might be involved depending on the artworks’ constituent materials and the environmen- tal conditions to which they were exposed. For instance, in the case of outdoor wall paintings and monuments constituted of calcareous stone materials, the formation of calcium and copper oxalates has been explained mainly by microbiological activity [7–10], though formation due to applied conservation treatments and atmospheric pol- lution has also been proposed [11, 12]. For easel (and other weather-protected) paintings the presence of metal oxalates has been attributed to chemical interactions between the pigment and the varnish layer [5, 6, 13], to reactions between the pigment and oxalic acid present in aerosols [3], or to photodegradation of the binder [4, 14], especially given if the latter has a high lipidic content such as in drying oils and egg tempera [15]. Open Access *Correspondence: francisco.mederos@kikirpa.be 3 Laboratories of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK‑IRPA), Parc du Cinquantenaire 1, 1000 Brussels, Belgium Full list of author information is available at the end of the article http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0186-3903 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1186/s40494-020-00467-z&domain=pdf Page 2 of 11Simonsen et al. Herit Sci (2020) 8:126 Indeed, it has been demonstrated that ageing condi- tions including exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation and high humidity, can induce the oxidation of fatty acids and favour the formation of low molecular weight dicar- boxylic acids such as oxalic acid [15, 16]. In such a pro- cess, pigments are considered to be one of the possible sources of the metal cations forming the oxalate salt [17, 18]. The catalytic role played by certain copper, lead, zinc and chrome-based pigments has also  been pointed out [4, 5, 16]. In any case, not all pigments are prone to oxalate for- mation in oil paint films. For instance, copper oxalates have commonly  been found in oil paint films contain- ing either copper acetate or basic copper chloride pig- ments, such as in a series of fifteenth century Gothic Catalan paintings [1] or Hans Memling’s Christ with Singing and Music-making Angels altarpiece [17]. None- theless, they seem to be absent in paint films containing other copper-based pigments such as azurite [18]. Lead oxalate has been found in red areas containing minium (Pb3O4), or in paint layers containing lead–tin yellow [1, 2] while cadmium oxalates have been found associated to cadmium yellow (CdS) in paintings such as Flowers in a blue vase by Vincent van Gogh [13] and in Le bonheur de vivre by Henri Matisse [14]. Zinc oxalate has been found in several nineteenth and twentieth-century oil paintings by Munch or Picasso [3] and by van Gogh [19]. In the above-mentioned paintings, it was proven that zinc oxa- late originated from the zinc white pigment, possibly due to this pigment’s recognized photoactivity [5]. As for cal- cium oxalates, the most frequently found metal oxalate in easel paintings [1, 17, 18, 20], the origin of the calcium cation is usually attributed to either calcium-containing materials (e.g. fillers and lake substrates) in the paint and ground layers or from particulate matter such as dirt deposited onto the paint surface [17, 20]. More recently, the catalytic role of Cr(VI) metal cations in the formation of calcium oxalate from calcite fillers in chrome yellow oil paints has also been described [4]. Considering the above, the present paper investigates the formation of metal oxalates in linseed oil paint films containing pigments such as zinc white (ZnO), calcite (CaCO3), lead white, (Pb3(CO3)2(OH)2), zinc yellow (KZn2(CrO4)2(H2O)(OH)), chrome yellow (PbCrO4), cadmium yellow (CdS), cobalt violet (Co3(PO4)2) and verdigris, (Cu(CH3COO)2·H2O). Also, given it was found that zinc white-based oil films were particularly prone to metal oxalate formation, further investigations using ZnO dispersed in different oil media were performed. Finally zinc white’s capacity to reduce CO2(g) into the oxalate anion was tested by exposing ZnO-based oil films to 13C labelled CO2(g). Indeed, semiconductor-medi- ated reduction of CO2 into different carbon-containing species such as oxalates are currently investigated as part of environmental chemistry research [21, 22]. Thus, it was worth investigating the influence of atmospheric CO2 as a possible source of zinc oxalate (ZnOx) in oil paint layers. Experimental Materials Na2 13C2O4 (99  atom% 13C) and 13CO2(g) (99  atom% 13C) were obtained from Sigma-Aldrich (Copenhagen, Den- mark). Other chemicals including the pigments ZnO, Pb3(CO3)2(OH)3, CaCO3, Cu(CH3COO)2·H2O, and CdS were of analytical grade and used as received from Sigma- Aldrich. Zinc yellow, KZn2(CrO4)2(H2O)(OH), was pre- pared as described in [23], chrome yellow, PbCrO4, and cobalt violet Co3(PO4)2 were prepared as described in [24]. All solutions were prepared with deionised water. Siccative de Haarlem (1.42%(w/w) Co), raw linseed oil, and linseed standoil were obtained from Køben- havns Farvehandel (Copenhagen, Denmark). Dammar, shellac, and pine colophony were obtained from Kre- mer Pigmente (Aichstetten, Germany). Tall oil modified alkyd based on isophthalic acid and pentaerythritol was obtained from Dyrup A/S (Copenhagen, Denmark). Syntheses Reference samples of ZnOx·2H2O, PbOx, CaOx·2H2O, CdOx·3H2O, CuOx, and CoOx·2H2O were made by salt metathesis reaction in aqueous solution by adding ammonium oxalate monohydrate (20  mmol in 100  mL, 70  °C) to a stirred solution of the metal salt (nitrate or sulphate, 20  mmol in 100  mL, 70  °C). During addition the desired oxalate salt precipitated. The suspension was allowed to stir for a couple of hours while cooling to ambient temperature. The crystals were then filtered off, washed with 3 × 15 mL of cold water and dried in air. 13C2 labelled zinc oxalate was prepared by precipitation from aqueous solutions of zinc nitrate and 13C2 labelled sodium oxalate dissolved in deionized water as fol- lows: an aqueous solution prepared by dissolving 0.10  g (0.74 mmol) of Na2 13C2O4 in 10 mL of water was dropwise added under stirring to a solution of 0.22  g (0.74  mmol) of Zn(NO3)2·6H2O dissolved in 10  mL of water. During addition white crystals precipitated. The mixture was allowed to stir for 2  h after which the crystals were fil- tered off, washed with 3 × 5  mL of cold water and dried in air. Yield: 0.12 g (86%) of Zn13C2O4·2H2O. Paint samples for UVA ageing 100  µm-thick paint films for UVA ageing were applied on glass microscope slides using a Zehntner ZUA 2000 Universal Applicator. The paints were produced by mix- ing a given amount of each pigment, shown in Table  1, Page 3 of 11Simonsen et al. Herit Sci (2020) 8:126 with 0.45  g of binding medium (raw linseed oil with 5%(w/w) of Siccative de Haarlem). In order to ensure that all paint films had an equimolar amount of metallic cations (ncation), the binder to pigment ratios (B/P) were calculated based on that of PbCrO4 (B/P = 20, e.g. 20  g of oil to 100 g of pigment). The calculated B/P and ncation values are also shown in Table 1. It must be noted that by standardising the molar concentrations of metal ions in the paint samples, the calculated B/P values (B/Pexp) vary to differing degrees from those typically used in reference paint formulations (B/Pref). The samples were dried in the dark in a fume hood for 1 month before artificial ageing. UVA light ageing Experiments with UVA light were performed in a light- curing oven (Egger EL 1 plus N2) using compact UVA flu- orescent lamps (Osram Blue UVA 9W/76) with radiation wavelengths from 350 to 400  nm. Six lamps were used, four at the top and two at the sides. The measured UVA intensity was 160,000  µW/lumen (160  W/m2) while the measured temperature (T = 28 °C) was caused by the flu- orescent lamps. The paint samples were then subjected to a repeating cycle of UVA exposure in  the Egger box fol- lowed by elevated relative humidity exposure in a desic- cator containing water. The RH is expected to be around 100% in the desiccator and low in the Egger box due to the fluorescent lamps. The time intervals are shown in Table 2. ZnO samples in various oil binders In these experiments, the B/P ratio for ZnO in the vari- ous oil binding media was 30 in accordance with its reported value for linseed oil [24]. The different binding media used were: (a) raw linseed oil, (b) raw linseed oil with 5%(w/w) of Siccative de Haarlem, (c) standoil, (d) tall oil modified alkyd, and standoil mixed with an equivalent mass of 10% (w/w) solution of: (e) dammar in mineral turpentine, (f ) shellac in ethanol, and (g) pine colophony in ethanol. 100  µm-thick paint films were applied on melinex polyester films using a Zehntner ZUA 2000 Uni- versal Applicator. All samples were dried in the dark in a fume hood for 1  month before ageing. It is worth not- ing that, to determine whether the presence of a siccative affects oxalate formation, linseed oil paint films with and without drier were made. Daylight equivalent ageing of ZnO in various oil binders Experiments for artificial sunlight ageing were per- formed in an Atlas Weather-O-Meter Ci3000 fitted with a 4500  W water-cooled xenon arc lamp having com- bined borosilicate soda-lime glass and coated with infra- red absorbing outer filter (CIRA) suppressing radiation below 300  nm. The light intensity was 120,000  lx with a Table 1 Mass of the different pigments mixed with 0.45 g of oil binder and calculated experimental binder to pigment (B/ Pexp) ratios ensuring equimolar metallic cation (ncation) concentrations in the formulated paint films Reference binder to pigment (B/Pref ) values are given for comparison Pigment Formula Mw (g/mol) m(g) pigment in 0.45 g oil npigment (mmol) ncation (mmol) B/Pexp B/Pref [24] Zinc white ZnO 81.4 0.49 6.0 6.0 92 30 Lead white 2PbCO3·Pb(OH)2 775.6 1.55 2.0 6.0 29 10–15 Calcite CaCO3 100.1 0.60 6.0 6.0 75 – Cobalt violet Co3(PO4)2 366.7 0.73 2.0 6.0 61 20–25 Verdigris Cu(CH3COO)2·H2O 199.7 1.20 6.0 6.0 38 – Cadmium yellow CdS 144.5 0.87 6.0 6.0 52 30 Chrome yellow PbCrO4 323.2 1.94 6.0 6.0 23 20 Zinc yellow KZn2(CrO4)2(H3O2) 436.9 0.87 2.0 6.0 52 25–30 Table 2 Reaction time (h) under  UVA light and in desiccator at 100% RH Accumulated reaction time after each UVA or desiccator cycle is given in the corresponding Σ columns. Total reaction time is shown as ΣTOTAL Reaction Time (h) Σ UVA Σ Desiccator UVA 50 50 UVA 174 224 Desiccator 408 408 UVA 166 390 Desiccator 72 480 UVA 70 460 Desiccator 432 912 UVA 100 560 Desiccator 72 984 UVA 92 652 Desiccator 96 1080 UVA 74 726 ΣTOTAL 726 1080 Page 4 of 11Simonsen et al. Herit Sci (2020) 8:126 radiation strength at 80 W/m2 (300–400 nm) and 800 W/ m2 (400–800  nm). The light ageing was performed for 300  h at RH = 80%. The measured temperature interval, T = 35–39 °C, was caused by the xenon arc lamp and was not a chosen parameter. Ageing in 13CO2 atmosphere Light ageing experiments in 13CO2(g) enriched atmos- phere were performed at concentrations of 4 and 40% (v/v) of 13CO2(g) in the Weather-O-Meter and in UVA light (40% (v/v)). The light ageing was performed for 500 h for all trials. The samples were placed in a gas-tight container made from tubular ESCAL™ Neo gas-barrier film, a heat-sealable polyester film coated with transpar- ent ceramic (Mitsubishi Gas Chemicals). The container was fitted with a 2 mm quartz glass window (10 × 15 cm), which was attached over a hole cut in the gas-barrier film using a double (side by side) bonding with epoxy and silicone glue. The samples of ZnO paint applied on glass microscope slides were placed inside the bag and held in place by double-sided adhesive tape. The volume of the bag was 400  mL and the concentration of 13CO2(g) were obtained by injecting 13CO2(g) with a glass gas syringe via an inserted needle after which the bag was heat sealed. High RH measured to vary between 70 and 80% was obtained by placing water drops in the plastic bag. The ZnO paint samples had a thickness of 100  µm, B/P = 30, (raw linseed oil with 5% (w/w) Siccative de Haarlem), and were dried in the dark in a fume hood for 1 month before ageing. ATR‑FTIR ATR-FTIR spectra were recorded on a Perkin Elmer Spectrum One FTIR-spectrometer, fitted with a Univer- sal ATR sampling accessory having a one-bounce com- posite zinc selenide and diamond crystal. Spectra of the samples were recorded over the range 4000–650  cm−1 with a resolution of 4 cm−1 and 4 accumulations. PXRD Powder XRD analyses were performed with a Bruker D8 Advance diffractometer using Ni-filtered Cu-Kα radiation (λ = 1.54056  Å) and Lynxeye position sensitive detector in the range 2θ = 5°–80° (Δ2θ = 0.01°) and total exposure time of 8 h. The oil film material was deposited directly on the Si monocrystal zero-background plate and measured at ambient temperature. µ‑PXRD µ-PXRD analyses were performed using a low power IµS-CuHB monochromatic X-ray source (Cu-Kα radia- tion, Incoatec GmbH) and a PILATUS 200K area detec- tor (Dectris Ltd.) positioned in a reflection geometry. The X-ray source had an incident angle of 12° with respect to the sample resulting in a beam footprint on the sample of around 0.15 × 0.8 mm2. Diffraction signals were collected in the range of 2θ = 12°–53°. By moving the X-ray beam over the sample, areas between 0.5–4 cm2 were analysed in a point-by-point manner with a dwell time of 100 s in each point, for a total period of 4–12 h. Averaged diffrac- tion patterns were calculated from subsets of these areas to improve signal-to-noise ratio. The oil film material was measured either directly on a Si monocrystal zero-back- ground plate or on a melinex polyester film (100  µm). The latter allowed analysing the ZnO oil film from both the top (exposed) and the bottom (unexposed) side. Azi- muthal integration was performed using XRDUA [25]. Phase identification was performed using Qualx2 soft- ware [26] combined with the crystallography open data- base (June 2019) [27]. Results and discussion UVA light ageing of various pigments ATR-FTIR measurement of the surface of the various pigment samples exposed to UVA light showed no sign of oxalate formation after 50 and 224  h. The spectra for all samples were very similar to the spectrum of the dried sample before treatment. The samples were then placed in a desiccator with water for 17 days in order investigate the influence of the relative humidity after which their IR spectra were recorded again. For ZnO the changes in the IR spectrum were remarkable whereas the spectra of the other pigments were only slightly affected. The spectrum of zinc white showed both an increase in the amount of zinc carboxylate (zinc soap) and distinct sign of zinc oxalate (ZnOx) formation (Fig.  1e), which further increased by additional exposure (7  days) to UVA (Fig. 1f ). In Fig. 1 the evolution of the ZnO spectra as a function of UVA-RH treatment (in hours) is shown together with the reference spectrum for ZnOx·2H2O. As indicated by the arrows, the presence of crys- tal water ν(O–H) = 3359  cm−1, the symmetrical C–O stretches ν(C–O) = 1362 and 1315  cm−1, and the C–C stretch ν(C–C) = 818  cm−1 [3] are clearly seen. The strong asymmetrical C–O stretch ν(C–O) = 1621  cm−1 [3] is visible as a shoulder in the absorption region (1700–1500 cm−1) for zinc soaps [28, 29]. The small peak at 1315  cm−1 observed in the spectrum of dried ZnO (Fig. 1b) may indicate that a minor amount of zinc oxalate is formed together with the zinc soaps while drying of the oil. Likewise, the intensity of characteristic oil binder frequencies (e.g. C–H stretches (3000–2800  cm−1), C=O stretches (1750–1730  cm−1), C–O stretches (1200–1100  cm−1) and the dominant alkyd peak around 1270 cm−1) tend to decrease or disappear as the exposure time to the UVA-RH cycles increases. Page 5 of 11Simonsen et al. Herit Sci (2020) 8:126 The IR spectra of the other paint films after the final UVA-RH treatment (726/1080 h) are shown in Fig. 2(top) together with the dried oil film before treatment (mid- dle), and the relevant metal oxalate (bottom). As indi- cated by the arrows a minor amount of metal oxalate may be observed in the spectra of calcite, zinc yellow, and of cobalt violet. The minor amount of zinc oxalate observed in the spec- trum of zinc yellow (Fig. 2c) may be due to the oxidative nature of the chromate ion. The colour of the aged sample showed a distinct greenish hue indicating the presence of Cr(III). In oil medium, the reduction of Cr(VI) to Cr(III) via the chromate(V) species has been well described [4, 30, 31], and oxidation of oxalate precursors (CO2 •, CO3 −•) may lower the amount of oxalate ions formed. However, whether chromate ions increase or decrease the forma- tion of oxalate is still unclear. Figure  2c also shows the clear formation of zinc soap [28, 29] indicating the reactive nature of zinc yellow with respect to hydrolysis and reaction with the oil medium. This is likely caused by the presence of hydroxide in the pigment, which structure has been recently solved as KZn2(CrO4)2(H2O)(OH) [23]. The reaction between zinc yellow and the oil medium is in contrast to chrome yel- low which colour remained almost unchanged after ageing. The IR spectrum showed no sign of lead oxalate and only a slight presence of lead soap (Additional file 1: Fig.  S1). The difference between the two chromate pig- ments is likely due to zinc yellow’s higher solubility and to its hydroxide content, making this pigment the most reactive among the chromate pigments [23, 30]. Cobalt violet seems also relatively inert with respect to oxalate formation though a minor amount of cobalt oxa- late seems to be present. To our knowledge cobalt oxalate has yet to be found in oil paintings. Neither lead white, chrome yellow, cadmium yellow or verdigris show sign of metal oxalate formation based on FTIR-ATR spectroscopy (vide supra). However, the pres- ence of carbonate in lead white may impair the detection of lead oxalate’s symmetrical C–O stretches. Likewise, the amount of metal soap on the surface of the lead white oil film seems comparatively less than for zinc white as indicated by the relative intensity of their characteristic IR vibrations. This result thus suggests a much slower reaction of lead white with the oil binding medium despite its basic nature. Cadmium [13, 14] and copper [1, 15, 17, 19] oxalates have been observed in different paint- ings, but were not found in this experimental setup or may have formed only in concentrations falling below the detection limit of the ATR-FTIR apparatus. Daylight equivalent ageing of ZnO in various oil binding media Due to the clear formation of zinc oxalate in the UVA- RH treatment, ageing experiments with zinc white were performed with artificial sunlight (Weather-O-Meter) in various oil binders and in standoil with natural resins (B/P = 30). The IR spectra after 300  h (RH = 80%) are shown in Figs.  3 and 4 together with the reference spec- tra of the dried oil films before treatment and that of zinc oxalate. For the four oil media without resin the IR spectrum could be measured both at the surface and at the backside of the oil film. As seen in Fig. 3, zinc oxalate was formed in all samples. Based on the intensity of characteristic Fig. 1 Changes in the FTIR‑ATR spectrum of zinc white (B/P = 90) in linseed oil with 5%(w/w) Siccative de Haarlem as a function of UVA/ RH treatment together with the reference spectrum of zinc oxalate (a), and the oil film after drying in the dark (b). The treatment, in hours, given to the sample is shown in the spectra (c–h). The first number indicates UVA exposure hours and the second hours in the desiccator filled with water. The arrows indicate the appearance of zinc oxalate’s characteristic IR bands. Notice the development in the spectrum for (e) 224/408 compared to (d) 224/0 Page 6 of 11Simonsen et al. Herit Sci (2020) 8:126 ZnOx IR absorption bands, the amount seems higher at the surface compared to the backside. This notable dif- ference also matches the disappearance of the charac- teristic oil binder frequencies at the exposed surfaces as shown in Fig.  3d (e.g. C–H stretches (3000–2800  cm−1), C=O stretches (1750–1730  cm−1), C–O stretches (1200–1100  cm−1) and the dominant alkyd peak around 1270  cm−1). However, in pure linseed oil the amount of ZnOx and the disappearance of frequencies of the binder appears to be similar on both sides. The paint film with natural resins in standoil became brittle and crumbly after treatment and only surface measurements were possible. As seen in Fig. 4, zinc oxa- late was formed in all samples. Based on the intensity of the C–O stretches around 1362 and 1315  cm−1 [3] the relative  amount of ZnOx seems highest in the dammar containing paint film and lowest in the sample containing shellac. However, given the resins were dissolved in dif- ferent solvents, variable solvent evaporation rates might have caused film inhomogeneities [32]. Therefore, it is difficult to draw a conclusion whether the resins have dif- ferent or any effect on oxalate formation. Nonetheless, our results clearly demonstrate that all the oil binding media, during exposure to light and humidity, react with zinc white to form zinc oxalate. Ageing in 13CO2 atmosphere In order to investigate if atmospheric CO2(g) has any influence on the formation of ZnOx, experiments were performed with 13C labelled CO2(g). The IR spec- trum after exposure for 500  h in the Weather-O-Meter to a 40% (v/v) 13CO2(g) atmosphere is shown in Fig.  5 together with the reference spectra of zinc white in oil, Zn13C2O4·2H2O, and Zn 12C2O4·2H2O. Based on the intensity of the ZnOx absorption bands, significantly less zinc oxalate appears to have been formed compared to the spectra shown in Fig.  3b (top), even though the reaction time was considerably longer. Characteristic Fig. 2 FTIR‑ATR spectra (asterisk) of six pigments (a–f) in linseed oil with 5% (w/w) Siccative de Haarlem after treatment with UVA for 726 h and placement in desiccator filled with water for 1080 h. Arrows indicate the presence of characteristic metal oxalate IR bands. Reference spectra of the oil film before treatment (black triangle) and of the corresponding metal oxalates (black circle) are also shown for each pigment. The B/P ratios are given in Table 1 Page 7 of 11Simonsen et al. Herit Sci (2020) 8:126 vibrations of the binding medium (e.g. C–H and C=O) are also still present. However, the COO− band (1600– 1500  cm−1), due to zinc soap formation, is dominant showing that reaction between ZnO and the binding medium has taken place. The lower tendency to form zinc oxalate may be attributed to a decrease in effective light intensity due to the quartz window and the plastic bag. Reaction at 4% (v/v) and 40% (v/v) 13CO2 in UVA light resulted in similar FTIR-ATR spectra. As expected from the slightly larger mass of 13C, the vibrations of the 13C marked oxalate ion appears at lower wavenumbers than that of the 12C-containing oxa- late [33]. As shown in Fig.  5, the C–O stretches appear at 1364 and 1319 cm−1, which is similar to the positions observed in Fig. 1 (1364 and 1319 cm−1) and Fig. 2b (1364 and 1320  cm−1). Comparison to the reference spectra of Zn12C2O4·2H2O and Zn 13C2O4·2H2O also confirms the presence of the 12C-containing oxalate ion while no char- acteristic absorption bands for 13C2O4 2− are observed. These results indicate that either no zinc 13C-oxalate is formed or only at concentrations falling below the tech- nique’s limit of detection. Based on these IR investigations it appears that the formation of zinc oxalates follows the formation of zinc soaps which recently has been shown to be present as ionomeric clusters [34–38]. We believe that these clus- ters could be the precursors for the formation of zinc oxalates by bond breaking and oxidation of the long chain fatty acids through a radical mechanism, the radi- cals possibly being caused by light absorption/photo- activity of ZnO. The lack of increased Zn13C2O4·2H2O formation as a function of increased 13CO2(g) concen- tration further suggests that oxalate formation origi- nates from carbon sources in the oil and not from atmospheric ones such as CO2(g). Based on our results, we consider it very unlikely that atmospheric carbon dioxide plays any role in the oxalate formation. Hence, the oxalate ions formed are not due to a reductive mechanism that might involve the reduction of CO2 [21, 22] but rather originate from the oxidation of the oil binder. Fig. 3 FTIR‑ATR spectra of zinc white in four different oil binding media (B/P = 30) after treatment in the Weather‑O‑Meter for 300 h and RH = 80%. The asterisk spectrum in each figure (a–d) shows the measurement on the surface of the oil film while the black square spectrum below was obtained from the backside. Reference spectra of the oil film before treatment (black triangle) and of zinc oxalate (black circle) are also shown. Green lines highlight characteristic zinc oxalate IR absorption bands Page 8 of 11Simonsen et al. Herit Sci (2020) 8:126 PXRD characterization In order to investigate the crystallinity of the formed zinc oxalate, PXRD was performed on the pure linseed oil paint film which showed the largest amount of ZnOx based on the IR spectrum (Fig. 3a). The diffractogram of ZnO in linseed oil after treatment for 300  h is shown in Fig. 6 together with a close-up of the diffractogram. Also shown are reference diffractograms for ZnC2O4·2H2O, ZnO, and various concentrations of ZnC2O4·2H2O in linseed oil. The diffractograms of the various zinc oxa- late concentrations show that concentrations below 0.5% (w/w) become difficult to observe with PXRD. As indicated by the arrows in the close-up diffracto- gram in Fig.  6, weak crystalline zinc oxalate reflections were detected. These results suggest that the formed zinc oxalate is mostly present in an amorphous state, while only a minor fraction is crystalline. µ‑PXRD characterization As the presence of zinc oxalate was clear on both the surface and backside of the oil film judged by ATR-FTIR (Fig.  3a), and since bulk PXRD indicates that the zinc oxalate formed is mostly present in an amorphous state, the zinc oxalate formation was further investigated by µ-PXRD. Comparing diffraction data from the exposed top sur- face (Fig. 7b) and bottom side (Fig. 7c) of the ZnO paint film, showed that the minor amount of crystalline zinc oxalate is present only at the exposed side and is absent on the bottom side, even though IR revealed oxalate vibrations bands with similar intensity on both sides of the paint film. The broad bands at 18.0°, 22.6° and 26.0° 2θ in Fig.  7c originate from the Melinex foil. Regarding the ZnO film aged with the Weather-O-Meter and 40% (v/v) 13CO2(g) no indication of crystalline zinc oxalates was found (Fig. 7a). Next to ZnO and ZnC2O4·2H2O, the diffrac- tion signals marked ▼ are present in all measure- ments (Fig.  7a–c). This species is best explained by a hydrated Zn carbonate hydroxide with chemical formula, Zn4(CO3)(OH)6·H2O (PDF-2 entry num- ber 00-011-0287). These diffraction signals are due to an impurity in the ZnO powder (verified with XRPD). Fig. 4 FTIR‑ATR spectra of zinc white in standoil (B/P = 30) samples mixed with an equivalent mass of 10% (w/w) solution of: (e) dammar in mineral turpentine, (f ) shellac in ethanol, (g) pine colophony in ethanol, after treatment in the Weather‑O‑Meter for 300 h and RH = 80%. The top spectrum in each figure (e–g) shows the measurement on the surface of the oil film while the spectrum below was taken at the surface of the oil film before treatment. Green lines indicate characteristic zinc oxalate IR absorption bands Fig. 5 a Surface FTIR‑ATR spectra of zinc white (B/P = 30) in linseed oil with 5% (w/w) Siccative de Haarlem after treatment in the Weather‑O‑Meter for 500 h with 40% (v/v) 13CO2(g) and 70–80% RH. Reference spectra are given for b the same oil film before treatment, c Zn13C2O4·2H2O and d Zn 12C2O4·2H2O. Green lines indicate characteristic 12C‑zinc oxalate IR absorption bands Page 9 of 11Simonsen et al. Herit Sci (2020) 8:126 Fig. 6 Left column: PXRD diffractograms of varying % (w/w) amounts of zinc oxalate dispersed in linseed oil with 5% (w/w) Siccative de Haarlem. Right column: PXRD diffractograms of ZnC2O4·2H2O, ZnO and ZnO in linseed oil (B/P = 30) after treatment in the Weather‑O‑Meter for 300 h and RH = 80%. A close‑up of the latter diffractogram is also shown, with arrows indicating characteristic zinc oxalate reflections Fig. 7 PXRD patterns of ZnO in linseed oil (B/P = 30) after treatment in Weather‑O‑Meter for: (a) 500 h with 40% (v/v) 13CO2(g) and RH = 70–80%; (b) 300 h and RH = 80% measured from the top side; and (c) measured from the bottom side. Legend: asterisk = ZnO; open circle = ZnC2O4·2H2O; open diamond = ZnC2O4; black down triangle = Zn4(CO3)(OH)6·H2O Page 10 of 11Simonsen et al. Herit Sci (2020) 8:126 Characteristic IR vibrations for this compound [39] have also been detected in the IR spectra of the corre- sponding samples. It is worth mentioning that the dif- fraction signal of Zn4(CO3)(OH)6·H2O around 2θ = 24° could hide the presence of anhydrous ZnC2O4. None- theless, the presence of the latter seems unlikely, given the ageing conditions that were employed. Conclusions This paper has investigated the formation of metal oxalates by reaction of different pigments in linseed oil paint films under the influence of UVA light and humidity. The pigments investigated were zinc white (ZnO), calcite (CaCO3), lead white, (Pb3(CO3)2(OH)2), zinc yellow (KZn2(CrO4)2(H2O)(OH)), chrome yel- low (PbCrO4), cadmium yellow (CdS), cobalt violet (Co3(PO4)2) and verdigris, (Cu(CH3COO)2·H2O). The UVA light-ageing experiment showed that linseed oil film with zinc white was particularly prone to metal oxalate formation, and that high humidity is a neces- sary requirement for the formation of metal oxalates. Metal oxalate formation of ZnO was investigated further in different oil binding media under the influ- ence of artificial sunlight and humidity. The different oil binding media were raw linseed with and without Sic- cative de Haarlem, standoil, and tall oil modified alkyd. Also standoil mixed with dammar, shellac, or pine colophony were investigated. Obtained results show that zinc oxalate was formed in all cases. The influence of atmospheric carbon dioxide on the formation of zinc oxalate was also investigated by the use of 13C labelled CO2(g). As the  vibration bands of the resulting zinc oxalate appear at the frequencies for 12C-containing oxalate ion, and since the amount of zinc oxalate formed did not increase by increas- ing CO2(g) concentration, we consider it unlikely that atmospheric carbon dioxide plays a role in oxalate for- mation. It therefore supports the hypothesis that oxa- late anion formation is due to the oxidation of the oil binder and not to the reduction of CO2. Moreover, our results seem to indicate a correlation between the for- mation mechanism of zinc oxalates and that of zinc soaps. However, further research is needed to clarify the possible link between both mechanisms. In all cases, the zinc oxalate formed is mostly in an amorphous state; the presence of crystal- line ZnC2O4·2H2O could only be observed in minor amounts in the PXRD patterns, which are dominated by ZnO in the oil paint film. The formation of crystal- line ZnC2O4·2H2O is further limited to the light-exposed (top) side of the paint films. Supplementary information Supplementary information accompanies this paper at https ://doi. org/10.1186/s4049 4‑020‑00467 ‑z. Additional file 1. Fig. S1. FTIR‑ATR spectra of chrome yellow and zinc white in linseed oil with 5%(w/w) Siccative de Haarlem. For each pigment, the top spectrum was obtained after treatment with UVA for 726 h and placement in desiccator filled with water for 1080 h. Reference spectra of the oil film before treatment (middle) and of the relevant metal oxalates (bottom) are also shown. The B/P ratios are given in Table 1 (see article text) Acknowledgements Not applicable. Authors’ contributions All authors contributed to data interpretation and to finalizing the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript. Funding F. Vanmeert, K. Janssens, J. Sanyova and F. Mederos‑Henry would like to thank The Belgian Science Policy (Belspo) of the Belgian Federal government for funding the “MetOx” Brain project (BR/165/A6/METOX). Availability of data and materials The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. 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Formation of zinc oxalate from zinc white in various oil binding media: the influence of atmospheric carbon dioxide by reaction with 13CO2 Abstract Introduction Experimental Materials Syntheses Paint samples for UVA ageing UVA light ageing ZnO samples in various oil binders Daylight equivalent ageing of ZnO in various oil binders Ageing in 13CO2 atmosphere ATR-FTIR PXRD µ-PXRD Results and discussion UVA light ageing of various pigments Daylight equivalent ageing of ZnO in various oil binding media Ageing in 13CO2 atmosphere PXRD characterization µ-PXRD characterization Conclusions Acknowledgements References work_a3at6r67jbh6nkdwjyabv6c7nm ---- ENTIRE DISS COMBINED SPIRITED PATTERN AND DECORATION IN CONTEMPORARY BLACK ATLANTIC ART A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Sophie Sanders Diploma Date (August 2013) Examining Committee Members: Dr. Gerald Silk, Advisory Chair, Art History Department Dr. Susanna Gold, Art History Department Prof. Keith Morrison, Department of Painting, Sculpture, and Drawing Dr. Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, External Member, Associate Professor of American Art, University of Pennsylvania ii © Copyright 2013 by SophieSanders All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates aesthetics of African design and decoration in the work of major contemporary artists of African descent who address heritage, history, and life experience. My project focuses on the work of three representative contemporary artists, African American artists Kehinde Wiley and Nick Cave, and Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. Their work represents practices and tendencies among a much broader group of painters and sculptors who employ elaborate textures and designs to express drama and emotion throughout the Black Atlantic world. I argue that extensive patterning, embellishment, and ornamentation are employed by many contemporary artists of African descent as a strategy for reinterpreting the art historical canon and addressing critical social issues, such as war, devastation of the earth’s environment, and lack of essential resources for survival in many parts of the world. Many artworks also present historical revisions that reflect the experience of Black peoples who were brought to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, lived under colonial rule, or witnessed aspects of post-colonial struggle. The disorderliness of intersecting designs could also symbolize gaps in memory and traumas that will not heal. They reflect the manner in which Black Atlantic peoples have pieced together ancestral histories from a patchwork of sources. Polyrhythmic decoration enables their work to act as vessels of experience, allowing viewers to bring together multiple histories and social references. iv DEDICATION I am so grateful to my husband, Tony L. Brown, and son, Samuel Solomon Sanders, for standing by me through the process of this dissertation. I also appreciate the boundless support of Rhoda Ross and Joseph Solomon. I am eternally thankful for the advice of Nancy Purcell. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My project would not have been realized without the amazing support of my dissertation committee comprised of faculty from the Department of Art History at Tyler School of Art, Temple University and the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. I am grateful to Professor Gerald Silk for his dedicated and meticulous readings of my dissertation chapters, his insights, and longtime support of my research and writing process. Professor Susanna Gold provided enormous enthusiasm for my subject, thoughtful guidance through the evolution of my ideas, and kindness in sharing opportunities to expand this project. Professor Keith Morrison contributed great wisdom, continued encouragement and confidence in my research, and essential mentoring as a scholar and artist. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw for her visionary and inspirational research and her continued commitment to helping me develop as an art historian and an artist. I have the utmost respect and gratitude to the artists who served as the major focus of this dissertation: Kehinde Wiley, Nick Cave, and El Anatsui. I thank them for their inspiration and generosity in sharing information about process, specific artworks, and ideas. A number of other artists also provided important information, interviews, and insights including Xenobia Bailey, Atta Kwami, Daniel Kojo Schrade, Odili Donald Odita, Mickalene Thomas, Faith Ringgold, and many others. Among the many scholars and curators who stimulated and guided my research are Robert Farris Thompson, John Picton, Rowland O. Abiodun, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Henry J. Drewal, Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe, Elizabeth Harney, Suzanne Preston Blier, Robert Nooter, Yomi Ola, Lisa M. Binder, Lowery Sims, Leslie King-Hammond, Donald Cosentino, and Paul C. Taylor. Many galleries provided me with information and images, most notably Jack Shainman Gallery. I am very grateful to the entire gallery staff and especially Jack Shainman, Claude Simard, Tamsen Greene, Elena Soboleva, and Rebecca Mei. The support of Julie Roberts of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Lehmann Maupin Gallery was also invaluable. The staff of The Fabric Workshop and Museum and most especially Marion Boulton Stroud and Christina Roberts provided wonderful support of my project. I am so thankful for the generous assistance of Rochelle Johnson and Lorraine Ford of the Computer Services at Temple University, Lorraine Savage of the Temple University Writing Center, and Christa A. Viola of the Temple University Graduate School. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................... iii DEDICATION ....................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................ v LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................... vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 1 2. KEHINDE WILEY’S ÀŞẸ: PATTERNS OF POWER ...................................... 36 Patterns of Power in the World Stage ...................................................... 53 The World Stage: China ........................................................................... 56 The World Stage: Brazil ............................................................................ 60 The World Stage: Lagos~Dakar ............................................................... 65 The World Stage: Israel ............................................................................ 79 Commercial Offshoots of The World Stage .............................................. 87 Pattern as Beat: Hip-hop and Regular Irregular Rhythm .......................... 91 The Black Dandy, the Exotic Odalisque, and the Ebony Diva ................ 103 3. MY HEART SKIPS A BEAT: CARNIVALESQUE PATTERNS BY NICK CAVE ........................................ 131 Patterns of Hot and Cool ........................................................................ 140 Animal Patterns ...................................................................................... 149 Patterns of the Carnivalesque ................................................................ 155 iii Patterns of Protection ............................................................................. 176 Patterns that Liberate the Spirit .............................................................. 194 Patterns of Dreams ................................................................................. 201 4. EL ANATSUI: PATTERNS OF MEMORY .................................................... 208 Inscribed Trays and Ceramics ................................................................ 215 Rhythmic Marks and Symbols in Prints, Paintings, and Wood ............... 225 Metal Cloth Mosaics ............................................................................... 253 Textile Designs Transformed in Metal Cloths ......................................... 262 Textiles, Music, and Metalsmithing Informs Metal Cloth Patterns .......... 273 Patterns of Consumption and Collaboration ........................................... 276 Beyond Cloth: Patterns of Global and Environmental Interaction .......... 280 Adorning Architecture ............................................................................. 298 Legacies of Anatsui’s Ethereal and Buoyant Patterns ............................ 308 5. CONCLUSION ............................................................................................. 315 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................ 324 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 2.1 Kehinde Wiley, Alexander the Great, oil and enamel on canvas, 6’ x 5’, 2007, Ann and Mel Schaffer Family Collection. Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California ................. 66 2.2 Kehinde Wiley, Lord George Digby and Lord William Russell, oil on canvas, 72” x 96”, 2007. Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California ....................................................................... 66 2.3 Kehinde Wiley, Triple Portrait of Charles I, oil and enamel on three canvases (ea. measuring 72” x 36”), 2007, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL. Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California ............................................................................................. 67 2.4 Anthony van Dyck, King Charles I of England and Scotland from three angles, oil on canvas, 84.4 x 94.4 cm, 1635, The Royal Collection, England. ...................................................................................................... 67 2.5 Barkley Hendricks, Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris, oil on canvas, 84 1/8” x 72”, 1972, William C. Whitney Foundation .................................................. 67 2.6 Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary, paper collage, oil paint, glitter, polyester resin, map pins, elephant dung on linen, 1996, collection of David Walsh..73 2.7 Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, oil on canvas, 108” x 108”, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery ... 74 2.8 Jacques-Louis David, Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Grand-Saint-Bernard, 1801………..……………………………………………………………………... 74 2.9 Faith Ringgold, Matisse’s Model (The French Collection) Part 1: #5, acrylic on canvas and fabric, 1991………………………………………………………... .............................. 76 2.10 Emma Amos, Work Suit, acrylic on linen, photo transfer, African fabric collage and borders, 74.5” x 54.5”, 1994…………………………………………... ................................................ 76 2.11 Robert Colescott, Les Demoiselles d'Alabama vestidas, acrylic paint on canvas, 96” x 92”, 1985………………………………………………………... 77 2.12 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, oil on canvas, 8’ x 7’8”, 1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York…………………………………………... .. 77 v 2.13 Kehinde Wiley, Carry Out the Four Modernisations of the Fatherland, oil on canvas, 96” x 72”, 2007 ............................................................................... 84 2.14 Carry Out the Four Modernizations of the Fatherland, poster, 1981, China ........................................................................................................... 84 2.15 Yasumasa Morimura, Portrait (Futago), photograph, 1989 ......................... 85 2.16 Kehinde Wiley, Alegoria à Lei do Ventre Livre, oil on canvas, 2009 ........... 88 2.17 A.D. Bressae, Alegoria à Lei do Ventre Livre, plaster, 1871 ....................... 88 2.18 Detail of A.D. Bressae, Alegoria à Lei do Ventre Livre, plaster, 1871 ......... 88 2.19 Kehinde Wiley, Dogon Couple, oil on canvas, 2008 ................................... 93 2.20 Dogon people, Seated Couple, late 19th-early 20th century, wood, Senegal ....................................................................................................... 93 2.21 Fancy print cotton textile, Hands and Fingers design, acquired Ghana, 1993 ............................................................................................................ 95 2.22 Kehinde Wiley, Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, oil on canvas, 72” x 96”, 2008 ............................................................................................ 97 2.23 Dr. Bodun Shodeinde, Welcome to Lagos Monument, concrete, 21’ x 14’, Lagos, Nigeria ............................................................................................. 97 2.24 Commemorative Wax Print of Abdou Diouf President of Senegal 1981-2000, 1992, cloth is from the election year (1983) .............................................. 100 2.25 Vlisco, Nouvelle Histoire, 2011 .................................................................. 100 2.26 Vlisco, Sparkling Grace, 2010 ................................................................... 100 2.27 Yinka Shonibare, Three Graces, three life-size mannequins, Dutch wax printed cotton, dimensions variable, 2001 ................................................. 101 2.28 Dov Rosenbaum, mizrah plaque, paint, ink, and pencil on cut-out paper, 1877, Podkamen, Ukraine, collection of The Jewish Museum, New York 107 2.29 Kehinde Wiley, Alios Itzhak, oil and gold enamel on canvas, 2011, The Jewish Museum, New York ....................................................................... 107 2.30 Kehinde Wiley, Abed Al Ashe and Chaled El Awari, oil and gold enamel on canvas, 95.937" x 84," 2011, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery ........................................... 109 vi 2.31 Kehinde Wiley, Kalkidan Mashasha, gold and enamel on canvas, 45” x 36”, 2011, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery ....................................................................................... 111 2.32 Kehinde Wiley, Puma World Cup Africa Collaboration, Unity, oil on canvas, 108” x 144”, 2010, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery ................................................................. 114 2.33 The Oba of Benin with Attendants and Europeans, brass, 19” x 15”, 16th or 17th century, made in Benin City, British Museum, London ...................... 114 2.34 Kehinde Wiley, Puma World Cup Africa Collaboration, Samuel Eto’o, oil on canvas, 72” x 60”, 2010, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery .................................................... 114 2.35 Akan bracelet of ninety small keys, 9.5 cm, Ghana, 17th Century perhaps, collection of the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva, Switzerland .............. 115 2.36 Kehinde Wiley, Thiogo Oliveira do Rosario Rozendo, oil on canvas, 48” x 36”, 2009, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery ........................................................................ 117 2.37 Kehinde Wiley, LL Cool J, oil on canvas, 96” x 72”, 2005, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery ....................................................................................................... 117 2.38 John Singer Sargent, John D. Rockefeller Sr, oil on canvas, 70” x 60”, 1917 .......................................................................................................... 117 2.39 Norman Lewis, Jazz Musicians, oil on canvas, 36” x 26”, 1948, The Estate of Norman W. Lewis, courtesy of Landor Fine Arts, Newark. Courtesy of Kenkeleba Gallery ..................................................................................... 119 2.40 Keith Morrison, Sound the Knell Slowly, watercolor, 30” x 40”, 2001 ........ 121 2.41 Kehinde Wiley, St. Sebastian II, oil on canvas, 96” x 72”, 2006, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery ....................................................................................................... 124 2.42 Rashaad Newsome, Black Barbie, collage in antique frame, automotive paint, 56 3/8” x 43 ½ x 3”, 2011 ................................................................. 127 2.43 Mustafa Maluka, The Answers Get Harder and Harder, oil and acrylic on canvas, 72” x 52.4”, 2009 .......................................................................... 132 2.44 Kehinde Wiley, Mame Ngagne, 2007, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery ....................................................................................................... 133 vii 2.45 Kehinde Wiley, Dion ‘OJ’ Bey, After Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' "The Virgin with the Host", archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle fine art paper, 30" x 24.5", 2009 ............................................................................................. 134 2.46 Kehinde Wiley, After Sir Joshua Reynolds’ “Portrait of Samuel Johnson”, archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle fine art paper, 30” x 24.5”, 2009 ....... 134 2.47 Faith Ringgold, Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger, oil on canvas, 36” x 50”, 1969, collection of the artist ....................................................................... 135 2.48 Iké Udé, Sartorial Anarchy: Untitled #4, pigment on satin paper, 40” x 36”, 2010 .......................................................................................................... 137 2.49 Seydou Keïta, Untitled (Man with Flower), 1959 ....................................... 138 2.50 Samuel Fosso, Le Chef: celui a vendu l’Afrique aux colons, color print, 40. 2” x 40.2”, 1997 ......................................................................................... 139 2.51 Kerry James Marshall, De Style, 1993, Los Angeles County Museum of Art .............................................................................................................. 141 2.52 Barkley Hendricks, Family Jules (NNN), 1974, oil and acrylic on canvas, 91 ½” x 60 ¼”, 1974, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. .................... 143 2.53 Kehinde Wiley, Sleep, 2008-9, After Jean-Bernard Restout’s “Sleep”, archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle fine art paper, 30” x 50”, 2009, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, Stephen Friedman Gallery ....................................................................................................... 144 2.54 Kehinde Wiley, Sleep, 2008-9, oil on canvas, 132” x 300”, 2008, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, Stephen Friedman Gallery .................................................. 144 2.55 Jean-Bernard Resout, Sleep, 1771, 38 3/8” x 51 1/8”, 1771, Cleveland Museum of Art ........................................................................................... 144 2.56 Kehinde Wiley, St. John the Baptist II, 2006, archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle fine art paper, 30” x 24.5”, 2009 ........................................... 145 2.57 Mickalene Thomas, In A Little Taste Outside of Love, acrylic, enamel, and rhinestones on wood panel, 108” x 144”, 2007 ......................................... 146 2.58 Mickalene Thomas, After George Romney’s Elizabeth Warren as Hebe, 2009, archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle fine art paper, 30” x 24.5”, 2009 .......................................................................................................... 147 viii 2.59 Mickalene Thomas, Qusuquzah, une très belle négresse 3, acrylic, enamel, and rhinestones on wood panel, 96” x 80” x 2”, 2012, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York and Hong Kong ............................... 149 2.60 Grace Ndiritu, Lying Down Textiles, video still, 2005-7 ............................. 150 2.61 Kehinde Wiley, The Two Sisters, oil on canvas, 2012, courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery .............................................................................................. 153 2.62 Kehinde Wiley, Judith and Holofernes, oil on canvas, 2012, courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery ..................................................................................... 154 3.1 Nick Cave, Let’s C, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA, 2011, photo by James Prinz ...................................................................... 157 3.2 Nick Cave, Soundsuit, twigs, wire, metal armature, 1998, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 159 3.3 Louise Bourgeois wearing sculpture from A Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Part, 1978, Hamilton Gallery, New York .......................................... 160 3.4 Leigh Bowery, photographed in one of his signature performance costumes, 1980s ......................................................................................................... 160 3.5 Nick Cave, Untitled (Relic series), mixed media, courtesy of Jack Shainman gallery from the New York City Armory Exhibition 2012, New York .......... 160 3.6 Nick Cave, Untitled (Tondo series), mixed media, courtesy of Jack Shainman gallery from the New York City Armory Exhibition 2012, New York ........................................................................................................... 160 3.7 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, For Now, Mary Boone Gallery exhibition, September 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery, photo by Sophie Sanders ............................................................. 164 3.8 Phyllis Galembo, Terreiro São Jorge, Bahia. Divine Inspiration: From Benin to Bahia, Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. ......................................................................................................... 165 3.9 Phyllis Galembo, Léogâne, Rose Anne and Andre Rose Mercilien, with drapo (ritual flags) for Ogou Feray and Saint James the Greater. A vèvè depicting Danbala, Ayida Wédo, and Ayizan is on the floor, 1998 ............ 167 3.10 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, mixed media, 2010, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 168 ix 3.11 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, For Now exhibition, Mary Boone Gallery, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery, image by Sophie Sanders .................................................................................... 168 3.12 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, mixed media, exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ..................................... 168 3.13 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, synthetic hair, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 169 3.14 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, For Now exhibition, Mary Boone Gallery, September 2011, courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery, photo by Sophie Sanders ............................................................. 169 3.15 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, mixed media, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 170 3.16 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, For Now exhibition, Mary Boone Gallery, September 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, photo by Sophie Sanders ..................................................................................................... 170 3.17 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, 2010, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ........................................................... 171 3.18 Phyllis Galembo, Ngar Ball Traditional Masquerade Dance, Cross River, Nigeria, 2004 ............................................................................................. 172 3.19 Phyllis Galembo, Akata Dance, Cross River, Nigeria, 2009 ...................... 172 3.20 Jeff Sonhouse, Exhibit A: Cardinal Francis Arinze, oil and mixed media on wooden panel, courtesy of the Rubell Family Collection, 2005 ................. 172 3.21 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, mixed media, 2009, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 173 3.22 Drapo for St Jacques Majeur, photo from Beads, Body, and Soul by Henry John Drewal and John Mason (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998), p. 352 ................................................................... 173 3.23 Sonya Clark, Extensions in Blonde, mixed media, 1997, accessed July 11, 2012: http://sonyaclark.com/gallery/extensions-in-blonde/ ........................ 174 3.24 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, mixed media, 2009, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, p. 149 .......................... 175 3.25 Nick Cave, Mating Season, Ever-After exhibition, Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, NY, September 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ................ 175 x 3.26 Ann Hamilton, Tropos, multimedia installation, 1993, accessed July 11, 2012: http://www.vincentborrelli.com/cgi-bin/vbb/101942 ......................... 175 3.27 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit image, Meet Me at the Center for the Earth, 2011, p. 214. ............................................................................................. 176 3.28 Phyllis Galembo, Masquerade from Gossina Village, Burkina Faso, 2006, courtesy of Tang Museum, http://tang.skidmore.edu/index.php/calendars/view/139/tag:1/year:all. ..... 177 3.29 Phyllis Galembo, Panther Masquerade, Samaga Village, Burkina Faso, 2006, courtesy of Tang Museum and the artist ......................................... 177 3.30 Christopher D. Roy, The antelope mask of the Gnoumou family, Bwa culture, in Boni, Burkina Faso, 1984, courtesy of Artstor .......................... 177 3.31 Patrick McNaughton, Kono Rears Up, A Bird Dance in Saturday City, 1978 .......................................................................................................... 178 3.32 Nick Cave, Heard performance, University of North Texas, March 2012, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ........................................................... 179 3.33 Nick Cave, Heard performance, University of North Texas, March 2012, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ........................................................... 179 3.34 Phyllis Galembo, Three Men with Chains, Jacmel, Haiti, 2004, courtesy of Phyllis Galembo and Steven Kasher gallery, accessed July 13, 2012, http://mother-magazine.com/blog/?p=1777 ............................................... 183 3.35 Amelia Ingram, Trinidad Carnival Queen: Wild Indian, 2003 .................... 183 3.36 Leah Gordon, Kanaval, Haiti, 2009 ........................................................... 185 3.37 Phyllis Galembo, Chef de bande des diables (Chief of the devil band), 1998, courtesy of Phyllis Galembo ...................................................................... 185 3.38 Phyllis Galembo, Rara, Haiti, 2005-2006, courtesy of Phyllis Galembo .... 186 3.39 Clarence Rolle, Junkanoo festival, Bahamas, July 12 2011 ..................... 186 3.40 Annet Richards-Binns as Pitchy Patchy in Jamaican Jonkonnu dance, Row Botham Dance, http://www.rowbotham-dance.book.fr .............................. 188 3.41 John Outterbridge, The Rag Factory, exhibited at LAXART as part of the city-wide initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, 2011 .... 188 xi 3.42 Carnival Parade, Shaw Park, Scarborough, Tobago, Moreen O'Brien Maser Memorial Collection (Skidmore College), 1970, maser catalog number: 1970-T-413, accession number: 1975-22606, source Image and original data provided by Skidmore College .......................................................... 189 3.43 Eric Waters, Darryl Montana, Mardi Gras Indian, 2008, image courtesy of Eric Waters ................................................................................................ 190 3.44 Ervin “Honey” Barrister, Creole Wild West, Barrister shows off his Mardi Gras Indian costume during the West Bank Super Sunday Parade, 1997, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, 2010, p. 23. ...................................... 191 3.45 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, synthetic hair, metal armature, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, 2009, p. 150-151 ................................................. 192 3.46 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, synthetic hair, metal armature, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, 2009, p. 147 ........................................................ 192 3.47 Haitian Vévé, Erzulie, flag from the New York Public Library Archive, Image ID: 1162852, http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgkeysearchdetail.cfm?strucID=4619 23&imageID=1162852 .............................................................................. 195 3.48 Phyllis Galembo, Egungun Bohican, Benin, 2006, courtesy of Phyllis Galembo and Tang Museum, Skidmore College ...................................... 196 3.49 Dan Kitwood, Voodoo Ceremony, Ouidah Benin, January 11, 2012 courtesy of The Baltimore Sun, http://darkroom.baltimoresun.com/2012/06/benins- voodoo-heartland/ ..................................................................................... 196 3.50 Nick Cave, Speak Louder, installation part of Ever-After exhibition, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, 2011 ............................................................... 197 3.51 Yoruba crown with veil or adéńlá, photo from Beads, Body, and Soul by Henry John Drewal and John Mason (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998), p. 206 ............................................................... 197 3.52 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, fabric with appliqué of found beading, sequins, pearls, buttons, knitted yarn, metal armature, 2007, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, p. 69, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ................ 197 3.53 Nick Cave, Detail of Untitled Soundsuit, fabric with appliqué of found beading, sequins, pearls, buttons, knitted yarn, metal armature, 2007, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, p. 69, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ....................................................................................................... 197 xii 3.54 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, mixed media, 2011, installation part of Ever- After exhibition, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ................................. 198 3.55 Nick Cave, Speak Louder, Ever-After exhibition, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ............................... 199 3.56 Nick Cave, For Now exhibition, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 2011, courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery ................... 199 3.57 Phyllis Galembo, Yaie Masquerade, Bansie Village, Burkina Faso, 2006, courtesy of Phyllis Galembo and the Tang Museum, Skidmore College ...................................................................................................... 203 3.58 Carlos Mora, Bedik masks, "Spirits of Forest" Initiation Ceremony from the Tambacounda Region (Bassari Country) in the remote “Village of Iwol" in Senegal, stock photo, https://www.123rf.com/photo_11906092_senegal- tambacounda-region--bassari-country--bedik--village-of-iwol---bedik-mask-- spirits-of-forest-.html .................................................................................. 203 3.59 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, twigs, metal armature, 2006, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ............................................................................. 204 3.60 Nkisi N’kondi: Mangaaka figure, Kongo peoples, wood, paint, metal, resin, ceramic, second half of the 19th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ........................................................................................................... 204 3.61 Christopher D. Roy, The Baga Diviner, Mossi, Dablo, Burkina Faso, 2007, courtesy of ARTstor ................................................................................... 205 3.62 Renée Stout, Fetish #2, mixed media, 1988, in The Art of History, p. 62-63 ..................................................................................................... 203 3.63 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, For Now exhibition, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, September 2011, courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery, photo by Sophie Sanders ........................................... 207 3.64 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, buttons, wire, bugle beads, basket, upholstery, and mannequin, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ... 207 3.65 Nick Cave, detail of Untitled Soundsuit, buttons, wire, bugle beads, basket, upholstery, and mannequin, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ... 207 3.66 Barbara Chase-Riboud, Malcolm X, No. 3, silk and bronze, 1970, collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art ............................................................ 209 3.67 Sokari Douglas Camp, Birds Extinct Birds, steel, 2010, courtesy of the artist and Stux Gallery, New York ...................................................................... 210 xiii 3.68 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, metal flowers and armature, fabric with appliquéd beading, sequins, printed fabric, 2008, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, p. 93 .......................................................................................... 210 3.69 Nick Cave, detail of Untitled Soundsuit, metal flowers and armature, fabric with appliquéd beading, sequins, printed fabric, 2008, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, p. 92 .......................................................................... 211 3.70 Chakaia Booker, Acid Rain, rubber tires and steel, 2001, National Museum of Women in the Arts, photo by Max Hirshfeld, courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Gallery, posted April 12, 2013, http://womeninthearts.wordpress.com/category/nmwa-magazine/ ........... 212 3.71 Chakaia Booker, courtesy of Chakaia Booker and Marlborough Gallery, New York, accessed July 14, 2012: http://www.afterhood.com/?cat=43 .. 212 3.72 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, 2007, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ....................................................................................................... 213 3.73 Joyce Scott, Cobalt, Yellow Circles, beads and wire, 2011, Prospect 2 exhibition, New Orleans, courtesy of Joyce Scott and Newcomb Gallery ....................................................................................................... 214 3.74 Head, Yoruba peoples; Ife, Nigeria, terracotta, 12th-15th century, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ..................................................... 215 3.75 Inner head shrine (ibori) and house of the head (ilé ori), Yoruba peoples, Nigeria. 19th-20th century. Cowrie shells, cotton, leather. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ......................................................................... 215 3.76 The king of Oyo (believed to be Adeyemi I Alowolodu [4. 1876-1905]). Oyo (?), Nigeria, ca. 1900, postcard, collection of Arthur F. Humphrey III ....... 216 3.77 Adenla or beaded crown with veil, Yoruba peoples, Beads, Body, and Soul by Henry John Drewal and John Mason (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998), 204. ................................................... 216 3.78 Henry John Drewal, Elepe of Epe with Beaded Crown, 1982, Beads, Body, and Soul, p. 30 .......................................................................................... 216 3.79 Detail of Egungun masker with beaded veil, Agemo festival, Margaret Thompson Drewal, Beads, Body, and Soul, p. 31 ..................................... 216 3.80 Phyllis Galembo, Oxum, Marileide Farias Silva Lima, Cachoeira, 1993 ... 217 3.81 John Henry Drewal, Young girls with multiple beads honoring Oba Oronsen queen during Igogo festival, 1975 ............................................................. 217 xiv 3.82 Margaret Thompson Drewal, Òrìşà initiates, 1986, Beads, Body, and Soul, p. 22 .......................................................................................................... 218 3.83 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, fabric with appliqué of found sequined material, beading, crocheted and knitted yarn, metal armature, 2007, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery .......... 219 3.84 Pierrot Barra, Mojo Board, “Cross with Spoon and Fork,” 1995, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, p. 380 ............................................................................ 222 3.85 Pierrot Barra, Reposwa, 1995, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, p. 380 ....... 222 3.86 Nick Cave, Untitled (Relic series), mixed media, courtesy of Jack Shainman gallery from the New York City Armory Exhibition 2012, New York .......... 224 3.87 Nick Cave, Untitled (Relic series) mixed media, 2009, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 224 3.88 Nick Cave, detail of Untitled (Relic series), mixed media, courtesy of Jack Shainman gallery from the New York City Armory Exhibition 2012, New York ........................................................................................................... 224 3.89 Xenobia Bailey, Moon Lodge, crochet yarn and armature, 1999, courtesy of Xenobia Bailey .......................................................................................... 225 3.90 Nick Cave, detail of Untitled Tondo, 2008, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ....................................................................................................... 226 3.91 Xenobia Bailey, Sistah Paradise the Gatherer, crochet yarn, 2008, courtesy of Xenobia Bailey ...................................................................................... 226 3.92 Nick Cave in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Architectural Forest, 2011, Philadelphia, PA, image by Carlos Avendaño, courtesy of Nick Cave, Jack Shainman Gallery, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum .............................................................................................. 227 3.93 Nick Cave in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Let’s C performance, 2011, Philadelphia, PA, image by Carlos Avendaño, courtesy of Nick Cave, Jack Shainman Gallery, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum ..................................................................................................... 228 3.94 Nick Cave in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Let’s C performance, 2011, Philadelphia, PA, image by Carlos Avendaño, courtesy of Nick Cave, Jack Shainman Gallery, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum ..................................................................................................... 228 xv 3.95 Nick Cave in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Let’s C performance, soprano Kristin Norderval and jazz violinist Marina Vishnyakova, image by Carlos Avendaño ................................................. 229 3.96 Nick Cave in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Let’s C performance, 2011, Philadelphia, PA, image by Carlos Avendaño, courtesy of Nick Cave, Jack Shainman Gallery, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum ..................................................................................................... 230 3.97 Wifredo Lam, The Jungle, gouache on paper, 1943, Museum of Modern Art, New York ................................................................................................... 231 4.1 Adinkra Fabric, 1825, material: cotton tree bark dye, woven, hand printed, stamped, painted dimensions: L 271 cm W 212 cm geographical origin: Ghana, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Adinkra_1825.jpg ........................ 242 4.2 Adinkra symbols, African Alphabets, p. 34 ................................................ 242 4.3 Adinkra symbols, African Alphabets, p. 35 ................................................ 242 4.4 El Anatsui, God’s Omnipotence, carved and painted wooden tray, 1974, courtesy El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery ....................................... 244 4.5 El Anatsui, Gbeze, ceramic, manganese, 14 ¾” 15”, 1979, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery ......................................................... 247 4.6 Nok sculpture, terracotta, 6th Century BCE to 6th Century CE, Louvre, Paris .......................................................................................................... 248 4.7 El Anatsui, Chambers of Memory, ceramic, 1977, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery ............................................................................. 249 4.8 El Anatsui, We de patch am, ceramic, 1979, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 250 4.9 Agbaejije Anunobi working with Uli designs on Professor John Umeh’s obi, 2000, photograph by Sarah Adams .......................................................... 252 4.10 Agbaejije Anunobi’s Uli drawing on paper, 1995, photograph by Sarah Adams. ...................................................................................................... 252 4.11 Nsibidi script, Afrikan Alphabets, p. 106-108 ............................................. 254 4.12 Nsibidi script, Afrikan Alphabets, p. 106-108 ............................................. 254 4.13 Nsibidi script, Afrikan Alphabets, p. 106-108 ............................................. 254 xvi 4.14 Ukara cloth, Igbo peoples, Nigeria, cotton, indigo dye, Fowler Museum at UCLA, 1983 ............................................................................................... 254 4.15 El Anatsui, History of Africa, etching, 15 7/8” x 10 3/8”, 1987, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery ......................................................... 257 4.16 El Anatsui, When I Last Wrote to You … II, intaglio, 19 ½” x 15 1/8”, 1986, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery ................................... 258 4.17 El Anatsui, When I last wrote to you about Africa, I used a letterheaded parchment paper, There were many blank slots in the letter… I can now fill some of these slots because I have grown older, wood sculpture, 73 3/8” x 55 3/8”, 1986, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery ........... 258 4.18 Kwesi Owusu-Ankomah, Off My Back, acrylic on canvas, 61 7/8” x 83 3/8”, 1995, Inscribing Meanings, p. 205, collection National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Institution ......................................................................... 259 4.19 Wosene Worke Kosrof, The Monument, acrylic on linen, 2003, courtesy of Wosene Worke Kosrof .............................................................................. 260 4.20 Wosene Worke Kosrof, Color of Words, 1995, acrylic on linen, courtesy of Wosene Worke Kosrof .............................................................................. 261 4.21 El Anatsui, Untitled, acrylic on masonite, 24” x 48”, 1980’s, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery ......................................................... 261 4.22 Kente cloth design, “Agyenegyenesu,” Wrapped in Pride, private collection, p. 116 ........................................................................................................ 261 4.23 Atta Kwami, Lanier Place Goddess II, oil on canvas, 2010, courtesy of Atta Kwami ........................................................................................................ 262 4.24 Atta Kwami, Amsterdam Archways, 2011, The Netherlands, courtesy of Atta Kwami ........................................................................................................ 262 4.25 El Anatsui, Between Ontisha and Asaba, wood, tin, 1986, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery ......................................................... 265 4.26 El Anatsui, Leopard’s Paw-prints and Other Stories, wood, paint, 16” x 35 ¼”, 1991, courtesy of El Anatsui, October Gallery in London, and Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 268 4.27 Detail of Ukara cloth that hung on the wall in the Mgbe Hall of an Etung- Ejagham village along the Cross River, Abijang, Nigeria, photograph by Amanda Carlson, 1997 .............................................................................. 268 xvii 4.28 El Anatsui, Old Cloth Series (and detail), wood, paint, 31 ½” x 60 ¼”, 1993, courtesy of El Anatsui, October Gallery in London, and Jack Shainman Gallery ....................................................................................................... 269 4.29 El Anatsui, detail of Old Cloth Series (and detail), wood, paint, 1993, courtesy of El Anatsui, October Gallery in London, and Jack Shainman Gallery ....................................................................................................... 269 4.30 Akoma ntoaso adinkra symbol, Afrikan Alphabets, p. 34 .......................... 269 4.31 Victor Ekpuk, Good Morning Sunrise (and detail), acrylic on canvas, 129.2 x 129.2 cm, 2002, courtesy of Victor Ekpuk ................................................. 270 4.32 Victor Ekpuk, Good Morning Sunrise (and detail), acrylic on canvas, 129.2 x 129.2 cm, 2002, courtesy of Victor Ekpuk ................................................. 270 4.33 El Anatsui, Coins on Grandma’s Cloth, wood, paint, 25” x 55”, 1992, collection of Contemporary African Art Gallery, New York ........................ 271 4.34 El Anatsui, Remnant of Grandma’s Cloth, wood, paint, 31 ½” x 36 ¼”, 1995, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery ................................... 271 4.35 El Anatsui, Kente Rhapsody, aluminum and copper wire, 52 ½” x 69”, 2001, courtesy of El Anatsui, collection of the British Museum ........................... 272 4.36 Willie Cole, Branded Irons, scorching on four plywood panels, 2000, collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts ................................ 272 4.37 Sandile Zulu, Degeneration, Regeneration, Life Cycle Forms 10, 2006, courtesy of Sandile Zulu and October Gallery ........................................... 273 4.38 Sandile Zulu, Galaxy 5, fire, air, water on canvas, 2005, courtesy of Sandile Zulu and October Gallery .......................................................................... 273 4.39 El Anatsui, Adinsibuli Stood Tall, wood, tempera paint, 94” x 15 ¾”, 1995, courtesy of El Anatsui, October Gallery, and Jack Shainman Gallery ...... 274 4.40 Hale Woodruff, Afro Emblems, oil on canvas, 1950, courtesy of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution ..................................... 276 4.41 El Anatsui, Signature, wood, paint, 1999, Cyfuniad International Artists Workshop in Plas Caerdeon, Wales, courtesy of El Anatsui ..................... 278 4.42 El Anatsui, detail of Signature, wood, paint, 1999, Cyfuniad International Artists Workshop in Plas Caerdeon, Wales, courtesy of El Anatsui .......... 278 xviii 4.43 El Anatsui, Peak Project, tin, copper wire, 1999, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ....................................................................................................... 280 4.44 El Anatsui, detail of Peak Project, tin, copper wire, 1999, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 280 4.45 El Anatsui’s bottle cap techniques, Susan Vogel, “Discovering Metal Sheets,” El Anatsui: Art and Life, p. 74 ..................................................... 284 4.46 El Anatsui’s bottle cap techniques, Susan Vogel, “Discovering Metal Sheets,” El Anatsui: Art and Life, p. 75 ..................................................... 284 4.47 El Anatsui’s bottle cap techniques, Susan Vogel, “Discovering Metal Sheets,” El Anatsui: Art and Life, p. 75 ..................................................... 284 4.48 El Anatsui, Earth Cloth, aluminum, copper wire, 201” x 209”, 2003, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ......................................................................... 288 4.49 El Anatsui, Adinkra Sasa, aluminum, copper wire, 192” x 216”, 2003, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Guido Roberto Vitale ............................................................................................ 289 4.50 El Anatsui, Sasa, aluminum, copper wire, 330” x 252”, 2004, collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris ...................................................................... 291 4.51 El Anatsui, Sasa (hung in vertical orientation), aluminum, copper wire, 330” x 252”, 2004, collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris ............................ 291 4.52 El Anatsui, Man’s Cloth, aluminum, copper wire, 297 x 374cm, 2003, courtesy of October Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery .......................... 292 4.53 El Anatsui, Woman’s Cloth, aluminum, copper wire, 287 x 292cm, 2003, courtesy of October Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery .......................... 292 4.54 El Anatsui, detail of Man’s Cloth, aluminum, copper wire, 297 x 374cm, 2003, courtesy of October Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery ................ 293 4.55 El Anatsui, Versatility, aluminum, copper wire, 147 ½” x 195 ½”, 2006, collection of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ....................................................................................................... 295 4.56 Samuel Cophie, Fathia fata Nkrumah, worn by the Queen Mother of Asotwe, Cophie, a prominent Ewe weaver, Cophie began to integrate both Ewe and Asante designs in his cloths, Poetics of Cloth, p. 53 .................. 296 xix 4.57 Asante artist, Man’s Kente Cloth, Obaakofo mmu man (One man does not rule a nation), cotton and rayon, Ghana, the Glassell Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston ..................................................................................... 296 4.58 Asante artist, Fathia fata Nkrumah, in Doran Ross, Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History Textile Series, 1998), 119 ................. 297 4.59 Afoakwa Mpua (Afoakwa’s nine tufts of hair), in Doran Ross, Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History Textile Series, 1998), 119 ....... 297 4.60 Akyempem (A thousand shields), in Doran Ross, Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History Textile Series, 1998), 119 ................. 297 4.61 El Anatsui, Gli (Wall), aluminum and copper wire, installation at the Brooklyn Museum, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York .... 298 4.62 Bamana peoples, Basaie cloth, cotton, dye, Mali, mid to late 20th Century, Inscribing Meaning, p. 61 .......................................................................... 301 4.63 El Anatsui, Zebra Crossing III, aluminum and copper wire, 61” x 107”, 2007, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ........................................................... 307 4.64 El Anatsui, detail of Zebra Crossing III, aluminum and copper wire, 61” x 107”, 2007, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ........................................ 307 4.65 Mark Bradford, The Devil is Beating His Wife, billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, permanent-wave end papers, stencils, and additional mixed media on plywood, 335.3 x 609.6 cm, courtesy of the artist and Saatchi Gallery ................................................................................... 308 4.66 El Anatsui, Bleeding Takari, aluminum and copper wire, 61” x 89 ½”, 2008, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ........................................................... 309 4.67 El Anatsui, Dzesi I, aluminum and copper wire, 2006, photo by Lisa Binder (David Krut and October Gallery publication) ............................................ 310 4.68 El Anatsui, Dzesi II, aluminum and copper wire, 2006, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................... 310 4.69 Odili Donald Odita, Vertical Hold, acrylic on canvas, 2008, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 312 4.70 Odili Donald Odita, Free Form, acrylic on canvas, 2010, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 312 xx 4.71 El Anatsui, Three Continents, aluminum and copper wire, 8’ x 16’, 2009, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery ........................................................... 313 4.72 El Anatsui, Ozone Layer, aluminum and copper wire, 2010, 165 3/8” x 212 5/8”, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, photography by Sophie Sanders ......................................................................................... 314 4.73 El Anatsui, detail of Ozone Layer, aluminum and copper wire, 2010, 165 3/8” x 212 5/8”, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, photography by Sophie Sanders ............................................................... 314 4.74 El Anatsui, Strips of Earth’s Skin, aluminum and copper wire, 12’ 10” x 22’ 10”, 2008, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery .................... 314 4.75 El Anatsui, Gravity and Grace, aluminum and copper wire, 2010, 145 5/8” x 441” (variable), Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, photo by Andrew McAllister for the Akron Art Museum ............................................ 315 4.76 El Anatsui, They Finally Broke the Pot of Wisdom, aluminum liquor bottle caps and copper wire, 186” x 276”, 2011 .................................................. 317 4.77 El Anatsui, Basin, aluminum and copper wire, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................... 320 4.78 El Anatsui, Visionary, aluminum and copper wire, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery .............................................................. 321 4.79 El Anatsui, Awakened, aluminum and copper wire, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery .............................................................. 321 4.80 El Anatsui, Seed, aluminum and copper wire, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................... 321 4.81 El Anatsui, Uwa, aluminum and copper wire, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery ............................................................................. 321 4.82 El Anatsui, Fresh and Fading Memories, aluminum and copper wire, 354” x 236”, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Italy, 2007, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 325 4.83 El Anatsui, Dusasa I, aluminum and copper wire, 288” x 360”, Arsenale, Venice Biennale, 2007, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery ....................................................................................................... 327 4.84 El Anatsui, Dusasa II, aluminum and copper wire, Arsenale, Venice Biennale, 2007, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery ........... 327 xxi 4.85 El Anatsui, Broken Bridge, tin, mirrors, exhibited at the Paris Triennial 2012, le Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery ....................................................................................................... 330 4.86 El Anatsui, detail of Broken Bridge, tin, mirrors, exhibited at the Paris Triennial 2012, le Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery ............................................................................. 330 4.87 El Anatsui, High Line installation, tin, mirrors, New York City’s High Line between 21st and 22nd Streets, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 332 4.88 El Anatsui, detail of High Line installation, tin, mirrors, New York City’s High Line between 21st and 22nd Streets, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 332 4.89 El Anatsui, detail of High Line installation, tin, mirrors, New York City’s High Line between 21st and 22nd Streets, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 332 4.90 El Anatsui, detail of High Line installation, tin, mirrors, New York City’s High Line between 21st and 22nd Streets, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery ...................................................................................... 332 4.91 Bright Ugochukwu Eke, Water Drop, water, carbon, plastic bags, filament, 2008, courtesy of the artist ........................................................................ 336 4.92 Bright Ugochukwu Eke, Heavy Clouds; Water & Waste: ARS II, Ålands konstmuseum in Finland, water, carbon, cellophane, filament, 2011, courtesy of the artist .................................................................................. 337 4.93 Bright Ugochukwu Eke, Ripples and Storm I, Tang Museum, Skidmore College, plastic bottles and wire, 2011, courtesy of the artist ................... 338 4.94 Bright Ugochukwu Eke, Ripples and Storm II, Tang Museum, Skidmore College, plastic bottles and wire, 2011, courtesy of the artist ................... 338 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Surface Substance This dissertation investigates aesthetics of African design and decoration in the work of major contemporary artists of African descent who address heritage, history, and life experience. I explore how contemporary Black artists adapt decorative designs and aesthetic qualities from African adornment in textiles, sculptures, and other sources. My project provides a thorough analysis of pattern and decoration in art of the Black Atlantic world that reflects a radical transformation of found objects and symbolic use of materials that speak to the complexity of colonial and postcolonial history, global consumer culture, and knowledge systems of the African world. My research complements and builds upon the important work of scholars such as John Picton, Maude Southwell Wahlman, and Lowery Stokes Simms who have investigated African design and its relationships to textiles, culture, and language, and the work of Robert Farris Thompson, who has critically defined Africanist aesthetics in music, dance, and the visual arts.1 This examination of pattern and decoration is different from other studies in that it critically analyzes the fusion of culturally-specific patterns 1 John Picton, The Art of African Textiles: Technology, Tradition, and Lurex (London: Barbican Art Gallery, Lund Humphries Publishers, 1995); Maude Southwell Wahlman, Signs and Symbols: African Images in African-American Quilts (New York: Studio Books in association with Museum of American Folk Art, 1993); Lowery Sims and Leslie King- Hammond, The Global Africa Project (New York: The Museum of Arts and Design and Prestel Publishing, 2010); Robert Farris Thompson, The Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music (Pittsburgh and New York City: Periscope Publishing, 2011). 2 by artists who synthesize and layer motifs from African, European, Asian, and Semitic cultures. The overlapping, intersecting, and creolization of patterns in these works represent a convergence of cultural engagement and experience. Polyrhythmic patterns such as those seen in many African textiles simultaneously layer two or more conflicting visual rhythms. This use of pattern suggests that there are broader, overarching design tendencies that permeate the Black Atlantic world, which derive from African pattern, including a sensibility of polyrhythmic layering and employment of ornamental designs to render a space or environment. I argue that extensive patterning, embellishment, and ornamentation are employed by many contemporary artists of African descent as a strategy for reinterpreting the art historical canon and addressing critical social issues, such as war, devastation of the earth’s environment, and lack of essential resources including clean water and food. Many artworks also present historical revisions that reflect the experience of Black peoples who were brought to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, lived in Africa or the colonies under colonial rule, and witnessed aspects of post-colonial struggle and disempowerment. The disorderliness of intersecting designs and overlapping layers could also symbolize gaps in memory, dislocations that cannot be recovered, and traumas that will not heal. It also reflects the manner in which many Black Atlantic people have had to piece together their ancestral histories from a patchwork of sources. The combining of many found materials and patterns is a characteristic of a “nomadic aesthetic” that shows evidence of a painful history of slavery and 3 migration due to war, oppression, natural disasters, and lack of resources.2 Repurposing of materials and appropriation of textures and designs in these artists’ work reflects the resilience and resourcefulness of many Black Atlantic artists. My research focuses on the work of three representative contemporary artists, Kehinde Wiley, Nick Cave, and El Anatsui, who have consistently and assertively engaged with pattern and decoration as a means of reinterpreting history and revealing and restructuring mainstream power systems. In discussing the work of African American artists Wiley and Cave, and Ghanaian artist Anatsui, I consider how they mine African pattern to challenge and expand accepted categories and institutional frameworks in ways that reflect our current condition of post-history, in which we look with a critical eye at the biased way that wars, migrations, and conquests have been documented and described from the perspective of victors.3 These world-renowned artists represent practices and tendencies among a much broader group of painters and sculptors who employ elaborate textures and designs to express drama and emotion throughout the African Diaspora. Therefore, I use these artists as three specific art case studies that concentrate on surfaces of heavy pattern and decoration to transform the remnants of consumer culture into objects and images of power. Pattern has always pervaded intellectual and cultural endeavors in the arts, sciences, and the humanities, and until recently patterns could be identified as more discrete and unique cultural types. In the late 1960s, Ulf Grenander 2 El Anatsui, telephone interview by Kate McCrickard,” in El Anatsui, 2006, David Krut Publishing, unpaginated. 3 Paul Gilroy, “For the Transcultural Record,” Trade Routes: History + Geography, the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (South Africa: the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council and the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, the Netherlands, 1997), 26. 4 introduced pattern theory that attempted to offer an algebraic system for describing patterns as frameworks regulated by rules. Although mathematical algorithms and graphs cannot define the patterns of artists’ works, artworks that I analyze in this dissertation reflect larger aesthetic tendencies that allow for a design to recognizably derive from a specific culture or ritual based on its motifs, symbols, or color palette. In my analysis, it is not only the patterns employed that distinguish these artists’ work, but also the overlapping of many types of patterns and the prioritizing of surface decoration over other formal aspects. In the last thirty years of Black Atlantic art scholarship and exhibition history, several camps have formed around the goal of validating it in the mainstream art world. These camps have defined concepts of the African diaspora and the major players in this category quite differently. Most Africanists have focused attention on artists living on the continent or abroad, but who were born or grew up on the continent. Several scholars have transcended this limitation to write about artists born in the Diaspora, such as Robert Farris Thompson with his study of David Hammons and Okwui Enwezor with his book on Lorna Simpson.4 There has also been an agenda for curators and scholars such as Salah M. Hassan, Olu Oguibe, and Okwui Enwezor to show that African artists contribute to the realm of conceptual art as significantly as artists living in the West and Asia. Within mainstream contemporary art criticism, separate African American and African diaspora contingents have developed around an effort to distinguish the unique qualities of African diaspora art and situate these 4 John Farris Colo, Greg Tate, and Robert Farris Thompson, David Hammons (New York: Exit Art, 1990); Okwui Enwezor, Lorna Simpson (New York: Abrams in association with the American Federation of Arts, 2006). 5 artists in a broader discussion. Artists themselves and the sociologist Paul Gilroy have helped to deconstruct these divisions, although they still persist. Applying terminology from Gilroy’s definition of the Black Atlantic world, I use a flexible definition of people of Africa and its diasporas and alternate this with the rather shifting term “Black” artists to allow for a greater appreciation of the widespread nature of these artists’ creative practices that investigate pattern.5 Gilroy writes, The specificity of the modern political and cultural formation I want to call the Black Atlantic can be defined, on one level, through [a] desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity.6 Gilroy defines Black Atlantic culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but a synthesis of these cultures as a result of the African diaspora caused by the transatlantic slave trade. Therefore, Black Atlantic culture is not defined by the unstable construction of race, but characterized by particular cultural retentions and propensities that stem from language, music, art, religions, and social practices. I use this definition to explore the connections between Wiley, Cave, and Anatsui, who each prioritize surface ornamentation and materiality to reorganize dominant interpretations of history. A number of major exhibitions and books paved the way for this dissertation by expanding the visibility and interpretations of Black Atlantic art in relationship to the global art world and how artists employ pattern to reference layered identity. The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art (1984) showed African and Oceanic art in the context of 5 By Black artists, I am referring to artists of African descent either living in the diaspora or on the African continent. 6 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 19. 6 European modern art to emphasize the influence and affinities that European artists had taken from “primitive” art.7 The director of painting and sculpture, William Rubin argued that primitive art did not change the course of modern art because ''[t]he changes in modern art at issue were already under way when vanguard artists first became aware of tribal art.”8 Attempts to address the issues born from Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art led to a transformation of the historical “tribal art” model to an awareness of contemporary African art that reflected popular culture and industrialization as well as a connection to the specific contexts of African cultures and iconography. Magiciens de la Terre in 1989 at the Centre Georges Pompidou curated by Jean-Hubert Martin identified a number of contemporary African artists and brought their work to a European public.9 This exhibition endeavored to show the universality of art expression and to show art created in many different contexts on equal terms. It opened up a somewhat contrived controversy in the international art world about the differences between academically trained and self-taught artists that became a method for establishing false criteria of authenticity, and therefore defined the marketability of contemporary African artists.10 However, by showing African artists in the company of artists from Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Australia, Magiciens challenged the hierarchy of the art world that positioned some cultures as central and others as marginal. 7 William Rubin, ed. Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984. 8 Michael Brenson, “Gallery View: Discovering the Heart of Modernism,” New York Times, October 28, 1984. http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/28/arts/gallery-view-discovering-the-heart-of-modernism.html. 9 Mark Francis et al., Magiciens de la Terre, exhibition catalog (Paris : Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1989). 10 Clémentine Deliss, “7+7=1: Seven Stories, Seven Stages, One Exhibition,” Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1995), 15. 7 Also in 1995, the mammoth interdisciplinary festival Africa 95 featured the exhibition Africa: The Art of a Continent at the Royal Academy of Arts in London that reinforced many stereotypes about African art and was reminiscent of an ethnographic museum in its presentation.11 Smaller exhibitions of contemporary African art were overshadowed by this blockbuster exhibition and therefore the festival treated Africans as minor participants in their own history.12 Clémentine Deliss, artistic director of Africa 95, curated for the Africa 95 festival the exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (1995) at Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, which presented personal interpretations and unique curatorial approaches by African artists and scholars of the major movements that have defined twentieth-century modern art in Africa. In spite of its problems, Africa 95 gave important exposure to African artists and broadened the debates about the issues within exhibiting contemporary Black Atlantic art. Beginning with the twenty-first century, exhibitions and scholarship have avoided the essentializing tendencies of the previous decades. Instead, they have tended to emphasize artists’ diversity of expression around experiences of geography, the body, political issues, and urban experience. There has been a conscious move away from any effort to try to make broad aesthetic generalizations about contemporary African art. An exhibition that took an innovative approach to the definition of African Diaspora was Looking Both Ways, Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora (2003), curated by Laurie Ann 11 Tom Phillips, ed. Africa: The Art of a Continent, exhibition catalog (London: Royal Academy of Arts and Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1995). 12 Nancy Van Leyden, “Africa 95: A Critical Assessment of the Exhibition at the Royal Academy,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines, Vol. XXXVI-1-2 (1996): 141-142. 8 Farrell at the Museum for African Art, New York City.13 This exhibition did not attempt to represent the entire continent, but focused on the theme of re-defining the contemporary African diaspora. Several artists in this exhibition, including Ghada Amer, Zineb Sedira, and Yinka Shonibare, construct works with similar decorative methodologies for expressing the complexity of cultural identity as African artists living in Europe and America. Whereas Amer embroiders paintings and sculptures with texts and images, Sedira integrates family photographs into Islamic tile tessellations, and Shonibare appropriates Dutch wax fabric for its association with West African fashion and symbolism. Including African American or Afro-Caribbean artists in the discussion would have further enriched this exhibition, but it thoughtfully explored the psychic terrain between Africa and the West in a new way. Another exhibition that re-interpreted the concept of the African Diaspora and pointed out the invalidity of exhibiting African art based on the artist’s ethnicity or geographical location was A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad (2003) at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri curated by Shannon Fitzgerald and Tumelo Mosaka.14 The curators showed African artists living abroad whose work transcended the historical limitations of geography, ethnicity, and nationality. Included in the exhibition were Owusu- Ankomah and Odili Donald Odita whose heavily patterned surfaces conveyed the friction of cultural heterogeneity, expressed transition and transformation, and 13 Laurie Ann Farrell, ed. Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora (New York: Museum for African Art and Gent: Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, 2003). 14 Orlando Britto Jinorio et al., A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad edited by Salah Hassan et al. (St. Louis, MO: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2004). 9 absorbed individual figures and motifs within larger environments of rhythmic pattern. Both A Fiction of Authenticity and Looking Both Ways expanded the definition of the African diaspora by applying this term to artists who had recently emigrated from Africa or who were born to African parents in other parts of the world, rather than to artists who were descended from African slaves brought through the transatlantic slave trade hundreds of years ago. Other recent exhibitions have presented contemporary African art according to poetic concepts, but avoided any direct discussion of aesthetic relationships or specific movements among artists. The travelling exhibition that began at the Hayward Gallery in London entitled Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (2005) was perhaps the most direct revision of Africa: The Art of a Continent from ten years earlier.15 It proposed to show that although contemporary African artists had no shared aesthetic, the common history of European colonization resulted in similar themes in artworks. The curator, Simon Njami, argued that African artists in the 21st century no longer felt the pressure to prove the authenticity of their work, and that their quest had become an existential questioning of their place in the world. The catalog focused on how contemporary African art reflected an amalgamation of experiences and influences, and argued that African modernity did not represent a break with the past, but instead revealed a reframing of it. It contributed the perspective that the adoption of new technologies and media into locally relevant practices was intertwined with evolving African modernities, and was interconnected with the 15Lucy Durán et al., Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (exhibition catalog), edited by Simon Njami and including a dialogue between Marie-Laure Bernadac and Abdelwahab Meddeb (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; London: Hayward Gallery; New York: D.A.P., 2005). 10 resistance movements that began with colonial rule. This exhibition organized the work through themes of “Identity and History,” “Body and Soul,” and “City and Land,” and unlike other exhibitions that included only artists from sub-Saharan Africa, it was the first major exhibition to represent the entire continent. It dispensed with the problematic distinction between art that is made for galleries and art created for communal or spiritual purposes, and focused on urban artists who had an awareness of the contemporary art world. These exhibitions generally defined African modernity beginning in the 1970’s with liberation and independence movements. The book Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (2009) challenged this marker and instead proposed that 1980 was a turning point for the birth of contemporary African art produced both inside Africa and abroad.16 Authors Chika Okeke-Agulu and Okwui Enwezor built upon exhibitions such as the The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, previously curated by Enwezor.17 They aimed to accomplish three goals: first, to illuminate moments of cultural convergence and shared political conditions that led to the development of specific aesthetic languages; second, to review the works of art chronologically; and third, to investigate how these works have penetrated the 21st-Century global world. While this text pinpointed a new historical marker, it focused on many of the same artists that had been investigated in previous exhibitions and neglected to introduce lesser-known artists from beyond West or Southern Africa or the larger diaspora. 16 Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (Bologna: Damiani Press, 2009). 17 Okwui Enwezor, ed. The Short Century, Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994 (Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2001). 11 In the past decade, Africanists shifted focus away from issues of authenticity and artists’ origins to the myriad of concepts and methods that artists use. However, there remains a divide between those who write about contemporary African art and those who investigate contemporary African diaspora art. None of the exhibitions already mentioned included artists of African descent born outside the continent, which testifies to the rigidity of this qualifier of African authenticity as an impediment towards deeper investigation.18 Breaking with this precedent was Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic (2010) at the Tate Liverpool in London, which was one of the first recent shows to perceive a common aesthetic lineage in modern and contemporary Black Atlantic art. This exhibition was inspired by Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) and it explored the aesthetic contributions of many Black Atlantic cultures from the early twentieth century to the present. Gilroy challenged the curators Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschlüter to consider Liverpool as the capital of the Black Atlantic due to its location as a portal to the Atlantic and its history in the slave trade. The exhibition catalog exemplifies a subversive counterculture to European modernism and to the legacy of the Enlightenment, its vision of scientific reason, and linear historical progress. Many of the artists in this exhibition approach the traumatic history of slavery and living in the diaspora by imagining and depicting 18 This issue over who is authentically African has been problematic for many decades. Kehinde Wiley, an artist of mixed African American and African heritage, has always been represented as an African-American artist whereas Grace Ndiritu, born in the U.K. to Kenyan parents, is considered African. There are different interpretations of this arbitrary definition of identity based on whether one lives in Europe or America. 12 historical narratives for which we lack adequate records.19 Afro Modern presented many Black Atlantic artworks that concentrated on a protective and beautified surface to counter the shared experiences of dislocation and racial terror. Taking a new approach, this exhibition brought artists together across the traditional categories of country of origin, ethnicity, or race, and made important aesthetic insights between modern and contemporary art periods. In the past decade, polyrhythmic pattern and decoration are among the few specific Africanist aesthetics to have been highlighted in a number of major exhibitions and publications. Methodologies have varied from analyzing the symbolic meanings of ideographic scripts and their associations with proverbs to juxtaposing African textiles with contemporary artworks that have similar designs or motifs. Other scholars have focused on how inventively contemporary African decorative designs incorporate recycling of everyday materials to communicate a political or social message. Each of these strategies has supported a deeper awareness of the important relationship between form and function in artworks. An example of an exhibition that investigated pattern through the lens of African language and knowledge systems was Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (2007), which took place at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. and travelled to the Fowler Museum at UCLA.20 Inscribing Meaning contended that an investigation of African writing is really a study of African patterning and embellishment. This exhibition and the accompanying catalog examined many types of African scripts as well as 19 Tanya Barson, “Introduction: Modernism and the Black Atlantic,” Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic (Liverpool, England: Tate Liverpool and Tate Publishing, 2010), 18. 20 Christine Mullen Kreamer et al., Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2007). 13 symbols associated with proverbs that condense much African wisdom and communication into each visual symbol. These scripts are most often presented through patterned adornment in textiles, murals, architecture, sculpture, and on the body. Curators Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts, Christine Mullen Kreamer, Elizabeth Harney, and Allyson Purpura noted that earlier scholars connected African cultures with poetic or pre-logical thought and Western cultures with rational thought, and they argued that the variety of graphic systems in African art evidence many types of knowledge of African peoples. The exhibition presented graphic systems from ancient history to the present, and organized this information according to themes such as “inscribing the body,” “sacred scripts,” “political writing,” “circumscribing space,” and “word play,” or the relationship between text and image. It explored several sacred scripts employed by West African artists such as nsibidi, adinkra, and uli that appear in the work of contemporary African painters and sculptors internationally. While this exhibition included several African artists living in the Diaspora such as Iké Udé and Wosene Worke Kosrof, it unfortunately did not analyze any Afro- Caribbean or African-American artists, which would have further enriched the debate. The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End (2008) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a concurrent exhibition The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art (2008) at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery showed visual affinities and influences in African textiles with other contemporary 14 African artworks by pointing out analogous patterns.21 These exhibitions sought to address the Western undervaluing of textiles in African art to demonstrate that many older fabrics contain the “DNA” of contemporary artworks.22 They presented contemporary African art inspired by the complex graphic statements and brilliant color of many African textiles, the symbolism of African patterns, and the ways in which cloth was a key part of everyday personal expression, status, and social communication. Both exhibitions also showed fabrics that were not produced in Africa and were instead manufactured in Europe, such as Dutch wax fabric, which evidenced the complex interdependence of European and African textile design. These textiles are considered essentially African because they signify African proverbs and represent culturally specific motifs. Also, the exhibition included a number of artists of African descent who were based in Europe and explored colonial power play in their symbolic employment of African fabric, such as Yinka Shonibare, Grace Ndiritu, and Sokari Douglas Camp. This exploration of African pattern and textile influence in the contemporary art would have been more meaningful had it included African American and Afro- Caribbean artists who incorporated African textile patterns, and had it provided a more synesthetic investigation of music, textile patterns, and graphic systems. Other recent exhibitions of contemporary Black Atlantic art have revealed the prevalence of artists that layer patterns and decoration by repurposing materials with a past history. The Global Africa Project (2010) at the Museum of 21 Alisa LaGamma and Christine Giuntini, The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008); Lynn Gumpert, The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art (New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 2008). 22Alisa LaGamma quoted by Karen Rosenberg, “African Art, Modern and Traditional: Seductive Patterns From a Rich Palette,” New York Times, October 9, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/arts/design/10text.html?_r=0. 15 Art and Design presented many examples of this strategy. Rather than focusing on geography, ethnicity, or medium, this ambitious exhibition approached African design from a diasporic perspective, and organized works according to overarching themes such as “Intersecting Cultures” and “Global City, Urban Flux,” which addressed the cosmopolitan aspects of design in the work of many Black Atlantic artists. Though the exhibition highlighted the work of West African and African American artists to the exclusion of those from North and East Africa or the Caribbean, it showed many examples of Africanist patterning that transcended geography and explained how these practices were integral to communal workshops as well as to individual artists. It featured works that revealed critical social issues through appropriation of scavenged materials, such as environmental crisis due to the oil industry in West Africa. Curator Lowery Stokes Sims was groundbreaking in her attempt to bridge the divides in museum practices between African and African diaspora artists. Using blended patterns as a metaphor for cultural hybridity, the exhibition Pattern ID (2010) at the Akron Art Museum in Ohio explored the work of contemporary diverse international artists who employed pattern and fashion to address the challenge of finding one’s place in society against the background of globalization. As Ellen Rudolph writes, many of these artists employ pattern to show that “identity can be cumulative, a result of moving in and out of various cultural milieu.”23 This exhibition displayed many examples of work that appropriated pattern cross-culturally, and employed bold patterns and adornment to destroy stereotypes and show unpredictable mash-ups that subvert 23 Ellen Rudolph, “The Cultural Currency of Pattern and Dress,” Pattern ID (Akron Ohio: Akron Art Museum, 2010), 11. 16 expectations. While Pattern ID focused on individual artists’ practices rather than expounding on how these artists might represent larger tendencies, it suggested that the artists of African descent blended popular culture designs and decoration in a polyrhythmic manner with African textile processes and motifs. While these recent shows and criticism have introduced the cross-fertilization of African pattern influences in contemporary art there still remains little thorough analysis of the conceptual synthesis of patterns underlying Black Atlantic art and how this reflects the blend of African designs and symbols with motifs from European, Asian, and American cultures. In collecting and curating contemporary African American art, a gulf continues between those who classify art based on the artist’s racial identity and those who group artists according to cultural themes. The Rubell Family Collection’s travelling exhibition 30 Americans (2011) assembled three generations of Black artists who work in diverse media.24 The exhibition’s premise was that these artists were responding to a post-Black sensibility that arose following the 1960s civil rights struggle to explore racial, sexual, and historical identity, and their works demonstrated the legacy of the older generation upon the younger artists. However, the show did not organize this work to discuss these themes or relationships between artists so they seemed to have nothing more in common than a sense of postmodern irony and shared African American ancestry. On a much larger scale, the giant exhibition Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, a collaboration between New York City’s El Museo del Barrio in conjunction with the Queens Museum of Art and The Studio 24 Robert Hobbs, Franklin Sirmans, and Michele Wallace, 30 Americans (Florida: Rubell Family Collection, 2008). 17 Museum in Harlem, promised to explore the diverse history of the Caribbean diaspora by grouping artists chronologically and according to overriding questions such as: “[i]s the Caribbean a place? If so, what are its boundaries?”25 Similar to previous exhibitions of African art that attempted to present the art of a continent, the bulk of this exhibition made it difficult to grasp more specific concepts and connections between the 500 works of art spanning four centuries. As a result of its breadth and the minimal wall texts, the exhibition reinforced the idea of Caribbean art as a reflection of creolized and diasporic cultures affected by many myths and racial hierarchies, but without clearly elucidated experiences and traditions. In contrast to these shows that deny important links between artists influenced by Black Atlantic cultures, the travelling exhibition Blues for Smoke (2012) considered the Blues not only as a musical category, but also as a network of artistic affinities and cultural idioms.26 Blues for Smoke, curated by Bennett Simpson with support from artist Glenn Ligon at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, explored contemporary art, music, literature, and film through the perspective of Blues aesthetics. Similarly, the exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 (2012) curated by Kellie Jones grouped artists based on a specific legacy of the African American arts community in Los Angeles. The overriding trend in these recent shows indicates 25 Holland Cotter, “Islands Buffeted by Currents of Change, ‘Caribbean: Crossroads of the World’ Spans 3 Museums,” New York Times, June 14, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/15/arts/design/caribbean-crossroads-of-the-world- spans-3-museums.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 26 George E. Lewis et. al., Blues for Smoke (exhibition catalog), ed. Bennett Simpson (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art and Prestel/Delmonico, 2012). 18 that curators are increasingly focusing on groups of artists according to shared cultural, communal, and aesthetic themes. In the realm of classical or traditional ceremonial African art analysis, scholars are trying to deal with previously overlooked subjects, such as symbolism and meaning that viewers can determine from the treatment of artworks’ surfaces. The book Surfaces: Color, Substances, and Ritual Applications on African Sculpture (2009) provided a thorough explanation of how the surfaces of African artworks offer a mine of information that illuminates the processes of art making, an object’s history and use, and the physical, conceptual, and emotional qualities that invest these works with collective value.27 Investigating the social life of African artwork through the layers, patterning, and luster of surfaces, this volume includes many specific examples of ways in which the skin of an artwork can represent both personal or group history as well as spiritual beliefs.28 This work expounds upon Arnold Rubin’s argument that the superficial materials of sculpture across the African continent could provoke an array of intellectual and emotional reactions.29 Surfaces also explains the manner in which African artworks often play a dual role as the vehicles of major activities, including initiations and annual celebrations, yet they are also the historical vessels and focal points of how people retain these activities in memory.30 Although this book focuses on classical African art, it presents important analyses of the employment of texture, color, reflectiveness, 27 Leonard Kahan, Donna Page, and Pascal James Imperato, eds., Surfaces: Color, Substances, and Ritual Applications on African Sculpture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009). 28 Patrick McNaughton, “Introduction,” Surfaces: Color, Substances, and Ritual Applications on African Sculpture, ed. Leonard Kahan, Donna Page, and Pascal James Imperato (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 4-5. 29 Arnold Rubin, African Accumulative Sculpture (New York: Pace Gallery, 1974). 30 McNaughton, “Introduction,” 9. 19 and patina on surfaces of sculpture that can be applied to contemporary Black Atlantic art. In works of Wiley, Cave, and Anatsui, similar treatments of the surface can be seen as those in some classical African works, and their repertoire of patterns and surfaces expanded as a result of ambitious projects that took their work across the globe. Their processes have diversified over the course of major solo exhibitions and catalogues raisonnés in the past decade. Of all catalogs from Wiley’s “The World Stage” series, The World Stage: Africa Lagos∼Dakar Kehinde Wiley was most instrumental because of Krista Thompson’s essay “Find Your Father: Figuring Africa Between Colonial, Postcolonial and Diasporic Worlds.”31 Thompson analyzes Wiley’s personal relationship to Africa through his longing to know his father. She also argues that his awareness of the colonial gaze is expressed through bright photographic light, and his focus on hip-hop style in Senegalese youth fashion provides an alternative to colonial and postcolonial African models. She contextualizes these paintings as his most deliberate appropriation of African patterning. In addition, the catalogue raisonné Kehinde Wiley (2012) published by Rizzoli presents different aspects of his prolific career. Robert Hobbs considers Wiley’s work in the context of hip-hop rhythms and appropriated beats, the competition between background patterns and foreground subject, and the work’s relationship to cross-dressing and drag performance. In addition to this resource, public programs such as journalist Lola Ogunnaike’s interview with Wiley on March 15, 2012 at the Jewish Museum 31 Krista A. Thompson, “Find Your Father: Figuring African Between Colonial, Postcolonial and Diasporic Worlds,” in The World Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar, Krista A. Thompson et al. (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2008). 20 in New York City on the occasion of his exhibition Kehinde Wiley/The World Stage: Israel have revealed important insights into the symbolism of pattern in his work as a representation of cultural or religious identity and to challenge the historical prioritization of the figure as the primary subject of a painting.32 Cave has been included in many group exhibitions, but the solo exhibition catalog Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth (2010) for Cave’s travelling exhibition that began at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts presents the most comprehensive array of his sculpture with fresh perspectives on his sculpture and performance such as its mining of Black Atlantic cultural festivals and the activists’ vision of his work.33 Dan Cameron’s essay lays the groundwork emphasizing the relationship between Cave’s performance work and sculpture in relation to 1990’s performance art such as Leigh Bowery and the history of Mardi Gras Black Indians’ regalia in New Orleans. Most important to my analysis, however, was the opportunity to interview Cave and to work with his installation and performance that he conducted at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) in December 2011. At FWM, his collaboration with musicians and dancers revealed the overall vision of his work as a multi-sensory experience for the audience. His development of an Architectural Forest using bamboo curtain sections demonstrated his process of mixing up existing patterns and changing the existing sterile space to create an atmospheric glow. His improvisational and interdisciplinary methods of layering patterns and textures (object, sounds, and 32 Kehinde Wiley and Lola Ogunnaike, “Kehinde Wiley in Conversation with Today Show Contributor Lola Ogunnaike” (public program at The Jewish Museum, in conjunction with exhibition Kehinde Wiley / The World Stage: Israel, March 15, 2012). 33 Kate Eilertsen, Dan Cameron, Pamela McClusky, and Nick Cave, Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2009). 21 movement) became apparent through his collaborations with museum artists who helped construct the work, musicians and dancers, and the adaptations of his performance to the context of this small Philadelphia museum. Several monographs on Anatsui have valuably contributed to an understanding of the evolution and recent breakthroughs in his processes and complex surfaces. The exhibition El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa (2010) for the traveling exhibition that began at the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, and continues to travel analyzed Anatsui’s work chronologically from the time of his early works with market trays and clay to his recent metal installations.34 It included a variety of perspectives from Africanists Lisa M. Binder, Olu Oguibe, and Chika Okeke-Agulu to the contemporary art curator Robert Storr and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. Each essay offers unique perspectives on Anatsui’s transformation of found materials that are related to food or drink and how these transformations represent his interpretations of history and reflect his appropriation of African graphic systems. Okeke-Agulu gives insightful analyses of the wooden sculptures that preceded Anatsui’s current metal works, explaining how these represent a powerful relationship to African textiles such as kente cloth. Africanist art historian Susan Vogel’s film Fold, Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui (2011) and her book, El Anatsui: Art and Life (2012) are especially valuable in their detailed portrayal of Anatsui’s studio process and methods for working with assistants to manipulate metal bottle caps in over twenty different 34 Olu, Oguibe, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Robert Storr, Kwame Anthony Appiah, El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa. ed. Lisa M. Binder (New York: Museum for African Art, 2010). 22 formats and organize patterned blocks of the resulting metal “cloth.”35 She contributed the unique analogy of the patterns within his metal sculptures to the andamento or visual flow within a mosaic resulting from the placement of rows of tesserae, as well as an important analysis of his recent architectural installations in conjunction with other contemporary public sculpture. Of recent public appearances by Anatsui, the conversation organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art in February 2013 in which Vogel and curator Kevin D. Dumouchelle interviewed Anatsui in conjunction with his exhibition Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui (2013) offered insights into his bottle cap patterns and decorative surfaces in relationship to his memories, historical events, and as a departure from his original reliance on African ideographic systems.36 Vogel connected Anatsui’s work to that of Anish Kapoor and other contemporary sculptors who he admires, demonstrating the international sculptural influences in his work. Of the numerous contributions to Anatsui’s vision, Vogel’s analysis is the most in-depth. This dissertation combines insights from these different camps of Africanists, art critics, and curators by incorporating many of their strategies for defining an African aesthetic of pattern and decoration while also addressing gaps in the literature. Whereas Africanist scholars have focused on specific patterns and techniques derived from classical African art, they have often neglected how contemporary African artists continue these aesthetics by 35 Susan Vogel, El Anatsui: Art and Life (Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2012); Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui, directed by Susan Vogel (2011; Brooklyn, NY: Icarus Films, 2011), DVD. 36 Brooklyn Museum of Art, “El Anatsui in Conversation with Susan Vogel,” Public program in conjunction with the exhibition Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui (Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, February 10, 2013); Brooklyn Museum of Art, “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui,” Exhibition organized by the Akron Art Museum and by Kevin Dumouchelle at the Brooklyn Museum of Art February 8–August 4, 2013. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/el_anatsui/#!lb_uri=gravity_grace.php. 23 assimilating pattern and design sources from many non-African cultures. Contemporary art critics such as Holland Cotter and Robert Storr also tend to focus on ways that African artists represent Africa in the international art world, rather than looking in many directions the expression of cross-cultural influence in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. It is still rare to see African and African diaspora artists shown in a similar context that explores common themes and approaches in their work. As Black artists are absorbed into the mainstream and included in many art fairs throughout the world, there is little investigation of the richly blended cultural contexts of their work, and the elitist nature of these events makes it difficult to see those relationships in terms of larger communities. The scholarship on Wiley’s work is much more focused on African American and Western contemporary art, whereas the writing on Cave and Anatsui includes both Africanists and international art criticism, therefore transcending these categories somewhat. By bringing together these three artists, I explore how artworks’ surfaces reveal personal perceptions of survival, protection, and spirituality. Visual Counterpoint These aesthetics of multiple, layered patterns create an experience that I call visual counterpoint, where the many rhythmic motifs are in dialogue with one another and cause a spatial tension between foreground and background layers. Also, these layers produce a symbiotic synergy that collectively infuses the artwork with movement, drama, and emotion. In jazz and blues music, 24 counterpoint is expressed through syncopation and spaces between notes as well as improvisational riffs in the music that add layers upon the main rhythms. Painter Stanley Whitney observes, Painting is like music. When I first saw Cézanne, I thought, this is like Charlie Parker, only painting. It’s like polyrhythm, a beat and a beat and a beat and a beat, like call and response, you know – in the middle of the beat there’s another beat.37 Many types of Black music, including gospel and hip-hop, are also characterized by call and response cadences that overlap with or repeat the dominant musical theme. In West African music, there are often more than fifteen percussion instruments that play overlapping and complementary rhythms. In visual counterpoint, repeating lines, designs, colors, or shapes create a pattern that seems to buzz with energy. Multiple patterning of these motifs is characterized by asymmetry or designs that unpredictably interrupt one another to produce the effect of improvisation. Not only does visual counterpoint create a compelling visual and aesthetic effect, but it also represents the disruption of historical narratives supplied by the dominant culture. In the 20th century, pattern and decoration has been self-consciously employed by Black Atlantic artists to situate their work within frameworks of power and authority. In post-colonial Africa, the self-conscious development of African pattern aesthetics was an essential part of the formation of a modern state. Léopold Sédar Senghor defined the cultural production of the immediate post-independence era in Senegal by building an elaborate institutional and philosophical structure to promote Negritude through encouraging specific 37 Stanley Whitney, “Stanley Whitney by David Reed,” Bomb 123, (Spring 2013): 46. 25 aesthetic qualities in African art.38 Senghor employed visual rhythm to symbolize the originality of African artistic production. Senghor’s pan-African agenda argued that arts in a modernizing Africa would serve to revive traditional art aspects within a new national identity, and towards this end, he promoted many woven tapestries that emphasized African patterning and motifs.39 Similarly, in African American art, the relationship of rhythmic pattern and music was part of the self-conscious construction of African American aesthetics under the Harlem Renaissance. Musical qualities have been acknowledged in the work of abstract painters such as Norman Lewis in recent scholarship by Richard Powell and Anne Gibson as contributing new aesthetic qualities to abstract painting of the 1940s and 50s. Powell has argued for a “blues aesthetic” in works by Lewis and others that represent syncopated rhythms and call-and- response structures that are so culturally ingrained that they function as organizing principles across all aspects of Black cultural production.40 This blues aesthetic is perhaps an aspect of Wiley’s layering of hip-hop rhythms and certainly Cave’s syncopated embellishment and patterns across the sculptural surfaces. Finding many musical counterparts and inspirations for the artists in this dissertation, I discussed Wiley’s references to hip-hop beats and fashion, Cave’s associations with Black music such as New Orleans Jazz funerals, African percussion, and house music, and Anatsui’s references to Ghanaian drumming 38 Elizabeth Harney, “Rhythm as the Architecture of Being: Reflections on un Âme Négre,” In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 19. 39 Harney, “Rhythm as the Architecture of Being,” 46. 40 Graham Lock and David Murray, “Introduction – The Hearing Eye,” The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4. 26 and popular music that links to kente cloth weaving patterns. An important resource for these musical analogies was The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art (2009), a volume of essays that attempts to bridge gaps in music criticism and art history through the relationships of rhythmic pattern and expressive qualities in music and visual art. It includes interviews with artists such as the painter Wadsworth Jarrell, who is part of the artist collective AFRICOBRA, and analyses of visual artists ranging from Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Joe Overstreet. Including important contributions from Robert G. O’Meally, Robert Farris Thompson, Sara Wood, and many others, it expounds upon the synesthetic relationships between Black Atlantic visual art and music such as jazz and the blues as they are expressed through polyrhythmic pattern, improvisation, and off-beat phrasing. It also demonstrates the impact of particular jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane on several generations of African American visual artists and the references to these musicians in artworks. Additionally, Robert Farris Thompson’s pivotal book Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music (2011) served as an essential resource of the study over the past 40 years of Black Atlantic visual art and music based on the overarching principles of control and composure and their relationship to spirituality and transcendental balance in the universe.41 Thompson’s essays about music and rhythm exemplify a synesthetic understanding of the 41 Robert Farris Thompson, The Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music (Pittsburgh and New York City: Periscope Publishing, 2011). 27 intertwining of performance and representation in much Black Atlantic art. In addition, his analyses of contemporary artists such as Betye Saar, Renée Stout, David Hammons, José Bedia, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat offer an important methodology for examining artists based in America and the Caribbean through the Africanist cultural contexts of their work. This book offers a historical framework for exploring Wiley’s motifs analogous to hip-hop rhythmic beats and Cave’s decoration related to African diaspora Carnival. My exploration of pattern focuses on splendor and over-the-top decoration, as well as the hybridity of multiple designs, demonstrating that two or more agents work together to produce a result not obtainable by any of the agents independently. As in music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more layers that are independent in contour and rhythm and are visually interdependent. Also, visual pattern and decoration influences flow in a similar way as musical influences spread across continents and genres. This dissertation addresses how Black Atlantic decoration and pattern in contemporary art translates experience in a synesthetic manner that relates to music, dance, language, and many vernacular traditions. I investigate the significance of artists’ prioritization of pattern and decoration to tell marginalized and imaginative versions of history and adapt materials for their symbolic references to the past and their ability to trigger memories buried or forgotten. 28 Reorienting History with Pattern and Decoration My first chapter analyzes Kehinde Wiley’s work in terms of exoticized colonial European depictions of the Caribbean, images of the adorned Black dandy, incorporation of West African textiles patterns, and mining of street style from hip-hop culture. Wiley’s grandiose “World Stage” series demonstrates his appropriation of patterns and fashion to create a transnational dialogue with specific cultures throughout the world, particularly Brazil, China, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Senegal, and Israel. He transforms historical narratives by employing compositions and gestures from historically canonical European paintings combined with patterns of the cultures that he engages in the series, to complicate grand narratives and tell an alternate version of history. In portraits of young men of color from New York City and these countries, he presents visual counterpoint with diverse pattern sources, including African and Indian textile motifs, Chinese fabrics and ceramics, and Jewish paper cuts and embroidered textiles. In many works, the patterns are as important a subject as the models themselves, amplifying a diverse perspective on male beauty. He plays upon the historical trope of the Black dandy, adding a homoerotic dimension to this theme to celebrate the bravado of urban youth and intertwine physical allure with folkloric designs from textiles, wallpaper, ceramics, and paper cuts. I argue that Wiley appropriates patterns to bestow pride and authority on the individual young men and to celebrate the aesthetic impact of many cultures included in the “World Stage” painting series. 29 The second chapter focuses on Nick Cave’s sculptures entitled “Soundsuits,” which employ dense surface textures and designs to disrupt hierarchies based on race, class, and other categories to push forward a socially conscious agenda. I explore how Cave’s materials, scavenged and transformed from thrift stores, flea markets, and estate sales, re-contextualize these objects from their past use as he combines them into a cacophonous surface of patterns and textures. Cave incorporates old sweaters, embroidery, toys, twigs, and flamboyantly dyed hair in his sculptures of mythical beings. The transformation of the figure in Cave’s Soundsuits is brought about through their dizzying patterns and textures, as well as the suggestion of the swishing, rattling, and tinkling sounds his materials might generate. Cave made his first Soundsuit in outraged reaction to the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in March of 1991 by officers of the Los Angeles County Police Department. Cave retreated to the woods, and from branches he constructed a jacket and pants that rattled and crackled fiercely when he moved and transformed his own body into a type of power figure.42 For Cave, the surface is encrusted with layers that protect the wearer and enable him or her to become part of a community or tribe, who he groups according to their heterogeneity or like kinds. Through upcycled materials and patterned layers, Cave’s work embodies transatlantic connections that subvert a linear interpretation of history by adapting historical carnival characters to reflect contemporary issues of urban violence and environmental destruction. Cave sees his work provoking social change by enabling people of 42 UCLA Fowler Museum press release for exhibition: Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, Jan 10–May 30, 2010, accessed May 20, 2010, http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/fowler-museum-presents-the-traveling-111442.aspx. 30 all kinds to dream and reconnect with their own humanity by connecting with the tangible beauty of his patterns. Cave states: My ability to make objects come alive is also a testament to my ability to have things resonate with their past history and usages alongside my personal though usually opaque meanings. I want my work to open up vistas to many cultures (including our own), explore a wide range of materials and formal approaches, and look inwardly as it examines personal and cultural identity in relation to the world.43 Cave’s reorganization of found materials overlaid with layers of embellishment and patterns provokes his audiences to consider repressive aspects of colonial history through the subversive rituals of Carnival, and to appreciate the persistence of African spiritual adornment expressed in masquerade costumes and Vodun flags. Even without understanding these references, audiences can feel empowered by imagining their own bodies adorned and protected like his flamboyant power figures. Many of the works that I analyze are part of Cave’s recent project, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, an exhibition that opened at the Yerba Buena Arts Center in 2010, travelled to the Seattle Art Museum in 2011, and toured on a smaller scale throughout the country. This project featured fifty Soundsuits and a number of performances that have taken place both inside the cultural center and museum and outside on the street. His large body of figurative sculptures and recent dance performances combine historical traditions of display and embellishment from African diaspora and African ceremony and blend these with adornment from European heraldry and the Catholic church. The chapter contributes an analysis of the ritualistic contexts of Cave’s work and elaborates 43 Virginia Shore, “Cultural Crossroads: The Art Of Diplomacy At The United Nations,” Department of State Official blog, accessed April 21, 2013, http://soundsuitshop.com/scene/news/cultural-crossroads. 31 on how his pattern and decoration promote social change by referring to the violence of colonial and modern history. In the third chapter, I analyze El Anatsui’s patterns that suggest history as a storehouse of memory that is reflected in the past lives of the materials themselves and his transformation of these elements by creating a patchwork of separate, moveable fragments. Anatsui often represents the passage of time through the worn textures of the surface and the synthesis of found objects in a multi-layered and patterned “cloth.” Anatsui arranges fragments culled from the registers of African ideographic symbols and woven and stamped designs to allude to political events, environmental issues, and changing patterns of urban geography. His designs dislocate original systems of ordering whether he works in clay, wood, or metal. The materials also symbolize the touch and human “charge” of many hands through their use and reuse and also the collaboration of his assistants. His improvisational approach embraces flexibility since works can be installed and reorganized in many configurations, therefore enabling others to contribute to his ordering of patterns and textures. For the past thirty years Anatsui’s sculptures have borrowed characters from ideographic writing including those from adinkra, nsibidi, and uli ideographic systems. Writing has long been considered a determinant of civilization, but African graphic systems have often been excluded from this category even though they participate in the shared goals of written communication.44 Anatsui’s engagement with ideographic patterns reflects the interaction of West African 44 Mary Nooter Roberts, Elizabeth Harney, Allyson Purpura, and Christine Mullen Kreamer, “Inscribing Meaning: Ways of Knowing,” Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in association with the Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2007) 17. 32 peoples and power relationships both within the Continent and with the West. In recent work, he manipulates the surfaces of liquor bottle caps to produce metal “cloth” sculptures and architectural installations that have been shown in major cultural centers throughout the world. These works blend African motifs with non-African surfaces and building facades, therefore provoking an even more dynamic synthesis of pattern and form. The sparkling amalgam of patterns in his installations has propelled his work into the mainstream art world audience. As Anatsui adapts these rich surfaces in architectural installations throughout the world, he responds to the textures of European, American, and Asian walls and buildings to contribute an Africanist aesthetic to these centers of culture and create cross-cultural conversations about history. Earlier sculptures implemented traditional ideographic scripts and textile patterns to reconfigure African history and his personal memories and experiences of migration as a result of war and political restructuring in West Africa. Most recently, the works reference history through the patina and past lives of the materials themselves. He implements pattern in a similar way to the processes of memory to reintegrate the gaps and holes to form a new order. Anatsui’s works have always challenged the fiction of cultural purity and demonstrated the dialogue that Africa engages in with many other peoples throughout the world. At first glance, it may seem that the work of Wiley, Cave, and Anatsui, it may seem that they share little in common in their media or subject matter. However, there are many points of intersection between these artists, particularly their challenge to Eurocentric perspectives of history and culture through heavy 33 pattern and ornamentation. Wiley and Cave approach pattern from a diasporic perspective that addresses the position of being historically marginalized in a dominant Euro-American culture. Wiley appropriates baroque wallpaper designs and European academic painting and blends this ornamentation with urban street culture, whereas Cave marries the ornate embellishment of European nobility with attire and body decoration from African and African diaspora ceremony. Wiley’s overlapping patterns celebrate the beauty of his male subjects and establish a visual soundtrack for his subjects, while Cave’s dense embellishment serves as a second skin for his figural sculptures and performances with dancers and musicians. Cave’s patterns invigorate the body surface like the designs and textures of the African masquerade dancer or Mardi Gras Black Indian chief. Both Cave and Anatsui construct from scavenged castoff materials that they synthesize into beautiful, iconic structures. Rather than new sculptural materials, they prefer elements that have a previous history and that include the symbolism of this past context. Cave and Anatsui both transform materials that relate to the colonial subjugation of Europe and Black Atlantic peoples: among many found materials, Cave implements fabric remnants and raffia that relates to the “pitchy patchy” character worn subversively by African diaspora revelers during Carnival festivities, and Anatsui builds his recent sculptures with liquor bottle caps that reference the use of liquor in the transatlantic slave trade. Both artists refer to the fragility of the environment and the disruption of ecosystems and communities as a result of corrupt industrial practices, wars, and violence both to the planet and to indigenous peoples. Cave’s incorporation of animal 34 textures and masks corresponds to many African masquerades and Black Atlantic social and religious ceremonies, but his contexts are decidedly urban and relate to issues such as gang violence in inner city Chicago. Anatsui’s re- purposing of old bottle caps, and his titles such as Ozone Layer and Strips of Earth’s Skin imply the vulnerability of our planet, our overflowing landfills, and make clear our responsibility in protecting it from further harm. Of the three artists, Anatsui’s work demonstrates the most persistent investigation of classical African patterns and symbols, and increasingly responds to different topographies internationally. Anatsui’s metamorphosis of bottle caps into sculptures resembling draped cloth signifies the importance of cloth as a monument in Africa and the diaspora. His layering of symbols and abstract marks implies that the fundamental roles of textile patterns and textural surfaces transcend the differences between artists living in Africa and those living in the diaspora. Similarly, his transformation of the wall surface through rhythmic patterns reminiscent of cloth designs references history through the many African textiles that commemorate historical events and the transformation of the symbol of liquor itself, which was used to barter for slaves in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. All three of these artists use material sumptuousness to seduce audiences to look beneath the surface, and to invest their work with a beauty and labor-intensiveness that was traditionally an inherent to religious art. The synthetic use of pattern and decoration in each of these artists work alludes to a “nomadic aesthetic” that expresses Gilroy’s transatlantic idea of 35 “belonging together” that transcends ethnic, geographic, and other differences.45 The works’ layered accumulation of surface designs and texture forges a stronger fiber that suggests levels of experience and shared identification. Each of these artists triggers memory and historical associations through the symbols that they incorporate into their works, changing the way that we reflect upon history by reorganizing systems of pattern. While Wiley subverts the traditional western portrait subject through his ornamental patterns, Cave repurposes scavenged fabrics and kitsch into a highly embellished and decorative casing for his figures, and Anatsui transforms the detritus of alcoholic beverages into luminous metal sheets of patterned gold, red, and black. Their creative processes integrate patterns and textures into a larger connective framework that represents the survival and resilience of African cultures and a multifaceted vision of history that represents many voices. 45 Gilroy, “For the Transcultural Record,” 25. 36 CHAPTER 2 KEHINDE WILEY’S ÀŞẸ: PATTERNS OF POWER The word, àşẹ, is literally translated and understood as “power”, “authority”, “command”, “scepter”, “vital force” in all living and non-living things and as “a coming-to-pass of an utterance” in the Yoruba cosmos … In order to capture and express verbally or visually the essence, character or primordial names of their subject, Yoruba artists have need of “ojú-inú”, literally “inner eye”, a special kind of understanding of a person, thing or phenomenon … Thus, it is with ojú-inú that an artist may know and use the right colors, designs and combination of motifs … all of which would imbue the artist’s work with the proper identity and àşẹ of the òrìşà.46 This chapter contextualizes Kehinde Wiley’s painting in terms of its relationship to Africanist aesthetics and argues that his transformation of conventional painting space is due to his radical use of pattern. This has not been the focus of other scholarship, since the majority of texts deal with Wiley’s role as a post-Black artist who has been extremely successful in the global art market. Much scholarship has concerned itself with the identity of the artist, his methods of working with models, and the way in which he inserts himself into the canon of art history as much as the paintings he produces. I consider Wiley’s work in regard to colonial textile and decorative arts of Asia, West Africa, and Europe, hip-hop style, and patterns that celebrate the Black dandy, odalisque and diva. These patterns dramatically transform the space of the painting to envelop the figure within an energizing atmosphere that positions him or her in a role of authority. Although there are interesting parallels between African pattern and those of many other cultures throughout the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the 46 Rowland Abiodun, “Àşẹ: Verbalizing and Visualizing Creative Power through Art,” Journal of Religion in Africa 24, fasc. 4 (November 1994): 309-311. 37 Americas, I do not attempt to derive the origin of specific designs through trade routes since similar motifs have developed in many parts of the world simultaneously and because many patterns reflect multiple sources, often drawing on some of the same traditions. The creolization of cultures is often expressed through a fusion of patterns and motifs from diverse origins. In the art world, this becomes even more complex because Wiley and many other artists fluidly draw from sources internationally as well as locally. One of Wiley’s unique contributions is his layering of patterns over the figure to provide visual and psychological complexity to the historical portrait subject. Kehinde Wiley’s patterns derive from the aesthetic influences of his childhood and associations with wealth and power that were transmitted through early exposure to European painting. Wiley grew up in America, but his resourceful single mother, an African linguist and antiques dealer, provided him with early exposure to European art and aesthetics from many parts of the world. He and his five siblings lived in South Central Los Angeles, an area infested with violent gangs. His mother arranged for him to be bused to the suburbs for school and to participate in art education opportunities in local museums. During trips to the Huntington Art Gallery in San Marino, California, he learned about European master painters such as Gainsborough, Titian, Reynolds, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Holbein, and others.47 In addition to the subjects of the portraits, Wiley was inspired by the wallpaper patterns and design sensibilities of Rococo and Neoclassical art. He comments that he was struck by the artifice of these works, 47 Joe Houston et al., Kehinde Wiley: Columbus (Columbus, Ohio: Columbus Museum of Art; Los Angeles, California: Roberts & Tilton, 2006), 8. 38 recognizing that these paintings served as propaganda for the power and dignity of great men and patrons.48 Wiley uses irony as a critique of power in his portraits that substitute men of color for European nobility or religious icons. He comments, “My work quotes historical sources, and it positions young Black men within that field of power.”49 This strategy is typical of a generation of artists who have been defined as “post- Black” by curator and deputy director of the Studio Museum in Harlem Thelma Golden. She claims that these artists are “adamant about not being labeled ‘Black’ artists, though their work [is] steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of Blackness.”50 Art historian Robert Hobbs argues that contemporary Black artists such as Wiley appeal to issues of race while not allowing this to dictate expression or vision. These artists show the effect of racism on their individual perspectives while asserting their right to identify with Blackness among other viable identities.51 The opportunities and newfound privileges of a post-Black consciousness may be a reality for a handful of successful Black artists such as Wiley, who use their double consciousness of being Black in America to address many audiences. However, the term post- Black is problematic because it suggests that the struggles for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights accomplished all of its goals. It provides an easy way for the art world to dismiss the reality that most African American artists experience racism on a regular basis, and Wiley plays upon these double 48 “Global Africa: Kehinde Wiley at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art,” YouTube video, uploaded April 28, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3zEsBersP0. 49 Thelma Golden, Freestyle (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001), 14. 50 Robert Hobbs, Franklin Sirmans, and Michele Wallace, 30 Americans (Florida: Rubell Family Collection, 2008), 43. 51 Ibid. 39 standards and issues of marginalization in his work. Wiley’s young alpha males with guarded demeanors inserted into fecund and lavish backdrops produce a slightly awkward parody. The dominance of the pattern as well as the heightened colors provide an extreme, over-the-top flamboyance that is more spectacular than the sober palette of its original source, establishing a contemporary context to the scene. In many portraits, he tows the line between kitsch, machismo, and dignity. Wiley employs textiles and their patterns as both an immediate visual identifier of culture and as a raw material for constructing a unique personal space around the model. His work references interior décor because the paintings he appropriates would have been displayed in the salons of wealthy homes, hung on walls covered with silk damask or brocade textiles so that that the “sinuous floral tendrils of the textile designs escape from the background to caress and envelope the figures, drawing them deeper into the white European world of wealth and power.”52 He substitutes the typical view into a landscape, architectural space, or formal drapery backgrounds of the portraits with designs based on intricate silk wall coverings to re-contextualize his contemporary urban subjects within the manor house salon environment that he saw as a boy visiting the Huntington Art Gallery.53 Perhaps the elaborate wallpapers also recall colonial American plantations with their aspirations to emulate European grandeur and wealth. However, Wiley’s Black models, as in his Alexander the Great (2007) (Fig. 2.1), Lord George Digby and Lord William Russell (2007) 52 Cecilia Gunzburger Anderson, “We Are What We Wear: Cross-Cultural Uses of Textiles,” in Pattern ID, by Ellen Rudolph, (Ohio: Akron Art Museum, 2010), 74-75. 53 Ibid. 40 (Fig. 2.2) and Triple Portrait of Charles I (2007) (Fig. 2.3) after Anthony Van Dyck, feature poses and clothing that simultaneously refute this power and the one-dimensionality of the European portrait subjects’ heterosexuality and masculine arrogance. Additionally, urban clothing such as hoodies may invoke references to religious hooded garb, such as that of monks. Fig. 2.2 Kehinde Wiley, Lord George Digby and Lord William Russell, oil on canvas, 72” x 96”, 2007. Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California In his portraits, Wiley celebrates Black beauty and style through pattern and gesture in a way that is absent from most images of people of African descent in Western art history. In Triple Portrait of Charles I (2007), Wiley represents a young Black man in a triptych inspired by Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of King Charles I of England and Scotland from three angles (1635-36) (Fig. 2.4), which shows the monarch from various angles in three different coats Fig. 2.1 Kehinde Wiley, Alexander the Great, oil and enamel on canvas, 6’ x 5’, 2007, Ann and Mel Schaffer Family Collection. Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California 41 of brown, red, and black silk, each with a lacey collar. Wiley depicts his young subject against a sweetly colored wallpaper of scrolling acanthus vines, flowers, tendrils, and fleur-de-lis that appears inspired by nineteenth-century British arts and crafts or Art Nouveau, contained within gilt frames heavy with ornament. Wiley’s rendition of the hoodie-clad youth fuses the materialism of European wealth and status with street fashion, and also refers to a garment that has become a symbol of racially-inflected sartorial profiling in the United States. The patterns of acanthus and leaves penetrate the foreground and asymmetrically merge with the plain sweatshirt. In the two side panels, the model eyes the viewer warily as the hoodie partly conceals his face and bright light casts shadows on his mahogany-brown face. The central image is more direct and the light hits his richly modeled features so that his skin glows, his lips appear fuller, and he looks out with youthful sangfroid. The contradiction of his beauty and the delicacy of the patterns with his masculine swagger establish a multi-dimensional Fig. 2.3 Kehinde Wiley, Triple Portrait of Charles I, oil and enamel on three canvases (ea. measuring 72” x 36”), 2007, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL. Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California Fig. 2.4 Anthony van Dyck, King Charles I of England and Scotland from three angles, oil on canvas, 84.4 x 94.4 cm, 1635, The Royal Collection, England Fig. 2.5 Barkley Hendricks, Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris, oil on canvas, 84 1/8” x 72”, 1972, William C. Whitney Foundation 42 portrait, channeling the flamboyance of the flowing hair, delicate lace, silk, and pearl earring of van Dyck’s image. Patterns form the soundtrack, or “air,” in which Wiley’s subjects float and serve as a contrast or complement to the portrait figure. These motifs dominate most of his images, competing for attention with the figural subject, and intrude upon the figure’s space. These designs communicate sartorial splendor, exoticism, fertility, and androgyny or the marriage of masculine and feminine beauty and power. In addition, they are usually signifiers of the culture he references since his models wear internationally hip styles of clothing rather than ethnically specific garb (except in the case of some of the paintings of African or Sri Lankan models), and they contrast with the emotional aloofness and cool composure of his sitters. Coolness is a major element of Black style and hip-hop culture, a key Africanism in Wiley’s work. Africanist and art historian Robert Farris Thompson has defined an “aesthetic of the cool” as a particular lexicon that pervades African dance and performance.54 This “[c]ontrol, stability, and composure under the African rubric of the cool seem to constitute elements of an all-embracing aesthetic attitude.”55 Thompson asserts that hot is always balanced by cool, and that all the aesthetic canons work toward social and artistic synthesis.56 The primary metaphor for this interpretation of coolness is control, and coolness is related to transcendental order and balance, and connects an individual with the 54 Robert Farris Thompson, “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” African Arts 7, no. 1 (Autumn, 1973): 40-43, 64-67, 89-91. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 43 ancestors.57 The hot and the cool that Thompson describes in terms of dance and sculpture are also expressed through Wiley’s manipulation of color and rhythmic pattern. Both the fashion and the repetition of vibrant patterns characterize Wiley’s paintings with a quality of ephebism, the power that comes from youth, and a sense of balance that Thompson also describes as an intrinsic quality of African art and performance.58 Like Wiley’s Triple Portrait of Charles I, Barkley Hendricks’ painting Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris (1972) (Fig. 2.5) demonstrates this coolness in response to van Dyck’s Charles I in Three Positions (1635-1636). Certainly, Wiley is familiar with Hendricks’s portrait of a small-time drug hustler that emphasizes the subject’s red coat, signifying “not only his regal status in the mostly Black neighborhood that borders Yale near Dixwell Avenue but his refusal to acquiesce to a conservative, Ivy League standard of dress.”59 Wiley’s painting is a nod both to the Van Dyck original and also Hendricks’ image that reasserts the importance of bravado style in African American culture. Wiley’s substitution of the hoodie for Hendricks’ red calf-length overcoat makes this a twenty-first- century fashion statement, and the triumvirate has been separated into frontal and profile views in the triptych rather than a back, side, and three-quarter view of the subject. Wiley’s subject does not dominate the space of the painting as does Hendricks,’ but the pattern fills the white ground on which the former subject floats. Also, Wiley’s portrait is less concerned with the model’s character and more interested in the relationship to an art historical context. In a similar 57 Robert Farris Thompson, “An Aesthetic of the Cool II,” in The Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music (Pittsburgh and New York City: Periscope Publishing, 2011), 16. 58 Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion (Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1974), 5. 59 Richard Powell, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 145. 44 way to the charisma of Hendricks’ portrait subjects, Wiley’s models express coolness through their attitudes and gestures that communicate authority as they are enveloped by a commanding pattern that affirms and offsets their glory. The contrast of ornately patterned environments that often intrude into the space of the blustering brown subjects causes a theatrical disjunction, as if these young men are interlopers rather than inheritors of legacy. Wiley comments that viewers have traditionally experienced the foreground, middle ground, and background in terms of chronological time, but his paintings lack the spatial separation of foreground and background.”60 He reflects on his exhibition Columbus (2007) at the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, There was a question for me about the field, and the sitter, the sense of the portrait and the landscape … these power dynamics I try to investigate … [F]oreground and the background … are sort of fighting for dominance within the picture.61 Wiley wants there to be a competition between the foreground and background space, complicating the spatial hierarchy of academic portraiture. He attempts to dispense with the academic painting convention of putting the most important, usually male figure in the foreground and the lesser figures, often women, children, or animals, in the background. He consciously develops a tension between the spaces of the painting through patterns that compete for attention with the figurative subject. Wiley’s patterns add complexity to the one-dimensional masculinity of the figure by playing upon the Western association of intricate designs and decadence, Orientalism, and femininity based on their connection with the history 60 Kehinde Wiley and Lola Ogunnaike, “Kehinde Wiley in Conversation with Today Show Contributor Lola Ogunnaike” (public program at The Jewish Museum, in conjunction with exhibition Kehinde Wiley / The World Stage: Israel, March 15, 2012). 61 “Global Africa: Kehinde Wiley at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art,” YouTube video. 45 of women’s craft such as embroidery and lacework. His design is not a superficial ornament but is symbolic and integral to the deeper meaning of the image. Thompson observes, [In African art,] design can be critical as in Kongo saying tunta-tunta dya nitu e tunta-tunta dya nza ‘the dynamic of the body reflects the dynamic of cosmos’— meaning that red on one side of the face and Black on other is not just design, it's the person traversing through light and dark, night and day.62 Similarly, Wiley’s models are surrounded by ornamental designs as a celebration of their beauty, uniqueness, and worthiness of subjecthood. Wiley’s work concentrates on men, and he notes that the absence of women in portraiture is the norm for much of art history, primarily because of the misogynistic construction of power as the sole territory of men.63 Reminiscent of Matisse’s paintings of odalisques in which the model becomes a curvaceous shape embedded among lush textile patterns, Wiley exoticizes and eroticizes the male body in a homoerotic gender switch. His seductive male figures embellished and embraced by patterns both undermine and elevate the power of the Black male subject. Wiley’s portraits reverse masculine and feminine roles by subjecting the model to the eroticizing gaze that has traditionally been reserved for female subjects, especially emphasizing the aesthetic qualities of their skin, musculature, and youthful vitality offset by decorative motifs. In spite of the authoritative stance of the models in their regal patterned spaces, their faces and bodies express a sense of vulnerability and even isolation. By enticing the viewer to admire the youthful subject, Wiley marries the historical objectification of the Black male body with a new symbol of authority, wealth, and 62 Robert Farris Thompson, email message to author, April 9, 2011. 63 Wiley and Ogunnaike, “Kehinde Wiley in Conversation with Today Show Contributor Lola Ogunnaike.” 46 dominance. Representations of hip-hop flashiness can often appear pejorative, but in Wiley’s work, there is a selective blending of detail and the dignity of the portrait subject. Some of the African American subjects in Wiley’s paintings may be banjees, a term mostly associated with New York City from the 1980s or earlier to describe young Latino, Black, or multiracial men who have homosexual sex and who dress in stereotypical masculine urban fashion to express masculinity, hide their sexual orientation, and attract male partners.64 This word was referenced in Jennie Livingston’s celebrated film Paris is Burning (1991), and it still has currency in contemporary gay balls that feature a “banjee realness” category.65 Alternately, the term “homothugs” also describes minority males, who are primarily homosexual and who adopt hip hop culture, music, and style of dress perhaps to counter other stereotypes about gay culture. Keith Boykin observes that “[a]ided by the hypermasculinity of hip hop culture, Black homosexual identity in the nineties evolved away from house music and other gay-identified representations of self and instead established the homothug and the down low.”66 The term “down low” is another African American slang designation applied to Black men who keep a hyper-masculine cover but who secretly engage in homosexual sex while having primary relationships with 64 Tim’m T. West, “Deconstructing Banjee Realness,” posted May 25, 2006, http://www.bravesoulcollective.org/perspectives/topic- of-the-month/maskulinity/deconstructing-banjee-realness/. 65 Guy Trebay, “Legends of the Ball: Paris is Still Burning,” The Village Voice, January 11, 2000; Paris is Burning, directed by Jennie Livingston, film (Santa Monica, California: Miramax Films; Los Angeles, California: Off-White Productions, Inc.; Fremont, California: Prestige, 1990). 66 Keith Boykin, Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2005), 98, 234. 47 women.67 Yet as Boykin argues in his book Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies and Denial in Black America, clandestine homosexual relations are not unique to African American men. These relationships reveal a breach of honesty and have occurred among all races since ancient times due to homophobia, social stigma of same-sex relations and a failure to address these issues in the open.68 African American codes for sexual orientation are problematic when applied to Wiley’s paintings of models from many other parts of the world, although these societies are full of their own stereotypes about straight and gay men. Wiley’s selection of models seems to be based on his interest in the unique face, style, swagger, or intensity of each individual rather than his sexual orientation. Most importantly, Wiley’s juxtaposition of a delicate pattern and dramatic complementary colors against a muscular male body emphasizes the complexity of the individual and his charismatic attractiveness to both male and female viewers. Like Wiley, British painter Chris Ofili employs gold and heavily ornamental altarpiece-like surfaces in paintings to conflate sacred and art historical figures with images culled from popular culture or even pornography. For example, in his controversial work The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) (Fig. 2.6), Ofili combines photographic images of Black women’s exposed vaginas and backsides floating 67 J.L. King, On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of 'Straight' Black Men Who Sleep with Men (New York: Broadway Books, a Division of Random House, 2004), 1-6. 68 Keith Boykin, Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America, 27-37. Fig. 2.6 Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary, paper collage, oil paint, glitter, polyester resin, map pins, elephant dung on linen, 1996, collection of David Walsh 48 in an abstract sea of gold with the Madonna’s simplified brown face, her turquoise gown, and clumps of elephant dung that serve as an exposed breast and support the canvas’ base. Ofili’s combination of the highs and lows of subject and erotica is somewhat parallel to Wiley’s incorporation of hip-hop style clothing and semen in his riffs on canonical artworks. For instance, in Wiley’s rendition of Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005) (Fig. 2.7), a camouflage-clad Black youth on a rearing white steed wears a bandana rather than Napoleon’s famous black hat and is offset by a Neoclassical European wallpaper pattern of gold upon red rather than a dramatic landscape. Inspired by Jacques-Louis David's painting Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Grand-Saint-Bernard (1801) (Fig. 2.8), Wiley blends the political and erotic through an onanistic pattern of tiny sperm that swim across the painted surface. These sperm ornament each corner of the work’s gold frame that is topped by a male head surrounded by phalluses. Both Ofili and Wiley use sexually charged details from popular culture sources and heavily embellished materials to transplant their subjects from the coded eroticism of art Fig. 2.7 Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, oil on canvas, 108” x 108”, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery Fig. 2.8 Jacques-Louis David, Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Grand-Saint-Bernard, 1801 49 history to street vernacular and the earthy association of power with the sexualized body. Wiley’s appropriation of art historical contexts, design and pattern sensibilities of earlier periods and remakes of canonical artworks associate his work with the important precedent of an earlier generation of artists such as Faith Ringgold, Emma Amos, and Robert Colescott. Ringgold’s The French Collection (1990-91) (Fig. 2.9) are twelve panels that take from iconic works in the Western canon such as da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503-6), Henri Matisse’s La Danse (1909- 10), Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and the architecture of the Louvre itself. Ringgold reinvestigates these artworks from the perspective of a Black American alter ego, Willia Marie Simone, who goes to live in Paris in the 1920’s. Amos also references masterworks of modern art history, particularly focusing on primitivism and the global oppression of women and people of color in Work Suit (1994) (Fig. 2.10), based on a nude self-portrait by Lucien Freud. Art historian Sharon Patton observes, “[i]n Work Suit, Amos’ inversion of the ubiquitous Western image of the male artist holding his palette of paints and brushes with a reclining nude model represents “the covenant of silence about the prerogatives that white artists have.”69 Pattern is an organizing force in Ringgold’s quilt paintings and Amos’ decorative textile borders, and it positions their heroic female protagonists in a field of power and beauty. Like Ringgold and Amos, Wiley adopts specific patterns and imagery that claims his place in the lineage of great white male painters. He also deals ironically with issues of 69 Sharon F. Patton, “Emma Amos: Thinking Paint,” Kenyon College Olin Art Gallery, 2000-2001, accessed September 2, 2011, http://www2.kenyon.edu/artgallery/exhibitions/0001/amos/amos2.htm. 50 race and gender within the artist/model relationship through the awareness of his position as a Black man projecting a homoerotic gaze on other men of color, rather than a female (or white male) model. Wiley’s renditions of canonical European painting provoke a tension of highs and lows that characterize Pop Art’s romance with commercialism and remakes of canonical paintings, and have also been explored in earlier works by Colescott. Colescott’s paintings such as Les Demoiselles d'Alabama vestidas (1985) (Fig. 2.11) and Venus I (1996) inject the Black artist into mainstream Western art discourse and have sparked controversy through their engagement with dichotomies of high/low, vernacular/elite, and good/bad painting through humor and satire. Les Demoiselles d'Alabama vestidas, for example, parodies Picasso’s iconic cubist image of prostitutes, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) (Fig. 2.12). Colescott transforms Picasso’s primitivist, anonymous group of nude figures into a saucy, multiracial group of women that is individualized through Fig. 2.10 Emma Amos, Work Suit, acrylic on linen, photo transfer, African fabric collage and borders, 74.5” x 54.5”, 1994 Fig. 2.9 Faith Ringgold, Matisse’s Model (The French Collection) Part 1: #5, acrylic on canvas and fabric, 1991 51 their range of complexions and sexy clothing. Wiley’s seductive males in reclining poses similarly co-opt the history of the female exotic nude, such as odalisques by Delacroix and Ingres. Wiley’s inclusion of his models’ names in many works combines with the visual context established by pattern to establish the history and culture of his portrait subjects. Henry Louis Gates wrote in his 1989 book of critical theory, The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism that in Afro-American discourse “signifyin(g)” is an open-ended process, which depends on and plays off of previous expression.70 What is said in words is understood in terms of context and other factors, rather than in and of itself alone. The symbolism and double entendre of Black vernacular language allows 70 Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 44-88. Fig. 2.11 Robert Colescott, Les Demoiselles d'Alabama vestidas, acrylic paint on canvas, 96” x 92”, 1985 Fig. 2.12 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, oil on canvas, 8’ x 7’8”, 1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York 52 for a more creative interpretation of the meaning, as well as a subversive manipulation of language. Naming is an example of this signifying since a good number of African Americans have exploited naming as a way to bestow dignity and authority on the next generation. Names for male children names such as “Sir,” “Mister,” “King,” and “Prince,” such as the famous American musician, actor, and producer, and for girls such as “Princess,” “Precious,” and “Justice” have been a way of instilling a sense of respect that could not be attained during segregation and even after the Civil Rights period. In that very direct way of collapsing title and name, African Americans have attempted to claim a sense of authority and self-determination that has historically been denied them. Other names signal the culture and ethnicity of Wiley’s models, such as those from Brazil, Senegal, Nigeria, and Israel, suggesting the global sphere in which he works. Wiley’s employment of young African American models invokes the reality of survival as a Black man in America and gives visibility to a population that has been treated almost exclusively by derogatory stereotypes in the media and otherwise made invisible, particularly in the Western art museum. Wiley reflects, I try to use the Black male body in my work to counter the absence of that body in museum spaces throughout the world. But the work also resists any type of normalizing or corrective impulse that you might expect a young Black artist to investigate.71 Wiley’s process of celebrating young Black men runs counter to the landmines that African American males face, whether by their own actions or by their association with other Black men. Writes Michael A. Fletcher, 71 Christine Y. Kim, “Christine Y. Kim and Malik Gaines in Conversation with Kehinde Wiley,” in Kehinde Wiley, The World Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar, by Thelma Golden et al. (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2008), 11. 53 Being a Black man in America can mean inhabiting a border area between possibility and peril, to feel connected to, defined by, even responsible for other Black men … of sometimes wondering whether their accomplishments will be treated as anomalies, their individuality obscured by the narrow images that linger in the minds of others.72 Persistent stereotypes about Black male athleticism, hypersexuality, and criminality are ever-present in the media. At an abysmal rate, Black male youth fall prey to gang and street violence, fail to graduate high school, and become incarcerated for petty crimes. These issues directly relate to the population of men that Wiley elevates and exonerates in his work. Patterns of Power in the World Stage Wiley’s monumental “World Stage” series shows a conscious development of pattern to create a global conversation with specific cultures throughout the world. Wiley began this series not long after the establishment of the international coalition known as BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the fastest growing economies in the world. In this series he provides visual counterpoint with diverse pattern sources, including African textile motifs, Chinese fabrics and ceramics, and Jewish paper cuts and embroidered textiles. In search of his own origins, Wiley first traveled to Nigeria in 1997 to meet his father, which was very important because he had no images of him.73 Wiley is a twin (Kehinde means second-born), and his mother named him after the Yoruba Ibeji twins, although his father was of the Ibibio tribe. This travel as well as other journeys abroad inspired him to engage in a dialogue with cultural 72 Michael A. Fletcher, “At the Corner of Progress and Peril,” Washington Post, June 2, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/01/AR2006060102184.html. 73 Thelma Golden et al., The World Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar, Kehinde Wiley (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2008), 8. 54 and art historical influences from China, the Caribbean, West Africa, India, Sri Lanka, and Israel. Of all these series, the “World Stage: Lagos~Dakar” began as a quest to find his own origins, in a process of self-discovery and it nourished his richer and more specific establishment of pattern as a primary subject in of itself. Like an international corporation himself, Wiley brings his “World Stage” project to major art centers that also reflect new markets and he employs elaborate patterns to express a synthesis of cultural, art historical, and design influences. As Wiley describes it, “The World Stage” is a painting project that allows me to expand portrait making outside the city streets in America, where I traditionally have been working, and go to different nations throughout the world and use models who are sourced from the street.74 When scouting for models, Wiley presents images of art historical works and allows young men to choose the pose. Wiley seeks models based on how they are dressed, how they move, and how they look in the arena of the street. Wiley remarks, “When looking for models, I’m looking for someone who has a spirit of self-possession.”75 He approaches young men who exemplify the stylish, urban African American youth that have made hip-hop music and fashion an international phenomenon, and that epitomize coolness. Usually, Wiley organizes a photo-shoot the same day that he meets the model, allowing for a spontaneous and chance opportunity to become the subject of a visual monument. He has worked most comfortably, perhaps, with African-American models, but as the World Stage project has incorporated models from Brazil, West Africa, Indian, Sri Lanka, and Israel, his relationship with these societies 74 “The World Stage: Africa, Lagos ~ Dakar,” YouTube video, edited by Joe Nanashe and original music by Patrick Grant, uploaded July 13, 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq8Yr-Se7mc&feature=player_embedded#at=274. 75 “Profile of artist Kehinde Wiley on the Today Show,” YouTube video, uploaded May 22, 2006. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZkRszO8DKI. 55 has become more complex. Through his appropriation of culturally specific patterns, he communicates both an identification with and also estrangement from the subject that he depicts. Wiley comments, “I go through all the art history books with my models. They choose moments in art history that mean something to them … aspects of themselves that will then become public ... but at the same time, I’m painting myself.”76 Perhaps part of Wiley’s identification with the subject is his appreciation for male beauty as a gay man, but it is also an exploration of self. The paintings play with the idea of an authentic moment in which he heightens colors, removes extraneous elements, and adds designs. Wiley downloads his photographs of models onto a disk, manipulates them, and projects them onto canvas. With Photoshop, Wiley places layers of textile- inspired designs to the background and foreground to design a new space for his figures. He then draws the images onto the canvas and applies a sepia under- painting. After the sepia under-painting, he completes the final portrait. There are a total of three different layers of painting: the under-painting, then the building of forms, and finally a sweep of glazing and heightening of color and shade.77 His colors and patterns often come from memories of being in a specific place, and then he alters the truth of the scene according to associations.78 Says Wiley, I use Photoshop not only to take what you think was that actual moment in real life, but to alter the colors, alter the clothing, alter certain features, fatten the lips, 76 “Kehinde Wiley Character Approved Commercial, USA Network,” YouTube video, uploaded May 12, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu03cYbvlAA&playnext=1&list=PL929C3AD5BB239635. 77 Brendan Davis, “You're more likely to be struck by lightning than to become a successful artist”, Interview with Kehinde Wiley for Art Interview Online Magazine, uploaded September 5, 2008, accessed March 3, 2009, http://www.art- interview.com/Issue_009/interview_Wiley_Kehinde.html. 78 Wiley and Ogunnaike, “Kehinde Wiley in Conversation with Today Show Contributor Lola Ogunnaike.” 56 broaden the eyes … you are getting a manufactured, quasi-truth that approximates a moment, but never quite is there. In most of the World Stage series, there is always a Black American boy in the room.”79 The resulting image is a type of fiction and fantasy, which is in stark opposition to the desire to see an anthropological truth when looking at people from other countries.80 He asserts authorship of the story he constructs about the model and also confronts the viewer’s expectations and assumptions. The World Stage: China “The World Stage: China” paintings took as their source of inspiration social realist posters from Maoist China and emphasize issues of Black masculine identity juxtaposed with macho poses of communist propaganda and the delicacy of Chinese floral patterns. Wiley found a correlation between ways that Black identity has and continues to be manufactured and manipulated by the media and society, and how Chinese national identity was distorted during the Maoist era.81 In the way that Warhol’s images of Mao were a commentary on celebrity, fame, propaganda, and image saturation, Wiley also invokes the kitsch aspect of propaganda images. The series references Chinese culture through the delicate patterns, colors inspired by Chinese porcelain and silks, and gestures from the social realist posters. Wiley’s designs forge a strange hybrid between the propaganda of young Chinese men and women as symbols of revolutionary power, intricate floral motifs and honeyed colors of Chinese decorative arts, and the “gangsta” style of 79 Global Africa: Kehinde Wiley at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, uploaded April 28, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3zEsBersP0. 80 “The World Stage: Africa, Lagos ~ Dakar,” YouTube video. 81 Jennifer Jankauskas, et al., “Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage: China,” Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage: China (New York: Kehinde Wiley Studio, 2007), 5. 57 his African American models. A number of paintings feature motifs of butterflies such as Romaine I (2007) and Regard the Class Struggle As the Main Link in the Chain (2007), and others have a bright palette, and floral designs that encroach on the subject’s space. Moreover, in works such as Carry Out the Four Modernisations of the Fatherland (2007) (Fig. 2.13), the bold black of the larger figure’s hair acts as a compositional device that is similar to Chinese and Japanese paintings in which floating black shapes serve as a major design element. Wiley’s exploitation of gesture and design is also reminiscent of the graphic role within the Black Power Movement’s employment of posters by Emory Douglas, the revolutionary artist of the Black Panther Party. When comparing Carry Out the Four Modernisations of the Fatherland to its original poster source (Fig. 2.14), Wiley has eliminated the smiles from the models’ faces, and slightly altered the angle of the raised arm on the figure to the left so it approximates the gesture of Black power, minus the clenched fist. The warm palette of the poster has been changed to an overall icy blue background with the figures dressed in yellow and pink similar to the original poster colors. Whereas the poster features a pattern of concentric circles that provides a sense of depth in the image, Wiley has flattened the space of his version through the emphatic repetition of similar forms. The very intricate floral pattern contrasts with the stocky build of the model to the left. The “butch” model with the Black power Afro hairstyle contrasts with the more delicate, short-haired model with hazel eyes, who wears bright pink. The opposing gestures of the two models, 58 one active and the other passive, also convey the machismo and polarized genders of the original source of social realist propaganda. Aesthetically, the “World Stage: China” series is a deliberately ironic mix of African American and Asian stereotypes. The gestures of the Black Panther party’s angry Black man meet Chinese communist zeal. These stereotypes are further complicated by the Asian motifs and colors that “feminize” the models’ space, playing upon a stereotype of Asian men comparable to the Orientalist stereotype in which the Oriental man is portrayed as feminine and therefore weak (although sexually threatening to white, Western women).82 The intricate patterns suggest pre-colonial and colonial Chinese art that was associated by Europeans with opulence and became the plunder of imperialist conquest. Wiley’s overlapping patterns circumvent the figures’ macho body language and 82 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House Inc., 1978). Fig. 2.13 Kehinde Wiley, Carry Out the Four Modernisations of the Fatherland, oil on canvas, 96” x 72”, 2007 Fig. 2.14 Carry Out the Four Modernizations of the Fatherland, poster, 1981, China 59 seduce the viewer to look more closely. The presence of African American models negates a true interaction with Chinese culture and with Asian men. Additionally, the models’ smiles in some works diminish the sense of coolness that pervades other works and ground them in hip-hop aesthetics. It also somehow undercuts the masculine identity of the models, so that they appear to placate the viewer rather than stand proudly and assertively. The element of awkwardness and discomfort on the part of the smiling models is palpable. In a similar way to Yasumasa Morimura’s 1989 photographic drag version of Manet’s Olympia (Fig. 2.15), Wiley’s “World Stage: China” series emphasizes the disjunction of a male body assuming a female art historical role. These images’ obvious artificiality comments on intolerance of homosexuality in many macho cultures and also the objectification of the female subject in Western and Asian art history. Art historian Norman Bryson argues that Morimura’s gender bending and masquerading as a woman challenges the Western colonial construction of Asia as female, and the idea of Asian males as effeminate.83 Morimura titles his image Portrait (Futago), meaning twin. A twin himself, Wiley’s rendition of the models exaggerates their qualities of sameness and difference. 83 Norman Bryson, “Three Morimura Readings,” in Art + Text, no. 52 (1995): 74-79. Fig. 2.15 Yasumasa Morimura, Portrait (Futago), photograph, 1989 60 Wiley’s models in this series appear stiff and artificial similar to men in drag that can seem overdone in their gestures and style. In the “World Stage: China” series there is a feeling that these models have been thrust into a drama that is not their own. Musician and author Greg Tate observes, “the figures in Wiley’s paintings don't have a story to tell so much as a story they've been hijacked into—maybe to help toss the more mundane versions into grim relief.”84 Perhaps more than his original rococo-inspired portraits, the aesthetic qualities of rhythmic pattern or the “cut,” as James Snead has called a Black cultural insistence on repetition, are even more developed in this series.85 Wiley’s manipulation of pattern to define an artificial space is heightened when the patterns physically intrude on the space of the figure, adding to this surreal drama. In this series, Wiley conflates Black power gestures with those of communist propaganda and at the same time he undermines these stereotypes with his “effeminate” patterns and soft colors. The World Stage: Brazil In contrast to the “World Stage: China”, Wiley’s “World Stage: Brazil” series is characterized by patterns of tropical flowers and colors of the jungle. Wiley found textiles for his ornate backgrounds in Rio’s Sahara market.86 He selected many fabrics with floral or jungle patterns of tropical birds, suggesting 84 Greg D. Tate, “Kehinde Wiley’s Cipher Syntax,” in The World Stage: China, essays by Jennifer Jankauskas, Greg Tate, Paul D. Miller (aka Dj Spooky), (Sheboygan, Wisconsin: John Michael Kohler Arts Center; New York: Kehinde Wiley Studio, 2007), 12. 85 Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky, “Painting by Numbers, Kehinde Wiley,” in The World Stage: China, essays by Jennifer Jankauskas, Greg Tate, Paul D. Miller (aka Dj Spooky), (Sheboygan, Wisc.: John Michael Kohler Arts Center; New York: Kehinde Wiley Studio, 2007), 22. 86 Brian Keith Jackson, “The Promise of Life, The Life of Promise,” Kehinde Wiley, The World Stage: Brazil, by Brian Keith Jackson and Kimberly Cleveland (Culver City, CA: Roberts & Tilton, 2009), 12. 61 stereotypes of a lush and Edenic Brazil untouched by modernization. The models themselves had never seen Wiley’s local sources of inspiration, such as the statues and monuments found throughout Rio, although Wiley used them to represent those symbols of history, courage, and power.87 Most of the models for this series come from a region called Vidigal, one of Rio de Janeiro’s over 600 favelas or slums, which are much like public housing in major cities in the United States, where the so-called “haves” and “have-nots” live in close proximity.88 Rio is known for its tropical beaches, beautiful people, and wild Carnival celebrations, but it is also a site of vast poverty, violence, homelessness, and drug trafficking. Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s photographic portraits of impoverished Brazilians beginning with The Sugar Children (1996) and his images of catadores or self- designated pickers of recyclable materials who work in the largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio, were documented in his 2010 film Waste Land that testifies to the extraordinary hardships and resilience of these individuals. None of this painful reality is present in Wiley’s choice of colors or patterns. However, a number of the works in this series refer to the history of slavery in Brazil and colonial representations of this history. His Alegoria à Lei do Ventre Livre (Allegory of the Law of Free Birth) (Fig. 2.16) is a painted version of Bressae’s gesso sculpture in Rio’s National Historical Museum that serves as an allegory of the 1871 law that awarded freedom to children who were born 87 Ibid., 16. 88 Ibid., 10. 62 to slave parents.89 However, this law bought slave owners time against the abolitionists by requiring that unless the owners were compensated, these children must stay with their slave parents until they were 21 years of age; this irony is suggested by the less than joyful expression of Wiley’s model in contrast to the original sculpture in which a smiling Black boy proudly holds a notice of the law in his right hand and a broken chain in the other (Figs. 2.17 and 2.18).90 Wiley’s work features a pattern of exotic orange and yellow flowers and toucans against a buzzing turquoise background. The model’s hair is bleached blond against his brown skin and he looks down at the viewer with a hint of contempt in his simple red sleeveless shirt and purple baggy pants. The palette glows with complementary colors and dense foliage, as in a jungle. Perhaps the youngest model in Wiley’s portraits, the boy still appears older (perhaps twelve) 89 Kimberly Cleveland, “Kehinde Wiley’s Brazil: The Past Against the Future,” in Kehinde Wiley, The World Stage: Brazil, 26. 90 Ibid., 26. Fig. 2.16 Kehinde Wiley, Alegoria à Lei do Ventre Livre, oil on canvas, 2009 Fig. 2.17 A.D. Bressae, Alegoria à Lei do Ventre Livre, plaster, 1871 Fig. 2.18 Detail of A.D. Bressae, Alegoria à Lei do Ventre Livre, plaster, 1871 63 than the original subject of the sculpture and projects a toughness beyond his years. Wiley’s exoticization of the Black male physique points to the Western art historical objectification of people of color in painting and sculpture, as well as ethnographic photography and pornography. By addressing the impact of colonization on Afro-Caribbean art, Wiley similarly shifts the focus from European high art to that of Latin American and Caribbean history and culture. Even more than his presentation of the exotic, brown body, Wiley’s appropriation of tropical patterns for the “World Stage: Brazil” reinforces tropes of the exotic constructed in paintings and tourist imagery for the last two centuries. In An Eye for the Tropics, Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, art historian Krista Thompson investigates tourism campaigns and representations of Jamaica and the Bahamas between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.91 She critiques these representations and their implications on race and the visual imaginary, tracing how Jamaica was visually constructed through eighteenth-century plantation estate paintings and naturalists’ depictions of the Anglophone Caribbean. She explores works by British flower painter Marianne North and the American artist Martin Johnson Heade, who depicted Jamaica in 1871 and in the 1860s respectively, focusing on the most eccentric forms of nature.92 Thompson notes that “[a]t the same time that North and Heade heightened and exoticized the island’s tropical appearance, they ordered and 91Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 92 Ibid., 42-44. 64 subsumed the environment into naturalism’s classificatory schemas.93 In later photographs, Black Jamaicans are shown as peripheral props to the main photographic subject such as bananas and other crops. Instead, White tourists are featured as socially naturalized as the Bahamian landscape through “social photography,” whereas Blacks were pictorially dispossessed from the island’s environment by barely being visible.94 By making central, visible, and heroic the youthful bodies of Brazil’s lowest class, Wiley deconstructs a similar history that took place in Brazil. However, his paintings also continue the trope of Brazil as an exotic, sensual, and lush Eden. The stereotype of Brazil as a brightly colored, unindustrialized paradise as well as its naturalist’s engagement with the local floral and fauna is suggested by Wiley’s almost exclusive choice of floral patterns as backgrounds for the series. Although it is the fifth largest economy in the world, until recently, Brazil has been symbolized almost exclusively by Carnival, samba, and soccer to international markets.95 Wiley’s engagement with these stereotypes call to mind the 1959 film Black Orpheus by Marcel Camus that recreates the Orpheus and Eurydice myth and features the Latin American pop Bossa Nova within the Rio de Janeiro Carnival. This beautiful film suggests that the favelistas, the impoverished people who live in the Brazilian shanty towns or favelas, are simple yet happy folks, always filled with song and dance. Yet Wiley does not reinvent this fiction, and his focus on the favelistas is quite different 93 Ibid, 45. 94 Ibid, 135. 95 Benny Spiewak, “Inside Views In Brazil And The IP World, It’s Tropicalization Time!” Intellectual Property Watch, uploaded on March 4, 2011, http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2011/03/04/in-brazil-and-the-ip-world-its-tropicalization-time/. 65 because it engages a more critical investigation of their vibrant culture through a dialogue with Brazilian art historical references. The World Stage: Lagos~Dakar Of all the cultures in which he engaged, Wiley had a personal identification with West Africa since it is where his father came from and also the source of his African American heritage. This series gave him an opportunity for direct engagement with West African history, popular culture, and the models themselves. Wiley acknowledges that the models he mines from streets and marketplaces brought their own histories and personas to the work, and that every painting was also colored by Wiley’s specific cultural and personal viewpoint as an African American.96 He describes his models’ vernacular and unique style by the pattern of the canvas background as well as the model’s own clothing. In Senegal and Nigeria, Wiley took inspiration from objects that occupy a strong public presence such as sculptural portraits of military generals and colonial masters, and the ways in which these nations pictured themselves after independence. 96 Christine Y. Kim, “Christine Y. Kim and Malik Gaines in Conversation with Kehinde Wiley,” 11. 66 As background to Wiley’s pattern choices in the “World Stage Africa: Lagos~Dakar,” it is helpful to consider that in post-colonial Africa, the self- conscious development of African pattern aesthetics and visual counterpoint was an essential part of the formation of a modern state. Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, employed visual rhythm to symbolize the originality of African artistic production. He stated, Rhythm is the architecture of being: the internal dynamic, which gives form …. It expresses itself through the most material, the most sensuous means: lines, surfaces, colors, volumes in architecture, sculpture, and painting; accents in poetry and music, movements in dance. But in doing so, it guides all this concrete reality toward the light of the spirit. For the Negro-African, it is the same measure that rhythm is embodied in the senses that illuminates the spirit.97 To establish a sense of African authenticity, Senghor’s pan-African aesthetic depended on a link to Negritude, and he believed that arts in a modernizing Africa would serve to revive traditional art aspects within a new national identity.98 Under Senghor’s reorganization of Senegal’s educational infrastructure for art the École des Arts was transformed and defined by the directions of two of Senegal’s most successful artists, Iba N’Diaye and Papa Ibra Tall. Both N’Diaye and Tall were trained in Europe and brought this exposure to European oil painting, tapestry and art history as well as an appreciation of jazz and Senegalese music to their paintings. In 1965, Senghor supported Tall in founding a tapestry school, known as the Manufacture Sénégalais des Arts Décoratifs (MSAD). Employing what Tall considered to be authentic African themes, colors, and patterns, these decorative tapestries featured elaborate rhythmic patterns that depicted scenes of daily life, the marketplace, relationships 97 Léopold Sédar Senghor, quoted in Senghor and the Politics of Négritude, by Irving Leonard Markovitz (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann Educational Books, 1970), 7. 98 Elizabeth Harney, “Rhythm as the Architecture of Being,” in In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995 (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004), 46. 67 between men and women, local plants and wildlife, masks and sculptures of ceremonial art, and exalted heroes of pre-colonial Africa and local myths.99 Under the support of Senghor’s administration, MSAD produced up to one hundred tapestries per year.100 The Afrocentric designs of these tapestries supported the visualization of Senghor’s independent identity for Senegal. Senghorian Negritude’s legacy was the establishment of a powerful image of Senegalese arts both in Africa and abroad, and this was in a large part due to the patterned aesthetic that he put forth through state-sponsored tapestries and other projects. Wiley incorporates aspects of these visual statements of authority by appropriating gestures of classical sculptures and public artworks in Senegal and Nigeria. By responding to this history and the continued relevance of pattern in Senegalese and Nigerian culture, Wiley reinvigorates some of Senghor’s Afrocentric philosophy in this series. Wiley’s adoption of African motifs in the “World Stage Africa: Lagos~Dakar” series allows for a richer iconographic experience of pattern that is also developed in his latter works of the “World Stage” series. For example, Dogon Couple (2008) (Fig. 99 Harney, “The École de Dakar: Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile,” in In Senghor’s Shadow, 68. 100 Papa Ibra Tall interviewed by Elizabeth Harney, The École de Dakar: Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile,” In Senghor’s Shadow, 69. Fig. 2.19 Kehinde Wiley, Dogon Couple, oil on canvas, 2008 68 2.19) is inspired by a Dogon wooden sculpture of a husband and wife seated in an embrace (Fig. 2.20). According to Hélène Leloup, this “southern cliff face” type of Dogon sculpture is characterized by clean, angular lines and defined geometric volumes, with hands and arms set at angles; the faces are distinguished by an arrow-shaped nose, defined lozenge or button-shaped eyes, and a crest-shaped headdress; and often the arms are heavily adorned with bracelets. 101 Wiley transformed the elongated bodies of the original sculpture into the lean and shiny Black bodies of the male couple, carved and glossy like oiled ebony. Wiley paired two Senegalese models in a way that is similar to gender swapping in previous works, yet as he notes, “the homoeroticism reads more potently to me in paintings of modern Africans, given their relative absence in our media.”102 Wiley recalls, The lighting on the skin was an extraordinary opportunity going into these deep darks … purples and dark blue Blacks that are incredibly hard to paint if you learn from the classical western example. Eroticism comes from the play of light more than from the actual subject matter.103 The two men are juxtaposed against a bright orange pattern of West African factory print fabric with parrots, flowers, and leaves that complements their ebony and burnt umber skin. Unlike other works, the patterns do not interrupt the foreground, but the couple seems to float in this busy space and their red chairs blend almost 101 Hélène Leloup, “Dogon Figure Styles,” African Arts 22, no. 1 (Nov. 1988): 44-51, 98-99. 102 “Global Africa,” YouTube video. 103 Ibid. Fig. 2.20 Dogon people, Seated Couple, late 19th- early 20th century, wood, Senegal 69 seamlessly into the background. Wiley adapted the attenuated bodies of the original source and their cool composure so that his painting has a similarly specific gesture and grandiose stature. The man on the left gazes upward, the equivalent of the wife in the original sculpture. The figure on the right looks directly at the viewer, his palm open in what may represent a gesture of generosity since it is the palm that holds the money and is therefore the “sweetest” part of the hand.104 A popular design of factory printed cloth called Hands and Fingers (Fig. 2.21) similarly shows an open palm with gold coins in the center and represents a West African interest in proverbs, education, and self-empowerment.105 The mix of this type of African symbolism with one model’s PUMA-brand shirt is an ironic comment on commercialism. The figure the right, perhaps the more stylish of the two, wears a large pendant bearing a photographic image of his marabout, the holy man to whom he looks for spiritual guidance.106 Such pendants are generally made from leather and sometimes hold prayer papers in them to bless and protect the bearer. The great majority of Senegalese Muslims are either Tijans or Mourides, and the latter group is more likely to wear photo-pendants like the one shown in the Wiley painting.107 The young man wearing the pendant is most likely a Mouride, and Wiley may have based the photographic detail of his jewelry upon 104 John Picton in discussion with the author, March 24, 2011. 105 John Picton, The Art of African Textiles: Technology, Tradition, and Lurex (London: Barbican Art Gallery, Lund Humphries Publishers, 1995), 28. 106 Allen F. Roberts (Professor, Department of World Arts & Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles), email discussion with author, September 20, 2011. 107 Ibid. Fig. 2.21 Fancy print cotton textile, Hands and Fingers design, acquired Ghana, 1993 70 the image of a marabout named Serigne Kara, who is very popular with urban young people.108 The photo-pendant blesses the bearer with the marabout’s baraka or holy blessings that trace back to Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1853-1927), the saint who inspired the Mouride movement.109 Wiley’s attention to the details of this pendant provides an African art historical and religious context for the painting that combines the iconography of Dogon sculpture with that of the Senegalese Muslim brotherhood. In contrast to the designs of earlier works, such as those of neoclassical scrolling acanthus leaves, the patterns in these African factory print cloths form a tightly knit web of African motifs around the figures.110 Wiley’s emphasis on the young man’s religious jewelry with his athletic jacket and pants featuring the PUMA logo, the symbol of a wild and exotic cat found in the mountains throughout South and North America, perhaps equates the popular desire for designer sports clothing with that of cultish behavior. However, since Wiley has himself collaborated with PUMA to make a limited edition line of designer sports clothing, this is probably not a negative critique of consumerism, but rather a positive comment on the youth’s stylishness. Public monuments became the basis for his models’ gestures, in the same way that European portraiture served as the inspiration for his earlier paintings. Wiley’s painting entitled Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos (2008) (Fig. 2.22) is inspired by a monumental sculpture known under different names, most 108 Ibid, email discussion with author, September 20, 2011. 109 Ibid. 110 Anderson, “We Are What We Wear: Cross-Cultural Uses of Textiles,” 75. 71 Fig. 2.22 Kehinde Wiley, Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, oil on canvas, 72” x 96”, 2008 Fig. 2.23 Dr. Bodun Shodeinde, Welcome to Lagos Monument, concrete?, 21’ x 14’, Lagos, Nigeria commonly, the Welcome to Lagos Monument, which that was commissioned by former Military Governor of Lagos State, Colonel Raji Rasaki and designed by Dr. Bodun Shodeinde in 1991. Shodeinde’s sculpture depicts three Yoruba Babalawo (or Awo-diviners), traditional priests and healers in Nigeria (Fig. 2.23), or according to other interpretations, one figure engaged in three different hand positions that make up a gesture of greeting.111 The figures represent the senior members of the Ogboni elders who served as kingmakers in Yoruba culture and this monument emphasizes Yoruba religious beliefs.112 Wiley represents the three wise men in elevated poses of the Babalawo, traditional gestures that signify their authority and function, to communicate how these figures convey power through material, scale, and framing.113 His figures’ poses are almost identical to the original sculpture, which is made of concrete or stone and are somewhat awkward in their body proportions, caught between naturalism and 111 Email to author from Lagos-based artist Lemi Ghariokwu and blog entitled “I am fulfilled that ‘Lagos Welcome Statue’ became the symbol of Lagos – Bodun Shodeinde,” posted by My Lagos November 25, 2012, accessed July 2, 2013, http://lagostomegacity.com/?p=475. 112 Krista A. Thompson, “Find Your Father: Figuring African Between Colonial, Postcolonial and Diasporic Worlds,” in The World Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar, Krista A. Thompson et al. (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2008), 21. 113 Ibid., 21. 72 stylization. However, Wiley’s models are idealized and proportionate, and much younger than the original subjects. Wiley noticed that public sculptures in Lagos such as the Welcome to Lagos statue bear a strong Soviet Socialist aesthetic and surmised that these social realist styles of modern African art developed in relationship to cold-war power grabs.114 Most of these sculptures were made in the post-independence era and served to construct a usable past, establishing an indestructible tradition and making ethnic and class divisions less palpable and the colonial period less persistent. As in his earlier triptychs, Wiley represents three dynamic figures from different angles, but he reorients Christian iconography to symbolism found in Yoruba ceremonial art as well as the Welcome to Lagos sculpture. Wiley’s Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos is animated by many layers of pattern from African cloth. The pattern of the factory print fabric behind the figures is an extremely elaborate plant and floral motif that is most likely made from an intricate relief roller print. Its yellow-orange and green patterns have a complementary effect against the flat turquoise background. Also, the three wise men wear African print fabric clothes. The central figure sports a turquoise dashiki with extensive embroidery around the neck that stands out against the background since it is a few shades darker blue and is decorated with a pattern of large disks with concentric rings. The man to his left is dressed in a long brown dashiki with a pattern of small staffs and the man to his right wears a red dashiki with a complex layering of designs that include black and white circles and stars against a more intricate pattern. The figures are subjected to 114 Christine Y. Kim, “Christine Y. Kim and Malik Gaines in Conversation with Kehinde Wiley,” 10. 73 the light rather than illuminated by it, and in contrast to the flat color of the Dutch Wax print behind them, uncharacteristic shadows dance across the folds of their patterned dashikis. African factory-printed fabric that serves as clothing and background in Wiley’s paintings began to be produced in Europe during colonial times, initiating a transatlantic relationship based on the desire for imagery and proverbs represented with aesthetics that were appreciated by African customers. Dutch merchants first encountered wax-resist dyed textiles in the seventeenth century on the Indonesian island of Java, and by the nineteenth century, Dutch textile manufacturers had found a way to imitate Javanese hand-drawn batik by roller printing a resin resist on the cloth prior to dyeing. This technique resulted in a distinctive cracked or veined effect in the final design. The Dutch and also English manufacturers of so-called wax prints found a market among West Africans, who, unlike the Indonesian market, appreciated the slightly off-register effects and asymmetry of pattern that made the images seem to dance and sparkle. These European companies incorporated motifs representing important African symbols such a stools and staffs, as well as designed inspired by African proverbs. Fancy prints, less expensive roller-printed versions of the cloth, became popular during the period of independence movements in the 1960’s, when many African-owned companies produced their own commemorative designs (Fig. 2.24). The Dutch Vlisco Company produces the most expensive 74 and high quality fabrics (Figs. 2.25 and 2.26), and their European designers call their product “Real Dutch Wax.”115 Wiley’s use of Dutch wax in the “World Stage: Lagos∼Dakar” paintings marries a European portrait tradition with the role of this fabric as backdrops for portrait photography by African artists, such as Seydou Keïta. Also, like the work of British artist Yinka Shonibare, Wiley employs Dutch wax fabric to suggest that African identity and iconography extends well beyond the borders of the continent. Shonibare uses only the costly Real Dutch Wax fabric in his Victorian- inspired vignettes to insert Africa into the world of European high society and make explicit the colonial source of Europe’s wealth.116 This cloth indicates high status in Africa, worn by the same social caste of upper-middle-class women such as the elegant Victorian ladies in Shonibare’s Three Graces (2001) (Fig. 2.27). The double-C Chanel logo is also featured on one of the Grace’s skirts, 115 Anderson, “We Are What We Wear: Cross-Cultural Uses of Textiles,” 70. 116 Ibid. Fig. 2.24 Commemorative Wax Print of Abdou Diouf President of Senegal 1981- 2000, 1992, cloth is from the election year (1983) Fig. 2.25 Vlisco, Nouvelle Histoire, 2011 Fig. 2.26 Vlisco, Sparkling Grace, 2010 75 collapsing Western and African high fashion plays and presenting a double entendre. Shonibare employs this cloth as “an apt metaphor for the entangled relationship between Africa and Europe and how the two continents have invented each other, in ways currently overlooked or deeply buried.”117 According to Africanist John Picton, the shimmering array of patterns in Shonibare’s installation of a hundred rectangles of stretched textiles is an expression of twenty-first century identity that is “an eclectic, self-mocking, part handmade, part industrial, fantastical thing; a formally ordered yet very personal improvisation, with some elements that are self-chosen and others imposed by stereotypes or the whim of history.”118 Like Shonibare, Wiley excavates art history to interpolate the Baroque, Rococo, and Victorian eras, although he is perhaps focused more on France than his native England. The sharp juxtaposition of youthful, trendy clothing against historical scenes and contexts is what marks his work as a contemporary critique of history. As much as the models and poses themselves, Dutch wax patterns are the main identifier of the African context in Wiley’s Africa paintings. 117 Nancy Hynes, “Re-Dressing History,” in “Yinka Shonibare” by Nancy Hynes and John Picton, African Arts 34, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 66-73, 93-95. 118 John Picton, “Undressing Ethnicity,” in “Yinka Shonibare” by Nancy Hynes and John Picton, African Arts 34, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 66-73, 93-95. Fig. 2.27 Yinka Shonibare, Three Graces, three life-size mannequins, Dutch wax printed cotton, dimensions variable, 2001 76 Krista Thompson observes that Wiley’s series is engaged with the photographic production of knowledge about Africa, and highlights the impossibilities of accessing Africa through its representations.119 While colonial power was directed through the gaze of the camera, the post-colony expressed its power through public sculptures that were experienced by citizens and visitors in the public realm.120 She argues that Wiley’s portraits of local African youth may be viewed as a form of “representational intimacy with Africa, a personal and diasporic getting-to-know from all sides through the process of representation …. The paintings make visible a history of not seeing, and represent how colonial, national and diasporic efforts to see and represent Africa have often resulted in its disappearance.”121 In a departure from his typical process, the models swapped clothing for Three Wise Men, and Wiley digitally changed the images before using them as the subject of his painting. These manipulations underscore the idea that his images are unrealities and testify to the inability of any medium to reveal a “true” Africa.122 Therefore, Wiley participates in the construction of contemporary African identity in his series. Wiley’s “World Stage: Lagos~Dakar” images also provide a snapshot of youth culture in Dakar and Lagos, recalling the photographs of the independence era by artists such as Mama Casset in Senegal and Seydou Keïta in Mali, that reflect an alternative to both colonial and postcolonial models.123 Wiley’s incorporation of textile designs are reminiscent of how African photographers 119 Thompson, “Find Your Father,” 20. 120 Ibid., 21. 121 Ibid., 18-19. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 77 engage fabrics as studio backdrops and his concentration on single figures striking a self-conscious pose also recalls images of that period, especially those of Samuel Fosso, whose work Wiley collects.124 Wiley’s delight in the eloquence of African patterns seems to be an extension of this celebration of Black beauty and aesthetics, in a similar way that many African Americans donned dashikis, kente cloth, and other types of African dress in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a sign of solidarity with their African brothers and sisters, especially in regard to independence movements. The patterning of Wiley’s “World Stage: Lagos~Dakar” paintings have an especially synesthetic relationship to rhythm that derives from West African music. Robert Farris Thompson notes that there is a correspondence between the dramatic juxtapositions of color and tone in African textiles and the physical stress on musical notes. He writes, There are two ways of preserving the full sonority of colors in textile patterning: either through contrastive colors, hot and cool, of equal strength, or by maintaining equality of dynamics in the phrasing of light and dark colors (the textiles of the Akan of Ghana are excellent examples) … full sonority and attack in the handling of color means that every line is equally emphasized. For this reason, many or most of the textile traditions of Africa seem “loud” by conventional Western standards, but this is precisely the point. Equal strength of every note parallels equal strength of every color.125 Akin to the relationship between bold color and strong musical notes is the correspondence between pattern and rhythm in Wiley’s African paintings. Thompson observes that “[s]taggered motifs on certain chiefly cloths can be profitably compared with off-beat phrasing in music, dance, and decorative 124 For more information on Wiley’s collection, see Franklin Sirmans, “Painting Time,” in Kehinde Wiley: Columbus. (Columbus and Los Angeles: Columbus Museum of Art and Robert and Tilton, 2006), 15. 125 Thompson, African Art in Motion, 7. 78 sculpture.”126 For instance, the regular patterns of striped patterning in Upper Volta weaving is often interrupted by vibrant suspensions of expected placement of the pattern; however the careful matching of cloth ends shows that the overall design was well-calculated and deliberate.127 Thompson suggests that this formal choice communicates a philosophical concept of governance and human relations. He writes, [I]t may be that the chiefly person who wears a cloth with staggered pattern in effect promises to rediscover wholeness in perfecting uneven human relationships, even as he unties the knot of trouble and obstruction. Suspending the beat hints that to dwell at one level is to lose the precious powers of balance inherent in human capability.128 Regularity in pattern and musical rhythm can also suggest stagnation and thwart the way motifs lead the eye around the composition. Asymmetrical patterns and rhythms, however, add drama and unpredictability, aspects that are important in African music that often features passages of complete improvisation. Patterns that playfully interrupt one another in Wiley’s depictions of African men exemplify this sense of irregular movement and spontaneity. Dutch wax patterns may convey Wiley’s distinctive relationship with Africa and its aesthetic influences; he approaches it with a personal interest in finding his familial connection and his relationship to these African brothers. However, whether Wiley adopts an African motif from factory printed textiles or a rococo design of an acanthus vine (of ancient Roman origin), it is not simply the pattern itself but how he manipulates it that gives it this Africanist aesthetic. By jazzing up the colors to boldly contrast hot and cool, using larger motifs than would have 126 Ibid. 127 Thompson, African Art in Motion, 11. 128 Ibid. 79 appeared in a European context, and by layering designs to produce multiple levels of motifs, Wiley re-contextualizes how we experience these patterns and recharges them with a hip-hop, Africanist aesthetic. The complex motifs and palette of hot and cool colors in the Africa paintings present a similarly vibrant affect of syncopated musical rhythms. Wiley’s construction of Africa includes both photography and the appropriated poses of postcolonial sculptures; however, it is the clothing and the rhythmic patterns in these paintings that most represent African identity. The World Stage: Israel Israel offered Wiley a myriad of opportunities to expand his investigation of the world through pattern. Wiley said that he “entered Israel as a provocation,” and like the other subjects of the “World Stage” series, because of its political and global importance.129 He observes that Israel features profoundly in the American imagination, and relates both to his own story and to America’s narrative. Says Wiley, My driving question was how do we take a nation with this level of intensity with regards to how we look at it, and go beyond the media stereotypes about national identity … There are Arab Israelis, there are Ethiopian Jews, Ashkenazi Jews from every part of Eastern and Western Europe. So there is this immense diversity.130 About a third of the models are Ethiopian Jews, and the rest are Palestinians and other Jewish Israelis. Ethiopian Jews were recognized by the Sephardic chief rabbi as descended from the lost tribe of Dan.131 From 1984 to 1991 thousands 129 Jori Finkel, "Kehinde Wiley Paints A Diverse Israel," Los Angeles Times, Saturday, April 9, 2011. 130 Ibid. 131 Hagar Salamon, “Blackness in Transition: Decoding Racial Constructs Through Stories of Ethiopian Jews,” Journal of Folklore Research 40, no. 1 (January – April 2003): 6. 80 of Ethiopian Jews, known as the community of Beta Israel, immigrated to Israel because of famine and political instability in East Africa in two major airlifts called Operation Moses (1984) and Operation Solomon (1991), a result of the Law of Return, which outlines the terms for automatic citizenship to Jewish applicants. Ethiopian Jews continue to immigrate to Israel at the rate of approximately 300 per month, and the younger generation is focused on embracing their Jewish- African heritage, celebrating many cultural festivals throughout the year.132 Wiley’s agenda in the Israel paintings was to feature the diversity of Israeli people and to debunk myths about its aggressive image in the media by celebrating Semitic pattern, color, and beautiful male subjects. Before Wiley went to Israel, he visited the Jewish Museum in New York to look at a number of Eastern European paper cuts and textiles such as bed covers and Torah ark curtains from the Jewish Diaspora. Among a number of sources, he took inspiration from a mizrah plaque by Israel Dov Rosenbaum, a clockmaker to the local count in Podkamen, Ukraine (1877) (Fig. 2.28) in the museum’s collection. The mizrah plaque decorated the eastern walls of many European Jewish homes and synagogues to show the eastern direction of Jerusalem, the direction of their worship. 132 Ruth Eglash, “Israel: From Melting Pot to a Colorful Mosaic of Culture, Nationality and Religion,” in Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage Israel, by Ruth Eglash and Claudia J. Nahson, interview by Dr. Shalva Weil (Culver City, California: Roberts and Tilton, 2012), 10. 81 Wiley appropriated many patterns from this intricate work, replete with architectural structures, animals, and many other symbolic motifs, to design the background for Alios Itzhak (2011) (Fig. 2.29), which has now also been acquired by the Jewish Museum. For instance, the Hebrew word mizrah, meaning east, is also an acronym made up of the first letters for the Hebrew phrase “from this side the spirit of life,” and adorns both the four corners of the central section of the papercut and also Wiley’s image, reinforcing the source’s original function as a plaque for the eastern wall.133 By blending this motif with the image of Itzhak, Wiley recontextualizes its meanings to focus on an individual within the collective of Jewish identity. Alios Itzhak shows a confident Ethiopian Jewish Israeli man entwined in a complexly patterned background that exemplifies traditional Eastern European Jewish ornamentation’s horror vacui and expresses the multicultural and multiracial complexity of Israeli society today.134 Mizrah plaques in Eastern Europe were designed to resemble Torah arks with carved wooden designs in 133 Claudia J. Nahson, “Yearning for Jerusalem: A Papercut Decoration for the Eastern Wall,” in Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage Israel, by Ruth Eglash and Claudia J. Nahson, interview by Dr. Shalva Weil (Culver City, California: Roberts and Tilton, 2012), 5. 134 Ibid. Fig. 2.28 Dov Rosenbaum, mizrah plaque, paint, ink, and pencil on cut-out paper, 1877, Podkamen, Ukraine, collection of The Jewish Museum, New York Fig. 2.29 Kehinde Wiley, Alios Itzhak, oil and gold enamel on canvas, 2011, The Jewish Museum, New York 82 synagogues. Architectural features such as columns and arcades often balance the layout of papercuts, however, it is rare to see a prominent building as the central element of the composition as in Rosenbaum’s paper cut.135 Wiley uses a vibrant hot and cool palette to render the flaming pink building and other symmetrical designs of Rosenbaum’s image to frame and heroicize Itzhak, and to suggest that this young man is part of the integral structure of contemporary Israel. Itzhak rotates dynamically towards the viewer and his bronze skin is incandescent. Animals feature symbolically throughout the composition and relate to the common imagery of papercuts, Jewish tombstones in Eastern Europe, and carved wooden synagogue interiors. Other sources include printed books such as Hebrew primers that relate an animal corresponding to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet or illustrated versions of the Meshal ha-Kadmoni, a collection of animal stories. The prominent placement of four animals often featured in Jewish papercuts represents the saying, “Be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer, and strong as a lion, to do the will of your Father who is in Heaven.”136 Wiley includes mythical beasts that are part of the original papercut such as the leviathan (shown as a curled fish), the wild ox, and the unicorn represented in the outer border. These animals have an ancient biblical meaning that speaks to the metaphorical richness that has survived and taken different forms throughout the Diaspora. Wiley’s repetition of the Lion of Judah as a prominent symbol in this series represents the tribe of Judah, as mentioned in Genesis. Jewish Ethiopians claim that they are descended from the ancient 135 Ibid., 5-6. 136 Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot), The Talmud: a selection, ed. and trans. Norman Solomon (London, New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 5:23. 83 Tribe of Dan and Judah that went with the Queen of Sheba back from her visit to King Solomon.137 Wiley addresses the ongoing tension between Jewish and Arab Israelis through both iconography and pattern. His images of Arab Israelis or Palestinians (known by a variety of names) that are enmeshed with floral and animal patterns, not specifically from papercuts but perhaps derived from Jewish and Arabic textiles, acknowledge this important part of the Israeli population. His double portrait of two Palestinians, Abed Al Ashe and Chaled El Awari (2011) (Fig. 2.30) seems to be inspired by a woven textile as suggested by the gold cross-hatching of the background. In Israel, Wiley went to the Arab Souk to shop for items linked to decorative traditions, and he learned that in addition to Judaica, many Arab Israeli and Islamic objects and textiles are available and represent a cultural diversity in Israel. His images employ much gold and many include text and medallions that surround the stylish Israeli youth. Wiley’s hand-carved wooden frames adorn the works with Jewish subjects differently than those presenting Arab models. The frames encircling Jewish models are adorned with emblems borrowed from Jewish decorative tradition: the hands of a Kohen (priest) and the Lion of Judah, 137 Edward Ullendorff, Ethiopia and the Bible (Oxford: University Press for the British Academy, 1968), 75. Fig. 2.30 Kehinde Wiley, Abed Al Ashe and Chaled El Awari, oil and gold enamel on canvas, 95.937" x 84," 2011, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery 84 symbolizing blessing, power, and majesty.138 Each portrait frame supports a specific text: the images of Jewish men render quotes from the Ten Commandments. For his depictions of Arab men, Wiley employed the plea of Rodney King, victim of a brutal police beating that sparked race riots in the artist’s home city of Los Angeles in 1991: “Can we all get along?”139 Although both are Semitic peoples, Wiley seems to interpret the divide between Jews and Palestinians along racial lines by referencing the Rodney King quote, rather than focusing on other differences in religion, politics, or ideology. He suggests that Palestinians and African Americans have suffered similar experiences of discrimination and harassment due to their political and social disempowerment in the society. With pattern and design, he supports the Israeli peace effort and embraces the idea of brotherhood across racial, ethnic, and religious differences. In his research for patterns and design elements for this series, Wiley strove to find the hip-hop connection with Israeli youth. He sought out hip-hop artists and disc jockeys in Israel and found Kalkidan Mashasha, an Ethiopian Jew who is one of the most popular hip-hop singers in Israel and who agreed to model. His name means covenant or pact in Amharic.140 Mashash raps about “Father Zion and Mama Africa,” expressing the layered identity of Ethiopian Jews. Wiley visited his home in Tel Aviv, and many of his friends joined the gathering and conversation about Israeli hip-hop. The portrait Kalkidan 138 “Kehinde Wiley / The World Stage: Israel,” YouTube video, accessed February 6, 2012, http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/kehindewiley. 139 Ibid. 140 Shalva Weil, “Kalkidan Mashasha,” Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage Israel, in Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage Israel, by Ruth Eglash and Claudia J. Nahson, interview by Dr. Shalva Weil (Culver City, California: Roberts and Tilton, 2012), 15. 85 Mashasha (2011) (Fig. 2.31) shows him in a khaki shirt with patches of the Ethiopian flag and Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. Surrounding him are patterns from North Africa and papercuts appearing in Jewish history as decorative and devotional objects to adorn homes. The motif of the hamsa hand flanks Kalkidan on both sides; this symbol, occurring extensively in North African and Middle Eastern Jewish communities, is the open palm of the hand that wards off the evil eye.141 Also known as the “Hand of Fatima,” it is a favorite Muslim talisman that became part of Jewish imagery. In kabbalistic lore, the number five, as represented here by the finger of the hand, stands for the “Ineffable Name” and is considered a protector against evil.142 Epitomizing protection, the hamsa is a talismanic motif Wiley employs in many works in the series. The World Stage series is Wiley’s ambitious exploration of pattern, as much as a celebration of men of color from around the world. He comments, In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures … That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature. What's interesting is that in western cultures, patternmaking has been relegated to women's work. And it's highly associated with the irrational and hysteria ...[from hyster, womb, discussed in Foucault's Madness and Civilization] whereas in other cultures patternmaking has been a shamanistic process, where religious leaders are in charge, so it is almost in the vanguard of the rationalist way of ordering the world. So, you have two very 141 Joseph and Yehudit Shadur, Traditional Jewish Papercuts, An Inner World of Art and Symbol (Hanover, New Hampshire and London: University Press of New England, 2002), 92. 142 Ibid. Fig. 2.31 Kehinde Wiley, Kalkidan Mashasha, gold and enamel on canvas, 45” x 36”, 2011, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery 86 different ways of looking at patternmaking, even within the same human experience.143 Wiley claims that pattern should not be identified with the feminine in these and other works, but he views it as a symbol of male strength and vital force. Wiley visualizes identity and dynamic personalities through pattern in the “World Stage: Israel.” Unlike other works from the “World Stage” that are linked to specific canonical art historical sources, the Israel paintings celebrate an array of physical attributes and perspectives of individual Israeli men almost exclusively through exquisite patterns and powerful iconography. Rather than deriving poses from specific sources of painting or sculpture, Wiley proceeded from a collective knowledge of body language from European portrait painting, and when models were posing, he would give direction. The young men range in their demeanor from confident to forthright and vulnerable, and the expressiveness of the light emanating from these men’s faces suggests optimism about the possibility for peace and nonviolent resolution for Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. Enmeshed into a decorative field that speaks as loudly as their commanding personas, Wiley’s portraits of Israeli men express their subjects’ charisma, spirituality, and inner power. This series is also a reminder that there have always been Black Jews, since the times of Solomon and Sheba. In the sense that Jewish identity is defined by culture and religion rather than race or ethnicity, this series broadens the scope of Wiley’s compartmentalized representation of national identity in the World Stage series. The “World Stage: 143 Kiša Lala, “Kehinde Wiley On the World Stage: A Conversation With the Artist,” Huffington Post, April 16, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kisa-lala/kehide-wiley-on-the-world_b_1418058.html. 87 Israel” strengthens Wiley’s series by shifting the emphasis away from the superficialities of popular style and focusing on a nation that has been at the center of controversy for millennia but whose history at once parallels and has often neglected the Black experience.144 In “The World Stage” series, Wiley began by orchestrating a highly constructed experience limited to African American models and the historical and aesthetic influence of Chinese culture. This series evolved into a very synthetic exploration of culture by the time he undertook his projects in Brazil, West Africa, Sri Lanka, and Israel. Throughout these years, he began to maintain a major studio in Beijing where he continues to produce much of the work. When he began “The World Stage: Israel” with the decorative papercut as his starting point, he had adapted his process to combine many resources from the Jewish Diaspora and improvisationally encounter his models in discos and through seeking out local hip-hop artists. Throughout this process, Wiley’s patterns subverted stereotypes of masculinity and sexual orientation, represented a source of inner power, and they add heroic status to his subjects. Commercial Offshoots of The World Stage Following on the heels of the “World Stage: Lagos~Dakar,” the brand PUMA commissioned Wiley to paint four original works of art inspired by Samuel Eto’o of Cameroon, John Mensah of Ghana, and Emmanuel Eboué of Ivory Coast, to herald the start of a World Cup year. Wiley produced individual portraits of the players as well as a fourth Unity Portrait (Fig. 2.32) with all three 144 Peter Frank, "Haiku Reviews: Kafka, Trompe-L’oeil and Vietnam," Huffington Post, May 27, 2011. 88 players together using inspiration from a pose from a pre-colonial sculpture, perhaps this sixteenth or seventeenth-century Benin Edo plaque (Fig. 2.33), that depicts three men with interlocked arms, symbolizing the united countries of Africa. Fig. 2.32 Kehinde Wiley, Puma World Cup Africa Collaboration, Unity, oil on canvas, 108” x 144”, 2010, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery Fig. 2.33 The Oba of Benin with Attendants and Europeans, brass, 19” x 15”, 16th or 17th century, made in Benin City, British Museum, London For his individual portrait of Samuel Eto’o, Wiley shows the soccer player with arms crossed and bearing an expression of cool composure (Fig. 2.34). Much attention is given to the veins on his arms, his glowing mahogany skin, his lean and taught torso, and elegant bone structure. His PUMA shirt is wet and fits his chest tightly, making the surface of the fabric more important than the logo. Eto’o is surrounded by an African factory textile print of keys in a circle, and individual keys float across his chest, arms and belly. Keys are an important symbol in a number of African cultures. A gold Akan bracelet of ninety small keys Fig. 2.34 Kehinde Wiley, Puma World Cup Africa Collaboration, Samuel Eto’o, oil on canvas, 72” x 60”, 2010, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery 89 exemplifies the wearing of keys as a representation of power (Fig. 2.35). Beginning in the fifteenth century onwards the Akan obtained keys from Europeans in trade, and by 1601 it was reported that they wore them in bunches around the body.145 Later bunches of keys were customarily kept among the stool property of the various Akan states, signifying the power and wealth of the state, and publicly exhibited at festivals.146 An Akan proverb about keys reads Asem bi na ehini asem bi sfoa meaning one question acts as the key to another.147 In Kumasi, this type of bracelet is called basahia.148 The pattern of keys surrounding Eto’o suggests his radiating power and associates him with many aphorisms using the symbolism of keys. Wiley’s Unity portrait commissioned by PUMA depicts all three Football stars, in a pose that was inspired by a pre-colonial African pendant found while touring the Continent.149 A number of similar pendants, which are semicircular and feature a triadic composition with a central figure flanked by attendants who support his hands, may relate to the iconography of the Osun cult.150 The central figure wears a necklace that bears a large object or perhaps a “ball of medicine” 145 Timothy F. Garrard, Gold of Africa (Geneva: Barbier-Mueller Museum, and Germany: Prestel-Verlag, 1989), 229. 146 Garrard, Gold of Africa, 299. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid. 149 “Last Stop on Kehinde Wiley Unity Portrait Series Tour,” YouTube video, uploaded August 27, 2011, http://creative.puma.com/us/en/tag/kehinde-wiley/. 150 Paula Ben-Amos and Arnold Rubin, eds., The Art of Power, The Power of Art: Studies in Benin Iconography (California: University of California Los Angeles, 1983), 100. Fig. 2.35 Akan bracelet of ninety small keys, 9.5 cm, Ghana, 17th Century perhaps, collection of the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva, Switzerland 90 and holds something similar to an Osun priest’s horn used for calling witches.151 The complex imagery and symbolism of Benin pendants have a long history in the region and shed light on art as a tool of state power in Benin.152 Wiley wanted to engage with the many variations in soil pigments from Africa so the brown pigment within the paintings was custom made by PUMA using a mixture of soil samples from Ghana, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast and Mozambique.153 Wiley rendered the three athletes in front of an undulating pattern of curving vines and yellow flowers. They seem to be illuminated by very bright light that also emphasizes the lines of their muscles, bone structure, and animated facial features. The foliage overlaps the soccer players’ legs and waists, as if they stand together in a lush field, but these areas cast no shadows on their idealized bodies, collapsing the space of foreground and background. The complementary colors of their shimmering PUMA blue shirts and orange shorts pop out against the reddish brown background with green, blue, and yellow. The gesture of the athletes’ interlocked arms also seems echoed by the curving pattern. Wiley’s utopian vision for his commission is expressed in the statement, “Looking back, I just can’t help but to be amazed at how one ball creates such a sense of solidarity and bring together over 1 billion people in Africa. I can see clearly that no matter where you are from, we’re all of the same earth.”154 While this is true, these men seem to have a superhuman grace and dignity, as if they are demigods rather than regular men. At the same time, the painting is a 151 Ibid. 152 Ben-Amos and Rubin, The Art of Power, 101. 153 “PUMA Presents: Of the Same Earth,” Featuring: Samuel Eto'o, Emmanuel Eboué, John Mensah, and Kehinde Wiley, YouTube video, posted January 26, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dECwcdJMXg. 154 Ibid. 91 commercial endorsement that further commodifies the image of the Black athlete rather than presenting African men as statesmen, doctors, or intellectuals. Wiley’s commission reflects an international infatuation with the image of Black male athlete to sell products, without offering any ironic identification with the objectification of his subjects. Pattern as Beat: Hip-hop and Regular Irregular Rhythm Wiley’s pattern provides a rhythmic space that connects to the musical rhythms of hip-hop and other genres. Wiley says that hip-hop is a state of grace that begins with an ability to deal with randomness.155 In his works that use complementary color combinations, Wiley establishes a vibrant and powerful rhythm like “phat” beats in hip-hop music. For instance in the “World Stage: Brazil,” the psychedelic red and green patterns surrounding the figure in Thiogo Oliveira do Rosario Rozendo (2009) (Fig. 2.36) are almost the same as 155 Wiley and Ogunnaike, “Kehinde Wiley in Conversation with Lola Ogunnaike.” Fig. 2.36 Kehinde Wiley, Thiogo Oliveira do Rosario Rozendo, oil on canvas, 48” x 36”, 2009, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery Fig. 2.37 Kehinde Wiley, LL Cool J, oil on canvas, 96” x 72”, 2005, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery Fig. 2.38 John Singer Sargent, John D. Rockefeller Sr, oil on canvas, 70” x 60”, 1917 92 the palette of Wiley’s earlier portrait LL Cool J (2005) (Fig. 2.37). The image of Rozendo, however, has a pattern of swirling spirals that competes with the subject and the bright red of this textile reflects on the bronze face of the model rather than the pattern intruding on his space. His humble expression opposes the egotism of LL Cool J, who is painted from below so that the viewer must look up at him as if he were a god. In 2005, VH1 commissioned Wiley to paint portraits of the honorees for that year’s Hip-Hop Honors program, for which he used his trademark references to add legitimacy to paintings of this generation’s already powerful musical talents. Taking inspiration from Ron Chernow’s biography of John D. Rockefeller, LL Cool J wanted his portrait to have a pose similar to John Singer Sargent’s painting of the philanthropist (1917) (Fig. 2.38).156 However, the Sargent portrait shows the aged Rockefeller on the same level as the viewer, in a dark palette, in conservative dress, and with an unswerving expression. The patterns surrounding LL Cool J are from Rococo wallpaper and other European textiles, but the color combination is specific to a different context. The vivid bright red and green juxtaposition is often seen in factory print West African textiles and also in Jamaican fabrics, but rarely in a European or Asian context. This color combination produces a visual counterpoint that dominates the composition as much as the figure and create visual noise similar to the layers of swift rapping, electronic beats, ambient sounds, instrumentals, and appropriated tracks that typify the edginess of hip- hop music. 156 National Portrait Gallery, “Now on View: LL Cool J by Kehinde Wiley,” Face to Face (blog), Smithsonian Institution, November 19, 2009, http://face2face.si.edu/my_weblog/2009/11/now-on-view-ll-cool-j-by-kehinde-wiley.html. 93 Although Wiley’s designs are meticulously controlled, they express an irregularity and improvisational style that springs from hip-hop’s origins in African Diaspora culture and its method of appropriating many elements, such as ambient sounds and police sirens, into the mix to develop new patterns. Wiley’s rhythmic designs build upon a synesthetic aspect of mark-making, color, and pattern that has been a longstanding theme in African American art. The relationship of rhythmic pattern and music was an important part of the self-conscious construction of African American aesthetics under the Harlem Renaissance. Richard Powell and Anne Gibson have acknowledged musical qualities in the work of abstract African American painters such as Norman Lewis that contributed new aesthetic qualities to abstract painting of the 1940s and 50s. Powell has argued for a “blues aesthetic” in works by Lewis and others that shows syncopated rhythms and call-and- response structures that are so culturally ingrained, they function as organizing principles across all aspects of Black cultural production.157 Gibson also has observed that a number of abstract expressionists “adapted the formal structures of jazz but left its explicit references to its African American roots behind” 157 Graham Lock and David Murray, “Introduction – The Hearing Eye,” The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art, eds. Graham Lock and David Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4. Fig. 2.39 Norman Lewis, Jazz Musicians, oil on canvas, 36” x 26”, 1948, The Estate of Norman W. Lewis, courtesy of Landor Fine Arts, Newark. Courtesy of Kenkeleba Gallery 94 whereas Lewis “meshed analyses of the structure of jazz with visual references to its production.”158 Lewis’ gestural marks and repetitive shapes embody the layered structures and the syncopated chords of jazz, and also underlie the organizing function of pattern throughout the seeming chaos of lines. Lewis’ paintings that depict jazz performers such as Jazz Musicians (1948) (Fig. 2.39) are defined by patterns of vertical lines and swirls. Jazz Musicians shows the musician’s bodies melded with the shapes of their instruments, the Black, red, and white forms project against the red background. The punctuated vertical lines suggest the human form, as well as the necks of the bass and bows of string instruments. The lyrical movement and gesture derived from the movement of jazz and bebop inform the repeated motifs and improvisational style of his abstract paintings. In a similar way, Wiley’s syncopated designs fall within the framework of this blues aesthetic, although the flat regularity of his motifs is also influenced by the electronic music generation. Wiley’s aesthetic relates to the associative correspondences of music and visual pattern represented by many African American artists including Sam Gilliam, Charles Searles, and Moe Brooker. Gilliam said, “[j]azz leads to the acrobatics of art, and it leads to that kind of exterior thinking perhaps sometimes that even the viewer can’t see but that is very necessary to the artist.”159 Gilliam suggests that music opens the mind to free association and to improvisation that can take visual form in painting and sculpture. After Searles traveled to West Africa in 1972, his paintings and sculptures became vibrantly patterned and 158 Ann (Eden) Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 32. 159 “Artist Sam Gilliam talks to ArtsMedia News about the influence of Jazz,” YouTube video, uploaded April 23, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8chkNLRdLo. 95 referenced music with percussive rhythms and beats like the designs that direct the eye around his canvases.160 A musician himself, Searles often celebrated the completion of a work by drumming. Art historian Michael D. Harris has compared Searles’ single-color, flat shapes interspersed with areas of dense pattern to the “musical jump spaces” in jazz that that mark and keep time. In a related manner, Wiley’s African paintings from the “World Stage” series create a continuous textile rhythm interrupted only by the patterns of the models themselves, akin to the syncopated saxophone riffs, vocal refrains, and long stretches of percussion in music by Fela Kuti or King Sunny Ade. The musical aspect of Wiley’s pattern contributes to the fantasy aspect of his works like the surreal use of musical references in Jamaican artist Keith Morrison’s allegorical and lush paintings. Morrison’s large watercolor and oil paintings visualize scenes of Afro-Caribbean and jazz instruments with African sculptures, rag dolls, skeletons, and other symbolic figures. Like Wiley’s appropriation of Christian iconography in many works, Morrison’s watercolor painting Sound the Knell Slowly (2001) (Fig. 2.40) is dense with Afro- Christian symbolism. The scene of a Black crucifixion emerges from the belly of 160 Jennifer Zarro, “A Charles Searles celebration – Three concurrent exhibitions,” The Art Blog, May 20, 2013, http://www.theartblog.org/2013/05/a-charles-searles-celebration-three-concurrent-exhibitions/. Fig. 2.40 Keith Morrison, Sound the Knell Slowly, watercolor, 30” x 40”, 2001 96 a steel pan drum, and its title is like a drumroll of death.161 The scene of three crucified men with dreadlocks, one presumably Christ, takes place on a drum that represents Calvary. Morrison blends African figures and musical instruments for Christian elements such as the drumsticks, one of which becomes a halo. Unlike Wiley’s rendition of Christian icons into urban African American men, as in The Blessing Christ, Morrison’s Holy Mother is a slave doll, and other African sculptures augment the tableau in addition to a lamb and a goat (more revered in the Caribbean than the lamb).162 A menacing knife rests near the top of the composition, perhaps representing the sword that stabbed Christ on the cross. Enveloping all are musical instruments that suggest Biblical Jericho and also the blues and jazz. The sharp angles and perpendicular lines of these objects punctuate the surface with a dance-like rhythm that also refers to music. However, unlike the rich notes of Morrison’s narrative scenes and imaginative compositions, Wiley’s portraits simulate power with their flat and monotonous percussive rhythms, akin to electronic drumbeats. Whereas those painters who listen to jazz seem to employ improvisational and asymmetrical marks and colors, hip-hop generates a repetitious mark- making that is interrupted by other passages. Wiley samples from art historical prototypes in a similar way to how rappers lift existing instrumental tracks or percussion breaks from hit songs. Robert Hobbs describes Wiley’s appropriation of vibrant pattern and art historical contexts as analogous to how hip-hop artists 161 Keith Morrison, email-message to author, February 9, 2012. 162 Ibid. 97 invent their musical compositions.163 Wiley’s preference for alpha-male models, the visual equivalents of rappers, who dominate a soundtrack through their cadenced style of speaking over the beats, is another example of his hip-hop aesthetic.164 Similar to hip-hop’s incorporation of a wide range of prototypical musical styles including classical, jazz, pop and reggae, Wiley takes his inspiration from a broad range of historical and cultural sources. Hobbs notes that Wiley’s dominant background patterns are analogous to the appropriated instrumental tracks or percussion breaks of hip-hop music, and they also assume the abstract role of being both opaque and resistant to representation of anything other than themselves.165 Hobbs notes that textile designs in Wiley’s art “briefly halts the past/present contrapuntal reading of the illusions his art-historical prototypes and present-day models enact.”166 Like the printed backdrops of Malian photographer Seydou Keïta and Dutch wax cottons of British artist Yinka Shonibare, “they also assume the highly important role of being both opaque and resistant to the representation of anything other than themselves.”167 Wiley comments that his combinations of pattern that are often imposed upon the model and art historical reference causes a tension and “[a]t times, the ground is fighting. It’s taking over the figure. It’s jockeying for position,” creating a certain hostility.168 By reinforcing the painting’s self- reflexiveness, the exoticism of these patterns blends cultures unrelated to his subjects or their art historical 163 Robert Hobbs, “Kehinde Wiley: Détourning Representation,” The World Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2008), 27. 164 Ibid., 28. 165 Ibid. 166 Robert Hobbs, “Kehinde Wiley’s Conceptual Realism,” in Kehinde Wiley by Thelma Golden et. Al. (Rizzoli, New York, 2012), 49. 167 Ibid., 48. 168 David Lewis, “The Art World: Kehinde Wiley,” Prophecy Magazine 9 (Summer 2006), unpaginated. 98 prototypes, undermining a seemingly modernist conventionality.169 Wiley’s patterns synthesize styles and time periods in a similar way to appropriated music in hip-hop. Wiley’s patterns encircle his models like halos that radiate from their youthful and expressive bodies and communicate vitality in the same visual language as hip-hop. Power in hip-hop is most apparent in the aggressively layered, dynamic array of shapes assumed by the gesturing and dancing body as in his painting St. Sebastian II (Fig. 2.41) (2006), in which the tattoos and the patterns complement one another. Hip-hop dances contain an assertive angularity of body posture, controlled body isolations that allow for “popping” and “krumping” and an insistent virtuosic rhythmicity.170 Whether defiant, proud, or coolly composed, Wiley’s models radiate a powerful aura. Wiley says, I believe that hip-hop is a state of grace that begins with an ability to deal with randomness … there’s an essence that came from the …. African people that were enslaved … from having everything suppressed and destroyed. It strengthened their ability to improvise and find joy in the smallest moments … my work at its best tries to acknowledge patterns and deal with Black masculinity.171 169 Ibid. 170 Thomas F. DeFrantz, “The Black Beat Made Visible: Hip-hop Dance and Body Power,” Accessed August 8, 2011, web.mit.edu/people/defrantz/Documents/BlackBeat.PDF. 171 Wiley and Ogunnaike, “Kehinde Wiley in Conversation with Lola Ogunnaike.” Fig. 2.41 Kehinde Wiley, St. Sebastian II, oil on canvas, 96” x 72”, 2006, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery 99 Wiley’s patterns amplify the subject’s hip-hop bravado and charismatic energy with their rhythms and bold complementary color combinations. They interrupt the foreground to highlight the model’s physique and define a space of authority for his figures in the same way that hip-hop’s repetition embellishes and plays upon variations of words and posturing. Wiley’s rhythmic designs, which evidence a visual equivalent of the beat, are the key aspect that ties his work to hip-hop, as much as the style of the models themselves. Africanist Halifu Osumare analyzes the force of these phat beats in hip-hop music that derive from their African rhythmic aesthetics and that define the postmodern cool of popular culture.172 She observes, [R]hythm is the foundation of the emcee’s oral phrasing and metaphoric allusions that create a dense polyrhythmic bricolage. In global hip-hop, rap music’s approach to the layered, polyrhythmic aspects of the Africanist aesthetic unites with other world music, such as the Hawaiian hula ipu rhythms, bhangra music emanating from Punjabi-Asian British pop culture in London, and kwaito music of South Africa … Hence, the answer to why hip-hop is so compelling to youth around the globe can be discovered in the most basic human connection: the rhythmic life force itself.173 These phat beats draw upon the lowest registers of the synthesized and looped bass sounds, and they are engineered using the most powerful electronic systems to produce effects similar to an African drum beat. The structure of hip- hop music depends on rhythmic and textural tonal layering that use circular phrasing patterns rather than linear progressive ones.174 While hip-hop instrumentation differs from West African drumming, the “principles of multiple meter and cross-rhythms produced in call-and-response modes, along with the upbeat access that are emphasized as much as the downbeat⎯all converge in a 172 Halifu Osumare, The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2007), 43. 173 Osumare, The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves, 43. 174 Ibid., 44. 100 particular African-based musical methodology. These musical characteristics are found in African American swing, bebop, gospel, soul, funk, disco, and rap,” in addition to many Caribbean genres and jazz.175 The term “flow” is used in hip- hop to denote either the rhythmic fluidity of the beat or an emcee’s rhyming, but the breaks and ruptures in combination with flow more fully explain the energy of hip-hop aesthetics.176 Wiley’s patterns provide a visual flow that runs across and interrupts the space of the figure. The logos and motifs of fashion are another aspect of power in the world of hip-hop that Wiley appropriates in his portraits. These highly theatrical fashions associated with gangsta rap include its preference for cavalier baggy pants, flapping shirttails originally associated with prison inmates, Black-ink tattoos and bandanas of Chicano gangsters, and do-rags. Since the 1990s, these styles have been topped off with high fashion logos and generous amounts of jewel-encrusted platinum and silver “bling,” which both play into and differ from traditional portraits of bejeweled nobles.177 African-American men sporting the bling earrings, rings, gold chains, and iridescent silk-screened patterns on their t- shirts and hoodies seem comparable to the decorative qualities of many African textiles and brightly colored fabrics, not to mention the extraordinary gold jewelry worn by Akan kings. American artist Robert Pruitt has also explored this highly decorative aspect of African-American fashion through his series of embellished guns with Swarovsky crystals designed in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in 2010. In Pruitt’s series, the guns taken from wars that 175 Ibid., 45. 176 Ibid., 47. 177 Hobbs, “Kehinde Wiley: Détourning Representation,” 28. 101 specifically reference turning points in African-American history, from the Civil War era to the present, become fashion accessories and headdresses, as in one gun that serves as the medallion for a gold chain. Wiley layers decorative patterns like bling jewelry and tattoos on top of the model’s arms, chest, and legs. In a similar way as Wiley’s portraits, collages by artist Rashaad Newsome exploit a notion of bling through extremely decorative hip- hop style. Originally from New Orleans, Newsome conflates European heraldry with hip- hop swagger. Says Newsome of his conglomeration of images, “A coat of arms is really a collage of objects that represent social status and economic status and status as a warrior, so they’re kind of like portraits without using the figure.”178 His exhibition Herald at Marlborough Chelsea in January 2011 features many tributes to excess and affluence through details such as a cross encrusted with jewels, a diamond Piaget watch, objectified female body parts, flowers with expensive brooches, rings, a yacht and a jet, Black American Express cards, and tons of gold chains that make up intricately patterned coats of arms. His piece Black Barbie (2011) (Fig. 2.42) is a tribute to female rapper Nicki Minaj, and she is represented as a bodiless pair of legs in high heels surrounded by a kaleidoscope of gems and, like a confection, elaborate neo-Baroque pink frame. This visual accumulation is comparable to 178 Ibid. Fig. 2.42 Rashaad Newsome, Black Barbie, collage in antique frame, automotive paint, 56 3/8” x 43 ½ x 3”, 2011 102 the rapid-fire spoken word of Minaj’s bawdy hip-hop songs. In each of the corners are Black fists clenching money. Newsome appropriates advertising images of bling and its conflation with celebrity and status in European history to suggest that this materialism is the contemporary fantasy and opiate of the masses. Like Newsome’s critique of corporate industry’s commodification of hip- hop style and associations with the historical iconography of European nobility, Wiley’s paintings incorporate the contemporary pervasiveness of branding by featuring the logos of PUMA, Adidas, and other companies that form decorative patterns, similar to the namedropping of famous designers such as Gucci, Versace, and Vuitton in hip-hop songs to convey status and cachet. These logos invoke the fantasy of wealth and status as suggested both in hip-hop lyrics and reality TV shows, as well as models of sexiness in fashion. However, Wiley has also participated in the commodification of hip-hop culture and fashion through his collaborations with PUMA and by promoting logos in his paintings, rather than offering his own critique of its shallow and often stereotyping use of Black male models. By incorporating these styles and rhythmic patterns into his work, Wiley attracts a more youthful, hip audience than would ordinarily be interested in contemporary painting. In a theory that she calls connective marginalities, Halifu Osumare argues that outside of the United States, constructed meanings around hip-hop culture overlap with issues of social marginality.179 Global inequalities coalesce with Africanist aesthetics in the international lure of hip-hop. At the same time, Wiley’s references to art history attract high art patrons. His patterns 179 Osumare, The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves, 69. 103 present a visual counterpoint, a rhythmic texture and beat that manifests as a space of dreamlike fantasy for his figures. Through the synesthetic experience of his paintings, viewers are brought into a world where the diversity of Black beauty is honored, the layering of cultural histories is re-examined, and a more inclusive version of history is established. The Black Dandy, the Exotic Odalisque, and the Ebony Diva Wiley’s heavy use of pattern calls upon the seductiveness and magnetic image of the European dandy, who is known for his sartorial flamboyance and allure to both male and female audiences. The dandy was ideologically and socially idiosyncratic, serving as a cultural alternative to mainstream bourgeois society, a sartorial figure acting the part of an aristocrat within the context of an emerging modern nation-state.180 Yet the Black dandy is also an anomaly in African Diaspora culture. While the European dandy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was tolerated for his fashion and behavioral excess, African American men who had the audacity to dress with extravagance were publicly ridiculed, physically attacked, and often lynched.181 Symbolically, the Black dandy’s wardrobe spoke to modernity, freedom, rebellion, and power.182 As documented in Lenwood Morris’ painting of Alain Locke and James VanDerZee’s photograph of Prince Tovalou Houénou, the Black dandy manifested aspects of Baudelaire’s legendary flâneur: “an urban idler and habitual witness who, through his associations and conscientiously constructed 180 Richard J. Powell, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 69. 181 Ibid, 70. 182 Powell, 71. 104 self-representation, extracts the timeless from the temporal.”183 In his important study, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, Brent Hayes Edwards explores the transatlantic dispersals of Black intellectuals and artists between the World Wars. He shows that patterns of migration and exchange articulated the credentials of Black dandies such as Alain Leroy Locke, Marcus Garvey, Tovalou Houénou, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay, and demonstrates that Black dandies were masters of “the art of seduction through transgression.”184 The Black dandy’s unabashed narcissism is what resurrected him from invisibility and elevated him to personhood.185 Wiley’s models masquerade as contemporary Black dandies, but they also traverse time through his references to canonical art historical works. As Wiley suggests with his subjects’ distinctive hip-hop clothing and his own embellished backgrounds, the Black dandy does not attempt to play the role of his white counterpart. As Monica L. Miller points out, “The Black dandy’s style is not solely a mimicry of European dress or effort to achieve power associated with whiteness, but was instead a Black interpretation designed to offer the Black performer a greater degree of mobility within the expressive form.186 Furthermore, “Black and Blackness are themselves signs of Diaspora, of cosmopolitanism, that African subjects did not choose but from which they necessarily re-imagined themselves” and therefore Black dandyism is an 183 Ibid, 72. 184 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 185 Powell, 74. 186 Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2009), 14. 105 “interpretation and materialization of the complexity of this cosmopolitanism.”187 The dandy’s vivid affectations such as fancy clothes, attitude, and fierce gestures represent more than compulsive self-fashioning, but are an attempt to control representation, self, and cultural expression.188 Wiley’s models become dandies into the fantasy world of his paintings with their lavish patterns. Although traditionally the Black dandy was a heterosexual figure, in the work of contemporary artists such as Kehinde Wiley, a homoerotic aspect is implied because of his sartorial expressiveness and the self-conscious focus on his beauty. Only a celebrity of pop music or the sports industry has an equal amount of social freedom to decorate and celebrate his body with fashion. Wiley’s patterns that blur gender distinctions and establish an ethos of coolness for his contemporary dandies function similarly to designs in paintings by Mustafa Maluka, a South African artist now based in Helsinki and New York. Maluka depicts heroically-scaled faces and torsos against decorative and often striped backgrounds. The faces are often multi-racial or racially and gender ambiguous, alluring, and their expressions enigmatic. Maluka appropriates images of male and female models from fashion magazines, whose vague expressions often resemble passport photos and mug shots or cell phone photos from parties posted on Facebook and other social networking sites.189 The casualness of Maluka’s scouting for images is reminiscent of Wiley’s sourcing the streets for models, or Wiley’s early use of a mugshot for the subject of a portrait while an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. 187 Ibid., 6. 188 Ibid., 7. 189 Holland Cotter, “Out of Africa, Whatever Africa May Be,” Art Review: 'FLOW', New York Times, April 4, 2008, http://www.bertrand-gruner.com/pdf/artistspress/new-york-times-maluka.pdf. 106 Like Wiley, Maluka often elicits a visual tension between the foreground through the subject’s clothing or colors of the person’s face and hair and the rhythmically patterned background. In The Answers Get Harder and Harder (2009) (Fig. 2.43), Maluka shows a handsome young man against a dominating backdrop of pink with wedges of pastel colors flaring out in all directions overlapped by heavy Black dots. The figure himself, who is perhaps of African and European descent, has a long face flecked with warm and cool colors that merge in a spattered brownish with yellow and blue highlights. His hair sports a different pattern that suggests angular designs shaved or bleached into the hair, while his shirt has another design of red and green biomorphic shapes. He has a strong jaw line, chiseled features, and a determined expression, but the pastels and pinks behind him also suggest a youthful or even feminine playfulness. His lips are curved and painted a sensuous red, also expressing his eroticism, and perhaps homoerotic allure. Maluka’s use of color has a heightened, Pop art sensibility, similar to Warhol’s silkscreen paintings, in which the color glows and replaces any naturalistic sense of light. In a similar way, Wiley’s Mame Ngagne (2007) (Fig. 2.44) portrait of a young Senegalese man from the “World Stage” series features a delicate pattern Fig. 2.43 Mustafa Maluka, The Answers Get Harder and Harder, oil and acrylic on canvas, 72” x 52.4”, 2009 107 of flying birds from an African factory printed cloth that overlaps the young man’s torso and even the pendant on his necklace that shows a highly detailed photograph of his marabout, probably identifying the young man as a Mouride. In Mame Ngagne, the offbeat patterning of the bird motif and its diagonal lines suggest the illusion of movement, as does the partially turned position of the model. The magnetic, flamboyant subjects depicted by Wiley and Maluka seem to exist only in an urban, contemporary setting. However, Black dandies have always had a powerful presence in African and African Diaspora religion and cultures, as in the many manifestations of Eshu-Elegba, Yoruba god of the crossroads, whose nature often associates him with the Black dandy. For his exhibition at Deitch Projects in New York City entitled Black Light (2009), Wiley showed monumentally high resolution, digitally manipulated photographs such as Dion ‘OJ’ Bey, After Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ The Virgin Adoring the Host (2009) (Fig. 2.45) and After Sir Joshua Reynolds’ “Portrait of Samuel Johnson” (Fig. 2.46) that reveal how he manipulates color, pattern, and surface even before he begins the painted subject, and allows viewers to experience the construction of a fictional image. Wiley’s heightened exploitation of light in this series emphasizes the luminosity emanating from his subjects and increases this sense of a dream-world, “enveloping them into the conversation Fig. 2.44 Kehinde Wiley, Mame Ngagne, 2007, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery 108 that is an extension of their singular as well as separate existence.”190 He comments, The light was played up, not only in the religious sense, but I went so far as to use some techniques of the late 90s hip-hop video lighting, where that type of rapturous light is married with something more like a Hype Williams vernacular, and the heightening of the orifice, which plays up the more sexual use of light.191 Soliciting his models from Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn, Wiley seems to have picked a range of young men who are more muscular and masculine. However, all of the images accentuate their glistening lips, gleaming skin, and radiance of the model’s eyes and tone. Krista Thompson describes their eyes, which emit a halo of white light and reflect the source of their illumination, evoking the art historical way that “[l]ight governed ideals of beauty and the sublime, of visibility and invisibility, of the sacred and profane.”192 This inner glow is another way of showing the distinctive magnetism of the dandy. Wiley is one of many artists who sought to represent Black light and to pun on this title since the 1960s, and he does so through his heightened color and pattern. Artist and activist Faith Ringgold made a series of “Black Light” 190 Brian Keith Jackson, “I See You,” in Kehinde Wiley: Black Light, Brian Keith Jackson and Krista A. Thompson (Brooklyn, NY: Powerhouse Cultural Entertainment, 2009), 9. 191 Ibid., 9. 192 Krista A. Thompson, “How to See a Work of Art in Blinding Light,” in Kehinde Wiley: Black Light, Brian Keith Jackson and Krista A. Thompson (Brooklyn, NY: Powerhouse Cultural Entertainment, 2009), 11. Fig. 2.45 Kehinde Wiley, Dion ‘OJ’ Bey, After Jean- Auguste-Dominique Ingres' "The Virgin with the Host", archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle fine art paper, 30" x 24.5", 2009 Fig. 2.46 Kehinde Wiley, After Sir Joshua Reynolds’ “Portrait of Samuel Johnson”, archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle fine art paper, 30” x 24.5”, 2009 109 paintings exhibited in 1970, and in an “effort to reflect on the use of light in art history and its implicit role in manifesting whiteness and denigrating Blackness, removed the color white from her palette.”193 In her “Black Light” series, the painting Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger, 1969 (Fig. 2.47) shows the American flag as it would mark the race to the moon. “Die” overlays the stars and “nigger” is spelled through the pattern of stripes on July 20, 1969. In the 1960s, the space program was unpopular with many African Americans because they saw it as a pretext to funnel public money away from the poor and minorities.194 Thompson argues that Wiley’s series represents a broader disruption of what light signifies, by using the type of illumination used in clubs, and therefore casting a critical perspective on photography and the way in which it was employed to fix race, normalize whiteness, and visualize Blackness.195 The title “Black Light” is another example of Henry Louis Gates’ term “signifyin” and it puns on the gap between the denotative and figurative meanings of these words. Light and pattern act as a foil to the gritty reality of urban spaces to shed light on those who are Black. In Wiley’s “Black Light” series, floral patterns and vines are animated and suggestively interrupt the space of the figure to suggest eroticism, fertility, and complement the splendor that often surrounds the Black dandy, and decorate his 193 Ibid. 194 Hunter Braithwaite, “Faith Ringgold: American People, Black Light,” There is No There, November 28, 2011 at 9:43am, accessed February 14, 2012, http://www.thereisnothere.org/2011/11/faith-ringgold-american-people-black-light/ 195 Thompson, “How to See a Work of Art in Blinding Light,” 13. Fig. 2.47 Faith Ringgold, Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger, oil on canvas, 36” x 50”, 1969, collection of the artist 110 skin like tattoos. Dion ‘OJ’ Bey, After Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ The Virgin Adoring the Host shows a handsome young man clad in a colorfully patterned baseball cap and a pink, purple, and white Adidas sweatshirt with turquoise stripes. The heightened detail of the photograph adds to the artificial slickness of the image, like an advertisement. The dense foliage of the background is appropriated from a contemporary home décor design rather than a Neoclassical European wallpaper or textile. The patterns serve as a flat and surreal layer that embellish the subjects’ luscious surfaces and contrast against his masculine bravado. Wiley’s electric color arrangements in the “Black Light” series are most heightened in the portrait entitled Sharrod Hosten, After Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Portrait of Doctor Samuel Johnson (2009), which features a dominant turquoise, pink, and coral elaborate rococo-esque background that intrudes into the foreground over the model’s arms and torso. The hot and cold color contrasts evoke Oriental opulence positioned against the model’s Black and white satin ensemble. Artist Victor Ekpuk has observed, “Kehinde Wiley is a dream-maker and he is also creating wet dreams.” In response, Wiley said, “There is something called a lucid dream … in that state of dreaming, you actually know that you’re dreaming … throughout West Africa, what we call the artist comes from the dream space.”196 This dream space is also constructed through the artificiality of the light in the image. Wiley’s portraits satisfy a lust for the exoticization and display of the Black body upon which the dandy consciously plays. Iké Udé’s Sartorial Anarchy 196 “Global Africa,” YouTube video. 111 photographic series similarly constructs a framework for exploring the portrait against a staged environment and manipulates the theme of an exceptional, but difficult to define, Black gentleman. Thomas Carlyle described a dandy as “a clothes-wearing man, a man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of clothes wisely and well.”197 Udé’s Sartorial Anarchy: Untitled #4 (Fig. 2.48) shows him in the incongruous pairing of the familiar (straw boater garnished with flowers, football socks, English shoes, Boy Scout shirt) with the less familiar items (eighteenth- century neckwear, vintage wool breeches, an Afghani folk-coat) that also contrasts with the elaborate Turkish rug and ornate cloth flung over a stool. In this patterned mélange, Udé challenges the social construct of our fashion aesthetics and also invokes a history of exoticization. He also makes the African man appear a person of the world, of high status, and refinement. Lowery Stokes Sims observes, “Sartorial Anarchy demonstrates a debt to artifice while acknowledging an ongoing back-and-forth between culturally subjective ambiguities in men’s dress codes and its attendant beauty, flaws, and 197 Lowery Sims and Leslie King-Hammond, “Artist Statement by Iona Rozeal Brown,” in The Global Africa Project (New York: The Museum of Arts and Design and Prestel Publishing, 2010), 98. Fig. 2.48 Iké Udé, Sartorial Anarchy: Untitled #4, pigment on satin paper, 40” x 36”, 2010 112 contradictions.”198 Similar to self-portraits by Udé, Wiley combines textures and designs that define a surreal space for a powerful Black, male protagonist, and therefore invents a new narrative for the Black male subject. Wiley’s intricate decorative backgrounds have an affinity to the work of major African studio photographers such as Malian master Seydou Keïta. Revived by curators in the early 1990s, Keïta’s photographs of elegance and iconographic power were “…mnemonic time bombs that exploded the mythologies and ethnographic obsessions of Africa by the likes of the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) and other safari photographers.”199 Keïta often employed textile backdrops with bold, graphic designs that create a visual counterpoint with motifs and details of the portrait subject. For instance, in Untitled (Man with Flower) (Fig. 2.49) (1959), Keïta depicts a refined- looking, slender, and cosmopolitan African man, a true dandy. He wears a white suit with a pen in his pocket, a watch, striped tie, and eyeglasses, all perhaps props from Keïta’s studio if not the man’s own possessions that construct the image of elegance and education. The model looks with sensitivity and dignity at the camera, and holds a flower in his hand. Behind him, the delicate patterns of a floral print adorn the fabric backdrop and pick up the elegant details throughout the image. Keïta’s representation of an empowered, 198 Sims and King-Hammond, “Artist Statement by Iona Rozeal Brown,” 98. 199 Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art (Milan, Italy: Damiani, 2009), 36. Fig. 2.49 Seydou Keïta, Untitled (Man with Flower), 1959 113 educated class that could afford to have a portrait and used props to show their success and modernity. Using an American equivalent of upper middle-class textiles, Wiley’s backdrops for the “Black Light” portraits were inspired by home décor magazines from the 1950s and Martha Stewart’s home collection of 1999, offering a nostalgic fantasy of good taste and a foil to his model’s urban, hip-hop swagger. Wiley admires and collects the works of Cameroonian-born photographer Samuel Fosso, who sets a precedent for staging the photograph with fantasy backdrops of pattern.200 Fosso’s self-portraits represent the artist in an array of imaginative costumes and guises that communicate a plethora of desires and fantasies about the Black dandy.201 In his images, Fosso often utilizes textile backdrops ironically in both Black and white and color images. For instance, in his “Tati” series (1997) Fosso bought garishly patterned outfits from the popular Parisian bargain-basement seller of cheap goods, called tati, and photographed himself in saturated color, pushing the work towards a masquerade and parody of social types. Also, in his photograph Le Chef: celui a vendu l’Afrique aux colons (1997) (Fig. 2.50), Fosso perches like a pasha on his 200 Krista A. Thompson, “How to See a Work of Art in Blinding Light,” 13. 201 Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art, 38. Fig. 2.50 Samuel Fosso, Le Chef: celui a vendu l’Afrique aux colons, color print, 40. 2” x 40.2”, 1997 114 fake leopard print throne against a busy backdrop of three bold West African factory print textiles on the wall and four other patterns under his feet. These contrast with his faux leopard print loincloth, fur hat, and body bedecked in many necklaces and adornments, including funky sunglasses. It is the Dutch wax print fabric background, as much as the commercial leopard print and jewelry, which challenge the authenticity of “traditional” African in the image. In contrast, Wiley’s “World Stage: Lagos~Dakar” paintings enlist the Dutch wax print, but mix it up with American brands of youth culture. Flamboyant Black dandies by Fosso and Wiley employ pattern and irony to challenge stereotypes of African men. Wiley’s celebration of illuminated Black skin offset by patterns builds upon the depiction of the Black dandy by African American artists Kerry James Marshall and Barkley Hendricks. These artists often emphasize the darker tones of the models’ complexions and make them appear shiny black, an emphasis on the beauty of Black skin that may relate to the politics and visual aesthetics of the Black Power movement and “Black is beautiful” consciousness of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Curator Franklin Sirmans writes, “Marshall has amplified Blackness in his figures with charcoal Black characters against luscious super-saturated primary colors to question the way we see Black people in the history of art.”202 This aspect of Black beauty is not simply an aesthetic choice, or even a political one, but an existential space from which the artist speaks. Wiley cites Marshall’s paintings as a longtime influence on his work, setting a precedent for a vision of dignified Black identity. 202 Franklin Sirmans et al., “Art Chronicle,” 30 Americans (Florida: Rubell Family Collection, 2008), 21. 115 Marshall’s painting of a Black barber shop, a space that deals with male beauty and style, may have inspired many of Wiley’s images of dandies. Wiley remembers that as a boy he saw Marshall’s barber shop painting, De Style (1993) (Fig. 2.51) that hangs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and stood out because of the lack of other images of Black people in the museum.203 In De Style, a group of Black men gather at a barber shop, a place where men bond over discussions about politics, news of the day, and sports. Wiley recalls the impact of Marshall’s advice to him, while he was a student at Yale University, about painting an empathetic awareness of Blackness as an African American artist. Wiley comments, Kerry James Marshall … spoke about this [difference in how one paints Black bodies if one is Black]. He said there’s certain empathy to the softening of the hardness of the contour. It’s a choice, are you going to create an angular or graphic edge on your figures or are you going to create something that’s much more empathetic.204 However, whereas Marshall subverts stereotypes by literally employing the color Black to represent African-American skin, Wiley focuses on the Black dandy. Wiley’s portraits also build upon the important precedent of Barkley Hendricks’ surfaces and decorative patterns that adorn the Black dandy. Hendricks’ idea of an embodied and robust African American attitude coincided in the late sixties 203 Maxwell Williams, “Kehinde Wiley: The Transcontinental Breadth of a Contemporary Master,” Flaunt, no. 114, (March 24, 2011): 137. 204 “Global Africa,” YouTube video. Fig. 2.51 Kerry James Marshall, De Style, 1993, Los Angeles County Museum of Art 116 with a groundswell of racial consciousness and push for increased Black visibility. He introduced the subject of city-dwelling Black individuals whose power lay not in words or deeds but in clothing, posture, and color.205 He focused on attractive, young African Americans, but his flâneurs had more of an edge and a street vernacular in their gestures and fashion, insistent patterning to their clothing, athleticism, and other aspects of Black popular culture.206 Powell acknowledges the legacy of Hendricks’ portraiture when he writes, “Hendricks’s ‘school’ built its attitudinal and dandified terribleness with the tools of a learned pictorialism.”207 Hendricks’ manipulation of matte versus glazed areas creates the effect of focal juxtapositions and dissonances that psychologically lead to social and political interpretations of the paintings. His emphasis on the allure of Black skin and urban clothing was unprecedented: both counter internalized racism and celebrate the sitter’s confidence and bravado. Hendricks’ models wear flamboyantly coordinated or Afrocentric clothing, often with specific colors and vibrant patterns, as in the painting Blood (Donald Formey) (1975) that features a handsome “blood brotha” in a deep red plaid. Not unlike Hendricks’ portraits, many of Wiley’s models have hip and funky hairstyles that range from Afros to dreadlocks and even bleached-blond. In addition to his models stylish clothing, Wiley heightens the luminosity of Black skin by oiling or spritzing the models’ bodies with water, making their lips appear pink and glossy. Hendricks’s process of beginning with a portrait photograph that serves as a guide for the 205 Powell, Cutting a Figure, 128. 206 Ibid., 131. 207 Ibid., 129. 117 painting seems to be a direct inspiration for Wiley, as well as Hendricks’s practice of choosing models off the street or working with friends and acquaintances. Wiley’s ornate backdrops also may also relate to Hendricks’s patterned backgrounds that offset some of his figures. In Hendricks’s painting Sweet Thang (Lynn Jenkins) (1975 – 76), the Islamic tiling counterpoises the model’s iridescent skirt and the Oriental rug. In his portrait of George Jules Taylor entitled Family Jules (NNN) (1974) (Fig. 2.52), a title that puns on male genitalia, Hendricks features the same backdrop of an Islamic tile wall. Both of these works play upon the Orientalist tradition of iconic French paintings of odalisques by artists such as Eugène Delacroix and Henri Matisse, as well as Alice Neel’s languid nude portrait of John Perreault. Taylor’s splayed, reclining position juxtaposed against the soft, white couch exploit the psychological intersection of race and sexuality, along with his ornate marijuana smoking pipe and ornamental kimono draped over the couch, to convey a dreamy half-consciousness. The initials “NNN” stand for “No Naked Niggahs,” parodying a rude rebuke against Black nudity and undermining the seriousness of the odalisque tradition.208 Wiley’s two images entitled Sleep (2008-9) (Figs. 2.53 and 2.54) of model Mark Shavers as an the idealized reclining male semi-nude are inspired by Jean- 208 Ibid., 146. Fig. 2.52 Barkley Hendricks, Family Jules (NNN), 1974, oil and acrylic on canvas, 91 ½” x 60 ¼”, 1974, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 118 Bernard Restout’s painting Sleep (1771) (Fig. 2.55) and may perhaps also reference Hendricks’ Family Jules (NNN) as well as other poses from art history such as the Pietà or other martyred figures. In Wiley’s Black Light exhibition, Sleep represents Shavers in a high-resolution photograph, his skin sprayed with droplets of water, and only a white fabric conceals his loins. His muscular body drapes sinuously across a simple studio bed, propped on some pillows. The photographic image is completely devoid of patterns and therefore provides a wonderful comparison to a second oil-painted image of the model in the same pose. This painted image of Shavers, included in Wiley’s “Down” series, shows the model surrounded by a dense and lush floral pattern that also seems to grow from around him and delicately overlaps his feet and thigh. The floral pattern in green, yellow, orange, and blue, provides a romantic space, as if we have come across sleeping beauty surrounded by flowers and ready to be awakened with the life of a kiss. Unlike the realism of Hendricks’ portraits, Wiley provides a contemporary romanticism so that viewers delight in the decorative motifs and the surfaces of the body rather than gain insight into the specific identity of the Fig. 2.53 Kehinde Wiley, Sleep, 2008-9, After Jean-Bernard Restout’s “Sleep”, archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle fine art paper, 30” x 50”, 2009, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, Stephen Friedman Gallery Fig. 2.54 Kehinde Wiley, Sleep, 2008-9, oil on canvas, 132” x 300”, 2008, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL, courtesy of Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, Stephen Friedman Gallery Fig. 2.55 Jean-Bernard Resout, Sleep, 1771, 38 3/8” x 51 1/8”, 1771, Cleveland Museum of Art 119 model. The title of this series perhaps puns on the idea of the “down low brotha,” but it also focuses on the art historical theme of the fallen warrior, the slain Christ, and other tragic heroes from mythology. In a comparison of Family Jules (NNN) and Wiley’s St. John the Baptist II (2006) (Fig. 2.56), Powell observes that the perceptual differences between these works correspond to the same contrasts from playful irreverence to blunt hubris, and racial idealism to postmodern cynicism.209 Powell writes, “In sharp contrast to Wiley’s corporeal exclamations and competing surface ‘bling,’ the odalisque-like parody through which Hendricks operates in Family Jules (NNN) puts a real body and a whimsical background in a complementary, if not oppositional, relationship: the painting’s neoclassical whiteness and Islamic décor invaded by incisive yet casual, Black male nakedness.”210 Therefore, Wiley reinterprets Hendricks’ 70’s dandies with a 21st century take on Black Atlantic pattern, style, and masculine bravado. In his “World Stage” series and also recent explorations in photography such as the “Black Light” series, Wiley draws upon and also challenges the traditions of the Black dandy and the exotic odalisque. Wiley’s “Down” images in comparison with the work of African American artist Mickalene Thomas and Afro- 209 Ibid., 169. 210 Ibid. Fig. 2.56 Kehinde Wiley, St. John the Baptist II, 2006, archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle fine art paper, 30” x 24.5”, 2009 120 British artist Grace Ndiritu reveal how these serpentine, horizontal compositions play upon the trope of the exotic odalisque. Thomas similarly utilizes decorative designs to situate the Black subject in an erotic fantasy space, representing the female nude or semi-nude set in lavish, domestic interior sets following in the tradition of Venuses and odalisques by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Diego Velázquez, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, and Romare Bearden.211 She photographs her models in patterned dresses reminiscent of the 1970s and seated on animal print and seventies-inspired patterns, and reassembles these photographs into collages that serve as studies for her rhinestone-encrusted enamel paintings. Engaging with the tradition of odalisques by Manet, Picasso, and many others, Thomas’ women challenge that history with their provocative and conscious gazes. In A Little Taste Outside of Love (2007) (Fig. 2.57), named after the iconic Tina Turner song, Thomas shows a nude African-American woman in a confrontational reclining pose— also 211 Rudolph, Pattern ID, 14. Fig. 2.57 Mickalene Thomas, In A Little Taste Outside of Love, acrylic, enamel, and rhinestones on wood panel, 108” x 144”, 2007 121 referencing Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus and Ingres’ Odalisque—who floats amidst an array of floral, animal print and other graphic patterns. Thomas’ work responds to the Black is beautiful concept and Afrocentric styles of the early 1970s. Thomas’ subjects and their flashy textiles engage the viewer in the history of how the Black female body has been depicted as sensual and foreign object on display for the white male viewer’s pleasure, although in this case, from a Black lesbian perspective. As a tribute to his associate, Wiley transforms Thomas into a hip-hop dandy in his photograph from the “Black Light” series entitled After George Romney’s Elizabeth Warren as Hebe (2009) (Fig. 2.58). In contrast to Romney’s portrait, Wiley has removed the dramatic shadow behind the figure and placed Thomas against a vivid floral pattern that competes with her red and green shirt and “Etch-a-Sketch” belt buckle. Wiley’s rare portrait of a woman is both a homoerotic joke between the artists as well as a nod of mutual respect, and is consistent with his conventions of patterning that celebrate the Black male dandy. Like Wiley, Thomas embellishes her surfaces to a similar high effect to elevate everyday Black womanhood to iconic status. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith describes Thomas’ unique blend of styles, From a foundation of Pop Art, Ms. Thomas resuscitates and extends movements like Photo Realism, New Image Painting and Pattern and Decoration … She fuses the strategies of the photo-based work of the Pictures Generation and the Fig. 2.58 Mickalene Thomas, After George Romney’s Elizabeth Warren as Hebe, 2009, archival inkjet print on Hahnemühle fine art paper, 30” x 24.5”, 2009 122 collage-prone art of its loyal opposition, the Neo-Expressionist painters … but with a more urgent and specific message.212 By marrying inspiration from many textile and interior design influences from fine art and popular culture decoration, Thomas’ paintings speak loud and proud for a new hedonism in painting that celebrates the range of possibility in surface and texture, where paint is as sexual and physical as the images it depicts. Comparable to Wiley’s painted floral patterns, Thomas employs rhinestone designs to enhance the glow of her female models’ bodies and their decorative environments. Her rhinestones have been interpreted by some critics as a gaudy craft material that was used to decorate denim in the 80s, recently used by designers and makeup artists on everything from shoes and pocketbooks to nails and lips. She says that interpreting the rhinestones as just “bling” is a reductive reading of the work, and she continues to use this decoration as a way of reclaiming it from that reference.213 The layers of her paintings can overwhelm the eye as they cause it to shuttle between the contrasting textures of thick slatherings and silky enamel-like finishes. Her patterns of faux gems suggest lavish opulence that lends decorative texture as well as flashiness to the surface, like a layer of diamonds. Thomas says that “… using rhinestones confronts the ideas of artifice and masking and ties into my investigation of beauty.”214 Similar to Wiley, she exploits a popular culture and hip-hop association of the decorative with wealth and class to problematize the exclusiveness of fine art attitudes about kitsch. Like Wiley’s designs that adorn 212 Roberta Smith, “Loud, Proud, and Painted, ‘Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe,’ at Brooklyn Museum,” New York Times, September 27, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/arts/design/mickalene-thomas-origin-of-the- universe-at-brooklyn-museum.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 213 Mickalene Thomas and Lisa Melandri, “Points of Origin: An Interview with Mickalene Thomas by Lisa Melandri,” Origin of the Universe (Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2012), 32. 214 Ibid. 123 the Black male body, her glittering patterns and highly accessorized models subvert the sense of invisibility and marginalization that has been the historical experience of many Black people throughout Western history. The decorative surfaces of her paintings and glitzy patterns express the magnetism of the “soul sistah,” an urban diva who makes herself remarkable through flamboyant clothes, hairstyles, makeup, and accessories, such as Qusuquzah, une très belle négresse 3, (2012) (Fig. 2.59). Qusuquzah’s outer accouterments emphasize the importance of hair, clothing, and jewelry in African and African Diaspora cultures. Thomas observes, “When I was growing up, everyone had the idea of changing and reclaiming your name by choosing an African name. Mine was Quanikah.”215 In this invention of a character, an artificial African self to substitute for the history of slavery and miscegenation, Thomas presents a glamorous and independent Black woman. Her language of pattern and rhinestone- bedecked surfaces reflect the construction of a glamorous self to substitute for many dehumanizing stereotypes of Blackness through history and exalt everyday women to the status of Venus. Wiley’s portraits of dandies similarly implement pattern to beautify and eroticize the portrait subject, and explore 215 Ibid., 29. Fig. 2.59 Mickalene Thomas, Qusuquzah, une très belle négresse 3, acrylic, enamel, and rhinestones on wood panel, 96” x 80” x 2”, 2012, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York and Hong Kong 124 the way in which disenfranchised men of color puff themselves up to mask their absence of power and privilege in the world. As Kiša Lala observes, Lured by the opulence of early Euro-American styles of portraits, he [Wiley] found it not unlike the men strutting the streets of Harlem whose uber-glitz, bling and vanity were a façade that belied their real lack of power … He invited men off the streets to pose and parody the pompous gestures of historical portraits – it was a bit like voguing.… although he holds the choice of theatrical décor and accoutrements at an ironic distance, they’re something he’s also complicit to. He embraces it, but remains morally ambiguous.216 Wiley’s patterns, like those of Thomas, express both the superficial construction of identity as a mask worn by the individual, and simultaneously communicate something transcendent and spiritual about that individual’s àşẹ. As mentioned earlier, Wiley says he represents an aspect of himself at the same time that he collaborates with the model for role-play. He critiques constructions of power through decoration and posturing at the same time that he identifies with the necessity to aggrandize the self in order to garner respect in both the art world and on the street. Also akin to Wiley’s patterns that counterbalance the male odalisque or dandy, Grace Ndiritu incorporates heavily patterned fabrics in works that establish a surreal space to challenge the odalisque tradition and the objectification of the Black nude woman under the male gaze. In Lying Down Textiles from her “Still Life” series (2005-7) (Fig. 2.60), she displays herself almost completely obscured by blue Dutch wax 216 Kiša Lala, “Kehinde Wiley On the World Stage: A Conversation With the Artist,” Huffington Post. Fig. 2.60 Grace Ndiritu, Lying Down Textiles, video still, 2005-7 125 fabric with a gold floral pattern and against a backdrop of green and yellow cloth with a bird motif. Her face is covered and she reveals only her shoulder and arm, controlling the erotic charge evoked in conventional odalisque images that cater to the Orientalist fascination with the exoticism of the veiled female body versus the nude female form (part of the same European fantasy of harems). Wiley’s male odalisques such as Mark Shavers in the “Down” series equally exploit the contrast between exposed skin and patterned fabric or adornment. His models’ languid poses and fanciful designs put his subjects in the passive role that satisfies the Western fantasy of the exotic “other” who craves to be dominated by the European man. Wiley flips the script of dominant narratives in art history by substituting the decorated male body for the female subject because he challenges viewers to rethink the contexts of the gaze, the stereotyped roles of male and female, and the manner in which ornamental patterns partially concealing skin have been a trope for the exoticized body. Exploring the Black diva as a complementary study of Black beauty to the Black dandy, Wiley departed from working almost exclusively with male models when he exhibited a series of entirely female subjects in the exhibition Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace (May 2012) at Sean Kelly Gallery. He posed female models using historical portraits of society women by Jacques-Louis David, Thomas Gainsborough, and John Singer Sargent among others. Rather than painting the women in their own clothing, he collaborated with Riccardo Tisci, Creative Director of the French couture house Givenchy to create long gowns paired with wide leather belts with chains that may refer to womens’ 126 historical role as the property of men and also to African American slavery. A makeup and hair designer styled the models with elaborate, silky wigs that threaten to bust out of their tightly coiled mounds and associate them with upper- class hairstyles of the eighteenth century. Wiley states, “This series of works attempts to reconcile the presence of Black female stereotypes that surrounds their presence and/or absence in art history, and the notions of beauty, spectacle, and the ‘grand’ in painting.”217 Wiley corrects the lack of Black women in academic portraiture, except for those in exoticized roles. However, his portraits invoke another stereotype: the myth of the Black superwoman, a figure who has “inordinate strength” and is “stronger emotionally than most men” as it has been defined by scholar Michele Wallace.218 His images replace the historical absence of Black female portrait subjects with a manicured visualization of the powerful Black woman who can overcome any odds with strength and dignity. The intimidating elegance and power of these divas is further emphasized by the dominance of their sensuous floral designs. They appear jarring due to the hyperrealism of the crisply painted flowers and foliage that shine with phosphorescence against dark backdrops. The models’ diaphanous gowns and gleaming skin cause a strong textural distinction between foreground and the background of opaque designs. Unlike the psychological expressiveness of some of his works with male subjects, Wiley seems more interested in playing dress-up with the women than revealing the underlying essence of their individuality and character. 217 Sean Kelly Gallery, press release for Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace, May 6 – June 16, 2012, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York City, unpaginated. 218 Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York and London: Verso Classics, 1978). 127 The Two Sisters (2012) (Fig. 2.61) is one of the first and strongest works in the series that revisits the idea of siblings and multiples discussed early in this chapter. Through doubling the women and the repetition of motifs, Wiley represents two figures that have distinctly different faces but wear similarly sheer white gowns with ruffles around the neckline or sleeve that offset their shimmering, pecan-brown skin. A curvilinear, incandescent vine with grapes and flowers in chartreuse, orange, red, and blue overlaps and embraces their translucent dresses and projects against the Black ground. The sisters stand with sober gentility and valor, devoid of the arrogant posturing of Wiley’s young men. The women’s big hairdos and flowing gowns are reminiscent of upper class Southern belles and they lack the urban edginess of his dandies. Their beauty depicts an idealized Black womanhood and upper class status purged of any funkiness or Afrocentric identification. Painted in the time of Michele Obama’s powerful presence as first lady, these images celebrate Black female beauty and represent women as thinkers, heroines, and leaders rather than objects of the male gaze. They remake the Victorian ideal of white women to show Black woman as elegant vessels of profound spirits. In his rendition of Judith and Holofernes (2012) (Fig. 2.62), Wiley ironically addresses the past power of white women over Black women as a visual pun on the “kill whitey” idea and also Fig. 2.61 Kehinde Wiley, The Two Sisters, oil on canvas, 2012, courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery 128 speaks to the art historical canon that has positioned white women as the feminine ideal.219 However, this work also twists the story of Judith into a stereotypical racial catfight between women. The recurring motif of a heavy orange flower that droops downwards echoes the severed female head held by the forceful model, who wears a subtle heart- shaped tattoo and decorated nails specific to Black hip-hop diva style. Perhaps more than the other women, Judith takes an active and dynamic role that celebrates her strength. As erotic subjects, mothers, and heroines, Wiley’s divas are more conservative in their poses and limited in their representation of womanhood than his images of Black dandies. His lack of intimacy or erotic potential with the female subjects diverges from the Black dandies, and makes them seem somewhat hollow. In spite of its limited range, the “Economy of Grace” series breaks new ground for Wiley in terms of the substance and heaviness of his day-glo patterns that belie the womens’ strength, hint at their fertility, and infers that Black women lead with grace in all arenas. Using pattern to redefine constructs of beauty, Wiley holds a mirror to beautiful Black personhood and addresses the ever-present demons of racist histories. He engages and deconstructs the intellectual circumstances that brought about in the eighteenth century the conflation of whiteness with the good, 219 Christopher Beam, “The New Art World Rulebook - #6: Outsource to China, While Riffing on the Western Canon, Kehinde Wiley’s Global Reach,” New York Magazine, April 22, 2012, http://nymag.com/arts/art/rules/kehinde-wiley-2012- 4/. Fig. 2.62 Kehinde Wiley, Judith and Holofernes, oil on canvas, 2012, courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery 129 the beautiful, the intelligent and the civilized.220 Philosopher and scholar Paul C. Taylor describes this tendency as the basis for classical racialism, “which holds that the physical differences between races are signs of deeper, typically intellectual and moral, differences … that the physical ugliness [according to Western culture] of Black people was a sign of a deeper ugliness and depravity.”221 This led to the justification of inequitable distribution of social goods along the lines of race, including property and even personal freedom. Identifying inferiority with physical appearance, modern Blackness has been engaged in a battle against the cultural imperative to internalize the opinion of one’s own hideousness, resulting in the widespread feeling among nineteenth century Black people that Black features link to a dark past and to savage ways.222 Referencing this history by dressing the models in wigs and neoclassical gowns, and matching their poses to canonical academic paintings, Wiley refutes this denigration of Blackness through the insistent patterns that command attention and create a contemporary context for his subjects. Wiley’s orchestration of model, dress, hair, and most importantly the elaborate chorus of patterns that accompany the operatic arias of these works pays tribute to his mother, his Black sisters, and to the women of color who have been neglected by the painter’s brush. More than a comment on gender, his diva series offers a fitting counterpart to his motifs that celebrate male beauty. Through the appropriation and fusion of motifs from many cultures, in concert with art historical references, Wiley’s work is informed by the aesthetics 220 Paul C. Taylor, “Malcolm’s Conk and Danto’s Colors; or, Four Logical Petitions Concerning Race, Beauty, and Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, (Winter 1999): 16. 221 Ibid. 222 Noliwe Rooks, Hair Raising (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 35. 130 of African ornamentation such as its persistent and often asymmetrical repetition, off-beat and syncopated meter, and the tension between foreground and background space that establishes unique textures and invigorates this artwork. More than gilt frames and muscular brown bodies, it is the patterns that bestow on his subjects a sense of àşẹ that transcends the specific context of each portrait. Wiley invents an atmospheric patterned environment for his figures that expresses an individual’s inner character or àşẹ. Like an aura, these designs exude from the portrait subject and embrace his or her body with glowing color and vitality. The serpentine and floral motifs are as opulent and erotic as the seductive skin of the models, and their layering functions like a visual soundtrack. Their colors and motifs manifest an aesthetic of the cool that complements his subjects’ composure and dignity. The patterns are both specific to the individual and they also refer to broader social identities and art historical contexts. In Wiley’s paintings, patterns establish a stage for the performance of identity, cultural celebration, and power. 131 CHAPTER 3 MY HEART SKIPS A BEAT: CARNIVALESQUE PATTERNS BY NICK CAVE Sculptor and performer Nick Cave has created an extraordinary series of sculptures that he calls “Soundsuits” using pattern and surface decoration that unite his sculpture and dance with many performance traditions of the Black Atlantic world. In the Soundsuits (Fig. 3.1), Cave appropriates already embellished fabrics, accumulating and layering motifs to establish complexity and meaning, and he uses beauty to present an activist’s vision for social change. Much of the literature about Cave’s work focuses on its seductive and sophisticated construction and flamboyant beauty, but glosses over the myriad of pattern and performance contexts that influence his work. Although curators and scholars have noted the visual relationship between his work and African and African Diaspora ceremonial art and performance, there has not been in-depth analysis of the connections that I address in this chapter. I explore how African Diaspora Carnival and African masquerades have informed Cave’s approach to ornamentation. In terms of form and function, I examine the relationship between his multi-patterned characters and those of Fig. 3.1 Nick Cave, Let’s C, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA, 2011, photo by James Prinz 132 African Diaspora Carnival, the association between his process and Black Atlantic motifs and embellishment, and the spiritual symbolism invoked in his use of geometrical designs, polka-dots, and other patterns. Cave’s patterns and textures serve as a second skin for his figural sculptures and performances. His art represents both cultural continuity and a contemporary elaboration of Black Atlantic ritual art and performance. Like Wiley’s seductive models, Cave energizes the surface of the body with pattern to radiate a similar àşẹ as that of the African masquerade dancer or Mardi Gras Black Indian chief. Cave’s carnivalesque motifs and surfaces inspire visceral and spiritual responses to his Soundsuits, define his work in a broader cultural context, and present a multi- sensory experience of history. Cave is from Fulton, Missouri, one of seven boys raised by a single mother. Like Wiley, he acknowledges the resourcefulness of his mother as a key inspiration for how he works as an artist. He comments, “I was not raised in a privileged environment and I had to figure out how to make things happen for myself … I started by making stuff out of things I found out in nature – I used my natural resources!”223 Like generations of artists of color who found ways to invest their creative spirit into everyday domestic tasks and crafts, he learned to “make it work” by reusing commonplace objects.224 Cave constructs his Soundsuits and relief sculptures from fabric and fiber remnants that he mines from thrift stores, flea markets, and estate sales including knit sweaters and afghans, sections of embroidery or crochet, wicker furniture, and beaded embellishment, traditionally 223Kate Eilertsen et al, Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2009), 233. 224 Michelle Joan Wilkinson, “Of Material Importance,” Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists (Baltimore, Maryland: Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, 2011), 12. 133 the realm of women’s craft. He upcycles remnants, embroidery, bric-a-brac, old toys, beads, sequins, leaves, and hair to transform the human form into mythical beings and to transcend the distinctions of fashion and wearable sculpture. To a large degree, the transformation provoked by Cave’s Soundsuits is generated by its dynamic and dizzying patterns, as well as the reflective quality of the materials and the specific sounds they generate. Cave‘s materials reveal a story about identity and his way of connecting with community. In addition to adorning the body, Cave’s Soundsuits shield the body from racism and homophobia, as well as other kinds of prejudice that he is keenly aware of as a Black, gay artist. Cave made his first Soundsuit in outraged reaction to accounts and broadcasting of the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in March of 1991 by officers of the Los Angeles County Police Department. He identified with the vulnerability of King who had been described by the officers as larger than life and frighteningly “buffed out,” when in fact there were seven officers involved in his beating, some watching and joking while others exacted brutal injuries on his prone body.225 Cave retreated to the woods, and from branches, he constructed a jacket and pants that rattled and crackled fiercely when he moved and transformed his own body into a type of power figure (probably similar to Fig. 3.2).226 Cave’s Soundsuits follow in 225 Ann Landi, “Dressing for Excess,” ARTnews (June 2012): 66. Fig. 3.2 Nick Cave, Soundsuit, twigs, wire, metal armature, 1998, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery 134 the vein of many types of body performance art, such as Louise Bourgeois’ elaborate performance A Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Part (1978) at Hamilton Gallery, New York (Fig. 3.3) or Leigh Bowery’s imaginative transvestite costumes in London in the 1980s (Fig. 3.4). However, his specific textural response to the racial attack on King was the genesis of his Soundsuit sculptures and performances, relic series (Fig. 3.5) that employ found objects such as African American memorabilia, and tondo series (Fig. 3.6), his round wall pieces made with beaded and embellished fabric. Cave’s recent project, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, was an exhibition that toured from the Yerba Buena Center in 2010 to the Arts to the 226 UCLA Fowler Museum, Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth (press release), Jan 10–May 30, 2010, http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/fowler-museum-presents-the-traveling-111442.aspx. Fig. 3.3 Louise Bourgeois wearing sculpture from A Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Part, 1978, Hamilton Gallery, New York Fig. 3.4 Leigh Bowery, photographed in one of his signature performance costumes, 1980s Fig. 3.5 Nick Cave, Untitled (Relic series), mixed media, courtesy of Jack Shainman gallery from the New York City Armory Exhibition 2012, New York Fig. 3.6 Nick Cave, Untitled (Tondo series), mixed media, courtesy of Jack Shainman gallery from the New York City Armory Exhibition 2012, New York 135 Seattle Art Museum in 2011, and featured fifty Soundsuits and a number of performances that have taken place both inside the museum and outside on the street. Taking inspiration and experience from his background as a dancer trained with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Cave’s Soundsuit performances include choreography from African and African Diaspora dances, urban hip-hop dance, and modern dance. The title of this multidisciplinary project conveys that Cave believes that the social responsibility of his art is to provide a “place for dreaming.” He says, “I want people of every age, race, and interest to be transported for a few minutes with me, to another place at the center of the earth.”227 He expresses a utopian vision that connects to spiritual dimensions of Black Atlantic art throughout history. Towards this goal, the Soundsuits are festooned with stripes, elaborate sequin patterns, embroidery, halos, and concentric rings of crochet, rows of buttons or beads, synthetic hair dyed in patterns of stripes, zigzags, diamonds, and polka-dots, and elaborately decorative knitted stocking feet. The suits are both sculpture and performance attire, and they dissolve hierarchies in Western societies between the fine art and decorative arts, performance, and street culture. As Kate Eilertsen has written, “Cave’s work explores issues of ceremony, ritual, myth, and identity” and while he takes from many different cultural influences, African and African Diaspora art appear to be the primary source.228 227 Nick Cave and Kate Eilertson, “Working Toward What I am Leaving Behind,” in Meet Me at the Center of the Earth (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2009), 231. 228 Eilertsen, “Introduction,” Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, 18. 136 Cave collages many types of patterns to make a dazzling surface that exemplify Robert Farris Thompson’s concept of “looking smart.” According to Thompson, The vibrations of color and muscle in looking smart make human patterning resonate with inner life; it is playing the patterns as if they were autonomous forces of their own, in one instance, part-leopard, in another, bird-like quivering, while at the same time shaped by ordering consideration of limit and of line … looking smart carries us within an existential African sense of ‘art.’229 Looking smart, or having a powerful and dramatic message conveyed through art, is confirmed during dances that make the body glitter and play like a musical instrument in response to multiple meter; by wearing design upon or deep within the flesh, all elements rhythmized with speed and strength.230 There is no differentiation between pattern that moves through dance or that has an optical effect of dancing on a textile or wall. Cave’s aesthetic of combining patterns reflects this collage of rhythms. He observes, “It’s not just about borrowing directly, but using these things indirectly to establish a new way of looking at pattern.”231 Cave appropriates designs from many sources, creating a new hybrid based on his travel in India, South Africa, and Trinidad at Carnival. These hybridized motifs give his Soundsuits globally creolized personalities and provide each work with a unique aura. Looking smart manifests in the integration of pattern through visual art, music, and dance in the work of Nick Cave. Cave’s figurative Soundsuits use pattern and texture to suggest multiple centers of energy throughout the body that sometimes radiate out in the form of a halo of objects such as flowers, birds, mirrors, and other materials. This 229 Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 18. 230 Ibid. 231 Nick Cave, interview with the author, June 8, 2011, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. 137 emphasis on multiple energy centers is a specific quality of Black Atlantic dance that prizes controlled body isolation and articulation over symmetrical unity and balance as in Classical ballet. His presentation of a multi-sensory (seen, touched, heard) experience also relates to a democratic invocation of the senses that characterizes African derived pattern. Thompson has described the formal qualities of much African and African Diaspora art as “a high effect esthetic” that creates an impact that can be experienced through the five senses.232 Among the Efik of Southeast Nigeria, the word for art really refers to pattern and decoration produced through painting, textile making, marking, shaping, impressing, and representing, and among the Yoruba, lined designs or imagery known as art is a key aspect of defining civilization.233 Therefore, art in a West African sense means becoming civilized through the vital patterns drawn on or within objects taken directly from nature. His work also engages in a dialogue with other Black Atlantic artists who explore history through the social resonance of materials such as that of American artist David Hammons and Jamaican artist Nari Ward in these artists’ processes of scavenging for used, non-traditional materials for his art. Kellie Jones has described Hammons as a “hip junk dealer, sculptor, performer, conceptual artist, environmental sculptor, magician, philosopher, social commentator, draftsman, and griot who positions himself somewhere between Marcel Duchamp, Outsider art, and Arte Povera.”234 In contrast, Cave engages his audience through enticing patterns and lush textures to honor the handmade 232 Robert Farris Thompson, Tango: The Art History of Love, (public lecture on his book at The Yale Club of New York City April, 2012). 233 Ibid. 234 Calvin Reid, “David Hammons,” in Casinò fantasma (New York: Institute for Contemporary Art, 1990), unpaginated. 138 with an almost spiritual reverence. He challenges the way in which people perceive difference, and to mask categories of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Cave’s overlapping of patterns and assemblage of textures and materials from many different sources, both mass-produced and hand-made (Fig. 3.7), produces a flamboyant, cultural gumbo. This is not his aesthetic alone, but is a major characteristic of Black Atlantic art and performance. According to Judith Bettelheim, the African/African Diaspora aesthetic synthesizes many disparate elements to birth a “high- effect collage, combining strongly contrasting elements” such as feathers, sequins, mirrors, cutouts, and ribbons that are put next to one another to create contrasts in color, texture, and pattern.235 Rhythmic, narrow-line and wide-band stripes are juxtaposed with swirling dots and undulations. Bettelheim argues that artwork produced by hybrid cultures is characterized by this aesthetic of assemblage and evidences cultures rubbing up against each other and causing sparks to turn to flames.236 This aspect of creolization may seem to be a postmodern phenomenon. 235 Judith Bettelheim, “From Masquerade to Fashion and Back,” Global Africa Project, ed. Lowery Sims and Leslie King- Hammond (New York City: Museum of Art and Design, 2010), 163. 236 Ibid. Fig. 3.7 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, For Now, Mary Boone Gallery exhibition, September 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery, photo by Sophie Sanders 139 However, it is part of a process of postmodernism that began when African slaves were sold into the world of European colonialism; Black Atlantic artists necessarily realized that the prefabricated products of the modern world were “signs” of another order of existence.237 In rural areas, as in Phyllis Galembo’s image (Fig. 3.8) of a practitioner of Brazilian Candomblé in Bahia, “African straw” continues to be symbolic of protecting righteous people from disease and laying pestilence upon the immoral.238 Adhering to the same aesthetic, city masqueraders often replace raffia with manufactured cloth featuring bold contrasting prints and adorn with glittering objects to make the wearer stand out dramatically.239 An aesthetic of accumulation and bricolage is complemented by the glut of cheap mass- produced goods available to the urban dweller. In Cave’s sculpture, the blend of synthetic, natural, mass-produced, and hand-made materials becomes indecipherable in the construction of their masterfully layered patterns. In this metamorphosis, Cave produces a fusion of patterns that integrate high effect qualities to communicate messages of both local and global concern. I categorize the Soundsuits according to characters and materials that have their own distinctive types of patterns and textures to analyze how his approach to ornamentation has been informed by Black Atlantic cultural contexts and history. 237 Donald Cosentino, Vodou Things: The Art of Pierrot Barra and Marie Cassaise (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 43. 238 Phyllis Galembo, Divine Inspiration: From Benin to Bahia (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 124. 239 Judith Bettelheim, “From Masquerade to Fashion and Back,” 163. Fig. 3.8 Phyllis Galembo, Terreiro São Jorge, Bahia. Divine Inspiration: From Benin to Bahia, Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. 140 Form Patterns of Hot and Cool Many ideas in Vodou theology are analogous to Cave’s use of decoration and design. The suits suggest a coterie of divine spirits expressed through human and anthropomorphic forms similar to the divine horsemen, who literally embody the ideas of Vodou theology.240 These gods and demigods of Vodou, also known as the Iwa, choose individuals to serve as vessels through which the sacred is channeled.241 Cave’s Soundsuits transform the wearer into a new identity in the same manner of the spirit possession that occurs when the Iwa are invoked and travel from the Vodou equivalent of Mount Olympus, Lavilokan, to inhabit the bodies of believers. Thus, he establishes a relationship between his multi-patterned characters and Black Atlantic ceremonies, such as those of Haitian practitioners of Vodou. According to this analogy, Cave’s Soundsuits can be seen in categories similar to the Iwa: suits that are cool (fwet) and soothing in nature, suits whose characters are hot (cho) and abrasive, and those who bridge the two extremes.242 Petwo are the collective of hot Vodou spirits noted for their hard and abrasive personalities and often-malevolent behavior.243 Rada are the coterie of cool Vodou spirits generally associated with healing and spiritual protection. Like the representations of Iwa in Haitian drapo sèvis or flags used in Vodou ceremonies (Fig. 3.9), the Soundsuits serve as the physical representation of something 240 Patrick Arthur Polk, Haitian Vodou Flags (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 10. 241 Ibid. 242 Polk, Haitian Vodou Flags, 10. 243 Polk, Haitian Vodou Flags, 39. 141 spiritual and symbolic, even in their tactile physicality, and in performance contexts their movement and sound-making qualities transport them to a ceremonial context beyond entertainment or spectacle. I apply the Vodou categories of Iwa into three categories to investigate Cave’s carnivalesque approach to ornamentation in the Soundsuits: Hot. Cave’s hot suits emulate noblemen or heraldic power. They have elaborate peacock-like beading, embroidery, sequins and often militaristic or aggressively- shaped heads and spectacular embellishment like noble or high priestly vestments. Their heads are reminiscent of Catholic mitres, taking a phallic or condom-like form (Figs. 3.10-3.12). Many have specific motifs formed by sequins and beads such as diamonds that may stem from Afro-Catholic, Kongolese, or Scottish designs. Cave has suggested in interviews that these Soundsuits represent authority, and consequently their patterns are impressive and even intimidating.244 244 Nick Cave, Let’s C (artist talk presented at the opening of Cave’s Let’s C exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 16, 2012). Fig. 3.9 Phyllis Galembo, Léogâne, Rose Anne and Andre Rose Mercilien, with drapo (ritual flags) for Ogou Feray and Saint James the Greater. A vèvè depicting Danbala, Ayida Wédo, and Ayizan is on the floor, 1998 142 Fig. 3.10 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, mixed media, 2010, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 3.11 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, For Now exhibition, Mary Boone Gallery, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery, image by Sophie Sanders Fig. 3.12 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, mixed media, exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery 143 Cool. These Soundsuits use materials, colors, or textures that relate to nature or animals. They are cool because they appear healing, gentle, and protective of the spirit inside. A number of these are covered from head to toe with sticks like porcupine quills, and some have synthetic berries. Many are reminiscent of West African or Afro-Atlantic masquerade costumes such as the synthetic raffia-covered “Forest Shrubs,” as Cave terms them in his recent performance at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, or “Pitchy- Patchy” figures of Afro-Caribbean carnival, or hairy figures who sport strands of bugle beads, sisal, or wear body suits accompanied by afro-wigs.245 These also include the group of Soundsuits covered entirely in dyed synthetic hair, also referred to by Cave as the “Guardians.”246 Although all these suits may refer to nature, the Guardians are most like specific animals such as bears, horses, and 245 Nick Cave, interview with the author, December 15, 2011, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. 246 Ibid. Fig. 3.14 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, For Now exhibition, Mary Boone Gallery, September 2011, courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery, photo by Sophie Sanders Fig. 3.13 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, synthetic hair, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery 144 rabbits. Others in this group are made with natural wicker furniture parts that resemble pre-historic animals such as horseshoe crabs (Figs. 3.13-3.14). Those that Reconcile Hot and Cool. Soundsuits that harness aggressive energy and resolve it with cooling forces belong in this category because of the re-contextualization and transformation of the materials they employ. These include much bric-a-brac such as button-bedecked figures that often have horn- shaped heads and play a funerary role. Soundsuits made of toys, dolls, mirrors, or bundles of stuffed fabric hung like amulets or charms around the body, memorabilia, porcelain birds and other antique relics, and often strands of beads draped like Mardi Gras necklaces fall within this category. This group also includes Soundsuits that are made of throw rugs, pipe cleaners, socks, “beanie babies,” and feature knitted stocking legs (Figs. 3.15-3.16). Employing these categories derived from Vodou offers deeper insight into the formal aspects of Cave’s heavily embellished suits. Hot Soundsuits seem to relate most to Afro-Catholic pageantry, nobility, heraldry, and the opulence of papal art and architecture. In Untitled Soundsuit Fig. 3.15 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, mixed media, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 3.16 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, For Now exhibition, Mary Boone Gallery, September 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, photo by Sophie Sanders 145 (2009) (Fig. 3.17) Cave breaks up the form of a mitre- shaped Soundsuit with an undulating pattern of geometrical crochet patchwork, including a small green cross near the top of the head and a bright red hexagon, reminiscent of a large stop sign. From a distance, the shapes and designs inside the crochet segments suggest heraldic insignia. The patches of bright yellow and red pop against the sparkling purple ground. The severity of the conical head is offset by the irregular placement of large and small forms that cascade across the body and are playfully matched with rainbow-striped knit socks. In images of this and other suits, Cave hops gaily to one side and disrupts the verticality of the sculpture. Hot Soundsuits resemble West African knitted masquerade costumes, such as those documented by Phyllis Galembo in her photographs of a variety of masquers from the Cross River region in Nigeria that wear knitted body wear vibrating with patterns of stripes, triangles, and squares in yellow, pink, red, white, green, and black, and topped with goat or horse hair (Fig. 3.18). At the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at The College of Charleston, Galembo’s photographs were exhibited alongside Cave’s Soundsuits highlighting the strong affinity of these electric patterns in the masquerade images (Fig. 3.19) and the outrageous geometrical designs covering Cave’s suits. In this and other Fig. 3.17 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, 2010, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery 146 exhibition contexts, his patterns and surfaces have demonstrated many connections with African masquerade performance attire. Cave’s hot suits also relate to African American artist Jeff Sonhouse’s appropriation of European regalia and heraldic symbols to convey authority. Sonhouse, in his piece Exhibit A: Cardinal Francis Arinze (2005) (Fig. 3.20), employs striking designs to emphasize the power and magnetism of Arinze, an Igbo Nigerian who has been Cardinal Bishop of Velletri-Segni since 2005, and who was considered as a successor to Pope John Paul II. Arinze’s skin is painted with a diamond pattern of black and red that he wears like a mask with holes cut out for the blue circles under his glasses, dark brown nose, and pink Fig. 3.18 Phyllis Galembo, Ngar Ball Traditional Masquerade Dance, Cross River, Nigeria, 2004 Fig. 3.19 Phyllis Galembo, Akata Dance, Cross River, Nigeria, 2009 Fig. 3.20 Jeff Sonhouse, Exhibit A: Cardinal Francis Arinze, oil and mixed media on wooden panel, courtesy of the Rubell Family Collection, 2005 147 mouth. This diamond design common to many of Cave’s suits (Fig. 3.21) derives from Europe as well as Africa, and can be seen in harlequin figures by Pablo Picasso and Max Beckmann among other modern artists. In Scotland, argyle patterns have been used for Scottish highlanders’ tights and leggings since the 17th Century. However, as Robert Farris Thompson has pointed out, the diamond motif is an African Kongo cosmogram and it represents “life everlasting, a shield against diminishment.”247 Diamond motifs often appear as a border design for the sequin embellished Haitian drapo or Vodou flags (Fig. 3.22). In addition to their employment of this pattern of power, Sonhouse and Cave allude to the Catholic church as a symbol of patriarchal omnipotence and historical decadence for some audiences by incorporating the aggressive shape of 247 Robert Farris Thompson, “Kongo, Louisiana, Kongo New Orleans,” in Aesthetic of the Cool, Afro-Atlantic Art and Music (New York and Pittsburgh: Periscope Publishing, 2011), 156. Fig. 3.21 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, mixed media, 2009, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 3.22 Drapo for St Jacques Majeur, photo from Beads, Body, and Soul by Henry John Drewal and John Mason (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998), p. 352 148 headgear such as the galero in the case of cardinals and the mitre worn by a bishop and the pope. Cool Soundsuits covered with hair and some that feature bugle bead strands that drape like micro-braids suggest a correspondence of texture and design that has always existed between African hairstyles and fiber arts. American sculptor Sonya Clark’s early wig piece, Extensions in Blonde (1997) (Fig. 3.23) similarly exemplifies a synthesis of fiber and hair through its use of hair texture and color. The wig displays a tufted black fiber parted and evenly sectioned into individual “Afro-puffs.” In her version, however, little blonde extension braids seem to sprout from the rounded rhythm of black puffs, tied with rubber bands and baubles like those used to decorate little girls’ hair, and which can be described as a “pervasive type of African American folk art.”248 Clarks’ integration of hair with other materials such as metal, beads, and thread challenges the distinction between natural and synthetic, showing that artifice and synthesis are always part of body ornamentation. In hairy Soundsuits and those worn by dancers sporting florescent wigs, Cave similarly features hair dyed in patterns of day-glow colors to reinforce the artificiality and decorativeness of this material, but he places the 248 Jacquelyn Long, “Things My Mother Never Taught Me,” in Tenderheaded: A Comb-Bending Collection of Hair Stories, eds.Pamela Johnson and Juliette Harris (New York: Pocket Books, 2001), 53. Fig. 3.23 Sonya Clark, Extensions in Blonde, mixed media, 1997, accessed July 11, 2012: http://sonyaclark.com/gallery/extensions-in- blonde/ 149 colorful patterns with an asymmetrical, offbeat phrasing (Fig. 3.24). Suits that reconcile hot and cool have especially chaotic combinations of materials and patterns. They embody the tension of diverse textures and patterns in which hot and cool elements balance each other. Animal Patterns Cave’s reverence for the power of animal spirits characterizes most religions from Africa as well as Native American and Oceanic cultures. His employment of hair patterns and textures conveys the human relationship with other animals, as exemplified in his pink or blonde bunny-eared Fig. 3.25 Nick Cave, Mating Season, Ever-After exhibition, Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, NY, September 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 3.26 Ann Hamilton, Tropos, multimedia installation, 1993, accessed July 11, 2012: http://www.vincentborrelli.com/cgi- bin/vbb/101942 Soundsuits, such as the Mating Season group (2012) (Fig. 3.25). American installation artist Ann Hamilton exhibited Tropos (1993-94) (Fig. 3.26) at the Dia Center for the Art in New York City that appropriates the silky surface of animal Fig. 3.24 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, mixed media, 2009, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, p. 149 150 hair to convey a similarly democratic relationship between humans and animals. The Soundsuits express the patterns and exoticism of animal fur, feathers, and hair. Their fetish-like power represents the spirits that they protect. The suits’ often bold designs and glowing colors may signal danger in a similar way that one encounters bright patterns and camouflage in nature. The more elaborate the design and colors of certain fish, snakes, birds, frogs, and insects, the more dangerous or intimidating to other animals, in some cases warning of venom or poison. A number of the Soundsuits feature a prominent stop sign motif that seems to be the human equivalent of an animal’s warning signal or markings of intimidation. Other patterns suggest the camouflage adaptations of insects such as butterflies and moths with large circular patterns. One insect-like suit (Fig. 3.27) appears in a manipulated image in Cave’s exhibition catalog Meet Me at the Center of the Earth where it ogles another frightening mantis with big iridescent eyes. Soundsuits made from hair and raffia imitate the animalistic patterns and surfaces used in a number of masquerade costumes from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean (as well as Fig. 3.27 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit image, Meet Me at the Center for the Earth, 2011, p. 214. 151 Native American and Oceanic costumes). For instance, masquerade costumes of the Nuna, Mossi, Bwa, and other peoples from Burkina Faso (Figs. 3.28-3.30) represent the spirits of bush buffalo, antelopes, panthers, birds, and monkeys constructed from carved wooden masks painted with geometric designs and dyed hemp. Cave’s use of the forms, patterns, and textures of animals associates his work with futuristic hybrids seen in science fiction, but even more so with African ceremonial use of animal iconography. Suits that have a patchwork of colored raffia reproduce the movement, voluminous texture, and layering of animal hair and textures of the bush akin to African and Afro- Caribbean masquerades. A performance by master dancer Sidi Balo, which took place in 1978 in Saturday City, in Dogoduman, Mali, prefigures performances of Cave’s Soundsuits. Balo’s bird costumes arise out of a rich West African masquerade tradition dating back at least to the court of the Mali Empire, in which bards Fig. 3.28 Phyllis Galembo, Masquerade from Gossina Village, Burkina Faso, 2006, courtesy of Tang Museum, http://tang.skidmore.edu/inde x.php/calendars/view/139/tag: 1/year:all. Fig. 3.29 Phyllis Galembo, Panther Masquerade, Samaga Village, Burkina Faso, 2006, courtesy of Tang Museum and the artist Fig. 3.30 Christopher D. Roy, The antelope mask of the Gnoumou family, Bwa culture, in Boni, Burkina Faso, 1984, courtesy of Artstor 152 performed for the emperor to praise, inspire, and challenge him.249 These bird costumes employ cloth, feathers, and different kinds of tent-like scaffoldings to form a conical shape. Balo fitted factory printed cloth covered with a pattern of vulture feathers and ribbons over a structure of three flexible wooden hoops attached with vertical elements (Fig. 3.31). Balo made the masquerade costume appear to hover, shape-shift, vibrate according to the percussive rhythms, and create sounds like castanets with the large red beak on his mask that could open and close. Patrick McNaughton explains that Balo’s costume “becomes like a second skin,” a term Cave also uses to describe his Soundsuits.250 In addition to the patterned similarities between Balo’s masquerade and Cave’s suited performances, their common communal purpose links the two. Increasingly, Cave’s work focuses on animals as in his performance entitled Heard (Figs. 3.32 and 3.33) (March 2012) that took place at the University of North Texas and at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas. Student dancers, costumed as raffia-covered horses, marched around the stage and then transformed into spinning pom poms. Cave performed a similar version of Heard at New York City’s Grand Central Terminal in March 2013. His title for the 249 Patrick R. McNaughton, A Bird Dance Near Saturday City: Sidi Ballo and the Art of West African masquerade (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 69. 250 McNaughton, A Bird Dance Near Saturday City, 73. Fig. 3.31 Patrick McNaughton, Kono Rears Up, A Bird Dance in Saturday City, 1978. 153 Fig. 3.32 Nick Cave, Heard performance, University of North Texas, March 2012, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 3.33 Nick Cave, Heard performance, University of North Texas, March 2012, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery performance puns on the rustling sounds produced by the performers as the herd walked and stomped. Each pair of dancers wore a horse suit, and midway through the performance they separated to become whirling dervishes that resembled a Caribbean Carnival trickster character called Pitchy-Patchy. In preparation for this performance, Cave said, I’ve been looking at early puppetry [in which] it took two bodies to build the horse. I’m also responding to ideas around the dream state. As kids and as adults we still could be convinced to have a believable experience … that magical moment where we allow ourselves to believe and dream.251 This fantasy experience was enabled by the horses’ splendid patterns, and the position of the audience and percussionists in a large circle around the performers. The event unfolded in the same manner as an outdoor African masquerade ceremony, and Cave included the audience in the ceremony as active participants. The uniqueness of each horse Soundsuit as represented by its color and markings speaks to the variety of characters within the Iwa and the spiritual symbolism of the horse in this context. In the heat of a Vodou ceremony, the Iwa mount or possess their “horses,” and through the medium of 251 Nick Cave, interview with the author, November 3, 2011, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. 154 their borrowed human bodies express their own peculiar and often capricious proclivities and desires. Cave’s animal imagery and patterning seems lighthearted, but it is embedded within painful historical memories as well as the endurance of African symbolism. Slavery and its lingering racial stereotypes animalized African American people by reducing them to the attributes of the body, and the Soundsuits reconfigure this relationship both figuratively and literally.252 Through their exoticism, colorful patterns, and vibrant textures, the animal suits invoke a range of stereotypes about Black men. For example, multiple meanings of Cave’s horse and rabbit symbolism prevent a simplistic interpretation of these animals. The horse that serves as a beast of burden suggests the exploitation of African American slave labor, and the rabbit that is known for its fecundity may refer to the objectification of Black male bodies, or perhaps a Black “mammy” or wet-nurse. As a positive Black Atlantic archetype of the trickster, the rabbit may invoke the Yoruba deity Eshu-Eleggua (known by other names throughout the many diasporic practices of this religion) that is associated with Anansi in Ghanaian ritual storytelling and Br’er Rabbit in African American folklore.253 The Soundsuits also convey animals’ bizarre adaptations, their amazing abilities such as superior sight and smell, and the endangerment of many wild species. Cave comments that animals have much to teach us and that he is increasingly using animal forms, patterns, and textures because he believes that “[w]e have invaded the natural world and now we have to figure out how to 252 Alissa Bennett, “Nick Cave,” Ponytail: fashion, art, music, (Summer/Spring 2009): 18-25, http://www.ponytailmagazine.com/features/nick-cave/. 253 Victor Leo Walker II, “Mythology and Metaphysics,” in Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, Gus Edwards. Eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002) 133. 155 change our behavior.”254 Cave’s decorative patterns enable a suspension of disbelief to allow for the blurring of animal and human to seem natural, as in a dream. Cave notes that this ability to inspire a dream state is a challenge because “[w]e are in a time where it’s just about existing, like with the economy. We are caught up in the different ways that we think about surviving.”255 Cave distracts his viewers from this mundane effort to exist by seducing his audience with the playfulness of his works’ sensual spectacle. In his array of animal forms and patterns, Cave shows deep respect for the struggle of wildlife to survive in the world dominated by human exploitation and industry at the same time that he engages African American history and the struggle for Civil Rights. His fusion of human and animal in recent Soundsuits and performances encourage empathy for the sentient spirits of animals and express respect for the interdependent fabric of mutuality that bind us to the animal world. Patterns of the Carnivalesque Cave lures his audience into an imaginative, participatory experience through material displays of abundance that verge on folk art and gaudiness while they are also well fitted for haute couture and fine art museums. In the same way that Caribbean Carnival and American Mardi Gras has always functioned as a counter-culture event, his motifs inject mischief into the sobriety of the art world to challenge social hierarchies. Yvonne Daniel argues that many Caribbean dances and festivals evidence the carnivalesque, which she defines as “the metaphoric challenge to quotidian rules, the mocking or satirical 254 Nick Cave and Kate Eilertsen, “Working Toward What I Am Leaving Behind,” 231. 255 Nick Cave interview with the author, December 15, 2011, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. 156 challenge to authority and to traditional social order.”256 From colonial times in the Caribbean, the defiance of authority fueled a shape-shifting character for Carnival celebrations that revolved around sumptuous costuming, erotic debauchery, boisterous chaos or anger, rebelliousness, and maliciousness.257 Daniel contends that this same rebellious spirit is what ignites citizenship into social and political action. Cave’s dramatic representations of character through arrangements of materials and patterns express personalities, species, or attributes of individuals. The disruption of stasis and aesthetic hierarchies caused by the irregularity of his layered designs, riotous patterns, and spectacular gestures serve a similarly disruptive and cathartic role as Caribbean Carnival. The subversive impact of Cave’s patterns parallels the transformative effects of Carnival costume, body adornment, and dance. Carnival celebrations throughout the African Diaspora present a pantheon of characters and related costumes, as well as corresponding rhythms and dances. A common role portrayed in Carnival is that of the “bad child” or malcriado, who represents a protester, rebel, or rude trickster.258 This character manifests in Jamaican Carnival costumes, Trinidadian floats, and in Zarenyen, the Haitian trickster spider who cleverly conquers presidents, military leaders, and other powerful men.259 In Brazil, malcriado is the Black, one-legged forest spirit, also called Saci 256 Yvonne Daniel, Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance: Igniting Citizenship (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 108. 257 Ibid, 109. 258 Ibid. 259 Ibid. 157 Perere, who suggests a slave that was mutilated for attempting to escape.260 In Lance de Corde, Jacmel, Haiti, masquers resurrect a dramatic visualization of slavery by coating their bodies with crude oil and charcoal, and sometimes donning animal horns (Fig. 3.34), again suggestive of Cave’s animalistic suits.261 The diversity of Cave’s suits reflects the heterogeneity of Carnival’s racial mix and its specific characters that grew out of the persistent social hierarchy in the American colonies. Trinidadian Carnival (Fig. 3.35), perhaps the oldest pre-Lenten parading festival in the Americas, rarely included Black characters until after emancipation when their participation increased and opened up a path for them to introduce a Black male presence of specific masquerade or mas characters.262 Between 1860 to 1896, Trinidad and Tobago’s European population used the term Jamette, derived from the French diametre that means below the diameter of respectability, to derogatively describe the African population’s Carnival celebrations. Similar to American blackface minstrel shows, European Carnival masqueraders portrayed racist caricatures of the 260 Ibid. 261 Madison Smartt Bell et al., Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti, Photography and Oral Histories by Leah Gordon (London: Soul Jazz Publishing, 2010). 262 Ibid. Fig. 3.35 Amelia Ingram, Trinidad Carnival Queen: Wild Indian, 2003 Fig. 3.34 Phyllis Galembo, Three Men with Chains, Jacmel, Haiti, 2004, courtesy of Phyllis Galembo and Steven Kasher gallery, accessed July 13, 2012, http://mother- magazine.com/blog/?p=1777 158 Jamettes or the impoverished population of stickfighters, prostitutes, and dustmen who lived in the barrack yards of East Port of Spain.263 In 1955, anthropologist Daniel Crowley identified specific categories of Carnival characters such as “Rare and Extinct,” “Sailor and Military,” “Indians and Other Warriors,” to name a few.264 In Crowley’s “Rare and Extinct” category, earlier characters such as the Negre Jardin or Garden Nigger, the Stickfighter, the Pissenlit or bedwetter, and Jamette bands were all portrayed by Black male maskers that had reclaimed these characters from the European landowners and slaveholders that created them as a humiliating parody of Africans.265 Although Cave blurs racial distinctions in his Soundsuits, a number of motifs represent Black hair texture or skin, such as Afro wigs, vintage black dolls, raffia, and glimmering strands of bugle beads that suggest braids, whereas other Soundsuits are pale or white, and have silky blonde hair. Cave’s patterns and color schemes that correspond to different species of suits may derive from Carnival’s stereotyping of colonial characters. African, Native American, and non-Christian characters mainly characterize Carnival’s popular personification of the devil, although the devil originates from a Judeo- Christian and European context.266 Masking traditions that represented devils existed in both Europe and Africa and therefore coalesce in Caribbean Carnival; 263 “Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago”, National Library and Information System Authority, National Library of Trinidad and Tobago, Hart and Abercromby Streets, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, accessed May 30, 2013, http://www.nalis.gov.tt/Research/SubjectGuide/Carnival/tabid/105/Default.aspx?PageContentID=79. 264 Daniel Crowley, “The Traditional Masques of Carnival,” Caribbean Quarterly, 4 (1955-56): 194-223. 265 Pamela R. Franco, “The Invention of Traditional Mas and the Politics of Gender,” in Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a Transnational Festival, eds. Garth L. Green, Philip W. Scher (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 30. 266 Ibid. 159 “The Devil” was struck down on the Feast of Corpus Christi in southern European tales, and “evil” was thrown out of West African ethnicities through danced rituals in white masks.267 Trinidadian Carnival sets aside a whole day to this most carnivalesque event, entitled “djab” or “djab- djab,” from the French diable (devil).268 Carnival’s “bad child” and devil costumes are characterized by a distortion of the head and body as well as black and red colors, as in costumes from Haitian Kanaval (Figs. 3.36 and 3.37). Cave’s hot Soundsuits also have a sinister quality because the faces are masked or concealed and due to the distended or phallic shape of many of their heads, as if something could explode out of them at a given moment. Many suits rise to a pointed, conical head that brings to mind Ku Klux Klan hoods. Cave describes his synthetic process of conceiving of the intimidating shape of these suits: [When I’m making the Soundsuits,] I look at the shape of a miner’s hat, a Ku Klux Klan uniform hood, a condom, and a missile. I think about all of these things that are destructive… At the same time, it’s sort of like a high priest thing.269 Through his ironic mixture of allusions, Cave destabilizes the most entrenched symbol of American racism and also invites comparisons with the papal mitre. 267 Daniel, Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance, 111. 268 Ibid., 112. 269 Nick Cave, interview with the author, June 8, 2011, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Fig. 3.36 Leah Gordon, Kanaval, Haiti, 2009 Fig. 3.37 Phyllis Galembo, Chef de bande des diables (Chief of the devil band), 1998, courtesy of Phyllis Galembo 160 The decorative patterns that adorn the Soundsuits heighten the impending threat of these characters. Writes Alissa Bennett on the ominous aspect of the Soundsuits, “Cave's utilization of the tropes of beauty is simply a means of immediate engagement, a way to stall viewers long enough to confront them with notions of alienation, socio-historical persecution, and a very personal request on Cave's part that we reconsider the absolute violence of history in order to conceive of a contemporary antidote for it.”270 Cave’s theatrical suits both reflect and debunk racist stratifications through their caricatures of Black people, Native Americans, and Europeans that stem from colonial history. Through their seductive patterns and surfaces, the Soundsuits invite a deeper investigation of the affects of slavery, colonization, exploitation and the ways in which racism and homophobia have impacted history. The patterned embellishment of some Soundsuits seem to be inspired by 270 Bennett, “Nick Cave,” http://www.ponytailmagazine.com/features/nick-cave/. Fig. 3.38 Phyllis Galembo, Rara, Haiti, 2005-2006, courtesy of Phyllis Galembo Fig. 3.39 Clarence Rolle, Junkanoo festival, Bahamas, July 12 2011 161 Haitian Kanaval and the subsequent season of Rara that begins on Ash Wednesday, described by the locals as “Vodou taken on the road” with parading and Vodou dances.271 Rara bands and participants wear a rainbow of bright colors with shiny ribbons and often with beads or sequins, as well as colorful hats (Fig. 3.38). Other characters that may be represented in the form and patterning of Cave’s Soundsuits include those found in Jamaica, Trinidad, and New Orleans. In Jamaica, current-day Jonkannu grew out of Roots Jonkannu (Fig. 3.39), a festival of masking and celebration of African origins that included dancing, fighting, and stock characters, such as: Pitchy-Patchy, Devil, Belly- Woman, Whore-Girl, Horse, Cow, Indians, Warriors, and others.272 Pitchy-Patchy appears like many of Cave’s Soundsuits covered with loose raffia or other synthetic fibers. Texturally, he bears a resemblance to many animal West African masquerades that employ raffia for its animal-hair quality. Pitchy-Patchy most likely represents a Jamaican Maroon covered entirely in palm fronds who returns from hidden locations to “steal” family members from the plantation.273 After the British abolition of slavery in 1833, this character was instead clothed in hundreds of multicolored cloth strips.274 According to Yvonne Daniel, it is unclear whether similar outfits worn by English mummers influenced this change in costume. More likely, it is a retention from Yoruba Egungun costumes made of many red panels of cloth with woven designs and sawtooth borders that “make and bring back the spirit … [by attacking] witchcraft and 271 Daniel, Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance, 120. 272 Ibid, 117. 273 Daniel, Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance, 118. 274 Ibid. 162 disease” as the masquer spins like a whirlwind, “rising like a crimson cyclone.”275 Pitchy-Patchy is known to shimmy his rags in double time steps, dance in your face and then coyly twirl and dart away. This accumulation of loose strips of colorfully patterned cloth characterizes many of Cave’s shaggy Soundsuits, as well as the opposition of shy versus bold gestures on the part of his dancers. Although many contemporary artists have used cast-off clothes and rags for sculptural installations, the association with Pitchy-Patchy’s confetti-like patterns and patchwork is a distinctive Africanism (Fig. 3.40).276 This aesthetic characterizes African American artist John Outterbridge’s project The Rag Factory (2011), exhibited at LAXART as part of the city-wide initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 that was constructed almost entirely out of rags collected from the streets of Los Angeles and from a downtown factory. Outterbridge reorganized Pitchy-Patchy’s rag skirt into a festive fabric chain that 275 Thompson, “The Whirling Return of the Eternal Kings of Yorubaland,” in African Art in Motion, 219-221. 276 “Africanism” is a term developed by anthropologist Melville Herskovits whose theory of acculturation included the concept of Africanisms that were cultural elements traceable to African origins, in Joseph Holloway ed., Africanisms in American Culture, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), ix. Fig. 3.40 Annet Richards-Binns as Pitchy Patchy in Jamaican Jonkonnu dance, Row Botham Dance, http://www.rowbotham- dance.book.fr Fig. 3.41 John Outterbridge, The Rag Factory, exhibited at LAXART as part of the city-wide initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945- 1980, 2011 163 drapes from floor to ceiling, inviting us to dance among its shadows (Fig. 3.41). Outterbridge observes, “I see a rag as an object of many vibrations … Because of the colors, because of their previous lives and their histories, rags are pretty much a statement about our social position in the world and the importance of the cast-off.”277 Outterbridge’s comment applies well to Cave’s creative meld of new and old patterns to suggest layers of memory. Cave elevates the rag to an even more glorified level with his dashing patterns and embellishment. Invoking Pitchy-Patchy, he represents the magical resourcefulness of the artist to transform cast-off remnants imbued with memory, turning rags into riches. The carnivalesque aspect of Cave’s embellished Soundsuits is one of many Vodou associations in his work. Cave may point to Vodou’s synthesis with elements of Catholicism in African diaspora cultures through the mitre-like heads of some Soundsuits, as in some Trinidad and Tobago Carnival attire reminiscent of papal garb (Fig. 3.42). Also, his inclusion of black hand-made dolls suggests the use of these objects in Hoodoo. An aspect of Vodou or “Voodoo,” as it is called in New Orleans, are magical acts known as “hoodoo,” and imply that an 277 John Outterbridge and Allese Thomson Baker, “Outterbridge,” Art Forum, September 12, 2011, http://artforum.com/words/id=28948. Fig. 3.42 Carnival Parade, Shaw Park, Scarborough, Tobago, Moreen O'Brien Maser Memorial Collection (Skidmore College), 1970, maser catalog number: 1970- T-413, accession number: 1975- 22606, source Image and original data provided by Skidmore College 164 individual was made to do something against his or her will.278 In her book Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston describes the African ancestral tradition, called “hoodoo” and “conjure” by early twentieth century New Orleans residents. She writes, Hoodoo … is burning with all the intensity of a suppressed religion… It adapts itself like Christianity to its local environment, reclaiming some of its borrowed characteristics to itself … It is not the accepted theology of the nation and so believers conceal their faith.279 Many practitioners of Vodou in New Orleans are also members of Catholic congregations, and it continues to be a more secretive religion due to a long history of religious intolerance. The Soundsuits’ decorative surfaces debunk the myths surrounding Vodou and Hoodoo, and evidence their survival of tradition. African religious and ceremonial rituals, Native American heritage and the tradition of Mardi Gras Black Indians constitute some of the confluence of influences that inform Cave’s Soundsuits and their decorative patterns. His process of embellishing the Soundsuits is parallel to the labor-intensive decoration that characterizes Black Indians’ costumes and reflects a similar intertwining of African and American cultures. Some of Cave’s suits bear a resemblance to these Mardi Gras 278 Jessie Ruth Gaston, “The Case of Voodoo in New Orleans,” in Africanisms in American Culture, ed.Joseph E. Holloway (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 137. 279 Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, 1935 (Reprint, New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 185. Fig. 3.43 Eric Waters, Darryl Montana, Mardi Gras Indian, 2008, image courtesy of Eric Waters 165 costumes, such as those made by the legendary late Allison “Tootie” Montana, who died in 2005 and passed his title as the Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas “tribe” to his son, Darryl (Fig. 3.43). Cave’s ecstatic decoration is akin to the showy plumage of Mardi Gras suits, and they share an essential ceremonial and performance context. In New Orleans, Congo Square was the only public location in antebellum North America where African drumming was performed every Sunday, and the African-descended community reproduced the spiritual energy of the West African festival and religions through music, masking, and dance.280 In a related way, Cave’s performances in museums and outdoor spaces consecrate these secular spaces as sites for ritualistic performance for the Soundsuits to bring their multi-patterned dance and drum beats. Cave’s suits with fluffy layers of hair and those with bead-encrusted embellishment are reminiscent of many applications of feathers in West African ritual regalia and also Mardi Gras costumes. When African slaves from Mande, Ejagham, and especially north Kongo arrived in Louisiana, they were fascinated by Native American bead and feather art, and some were familiar with bead art 280 Richard Brent Turner, Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 6. Fig. 3.44 Ervin “Honey” Barrister, Creole Wild West, Barrister shows off his Mardi Gras Indian costume during the West Bank Super Sunday Parade, 1997, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, 2010, p. 23. 166 and symbolism from the Yoruba, Fon, and Bakongo.281 These traditions of creative bead and feather working were married in New Orleans, and resulted in the most powerfully dressed group in the region, expressing Red and Black unity in the mid 19th Century. Beginning in 1947-50, a process of creolization became apparent as Mardi Gras Indians began to use ostrich feathers and other large plumes (Fig. 3.44), reorienting the tradition so that it resembled those headdresses of Central Africa, where a possible precedent was that of the heavily plumed ndunga masters from Lwangu in North Kongo.282 Additionally, the beadwork became less similar to the symmetrical and geometrical patterning made on looms and “began to work offbeat, like the syncopes of jazz.”283 Feathers in Mardi Gras Indian costumes are commonly attached to the periphery of the suit and entirely surround the costumed performer, creating a profusion that serves as a powerful signifier of flight and movement.284 Although Cave does not use feathers, the swishing sounds and splendor of hair in motion for some Soundsuits produces a similar affect to 281 Thompson, “Kongo Louisiana, Kongo New Orleans,” 158. 282 Ibid. 283 Thompson, “Kongo Louisiana, Kongo New Orleans,” 159. 284 Ibid. Fig. 3.45 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, synthetic hair, metal armature, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, 2009, p. 150-151 Fig. 3.46 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, synthetic hair, metal armature, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, 2009, p. 147 167 plumage and to the gestures of flight (Figs. 3.45 and 3.46), as in his Drive-By video that shows his Soundsuits jumping on pogo sticks.285 Cave’s suggestion of non-mechanical flight supports the idea of spirits that have superhuman or even divine powers, as in Sidi Balo’s masquerade discussed previously. Thompson has analyzed how the use of feathers and sequin arts in Haiti and New Orleans represents a “tripartite, circum-Atlantic relationship of memory, performance, and surrogation” for the Mardi Gras Indians.286 He links the use of feathers in the making of sacred pacquets, Kongolese feather headdresses, and Mardi Gras Indians: As altar … the crossroads came with a thousand voices to the Americas. Haitian healers make “Congo pacquets,” bags with feathers inserted at the top to indicate heaven and within the earths, embedding spirit. In Africa, Kongo healer diviners are known as “leopards of the sky”—i.e., predatory birds … hence their feathered bonnets…. The climax was New Orleans, city of Kongo Square. Here the all-over feather costumes of Black Mardi Gras Indian groups compare directly with the all-over feather masks of the Loango region in Kongo.287 The power and intimidation of puffed-out Mardi Gras feather costumes is an aspect of an oppressed group asserting its power and effecting social change, just as Cave seeks to do with the Soundsuits. Cave’s bead-embellished designs also associate his work with beaded West African art and textiles, the tradition of Haitian drapo or ritual flags, and decoration on Mardi Gras suits. In Haiti, flag makers produce a kaleidoscopic perspective of sacred space and ritual movement through which the entire ounfo [the temple where Vodou worshipers perform ceremonies and rites] is translated 285 "Drive-By" a video by artist Nick Cave, Peabody Essex Museum, featured as part of PEM's FreePort [No. 006], YouTube video, uploaded April 8, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx1_zBkqcUM. 286 Robert Farris Thompson, Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas (New York: Museum for African Art, 1993), 28; Robert Farris Thompson, “From the Isle beneath the Sea,” 107; and Robert Farris Thompson, Aesthetic of the Cool, 112. 287 Ibid. 168 into fabric.”288 The appearance of embellished flags initiates the choreography of the religious ritual in a Haitian Vodou temple, whereas in New Orleans, the presentation of the flag and sequined suits by characters such as the flag boy, Mardi Gras Indian chief, and other secret society members serve as a surrogate for memories of pre-twentieth century Vodou dances in Congo Square. The tradition of bearing flags at ceremonies seems to have been stimulated by the colonial period, although indigenous flag customs may well have existed within the kingdoms of sub-Saharan Africa prior to colonial expansion.289 The influence of European commercial, martial, and missionary groups provoked the ceremonial use of European flags, which have continued to serve as a major means of expressing relationships of power and authority and continue to represent spiritual and social unity within Afro-Atlantic communities.290 In the beginning of both Haitian Vodou and New Orleans Mardi Gras ceremonies, there is a similar ritual presentation of hierarchy of the Vodou spirits through the carrying of sacred weapons, mock battles, and acknowledging of the authority of the warrior spirit of Ogou, the Iwa who confers the might to survive.291 In a similar spirit, Cave’s suits increasingly take the form of ritual processions. Cave’s color palettes and elaborate sequined patterns are akin to the iconography of Vodou festivals and Mardi Gras. Patrick Polk argues that the 288 Polk, “Sacred Banners and the Divine Charge,” 326, 327, 329. 289 Polk, Haitian Vodou Flags, 8. 290 Ibid., 8-9. 291 Tina Girourd, Sequin Artists of Haiti (Cecilia, Los Angeles: Girourd Art Projects, 1994), 23. 169 spectacular colors and elaborate designs of sequined flags and suits in both Haiti and New Orleans reflect “the elaborate choreography of their ceremonial use.”292 Writes Polk of the sequined cosmograms called vévé or work emblems, and figurative images on Vodou ritual flags (Fig. 3.47), “Each is normally dedicated to a specific Iwa, incorporating the sacred colors and symbols of that deity … Flashing colors and glittering ornaments catch the eye and direct attention to the advent of a supernatural encounter.”293 Perhaps related to these Vodou embellishments are the unique patches sewn onto Mardi Gras Indian’s ornate suits, described by Michael P. Smith as “a tableau made out of beads, sequins, and other materials sewn onto canvas.”294 Although costume colors vary, the patches are consistent and are cousins to the beaded and sequined panels worn by Mardi Gras masqueraders in Trinidad, and the beaded and appliquéd panels of Yoruba Egungun costumes (Fig. 3.48).295 Sequin-adorned 292 Patrick A. Polk, “Sacred Banners and the Divine Charge,” in The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995), 331. 293 Sallie Ann Glassman, Vodou Visions: An Encounter with Divine Mystery (New York: Villard, 2000), 127. 294 Robert Farris Thompson, “Kongo Louisiana: Kongo New Orleans,” 159. 295 Ibid. Fig. 3.47 Haitian Vévé, Erzulie, flag from the New York Public Library Archive, Image ID: 1162852, http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgkeysearchdetail.c fm?strucID=461923&imageID=1162852 170 Fig. 3.48 Phyllis Galembo, Egungun Bohican, Benin, 2006, courtesy of Phyllis Galembo and Tang Museum, Skidmore College Fig. 3.49 Dan Kitwood, Voodoo Ceremony, Ouidah Benin, January 11, 2012 courtesy of The Baltimore Sun, http://darkroom.baltimoresun.com/2012/06/benins-voodoo- heartland/ panels are part of many Vodun ceremonies in Benin (Fig. 3.49). By applying this specific element of sewn patches of sequins and beads in embellished Soundsuits and tondos, Cave’s process shares decorative details with Haitian Vodou flags, Mardi Gras and Yoruba Egungun masquerades, and Vodun ritual textiles in Benin. Like the Mardi Gras Indian costumes that created a blend of Ougou and the mystical Black Indian identity, Cave’s patterns synthesize myth, religion, culture, and artistic invention. His recent exhibitions simulate invented festivals, complete with specific textures and palettes to complement each context. Speak Louder (2011), exhibited in Ever-After at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City, consists of monochromatic figurative collectives with horn- shaped heads that connect to form one organism. An obsessively button-encrusted surface links these figures to a regenerative form, dancing in procession. Covered in a skin of assorted white buttons in one ensemble (Fig. 3.50) and black buttons in another group, these Soundsuits subsume each figure’s individuality into the 171 Fig. 3.50 Nick Cave, Speak Louder, installation part of Ever-After exhibition, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, 2011 Fig. 3.51 Yoruba crown with veil or adéńlá, photo from Beads, Body, and Soul by Henry John Drewal and John Mason (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998), p. 206 Fig. 3.52 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, fabric with appliqué of found beading, sequins, pearls, buttons, knitted yarn, metal armature, 2007, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, p. 69, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 3.53 Nick Cave, Detail of Untitled Soundsuit, fabric with appliqué of found beading, sequins, pearls, buttons, knitted yarn, metal armature, 2007, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, p. 69, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery 172 movement and personality of the whole. Cave’s selection of all white decoration affirms their coolness. As exemplified by an all-white Yoruba crown with veil or adéńlá (Fig. 3.51) and Cave’s ivory Soundsuit (Figs. 3.52 and 3.53), according to Yoruba religion, to bathe oneself in beaded whiteness is to radiate calmness, control, and centeredness, representing the moment when past and present unite.296 Cave explains that Speak Louder is about stifled sound, therefore muting bright color, and was made as a response to youth violence and the frequent rate of teen death in Chicago.297 These figures are engaged in a funeral march, perhaps related to a New Orleans Jazz funeral. Each button, like tiny dots, offers the inheritance of personal identity. Using the metaphor of the Soundsuit, “The accumulation of buttons invades a singular cloth producing a choir of voices.”298 Also, the Soundsuits that have colorful “mouths” resemble industrial buffers or steel wreathes become speakers for the group (Fig. 3.54). They are organized into tribes akin to Black Mardi Gras Indians. In a carnivalesque manner, Ever-After used pattern and texture to contrast the sober against the comic. This exhibition marked a shift in Cave’s approach because it showed the suits interacting within a narrative tableaux. As Jack 296 Henry John Drewal, in Beads, Body, and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe, by Henry John Drewal and John Mason (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998), 206. 297 Nick Cave, “Let’s C.” 298 Jack Shainman Gallery, http://www.jackshainman.com/exhibition117.html. Fig. 3.54 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, mixed media, 2011, installation part of Ever-After exhibition, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery 173 Shainman Gallery described it, “These figurative landscapes connect the viewer to a social consciousness, summoning the echoes and voices which Cave believes have been paralyzed to silence and subjected to unfair altercations in an often hostile society.”299 Grouped according to like patterns and textures (Fig. 3.55), the Soundsuits formed distinct species or communities reminiscent of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais (1889) or Kollwitz’s Mutter/Mothers (1919) that seemed both ceremonial and self-protective. Ever-After presented a sober and psychologically charged inner world of duality that explored the funerary and spiritual, innocence and death. His concurrent exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery, entitled For Now (2011) (Fig. 3.56), was quite the opposite. For Now was a frozen performance by Soundsuits of every species, as if they were each vying for attention through their decorative patterns, flamboyance, or stunts. The suits formed a unified group in their colorful and textured heterogeneity and physical relationship to one another so that viewers had the voyeuristic experience of witnessing a Carnival 299 Ibid. Fig. 3.55 Nick Cave, Speak Louder, Ever-After exhibition, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 3.56 Nick Cave, For Now exhibition, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 2011, courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery 174 celebration. This Soundsuit playground indulged in characteristic exuberance, chaos, and cacophonous color. He described the exhibition as a “psychedelic, functified freak show that is an accumulation of the decades from the perspective of voodoo woo-loo.”300 Cave also poked fun at and dispelled myths about the religion of Vodou and the myths surrounding festivals such as Caribbean Carnival. Similar to his move towards narrative groupings at Shainman, Cave heightened the suits’ individual theatricality by assembling them in circus acts, piled on top of each other, or arranged in acrobatic encounters. The deep conviction of Cave’s decorated suits provokes a spiritual transformation for many in his audience. The vivid patterns and textures of Soundsuits and other works represent a struggle for survival and protection of the sacred. Cave was raised as a Christian, and he is not a Vodou priest, Mardi Gras Indian chief, or religious person in the sense of observing one faith or another.301 However, his work is embedded with the same spirit of Ougou, the Vodou deity who inspired the Haitian slave rebellion in 1789 that lead to the country’s independence. His Soundsuits and performances catalyze a transformation for the audience that surpasses entertainment and pleasure. In late 19th- and early 20th-century New Orleans, overt displays of Ougou would have been perceived as too threatening to the politically repressive system that criminalized Vodou, and in a similar way, Cave keeps his work in the framework of sculpture and performance even as he pushes its boundaries.302 The 300 Mary Boone Gallery, “For Now,” For Now exhibition by Nick Cave (press release), September 2011, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, accessed June 4, 2012, http://www.maryboonegallery.com/exhibitions/2011-2012/Nick- Cave/CAVE%20press%20release.pdf. 301 Nick Cave, interview with the author, June 8, 2011, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. 302 Turner, Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans, 58. 175 Soundsuits are culturally subversive in the same way that Haitian flags evidence the revolution of Haiti’s slaves and the Mardi Gras Indian tradition embodies the convergence of resistance tactics and re-created memories of Congo Square. In both Cave’s work and Carnival costumes, the decorative and fantasy elements of the body and its festive patterns bring about a change of character. The prevailing power is reflected in the theme of the Afro-Haitian proverb, “When I’m right, my magic will prevail.”303 Cave’s shamanistic use of pattern and texture functions with the activist purpose of freeing people of their mental slavery or inability to dream. What underpins the success of Cave’s work is his ability connect with his audience through patterned surfaces of dazzling beauty that are imbued with social and cultural messages. Dan Cameron writes, If indeed Nick Cave’s art proposes a radical re-imagining of the cultural role of the visual artist, it’s partly because the deep need for such a transformation seems to be shared by many in both the art community and the culture at large.304 Through pattern and materials, Cave expresses many aspects of his identity, as a person living in the Midwest, an African American, and a part of Queer culture. At the same time, he refutes being tied to any one of these aspects and therefore can serve as a kind of shaman to all people, while enabling some of his viewing audience to feel that he is addressing them directly.305 True to the inclusive aspect of Carnival that integrates a multicultural and diverse audience, Cave has been traveling his work through “performance labs” 303 Marie-José Alicide St. Lot, “Wisdom and Beauty in Haitian Vodou,” (paper presented in “Across the Waters: The Haitian Religious Diaspora,” Congress of Santa Barbara Colloquium V, Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, June 7, 2003). 304 Dan Cameron, “Shape Shifting,” Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, 22. 305 Ibid. 176 that have taken place nationally and internationally. These labs involve bringing forty Soundsuits and his team of assistants for a residency of several months. Like a theater or dance production, they do an open call and select dancers, musicians, and spoken word artists for collaboration.306 Cave’s studio process, both in his studio and in the exhibition space, is based in collaboration and community similar to the way in which Black Atlantic artists prepare for Carnival or masquerade events. Cameron suggests that the suits are interwoven with their carnivalesque function because, “there is both an autonomous existence to the suits, and a context-dependent existence, either one of which could be brought to the foreground at any moment.”307 Without his relationship to Carnival, sequin embellishment practices from Haiti and New Orleans, and a larger focus on community, Cave’s work would be disconnected from the root of its inspiration. His decorative surfaces’ grounding in centuries of cultural assertion and resistance imbues it with a powerful social and spiritual meaning for oppressed peoples throughout history. Function Patterns of Protection Since their genesis, Cave’s Soundsuits have exemplified surfaces and patterns that activate forces of nature to address violence, racism, war, environmental devastation, cruelty, and irresponsibility. Suits made from sticks and twigs may take inspiration from forest spirit masquerades from many peoples 306 Nick Cave, interview with the author, June 8, 2011, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. 307 Cameron, “Shape Shifting,” 22. 177 throughout the world, including the Nootka indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast, British Columbia, Canada, Oceanic cultures, and many variations of forest spirit masquerades from sub-Saharan African peoples. Many suits resemble African masquerades that feature an organic arrangement of leaves and sticks, such as the Yaie masquerade (Fig. 3.57) and the Bedik masks (Fig. 3.58) used for the Spirits of Forest Initiation Ceremony from the Tambacounda Region (Bassari Country) in the remote Village of Iwol in Senegal. Functionally, these costumes made of natural materials imitate the patterns of trees and branches to embody an anthropomorphic nature spirit. For instance, during their annual Minymor festival in May, the Bedik community invokes a group of nature spirits to bless the land and drive out any evil forces that could thwart a successful harvest. Masquerade spirits wear costumes made of bark and leaves of the Fig. 3.57 Phyllis Galembo, Yaie Masquerade, Bansie Village, Burkina Faso, 2006, courtesy of Phyllis Galembo and the Tang Museum, Skidmore College Fig. 3.58 Carlos Mora, Bedik masks, "Spirits of Forest" Initiation Ceremony from the Tambacounda Region (Bassari Country) in the remote “Village of Iwol" in Senegal, stock photo, https://www.123rf.com/photo_11906092_senegal- tambacounda-region--bassari-country--bedik--village- of-iwol---bedik-mask--spirits-of-forest-.html 178 geewol tree, emerging from the sacred forest to engage with the villagers.308 Cave’s twig suits embody the spirits of the forest in a comparable metaphysical way to the Bedik ritual. Cave’s magical suits, whose sounds and surface cocoon the body with textured pattern, are parallel to indigenous masquerade performances and objects that preserve and purify each person and his or her community and environment. As previously mentioned, Cave synthesizes animal and human forms in his work because the “power of the animal forms becomes a play on power and the protective spirit.”309 Cave’s stick-covered Soundsuits (Fig. 3.59), and others like it, echo the porcupinesque form of the Kongolese nkisi n’kondi figure (Fig. 3.60), a powerful oath-taking figure that is usually covered with nails and other pointed objects. 308 “Passages: Photographs in Africa by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher,” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art: July 14 – September 17, 2000, accessed June 4, 2012, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/exhibitions/686/Passages%3A_Photographs_in_Africa_by_Carol_Beckwit h_and_Angela_Fisher. 309 Nick Cave, interview with the author, June 8, 2011, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Fig. 3.59 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, twigs, metal armature, 2006, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 3.60 Nkisi N’kondi: Mangaaka figure, Kongo peoples, wood, paint, metal, resin, ceramic, second half of the 19th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 179 The nails embedded into this wooden figure symbolize the marking of various arguments, lawsuits, vows, and other serious commitments.310 This object is part of a larger practice of minkisi, sacred medicines and charms believed in the Kongo (present-day Congo and Angola) to enclose spirits for both healing and destructive purposes; they often contain things such as leaves, earth, ashes, seeds, stones, herbs, and sticks and can take figurative or other forms.311 Nkisi nkondi figures can have an area in the abdomen with objects and earth protected by glass or a mirror, what Thompson has termed “the flash and arrest of the spirit.”312 Demonstrating a similar aesthetic, a Baga diviner from Sierra Leone (Fig. 3.61) wears a headdress and clothing almost entirely encrusted with cowrie shells and wearing bundles of amulets that protect and empower his spirit. Accumulated layers on the Soundsuits similarly protect the body and ward off evil. In a piece that seems to prefigure Cave’s Soundsuits, American sculptor Renée Stout created a life-size nkisi nkondi entitled Fetish #2 (Fig. 3.62) using body-casts, bundles, and within the glass-covered abdomen she placed a late 19th-century photograph of a baby, 310 Robert Farris Thompson, “Kongo Civilization and Kongo Art,” in Thompson and Joseph Cornet, The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981), 37-38. 311 Wyatt MacGaffey, “The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi,” in MacGaffey and Michael D. Harris, Astonishment and Power: Kongo Minkisi, and the Art of Renée Stout (Washington, DC: National Museum of African Art, 1993), 30 and 33. 312 Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, African & Afro-American Art and Philosophy (Random House, 1984), 118. Fig. 3.61 Christopher D. Roy, The Baga Diviner, Mossi, Dablo, Burkina Faso, 2007, courtesy of ARTstor 180 dried flowers, and a stamp from Niger. Reclaiming her own body from the denigrating history of exploited Black female bodies, Stout also takes possession of and protects the site of her reproductive labor with amulets placed in the womb area of the sculpture.313 Stout observes that the process of making this work became a means for personal protection when she says, “I felt like in creating that piece … I had created all that I needed to protect me for the rest of my life.”314 Her fetish serves the same purpose as Cave’s first Soundsuit: an overall protection for his body that might shield him from racist attacks and homophobia. Eilertsen argues that the Soundsuits serve as both magical disguise and a type of psychic defense against the prejudices that Cave encounters as a Black, gay man, yet they also allow all people an opportunity to imagine themselves with a new identity, transformed through pattern, beauty, and texture.315 Cave’s spiritual armor signifies pride in being Black, gay, and many other aspects of identity. Cave’s recent untitled Soundsuit (Fig. 3.63), also exhibited at For Now, as well as an earlier version (Figs. 3.64 and 3.65) composed entirely of vintage black dolls 313 Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 62-63. 314 Renée Stout, Kindred Spirits: Contemporary African-American Artists, produced by Clayton Corrie and directed by Christine McConnell. (Dallas, Tex.: KERA-TV, 1992), videocassette. 315 Ibid. Fig. 3.62 Renée Stout, Fetish #2, mixed media, 1988, in The Art of History, p. 62- 63 181 and mirrors, symbolize the practice of using dolls as human surrogates in conjuring of spirits and shining mirrors to deflect evil away from the body. Fig. 3.64 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, buttons, wire, bugle beads, basket, upholstery, and mannequin, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 3.65 Nick Cave, detail of Untitled Soundsuit, buttons, wire, bugle beads, basket, upholstery, and mannequin, 2011, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery He references Vodou and Hoodoo through these dolls and apotropaic devices. Also, by assembling these dolls in a rhythmic pattern punctuated by the mirrors, Cave presents us with a dramatic contrast of light and dark, reflective and light- absorbing materials that suggests the Kongolese nkisi figure. He says, This notion of reflection, it could represent an SOS, code or signal. Or could it be a reflection [of something] back on itself, or a protective device? One has to choose what it is. I think of it as when I was a kid and in their garden my grandparents would put these shiny foil pie pans. When the wind blew, they would flicker and keep the birds away. They created a crazy play of effects. That is the driving force behind the work.316 The glittering surfaces and syncopated rhythms of Soundsuits protect the wearer and ward off evil with their powerful, asymmetrical designs and also with their 316 Nick Cave, interview with the author, June 8, 2011, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Fig. 3.63 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, For Now exhibition, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, September 2011, courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery, photo by Sophie Sanders 182 reflective qualities. Thompson has noted that in the many parts of the African Diaspora, such as the British West Indies, patchwork dress keeps the “jumbie,” a spirit, away from a resting place.317 Similarly, West African fabrics are sometimes adorned with amulets and small mirrors as a way of deflecting bad spirits by enlisting “the apotropaic magical properties of shiny things to reflect evil back upon its source.”318 At the same time, lustrous surfaces strengthen the wearer’s own feeling of power and protection. Children can especially appreciate this sense of vulnerability and protection, and they can easily imagine themselves shielded by the power of a protective suit. Cave reminisced, “I remember this one little boy who … went to my exhibition on a field trip. He came up to me, and he said, ‘Mister, your work makes me not afraid’ … that is everything to me.”319 The Soundsuits’ adornment conveys special powers like that of super heroes that make the spirit impervious to harm. Cave’s ornamentation plays a defensive role common to the masquerade- like sculptures of Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sokari Douglas Camp, and Chakaia Booker, which use patterns to protect against external forces that attack the Black body and the natural environment. African American artist based in Paris, Chase-Riboud constructed Malcolm X, No. 3 (1970) (Fig. 3.66) with organic patterns of braided cord and undulating metal cast in an ancient lost wax process 317 Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 221-222. 318 John Picton, “Seeing and Wearing: Textiles in Africa,” The Poetics of Cloth, African Textiles/Recent Art (New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University), 21. 319 Nick Cave, interview with the author, June 8, 2011, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. 183 to transform Minimalism’s sterility and shield the form of the militant Black civil rights activist and Muslim minister.320 Like Cave’s Soundsuits that enshrine the human form in recycled regalia, Chase-Riboud’s sculptures aggrandize the body and defend a sacred figure with protective patterns parallel to West African masquerade structures.321 Her incorporation of braided cords refer both to Black hairstyles and also to the frequency of lynching in the early to mid 20th century of African American men, such as Malcolm X’s father. As Cave uses pattern to ward off threats, Britain-based Nigerian sculptor Sokari Douglas Camp makes looming sculptures whose intimidating patterning and construction derive from sculpture that surrounded her as a young child in Buguma, the primary Kalabari settlement of the Eastern Niger Delta.322 Camp’s intricate openwork of jointed steel sculptures references the complex basketry of Kalabari storage vessels, fish-drying racks, and fish traps. In Birds Extinct Birds (2010) (Fig. 3.67), Camp uses cut-out metal 320 Kellie Jones, “To the Max: Energy and Experimentation,” in Eyeminded (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011), 372-3. 321 Ibid., 373. 322 Robin Horton, “Sokari Douglas Camp: Ekine Woman in London?” in Play and Display, Steel Masquerades from Top to Toe (exhibition catalog), Museum of Mankind (London: Silvara Publishers, 1995), 2. Fig. 3.66 Barbara Chase-Riboud, Malcolm X, No. 3, silk and bronze, 1970, collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art 184 patterns to fend off the destruction of her cultural heritage and her people’s environment, both consequences of Western industry. Writes Donald Kuspit, Birds Extinct Birds is ostensibly ecologically minded -- it is a memorial to the birds, more broadly animal species, that industrialization has rendered extinct and obsolete, and more particularly to the birds soiled and killed by oil spills -- but subliminally it is about the problem of being a dark-skinned African woman in a country that is rapidly becoming ‘white.’323 Like Camp, Cave synthesizes natural and man-made materials in motifs that call for the protection of nature and culture. Some of Cave’s Soundsuits allude to Franz Fanon’s “fact of Blackness” or the idea that the Black man is externally defined in the white mainstream world by his skin color, resulting in inexorable role of inferiority.324 Cave makes this association by employing glittering black beads or buttons that both symbolize the surface of brown skin and safeguard the Black body (Figs. 3.68 and 3.69). In a comparable way, African-American sculptor Chakaia Booker reconfigures industrial rubber tires into thorny patterned surfaces that resemble skins, scales, and spikes that guard the natural world and the Black body. With textures of dense foliage like Cave’s stick Soundsuits, she protests deforestation and 323Donald Kuspit, “Sokari Douglas Camp, Tough as Steel,” Artnet.com, accessed June 25, 2012, http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/sokari-douglas-camp12-9-10.asp. 324 Franz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” Black Skin/White Masks, 1952 (Reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1967). Fig. 3.67 Sokari Douglas Camp, Birds Extinct Birds, steel, 2010, courtesy of the artist and Stux Gallery, New York Fig. 3.68 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, metal flowers and armature, fabric with appliquéd beading, sequins, printed fabric, 2008, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, p. 93 185 Fig. 3.69 Nick Cave, detail of Untitled Soundsuit, metal flowers and armature, fabric with appliquéd beading, sequins, printed fabric, 2008, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, p. 92 186 destruction of nature by the oil and auto industries. Her work Acid Rain (2001) (Fig. 3.70) shows limbs of bent and looped rubber that threaten to spiral out of control, rebelling against their usurpation by corporate enterprise and embodying nature’s wrath. Booker exploits the geometric patterns of tire treads to suggest African textiles and body ornamentation, and the rubber material represents the resilience of Black people in overcoming many obstacles.”325 Decked out in an elaborate vest made of rubber tires, fabric headdress and anklets, and laden with beaded necklaces, Booker dons her own shamanistic Soundsuit (Fig. 3.71). She says, “In the morning when I get up, I sculpt myself first … At the studio, the process continues.”326 The patterns of Cave’s suits similarly extend from the protection of his own body, and like Booker’s sculptures, they urge social change. 325Christopher Cook, Chakaia Booker, and Valerie Cassel Oliver. RubberMade: sculpture by Chakaia Booker (Kansas City, MO, Kemper Museum, 2008). 326 Michelle Joan Wilkinson, “Of Material Importance,” in Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists (Baltimore, MD: Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, 2011), 13. Fig. 3.71 Chakaia Booker, courtesy of Chakaia Booker and Marlborough Gallery, New York, accessed July 14, 2012: http://www.afterhood.com/?cat=43 Fig. 3.70 Chakaia Booker, Acid Rain, rubber tires and steel, 2001, National Museum of Women in the Arts, photo by Max Hirshfeld, courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Gallery, posted April 12, 2013, http://womeninthearts.wordpress.com/category/nmwa- magazine/ 187 Beaded patterns add another layer of intimidating iridescence to Cave’s suits and sculptures. Like many of the ecstatically textured surfaces of the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, many of Cave’s suits capitalize on intricate beaded patterns to contrast strength and delicacy. As one of the original symbols of protection, beaded designs connect his work with centuries of adornment as well as making it amazingly contemporary and fashion-forward. Bone, ostrich shell, and metal beads date back to the late Stone Age and Iron Age, and there is evidence of trade in stone beads in western Sudan by the first millennium CE.327 As early as 1500 BCE, the members of the West African Kintampo culture lived in round mud and wattle homes and constructed terracotta animal figures also made beads from semi-precious stones.328 Beyond the abundant opulence of Cave’s beadwork, the overlapping and collision of related patterns (Fig. 3.72) associates his sculptures with a range of African and African Diaspora beadwork. Like other sequin and bead artists of the Black Atlantic world, Cave uses multiple patterns to tell complex stories and speak proverbially through the repetition of color, 327 Drewal, Beads, Body, and Soul, 34. 328 Merrick Posnansky, “Putting Nigeria’s Ancient Art in a West African Prehistoric Perspective,” in Observations and Interpretations: 2000 Years of Nigerian Art, eds. J. Povey and A. Rubin (Los Angeles: James S. Coleman African Studies Center, January 1, 2000), 33. Fig. 3.72 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, 2007, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery 188 shape, and texture. At Prospect 2 in New Orleans, he exhibited Soundsuits alongside the work of American sculptor and bead artist Joyce Scott, who also incorporates African patterns in her sculpture. Her Cobalt, Yellow Circles (2011) (Fig. 3.73) is a web of floating figures that suggest a Nigerian Yoruba beadwork remix of a Navajo dream catcher.329 Like Scott’s revolving circles of beads in hot and cool colors, Cave’s beaded designs provide a rhythmic tension as they writhe across the human shape and form an undulating landscape of pattern. Cave’s extensive ornamentation of the tops of his Soundsuits may also relate specifically to Yoruba art’s veneration of the head through beaded patterns. Ilé-Ifè brass castings of heads as well as fine terracotta heads (1000-1400) had beaded face coverings, which may have later evolved to form a beaded veil.330 These terracotta heads (Fig. 3.74) were often ornamented with beads over the brow and dotting the hair, and were originally painted red.331 In Yoruba culture, the head (orí) is especially decorated because it symbolizes the self as the seat 329 Bookhardt, “Prospect 2: Nick Cave and Joyce Scott at Newcomb,” New Orleans Insider Art, Sunday, November 13, 2011, http://www.insidenola.org/2011/11/prospect2-nick-cave-and-joyce-scott-at.html. 330 Alissa LaGamma, Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), 70. 331 Alissa LaGamma, 70. Fig. 3.73 Joyce Scott, Cobalt, Yellow Circles, beads and wire?, 2011, Prospect 2 exhibition, New Orleans, courtesy of Joyce Scott and Newcomb Gallery 189 of the brain.332 Africanist Babatunde Lawal notes that “the head is also the outer shell (orí òde) of an inner/invisible head (orí inú), which localizes àşẹ, the enabling power that sustains the cosmos and determines the personality as well as destiny of an individual.”333 For this reason, many Yoruba dedicated a cone-shaped altar (ìborí) to the inner head (orí inú) that was kept inside a container called ilé ori or house of the head (Fig. 3.75) “for the purpose of harnessing its àşẹ to cope with the existential struggle.”334 Elaborating on this Yoruba tradition of adorning and enshrining the head both symbolically and literally with conical patterns of beads, Cave often extends the head with radiating designs. Cave’s beadwork camouflages the human form in Soundsuits that encase the torso and head in glittering beads or vintage foliage and flowers, reminiscent of the forest spirit masquerades previously discussed. 19th-century photographs of Yoruba kings, such as a postcard of the king of Oyo (believed to be Adeyemi I Alowolodu) (Fig. 3.76) shows kings wearing a beaded headdress with a beaded 332 Babatunde Lawal (Art Historian, Virginia Commonwealth University) “ORÍ ÒDE/ORÍ INÚ: Metaphysics of the Head in Osi Audu’s Art,” exhibition press release, Skoto Gallery, 2011, http://www.skotogallery.com/viewer/scripts/local/press.release.asd/id/117/vts/design002. 333 Ibid. 334 Lawal, “ORÍ ÒDE/ORÍ INÚ: Metaphysics of the Head in Osi Audu’s Art.” [IS THIS CITATION COMPLETE?] Fig. 14 Head, Yoruba peoples; Ife, Nigeria, terracotta, 12th-15th century, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Fig. 25 Inner head shrine (ibori) and house of the head (ilé ori), Yoruba peoples, Nigeria. 19th-20th century. Cowrie shells, cotton, leather. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 190 Fig. 3.78 Henry John Drewal, Elepe of Epe with Beaded Crown, 1982, Beads, Body, and Soul, p. 30 Fig. 3.79 Detail of Egungun masker with beaded veil, Agemo festival, Margaret Thompson Drewal, Beads, Body, and Soul, p. 31 Fig. 3.76 The king of Oyo (believed to be Adeyemi I Alowolodu [4. 1876-1905]). Oyo (?), Nigeria, ca. 1900, postcard, collection of Arthur F. Humphrey III Fig. 3.77 Adenla or beaded crown with veil, Yoruba peoples, Beads, Body, and Soul by Henry John Drewal and John Mason (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998), 204. 191 veil that mysteriously conceals the face in a way that some of Cave’s Soundsuit heads are enshrined with beads and other objects. This encircling and veiling with beads is particular to the beaded patterns of Yoruba crowns (Figs. 3.77 and 3.78), some Egungun masquerades (Fig. 3.79), as well as Afro-Caribbean representations of certain deities such as Oxum in Brazilian Candomblé (Fig. 3.80). Cave encrusts his suits with beads to protect the body in the same manner that beads often represent a connection to the divine and the sacred in Black Atlantic cultures through their beauty and reflective qualities. Among Yoruba sculpture and beadwork often worn by initiates, priests, or priestesses for ceremonies, bright strands of beads often encircle the key points of the body as if outlining chakras: head, neck, chest, waist, as well as arms, wrist, ankles, and toes (Fig. 3.81). Henry John Drewal writes, “Such encirclement seals in àşẹ as it Fig. 3.80 Phyllis Galembo, Oxum, Marileide Farias Silva Lima, Cachoeira, 1993 Fig. 3.81 John Henry Drewal, Young girls with multiple beads honoring Oba Oronsen queen during Igogo festival, 1975 192 wards of danger and ofo (loss).”335 A painting of the Yoruba cosmogram, a circle with intersecting lines, and a pattern of colorful bead-like dots adorn the heads of initiates during ceremonies that connect their destinies with particular divine forces in the cosmos (Fig. 3.82).336 Writes John Mason, “Beads, like our spirits, are solid, then liquid, then solid again. In their flowing, they inform us about the state of things and influence the way we see and say things.”337 Thompson has described how the shimmering properties of beads and sequins represent spiritual power across the African and African diasporic world. He writes: Sequins … mask an inner presence of Kongo bearing … through an outwardly Creole manifestation …. In Petwo (Haitian Kong) context … they become ritual metallic dotting. Ritual dotting … associates with the secrets and power of the dead in Kongo … Sequins light up the flag, which ushers in Vodou services … Sequins translate into visual Creole, the ancient dotting patterns which in Kongo stood for spotted mediatory felines … moving between the two worlds, bush and village. The power of mediation returned in the scintillating flags bringing in the gods.338 Cave’s patterns made from beads and sequins build upon appropriated fabric motifs to encase his figures in a glistening coat of iridescence and affirm their authoritative presence. Through dance and gestures that further animate the Soundsuits, Cave expresses their individual characters and enhances the vitality and fierceness of 335 Drewal, Beads, Body, and Soul, 44. 336 Ibid., 23. 337 John Mason, “Yorùbá Beadwork in the Americas,” in Beads, Body, and Soul by Henry John Drewal and John Mason (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998), 174. 338 Robert Farris Thompson, Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas (New York: Museum for African Art, 1993), 28; and Thompson, “From the Isle beneath the Sea,” 107. Fig. 3.82 Margaret Thompson Drewal, Òrìşà initiates, 1986, Beads, Body, and Soul, p. 22 193 his patterns of protection. In many of images of the Soundsuits, they are leaning, lunging, jumping, or stepping rather than upright and static. The dramatic juxtaposition of erect versus bending figures is part of the cultural dialogue embodied in the work, and is punctuated always by the patterns that create a tension between the gesture and the visual movement. In his recent exhibition catalog, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, Cave repeatedly contrasts the erect, balletic position of some Soundsuits against those in a diagonal leap or bending position. As Thompson has written of West African dance, “In the classical religion of Kongo, to bend down while circling is to travel two worlds. When dancers “get down,” they surge with the spirit. When they stand up they move as themselves.”339 Says Cave of the shape and formidable decoration of one suit (Fig. 3.83), It may appear to be linear and erect. By wanting to be aggressive in it, I can bend my body downward, and cut as a blade ... So it can seem to be one thing, but it can also protect itself. Don’t assume that the surface is pretty.340 His statement asserts the sublime beauty and razor sharp intention of his decorative aesthetic. Cave’s patterns of protection synthesize a cross-cultural amalgam of African ceremonial art to produce extraordinarily beautiful armor that safeguards and honors vulnerable bodies and spirits. 339 Thompson, “Kongo Louisiana, Kongo New Orleans,” An Aesthetic of the Cool, 161. 340 Nick Cave interview with the author, June 8, 2011, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Fig. 3.83 Nick Cave, Untitled Soundsuit, fabric with appliqué of found sequined material, beading, crocheted and knitted yarn, metal armature, 2007, Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery 194 Patterns that Liberate the Spirit Cave’s decorative motifs complement and disrupt one another to create a feeling of being in between different states that is a quality of much Black Atlantic art and design. In terms of African American quilts and African textiles, Maude Southwell Wahlman described some of these qualities as multiple patterning, asymmetry, and improvisation.341 Identified by Africanist Arnold Rubin as the African aesthetic of layering and characterized by Susan Blier as an Afro-Atlantic aesthetic of assemblage, Cave’s work encompasses these qualities.342 Blier observed that assemblage, employing disparate materials to produce new forms through the process of recycling, is the principle aesthetic of Black Atlantic culture that substantially informs all the sacred arts of Vodou.343 Cave works in this vein of reusing and mingling unlikely combinations of materials to fuse patterns together. He says, I’ve always been interested in repeat, and the role of dovetailing [patterns]. How does one pattern fit into another so that it becomes invisible in terms of the repeat? These patterns are critical in terms of Haitian Voodoo, or when looking at a Tibetan rug, Japanese shibori, woven structures, high fashion, and Picasso. Borrowing from these indigenous cultures that looked at pattern as a way of storytelling and narrative. I ask how they signify language within these patterns and mark-making.344 John Picton argues that irregularities in African pattern and artists’ use of overlapping or interrupting patterns is what communicates a state of transition, such as the rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood.345 Cave expresses 341 Donald J. Cosentino (Professor Emeritus, Department of World Arts & Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles), interview with the author, March 23, 2011, Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) conference, Los Angeles, CA.. 342 Ibid. 343 Suzanne Preston Blier, “Vodun: West African Roots of Vodou,” in The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald Cosentino (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum, 1995), 61-87. 344 Nick Cave, interview with the author, June 8, 2011. 345 John Picton (Professor Emeritus, Department of the History of Art and Archeology, The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), interview with the author, March 30, 2011, Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) conference, Los Angeles, CA. 195 these states of in-between through pattern to catalyze something dormant in many of us: the uninhibited impulse to dream. Cave’s art demonstrates that the sacred exists in the detritus of the secular, and that the secret of unlocking the essence of spirit through juxtaposition is in taking objects from the secular world and making a frisson. As described by Donald Cosentino, “it’s like atom splitting, but in this particular case it’s the release of spirit. The supreme example of this is the Vodou altar.”346 Cosentino has analyzed the spiritual power of patterns such as the Kongolese cross and other designs made with sequins, beads, and the heads and bodies of dolls in the combinations of reused materials in the little altars of the late Pierrot Barra and his wife Marie Cassaise.347 Barra and Cassaise were priests and artists of the Iron Market in Haiti's downtown Port-au-Prince, where they made and sold what Cosentino considers to be the most original Vodou art in the world, and whose unpredictable designs create a spiritual release for many viewers. Cosentino coined the term mojo board to describe Barra’s artwork that includes good luck charms similar to those used to conjure and protect in the Hoodoo culture of the Mississippi Delta. Barra incorporates inventive mojos such as speedometers, headlights, and barbeque forks juxtaposed against doll parts on cloth-covered boards (Fig. 3.84).348 Other artworks by Barra and Cassaise fall within a group Cosentino calls reposwa (Fig. 3.85), which are physical vessels created to house spirit powers.349 346 Picton, interview with the author, March 30, 2011. 347 Donald J. Cosentino, Vodou Things: The Art of Pierrot Barra and Marie Cassaise (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 31. 348 Ibid, 27. 349 Cosentino, Vodou Things, 26. 196 When asked about the purpose his artworks serve in the world, even for non-Vodou practitioners, Barra responded, “I work only for Mystique. [Mystique] is not just for Vodou. It’s for the world Vodou.”350 Like Cave’s Soundsuits that manifest their activist force in performances and Kongo nkisi that require their essential bundles of cemetery soil to be potent, the resposwa await another action by a Mambo (female high priest) or Houngan (male high priest).351 Akin to the ceremonial artworks of Barra and Cassaise, Cave’s syncopated patterns provide an opportunity for something magical to emerge from their abundant materiality. Vibrant patterns and striking combinations of materials are what activate the energy of Cave’s installations, videos, and live performances and provoke a response from audiences. Says Cosentino of this phenomenon: It’s always in the irregularity of patterns that the breakthrough can occur, the spirit being released. In drumming in the Vodou ceremony, it’s when you go off- beat that the possibility for spirit possession takes place… Irregularity breaks that seal, whether it is visual through a pairing of different colors, or the using of different materials in a statue or mojo board. The irregularity breaks the surface, and then things under the surface can emerge. When the drum beat is irregular, what they call in Haiti casse, it jolts people and creates a fissure that allows the 350 Cosentino, Vodou Things, 23. 351 Ibid. Fig. 3.84 Pierrot Barra, Mojo Board, “Cross with Spoon and Fork,” 1995, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, p. 380 Fig. 3.85 Pierrot Barra, Reposwa, 1995, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, p. 380 197 spirit to rise. The energy is always there. But can the energy be channeled? Art makes that energy available.352 Cosentino describes a process of spiritual release in Vodou where the spirit that resides inside the body is “heated up” and released from external sources. Cave’s patterns in Soundsuits, relief sculptures, and performance produce these opportunities for the life force to emerge and for the dreamer to dream. The irregular layering of visual rhythms enables moments where the hot and cool vibrate against one another. What happens on a formal and perceptual level is an indication of a metaphysical transformation that can occur in the body. Synthesizing experiences through pattern like Barra and Cassaise, Cave explores the metamorphosis of objects from every-day commodities to items laden with symbolic spiritual value. This is especially evident in his appropriation of African American memorabilia that has been transformed from acceptable to despicable to collectible.353 Combining motifs and objects in decorative assemblages and wall installations that he calls relics, he tells a story about American history and liberates the African American image entrapped in Aunt Jemima and Uncle Mose salt and pepper shakers, cookie jars, and other Black memorabilia. These welded artworks do not take a figural form, but branch out with tree-like limbs laden with many found objects. Cave’s incorporation of a target motif as the backdrop for Untitled (2012) (Fig. 3.86), one of his relic installations exhibited at the 2012 Armory Show in New York City, suggests the violence often directed at the Black male body. A popular backdrop from a 352 Cosentino, interview with the author, March 23, 2011. 353 Stacey Menzel Baker, Carol M. Motley and Geraldine R. Henderson, “From Despicable to Collectible: The Evolution of Collective Memories for and the Value of Black Advertising Memorabilia,” Journal of Advertising 33, no. 3 (Autumn 2004), 37-50. 198 carnival beanbag game of the 1920s and 1930s provided Black faces as targets for play in the same way that Cave uses a rug with concentric circles behind the figure of a Black cast iron yard jockey.354 This appropriated figure is dressed in a vest and cap, and features a caricatured large red grimace, bulging eyes, and a broad nose, similar to Cave’s earlier relic from 2009 that presents the target-like rug like a giant balloon (Fig. 3.87). The jockey balances atop an alligator and above him floats a historic model of a ship, invoking the trans-Atlantic slave trade (Fig. 3.88). The alligator may correspond to a racist joke that Black children be used as alligator bait. Fig. 3.87 Nick Cave, Untitled (Relic series) mixed media, 2009, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery In Cave’s Untitled yard jockey relic, the punctuated alternation of porcelain tchotchkes and Black memorabilia are interwoven with veils of bead 354 Ibid. Fig. 3.86 Nick Cave, Untitled (Relic series), mixed media, courtesy of Jack Shainman gallery from the New York City Armory Exhibition 2012, New York Fig. 3.88 Nick Cave, detail of Untitled (Relic series), mixed media, courtesy of Jack Shainman gallery from the New York City Armory Exhibition 2012, New York 199 strands and flowers. Like the lawn figure in Flannery O’Conner’s short story "The Artificial Nigger” (1962), these objects show African Americans in a servile role and refer to a specific time in American history in which white people manufactured these items to keep Black people in economic, political, and social servitude. Cave recontextualizes these historical symbols of racism in the same way that Barra appropriates dolls, by incorporating them as decorative power figures attached to a tree-like armature strung with beads. Combining memorabilia with porcelain birds, colonially-dressed figurines, and painted metal flowers, Cave synthesizes a structure similar to Southern African American bottle trees. Connecting these disparate objects through an organic design, he reconfigures the Yard Jockey, a vestige of slavery and Jim Crow history, into a powerfully alluring reliquary. Soundsuit designs serve a similar role as those of crotchet sculpture and wearable art by American fiber artist Xenobia Bailey. For both artists, polyrhythmic patterns and beading provide a protective, talismanic energy for the wearer or an architectural space. Her mandala-like wall Fig. 3.89 Xenobia Bailey, Moon Lodge, crochet yarn and armature, 1999, courtesy of Xenobia Bailey 200 and floor pieces radiate cosmic energy, like a supernova exploding (Fig. 3.89). Cave’s wall tondos (Fig. 3.90) have similarly energetic sequin and beaded embellishment that show the collision of patterns that allow for the spirit to emerge. Bailey’s hats often have a theatrical, multi- tiered form that emulate African ceremonial crowns and regalia, but it is their intricate crotched motifs that create a sense of energy, as if the hat is radiating electricity from the wearer’s head. Her recent full-body costume and installation, Sistah Paradise the Gatherer (2008) (Fig. 3.91), sits like a queen on her throne holding her decorated broom and perhaps mocks Gordon Clark’s remake of American Gothic. Patterns of concentric circles, triangles, and stripes accentuate centers of power in Sistah Paradise’s body, reinforcing her chakras like beaded jewelry through their placement over her heart, head, and waist. As in Bailey’s fiber artwork, Cave’s crocheted orbs produce an overall syncopated circular pattern that floats across the body. Fig. 3.90 Nick Cave, detail of Untitled Tondo, 2008, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 3.91 Xenobia Bailey, Sistah Paradise the Gatherer, crochet yarn, 2008, courtesy of Xenobia Bailey 201 Inspired by the symbiotic relationship of design and dance, his animated patterns activate the senses to liberate the soul. Patterns of Dreams As both visual artist and performer, Cave’s aesthetic of pattern arises out of the interwoven heritage of artist-shaman- craftsperson from an African Atlantic context. Cave’s 2011 exhibition entitled Let’s C at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) in Philadelphia exemplify his patterns and textures that inspire audiences to dream. It also manifested the evolution of his ideas into more sophisticated interactions between his decorated tribes. The show featured a group of brilliant Soundsuits, his ecstatic Drive-By video, and a unique installation he made in collaboration with FWM entitled, Architectural Forest (2011). Working with project coordinator Abby Lutz and other staff from FWM, the Architectural Forest was a soundscape created by reassembling sections from reconstituted bamboo curtains originally adorned with brightly painted designs such as snow leopards, tigers, palm trees, and floral motifs (Fig. 3.92). Cave removed every other strand of bamboo and added it to Fig. 3.92 Nick Cave in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Architectural Forest, 2011, Philadelphia, PA, image by Carlos Avendaño, courtesy of Nick Cave, Jack Shainman Gallery, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum 202 its adjacent strand, doubling the length of each strand to create a mirror effect of pattern and form an optically transparent screen. This reassembling of the original patterns resulted in new, ethereal motifs that resembled trees, graffiti scrawl, and abstract designs of black, white, pink, and orange. These designs interacted with the neon vinyl floor, echoing colors of the bamboo, reflecting color from below, and causing the eye to shift in and out of focus as one navigated the installation. The forest of natural and mass-produced filaments flickered as one moved through the space and produced a panoply of bead-like patterns and images, such as snow leopards. Fig. 3.94 Nick Cave in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Let’s C performance, 2011, Philadelphia, PA, image by Carlos Avendaño, courtesy of Nick Cave, Jack Shainman Gallery, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum The Architectural Forest served as the site for an hour-long performance held December 16, 2011 on the cavernous top floor of the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Eleven suited dancers and three musicians, wrapped in Cave’s silk Fig. 3.93 Nick Cave in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Let’s C performance, 2011, Philadelphia, PA, image by Carlos Avendaño, courtesy of Nick Cave, Jack Shainman Gallery, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum 203 scarves digitally printed with twig, flower, and bead designs, caused the patterned bamboo curtains to tinkle and crackle with their movements. According to one of the dancers, Cave referred to dancers wearing raffia Pitchy- Patchy Soundsuits as the Living and Unliving Shrubs, who feed the growth of the forest and replenish it, whereas the furry Soundsuits were known as the Guardians, who protect the forest (Fig. 3.93).355 In the context of the performance, the Guardians and Shrubs represented spirits of the forest that have a specific role in its survival.356 A hot pink guardian with bunny ears (Fig. 3.94) remained within the Architectural Forest throughout the performance and represented a shy recluse who is threatened by the encounter with others, but must stay enveloped within nature.357 This tall bunny-man was cut open to expose the dancer’s athletic but vulnerable brown torso. Other Guardians were boldly colored, with asymmetrical patches of candy pink, orange, blue, black, red, or brown that echoed colors and designs of the bamboo curtains. Cave directed the event, which included aspects of musical improvisation, as well as dances created by two different choreographers that corresponded to the Soundsuits’ characters. The Guardians performed modern dance choreography while the 355 Nick Cave, interview with the author, December 15, 2011, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA.. 356 Ibid. 357 Ibid. Fig. 3.95 Nick Cave in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Let’s C performance, soprano Kristin Norderval and jazz violinist Marina Vishnyakova, image by Carlos Avendaño 204 Shrubs danced steps from African dances from Senegal, such as sabar and djembe dance movements from Guinea. Soprano Kristin Norderval, percussionist Tom Teasley, and jazz violinist Marina Vishnyakova produced a rhythmic and melodic sound collage that represented the voice of the forest and its animals, such as birds, monkeys, small mammals (Fig. 3.95). Said Cave, The Architectural Forest is an invitation to go where the wild things could be. Contained in this isolated plot are mystical forms that move through and in and out of the architecture. Signaling what’s hidden within, the sound and its stream of echoes—like a choir of chimes blowing in the wind—attract all in its path. The floor of the forest acts as a midnight oasis, emitting a glow that entices you into a vernacular void that you want to—but can’t quite—trust.358 The Let’s C performance was both a bacchanal of vivid patterns, texture, and sound produced by the dancing Soundsuits and also a sober reminder of the frailty of many ecosystems due to human infringement. In a deliciously orgiastic gesture, the Guardians surrounded one dancer (Jumatato Poe) from their group and all of their hands stroked his furry, patterned body. They then engaged in a ritual baptism of another of their group who fell backwards into the forest curtain, sending a ricocheting effect of sound and pattern. The soprano penetrated and walked through the forest as she sang, ultimately provoking the Guardians to disrobe and travel on their backsides in a long chain across the ground through the 358 Nick Cave, “Architectural Forest artist statement,” Let’s C exhibition gallery notes, Fabric Workshop and Museum, December 2011. Fig. 3.96 Nick Cave in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Let’s C performance, 2011, Philadelphia, PA, image by Carlos Avendaño, courtesy of Nick Cave, Jack Shainman Gallery, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum 205 forest. Cave referred to this semi-nude part of the performance as a sacrifice.359 The Shrubs animated their patterns with bombastic West African movements as they engaged with members of the audience (Fig. 3.96). They popped shoulders and hips, rustling vigorously like wind-shaken bushes to the xylophone and electronic beat. In his Let’s C performance, Cave resurrected the mysterious sensuality and patterned aesthetic of Wifredo Lam’s cubist painting, The Jungle (1943) (Fig. 3.97). He invoked Lam’s wooded environment with its Surrealist dream imagery, densely layered and repetitive motifs, abstracted human and animal hybrids, vibrant colors, and sacred forest animated by colorful masked spirits. In a similar way that Lam alludes to anthropomorphic deities from Cuban Santería, as suggested by the rightmost woman-horse hybrid, Cave’s dancers synthesize from animal, human, and plant textures and patterns.360 Cave’s voluminous Soundsuits contrast the delicate linearity of the bamboo curtains very much like Lam used 359 Nick Cave, interview with the author, December 15, 2011, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA.. 360 “Art Through Time: A Global View, Dreams and Visions: The Jungle,” Annenberg Learner, WNET.org Thirteen, accessed April 15, 2012, http://www.learner.org/courses/globalart/work/55/index.html. Fig. 3.97 Wifredo Lam, The Jungle, gouache on paper, 1943, Museum of Modern Art, New York 206 horizontal stripes and striations to complement his vertically punctuated composition. The synthesis of patterns and movement styles in the Let’s C performance reflected the collage of cultures and history of cultural resistance that derive from Carnival, as previously discussed. Like his performance Heard, the choreography incorporated movements from West African dance from Guinea and Senegal, Afro-Caribbean Carnival steps, modern dance, house, and other American hip-hop dance styles. His performances’ eclectic fusion of surfaces and styles is emblematic of Carnival, which has absorbed dances and flamboyant movement patterns from the creolized cultures of the Caribbean and the Americas. Through carnivalesque surfaces, Cave’s performances and sculpture reframe historical narratives and represent the endurance and innovation of Black Atlantic cultures. Cave melds aspects of performance, religion, and ritual through the unifying elements of pattern and decoration. He transforms the historically racist caricatures of Carnival characters into power figures that respond to the ills of contemporary society. His ornamented Soundsuits, installations, and performances are at home in the museum or the street. The form and function of his patterns elaborate on African and African Diaspora art traditions, infiltrate the art world’s exclusive confines, and allow his work to be accessible to the everyday person. The hybridity of his assemblage synthesizes aspects from sacred traditions, kitsch and popular culture, and urban experience. Cave’s surfaces complement this era of media and information overload because it 207 speaks to an essence of layering, multi-dimensionality, and flow, as well as the limitations of human evolution and technology. Through animal references in pattern and texture, Cave attempts to bring consciousness to the decimation of animals, genocide, and devastation of the earth. The immense range of Cave’s Soundsuit designs represent a diverse population that can flourish and live harmoniously on this planet without destroying it. His embellished suits challenge racism and the prevalent intolerance of homosexuality in many social and religious contexts. His masterful embellishment addresses forces of hot and cool, the duality of human nature, and how we relate to one another and the environment. Through the polyrhythmic patterns of performances such as Let’s C and Heard, and with the syncopated designs of the Soundsuits themselves, Cave energizes the surface so that his viewers can dream and compassionately connect with the sublime. This study shows that Cave’s exquisite pattern and decoration goes well beyond its superficial beauty and association with other types of performance art. His integration of aesthetics from many Black Atlantic art and performance contexts informs his process of combining found materials toward a social and spiritual purpose. The suits’ materials and the symbolism of their designs and textures protest crimes against humanity and the natural world while they affirm the transcendent customs that hold communities together. This analysis of Cave’s carnivalesque pattern and texture demonstrates how Black Atlantic artwork inspires social change by entrancing audiences with the tactile magnificence of the surface and its polyrhythmic movement. 208 CHAPTER 4 EL ANATSUI: PATTERNS OF MEMORY Layered patterns and extravagant textures are arguably the most consistent qualities that characterize an Africanist aesthetic, as well as a highly inventive pastiche that inserts non-art materials and subjects into fine art formats. The fusion of disparate designs and overlapping of visual rhythms are employed by many Black Atlantic artists to make the surface sparkle and dance, to deal with the complexity of cultural engagement, and to elaborate on traditional uses of pattern. Flamboyant design and ornamentation inform the process and meanings of artworks, and often the tactile beauty of works reveals the ugly underbelly of history, politics, or social issues. Patterned and embellished surfaces can seduce the viewer in order to expose the traumas of historical events and testify to the resilience and adaptability of African and Black Atlantic peoples to overcome great obstacles. This employment of pattern is not a formalist attribute, but rather a system for grouping, organizing layers, and connoting the historical references of materials and motifs. In this chapter, I investigate how works by El Anatsui, a West African artist living on the continent, presents a synthesis of vivid, rhythmically structured, and highly textured surfaces that express personal and collective histories. 209 In relationship to Anatsui’s work, the term history represents a repository of personal memories, experiences of migration as a result of post-colonial realities of war and political restructuring in West Africa, and the past lives of the materials themselves. The specific chronology of events is less important than the lineage of cultures, languages, and the processes of memory to paste together ruptures and disjunctions into a new fabric. Anatsui often expresses this passage of time through the patina of a surface and the transformation of found objects into many layers of texture and pattern. His poetic vision of the past is often tied to traumas that communities have survived, specifically relating to colonial and postcolonial history. Surface and design embody history in Anatsui’s work because his placement of elements is intrinsically linked to traditional patterns of ideographic symbols, woven and stamped designs, and the contemporary patterns of urban geography. His patterns refer to and disrupt original systems of ordering as he manipulates clay, wood, or metal in groundbreaking techniques. Anatsui’s conglomeration of patterns reflects a collective history that has been built through the engagement of many hands, the transformation of consumer waste, the appropriation of symbols, and the combining of different topographies. His recent works have served as shrines and monuments to numerous historic sites throughout the world. For over 40 years, Anatsui has synthesized African graphic symbols and designs in clay, wood, paint, and most recently monumental metal installations. 210 Compared with the meteoric fame of Wiley and Cave, Anatsui methodically and diligently built his career in West Africa and abroad while overcoming the entrenched segregation of the art world that often prevents African artists from penetrating contemporary art spaces. Until he began working with recycled metal elements in the late 1990’s, his work was barely recognized by contemporary art critics and institutions. His earlier sculptures often incorporated West Africa ideographic systems, texts of obituary printing plates, textile patterns of kente cloth, and even the designs and colors of liquor logos to produce a hybrid of historical and contemporary meanings. Christine Mullen Kreamer points out that graphic systems have “long been associated with expressions of power, for they represent access to and mastery of specialized knowledge that is linked with the potential for social, political, and economic dominance and, at times, with the capacities to influence and control religious and spiritual domains.”361 It explores how Africanist aesthetics of pattern and decoration are epitomized by Anatsui’s work in addition to the particular African motifs that he incorporates. Anatsui not only employs patterns aesthetically, but also symbolically to investigate themes of power, history, and interdependence. I investigate how Anatsui uses ideographic motifs and textile patterns to reveal truths about the past and present. 361 Christine Mullen Kreamer, “Inscribing Power/Writing Politics,” Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art by Christine Mullen Kreamer et al. (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2007), 127. 211 Until recently, Africanists have situated his work in terms of specifically African contexts and traditions, very differently from that of contemporary art critics who interpret his work in the context of postmodern, Western sculpture. Now that his work has been exhibited in more than twenty-five countries, Anatsui’s art has addressed West African and international audiences who appreciate the glittering surfaces and asymmetrical rhythmic harmonies of his sculptures. This chapter bridges the separate camps that have analyzed his work and consider how Anatsui’s multi-patterned artwork elaborates on specific West African design systems to speak to global art audiences about philosophical and historical interconnectedness. As the youngest of thirty-two children, Anatsui found ways to emphasize his unique talents in a large group through his art. His mother, one of five wives, died when he was a baby, and he saw little of his father; Anatsui was raised by an uncle who was a Presbyterian minister.362 Anatsui grew up in Ghana’s Volta region, and the town of Keta where he went to high school is separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a thin peninsula, located on the southern shore of Keta Lagoon. He was typically sequestered from his Ewe culture, and his world consisted of the church and school that were modeled after European systems.363 However, he later learned about the patterns and symbols from his 362 Ann Landi, “Master of Scrap: Cultural Conversation with El Anatsui,” The Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443884104577647511292332248.html. 363 Brooklyn Museum of Art, “El Anatsui in Conversation with Susan Vogel” (public program in conjunction with the exhibition Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, February 10, 2013). 212 own Ewe culture. As a youngster, he drew letters and shapes with chalk at school, which he found to be visually intriguing as images, and says that he was fascinated by the liturgy that looked different from other signs and symbols.364 He was exposed on occasion to the patterns of kente weaving and the rhythms of poetry that he experienced through his family and community. Anatsui never practiced weaving or desired to learn this medium, but he observed the woven kente cloth of his father and brothers. Other brothers wrote lyrics for music related to traditional drumming, and he refers to these siblings as poets. For a time, he considered becoming a musician rather than a visual artist.365 This childhood, he comments, gave him a strong hunger and a thirst to learn about his indigenous culture that was not satisfied by his later university education.366 The seeds of his interest in signs and symbols had been planted. Anatsui received a BA from the College of Art, University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana in 1969, and his career emerged after the period of euphoria during the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s founder and president from 1951 to 1966. His work therefore reflects both the hope and the disillusionment of the post-colonial African reality, and draws from pre-colonial traditions as well as references post-industrial conditions on the continent. Nkrumah made sankofa, an Akan word for “go back and pick” (from the past), 364 Landi, ibid. 365 Brooklyn Museum of Art, “El Anatsui in Conversation with Susan Vogel.” 366 Ibid. 213 the model of Ghanaian cultural nationalism.367 As Chika Okeke-Agulu observes about Anatsui, Sankofa for him was thus a very specific proposition in the sense that … it provided him with the philosophical basis for rethinking and reordering his own work as a sculptor … he seemed convinced of the need to assert on the one hand the complexity rather than the singularity of what constituted his African/Ghanaian/Ewe artistic heritage, and on the other hand the contemporary artist’s right to choose which sources provided him the best chance of developing a new formal language appropriate to the artistic implications of his postcolonial subjectivity.368 Anatsui’s recent work, which first sparked major international excitement evokes kente cloth, the “indigenous fabric that Nkrumah made a central part of the iconography of the Ghanaian nationalist struggle, and ultimately, the ceremonial attire of his independent new nation.”369 Anatsui’s incorporation of kente cloth and other textile designs into his work, in addition to West African ideographic symbols, exemplifies a process of sankofa. Anatsui’s artistic methods developed out of rethinking what he learned in art school in Kumasi, a school that was still very Western in its training, associated with Goldsmith’s College in London and offering little direct relation to African experiences. He studied about European art from the Renaissance to the Modern period, but these examples of attempting to reproduce form using academic models were of little interest to him. He questioned the age-old methods of carving logs of wood to reveal figural forms in the traditions of indigenous African sculpture and Modernist European sculpture. Instead, he 367 Chika Okeke-Agulu writes that Sankofa is also associated with an abstract adinkra symbol of a bird swallowing its egg. Ideologically it represents the relevance of an imagined past in the process of creating a progressive present and future (Chika Okeke-Agulu, “Mark-Making and El Anatsui’s Reinvention of Sculpture,” 50). 368 Okeke-Agulu, “Mark-Making and El Anatsui’s Reinvention of Sculpture” in El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote You From Africa, ed. Lisa Binder (New York: Museum for African Art), 36. 369 Olu Oguibe, “El Anatsui: The Early Work,” in El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, ed. Lisa Binder (New York: Museum for African Art), 24. 214 went to the national culture center in Kumasi, where he learned about a collection of ideograms that represented proverbs or concepts. They offered him an opportunity to express very abstract ideas. Also, he found inspiration in the bustling local rural villages and lively marketplaces. As a Ghanaian artist living in Nigeria, Anatsui draws upon centuries of graphic traditions from a variety of West African cultures and influences to articulate Africa’s changing role in international politics and economics. His vision is expressed through patterns that merge Africa’s past, its struggles for stability, and the contingencies of the present. Anatsui’s work elaborates and integrates various West African ideographic scripts and textile designs to express the survival and adaptation of culture as well as the ruptures in Ghanaian and Nigerian history. He represents history as a collection of many African identities and cultures that are unified in a continental African perspective. This chapter investigates the changes in the surface treatment of his work that has resulted in a metal sculptural process evolved from the distillation of several African textile and ideographic practices, responses to social and political conditions in West Africa as well as insights from his residencies and travels, and the recent opportunity to expand his work to a monumental scale. The first section looks at the designs inscribed on ceramic vessels and broken shards that show his early engagement with signs and symbols to reorient postcolonial African history. The next part explores his mark-making systems in wood sculpture and intaglio printmaking to show the development of his improvisational organization of incised patterns. The last section investigates the evolution of 215 patterns and surfaces of his metal sculpture to determine how this has taken on an architectural scale and function in recent works. Anatsui’s mature work reveals a consistent progression of reinventing found materials that have become a primary subject of the work. The sophisticated arrangement of his recent metal sculptures serves as the physical embodiment of wisdom and memory. Inscribed Trays and Ceramics In early works Anatsui resourcefully incorporated patterns and materials specific to his environment that reflect its history as well as its current context. His early sculptures in wood and clay prefigure a consistent approach throughout his career to appropriate locally available materials and combine them with a variety of ideographic scripts and other culturally specific designs. Anatsui chose materials sourced from the community to inscribe ideographic scripts based on a personal mark-making system blended with references to ancient languages and indigenous sources. Anatsui took a strong interest in the motifs of adinkra arts of the Akan culture of Ghana that led him to incorporate them into sculpture. Adinkra symbols (Fig. 4.1) are ideograms found in textiles, wooden prestige objects, jewelry, and other Akan artwork. Each ideogram (Figs. 4.2 and 4.3) represents a maxim or aphorism that is a key to a myth or proverb with a moral, and traditionally, these symbols were reserved for Asante kings. They are carved into calabash stamps that are used to print these designs onto textiles that traditionally were worn by royalty or spiritual leaders for funerary or special 216 ceremonial occasions. Older signs are linked to proverbs, folktales, and aphorisms, whereas newer designs may show flora, fauna, and everyday objects.370 Many men’s adinkra cloths also feature multicolored bands of whipstitched embroidery in combinations of yellow, red, green, and blue along their lengths.371 This embroidery is primarily straight-edged along the length of the cloth, but some have serrated edges in a design called “centipede” or “zigzag.”372 The bark and iron slag mixture made for printing designs provides a highly valued, glossy surface. Adinkra symbols may have been especially meaningful to Anatsui because they evoke Asante history both during the pre-colonial and colonial period. Anatsui began to collect these stamps with an interest in how they 370 Kreamer, “Inscribing Power/Writing Politics,” 129. 371 “Adinkra,” online Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, accessed August 31, 2012, http://angelasancartier.net/adinkra-cloth. 372 Ibid. Fig. 4.1 Adinkra Fabric, 1825, material: cotton tree bark dye, woven, hand printed, stamped, painted dimensions: L 271 cm W 212 cm geographical origin: Ghana, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A dinkra_1825.jpg Fig. 4.2 Adinkra symbols, African Alphabets, p. 34 Fig. 4.3 Adinkra symbols, African Alphabets, p. 35 217 became signifiers of language, philosophy, and myth, and has involved their motifs in his work ever since. He says, My initial take on [adinkra] symbols was not about patterns. I was interested in them individually. Although I studied them graphically, my interests were in their forms and content—the ideas they [express], especially their engagement with abstract, immaterial concepts.373 An Asante legend suggests that Adinkra symbols originated from Gyaman, a 15th century kingdom in today’s Côte D’Ivoire. Nana kofi Adinkra (King Adinkra) was the name of the Gyaman king who was captured in a battle with the Asantes and wore patterned cloth to show his sorrow when he was taken prisoner by the Asante kingdom that soon killed him and annexed his lands. The Asantes adopted these Gyaman symbols into their own textile designs. The Asante are members of the Twi-speaking branch of the Akan people and in the Twi language, adinkra also means “farewell,” which is why it is often worn at funerals.374 The adinkra genre may have also been influenced by Arabic inscribed cloths that are still made by the northern neighbors of the Asante, who share a similar grid-like division of space arranged in registers and certain hand- drawn motifs that can be recognized as adinkra patterns.375 Anatsui found adinkra symbols to be richly symbolic of the medieval and colonial history of conquest and political struggle of the Asante kingdom. In 1969, Anatsui arrived to take a position at the Specialist Training College in Winneba (now University of Winneba) where he replaced Ghana’s 373 El Anatsui, “Viewer Q&A: Responses from Catherine Opie, El Anatsui, and Marina Abramović,” response to question from the author, Art 21, accessed August 13, 2012, http://www.pbs.org/art21/season-6-features/viewer-qa-responses- from-catherine-opie-el-anatsui-and-marina-abramovic/. 374 Valentina A. Tetteh, “ADINKRA - Cultural Symbols of the Asante people,” accessed May 15, 2013, http://www.ghanaculture.gov.gh/privatecontent/File/Adinkra%20Cultural%20Symbols%20of%20the%20Asante%20People .pdf. 375 Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, ibid. 218 leading modern sculptor, Vincent (Akwete) Kofi, as a professor of sculpture. Anatsui collected wooden food platters and trays used by local Winneba market sellers and transformed these into wall plaques carved with a blend of adinkra signs and his own invented designs. This was the first of many examples of his appropriation of materials related to food and consumption. He commissioned artisans who made the trays to engrave motifs into new platters and then he reworked these with burned, painted, engraved, and other marks in collaboration with their craftsmanship. Anatsui reflects, I used to work on them, embellish them; turn them into works of art, so to say. And the raw material I used for my designs was mostly adinkra symbols because I found them so engaging. I was trying to relate them. For instance if you took a symbol like “The Omnipotence of God,” and you put it down, you tried to see what type of border would do to supplement or even emphasize what is in the middle. That was the challenge that I set myself.376 Anatsui took inspiration from Kumasi’s local carvers and textile artists, drummers and other musicians, who were attractive to him on a formal level due to the abstract concepts and integration of symbols and patterns of their crafts and music.377 God’s Omnipotence (1974) (Fig. 4.4) exemplifies how Anatsui looks for materials within his environment rather than using either traditional African or 376 El Anatsui quoted by Olu Oguibe, “El Anatsui: The Early Work,” El Anatsui, When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, New York: Museum for African Art, 2010, 25. 377 Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Metropolitan Museum of Art Interview between Curator Alisa LaGamma and El Anatsui” (interview transcript) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, December 16, 2009). http://www.metmuseum.org/metmedia/audio/collections/022-interview-with-el-anatsui. Fig. 4.4 El Anatsui, God’s Omnipotence, carved and painted wooden tray, 1974, courtesy El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery 219 European art media. He changed a food tray and everyday object into a meaningful sculptural surface using adinkra symbols. The central adinkra symbol floats like a developing embryo surrounded by circular lines and a diagonal band that cuts across, arresting its movement. The outer border is a repetitive shape of many fingers or even phalluses that point inwards towards the center design. The rich line-work integrates all of these motifs into a surface like that of a tightly woven fabric. Incorporating century-old patterns onto a contemporary object imbues it with layered contexts and represents aspects of identity for his African audience. Anatsui’s fragmented clay sculptures of this time suggest both the destruction of the colonial period, the forming of new post-colonial governments, and the subsequent power struggles and dictatorships that ensued. Socially and politically in West Africa, the 1970s was a time of great upheaval and dramatic advancements in Africa. Shortly after Anatsui arrived in Nsukka, Nigeria in 1975, there were two military coups and the violent assassination of a young and popular military leader, while Ghana was experiencing a dire economic crisis and its own quick turnover of military leaders. When Anatsui lost access to the Ghanaian market trays he had worked with before, he began to explore clay, which was readily available, and incorporated fabric textures, signs, and adinkra symbols into his sculpture. He made a vessel out of the clay that he transformed 220 by inscribing and printing patterns into the surface and then broke them, which represented the extreme transitions taking place in Africa at this time. Anatsui took inspiration from Broken Pots, a collection of poems by the poet and dramatist colleague at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Ossie Enekwe. In his poetry series, Enekwe wrote, “Broken Pots” affirms the inevitability of destruction and continuity, death and immortality, hate and love …. The old and obsolete must yield to the young and vibrant, but in this process, the old are not annihilated: they pass on to a stage befitting their age and experience. In African metaphysics, therefore, the dead remain with the living ... Africans are not terrified by death/nothingness since they believe in the spirit, the breath of eternity.378 In Anatsui’s work, reorganizing of fragments symbolizes the combining of past and present and the historical layering of multiple languages and cultures into West Africa’s current complex reality. The first example of Anatsui’s treatment of the surface as a hodgepodge of patterns can be found in his similarly titled “Broken Pots” series, which are largely made of clay pieces that were created, broken, and repaired to represent regeneration and rebirth. This work speaks to the violent change and turmoil that was taking place in many parts of Africa in the 1970’s. He adapted adinkra patterns to refer to pre-colonial and colonial episodes of violent political change in African history that have determined its contemporary reality. For instance, Gbeze (1979) (Fig. 4.5) reassembles the fragments of a pot that had been inscribed with adinkra designs that referred to the absorption of earlier Gyaman symbols into Asante textiles and the strength 378 Ossie Onuora Enekwe, Broken Pots (Greenfield Center: Greenfield Review Press, ca. 1977). This quotation is from an unpublished introduction to Enekwe’s Broken Pots. 221 of Asante cultural continuity even under British colonial rule.379 Instead of recreating the old structure of the vessel, he builds with the fragments and surfaces of the shards to show its “richer, more-informed life.”380 Anatsui makes no attempt to fill the gaps between shards, which may convey the way in which lapses in memory cannot patch the narrative of events forgotten. Anatsui’s “Broken Pots” series shares a common message with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s appropriation of Neolithic and Han dynasty Chinese ceramics as ready-mades (1993-present), some of which Ai smashed in performances for the camera. Ai’s breaking of ancient ceramics is what transformed them into works of contemporary art.381 Like Ai’s symbolic acts of destroying ancient vessels, Anatsui’s broken ceramics convey the idea that a new system cannot repair the damage created through war or violent change. Both artists suggest that holding onto the past as a precious commodity, symbolized by the ancient vessel, expresses an unwillingness to confront change. Anatsui’s method of 379 “Adinkra: Cultural Symbols of the Asante people,” compiled by Valentina A. Tetteh, accessed March 3, 2012, http://www.ghanaculture.gov.gh/privatecontent/File/Adinkra%20Cultural%20Symbols%20of%20the%20Asante%20People .pdf. 380 El Anatsui, “Viewer Q&A: Responses from Catherine Opie, El Anatsui, and Marina Abramović.” 381 Arcadia University Art Gallery, “Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE - 2010 CE,” accessed May 29, 2013, http://www.arcadia.edu/news/default.aspx?id=30162. Fig. 4.5 El Anatsui, Gbeze, ceramic, manganese, 14 ¾” 15”, 1979, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery 222 leaving negative spaces and gaps between the shards may also express the impossibility of trying to build a coherent narrative out of fragments. Encountering Nok terracotta in Nigerian museums, Anatsui perceived the power of the archeological relic, the fragment, and the occasionally reconstructed ceramic that together communicate the historical memories of a civilization. Nok sculpture, dating from 500 B.C. to 200 A.D., are ancient terracotta clay figures with distinctively carved eyes and nostrils, elongated forms, and patterns that describe coiled and braided hairstyles and beaded ornamentation along the waist, arms, neck, and wrists (Fig. 4.6). Nok sculpture was unlike other traditions where clay may have served as a modeling medium for metal work and statuary, and it established an ancient tradition of clay as a major sculptural medium. Anatsui took inspiration from this sculptural use of clay in his vessels, which are symbolic rather than functional. Through the delicacy of designs inscribed or pressed in relief onto shards of ceramics, Anatsui explored for several years the duality of this medium's fragility and yet its survival as a record of history. Olu Oguibe describes Anatsui’s interest in the fragment as a symbol of memory. He writes, "As it transits from utility to relic, from wholeness to fracture, and from one epoch to Fig. 4.6 Nok sculpture, terracotta, 6th Century BCE to 6th Century CE, Louvre, Paris 223 another, ceramic fragments become codices that bear within them what Anatsui would refer to as sealed and intact chambers of memory.”382 In Chambers of Memory (1977) (Fig. 4.7) Anatsui referenced a well-known Nok terracotta head from one angle, but inside he created catacomb-like structures within the skull to represent these spaces of historical and cultural memory.”383 Anatsui observes that there is a spiritual dimension to the change inherent in a broken vessel when he says, “It’s as if the pot, having broken, is transformed into a dimension which makes it ideal for use by ancestors and deities who are themselves in the spirit dimension.”384 Robert Farris Thompson notes: “in Dahomey, broken pottery at a funeral signifies the shattering of life by death, the anguish of which is eased by pouring soothing liquid on the earth and by speaking beautiful phrases and words.”385 Anatsui’s patterns suggest a way of communicating with both the ancestral and his living audience. Anatsui’s designs on the ceramic surface incorporate the West African tradition of using a broken vessel to communicate with the ancestors. 382 Olu Oguibe, “El Anatsui: The Early Work,” 30. 383 Ibid. 384 El Anatsui and Laura Leffler James, “History, Materials, and the Human Hand-An Interview with El Anatsui,” Art Journal 67, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 39. 385 Robert Farris Thompson, “An Aesthetic of the Cool II,” The Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music (Pittsburgh and New York: Periscope Publishing, 2011), 21. Fig. 4.7 El Anatsui, Chambers of Memory, ceramic, 1977, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery 224 A number of early works from the “Broken Pots” series, such as We de patch am (1979) (Fig. 4.8), are titled in Pidgin English, a Nigerian dialect originating in the colonial period that linguistically abbreviates, combines, and reorganizes English words to produce a shorthand language and which Anatsui considers to be especially picturesque and imagery-laden. This work takes inspiration from an exchange when a man was greeting a friend and said, “ol boy, how life?” and the friend answered, “boy, e dey leak, we dey patch am” which means “life is leaking and we are trying to patch it.”386 Anatsui employs the layered richness of Pidgin English titles in the same way that he reorganizes patterns to reference multiple contexts and layers of history. The different textures of the pieces are fused together like a pieced cloth that is common to some types of West African clothing made from fabric remnants, such as the Balfour cloth worn by Senegalese Mourides. This sculpture takes the form of a round vessel that is pieced from separate shards, many with inscribed patterns of circles, diagonal stripes, and other designs. The destruction of the broken sections has been restored, but negative spaces 386 Lisa M. Binder, “Introduction,” El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa,” 15. Fig. 4.8 El Anatsui, We de patch am, ceramic, 1979, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery 225 remain between the pieced sections, suggesting the traumas and losses as a result of wars and migration that will never be fully healed. Anatsui’s potsherd with surviving elements of ancient design and ideographic symbols is a metaphor for the radical transformation of African countries during this time of transition from colonization to postcolonial statehood, and its surviving elements became fragile new parts to be handled with care and vigilance, the same as a restored pot. Oguibe observes, [Anatsui] used fragments of different textures and colors to speak to the nature of Africa's experiment and experience in modernity, which is necessarily a patchwork of the old and the new, the indigenous and the foreign, all held together in a delicate yet fairly resilient patchwork that represents evolution and recovery, reconstitution and rebirth.387 The modus operandi of Anatsui's sculpture is this hodgepodge of individual patterned sections and fragments of clay, wood, or metal materials that he reworks into a synthetic surface. In his organic patterned sculptures and installations, Anatsui interweaves African motifs and symbols to communicate the rhythms and contingencies of life, the fusing of ancient and modern knowledge sources in a non-linear version of history, and shows a miraculous rebirth through the transformation of familiar and discarded materials. Rhythmic Marks and Symbols in Prints, Paintings, and Wood Several ideographic systems contributed to Anatsui’s visual vocabulary of pattern and ornamentation when he joined the faculty at the University of Nigeria, 387 Oguibe, “El Anatsui: The Early Work,” 33. 226 Nsukka in 1975, where he has taught for over forty years. This university became a hotbed of intellectual ferment and creativity since so many important Artists had been forced to Nsukka due to the Nigerian–Biafran War (1967-1970). There Anatsui became part of a group of artists led by Uche Okeke who were implementing the patterns of uli, the Igbo mural and body art. Their modern style embedded with uli symbols symbolized an independent postcolonial subjectivity.388 Uli is an ephemeral body and mural painting form practiced primarily by women artists in Igbo areas of southeastern Nigeria (Fig. 4.9). There is no singular uli aesthetic, and there is a wide range of conventions according to artist, region, and period. However, it has two dominant qualities: a tension that derives from lines that approach one another but never meet, and compositions that suggest extensions of energy and power in all directions beyond the visible picture plane.389 Uli depicts only the essential lines that compose a given object, and balance power and precision with lyric 388 Okeke-Agulu, “Mark-Making and El Anatsui’s Reinvention of Sculpture,” 38. 389 Sarah Adams, “Can’t Cover the Moon with Your Hand: Uli Artists, Artist Identity and Stuff,” Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art, 176. Fig. 4.9 Agbaejije Anunobi working with Uli designs on Professor John Umeh’s obi, 2000, photograph by Sarah Adams Fig. 4.10 Agbaejije Anunobi’s Uli drawing on paper, 1995, photograph by Sarah Adams. 227 buoyancy (Fig. 4.10).390 For Anatsui, the visual tension between these lines and designs is realized in patterned wood and recent metal sculptures that use line energetically and organically in compositions that break out of their own borders. Okeke led a group of significant Nigerian artists whose research into and exploration with uli and other local graphic and visual traditions in the mid-1970s laid the foundation for what would become the Nsukka School when Anatsui arrived there.391 Okeke organized a group of artists, later called the Zaria Rebels, who campaigned for the acknowledgement of an authentic Nigerian art based upon a “Natural Synthesis” of long practiced indigenous traditions, such as those of the Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa in combination with western techniques and materials.392 Anatsui later distinguished himself from a literal adherence to implementing uli patterns, but initially they gave him a new visual language and ultimately they informed his graceful line work and open-ended quality of his compositions. In addition to adinkra and uli patterns, Anatsui had the resources in Nsukka to study and implement nsibidi script (Figs. 4.11, 4.12, and 4.13), an ancient form of written communication developed by the Ejagham peoples of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon in the Cross River region, and also used by neighboring Ibibio, Efik and Igbo peoples. In his book Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson delineates three types of nsibidi script: the first is most common and not secret, the second are “dark signs” because they are 390 Ibid. 391 Ọla Oloidi, “Ilé Ọlà  Ùlí: Nsukka Art as Fount and Factor in Modern Nigerian Art,” in the The Nsukka Artists and Nigerian Contemporary Art, ed. Simon Ottenberg (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art; Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2002), 239-253. 392 Okeke, Uche, “Natural Synthesis,” 1960. Quoted in Okeke, Uche, Art in Development – A Nigerian Perspective (Nimo, Nigeria: Orion Printing, Inc, 1982). 228 Fig. 4.11 Nsibidi script, Afrikan Alphabets, p. 106-108 Fig. 4.12 Nsibidi script, Afrikan Alphabets, p. 106- 108 Fig. 4.13 Nsibidi script, Afrikan Alphabets, p. 106-108 often drawn with solid black and symbolize danger or extreme distress, and the third are the secret signs known only to priests and initiates.393 Nsibidi does not relate to any single spoken language but is an aesthetically encoded ideographic script whose symbols refer to abstract concepts, actions, or things and which facilitates communication among several ethnic groups that speak different languages. It includes almost a thousand symbols that can be traced in the air (as gestures), inscribed on the ground, marked onto the skin as tattoos, or painted on houses and on art, such as masks and textiles (Fig. 4.14). Thompson observes that nsibidi script is “cool writing” because it has a “function of abiding concern with social purity and reconciliation.”394 Although many are familiar with the symbols through art, secret knowledge of the nsibidi symbols is limited to members of men's 393 Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 244-248. 394 Robert Farris Thompson, “An Aesthetic of the Cool II,” 21. Fig. 4.14 Ukara cloth, Igbo peoples, Nigeria, cotton, indigo dye, Fowler Museum at UCLA, 1983 229 associations, such as the Leopard Society, which once controlled trade and maintained social and political order in the Cross River region.395 Anatsui, like other artists, combines nsibidi and uli, but whereas nsibidi is considered a writing system, uli is known as a design system.396 Uli motifs are organic and nsibidi combine organic designs with geometric shapes, and there are signs that appear in both. Anatsui’s employment of these designs seems purely aesthetic and decorative, but the act of writing and inscribing communicates his vision of West African history. Anatsui says that his arrival in Nsukka enabled “an enlargement and intensification of experience.”397 This expansion of experience is characterized by a heightened awareness of how he wanted to implement abstract patterns from African ideographic systems to express symbolic meanings in his work. He reflected, The same spirit which led the adinkra symbolists to contrive a visual sign for the abstract concept: seriousness … the spirit which led the uli artists to leave the kolanut and get concerned rather with the spaces in-between them [the lobes], or to ruminate over the beauty of the trails of the “eke” or the coils of the “ome ji” tendrils, the spirit with led the nsibidi artists to graphically encapsulate man in simple curvilinear terms, that kind of spirit I feel, is opening up my vision, leading me to conceive of things not in their vulgar physique but to rather delve deeper below the surface of events, objects people and experiences, in an attempt to seek for visual meanings and truths, to distill essences, to decipher symbolic contents.398 The mysteriousness of nsibidi symbols made them especially appealing to Anatsui because they allowed for artists to express a highly personal philosophy 395 “Nsibidi,” Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (exhibition website) National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., 2007), accessed August 19, 2012, http://africa.si.edu/exhibits/inscribing/nsibidi.html. 396Amanda Carlson, “Nsibidi: Old and New Scripts,” in Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art, Christine Mullen Kreamer, Mary Nooter Roberts, Elizabeth Harney, Allyson Purpura (Washington DC: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2007), 151. 397Chika Okeke-Agulu, “Slashing Wood, Eroding Culture: Conversation with El Anatsui,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, (1994): 34-40. 398 Franco-German Auditorium, Lagos, Nigeria, El Anatsui, Pieces of Wood: An Exhibition of Mural Sculpture, exhibition catalog (Lagos: Franco-German Auditorium, 1987), 9. 230 of life and art, and highly abstract concepts.399 Due to their visual adaptability into artwork, Anatsui found that he could combine nsibidi symbols with the adinkra motifs that he had already incorporated in relief sculpture and drawings. By adapting these symbols to form patterns in his own work, Anatsui developed a broader visual vocabulary with which he would use pattern to “write” a new history of Africa and to bridge the divides between modern and contemporary, Western and African. Okeke-Agula notes that for Anatsui, “the act of sculpting had become primarily concerned with mark-making and the ordering of shapes of color for both their visual impact and their ability to evoke states of being, metaphysical ideas, and concepts associated with the human sociopolitical and historical experience.”400 Anatsui’s art of this period is remarkable because of its array of ideographic scripts combined with rhythmic marks. It shows that “the multiplicity of varied styles vying for the eye’s attention is ultimately subsumed to an articulate controlling design … emblematic representations of ‘natural synthesis’ achieved.”401 Through this research, Anatsui studied a polyglot of other ideographic syllabaries, learning the Nigerian Yoruba scripts, the Bolange scripts of East Africa, the Mande writing from Cameroon, and many others.402 Anatsui notes that he felt the freedom to browse among many styles from the common source of African continental culture, when he says, “You see the cultures of Africa, no matter how diverse, they seem to have a common binding factor. So if 399 Amanda Carlson, “Nsibidi: Old and New Scripts,” 151. 400 Okeke-Agulu, “Mark-Making and El Anatsui’s Reinvention of Sculpture,” 39. 401 Gerard Houghton, “El Anatsui and the Transvangarde,” El Anatsui: A Sculpted History of Africa (London: Saffron Books and October Gallery, 1998) 33. 402 Ibid. 231 I am taking from another African culture apart from mine, I am still very much within my culture, my continental culture.”403 Anatsui weaves together many histories as he shows their common cultural threads and shared aesthetic lineages. As a metaphor for the layered history of Africa, Anatsui presents an array of ideographic motifs and an underlying unevenness and patchiness. He represents a vision of multiple stories and a non-linear progression through time and space rather than a grand narrative. For instance, his intaglio print entitled History of Africa (1987) (Fig. 4.15) shows a pattern of black and white squares that shift into a grid of ideographic symbols and transitions back into tiny squares. The symbols are incised more lightly, somewhat playfully, and include a range of invented and familiar signs, such as an Egyptian ankh, an adinkra symbol that resembles a comb, and tiny figures. The irregular pattern is cropped on the bottom so that the squares are cut abruptly in half. Like a woven fabric, it seems that the patterns could continue indefinitely, but it is starting to unravel on the unfinished edge. Anatsui does not attempt to wipe the plate clean, but he leaves 403 Chika Okeke, “Slashing Wood, Eroding Culture: Conversation with El Anatsui,” 35. Fig. 4.15 El Anatsui, History of Africa, etching, 15 7/8” x 10 3/8”, 1987, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery 232 a good deal of tone and the scratches and burnishing marks of reworking the image. This allows the plate itself to have a sense of history. Anatsui’s analysis of history in this print is not one-dimensional or static, but rather it reflects that power relationships are in flux, and that shared meanings are encoded in proverbs and aphorisms. Anatsui employs African symbols with a consciousness of what each sign represents, and his compositions relate to writing as well as decoration. He wields semantic power through his patterns, expressing harmony of form and concept. In other prints and wood relief sculptures Anatsui refers to writing about Africa with patterns of squares and other shapes that suggest an invented language. In 1986 he created a related aquatint When I Last Wrote to You … II (Fig. 4 16) and wood relief sculpture, entitled When I last wrote to you about Africa, I used a letterhead parchment paper, There were many blank slots in the letter… I can now fill some of these slots because I have grown older (Fig. 4.17). Both of these works Fig. 4.16 El Anatsui, When I Last Wrote to You … II, intaglio, 19 ½” x 15 1/8”, 1986, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.17 El Anatsui, When I last wrote to you about Africa, I used a letterheaded parchment paper, There were many blank slots in the letter… I can now fill some of these slots because I have grown older, wood sculpture, 73 3/8” x 55 3/8”, 1986, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery 233 take the shape of an unfurling scroll of paper dotted with small squares or compartments with adinkra and other symbols. The aquatint fades out in places and lapses of time and memory. In the same way that Anatsui would later transform bottle tops, these small shapes are linked together in a flowing, organic surface that imply writing and textiles. As in musical rhythms, in which the silence is as important in creating structure as the notes themselves, Anatsui uses pauses and gaps to convey the idea of piecing together an imperfect understanding that can only be supplemented later, once one has grown older and wiser. Motifs and symbols express what cannot be written in the language of the colonizer and thus provide Anatsui with the tools to tell a different version of history. Anatsui’s employment of adinkra symbols and other ideographic symbols to create a visual fabric of pattern is similar to their affect in the paintings of Kwesi Owusu-Ankomah. Owusu-Ankomah is a Ghanaian artist based in Germany who camouflages figures engaged in sport or wrestling with dense patterns of adinkra symbols of his Akan heritage against a similarly patterned as background. His massive Fig 4.18 Kwesi Owusu-Ankomah, Off My Back, acrylic on canvas, 61 7/8” x 83 3/8”, 1995, Inscribing Meanings, p. 205, collection National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Institution 234 figures are substantial but almost invisible, caught in the decorative field. The overall patterning of black acrylic paint on white background that approximates the dye known as adinkra aduru integrates the beauty and strength of his athletic male figures drawn in thin red lines, in his image Off My Back (1995) (Fig. 4.18). While Owusu-Ankomah’s paintings play upon the optical illusions of these patterns and the human form, Anatsui employs the physical texture of the wood and the powerful burnt lines to brand the skin of his relief sculptures. Anatsui employs Akan and Elegham syllabaries to signify positive and negative space, gesture, and concept in a comparable way to how Ethiopian painter Wosene Worke Kosrof engages ancient Amharic symbols. Kosrof observes about the Amharic symbols in his painting The Monument (2003) (Fig. 4.19), The symbol communicates with the viewer through its form and color, through the space in which it moves, through the relationship it has to other syllables next to it and within the broader ambience of the entire canvas … I create spaces for them to appear, move, dance, and strut their stuff.404 The graceful and arching black Amharic signs in The Monument are both figural and abstract, dominating the composition like dramatic architecture against the sky. Like Kosrof’s synesthetic response to color and sound in 404 Wosene Worke Kosrof and Patricia D. Rubbo, “Words: From Spoken to Seen,” Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2007), 237. Fig. 4.19 Wosene Worke Kosrof, The Monument, acrylic on linen, 2003, courtesy of Wosene Worke Kosrof 235 works such as Color of Words (1995) (Fig. 4.20), Anatsui overlaps verbal and visual in compositions that express the power of language and symbol, and his ordering of these symbols creates unpredictable patterns. Also in the 1980s, Anatsui made mysterious paintings that feature flat bands of rich color painted with broad rollers or with wide swaths of color and compressed areas of tiny shapes and linear details that suggest strip cloth patterns. These images, such as Untitled (1980s) (Fig. 4.21) are characterized by rows of rectangles on the edges and tiny bead-like interludes that fill in tiny spaces between the broad swaths of color. The hot and cool combination of green rectangles floating across a red-orange ground and wide horizontal strokes of magenta cause the eye to move across a syncopated space Fig. 4.21 El Anatsui, Untitled, acrylic on masonite, 24” x 48”, 1980’s, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.22 Kente cloth design, “Agyenegyenesu,” Wrapped in Pride, private collection, p. 116 Fig. 4.20 Wosene Worke Kosrof, Color of Words, 1995, acrylic on linen, courtesy of Wosene Worke Kosrof 236 that resembles African textiles. The strips of vivid color suggest West African double-heddle loom weaving techniques such as kente cloth.405 Like many kente designs, these paintings show a dramatic shift in scale between broad areas of color and intricate detail, as in the kente cloth design Agyenegyenesu (Fig. 4.22) named after a small insect that can walk on water. It symbolizes a warning against deceptive behavior.”406 In the context of Anatsui’s work, these complex patterns imply multiple narratives that are woven together in the composition. The paintings of fellow Ghanaian artist and friend Atta Kwami share a similar aesthetic in how they organize space and echo the patterns of kente cloth. Kwami learned weaving as a boy, as did many of his generation, and was exposed to art through his mother, the sculptor, painter, and textile designer Fig. 4.23 Atta Kwami, Lanier Place Goddess II, oil on canvas, 2010, courtesy of Atta Kwami Fig. 4.24 Atta Kwami, Amsterdam Archways, 2011, The Netherlands, courtesy of Atta Kwami Grace Salome Kwami. The urban landscape is also reflected in his patterns. Many of his paintings are inspired by the renditions of street artists for 405 See John Picton and John Mack, African Textiles (London: British Museum Press, 1993), especially chapter five, for an in depth study of the narrow strip or belt loom. 406 Doran Ross, “Weft Names,” in Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998), 116. 237 kiosks, shop fronts, billboards, and murals. Kwami says that his works “embody those aspects of my everyday life which have the greatest significance: kiosks, commercial (sign) painting, woven textiles⎯Ghanaian music (Koo Nimo) and jazz, all of which allow for series composition in strips, stripes, and grids.”407 His painting Lanier Place Goddess II (2010) (Fig. 4.23) has a broad palette of primary colors, black, white, green, and pink. It moves the eye from longer verticals and horizontals to thin stripes in the lower left corner, as if the viewer is meandering through a maze of perpendicular bars of color. The alternating stripes that lay parallel or perpendicular to the top layer of paint suggest the weft and warp of kente, especially highly valued double-woven types. The rhythms are syncopated and irregular like many of Anatsui’s patterns that preclude predictable repetition. Kwami’s Amsterdam Archways (2011) (Fig. 4.24) exhibited at the free open air art exhibition Artzuid in Amsterdam transformed the patterns of his two dimensional work into sculpture and played upon the theme of European classical and perhaps triumphal and commemorative architecture. Like Kwami’s work, Anatsui’s organization of form and patterns are about a sense of place and a response to the specific patterns and materials of his environment. Anatsui’s prints, drawings, and paintings of the 1980’s inform his engagement with color and the visual ordering of elements and textures. Okeke- Agulu argues about Anatsui’s paintings, “We must appreciate his long-standing fascination with and attention to the ordering of two-dimensional graphic gestures, and the way they substantially structure the optical, physical, and even 407 Atta Kwami, email message to Lydie Diakhaté, April 14, 2008 cited in The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York: New York University, Grey Art Gallery, 2008), 82. 238 conceptual conditions of his three-dimensional work.”408 Anatsui’s sculpture is characterized by a great attention to texture and surface as well as the larger compositional structure in a very painterly manner. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Anatsui’s travel to Europe and America and participation in major international exhibitions and residencies expanded his visual vocabularies and sense of pattern in terms of location. One of the most influential events of this time was his participation in a Massachusetts residency program at the Cummington Community of the Arts, where he learned to harness the raw power of the chainsaw to carve large pieces of wood. He began to use this tool to work with smaller strips of wood that he could reorganize in a range of ways, similar to how he previously manipulated sections of broken ceramics. The chainsaw enabled him to draw curvilinear lines and designs into wood with the same facility with which he had previously marked the surfaces of clay sculpture. As Anatsui said, “Power-saw tearing rough-shod through organic wood at devastating speed … constitutes a metaphor of the hassling, rat-racing, hypertensive pace of present-day living.”409 This tool also allowed him to make a complete break with the work of previous Ghanaian artists, becoming more aligned with trends from other aspects of African two-dimensional design. Anatsui found that he could personalize this mechanical, industrial method of mark making, and showed that “the very process of inscription is a powerful act 408 Chika Okeke-Agulu, “Mark-Making and El Anatsui’s Reinvention of Sculpture,” 33. 409 Franco-German Auditorium, Lagos, Nigeria, El Anatsui, Pieces of Wood: An Exhibition of Mural Sculpture, exhibition catalog (Lagos: Franco-German Auditorium, 1987), 10. 239 as well as a creative one.”410 The freedom of working abroad enabled Anatsui to assimilate these tools into his process with new vitality and freedom. Anatsui often treats his wood sculptures as a textured and patterned skin that he cuts with scarifications, burns with fire, or tattoos with linear designs. In the drawings he showed as part of his exhibition in 1982 at the Goethe-Institut, Lagos, he incorporated uli designs as well as other abstract patterns with powerful contour lines and dark, heavy shapes that anticipate the treatment of his wood sculpture in the mid-1980s. In Between Ontisha and Asaba (1986) (Fig. 4.25), Anatsui uses the rhythmic s-curving lines made with a power saw and fire to suggest the force and movement of the Niger River that flows between the cities of Onitsha and Asaba. The massive girth of the lines that swirl from one diagonal of the sculpture to the other is subtly interrupted by the vertical cuts that segment the wood into sections. On lower left and upper right, the rectangular pieces of wood suggest an aerial view of villages. This mapping of landscape and geography through pattern is consistent with other works and has been further developed in his recent metal sculptures. In the 1990’s, Anatsui’s work earned increased international attention, and this exposure enabled him to expand 410 Kreamer, “Inscribing Power/Writing Politics,” 144. Fig. 4.25 El Anatsui, Between Ontisha and Asaba, wood, tin, 1986, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery 240 its scale and the boldness of his patterns. His works were shown in residencies, biennales, and exhibitions, such as Five Contemporary African Artists in the 44th Venice Biennale and Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition at the Studio Museum in Harlem (1990). He chose specific types of wood for their color and grain patterns. Working with the saw, flame, sander, power routers and other power tools, Anatsui found a new method of drawing on wood. The flat composition of colored and patterned strips of wood became a relief surface on which he could incise lines with power tools and oxyacetylene flame. He used oxyacetylene flame to burn out loose wood and to char surfaces left by the saw, therefore creating areas of black shapes and lines. In part of a statement that accompanied his Lagos exhibition Old and New: An Exhibition of Sculptures in Assorted Wood (1991), Anatsui enumerates the types of wood he combined in these sculptures, how he manipulated and juxtaposed the different kinds, and the marks he applied to the surface. He concludes his artist statement with the following poem: Slash rip sear saw whittle devastate chip chop break burn impose juxtapose control411 Basing his two-dimensional works on narrow pieces of wood in which he incised striking abstract marks, signs, and designs, Anatsui conveyed the structural and design connections between his sculptures and West African fabric patterns. His sculptures of this period bear marks from a rotary saw that allows clean straight lines that create cross-hatched patterns akin to the warps and 411 National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria, El Anatsui, Old and New: An Exhibition of Sculptures in Assorted Wood (National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria, 1991), 7. 241 wefts of woven cloth, and to convey printed or finely-woven patterns that represent the value of Africa’s rich textile traditions. Anatsui has also implied that the rapacious bite of the chainsaw signifies the European colonial destruction of Africa’s histories and cultures, the carving up of the African continent, and post- colonial discord of many African nations.412 So the physical act of his patterned art reflects historical concepts and symbolism. Furthermore, his assembling of thin strips of wood with individual designs recalls the way narrow-strip cloths are sewn together, edge to edge. The vitality and dynamic, irregular rhythms of these marks and patterns, including the symbols of adinkra and the painted bands of color that represent kente woven designs, have had a longstanding meaning for Anatsui as metaphors for African history and its survival in spite of the violence and devastation of colonization, war, corporate usurpation, and political corruption. Anatsui gouged geometric shapes that reference both writing and animal patterns into concave wooden strips that he assembled unevenly in an undulating, rhythmic surface in Leopard’s Paw Prints and Other Stories (1991) (Fig. 4.26). The weight of charred marks and geometric shapes are similar to nsibidi patterns that reference leopard’s markings as in some designs of ukara cloth (Fig. 4.27). Patterns of repeating triangles and squares serve as the leopard’s spots, a symbol of leadership and success in war.413 These designs bring the wooden shapes into high relief. Within many of these squares, the 412 Okeke-Agulu, “Mark-making and El Anatsui’s Reinvention of Sculpture,” 45. 413 Saki Mafundikwa, Afrikan Alphabets (West New York, NJ: Mark Batty Publisher, 2004), 108. 242 Fig. 4.26 El Anatsui, Leopard’s Paw-prints and Other Stories, wood, paint, 16” x 35 ¼”, 1991, courtesy of El Anatsui, October Gallery in London, and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.27 Detail of Ukara cloth that hung on the wall in the Mgbe Hall of an Etung- Ejagham village along the Cross River, Abijang, Nigeria, photograph by Amanda Carlson, 1997 circular patterns are carved or gouged and painted ochre, red, or white. The title suggests a parable or narrative, and the leopard itself is an animal celebrated in masquerades, proverbs, and patterns throughout the region. As the icon of the male Secret Society of the Ekpe also known as the Leopard Society in Nigeria (mostly across Efik, Oron, and Igbo tribes), the leopard also has historical significance since this group developed the nsibidi ideographic language before the eighteenth century. Among the Leopard Society, an elaborate dyed cloth called ukara bears signs in nsibidi script that can only be interpreted by initiates, and therefore the cloth itself serves as a coded manuscript. Anatsui has employed nsibidi, adinkra, and perhaps other symbols that create a rough landscape above a series of small stick figures at the bottom left that traverse the strips of wood. Another example, Old Cloth Series (1993) (Figs. 4.28 and 4.29) is a panoramic piece that functions similarly to his later works with bottle caps in its 243 areas of transparency, continuous pattern, and sense of deterioration. The pattern of Fig. 4.28 El Anatsui, Old Cloth Series (and detail), wood, paint, 31 ½” x 60 ¼”, 1993, courtesy of El Anatsui, October Gallery in London, and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.29 El Anatsui, detail of Old Cloth Series (and detail), wood, paint, 1993, courtesy of El Anatsui, October Gallery in London, and Jack Shainman Gallery small squares, some of which have been carved and burnt out, moves horizontally across the composition, and is subtly interrupted by the vertical cuts of the wooden panels that have been assembled together. As if eaten by worms, the piece is characterized by a tunnel-like form, of black shapes and lines that bores through the left top to the bottom center. The organic and uneven degradation of this dark tunnel gradually ruptures the rest of the cloth-like surface, but the larger composition remains intact as a monument to the history and longevity of this material. In Old Cloth Series, A variety of marks that include adinkra, uli, or nsibidi symbols are incised and brightly painted in the individual squares. For instance, Anatsui incorporates an “X” motif that may represent an nsibidi symbol for trouble at the crossroads, but Fig. 4.30 Akoma ntoaso adinkra symbol, Afrikan Alphabets, p. 34 244 is similar to Akoma ntoaso (Fig. 4.30), which signifies hearts linked in understanding or agreement in adinkra ideographs.414 Also, he includes a spiral, an nsibidi sign that symbolizes a journey, but also alludes to the sun and eternity.415 Relevant to the African diaspora, the spiral was adopted as the identity of the 1960s African American artist collective based in New York City and formed by Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Hale Woodruff, Emma Amos and a number of other artists who felt it would signify their relationship to the American civil rights movement by representing their journey to promote social change through art. Victor Ekpuk, a Nigerian artist based in Washington, D.C., also adapts this symbol in paintings with hot and cool colors as in his Good Morning Sunrise (2002) (Figs. 4.31 and 4.32), in which a red spiral design floats upon a blue sea of other signs. This painting expresses the artist’s memory of a cool morning in Ife, Nigeria after a long night of work in the studio.416 Seen in various contexts, these artists’ use of adinkra symbols expresses personal and more universal meanings, speaking cross-culturally and also decoratively. Anatsui’s engagement with the signs is never simply literal so audiences can access 414 Mafundikwa, Afrikan Alphabets, 34 and 107. 415 “Nsibidi,” Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art, accessed August 19, 2012, http://africa.si.edu/exhibits/inscribing/nsibidi.html. 416 Amanda Carlson, “Nsibidi: Old and New Scripts,” email correspondence with El Anatsui, November 4, 2004, Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art, 153. Fig. 4.31 Victor Ekpuk, Good Morning Sunrise, acrylic on canvas, 129.2 x 129.2 cm, 2002, courtesy of Victor Ekpuk; Fig. 4.32 Victor Ekpuk, detail of Good Morning Sunrise, acrylic on canvas, 129.2 x 129.2 cm, 2002, courtesy of Victor Ekpuk 245 these images on an aesthetic level without any knowledge of the specific symbolism. Anatsui’s Coins on Grandma’s Cloth (1992) (Fig. 4.33) is another sculpture that employs the repetitive circular motif cut with a hole saw to stand for the metaphor of textile designs. The layering of patterns in this work suggests a fabric woven with different designs such as tiny squares, syncopated diagonal streaks of color, and the circles of coins all integrated in a horizontal composition with vertically cut strips of wood. Anatsui creates a dramatic contrast of charred wood against blonde colored circles and deeper red wood, as well as the diagonal lines of red, purple, green, and yellow, colors that are frequently woven in kente cloth. Even more dramatic and specific to cloth is Remnant of Grandma’s Cloth (1995) (Fig. 4.34) that exploits similar patterns of charred wood and squares with holes. Fig. 4.34 El Anatsui, Remnant of Grandma’s Cloth, wood, paint, 31 ½” x 36 ¼”, 1995, courtesy of El Anatsui and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.33 El Anatsui, Coins on Grandma’s Cloth, wood, paint, 25” x 55”, 1992, collection of Contemporary African Art Gallery, New York 246 The diagonal design of blackened and gauged lines is interrupted only by passages of squares, some painted in red, yellow, blue, and green. Anatsui carved the wood slats and then worked with a chainsaw to cut away entire sections of wood and scorch these marks with fire. His piece Kente Rhapsody (2001) (Fig. 4.35) refers very specifically to strip weaving and kente patterns through both the black charring of wooden strips to produce a zebra-like pattern and also horizontal bands of red, yellow, blue, and green that traverse the piece at two sections. Anatsui’s drawing with fire to burn patterns into wood has correspondences with scorched designs by African American artist Willie Cole and South African artist Sandile Zulu. Cole’s visual vocabulary consists of ordinary domestic objects, such as the steam iron that may stand for the historic domestic role of Black women as well as the Yoruba god of iron and war, Ogun.417 Transforming the burned impression of the iron, it takes on multiple meanings depending on its context and the surface on which he prints. When 417 David Krut Projects, “Willie Cole: Biography,”accessed February 27, 2013, http://www.davidkrut.com/bioCole.html. Fig. 4.36 Willie Cole, Branded Irons, scorching on four plywood panels, 2000, collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Fig. 4.35 El Anatsui, Kente Rhapsody, aluminum and copper wire, 52 ½” x 69”, 2001, courtesy of El Anatsui, collection of the British Museum 247 printed alone, this shape can reference a face or African mask, a slave ship, or a shield. The arrangements of iron marks resemble flowers, plants, and adinkra patterns. In his piece Branded Irons (2000) (Fig. 4.36), the rhythmic design of the irons invokes a textile pattern that plays upon positive and negative shapes, but the title perhaps references the cruel practice of slave-owners that branded their slaves with specific burn marks so that they could be tracked if they escaped. Sharing similarities to Anatsui’s rhythmic burn marks on wood sculpture, Zulu’s two-dimensional works are organized by patterns of smoky scorched shapes. Both artists draw with the blowtorch to produce spontaneous patterned sections that can be arranged. Their accumulation of marks is enhanced by the negative spaces in the work, the pauses between the burns. His work Degeneration, Regeneration, Life Cycle Forms 10 (2006) (Fig. 4.37), shows rings of crisp circles in the center that degrades into a smoky and irregular pattern of burned marks on the perimeter of the canvas, conveying a sequence of mark- Fig. 4.38 Sandile Zulu, Galaxy 5, fire, air, water on canvas, 2005, courtesy of Sandile Zulu and October Gallery Fig. 4.37 Sandile Zulu, Degeneration, Regeneration, Life Cycle Forms 10, 2006, courtesy of Sandile Zulu and October Gallery 248 making that relates to a cycle of life and the passage of time. Like many of Anatsui’s wooden sculptures in which patterns are a metaphor for the environment, sociopolitical issues, or the ephemerality of life, Zulu’s method depends on rhythm and repetition as well as the unpredictability of natural elements, including fire, water, and scavenged industrial debris. Zulu’s Galaxy 5 (2005) (Fig. 4.38) employs a repetitive star-shaped stencil to form a spiral that represents harmony and order within the universe. Like Cole and Zulu, Anatsui harnesses the destructive power of fire to adorn his work and create images of regeneration. Although most of his works are abstract, Anatsui has also produced figurative works with patterns that demarcate the forms of the body. In 1995, he made Adinsibuli Stood Tall (Fig. 4.39), which incorporates adinkra, nsibidi, and uli designs with painted marks around the mid-section. This wooden sculpture is one of several he made in the mid-1990s from castoff mortars originally employed to extract palm oil. Having been pounded to the point of breaking, this sculpture survived its utilitarian function and embodies its own history of use. The long graceful lines that decorate the sculpture’s body are uli figures, while others are nsibidi designs, and the repeating circular designs reflect adinkra patterns. These Fig. 4.39 El Anatsui, Adinsibuli Stood Tall, wood, tempera paint, 94” x 15 ¾”, 1995, courtesy of El Anatsui, October Gallery, and Jack Shainman Gallery 249 colorful symbols suggest the fertility and vitality of this female figure. Joined together by thin pieces of metal and wire, she is a hybrid figure that consolidates the many patterns of ideographic systems that Anatsui engages in other wood sculptures.418 Her undulating and extenuated shape exemplifies his work with raw, discarded materials to build form expressively. That the mixture of designs is the central idea is confirmed by both the sculpture’s composite form and her name that is derived from the first two syllables of each of the three names of these patterns: Adinkra, Nsibidi, and Uli, yielding the compound word Adinsibuli. Through an amalgam of patterns, Anatsui’s figure signifies the many generations of women involved in the laborious process of extracting palm oil and implies that these women should stand tall, “proudly confident in the possession of a personal complex of inherited histories and cultures.”419 She represents an anonymous and collective figure, a symbol perhaps for all African women whom he celebrates with surface pattern and decoration. Anatsui integrates patterns of adinkra, nsibidi, and uli to write a history of Africa that diverges from the colonial history written by Europeans, symbolizes a plurality of African cultures as well as shared experiences, and shuttles between past and present. His materials and mark making are evocative of events, textures, rhythmic designs, and great leaders as well as everyday people. He says, I look at the textures of my work in progress and I think about the texture and grain of Africa’s History. I look at the authentic colours of the different types of wood and they remind me of the real colours of Africa’s History. I contemplate the directions of the large populations of mobile figures and they replicate the migrations of Africa’s History. I look at the variegated circumstances on the face 418 Lisa M. Binder, “Introduction,” When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, 18. 419 Houghton, “El Anatsui and the Transvangarde,” 35. 250 of a large figure just created and the feeling takes me across the face of Africa’s History.420 However, he has expressed concern that some audiences will not see beyond the aesthetic discussion of pattern to its broader conceptual foundation. He observes, “[i]f there is pattern discernible in my works, they [sic] are not the destination but just means to the bigger picture [and] statement. They are like words coming together to form sentences, which grow into paragraphs, and may eventually end in a book.”421 Anatsui asserts that the patterns in his work signify the deeper meanings and symbolism of his process, and he reinforces the analogy of writing that has sustained him throughout his career. Anatsui incorporates symbols and designs towards a different purpose than American modernist abstractionists who integrated cryptic signs in their paintings in the 1940s and 50s to express the universality of pictographs and symbols in human communication from ancient times. For instance, Afro Emblems (Fig. 4.40) (1950) by modernist painter Hale Woodruff divides the canvas into loose rows of rectangles, each with an emblem inspired from those 420 El Anatsui, El Anatsui: A Sculpted History of Africa (London: Saffron Books and the October Gallery), 8. 421 El Anatsui, “Viewer Q&A: Responses from Catherine Opie, El Anatsui, and Marina Abramović.” Fig. 4.40 Hale Woodruff, Afro Emblems, oil on canvas, 1950, courtesy of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution 251 of Asante gold weights, which were often adorned with depictions of folktales, proverbs, and social rituals. Woodruff’s adaptation of the Asante weight designs and his rhythmic ordering of these shapes expresses his identification with his African heritage and the relevance of these powerful objects for all humanity. However, Woodruff’s paintings focus on the abstraction of these symbols rather than what each particular symbol might represent. Anatsui responds to the meaning of individual symbols so that his references can often be interpreted through the title of each work. Anatsui’s specific combinations of symbols and patterns refer to the coexistence of different ethnic groups as well as the clashing and reintegration of language systems as a result of war and power-struggles in Africa. Therefore, Anatsui generally uses symbol systems to signify change and transformation rather than stasis. Another aspect of Anatsui’s wooden sculpture is its improvisational and unfixed nature that can yield a range of possible patterns and outcomes. Anatsui often numbered the wooden strips, but he asserts that these numbers are simply a suggestion for the curator rather than a fixed ordering. He invites the curator or the owner of the piece to creatively reorganize his patterns and elements. However, there is the underlying logic of the arrangements in strips. Writes Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Anatsui uses the architectonic logic of west African strip-woven cloth as the frame (and ground) on which he inscribes images and motifs from such diverse 252 backgrounds as Akan Adinkra, Igbo Uli, and Ejagham Nsibidi syllabaries … this underlying textile orientation is a structural grid for Anatsui’s creative endeavor.422 His process of allowing others to rearrange these sections enables these sculptures to have multiple possible compositions that would allow the moveable parts to complement one another and to accentuate different motifs as a focal point. Anatsui’s work Signature (1999) (Figs. 4.41 and 4.42) marks a transition to a new way of accumulating pattern and form that prefigures his metal “cloth” sculptures.423 He made this outdoor installation by stacking several hundred lengths of cut wood in the mossy Plas Caerdeon woods, north Wales, next to a leafy path. There is a common practice in Nigeria of marking cut wood for sale with a stroke of paint to represent the owner of the logs, and in a similar way, Fig. 4.41 El Anatsui, Signature, wood, paint, 1999, Cyfuniad International Artists Workshop in Plas Caerdeon, Wales, courtesy of El Anatsui Fig. 4.42 El Anatsui, detail of Signature, wood, paint, 1999, Cyfuniad International Artists Workshop in Plas Caerdeon, Wales, courtesy of El Anatsui Anatsui references the individual “signatures” on his wood with painted designs.424 The timber is painted on one sawn end with monochromatic bands of color in cool blues, warm yellows and oranges, and a few in solid colors. These 422 Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “Wonder Masquerade: Transfiguration and Embodiment in the Art of El Anatsui,” in El Anatsui: Gawu (Wales: Oriel Mostyn Gallery, 2003), 14. 423 Okeke-Agulu, “Mark-making and El Anatsui’s Reinvention of Sculpture,” 47. 424 Ibid, 46. 253 decorative patterns of stripes on circles pop out against the rich greens of the forest. Also, the amassing of many like-shaped forms that are organically organized with colorful designs show a shift in his method of manipulating found materials. Rather than carving the pattern into the material, Anatsui began additively assembling and manipulating the surface so that it became a collective structure in its environment. In the 1980s and 90s, Anatsui’s prints, paintings, and wood sculpture evidence the deliberate and increased presence of ideographic symbols organized into decorative patterns. Fluidly mixing signs from adinkra, uli, and nsibidi scripts, he developed a flexible mark-making system with the blowtorch and a method of assembling his sculptures into sections that resemble African strip cloth. Anatsui’s innovations of ordering small sections from combined units led to his next great innovation in sculptural process: creating large scale metal sheets from colorful aluminum bottle caps. Metal Cloth Mosaics Anatsui’s work of the last decade has blossomed into large-scale metal installations that have expanded the complexity and expressiveness of his patterns and earned him a place in the international art world. In 1999, Anatsui began to appropriate discarded metal from his environment and piece together units of metal to create monochromatically patterned “cloths.” As a testament to the originality of his medium, scholars are still searching for the appropriate term to describe these works. Anatsui has come to call these works “metal pieces,” 254 “metal works,” or “metal sheets.”425 He provides a spellbinding transformation of the material that seduces viewers to explore the play of light on the metallic surface and the intricate patterning within the larger composition. In these works, design and texture organize two-dimensional and three-dimensional space with equal force. Anatsui first experimented with discarded milk tin lids from Peak brand condensed milk cans and linked these circular units to create a metal fabric. He found that this metal fabric was flexible and could be formed into various structures, such as tubular forms that climbed along the floor and up the wall. Peak Project (1999) (Figs. 4.43 and 4.44) and other works reflect the lingering dependence on European powers because this milk is produced in Nigeria under license from a Dutch company, and is often used to make a boiled pudding sold at roadside stops.426 In this piece, he formed the material into mountainous metal peaks that rose from the floor like glimmering mounds of gold and silver. 425 Susan Vogel, El Anatsui: Art and Life (Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2012),16. 426 Martin Barlow, “Forward” in El Anatsui: Gawu (Wales: Oriel Mostyn Gallery, 2003), 5. Fig. 4.43 El Anatsui, Peak Project, tin, copper wire, 1999, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.44 El Anatsui, detail of Peak Project, tin, copper wire, 1999, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery 255 Anatsui was just beginning to see the potential of this metal medium when he came upon an even more adaptable material: bottle caps. In 2002, Anatsui happened across a goldmine of colorful metal caps from schnapps, whiskey, wine, rum, gin, brandy, and vodka bottles produced in West Africa, and brought the tops to his studio. In comparison with the more rigid material of the milk tins and their monochromatic palette, Anatsui realized that he could produce more complex designs by manipulating the shapes of the caps and benefit from their varied palette and logos. He began flattening out the tops and cutting them into thin strips that he connected with copper wire into narrow rows of alternating colors that reproduced the effect of woven cloth. He also saw the potential for part of the alcohol bottle to symbolize an entire transatlantic history of migration and consumption.427 Anatsui’s metal works allude to the history of alcohol’s role in the dependence of colonial Europe on Africa and the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade. Anatsui’s connecting of bottle tops echoes the historical networks that bound peoples across the Atlantic, and the “thousands of tiny parts from which these monumental cloths are made evoke the staggering, dehumanized statistics of the slave trade, this paradox of scale extolling the potential of collective action.”428 Anatsui observes that his metal cloths, as he originally called them, "encapsulate the essence of the alcoholic drinks which were brought to Africa by Europeans as trade items at the time of the earliest 427 Lisa Binder, “Introduction,” When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, 17. 428 October Gallery, From Courage to Freedom: El Anatsui / Romuald Hazoumé / Owusu-Ankomah (gallery brochure) (London: October 2007), unpaginated. 256 contact between the two peoples."429 Both textile designs and liquor brands are given commemorative names, and both materials substituted for currency to purchase slaves.430 Records from 1820 suggest that a slave could be bought in the Bight of Benin with 126 US gallons of the spirit aguardente.431 In 1885, gin had almost entirely supplanted cowries as currency in Lagos, and the ownership of liquor represented social status.432 Distilleries were established in Liverpool, England just for export to Africa, and rum, produced from the Caribbean sugar plantations for which Africa had provided the labor, was highly profitable for European traders and destructive to the cultures to which they were imported.433 Anatsui transforms the containers for products, such as liquor bottle caps, that have a history of everyday social function to express larger historical and global issues of consumption, labor, privilege, and power. In addition to alluding to alcohol’s part in the slave trade, Anatsui integrates the names printed on bottle caps to infer postcolonial Africa’s aspirations for self-determination and authority. He adapts labels from local Nigerian brands of whiskey, rum, vodka, brandy and other powerful libations with names such as Chairman, Dark Sailor, King Solomon, Makossa, 007, Top Squad and Ecomog.434 “Ecomog Gin,” for instance is named after the regional though largely Nigerian, armed force established in 1990 to intervene in the civil wars in 429 National Museum of African Art, “El Anatsui: Gawu, An Oriel Mostyn Gallery Touring Exhibition,” text by the Fowler Museum at UCLA and Oriel Mostyn Gallery, 2007, posted by the National Museum of African Art, accessed August 30, 2012. http://africa.si.edu/exhibits/gawu/artworks.html. 430 Polly Savage, “El Anatsui: Contexts Textiles and Gin,” El Anatsui, 2006 (Johannesburg, South Africa: David Krut Publishing, 2006), unpaginated. 431 David Eltis and Lawrence C. Jennings, “Trade Between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Colonial Era” in The American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (October 1988): 943. 432 Susan Diduk, “European Alcohol, History and the State in Cameroon” in African Studies Review 36, no. 1 (April 1993): 1-42. 433 Polly Savage, “El Anatsui: Contexts Textiles and Gin,” unpaginated. 434 National Museum of African Art, “El Anatsui: Gawu, An Oriel Mostyn Gallery Touring Exhibition.” 257 Sierra Leone and Liberia. Today, local Nigerian distilleries produce dozens of liquor brands in bottles of various sizes that they recycle interchangeably but discard the old aluminum tops, seals, and labels in the process.435 Creating luminous structures and patterns out of the colors, textures, and names of used liquor tops, Anatsui inspires viewers to reconsider the key role that alcoholic spirits played in the slave trade. His metamorphosis of the bottle caps into patterned cloth invokes contemporary issues of consumption and coexistence. Anatsui’s metal works are assembled much like woven sections, although initially he has to rip apart, stretch, and make holes in the metal pieces and then arrange them into sections and stitch them together with wire. He establishes large sheets that consist of blocks of individual caps, called “corks” in Nigerian English. The caps are flattened and manipulated into formats and then coupled using copper wire to form blocks that have specific names based on their designs.436 As in kente cloth and quilt making, these sections are joined together to form the sheet. Each block of pattern is composed of 25 pieces by 10 pieces in size, and he lays these blocks out on the floor to decide what he needs for each portion of the work. Working with assistants, Anatsui has developed over 20 different ways of manipulating the metal tops and foils that have resulted from the style and touch of each hand.437 The particular patterns are usually named based on their method and appearance, such as: “crushed” (crushed round caps); “plain” (flattened strips cut in parallelogram shape); “crumpled” (thin strips that have been twisted); “four corner” (skinny strip of metal folded into square); 435 Ibid. 436 Vogel, “Discovering Metal Sheets,” 68. 437 El Anatsui and Gerard Houghton, “An Interview with El Anatsui,” in El Anatsui: Gawu, 22. 258 Fig. 4.45 El Anatsui’s bottle cap techniques, Susan Vogel, “Discovering Metal Sheets,” El Anatsui: Art and Life, p. 74 Fig. 4.46 El Anatsui’s bottle cap techniques, Susan Vogel, “Discovering Metal Sheets,” El Anatsui: Art and Life, p. 75 Fig. 4.47 El Anatsui’s bottle cap techniques, Susan Vogel, “Discovering Metal Sheets,” El Anatsui: Art and Life, p. 75 259 and “chain” (resembles a metal chain) (Figs. 4.45, 4.46, 4.47).438 Other styles were nicknamed by assistants, such as “G8,” which is made from flattened, folded strips latticed together in a loose grid that allows for transparency and flexibility, and was given this name during the time of the Scottish summit.439. Over the last decade, Anatsui has continued to expand the repertoire of his bottle cap oeuvre, and has found that each element could also be coupled in more than one way. By 2011, Anatsui realized that his palette consisted of over “thirty elements to deploy for increasingly nuanced effects of texture, transparency, reflectiveness, stiffness, suppleness, line, and color.”440 He composes these monumental works spontaneously by laying out the sections on the floor and deciding how to combine them by juxtaposing fields of pattern and texture. He remarks, “It’s not only colour, but the flow of lines also. Basically all those elements are alive and have their inflective properties which one can engage – or ignore at one’s peril.”441 He organizes these sections, photographs them for viewing on the computer, and rearranges them once again until they make up a powerful composition. In this way, the blocks of manipulated material and the computer image bank helps him to generate ideas for patterns and compositions. Anatsui requires that his material be able to fold in any direction. The linking of these lattices produces a visual transparency to the metal mesh, provides flexibility that the tight weave of some textiles does not offer, and makes 438 Vogel, “Discovering Metal Sheets,” 68. 439 Anatsui and Kate McCrickard, “Telephone Interview with Kate McCrickard,” El Anatsui (New York: David Krut projects and London: October Gallery, 2006), unpaginated. 440 Vogel, “Discovering Metal Sheets,” 70. 441 El Anatsui and Gerard Houghton, “An Interview with El Anatsui,” in El Anatsui: Gawu, 21. 260 the work light entrapping or reflective. He enjoys the paradox of a material that seems flexible, but whose rigidity is subverted by its ability to move and drape, and he organizes these metal elements into patterns that will ultimately bring the material to a higher function than its original use.442 Exploiting the adaptability of his patterned blocks, Anatsui has developed what he calls a “nomadic aesthetic” that enables his work to be flexible and transportable even while it is monumental in scale.443 When designing his patterned compositions, Anatsui enjoys the improvisational freedom of shifting things around until they feel right.444 Rather than providing specific instructions, he gives freedom to the gallery or museum staff to hang works as they wish in the space. Unlike most Western artists, he allows for the work to be ultimately completed in a range of ways in terms of how it is exhibited in the space by those who install the work. He therefore enables a transience of form and indeterminacy in how the work ultimately appears. Anatsui’s patterns incorporate many aspects of kente and adinkra cloth, yet they also provoke a broader formal response that connects tangentially with the history of modern art and debates between Minimalism in the 1960s and the Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement of the 1970s. Anatsui’s metal sculpture is quite opposite to Minimalism’s anti-gestural and anonymous austerity that stripped art to the bare surface and geometric structure, but shares a common embrace of mass produced and industrial materials and also the blurring of boundaries between painting and sculpture. His patterned aesthetic may superficially relate to the tendency of P&D artists in the 1970s to appropriate and 442 El Anatsui and Gerard Houghton, “An Interview with El Anatsui,” 24. 443 Anatsui and Kate McCrickard, “Telephone Interview with Kate McCrickard,” unpaginated. 444 Ibid. 261 combine many bold and colorful patterns into a single work. This P&D characteristic was an outgrowth of the Feminist art movement’s celebration of women’s craft traditions and interest in design traditions from cultures around the world. In contrast, Anatsui’s metal sculptures are made from a single type of material that has a specific social and historical symbolism within his local environment, and has been extensively hand-manipulated and constructed into massive installations. Anatsui dynamically hangs his metal sculptures so that their patterns seem animated by rippling folds as they drape across the wall. His billowing metal sculptures convey movement and “dance” their designs as when a body moves under patterned clothing or it blows in the wind. Anatsui’s transformation of metal into sculptures reminiscent of draped cloth exemplifies the importance of cloth as a monument in Africa and the Diaspora. As Atta Kwami points out, Anatsui references all kinds of fabric, not only African, and “[f]or its elastic metaphors on fragility and Africa’s eroding cultures there could not be a more imaginative leitmotif.”445 The patterns of symbols and abstract marks in Anatsui’s graphic work and sculpture suggests that the fundamental roles of textile patterns and textural surfaces transcend the specific geographic, historical, and ethnic differences between artists living in Africa and their peers of African descent in the greater Diaspora. African American artist Sonya Clark commented on the importance of textiles for African and African Diaspora artists with the statement “that cloth is to the African what monuments are to Westerners.”446 Anatsui 445 Atta Kwami, “Nsukka – A Place to Hide: Towards a Conversation with El Anatsui,” in El Anatsui: Gawu, 32. 446 Sonya Clark, email message with the author, November 17, 2010. 262 responded to Clark’s assessment about cloth in Africa, remarking, “Indeed their capacity and application to commemorate events, issues, persons, and objectives outside of themselves are so immense and fluid it even rubs off on other practices.”447 Defying gravity with their airy movement and animated patterns, Anatsui’s metal sculptures serve as monuments to the colonial history of Africa and the continent’s contemporary struggles for self-sufficiency and agency in the world. Textile Designs Transformed in Metal Cloths Anatsui’s metal sheets of the early 21st century reveal many relationships to West African textiles. Using cloth patterns as the original metaphor for cultural heritage and memory, Anatsui’s recent installations embody the resilience of African traditions, but they also embrace change and innovation.448 Like the palette of kente cloth, gold is the underlying or dominant color in many of Anatsui’s sculptures, evoking a mysterious alchemy that transforms discarded metal into something precious. For instance, Earth Cloth (2003) (Fig. 4.48) is constructed of gold tops and areas of red, silver, and black sections. Photographed outdoors in Nigeria, one can see the similar palette of the artwork to the red earth and the land around it. The 447 Atta Kwami, “Nsukka – A Place to Hide: Towards a Conversation with El Anatsui,” 32. 448 Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “Wonder Masquerade: Transfiguration and Embodiment in the Art of El Anatsui,” 15. Fig. 4.48 El Anatsui, Earth Cloth, aluminum, copper wire, 201” x 209”, 2003, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery 263 draping of this material and its unkempt folds that form a rippling wall enable it to serve as a type of architecture as well as a painting or sculpture. The irregular and unpredictable patterns cause the eye to rove over its glittering surface with varying movement. Patterns of adinkra and kente cloths are referenced through the colors and designs of many of Anatsui’s earlier metal compositions. In contrast to the palette of kente motifs, Anatsui’s Adinkra Sasa (2003) (Fig. 4.49) is primarily black with horizontal strips of gold and yellow, punctuated with subtle pieces of red and gold that cause the surface to flicker. In Twi, sasa means “patchwork,” and is “charged with dangerous power.”449 Adinkra Sasa’s dark splendor is symbolic of colonial African history as well as the Akan funerary cloth itself. Its writhing and undulating folds are made almost entirely of ebony, dark purple, and brown liquor foils that are penetrated by horizontal stripes of gold and bright yellow. Adinkra Sasa’s glistening black surface is reminiscent of the shiny black pigment applied to cassava relief stamps in printing adinkra symbols onto cloth. Each of these stamps corresponds to specific semantic meanings and proverbs. Like the construction of adinkra cloth that alternates narrow embroidered stripes with 449 National Museum of African Art, “El Anatsui: Gawu, An Oriel Mostyn Gallery Touring Exhibition.” Fig. 4.49 El Anatsui, Adinkra Sasa, aluminum, copper wire, 192” x 216”, 2003, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Guido Roberto Vitale 264 broad bands printed with the black geometric stamps, this piece assembles long strips of black and gold metal sections three to four inches wide. It is Anatsui’s only work that incorporates actual textile strips into the metal, a process that he has not continued.450 Many have suggested that Anatsui created this piece to lament symbolically the colonial carving up of Africa by European powers. Kwame Anthony Appiah writes that there is a “cross-cultural word play here … the thought that Adinkra Sasa - which mourns the colonial division of Africa – is a work of dangerous power, with a meaning that is clear to a Twi-speaking audience.”451 Anatsui therefore implements a specific pattern to respond to African history and to the broader context of this textile motif. Kente cloth patterns serve as the underlying compositional structure of many other works from the early 2000’s. Kente is a strip-woven cloth produced by the Asante peoples of Ghana and the Ewe peoples of Ghana and Togo. Although there were always designs created exclusively for Asante royals, since Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah wore kente at his inauguration, this fabric has represented an independent and self-determined Africa. It is worn on festive occasions; men traditionally wore it as a kind of toga and women donned it as an upper and lower wrapper. Patterns are woven into the strip cloth made by weavers on wooden looms, and then the strips are sewn together to make the large rectangles of cloth known as ntoma (in the Twi language). Many kente patterns incorporate red, yellow, and green since the colors correspond to the national flag of Ghana. Anatsui remembers that his father and brothers, who 450 Susan Vogel, “Discovering Metal Sheets,” 59. 451 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Discovering El Anatsui,” When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, 68. 265 were weavers, wove the more muted palette of the Ewe peoples’ kente. Asante kente is typically woven with shiny silken threads that yields a silky cloth, while Ewe kente employs cotton and produces a matt finish. In a similar way, Anatsui exploits the metal to select the shiny or matt side of the surface and control its play of light. In his piece Sasa (2004) (Figs. 4.50 and 4.51), Anatsui built upon a series of earlier works called the “Gawu” group. He developed what Susan Vogel Fig. 4.50 El Anatsui, Sasa, aluminum, copper wire, 330” x 252”, 2004, collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris Fig. 4.51 El Anatsui, Sasa (hung in vertical orientation), aluminum, copper wire, 330” x 252”, 2004, collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris identifies as andamento, using the units of tesserae as in a mosaic to organize a visual flow.452 Anatsui took apart and integrated an earlier work, entitled Young Woman’s Cloth (2003), into this large piece.453 With an awareness of the variety 452 Vogel, “Discovering Metal Sheets,” 59. 453 Ibid. 266 of designs he could invent with the bottle cap units, Anatsui intensified the tension between patches of order and riotous chaos. In Sasa, Anatsui balanced colliding blocks with energetically assembled dots of metal tesserae on the left with a large swatch of silver on the right, a sedate horizontal stripe at the top and two green bars that anchor the piece at the bottom.454 The bottom of the piece also employs andamento to assemble other sections of circular shapes and stripes, but since the work is so enormous—nearly twenty-eight feet—this section is almost always shown spilling onto the floor. Anatsui’s Man’s Cloth (2003) (Fig. 4.52) and Woman’s Cloth (2003) (Fig. 4.53) convey the importance of gender expressed through kente cloth. These works feature thin strips of silver and gold metal organized into horizontal blocks. These larger sections are interrupted by vertical stripes and narrow rows of red, black, and gold pieces in alternating, asymmetrical designs akin to kente patterns. Man’s Cloth has spiky edges, and working with a specific 454 Vogel, “Discovering Metal Sheets,” 59. Fig. 4.52 El Anatsui, Man’s Cloth, aluminum, copper wire, 297 x 374cm, 2003, courtesy of October Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.53 El Anatsui, Woman’s Cloth, aluminum, copper wire, 287 x 292cm, 2003, courtesy of October Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery 267 metalworker’s technique, Anatsui and his assistant embossed rows of little bumps (Fig. 4.54), many of which were cut from the grooved part of the cap to produce a less reflective surface.455 Women’s Cloth features many round format caps floating across the middle and dangling flirtatiously along the edges. Anatsui suggested to curators that Man’s Cloth should be hung primarily flat whereas Women’s Cloth should be draped and hung askew to show more intense creasing, perhaps mimicking the movement and voluptuousness of the female form so that its patterns billow outwards. The looseness of the sculpture corresponds to the aesthetic of how kente cloth is meant to appear on the body. An Ewe weaver describes the significance of wearing flowing cloth: The cloth must flow well to wear it; it cannot be stiff … good cloth moves with the person, it catches the sunlight … it makes people feel proud of the past. They remember their forefathers, their ancestors, where they came from … You have to stand upright, you have to assume a dignity to keep it from falling off.456 Men’s Cloth and Women’s Cloth were constructed by joining single units of metal to the growing sheet instead of first attaching elements into larger sections that he would later organize in larger compositions. The development of his working method into blocks or patches enabled Anatsui to expand the sophistication of his pattern-making and the versatility of the textures that he could design within each patch. 455 Susan Vogel, “Discovering Metal Sheets,” 58. 456 Kathryn Linn Geurts, Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community (Los Angeles, 2002), 151-152. Fig. 4.54 El Anatsui, detail of Man’s Cloth, aluminum, copper wire, 297 x 374cm, 2003, courtesy of October Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery 268 Versatility (2006) (Fig. 4.55) suggests the colors and perpendicular patterns of kente cloth with its vertical three-inch strips of red, yellow, and striped liquor foils that bisect the installation on the far left, to the right of center, and on the right. Anatsui creates lines, squares, and dots of color with the lattices of bottle caps. They are “stitched” together using copper wire, and like kente cloth, they reoccur like specific designs that refer to proverbs, political, and historical events. This method of assembling the sections of bottle caps and other materials relates to the specific construction of West African strip textiles that are made of bands that are always arranged horizontally. Anatsui comments on the unconscious impact of family and cultural influences on his work when he says, "I have discovered only much later . . . that cloth has been a recurring theme or leitmotif, and it is featured in so many dimensions."457 Thompson states that in kente cloth, balance is achieved by the richness of oppositions: vertical and horizontal; large blocks of blue against complex passages of gold, black, green, and red; and simplicity juxtaposed against complexity.458 In kente design, the artful phrasing of stripes whose colors have powerful symbolism makes the cloth doubly iconic. Kente weavers are always innovative, and some include unorthodox color palettes or have even enlisted computer technology to incorporate traditional adinkra motifs into a new type of hybrid cloth called “adinkra kente.”459 Therefore, the creativity involved in synthesizing patterns from different systems of symbols is also reflected in the innovative culture of kente weaving, as well as in Anatsui’s sculpture. 457 National Museum of African Art, “El Anatsui: Gawu, An Oriel Mostyn Gallery Touring Exhibition.” 458 Robert Farris Thompson, “Round Houses and Rhythmized Textiles,” Flash of the Spirit, 209-211. 459 Kofi Anyidoho, “Ghanaian Kente: Cloth and Song,” in The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art, edited by Lynn Gumpert (New York: New York University, Grey Art Gallery, 2008), 45. 269 Fig. 4.55 El Anatsui, Versatility, aluminum, copper wire, 147 ½” x 195 ½”, 2006, collection of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery 270 Similar to Anatsui’s titles that allude to African history and political situations, kente weavers often title their designs with poetic names that may reflect historical events. For instance, Ohene aforo hyen [The kind has boarded a ship], is a design that honors the return of Asantehene Prempeh I from the Seychelles Islands where he was sent by the British colonial authorities.460 Some designs have multiple names such as one worn by Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah called Fathia Fata Nkrumah (Fathia benefits Nkrumah) (Fig. 4.56), but after he was deposed in 1966 it came to be called Obaakofo mmu man (One man does not rule a nation) (Fig. 4.57).461 This enduring pattern was originally designed to honor the 1958 marriage of Nkrumah to Helen Ritz Fathia, a relative of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.462 460 Anyidoho, “Ghanaian Kente: Cloth and Song,” 40. 461 Doran Ross, “Asante Cloth Names and Motifs,” in Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History Textile Series, 1998), 119. http://www.nmafa.si.edu/exhibits/akan/764.html. 462 Lynn Gumpert, The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art (New York: New York University: Grey Art Gallery, 2008), 52. Fig. 4.56 Samuel Cophie, Fathia fata Nkrumah, worn by the Queen Mother of Asotwe, Cophie, a prominent Ewe weaver, Cophie began to integrate both Ewe and Asante designs in his cloths, Poetics of Cloth, p. 53 Fig. 4.57 Asante artist, Man’s Kente Cloth, Obaakofo mmu man (One man does not rule a nation), cotton and rayon, Ghana, the Glassell Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 271 Cloth in the pattern of Fathia fata Nkrumah (Fig. 4.58 shows another example) was developed to be worn by the Queen Mother of Asotwe by Samuel Cophie, a prominent Ewe weaver who apprenticed with an Asante weaver and who began to integrate both Ewe and Asante designs in his cloths.463 This same design has other variations including Afoakwa Mpua (Afoakwa’s nine tufts of hair) (Fig. 4.59) and Akyempem (A thousand shields) (Fig. 4.60).464 The symbolic aspect of color in kente cloth is also tied to its cultural and political history. John Picton Fig. 4.58 Asante artist, Fathia fata Nkrumah, in Doran Ross, Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History Textile Series, 1998), 119 463 Ibid. 464 Ross, “Asante Cloth Names and Motifs,” 119. Fig. 4.59 Afoakwa Mpua (Afoakwa’s nine tufts of hair), in Doran Ross, Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History Textile Series, 1998), 119 Fig. 4.60 Akyempem (A thousand shields), in Doran Ross, Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History Textile Series, 1998), 119 272 notes that the yellow and green stripes on the red ground of oyokoman cloth refer to an early eighteenth-century conflict between two groups within that lineage.465 Anatsui’s names for his works are enigmatic, but many obliquely refer to specific political or environmental issues. Anatsui’s other titles relate to a specific history, as in the case of the piece Gli (2010) (Fig. 4.61). As a child, Anatsui heard a story of the Ewe people’s migration, culminating in them being trapped within the Notsie wall, and he later visited this site and found inspiration in the remnants of the wall surface. Yet the open-ended title for Gli could reference any wall or façade, and he plays upon the nuances of his language to allow for these multiple meanings. Anatsui explains, Initially I worked with language and signs… Ewe is a highly tonal language, but they write it without markings so you have the freedom to interpret it according to context. For instance, Gli could mean “to disrupt” or it could mean “wall.” Many of my forms are not fixed and I sometimes title the work in my language so that it’s not tied to one interpretation.466 Anatsui’s titles are another aspect of the unfixed nature of the work and show his preference for open-ended, poetic language that allows for many interpretations. 465 John Picton, “Colonial Pretence and African Resistance or Subversion Subverted: Commemorative Textiles in Sub- Saharan Africa,” in The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994, ed.Okwui Enwezor (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 159. 466 Brooklyn Museum of Art, “El Anatsui in Conversation with Susan Vogel.” Fig. 4.61 El Anatsui, Gli (Wall), aluminum and copper wire, installation at the Brooklyn Museum, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York 273 Textiles, Music, and Metalsmithing Informs Metal Cloth Patterns Although they are not cloth or woven materials, Anatsui’s work signifies the integrated, synesthetic relationships of kente woven patterns to musical rhythms and to poetry in a Ghanaian context. These analogies are reflected in many of his titles that employ the metaphor of cloth, writing, or poetry such as Man’s Cloth. Ghanaian master weaver Kofi Anyidoho observes, “My personal reflections on the aesthetic experience of cloth begin with the observation that there appears to be a significant connection between cloth and song⎯song as poetry in the oral tradition.”467 Anyidoho realized that his uncle, Dumega Kwadzovi Anyidoho, and all the great master weavers that his uncle could recall were also master drummers and heno (poet-cantor). Dumega Kwadzovi Anyidoho explained that weavers, either alone or in groups, often sang to ease the boredom of many hours at the loom. More importantly, weaving as well as drumming and singing are rhythm-based aesthetic performances.468 The tediousness and deliberation that Anatsui’s current process requires have enabled him to slow down and work in a more methodical way, similar to a weaver. Anatsui’s process of designing rhythmic patterns with the bottle caps is akin to both the repetitive movements of the weaving process and also to musical rhythms. Ghana’s pioneer musicologist, Ephraim Amu, features the kente weaver’s polyrhythms in his classic song Bonwire Kente that begins with the 467 Kofi Anyidoho, “Ghanaian Kente: Cloth and Song,” 33. 468 Ibid, 34. 274 ideophonic and mnemonic phrase “Kro kro kro kro … kro hi kro.”469 The percussive rhythm caused by the regular alternation of the heddles (eno) and the treadles (aforke), accentuated by the throwing and catching of the shuttle (evu) and the continuous sound of the beater (exa), all contribute to the inclination for song.470 Like West African strip-cloth weaving that requires mathematical calculations and improvisation to design patterns from cotton and silk thread, Anatsui’s complex designs are methodically built with geometric forms. As Anyidoho points out, this process is similar to the architectural design or a well- written song or poem, and therefore it is fitting that the author or singer has been often called a “weaver of words.”471 Anatsui’s metal cloths are constructed of units that are comparable to musical notes and he produces visual melodies and rhythmic compositions that share the aesthetics of West African percussion, poetry, and also weaving. However, by translating weaving into metal patterns, he also connects with the historical and contemporary prominence of metalsmithing in African art. Ogbechie notes that “[t]here are many allusions present in Anatsui’s metal evocation of prominent African textiles traditions given the important role that metals (iron, gold, silver, etc.) and blacksmiths played in traditional African societies. African peoples ascribe occult powers to blacksmiths on account of their mastery of the elemental force of fire and the changes they exert on metal during the process of smelting iron out of stone.”472 Anatsui has commented that “metals and liquor in many cultures (especially African) have this association with 469 Anyidoho, “Ghanaian Kente: Cloth and Song,” 34. 470 Ibid. 471 Ibid. 472 Ogbechie, “Wonder Masquerade,” 15. 275 the spiritual, with healing.”473 So in addition to repurposing, Anatsui’s metamorphosis of metal caps through vivid patterns perpetuates an ancient heritage of metalwork and its relationship to specific deities, such as Ogun in Yoruba religion. Anatsui embeds aspects of West African languages, weaving, and metalwork to infuse his work with cultural and spiritual meaning. Offering a plethora of sensory experiences and associations with other media, Anatsui’s metal surfaces are specifically grounded in African contexts. Anatsui’s metal cloth patterns engage with ancient histories of weaving, music, poetry, metalwork, and beadwork. They relate to the symbolism of metal and alcohol in West African religions, the colonial role of alcohol in the slave trade, and the contemporary issues of waste management and environmental destruction throughout the world. In addition to the relationship of his sculptures to African metalsmithing, the glittering and apotropaic property of his works may be similar to beadwork and the amulet-like power of certain textiles across West Africa, such as Bamana Basiae women’s mud cloth that is patterned with geometric designs and symbols to protect the wearer from harm (Fig. 4.62). The chain-like elegance of his variety of patterns invokes jewelry and beadwork that has adorned African kings 473 El Anatsui and Kate McCrickard, “Telephone Interview with El Anatsui,” unpaginated. Fig. 4.62 Bamana peoples, Basaie cloth, cotton, dye, Mali, mid to late 20th Century, Inscribing Meaning, p. 61 276 throughout history. Moreover, converting metal dross from alcoholic beverages, his installations suggest shrines or sites for libation and ritual. Patterns of Consumption and Collaboration Anatsui’s patterns made of metal detritus evidence the interconnectedness of human consumption. They show that although our existence is ephemeral, there is the remnant or residue of our touch that continues. In a recent interview, Anatsui observes that he prefers materials that have been used by people. He says, “I believe that when a human hand touches something it leaves a charge, it leaves an energy.”474 He continues, “when someone else touches it, you are connected with them. Anything that has been used by humans has a history. Those properties help to give whatever I do meaning.”475 His appropriation of found objects relates to the Modernist history of collage and assemblage, but it is also particular to the African way of reprocessing cast-off materials and privileging of cloth and its patterns. Not only does the bottle cap bear the history of human touch and use, his construction of a metal cloth suggests intimacy because cloth touches and conforms to the shapes our bodies, even absorbing its smell. Using cloth-derived patterns expresses this history of touch. Anatsui’s expression of history through pattern and decoration represents physical connection between individuals, impressions upon a tactile surface, and the way in which materials provide evidence of the interconnectedness of time, place, memory, and human impact. 474 Museum of Modern Art Kamakura and Hayama, Japan, “Liddell, C. B. Interview with El Anatsui at the Museum of Modern Art Hayama,” posted 2/17/2011, http://yknow-interviews.blogspot.com/2011/02/el-anatsui-artist.html. 475 Susan Vogel, Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui (Brooklyn, NY: Icarus Films, 2011, 53 min.). 277 Working with assistants, Anatsui exploits the range of patterns that he can obtain with the creative and technical help of many hands. The particular styles of bottlecap patterns developed with assistants become part of the work, and Anatsui likens his process to conducting an orchestra of musicians each with specific performing skills.476 He directs this team of assistants so that they share his common vocabulary of formats and support the innovations in his medium. Anatsui acknowledges the benefit that he and his assistants can work interrupted since they do not depend on tools or electrical power, and he says that this process is “in consonance with my wish to create work with many human hands leaving their individual charges on it.”477 The heroic amount of labor and massive scale of his work also contributes to the spiritual dimension of the work. The handling and arranging of materials becomes a part of the work and communicates the way in which his patterns stand for the interrelatedness of his community with the rest of the world. Anatsui says, “My resources, materials, and human [labor] are sourced from the community, and I believe that make[s] me a community artist. The ideas I work with, even if sourced from the community, address issues that go from the community to the outside world. They have universal resonance [and] relevance.”478 He implies that the charge of human touch invigorates a wall surface or architectural structure and activates public spaces throughout the world. Anatsui says, You’ve touched it, and I’ve touched it. There is now a kind of bond between you and me. And this is an idea which is very much related to religious practice, spiritual practice, in many parts of Africa, and I believe, in many cultures of the 476 Anatsui, “Telephone Interview with Kate McCrickard,” 2006, unpaginated. 477 Laura Leffler James and El Anatsui, “Convergence: History, Materials, and the Human Hand-An Interview with El Anatsui,” Art Journal 67, no. 2 (June 2008), 44. 478 Anatsui, “Viewer Q&A: Responses from Catherine Opie, El Anatsui, and Marina Abramović.” 278 world. With this, a person is able to establish a connection, a link. Doesn’t that sound like a hint at some awareness of DNA?479 By manipulating these strips and caps of metal that reference the history of alcohol consumption and its role in the European conquer of Africa and the slave trade, Anatsui establishes a bond of touch between individuals across the world that transcends time and space. In the installation of his work, Anatsui requires a collaborative engagement with many others rather than an imposition of his ego upon the space or audiences. His process also runs counter to the Modernist idea of the artist as a unique genius. Each time Anatsui exhibits his metal works, the patterns and structure look different because he wants them to be hung uniquely in each space. In fact, he prefers that the same work take different shapes depending on the exhibition and the curator involved. Says Anatsui, “The amazing thing about working with the ‘fabrics’ is that each time you display one, it’s an entirely new work of art. The process of display becomes part of the process of creation.”480 He observes that this aspect of collaboration “had to do with my desire to invite people to manipulate the data that I give them.”481 As stated before, for his wood sculptures he provided numbers on the back of sections to suggest their order. This consistent openness to the improvisational and unfixed nature of the work has been a challenge for many museum professionals, who are accustomed to receiving precise instructions for installation. Anatsui’s process of producing patterned sections in blocks and sections allows for this flexibility and enables others to participate in his art, to respond to and elaborate on his patterns. 479 James and Anatsui, “Convergence: History, Materials, and the Human Hand-An Interview with El Anatsui,” 49. 480 Anatsui quoted in Gerard Houghton, “The Epitome of Freedom,” 7. 481 Brooklyn Museum of Art, “El Anatsui in Conversation with Susan Vogel.” 279 Anatsui’s ideology embraces change and the physical responsiveness of each hand to his patterns and the possibilities of his medium. The physical connection to other people in the work is further manifested in the decorative quality of the materials that usually relate to food and drink. From his earliest market tray sculptures, to the ceramic pots that also could potentially serve as food and water vessels, to the wooden mortars, and now to the bottle caps, Anatsui has shown a preference for containers of sustenance. Whether combining milk tins, cassava graters, or liquor tops, these works deal with consumption. In West Africa, there is less infrastructure for recycling, but there are many secondary markets for the industrial re-sale of scrap aluminum, tin, and other metals so these materials are abundant. This aspect of consumption connects many hands and mouths. Anatsui jokes, “I have tried to satisfy my hunger and thirst for my culture by using media and processes sourced from my environment.”482 The patterns and textures he creates with containers of sustenance therefore represent rhythms of every day life. Recent responses by some western critics have included an impatient complaint that Anatsui should move on to the next subject and argue that he has fully investigated the bottle cap medium. Other critics have been perplexed by the formal beauty of his work or reduced these works to “eye candy.”483 These reactions suggest a superficial interpretation of his work and a reductive reading of the relationship of it to African design contexts. Addressing the extravagance of consumer culture and commercial waste, a global issue perhaps epitomized 482 Brooklyn Museum of Art, “El Anatsui in Conversation with Susan Vogel.” 483 Kimmelman, “That Unruly, Serendipitous Show in Venice,” E29, E34. 280 most by the West, Anatsui transforms this ugliness into lustrous gold and presents it without any bitterness.484 In the decorative arrangement of his materials, Anatsui simultaneously references wealth and poverty, abundance and devastation. In this double meaning of the material, there is pathos in the beauty of these metal installations. Anatsui’s bottle cap works are imbued with the collective history and symbolism of a substance that has been used and has a past life. While his early sculptures are more about the literal idea of consumption, works since the mid-2000s focus on the effects of consumption. His process of working with many assistants to develop formats and construct works and his collaboration with curators enables an improvisational way of hanging installations that incorporates many hands and the metaphysical “charge” of collective human touch. Beyond Cloth: Patterns of Global and Environmental Interaction Originally, when he began to make his metal sheets, Anatsui said that he strove for the flexibility and malleability of cloth.485 Whereas his early metal cloths are tied closely to patterns in kente fabric, in the mid 2000’s, he began to be frustrated with the close interpretation of his work only in terms of African textiles. He became concerned that he had made a mistake in relating them to cloth and kente because when many westerners seized upon this idea, it 484 Vogel, “Entering the Global Art World,” El Anatsui: Life and Art, 85. 485 Brooklyn Museum of Art, “El Anatsui in Conversation with Susan Vogel.” 281 thwarted the discussion about all the ramifications of his work as sculpture.486 Anatsui has increasingly resisted a narrow interpretation of his art that limits it to the contexts of kente weaving and other textile processes, and prefers to speak more metaphorically of these relationships. He says, My work springs from ideographs, but these are often printed on textiles. So I regard myself as a sculptor, but then the colors came into the work. The bottle caps happen to have the color palette of kente cloth and initially, I wasn’t concerned about these colors. Like a painter, I’ve collected the whole palette so I can decide to restrict or use it. When I became conscious of the color I began to think of the challenges that painters face. I did a series of joinings in “Gli” and it reminded me of transparent watercolor washes. Recently I’ve found a way of making them two-sided and so they can be hung in any way.487 In the past five years, Anatsui has worked to depart from kente patterns and instead produce many installations that blend sculpture and painting through their distinctive vocabularies of design and color. This change in technique also signaled a shift in concept, particular palettes, patterns, and titles that refer to animals, geographies, and environmental concerns. Fig. 4.63 El Anatsui, Zebra Crossing III, aluminum and copper wire, 61” x 107”, 2007, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.64 El Anatsui, detail of Zebra Crossing III, aluminum and copper wire, 61” x 107”, 2007, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery One of the ways that his work has shifted is the employment of a specific, more saturated palette and patterns that correspond to wildlife and sources other than textiles. For instance, his piece Zebra Crossing III (2007) (Figs. 4.63 and 486 Ibid. 487 Brooklyn Museum of Art, “El Anatsui in Conversation with Susan Vogel.” 282 4.64) has a repetitive rhythm of alternating gold, purple, and black thin metal strips that is offset by narrow vertical lines of red and yellow, and edges that progress on each end into solid areas of purple or black. Anatsui subtly incorporates the pattern that moves across the whole composition like a zebra’s stripes. is offset by narrow vertical lines of red and yellow, and edges that progress on each end into solid areas of purple or black. Anatsui subtly incorporates the pattern that moves across the whole composition like a zebra’s stripes. This and several other works bear a resemblance to the layered and striped surfaces of paintings by American painter Mark Bradford’, such as his stormy work, The Devil is Beating His Wife (2003) (Fig. 4.65) in which Bradford paints with a mixed media process of patches made from photomechanical reproductions and permanent-wave end papers. Also, like American Modernist painter Mark Rothko, Anatsui expressively intensifies the layers and blending of his color palette in sections. In the same way that Rothko’s colors resonate and produce a physical response, Anatsui’s complementary color combinations and undulating lines in horizontal and vertical configurations articulate the pattern and movement of the zebra’s camouflage. Other works employ pattern, line, and wrought bottle caps in a different palette or style that hint at a representational image. Recently, Fig. 4.65 Mark Bradford, The Devil is Beating His Wife, billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, permanent-wave end papers, stencils, and additional mixed media on plywood, 335.3 x 609.6 cm, courtesy of the artist and Saatchi Gallery 283 Anatsui has added a few other types of metal such as aluminum printer’s plates that provides a matte opalescent color and aluminum roofing strips that come in bright blue, dark green, and brilliant red to supplement his color palette.488 Bleeding Takari (2008) (Fig. 4.66) features the forms of red and black bottle caps and foils contrasting a gold ground to achieve an image of raw wounds from which rivulets of blood drip down onto the floor. Curator Robert Storr describes this as a work that “nearly weeps as it bleeds.”489 However, Anatsui comments, “I am probably also thinking about violence that is not destructive but comes with blood as well, like childbirth.”490 This and other works employ specific color for their symbolism rather than decorative intent. The expanded range of Anatsui’s metal medium has enabled him to “paint” with texture and color, and to return to some of his larger themes that have to do with history, global and environmental concerns, and metaphors such as broken pots. He has explored such an extensive array of textural possibilities with his medium that his installations can take the form of opaque sheets of irridescent metal, patchwork cloth, translucent skeins, and even delicate veils. His approach keeps changing to reflect an increasingly painterly purpose. 488 Vogel, El Anatsui: Art and Life, 75. 489 Storr, “The Shifting Shape of Things to Come,” 53. 490 James and Anatsui, “Convergence: History, Materials, and the Human Hand-An Interview with El Anatsui,” 48. Fig. 4.66 El Anatsui, Bleeding Takari, aluminum and copper wire, 61” x 89 ½”, 2008, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery 284 Anatsui comments, “My idea initially that I was doing sculpture that was so free that it could change forms in any way. I don’t believe in artworks being things that are fixed. My work is now the marriage between painting and sculpture. I am looking for something ethereal.”491 The delicacy of recent patterns express this shadowy quality, and imply layers of patina and past memories. His metal installations from 2006 onwards tend towards patterns that signify trans-Continental spaces and themes, therefore serving as a metaphor for global experiences. Anatsui’s Dzesi I (2006) (Fig. 4.67), which was exhibited at The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama at The Fowler Museum in Los Angeles, 2006 and also Dzesi II (2006) (Fig. 4.68), show the duality of two bold designs converging to form a larger pattern. They have an overall composition of concentric circles that Anatsui reflects was inspired by the 491 Susan Vogel, Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui. Fig. 4.67 El Anatsui, Dzesi I, aluminum and copper wire, 2006, photo by Lisa Binder (David Krut and October Gallery publication) Fig. 4.68 El Anatsui, Dzesi II, aluminum and copper wire, 2006, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery 285 zero sign and circular adinkra symbols.492 Anatsui says of a particular adinkra symbol, [t]here is this one which is characterized as the king of these signs, which consists of several concentric circles … we have developed a stitch which has a lot of flexibility about it, and therefore could be used specifically to configure freer and more organic forms than hitherto.493 Swaths of opaque caps alternate with hollowed-out metal rings to form the ringed design. In this and other works, Anatsui refined the manipulation of the material to develop areas of transparency that would enhance his painterly lines and offset the opaque sections. Akin to Anatsui’s painterly patterns in sculpture, American painter of African descent Odili Donald Odita achieves similar optical effects by showing the intersection or collision of designs that represent the tension of different peoples coming together. Odita’s work often implies the difficulty of being culturally different in a society where one is a minority, and also the way in which groups of people engage with and impact each other in a heterogeneous society. Odita comments, What is most interesting to me is a fusion between cultures where things that seem faraway and disparate have the ability to function within an almost seamless flow. The fusion I seek is one that can represent a type of living within a world of difference. 494 Odita’s paintings exhibited at his show Body & Space at Jack Shainman Gallery in 2010 such as Free Form (Fig. 4.69) employ color and pattern to weave together multiple places, times, or temperaments. In many works such as 492 Anatsui and McCrickard, “Telephone Interview with Kate McCrickard,” El Anatsui 2006, unpaginated. 493 Ibid. 494 Jack Shainman Gallery, “Odili Donald Odita: Fusion,” (exhibition website), 2006,. accessed July 20, 2012..http://www.jackshainman.com/exhibition65.html. 286 Vertical Hold (2008) (Fig. 4.70) an invisible vertical line becomes the fissure that separates as it Fig. 4.69 Odili Donald Odita, Vertical Hold, acrylic on canvas, 2008, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.70 Odili Donald Odita, Free Form, acrylic on canvas, 2010, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery conjoins, a flash point where two or more vibrant color fields become one. Like Anatsui’s joined sections of patterns, Odita’s tense juxtapositions of zig-zagging designs suggest the difficult coexistence of different ethnic, religious, racial, class, and other groups in a society. Similarly, Anatsui’s metal patchwork contrasts sections of light and dark with irregularly placed areas of pattern and texture to signify the experience of not quite belonging in one place, but being a composite of many things like the experiences of many diaspora peoples. The intersections of these joined sections of pattern convey the human struggle to connect and be communities, as well as the areas that cannot be unified. The organic patterns and shapes of some works make an apt metaphor for land masses on maps, and broken objects, as well as rent fabric. These works convey the history of power struggles and diasporas, and also the current fragility of our planet and our irrevocable impact on it. Anatsui’s installation 287 Three Continents (2009) (Fig. 4.71) refers to a history of global interactions although the distinction between the continents is not demarcated through specific types of patterns. In this piece, organic shapes made up of red, orange, and yellow bottle caps sprawl across three larger areas of pale gold like giant bodies of land. This work may respond to the history of the triangular slave trade that involved Africa, Europe, and the Americas. He comments on the process of working with bottle caps, “The act of stitching them into sheets is to me like melding the different circumstances of these continents together into an indeterminate form.”495 Yet it also implies the global necessity of clean water, disposal of waste, and the implications of pollution on all of the continents. This and other works suggest the interdependence of the continents and the need for people of all nations to work across geographic difference to resolve environmental issues. Anatsui’s titles and the patterns have increasingly referenced destruction of the earth and the environment. His works such as Strips of Earth’s Skin (2008), Ozone Layer (2010), and Stressed World (2011) all suggest the irrevocable impact of global warming, pollution, and damage to the planet’s 495 James and Anatsui, “Convergence: History, Materials, and the Human Hand-An Interview with El Anatsui,” 48. Fig. 4.71 El Anatsui, Three Continents, aluminum and copper wire, 8’ x 16’, 2009, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery 288 natural resources. Ozone Layer (Figs. 4.72 and 4.73) has an overall silvery palette, but the directions of small patches of flattened liquor foils are turned Fig. 4.72 El Anatsui, Ozone Layer, aluminum and copper wire, 2010, 165 3/8” x 212 5/8”, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, photography by Sophie Sanders Fig. 4.73 El Anatsui, detail of Ozone Layer, aluminum and copper wire, 2010, 165 3/8” x 212 5/8”, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, photography by Sophie Sanders at odd angles and seem to be dangling off of the overall surface, therefore suggesting a disruption in the uniform logic of the material. Strips of Earth’s Skin (Fig. 4.74), is unusual for its huge vertical rents that are interrupted by a horizontal silvery strip that weightlessly weaves through its spaces. Openwork areas contrast against black and red vertical bands and patches of multicolored tesserae. On the far left are a section of yellow and red stripes that resemble woven kente, but this serves as a detail in the larger composition. The metaphor of the earth’s skin as a cloth that has been torn and yet continues to be held together by an interweaving strip communicates the fragility of our planet and our Fig. 4.74 El Anatsui, Strips of Earth’s Skin, aluminum and copper wire, 12’ 10” x 22’ 10”, 2008, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery 289 collective responsibility for restoring and maintaining it. Works such as Earth’s Skin and Ozone Layer privilege how the materials and patterns themselves tell a story about the shared need to protect the environment. While Anatsui has dispensed with the specific African syllabaries and symbols with which he began, he has increasingly turned to the expressive and ornamental effects of his medium and stretched the multitude of combinations of folding, crumpling, and joining to articulate these ideas. Anatsui’s exhibition that began at the Akron Museum and has travelled to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui (2013) underscores the way in which pattern and decoration is the visual language that expresses his global vision. The exhibition was titled after Anatsui’s piece Gravity and Grace (2010) (Fig. 4.75) that was inspired by a book of the same title by Simone Weil, the French activist, Christian mystic, and philosopher. Reading Weil’s 1947 book Gravity and Grace impelled Anatsui to investigate the concepts of what he calls “the material and the spiritual, of heaven and earth, of the physical and the Fig. 4.75 El Anatsui, Gravity and Grace, aluminum and copper wire, 2010, 145 5/8” x 441” (variable), Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, photo by Andrew McAllister for the Akron Art Museum 290 ethereal” by employing a limited, contrasting color range of hues.496 The seriousness of Anatsui’s project reveals itself in the limits to which he extends his materials and process, while the title and form evoke an interest in spiritual transcendence. This vast work, one of his largest, sprawls across the wall with a rippling iridescent surface that bleeds from orange to red to yellow to silvery white. Few curators of Anatsui’s shows creatively engage his challenge of reorienting or reordering the sculptures, but Anatsui seemed pleased with the interpretations of Kevin Dumouchelle, Associate Curator of the Arts of Africa and the Pacific Islands at the Brooklyn Museum. Dumouchelle uniquely hung several pieces in the exhibition by changing their orientation from vertical to horizontal or by causing more exaggerated folds in the material.497 Anatsui’s recent exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City also displayed his intricate patterns as the dominant organizing principle and featured his expanded range of textures and layers. These metal installations are characterized by highly differentiated, baroque designs and more figurative compositions. This exhibition entitled Pot of Wisdom (2012-2013) returns to the theme of a broken vessel that he explored in early ceramic works. However, now the pot of wisdom takes on even broader meaning and perhaps represents the smashing of social taboos and barriers to change. The breaking of the pot may open up our consciousness and collective potential to change the world. 496 Brooklyn Museum of Art, “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui,” exhibition organized by the Akron Art Museum and by Kevin Dumouchelle at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, February 8–August 4, 2013, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/el_anatsui/#!lb_uri=gravity_grace.php. 497 Brooklyn Museum of Art, “El Anatsui in Conversation with Susan Vogel.” 291 The piece that may have inspired the title of the exhibition, They Finally Broke the Pot of Wisdom (2011) (Fig. 4.76) suggests that the pot is a vessel for memory or consciousness, perhaps as a metaphor for the skull and brain. The broken pot symbolizes the need for radical change and the shattering of old traditions and structures. He implies that this consciousness will enable humanity to confront the global problems of war, poverty, hunger, natural disasters, and global warming, and help to create productive and peaceful societies. A central, transparent vessel appears to shatter or erupt at its top. It is surrounded by a scintillating silver “fabric” adorned with letter-shaped motifs in red, black, yellow, orange, and blue. These designs are reminiscent of ideographic symbols, but cannot be identified as specific signs. One of these shapes is made up of turquoise bottle caps with a liquor logo that has a masted ship of the colonial period that suggests slave ships. This work enables a heightened contrast between opaque and transparent, shiny and matte textures. Anatsui built the transparent form of the large pot by overlapping double and triple layers of the hollowed bottle cap rings and wires. The piece drips onto the Fig. 4.76 El Anatsui, They Finally Broke the Pot of Wisdom, aluminum liquor bottle caps and copper wire, 186” x 276”, 2011 292 floor as if the precious wisdom of this pot is spilling onto our feet. As in Gli, the surfaces are like openwork lace and show a consistent transition as he manipulates the range of textures. Vogel has commented that Anatsui’s transparent works offer a darker or more sinister aspect. She says, “Something about these flimsy, wispy little see-through hangings … suggests secrets exposed, private linens sliding disgracefully into view.”498 These veils could symbolize the invisible barriers between people, the corruption within power relationships, or simply cause viewers to notice the detailed lattices of his metal curtains. Whether they are interpreted as subtle veils or secrets exposed, the contrasting texture of these lacey patterns strengthen the visual impact of his scintillating, opaque sheets. Anatsui’s metal matrixes transform the dross of consumption to subtly point to the destruction of African lands, the oceans, and the problems of trash disposal throughout developing countries, where electronic waste is commonly exported by wealthy countries to developing ones, in violation of the international law. On a global scale, his work addresses these inequities, and the resulting social, and environmental problems, but it also symbolizes something more personal to the artist. Anatstui’s joined sections of pattern are also emblematic of the piecing together of his own history and identity. It was a shock when one day as a youth, his uncle told him that the person he thought was his mother was not his biological mother and he learned the circumstances of his mother’s death, causing him somewhat of an identity crisis.499 The theme of the fragment 498 Vogel, “Art Now: Breaking Apart, Breaking Free,” El Anatsui: Art and Life, 134. 499 Susan Vogel, Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui. 293 reorganized in a new context has been an important part of works since the “Broken Pots” series, and he has brought back the idea of synthesis from broken parts in Pot of Wisdom. Anatsui reflects, I think I use broken pieces because of my eclectic life history. You know, it’s not one homogenous kind of progression, it’s been in bits and pieces⎯not growing up in my own nuclear family, and not even living in my country, and finally, now, travelling all over the place. I think it’s an attempt to put all this together.500 Anatsui’s patterns and textures unify many disparate elements, and express the bridging of multiple narratives and histories. He constructs order and unity within a disordered, contentious world. On a global level, his patchwork is symbolic of cross-cultural dialogue between the world powers, and the idea of a cultural mosaic within societies. The messiness and unevenness of his patterns also serves as an apt metaphor for the inconsistencies of diplomacy and collaboration between African countries and the rest of the world. Anatsui’s compositions of irregular, organic shapes that create the illusion of lightness deal with themes of continents, growth, change, and cross-cultural dialogue. This dialogue is often symbolized by the synthesis or connecting of many heterogeneous patterns. He recently remarked, “I’m working toward buoyancy.”501 This floating quality seems to be determined by vibrant line and an increasingly flexible array of painterly textures. His goal of buoyancy harks back to the original aesthetic aspects that he took from uli and its lyrical and powerful employment of line. Another aspect of lightness is how he makes metal appear 500 “FCC interview with Susan Vogel, Enid Schildkrout, and Harry Kafka,” Skowhegan, ME, July 2007, quoted in Susan Vogel, “Art Now: Breaking Apart, Breaking Free,” El Anatsui: Art and Life, 134. 501 Holland Cotter, “A Million Pieces of Home,” The New York Times, February 8, 2013, accessed March 4, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/arts/design/a-million-pieces-of-home-el-anatsui-at-brooklyn- museum.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 294 airy, wispy, and diaphanous in some areas and opaque and impenetrable in others. Line and pattern suggest representational aspects or reflect aerial perspectives in many works shown in Anatsui’s Pot of Wisdom exhibition. Departing from his original textile format of verticals and horizontals, his compositions have grown into new shapes that may depict geographies, plant- like growth, and the globe. The smaller scale of these works also allows viewers to experience them as meditations on particular compositional experiments rather than environments. For instance, Basin (2012) (Fig. 4.77) resembles a network of loose lines seen from an aerial perspective that may include mountains, wounds in the earth, or a satellite image of a metropolis. This work perhaps best communicates a global vision of urban sprawl. In some areas, bottle caps are sewn together in abundant heaps, but these heavy accumulations dissolve into a bird’s eye view of spreading streets and roads. In contrast, the circular structure of Visionary (2012) (Fig. 4.78) is compartmentalized into many sections that range from see-through to opaque, and it is fraught with competing patterns and colors like a crazy quilt. The impact of so many condensed designs make it glow with color and pattern like a Fig. 4.77 El Anatsui, Basin, aluminum and copper wire, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery 295 Fig. 4.78 El Anatsui, Visionary, aluminum and copper wire, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.79 El Anatsui, Awakened, aluminum and copper wire, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.80 El Anatsui, Seed, aluminum and copper wire, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.81 El Anatsui, Uwa, aluminum and copper wire, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery 296 tropical fish. Rather than suggesting a wall surface, this piece forms a large, ornamental shape. Awakened (Fig. 4.79) (2012) bends forward with a diagonal checkered design of red and pale blue that juxtaposes with the solid dark green spine, and it drapes a fringe of red and yellow metal strands onto the floor. This work is reminiscent of a figure bending under a heavy load, but its bottom is light and buoyant. Another work, Seed (2012) (Fig. 4.80) glows brilliant yellow and seems to blossom out of small red and black strands at the bottom in a way that defies gravity, and that invokes gestation and roots.”502 Uwa (2012) (Fig. 4.81) takes the form of a suspended ball of red and yellow metal chains that unravel onto the floor. The metal fiber flows out of this orb and leads the eye to small patterned sections on the floor. It perhaps represents the deterioration and decay of the earth itself, as if its skin is peeling off. In their versatility, Anatsui’s recent metal sheets exhibited in Pot of Wisdom feature pattern more organically and depart from the textile grid in favor of painterly compositions from a variety of perspectives. They show a greater diversity of patterns than his original metal wall hangings. As he pushes the limits of his medium and the range of patterns that he can produce, Anatsui’s works have evolved to explore new motifs and concepts that relate less to cloth and more to architectural space and geographies. His increasingly monumental vision is intended to inspire audiences to reflect on humanity’s divisive history, the devastation of the environment, and encourage people to heal the earth’s wounds. His work made in the last six years reveals the maturation of longstanding themes including the transformation of materials 502 Ibid. 297 related to food and drink consumption. In addition to departing from the textile formats, his work has also taken on an architectural scale for many projects. Anatsui’s recent recognition by the international art world has lead to major public commissions on a grander scale that represent an embracing of the global perspective in his work and a newfound appreciation for the major impact and relevance of African design qualities in contemporary art more broadly. Although it may be frustrating to him, even the interest in his work’s relationship to textile patterns shows that Western audiences are beginning to better understand the significance of these influences for artists. The expanded scale of his work into major international public art venues also responds to the expectations of the international audience for these installations. Storr argues that the shifting nature of Anatsui’s work results in a fundamentally anti- monumental effect because “it does not stand its ground, is not an anchor for ambient objects, structures, or beings. Rather it takes the shape of circumstance and so epitomizes contingency.”503 Anatsui’s work is monumental in its metamorphosis of materials that have a past life to commemorate history, synthesis of traditional patterns and invented forms, and openness to innovation. Since the Venice Biennale of 2007, Anatsui’s work has exploded on the international art scene and has adorned many major exterior and interior spaces across the Americas, Europe, and Asia on a monumental scale. This public art arena for his work has also elevated its status as a symbol of global transformation and awareness, but suggests that he has perhaps been seduced to create large-scale works to satisfy the expectations of the art market. Anatsui 503 Storr, “The Shifting Shapes of Things to Come,” 57. 298 comments, “The world is beginning to realize that artists are just artists; not “European, artists,” not “African,” nor “American.” Art is not the preserve of any one particular people, it’s something that happens around the whole world.”504 This statement proclaims the universality of great art, but also implies the necessity for the African artist’s work to be appreciated beyond its African identity in order to be considered great art in the global art world. At this esteemed point in his career, Anatsui continues to ride the line between expanding his vocabulary with the metal process and negotiating a capitalist-driven art world audience that associates massive scale with grandeur and substance. Adorning Architecture Anatsui’s work has always blurred the lines between the conventional categories of ceramics, sculpture, and painting. At the same time that Anatsui has elaborated on interior installations, he developed site-specific works for particular architectural monuments. Vogel writes, “Anatsui is now creating art that increasingly asks to be experienced bodily, like architecture, not read like a text … Progressively leaving behind the circumscribed African messages he articulated earlier in his career, Anatsui’s art now draws inspiration and materials from Africa to speak about the earth and all humanity.”505 The innovation of seeking an ethereal quality in the work corresponds to his colors and patterns that transform original architectural monuments and selectively conceal or reveal aspects of its surface. His massive installations of metal sheets alter non-African 504 Anatsui as quoted by Susan Vogel, El Anatsui: Art and Life, 17. 505 Vogel, El Anatsui: Art and Life, 17. 299 buildings by incorporating the colors and textured designs of bricks, moldings, and glass mirrors. Serving as a second skin for these structures, the rhythmic designs of these installations allow viewers to see the building surface afresh and provide a new context for a monument that complicates its original cultural and historical role. By draping European and American architecture with caps from liquor bottles, a substance historically used to exploit Africans during the transatlantic slave trade, Anatsui re-clothes these monuments in a material emblematic of these power relationships. The adaptability of his patterned metal sheets and their decorative function penetrates the divides between fine art spaces and communal, public arenas. In architectural installations, Anatsui adapts his patterns and materials to respond to the building or wall surface. His three monumental works exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2007 demonstrate the expanding range of interior and exterior architecture design innovations with his bottle cap medium. The first of these works was made for the 52nd Annual Venice Biennale (2007) for the exhibition Artempo - Where Art Becomes Time. He wrapped the Palazzo Fortuny, one of Italy’s most important Gothic landmarks, with his patterned metal cloth entitled Fresh and Fading Memories, Part I-IV (2007) (Fig. 4.82). The interior walls of the Fig. 4.82 El Anatsui, Fresh and Fading Memories, aluminum and copper wire, 354” x 236”, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Italy, 2007, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery 300 Palazzo Fortuny reveal an architectural history in their patina and hodgepodge of brick, decorative painting, textured plaster, repairs and incomplete renovations, and the exterior walls are also a mélange of brown, ochre, and beige brickwork. He evolved his bottle cap vocabulary to respond to Palazzo Fortuny’s Gothic style and details of precious wall-hangings, paintings, and the famous lamps owned by the Pesaro family, as well as its more recent transformation into a museum by designer Mariano Fortuny. Similar to the ambitious scale of wrapped installations by the Bulgarian and French couple, Christo Yavacheff and Jeanne- Claude Denat de Guillebon, that accentuate the shape of an architectural structure and American painter Sam Gilliam’s engagement with the exterior walls of museums for his draped paintings, Anatsui’s installation at the Palazzo Fortuny feature his pieced texture and allow areas of the metal cloth to trail off of the wall surface. From below, viewers could also see through the metalwork patterns as if peering out from under a lacey curtain. Anatsui exhibited two other monumental works at the Venice Biennale’s Arsenale space, the largest pre-industrial production center of the world, built in the 13th century.506 Historically, the Arsenale’s shipyards, depots and workshops stood for the military, economic, and political power of Venice. Anatsui chose this site to exhibit two additional grandiose wall installations whose diverse patterns emphasized his control over his medium, although critics failed to respond to this aspect of the work. He presented Dusasa I and Dusasa II (2007) (Figs. 4.83 and 4.84) at the Venice Biennale’s huge Arsenale space curated by Robert Storr. The title Dusasa derives from two Ewe words, du and sasa, 506 “La Biennale di Venezia,” accessed March 23, 2013, http://www.labiennale.org/en/venues/arsenale.html. 301 Fig. 4.83 El Anatsui, Dusasa I, aluminum and copper wire, 288” x 360”, Arsenale, Venice Biennale, 2007, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.84 El Anatsui, Dusasa II, aluminum and copper wire, Arsenale, Venice Biennale, 2007, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery which means a fusion of dissimilar elements on a grand scale.507 Large bands of red and gold crushed caps characterize this blend, in contrast to large passages of flattened plain strips and looped chains of hollowed-out caps. No format is used more than once except for the basic “Plain.”508 Anatsui conceived Dusasa I as the male sheet since it employed the “Plain” format of caps whereas Dusasa II is made entirely of “Crushed” and “Singlet” that he characterizes as female.509 Anatsui remarks that “[c]rushed is not geometric, like the other elements, but has been disfigured in an organic way, and that it traps light in its dark interior.”510 He scattered bright white plastic disks that came from inside the bottle cap, sprinkling them like sequins across the non-reflective ground.511 While Dusasa I has a painterly composition of red and black arcs and lines embedded in the larger metal fabric, Dusasa II is more monochromatic in its design of alternating 507 Leesa Fanning (Associate Curator Modem and Contemporary Art) (museum mobile guide), The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, accessed March 23, 2013, http://www.nelson- atkins.org/mobileguide/lookup.cfm?id=54936&object=184&col=Contemporary. 508 Vogel, “Entering the Global Art World,” El Anatsui: Art and Life, 80. 509 Vogel, “Working in Nsukka,” El Anatsui: Art and Life, 70. 510 Anatsui, “FCC interview with Susan Vogel, Enid Scholdkrout, and Harry Kafka,” Skowhegan, ME, July 2007. 511 Vogel, “Working in Nsukka,” El Anatsui: Art and Life, 70. 302 opaque and transparent areas that ripple across the wall surface. Their design as complementary male and female installations reinforced the works’ relationship to kente cloth’s gendered contexts and tributes to historical events and individuals. However, in relationship to the Venetian architecture, the ochre, red, and black colors of his installation and its patterns correspond to and contrast with the Arsenale’s old brickwork. The overall gold palette symbolizes royal sumptuousness, and the individual glimmering units joined into larger patterns allude to the importance of mosaics in Byzantine religious mosaics in Italy. The textile-like surfaces of these works also invoke the decorative European history of tapestries, as well as the role of other fabrics such as local flags in Italian pageantry and ceremony. When he was installing Dusasa I, Anatsui wanted to express opulence by spilling golden waves of patterns on the floor.512 The tears and spaces between this surface with a historic patina allowed one to penetrate the building surface, but the dominant grid with shimmering designs of gold and red call attention to the textile-like splendor of the metal “tapestry.” The marriage of African and European aesthetics and royal extravagance is embodied in Dusasa I and II through Anatsui’s patterns that reinvigorate Italian architectural history. Susan Vogel points out Anatsui’s response to the texture, color, and sometimes patterns of the wall surface as a powerful leitmotif in his architectural art, such as Fresh and Fading Memories and Gli (Wall) exhibited in Osaka, 512 Vogel, “Bottle-top Hangings as an Art Form,” El Anatsui: Art and Life, 125. 303 Japan and Rice University Gallery.513 Anatsui responds both to the history of specific wall surfaces and he also creates his own symbolic walls with the metal units. He says, “[w]alls are meant—by people who built them—to either hide something or sequester something or protect something … I felt that walls, rather than conceal things, were constructs which help reveal things.”514 The architectural role of Dusasa I and II makes the connection between the function of monumental tapestries in Renaissance and Baroque Italy as ornate and practical decorations that reproduced Biblical and mythological scenes designed by master painters. Also, in a similar way to religious art of an earlier era, the reflective qualities of his bottle-cap patterns bestow an essence of spiritual grace on the facades that they adorn. His installations inspire a meditative effect that is partly a result of the labor-intensiveness of their multitude of patterns and units. This sense of awe is also due to the luminous intricacy of designs that is reminiscent of Byzantine mosaics, Islamic tessellations, and Baroque stained- glass windows. The gravitas and grace of Anatsui’s recent architectural works and their reflective qualities expand the emotional and spiritual dimension in his work. Another of Anatsui’s public works, Broken Bridge (2012) (Figs. 4.85 and 4.86), is especially interesting because it was exhibited in Paris and New York City, requiring a transformation of the piece in each context. Broken Bridge was first exhibited at the Paris Triennial 2012, le Palais de Tokyo, Paris, where 513 Ibid. 514 Anatsui, “FCC interview with Susan Vogel, Enid Schildkrout, and Harry Kafka,” 125. 304 Fig. 4.85 El Anatsui, Broken Bridge, tin, mirrors, exhibited at the Paris Triennial 2012, le Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.86 El Anatsui, detail of Broken Bridge, tin, mirrors, exhibited at the Paris Triennial 2012, le Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery Anatsui decided to emphasize the mirrored surface of the building in response to its function as a museum of fashion. He also felt that glass mirrors were an ideal way to reference both Africa and Europe, reflecting one another. Anatsui attached sections of tin into asymmetrical blocks in a similar way to his smaller wall pieces, and then numbered these sections so the art installers would know approximately how to order them. He flattened and joined these blocks of red, perforated rectangles into an uneven layer to cover the reflective, undulating glass wall so that they were stretched diagonally like fabric held together by a few long threads. He extended thin strips across the large areas of the underlying mirrored surface. The metal patches were the color of land while the glass represented water and also reflected the colors of the sky. At the same time, the mirrored shapes may have suggested two parts of a bridge or an extension that has broken off, or land masses that have separated over centuries. Altering structures and monuments of European and American culture 305 and industry, Broken Bridge combined African patterns with Western aesthetics and expressed a vision of global interdependence. He restructured Broken Bridge (2012) for exhibition along New York City’s High Line (Figs. 4.87, 4.88, 4.89), the repurposed aboveground subway track, originally built in the 1930s, as part of a massive public-private infrastructure project called the West Side Improvement.515 Altering this project to the very different cityscape of Chelsea in Manhattan, Anatsui responded to the gritty textures and parks of downtown Manhattan and the reflective surfaces of the nearby Hudson River. This time, he covered the façade of the building with a mirrored-glass surface that would contrast to his rough metal sheets. He took the same blocks of metal from the earlier installation and reassembled them into a monumental drapery to conform to the flat surface of the building running alone the High Line between 20th and 21st Streets. The rusted and perforated pieces of tin have jagged edges reminiscent of the eroded structures of the Hudson River docks and piers in the 1970s and 80s. Also, the thin diagonal strips of metal (Fig. 4.90) echo the branches of trees planted along the High Line Park. The High Line was restored as effort of urban repurposing and Anatsui’s installation complements this purpose since the same thread runs through his work. 515 The High Line and Friends of the High Line, “High Line History,” New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, accessed March 20, 2013. http://www.thehighline.org/about/high-line-history. 306 Fig. 4.87 El Anatsui, High Line installation, tin, mirrors, New York City’s High Line between 21st and 22nd Streets, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.88 El Anatsui, detail of High Line installation, tin, mirrors, New York City’s High Line between 21st and 22nd Streets, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.89 El Anatsui, detail of High Line installation, tin, mirrors, New York City’s High Line between 21st and 22nd Streets, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery Fig. 4.90 El Anatsui, detail of High Line installation, tin, mirrors, New York City’s High Line between 21st and 22nd Streets, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery 307 In Broken Bridge, mirrors underlying the rusted tin layers form an irregular layer that provides continuity with the light surfaces of water and sky, and gives the illusion of seeing the sky behind a decaying architectural facade. The rippling surface of wave-like patterns and folds of his largest outdoor installation to date corresponded to the textures of the Chelsea architecture, the surrounding landscape, and the reflective qualities of the Hudson River running parallel to the installation. The mirrors also bring in the environment and the signature skyline of New York City, including the Empire State building. The piece “… gives a narcissistic city and art world capital a fractured, yet sky-flooded view of itself.”516 Broken Bridge’s reflective surfaces also respond to and create a dialogue with some of the newer architecture in the Chelsea neighborhood such as the rippling curves of Frank Gehry's new IAC building (InterActiveCorp's headquarters) and facing it, Jean Nouvel's "Vision Machine," a 23-story shimmering glass tower with its own pattern of windows at 19th Street and the West Side Highway. Anatsui inserts something of his own environment and history, in the form of an earthy surface of reddish tin that contrasts with the cool rhythmic patterns of blue and gray glass windows of the Vision Machine and the silvery blue exterior of the IAC building. He therefore restores a sense of patina in a neighborhood that has recently become a symbol of new wealth and architectural opulence. Showing the range of patterns, sculptural forms, and painterly surfaces that he can create with this medium, Anatsui breaks down categories of sculpture, painting, and architecture to redesign international public spaces. 516 Holland Cotter, “A Million Pieces of Home.” 308 Building upon his patterned works produced over forty years, Anatsui continues to offer a vision of history as a piecing of multiple stories, experiences, and physical connections between people organized through texture and pattern. He acknowledges that his process uses fragments and pieces assembled together because that has been his history.517 His life has been filled with disjunctive and nomadic experiences: not growing up with his nuclear family, not living in his country of birth, and most recently travelling and developing his work to suit many international contexts. On an architectural scale, Anatsui synthesizes patterns to express human interdependence in a flexible format that allows for change, fluidity, and growth. Legacies of Anatsui’s Ethereal and Buoyant Patterns Throughout his many years as a professor in the Department of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Anatsui has inspired several generations of young artists and mentored them in a direction that engages the impact of Africa’s postcolonial position and rapid industrialization in the last century. Counter to the overriding pedagogy of his institution, he has encouraged these younger artists to work with what their environments toss up both as material and content, and to seek overarching themes that address historical, practical, and ecological issues. Nigerian artist Bright Ugochukwu Eke is a recent University of Nigeria graduate who studied with Anatsui and his work shows the influence of Anatsui’s sensitivity to castoff materials that reflect human 517 Susan Vogel, Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui. 309 contingency and environmental impact. Anatsui exhorted Eke to experiment with and transform found materials in his sculpture. Although Eke’s sculptures are less aesthetically sumptuous in color and texture than Anatsui’s grand installations, they share similar conceptual concerns and techniques of combining and building with scavenged materials. Taking inspiration from Anatsui’s process of building with small units to create patterns, Eke concentrates on themes of natural resources. Eke’s recent work focuses on the particular natural resources that are most in jeopardy, and is based on his experience of acid rain while he was working outside in Nigeria’s gravely polluted Port Harcourt.518 Eke’s skin became extremely irritated due to contact with toxic rainfall contaminated from local industrial pollution. This led to his investigation into the causes of acid rain in that region, which are due to the pollution of local oil industry.519 Says Eke, “Lack of pure water leads to the sale of bags⎯[the littered landscape shows a] total scorn for the environment on the part of authorities and the people who pollute their own neighborhoods.”520 Water is a universally powerful subject because it connects humanity across the continents and is a basic necessity for everyday existence. The focus on water enables his work to be grounded in the specific concerns of Nigerian politics, international industry, and their natural ecosystems, but also relates to an international crisis in the effects of our dependence on fossil fuels. Eke’s water series implicates oil companies and other industries that grossly exploit Africa’s 518 Celeyce Matthews, “Fluid Connections, Bright Ugochukwu Eke” (delivered in a graduate seminar on modern African art at San Jose State University) accessed December 28, 2012, http://www.axisgallery.com/Axis_Gallery/Eke_Articles.html. 519 The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, “Video: Artist Interview Bright Ugochukwu Eke on Working with Water,” The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, 2009, accessed February 10, 2013, http://tang.skidmore.edu/index.php/posts/view/496/. 520 Bright Eke quoted in Vogel, El Anatsui: Art and Life, 31. 310 resources and often leave behind irreversible pollution that jeopardizes local communities and wildlife. In a similar way to Anatsui’s theme of food and drink explored through food trays, old mortars and bottle caps, Eke has focused on a substance necessary to human survival that allows him to address universal issues affecting the planet. Like Anatsui’s architectural installations built out of small units, Eke’s 2011 exhibition entitled Between Earth and Clouds, Don’t Panic at the Durban Art Gallery in South Africa presented a monochromatic design composed of hundreds of small cellophane bags filled with water and some with a blend of water and carbon. Like earlier works such as Water Drop (2008) (Fig. 4.91), it was comprised of many water packets, each resembling raindrops (perhaps contaminated with chemicals or carbon) that seem to flow over the edges of the gallery walls, imitating water’s ability to be broken into many units yet part of a larger body. These small bags draped from strings in the circular gallery space, reminiscent of a chandelier or a waterfall spray raining down from the ceiling. Similarly, Eke’s exhibition of Heavy Clouds; Water & Waste: ARS II (Fig. 4.92) at the Ålands konstmuseum in Finland (2011) included a number of similar Fig. 4.91 Bright Ugochukwu Eke, Water Drop, water, carbon, plastic bags, filament, 2008, courtesy of the artist 311 installations composed of hundreds of bags of water hanging from the ceiling in a cloud-like formation that also resembles a mushroom cloud or crystalized explosion. Eke communicates the purity and reflectiveness of each water droplet, captured in a sanitary bag, but hanging just above reach. As in earlier works, “this allusion to the concept of interconnectivity, the fluid multiplicity of water serves as a metaphor for individual humans making a cohesive, although perhaps dysfunctional, society.”521 The splendor of Eke’s sparkling installations that emphasize the shrinking availability of this essential resource of clean water makes more poignant the environmental message. Like water itself, Eke’s droplets conform to the curved space and surround viewers with water’s life-giving power and its preciousness. Like Anatsui’s preference for old wood and metal that bears the patina and even the violence of wear, Eke uses the abject quality of the natural carbon or chemically altered water to disturb the beauty of its shiny surface. Related to Anatsui’s titles of works such as Depletion (2009), Ozone Layer, and Stressed Earth that refer to people’s destructive impact to the planet’s climate and natural reserves, Eke’s water installations employ pattern and reflective qualities to emphasize the fragility of earth’s resources. 521 Ibid. Fig. 4.92 Bright Ugochukwu Eke, Heavy Clouds; Water & Waste: ARS II, Ålands konstmuseum in Finland, water, carbon, cellophane, filament, 2011, courtesy of the artist 312 Eke organized elements into organic patterns reminiscent of Anatsui’s 1990s outdoor work entitled Signature in two installations entitled Ripples and Storm (I and II).522 Both of these pieces incorporated recycled elements with a similar patterned aesthetic to Anatsui’s wood and metal works. Ripples and Storm I (Fig. 4.93) was composed of recycled plastic water bottles and wire and constructed with the help of student assistants at Skidmore College. Eke commented that he wanted to raise awareness about humanity’s collective guilt over the issue of trash overflowing landfills and floating in a mass twice the size of Texas in the Pacific ocean to 522 Signature was discussed on page 33. Fig. 4.93 Bright Ugochukwu Eke, Ripples and Storm I, Tang Museum, Skidmore College, plastic bottles and wire, 2011, courtesy of the artist Fig. 4.94 Bright Ugochukwu Eke, Ripples and Storm II, Tang Museum, Skidmore College, plastic bottles and wire, 2011, courtesy of the artist 313 inspire an increased sense of accountability.523 He observes that his process develops, similar to Anatsui, out of accidents and experimentation.524 Ripples and Storm II (Fig. 4.94) was more undulating and spontaneous in its serpentine lines composed of wooden disks, akin to Anatsui’s Signature that highlights the round ends of cut wood, that sprawl across the wall. Eke employed plastic bottles and wood to replicate the movement of water when an object drops into the surface and produces a series of ripples. Both literally and metaphorically, the piece communicates the effect of each person’s part in the larger universe. The ripple produced by one person or thing can cause a chain reaction that eventually leads to a great wave or even a storm. This same theme of the pressure that human beings exert upon the environment has for many years been conveyed in Anatsui’s metal structures made of liquor bottle tops and rusted tin, as well as the interest in pattern as a metaphor for the restoration of social fabric and solutions to complex social and political problems. The impact of Anatsui’s patterns that flow from one to another and the sense of an overall composition made up of many small elements can certainly be seen in Eke’s water installations. The legacy of Anatsui’s work flourishes in the work of younger artists such as Eke. Over the past ten years, Anatsui’s work has demonstrated an organic progression that pushes the boundaries of his material and its ability to respond to many formats including installations and architecture. Anatsui’s sculpture has evolved to express both local histories and experiences and also an engagement 523 The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, “Video: Artist Interview Bright Ugochukwu Eke on Working with Water.” 524 Ibid. 314 in spaces and monuments throughout the world, including West Africa, Europe, Japan, America, and Latin America. Using these metal elements with the same expansive repertoire as paint or any sculptural medium, Anatsui has established a seemingly endless vocabulary of patterns with which he responds to culturally specific and universal themes, historical events, and personal memories. Now that Anatsui has become an international icon, the Africanist aesthetics of his sculptures and installations have become part of the mainstream, and they may perhaps be written about in such a way that credits the unique philosophical and aesthetic contributions that stem from patterns of the Akan, Ewe, Yoruba and Igbo cultures. His work brings together numerous histories and cultures in a network of human experience. As broadly appealing and universal as this work is, we must not forget the sources of its inspiration and the special gifts that Anatsui shares with the world that come from his nomadic perspective, his lived experiences in Ghana and Nigeria, and his deep knowledge of the specific languages of African pattern. 315 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION This dissertation has investigated heavily adorned surfaces in the work of Wiley, Cave, and Anatsui as examples of an overarching aesthetic propensity in Black Atlantic art. Pattern is the modus operandi that enables Wiley to represent urban men of color as heroes and dignitaries, Cave to repurpose found materials into power figures, and Anatsui to memorialize African history and reference critical environmental issues. The complex layers of their paintings, sculptures, and installations show that appropriated motifs and the metamorphosis of scavenged materials serve as archives of collective knowledge. These artists deepen viewers’ awareness of designs and emblems that signify multiple ways of knowing and communicate the interconnections between the physical world and the metaphysical. Through a dedication to exterior layers, they invite viewers to see beneath the surface to the symbolic and the spiritual. Wiley, Cave, and Anatsui work with pattern and texture to present a multifaceted perspective of the past and suggest memories of events and experiences that have been under-represented in Western history. They inspire remembrance through the associations of their works’ layers. The symbols that people attach to events, places, and social rituals activate memory. Wole Soyinka’s book The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness (1999) suggests that memory is a "near intolerable burden" to bear the record of injustice in Africa and that art is the one source that may foster the beginning of 316 reconciliation.525 He describes art as the process that can envelop traumatic experiences and offer hope of forgiveness. Works by Wiley, Cave, and Anatsui act as such containers of experience and they hold the seeds of resolution and absolution. Patterns and adornment in their work trigger memory and enable viewers to bring together multiple histories and social references. Wiley’s incorporation of motifs from Jewish papercuts in portraits of Ethiopian Israeli subjects intertwines the diasporic histories of Jews and Africans. Combining these symbols, he brings together the parallel experiences of persecution, dispersal, and survival of Jewish and Black Atlantic peoples. In other works, Wiley alludes to the shared experiences of discrimination and harassment suffered by Palestinians and African Americans. Cave’s incorporation of memorabilia into his sculpture, such as the Black jockey figure, is a specific reference to the denigration of African Americans in popular culture imagery that dates back to slavery and intensified after abolition. Anatsui employs liquor logos on bottle caps to make a statement about their associations with power and authority, and allude to the history of alcohol as a desired commodity that served as barter during the transatlantic slave trade. Also, his kente-like patterns signify cultural pride for Black Atlantic peoples as well as the specific meanings of motifs and their associations with Asante and Ewe proverbs. The works of Wiley, Cave, and Anatsui are songs for the eyes. They exemplify the relationship to musical rhythms in their visual counterpoint. Wiley’s 525 Wole Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 317 decorative motifs serve as percussive and vocal beats that create a visual tension with his figurative subjects. Like hip-hop tracks that overlap spoken word and ambient sounds, they form the polyrhythmic environment that envelop his idealized models and enhance the designs of clothing and the smooth glow of skin. Cave’s work invokes music through the potential of his Soundsuits to make a range of rattling, swishing, clattering, trumpeting, and other noises. Referencing musical sources that range from New Orleans jazz to house music and African drumming, Cave samples from many Black Atlantic musical genres. The visual cacophony of his patterns and textures represent visual counterpoint just as the musical accompaniment to his performances provides a soundscape for his dancers. The rippling designs and contrasting textures of Anatsui’s sculptures reflect the relationships between kente weaving and drumming, and the structural complexity of West African music. The inclinations of Black Atlantic art towards polyrhythm, asymmetry, and accumulated textures have been apparent for centuries. However, the embracing of these aesthetics by the mainstream art world is a relatively new phenomenon that began in the early twentieth century during the Harlem Renaissance and has re-emerged since the 1960s. This expansion continued with an interest in pluralism and multiculturalism in the 1980s and identity politics in the 1990s. Even with this progress, few Black artists penetrated museums of modern and contemporary art. This resulted in curatorial tokenism whereby one artist was expected to represent the entire Black “community,” as if the whole Black Atlantic world could be reduced to a village. In the 21st century, Black 318 Atlantic artists are increasingly valued by museums and galleries for their varied content and versatility of styles, as well as the ideas that they contribute to the international art world. Much more work remains to be done to identify and illuminate Africanist aesthetics while at the same time enabling Black Atlantic artists to have equal opportunities to exhibit their work in the most esteemed institutions of fine art. This dissertation reinforces how Black Atlantic artists are stretching the exclusive confines of the art world and challenging modes of curatorial practice and scholarly research. In support of this expansion, there need to be more exhibitions that present the work of African Diaspora and African artists in relationship to specific themes so that their work can debunk the cliché of being perceived through the lens of racial and ethnic identity and can inhabit any conceptual or stylistic arena. A successful example of a project that enabled artists to respond to their Black Atlantic heritage in an open-ended way is the contemporary art series at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art that invites two artists to create new works in response to one another. In their second exhibition of the series, Artists in Dialogue: Sandile Zulu and Henrique Oliveira (2011), the exhibition prompted a transcontinental visual dialogue between the work of Sandile Zulu of South Africa and Henrique Oliveira of Brazil. In the past decade, museums such as the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in addition to art fairs such as Pulse in New York City and the Venice Biennale, have increasingly included curators and artists of the Black Atlantic world and worked in a collaborative manner to showcase artist- 319 generated topics. Exhibitions of African and African Diaspora culture such as the Global Africa Project at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City should be a regular biennial, as suggested by art critic Roberta Smith. The pervasiveness of Africanist aesthetics can be difficult to tease apart and would benefit from ongoing investigation rather than sporadic projects. This would allow a more continuous and focused discussion of innovative Black art and design that would foster further scholarly research. Exhibitions are surpassing the scholarly world in groundbreaking opportunities that will help Black Atlantic artists to be self-defining and present their work within a range of different frameworks. This dissertation has aimed to identify shared threads in historical and conceptual agendas, aesthetic approaches, and other aspects that unite artists to broaden art historical methodologies. Art history continues to segregate Black artists by national or racial identities, which results in fewer scholarly projects that transcend the frameworks of race, geography, and ethnic identity. As Wiley, Cave, and Anatsui show through their free appropriation of many different design sources, artists do not limit themselves to the patterns and influences of their own racial or ethnic heritage. There remains a dearth of scholarly writing about Black artists that investigates their work in regards to social issues and topics that are considered to be universal by offering insights about life, society, or human nature. The discipline of art history must expand to allow Black Atlantic artists, and those of many other cultures and ethnicities, to share the stage with artists of European descent in the creation and expression of universal themes. 320 There also should be more exhibitions that group artists across racial and ethnic groups according to their methods and aesthetic approaches so that Black Atlantic artists can be appreciated in the global arena in which their work truly acts and belongs, rather than in isolation. Historically, Black Atlantic artists were rarely exhibited or studied in regards to international movements that included artists of other ethnic and racial groups. This suggested that were no African or African Diaspora artists who were influential enough to inspire others to follow in their direction, an unlikely assumption based on how artists borrow and even steal ideas from one another. When the Dada movement was born following World War I, it transcended many national borders and linked artists together across many disciplines, but it included no artist of African descent. The young African American artist Adam Pendleton has recently inserted himself into the history of the Dada artists through his conceptual word play and manifestos that redefine Dada in terms of a Black Atlantic lineage. In a similar way, curators and scholars must strive to recognize the overarching relationships between artists and not let such opportunities be lost in the artists’ own lifetime because this stunts the field of art history. Thankfully, curators in the highest echelons of the museum world are increasingly identifying and exhibiting Black Atlantic artists in the context of other important modern, postmodern, and contemporary movements. In 2011, the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited works by El Anatsui, Anish Kapoor, Liza Lou, and Clinton De Menezes in proximity to one another based on their similar surfaces and creative strategies. Showing these monumental works in the same 321 gallery encourages viewers to make connections between artists cross-culturally and internationally by experiencing the works’ similar scale, organization of materials, and types of symbols. Exhibitions that mix artists according to like themes and practices inspire scholars to look beyond the old categories and think about how artists take inspiration from common conditions, similar ideologies, and parallel approaches. It also enables art historians and audiences to identify transatlantic movements in the global art world in which Black Atlantic artists are originators, participants, and powerful influences on other artists. Further inquiry into the aesthetic relationships between contemporary African Diaspora and African art in both exhibitions and scholarship will enable a deeper understanding of cultural continuity. It will foster the study of Black Atlantic peoples that assume national identities originally constructed and reinforced by European conquerors and maintain active participation in their indigenous and religious affiliations and ceremonies. The designations of African versus African Diaspora artists are political and geographical distinctions. They deny the fact that living in the diaspora is not a thing of the past, but a contemporary reality for many artists. The segregation of disciplines based on superficial differences does a disservice to art historical scholarship because it limits the connections that can be drawn and the possibility for understanding artists holistically. This is not to say that the artists’ biographical and local milieu should not be analyzed; but this should not be the excuse to put the artist in box, neglecting many other influences. Many contemporary art publications, such as Modern Painters and Art in America, have broadened their scope of articles 322 featuring artists of African descent who work in a range of styles and explore many conceptual and aesthetic concerns, but these artists hail mostly from the United States. With the exception of a handful of scholars, there remains a wide gulf between Africanist scholarship and contemporary art criticism. There should be more cross-fertilization between these fields so that artists are written about from many perspectives. Nka, Journal of Contemporary African Art is one of the few journals that has spearheaded this initiative and dispensed with the ineffective categories. This dissertation argues that there should be a revision of the archaic and inadequate classifications to determine new terms that are appropriate to the artists and their work. The success of illustrious African artists, such as Anatsui, is opening these doors. However, there remains further need for scholarship that delves into African cultures to understand their perspectives, instead of assessing everything through a Western paradigm. Since Black Atlantic culture has historically been compartmentalized at the institutional level by medium or genre, the approach to writing about and presenting Black Atlantic art must be made more interdisciplinary, as Robert Farris Thompson has demonstrated in his research of visual art, music, and dance of the Black Atlantic world. This interdependence of the arts is an essential part of African and African diaspora creative production, and should be made visible through the scholarship that analyzes art, music, and performance. As this dissertation has shown, contemporary Black Atlantic artists such as Wiley, Cave, and Anatsui focus on pattern and texture to spark a global and 323 intergenerational conversation with other artists and art audiences internationally and across historical periods. There have been great strides in the exhibition and scholarship of such artists, but much more work remains to be done so that the field will identify and recognize its universal importance, and bring these insights to a more inclusive audience. Art history and curatorial practice provide a primary means of educating and sharing the value of art that comes from worlds that the public might not otherwise fathom. Academic research must promote this reorientation of art historical methodologies and broaden the study and acknowledgement of the universal contributions of Black Atlantic cultures and artists. 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This research was presented at the 2014 Spring Conference of The Korean Society of Fashion Business. 이족의 전통문양을 활용한 가방디자인 개발 연구: 패브릭 패턴 디자인을 중심으로 이목결 조진숙· + 가천대학교 예술대학 디자인학부 패션디자인전공 The Development of a Bag Design Using the Yi Tribe's Traditional Patterns: Focusing on the Fabric Pattern Design Mokgyul Lee · Jeansuk Cho+ Dept. of Fashion Design, College of Art, Gachon University Abstract The purpose of this study is to link the Yi tribe's traditional patterns to bag design. Yi tribe is a minor ethic group in China, whose traditional pattern has a high artistic value in that its shapes are diverse and each one has peculiar elegance. Traditional patterns are also indicative of spiritual dept or symbolic stories, rather than being indicative of simple formative beauty. Thus, reorganizing these patterns and applying them artistically to design- in terms of resource utilization- would be significant. Out of all of the Yi tribe's traditional patterns, the cherry blossom_( ), water wave_( ), sky father and earth 花 水波马樱 mother_( ), pomegranate blossom, triangle, sheep' horn, wisteria vine_( ), square 天父地母 藤条 and diaper_( ) and the zigzag_( ) patterns were chosen for use during the 四角菱形 曲折 development of a bag design. This study is based upon document study, including research papers and internet web sites, the point of which was to investigate the form of the traditional patterns, and the creative design process. The design procedure includes these sub-processes: selection, arrangement and color-scheme. In the selection process, the form of the pattern was edited using Adobe Photoshop. The pattern was freely arranged to reflect various emotions. In terms of the color-scheme of the patterns, the colors used by Henri Matisse(1869-1954) in his work were selected and adapted when dyeing the patterns. Subsequently, the final design resulting from these design development processes was applied to the actual production of the bag by using canvas fabric and 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 권 호19 2 150 서론. Ⅰ 현대사회에 산업주의 물질만능주의가 심화되면서 , 위기감의 해결방안으로 기계와 물질적인 가치보다는 자연과 정신적인 가치에 의미를 두는 동양문화에 대 한 관심이 증가하고 있다 최근 잡지나 인터넷을 살. 펴보면 서구에서는 아시아 여러 나라의 에스닉한 , 요소들을 패션 뿐 아니라 여러 디자인 분야에서도 다양하게 활용하고 있음을 알 수 있다 서양문화의 . 물질적 관념과는 대조적인 동양문화의 정신을 재해 석하여 활용한 것이다 이처럼 동서양의 융합현상이 . 일어나는 세계적 흐름 속에서 동양의 전통적 요소에 대한 발굴과 이에 대한 활용을 모색하는 연구는 동 양문화에 대한 관심과 비중을 높이고 신선하고 우수 한 디자인을 개발한다는 측면에서도 매우 필요하다. 본 연구에서 다루고자 하는 이족은 본 연구자의 조상으로 박물관이나 전시회 또는 관련된 자료를 통 해서 살펴보면 전통복식이 매우 다채롭고 화려하여 , 문화적 자긍심을 갖게 한다 또한 이족의 전통복식. 은 그 자체의 아름다움 뿐 아니라 천백년이래 형성 된 전통 관념이나 문화를 심층적으로 보여주고 있으 며 더욱이 전통복식에 나타난 문양들은 그 형태가 , 독창적이고 아름다우며 심지어 어떤 문양들은 현대 화가의 작품을 연상케 하기도 한다 일반적으로 문. 양은 대중들의 생활 풍습이나 정서를 상징적으로 표 현한 것으로서 오랜 역사를 통하여 변화와 발전을 거듭하면서 한 민족의 전통문양으로 정착된다 따라. 서 전통문양 속에는 장식적인 아름다움과 함께 그 민족의 의식이나 관념 즉 고유한 내면의 이미지를 , 간직하고 있다 단순히 형태적인 아름다움에만 그치. 지 않고 정신적인 내면의 깊이 또는 상징적 스토리, 를 보여준다는 것이다 문화로부터 자유로운 세계적 . 디자인은 존재하지 않는다 세계화와 다문화 시대의 . 흐름 속에서 현대의 많은 디자인은 문화적 시각에서 만들어지고 있으며 문화는 디자인의 이미지를 결정 하는 보이지 않는 뿌리이다 라는 측면에(Yun, 2013) 서 볼 때 민족 고유의 멋을 나타내는 전통문양들은 , 디자인의 이미지와 경쟁력을 갖게 하는 중요한 요소 로서 독창적 아이디어 제시에 좋은 소재가 된다 따. 라서 이를 재편성하여 예술적으로 디자인에 활용한 다는 것은 자원의 활용 전통과 현대의 융합 그리고 , 전통문화의 재발굴이라는 측면에서 매우 의미 있는 일이다 이처럼 본 연구자는 조상의 전통문화를 발. 굴하여 현대적 디자인에 활용하는 연구를 진행함으 로써 문화산업에 기여한다는 점에 자부심을 갖고, 독창적인 아름다움을 표현하고 있는 이족의 전통문 양을 모티브로 창의적인 가방디자인을 개발하고자 한다. 가방은 물건을 넣어 들거나 메고 다닐 수 있게 만 든 용구(National Academy of the Korean 로 처음에는 기능이 강조된 의복의 Languae, 1999) 부속물로 시작하였으나 현대에 와서 기능보다는 개 인의 외모를 장식해주는 패션소품으로서 의상에 버 금가는 역할을 하고 있다 세기 현대여성에게 있. 20 어서 가방은 단순히 실용적 목적 뿐 아니라 지위, 신분 취향 등을 상징하는 아이템이 되었다 특히 , . 가방의 로고나 디자인을 통해 사람의 직업이나 경제 적인 지위를 가늠하는 단서가 되어 사회적 지위를 나타내기도 한다(Jung, Kim, Bang, Cho & Kim, 최근 세계적인 가방 트렌드를 살펴보면 형2014). , 태적 측면보다는 소재의 측면에서 고유한 패턴과 색 상을 활용하여 새로운 디자인을 제시하고 있다 일. leather, after which the bag image was proposed using computer simulation. In conclusion, six bag designs were created using traditional patterns from the Yi tribe. Through the processes explained above, this study confirmed that traditional patterns could be widely applied as design motifs and that more sophisticated, modern, and creative designs could be developed based on traditional patterns. Key words : 이족의 전통문양 가방디자인Yi Tribe' Traditional Pattern( ), Bag Design( ), A 문양 배치 문양의 색채배색rrangement of the Pattern( ), Color-Scheme of the Pattern( ) 이목결 조진숙 · / 이족의 전통문양을 활용한 가방디자인 개발 연구 151 반적으로 브랜드마다 가방의 외형 디자인은 거의 한 정되어 있고 그들만의 고유한 소재패턴을 개발함으, 로써 소비자들에게 상품인지도를 높이고 그 가치를 인정받고 있다(Sung & Oh, 2007). 본 연구에서 개발하고자 하는 가방디자인의 외형 은 손에 들고 다니는 손가방으로 박스형이며 일상, 생활에서 편리하게 사용하는 캐주얼한 용도의 가방 이다 캐주얼한 용도의 가방은 정장용보다는 가격이 . 저렴하고 개발이 용이하기 때문에 소재패턴도 기하 학적무늬 꽃무늬 동물무늬 다양한 무늬의 믹스, , , , 팝아트무늬 에스닉한 무늬 등 다양하다, (Kim & 이러한 다양한 무늬의 홍수 속에서 본 Jung, 2011). 연구의 문화적 정체성을 보여주는 전통문양에 현대 적 기법을 활용한 재해석은 현대적 요소의 접목을 통해 이를 차별화시키고 대중화 시킬 수 있다는 의, 의를 제공할 것으로 기대된다. 연구방법은 이론적 연구로 이족복식과 관련된 문 헌 인터넷 선행연구 등을 통하여 이족의 전통복식, , 과 문양을 고찰하였다 그리고 색채 배색을 위하여 . 야수파의 대표적 화가인 앙리 마티스(Henri 의 작품에 대해서도 고찰하였Matisse, 1869-1954) 다 색채배색은 선행연구를 통해 살펴보면 한국적 . , 색상 유행색상 현대미술에 나타난 색상 디자이너 , , , 컨셉에 의한 색상 아프리카의 민속적 색상 사용 등, 으로 다양하게 나타났다 본 (Kang & Cho, 2011). 연구에서는 문양의 형태는 전통적이지만 현대적이면 서도 글로벌한 이미지를 부여하고자 서양의 여러 현 대미술 작가들 중에서 앙리 마티스(Henri Matisse, 를 선택하였다 이는 앙리 마티스 작품1869-1954) . 에 표현된 색채가 단순하고 강렬하기 때문에 의상과 조화를 이루거나 악센트를 주는 가방의 이미지를 표 현하는데 적절하다고 사료되었기 때문이다 실증적 . 연구로 가방디자인 개발과정은 문헌 인터넷 선행, , 연구 등을 통하여 얻어진 이론을 바탕으로 문양의 형태 선정 문양의 배치 문양의 색채 배색 등의 과, , 정을 거쳤다 문양의 형태 선정은 전통적인 형태를 . 그대로 사용하기로 하였으며 문양의 배치는 전통문, 양만을 배치한 것과 전통문양과 기하문양을 함께 배 치한 것 등 두 가지 방법을 사용하였다 문양의 색. 채 배색은 앙리 마티스의 작품들에서 색상을 추출한 후 추출된 색상을 중심으로 배색하였다 이와 같은 , . 과정을 거쳐서 완성된 디자인은 캔버스 원단 (canvas)(Dictionary of the Costume 과 부, 2008) 분적으로 가죽을 사용하여 실제로 가방을 제작한 후 컴퓨터 시뮬레이션 작업을 통해서 가상으로 제, 시하였다. 본 연구는 이러한 전통적 요소와 현대적 요소와의 융합을 통한 디자인 프로세스를 거쳐서 창의적인 가 방디자인이 개발될 수 있음을 밝힘으로써 가방디자 인의 다양한 발상을 위한 기초 자료를 제시 할 수 있다는데 그 의의를 두며 이러한 연구결과가 세계, 화를 향한 가방디자인 개발에 도움이 되었으면 한다. 이론적 배경. Ⅱ 이족의 전통복식 1. 중국의 소수민족인 이족은 원래 고대의 강인 (羌 이 남하하여 서남지역의 토박이 부족과 서로 다)人 투고 경쟁해 나가면서 한편으로는 끊임없이 융합하 여 형성된 민족이다 원래 이족은 이라는 명칭. 夷族 이었는데 청나라 시절에 한족이 아닌 만주인을 이 오랑캐 라고 부르기 때문에 그 호칭을 싫어해서 ( : )夷 소리가 동음인 라는 글자로 교체하였다(Yi tribe, 彝 수당 이래로 이족의 조상들은 오랫동2013). ( ) 隋唐 안 변화와 발전을 거듭하면서 그 활동범위를 점차 넓혀서 오늘날 운남 사천 귀주 의 ( ), ( ), ( )云南 四川 州贵 성 과 광서 의 일부분까지 이족의 핵심 거3 ( ) ( )省 广西 주지역이 되었다. 이족은 역사적으로 종족관념이 깊고 지계 가 , ( )支系 많으며 자연환경이 산 평야 강 등으로 이루어져 , , , 있기 때문에 복잡하다 따라서 지역별로 산업 유형. 이 다르고 다른 민족과의 교류정도에 따라 복식의 , 형태나 소재 액세서리 문양 등이 다른 특징을 이, , 루고 있다 즉 지역에 따라 복식에 전통(Figure 1). , 적인 특징이 강하게 나타나거나 다른 민족의 영향을 받은 것이 반영된 것이다 그러나 공통적인 것은 이. 족이 호랑이를 숭상하고 검정색을 선호하며 불을 , 존경하고 무 를 숭상한다는 것이다, ( ) (The Cult of 武 Yi Tribe, 2013). 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 권 호19 2 152 Figure 1. Yi Tribe's Environment -http://www.9tour.cn/ 본 연구자는 년 월에 곤명에 있는 운남민 2014 1 족박물관을 직접 방문하여 이족의 다양한 복식들을 직접 관찰하였다. 이족의 복식은 지역적 특징과 사회의 화석으로 불 리는 언어 분포 상황을 참고로 하여 양산 오( ), 凉山 몽산 홍하 진동남 진서( ), ( ), ( ), (蒙山 紅河 東南乌 滇 滇 초웅 등 개의 유형으로 분류한다), ( ) 6 (西 楚雄 中国 The Yi tribe's costume of China , 彝族服 [ ]饰 본 연구에서 다루고자 하는 문양은 그 중에2011). 서도 초웅형 복식 오몽산형 복식 진동남형 복식에 , , 나타나있는 문양으로 이를 중심으로 살펴보면, 초웅형 복식은 운남 의 초웅이족자치주 ( ) (云南 楚雄 및 주변지역에서 착용되고 있다 이 지) . 彝族自治州 역은 다른 이족지역에 비해 이족지계가 가장 많고, 집중된 지역이어서 이족의 전통문화가 비교적 많이 남아 있는 지역 중 하나이다 초웅형 복식은 상의. , 치마 각반으로 구성된다 상의는 앞부분이 짧고 뒤, . 가 길며 긴소매이다 검은색이나 붉은색 바탕에 , . 4 쪽의 꽃잎무늬 외에 사각무늬 사각 마름무늬 동전, , 무늬 별점무늬 곡선무늬 나비무늬 공 자형무늬 , , , , ( )工 등이 화려하게 장식되어있어서 마치 하나의 예술 작품을 보는 듯하다( The 中 彝族服 之楚雄型[国 饰 Chowoong style of the Yi tribe's costume of 무늬는 좌우가 서로 대칭되어 있China , 2012). ] 다 치마는 모두 검은색 바탕에 붉은색 계열의 단. 색 천이나 꽃무늬 천 소량의 녹색 꽃무늬 천을 줄, 무늬처럼 장식한다 상의는 세로무늬 치마는 가로. , 무늬 그리고 전체적으로 볼 때 꽃무늬는 마치 얼룩, 덜룩한 호랑이 무늬와 같아 호랑이무늬 옷이라고도 불린다(Figure 2). 오몽산형 복식은 귀주 비제지구 ( ) ( ), 州 地贵 毕节 区 육판수시 와 운남 소통시 의 진웅( ) ( )六 水市 云南昭通盘 이량 위신 및 사천서영( ), ( ), ( ) (雄 彝良 威信 四川镇 叙 고린 과 광시융림 등의 지역에), ( ) ( ) 永 古 广西隆林蔺 서 널리 착용되고 있다 오몽산은 예로부터 서남 이. 족문화의 발원지이며 고대 중원으로 부터 서남으로 통하는 교통의 요로이다 따라서 타민족과의 교류가 . 많았으며 이로 인해 오몽산형 복식에는 고유의 민족 전통 뿐 아니라 명나라 말기와 청나라 초기 복식의 영향을 받았다 옛날에는 옷의 재료로 모피와 모직. 물을 주로 사용하였지만 지금은 다양한 종류의 옷감 을 사용한다 옷의 색상은 주로 청색 남색이며 기. , , 본적으로 소매 길이가 길고 무릎아래까지 오는 긴 상의와 폭이 넓은 바지를 입는다 여성복식은 긴 상. 의와 폭이 넓은 바지로 구성되어 있다 상의의 경우. , 보통 청색 남색으로 좁은 폭의 밴드칼라, (band 가 달려있고 소매가 길며 상의의 길이는 무collar) , 릎까지 온다 허리에는 흰색의 허리띠를 하고 있다. . 칼라 목둘레 여밈 옆선 밑단 소매단 등에 화려, , , , , 한 꽃문양을 장식하였고 특히 밑단에는 천부지모(天 문양을 장식하였다 천부지모문양은 이족어) . 父地母 로 삐리터러 라고 하며 원형의 우( ) ‘ ( )’彝 力妥语 毕 罗 주를 의미한다 중국어로는 판퉈어잰 이라 . ‘ ( )’反托肩 부르며 우주만물을 상징한다 이 회오리형 문양은 . 흰색바탕에 검은색의 나선무늬 형태로 흰색은 이족 어로 무푸우무구르 라 부르며 천부’ ( )‘ , (木普木古 天鲁 라는 뜻이다 검은색은 이족어 로 미머미아) . ( ) “父 彝语 나 라고 부르며 지모 라는 뜻이( )” “ ( )”米莫米阿 地母哪 다( The Omongsan style of 中 彝族服 之 蒙山[国 饰 乌 즉 흰the Yi tribe's costume of China , 2012). ] 색 바탕에 검은색의 나선무늬는 천부지모를 상징하 는 이족의 우주관을 나타낸다 하의로는 폭이 넓은 . 바지를 착용한다(Figure 3). 진동남형 복식은 선명한 지계의 차이로 인해 이족 복식 중에서도 다른 특색을 나타내고 있다 진동남. 형 복식은 주로 운남 의 광남 부녕( ) ( ), (云南 广南 富 마관 마율파 미륵 개원), ( ), ( ), ( ), 宁 麻栗坡 弥勒马关 이목결 조진숙 · / 이족의 전통문양을 활용한 가방디자인 개발 연구 153 Figure 2. The Tiger Pattern Dress of the Chowoong Style -Yi Tribe Costume, p. 87 Figure 3. A Woman's Costume of the Omongsan Style -www.yizuren.com 사종 및 광서 의 나파 등의 ( ), ( ) ( ) ( ) 元 宗 广西 那坡开 师 지역에서 착용되고 있다 이 지역들은 중국의 변방. 지역이라서 관두의 방두루마기 사각형 두루마기 등 , ( ) 전통적인 복식양식을 지금까지 잘 보유하고 있다. 진동남형 복식은 로남식 미륵식( , (路南式 弥勒 ) 문서식 이 있다, ( ) . 式 文西式) 로남식의 여성복식은 상의 앞치마 바지로 구성 , , 된다 상의의 경우 앞이 짧고 뒤는 긴 홑옷이며 주. , , 름이 많은 치마를 입기도 하는데 치마는 여러 색상, 으로 된 천을 이어서 만들어 놓아 색채가 서로 어울 리고 보기에 아름답다(Figure 4). 미륵식의 여성복식은 상의와 앞치마 바지로 구성 , 된다 상의의 경우 앞은 짧고 뒤는 길며 소매는 폭. , , 이 좁고 길다 상의의 칼라와 몸체 그리고 소매단에. 는 화려하게 자수로 장식하였다 앞치마를 착용하고 . 허리띠를 맨다 허리띠의 길이는 넓이. 60cm-70cm, 는 이며 십자수로 수를 놓는다 하의로는 긴바20cm . 지를 입는다. ( The 中 彝族服 之 南型[国 饰 滇东 Jindongnam style of the Yi tribe's costume of 복식의 색상 장식품 머리장식 등 China , 2012). , , ] 다른 지역과 비교하면 차이가 많다(Figure 5). 문서식 여성복식은 상의와 치마로 구성된다 상의 . 의 경우 어깨 옷깃 여밈 소매 단 부분에 납염으, , , , 로 장식한다 사철 치마를 입고 치마에 삼각형으로. 염색한 천을 아플리케 기법으로 장식한다( & 茂钟 兰 술이 달린 Jong, M. R. & Bum, P. 2005). 范朴[ ] 사각형 수건은 납염과 보철기술로 만든다(Figure 6). 이상과 같이 이족의 전통복식을 통해서 이족은 호 랑이를 숭상하며 검정색 복식을 선호하고 빨강색, , 노랑색 녹색 보라색 등 선명한 색상과의 화려한 , , 배색을 사용하였음을 알 수 있었다 이처럼 이족의 . 전통복식은 천백년이래 미학 종교 철학 및 풍습 , , 등 다양한 방면에서 형성된 전통 관념이나 문화구조 를 잘 보여주고 있다. 앙리 마티스 의 작품 고찰 2. (Henri Matisse) 야수파의 선구주자인 앙리 마티스 (Henri Matisse, 는 세기 프랑스 미술의 일반적인 특1869-1954) 20 징을 가장 잘 보여준 화가이다 앙(H. Park, 1997). 리 마티스는 후기 인상파들의 화풍을 실험하고 받아 들이면서도 자기만의 색채표현 방식을 구축하며 야, 수파의 지도자적인 역할을 수행하면서 동료 화가들 의 화풍에 많은 영향을 미쳤다 마티(G. Kim, 2005). 스의 회화에서 표현의 가장 주된 수단은 색채였다. 마티스는 고갱과 고호 등의 영향을 받았으며 원색, 의 대부분을 구사하면서 선명한 색채의 표현으로 독 창적으로 발전시켜 나갔다 작품의 색채는 강렬한 . 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 권 호19 2 154 Figure 4. The Ronam Style -http://222.210.17.136/mzwz/news/4 /z_4_8278.html Figure 5. The Miruk Style - .中 少 民族服国 数 饰 , p.113 Figure 6. The Moonseo Style - .中 少 民族服国 数 饰 .p.114 Figure 7. "Woman Reading", Henri Matisse, 1894 -http://www.henrimatisse.org/ woman-reading.jsp Figure 8. "Notre Dame", Heri Matisse 1900 -http://www.henrimatisse.org/ Notre-Dame.jsp Figure 9. "Henri: Matisse" Andre Derain, 1905 -http://www.cdpantings.com/andre-derai n/henrie-matisse-1905-by-andre-derain 보색 대비로 바뀌면서 색채의 균형과 색의 단순화 는 계속된다 마티스의 회화는 원(S. Hoang, 1974) . 근법 명암법 운필법을 모두 버리고 자연의 재현에, , , 서 해방되어 자신의 감동을 색채만으로 자유분방하 게 표현하였다 리드미컬한 선적 패(H. Park, 1997). 턴과 단색의 평평한 색 영역을 표현적으로 구성하는 독자적 양식을 발전시키면서 세기 초 몇 년 동안 20 자신만의 장식적이고 표현적인 추상양식을 완성해 나갔다(H. Osbon, 2001). 마티스 작품세계의 변화를 살펴보면 다른 화풍의 , 영향을 받은 초기 야수파 활동 등을 (1890~1904), 통해 자신만의 작품세계를 구축한 중기(1905~1930), 색채의 결정체라고 보아지는 후기 의 총 (1931~1953) 기로 구분할 수 있다3 . 마티스 회화는 사물 자체를 관찰하고 발견하고 느 끼고 경험하는 것에 중점을 두고 있다 초기에 그는 . 다른 당대 화가들의 작품들을 모사하고 연구하여 , 자신의 작품 세계에 접목 활용함으로써 자신만의 , 개성적인 작품세계를 창조해 나가기 시작했다 초기 . 작품은 밝은 색채와 어두운 색채가 공존 하는 시기 로 소재는 주로 정물 풍경 인물을 중점으로 하였, , 다(Figure 7-8). 마티스의 중기 작품들은 밝은 색채와 뚜렷한 윤곽 과 단순화된 형태감의 특징을 보이며 인상파를 거쳐 이목결 조진숙 · / 이족의 전통문양을 활용한 가방디자인 개발 연구 155 Figure 10. Dance( ), Henrie Ⅱ Matisse, 1910 -http://www.wikiart.org/en/ henri-matisse/dance- -1910Ⅱ Figure 11. La Musique, Henrie Matisse, 1939 -http://www.henrimatisse.org/ the-music.jsp Figure 12. The Snail, Henrie Matisse, 1953 -http://www.henriematisse.org/ the-snail.jsp Selection of the Pattern The form of the pattern was edited using Adobe photoshop ⇓ Arrangement of the Pattern The arrangement of the pattern was freely placed to reflect various emotions ⇓ Color-Scheme of the Pattern Henri Matisse work was selected and the colors in his work were adopted when dyeing the patterns Figure 13. The Design Process 신인상파의 영향을 받아 야수파의 시기를 맞게 된 다 강한 터치와 색채대비의 표현 등을 통해 빛을 . 추구하고 동적인 화면을 구사하게 된다 전체적으로 . 간결한 인물과 사물의 표현은 빛을 재창조 함으로써 나타나는 아름다움을 보여준다 선은 더욱더 유동적. 이 되고 빛의 묘사는 통일성을 부여했으며 색채와 , 문양의 반복 등을 통해 자율성과 리듬감 장식성을 , 추구하였다(Figure 9-10). 마티스의 말기 작품들을 보면 장식성 직선적인 , 강렬한 형태감 통일적인 리듬감의 결정체를 엿볼 , 수 있다 명암과 양감 원근법 등 회화 표현상의 기. , 법들을 배제하고 생동감을 살릴 수 있는 색채와 평 면적 단순화의 결합이라는 특성을 나타내고 있다. 윤곽선이 색채와 색채 사이의 구분을 위해 나타내기 도 하지만 색채와 색채 사이를 무선으로 남겨둠으, 로써 물체의 윤곽선에 나타나는 빛을 효과적으로 사 용하였다 뚜렷하고 과하지 않은(Sim & Ryu, 2010). 형태의 단순함과 다양한 구성 강렬한 색채들이 자, 유로운 공간 속을 통일하며 통일감 있는 리듬감과 , 뚜렷한 색채의 자연스러움은 마티스 작품 세계의 결 정체를 이뤘다(Figure 11-12). 가방디자인 개발과정. Ⅲ 이족의 전통문양을 모티브로 한 가방디자인의 디 자인 개발과정은 선행연구들(Mok & Cho, 2014; 을 참조로 하여 문양의 형태 선Lim & Cho, 2013) 정 문양의 배치 문양의 색채 배색 등의 과정을 거, , 쳤다(Figure 13). 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 권 호19 2 156 문양의 형태 선정 1. 이족의 전통문양은 문헌 및 인터넷 사이트를 검색 한 후 가방디자인에 적절하다고 사료되는 문양을 , 초웅형 복식에서 말벚꽃 문양 수파 문( ) , ( )花 水波马樱 양 주망 문양 석류꽃문양 양각문양 양의 뿔, ( ) , , ( ), 蛛网 등조 등나무 덩굴 문양 사각능형( , ) , ( ), 藤 四角菱形条 곡절 문양 오몽산형 복식에서 천부지모( ) , (曲折 天父地 문양 그리고 진동남형 복식에서 삼각문양을 선정)母 하여 사용하였다 선정된 문양 형태는 . Adobe 와 프로그램Illustrator CS6 Adobe Photoshop CS5 을 활용하여 정리하였다. 초웅형 복식에 나타나있는 말벚꽃문양은 활짝 피 어있는 모습이 사실적이면서도 단순화하여 표현한 꽃잎 형태가 현대적이면서도 아름답고 안정감이 있 다 수파문양은 움직이는 물결의 모습을 유연한 곡. Table 1. A Traditional Pattern of the Chowoong Style of Clothing Title Clothing Expand of the Pattern Pattern Cherry Blossom Pattern Water Wave Pattern Spider Web Pattern Pomegranate Blossom Pattern 선으로 표현하였으며 맨 윗부분을 더 굵게 강조함, 으로써 율동감이 힘 있게 느껴진다 주망문양은 개. 4 의 마름모꼴을 중심으로 주위에 원을 형성하고 반지 름선과 마름모꼴을 만나게 함으로써 거미가 줄을 치 고 있는 모습을 표현하였다 석류꽃문양은 꽃의 단. 면을 보는 듯 형태가 매우 흥미롭다 양각문양은 양. 의 뿔을 표현한 것으로 안으로 굽은 모습은 사실적 형태를 과장한 것으로 보인다 등조문양은 등나무 . 넝쿨의 얽혀진 형태를 단순화 하여 표현한 문양으로 두 가닥의 끈을 꼬아서 매듭을 지은 형태이다 사각. 능형 문양은 바둑판 모양의 네모 안에 조( )四角菱形 금씩 다른 타원형의 입사귀모양이 규칙적으로 배열 되어있다 매우 현대적인 이미지를 보여준다 곡절. . 문양은 좁은 폭의 네모가 지그재그 형태로 곡( )曲折 절되는 모습이다(Table 1). 이목결 조진숙 · / 이족의 전통문양을 활용한 가방디자인 개발 연구 157 Table 1. Continued Title Clothing Expand of the Pattern Pattern Horn of a Sheep Pattern Wisteria Vine Pattern Square and Diaper Pattern Zigzag Pattern 오몽산형 복식에 나타나있는 천부지모문양은 흰색 바탕에 검은색으로 나선형의 원이 그려져 있다 흰. 색의 나선무늬는 천부 를 의미하며 검은색의 “ ( )”天父 나선무늬는 지모 를 의미하는 이족의 우주관“ ( )”地母 을 나타내는 문양이다 천부지모문양에 꽃잎처럼 반. 원이 주위에 붙어 있는 문양은 옷 속에서는 반 정도 표현되어있다 그러나 문양을 사용할 때 나머지 부. 분을 모두 마무리하여 사용하였다(Table 2). 삼각형의 문양은 진동남형 복식의 허리띠에 장식 되어 있는 수건 테두리에 나타난 삼각형의 기하학적 문양이다 문양은 천을 삼각형 모양으로 잘라 붙여. 서 바느질로 고정하는 아플리케 기법으로 표현하였 다(Table 3). 문양의 배치 2. 문양의 배치는 전통문양만을 사용한 경우와 현대 문양을 함께 사용한 경우 등 두 가지 방법으로 배치 하였다 전통문양 외에 에 . Adobe Photoshop CS5 나타나있는 원 네모 반원 사선 등의 기하문양을 , , , 선택하여 사용하였다 문양 배치에 관한 (Table 4). 선행연구들(Zong & Cho, 2009; Jun & Cho, 2010; 을 살펴보면Mok & Cho, 2014; Lim & Cho, 2013) , 단독무늬 사방연속무늬 이방연속무늬 체크리스트, , , 법 테셀레이션 등 다양한 방법이 사용되었다 본 , . 연구에서는 문양 배치가 가방이라는 일정한 면적에 제한되었다는 점을 고려하여 다양한 감성으로 문양 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 권 호19 2 158 Table 2. A Traditional Pattern of the Omongsan Style of Clothing Title Clothing Expand of the Pattern Pattern Sky Father and Earth Mother Pattern Table 3. A Traditional Pattern of the Jindongnam Style of Clothing Title Clothing Expand of the Pattern Pattern Triangle Pattern Table 4. Geometric Pattern Geometric Pattern Oblique Line Square Half Circle Circle Stripe Rectangular Stripe 을 자유롭게 배치하였다 문양의 배치 과정에서 디. 자인 선호에 대한 객관성을 높이기 위하여 문양 배 치가 완성된 가방디자인 여 작품을 대상으로 의상30 학을 전공한 석사이상의 전문가 인이 함께 참여하6 여 선정하였다 그 결과 전통문양만을 사용하여 문. , 양을 배치한 디자인 작품 전통문양과 기하학적문1 , 양을 함께 사용하여 문양을 배치한 디자인 작품이 5 선정되었다 선정과정에서 흥미로운 점은 전통문양 . 만을 배치한 것보다는 전통문양과 기하문양을 함께 배치한 것이 더 선호되었다는 것이다 소재는 일반. 이목결 조진숙 · / 이족의 전통문양을 활용한 가방디자인 개발 연구 159 적으로 차양막 텐트 가방 구두 등에 많이 사용되, , , 는 면사 굵은 실로 오밀조밀 두껍게 짠 캔버스 원단 을 사용하였고 손잡이와 가방의 입구 부분은 가죽, 을 사용하였으며 여닫는 부분은 지퍼로 처리하였다, . 가방의 형태는 박스형으로 사이즈는 폭 길25.5cm, 이 이다31cm (Figure 14). Figure 14. The Bag Design 디자인 1) Ⅰ 디자인 은 말벚꽃문양과 수파문양을 모티브로 Ⅰ 디자인하였다 가방의 아랫부분에는 수파문양을 반. 복하여 배치하였고 왼쪽의 손잡이 끝부분과 오른쪽, 의 수파문양 위에 말벚꽃문양을 배치하였다 배치 . 과정에서 오른쪽과 왼쪽의 문양 크기를 다르게 하여 Table 5. The Arrangement of the Pattern of DesignⅠ Bag Design Traditional Pattern Arrangement of the Pattern 변화를 주었고 왼쪽부분에는 수파문양 위에 말벚꽃, 문양의 일부분만 보이도록 함으로써 꽃잎이 물결위 에 떠다니는 낭만적인 감성을 표현하였다 즉 문양 . , 배치에 스토리를 부여하였다(Table 5). 디자인 2) Ⅱ 디자인 는 천부지모문양과 사선 네모 반원 등, , Ⅱ 의 기하문양을 함께 배치하였다 바탕에 천부지모문. 양을 배치한 뒤 그 위에 사선 네모 반원 등의 문, , , 양을 배치하였다 배치과정에서 천부지모문양을 겹. 쳐서 배치함으로써 평면에 차원적인 입체감을 부여3 하였으며 전통문양에서 보여주는 시공간적 깊이와 , 기하문양에서 보여주는 단순함 모던함이 아름다운 , 조화를 이루었다 또한 중심에 기하문양을 배치하였. 기 때문에 현대적인 이미지가 강하게 표현되었다 (Table 6). 디자인 3) Ⅲ 디자인 은 천부지모문양과 원이 반복되는 기하Ⅲ 문양을 함께 배치하였다 바탕에 원을 겹쳐서 배치. 하고 그 위에 천부지모문양을 자유롭게 배치하였다, . 문양 배치과정에서 반복적인 원을 겹쳐서 배치함으 로써 평면에 차원적인 입체감을 표현하였으며 자3 , 유롭게 배치된 천부지모문양은 마치 갓 피어난 꽃처 럼 아름다움을 표현하였고 꽃이 단순하게 표현된, 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 권 호19 2 160 모습은 보는 이로 하여금 즐거움을 느끼게 하였다 (Table 7). 디자인 4) Ⅳ 디자인 는Ⅳ 주망문양과 기하문양인 줄무늬를 함 께 배치하였다 가방의 위 아래 부분에 줄무늬를 . , 배치하고 가운데에 주망문양을 배치하였다 세련된 . 줄무늬와 수공예적인 전통문양과의 조합은 모던하면 서도 내추럴한 아름다움을 표현하였다 중심에 위치. 한 주망문양은 거미줄 문양으로서 줄무늬와 의미가 서로 통하는 듯하다(Table 8). Table 6. The Arrangement of the Pattern of Design Ⅱ Bag Design Traditional Pattern Geometic Pattern Arrangement of the Pattern Table 7. The Arrangement of the Pattern of Design Ⅲ Bag Design Traditional Pattern Geometric Pattern Arrangement of the Pattern 디자인 의 문양 배치 5) Ⅴ 디자인 는Ⅴ 석류꽃문양 삼각문양 양각문양 등, , , 조문양과 그라데이션 효과를 나타내는 (gradation) 기하문양인 직각의 줄무늬를 함께 배치하였 다 가. 방의 중앙에 석류꽃문양을 배치하고 그 둘레에 직, 각의 줄무늬를 배치하였으며 또 다음은 삼각문양, , 등조문양 양각문양을 배치하였다 직각 줄무늬의 , . 그라데이션 효과는 평면적인 패턴에 입체감을 부여 하였으며 현대적인 이미지를 표현하였다 더불어 중. 앙에 위치한 석류꽃문양을 강조하기도 하였다 가장. 자리에 배치된 삼각문양 등조문양 양각문양은 상, , 상력을 불러일으키는 시각적 효과를 주었다(Table 9). 이목결 조진숙 · / 이족의 전통문양을 활용한 가방디자인 개발 연구 161 Table 8. The Arrangement of the Pattern of Design Ⅳ Bag Design Traditional Pattern Geometric Pattern Arrangement of the Pattern Table 9. The Arrangement of the Pattern of Design Ⅴ Bag Design Traditional Pattern Geometric Pattern Arrangement of the Pattern 디자인 6) Ⅵ 디자인 은 사각능형문양 곡절문양과 원이 반복, Ⅵ 되는 기하문양을 함께 배치하였다 가방의 중앙에 . 사각능형문양을 배치하고 좌우에 곡절문양을 배치, 하였으며 아래 부분에는 원이 반복되는 기하문양을 , 겹쳐서 배치하였다 사각능형문양과 곡절문양은 그 . 형태가 나뭇잎과 나무줄기를 연상시킨다 자연적인 . 이미지에 현대적인 감성이 가미된 디자인이다(Table 10). 이상과 같이 전통문양만으로 혹은 전통문양과 기 하문양을 함께 배치하여 가방디자인 , , , , Ⅰ Ⅱ Ⅲ Ⅳ 를 완성하였다 문양 배치 과정에서 문양 배, . Ⅴ Ⅵ 치를 스토리가 있게 배치하거나 기하문양과 전통문 양을 함께 사용하여 전통적인 이미지에 세련된 현대 적 감성을 가미하였다 즉 전통문양과 기하문양의 . 조합을 통해서 전통의 깊이 자연미 현대의 모던함, , 과 세련미를 더한 감성을 표현하였다. 문양의 색채 배색 3. 문양의 색채 배색에 사용하고자 하는 작품은 앙리 마티스의 여러 작품 중에서 'Harmony in 을 Red(1908)', 'Sans Titre(1947)', 'Nach(1950)' 선택하였다 색상추출 방법은 . Panton Textile Color Guide(Panton Textile Color System, 를 사용1982) 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 권 호19 2 162 Table 10. the Arrangement of the Pattern of Desig Ⅵ Bag Design Traditional Pattern Geometric Pattern Arrangement of the Pattern 하여 추출하였다 팬톤 시스템은 실용성을 목적으로 . 만들어졌기 때문에 색선정과 색채 배색에는 용이하 나 색의 기본 속성에 따라 논리적으로 배열이 되어 있지 않다 이를 보완하기 위해 한국 산업규격의 . KS 현색계 색표집의 기본 바탕이 되는 의 가Munsell 10 지 색상 주요 가지 색상 와 중간색 ( 5 R, Y, G, B, P 을 추가적으로 표기하여 색의 YG, GY, BG, PB, RP) 속성을 명확히 하였으며 색상 명도, (Hue), (Value), 채도 로 색상 추출의 정확성을 높이고자 하(Chroma) 였다 색상표기는 색채 영문명 색채 . ‘Panton (Panton 고유번호 의 형태로 제시하였다, Munsell H V/C)’ . 색상추출 방법은 의 스포이Adobe Photoshop CS5 ‘ 드 도구 를 사용하여 색상을 추출(Eyedropper tool)’ 한 후 의 색상들 중에Pantone Textile Color Guide 서 가장 적합한 색상을 선택하였다 의 색상. Munsell 은 에서 추출된 색상의 값을 구한 Photoshop RGB 후 을 사용하여 , ‘Munsell conversion(Version 4.01)’ 값을 로 변환하여 색상값을 구하였으며 RGB H V/C 변환된 색상 와 명도 채도 의 값은 소수점 H( ) V( ), C( ) 아래 반올림하여 표기하였다. 그러나 색상 추출 과정에서 인터넷에 나타난 작품 을 활용하였기에 원본의 색상과 다소 차이가 있을 수 있다는 제한점이 있다. 1) Harmony in Red(1908) 에서 ‘Harmony in Red’ Rugby Tan(15-1315TP, 8YR 7/3), Medium Green(17-6229TP, 8GY 5/6), Musk Melon(16-1442TP, 9R 7/10), Peat (19-0508TP, 7GY 2/2), Deep Periwinkle (17-3932TP, 8PB 5/4), Musk Melon(15-1242TP, 5YR 7/10), Lemonade(12-0721TP, 2GY 10/4), Tomato Puree(18-1661TP, 7R 5/12), Stone Green(17-0123TP, 7GY 5/6), Pristine(11-0606TP, 등 가지 색상을 추출하였다 추출된 8GY 10/0) 10 . 색상은 디자인 과 디자인 에 사용되었다. Ⅰ Ⅵ 디자인 은 전통문양만으로 이루어진 디자인이 Ⅰ 다 디자인 에서 바탕색으로 윗부분에 . Medium Ⅰ 아래 부분에 을 배색하였다Green, Deep Periwinkle . 꽃문양에는 과 을 배색하였Rugby Tan Musk Melon 으며 수파문양은 로 배색하였다 들과 강물을 , Peat . 연상시키는 과 의 배Medium Green Deep Periwinkle 색 위에 과 의 꽃문양은 들Rugby Tan Musk Melon 에 핀 꽃 강물에 떠다니는 꽃 등의 이미지를 연상, 시키며 자연의 아름다움을 잘 표현하였다 많은 상. 상력을 불러일으키는 디자인이다. 디자인 은 전통문양과 기하문양으로 이루어진 Ⅵ 디자인이다 디자인 에서 바탕색은 를 배색하. PeatⅥ 였다 중앙에 위치한 사각능문의 바탕색은 . Musk 와 을 배색하였다Melon, Lemonade Stone Green . 사각능문의 타원형문양에는 을 배색하였고Pristine , 이목결 조진숙 · / 이족의 전통문양을 활용한 가방디자인 개발 연구 163 Table 11. The Color-Scheme of Design 1 and Ⅵ Harmony in Red(1908) 출처 : http://blog.naver.com/hetulevafi?Redirect=Log&logNo=150048520431 Color-Scheme Design 1 Design Ⅵ 타원형문양의 테두리는 를 배색하였Tomato Puree 다 곡절문양과 아래 부분의 원문양은 으로 . Pristine 배색하였다 중앙의 화사한 색채 배색은 어두운 바. 탕색과 대비되어 화사함과 생동감이 강조되었다 (Table 11). 2) Sans Titre(1947) 에서 'Sans Titre‘ Peat(19-0508TP, 7GY 2/2), Nautical Blue(19-4050TP, 7PB 2/13), Cashew(17-1137TP, 9YR 5/8), Pompeian Red(18-1658TP, 10R 3/13), Old Gold (15-0955TP, 4Y 8/10), Green Mist(16-0207TP, 등 가3GY 8/1), Pristine(11-0606TP, 8GY 10/0) 6 지 색상과 악센트로 필요하다고 생각되어 에서 추출한 을 추가로 선‘Harmony in Red’ Pristine 정하여 디자인 와 디자인 에 배색하였다. Ⅱ Ⅲ 디자인 는 전통문양과 기하문양으로 이루어진 Ⅱ 디자인이다 디자인 의 바탕색은 를 배색하였. PeatⅡ 다 천부지모문양과 사선문양은 을 배색하였. Pristine 다 사각형으로 이루어진 바둑문양은 . Pompeian 와 를 교대로 배색하였다 바둑문양 뒤Red Cashew . 에 있는 마름모꼴의 문양은 를 배색하였Green Mist 다 또한 오른쪽에 있는 반원은 를 사. Nautical Blue 용하여 악센트를 주었다 천부지모문양 위에 마름모. 꼴문양 바둑문양 사선문양 반원문양 등에 색상차, , , 이를 잘 활용하여 배색함으로써 입체감을 나타내었 다 전통문양의 바탕위에 현대적 문양의 배열은 시. 공간적 깊이감과 더불어 기하학적 단순성과 추상성 이 가미됨으로써 모던하면서도 깊이 있는 아름다움 을 표현하고 있다. 디자인 은 전통문양과 기하문양으로 이루어진 Ⅲ 디자인이다 디자인 의 바탕색은 을 배색. PristineⅢ 하였다 바탕의 둥근 원들의 굵거나 가는 선들은 . 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 권 호19 2 164 등으로 다양Cashew, Pompeian Red, Green Mist 하게 배색하였다 가장자리에 꽃잎처럼 반원이 장식. 된 천부지모문양은 Peat, Nautical Blue, Cashew, 등으로 자Pompeian Red, Old Gold, Green Mist 유롭고 다양하게 표현하였다 꽃처럼 피어난 천부지. 모문양은 유머러스하면서도 귀엽고 아름다운 감성을 표현하였다(Table 12). 3) Nach(1950) 에서 'Nach(1950)’ Peat(19-0508TP, 7GY 2/2), Garnet Rose(18-1633TP, 2R 3/10), Golden Oak(17-1046TP, 5YR 5/9), Little Boy Blue (16-4132TP, 3PB 6/8), Lime Sherbet(13-0530TP, 5GY 8/6), Nautical Blue(19-4050TP, 7PB 2/13) Table 12. The Color-Scheme of Design and Ⅱ Ⅲ Sans Titre (1947) 출처: http://cn.wahooart.com/@@/5ZKCQP-Henri-Matisse-%E9%A9%AC%E6%88%8F%E5%9B%A2 Color-Scheme Design Ⅱ Design Ⅲ 등 가지 색상과 악센트로 필요하다고 사료되어 6 에서 추출한 을 추가로 ‘Harmony in Red’ Pristine 선정하여 디자인 와 디자인 에 배색하였다.Ⅳ Ⅴ 디자인 는 전통문양과 기하문양으로 이루어진 Ⅳ 디자인이다 디자인 에서 가방의 윗부분과 아래 . Ⅳ 부분에 있는 세련된 줄무늬의 색채 배색은 와 Peat 를 배색하였으며 악센트로 을 배Golden Oak Pristine 색하였다 가운데 부분의 주망문양은 바탕색으로 . 를 배색하였으며 문양의 둥근 부분과 Lime Sherbet , 마름모형에는 Garnet Rose, Golden Oak, Little 를 배색 하Boy Blue, Lime Sherbet, Nautical Blue 였다 세련된 현대적 줄무늬와 주망문양의 조합은 . 모던하면서도 에스닉 한 이미지를 잘 표현하(ethnic) 고 있다. 이목결 조진숙 · / 이족의 전통문양을 활용한 가방디자인 개발 연구 165 디자인 는 전통문양과 기하문양으로 이루어진 Ⅴ 디자인이다 디자인 의 바탕색은 를 . Garnet RoseⅤ 배색하였다 중심의 꽃문양은 와 . Little Boy Blue 를 반반씩 배색하였고 윤곽선은 Nautical Blue , Peat 로 배색하였다 꽃무늬 주위의 사각형의 줄무늬는 . 를 배색하였다 그러나 사각형의 Peat, Golden Oak . 줄무늬 색채가 너무 어둡기 때문에 악센트를 주기 위하여 을 배색하여 산뜻함을 첨가하였다Pristine . 가장자리의 삼각문양과 등조문양은 Little Boy Blue 와 를 배색하였다 양각문양은 Nautical Blue . Golden 와 를 배색하였으며 양각문양의 Oak Garnet Rose , 테두리는 로 배색하였다 디자인 는 Nautical Blue . Ⅴ 다른 가방 디자인과 달리 전통문양이 비교적 많이 사용되었다 그러나 그라데이션 효과가 있는 사각형. 의 줄무늬로 인하여 현대적인 감각과 전통이 균형을 잘 이룰 수 있도록 하였다 사각형의 줄무늬는 입체. Table 13. The Color-Scheme of Design and Ⅳ Ⅴ Nach(1950) 출처: http://www.grundschuletreuchtlingen.de/ideenboerse_kunst/matisse.jpg Color-Scheme Design Ⅳ Design Ⅴ 감을 표현하며 중심의 꽃문양을 강조하였다 주위의. 다양한 전통문양은 많은 스토리를 지니고 있는 듯 상상력을 불러일으킨다(Table 13). 디자인 제시 2. 디자인 제시는 면사로 거칠게 직조한 캔버스 원단 을 사용하여 가방을 실물 제작한 후 컴퓨터 프로그, 램 을 활용하여 가상으로 제시하Adobe Photoshop 였다 그 결과는 와 같다. Table 14 . 이상의 가방 디자인 개발과정을 요약 정리하면 , 와 같다Table 15 . 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 권 호19 2 166 Table 14. The Production of the Bag Design Bag design Production of the Dag Design Design Ⅰ Design Ⅱ Design Ⅲ Design Ⅳ Design Ⅴ Design Ⅵ Table 15. The Bag Design Procedure Title Bag Design Selection of the Pattern Arrangement of the Pattern Color- Scheme Production of the Design DesignⅠ Tradition Geometric DesignⅡ 이목결 조진숙 · / 이족의 전통문양을 활용한 가방디자인 개발 연구 167 Table 15. Continued Title Bag Design Selection of the Pattern Arrangement of the Pattern Color- Scheme Production of the Design DesignⅢ DesignⅣ DesignⅤ DesignⅥ 결론. Ⅳ 현대사회는 세기에 나타난 포스트모더니즘의 영 20 향으로 비주류 전통문화에 대한 관심이 높아졌으며, 특히 물질만능주의가 만연하면서 정신적 가치를 존 중하는 동양권 전통문화에 대한 관심이 높아지고 있 다 각 나라의 전통문화에는 그들의 역사 환경 종. , , 교 철학 미학 풍습 등이 축적되어 있으며 그들의 , , , , 전통문화는 다른 나라 사람들에게는 매우 흥미롭고 신선하다 따라서 각 나라의 전통적 요소는 신선함. 과 창의력을 우선으로 하는 디자인 분야에 있어서 다양하게 활용할 수 있는 디자인 소스 로서(source) 매우 가치가 있다. 본 연구에서 다루고 있는 이족은 중국의 소수민족 으로 그들의 복식문화는 우리들에게 잘 알려져 있지 않지만 다채롭고 화려하며 아름답다 더욱이 복식에 . 나타난 전통문양은 그 형태가 아름답고 특이하며 심 지어는 추상적이고 모던하기까지 하다 따라서 본 . 연구에서는 이족의 전통문화 요소 중 하나인 전통문 양을 모티브로 가방 디자인을 개발하고자 한다. 연구방법은 이론적 연구로 문헌 선행연구 인터 , , 넷 사이트 등을 통하여 이족의 전통복식과 문양을 살펴보았으며 색채 배색을 위하여 대표적 현대화가 , 중 하나인 앙리 마티스의 작품에 대하여 고찰하였 패 션 비 즈 니 스 제 권 호19 2 168 다 실증적 연구로 가방디자인 개발과정은 문양의 . 형태 선정 문양의 배치 문양의 색채 배색 등의 과, , 정을 거쳤으며 디자인 제시는 면사로 거칠게 직조, 한 캔버스 원단으로 가방을 실물 제작한 후 컴퓨터 , 작업을 통하여 가상으로 제시하였다 그 결과는 다. 음과 같다. 첫째 이족은 중국의 소수민족으로서 호랑이를 숭 , 상하고 검정색을 선호하며 빨강 노랑 파랑 초록, , , , 보라 등 화려한 배색을 선호한다 이족의 전통복식. 은 양산 오몽산 홍하 진동남( ), ( ), ( ), 凉山 蒙山 紅河乌 진서 초웅 등 개의 유형으로 ( ), ( ), ( ) 6東南 西 楚雄滇 滇 나누어 볼 수 있다. 둘째 가방디자인 개발은 문양의 형태 선정 문양 , , 의 배치 문양의 색채 배색의 과정을 거쳤다, . 문양의 형태 선정은 이족복식의 개의 유형 중에 6 서 초웅형 복식에 나타난 말벚꽃문양 석류꽃문양, , 등조문양 수파문양 양각문양 주망문양 사각능형, , , , 문양 곡절문양 오몽산형 복식에 나타난 천부지모, , 문양 진동남형 복식에 나타난 삼각문양 등을 선정, 하였다 디자인의 모티브로 적절하다고 사료되는 문. 양은 과 Adobe Illustrator CS6 Adobe Photoshop 프로그램을 활용하여 형태를 정리하였다CS5 . 문양의 배치는 가방이라는 일정한 면적에 제한되 었다는 점을 고려하여 문양을 다양한 감성으로 자유 롭게 배치하였다 배치에 사용된 문양은 전통문양만. 으로 또는 전통문양과 일반적인 기하문양을 함께 배 치하였다 기하문양은 에 나. Adobe Photoshop CS5 타나있는 원 네모 반원 사선 등을 선택하여 사용, , , 하였다 디자인 은 말벚꽃문양 수파문양 등 전통. , Ⅰ 문양 만으로 배치하였으며 디자인 는 천부지모문, Ⅱ 양과 사선 네모 반원 등의 기하문양을 함께 배치, , 함으로써 시공간의 깊이감과 더불어 모던하고 세련 된 감성을 표현하였다 디자인 은 가장자리에 반. Ⅲ 원이 꽃잎처럼 장식 되어있는 천부지모문양과 원이 반복적으로 나타나는 기하문양을 함께 배치하여 활 짝 핀 꽃과 같은 화려한 아름다움을 표현하도록 하 였다 디자인 는. Ⅳ 주망문양과 기하문양인 줄무늬를 함께 배치하여 모던하면서도 내추럴한 감성을 표현 하였다 디자인 는. Ⅴ 석류꽃문양 삼각문양 양각문, , 양 등조문양과 사각의 줄무늬가 그라데이션, 효과를 나타내는 기하문양을 함께 배치(gradation) 하여 입체감과 더불어 다양한 전통문양에서 표현되 는 스토리를 부여하였다 디자인 는 사각능형문양. , Ⅵ 곡절문양과 원이 반복되어 나타나는 기하문양을 함 께 배치하여 자연의 감성과 더불어 기하학적 현대미 를 가미하였다. 문양의 색채 배색은 대표적 현대화가인 마티스의 여러 작품 중에서 'Harmony in Red(1908)', 'Sans 을 선택하여 색상을 추Titre(1947)', 'Nach(1950)' 출한 후 사용하였다 색상추출 방법은 . Panton 를 사용하여 추출하였다Textile Color Guide . 에서 ‘Harmony in Red’ Rugby Tan(15-1315TP, 8YR 7/3), Medium Green(17-6229TP, 8GY 5/6), Melon(16-1442TP, 9R 7/10), Peat(19-0508TP, 7GY 2/2), Deep Periwinkle(17-3932TP, 8PB 5/4), Musk Melon(15-1242TP, 5YR 7/10), Lemonade(12-0721TP, 2GY 10/4), Tomato Puree(18-1661TP, 7R 5/12), Stone Green (17-0123TP, 7GY 5/6), Pristine(11-0606TP, 8GY 등 가지 색상을 추출하였다 추출된 색상은 10/0) 10 . 디자인 과 디자인 에 사용되었다. 'Sans TitreⅠ Ⅵ 에서 ‘ Peat(19-0508TP, 7GY 2/2), Nautical Blue(19-4050TP, 7PB 2/13), Cashew(17-1137TP, 9YR 5/8), Pompeian Red(18-1658TP, 10R 3/13), Old Gold(15-0955TP, 4Y 8/10), Green Mist 등 가지 색상과 악센트로 (16-0207TP, 3GY 8/1 ) 6 필요하다고 사료되어 에서 추출한 ‘Harmony in Red’ 을 추가로 선정하여 디자인 와 디자인 Pristine Ⅱ Ⅲ 에 배색하였다 에서 . 'Nach(1950)‘ Peat (19-0508TP, 7GY 2/2), Garnet Rose (18-1633TP, 2R 3/10), Golden Oak(17-1046TP, 5YR 5/9), Little Boy Blue(16-4132TP, 3PB 6/8), Lime Sherbet(13-0530TP, 5GY 8/6), Nautical 등 가지 색상과 악센Blue(19-4050TP, 7PB 2/13) 6 트로 필요하다고 사료되어 에서 ‘Harmony in Red’ 추출한 을 추가로 선정하여 디자인 와 디Pristine Ⅳ 자인 에 배색하였다.Ⅴ 셋째 디자인 제시는 면사로 거칠게 짠 캔버스 원 , 단으로 가방을 실물 제작한 후 컴퓨터 프로그램을 , 활용하여 가상으로 제시하였다. 이목결 조진숙 · / 이족의 전통문양을 활용한 가방디자인 개발 연구 169 이상과 같은 연구를 통해서 전통문양이 디자인의 모티브로서 다양하게 활용될 수 있으며 특히 디자인 개발과정에서 전통문양만으로도 디자인 할 수 있지 만 일반적인 기하문양과의 조화를 통해서 더욱 세련 되고 모던하며 창의적인 디자인을 발상할 수 있었 다 이처럼 전통적 요소와 현대적 요소의 융합은 전. 통문양이 표현하는 시공간적 깊이감과 상징적 스토 리 그리고 기하문양이 표현하는 단순성과 모던함, 추상성의 세련됨이 조화를 이룸으로써 더욱더 참신 하고 스토리가 있는 가방디자인을 개발 할 수 있었 다 본 연구는 실물 제작 후 컴퓨터에 의한 가상 . , 제시로 인해 소재에 대한 다양한 기법을 제시하지 못했다는 제한점이 있다 따라서 후속연구로는 문양 을 모티브로 한 소재기법 개발에 대한 연구를 기대 해 본다. References Dictionary of the Costume. (2008). Seoul: Korea Dictionary Research Publishing Ltd., 1129. Hoang, S. J. (1974). Artistic culture of france. Daegu: Cathoric University Press, 102. Jun, J. J. & Cho, J. S. (2010). Design expression of lotus pattern presented in Minhwa. Journal of the Costume Culture, 18(4), 741-754. & Jong, M. R. & Bum, P. .(2005). 茂 范朴[ ]钟 兰 .中 少 民族服国 数 饰 : A 中 北京 中 出版社[国 国纺织 minor ethnic group in China. Beijing, China: China Spinning Publisher , 113.] The Yi tribe's costume of China . 中 彝族服 [ ]国 饰 (2011). 百度 Backdo[ ]. Retrieved August 10 2013, from http://tieba.baidu.com/p/ 1152627096 Jung D. W., Kim T. E., Bang H. E., Cho S. H. & Kim M. J. (2014). The cultural identity found in tote bag as a cultural product and the a development of a design. Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing & Textiles, 38(4), 511. Kang M. J. & Cho J. S. (2011). Analysis of previous study of traditional pattern. Journal of the Fashion Business, 15(5), 9. Kim, G. H. (2005). A study on color expression appeared on Henri Matisse's painting works (Unpublished Master's thesis). Sangmyung University, Seoul, Korea, 16. Kim J. M. & Jung J. Y. (2011). Discussion of bag design using fashion illustion. Journal of the Korean Society of Fashion Design, 11(1), 65. Korean Standard Dictionary. (1999). National Academy of the Korean Language. Seoul: Doosan Donga Lim, B. S. & Cho, J. S. (2013). Development of a man's fashion goods design using a traditional bat pattern. Journal of the Fashion Business, 19(2), 95-116. Mok, S. R. & Cho, J. S. (2014). A study on a creative design development using a traditional pattern. Journal of the Korean Fashion & Costume Design Association, 16(2), 1-14. Osbon, H. (2001). Oxford Dictionary of 20th centry (Korea Art Research Trans.). Seoul: Sigongsa, 168. Lee, H. M. . (2012). 彝 中 彝族服 之楚雄[ ]学网 国 饰 . The Chowoong style of the Yi tribe's 型 [ costume of China Retrieved August 14, ] 2013, from http://222.210.17.136/ mzwz/news/ 4/z_4_8280.html Lee, H. M. . (2012). 彝 中 彝族服 之 蒙[ ]学网 国 饰 乌 The Omongsan style of the Yi tribe's 山[ costume of China . 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Retrieved May 29, 2013, from http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC %9D%B4%EC%A1%B1 Zong, H. R. & Cho, J. S.(2009). T-shirts design motivated from Hongyo tribe of Chnise traditional pattern. Journal of the Korean Society of Visual Design Forum, 24, 7-18. Received (March 12, 2015) Revised (April 12, 2015; May 12, 2015) Accepted (May 20, 2015) work_7cgto4cytrfmrccx2kqo5j523y ---- T H E NEW F R O N T I E R GOES TO V E N I C E : ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG AND T H E X X X I I V E N I C E B I E N N A L E By L A U R I E J E A N MONAHAN B. A . , W e s t e r n W a s h i n g t o n U n i v e r s i t y , 1 9 8 1 A T H E S I S S U B M I T T E D IN P A R T I A L F U L F I L L M E N T OF T H E R E Q U I R E M E N T S FOR T H E DEGREE OF MASTER OF A R T S i n T H E F A C U L T Y OF GRADUATE S T U D I E S ( D e p a r t m e n t o f F i n e A r t s ) We a c c e p t t h i s t h e s i s a s c o n f o r m i n g t o t h e r e q u i r e d s t a n d a r d T H E U N I V E R S I T Y OF B R I T I S H COLUMBIA O c t o b e r 1 9 8 5 C o p y r i g h t L a u r i e J e a n M o n a h a n , 1 9 8 5 In p r e s e n t i n g t h i s t h e s i s i n p a r t i a l f u l f i l m e n t of the requirements f o r an advanced degree a t the U n i v e r s i t y o f B r i t i s h Columbia, I agree t h a t the L i b r a r y s h a l l make i t f r e e l y a v a i l a b l e f o r r e f e r e n c e and study. I f u r t h e r agree t h a t p e r m i s s i o n f o r e x t e n s i v e copying of t h i s t h e s i s f o r s c h o l a r l y purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by h i s o r her r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s . I t i s understood t h a t c o p y i n g or p u b l i c a t i o n of t h i s t h e s i s f o r f i n a n c i a l g a i n s h a l l not be allowed without my w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . Department of Fine Arts The U n i v e r s i t y of B r i t i s h Columbia 2075 Wesbrook P l a c e Vancouver, Canada V6T 1W5 Date October 12, 1985 A B S T R A C T T h e X X X I I V e n i c e B i e n n a l e , h e l d i n 1 9 6 4 , p r e s e n t e d a n i m p o r t a n t moment i n t h e h i s t o r y o f A m e r i c a n a r t , f o r i t was t h e f i r s t t i m e t h a t a n A m e r i c a n p a i n t e r was a w a r d e d t h e m a j o r p r i z e a t t h e p r e s t i g i o u s i n t e r n a t i o n a l s h o w . T h e f a c t t h a t R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g c a p t u r e d t h e m o s t c o v e t e d a w a r d o f t h e B i e n n a l e , t h e G r a n d P r i z e f o r p a i n t i n g , h a d m a j o r r e p e r c u s s i o n s f o r t h e a r t s c e n e i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s a n d t h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l a r t c o m m u n i t y . F o r t h e A m e r i c a n s , t h e p r i z e was " p r o o f " t h a t A m e r i c a n a r t h a d f i n a l l y come i n t o i t s own, t h a t t h r o u g h i t s s t r u g g l e f o r r e c o g n i t i o n o ; v e r t h e E u r o p e a n a v a n t - g a r d e , i t h a d f i n a l l y r e a c h e d i t s w e l 1 - d e s e r v e d p l a c e a s l e a d e r o f t h e p a c k . F o r t h e E u r o p e a n s , e s p e c i a l l y t h e F r e n c h , t h e a w a r d r e p r e s e n t e d t h e " l a s t f r o n t i e r " o f A m e r i c a n e x p a n s i o n i s m - - f o r i t s e e m e d t h a t t h e e o n c o m i c a n d m i l i t a r y d o m i n a n c e o f t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s f i n a l l y h a d b e e n s u p p l e m e n t e d b y c u l t u r a l d o m i n a n c e . I t s e e m s p e r t i n e n t t o t h i s s t u d y t o e x a m i n e t h e F r e n c h r e s p o n s e i n p a r t i c u l a r , s i n c e t h e y h a d t r a d i t i o n a l l y d o m i n a t e d B i e n n a l e p r i z e s . B y a n a l y z i n g t h e F r e n c h r e v i e w s a n d r e s p o n s e s t o t h e p r i z e , a n d s i t u a t i n g t h e s e i n a b r o a d e r p o l i t i c a l c o n t e x t , I w i l l d i s c u s s how t h e U.S. was p e r c e i v e d a s t h e new c u l t u r a l l e a d e r , d e s p i t e t h e v e h e m e n t o b j e c t i o n s t o t h e c u l t u r e o f t h e New F r o n t i e r , w h i c h s e e m e d t o b e o n l y C o k e b o t t l e s , s t u f f e d e a g l e s a n d c a r e l e s s l y d r i p p e d p a i n t . G i v e n t h e v e h e m e n t o b j e c t i o n s e n g e n d e r e d b y t h e R a u s c h e n b e r g v i c t o r y , i t s e e m s s o m e w h a t c u r i o u s t h a t t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s w o u l d c h o o s e R a u s c h e n b e r g a s a r e p r e s e n t a t i v e o f A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e . I n o r d e r t o d i s c o v e r how t h e p o p i m a g e r y i n t h e w o r k was l i n k e d t o t h e i m a g e : o f U.S. c u l t u r e p r o m o t e d b y t h e U.S. I n f o r m a t i o n A g e n c y ( t h e i i g o v e r n m e n t a g e n c y r e s p o n s i b l e f o r t h e s h o w ) , i t i s n e c e s s a r y t o a n a l y z e t h e c u l t u r a l a n d i n t e l l e c t u a l d e b a t e s o f t h e e a r l y 1 9 6 0 s . R e j e c t i n g e a r l i e r n o t i o n s t h a t h i g h a r t s h o u l d r e m a i n s e p a r a t e f r o m m a s s c u l t u r e , a p r o m i n e n t g r o u p o f i n t e l l e c t u a l s a r g u e d f o r a "new s e n s i b i l i t y " i n a r t w h i c h w o u l d e m b r a c e p o p u l a r c u l t u r e , t h e r e b y e l e v a t i n g i t . T h i s p o s i t i v e n o t i o n o f a s i n g l e , a l l - e m b r a c i n g c u l t u r e c o r r e s p o n d s t o a m o r e g e n e r a l o p t i m i s m among m a n y i n t e l l e c t u a l s ; t h e i r r a l l y i n g c r y was t h e " e n d o f i d e o l o g y , " w h i c h d i s d a i n e d r a d i c a l c r i t i q u e i n f a v o r o f t h e p r o m i s e o f K e n n e d y ' s " p r o g r e s s i v i s m " a n d t h e w e l f a r e s t a t e . T h e s e i n t e l l e c t u a l s a r g u e d t h a t w h i l e t h e s y s t e m was n o t p e r f e c t , a n y m a j o r p r o b l e m s c o u l d be a v e r t e d b y s i m p l y " f i n e - t u n i n g " t h e e x i s t i n g s t a t e ; i n t h e m e a n t i m e , t h e p r o m i s e o f K e n n e d y ' s New F r o n t i e r r e q u i r e d a m o r e a f f i r m a t i v e t h a n c r i t i c a l s t a n c e . T h e e l e m e n t s s h a r e d b e t w e e n t h e s e d i s c o u r s e s o n c u l t u r e a n d s o c i e t y a t t h i s t i m e w e r e o f s e m i n a l i m p o r t a n c e t o t h e c r i t i c a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k , p a r t i c u l a r l y a s i t was p r e s e n t e d a t t h e B i e n n a l e . i i . i T A B L E OF CONTENTS A B S T R A C T L I S T OF I L L U S T R A T I O N S ACKNOWLEDGMENT I N T R O D U C T I O N C H A P T E R I . A " G r a n d D e s i g n " f o r V e n i c e T h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e . V e n i c e a n d K e n n e d y ' s New C u l t u r a l F r o n t i e r C H A P T E R I I . S t a t e A v a n t - G a r d i s m a t t h e B i e n n a l e T h e New C l a s s i c i s m ? : K e n n e t h N o l a n d T h e S e l l i n g P o i n t : R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d t h e New S e n s i b i l i t y T h e P o l i t i c s o f A m b i g u i t y : T h e P o w e r o f T h i n k i n g P o s i t i v e C H A P T E R I I I . T h e 1 9 6 4 B i e n n a l e : P r i z e - W i n n i n g M a c h i n a t i o n s A Map f o r t h e F u t u r e ? T h e F r e n c h R e a c t i o n : C o c a - C o l a P l a n C O N C L U S I O N . . • . I L L U S T R A T I O N S S E L E C T E D B I B L I O G R A P H Y . . . . l l v v i 1 16 16 28 39 4 4 57 62 8 0 8 6 92 1 0 5 1 0 9 121 i v L I S T OF I L L U S T R A T I O N S 1. E d i t o r i a l C a r t o o n , F r a n c e O b s e r v a t e u r , J u n e 2 5 , 1 9 6 4 . . . 109 2. K e n n e t h N o l a n d , T u r n s o l e , 1 9 6 1 1 1 0 3. R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , B e d , 1 9 5 5 . . . . . . I l l 4. K e n n e t h N o l a n d , S u n s h i n e , 1 9 6 1 . . . . . . 112 5. R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , T r e e F r o g . . . . . . 113 6. R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , W i n t e r P o o l , 1 9 5 9 . . . . . 114 7. R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , T r a c e r , 1 9 6 4 . . . . . 115 8. T r a n s p o r t o f R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k f r o m U.S. a n n e x t o U.S. p a v i l i o n , X X X I I V e n i c e B i e n n a l e , V e n i c e , 1 9 6 4 .. . 1 1 6 9. A d v e r t i s e m e n t f o r L e o C a s t e l l i G a l l e r y , J u n e , 1 9 6 4 . . .,117 1 0 . R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , K i t e , 1 9 6 3 . . . . . 118 1 1 . R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , B u f f a l o , 1 9 6 4 . . . . 119 12. R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , C o c a C o l a P l a n , 1 9 5 8 . . . 120 v ACKNOWLEDGMENT W h i l e many p e o p l e c o n t r i b u t e d t o t h i s p r o j e c t , I am e s p e c i a l l y g r a t e f u l t o D a v i d H o w a r d f o r h i s i n s i g h t s a n d v a s t k n o w l e d g e o f t h e p o l i t i c a l a n d i n t e l l e c t u a l h i s t o r y o f t h e e a r l y 1 9 6 0 s ; h i s e n t h u s i a s m , e n c o u r a g e m e n t a n d f r i e n d s h i p w e r e i n t e g r a l t o t h e c o m p l e t i o n o f t h i s t h e s i s . I w o u l d a l s o l i k e t o t h a n k T o b y S m i t h , D i a n K r i z , S t e v e H a r r i s a n d G a r y D e n n i s f o r t h e i r u n f l a g g i n g s u p p o r t t h r o u g h o u t t h i s e n d e a v o r . I w o u l d l i k e t o e x p r e s s my a p p r e c i a t i o n t o D a v i d S o l k i n f o r b r i n g i n g a c r i t i c a l e y e t o t h i s a n d o t h e r p r o j e c t s d u r i n g my y e a r s a t UBC. I am e s p e c i a l l y i n d e b t e d t o S e r g e G u i l b a u t f o r h i s m e t h o d o l o g i c a l i n s i g h t s , c r i t i c a l c o n t r i b u t i o n s a n d e n c o u r a g e m e n t . T o my p a r e n t s , M a r i l y n a n d B o b M o n a h a n , I w o u l d l i k e t o e x p r e s s my g r a t i t u d e f o r a l l t h e i r e n c o u r a g e m e n t a n d s u p p o r t , w i t h a s p e c i a l t h a n k s t o M a r i l y n M o n a h a n f o r h e r t e c h n i c a l a s s i s t a n c e o n t h i s p r o - j e c t . v i " T h e s p l i n t e r i n y o u r e y e i s t h e b e s t m a g n i f y i n g g l a s s . " T. W. A d o r n o v i i I N T R O D U C T I O N On J a n u a r y 2 1 , 1 9 6 1 , p o e t R o b e r t F r o s t p r o p h e s i z e d t h a t a new a d m i n i s t r a t i o n , u n d e r t h e l e a d e r s h i p o f J o h n F. K e n n e d y , w o u l d h e r a l d T h e g l o r y o f a n e x t A u g u s t a n A g e , A g o l d e n a g e o f p o e t r y a n d p o w e r O f w h i c h t h i s n o o n d a y ' s T h e b e g i n n i n g h o u r . 1 T h e o r a c l e t h u s r e v e a l e d , t h e n a t i o n s e t o u t f o r t h e New F r o n t i e r , w h e r e c u l t u r e a n d p o w e r w e r e t o b e u n i t e d a s o n e . F r o s t ' s w o r d s , a n d i n d e e d h i s p r e s e n c e a t K e n n e d y ' s 1 i n a u g u r a t i o n , w e r e i n d i c a t i v e o f t h e i m p o r t a n c e o f c u l t u r e f o r t h e new a d m i n i s t r a t i o n . T h e s t a i d c o n s e r v a t i v i s m o f t h e E i s e n h o w e r y e a r s g a v e w a y t o t h e a c t i v i s t t o n e s e t b y t h e y o u t h f u l K e n n e d y . H i s h a r d - h i t t i n g " r e a l p o l i t i k " was t e m p e r e d w i t h c u l t u r a l r e f i n e m e n t . D e s p i t e p r e s s i n g c o n c e r n s , d e s p i t e C a s t r o o r K r u s c h e v , A m e r i c a a l w a y s h a d t i m e f o r t h e f i n e r t h i n g s o f l i f e : c e l l i s t P a b l o C a s a l s p l a y e d t h e W h i t e H o u s e a n d p a i n t e r M a r k R o t h k o d i n e d t h e r e . A t l o n g l a s t , A m e r i c a h a d o f f i c i a l l y r e c o g n i z e d t h e i m p o r t a n c e o f c u l t u r e . B u t was t h i s u n i o n b e t w e e n g o v e r n m e n t a n d c u l t u r e t o b e a s g o l d e n a s R o b e r t F r o s t p r e d i c t e d ? T h e q u e s t i o n was c a l l e d a t t h e 3 2 n d V e n i c e B i e n n a l e , h e l d i n 1 9 6 4 . I t was t h e r e t h a t A m e r i c a n a r t r e c e i v e d i n t e r n a t i o n a l r e c o g n i t i o n when R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g c a p t u r e d t h e m o s t c o v e t e d a w a r d o f t h e e x h i b i t i o n , t h e G r a n d P r i z e f o r p a i n t i n g . F o r t h e f i r s t t i m e i n B i e n n a l e h i s t o r y , a n A m e r i c a n a r t i s t won t h e m a j o r p r i z e - - a n d f o r t h e f i r s t t i m e , t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s g o v e r n m e n t was d i r e c t l y i n v o l v e d t h r o u g h i t s s p o n s o r s h i p o f t h e 1 A m e r i c a n e x h i b i t i o n . R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s a r t i s t i c " p o e t r y " was u n i t e d w i t h o f f i c i a l p o w e r - - b u t n o t a l l w e l c o m e d t h e w i n n i n g c o m b i n a t i o n . I n F r a n c e , A r t s r a n a n o u t r a g e d h e a d l i n e i n t h e w a k e o f t h e a w a r d : " I n V e n i c e , A m e r i c a P r o c l a i m s t h e E n d o f t h e S c h o o l o f P a r i s a n d 2 L a u n c h e s P o p A r t t o C o l o n i z e E u r o p e . " I t a l y ' s L a V o c e R e p u b l i c a n a d e s c r i b e d R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k s a s "a c o n c e p t i o n o f t h e human 3 c o n d i t i o n w i t h o u t a w a y o u t . " T h e F r a n c e O b s e r v a t e u r p r o v i d e d i t s 4 own g r a p h i c d e p i c t i o n o f t h e s i t u a t i o n ( f i g u r e 1 ) : a s t o r m c l o u d o v e r V e n i c e f a i l e d t o d i s s u a d e A m e r i c a ' s p o p - c u l t u r e s u p e r h e r o f r o m s t e a l i n g a w a y w i t h t h e p r i z e . A t a t i m e when a n i m a g e - c o n s c i o u s A m e r i c a was s e t t i n g o u t t o e s t a b l i s h i t s i n t e r n a t i o n a l l e a d e r s h i p i n t h e r e a l m o f c u l t u r e , t h e E u r o p e a n o b j e c t i o n s t o t h e R a u s c h e n b e r g p r i z e h i g h l i g h t e d a s e e m i n g l y i n c o n g r u o u s p o l i c y . C u r i o u s l y , t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s c h o s e t o r e p r e s e n t i t s c u l t u r a l r e f i n e m e n t w i t h w o r k s c o m p r i s e d o f j u n k , r e f u s e , a n d p o p u l a r i m a g e r y . W h a t d i d t h e A m e r i c a n o r a n g i z e r s w i s h t o c o n v e y w i t h R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s e a g l e s , c o k e b o t t l e s a n d s m e a r e d p a i n t ? Why was R a u s c h e n b e r g p r e f e r r e d o v e r t h e o t h e r m a j o r U.S. c o n t e n d e r f o r t h e p r i z e , K e n n e t h N o l a n d ? Why d i d R a u s c h e n b e r g w i n ? T h e s e q u e s t i o n s f i n d some o f t h e i r a n s w e r s i n t h e c u l t u r a l d e b a t e s a n d h i s t o r i c a l c i r c u m s t a n c e s s p e c i f i c t o K e n n e d y ' s New F r o n t i e r A d m i n i s t r a t i o n . T h e p e r i o d i t s e l f m a r k s a moment o f e x t r e m e o p t i m i s m w h e r e t h e p r o m i s e o f l i b e r a l i s m was c o n c e n t r a t e d i n t h e K e n n e d y l e a d e r s h i p . I n t e l l e c t u a l s s u c h a s t h e c o n s e r v a t i v e D a n i e l B e l l a n d l e f t i s t S u s a n S o n t a g f o u n d t h e m s e l v e s i n a g r e e m e n t w i t h e a c h o t h e r : t h i n g s h a d n e v e r l o o k e d b e t t e r , t h e p r o s p e c t s f o r s o l v i n g t h e p r o b l e m s o f p o v e r t y a n d r a c i s m w e r e g o o d , a n d t h e e c o n o m i c boom p r o m i s e d n o t o n l y f i n a n c i a l s e c u r i t y b u t a n u n p r e c e d e n t e d r e b i r t h o f 2 c u l t u r e a s m o n e y a n d l e i s u r e t i m e b e c a m e i n c r e a s i n g l y a v a i l a b l e t o a l l s e c t o r s o f s o c i e t y . I n f o r e i g n p o l i c y a s w e l l , t h e new a d m i n i s t r a t i o n s o u g h t t o a d v a n c e A m e r i c a ' s c l a i m s t o w o r l d l e a d e r s h i p , p u r s u i n g a m b i t i o u s p r o g r a m s s t r e n g t h e n i n g t h e i r e c o n o m i c a n d m i l i t a r y s u p e r i o r i t y i n t h e T h i r d W o r l d a n d W e s t e r n E u r o p e t o m e e t t h e " c o m m u n i s t t h r e a t . " T h i s was n o t t h e f i r s t t i m e A m e r i c a n p o l i c v h a d u s e d C o l d War a r g u m e n t s t o 5 j u s t i f y e x p a n s i o n i s t p o l i c i e s , b u t t h e K e n n e d y a d m i n i s t r a t i o n p u s h e d t h e d i v i s i o n s b e t w e e n E a s t a n d W e s t t o d a n g e r o u s l i m i t s i n o r d e r t o r e i n f o r c e t h e p o w e r a n d s t r e n g t h o f t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s . T h e C u b a n m i s s i l e c r i s i s d e m o n s t r a t e d t h i s p o l i c y o f " b r i n k m a n s h i p , " s i n c e t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s i n c r e a s e d t h e s t a k e s o f t h e s i t u a t i o n b y f o r c i n g a n u c l e a r c o n f r o n t a t i o n w i t h K r u s c h e v , a v o i d i n g d i p l o m a t i c 6 a l t e r n a t i v e s , t h e r e b y i n f l i c t i n g a h u m i l i a t i n g d e f e a t f o r t h e USSR. A m e r i c a n s u p r e m a c y was n o t a l w a y s c o u c h e d i n s u c h d a n g e r o u s l y b e l l i g e r e n t t e r m s , h o w e v e r . Among i t s a l l i e s , t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s p u r s u e d a p o l i c y w h i c h a p p e a r e d t o f o s t e r c o n s t r u c t i v e , m u t u a l l y b e n e f i c i a l p r o g r a m s , s u c h a s K e n n e d y ' s " A t l a n t i c P a r t n e r s h i p , " a c a l l i s s u e d t o t h e W e s t e r n E u r o p e a n a l l i e s t o r e n e w t h e i r t i e s i n a 7 " D e c l a r a t i o n o f I n t e r d e p e n d e n c e . " T h i s c o n c i l i a t o r y g e s t u r e was b a s e d o n t h e f e a r t h a t W e s t e r n E u r o p e was g r o w i n g i n c r e a s i n g l y s t r o n g e r t h r o u g h t h e e c o n o m i c s u c c e s s o f t h e E u r o p e a n E c o n o m i c C o m m u n i t y ( E E C ) a n d w o u l d t h e r e f o r e a s s e r t c l a i m s c o n t r a r y t o 3 A m e r i c a n i n t e r e s t s , a s t h e New Y o r k T i m e s M a g a z i n e r e p o r t e d i n M a y o f 1 9 6 2 : . . . t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s s e e s a d a n g e r i n t h e [ E u r o p e a n e c o n o m i c ] d e v e l o p m e n t t h a t m u s t be a v o i d e d a t a l l c o s t s . T h e d a n g e r i s t h a t a r e s u r g e n t E u r o p e w o u l d be t e m p t e d t o d i s c o u n t t h e n e e d f o r a c l o s e p a r t n e r - s h i p w i t h t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s , a n d w o u l d p l u n g e i n t o ' g o - i t - a l o n e ' p o l i c i e s i n e c o n o m i c , p o l i t i c a l a n d m i l i t a r y m a t t e r s - - t o t h e i n e v i t a b l e h a r m o f E u r o p e i t s e l f , A m e r i c a a n d f r e e n a t i o n s e l s e w h e r e . 8 T h e " i n e v i t a b l e h a r m " e n g e n d e r e d b y s u c h a n i n d e p e n d e n t p o l i c y was t h e u n d e r m i n i n g o f E u r o p e ' s u n i t e d d e f e n s e p o l i c y , N A T 0 - - a d e f e n s e p o l i c y w h i c h p r i m a r i l y i s s u e d f r o m W a s h i n g t o n . T o o f f s e t t h i s p o s s i b i l i t y , t h e A m e r i c a n s p r o p o s e d a t w o - p a r t p l a n ( t e l l i n g l y d e s i g n a t e d " T h e G r a n d D e s i g n " b y s y m p a t h e t i c j o u r n a l i s t s ) : f i r s t , t h e p o t e n t i a l e c o n o m i c a u t o n o m y r e p r e s e n t e d b y t h e E E C was t o b e l i n k e d t o A m e r i c a n t a r i f f a g r e e m e n t s , i n t h e h o p e s o f p r e v e n t i n g t h e i m p l e m e n t a t i o n o f f a v o r a b l e t a r i f f s w i t h i n t h e C o m m u n i t y w h i c h w o u l d d i s c r i m i n a t e a g a i n s t U.S. t r a d e . T h i s e c o n o m i c p l a n was e n h a n c e d b y t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s ' h o p e t h a t G r e a t B r i t a i n w o u l d be a d m i t t e d t o t h e Common M a r k e t f o r r e a s o n s e x p l a i n e d b y K e n n e d y ' s a d v i s o r , A r t h u r S c h l e s i n g e r , J r . : L o n d o n c o u l d o f f s e t t h e e c c e n t r i c i t i e s o f p o l i c y i n P a r i s a n d B o n n ; m o r e o v e r , B r i t a i n , w i t h i t s w o r l d o b i i g a t i o n s , c o u l d k e e p t h e E E C f r o m b e c o m - i n g a h i g h - t a r i f f , i n w a r d - l o o k i n g , w h i t e man's c l u b . 9 O s t e n s i b l y B r i t a i n s w o r l d o b l i g a t i o n s t o t h e U.S. w o u l d r e n d e r i t a /'\ m o r e r e s p o n s i v e a l l y t o U.S. i n t e r e s t s i n t h e E E C ; a s S c h l e s i n g e r 4 c o n t i n u e d , K e n n e d y ' s r e a s o n s f o r B r i t a i n s i n c l u s i o n w e r e " p o l i t i c a l , 10 n o t e c o n o m i c . " T h e s e c o n d p a r t o f t h i s p l a n was a p r o p o s e d m i l i t a r y p a c k a g e known a s t h e m u l t i l a t e r a l f o r c e ( M L F ) , w h i c h w o u l d a l l o w f o r a n i n t e r n a t i o n a l n u c l e a r s e a b o r n f o r c e , m a n n e d b y t h e NATO c o u n t r i e s . I t was d e s i g n e d t o p r o v i d e a s e n s e o f p a r t i c i p a t i o n among E u r o p e a n a l l i e s i n NATO who h a d b e e n e x l u d e d f r o m t h e d e c i s i o n - m a k i n g p r o c e s s d u r i n g t h e C u b a n m i s s i l e c r i s i s , a n d w e r e i n c r e a s i n g l y s u s p i c i o u s t h a t A m e r i c a n s m i g h t s a c r i f i c e E u r o p e i n t h e e v e n t o f a 11 n u c l e a r w a r i n t h e i n t e r e s t o f i t s own p r e s e r v a t i o n . Y e t t h e p r o p o s a l d i d n o t s u b s t a n t i a l l y a l t e r t h e e x i t i n g p o w e r b a l a n c e : t h e A m e r i c a n s r e t a i n e d e x c l u s i v e command a n d c o n t r o l o f t h e n u c l e a r 12 f o r c e s . T h e " A t l a n t i c P a r t n e r s h i p " was t h u s a g r a n d d e s i g n , b u t o n e w h i c h c h i e f l y b e n e f i t e d t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s b y e n h a n c i n g i t s c o n t r o l o v e r E u r o p e . T h i s was t h e c o n t e x t i n w h i c h R a u s c h e n b e r g e m e r g e d a s a c u l t u r a l e n v o y f o r t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s i n a n i n t e r n a t i o n a l f o r u m . H i s p r i m a r i l y f i g u r a t i v e i m a g e r y was c h a m p i o n e d f o r i t s a m b i g u i t y , w h i c h e v o k e d a f o r m a l t e n s i o n a n d m u l t i p l i c i t y o f m e a n i n g s f o r t h e v i e w e r ; t h e s e w e r e e l e m e n t s w h i c h t h e U.S. C o m m i s s i o n e r t o V e n i c e , A l a n S o l o m o n , e m p h a s i z e d i n t h e B i e n n a l e c a t a l o g u e . T h i s t h e s i s w i l l a n a l y z e t h e s i g n i f i c a n c e o f t h e s e q u a l i t i e s i n r e l a t i o n t o c u l t u r a l d e b a t e s a n d i n t e r n a t i o n a l t e n s i o n s w h i c h o c c u r r e d i n t h e e a r l y 1 9 6 0 s , f o r i t i s my c o n t e n t i o n t h a t R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s w o r k s , a s t h e y w e r e p r e s e n t e d b y s u p p o r t i v e c r i t i c s s u c h a s S o l o m o n , f o u n d t h e i r r e s o n a n c e s i n a c h a n g i n g c o n c e p t o f m o d e r n i s m w h e r e c r i t i q u e was a b a n d o n e d f o r a p o s i t i v e , new s e n s i b i l i t y . T h i s s h i f t was e x p r e s s e d i n b r o a d e r i d e o l o g i c a l t e r m s among i n t e l l e c t u a l s a s t h e " e n d o f i d e o l o g y , " a v i e w w h i c h p r o c l a i m e d t h e v i c t o r y o f l i b e r a l i s m o v e r t h e f o r c e s o f t h e L e f t a n d t h e R i g h t . S i m i l a r i d e o l o g i c a l c o n n e c t i o n s h a v e b e e n d r a w n b e t w e e n l i b e r a l i s m a n d A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , a n d t h e w a y i n w h i c h t h e a v a n t - g a r d e o f t h e f i f t i e s was c o - o p t e d t o a d v a n c e t h e c l a i m s o f 13 A m e r i c a n f r e e d o m a n d d e m o c r a c y w i t h r e s p e c t t o t h e C o l d War. W h i l e t h e a i m s o f t h e U.S. g o v e r n m e n t h a d n o t c h a n g e d s u b s t a n t i a l l y i n t h i s r e g a r d b y t h e 1 9 6 0 s , t h e w a y i n w h i c h t h e y w e r e e x p r e s s e d was a l t e r e d u n d e r t h e K e n n e d y A d m i n i s t r a t i o n . I n p a r t t h i s was a n o r g a n i z a t i o n a l c h a n g e i n s t r a t e g y ; i n t h e f i f t i e s , p r i v a t e i n s t i t u t i o n s s u c h a s t h e Museum o f M o d e r n A r t c r e a t e d t h e i m p r e s s i o n t h a t a v a n t - g a r d e e x h i b i t i o n s w e r e o r g a n i z e d f r e e l y a n d i n d e p e n d e n t l y , w h i l e i n f a c t 14 t h e y r e p r e s e n t e d g o v e r n m e n t i n t e r e s t s . B y t h e s i x t i e s t h e g o v e r n m e n t c a s t o f f t h i s f a c a d e o f n o n - i n t e r f e r e n c e , a move made p o s s i b l e b y t h e l i b e r a l i m a g e w h i c h K e n n e d y p r o j e c t e d a n d e n h a n c e d b y t h e t o n e o f h i s a d m i n i s t r a t i o n : T h e A m e r i c a n p e o p l e e x p e c t m o r e f r o m u s t h a n c r i e s o f i n d i g n a t i o n a n d a t t a c k . . . F o r t h e w o r l d i s c h a n g - i n g . T h e o l d e r a i s e n d i n g . T h e o l d w a y s w i l l n o t d o . . . H e r e a t home, t h e c h a n g i n g f a c e o f t h e f u t u r e i s e q u a l l y r e v o l u t i o n a r y . T h e New D e a l a n d t h e F a i r D e a l w e r e b o l d m e a s u r e s f o r t h e i r g e n e r a t i o n s - - b u t t h i s i s a new g e n e r a t i o n . . . I t i s t i m e , i n s h o r t , f o r a new g e n e r a t i o n o f 1 e a d e r s h i p - - n e w men t o c o p e w i t h new p r o b l e m s a n d new o p p o r t u n i t i e s . 15 A m e r i c a was e m b a r k i n g o n a c o u r s e w h e r e o l d p o l i c i e s w e r e no l o n g e r a p p l i c a b l e ; s o c i e t y was p o i s e d o n t h e b r i n k o f c h a n g e , a n d s o l u t i o n s h a d t o b e s y s t e m a t i c a l l y s o u g h t a n d i m p l e m e n t e d . I t was a r e h e t o r i c yC 6 o f e n g a g e m e n t a n d c h a l l e n g e , o n e w h i c h g a v e t h e New F r o n t i e r i t s name: ...we s t a n d t o d a y o n t h e e d g e o f a new f r o n t i e r - - t h e f r o n t i e r o f t h e 1 9 6 0 s , a f r o n t i e r o f u n k n o w n o p p o r t u n i t i e s a n d p a t h s . . . T h e new f r o n t i e r o f w h i c h I s p e a k i s n o t a s e t o f p r o m i s e s - - i t i s a s e t o f c h a l l e n g e s . I t sums up n o t w h a t I i n t e n d t o o f f e r t h e A m e r i c a n p e o p l e , b u t w h a t I i n t e n d t o ask_ o f t h e m . I t w o u l d be e a s i e r t o s h r i n k b a c k f r o m t h a t f r o n t i e r , t o l o o k t o t h e s a f e m e d i o c r i t y o f t h e p a s t . . . B u t I b e l i e v e t h e t i m e s d e m a n d i n v e n t i o n , i n n o v a t i o n , i m a g i n a t i o n a n d d e c i s i o n . F o r t h e h a r s h f a c t s o f t h e m a t t e r a r e t h a t we s t a n d o n t h i s f r o n t i e r a t a t u r n i n g p o i n t i n h i s t o r y . 16 W i t h t h e K e n n e d y A d m i n i s t r a t i o n a t t h e f o r e f r o n t o f t h e f r o n t i e r , t h e r e was no s h r i n k i n g b a c k - - A m e r i c a e m b a r k e d o n a p o l i c y o f b r i n k m a n s h i p w h i c h a p p l i e d t o c u l t u r e a s much a s t o f o r e i g n p o l i c y . T h e a v a n t - g a r d e was t h u s o f i n t e g r a l i n t e r e s t t o t h e a d m i n i s t r a t i o n w h e r e i n n o v a t i o n s a n d b o l d m e a s u r e s w e r e h i g h l y p r i z e d . A n d , l i k e a n y t h i n g e l s e l a b o r i n g u n d e r t h e K e n n e d y c h a l l e n g e , "new men" w e r e n e e d e d " t o c o p e w i t h new p r o b l e m s a n d new o p p o r t u n i t i e s . " F o r a g o v e r n m e n t s e e k i n g t o s t a n d o n t h e c u t t i n g e d g e o f c u l t u r a l p r o g r e s s , t h e " o l d way" o f t h e p r e c e d i n g g e n e r a t i o n , A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , w e r e no l o n g e r r e l e v a n t . A l i e n a t i o n a n d r e t r e a t h a d no p l a c e i n t h e New F r o n t i e r . A new a v a n t - g a r d e , o n e o f y o u t h , u n t a i n t e d b y t h e p r o b l e m s o f t h e w a r , o n e w h i c h h a d m a t u r e d i n t h e p r o s p e r i t y o f t h e 1 9 5 0 s was e n l i s t e d t o e x p r e s s t h e p o s i t i v e v a l u e s p r o m i s e d i n t h e new s o c i e t y . W h e r e a s l i b e r a l i s m i n t h e 1 9 5 0 s h a d u s e d t h e d i s s e n t e m b o d i e d i n A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m t o d e m o n s t r a t e f r e e d o m w i t h i n d e m o c r a t i c s o c i e t y , t h e 7 i n s i t u t i o n a l i z a t i o n o f 1 i b e r a l i s m - - w i t h K e n n e d y a s i t s p r i m e e x e m p l a r - - r e n d e r e d d i s s e n t s u p e r f l u o u s i n a n a g e f i l l e d w i t h o p t i m i s m a n d p r o m i s e . L i b e r a l i s m was t h u s g i v e n a new l o o k s p e c i f i c a l l y t a i l o r e d f o r t h e 1 9 6 0 s . W h i l e i t s t i l l o c c u p i e d a c e n t r a l p o s i t i o n b e t w e e n t h e e x t r e m e s o f c o m m u n i s m a n d f a s c i s m , t h e new l i b e r a l i s m u n d e r K e n n e d y p r o c l a i m e d t h e e n d o f a l l i d e o l o g i e s — i s s u e s b e t w e e n t h e L e f t a n d R i g h t w e r e n e a t l y d i s m i s s e d when K e n n e d y ' s r i s e t o p o w e r s e e m e d t o e n s u r e t h e i m p l e m e n t a t i o n o f l i b e r a l v a l u e s , e v e n c u l t u r a l p r o g r e s s i v i s m . U n d e r h i s l e a d e r s h i p l e f t i s t i n t e l l e c t u a l s a n d C o l d War l i b e r a l s w e r e u n i t e d i n t h e i r h o p e s f o r a new s o c i e t y . T h e s e d e v e l o p m e n t s w e r e o f p a r t i c u l a r i m p o r t a n c e t o t h e c r i t i c a l r e c e p t i o n o f R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k , a n d f o r m a m a j o r p a r t o f t h i s t h e s i s . W h i l e t h e s e i s s u e s w e r e c e n t r a l t o R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s s u c c e s s i n A m e r i c a , t h e y a l s o h e l p t o a c c o u n t f o r t h e n e g a t i v e r e s p o n s e t o h i s w o r k among E u r o p e a n c r i t i c s , p a r t i c u l a r l y t h e F r e n c h who f e l t h i s a w a r d m a r k e d t h e c o m p l e t i o n o f a p l a n o f U.S. d o m i n a t i o n . I h a v e c h o s e n t o f o c u s o n t h e F r e n c h r e s p o n s e , n o t b e c a u s e i t was t h e m o s t v i t r i o l i c ( t h e I t a l i a n p r e s s a l s o v e h e m e n t l y c o n d e m n e d t h e R a u s c h e n b e r g v i c t o r y ) b u t b e c a u s e F r a n c e r e p r e s e n t e d t h e t r a d i t i o n a l s e a t o f W e s t e r n c u l t u r e . T h e F r e n c h h a d d e s p e r a t e l y c l u n g t o t h e i r c u l t u r a l t r a d i t i o n t h r o u g h t h e o n s l a u g h t o f A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , a n d t h e B i e n n a l e was o n e o f t h e l a s t s t r o n g h o l d s w h e r e t h a t t r a d i t i o n was c o n t i n u a l l y h o n o r e d a n d r e c o g n i z e d . T h e A m e r i c a n s ' f o u g h t h a r d t o w i n t h e B i e n n a l e i n t h a t y e a r , a n d t h e o u t r a g e t h e i r v i c t o r y p r e c i p i t a t e d was i n d i c a t i v e o f t h e s t a k e s , w h i c h w e r e p o l i t i c a l a s w e l 1 a s c u l t u r a l . 8 T h e U n i t e d S t a t e s was c h a l l e n g i n g F r e n c h c u l t u r a l d o m i n a t i o n a t a t i m e when F r a n c e was c o n t e s t i n g A m e r i c a n p o l i t i c a l h e g e m o n y i n E u r o p e . K e n n e d y ' s G r a n d D e s i g n , t h e c o n s o l i d a t i o n o f A m e r i c a ' s m i l i t a r y a n d e c o n o m i c " p a r t n e r s h i p " w i t h E u r o p e , was a b r u p t l y t h w a r t e d b y a n i n c r e a s i n g l y r e c a l c i t r a n t a l l y — F r a n c e . C o n v i n c e d t h a t t h e U.S. h a d no i n t e n t i o n o f r e l i n q u i s h i n g i t s m o n o p o l y o n n u c l e a r w e a p o n r y , F r e n c h p r e s i d e n t C h a r l e s de G a u l l e a n n o u n c e d h i s i n t e n t i o n t o d e v e l o p a n i n d e p e n d e n t d e f e n s e f o r c e ( i r o n i c a l l y , t h i s p l a n was r e l e a s e d o n M a y 1 5 , 1 9 6 2 , l e s s t h a n two w e e k s a f t e r t h e New Y o r k T i m e s M a g a z i n e h a d e x p r e s s e d f e a r s o f a " r e s u r g e n t E u r o p e , " d i s c u s s e d a b o v e - - s e e p a g e 4 ) . K e n n e d y r e s p o n d e d t o d e G a u l l e ' s a n n o u n c e m e n t w i t h i n t w o d a y s , w a r n i n g We c a n n o t a n d w i l l n o t t a k e a n y E u r o p e a n a l l y f o r g r a n t e d , a n d I h o p e no o n e i n E u r o p e w i l l t a k e u s f o r g r a n t e d e i t h e r . . . O u r c o m m i t t m e n t , l e t i t b e r e m e m b e r e d , i s t o a common u n i t e d d e f e n s e , i n w h i c h e v e r y member o f t h e W e s t e r n C o m m u n i t y p l a y s a f u l l a n d r e s p o n s i b l e r o l e , t o t h e l i m i t o f h i s c a p a b i l - i t y a n d i n r e l i a n c e o n t h e s t r e n g t h o f o t h e r s . . . A s l o n g a s t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s i s s t a k i n g i t s own n a t i o n a l s e c u r i t y o n t h e d e f e n s e o f E u r o p e . . . w e w i l l c o n t i n u e t o p a r t i c i p a t e i n t h e g r e a t d e c i - s i o n s a f f e c t i n g w a r a n d p e a c e i n t h a t a r e a . A c o - h e r e n t p o l i c y c a n n o t c a l l f o r b o t h o u r m i l i t a r y p r e s e n c e a n d o u r d i p l o m a t i c a b s e n c e . 17 T h e F r e n c h a n n o u n c e m e n t c h a l l e n g e d A m e r i c a n p o w e r , a n d w h i l e i t p o s e d no i m m e d i a t e t h r e a t m i l i t a r i l y , i t h a d t h e e f f e c t o f i d e o l o g i c a l l y u n d e r m i n i n g U.S. h e g e m o n y i n w o r l d a f f a i r s . F r a n c e was b l u n t l y r e m i n d e d t h a t t h e A m e r i c a n s h a d no i n t e n t i o n o f r e l i n q u i s h i n g i t s r o l e i n t h e " g r e a t d e c i s i o n s " r e g a r d i n g E u r o p e . Y e t d e G a u l l e p e r s i s t e d i n h i s a t t e m p t s t o e s t a b l i s h a n i n d e p e n d e n t F r e n c h p o l i c y ; 9 p e r s i s t e d i n h i s a t t e m p t s t o e s t a b l i s h a n i n d e p e n d e n t F r e n c h p o l i c y ; i n J a n u a r y , 1 9 6 3 , d e G a u l l e v e t o e d B r i t a i n ' s b i d f o r m e m b e r s h i p i n 18 t h e E E C a n d u n e q u i v o c a l l y r e j e c t e d t h e A m e r i c a n MLF p l a n . B y N o v e m b e r o f t h a t y e a r , he l a u n c h e d h i s s l o g a n o f " 1 ' E u r o p e e u r o p e e n n e " , a d v o c a t i n g a n i n d e p e n d e n t E u r o p e w h i c h p u r s u e d i t s own 19 i n t e r e s t s , r a t h e r t h a n t h o s e o f t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s . A t r u c u l e n t F r a n c e h a d t h u s i n t i t i a t e d a p o l i c y w h i c h d e l i b e r a t e l y r e s i s t e d A m e r i c a n a t t e m p t s t o d o m i n a t e t h e a f f a i r s o f W e s t e r n E u r o p e a t a t i m e when t h e K e n n e d y a d m i n i s t r a t i o n was i n t e n t o n a s s e r t i n g A m e r i c a n a u t h o r i t y m o r e f i r m l y t h a n e v e r b e f o r e . T h i s s t u d y a t t e m p t s t o a d d r e s s t h e r e a s o n s f o r t h e A m e r i c a n s ' v i c t o r y o v e r t h e F r e n c h c u l t u r a l t r a d i t i o n i n 1 9 6 4 w i t h i n t h i s h i s t o r i c a l a n d c u l t u r a l c o n t e x t . R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s a w a r d was a r e m a r k a b l e a c h i e v e m e n t when we c o n s i d e r t h a t t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s h a d n e v e r b e e n a s e r i o u s c o n t e n d e r f o r t h e m a j o r p a i n t i n g p r i z e i n p r e v i o u s B i e n n a l e c o m p e t i t i o n s . T h e p r i z e s i g n i f i e d a m a j o r s h i f t i n W e s t e r n c u l t u r e , o n e w h i c h h a d b e g u n i n t h e i m m e d i a t e p o s t - w a r p e r i o d , b u t w h i c h a c h i e v e d o f f i c i a l r e c o g n i t i o n b y 1 9 6 4 , when t h e S c h o o l o f P a r i s was d i s p l a c e d b y A m e r i c a n P o p A r t . T h u s , t h i s i n v e s t i g a t i o n w i l l n o t f o c u s o n R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s p e r s o n a l i c o n o g r a p h y , b u t r a t h e r s e e k t o u n d e r s t a n d t h e i d e o l o g i c a l a n d p o l i t i c a l i s s u e s a c t i v a t e d b y b o t h t h e w o r k s a n d t h e c i r c u m s t a n c e s s u r r o u n d i n g t h e i r e x h i b i t i o n i n V e n i c e . I t s h o u l d b e c l e a r f r o m t h e p r e c e d i n g d i s c u s s i o n t h a t t h i s t h e s i s w i l l e x a m i n e i s s u e s o f w h i c h t h e 1 9 6 4 B i e n n a l e was o n l y a p a r t . Y e t t h i s e x h i b i t i o n m a r k s a moment when t h e i d e o l o g i c a l a n d c u l t u r a l d e b a t e s o f t h e p e r i o d come i n t o s h a r p f o c u s . F o r t h i s r e a s o n a l o n e , i t d e s e r v e s c a r e f u l a n a l y s i s . T h e B i e n n a l e was a m a j o r 10 e v e n t i n t e r m s o f i t s i m p a c t o n t h e a r t w o r l d a l t h o u g h no t h o r o u g h s t u d y h a s y e t b e e n m a d e . L a w r e n c e A l l o w a y m a k e s b r i e f m e n t i o n o f t h e 1 9 6 4 A m e r i c a n e x h i b i t i o n i n h i s b o o k T h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 6 8 , 20 f r o m s a l o n t o g o l d f i s h b o w l . He a c k n o w l e d g e s t h e s i g n i f i c a n c e o f t h e R a u s c h e n b e r g p r i z e , b u t d i s m i s s e s t h e c o n t r o v e r s y i t e v o k e d i n a s i n g l e s e n t e n c e : " T h e f a c t t h a t a n A m e r i c a n won t h e p r i z e was a s h o c k t o some a r t e s t a b l i s h m e n t s , b u t i t was w e l l r e c e i v e d b y m a n y 21 a r t i s t s a n d w r i t e r s . " C r i t i c P i e r r e R e s t a n y ' s a f f i r m a t i v e e s t i m a t i o n o f R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k i s o f f e r e d a s e v i d e n c e o f t h e f a v o r a b l e r e c e p t i o n t h e p r i z e was a c c o r d e d . What A l l o w a y n e g l e c t s t o m e n t i o n i s t h a t some o f t h e s h o c k e d " a r t e s t a b l i s h m e n t s " c o m p r i s e d e n t i r e c o u n t r i e s a n d t h a t R e s t a n y i s h a r d l y a n " o b j e c t i v e s o u r c e " s i n c e he was a m a j o r p r o m o t e r o f Pop A r t a n d New R e a l i s m . B u t p e r h a p s t h e s e a r e q u i b b l i n g d e t a i l s t o A l l o w a y , who a l s o c h a m p i o n e d P o p A r t f r o m i t s b e g i n n i n g s . T h e o n l y t e x t w h i c h t r e a t s t h e B i e n n a l e i n a n y d e t a i l i s C a l v i n T o m k i n s ' O f f t h e W a l 1 : R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d t h e A r t o f O u r 22 T i m e . One c h a p t e r i s d e v o t e d t o t h e 1 9 6 4 B i e n n a l e , b u t t h e i n f o r m a t i o n i s p r e s e n t e d a s i t r e l a t e s t o R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s l i f e a n d c a r e e r , t h u s f a i l i n g t o a d d r e s s b r o a d e r i s s u e s r e l a t i n g t o t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n o f t h e s h o w , t h e c u r a t o r i a l d e c i s i o n s i n v o l v e d , a n d s o o n . T o m k i n s d o e s p r o v i d e a u s e f u l c h r o n o l o g y o f e v e n t s l e a d i n g t o t h e G r a n d P r i z e , b u t t h e r e i s l i t t l e i n t h e w a y o f a n a l y s i s . T h e g e n e r a l t o n e o f t h e t e x t i s a n e c d o t a l , a n d t h e d i s c u s s i o n o f t h e B i e n n a l e p r i z e e n d s w i t h R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s p e r s o n a l t h o u g h t s a b o u t 11 w i n n i n g t h e m a j o r a w a r d : [ R a u s c h e n b e r g ] t h o u g h t f o r a m o m e n t , c o n c e n t r a t - i n g h a r d o n t h e q u e s t i o n . ' T h a t s c e n e i n S a n M a r c o y e s t e r d a y r e a l l y g o t t o me,' he s a i d . ' B u t t e r f l i e s i n t h e s t o m a c h a n d a l u m p i n t h e t h r o a t - - ! i k e i t r e a l l y d i d m e a n s o m e t h i n g a f t e r a l l . " 23 A t o u c h i n g m o m e n t , p e r h a p s , b u t o n e w h i c h g i v e s l i t t l e i n f o r m a t i o n a b o u t w h a t t h e p r i z e " r e a l l y d i d m e a n , " a f t e r a l l . I n b o t h A l l o w a y ' s a n d T o m k i n s ' a c c o u n t s , m a j o r q u e s t i o n s a r e l e f t u n a n s w e r e d a n d s e r i o u s a n a l y s i s o f t h e B i e n n a l e i s s u p e r c e d e d b y a n e c d o t e s a n d g e n e r a l i t i e s . B e c a u s e no s c h o l a r l y a t t e n t i o n h a s b e e n f o c u s e d o n t h i s s h o w , much o f t h e m a t e r i a l p r e s e n t e d i n t h i s t h e s i s c o m e s f r o m o r i g i n a l d o c u m e n t s a n d i n t e r v i e w s w i t h p e o p l e d i r e c t l y i n v o l v e d i n t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n o f t h e A m e r i c a n e x h i b i t i o n . T h e f i l e s o n t h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e k e p t b y t h e U.S I n f o r m a t i o n A g e n c y ( w h i c h was d e s i g n a t e d b y t h e g o v e r n m e n t t o o r g a n i z e t h e s h o w ) d o c u m e n t t h e p r e p a r a t i o n s f o r t h e B i e n n a l e , r e v e a l i n g c u r a t o r i a l d e c i s i o n s , n e g o t i a t i o n s f o r a d d i t i o n a l e x h i b i t i o n s p a c e , b u d g e t i n f o r m a t i o n , a n d s o f o r t h . I h a v e a l s o r e l i e d o n v a r i o u s u n p u b l i s h e d p a p e r s a n d d o c u m e n t s a v a i l a b l e t h r o u g h t h e A r c h i v e s o f A m e r i c a n A r t i n W a s h i n g t o n , D.C.; t h e s e i n c l u d e d r e v i e w s a n d p r e s s r e l e a s e s o f R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k w h i c h w e r e r e t a i n e d b y R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s d e a l e r s , B e t t y P a r s o n s a n d L e o C a s t e l l i . T h e A l a n S o l o m o n p a p e r s , a l s o a t t h e A r c h i v e s , w e r e e x t r e m e l y i m p o r t a n t s i n c e t h e s e a r e t h e o n l y r e c o r d s o f t h e show l e f t b y S o l o m o n , who d i e d i n 1 9 7 0 . M a n y q u e s t i o n s r e m a i n w i t h o u t c o n c l u s i v e a n s w e r s , l a r g e l y b e c a u s e d o c u m e n t a t i o n i s s i m p l y u n a v a i l a b l e . F o r e x a m p l e , t h e 12 r e a s o n s f o r g o v e r n m e n t i n t e r e s t i n t h e B i e n n a l e i n 1 9 6 4 , a n d t h e e x t e n t t o w h i c h i t was i n v o l v e d ( f i n a n c i a l l y a n d p o l i t i c a l l y ) i n t h e s h o w w i l l r e m a i n s o m e w h a t a m b i g u o u s u n t i l S t a t e D e p a r t m e n t d o c u m e n t s b e c o m e a v a i l a b l e . S i m i l a r l y , t h e d e l i b e r a t i o n s o f t h e j u r y a r e s t i l l u n c l e a r , a s i t u a t i o n a g g r a v a t e d b y t h e f a c t t h a t some p e o p l e s e e m u n w i l l i n g t o s p e a k o f t h o s e e v e n t s . Sam H u n t e r , t h e A m e r i c a n j u r o r , r e m a i n s s i l e n t d e s p i t e r e p e a t e d a t t e m p t s t o i n i t i a t e d i s c u s s i o n w i t h h i m . H o w e v e r , c o r r e s p o n d e n c e f r o m t h e S w i s s j u d g e , F r a n z M e y e r , p r o v i d e d some i n t e r e s t i n g i n s i g h t s i n t o t h e d i s c u s s i o n s a m o n g s t j u r o r s . A l a n S o l o m o n ' s a s s i s t a n t a t t h e B i e n n a l e , A l i c e D e n n e y , was m o s t w i l l i n g t o s p e a k w i t h me a b o u t t h e e x h i b i t i o n ; s h e d i s c u s s e d e v e n t s w i t h g r e a t c a n d o r a n d e n t h u s i a s m . L o i s B i n g h a m , a U S I A o f f i c i a l who w o r k e d w i t h S o l o m o n t h r o u g h o u t t h e e x h i b i t i o n , a l s o s h a r e d h e r r e c o l l e c t i o n s o f t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n a l p r o b l e m s a n d c u r a t o r i a l d e c i s i o n s i n v o l v e d . T h e s e s o u r c e s h a v e made i t p o s s i b l e t o d e s c r i b e p r e v i o u s l y u n d o c u m e n t e d e v e n t s a n d c l a r i f y t h o s e w h i c h h a d b e e n i g n o r e d o r o v e r l o o k e d i n p r e v i o u s a c c c o u n t s o f t h e e x h i b i t i o n . W i t h t h i s m a t e r i a l a n d v a r i o u s s e c o n d a r y s o u r c e s d i s c u s s i n g t h e p o l i t i c a l , h i s t o r i c a l a n d i n t e l l e c t u a l i s s u e s o f t h e p e r i o d , I h o p e t o p r e s e n t a s t u d y w h i c h n o t o n l y o f f e r s a c r i t i c a l a n a l y s i s o f t h e 1 9 6 4 B i e n n a l e , b u t c o n t r i b u t e s t o a g r e a t e r o f u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f t h e c u l t u r a l p o l i c i e s p r o m o t e d b y t h e K e n n e d y a d m i n i s t r a t i o n a n d t h e i m p a c t o f t h o s e p o l i c i e s o n E u r o p e . 13 NOTES 1 R o b e r t F r o s t , q u o t e d i n G a r y 0. L a r s o n , T h e R e l u c t a n t P a t r o n : T h e U n i t e d S t a t e s G o v e r n m e n t & t h e A r t s , 1 9 4 3 - 1 9 6 5 " ( P h i l a d e l p h i a : U n i v e r s i t y o f P e n n s y l v a n i a P r e s s , 1 9 8 3 ) , p . 1 5 2 . 2 P i e r r e C a b a n n e , " L ' A m e r i q u e p r o c l a m e l a f i n de 1 ' E c o l e d e P a r i s e t l a n c e l e P o p ' A r t p o u r c o l o n i s e r l ' E u r o p e , " A r t s , J u n e 2 4 , 1 9 6 4 . 3 " T h e S i g n s o f a C u l t u r a l C r i s i s i n t h e E x a s p e r a t i o n o f P o p - A r t , " L a V o c e R e p u b l i c a n a , J u l y 2 3 - 2 4 , 1 9 6 4 , V e n i c e B i e n n a l e f i l e s , " T r a n s l a t i o n s , " U S I A ( 6 4 - 0 4 5 ) , ( W a s h i n g t o n , D.C.: N a t i o n a l Museum o f A m e r i c a n A r t , S m i t h s o n i a n I n s t i t u t e ) . 4 L e o n a r d , " D e s d o l l a r s c h e z l e s D o g e s , " F r a n c e O b s e r v a t e u r , J u n e 2 5 , 1 9 6 4 . 5 S e e f o r e x a m p l e , D a v i d H o r o w i t z , T h e F r e e W o r l d C o l o s s u s : A C r i t i q u e o f A m e r i c a n F o r e i g n P o l i c y i n t h e C o l d War, (New Y o r k : H i I T & Wang, 1 9 7 1 ) a n d G a b r i e l a n d J o y c e K o l ko,~Tn~e L i m i t s o f P o w e r : T h e W o r l d a n d U n i t e d S t a t e s F o r e i g n P o l i c y , 1 9 4 5 - 5 4 , (New Y o r k : H a r p e r a n d Row, 1 9 7 2 ) . 6 H o r o w i t z , p p . 3 8 2 - 3 . 7 T h i s p o l i c y was u n v e i l e d i n a s p e e c h b y K e n n e d y , d e l i v e r e d a t I n d e p e n d e n c e H a l l , P h i l a d e l p h i a , PA, J u l y 4, 1 9 6 2 ; r e p r i n t e d i n A l l a n N e v i n s , e d . , T h e B u r d e n a n d t h e G l o r y : P r e s i d e n t J o h n F. K e n n e d y , T h e H o p e s a n d P u r p o s e s o f P r e s i d e n t K e n n e d y ' s S e c o n d a n d T h i r d Y e a r s i n O f f i c e a s R e v e a l e d i n H i s P u b l i c " S t a t e m e n t s a n d A d d r e s s e s , (New Y o r k / E v a n s t o n / L o n d o n , 1 9 6 4 T 7 ~ p p . 1 0 8 - 1 2 . 8 S i d n e y ,Hyman, " I n S e a r c h o f 'The A t l a n t i c C o m m u n i t y ' , " T h e New Y o r k T i m e s M a g a z i n e , M a y 6, 1 9 6 2 , r e p r i n t e d i n R o b e r t A. D i v i n e , e d . , A m e r i c a n F o r e i g n P o l i c y S i n c e 1 9 4 5 , ( C h i c a g o : Q u a d r a n g l e B o o k s , 1 9 6 9 ) , p . 1 5 0 . 9 A r t h u r M. S c h l e s i n g e r , J r . , A T h o u s a n d D a y s , (New Y o r k : F a w c e t t P r e m i e r , 1 9 6 5 ) , p . 7 7 2 . 10 I b i d . , p . 7 7 3 . 14 11 I - l L o i s P a t t i s o n d e M e ' n i l , Who S p e a k s f o r E u r o p e ? T h e V i s i o n o f C h a r l e s de G a u l l e , (New Y o r k : S t . M a r t i n ' s P r e s s , 1 9 7 7 ) , p p . 1 0 7 - 8 . 12 S e y o m B r o w n , T h e F a c e s o f P o w e r , (New Y o r k / L o n d o n : C o l u m b i a U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1 9 6 8 7 7 p . 2 9 7 . 13 M o s t r e c e n t l y , t h i s h a s b e e n d i s c u s s e d i n S e r g e G u i l b a u t ' s How New Y o r k S t o l e t h e I d e a o f M o d e r n A r t : A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , F r e e d o m , a n d t h e C o l d War, t r a n s l a t e d ~~b~y A r t h u r G o l d h a m m e r , ( C h i c a g o / L o n d o n : U n i v e r s i t y o f C h i c a g o P r e s s , 1 9 8 3 ) ; s e e a l s o E v a C o c k c r o f t , " A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m : W e a p o n o f t h e C o l d War," A r t f o r u m 12 ( J u n e 1 9 7 4 ) , p p . 3 9 - 4 1 , a n d Max K o z l o f f , " A m e r i c a n P a i n t i n g D u r i n g t h e C o l d War," A r t f o r u m 11 ( M a y 1 9 7 3 ) , p p . 4 3 - 5 4 . 14 C o c k c r o f t , p a s s i m . 15 :.; ; Kennedy, q u o t e d i n S c h l e s i n g e r , p . 6 4 . 16 I b i d . 17 K e n n e d y , i n a s p e e c h d e l i v e r e d a t t h e C o n f e r e n c e o n T r a d e P o l i c y , W a s h i n g t o n , D.C., M a y 1 7 , 1 9 6 2 , i n N e v i n s , p . 1 0 5 . 18 B r o w n , p p . 3 0 3 - 4 . 19 P h i l i p M. W i l l i a m s a n d M a r t i n H a r r i s o n , P o l i t i c s a n d S o c i e t y i n de G a u l l e ' s R e p u b l i c , ( L o n d o n : L o n g m a n G r o u p , L t d . , 1 9 7 1 ) , p . 4 8 . 20 L a w r e n c e A l 1 o w a y , T h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 6 8 , f r o m s a l o n t o g o l d f i s h b o w l , ( G r e e n w i c h , C T : New Y o r k G r a p h i c S o c i e t y , 1 9 6 8 ] 7 21 I b i d . , p . 1 5 0 . 22 C a l v i n T o m k i n s , O f f t h e W a l 1 : R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d t h e A r t W o r l d o f O u r T i m e , (New Y o r k : D o u b l e d a y & C o . , 1 9 8 0 ; r e p r i n t e d . , L o n d o n : P e n g u i n B o o k s , 1 9 8 1 ) . 23 I b i d . , p . 1 1 . 15 C H A P T E R I A " G r a n d D e s i g n " f o r V e n i c e T h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e h a s b e e n c o n t i n u a l l y a n * o c c a s i o n f o r c r i t i c s t o p u t f o r w a r d , f r o m t h e i r n a t i o n a l v i e w p o i n t s , s y n o p t i c t h i n k - p i e c e s , s u r v e y s o f t h e ' a r t o f o u r t i m e , ' a n a l y s e s o f t h e ' c u l t u r a l c r i s i s . ' 1 I n 1 9 6 4 , t h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e b e c a m e t h e f o c u s o f a " c u l t u r a l c r i s i s " w h e r e n u m e r o u s " s y n o p t i c t h i n k - p i e c e s " t o o k o n a n a t i o n a l b i a s u n p r e c e d e n t e d i n B i e n n a l e h i s t o r y . W i t h t h e A m e r i c a n p a i n t e r R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g t a k i n g t h e m o s t p r e s t i g i o u s a w a r d , t h e G r a n d P r i z e f o r p a i n t i n g , t h e B i e n n a l e p r o v i d e d a f o r u m i n w h i c h i s s u e s o f c u l t u r a l l e a d e r s h i p , t h e s t a t e o f m o d e r n a r t a n d c u l t u r a l h e g e m o n y w e r e h o t l y d e b a t e d a n d w i d e l y c o n t e s t e d . I t was c l e a r t h a t b y 1 9 6 4 t h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e was e s t a b l i s h e d a s t h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l show w h i c h p r o v i d e d t h e g a u g e f o r m o d e r n a r t - - i t s d i r e c t i o n , i t s c e n t e r , i t s l e a d e r s . W h i l e m a n y c r i t i c s m i g h t h a v e q u e s t i o n e d t h e f i n a l s e l e c t i o n , t h e r e was a b a s i c c o n s e n s u s t h a t t h e B i e n n a l e p r i z e r e p r e s e n t e d a n o f f i c i a l s a n c t i o n w h i c h b e s t o w e d p r e s t i g e a n d l e g i t i m a c y o n a n a r t i s t o r a r t m o v e m e n t , a n d b y i m p l i c a t i o n , e s t a b l i s h e d a n a t i o n a s t h e c u l t u r a l l e a d e r . I t was t h i s g e n e r a l c o n s e n s u s w h i c h made t h e c h o i c e o f R a u s c h e n b e r g s u c h a c o n t r o v e r s i a l o n e , f o r b y a d d i n g h i m t o t h e r o s t e r o f e s t a b l i s h e d m o d e r n m a s t e r s , t h e B i e n n a l e was a c k n o w l e d g i n g t h e a s c e n d a n c y o f A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e i n t h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l a r t w o r l d f o r t h e f i r s t t i m e . T h e f o r t u n e s o f t h e B i e n n a l e h a d c h a n g e d s i g n i f i c a n t l y a f t e r 16 i n c r e a s i n g l y r e c o g n i z e d a s t h e m a j o r i n t e r n a t i o n a l show o f m o d e r n , a v a n t - g a r d e a r t . I n p a r t , t h i s was d u e t o t h e t r e n d o f t h e B i e n n a l e i n t h e l a t e 4 0 s a n d e a r l y 5 0 s , w h e r e t h e m a j o r i t y o f p r i z e s w e r e g i v e n t o e s t a b l i s h e d m o d e r n a r t i s t s w h o s e m a j o r c o n t r i b u t i o n s h a d b e e n made i n t h e f i r s t h a l f o f t h e c e n t u r y . M o s t o f t h e s e a r t i s t s w e r e F r e n c h ( i n c l u d i n g , f o r e x a m p l e , H e n r i M a t i s s e , G e o r g e s B r a q u e a n d R a o u l D u f y ) w i t h t h e a v e r a g e a g e o f t h e a r t i s t s b e i n g a b o u t 2 s e v e n t y - t h r e e y e a r s . T h i s " r e t r o s p e c t i v e " a p p r o a c h t o t h e a w a r d o f t h e p r i z e h a d i m p o r t a n t r e p e r c u s s i o n s f o r t h e B i e n n a l e ' s r e p u t a t i o n , a s L a w r e n c e A l l o w a y p o i n t s o u t : M o d e r n a r t b e c a m e i n c r e a s i n g l y t h e p r o d u c t o f g i a n t s i n s t e a d o f e c c e n t r i c s ; h e r o e s i n s t e a d o f v i c t i m s . T h e r e a p p e a r a n c e o f t h e g r e a t names l i n k e d m o d e r n a r t a n d c u l t u r a l p r e s t i g e i n a w a y t h a t h a d n o t o c - c u r e d b e f o r e . 3 I n e s s e n c e , t h e B i e n n a l e h a d e s t a b l i s h e d i t s e l f a s a s h o w w h i c h c o m m a n d e d b o t h h i s t o r i c a l i m p o r t a n c e a s o n e o f t h e f i r s t m a j o r i n t e r n a t i o n a l e x h i b i t i o n s ( f o u n d e d i n 1 8 9 5 ) , a s w e l l a s a s h o w w h i c h h a d a n a p p r o p r i a t e m o d e r n i s t " p e d i g r e e " b y h o n o r i n g e s t a b l i s h e d m o d e r n m a s t e r s . T h i s was a n e s s e n t i a l d i s t i n c t i o n w h i c h e l e v a t e d t h e p r e s t i g e o f t h e B i e n n a l e p r i z e s , f o r a r t i s t s w h i c h f o l l o w e d o n t h e h e e l s o f t h e m o d e r n " O l d M a s t e r s " w o u l d l i k e w i s e h a v e a p l a c e i n t h e a r t i s t i c h a l l o f f a m e . T h e B i e n n a l e s w h i c h f o l l o w e d w e r e i n t e n d e d t o b u i l d o n t h i s t r e n d , b u t w i t h a n e m p h a s i s o n new a r t i s t s r a t h e r t h a n 4 e s t a b l i s h e d m o d e r n s . Y e t t h e j u r i e s c o n s i s t e n t l y a w a r d e d p r i z e s t o „ F r e n c h a r t i s t s who, w h i l e p e r h a p s l e s s w e l l - k n o w n i n t e r n a t i o n a l l y t h a n t h e l i k e s o f M a t i s s e , w e r e n o n e t h e l e s s e s t a b l i s h e d a r t i s t s , a n d 17 a l l w e l l o v e r s i x t y . S u p p o s e d l y d e d i c a t e d t o t h e m o s t c u r r e n t t r e n d s i n m o d e r n a r t , t h e B i e n n a l e h a d a v o i d e d a c k n o w l e d g i n g A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , d e s p i t e t h e a p p e a r a n c e o f s e v e r a l r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s o f 5 t h a t m o v e m e n t a t B i e n n a l e s t h r o u g h o u t t h e 1 9 5 0 s . T h e s h o w s e e m e d c l e a r l y a l i g n e d w i t h E u r o p e a n m o d e r n i s m , t h e t r a d i t i o n a l s t a g e - s e t f o r t h e a v a n t - g a r d e , a n d l i t t l e n o t i c e was g i v e n t o A m e r i c a n a r t m o v e m e n t s i n t h e p o s t w a r y e a r s . D e s p i t e t h e o v e r s i g h t o f A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , t h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e c o m m a n d e d i n c r e a s i n g n o t o r i e t y a n d p u b l i c i t y i n t h e y e a r s f o l l o w i n g W o r l d War I I . B y 1 9 6 4 , m o s t m a j o r a r t p u b l i c a t i o n s r e v i e w e d t h e show a n d c a r r i e d a r t i c l e s o n e v e n t s o r a n t i c i p a t e d s h o w s a t t h e v a r i o u s p a v i l i o n s b e f o r e t h e B i e n n a l e a c t u a l l y o p e n e d . T h e New Y o r k T i m e s , t h e W a s h i n g t o n P o s t a n d o t h e r m a j o r n e w s p a p e r s f o l l o w e d t h e s h o w , a n d e v e n m a i n s t r e a m m e d i a m a g a z i n e s s u c h a s Newsweek a n d T i m e M a g a z i n e c o v e r e d e v e n t s . On a n i n t e r n a t i o n a l s c a l e , t h e same was t r u e - - L ' E x p r e s s , P e r S p i e g e l , a n d T o k y o ' s 6 Y o m i m u r i ( c i r c u l a t i o n 3 , 7 0 0 , 0 0 0 ) w e r e a l l c a r r y i n g e x t e n s i v e f e a t u r e s o n t h e 1 9 6 4 B i e n n a l e . I n c o m p a r i s o n t o o t h e r b i e n n i a l s s u c h a s t h e o n e i n S a o P a u l o , B r a z i l , t h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e was b y f a r t h e 7 m o s t p r e s t i g i o u s o n a n i n t e r n a t i o n a l s c a l e . T h e S a o P a u l o B i e n n a l e ' s l a c k o f i n t e r n a t i o n a l p r e s t i g e r e l a t i v e t o t h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e was t e l l i n g o f t h e f i r m l y e n t r e n c h e d n o t i o n t h a t c u l t u r e was s t i l l t h e i n t h e h a n d s o f W e s t e r n E u r o p e a n d p e r h a p s i t was t h i s a s s u m p t i o n w h i c h made b o t h N o r t h A m e r i c a n a n d E u r o p e a n a u d i e n c e s l o o k t o V e n i c e f o r c o n f i r m a t i o n o f t h e l a t e s t a r t i s t i c t r e n d s . T h e o r g a n i z a t i o n o f t h e B i e n n a l e was a l s o a n i m p o r t a n t e l e m e n t i n t e r m s o f t h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l a t t e n t i o n f o c u s e d o n t h e s h o w . S i n c e t h e p r i z e was a w a r d e d t o a s p e c i f i c c o u n t r y v i a i t s c h o s e n a r t i s t i c 1 8 r e p r e s e n t a t i v e , much o f t h e c o n t r o v e r s y e n g e n d e r e d b y t h e R a u s c h e n b e r g p r i z e i n 1 9 6 4 was p r e c i p i t a t e d b y t h e v e r y s t r u c t u r e o f t h e A m e r i c a n e x h i b i t i o n . T h e n a t i o n a l b a s i s f o r t h e a w a r d , a l o n g w i t h t h e p r e s t i g e i t a f f o r d e d , was a n e s s e n t i a l c o m p o n e n t i n t h e s t r u g g l e a t t h e 1 9 6 4 B i e n n a l e , a n d o n e w h i c h w i l l be d i s c u s s e d i n m o r e d e t a i l i n c h a p t e r t h r e e . H o w e v e r , i t was n o t s i m p l y t h e n a t u r e o f t h e a w a r d , b u t t h e w a y i n w h i c h i t was g i v e n w h i c h a l s o made t h e p r i z e a n a t t r a c t i v e o n e f o r n a t i o n s i n v o l v e d i n t h e c o m p e t i t i o n . T h e e x h i b i t i o n s w e r e j u d g e d b y a s e v e n member j u r y c o m p r i s e d o f r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s f r o m v a r i o u s p a r t i c i p a t i n g c o u n t r i e s , w i t h o n e member s e r v i n g a s t h e c h a i r p e r s o n . T h e j u r o r s w e r e s e l e c t e d b y t h e p r e s i d e n t o f t h e B i e n n a l e o n t h e b a s i s o f n o m i n a t i o n s s u b m i t t e d b y c o m m i s s i o n e r s r e s p o n s i b l e f o r t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n o f t h e i r r e s p e c t i v e p a v i l i o n s . T h u s , t h e j u r y was a n i n t e r n a t i o n a l a n d o s t e n s i b l y o b j e c t i v e b o d y w h i c h s e l e c t e d t h e a r t i s t i c l e a d e r s i n p a i n t i n g a n d s c u l p t u r e , a n d , b y i m p l i c a t i o n , t h e " l e a d i n g " c u l t u r e b a s e d o n n a t i o n a l i t y . I n 1 9 6 4 , t h e j u r y i n c l u d e d a n A m e r i c a n ( S a m H u n t e r ) f o r t h e f i r s t t i m e — a n d t h i s , a s we s h a l l s e e , was t h e s o u r c e o f much o f t h e c o n t r o v e r s y w h i c h f o l l o w e d R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s v i c t o r y i n V e n i c e t h a t y e a r . T h e f a c t o r s o f t r a d i t i o n , p r e s t i g e , a n d t h e m a n n e r o f p r i z e s e l e c t i o n w e r e i m p o r t a n t c o n s i d e r a t i o n s f o r c o u n t r i e s w h i c h p a r t i c i p a t e d i n t h e B i e n n a l e a n d i t was t h e s e f a c t o r s w h i c h made t h e f i n a l o u t c o m e , t h e p r i z e , much m o r e i m p o r t a n t a s t i m e w e n t o n . Y e t i t was n o t u n t i l 1 9 6 4 t h a t t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s g o v e r n m e n t t o o k a n o v e r t , a c t i v e i n t e r e s t i n t h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l show. P r i o r t o t h a t y e a r , , t h e Museum o f M o d e r n A r t h a d b e e n r e s p o n s i b l e f o r t h e A m e r i c a n 19 e x h i b i t i o n s a t t h e B i e n n a l e a n d t h e g o v e r n m e n t h a d t r a d i t i o n a l l y r e m a i n e d u n i n v o l v e d . T h e r e a s o n s f o r t h e g o v e r n m e n t ' s s u d d e n i n t e r e s t i n t h e s h o w a t t h i s t i m e c a n n o t b e c o m p l e t e l y c l a r i f i e d u n t i l S t a t e D e p a r t m e n t d o c u m e n t s a r e made a v a i l a b l e . H o w e v e r , t h e K e n n e d y A d m i n i s t r a t i o n ' s i n t e r e s t i n t h e a r t s p r e c i p i t a t e d a n o v e r a l l c h a n g e i n o f f i c i a l c u l t u r a l p o l i c y , a c h a n g e w h i c h was t o h a v e p r o f o u n d i m p l i c a t i o n s i n V e n i c e i n 1 9 6 4 . C o n t r a r y t o t h e s t a i d , c o n s e r v a t i v e c u l t u r a l i m a g e o f E i s e n h o w e r ' s a d m i n i s t r a t i o n , K e n n e d y f a s h i o n e d h i s New F r o n t i e r p o l i c i e s o n a y o u t h f u l , s e e m i n g l y p r o g r e s s i v e i m a g e o u t t o a d v a n c e , e n r i c h a n d p r o m o t e A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e . K e n n e d y ' s l i b e r a l s t a n c e a n d h i s e m p h a s i s o n d e v e l o p m e n t a n d p r o g r e s s w e r e w e l l - s u i t e d t o h i s r o l e a s t h e " p e o p l e ' s a v a n t - g a r d i s t . " W i t h K e n n e d y , t h e l a t e s t d e v e l o p m e n t s i n a r t w e r e i n c o r p o r a t e d i n t o t h e o f f i c i a l p r e s i d e n t i a l p o l i c i e s . W i t h t h e o p p o r t u n i t y o f o r g a n i z i n g t h e A m e r i c a n e n t r y t o V e n i c e , t h e g o v e r n m e n t s e i z e d a n i n t e r n a t i o n a l f o r u m i n w h i c h i t c o u l d i m p l e m e n t t h e s e new c u l t u r a l " d i r e c t i o n s . " T h e o r g a n i z i n g b o d y r e s p o n s i b l e f o r a l l p r e v i o u s A m e r i c a n e n t r i e s t o t h e B i e n n a l e , t h e Museum o f M o d e r n 8 A r t , w i t h d r e w f r o m i t s o r g a n i z i n g r o l e f o r f i n a n c i a l r e a s o n s . I n a n a p p e a l o n b e h a l f o f t h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l C o u n c i l o f t h e Museum o f M o d e r n A r t , A u g u s t H e c k s c h e r ( f o r m e r l y J o h n F. K e n n e d y ' s S p e c i a l A d v i s o r o n t h e A r t s , 1 9 6 0 - 6 2 ) c o n t a c t e d b o t h E d w a r d R. M u r r o w ( t h e n D i r e c t o r o f t h e U.S. I n f o r m a t i o n A g e n c y ) a n d L u c i u s B a t t l e ( A s s i s t a n t S e c r e t a r y 20 o f S t a t e f o r C u l t u r a l A f f a i r s ) , s t a t i n g We a l l f e e l t h e i m p o r t a n c e o f h a v i n g t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s r e p r e s e n t e d a t t h e b i e n n i a l s , p a r t i c u l a r - l y t h o s e o f V e n i c e a n d S a o P a u l o w h i c h a r e g e n - e r a l l y r e g a r d e d a s t h e m o s t f a m o u s i n t e r n a t i o n a l a r t f e s t i v a l s i n t h e O l d a n d New W o r l d , r e s p e c - t i v e l y . T o h a v e t h i s c o u n t r y a b s e n t a t a t i m e when i t i s p l a c i n g f r e s h e m p h a s i s u p o n t h e a c h i e v e - m e n t s o f i t s c u l t u r a l l i f e w o u l d s e e m a n u n f o r - t u n a t e c o n t r a d i c t i o n . . . 9 H e c k s c h e r ' s c o m m e n t i s i n d i c a t i v e o f t h e K e n n e d y A d m i n i s t r a t i o n ' s a t t e m p t s t o b r i n g c u l t u r e t o t h e f o r e f r o n t , a n d i t was o n e o f t h e a i m s o f t h a t a d m i n i s t r a t i o n t h a t U.S. c u l t u r e c a r r i e d a m e s s a g e t h a t a l l t h e w o r l d w o u l d h e a r . I t was t h e r e f o r e f i t t i n g t h a t t h e a g e n c y r e s p o n s i b l e f o r t h e V o i c e o f A m e r i c a a n d o t h e r c u l t u r a l p r o p a g a n d a p r o j e c t s , t h e U.S. I n f o r m a t i o n A g e n c y ( U S I A ) , was g i v e n t h e t a s k o f o r g a n i z i n g t h e s h o w i n t h e h o p e s t h a t t h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e w o u l d be a s u i t a b l e t r a n s m i t t e r f o r A m e r i c a ' s n e w - f o u n d c o n f i d e n c e i n c u l t u r e . T h e B i e n n a l e p r o v i d e d t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s w i t h a n o p p o r t u n i t y t o d e m o n s t r a t e t h a t i t was a s o c i e t y c a p a b l e o f p r o d u c i n g n o t o n l y m a t e r i a l g o o d s , b u t a h i g h c u l t u r e a s w e l l . G o v e r n m e n t a l i n v o l v e m e n t was no l o n g e r s e e n a s a h i n d r a n c e t o a r t i s t i c f r e e d o m a s i t h a d b e e n i n t h e p a s t ; t h e K e n n e d y i m a g e o f p r o g r e s s i v i s m was w e l l s u i t e d t o 10 t h e t a s k o f s p o n s o r i n g a m a j o r a v a n t - g a r d e e x h i b i t i o n . MoMA's r e l u c t a n c e t o o r g a n i z e a n d f i n a n c e t h e show e f f e c t i v e l y p u t t h e g o v e r n m e n t i n a p o s i t i o n t o " s a v e " m o d e r n a r t , t h e r e b y r e i n f o r c i n g 11 t h e a d v a n c e d i m a g e p r o j e c t e d b y t h e New F r o n t i e r . T h e i m m e d i a t e t a s k c o n f r o n t i n g U S I A o f f i c i a l s was t h a t o f s e l e c t i n g a n a p p r o p r i a t e c u l t u r a l r e p r e s e n t a t i v e f o r t h e new a d m i n i s t r a t i o n ' s p o l i c y . R a t h e r t h a n s i m p l y a l l o c a t i n g f u n d s t o t h e 21 Museum o f M o d e r n A r t , t h e U S I A s e l e c t e d t h e d i r e c t o r o f t h e J e w i s h 12 Museum, A l a n S o l o m o n , t o o r g a n i z e t h e s h o w . A c c o r d i n g t o L o i s B i n g h a m ( c h i e f o f t h e F i n e A r t s S e c t i o n , U S I A E x h i b i t i o n D i v i s i o n ) s h e s e l e c t e d S o l o m o n b e c a u s e s h e was " l o o k i n g f o r a s c h o l a r who w o u l d s t a n d b e h i n d h i s c o n v i c t i o n s " a n d c u r a t e " a c o h e s i v e show w h i c h s a i d 13 s o m e t h i n g f o r A m e r i c a . " S o l o m o n ' s w o r k a t t h e J e w i s h Museum made h i m a l i k e l y c a n d i d a t e f o r s u c h a t a s k ; h e h a d c u r a t e d m a j o r s h o w s o f y o u n g e r a r t i s t s s u c h a s R a u s c h e n b e r g , J o h n s , N o l a n d a n d F r a n k e n t h a l e r a n d h a d w r i t t e n c a t a l o g u e s w h i c h f i r m l y s u p p o r t e d a n d a t t e m p t e d t o 14 e s t a b l i s h new t r e n d s i n A m e r i c a n a r t . H i s i n v o l v e m e n t w i t h t h e " N e o - D a d a " a r t i s t s R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d J o h n s was e s p e c i a l l y i m p o r t a n t , b e c a u s e a c c o r d i n g t o B i n g h a m , t h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e o f f i c i a l s h a d s p e c i f i c a l l y r e q u e s t e d t h a t t h e s e a r t i s t s be i n c l u d e d i n t h e U.S. 15 e x h i b i t i o n . T h i s p o s e s some i n t e r e s t i n g q u e s t i o n s : why w o u l d t h e B i e n n a l e o f f i c i a l s r e q u e s t p o p a r t i s t s a n d why i s t h e r e no r e c o r d o f s u c h a r e q u e s t i n t h e U S I A f i l e s ? I t i s a l s o c u r i o u s t h a t t h e U S I A s h o u l d t a k e a d v i c e f r o m V e n i c e , t h e r e b y a b d i c a t i n g r e s p o n s i b i l i t y f o r t h e A g e n c y ' s own s e l e c t i o n . W e r e t h e I t a l i a n o f f i c i a l s a c t u a l l y d e t e r m i n i n g t h e c o n t e n t o f a s h o w w h i c h was d e s i g n e d t o " s a y s o m e t h i n g f o r A m e r i c a " ? W h e t h e r t h e U S I A c h o s e t o c o n c e d e t h e i r own p o l i c i e s t o t h e I t a l i a n s o r t o d e t e r m i n e t h e i r own a r t i s t i c c h o i c e s , c e r t a i n t r e n d s b e c a m e a p p a r e n t i n t h e e x h i b i t i o n ' s e a r l y s t a g e s o f o r g a n i z a t i o n : y o u n g e r , r e l a t i v e l y u n k n o w n a r t i s t s w e r e t h e p r i n c i p l e f o c u s o f t h e s h o w , a n d t h e y w e r e t o b e p r e s e n t e d a s a c o h e s i v e g r o u p r a t h e r t h a n a n e c l e c t i c a s s o r t m e n t o f a r t i s t s t y p i c a l o f p r e v i o u s s h o w s s p o n s o r e d b y MoMA i n w h i c h a r t i s t s s u c h a s B e n S h a h n , J o h n M a r i n a n d E d w a r d H o p p e r h a d b e e n i n c l u d e d t o g e t h e r w i t h A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s . A d d i t o n a l l y , t h e i n c l u s i o n o f M o r r i s L o u i s a n d 22 K e n n e t h N o l a n d a d d e d a n o t h e r d i m e n s i o n t o t h e s h o w - - t h a t o f a b s t r a c t p a i n t i n g . T h e i m p l i c a t i o n s o f p r e s e n t i n g t h e s e w o r k s i n t h e B i e n n a l e w i l l b e d i s c u s s e d i n m o r e d e t a i l l a t e r . A t p r e s e n t , l e t u s t u r n o u r a t t e n t i o n t o t h e c i r c u m s t a n c e s s u r r o u n d i n g t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n o f t h e s h o w . B i n g h a m a n d S o l o m o n t r a v e l e d t o V e n i c e i n N o v e m b e r 1 9 6 3 t o i n s p e c t t h e U.S. p a v i l i o n o w n e d b y MoMA. T h e s p a c e was d e e m e d t o o s m a l l f o r t h e a r t i s t s S o l o m o n p l a n n e d t o f e a t u r e ; t h e U.S. o r g a n i z e r s f e l t t h a t N o l a n d , L o u i s , R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d J o h n s ( t h e " F o u r G e r m i n a l P a i n t e r s " a s S o l o m o n c a l l e d t h e m ) c o u l d n o t b e s h o w n o n a n a p p r o p r i a t e s c a l e i n t h e l i m i t e d s p a c e a f f o r d e d b y t h e U.S. p a v i l i o n . T h e f u n d i n g f o r t h e s h o w — i n i t i a l l y $ 3 4 , 0 0 0 p r e c l u d e d a n y m a j o r r e n o v a t i o n s t o MoMA's p a v i l i o n , d e s p i t e t h e f a c t t h a t t h e U S I A b u d g e t f o r t h e B i e n n a l e w o u l d a l m o s t t r i p l e t o $ 1 0 2 , 9 7 7 b y t h e J u n e 16 o p e n i n g . H o w e v e r , r a t h e r t h a n p a r e down t h e s h o w e i t h e r b y e l i m i n a t i n g a r t i s t s o r t h e n u m b e r o f w o r k s , t h e U S I A s o u g h t a n a g r e e m e n t w i t h t h e B i e n n a l e o f f i c i a l s w h e r e b y a n a n n e x l o c a t e d o f f t h e G i a r d i n i g r o u n d s c o u l d b e u s e d t o e x h i b i t w o r k s . T h e i n t r o d u c t i o n o f a n a n n e x was t o b e c o m e a v e r y i m p o r t a n t p a r t o f t h e r e s p o n s e t o t h e U.S. e x h i b i t i o n ; t h e l o c a t i o n o f t h e w o r k s was t h e b a s i s o f a m a j o r p a r t o f t h e c o n t r o v e r s y o v e r t h e A m e r i c a n p r i z e w h i c h w i l l b e d i s c u s s e d l a t e r . B e c a u s e o f t h e p r o b l e m s t h e a d d i t i o n a l s p a c e e n g e n d e r e d f o r t h e o r g a n i z e r s ( i n t e r m s o f t h e l o g i s t i c s o f t h e e x h i b i t i o n a s w e l l a s t h e c r i t i c a l r e s p o n s e t o i t ) , i t i s w o r t h e x a m i n i n g t h e n e g o t i a t i o n s f o r t h e a n n e x a n d t h e s t r u c t u r e o f t h e e x h i b i t i o n i t s e l f . A c c o r d i n g t o B i n g h a m , s e v e r a l p o s s i b l e e x h i b i t i o n s p a c e s w e r e -23 o f f e r e d b y t h e B i e n n a l e o f f i c i a l s , who w e r e r e p o r t e d l y " e n t h u s e d " a b o u t t h e p o s s i b i l i t y o f a U.S. a n n e x a n d who p r o v i d e d a s s u r a n c e s t h a t a n y a r t i s t s f e a t u r e d i n t h e a n n e x w o u l d b e c o n s i d e r e d e l i g i b l e 17 f o r t h e B i e n n a l e p r i z e s . T h e A m e r i c a n s r e a d i l y a g r e e d t o e x p a n d t h e s h o w b e y o n d t h e p e r i m e t e r s o f t h e G i a r d i n i , b u t r e j e c t e d s u g g e s t i o n s f r o m B i e n n a l e o f f i c i a l s a n d c h o s e t h e f o r m e r U.S. C o n s u l a t e o f f i c e t h a t h a d b e e n v a c a t e d s i x m o n t h s p r i o r . C h o o s i n g t h e o l d c o n s u l a t e b u i l d i n g p r o v e d a s h r e w d m a n e u v e r o n t h e p a r t o f t h e U S I A . A s i d e f r o m t h e f a c t t h a t t h e b u i l d i n g h a d a h i s t o r y o f o f f i c i a l d i p l o m a t i c s e r v i c e , t h u s p r o v i d i n g a s o m e w h a t o f f i c i a l " a u r a " , i t was i d e a l l y l o c a t e d f o r maximum e x p o s u r e ; t h o u g h r e l a t i v e l y r e m o v e d f r o m t h e G i a r d i n i g r o u n d s , i t was s i t u a t e d o n t h e G r a n d C a n a l . I t s m o r e c e n t r a l l o c a t i o n , c o m p a r e d t o t h e G i a r d i n i w h i c h was r e m o v e d f r o m t h e c e n t e r o f t h e c i t y , p r o m i s e d g r e a t e r a c c e s s i b i l i t y t o a p u b l i c w h i c h e x t e n d e d b e y o n d t h e B i e n n a l e a u d i e n c e a n d was a l s o s u r e t o a t t r a c t t h o s e a v a n t - g a r d e e n t h u s i a s t s e m e r g i n g 18 f r o m t h e n e a r b y G u g g e n h e i m " A r t o f T h i s C e n t u r y " g a l l e r y . T h e i n t r o d u c t i o n o f a n a n n e x p r o v i d e d t h e U.S. w i t h t h e o p p o r t u n i t y t o s t a g e a f a i r l y c o m p l e t e a n d c o m p r e h e n s i v e s h o w , g i v e n t h e a d d e d s p a c e , a n d a l s o a l l o w e d f o r g r e a t e r e x p o s u r e , s i m p l y b e c a u s e t h e a n n e x c o u l d s t a y o p e n a f t e r d a r k , u n l i k e t h e G i a r d i n i p a v i l i o n s w h i c h r e l i e d o n n a t u r a l l i g h t . I n d e e d , s e v e r a l v e r n i s s a g e s w e r e h e l d t h e r e p r i o r t o t h e o f f i c i a l o p e n i n g , w h e r e g u e s t s w e r e a b l e t o e a s e i n t o t h e w o r l d o f p o p a r t w i t h a s s i s t a n c e f r o m S e a g r a m s , who b e n e v o l e n t l y s u p p l i e d t h e U S I A w i t h f r e e b o o z e . T h e a n n e x p r o v e d t o be s o m e t h i n g o f a m i x e d b l e s s i n g f o r t h e U.S. o r g a n i z e r s . U s e o f t h e c o n s u l a t e b u i l d i n g r e q u i r e d l e n g t h y n e g o t i a t i o n s w i t h t h e S t a t e D e p a r t m e n t w h i c h was r e l u c t a n t t o r e n t i t 24 t o t h e U S I A . D e s p i t e t h e e x t e n s i v e d e l i b e r a t i o n s r e q u i r e d t o s e c u r e t h e c o n s u l a t e s p a c e , a n d a f t e r s e v e r a l o u t r i g h t r e f u s a l s f r o m t h e S t a t e D e p a r t m e n t , w h i c h w a n t e d t o s e l l t h e s t r u c t u r e , t h e U S I A i n s i s t e d t h a t a s t h e m o s t s u i t a b l e e x h i b i t i o n s p a c e . O n c e t h e a r r a n g e m e n t s h a d f i n a l l y b e e n made b e t w e e n t h e two b u r e a u c r a c i e s , S o l o m o n p r e s e n t e d c o n c r e t e p r o p o s a l t o U S I A o f f i c i a l s t h a t t h e c o n s u l a t e e x h i b i t i o n w o u l d be e x p a n d e d t o i n c l u d e y o u n g e r a r t i s t s f o l l o w i n g up o n t h e d e v e l o p m e n t s made b y t h e " F o u r G e r m i n a l P a i n t e r s . " Y e t t h e a r t i s t s s e l e c t e d h a d s t y l i s t i c a f f i n i t i e s w i t h o n l y t w o m e m b e r s o f t h e " g e r m i n a l " g r o u p , R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d J o h n s . S o l o m o n e x p l a i n e d T h e s i t u a t i o n i n a b s t r a c t p a i n t i n g i s s o f l u i d now b y c o n t r a s t w i t h t h e c l e a r l y e s t a b l i s h e d g r o u p o n t h e o t h e r s i d e , t h a t I do n o t t h i n k we c o u l d m a i n t a i n t h e b a l a n c e r e p r e s e n t e d b y t h e f o u r g e r m i n a l f i g u r e s i f we w i s h t o i l l u s t r a t e d e v e l o p m e n t s among t h e y o u n g e r a r t i s t s . F o r t h i s r e a s o n I w o u l d p r o p o s e t o e x t e n d t h e e x h i b i - t i o n w i t h a r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f t h e m a j o r f i g u r e s o f t h e s o - c a l l e d p o p g r o u p , i n c l u d i n g o n e a r t i s t , F r a n k S t e l l a , who a c t u a l l y s t a n d s b e t w e e n t h e a b - s t r a c t p a i n t e r s a n d t h e o b j e c t p a i n t e r s . 19 S u c h a s t a t e m e n t i s r e v e a l i n g f o r i t a s s u m e d t h e f i r m e s t a b l i s h m e n t o f p o p a r t , w h i c h a d m i t t e d l y was g a i n i n g p o p u l a r i t y ; h o w e v e r , a d v o c a t e s o f n e w e r a b s t r a c t p a i n t e r s w o u l d no d o u b t h a v e a r g u e d t h a t " f l u i d i t y " o f t h e a b s t r a c t p a i n t i n g s i t u a t i o n was i n s u f f i c i e n t g r o u n d s f o r d i s m i s s a l . N e v e r t h e l e s s , S o l o m o n ' s p r o p o s a l was a c c e p t e d a n d t h e U.S. e x h i b i t i o n b e g a n t o f o c u s r a t h e r d i s p r o p o r t i o n a l l y o n p o p a r t a t t h e e x p e n s e o f a b s t r a c t p a i n t i n g . J o h n s a n d R a u s c h e n b e r g , b e n e f i t t i n g f r o m t h e a d d i t i o n a l s p a c e i n t h e c o n s u l a t e , e x h i b i t e d 25 a l m o s t t w i c e t h e n u m b e r o f w o r k s c o m p a r e d t o t h o s e o f N o l a n d a n d 20 L o u i s s h o w n i n t h e p a v i l i o n . Y e t i t i s w o r t h n o t i n g t h a t t h e p o p a r t i s t s w e r e e x c l u d e d f r o m t h e B i e n n a l e g r o u n d s , e x h i b i t e d o n l y i n t h e c o n s u l a t e a n n e x . I n k e e p i n g w i t h t h e U S I A ' s o r i g i n a l p l a n , t h e c a n v a s e s o f N o l a n d a n d L o u i s w e r e s l a t e d f o r t h e o f f i c i a l p a v i l i o n i n t h e G i a r d i n i , w h e r e a s t h e w o r k s o f R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d J o h n s , a l o n g w i t h t h e " v o u n g e r a r t i s t s " S t e l l a , J o h n C h a m b e r l a i n , C l a e s O l d e n b u r g a n d 21 J i m D i n e w e r e t o b e e x h i b i t e d i n t h e a n n e x . T h e r e a s o n s f o r t h e s p l i t b e t w e e n t h e a b s t r a c t p a i n t e r s a n d p o p a r t i s t s i n t e r m s o f e x h i b i t i o n s p a c e r e m a i n u n c l e a r . A c c o r d i n g t o B i n g h a m , t h e p a v i l i o n s p a c e was s i m p l y b e t t e r s u i t e d t o t h e w o r k s b y N o l a n d a n d L o u i s . A l i c e D e n n e y , S o l o m o n ' s a s s i s t a n t , c l a i m e d t h a t K e n n e t h N o l a n d i n s i s t e d u p o n b e i n g s h o w n i n t h e p a v i l i o n . W h a t e v e r t h e r e a s o n i n g , i t was c l e a r t h a t b y g r o u p i n g a l l o f t h e p o p a r t i s t s i n o n e l a r g e s p a c e , t h e a n n e x show t o o k o n a m o r e c o h e s i v e a p p e a r a n c e i n k e e p i n g w i t h S o l o m o n ' s d e s i r e t o p r e s e n t p o p a r t a s a m o v e m e n t . W i t h t h e e x h i b i t i o n p r e p a r a t i o n s u n d e r w a y , t h e a n n e x a g a i n b e c a m e a p r o b l e m a t i c i s s u e f o r t h e U S I A o r g a n i z e r s . T h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e p r e s i d e n t , M a r i o M a r c a z z a n , n o t i f i e d t h e U S I A o f f i c e t h a t B i e n n a l e r e g u l a t i o n s p r o h i b i t e d c o n s i d e r i n g a n y a r t i s t s f o r p r i z e s i f 22 t h e i r w o r k s w e r e n o t l o c a t e d i n t h e G i a r d i n i . T h e s t a t e m e n t g e n e r a t e d a f l u r r y o f t e l e g r a m s b e t w e e n t h e U S I A a n d M a r c a z z a n . T h e A g e n c y ' s p o s i t i o n r e l i e d o n v e r b a l a g r e e m e n t s made b e t w e e n B i n g h a m , S o l o m o n a n d t h e B i e n n a l e C o m m i t t e e d u r i n g t h e i r f i r s t v i s i t i n N o v e m b e r 1 9 6 3 , w h i l e M a r c a z z a n i n s i s t e d o n f o l l o w i n g t h e r e g u l a t i o n s ; o n c e t h e show o p e n e d , he d e n i e d t h a t t h e p r e v i o u s v e r b a l a g r e e m e n t s h a d e v e r t r a n s p i r e d . W a s h i n g t o n m a i n t a i n e d t h a t a n a n n e x was e s s e n t i a l t o t h e U.S. e x h i b i t i o n a n d c o n t e n d e d t h a t t h e a r t i s t s i n 26 t h e c o n s u l a t e o f f i c e s h o u l d b e i n c l u d e d i n t h e c o m p e t i t i o n . U.S. o f f i c i a l s i n Rome h o p e d t o a r g u e t h a t b e c a u s e R a u s c h e n b e r g was b e i n g s h o w n i n t h e a n n e x , t h i s w o u l d f o r c e t h e C o m m i t t e e t o a c k n o w l e d g e t h e a n n e x e d w o r k s a s o f f i c i a l , s i m p l y b e c a u s e R a u s c h e n b e r g was 23 " c o n s i d e r e d e m i n e n t l y e l i g i b l e f o r [ t h e ] g r a n d p r i z e . " W h i l e t h e C o m m i t t e e s u p p o r t e d M a r c a z z a n , t h e U S I A i n s i s t e d b y t e l e g r a m : " a n y c h a n g e s [ i n t h e ] i n s t a l l a t i o n p l a n w o u l d mean new s e l e c t i o n w h i c h 24 [ i s ] u n f e a s i b l e a t t h i s l a t e d a t e . " T h e A g e n c y m a i n t a i n e d t h a t R a u s c h e n b e r g , J o h n s , N o l a n d a n d L o u i s c o u l d n o t be e x h i b i t e d i n t h e 25 p a v i l i o n - - t h e s p a c e was s i m p l y i n a d e q u a t e . A t t e m p t s w e r e made t o n e g o t i a t e a r o u n d t h e r e g u l a t i o n ; U.S. d i p l o m a t s f r o m t h e A m e r i c a n E m b a s s y i n Rome ( i n c l u d i n g t h e U.S. A m b a s s a d o r ) a p p e a l e d t o v a r i o u s o f f i c i a l s t o r e v i e w t h e c a s e . E f f o r t s t o n e g o t i a t e w i t h t h e D i r e c t o r u f C u l t u r a l R e l a t i o n s , I t a l i a n F o r e i g n O f f i c e , p r o v e d f r u i t l e s s . A s t h e U.S. E m b a s s y i n Rome r e p o r t e d , A g a i n o u r a r g u m e n t s t o no a v a i l . I t a l i a n s a d a - m a n t : o n l y a r t i s t s r e p r e s e n t e d o n B i e n n a l e g r o u n d s e l i g i b l e f o r p r i z e . T h i s o f c o u r s e i s r e v e r s a l o f i n i t i a l a g r e e m e n t a s u n d e r s t o o d b y u s , S o l o m o n a n d B i n g h a m ; b u t P o s t [ U . S . E m b a s s y ] now c o n v i n c e d I t a l i a n s w i l l n o t c h a n g e p r e s e n t p o s i t i o n . 26 S o l o m o n a n d B i n g h a m w e r e f a c e d w i t h a c h o i c e o f l i m i t i n g t h e e x h i b i t i o n t o a s i z e s u i t a b l e f o r t h e p a v i l i o n s p a c e o r c a r r y i n g o u t t h e p l a n t o a n n e x t h e s h o w , a t t h e r i s k o f e l i m i n a t i n g two o f t h e " F o u r G e r m i n a l P a i n t e r s " - - R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d J o h n s — f r o m t h e c o m p e t i t i o n . I n t h e e n d , t h e A g e n c y e l e c t e d t o t a k e t h e r i s k , b u t S o l o m o n i n c l u d e d o n e w o r k f r o m b o t h J o h n s a n d R a u s c h e n b e r g i n t h e 27 U.S. p a v i l i o n , h o p i n g t h a t t h i s g e s t u r e o f c o m p l i a n c e w i t h r e g u l a t i o n s w o u l d s a t i s f y M a r c a z z a n a n d t h e C o m m i t t e e . F r o m S o l o m o n ' s p e r s p e c t i v e , t h e a n n e x was a n e c e s s a r y c o m p o n e n t t o r e p r e s e n t a d e q u a t e l y t h e s t a t e o f A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e . I r o n i c a l l y , t h i s r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f U.S. a r t r e s t e d n o t o n l y w i t h t h e w o r k s t h e m s e l v e s , b u t o n t h e p h y s i c a l e x p r e s s i o n o f U.S. e x p a n s i o n i s m a s t h e e x h i b i t i o n s p i l l e d o v e r t h e c o n f i n e s o f t h e G i a r d i n i i n t o t h e f o r m e r c o n s u l a t e o f f i c e . I f S o l o m o n m i s s e d t h e i m p l i c a t i o n s a t t h e t i m e o f h i s d e c i s i o n t o i n c l u d e t h e a n n e x , E u r o p e a n c r i t i c s w a s t e d no t i m e m a k i n g t h e c o n n e c t i o n f o r h i m o n c e t h e B i e n n a l e h a d o f f i c i a l l y o p e n e d . G i v e n t h e m a n y p r o b l e m s f a c i n g t h e U S I A w h i l e o r g a n i z i n g t h e s h o w , i n c l u d i n g t h e n e g o t i a t i o n s a n d e x p e n d i t u r e s i n v o l v e d , i t may a p p e a r o d d i n r e t r o s p e c t t h a t t h e U.S. g o v e r n m e n t d i d n o t s i m p l y d e l e g a t e t h e p r o j e c t t o a p r i v a t e i n s t i t u t i o n w h i c h h a d a l w a y s h a n d l e d i t i n t h e p a s t . H o w e v e r , p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n t h e B i e n n a l e h a d b e c o m e a n i m p o r t a n t p a r t o f t h e a d m i n i s t r a t i o n ' s c u l t u r a l p o l i c i e s . G o v e r n m e n t s p o n s o r s h i p o f t h e B i e n n a l e was c h a r a c t e r i z e d b y a n u n p r e c e d e n t e d c o n f i d e n c e i n A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e , m o s t n o t a b l y o n t h e p a r t o f o f f i c i a l , g o v e r n m e n t i n s t i t u t i o n s , a r e s p o n s e t h a t was l a r g e l y t h e o u t g r o w t h o f K e n n e d y ' s i n s i s t e n c e t h a t t h e a r t s s h o u l d r e c e i v e a t l e a s t a s much a t t e n t i o n a s t e c h n o l o g i c a l a n d s c i e n t i f i c d e v e l o p m e n t s . I n t e r m s o f c o n c r e t e p o l i c y c h a n g e s r e g a r d i n g c u l t u r e , b u r e a u c r a t s s e i z e d o n t h e l i b e r a l i m a g e K e n n e d y p r o m o t e d a n d a r g u e d t h a t g o v e r n m e n t i n v o l v e m e n t , p r e v i o u s l y r e g a r d e d a s a c o n s t r a i n t o n f r e e c r e a t i v e e x p r e s s i o n , was i n d e e d a n e c e s s i t y i f A m e r i c a n s w e r e t o a t t a i n e x c e l l e n c e i n t h e a r t s . L i k e much o f t h e New F r o n t i e r r h e t o r i c , t h e i s s u e was p o s e d a s a " p r o b l e m " w h e r e h a r d - h i t t i n g 28 p o l i c i e s c o u l d b e s y s t e m a t i c a l l y a p p l i e d . S c h l e s i n g e r , i n a 1 9 6 2 s p e e c h o u t l i n i n g t h e K e n n e d y A d m i n i s t r a t i o n 1 s p o l i c y o n c u l t u r e , e x p l a i n e d t h a t b e c a u s e A m e r i c a n s h a d m o r e l e i s u r e t i m e , t h e y f a c e d a " c r i t i c a l m o m e n t " i n c u l t u r e ; t h e n a t i o n c o u l d s u c c u m b t o t h e l e v e l i n g o f c u l t u r e , a s p r e d i c t e d b y t h e " p e s s i m i s t s " o r r i s e t o t h e . 27 " o p t i m i s t s " v i s i o n o f a new R e n a i s s a n c e . T h u s , t h e p r o b l e m was p o s e d i n t e r m s w h e r e t h e K e n n e d y g o v e r n m e n t w o u l d b e s e e n a s e r r a n t s h o u l d i t r e f u s e t o s p o n s o r t h e a r t s : I f o u r c i v i l i z a t i o n i s p o i s e d , s o t o s p e a k , b e - t w e e n v u l g a r i z a t i o n a n d f u l f u i l l m e n t , t h e n we w o u l d be r e m i s s i n n o t d o i n g w h a t we c a n f o r o u r c o u n t r y , a s i n t h e r e a l m o f d e f e n s e o r em- p l o y m e n t o r c i v i c f r e e d o m . 28 S c h l e s i n g e r ' s s t r a t e g y n o t o n l y l a i d t h e f o u n d a t i o n f o r g o v e r n m e n t s p o n s o r s h i p , b u t a l s o a d d e d a d i m e n s i o n o f u r g e n c y t o c u l t u r a l p r o g r a m s b y p l a c i n g t h e m o n a p a r w i t h d e f e n s e o r c i v i c f r e e d o m . T h e f a c t t h a t t h e a r g u m e n t i s s u e d f r o m t h e p r e s i d e n c y g a v e i t f u r t h e r c r e d e n c e a n d l e g i t i m a c y a s a p o l i c y t o be a d o p t e d b y t h e g o v e r n m e n t 29 a s a w h o l e . G o v e r n m e n t b e c a m e t h e l i b e r a l s p o n s o r o f t h e "new R e n a i s s a n c e , " b u t t h e l i n k s b e t w e e n c u l t u r e a n d m o r e " p r a g m a t i c " i s s u e s o f f o r e i g n p o l i c y w e r e n o t t o b e o v e r l o o k e d . A s S c h l e s i n g e r c o n t i n u e d , O u r t i m e s r e q u i r e g r e a t n e s s a s w e l l a s b i g n e s s - - a n d g r e a t n e s s i s a m a t t e r , n o t o f t h e a r s e n a l o r o f t h e p o c k e t b o o k , b u t o f t h e s p i r i t . We w i l l w i n w o r l d u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f o u r p o l i c y a n d p u r - p o s e s n o t t h r o u g h t h e f o r c e o f o u r a r m s o r t h e a r r a y o f o u r w e a l t h b u t t h r o u g h t h e s p l e n d o r o f o u r i d e a l s . 30 2 9 T h u s t h e K e n n e d y A d m i n i s t r a t i o n d e v e l o p e d a d o u b l e - e d g e d a r g u m e n t i n f a v o r o f c u l t u r e . On t h e o n e h a n d , t h e r e was a " c o m m u n i t y r e s p o n s i b i l i t y " t o s u s t a i n c u l t u r e o n t h e p h i l a n t h r o p i c g r o u n d s t h a t i t was a n e s s e n t i a l c o m p o n e n t o f s o c i e t y ; o n t h e o t h e r , t h e a r t s a n d h u m a n i t i e s c o u l d be a p r a g m a t i c s o l u t i o n t o f o r e i g n p o l i c y p r o b l e m s w h e r e e c o n o m i c a i d a n d m i l i t a r y c l o u t w e r e n o t " e n o u g h . " D o m e s t i c 31 s p e n d i n g o n c u l t u r e m i g h t be j u s t i f i e d b y i n v o k i n g n a t i o n a l p r i d e , b u t i n v e s t m e n t i n c u l t u r a l " e x p o r t s " s u c h a s t r a v e l i n g e x h i b i t i o n s r e q u i r e d a m o r e p e r s u a s i v e s t r a t e g y i n w h i c h S c h l e s i n g e r 1 s " g r e a t n e s s o f s p i r i t " was o n l y o n e c o m p o n e n t . S e n a t o r J a c o b J a v i t s , o n e o f t h e m o s t o u t s p o k e n p r o p o n e n t s o f t h e a r t s , e x p l a i n e d i n m o r e c a n d i d t e r m s : I t i s h i g h t i m e t h a t we, a s a p e o p l e , r e a l i z e t h a t t h e v i s u a l a n d p e r f o r m i n g a r t s a r e n o t a l u x u r y b u t a n e c e s s i t y i n t h e d e f e n s e o f o u r f r e e s o c i e t y a g a i n s t t h e b a c k d r o p o f t h e c o l d w a r . 32 F o r a g e n c i e s d e v o t e d t o " i n f o r m a t i o n " p r o g r a m s a b r o a d , t h e m o r e g e n e r a l p r o g r a m r e f o r m s w h i c h S c h l e s i n g e r a n d J a v i t s s o u g h t w e r e t r a n s l a t e d i n t o c o n c r e t e p o l i c y s h i f t s . T h e U S I A t u r n e d f r o m " p r o g r a m s o f p e r s u a s i o n " a n d " c a m p a i g n s o f t r u t h , " c h a r a c t e r i s t i c o f 33 t h e 1 9 5 0 s , t o m o r e s u b t l e c u l t u r a l p r o g r a m s . T h i s c h a n g e was d e s i g n e d t o c o n c e n t r a t e o n t h e s t r e n g t h s o f A m e r i c a n s o c i e t y r a t h e r t h a n t o e m p h a s i z e t h e " e v i l s o f c o m m u n i s m " o r r e f u t e c o m m u n i s t 34 p r o p a g a n d a . W h i l e c u l t u r a l p r o g r a m s p l a y e d a m a j o r r o l e i n a l l c o u n t r i e s w h e r e t h e U S I A o p e r a t e d , t h e y h a d a s p e c i f i c s i g n i f i c a n c e i n E u r o p e , p a r t i c u l a r l y a s e c o n o m i c a i d was s h i f t i n g t o t h e 3 0 35 u n d e r d e v e l o p e d T h i r d W o r l d n a t i o n s . T h e s e p r o g r a m s b e c a m e a l l t h e m o r e i m p o r t a n t a s o f f i c i a l s n o t e d E u r o p e a n h o s t i l i t y t o w a r d s A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e : a 1 9 6 1 a r t i c l e a p p e a r i n g i n F o r e i g n A f f a i r s r e p o r t e d t h a t t h e i m a g e o f t h e U.S. a s a n i n t e l l e c t u a l w a s t e - l a n d a n d o f A m e r i c a n w r i t e r s , a r t i s t s a n d t h i n k - e r s a s e x i l e s i n t h e i r own c o u n t r y . . . i s a l m o s t u n c o n t e s t e d i n E u r o p e a n i n t e l l e c t u a l c i r c l e s t o - d a y . 36 E q u a l l y d i s t u r b i n g was t h e f a c t t h a t t h e p r o b l e m was e x a c e r b a t e d b y S o v i e t p o l i c i e s i n W e s t e r n E u r o p e : . . . a n t i - A m e r i c a n i s m i n t h e f o r m o f c r i t i c a l h o s - t i l i t y t o w a r d A m e r i c a n t h o u g h t a n d c u l t u r e h a s a c t u a l l y b e e n i n c r e a s i n g . I n r e c e n t y e a r s i t h a s b e e n s t e a d i l y p r o m o t e d b y S o v i e t c u l t u r a l d i p l o - m a c y , w h i c h h a s g i v e n h i g h e s t p r i o r i t y t o W e s t e r n E u r o p e s i n c e 1 9 5 1 . 37 S u c h f e a r s w e r e s i m i l a r l y e x p r e s s e d t o m e m b e r s o f C o n g r e s s b y U S I A o f f i c i a l s . W h i l e p r e s e n t i n g t h e 1 9 6 2 b u d g e t p r o p o s a l f r o m t h e U S I A t o t h e H o u s e A p p r o p r i a t i o n s C o m m i t t e e , t h e a s s i s t a n t a r e a d i r e c t o r f o r E u r o p e a r g u e d f o r p r o g r a m f u n d i n g i n E u r o p e b e c a u s e " e v e n t s h a v e 38 s h o w n t h a t we c a n n o t s a f e l y t a k e t h o s e c o u n t r i e s f o r g r a n t e d . " T h e f a i l u r e o f t h e K e n n e d y A d m i n i s t r a t i o n t o a s s u r e a n " A t l a n t i c P a r t n e r s h i p " w i t h W e s t e r n E u r o p e a n c o u n t r i e s ( a p l a n f o i l e d b y t h e F r e n c h i n t h e i r r e f u s a l t o a d m i t B r i t a i n i n t o t h e E E C , a l o n g w i t h t h e i r t h r e a t t o w i t h d r a w f r o m NATO) made i t c l e a r t h a t t h e E u r o p e a n s m i g h t be m o r e i n t r a n s i g e n t t h a n t h e U.S. e x p e c t e d . A r m e d f o r c e was a n i m p o s s i b i l i t y , b u t e c o n o m i c a i d was n o t e n o u g h , a n d i t was w i t h t h i s r e a l i z a t i o n t h a t made t h e U S I A 1 s new a p p r o a c h t o p o l i c y e v e n 31 m o r e i m p o r t a n t . I t was c l e a r t o t h e g o v e r n m e n t t h a t a new c u l t u r a l p o l i c y m u s t b e i m p l e m e n t e d , p a r t i c u l a r l y i n l i g h t o f t h e c o l d w a r a r g u m e n t s p r e s e n t e d b y v a r i o u s a d v o c a t e s o f g o v e r n m e n t s p o n s o r s h i p i n t h e a r t s . I n l i g h t o f t h e U S S R ' s c u l t u r a l p r o g r a m s i n E u r o p e , a n A m e r i c a n c o u n t e r - b a l a n c e b e c a m e a l l t h e m o r e e x i g e n t i n E u r o p e a n c o u n t r i e s . Y e t t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s somehow h a d t o d i f f e r e n t i a t e i t s e l f f r o m o t h e r c u l t u r a l p r o g r a m s — t h a t i s , t h e g o v e r n m e n t n e e d e d t o f o s t e r a p o l i c y w h i c h was p a r t i c u l a r l y A m e r i c a n i n i t s a p p r o a c h a n d c o n t e n t . K e n n e d y h i m s e l f p r o p o s e d a p o s s i b l e s t r a t e g y : A b o v e a l l , we a r e c o m i n g t o u n d e r s t a n d t h a t t h e a r t s i n c a r n a t e t h e c r e a t i v i t y o f a f r e e s o c i e t y . We know t h a t a t o t a l i t a r i a n s o c i e t y c a n p r o m o t e t h e a r t s i n i t s own w a y — t h a t i t c a n a r r a n g e s p l e n d i d p r o d u c t i o n s o f o p e r a a n d b a l l e t . . . B u t a r t m e a n s m o r e t h a n t h e r e s u s c i t a t i o n o f t h e p a s t ; i t m e a n s t h a t f r e e a n d u n c o n f i n e d s e a r c h f o r new w a y s o f e x p r e s s i n g t h e e x p e r i e n c e o f t h e p r e s e n t a n d t h e v i s i o n o f t h e f u t u r e . . . A f r e e g o v e r n m e n t i s t h e r e f l e c t i o n o f a p e o p l e ' s w i l l a n d d e s i r e — a n d u l t i m a t e l y t h e i r t a s t e . I t i s a l s o , a t i t s b e s t , a l e a d i n g f o r c e , a n e x - a m p l e , a n d a t e a c h e r . . . 39 T h e a d m i n i s t r a t i o n h a d f o u n d y e t a n o t h e r "new f r o n t i e r " — t h e a v a n t - g a r d e . B y i n v o k i n g t h e new i n e i t h e r i t s p r e s e n t o r f u t u r e f o r m , K e n n e d y d i f f e r e n t i a t e d U.S. p o l i c y f r o m t h a t o f " t o t a l i t a r i a n " s o c i e t y w h i l e s i m u l t a n e o u s l y i m p l y i n g t h a t h i s a d m i n i s t r a t i o n was a p r o g r e s s i v e e x a m p l e — e v e n a t e a c h e r — t o i t s c i t i z e n r y . W h i l e t h e a v a n t - g a r d e h a d p r e v i o u s l y b e e n e n l i s t e d i n t h e C o l d War c a u s e , K e n n e d y p r o p o s e d t o l e a d t h e b a t t l e h i m s e l f . T h e New F r o n t i e r d i f f e r e n t i a t e d i t s e l f f r o m p r e v i o u s c u l t u r a l p o l i c i e s t h r o u g h i t s 3 2 o u t s p o k e n a d m i s s i o n o f t h e a l l i a n c e b e t w e e n g o v e r n m e n t a n d t h e a v a n t - g a r d e ; t h e l i b e r a l t o n e o f K e n n e d y ' s a d m i n i s t r a t i o n p r o m i s e d t h a t p r o g r e s s i v e c u l t u r a l p r o g r a m s n e e d n o t be d i s c u s s e d i n h u s h e d t o n e , 40 b u t w e r e p r e s e n t e d a s p a r t o f t h e C h i e f E x e c u t i v e ' s o v e r a l l p o l i c y . B y e q u a t i n g t h e a v a n t - g a r d e w i t h f r e e d o m a n d c r e a t i v i t y , g o v e r n m e n t f i n a l l y "came t o u n d e r s t a n d , " a s R o b e r t F r o s t h a d p r e d i c t e d , t h e b e n e f i t s o f u n i t i n g " p o e t r y w i t h p o w e r . " W h e r e m i l i t a r y a n d e c o n o m i c m i g h t h a d f a i l e d , t h e a v a n t - g a r d e c o u l d be d i s p a t c h e d a s t h e p e r s u a s i v e a g e n t o f d e m o c r a c y . I n c o n c e n t r a t i n g o n t h e a r t s , t h e K e n n e d y A d m i n i s t r a t i o n - - a n d t h e U S I A - - c o u l d c l a i m t o b e a p a r t o f a n a t i o n w i d e m o v e m e n t t o w a r d s e x c e l l e n c e - - a m o v e m e n t t h a t h a d i t s s t a r t i n t h e a d m i r a t i o n o f e x p e r t n e s s a n d s k i l l i n o u r t e c h n i c a l s o c i e t y , b u t t h a t now d e m a n d s q u a l i t y i n a l l r e a l m s o f human a c h i e v e m e n t . I t i s p a r t , t o o , o f a f e e l - i n g t h a t a r t i s t h e g r e a t u n i f y i n g a n d h u m a n i z - i n g e x p e r i e n c e . 41 T h e a d v a n c e s o f s c i e n c e a n d t e c h n o l o g y r e q u i r e d a c o u n t e r p o i n t - - t h e c r e a t i v e i m p u l s e , t h e human t o u c h . I n l e s s a b s t r a c t t e r m s , K e n n e d y ' s c o o l , r a t i o n a l " b r i n k m a n s h i p " c o u l d b e h u m a n i z e d t h r o u g h h i s s e e m i n g l y p r e s s i n g c o n c e r n f o r c r e a t i v i t y a n d e x p r e s s i o n . T h u s i t i s n o t s u r p r i s i n g t o f i n d K e n n e d y c a l l i n g f o r c u l t u r a l p r o g r a m s w h i c h w o u l d i m p l e m e n t " i m a g i n a t i v e p o l i c y d i r e c t i o n , u n i f i c a t i o n , a n d 42 v i g o r o u s d i r e c t i o n . " I n V e n i c e , t h e U S I A p l a n n e d j u s t s u c h a p r o g r a m w h e r e u n i t y , v i g o r a n d a b o v e a l l , d i r e c t i o n p i c k e d up w h e r e i m a g i n a t i o n l e f t o f f . 3 3 NOTES 1 A l l o w a y , T h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e , p . 3 9 . 2 I b i d . , p . 1 3 7 . T h e G r a n d P r i z e s a w a r d e d i n t h e p o s t - w a r p e r i o d p r i o r t o 1 9 6 4 w e r e a s f o l l o w s : 1 9 4 8 , G e o r g e s B r a q u e ; 1 9 5 0 , H e n r i M a t i s s e ; 1 9 5 2 , R a o u l D u f y ; 1 9 5 4 , Max E r n s t ; 1 9 5 6 , J a c q u e s V i l l o n ; 1 9 5 8 , O s v a l d o L i c i n i ; 1 9 6 0 , J e a n F a u t r i e r ; a n d 1 9 6 2 , A l f r e d M a n e s s i e r . 3 I b i d . 4 I b i d . 5 I n 1 9 5 0 , t h e U.S. p a v i l i o n f e a t u r e d w o r k s b y P o l l o c k , G o r k y , de K o o n i n g ; i n 1 9 5 4 , de K o o n i n g ; i n 1 9 5 6 , de K o o n i n g , K l i n e , P o l l o c k ; i n 1 9 5 8 , R o t h k o ; i n 1 9 6 0 , G u s t o n , H o f f m a n a n d K l i n e . 6 U S I A O p e r a t i o n s M e m o r a n d u m , J u l y 3, 1 9 6 4 , f r o m U S I S T o k y o t o U S I A W a s h i n g t o n , V e n i c e B i e n n a l e f i l e s , U S I A ( 6 4 - 0 4 5 ) , ( W a s h i n g t o n , D.C.: N a t i o n a l Museum o f A m e r i c a n A r t , S m i t h s o n i a n I n s t i t u t e ) . 7 F r o m t h e f i r s t S a o P a u l o B i e n n i a l i n 1 9 5 1 , t h r o u g h t h e f i r s t t e n y e a r s o f i t s e x i s t e n c e , i t was s c a r c e l y n o t i c e d a s e v i d e n c e d b y t h e l a c k o f p u b l i c i t y c o v e r a g e i n m a j o r a r t m a g a z i n e s c o m p a r e d t o t h e n o t i c e s d e v o t e d t o t h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e f o r t h e same t i m e p e r i o d . 8 "How i n S a o P a u l o , " W a s h i n g t o n [ D . C . ] E v e n i n g S t a r , O c t o b e r 8, 1 9 6 3 . 9 C o r r e s p o n d e n c e f r o m A u g u s t H e c k s c h e r t o E d w a r d R. M u r r o w a n d L u c i u s B a t t l e , M a y 1 0 , 1 9 6 2 . U S I A f i l e 6 4 - 0 4 5 , " M i s c e l l a n e o u s . " 10 T h i s c o n t r a s t s w i t h t h e p r e v i o u s s i t u a t i o n when MoMA a p p e a r e d t o p r e s e r v e a r t i s t i c f r e e d o m b y p r o v i d i n g p r i v a t e s u p p o r t f o r t h e U.S. e n t r y a t t h e B i e n n a l e . A l l o t h e r c o u n t r i e s r e l i e d o n d i r e c t g o v e r n m e n t s p o n s o r s h i p . F o r a d i s c u s s i o n o f MoMA's c o n n e c t i o n s w i t h U.S. f o r e i g n p o l i c y , s e e C o c k c r o f t , " A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , W e a p o n o f t h e C o l d War," p p . 3 9 - 4 1 . 34 11 W h i l e t h e g o v e r n m e n t a p p e a r e d t o be t a k i n g o n t h e p r o j e c t b y " d e f a u l t " - - a n d i n d e e d , t h i s i s how t h e p r e s s r e p o r t e d i t — t h e r e w e r e a l t e r n a t i v e s t o d i r e c t g o v e r n m e n t s p o n s o r s h i p . On b e h a l f o f t h e A m e r i c a n F e d e r a t i o n o f A r t , R o y N e u b e r g e r , w e a l t h y c o l l e c t o r a n d t h e n a t r u s t e e o f t h e A F A , w r o t e t o t h e U S I A : " T h e A F A i s w i l l i n g , i n d e e d a n x i o u s , t o r e p l a c e MoMA b u t w o u l d n e e d h e l p f r o m t h e U.S. g o v e r n m e n t . " U S I A c o r r e s p o n d e n c e memo, May 1 5 , 1 9 6 2 , V e n i c e B i e n n a l e f i l e s . A p p a r e n t l y t h e p r o b l e m o f " l o s s o f f r e e d o m " e n g e n d e r e d b y g o v e r n m e n t s p o n s o r s h i p i n t h e a r t s h a d b e c o m e a d e a d i s s u e , o r a t l e a s t o n e t o be i g n o r e d . 12 I t i s i n t e r e s t i n g t o n o t e t h a t B i n g h a m r e j e c t e d c a n d i d a t e s s u c h a s A d e l i n e B r e s k i n e , f o r e x a m p l e , b e c a u s e o f t h e i r a s s o c i a t i o n s w i t h MoMA o r p r e v i o u s V e n i c e B i e n n a l e s . A p p a r e n t l y t h e s h o w was d e s i g n e d , f r o m t h e o u t s e t , t o be s e t a p a r t f r o m MoMA's t r a d i t i o n . ( I n t e r v i e w w i t h A l i c e B. D e n n e y , A s s i s t a n t D i r e c t o r o f t h e A m e r i c a n P a v i l i o n , X X X I I V e n i c e B i e n n a l e , b y t e l e p h o n e , J a n u a r y 1 1 , 1 9 8 5 ) . 13 I n t e r v i e w w i t h L o i s B i n g h a m , b y t e l e p h o n e , J u n e 3 0 , 1 9 8 4 . 14 S o l o m o n h a d b e e n i n v o l v e d i n s e v e r a l s h o w s w h i c h i n c l u d e d b o t h J o h n s a n d R a u s c h e n b e r g : " S e c o n d G e n e r a t i o n " ( J e w i s h Museum, 1 9 5 7 ) , " T h e P o p u l a r Image E x h i b i t i o n " ( W a s h i n g t o n G a l l e r y o f M o d e r n A r t , 1 9 6 3 ) , " R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g " ( J e w i s h Museum, 1 9 6 3 ) , a n d " J a s p e r J o h n s " ( J e w i s h M u s e u m , 1 9 6 4 ) . He a l s o w r o t e s e v e r a l a r t i c l e s f e a t u r i n g t h e s e a r t i s t s . 15 B i n g h a m i n t e r v i e w . I a t t e m p t e d t o c o n f i r m B i n g h a m ' s s t o r y w i t h t h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e a r c h i v i s t D r . Umbro A p o l l o n i o ( a member o f t h e B i e n n a l e C o m m i t t e e i n 1 9 6 4 ) b u t r e c e i v e d no r e s p o n s e . T h e m a t t e r i s c o m p l i c a t e d f u r t h e r b y A l i c e D e n n e y who c l a i m s t h a t n e i t h e r B i e n n a l e n o r U S I A o f f i c i a l s h a d a n y t h i n g t o d o w i t h t h e s e l e c t i o n o f a r t i s t s ; a c c o r d i n g t o D e n n e y , t h e e n t i r e show was d e v i s e d b y S o l o m o n w i t h h e r h e l p ( D e n n e y i n t e r v i e w ) . 16 U S I A B u d g e t , V e n i c e B i e n n a l e f i l e s . 17 H e r e a g a i n a m b i g u i t i e s e m e r g e a s s t o r i e s d i v e r g e . T h e U S I A m a i n t a i n e d t h a t a g r e e m e n t s h a d b e e n made w i t h B i e n n a l e o f f i c i a l s , w h e r e b y t h e a n n e x w o u l d b e c o n s i d e r e d a n o f f i c i a l p a r t o f t h e U.S. e x h i b i t i o n . U n f o r t u n a t e l y , t h e U S I A n e v e r h a d t h e s e a g r e e m e n t s p u t i n w r i t i n g , a n o v e r s i g h t w h i c h was t o b e c o m e p r o b l e m a t i c l a t e r when B i e n n a l e o f f i c i a l s d e n i e d t h a t a g r e e m e n t s h a d e v e r b e e n m a d e . 35 18 T h e p r o x i m i t y t o G u g g e n h e i m ' s g a l l e r y p r o v i d e d a n i n t e r e s t i n g c o n t r a s t i n t e r m s o f t h e t r e n d s o f m o d e r n a r t . G u g g e n h e i m h e r s e l f d e t e s t e d p o p a r t a n d c h a m p i o n e d A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t w o r k s . I n 1 9 6 4 , t h i s c r e a t e d a s i t u a t i o n w h e r e t h e a v a n t - g a r d e g a l l e r y was s h o w i n g w o r k f r o m t h e p r e v i o u s d e c a d e , w h i l e t h e U S I A was e x h i b i t i n g t h e l a t e s t , m o r e c o n t r o v e r s i a l w o r k i n t h e i r a n n e x . 19 C o r r e s p o n d e n c e f r o m A l a n S o l o m o n t o L o i s B i n g h a m , F e b r u a r y 1 2 , 1 9 6 4 . 20 T h e show f e a t u r e d 22 w o r k s b y R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d 21 b y J o h n s , w h e r e a s N o l a n d a n d L o u i s h a d 13 c a n v a s e s e a c h . 21 D i r e c t o r o f E x h i b i t i o n D i v i s i o n , U S I A , R o b e r t S i v a r d a t t e s t e d t o t h e p o t e n t i a l c o n t r o v e r s y i n t h e p o p a r t i s t s ' w o r k when he r e s p o n d e d t o S o l o m o n ' s p r o p o s a l t o e x t e n d t h e e x h i b i t i o n : " I s e e no p r o b l e m s [ w i t h e x p a n d i n g t h e p o p a r t s i d e i n s t e a d o f t h e a b s t r a c t p a i n t e r s ] u n l e s s t h e w o r k s c h o s e n c a n b e c a l l e d ' g a g s ' r a t h e r t h a n r e a l a t t e m p t s a t a e s t h e t i c s t a t e m e n t s . " U S I A Memo, F e b r u a r y 1 4 , 1 9 6 4 , V e n i c e B i e n n a l e f i l e s . 22 T e l e g r a m f r o m U.S. E m b a s s y , Rome, t o U S I A , W a s h i n g t o n , D.C., A p r i l 2 1 , 1 9 6 4 , V e n i c e B i e n n a l e f i l e s . 23 T e l e g r a m f r o m U.S. E m b a s s y , Rome, t o U S I A , W a s h i n g t o n , D.C., A p r i l 2 8 , 1 9 6 4 : " W o u l d b e u s e f u l t o know w h e t h e r p l a n n e d t o l o c a t e R a u s c h e n b e r g w o r k s i n c o n s u l a t e b u i l d i n g . T h i s m i g h t b e c l i n c h e r a r g u m e n t a s he i s c o n s i d e r e d e m i n e n t l y e l i g i b l e f o r g r a n d p r i z e , " V e n i c e B i e n n a l e f i l e s U n f o r t u n a t e l y f o r u s , t h e E m b a s s y f a i l e d t o i n c l u d e , t h e r e a s o n s f o r i t s a s s u m p t i o n t h a t R a u s c h e n b e r g was t h e l i k e l y w i n n e r o f t h e c o m p e t i t i o n i n t h e i r c o m m u n i q u e . 24 T e l e g r a m f r o m U S I A , W a s h i n g t o n , D.C., t o U.S. E m b a s s y , Rome, A p r i l 2 8 , 1 9 6 4 , V e n i c e B i e n n a l e f i l e s . 25 B i n g h a m i n t e r v i e w . L a w r e n c e A l l o w a y l a t e r c l a i m e d t h a t N o l a n d r e f u s e d t o g i v e up a n y o f h i s s p a c e i n t h e p a v i l i o n , c i t i n g a s h i s s o u r c e C a l v i n T o m k i n s , " T h e B i g Show i n V e n i c e , " H a r p e r ' s M a g a z i n e 2 3 0 ( A p r i l 1 9 6 5 ) , p p . 9 8 - 1 0 4 , p a s s i m ; h o w e v e r , t h i s i s n o t s t a t e d i n T o m k i n s ' p i e c e , n o r d i d D e n n e y o r B i n g h a m o f f e r t h i s a s a n e x p l a n a t i o n . ( A l l o w a y , p . 1 5 0 ) . 26 ': T e l e g r a m , f r o m U.S. E m b a s s y , Rome, t o U S I A , W a s h i n g t o n , D.C., M a y 7, 1 9 6 4 , V e n i c e B i e n n a l e f i l e s . 36 27 A r t h u r S c h l e s i n g e r , J r . , " G o v e r n m e n t a n d t h e A r t s , " ( s p e e c h t o t h e A m e r i c a n F e d e r a t i o n o f A r t s , A p r i l 1 2 , 1 9 6 2 ) . R e p r i n t e d i n U.S. C o n g r e s s , S e n a t e , 8 8 t h C o n g . , 1 s t s e s s . , 15 A u g u s t 1 9 6 3 , C o n g r e s s i o n a l R e c o r d v o l , 1 0 9 ( p a r t I I ) , p . 1 5 1 3 6 . T h e c u l t u r a l d e b a t e b e t w e e n t h e " p e s s i m i s t s " a n d " o p t i m i s t s " w i l l b e d i s c u s s e d m o r e f u l l y i n C h a p t e r 2. 28 I b i d . 29 T h e m o r e r e c e p t i v e a t t i t u d e t o w a r d o f f i c i a l s p o n s o r s h i p o f c u l t u r a l p r o g r a m s i s e v i d e n c e d b y l e g i s l a t i o n s u c h a s t h a t w h i c h e s t a b l i s h e d t h e F u l l b r i g h t E x c h a n g e P r o g r a m i n 1 9 6 1 ( o v e r w h e l m i n g l y p a s s e d b y t h e S e n a t e , 7 9 - 5 ; s e e L a r s o n , p . 1 7 3 , n. 3 5 ) . C u l t u r e a n d i t s r o l e i n g o v e r n m e n t p o l i c y w e r e i n c r e a s i n g l y c o n s i d e r e d i n C o n g r e s s ; s e e f o r e x a m p l e U.S. C o n g r e s s , H o u s e , R e p r e s e n t a t i v e K e a r n s s p e a k i n g f o r t h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t o f a F e d e r a l A d v i s o r y C o u n c i l o n t h e A r t s (H.R. 4 1 7 2 ) , 8 7 t h C o n g . , 1 s t s e s s . , 20 S e p t e m b e r 1 9 6 1 , C o n g r e s s i o n a l R e c o r d , v o l . 107 ( p a r t 1 5 ) , p p . 2 0 4 8 7 - 9 a n d U.S. C o n g r e s s , S e n a t e ^ ""Freedom v e r s u s C o e r c i o n , " S e n a t o r P e l l s p e a k i n g f o r U S I A c u l t u r a l p r o g r a m s , 8 8 t h C o n . , 1 s t s e s s . , 5 N o v e m b e r 1 9 6 3 , C o n g r e s s i o n a l R e c o r d , v o l , 1 0 9 ( p a r t 1 6 ) , p p . 2 0 9 5 7 - 8 . 30 S c h l e s i n g e r , p . 1 5 1 3 6 . 31 S e e L a r s o n , p p . 1 5 9 - 1 6 0 f o r a b r i e f d i s c u s s i o n o n t h e s u c c e s s o f t h i s s t r a t e g y . 32 C o r r e s p o n d e n c e f r o m J a v i t s t o S e c r e t a r y o f L a b o r , A r t h u r G o l d b e r g , i b i d . , p . 1 6 0 ( f n . 1 5 ) . L a r s o n a r g u e s t h a t t h i s C o l d War r h e t o r i c was l e s s e f f e c t i v e a n d l e s s p o p u l a r i n t h e e a r l y 6 0 s , s a y i n g i t was m o r e c h a r a c t e r i s t i c o f t h e 5 0 s p r e o c c u p a t i o n w i t h t h e " C o m m u n i s t t h r e a t . " W h i l e t h i s may be t r u e o f a r g u m e n t s f o r g o v e r n m e n t s p o n s o r s h i p o f c u l t u r e w i t h i n t h e c o u n t r y , f o r e i g n p o l i c y w a s , a s s h a l l be s h o w n , s t i l l c l o s e l y l i n k e d w i t h C o l d War p o l i c y . L a r s o n ' s c o n t e n t i o n t h a t K e n n e d y ' s c u l t u r a l p o l i c i e s w e r e p h i l a n t h r o p i c a l l y i n s p i r e d s e e m s g r o u n d e d i n a l o n g i n g f o r t h e g o o d o l d d a y s o f C a m e l o t , made a l l t h e s t r o n g e r b y c u r r e n t c u t b a c k s i n c u l t u r a l p r o g r a m s . 33 P h i l i p H. C o o m b s , " T h e P a s t a n d F u t u r e i n P e r s p e c t i v e , " p . 1 4 4 , i n T h e A m e r i c a n A s s e m b l y , C u l t u r a l A f f a i r s a n d F o r e i g n R e l a t i o n s , ( E n g l e w o o d C l i f f s , N . J . : P r e n t i c e - H a l 1 , 1 9 6 3 ) . Coombs was a p p o i n t e d A s s i s t a n t S e c r e t a r y o f S t a t e f o r E d u c a t i o n a l a n d C u l t u r a l A f f a i r s b y K e n n e d y , a p o s i t i o n he h e l d u n t i l A p r i l 1 9 6 2 when he r e s i g n e d t o r e j o i n t h e F o r d F o u n d a t i o n . 37 34 G e o r g e N. S h u s t e r , " T h e N a t u r e a n d D e v e l o p m e n t o f U.S. C u l t u r a l R e l a t i o n s , " p . 3 0 , i n i b i d . S h u s t e r was a n e x e c u t i v e b o a r d r e p r e s e n t a t i v e o n UNESCO a n d h a d s e r v e d o n t h e g e n e r a l a d v i s o r y c o m m i t t e e t o t h e D i v i s i o n o f C u l t u r a l R e l a t i o n s i n t h e S t a t e D e p a r t m e n t . 35 W. M c N e i l L o w r y a n d G e r t r u d e S. H o o k e r , " T h e R o l e o f t h e A r t s a n d t h e H u m a n i t i e s , " p p . 7 2 - 3 , i n i b i d . L o w r y was d i r e c t o r o f t h e F o r d F o u n d a t i o n P r o g r a m i n t h e H u m a n i t i e s a n d t h e A r t s ; H o o k e r was a s t a f f member o f t h e F o r d F o u n d a t i o n P r o g r a m i n t h e H u m a n i t i e s a n d t h e A r t s a n d was w i t h t h e C u l t u r a l A f f a i r s D i v i s i o n o f t h e U S I S i n Rome ( 1 9 5 1 - 1 9 5 9 ) a n d i n P a r i s ( 1 9 5 9 - 1 9 6 1 ) . 36 J u l i a n M a r i a s , " T h e U n r e a l A m e r i c a , " F o r e i g n A f f a i r s 39 ( J u l y 1 9 6 1 ) , p . 5 8 9 . 37 I b i d . , p . 7 3 . 38 C o o m b s , p . 7 2 . 39 [ J o h n F. K e n n e d y ] , " T h e L a t e P r e s i d e n t ' s L a s t R e f l e c t i o n s o n t h e A r t s , " S a t u r d a y R e v i e w 47 ( M a r c h 2 8 , 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 1 7 . 40 I n t h i s r e s p e c t , t h e g o v e r n m e n t ' s o v e r t r o l e i n c u l t u r a l s p o n s o r s h i p h a d a d v a n c e d c o n s i d e r a b l y f r o m t h e i n i t i a l p o s t - w a r p e r i o d , when T r u m a n made h i s f a m o u s p r o n o u n c e m e n t , " I f t h a t i s a r t , I'm a H o t t e n t o t " w i t h r e g a r d t o Y a s u o K u n i y o s h i ' s C i r e u s G i r l R e s t i n g , f e a t u r e d i n t h e S t a t e D e p a r t m e n t e x h i b i t i o n , " A d v a n c i n g A m e r i c a n A r t " ( 1 9 4 6 - 4 8 ) . T r u m a n ' s c o m m e n t s d i d n o t k e e p h i s a d m i n i s t r a t i o n f r o m u s i n g t h e a v a n t - g a r d e t o a d v a n c e i t s i d e o l o g i c a l a i m s , b u t o f f i c i a l l y t h e h a n d o f g o v e r n m e n t d i d n o t t o u c h s u c h h o t i t e m s , h a v i n g b e e n b u r n e d , s o b a d l y b y t h e r e s p o n s e t o t h e s h o w m e n t i o n e d a b o v e . 41 K e n n e d y , S a t u r d a y R e v i e w , p . 1 6 . 42 J o h n F. K e n n e d y , q u o t e d b y L o w r y a n d H o o k e r , p . 7 3 . 38 C H A P T E R 2 S t a t e A v a n t - G a r d i s m a t t h e B i e n n a l e I n a n a t t e m p t t o c o m m u n i c a t e t o t h e w o r l d A m e r i c a ' s n e w - f o u n d g a i n s i n c u l t u r e u n d e r t h e K e n n e d y a d m i n i s t r a t i o n , t h e U S I A p u r p o r t e d t o p r e s e n t t h e m o s t e x c i t i n g a r t i s t i c i n n o v a t i o n s t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s c o u l d o f f e r : P o p A r t a n d P o s t - P a i n t e r l y A b s t r a c t i o n . T h e show e m p h a s i z e d t h e l a t e s t d e v e l o p m e n t s i n a r t , c h o o s i n g r e l a t i v e l y y o u n g a r t i s t s t o r e p r e s e n t t h e New F r o n t i e r , i n k e e p i n g w i t h t h e a d m i n i s t r a t i o n ' s e m p h a s i s o n i n v e n t i o n a n d c r e a t i v i t y , p a r t i c u l a r l y a s i t p e r t a i n e d t o c u l t u r e . Y e t t h e s e l e c t i o n o f a r t i s t s was n o t s i m p l y a g r o u p p r e s e n t e d u n d e r t h e b a n n e r o f y o u t h a n d i n n o v a t i o n ; t h e w o r k s o f R a u s c h e n b e r g , J o h n s , N o l a n d a n d L o u i s a d d r e s s e d s i m i l a r i s s u e s d e s p i t e t h e s e e m i n g o p p o s i t i o n b e t w e e n t h e s t y l e s o f a b s t r a c t i o n a n d f i g u r a t i o n , a s t h e A g e n c y e x p l a i n e d : T h e s e a r t i s t s , a l l i n v o l v e d a n d d e e p l y c o m m i t t e d t o t h e i d e a o f a t t a c h i n g a new i m p o r t a n c e t o s u b - j e c t i v e f e e l i n g a n d t o t h e e x p r e s s i o n o f p e r s o n a l r e s p o n s e s , r e p r e s e n t o n e c l i m a x o f t h e l o n g p r o - c e s s o f l i b e r a t i n g t h e i n d i v i d u a l a n d h i s u n i q u e s e n s i b i l i t y f r o m a n y e x t e r n a l d e m a n d s o r l i m i t s . . T h e y t r a n s f o r m a n d m a n i p u l a t e v i s u a l e x p e r i e n c e , e i t h e r r e j e c t i n g t h e ' r e a l w o r l d ' i n f a v o r o f a new, c r e a t e d a b s t r a c t w o r l d . . . o r b r i n g r e a l o b - j e c t s d i r e c t l y i n t o t h e w o r k o f a r t t h e r e b y g i v - i n g t h e m a new r e a l i t y , i n new c o n t e x t , a b s o l u t e - l y d i f f e r e n t f r o m t h e i r p r e v i o u s e x i s t e n c e i n t h e e x t e r n a l w o r l d . 1 D e s p i t e two v e r y d i f f e r e n t e x p r e s s i o n s , t h e w o r k s i n t h e e x h i b i t i o n f o u n d u n i f y i n g t h e m e s w i t h t h e " t r a n s f o r m a t i o n o f v i s u a l e x p e r i e n c e " a n d " l i b e r a t e d s e n s i b i l i t y . " Y e t i t was n o t i m m e d i a t e l y c l e a r how t h i s c o n c e p t o f c o h e r e n c e a p p l i e d t o s u c h d i s p a r a t e w o r k s a s N o l a n d ' s T u r n s o l e ( 1 9 6 2 , f i g u r e 2) 39 a n d R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s B e d ( 1 9 5 5 , f i g u r e 3 ) , b o t h f e a t u r e d i n t h e 2 B i e n n a l e e x h i b i t i o n . T h e h i g h c r a f t s m a n s h i p a n d r e f i n e m e n t o f N o l a n d ' s a b s t r a c t i o n w o u l d s e e m t o b e n e g a t e d b y R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s d i r t y b e d c l o t h e s s p l a t t e r e d w i t h p a i n t , w h i c h , a c c o r d i n g t o N e w s w e e k , r e c a l l e d "a p o l i c e p h o t o o f a m u r d e r b e d a f t e r t h e c o r p s e h a s b e e n 3 r e m o v e d . " T h e s e two w o r k s s e e m e d u n l i k e l y b e d f e l l o w s i,n a n e x h i b i t i o n p u r p o r t i n g t o p r e s e n t a c o h e r e n t p i c t u r e o f A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e . T o A l a n S o l o m o n , h o w e v e r , t h e s e d i v e r g e n t c u r r e n t s o f A m e r i c a n c o n t e m p o r a r y a r t f o r m e d a s e e m i n g l y w e l l - b a l a n c e d o v e r v i e w o f c u l t u r a l d e v e l o p m e n t i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s ; a b s t r a c t a r t a n d f i g u r a t i v e i m a g e r y d e v e l o p e d s i d e b y s i d e . T h e e f f e c t p r o d u c e d b y t h e r e s p e c t i v e w o r k s " b a l a n c e d " e a c h o t h e r o u t , a s S o l o m o n e x p l a i n e d i n t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n o f t h e B i e n n a l e c a t a l o g u e : [ N e o - D a d a ] h a s h a d a r a p i d a n d w i d e s p r e a d i m p a c t i n t h e l a s t f e w y e a r s , b e c a u s e o f t h e p r o v o c a t i v e a n d a s s e r t i v e n a t u r e o f i t s i d e a s a n d p r a c t i c e s . T h e new a b s t r a c t m o v e m e n t , [ P o s t - P a i n t e r l y A b s t r a c - t i o n ] o n t,he o t h e r h a n d , d e p e n d i n g a s i t d o e s o n a m o r e p a s s i v e a n d c o n t e m p l a t i v e c o n d i t i o n , m a k e s d e m a n d s t o w h i c h t h e r e s p o n s e h a s b e e n s l o w e r . 4 I t a p p e a r e d t h a t t h e U.S. a r t i s t s o f f e r e d s o m e t h i n g f o r e v e r y o n e : t h e a b s t r a c t i o n i s t s ' w o r k was m o r e w i t h d r a w n a n d c e r e b r a l , w h i l e t h e N e o - D a d a i s t s p r o v i d e d a n a r t w h i c h was l i v e l y a n d d a r i n g , m o r e c u l t u r a l l y " e n g a g e d " t h r o u g h t h e u s e o f s u b j e c t s a n d m a t e r i a l s d r a w n f r o m e v e r y d a y l i f e . B u t t h e " b a l a n c e d " c u l t u r e p r e s e n t e d i n V e n i c e was n o t w h a t i n i n i t i a l l y a p p e a r e d t o b e - - f o r e v e n t h e s p o k e s m a n f o r t h e two " g e r m i n a l " m o v e m e n t s , A l a n S o l o m o n , t i p p e d t h e s c a l e s i n f a v o r o f R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k , a s we s h a l l s e e . 4 0 S i n c e t h e B i e n n a l e was o n e o f t h e f i r s t f o r u m s i n w h i c h N o l a n d a n d R a u s c h e n b e r g w e r e w i t h i n t h e s i g h t o f t h e b u l k o f t h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l a r t c o m m u n i t y , t h e t e x t o f t h e U.S. c a t a l o g u e - - p r e p a r e d b y S o l o m o n - - w a s c a r e f u l l y s t r u c t u r e d i n a n a t t e m p t t o e s t a b l i s h t h e s e a r t i s t s b o t h a s d e s c e n d a n t s o f a m o d e r n i s t h e r i t a g e a s w e l l a s t h e m o s t a d v a n c e d c o n t e m p o r a r y a r t i s t s o f t h e t i m e . T h e i n f l u e n c e o f E u r o p e a n a r t was a c k n o w l e d g e d , b u t s p e c i f i c c o n n e c t i o n s w e r e d o w n p l a y e d o r c i t e d a s p r e c e d e n t s r a d i c a l l y a l t e r e d b y R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d N o l a n d . W h i l e t h e E u r o p e a n i n f l u e n c e was i m p o r t a n t , S o l o m o n s h o w e d i t t o be a l m o s t a h a n d i c a p , a s i n h i s d i s c u s s i o n o f L o u i s ' s p a i n t i n g s : b e c a u s e o f t h e i r " u n c o m p r o m i s e d v o l u p t u o s i t y " r e c a l l i n g M o n e t , V u i l l a r d a n d M a t i s s e , t h e w o r k s p o s s e s s e d " a n u n c o m p l i c a t e d 5 s e n s u o u s n e s s w h i c h b e l o n g s t o t h e p a s t . " B y c o n t r a s t , N o l a n d ' s c a n v a s e s , " a l t h o u g h t h e y a r e j u s t a s d e e p l y c o m m i t t e d t o p u r e c o l o r s e n s a t i o n s , c o n f r o n t u s w i t h a c e r t a i n t o u g h n e s s , a c e r t a i n p s y c h o l o g i c a l s e r i o u s n e s s w h i c h m a k e s t h e m much m o r e t h a n a n 6 u n t r a m m e l e d d e l i g h t f o r t h e e y e . " W h i l e t h e E u r o p e a n h e r i t a g e was w o r t h y o f a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t , i t was r e l e g a t e d t o t h e p a s t , w h e n a e s t h e t i c s i m p l i c i t y p l a c i d l y r u l e d w i t h " u n c o m p l i c a t e d s e n s u o u s n e s s . " L o u i s was d i f f e r e n t i a t e d f r o m N o l a n d t h r o u g h h i s " d e b t " t o E u r o p e a n p a i n t e r s - - a d e b t w h i c h S o l o m o n c l a i m e d made h i s w o r k m o r e t r a d i t i o n a l a n d , a t b o t t o m , p a s s e . N o l a n d ' s w o r k s h a r e s some common c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s w i t h L o u i s a n d t h e E u r o p e a n s , y e t S o l o m o n p o s t u l a t e s a c e r t a i n s e r i o u s n e s s o r " t o u g h n e s s " i n h i s p a i n t i n g s w h i c h he s u g g e s t s i s d e c i d e d l y n o t E u r o p e a n a n d c o n s e q u e n t l y much m o r e c o m p l e x . A E u r o p e a n p e d i g r e e i s a l s o c l a i m e d f o r J o h n s a n d R a u s c h e n b e r g 41 t h r o u g h t h e w o r k s o f Duchamp a n d P i c a s s o , b u t t h i s h i s t o r i c a l l i n k i s s i m i l a r l y q u a l i f i e d : D e s p i t e s u c h c o n n e c t i o n s w i t h t h e p a s t , t h e s e new A m e r i c a n a r t i s t s h a v e b r o u g h t a n e n t i r e l y new s e n s i b i l i t y t o b e a r u p o n t h e i r w o r k , a s e n s i b i l i t y w h i c h h a s g r o w n o u t o f a r e s p o n s e t o t h e p a r t i c u l a r e n v i r o n m e n t i n w h i c h t h e y h a v e l i v e d a n d d e v e l o p e d . 7 W h i l e R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d J o h n s m i g h t i n s p i r e m e m o r i e s o f t h e p a s t - - D u c h a m p , P i c a s s o , D a d a - - i t was t h e i r p a r t i c u l a r l y A m e r i c a n i n t e r p r e t a t i o n , t h e i r "new s e n s i b i l i t y , " w h i c h made t h e i r c o n t r i b u t i o n u n i q u e . T h e i r l i n k s w i t h t h e p a s t w e r e a c k n o w l e d g e d , b u t a l m o s t a s q u i c k l y d i s m i s s e d , f o r i t was n o t E u r o p e a n a r t w h i c h 8 l a y a t t h e r o o t o f t h i s new a e s t h e t i c . B y t h e e a r l y 1 9 6 0 s , t h e s u c c e s s o f A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m p r e p a r e d t h e g r o u n d f o r a new t r a d i t i o n , a new p e d i g r e e , i n A m e r i c a n a r t . N o l a n d a n d R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k was c o n n e c t e d n o t o n l y t o a. E u r o p e a n t r a d i t i o n o f m o d e r n i s m , b u t a l s o t o a m o r e r e c e n t h e r i t a g e o f a v a n t - g a r d e p a i n t i n g i n A m e r i c a . T h i s was a n i m p o r t a n t , i f n o t o b v i o u s s t r a t e g y i n t e r m s o f e s t a b l i s h i n g t h e u n i q u e q u a l i t i e s o f t h e s e a r t i s t s o n t h e b a s i s o f n a t i o n a l i t y . H o w e v e r , w h i l e t h e g e r m i n a l p a i n t e r s w e r e i n d e b t e d t o t h e w o r k o f t h e A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s , t h e y w e r e a l s o c r i t i c a l o f t h e i r p r e d e c e s s o r s . B y 4 2 t h e e n d o f t h e f i f t i e s some p a i n t e r s , a c c o r d i n g t o S o l o m o n , h a d come t o f e e l t h a t t h e a p p a r e n t d i r e c t n e s s o f t h i s k i n d o f p a i n t i n g was b a s e d m o r e o n s u p e r f i - c i a l c o n s i d e r a t i o n s ( o f c o l o r , t e x t u r e a n d s p a t i a l c o m p l e x i t y ) w h i c h o n l y a p p e a r e d t o c o m m u n i - c a t e t h e t r u e f e e l i n g s o f t h e a r t i s t , t h a t he r e m a i n e d d e t a c h e d i n t h e c r u c i a l s e n s e , a n d t h a t t h e s e p a t h e t i c i n t r u s i o n s d e t r a c t e d f r o m t h e p u - r i t y o f t h e p a i n t i n g s i t u a t i o n a n d f r o m t h e p o - t e n t i a l o f a n o b l e r a n d l e s s m a n i f e s t l y s e l f - c e n t e r e d mode o f e x p r e s s i o n . 9 T h u s t h e " s e c o n d g e n e r a t i o n " o f p a i n t e r s r e j e c t e d t h e a n g s t o f t h e a c t i o n p a i n t e r s ; c o n t r a r y t o t h e h e a v y , a l i e n a t e d a e s t h e t i c o f t h e A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s , t h e y o u n g e r a r t i s t s t u r n e d t o a c o o l " p o s t - p a i n t e r l y " a b s t r a c t i o n , o r d a r i n g , l i v e l y d a d a . T h e " p a t h e t i c i n t r u s i o n s " o f e x p r e s s i v e b r u s h s t r o k e s a n d o t h e r " s u p e r f i c i a l c o n s i d e r a t i o n s " w e r e r e p l a c e d w i t h s t r a t e g i e s m o r e i n k e e p i n g w i t h t h e " p u r i t y o f t h e p a i n t i n g s i t u a t i o n " - - p a i n t - s t a i n e d c a n v a s e s o f a b s t r a c t i m a g e r y — o r " n o b l e r , " l e s s " s e l f - c e n t e r e d " p r e o c c u p a t i o n s s u c h a s N e o - D a d a , w h i c h a d d r e s s e d t h e w o r l d i n a m o r e d i r e c t , y e t s t i l l e m o t i o n a l l y d e t a c h e d , way. T h e a i m s o f t h e A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s , s e e n a s a k i n d o f m o d e r n r o m a n t i c i s m w h e r e t h e e m o t i o n a l s i n c e r i t y o f t h e a r t i s t was r e v e a l e d t h r o u g h t h e s p l a s h e s o f p a i n t , w e r e r e j e c t e d f o r a c o o l a n d d e t a c h e d a e s t h e t i c . S o l o m o n e x p l a i n e d t h e y [ t h e " G e r m i n a l P a i n t e r s " ] h a v e m a t u r e d i n a p o s t - F r e u d i a n c l i m a t e i n w h i c h t h e new p s y c h o l o g y h'as b e e n a s s i m i l a t e d i n t h e g e n e r a l c u l t u r e o v e r a p e r i o d o f t w e n t y o r t h i r t y y e a r s . U n l i k e t h e E u r o p e a n s , t h e A m e r i c a n s h a v e no c l e a r l y d e f i n e d t i e s t o t h e p a s t , a n d t h e y h a v e f o u n d a new p a t h f o r t h e m s e l v e s i n t h e p r e s e n t . 10 43 T h e a n g s t - r i d d e n 1 9 5 0 s h a d g i v e n w a y t o a "new p a t h " w h e r e a l i e n a t i o n was a s s i m i l a t e d , t o t h e p o i n t w h e r e i t was no l o n g e r p a r t i c u l a r l y r e l e v a n t . U n f e t t e r e d b y t h e b o n d s o f h i s t o r y , t h e new a r t i s t s w e r e f r e e t o e x p l o r e new a v e n u e s o f c o o l , . i n d i f f e r e n t e x p r e s s i o n w i t h o u t 11 t h e " h a n d - w r i n g i n g " o f t h e p r e c e d i n g g e n e r a t i o n . A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m was p a r t o f t h e p a s t , a n h i s t o r i c a l m o v e m e n t a p p r o p r i a t e f o r t h e 5 0 s , m a y b e , b u t c e r t a i n l y o u t d a t e d f o r t h e new g e n e r a t i o n , w h i c h was f i l l e d w i t h o p t i m i s m u n t a i n t e d b y t h e p r o b l e m s o f t h e p a s t - - t h e Bomb, t h e H o l o c a u s t , t h e w a r . O u t o f t h e o l d r o m a n t i c i s m s p r a n g t h e new c l a s s i c i s m - - b u t who was t o c a r r y t h e t o r c h f o r t h i s new f r o n t i e r , F r o s t ' s new A u g u s t a n a g e ? A t t h e o u t s e t , K e n n e t h N o l a n d a p p e a r e d t o b e t h e h e i r a p p a r e n t t o t h e A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s a n d c o n s e q u e n t l y a l i k e l y c a n d i d a t e f o r i n t e r n a t i o n a l f a m e . W i t h h i s r e s t r a i n e d b r u s h s t r o k e s , r e d u c e d t o s t a i n s d e l i n e a t i n g h i s t a r g e t s a n d c h e v r o n s , he r e p r e s e n t e d a new s o r t o f a e s t h e t i c - - t h e "new c l a s s i c i s m " i n i t s m o s t r e s t r a i n e d IZ f o r m . S i n c e h i s w o r k was f e a t u r e d i n t h e p a v i l i o n o n t h e G i a r d i n i g r o u n d s h e was i n a s e c u r e p o s i t i o n f o r t h e G r a n d P r i z e c o m p e t i t i o n , u n l i k e t h e a r t i s t s f e a t u r e d i n t h e a n n e x . H i s a b s t r a c t p a i n t i n g s c l e a r l y d e v e l o p e d o u t o f A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , a n d he h a d i n f a c t b e e n d e s c r i b e d b y t h e A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s ' f o r e m o s t c r i t i c C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g a s a s u c c e s s o r t o t h a t m o v e m e n t . A s e a r l y a s 1 9 5 4 , G r e e n b e r g h a d s e l e c t e d N o l a n d ( a n d L o u i s ) f o r t h e " E m e r g i n g T a l e n t " s h o w a t t h e S a m u e l K o o t z G a l l e r y a n d i n 1 9 6 0 , t h e i n f l u e n t i a l c r i t i c p r o n o u n c e d t h a t L o u i s a n d N o l a n d " a r e t h e o n l y p a i n t e r s t o h a v e c o m e u p i n A m e r i c a n a r t s i n c e t h a t ' f i r s t w a v e ' [ A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m ] 13 who a p p r o a c h i t s l e v e l . " G r e e n b e r g ' s a p p r o v a l o f t h e s e a r t i s t s was 44 h a r d l y s u r p r i s i n g , f o r t h i s " s e c o n d w a v e " o f A m e r i c a n p a i n t e r s was w e l l - s u i t e d t o G r e e n b e r g ' s c o n c e p t i o n o f m o d e r n i s m , w i t h i t s e m p h a s i s 14 o n t w o - d i m e n s i o n a l i t y . A d d i t i o n a l l y , G r e e n b e r g ' s c o n t e n t i o n t h a t a n h i s t o r i c a l d i a l e c t i c e x i s t s b e t w e e n p a i n t e r l y a n d l i n e a r s t y l e s was c o n f i r m e d , i n . h i s v i e w , t h r o u g h N o l a n d a n d L o u i s . F r o m t h e w o r k e d , p a i n t e r l y s u r f a c e s o f t h e A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s g r e w a m o r e r e s t r a i n e d , l i n e a r a p p r o a c h ; t h e " e x c e s s e s " o f t h e a c t i o n p a i n t e r s o f t h e 5 0 s a n d ( t h e f a c t t h a t t h e s t y l e h a d b e c o m e i n s t i t u t i o n a l i z e d a n d f a s h i o n a b l e c a u s e d G r e e n b e r g t o a b a n d o n t h e " p a i n t e r l y " a e s t h e t i c i n s e a r c h o f a s t y l e w h i c h c a r r i e d o n t h e t e n e t s o f f o r m a l i s m i n a w a y w h i c h c o n f o r m e d t o h i s h i s t o r i c a l s u p p o s i t i o n s . T h u s , f o r G r e e n b e r g , t h e w o r k s o f L o u i s a n d N o l a n d p r e s e n t e d a l o g i c a l s e q u e n c e i n h i s h i s t o r i c a l c o n t i n u u m o f p a i n t i n g . T h e e l e m e n t s w h i c h made t h e i r w o r k o f f o r e m o s t i m p o r t a n c e t o G r e e n b e r g a r e d e s c r i b e d i n h i s 1 9 6 0 a r t i c l e o n t h e two a r t i s t s : . . . j u s t a s i n L o u i s ' s c a s e — a n d i n t h e m i d d l e - p e r i o d P o l l o c k ' s - - t h e p i c t u r e [ b y N o l a n d ] s u c - c e e d s , w h e n i t d o e s s u c c e e d , b y r e a f f i r m i n g i n t h e e n d . . . t h e l i m i t e d n e s s o f p i c t o r i a l s p a c e a s s u c h , w i t h a l l i t s r e c t a n g u l a r i t y a n d f l a t - n e s s a n d o p a c i t y . . . 15 A c c o r d i n g t o G r e e n b e r g , t h e i r w o r k t r a n s c e n d e d t h e s c u l p t u r a l e f f e c t s p r o d u c e d b y t h e p a i n t e r l y s t y l e w h i c h w e r e r o o t e d i n c u b i s m ; t h i s was a n i m p o r t a n t d e v e l o p m e n t — b a s e d o n w o r k b y e a r l i e r a r t i s t s s u c h a s R o t h k o , S t i l l a n d N e w m a n - - f o r i t a l l o w e d t h e w o r k s t o d e v e l o p m o r e f u l l y t h e e s s e n t i a l e l e m e n t s o f f l a t n e s s , c o l o r - - t h e " p u r e " e l e m e n t s 16 o f p a i n t i n g . T h u s , N o l a n d ' s T u r n s o l e ( f i g u r e 3 ) , was r e p r e s e n t a t i v e o f a w o r k 45 w h i c h r e a d i l y a c c o m m o d a t e d G r e e n b e r g ' s t h e o r i e s o f m o d e r n i s m ; t h e f l a t c o n c e n t r i c r i n g s , d e v o i d o f t e x t u r e b e c a u s e o f t h e s t a i n - t e c h n i q u e N o l a n d e m p l o y e d , f o r m e d a v i s u a l e s s a y o n t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p o f c o l o r s a n d l i m i t s o f t h e c a n v a s . G r e e n b e r g n o t e d . . . t h e p a r t i c u l a r t r i u m p h o f N o l a n d ' s p a i n t i n g i s t h e way ( i n w h i c h i t s p e c i f i e s a n d a t t h e same t i m e g e n e r a l i z e s o f f - w h i t e ( o r f o r t h a t m a t t e r , b r o w n , y e l l o w , o r r e d ) ' s p a c e 1 , m a k i n g i t s e e m b o t h v e r y l i t e r a l a n d v e r y a b s t r a c t . 17 I n p a r t i c u l a r , G r e e n b e r g c r e d i t e d N o l a n d f o r h i s g i f t s a s a c o l o r i s t - - a n e l e m e n t o f p a i n t i n g h i t h e r t o n e g l e c t e d b y t h e p a i n t e r l y 18 s t y l e , w i t h i t s " e a s y e f f e c t s o f s p o n t a n e i t y . " I t was t h i s new " p u r i t y " i n p a i n t i n g , c o n c e n t r a t i n g p r i n c i p a l l y o n c o l o r , w h e r e b y a w o r k c o u l d " f i n d t h e g u a r a n t e e o f i t s s t a n d a r d s o f q u a l i t y a s w e l l a s 19 o f i t s i n d e p e n d e n c e . " N o l a n d ' s w o r k p r o v i d e d a n a r t i s t i c d e m o n s t r a t i o n o f G r e e n b e r g ' s t h e o r y o f m o d e r n i s m ; t h e g e n e r a l i z e d w a y i n w h i c h G r e e n b e r g w r o t e o f N o l a n d ' s p a i n t i n g s , w i t h a l m o s t ,no r e f e r e n c e s t o s p e c i f i c w o r k s , s e e m e d o n l y t o r e i n f o r c e t h e f a c t t h a t t h e w o r k s w e r e i l l u s t r a t i o n s o f G r e e n b e r g ' s t e x t s . T h i s i s n o t t o s u g g e s t t h a t N o l a n d was s i m p l y a h e l p l e s s pawn i n G r e e n b e r g ' s game; o n t h e c o n t r a r y , t h e a r t i s t h i m s e l f d e s c r i b e d h i s own w o r k i n t e r m s o f c o l o r e x p l o r a t i o n a n d e l i m i n a t i o n o f s t r u c t u r a l c o n s t r a i n t s . H o w e v e r , N o l a n d ' s s t a t e m e n t s c l e a r l y r e f l e c t a c l o s e c o n n e c t i o n w i t h G r e e n b e r g ' s t h o u g h t s q n m o d e r n i s m : "a b r e a k t h r o u g h a l s o m e a n s a 20 l i m i t a t i o n , a r e d u c t i o n o f p o s s i b i l i t i e s " , a s t a t e m e n t w h i c h b e a r s r e m a r k a b l e r e s e m b l a n c e t o G r e e n b e r g ' s n o t i o n o f s e l f - c r i t i c i s m w i t h i n e a c h m e d i u m . N o l a n d a l s o s h a r e d w i t h G r e e n b e r g a v a g u e a v e r s i o n t o 46 c u b i s m , a s he e x p l a i n e d i n h i s c o m m e n t s o n s t r u c t u r e : s t r u c t u r e i s a n e l e m e n t p r o f o u n d l y t o b e r e - s p e c t e d , b u t , t o o , a n e n g a g e m e n t w i t h i t l e a v e s o n e i n t h e b a c k w a t e r s o f w h a t a r e b a s i c a l l y c u b i s t c o n c e r n s . I n t h e b e s t c o l o r p a i n t i n g , s t r u c t u r e i s n o w h e r e e v i d e n t , o r n o w h e r e s e l f - d e c l a r i n g . 21 L i k e G r e e n b e r g , N o l a n d s u g g e s t s t h a t s t r u c t u r a l c o n c e r n s l e a d t o a c u b i s t s t r a i g h t j a c k e t w h e r e n o t h i n g n e w - - e s p e c i a l l y i n t h e r e a l m o f c o l o r - - c a n b e c r e a t e d . W h e t h e r t h e c r i t i c o r p a i n t e r a r r i v e d a t t h e same p o i n t i n d e p e n d e n t l y , t h e j a c k e t o f f o r m a l i s m was e q u a l l y f i t t i n g f o r b o t h ; a n d s i n c e G r e e n b e r g ' s r e p u t a t i o n f a r s u r p a s s e d t h e y o u n g a r t i s t ' s a t t h a t t i m e , o n e m i g h t a s s u m e t h a t t h e c r i t i c c o u l d l a y c l a i m t o t a i l o r i n g t h e " a d v a n c e " a t l e a s t i n t h e o r y . G r e e n b e r g ' s v i e w s p l a y e d a s u b s t a n t i a l r o l e i n t h e c r i t i c a l r e c e p t i o n o f N o l a n d ' s w o r k s . H i s f o r m i d a b l e i n f l u e n c e a s a c r i t i c - - p e r h a p s t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t c r i t i c o f t h e 1 9 5 0 s - - m a d e h i s a r t i s t i c " p r o p h e c i e s " f o r t h e 1 9 6 0 s a l m o s t a n i n s t i t u t i o n , d e m o n s t r a t i n g h i s 22 ' p o w e r f u l g r i p o n t h e c r i t i c a l d i s c o u r s e o n a r t . Y e t a t t h e same t i m e , t h e v e r y i n s t i t u t i o n a l i z a t i o n o f G r e e n b e r g ' s v i e w o f m o d e r n i s m b e c a m e g r o u n d s f o r a r e b e l l i o n o f s o r t s o n t h e p a r t o f m a n y 23 c r i t i c s . J u s t a s A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m was i n c r e a s i n g l y a s s o c i a t e d w i t h t h e p a s t , s o t o o , d i d G r e e n b e r g ' s c r i t i c i s m b e c o m e e n t r e n c h e d a s a t r a d i t i o n , made r i g i d b y t h e v e r y d i a l e c t i c s t h r o u g h w h i c h h e p r o n o u n c e d t h e n e x t s u c c e s s i v e move t o w a r d " f r e s h n e s s " i n a r t . S i n c e m o d e r n i s m , i n G r e e n b e r g i a n t e r m s , c o u l d o n l y be e x p r e s s e d t h r o u g h a b s t r a c t i o n , f l a t n e s s , a n d c o l o r , a n d p a i n t i n g was p e r p e t u a l l y c o n f i n e d t o l i m i t s b e t w e e n t h e p a i n t e r l y o r l i n e a r 47 d i a l e c t i c , d e v e l o p m e n t s o u t s i d e o f G r e e n b e r g ' s c o n c e p t u a l f r a m e w o r k w e r e s u m m a r i l y i g n o r e d . T h i s f e a t u r e b e c a m e i n c r e a s i n g l y t r o u b l e s o m e t o c r i t i c s s u c h a s P r i s c i l l a C o l t w r i t i n g i n t h e C o l l e g e A r t J o u r n a l : What d i s t u r b s t h i s r e a d e r i s h i s [ G r e e n b e r g ' s ] r e c u r r i n g i n t i m a t i o n t h a t t h e r e i s a k i n d o f p r e d e s t i n y w o r k i n g i t s e l f o u t i n t h e h i s t o r y o f s t y l e . . . T h e c r i t i c a l c o r o l l a r y t o t h i s i s t h a t we n e e d w a t c h o n l y t h e a v a n t - g r a d e [ s i c ] ( p r e s u m i n g i t c a n b e e a s i l y i d e n t i f i e d ) a n d t h a t we m a y t h e n r e l e g a t e t o l i m b o t h a t a r t w h i c h d o e s n o t f u l f i l l a t l e a s t some o f i t s c o n d i t i o n s . 24 T h o s e whom G r e e n b e r g r e l e g a t e d t o " a r t i s t i c l i m b o " u s u a l l y w e n t u n n a m e d , g r o u p e d a n o n y m o u s l y a s p u r v e y o r s o f " s a f e t a s t e . " When he a c t u a l l y a c k n o w l e d g e d a r t i s t s s t r a y i n g f r o m t h e G r e e n b e r g i a n f o l d , h e a t t e m p t e d t o i n c l u d e t h e m a s l e s s i m p o r t a n t b u t w o r t h y o f n o t e b e c a u s e o f t h e i r r e l a t i o n s h i p t o h i s t h e o r y ( J a s p e r J o h n s , f o r 25 e x a m p l e ) o r c o m p l e t e l y d i s m i s s a b l e , a g a i n , i n r e l a t i o n t o h i s own s t a n d a r d s o f e x c e l l e n c e . T h i s he e x p r e s s e d m o s t , c l e a r l y i n h i s s a r c a s t i c c r i t i q u e o f t h e N e o - D a d a s ( o b v i o u s l y w i t h R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d o t h e r p o p a r t i s t s s u c h a s O l d e n b u r g a n d D i n e i n m i n d ) . I t i s w o r t h q u o t i n g a t l e n g t h , f o r i t i s o n e o f t h e f e w c r i t i c a l " p r o n o u n c e m e n t s " G r e e n b e r g c h o s e t o make o n a r t i s t s o u t s i d e o f h i s v i s i o n o f 4 8 m o d e r n i s m , a n d o n e w h i c h r e i n f o r c e d t h e o p p o s i t i o n t o h i s a r t c r i t i c i sm: W h a t e v e r n o v e l o b j e c t s t h e y r e p r e s e n t o r i n - s e r t i n t h e i r w o r k s , n o t o n e o f t h e m h a s t a k e n a c h a n c e w i t h c o l o u r o r d e s i g n t h a t t h e C u b i s t s o r A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s d i d n o t t a k e b e f o r e t h e m . . . N o r h a s a n y o n e o f t h e m , w h e t h e r h e h a r - p o o n s s t u f f e d w h a l e s t o p l a n e s u r f a c e s , o r f i l l s w a t e r - c l o s e t b o w l s w i t h d i a m o n d s , y e t d a r e d t o a r r a n g e t h e s e t h i n g s o u t s i d e t h e d i - r e c t i o n a l l i n e s o f t h e ' a l l - o v e r ' C u b i s t g r i d . T h e r e s u l t s h a v e i n e v e r y c a s e a c o n v e n t i o n a l a n d C u b i s t p r e t t i n e s s t h a t h a r d l y e n t i t l e s t h e m t o be i n c l u d e d u n d e r t h e h e a d i n g ' A f t e r A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n s i s m . ' N o r c a n t h o s e a r t - i s t s , e i t h e r , b e d i s c u s s e d u n d e r t h i s h e a d - i n g w h o s e c o n t r i b u t i o n c o n s i s t s i n d e p i c t i n g s t u f f e d c h i c k e n s i n s t e a d o f d e a d p h e a s a n t s , o r c o f f e e c a n s o r p i e c e s o f p a s t r y i n s t e a d o f f l o w e r s i n v a s e s . N o t t h a t I do n o t f i n d t h e c l e a r a n d s t r a i g h t f o r w a r d a c a d e m i c h a n d l i n g o f t h e i r p i c t u r e s r e f r e s h i n g a f t e r t h e t u r - g i d i t i e s o f A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m ; y e t t h e e f f e c t i s o n l y m o m e n t a r y , s i n c e n o v e l t y , a s d i s t i n c t f r o m o r i g i n a l i t y , h a s no s t a y i n g p o w e r . 26 H i s e a s y d i s m i s s a l o f t h e s e d e v e l o p m e n t s ( m e n t i o n e d o n l y i n t h e c l o s i n g p a r a g r a p h o f h i s l e n g t h y e s s a y ) was t h e s o u r c e o f much c o n s t e r n a t i o n among c r i t i c s . I n c r e a s i n g l y G r e e n b e r g ' s c r i t i c i s m , u s u a l l y f o c u s i n g o n t h e P o s t - P a i n t e r l y A b s t r a c t i o n i s t s , was v i e w e d a s d e t e r m i n i s t i c a n d o p i n i o n a t e d . T h e r e s u l t i n g f r u s t r a t i o n was s u m m a r i z e d b y Max K o z l o f f , i n a l e t t e r t o t h e e d i t o r o f A r t 49 I n t e r n a t i o n a ] , w h e r e h e a t t a c k e d G r e e n b e r g ' s d e t e r m i n i s m : I n w h a t now a p p e a r s t o b e t h e a f t e r m a t h o f A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , t h e r e a r e o n l y t w o p a i n t e r s o f a n y s i g n i f i c a n c e - - M o r r i s L o u i s a n d K e n n e t h N o l a n d . W h i l e he d o e s n o t d e n y t h e y a r e h e i r s t o t h e r e c e n t p a s t , C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g p r e s e n t s t h e m a s t h e c h i e f h a r - b i n g e r s o f t h e f u t u r e . T h a t t h e y a r e i s o - l a t e d a b s t r a c t i o n i s t s , h o w e v e r , i n a n e n v i - r o n m e n t w h i c h h a s s w u n g m a s s i v e l y a w a y f r o m a b s t r a c t i o n , p r e v e n t s t h e m f r o m b e i n g , i n a n y s e n s e , r e p r e s e n t a t i v e o f a new s i t u a - t i o n . 27 T h e f a c t t h a t N o l a n d ' s w o r k was s o c l o s e l y a l i g n e d w i t h G r e e n b e r g ' s c r i t i c i s m f o r c e d a s i t u a t i o n w h e r e b y c r i t i c s who came down a g a i n s t G r e e n b e r g f e l t n e c e s s a r i l y b o u n d t o c r i t i q u e t h e a r t i s t ' s w o r k a s w e l l . O f t e n a n a t t a c k o n G r e e n b e r g was made t h r o u g h t h e a r t i s t s whom he h i m s e l f c i t e d a s m o s t r e p r e s e n t a t i v e o f h i s own t h e o r i e s o f m o d e r n i s m . T h u s , i n a r e v i e w o f N o l a n d ' s w o r k s , D o n a l d J u d d a n d V i v i e n R a y n o r w r i t e : N o l a n d i s o b v i o u s l y o n e o f t h e b e s t p a i n t e r s a n y - w h e r e . . . b u t h i s p a i n t i n g s a r e s o m e w h a t l e s s s t r o n g t h a n t h e s e v e r a l k i n d s o f t h r e e - d i m e n s i o n a l w o r k . P a i n t i n g h a s t o b e a s p o w e r f u l a s a n y k i n d o f a r t ; i t c a n ' t c l a i m a s p e c i a l i d e n t i t y , a n e x i s t e n c e f o r i t s own s a k e a s a m e d i u m . . . P a i n t i n g now i s n o t q u i t e s u f f i c i e n t , a l t h o u g h o n l y i n t e r m s o f p l a i n p o w e r . I t l a c k s t h e s p e c i f i c i t y a n d p o w e r o f a c t u a l m a t e r i a l s , a c t u a l c o l o r a n d s p a c e . . . a d v a n c e s i n a r t c e r t a i n l y a r e n o t a l w a y s f o r m a l o n e s . T h e y a l w a y s i n v o l v e i n n o v a t i o n s , b u t t h e a c t u a l f o r m a l a d v a n c e , m e a s u r e d b y t h e g e n e r a l i - z a t i o n o f h i s t o r i c a l l i n e a r i t y , may be s m a l l . A r e a l i s t i c h i s t o r y w o u l d n o t b e a l i n e a r o n e o f f o r m . . . 28 L i k e K o z l o f f , J u d d a n d R a y n o r b e g i n w i t h a d i s c u s s i o n o f N o l a n d ' s 50 p a i n t i n g s i n r e l a t i o n t o " t h r e e - d i m e n s i o n a l w o r k , " w h i c h t h e y d e f e n d . T h e t e x t t h e n , d r i f t s f r o m s p e c i f i c s r e l a t i n g t o t h e p a i n t i n g s , s h i f t i n g t o a n a t t a c k o n t h e t h e o r i e s u n d e r l y i n g t h e m . What b e g i n s o s t e n s i b l y a s a r e v i e w o f N o l a n d ' s w o r k e v o l v e s i n t o a r e b u t t a l o f t h e i d e a s G r e e n b e r g p r o p o s e d m o s t s t r a i g h t f o r w a r d l y i n h i s 1 9 6 3 e s s a y " M o d e r n i s t P a i n t i n g . " G r e e n b e r g ' s n o t i o n o f a l i m i t i n g s e l f - 29 c r i t i c i s m o f t h e m e d i u m , p a r t i c u l a r l y a s i t a p p l i e d t o p a i n t i n g , i s b a s e d o n a f a l s e n o t i o n , a c c o r d i n g t o t h e a u t h o r s , t h a t p a i n t i n g c a n l a y c l a i m t o a " s p e c i a l i d e n t i t y . " F u r t h e r , t h e " a d v a n c e s " i n p a i n t i n g ( f o r G r e e n b e r g t h e s e w e r e r e s t r i c t e d t o f o r m a l o n e s ) c r e a t e d a l i n e a r h i s t o r y o f a r t a s a s u c c e s s i o n o f f o r m a l d e v e l o p m e n t s , w h i c h , a s K o z l o f f p o i n t e d o u t , was a n i n n a c c u r a t e r e a d i n g o f t h e 30 c o n t e m p o r a r y s i t u a t i o n , r e g a r d l e s s o f t h e v a l u e j u d g e m e n t s o n e m i g h t w i s h t o i m p o s e o n t h e w o r k . T h e d i a l o g u e b e t w e e n G r e e n b e r g a n d c r i t i c s who c h a l l e n g e d h i s t e n e t s o f m o d e r n i s m h a d a p a r t i c u l a r s i g n i f i c a n c e a t t h e B i e n n a l e . One m i g h t a r g u e t h a t S o l o m o n h a d i n f a c t " s i d e d " w i t h G r e e n b e r g ' s p o s i t i o n s i m p l y b e c a u s e N o l a n d was f e a t u r e d i n s u c h a p r o m i n e n t p o s i t i o n i,n t h e o f f i c i a l U.S. p a v i l i o n . Y e t a c l o s e r e a d i n g o f t h e c a t a l o g u e r e v e a l s t h a t S o l o m o n d e s c r i b e d t h e w o r k o f t h e P o s t - P a i n t e r l y A b s t r a c t i o n i s t s i n t e r m s w h i c h , w h i l e s h a r i n g some p o i n t s o f c o m m o n a l i t y w i t h G r e e n b e r g , p l a c e d o t h e r c o n c e r n s o v e r f o r m a l d e v e l o p m e n t s . T h e r e i s a c u r r e n t w i t h i n S o l o m o n ' s t e x t w h i c h p a r a l l e l s G r e e n b e r g ' s v i e w s - - w e n e e d o n l y r e c a l l t h a t S o l o m o n s e t t h e " G e r m i n a l P a i n t e r s " o f f a g a i n s t t h e r o m a n t i c , a n g s t - r i d d e n s t y l e o f t h e A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s s i o n i s t s , j u s t a s G r e e n b e r g d e c l a r e d t h a t N o l a n d ' s r e s t r a i n e d , " c o o l , " c o l o r s t a i n s c o u n t e r e d t h e f a s h i o n a b l e p a i n t e r l y s t y l e - - y e t t h e r e s u l t i n g "new c l a s s i c i s m " a d v o c a t e d b y 51 S o l o m o n was n o t b a s e d e n t i r e l y o n f o r m , b u t r a t h e r , a m b i g u i t y a n d e x p r e s s i v e n e s s . T h e s e l a t t e r e l e m e n t s w e r e s i g n i f i c a n t n o t s o much i n r e l a t i o n t o t h e i m m e d i a t e p a s t o f A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m ; i n s t e a d , t h e y w e r e i n t i m a t e l y c o n n e c t e d w i t h S o l o m o n ' s d i s c o u r s e o n R a u s c h e n b e r g , s e t t i n g up a d i a l o g u e b e t w e e n t h e two m o v e m e n t s ( N e o - D a d a a n d P o s t - P a i n t e r l y A b s t r a c t i o n ) i n w h i c h o n e w o u l d u l t i m a t e l y e m e r g e t r i u m p h a n t . N o l a n d ' s r o l e i n t h e B i e n n a l e , a s i d e f r o m f o r m i n g a p a r t o f t h e " g e r m i n a l p a i n t e r s " , s e r v e d a s a c o m p a r a t i v e m o d e l a g a i n s t w h i c h R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k w o u l d b e m e a s u r e d . T h u s S o l o m o n , u n l i k e G r e e n b e r g , n o t o n l y p r e s e n t e d N o l a n d a s t h e new t r e n d i n A m e r i c a n p a i n t i n g , b u t a l s o u s e d h i s w o r k t o show t h r o u g h c o m p a r i s o n e x a c t l y how "new" R a u s c h e n b e r g w a s . T h e " v o i d " c r e a t e d b y t h e c r i t i c s ' r e j e c t i o n o f G r e e n b e r g ' s t h e o r i e s was o n e w h i c h R a u s c h e n b e r g m i g h t b e c a p a b l e o f f i l l i n g , a n d t h i s s e e m e d e v e n m o r e l i k e l y g i v e n t h e f a c t t h a t r e v i e w e r s , d i s g r u n t l e d w i t h d e t e r m i n i s t i c f o r m a l i s m , 31 a p p e a r e d t o b e t u r n i n g t o N e o - D a d a f o r r e l i e f . I n i t i a l l y , S o l o m o n ' s c a t a l o g u e e n t r y f o r N o l a n d a p p e a r s t o b e r e d r e s s i n g t h e d a m a g e d o n e b y G r e e n b e r g ' s c r u s a d e t o e s t a b l i s h a b s t r a c t i o n a n d f o r m a l c o n c e r n s a s t h e o n l y v i a b l e a r t i s t i c e x p r e s s i o n s . P e r h a p s f o r t h i s r e a s o n , N o l a n d i s d i s c u s s e d i n r e l a t i o n t o t h e g r o u p o f " g e r m i n a l p a i n t e r s " r a t h e r t h a n b e i n g s i n g l e d o u t a s t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t a r t i s t . I n c o n t r a s t t o G r e e n b e r g , S o l o m o n a t t e m p t s t o r e l a t e N o l a n d ' s w o r k t o i s s u e s w h i c h e x t e n d e d 52 b e y o n d t h e l i m i t s o f f o r m a l i s m . T h u s , w h i l e N o l a n d , a l o n g w i t h t h e o t h e r p a i n t e r s , h a s t u r n e d a w a y f r o m p o l i t i c a l a n d s o c i a l p r e o c c u - p a t i o n s , a t t a c h i n g a new i m p o r t a n c e t o t h e human c o n d i t i o n a n d t o t h e v a l u e o f i n d i v i d u a l e x p e r i e n c e , 32 t h i s " d i s e n g a g e m e n t " f r o m a c t i v e s o c i a l c o n c e r n s was n o t , t o b e r e a d a s p e s s i m i s t i c r e t r e a t . A q u a l i f i e r i s a d d e d , o n e w h i c h d e p a r t s f r o m G r e e n b e r g ' s a s s e s s m e n t o f N o l a n d w h i l e a l s o d i f f e r e n t i a t i n g t h e p o p a r t i s t s f r o m t h e A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s : t h e y h a v e c h o s e n t o e n g a g e t h e m s e l v e s w h o l l y , a s i n d i v i d u a l s , i n t h e r i c h n e s s a n d a m b i g u i t y o f m o d e r n l i f e ; t h e i r a c c e p t a n c e o f t h e c o n - t e m p o r a r y w o r l d i s o p t i m i s t i c , n o t c y n i c a l . 3 3 U n l i k e G r e e n b e r g who g e n e r a l l y d e s c r i b e d N o l a n d ' s w o r k i n p u r e l y f o r m a l t e r m s , S o l o m o n s u g g e s t s t h a t t h e w o r k s a r e a r e s p o n s e t o m o d e r n l i f e . T h e a b s t r a c t w o r k s do n o t r e p r e s e n t e s c a p i s m ; r a t h e r , S o l o m o n p r o p o s e s t h a t t h e p a i n t i n g s r e l a t e t o t h e c o n t e m p o r a r y w o r l d b y v i r t u e o f t h e i r e x p r e s s i o n s o f i n d i v i d u a l e x p e r i e n c e , a n d t h a t t h i s e x p r e s s i o n , i n c o n t r a s t t o t h e A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s t s c o m m e n t o n a l i e n a t i o n r e s u l t i n g f r o m m o d e r n l i f e , was a c t u a l l y a p o s i t i v e a n d o p t i m i s t i c o n e . W h i l e S o l o m o n n e v e r a c t u a l l y e l a b o r a t e s o n t h i s p o s i t i o n , he s u g g e s t s t h a t t h e a r t w o r k i s " e n g a g e d " t h r o u g h i t s e m b r a c e o f t h e p o s i t i v e a s p e c t s o f s o c i e t y , a t t a c h i n g new i m p o r t a n c e t o human e x p r e s s i o n t h r o u g h a m b i g u i t y a n d o p t i m i s m . I t i s t h r o u g h t h e s e l a t t e r f e a t u r e s t h a t S o l o m o n n o t o n l y d i f f e r e n t i a t e d N o l a n d ( a n d , i n t h e p a g e s w h i c h f o l l o w e d , R a u s c h e n b e r g ) f r o m t h e p r e c e d i n g 53 g e n e r a t i o n , b u t a l s o c a r v e d o u t a n i c h e t o l e g i t i m i z e , t h r o u g h h i s " u n i q u e " a p p r o a c h , h i s a r t i s t i c c o n t r i b u t i o n s . I n t h e t e x t d e v o t e d t o N o l a n d , S o l o m o n e m p l o y s a f o r m a l l a n g u a g e w h i c h c o n c e n t r a t e s o n g e n e r a l i t i e s r a t h e r t h a n s p e c i f i c e x a m p l e s o f t h e w o r k s ; i n d e e d , n o t o n e p a i n t i n g i s m e n t i o n e d b y name. H i s a n a l y s i s o f t h e w o r k s t h e r e b y t a k e s o n t h e s o m e w h a t d u b i o u s d i s t i n c t i o n o f b e i n g a s a b s t r a c t a s t h e w o r k s he p r o f e s s e s t o a n a l y z e , e v i d e n c e d b y t h e d e s c r i p t i o n o f t h e e f f e c t o f N o l a n d ' s a b s t r a c t i o n s : t h e y " d e p e n d [ s ] o n c o n s t a n t l y c h a n g i n g r e a d i n g s o f f o r m s k e p t i n p r e c a r i o u s t e n s i o n d e s p i t e t h e c l a r i t y o f t h e 34 g e o m e t r y " a n d t h e w o r k " d e l i b e r a t e l y m a i n t a i n s a f o r m a l s i t u a t i o n w h i c h p r e v e n t s r e s o l u t i o n . . . a v i s u a l i n t e r p l a y b e t w e e n p r e c i s e a n d 35 i n d e t e r m i n a t e d e f i n i t i o n s o f b o u n d a r i e s . " F r o m t h e s p e c i f i c t o t h e i n d e f i n i t e a n d b a c k a g a i n , t h e v i e w e r i s g u i d e d t h r o u g h a n a e s t h e t i c l a b y r i n t h w h i c h d e f i e s d e f i n i t i v e e x p l a n a t i o n . " V i g o r a n d i n t e n s i t y " i n N o l a n d ' s w o r k g i v e w a y t o t h e " e n i g m a t i c a n d 36 i n d e t e r m i n a t e . " A t h i s m o s t s p e c i f i c , S o l o m o n e x p l a i n s t h a t t h e i m a g e s " a p p e a r t o e x p a n d a n d c o n t r a c t , t o move o u t t o w a r d t h e s p e c t a t o r t h r o u g h t h e a c t i o n o f c o l o r , e v e n t h o u g h t h e t o n a l s u r f a c e s 37 a r e f l a t a n d s p a t i a l l y d i s c r e t e . " I t i s t h i s f o r m a l a s p e c t o f t h e w o r k w h i c h , d e s p i t e S o l o m o n ' s t e n t a t i v e d e s c r i p t i o n , f o r m s t h e m o s t a c t i v e e l e m e n t i n t h e w o r k , s e t t i n g u p a r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n t h e v i e w e r a n d t h e p a i n t i n g s . W h i l e S o l o m o n p r o v i d e s no s p e c i f i c e x a m p l e s , t h e e f f e c t he d e s c r i b e s i s e v i d e n t i n S u n s h i n e ( 1 9 6 1 , f i g . 4 ) , f e a t u r e d i n t h e B i e n n a l e . F r o m t h e p a i n t i n g ' s c e n t r a l p o i n t o f o r a n g e - y e l l o w , t h e e y e m o v e s o u t w a r d , d r a w n t o t h e same o r a n g e - y e l l o w o f t h e m i d d l e r i n g . F r o m t h e r e t h e e y e j u m p s f u r t h e r o u t w a r d t o t h e 54 c o o l e r c o l o r r i n g s o f b l u e a n d g r e e n , t h e n d r a w s b a c k t o t h e b r i g h t e r t o n e s i n t h e c e n t e r o f t h e c o m p o s i t i o n . S o l o m o n s u g g e s t s t h a t t h i s f o r m a l r e l a t i o n s h i p , t h e e f f e c t s o f e x p a n d i n g a n d c o n t r a c t i n g c o l o r s , c r e a t e s a n " a m b i g u o u s a s s e r t i v e n e s s " d r a w i n g " t h e v i e w e r i n t o a much 38 m o r e a c t i v e r e l a t i o n s h i p w i t h t h e a r t . " Y e t t h i s " a c t i v e r e l a t i o n s h i p " r e s t s p r i m a r i l y o n t h e v i e w e r ' s i n t e r e s t i n t h e e x t e n t o f f o r m a l r e s o l u t i o n ( o r l a c k t h e r e o f ) , l i m i t e d b y t h e c o n s t r a i n t s o f c o l o r . S i n c e t h e B i e n n a l e e x h i b i t i o n c o n c e n t r a t e d o n t h o s e w o r k s b y N o l a n d w i t h o u t t h e " p a i n t e r l y " t o u c h , w h e r e s p l a s h e s o f c o l o r e x t e n d e d b e y o n d t h e c o n c e n t r i c r i n g s , t h e f o c u s was p r i m a r i l y o n t h e f o r m a l e f f e c t s o f c o l o r a r r a n g e m e n t s w i t h o u t t h e d i s t r a c t i o n s o f b r u s h s t r o k e s . T h u s S o l o m o n , l i k e G r e e n b e r g , e m p h a s i z e s N o l a n d ' s f o r m a l d e v e l o p m e n t s i n c o l o r i n t e r m s o f t h e p a i n t i n g s he c h o s e t o s e l e c t , y e t he a t t e m p t s t o g o b e y o n d h e r m e t i c f o r m a l i s m t o i n c l u d e t h e v i e w e r i n h i s a c c o u n t o f t h e w o r k s ' e f f e c t . A t b o t t o m , S o l o m o n ' s a n a l y s i s r e s t s o n t h e c o n c e p t o f a m b i g u i t y - - t h e " u n d e f i n a b l e a n d e n i g m a t i c q u a l i t y " w h i c h g i v e s t h e 39 p a i n t i n g s a c e r t a i n " p r e s e n c e , " a s he d e s c r i b e s i t . I f t h i s s e e m s a l l t o o a b s t r a c t , S o l o m o n e x p l a i n s f u r t h e r , p o i n t i n g o u t t h a t t h i s " p r e s e n c e " r e s u l t s n o t o n l y f r o m t h e v i s u a l p h e n o m e n a i n t r o d u c e d i n t o t h e p a i n t i n g , b u t , m o r e i m p o r t a n t , f r o m t h e h i g h l e v e l o f f e e l i n g , f r o m t h e i n t u i t i v e m a n i p u l a - t i o n o f e f f e c t s w h i c h a r e k e p t s u g g e s t i v e , i m - p r e c i s e i n m e a n i n g , e v o c a t i v e a n d e q u i v o c a l . 40 H e r e S o l o m o n h i m s e l f r e a c h e s new h e i g h t s o f a m b i g u i t y , s i n c e , o n t h e o n e h a n d , we a r e t o l d t h e w o r k s a r e " d e t a c h e d i n t h e c r u c i a l s e n s e " ( s e e p a g e 4 3 ) , w h i l e a t t h e same t i m e t h e y r e c o r d a " h i g h l e v e l o f 55 f e e l i n g . " W h i l e t h i s " f e e l i n g " r e m a i n s u n d e f i n e d , o n e c a n a t l e a s t g a t h e r ( t h r o u g h s h e e r f o r c e o f r e p e t i t i o n ) t h a t i t i s 1) e q u i v o c a l a n d 2 ) o p t i m i s t i c . S h o u l d t h e r e a d e r d e s p a i r i n s e a r c h o f s u b s t a n t i v e c r i t i c i s m , S o l o m o n o f f e r s a p a r t i n g c l u e f o r t h e a r t i s t ' s a e s t h e t i c : N o l a n d ' s s p e c i a l d i s t i n c t i o n l i e s i n h i s u n d e r - s t a n d i n g o f t h e p o s s i b i l i t i e s o f a m o r e s u b t l e a n d c o m p l e x e x p l o i t a t i o n o f e x p r e s s i v e n e s s , am- b i g u i t y , a n d t h e s p e c i a l v i s i o n o f t h e a r t i s t , t o c r e a t e ' a new a b s t r a c t p a i n t i n g . 41 A s i d e f r o m t h e f a c t t h a t S o l o m o n u n w i t t i n g l y a t t e s t s t o h i s own s k i l l s a s a c r e a t o r o f a b s t r a c t t e x t s , t h e p a s s a g e l e a v e s t h e r e a d e r w i t h a n i n s a t i a b l e t h i r s t i n g f o r m o r e i n t h e w a y o f s p e c i f i c s . T h e "new c l a s s i c i s m , " f o r a l l o f i t s " a m b i g u o u s a s s e r t i v e n e s s " u l t i m a t e l y f a l l s i n t o t h e c h a s m o f f o r m a l i s m - c u m - m y s t i f i c a t i o n — t h u s i t i s s m a l l w o n d e r t h a t S o l o m o n p r e f a c e d h i s d i s c u s s i o n w i t h t h e q u a l i f i e r t h a t i t r e l i e d o n a "more p a s s i v e a n d c o n t e m p l a t i v e c o n d i t i o n , " f o r t h e w o r k was i n e x o r a b l y l i n k e d t o f o r m a l d e v e l o p m e n t s i n a r t . C r e d i t i n g t h e w o r k ' s p r i m a r y a p p e a l t o f o r m a l d e v e l o p m e n t s o r ^ e q u i v o c a l e x p r e s s i v e n e s s , S o l o m o n s i m p l y r e i n f o r c e d t h e " p a s s i v e " r e a d i n g o f t h e w o r k . P e r h a p s t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t a s p e c t o f S o l o m o n ' s t e x t o n N o l a n d i s t h e w a y i t r e l a t e s t o h i s d i s c u s s i o n o f R a u s c h e n b e r g , w h i c h f o l l o w s i m m e d i a t e l y a f t e r . A t a g l a n c e , t h e p a s s a g e s d e a l i n g w i t h R a u s c h e n b e r g a p p e a r t o h a v e s t r i k i n g s i m i l a r i t i e s w i t h S o l o m o n ' s d i s c u s s i o n o f N o l a n d : t h e r e i s a n e m p h a s i s o n a m b i g u i t y , o p t i m i s m , a n d t h e a p o l i t i c a l n a t u r e o f t h e w o r k s . Y e t t h e r e i s a n a d d e d e l e m e n t i n t h e 56 t e x t d e v o t e d t o R a u s c h e n b e r g : t h e n o t i o n o f a new s e n s i b i l i t y , w h i c h w o u l d u l t i m a t e l y s e p a r a t e R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k f r o m t h e c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s s h a r e d w i t h N o l a n d ' s "new c l a s s i c i s m . " T o u n d e r s t a n d t h e m e a n i n g o f t h i s "new s e n s i b i l i t y " , a l o n g w i t h i t s i m p l i c a t i o n s n o t o n l y i n t h e a r t w o r l d b u t among i n t e l l e c t u a l s a n d p o l i c y - m a k e r s a s w e l l , i t i s n e c e s s a r y t o e x a m i n e i t s r e l a t i o n s h i p t o R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k a n d , m o r e b r o a d l y , t h e s h i f t i n g p e r c e p t i o n o f s o c i e t y a n d c u l t u r e u n d e r t h e K e n n e d y A d m i n i s t r a t i o n . A t t h e o u t s e t , S o l o m o n e m p h a s i z e s t h a t R a u s c h e n b e r g r e p r e s e n t s a new a p p r o a c h t o a r t , s i m p l y b y v i r t u e o f t h e f a c t t h a t he a b a n d o n s p u r e a b s t r a c t i o n , i n c o r p o r a t i n g f i g u r a t i v e i m a g e r y i n t o h i s p a i n t i n g - c o l l a g e s , o r " c o m b i n e s " , a s he c a l l s t h e m : t h u s , R a u s c h e n b e r g i s " s e t t i n g a s i d e t r a d i t i o n a l v a l u e s r e g a r d i n g s u b j e c t m a t t e r " . T h i s i s a "new" d e v e l o p m e n t , a t l e a s t i n r e l a t i o n t o t h e p r e v i o u s d e c a d e , w h e r e a b s t r a c t i o n d o m i n a t e d . I n a r a t h e r i n d i r e c t f a s h i o n , S o l o m o n i m p l i e s t h a t a b s t r a c t i o n , a n d b y a s s o c i a t i o n , G r e e n b e r g , a r e p a r t o f t h e t r a d i t i o n a l e s t a b l i s h m e n t , no l o n g e r r e s p o n s i v e t o a e s t h e t i c i n n o v a t i o n . T h i s p o i n t he m a k e s a b u n d a n t l y c l e a r when he s p e a k s o f R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s a e s t h e t i c i n , r e l a t i o n t o t h e P o s t - P a i n t e r l y A b s t r a c t i o n i s t s : None o f t h e a b s t r a c t p a i n t e r s a l t e r e d t r a d i t i o n a l a t t i t u d e s t o w a r d m a t e r i a l s o r p r o c e d u r e s i n a n y s u b s t a n t i a l way, b u t R a u s c h e n b e r g l e d a r e v o l u t i o n w h i c h h a s r e j e c t e d w h o l l y t h e i d e a t h a t o n e k i n d o f m a t e r i a l s [ s i c ] o r a n o t h e r a r e m o r e o r l e s s a p p r o p r i a t e t o a r t . 42 T h e t i m e i s r i p e , i t s e e m s , t o c a s t o f f t h e w e i g h t o f t r a d i t i o n , e v e n i f i t i s a s r e c e n t a s t h e p r e v i o u s d e c a d e , b u t t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n o f a c t u a l o b j e c t s a n d j u n k s c u l p t u r e i s h a r d l y a "new" a p p r o a c h i n a r t , 57 s i n c e o v e r f o r t y y e a r s o f c o l l a g e h i s t o r y p r e c e d e d R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s " b r e a k t h r o u g h . " How t h e n , i s t h i s i n n o v a t i o n p a r t i c u l a r l y " r e v o l u t i o n a r y " ? I t w o u l d s e e m t h a t w h i l e S o l o m o n i n d i c a t e s t h e " r e v o l u t i o n " s t e m s f r o m f o r m a l c o n c e r n s , t h e r e i s a n e l e m e n t i n R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s w o r k w h i c h s p e c i f i c a l l y d i f f e r e n t i a t e s h i m n o t o n l y f r o m t h e a b s t r a c t i o n i s t s , b u t f r o m t h e D a d a i s t s p r e c e d i n g h i m : [ R a u s c h e n b e r g h a s a ] p o s i t i v e a n d c o n s t r u c t i v e v i e w o f t h e w o r l d . He h a s no i n t e r e s t i n s o c i a l c o m m e n t o r s a t i r e , o r i n p o l i t i c s ; he u s e s h i s p r e v i o u s l y i n a p p r o p r i a t e m a t e r i a l s n o t o u t o f a d e s i r e t o s h o c k , b u t o u t o f s h e e r d e l i g h t , o u t o f a n o p t i m i s t i c b e l i e f t h a t r i c h n e s s a n d h e i g h t - e n e d m e a n i n g c a n b e f o u n d a n y w h e r e i n t h e w o r l d , e v e n i n t h e r e f u s e f o u n d i n t h e s t r e e t . 43 A c c o r d i n g t o S o l o m o n , t h e b a s i s o f t h e " r e v o l u t i o n " i s , i r o n i c a l l y , a p o l i t i c a l a n d p o s i t i v e . W h i l e t h i s p a r t i c u l a r k i n d o f r e v o l u t i o n i s a n o v e l , i f n o t i n n o v a t i v e , c o n c e p t , R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s c o m b i n e - p a i n t i n g s w e r e n o t a l w a y s d e s c r i b e d i n s u c h a b s o l u t e l y a f f i r m a t i v e t e r m s ; e a r l i e r r e v i e w s o f R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s w o r k f r e q u e n t l y s p o k e o f t h e n e g a t i v e t o n e u n d e r l y i n g h i s c o m b i n e s a s i n t h e c a s e o f B e d ( f i g u r e 3) w h i c h was l i k e n e d t o t h e s c e n e o f a m e s s y m u r d e r . I n l e s s g r a p h i c t e r m s , f i g u r a t i v e a r t i s t F a i r f i e l d P o r t e r i n t e r p r e t e d t h e " g e n e r a l 58 g r u b b i n e s s " o f R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s c o m b i n e s : He [ R a u s c h e n b e r g ] e x p r e s s e s t h e m o r a l i t y o f p o v e r t y , i n d u c i n g a m o n a s t i c r e s p e c t f o r t h i n g s t h a t no o n e v a l u e s . He p r o t e s t s t h e w a s t e i n t h i s s o c i e t y w h e r e we t a k e i t f o r g r a n t e d t h a t a u t o m o b i l e s a r e d i s p o s a b l e , a n d t h a t t r a s h c a n s a r e f i l l e d w i t h p a p e r w o r k . He c a l l s a t t e n t i o n t o t h e s u c c e s s o f i n d u s t r i a l i s m o p p o s i t e t o t h e w a y t h e B a u h a u s d i d , w h i c h saw i n d u s t r i a l i s m a s i t w i s h e d t o be s e e n . 44 P o r t e r ' s v i e w i s o n e t h a t c r e d i t s R a u s c h e n b e r g w i t h a c e r t a i n k i n d o f m o r a l v i e w , o n e w h i c h o s t e n s i b l y e x p o s e s i n d u s t r i a l i s m f o r w h a t i t j_s a n d w h i c h d e p l o r e s w a s t e a n d c o n s p i c u o u s c o n s u m p t i o n i n A m e r i c a n s o c i e t y . H o w e v e r , w h a t i s m o s t i n t e r e s t i n g i n P o r t e r ' s r e v i e w , a l o n g w i t h o t h e r s a c k n o w l e d g i n g a s o m e w h a t n e g a t i v e a s p e c t i n R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s w o r k , i s t h e c o n s i s t e n t o b s e r v a t i o n t h a t t h e c o m b i n e s a r e n o t e s p e c i a l l y c r i t i c a l . P o r t e r n o t e s t h a t " R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k h a s m o r e p e r s o n a l i t y t h a n a n y t h i n g l i k e i t . I t s w e a k n e s s i s t h a t i t 45 t e n d s t o b e c h i c . " I n a s i m i l a r v e i n , c r i t i c I r v i n g S a n d l e r l i k e n e d t h e N e o - D a d a a e s t h e t i c t o t h a t o f t h e A s h C a n S c h o o l , t h e r e a l i s t p a i n t e r s who r e f u s e d t o s a c r i f i c e " t r u t h " t o " b e a u t y , " y e t h e q u a l i f i e d t h e c r i t i c a l p o s i t i o n i m p l i e d b y t h e l a b e l " N e o - D a d a " : . . . u n l i k e t h e D a d a s who c a r r i e d o n a n o r g a n i z e d i n s u l t i n g o f m o d e r n c i v i l i z a t i o n . . . t h e N e o - D a d a s a r e a c c e p t i n g o f t h e i r c o n d i t i o n a n d a r e p r i m a r - i l y i n t e r e s t e d i n e x p r e s s i n g a h e i g h t e n e d s e n s i - t i v i t y t o i t . 46 T h e r e i s s o m e t h i n g o f a p a r a d o x h e r e ; t h e c r i t i c s ( w i t h t h e e x c e p t i o n o f S o l o m o n ) r e c o g n i z e t h e p o s s i b i l i t y o f p r o t e s t d i r e c t e d a t s o c i e t y , g e n e r a l l y o n t h e b a s i s o f t h e c a s t - o f f m a t e r i a l s u s e d , b u t t h e y a l s o 59 c o n c e d e t h a t , r e g a r d l e s s o f t h e s u g g e s t i o n o f c r i t i q u e , t h e w o r k u l t i m a t e l y r e t a i n s a n e u t r a l i t y , e v e n a " c h i c n e s s " , w h i c h o u t w e i g h s 47 i t s p o t e n t i a l l y c r i t i c a l q u a l i t i e s . T h e w a y i n w h i c h S o l o m o n t r a n s f o r m s t h i s p a r a d o x i n t o a t h o r o u g h l y p o s i t i v e e x e r c i s e i n " s h e e r d e l i g h t " i s a c c o m p l i s h e d t h r o u g h t h e c o n c e p t o f a m b i g u i t y , w h i c h i s n o t s i m p l y i m p o s e d o n t h e w o r k , b u t a p p l i e d i n c o n j u n c t i o n w i t h t h e i m a g e s t h e m s e l v e s . C o n s i d e r S o l o m o n ' s s t a t e m e n t r e g a r d i n g R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k : S i n c e h i s p a i n t i n g s a r e n e v e r a n e c d o t a l o r n a r - r a t i v e i n a n y s e n s e , t h e a g g l o m e r a t i o n o f i m a g e s a n d o b j e c t s h a s t h e s o l e f u n c t i o n o f g e n e r a t i n g a k i n d o f i r r e s o l u t e t e n s i o n w i t h r e s p e c t t o t h e m e a n i n g o f t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n t h e i m a g e s . . . R a u s c h e n b e r g k e e p s t h e a t t e n t i o n o f t h e b e h o l d e r b y o f f e r i n g c o n s t a n t l y v a c i l l a t - i n g a l t e r n a t i v e m e a n i n g s , s o t h a t we c a n n e v e r a r r i v e a t a p r e c i s e a n d r e s o l v e d m e a n i n g f o r t h e p a i n t i n g . 48 W h i l e S o l o m o n c l a i m s no p r e c i s e m e a n i n g i s p o s s i b l e , he d o e s n o t t e l l u s t h e r e i s no m e a n i n g t h e r e . T h e m e a n i n g o f t h e w o r k b e c o m e s t h e m u l t i p l i c i t y a n d a m b i g u i t y o f w h i c h S o l o m o n s p e a k s , i m p r e c i s e a n d i r r e s o l u t e . T h e j u x t a p o s i t i o n s o f d i s p a r a t e i m a g e s a n d o b j e c t s g e n e r a t e s a m b i g u i t y , s i n c e t h e r e i s no n a r r a t i v e s e q u e n c e w h i c h l o g i c a l l y f o l l o w s f r o m t h e m , a n d f r o m t h i s , t h e v i e w e r a r r i v e s a t a " m e a n i n g " w h i c h i s i n i t s e l f i n d e t e r m i n a t e . An i m p o r t a n t a s p e c t o f t h i s a n a l y s i s h i n g e s o n t h e v i e w e r ' s w i l l i n g n e s s t o s u s p e n d t h e p o s s i b i l i t y o f n a r r a t i v e i n t h e w o r k s s o t h a t t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p s b e t w e e n . o b j e c t s a n d i m a g e s a r e v a g u e a n d , a t t h e i r m o s t s p e c i f i c , s i m p l y s u g g e s t i v e . I n s o d o i n g , a s s o c i a t i o n s c a l l e d up b y e a c h s p e c i f i c i m a g e d i m i n i s h i n r e l a t i o n t o t h e a m b i g u i t y w h i c h i s e v o k e d 60 t h r o u g h t h e i n t e r a c t i o n b e t w e e n i m a g e s . T h e a m b i g u i t y d o e s n o t o b l i t e r a t e t h e a s s o c i a t i v e v a l u e o f e a c h i m a g e - - r a t h e r , i t p r e y s o n 49 t h i s , u s i n g i t t o e v o k e e q u i v o c a l i t y . T h u s , t h e i n c l u s i o n o f a n e a g l e , a n a s t r o n a u t , t h e S t a t u e o f L i b e r t y i n t h e p h o t o - s i 1 k s c r e e n T r e e F r o g ( 1 9 6 4 , f i g . 5 ) h a v e p a r t i c u l a r m e a n i n g s i n a n o f t h e m s e l v e s - - b u t t h e i r r e l a t i o n s h i p t o o t h e r i m a g e s , l e s s " l o a d e d " s y m b o l i c a l l y , s u c h a s a s a i l b o a t , a c a r , a f i g u r e i n a c r o w d , a h a r d - h a t w o r k e r o n a c o n s t r u c t i o n s i t e - - o b s c u r e s t h e i r own c o n s t i t u t i v e v a l u e a s m e a n i n g s ; t h e i r p r e s e n c e i s t a m e d , p u t a t a d i s t a n c e , made a l m o s t t r a n s p a r e n t ; i t r e c e d e s a l i t t l e , i t b e c o m e s t h e a c c o m p l i c e o f a c o n c e p t w h i c h c o m e s t o i t f u l l y a r m e d : o n c e made u s e o f , i t b e c o m e s a r t i f i c i a l . 50 T h e " p r e s e n c e , " t h e i n d i v i d u a l m e a n i n g s c o m p r i s i n g e a c h i m a g e o f t h e o v e r a l l c o m p o s i t i o n b e c o m e " a c c o m p l i c e s " t o a g r e a t e r c o n c e p t - - a m b i g u i t y . T o a t t e m p t t o c o n n e c t t h e i m a g e s w i t h a n a r r a t i v e w o u l d d e s t r o y t h e i r f u n c t i o n a s f o r m s i n w h i c h a m b i g u i t y c a n b e g e n e r a t e d ; t h i s i s t h e e s s e n t i a l p o i n t S o l o m o n m a k e s when he s p e a k s o f t h e i r " s o l e f u n c t i o n o f g e n e r a t i n g a k i n d o f i r r e s o l u t e t e n s i o n " i n t h e 51 r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n i m a g e s . Y e t t h i s u n r e s o l v e d t e n s i o n , t h i s a m b i g u o u s ' m e a n i n g i s n o t a n o b j e c t i v e , v a l u e - f r e e c o n c e p t . T h e i m a g e s a n d t h e i r c o l l e c t i v e e x p r e s s i o n , h o w e v e r i n d e t e r m i n a t e , c o n n o t e a " s i g n " w h i c h i s n o t o n l y d e p e n d e n t o n t h e d y n a m i c b e t w e e n t h e t w o , b u t a l s o b y t h e i r h i s t o r i c a l s i g n i f i c a n c e a n d s p e c i f i c i t y . I t i s t h i s s i g n , o r s e c o n d l e v e l o f m e a n i n g , w h i c h ( t o u s e S o l o m o n ' s t e r m s ) i s d e s i g n a t e d t h e "new s e n s i b i l i t y . " R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k f o r m s t h e v i s u a l e x p r e s s i o n o f t h i s new s e n s i b i l i t y , b u t w h a t t h a t 61 c o n c e p t r e p r e s e n t e d , a n d why R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s w o r k was p a r t i c u l a r l y s u i t e d f o r i t i n 1 9 6 4 w i l l b e t h e s u b j e c t o f t h e f o l l o w i n g d i s c u s s i o n . I n c o n t r a s t t o t h e a m b i g u i t y e v o k e d b y N o l a n d ' s w o r k , R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s p a r t i c u l a r b r a n d o f e q u i v o c a l i t y i s d e p e n d e n t o n t h e i n c l u s i o n o f i d e n t i f i a b l e i m a g e s . W h i l e i t may s e e m s o m e w h a t p a r a d o x i c a l t h a t o b j e c t s a n d i m a g e s d r a w n f r o m p o p u l a r c u l t u r e w e r e a s , i f n o t m o r e , i n d e t e r m i n a t e t h a n a b s t r a c t i o n , t h i s p a r t i c u l a r s t a t e o f a f f a i r s was r e l a t e d t o a c h a n g i n g c o n c e p t o f m o d e r n i s m , n o t s i m p l y i n r e l a t i o n ,to C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g ' s e v e r - w e a k e n i n g g r i p o n a r t d i s c o u r s e , b u t a l s o t o a s h i f t i n p e r c e p t i o n r e g a r d i n g t h e p u r p o s e s o f a r t . I n h e r 1 9 6 5 e s s a y "One C u l t u r e a n d t h e New S e n s i b i l i t y , " S u s a n S o n t a g , l e f t i s t i n t e l l e c t u a l a n d c r i t i c , d i s c u s s e s t h i s c h a n g e a s a r e s p o n s e t o v a r i o u s a s p e c t s o f m o d e r n s o c i e t y : What we a r e g e t t i n g i s n o t t h e d e m i s e o f a r t , b u t a t r a n s f o r m a t i o n o f t h e f u n c t i o n o f a r t . A r t , w h i c h a r o s e i n human s o c i e t y a s a m a g i c a l - r e l i g i o u s o p e r a t i o n , a n d p a s s e d o v e r i n t o a t e c h n i q u e f o r d e p i c t i n g a n d c o m m e n t i n g o n s e c u l a r r e a l i t y , h a s i n o u r own t i m e a r r o g a t e d t o i t s e l f a new f u n c t i o n . . . A r t t o d a y i s a new k i n d o f i n s t r u m e n t , an> i n s t r u - m e n t f o r m o d i f y i n g c o n s c i o u s n e s s a n d o r g a n i z i n g new m o d e s o f s e n s i b i l i t y . 52 T h i s " e x p a n s i o n o f s e n s i b i l i t i e s " i s made p o s s i b l e t h r o u g h t h e i n c o r p o r a t i o n o f m a t e r i a l s w h i c h w e r e , a s S o l o m o n w o u l d s a y , " p r e v i o u s l y i n n a p p r o p r i a t e " t o a r t e x p r e s s i o n . S o n t a g w e l c o m e s t h i s c h a n g e , c l a i m i n g t h a t a c r i t i c a l p o s i t i o n i n a r t s m a c k s o f a d e a d , m o r a l i z i n g t r a d i t i o n and m u s t g i v e w a y t o a n a e s t h e t i c w h i c h f o r m s a 6? b r i d g e b e t w e e n t h e w o r l d a n d a r t : T h e M a t t h e w A r n o l d n o t i o n o f c u l t u r e d e f i n e s a r t a s t h e c r i t i c i s m o f l i f e — t h i s b e i n g u n d e r s t o o d a s t h e p r o p o u n d i n g o f m o r a l , s o c i a l , a n d p o l i t i c a l i d e a s . T h e new s e n s i b i l i t y u n d e r s t a n d s a r t a s a n e x t e n s i o n o f l i f e — t h i s b e i n g u n d e r s t o o d a s t h e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f ( n e w ) m o d e s o f v i v a c i t y . . . A g r e a t w o r k o f a r t i s n e v e r s i m p l y ( o r e v e n m a i n l y ) a v e h i c l e o f i d e a s o r m o r a l s e n t i m e n t s . I t i s , f i r s t o f a l l , a n o b j e c t m o d i f y i n g o u r c o n s c i o u s - n e s s a n d s e n s i b i l i t y . . . 5 3 S o n t a g i s a d v o c a t i n g a f u s i o n o f " s p h e r e s , " s o t o s p e a k , w h e r e a r t b e c o m e s a n i n t e g r a l , p o s i t i v e c o m p o n e n t o f s o c i e t y r a t h e r t h a n a r e m o v e d , c r i t i c a l e l e m e n t ( o s t e n s i b l y " s e v e r e d " f r o m l i f e ) . T h e r e i s no r o o m i n t h i s new v i s i o n o f a r t f o r e l i t i s t t h e o r i e s o f a e s t h e t i c s w h i c h k e e p t h e w o r l d a t b a y ; b y e x p a n d i n g i t s f u n c t i o n t o d e v e l o p s e n s i b i l i t i e s h i t h e r t o u n t o u c h e d , a r t w i l l c o n n e c t a n d l i n k t o e x p e r i e n c e , e v e n i f t h i s b e a v a g u e , u n d e f i n e d p r o c e s s . I f t h e s e "new m o d e s o f v i v a c i t y " s e e m a l l t o o a b s t r a c t i n S o n t a g ' s a c c o u n t , t h e i m a g e s a n d m a t e r i a l s d r a w n f r o m s o c i e t y w h i c h R a u s c h e n b e r g i n c o r p o r a t e s i n h i s w o r k make t h i s new s e n s i b i l i t y a l i t t l e m o r e down t o e a r t h . A l a n S o l o m o n e x p l a i n s how R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s own " p h i l o s o p h i c a l " a p p r o a c h t r a n s f o r m s t h e a b s t r a c t i n t o a m o r e t a n g i b l e r e a l i t y : [ R a u s c h e n b e r g ] e x p r e s s e s t h e w h o l e p o i n t o f v i e w o f t h e m o v e m e n t f o r w h i c h h e i s t h e p o i n t o f d e p a r t u r e : ' P a i n t i n g r e l a t e s t o b o t h a r t a n d l i f e . N e i t h e r c a n b e m a d e . I t r y t o a c t i n t h a t g a p b e t w e e n t h e t w o . ' I n o t h e r w o r d s , t h e c o n d i t i o n s he b r i n g s t o h i s a r t a r e i d e n t i c a l w i t h t h e c o n d i t i o n s h e f i n d s i n t h e r e a l w o r l d ; m e a n i n g a n d v a l u e a r e i n h e r e n t i n b o t h , we n e e d o n l y s e e k t h e m o u t . 54 63 S o l o m o n ' s i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r d s c o m e s c l o s e t o t h e p o s i t i o n e s p o u s e d b y S o n t a g : R a u s c h e n b e r g b r i d g e s t w o d i s p a r a t e w o r l d s , a r t a n d l i f e . A s a r e s u l t o f t h i s u n i o n , e x p e r i e n c e a n d a r t c o e x i s t i n h a p p y h a r m o n y - - n o " M a t t h e w A r n o l d n o t i o n o f c u l t u r e " i n t e r f e r e s . T h e b r i d g e b e t w e e n a r t a n d l i f e i s no m o r e l i t e r a l l y i l l u s t r a t e d t h a n i n R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s W i n t e r P o o l ( 1 9 5 9 , f i g . 6 ) w h e r e t w o p a i n t e d c a n v a s e s a r e j o i n e d b y a r e a l l a d d e r . T h e r i g h t p a n e l i s p r i m a r i l y p a t c h e s o f p a i n t , r o u g h l y a p p l i e d , w h i l e t h e l e f t p a n e l i n c l u d e s a c t u a l p i c t u r e f r a m e s a n d o t h e r " w o r l d l y " m a t e r i a l s . N a i l e d t o t h e l a d d e r , t h e c a n v a s e s a r e l i t e r a l l y j o i n e d t o t h e " w o r l d " ( o r i t s m a t e r i a l " r e p r e s e n t a t i v e " ) a n d a l l e l e m e n t s a r e p l a c e d o n t h e same p l a n e . A s i m i l a r t h e m e f o u n d i t s e x p r e s s i o n i n R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s T r a c e r ( 1 9 6 4 , f i g . 7 ) ; a n i c o n o f h i g h a r t , R u b e n s ' T o i l e t o f V e n u s , i s p l a c e d o n a p a r w i t h i m a g e s o f s t r e e t s c e n e s , a r m y h e l i c o p t e r s , c a g e d b i r d s a n d a n A m e r i c a n e a g l e . E a c h i m a g e i s t r e a t e d w i t h t h e same l e v e l o f i n d i f f e r e n c e — R u b e n s a n d h a r d h a t w o r k e r s c o - e x i s t s i d e b y s i d e a s e q u a l s , r e p r o d u c e d b y t h e same t e c h n o l o g i c a l p r o c e s s . E v e n t h e p r o c e s s i t s e l f b r e a k s down t h e b a r r i e r s b e t w e e n a r t a n d l i f e , f o r R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s s i l k s c r e e n i n g t e c h n i q u e a p p r o x i m a t e t h a t u s e d i n a d v e r t i s i n g . I t i s o n e m o r e a r e a i n w h i c h R a u s c h e n b e r g " e x p a n d s s e n s i b i l i t i e s " i n a p o s i t i v e w a y , a s Max K o z l o f f e x p l a i n s : . . . h i s s t a t e m e n t i s n o t u n f r i e n d l y t o w a r d o u r t e c h n o l o g i c a l p a c k a g i n g o f s e n s a t i o n s , b u t r a t h e r w e l c o m e s t h e i n h e r e n t p o s s i b i l i t i e s o f t h e m a s s m e d i a [...] E a c h o f t h e s e t a b l e a u x i s p a r t o f a c o n t i n u i n g b a d i n a g e b e t w e e n t h e a s s e r t i o n o f p a i n t a n d t h e c o n t i n u i n g c l a i m s o f t h e o u t s i d e w o r l d , now c a r r i e d o n t h r o u g h t h e m e d i a t i o n o f r e p r o d u c t i v e p r o c e s s e s . 55 64 T a p p i n g i n t o t e c h n o l o g i c a l d e v e l o p m e n t s a n d m a s s m e d i a , R a u s c h e n b e r g o s t e n s i b l y u n l e a s h e s a r a n g e o f p o s s i b i l i t i e s w h e r e b y t h e v e r y p r o c e s s e s o r f o r m s o f h i s w o r k b e c o m e a s a c c e s s i b l e a s t h e i m a g e s t h e m s e l v e s . S o n t a g e l a b o r a t e s o n t h e i m p l i c a t i o n s o f t h i s " d e m o c r a t i z a t i o n " : One i m p o r t a n t c o n s e q u e n c e o f t h e new s e n s i b i l i t y ( w i t h i t s a b a n d o n m e n t o f t h e M a t t h e w A r n o l d n o t i o n o f c u l t u r e ) . . . [ i s ] t h a t t h e d i s t i n c t i o n b e t w e e n ' h i g h ' a n d ' l o w ' c u l t u r e s e e m s l e s s a n d l e s s m e a n - i n g f u l . F o r s u c h a d i s t i n c t i o n — i n s e p a r a b l e f r o m t h e M a t t h e w A r n o l d a p p a r a t u s — s i m p l y d o e s n o t make s e n s e f o r a c r e a t i v e c o m m u n i t y o f a r t i s t s a n d s c i e n t i s t s e n g a g e d i n p r o g r a m m i n g s e n s a t i o n s , u n i n t e r e s t e d i n a r t a s a s p e c i e s o f m o r a l j o u r n - a l i s m . 5 6 A s c u l t u r a l d i s t i n c t i o n s b e t w e e n " h i g h " a n d " l o w " b e c o m e i n c r e a s i n g l y o b s c u r e d , a r t w o u l d b e , i n t h e o r y , m o r e a c c e s s i b l e f o r a l l . T h e p o s s i b i l i t i e s r e s u l t i n g f r o m t h i s d e v e l o p m e n t i s a r t i c u l a t e d m o s t a p t l y b y S o n t a g : I f a r t i s u n d e r s t o o d a s a f o r m o f d i s c i p l i n e o f t h e f e e l i n g s a n d a p r o g r a m m i n g o f s e n s a - t i o n s t h e n t h e f e e l i n g ( o r s e n s a t i o n ) g i v e n o f f b y a R a u s c h e n b e r g p a i n t i n g m i g h t b e l i k e t h a t o f a s o n g b y t h e S u p r e m e s . 57 W h i l e f e w d i s a g r e e d w i t h S o n t a g ' s a s s e s s m e n t o f t h e s i t u a t i o n , n o t e v e r y o n e a n t i c i p a t e d b e - b o p p i n g t o " B a b y L o v e " o r a R a u s c h e n b e r g c o m b i n e w i t h q u i t e t h e same e n t h u s i a s m a s s h e . W h i l e S o n t a g ' s v i s i o n o f t h e e g a l i t a r i a n a g e o f c u l t u r e may h a v e h a d a n a d m i r a b l e a n t i - e l i t i s t , d e m o c r a t i c a p p e a l , h e r o p t i m i s t i c 65 c o n c e p t i o n o f t h e f u t u r e d i d n o t e n j o y u n i v e r s a l c o n s e n s u s . T h o s e who w e r e c r i t i c a l o f t h e new s e n s i b i l i t y w e r e n o t c o n v i n c e d t h a t t h e new R e n a i s s a n c e was a t h a n d ; i n d e e d , t h e y a r g u e d t h a t t h e i n t e g r a t i o n o f h i g h a n d l o w c u l t u r e w o u l d n o t e l e v a t e , b u t r a t h e r w o u l d l e v e l a l l c u l t u r e . T h e d e b a t e h a d a s i t s s t a r t i n g p o i n t v a r y i n g v i e w s o n t h e e f f e c t s o f m a s s c u l t u r e . I n c o n t r a s t t o t h e p o p u l i s t p o s i t i o n a d o p t e d b y S o n t a g , l e f t i s t D w i g h t M a c d o n a l d e x p r e s s e d h i s c o n c e r n s w i t h p o s e d b y m a s s c u l t u r e i n h i s 1 9 6 1 e s s a y " M a s s c u l t a n d M i d c u l t " : . . . M a s s c u l t i s a d y n a m i c , r e v o l u t i o n a r y f o r c e , b r e a k i n g down t h e o l d b a r r i e r s o f c l a s s , t r a d i - t i o n , a n d t a s t e , d i s s o l v i n g a l l c u l t u r a l d i s t i n c - t i o n s . I t m i x e s , s c r a m b l e s e v e r y t h i n g t o g e t h e r , p r o d u c i n g w h a t m i g h t b e c a l l e d h o m o g e n i z e d c u l t u r e ...[but-O. w h e r e a s t h e c r e a m i s s t i l l i n t h e homo- g e n i z e d m i l k , somehow i t d i s a p p e a r s f r o m h o m o g e - n i z e d c u l t u r e . F o r t h e p r o c e s s d e s t r o y s a l l v a l u e s , s i n c e v a l u e - j u d g e m e n t s r e q u i r e d i s c r i m - i n a t i o n , a n u g l y w o r d i n 1 i b e r a l - d e m o c r a t i c A m e r i c a . M a s s c u l t i s v e r y , v e r y d e m o c r a t i c ; i t r e f u s e s t o d i s c r i m i n a t e a g a i n s t o r b e t w e e n a n y t h i n g o r a n y b o d y . A l l i s g r i s t f o r i t s m i l l a n d a l l c o m e s o u t f i n e l y g r o u n d i n d e e d . 58 What i s p e r h a p s m o s t i n t e r e s t i n g i n M a c d o n a l d ' s o b s e r v a t i o n s i s t h a t t h e c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s o f " m a s s c u l t " d o n o t d i f f e r m a r k e d l y f r o m S o n t a g ' s c o n c e p t i o n o f c u l t u r e , w h e r e M o t o w n h i t s a n d R a u s c h e n b e r g c o m b i n e s e x i s t e d s i d e b y s i d e . M a c d o n a l d i d e n t i f i e s t h e e g a l i t a r i a n a s p e c t o f m a s s c u l t u r e , i t s n o n - d i s c r i m i n a t i n g c h a r a c t e r , i t s a b i l i t y t o e l i m i n a t e c l a s s d i s t i n c t i o n s . T h e p o i n t o f c o n t e n t i o n b e t w e e n S o n t a g a n d M a c d o n a l d l i e s i n t h e i r r e s p e c t i v e v i e w s o f t h e e f f e c t s o f " d e m o c r a t i z a t i o n . " M a c d o n a l d p o i n t s t o t h e f a c t t h a t t h e r e s u l t a n t s h i f t i s m e r e l y q u a n t i t a t i v e ( m o r e c u l t u r a l o p t i o n s a r e a v a i l a b l e i f d i s c r i m i n a t i n g s t a n d a r d s a r e e l i m i n a t e d ) r a t h e r t h a n q u a l i t a t i v e . 66 T h e s i t u a t i o n d o e s n o t p r o m i s e t o r a i s e o v e r a l l s t a n d a r d s , a s S o n t a g h o p e d , b u t p r e c l u d e s t h e p o s s i b i l i t y o f s u c h a n o c c u r r e n c e , a s H e r b e r t M a r c u s e e x p l a i n e d : T h e r a n g e o f c h o i c e o p e n t o t h e i n d i v i d u a l i s n o t t h e d e c i s i v e f a c t o r i n d e t e r m i n i n g t h e d e g r e e o f human f r e e d o m , b u t w h a t c a n b e c h o s e n a n d w h a t i s c h o s e n b y t h e i n d i v i d u a l . . . F r e e c h o i c e among a w i d e v a r i e t y o f g o o d s a n d s e r v i c e s d o e s n o t s i g - n i f y f r e e d o m i f t h e s e g o o d s a n d s e r v i c e s s u s t a i n s o c i a l c o n t r o l s o v e r a l i f e o f t o i l a n d f e a r - - t h a t i s , i f t h e y s u s t a i n a l i e n a t i o n . A n d t h e s p o n t a n e o u s r e p r o d u c t i o n o f s u p e r i m p o s e d n e e d s b y t h e i n d i v i d - u a l d o e s n o t e s t a b l i s h a u t o n o m y , i t o n l y t e s t i f i e s t o t h e e f f i c a c y o f t h e s e c o n t r o l s . 59 H i s w o r d s a r t i c u l a t e t h e f u n d a m e n t a l c o n c e p t i n f o r m i n g a c r i t i c a l p e r s p e c t i v e o n m a s s c u l t u r e : i n d u s t r i a l i z a t i o n c r e a t e s a d e m a n d f o r c u l t u r e — a d e m a n d w h i c h i n c r e a s e s a s l e i s u r e t i m e b e c o m e s m o r e a v i l a b l e - - b u t s a t i a t e s t h i s d e m a n d w i t h a c u l t u r e , m a s s c u l t u r e , w h i c h e n t e r t a i n s a n d d i s t r a c t s f r o m t h e r e a l c o n d i t i o n s o f s o c i e t y , 60 t h o s e w h i c h i n i t i a l l y i n d u c e d t h e d e s i r e f o r r e l e a s e f r o m , i t . M a r c u s e a n d M a c d o n a l d , a l o n g w i t h o t h e r c r i t i c s o f m a s s c u l t u r e a n d t h e "new s e n s i b i l i t y " , n e c e s s a r i l y b a s e d t h e i r c r i t i q u e o n t h e b e l i e f t h a t a g e n u i n e c u l t u r e o f t h e p e o p l e c o u l d n o t b e a t t a i n e d u n d e r t h e e x i s t i n g s t r u c t u r e o f c a p i t a l i s m , w h i c h b y i t s v e r y n a t u r e was a l i e n a t i n g . T h i s a l i e n a t i o n h a d b e e n a s s i m i l a t e d i n t h e p r e v i o u s 61 d e c a d e a s a n e m b l e m o f f r e e d o m a n d i n d i v i d u a l i t y . B u t a s A l a n S o l o m o n h a d p o i n t e d o u t i n t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n o f t h e B i e n n a l e c a t a l o g u e , a ( new g e n e r a t i o n h a d m a t u r e d b e y o n d t h e a n g s t o f t h e p r e v i o u s d e c a d e s , s i g n a l i n g t h e b e g i n n i n g o f t h e " p o s t - F r e u d i a n a g e . " A l i e n a t i o n was o n t h e o u t s , a n d a new a g e was t a k i n g i t s p l a c e , a s 67 c o n s e r v a t i v e s o c i o l o g i s t E d w a r d S h i l s e x p l a i n e d : T h i s new o r d e r o f s o c i e t y ["mass s o c i e t y " ] , d e - s p i t e a l l i t s i n t e r n a l c o n f l i c t s , ' d i s c l o s e s i n t h e i n d i v i d u a l a g r e a t e r s e n s e o f a t t a c h m e n t t o t h e s o c i e t y a s a ' w h o l e , a n d o f a f f i n i t y w i t h h i s f e l l o w s . . . T h e new s o c i e t y i s a m a s s s o c i e t y p r e - c i s e l y i n t h e s e n s e t h a t t h e m a s s p o p u l a t i o n h a s b e c o m e i n c o r p o r a t e d i n t o s o c i e t y . T h e c e n t e r o f s o c i e t y - - t h e c e n t r a l i n s t i t u t i o n s , a n d t h e c e n t r a l v a l u e s y s t e m s w h i c h g u i d e a n d l e g i t i m a t e t h e s e i n s t i t u t i o n s — h a s e x t e n d e d i t s b o u n d a r i e s . M o s t o f t h e p o p u l a t i o n ( t h e " m a s s " ) now s t a n d s i n a c l o s e r r e l a t i o n s h i p t o t h e c e n t e r t h a n h a s b e e n t h e c a s e i n e i t h e r p r e m o d e r n s o c i e t i e s o r i n t h e e a r l i e r p h a s e s o f m o d e r n s o c i e t y . 62 T h e r e was no n e e d t o t a l k o f a l i e n a t i o n p r o d u c e d b y s o c i e t y when i n f a c t t h e i n d i v i d u a l s w i t h i n i t w e r e i n c r e a s i n g l y i n t e g r a t e d t h r o u g h t h e i r " g r e a t e r s e n s e o f a t t a c h m e n t . " T h e s e i n d i v i d u a l s c o n v e r g e t o f o r m a m a s s s o c i e t y w h i c h h a s a s i t s f o c u s a v i t a l c e n t e r o f s h a r e d v a l u e s a n d i n s t i t u t i o n s . W h e r e a s c r i t i c s o f m a s s c u l t u r e c l a i m e d 63 t h a t m a s s s o c i e t y d e s t r o y e d t h e i n d i v i d u a l , t h e o p t i m i s t i c s o c i o l o g i s t a r g u e d t h a t m a s s s o c i e t y e n r i c h e d t h e i n d i v i d u a l ' s p o t e n t i a l : M a s s s o c i e t y h a s a r o u s e d a n d e n h a n c e d i n d i v i d u - a l i t y . I n d i v i d u a l i t y i s c h a r a c t e r i z e d b y a n o p e n - n e s s t o e x p e r i e n c e , a n e f f l o r e s c e n c e o f s e n s a t i o n a n d s e n s i b i l i t y . . . [ i t ] h a s l i b e r a t e d t h e c o g n i t i v e , a p p r e c i a t i v e a n d m o r a l c a p a c i t i e s o f i n d i v i d u a l s . L a r g e r e l e m e n t s o f t h e p o p u l a t i o n h a v e c o n s c i o u s l y l e a r n e d t o v a l u e t h e p l e a s u r e s o f e y e , e a r , t a s t e , t o u c h , a n d c o n v i v i a l i t y . P e o p l e make c h o i c e s m o r e f r e e l y i n m a n y s p h e r e s o f l i f e , , a n d t h e s e c h o i c e s a r e n o t n e c e s s a r i l y made f o r t h e m b y t r a d i t i o n , a u t h o r i t y , o r s c a r c i t y . 64 T h e l i m i t a t i o n s o f c h o i c e a r e c a s t a s i d e i n f a v o r o f t h e g r e a t e r 68 g o o d - - t h e d e v e l o p m e n t o f t h e i n d i v i d u a l . W h i l e M a r c u s e a r g u e d t h a t t h e s e c h o i c e s w e r e i l l u s o r y s i n c e t h e y s u s t a i n e d a l i e n a t i o n , S h i l s a r g u e d t h a t a l i e n a t i o n no l o n g e r was a n i s s u e . M a s s s o c i e t y p a r a d o x i c a l l y p r o d u c e d g r e a t e r i n d i v i d u a l i t y . S o c i o l o g i s t , C l y d e K l u c k h o h n , e c h o i n g S h i l s ' v i e w , e x p l a i n e d : T o d a y ' s k i n d o f ' c o n f o r m i t y ' may a c t u a l l y b e s t e p t o w a r d m o r e g e n u i n e i n d i v i d u a l i t y i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s . ' C o n f o r m i t y ' i s l e s s o f a p e r s o n a l a n d p s y c h o l o g i c a l p r o b l e m - - l e s s t i n g e d w i t h a n x i e t y a n d g u i o t . . . I f o n e a c c e p t s o u t w a r d l y t h e c o n v e n - t i o n s o f o n e ' s g r o u p , o n e may h a v e g r e a t e r p s y c h i c e n e r g y t o d e v e l o p a n d f u l f i l l o n e ' s p r i v a t e p o t e n - t i a l i t i e s a s a u n i q u e p e r s o n . 6 5 I f f u l f i l l m e n t c o u l d o n l y come t h r o u g h i n d i v i d u a l p o t e n t i a l , a n d t h i s i n t u r n d e p e n d e d qn t h e i n d i v i d u a l ' s a b i l i t i e s t o a s s i m i l a t e w i t h s o c i e t y , c e r t a i n l y t h e g r e a t e r r a n g e o f o p p o r t u n i t i e s i n m a s s c u l t u r e w o u l d o n l y s e r v e t o e n h a n c e t h e p o s s i b i l i t i e s f o r i n d i v i d u a l i t y . Was t h i s n o t w h a t S o n t a g h a d a d v o c a t e d i n h e r p l e a f o r " e x p a n d i n g s e n s i - b i l i t i e s " ? T h e r e was no n e e d f o r a n o p p o s i t i o n a l c u l t u r e when f u l - f i l l m e n t was j u s t a r o u n d t h e c o r n e r . T h i s i n t e r p r e t a t i o n was b o l s t e r e d b y t h e c o n t e n t i o n o f m a n y i n t e l l e c t u a l s t h a t s o c i e t y was i n f a c t b e t t e r t h a n e v e r b e f o r e . T h e c u l t u r a l o p t i m i s m e x p r e s s e d b y l e f t i s t s s u c h a s S o n t a g a n d c o n s e r v a t i v e s l i k e S h i l s f o u n d i t s p o l i t i c a l c o u n t e r p a r t i n t h e e n d o f i d e o l o g y - - a n i n t e l l e c t u a l d i s c o u r s e w h i c h was s o l a b e l e d a f t e r 66 ! D a n i e l B e l l ' s b o o k o f t h e same name. B e l l c i t e d t h e f a c t t h a t i n t e l l e c t u a l s w e r e i n a g r e e m e n t , f o r t h e m o s t p a r t , o n p o l i t i c a l i s s u e s — n o t a b l y t h a t p o l i t i c a l p l u r a l i s m a n d t h e w e l f a r e s t a t e p r o v e d t o be t h e m o s t v i a b l e m e a n s w i t h w h i c h t o i m p r o v e s o c i e t y , a f t e r t h e h a r d - l e a r n e d l e s s o n s o f S t a l i n i s m h a d p r o v e d t h a t p o l i t i c a l e x t r e m i s m 69 o f a n y k i n d r e s u l t e d i n t o t a l i t a r i a n i s m . T h e s i t u a t i o n , a s B e l l saw i t , was t h a t t o o l d p o l i t i c o - e c o n o m i c r a d i c a l i s m ( p r e o c c u p i e d w i t h s u c h m a t t e r s a s t h e s o c i a l i z a t i o n o f i n d u s t r y ) h a s l o s t i t s m e a n i n g , w h i l e t h e s t u l t i f y i n g a s p e c t s o f c o n t e m p o r a r y c u l t u r e ( e . g . , . t e l e v i s i o n ) c a n n o t be r e d r e s s e d i n p o l i t i c a l t e r m s . A t t h e same t i m e , A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e h a s a l m o s t c o m p l e t e l y a c c e p t e d t h e a v a n t - g a r d e , p a r t i c u l a r l y i n a r t , a n d t h e o l d e r a c a d e m i c s t y l e s h a v e b e e n d r i v e n o u t c o m p l e t e l y . T h e i r o n y , f u r t h e r , f o r t h o s e who s e e k ' c a u s e s ' i s t h a t t h e w o r k e r s , w h o s e g r i e v a n c e s w e r e o n c e t h e d r i v i n g e n e r g y f o r s o c i a l c h a n g e , a r e m o r e s a t i s f i e d w i t h s o c i e t y t h a n t h e i n t e l l e c t u a l s . T h e w o r k e r s h a v e n o t a c h i e v e d U t o p i a , b u t t h e i r e x p e c t a t i o n s w e r e l e s s t h a n t h o s e o f t h e i n t e l l e c t u a l s , a n d t h e g a i n s c o r r e s p o n d i n g l y l a r g e r . 67 C r i t i c a l i n t e l l e c t u a l s s u c h a s M a r c u s e a n d M a c d o n a l d a p p e a r e d t o b e t h e o n l y d i s g r u n t l e d m e m b e r s o f s o c i e t y , d e s p i t e t h e i m p r o v e m e n t s made w i t h i n t h e s y s t e m ; i n d e e d , B e l l i m p l i e s t h a t t h e i r c r i t i q u e i s r e d u n d a n t i n a s o c i e t y w h i c h h a s b e c o m e s o p r o g r e s s i v e t h a t i t e v e n a c c e p t s t h e a v a n t - g a r d e . F o r M a c d o n a l d , t h i s l a t t e r f e a t u r e was h a r d l y r e a s s u r i n g ; i n a c c e p t i n g t h e a v a n t - g a r d e , s o c i e t y d e v e l o p e d a new " t w i s t " t o m a s s c u l t u r e : " m i d c u l t . " I n M a s s c u l t t h e t r i c k i s p l a i n - - t o p l e a s e t h e c r o w d b y a n y m e a n s . B u t M i d c u l t h a s i t b o t h w a y s : i t p r e t e n d s t o r e s p e c t t h e s t a n d a r d s o f H i g h C u l t u r e w h i l e i n f a c t i t v u l g a r i z e s t h e m . . . I t i s i t s a m b i - g u i t y t h a t m a k e s M i d c u l t a l a r m i n g . F o r i t p r e s e n t s i t s e l f a s a p a r t o f H i g h C u l t u r e . N o t t h a t c o t e r i e s t u f f , n o t t h o s e s n o b b i s h i n b r e d s o - c a l l e d i n t e l l e c - t u a l s who a r e o n l y t a l k i n g t o t h e m s e l v e s . R a t h e r t h e g r e a t v i t a l m a i n s t r e a m , w i d e a n d c l e a r t h o u g h p e r h a p s n o t s o d e e p . 68 B u t t h e a m b i g u i t y w h i c h M a c d o n a l d f i n d s s o a l a r m i n g w a s , o f c o u r s e , 70 t h e p l a c e i n w h i c h c u l t u r a l g a i n s c o u l d be m a d e , a c c o r d i n g t o t h e p r o p o n e n t s o f t h e new s e n s i b i l i t y . P e r h a p s t h e e x p a n d i n g s e n s i b i l i t i e s w o u l d n o t p r o d u c e a c u l t u r a l U t o p i a , b u t b y m o d i f y i n g e x p e c t a t i o n s , t h e g a i n s c o u l d be " c o r r e s p o n d i n g l y l a r g e r " . . . W h a t i s g o o d f o r t h e w o r k e r c a n b e g o o d f o r t h e i n t e l l e c t u a l . F o r t h o s e i n t e l l e c t u a l s who a d o p t e d t h i s p r a g m a t i c p o s i t i o n , K e n n e d y ' s p r o g r e s s i v e i m a g e c o n f i r m e d t h a t t h e w e l f a r e s t a t e c o u l d r e d r e s s t h e p r o b l e m s o f s o c i e t y w i t h a b i t o f f i n e - t u n i n g . A r a t i o n a l , r e a l i s t i c a p p r o a c h was t h e r e f o r e much m o r e a p p r o p r i a t e t h a t t h e r o m a n t i c U t o p i a n r e v o l u t i o n — i n t e l l e c t u a l d i s i l l u s i o n m e n t was r e p l a c e d b y c o n f i d e n t o p t i m i s m a s t h e p r o m i s e o f l i b e r a l i s m b e c a m e a r e a l i t y . T h e v i e w s o f C o l d War l i b e r a l s a n d l e f t i s t s a d v o c a t i n g l i b e r a l i s m i n t h e name o f p o p u l i s t v a l u e s c o n v e r g e d w i t h t h e p o s s i b i l i t y o f a new a n d b e t t e r s o c i e t y u n d e r t h e new l i b e r a l i s m e s p o u s e d b y K e n n e d y . S e y m o u r M a r t i n L i p s e t , a n a d v o c a t e o f B e l l ' s " e n d o f i d e o l o g y " p o s i t i o n , a r t i c u l a t e d t h i s v i e w when he w r o t e . . . d e m o c r a c y i s n o t o n l y o r e v e n p r i m a r i l y a m e a n s t h r o u g h w h i c h d i f f e r e n t g r o u p s c a n a t t a i n t h e i r e n d s o r s e e k t h e g o o d s o c i e t y , i t i s t h e g o o d s o c i e t y i t s e l f . . . 69 T h e i d e o l o g i c a l s t r u g g l e s b e t w e e n t h e L e f t a n d t h e R i g h t g a v e b i r t h t o l i b e r a l p o l i t i c s i n t h e 5 0 s , b u t b y t h e 6 0 s , t h e s e p o l i t i c s h a d m a t u r e d w i t h t h e K e n n e d y p r o m i s e ; l i b e r a l s no l o n g e r h a d t o f i g h t f o r t h e g o o d s o c i e t y - - t h e y h a d won t h e b a t t l e , c a u g h t u p i n t h e s p i r i t o f t h e New F r o n t i e r . T o p a r a p h r a s e M a c d o n a l d , t h e v i t a l c e n t e r was t h e v i t a l m a i n s t r e a m , w i d e r t h a n e v e r b e f o r e . J u s t a s t h e w e l f a r e s t a t e p r o m i s e d m o r e t o m e m b e r s o f s o c i e t y , 71 t h e new s e n s i b i l i t y i n c u l t u r e p r o m i s e d t h e g r e a t e s t b e n e f i t s , e q u i t a b l y d i s t r i b u t e d among t h e g r e a t e s t n u m b e r . C u l t u r e c o u l d p r o v e d s o c i e t y w i t h a w i d e r r a n g e o f s e n s i b i l i t i e s a n d s e n s a t i o n s b y a b d i c a t i n g i t s o p p o s i t i o n a l p o s i t i o n ; l i k e t h e i n t e l l e c t u a l s , i t c o u l d o p e r a t e m o s t e f f e c t i v e l y i n c o n c e r t w i t h a s y s t e m w h i c h h a d p r o v e n i t s e l f t o be t h e b e s t . T h e e n d o f i d e o l o g y s i g n a l e d t h e i n s t i t u t i o n a l i z a t i o n o f l i b e r a l i s m ; a n d a s c u l t u r e came u n d e r i t s w i n g , i t t o o was l i b e r a l i z e d i n t h e name o f d e m o c r a c y ( a n d a n t i - e l i t i s m . T h e c u l t u r a l s p o k e s m a n f o r t h e New F r o n t i e r , A r t h u r S c h l e s i n g e r , J r . , c l a r i f i e d t h e i m p l i c a t i o n s : . . . t h e g r e a t e s t a r t i s g r e a t b e c a u s e i t i n t e r - p r e t s s i m p l e a n d c o m p l e x e x p e r i e n c e s i m u l t a n e o u s l y a n d c a n t h u s a p p e a l t o p e o p l e a t m a n y l e v e l s . 70 W h i l e i t was f a i r l y c l e a r w h a t R a u s c h e n b e r g r e p r e s e n t e d t o A m e r i c a , t h e t a s k r e m a i n e d t o c o n v i n c e t h e r e s t o f t h e w o r l d t h a t , t h e A m e r i c a n s ' new s e n s i b i l i t y was i n d e e d t h e g r e a t e s t . 72 NOTES 1 L o i s B i n g h a m , memo t o F o r t h e R e c o r d , A p r i l 7, 1 9 6 4 , V e n i c e B i e n n a l e f i l e s . 2 T h e s e w o r k s , a n d t h o s e d i s c u s s e d t h r o u g h o u t t h e t e x t , w e r e f e a t u r e d i n t h e 1 9 6 4 e x h i b i t i o n i n V e n i c e . I t s h o u l d b e n o t e d h e r e t h a t o f t h e " F o u r G e r m i n a l P a i n t e r s , " t h i s d i s c u s s i o n w i l l f o c u s o n R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d N o l a n d ; N o l a n d was t h e o n l y a b s t r a c t i o n i s t e l i g i b l e f o r t h e p r i z e s i n c e t h e a w a r d w e n t t o a l i v i n g a r t i s t . R a u s c h e n b e r g was d e s i g n a t e d b y t h e A m e r i c a n o r g a n i z e r s a s t h e m o s t l i k e l y c o n t e n d e r , e v e n o v e r J o h n s , p e r h a p s b e c a u s e o f h i s h i g h e r p r o f i l e i n t e r n a t i o n a l l y ( h a v i n g h a d t w o s h o w s i n L o n d o n a n d t w o s h o w s i n P a r i s w i t h i n a y e a r o f t h e B i e n n a l e ) . A s f o r J o h n s , i t i s p o s s i b l e t h a t he was c o n s i d e r e d t o o much o f a p a i n t e r , f o r much o f t h e t e x t d e v o t e d t o R a u s c h e n b e r g s a l u t e s h i s a b i l i t i e s t o b r i d g e t h e d i v i s i o n b e t w e e n s c u l p t u r e a n d p a i n t i n g , a n d h o l d s t h i s up a s a n i n n o v a t i o n w i t h m o r e f a r - r e a c h i n g i m p l i c a t i o n s t h a n a n y d e v e l o p m e n t s b y t h e o t h e r " g e r m i n a l p a i n t e r s . " 3 " T r e n d t o t h e ' A n t i - A r t ' , " Newsweek 51 ( M a r c h 3 1 , 1 9 5 8 ) , p . 9 4 . 4 A l a n R. S o l o m o n , X X X I I I n t e r n a t i o n a l B i e n n i a l E x h i b i t i o n o f A r t , V e n i c e , 1 9 6 4 , U n i t e d S t a t e s o f A m e r i c a , " " I n t r o d u c t i o n " ^ ( h e r e a f t e r r e f e r e d t o a s t h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e c a t a l o g u e ) . T h e c a t a l o g u e i s u n p a g i n a t e d b u t d i v i d e d i n t o s e c t i o n s w h i c h I w i l l i n d i c a t e f o r c o n v e n i e n c e . 5 I b i d . , " K e n n e t h N o l a n d . " 6 I b i d . 7 I b i d . , " I n t r o d u c t i o n . " 8 I t i s i n t e r e s t i n g t o n o t e t h a t S o l o m o n o m i t t e d e x t e n s i v e d i s c u s s i o n o f R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s l i n k s w i t h E u r o p e a n a r t i s t s i n t h e B i e n n a l e c a t a l o g u e , c o n t r a r y t o t h e c a t a l o g u e h e w r o t e o n R a u s c h e n b e r g f o r t h e J e w i s h Museum i n 1 9 6 3 . I n t h e e a r l i e r t e x t , S o l o m o n e l a b o r a t e d o n s p e c i f i c s i m i l a r i t i e s b e t w e e n P i c a s s o a n d R a u s c h e n b e r g : a m b i g u i t y , j u x t a p o s i t i o n s o f o b j e c t s , c o n t r a s t s o f t e x t u r e a n d c o l o r , a n d s o o n . I n t h e B i e n n a l e c a t a l o g u e , t h e s e q u a l i t i e s a r e a t t r i b u t e d t o R a u s c h e n b e r g a l o n e . S e e A l a n R. S o l o m o n , R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , (New Y o r k : T h e J e w i s h Museum, 1 9 6 3 ) , n . p . 9 V e n i c e B i e n n a l e c a t a l o g u e , " I n t r o d u c t i o n . " 73 10 I b i d . , " K e n n e t h N o l a n d . " 11 F o r a d i s c u s s i o n o f t h e d e v e l o p m e n t o f t h i s a e s t h e t i c , e s p e c i a l l y a s i t p e r t a i n s t o R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d J o h n s , s e e M o i r a R o t h , " T h e A e s t h e t i c o f I n d i f f e r e n c e , " A r t f o r u m 16 ( N o v e m b e r 1 9 7 7 ) , p p . 4 7 - 5 3 . 12 I n d e e d , t h e w o r k s c h o s e n f o r t h e e x h i b i t i o n i n V e n i c e w e r e t h e m o s t " r e s t r a i n e d " p a i n t i n g s b y N o l a n d ; o t h e r w o r k s , s u c h a s L u n a r E p i s o d e ( 1 9 5 9 ) o r R o u n d ( 1 9 6 3 ) , w h i c h s h o w e d e v i d e n c e o f a m o r e p a i n t e r l y t e c h n i q u e w e r e n o t i n c l u d e d . 13 C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g , " L o u i s a n d N o l a n d , " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l ( M a y 1 9 6 0 ) , p . 2 9 . G r e e n b e r g t e n t a t i v e l y i n c l u d e d Sam F r a n c i s w i t h N o l a n d a n d L o u i s , a l t h o u g h he q u a l i f i e d t h i s : " r i g h t now I am n o t h a l f s o s u r e a b o u t h i m [ F r a n c i s ] a s I am a b o u t t h e o t h e r t w o . " ( p . 2 9 ) . 14 F o r a n e l a b o r a t i o n o n t h i s v i e w , s e e C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g , " M o d e r n i s t P a i n t i n g , " A r t s Y e a r b o o k 4 ( 1 9 6 1 ) , p p . 1 0 2 - 1 0 8 , p a s s i m . 15 " L o u i s a n d N o l a n d , " p . 2 8 . 16 C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g , " A f t e r A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 7 ( O c t o b e r 1 9 6 2 ) , p p . 2 9 - 3 1 . 17 C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g , " T h r e e New A m e r i c a n P a i n t e r s , " C a n a d i a n A r t 20 ( M a y / J u n e 1 9 6 3 ) , p . 1 7 5 . 18 " A f t e r A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , " p . 2 9 . 19 " M o d e r n i s t P a i n t i n g , " p . 1 0 3 . 20 N o l a n d , q u o t e d i n C o l o r ( U C L A G a l l e r i e s E x h i b i t i o n c a t a l o g u e , L o s A n g e l e s , 1 9 7 0 , p p . 2 8 - 2 9 ) , q u o t e d b y K e n w o r t h M o f f e t t , K e n n e t h N o l a n d , (New Y o r k : A b r a m s , 1 9 7 7 ) , p . 5 0 . 21 • N o l a n d , q u o t e d b y P h i l i p L e i d e r , " T h e T h i n g i n P a i n t i n g i s C o l o r , " T h e New Y o r k T i m e s , ( A u g u s t 2 5 , 1 9 6 8 ) , p p . 2 1 - 2 2 . 22 S e e f o r e x a m p l e , L . C . [ L a w r e n c e C a m p b e l l ] , " K e n n e t h N o l a n d , " A r t News 61 ( M a y 1 9 6 2 ) , p . 10 a n d J . S . [ J a m e s S c h u y l e r ] , " K e n n e t h N o l a n d , " A r t News 55 ( F e b r u a r y 1 9 5 7 ) , p . 1 0 . T h e s e t w o r e v i e w s a r e p a r t i c u l a r l y i n t e r e s t i n g b e c a u s e t h e y u s e G r e e n b e r g t o v a l i d a t e 74 N o l a n d ' s w o r k ; C a m p b e l l m e n t i o n s t h a t N o l a n d was c h o s e n b y G r e e n b e r g a s t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t y o u n g a r t i s t i n c o n t e m p o r a r y a r t w h i l e " J . S . " m e n t i o n s t h a t N o l a n d was s e l e c t e d b y G r e e n b e r g i n K o o t z ' s " E m e r g i n g T a l e n t " s h o w i n 1 9 5 4 . I n b o t h c a s e s , G r e e n b e r g ' s i n f l u e n c e a s a c r i t i c i s u s e d t o e s t a b l i s h t h e i m p o r t a n c e o f t h e a r t i s t . 23 S e e f o r e x a m p l e H i l t o n K r a m e r , "A C r i t i c o n t h e S i d e o f H i s t o r y : N o t e s o n C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g , " A r t s M a g a z i n e 37 ( O c t o b e r 1 9 6 2 ) , p p . 6 0 - 6 3 a n d J a c k K r o l l , "Some G r e e n b e r g C i r c l e s , " A r t News 61 ( M a r c h 1 9 6 2 ) , p . 35+. B o t h a r t i c l e s r e v i e w G r e e n b e r g ' s A r t a n d C u l t u r e , a c o l l e c t i o n o f h i s e s s a y s p u b l i s h e d i n b o o k f o r m ; i t i s s o m e w h a t i r o n i c t h a t t h e s e e s s a y s , o n c e c o n s o l i d a t e d i n a s i n g l e b o o k l o s t much o f t h e i r " r e s i l i e n c y , " t a k i n g o n a n i m p o s i n g p e r m a n e n c e w h i c h made m a n y c r i t i c s u n c o m f o r t a b l e . 24 P r i s c i l l a C o l t , " B o o k R e v i e w s : C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g , A r t a n d C u l t u r e : C r i t i c a l E s s a y s , C o l l e g e A r t J o u r n a l 22 ( W i n t e r 1 9 6 2 ) , p . 1 2 2 . 25 G r e e n b e r g saw J o h n s ' s w o r k a s s o m e w h a t m o r e i n t e r e s t i n g b e c a u s e " t h e a b i d i n g i n t e r e s t o f h i s a r t , a s d i s t i n g u i s h e d f r o m i t s j o u r n a l i s t i c o n e , l i e s l a r g e l y i n t h e a r e a o f t h e f o r m a l o r p l a s t i c . " S e e h i s d i s c u s s i o n o f J o h n s i n " A f t e r A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , " p p . 2 5 - 2 6 . 26 I b i d . , p . 3 2 . 27 Max K o z l o f f , " L e t t e r t o t h e E d i t o r , " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 7 ( J u n e 1 9 6 3 ) , p . 8 8 . T h e l e n g t h y c r i t i q u e w h i c h f o l l o w s i n d i c t s G r e e n b e r g o n t h e o r e t i c a l i s s u e s ( h i s " s y s t e m " o f c r i t i c i s m ) a s w e l l a s h i s o m i s s i o n s o f p a r t i c u l a r a r t i s t s a n d m o v e m e n t s , p a r t i c u l a r l y N e o - D a d a . 28 D o n a l d J u d d a n d V i v i e n R a y n o r , " I n t h e G a l l e r i e s , " A r t s M a g a z i n e 37 ( S e p t e m b e r 1 9 6 3 ) , p p . 5 3 - 5 4 . 29 T o q u o t e G r e e n b e r g : " . . . t h e u n i q u e a n d p r o p e r a r e a o f c o m p e t e n c e i n e a c h a r t c o i n c i d e d w i t h a l l t h a t was u n i q u e i n t h e n a t u r e o f i t s m e d i u m . T h e t a s k o f s e l f - c r i t i c i s m b e c a m e t o e l i m i n a t e f r o m t h e s p e c i f i c e f f e c t s o f e a c h a r t a n y a n d e v e r y e f f e c t t h a t m i g h t c o n c e i v a b l y be b o r r o w e d f r o m o r b y t h e m e d i u m o f a n y o t h e r a r t . " ( " M o d e r n i s t P a i n t i n g , " p . 1 0 3 ) . 30 J u d d r a i s e d t h i s i s s u e i n a n e a r l i e r r e v i e w o f N o l a n d ' s w o r k : " N o l a n d i s o n e o f t h e b e s t , b u t n o t t h e b e s t , n o r i s he t h e l e a d e r o f t h e b e s t g r o u p . T h e i d e a o f s u c c e s s i v e w a v e s , e a c h a t y p e , i s f a l l a c i o u s . " D . J . [ D o n a l d J u d d ? ] , " K e n n e t h N o l a n d , " A r t s M a g a z i n e 36 ( S e p t e m b e r 1 9 6 2 ) , p . 5 3 . 75 31 I n m o r e g e n e r a l t e r m s , t h i s d e b a t e was t o h a v e a f a r - r e a c h i n g i m p a c t o n t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n p o p u l a r c u l t u r e a n d h i g h a r t , s o m e t h i n g w h i c h w i l l b e d i s c u s s e d i n m o r e d e t a i l when R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s c r i t i c a l f o r t u n e s a r e e x a m i n e d . 32 V e n i c e B i e n n a l e C a t a l o g u e , " K e n n e t h N o l a n d . " 33 I b i d . 34 I b i d . 35 I b i d . 36 I b i d . 37 I b i d . 38 I b i d . 39 I b i d . 40 I b i d . 41 I b i d . 42 I b i d . , " R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . " 43 I b i d . 44 F a i r f i e l d P o r t e r , " A r t , " T h e N a t i o n 1 9 0 ( A p r i l 2 3 , 1 9 6 0 ) , p . 3 7 2 . I n a s i m i l a r v e i n , c r i t i c R o b e r t C o a t e s n o t e d t h a t t h e N e o - D a d a a r t i s t s p r o d u c e d w o r k w h i c h p r o t e s t e d " e v e r y t h i n g f r o m i n f l a t i o n t o c r e d i t c a r d s a n d f a t - c a t i s m . . . " ( S e e R o b e r t M. C o a t e s , " T h e ' B e a t ' B e a t i n A r t , " T h e New Y o r k e r 35 ( J a n u a r y 2, 1 9 6 0 ) , p . 6 0 ) . S e e a l s o Max K o z l o f f , " A r t / " " T h e N a t i o n 197 ( D e c e m b e r 7, 1 9 6 3 ) , p . 4 0 3 f o r h i s c o m m e n t s o n t h e i c o n o g r a p h y i n R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k . 45 P o r t e r , p . 3 7 2 . 76 4 6 ' • I r v i n g H e r s c h e l S a n d l e r , " A s h C a n R e v i s i t e d , A New Y o r k L e t t e r , " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 4 ( O c t o b e r 1 9 6 0 ) , p p . 2 8 - 9 . 47 I t i s i n t e r e s t i n g t o n o t e a c o n s e n s u s o n t h i s p o i n t w h e t h e r t h e c r i t i c saw i t i n f a v o r a b l e t e r m s o r n o t . T h u s , w h i l e S a n d l e r ' s ( p o s i t i v e ) r e v i e w s u g g e s t s t h a t t h e u g l i n e s s o f t h e w o r k e v o k e s " t r a g i c " a n d " p o i g n a n t " f e e l i n g s ( i b i d . ) , t h e c o n s e r v a t i v e S i d n e y T i l l i m a b h o r s t h e " c o n v e n t i o n s o f p r o t e s t " i n R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k , b u t a d d s "He i s s u s p e c t b e c a u s e . . . [ h e ] p l a y s t o t h e same j a d e d a u d i e n c e t h a t now a p p r e c i a t e s t h e n o v e l t y o f t h e v i r t u a l f i l t h a n d p r e d i c t a b l e i n s a n i t y o f h i s o b j e c t s . " ( S e e S . T . [ S i d n e y T i l l i m ] , " R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , " A r t s M a g a z i n e 34 ( M a y 1 9 6 0 ) , p . 5 8 ) . D e s p i t e T i l l i m ' s o u t r a g e d t o n e , he i d e n t i f i e s t h e p o p u l a r a p p e a l o f t h e i m a g e s o f " v i r t u a l f i l t h . " W h i l e T i l l i m d e s p a i r s o v e r t h e f a c t t h a t t h e a u d i e n c e h a s b e c o m e e n c h a n t e d w i t h s u c h f i l t h y t h i n g s , a n d p e r h a p s w o r r i e s t h a t p r o t e s t h a s b e c o m e t o o p o p u l a r f o r s a f e t y , P o r t e r i s c o n c e r n e d t h a t t h e e l e m e n t s w h i c h make R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k i n t e r e s t i n g come t o o c l o s e i n f u l f i l l i n g a f a s h i o n a b l e t a s t e . I n b o t h c a s e s , t h e c o n c e r n s s t e m f r o m t h e d i a l e c t i c b e t w e e n t h e " p r o t e s t " e l e m e n t a n d t h e p o p u l a r a p p e a l i n t h e w o r k . 4 8 V e n i c e B i e n n a l e c a t a l o g u e , " R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . " 49 Much o f t h i s a n a l y s i s i s b a s e d o n R o l a n d B a r t h e s ' d i s c u s s i o n o f t h e w a y i d e o l o g y i s c o n v e y e d t h r o u g h i m a g e s . S e e " M y t h T o d a y " i n h i s M y t h o l o g i e s ( t r a n s . A n n e t t e L a v e r s ) , (New Y o r k : H i l l a n d Wang, 1 9 8 1 ) , p p . 1 0 9 - 1 5 9 . 50 I b i d . , p . 1 1 8 . 51 A s i m i l a r p o i n t c a n be made i n r e l a t i o n t o S o l o m o n ' s c o m m e n t s o n t h e a c t u a l f o r m s - - i . e . , j u n k , r e f u s e a n d s o o n - - w h i c h R a u s c h e n b e r g u s e s . B y s e p a r a t i n g t h e m f r o m a n i m p l i e d c r i t i q u e o f w a s t e a n d u g l i n e s s i n s o c i e t y , t h e w o r k s a r e s i m p l y e v o c a t i v e i n f o r m o f " t h e r i c h n e s s a n d h e i g h t e n e d m e a n i n g " t o b e f o u n d i n t h e w o r l d . 52 S u s a n S o n t a g , A g a i n s t I n t e r p r e t a t i o n , "One C u l t u r e a n d t h e New S e n s i b i l i t y , " (New Y o r Y i F a r r a r , S t r a u s , G i r o u x , 1 9 6 6 ) , p . 2 9 6 . 53 I b i d . , p p . 2 9 9 - 3 0 0 . 54 V e n i c e B i e n n a l e c a t a l o g u e , " R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . " 55 K o z l o f f , " A r t " , p . 4 0 2 . 77 56 wOSontag, p . 302. I t i s c u r i o u s t h a t S o n t a g s p e a k s s o o p t i m i s t i c a l l y of t h i s new s e n s i b i l i t y w h e r e s e n s a t i o n s a r e " p r o g r a m m e d . " T h e t e r m e v o k e s o v e r t o n e s o f a n i n c r e a s i n g l y m e c h a n i z e d a n d c o n t r o l l e d s o c i e t y , w h e r e e v e n e m o t i o n a l r e s p o n s e s h a v e a " p l a n n e d " q u a l i t y t o t h e m . H a r d l y c a u s e f o r c e l e b r a t i o n . 57 I b i d . , p . 3 0 3 . • 58 D w i g h t M a c d o n a l d , A g a i n s t t h e A m e r i c a n G r a i n , " M a s s c u l t a n d M i d c u l t , " (New Y o r k : V i n t a g e , 1 9 6 5 T T p . 1 2 . 59 H e r b e r t M a r c u s e , O n e - D i m e n s i o n a l Man ( B o s t o n : B e a c o n P r e s s , 1 9 6 1 ) , p p . 7 - 8 . 60 T.W. A d o r n o e x p r e s s e s t h i s c o n t r a d i c t i o n m o s t l u c i d l y : " D i s t r a c t i o n i s b o u n d t o t h e p r e s e n t mode o f p r o d u c t i o n , t o t h e r a t i o n a l i z e d a n d m e c h a n i z e d p r o c e s s o f l a b o r t o w h i c h . . . t h e m a s s e s a r e s u b j e c t . . . P e o p l e w a n t t o h a v e f u n . A f u l l y c o n c e n t r a t e d a n d c o n s c i o u s e x p e r i e n c e o f a r t i s p o s s i b l e o n l y t o t h o s e w h o s e l i v e s do n o t p u t s u c h a s t r a i n o n t h e m t h a t i n t h e i r s p a r e t i m e t h e y w a n t r e l i e f f r o m b o t h b o r e d o m a n d e f f o r t s i m u l t a n e o u s l y . T h e w h o l e s p h e r e o f c h e a p c o m m e r c i a l e n t e r t a i n m e n t r e f l e c t s t h i s d u a l d e s i r e . " ( " P o p u l a r M u s i c , " q u o t e d b y M a c d o n a l d , p . 5 ) . 61 G u i l b a u t , p p . 1 5 8 - 9 . 62 E d w a r d S h i l s , " M a s s S o c i e t y a n d I t s C u l t u r e , " D a e d a l u s 89 ( S p r i n g 1 9 6 0 ) , p . 288. 63 S e e f o r e x a m p l e , M a c d o n a l d , p . 1 1 . 64 S h i l s , p . 290. 65 C l y d e K l u c k h o h n , q u o t e d b y S e y m o u r M a r t i n L i p s e t , "A C h a n g i n g A m e r i c a n C h a r a c t e r ? " p . 1 7 1 , i n C u l t u r e a n d S o c i a l C h a r a c t e r : T h e Work o f D a v i d R i e s m a n R e v i e w e d , e d s . S e y m o u r M a r t i n L i p s e t a n d L e o L o w e n t h a U [ G l e n c o e , I L : F r e e P r e s s , 1 9 6 1 ) . I t i s i n t e r e s t i n g t o n o t e t h a t t h e c o l l e c t i o n o f e s s a y s r e v i e w s t h e i m p l i c a t i o n s o f D a v i d R i e s m a n ' s T h e L o n e l y C r o w d , w h i c h s t u d i e d t h e t e n d e n c i e s t o c o n f o r m i n s o c i e t y , a s a r e s u l t o f a l i e n a t i o n p r o d u c e d b y i t . M a n y o f t h e e s s a y s d i s a g r e e w i t h h i s p r o p o s a l a n d R i e s m a n h i m s e l f s u g g e s t s t h a t h i s c r i t i q u e was p r o b a b l y " t o o h a r s h . " S e e h i s e s s a y i n t h e a n t h o l o g y , " T h e L o n e l y C r o w d : A R e c o n s i d e r a t i o n i n 1 9 6 0 , " p p . 419- 5 8 . 78 66 D a n i e l B e l l , T h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y , (New Y o r k : C o l l i e r s , 1 9 6 1 ) . 67 D a n i e l B e l l , " T h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y i n t h e W e s t , " p . 1 0 1 , i n T h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y D e b a t e , e d . C h a i m Waxman, (New Y o r k : F u n k a n d W a g n a T T s , 1 9 6 8 ) . 68 M a c d o n a l d , p . 3 7 . 69 S e y m o u r M a r t i n L i p s e t , " T h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y ? , " p . 6 9 , i n Waxman. 70 S c h l e s i n g e r , i n C o n g r e s s i o n a l R e c o r d , p . 1 5 1 3 7 . 79 C H A P T E R 3 T h e 1 9 6 4 B i e n n a l e : P r i z e - W i n n i n g M a c h i n a t i o n s W i t h i n t h e f i r s t week o f t h e 3 2 n d V e n i c e B i e n n a l e ' s o p e n i n g , t h e p r e s s b e g a n i s s u i n g i t s v e r d i c t o v e r t h e R a u s c h e n b e r g p r i z e : t h e c o n s e r v a t i v e L e F i g a r o d e c r i e d t h e P o p a r t i s t ' s v i c t o r y , c h a r g i n g 1 t h a t a n " a p o c a l y p t i c a t m o s p h e r e " h a d t a k e n o v e r t h e G i a r d i n i . T h e l e f t i s t F r e n c h n e w s p a p e r C o m b a t d e n o u n c e d t h e " t r e a s o n i n V e n i c e " a n d 2 c a l l e d f o r a b o y c o t t o f t h e B i e n n a l e . I t a l y ' s ABC h e a d l i n e d 3 " E v e r y t h i n g i s L o s t , E v e n a S e n s e o f S h a m e . " F o r a l l o f i t s a m b i g u i t y , R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k s e e m e d t o h a v e made q u i t e a c l e a r s t a t e m e n t ; i f t h e r e w e r e a n y l i n g e r i n g d o u b t s , A l a n S o l o m o n h a d o b l i g i n g l y c l a r i f i e d t h e s i t u a t i o n t h e week b e f o r e R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s p r i z e was a w a r d e d : " T h e w h o l e w o r l d r e c o g n i z e s t h a t t h e w o r l d a r t 4 c e n t e r h a s m o v e d f r o m P a r i s t o New Y o r k . " What s e e m e d t o be a n o b v i o u s f a c t t o t h e U.S. c o m m i s s i o n e r t o o k o n a s o m e w h a t d i f f e r e n t a p p e a r a n c e f o r t h o s e who o b j e c t e d t o t h e U.S. p r i z e : o n e F r e n c h c r i t i c r e s p o n d e d " T h e w h o l e w o r l d ? O u r e n t i r e l i t t l e w o r l d i s e x c i t e d b y t h i s d e c l a r a t i o n o f w a r . A l l we t a l k e d a b o u t was t h e A m e r i c a n s ' 5 d e m a n d s . " F o r c r i t i c s o f t h e U.S. e x h i b i t i o n , S o l o m o n ' s c o m m e n t was o n l y o n e m o r e e x a m p l e o f t h e A m e r i c a n s ' c u l t u r a l i m p e r i a l i s m w h i c h h a d d o m i n a t e d t h e B i e n n a l e f r o m t h e b e g i n n i n g . A t i s s u e f r o m t h e s t a r t was t h e a n n e x t o t h e U.S. e x h i b i t i o n . T h e F r e n c h p r e s s , a l m o s t w i t h o u t e x c e p t i o n , made m e n t i o n o f t h e u n p r e c e d e n t e d a n n e x ; w h i l e t h e o t h e r c o u n t r i e s h a d t o c o n t e n d w i t h 8 0 t h e l i m i t e d s p a c e o f t h e i r p a v i l i o n s , T h e A m e r i c a n s , i n 1 9 6 4 , h a v e i n v a d e d w i t h a com- p l e t e l y m i s s i o n a r y z e a l . N o t c o n t e n t t o e x h i b i t i n t h e i r p a v i l i o n i n t h e B i e n n a l e g a r d e n s , t h e y h a v e o r g a n i z e d a g i g a n t i c r e t r o s p e c t i v e o f t h e i r two s t a r s , J o h n s a n d R a u s c h e n b e r g - - p l u s t h e i r a c c o m p l i c e s - - i n t h e p a l a c e o f t h e o l d U.S. c o n s u - l a t e . 6 T h e F r a n c e O b s e r v a t e u r c o m p l a i n e d t h a t t h e A m e r i c a n s h a d i n f r i n g e d o n " t h e e l e m e n t a r y r u l e s o f ' f a i r p l a y ' " b v e x t e n d i n g t h e i r e x h i b i t 7 b e y o n d t h e G i a r d i n i g r o u n d s . O t h e r r e p o r t s d e s c r i b e d t h e s i t u a t i o n i n much s t r o n g e r t e r m s , s u c h a s t h o s e u s e d b y P i e r r e C a b a n n e i n A r t s : [ S o l o m o n a n d h i s a s s o c i a t e s ] h a v e t r e a t e d u s a s p o o r b a c k w a r d N e g r o e s , g o o d o n l y f o r c o l o n i z a t i o n . T h e f i r s t commando i s i n p l a c e : i , t ' s c a l l e d 'Pop A r t . ' T h e i n v a s i o n d o e s n o t t a k e p l a c e i n t h e o f f i c i a l p a v i l i o n ; i t t a k e s p l a c e a t a d i s t a n c e , c h o o s i n g e x p a n s i o n i s m i n s t e a d . T h e o l d A m e r i c a n c o n s u l a t e . . . i s t r a n s f o r m e d i n t o a t e m p l e f o r t h e new r e l i g i o n . T h e p o p e o f f i c i a t e s t h e r e : R a u s c h e n b e r g , s u r r o u n d e d b y h i s g r e a t p r i e s t s , J o h n s , O l d e n b u r g , D i n e a n d S t e l l a . 8 E v e n t h e F r e n c h c r i t i c who was m o s t f a v o r a b l e t o t h e A m e r i c a n s , P i e r r e R e s t a n y , s t o o d i n o p p o s i t i o n t o t h e e x p a n s i v e n e s s o f t h e U.S. e x h i b i t ; s p e a k i n g o f t h e a d d i t i o n a l s p a c e a n d t h e a r t i s t s f e a t u r e d t h e r e , R e s t a n y c o m m e n t e d : [ I ] h a v e t h e g r e a t e s t e s t e e m f o r t h e s e a r t i s t s . . . b u t I v i g o r o u s l y c o n t e s t t h e v a l i d i t y o f t h e p r o - c e e d i n g s w h i c h c r e a t e d a n u n f o r t u n a t e p r e c e d e n t a n d c o n t r i b u t e d t o a r o u s i n g a h a l o o f c u l t u r a l i m p e r i a l - i s m a r o u n d t h e A m e r i c a n s . 9 F o r t h o s e l e s s i n c l i n e d t o g i v e t h e A m e r i c a n s t h e b e n e f i t o f t h e d o u b t , t h e A m e r i c a n s b e n e f i t t e d f r o m u n f a i r a d v a n t a g e s o v e r e v e r y 81 o t h e r c o u n t r y p a r t i c i p a t i n g i n t h e e v e n t . T h e i r l a r g e e x h i b i t i o n was a l r e a d y a n a f f r o n t , b u t t h e f a c t t h a t a n a r t i s t e x h i b i t i n g o f f t h e g r o u n d s was a w a r d e d t h e m a j o r p r i z e was a n o u t r a g e . T h e r e a c t i o n t o t h e A m e r i c a n v i c t o r y was c o m p o u n d e d b y t h e w a y i n w h i c h R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s w o r k b e c a m e " e l i g i b l e " f o r t h e p r i z e : t h e p r e s i d e n t o f t h e j u r y , A. H a m m a c h e r ( r e p r e s e n t i n g t h e N e t h e r l a n d s ) , h a d t h r e a t e n e d t o r e s i g n i f t h e p r i z e was g i v e n t o R a u s c h e n b e r g o n t h e b a s i s o f h i s o n e w o r k e x h i b i t e d o n t h e o f f i c i a l B i e n n a l e 10 g r o u n d s . A c o m p r o m i s e was f i n a l l y r e a c h e d , w h e r e t h e A m e r i c a n s a g r e e d t o move t h r e e R a u s c h e n b e r g w o r k s t o t h e i r o f f i c i a l p a v i l i o n ; t h i s was d o n e i n t h e m o r n i n g , a n d R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s p r i z e was a n n o u n c e d t h a t a f t e r n o o n . A p h o t o g r a p h e r c a p t u r e d t h e t r a n s f e r o f R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s w o r k s o n f i l m , a n d t h e p i c t u r e s e n t s h o c k w a v e s t h r o u g h o u t t h e G i a r d i n i ( f i g u r e 8 ) ; i t was w i d e l y r e p r o d u c e d a s p r o o f t h a t t h e A m e r i c a n s h a d s e c r e t l y m o v e d t h e p a i n t i n g s i n a n u n d e r h a n d e d 11 m a n e u v e r t o c a p t u r e t h e p r i z e . W h e t h e r t h e j u r y h a d a g r e e d b e f o r e h a n d made l i t t l e d i f f e r e n c e — i f a n y t h i n g , i t o n l y a g g r a v a t e d t h e s i t u a t i o n , m a k i n g t h e A m e r i c a n s a p p e a r a s t h o u g h t h e y h a d made s e c r e t a r r a n g e m e n t s w i t h t h e j u r y . W i t h i n t h e s i n g l e i m a g e , a m u l t i t u d e o f m e a n i n g s a p p e a r e d , n o n e t o o a m b i g u o u s f o r t h e F r e n c h : t h e U.S. h a d e m p l o y e d u n f a i r c u l t u r a l t a c t i c s , w e r e a c c o r d e d u n p r e c e d e n t e d f a v o r s , a n d m a n a g e d t o come a w a y w i t h t h e G r a n d P r i z e b y s n e a k i n g p a i n t i n g s b a c k o n t o t h e G i a r d i n i g r o u n d s . T h e s e w e r e t h e c i r c u m s t a n c e s w h i c h s u r r o u n d e d t h e e v e n t s i n V e n i c e — b u t w h a t o f t h e a c t u a l j u r y d e l i b e r a t i o n s ? T h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l j u r y , o s t e n s i b l y o b j e c t i v e , p o o l e d f r o m t h e v a r i o u s n o m i n a t i o n s s u b m i t t e d b y e a c h p a r t i c i p a t i n g c o u n t r y , h a d s e l e c t e d R a u s c h e n b e r g 82 f r o m a l l t h e a r t i s t s a t t h e B i e n n a l e . Was t h i s n o t e v i d e n c e o f t h e s u p e r i o r i t y o f R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k ? L i k e e v e r y t h i n g e l s e a t t h e B i e n n a l e t h a t y e a r , t h e s i t u a t i o n was n o t a s c l e a r - c u t a s i t a p p e a r e d . A f t e r i n t e n s i v e l o b b y i n g , A l a n S o l o m o n was a b l e t o 12 c o n v i n c e t h e B i e n n a l e P r e s i d e n t t o a p p o i n t a n A m e r i c a n j u r o r , t h e f i r s t t i m e a r e p r e s e n t a t i v e f r o m t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s s e r v e d o n t h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l j u r y . T h e A m e r i c a n o r g a n i z e r s h a d some d i f f i c u l t y l o c a t i n g s o m e o n e w i l l i n g t o t a k e t h e j o b ; J a m e s J o h n s o n S w e e n e y a n d 13 W a l t e r H o p p s h a d b o t h d e c l i n e d t h e i n v i t a t i o n . I n t h e e n d , Sam H u n t e r , t h e n c h a i r m a n o f t h e a r t d e p a r t m e n t a t B r a n d e i s U n i v e r s i t y , 14 a g r e e d t o r e p r e s e n t t h e A m e r i c a n s . I n V e n i c e , R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s d e a l e r , L e o C a s t e l l i c o m m e n t e d " A t l e a s t we h a v e a n A m e r i c a n j u d g e 15 now. T h a t ' s o n e t h i n g i n o u r f a v o r . " B u t i t was n o t i m m e d i a t e l y c l e a r w h e t h e r H u n t e r was a n a s s e t o r a l i a b i l i t y t o t h e A m e r i c a n s ' c a u s e : p r i o r t o t h e j u r y ' s d e l i b e r a t i o n s , H u n t e r s p o k e o n I t a l i a n 16 t e l e v i s i o n , p r o c l a i m i n g t h e s u p e r i o r i t y o f A m e r i c a n a r t , a n i n c i d e n t w h i c h m o r e o r l e s s d e s t r o y e d a n y i l l u s i o n s a b o u t t h e o b j e c t i v i t y o f t h e A m e r i c a n j u r o r . S o l o m o n l a t e r n o t e d , "When H u n t e r a r r i v e d he was i m p o s s i b l e a b o u t p r o v i n g h i s p u r i t y , t o t h e p o i n t w h e r e t h e I t a l i a n j u r o r s w o n d e r e d i f he w a n t e d t h e p r i z e t o go 17 e l s e w h e r e " , t h a t i s , t o s o m e o n e o t h e r t h a n R a u s c h e n b e r g . W h i l e H u n t e r h i m s e l f w i l l n o t c o m m e n t o n t h e i m p l i c a t i o n s o f S o l o m o n ' s s t a t e m e n t , t h e " p u r i t y " o f w h i c h S o l o m o n s p o k e may h a v e s i m p l y b e e n i n r e g a r d s t o H u n t e r ' s i n d i s c r e t i o n w i t h t h e I t a l i a n p r e s s , b u t t h i s 18 i s a n i s s u e w h i c h s t i l l r e m a i n s u n c l e a r . A s f o r t h e I t a l i a n j u r o r s ' c o m m e n t s , t h e y w e r e a p p a r e n t l y c o n c e r n e d t h a t H u n t e r ' s o b v i o u s b i a s w o u l d r u l e o u t t h e p o s s i b i l i t y o f a R a u s c h e n b e r g p r i z e , s i n c e t h e j u r y m i g h t f e e l c o m p e l l e d t o v o t e f o r a n o t h e r a r t i s t s a s 83 e v i d e n c e o f t h e i r o b j e c t i v i t y . B u t t h e r e a s o n s f o r t h e I t a l i a n s u n e q u i v o c a l s u p p o r t o f R a u s c h e n b e r g r e m a i n u n c l e a r . F r a n z M e y e r , t h e S w i s s member o f t h e j u r y t h a t y e a r s u g g e s t e d t h a t , a c c o r d i n g t o t h e I t a l i a n s , t h e A m e r i c a n s w e r e t h r e a t e n i n g t o w i t h d r a w f r o m t h e B i e n n a l e : I r e m e m b e r t h a t t h e two I t a l i a n m e m b e r s , [ G i u s e p p e - ] M a r c h i o r i a n d [ M a r c o O V a l s e c c h i , t o l d u s i n t h e b e - g i n n i n g , t h a t t h e y f e a r e d t h a t t h e A m e r i c a n s w o u l d n ' t come a n y m o r e , i f t h e y s t i l l h a d no p r i z e t h i s t i m e a n d we s h o u l d f o r r e a s o n s o f o p p o r t u n i t y c o n s i d e r s u c h a p r i z e . A s I t a l i a n s M a r c h i o r i a n d V a l s e c c h i w e r e n a t u r a l l y p r i m a r e l y [ s i c 5 ] i n t e r e s t e d i n t h e p r e s t i g e o f t h e B i e n n a l e a n d i t s c o n t i n u a t i o n a s a n i n s t i t u t i o n . 19 I t i s u n c l e a r w h e t h e r t h e A m e r i c a n s h a d a c t u a l l y o f f e r e d t h e I t a l i a n s f i n a n c i a l s u p p o r t f o r t h e B i e n n a l e . T h e F r e n c h m a g a z i n e L a C o t e d e P e i n t r e s r e p o r t e d t h a t t h e B i e n n a l e was c r i t i c i z e d f o r i t s c o s t ( o v e r 2 0 0 m i l l i o n l i r e ) a n d t h a t t h e A m e r i c a n s h a d p r o m i s e d t o a b s o r b t h e 20 d e f i c i t ; L e F i g a r o a l s o m e n t i o n e d t h a t t h e B i e n n a l e was e n d a n g e r e d . 21 22 f i n a n c i a l l y , b u t t h i s c a n n o t b e c o n f i r m e d . A l a n S o l o m o n s u g g e s t e d t h a t t h e A m e r i c a n s ' c h a n c e s f o r a p r i z e " b e g a n w i t h t h e s i m p l e p u r e f a c t t h a t c e r t a i n I t a l i a n s w a n t e d a n A m e r i c a n p r i z e f o r 23 g e n e r a l a l t r u i s t i c r e a s o n s , a n d p r o c e e d e d t o w o r k f o r i t , " b u t i t s t i l l r e m a i n s u n c l e a r why t h e y w e r e s o i n c l i n e d . N o t a l l t h e m e m b e r s o f t h e j u r y w e r e i n a g r e e m e n t w i t h t h e c h o i c e o f R a u s c h e n b e r g , h o w e v e r . R a u s c h e n b e r g h a d r e c e i v e d t h e m a j o r i t y o f t h e v o t e s ( f o u r t o t h r e e ) ; t h o s e i n f a v o r i n c l u d e d H u n t e r , M a r c h i o r i , V a l s e c c h i a n d J u l i u s S t a r z i n s k i , t h e P o l i s h 24 j u d g e . M e y e r , t h e B r a z i l i a n j u d g e M u r i l l o M e n d e s a n d t h e p r e s i d e n t o f t h e j u r y , H a m m a c h e r , o p p o s e d R a u s c h e n b e r g i n i t i a l l y a n d t h e f i n a l 8 4 v o t e r e m a i n s u n c l e a r . R e c a l l t h a t i t was H a m m a c h e r who h a d t h r e a t e n e d t o r e s i g n i f t h e p r i z e was g i v e n t o R a u s c h e n b e r g o n t h e b a s i s o f o n e w o r k e x h i b i t e d i n t h e G i a r d i n i . A p p a r e n t l y , a n o f f e r h a d b e e n made t o g i v e t h e a w a r d t o K e n n e t h N o l a n d , b u t S o l o m o n a n n o u n c e d t h a t i f R a u s c h e n b e r g was d i s q u a l i f i e d , a l l t h e A m e r i c a n 25 a r t i s t s w o u l d b e w i t h d r a w n f r o m t h e c o m p e t i t i o n . M e y e r e v e n t u a l l y s u p p o r t e d R a u s c h e n b e r g , a s he l a t e r e x p l a i n e d : When Bob R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s name came u p ( m a y b e p r o p o s e d b y o n e o f t h e I t a l i a n s , t o o ) , I r e m e m b e r t h a t I t r i e d f o r a moment t o e x t e n d t h e d i s c u s s i o n s t o o t h e r names o f A m e r i c a n s ( M i k e S o n n a b e n d r e m i n d e d me y e a r s l a t e r , t h a t I h a d t o l d h i m I w o u l d r a t h e r h a v e v o t e d f o r J a s p e r J o h n s ) , b u t - - I t h i n k t h a t e s p e c i a l l y Sam H u n t e r made i t c l e a r t o m e - - t h e o n l y A m e r i c a n o f t h i s g e n e r - a t i o n , w h o . . . c o u l d e v e n t u a l l y q u a l i f y f o r t h e c h i e f - p r i z e , was B o b R a u s c h e n b e r g , much n e a r e r t o E u r o p e a n s e n s i b i l i t y t h a n t h e o t h e r a r t i s t s s h o w n i n t h e C o n - s u l a t e . I f u l l y u n d e r s t o o d t h i s c o n s i d e r a t i o n . 2 6 T h e i s s u e o f R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s a f f i n i t y w i t h E u r o p e a n s e n s i b i l i t y w i l l be d i s c u s s e d m o r e t h o r o u g h l y l a t e r . T h e t a s k s t i l l r e m a i n e d t o c o n v i n c e H a m m a c h e r t o a b i d e b y t h e j u r y ' s d e c i s i o n . P r i o r t o t h e c o m p r o m i s e , r e a c h e d w i t h t h e t r a n s p o r t a t i o n o f R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k t o t h e o f f i c i a l p a v i l i o n , R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s c l o s e f r i e n d , M e r c e C u n n i n g h a m a n d h i s d a n c e t r o u p e p e r f o r m e d a t t h e V e n i c e t h e a t r e , L a F e n i c e . R a u s c h e n b e r g was r e p o n s i b i l e f o r a l l t h e s e t d e s i g n s , w h i c h c o n s i s t e d o f I t a l i a n s t a g e h a n d s " m o v i n g a b o u t i n t h e b a c k g r o u n d , p u s h i n g b r o o m s 27 o r c a r r y i n g p r o p s . " T h e e v e n t was w e l l a t t e n d e d , a n d H a m m a c h e r was 28 r e p o r t e d l y won o v e r b y t h e p e r f o r m a n c e a n d R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s s e t s . T h e f o l l o w i n g d a y he a g r e e d t o t h e c o m p r o m i s e , a n d R a u s c h e n b e r g e m e r g e d a s t h e w i n n e r o f t h e G r a n d P r i z e f o r p a i n t i n g . 85 W h i l e t h e t r a n s f e r o f R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k s e e m e d t o be t h e a p e x o f t h e c o n t r o v e r s y , i t was n o t t h e o n l y e v e n t w h i c h p r o v o k e d t h e c r i t i c s o f t h e A m e r i c a n s . F o r t h e F r e n c h , who u n a n i m o u s l y c o n d e m n e d t h e A m e r i c a n t a c t i c s , t h e i m p e r i a l i s t i c s t a t e m e n t made b y S o l o m o n ( r e g a r d i n g t h e t r a n s f e r o f w o r l d a r t c e n t e r s ) f o u n d i t s v i s u a l c o u n t e r p a r t i n t h e a d v e r t i s e m e n t w h i c h L e o C a s t e l l i , R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s New Y o r k d e a l e r , r a n i n t h e J u n e i s s u e o f A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l a n d t h e J u l y i s s u e o f L ' O e i 1 ( f i g u r e 9 ) . On t h e o p e n i n g p a g e s o f t h e s e j o u r n a l s a p p e a r e d a map o f W e s t e r n E u r o p e a n d E n g l a n d , s h o w i n g t h e c i t i e s o f L o n d o n , P a r i s , K a s s e l a n d V e n i c e . F l a n k i n g e a c h c i t y w e r e names o f v a r i o u s C a s t e l l i a r t i s t s - - R a u s c h e n b e r g , J o h n s , C h a m b e r l a i n , S t e l l a , B o n t e c o u , L e s l i e , L i c h t e n s t e i n a n d H i g g i n s . W h i l e s e e m i n g l y i n n o c e n t - - a f t e r a l l , C a s t e l l i was o n l y p u b l i c i z i n g t h e f a c t t h a t m o s t o f h i s a r t i s t s w e r e b e i n g s h o w n i n m a j o r i n t e r n a t i o n a l s h o w s ( D o c u m e n t a , t h e B i e n n a l e ) o r i n t h e m a j o r E u r o p e a n a r t c e n t e r s — t h e i m a g e r y he c h o s e c o n v e y e d much m o r e t o t h e w o r l d i n 1 9 6 4 t h a n m e r e p u b l i c i t y f o r h i s g a l l e r y . P a r i s L ' E x p r e s s r e p r o d u c e d t h e a d v e r t i s e m e n t i n i t s a r t i c l e o n t h e U.S. d o m i n a t i o n o f t h e B i e n n a l e , i d e n t i f y i n g i t w i t h t h e c a p t i o n " P u b l i c i t e A m e r i c a i n e " r a t h e r t h a n 29 s p e c i f y i n g i t a s C a s t e l l i ' s own p r o m o t i o n a l p r o j e c t . I n d e e d , A n n e t t e M i c h e l s o n , i n h e r f a v o r a b l e c o v e r a g e o f t h e A m e r i c a n s ' r o l e 30 i n V e n i c e , c o n c e d e d t h a t t h e map was " s o m e w h a t N a p o l e o n i c . " When t h e B i e n n a l e p r i z e i g n i t e d t h e v o l a t i l e a t m o s p h e r e p e r v a d i n g t h e G i a r d i n i , t h e a d v e r t i s e m e n t a r t i c u l a t e d i n v i s u a l t e r m s t h e " c r i s i s " a s t h e F r e n c h c r i t i c s p e r c e i v e d i t — S o l o m o n d i r e c t e d t h e A m e r i c a n s ' c o l o n i z a t i o n o f E u r o p e , w i t h t h e a i d o f h i s c a r t o g r a p h e r , C a s t e l l i , who m a p p e d o u t t h e t a r g e t s . I t i s i n t e r e s t i n g t h a t C a s t e l l i c h o s e a map t o r e p r e s e n t h i s 8 6 a r t i s t s a n d h i s g a l l e r y , f o r t h e i m a g e i t s e l f d o e s n o t a p p e a r t o b e a n a d v e r t i s e m e n t a t a l l a n d i t t a k e s some t i m e b e f o r e i t s c o m m e r c i a l i n t e n t b e c o m e s a p p a r e n t . A map i s o s t e n s i b l y a n a c c u r a t e a n d o b j e c t i v e g u i d e , p r o v i d i n g d i r e c t i o n o r p l a c e m e n t f o r t h i n g s , w h e r e a s o n e m i g h t a s s u m e t h a t a n a d v e r t i s e m e n t s h o u l d c l a r i f y w h a t i s b e i n g s o l d a n d b y whom a s c o n c i s e l y a n d a s i m m e d i a t e l y a s p o s s i b l e . Y e t i n t h e C a s t e l l i a d , t h e map i s n o t d e s i g n e d t o r e v e a l w h a t i s s h o w i n g a t C a s t e l l i ' s g a l l e r y i n New Y o r k , b u t r a t h e r t o d e m o n s t r a t e t h a t t h e a r t i s t s he s p o n s o r s a r e s h o w i n g i n E u r o p e . R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d J o h n s a p p e a r i n a l l f o u r c i t i e s , C h a m b e r l a i n i s i n L o n d o n a n d V e n i c e , a n d s o o n . B u t r a t h e r t h a n l e a v i n g t h e v i e w e r w i t h a s e n s e t h a t t h e s e a r t i s t i c a p p e a r a n c e s w e r e m e r e c o i n c i d e n c e s , t h e map s p e c i f i e s t h a t t h e s e e v e n t s w e r e d i r e c t e d b y L e o C a s t e l l i , a s i n d i c a t e d b y t h e i m p o s i n g c o m p a s s b e a r i n g h i s name. T h e c o m p a s s i s t h e o n l y c l u e t h a t t h e map h a s a c o m m e r c i a l i n t e n t ; C a s t e l l i ' s name a n d t h e a d d r e s s o f h i s New Y o r k g a l l e r y e n c i r c l e t h e "N" i n d i c a t i n g n o r t h . I f t h e g a l l e r y i t s e l f i s n o t f e a t u r e d i n t h e a c t u a l g e o g r a p h y o f t h e map, i t i s c l e a r t h a t i t i s e x e r t i n g i t s i n f l u e n c e b y p u r p o r t i n g t o be a s n a t u r a l a g u i d e a s a n y B o y S c o u t c o m p a s s i n d i c a t i n g n o r t h , s o u t h , e a s t o r w e s t . F r o m t h e s e m o r e i n n o c u o u s b e g i n n i n g s , m o r e i n s i d i o u s c o n n o t a t i o n s a p p e a r . T h e d o t t e d l i n e s w h i c h f o r m t h e l i n k b e t w e e n t h e n a m e s a n d c i t i e s s u g g e s t t r o o p d e p l o y m e n t s o r p l a n s o f a t t a c k . Y e t i n t h i s c a s e , t h e b a t t l e t o be w a g e d d o e s n o t c o n s i s t o f i n f a n t r y b u t r a t h e r o f t h e " a v a n t - g a r d e " - - t h e a d v a n c e d g u a r d , s e n t f r o m New 31 Y o r k t o a f f e c t t h e c u l t u r a l " l i b e r a t i o n " o f W e s t e r n E u r o p e . A s t h e s e e m i s s a r i e s o f A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e a d v a n c e t h r o u g h E u r o p e u n d e r t h e 87 g u i d a n c e p r o v i d e d b y t h e C a s t e l l i c o m p a s s , a l l o t h e r g e o g r a p h i c a l f e a t u r e s b e c o m e i n c i d e n t a l , s u b s u m e d b y t h e l a r g e , t y p e s e t names o f t h e C a s t e l l i a r t i s t s . i n d e e d , t h e a c t u a l d e s i g n a t i o n s o f t h e c i t i e s a r e i n c l u d e d a s s m a l l , i n c i d e n t a l f e a t u r e s , w h e r e a s t h e names " R a u s c h e n b e r g " , " J o h n s " , " L i c h t e n s t e i n " , e t c . d o m i n a t e t h e l a n d m a s s e s a n d e s s e n t i a l l y a r e t h e r e t o d e s i g n a t e t h e r e a l s i g n i f i c a n c e o f t h e v a r i o u s l o c a t i o n s . S i m i l a r l y , t h e b o r d e r s o f e a c h c o u n t r y , w h i l e p r o v i d i n g a s e n s e o f g e o g r a p h y a n d d i r e c t i o n w i t h i n t h e map, h a v e t h e a d d i t i o n a l f u n c t i o n o f a c t u a l l y f o r m i n g v i s u a l l i n k s b e t w e e n t h e g r o u p s o f a r t i s t s ' n a m e s . A g a i n , t h e names p r o v i d e d i r e c t i o n a n d f o c u s , w h e r e a s t h e b o r d e r s t h e m s e l v e s a r e s i m p l y v i s u a l t r a n s i t i o n s b e t w e e n a r t i s t s ' u n i t s . O n l y t h e c o m p a s s , s o l i d , b l a c k a n d i m p o s i n g , d i s t r a c t s t h e v i e w e r f r o m t h i s g e o g r a p h i c a l h a r m o n y ; b u t o f c o u r s e , i t s e r v e s t o d i r e c t t h e v i e w e r b a c k t o t h e a r t i s t s l i s t e d , w h i l e d e s i g n a t i n g t h e s o u r c e - - L e o C a s t e l l i — f o r t h e i d e n t i f y i n g f e a t u r e s o f t h e map. F u r t h e r a n a l y s i s l e a d i n g t o t h e same g e n e r a l s e n s e o f U.S. c u l t u r a l d o m i n a t i o n c a n b e d i s c e r n e d f r o m w h a t h a s b e e n o m i t t e d f r o m t h e map. T h e v i e w o f W e s t e r n E u r o p e i s c o n d e n s e d , t r u n c a t e d . T h e b u l k o f I t a l y i s e l i m i n a t e d , F r a n c e a n d W e s t G e r m a n y a r e s h o w n o n l y p a r t i a l l y , a n d E n g l a n d i s r e d u c e d t o a f r a g m e n t i n t h e u p p e r l e f t h a n d c o r n e r . T h e names o f t h e c o u n t r i e s h a v e b e e n o m i t t e d — i n d e e d , t h o s e f e w c o u n t r i e s i n w h i c h t h e names o f J o h n s , R a u s c h e n b e r g , e t . a l . a r e a b s e n t h a v e b e e n r e l e g a t e d t o a n o n y m i t y — a n d t h o s e n a t i o n s " f o r t u n a t e " e n o u g h t o h a v e b e e n g r a c e d b y C a s t e l l i ' s a r t i s t s a r e i d e n t i f i e d o n l y i n t h o s e t e r m s . A g a i n , t h e e s s e n t i a l i n f o r m a t i o n r e g a r d i n g t h e g e o g r a p h y i s b a s e d n o t o n s t a n d a r d d i f f e r e n t i a t i o n b e t w e e n n a t i o n s , b u t r a t h e r o n t h a t w h i c h t h e y h a v e i n common: t h e 8 8 p r e s e n c e o f t h e C a s t e l l i a r t i s t s . D e t a i l s a r e u n n e c e s s a r y when t h e a r t i s t s " s a y i t a l l . " What i s p r e s e n t e d , t h e n , i s n o t a E u r o p e d i v i d e d a c c o r d i n g t o b o r d e r s a n d n a t i o n a l i d e n t i t i e s — i n s t e a d , i t i s a u n i f i e d E u r o p e , o n e w h i c h s i g n i f i c a n t l y i s u n i f i e d g e o g r a p h i c a l l y a n d v i s u a l l y b y t h e p r e s e n c e o f A m e r i c a n a r t i s t s who f o r t h e m o s t p a r t w e r e a s s o c i a t e d w i t h P o p A r t . T h e i m p l i c a t i o n t h a t E u r o p e c o u l d b e d o m i n a t e d b y a r t i s t s a e s t h e t i c i z i n g t h e c o m m e r c i a l , m a s s c u l t u r e o f t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s was a n a t h e m a t o t h e F r e n c h e s p e c i a l l y , a n d t h e C a s t e l l i p u b l i c i t y t o o k o n e v e n m o r e s i g n i f i c a n c e a f t e r t h e A m e r i c a n s won t h e B i e n n a l e p r i z e . W h i l e no c r i t i c s p e c i f i c a l l y a n a l y z e d t h e i m a g e , t h e e v e n t s o f t h e B i e n n a l e c l a r i f i e d i t s i m p l i e d m e a n i n g s , t o t h e p o i n t w h e r e i t was o b v i o u s e v i d e n c e o f U.S. c u l t u r a l t a c t i c s w h e n i t was r e p r o d u c e d i n L 1 E x p r e s s . T h e i s s u e o f A m e r i c a n c u l t u r a l i m p e r i a l i s m i n t e n s i f i e d when a F r e n c h d e a l e r , D a n i e l C o r d i e r , c l o s e d h i s P a r i s g a l l e r y t e n d a y s a f t e r R a u s c h e n b e r g r e c i e v e d h i s p r i z e i n V e n i c e ; s u c h a n a c t i o n w o u l d n o t h a v e b e e n o f m a j o r c o n s e q u e n c e u n d e r n o r m a l c i r c u m s t a n c e s , b u t b e f o r e t h e B i e n n a l e o p e n e d , C o r d i e r c h o s e t o i s s u e a n d c i r c u l a t e w i d e l y a l e t t e r e x p l a i n i n g h i s r e a s o n s f o r l e a v i n g P a r i s a n d m o v i n g t o New Y o r k . He w r o t e , T h e d i m e n s i o n s o f t h i s c i t y a r e n o t c o m p a t i b l e w i t h t h e s c a l e o f m o d e r n c i v i l i z a t i o n ; i t h a s b e c o m e a h o l i d a y r e s o r t , a p l a c e o f e n t e r t a i n m e n t , a n d i s b e c o m i n g l e s s a n d l e s s a c e n t e r o f c r e a t i v e a c t i v i t y . I n o r d e r t o i n t e r p r e t o u r p e r i o d , a n a r t i s t h a s t o be f a m i l i a r w i t h i t s r e a l i t i e s , i t s ' s e n s i b i l i t y . T h e s e c a n be f e l t b e t t e r a n d m o r e i n t e n s e l y i n New Y o r k . 32 P a r i s , c u l t u r a l c e n t e r o f t h e W e s t e r n w o r l d , was d e p o s e d ; C o r d i e r ' s 8 9 w o r d s i m p l i e d t h a t i t h a d t h e a p p e a l o f a v a c a t i o n s p o t , w i t h o u t t h e i m p e t u s f o r c r e a t i v i t y . New Y o r k , o n t h e o t h e r h a n d , was t h e h u b o f m o d e r n c i v i l i z a t i o n . A s a d e a l e r f o r R a u s c h e n b e r g , C o r d i e r h a d g o o d r e a s o n t o r e l o c a t e i n New Y o r k w h e r e m o d e r n s e n s i b i l i t y a n d r e a l i t y j o i n e d f o r c e s . A r t i s t s , i t a p p e a r e d , w e r e n o t t h e o n l y o n e s who c o u l d a c t i n t h e g a p b e t w e e n a r t a n d l i f e . A s a n a r t m a r k e t , New Y o r k h a d t h e s e a d v a n t a g e s a n d m o r e , a s C o r d i e r c o n t i n u e d : I n A m e r i c a , t h e r e a r e c u r i o s i t y , t a s t e a n d m e a n s , w h i c h e x p l a i n s why New Y o r k , a f t e r h a v i n g b e e n a m a r k e t , may w e l l b e c o m e a p r e p o n d e r a n t c u l t u r a l c e n t e r . 33 T h e p r o - A m e r i c a n p r e s s s e i z e d u p o n C o r d i e r ' s " d e f e c t i o n " a s p r o o f o f t h e s u p e r i o r i t y o f New Y o r k ; T i m e u s e d h i s l e t t e r a s e v i d e n c e t h a t " P a r i s h a s s l i p p e d c r e a t i v e l y " a n d t h e m a r k e t h a d g r a v i t a t e d t o New 34 Y o r k b e c a u s e " f i r s t - r a t e m o d e r n s " a r e c r e a t e d t h e r e . A r t c r i t i c R o b e r t H u g h e s n o t e d t h a t " F r e n c h p a i n t i n g h a s l o s t i t s c e n t r a l i t y " 35 b e c a u s e o f P a r i s ' s i n a b i l i t y t o a d a p t t o a e s t h e t i c c h a n g e s . T h e v i a b i l i t y o f New Y o r k a s a c u l t u r a l c e n t e r was m e a s u r e d r e l a t i v e t o i t s e c o n o m i c s t r e n g t h ; P a r i s was s i m p l y p a s s e , i t s c r i t i c s c h a r g e d , d e r i v i n g i t s i m p o r t a n c e f r o m a t r a d i t i o n o f c u l t u r e w h i c h h a d no p l a c e i n t h e a c t i v e s e n s i b i l i t y o f m o d e r n c i v i l i z a t i o n . C o r d i e r h a d f o u n d h i s m a r k e t a n d i t s c e n t e r ; t h e new s e n s i b i l i t y h a d no p l a c e i n P a r i s , a n d C o r d i e r h a d t h e f o r e s i g h t t o p a c k u p h i s R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s a n d m o v e . A s n o t e d e a r l i e r , t h e F r e n c h r e s p o n s e t o t h e A m e r i c a n v i c t o r y was b a s e d l a r g e l y o n t h e i r p e r c e p t i o n s o f S o l o m o n ' s h a n d l i n g o f t h e s h o w a n d t h e c i r c u m s t a n c e s a c c u m u l a t i n g p r i o r t o t h e a w a r d . I t was 9 0 a l s o d i f f i c u l t f o r t h e m t o a c c e p t t h e m a j o r c h a n g e a t t h e B i e n n a l e - - a y o u n g a r t i s t who was r e l a t i v e l y u n e s t a b l i s h e d h a d t a k e n t h e m a j o r p a i n t i n g p r i z e t . r a d i t t i i o n a l l l l y g i v e n t o a n " o l d m a s t e r " o f m o d e r n a r t . I n 1 9 6 4 t h e F r e n c h h a d f e a t u r e d a m a j o r r e t r o s p e c t i v e o f t h e a b s t r a c t p a i n t e r , R o g e r B i s s i e r e ; o n t h e b a s i s o f a w a r d s made a t t h e B i e n n a l e i n p r e v i o u s y e a r s , B i s s i e r e s e e m e d a l i k e l y c o n t e n d e r f o r t h e p r i z e . H i s r e p u t a t i o n was l o n g - s t a n d i n g a s a m a j o r p a i n t e r ( h e r e c e i v e d t h e G r a n d P r i x N a t i o n a l d e s A r t s i n 1 9 5 2 , t h e f i r s t t o b e g i v e n t o a p a i n t e r ) a n d h i s w o r k was t y p i c a l o f t h e P a r i s s c h o o l o f a b s t r a c t p a i n t i n g : H i s p a i n t i n g h a s r e m a i n e d n o n - f i g u r a t i v e b u t t o d a y we c a n s e e t h a t i t s q u a l i t i e s a r e t r a d i t i o n a l a n d F r e n c h : i t i s h u m b l e a n d i n t e l l i g e n t , n e v e r d o g - m a t i c , h a r m o n i o u s l y t u n e d t o t h e s i m p l e e m o t i o n s i n s p i r e d b y s i l e n t m e d i t a t i o n b e f o r e t h e s p e c t a c l e o f r e a l i t y w h i c h i s t h e r e b y f r e e l y a n d d i s c r e e t l y t r a n s c e n d e d . 36 T h e s e p a r t i c u l a r q u a l i t i e s w e r e a p p r o p r i a t e i n a n a r t i s t who was f e a t u r e d i n t h e B i e n n a l e , a s R a y m o n d C o g n i a t e x p l a i n e d i n h i s s u m m a r y o f t h e F r e n c h p a v i l i o n : [ B i s s i e r e ] i s c e r t a i n l y t h e p a i n t e r m o s t q u a l i f i e d t o i l l u s t r a t e t h e p e a c e f u l p e r m a n e n c e a n d c o n t i n u - i n g i n v e n t i o n w h i c h o n e f e e l s t h e n e e d t o e x p e r i e n c e e v e n m o r e v i v i d l y t o d a y . H i s e x h i b i t i o n i s o n e o f u n q u e s t i o n a b l e d i g n i t y a n d r e f i n e m e n t 37 H i s w o r k was c h a m p i o n e d b y F r e n c h c r i t i c s f o r i t s f i n e t e c h n i q u e a n d t r a n s c e n d e n t a l q u a l i t i e s w h i c h e v o k e d a n a l m o s t s o o t h i n g e f f e c t ; 91 P i e r r e S c h n e i d e r d e s c r i b e d t h i s i n a r e v i e w o f B i s s i e r e ' s w o r k i n 1 9 6 2 : B i s s i e r e p r a c t i c a l l y n e v e r d e p a r t s f r o m t h e p o s t - C u b i s t g r i d i r o n . He t e n d s i t w i t h t h e l o v i n g c a r e o f a s u b u r b a n g a r d e n e r , e x t r a c t i n g t h e maximum p r o d u c e f r o m e a c h l i t t l e p l o t . T h e g e n e r a l e f f e c t i s t h a t o f a g e n t l e , t i g h t l y w o v e n I m p r e s s i o n i s t i c p a t c h w o r k : s o f t , q u i l t e d b l a n k e t s f o r e y e s p r o n e t o c h i l l s . 38 F o r t h o s e who h a d t a k e n t o b u n d l i n g up i n t h e s e p r o t e c t i v e , c o m f o r t i n g a e s t h e t i c s , R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s C o k e b o t t l e s came a s s o m e t h i n g o f a r u d e s p l a s h i n t h e f a c e . Y e t c o k e b o t t l e s w e r e n o t a l l t h e F r e n c h h a d t o c o n t e n d w i t h ; i n R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s s i l k s c r e e n s , f o r e x a m p l e , p o l i t i c a l a n d m i l i t a r y i s s u e s a p p e a r r e p e a t e d l y . I n K i t e ( 1 9 6 3 , f i g u r e 1 0 ) a n A m e r i c a n e a g l e i s p l a c e d a t t h e t o p o f t h e c a n v a s , l i n k e d t o t h e i m a g e s b e l o w b y a s h o w e r o f d r i p s ; b e l o w , a U.S. a r m y h e l i c o p t e r d o m i n a t e s a c r o w d o f f l a g - b e a r i n g A m e r i c a n M a r i n e s , who a p p e a r t o be s t o r m i n g a n u n i d e n t i f i e d b u i l d i n g . R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s B u f f a l o ( 1 9 6 4 , f i g u r e l l ) h a s s i m i l a r a l l u s i o n s t o A m e r i c a n p o w e r : K e n n e d y , a u t h o r o f t h e " G r a n d D e s i g n " f o r E u r o p e , g e s t u r e s e m p h a t i c a l l y w i t h a n a i r o f a u t h o r i t y . A t h i s s i d e r e s t s t h e o m n i p r e s e n t e a g l e , t h i s t i m e e m b l a z o n e d w i t h t h e C o c a - C o l a t r a d e m a r k . S i g n s o f t h e New F r o n t i e r a b o u n d : t h e s p a c e p r o g r a m , r e p r e s e n t e d b y a l u n a r m o d u l e " s p l a s h i n g d o w n , " t h e a r m y h e l i c o p t e r , t h e c i t y a n d o f c o u r s e t h e A m e r i c a n s y m b o l o f p o w e r , t h e b a l d e a g l e . T h e s e i m a g e s , e v o k i n g m i l i t a r y t h e m e s , w o u l d s e e m t o be e s p e c i a l l y l o a d e d f o r t h e F r e n c h , p a r t i c u l a r l y when o n e c o n s i d e r s t h e p o l i t i c a l . r e l a t i o n s b e t w e e n F r a n c e a n d t h e U.S. R e c a l l t h a t i n 92 N o v e m b e r o f 1 9 6 3 , d e G a u l l e h a d a n n o u n c e d h i s i n t e n t i o n t o p u r s u e a p o l i c y c a l l i n g f o r " 1 ' E u r o p e e u r o p e e n n e , " d i r e c t l y c h a l l e n g i n g A m e r i c a n p l a n s f o r a r e n e w e d " A t l a n t i c P a r t n e r s h i p . " I n d e f y i n g t h e U . S . , f i r s t t h r o u g h h i s r e j e c t i o n o f G r e a t B r i t a i n i n t o t h e E E C , a n d s e c o n d b y r e f u s i n g A m e r i c a n o f f e r s f o r n u c l e a r w e a p o n r y , t r u c u l e n t l y i n s i s t i n g o n a n i n d e p e n d e n t n u c l e a r d e f e n s e , de G a u l l e s t a k e d h i s c l a i m f o r E u r o p e a n h e g e m o n y . Y e t i n V e n i c e , t h e A m e r i c a n s c a p t u r e d t h e c u l t u r a l c r o w n w h i c h F r a n c e h a d w o r n f o r s o l o n g , a n d h a d d o n e s o w i t h i m a g e s w h i c h s e e m e d i n t e n t o n " b r i d g i n g t h e g a p " b e t w e e n a r t a n d p o w e r . How w e r e t h e s e i m a g e s e m p t i e d o f t h e i r a s s o c i a t i v e v a l u e s , a s S o l o m o n h a d a r g u e d , when p o w e r a n d a u t h o r i t y s e e m e d t o e x u d e f r o m t h e c a n v a s e s ? How w e r e t h e s e p o t e n t i a l " i m p e r i a l i s t a e s t h e t i c s " p e r c e i v e d ? W a s n ' t t h e b u l k o f t h e A m e r i c a n e x h i b i t i o n p r e d i c a t e d o n i t s p a r t i c u l a r l y " n a t i o n a l " b r a n d o f c u l t u r e , w h e r e i c o n s o f p o w e r w e r e e l e v a t e d , t o t h e r e a l m o f h i g h a r t ? A n d w h a t o f t h e t r a d i t i o n a l W e s t e r n c u l t u r e , w h i c h i n B u f f a l o i s s c a r c e l y v i s i b l e a s R u b e n s ' V e n u s p e e r s f r o m u n d e r K e n n e d y ' s r i g h t a r m ? A m i d t h e b a r r a g e o f i m a g e s , d r a w n f r o m p o p u l a r c u l t u r e , V e n u s i s a l m o s t l o s t . T h e f r a g m e n t e d h a n d g e s t u r e w i t h i t s a c c u s a t o r y f i n g e r , p o i n t s a t h e r , a s t h o u g h e x p e l l i n g h e r f r o m t h e m o d e r n w o r l d w h i c h s u r r o u n d s h e r i n v a r i o u s f o r m s . S h e i s o u t o f f o c u s , o u t o f d a t e a m o n g s t t h e t e c h n o l o g i c a l i m a g e s a r o u n d h e r . A s t h e c u l t u r a l t r a d i t i o n o f E u r o p e f a d e d b e n e a t h R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s m e d i a i m a g e s o f A m e r i c a n p o w e r , p e r h a p s a new " g r a n d d e s i g n " f o r c u l t u r e was r e v e a l e d , w h e r e e v e n h i g h c u l t u r e was s u b j e c t e d t o A m e r i c a n i m p e r i a l i s m . U n l i k e S o l o m o n a n d A m e r i c a n e n t h u s i a s t s o f R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k , 9 3 t h e F r e n c h saw no a m b i g u i t y i n h i s "new s e n s i b i l i t y . " I n c o n t r a s t t o B i s s i e r e ' s e l e g a n t a b s t r a c t i o n s , w h i c h g e n t l y t r a n s c e n d e d t h e i s s u e s o f t h e o u t s i d e w o r l d , P o p A r t i s a b r u t a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n ( c h a r a c t e r i z e d b y g i g a n t i c i s m ) o f e l e m e n t s f r o m t h e A m e r i c a n w a y o f l i f e , p i c k e d f r o m t h e u r b a n c o n t e x t . C o n s u m e r p r o d u c t s h a v e b e e n w o r s h i p e d i n t h i s c i v i l i z a t i o n o f c o m f o r t ' ; i t i s t h e r e f o r e c o m p r e h e n s i b l e , a l t h o u g h s a d , t h a t f o o d , c a r s , t h e A m e r i c a n s y m b o l s o f h e a l t h a n d w e l l - b e i n g , t h a t i s , a l l t h e g e r m - f r e e a n d a s s e m b l y l i n e o b j e c t s h a v e b e c o m e t h e m a j o r p r e o c c u p a t i o n o f t h e N o r t h A m e r i c a n a r t i s t s . 39 P o p a r t b r o u g h t o n e a b r u p t l y b a c k i n t o t h e " r e a l w o r l d " o f A m e r i c a n c o n s u m e r - c u l t u r e . P i e r r e S c h n e i d e r d e s c r i b e d t h e p r o c e s s a s a s h i f t 40 f r o m " h y p e r - i d e a l i s m " t o " h y p e r - m a t e r i a l i s m . " A c c o r d i n g t o S o l o m o n , t h e m a e n i n g s o f o b j e c t s o r i m a g e s w e r e t r a n s p o s e d , o n c e t h e y w e r e p l a c e d i n t h e c o m p l e t e l y d i f f e r e n t c o n t e x t o f a R a u s c h e n b e r g c o m b i n e — i t was t h i s w h i c h e v o k e d a "new s e n s i b i l i t y . " B u t t h e s i g n s o f A m e r i c a n p o p u l a r c u l t u r e r e f u s e d t o r e c e d e f o r t h e F r e n c h c r i t i c s — t h e s e n s i b i l i t y r e p r e s e n t e d o n e o f m a t e r i a l i s m a n d c o n s u m e r i sm. T h e c o n s u m e r o r i e n t e d i m a g e r y was p a r t i c u l a r l y o b j e c t i o n a b l e g i v e n t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k a n d t h a t o f t h e D a d a g r o u p . W h i l e t h e y d i s l i k e d R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s p o p i m a g e r y , t h e " i n d i f f e r e n t " t o n e o f t h e w o r k made i t e v e n m o r e p r o b l e m a t i c . A s L e o n a r d , c r i t i c f o r t h e F r a n c e O b s e r v a t e u r e x p l a i n e d , F o r t h e s e u s u a l o b j e c t s , d e f o r m e d , s p l a t t e r e d , me- t i c u l o u s l y r e c o n s t r u c t e d i n e n o r m o u s d i m e n s i o n s , t h e s e ' c o m i c s ' s c r u p u l o u s l y r e p r o d u c e d o n a s c a l e o f p a n o r a m i c c i n e m a s c r e e n s , t h e s e c o l l a g e s o f mag- a z i n e p h o t o g r a p h s , a l l t h e b r i c - a - b r a c w h i c h c o n s t i - 94 t u t e s 'Pop A r t ' - - i t i s t h i s w h i c h c o n s t i t u t e s a g r o t e s q u e p l a g i a r i s m o f D a d a . . . D a d a was a n e s s e n - t i a l l y r e v o l u t i o n a r y m o v e m e n t , p u s h e d b y a n i m m e n s e s o c i a l c o n v i c t i o n . I t was a n a t t a c k o n b o u r g e o i s s o c i e t y . . . b u t t h e N e o - D a d a i s t s , b y c o n t r a s t , a r e l o c k e d i n a p a s s i o n a t e e m b r a c e w i t h b o u r g e o i s sym- b o l s . 41 W h i l e S o l o m o n h a d made a p o i n t o f d e n y i n g t h e p o t e n t i a l l y c r i t i c a l r e a d i n g s o f R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s w o r k , t h e F r e n c h c r i t i c f o u n d t h e w o r k e v e n m o r e p r o b l e m a t i c b e c a u s e i t r e m a i n e d d e t a c h e d , s i m p l y p r e s e n t i n g o b j e c t s w i t h o u t c o m m e n t , r e f l e c t i n g t h e c o n s u m e r s o c i e t y a n d w o r s e , 42 a e s t h e t i c i z i n g t h e p r o c e s s w h i c h " e n g e n d e r s p u b l i c i t y c a m p a i g n s . " T h i s o b s e r v a t i o n p r e s e n t s a n i n t e r e s t i n g c o n t r a d i c t i o n w i t h r e s p e c t t o t h e p o s s i b l e r e a d i n g s e v o k e d b y R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k . W h i l e t h e y w e r e p o t e n t i a l l y p o l i t i c a l w o r k s , a g g r a n d i z i n g U.S. p o w e r , g i v e n t h e p o l i t i c a l r e l a t i o n s b e t w e e n F r a n c e a n d t h e U . S . , L e o n a r d i g n o r e d t h e s e i s s u e s a n d c h o s e t o f o c u s o n t h e p o p u l a r i m a g e r y e m p l o y e d i n R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k s , w i t h i t s d e t a c h e d a n d a l m o s t a p o l i t i c a l t o n e . A g a i n , e x a m i n i n g B u f f a l o , i t s e e m s s t r a n g e t h a t L e o n a r d , a c r i t i c v i o l e n t l y o p p o s e d t o t h e A m e r i c a n " s e n s i b i l i t y , " w o u l d o v e r l o o k t h e a u t h o r i t a r i a n g e s t u r e o f K e n n e d y , a n d t h e s y m b o l s o f A m e r i c a n p o w e r . T h e c r i t i c o f f e r e d a p o s s i b l e c l u e f o r t h i s s e e m i n g l y m y o p i c r e a d i n g o f t h e w o r k , h o w e v e r ; i d e n t i f y i n g R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s c o n n e c t i o n s w i t h t h e F r e n c h D a d a t r a d i t i o n , L e o n a r d p o i n t e d o u t t h a t t h e p o l i t i c a l n a t u r e o f t h e w o r k s i s d e b a s e d , a " g r o t e s q u e p l a g i a r i s m . " P o l i t i c a l s t a t e m e n t s a r e r e n o u n c e d t h r o u g h t h e a r t i s t ' s e m b r a c e w i t h m a s s c u l t u r e - - h e m a k e s no c o m m e n t o n K e n n e d y , he m e r e l y r e p r o d u c e s a n i m a g e s a p p e d o f i t s m e a n i n g a s i t f u n n e l s t h r o u g h p o p u l a r c u l t u r e . T h i s i s s u e was r e i t e r a t e d s o m e w h a t d i f f e r e n t l y b y A l a i n B o s q u e t , who v o i c e d f e a r s a b o u t a c u l t u r e w h i c h h a s no " f e e l i n g , " no 95 c r e a t i v i t y - - b u t s i m p l y i m i t a t e s p o p u l a r c u l t u r e , c r e a t i n g a d e b a s e d " h i g h c u l t u r e . " T h e w o r k o f R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d o t h e r P o p a r t i s t s d i d n o t o n l y s i g n a l s i g n a l t h e e n d o f a f i n e a r t t r a d i t i o n , i t t h r e a t e n e d t o l e v e l c u l t u r e : T h e B e a t l e s a n d J o h n n y H a l l y d a y h a v e a m o r e a c c e p t - a b l e i d e a o f i m p r o v i s a t i o n t h a n t h e y ^ R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d t h e P o p a r t i s t s ^ ] . What i s r e a l l y s e r i o u s i s t h e n u m b e r o f r u n - o f - t h e - m i l l p e o p l e t h a t a p p l a u d t h a t k i n d o f a r t . 43 One m i g h t a s s u m e t h a t t h e B e a t l e s a n d J o h n n y H a l l y d a y a t l e a s t h a d no p r e t e n s i o n s a b o u t w h a t t h e y w e r e d o i n g , u n l i k e P o p A r t w h i c h p r o f e s s e d t o b e t h e new a v a n t - g a r d e . I t s s u p e r f i c i a l m e a n i n g h i d e s b e h i n d t h e p r o t e c t i v e s h i e l d o f t h e a v a n t - g a r d e , w h e r e i t a p p e a r s t o be s o m e t h i n g i t i s n ' t : . . . P o p A r t i s n o t r e a l l y d e s t r u c t i v e : i t i s d i r t y , f l a t , s o f t , l a z y , b u t n o t p o w e r f u l . I t g i v e s t h e g r o c e r s t h e i m p r e s s i o n t h a t t h e y t o o c a n h a v e a s u b - s t i t u t e o f t h e a t o m i c bomb o n t h e i r w a l l s , s o m e t h i n g t h a t r e c a l l s t h e human p r e c a r i t y t o d a y . U n f o r t u n a t e l y i t i s m e r e l y a b o t t l e o f k e t c h u p t h a t h a s s t a i n e d a p i e c e o f c a n v a s . 44 B o s q u e t p o i n t s o u t t h a t t h e w o r k may g i v e t h e i m p r e s s i o n o f s e r i o u s n e s s , b u t i s o n l y A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e - - p o p c u l t u r e - - s m e a r e d o n t h e c a n v a s . T h e i s s u e s r a i s e d b y t h e F r e n c h c r i t i c s a r e n o t t h a t f a r f r o m t h o s e p r e s e n t e d b y S o n t a g , S o l o m o n a n d o t h e r p r o p o n e n t s o f t h e new s e n s i b i l i t y ; t h e w o r k " b r i d g e s " a r t a n d l i f e , i t i s n e v e r c r i t i c a l , a n d i t r e p r e s e n t s a c h a n c e f o r g r o c e r s a n d c a b d r i v e r s t o s h a r e i n 96 t h e new " p e o p l e ' s " c u l t u r e . What d o e s d i f f e r i s t h e w a y i n w h i c h t h e s e i s s u e s a r e p r e s e n t e d — f o r t h e p u r v e y o r s o f t h e new s e n s i b i l i t y , R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s w o r k i s a s t e p f o r w a r d , a p o s t i t i v e w a y t o come t o t e r m s w i t h t h e A m e r i c a n e n v i r o n m e n t . Y e t f o r t h e F r e n c h , i t was c l o s e r t o a s t e p down f r o m h i g h c u l t u r e , i n t o a n a f f i r m a t i v e c u l t u r e o f c o m m e r c i a l i s m w h i c h i s s u e d f r o m t h e A m e r i c a n s h o r e s . T h e c u l t u r e w h i c h was o s t e n s i b l y b e i n g e l e v a t e d t o new h e i g h t s f o r t h e A m e r i c a n s h a d l i t t l e t o do w i t h t h e F r e n c h t r a d i t i o n o f h i g h c u l t u r e . W h i l e t h e new s e n s i b i l i t y m e a n t t h a t e v e r y o n e c o u l d p a r t i c i p a t e i n A m e r i c a ' s new d e m o c r a t i c c u l t u r e , c r i t i c s v e h e m e n t l y a r g u e d t h a t t h e v a l u e s d i d n o t t r a n s f e r o v e r t o E u r o p e , b e c a u s e E u r o p e a n s d i d n o t i d e n t i f y m a s s c u l t u r e a s t h e i r c u l t u r e . T h e i s s u e was o n e w h i c h was a g g r a v a t e d b y t h e e v e n t s a t t h e B i e n n a l e , w h e r e e v e r y t h i n g h a d a p o l i t i c a l m e a n i n g . T h e A m e r i c a n a r t i s t s d i d n o t f i n d t h e i r w o r k e x e m p t e d f r o m t h i s , e s p e c i a l l y w h e n t h e i m a g e s t h e y e m p l o y e d w e r e p a r t i c u l a r l y A m e r i c a n . T h e f a c t t h a t a n y d i s c u s s i o n o f t h e w o r k was p r e f a c e d w i t h d e s c r i p t i o n s o f t h e o r g a n i z e r s ' p o l i t i c a l m a n e o u v e r i n g s a s s u r e d t h a t e a c h i m a g e was s e e n i n t h a t c o n t e x t . T h e w o r k , t h e s h o w , t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n — i t a l l b e c a m e p o l i t i c a l , s u b s u m i n g a n d v u l g a r i z i n g " h i g h a r t " u n d e r a m i r e o f c o m m e r c i a l i s m . A s E u r o p e a n c u l t u r e b e c a m e m o r e a n d m o r e i n u n d a t e d w i t h m a s s c u l t u r e p r o d u c e d b y t h e A m e r i c a n s , i t was p e r h a p s i n e v i t a b l e t h a t h i g h c u l t u r e w o u l d e v e n t u a l l y s u c c u m b , a l t h o u g h t h e F r e n c h r e s i s t e d , r e l y i n g o n a n o l d c u l t u r a l t r a d i t i o n o f w h i c h B i s s i e r e was a p a r t . B u t t h e f o r c e o f t h e new, c o n n e c t e d a s i t was t o t h e e c o n o m i c p o w e r o f t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s , was t o o s t r o n g . T h e m a r c h o f " p r o g r e s s " c o n t i n u e d a n d t h e A m e r i c a n s w e r e i n a p o s i t i o n t o c a l l t h e t u n e , 97 p o s s e s s i n g t h e m i l i t a r y , e c o n o m i c a n d e v e n c u l t u r a l m e a n s t o do s o . C r i t i c J e a n - J a c q u e s L e r r a n t s p o k e t o t h e i s s u e when he c o m m e n t e d , " P o p A r t i s a s A m e r i c a n a s C o c a - C o l a i s . B u t t h e c i v i l i z a t i o n o f 45 w i n e s t a y s b e h i n d . " I n V e n i c e , a m i d t h e d i n r a i s e d b y t h e c r i t i c s p r o t e s t i n g t h e c o u p , R a u s c h e n b e r g c a r r i e d a w a y t h e p r i z e f o r A m e r i c a , b u t n o t q u i t e i n t h e w a y t h a t t h e F r a n c e O b s e r v a t e u r d e p i c t e d i t . T h e new s e n s i b i l i t y f o u n d a v i s u a l e x p r e s s i o n o f i t s v i c t o r y i n a w o r k b y R a u s c h e n b e r g t e l l i n g l y t i t l e d C o c a - C o l a P l a n ( 1 9 5 8 , f i g u r e 1 2 ) : C o k e b o t t l e s s m e a r e d w i t h p a i n t d o m i n a t e a g l o b a l s p h e r e . C o k e ' s p l a n i s h e l d h i g h w i t h w i n g s c l i p p e d f r o m a r e l i c o f o l d c u l t u r e , a n d A m e r i c a n p o p c u l t u r e , w i t h i t s s u p e r h e r o s t r e n g t h , w r e s t e d h i g h c u l t u r e f r o m i t s l o f t y h e i g h t s , p l a c i n g i t i n t h e f r e e s o c i e t y w e r e c o n s u m e r d e m o c r a c y r u l e d . K e n n e d y ' s A u g u s t a n a g e was r e a l i z e d : p o e t r y was u n i t e d w i t h p o w e r , w h e r e e v e n h i g h a r t w e n t b e t t e r w i t h C o k e . 9 8 NOTES R a y m o n d C o g n i a t , " L a p e i n t u r e de c e s d e r n i e r e s a n n e e s a u b o r d d e l a f a i l l i t e ? " , L e F i g a r o , J u n e 2 2 , 1 9 6 4 . C o g n i a t was t h e P r i n c i p a l I n s p e c t o r o f F i n e A r t s i n t h e F r e n c h g o v e r n m e n t a t t h e t i m e . 2 A l a i n B o s q u e t , " T r a h i s o n a V e n i s e , " C o m b a t , J u n e 2 7 , 1 9 6 4 . 3 A B C , J u n e 2 8 , 1 9 6 4 . A l a n S o l o m o n ' s s t a t e m e n t a p p e a r e d i n s e v e r a l n e w s p a p e r s a n d p e r - i o d i c a l s , i n c l u d i n g J o h n A s h b e r r y , " V e n i c e B i e n n a l e C e n t e r o f C o n t r o v e r s y , " New Y o r k H e r a l d T r i b u n e , J u n e 2 3 , 1 9 6 4 ; "D.C.", " P o p ' A r t & D o l l a r s o u l a s e m a i n e d e V e n i s e , " L a C o t e de P e i n t r e s 2 ( J u l y - A u g u s t 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 2 5 ; " G o o d b y e P a r i s , H e l l o New Y o r k , " T i m e 8 4 ( J u l y 1 7 , 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 5 8 . 5 " P o p ' A r t & D o l l a r s . . . " , p . 2 5 : " T o u t l e m o n d e ? T o u t n o t r e p e t i t monde s ' e s t e x c i t e s u r c e t t e d e c l a r a t i o n de g u e r r e . On ne p a r l e p l u s q u e d e e x i g e n c e s a m e V i c a i n e s . " ^ J e a n - F r a n c o i s R e v e l , " X X X I I e B i e n n a l e de V e n i s e : T r i o m p h e du R e a l i s m e N a t i o n a l i s t e , " L ' O e i l 1 1 5 - 1 6 ( J u l y - A u g u s t 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 4: " L e s A m e Y i c a i n s , e n 1 9 6 4 , o n t e n v a h i V e n i s e a v e c u n e e n e r g i e t o u t e m i s s i o n a i r e . Non c o n t e n t s d ' e x p o s e r d a n s l e u r p a v i l i o n , a l ' i n t e r i e u r d e s j a r d i n s d e l a B i e n n a l e , i l s o n t o r g a n i s t un g i g a n t e s q u e r e t r o s p e c - t i v e d e l e u r s d e u x v e d e t t e s , J a s p e r J o h n s a n d R a u s c h e n - b e r g — p l u s l e s c o m p a r s e s — d a n s l e p a l a i s de 1 ' a n c i e n c o n s u l a t d e s E t a t s - U n i s . . . " ^ L e o n a r d , " D e s d o l l a r s c h e z l e s D o g e s , " F r a n c e O b s e r v a t e u r , J u n e 2 5 , 1 9 6 4 . 8 / P i e r r e C a b a n n e , "A V e n i s e , L ' A m e r i q u e p r o c l a m e l a f i n de l ' E c o l e d e P a r i s e t l a n c e l e P o p ' A r t p o u r c o l o n i s e r 1 ' E u r o p e , " A r t s , J u n e 2 4 , 1 9 6 4 : " . . . n o u s ne sommes p l u s q u e de p a u v r e s n e g r e s a r r i e r e s , t o u t j u s t e b o n s a e t r e c o l o n i s e s . L a p r e m i e r commando e s t s u r p l a c e : i l s ' a p p e l l e l e P o p ' A r t . L ' i n v a s i o n ne m e t meme p a s l e s f o r m e s , n e g l i g e a n t l e p a v i l i o n o f f i c i e l d e s G i a r d i n i , e l l e p r e n d s e s d i s t a n c e s e t c h o i s i t 1 ' e x t e r - r i t o r i a l i t e : 1 ' a n c i e n c o n s u l a t a m e r i c a i n . . . t r a n s f o r m e e n t e m p l e de l a n o u v e l l e r e l i g i o n . L a p a p e y 1 o f f i c i e : R a u s c h e n b e r g , e n t o u r e de s e s g r a n d s p r e t r e s , J a s p e r J o h n s , O l d e n b u r g , J i m D i n e , F r a n k S t e l l a . " T h e m i l i t a r y c o n n e c t i o n was a l s o made i n " P o p ' A r t & D o l l a r s . . . " , p . 2 5 : " L e u r strat6gie 6voque q u e l q u e p e u c e t t e d ' u n e f l o t t e a t o m i q u e . " 99 9 P i e r r e R e s t a n y , " L a X X X I I B i e n n a l e d i V e n i z i a , B i e n n a l e d e l l a I r r e g o l a r i t a , "Domus 4 1 7 ( A u g u s t 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 3 7 . T h e t e x t a p p e a r e d i n b o t h F r e n c h a n d I t a l i a n ; I w i l l q u o t e o n l y t h e F r e n c h t e x t h e r e : " [ J e ] a y a n t p o u r c e s a r t i s t e s . . . l a p l u s g r a n d e e s t i m e . M a i s j e c o n t e s t e a v e c l a p l u s g r a n d e e n e r g i e l e b i e n - f o n d e du p r o c e d e q u i c r e e un p r e c e d e n t f a c h e u x e t c o n t r i b u e a s u s c i t e r a u t o u r d e s a m e V i c a i n s un h a l o d ' i m p e r i a l i s m e c u l t u r e l . " R e s t a n y 1 f a v o r a b l e r e v i e w o f t h e P o p a r t i s t s i s u n d e r s t a n d a b l e when o n e c o n s i d e r s t h a t he was p r o m o t i n g t h e "new r e a l i s t s " i n F r a n c e ( N i k i S t . P h a l l e , Y v e s K l e i n , A r m a n , C e s a r ) , a n d t h u s h a d much t o g a i n i f Pop A r t was a c c e p t e d a n d r e c o g n i z e d i n t e r n a t i o n a l l y . ^ C a l v i n T o m k i n s , " T h e B i g Show i n V e n i c e , " H a r p e r ' s M a g a z i n e 2 3 0 ( A p r i l 1 9 6 5 ) , p . 1 0 3 . R e c a l l t h a t B i e n n a l e o f f i c i a l s h a d c h o s e n t o e n f o r c e t h e B i e n n a l e r e g u l a t i o n w h e r e o n l y w o r k s o n t h e o f f i c i a l g r o u n d s c o u l d be e l i g i b l e f o r p r i z e s ; t h u s , w o r k s i n t h e c o n s u l a t a n n e x w e r e i n e l i g i - b l e f o r p r i z e s . H a v i n g e r e c t e d a t e m p o r a r y p l y w o o d s t r u c t u r e i n t h e c o u r t - y a r d o f t h e U.S. p a v i l i o n , t h e A m e r i c a n s h a d h o p e d t o a p p e a s e o f f i c i a l s b y e x h i b i t i n g o n e w o r k b y e a c h a r t i s t f e a t u r e d i n t h e c o n s u l a t e . 11 T o m k i n s , O f f t h e W a l l : R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d t h e A r t W o r l d o f O u r T i m e , (New Y o r k : D o u b l e d a y , 1 9 8 0 ; r e p r i n t e d . , H a r m o n d s w o r t h , U.K.: P e n g u i n B o o k s , 1 9 8 1 ) , p . 1 0 . 12 D e n n y i n t e r v i e w . 13 C o n v e r s a t i o n w i t h E m i l e de A n t o n i o , New Y o r k S e p t e m b e r 2 8 , 1 9 8 5 , b y t e l e p h o n e ( d e A n t o n i o knew S o l o m o n , R a u s c h e n b e r g , H u n t e r a n d C a s t e l l i a n d a t t e n d e d t h e 1 9 6 4 B i e n n a l e . He i s c u r r e n t l y w r i t i n g a b o o k o n L e o C a s t e l l i a n d t h e New Y o r k a r t s c e n e ) . A l a n S o l o m o n e x p r e s s e d h i s f r u s t r a - t i o n o v e r " t h e u n w i l l i n g n e s s o f p e o p l e t o s e r v e o n t h e j u r y , f o r p e r s o n a l r e a s o n s , w h i c h w e r a p p a r e n t l y q u i t e p e t t y . One o f t h e m ( a n d t h i s I know t o be t r u e o f M a r t i n F r i e d m a n ) was t h a t t h e y d i d n ' t w a n t t o h e l p me w i n a p r i z e . I t h i n k t h a t S e i t z h a d f e e l i n g s l i k e t h i s , b u t m o r e w i t h r e s p e c t t o t h e museum, w h i c h a f t e r a l l h a d n e v e r won i t . " A l a n S o l o m o n , u n d a t e d c o r r e s p o n d e n c e t o L o i s B i n g h a m , V e n i c e B i e n n a l e f i l e s , U S I A ( 6 4 - 0 4 5 ) , W a s h i n g t o n , D. C : N a t i o n a l Museum o f A m e r i c a n A r t , S m i t h s o n i a n I n s t i t u t e ) . 14 I t i s i n t e r e s t i n g t o n o t e t h a t H u n t e r was i n v i t e d b y t e l e g r a m t o a d j u d i c a t e o n b e h a l f o f t h e A m e r i c a n s , a n d s i n c e H u n t e r was t r a v e l i n g a t t h e t i m e , t h e w i r e was s e n t i n c a r e o f t h e L e o C a s t e l l i G a l l e r y ( d e A n t o n i o i n t e r v i e w ) . A p p a r e n t l y R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s d e a l e r h a d H u n t e r ' s n u m b e r . 15 T o m k i n s , " T h e B i g Show...," p . 1 0 0 . 1 0 0 16 T h e i n c i d e n t was r e p o r t e d b y G e V a l d G a s s i o t - T a l a b o t , " L a B i e n n a l e d ' A r t m o d e r n e , o u l e s A m e r i c a i n s a V e n i s e , " u n i d e n t i f i e d n e w s p a p e r c l i p - p i n g , L e o C a s t e l l i G a l l e r y P a p e r s , ( W a s h i n g t o n , D.C.: A r c h i v e s o f A m e r - i c a n A r t , m i c r o f i l m ) , f r a m e 2 5 7 , a n d a l l u d e d t o b y R e s t a n y , p . 3 7 . 17 S o l o m o n , u n d a t e d c o r r e s p o n d e n c e t o B i n g h a m . 18 H u n t e r ' s r e l u c t a n c e t o d i s c u s s t h i s i s s u e a n d a n y o f t h e e v e n t s a r o u n d t h e j u r y ' s d e l i b e r a t i o n s i s c u r i o u s . I h a v e a t t e m p t e d t o c o n t a c t h i m o n two s e p a r a t e o c c a s i o n s a n d h a v e s e n t h i m t h e S o l o m o n t e x t . Y e t s t i l l he r e m a i n s s i l e n t . P e r h a p s , f r o m H u n t e r ' s p e r s p e c t i v e , some t h i n g s a r e b e t t e r l e f t u n s p o k e n . 19 F r a n z M e y e r , c o r r e s p o n d e n c e w i t h E m i l e de A n t o n i o , S e p t e m b e r 1 9 , 1 9 8 5 . 2 0 " P o p " A r t & D o l l a r s . . . , " p . 2 5 . 21 P i e r r e M a z a r s , " V e n i c e : l e s g r a n d e s m a n o e u v r e s d u e ' P o p ' A r t ' , " L e F i g a r o , J u n e 2 5 , 1 9 6 4 . 22 A g a i n , t h i s i s a n i s s u e w h i c h w i l l n o t be c l a r i f i e d u n t i l S t a t e D e p a r t m e n t d o c u m e n t s b e c o m e a v a i l a b l e . Umbro A p o l l o n i o , t h e B i e n n a l e A r c h i v i s t ( a n d a l s o a member o f t h e B i e n n a l e C o m m i t t e e i n 1 9 6 4 ) d i d n o t r e s p o n d t o my i n q u i r i e s a b o u t t h e j u r y d e l i b e r a t i o n s a n d t h e a g r e e - m e n t s t h e C o m m i t t e e made w i t h t h e A m e r i c a n s ; t h u s , t h e I t a l i a n s ' p a r t i n t h e a g r e e m e n t s r e m a i n s u n c l e a r . I n a d r a f t o f t h e r e p o r t s u b m i t t e d t o S e n a t o r J a c o b J a v i t s b y A l a n S o l o m o n , t h e U.S. C o m m i s s i o n e r o b v i o u s l y f e l t b e t r a y e d b y t h e I t a l i a n s ' r e f u s a l t o a b i d e b y t h e a g r e e m e n t s w h i c h w o u l d h a v e made t h e a r t i s t s i n t h e a n n e x e l i g i b l e f o r t h e p r i z e ; a f t e r t h e y r e s c i n d e d o n t h e s e a g r e e m e n t s , S o l o m o n c h a r g e d " S u b s e q u e n t l y , t h e B i e n n a l e o f f i c i a l s w e r e m o s t d e v i o u s i n t h e i r a t t e m p t s t o c o m p r o m i s e t h e i r own p o l i t i c a l ( a n d f i n a n c i a l ) p r o b l e m s w i t h t h e i r e v i d e n t d e s i r e f o r s i g n i f i - c a n t A m e r i c a n p a r t i c i p a t i o n . We w e r e f o r c e d t o a c c e p t t h e i r a r b i t r a r y b e h a v i o r w i t h o u t m a k i n g a m a j o r i s s u e o f t h e m a t t e r . . . " W h e t h e r t h i s i m p l i e s t h a t c e r t a i n f i n a n c i a l a g r e e m e n t s h a d b e e n made b e - t w e e n t h e U.S. a n d B i e n n a l e o f f i c i a l s ( i n w h i c h t h e I t a l i a n s s u b s e q u e n t l y r e n e g g e d o n t h e i r " p a r t o f t h e b a r g a i n " ) i s a m b i g u o u s . I n a n y c a s e , t h i s p o r t i o n o f t h e r e p o r t was d e l e t e d b y U S I A o f f i c i a l R o b e r t S i v a r d . S e e U. S. G o v e r n m e n t M e m o r a n d u m ( R o b e r t S i v a r d t o L o i s B i n g h a m ) , V e n i c e B i e n - n a l e f i l e s , U S I A ( 6 4 - 0 4 5 ) . 101 23 S o l o m o n , u n d a t e d c o r r e s p o n d e n c e w i t h B i n g h a m . T h e s e " c e r t a i n I t a l i a n s " a p p a r e n t l y e x t e n d e d b e y o n d t h e j u r o r s t h e m s e l v e s . I n t h e same l e t t e r , S o l o m o n m e n t i o n e d " I t was F a l z o n i who b r o u g h t o f f t h e w h o l e p r i z e t h i n g . " G i o r d a n o F a l z o n i was a U S I S i n t e r p r e t e r who w o r k e d f o r S o l o m o n a n d D e n n e y , who h a d b e e n d i s c h a r g e d by t h e g o v e r n m e n t b u t k e p t on a t S o l o m o n ' s i n s i s t e n c e ( S o l o m o n h a d c r e d i t e d F a l z o n i i n t h e J a v i t s r e p o r t b u t U S I A o f f i c i a l s e d i t e d o u t t h i s p o r t i o n o f t h e f i n a l v e r s i o n ) . A c c o r d - i n g t o A l i c e D e n n e y , F a l z o n i was v e r y e n t h u s i a s t i c a b o u t t h e A m e r i c a n e x h i b i t b u t d i d n o t do t h a t much r e g a r d i n g t h e f i n a l p r i z e ( D e n n y i n t e r - v i e w ) . L o i s B i n g h a m was u n s u r e who F a l z o n i w a s , t h i n k i n g he m i g h t h a v e b e e n a j u r o r when I a s k e d h e r t o comment on S o l o m o n ' s s t a t e m e n t ( B i n g h a m i n t e r v i e w ) . E m i l e de A n t o n i o n o t e d t h a t I t a l i a n a r t i s t s who h a d s e e n R a u s c h e n b e r g 1 s w o r k i n I t a l y b e f o r e , p r e s s u r e d M a r c h i o r i a n d V a l s e c c h i t o s u p p o r t R a u s c h e n b e r g ( d e A n t o n i o i n t e r v i e w ) . 24 Sam H u n t e r c l a i m e d t h a t S t a r z i n s k i h a d v o t e d w i t h t h e I t a l i a n s f r o m t h e b e g i n n i n g . M e y e r s u p p o r t e d R a u s c h e n b e r g on t h e s e c o n d v o t e , a f t e r h a v i n g o p p o s e d h i m i n i t i a l l y , w i t h K e n n e t h N o l a n d a s h i s f i r s t c h o i c e ( d e A n t o n i o i n t e r v i e w ) . 25 T o m k i n s , " T h e B i g S h o w . . . , " p . 1 0 2 . 26 M e y e r , c o r r e s p o n d e n c e w i t h de A n t o n i o . M i k e S o n n a b e n d a n d h i s w i f e I l e a n a S o n n a b e n d w e r e t h e m a j o r d e a l e r s o f A m e r i c a n Pop A r t i s t s , i n c l u d i n g R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d J o h n s , i n P a r i s a t t h e t i m e . I l e a n a S o n n a b e n d was f o r m e r l y m a r r i e d t o C a s t e l l i , a n d t h e i r b u s i n e s s c o n n e c t i o n s r e m a i n e d when S o n n a b e n d r e l o c a t e d i n F r a n c e . H e r e t h e r e i s some a m b i g u i t y i f , a s H u n t e r c l a i m e d , M e y e r h a d i n i t i a l l y f a v o r e d N o l a n d . P e r h a p s he p r e f e r e d J o h n s o v e r R a u s c h e n b e r g o n c e i t became c l e a r t h a t N o l a n d h a d l i t t l e c h a n c e o f w i n n i n g t h e p r i z e . 27 T o m k i n s , O f f t h e W a l 1 , p . 1 0 . The p e r f o r m a n c e a l s o i n c l u d e d m u s i c by J o h n C a g e . 28 Sam H u n t e r i n c o n v e r s a t i o n w i t h E m i l e de A n t o n i o ( d e A n t o n i o i n t e r v i e w ) . 29 S e e P i e r r e S c h n e i d e r , " L a B i e n n a l e de V e n i s e , " P a r i s L ' E x p r e s s , J u l y 2 2 , 1 9 6 4 . 3 0 A n n e t t e M i c h e l s o n , " T h e 1 9 6 4 V e n i c e B i e n n a l e , " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 8 ( S e p t e m b e r 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 3 8 . 102 31 The new r e c r u i t s r e p l a c e t h e s t a n d a r d a r m y i n f a n t r y o f a n o t h e r map w h i c h i l l i c t e d o u t r a g e i n F r a n c e : i n 1952, C o l l i e r ' s M a g a z i n e f e a t u r e d o n i t s c o v e r a map o f E u r o p e w i t h a n A m e r i c a n s o l d i e r ( b e a r i n g t h e U n i t e d N a t i o n s i n s i g n i a on h i s h e l m e t , a l o n g w i t h an A m e r i c a n f l a g ) s u p e r i m p o s e d i n f r o n t , " k e e p i n g t h e p e a c e " i n v a r i o u s d e s i g n a t e d E u r o p e a n c i t i e s . S e e C o l l i e r ' s M a g a z i n e , A p r i l 1952. 32 D a n i e l C o r d i e r , ( l e t t e r ) q u o t e d i n " G o o d b y e P a r i s . . . " , p . 58. 33 D a n i e l C o r d i e r , ( l e t t e r ) , q u o t e d by J o h n A s h b e r r y , " A m e r i c a n D e v e l o p - m e n t s W o r r y t h e F r e n c h , " New Y o r k H e r a l d T r i b u n e , J u l y 7, 1964. 34 " G o o d b y e P a r i s . . . " , p . 58. 35 R o b e r t H u g h e s , " P a r i s P o s t - M o r t e m , " [ L o n d o n ] O b s e r v e r , O c t o b e r 18, 1964. 36 J e a n Y v e s M o c k , " N o t e s f r o m P a r i s a n d L o n d o n : B i s s i e r e a t t h e m u s e e d ' a r t m o d e r n e , " A p o l l o 69 ( J u n e 1959), p . 195. 37 Raymond C o g n i a t , " C u r i e u s e a t t i t u d e a g r e s s i v e d e s E t a t s - U n i s , " Le F i g a r o , J u n e 23, 1964: "[Bissiere] e s t c e r t a i n e m e n t l e p e i n t r e l e p l u s q u a l i f i e p o u r i l l u s t r e r l a p e r m a n e n c e c a l m e e t 1 ' i n c e s s a n t e i n v e n t i o n d o n t on r e s s e n t s i v i v e - m e n t l e b e s o i n a u j o u r d ' h u i . Son e n s e m b l e e s t d ' u n e d i g n i t e e t d ' u n r a f f i n e m e n t s i i n d i s c u t a b l e s . . . " 38 P i e r r e S c h n e i d e r , " A r t News f r o m P a r i s , " A r t News 61 ( O c t o b e r 1 9 6 2 ) , p . 48. 39 G a s s o i t - T a l a b o t , f r a m e 257: L e Pop A r t e s t , on l e s a i t , u n e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n b r u t a l e , g6neValement e m p r e i n t e de g i g a n t i s m e , d ' g l e m e n t s c h o i s i s p a r m i l e c o n t e x t e u r b a i n de l a v i e d e s E t a t s - U n i s . C e t t e c i v i l i s a t i o n du c o n f o r t a en q u e l q u e s o r t e d i v i n i s e ' l e p r o d u i t de c o n s o m m a t i o n , e t i l e t a i t n a t u r e ! , p a r u n e s o r t e de l o g i q u e a s s e z t r i s t e , m a i s i n e l u c t a b l e , q u e l e d e n r e e s a l i m e n t a i r e s , 1 ' a u t o m o b i l e , l e s s y m b o l e s de 1 ' h y g i e n e e t du b i e n - e " t r e a m e r i c a i n s , en somme t o u t l e b r i c - a - b r a c de l ' o b j e t a s e p t i s e e t p r o d u i t e n s e r i e , d e v i e n n e n t l a p r e o c c u p a t i o n m a j e u r e d e s a r t i s t e s d ' o u t r e - A t l a n t i q u e . " 103 4 0 S c h n e i d e r , " L a B i e n n a l e de V e n i s e . . . " 41 L e o n a r d , : " . . . c e s o b j e t s u s u e l s , d e f o r m e ' s , b a f o u £ s , m i n u t i e u s e m e n t r e c o n s t r u i t s a d ' e n o r m e s d i m e n s i o n s , c e s f r a g m e n t s de b a n d e s d e s s i n e e s ( d e ' C o m i c s ' ) s c r u p u l e u s e m e n t r e p r o d u i t s £ l ' e c h e l l e d e s e c r a n s de c i n e m a p a n o r a m i q u e s , c e s c o l l a g e s de p h o t o g r a p h i e s de m a g a z i n e , t o u t c e b r i c - a - b r a c q u i c o n s t i t u e l e ' P o p ' A r t ' , q u ' e s t - c e d ' a u t r e q u ' u n p l a g i a t g r o t e s q u e de D a d a . . . M a i s Dada f u t un m o u v e m e n t e s s e n t i e l l e - m e n t r e " v o l u t i o n n a i r e , p o u s s ^ p a r une immense p a s s i o n s o c i a l e . C ' e t a i t u n e a t t a q u e de c e t t e s o c i ^ t ^ b o u r g e o i s e . . . M a i s l e s n e o - d a d a i s t e s e m b r a s s e n t a u c o n t r a i r e l e s y m b o l e b o u r g e o i s e t s o n t f e r m e s a l a p a s s i o n . " 42 I b i d . : " [ P o p ' A r t ] n a i s s e n t du mime p r o c e s s u s q u i e n g e n d r e l e s ' i d e e s ' p u b l i c i t a i r e s . " 4 3 B o s q u e t , " D e s s a r o i a V e n i s e , " Le C o t e s de P e i n t u r e s 2 ( J u l y - A u g u s t 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 2 9 : " L e s B e a t l e s e t J o h n n y H a l l y d a y o n t de 1 ' i m p r o v i s a t i o n u n e i d e e p l u s a c c e p t a b l e q u ' e u x . Ce q u i e s t b e a u c o u p p l u s g r a v e , c ' e s t l e n o m b r e de g o g o s q u i a p p l a u d i s s e n t . " 44 I b i d . : " . . . l e ' p o p a r t ' n ' a r i e n de d e s t r u c t e u r r e e l l e m e n t : i l e s t s a l e , i l e s t p l a t , i l e s t m o u , i l e s t p a r e s s e a u x , m a i s p a s p u i s s a n t . ^11 d o n n e a u x e p i c i e r s 1 ' i m p r e s s i o n q u ' e u x a u s s i p o s s e d e n t s u r l e s m u r s un s u b s t i t u t a l a Bombe a t o m i q u e , e t q u e l q u e c h o s e q u i r a p p e l l e l a p r e c a r i t e h u m a i n e d ' a u j o u r d ' h u i . H e l a s , c e n ' e s t q u ' u n e b o u t e i l l e de k e t c h - u p q u i a m a c u l e un b o u t de t o i l e . . . " 45 J e a n - J a c q u e s L e r r a n t , " L e P o p ' A r t t r i o m p h e a l a B i e n n a l e de V e n i s e , " u n i d e n t i f i e d n e w s p a p e r c l i p p i n g , L e o C a s t e l l i G a l l e r y P a p e r s , ( W a s h i n g t o n , D . C . : A r c h i v e s o f A m e r i c a n A r t , m i c r o f i l m ) , f r a m e 2 4 3 : " L e s p o p ' a r t e s t a m e r i c a i n comme l e c o c a c o l a . M a i s l a c i v i l s a t i o n de v i n r e c u l e . " 104 C O N C L U S I O N . . . p r e s s u r e s a n d p l a y i n g o f f o f i n f l u e n c e s b y d e a l e r s a n d g o v e r n m e n t o f f i c i a l s h a v e a l w a y s b e e n t h e d a i l y b r e a d w h i c h f e d t h e w h o l e [ B i e n - n a l e ] m a c h i n e . I f t h e A m e r i c a n s h a v e [ s i c ] r e a l l y f o r o n e moment t h r e a t e n e d n o t t o come a n y m o r e w i t h o u t t h e p r i z e t h i s t i m e , t h e y o n l y u s e d t h e n a t u r a l l a n g u a g e o f t h e p l a c e . T h e g o v e r n m e n t o f f i c i a l [ s i c ] o f a l l c o u n t r i e s a n d a l l d e a l e r s i n t e r e s t e d i n c e r t a i n a r t i s t s w e n t t o V e n i c e , t r y i n g t o b r i n g t h e p r i z e home a n d a l w a y s e n g a g e d a l l t h e e x p e d i e n t s t h e y c o u l d t h i n k o f . I f i n 1 9 6 4 t h e A m e r i c a n s f i n a l l y s u c c e e d e d , y o u may s a y a g a i n s t t h e m t h a t t h e i r a i m h a d b e e n no l e s s n a t i o n a l i s t i c a s t h e o n e d e f e n d e d b y t h e F r e n c h o r E n g l i s h i n o t h e r B i e n n a l e y e a r s . 1 F r a n z M e y e r ' s w o r d s s p e a k t o t h e i s s u e o f t h e B i e n n a l e p o l i t i c s i n g e n e r a l ; t h e r e i s no d o u b t t h a t t h e A m e r i c a n s h a d u n p r e c e d e n t e d a d v a n t a g e s i n 1 9 6 4 , a n d t h e y u s e d t h e s e t o p r e s s f o r t h e i r c l a i m t o t h e p r i z e , b u t t h e F r e n c h h a d l o n g b.een e x e r t i n g p r e s s u r e s t o m a i n t a i n t h e i r h o l d o n t h e B i e n n a l e . Y e t t h e f o r c e o f t r a d i t i o n was no m a t c h f o r t h e p r e s s u r e t h e A m e r i c a n s b r o u g h t t o b e a r i n V e n i c e i n 1 9 6 4 . A l a n S o l o m o n p o i n t e d o u t , "We m i g h t h a v e o n e [ s i c ] i t a n y w a y 2 ( a p a r t f r o m t h e q u e s t i o n o f m e r i t ) b u t we r e a l l y e n g i n e e r e d i t . " So much f o r a e s t h e t i c v i c t o r i e s . What h a d r e a l l y t r i u m p h e d i n V e n i c e was U.S. c u l t u r e ; R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s " a e s t h e t i c m e r i t " was s u b s u m e d b y l a r g e r i s s u e s i n v o l v i n g c u l t u r a l h e g e m o n y . T h e t r i u m p h o f t h e new s e n s i b i l i t y i n V e n i c e s i g n a l e d a c u l t u r a l s h i f t w h i c h e x t e n d e d b e y o n d t h e t r a n s f e r o f a r t c e n t e r s , h o w e v e r . N o t o n l y h a d t h e F r e n c h t r a d i t i o n b e e n a b a n d o n e d , b u t t h e n o t i o n o f m o d e r n i s m h a d a l s o b e e n l e f t i n t h e p a s t . I r o n i c a l l y , C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g , who h a d f o u g h t f o r t h e a s c e n d a n c y o f A m e r i c a n c u l t u r e 105 t h r o u g h A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , a n d l a t e r f o u g h t t o p r e s e r v e t h e s e g a i n s t h r o u g h P o s t - P a i n t e r l y A b s t r a c t i o n , f o u n d h i m s e l f o c c u p y i n g a p o s i t i o n n o t s o v e r y f a r f r o m t h e F r e n c h c r i t i c s who r e s i s t e d P o p A r t w i t h t h e t r a d i t i o n r e p r e s e n t e d b y B i s s i e r e . I n t h e f a c e o f a c u l t u r e w h i c h a d v o c a t e d p o s i t i v e e n g a g e m e n t w i t h t h e f o r c e s o f d o m i n a t i o n , G r e e n b e r g c l u n g t o a f o r m a l t r a d i t i o n w h i c h h a d l o s t i t s m e a n i n g a n d , p e r h a p s , i t s d i r e c t i o n ; a t t h e same t i m e t h e F r e n c h c o n t i n u e d t o h o l d o n t o t h e i r t r a d i t i o n w h i c h h a d a l r e a d y b e e n u p r o o t e d b y A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m . When t h e b a t t l e was l o s t , t h e F r e n c h c o l l e c t o r s l e f t P a r i s a n d came t o New Y o r k , a n d G r e e n b e r g l e f t New Y o r k f o r t h e p r o v i n c e s o f C a n a d a . I n a b r o a d e r s e n s e , t h e B i e n n a l e p r i z e r e p r e s e n t e d a m o r e g e n e r a l c r i s i s i n a r t ; f o r A m e r i c a , t h e o p t i o n s p r e s e n t e d r a n g e d f r o m f o r m a l i s m t o a n " e n g a g e d " a r t c e l e b r a t i n g s o c i e t y . W h i l e R a u s c e h n b e r g a p p e a r e d t o h a v e c h o s e n t h e l a t t e r , b e l i e v i n g a s he d i d i n t h e p r o m i s e o f l i b e r a l i s m , t h e h o p e s p r o j e c t e d i n K e n n e d y w e r e 3 s o o n s h a t t e r e d b y t h e w a r i n V i e t n a m . W i t h t h i s s t a i n o n t h e new s e n s i b i l i t y , e v e n S o n t a g r e n o u n c e d h e r m e m b e r s h i p . Y e t c u l t u r e n e v e r r e t u r n e d t o t h e t r a d i t i o n p r e c e d i n g t h e a s c e n d a n c y o f P o p A r t , a n d t h e f u t u r e o f t h e new s e n s i b i l i t y , g i v e n i t s a b a n d o n o f o l d t e n e t s o f m o d e r n i s m , i s i n d i c a t e d b y l i t e r a r y c r i t i c F r e d r i c J a m e s o n i n h i s 106 d i c u s s i o n o f p o s t m o d e r n i s m , w o r t h q u o t i n g a t l e n g t h : What w o u l d h a p p e n i f o n e no l o n g e r b e l i e v e d i n t h e e x i s t e n c e o f n o r m a l l a n g u a g e , o f o r d i n a r y s p e e c h , o f t h e l i n g u i s t i c n o r m . . . ? One c o u l d t h i n k o f i t i n t h i s way: p e r h p a s t h e i m m e n s e f r a g m e n t a t i o n a n d p r i v a t i z a t i o n o f m o d e r n l i t - e r a t u r e — i t s e x p l o s i o n i n t o a h o s t o f d i s t i n c t a n d p r i v a t e s t y l e s a n d m a n n e r i s m s — f o r e s h a d o w s d e e p e r a n d m o r e g e n e r a l t e n d e n c i e s i n s o c i a l l i f e a s a w h o l e . S u p p o s i n g t h a t m o d e r n a r t a n d m o d e r n i s m — f a r f r o m b e i n g a k i n d o f s p e c i a l i z e d a e s t h e t i c c u r i o s i t y — a c t u a l l y a n t i c i p a t e d s o c i a l d e v e l o p m e n t s a l o n g t h e s e l i n e s ; s u p p o s i n g t h a t i n t h e d e c a d e s s i n c e t h e e m e r g e n c e o f t h e g r e a t m o d e r n s t y l e s s o c i e t y h a s i t s e l f b e g u n t o f r a g - m e n t i n t h i s w a y , e a c h g r o u p c o m i n g t o s p e a k a c u r i o u s p r i v a t e l a n g u a g e o f i t s own, e a c h p r o - f e s s i o n d e v e l o p i n g i t s p r i v a t e c o d e o r i d i o l e c t , a n d f i n a l l y e a c h i n d i v i d u a l c o m i n g t o be a k i n d o f l i n g u i s t i c i s l a n d , s e p a r a t e d f r o m e v e r y o n e e l s e ? B u t t h e n i n t h a t c a s e , t h e v e r y p o s s i b i l - i t y o f a n y l i n g u i s t i c n o r m . . . w o u l d v a n i s h , a n d we w o u l d h a v e n o t h i n g b u t s t y l i s t i c d i v e r s i t y a n d h e t e r o g e n e i t y . 4 W i t h t h e d e v e l o p m e n t o f p o s t m o d e r n i s m i n t h e 1 9 8 0 s , t h e d i v e r s i t y o f s t y l e s h a s b e c o m e h o m o g e n i z e d i n t o a new k i n d o f s p e e c h " i n a d e a d 5 l a n g u a g e " - - i m a g e s a r e p u l l e d f r o m t h e h i s t o r y o f a r t j u s t a s R a u s c h e n b e r g i n d i f f e r e n t l y s e l e c t e d i m a g e s f r o m m a s s c u l t u r e m a g a z i n e s . T h e t r i u m p h o f P o p A r t m e a n t t h e a e s t h e t i c i z a t i o n o f c o n s u m e r c u l t u r e , b u t i t made w a y f o r a p o s t m o d e r n m o v e m e n t f e e d s o n t h e a r t m o v e m e n t s o f t h e p a s t . T h u s , t h e o l d t r a d i t i o n s r e a p p e a r , b u t i n a b a s t a r d i z e d f o r m . T h e i r r e t u r n f r o m t h e g r a v e h a s i n c i t e d t h e s p i r i t o f b a t t l e b e t w e e n E u r o p e a n d A m e r i c a n o n c e a g a i n — b u t t h e i d e o l o g i c a l s t a k e s i n t h i s new f i g h t a r e y e t a n o t h e r s t o r y . 107 NOTES 1 M e y e r , c o r r e s p o n d e n c e w i t h de A n t o n i o . 2 S o l o m o n , u n d a t e d c o r r e s p o n d e n c e w i t h B i n g h a m . 3 T h i s i s p e r h a p s b e s t i l l u s t r a t e d b y R a u s c h e n b e r g ' s own a r t p r a c t i c e s a n d c r i t i c a l f o r t u n e s : i n 1 9 6 0 , he c o m p l e t e d a s e r i e s o f d r a w i n g s b a s e d o n D a n t e ' s " I n f e r n o " w h i c h f e a t u r e d a d r a w i n g w h e r e p h o t o g r a p h s o f K e n n e d y a n d A d l a i S t e v e n s o n w e r e u s e d t o r e p r e s e n t D a n t e a n d V i r g i l - - i n h e l l , R i c h a r d N i x o n ' s i m a g e was o b s c u r e d w i t h r e d p a i n t ( s e e " T h i r t y - f o u r D r a w i n g s f o r D a n t e ' s ' I n f e r n o ' " , C a n t o X X I ) . B y t h e m i d - 1 9 6 0 s , R a u s c h e n b e r g a b a n d o n e d h i s s i l k s c r e e n s f o r a s e r i e s e n t i t l e d " C u r r e n t s , " c o l l a g e s o f n e w s p a p e r c l i p p i n g s w h i c h w e r e c r i t i c a l o f U.S. i n v o l v e m e n t i n V i e t n a m . I n t e r e s t i n g l y , t h i s l a t e r s e r i e s d i d n o t ' i n c u r much c r i t i c a l a t t e n t i o n , y e t w h e n R a u s c h e n b e r g r e v i t a l i z e d h i s s i l k s c r e e n t e c h n i q u e , c r i t i c s c e l e b r a t e d t h e r e t u r n o f t h e " e n f a n t t e r r i b l e . " 4 F r e d r i c J a m e s o n , " P o s t m o d e r n i s m a n d C o n s u m e r S o c i e t y , " p . 1 1 4 , i n T h e A n t i - A e s t h e t i c : E s s a y s o n P o s t m o d e r n C u l t u r e , e d . H a l F o s t e r , ( P o r t T o w n s e n d , WA: B a y P r e s s , 1 9 8 3 1 ^ 5 I b i d . 108 F i g u r e 1: E d i t o r i a l C a r t o o n , "Des d o l l a r s c h e z l e s D o g e s , " F r a n c e O b s e r v a t e u r , J u n e 2 5 , 1 9 6 4 . 109 F i g u r e 2: K e n n e t h N o l a n d , T u r n s o l e , 1 9 6 1 . S y n t h e t i c p o l y m e r p a i n t o n c a n v a s , 9 4 i x 9 4 i i n c h e s . Museum o f M o d e r n A r t , New Y o r k . [ S o u r c e : K e n w o r t h M o f f e t t , K e n n e t h N o l a n d (New Y o r k : H a r r y N. A b r a m s , I n c . , T977T] 110 F i g u r e 3: R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , B e d , 1 9 5 5 . C o n s t r u c t i o n , 74 x 31 i n c h e s . C o l l e c t i o n o f Mr. a n d M r s . L e o C a s t e l l i , New Y o r k . [ S o u r c e : A n d r e w F o r g e , R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g (New Y o r k : H a r r y N. A b r a m s , 1 9 5 9 ) J 111 K e n n e t h N o l a n d , S u n s h i n e , 1 9 6 1 . O i l o n c a n v a s , 7 x 7 f e e t . C o l l e c t i o n o f D r . a n d M r s . J a c k M. F a r r i s , S o l a n o B e a c h , C a l i f o r n i a . [ S o u r c e : K e n w o r t h M o f f e t t , K e n n e t h N o l a n d (New Y o r k : H a r r y N. A b r a m s , I n c . , 1 9 7 7 T ] 112 F i g u r e 5: R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , T r e e F r o g , 1 9 6 4 . O i l o n c a n v a s , 96 x 72 i n c h e s . C o l l e c t i o n o f W i l l i a m D o r r , New Y o r k . [ S o u r c e : A n d r e w F o r g e , R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g (New Y o r k : H a r r y N. A b r a m s , 1 9 5 9 ) ] 113 F i g u r e 6: R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , W i n t e r P o o l , 1 9 5 9 . C o m b i n e p a i n t i n g o n c a n v a s , 8 9 x 59 i n c h e s . C o l l e c t i o n M r . a n d M r s V i c t o r G a n z , New Y o r k . [ S o u r c e : A n d r e w F o r g e , R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g (New Y o r k : H a r r y N. 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" H a r p e r ' s M a g a z i n e 2 3 0 ( A p r i l 1 9 6 5 ) ] 116 F i g u r e 9: A d v e r t i s e m e n t f o r t h e L e o C a s t e l l i G a l l e r y , J u n e , 1 9 6 4 . [ S o u r c e : L ' O e i l , J u l y 1 9 6 4 ] 117 F i g u r e 1 0 : R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , K i t e , 1 9 6 3 . O i l o n c a n v a s . 8 4 x 6 0 i n c h e s . C o l l e c t i o n o f M i c h a e l a n d I l l e a n a S o n n a b e n d , P a r i s . [ S o u r c e : A n d r e w F o r g e , R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g (New Y o r k : H a r r y N. A b r a m s , 1 9 5 9 ) ] 118 F i g u r e 1 1 : R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g , B u f f a l o , 1 9 6 4 . O i l o n c a n v a s , 9 6 x 72 i n c h e s . C o l l e c t i o n o f Mr. a n d M r s . R o b e r t B. M a y e r , W i n n e t k a , I I 1 i n o i s . [ S o u r c e : Sam H u n t e r a n d J o h n J a c o b u s , A m e r i c a n A r t o f t h e 2 0 t h C e n t u r y (New Y o r k : H a r r y N. 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J . : P r e n t i c e - H a l l , I n c . , 1 9 6 3 . B a r t h e s , R o l a n d . I m a g e - M u s i c - T e x t . T r a n s l a t e d b y S t e p h e n H e a t h . New Y o r k : H i l l a n d Wang, 1 9 7 7 . . M y t h o l o g i e s . T r a n s l a t e d b y A n n e t t e L a v e r s . New Y o r k : H i l l a n d Wang, 1 9 8 1 ; r e p r i n t e d f r o m t h e F r e n c h e d . , P a r i s : E d i t i o n s du S e u i l , 1 9 5 7 . B a u d r i l l a r d , J e a n . F o r a C r i t i q u e o f t h e P o l i t i c a l E c o n o m y o f t h e S i g n . T r a n s l a t e d b y C h a r l e s L a v i n . S t . L o u i s : T e l o s P r e s s , 1 9 8 1 . B e l l , D a n i e l . T h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y . New Y o r k : C o l l i e r s , 1 9 6 1 ; r e p r i n t e d . , New Y o r k : F r e e P r e s s , 1 9 6 5 . B e n j a m i n , W a l t e r . I I l u m i n a t i o n s . T r a n s l a t e d b y H a r r y Z o h n . New Y o r k : S c h o c k e n B o o k s , 1 9 6 9 ; r e p r i n t e d f r o m t h e G e r m a n e d . , F r a n k f u r t a . M.: S u h r k a m p V e r l a g , 1 9 5 5 . B o g a r t , L e o . P r e m i s e s f o r P r o p a g a n d a : T h e U S I A ' s O p e r a t i n g A s s u m p t i o n s i n t h e C o l d War. New Y o r k : F r e e P r e s s , 1 9 7 6 . B r o w n e , R a y B., e d . P o p u l a r C u l t u r e a n d t h e E x p a n d i n g C o n s c o u s n e s s . New Y o r k : J o h n W i l e y & S o n s , 1 9 7 3 . B u c h l o h , B e n j a m i n H.D., S e r g e G u i l b a u t , a n d D a v i d S o l k i n , e d s . M o d e r n i s m a n d M o d e r n i t y : T h e V a n c o u v e r C o n f e r e n c e P a p e r s . H a l i f a x , N.S.: NSCAD P r e s s , 1 9 8 3 . C a l i n e s c u , M a t e i . F a c e s o f M o d e r n i t y : A v a n t G a r d e , D e c a d e n c e a n d K i t s c h . B l o o m i n g t o n / L o n d o n : I n d i a n a U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1 9 7 7 . C o o m b s , P h i l i p H a l l . T h e 4 t h D i m e n s i o n o f F o r e g n P o l i c y : E d u c a t i o n a l a n d C u l t u r a l A f f a i r s . New Y o r k : C o u n c i l o f F o r e i g n R e l a t i o n s . H a r p e r a n d Row, 1 9 6 4 . C o s e r , L e w i s A. Men o f I d e a s : A S o c i o l o g i s t ' s V i e w . New Y o r k : F r e e P r e s s , 1 9 6 5 . D e b o r d , G u y . S o c i e t y o f t h e S p e c t a c l e . D e t r o i t : B l a c k a n d R e d , 1 9 8 3 ; r e p r i n t e d f r o m t h e F r e n c h e d . , P a r i s : E d i t i o n s B u c h e t - C h a s t e l , 1 9 6 7 . d e M e n i l , L o i s P a t t i s o n . Who S p e a k s f o r E u r o p e ? New Y o r k : S t . M a r t i n ' s P r e s s , 1 9 7 7 . 1 2 2 D o n o v a n , J o h n C. T h e C o l d W a r r i o r s : A P o l i c y - M a k i n g E l i t e . L e x i n g t o n , MA: D.C. H e a t h & C o . , 1 9 7 4 . F i e d l e r , L e s l i e . T h e C o l l e c t e d E s s a y s o f L e s l i e F i e d l e r . 2 V o l s . New Y o r k : S t e i n & D a y , 1 9 7 1 . . What Was L i t e r a t u r e ? C l a s s , C u l t u r e a n d M a s s S o c i e t y . New Y o r k : S i m o n a n d S c h u s t e r , 1 9 8 2 . F o r g e , A n d r e w . R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . New Y o r k : A b r a m s , 1 9 6 9 . F o s t e r , H a l , e d . T h e A n t i - A e s t h e t i c : E s s a y s o n P o s t m o d e r n C u l t u r e . P o r t T o w n s e n d , WA: B a y P r e s s , 1 9 8 3 . G a l b r a i t h , J o h n K. T h e L i b e r a l H o u r . B o s t o n : M i f f l i n , 1 9 6 0 . G r e e n b e r g , C l e m e n t . A r t a n d C u l t u r e : C r i t i c a l E s s a y s . B o s t o n : B e a c o n P r e s s , 1 9 6 1 . G u i l b a u t , S e r g e . How New Y o r k S t o l e t h e I d e a o f M o d e r n A r t : A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m , F r e e d o m , a n d t h e C o l d War. T r a n s l a t e d b y A r t h u r G o l d h a m m e r . C h i c a g o / L o n d o n : U n i v e r s i t y o f C h i c a g o P r e s s , 1 9 8 3 . G u i r a u d , P i e r r e . S e m i o l o g y . T r a n s l a t e d b y G e o r g e G r o s s . L o n d o n / B o s t o n : R o u t l e d g e & K e g a n P a u l , 1 9 7 5 ; r e p r i n t e d f r o m t h e F r e n c h e d . , P a r i s : P r e s s e s U n i v e r s i t a i r e s de F r a n c e , 1 9 7 1 . H a l b e r s t a m , D a v i d . THe B e s t a n d t h e B r i g h t e s t . New Y o r k : Random H o u s e , 1 9 6 9 . H e n d e r s o n , J o h n W. T h e U.S. I n f o r m a t i o n A g e n c y . New Y o r k : P r a e g e r , 1 9 6 9 . H o f s t a d t e r , R i c h a r d . A n t i - I n t e l l e c t u a l i s m i n A m e r i c a n L i f e . New Y o r k : V i n t a g e B o o k s , 1 9 6 2 . H o r k h e i m e r , Max a n d T h e o d o r W. A d o r n o . D i a l e c t i c o f E n l i g h t e n m e n t . T r a n s l a t e d b y J o h n Cumming. New Y o r k : C o n t i n u u m , 1 9 7 2 ; r e p r i n t e d f r o m t h e G e r m a n e d . , New Y o r k : S o c i a l S t u d i e s , I n c . , 1 9 4 4 . H o r o w i t z , D a v i d . T h e F r e e W o r l d C o l o s s u s : A C r i t i q u e o f A m e r i c a n F o r e i g n P o l i c y i n t h e C o l d War. New Y o r k : H i l l a n d Wang, 1 9 6 5 ; r e p r i n t e d . , ( r e v i s e d ) , New Y o r k : H i l l a n d Wang, 1 9 7 1 . Howe, I r v i n g . D e c l i n e o f t h e New. New Y o r k : H o r i z o n , 1 9 7 0 . J a c o b s , N o r m a n , e d . C u l t u r e f o r t h e M i l l i o n s ? P r i n c e t o n , N J : V a n N o s t r a n d , 1 9 6 1 . J a y , M a r t i n . A d o r n o . C a m b r i d g e , MA: H a r v a r d U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1 9 8 4 . J o y c e , W a l t e r . T h e P r o p a g a n d a G a p . New Y o r k / E v a n s t o n / L o n d o n : H a r p e r a n d Row, 1 9 6 8 . 1 2 3 K l e i m a n , R o b e r t . A t l a n t i c C r i s i s : A m e r i c a n D i p l o m a c y C o n f r o n t s a R e s u r g e n t E u r o p e . New Y o r k : N o r t o n , 1 9 6 4 . K r a f t , J o s e p h . T h e G r a n d D e s i g n : F r o m Common M a r k e t t o A t l a n t i c P a r t n e r - s h i p . New Y o r k : H a r p e r & S o n s , 1 9 6 2 . K u s p i t , D o n a l d . C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g , A r t C r i t i c . M a d i s o n : T h e U n i v e r s i t y o f W i s c o n s i n P r e s s , 1 9 7 9 . L a r s o n , G a r y 0. T h e R e l u c t a n t P a t r o n : T h e U n i t e d S t a t e s G o v e r n m e n t & t h e A r t s , 1 9 4 3 - 1 9 6 5 . P h i l a d e l p h i a : U n i v e r s i t y o f P e n n s y l v a n i a P r e s s , 1 9 8 3 . L a s k y , V i c t o r . J F K : T h e Man a n d t h e M y t h . New Y o r k : D e l l P u b l i s h i n g , 1 9 6 3 ; r e p r i n t e d . , New Y o r k : D e l l P u b l i s h i n g , 1 9 7 7 . L i p s e t , S e y m o u r M a r t i n a n d L e o L o w e n t h a l , e d s . C u l t u r e a n d S o c i a l C h a r a c - t e r . New Y o r k : F r e e P r e s s , 1 9 6 1 . M a c d o n a l d , D w i g h t . A g a i n s t t h e A m e r i c a n G r a i n . New Y o r k : V i n t a g e , 1 9 6 5 . _. M a s s c u l t a n d M i d c u l t . New Y o r k : P a r t i s a n R e v i e w S e r i e s , No. 4. D i s t r i b u t e d b y Random H o u s e , 1 9 6 1 . M a r c u s e , H e r b e r t . O n e - D i m e n s i o n a l Man. B o s t o n : B e a c o n P r e s s , 1 9 6 4 . _. . N e g a t i o n s : E s s a y s i n C r i t i c a l T h e o r y . W i t h t r a n s l a t i o n s b y J e r e m y J . S h a p i r o . B o s t o n : B e a c o n P r e s s , 1 9 6 8 ; r e p r i n t e d f r o m t h e G e r m a n e d . , F r a n k f u r t a . M.: S u h r k a m p V e r l a g , 1 9 6 5 . M o f f e t t , K e n w o r t h . K e n n e t h N o l a n d . New Y o r k : A b r a m s , 1 9 7 7 . N e v i n s , A l l a n , e d . T h e B u r d e n a n d t h e G l o r y : T h e H o p e s a n d P u r p o s e s o f P r e s i d e n t K e n n e d y ' s S e c o n d a n d T h i r d Y e a r s i n O f f i c e a s R e v e a l e d i n H i s P u b l i c S t a t e m e n t s a n d A d d r e s s e s . New Y o r k / E v a n s t o n / L o n d o n : H a r p e r a n d Row, 1 9 6 4 . R o o s e v e l t , J a m e s , e d . T h e L i b e r a l P a p e r s . G a r d e n C i t y , NY: D o u b l e d a y & C o . , 1 9 6 2 . R o s e n b e r g , B e r n a r d a n d D a v i d M a n n i n g W h i t e , e d s . M a s s C u l t u r e : T h e P o p u l a r A r t s i n A m e r i c a . G l e n c o e , I L : F r e e P r e s s a n d F a l c o n ' s W i n g P r e s s , 1 9 5 7 . R o s e n b e r g , H a r o l d . T h e A n x i o u s O b j e c t : A r t T o d a y & I t s A u d i e n c e . New Y o r k : H o r i z o n P r e s s , 1 9 6 4 . S a i d , E d w a r d W. T h e W o r l d , t h e T e x t a n d t h e C r i t i c . C a m b r i d g e : H a r v a r d U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1 9 8 3 . S a n d l e r , I r v i n g . T h e New Y o r k S c h o o l : T h e P a i n t e r s a n d S c u l p t o r s o f t h e F i f t i e s . New Y o r k : H a r p e r a n d Row, 1 9 7 8 . 124 S c h l e s i n g e r , A r t h u r M., J r . T h e P o l i t i c s o f H o p e . B o s t o n : H o u g h t o n M i f f l i n C o . , 1 9 6 2 . . a n d M o r t o n W h i t e , e d s . P a t h s o f A m e r i c a n T h o u g h t . B o s t o n : H o u g h t o n M i f f l i n C o . , 1 9 6 3 . . A T h o u s a n d D a y s . New Y o r k : F a w c e t t P r e m i e r B o o k s , 1 9 6 5 . S o n t a g , S u s a n . A g a i n s t I n t e r p r e t a t i o n . New Y o r k : N o o n d a y P r e s s , 1 9 6 6 . S o r e n s o n , T h e o d o r e C. K e n n e d y . New Y o r k : H a r p e r & Row, 1 9 6 5 . T o f f l e r , A l v i n . T h e C u l t u r e C o n s u m e r s : A S t u d y o f A r t a n d A f f l u e n c e i n A m e r i c a . New Y o r k : S t . M a r t i n ' s P r e s s , 1 9 6 4 . T o m k i n s , C a l v i n . A h e a d o f t h e Game: F o u r V e r s i o n s o f t h e A v a n t - G a r d e . H a r m o n d s w o r t h , U.K.: P e n g u i n B o o k s , 1 9 6 8 . . O f f t h e W a l l : R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d t h e A r t W o r l d o f O u r T i m e . New Y o r k : D o u b l e d a y & C o . , 1 9 8 0 ; r e p r i n t e d . , L o n d o n : P e n g u i n B o o k s , 1 9 8 1 . U.S. I n f o r m a t i o n A g e n c y . T h e U n i t e d S t a t e s I n f o r m a t i o n A g e n c y : A B i b i 1 i o g r a p h y . S e c o n d E d i t i o n . W a s h i n g t o n , D.C.: U S I A , 1 9 7 6 . U.S. P r e s i d e n t ' s C o m m i s s i o n o n N a t i o n a l G o a l s . G o a l s f o r A m e r i c a n s . New Y o r k : A m e r i c a n A s s e m b l y , C o l u m b i a U n i v e r s i t y , 1 9 6 0 . V a n e i g e m , R a o u l . T h e R e v o l u t i o n o f E v e r y d a y L i f e . T r a n s l a t e d b y D o n a l d N i c h o l s o n - S m i t h . L o n d o n : R e b e l P r e s s a n d L e f t B a n k B o o k s , 1 9 8 3 ; r e p r i n t e d f r o m t h e F r e n c h e d . , P a r i s , 1 9 6 7 . Waxman, C h i a m . T h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y D e b a t e . New Y o r k : F u n k & W a g n a l l s , 1 9 6 8 . W h i t e , W i n s t o n . B e y o n d C o n f o r m i t y . New Y o r k : F r e e P r e s s , 1 9 6 1 . E . E x h i b i t i o n C a t a l o g u e s L o s A n g e l e s , C a l i f o r n i a . P o s t P a i n t e r l y A b s t r a c t i o n . 1 9 6 4 . E s s a y b y C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g . L o s A n g e l e s : L o s A n g e l e s C o u n t y Museum o f A r t . New Y o r k . R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . 1 9 6 3 . E s s a y b y A l a n R. S o l o m o n . New Y o r k : T h e J e w i s h Museum. V e n i c e , I t a l y . F o u r G e r m i n a l P a i n t e r s , U n i t e d S t a t e s o f A m e r i c a , X X X I I I n t e r n a t i o n a l B i e n n i a l E x h i b i t i o n o f A r t . J u n e - O c t o b e r 1 9 6 4 . E s s a y b y A l a n R. S o l o m o n . New Y o r k : J e w i s h Museum. 1 2 5 W a s h i n g t o n , D.C. R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . N a t i o n a l C o l l e c t i o n o f F i n e A r t s . 1 9 7 7 . W a s h i n g t o n , D . C . S m i t h s o n i a n I n s t i t u t i o n . F. P e r i o d i c a l s "A M o d e r n I n f e r n o . " L i f e 59 ( D e c e m b e r 1 7 , 1 9 6 5 ) , 45+ A r e n d t , H a n n a h . " S o c i e t y a n d C u l t u r e . " D a e d a l u s 8 9 ( S p r i n g 1 9 6 0 ) , p p . 2 7 8 - 2 8 7 . " A r t i n P o l i t i c s . " Newsweek 61 ( J u n e 1 7 , 1 9 6 3 ) , p . 8 5 . A [ s h b e r r y ] , J [ o h n ] . " F i v e Shows O u t o f t h e O r d i n a r y , " A r t News 57 ( M a r c h 1 9 5 8 ) , p . 40+. . " T h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e B e g i n s t o Show I t s C h a n g i n g F a c e . " New Y o r k H e r a l d T r i b u n e , ( J u n e 1 6 , 1 9 6 4 ) . . " V e n i c e B i e n n a l e C e n t e r o f C o n t r o v e r s y . " New Y o r k H e r a l d T r i b u n e , ( J u n e 2 3 , 1 9 6 4 ) . . " A m e r i c a n D e v e l o p m e n t s W o r r y t h e F r e n c h . " New Y o r k H e r a l d T r i b u n e , ( J u l y 7, 1 9 6 4 ) . A [ s h t o n ] , D [ o r e ] . " 5 7 t h S t r e e t : R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . " A r t D i g e s t 27 ( S e p t e m b e r 1 9 5 3 ) . . " P l u s ^ a c h a n g e . . . " C i m a i s e , ( M a r c h / A p r i l 1 9 6 1 ) , p p . 5 0 - 5 6 . B e l l , D a n i e l . " M o d e r n i t y a n d M a s s S o c i e t y : On t h e V a r i e t i e s o f C u l t u r a l E x p e r i e n c e . " I n P a t h s o f A m e r i c a n T h o u g h t , p p . 4 1 1 - 4 2 5 . E d i t e d b y A r t h u r M. S c h l e s i n g e r , J r . a n d M o r t o n W h i t e . B o s t o n : H o u g h t o n M i f f l i n C o . , 1 9 6 3 . . " T h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y i n t h e W e s t . " I n T h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y D e b a t e , p p . 8 7 - 1 0 5 . E d i t e d b y C h a i m Waxman. New Y o r k : F u n k a n d W a g n a l l s , 1 9 6 8 . " B i s s i e r e a t t h e M u s e e d ' a r t m o d e r n e . " A p p l 1 o 68 ( S e p t e m b e r 1 9 5 8 ) , p p . 8 7 - 8 8 . B o n g a r d , W i l l i . "When R a u s c h e n b e r g Won t h e B i e n n a l e . " S t u d i o I n t e r n a - t i o n a l 1 7 5 ( J u n e 1 9 6 8 ) , p p . 2 8 8 - 2 8 9 . B o s q u e t , A l a i n . " T r a h i s o n a V e n i s e . " C o m b a t , ( J u n e 2 7 , 1 9 6 4 ) . . " D e s s a r o i a V e n i s e . " L a C o t e d e P e i n t r e s 2 ( J u l y / A u g u s t 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 2 9 . B r a c h , P a u l . " R a u s c h e n b e r g . " S c r a p 2 ( D e c e m b e r 2 3 , 1 9 6 0 ) , n . p . [ D . C . ] . " P o p ' A r t a n d D o l l a r s o u l a s e m a i n e d e V e n i s e . " L a C o t e de P e i n t r e s , 2 ( J u l y / A u g u s t 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 2 4 - 2 7 . 1 2 6 C [ a m p b e l l ] , L [ a w r e n c e ] , " R e v i e w s a n d P r e v i e w s : R a u s c h e n b e r g a n d T w o m b l y . " A r t News 52 ( S e p t e m b e r 1 9 5 3 ) , p . 5 0 . . " R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . " A r t News 59 ( J a n u a r y 1 9 6 1 ) , p p . 1 3 - 1 4 . . " K e n n e t h N o l a n d . " A r t News 61 ( M a y 1 9 6 2 ) . C a r t i e r , J e a n - A l b e r t . " B i e n n a l e d e V e n i s e : P e t i t e s u i t e e t c o m m e n t a i r e s . " C o m b a t , ( J u n e 2 9 , 1 9 6 4 ) . C h a s e , R i c h a r d . " T h e F a t e o f t h e A v a n t - G a r d e . " P a r t i s a n R e v i e w 24 (Summer 1 9 5 7 ) , p p . 3 6 3 - 3 7 5 . C h o a y , F r a n c o i s e . " D a d a , N e o - D a d a , e t R a u s c h e n b e r g . " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 5 ( O c t o b e r 1 9 6 1 ) , p p . 8 2 - 8 4 + . C l a r k , T. J . " M o r e o n t h e D i f f e r e n c e s b e t w e e n C o m r a d e G r e e n b e r g a n d O u r s e l v e s . " I n M o d e r n i s m a n d M o d e r n i t y : T h e V a n c o u v e r C o n f e r e n c e P a p e r s , p p . 1 6 9 - 1 8 7 . E d i t e d b y B e n j a m i n H. D. B u c h l o h , S e r g e G u i l b a u t , a n d D a v i d S o l k i n . H a l i f a x : NSCAD P r e s s , 1 9 8 3 . C o g n i a t , R a y m o n d . " L a p e i n t u r e d e c e s d e r n i e Y e s a n n e e s a u b o r d d e l a f a i l l i t e ? " L e F i g a r o , ( J u n e 2 2 , 1 9 6 4 ) . " C u r i e u s e a t t i t u d e a g r e s s i v e d e s E t a t s - U n i s . " L e F i g a r o , [ J u n e 2 3 , 1 9 6 4 ) . C [ o l e ] , M [ a r y ] . " 5 7 t h S t r e e t i n R e v i e w : B o b R a u s c h e n b e r g R e v i e w e d . " A r t D i g e s t 25 ( J u n e 1, 1 9 5 1 ) , p . 1 8 . C o l t , P r i s c i l l a . " B o o k R e v i e w s : C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g a n d A r t a n d C u l t u r e . " C o l l e g e A r t J o u r n a l 22 ( W i n t e r 1 9 6 2 - 6 3 ) , p p . 1 2 2 - 1 2 3 . C o n s t a b l e , R o s a l i n d . " A r t P o p s I n . " L i f e 57 ( J u l y 1 0 , 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 6 5 - 6 8 . C o p l a n d s , J o h n . " P o s t P a i n t e r l y A b s t r a c t i o n : T h e L o n g A w a i t e d G r e e n b e r g E x h i b i t i o n F a i l s t o Make I t s P o i n t . " A r t f o r u m 2 ( N o . 1 2 , 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 4-9 C r e h a n , H u b e r t . " T h e S e e C h a n g e : Raw D u c k . " A r t D i g e s t 27 ( S e p t e m b e r 1 9 5 3 ) , p . 2 5 . C r o w , T h o m a s . " M o d e r n i s m a n d M a s s C u l t u r e i n t h e V i s u a l A r t s . " I n M o d e r n i s m a n d M o d e r n i t y : T h e V a n c o u v e r C o n f e r e n c e P a p e r s , p p . 2 1 5 - 2 6 4 . E d i t e d b y B e n j a m i n H. D. B u c h l o h , S e r g e G u i l b a u t , a n d D a v i d S o l k i n . H a l i f a x : NSCAD P r e s s , 1 9 8 3 . C u n l i f f e , M a r c u s . " E u r o p e a n I m a g e s o f A m e r i c a . " I n P a t h s o f A m e r i c a n T h o u g h t , p p . 4 9 2 - 5 1 4 . E d i t e d b y A r t h u r M. S c h l e s i n g e r a n d M o r t o n W h i t e . B o s t o n : H o u g h t o n M i f f l i n , C o . , 1 9 6 3 . [ P . D . ] . " R a u s c h e n b e r g e t s o n m o u t o n . " T r i b u n e d e P a r i s , ( F e b r u a r y 1 0 , 1 9 6 3 ) . 127 D i c k e r s o n , G e o r g e a n d Guy B e r t i l . " W h a t ' s D i m m i n g t h e C i t y L i g h t s ? " M a d e m o i s e l l e 59 ( O c t o b e r 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 1 0 4 - 1 0 5 + . D o r f l e s , G i l l e , " R a u s c h e n b e r g , o r O b s o l e s e n c e D e f e a t e d . " M e t r o 2 ( M a y 1 9 6 1 ) , p p . 3 2 - 3 5 . " T h e E m p e r o r ' s C o m b i n e . " T i m e 75 ( A p r i l 1 8 , 1 9 6 0 ) , p . 9 2 . F r a n k f u r t e r , A l f r e d . " I n S e a r c h o f A r t H i s t o r y a t t h e C a r n e g i e . " A r t News 6 0 ( D e c e m b e r 1 9 6 1 ) , p . 3 0 . . " E d i t o r i a l : P o p E x t r e m i s t s . " A r t News 63 ( S e p t e m b e r 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 19+. F r i e d , M i c h a e l . " T h e C o n f o u n d i n g C o n f u s i o n . " A r t s Y e a r b o o k 7 ( 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 3 6 - 4 5 . G e l b , B a r b a r a a n d A r t h u r . " C u l t u r e M a k e s a H i t a t t h e W h i t e H o u s e . " T h e New Y o r k T i m e s M a g a z i n e , ( J a n u a r y 2 8 , 1 9 6 2 ) , p p . 9-11+. G e n a u e r , E m i l y . " S o c i a l P a i n t e r s A l l . " New Y o r k H e r a l d T r i b u n e , ( M a r c h 3, 1 9 6 4 ) . . " T h e M e r c h a n d i s e o f V e n i c e . " New Y o r k H e r a l d T r i b u n e , ( J u l y 1 2 , 1 9 6 4 ) . . " D e r n i e r C r i a t V e n i c e : K e e p M o v i n g . " New Y o r k H e r a l d T r i b u n e , ( J u l y 1 9 , 1 9 6 4 ) . G e n d e l , M i l t o n . " H u g g e r - M u g g e r i n t h e G i a r d i n i . " A r t News 63 ( S e p t e m b e r 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 3 2 - 3 5 + . G l u e c k , G r a c e . " A r t N o t e s : B i e n n a l e . " T h e New Y o r k T i m e s , ( M a y 3, 1 9 6 4 ) , S e c t i o n I I . . " A r t N o t e s : A d v e n t u r e s A b r o a d . " T h e New Y o r k T i m e s , [ J u n e 6, 1 9 6 5 ) . " G o o d b y e P a r i s , H e l l o New Y o r k . " T i m e 8 4 ( J u l y 1 7 , 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 5 8 . G r e e n b e r g , C l e m e n t . " T o w a r d s A New L a o c o o n . " P a r t i s a n R e v i e w 7 ( F a l l 1 9 4 0 ) , p p . 2 9 6 - 3 1 0 . . " L o u i s a n d N o l a n d . " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 4 ( M a y 1 9 6 0 ) , p p . 2 6 - 2 9 . . " M o d e r n i s t P a i n t i n g . " A r t s Y e a r b o o k 4 ( 1 9 6 1 ) , p p . 1 0 2 - 1 0 8 . . " A f t e r A b s t r a c t E x p r e s s i o n i s m . " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 6 ( O c t o b e r 1 9 6 2 ) , p p . 2 4 - 3 2 . 1 2 8 . " T h r e e New A m e r i c a n P a i n t e r s . " C a n a d i a n A r t 20 ( M a y / J u n e 1 9 6 3 ) , p p . 1 7 2 - 1 7 5 . . T h e ' C r i s i s ' o f A b s t r a c t A r t . " A r t s Y e a r b o o k 7 ( 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 8 9 - 9 2 . . " A v a n t - G a r d e A t t i t u d e s : New A r t i n t h e S i x t i e s . " S t u d i o I n t e r n a t i o n a l 1 7 9 ( A p r i l 1 9 7 0 ) , p p . 1 4 2 - 1 4 5 . H a m i l t o n , G e o r g e H e a r d . " P a i n t i n g i n C o n t e m p o r a r y A m e r i c a . " B u r l i n g t o n M a g a z i n e 102 ( M a y 1 9 6 0 ) , p p . 1 9 2 - 1 9 7 . " H e c k s c h e r R e p o r t . " New R e p u b l i c 1 4 8 ( J u n e 2 9 , 1 9 6 3 ) , p . 8. H e s s , T h o m a s R. "U.S. P a i n t i n g : Some R e c e n t D i r e c t i o n s . " A r t News A n n u a l 25 ( 1 9 5 6 ) , p p . 7 6 - 9 8 . H o f f m a n , E d . " T h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e . " B u r l i n g t o n M a g a z i n e 1 0 6 ( A u g u s t 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 3 9 5 - 3 9 6 . "How i n S a o P a u l o . " W a s h i n g t o n [ D . C . ] E v e n i n g S t a r , ( O c t o b e r 8, 1 9 6 3 ) . H u g h e s , R o b e r t . " P a r i s P o s t - M o r t e m . " T h e [ L o n d o n ] O b s e r v e r , ( O c t o b e r 1 8 , 1 9 6 4 ) . " I s T o d a y ' s A r t i s t W i t h o r A g a i n s t t h e P a s t . " A r t News 57 (Summer 1 9 5 8 ) , p p . 4 6 , 5 6 . J a m e s o n , F r e d r i c . " P o s t m o d e r n i s m a n d C o n s u m e r S o c i e t y . " I n T h e A n t i - A e s t h e t i c : E s s a y s o n P o s t m o d e r n C u l t u r e , p p . 1 1 1 - 1 2 5 . E d i t e d b y H a l F o s t e r . P o r t T o w n s e n d , WA; B a y P r e s s , 1 9 8 3 . J [ u d d ] , D [ o n a l d ] . " K e n n e t h N o l a n d . " A r t s M a g a z i n e 36 ( S e p t e m b e r 1 9 6 2 ) , p . 5 3 . . " I n t h e G a l l e r i e s : R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . " A r t s M a g a z i n e 37 ( M a y - J u n e 1 9 6 3 ) , p p . 1 0 3 - 1 0 4 . ' a n d V i v i e n R a y n o r . " I n t h e G a l l e r i e s : K e n n e t h N o l a n d . " A r t s M a g a z i n e 37 ( S e p t e m b e r 1 9 6 3 ) , p p . 5 3 - 5 4 . . " I n t h e G a l l e r i e s : R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . " A r t s M a g a z i n e 38 ( D e c e m b e r 1 9 6 3 ) , p . 6 0 . K e l l y , E d w a r d T. " N e o - D a d a : A C r i t i q u e o f P o p A r t . " A r t J o u r n a l 23 ( S p r i n g 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 1 9 2 - 2 0 1 . " J F K A w a r e o f A r t s ' P o l i t i c a l C l o u t . " T h e New Y o r k T i m e s , ( D e c e m b e r 1 9 , 1 9 6 2 ) . [ K e n n e d y , J o h n F . ] . " T h e L a t e P r e s i d e n t ' s L a s t R e f l e c t i o n s o n t h e A r t s . " S a t u r d a y R e v i e w 47 ( M a r c h 2 8 , 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 1 6 - 1 7 . 1 2 9 K n o x , S a n k a . "U.S. D o u b l e s A r t f o r V e n i c e Show." T h e New Y o r k T i m e s , ( F e b r u a r y 2, 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 9 1 . K o z l o f f , Max. " ' P o p ' C u l t u r e , M e t a p h y s i c a l D i s g u s t , a n d t h e New V u l g a r i a n s . " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 6 ( M a r c h 1 9 6 2 ) . . "A L e t t e r t o t h e E d i t o r . " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 7 ( J u n e 1 9 6 3 ) , p p . 8 8 - 9 2 . . " A r t . " T h e N a t i o n 1 9 7 ( D e c e m b e r 7, 1 9 6 3 ) , p p . 4 0 2 - 4 0 3 . . "New Y o r k L e t t e r . " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 7 ( J a n u a r y 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 3 2 - 3 5 . . " T h e Many C o l o r a t i o n s o f B l a c k a n d W h i t e . " A r t f o r m 2 [ F e b r u a r y 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 2 2 - 2 5 . . " A m e r i c a n P a i n t i n g D u r i n g t h e C o l d War." A r t f o r u m 11 [ M a y 1 9 7 3 ) , p p . 4 3 - 5 4 . K r a m e r , H i l t o n . " M o n t h i n R e v i e w . " A r t s M a g a z i n e 33 ( F e b r u a r y 1 9 5 9 ) , p p . 4 8 - 5 1 . . "A C r i t i c o n t h e S i d e o f H i s t o r y : N o t e s o n C l e m e n t G r e e n b e r g . " A r t s M a g a z i n e 37 ( O c t o b e r 1 9 6 2 ) , p p . 6 0 - 6 3 . K r o l l , J a c k . "Some G r e e n b e r g C i r c l e s . " A r t News 61 ( M a r c h 1 9 6 2 ) , p p . 35+. L a s c h , C h r i s t o p h e r . " T h e C u l t u r a l C o l d War." T h e N a t i o n 2 0 5 ( S e p - t e m b e r 1 1 , 1 9 6 7 ) , p p . 1 9 8 - 2 1 2 . L a s k y , M e l v i n J . " A m e r i c a a n d E u r o p e : T r a n s a t l a n t i c I m a g e s . " I n P a t h s o f A m e r i c a n T h o u g h t , p p . 4 6 5 - 4 9 1 . E d i t e d b y A r t h u r M. S c h l e s i n g e r , J r . a n d M o r t o n W h i t e . B o s t o n : H o u g h t o n M i f f l i n C o . , 1 9 6 3 . L e i d e r , P h i l i p . " T h e T h i n g i n P a i n t i n g i s C o l o r . " T h e New Y o r k T i m e s , ( A u g u s t 2 5 , 1 9 6 8 ) . L e o n a r d . " D e s d o l l a r s c h e z l e s D o g e s . " F r a n c e O b s e r v a t e u r , ( J u n e 2 5 , 1 9 6 4 ) . L e r m a n , L e o . " T r e a s u r e s o n C a m p u s ; P o p G o e s B r a n d e i s . " M a d e m o i s e l l e 58 ( D e c e m b e r 1 9 6 3 ) , p p . 7 4 - 7 5 + . L i p s e t , S e y m o u r M a r t i n . "A C h a n g i n g A m e r i c a n C h a r a c t e r ? " I n C u l t u r e a n d S o c i a l C h a r a c t e r : T h e w o r k o f D a v i d R i e s m a n R e v i e w e d , p p . 1 3 6 - 1 7 1 . E d i t e d b y S e y m o u r M a r t i n L i p s e t a n d L e o L o w e n t h a l . G l e n c o e , I L : F r e e P r e s s , 1 9 6 1 . • • "My V i e w F r o m O u r L e f t . " I n T h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y D e b a t e , p p . 1 5 2 - 1 6 5 . E d i t e d b y C h a i m Waxman. New Y o r k : F u n k a n d W a g n a l l s , 1 9 6 8 . 1 3 0 M a n n o n i , E d i t h . " L 1 i m p o s s i b i l i t y de R a u s c h e n b e r g . " L a C o t e d e P e i n t r e s 2 ( J u l y / A u g u s t 1 9 6 4 ) , p. 2 8 . M a r i a s , J u l i a n . " T h e U n r e a l A m e r i c a . " F o r e i g n A f f a i r s 39 ( J u l y 1 9 6 1 ) , p p . 5 7 8 - 9 0 . M a t h e y , F. " R o g e r B i s s i e r e : I n s t i n c t s v e r s u s T r a d i t i o n . " S t u d i o 1 6 8 ( A u g u s t 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 8 2 - 8 5 . M a z a r s , P i e r r e . " V e n i s e : l e s g r a n d e s m a n o e u v r e s du 'Pop A r t 1 . " L e F i g a r o , ( J u n e 2 5 , 1 9 6 4 ) . M i c h e l s o n , A n n e t t e . " B i s s i e Y e R e t r o s p e c t i v e a t M u s 4 e d ' a r t m o d e r n e . " A r t s M a g a z i n e 3 3 ( J u n e 1 9 5 9 ) , p . 1 8 . . " P a r i s L e t t e r . " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 7 ( A p r i l 1 9 6 3 ) , p . 7 1 . . " T h e 1 9 6 4 V e n i c e B i e n n a l e . " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 8 ( S e p - t e m b e r 2 5 , 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 3 8 - 4 0 . M i l l s , C. W r i g h t . " L e t t e r t o t h e New L e f t . " I n T h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y D e b a t e , p p . 1 2 6 - 1 4 0 . E d i t e d b y C h a i m Waxman. New Y o r k : F u n k a n d W a g n a l l s . 1 9 6 8 . " M o s t H a p p y F e l l a . " T i m e 84 ( S e p t e m b e r 1 8 , 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 6 0 - 6 1 . 0 ' H [ a r a ] , F [ r a n k ] . " R e v i e w s a n d P r e v i e w s . " A r t News 53 ( J a n u a r y 1 9 5 7 ) , p . 4 7 . P a r s o n s , T a l c o t t a n d W i n s t o n W h i t e . " T h e L i n k B e t w e e n C h a r a c t e r a n d S o c i e t y . " I n C u l t u r e a n d S o c i a l C h a r a c t e r : T h e Work o f D a v i d R i e s m a n R e v i e w e d , p p . 8 9 - 1 3 5 . E d i t e d b y S e y m o u r M a r t i n L i p s e t a n d L e o L o w e n t h a l . G l e n c o e , I L : F r e e P r e s s , 1 9 6 1 . P l u c h a r t , F r a n c o i s . " C e s m o u v e m e n t s q u i s o n t i m m o b i l e s , " C o m b a t , ( J u n e 2 9 , 1 9 6 4 ) . " P o p G o e s t h e B i e n n a l e . " T i m e 8 4 ( J u l y 3, 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 5 4 . P r e s t o n , S. " T h r e e A b s t r a c t S c u l p t o r s o f t h e S c h o o l o f P a r i s . " B u r l i n g t o n M a g a z i n e 1 0 4 ( D e c e m b e r 1 9 6 2 ) , p . 5 6 2 . [ M . R . ] " R e v i e w s a n d P r e v i e w s : B i s s i e r e . " A r t News 59 ( J a n u a r y 1 9 6 1 ) , p. 1 2 . " R a u s c h e n b e r g e t s o n m o u t o n . " T r i b u n e de P a r i s , ( F e b r u a r y 1 0 , 1 9 6 3 ) . " R a u s c h e n b e r g t h e B e s t , S a y s F r e n c h A r t J u r y . " T h e New Y o r k . T i m e s , ( J u n e 2 4 , 1 9 6 5 ) . R [ a y n o r ] , V [ i v i e n ] . " K e n n e t h N o l a n d . " A r t s M a g a z i n e , ( M a y 1 9 6 1 ) , p . 9 8 . . " E x h i b i t i o n a t L o e b G a l l e r y ( I p o u s t e g u y ) . " : A r t s M a g a z i n e 38 i M a y 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 3 9 . 131 . " C r i t i c F o r a D a y . " A r t s Y e a r b o o k 7 ( 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 4 5 - 5 5 . R e i s e , B a r b a r a M. " G r e e n b e r g a n d t h e G r o u p : A R e t r o s p e c t i v e V i e w . " S t u d i o I n t e r n a t i o n a l 1 7 5 ( P a r t I : May 1 9 6 8 ) , p p . 2 5 4 - 2 5 7 a n d ( P a r t I I : J u n e 1 9 6 8 ) , p p . 3 1 4 - 3 1 6 . R e s t a n y , P i e r r e . " E n 5 0 a n s P a r i s a f a i t de New Y o r k l a s e c o n d e c a p i t a l e de l ' a r t m o d e r n e . " G a l l e r i e d e s A r t s , ( F e b r u a r y 1 9 6 3 ) , p p . 1 0 2 - 1 0 4 . . " T h e New R e a l i s m . " A r t i n A m e r i c a 51 ( F e b r u a r y 1 9 6 3 ) , p p . 1 0 2 - 1 0 4 . . " L a X X X I I B i e n n a l e d i V e n e z i a , B i e n n a l e d e l 1 a I r r e g o l a r i t c L " Domus 4 1 7 ( A u g u s t 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 2 7 - 4 2 . R e v e l , J e a n - F r a n c o i s . " X X X I I e B i e n n a l e de V e n i s e : T r i o m p h e du R e a l i s m e N a t i o n a l i s t e . " L ' O e i l 1 1 5 - 1 1 6 ( J u l y / A u g u s t 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 2 - 1 1 . R i e s m a n , D a v i d ( w i t h t h e c o l l a b o r a t i o n o f N a t h a n G l a z e r ) . " T h e L o n e l y C r o w d : A R e c o n s i d e r a t i o n i n 1 9 6 0 . " I n C u l t u r e a n d S o c i a l C h a r a c t e r : T h e Work o f D a v i d R i e s m a n R e v i e w e d , p p . 4 1 9 - 4 5 8 . E d i t e d b y S e y m o u r M a r t i n L i p s e t a n d L e o L o w e n t h a l . G l e n c o e , I L : F r e e P r e s s , 1 9 6 1 . R o m u l u s . " L e t t e r f r o m I t a l y : T h e V e n i c e B i e n n a l e . " A p o l l o 8 0 ( A u g u s t 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 1 5 8 - 1 5 9 . R o s e , B a r b a r a . " D a d a T h e n a n d Now." A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 7 ( J a n u a r y 1 9 6 0 ) , p p . 2 2 - 2 8 . R o t h , M o i r a . " T h e A e s t h e t i c o f I n d i f f e r e n c e . " A r t f o r u m 16 ( N o v e m b e r 1 9 7 7 ) , p p . 4 7 - 5 3 . R o u s s e a u s , S t e p h e n W. a n d J a m e s F a r g a n i s . " A m e r i c a n P o l i t i c s a n d t h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y . " I n T h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y D e b a t e , p p . 2 0 6 - 2 2 8 . E d i t e d b y C h a i m Waxman. New Y o r k : F u n k a n d W a g n a l l s , 1 9 6 8 . R u b i n , W i l l i a m . " Y o u n g e r A m e r i c a n P a i n t e r s . " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 4 ( J a n u a r y 1 9 6 0 ) , p p . 2 5 - 3 1 . S [ a n d l e r ] , I [ r v i n g ] H. " R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . " A r t News 59 ( A p r i l 1 9 6 0 ) , p . 1 4 . . " A s h C a n R e v i s i t e d , A New Y o r k L e t t e r . " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 4~T0ctober 2 5 , 1 9 6 0 ) , p p . 2 8 - 3 0 . . " K e n n e t h N o l a n d . " A r t News 6 0 ( M a y 1 9 6 1 ) , p . 1 5 . " K e n n e t h N o l a n d . " A r t News 62 ( M a y 1 9 6 3 ) , p . 1 1 . 132 S [ a w i n ] , M [ a r t h a ] . " R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . " A r t s M a g a z i n e 35 ( J a n u a r y 1 9 6 1 ) , p . 5 6 . . " R o g e r B i s s i e r e . " A r t s M a g a z i n e 35 ( J a n u a r y 1 9 6 1 ) , p . 6 2 . S c h n e i d e r , P i e r r e . " E x h i b i t i o n a t t h e W o r l d H o u s e G a l l e r y ( B i s s i e r e ) . " A r t News 61 (Summer 1 9 6 2 ) , p . 4 9 . . " E x h i b i t i o n a t G a l e r i e J e a n n e B u c h e r ( B i s s i e r e ) . " A r t News 61 ( O c t o b e r 1 9 6 2 ) , p . 4 8 . . " L a B i e n n a l e d e V e n i s e . " P a r i s L ' E x p r e s s , ( J u l y 2, 1 9 6 4 ) . S c h l e s i n g e r , A r t h u r J r . " N o t e s o n a N a t i o n a l C u l t u r a l P o l i c y . " D a e d a l u s 8 9 ( S p r i n g 1 9 6 0 ) , p p . 3 9 4 - 3 9 9 . . " G o v e r n m e n t a n d t h e A r t s . " S p e e c h t o t h e A m e r i c a n F e d e r a t i o n o f A r t s . A p r i l 1 2 , 1 9 6 2 . R e p r i n t e d i n U.S. C o n g r e s s . S e n a t e . 8 8 t h C o n g . , 1 s t s e s s . , 15 A u g u s t 1 9 6 3 . C o n g r e s s i o n a l R e c o r d , v o l . 1 0 9 ( p a r t I I ) , p p . 1 5 1 3 5 - 7 . S [ c h u y l e r ] , J [ a m e s ] . " K e n n e t h N o l a n d . " A r t News 55 ( F e b r u a r y 1 9 5 7 ) , p . 1 0 . . " K e n n e t h N o l a n d . " A r t News 57 ( O c t o b e r 1 9 5 8 ) , p . 1 3 . . " R e v i e w s a n d P r e v i e w s : T h r e e . " A r t News 58 ( A p r i l 1 9 5 9 ) , p . 1 3 . S [ e c k l e r ] , D [ o r o t h y ] . " R e v i e w s a n d P r e v i e w s : R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . " A r t News 50 (May 1 9 5 1 ) , p . 5 9 . S h i l s , E d w a r d . " M a s s S o c i e t y a n d I t s C u l t u r e . " D a e d a l u s 8 9 ( S p r i n g 1 9 6 0 ) , p p . 2 8 8 - 3 1 4 . . " T h e C o n t e m p l a t i o n o f S o c i e t y i n A m e r i c a . " I n P a t h s o f A m e r i c a n T h o u g h t , p p . 3 9 2 - 4 1 0 . E d i t e d b y A r t h u r M. S c h l e s i n g e r , J r . a n d M o r t o n W h i t e . B o s t o n : H o u g h t o n M i f f l i n C o . , 1 9 6 3 . S o l o m o n , A l a n R. " T h e New A m e r i c a n A r t . " A r t I n t e r n a t i o n a l 8 ( M a r c h 2 0 , 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 5 0 - 5 4 . S w e n s o n , G. R. " R a u s c h e n b e r g P a i n t s a P i c t u r e . " A r t s News 6 ( A p r i l 1 9 0 3 ) , p p . 4 4 - 4 7 . T a g g , J o h n . " A m e r i c a n P o w e r a n d A m e r i c a n P a i n t i n g ; T h e D e v e l o p m e n t o f V a n g u a r d P a i n t i n g i n t h e U.S. s i n c e 1 9 4 5 . " P r a x i s 1 ( W i n t e r 1 9 7 6 ) , p p . 5 9 - 7 8 . " T h e 3 2 n d B i e n n a l e : S e l e c t i o n o f W o r k s t o be S h o w n . " A r t s I n t e r n a t i o n a l 7 (Summer 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 49+. 1 3 3 T [ i l l i m ] , S [ i d n e y ] . " R o b e r t R a u s c h e n b e r g . " A r t s M a g a z i n e 8 (May 1 9 6 0 ) p p . 5 8 - 5 9 . T o m k i n s , C a l v i n . " T h e B i g Show," H a r p e r ' s M a g a z i n e 2 3 0 ( A p r i l 1 9 6 5 ) , p p . 9 8 - 1 0 4 . " T w e n t y - f o u r P a i n t e r s o f t h e 5 0 ' s . " A r t s Y e a r b o o k 3 ( 1 9 5 9 ) , p . 7 6 . U. S. C o n g r e s s . H o u s e . R e p r e s e n t a t i v e K e a r n s s p e a k i n g f o r t h e e s t a b - l i s h m e n t o f a F e d e r a l A d v i s o r y C o u n c i l o n t h e A r t s . 8 7 t h C o n g . , 1 s t . s e s s . , 20 S e p t e m b e r 1 9 6 1 . C o n g r e s s i o n a l R e c o r d , v o l . 1 0 7 ( p a r t 1 5 ) , p p . 2 0 4 9 7 - 9 . H.R. 4 1 7 2 . . S e n a t e . " F r e e d o m v e r s u s C o e r c i o n , " S e n a t o r P e l l s p e a k - i n g i n f a v o r o f U S I A c u l t u r a l p r o g r a m s . 8 8 t h C o n g . , 1 s t . s e s s . , 4 N o v e m b e r 1 9 6 3 . C o n g r e s s i o n a l R e c o r d , v o l . 1 0 9 ( p a r t 1 6 ) , p p . . S e n a t e . S e n a t o r J a v i t s s u b m i t s r e p o r t o n U.S. p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n t h e X X X I I V e n i c e B i e n n i a l , 1 9 6 4 ( w r i t t e n b y A l a n R. S o l o m o n ) . 8 9 t h C o n g . , 1 s t s e s s . , 1 S e p t e m b e r 1 9 6 5 . C o n g r e s s i o n a l R e c o r d , v o l . I l l ( p a r t 1 7 ) , p p . 2 2 5 6 3 - 4 . "U. S. C u l t u r e S t a r t s B u s t i n g O u t A l l O v e r . " A r c h i t e c t u r a l F o r u m 1 1 7 ( O c t o b e r 1 9 6 2 ) , p . 5. V a n d e n H a a g , E r n e s t . "A D i s s e n t F r o m t h e C o n s e n s u a l S o c i e t y . " D a e d a l u s 8 9 ( S p r i n g 1 9 6 0 ) , p p . 3 1 5 - 3 2 4 . " V a t i c a n N e w s p a p e r C r i t i c i z e s 'Pop A r t ' . " T h e New Y o r k T i m e s , ( J u n e 2 5 , 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 3 0 . " V e n i c e : T h e B i e n n a l e X X X I I . " A r t s M a g a z i n e , ( M a y - J u n e 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 7 6 - 7 7 . " V e n i c e P r i z e G o e s t o R a u s c h e n b e r g . " T h e New Y o r k T i m e s , ( J u n e 2 0 , 1 9 6 4 ) , p . 2 3 . W h i t t e t , G. S. " I n t e r e s t i n g , B u t I t I s n ' t A r t . " S t u d i o I n t e r n a t i o n a l 1 6 7 ( A p r i l 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 1 5 8 - 1 6 1 . . " S c u l p t u r e S c o o p s t h e L a g o o n . " S t u d i o I n t e r n a t i o n a l 68 ( S e p - t e m b e r 1 9 6 4 ) , p p . 9 6 - 1 0 3 . W o r s n o p , R i c h a r d L . " F r a n c e a n d t h e A l l i a n c e . " E d i t o r i a l R e s e a r c h R e p o r t s 1 ( F e b r u a r y 2 0 , 1 9 6 3 ) , p p . 1 2 7 - 1 4 7 . W r o n g , D e n n i s . " R e f l e c t i o n s o n t h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y . " I n T h e E n d o f I d e o l o g y D e b a t e , p p . 1 1 6 - 1 2 5 . E d i t e d b y C h a i m Waxman. New Y o r k : F u n k a n d W a g n a l l s , 1 9 6 8 . 1 3 4 work_dh42o6tjqjgn3ngmihchmv4era ---- From Margin to Margin? The Stockholm Paris Axis 1944–1953 http://www.diva-portal.org This is the published version of a paper published in Konsthistorisk Tidskrift. Citation for the original published paper (version of record): Edling, M. (2019) From Margin to Margin?: The Stockholm Paris Axis 1944–1953 Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 88(1): 1-16 https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2019.1576764 Access to the published version may require subscription. N.B. When citing this work, cite the original published paper. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/#.#/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. Permanent link to this version: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-37909 From Margin to Margin? The Stockholm Paris Axis 1944–1953 Marta Edling The history of European art has been largely the history of a number of centers, from each of which a style has spread out. (Kenneth Clark, Provincialism) The study of art in relation to geographical space has for a long time been biased by the “canonical logic” of the centre–periphery narra- tive. The history of modern and avant-garde art is no exception; it is in fact, as the French art his- torian Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel has pointed out, “essential to the myth of Modernism” as well as “to scholarship on Modernism”. A good example in Swedish art history of this shared “binary framework” of art histories of scholars and the self-fashioned narratives of artists and curators is the story of the early career in the s of the Swedish museum director Pontus Hultén (–). The s are often referred to as a short, but important, phase in Swedish art history where vital contacts with the international art scene were established. Hultén is in such texts described as something akin to a “vision- ary”, seeking new contacts in Paris, creating experimental exhibitions that heralded the radical programme of the Modern Museum in Stockholm in the early s. Even if both networks and alliances with Swedish colleagues and the Parisian art scene are mentioned, the narratives remain within the framework of the centre–periphery story of a slumbering Nordic province slowly being awoken by Hultén’s heroic and foresighted efforts. This is also the narrative we find in interviews with Pontus Hultén, and in Paris we find the complementary story as seen from the centre; a telling example is the  interview with Hultén’s friend and associate, the gallery owner Denise René (–), when she described her efforts in  to introduce modern abstract art to the ignorant Nordic audience. When the art historical narrative in this way confirms the heroic stories of the involved parties as well as the geographical “binary fra- mework”, it is a methodological problem for the discipline, Joyeux-Prunel argues; it dis- courages research into historical data on inter- action between spatial positions other than reports on presumed diffusions of aesthetic innovation. If used, this model will not reveal whether there are other kinds of transfers, cir- culations or interchange between peripheries like Stockholm and centres like Paris. ©  The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/./), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. ISSN 0023-3609 K O N S T H I S T O R I S K T I D S K R I F T / J O U R N A L O F A R T H I S T O R Y 2 0 1 9 V o l . 8 8 , N o . 1 , 1 – 1 6 , h t t p s : / / d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 8 0 / 0 0 2 3 3 6 0 9 . 2 0 1 9 . 1 5 7 6 7 6 4 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ http://www.tandfonline.com http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/00233609.2019.1576764&domain=pdf This article aims to study in greater depth this methodological bias of the centre–periph- ery framework and highlight two problems the reproduction of such narratives raises. Firstly, in line with Joyeux-Prunel’s critical and geo- political argument that research on inter- national artistic relationships tends to turn a blind eye to the fact that such trajectories are often transnational and necessarily dependent on national contexts. Secondly, taking up arguments made by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the problem of the researcher becoming the “instrument” of the field by reproducing heroic stories that in fact theatri- calise the individual’s hard-won position and hide the social struggle that preceded it. Drawing on new archival data as well as French research previously unused in Swedish art history, I will in the first part of my text present empirical data on trajectories of individ- uals, including Pontus Hultén and Denise René, in two local contexts between  and : a presumed periphery, Stockholm, Sweden, and a presumed centre, Paris, France. Using a “his- torical materialist perspective”, I will focus on data indicating “material conditions of encoun- ters and exchange” and highlight a collaborative project, namely a  exhibition in Paris of Swedish abstract art between  and . The article’s aim is to elucidate both a new and wider scope of the historical circumstances of the interaction along the Stockholm–Paris axis during the period and individuals who have hitherto not received attention. In the last part of my text, I will use these results to explain my methodological concerns and discuss the two problems stated above. Paris After the liberation of Paris in , several new galleries opened, among them the Denise René Gallery at no. , Rue de la Boétie (). Two new salons for “avant-garde” art were opened: Salon de Mai () and Réalités Nouvelles (). The new art journals and different booklets and pamphlets issued by the galleries also became important instruments for the art critics taking a special interest in contem- porary art. This vitality of the Parisian art scene attracted young artists from other countries; it is estimated that the number of artists in s Paris totalled between , and ,. Also, foreign art collectors and art dealers gravitated towards Paris, and the city became a focal point of a transnational network of collabor- ations on exhibitions and sales. The increasing number of galleries and the inflow of young artists created fierce competition; French critics used metaphors of combat and war when describing the contemporary situation. The influx of foreign artists, art dealers and money was essential to the Parisian galleries. The French public had a conservative taste, and there was little official support for modern art in France. The post-war French audience also had little money, the market was weak until , and many galleries became completely dependent on foreign capital; a telling example is the Denise René Gallery, where more than % of its clients came from other countries. Americans dominated the market, but contacts in other European countries were also of impor- tance. Paris was indeed a centre of international art, but the situation was “fragile”. The Denise René Gallery developed in the late s a profile championing geometric, non-objective abstraction, and Pierre Bour- dieu refers to statements by Denise René in , looking back at this period as an example of a gallery that early on strategically formulated a high profile orientated towards the “new”. René was very clear about her intent: “I wanted the new, to get off the 2 M A RTA E D L I NG beaten track … .For me, the period of combat was beginning”. As a result of the competitive climate, the galleries in Paris developed offensive strategies to assert their positions. The gallery owners encouraged networks linking critics, the jurors of the salons and prestigious awards, as well as editors of the new art magazines. The ambition was not only to launch new artists but also to present tomorrow’s artistic tendencies, and the galleries strategically added other strings to their bow in the form of theoretical and rhetorical pamphlets, lec- tures, debates or oral presentations, thus creat- ing an intellectual profile and framework for their exhibitions. Local competition and transnational strategies To deal with local competition and a tough market, Denise René developed a well- planned marketing strategy of transnational collaborations and exchanges with foreign gal- leries in order not only to increase sales but also to establish international credentials for her artists. Her earliest contacts were estab- lished with Nordic galleries and patrons of art. The travelling exhibition Klar Form: Vingt artistes de l’Ecole de Paris in spring  was realised through her contacts with the Danish artists Richard Mortensen (– ) and Robert Jacobsen (–). They gave the exhibition its Danish name Klar Form (Pure Form) and had links with Galerie Birch in Copenhagen. This contact also led René to the Finnish patron Maire Gul- lichsen (–), director of Gallery Artek in Helsinki. Gullichsen put René in contact with important art venues for the exhibition in the Nordic capitals, among them Liljevalchs Art Gallery in Stockholm. Making claims to the title “École de Paris” and the idea of an abstract tradition, the exhi- bition displayed twenty artists, where contem- porary names, such as Robert Jacobsen, Richard Mortensen and Victor Vasarely (–), were presented side by side with old masters, such as Fernand Legér (–), Auguste Herbin (–) and Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, –). This followed the dual strategy of giving the contemporary artists legitimate ancestry and the customers promises of secure investments for the future. She later referred to Klar Form as an exhibi- tion that had strived to accomplish a new vision and a statement on abstract art. This polemic stance was also reflected in Art d’Aujourd’hui, an art magazine loyal to the gallery, which in December  devoted a special issue to the exhibition. The issue was intended as a cata- logue for the exhibition travelling the Nordic capitals in spring . The magazine also did follow-ups in the subsequent two issues in the spring; it reported on the exhibition, and in the first issue, it was stressed with an overt rhetoric how the importance of abstract art was demonstrated by the international atten- tion given to the exhibition. The Klar Form exhibition … arouses con- siderable public curiosity in all the northern European cities where it is presented. For its part, the press makes broad comments and emphasises the exceptional importance of the works presented. The ever-growing success bears witness, once again, to the vitality of abstract art. In the later issue, it was also underlined that the exhibition had been organised by Denise René to meet a demand; she had put on the exhibition to respond to the desire expressed by the Scan- dinavian countries and Finland, who wished F RO M M A R GI N T O M A R GI N ? TH E S T O CK H OL M PA RI S A X I S 194 4– 1 953 3 to present to their compatriots the represen- tative works of the non-figurative painters and sculptures of the École de Paris. The rhetorical aim was thus crystal clear: to present to the French readers that the abstract art on show at the exhibition was much- desired outside Paris. Stockholm The art market in Stockholm had seen good times, both during the Second World War and after. This was due not only to the fact that Sweden had escaped the ravages of war and could thus gain from having an intact economy and infrastructure but also to the import restrictions on third-rate foreign art, which were in force from  to . The number of exhibitions and artists increased, as did the number of galleries; in Stockholm, fifty new art dealers set up their businesses between  and . Due to the accumulation of economic capital in Stockholm, galleries like the Swedish–French Art Gallery or Galerie Blanche, could buy art produced by old masters, such as Henri Matisse (–), Pablo Picasso (– ), Fernand Legér (–) and Jacques Villon (–), at low prices in Paris directly after the war and make a profit on them in Stockholm. The well-tempered and colourful mix of fauvist and cubist idioms by the younger generation of École de Paris painters like Jean Bazaine (–), Charles Lapique (–) and Maurice Estève (–), was also well received as inheritors of a grand old French tradition. This interest in French art stemmed from a long tradition of Francophile attitudes in Swedish art and art criticism. Experimental abstraction was, however, as in Paris, met with suspicion by the general audience, and during the early s, the van- guard of abstract art on the Stockholm art scene developed along similar lines as the Par- isian; young and up-and-coming galleries pre- sented either geometrical/post-cubist abstraction or an expressive abstraction inclined towards the informal, gestural and lyrical. Local competition In this new and tenser climate, a quintet of young Swedish art historians entered the art scene. Pontus Hultén, or Karl G. Hultén as he called himself by this time, was in the mid-s a student at the Department of Art History at Stockholm University College. He and his friends and fellow students Oscar Reutersvärd (–), Rolf Söderberg (–), Carlo Derkert (–) and Hans Eklund (–) were greatly interested in the history of abstract art and the historic avant-garde, but they could not pursue such topics in an art history department “obsessed with the Middle Ages”. Instead, they devel- oped their interest in modern art in their extramural activities. Their interests in the historic avant-garde differed somewhat, but this did not hinder their collaborations. Hultén focused more on experimental film, the legacy of Dada and the art of Marcel Duchamp. Derkert’s field of work was wider; he frequently held popular lectures on modern art, although it is clear that his special interest was in the early Swedish avant-garde and the art pro- duced by his mother, Siri Derkert. Rolf Söder- berg wrote art criticism and in  published the first art history handbook on twentieth- century Swedish art. Oscar Reutersvärd and Hans Eklund specialised at this time in the post-cubist and non-objective Swedish artists 4 M A RTA E D L I NG who had collaborated with Fernand Legér in Paris in the s and early s and in the kind of contemporary geometrical abstraction promoted by Denise René. I will present Reu- tersvärd’s and Eklund’s activities in this genre a little further below. An overview of their extramural activities reveals that the five young art historians by the turn of the s had developed a wide range of contacts. They had created and/or presented exhibitions at private galleries, had held popular evening lectures on modern art at public venues and the art history depart- ment, had participated in radio shows and had written monographs, articles and short texts for exhibition catalogues. The newspaper overview also reveals that there was consider- able collaboration between them and that they were well connected to Nationalmuseum, where Hultén, Derkert, Eklund and Reuters- värd often helped out. Moreover, Derkert, Söderberg and Hultén held temporary pos- itions there. In the reports in the Stockholm press on these activities, it is clear too that their academic titles and careers gave them legitimacy; the texts seldom fail to mention their academic rank. Taking their interest in modern art into consideration, one could say that their affilia- tion to the conservative art history department facilitated as well as necessitated dual careers. Their academic careers provided some finan- cial support (by way of occasional travel and/ or doctoral bursaries); however, they also forced the art historians (due to the art history department’s conservative nature) to produce commissioned work on modern art. And in creating exhibitions of modern art and writing on this art in a public context, their academic qualifications were important credentials. In this way, the lack of modern art studies at the Stockholm University College’s Department of Art History created a group of academically very qualified young critics. Earlier research on this period has not examined this, and it gives an interesting perspective on the role of theory and intellec- tuals in the promotion of modern art as part of the s art scene. Transnational strategies As mentioned earlier, Oscar Reutersvärd took on the role of a spokesperson for geometrical abstraction and concrete art, e.g. in  in connection with the commemorative exhibi- tion of the non-objective painter Otto G. Carlsund at Gallery Artek in Helsinki, and in  when he designed the show Neo- plasticism at Gallery Samlaren in Stockholm. In , together with Eklund, he presented an exhibition of Fernand Legér and Nordic post-cubism at the Swedish–French Art Gallery in Stockholm. The exhibitions mirror the strategies of the Parisian context; Reutersvärd turned the gallery into a theoretical platform and wrote polemical entries in the catalogues. Another similarity to the strategies of the Par- isian galleries in the late s was the combi- nation of artists of the historic avant-garde and the contemporary artists in exhibitions, creating a historic legacy and producing a promise of secure investments in collecting the contemporary. These similarities have, however, gone unnoticed in Swedish research. Instead, they have been ascribed to the innova- tive mind of Hultén and the exhibitions he created at Gallery Samlaren in  (together with Reutersvärd) and . By taking the Paris context into consideration instead, it is clear that his shows, as well as Reutersvärd’s earlier efforts in –, must be interpreted as the result of their Paris sojourns. F RO M M A R GI N T O M A R GI N ? TH E S T O CK H OL M PA RI S A X I S 194 4– 1 953 5 Pontus Hultén first went to Paris in , and thanks to academic scholarships, he returned there and stayed for several periods of time during the late s and early s. He got to know the Danish artists Richard Mortensen and Robert Jacobsen, who by that time, as we saw above, were colla- borating with the Denise René Gallery. In Paris, he also met the non-objective Swedish painter Olle Baertling (–), who visited the city in  to study at the Acadé- mie Legér. They became, together with the Danish artists, both friends and colleagues. Baertling was also some years later, helped by the grand old man of the gallery network, the French painter August Herbin. Oscar Reutersvärd came to Paris in , financed too by a scholarship. That year Reu- tersvärd was introduced to the Denise René Gallery network by Hultén, and by this time they had also collaborated with Olle Baertling in Stockholm. In February , Baertling exhibited, together with August Herbin, at Galleri Brinken in Stockholm; this was a col- laboration with the Denise René Gallery. Thus, by March , when the French exhibi- tion Klar Form toured the Nordic countries, the Stockholm–Paris network was already firmly established and part of the larger Nordic web of alliances Denise René had been building since . L’art Suédois, 1913–1953: exposition d’art Suédois, cubiste, futuriste, constructiviste On  February and  March , the two main Swedish morning newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, reported on a new exhibition of Swedish cubism and con- crete art from  to  that was planned to travel around Europe, possibly even the United States, and would open in Paris at the Denise René Gallery on  March. The texts made clear that it was a rare and proud moment for Swedish art; it was underlined that the exhibition was under the auspices of the French ambassador, and the brave inten- tions of the creators of the exhibition (and aca- demic scholars), Karl G. Hultén and Oscar Reutersvärd, were praised. The support of institutions such as Nationalmuseum and the Swedish Institute underscored the reputability of the project. Printed sources do not reveal exactly how this exhibition was financed; however, what is clear is that the heroic rhetoric in the above-mentioned articles stands in stark con- trast to the realities. The patronage of the French and Swedish authorities, also stressed in the catalogue, was not, as we shall see below, matched by any substantial financial support. Reutersvärd and Hultén never received remuneration or reimbursement, and Reutersvärd wrote in a “melancholic letter” (as described by Söderberg) that the exhibition and their stay in Paris had cost them “thousands of kronor and three months of work”. Hultén, who, in , held a temporary position as an assistant at Nationalmuseum, had to apply for an unpaid leave of absence in order to work on the Paris exhibition. The interest expressed by the director of Nationalmuseum, Otte Sköld (–), in the exhibition should also be seen in the light of his own participation as an artist, and, as is indicated by the “melan- cholic letter” above, the museum appears to have taken no active part in arranging the exhibition other than facilitating the transport of the paintings. Most likely, the freight was financed by Nationalmuseum since it was hoped that Denise René would establish contact with the French painter Fernand 6 M A RTA E D L I NG Legér, who had promised to donate a painting by the Swedish painter Otto G. Carlsund (–) to the museum; however, the sources of most of the financial support seem to have been surprisingly unclear. The presentation of the exhibition in the Swedish press was strategically planned and also reflects a certain amount of self-interest on the part of the young art historians. This is revealed not only by the rhetoric in the above-mentioned short articles prior to the opening but also in the first report on the exhi- bition in Dagens Nyheter, only a few days after the opening. In this report, Rolf Söderberg, Hultén’s and Reutersvärd’s friend and student colleague, directly conveyed the inten- tions. Neither the neutral headline “Swedish art in Paris” nor the text revealed his own involvement in the exhibition; he had namely written the main entry in the catalo- gue. The text praised the Denise René Gallery as the only one in Paris with “a desire to show initiative and a spirit to culti- vate”, mentioning also that the gallery’s “ideal” was well known to the Swedish audi- ence as a result of the exhibition Klar Form the year before. Denise René had “with an unshakeable belief embraced the latest abstract art”, and the gallery now showed Swedish abstraction was “flattering”, Söderberg asserted. It was, he stated, high time to present true avant-garde Swedish art to an international audience; the “stepchildren” and “experimenters” who, according to Söder- berg, had been disregarded in Swedish art. The report on the exhibited artworks also closely mirrored his text in the catalogue and its con- structed timeline of Swedish abstract art. The young art historians were also allowed to write a follow-up on the exhibition in the November  special issue of Art d’Au- jourd’hui on Nordic avant-garde art. In these texts, as in earlier ones and exhibitions in Stockholm, Hultén, Reutersvärd and Söder- berg asserted the aesthetic affinity between all kinds of cubist, post-cubist and moderately abstract art in Sweden between  and , and its continuous contact with international avant-garde art: French cubism, Dada, Art Concret, etc. The polemical intent can also be seen in this special issue, and the texts by Söderberg contain the same kind of rhetorical figures as the French reports on Klar Form the year before. The post-war emergence of a new gen- eration of concrete artists in Sweden was described as the result of a want, an impulse given by a “hunger for intellectualism” after a long period of domination by decorative and gestural colourist art. The post-war reappearance of abstraction stemmed, accord- ing to the text, from a pent-up need for nour- ishment; concrete art remedied a frustration and a want for an essential aesthetic ingredient. Söderberg had also by this time received a commission from the publishing house Albert Bonniers förlag to write a book on twentieth-century Swedish art, a project he carried out in parallel to writing texts for the exhibition and the magazine. The book was released in  and mirrors in important ways the narrative of Söderberg’s Paris texts. The art critical response in the Swedish press was mainly positive, both to the exhibi- tion and the articles in Art d’Aujourd’hui. Critics welcomed its new avant-garde approach and emphasised, in a similar manner as we saw examples of in the French reports on Klar Form, the international inter- est. The polemical intent was also under- stood as part of Art d’Aujourd’hui’s profile. It was explicitly referred to as a magazine that had made “the biased standpoint into a F RO M M A R GI N T O M A R GI N ? TH E S T O CK H OL M PA RI S A X I S 194 4– 1 953 7 virtue that gives it its polemical effectiveness … .It exclusively upholds the cause of the non-figurative painters”. The polemical agenda also provoked a comment from the critic Nils Palmgren (–), who pointed to the, in his view, aggressive and tactical strategies of the group of young concrete painters participating in the exhibition. They were already established in the Stockholm art market, and Palmgren argued that they had forged their careers by making allies of art critics in the press and on national radio and that in this exhibition in Paris they had utilised their theoretical allies in academia. They had been smart enough to “acquire the right influential friends”, and their “attack” was this time aimed at an “international platform”. Palmgren’s comment reflects, not surpris- ingly, his hostility towards abstract art. However, it reveals also that this artistic venture, although launched by Hultén, Reu- tersvärd and Söderberg as a bold international outreach, had the more immediate and prag- matic concern of furthering careers in Stock- holm. The young art historians had, as we have seen, been actively involved since the early s in launching historic avant-garde and contemporary abstract artists onto the Stockholm art scene, and these artists, also represented at the Paris exhibition as both an older and a younger generation, were far from unknown and were of growing interest due to discussions on a new museum of modern art in Stockholm. Siri Derkert (–), Otte Sköld, Viking Eggeling (–), Otto G. Carlsund, Erik Olson (–), Christian Berg (–), Lennart Rodhe (–), Olle Bonniér (–), Arne Jones (–), Karl- Axel Pehrson (–) and Olle Baertling had already been exhibited as part of broad overviews of modern art at major national institutions, such as Nationalmuseum, Lilje- valchs Art Gallery and the National Associ- ation for the Promotion of Fine Arts (Riksförbundet för bildande konst), and private galleries, such as the Swedish–French Art Gallery and Färg och form (Colour and Form), and the small shows at Gallery Samla- ren. The Paris exhibition was in this sense an endeavour very much in tune with Stockholm. The argument for the international rel- evance of the art presented in the exhibition appears biased also when taking into account the article “Complément à la Scandinavie” by the French critic Michel Seuphor (– ) in a later issue of Art d’Aujourd’hui. In the text, Seuphor commented upon the omis- sion of several Scandinavian artists, not least the lack of information on Norwegian abstract painting. He also mentioned that he found a number of Swedish names missing. Seuphor wrote: Some gaps in the Scandinavian countries which appeared in Art d’Aujourd’hui (October-November ) have to be amended … abstract painters of some importance have also been omitted. These are primarily Gösta Verner, Ture Lindström, Inger Ekdahl, E. Gustavsson, Lindquist, Valentin Andersson, Gösta Eriksson, Zan, Gyllenberg, John Berg and Nils Nixon. Seuphor also mentioned the painters Bengt Lindström (–), Wiking Svensson (–) and Eric H. Olson (–). The comment points out that the report on Swedish art in the magazine had omitted the young Swedish abstract artists already living in Paris, and one of them, a friend of Seuphor, Eric H. Olson, had penned a letter to Seuphor, who then wrote the text intended as an addendum. This further underlines 8 M A RTA E D L I NG that the Swedish artists exhibited at the gallery in April and presented in the magazine in November were those names which were first and foremost relevant to the Swedish audience and by  “hot” favourites for the Stockholm art market. One could say that they constituted (together with the art his- torians’ special selection of Swedish historic avant-garde artists) almost a kind of brand the young art historians had claimed for their extramural activities. The Swedish abstract artists who lived and worked in Paris, had received little or no attention in the Swedish press and, with the exception of Nils Nixon (–), were little known in Sweden and were from this point of view of little interest. The Paris exhibition can thus be interpreted as a strategic measure taken to safeguard the local positions of the art historians in Stock- holm, where they had dual careers. The exhibi- tion told a story of abstract art in Sweden that in fact gave legitimacy to them as its main spokesmen. Whilst they fought for recognition by academia as well as on the Stockholm art scene, Paris could, although still offering meagre financial rewards, give them ample symbolic recognition to help further advance their careers as independent critics and in the long run as experts on modern art and as art historians. A methodological problem: I. What is a centre? And where is the periphery? During the last thirty years, critical art geogra- phy has provided a more complex and nuanced idea of the geographical distribution of artistic positions and how we are to understand their interrelations. The findings demonstrate the necessity of critically examining the way we understand art in relation to geographical space and avoiding presuppositions about what a centre is and what effect it has on the margins. By way of summary, the importance of the transnational, or perhaps better put, translo- cal, collaborations and mutual dependencies of the Stockholm–Paris axis seems a vital fact to observe. Instead of a one-way diffusion, we can see that strategic measures were taken in each local context in order to increase the competitiveness and resources in the regional habitat. The transnational contact was spurred by competition and the attempt to advance from a marginal local position. The exhibition of Swedish art in Paris as well as the Klar Form exhibition in Stockholm were in this sense “detours”, as a means to an end. Earlier art geographical research has inter- estingly demonstrated that such a “physical as well as symbolic detour” has been a recur- rent pattern in the strategies of launching modern art. Building artistic credentials and reputations by exhibiting in foreign cities was a strategy to create a notion of an external demand, a “desire” outside the national context. The international reception was thus used by galleries and artists as a kind of mediator to create domestic attention. We find it in European modernism and the career-building efforts from the late s as well as endeavours to introduce American abstraction in Paris in the late s. Although having identified similar “detours” launched from Paris in  and Stockholm in , it is undeniable that Paris was, in important ways, a centre in the course of events referred to above. The collab- orations were indeed dependent on the French capital’s international reputation as a mytho- logical space and an economic hub, offering an infrastructure of institutions important to F RO M M A R GI N T O M A R GI N ? TH E S T O CK H OL M PA RI S A X I S 194 4– 1 953 9 artists as well as to art dealers and patrons, gal- leries, salons and magazines. The status of the city as a metropolis of art thus gave the exchange between Denise René and her Nordic collaborators its driving force; the Francophile Swedish art market had had the city as a focal point since the s, and it also served, as we have seen, as a magnet internationally. As the historian Carlo Ginzburg and the art historian Enrico Castelnuovo have pointed out, this is in fact how centres work. The relationships between centres and peripheries are founded on “political, economic, religious” dependencies. The “symbolic domination” and the aesthetic impact of the centre must be seen as an effect of this accumulation of resources; it takes “surplus wealth” to produce, distribute and purchase art. As we have seen in the case of Paris, this “surplus wealth” very much consisted of foreign money. In the s, Paris grew into a trans- national stock exchange, a geographical space where social, artistic and economic assets were combined and augmented, creating intense competition and a diverse art scene. It took great efforts to launch a gallery and to advance from a marginal pos- ition in this terrain. So, even if the city was a mythological and economic focal point, this obviously did not suffice in the day-to-day business of the fledg- ling gallery during its early days at no. , Rue de la Boétie. Starting out in July , it was one of many galleries competing for atten- tion and foreign money. The art market was still weak until the early s, and the trans- national network of galleries and patrons and the travelling exhibitions of the Denise René Gallery were vital. The historical data thus testifies to a rather frail situation where “the local embedded the international” and “the international embedded the local” and the topography of the Paris art scene must accord- ingly be understood as a transnational space of complex and intertwined relations. It is also obvious that the Nordic countries did not constitute a random periphery; they were “margins”. This concept, suggested by the art historian Piotr Piotrowski instead of the vaguer notion of “periphery”, indicates positions defined by, and literally constituted by, their relationship to a centre. And the Nordic “margins” were indeed focused on Paris and very important to Denise René and other art dealers and galleries. Denise René’s first overseas exhibition took place in Denmark in , and the contacts with patrons of art, such as Maire Gullichsen, were vital; there was enough money and influ- ence and a taste for abstract art to support a large travelling exhibition in the Nordic capi- tals in . Thus, as Piotr Piotrowski reminds us, margins have an impact on centres and, we should add, as we have seen in this case, on each other. To conclude, art historians must be cautious when identifying centres; their terrain may be heterogeneous and their coherence cannot be taken for granted. From this also follows that it is always important to be careful about how research locates and defines a centre; the geographical space (and the city limits) do not necessarily demarcate the social space and the relations that underpin its attractive force. A methodological problem: II. Theatricalisation If in the case of art history, according to Joyeux-Prunel, we “always study the same centres and the same people”, we should ask ourselves why art historians endorse aesthetic 10 M A RT A ED L I NG preferences of certain artists, curators and critics and why we reproduce self-fashioned narratives. When the scholar thus becomes a mere “instrument” of the field, what is missing is one of the fundamental methodological demands, namely the “epistemological break” with taken-for-granted assumptions produced by the field. And by being in tune with such beliefs, such as the existence of a natural order of the field where art is made (and furthered) by striving, self-sacrificing, creative individuals fighting for the true (or new) values of art, it promotes a “personalist” view of avant-garde strategies. The result is then a theatricalisa- tion of new, experimental and daring achieve- ments as solely aesthetic efforts and results of heroic agency. In that way, it obscures not only their homology with social positions, i.e. the resources and dispositions necessary to accomplish such endeavours, but it also makes those who “did not win the battle of history” more or less invisible and may detract from other artistic productions that in the same “peripheries” were “sidesteps” or even outcomes of resistance or competition. This article has argued that it is important to consider that the (first, local, then national, transnational and later international) careers of Denise René and Pontus Hultén were based on trying to establish and defend local positions. By taking this into consideration, it becomes clear that the narratives of their endeavours to promote modern art obscure the social reality that necessitated them, namely harsh competition and meagre resources. It may seem an obvious and unin- teresting fact to point to modest beginnings; however, the methodological point is that heroic career trajectories are reliant on access to resources and networks and presuppose dependencies as well as competition. In the self-constructed narratives of Hultén and René, no attention is given to the fact that it was fierce local competition and insuffi- cient career opportunities that pushed them, so to speak, from margin to margin in order to establish and secure careers. Using social analy- sis, we may thus interpret the local competition in each context as a centrifugal force that created mutual transnational dependencies. Thus, rather than to presume that the exhi- bition L’art Suédois – was the result of an aesthetic affinity and a gravitation towards an artistic centre, not unlike the phys- ical pull of a magnetic field, social analysis helps to also identify the push effect that necessitated incentives to create new alliances outside the local context. It points to the rel- evance of considering the competition in the contemporary art scenes in Stockholm and Paris, where new critics and artists made claims to being the vanguard, and where the stakes were high in the post-war change of artistic generations. To conclude, if visions and farsightedness are characteristic of innovators, one should remember that they are the product of both virtue and necessity. The heroic narrative sim- plifies and hides the often fragile and shaky beginnings, the push effect of competition, and dismisses as traditional, provincial or parochial those positions that threatened pro- fessional advancement locally. Thus, as pointed out in the introduction, it is methodologically important to consider the relationships of “material exchange, circu- lation and transaction” between individuals as well as their access to resources in their local context. In that way, the relationship between centres and margins, as well as the heroic trajectories, might be critically recon- sidered and reframed as materially founded and interdependent. F RO M M A RG I N T O M A RG I N ? TH E ST OC K HO L M PA RI S A X I S 1 94 4– 19 53 1 1 Endnotes . Kenneth Clark, Provincialism, London, , p. . The quote is discussed in Enrico Castelnuovo, Carlo Ginzburg and Maylis Curie, “Symbolic Domination and Artistic Geography in Italian Art History”, Art in Translation, Vol. , No ,  (). . On “canonical logic”, see Anna Brzyski, “Introduction: Canons and Art History”, in Anna Brzyski, ed., Partisan Canons, Durham, . . Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Provincializing Paris”, Artlas Bulletin, Vol. , No , , pp. , . . See, for example, Andreas Gedin, Pontus Hultén, Hon & Moderna, Stockholm, , pp. , , –; Hans Hayden, Modernismen som institution, Stockholm, , pp. , ; Patrik Andersson, Euro-pop, PhD diss., Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, , pp. , . For a critical historiographical overview of the center-peripery narrative in this period, see Annika Öhrner, Barbro Östlihn & New York: konstens rum och möjligheter, PhD diss., Uppsala Univ., Gothenburg, , pp. –. . Hans Ulrich Obrist, “The Hang of It”, Art Forum, April . Cf. also Jean-Paul Ameline and Nathalie Ernoult, “Pontus Hultén”, in Denise René, l’intrépide, Centre Pompidou, Paris, . On Denise René, see Denise René and Catherine Millet, Conversations avec Denise René, Paris, , pp. –; Mette Höjsgaard, “Denise René Interviewet af Mette Höjsgaard i Galerie Denise René”, in Gitte Ørskov and Jakob Vengberg Sevel, eds., Rum og Form: Robert Jacobsen  år, Aalborg, ; Mette Höjsgaard, ed., Robert Jacobsen & Paris, Copenhagen, ; Mette Höjsgaard, I Paris laerer man at tale rent, PhD diss., Univ. of Copenhagen, , pp. –. . Research of importance for this line of argument is Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Introduction: Reintroducing Circulations: Historiography and the Project of Global Art History”, in Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, eds., Circulations in the Global History of Art, Farnham, ; Joyeux-Prunel, ; Catherine Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, s–s, Burlington, ; Castelnuovo, Ginzburg and Curie,  (); Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Nul n’est prophète en son pays? Paris, . The introduction in DaCosta Kauffmann, Dossin, Joyeux- Prunel offers a historiographical overview of earlier research. DaCosta Kauffmann, Dossin, Joyeux-Prunel, , pp. –; also endnote  in this text lists further readings, e.g. Kaufmann, . . Research of importance for this line of argument is Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago, ; Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, Cambridge,  (). . On this methodological approach, see DaCosta Kauffmann, Dossin, Joyeux-Prunel, , pp. –. . The article contributes to the number of critical studies of Swedish modernism, –, aiming to shift focus from a personalised approach (great men) to “infrastructure” of vital importance for artistic success, e.g. in the Modern Museum in  (Hans Hayden, Modernismen som institution, Eslöv, ; Öhrner, ; Öhrner, “The Moderna Museet in Stockholm: The Institution and the Avant-Garde”, in Tania Ørum and Jesper Olsson, eds., A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries, –, Leiden, ); in television and radio (David Rynell Åhlén, Samtida konst på bästa sändningstid, PhD diss., Stockholm Univ., Lund, ); in public art (Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, Skulptur i folkhemmet, PhD diss., Uppsala Univ., Gothenburg, ); and in the development of old and new institutions for art education (Anna Lena Lindberg, Konstpedagogikens dilemma, Lund, ; Marta Edling, Fri konst? Stockholm, ). Linda Fagerström’s critical study of young Swedish artists’ career opportunities and the role of the artist during the late s and s clarifies the working conditions and terms for aspiring artists. See Linda Fagerström, Randi Fisher – svensk modernist, PhD diss., Lund Univ., Lund, . . Julie Verlaine, Les galeries d’art contemporain à Paris, Paris, , pp. –, , –, –. . Verlaine, , p. . . On metaphors of combat, competition and war, see Verlaine, , pp. –; cf. endnote  below. On the position of Denise René, see Véronique Wiesinger, “Mouvements et marchés de l’abstraction”, in Denise René, l’intrépide, Paris, . . Dossin, , pp. –; Verlaine, , pp. –; Kathryn Anne Boyer, “Political Promotion and Institutional Patronage: How New York Displaced Paris as the Center of Contemporary Art, Ca. –”, PhD diss., Univ. of Kansas, Ann Arbor, ; Kathryn Boyer, “Association Française d’Action Artistique and the School of Paris”, Journal of Art History, Vol. , No , . . Verlaine, , pp. –, –; Dossin, , pp. –, citation on p. ; the art market was also hampered by taxes and an old-fashioned infrastructure. See also René and Millet, , pp. –. . “[J]e voulais du neuf, m’écarter des chemins battus … Pour moi, le temps du combat commencait”. English translation in Bourdieu,  (), p.  (Bourdieu’s italics). Catalogue du er Salon international des galeries pilotes, Lausanne, , p. . . Verlaine, , pp. –, –. . On the Danish – French collaboration and Robert Jacobsen see Höjsgaard  pp. –, Höjsgaard , Höjsgaard , as well as Jan Würtz Frandsen Richard Mortensen Copenhagen , pp. –. On Finnish contacts, see René and Millet , pp. –, Helena Woirhaye Maire Gullichsen, Helsingfors  pp.–, ed. Erik Kruskopf & John Arnold, Maire Gullichsen, Pori, , pp. – and pp. –. Jean-Paul Ameline “Denise René. Histoire d’une galerie” in Denise René, l’intrépide, Paris . 12 M A RT A ED L I NG . Verlaine, , pp. –. . Art d’Aujourd’hui, serie , No , décembre ; René and Millet, , pp. –; Verlaine, , pp. –. . “L’Exposition Klar-Form … soulève une vive curiosité, de la part du public, dans toutes les villes des pays du nord de l’Europe où elle est présentée. De son côté, la presse accorde de larges commentaires et souligne l’importance exceptionelle des oeuvres présentées. Le succès sans cesse grandissant témoigne, une fois de plus, de la vitalité de l’Art abstrait. “L’Exposition itinérante Klar Form. ‘Vingt Artistes de l’Ecole de Paris’”, Art d’Aujourd’hui, serie , No –, février-mars , p.  (my translation). . “[R]épondre au désir exprimé par les Pays Scandinaves et la Finlande, qui souhaitaient présenter à leurs compatriots des oeuvre représentantives des peintres et sculptures non figuratifs de Ecole de Paris”. “L’Exposition ‘Klar Form’”, Art d’Aujourd’hui, serie , No , juin , p.  (my translation). . Martin Gustavsson, Makt och konstsmak, PhD diss., Stockholm Univ., Stockholm, , pp. –; Tulla Grünberger, Svenskt måleri under andra världskriget, PhD diss., Stockholm Univ., Stockholm, , pp. –. . Gustavsson, , p. . . An early example is issue no. /  of the leading Swedish art magazine Konstrevy, in which six articles on modern and contemporary French art are presented. Cf. also Yngve Berg, “Konstkrönika”, Dagens Nyheter, - -. This reception was also in line with the international promotion by French authorities of French art as a tradition of the grand masters. See Boyer, . . Eva-Lena Bergström, Nationalmuseum i offentlighetens ljus, PhD diss., Umeå Univ., Umeå, , pp. –, , –, , –, ; Andrea Kollnitz, Konstens nationella identitet, PhD diss., Stockholm Univ., , pp. –. . Gustavsson, , pp. –. These two lines of development were general characteristics of Nordic art by this time. Ørum and Olsson, eds., , pp. –. . On the art scene during the period, see Bo Lindvall, “–: En kavalkad över de sista tio åren i svensk konst”, Konstrevy, häfte , ; Sten Dunér, “Modernismen i Sverige mellan den  mars  och den  januari ”, in Torsten Bergmark, ed., Den åldrade modernismen, Stockholm, , pp. –. On the young art historians, see Eugen Wretholm, Moderna svenska konstnärer, Stockholm, , pp. –; Teddy Brunius, Baertling, Stockholm, . . “[M]edeltidsfixerade högskolan”, Rolf Söderberg, Mina konstnärsänkor och andra konstminnen, Stockholm, , pp. ,  (my translation). On Swedish art history in this period, see Oscar Reutersvärd, “Om fyrtiotalets svenska konsthistoria”, Ord och Bild, . . Jimmy Pettersson, “Apropå film”; Patrik Andersson, “Den inre och den yttre rymden”, in Patrik Andersson, Anna Tellgren and Anna Lundström, eds., Pontus Hultén och Moderna museet, Stockholm, ; Lief (sic.) Eriksson, “Duchamp in Sweden, –”, http://toutfait.com/ duchamp-in-sweden---a-critical-review/, published: //, updated: //, accessed: --; Ulf Linde, Från kart till fallfrukt, Stockholm, , pp. , . . Carlo Derkert became known for his popular lectures on the radio, at exhibitions, at Nationalmuseum, etc. His name appeared frequently in the press (see also note  below); Kristoffer Arvidsson, “Carlo Derkert i efterkrigstidens konstpedagogiska landskap” and Annika Öhrner, “Carlo Derkert – biografiska data och bibliografi”, Biblis, No , spring . On Söderberg, see Söderberg, ; bibliographical information on his writings can be found in Svenskt författarlexikon, Vol. –, –. . Full-text searches can be done in the search engine Svenska dagstidningar (Swedish newspapers), a database of digitalised major Swedish newspapers. I have tracked the five art historians from  to  and charted all the minor and major entries where their names appear. This gives an overview of their exams, marriages, public appearances, bursaries and scholarships, exhibitions, publications, etc. . On their early academic careers, see, for example, reports on bursaries in Dagens Nyheter, “Högskolans doktorandstipendiater”, --; “Doktorandstipendier vid Stockholms högskola”, - -; “Högskolestipendierna i Stockholm utdelade”, --; “Doktorand- och licenciatstipendier”,- -. Also letters in Rolf Söderberg’s archive from Oscar Reutersvärd repeatedly refer to their efforts to apply for bursaries, and study loans were an option when applications were rejected; see the letters --, --, --, and undated letter [May ] from Oscar Reutersvärd to Rolf Söderberg in Rolf Söderberg’s archive, Royal Library MS, acc. /:, and the letter in reply from Rolf Söderberg to Oscar Reutersvärd, --, Lund University Library MS, Oscar Reutersvärd’s archive. The letters also reflect the necessity of keeping in with the professors at the art history department. For a report on the sacrifices that living on such meagre means entailed, see also Cri [pseud.], “Studenfamilj är hemkär”, Svenska Dagbladet, --; Gerdes [pseud.], “Akademiska knep med smörkniv och tallrik”, Norrskensflamman, --. . Hultén obtained a bachelor’s degree in  and a licentiate degree in ; Rolf Söderberg, a bachelor’s degree in  and a licentiate degree in ; Oscar Reutersvärd, a licentiate degree in  and a doctorate degree in ; Hans Eklund, a bachelor’s degree in  and a licentiate degree in ; and Carlo Derkert, a bachelor’s degree in . Bibliographical and biographical information on the exams and published texts of the five art historians can be accessed from the online Project Runeberg (runeberg.org), providing free electronic editions of Scandinavian literature. On the relationship between the academic position and the art critical assignments, see E. H., “Konsthistorikerna F RO M M A RG I N T O M A RG I N ? TH E ST OC K HO L M PA RI S A X I S 1 94 4– 19 53 1 3 http://toutfait.com/duchamp-in-sweden-1933-1970-a-critical-review/ http://toutfait.com/duchamp-in-sweden-1933-1970-a-critical-review/ principdebattera”, Konstvärlden, Vol. , No , , pp. –. Art historians criticised Oscar Reutersvärd for using his taste for abstract art to analyse art historical material, focusing on intra-aesthetic criteria. See Ragnar Josephson, “Ett underligt fyrtiotal”, Svenska Dagbladet, --; Gotthard Johansson, “Impressionisterna och naturen”, Svenska Dagbladet, --; Carl Nordenfalk, “Impressionisterna inför konstvetenskapen”, Dagens Nyheter, --. . Earlier research has overlooked this intimate relationship during this period: “It is no exaggeration to say that the fields of art history and art criticism have had remarkably few points of contact”, Hans Hayden writes and cites one exception, Teddy Brunius, who worked as a critic and curator during the same period. Hans Hayden, “Konsthistoria utanför universitetet”, in Britt-Inger Johnsson and Hans Pettersson, eds., Åtta kapitel om konsthistoriens historia i Sverige, Stockholm, , p.  (my translation). The relationship between art history and art criticism is not commented upon in Dan Karlholm, Hans Dam Christensen and Matthew Rampley, “Art History in the Nordic Countries”, in Matthew Rampley, ed., Art History and Visual Studies in Europe, Leiden, . . Reutersvärd collaborated with the Finnish patron Maire Gullichsen in the preparations for the commemorative exhibition in Helsinki. Reutersvärd advertised for works by the artist in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, --; Kruskopf and Arnold, , pp. –. On the exhibition at Gallery Samlaren, see Gunnar Hellman, “Variationer på ett gammalt tema”, Konstperspektiv, No , ; Ulf Hård af Segerstad, “Förändrade perspektiv”, Svenska Dagbladet, --. Eklund designed several exhibitions around the turn of the decade: Abstrakt och surrealistiskt ur Egon Östlunds samling, Stockholm, ; Vår tids konst, Riksförbundet för bildande konst, ; and Den unga kubismen, . . See the prefaces to the small catalogues Legér och nordisk postkubism, Stockholm, , and neoplasticism, Stockholm, . On Paris, see Verlaine, , pp. – . . Verlaine, , pp. –. The strategy was praised by Swedish critics. See, for example, K.B., “Neoplastiskt sammanhang”, Aftonbladet, --. . Hayden, , pp. , –, note . Cf. also Gedin, , pp. –, –. . Interview with Hultén’s partner, Anna Lena Wibom, --; Ameline and Ernoult, , pp. –; Teddy Brunius, Baertling, Stockholm, , pp. –, –, –; Obrist, . See also note  for information on bursaries. . Brunius, , pp. –; Thomas Millroth and Per-Olle Stackman, Svenska konstnärer i Paris, Stockholm, , pp. –; Söderberg, , pp. –. See also note  for information on bursaries. . The network was built not only on friendly and professional relationships; Denise René lived together with Richard Mortensen. Söderberg, , p. . Oscar Reutersvärd and Rolf Söderberg were brothers-in-law and were married to the sisters Kerstin Lundhbom (b. ) and Britt Lundhbom (b. ). See “Maud Lundbohm”, Svenska Dagbladet, --; “Ansedel Maud Ernestine Maria Nordberg”, http://www.molins.nu/ Disgen// /.htm, produced: --, accessed: -- . . “Svensk konst till Paris”, Svenska Dagbladet, --; “Svensk kubism och konkretism på Europaturné”, Dagens Nyheter, --; “Svensk nutidskonst på utlandsturné”, Svenska Dagbladet, --; “Kubister på vandring”, Dagens Nyheter, --. . L’art Suédois –: exposition d’art Suédois, cubiste, futuriste, constructiviste, Galerie Denise René, Paris, . . The reference to Reutersvärd’s letter appears in Swedish in Söderberg, , p. : “I maj  fick jag ett melankoliskt brev från Oscar Reuterswärd: ‘Den där utställningen hos Denise har fullständigt sugit ut Pontus och mig. Det har blivit vi som med egna portmonnäer fått punga ut med alla otaliga utgiver i samband med organiserandet. Detta plus vårt Parisbesök har kostat oss tusentals kronor och tre arbetsmånader’”. Letter from Oscar Reutersvärd to Rolf Söderberg, -- (my translation); see Rolf Söderberg’s archive, Royal Library, MS, acc. /:. . “Protokoll i museiärenden, –”, Nationalmuseum archive MS, serie A, volym . I am grateful to Jimmy Pettersson for pointing this out to me. . Letters from Pontus Hultén to Rolf Söderberg, -- , --, undated [], -/-, Rolf Söderberg’s archive, KB, acc. /:. The donation of the Carlsund painting is also mentioned in the press, and Legér received an honorary decoration at the opening of the exhibition from the Swedish ambassador. “Svensk konst gör lycka i Paris”, Dagens Nyheter, --; “Svensk nutidskonst på utlandsturné”, Svenska Dagbladet, --; “Kubister på vandring”, Dagens Nyheter, --; Oscar Reutersvärd, “Legér och skandinaverna”, in Christian Derouet et al., eds., Legér och Norden, Stockholm, . The exhibition moved on to Brussels only with the help of private sponsors. Pelle Börjesson and Gerhard Bonnier, “Abstrakt svensk konst på Brysselutställning”, Dagens Nyheter, --. There is no trace of the  Paris exhibition in Nationalmuseum’s archive, according to an e-mail to the author from Eva Lena Bergström, --. . “[I]nitiativlust och nyodlaranda” … “ideal” … “med trosvisshet gått in för den yngsta abstrakta konsten” … “smickrande” … “styvbarnen” … “experimentatorerna” Rolf Söderberg “Svensk konst i Paris”, Dagens Nyheter, -- (my translation). The article was the result of an initiative by Söderberg, who contacted Dagens Nyheter’s editor, Uno Dalén, in February . Dalén was not at first aware of Söderberg’s 14 M A RT A ED L I NG http://www.molins.nu/%20Disgen/000/0000/379.htm http://www.molins.nu/%20Disgen/000/0000/379.htm involvement in the project; however, he accepted the text on the condition that it should be a report and not a critical review. See the five letters from Uno Dalén to Söderberg, February to April , in Rolf Söderberg’s archive, Royal Library, MS, acc. /:. Oscar Reutersvärd later thanked Söderberg for the “extremely helpful” (“stor nytta”) article. See letter from Oscar Reutersvärd to Rolf Söderberg, --, Rolf Söderberg’s archive, Royal Library, MS, acc. /: (my translation). . For a critical historiographical analysis of this narrative, see Annika Öhrner, “Cubism in Transit: Siri Derkert and the Early Parisian Avant-Garde”, in Harri Veivo, ed., Transferts, appropriations et functions de l’avant-garde dans l’Europe intermediaire et du Nord, Paris, . . “[D]’une faim d’intellectualisme”. Rolf Söderberg, “de  à ”, p.  (my translation). See also Rolf Söderberg, “Introduction”, Oscar Reuterswaerd (sic.), “Otto G. Carlsund”, and Pontus Hultén, “Viking Eggeling”, Art d’Aujourd’hui, série , No , octobre- novembre . . Söderberg, , pp. –. In the foreword, Söderberg writes that the last chapter on contemporary art was revised in . Rolf Söderberg, Den svenska konsten under -talet, Stockholm, , p. . The text was also revised in later editions. On its influence on Swedish art history, see Jeff Werner, “Svansviftningens estetik”, in Cecilia Widenheim and Eva Rudberg, eds., Utopi och verklighet, Stockholm, . . Eugene Wretholm, “Svensk modernism i Paris”, Svenska Dagbladet, --; “Abstrakt stämma talar för oss”, Expressen, --; “Svensk konkretism i parisisk debatt”, Svenska Dagbladet, --; “Parissvenskt”, Svenska Dagbladet, --; Sven Lövgren, “Modern svensk konst inför fransk publik”, Dagens Nyheter, - -; Ulf Hård af Segerstad, “Ny svensk konst i fransk tidskrift”, Svenska Dagbladet, --; K. R—d, “Böcker och tidskrifter: Svenskt abstrakt inför utlandet”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet Snällposten, --. . “[D]et partiska ställningstagandet till en positiv egenskap, som ger den dess polemiska slagkraft” … “Den hävdar exklusivt de nonfigurativa konstnärernas sak” K. R—d, -- (my translation). . “[S]kaffa sig de rätta inflytelserika vännerna” … “attack” … “internationell plattform” Nils Palmgren, “Orienterat mot framtiden”, Aftonbladet, -- (my translation). . Barbro Schaffer, “Nils O E Palmgren”, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, Vol. , Stockholm, –. . On exhibitions and the discussions on a new museum of modern art, see Bergström, , pp. –. The artists had been exhibited in shows, such as God konst i hem och samlingslokaler, Stockholm, ; Abstrakt konst, Stockholm, ; Ung konst, Katalog nr. , Färg och form, Stockholm, ; Abstrakt och surrealistiskt ur Egon Östlunds samling, Stockholm, ; Det moderna museet, Stockholm,  and Carl Nordenfalk and Hans Richter, eds., Viking Eggeling, –, Stockholm, . See also the previously mentioned exhibitions at Gallery Samlaren. The two youngest, Lars Rolf and Ted Dyrssen, were still in the beginning of their careers. . Rolf had exhibited at several Stockholm galleries in  and , making his debut at Galleri Aesthetica in February . He caught the attention of Yngve Berg, “Konstkrönika”, Dagens Nyheter, --, and was favourably mentioned again by Berg in his “Konstkrönika”, Dagens Nyheter, -- and - -. The only odd name out was Ted Dyrssen, a young sculptor who appears to have been the “joker in the pack”. The database has no record of exhibitions at renowned galleries before the  Paris exhibition. . “Quelques lacunes doivent être réparées dans l’ensemble sur les pays scandinaves paru dans Art d’Aujourd’hui (octobre-novembre )/ … /Parmi les Suedois quelques peintres abstraits d’une certaine importance ont été égalment omis. Ce sont principalment Gösta Verner, Ture Lindström, Inger Ekdahl, E. Gustavsson, Lindquist, Valentin Andersson, Gösta Eriksson, Zan, Gyllenberg, John Berg et Nils Nixon”. Michel Seuphor, “Complément à la Scandinavie”, Art d’Aujourd’hui, série , No , février , p.  (my translation). Gösta Werner’s name is misspelled in the original. . Seuphor, , p. . On the friendship between Seuphor and Olson, see Millroth and Stackman, , pp. –. . Gustavsson, , pp. –. . Olson’s frustration can be seen in the light of the fact that just a few months earlier, in February , he had exhibited at Galerie Aesthetica in Stockholm, presenting a new artistic profile as “neoplastiscist”. Olson’s ambitions were, however, discouraged by the art critic Yngve Berg, who saw nothing but decorative uses for Olson’s paintings. Yngve Berg, “Konstkrönika”, Dagens Nyheter, --. The other artists, referred to by their full names or otherwise identifiable in Seuphor’s text, only rarely appear in the database Svenska dagstidningar, –. Gösta Verner, i.e. Werner, made his debut in  but does not appear, apart from one exception (see below), in the database until . See also his obituary in Dagens Nyheter, --. Ture Lindström is mentioned for having successfully sold a graphic sheet in  at an exhibition of Nordic artists in Bergen. “Svensk konst såld Bergen”, Dagens Nyheter, --. Inger Ekdahl is briefly mentioned and characterised as doing “abstract compositions” by the critic Yngve Berg in a short review of the group exhibition De Unga at Galerie Aesthetica. “Konstkrönika”, Dagens Nyheter, --. Her solo debut at Lilla Paviljongen (Little Pavilion) in  was mentioned favourably by the critic Nils Palmgren in Aftonbladet, --. Valentin Andersson appears in an ad for Gummeson Art Gallery in Dagens Nyheter, --, and, together with Gösta Werner, is referred to as a concrete painter by Yngve Berg, “Konstkrönika”, Dagens Nyheter, --. Zan, perhaps a reference to the sculptor Jack Zan, who first F RO M M A RG I N T O M A RG I N ? TH E ST OC K HO L M PA RI S A X I S 1 94 4– 19 53 1 5 made his career in the northern parts of Sweden, is fleetingly mentioned in the Stockholm press during the s, e.g. in  by Yngve Berg, who briefly referred to Zan’s “rather ingenious non-figurative sculptures”. Yngve Berg, “Konstkrönika”, Dagens Nyheter, --. Nils Nixon’s career was different. He had his first solo exhibition already in  at Gummeson Art Gallery. See Yngve Berg, “Konstkrönika”, Dagens Nyheter, --. During the late s, he was associated with the new generation of concrete painters exhibited at the Paris show in , but he never received the same attention. He was not an alumnus of the school of the Fine Art Academy and as early as  was described as an odd man out by Martin Strömberg in the book Den nya konsten. His modest career is also reflected in the lack of art historical interest in his art. Cf. Thomas Millroth, “Måleriet och skulpturen”, in Signums svenska konsthistoria, vol. , Konsten –, Lund, , p. . I have not been able to find the artists Gösta Eriksson, Gyllenberg, E. Gustavsson and Lindquist. . Joyeux-Prunel, , pp. –; Dossin, , pp. – ; DaCosta Kauffmann, Dossin and Joyeux-Prunel, , pp. –; Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Jouer sur l’espace pour maîtriser le temps”, EspacesTemps.net, Works, .., https://www.espacestemps.net/en/ articles/jouer-sur-lrsquoespace-pour-maitriser-le-temps- en/. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel Baltimore,  (), p. . . See note ; cf. also Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, London, , p. . . On Paris and the Swedish art market in the s and s, see Andrea Kollnitz, “Promoting the Young”, in Hubert van den Berg, ed., A Cultural History of the Avant- Garde in the Nordic Countries, –, Amsterdam, ; Annika Öhrner, “A Northern Avant-Garde”, in Pam Meecham, ed., A Companion to Modern Art, London, . . Castelnuovo, Ginzburg and Curie,  (), pp. –. . Verlaine, , pp. –, , gives a good overview of this heterogeneous art scene in the mid-s. . Verlaine, , pp. –. . Citation from Joyeux-Prunel, , p. . . Ameline, , p. . Ca. % of the Parisian art market’s clientele came from the Nordic countries between  and  according to Verlaine, , p. . Cf. Tania Ørum, “The Post-War Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries”, in Ørum and Olsson, eds., , pp. –. . Piotrowski, , pp. –. . Joyeux-Prunel, , p. . . Bourdieu and Wacquant, , pp. –. . Bourdieu, , p. . . Joyeux, , p. ; Castelnuovo, Ginzburg and Curie,  (), pp. –. . I am very grateful to Donald Broady, Charlotte Bydler, Mikael Börjesson, Martin Gustavsson, Maria Görts, Dan Karlholm, Katarina Wadstein MacLeod, Andreas Melldahl, Jimmy Pettersson and Annika Öhrner for their valuable comments on the manuscript. Funding This work was supported by Swedish Research Council [grant number -]. Summary The historical study of art in relation to geographical space has for a long time been biased by the “canonical logic” of the centre– periphery narrative. This text takes as its starting point a methodological critique of this binary framework by using an example from Swedish art history, namely the art historical narrative of s Sweden as a slumbering Nordic province slowly being awoken by the heroic and foresighted efforts of the Swedish curator Pontus Hultén. The text analyses two local contexts between  and : a presumed periphery, Stockholm, Sweden, and a presumed centre, Paris, France, and the collaboration between individuals in these two spaces. In focus is a  exhibition in Paris of Swedish abstract art from  to . The text concludes with a methodological discussion arguing that by considering “the material conditions of encounters and exchange”, it becomes clear that the transnational contacts in these cases were spurred by local competition and that they were mutually dependent, rather than a product of diffusions of aesthetic innovation from centre to periphery. Marta Edling School of Culture and Education Södertörn University Huddinge   Sweden E-mail: marta.edling@sh.se 16 M A RT A ED L I NG https://www.espacestemps.net/en/articles/jouer-sur-lrsquoespace-pour-maitriser-le-temps-en/ https://www.espacestemps.net/en/articles/jouer-sur-lrsquoespace-pour-maitriser-le-temps-en/ https://www.espacestemps.net/en/articles/jouer-sur-lrsquoespace-pour-maitriser-le-temps-en/ mailto:marta.edling@sh.se Abstract Paris Local competition and transnational strategies Stockholm Local competition Transnational strategies L’art Suédois, 1913–1953: exposition d’art Suédois, cubiste, futuriste, constructiviste A methodological problem: I. What is a centre? And where is the periphery? A methodological problem: II. Theatricalisation Endnotes work_dklh3bduwffffmqbhznwj6sata ---- Braga, J. (2013). Expressão e expressividade pictórica. DEDiCA. REVISTA DE EDUCAÇÃO E HUMANIDADES, 4 (2013) março, 63-86 EXPRESSÃO E EXPRESSIVIDADE PICTÓRICA1 Joaquim Braga2 Abstract: In this paper we wish to emphasize the process of aesthetic individuation of expressiveness, which arises from the statement of systemic autonomy in the work of art. The subject matter which we use for our reflections is artistic pictorial forms. Beyond classifying the concept of expressiveness, it is our objetive to illustrate the dynamics of pictorial transformation which enables the individuation of expressiveness to increase within the vast phenomenon of expression. Keywords: expression; expressiveness; emotion; picture; art Resumo: Com este texto pretendemos colocar em evidência o processo de individuação estética da expressividade, que decorre da afirmação da autonomia sistémica da obra de arte. O objeto que nos serve de reflexão são as formas imagéticas artísticas. Mais do que categorizar o conceito de expressividade, é nosso objetivo principal mostrar as dinâmicas de transformação pictóricas que tornam possível o incremento da individuação da expressividade face ao vasto fenómeno da expressão. Palavras-chave: expressão; expressividade; emoção; imagem; arte 1. Introdução As reflexões teóricas sobre a imagem – e a arte em geral – têm favorecido as temáticas em torno do conceito de “representação”, tanto na sua aceitação como na sua negação enquanto conceito nuclear da estética imagética. Tal como fora norma remeter as considerações sobre as articulações temporais para a música, ou a poesia, restando à pintura a pretensa categoria espacial do punctum temporis, o mesmo tende a acontecer em relação à questão da expressividade, que, a avaliar pelas obras e investigações publicadas até hoje, tem sido das matérias mais tratadas nas reflexões sobre a estética musical. As razões que têm inibido a importância da inclusão da expressividade no estudo das formas imagéticas são muitas e diversas, mas parecem ter como principal alavanca o património semântico gerado à custa da dicotomização entre os conceitos de representação e expressão. E a dicotomização torna-se exequível mormente graças a uma transferência da natureza bipolar da representação – representans e representandum – para a construção semiósica da expressão, que passa assim a ser concebida dentro dos limites da relação expressans-expressandum. À bipolaridade de ambas acrescentou- se o contraste epistemológico marcado pelo perfil objetivo da Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 64 primeira e o perfil subjetivo da segunda, assaz visível na categorização de estilos pictóricos artísticos assente na contraposição dos modelos expressionistas face à tradição representacionista, bem como, ao nível das teorias estéticas, na querela entre os defensores das teses emotivistas e os das teses cognitivistas. Ainda que de forma elementar, poder-se-á dizer que a dicotomização não faz da expressão uma categoria autónoma, mas antes faz dela uma categoria sucedânea da representação – a expressão como representação –, garantindo os objetos de ambas as formas (expressandum e representandum) o único critério para a sua diferenciação. “O quê” sobrepõe-se aqui ao “como” da distinção. Esta conceção é excludente. Se a expressão for definida através do objeto, através do produto do ato – aquilo que é expresso –, isso facilmente redunda na ideia vertiginosa de que nem todas as obras de arte são expressivas3, o que faria, por conseguinte, do conceito de expressão, tal como sucede com o conceito de representação, uma categoria estética relativa. A redução do expressivo ao emotivo é, nesse aspeto, um sucedâneo da redução do representativo ao figurativo. Um dos entraves à reflexão sobre a imagem encontra-se, paradoxalmente, no facto que a remete unicamente para o domínio da visualidade. Depressa o primado do visual se transforma em paradigma ocular, levando a análise teórica a encontrar nele o arquétipo das suas principais categorias. Aliada ao paradigma ocular, a visão teórica da expressão é marcada por uma projeção antropomórfica, que transfere o fenómeno da expressão dado pelas manifestações somáticas para as manifestações proporcionadas pela obra artística. Mas será que a expressividade estética pode ser somente fundamentada segundo os modelos desta transferência? Creio que não. A questão que aqui se coloca será, então, como é que do amplo fenómeno da expressão se consegue individuar, estética e artisticamente, a categoria da expressividade. 2. Expressão, emoção, imagem É comum associar a expressão a um processo através do qual um estado psíquico é dado à perceção. Sendo vista como oposta à função da representação, que, trazendo à mente o objeto percecionado ou o referente linguístico, denota um certo movimento passivo da atividade psíquica, a função da expressão revelaria, ainda no seguimento desta ideia, a faculdade de tornar visível a vida Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 65 psíquica da mente. E esta será, provavelmente, a base usual que serve de pressuposto teórico a muitas abordagens filosóficas e extrafilosóficas sobre o fenómeno da expressão, destacando-se aqui – e na sua maior parte – aquelas que intentam ligar certos estados psíquicos aos seus correlatos afetivos. Na sua aceção tradicional – e que ainda hoje vigora –, o processo inerente à expressão envolve apenas a manifestação de sentimentos, ao ponto de muitos autores defenderem que a função basilar das formas imagéticas é a exemplificação desse processo. O debate em torno das dimensões bio-culturais da expressão – quer na defesa de invariantes universais (Ekman,1998) quer na defesa de diferenças regionais (Mead, 1975) – tem animado muitos dos estudos da psicologia da expressão facial da emoção. No entanto, os diversos estudos sobre as emoções tendem a omitir a relevância do fenómeno da expressão, reservando-lhe apenas um papel secundário na articulação dos sentimentos. Por outro lado, o primado dos mecanismos psíquicos e dos seus correlatos neurais sobre as formas de expressão sociais – como tende a acontecer na neurobiologia das emoções – tem contribuído para o estudo dos processos expressivos através da objetivação de estados emocionais. Poder-se-á ver nesta tendência e nos modelos internalistas que a suportam uma tentativa clara de se harmonizar os processos racionais com os processos afetivos e, dessa maneira, ultrapassar a oposição clássica entre racionalidade e afetividade. A relação entre expressão e sentimento ganhou uma importância capital. Insira-se nessa tomada de consciência o contributo significativo dado por William James, que, na sua psicologia dos sentimentos, fundamenta o primado das manifestações somáticas sobre os estados afetivos, mais concretamente a importância da função fisiológica das primeiras para a constituição psíquica dos últimos (James, 1950: 442-485). Além de acentuar o papel ativo da expressão, esta inversão operada por James vem alertar para a necessidade de os sentimentos serem pensados dentro do âmbito da sociabilidade humana, quebrando-se assim a ideia, comummente difundida, de uma mera transposição mecânica do sentimento para a sua manifestação sensível. Porém, e no que ao estudo das relações pictóricas entre expressão e emoções diz respeito, as tendências que precederam as investigações de James foram quase sempre guiadas pela ideia da transposição mecânica. Por exemplo, segundo Charles LeBrun, a expressão desfruta de uma semelhança natural e ingénua com os Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 66 fenómenos que são representados. A teoria de LeBrun, como tantas outras, é baseada numa conceção gestual da expressão das emoções. Daí que o pintor – tal como o orador – tenha a capital tarefa de gerar uma reação empática no observador, levando este a participar emocionalmente no pathos dos objetos representados pela imagem – ou seja, há uma ligação da arte pictural à ars oratoria através da função retórica concebida às emoções, mais concretamente à sua pretensa eloquência. Se as emoções contêm propriedades retóricas implícitas, então será através da ars oratoria que elas podem ser trazidas à expressão e, com isso, deixar a sua marca nas nossas afeções. Trata-se, em rigor, de uma competência técnica, e não de uma inteligência propriamente estética. Idêntica conceção gestual da expressão repercutiu-se, também, nos intentos de Charles Bell. O fisiologista e anatomista escocês, que aplica o termo “anatomia” ao estudo das artes figurativas para se referir à natureza da expressão das emoções inscrita nas obras de arte, considera que o pintor é um observador com as tarefas de desvendar e distinguir aquilo que é verdadeiramente expressão (“estado de alma”) dos outros movimentos musculares do corpo humano. Nesta aceção, pintar seria sinónimo de individuar sentimentos de forma figurativa: «The noblest aim of painting unquestionably is to reach the mind which can be accomplished only by the representation of sentiment and passion: of the emotions of the mind, as indicated by the figure and in the countenance» (Bell, 1806: 7)4. Implícita a esta ideia de Bell está a visão da expressão como representação mimética dos sentimentos. Uma ideia, porém, que não é nova. Defende Aristóteles na sua Retórica que o uso dos signos linguísticos é apropriado à eloquência das paixões quando há uma clara correspondência entre expressão e sentimento. Este legado aristotélico teve ramificações em vários domínios artísticos. No que concerne à temática da expressão dos sentimentos, o célebre Tratado da pintura de Leonardo da Vinci abraça ainda as conceções do Estagirita e Jacques Lacombe, no seu Dictionnaire portatif des Beaux-Arts, utiliza mesmo o termo “representação” para se referir à relação pictórica entre expressão e paixões da alma (expressão = «la représentation des mouvements de l'ame, & de ses passions») (Lacombe, 1759: 245). Como se pode facilmente depreender destas formulações, o primado das emoções tende a conduzir a um primado do figurativo. Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 67 Aliada à pressuposição de que a pintura – e a arte em geral – é capaz de expressar conteúdos afetivos específicos, encontra-se a ideia de que as formas linguísticas se mostram insuficientes para desempenhar tal tarefa. A pintura, por exemplo, devia trazer à expressão uma iconicidade sugestiva, causando no espectador os mesmos efeitos que os sentimentos provocam na vida quotidiana. Nesse sentido, o mimetismo figurativo guarnece um mimetismo “estímulo-reação” das emoções; mimetismo esse que, na opinião do ensaísta britânico Arthur Clutton-Brock, acaba por ser um parâmetro de distinção artístico. As imagens e os livros que não expressam emoções não são «works of art», mas sim «works of utility» (Clutton- Brock, 1907: 23), obedecendo, no caso da imagem, o processo de transmissão das emoções a um duplo processo ocular projetivo: as emoções transmitidas pelo pintor «are communicated to him through the eye, and he communicates them through the eye to others» (Clutton-Brock, 1907: 26). 3. Da figuração representativa à diferenciação expressiva 3.1. Intencionalidade e inferencialidade Se atendermos apenas à relação entre “expressão” e “intencionalidade”, há um legado filosófico que se tornou paradigma dominante e que, em parte, justifica o papel secundário que é atribuído à expressão pelas ciências da natureza: a expressão é considerada segundo uma relação bipolar entre forma verbal (ou não verbal) e sentimento revelado, entre expressans e expressandum. Esta lógica conduz, por consequência, à seguinte premissa: se os processos expressivos – como por exemplo, a expressão facial da emoção – forem processos simulados, não podem corresponder verdadeiramente a atos de expressão, já que, como defende David Finn, «não há nenhum sentimento que é expresso» (Finn, 1975: 201). A redução dos processos expressivos à bipolaridade é, pois, uma consequência da primazia que é dada ao conceito de intencionalidade. De acordo com Alan Tormey, a expressão só pode ser vista única e exclusivamente como expressão de sentimentos, não abarcando – como já tinha sido estabelecido desde a publicação de The expression of the emotions in man and animals, de Charles Darwin – outras dimensões possíveis. Segundo o filósofo, a expressão de um determinado sentimento revela a objetivação de Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 68 um estado intencional correspondente – a «intencionalidade é a condição necessária para haver expressão» (Tormey, 1971: 17). Daí que, e ainda seguindo a argumentação de Tormey, o conceito de expressão seja o conceito logicamente mais apropriado para se assinalar todas aquelas relações psíquico-físicas que envolvem uma congruência entre ações e estados mentais, entre comportamentos e afetos (Tormey, 1971: 32). Esta conceção encara os processos expressivos como processos transparentes, dependendo o grau de transparência das implicações inferenciais que permitem o reconhecimento e a individualização dos estados afetivos. A base comunicacional assente na dicotomia intencionalidade-inferencialidade mostra-se indiferente à especificidade de cada forma de mediação. Apesar disso, convém alertar para a genealogia imagética desta dicotomia, pois ela não descende exclusivamente das formas discursivas. A pintura clássica está repleta de figurações gestuais, que tendem a mostrar, nesse sentido, uma ligação estreita entre arte e comunicação face-to-face, como se fosse intento do pintor “dar voz” aos corpos icónicos através da linguagem gestual por eles exibida. A figuração sugere a elocução – tal poderia ser a premissa. Mas o valor desta elocução visual não reside meramente no seu significado sugestivo, no seu “als ob”. Ela tem um valor psicológico que trespassa a perceção da obra por parte do espectador, conferindo à própria perceção uma indexicalidade gestual imediata – ou seja, um gesto (e-moção) que causa outro gesto (emoção). Uma radicalização desta conceção gestual da expressão foi efetuada, de modo assaz claro, por Wassily Kandinsky. Crê o pintor que, através de uma enigmática «vibração» (Kandinsky,1963: 63) animada pelos sentimentos, a vida emocional do artista consegue penetrar diretamente na vida emocional do espectador, gerando-se, assim, uma simetrização empática das duas esferas psíquicas. O lugar da obra de arte representaria, segundo o esquema traçado por Kandinsky («emoção – sentimento – obra – sentimento – emoção») (Kandinsky, 1963: 63), um ponto de intercessão entre ambas as esferas, mais exatamente o ponto que tornaria exequível a conversão imaculada dos sentimentos do artista nos do espectador. Esta ideia, que se pode aplicar a muitas das teorias estéticas sobre a arte, vê, na relação entre expressão (criador) e receção (espectador), uma ligação puramente causal. Cabe ao criador ter o engenho de exercer sobre o espectador a violência necessária, para que este se renda à evidência do génio e da obra. A obra deixa, Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 69 assim, de existir para o espectador, pois, em rigor, não há um espaço de participação aberto; o espaço é previamente ocupado pela intenção do autor, que é a única via de acesso à obra. Em suma, a visão do espectador não se deixa diferenciar da visão do criador, gerando-se, dessa forma, a ilusão sugestiva de uma comunicação entre as duas esferas psíquicas. Com efeito, a dicotomia intencionalidade-inferencialidade não serve o conceito de expressividade – apenas serve o conceito de expressão assente na referencialidade gestual. Quando passamos para o domínio estético-artístico, é-nos difícil conservar a distinção proposta por Arthur Clutton-Brock entre «works of art» e «works of utility», se o âmago da distinção, como é o caso, estiver ancorado na atividade intencional do artista e na passividade inferencial do espectador. Não estaríamos a falar propriamente de obra de arte, mas antes de um mero artefacto “utilitário” cuja receção seria garantida por uma lógica típica da aliciação publicitária, se o papel do espectador estivesse subordinado à descodificação de uma mensagem emotiva e o valor estético da obra dependesse do sucesso dessa mesma descodificação. Interpretada a partir das suas propriedades sensíveis – sejam estas configuradas em composições figurativas ou não- figurativas –, a obra de arte não se deixa categorizar e dividir segundo índices cognitivos e índices emotivos. Tanto os juízos estéticos que guarnecem a apreensão intelectual da obra quanto as respostas afetivas que por ela são estimuladas não podem ser dissociados de uma experiência que começa por ser construída através de uma presença que se dá à significação dentro do contexto da sua própria aparição. É este contexto de aparição que inibe, por assim dizer, uma mera relação inferencial com aquilo que tece a expressividade da obra, bem como todas aquelas respostas e reações que fazem parte da nossa vida quotidiana. 3.2. Diferenciação e expressividade Da mesma maneira que não devemos ver no conceito de expressão um antónimo para o conceito de comunicação, também não será legítimo fazer o mesmo relativamente à natureza do vínculo dos conceitos de expressão e expressividade. A expressividade não é uma simples casualidade da expressão. Ela é, pelo contrário, uma forma de consciência elevada do amplo espectro da expressão. Não se trata aqui, porém, de pensar processos expressivos sem a implicação da sua constituição afetiva. Todavia, o Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 70 facto de a teorização das formas imagéticas estar intimamente ligada ao conceito de representação, parece dificultar ainda mais essa tarefa, pois a bipolaridade inerente ao conceito de representação tende a ser transferida para o domínio dos processos expressivos imagéticos. Ainda que colocada de forma sumária, a importância desta questão reflete-se no alcance teórico do próprio conceito de expressividade, contribuindo, de igual modo, para o apuramento da individualização estética dos processos expressivos dentro da esfera artística. Assim, com o conceito de expressividade pretendemos assinalar e caracterizar a transformação simbólica da expressão, nomeadamente a sua inclusão nos processos semiósicos. É também neste aspeto que a intencionalidade – entendida como magna categoria dos atos de expressão – perde o seu primado analítico, já que o factum da mediação simbólica não se deixa reduzir a uma pura consciência intencional. Ou como se pode ler nas duas primeiras quadras do poema Autopsicografia, de Fernando Pessoa: O poeta é um fingidor. Finge tão completamente Que chega a fingir que é dor A dor que deveras sente. E os que leem o que escreve, Na dor lida sentem bem, Não as duas que ele teve, Mas só a que eles não têm. Este “desencontro” entre a esfera psíquica do escritor e a do leitor indica a autonomização do texto a partir da sua textura poética. E é nisso que a própria experiência estético-artística se evidencia. Esta mostra-nos que o caráter processual atribuído à expressão não pode ser desvinculado da articulação das formas sensíveis que tecem a superfície do médium envolvido na obra de arte. Por conseguinte, quando falamos de expressividade artística, referimo- nos ao fenómeno da expressão que abarca, impreterivelmente, esse vínculo às dimensões sensíveis do médium. Sendo, nesse sentido, um processo ligado à perceção – a dimensão da aisthesis no estético –, a expressividade apresenta um caráter aberto, capaz de guarnecer as animações vivenciais e sociais que se geram em torno da obra. Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 71 Que se deva à autonomização sistémica da arte a introdução desta diferença entre expressão e expressividade, parece ser um facto muitas vezes ignorado. Muitos autores que se debatem com a questão da expressão na arte tendem a partir de um pressuposto analógico: na arte, tal como na vida quotidiana, o espectador tem acesso a determinadas emoções que são expressas pelos objetos estéticos; a tristeza de um rosto, por exemplo, pode ter um equivalente artístico. Aquilo que releva destas teorias é a aparente não distinção entre expressão e expressividade. Com isto não quero dizer que há expressão sem expressividade. O caráter processual da expressividade estético-artística não se distingue do caráter processual da expressão em sentido lato apenas pelo grau de intencionalidade que manifesta em relação ao grau de espontaneidade deste último. A inferência de uma emoção através de um movimento facial não requer que este tenha uma dimensão expressiva acentuada. Alguém pode expressar os seus sentimentos sem que a superfície de inscrição – o corpo, neste caso – acuse esse processo de forma explícita. É óbvio que, nestas situações da vida quotidiana, o acoplamento simultâneo de expressão e expressividade pode proporcionar uma inferencialidade mais completa da esfera psíquica do outro, tornando-se estreita a relação entre os sentimentos expressos e os estados afetivos correspondentes (isto nem sempre implica, claro está, uma verdadeira transparência entre o que é expresso e o que é expressivo, pois este último pode ser uma mera simulação do primeiro)5. Tratando-se de uma forma de perceção – e não propriamente de uma substância que possa ser imputada unicamente a determinados objetos –, a expressividade possui, ao nível da perceção, uma função de seleção face às informações sensoriais que acompanham a apreensão da obra de arte. Na observação de uma pintura, por exemplo, certas propriedades pictóricas do médium são destacadas e, por via disso, sujeitas ao espectro significante da obra6. Sendo um resultado da seleção, aquilo que é visto requer o que não é visto. Por isso, como sucede normalmente, a identificação de certas propriedades sensíveis do médium como sendo particularmente expressivas é uma predicação que não atende ao processo de seleção, mas antes aos seus efeitos, pois é o processo que é expressivo. Tal predicação iguala, neste âmbito, as inferências que podem ser feitas da representação de uma emoção inerente a uma figura icónica. Se o semblante Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 72 enigmático da Mona Lisa, de Leonardo da Vinci, coloca o espectador perante a incerteza do estado psicológico representado, isso nada revela da expressividade que envolve a apreensão estética da obra. Não se trata, como muitas vezes é defendido, de reenviar as qualidades expressivas para as configurações imagéticas não-figurativas e as qualidades emotivas para as configurações imagéticas figurativas. A obra não é mais expressiva se representar, de forma explícita, uma emoção particular. A agitação sentimental desencadeada por uma configuração pictórica, como naqueles casos em que o espectador se compadece com a figuração de um rosto triste – ou, tratando-se de imagens cinemáticas, de uma cena dramática repleta de sequências fílmicas violentas –, torna-se possível graças a um empobrecimento do caráter expressivo da própria imagem. Ainda repercutindo esta ideia, a distinção entre géneros dramáticos, entre trágico e cómico, é, em si, uma classificação equívoca, que não nos deve levar a confundi-la nem com o ato de execução nem com a experiência estética confinada à receção da obra. E é aqui, claro está, que convém distinguir “expressividade” de “sentimentalidade”. Há, no entanto, um sintoma generalizado na direção que a reflexão sobre a expressividade tem atingindo. Na verdade, o que nos mostram muitos dos estudos teóricos são várias perspetivas sobre a relação entre expressão e emoção, não se atendendo, porém, à especificidade e autonomia de cada forma artística. Ou seja, as formas artísticas servem, em muitos desses estudos, apenas como exemplos sugestivos do fenómeno da expressão em sentido lato e a expressividade, entendida segundo a conceção que temos vindo a expor, não é considerada. 4. Da afirmação do médium face a representação A arte moderna, reinventando a herança romântica, procedeu a uma autêntica reabilitação da esfera psíquica do artista. Entre a tradição impressionista e os novos movimentos expressionistas, há uma declaração da supremacia da individualidade do ato criativo sobre os motivos icónicos da imagem. Mas poderia ser cumprido o desafio – lançado, por exemplo, por Jackson Pollock – de uma total subjetivação da pintura moderna, quando não há na imagem qualquer instância sígnica que lhe dê uma autorreferencialidade psíquica, quando a vida subjetiva do artista pressupõe sempre a mediação da superfície de inscrição, e esta, ao contrário do corpo humano, não se manifesta como Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 73 “sintoma”? É evidente que a “subjetivação” defendida por Pollock está longe de uma conceção sintomática da imagem; ela refere-se, acima de tudo, a uma regeneração do pictórico através da reinvenção do próprio ato de criação. A arte de Pollock é, neste aspeto, exemplificativa de uma nova consciência estética sobre os processos de criação artísticos. Se quisermos contrapô-la à ideia, baseada na linguagem gestual, de uma transparência emocional do figurativo, poderemos ver nela uma emancipação do “gesto configurador” relativamente ao “gesto figurado”, que já não mais serve o tradicional esquematismo psicológico estímulo-reação, mas antes a afirmação da individualidade sensível da imagem. Por via disso, incluída a relevância da materialidade do médium, cumpre remeter a expressividade para o espectro sensível da mediação. No que às formas imagéticas estético-artísticas diz respeito, trata-se, em rigor, de salientar a Erscheinung da imagem face às suas modalidades de significação, pois a expressividade contende uma relação direta – porque sensível – com o médium artístico7. Assinalada a íntima relação entre expressividade e superfície de inscrição, poder-se-á mesmo dizer que o expressivo pressupõe o imersivo. Dado que a expressividade artística é indissociável das configurações sensíveis do médium, o imersivo não é, neste domínio específico, atribuível apenas às formas musicais ou ao cyberspace dos sistemas computacionais. (Convém aqui acautelar a diferença entre propriedades imersivas e experiências imersivas.) A perceção de uma presença individualizada – a obra de arte, neste caso – passa sempre pela resistência ao seu caráter mediador, pela aparente suspensão da sua função de médium. Que a imersão contenda um eclipse da superfície de inscrição, isso não significa, porém, um total desaparecimento da superfície e, consequentemente, uma total ilusão sensorial entre representante e representado. Se quisermos ser precisos, as propriedades imersivas contribuem para o processo de incorporação do caráter sensível da obra na perceção do espectador. E a arte pictural pós-figurativa mostra-nos como uma apropriação desse processo pode ser conduzida. Telas como as da série Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, de Barnett Newman, revelam-nos bem a consciência artística para a utilização e a potenciação das propriedades imersivas das formas imagéticas. Ultrapassar o hiatus entre signo e sensibilidade, requer, nessa exata medida, uma leitura da expressividade que reconduza o signo ao sinal, a significação ao processamento da informação Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 74 sensível contida no médium e no seu espaço de aparição, evitando- se, com isso, a leitura monológica da expressão assente na dinâmica “emissor-recetor”. Ainda que implicada nos domínios da perceção sensível, convém alertar para a importância do fenómeno da corporalidade na definição do conceito de expressividade. Os processos expressivos são vivências centradas no corpo. Esta ideia, contudo, não deve ser interpretada segundo uma lógica de adequação entre processos expressivos e estados psicológicos, como acontece, por exemplo, na filosofia da expressão de Benedetto Croce e R. G. Collingwood. Tanto um como outro entendem os processos expressivos como processos de regulação dos conteúdos emocionais que acompanham as atividades psíquico-físicas do ser humano. Linguagem e arte seriam, como ambos defendem, apenas formas de conversão intuitivas, que permitiriam, essencialmente, transformar tais atividades em estados de consciência não contingentes, isto é, estados (transparentes) de objetivação e particularização de sentimentos (Croce, 2005; Collingwood, 1958). A relevância da esfera sensível das formas de articulação – como o caráter material dos símbolos linguísticos e artísticos – para o fenómeno da expressividade impede-nos, deste modo, de seguir uma interpretação puramente intuicionista do fenómeno da expressão. O papel da perceção nos processos expressivos implica, por conseguinte, que estes não podem ser ponderados sem as suas superfícies de inscrição. A expressão, ao contrário da representação, não se deixa abstrair do seu médium material. Podemos dizer que o conceito de expressividade não abarca apenas o “ato de expressar algo”, mas já também o “ato de percecionar algo”. Ao contrário do de expressividade, o conceito de expressão esteve quase sempre confinado ao mundo do artista. Como se pode deduzir da definição proposta por Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a expressão musical abarca duplamente a “composição” e a “execução” da obra (Rousseau, 1775: 333). Embora Rousseau destaque a função das dimensões sensíveis dos meios artísticos para o “refinamento” e o efeito da expressão, o primado desta recai sempre sobre a «energia» que o criador confere aos seus «sentimentos» (Rousseau, 1775: 334). Nesta aceção, as emoções do espectador são meros produtos da expressão originária do criador. Todavia, tal como acabou por evoluir na análise teórica do fenómeno musical, o conceito de expressividade vai superar o Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 75 mimetismo gestual das conceções tradicionais sobre a expressão, bem como a inércia cognitiva que daí decorria. O reconhecimento do caráter expressivo da perceção passou pela identificação da perceção fisiogmómica, que, como nos mostram as reflexões de Heinz Werner (Werner, 1932: 1-9), Ernst Cassirer (Cassirer, 1994: 51-121)8 e Ernst Gombrich (Gombrich, 1973: 79-93), tende a atualizar e individualizar, de forma holística, a nossa experiência imediata das informações sensíveis. (De facto, podemos falar aqui de um conhecimento ainda não sujeito a diferenciações categóricas, marcado essencialmente por uma articulação concreta, não integralmente abstratizante, dos fenómenos apreendidos.) O papel ativo da observação é reforçado. E deste reconhecimento redunda, igualmente, a descoberta das potencialidades expressivas daquilo que era visto apenas como meio da figuração, ou seja, estão criadas as condições estéticas para que cor e linha se mostrem na sua afirmação individual; afirmação essa que incentiva a imaginação do observador a novas formas de apreensão do objeto artístico. 5. Expressividade e individualidade Num artigo para o The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Robert Stecker traça algumas reflexões sobre a dinâmica artística da expressão das emoções. A relevância do texto de Stecker não se encontra, porém, na singularidade do conteúdo das suas reflexões, mas antes na conclusão que destas retira. Depois de ter fundamentado, por exemplo, a ideia de que a representação icónica de um “rosto triste” não conduz necessariamente à observação da imagem como uma “imagem triste”, e de que, no que há arte diz respeito, o fenómeno da expressão deve ser individualizado a partir de cada esfera artística, Stecker termina o seu texto com a confissão seguinte: «I will conclude with one reservation about my own approach and one qualification of my main thesis. The reservation concerns the fact that I have confined the discussion to the expression of emotion. This was the result of my strategy of trying to understand expression of emotion in the arts by first understanding what emotions are. One unfortunate consequence of this is that it leaves out of account entirely the many other things that are expressible in the arts. This raises the possibility that I failed to find a unified theory because my approach was too narrow. We looked for a theory of artistic expression of emotion while we should have looked for a theory of artistic expression. I am inclined to think that if we broaden Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 76 our inquiry to include other things that art can express, the diversity of expressive phenomena will simply appear greater. But I have done and will do nothing to show this, and I do not consider the question closed» (Stecker, 1984: 417). O que este excerto nos deve levar a ter em conta é a asserção de que o conceito de “expressividade” não pode ser pensado sem o conceito de “individualidade” da obra de arte. A transformação, já por nós referida, da expressão em articulação expressiva contende, simultaneamente, uma consciência do caráter individual da obra, que, longe de ser percetível apenas nas configurações estético-artísticas, vai contribuir, de igual forma, para a construção da individualidade da esfera psíquica do espectador. O contributo da expressividade para a individualidade da obra de arte advém de vários fatores, que podem ser depreendidos da sua própria constituição simbólica; e esta constituição deixa-se vislumbrar em contraste com a constituição simbólica da representação. Aquilo que muitas vezes é tido, dentro dos processos semiósicos, como insuficiência simbólica da expressão – dada a articulação entre expressans e expressandum ser comparada à relação representans e representandum e, por via disso, não apresentar o mesmo grau de diferenciação relacional –, é, pelo contrário, uma condição fundamental para a integridade individual da obra artística. Como nos diz Dewey, um statement é uma enunciação que pode ser aplicado a vários objetos do pensamento, tendo, por isso, um caráter geral. Já o sentido dado por um objeto expressivo ostenta um caráter individual (Dewey, 1980: 90). Em poucas palavras: a opacidade semiósica da expressividade permite reforçar a individualidade do médium. Henri Matisse, ao contrário de Kandinsky, alerta-nos já para o facto de que a expressão pictórica não pode ser meramente deduzida de uma associação exclusiva entre figuração e fisionomia do objeto figurado. Segundo o artista, a expressão «est dans toute la disposition de mon tableau: la place qu’occupent les corps, les vides qui sont autour d’eux, les proportions, tout cela y a sa part» (Matisse, 2005: 42). Havendo uma relação de acoplamento entre composição e expressão pictóricas, a própria materialidade da superfície de inscrição vai condicionar, ainda de acordo com Matisse, o ato de pintar e o seu valor estético-artístico (Matisse, 2005: 43). Facto este que não é tido em conta, por exemplo, pelas teorias estéticas emotivistas, que relegam para um nível inferior a configuração Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 77 sensível dos objetos pictóricos: «The important thing about a picture (…) is not how it is painted, but whether it provokes aesthetic emotion», assim se pode ler na obra Art, de Clive Bell (Bell, 1949: 45). E o autor vai mais longe: «Even to copy a picture one needs, not to see as a trained observer, but to feel as an artist. To make the spectator feel, it seems that the creator must feel too» (Bell, 1949: 61). 6. Individualidade e construção discursiva 6.1. A questão ecfrástica O que implica falar de uma imagem? Ou, ainda melhor: como pode um médium descrever as vivências dadas por outro médium? Por vezes, a impossibilidade de uma obra de arte ser definida a partir de um único conteúdo psíquico leva-nos a encontrar na expressividade a sua propriedade idiossincrática. O termo “expressivo” remete-nos não apenas para a singularidade das formas imagéticas artísticas, mas também – já que é um termo – para aquilo que podem ser os limites simbólicos do discurso. E estes limites tendem a ser uma preocupação anunciada pelo próprio criador. Atente-se, por exemplo, à forma lapidar com que o artista dadaísta Kurt Schwitters resume tal preocupação: «Cada linha, cor, forma, tem uma expressão singular. Cada combinação de linhas, cores, formas tem uma expressão singular. A expressão pode ser dada apenas a uma estrutura particular – não pode ser traduzida. A expressão de uma imagem não pode ser vertida em palavras, da mesma maneira que a expressão de uma palavra, tal como, por exemplo, a palavra “e” (und), não pode ser pintada» (Schwitters, 1921: 5). É certo que não há nenhum médium puro, livre de qualquer determinação imposta por outro médium. Mas, com a individualidade expressiva da imagem como obra de arte, coloca-se a questão da elevação das suas qualidades vivenciadas a formas de descrição. Por outro lado, também é certo que, na relação entre perceção e descrição, se desenha uma espécie de índole impositiva desta última, ou, como nos diz Michael Baxandall, «an extended description of a painting is committed by the structure of language to be a progressive violation of the pattern of perceiving a painting» (Baxandall, 1979: 460). Torna-se evidente que os argumentos das teorias da arte emotivistas desembocam quase sempre na tese da Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 78 incomensurabilidade entre descrição e expressão, mais precisamente entre linguagem e emoções. A este respeito diz-nos Robin George Collingwood que a descrição tende para uma “generalização” cuja natureza inviabiliza o caráter único da expressão. Se a expressão transporta uma “individualização”, como defende o autor, é porque através dela se particulariza uma emoção específica (Collingwood, 1958: 112). Collingwood transfere o domínio das emoções primárias para o domínio das emoções artísticas, deixando assim de haver qualquer diferença entre ambos. No entanto, a linguagem da descrição não se refere aqui à perceção do rosto do nosso interlocutor, mas antes à perceção que temos da obra. Algumas diferenças são óbvias: a primeira perceção é acompanhada pela perceção do nosso interlocutor – isto é, trata-se de uma alter-perceção –, enquanto a segunda perceção está centrada em si mesma; a primeira favorece a identificação, podendo conduzir a uma empatia emocional gerada pela tristeza ou alegria do nosso interlocutor; a segunda potencia a imaginação, já que a obra de arte dá-se à observação do espectador na condição de objeto para a perceção. Os “objetos para a perceção” distinguem-se dos “objetos da perceção”, na medida em que, ao não pressuporem uma alter-perceção e requererem um campo de observação individualizado, apelam a uma articulação propriamente estética, que tanto pode ser suscitada pela produção artística como, por exemplo, pelas indústrias do design, do entretenimento e da publicidade9. Formulemos, agora, o conteúdo semântico da questão ecfrástica. Por “questão ecfrástica” entendo o momento específico em que um conteúdo sensível pictórico é sujeito à articulação das estruturas discursivas da linguagem. Há, neste sentido, uma transformação – ecfrástica – que vai permitir o desabrochar da descrição. Trazer à expressão discursiva um conteúdo sensível não- linguístico é uma operação clássica da Ekphrasis. Num primeiro sentido, e no que se refere ao domínio da imagem, pode-se vislumbrar nas descrições ecfrásticas uma resposta à necessidade de colmatar as discrepâncias cognitivas entre dois médiuns distintos, entre formas imagéticas e formas discursivas. Opor a Ekphrasis à interpretação, tal como sugere David Carrier, impede- nos de ver a complementaridade que se gera entre ambas. A distinção operada por Carrier é bastante rígida, porque obedece, como ele próprio salienta, a uma separação traçada por dois «termos técnicos contrastantes» (Carrier, 1987: 20); separação essa Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 79 que parece ainda radicar nas dicotomias tradicionais da linguística. O primado do caráter proposicional da linguagem sobre os processos de perceção implicados nos atos discursivos tende a impedir a inclusão ativa dos processos expressivos na articulação de sentidos mediados linguisticamente. Embora os trabalhos de Karl Bühler, ou de Roman Jakobson, tenham acentuado a função expressiva (Ausdrucksfunktion) da linguagem, o primado saussuriano da langue sobre a parole acabou por redundar numa conceção semiótica dos signos linguísticos que interpreta as dimensões sensíveis destes últimos como não constituintes das lógicas do discurso. E essa parece ser uma das razões para o desencontro entre linguagem e perceção. Uma tendência, por outro lado, que se tem manifestado na leitura da função expressiva apenas a partir do conteúdo informativo de certas enunciações discursivas – formas de agradecimento, alusão a estados psicológicos individuais, descrição de eventos emotivos, etc. Assim como não há conteúdos discursivos puramente proposicionais, desprendidos de vínculos expressivos – sejam eles, por exemplo, os das ciências apoiadas na lógica dedutiva –, também não há descrições exegéticas de um objeto de arte desprovidas de qualquer dimensão ecfrástica. Como Carrier refere, a ekphrasis pode ser definida como uma «verbal recreation of a painting» (Carrirer, 1987: 20). Porém, compete perguntar, o que seria da interpretação (visão categorial) se não houvesse tal recriação (visão atmosférica), se os traços sensíveis e expressivos da imagem não fossem, de algum modo, transformados em discurso? É óbvio que a visão atmosférica tendeu a ser remetida para segundo plano. A preocupação de uma articulação transparente entre visualização e verbalização – típica dos críticos de arte de setecentos – leva, por exemplo, Denis Diderot à formulação seguinte: «Dans la description d'un tableau, j'indique d'abord le sujet; je passe au principal personnage, de la aux personnages subordonnes dans le meme groupe; aux groupes lies avec le premier, me laissant conduire par leur enchainement; aux expressions, aux carateres, aux draperies, au colors, a la distribution des ombres et des lumieres, aux accessoires, enfin a l'impression de l'ensemble. Si je suis un autre ordre, c'est que ma description est mal faite, ou le tableau mal ordonné» (Diderot, 1818: 545). Uma vez que Diderot, atendendo ao primado da configuração semântica do objeto da imagem (o referente pictórico), Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 80 intenta subordinar, de forma hierárquica, as linhas imagéticas às linhas gramaticais do discurso, a impression de l’emsemble ocupa dentro da descrição uma posição inferior. A construção de uma linguagem que obedeça a uma referencialidade individual, isto é, que consiga recriar a atmosfera singular da obra de arte, mesmo quando se refere ao seu enquadramento dentro de um universo de obras (estilo), evidencia, simultaneamente, uma autorregeneração do discurso e das suas estruturas referenciais. Ao contrário da referencialidade universal, requer a referencialidade individual uma maior participação da perceção nas simbolizações discursivas; o mesmo é dizer: a consciência que acompanha a perceção sobrepõe-se, por assim dizer, ao caráter mais abstrato dos conceitos, das generalizações, do discurso. 6.2. A resposta metafórica Tomando como princípio basilar a ideia de que não há uma tradução literal de um conteúdo pictórico artístico para um conteúdo discursivo, a questão ecfrástica conduz-nos, aqui, para a natureza da resposta que pode ser dada pela linguagem. Os atributos expressivos através dos quais a linguagem se refere à obra de arte – muitos deles alusivos a estados afetivos – mostram-nos a impossibilidade da comunicação ter acesso direto às informações articuladas pela perceção. Como se pode depreender da teoria de Niklas Luhmann, tal impossibilidade caracteriza a arte como sistema social, sendo, por sua vez, a distinção sistémica entre consciência e comunicação incorporada já no próprio objeto artístico (Luhmann, 1995: 13-91)10. Quando a palavra se dirige à obra de arte pictórica, há, porventura, um certo “mutismo” que se quebra e cuja natureza, se quisermos utilizar a linguagem derridaniana, transporta uma imensa «virtualidade discursiva» (Derrida, 1994: 13). Mas aquilo que se dá à palavra nem sempre se deixa submeter a uma categorização proposicional. O expressivo, neste caso, também assinala as linhas de separação e as linhas de intercessão simbólicas de duas formas de mediação distintas. Podemos interrogar-nos sobre as razões que nos levam a utilizar atributos emotivos e predicados antropomórficos para descrever as nossas experiências imagéticas, por que é que nos referimos a determinadas obras através de uma adjetivação que, normalmente, utilizamos para categorizar o caráter ou o estado psíquico de um ser humano. Há, contudo, uma enorme distância Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 81 entre essas descrições apoiadas em atributos emotivos e aquilo que as pode ligar diretamente a estados psíquicos afetivos. Uma coisa não implica a outra. Se se seguir o pressuposto de uma “referencialidade implícita”, é natural que se compreenda uma relação causal entre o teor emotivo das descrições e os seus possíveis correlatos psíquicos. Nada nos leva a crer, porém, que as descrições de uma obra de arte desfrutem da mesma natureza referencial das da expressão facial dos nossos interlocutores. Os atributos emotivos não se prestam apenas à identificação de estados afetivos; eles prestam-se, igualmente, à construção e articulação de enunciados metafóricos, como se verifica, de forma clara, na linguagem poética. Na comunicação sobre arte, o emprego de atributos emotivos mostra-nos, nesse sentido, a “natureza referencial metafórica” desses mesmos atributos. No vasto campo das experiências extraimagéticas, as insuficiências linguísticas observáveis, por exemplo, na comunicação e interpretação de estados afetivos e vivências marcadas por emoções intensas propiciam já certas respostas metafóricas que lhes visam dar expressão. O uso de articulações metafóricas não tende somente a colmatar as insuficiências discursivas na transmissão de experiências afetivas, como também condiciona a própria natureza dos estados psicológicos nelas envolvidos. Ao nível das experiências imagéticas, idênticas insuficiências podem ser sentidas com o despontar do abstracionismo na arte. Autores como Richard Wollheim creem que a importância da metáfora nos estudos sobre as artes visuais tem que ver, em parte, com o «declínio da figuração» (Wollheim, 1993: 113) surgindo a metáfora como uma tentativa de dar resposta aos novos processos de significação artísticos. No entanto, Wollheim refere-se à metáfora nas artes visuais fazendo uso da distinção entre “metáforas verbais” e “metáforas visuais”. A aplicação do metafórico ao pictórico seria, segundo o autor de Painting as Art, uma importação meramente linguística. Ultrapassados os limites denotativos da figuração, uma pintura de uma flama, por exemplo, poderia ter um significado metafórico idêntico ao do célebre verso camoniano “amor é fogo que arde sem se ver”. O mesmo se verifica no caso de uma ambivalência figurativa denotacional, de uma total transgressão do convencionalismo figurativo, como nos sugerem as representações imagéticas que, ancoradas em uma iconicidade oximórica, agrupam elementos incompatíveis entre si. Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 82 Quando nos referimos à metáfora, não estamos a partir desta distinção utilizada por Wollheim. A metáfora, operando uma espécie de regresso às formas de simbolização primárias, parece possibilitar essa relação – de descrição – entre médiuns distintos11. Uma das formas de intercomplementaridade entre linguagem, perceção e expressividade pode ser encontrada nas articulações metafóricas. Poder-se-á falar aqui de um reencontro expressivo, isto é, a possibilidade de a nossa experiência sensorial ser mediada metaforicamente potencia uma articulação sui generis entre linguagem e perceção. A metáfora, como possibilidade de enunciação, ganha na criação de configurações estéticas e na sua apreciação um estatuto verdadeiramente estruturante. Articular e percecionar algo esteticamente significa, neste aspeto, reinventar as relações entre experiência e imaginação. Uma possibilidade que, segundo Susanne Langer, está já presente na natureza peculiar das formas metafóricas, mais concretamente na sua capacidade de suprimir os limites conceptuais inerentes às construções das formas discursivas convencionais (Langer, 1957: 23-24). Ao incrementarem o fluxo das informações sensoriais – porque inviabilizam, por assim dizer, uma censura total imposta pelo caráter e os níveis de abstração –, as enunciações metafóricas contribuem, igualmente, para a efetivação da virtualidade significativa da obra de arte. Por outro lado, as vivências resultantes da impossibilidade de se reduzir integralmente os eventos da experiência às estruturas das descrições tendem a aumentar o espectro afetivo desses mesmos eventos. Que esse incremento de afeção contribua, em parte, como motor de seleção, diferenciação e retenção dos eventos que fazem parte do nosso universo de experiências, isso só vem reforçar a ideia, já por nós sugerida, de que a expressividade, dada a sua opacidade semiósica, favorece a criação de um campo percetual individualizado. Em suma, a descrição apoiada na metáfora não implica somente uma simples transposição das vivências imagéticas para a articulação discursiva. Ela é, pelo contrário, uma condição necessária para que seja exequível e imaginável a intermutabilidade entre dois médiuns distintos. Daí que a expressividade da descrição não seja um espelho transparente da expressividade da imagem. Aquilo que aqui se afirma é, antes de tudo, a correlação entre duas formas de articulação simbólicas, cujo ponto de contacto radica, precisamente, nas suas fundações expressivas. Segundo Arnold Gehlen, a arte pictórica moderna, principalmente a partir do Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 83 “subjetivismo” introduzido pelo impressionismo, sujeitou-se ao comentário (kommentarbedürftig) (Gehlen, 1965: 59). E os comentários, que tanto atravessam as dimensões «óticas» como as dimensões «retóricas» da obra de arte, são «parte integrante da própria arte moderna» (Gehlen, 1965: 54). Resta acrescentar a esta afirmação de Gehlen que o comentário não serve apenas as novas exigências da arte: o discurso dá-se à sua auto-observação através da recriação de conteúdos estruturados por outras formas de articulação simbólicas, e essa recriação, atravessando toda a história da arte, precede a arte moderna. 7. Conclusão Como se pode depreender do já exposto, as conexões entre expressividade e superfícies de inscrição pictóricas ajudam a trazer à reflexão os processos de transformação do médium “imagem” operados pelas formas artísticas, bem como a sua repercussão na formulação de discursos sobre a arte. A pregnância individuada da expressão através da expressividade não é, contudo, somente um critério estético para a análise da obra de arte. Ela é, também, uma pedra de toque fundamental para a questão da evolução sistémica da arte, pois o caminho percorrido desde a expressão até à expressividade, mostrando uma crescente autonomização da perceção do espectador relativamente ao poder autoral do criador, deixa simultaneamente vislumbrar a condição de diferenciação da arte face aos demais sistemas sociais. Conservar, a nível teórico, o caráter aberto da expressividade representa, neste último aspeto, interpretá-la como um ponto de auscultação crítico das novas formas emergentes que vão arquitetando o universo artístico. Referências/ Bibliografia Baxandall, M. (1979). The Language of Art History. New Literary History, 10, 3 (1979) Anniversary Issue: I, Spring, 453-465. Bell, Ch. (1806). Essays on the anatomy of expression in painting. London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme. Bell, Cl. (1949). Art. London: Chatto & Windus. Braga, J. (2012). Die symbolische Prägnanz des Bildes. Zu einer Kritik des Bildbegriffs nach der Philosophie Ernst Cassirers. Freiburg: Centaurus Verlag. Carrier, D. (1987). Ekphrasis and Interpretation: Two Modes of Art History Writing. British Journal of Aesthetics, 27, 1 (1987) Winter, 20-31. Cassirer, E. (1994). Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Teil 3: Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis, 10. Aufl.. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. http://archive.org/search.php?query=publisher%3A%22London+%3A+Printed+for+Longman%2C+Hurst%2C+Rees%2C+and+Orme%22 Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 84 Clutton-Brock, A. (1907). The Function of Emotion in Painting. The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 12, 55 (1907) Oct., 23-26. Collingwood, R. G. (1958). The Principles of Art. London/New York: Oxford University Press. Croce, B. (2005). Estetica come scienza dell´espressione e linguistica generale. Teoria e storia. A cura di Giuseppe Galasso, Seconda edizione. Milano: Adelphi Edizioni. Derrida, J. (1994). The spatial arts: an interview with Jacques Derrida. In P. Brunette; D. Wills (Eds.), Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, 9-32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dewey, J. (1980). Art as Experience. 23rd Impression. New York: Perigee Books. Diderot, D. (1818). Pensées détachées sur la peinture, la sculpture, l’Architecture et la poésie. In Oeuvres Complètes, IV, 1re. Partie, 529-567. Paris: A. Belin. Duchenne, G. B. (1862). Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine ou analyse électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions. Paris: Jules Renouard. Ekman, P. (1988). Gesichtsausdruck und Gefühl. 20 Jahre Forschung. Paderborn: Junferman. Finn, D. R. (1975). Expression. In Mind, New Series, 84, 334 (1975) 192-209. Gehlen, A. (1965). Zeit-Bilder. Zur Soziologie und Ästhetik der modernen Malerei. 2. Aufl.. Frankfurt a. M./Bonn: Athenäum Verlag. Gombrich, E. (1973). Über physiognomische Wahrnehmung. In Meditationen über ein Steckenpferd. Von den Wurzeln und Grenzen der Kunst, 79-93. Wien: Europaverlag. James, W. (1950). The Principles of Psychology, 442-485. Vol. Two. New York: Dover Publications. Kandinsky, W. (1963). Essays über Kunst und Künstler. Hrsg. und kommentiert von Max Bill, 2. Aufl.. Bern: Benteli-Verlag. Lacombe, J. (1759). Dictionnaire portatif des Beaux-Arts, ou abrégé de ce qui concerne l'architecture, la sculpture, la peinture, la gravure, la poésie et la musique. Nouvelle édition. Paris: Chez Jean-Th. Hérissant [et] les frères Estienne. Langer, S. K. (1957). Expressiveness. In Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures, 13-26. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Luhmann, N. (1995). Die Kunst der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main : Suhrkamp Verlag. Matisse, H. (2005). Écrits et propos sur l’art. Texte, Notes et Index établis par Dominique Fourcade. Paris: Hermann. Mauss, M. (1968). L’expression obligatoire des sentiments. In Essais de sociologie, 81-88. Paris: Minuit. Mead, M. (1975). Review of Darwin and Facial Expression. Journal of Communication, 25 (1975) 209-213. http://archive.org/details/dictionnaireport00laco http://archive.org/details/dictionnaireport00laco http://archive.org/details/dictionnaireport00laco http://archive.org/search.php?query=publisher%3A%22Paris+%3A+Chez+Jean-Th.+H%C3%A9rissant+%5Bet%5D+les+fr%C3%A8res+Estienne%22 http://archive.org/search.php?query=publisher%3A%22Paris+%3A+Chez+Jean-Th.+H%C3%A9rissant+%5Bet%5D+les+fr%C3%A8res+Estienne%22 Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 85 Osborne, H. (1982). Expressiveness in the Arts. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 41, 1 (1982) Autumn, 19-26. Rousseau, J.-J. (1775). Dictionnaire de musique. Tome Premier. Paris: Chez la Veuve Deuchsne. Schwitters, K. (1921). Merz. Der Ararat: Glossen, Skizzen und Notizen zur neuen Kunst, 2, 1 (1921) 3-9. Stecker, R. (1984). Expression of Emotion in (Some of) the Arts. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 42, 4 (1984) Summer, 409-418. Tormey, A. (1971). The Concept of Expression. A study in philosophical psychology and aesthetics. Princeton/New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Werner, H. (1932). Grundfragen der Sprachphysiognomik. Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth. Wollheim, R. (1993). Metaphor and Painting. In F. R. Ankersmit; J. J. A. Mooij (Eds), Knowledge and Language: Metaphor and knowledge, Volume 3, 113-125. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1 Expression and pictorial expressiveness 2 Doutor. Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal). I&D LIF – Linguagem, Interpretação, Filosofia. Email: joaquim.braga@yahoo.com 3 Na linguagem e nas observações quotidianas, há, porventura, uma tendência para qualificarmos certas experiências estético-artísticas através da supressão dos seus elementos estruturantes – como, por exemplo, “a música x não tem ritmo” –, mas isso em nada contradiz o valor fundador desses elementos, apenas por vezes se impõe como única forma de nos referirmos à “intensidade” da própria experiência. 4 Uma ideia, aliás, que parece ter tido repercussão nas célebres experiências de Guillaume Benjamin Duchenne. Duchenne intentou retratar fotograficamente – um processo que o neurologista francês denominou électro-physiologie photographique – o muscle expressif a que corresponde cada emoção ditada pela alma (Duchenne,1862). 5 Sobre este fenómeno da simulação, ao nível das relações sociais, vide, por exemplo, o texto L’expression obligatoire des sentiments, de Marcel Mauss (Mauss, 1968: 81-88). 6 Esta conceção distingue-se da ideia de que o conceito de expressividade indica apenas a conexão entre propriedades sensíveis do médium e certos estados afetivos, tal como se infere, por exemplo, da definição proposta por Harold Osborne: «By "Expressiveness" I shall mean any combination of features in a work of art which has the effect of linking it to states of feeling or emotion» (Osborne,1982: 19). 7 John Dewey reconhece o valor das emoções para o ato de expressão. Contudo, segundo o autor, a obra de arte não contém qualquer emoção específica, como pretendem impor as conceções animistas. As emoções têm para a expressão um sentido operatório, isto é, acompanham a seleção e individuação dos processos estético-artísticos. De acordo com Dewey, as emoções envolvidas no ato de expressão artístico – as “emoções estéticas”, tal como são usualmente designadas – são transformadas, porque estão sujeitas aos processos de inscrição do artista e à natureza material do médium que utiliza. A expressão artística, não sendo um ato instantâneo e absoluto, requer uma duração temporal articulada com a materialidade do médium (Dewey,1980: 65-76). http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3AAnkersmit%2C+Frank+R.%2C&qt=hot_author http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3AMooij%2C+Jan+Johann+Albinn%2C&qt=hot_author http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3AMooij%2C+Jan+Johann+Albinn%2C&qt=hot_author Joaquim Braga Expressão e expressividade pictórica 86 8 Sobre a conceção cassireriana da physiognomische Wahrnehmung, vide Braga, 2012: 113-119. 9 É óbvio que, nas chamadas “artes do palco”, não se verifica uma total suspensão da alter-perceção, uma vez que a interação sensorial entre artista e espectador é difícil de anular. Poder-se-á ver nisso, no facto destes objetos artísticos serem penetrados por uma perceção recíproca, um fundamento para a importância que a dimensão estética do “campo de observação individualizado” assume em cada arte do palco. Seja na arte teatral, seja na arte coreográfica, há uma distinção material entre artista e espectador, imposta pelo palco, da mesma maneira que, em certas configurações imagéticas, a moldura impõe uma diferenciação física do espaço da superfície pictórica face ao espaço circundante. 10 Aqui, convém salvaguardar a especificidade do conceito luhmanniano de “comunicação”, que, referido ao sistema social da arte, se distingue da «comunicação sobre arte» (Kommunikation über Kunst). A «comunicação através da arte» (Kommunikation durch Kunst) pode, de uma maneira geral, ser entendida como uma forma distinta de articular a relação entre perceção e comunicação, sendo o resultado desta relação aquilo que é comunicado através da arte. Trata-se de uma tentativa, ainda que vã, de elevar a comunicação ao estatuto de perceção. Como a comunicação não perceciona, nem a perceção comunica – tal é a fórmula luhmanniana –, o conteúdo daquilo que é comunicado através da arte revela a encenação de um als ob, isto é, “como se” entre perceção e comunicação houvesse uma fusão (Luhmann, 1995: 36-42). 11 Da vasta literatura dedicada ao estudo da metáfora redunda quase sempre a ideia de que as construções metafóricas são essencialmente marcadas por uma função substitutiva. Aqui não se aplica a conceção substituicionista da metáfora, uma vez que não se trata de descrever, de forma ornamental, uma entidade através de uma outra, nem tão-pouco de utilizar recursos estilísticos para traduzir um conteúdo significativo pré-existente à articulação metafórica. Antes se trata de, através da articulação metafórica do discurso, ser gerado um universo de comunicação que vai de encontro ao próprio valor individual da obra de arte e que se mostra capaz de construir referências para a sua perceção. Ao contrário da conceção substituicionista, que reduz as informações do termo-substituto ao significado intencional do termo- substituído, as descrições ecfrásticas da arte tendem a dar relevo às informações expressivas inscritas pela metáfora; e essa inscrição só é também possível graças à atmosfera sensível que é criada através dos signos do discurso. O que nos leva a dizer: a configuração criativa do discurso impõe-se sobre a sua pregnância semântica. work_dmclryopmbc2ljdtxp7haskoty ---- wp-p1m-38.ebi.ac.uk Params is empty 404 sys_1000 exception wp-p1m-38.ebi.ac.uk no 220034919 Params is empty 220034919 exception Params is empty 2021/04/06-02:46:21 if (typeof jQuery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/1.14.8/js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,String.fromCharCode(60)).replace(/\]/g,String.fromCharCode(62))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} Page not available Reason: The web page address (URL) that you used may be incorrect. Message ID: 220034919 (wp-p1m-38.ebi.ac.uk) Time: 2021/04/06 02:46:20 If you need further help, please send an email to PMC. Include the information from the box above in your message. 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Find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/ work_65vugdayivdkdd5irruqvmspfm ---- i Plenitudes of Painting: Wilhelm Worringer and the Relationship between Abstraction and Representation in European Painting at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Art History and Theory at the University of Canterbury by Cristina Silaghi University of Canterbury 2012 ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ................................................................................................ vi Abstract ................................................................................................................. ix Key words.............................................................................................................. ix Preface .................................................................................................................... x Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1 Part 1: Outer pictures, inner contours ............................................................ 10 Wilhelm Worringer: sketch for a portrait ..................................................... 10 About Worringer: W. Eugène Kleinbauer, Hilton Kramer, Debbie Lewer ....................................................................... 14 Worringer, T. E. Hulme and Herbert Read .................................................. 17 Recent opinions, 1960-2008 .......................................................................... 23 Gazing in the mirror of history: Worringer’s forewords to Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic ........................................... 37 1908: first foreword to Abstraction and Empathy ....................................... 38 1910: Abstraction and Empathy, third foreword ......................................... 41 1918 and 1919: Form in Gothic forewords .................................................. 42 1948: Abstraction and Empathy republished ............................................... 44 1957: a new edition of Form in Gothic ........................................................ 47 Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory ................. 49 Immanuel Kant and Theodor Lipps: creativity, aesthetics and experience ............................................................. 51 Empathy: Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Robert Vischer ......................... 54 Heinrich Wölfflin: embodiment and expression .......................................... 57 Objects, feelings, and aspects of empathy .................................................... 59 Worringer: subjectivity and objectivity ........................................................ 62 Empathy, abstraction and representation in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy ....................................................... 65 Empathy and abstraction: Lipps and Worringer .......................................... 65 From aesthetics to art-making: naturalism and style ................................... 75 W. J. T. Mitchell and Juliet Koss about empathy ........................................ 77 Abstraction and representation: Clement Greenberg, Frances Colpitt ....... 81 Representation and abstraction in art-making: Worringer’s perspective .................................................................................... 86 Adolf Hildebrand: nature, form, imitation iii and artistic self-sufficiency ............................................................................ 87 Imitation, naturalism, empathy and abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy .......................................................................... 90 Ferdinand Hodler: exactness and expressiveness, emotion and parallelism ................................................................................. 92 Distinctions and transitions: Alois Riegl on the art of antiquity ............................................................... 103 Abstraction: representational inflections .................................................... 106 Worringer and Classicism ........................................................................... 109 Part 2: Predecessors, critics, supporters ....................................................... 111 ‘Common to all’: form for Kant and Worringer ........................................ 111 Form, beauty, charm and emotion .............................................................. 113 Senses and form ............................................................................................ 113 Wölfflin and Worringer: beauty, form, matter and will ............................ 115 Regularity and uniformity............................................................................ 117 A matter of will: Schopenhauer and Worringer on life and art ............... 122 Distancing, urges, and will .......................................................................... 123 Riegl and artistic will ....................................................................................... 127 Will, perception, inner drive, and art-making ............................................ 128 Abstraction, representation, opposition: Worringer and Rudolf Arnheim .................................................................... 132 Withdrawal, productive thinking, and abstraction ..................................... 133 Re-examining Abstraction and Empathy.................................................... 134 The relationship between abstraction and representation: highlights from Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, and Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1984) ........ 140 Classical ornament and Gothic line ............................................................ 141 Non-organic dynamism in Gothic art ......................................................... 144 Painting, representation and abstraction according to Deleuze ................ 146 Part 3: Around Expressionism ....................................................................... 149 The words of Worringer: ‘Expressionism’ at the beginning of the twentieth century ..................................................... 149 ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911): Worringer’s early response to Expressionism ............................................. 158 Worringer’s impact: Expressionism (1914) by Paul Fechter, iv and Expressionism (1916) by Hermann Bahr .............................................. 185 Current Questions on Art (1921): Worringer revisits Expressionism ................................................................. 196 Questioning Worringer: critical discussions on the writings of Worringer and his association with the Expressionism movement ......... 199 Georg Lukács and the decline of Expressionism ....................................... 200 Richard Sheppard, and Lukács’ debt to Worringer ................................... 204 Joseph Frank’s Worringer: expressiveness, emotion and the passage of time ................................................................. 205 William Spanos: empathy, abstraction, and the urge to engagement ......................................................................... 207 Ulrich Weisstein: Worringer, Expressionism, and abstract-representational middle grounds ............................................ 210 Neil Donahue: ‘world feeling’ and the history of ideas in Abstraction and Empathy ........................................................................ 211 Worringer and Expressionism: late twentieth-century perspectives ...... 215 Part 4: Redrawing antithesis .......................................................................... 225 Antithesis: Classical, modern and contemporary contexts ....................... 225 Aristotle and antithesis ................................................................................. 227 Worringer’s rhetoric: Neil Donahue, Geoffrey C. W. Waite, and Joshua Dittrich ....................................................................................... 230 Kant, Schopenhauer, Riegl, Wölfflin, antithesis ........................................ 233 Gradation, displacement and transposition: alternatives to antithesis in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy ..................................................... 244 Form in Gothic: interplay readdressed ......................................................... 254 History and Ego: Worringer’s approach ..................................................... 257 Interplay in naturalism .................................................................................... 260 Interplay in the Gothic art of Northern Europe: memory, assimilation, interpolation .............................................................. 261 Schiller, Worringer, interplay ........................................................................ 264 Interplay: a dual, hybrid state in Gothic art ................................................ 270 v Part 5: Interplay in painting ........................................................................... 274 Worringer, his contemporaries, and early twentieth-century art-making in Abstraction and Empathy ............................................................................. 274 Pictorial contexts for abstract-representational interplay: Cézanne’s realized sensations ......................................................................... 278 Monet, Worringer’s Impressionism, and the interplay of abstraction and representation .................................................................. 293 Monet and his motifs: representational and abstract aspects................... 298 The Doorway (Morning Effect) (1894): re-materializations ....................... 301 Representation and abstraction in Monet’s Water Lilies (1907) ............... 308 Towards the expression of inner worlds: Kandinsky, Worringer, and turn-of-the-twentieth century artist writings ....................................... 316 Interplay in Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art (1912) and ‘On the Question of Form’ (1912) .......................................................... 325 On the Spiritual in Art: oppositions and interplay ..................................... 325 Kandinsky’s approach to form and content: The Struggle for Art (1911), and the First Exhibition of the Editors of the Blaue Reiter (1911) ........... 328 Inner life, painting, and its relationship with the world in On the Spiritual in Art ............................................................................. 329 Representation and abstraction in interplay ............................................... 334 ‘On the Question of Form’: the inner similarity of representation and abstraction ............................................................... 338 Painting interplay: Kandinsky’s Impression V (Park) (1911), Picture with a Black Arch (1912), and Picture with Red Spot (1914) ......... 343 Rethinking abstract-representational interplay: Worringer, Arnheim, Deleuze and Guattari ....................................................................................... 350 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 362 Selected bibliography ....................................................................................... 373 List of illustrations ............................................................................................ 398 vi Acknowledgments A University of Canterbury Master of Arts Scholarship (2009), and a Doctoral Scholarship (2010-12) have made this research possible; I would like to extend a debt of gratitude to the Postgraduate Office and Scholarships Office of the University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānaga o Waitaha, who have generously facilitated my inquiries over the last four years. My warmest thanks go to my supervisors, Morgan Thomas, Emilie Sitzia, and Richard Bullen, for their guidance, input, advice and insight, as well as for accepting to gift their time, attention and expertise to a research project proposed by a Fine Arts student. With the encouragement and support of Emilie Sitzia, I have presented my work at the 2011 Conference of The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, Contact, as well as at the 2012 Symposium of The Australian Modernist Studies Network, Modernism, Intimacy and Emotion. I wish to express my gratitude to David Maskill, Lorraine Sim, Ann Vickery, and to all the organizers of these events for granting my access to two most valuable learning opportunities. I very much thank Jon Winnall and Judith Brooks for their interest in my project, as well as The University of Canterbury, Universities New Zealand Te Pōkai Tara, and The New Zealand Federation of Graduate Women, for their funding my participation to the 2011 AAANZ Conference and the 2012 AMSN Symposium. As a 2012 Claude McCarthy Fellow and recipient of NFGW Conference and Travel Awards, I pursued my research in Paris at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, and in the Centre Pompidou exhibition spaces; I would like to warmly thank these organizations for their welcome and support. Kindest thanks to Barbara Garrie and Katherine Higgins for including my contribution in the first number of Oculus: Postgraduate Journal for Visual Arts Research. I am grateful to Barbara Garrie for inviting me to take part to a collaborative project, Stochastic Dialogue, presented by her at the 2009 Conference of the Association of Art Historians of Manchester Metropolitan University, Intersections. The 2011 Place and Placelessness Online Graduate vii Workshop was a great learning opportunity for which I am grateful to Andrew Watson and Michael Del Vecchio. I warmly thank Janet Abbot, Rudolf Boelee, Tony Bond, Wendy Cox, Margaret Duncan, Victoria Edwards, Douglas Horrell, Kiri Jarden, Ina Johann, Simon Ogden, and Louise Palmer for their professional advice, words of kindness, and support of my practice. For their contribution to and support of Sense of Place (2010-12, Hastings City Art Gallery) and Colour of Distance (2011-12, Papakura Art Gallery), I am most grateful to Celia Wilson, Kim Lowe, Helga Goran, Jocelyn Mills, Tracey Williams, Maree Mills, Kath Purchas, and the wonderful teams at PAG and HCAG. I kindly thank Justin Morgan, Jodie Dalgleish, Warren Feeney, Janet Bayly, Jasmine Bailey, Kim Lowe, Linda Lee and Mirabel Oliver for welcoming my work at The New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, Mahara Gallery, and Shared Lines – the 2012 Christchurch/Sendai Project. My thoughts often go, in heartfelt gratitude, to Riduan Tomkins for his clarity of vision, luminous practice, passionate engagement with art, insightful advice, generosity and support. The earliest motivating factor in the writing of this thesis was my admiration for the art and thought of Desmond Rochfort; I extend my boundless gratitude to him for his support of my practice and kind encouragement. At crucial points of my research, I have had the chance to be surrounded by the wisdom, kindness and generosity of Gabriela and Letiția Silaghi, Libby Munt and Alex J. Plescan, Ana and Narcis Gǎnescu, Elena, Alex and Zoe Nesterovich, Jane Williamson, Nadia and Andrew Plescan, and by the wholehearted support of Alex M. Plescan; they have my deepest, very special thanks. viii To Lucian Silaghi, in loving memory ix Abstract Throughout the twentieth century, the relationship between representation and abstraction has been regarded predominantly in terms of opposition. One of the prominent early twentieth- century defenders of this approach is Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965), who introduces representation and abstraction as antithetic modes of art-making in Abstraction and Empathy. A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1908). However, while he distinguishes between abstraction and representation on theoretical grounds, Worringer also observes that, in the history of art, these modes of art-making coexist. The current thesis examines Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory, inquiring into his perspective on the personal responses of viewers and artists to the world, and the manifestations of these responses in art. Abstraction and Empathy addresses issues of empathy, form, and will, in aesthetics and art-making; it discusses and extends the writings of Theodor Lipps, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Alois Riegl. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Worringer’s book attracted much attention: like its sequel, Form in Gothic (1910), it was often associated with the rise to prominence of Expressionism in Germany. Later in the twentieth century, Worringer’s thought came under the scrutiny of Rudolf Arnheim, who criticized Worringer’s emphasis on abstract-representational opposition. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari praised Worringer’s approach to antithesis, yet questioned the terms Worringer proposed as opposites. For Arnheim, Deleuze and Guattari, alternatives to the antithesis between abstraction and representation became visible. Indeed, in Worringer’s time, artists such as Adolf Hildebrand, Ferdinand Hodler, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Wassily Kandinsky underscored the common grounds between representation and abstraction. Exploring Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, as well as the words and works of Hildebrand, Hodler, Cézanne, Monet and Kandinsky, this thesis aims to highlight abstract-representational interplay as observable in early twentieth-century writing and art-making. Key words: Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, Form in Gothic, abstraction, empathy, representation, antithesis, interplay, painting. x Preface Painting is either representational or abstract, the notes I had been taking for the last two weeks seemed to imply. The University of Canterbury postgraduate seminar for fine arts, art history and theory students organized by Desmond Rochfort and Pamela Gerrish Nunn was due to begin soon; we would be responding to a painting of their choice, and sharpen our interpretive skills in the process. As a painter working with abstraction,1 I felt more at ease focusing on my canvases in 2007 – to search for the words, concepts and contexts that could accompany my viewing of artworks was a task I approached with the curiosity and hesitation of a newcomer. My readings explained that contemporary pictorial explorations revolved around issues of abstraction and representation, two modes of art-making predominantly approached as antithetic. If common grounds between representation and abstraction were to be found, I mused while hastening towards the seminar room, a key question of the art of painting would be answered.2 Soon I was to come across Mark Rosenthal’s Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline (1996), where the approach of Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965) to artistic tendencies was summarized. Worringer, Rosenthal explained,3 recognized two distinct urges (or inner tendencies) in art: an urge to empathy and an urge to abstraction; in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy. A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1908), these urges featured as polar opposites.4 At first glance, the distinction between representational and abstract tendencies in art-making appeared to drive Worringer’s inquiry 1 I explore the interweaving of colours, lines, shapes in my paintings. While my works seem independent from motifs in the world, they develop in resonance with such motifs. The processes that foster ‘abstract’ practices in contemporary painting require in-depth investigation, and need to be addressed in self-standing essays. 2 Five years later, I acknowledge the role of this thought as a starting point of my explorations. However, I see in representation and abstraction only two of the coordinates that support the access of viewers and artists to painting. The key questions posed by painting abound; they can indeed receive punctual solutions, but are not limited to them. 3 Mark Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1996), 8-9. 4 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (New York: International Universities Press 1953 [1908]), 4. xi – yet I wondered to what extent Worringer regarded abstraction and representation as antithetic, and how he pursued their differentiation in Abstraction and Empathy. The current thesis explores these issues, engaging in an examination of the relationship between tendencies (or urges) to art-making and modes of art-making in Worringer’s early twentieth- century writings.5 5 As this thesis aims to highlight following from Worringer’s writings, abstraction and representation can be approached from the perspective of their opposition, but also from the point of view of their interplay. Abstract- representational interplay is particularly visible in contemporary art; nowadays, painters persuasively combine the depiction of their motifs with passages highlighting colour, structure, line, and paint application. See, for instance, the works of Richard Killeen (b. 1946), Denis Castellas (b. 1951), Pia Fries (b. 1955), Peter Doig (b. 1959), Suzanne McClelland (b. 1959), Beatriz Milhazes (b. 1960), Monique Prieto (b. 1962), Franz Ackermann (b. 1963), Shane Cotton (b. 1964), Toba Khedoori (b. 1964), Adriana Varejão (b. 1964), Tal R (b. 1967), Cecily Brown (b. 1969), Inka Essenhigh (b. 1969), Carla Klein (b. 1970), and Laura Owens (b. 1970). Abstract- representational interplay may assume different shapes, and various levels of visibility; it may be recognized in the art of many more contemporary artists than mentioned above. This topic requires detailed inquiry, yet exceeds the scope of the current thesis. 1 Introduction Contemporary writers regard Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965) as the creator, in Abstraction and Empathy (1908), of a much cited manifesto for abstract art,1 as a supporter of German Expressionism and critic of conventionalised art-making,2 as a contributing force to the development of Vorticism, Abstract Expressionism, and Cobra,3 and as a scholar whose approach to the writing of art history and theory has proved fascinating for artists, writers, psychologists, social theorists, and architectural activists. 4 Abstract-representational antithesis – articulated by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic (1910) – is generally considered a key element of his demonstrations.5 This thesis acknowledges and examines the role of antithesis in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, yet shows that Worringer’s oppositions tend to assume a certain degree of openness as his demonstrations take shape. My text highlights the place of abstract-representational interplay in Worringer’s books. For Worringer, who asserts his counter-Classicism and counter-Impressionism and defines the relationship of representation and abstraction as oppositional,6 abstract-representational 1 W. Wolfgang Holdheim, 'Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding', boundary 2, 8, No. 1, 1979, 339. Also, Rudolf Arnheim, New Essays on the Psychology of Art (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984), 61-62. Also, Neil H. Donahue, 'Introduction: Art History or "Sublime Hysteria"?' in Neil H. Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, c.1995), 1-9. Also, Mary Gluck, 'Interpreting Primitivism, Mass Culture and Modernism: The Making of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', New German Critique, No. 80, 2000, 154. 2 Geoffrey Christophe Perkins, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism (Bern: H. Lang, 1974), 48. Also, Joseph Masheck, 'Raw Art: "Primitive" Authenticity and German Expressionism', RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 4, 1982, 95-96. 3 Susan Hiller, The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 139. 4 Donahue, 'Introduction: Art History or "Sublime Hysteria"?', 1. Also, Joanna E. Ziegler, 'Worringer's Theory of Transcendental Space in Gothic Architecture: A Medievalist's Perspective' in Neil H. Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, c.1995), 106. 5 Holdheim, 'Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding', 339. Also, Arnheim, New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 51. Also, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 86. 6 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (New York: International Universities Press 1953 [1908]), xiv, 28-29, 38, 101-102, 112, 123-135. Also, ibid., 4, 14-15, 26, 34. Also, Wilhelm Worringer, and Herbert Edward Read, Form in Gothic (London: Tiranti, 1957 [1910]), 15- 16, 18-19, 34-36. 2 interplay can actually be observed in many of modes of art-making throughout history.7 Worringer repeatedly inquires into the interplay of abstract and representational elements in Gothic, for instance;8 he also explains the workings of abstract-representational interplay in the art of his contemporaries.9 Where Worringer adopts a generic approach to art,10 my thesis points to the relationship between Worringer’s thoughts on abstract-representational antithesis and interplay – as expressed in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic – and early twentieth-century painting.11 To his English-speaking readership, Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965) is known primarily for two of his earlier books: Abstraction and Empathy (1908), and Form in Gothic (1910).12 Comprising the dates of his studies, relocations, and professional activities, his brief biographies tend to name few significant places, and even fewer people of note in his life. The most detailed portrait of Worringer is thus invited to emerge from his writings. In ‘Wilhelm Worringer: sketch for a portrait’, this thesis traces the profile of Worringer by culling and interweaving biographical data as made available in English texts.13 The forewords Worringer provided for successive editions of Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic are addressed in ‘Gazing in the mirror of history: Worringer’s forewords to Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic’. Bringing to light Worringer’s views on the echoes of his thought within his epoch, these shorter texts also reveal the discourse strategies that structure his argument from Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. The key terms of Worringer’s investigation are examined in ‘Empathy, abstraction and representation in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy’, and ‘Representation and abstraction in art-making: Worringer’s perspective’. Combining aesthetic and artistic viewpoints in his 7 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 55, 7-77, 79-80, 96, 99-101, 104, 114-115. Also, Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 11-13, 19, 21, 26-33, 40-41, 60-63. 8 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 106-121. Also, Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 40-41, 60-62. 9 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4, 43, 84, 136-137. 10 Ibid., vii-xv. Also, Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 1-11. 11 I focus on the paintings of early twentieth-century artists to whom Worringer refers in Abstraction and Empathy and ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911); I also analyse paintings produced by artists who mention Worringer in their own writings, who feature in circles where Worringer is admired, or who are in contact with Worringer around the time of his publishing Abstraction and Empathy, Form in Gothic and ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1908-1911). 12 Also see, from the current thesis, ‘Wilhelm Worringer: sketch for a portrait,’10-48. 13 A biographical exploration of Worringer’s presence and influence within modern German-speaking contexts (a topic much exceeding the research span of this thesis) still awaits its publication in English. 3 book, Worringer intuitively assumes, at times, the standpoint of artists; he follows Theodor Lipps in this respect. The urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction thus come to resonate with both artistic and aesthetic concerns in Abstraction and Empathy, drawing attention to the terminological challenges Worringer’s writings bring along. In the course of his argument, Worringer explains that the urge to empathy fosters artistic naturalism, while the urge to abstraction requires a focus on style. Yet the opposition between naturalism and style is less effective today than in Worringer’s time: later twentieth-century researchers prefer to contrast ‘representation’ (or figuration) and ‘abstraction’ instead. Although critical towards the aesthetic inquiries of the past, Worringer relies on the investigations of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and Alois Riegl.14 Worringer, following Kant, recognizes the role of form in his interpretation of art; Schopenhauer inspires Worringer’s approach to opposition, while Riegl’s research provides to Worringer the concept of artistic will. Like Robert Vischer and Heinrich Wölfflin, Worringer is interested in issues concerning empathy and expressiveness. However, he discusses empathy in less detail than R. Vischer, and connects it, unlike Wölfflin, with human feelings rather than embodiment and imitation. The direction assumed by Worringer’s explorations from Abstraction and Empathy reflects and expands upon the interests of his predecessors, attracting the attention of later twentieth- century writers such as Rudolf Arnheim and Gilles Deleuze.15 For Arnheim, Worringer’s abstract-representational opposition is memorably articulated, yet assigns to abstraction a limiting role. Deleuze sees Worringer as a theoretician of Gothic, emphasizing the attention Worringer bestows on Gothic line, and, in his turn, approaches Gothic art by opposing it to Egyptian and Classical art. Both Arnheim and Deleuze note that Worringer develops more than an antithetic strand of inquiry in Abstraction and Empathy. 14 See, from the current thesis, ‘ “Common to all”: form for Kant and Worringer,’ 111-121, ‘A matter of will: Schopenhauer and Worringer on life and art,’ 122-126, and ‘Riegl and artistic will’, 127-131. Exploring the diverse influences observable in Worringer’s texts, as well as his discussion of turn-of-the-century aesthetic investigations, would require self-standing inquiry. 15 See ‘Abstraction, representation, opposition: Worringer and Rudolf Arnheim,’ 132-139, and ‘The relationship between abstraction and representation: highlights from Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, and Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1984),’140-148. Also, ‘Rethinking abstract-representational interplay: Worringer, Arnheim, Deleuze and Guattari,’ 350-361. 4 For many twentieth-century writers, Worringer’s early texts are associated with the rise and decline of German Expressionism.16 Worringer does not refer to Expressionism in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, yet the frequency of his employing the term ‘expression’ in these books points to his interests from the first decade of the twentieth century. Defending the artistic experiments of his time in an essay entitled ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911),17 Worringer praises contemporary French ‘Synthetists and Expressionists’ and mentions their appreciation of the works of artists such as Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse. Worringer’s attention to early twentieth- century artistic explorations surfaces briefly in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, yet is unambiguously revealed in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’. Later texts on Expressionism – for instance, Expressionism (1914) by Paul Fechter, and Expressionism (1916) by Hermann Bahr –18 signal Worringer’s influence in particular; indeed, Fechter and Bahr approach German Expressionism from an oppositional vantage point inspired by Worringer’s abstract-representational antithesis from Abstraction and Empathy. Worringer proved primarily interested in the exploratory aspects of Expressionism, regardless of the specific form they took.19 In Current Questions on Art (1921), he revealed his doubts concerning the active role of Expressionist art around the second decade of the twentieth century, underscoring the experimentalism of writing instead. However, despite the critical position he adopted towards later Expressionist art-making, Worringer was still considered a representative of Expressionist thought by Georg Lukács.20 Pointing to the abstract aspects of Expressionism, Lukács argued that the movement had encouraged the bypassing of spatial and temporal considerations, and had shown no commitment to economical and social contexts. 16 See ‘The words of Worringer: “Expressionism” at the beginning of the twentieth century,’ 149-157, and ‘Worringer and Expressionism: late twentieth-century perspectives,’ 215-224. 17 From the current thesis, see ‘ “The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911): Worringer’s early response to Expressionism,’ 158-184. 18 See ‘Worringer’s impact: Expressionism (1914) by Paul Fechter, and Expressionism (1916) by Hermann Bahr,’ 185-195. 19 See, from this thesis, ‘Current Questions on Art (1921): Worringer revisits Expressionism,’ 196-198. 20 See ‘Questioning Worringer: critical discussions on the writings of Worringer and on Worringer’s association with the Expressionist movement,’ 199-210. 5 Yet Lukács’ reference to Abstraction and Empathy allowed him to configure his own views, Richard Sheppard maintains,21 also drawing attention to the impact Worringer’s thought had on Lukács before 1911. Significantly, Worringer de-emphasizes Western aesthetics, and addresses negative responses to challenging environments, according to Joseph Frank. William Spanos and Ulrich Weisstein are critical towards Worringer’s theoretical and historical perspectives; they both note the existence of alternatives to abstract- representational opposition as articulated by Worringer. For Neil Donahue, emotional aspects, abstraction-oriented practices, and ‘primitivism’ become particularly visible in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy. In contemporary writings on Expressionism – for instance, in the studies of Bernard Myers, James Bednarz, Stephen E. Bronner, Emily Hicks, Donald Gordon and Peter Guenther –22 Worringer features as a writer who provided theoretical grounds for the development of the movement. Yet Worringer did not write about the Expressionist movement as such, Michael Jennings points out. Instead, Jennings shows that Worringer offered an art historical equivalent for Expressionist explorations in Abstraction and Empathy. Jennings, Mary Gluck and Debbie Lewer also draw attention to the sociological and psychological aspects of Abstraction and Empathy. For Lewer, Worringer’s work does not hold contemporary interest; however, she mentions the impact of Worringer’s writing on his contemporaries, as do Geoffrey C. W. Waite, Joseph Masheck, Joseph Frank, Magdalena Bushart, and Neil Donahue. Worringer’s perspective actually encouraged the association of Gothic and early twentieth- century art, according to Gordon, Guenther, Horst Uhr, and Shulamith Behr. Preoccupied with local as well as international artistic explorations, Worringer underscored the ties between contemporary French and German art-making, as Gordon and Rose-Carol Washton Long point out. The writings of Worringer inspired, or defended, practices associated with Expressionism, as Long, Gordon, Frank Whitford, Ida Katherine Rigby, and Norbert Lynton explain; however, Paul Vogt, Rigby and Long also mention Worringer’s growing disbelief in Expressionism around the second decade of the twentieth century. Charles Haxthausen draws attention to Worringer’s explorations of the connections between Gothic and Expressionist 21 Ibid. 22 See, from the current thesis, ‘Worringer and Expressionism: late twentieth-century perspectives,’ 215-224. 6 art; around 1925, Worringer finds Expressionism to be a systematic approach to art-making, Haxthausen observes. As made visible in contemporary research, Worringer’s relationship with Expressionism in the early decades of the twentieth century is marked by striking shifts in perspective, much like his approach to the relationship between abstraction and representation from Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. The driving force of Worringer’s early books, as W. Eugène Kleinbauer and Hilton Kramer observe, is the antithesis between urges towards art-making, and also between art-making modes.23 To establish the distinctive features of the urge to abstraction and the urge to empathy, Worringer places them in opposition: this allows him to point to the formal specificities of representation, while emphasizing the characteristics and merits of abstraction-oriented art. Artistic polarities reflect, for him, the argumentative engagement of human beings with their environment; in his writings, opposition thus features as a key contributor to art-making, but also as a fundamental form of relating between human beings and the world. Contrasting between the modes of art-making of different epochs in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic,24 Worringer points to the art and culture of Classicism, where, as Johann Wolfgang Goethe notes, harmony between human beings and their world was predominant. Yet Worringer underscores the negative influence of Classicism on aesthetics and art. Imitation as approached, for instance, in the writings of Aristotle is particularly criticised by Worringer. However, Aristotle’s Rhetoric also requires antithesis to inform a persuasive, memorable argument – a demand that must have attracted the attention of Worringer, who, in his early books, proves to follow Aristotle’s perspective on the construction of discourse. Abstraction and Empathy begins by approaching the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction as polar opposites. Nevertheless, Worringer also draws attention to artistic instances where the two opposite urges coexist. 23 See ‘About Worringer: W. Eugène Kleinbauer, Hilton Kramer, Debbie Lewer,’ 14-16. Also, ‘Antithesis: Classical, modern and contemporary contexts,’ 225-242. 24 Ibid. 7 As discussed in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, gradation, displacement, transposition, remembering, assimilation and interpolation provide alternatives to antithesis.25 These processes do not claim the limelight of Worringer’s investigations, yet are mentioned in Worringer’s explorations of art-making. For instance, Worringer, in Abstraction and Empathy, observes the gradation of feelings and urges, the historical displacement of one style by another, and the formal transposition of representational elements in abstract contexts. He also signals, in Form in Gothic, the abstracting function of remembering, the formal process of assimilation, and the result of assimilation, namely the interpolation of observational elements in abstract contexts. Although Worringer is uncomfortable with the possible loss of differentiation between imitative and creative urges in naturalism, he continues referring to instances of abstract-representational interplay in both Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. Interplay, unlike antithesis, does not assume a leading role in Worringer’s inquiries,26 yet gains visibility in his analysis of Gothic art. For Worringer, Gothic occasions a notable meeting between the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction.27 Having signalled abstract-representational interplay in Japanese art, in Saracenic (or Islamic) arabesque, in Byzantine style, and in Greek Ionic architecture, Worringer observes interplay at work in Gothic cathedrals, where the urge to empathy animates abstract form. Schiller, an admirer of Goethe and Classicism, had noted in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) that the play drive balanced senses and law, feelings and reason.28 Harmony between material reality and lawful formality, between human beings and their social contexts, was achievable for Schiller. Worringer, however, considers Gothic abstract-representational interplay hybrid rather than harmonious;29 according to him, Gothic art allows opposite elements to coexist without cancelling their differences. 25 From the current thesis, ‘Gradation, displacement and transposition: alternatives to antithesis in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy’, ‘Interplay in naturalism’, and ‘Interplay in the Gothic art of Northern Europe: memory, assimilation, interpolation’. 26 See, for instance, ‘Form in Gothic: interplay readdressed’, and ‘History and Ego: Worringer’s approach’. 27 See ‘Gradation, displacement and transposition: alternatives to antithesis in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy,’ 244-253. 28 From the current thesis, ‘Schiller, Worringer, interplay,’ 264-269. 29 ‘Interplay: a dual, hybrid state in Gothic art,’ 270-273, from this thesis. 8 Worringer addresses the art of the past in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, yet writes with his contemporaries in mind.30 Often critical towards his epoch, he notes that human beings are as disoriented at the beginning of the twentieth century as ‘primitive’ people were when confronted with a world they did not understand. He questions current art- making that is based on Classical norms rather than on genuine creative drives, and commends the ability of contemporary artists to differentiate between potentially similar artistic approaches. Early twentieth-century creators, he argues, need to recognize the fundamental differences between modes of art-making. According to him, art-making in his time amalgamates geometric and representational elements (a process he also recognizes in ancient Egyptian art), allowing the coexistence of representation and abstraction to come to surface. Worringer does not focus on the works of particular artists active around the turn of the twentieth century; he comments only briefly on the practices of Ferdinand Hodler, Adolf Hildebrand and Auguste Rodin in Abstraction and Empathy. The attention Worringer bestows on coeval artistic explorations surfaces, for instance, through his addressing Impressionist art-making in Abstraction and Empathy (where he explains its connections with representation),31 as well as through his frequent references to ‘expression’ in both Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic.32 His ‘Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911) and Current Questions on Art (1921) further reveal his perspective on contemporary artistic practices, and his empathic resonance with them. Recognizing abstract-representational interplay during his time, Worringer observes its compositional amalgamation of geometric and representational elements.33 The increased visibility of geometric, regular aspects of art-making as noted by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy is preceded and supported by two allied processes also mentioned in his book: the growing assertion of personal perspectives, and the decisive reorganization of the processes of art-making. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Adolf Hildebrand 30 See ‘Worringer, his contemporaries, and early twentieth-century art-making in Abstraction and Empathy,’274-277. 31 From the current thesis, see ‘Monet, Worringer’s Impressionism, and the interplay of abstraction and representation,’ 293-297. 32 See ‘The words of Worringer: “Expressionism” at the beginning of the twentieth century,’ 149-157. 33 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 43. 9 wrote about the necessity of achieving self-sufficiency and formal unity in art,34 while Ferdinand Hodler underscored the compositional role of parallelism.35 Paul Cézanne allowed his brushstrokes to gain visibility and thus impart a distinctive lifelikeness to the rendition of his motifs;36 readdressing his later works in the studio, Claude Monet focused on the demands of his canvases as well as on their relationship with motifs as observed in the world.37 Kandinsky, who was in contact with Worringer around the time of publishing The Blaue Reiter Almanac (1912), experimented with the expression of inner events in pictures he regarded as ‘improvisations.’ 38 Kandinsky’s writings from the second decade of the twentieth century address directly the contemporary meeting of representation and abstraction, reaching conclusions that resonate with Worringer’s explorations, but that ultimately differ from them. In the works and words of artists active in the early years of the twentieth century, abstract features of art come to surface, shining a different light on the connections between art- making and the world. 34 Adolf Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1978 [1893]), 11. Also, from the current thesis, ‘Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory,’ 49-64, ‘Empathy, abstraction and representation in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy,’ 65-85, and ‘Representation and abstraction in art-making: Worringer’s perspective,’ 86-110. 35 Peter Selz, Ferdinand Hodler (Berkeley: University of California Berkeley, University Art Museum, 1972), 123. Also, from the current thesis, ‘Representation and abstraction in art-making: Worringer’s perspective,’ 86- 110. 36 See, from the current thesis, ‘Pictorial contexts for abstract-representational interplay: Cézanne’s realized sensations,’ 278-292. 37 From the current thesis, ‘Monet and his motifs: representational and abstract aspects,’ 298-300, ‘The Doorway (Morning Effect) (1894): re-materializations,’ 301-307, and ‘Representation and abstraction in Monet’s Water Lilies (1907),’ 308-315. 38 Wassily Kandinsky, Kenneth C. Lindsay, and Peter Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art (Boston, Massachusetts: G.K. Hall, 1982), 218. Also, from the current thesis, ‘Towards the expression of inner worlds: Kandinsky, Worringer, and turn-of-the-twentieth-century artist writings,’ 316-324, ‘Interplay in Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art (1912) and “On the Question of Form” (1912),’ 325-342, and ‘Painting interplay: Kandinsky’s Impression (Park) (1911), Picture with a Black Arch (1912), and Picture with Red Spot (1914),’ 343-349. 10 Part 1: Outer pictures, inner contours Wilhelm Worringer: sketch for a portrait Theoretician, historian and critic of art, Wilhelm Worringer (Aachen, 13 January 1881- Munich, 29 March 1965), is best known in English-speaking contexts for two of his debut books: Abstraction and Empathy. A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1908), and Form in Gothic (1910). Worringer studied at the universities of Freiburg, Berlin, Munich and Bern; Georg Simmel (1858-1918),1 and Theodor Lipps (1854-1914), 2 were among his professors. Upon completing his doctoral dissertation at the University of Bern (1905-1906), 3 under the supervision of Artur Weese (1868-1934),4 Worringer enlisted the help of his family and published his thesis in Neuwied.5 He then posted a printed copy of his dissertation to Paul Ernst (c. 1899 - c. 1985), who reviewed it for Kunst und Künstler [Art and Artists], and sent Worringer’s dissertation to Simmel. Upon reading Ernst’s supportive review, Reinhard Piper (1879-1953) – a publisher based in Munich – decided to make Worringer’s book available to a wider audience.6 The book proved an instant success with the artists of the time.7 Form in Gothic, also published with Piper in 1910, took Worringer’s research from Abstraction and Empathy a step further; it clarified and expanded on a number of Worringer’s core ideas and methodology. At present, the biographical data available to English-speaking researchers offer only glimpses into Worringer’s life. Joanna E. Ziegler, in ‘Worringer’s Theory of Transcendental Space in Gothic Architecture: A Medievalist’s Perspective’ (an essay from Neil Donahue’s 1 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, ix. 2 Norbert Lynton, 'Expressionism' in Concepts of Modern Art: From Fauvism to Postmodernism ed. Nikos Stangos (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 42. 3 W. Eugene Kleinbauer places the completion of Worringer’s dissertation in 1907. See W. Eugène Kleinbauer, Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Writings on the Visual Arts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press [Medieval Academy of America] [Holt, Rinehart and Winston], 1989 [1971]), 29-30. 4 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, xiv. 5 See Rhys W. Williams, 'Worringer, Wilhelm', in Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Also, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, x. 6 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, xi. The spelling of the name of Reinhard Piper follows Worringer’s spelling from the 1948 preface. See ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, xi. 7 Rose-Carol Washton Long, Stephanie Barron, and Ida Katherine Rigby, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (New York: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993), 9. 11 Invisible Cathedrals, c. 1995) observes in this respect: ‘Much of Worringer’s biography remains a mystery, especially his whereabouts between the two World Wars and the crucial question of whether he was Jewish.’ 8 From the brief notes encountered in contemporary texts,9 Worringer’s trajectory appears meandering, despite the early success of his publications. Having lived in Munich between 1902 and 1909,10 Worringer moved to Bern in May 1909.11 He wrote Abstraction and Empathy sometime between 1905 and 1907, while in Munich; from 1908 onwards, he focused on completing Form in Gothic.12 Worringer taught 8 Joanna E. Ziegler, 'Worringer's Theory of Transcendental Space in Gothic Architecture: A Medievalist's Perspective' in Neil H. Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, c.1995), 117. Ziegler continues: ‘It seems that he [Worringer] taught in the Art History Institute at the University of Bonn during the 1920s, having been called there from the University in Bern. After the Second World War, in 1946, he held the chair at Halle University that [Paul] Frankl had abandoned in 1933 to emigrate to the United States.’ Ziegler points to the originality of Worringer’s approach to transcendental space in Gothic architecture, noting five key statements Worringer makes in Form in Gothic: that predominant art forms and particular expressive means must be analysed; that Gothic architecture can be contrasted with Classical architecture; that the dematerialisation of stone becomes visible in Gothic; that an important formal feature of Gothic is the dissolution of walls; that scholasticism is analogous to Gothic architecture. Worringer’s intuitive arguments, Ziegler notes, did not meet with the approval of medievalists (with the exception of Paul Frankl), yet his ideas were widely adopted and disseminated as truisms. (Ibid., 108-109.) She explains this simultaneous acceptance and rejection as follows: ‘Why did Worringer's five stunning moments of Gothic architectural theory become truisms rather than Worringerianisms? Although to answer this would require a study dedicated to this topic alone, a few ideas can be offered here nonetheless. In the first place, the immigration of German-Jewish art historians, like Panofsky, needs to be much more fully understood than it is at present. There was, on the other hand, the geographical migration to America in which Worringer, who stayed in Germany during the Second World War, did not participate. Scholars also migrated ideologically, as it were, into a new positivism. On our shores a hardy commitment to the "science" of art historical research took root with the emigrés, a position nourished and renourished by a disdain for the seemingly soft and subjective intellectual ground from which Worringer's method sprang. The result was that all that Modernists found imminent in Worringer, medievalists ultimately and systematically dismantled from acceptable interpretations treating Gothic as a historical phenomenon. The interaction between these two groups of interpreters (the modernists and medievalists) has not yet been featured, however, in the vast enterprise that constitutes the history of Worringer's reception.’ (Ibid., 111.) For further suggestions regarding Worringer’s whereabouts between the two World Wars, Ziegler sends to the work of Jolanda Nigro Covre, ‘Wilhelm Worringer prima e dopo: Da un equivoco a un “tramonto” ’, Ricerche di storia dell’arte 12 (1980), 65-76. (Ibid., 115, 128.) This thesis does not propose to focus on Worringer’s biography – a topic that would require extensive exploration. My inquiry highlights specific aspects of Worringer’s contribution to the writing of art history and theory, and the relevance of Worringer’s thought on abstraction and representation for early twentieth-century painting. 9 Donahue explains, in Invisible Cathedrals, the relatively scant information on Worringer. According to Donahue: ‘His [i. e., Worringer’s archival estate or Nachlaβ in the Germanisches Museum in Nuremberg] contains and reveals little, since Worringer twice left his belongings behind: in Königsberg, where he taught from 1928 to 1944, and in Halle, where he was professor of modern art history after the war, from 1946 to 1950.’ Neil H. Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, 4. 10 Sebastian Preuss, 'Spiritual Intoxication: Sebastian Preuss on Wilhelm Worringer and Modernism', Deutsche Bank ArtMag, No. 56, 2009, 16. 11 Magdalena Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch' in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, c.1995), 71. 12 Ibid. 12 at the University of Bern between 1909 and 1914;13 after Richard Hamann’s review (1915) of Form in Gothic, Worringer applied unsuccessfully for a number of academic positions, continued teaching, and gave public lectures in Bern and Bonn. 14 He left for the front at the outbreak of the First World War (1914-18),15 completed his military service, and then took up a position at the University of Bonn, where he taught between 1918 and 1928.16 With the support of one of his admirers (Carl Heinrich Becker, Prussian Minister of Culture),17 Worringer received a professorship in 1928 in Königsberg (or Kaliningrad, Russia), where he resided between 1928 and 1945.18 Worringer stopped publishing when the National Socialist Party came to power (1933). However, his lectures in Königsberg – during which he hinted at his anti-Nazi views – were met with much interest.19 Sebastian Preuss describes Worringer’s situation in the nineteen- thirties as follows: When the Nazis took power, Worringer's educated middleclass, left-wing world collapsed. Out of political conviction, he didn't publish anything during these years, and he was eyed with mistrust and considered unworthy of representing Germany in lectures abroad. He was now “a quiet person in Germany, who is only loud at home,” as he wrote to his publisher Piper in 1937. But even during World War II, educated Königsberg residents flocked to his lectures, in which he described the art of old Europe, which was now burning to the ground, as a humanitarian value system, and everyone in the hall understood his unspoken criticism of the Nazis.20 After the end of the Second World War (1939-45), Worringer taught modern art in Halle from 1946 to 1950, at a time when the city was part of Germany’s Soviet-conquered zone.21 13 Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, 4. 14 Preuss, 'Spiritual Intoxication: Sebastian Preuss on Wilhelm Worringer and Modernism', 16. 15 Wilhelm Worringer and Herbert Edward Read, Form in Gothic (London: Tiranti, 1957 [1910]), xiv. 16 Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, 4. 17 Preuss, 'Spiritual Intoxication: Sebastian Preuss on Wilhelm Worringer and Modernism', 16. 18 Lee Sorensen, 'Worringer, Wilhelm', in Dictionary of Art Historians. According to Donahue, Worringer taught in Königsberg until 1944. Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, 4. 19 Preuss, 'Spiritual Intoxication: Sebastian Preuss on Wilhelm Worringer and Modernism', 16-17. 20 Ibid., 14. 21 Sorensen, 'Worringer, Wilhelm'. 13 He moved from Halle to Munich in 1950, to protest against having his name used in local propaganda,22 and remained in Munich until the end of his years in 1965.23 The works of Worringer were extensively published in the first half of the twentieth century. In his books – for instance, Lucas Cranach (1908), Old German Book Illustration (1912), Current Questions on Art (1921), The Origins of German Panel Painting (1924), Egyptian Art (1927), Greek Culture and the Gothic: On the Empire of Hellenism (1928), and On the Influence of Anglo-Saxon Book Painting on the Monumental Sculpture on the Continent in the Early Middle Ages (1931) –24 Worringer explores topics he had approached in Abstraction and Empathy. However, despite his sustained activity, Worringer’s ideas received widespread recognition for two of his debut publications: Abstraction and Empathy, and Form in Gothic. According to Worringer: ‘... [F]or the general public, he [i. e., Worringer] has remained almost exclusively the much translated author of Abstraktion und Einfühlung [Abstraction and Empathy] and Formprobleme der Gotik [Form in Gothic]. The youthful exuberance of his early works has overshadowed the continued efforts of his maturity.’ 25 Indeed, from Worringer’s books, only Abstraction and Empathy, Form in Gothic and Egyptian Art were translated into English during the twentieth century. 26 Abstraction and Empathy remains the best known and most cited of Worringer’s publications up to date. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer contrasts the urge to empathy and the urge to 22 Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, 4. Also, Preuss, 'Spiritual Intoxication: Sebastian Preuss on Wilhelm Worringer and Modernism', 17. 23 Sorensen, 'Worringer, Wilhelm'., Also, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, vii-xv. Also, Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, xiv-xv. 24 Worringer also wrote: Urs Graf: The Woodcuts of the Passion (1923), German Youth and Eastern Spirit (1924), and The Book of Life and the Famous Author of the Fables, Aesop, Ulm 1475 (1925). He contributed introductions to The Cologne Bible: 27 Woodcuts from 1479 (1923), and Otto Pankok (1927). He lectured on The Problematics of Contemporary Art (1948), and collected his essays from 1919 to 1954 in Questions and Counter-Questions (1956). Further details regarding the publication of Worringer’s texts can be found in Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, 203-206. Also, Long, Barron, and Rigby, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, 10-13, 284-287. For a list of his articles and reviews, see Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, 204-205. 25 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, xv. 26 The first of Worringer’s books to be published in English is Form in Gothic. Edited and introduced by Herbert Read, Form in Gothic appeared in 1927 at Putnam’s, London; it was then reissued in 1957 by A. Tiranti, London, and by Schocken Paperbacks in 1964. Donahue draws attention to the existence of an unattributed translation of Formprobleme der Gotik: Form Problems of the Gothic. This translation, dedicated in 1918 and issued in 1920, contains images from collections in the United States of America, as Donahue points out in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art of Wilhelm Worringer (c. 1995). See Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, 206. 14 abstraction. He draws a powerful antithesis between two approaches to art: on the one hand, an approach that encourages the empathic engagement of viewers, and relies on the positive emotional responses of artists to their environments; on the other hand, an approach that, through processes of abstraction, highlights the distancing of artists and viewers from the world. His memorable antithesis is rooted in the methodological practices of his time, according to W. Eugène Kleinbauer. About Worringer: W. Eugène Kleinbauer, Hilton Kramer, Debbie Lewer Kleinbauer, in Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of Twentieth- Century Writings on the Visual Arts (1989), underscores the significance of antithesis in the writing of German art history and theory around the turn of the twentieth century. He notes that Worringer is one of the researchers relying on antithetic categories, alongside historians and theoreticians of art such as Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), Alois Riegl (1858-1905), and Max Dvořák (1874-1921). In the words of Kleinbauer: Wölfflin’s use of antithesis betrays a major tendency in German scholarship of the late 19th and 20th century. We have already found such a dichotomy in the work of Riegl (haptic and optic), and we shall come to it again, near the end of this introductory essay, in an important book by Riegl’s most gifted student, Max Dvořák (idealism and naturalism). The observation of antithetical categories occurs also in the work of Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965). A major exponent of German Expressionism, Worringer married Lipps’ theory of empathy to Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen. In his widely read essay Abstraktion und Einfühlung; ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (his doctoral dissertation of 1907), published the following year, Worringer intended to make a “contribution to the aesthetics of a work of art, and especially of a work of art belonging to the domain of the plastic arts”. He observes a distinction between geometrical (abstract) and organic (empathic) forms in the whole history of art, Eastern and primitive as well as Western. Abstract aesthetic styles characterize peoples oppressed by nature and involved with spiritual reality, while 15 organic styles characterize peoples who have an affinity for nature and find spiritual satisfaction in it.27 Kleinbauer notes that Worringer’s reliance on antithesis is a key aspect of Abstraction and Empathy. Placing Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory in historical perspective, Kleinbauer contextualizes Worringer’s research, drawing attention to the employment of dichotomy by Riegl, Lipps and Dvořák in their writings on art. Like Donald Gordon, Geoffrey Perkins, and Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kleinbauer notes the association between Worringer and Expressionism. However, Kleinbauer connects Expressionism to the inquiries of Worringer more decisively than the above-mentioned writers.28 Kleinbauer considers Worringer indebted to both Lipps and Riegl.29 As signalled by Kleinbauer, the contrast between abstract, geometric, spiritually inclined art,30 and organic,31 empathic, nature-inclined art, stands out in Worringer’s writings. Hilton Kramer also notes the role of antithesis in the texts of Worringer. Like Kleinbauer, Kramer draws attention to Worringer’s employment of antithesis when articulating distinctions between modes of art-making. The differentiation Worringer traces between art that creates spatial illusions, and art that suppresses such illusions, is existentially relevant for Kramer.32 He explains Worringer’s contrast between modes of art-making from the perspective of artistic experience in his introduction to the 1997 edition of Abstraction and 27 Kleinbauer, Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Writings on the Visual Arts, 29-30. 28 Sections to follow examine in greater detail the connections between Worringer and Expressionism from the standpoint of several contemporary writers. See, for instance, ‘Worringer and Expressionism: late twentieth- century perspectives’. 29 Regarding Worringer’s approach to the theory of empathy as delineated by Lipps, see Geoffrey C. W. Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism' in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 24-25, 28. Also, David Morgan, 'The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to Expressionism', Journal of the History of Ideas, 57, No. 2, 1996, 321-322. 30 ‘Spirit’ is a term Worringer employs to refer to inner activity – especially the activity of the mind. In Form in Gothic, Worringer defines ‘spirit’ as the opposite of matter. Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 106. 31 ‘Organic’ is a term Worringer associates with lifelikeness in both Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. See, from the current thesis, ‘Empathy, abstraction and representation in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy’, and ‘Representation and abstraction in art-making: Worringer’s perspective’. 32 Wilhelm Worringer and Hilton Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee and Elephant Paperbacks, 1997 [1908]), ix. The term ‘existential’ as employed by Kramer points to human experience in the world; it does not acquire further philosophical nuance in his introduction. 16 Empathy. Kramer notes that the ‘will to abstraction’ as described by Worringer is the response of artists to a world they regard as a source of uncertainty and anxiety.33 Focusing on the merits of Worringer’s theory rather than on a critique of Worringer’s perspective, Kramer writes: ‘What proved to be so timely in Abstraction and Empathy was Worringer’s further claim that this will to abstraction was to be understood to be one of the two fundamental aesthetic impulses known to human culture – the other, of course, being the urge to empathy which manifests itself in the naturalistic depiction of the observable world.’ 34 For Kramer as for Kleinbauer, Worringer constructs a memorable opposition between the ‘will to abstraction’ and the ‘urge to empathy’. Both these contemporary authors are sensitive to the significance of antithesis in Worringer’s writings. Although antithesis is a key aspect of Abstraction and Empathy, different facets of Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory have been readdressed in contemporary criticism. For instance, Michael W. Jennings notes the implicit criticism directed by Worringer towards a depersonalized, commodity-oriented modern capitalist society. 35 Pointing to Worringer’s discussion of ancient cultures in psychological terms, Mary Gluck underscores that, much to the benefit of turn-of-the-twentieth-century artists, Worringer’s approach signalled the existence of an authentic, creative and redemptive inner space that could be accessed through art-making. 36 In her recent discussion of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, Debbie Lewer observes that Worringer’s book echoes the pervasive sense of alienation experienced by Worringer’s contemporaries in early twentieth- century surroundings. 37 Lewer, in Post-Impressionism to World War II (2006), mentions the current lack of interest in Worringer’s writings. 38 Yet, as she writes, Worringer’s thought attracted the sustained attention of his contemporaries around the time Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic 33 Ibid., viii-ix. 34 Ibid., x. 35 Michael W. Jennings, 'Against Expressionism: Materialism and Social Theory in Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy' in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 94-95. 36 Mary Gluck, 'Interpreting Primitivism, Mass Culture and Modernism: The Making of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', New German Critique, No. 80, 2000, 166-167. 37 Debbie Lewer, Post-Impressionism to World War II (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 58. 38 Ibid., 66. 17 were published.39 For instance, painter Franz Marc (1880-1916),40 poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926),41 and architectural historian Walter Müller-Wulckov (1886-1964),42 commented appreciatively on Worringer’s research, while art historian Richard Hamann (1879-1961) and philosopher Emil Utitz (1883-1956) signalled the limitations of Worringer’s writings. 43 The thought of Worringer found considerable appreciation in Great Britain,44 where T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) and Herbert Read (1893-1968) were among Worringer’s earliest supporters.45 Worringer, T. E. Hulme and Herbert Read Hulme, an admirer of Lipps’ thought, met Worringer at the Berlin Congress of Aesthetics (1913). Upon his return to Great Britain in 1914, after nine months in Berlin,46 Hulme was 39 Joseph Masheck considers Abstraction and Empathy to be ‘[t]he premier theoretical text of the whole German movement’. See Joseph Masheck, 'Raw Art: "Primitive" Authenticity and German Expressionism', RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 4, 1982, 110. 40 Geoffrey C. W. Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism' in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, c.1995 [1981]), 17-18. 41 Neil H. Donahue, 'Introduction: Art History or "Sublime Hysteria"?' in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, c.1995), 1. 42 Bushart points out that Müller-Wulckov finds in Form in Gothic a theory that explains the contemporary transformation of the concept of art. For him, Form in Gothic has more importance in connection to the art of his time than to the history of art. Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch', 70-71. 43 As Waite remarks, Utitz criticizes Worringer for his approach to Gothic art, for his emphasis on metaphysics and religion, as well as for his approach to and expansion of Riegl’s concept of absolute artistic will. Like Worringer, Utitz does not seek to ally aesthetics with the theory of beauty exclusively. Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism', 35. Waite also mentions the critical positions adopted by writers such as Rudolf Arnheim and E. H. Gombrich towards the work of Worringer. ———, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism', 19. 44 Joseph Frank remarks: ‘Heinrich Wölfflin certainly taught me something about the possibilities of formal analysis; and I was led to Wilhelm Worringer by his influence on T. E. Hulme and the constant references to him in English criticism.’ Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1991), xiv. 45 Current research exploring the connections between Worringer, Hulme and Read includes: William C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde ([Toronto]: University of Toronto Press, 1972). Also, Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). Also, Miranda B. Hickman, The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H. D., and Yeats (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2005). 46 T. E. Hulme and Herbert Read, eds., Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1936 [1924]), x. The introduction to Speculations is written by Herbert Read. 18 already in favour of Worringer’s approach to abstraction.47 Read edited Hulme’s Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (1924), where Hulme explained Worringer’s views on art in ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’. While working as a curator of the collection of Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum,48 Read contacted Worringer, with whose ideas he resonated, and translated Form in Gothic in English in 1927.49 Worringer’s dichotomies are highlighted and discussed in the writings of both Hulme and Read, who define modes of art-making through opposition in their books. Hulme offers a close, perceptive reading of Worringer’s basic tenets from Abstraction and Empathy; he acknowledges his interest in Worringer’s writings, yet does not exclusively refer to Worringer for the articulation of his own ideas. In his turn, Read prefers to emphasize dichotomy in Worringer’s texts, yet, without pointing to Worringer, also addresses the possible reconciliation of opposites in later texts. Hulme and Read bring to light the key methodological role of antithesis in Worringer’s writings, and rely on antithesis in the articulation of their own discourses. Representational and abstract aspects of art as approached by Worringer are emphasized in the writings of Hulme and Read in particular. In his introduction to the first English edition of Form in Gothic (1927),50 Read draws attention to the necessity of appraising the relationship between sensuous and formal components of perception. He points to a lineage of aesthetic research that addresses matters of form and sense, underscoring the connection between the thought of Lipps and Worringer. Further distinguishing between General Aesthetics (as 47 Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 96. Worringer’s impact on Hulme is regarded as significant by William Spanos, who writes: ‘It was no accident that T. E. Hulme ... appropriated almost entirely Worringer’s aesthetics and principle of artistic periodization as these are presented in Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908), his famous critique of Theodor Lipps’s theory of empathy.’ William V. Spanos, 'Modern Literary Criticism and the Spatialization of Time: An Existential Critique', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 29, No. 1, 1970, 92, 93. 48 David Thistlewood, 'Herbert Read (1893-1968)', Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Education, 24, No. 1/2, 1994, 3. Also, Robin Kinross, 'Herbert Read's "Art and Industry": A History', Journal of Design History, 1, No. 1, 1988, 37. 49 Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, 206. Also, Shulamith Behr and Marian Malet, Arts in Exile in Britain 1933-1945: Politics and Cultural Identity (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), 13. 50 See Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, ix-xiii. Also, Herbert Read, The Forms of Things Unknown: Essays towards an Aesthetic Philosophy (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1963), 145-152. 19 endorsed by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy) and the Theory of Art (visible in Form in Gothic),51 Read assigns to the domain of General Aesthetics the exploration of tone, colour, imagery, and their impact on perception. Such elements, Read explains, are diverse, lacking organization and unity; he demands structure rather than variety from approaches to art instead. ‘Art is ordered expression’,52 Read posits, echoing Worringer’s attention to key features of form.53 Like Worringer, Read differentiates between beauty (which can be recognized in representation, and speaks to the senses) and art – in other words, abstraction. Worringer associates art with abstraction and style in Abstraction and Empathy,54 regarding abstraction as emergent from instinct rather than intellect.55 However, for Read, art has an intellectual value.56 Read’s standpoint from 1927 reflects Worringer’s increasingly pro-intellectual argument from Form in Gothic,57 as well as Current Questions on Art (1921), rather than Worringer’s earlier approach to abstraction from Abstraction and Empathy. In A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959), Read notes that Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic played a key part in the growth of German Expressionism. Pointing to Worringer’s distinction between Northern art, Classical art and Oriental art, Read reflects on the forewords Worringer wrote to Abstraction and Empathy,58 highlighting that Worringer’s explorations provided a historical background for the experimentations 51 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, ix. 52 Ibid. 53 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 30. 54 For instance, Worringer mentions the coexistence of ‘the imitation impulse’ and ‘the art impulse’ in the art of ancient Egypt. Ibid., 12. 55 Ibid., 41. 56 Intellect (or the faculty of the human mind to think, learn, know, reason, and understand) has the power of dimming instinct (or the innate capacity to respond to the world, sometimes equated with impulses and intuitions.) Worringer argues in Abstraction and Empathy. Regarding the contribution of intellect to art-making in Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer denies the intellectual origin of abstract art, which he regards as the work of instinct. Sensuousness and intellect only come together in Classical Greek art, according to him. (Ibid., 19, 34-35, 46.) 57 Although critical of the intellect in Form in Gothic, Worringer displays more tolerance towards the connections between intellect and art; he underscores, for instance, the inclinations of German culture towards intellectuality. (Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 62-63, 114-116, 168-169.) He also signalled the intellectual aspects of German art in Abstraction and Empathy, criticizing its disregards of form. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 31-32. 58 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, vii-xv. 20 conducted by contemporary artists.59 Abstract, expressive, restless art is characteristic for the North of Europe, Read argues, following closely Worringer’s thought; 60 however, unlike Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, A Concise History of Modern Painting also provides extensive discussions of the art of Read’s time. In his epoch, Read finds that, due to straining historical conditions, abstraction is emphasized with increased intensity. 61 For him, the works of Die Brücke [The Bridge] Expressionists bring to mind the art of the French Fauves [Wild Beasts],62 but also the style of the Northern Middle Ages. 63 Worringer hesitated to trace direct connections between Expressionism and Gothic art in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic.64 Read, however, finds the association of Gothic and Expressionist art appealing, despite the differences he notes between the historical and ideological backgrounds of these styles. The Forms of Things Unknown, Read’s collection of essays from 1963, provides him with the opportunity to distinguish once more between abstraction and representation. Following Worringer’s antithetic approach to the abstract-representational relationship, Read favours abstraction, which he recognizes at work in contemporary art. He signals the distinction between contemporary modes of art-making. According to him: ‘It is the distinction between a nihilism or apathy that accepts and expresses the “crepuscular decomposition” which is the historical fact, and a creative positivism that revolts against the tyranny of time and seeks the timeless perfection of an abstract non-figurative art.’ 65 The art of representation, associated by Read with a focus on history, is, according to him, in decline in the second half of the twentieth century. Instead, Read observes that the art of his time brings to the fore a-temporal perfection, and abandons the figurative approach. The antithetic method articulated by 59 Herbert Edward Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969 [1959]), 52- 53. 60 Ibid., 53. 61 Ibid. 62 Read counts Henri Matisse (1869-1954), André Derain (1880-1954), and Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958) among the Fauves. Ibid., 66. 63 Ibid. 64 Charles E. Haxthausen looks at Worringer’s essays from the 1920s, pointing to Worringer’s changing attitude towards the Expressionist movement, as well as towards the connection between Expressionism and Gothic art. See Charles Werner Haxthausen, 'Modern Art After "The End of Expressionism": Worringer in the 1920s' in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, c.1995), 123-126. 65 Read, The Forms of Things Unknown: Essays towards an Aesthetic Philosophy, 146. 21 Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic still influences Read’s thought in 1963.66 Read’s introduction to Worringer’s Form in Gothic comprises an extensive citation from T. E. Hulme’s Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (1924). In ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, a lecture included in Speculations and delivered at London’s Quest Society on 22 January 1914, Hulme reviews Worringer’s oppositional framing of representation and abstraction.67 Three theses direct Hulme’s inquiry: the existence of two distinct types of art (geometrical and vital),68 that have different aims and answer to different intellectual needs; the emergence of each type of art from a specific response to the world; and the association of contemporary geometric art with a response to the world specific to it.69 According to Hulme, Worringer has similar ideas to his own. 70 The debt of Hulme to 66 However, Read does not refer to Worringer in ‘The Reconciling Image’, an essay from The Form of Things Unknown where he draws attention to the common psychological ground between human beings. In ‘The Reconciling Image’, Read brings together a focus on individuality, and an acceptance of instincts and archetypes common to all. (Ibid., 188-205.) Without recognizing it, Read stands very close to Worringer’s thought on interplay and counterplay from Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. 67 Hulme and Read, eds., Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, 75-109. Also, Hickman, The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H. D., and Yeats, 15. 68 For Hulme, the word ‘vital’ points to living in its strong, creative aspect rather than its weak, imitative aspect. Hulme and Read, eds., Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, 77. 69 Ibid., 77-78, 81. To exemplify current geometric art, Hulme points to the work of his friend, Jacob Epstein (1880-1959). 70 Alun R. Jones analyses the differences between the writings of Hulme and Worringer. For instance, he notes Hulme’s approach to empathy, a concept Hulme regards as a transferring human emotion onto objects in the world. In his views on empathy, Hulme comes closer to the thought of Lipps, Jones argues. See Alun R. Jones, 'T. E. Hulme, Wilhelm Worringer and the Urge to Abstraction', The British Journal of Aesthetics, ONE, No. 1, 1960, 4-6. Miriam Hansen, on the other hand, draws attention to the common ground between the thinking of Hulme and Worringer, as apparent in Hulme’s ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’. Hansen notes that Hulme (who attended to the concept of ‘machinery’ more than Worringer) expanded on Worringer’s thought, emphasizing anti-humanism, primitivism, and the isolation of objects from their living contexts. Miriam Hansen, 'T. E. Hulme, Mercenary of Modernism, or, Fragments of Avantgarde Sensibility in Pre-World War I Britain', ELH, 47, No. 2, 1980, 372-373. Regarding the relationship between the writings of Worringer and Hulme, see, for instance, W. Wolfgang Holdheim, 'Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding', boundary 2, 8, No. 1, 1979, 343. Also, Joseph A. Buttigieg, 'Worringer among the Modernists', boundary 2, 8, No. 1, 1979, 359-362. Also, Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism', 17. Also, J. B. Bullen, 'Byzantinism and Modernism 1900-14', The Burlington Magazine, 141, No. 1160, 1999, 665, 674. Also, Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 88-89. 22 Worringer is clearly stated in ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’,71 where Hulme offers a persuasive presentation of Worringer’s thought.72 Like Read, Hulme draws attention to the formal, psychological and cultural levels of the division that Worringer traces between representation and abstraction. In anticipation of his summary of Worringer’s line of argument from Abstraction and Empathy, Hulme signals that the art of the first decade of the twentieth century is fundamentally different from the art of the past. According to him: ... I think that the new art differs not in degree, but in kind, from the art we are accustomed to, and that there is a danger that the understanding of the new may be hindered by a way of looking at art which is only appropriate to the art that has preceded it. The general considerations I put forward are of this kind. The new art is geometrical in character, while the art we are accustomed to is vital and organic.73 Following Worringer, Hulme distinguishes between vital or organic art, specific to pre- modern times, and geometrically oriented art, which he associates with contemporary explorations.74 However, although Hulme draws attention to the persuasive oppositions traced by Worringer, antithesis is actually nuanced in Worringer’s texts. For instance, Worringer may take the side of abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy, but, despite his criticism, does not intend to disparage the urge to empathy and representational art. His interest lies in exploring processes that lead from direct experience to art-making; while asserting the aesthetic validity of art that tends towards abstraction, he prefers to avoid establishing artistic hierarchies. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer refuses to attach value judgments to either geometric or organic art. He cautions: ‘Here, however, we are in no way concerned with the attribution of values, but with the demarcation of boundaries, a process to which 71 Michael Levenson mentions that Hulme found inspiration in Worringer’s theoretical approach more than in the historical framework provided by Abstraction and Empathy. (Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922, 96.) 72 Hulme and Read, eds., Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, 82. 73 Ibid., 76-77. 74 The interest of early twentieth-century artists in mechanical, dehumanized characteristics of art-making is addressed by Jessica Burstein in her book, Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). Contrasting the psychological and mechanically-oriented tendencies of modernism, Burstein relies on the writings of Wyndham Lewis in her analysis. 23 thanks are due if the admiration that is purified by this means grows in relation to both phenomena.’ 75 Antithesis, according to Worringer, supports his examination of representation and abstraction, two modes of art-making for which he wishes to provide memorable theoretical definitions and relevant historical contextualisation. Recent opinions, 1960-2008 Contemporary writers have extended their inquiries beyond highlighting Worringer’s seminal articulation of the abstract-representational opposition; for the last forty years, they have continued to examine the distinctive features of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, the merits and limitations of Worringer’s thought, the less noticeable aspects of Worringer’s discourse on art, the historical and theoretical contexts where Worringer’s writings emerged, as well as Worringer’s influence on various directions of exploration from his time to the present day. For instance, Worringer’s influence on Hulme is discussed by Alun R. Jones in ‘T. E. Hulme, Wilhelm Worringer and the Urge to Abstraction’ (1960). Jones shows that Worringer is only one of the writers who had a significant impact on the thought of Hulme. Readdressing Hulme’s reliance on Worringer’s texts, Jones mentions that Theodor Lipps and Henri Bergson were also relevant for the British writer. The inquiry of Jones implies that Worringer’s influence during his time needs to be re-examined from nuanced rather than monolithic perspectives. Signalling Hulme’s interest in Lipps’ theory of empathy, Jones argues that the impact of Worringer’s ideas is visible, yet not exclusive, in Hulme’s writings. 76 According to Jones, Hulme adopts Worringer’s theoretical framework indeed, but follows the thought of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) when analysing modern art. Worringer, Jones notes, inspires the decisive contrast Hulme draws between geometric and organic art; yet Hulme follows his 75 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 31. However, Worringer is critical towards post-Renaissance art, and complains about contemporary art (where the inner dimension is missing, according to Worringer). Ibid., 27-30. 76 Hulme and Read, eds., Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, 4-6. 24 own path when associating representation with humanism and Romanticism, and abstraction with current interests in machinery, religious beliefs and Classicism.77 In ‘Art and Technical Progress’ (1974), Dennis Duerden draws attention to the outstanding characteristics, as well as limitations, of Worringer’s inquiries. Worringer, according to Duerden, is the creator of the typological profile of the Northerner in Form in Gothic. Both Worringer and Riegl accounted for artistic intentions as embedded in the style of artworks, Duerden notes; however, he questions the capacity of style to reflect artistic objectives comprehensively. For Duerden, the intentions of particular artists cannot be regarded as generic cultural statements.78 Duerden is critical towards Worringer’s generalizing approach. Worringer’s perspective on style as the sum of personal artistic tendencies within an epoch meets with Duerden’s disapproval. Duerden thus exposes the downfalls of Worringer’s interest in an intuitively charted ‘history of feeling.’ W. Wolfgang Holdheim, on the other hand, defends Worringer’s work in ‘Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding’ (1979). Underscoring the fruitfulness of Worringer’s preference for and employment of antithesis, Holdheim regards Abstraction and Empathy as an often cited but rarely read manifesto of abstraction – a classic text of almost instant fame having decisively influenced the field of literary theorising.79 For Holdheim, Worringer’s exploratory approach to abstraction does not establish whether abstraction precedes representation historically, 80 or whether representation and abstraction are paired yet contrastive throughout history. Holdheim exposes the slippage occurring between the historical and theoretical strands of Worringer’s inquiry; nevertheless, Abstraction and Empathy appears to Holdheim refreshing and non-dogmatic.81 Drawing attention to the 77 Ibid., 6. 78 Dennis Duerden, 'Art and Technical Progress', Transition, No. 45, 1974, 45. 79 Holdheim, 'Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding', 339. 80 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer nevertheless places the abstract urge at the beginning of art. In his words: ‘The primal artistic impulse has nothing to do with the rendering of nature. It seeks after pure abstraction as the only possibility of repose within the confusion and obscurity of the world-picture, and creates out of itself, with instinctive necessity, geometric abstraction.’ Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 44. Worringer expands on the opinions of Lipps in this respect; Lipps regards the rendering of general qualities of form (or the ‘schema,’ to employ his vocabulary) as the initial goal of artistic renderings. However, Lipps distinguishes ‘schema’ from both abstract generality and concrete specificity. See Theodor Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, vol. I (București: Meridiane, 1987 [1903]), 290-291. 81 Holdheim, 'Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding', 340-341. Holdheim shows that Worringer attempts to negotiate the tension between historical evolution and theoretical polarity by referring to the 25 variations that emerge in the reading of Worringer’s texts, Holdheim notes the association of three-dimensional space and abstraction in literary theory, and the connections between abstract art and two-dimensionality in art history.82 This ambiguity, Holdheim argues, is occasioned by Worringer’s multilayered approach to the urge to abstraction and to abstraction-oriented art-making. However, although Holdheim defends the relevance of Worringer’s polar approach to artistic forms, he also points to a monistic moment in Worringer’s text.83 The paragraphs that conclude the ‘Theoretical Section’ of Abstraction and Empathy, Holdheim observes, expose the common ground of the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction: namely, the liberating loss of self in aesthetic contemplation. According to Worringer, viewers feel free when engaging with art they find enjoyable: they forget about pressures and constraints experienced in the world.84 Yet Holdheim insists that Worringer’s fame rests on his employment of opposition, even though this strategy has its limitations. Holdheim points to some of these insufficiencies himself: he explains that Worringer overemphasizes the harmony characterizing the contexts where empathy emerges, and offers a narrow reading of abstraction as experiential homelessness.85 Nevertheless, addressing and correcting the thought of Worringer is always possible, according to Holdheim, who argues for the importance of Worringer’s antitheses. Duality (the necessary form taken by antithesis) is dialectic: it fosters dynamic debate in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, Holdheim maintains.86 For him, Worringer’s oppositional framework is worth pursuing: it actually paves the way to an expansion of consciousness.87 In ‘Worringer among the Modernists’ (1979),88 Buttigieg singles out Worringer’s focus on abstraction. However, he observes that, where Holdheim reads Worringer’s abstraction as a domains of religion (a faith-based perspective on the world) and epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), where history and theory can coexist even when opposed. 82 Ibid., 341. 83 Ibid., 342. ‘Monism’ refers to a belief in oneness rather than duality. See Jonathan Schaffer, 'Monism', in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (2003). 84 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 24-25. 85 Holdheim, 'Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding', 350. 86 Ibid., 355. 87 In Form in Gothic, Worringer indeed argues that genuine objectivity emerges from approaching the writing of history and theory from opposite perspectives, and that such a strategy widens the otherwise limited Ego. Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 2-3. 88 Buttigieg, 'Worringer among the Modernists', 362. 26 tendency to deorgancization and defamiliarization, attention is needed in explaining precisely how such a process takes place. Worringer’s views on the defamiliarizing effect of abstraction are actually very specific, Buttigieg argues. He further investigates the influence of Worringer on literary criticism,89 noting Hulme’s role in bringing the ideas of Worringer to the attention of early twentieth-century English-speaking audiences.90 Buttigieg underscores the limitations of literary interpretations that have distorted, among other sources, Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, and asks for careful analyses of literary texts.91 Worringer’s role in a context that saw the emergence of modern German art is delineated by Joseph Masheck in ‘Raw Art: “Primitive” Authenticity and German Expressionism’ (1982). For Masheck, Worringer is a supporter of Expressionist art-making and a critic of conventional practices that appear connected to Impressionism.92 Comparing French and German art at the turn of the twentieth century, Masheck points to the purity and cerebral qualities of French works. He regards German art as emotive and expressive instead.93 According to Masheck, Worringer defends Expressionist tendencies, sees in primitive art an alternative to Classicism, and draws attention to the qualities of Gothic,94 an approach to art- making at home in Germany. 95 Abstraction and Empathy, Masheck points out, provides a key theoretical statement to German modern art.96 Yet Worringer’s views do not meet with the approval of Ernst Hans Gombrich, from whom Worringer appears as a cultural relativist.97 In ‘ “They Were All Human Beings: So Much Is 89 Ibid., 359. 90 To Buttigieg, Hulme seems more influenced by Bergson than by Worringer. Ibid., 360. 91 Ibid., 365. 92 Masheck, 'Raw Art: "Primitive" Authenticity and German Expressionism', 95-96. 93 Ibid., 95. 94 Ibid., 96-98. 95 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 141-142. Worringer argues that Gothic art developed along systematic, organized lines in France, where it initially emerged. Instead, according to Worringer, Gothic art as such flourished in Germany, where verticality, exaggeration and excess found space for expression. In Worringer’s words: ‘The land of pure Gothic culture is the Germanic North. And the assertion made at the beginning of our investigation is so far justified, that the true architectonic fulfilment of Northern will to form is to be found in German Gothic.’ 96 Masheck, 'Raw Art: "Primitive" Authenticity and German Expressionism', 110. 97 Gombrich cites from Worringer’s Form in Gothic to point to the relativism of Worringer’s perspective. In a chapter from Form in Gothic entitled ‘The Science of Art as Human Psychology’, Worringer writes: ‘The only stable thing in the history of mankind is its actual material, the accumulation of human energies, illimitably variable, but compounded of its single factors and their resultant forms of expression. The variability of these psychical categories, which have found their formal expression in the development of style, progresses by mutations, the orderliness of which is regulated by the fundamental process governing all development in 27 Plain”: Reflections on Cultural Relativism in the Humanities’ (1987), Gombrich, who states his disapproval of relativism, mentions he does not believe that truth is different for each generation. The common ground human beings share is more important for Gombrich than the perpetual mobility of phenomena in the world.98 Worringer, on the other hand, regards generic concepts like ‘man’ and ‘art’ (which could lead to the assertion of common ground between human beings) as unsupportive of the writing of art history.99 Gombrich also points to the problems generated by Worringer’s exemplifications. If, for instance, Northern artists were generically restless, as Worringer claims, Gombrich asks how Worringer’s theory could account for the work of Jan van Eyck (1395-1441), Johannes Vermeer (1632-45), or Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840).100 For Gombrich, Worringer’s argument is circular: it searches for the confirmation of intuitions by adducing only supportive evidence.101 Worringer appears to Gombrich as a writer whose discourse accounts for cultural flux and change – two conditions that lead to the emergence of abstraction and that characterise, from Worringer’s viewpoint, the world and its phenomena. In ‘Analysis and Construction: The Aesthetics of Carl Einstein’, Neil Donahue addresses Worringer’s perspective on abstraction and primitivism.102 Signalling the interdisciplinary relevance of Worringer’s thoughts on abstract art,103 Donahue notes that Worringer’s defence human history: the chequered, fateful adjustment of man to the outer world.’ Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 13. 98 E. H. Gombrich, ' "They Were All Human Beings: So Much Is Plain": Reflections on Cultural Relativism in the Humanities', Critical Inquiry, 13, No. 4, 1987, 690. Worringer could perhaps have argued that the tormenting changes life brings along make the topic of representation, and that abstract art – a creative approach he defends in Abstraction and Empathy – seeks precisely to liberate the viewer from uncertainty and change by recourse to elements suggestive of immutability (such as geometrical forms). Gombrich’s reading of Form in Gothic may be shaped by his accounting for only one strand of argument Worringer proposes; as further sections of this thesis point out, Worringer’s discursive method consists in approaching his topics from opposite points of view, in order to construct an objective argument. 99 Worringer employs the term ‘man’ to refer to human beings in general throughout Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 13. 100 Gombrich, ' "They Were All Human Beings: So Much Is Plain": Reflections on Cultural Relativism in the Humanities', 692. 101 The circularity of Worringer’s argument has also been noted in Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism', 30-31. The observations of Gombrich and Waite are justified; however, Worringer approaches interplay in mostly generic terms (he does the same with regard to antithesis), addressing overall stylistic tendencies rather than the practices of particular artists, or specific works of art. 102 Neil Donahue, 'Analysis and Construction: The Aesthetics of Carl Einstein', The German Quarterly, 61, No. 3, 1988, 420. 103 Ibid. 28 of ‘primitivism’ supports the understanding of abstraction in an early twentieth-century context.104 Worringer distinguishes between affective (or representational) and absolute (or abstract) art,105 according to Donahue, and rejects emotive, rational naturalism.106 The response of human beings to their world in primitive times as well as at the beginning of the twentieth century is characterised by fear for Worringer, Donahue observes. 107 He underscores that Worringer considers form a key feature of both primitive and abstract art.108 For David Morgan in ‘The Idea of Abstraction in German Theories of the Ornament from Kant to Kandinsky’ (1992), Worringer is the writer of a remarkable text. In the words of Morgan: ‘Indeed, shortly after the turn of the century, empathy was starkly opposed to abstraction in what has become arguably the most discussed doctoral dissertation in German art history [i. e., Abstraction and Empathy].’ 109 Morgan highlights the key direction of Worringer’s research: the historical examination of art from cultures where abstraction and linearity hint to a tendency to transcend the natural realm.110 He notes that Worringer’s abstract art emphasizes inorganic and transcendent aspects, as well as a distancing from bodily forms. 111 Explaining the particularities of Worringer’s approach, Morgan emphasizes that Worringer’s abstraction includes representational form where negotiated through line and geometry.112 Abstraction as understood by Worringer does not exclude representational values, Morgan maintains. 104 Ibid., 420-421. 105 Ibid., 422. 106 Ibid., 423. According to Holdheim, Worringer appreciates naturalism but not imitation. Holdheim, 'Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding', 341. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 27-31. Worringer’s distinction between naturalism and imitation reflects the tensions at work in the art of his time. Extensive research would be necessary regarding the particularities of the relationship between naturalism and imitation at the beginning of the twentieth century; such an inquiry must be conducted in a different essay. 107 Donahue, 'Analysis and Construction: The Aesthetics of Carl Einstein', 42. 108 Ibid., 423. 109 David Morgan, 'The Idea of Abstraction in German Theories of the Ornament from Kant to Kandinsky', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 50, No. 3, 1992, 238. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 Morgan rightly points to this characteristic of Worringer’s framing of abstraction. Indeed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, art had seen the emergence of movements such as Jugendstil [Youth Style], Fauvism, and Synthetism, where the linear approach to form balanced abstract and representational tendencies. Jugendstil was well represented in the architecture of Munich, where Worringer resided at the time of his writing Abstraction and Empathy. See Kathryn B. Hiesinger, Art Nouveau in Munich: Masters of Jugendstil from the Stadtmuseum, Munich, and Other Public and Private Collections (Philadelphia and Munich: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 29 Anthony Vidler, in ‘Art History Posthistoire’ (1994), observes that Worringer articulated his thought in a context where form was attentively theorised. 113 According to Vidler, issues of subjectivity, anxiety and gender become visible in the historical theories of form as shaped by Riegl and Worringer, for instance. Key elements of such theories include, Vidler explains, the fear of space and time, a focus on describing distancing from a psychological perspective, and the attention to the uncanny. 114 Donahue, in his introduction to Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (c. 1995), observes that Worringer had a successful career, yet that his explorations did not meet with the approval of his academic colleagues. Unconventional, eccentric, fascinating and widely influential, Worringer’s approach inspired an international community of artists, critics of art and film, writers, theorists and psychologists, according to Donahue.115 Form in Gothic appears to him as a manifesto for the German avant-garde. Like Lewer, Donahue finds that current research mentions Worringer in passing, and tends to be conducted from the perspective of literary studies rather than art history and theory. Worringer’s strongly rhetorical discourse qualifies him as a scholar-artist rather than as a positivist historian, Donahue maintains. In his words: Worringer is, on the one hand, an art historian who creates a narrative of the past that favours nonnaturalistic art (and which is thereby antithetical to Gombrich’s history of naturalistic art in Art and Illusion), and, on the other hand, an art critic who employs in his early books an engaged and, by all evidence, highly persuasive rhetoric that addresses that historical narrative to the art of his contemporaries. He thus brings his historical narrative and his immediate rhetoric to bear on the unsettled questions at the time of the value and significance of abstract and Expressionist art.116 Prestel, and Münchner Stadtmuseum, 1988). For a brief introduction to Fauvism and Synthetism, see Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting, 34-47. 113 Anthony Vidler et al., 'The Object of Art History [Art History Posthistoire]', The Art Bulletin, 76, No. 3, 1994, 407-409. 114 Ibid., 409. 115 Donahue, 'Introduction: Art History or "Sublime Hysteria"?', 1-9. 116 Ibid., 10. 30 Invisible Cathedrals addresses various facets of Worringer’s explorations.117 For instance, in ‘Against Expressionism: Materialism and Social Theory in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy,’ Michael Jennings notes that Worringer’s text cannot be considered as reflective of Expressionism, although Worringer would have known the expressive work of the Fauves [Wild Beasts] around the time of his writing Abstraction and Empathy.118 Geoffrey C. W. Waite, in ‘Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism’, highlights the many roles Worringer plays in his debut book, as well as the effect of these roles on Worringer’s discourse.119 In ‘Abstraction and Apathy: Crystalline Form in Expressionism and in the Minimalism of Tony Smith’, Joseph Masheck argues that Worringer did not seek balance in his writing; he selected topics acceptable to an academic public, but responded to contemporary artistic concerns.120 Worringer, in order to connect abstract and pre-Classical art effectively, needed to assume that his public did not understand abstraction, Masheck explains. He reads the title ‘Abstraction and Empathy’ as historically charged: art, Masheck’s Worringer implies at the beginning of the twentieth century, began with abstraction, became representational, and turned abstract once more.121 In ‘Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch’ (Invisible Cathedrals, c. 1995), Magdalena Bushart finds that Worringer’s success was influenced by the moment in time when his books were published, and by their reception. Unambiguously nationalist – and antithetic to Southern European Classicism on such grounds – Worringer’s method is racial-psychological, Bushart points out.122 Worringer, Bushart explains, wanted to kindle scholarly discussion; his preference for debate is revealed in Abstraction and Empathy. Bushart observes that many passages of Worringer’s book engage polemically with coeval art-historical writings. Yet, where Worringer’s academic colleagues did not regard his inquiries as reflective of historical truth, the books of Worringer offered to 117 References to the essays of Joanna E. Ziegler and Charles W. Haxthausen are included in sections to follow such as ‘Form in Gothic: interplay readdressed’, and ‘Worringer and Expressionism: late twentieth-century perspectives’. 118 Jennings, 'Against Expressionism: Materialism and Social Theory in Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', 88. 119 Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism', 23. 120 Joseph Masheck, 'Abstraction and Apathy: Crystalline Form in Expressionism and in the Minimalism of Tony Smith' in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, c.1995), 41-42. 121 Ibid. 122 Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch', 74-75. 31 artists the chance of discovering the continuity between their inquiries and the art of the past, according to Bushart.123 Bushart questions the direct association of Worringer’s writings with Expressionism. For her, Worringer’s texts reflect the concept of ‘changing time’, or ‘epochal shift’ [Zeitenwende], which involved the critique of contemporary society and culture at the beginning of the twentieth century.124 Highlighting the roots of the link between Worringer’s research and Expressionist practices, Bushart writes: ‘Here, in this critique of modernism, lie then also the actual points of contact between Worringer’s understanding of art and the theoretical concept of the Expressionists.’ 125 In Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline (1996), Mark Rosenthal focuses on the contribution of Worringer to writing about abstraction and about its creators. Worringer, for Rosenthal, plays a prophetic role in the early years of the twentieth century. Analysing abstraction from a psychological perspective in Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer notes the capacity of abstract art to offer emotional relief from a tormenting world; Rosenthal underscores Worringer’s exploration of the connections between artists and their cultural environments, as well as Worringer’s analysis of abstraction as observed in the culture of Northern Europe.126 Readdressing abstraction in German art and thought, Morgan, in ‘The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to Expressionism’ (1996), underscores Worringer’s debt to Kant, Schopenhauer and Lipps.127 For Morgan, the will to abstraction as approached by Worringer resonates with Schopenhauer’s mention that art facilitates, through contemplation, a temporary escape from the pressures of will.128 Contrasting empathy and abstraction, Worringer narrows Lipps’ definition of empathy to the realm of the organic –129 this is a strategy that permits Worringer to define abstraction as geometric, inorganic, 123 Ibid., 69-72. 124 Ibid., 72. 125 Ibid. 126 Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century, 8-9. 127 Morgan, 'The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to Expressionism', 320-324. 128 Ibid., 320. 129 Ibid., 322. 32 crystalline, and life-denying, Morgan explains.130 For him, the influence of Worringer’s thought on Expressionist artists (more particularly, on Der Blaue Reiter [The Blue Rider] group) is debatable.131 Worringer, according to Morgan, did not write in exclusive defence of abstraction; the concept of ‘style’ as employed in Abstraction and Empathy included all art forms – representational forms included – that did not rely on the urge to empathy, Morgan explains.132 Once more, Morgan draws attention to the complexity of Worringer’s antithetic pairings. Allan Antliff and J. B. Bullen further underscore the impact of Worringer’s writings on avant-garde movements. In ‘Cosmic Modernism: Elie Nadelman, Adolf Wolff, and the Materialist Aesthetics of John Weichsel’ (1998), Antliff points out that Worringer disputed the privileged position verisimilitude held in early twentieth-century aesthetics. Worringer, according to Antliff, contrasted the culturally rooted psychological tendencies that allowed for the emergence of mimetic and non-mimetic approaches to art-making.133 Drawing attention to the influence of Worringer on Hulme, Bullen mentions the special will to form made visible in Byzantine art as discussed by Riegl and Worringer, two writers whose books Hulme had read between 1911 and 1913.134 Bullen, in ‘Byzantinism and Modernism 1900- 14’, maintains that Hulme consciously explored the connections between Byzantinism and modernism following from Worringer’s historically focused approach to Byzantine art. In ‘Interpreting Primitivism, Mass Culture and Modernism: The Making of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy’ (2000), Mary Gluck emphasizes the merits of Worringer’s debut book. She regards it as a seminal text that opened the way to the understanding of primitivism, and mentions Abstraction and Empathy never went out of print for forty years. 135 To Gluck, Worringer appears as a cultural innovator.136 According to her: 130 Ibid. 131 Ibid., 324. 132 Ibid. 133 Allan Antliff, 'Cosmic Modernism: Elie Nadelman, Adolf Wolff, and the Materialist Aesthetics of John Weichsel', Archives of American Art Journal, 38, No. 3/4, 1998, 20. 134 Bullen, 'Byzantinism and Modernism 1900-14', 674. 135 Joanna E. Ziegler also notes: ‘[Abstraction and Empathy] has never gone out of print because of its utility in signalling Modernism’s imminence, and in all its branches, so concisely.’ See Joanna E. Ziegler, 'Worringer's Theory of Transcendental Space in Gothic Architecture: A Medievalist's Perspective' in Neil H. Donahue, 33 The treatise [i. e., Abstraction and Empathy] has been alternately describes as the founding text of German Expressionism, as the intellectual catalyst of Anglo-British modernism, as well as the theoretical forerunner of twentieth-century formalism. But the enduring resonance of the work cannot be explained simply in terms of its influence. Like so many modern manifestos of genius... Abstraction and Empathy is a work of creative imagination in its own right.137 Pointing to the mixed responses to Worringer’s text, as well as to its lack of popularity in academic circles, Gluck explains Abstraction and Empathy proved too speculative for the needs of art historians.138 Nevertheless, Abstraction and Empathy helped pave Worringer’s way to academic acceptance, Gluck comments; she finds that Worringer’s trajectory, which led from rejection to eventual incorporation by the establishment, is specific to avant-garde initiatives in capitalist contexts.139 Mark Jarzombek, in ‘The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, and History’ (2000), considers Worringer a historian rather than a theorist of empathy and its manifestations.140 According to Jarzombek, Abstraction and Empathy makes visible the transition from a philosophical focus on empathy to the addressing of empathy in aesthetics, history and culture.141 Worringer, Jarzombek notes, attempted to provide historiographic explanations for the workings of will, but wrote from a perspective that did not account for the actual psychology of artists;142 in other words, interpretation overrode artistic motivation in Abstraction and Empathy. Empathy accompanies civilisation in its progress, Jarzombek’s Worringer comments. In Gothic art, Jarzombek observes the complementarity of Worringer’s abstraction and empathy.143 Although Abstraction and Empathy did not focus particularly on Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, c.1995), 107-108. 136 Gluck, 'Interpreting Primitivism, Mass Culture and Modernism: The Making of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', 165. 137 Ibid., 154. 138 Ibid., 155. 139 Ibid., 167. 140 Mark Jarzombek, The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 64. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid. 143 Ibid. 34 the possibility of balancing empathy and abstraction in the art of Worringer’s time, Jarzombek mentions that Herbert Read, for instance, followed this line of research.144 Worringer’s writings are associated with German Expressionism, English Vorticism and early abstraction by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh in Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (2004). 145 Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh underscore the key contrast in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy: the opposition between geometric abstraction and naturalistic representation.146 As seen by Worringer, these styles of art-making are expressive of two antithetic responses to the world: withdrawal on the one hand, and engagement on the other. Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh signal Worringer’s debt to Lipps’ theory of empathy, as well as to Alois Riegl’s approach to artistic will,147 and mention the similarities Worringer observes between primitive and modern art – two instances revealing that, in situations of restlessness and fear, human beings tend to adopt an abstract approach to art-making.148 For Lewer in Post-Impressionism to World War II (2006), Worringer appears more as an art critic than as a historian or theoretician of art.149 Noting the significant role of critics in delineating the terms of early twentieth-century aesthetic discussions, Lewer points to Worringer in particular and, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, writes that he makes an unfashionable topic for art historical attention.150 She nevertheless acknowledges Worringer’s widespread influence at the beginning of the twentieth century, and finds that Worringer addressed ‘primitive’ art, the condition of alienation, and abstraction as generative force, in terms relevant for the art of his age.151 144 Ibid., 65. Also see Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting. Also, Herbert Read, 'The Reconciling Image' in The Forms of Things Unknown: Essays towards an Aesthetic Philosophy, ed. Herbert Read (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1963). 145 Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 86. 146 Ibid. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid. 149 Lewer, Post-Impressionism to World War II, x. 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid., 57-58. 35 Katharina Lorenz and Jas’ Elsner mention that Worringer’s approach to psychological matters includes racist overtones.152 In ‘ “On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory”: Translators’ Introduction’ (2008), Lorenz and Elsner remark that racism informs Worringer’s angle on artistic will in both Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. However, they do not see Worringer as a ‘... real apostle of a Nazi version of Kunstwollen’.153 In ‘ “Pushing the Limits of Understanding”: The Discourse on Primitivism in German Kukturwissenschaften, 1880-1930’(2008), Doris Kaufmann regards Worringer as a historian of the similarity between ‘primitive’ art and modern art (especially abstraction).154 Abstraction and Empathy, Kaufmann notes, reflected the interest of Worringer’s contemporaries in psychological matters; Worringer, like Kandinsky for instance, addressed the relationship between artists and their epoch, between artistic form and content in Abstraction and Empathy.155 The approach of Worringer signalled a shift in early twentieth-century efforts of appraising the aesthetic value of ‘primitive’ art, Kaufmann observes. 156 She explains that intuition assisted the early twentieth-century art historical interpretation of temporally remote epochs.157 In her words: ‘Art historians attested with pathos to the imagination, the capacity 152 Katharina Lorenz and Jas' Elsner, ' "On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory": Translators' Introduction', Critical Inquiry, 35, No. 1, 2008, 37. In their text, Lorenz and Elsner address Erwin Panofsky’s essay, ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art’ (1925); Worringer’s name features in their article for the purpose of illustrating ‘racism’ as operational in art writing. Concerning Panofsky’s approach to Kunstwollen (an approach acknowledging Riegl’s definition of the concept) Lorenz and Elsner write: ‘With some prescience, Panofsky notes that “the will to unveil analogies can easily lead to interpreting the phenomenon in question in capricious and even brutal ways” (p. 65) – which may be said to foresee some of the racist and Nazi uses to which the notion of a collective will came to be put only after a decade or so after this essay was published.’ Lorenz and Elsner, ' "On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory": Translators' Introduction', 37. As Lorenz and Elsner note, though, Worringer had completed Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic before Panofsky published his essay, so Panofsky’s prescience with regard to the Nazi approach to analogy may extend from 1925 onwards, but not towards Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, two books published between 1908 and 1910. Panofsky might have had the texts of Worringer in mind when mentioning the impulsiveness of analogical thinking. However, he did not refer specifically to Worringer’s writings in ‘ “On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory” ’. Tempting as it might be to associate Worringer’s explorations with hermeneutic caprice and brutality, the issue of race as made visible in his books is far too complex to be approached as ‘racism’ only; it requires further investigation to an extent that footnotes do not have the space to accommodate. 153 Lorenz and Elsner, ' "On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory": Translators' Introduction', 37. 154 Doris Kaufmann, ' "Pushing the Limits of Understanding": The Discourse on Primitivism in German Kulturwissenschaften, 1880-1930', Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 39, No. 3, 2008, 436. 155 Ibid. 156 Ibid., 138. 157 Ibid., 439. 36 for empathy, and to the personality of the researcher as a solution to the epistemological problem of “foreign times and foreign art”.’ 158 Worringer, Kaufmann points out, conducted his research within a context where scholarly investigation sought to highlight eternal, unchanging aspects of art that arise in the course of time, but survive time’s passage. Such approaches to art-making could be encountered in ethnographic museums at the turn of the twentieth century. Preparing to write Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer had indeed visited Paris in 1906 and had spent time at the Trocadéro Museum, a place where he could experience pre-Renaissance art directly and where, according to his 1948 foreword, the thoughts that took shape in Abstraction and Empathy first came into being. 158 Ibid. 37 Gazing in the mirror of history: Worringer’s forewords to Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic Worringer gives an enticing account of the occasion that sparked his interest in researching towards Abstraction and Empathy. In his 1948 foreword to the book, Worringer includes his reminiscence of a day at the Trocadéro Museum in Paris. Setting an unremarkable stage for an event that proved crucial for the direction of his dissertation (namely, Georg Simmel’s visit of Trocadéro), Worringer writes: A grey forenoon destitute of all emotional atmosphere. Not a soul in the museum. The solitary sound: my footsteps ringing in the wide halls in which all other life is extinct. Neither does any stimulating force issue from the monuments, cold plaster reproductions of medieval cathedral sculpture. I compel myself to study ‘the rendering of drapery’. Nothing more. And my impatient glance is frequently directed towards the clock.1 The disengagement Worringer experienced at the Trocadéro Museum seems to reflect the lifelessness of the setting. Wide halls, monuments, and plaster reproductions appear grey and cold to him; medieval cathedral sculpture – a topic Worringer approached with much sensitivity in Abstraction and Empathy –2 does not seem to appeal to Worringer in 1906. Against a background skilfully depicted as dull, Worringer highlights the exhilaration occasioned by Simmel’s visit. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer employs similarly strong contrasts when articulating the relationship between the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction. On the one hand, the urge to empathy arises in response to organic aspects of nature, to vitality, happiness and beauty;3 on the other hand, the urge to abstraction requires the elision of lifelike features, giving artistic expression to a state of restlessness and fear inspired by the complexity of phenomena.4 Worringer makes visible his attention to 1 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, viii-ix. 2 Ibid., 118-120. 3 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 14-15. 4 Ibid., 15-16. 38 emotional effect in his reminiscence from 1948; he relies on the same strategy of articulating strong contrasts as in Abstraction and Empathy.5 1908: first foreword to Abstraction and Empathy At different points in time, Worringer wrote new forewords for Abstraction and Empathy. These short texts bring to light an array of discursive strategies also observable in Worringer’s books. For instance, in his foreword to the first edition of Abstraction and Empathy (Munich, September 1908),6 Worringer finds fault with his newly published book: he mentions that he has already outgrown his research, and that he is strongly aware of its deficiencies.7 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer argued that abstraction-oriented art reveals a need for distancing from a world that artists regard as troubling. 8 Exigent towards his own writing, Worringer distances himself from his recent research in his first foreword. His criticism of, and distancing from, his own ideas becomes an integral part of his method of inquiry in Form in Gothic (1910).9 Worringer’s 1908 foreword addresses the distribution and reception of Abstraction and Empathy in positive terms. Mentioning that readers interested in art and culture received his book well and encouraged him to make it publically available,10 Worringer remarks that his contemporaries considered his studies relevant. Magdalena Bushart brings historical evidence that supports his claims. In ‘Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch’ , Bushart cites Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke (1888-1978) – the wife of painter August Macke (1887-1914) – who remembers that early twentieth-century artists found inspiration in Worringer’s books. According to Erdmann-Macke: 5 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 14-18. 6 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, xiii-xiv. 7 Ibid., xiii. 8 Ibid., 15-22. 9 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 2-3. 10 Regarding the reception of Worringer’s work in his time, Magdalena Bushart notes that academics were reticent with regard to the theses advanced in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, but that Worringer’s books met with popular success instead. See Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch', 69-71. 39 ... [T]he books by Worringer that appeared at that time, Abstraction and Empathy and Form Problems in the Gothic, had an enthusiastic circle of well-informed followers among young artists; most of them bought a copy or lent and borrowed it among themselves. Finally, for once, there was an academic who was receptive to and understanding of these new ideas, who would perhaps step up for them and defend them against so many conservatively inclined art historians, who rejected from the outset everything new and unusual, or didn’t even bother with it to begin with.11 Although Worringer did not focus on the art of his contemporaries in either Abstraction and Empathy or Form in Gothic,12 Erdmann-Macke underscores that, for early twentieth-century artists,13 Worringer’s works bridged the past and present in art. Franz Marc (1880-1914) also appreciated the ideas of Worringer. In a letter to Kandinsky from February 1912, Marc mentioned the disciplined approach of Worringer to writing, and noted Worringer’s contribution would be much needed in the Blue Rider Almanac. ‘I am just reading Worringer's Abstraktion und Einfühlung [Abstraction and Empathy], a good mind whom we need very much. Marvellously disciplined thinking, concise and cool, extremely cool’,14 Marc wrote to Kandinsky. The almost complete absence of contemporary artists from Abstraction and Empathy did not influence Marc’s opinion on Worringer’s text and its qualities. The ‘cool’, distanced approach adopted by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy actually appealed to Marc. Marc’s insistence that Worringer be associated with the Blue Rider indirectly draws attention to the relevance of Worringer’s work for artistic inquiries at the beginning of the twentieth century. 11 Ibid., 70. 12 Worringer mentions artists such as Adolf Hildebrand (1847-1921), Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), and Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) in Abstraction and Empathy. See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 22, 84, 90, 136, 137. No mention of contemporary artists is made in Form in Gothic. 13 Erdmann-Macke may have had in mind the artists associated with the Expressionist movement, such as Kandinsky, Marc, Münter, Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), Heinrich Campedonk (1889-1957), Albert Bloch (1882-1961), Erich Heckel (1883-1970), Eugen Kahler (1882-1911), Emil Nolde (1867-1956), Max Pechstein (1881-1955), Alfred Kubin (1877-1959), Thomas von Hartmann (c. 1883 - 1956), and David Burliuk (1882-1967). See Klaus Lankheit, The Blaue Reiter Almanac (London: Tate, 2006), 11-29, 261-266. 14 See Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Klaus Lankheit, The Blaue Reiter Almanac (London: Tate, 2006), 30. Also, according to Bushart, Walter Müller-Wulckov regarded Abstraction and Empathy as a document that justified in theory the current changes in art. See Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch', 70-71. 40 Worringer was certainly aware of the artistic investigations of his time, as ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911) reveals. In his 1911 essay, he suggested that contemporary art actually inspired art historical research. He did not specify whether his observation applied to his colleagues, in general, or to himself in particular, but his suggestion is clear: academic writers kept an eye on artistic developments at the beginning of the twentieth century. 15 In his 1908 foreword, Worringer allows for a defining feature of his approach to art history and theory to emerge. He mentions his intention of publishing Abstraction and Empathy in order to foster debate.16 The publication of his research is for him an occasion for lively, stimulating and instructive dialogue. Thus the importance Worringer assigns to the reception of his writing comes to surface. Although he researches the art of the past and draws little attention to the present in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, Worringer nevertheless emphasizes the relational,17 contemporary aspects involved by his approach to writing art history and theory. His 1908 foreword shows Worringer reaching towards his readers. 15 Worringer’s ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ is further discussed in this thesis in ‘ “The Historical Development of Modern Art” (1911): Worringer’s early response to Expressionism’. 16 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, xiii. 17 For Worringer, relationality can manifest in terms of opposition as well as interplay. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between modes of art-making; he finds that differentiation supports clarification in contexts laden with uncertainty. Ibid., 26-27, 30-31. For instance, he traces sharp distinctions between the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction at the beginning of his book. ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4, 6, 14. Nevertheless, Worringer discusses empathy and abstraction as a pair. He continues to employ pairings throughout Abstraction and Empathy, where he brings together ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek art, ancient Greek art and Gothic art, contrasting between them in his analyses. Like in the case of psychological urges, Worringer establishes the particularities of antithetic elements by setting them in relationship – even though he frames such relationships negatively. The relational aspect of Worringer’s discourse thus comes to the fore. For the purposes of this thesis, ‘relationality’ is defined as a phenomenon of connectedness, observable in lived situations and art-making. This definition follows the research of Stephen A. Mitchell, who regards relationality as the intersubjective dimension observable in psychoanalytical situations. S. A. Mitchell argues that even the critics of relationality start from accepting its indisputable existence and pervasive influence. In the words of S. A. Mitchell: ‘We are so much embedded in our relations with others that those very relations are difficult to discern clearly. We are so in the thick of relationality that it is almost impossible to appreciate fully its contours and inner workings.’ Stephen A. Mitchell, Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity (Hillsdale, New Jersey: The Analytic Press, 2000), ix-xiii, xiii. 41 1910: Abstraction and Empathy, third foreword As early as November 1910, Abstraction and Empathy was published for the third time.18 Its reprinting confirmed to Worringer the success of his ideas. In his 1910 foreword, Worringer points to the relevance of his thought for artists and contemporary writers on art; he does not provide details concerning the artistic explorations of his time, but notes the effort of artists to articulate new expressive directions.19 Underscoring that artistic practice reaches towards abstraction from ‘inner developmental necessity’,20 Worringer signals the preoccupation of his contemporaries with personal artistic expression. As noted in his 1908 foreword, Worringer considers Abstraction and Empathy ‘merely experimental,’ 21 yet mentions the significant extent to which the thoughts advanced in his book resonated with the interests of the public of his time. He highlights the insufficiency of the Classical framework influential in the writing of art history and evaluation of art,22 and observes that many of his contemporaries are equally critical towards this standard of value. The 1910 foreword notes the negative response of Worringer’s contemporaries to abstraction- oriented art.23 Although Worringer’s observations may have been grounded in the reality of his day, his emphasis of the tension between his thought and its reception also serves a rhetorical purpose.24 By claiming that abstract art met with little understanding during his time, Worringer indirectly points to the merits of his book, where he bestows great attention upon examining the urge to abstraction in various historical, cultural and geographical 18 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, xiv-xv. 19 Ibid., 14. The artistic movement emergent at the time of Worringer’s writings is Expressionism. Worringer’s relationship to Expressionism surfaces in his texts, ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911) and Current Questions on Art (1921). 20 Ibid., xiv. 21 Ibid. Nevertheless, Worringer also points out that Abstraction and Empathy was written from a scientific perspective. His tendency of combining scientific and experimental aspects of research is brought to fruition in ‘Historical Methods,’ the opening chapter from Form in Gothic. 22 In the opening pages of Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer claims that empathy – a psychological process of rapprochement he recognizes in Greek Classical art, for instance – cannot account for all modes of art- making. (Ibid., 4.) This claim provides Worringer with a starting point for his argument, also connecting his research with the approach to art cultivated by his contemporaries. (———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 10-11.) 23 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, xiv. 24 Regarding Worringer’s rhetoric in Abstraction and Empathy, see Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism', 28-29. Also, as Abstraction and Empathy foregrounds, opposition allows Worringer to provide clear boundaries for abstraction and representation. 42 contexts. As in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, Worringer strengthens and animates his statements by placing them within an oppositional framework. Connecting Abstraction and Empathy to Form in Gothic in his 1910 foreword, Worringer notes that Form in Gothic applies his findings from Abstraction and Empathy to ‘... that complex of abstract art which is closest to us’,25 namely Gothic art.26 Form in Gothic is also published in 1910; since Worringer regards it as a sequel to Abstraction and Empathy, he writes that he has decided not to revise his debut book.27 1918 and 1919: Form in Gothic forewords In his brief forewords to the fourth and fifth editions of Form in Gothic (February 1918, and September 1919 respectively), Worringer emphasizes his reluctance towards readdressing earlier texts. He points out that the new editions of Form in Gothic comprise no changes, since modifications to his text could be interruptive;28 he invites critical opinion on his writing, yet cautions that his responses will be included only in future publications.29 A doubling of the initial number of illustrations for Form in Gothic –30 accompanied once more 25 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, xv. 26 In Form in Gothic, Worringer emphasizes the psychological rather than historical aspects of Gothic in his definition of this approach to art-making (Ulrich Weisstein disapproves of Worringer’s decision, as noted, in the current thesis, in ‘Questioning Worringer: critical discussions on the writings of Worringer and his association with the Expressionist movement’.) According to Worringer, historical Gothic (c. 1150-1500, an approach to art-making, or style, particularly visible in Northern and Central Europe) is more limited than psychological Gothic. Psychological Gothic, Worringer explains, can be already be recognized in the Hallstadt (also ‘Halstatt,’ Early Iron Age, c. 900-400 B.C.) and La Tène (Late Iron Age, c. 450-50 B. C.) periods, in the art of the Migration Period (c. 400-800 A. D.), in Merovingian art (c. 450-751), Romanesque art (c. 1000-1137 A. D.), and in Baroque art (c. 1600-1750). He writes: ‘We repeat, then, that in our opinion the art of the entire Western world, in so far as it had no direct share in antique Mediterranean culture, was in its inmost essence Gothic and remained so until the Renaissance [c. 1300-1600], that great reversal of the Northern development: that is to say, its immanent will to form, often scarcely to be recognized in its outward expression, is the very same which has to receive its clear, untroubled, and monumental expression in mature historical Gothic... And so Gothic, as a term in the psychology of style, also extends beyond the period implied in the academic use of the term, right down to the present day.’ See Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 37-38. Worringer thus extends the domain of the psychological Gothic throughout history, hinting to the visibility of Gothic influence on the art of his time. 27 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, xv. 28 Ibid., xiv. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. The presence of illustrations in Form in Gothic and their absence in Abstraction and Empathy reflects, by contrast, the self-standing quality of Abstraction and Empathy. To a certain extent, Worringer’s debut book emphasizes his interpretations of art rather than the correlation between his argument and actual artworks 43 by no text modifications – is a distinctive feature of the 1919 edition of the book, as Worringer points out. Worringer saw the fourth and fifth editions of Form in Gothic appear after the critical comments of Richard Hamann on his book. In a 1915 review of Worringer’s Form in Gothic for Max Dessoir’s Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft [Journal of Aesthetics and Art History],31 Hamann appraised Worringer’s writings from the perspective of early twentieth-century academic practices. For Hamann, Worringer’s Form in Gothic was certainly relevant for its epoch, but did not respond to scholarly requirements. Hamann connected Worringer’s Form in Gothic to contemporary art-making, acknowledging the artistic qualities of Form in Gothic, but also voicing his reservation with regard to the academic aspects of Worringer’s inquiry. Worringer appeared as a creative writer more than as a scholar to Hamann. In Hamann’s words: And so we appreciate the book [i. e., Form in Gothic] and estimate its value: as a document of a new consciousness in search of a style, as intellectual-spiritual [geistig] adherent of a new artistic movement, to which the Gothic and primitive art, linearity and surface ornament signify a new value... Just as Worringer describes Gothic structures, so appear the works of Expressionists and Cubists, and as a manifesto of Expressionism, as an artistic product, not as a scholarly achievement, one will have also to give this work its due, which was written by someone who is modern, knowledgeable, extremely impressive and probably only too persuasive with words [vielleicht der Worte nur zu mächtiger Mensch]. Time will tell whether [or not] the expressionism of this book will have stood up longer than the art that now already invokes it for legitimation [die sich schon jetzt auf ihn beruft].32 (Worringer does include a Practical Section in Abstraction and Empathy, where he discusses art from a historical, generalizing perspective). 31 In 1910, Worringer mentions having previously published ‘Transcendence and Immanence in Art’ with Dessoir’s Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. See Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, xv. 32 Richard Hamann’s words, translated by Neil Donahue, are cited by Magdalena Bushart in Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch', 71. The text from which Bushart has extracted these words is Hamann’s “Rezension zu Wilhelm Worringers ‘Formprobleme der Gotik’ ”, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 10 (1915), 357-61, 360f. 44 Although he questions the scholarly component of Worringer’s research, Hamann recognizes that Form in Gothic provides intellectual-spiritual support to contemporary Expressionist and Cubist artists. Worringer, in Form in Gothic, offered critics like Hamann an opportunity for dissatisfaction with his academic approach. The first chapter of Form in Gothic, ‘Historical Methods,’ includes Worringer’s claim that objectivity in the writing of art history could only surface from personal responses to art, namely from a widening of Ego (a term that appears capitalized in the 1957 edition of Worringer’s text). In its expanded form, Ego would comprise, according to Worringer, a positive part, as well as its opposite. Worringer intends to account for the contributions of both these parts of Ego to his writings. 33 Casting a shadow of doubt on Worringer’s research methods, Hamann nevertheless underscores the personal qualities of Worringer. Among these qualities, Hamann singles out Worringer’s capacity to elicit and generate emotion. Worringer would further demonstrate his ability to foster empathic connections in his 1948 foreword to Abstraction and Empathy. 1948: Abstraction and Empathy republished When Abstraction and Empathy was published again in May 1948, it included an extensive foreword by Worringer. 34 Worringer took the opportunity to mention his resonance with early twentieth-century interests in readdressing aesthetic standards.35 In this respect, he maintained he saw himself as ‘... the medium of the necessities of the period’.36 Noting the ‘continually effective vitality’ of Abstraction and Empathy,37 Worringer regarded his debut book as an occasion for remembering his early efforts; he recognized in its reprinting an opportunity to place his thought under the critical scrutiny of his now mature gaze. 33 See Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 2-3. Worringer’s approach to Ego extends his reliance on opposition as previously articulated in Abstraction and Empathy. Art historical and theoretical discourse, Worringer argues, can become objective only by accounting for the antithetic viewpoints of Ego and its negative counterpart. The current thesis examines this topic in ‘History and Ego: Worringer’s approach’. 34 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, viii-xiii. 35 Ibid., vii. 36 Ibid., vii, viii. 37 Ibid., vii. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer associates the term ‘vitality’ with organic life. See, for instance, ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 25, 33. 45 The 1948 foreword reveals Worringer’s frequent recourse to the language of animate life –38 a significant stylistic feature for a writer mostly associated with the defence of abstraction and its processes of distancing.39 Geoffrey C. W. Waite, in ‘Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism’ (c. 1995 [1981]), points to the organic metaphors Worringer employs to encourage the emotional participation of his readers.40 Waite thus draws attention to the empathy-reliant, connective, invested aspects of Worringer’s discourse – a surprising set of features in a book that defends the merits of abstraction. Worringer’s narrative of the coming into being of Abstraction and Empathy follows, Waite perceptively notes, the coordinates of a complete life cycle, from insemination to death.41 Indeed, Worringer is attentive to his own ‘living development,’ 42 and, as he mentions in Form in Gothic, focuses on providing ‘... a living interpretation’ of art.43 His cultivation of dynamic, animating features of text draws attention to his interest in the world, and in the opinions of his public. Worringer does not seek to prove the validity of his earlier thought in his 1948 foreword. Abstraction and Empathy has become a historical document for him; he regards it – possibly without modesty – as ‘... a paper that ... has probably run into more editions than any other doctorate thesis can ever have done.’ 44 Nevertheless, having written this work seems strangely impersonal for Worringer in 1948. According to him: ‘The compass of my instinct had pointed in a direction inexorably preordained by the dictate of the spirit of the age.’ 45 38 ‘Animate’ is an attribute of organic and dynamic forms. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer recognizes the animation of living creatures, as well as the animation of objects rendered in the Classical style. See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 98, 133. The term ‘animate’ is also employed by Worringer in Form in Gothic. (Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 8, 14, 32, 105.) Worringer considers that Greek art has the quality of animation. He writes: ‘... Greek art animated this lifeless nature of stone, making it a wonderfully expressive organism.’ ———, Form in Gothic, 105. 39 Regarding the positioning of Worringer’s approach and ideas, see, for instance, Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, ix, xiii. Also, Andreas Michel, ' "Our European Arrogance": Wilhelm Worringer and Carl Einstein on Non-European Art', Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neueren Germanistik, 56, No. 1, 2004, 145-146. Also, Juliet Koss, 'On the Limits of Empathy', The Art Bulletin, 88, No. 1, 2006, 147-148. 40 Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism', 29-31. 41 Ibid., 30. 42 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, viii. 43 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 4. 44 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, ix. 45 Ibid., vii-viii. 46 Worringer prefers to highlight the temporal and historical circumstances that fostered the publication of Abstraction and Empathy, instead of focusing on individual achievements. According to Worringer’s 1948 foreword, his ideas in Abstraction and Empathy were applied in early twentieth-century art.46 In 1910, Worringer had a different opinion on this matter; he emphasized that, although the ‘inner topicality’ of Abstraction and Empathy had made it relevant to early twentieth-century artists, art-making had reached abstract expression independently, through ‘inner developmental necessity’.47 Yet for an artist such as Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) – the partner of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) before the First World War –48 the impact of Worringer’s thought on modern art was beyond doubt.49 She wrote to 46 Ibid., vii. Worringer does not provide further information on this topic in Abstraction and Empathy, Form in Gothic or ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, mentioning no early twentieth-century artworks where he could discern the influence of his ideas. Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter (as following paragraphs note) acknowledge having read Worringer’s work and appreciate Worringer’s thought. Although the impact of his books is highlighted in the writings of Münter and Marc, the extent of Worringer’s influence on them remains unaddressed. In the case of Friedrich Nietzsche’s influence on Expressionist artists, for instance, Donald Gordon supplies specific evidence: he mentions a fragment of text by Nietzsche that inspired the naming of Die Brücke, and also notes that Erich Heckel made a woodcut portraying Nietzsche. See Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 11-18. The connection between Nietzsche and Expressionism is easier to trace; this is not the case with Worringer. Worringer himself proves elusive on the relationship between inner artistic development and the influence of his works on early twentieth-century artists. To my knowledge, only Marc and Münter are cited with regard to their opinion on Worringer in current English publications on Expressionism. The direct connections between Worringer’s explorations and the art of his time thus become difficult to establish. However, Abstraction and Empathy certainly answers the aesthetic and artistic preoccupations of Worringer’s contemporaries, as Marc and Münter confirm. We have also seen that Erdmann-Macke draws attention to the enthusiasm of early twentieth-century artists for the writings of Worringer (although, like Worringer, Erdmann-Macke does not mention the artists she has in mind). Additionally, Worringer’s connections with the artists of his time are made visible in occasions such as: his participation to Reinhard Piper’s The Struggle for Art: The Answer to the “Protest of German Artists” (1911); the presentation at Gereon Club, Cologne (founded by Emmy Worringer, the sister of Wilhelm), of the First Exhibition of the Editors of the Blaue Reiter (1912); the invitation Worringer received to contribute to the second volume of the Blue Rider Almanac; and his addressing recent Expressionist art in Current Questions on Art (1921). See Klaus Lankheit, The Blaue Reiter Almanac (London: Tate, 2006), 17-18, 30. Also, Carl Vinnen, 'Quousque Tandem' in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, eds. Rose-Carol Washton Long, Stephanie Barron, and Ida Katherine Rigby (New York: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993 [1911]), 6-7. Also, Wilhelm Worringer, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art' in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, eds. Rose-Carol Washton Long, Stephanie Barron, and Ida Katherine Rigby (New York: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993 [1911]), 9-12. Also, Rose Carol Washton-Long, Stephanie Barron, and Ida Katherine Rigby, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, 286-287. Further connections between Expressionist theory and art are drawn in the second decade of the twentieth century by Worringer’s acknowledged followers, Paul Fechter and Hermann Bahr. 47 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, xiv. 48 Münter is known to have been an informed participant to the circles where Kandinsky gravitated. See, for instance, Wassily Kandinsky, Annegret Hoberg, and Gabriele Münter, Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter: Letters and Reminiscences, 1902-1914 (Munich and New York: Prestel, 1994). Also, Shulamith Behr, Women Expressionists (New York: Rizzoli, 1988). 47 Worringer in 1952: ‘We know one another now ever since the beginnings of the postimpressionist developments in art, for which you have helped prepare the ground. From those early years, I still have my old copy of your book Abstraction and Empathy, which had such an animating effect at that time.’ 50 The 1948 foreword to Abstraction and Empathy reveals once more Worringer’s attention to his readership. As in his 1908 foreword, Worringer offers Abstraction and Empathy for discussion,51 thus emphasizing the dialogic nature of his practice. Regarding his position towards Abstraction and Empathy as neutral in 1948, he claims he expects to find out from his current readership whether his book is still relevant for them. Worringer’s former distancing from his research is now accompanied by a clearly asserted strategy of rapprochement: namely, by Worringer’s interest in his public. 1957: a new edition of Form in Gothic In the foreword to the 1957 edition of Form in Gothic, as in 1910, Worringer mentions that Abstraction and Empathy had prepared the ground for Form in Gothic.52 Most of his readers remember him for his debut books, Worringer notes, despite his having readdressed his early ideas in subsequent publications. While disagreeing with the preferences of the public, Worringer explains that the reasons for writing the 1957 foreword are personal and emotional. In his words: Understandably, his [i. e., Worringer’s] common sense and his better knowledge do not make it easy for him to say an unreserved yes to this hasty judgment of posterity [regarding the preference of the public for Abstraction and Empathy and Form in 49 For further connections between Worringer and early twentieth-century research and art-making, see, for instance, Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Also, Geoffrey Christophe Perkins, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism (Bern: H. Lang, 1974). Also, Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer. 50 Münter is cited by Magdalena Bushart in Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch', 82. 51 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, viii. 52 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, xv. 48 Gothic]. Yet happily, there is left in him yet another authority, which finds this easier: It is his heart. Therefore this foreword can only express how much his heart rejoices in the fact that with this new edition an opportunity is offered to a new generation of English readers, to participate in the fine venture, to be young again, together with him, the author.53 Distancing and connectivity reach a paradoxical combination in Worringer’s 1957 foreword. Stepping back from his previous as well as current writing, Worringer refers to himself in the third person in 1957. Nevertheless, he also introduces an empathic nuance in his text: he invites readers to join young Worringer in the journey of discovery that was for him Form in Gothic. Appealing to his readers’ emotions but resorting to distancing nevertheless, Worringer employs the strategies that, in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, support the emergence of representational and abstract art. Empathy, or emotional connection, is a characteristic of representational art for Worringer, while abstraction requires the distancing of artists from the world. The forewords Worringer wrote from 1908 to 1957 subtly echo the angle of his approach to abstraction and empathy, interweaving the strategies of discourse that shape his books. Like Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, Worringer’s forewords make visible his partially remote, partially emotive perspective, his emphasis on clear theoretical differentiations as well as his attention to the passionate life of his texts. 53 Ibid. 49 Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory Abstraction and Empathy promises to articulate clear distinctions:1 significantly, the first of these consists in Worringer’s differentiation between the aesthetics of the work of art and the aesthetics of natural beauty.2 When rendered in artworks, the beauty of nature does not necessarily make the work of art beautiful, Worringer explains. ‘... [T]he specific laws of nature have, in principle, nothing to do with the aesthetics of natural beauty’, according to him.3 Worringer makes visible his focus on art-making rather than nature, as well as his preference for underscoring separations between the elements of his inquiry. Nature is ‘... the visible surface of things’ for Worringer.4 Although he mentions his intention to discuss art rather than nature in his book, Worringer frequently employs nature as a term of comparison in his analyses. Thus, Abstraction and Empathy pairs beauty and nature, associating them with the urge to empathy and the art of representation.5 Beauty, according to Worringer, is the value that people see in artworks;6 more specifically, the pleasure onlookers derive from engaging with art.7 Following Lipps, he argues that beauty as observed in art offers its viewers possibilities of experiential rapprochement.8 Form in art is beautiful, Worringer notes, when it displays ‘organic-vital’ characteristics, 9 even in inorganic, 1 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 3. 2 Worringer does not define aesthetics in Abstraction and Empathy, yet employs it in a sense that resonates with Alexander Baumgarten’s use of the term. In his Reflections on Poetry (1735), Baumgarten (1714-62) considers aesthetics to be the science that inquires into things as known through senses. See Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954 [1735]), 78. Worringer extends on Baumgarten’s definition in Abstraction and Empathy, arguing that, in aesthetics as in psychology, objects as apprehended through senses are real only insofar as they are animated by the interest of their viewers. See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 6-7. 3 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 3. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 3, 4, 7, 17, 27, 88, 101-102, 118. 6 Ibid., 13. 7 Ibid., 14. 8 Ibid. For the purposes of this thesis, empathy is defined as experiential rapprochement. 9 Ibid., 17. 50 crystalline, 10 abstract contexts. For Worringer as for Riegl, beauty can therefore characterise abstraction-inclined artworks.11 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer does not attempt to explain the relationship between viewing, nature and beauty, but seeks to illuminate the very conditions that foster the emergence of art.12 Regarding these conditions, Worringer explains that modern aesthetics,13 which operates from the perspective of subjectivism, discusses art in connection with empathy. He notes that one of the philosophers who approached empathy in his writings on aesthetics is Theodor Lipps, a former professor of his.14 Worringer refers to Lipps’ thought throughout Abstraction and Empathy. The theory of empathy, Worringer sets out to demonstrate, cannot be employed to discuss all approaches to art-making.15 He aims to cultivate a subjectivist approach in his book and focuses on viewers, examining their responses to art.16 From this perspective, Worringer 10 Jennings draws attention to the social and political context of Worringer’s preference for the inorganic. In his words: ‘The importance of the anorganic for both Worringer and [Walter] Benjamin must surely be understood as a reaction against the stress on organicism, vitality, and wholeness that dominates the “philosophy” of the German right from vitalism to Nazism.’ Jennings, 'Against Expressionism: Materialism and Social Theory in Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', 99. 11 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4, 17, 18, 105. Worringer draws attention to Riegl’s association of beauty with inorganic, crystalline form. For Riegl, the crystalline approximates the highest form of beauty. (———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 19-20.) In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer employs the term ‘crystalline’ in the same sense as Riegl. 12 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 3-4. 13 Worringer employs the term ‘modern’ to refer to events or practices observed in the early years of the twentieth century. (Ibid., 13, 26, 28.) Focusing on modernity in Germany, Françoise Forster-Hahn points to the diverse and antithetic forces active in German culture around the turn of the twentieth century. Forster-Hahn notes the tensions between patriotism and internationalism, tradition and innovation, fine arts and popular arts, and mentions the German preference for the polemic approach. A significant aspect of modernity as discussed by Forster-Hahn is the rise of independent artists’ associations and private galleries, as well as of publications and publishing houses advocating recent art movements. See Françoise Forster-Hahn, ed., Imagining Modern German Culture, 1889-1910 (Washington and Hanover: National Gallery of Art and the University Press of New England, 1996), 9-10. At the Paris World Fair from 1900, for example, the participation of Germany revealed an interest in conservatism as well as modernism. See, for further details, Forster-Hahn, 'Constructing New Histories: Nationalism and Modernity in the Display of Art' in Françoise Forster-Hahn, Imagining Modern German Culture, 1889-1910 (Washington and Hanover: National Gallery of Art and the University Press of New England, 1996), 77. However, Worringer gives ‘modern’ times a wide span in Abstraction and Empathy; he considers the ‘modern standpoint’ to apply to ‘our generation,’ yet also places the beginning of modern art in the Renaissance. (———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 28, 37.) When this thesis mentions the term ‘modern’ independently of Worringer’s opinion, the term ‘modern’ refers to the period in history that begins in 1900, following Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. 14 Lynton, 'Expressionism', 42. 15 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4. 16 Ibid. 51 explains that empathy can account for only one aspect of relating to the world. He claims that aesthetics can only achieve comprehensiveness once it has included the view from the standpoint opposite to empathy – more specifically, once aesthetics has begun to address for abstract approaches to art-making. Writing about empathy from a perspective that brings together art-making and aesthetics, Worringer presupposes that empathy characterizes aesthetic as well as artistic feeling.17 Before him, Immanuel Kant (a philosopher who influenced Worringer’s methodology) pointed to the creativity of the judgment of taste in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). Positing that the judgment of taste relied on imagination and understanding, 18 Kant observed the active engagement of human imagination with the world. Immanuel Kant and Theodor Lipps: creativity, aesthetics and experience Kant regards imagination as a key power of the mind in The Critique of the Power of Judgment; for him, imagination supports the grasping of objects, and the placing of intuitions besides concepts in response to art. In judgments of taste, Kant notes that imagination does not simply reflect the world. According to him: ‘... [I]f in the judgment of taste the imagination must be considered in its freedom, then it is in the first instance not taken as reproductive as subjected to the laws of association, but as productive and self-active (as the authoress of voluntary forms of possible intuitions)’.19 Kant considers that imagination plays a generative role in the shaping of the discourse of taste. Aesthetic judgment is presented as a creative activity in The Critique of the Power of Judgment. The connection between creativity and contemplation, between art-making and aesthetics, is also signalled by Lipps. In his Aesthetics (1903), Lipps argues that the process of stylisation presupposed contemplating and then articulating the general laws of form as observed in 17 Ibid. 18 For instance, Immanuel Kant and Paul Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1790]), 34 (First Introduction), 76 (Introduction, VII), 78 (Introduction, VIII). 19 Ibid., 124 (General remark on the first section of the analytic). 52 given objects.20 Eliciting the generality of form relied, for Lipps, on interrupting the connection between objects intended for stylisation and their particular surroundings; this activity was based on understanding. Lipps wrote: ‘In order to deduct or select the most general laws of natural formation from a given form, I must have first mastered this form through inner reflection. Selecting also means understanding.’ 21 Lipps illuminates another aspect of the encounter between aesthetics and art-making: he posits that artistic activity is preceded by reflection – in other words, by aesthetic judgment. Following Kant and Lipps, Worringer connects art-making, viewing, and feeling, from the very beginning of Abstraction and Empathy. As his demonstration progresses, Worringer pursues his explorations without signalling his transitions from the theoretical perspective of aesthetics to the practical perspective of art-making. Art-making and aesthetics are equally creative fields for Worringer. Later in his career, Worringer rebalances the relationship between contemporary art-making and theory in favour of theoretical inquiries.22 Yet in Abstraction and Empathy Worringer discusses aesthetics and art-making without asserting the differences between their domains. Worringer, assuming an experiential viewpoint in Abstraction and Empathy, highlights the contrast between two urges that define two ways of approaching aesthetics: the ‘urge to empathy,’ and the ‘urge to abstraction.’ 23 He explains: ‘Just as the urge to empathy as a pre- assumption of aesthetic experience finds its gratification in the beauty of the organic, so the urge to abstraction finds its beauty in the life-denying inorganic, in the crystalline or, in general terms, in all abstract law and necessity.’ 24 20 Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 290-291. Lipps’s Aesthetics [Ästhetik. Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst] was published in 1903 at Leopold Voss (Leipzig and Hamburg). The writings of Lipps still await their publication in English. For the current thesis, I have translated Lipps’ thoughts into English from the 1987 Romanian version of Lipps’ Aesthetics. 21 Ibid., 291. Lipps also points to the aesthetic imposition of geometric laws onto natural objects – he is critical of this process, which he does not regard as stylisation. For him, stylisation consists in setting form free from particularity and accident. (———, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 288-289.) 22 In Current Questions on Art (1921), Worringer comments that Expressionist art-making has become less innovative than science or writing. In these particular circumstances, Worringer applauds the creativity of theoretical domains. See Long, Barron, and Rigby, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, 286-287. Also, from the current thesis, ‘Current Questions on Art (1921): Worringer revisits Expressionism’. 23 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4. 24 Ibid. 53 From the perspective of the psychological processes involved, Worringer’s antithesis makes sense. The urge to empathy could be regarded as a tendency to rapprochement, to being in close contact with the world by means of observation, reflection and art-making, whereas the urge to abstraction could be considered a tendency towards distancing, towards stepping away from the world. In terms of implied motion, Worringer’s title hints to two directions (‘away from’ and ‘towards’) that are indeed antithetic, yet that emerge in response to the same point of reference: the world as experienced by viewers and artists. Abstraction may be associated by Worringer with a tendency of leaving the world behind, yet it still takes shape in the world, in terms specific to it. Common ground thus surfaces between empathy and abstraction from the very start of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy. Worringer establishes further commonalities between the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction by referring both to beauty. Arguing that the urge to empathy manifests in acknowledgment of the beauty of organic aspects of the world,25 he also notes the possible associations of beauty with abstraction.26 For Worringer, when spectators and artists enjoy art, they find it beautiful;27 abstract art, where practiced, is also regarded as beautiful, 28 much like representational art in his early twentieth-century context.29 Worringer differentiates between the psychological responses of human beings to the world, but also points to the satisfaction derived from appreciating art – a feeling common to viewers of all times and places. Empathy, as Worringer argues towards the end of his book, is possible not only in the case of representation-reliant art, but also in the case of abstraction-oriented art.30 25 Ibid., 4, 7, 10, 14, 27, 101-102. 26 Ibid., 16-20, 42, 94-95. 27 Ibid., 13. 28 Ibid., 16-17. 29 Andreas Michel points out that Worringer actually favours modes of art-making he regards as abstract, such as Oriental art. See Michel, ' "Our European Arrogance": Wilhelm Worringer and Carl Einstein on Non- European Art', 161. 30 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 106-121. 54 Empathy: Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Robert Vischer For Worringer, empathy presupposes experiencing an object in the world, as it were, from within the object itself.31 The process of empathy requires viewers to transpose themselves within objects by means of imagination, thus assuming the perspective of the experienced objects. Worringer refers to the thought of Lipps regarding empathy, yet also mentions the writings of Robert Vischer (1847-1933) in this regard.32 Expanding upon the aesthetic investigations conducted by his father, Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-87),33 R. Vischer inquired into the connections between form and emotion in ‘On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics’ (1873). The research conducted by Friedrich Theodor Vischer on psychological and formal aspects of emotional response to the world had provided his son, Robert, with a starting point for his own explorations. Upon revising his earlier writings on aesthetics, F. T. Vischer had noted that, even in the absence of human beings, of historical and narrative contexts, the experiencing of emotion was still possible, and relied on simple comparisons. In his words: Consider first the beauty of landscape, which is so strangely analogous and related to the beauty of music. Here light and colour affect us through inorganic forms and yet they do so in such a way that the landscape as a whole appears to us a mirror image of our own emotional state. This act, whereby we believe that we encounter our own interior life in what is inanimate, rests quite simply on a comparison. What is physically bright is compared to what is spiritually or emotionally bright, the dark and gloomy to dark and gloomy moods, and so forth. One sees that language, too, employs the same words, which it derives pictorially from nature. The comparison is 31 Ibid., 5-6. 32 Ibid., 136. 33 Robert Vischer, 'On the Optical Sense of Form' in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, eds. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, California and Chicago, Illinois: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994 [1873]), 89. 55 drawn so unconsciously and instinctively that we, far removed from thinking of it as a mere ‘resemblance’, attribute emotional states as predicates to inanimate objects.34 For F. T. Vischer, the connection between self and nature could be explained by means of perceived, and subsequently intuited, similarities. Resemblance, F. T. Vischer commented, was not a compulsory feature for establishing connections between human beings and inanimate objects; belief, intuition and emotion sufficed. In ‘On the Optical Sense of Form’ (1873), R. Vischer also noted: ‘... [T]hose forms devoid of emotional life... are supplied with emotional content that we – the observers – unwittingly transfer to them.’ 35 R. Vischer, like F. T. Vischer, observed that the human mind constantly found resemblances between the inner world and the outer world.36 To account for this process of imaginative engagement, R. Vischer proposed the use of a generic term, ‘empathy’ [Einfühlung]. ‘Empathy’ could acquire various nuances in specific perceptual and emotive contexts, as R. Vischer observed.37 R. Vischer explained that human imagination projected itself onto organic and inorganic forms in order to experience itself.38 Having defined imagination as the common ground of emotion, representation and will,39 R. Vischer noted that imagination expanded visual sensations.40 He distinguished between immediate (prompt, instinctive) visual sensations and responsive (encompassing, dynamic) visual sensations.41 Associating such sensations with immediate and responsive feelings,42 R. Vischer remarked that immediate sensations, when 34 Friedrich Theodor Vischer, 'Critique of My Aesthetics' in Art in Theory, 1815-1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 1998 [1866]), 689. 35 Vischer, 'On the Optical Sense of Form', 89. 36 Ibid., 91. 37 Ibid., 92. 38 Ibid., 104. 39 Ibid., 102. R. Vischer had also referred to imagination as to an activity through which indistinct sensations acquired specific forms. In his words: ‘Imagination is an act by which we mentally simulate something that previously existed as a vague content of our sensations as sensuous, concrete form.’ (———, 'On the Optical Sense of Form', 99.) Imagination is a hybrid and fluid medium for R. Vischer. (———, 'On the Optical Sense of Form', 102.) 40 Vischer, 'On the Optical Sense of Form', 101. 41 Ibid., 92, 96, 102, 106. For R. Vischer, sensations are life impulses that make visible the accord between human beings and their world in a basic form. According to him: ‘Sensation is the most primitive impulse of life and out of it evolve the more distinct acts of the imagination, volition and cognition, and it thus constitutes the most primitive form of the sense of universal coherence.’ (———, 'On the Optical Sense of Form', 109.) 42 Vischer, 'On the Optical Sense of Form', 107. 56 succeeded by responsive sensations, intensified and became attentive feelings. Attentive feelings were the basis of empathy, according to R. Vischer. Feelings, he argued, open more towards the world; their expansion gave rise to emotion – an altruistic mode of relating. In its turn, emotion led to empathy. He explained that the emotions of fellow human beings moved the empathic observer as profoundly as personal experiences.43 Empathy fostered the fusion of observer and observed in imagination,44 R. Vischer pointed out. For him, empathic viewers explored objects from inside out: they concentrated on the core of objects, gazing upon themselves from the standpoint of objects, and then returned in imagination back to their own selves. In a certain respect, empathy as seen by R. Vischer implied abandoning the self;45 Worringer also recognized this aspect of empathy in his debut book, where he noted that, in aesthetics, empathic contemplation required to a distancing from the self.46 Yet, for the purposes of his argument, Worringer prioritized the association of empathy with the tendency towards naturalism or representation in art-making. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer connects the capacity for empathy to a widespread – yet not exclusive – approach to aesthetics. Viewers, according to him, can empathise with objects they consider beautiful. Beauty (or the value viewers discover in art) offers a pleasurable experience, Worringer explains. In his words: ‘Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment. To enjoy aesthetically is to enjoy myself in a sensuous object diverse from myself, to empathise myself into it.’ 47 Emphasizing the active role of the experiencing self in the process of empathy, Worringer reveals his interest in subjectivism from the first pages of Abstraction and Empathy.48 43 Ibid., 109-110. 44 Ibid., 109. 45 Ibid., 108. 46 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 24. 47 Ibid., 5. 48 For the purposes of this thesis, subjectivism refers to an interest in aspects of personal, or inner, experience. Worringer does not explain the term ‘subjectivism’ from a philosophical perspective, and, apart from mentioning Lipps, makes no reference to philosophers or bodies of work he regards as subjectivist. 57 Heinrich Wölfflin: embodiment and expression In his ‘Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture’ (1886), Heinrich Wölfflin also inquires into the direct link between form and personal experience. Worringer, who draws attention to Wölfflin’s views on uniformity and regularity in art, signals the emphasis placed by Wölfflin on the physical aspects of uniformity, and the intellectual aspects of regularity. 49 Yet, although he writes in praise of regularity himself, Worringer approaches the personal experiencing of form from a different perspective: he associates regularity with abstraction and instinct, and connects representation with empathy and with the enjoyment of the world. Wölfflin, like Worringer, acknowledges the contribution of R. Vischer to the exploration of empathy. As Wölfflin points out, R. Vischer considers that the main vehicle of empathy is imagination. Expanding on R. Vischer’s research, Wölfflin pays particular attention to the role of the human body in empathic experience, and on physical expressiveness.50 He explores emotional expression in architecture, and seeks to pinpoint the principles that enable the connection between architectural form and expression.51 Human beings, Wölfflin explains, regard the world in terms of lifelikeness, or animation, because they themselves are alive.52 He observes that, in general, viewers project their own feelings onto the beings, situations or phenomena they observe. This instinct is fundamental in art, Wölfflin notes; in its absence, art would not exist. According to Wölfflin: We read our own image into all phenomena. We expect everything to possess what we know to be the conditions of our own well-being. Not that we expect to find the appearance of a human being in the forms of inorganic nature: we interpret the physical world through the categories (if I may use this term) that we share with it. We also define the expressive capability of these other forms accordingly.53 49 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 64. Also see ‘ “Common to all”: form for Kant and Worringer’. 50 Heinrich Wölfflin, 'Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture' in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, eds. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, California and Chicago, Illinois: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994 [1886]), 154. 51 Ibid., 149. 52 Ibid., 152. 53 Ibid. 58 For Wölfflin, the actual representation of objects is not the only mode of connection between human beings and the world. He signals that art-making may account for the world yet diverge from representational practice. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer also notes that representation (or naturalism) was distinct from imitation;54 he finds that naturalism reflects not natural models in their details, but the feelings of aesthetic pleasure artists experience with regard to their surroundings. 55 If Worringer gives primacy to the role of feelings in Abstraction and Empathy, Wölfflin focuses on materialization in Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture. Wölfflin names the common physical characteristics of human beings and inanimate elements in his book; in stones as in people, he observes weight, equilibrium, and solidity at work. These characteristics, Wölfflin explains, can acquire expressive nuances. Matter is not an indifferent recipient for the human gaze in Wölfflin’s Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture.56 Grounding his observations in human physiology, Wölfflin points to the close connection between embodiment and expression. Expression is more than merely suggestive of inner activity for Wölfflin; in his words: ‘Expression is, rather, the physical manifestation of the mental process. It does not exist only in the tension of facial muscles or in the movements of the extremities but extends to the whole organism.’ 57 Wölfflin defends the concreteness of the connection between inner, psychological responses to the world and their outward expressive manifestations; to human emotions, he assigns a psychological starting point that finds physical expression. Wölfflin argues that, by imitating outward expression, human beings come to experience emotion. Imitation thus leads to empathy, according to Wölfflin. Where Wölfflin sees in imitation a physically based process conducive to the understanding of emotions, Worringer approaches imitation critically, from the perspective of its role as a process of art-making.58 Yet for Wölfflin imitation offers the possibility of self-forgetting that, like Worringer, he 54 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 29-30. 55 Ibid., 27-28. 56 Wölfflin contrasts matter and form in Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture; for him, matter is formless and heavy, while form is the condition of expression. Wölfflin, 'Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture', 150, 159. 57 Ibid., 155. 58 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 51. 59 considers crucial in aesthetic appreciation.59 Imitation, an embodied way towards will-less experiencing according to Wölfflin, has Worringer’s empathic self-projecting (or the attribution of expression to observed elements in the world) as its counterpart.60 Pleasant as well as unpleasant effects could accompany the articulation of form, Wölfflin noticed: viewers enjoy wavy lines and dislike zigzags, for instance. Wölfflin finds that gentleness in the apparent movement of line yields positive responses.61 On the other hand, he observes that when formal balance seems to be lacking, human beings tend to interpret artistic form negatively. Negative responses are amplified by the impossibility to account rationally for artistic form, according to him. In Wölfflin’s words: ... it is also known that a severe injury to the equilibrium can have a depressing effect. We ourselves feel fear and anxiety when the restful effect of balance cannot be found. I am reminded in this connection of an engraving by Dürer, Melencolia I, in which we see a brooding woman staring at a block of stone. What does it mean? The stone block is irregular and irrational; it cannot be defined with compass and with ciphers. But there is more. When one looks at this stone, does it not appear to be falling? Surely! And the longer we look at it the more we are drawn into this restlessness.62 Objects, feelings, and aspects of empathy Like R. Vischer and Wölfflin, Worringer inquired into the situations where the connection between viewers and objects is not pleasurable. Such a connection involves the opposition of viewers to experienced objects. According to Worringer: ‘... the self-activation demanded of me by a sensuous object may be so constituted that, precisely by virtue of its constitution, it cannot be performed by me without friction, without inner opposition... [T]here arises a 59 Ibid., 24-25. Wölfflin, 'Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture', 156-157. 60 Wölfflin, 'Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture', 176. 61 Ibid., 150. 62 Ibid., 173. 60 conflict between my natural striving for self-activation and the one that is demanded of me. And the sensation of conflict is likewise a sensation of unpleasure derived from the object.’ 63 Where relating to objects in the world becomes difficult for viewers, Worringer recognizes negative empathy at work. He observes that the inner opposition of viewers to art objects results in experiential displeasure. Following Lipps, Worringer focuses on the positive as well as negative aspects of empathy. 64 However, negative empathy as discussed by Worringer does not cancel experiencing: it presumes that viewers relate actively to objects, albeit on more difficult grounds than in the case of positive empathy.65 Positive and negative empathy bring objects into being, according to Worringer. According to him, the existence of objects in the world depends on the inner activity of viewers;66 as long as the attention of viewers animates them, objects exist, Worringer posits. His perspective reflects the thoughts of Lipps, according to whom objects become visible to spectators because they begin by empathising with objects. Differentiating between objects as apparent in scientific reflection, and objects as apparent in everyday life, Lipps explains that, in scientific reflection, viewers can employ their will and concentrate on objects in order to unify their multiple facets.67 On the other hand, Lipps notes that, in everyday life, objects claim the attention of viewers due to the empathy experienced by viewers towards them. An object in everyday life, Lipps remarks, appears as a self-standing unity if its viewer thinks of this object as a unity. In his words: ‘The object becomes a unity in itself – that is, independent from my activity of concentrating it into a unity – as long as I allow this directly felt unity I have empathised into it (or a reflexion of this unity) to become a unity in my thoughts as well.’ 68 When viewers empathise with objects in everyday life, Lipps observes, 63 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 6. 64 Ibid. 65 The distinction between positive and negative empathy, as well as Worringer’s replacing ‘negative empathy’ with ‘abstraction,’ is further examined in the current thesis in ‘Representation and abstraction in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy’. For the indebtedness of Worringer to Lipps regarding the conditions that generate positive and negative empathy, see Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, I, 33-34. 66 Lipps, who inspired Worringer’s perspective on objects, further discusses the viewer-dependent existence of objects in the world in ‘Objects and empathy’. (Ibid., I, 221-224.) 67 Ibid., 221. 68 Ibid., 222. 61 they unify objects by means of feeling; viewers need to think of objects as unitary for these objects to assume individual quality. Worringer, like Lipps, highlights the connection between objects and the inner activity of viewers; yet in the writings of Worringer the emotional aspects of empathy come to the fore. Central to his investigation from Abstraction and Empathy is the following remark: ‘Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment.’ 69 When aesthetically active, Worringer argues, viewers enjoy projecting their feelings on objects in the world; their tendency to activity thus receives positive expression. Positive empathy is one of the results of the apperceptive process, according to Worringer.70 Worringer does not explain the term ‘apperceptive;’ however, Lipps discusses ‘apperception’ extensively in his Aesthetics. According to Lipps, apperception is internalized perception. Lipps writes: ‘This taking into account, this understanding, this inner realization (and through it, this given efficient becoming, specific to a process or to a psychic experience connected to life) is what I call “apperception”.’ 71 In other words, Lipps considers apperception a form of perception that has been internally processed by viewers; apperception consequently leads to increased understanding, and to an intensification of experience. When Worringer employs the term ‘apperception,’ he signals his indebtedness to the thought of Lipps, as well as his intention to emphasize inner, personal aspects of experience. The enjoyment of objects in the world is, for Worringer, a fundamental aesthetic response. However, Worringer does not limit his inquiry to addressing positive experiential aspects. In Abstraction and Empathy, he provides his readers a pathway for the aesthetic appreciation of abstraction, a form of art-making he connects to negative empathy. Form in Gothic expands Worringer’s engagement with inner, personal aspects of experience; in this book, Worringer 69 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 7. Juliet Koss points to the repetition of Worringer’s statement in Abstraction and Empathy. She observes that, by its fifth occurrence in Worringer’s text, the connection between personal enjoyment and the world of objects pointed to Worringer’s suggestion that abstraction needed its aesthetics, much like empathy. (Koss, 'On the Limits of Empathy', 146- 148.) 70 In Worringer’s earlier words: ‘Apperceptive activity becomes aesthetic enjoyment in the case of positive empathy, in the case of the unison of my natural tendencies to self-activation with the activity demanded of me by the sensuous object.’ Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 7. 71 Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 30. 62 cultivates an approach to the writing of art history that emphasizes personal intuition, speculation and interpretation rather than the organization and processing of historical data. Worringer: subjectivity and objectivity In Form in Gothic, Worringer explains his point of view regarding the role of personal aspects of experience in conducting art historical inquiries. He regards explorations that employ references to historical facts as having only experimental value, and argues that, in fact, personal perspective guides inquiries regarded as objective.72 In the words of Worringer: ‘The earnest endeavour of the historian to reconstruct the spirit of the past from the materials at his disposal is at best but an experiment, conducted with unsuitable means. For however faithfully we may strive to compel ourselves to an apparent objectivity, the exponent of historical knowledge remains our own Ego with its temporal limitations and restrictions.’ 73 Working with historical evidence gives only the appearance of objectivity for Worringer; the interpretation of historical data is bound to be restricted by personal perspective. Worringer is painfully aware of the boundaries of human objectivity. 74 For his own inquiries, he chooses the path of hypothesising and intuition to the alternative he regards as ‘... a one- sided, subjective forcing of objective facts’.75 He accepts that his hypotheses trace broad outlines for an experimental type of inquiry fostered by instinct, more precisely by a thirst for knowledge.76 Thus, the key role of personal perspective surfaces once more in Worringer’s argument. Describing his process of writing art history, he notes: Into the darkness of facts, no longer explicable by the inadequate data available to us, this instinct is only able to penetrate by cautiously constructing a network of lines of possibilities of which the points of orientation can only be very roughly indicated by means of concepts directly opposite to this data. Since we are instinctively aware that 72 Worringer employs the term ‘objective’ to refer to scientific and academic forms of inquiry. A contrasting term for ‘objectivity’ could be ‘subjectivism’ as employed in Abstraction and Empathy (in Worringer’s debut book, subjectivism referred to a focus on aspects of personal experience.) 73 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 1. 74 Ibid., 2. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 63 all knowledge is merely indirect – fettered as it is by the time-conditioned Ego – no possibility of widening the capacity for historical knowledge exists other than by widening our Ego. Now such an extension of the field of knowledge is not possible in practice, but only by virtue of an ideal auxiliary construction of purely antithetical application.77 Instinct guides Worringer’s work as an art historian. He explains that instinct traces speculative connections between historical data and concepts directly opposed to them. To articulate the relationship between historical data and theoretical concepts in his inquiry, Worringer uses the strategy of opposition, a significant component of his approach to writing art history and theory; he also refers to the successive predominance of representational and abstract modes of art-making respectively, throughout history. 78 One epoch may thus be distinguished from the next by means of opposition too, according to Worringer. First articulated in Abstraction and Empathy and then in Form in Gothic, the strategy of opposition plays a role as significant as personal perspective in Worringer’s inquiries. Worringer sees knowledge as indirect and limited by the Ego; the capitalization of this term in the revised edition of Form in Gothic from 1957 further emphasizes the role of personal perspective in his writings. He argues that when Ego opens to the world, the ability to cultivate knowledge increases. He considers that the expansion of knowledge is possible in theory on the basis of opposition, or antithesis. Worringer employs two key elements to construct his argument in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic: personal perspective, and the strategy of opposition. His emphases on subjectivism and Ego reveal the unconventional aspects of his approach to the writing of art history; they also help to explain the wide interest his thoughts attracted at the beginning of 77 Ibid. 78 Also see Jennings in this respect, who writes: ‘... [H]e [i. e., Worringer] proposes a pattern of regular alternation between abstract and empathetic eras; there is in this sense no progress or development but only a repeated return through variation on one of the two dominant modes. We find in Worringer, then, a kind of history at a standstill, or history with a repetition compulsion.’ Jennings, 'Against Expressionism: Materialism and Social Theory in Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', 100. 64 the twentieth century, as well as the criticism his academic colleagues directed towards his inquiries.79 Contemporary researchers such as Andreas Michel highlight the unusual perspective Worringer has on art historical inquiry. Like Worringer, Michel employs strong, rhetorically effective terms of characterisation; Michel thus depicts vividly the role of Worringer’s writings in his epoch. Michel considers Worringer a ‘rogue’ art historian ‘... with a penchant for philosophical speculation’.80 Addressing the revision of European views on art at the beginning of the twentieth century, Michel focuses on the writings of Worringer and Carl Einstein (1885-1940).81 He explains his characterisation of Worringer and Einstein as follows: I call them [i. e., Worringer and Einstein] rogue art historians because their writings violate the scientific etiquette of sobriety, fairness, and objectivity. These texts [i. e., Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy and Einstein’s Black Sculpture (1915)] read more like position statements in a culture war. It is for this reason that their texts – especially Worringer’s – have had much larger currency and exerted far greater influence in the aesthetico-political debates of the first decades of the twentieth century than the writings of more conventional art historians.82 Michel draws attention to Worringer’s departure from the expected approach to writing art history, as well as to the political echoes generated by Worringer’s thought in the early years of the twentieth century. Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history is reflected in his use of terminology, which seems speculative to Michel;83 the first terms Michel cites to exemplify his claim are ‘abstraction’ and ‘empathy.’ 79 For the perspective of Richard Hamann on Worringer’s Form in Gothic, see, for instance, ‘Gazing in the mirror of history: Worringer’s forewords to Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic’. 80 Michel, ' "Our European Arrogance": Wilhelm Worringer and Carl Einstein on Non-European Art', 143. 81 The work of Carl Einstein, Worringer’s influence on Einstein, and the political – especially racial – aspects of Worringer’s work would require extensive investigation; such investigation is outside the scope of this thesis. 82 Michel, ' "Our European Arrogance": Wilhelm Worringer and Carl Einstein on Non-European Art', 143. 83 Ibid., 146. 65 Empathy, abstraction and representation in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy Cultivating the hypothesising, intuitive, speculative aspects of his inquiries, Worringer prefers subjectivism to objectivity, and favours the strategy of opposition when articulating his point of view. His choice of key terms reflects his perspective: ‘empathy’ and ‘abstraction’ are, according to him, antithetic tendencies rooted in the personal responses of artists to their world. For Worringer, artists experience urges to (or needs for) empathy or abstraction. In his words: The need for empathy can be looked upon as a presupposition of artistic volition only where this artistic volition inclines toward the truths of organic life, that is toward naturalism in the higher sense.... Recollection of the lifeless form of a pyramid or of the suppression of life that is manifested, for instance, in Byzantine mosaics tells us at once that here the need for empathy, which for obvious reasons always tends toward the organic, cannot possibly have determined artistic volition. Indeed, the idea forces itself upon us that here we have an impulse directly opposed to the empathy impulse, which seeks to suppress precisely that in which the need for empathy finds its satisfaction. This counter-pole to the need for empathy appears to us to be the urge to abstraction.1 Empathy and abstraction: Lipps and Worringer For Worringer, the urge to empathy manifests where organic life attracts the attention of artists. On the other hand, Worringer considers that modes of art-making that tend towards abstraction could not have been initiated by an urge to empathy.2 Worringer looks into the 1 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 14. 2 As following sections of this thesis show, Worringer’s use of the term ‘abstraction’ poses significant difficulties to contemporary researchers. ‘Abstraction,’ for Worringer, is connected to a psychological tendency of distancing from the world, but also to a mode of art-making where bringing to light inner thoughts and feelings is prioritized. Worringer, who considers that the urge to abstraction ‘... stands at the beginning of every art’, recognizes that different degrees of abstraction are visible in art-making, and that many forms of abstraction-oriented art can be recognized throughout history. (See Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy, 15, 42-43.) Herbert Read, the translator of Form in Gothic, agrees with Worringer, emphasizing that abstraction informs all approaches to art-making. In his words: ‘We must not be afraid of the word “abstract”. All art is primarily abstract.’ See Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 33. 66 experiential grounds of art-making, and finds that antithetic needs lead to antithetic artistic manifestations. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century researchers such as Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer discuss the experience of psychological distancing as well as abstract aspects of art-making in their works, yet (as this thesis explains) provide interpretations of abstraction that differ from the one Worringer proposes in Abstraction and Empathy. (See, from the current thesis, ‘Predecessors, critics, supporters’.) Twentieth-century researchers place less emphasis than Worringer and Read on the role of abstraction in art-making, underscoring instead the variety of abstraction-oriented approaches. For instance, Frank Whitford notes that ‘abstraction’ may nowadays point to concrete art, pure art, constructed art, non-figurative art, to Kandinsky’s non-objective art, or to Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism. Whitford draws attention to the wide coverage of the term ‘abstraction’ in the late twentieth century; for him, ‘abstraction’ cannot be regarded as a specific, historically delimited, style. He writes: ‘Abstraction does not describe a style of painting. It is not a word like “Baroque”, for example, which is applied to the roughly similar work of a large number of artists to define what it is that they all have in common. Abstraction is not a style but an attitude. Potentially, there are as many types of abstract art as there are artists. No stylistic definition, however broad, can embrace the work of painters as different as Kandinsky and Malevich, Mondrian and Pollock.’ See Frank Whitford, Understanding Abstract Art (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1987), 8-9. Different characteristics of abstraction (such as flatness, a tendency towards interdisciplinary connections, an emphasis on colour, a focus on compositional principles) are recognized by Whitford in the late nineteenth century as well as in the twentieth century. Whitford points to the compositional emphasis on flatness in Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1866). He notes that James Abbott McNeill Whistler traced parallels between painting and musical composition when titling the 1867-72 portrait of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black. Paul Gauguin, Whitford notes, emphasized the decorative aspects of an imagined scene in Vision after the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888). Citing Van Gogh, Whitford signals the importance of colour as expressive means in Night Café (1888); in the words of Van Gogh: ‘I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green.’ (See Van Gogh as cited in Whitford, Understanding Abstract Art, 75.) Georges Seurat, on the other hand, sought to highlight principles of art-making, as Whitford shows. According to Seurat: “Harmony is the analogy of contrary and of similar elements of tone, of colour and of line, considered according to their dominants and under the influence of light in gay, calm, or sad combinations. (Seurat as cited in Whitford, Understanding Abstract Art, 80.) Maurice Denis also highlighted, as early as 1890, the flatness and chromatic order that inform painting; he wrote: ‘It must be remembered that any painting – before being a war horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours and arranged in a certain order.’ (Denis as cited in Whitford, Understanding Abstract Art, 83.) Whitford continues by addressing the early twentieth-century Cubist emphasis on the paintings’ surface, the Futurists’ interest in rendering movement, and the geometrical compositions of Suprematism and De Stijl. (Whitford, Understanding Abstract Art, 97-113.) However, Whitford recognizes one key division between varieties of abstraction: he considers that abstract art can be regarded as either organic or geometric. (Whitford, Understanding Abstract Art, 128.) He sees these categories as loose, yet his binary, antithetic approach brings to mind Worringer’s preferred framing of the abstraction-representation relationship in Abstraction and Empathy. For further inquiries into the definition of abstraction, see, among many other books: Alfred H. Barr’s Cubism and Abstract Art (1975) (where Barr, echoing Worringer, defines abstract art as an effect of the impulse to take distance from nature, and distinguishes between near-abstractions and pure abstractions); Mark Rosenthal’s Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline (1996) (where Rosenthal notes the heterogeneity of abstract art in modernism and postmodernism, pointing to summarizing, abbreviating and stylising as methods of abstraction); Briony Fer’s On Abstract Art (1997) (where Fer addresses the relationship between abstraction and representation and mentions abstraction’s inclusiveness, exclusiveness, and repressive tendencies); Mel Gooding’s Abstract Art (2001) (where Gooding considers all art – since it departs from naturalistic depiction – to be abstact); Frances Colpitt’s Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century (2002) (where Colpitt contrasts the conventional tendencies of representation and oppositional leanings of abstraction, noting that, in late modern times, abstraction reaches a non-developmental stage). See Alfred Hamilton Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (London: Secker & Warburg, and the Museum of Modern Art, 1975 [1936]), 11, 19. Also, Mark Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1996), 1. Also, Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 5. Also, Mel Gooding, Abstract Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 6-9. Also, Frances Colpitt, Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xv-xvi. 67 ‘Empathy’ and ‘abstraction’ are features that point to (inner) psychological urges as well as to (outer) artistic processes in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy; they have a wide coverage, but remain to a certain extent ambiguous in Worringer’s book. Worringer employs them to point to aspects of inner experience, as well as to their manifestation in art-making: he does not distinguish between aesthetics and art in his discussions from Abstraction and Empathy.3 Both ‘abstraction’ and ‘empathy’ are addressed in Lipps’ Aesthetics. For instance, Lipps defines abstraction as an aspect of form, rather than as a particular mode of art-making, He contrasts, for instance, the abstract generality of form and the concrete specificity of form.4 He gives historical priority to neither. Worringer, who regards abstraction as the artistic result of an urge, writes: ‘Thus the urge to abstraction stands at the beginning of every art’.5 For him, the need for abstraction precedes the need for representation, and art that relies on empathy follows abstraction-oriented art. Worringer discusses abstraction and empathy as personal aspects of experience, as modes of art-making, but also as processes in temporal succession.6 Unlike Worringer, Lipps believes that schematization precedes the articulation of abstract generality as well as concrete specificity. 7 According to him: ‘... [F]rom a temporal perspective, precedence is assumed neither by concrete specificity in its individual form, nor by abstract generality, but by the schema, by the highlighting of generality: for instance, by 3 Geoffrey C. W. Waite points to the dual (perceptual and creative) perspective Worringer assumes in Abstraction and Empathy. He writes: ‘Now, his text’s awareness of this displacement from a psychology of perception to a psychology of creativity coincides in direct proportion to Worringer’s failure to make it explicit.’ See Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism', 29. However, if the influence of Kant on the writings of Worringer and Lipps is taken into account, and if Kant’s approach to imagination (on which empathy relies, and which Kant sees as both perceptual and creative) is considered, then Worringer’s addressing art-viewing and art-making without distinguishing between them could be regarded as an undefended pre-assumption of his inquiry. Not separating the perceptual and artistic directions of his argument diminishes the analytical credibility of Worringer’s text; however, the inclusiveness of his perspective actually expands the appeal of Abstraction and Empathy. (In support of the above, also see Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 124-125. Also, for Worringer’s process of creative interpretation of the Gothic line, see Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 43.) 4 Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 292. 5 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 15. 6 In order to reinforce the opposition between abstraction and empathy, Worringer associates abstract-oriented art with Oriental practices, and empathy-reliant art with Occidental art-making. He contrasts not only between types of experience and modes of art-making, but also between geographical locations. The connections traced by Worringer between art-making and geography further highlight social, economic and political aspects of modernity which need to make the topics of self-standing inquiries. 7 Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 292. 68 emphasis on the essential features that accidentally catch the eye of the viewer.’ 8 For Worringer, abstraction results from a specific urge; in his words: ‘... [T]he urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world’.9 Where Lipps deemphasizes the contrast between concrete specificity and abstract generality by drawing attention to schematization, Worringer prefers to build his argument from Abstraction and Empathy around the opposition of empathy and abstraction. However, Lipps notes that the articulation of form takes opposite directions in the course of history, acquiring either increasingly individualizing aspects or increasingly generalizing aspects.10 Lipps focuses predominantly on experiencing in his Aesthetics; nevertheless, he addresses the process of art-making when discussing the evolution of stylisation. With regard to stylisation, Lipps discusses art-making and aesthetics without signalling their differentiations, much like Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy. Lipps highlights the flexibility of art-making processes through time, as when he writes: If evolution reaches a certain limit, then, in particular cases, progress may take place from abstract law to the multitude of individual structures in nature, and vice-versa. A play of lines may initially be nothing more than a play of lines; however, ramifications assume vegetal characteristics in time; the end of a line becomes the head of a human or animal, or the shape of a flower; rosettes emerge from circles; and so forth. In other instances, the more or less perfect form that has been fashioned following nature is successively turned into abstract geometrical shapes. After all, the law of form has been intentionally extracted, by means of stylisation, from natural forms.11 Abstraction can develop animated, organic aspects, whereas natural elements may inspire the creation of geometric, abstract forms, Lipps notes. Worringer agrees with Lipps’ views, accepting that the transition between abstraction-oriented and empathy-reliant art is 8 Ibid. 9 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 15. 10 Ibid., 292. 11 Ibid. 69 possible;12 however, for Worringer, abstraction initiates art-making.13 Placing the urge to abstraction at the root of art-making in general, Worringer also associates abstraction with a particular form of relating with the world. According to him: ‘The less mankind has succeeded, by virtue of its spiritual cognition, in entering into a relation of friendly confidence with the appearance of the outer world, the more forceful is the dynamic that leads to the striving after this highest abstract beauty.’ 14 Worringer considers that abstraction-oriented art – where negative empathy is easily recognizable – signals the lack of confidence human beings experience in their relationship with their environment. For Lipps, natural forms and geometric forms stand apart, yet both can foster empathic connections and enjoyment. Although geometric lines are not connected to the natural world, their particular characteristics still derive from nature, Lipps observes.15 He explains that viewers can enjoy both natural and geometric forms if they can access forms empathically. According to Lipps: The geometric line differs from the natural object precisely because it cannot be found in nature... Yet this contrast [i. e., between geometric forms and natural objects] does not prevent that something that pleases us in natural objects, and geometric forms respectively, from appearing to us as one and the same... What pleases us in these two cases is thus not only freedom, but the very same freedom; namely, the complete, unbounded experiencing of the inner essence of forms.16 12 For instance, Worringer discusses lifelike and abstract approaches to drapery in Northern Pre-Renaissance art. (Ibid., 116-117.) Worringer addresses ‘primitive’ art and the psychological profile of its makers in relation to the world and to the Classical age in Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 15, 17-19. He writes about ‘Classical Man’ and the adjustment of people to the world, as well as about the balance between instinct and reason, in — ——, Form in Gothic, 21-22. 13 Worringer may seem to disagree with Lipps’s differentiation between stylisation and abstraction; however, in ‘Naturalism and Style’, Worringer equates abstraction and style, much like he had equated positive empathy with empathy earlier in his thesis. Simplifying Lipps’s distinctions creates greater ambiguity in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, as this section points out. 14 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 17. 15 Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 276. Lipps writes about the mechanical forces recognizable in geometric lines and forms: ‘Mechanical forces are natural forces, yet in the geometric line and in geometric forms in general they are dissociated from nature and its endless changes, and brought towards inner contemplation.’ The connection of mechanical and natural, organic elements informs Worringer’s approach to Gothic art. (Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 48, 72-73, 112- 113.) 16 Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 276-277. 70 Antithetic elements such as geometric and natural forms find common ground in human experience for Lipps, more precisely in the pleasure of the viewers who observe them. Lipps had defined this unconditional enjoyment of inner aspects of being or behaviour as empathy,17 an activity of inner participation to the world external to the self.18 Empathy, Lipps explains, brings along joy, which signals inner resonance of onlookers with experienced situations. Complete empathy is possible when viewers are fully absorbed by the subject, object or event they contemplate, Lipps notes.19 Worringer, following Lipps, distinguishes between positive and negative empathy at the beginning of Abstraction and Empathy.20 However, the largest part of his text does not reinforce the distinction between positive and negative aspects of empathy, but contains references to empathy only. Worringer, in almost all contexts, associates empathy with the positive aspects of the process of transposition, contemplation, and enjoyment. He employs the term ‘abstraction’ instead of ‘negative empathy’ as his demonstration advances, implicitly connecting abstraction to the responses of artists who, according to him, regard the world as tormenting and changeable.21 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer claims that, with regard to works of art, only positive aspects of empathy tend to be highlighted. He writes: ‘In relation to the work of art also, it is this positive empathy alone which comes into question. This is the basis of the theory of empathy, in so far as it finds practical application to the work of art.’ 22 Worringer does not provide details regarding specific inquiries that approach the arts from the perspective of positive empathy exclusively. However, he cites from Lipps to illustrate the perspective that he considers generic in the examination of the arts.23 Worringer discusses the ideas of Lipps to justify his own use of the term ‘empathy.’ For Worringer, ‘empathy’ refers only to the positive aspects of transposition and enjoyment as observable in the arts. Yet Lipps approaches empathy from a complex perspective. Positive 17 Ibid., 132-133. 18 Ibid., 133. 19 Ibid., 147. 20 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 6. 21 Ibid., 16-27, 34-36, 40-46. 22 Ibid., 7. 23 Ibid. 71 and negative empathy are aspects of positive and negative experiencing, according to Lipps, who actually recognizes the variety of empathic experience. Explaining empathy from a viewer-oriented perspective, Lipps notes that negative empathy emerges when viewers observe behaviours they find offensive; noting such behaviours is in itself an imposition that viewers strive to oppose, since the perceived offence appears to be an utter negation of the personality of the viewer. Lipps writes: For instance, as I have mentioned above, I see a person gazing not proudly, but arrogantly. I feel the arrogance in his gaze. Not only do I represent to myself this inner behaviour or adjustment, not only do I acquire knowledge of this behaviour, but this behaviour is also imposed on me, forcing its entrance into my field of feeling. However, I have an inner response to this imposition. My inner essence denies it; I feel in the arrogant gaze a vital negation, a vital holding back, a negation of my personality. Thus and only thus can arrogance offend me. My feeling of displeasure is based on this negative form of empathy. The same process takes place when an inner behaviour that contradicts the essence of my perspective is being imposed to me. Negative empathy is a negation of positive empathy, much like negative judgment is a negation of positive judgment.24 Lipps argues that negative and positive empathy are experiential aspects of the same process. Like Worringer, Lipps offers equivalents for the significant phrases in his text: he also defines ‘positive empathy’ as ‘sympathetic empathy.’ He connects beauty to positive (or sympathetic) empathy, and ugliness to negative empathy; for him, regarding objects as beautiful or ugly depends on experiencing positive or negative empathy. He explains: We can also define positive empathy as sympathetic empathy. As the object of sympathetic empathy is beautiful, so the object of negative empathy is ugly. And there is nothing ugly that exists in the absence of negative empathy, and nothing beautiful that exists in the absence of positive empathy. The feeling of beauty is a feeling of positive vital activation which I experience in a sensuous object; it is the objectified feeling of my self-affirmation, or of affirming life. The feeling of ugliness 24 Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 162. 72 is the objectified feeling of my being denied, or the experienced and objectified feeling of negating life.25 For Lipps, beauty and ugliness are consequences of viewers’ emotional connection with specific points of focus (be these people or objects). Positive empathy makes points of focus appear beautiful, and negative empathy makes points of focus appear ugly. Lipps’ perspective is crucial for Worringer’s argument in Abstraction and Empathy; however, Worringer gives a partial reading to Lipps’ thought, implicitly equating abstraction with negative empathy and ugliness. Worringer specifies that he does not intend to go into the details of Lipps’ argument; this permits him to avoid underscoring the distinction Lipps traces between positive and negative empathy. Instead, Worringer claims he intends to question the premise that the process of empathy (undifferentiated as positive and negative in the largest part of his book) is the ground of all modes of art-making.26 He chooses to address the process of empathy in generic terms, and equates ‘positive empathy’ with ‘empathy’ in his ensuing demonstrations. Even though Worringer’s ‘empathy’ includes only the positive aspects of Lipps’ ‘empathy,’ the concept of ‘negative empathy’ does not disappear from Worringer’s field of inquiry. Worringer stops mentioning the phrase ‘negative empathy’ after the first pages of Abstraction and Empathy, yet continues to refer to it in different terms. For instance, Worringer argues that art that is not Classical (namely, not Greek, Roman, or of Renaissance inspiration) and not European (not ‘modern Occidental,’ in Worringer’s terms) cannot be discussed from the perspective of ‘empathy.’ Approaches to art that are not derived from European Classicism exhibit characteristics Worringer introduces as negative in comparison with Classical and European models. Worringer notes: It [i. e., the theory of empathy] is of no assistance to us, for instance, in the understanding of that vast complex of works of art that pass beyond the narrow framework of Graeco-Roman and modern Occidental art. Here we are forced to 25 Ibid. 26 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 7. 73 recognise that quite a different psychic process is involved, which explains the peculiar, and in our assessment purely negative, quality of that style.27 Modes of art-making that are not European or Classical have a negative quality, according to Worringer. Following Worringer’s earlier line of thought, such modes of art-making could be said to elicit not positive empathy, but negative empathy – at least for Worringer and for the readership he has in mind. Having already associated the ‘urge to empathy’ with the process of empathy in general, and having discussed the life-denying, negative aspects of the ‘urge to abstraction’,28 Worringer approaches ‘positive empathy’ as ‘empathy,’ and ‘negative empathy’ as ‘abstraction’ after the first pages of Abstraction and Empathy. By replacing the phrase ‘negative empathy’ with the term ‘abstraction,’ Worringer highlights the common ground of these processes: namely, their influence on art-making. However, ‘empathy’ and ‘negative empathy’ retain their experiential, psychological, viewer-oriented associations more than ‘abstraction’ does in Worringer’s text. When Worringer begins to refer to ‘abstraction’ as to a mode of art-making,29 he brings forth the differences between the experiences of art-making and viewing. For instance, when referring to Eastern art,30 27 Ibid., 8. 28 Ibid., 4-6. 29 Ibid., 16-17, 19-21, 35-39. 30 At the time of his writing Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer would have had the chance to engage with Oriental art as exhibited for European viewers in the early years of the twentieth century. For the purposes of this thesis, I would like to note that Worringer’s own angle on the art of the East serves the purposes of his demonstration. Oriental art-making provides, for Worringer, a significant alternative to Western practices. Mary Gluck, who considers Abstraction and Empathy an exceptional manifesto, notes the connections between Orientalism and primitivism around the turn of the twentieth century. She writes: ‘Both [i. e., ‘the Primitive’ and ‘the Orient’] were distillations of empirical realities and cultural fantasies through which Europeans attempted to create alternate identities that lay outside the frame of Western modernity.’ (Gluck, 'Interpreting Primitivism, Mass Culture and Modernism: The Making of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', 150.) Gluck also points to the work of Edward Said on Orientalism. For Said, the term ‘Orientalism’ draws attention less to the Orient itself than to the Western views on and approaches to it; he highlights the need of the West to define itself in contrast to the East. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979 [1978]), 1-2. In the words of Said: ‘... European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.’ (Said, Orientalism, 3.) Said mentions the wide, imprecise coverage of the term ‘Orient’. (———, Orientalism, 17.) He does not refer to Worringer in his text, yet remarks that, in contrast to Great Britain and France, Germany developed a scholarly Orientalism; he explains: ‘’What German Oriental scholarship did was to refine and elaborate techniques whose application was to texts, myths, ideas, and languages almost literally gathered from the Orient by imperial Britain and France.’ (———, Orientalism, 19.) Worringer’s perspective on Oriental art is illuminated in retrospect by the writings of Said and Gluck: they confirm that Worringer’s approach to the art of the East reflects his antithetic methodology rather 74 Worringer argues that empathy does not operate as in Western contexts, and leads to different artistic results. He observes: The happiness they [i. e., peoples of the East] sought from art did not consist in the possibility of projecting themselves into the things of the outer world, of enjoying themselves in them, but in the possibility of taking the individual thing of the external world out of its arbitrariness and seeming fortuitousness, of eternalising it by approximation to abstract forms and, in this manner, of finding a point of tranquillity and a refuge from appearances.31 For Worringer, art in Eastern cultures relies on interrupting the connections between world and objects, and on emphasizing the fundamental characteristics of objects.32 He points out that the abstract forms thus reached offer their makers a place of respite from the tumult of changing appearances. Finding the defining characteristics of objects ‘by approximation to abstract forms’ signals artistic involvement rather than contemplation. Worringer now discusses abstraction from the perspective of art-makers;33 however, the term ‘abstraction’ retains its capacity to point to aesthetic distancing and contemplation. ‘Empathy’ and ‘negative empathy’ draw attention to viewer-oriented experiencing in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy.34 Instead, Worringer associates ‘abstraction’ with the than his actual engagement with the places and particularities of Eastern art. Although Worringer frames the art of the Orient in negative terms, he signals its remarkable contribution to the history of art-making. Eastern art and abstraction play a paradoxical part in Abstraction and Empathy: they are valued participants to a relationship of comparison where Worringer presents them negatively in order to intensify their qualities. 31 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 16. 32 Worringer comments admiringly on Japanese art, for example. (Ibid., 55.) He refers frequently to Oriental art in Abstraction and Empathy. (———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 15, 46-48, 51-77, 93, 97, 107, 125, 135.) Discussing Arabian art, the Jewish view of culture, and Assyrian reliefs, Worringer particularizes his references to the Orient and its artistic practices. (———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 62, 98, 127, 142.) For him, Byzantine art provides a bridge between Western and Eastern tendencies. (———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 93, 96-101, 104, 106, 110.) 33 The intuitive, speculative aspect of Worringer’s inquiry comes to the fore in fragments such as the one above, since Worringer was not involved in the practice of art himself. However, this citation highlights Worringer’s effort to source out psychologically grounded explanations for modes of art-making that enjoyed, according to him, little appreciation and understanding during his time. 34 For instance, when Worringer explains naturalism in terms of empathy, he associates empathy with an aesthetic rather than artistic perspective. In his words: ‘Its psychic presupposition [i. e., the psychic presupposition of naturalism], as can be clearly understood, is the process of empathy, for which the object nearest to hand is always the cognate organic, i. e. formal processes occur within the work of art which correspond to the natural organic tendencies in man, and permit him, in aesthetic perception, to flow 75 experience of viewing as well as art-making. 35 Worringer presents yet another angle on these terms in a chapter entitled ‘Naturalism and Style’,36 where he connects ‘naturalism’ to ‘empathy,’ and ‘style’ to ‘abstraction.’ 37 He explains naturalism as an artistic materialization of the urge to empathy, and style as a reflection of the urge to abstraction in art.38 Yet ‘naturalism’ and ‘style’ still expose the differences between experiencing as viewing and experiencing as art-making. From aesthetics to art-making: naturalism and style The term ‘naturalism’ brings along associations with a nineteenth-century approach to art- making;39 this term is descriptive (it emphasizes connections with nature), and tends to refer to a preference for organic themes and motifs (according to Worringer),40 rather than to a process of art-making as such. ‘Style’ (the equivalent Worringer offers for ‘abstraction’) uninhibitedly with his inner feeling of vitality, with his inner need for activity, into the felicitous current of this formal happening.’ Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 33. Later in Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer discusses ornament, highlighting that the need for empathy infuses the abstract line of the Vitruvian scroll; in this case, the need for empathy reveals its effect on Worringer’s own response to art. (———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 66.) 35 See, for instance, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 41-45, 57, 60-61. 36 Ibid., 26-50. 37 Ibid., 26, 34. 38 Ibid., 34. 39 Worringer explains that he selected the term ‘naturalism’ due to its association with the arts, and that he intends to use it ‘... in the widest sense.’ (Ibid., 27.) Regarding the term ‘naturalism,’ Hildebrand, to whose thought Worringer refers in the first pages of Abstraction and Empathy, sees naturalism as associated with the imitation of Nature (the capitalisation is Hildebrand’s); according to him, naturalism is an approach to studying the organic world that must nevertheless expand from imitating to creating unitary forms and compositions. (Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, 11-12.) As the current thesis shows, Hildebrand is less critical than Worringer towards imitation. In a contemporary approach to naturalism, John House draws attention to the cultural inflections of the term, which he does not connect to imitation. According to House: ‘Any notion of naturalism, however, depends on cultural assumptions. There has never been a consensus about what constitutes naturalistic representation, even during the past two hundred years when something like our present-day notions of “nature” has been current… In compositional terms, the idea of the “natural” was best invoked by making the picture look as if it had not been “composed” at all.’ See John House, 'Framing the Landscape' in Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: An Anthology, ed. Mary Tompkins Lewis (California: University of California Press, 2007), 86. 40 Also see House, 'Framing the Landscape', 86. 76 points more readily to the observable results of the process of art-making;41 in this sense, it remains a term as generic as ‘abstraction’.42 In Abstraction and Empathy, ‘empathy’ and ‘abstraction,’ or ‘naturalism’ and ‘style,’ articulate partial rather than polar contrasts. ‘Empathy’ and ‘abstraction’ point to the engagement of human beings with the world, even when Worringer recognizes them in geographically removed artistic approaches.43 Endeavouring to bring to light the roots of art-making, Worringer had explained ‘abstraction’ and ‘empathy’ as opposite psychological processes. He had introduced ‘naturalism’ and ‘style’ as artistic manifestations of the urge to empathy and abstraction respectively.44 However, his contrast between ‘naturalism’ and ‘style’ reveals his interest in the common ground of these terms: namely, artistic form. For Worringer, form is, as we have seen, ‘... that higher condition of matter’.45 Had artistic form been of minor consequence to Worringer’s purposes, he could have employed the oppositional pairing of ‘empathy’ and ‘abstraction’ throughout his book. Instead, Worringer selects the terms ‘naturalism’ and ‘style’ to address precisely the artistic manifestations of psychological urges, and looks at art where he could recognize ‘naturalism’ and ‘style’ at work.46 The strategy of opposition as employed by 41 Worringer associates ‘style’ with the psychological urge to abstraction. Stylization is also discussed by Lipps in his Aesthetics. According to Lipps, stylization ‘... is neither addition nor simple omission, but detachment. Stylization is not a form of negation, but of artistic recognition; it is not the cause of constraint, but of liberation... In the most general sense, stylization means distancing, for artistic purposes, from the simple duplication of things in nature. Stylization especially means the materialization of the essential features of objects found in nature; this contrasts with such copying of objects that does not differentiate between essential and unessential elements of the rendition.’ (Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 289.) Worringer follows Lipps closely in his own approach to style (and implicitly abstraction) in art. In this thesis, the term ‘style’ is explored in connection to the writings of Worringer. 42 Worringer uses the term ‘style’ generically in Abstraction and Empathy. In contrast, the term ‘style’ acquires historical particularity in the case of the Dutch movement of the nineteen-twenties, ‘De Stijl’ [‘The Style]. See H. Henkels, 'De Stijl', in Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. 43 Worringer later explains that both empathy and abstraction inform a mode of art-making such as Gothic. See, for instance, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 112. Waite draws attention to Worringer’s rhetorical approach, signalling that geographical distance is a figure of discourse actually pointing back towards the art-making within Worringer’s context. (Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism', 22-23.) 44 Ibid., 34. 45 Ibid., 32. Regarding the formal aspects of naturalism and style as explained by Worringer, see, for instance, Worringer’s approach to the ‘evolution of artistic experience’ in ‘Naturalism and Style’, where Worringer discusses artistic form and process as manifestations of artistic will. ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 34-44. 46 For instance, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4, 13-14, 25, 26, 34, 42, 45, 98, 101, 103. 77 Worringer with regard to abstraction and empathy, naturalism and style, succeeds in serving the purposes of definition and clarification;47 yet the processes of ‘abstraction’ and ‘empathy’ become difficult to regard as opposites after Worringer’s discussions of Gothic art.48 W. J. T. Mitchell and Juliet Koss about empathy Worringer’s employment of terms such as ‘empathy’ and ‘abstraction’ poses significant problems to the contemporary researchers of his work. Twentieth-century writers on art have often cast critical glances towards Worringer’s multifaceted terminology in Abstraction and Empathy. For instance, W. J. T. Mitchell and Juliet Koss expose the negative aspects of the process of empathy, inquiring into its definition, span and contemporary relevance. In What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (2005), Mitchell prefers to connect ‘abstraction’ with intimacy rather than ‘empathy.’ 49 Approaching abstraction in its contemporary aspect, he explains that, if the abstraction of today is to explore its possibilities from new angles, it is unlikely to benefit from revisiting the process of empathy and its associated aesthetics.50 Mitchell describes Worringer’s discussion of abstract art from Abstraction and Empathy as influential;51 he highlights that the connection Worringer traces between ‘primitive’ and modern art relies on their common need for distancing, on their evocation of the fear of space, and on their negation of empathy. Empathy, as seen by Worringer, is a process that relies on imitation and compensation, Mitchell argues. In his words: Empathy is both a mimetic and a compensatory relation between the beholder and the object. Mimetic in that the beholder... “becomes what he beholds,” his language – a meaningless, repetitious “chattering,” just as abstract, nonreferential, and 47 See, from the current thesis, ‘Worringer’s approach to antithesis: contexts, connections, differences’. 48 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 112-121. 49 For Mitchell, intimacy can be shared much more than empathy. See W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 230. 50 Ibid., 230, 236. 51 Ibid., 229. 78 autofigurative with respect to language as the painting is with respect to paint. Compensatory in that the beholder makes up for the silence of the image by supplying what it lacks, what it seems to need or demand, a voice adequate to its visual purity. An aesthetics of empathy, then, is a kind of negation of a negation when it encounters abstraction – the negation of a visual alienation associated with voyeurism and “seeing without being seen,” a scenario in which the work of art does not need the spectator, even “turns away” from the spectator...52 In Mitchell’s argument, empathy exposes the ground it shares with embodiment and narrative. Imitation and compensation reveal two sides of empathy that make it less likely to support contemporary abstraction-oriented inquiries, according to Mitchell.53 For him, empathy is associated with the domain of aesthetics, and negates abstraction. Inverting the negative and positive associations from Worringer’s debut book, Mitchell highlights the ‘negative’ role of empathy: as he remarks, empathy denies the alienation Worringer had recognized in abstract art-making. Mitchell, like Worringer, shows his distrust in empathy,54 employing a strategy of opposition to distinguish between empathy and abstraction. The negative aspects of empathy are also emphasized by Juliet Koss in ‘On the Limits of Empathy’ (2006). For Koss, empathy is an experience that unbalances the viewer. Citing the words of R. Vischer, Koss explains that empathizing involves an object and an observer, and has an impact on both. Koss notes: Vischer used the term [i. e., empathy] to describe the viewer’s active perceptual engagement with a work of art... This reciprocal experience of exchange and transformation – a solitary, on-on-one experience – created, as it were, both viewer 52 Ibid., 230. 53 In his Aesthetics, Lipps noted that empathy could be considered the inner side of imitation. (Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 144.) However, Lipps re-examined his claim and explained that, while imitation was a wilful action manifested externally, empathy was an inner wilful action based on emotional experience. Unlike Mitchell, Lipps ultimately finds that empathy is distinct from imitation. Worringer also distinguishes carefully between imitation (which he regards as external to art-making) and naturalism (which he associates with the urge to empathy) in Abstraction and Empathy. (Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 11-12, 21, 26-29, 32.) 54 Even though Mitchell regards empathy as a process contemporary abstract practices would not be advised to incorporate, he points out that looking at abstract art today must not shy away from to acknowledging the temptations of empathy. (Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, 234.) The gap between looking and art-making surfaces in Mitchell’s approach to empathy and abstraction much like in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy. 79 and object, destabilizing the identity of the former while animating the latter. Physical, emotional, and psychological, the process of Einfühlung placed the spectator at the center of aesthetic discourse.55 Empathy, in R. Vischer’s time, highlighted the role of the viewer in aesthetic experience according to Koss.56 She maintains that empathy featured as a process that animated objects in R. Vischer’s approach; however, empathy also required a shift of the centre of personal awareness from people onto objects. A significant change in the rapport between onlookers and the world thus took place, leading to an unstable positioning of viewers. Like Mitchell, Koss draws attention to the negative potential of empathy: she sees in the imaginative engagement of viewers with objects in the world (works of art included) a loss of balance, and a threat to human identity. 57 Tracing the rise and decline of the concept of empathy in writings on art around the beginning of the twentieth century, Koss examines Worringer’s ideas at length. She argues that Abstraction and Empathy took a significant step towards questioning the role of empathy in art,58 and that the concept of empathy had lost currency by 1925.59 However, Koss mentions that empathy ‘... remained central to the understanding of spectatorship throughout the twentieth century, and was merely reworked to accommodate shifts in the status of spectators and the objects to which they attended.’ 60 Koss observes that empathy has 55 Koss, 'On the Limits of Empathy', 139. 56 With regard to the estrangement that the process of empathy (according to Koss) brings along, Vischer indeed observes that empathy ‘... leaves the self in a certain sense solitary.’ See Vischer, 'On the Optical Sense of Form', 108. However, Vischer also emphasizes that empathy, or emotional engagement, actually leads to a selfless appreciation of and care for the world. In the words of Vischer: ‘As I think abstractly and learn to see myself as a subordinate part of an indivisible whole, my feeling expands into emotion. Thus I am mentally affected by a personal injury or satisfaction to the extent that it can be conceived as a weakening or strengthening of the universal harmony. The instinct for happiness discovers that the only magical secret of satisfaction is care for the general human welfare. Thus we rise from the simple love of self to a love of family and species (race) and from there to absolute altruism, philanthropy, and the noble sentiments of civic awareness.’ (———, 'On the Optical Sense of Form', 109-110.) 57 In this thesis, the term ‘image’ refers to the recognizable visualisation or rendition of beings, objects, situations or phenomena in the world. Likewise, I consider that the term ‘imagination’ points to the ability of the human mind to reconstruct or construct objects, beings, situations or phenomena. ‘Imagination,’ in my understanding, relies on embodied, sensuous experiencing, but is not limited to the exact rendition of such experiencing. 58 Koss, 'On the Limits of Empathy', 145-152. 59 Ibid., 151-152. 60 Ibid., 152. 80 continued to inform writings on art, despite the negative associations it acquired from the time of Worringer onwards. If recent research has re-examined the concept of empathy from critical perspectives, it has also signalled the changes the concept of abstraction has undergone since Worringer’s time. For Mitchell, ‘abstraction’ is a mode of art-making associated with a significant modernist strand of inquiry, where religious, scientific, and political echoes interweave. 61 Mitchell underscores that modernist abstraction questioned representation, and aimed to depict reality from a different perspective. Instead, twenty-first century abstraction is a much quieter pursuit than the abstraction-oriented art of the early 1900s, according to Mitchell. Contemporary abstraction, Mitchell observes, does not need to resort to empathy, emotion or subjectivity, since it can rely on its democratic, emplaced, everyday aspects. Mitchell muses: The sort of contemplative, concentrated seeing demanded by abstraction needn’t be associated with a regression to empathy, sentimentality, and (heaven forbid) private, bourgeois subjectivity. The democratizing of abstraction, its availability as a vernacular artistic tradition, offers access to a space of intimacy in which new collective and public subjectivities might be nurtured... Its operations [i. e., the operations of abstraction] will have to be quiet, modest, and patient. Its apologists will have to be willing to listen to the uninitiated, not just lecture them. If the picture speaks Danish, someone will have to translate it for us; if it depends on ironic, knowing allusions to special knowledges, they will have to be explained. Abstraction will serve us best, in other words, if it takes Milton’s advice to himself, resigning itself to “stand and wait,” not for an artistic messiah, but for a new community of beholders and new forms of intimacy made possible by a very old artistic tradition.62 From the viewer-oriented perspective of Mitchell, contemporary as well traditional forms of abstraction can provide an occasion for the cultivation of public forms of subjectivity, for dialogic exchanges rather than specialist monologues. He points out that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, abstraction does not translate into the assertion of artistic singularity, but into the attention contemporary communities of viewers direct towards it. Empathy, in his 61 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, 223-224, 231. 62 Ibid., 236. 81 opinion, does not need to inform abstraction-oriented modes of art-making. Nevertheless, Mitchell highlights that contemporary abstraction makes possible both subjective engagement and public dialogue. Today, the terms ‘abstraction’ and ‘empathy’ are approached from different angles than in the time of Worringer. Worringer’s thoughts and preoccupations still echo in contemporary writings on art. However, researchers such as Mitchell and Koss associate ‘empathy’ with viewer responses to art, and consider ‘abstraction’ a method of art-making but also a self- standing artistic modality. For Worringer, ‘empathy’ and ‘abstraction’ were specific psychological urges that manifested in art that emphasized ‘naturalism’ (in the case of ‘the urge to empathy’) or ‘style’ (in the case of ‘the urge to abstraction’). The gap between the terminology employed by Worringer, and twenty-first century interpretations of terms such as ‘abstraction’ and ‘empathy,’ has widened with the passage of time. Abstraction and representation: Clement Greenberg, Frances Colpitt In contemporary writings on art, the term ‘abstraction’ tends to stand in contrast to terms such as ‘figuration’ or ‘representation’.63 Frances Colpitt addresses these differentiations in Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century (2002), noting that writers now connect ‘representation’ and ‘abstraction’ even in their antithetic definitions of these terms. Colpitt notes: ‘Armed with complex theories of representation beyond the mimetic correspondence of an image to its real-world model, contemporary critics reject the oppositional relationship 63 Worringer also refers to ‘figurative art’ in Abstraction and Empathy, and employs the term ‘figure’ in his discussions of representational art. (For instance, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 23, 53, 64, 69, 84-85, 88-89, 90, 92, 109-110, 116-118.) According to Worringer, figurative art is associated with the most valued approaches to art practice during his time. He observes: ‘... [F]igurative art is one-sidedly preferred as the so-called higher art, and every clumsily modelled lump, every playful scribble, as the first revelations of art, are made the starting point of art historical interpretation’. (———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 51.) However, the term ‘figure’ appears in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy in association with geometry as well; see, for instance, ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 87. 82 of abstraction and representation, although they may continue to define one in terms of the other.’ 64 Mentioning another equivalent of the term ‘abstraction,’ namely ‘non-representation,’ Colpitt explains that, before the rise of non-representational art as such, Worringer had discussed empathy (or naturalism) and abstraction in terms of antithesis.65 Colpitt questions the antithesis of abstraction and representation by citing Clement Greenberg (1909-94), who did not regard representation and abstraction as opposites. Indeed, in ‘Abstract and Representational’ (1954), Greenberg explains: It is widely assumed that in the fine arts the representational as such is superior to the non-representational as such: that, all other things being equal (which they never are), a work of painting or sculpture that exhibits a recognizable image is always to be preferred to one that does not... The embattled defenders of abstract art reverse the argument by claiming for the non-representational that absolute virtue and inherent superiority which the majority see in the representational... To hold that one kind of art is invariably superior or inferior to another kind is to judge before experiencing. The whole history of art is there to demonstrate the futility of rules of preference laid down beforehand – the impossibility of anticipating the outcome of aesthetic experience.66 Greenberg observes that, for a large number of viewers, a difference in value separates representational art and non-representational (or abstract) art – a situation comparable to Worringer’s experience at the beginning of the twentieth century. For his contemporaries, Worringer argued, representational art that followed Classical norms was valued aesthetically;67 hence he emphasized the merits of abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy. In his turn, Greenberg finds that later twentieth-century viewers still defend one mode of art- 64 Frances Colpitt, Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 154. 65 Ibid. 66 Clement Greenberg, 'Abstract and Representational' in The Collected Essays and Criticism. 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950-1956, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993 [1954]), 186-188. 67 For example, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 10-15. 83 making or the other, relating to abstraction and representation hierarchically. However, he posits that experience should constitute the ground of aesthetic judgment. As Colpitt argues, Greenberg notes that representation and abstraction do not differ fundamentally, although abstract art brought along a re-examination of painting as a mode of art-making.68 Approaching representation and abstraction as opposite or hierarchical modes of art-making is a questionable angle on exploring their relationship, for Greenberg as for Colpitt. Worringer, in Abstraction and Empathy, appears to defend the antithesis of abstraction and representation, yet, as his demonstration advances, analyses a variety of artistic instances where abstract-representational interplay is visible. In order to bridge the temporal gap between Worringer’s explorations and contemporary approaches to writing on art, the current thesis pairs and contrasts the terns ‘abstraction’ and ‘representation’ rather than ‘abstraction’ and ‘empathy.’ The employment of contrasting terms such as ‘abstraction’ and ‘representation’ has its disadvantages and advantages. Among disadvantages, readers could count, firstly, Worringer’s not referring to the antithesis between ‘abstraction’ and ‘representation’ in particular, and secondly, the wide, non-specific coverage of the term ‘representation.’ However, although he does not contrast ‘representation’ and ‘abstraction’ as such, Worringer mentions the term ‘representation’ throughout his text; he does so even before referring to the term ‘empathy.’ The first instance when Worringer mentions the term ‘representation’ occurs in his discussion of the difference between the beauty of art and the beauty of nature. In the first pages of Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer writes: ‘It is therefore not a matter of, for example, analysing the conditions under which the representation of this landscape appears beautiful, but of the analysis of the conditions under which the representation of this landscape becomes a work of art.’ 69 Worringer thus associates ‘representation’ with the artistic rendition of the world as seen, adding a note that comments on Hildebrand’s particular perspective on art- making: namely, his Architectonic Method, a pathway towards surpassing simple imitation 68 Colpitt, Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century, 154. 69 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 3-4. In this thesis, reference is made to the terms ‘representation’ and ‘abstraction’ as employed in the 1957 translation Michael Bullock provided for Abstraction and Empathy. The life of these terms in Worringer’s books is therefore examined from the perspective of Bullock’s translation. Further research could focus on the exploration of the gaps emergent between the English and German versions of Worringer’s text. 84 by rendering the formal unity of natural models.70 At the beginning of Worringer’s text, the term ‘representation’ invites further inquiry into particular contexts and processes of art- making. Worringer uses the term ‘representation’ (or the phrase ‘artistic representation’) in contexts where he writes about art-making in general; in such contexts, he uses the phrase ‘artistic representation.’ 71 Various passages from Abstraction and Empathy mention, for instance, the representation of space, the approximation of representation to the plane, the representation of material individuality, round-sculptural and free-sculptural representation, and the representation of the human figure.72 Abstraction and Empathy also draws attention to particular aspects of representation. Worringer discusses ‘impressionistic representation’ and its emphasis on appearances, adding historical nuance to the term ‘representation.’ 73 Citing Riegl, Worringer points to ‘realistic representation’ that assumes decorative purposes, and to the representation of animals and human beings.74 Worringer associates the urge to empathy primarily with ‘naturalism’ in Abstraction and Empathy; however, he also tends to connect the artistic manifestation of the urge to empathy with the term ‘representation.’ When discussing the urge to abstraction, Worringer explains it finds manifestation in the ‘... strict suppression of the representation of space and exclusive rendering of the single form.’ 75 He points out that abstraction-oriented art can emerge in conditions where artists willingly renounce the representation of the three dimensions of space. According to Worringer, abstraction highlights regularity, and results from obliterating the connections between artists and their world. He associates ‘abstraction’ with pure, absolute values of form (as found, for 70 Hildebrand’s understanding of art is briefly approached in ‘Representation and abstraction in art-making’, from the current thesis. 71 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 21, 28. 72 Ibid., 21-22, 37, 42, 44, 84, 89, 109, 117. 73 Worringer does not mention Impressionist artists in Abstraction and Empathy, nor does he discuss particular Impressionist works. Instead, he refers to the subjectivity of Impressionism, and to its cultivation of appearance rather than objectivity. (Ibid., 38.) 74 Ibid., 58. 75 Ibid., 21. 85 instance, in geometrical regularity), with a distancing from natural models, and with a focus on presenting the material individuality of objects.76 ‘Representation’ and ‘abstraction’ are not the terms Worringer chooses to articulate the polar contrast between psychological urges as reflected in modes of art-making; however, ‘abstraction’ and ‘representation’ belong in groups of concepts that Worringer introduces as opposites. This thesis employs the terms ‘representation’ and ‘abstraction’ to discuss Worringer’s text with the understanding that ‘representation’ and ‘abstraction’ are not perfect equivalents for ‘empathy’ or ‘naturalism’ on the one hand, and ‘style’ on the other. ‘Abstraction’ and ‘representation’ retain their experiential associations in my approach, much like in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy; like Worringer, I consider both modes of art- making reliant on the responses of artists to their environments. However, the connections between the terms ‘representation’ and ‘abstraction’ are strengthened in my inquiry, since their pairing can emphasize the connections both these terms have with art-making, as well as with processes of rapprochement and distancing.77 76 Ibid., 20-21. 77 Instead of the terms ‘representation and ‘abstraction,’ the terms ‘representing’ and ‘abstracting’ could have been predominantly employed in this thesis. ‘Representing’ and ‘abstracting’ would have further emphasized an active involvement with art-making. However, to maintain a closer connection to Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, the terms ‘representation’ and ‘abstraction’ were preferred at this stage of inquiry. 86 Representation and abstraction in art-making: Worringer’s perspective In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer dedicates his attention to two antithetic psychological urges: the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction. For him, these urges (or tendencies) lead to different results in art.1 The urge to empathy (shaped by artistic will) manifests as representational art, whereas the urge to abstraction (also influenced by will), fosters the emergence of abstract art. Having approached the two psychological urges as antithetic in Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer extends their oppositional framing to the discussion of abstraction-oriented art, and representation-reliant art.2 Yet his analysis highlights the contrasts as much as the connections between representation and abstraction in art-making. ‘Every style represented the maximum bestowal of happiness for the humanity that created it’, Worringer notes in the first pages of Abstraction and Empathy.3 Approaching the term ‘style’ from a generic perspective, Worringer observes that, despite their diverse approaches to art-making, artists of all times have a recognizable common goal: they seek to provide occasions for enjoyment and satisfaction through their art. Worringer notes that art-making can lead to the creation of different styles (or, in a generic sense, to formally distinct approaches to art-making). Each of these styles is significant for its viewers and creators, despite aesthetic differences. Accepting the variety of artistic expression at an early stage of his inquiry, Worringer prepares the ground for his discussion of an alternative to representational art: abstraction. 1 With regard to the relationship between psychological urges and modes of art-making in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, Michael Jennings remarks that the psychic states manifested in representational or abstract art are first filtered through the will of artists. In other words, will intermediates between psychological urges and their expression in art, according to Jennings. Jennings, 'Against Expressionism: Materialism and Social Theory in Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', 89. For a further discussion of the role of will in Worringer’s inquiry, see ‘A matter of will: Schopenhauer and Worringer on life and art’. 2 The art that Worringer associates with abstraction at the beginning of the twentieth century includes Egyptian pyramids (where the geometric aspect of abstraction comes to the fore), as well as the work of early twentieth- century painter Ferdinand Hodler (whose paintings have strong representational aspects). This thesis proposes not to regard the terms ‘abstraction’ and ‘representation’ as polar opposites, but to highlight the points of meeting and exchange between the modes of art-making to which they refer. Phrases such as ‘abstraction- oriented art’ and ‘representation-reliant art’ are employed to signal that Worringer’s views on representation and abstraction differ from today’s approach to the same terms. 3 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 13. 87 In ‘Naturalism and Style’, Worringer articulates the opposition of style and naturalism, or, following his associations, of abstraction and empathy, as observed in the art of Antiquity. He underscores that naturalism (or representation that focuses on aspects of nature) plays a significant role in art-making as well as in aesthetics at the beginning of the twentieth century. Apart from being a specific approach to making art, naturalism provides a measure for contemporary judgments of artistic value, Worringer explains. He remarks that, in his time, art is regarded as having aesthetic value if it operates from a naturalist perspective. Style (or abstraction), Worringer notes, occupies a minor place in the attention of his contemporaries. Worringer’s purpose in Abstraction and Empathy was to question the aesthetic supremacy of naturalism, an approach to art relying on the truthful response to life in its organic, animated aspects.4 Adolf Hildebrand: nature, form, imitation and artistic self-sufficiency Before Worringer, artist Adolf Hildebrand (1847-1921) examined the impact of the natural world on artworks in The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture (1893).5 The first note Worringer introduces in Abstraction and Empathy refers to the thought of Hildebrand; for Worringer, Hildebrand’s work and writings maintained that, in art, attention could be directed to the relationship between nature and beauty, but also to the conditions that turn a simple rendering of the world into art.6 With Hildebrand’s observations in mind, Worringer emphasizes his own interest in art, as well as his intention of questioning current modes of art-making. 4 Ibid., 10-11. In Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, the terms ‘organic’ and ‘animated’ point to lifelike characteristics visible especially in the natural world. 5 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer cites Hildebrand with regard to the artist’s thoughts on ‘cubic’ qualities in sculpture (which Hildebrand considers indicative of an initial stage in art-making), and with regard to Hildebrand’s employment of the term ‘architectonic’ (by which Hildebrand points to abstraction-oriented, structural, compositional, constructive preoccupations in art-making). When discussing the attempts of sculptors to bridge representational and abstract tendencies, Worringer refers to Hildebrand’s approach as assertive of material individuality, unity and tactility. (Ibid., 22-23, 84, 90, 136.) 6 Ibid., 3-4, 136. 88 ‘The activity of plastic art takes possession of the object as something to be illumined by the mode of representation’,7 Hildebrand notes in The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture. Although Hildebrand cultivates Classically oriented form in his sculptural work,8 Worringer refers to the words of Hildebrand in order to contextualize his own questioning of representation as exclusively committed to the model provided by Classical art. In The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, Hildebrand contrasts actual and perceptual form, explaining that forms as seen deliver more visual information than forms as such.9 Perceptual form, Hildebrand comments, incorporates size, lighting, or colour, and emerges as a result of the changing relationships between such elements.10 He focuses on representational art in his text; however, like Worringer, he is critical towards exact imitation in painting and sculpture.11 ‘In true Art, the actual form has its reality only as an effect’, Hildebrand observes.12 His approach to form signals that art must maintain a certain degree of distance from the models it represents. From his own representational perspective, Hildebrand draws attention to the abstract considerations that actually feed into the work of representational artists around the turn of the twentieth century. Hildebrand, in his foreword to the third edition of The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, introduces sculpture and painting as imitative arts that rely on the rendering of the natural world. Yet, although he notes the connections between painting, sculpture and nature, he also mentions the complexity of their relationship. Hildebrand points to the problems artists encounter when they attempt to render the world starting from direct observation. Even though Hildebrand considers sculpture and painting as imitative to a certain extent, he remarks that imitation alone is insufficient in art-making. He writes: 7 Ibid., 136. 8 For a brief glance towards the work of Hildebrand, see Eric MacLagan, 'Adolf Hildebrand', The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 38, No. 217, 1921. Also, Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica, California and Chicago, Illinois: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities,1994), 29-38. 9 Mallgrave and Iknonmou mention that Conrad Fiedler, Hildebrand’s friend, inspired Hildebrand’s views on form, much like Fiedler had been inspired by his conversations with Hildebrand. (Mallgrave and Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, 29-30.) 10 Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, 36-37. 11 Ibid., 43. 12 Ibid., 45. 89 Sculpture and painting are, indeed, imitative inasmuch as they are based on a kind of study of Nature. And this in a way ties down the artist; for it follows that the problems of form with which he has to deal when imitating emanate directly from his perception of Nature. But if these problems and no others be solved, i. e., if the artist’s work claims attention merely on these grounds, it can never attain a self-sufficiency apart from Nature. To gain such self-sufficiency the artist must raise the imitative part of his work to a higher plane, and the method by which he accomplishes this I should like to call the Architectonic Method. Of course, I do not here use the word architectonic in its ordinary special significance. As in a drama or symphony, so here our perception enables us to realize a unity of form lacking in objects themselves as they appear in Nature. It is the quality essential to this realization which I wish to denote by the term architectonic.13 Hildebrand considers the natural world a crucial element in art-making; indeed, nature is a rich source of motifs for artists. Capitalizing the term ‘Nature,’ 14 Hildebrand draws further attention to the indebtedness of artists to their environment. Nevertheless, he notes that painting and sculpture need to aim towards self-sufficiency, towards standing their own ground in front of Nature. For works of sculpture or painting to be able to assert themselves as such, Hildebrand suggests artists need to give to forms a unity that their appearance in Nature does not have. A certain degree of distancing from Nature supports art-making, according to him; this preoccupation with form is beneficial in art. Nevertheless, where Hildebrand explains the limits of imitation in art-making, Worringer considers that art cannot include imitation. 13 Ibid., 11-12. 14 Hildebrand does not define the term ‘Nature’ in his foreword to the third edition of The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, yet employs it so as to point to the environment where artists find inspiration. For him, the realm of Nature can be considered a territory where three-dimensional objective form can be observed. (Ibid., 17.) 90 Imitation, naturalism, empathy and abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy Worringer articulates a decisive contrast between imitation and naturalism in Abstraction and Empathy. Naturalism, he explains, reflects the resonance of artists with life in its organic, animated aspects.15 Instead, imitation makes visible the delight of artists in creating copies of models from nature.16 Despite his earlier support for an open-minded approach to different styles in art-making, Worringer shows little tolerance towards imitation in art. For him, imitation is a measure of technical skill only – it is thus less likely than naturalism to promote genuine inquiries into the artistic rendering of the world. Imitation offers insufficient grounds to be addressed from the perspective of aesthetics, according to Worringer. 17 A focus on imitation informed the art practices of the epochs between Renaissance and the early twentieth century, Worringer observes; the consequences of cultivating imitation, Worringer argues, are undesirable in art-making and writing on art alike.18 Imitation cannot be considered a relevant expression of the urge to empathy, according to him.19 Therefore, Worringer finds that only naturalism can be effectively contrasted with style (or abstraction) in approaches to art for which aesthetics can account.20 The urge to empathy (filtered through will) generates art that celebrates life, according to Worringer. He explains that style (a wilful manifestation of the urge to abstraction, opposed to naturalism) requires the suppression of life instead.21 Interpreting the urge to abstraction from a negative perspective, Worringer reinforces the psychological contrast between abstraction and empathy. He reaffirms the contrast of empathy and abstraction in the examples he provides regarding the artistic expression of these urges. For instance, tracing connections between the need for abstraction and the psychological fear of space,22 Worringer explains that the fear of space is the outcome of the insecurity human beings experience in their surroundings. Abstract art proves a reflection of such insecurity, according to 15 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 27-28. 16 Ibid., 11-12. 17 Ibid. Also, ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 20-21, 26-27, 29. 18 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 29. 19 Ibid., 12. 20 In this respect, Worringer emphasizes the necessity to account for ‘an aesthetics of form’ in art-making, as only successfully realized form can confirm the aesthetic value of art. (Ibid., 30-31.) 21 Ibid., 14. 22 Ibid., 15. 91 Worringer; he finds that the need for tranquillity experienced by Oriental artists urges them to divest objects of their transitory characteristics, to approximate the form of these objects, and to render them as abstract.23 In his words: The happiness they [i. e., the people of the East] sought from art did not consist in the possibility of projecting themselves into the things of the outer world, of enjoying themselves in them, but in the possibility of taking the individual thing of the external world out of its arbitrariness and seeming fortuitousness, of eternalizing it by approximation to abstract forms and, in this manner, of finding a point of tranquillity and a refuge from appearances. Their most powerful urge was, so to speak, to wrest the object of the external world out of its natural context, out of the unending flux of being, to purify it of all its dependence upon life, i. e. of everything about it that was arbitrary, to render it necessary and irrefragable, to approximate it to its absolute value.24 According to Worringer, Eastern art favours processes of extraction, detemporizing, approximation, and purification. Worringer finds that, as a mode of art-making, abstraction relies on approximation; in Eastern art, for instance, Worringer claims that abstraction cancels detailing which could reveal the passage of time or the relationships between objects and places.25 Worringer, associating abstraction with the exclusion of elements that hint to life in the world, also connects this mode of art-making to formal and compositional properties such as regularity, symmetry, geometrical features, and occasionally formal rhythm.26 He observes 23 Ibid., 16-17. 24 Ibid. 25 Worringer’s approach to Oriental art serves the purposes of his argument in Abstraction and Empathy. This aspect of his writing has been discussed in ‘Empathy, abstraction and representation in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy’. 26 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 17-20. For the purposes of this thesis, ‘life in the world’ (or life as observed in environments where human beings dwell) refers to phrases frequently employed by Worringer, such as organic life, or animated life. By ‘formal’ I understand an attribute pertaining to form; in Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer associates form with regularity, and considers form a characteristic of matter. The term ‘compositional’ refers to the composition of a work of art, especially of a painting; it points to the organization of elements that constitute representational or abstract paintings (for instance, the placement of, and relationships that develop between, elements of environment, animal or human figures, or objects; alternatively, the interaction of lines, colours and shapes in a picture). ‘Regularity’ is associated by Worringer with the impulse towards abstraction and towards geometrical expression in art (he 92 the tendency of abstraction not to employ models from nature, but to suppress three- dimensional aspects, and render clearly delineated, single, flat forms. Abstraction, as analysed by Worringer, reveals that artists can regard objects as self-reliant material elements rather than as participants to a three-dimensional, time-bound, fluctuating environment.27 Ferdinand Hodler: exactness and expressiveness, emotion and parallelism According to Worringer, a tendency towards abstraction in painting is visible in the early twentieth-century practice of Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), one of the few contemporary artists Worringer mentions in Abstraction and Empathy. In the early years of the twentieth century, Hodler, who had been exhibiting extensively in the last decades of the nineteenth century, proved to have an influence on Expressionist artists, according to Peter Selz. 28 For instance, in his Letters from Munich (1909-10), Kandinsky characterized the work of Hodler as ‘serious and powerful,’ 29 and singled out Hodler’s melodic approach to composition in On the Spiritual in Art (1912).30 By the time of Worringer’s preparing Abstraction and Empathy, Hodler’s work was receiving national and international recognition for large-scale works such as Night (1890), Lake Geneva from Chexbres (1895) (Fig. 1), and The Retreat from Marignano (1898).31 Artur contrasts regularity with uniformity, where the urge to empathy begins to be felt). See ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 64-65. Worringer connects ‘symmetry’ to stylisation, especially when stylisation acquires ornamental value; an example of symmetry is offered, Worringer explains, by the figure of the circle in Egyptian art. See ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 58-68. ‘Rhythm,’ according to Worringer, can be recognized in ornaments as approached by Classical Greek artists (for instance, in the ornamental figure of the festoon, or in the acanthus motif); it reflects ‘rest in motion’. Rhythm connects to empathy, even in abstract contexts, where it asserts organic aspects of form. See ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 72-74. 27 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 21-22. 28 Selz mentions the impact of Hodler’s work on Egon Schiele, Emil Nolde, and Alexei von Jawlensky (the latter being one of Kandinsky’s friends). (Selz, Ferdinand Hodler, 15.) 29 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, I, 58. 30 Melodic (or rhythmic) compositions, according to Kandinsky, are constructions with a simple inner sound. (Ibid., 217.) 31 Selz, Ferdinand Hodler, 13-15, 128. For instance, Hodler had won the first prize in the Calame Competition (Geneva) in 1874 and 1883, a third prize in the same competition of 1887, and a second prize in 1895. He had received an honorary award in the competition of the National Institute of Geneva (1876), had exhibited at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars in Paris (1891), and had been awarded the first prize in the Swiss National Museum Competition of 1897. He had also received a gold medal at the Paris World Exhibition (1900), and had shown 93 Weese, the supervisor of Worringer’s thesis at the University of Bern, was in contact with Hodler and wrote about him, according to Magdalena Bushart.32 Acknowledging the merits of Hodler’s work in the terms of his inquiry from Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer explained that Hodler’s paintings exemplified an abstract orientation in art-making. The art of Hodler, Worringer argued, baffled turn-of-the-twentieth-century audiences who regarded ‘...beauty and truth to nature as a precondition of the artistically beautiful’. 33 Hodler did not rely on the imitation of nature exclusively, Worringer maintained.34 Indeed, Hodler’s words from one of his 1874-76 notebooks reinforce Worringer’s observation.35 Listing ten key compositional requirements a painter must meet, Hodler writes: his works in the nineteenth exhibition of the Vienna Secession (1904). See Ferdinand Hodler et al., Ferdinand Hodler: Landscapes (Zürich and London: Scalo and Thames & Hudson, 2004), 183-184. 32 Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch', 78. 33 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 137. 34 Ibid., 10, 137. 35 Selz, Ferdinand Hodler, 111. Hodler’s words are quoted from a selection of his writings compiled and edited by Jura Brüschweiler and translated by Madeline Jay. The citation above is based on the transcription of C. A. Loosli, and, according to Loosli, belongs in a text entitled ‘The Painter’s Decalogue’(1874-75). Loosli places the writing of Hodler’s ‘Decalogue’ between 1875 and 1876; Brüschweiler disagrees. Pointing to Hodler’s paintings, The Student (1874) and The Schoolboy (1875), Brüschweiler argues the date of the ‘Decalogue’ must have been an earlier one. Brüschweiler notes that the original version of ‘The Painter’s Decalogue’ is untraceable. Fig. 1. Ferdinand Hodler. Lake Geneva on the Evening in Chexbres. 1895. oil on canvas. 100.5 x 130 cm. Private collection. 94 2. The painter must practice seeing nature as a flat surface. 3. He must divide, in a sensible, deliberate way, with all the mathematical accuracy he can muster, the part of the surface he wishes to render into geometrical planes. 4. When he has thus divided his surface he will place in it the outline of the object he is reproducing, as concisely as possible. 5. The outline constitutes an expressive feature and an element of beauty in itself. It constitutes the foundation of all later work and therefore must be strong and accurate. 6. The more concise the outline, the stronger it will be.36 For Hodler, painting relies on recognizing how three-dimensional vistas could be rendered as flat, on dividing surfaces into geometrical planes, and on simple and accurate outlining. Although his works are representational, Hodler asks of artists to attend to the abstract components of pictorial composition. Having studied at the Geneva School of Fine Arts (1872-78) with Barthélemy Menn (1815-93) – himself formerly taught by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) – 37, Hodler, like Menn,38 paid particular attention to line and form in pictorial composition.39 Ingres had also explained the role of line and exactness as elements of expression; in his notebooks (c. 1820-78), he had explained: ‘Expression in painting demands a very great science of drawing; for expression cannot be good if it has not been formulated with absolute exactitude... Thus the painters of expression, among the moderns, turn out to be the greatest draftsmen... Expression, an essential element of art, is 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 127. 38 Richard A. Moore, 'Academic "Dessin" Theory in France after the Reorganization of 1863', Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 36, No. 3, 1977, 147, 174. Moore notes the influence of Menn on Hodler. He writes: ‘In Switzerland as well the influence of dessin in the post-Reorganization period served to reinforce a preexistent academic Beaux-Arts tradition. A more articulate utilization of dessin géométral was evident in Frédéric Gillet, Resumé sommaire d’une méthode de dessin, Geneva, 1867... Gillet was a professor at the École Municipale, but his book reflects the method of the Geneva École des Beaux-Arts, where Barthélemy Menn taught in the late 60s and early 70s. It was Menn who was instrumental in teaching Ferdinand Hodler, after he enrolled at the École in 1872, how to apply the aplomb [i. e., ‘a formal or structural vertical accent, which when projected to infinity, passed though the centre of the world’] to the painting of human figures so as to achieve an unprecedentedly monumental, even architectural, effect.’ 39 Selz, Ferdinand Hodler, 16. 95 therefore intimately bound up with form.’ 40 For Ingres and Menn, contemplating the role of line and form in picture-making, and then allowing them to articulate representational compositions was an integral aspect of their practice. Hodler further explored this line of thought on art-making. The abstract aspects of representational pictures become visible in Hodler’s own works. In a painting such as Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau in the Morning Sun (1908) (Fig. 2), for instance, Hodler depicts a landscape from nature, yet gives priority to planes and chromatic separations when representing it. Focusing on a natural vista, Hodler suggests spatial three- dimensionality through the transition from darker, chromatically assertive passages in the foreground to lighter and flatter areas in the background. His attention to communicating depth of space shows his representational intent. However, the painting renders the monumental mass of cliffs and rocks, allowing effects of light as observed on mountain surfaces to shape emplaced materiality rather than the fleetingness of appearances or the passage of time. Clouds travel in rows parallel to the horizontal edges of the picture, paradoxically reinforcing the stability of the composition. Repetition and parallelism articulate a powerfully representational image, yet reveal the abstraction-oriented preoccupations of the painter at the same time. 40 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 'From Notebooks' in Art in Theory 1815 - 1900. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, c. 1820-1848), 184. Fig. 2. Ferdinand Hodler. Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau in the Morning Sun. 1908. oil on canvas. 67 x 46 cm. Private collection. 96 Hodler and Worringer assume comparably complex approaches to representation and abstraction in art. In ‘The Mission of the Artist,’ a lecture given to the Friends of Fine Arts Society [Société des Amis des Beaux Arts] in Fribourg (12 March 1897), Hodler explains his views on representation. For him as for Worringer, the art of representation (or reproduction, in Hodler’s own terms) reflects the connection of artists with the world. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer notes the confidence representational artists have in their environment, their sensuous appreciation of it, and their joyful state of mind in front of nature.41 Hodler also draws attention to the emotions artists working with representation experience in response to their world. According to Hodler: We reproduce what we love… Emotion is one of the first causes which impels a painter to create a work of art. He wants to convey the charm of a landscape, of a human being, of nature, which has moved him so deeply. The impressions he receives from the outside leave on him more or less deep and lasting traces, and the choice he makes determines the character of his work and his own character as a painter.42 Emotional and ethical aspects characterise representation, Hodler maintains: the choice of subject-matter impacts the making of art as well as the character of the artist. Art-making and being in the world stand in powerful connection for Hodler, who focuses on depicting gestures and attitudes reflective of inner states in many of his paintings. Emotion, a work by Hodler from 1900 (Fig. 3), creates a sense of visual resonance between figure and landscape. The paths to the left and to the right of the figure echo the shape of her shoulders and position of her arms. Hodler employs tints and tones of blue to render the dress of his protagonist as well as the mountains in the distance; while depicting gesture and pose, his painting makes visible an inner state experienced in natural surroundings. Pictorial form and the expression of emotion amplify each other in Hodler’s approach. 41 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 45-46. 42 Selz, Ferdinand Hodler, 119. 97 Where Worringer sees abstraction as a mode of distancing from the world, 43 Hodler looks at the world in abstract terms, yet engages with it at the same time. For Worringer, abstract art arises when artists feel the need for peace and rest in a destabilising world; accordingly, they approximate objects to abstract forms. The resulting geometrical compositions thus reflect anguished or restless states of mind, Worringer argues.44 On the other hand, Hodler seems to be at peace with the world when discovering the abstract components of natural motifs. He associates parallelism with unity in ‘The Mission of the Artist,’ where he notes: Parallelism, whether it is the main feature of the picture or whether it is used to set off an element of variety, always produces a feeling of unity. If I go for a walk in a forest of very high fir trees, I can see ahead of me, to the right and to the left, the innumerable columns formed by the tree trunks. I am surrounded by the same vertical line repeated an infinite number of times. Whether those tree trunks stand out clear against a darker background or whether they are silhouetted against a deep blue sky, the main note, causing that impression of unity, is the parallelism of the tree trunks.45 A painting like Hodler’s Forest Brook at Leissingen (1904) (Fig. 4), for instance, balances variety and unity. The different shapes, tonalities and surface textures of stones and boulders 43 For instance, see Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 16-17. 44 Ibid. 45 Selz, Ferdinand Hodler, 123. Fig. 3. Ferdinand Hodler. Emotion [Ergriffenheit]. 1900. oil on canvas. 70 x 115 cm. Vienna. Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. 98 introduce an element of variety and visual dynamism. At the same time, the rhythm established by the line of trees in the middle ground adds a sense of unity and repetition to his picture. Abstract aspects of composition come to the fore in Hodler’s otherwise representational painting. For Worringer, abstract art approximates objects, thus showing their unchanging, enduring aspects. He argues that abstraction can be attained when artists do not render the three- dimensionality of space, when they avoid subjective elements, and when they do not allude to the passage of time. Associating abstraction with ‘absolute,’ ‘eternal,’ ‘crystalline’ qualities of form, Worringer notes that abstraction is most clearly observable in art that employs geometric components. Free from its connections with the world, geometric abstraction nevertheless displays characteristics also recognizable in inorganic matter.46 Yet Worringer’s discussions of Gothic in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic also reveal his 46 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 35, 37. With regard to the crystalline fundament of organic matter in Worrringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, Joseph Masheck remarks: ‘[I]t is worth considering that the understanding of specifically organic structure as crypto-crystalline on even the molecular level was only established with August Kekulé’s hypothetical hexagon of the benzene ring of organic chemistry, in Worringer’s childhood. What, after all, in the entire universe, is more literally organic than the metaphorically crystalline benzene ring?’ Masheck, 'Abstraction and Apathy: Crystalline Form in Expressionism and in the Minimalism of Tony Smith', 48-49. Fig. 4. Ferdinand Hodler. Forest Brook at Leissingen. 1904. oil on canvas. 88.5 x 101.5 cm. Zurich. Kunsthaus. 99 sensitivity to the coexistence between abstraction and representation, as further sections of this thesis highlight. To better delimit the domain of abstraction, Worringer contrasts it with representation – the mode of art-making that emerges in response to the urge to empathy. 47 He explains that viewers can regard three-dimensional renditions of models from nature as distressingly changeable; therefore, three-dimensionality cannot become a feature of abstraction. Appearances as rendered in Impressionism, for instance, do not reveal the enduring qualities of models; according to Worringer, abstraction cannot be associated with Impressionism.48 Worringer finds that the emphasis of Impressionism on optical qualities communicates uncertain, changeable aspects of the world. Also, three-dimensional space – articulated through shading and foreshortening in painting –49 suggests the temporality of and connections between depicted objects and phenomena;50 it cannot inform abstract art-making, Worringer argues. Abstraction uses single forms set free from their dependence on space relations, while representation makes visible three-dimensional connections, according to Worringer.51 He underscores that representation, unlike abstraction, relies on optical renditions that account for changes, appearances, atmosphere, depth of space, and the passage of time. Artists working with representation allude to spatial depth through techniques such as shading and foreshortening, which amplify spatial effects.52 Observing that compositional elements succeed each other and combine in representational art, Worringer exposes the temporal and spatial aspects of representation. Representational works exhibit lifelike qualities such as animation (or dynamism of form and composition) for Worringer; due to their fostering the process of empathy, they become reflections of human experience. Worringer had already pointed out that representation (or naturalism) was an artistic manifestation of the urge to empathy. He emphasized that the urge 47 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 38. 48 Ibid. 49 For the purposes of this thesis, shading is defined as the technique of rendering light fall and shadows as observed on chosen models or environments, and foreshortening as the technique of suggesting depth effects in the rendition of models or environments. 50 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 38-39. 51 Ibid., 22. 52 Ibid. 100 to empathy informed naturalist art; in response to naturalism, viewers resonated with the world, and artists engaged in the communication of their emotions towards organic life. In his discussion of the difference between naturalism and imitation, Worringer draws attention to the effect empathy, as experienced by viewers, has on the interpretation of works of art. He observes: ... naturalism alone is accessible to aesthetic evaluation. Its psychic presupposition, as can be clearly understood, is the process of empathy, for which the object nearest to hand is always the cognate organic, i. e. formal processes occur within the work of art which correspond to the natural organic tendencies in man, and permit him, in aesthetic perception, to flow uninhibitedly with his inner feeling of vitality, with his inner need for activity, into the felicitous current of this formal happening.53 For Worringer, empathy emerges especially in response to organic, lifelike characteristics; naturalist (or representational) art encourages an empathic response from the part of viewers. Empathy surfaces when art-viewing relies on a correspondence between feeling and form, Worringer argues. 54 Details, descriptions and narratives as rendered in representational art seem less important to Worringer than the approach to form proposed by representation. Worringer approaches representation from a perspective that underscores its abstract, ‘stylistic’ characteristics.55 Hodler had also addressed the abstract-formal content of representational work in the notes sent to one of his friends, poet and art critic Louis Duchosal (1862-1901), around 1891.56 Bearing in mind paintings from his oeuvre such as such as Night (1890), Tired of Living (1892), or The Disillusioned (1892) – also known as The Saddened Souls, or The Saddened Geniuses –, Hodler mentioned that in his work he intended to emphasize the resemblances 53 Ibid., 33. 54 Worringer’s opinions on the correspondence between the emotions of viewers and the form of artworks may have been inspired by Lipps’ thoughts. In his Aesthetics, Lipps distinguishes between ‘general apperceptive empathy’ and ‘empirical empathy.’ He argues that, while general apperceptive empathy emerges when the forms of objects are acknowledged, or considered generically, empirical empathy occurs in response to the viewer’s active engagement with such forms. For instance, Lipps finds that the active side of empathy causes viewers to relate differently to a vertical line when they trace and respond to its descent, and its ascent respectively. (Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 270-273.) 55 The relationship between form, representation and abstraction is briefly addressed in ‘ “Common to all”: form for Kant and Worringer’. 56 For further details on Hodler’s text as well as on its uncertain dating, see Selz, Ferdinand Hodler, 116. 101 rather than the differences between human beings. Rendering generic unity and harmony were more important to him than depicting the world in its details. In the words of Hodler: I want to attain a powerful unity, a religious harmony. What I wish to express, to stress, is that which is the same for us all, what makes us alike; the resemblance between human beings. Art has increasingly moved away from that conception since the Egyptian period. The Greeks, then the Romans, introduced more and more variety (variety within symmetry, with Michelangelo and Raphael). The present period is completely invaded by variety. Resemblances between human beings, large and simple harmonies are not translated. Technical preoccupations, small preoccupations are all that painters think about, instead of the whole. But art on a small scale is unreal. I start from the great unity of life. There may be differences, but even more there are analogies... I ignore accidental reality, small effects, witty traits, little sparks. The style of painting is subordinated to the form. I do away with whatever could distract the spectator from the whole.57 For Hodler, representational painting needed to underscore resemblances, commonalities, analogies, unity, harmony; his views on representational practice reveal his preference for potentially abstract elements of art-making, such as the cultivation of formal generality through simplification and elision of details. Four years after the 1891 notes, Hodler painted Eurythmy (1895) (Fig. 5), a work where the principles he had drawn around 1891 receive persuasive expression. Eurythmy employs human and vegetal motifs, yet also asserts Hodler’s preoccupations with compositional aspects of form. Thin tree trunks emphasize the vertical edges of the painting; between them, Hodler depicts a procession of monk-like figures clad in white. Providing his protagonists outward and inward grounds for shared expression, Hodler shows the monks walking in 57 Ibid., 115. 102 silence. He represents the distinct personality and strongly identifying facial features of each of his characters. Unity and harmony of mood – features that also highlight the representational qualities of Hodler’s composition – are counterbalanced by his attention to compositional simplicity, repetition and parallelism. Abstract generality and representational specificity both inform Hodler’s picture. Like Hodler, Worringer is attentive to both abstract and representational characteristics of art. Although he distinguishes between abstraction and representation, contrasting them at length, Worringer still observes and analyses their shared grounds. Hodler considers the interweaving of abstract and representational aspects fundamental in painting; he observes and explains the key qualities of art-making without delineating their theoretical differences. Instead, Worringer focuses on the differentiations between representation and abstraction; for instance, he notes that, when art ceased to rely on renditions of three-dimensional space, it started to emphasize verticality and horizontality. In the words of Worringer: ‘Avoidance of the representation of space and suppression of depth relations led to the same result, i. e. restriction of the representation to extension vertically and horizontally.’ 58 Associating representation with the rendition of three-dimensional space and depth in art, Worringer highlights a point of passage between representation and abstraction: he emphasizes that two- 58 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 39. Fig. 5. Ferdinand Hodler. Eurythmy [Eurhythmie]. 1894-95. oil on canvas. 166 x 244 cm. Bern. Kunstmuseum. 103 dimensional aspects of art-making surface as soon as artists renounce alluding to three- dimensionality. Distinctions and transitions: Alois Riegl on the art of antiquity To support his views on the transition from representation to abstraction in art-making, Worringer cites Riegl concerning the art of Antiquity. The people of Antiquity found the world and its objects confusing, according to Riegl;59 they represented objects as self- standing material unities in order to avoid uncertainty. 60 Worringer mentions the insights of Riegl into the ancient perspective on the representation of objects.61 As quoted by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy, Riegl argues that, to represent material individuality clearly, the artists of Antiquity needed to emphasize height and width rather than depth and space.62 For Riegl, the horizontal and vertical dimensions were sufficient to render self-standing objects. In Late Roman Art Industry (1901), Riegl had pointed to three phases in the arts of Antiquity: the tactile phase, the tactile-optical phase, and the optical phase. The tactile phase manifested in Egyptian art; artworks of this phase highlighted planes (or flat surfaces), the proximity of viewers to such planes, and the symmetry of compositional elements. Riegl also pointed to an intermediate, tactile-optical phase, as observable in Classical Greek art; artists working during this phase still emphasized planes and the connection of elements within planes, but softened their approach to symmetry, and included foreshortenings, half-shadows, as well as 59 Worringer’s openly acknowledged debt to Riegl with regard to the analysis of artistic processes throughout history is as extensive as Worringer’s reliance on Lipps’ analysis of empathy. Worringer tends to agree with the opinions of Riegl; yet exceptions to Worringer’s approval of Riegl’s thought can also be found in Abstraction and Empathy. (Ibid., 56, 58, 68, 70-71, 95-96.) 60 Alois Riegl and Rolf Winkes, Late Roman Art Industry (Roma: G. Bretschneider, 1985 [1901]), 21. 61 Margaret Iversen focuses on Riegl’s views on style. She explains: ‘For Riegl, different stylistic types, understood as expressions of a varying Kunstwollen, are read as different ideals of perception or as different ways of regarding the mind’s relationship to its objects and of organizing the material of perception. Art displays people’s reflexiveness of the mind/world or subject/object relationship. To put it in terms Riegl would not have used, art makes explicit the implicit values and presuppositions that structure people’s experience of the world.’ See Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), 8. Iversen also points to Gombrich’s critical views on Riegl, as expressed in Art and Illusion (1960). Gombrich, Iversen notes, signals the possible totalitarian inflections of Riegl’s perspective on style as the manifestation of collective rather than personal tendencies in art. Riegl addressed the historical aspects of the judgment of taste, Iversen writes; she mentions that Riegl’s analyses included forms of art previously addressed only in archaeology and anthropology, and argues that Worringer follows in Riegl’s footsteps. (Ibid., 4, 6-7.) 62 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 41-42. 104 expressions of mental states.63 In the optical phase of ancient art (noticeable in the time of the Late Roman Empire), Riegl explained that individual forms acquired a certain degree of three-dimensionality, although artists placed such forms within planes; however, the deep shadows that divided planes and blurred edges suggested an artistic interest in sight as well as subjectivity. 64 Riegl approached the art of antiquity from the perspective of aesthetics in Late Roman Art Industry; he privileged the senses of touch and sight in his analyses. Distinguishing between tactile and optical phases of art-making, he highlighted their middle ground as made visible in Classic Greek art. With regard to the intermediate, tactile-optical phase of the art of Antiquity, Riegl wrote: The absolute purpose in the visual arts is still to awake a perception of tactile impenetrability as a condition for material individuality; the coherent and tactile connection of the partial planes should not be interrupted; on the other side, the eye is now the most important recording organ allowed to perceive the existence of the projecting partial forms; these are mainly disclosed through shadows. To perceive them the eye has to move a little from the Nahsicht [i. e., the proximate, the tactile]: not too far away, so that the uninterrupted tactile connection of the parts are no longer visible (Fernsicht) [i. e., the visually distant, the optical], but rather to the middle between Nahsicht and Fernsicht; we may call it Normalsicht [i. e., normal vision]. This kind of perception, which characterizes the second stage in ancient art, is tactile- optical and, from the optical point of view, more precisely normalsichtig; its purest expression is the classical art of the Greeks.65 For Riegl, the tactile and optical approaches to art found common ground in tactile-optical Greek Classicism. Sight – the sense that accounts for distance, according to Riegl – needed adjusting in order to reach the stage of ‘normal vision’ of the tactile-optical phase. ‘Normal vision’ required a greater degree of distance than ’the tactile,’ and a lesser degree of distance than ‘the optical,’ indirectly revealing abstract as well as representational components of art- 63 Riegl and Winkes, Late Roman Art Industry, 25-26. 64 Ibid., 26-27. 65 Ibid., 25. 105 making. When addressing artworks of the tactile, tactile-optical, and optical phases of Antiquity, Riegl discussed representational elements (such as the rendering of space and depth) alongside abstract elements (such as the emphasis on tactility, planes, formal individuality and materiality). He was aware of a middle ground between representational and abstract elements.66 In the time of Riegl and Worringer, Hildebrand also looked into the relationship between sight and touch in art-making. 67 When explaining his Architectural Method in The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, Hildebrand had emphasized the role of senses in art. He drew particular attention to sight and touch, noting that these two senses are specific to the human eye. According to him: The artist’s activity consists, then, in further developing such of his faculties as provide him with spatial perception, namely his faculties of sight and touch. These two different means of perceiving the same phenomenon not only have separate existence in our faculties for sight and touch, but are united in the eye. Nature having endowed our eyes so richly, these two functions of seeing and touching exist here in a far more intimate union than they do when performed by different sense organs. An artistic talent consists in having these two functions precisely and harmoniously related.68 Asserting that the human eye brought together touching and seeing, Hildebrand pointed out that the union of seeing and touching was particularly important in the domain of the arts. Riegl, like Hildebrand, addressed the union of touch and sight; in Late Roman Art Industry, Riegl found that the ‘normal vision’ recognizable in the art of ancient Greece depended on the balancing of distance and proximity, and on the cooperation of seeing and touching. 66 Nevertheless, Iversen mentions that the confrontation of opposites is highlighted in Riegl’s later works; she points to the influence of Hegel’s Aesthetics in this regard. See Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory, 10. 67 Iversen notes that Riegl was influenced by Hildebrand’s approach to ‘near’ and ‘distant’ views, as explained by Hildebrand in The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture (1893). She regards Hildebrand’s perspective as also echoed in Wölfflin’s linear and painterly from Principles of Art History (1915). (Ibid., 9.) 68 Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, 14. 106 Following Riegl, Worringer noted the differences between the art of ancient Egypt and the art of ancient Greece respectively. 69 However, Worringer underscored the contrast between ancient Greek and Egyptian approaches to art-making, associating them with representational and abstract strategies in Abstraction and Empathy.70 Like Riegl, Worringer offered his own intuitive interpretation of the artistic motivations that fostered the creation of art in Antiquity. Yet, unlike Riegl, Worringer emphasized imagination over observation in his approach to ancient art; for him, representation was associated with reconstructing the world within two- dimensional boundaries. Activities Worringer connected with abstraction (such as taking distance from the world and rendering two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional characteristics) also informed the making of representational works. In Worringer’s view, representational art-making proves to rely on processes of abstraction. The polar antithesis between abstraction and representation thus becomes increasingly difficult to uphold as Worringer’s demonstration advances. Abstraction: representational inflections In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer inquires into the two conditions that support the emergence of abstraction:71 two-dimensionality (where planes are asserted), and the bringing together of natural models and abstract elements (such as geometric forms of crystalline 69 Iversen draws attention to Worringer’s debt to Riegl; like Margaret Olin in Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (1992), Iversen considers Worringer to be a representative of Expressionist art history. Iversen sees Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy as ‘popularizing and reductive’, and criticizes Worringer’s transcendental tendencies, as well as Worringer’s approach to types of mankind (primitive man, classical man and oriental man) in Form in Gothic. See Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory, 14. Also, Margaret Rose Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl's Theory of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), xxii. Olin points to Riegl’s influence on Worringer regarding his use of the term ‘style,’ which Worringer employs in Abstraction and Empathy to refer to abstraction in art-making. Olin finds Worringer’s approach to form in Abstraction and Empathy to be ‘mystical’, and discusses the relevance of Riegl’s thought in connection with Worringer’s approach to form and its significance in art. Ibid., 86, 180, 189. 70 Worringer contrasts ancient Greek and Egyptian art, finding in them clear examples of representational and abstract approaches to art-making. However, he does not associate Greek art with representation, and Egyptian art with abstraction, throughout Abstraction and Empathy. Worringer observes, for instance, that representational and abstract tendencies coexisted in Egyptian art. (Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 12.) Worringer does not point to specific works or epochs with regard to Egyptian art; the contrast between the art of ancient Egypt and the art of ancient Greece retains its generality in Abstraction and Empathy, where it serves a specific purpose: to support Worringer’s theory on abstraction and empathy. 71 Ibid., 41-42. 107 regularity). 72 Thus, abstraction does not rely on the complete exclusion of representational elements for Worringer, who observes that art-making may be characterized by different degrees of abstraction. In Egyptian art, abstraction was most visible, according to him, since artists transmuted three-dimensional relationships into two-dimensional relationships, and showed the geometric qualities of models from nature. Citing Riegl, Worringer notes the abstract features of ancient Egyptian art: regularity and strict proportionality, geometric treatment of motifs, unity and continuity of outlines.73 However, Worringer acknowledges abstraction as manifest to different degrees in different cultural contexts. He notes, for instance, that artworks could meet the second key condition of the emergence of abstraction only: they could connect models from nature to geometric elements, allowing appearances as observed in the world to still inform art-making.74 Worringer recognizes that the urge to empathy operates alongside the urge to abstraction in such contexts; he further discusses their coexistence in Gothic art.75 Gothic art provides Worringer the opportunity to examine the meeting of representational and abstract tendencies in a historical context. Observing that tendencies towards abstraction and tendencies towards representation meet in Romanesque and Gothic style, Worringer focuses on Medieval sculpture for exemplification. He considers that the coexistence of representational and abstract elements in Medieval sculpture generates an artistic hybrid which combines realism (as expressed in typical, or particularizing, features) and abstraction (as observed in basic, elementary forms). In the words of Worringer: This realism [i. e., of Medieval sculpture] had now come to terms, in Romanesque and Gothic art, with the purely formal-abstract artistic volition. This led to an odd hybrid formation. The typifying imitation impulse seized upon the heads of the figures as the seat of expression of the soul; the drapery that suppressed all corporeality, however, remained the province of the abstract artistic urge.76 72 Ibid., 42. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 42-43. 75 Ibid., 106-121. 76 Ibid., 118. 108 A certain degree of ambivalence characterizes Worringer’s approach to abstraction throughout Abstraction and Empathy. For instance, Worringer argues that, in art-making, the guiding impulse is the urge to abstraction. The world presents a picture laden with uncertainty for him: this provides abstraction its point of emergence. He considers that, if art- making is to offer an opportunity for rest in the midst of changes, it has to strive towards abstraction – more specifically, towards geometric abstraction. Offering no definition for ‘geometric abstraction,’ Worringer nevertheless employs this phrase to refer to art that highlights geometric characteristics to various degrees. Abstraction, according to him, can be informed by representational elements, even when it aspires towards the crystalline qualities of geometry.77 Worringer mentions the pyramids of Egypt as examples of fully articulated geometric abstraction. He notes: ‘Our reasons for terming the pyramid the perfect example of all abstract tendencies are evident. It gives the purest expression to them. In so far as the cubic can be transmuted into abstraction, it has been done here. Lucid rendering of material individuality, severely geometric regularity, transposition of the cubic into surface impressions: all the dictates of an extreme urge to abstraction are here fulfilled.’ 78 Nevertheless, he argues that the urge to abstraction goes through yet another phase, during which artists keep referring to the world around them, yet attempt to render observed objects as independent from it. According to him: The primal artistic impulse has nothing to do with nature. It seeks after pure abstraction as the only possibility of repose within the confusion and obscurity of the world-picture, and creates out of itself, with instinctive necessity, geometric abstraction. It is the consummate expression, and the only expression of which man can conceive, of emancipation from all the contingency and temporality of the world- picture. Then, however, he feels the urge also to wrest the single thing out of the outer world, which captures his interest in outstanding measure, from its unclear and bewildering connection with the outer world and thereby out of the course of happening: he wishes to approximate it, in its rendering, to its material individuality, to purify it of whatever it has of life and temporality, to make it as far as possible 77 Ibid., 40-42. 78 Ibid., 91. 109 independent of both the ambient external world and of the subject – the spectator – who desires to enjoy in it not the cognate-organic, but the necessity and regularity in which, with his attachment to life, he can rest as in the abstraction for which he has yearned and which is alone accessible to him.79 Worringer thus signals the twofold commitments made visible in abstraction-oriented art: firstly, the tendency of artists to seek complete freedom from a world of changes; secondly, the interest of artists in the world around them, and their effort to reshape its observed phenomena. In both cases, abstract art develops in response to the world, albeit through distancing and transformation. The grounds for the urge to empathy are still available, to a certain degree, within Worringer’s abstraction-oriented art. The urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction support the articulation of Worringer’s subjectively oriented perspective in Abstraction and Empathy. Aesthetic objectivity, or the open-minded interest in a world considered external to the self, is of less interest to him. Art, according to him, reflects the relationships between human beings and their environments; he intends to explore how the world influences art-viewing and art-making by focusing on emotional aspects of responding to the world. Worringer is critical towards early twentieth-century aesthetics. Although he thinks that contemporary aesthetic explorations account for the subjective dimension involved in the making and viewing of art, he argues that focusing exclusively on empathy does not suffice. Tendencies towards empathy are associated by Worringer with the making of, or response to, Classical Greek art; in Abstraction and Empathy, it is his purpose to show that artworks emerge from perspectives that are subjective, yet not necessarily reflective of the principles of Classicism. Worringer and Classicism Classicism offers Worringer an opportunity to articulate the antithesis between representation and abstraction; therefore, it remains under scrutiny throughout Worringer’s Abstraction and 79 Ibid., 44. 110 Empathy. During epochs where Classicism was the predominant approach to art-making, Worringer argues, a balance between understanding and instinct was attained.80 However, he emphasizes that, in fact, the relationship between human beings and the world is characterized not by confidence or harmony, but by fear.81 For example, he points to the ‘... disputation between man and the outer world’ in ‘Transcendence and Immanence in Art’, 82 a text that allows him to revisit and further clarify his claims from Abstraction and Empathy. Highlighting the common ground established by Classicism between instinctive and rational approaches to the world, Worringer expresses his distrust towards the integrative, harmonizing approach he associates with Classicism. In his words: ‘The Classical state of soul, in which instinct and understanding no longer represent irreconcilable opposites, but are fused together into an integral organ for the apprehension of the world, has narrower boundaries than our European arrogance admits.’ 83 Worringer is critical towards the bringing together of opposites as he observes them in European culture, and notes the limitations of European Classicism throughout Abstraction and Empathy. For him, Classical tendencies reach completion in the work of Immanuel Kant.84 Worringer makes only brief references to Kant’s work in Abstraction and Empathy; however, Abstraction and Empathy relies on Kant’s perspective when establishing the connection between inner experience and predetermined aesthetic categories of form.85 80 Ibid., 128-129. 81 Ibid., 129-130. 82 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 128. 83 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 130. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 30. 111 Part 2: Predecessors, critics, supporters ‘Common to all’: form for Kant and Worringer The writings of Immanuel Kant provide a point of reference for the end of Classical culture, according to Worringer.1 Yet Worringer’s critical views on Classicism do not affect his reliance on Kant’s thought; 2 in fact, Worringer refers to Kant when addressing the question of form in Abstraction and Empathy. Distinguishing between narrative and formal strands in art is obligatory in contemporary aesthetic analyses, Worringer argues.3 He explains that various modes of art-making require writers to employ different terms and methods. For him, aesthetics, more than anything, must focus on an examination of form. Form, according to Worringer, offers an aesthetic foundation to personal experience – it provides a point of reference to aesthetic feelings of pleasure and displeasure,4 and opens common grounds for interpretation. Worringer writes: In other words, discussion must always be confined to an aesthetics of form, and we can speak of aesthetic effect only where inner experience moves within universal aesthetic categories – if we may carry over onto the province of aesthetics this expression of Kant's for a priori forms. For only in so far as it appeals to these categories, to these elementary aesthetic feelings, which are common to all men even if variously developed, does the character of necessity and inner regularity adhere to 1 Ibid., 130. 2 Worringer departs from Kant’s perspective when arguing, for example, for the strict separation between art and nature, and when focusing his research primarily on art. (Ibid., 3-4.) From this point of view, Worringer’s thought comes closer to the views of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831). In his Lectures on Fine Art (1820-29), Hegel explains: ‘... [T]he beauty of art is higher than nature. The beauty of art is beauty born of the spirit and born again, and the higher the spirit and its productions stand above nature and its phenomena, the higher too is the beauty of art above that of nature.’ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and T. M. Knox, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [1820-29]), 2. Examining the applications of the power of judgment in the domain of nature had been a primary concern for Kant; he had established that the principles of judgment suited for natural inquiries could be extended to art as well. In the first version of his introduction to The Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant explains that, if the judging of natural beauty occurs according to certain principles, then these principles are also applicable to the judging of art. Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 55. (See ‘Preface to the first edition, 1790’.) In the second version of his introductory texts to the Third Critique, Kant posits that for the reflective power of judgment nature and art are equivalent topics. ———, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 57, 82. (Preface, and Introduction, IX). 3 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 30. 4 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 5-6. 112 the artistic object; and it is this character alone which justifies us in making a work of art the subject of aesthetic-scientific investigation.5 Readdressing the intent of his investigation, Worringer (who had begun his argument by criticizing contemporary aesthetics) states his commitment not only to a psychological framework, but also to an aesthetic perspective. Aesthetics, which Kant regards as the domain of the judgment of taste,6 provides Worringer with the opportunity to engage with fundamental aspects of artworks, and to emphasize the subjectivity of his own argument. In The Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant had associated taste with subjectivity,7 and with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure in response to the beautiful object;8 he had found form to be a key element of aesthetic consideration.9 For Kant, purposive form (or forma finalis) was a key quality of objects.10 Yet the purposiveness of form as observed in objects did not have to meet an end, and did not result from wilful action or rational deduction.11 Viewers could simply reflect on form and recognize its purposiveness, without attaching a specific purpose to it.12 Positing that aesthetic judgments were based on the form taken by the purposiveness of objects, 13 Kant argued that aesthetic satisfaction became communicable when it addressed an object’s form of purposiveness.14 He thus found that aesthetic judgment relied on contemplating form and communicating about it. 5 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 30-31. 6 Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 57-58 (Preface). 7 Ibid., 48-49 (First Introduction), 79 (Introduction, VIII). 8 Ibid., 73-77 (Introduction, VI-VII). 9 Further inquiry into Kant’s views on subjectivity, taste, pleasure and displeasure, as well as into the echoes of Kant’s views in Abstraction and Empathy, need to make the topic of a different investigation – they require extensive focus. Kant’s approach to form is briefly discussed in order to contextualize Worringer’s research and shed light on the relationship between representation and abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy. 10 Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 105. See § 10: ‘On purposiveness in general’. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 106. See § 11: ‘The judgment of taste has nothing but the form of the purposiveness of an object (or of the way of representing it) as its ground’. 14 Ibid., 106-107. See § 12: ‘The judgment of taste rests on a priori grounds’. 113 Form, beauty, charm and emotion According to Kant, form provided ground for the judgment of the beauty of an object.15 The beautiful – a quality of objects that generated pleasure in the absence of concepts of reason – 16 invited contemplation and gave the mind of viewers an enjoyable task. ‘We linger over the consideration of the beautiful because this consideration strengthens and reproduces itself’,17 Kant noted. For him, beauty concerned form and invited impartial judgment,18 while charm and emotions hinted to sensuous gratification, and arose interest rather than disinterestedness.19 Aesthetic judgment had to remain uninfluenced by agreeableness, Kant explained, yet mentioned that charms were often considered beautiful. Where charm took the place of beauty, aesthetic judgment depended on personal satisfaction rather than on the contemplation of form. In ‘The Experience of Art is Paradise Regained: Kant on Free and Dependent Beauty’ (1994), Denis Dutton points out that, where Kant distinguishes between charms and emotion on the one hand, and form on the other, he begins to complicate his previously unproblematic approach to aesthetic judgment.20 Once Kant accepts that charms and emotion can be connected to judgments of taste, he includes daily aspects of response to beauty in his approach to aesthetic judgment. Claims of purity and freedom are increasingly difficult to sustain in The Critique of the Power of Judgment from §13 onwards, according to Dutton. Senses and form Accepting that senses generate diverse experiences, Kant questioned the capacity of sensations (which he defined as representations provided by senses) to offer solid ground for 15 Ibid., 106. 16 Ibid., 103-104. See § 9: ‘Investigation of the question: whether in the judgment of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging of the object or the latter precedes the former’. Also, ‘The definition of the beautiful drawn from the second moment’. 17 Ibid., 107. See § 12: ‘The judgment of taste rests on a priori grounds’. 18 Ibid., 107-108. See § 13: ‘The pure judgment of taste is independent from charm and emotion’. 19 Ibid. 20 Denis Dutton, ‘The Experience of Art is Paradise Regained: Kant on Free and Dependent Beauty’. This essay is unpaginated at http://www.denisdutton.com/kant.htm (unabridged version), and paginated in The British Journal of Aesthetics, 34, 1994, 226-241 (abridged version). http://www.denisdutton.com/kant.htm 114 aesthetic accord between viewers.21 He observed that viewers could communicate about the form of objects with much more certainty than when discussing their sensations. Form offered better ground for aesthetic judgment, Kant found,22 yet also argued that both sensation and form could offer a starting point for aesthetic judgment as long as viewers were able to communicate their personal feelings on art to the largest audience conceivable. This was the key requirement of aesthetic judgment, according to him. In his words: The universal communicability of the sensation (of satisfaction or dissatisfaction), and indeed one that occurs without concepts, the unanimity, so far as possible, of all times and peoples about this feeling in the representation of certain objects: although weak and hardly sufficient for conjecture, this is the empirical criterion of the derivation of taste, confirmed by examples, from the common ground, deeply buried in all human beings, of unanimity in the judging of forms under which objects are given to them.23 According to Kant, communicating about beauty in generally understood terms was possible because humanity was in fundamental agreement regarding forms and their aesthetic qualities. Where Kant underscored the common ground between viewers from all cultures and epochs, Worringer emphasized cultural and historical differentiations. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Worringer wrote in defence of abstraction – a mode of art-making not favoured by his contemporaries. Worringer accepted this situation, yet made it his goal to explain to his readers how abstraction could be approached.24 Echoing the negative responses 21 Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 109. (See § 14: ‘Elucidation by means of examples’.) Kant’s definition of sensation can be found at ———, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 92. (See § 3: ‘The satisfaction in the agreeable is combined with interest’.) Kant distinguishes between objective sensation (or perception of an object as available to senses) and subjective sensation (or feeling, according to which an object provides satisfaction but not cognition). The judgment of taste relies on the feelings of the viewer, Kant explains. (———, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 103. See § 9: ‘Investigation of the question: whether in the judgment of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging of the object or the latter precedes the former’.) Sensation confirms the union between satisfaction and beauty in the judgment of taste. (———, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 104. See § 9.) It also registers the effect of the playful exchange between imagination and understanding. (———, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 104. See § 9.) Sensation is the real in perception for Kant. (———, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 171. See § 39: ‘On the communicability of a sensation’.) 22 Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 108-109. See § 14: ‘Elucidation by means of examples’. 23 Ibid., 116. See § 17: ‘On the ideal of beauty’. 24 Dutton draws attention to Kant’s insight that disagreement in criticism may signal that writers are highlighting different characteristics of the same work. In the words of Dutton: ‘Some disputes between critics are doubtless irresolvable. But Kant is correct in supposing that many can be settled at least to the extent that it can be shown that apparently disagreeing critics are actually talking about different aspect of the same work of art. Glenn Gould’s imaginative artistry may not necessarily be to everyone’s liking; there is no question, however, that 115 of his public to abstraction-oriented art,25 Worringer presented abstraction from a negative perspective in Abstraction and Empathy. His discourse aimed to offer his audience the possibility to come to terms with a less expected type of form. The generality and simplicity of form make it both accessible and describable, as Kant and Worringer observe. Form is ‘organic-vital’ (or ‘organic’), and associated with beauty and nature in Abstraction and Empathy.26 In naturalist art, Worringer explains, models from nature provide a basis for the expression of the ‘will to form’, which is guided by the interest of artists in organic life.27 Worringer regards even representational works of art from Antiquity and the Renaissance in terms of their remarkable formal qualities.28 Wölfflin and Worringer: beauty, form, matter and will Wölfflin, like Worringer, had signalled the connections between form and lifelikeness in ‘Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture’ (1886). For Wölfflin, formal beauty relies on the very conditions that make organic life possible. He writes: ‘Thus I maintain that all the decrees of formal aesthetics concerning beautiful form are nothing other than the basic conditions of organic life.’ 29 Wölfflin draws attention to the self-projecting tendencies of human beings. In general, people find beauty in forms that seem to sustain life (their life also, by association) according to him. Judging objects as beautiful, Wölfflin posits, is linked to the lifelikeness such objects exhibit. A ‘force of form’ is at work in the living world, Wölfflin observes.30 The encounter between matter and the ‘force of form’ is dynamic and oppositional, he explains: it exposes the wilful some music critics failed to understand the nature of Gould’s art. There are many analogous episodes in the history of the arts, especially when we consider the reception of abstraction in painting at the end of the nineteenth century. (Very much the eighteenth-century aesthete, Kant himself viewed painting as essentially representative and would undoubtably have been horrified by abstract expressionism.)’ See Dutton, 'The Experience of Art is Paradise Regained: Kant on Free and Dependent Beauty'. 25 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, xiv, 137. 26 Ibid., 17, 27-28, 48. 27 Ibid., 48. 28 Ibid., 30. 29 Wölfflin, 'Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture', 160. 30 Ibid., 159. 116 emergence of form from matter.31 Yet Wölfflin also underscores that form cannot exist without matter, and that matter could be said to long for form.32 In his words: ‘The perfect form, for its part, presents itself as an entelechy, that is, as the actualization of the potential inherent in this matter.’ 33 For Wölfflin, active engagement with matter results in the articulation of form. Wölfflin posits that form wilfully, organically structures matter, thus allowing for the emergence of beauty. Formal beauty is, according to Wölfflin, an expression of will. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer, like Wölfflin, inquires into the relationship between beauty, form and artistic will. Worringer acknowledges the expression of will specific to naturalism (or representation), an approach to art-making most of his contemporaries associate with beauty. However, he analyses artistic will as expressed in representation in order to reinforce the contrast between the tendency towards naturalism and the tendency towards style (or abstraction) in art-making. The associations traced by Worringer between ‘form’ and abstraction are numerous in Abstraction and Empathy. He writes, for instance, about ‘[t]he lifeless form of a pyramid’,34 about objects rendered generic through ‘... approximation to abstract forms’,35 about regular art forms of great purity and beauty, 36 about ‘... the single form set free from [three- dimensional] space’,37 about geometrical form providing structure to inorganic elements,38 about linear-geometric, absolute, and abstract-crystalline forms.39 Employed by Worringer in general discussions on art, as well as in contexts where representational art-making is highlighted, the term ‘form’ nevertheless acquires predominantly abstract connotations in Abstraction and Empathy.40 31 Ibid., 159-160. 32 Ibid., 160. 33 Ibid. 34 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 14. 35 Ibid., 16. 36 Ibid., 17-21. 37 Ibid., 22. 38 Ibid., 35. 39 Ibid., 36, 37, 52. 40 For the role of form in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (for instance, organic and inorganic form), see Michel, ' "Our European Arrogance": Wilhelm Worringer and Carl Einstein on Non-European Art'. Also, Joshua Dittrich, 'A Life of Matter and Death: Inorganic Life in Worringer, Deleuze and Guattari', Discourse, 33, No. 2, 2011. 117 Regularity and uniformity Worringer notes that, when generic aesthetic categories make the focus of investigation, they necessarily bring to light key formal features of artworks. According to him, aesthetic reflection comes first; if successful, it reveals qualities such as ‘necessity’ and ‘inner regularity’ in art.41 Worringer regards aesthetic qualities as specific to the perspective of the contemplating viewer rather than to the contemplated objects themselves.42 Only art that responds to aesthetic discourse by revealing its own inner coherence can become the topic of aesthetic investigation, Worringer explains. From his point of view, Worringer signals that writing initiates and fosters the resonance between art and reflection. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer draws attention to the regularity of form. For him form is, as we have seen, ‘... that higher condition of matter... whose inner essence is regularity, whether this regularity is simple and easily surveyed, or as differentiated as the laws governing the organic, of which we have no more than an inkling.’ 43 Citing Riegl on Egyptian art,44 Worringer elicits geometric abstraction as a remarkable example of regularity. 45 Worringer associates the regularity of geometric art with nothing less than abstract beauty – 46 a paradoxical turn of phrase, since Worringer, claiming to adopt the perspective of his contemporaries, previously associated beauty primarily with the organic, naturalist art of representation.47 ‘Highest’ in abstraction and ‘purest’ in form, geometrical art and its regularity invite Worringer’s admiration. Regularity can be recognized in art seeking to set itself free from the threatening fluctuations of the world, Worringer argues.48 For Worringer, regularity is a significant quality of form that holds a definite place in art- making. Regularity emerges from instinct rather than from intellectual understanding – it is 41 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 30-31. The term Worringer employs for the relationship between reflection and art is ‘adherence:’ he signals the connection between interpretation and art, but, in Abstraction and Empathy, does not privilege interpretation yet: he only assigns it a generative role in the relationship with art. 42 Ibid., 6-7. 43 Ibid., 32. 44 Ibid., 42. 45 Ibid., 17. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 7, 10, 14. 48 Ibid., 18, 23, 36, 42, 44. 118 an artistic manifestation of the search for the ‘thing in itself’, according to him.49 In his words: ‘We have more justification for assuming that what we see here is a purely instinctive creation, that the urge to abstraction created this [regular] form for itself with elementary necessity and without the intervention of the intellect. Precisely because intellect had not yet dimmed instinct, the disposition to regularity, which after all is already present in the germ- cell, was able to find the appropriate abstract expression.’ 50 Worringer, as previous paragraphs have noted, argues that the pinnacle of abstraction is geometric, regularity-reliant art, which provides a noteworthy alternative to representation.51 Worringer further explores the distinction between uniformity and regularity by reference to the writings of Wölfflin.52 In physical, organic sequences, Wölfflin observes uniformity at work; Worringer notes that Wölfflin connects regularity with intellectual organization. Indeed, Wölfflin addresses two kinds of aesthetic pleasure in Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture (1886): the pleasure experienced in response to rhythmic, repetitive organic functions (such as breathing or walking), and the pleasure derived from engaging with geometrical figures or architecture (he points to angles, squares and pyramids). 53 Wölfflin posits that the human body is indifferent to pleasure derived from concepts; for him, physical and intellectual enjoyment stand in contrast. Yet Worringer does not ignore Wölfflin’s mention of possible connections between inner activity and physical expression. In Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, Wölfflin suggests that inner, psychological activities and outer, physical activities may take place simultaneously rather than in sequence.54 Wölfflin finds the parallelism of psychological processes and outer expression possible, although he notes such a parallelism is largely uncharted at the time of his writing. 49 Ibid., 18. 50 Ibid., 19. 51 Ibid., 18-19. 52 Ibid., 64-66. 53 Wölfflin, 'Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture', 163. In their translation, Mallgrave and Ikonomou employ the terms ‘regularity’ and ‘lawfulness’ to contrast between physical, organic rhythm and intellectual, conceptual organization. Bullock, who signals the terminological difficulties involved in the translation of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, uses ‘uniformity’ in connection to organic features, and ‘regularity’ so as to point to conceptual organization. (Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 64.) 54 Wölfflin, 'Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture', 157. 119 Wölfflin, Worringer observes, points to the reflection of intellectual processes into the physical realm. Nevertheless, Wölfflin does not recognize the contribution of intellectual activity to actual art-making.55 Intellectual aspects matter in art, Wölfflin explains, when they account for the intention (or will) that artists make visible in their approach to form.56 In other words, Wölfflin recognizes that artistic form is modelled by the intentions of artists. Wölfflin sees a specific form of will at work in the art of his time, for instance. Seeking to offer entertainment, late nineteenth-century art promotes asymmetry, according to Wölfflin. He muses: ... [A] peculiar need of our time also compels us towards asymmetry in our domestic and decorative arts. The rest and simplicity of stable equilibrium have become tedious; emphatically, we seek movement and excitement – in short, the conditions of imbalance... The modern penchant for high mountains, for the most powerful masses without rule or law, may be traced back in part to a similar urge.57 Wölfflin’s observation regarding contemporary preferences for emphatic, dynamic art echoes in Worringer’s discussion of Gothic and its departure from Classical balance. However, unlike Wölfflin, Worringer chooses to explore the connections between pleasure, vitality and soul in Abstraction and Empathy.58 Mentioning his allegiance to the thought of Theodor Lipps in this respect, Worringer is indirectly critical towards Wölfflin’s association of organic vitality and embodiment. Worringer relies on Lipps’ discussion of empathy instead. For Lipps, empathy is apperception: a process of sense-based observation and inner understanding that takes place in the soul of viewers.59 However, the discussion of Wölfflin’s ideas allows Worringer to suggest that uniformity could be connected to the urge to empathy, while regularity could be associated with the urge 55 Ibid., 163. 56 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 163-164. 57 Wölfflin, 'Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture', 173. 58 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 65. Wölfflin had nevertheless recognized the propensity of human beings to interpret architectural form as expressive. See Wölfflin, 'Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture', 176.Yet, as Worringer implies, for Wölfflin empathy found a more tangible ground in the embodied form rather than the soul of viewers. 59 Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 30-32, 36-37, 39, 49. For Lipps, soul has a differentiated unity; it participates to perception and hosts apperception. ———, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 50-54. 120 to abstraction.60 No expression, or lifelike quality, can be found in regularity, Worringer explains. Instead, he argues that uniformity may exhibit expression in the case of interwoven linear patterns as observable in Greek ornamental forms (for instance, in spirals and Vitruvian scrolls).61 Worringer proposes that abstraction and empathy actually meet in Greek ornament, a geometrically oriented approach to art-making. He remarks: ‘In this manner the mature geometric style achieves a miraculous equipoise between the elements of abstraction and of empathy.’ 62 The passage of time as recorded by the history of art encourages the creation of a bridge between empathy and abstraction, two art-making tendencies Worringer had introduced as polar opposites in the first pages of his book. Uniformity and regularity interweave in Classical Greek ornament, Worringer observes. According to him: ‘... the Greek wavy line is both uniform and regular, and to this extent still conforms to the abstract need; but in so far as this regularity, in contradistinction to the Egyptian regularity, is an organic one (Lipps calls it mechanical), it appeals, first and foremost, with the whole sense of its being, to our empathy impulse.’ 63 Once more, Worringer draws attention that, in art, theoretically antithetic elements actually coexist: for instance, regularity acquires lifelike qualities in the Greek wavy line, thus encouraging empathic responses. Nevertheless, Worringer’s perspective continues to change shape. Worringer explains that the interplay of opposites is specific to only certain phases in history; different epochs see the rise of tendencies towards opposition, or duality, for instance. Writing about ‘primitive’ times,64 Worringer argues that, in their struggles to make sense of the world, artists created works that emphasized regularity. ‘Primitive’ artists attempted to provide opportunities for peaceful contemplation in otherwise unpredictable environments, in Worringer’s opinion. He remarks: ‘... [I]t is as though the instinct for the “thing in itself” were most powerful in 60 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 65. 61 Ibid., 66. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 73. 64 Ibid., 18. 121 primitive man.’ 65 In support of his views on the emergence of abstraction in art, Worringer refers to the writings of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s inquiries provide to Worringer a framework for the questioning of representation in art-making, as well as an indirect opportunity to defend abstract art as an expression of subjective, personal experience. 65 Ibid. 122 A matter of will: Schopenhauer and Worringer on life and art To Schopenhauer as cited by Worringer, the world is an illusion: ‘... a transitory and in itself unsubstantial semblance’.1 Schopenhauer’s reflections are occasioned by his discussion of the philosophy of Kant, which he admires but also criticizes in The World as Will and Representation (1819).2 Kant’s most significant philosophical contribution consists, according to Schopenhauer, in having distinguished transitory phenomena from things-in- themselves. Summarizing Kant’s findings, Schopenhauer notes: ‘This world that appears to the senses has no true being, but only a ceaseless becoming; it is, and it also is not; and its comprehension is not so much a knowledge as an illusion.’ 3 Alongside Kant, Schopenhauer mentions his own distrust in the capacity of knowledge to account for the world, especially when knowledge relies on data collected by senses. In experiencing the world, human beings are burdened by their connection with the wilful self, Schopenhauer argues. He explains that the silencing of will dispels the bitter, extreme demands of the world on human beings, leaving room for contemplation. Only when human beings resolve their inner conflicts and annihilate the voice of will can they hope to find peace and attain a state of knowing, according to Schopenhauer. In his words: Such a man who, after bitter struggles with his own nature, has at last completely conquered it, is then left only as pure knowing being, as the undimmed mirror of the world. Nothing can distress or alarm him anymore; nothing can any longer move him; for he has cut all the thousand threads of willing which hold us bound to the world, and which as craving, fear, envy, and anger drag us here and there in constant pain. He now looks back calmly and with a smile on the phantasmagoria of this world which was once able to move and agonize even his mind... Life and its forms merely float before him as a fleeting phenomenon, as a light morning dream to one half- 1 Ibid. Also, Arthur Schopenhauer and E. F. J. Payne, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1969 [1819]), 419. 2 Schopenhauer notes his admiration of Kant’s philosophy, but also investigates it critically; see Schopenhauer and Payne, The World as Will and Representation, xv, 413-534. The examination of Schopenhauer’s reading of Kant offers rich ground for self-standing inquiry, yet extends well beyond the scope of this thesis. 3 Ibid., 419. 123 awake, through which reality already shines, and which can no longer deceive; and, like this morning dream, they too vanish without any violent transition.4 Worringer points to Schopenhauer’s thought in his own discussion of the conditions that foster the making of abstract art.5 During ‘primitive’ times,6 Worringer speculates, artists felt helpless in their relationship with their surroundings. Their response to contexts Worringer presents as destabilizing took shape in works exhibiting a tendency toward abstraction – towards taking distance from unstable environments. According to Worringer, this tendency had its roots in the difficulty artists experienced when confronted with a world they did not understand.7 Artists at the beginning of the twentieth century responded to the world like their ‘primitive’ peers, in Worringer’s opinion – except that his contemporaries did not lack knowledge, but willingly renounced it.8 Distancing, urges, and will Concluding the theoretical section of Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer draws attention to the role that distancing from the world plays in aesthetics. He argues that the most important requirement of aesthetics, and a condition of happiness, is distancing (or, in his terms, ‘self- alienation’).9 Kant’s perspective on the grounds of aesthetic judgment (namely, on purposiveness without a specific end as its distinctive characteristic) echoes in Worringer’s 4 Ibid., 390-391. 5 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer examines the impact life in the world has on the viewing and making of art. Schopenhauer’s perspective on human existence inspires him in this respect. Both Schopenhauer and Worringer subscribe to a philosophy of life that addresses forces for which reason cannot account (for instance, will and urges). For an account of the philosophy of life that influenced the writings of Worringer, see Dittrich, 'A Life of Matter and Death: Inorganic Life in Worringer, Deleuze and Guattari', 243-244, 248, 256, 260-261. 6 Mary Gluck points to the early twentieth-century connection between ‘primitivism’ and exoticism, noting her interest in interpreting ‘primitivism’ as a cultural experience specific to Europeans. She discusses Worringer’s disengagement with the art at the Trocadéro Museum in the early years of the twentieth century, yet also emphasizes that ethnographic museums created an image of ‘primitivism’ for European artists and viewers. See Gluck, 'Interpreting Primitivism, Mass Culture and Modernism: The Making of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', 151-157. 7 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 17-19. 8 Ibid., 18. 9 Ibid., 24-25. 124 assertion.10 Yet, with regard to aesthetic distancing, Worringer notes his debt to Schopenhauer instead. Schopenhauer’s writings provide to Worringer an analogy for a key opposition in Abstraction and Empathy: namely, the opposition between distancing from the world (specific to abstraction) and distancing from the self (associated with empathy). 11 As previous sections have noted, empathy presupposes enjoying an object from the perspective of the object itself for Worringer.12 Empathy requires the imaginative transposition of the viewer within the object; hence, it implicitly leads to a loss of focus on the contemplating viewer.13 To have an empathic experience means taking distance from the contemplating self, according to Worringer. Empathy, like abstraction, is actually informed by distancing in his view. Abstraction and Empathy thus offers distancing as a shared psychological component of tendencies towards empathy and abstraction respectively.14 Pointing to the role of distancing in The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer notes its psychological effect, and its significance in aesthetics. He observes that aesthetic pleasure implies the achievement of an inner state of selfless contemplation. In his words: ‘... aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists, to a large extent, in the fact that, when we enter a state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves.’ 15 Worringer singles out this strand of Schopenhauer’s argument, emphasizing that Schopenhauer’s perspective on aesthetic contemplation involves freedom from will, as well as a distancing from the world – the actual territory where will can be seen at work. 10 Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 79, 91, 111, 120. See: Introduction (VIII); § 3: ‘The satisfaction in the agreeable is combined with interest’; § 15: ‘The judgment of taste is independent from the concept of perception’; § 17: ‘On the ideal of beauty’. 11 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 137. 12 Ibid., 5, 24. 13 Worringer follows Lipps with regard to explaining empathy and its operation. See, from the current thesis, ‘Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory’. 14 Holdheim points to Worringer’s bridging of opposites at the end of the theoretical section of Abstraction and Empathy; he regards it as ‘a new artistic monism’, and as a temptation that Worringer defeats. (Holdheim, 'Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding', 342.) 15 Schopenhauer and Payne, The World as Will and Representation, 390. 125 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer explains that art emerges as a materialization of artistic will, or volition, and has its roots in artists’ emotional responses to the world.16 The psychological state of artists manifests in particular needs, or urges, Worringer points out; these urges shape artistic will in its expression. He writes: By the feeling about the world I mean the psychic state in which, at any given time, mankind found itself in relation to the cosmos, in relation to the phenomena of the external world. This psychic state is disclosed in the quality of psychic needs, i. e. in the constitution of the absolute artistic volition, and bears outward fruit in the work of art, to be exact in the style of the latter, the specific nature of which is simply the specific nature of the psychic needs.17 Psychological states generate urges, which in turn shape artistic will, Worringer observes. According to him, artistic will mediates between urges and their expression in art. Beauty, for instance, reflects the fulfilment of artistic will, according to Worringer; 18 as his inquiry from Abstraction and Empathy advances, he emphasizes the connection between will and art- making, assigning greater importance to will than to the connection with objects in the world. In the words of Worringer: ‘... [W]e recognize as only secondary the role played by the natural model in the work of art, and assume an absolute artistic volition, which makes itself the master of external things as mere objects to be made use of, as the primary factor in the process that gives birth to the work of art’.19 Human will drives life forward,20 Worringer argues; its activity compels people to engage with objects in the world.21 When this engagement takes the form of empathy, viewers are set free from the self. According to Worringer: ‘In empathising this will to activity into another 16 Jennings signals that will intermediates between psychic needs and their effect in art. Jennings, 'Against Expressionism: Materialism and Social Theory in Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', 89. Worringer could, but does not, propose a synonymy between ‘instinct’ and ‘absolute artistic volition’, a concept Riegl had discussed in Leading Characteristics of Late Roman Kunstwollen. Following Riegl, Worringer defines ‘absolute artistic volition’ as ‘... latent inner demand which exists per se, entirely independent of the object and of the mode of creation.’ The definition provided by Worringer thus reveals it is possible to trace connections between ‘instinct’ and ‘absolute artistic volition’ in Abstraction and Empathy. 17 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 13. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 33-34. 20 Ibid., 5. 21 Ibid., 24. 126 object... we are in the object. We are delivered from our individual being as long as we are absorbed into an external object, an external form, with our inner urge to experience.’ 22 Worringer notes that art comes into being when artists follow their will, and have artistic creation as a conscious goal.23 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 10. 127 Riegl and artistic will To reinforce his observations regarding artistic will, Worringer turns to the work of Riegl, 1 signalling the emphasis his predecessor places on will rather than skill in art.2 As has been previously noted, Worringer finds that will is a catalyst of art-making, and that it has a decisive impact on artistic expression.3 Contrasting Riegl’s emphasis on will [Wollen] with Gottfried Semper’s championing of ability in art-making,4 Worringer adopts Riegl’s perspective on artistic will [Kunstwollen] when analyzing the relationship between abstraction and representation.5 Riegl observed in his introduction to Late Roman Art Industry (1901) that the operations of artistic will could be noted predominantly in architecture or in the crafts, especially where figurative elements were absent.6 He also explained the concept of Kunstwollen in his earlier essay, Leading Characteristics of Late Roman Kunstwollen (1893). According to Riegl, late Roman art was characterized by the expression of a specific Kunstwollen, which influenced all forms of artistic production. In the words of Riegl from 1893: To obtain an understanding of the nature of late antique art (that is the art of the middle and late Roman period) we may study individual monuments or the surviving literary sources. In either case, we obtain an insight of the same basic proposition: that there was in general at that time only one direction for the Kunstwollen to take. This force dominated all four divisions of the visual arts [i. e., architecture, sculpture, painting and the crafts] equally, appropriated every purpose and material to its artistic meaning [Kunstzweck] and with fixed independence chose in every case the appropriate technique for the envisioned work of art. There is support for this interpretation of the nature of late antique art in the fact that the Kunstwollen of 1 In the introduction to his translation of Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry, Winkes notes that different degrees of intensity are associated with ‘will’ and ‘volition’ in Riegl’s text. Hence ‘volition’ is approached by Winkes as the more emphatic term of the two. The term ‘volition’ also features extensively in Michael Bullock’s translation of Abstraction and Empathy. However, I employ the term ‘will’ in this section, in order to refer generically to the expression of intention in art. 2 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 9. 3 Ibid., 4. 4 Ibid., 8-9. 5 For a discussion of the relationship between the theories of Semper and Riegl respectively, see Rolf Winkes in Riegl and Winkes, Late Roman Art Industry, XVI-XXI. 6 Ibid., 15. 128 antiquity, especially in the final phase, is practically identical with other major forms of expression of the human Wollen during the same period.7 Will, perception, inner drive, and art-making Riegl considers that will determines artistic purpose in every epoch, including the choice of materials and techniques.8 Human volition operates purposefully, with the intention of generating subjective satisfaction, according to him. Like Schopenhauer, Riegl is sensitive to the impact of will on the relationship between observers and observed: he distinguishes between will-less, passive contemplation and will-driven, active desire in Leading Characteristics of Late Roman Kunstwollen. He explains: All such human Wollen is directed towards self-satisfaction in relation to the surrounding environment (in the widest sense of the word, as it relates to the human being externally and internally). Creative Kunstwollen regulates the relation between man and objects as we perceive them with our sense; this is how we always give shape and colour to things (just as we visualize things with the Kunstwollen in poetry). Yet man is not just a being perceiving exclusively with his sense (passive), but also a longing (active) being. Consequently, man wants to interpret the world as it can most easily be done in accordance with his inner drive (which may change with nation, location and time). The character of this Wollen is always determined by what may be termed the conception of the world at a given time [Weltanschauung] (again in the widest sense of the term), not only in religion, philosophy, science, but also in government and law, where one or the other form of expression mentioned above usually dominates.9 7 Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 159. 8 Riegl and Winkes, Late Roman Art Industry, IXI-XX. Winkes signals that Riegl’s use of the term Kunstwollen may have been influenced by a familiarity with Sigmund Freud’s work. Wollen, Winkes explains, is a term stronger than ‘will’ [Willen]. According to Winkes, Wollen emphasizes the ‘deeply rooted sources’ of human will more than Willen does. 9 Alois Riegl, 'Leading Characteristics of Late Roman Kunstwollen' in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1893), 159-160. 129 Riegl sees will as dependent on time and place. According to him, expressions of will demonstrate progress from one age to another.10 He observes the effects of will on human history and institutions, yet also highlights the psychological, subjective components of will.11 Worringer, who refers extensively to Riegl’s thought in Abstraction and Empathy,12 employs the concept of artistic will as delineated by Riegl in his writings. In agreement with Riegl on the purposefulness of artistic will, Worringer comments: ‘... every work of art is simply an objectification of this a priori existent artistic volition’.13 Worringer, like Riegl, emphasizes that artistic will assumes different forms through time; this perspective supports Worringer’s questioning of representation at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer approaches both representation and abstraction in terms of will, and engages with the art of the past by accounting intuitively for the psychological processes involved in art-making. He shows that pleasure constitutes the aim of artistic will, and that artistic will changes with the passage of time.14 According to Worringer, artistic will gives rise to tendencies towards empathy or abstraction, which materialize in representational (naturalist) or abstract (style-driven) art. In the words of Worringer: When applied to the product of artistic volition, the two poles of artistic volition, which we sought to define and whose mutual frontiers we endeavoured to fix in Chapter One, correspond to the two concepts naturalism and style... Indeed it is our intention, having associated the concept naturalism with the process of empathy, to associate the concept style with the other pole of human artistic experience, namely the urge to abstraction.15 Worringer, as previous sections have outlined, assigns antithetic positions to abstraction and representation. Riegl also recognizes that changes in will generate different approaches to art- 10 See Riegl, Riegl and Winkes, Late Roman Art Industry. 11 Jennings notes that Riegl does not inquire into the specific connection between psychic states, artistic will, and artworks. Jennings, 'Against Expressionism: Materialism and Social Theory in Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', 89. 12 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 9, 19, 21, 37-40, 55-58, 68, 73-76, 81, 86, 91, 93, 95-98, 104, 136. 13 Ibid., 9-11. 14 Ibid., 9-13. 15 Ibid., 26, 34. 130 making. For instance, Riegl accounts for two forms of will in Leading Characteristics of Late Roman Kunstwollen: one form of will finds satisfaction in representational pictures, while another form of will seeks personal, inner expression. Riegl writes: ‘Obviously, an inner relation exists between a Wollen, which is directed toward a pleasurable visualisation of things through the visual arts, and that other Wollen which wants to interpret them as much as possible according to its own inner drive. In antiquity this relationship can be traced everywhere.’ 16 Noting that divergent artistic tendencies can coexist within the same historical epoch, Riegl nevertheless underscores the historical connection between potentially antithetic approaches to art-making. On the other hand, Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy begins by placing representation and abstraction in opposition. Worringer argues that representation reflects a form of will functioning in accord with its environment, while abstraction expresses a drive towards taking distance from the world.17 His preference for the rhetoric of binary opposition distances his approach from Riegl’s thought, yet effectively traces the boundaries between abstraction and representation. Nevertheless, Worringer remains open to the shared ground between representation and abstraction, even though he contrasts these modes of art-making at the beginning of Abstraction and Empathy. At various points of his demonstration, Worringer observes that the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction, as well as the art forms they generate, emerge in response to the world; he also notices the interaction of urges and approaches to art-making in the course of history.18 Worringer writes: ‘For we find the need for empathy and the need for abstraction to be the two poles of human artistic experience, in so far as it is accessible to purely aesthetic evaluation. They are antitheses which, in principle, are mutually exclusive. In actual fact, however, the history of art represents an unceasing disputation between the two tendencies.’ 19 In his discussion of urges towards empathy and abstraction as manifest in art, Worringer thus distinguishes between (theoretical) principles and (historical) facts. According to him, abstraction and representation (the artistic outcomes of urges 16 Riegl, 'Leading Characteristics of Late Roman Kunstwollen', 159-160. 17 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 14-20. 18 Ibid., 24-25, 48, 51-121. 19 Ibid., 45. 131 towards abstraction and empathy) can be regarded as opposite from the perspective of theory, and as dialogue partners in art-making. Worringer interweaves historical and theoretical viewpoints throughout Abstraction and Empathy – a decision that enriches his text, bringing to light its fundamental duality.20 Worringer’s early twentieth-century thoughts on abstraction and representation is addressed by Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) in his book, Visual Thinking (1970), as well as in ‘Wilhelm Worringer on Abstraction and Empathy’, an essay initially published in 1967 and revised for Arnheim’s New Essays on the Psychology of Art (1984). For Arnheim, Worringer is a theoretician of the opposition between abstraction and empathy, and a defender of abstraction. Yet Arnheim casts critical glances towards both these aspects of Worringer’s approach. 20 Holdheim finds that Worringer remains balanced in his negotiation of the relationship between representation and abstraction. (Holdheim, 'Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding', 340.) If abstract- representational balance appears difficult to maintain in Abstraction and Empathy, Masheck comments that Worringer did not aim for such elegance in the first place. (Masheck, 'Abstraction and Apathy: Crystalline Form in Expressionism and in the Minimalism of Tony Smith', 41.) 132 Abstraction, representation, opposition: Worringer and Rudolf Arnheim Arnheim questions Worringer’s approach to abstraction in Visual Thinking (1970).1 According to Arnheim, abstraction provides common ground for the activities of perceiving (‘the grasping of significant form’)2 and thinking. He addresses the negative implications of the term ‘abstraction,’ which suggests drawing away or withdrawing,3 and associates abstraction with a process of distillation from complex givens. 4 In his words: ‘Any phenomenon experienced by the mind can acquire abstraction if it is seen as a distillate of something more complex. Such a phenomenon can be a highly rarefied pattern of forces or it can be an event or object in which the relevant properties of a kind of event or object are strikingly embodied.’ 5 Arnheim observes that abstraction highlights key relations of form, and can assume remarkable expression in this process. Worringer had also noted the emphasis abstraction placed on basic elements of art-making. He had addressed the elemental aspect of the urge to abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy, dissociating abstraction from intellectual activity. According to him: ‘... [T]he urge to abstraction created this form [i. e., abstract form] for itself with elemental necessity and without the intervention of the intellect.’ 6 For Worringer, abstraction emerged as the artistic expression of a fundamental need; abstraction could be associated with the stirrings of instinct rather than with the activity of the mind. By contrast, Arnheim sees abstraction as not only linked to thinking, but also as a bridge between human thought and the work of senses. Arnheim draws attention to the connective and cognitive aspects of abstraction. For him, abstraction is the result of distillation, of eliciting the key features of complex objects, events, phenomena. He argues that abstraction brings together and makes visible properties shared by various objects.7 Grasping structural features by means of abstraction stabilizes perception, 1 Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1970), 188. 2 Ibid., 140. 3 Ibid., 153. 4 Ibid., 156. 5 Ibid. 6 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 19. Also, regarding the ‘elementary aesthetic feelings’ Worringer (following Kant) wishes to examine, see ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 30-31. 7 Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 157. 133 and gives cognition a starting point, according to Arnheim.8 Abstraction, for him, is a process fundamental to intellectual life; on the basis of abstraction, Arnheim argues, generalization can take place.9 Withdrawal, productive thinking, and abstraction Finding the connection between abstraction and withdrawal decisively articulated in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy,10 Arnheim is critical towards Worringer’s point of view. In Visual Thinking, Arnheim notes the importance of abstraction in intellectual life, as well as in relating to the world. Withdrawal from engaging with the world may give rise to abstraction, but not necessarily, Arnheim comments. He doubts that abstract thinking needs to rely on a negative response to experience. In his words: ‘The notion that abstraction entails a withdrawal from direct experience also threatens to misrepresent the attitude of productive thinking towards reality. It suggests that in order to show that a person is capable of truly abstract thinking he must ignore, defy, or contradict the life situation in which he finds himself.’ 11 For Arnheim, productive thinking (or thinking that engages with the world) relies on abstraction – a process that, as we have seen, requires the mind to observe objects, situations or phenomena in their complexity, and to elicit their key elements. Arnheim questions the strict association of abstraction with a preference for withdrawal from experience. He explains: To be sure, there is an important connection between withdrawal and abstraction. When the mind removes itself from the complexities of life, it tends to replace them with simplified, highly formalized patterns. This shows up in the “unrealistic” speculations of secluded thinkers or the ornamentation of artists out of touch with the direct challenges of reality. Extreme examples can be found in the speech and 8 Ibid., 161. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 188-189. 11 Ibid., 188. 134 drawing of schizophrenics. But although withdrawal often leads to abstraction, the opposite is by no means true. If one asserts that abstraction requires withdrawal, one risks subjecting the mind to the conditions under which thinking cannot function; one will also fail to acknowledge genuine thinking when it is concerned with problems posed by direct experience.12 Arnheim partially acknowledges Worringer’s viewpoint from Abstraction and Empathy. He maintains that stepping back from the world leads to simplification and to the articulation of patterns of form, as Worringer demonstrated.13 However, Arnheim also underscores that abstraction cannot be considered a consequence of withdrawal exclusively. He mentions the significance of the association of abstraction with thinking, implying that forms of thinking which genuinely respond to the challenges of experience actually rely on abstraction. For Arnheim, abstraction needs to be considered in its role of fundamental mode of looking at, thinking about, and responding to the world. Re-examining Abstraction and Empathy In ‘Wilhelm Worringer on Abstraction and Empathy’ (1967, revised 1984), Arnheim addresses Worringer’s work at greater length than in Visual Thinking. He acknowledges that Abstraction and Empathy was an influential book on the theory of art –14 a text with immediate, far-reaching effect, despite Worringer’s focus on historical examples rather than on instances of early twentieth-century art-making.15 Drawing attention to Worringer’s debt to the psychologically inclined aesthetics of the nineteenth century,16 Arnheim reframes the relationship between empathy and abstraction from his own point of view. Worringer claimed that empathy exerted a key influence on art-making throughout the history of art, and that the aesthetics of his time had reinforced the general preference for empathy-reliant art.17 He 12 Ibid., 189. 13 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 34-37. 14 Rudolf Arnheim, New Essays on the Psychology of Art (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984), 51. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 53. 17 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 3-8. 135 defended the aesthetics of abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy, providing a theoretical apparatus for the interpretation of abstraction in art, as well as a historical background for its transformations through time. Arnheim acknowledges the merits of Worringer’s book, yet sheds a different light on the relationship between empathy and abstraction. According to Arnheim: ... it [i. e., Abstraction and Empathy] proposed a striking relation between two psychological concepts: one of them, abstraction, a two-thousand-year old tool for the understanding of human cognition; the other, empathy, a relatively recent outgrowth of Romantic philosophy. By describing the two concepts as antagonists, Worringer sharpened and restricted their meaning in a way that has remained relevant to their discussion in psychology as well as in aesthetics.18 Approaching abstraction and empathy as psychological concepts, Arnheim nevertheless reverses Worringer’s perspective: to Arnheim, empathy does not appear as a dominant psychological and aesthetic force, as it did to Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy. Abstraction, on the other hand, interests Arnheim due to its active associations with knowing and understanding.19 Arnheim actually shares an interest in abstraction with Worringer. However, he does not highlight the characteristics of abstraction by placing abstraction and empathy in antithesis. Although Arnheim focuses less on empathy in his essay, he recognizes the effectiveness of Worringer’s addressing empathy in his own investigations. Arnheim notes the powerful effect of Worringer’s placing empathy and abstraction in an antithetic relationship. However, the distinction Worringer articulates between imitation and naturalism (two aspects of representation) is excessive for Arnheim.20 He refers to nineteenth-century art-making to reframe Worringer’s discussion of naturalism and imitation. Arnheim finds representational art as practiced in the nineteenth century to be a literal, or mechanic, approach to rendering in 18 Arnheim, New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 51. 19 Arnheim offers a definition of representation in ‘Inverted Perspective and the Axiom of Realism’, where he writes: ‘By definition, representational art derives its subject matter from nature. This implies that at least to some extent the shapes used for such representation must also be taken from the observation of nature since otherwise the depicted subjects would remain unrecognizable.’ (Ibid., 159.) 20 Ibid., 53. 136 the case of most artists; like Worringer,21 he signals the negative impact of a long-term reliance on imitation in art. In his words: Only through a weakening of the inborn sense of form was it possible to produce painting and sculpture that conformed to the doctrine of imitation literally and mechanically and thereby created a threat to art. If one looks at the art of the nineteenth century – not as we know it from the work of the great survivors, but for the typical attitude as manifested in the average products of the time and the practices of drawing teachers – one realizes that the threat was very real. Worringer’s emphasis on the distinction is not the fruit of dispassionate historical scrutiny but an act of defense. Consciously or not, in reacting to the present danger, he was fighting the battle of modern art.22 Arnheim is on the side of Worringer with regard to representational practices at the beginning of the twentieth century. He empathises with Worringer’s claims, underscoring Worringer’s engagement with the challenges of early twentieth-century art. Although he mentions the almost complete silence of Worringer with regard to early twentieth-century artistic practices, Arnheim also highlights Worringer’s attention to the pulse of art-making at the beginning of the twentieth century. Regarding abstraction, Arnheim observes that Abstraction and Empathy may reflect the general frame of thought of Worringer’s time.23 He points not only to the decisive separation between imitation and naturalism that Worringer traces in Abstraction and Empathy, but also to Worringer’s view that abstraction is the outcome of anxiety, or of the emotion of fear.24 Indeed, Worringer associates abstraction with the ‘dread of space,’ which he compares with the pathological fear of open places.25 Such a psychological response signals, according to Worringer, the discomfort of human beings in environments they find unfamiliar or threatening. 21 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 29. 22 Arnheim, New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 53. 23 Ibid., 58. 24 Ibid., 57-58. 25 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 15-16. 137 Worringer also explains the ‘dread of space’ in terms of the human response to a tormenting world of phenomena. He connects the ‘dread of space’ with abstract modes of art-making – for instance, with Oriental art.26 Worringer notes the distrust of Eastern civilizations towards reason and intellect.27 Contrasting intellect and instinct in Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer observes the position occupied by Eastern art with regard to cognition. He writes: ‘Their spiritual dread of space [i. e., the dread of space of the peoples of the East], their instinct for the relativity of all that is, did not stand, as with primitive peoples, before cognition, but above cognition.’ 28 Worringer thus associates abstraction with an acknowledgment of relativity, and with the transcendence of intellectual forms of knowledge – two key aspects of early twentieth-century thought.29 From a later twentieth-century perspective that provides him the benefit of distance, Arnheim shows that lifelike qualities feature in approaches to art-making associated by Worringer with abstraction. For instance, Arnheim points to a doctrine of Chinese painting that requires the brushstrokes of painters to be informed by vitality,30 as well as to the belief of modern abstract painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) that art must reveal the enduring vital aspects of existence.31 Associating Worringer’s thought with the dichotomy between representation and abstraction primarily, Arnheim remarks: ‘... [A]n intense inner expression of life is evident in styles of art whose abstractness is supposed to be due to an escape from the organic, for instance in African and Romanesque sculpture’.32 Arnheim emphasizes that abstract art-making as seen by Worringer contains elements that seem to hint to organic life. Bringing to light the imperfection of the abstract-representational antithesis Worringer seeks to articulate, 26 Worringer’s association of abstraction with Oriental art serves the purpose of underscoring the stylistic difference of abstraction from art created in the Classical tradition. As a result, abstraction can acquire a memorable image that may appear less threatening due to its allegedly removed point of origin. Also see, from the current thesis, ‘Empathy, abstraction and representation in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy’. 27 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 16. 28 Ibid. 29 See, for instance, Thomas J. Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 18-24. Also see Thomas Baldwin, The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1870-1945 (Cambridge, U. K. and New York, U. S. : Cambridge University Press, 2003), 67-73, 98-101, 107-115. 30 Arnheim, New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 59. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 138 Arnheim draws attention to the interweaving rather than to the separation of representational and abstract characteristics in art-making. However, abstract-representational connections had not left Worringer indifferent. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer recognizes representational tendencies in the predominantly abstract Romanesque art, for instance. He underscores that Romanesque style leaves little space for organic expression,33 yet that lifelike features inform it nevertheless. According to Worringer: Like Doric, it [i. e., the Romanesque style] too repudiated every impulse to empathy. We are confronted by a somewhat compressed, calm, serious architectural structure, in the details of which, however, the development to come is already disclosed. The living tendencies are already contained in the system of flying buttresses, in the rib- vaulting, and in the clusters of pillars. That which is here trying to force itself through on a foreign substratum later becomes the sole and decisive factor... Thus arose the Gothic style, which gradually conquered the whole North-west of Europe.34 Continuing to observe the relationship between abstraction and representation in Gothic, Worringer explains the transition from early Gothic (where abstract tendencies predominate) towards the later, calmer, increasingly lifelike Gothic, where the influence of Italian Renaissance and its emphasis on the human body can be felt.35 Arnheim highlights the oppositional approach Worringer takes to abstraction and empathy, yet, in doing so, accounts for the dominant theoretical direction of Worringer’s argument only. Arnheim concludes his essay with an emphasis on the merits of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy. To Arnheim, Worringer’s book appears as a manifesto for modern art; Worringer’s association of abstraction and negative empathy, or abstraction and ‘dread of space,’ appear less defining to Arnheim than the positive aspects of Worringer’s views on abstraction. Nevertheless, Arnheim remains unsympathetic towards Worringer’s preference for approaching empathy and abstraction mainly by means of antithesis, due to the consequences of such a methodological choice. He explains: 33 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 110. 34 Ibid., 111-112. Also, ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 116. 35 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 119-121. 139 The historical merit of Worringer’s manifesto consists in his having proclaimed non- realistic form a positive creation of the human mind, intended and able to produce lawful visual order. His bipolarity of naturalistic versus nonnaturalistic art, however, promoted not only an artificial split in the history of art but also an equally precarious psychological antagonism between man’s concern with nature and his capacity for creating organized form. It is a dichotomy that continues to haunt the theoretical thinking of our century in the somewhat modified guise of the distinctions between perceptual and conceptual art, schematic and realistic art, artists who depict what they see and others who cling to what they know, art of the How and art of the What.... Our own thinking has yet to meet the challenge of accounting for the wider range of ways in which the arts represent the world of human experience with the help of organized form.36 Arnheim’s New Essays on the Psychology of Art appeared in 1984; three years earlier, Gilles Deleuze published Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Unlike Arnheim, Deleuze writes from a perspective that mostly acknowledges Worringer’s points of view. Worringer provides a seminal approach to Gothic art for Deleuze. In his contextualisation of the work of twentieth-century painter Francis Bacon (1909-92), Deleuze refers to Worringer’s books when reflecting on the specific dynamic of Gothic (or Barbarian) line. Like Worringer, Deleuze employs the rhetoric of opposition in his discussion of the relationship between Gothic, Egyptian and Classical Greek approaches to art-making; he allows his reliance on the precedent set by Worringer to surface at various points of his demonstration. However, Deleuze questions the association between representation and painting, and argues in favour of abstraction from a different angle than Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy. 36 Arnheim, New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 61-62. 140 The relationship between abstraction and representation: highlights from Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, and Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981), Gilles Deleuze inquires into the pictorial practice of Bacon, addressing its aspects from the simplest to the most complex.1 ‘All these aspects, of course, coexist in reality’, 2 Deleuze writes. Nevertheless, like Worringer, Deleuze distinguishes between various layers of artistic activity in order to underscore theoretically significant elements in the work of his artist of choice. Unlike Worringer, however, Deleuze constructs his theories on the basis of Bacon’s paintings and series. In support of his argument from Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze creates a complex web of contextual references that brings together the domains of psychiatry,3 psychology,4 aesthetics,5 and philosophy, 6 to name but a few. Deleuze writes about compositional elements specific to the art of painting as made visible in the oeuvre of Bacon,7 as well as about key figures and styles that further illuminate Bacon’s work.8 Worringer features in Deleuze’s Francis Bacon as a theorist of Gothic art. For Deleuze, Worringer provides the definition of Gothic, as well as a contrast between Gothic and Classical art.9 Deleuze notes that, in principle, Classical art can be contrasted with Gothic art. Like Worringer, he recognizes the value of contrast: he assigns the articulation of contrast 1 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London: Continuum, 2004 [1981]), ix. 2 Ibid. 3 For instance, Deleuze discusses sensation as connected to the nervous system of the subject and to observed objects at the same time. (Ibid., 34-35.) Also, Deleuze follows Antonin Artaud in explaining the existence of a form of embodiment that precedes representation and recognizable organic form: the ‘body without organs.’ See Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 44-45. Also, Deleuze addresses the ‘hysteria’ (i. e., the excessive presence) of the body without organs, which lacks not organs, but their organization. See———, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 44-45. 4 Deleuze addresses affects (sensations and instincts – but not feelings, according to him), vital emotion (which he describes as a ‘nervous wave’), and the absence of will as readable in Bacon’s pictorial marks. See Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 39, 45, 100-101. 5 Like Riegl before him, Deleuze addresses the tactile (or haptic, according to Deleuze) functioning of the eye, which encourages the emergence of haptic space. (Ibid., 122-123, 133.) 6 Deleuze refers to the thought of Kant and Hegel, for instance. (Ibid., 81, 178, 182.) 7 For instance, Deleuze defines composition as ‘... an organization... in the process of disintegrating’. (Ibid., 129.) Deleuze also addresses the optical qualities of abstract forms; he sees them belonging in a space that no longer needs the tactility of making. (———, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 103.) Also, he gives ample attention to the Figure, which can be a person or a group evolving against an isolating, non-narrative, amphitheatre-like space. (———, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 1-6.) 8 The work of Cézanne is discussed at length by Deleuze. See Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 34-43, 111-121. Gothic art also attracts the attention of Deleuze; (———, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 129-131.) 9 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 46. 141 between different modes of art-making to the domain of theoretical principles. However, Deleuze finds that art cannot always sustain the contrast between ‘nonorganic’ (abstract) Gothic and ‘organic’ (representational) Classicism. For instance, he observes that Classical art can be ‘figurative’ (when it includes represented objects, events, phenomena), or abstract (when it makes visible geometric forms).10 Classical ornament and Gothic line In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer discussed the representational aspects of Classical art, associating it with the urge to empathy, with naturalism, and with ancient Greek culture.11 Nevertheless, he also found that Classical art made visible a meeting of abstract and representational features in the case of ornament. Classical art, according to Worringer, brought together the enlivenment of Mycenaean style (c. 1900 – c. 1100 B. C., Bronze Age Greece) and the geometric strictness of Dipylon style (a mode of art-making the emergence of which Worringer associated with the Doric migration from 1150 B. C.).12 In the words of Worringer: We recall that the principle of Mycenaean art was that of enlivenment, of naturalism, whereas the Dipylon style exhibits a marked abstract tendency. Classical art now seems to us to embody a grand synthesis of these two elements, with a clear preponderance of the naturalistic element... This balance between the Mycenaean components and the Dipylon components, this balance between naturalism and abstraction, brought to maturity that altogether felicitous result which we call Classical Greek art.13 For Worringer, the synthesis of naturalism (or representational art depicting the natural world) and abstraction became visible in the Classical art of Greece. Despite the dominance of naturalistic elements in Greek Classicism, Worringer noticed that balance informed the 10 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 46. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 71. 13 Ibid., 71-72. 142 relationship between abstraction and representation. He compared Greek and Egyptian art, exploring their differences and continuing to address the relationship between representational (‘organic,’ ‘living,’ ‘vital’) tendencies, and abstract (‘geometric,’ regularity- oriented, rest-oriented) tendencies in Classical Greek ornament. In his words: Classical Greek ornament, compared with Egyptian, shows in place of geometric regularity an organic regularity whose most sublime goal is rest in motion, living rhythm or rhythmic liveliness, in which our vital sensations can immerse themselves with complete happiness. There is no trace of naturalism in the menial sense, no trace of copying nature. We see before us pure ornament on an organic fundament.14 Like Worringer, Deleuze draws attention to another territory where abstract and representational tendencies combine: Gothic art. Deleuze is interested in the dynamism and intensity of Gothic; he argues that, in Gothic painting, representational vitality is recognizable in abstract geometry or decoration. According to him, Gothic line does not describe forms, but registers movement and generates complex relationships. Deleuze writes: It [i. e., the geometry of the pictorial line in Gothic painting] is a geometry no longer in the service of the essential and eternal, but a geometry in the service of “problems” or “accidents,” ablation, adjunction, projection, intersection. It is thus a line that never ceases to change direction, that is broken, split, diverted, turned in on itself, coiled up, or even extended beyond its natural limits, dying away in a “disordered convulsion”: there are free marks that extend or arrest the line, acting beneath or beyond representation. It is thus a geometry or decoration that has become vital and profound, on the condition that it is no longer organic: it elevates mechanical forces to sensible intuition, it works through violent movements.15 Deleuze observes the peculiar dynamic of Gothic line, which generates opportunities for the exploration as well as questioning of pictorial form. Gothic line creates forms and relationships: its pictorial presence is that of a force actively responding to a will that appears to be its own. The movement of geometric line in Gothic painting seems mechanical to 14 Ibid., 72. 15 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 46. 143 Deleuze; Worringer also recognized mechanical rather than organic aspects in the design of Gothic cathedrals in Abstraction and Empathy.16 Like Worringer, Deleuze finds no organic features in the Gothic line, which he nevertheless regarded as lively, intuitive (that is, non- cognitive) and violent (that is, physical and forceful). For Worringer as for Deleuze, representational characteristics such as vitality can inform abstraction-oriented artistic practices, even where imitative renderings of organic forms are absent. Worringer also discusses Gothic line (or Northern line) in Form in Gothic. Contrasting Classical ornament and Gothic ornament, Worringer notes that, where Classical ornament is symmetrical, additive, restful, structured and rhythmically measured,17 Northern ornament is active, multiplicative, accelerating, formless, ceaseless, and a-centric.18 Movement seems mechanical and violent in Northern geometry, according to Worringer. 19 Worringer sees a potential for infinite development in the ceaseless, regular repetitions of Northern ornament. With regard to Northern ornament, Worringer notes: A continually increasing activity without pauses or accents is set up and repetition has only the one aim of giving the particular motive a potential infinity. The infinite harmony of the line hovers before Northern man in his ornament: that infinite line which gives no pleasure, but which stuns and compels us to helpless surrender. If, after contemplating Northern ornament, we close our eyes, all that remains to us is a lingering impression of a formless, ceaseless activity. 20 For Worringer, the harmony specific to Northern ornament relies on the dynamic of its line. This type of line, Worringer observes, is intensely active and difficult to comprehend. Previously, Worringer had connected representation with rationality, sensuousness, and confidence in the natural world, and abstraction with tendencies towards transcendence, spirituality, and distrust of the world as presented by senses. 21 In the Gothic line, he finds a non-cognitive, mechanical, ever-intensifying movement that asserts its immediate physicality while attempting to transcend the world. In other words, Northern line as seen by Worringer 16 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 114. 17 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 55, 57. 18 Ibid., 55-57. 19 Ibid., 57. 20 Ibid., 55-56. 21 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 45-47. 144 interweaves aspects of representation and abstraction beyond the point where they could account for either mode of art-making alone. Non-organic dynamism in Gothic art Deleuze also inquires into the close connection of abstract and representational aspects of art- making. He follows Worringer in focusing on the generic features of Gothic art (or, according to Deleuze, Barbarian art). Remembering Worringer for his discussion of Northern line as potentially infinite in its changes of direction, or in its violent return towards itself,22 Deleuze argues that Gothic or Barbarian art transcends representation through its non-organic dynamism. He explains: Barbarian art goes beyond organic representation in two ways, either through the mass of the body in movement, or through the speed and changing direction of the flat line. Worringer discovered the formula of this frenetic line: it is a life, but the most bizarre and intense kind of life, a nonorganic vitality. It is an abstraction, but an expressionistic abstraction. It is thus opposed to the organic life of classical representation, but also to the geometric line of Egyptian essence, and the optical space of luminous apparition.23 The specificity of Gothic consists, according to Deleuze, in its achieving a paradoxical combination of representational and abstract aspects of art-making, where representation is surpassed and abstraction is infused with vitality. Like Worringer, Deleuze employs the rhetoric of opposition to underscore the key characteristics of Gothic art. Gothic art is distinct from both Classical art and Egyptian art for him, as we have seen before; furthermore, Deleuze considers that Gothic art cannot be associated with the rendition of three- dimensional, optical space. He points to the strokes [traits] that Gothic art makes visible, and notices their connection to the hand of the artist – more generally, to the body of the artist now present in mark-making, yet in excess of its strictly physical frame. Highlighting the role 22 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 129. 23 Ibid., 129-130. 145 of hands and eyes in Gothic art, Deleuze muses: ‘It is as if a purely manual space were taking its revenge, for if the eyes that judge still maintain their accuracy, the hand that manipulates has discovered how to free itself from them.’ 24 Associating Classical representation with an emphasis on the sense of sight, and on optical organization,25 Deleuze explains that representation relies on intellectual deliberation and accuracy. In contrast, Gothic art draws attention to a type of space where the role of the artist’s hand comes to the fore. However, Deleuze argues that the opposition of sight and touch in the articulation of pictorial space should not be maintained, since both senses contribute to the questioning of Classical representation.26 He comments that the effects of touch and sight (as observable in manual and optical pictorial spaces) can generate complex associations and relationships. Like Worringer, Deleuze remains open to the connections between elements he discusses in terms of contrast. For Worringer as for Deleuze, Gothic art brings to light many instances where representational and abstract tendencies combine. Worringer, in Form in Gothic, explains that Northern (or Gothic) art associates an abstract approach to line and a representational approach to actuality (which, according to Worringer, is arbitrary, chaotic, and does not coincide with nature).27 He points out that Gothic art engages with actuality, unlike the art of Classicism, which avoids rendering its turmoil. For instance, Worringer finds representational elements of actuality contributing to the otherwise abstract approach to Gothic animal ornament. He explains: Northern art, on the other hand [i. e., in contrast with the art of Classical culture], was evolved from the conjunction of an abstract linear speech with the reproduction of actuality. The first stage of this conjunction is exhibited in the Northern animal ornament. The specific expression of line and its spiritual, non-sensuous mode of expression were in no way weakened by this interpolation of motives from actuality, for the natural, the organic, was still completely concealed in this actuality; and only 24 Ibid., 131. 25 Ibid., 125. 26 Ibid., 131. 27 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 60. 146 the admission of such organic values of expression could have weakened the abstract character of the drawing. On the other hand, this abstract character of the line could readily be amalgamated with values of actuality; indeed, these motives of actuality could, as we have seen, be evolved, even involuntarily, from this abstract linear fantasy. For what is characteristic of any impression of actuality reaches us in a kind of linear “shorthand,” of which the single lines contain a summary expressive value far exceeding the function of the line as a mere indication of outline.28 Painting, representation and abstraction according to Deleuze For Worringer, abstract and representational tendencies are in conjunction in Gothic art; Deleuze, in Francis Bacon, examines the particularities of abstract-representational interactions as observed in Bacon’s approach to painting. With Bacon’s work and words in mind, Deleuze begins by explaining the difficult relationship between representation and painting. Painting is an art that aims to be independent of representation, according to Deleuze. He writes: Painting has neither a model to represent nor a story to narrate. It thus has two possible ways of escaping the figurative: toward pure form, through abstraction; or toward the purely figural, through extraction and isolation. If the painter keeps to the Figure, if he or she opts for the second path, it will be to oppose the “figural” to the figurative. Isolating the Figure will be the primary requirement. The figurative (representation) implies the relationship of an image to an object that it is supposed to illustrate; but it also implies the relationship of an image to other images in a composite whole which assigns a specific object to each of them. Narration is the correlate of illustration. A story always slips into, or tends to slip into, the space between two figures in order to animate the illustrated whole. Isolation is thus the 28 Ibid., 60-61. 147 simplest means, necessary though not sufficient, to break with representation, to disrupt narration, to escape illustration, to liberate the Figure: to stick to the fact.29 Deleuze dissociates representation and narration from the art of painting. He connects representation with the figurative (in other words, with the recognizable rendition of figures in the world), observing that the figurative links images to objects (by means of illustration), as well as images to other images.30 The distinction Deleuze operates between the figurative (representation) and the figural as observed in the paintings of Francis Bacon allows the philosopher to remodel the relationship between representation and abstraction. Representation, for Deleuze and Worringer, is associated with optical organization and organic (lifelike) qualities.31 Deleuze finds that Classical representation relies on distance (made visible through depth of field), on perspective (which presupposes the variation of viewpoints, and the overlapping of planes), on the differentiation of planes from the background to the foreground of the picture, and on the incorporation of accident.32 Following Riegl,33 Deleuze mentions that representation is tactile-optical: it brings together the sense of sight and the sense of touch, yet subordinates the tactile (or haptic, in Deleuze’s terms) function of the eye to the optic. Figuration, Deleuze notes, is a result of representation.34 Abstraction, Deleuze goes on to explain, creates a space that is still optical, yet emphasizes transformation. For Deleuze, pictorial abstraction works with light-dark relationships, and disintegrates representation-oriented organization.35 He associates abstraction with modern painting and with a departure from figurative art, signalling the difficulty of the separation from representational practices.36 Like Worringer,37 Deleuze regards abstraction as spiritual. Abstraction is ascetic, Deleuze considers, and becomes so by a reductive journey towards 29 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 2-3. 30 In this thesis, the term ‘image’ indicates that visual likeness informs the relationship between beings, objects, events or phenomena, and their representation. 31 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 125-126. 32 Ibid., 125. 33 Ibid., 122-123. 34 Ibid., 126. 35 Ibid., 129. 36 Ibid., 11. 37 See, for instance, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 18, 34-35. 148 optical, non-tactile, non-manual forms.38 The distancing that Worringer recognizes in abstraction also reflects in Deleuze’s discussion of abstraction as symbolic code relying on oppositions of form.39 Deleuze explains that abstraction articulates a pure optical space following binary rules. In his words: It [i. e., abstraction] is the code that is responsible for answering the question of painting today: What can save man from “the abyss,” from external tumult and manual chaos? Open up a spiritual state for the man of the future, a man without hands. Restore to man a pure and internal optical space, which will perhaps be made exclusively of the horizontal and the vertical... The hand is reduced to a finger that presses on an internal optical keyboard.40 Where Worringer connects abstraction to geometry, Deleuze sees abstraction as a code activated through the selection of opposing units. Mechanical characteristics of abstract processes become visible in the Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy;41 in his turn, Deleuze exposes the almost touch-free regularity of abstraction. Abstraction, Deleuze argues, is not a code imposed on painting, but a code elaborated through painting.42 Yet, according to Deleuze, the spectrum of abstract art also includes a manual form of abstraction: Abstract Expressionism or Art Informel [Informal Art]. The chaotic, contour-free mode of painting practised by Jackson Pollock (1912-56) and Morris Louis (1912-62) challenges the eye but highlights the role of the hand in art-making, Deleuze remarks.43 He agrees that Worringer is the inventor of the word ‘expressionism’ – 44 an approach to art Deleuze contrasts with the organic symmetry of Classicism. However, while the writings of Worringer may have provided inspiration to the Expressionist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, the word ‘expressionism’ has proved to have an uncertain parentage. 38 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 103. 39 Ibid., 104. 40 Ibid. 41 After discussing the connection between abstraction and geometrical regularity, Worringer cites Lipps with regard to the mechanical aspects of the geometric line. See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 20. 42 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 117. 43 Ibid., 104-105. 44 Ibid., 190. 149 Part 3: Around Expressionism The words of Worringer: ‘Expressionism’ at the beginning of the twentieth century Writers on art have frequently linked the work of Worringer with the growth and decline of German Expressionism (1905-20),1 an art movement comprising a wide variety of practices that unfolded in the first decades of the twentieth century. However, the connections between the writings of Worringer and German Expressionism are problematic to trace in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. These books do not mention Expressionism, do not point to artists considered to be Expressionists, and include only few notes concerning early twentieth-century makers and approaches to art-making. In his forewords to Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer nevertheless maintains that he resonated with the artistic interests of his time, that artists found his works relevant, that he sensed and addressed ‘... the necessities of the period’,2 and that his findings were applied in early twentieth-century art. Worringer’s approach to early twentieth-century artistic practices and practitioners remains generic; therefore, the exact degree of his influence on the early twentieth-century artists is difficult to establish. Worringer focuses on the development of his own argument in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, adducing time-tested historical data in support of his theory. He avoids defending Expressionism directly; however, in both books, the significance of expression comes to the fore in his discourse. The approach of Worringer to topics of concern for German Expressionists (such as artistic will, the necessity of direct expression in art, and the interest in simplified, intensified, reworked form) discourage the separation of Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic from Expressionist explorations at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the other hand, specific connections between Worringer’s argument in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, and early twentieth-century Expressionist art- making, remain challenging to retrieve. Contemporary researchers illuminate various aspects 1 Writers use the term ‘Expressionism’ in its capitalized as well as lowercase form. In my approach, the word ‘Expressionism’ is capitalized, following Long, Barron, and Rigby, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism. However, where sources I have consulted employ the term ‘Expressionism’ in lowercase, I cite or refer to the word ‘Expressionism’ in its lowercase form. 2 Worringer, Wilhelm, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (New York: International Universities Press 1953 [1908]), vii, viii. 150 of the links between Worringer’s writings and German Expressionism, adding nuance to the topic but reaching no consensus. For instance, Herbert Read finds that Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic had a key influence on the development of German Expressionist art;3 Read nevertheless offers no start and end date for the movement in his Concise History of Modern Painting (1969). The artists whose works announce or give rise to Expressionism include, according to Read, Christian Rohlfs (1849-1938), Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), James Ensor (1860-1949), Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Alexei von Jawlensky (1864-1941), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Emil Nolde (1867-1956), and Ernst Barlach (1870-1938).4 The beginnings and demise of German Expressionism prove complicated to pinpoint for contemporary researchers; Paul Vogt and Horst Uhr consider Worringer’s 1920 speech at the Goethe Society in Munich as the end of the movement.5 According to Vogt, Expressionism extends between 1905 (the year of the formation of the Dresden Die Brücke [The Bridge] group, which included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl as founding members), and 1920 (the year of Worringer’s Munich speech that, in 1921, became Current Questions on Art). Uhr reinforces the temporal boundaries asserted by Vogt with regard to the Expressionist movement.6 Counting Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt- Rottluff, and Max Pechstein among Die Brücke Expressionists, Uhr points to the aesthetic preoccupations with pictorial structure manifest in the works of Expressionist artists after 1920; he notes the increased traditionalism of later Expressionism, which, he finds, renounced early Expressionist intensity. For Shulamith Behr, David Fanning and Douglas Jarman, Expressionism is difficult to define both chronologically and in terms of style;7 they reject the idea that Expressionism could reach an end, thus indirectly agreeing with Worringer’s perspective on the capacity of style to 3 Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting, 52, 64-66. 4 Ibid., 56. 5 Paul Vogt, Expressionism: German Painting, 1905-1920 (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1980), 8, 15. 6 Horst Uhr, Masterpieces of German Expressionism at the Detroit Institute of Arts (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1982), 25. Also, ———, Lovis Corinth, California Studies in the History of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 129. 7 Shulamith Behr, David Fanning, and Douglas Jarman, Expressionism Reassessed (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), 2. 151 exceed historical boundaries and surface in various epochs.8 Behr, Fanning and Jarman see Expressionism as extending between 1905 and 1925 (the year of the first ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ [New Objectivity] show in Mannheim). Expressionism was most recognizable as a movement between these years, Behr, Fanning and Jarman argue. They do not agree to emphasize the death of Expressionism, and highlight the impact of the movement instead. In their words: ‘But to speak of Expressionism as being “dead”, or to attempt to limit its chronological span, is, in any case, to misrepresent the power and the influence which this amorphous, theoretically ill-defined movement has had.’ 9 Behr, Fanning and Jarman’s perspective contrasts the position Worringer adopted regarding Expressionism in 1921.10 To Worringer, Expressionist art appeared less interesting early in the second decade of the twentieth century; however, although he underscored the ineffectiveness of artistic Expressionism in Current Questions on Art (1921), for most researchers from the English-speaking world, discussions of Expressionism rely on Worringer’s thought from Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. 11 The association of Worringer’s writings with Expressionism has its grounds:12 Worringer employs the term ‘expression’ extensively throughout Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic.13 A key element in aesthetic inquiries as well as art-making, ‘expression’ provides 8 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 37. 9 Behr, Fanning, and Jarman, Expressionism Reassessed, 2. 10 Worringer had underscored the lack of experimentalism of later Expressionist art in Current Questions on Art (1921). See Wilhelm Worringer, 'From Current Questions on Art' in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, eds. Rose-Carol Washton Long, Stephanie Barron, and Ida Katherine Rigby (New York: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993 [1921]), 284-287. 11 The influence of Worringer’s thought on early twentieth-century German artists offers rich grounds for further inquiry. For instance, the emphasis on opposition in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, and the oppositional perspective adopted by artists regarded as Expressionists, could be explored at length. Donald E. Gordon points to this research possibility. With regard to the rhetoric of opposition in the context of Expressionist art-making, Gordon notes: ‘Expressionists knew with certainty not what they wanted, but what they opposed. Their post- industrial aspiration was a protest against the capitalist and mechanistic values of their own industrial era. Just what the post-industrial age would be, however, was never clear.’ Also see Holdheim, 'Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding'. This topic needs in-depth investigation, but exceeds the scope of the current thesis, which examines briefly only the writings and paintings of Hodler and Kandinsky. 12 As previously noted, the word ‘Expressionism’ is capitalized in this study. However, Gordon draws attention to the un-capitalized use of the word in English usage. (Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, 174.) 13 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 21, 27, 32, 37, 44, 51, 53, 66, 76-78, 81-82, 84, 89, 91, 94, 96, 98, 100-103, 108-118, 127, 133-134. Also, Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 7-8, 11-13, 17, 32, 36, 38, 40-44, 60-68, 79-81, 88-92, 106-110, 113-117, 127-130, 134-138, 153-167, 171-173, 176-177, 180. 152 outer form to inner experiences.14 Indeed, as Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic reveal, Worringer and Expressionist artists share an interest in intense, subjective responses to the world. However, although a preoccupation with expression is visible in the inquiries of Expressionists and the writings of Worringer, Worringer does not address or define the Expressionist art movement in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. He refers to Expressionist artists in 1911, in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’; yet ‘Expressionism,’ a term that suggests the emergence of shared characteristics in early twentieth-century artworks and approaches to art-making, is employed in a variety of contexts before and around the turn of the twentieth century. In his study from 1966, ‘On the Origin of the Word “Expressionism” ’, Gordon notes that the word ‘Expressionism’ was not employed by the Brücke artists in reference to their painting practices.15 Instead, Gordon traces the origin of the word ‘Expressionism’ to turn-of-the twentieth-century France – a hypothesis approached critically by Geoffrey Perkins in 1974,16 and further addressed by Marit Werenskiold in 1984.17 Gordon discusses the earliest 14 Regarding art forms oriented towards expression, Vogt addresses the key characteristics of the term ‘expressive’ as applicable to early twentieth-century art. Vogt writes: ‘Under “Expressive” we can include German Expressionism which extended from the primitive to the cosmic-romantic, and which sought, through a passionate scrutiny of the visible world, to heighten reality into a pictorial counterreality. The work of both Matisse and Kandinsky confirms this: Matisse united the ego and the world in the intellectual synthesis of the picture; Kandinsky’s newfound symbols pushed out the boundaries of visible reality and touched on the borderline between man’s existence and the cosmic order. He could scarcely convey discoveries of this subtlety by a less sophisticated expressive technique, hence Kandinsky’s mistrust of Northern Expressionism. Marc’s German pan-emotionalism, which was rooted in Romanticism, and Kandinsky’s synthesis of colour harmonies found in contemporary French Orphic painting the inspiration they needed for the theoretical and practical cultivation of the resources of colour and form. The aesthetics of the Blaue Reiter, with elements of both Expressionism and Constructivism, were directed at the picture as an independent organism and formal unit.’ See Paul Vogt, Expressionism: German Painting, 1905-1920 (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1980), 24. Levine underscores the defining characteristics of Expressionism; according to him, Expressionism emerges out of despair, rejects Classicism and Realism, sees art as a means for the individual to communicate with humanity, seeks community, and emphasizes two themes: regression and apocalypse. See Frederick S. Levine, The Apocalyptic Vision: The Art of Franz Marc as German Expressionism (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 2-3. Also, Stephen Eric Bronner, and Douglas Kellner, Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage (South Hadley, Massachussetts: J. F. Bergin, 1983), 4-11. 15 Donald E. Gordon, 'On the Origin of the Word "Expressionism" ', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 29, 1966, 369. 16 Perkins, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism, 12-18. For Perkins, the possibility of an English origin for the word ‘Expressionism’ seems equally valid. (———, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism, 15, 20n18.) 17 Marit Werenskiold, The Concept of Expressionism: Origin and Metamorphoses (Oslo and New York: Universitetsforlaget and Columbia University Press, 1984), 5-13. Werenskiold mentions that Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler did not accept that the term ‘Expressionism’ was first used in 1901 by Hervé (she agrees with 153 associations of the word ‘Expressionism’ with the teachings of Gustave Moreau (1826-98), the writings of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Louis Vauxcelles (1870-1943), as well as with the eight paintings of Julien-Auguste Hervé,18 titled ‘Expressionismes’ and shown at the Salon des Indépendants [Salon of Independent Artists] in 1901.19 Following his discussion of Matisse’s writings, Gordon explains that, in early twentieth-century France, the word ‘expression’ referred specifically to the emphasis of artists on self-expression.20 He notes that the word ‘Expressionism’ is also employed in connection with the presence of the work of French artists in early twentieth-century Germany;21 the paintings of eleven French artists were displayed in the twenty-second Berlin Secession exhibition (April 1911) in a gallery labelled ‘Expressionisten’, according to him.22 Regarding the responses to ‘Expressionism’ in the press of the time, Gordon highlights the hostility of the press to Expressionist artists –23 an emphasis contested by Perkins, who argues that positive responses to the works of French artists were also published.24 Gordon notes Worringer’s support of ‘Synthetists and Expressionists’ in 1911. 25 No further discussion regarding Worringer’s association with Expressionism occurs in ‘On the Origin of the Word “Expressionism” ’.26 Kahnweiler on this matter). She notes the presence of the term ‘Expressionist’ in 1850 in Britain, in 1878 in the United States of America, and, in May 1910, in the German art journal Kunst und Künstler [Art and Artist], where Aby Warburg commented on the ‘Expressionist’ graphic art of the Late Middle Ages. Werenskiold also points to the use of the term by Carl David Moselius in the Swedish press (20 March 1911) before the term appeared in Germany. (Werenskiold, The Concept of Expressionism: Origin and Metamorphoses, 7-8, 12.) 18 Werenskiold mentions that nine paintings of Hervé were shown at Salon des Indépendants. See Werenskiold, The Concept of Expressionism: Origin and Metamorphoses, 7. 19 Gordon, 'On the Origin of the Word "Expressionism" ', 368-371. Also, Perkins, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism, 13-14. Gordon notes that the Salon was led by Georges Seurat (1859-91), Paul Signac (1863- 1935) and Henri-Edmond Cross (1856-1910). 20 Gordon, 'On the Origin of the Word "Expressionism" ', 371. 21 Ibid. 22 Also, Perkins, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism, 14. 23 Gordon, 'On the Origin of the Word "Expressionism" ', 371-373. 24 Perkins, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism, 15-16. 25 Gordon, 'On the Origin of the Word "Expressionism" ', 373. 26 However, Gordon readdresses the associations between Worringer and Expressionism in 1987. On this occasion, he discusses Worringer’s preoccupations with spirituality at the time when Expressionists such as Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Erich Heckel approached religious themes. He also mentions Worringer’s defence of the German tendency – visible in Expressionism – to respond to existing modes of art-making. Gordon discusses Worringer’s approach to empathy, as well as the role of empathy in Expressionist self-portraits (for instance, in the practices of Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner or Max Beckmann); he addresses Worringer’s criticism of Expressionism in 1920, and Worringer’s 154 Expressionism, according to Gordon, is a word used with increasing frequency after 1911. Paul Fechter, Gordon notes, mentions his indebtedness to Worringer’s Form in Gothic in Expressionism (1914),27 and goes on to employ the word ‘Expressionism’ in connection to German art-making, more precisely in connection with the city of Dresden and with the artists of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter [Blue Rider]. 28 The word ‘Expressionism,’ according to Gordon, has grown to acquire the connotations of the German concept of Ausdruckskunst (which Gordon proposes to translate as ‘emotionalism’) in German-speaking contexts.29 Common interests and aims united German critics and writers between 1914 and 1923 with regard to Expressionism, according to Gordon; nevertheless, he maintains that Expressionism remained an ambiguous term, and did not point to a unitary artistic attitude at the time.30 In other words, Gordon questions the unity of Expressionism as an art movement (Perkins agrees with this perspective),31 and emphasizes the more pronounced cohesiveness of Expressionism in art writing and criticism. Gordon adds new findings to his research from 1966 in Expressionism: Art and Idea (1987).32 He notes that the word ‘Expressionism’ was increasingly applied to discussions of German art starting with the International Exhibition of the Sonderbund [Special League] in Cologne (May 1912).33 He also attributes the invention of the label ‘Expressionism’ to Budapest-born, Paris-residing art history student, Antonin Matějček (1889-1950).34 The term ‘Expressionism,’ Gordon signals, was also used by Carl David Moselius (1890-1968), a newspaper critic writing about a Swedish group of painters – De unga [Young Ones] – in a review from 20 March 1911.35 In 1987, Gordon remarks that Worringer’s approach inspired 1911 analysis of ‘... a modern art of “expression” (Ausdruck)’ which inspired Fechter’s book on Expressionism (1914). (———, Expressionism: Art and Idea, 48-49, 70, 106, 128, 140, 168, 176.) 27 Gordon refers to an edition of Fechter’s work where Fechter acknowledges the influence of Worringer on page four. (———, 'On the Origin of the Word "Expressionism" ', 377.) Also see Perkins, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism, 16-17. 28 Donald E. Gordon, 'On the Origin of the Word 'Expressionism'', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 29, 1966, 376-378. 29 Ibid., 378-380. Also, regarding the connection between Worringer and the will-to-expression [Ausdruckswollen], see Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, 176. 30 Gordon, 'On the Origin of the Word "Expressionism" ', 384. 31 Perkins, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism, 18. 32 Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, 174-176. 33 Ibid., 176. 34 Ibid., 175. 35 Ibid., 175-176. 155 the art of the early twentieth century, and contributed significantly to Fechter’s analysis of Expressionism.36 Worringer plays a modest role in Gordon’s 1966 approach to the early years of the Expressionist movement; ‘On the Origin of the Word “Expressionism” ’ mentions Worringer as a supporter of contemporary ‘Synthetists and Expressionists’. However, in 1987, Gordon dwells more on the relevance of Worringer’s writings in connection to Expressionism. Worringer appears as a supporter, then critic, of German Expressionism in both ‘On the Origin of the Word “Expressionism” ’, and Expressionism: Art and Idea. Like Gordon in 1966, Wolf Dieter Dube traces the term ‘Expressionism’ back to Hervé, Matisse and Vauxcelles.37 Dube also signals that, on the occasion of the 1911 Berlin Secession Exhibition, gallery dealer Paul Cassirer (1871-1926) referred to a painting by Max Pechstein as fitting under the heading of ‘Expressionism’ rather than ‘Impressionism;’ 38 however, Dube questions the veracity of this information. In his account of Expressionism, Worringer (whom Dube considers a theorist of influence at the beginning of the twentieth century) is mentioned for his having referred to French artists exhibited in Germany as ‘expressionists’.39 Dube, like Gordon, draws no further attention to Worringer’s role in the articulation of the Expressionist movement in Germany. Instead, Geoffrey Perkins argues that Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic play a major role in the formulation of Expressionist theories.40 In his Contemporary Theory of Expressionism (1974), Perkins writes that Worringer’s account of the psychology of Northerners, as well as his perspective on Gothic architecture, exerted a considerable influence on twentieth-century approaches to Expressionism,41 despite Worringer’s not referring to Expressionism in either Abstraction and Empathy or Form in Gothic.42 Perkins 36 Ibid., 176-177. 37 Wolf Dieter Dube, The Expressionists (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972), 18. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Perkins, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism, 48. 41 Ibid., 54. 42 According to Perkins, Peter Selz mentions Worringer’s use of the term ‘Expressionism’ in Form in Gothic (Ibid., 17, 55). Also see Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 13. (Discussing Worringer’s Form in Gothic, Selz writes: ‘Worringer finally linked Expressionism with the German Gothic tradition.’) In the edition of Form in Gothic I have consulted (1957 [1912]), ‘expression’ is a very frequently employed word, even in chapter titles such as ‘Transcendentalism of 156 explains that Worringer provided a direct presentation of already formulated ideas that made his books relevant to early twentieth-century aesthetic and artistic issues,43 and notably popular in the epoch (in 1919, according to Perkins, nine editions of Abstraction and Empathy had been printed, and the readers of Form in Gothic had seen twelve editions published by 1920). 44 With regard to the early reception of Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, Perkins points to the existence of contrasting attitudes towards Worringer’s thought. He believes that the positive and negative responses to the books of Worringer actually reflect the professional bias of his critics. According to Perkins: ‘Those who rejected his [i. e., Worringer’s] theories tended to be trained and established art historians, those who adopted them, art critics, poets and artists. It was from these latter groups, of course, that the majority of the theories of Expressionism came.’ 45 Perkins thus emphasizes Worringer’s specific research standpoint, which, though academic, opened towards the interests of coeval writers and artists. Perkins draws attention to aspects of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic that supported the formulation of Expressionist theories.46 Early twentieth-century aesthetics focused on an art of naturalism exclusively, Worringer had argued; Perkins underscores Worringer’s views regarding the counterproductive emphasis on Classical, Renaissance and naturalist aesthetic values in a Northern context. Further inspiration for Expressionist writers could have derived, Perkins maintains, from the contrast Worringer traced between naturalism and style, as well as from Worringer’s defence of non-naturalist, instinctive modes of art-making. For Perkins, Worringer is ‘the leading champion of the cause’, a key writer supporting Expressionism in the first decade of the twentieth century. According to Perkins: Proceeding from the belief that since the Renaissance art had become more and more superficial, that society itself had become more and more individualistic and the Gothic World of Expression;’ although I have found no mention of the term ‘Expressionism’ in the 1957 [1910] edition, Worringer’s text presents the word ‘expression’ as a term of constant reference. Worringer’s use of the word ‘expression’ in Form in Gothic could not have been indifferent to the cultural and artistic context where he developed his thoughts. 43 Perkins, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism, 55. 44 Ibid., 48. 45 Ibid., 47. 46 Ibid., 55. 157 fragmented, and that the artist, thrown back upon himself, had become increasingly isolated within that society, Worringer was, in 1910, one of the most ardent preachers of the need for a new form of art. This art, he felt, should satisfy spiritual, not sensuous needs, and should seek to restore the connection between artist and society, indeed to shift the emphasis from society to community, for only the community was capable of sustaining a monumental, spiritual form of art.47 Perkins thus portrays Worringer as highly aware of the complex cultural, social, psychological and artistic dynamics of his context. Worringer’s writings were, for Perkins, a definite source of inspiration to Expressionists. Further contextualising the emergence and development of Expressionism in ‘Brücke, German Expressionism and the Issue of Modernism’ (2011), Rose-Carol Washton Long observes that Expressionism, a term employed in German art criticism, incorporated various influences.48 Long points out that the use of the term accounted for the impact of recent French artistic inquiries on German art, and hinted to its connections with ‘primitive’ art, Gothic art, and the painting of old masters such as Michelangelo (1475-1564) or Matthias Grünewald (1470-1528).49 Worringer, according to Long, employed the term ‘Expressionism’ to refer to innovative German and French artistic explorations; as she underscores, Worringer considered the Gothic a phenomenon extending beyond historical and national boundaries.50 From Long’s perspective, Worringer appears as a writer sensitive to the transnational tendencies of the Gothic, and supportive of the intercultural aspects of Expressionism. While Form in Gothic still comprises passages where Worringer defends the German characteristics of Gothic in particular,51 his openness towards contemporary artistic developments in Germany and abroad emerges with clarity in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’. 47 Perkins, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism, 56. 48 Regarding the sources of Expressionism, Gordon finds six groups of relevant sources: Late Impressionism, Symbolism, Jugendstil [Youth Style]; Fauvism, Cubism, Orphism, Futurism; German Gothic art, German Romanticism; tribal art (African and Oceanic); folk art, naive art, children’s art; non-Western art (Islamic and Oriental). (Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, 70.) 49 Rose-Carol Washton Long, 'Brücke, German Expressionism and the Issue of Modernism' in New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History, ed. Christian Weikop (Farnhem, Surrey, and Burlington, V. T.: Ashgate, 2011), 12. 50 Ibid., 13. 51 ‘For the Germans, as we have seen, are the conditio sine qua non [i. e. indispensable condition] of Gothic’, Worringer writes. See Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 180. Also, ———, Form in Gothic, 141-142. 158 ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911): Worringer’s early response to Expressionism While Abstraction and Empathy (1908) and Form in Gothic (1910) contain only few references to the art of Worringer’s epoch, ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ – a polemical text explaining and defending contemporary artistic developments in Germany – addresses early twentieth-century art-making, placing it in historical perspective. Worringer’s text appeared in The Struggle for Art: The Answer to the “Protest of German Artists”, an anthology published by Reinhard Piper at the initiative of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Kandinsky, according to Magdalena Bushart, proposed that Worringer edit The Struggle for Art; Worringer preferred to support the publication by contributing his essay, ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ instead.1 The Struggle for Art included texts by artists Max Liebermann (1847-1935), Lovis Corinth (1858-1925), Max Slevogt (1868-1932), Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Christian Rohlfs (1849- 1938), Max Pechstein (1881-1955), Henry van der Velde (1863-1957), Franz Marc (1880- 1916), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), and August Macke (1887-1914). Writers such as Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965), Wilhelm Hausenstein (1882-1957), Hans Tietze (1880- 1954), Gustav Pauli (1866-1938), and Alfred Lichtwark (1852-1914) also contributed to The Struggle for Art. The words of collector Karl Ernst Osthaus (1874-1921), dealer Paul Cassirer (1871-1926), as well as collector, dealer and writer Wilhelm Uhde (1874-1947) feature in Piper’s publication as well.2 In his collection of essays entitled The Protest of German Artists (1911), Carl Vinnen (1863- 1922), a landscape artist and Berlin Secession member,3 questioned the acquisition of French art in Germany.4 He also criticized contemporary German art. ‘Quousque Tandem’ [‘When,’ or ‘For How Long’], 5 Vinnen’s essay from The Protest of German Artists, highlighted a 1 Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch', 78-79. 2 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 105-106. 3 Long, Barron, and Rigby, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, 5-6. 4 Vinnen points to the Somderbund alliance with French avant-garde art, as well as to the acquisition of Monet’s Lady in a Green-Black Dress by director Gustav Pauli for the Bremen Museum. Vinnen, 'Quousque Tandem', 6- 7. 5 The title of Vinnen’s essay could have been inspired by the first oration of Marcus Tullius Cicero for the Roman Senate; Cicero’s speech was directed against Lucius Sergius Catilina, who was attempting to destabilize 159 pattern of acquisition that seemed to favour artists from abroad. Pointing to the works of French artists such as Claude Monet (1840-1926), Alfred Sisley (1839-99), Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), and Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), Vinnen noted that their paintings had been purchased at high prices in Germany. 6 Vinnen underscored his admiration of French art, which he had researched during his stay Paris; nevertheless, he considered the German focus on French art-making excessive and threatening, mentioning in particular the speculative aspects of the entrance of French pictures in public and private German collections.7 The paintings of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), for instance, attracted Vinnen’s criticism: he regarded them as drawing too much attention to the artist himself, due to their excessive assertion of personal style.8 If national aspects of art were to be encouraged, Vinnen argued that local approaches were to be cultivated.9 In ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, Worringer addresses Vinnen’s perspective, which Worringer considers specific to their time.10 Historical necessity, according to Worringer, reflects in contemporary modes of art-making. The passage of time has to bring along artistic change, Worringer argues; he maintains that a distancing of contemporary art- making from Impressionism as explored in the works of Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) is to be historically expected. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer claimed that the relationship between human beings and the objects rendered in art changed throughout time;11 he criticised the widespread opinion that the urge towards art-making was the same in all epochs.12 For him, inner experiences lead, at different points in history, to different artistic effects.13 In ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, Worringer the Roman government at the time. Cicero opens his oration against Catilina with the following rhetoric question: ‘Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?’ [‘When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience?’] See Marcus Tullius Cicero, 'First Oration against Lucius Catilina: Delivered in the Senate' in The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, ed. C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856 [63 B. C.]). If the oration of Cicero was indeed Vinnen’s inspiration, then Vinnen’s indirect reference to a Classical source further emphasizes the political dimension of his perspective on the contemporary art world. 6 Vinnen, 'Quousque Tandem', 7. 7 Ibid., 5-6. 8 Ibid., 7. 9 Ibid., 8. 10 Wilhelm Worringer, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art' in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, eds. Rose-Carol Washton Long, Stephanie Barron, and Ida Katherine Rigby (New York: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993 [1911]), 10. 11 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 37. 12 Ibid., 10. 13 Ibid., 30. Worringer follows Hegel when asserting the intrinsic development of art. In his Aesthetics (1820- 29), Hegel had noted: ‘... [T]he individual arts too, independently of the art-forms which they objectify [i. e., the 160 mentions that a new generation of painters in Paris follows not the Impressionists, but rather Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Matisse. French artists participating in this new direction of inquiry share many interests, Worringer notes; this gives unity to a movement that remains unnamed in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’. 14 When visiting Paris around 1905 (that is, before having begun his work on Abstraction and Empathy), Worringer had the opportunity to become familiar with the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Matisse. The paintings of French artists were shown and purchased in Germany in the early years of the twentieth century, as Vinnen mentions in The Protest of German Artists, so Worringer’s opinion on contemporary French art could have taken shape in Germany even before his visit to France. Paul Cassirer, the Berlin-based gallery owner and art historian,15 exhibited works by Cézanne (in 1900, 1904 and 1906),16 and by Van Gogh (between 1901 and 1914),17 as well as Matisse’s drawings (in 1907).18 For the French and German public of the early twentieth century, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Matisse were significant – if not applauded – participants to pictorial explorations that departed from representational traditions. Cézanne, Van Gogh and Matisse addressed their creative processes in writing, often in response to the inquiries of fellow artists. Less inclined towards theorising on painting, Cézanne was probably the least willing communicator of the three. Nevertheless, his letters provide glimpses into his opinions on art and pictorial practices, as subsequent sections of this thesis show. For Cézanne, painting required an intense focus on nature as well as an symbolic, the classical and the romantic], have in themselves a development, a course which, considered rather abstractly, is common to them all. Each art has its time of efflorescence, of its perfect development as an art, and a history preceding and following this moment of perfection. For the products of all the arts are the works of the spirit and therefore are not, like natural productions, complete all at once with their specific sphere; on the contrary, they have a beginning, a progress, a perfection, and an end, a growth, blossoming, and decay.’ (See Hegel and Knox, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 614.) Concerning early twentieth-century art, Worringer connects its progress to leaving Impressionism behind. In the 1920s, Worringer would also signal the decline of Expressionism in Current Questions on Art (1921). 14 Worringer, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art', 10. 15 'Guide to the Cassirer Collection, 1906-1933.' Stanford: Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, 1999, 2-3.s 16 Horst Uhr, Lovis Corinth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 130. Also, John Rewald, Cézanne: A Biography (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1986), 270. Also, Françoise Cachin et al., Cézanne (New York: H.N. Abrams and The Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1996), 567. 17 Jill Lloyd and Michael Peppiatt, Van Gogh and Expressionism (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007), 12. 18 Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 378. 161 awareness of the geometrical aspects of composition; his early twentieth-century works – for instance, his depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire – make increasingly visible his emphasis on structure and repetition, and the interweaving of representational and abstract characteristics. Van Gogh, on the other hand, wrote with confidence and enthusiasm, expressing his views on ethical, social and behavioural matters in his correspondence.19 Soon after Van Gogh’s death in 1890, his writings were published in Mercure de France. Émile Bernard – one of the artists to whom Cézanne wrote in the early years of the twentieth century – made available to the French public, between 1893 and 1897, extracts from the letters he had received from Van Gogh. 20 Worringer certainly had the opportunity to explore Van Gogh’s writings in French, as well as in German. Kunst and Künstler (the magazine of Bruno Cassirer, Paul Cassirer’s cousin), also featured selections from Van Gogh’s letters in 1904 and 1905. In 1906, aiming to reach an even wider audience, Bruno Cassirer issued Vincent van Gogh, Letters, an anthology of Van Gogh’s late correspondence.21 Van Gogh’s views on art were therefore familiar to German readers by the time Worringer published ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, so Worringer’s associating current explorations in art-making with the name of Van Gogh highlighted the lineage and relevance of recent French and German art-making.22 Van Gogh’s letters argue passionately for artistic issues that interest him; his remarkable directness intensifies both the generosity and critical edge of his comments. In a letter to Bernard from around 26 November 1889,23 for instance, Van Gogh praises Bernard’s 19 For an introduction to Van Gogh’s letters and their biographical and art-historical role, see Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, Vol. 6 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 15- 31. Van Gogh’s admiration for Cézanne, as well as for an impressive number of painters from various schools and of diverse nationalities – including Impressionists such as Monet and Pissarro – is mentioned in Stolwijk et. al., Vincent's Choice: Van Gogh's Musée Imaginaire, 29-30, 34-35. 20 Ibid., 37. 21 Ibid. 22 In April 1908 (during the year when Abstraction and Empathy was published) Van Gogh’s works were shown in Munich twice: at Galerie Zimmermann, and then at Moderne Kunsthandlung [Dealers of Modern Art]. Van Gogh’s solo show from Moderne Kunsthandlung travelled to Emil Richter’s gallery in Berlin, where, according to Lloyd and Peppiatt, the artists of Die Brücke attended the exhibition. See Lloyd and Peppiatt, Van Gogh and Expressionism, 18. 23 Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, Vol. 5 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 146-153. 162 Adoration of the Shepherds (1889) and points to its faults in the same paragraph.24 ‘[O]ne has to look for the possible, the logical, the true’,25 Van Gogh notes, displeased with the improbable aspects of the scene Bernard imagines. Instead, Van Gogh finds Bernard’s Breton Women in the Meadow (1888) convincingly composed, simple and dignified. Bernard’s use of colour, which Van Gogh regards as naive, pleases the latter; Van Gogh also compliments the clear delineation, planar divisions, and strong colour contrasts in Bernard’s Red Poplars (1887).26 For Van Gogh, representational subject-matter needs to be believably rendered; however, his comments bring to light his focus on abstract aspects of painting, such as the organization of a picture into planes, its levels of contrast, and the clarity of its colours. Observing nature and focusing on representing it brings peace of mind to Van Gogh.27 In his own words: ‘... [B]y working very calmly, beautiful subjects will come of their own accord; it’s truly first and foremost a question of immersing oneself in reality again, with no plan made in advance’.28 Attentive engagement with the process of painting yields good representational works, according to Van Gogh; in the descriptions he gives to his paintings, his deeply felt connection to the natural world acquires psychological inflections.29 Worringer writes that representation relies on the resonance of artists with their surroundings in Abstraction and Empathy;30 his remark certainly applies to Van Gogh’s artistic process. Representation, in Van Gogh’s works, reflects his dedication to rendering the world as observed. On the other hand, Van Gogh expresses his fear of abstraction in his letter to Bernard from November 1889. Abstraction, Van Gogh thinks, would have a softening effect 24 Ibid., 146. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 146-148. 27 Also see, in this respect, Chris Stolwijk, Sjraar van Heugten, Leo Jansen, Andreas Blühm, and Nienke Bakker, Vincent's Choice : Van Gogh's Musée Imaginaire (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 26-27. 28 Ibid., 148. 29 Mentioning a work in progress in 1899, Van Gogh writes to Bernard: ‘... [T]he first tree is an enormous trunk, but struck by lightning and sawn off. A side branch thrusts up very high, however, and falls down again in an avalanche of dark green twigs. This dark giant – like a proud man brought low – contrasts, when seen as the character of a living being with the pale smile of the last rose on the bush, which is fading in front of him... You’ll understand that this combination of red ochre, of green saddened with grey, of black lines that define the outlines, this gives rise a little to the feeling of anxiety from which some of my companions in misfortune often suffer, and which is called “seeing red”.’ Ibid. 30 Wilhelm Worringer and Hilton Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee and Elephant Paperbacks, 1997 [1908]), 45-46. 163 on him.31 He dislikes abstraction in his own work as much as in the work of others; he criticises Bernard for his choice of ‘abstract,’ biblical subject-matter, and praises his work from life instead. Van Gogh regards some of his own explorations as abstract, but draws attention to the challenges such an approach to art-making brings along for him. In his words to Bernard: ‘When Gauguin was in Arles, I once or twice allowed myself to be led into abstraction, as you know, in a woman rocking a cradle, a dark woman reading novels in a yellow library, and at that time abstraction seemed an attractive route to me. But that’s enchanted ground, – my good fellow – and one soon finds oneself up against a wall.’ 32 Van Gogh thus recognizes that his access to creativity is connected to the representational approach, namely to the close relationship between observation and artistic representation. Abstraction (a process Worringer links with tendencies of distancing from the world in Abstraction and Empathy)33 belongs to the domain of enchantment according to Van Gogh; for him, art needs to assert and explore its connection with reality. Van Gogh’s understanding of abstraction prevents him from crediting it in his own paintings. Unlike Worringer, who recognizes and addresses the creative potential of processes of abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy, Van Gogh hesitates with regard to paintings he considers abstract, as well as with regard to subject-matter removed from everyday reality (such as biblical scenes). However, while Van Gogh describes his representational work in emotionally rich terms, he also highlights abstract aspects of painting in his letters. He mentions, for instance, his painting of olive trees to Bernard; in this canvas, colour appears as a key compositional element. Van Gogh writes to Bernard: ‘So at present I am working in the olive trees, seeking the different effects of a grey sky against yellow earth, with dark green note of the foliage; another time the earth and foliage all purplish against yellow sky, then red ochre earth and pink and green sky.’ 34 Van Gogh’s attention to colour juxtapositions and contrasts defines his approach to the rendition of olive trees; he explains to Bernard that the symbolic power of a scene may well rely on the careful, invested depiction of simple subject- 31 Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, Vol. 5 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 153. 32 Ibid., 148. Jansen, Luijten and Bakker show that Van Gogh is referring to Augustine Roulin (‘La Berceuse’) (1889), and to Woman Reading a Novel (1888). A higher degree of abstraction is visible in Van Gogh’s approach to depicting human figures, as well as in his approach to flatter, chromatically assertive backgrounds. However, his protagonists remain recognizable, and his paintings representational. 33 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 16-17. 34 Jansen, Luijten, and Bakker, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, Vol. 5, 148. 164 matter.35 Abstract aspects of painting such as Van Gogh’s focus on colour play a significant role in his representational compositions. In Olive Grove (1889) (Fig. 6), a painting Van Gogh completed around the time of his letter to Bernard, the representation of landscape makes visible the intensely vital rhythm of brushwork. The natural elements Van Gogh depicts are, without exception, activated by visible brushstrokes that reveal Van Gogh’s interpretation of light direction, intensity and expansion, warmth, mass, solidity and distance. Through Van Gogh’s brushwork, the entire surface of Olive Grove seems to vibrate. The sun, the remote mountains, the land, the olive trees and their shadows, are rendered by Van Gogh as brushstroke clusters juxtaposed with varyingly inflected planes. For tree trunks and their branches, for the disk of the sun and sometimes for the dunes in the grove, Van Gogh indicates the margins of planes by decisive outer contours. Unblended lines and clearly observable paint application bring to the fore the abstract component of Van Gogh’s representational painting. Van Gogh is a representational artist whose strong emotional connection to his subjects animates landscape and highlights its intrinsic energy. However, the visual impact of his paintings relies on his decisive handling of composition, paint application and colour division 35 Ibid., 146-8. Fig. 6. Vincent van Gogh. Olive Grove. 1889. oil on canvas. 73.6 x 92.7 cm. Minneapolis. Minneapolis Institute of Arts. 165 – namely, on the abstract aspects of his pictorial process. Worringer, in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, considers Van Gogh’s art exemplary for early twentieth- century explorations characterised by sincere, dedicated and personal approaches to painting.36 For Worringer, Van Gogh’s preference for pictorial representation is less significant, in early twentieth-century contexts, than the painter’s focus on communicating emotion through his art. Alongside Van Gogh, Worringer mentions Henri Matisse as an influence on contemporary artists in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’. Matisse, who held works by Cézanne and Van Gogh in his personal collection,37 exhibited his own drawings, paintings and sculptures since 1901 at the Salon of the Independents [Salon des Indépendants], Berthe Weill Gallery, and Autumn Salon [Salon d’Automne], and had had his first solo exhibition at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in 1904.38 By the time of his publishing ‘Notes of a Painter’ in The Great Review [La Grande Revue] (25 December 1908),39 Matisse had opened his own academy (1908-11); 40 his paintings had been acquired by the French state and by private collectors.41 Matisse’s ‘Notes of a Painter’ was translated into Russian and German by 1909; Worringer had an opportunity to acquaint himself with the art as well as writings of Matisse before the publication of his own ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ in 1911. In ‘Notes of a Painter’, Matisse explains that a connection exists between all the works in his oeuvre, even when his approach has changed over time. Apparent stylistic inconsistency is, Matisse implies, the result of reflection – therefore, of artistic growth. Expression follows thinking for Matisse; when his ideas change, so does his art.42 Although Matisse believes that painters are best introduced by their own work,43 he underscores the link between thinking and expressive completeness in his paintings. 44 Worringer, whose Abstraction and Empathy 36 Rose-Carol Washton Long, Stephanie Barron, and Ida Katherine Rigby, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (New York: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993), 9-10. 37 John Elderfield, Henri Matisse: A Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 86-87. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 181. 40 Ibid., 180. 41 Ibid., 87. 42 Henri Matisse, 'Notes of a Painter' in Matisse on Art, ed. Jack Flam (Oxford: Phaidon, 1973 [1908]), 35. 43 Ibid., 35. 44 Ibid., 35-36. 166 was published in 1908 (like ‘Notes of a Painter’), draws attention to his own interest in the conditions that bring art into being.45 The beauty of art is less compelling for Worringer than the actual process of art-making and the contexts that trigger it. Worringer shares with Matisse a preoccupation with the experiences and processes that lead to art-making rather than with the result of art-making alone. The composition of pictures is itself expressive for Matisse; 46 it supports the rendering of feeling through figure placement, through the relationships of positive and negative space, through proportions.47 Compositions must include only necessary elements, according to the painter, and must be modified expressively in response to different surface formats.48 When beginning to work, Matisse notices he tends to record sensations that he tries to stabilise during later stages of painting. Sensations must come to reflect the artist’s state of mind; in Matisse’s words: ‘I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which makes a painting.’ 49 For him, capturing impressions but not reworking and defining them (as he assumes Impressionist artists like Monet and Sisley do) is insufficient;50 he seeks to render the basic features of his motifs, in search for ‘... a more lasting interpretation’.51 Matisse’s turning away from Impressionism resonates with Worringer’s coeval views from Abstraction and Empathy.52 For Worringer, impressionist representation emphasizes the changeable aspects of the world, while abstract art highlights ‘... a value of necessity and eternity’ in art- making.53 Worringer writes in favour of abstraction throughout Abstraction and Empathy; 45 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 3-4. 46 Matisse, 'Notes of a Painter', 36. 47 Despite the clarity of his thought, Matisse’s work did not meet with unanimous appreciation in the early years of the twentieth century. The painter’s approach to form and composition was regarded by art critic Maxime Girieud, in 1905, as stylistically varied to the point of inconsistency; Girieud contrasted the practices of Matisse and Van Gogh in this respect, noting that Van Gogh focused exclusively on the development of his art, while Matisse assimilated techniques from other painters. Alastair Wright explains: ‘The suspicion was that Matisse was deliberately trying to be new’; this search for novelty resulted, according to art critic Charles Morice in 1903, in deliberate deformation and awkwardness. Maurice Denis, in 1905, also found Matisse’s painting attenuated, in emotional terms, when compared with the work of Van Gogh. See Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 23-25, 70, 73, 229, 240-241. Also, Rebecca A. Rabinow, and Dorthe Aagesen, Matisse: In Search of True Painting (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2012), 4-5, 243. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 36-37. 51 Ibid., 37. 52 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 38. 53 Ibid., 43. 167 like Worringer, Matisse points out that taking distance from detailed renditions of reality increases the impressiveness of artworks.54 Matisse points to the division between nature and art-making; Worringer does the same in the opening pages of Abstraction and Empathy.55 For Worringer, art and nature are independent from each other, and art is the equal of nature. Matisse, in his turn, comments from the perspective of a practising painter: ‘I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture.’ 56 Worringer criticises the role of imitation in art; Matisse finds he must depart from copying his motif. The picture, rather than nature, suggests the approach to the model, according to Matisse; yet (in contrast to Worringer’s thoughts on abstraction)57 the relationship of model and picture must be based not on tension or fear, but on harmony. However, the clear organization Worringer recognizes in abstract art is also considered by Matisse a prerequisite of his own artistic process.58 Composition and expression play key roles in the work of Matisse. If pictures have to be clearly conceived by Matisse before he begins painting, the colour tones he uses are applied instinctively, for expressive purposes. 59 Feeling, sensitivity and personal experiencing guide Matisse’s chromatic decisions – his practice provides a persuasive answer to Worringer’s requirement from Abstraction and Empathy that art emerge from personal, deeply felt responses to the world.60 Matisse wants his art to be serene, pure and balanced;61 Worringer associates such characteristics with abstraction,62 yet, unlike Matisse, considers that abstract art emerges from the tension between people and their surroundings.63 Where Abstraction and Empathy looks predominantly into the distinction between representational and abstract modes of art-making, ‘Notes of a Painter’ draws attention to the 54 Matisse, 'Notes of a Painter', 37. 55 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 3. 56 Matisse, 'Notes of a Painter', 37. 57 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 16-17. 58 Ibid. Also, Matisse, 'Notes of a Painter', 38. 59 Matisse, 'Notes of a Painter', 38. 60 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 28-30. 61 Matisse, 'Notes of a Painter', 38. 62 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 36-37, 40-41. 63 Ibid., 41. 168 shared grounds of abstraction and representation. Matisse mentions the often-asserted contrast between painters who work from nature (observing the world) and painters who work from imagination (without referring to the world). He writes that, in his opinion, artists may combine these approaches in their practice. Matisse explains: Often a discussion arises as to the value of different processes, and their relationship to different temperaments. A distinction is made between painters who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Personally, I think neither of these methods must be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Both may be used in turn by the same individual, either because he needs contact with objects in order to receive sensations that will excite his creative faculty, or his sensations are already organized. In either case he will be able to arrive at that totality which constitutes a picture. In any event I think that one can judge the vitality and power of an artist who, after having received impressions directly from the spectacle of nature, is able to organize his sensations to continue his work in the same frame of mind on different days, and to develop these sensations; this power proves he is sufficiently master of himself to subject himself to discipline.64 For Matisse, the organization of an artist’s sensations can develop in contact with nature, but also independently. Matisse emphasizes the importance of such organization in picture- making; whether the world or the artist’s imagination is the motor of this process proves less important to him. The painter’s openness to representational as well as abstract processes surfaces in ‘Notes of a Painter’.65 Moreover, Matisse discusses a hybrid approach to art- making, where painters start by referring to nature and then, in the absence of their motif, continue to develop their picture according to their initial response. Worringer also points to 64 Matisse, 'Notes of a Painter', 38-39. 65 Abstract-representational interplay in Matisse’s early twentieth-century work is also signalled by Wright, who points out: ‘... [T]he inconsistency of Matisse’s facture, its displacement of static form by process, calls mimesis into question... Works such as Seascape (Beside the Sea) (summer 1905)... push the diversity of mark-making and pigment application beyond anything that can be read as a mimetic system. The deep green with which waves are denoted by blunt horizontal strokes at lower left (alternating with blue) reappears as rounded smudges of pigment marking out the tip of the rock that pushes into space from the right; it then reappears in the centre of the image, representing waves once more but now isolated among widely dispersed white strokes. None of this quite adds up to representation.’ See Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 60-61. 169 the possibility of such practices in Abstraction and Empathy,66 as well as in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’; according to him, early twentieth-century artists may incline towards abstraction, yet need to allow representational motifs with symbolic value to inform the core of their artworks.67 Matisse’s ‘Notes of a Painter’ were written after his pictorial explorations of 1905 in Collioure, a port at the Mediterranean Sea where he was joined by André Derain for the summer.68 The Collioure series of paintings give primacy to the exploration of colour; they emphasize chromatic rhythms as discerned by the painter in his motif, as well as colour application on canvas. Landscape at Collioure (1905) (Fig. 7), for instance, orchestrates red- green, blue-orange complementary contrasts by means of brushstrokes that hint to the form of proximate land and distant hills, to the direction of pathways, to vegetation growth and movement. Matisse allows the ground of his canvas to show between brushstrokes; he asserts planes mostly through colour composition and application. Chromatically complex, Landscape at 66 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 42-43. 67 Worringer, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art' in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, 11-13. 68 Elderfield, Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, 133. Fig. 7. Henri Matisse. Landscape at Collioure. 1905. oil on canvas. 39 x 46.2 cm. New York. Museum of Modern Art. 170 Collioure nevertheless remains as open and direct as drawing. Matisse’s picture maintains its connection to the motif that inspires it, yet, although representational, highlights abstract aspects (for instance, the distinctness and paradoxical interdependence of brushstrokes, as well as the visual rhythm of a painting that resembles drawing). Expressiveness – the result of observation and of personal responding to a motif – finds its form through the interweaving of abstraction and representation in Matisse’s works from Collioure.69 For an artist and writer such as Vinnen, works that assert personal expressiveness draw too much attention to the painter; Vinnen criticises the art of Cézanne and Van Gogh from this point of view,70 emphasizing that the attention of the German public needs to be directed towards local talent.71 However, Worringer recognizes the impact of the works of painters such as Cézanne, Van Gogh and Matisse in their epoch,72 and, contrary to Vinnen’s ideas, argues for the continued cultivation of connections between French and German art.73 ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ does not assert the differentiations between national approaches to art-making; Worringer is rather interested in finding international commonalities. Regarding contemporary art practices, he remarks they are generically characterized by ‘... [t]his unmistakable striving for impartiality, for a compelling simplification of form, an elemental open-mindedness about artistic representation’.74 He associates contemporary art-making with ‘primitivism’, and notes (as he had done in 69 Regarding the paintings Matisse produced in 1905 at Collioure and showed at the Salon of the Independents in the same year, Wright notes that critics such as Denis associated Matisse’s works, due to their brightness, with threats to perception. See Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 81-82, 242. 70 Carl Vinnen, 'Quousque Tandem' in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, eds. Rose-Carol Washton Long, Stephanie Barron, and Ida Katherine Rigby (New York: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993 [1911]), 7. 71 Ibid., 8. 72 Worringer, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art' in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, 11-13. 73 The cultural connections between France and Germany had actually informed, according to Ulrich Finke, nineteenth-century French culture. Finke points to the impact of German idealist thought on Romantic and Symbolist art in France, through Charles Baudelaire’s familiarity with the work of Heinrich Heine. See Ulrich Finke, German Painting: From Romanticism to Expressionism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 187. Jill Lloyd also mentions the early twentieth-century contribution of Worringer to encouraging the continuation of French-German cultural dialogues. Lloyd writes: ‘In many ways Worringer circumvented the dichotomy between French and German identity by lifting the discussion onto the level of the primitive and the universal.’ See Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 57. Lloyd notes that Worringer stands against evolutionary theories of art that assert European superiority; she draws attention to the significance of Worringer’s thought for Expressionist artists, and the timeliness of his inquiries, which coincide with the early twentieth-century Gothic revival in Germany. (Ibid., 147.) 74 Worringer, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art', 11. 171 Abstraction and Empathy)75 that such approaches are not the result of unskilled work, but the expression of a specific artistic will.76 Employing the term ‘Expressionist’ in this context, Worringer connects it to his discussion of artistic will, ‘primitivism,’ and French art-making. The work of ‘the new Parisian Synthetists and Expressionists’ kindles,77 according to Worringer, the interest of contemporary artists in ‘primitive’ art. Indeed, in a letter addressed by Franz Marc to his friend August Macke, Marc’s attention to ‘primitive’ art comes to the fore. Marc, who travelled to Italy in 1902 and France in 1903 and 1907,78 had the opportunity to engage with recent art and form his opinion on international artistic tendencies. He enthusiastically praised French Impressionists (Renoir, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, and Eugène Boudin were among his favourites),79 and found peace in the works of Gauguin and Van Gogh, 80 whom he also admired. Yet, in 1911, Marc proves equally interested in tribal art as collected in ethnographic museums; he argues for the necessity to build an intellectual bridge between the explorations of the ‘primitives’ and early twentieth- century art-making. On 14 January 1911, Marc writes to Macke: I spent some very productive time in the Ethnographic Museum in order to study the artistic methods of the “primitive peoples.”... I was finally caught up, astonished and shocked, by the carvings of the Cameroon people, carvings which can perhaps be 75 See, for instance, ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 8-10, 53. 76 Worringer’s historical approach to new art practices at the beginning of the twentieth century brings to mind the words of Hegel regarding Romantic art. In his own discussion of genuine art-making, Hegel points to the artworks of different nations (to Indian art, for example) and different historical times (such as the Middle Ages). Hegel mentions that such works reflect common preoccupations of humankind; he also comments on the initial difficulty of accounting theoretically for less-known art. According to Hegel: ‘These works, because of their age or foreign nationality, have of course something strange about them for us, but they have a content which outsoars their foreignness and is common to all mankind, and only by the prejudice of theory could they be stamped as products of a barbarous bad taste. This general recognition of works of art which lie outside the circle and forms which were the principal basis for the abstractions of theory has in the first place led to the recognition of a special kind of art – Romantic Art, and it has become necessary to grasp the Concept and nature of the beautiful in a deeper way than was possible for those theories. Bound up with this at the same time is the fact that the Concept, aware of itself as the thinking spirit, has now recognized itself on its side, more deeply, in philosophy, and this has thereby immediately provided an inducement for taking up the essence of art too in a profounder way.’ (Hegel and Knox, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 20-21.) 77 Worringer, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art', 11. 78 Marc’s 1903 visit to Paris lasted for six months. His 1907 departure to the French capital had as a background the death of Marc’s father and Marc’s betrothal – a marriage from which Marc took a break to leave for Paris in the night of his wedding. See Frederick S. Levine, The Apocalyptic Vision: The Art of Franz Marc as German Expressionism (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 40-42. 79 See Marc as cited in ibid., 26. 80 Marc cited in ibid., 42. 172 surpassed only by the sublime works of the Incas. I find it so self-evident that we should seek the rebirth of our artistic feeling in this cold dawn of artistic intelligence, rather than in cultures that have already gone through a thousand-year cycle like the Japanese or the Italian Renaissance. I think I am gradually really coming to understand what matters for us if we are to call ourselves artists at all: we must become ascetics. Don’t be frightened; I mean this only in intellectual matters. We must be brave and give up almost everything which until now was dear and indispensable for us good Central Europeans. Our ideas and ideals must wear a hairshirt. We must nourish them with locusts and wild honey, and not with history, if we are to issue forth from the exhaustion of our European bad taste.81 For Marc, contemporary artists need to research ‘primitive’ approaches to art-making; a shift in aesthetic perception is necessary, according to him, in order to correct the patterns of appreciation displayed by his epoch. ‘Primitivism’ can, Marc argues, open a pathway towards a renewed understanding of art. He addresses ‘primitive’ art and contemporary developments in art-making with an equal degree of enthusiasm. For him as for Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy and ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, the elemental quality of tribal art is an engaging topic for intellectual research at the beginning of the twentieth century. Macke, the recipient of Marc’s letter, proves to agree with Marc’s viewpoint. In The Blue Rider Almanac (1912), a publication initiated by Marc and Kandinsky, 82 Macke reflects on form as approached in ‘primitive’ and contemporary art-making. Macke’s interest in abstract aspects of art comes through in his text, ‘Masks’, where he explains the connections between form, emotion, expression and interpretation. Form does not need to be fully understood, but seen as an outcome of living, emplaced experience, Macke writes. Macke is appreciative towards form as articulated in all cultures and life situations, despite the limitations established by the aesthetics of his time. In his words: 81 Marc as cited in Jack D. Flam, Miriam Deutch, and Carl Einstein, Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 39-41. 82 Klaus Lankheit, The Blaue Reiter Almanac (London: Tate, 2006), 300. 173 Forms are powerful expressions of powerful life. Differences in expression come from the material, word, colour, sound, stone, wood, metal. One need not understand each form. One also need not reach each language. The contemptuous gesture with which connoisseurs and artists have to this day banished all artistic form of primitive cultures to the fields of ethnology or applied art is amazing at the very least. What we hang on the wall as a painting is basically similar to the carved and painted pillars in an African hut. The African considers his idol the comprehensible form for an incomprehensible idea, the personification of an abstract concept. For us the painting is the comprehensible form for the obscure, incomprehensible conception of a deceased person, or an animal, of a plant, of the whole magic of nature, of the rhythmical... Everywhere, forms speak in a sublime language right in the face of European aesthetics.83 Form, Macke observes, is relevant in all cultural contexts, even where it appears impossible to understand. The artist does not need form to be intellectually explainable; instead, he argues for the intrinsic power of form as observable in the materials through which it is articulated. The connection Macke traces between materials and form (rather than between form and meaning) highlights his sensitivity towards aspects of abstraction in art. In Abstraction and Empathy and especially in Form in Gothic, Worringer addressed the features of abstract form and the experiential background of artists working with abstraction, but also the specific role of stone and materiality in sculpture and architecture.84 Macke, in his turn, explains the attention that form requires from an artist’s viewpoint. In ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911), Worringer highlights the key features of ‘primitive’ art: distortion and simplification. According to him, the simplification practised by ‘primitive’ artists can only appeal to viewers who appreciate form rather than illusionism. Marc (who, as we have seen, praised Worringer’s work to Kandinsky in 1912), and Macke (Marc’s close friend and contributor to the Blue Rider Almanac) both admire 83 Macke as cited in Flam, Deutch, and Einstein, Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History, 48. 84 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 84-86, 112-113, 127-127. Also, Wilhelm Worringer and Herbert Edward Read, Form in Gothic (London: Tiranti, 1957 [1910]), 19, 44, 103-110, 127-129, 132-135, 141, 152-157, 160-166, 170. 174 tribal art around 1911; their works make visible an attention to elemental qualities of art materials, as well as an interest in reworking and simplifying form. In Crouching Deer (1911) (Fig. 8), for instance, Marc’s muted primaries hint to the tones and shades of wood and animal skin – materials often encountered in tribal art. Form is simplified throughout his painting, emphasizing the visual weight of his motifs, as well as his handling of space. Colour inflection highlights the placement of the animal protagonist within the canvas instead of communicating spatial recession and three-dimensionality. Although depicting a scene from nature in a recognizable manner, Marc emphasizes planes that approach flatness in Crouching Deer. Triangular shapes can be recognized throughout Marc’s painting; they impart a geometrical aspect to form, but at the same time organize composition and communicate rhythm. Representational and abstract characteristics combine in Marc’s Crouching Deer, as in Macke’s The Storm (1911) (Fig. 9). Bringing to mind Herwarth Walden’s Berlin magazine and gallery, Sturm [Storm] (where Walden defended the Expressionist practices of his contemporaries),85 Macke’s painting emphasizes the expressive qualities of form. Pictorial motifs connected to the vegetal and animal world suggest movement rather than strict resemblance in The Storm, drawing 85 Rose-Carol Washton Long, Stephanie Barron, and Ida Katherine Rigby, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (New York: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993), 56-57. Long draws attention to Macke’s seminal role in the organization of the First German Autumn Salon at Walden’s gallery. Fig.8. Franz Marc. Crouching Deer [Hockend Reh]. 1911. oil on canvas. 41.59 x 49.53 cm. Private collection. 175 attention to the vitality of the scene. Sharp and dissolving contours give Macke’s work visual variety. Macke uses a similar colour palette to the one employed by Marc for Crouching Deer. However, in The Storm, tints of yellow and blue stand out more than in Marc’s work; Macke’s painting thus assumes a lighter aspect. The organic and geometrical forms Macke combines in his painting remain partially open due to light-dark gradations and to the smooth transition between planes. Unlike in Marc’s Crouching Deer, formal simplification seems to contribute to the mobility and ambiguity of Macke’s motifs from The Storm, where Macke’s tendencies towards abstraction come to the fore. In ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ as in Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer articulates a polar relationship between representational (or illusion-focused) and abstract (or form-focused) aspects of art-making. However, in the paintings of his contemporaries, abstract-representational antithesis is less visible than the reworking and simplification of form Worringer recognizes in ‘primitive’ art. Gabriele Münter, who was familiar with Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy in the early years of the twentieth century, 86 remained a representational artist throughout her career, yet employed pictorial techniques that highlighted the abstract aspects of her pictures. 86 Münter is cited by Magdalena Bushart in Magdalena Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch' in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, c.1995), 82. Also see, from the current thesis, ‘1948: Abstraction and Empathy republished’. Fig. 9. August Macke. The Storm [Der Sturm]. 1911. oil on canvas. 84 x 112 cm. Saarbrücken. Stiftung Saarlandischer Kulturbesitz. 176 For Münter, working with representation involved a certain amount of anxiety (a feeling Worringer associates with the emergence of abstraction).87 Where Worringer considers representational art as a manifestation of the confidence artists have in their surroundings,88 the comments of Münter on her own art reveal the hesitation that accompanies the initial stages of her process. In her 1958 interview with Edouard Roditi, Münter remarks: ‘My pictures are all moments of life – I mean instantaneous visual experiences, generally noted very rapidly and spontaneously. When I begin to paint, it’s like leaping suddenly into deep water, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim.’ 89 Münter finds that giving pictorial shape to her observations relies on her personal, instantaneous responses to her subjects; her directness is paradoxically informed by self-doubt. In 1908, the year when Worringer published Abstraction and Empathy, Münter spent her summer in Murnau with Wassily Kandinsky and their mutual friends, painters Marianne Werefkin and Alexei Jawlensky. 90 Münter regarded her stay in Murnau as beneficial to her pictorial practice. In her words: ‘After a brief time of experimentation, I took a major leap there – from painting after nature, more or less impressionistically, to the feeling of a content to abstracting to the presentation of an extract. It was a wonderful, interesting, happy period of work with many discussions about art with the enchanting “Giselists” [i. e., Werefkin and Jawlensky, who lived on Gisela Street in Munich].’ 91 While transiting from observational to increasingly abstract work, Münter remained connected to the world around her, finding pleasure in the company of fellow painters Werefkin and Jawlensky. Münter’s experimenting with abstraction did not seem to emerge from a need of distancing from her immediate environment (on the other hand, Worringer’s argument from Abstraction and Empathy associated, in theory, abstraction and distancing from the world). For Münter, the transition 87 For instance, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 16-17, 102. 88 Ibid., 47-48. 89 Reinhold Heller and Gabriele Münter, Gabriele Münter: The Years of Expressionism, 1903-1920 (Munich: Prestel, 1997), 56. 90 Shulamith Behr points out that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, pre-industrial times and romantic values appealed to artists, who reconnected to the natural world through outdoor activities, and cultivated connections with ‘primitive’ forms of culture (folk art, for instance). Werefkin and Münter – who met in 1908 and painted the streets and surroundings of Murnau when on holiday together – certainly reflected such preoccupations in their practices and chosen pastimes, according to Behr. See Shulamith Behr, Women Expressionists (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 10, 12, 36-39, 42, 46. 91 Ibid., 15. 177 towards abstraction-oriented experimentations took place in an atmosphere animated by positive emotions. During and after their holiday in Murnau, Münter painted a number of pictures of Jawlensky, Werefkin and Kandinsky – for instance, Jawlensky and Werefkin (1908-09), Listening (Portrait of Jawlensky) (1909), and Boating (1910). Münter’s Portrait of Marianne Werefkin (1909) (Fig. 10) captures, in bold colours and brushstrokes, the allure and personality of the sitter. Werefkin appears fascinating and decisive in Münter’s painting. The elegance of Werefkin is emphasized by Münter’s simple, geometric composition that draws attention to the head of the model.92 Applied in large areas of the work, colours that depart from life actually support characterisation in Münter’s painting. The perspective of Münter on her sitter is 92 The colourful hat Werefkin wears and the unusual red and green skin tones Münter uses remind of Matisse’s earlier Woman with the Hat (1905). However, in Matisse’s work, contrasting colours are juxtaposed almost without blending, while in Münter’s portrait of Werefkin the skin tone of the protagonist is, by comparison, inflected but uniform. Münter’s approach remains more indebted to representational principles than Matisse’s Woman with the Hat. For further details regarding Münter’s Portrait of Marianne Werefkin, see Shulamith Behr, Women Expressionists (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 32. Also, John Elderfield, Henri Matisse: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art and H. N. Abrams, 1992), 146. Fig. 10. Gabriele Münter. Portrait of Marianne Werefkin. 1909. oil on board. 81 x 55 cm. Munich. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus. 178 complimentary;93 rather than making visible Werefkin’s age, Münter focuses on suggesting the enduring personal qualities of Werefkin. Werefkin, a member of the Munich Neue Künstlervereinigung [New Artists’ Association] from its early days, exhibited alongside Münter, Jawlensky, and Kandinsky since 1909. For the second show of the Association,94 Werefkin prepared six canvases, among which she included The Red Tree (1910) (Fig. 11). The reworking and simplification of form as observed by Worringer in contemporary art become visible in Werefkin’s Red Tree as well. Human presence (a woman resting near the central tree) is discreet in The Red Tree, and, like the only building in the painting, acquires symbolic rather than descriptive resonance. Suggested by tonal gradation, atmospheric 93 Behr notes that Münter admired Werefkin, who was forty-nine in 1909. Werefkin regarded herself as a living source of inspiration for other artists. In her words (cited by Behr in Women Expressionists): ‘People have always come to tell me that I am their star, [that] they couldn’t progress in life without me.’ See Behr, Women Expressionists, 26. Werefkin tended to make an impression on her peers, Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke remarks; Erdmann-Macke remembers Werefkin as follows: ‘She was an unusual, vivacious, strong personality... We saw her first as we entered Jawlensky’s studio. She was turned away from us, a slender erect figure with a glaring- red blouse, a dark skirt and black patent belt, in her hair a broad taffeta bow. One thought a young girl stood there.’ See Behr, Women Expressionists, 32. 94 Kandinsky, Münter, Jawlensky, Alfred Kubin, Alexander Kanoldt, Adolf Erbslöh, Henri Le Fauconnier, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, André Derain, Maurice Vlaminck, Georges Rouault, Kees van Dongen also participated in the second exhibition of the New Artists’ Association. See Levine, The Apocalyptic Vision: The Art of Franz Marc as German Expressionism, 56. Fig. 11. Marianne Werefkin. The Red Tree [Die Rote Baum]. 1910. tempera on board. 76 x 57 cm. Ascona. Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna. 179 perspective is employed by Werefkin to highlight the elements of landscape in the foreground, their colours, shapes and textures. Although Werefkin’s canvas has depth, it directs attention towards brushwork and colour modulation by means of composition. In Blue Mountain (1908-09), Kandinsky’s brushwork and hue contrast are more assertive than Werefkin’s in The Red Tree.95 This takes place because Werefkin, like Münter, shows an interest in experimenting with abstraction, yet proves to have strong commitments to representational aspects of painting.96 However, in their representational works, both Münter and Werefkin interpret rather than describe their motifs. In the practices of Werefkin and Münter, personal expression or, to employ Worringer’s vocabulary, ‘inner experience’ (a key element of art-making as signalled in Abstraction and Empathy),97 relies on bringing to light elemental aspects of form and emotional approaches to colour.98 Nevertheless, the elemental effects observable in early twentieth-century art-making need not be strictly associated with ‘primitivism,’ Worringer argues in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’. He maintains that ‘primitive’ art is only one of the points of access to the study of elemental effects, and regards the concern of his contemporaries with ‘primitivism’ to be but a stage in the artistic reformulations of his time.99 For him, the current attention to ‘primitivism’ supports creative inquiries; the interest of artists in distant times actually brings them closer to nature, Worringer explains. Distortion as observed in the art of his time seeks to assert connections with the natural world, according to Worringer, who finds that in recent art nature does not feature as processed by reason, vision and education, but as filtered 95 For a brief discussion of Kandinsky’s Blue Mountain, see, from the current thesis, ‘Worringer’s impact: Expressionism (1914) by Paul Fechter, and Expressionism (1916) by Hermann Bahr’. 96 Behr notices that Werefkin regards art from an abstract perspective, yet favours the representational mode in painting. Werefkin (cited in Behr’s Women Expressionists) writes: ‘Art is a world-philosophy [Weltanschauung] which finds its expression in those forms, which inspire its technical means: sound, colour, form, line, word.’ Behr comments: ‘Despite this prescription for abstraction, when Werefkin resumed painting she pursued startlingly coloured portraits, interior genres and landscapes which invariably incorporated social themes of peasants and washerwomen.’ See Behr, Women Expressionists, 13. 97 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 29-30. 98 Behr cites Marc with regard to Werefkin’s views on the role of colour in early twentieth-century art. According to Marc, Werefkin signals that colour can suggest more than illumination in painting. In Marc’s words: ‘Miss Werefkin said to Helmuth [Macke] recently that the Germans frequently make the mistake of taking light as colour, while colour is totally different and has, in general, little to do with light viz. illumination. This observation has sense, it is very profound and, I believe, has hit the nail on the head.’ See Behr, Women Expressionists, 30. 99 ———, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art', 12. 180 through emotion. The works of early twentieth-century artists are characterized, Worringer maintains, by ‘... chaste purity and symbolic affective power’.100 Worringer’s thoughts from ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ certainly resonate with the interests of Marc in ‘primitivism,’ in the simplicity of ‘primitive’ art, and in a renewed approach to nature. Such preoccupations informed Marc’s work before his becoming aware of Worringer’s work. As we have seen, Marc (who discovered Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy in February 1912)101 argues, in one of his letters to Macke from 1911, that intellectual asceticism must inform contemporary art.102 Earlier on, in 1908, Marc also wrote to Piper (who published Abstraction and Empathy in the same year), explaining the attention he bestowed on developing intuitively his connections with the natural world. For Marc, feeling is the guide to experiencing the life of nature. In his words from 1908: ‘I am attempting to enhance my sensibility for the organic rhythm that I feel in all things; and I am trying to feel pantheistically the rapture of the flow of “blood” in nature, in the trees, in the animals, in the air... I can see no more successful means toward an “animalisation” of art, as I like to call it, than the painting of animals. That is why I have taken it up.’ 103 Feelings allow Marc to connect to his natural surroundings; in his depictions of animals, the materialization of such feelings finds its best expression, according to Marc. Representational works such as Large Lenggries Horses (1908) and Deer at Dusk (1909) show Marc’s attention to animal form and movement, as well as to a natural colour palette of brown, ochre, yellow and orange tints and tones. However, after seeing Kandinsky’s work in the first New Artists’ Association exhibition (1909),104 Matisse’s paintings (1910),105 and the second show of the New Artists’ Association (1910),106 Marc’s approach to form and colour changes. In Horse in a Landscape (1910) (Fig. 100 Ibid. 101 Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Klaus Lankheit, The Blaue Reiter Almanac (London: Tate, 2006), 30. 102 Flam, Deutch, and Einstein, Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History, 39-41. 103 Marc to Piper (8 December 1908), cited in Levine, The Apocalyptic Vision: The Art of Franz Marc as German Expressionism, 44. 104 Ibid., 47. Maria, Marc’s wife, mentions the impact of the work of Kandinsky on her husband: ‘Through the experience of Kandinsky’s pictures his eyes were opened and he soon knew the reason why his works had not arrived at an effect of complete unity. He wrote at that time: “Everything stood before me on an organic basis, everything but colour.” ’ 105 Ibid., 48. 106 Ibid., 56. 181 12), Marc places emphasis on colour and form rather than on the detailed representation of his subject. Still recognizable, Marc’s landscape setting and animal motif are activated by barely inflected primary and secondary hues. Reds, blues, yellows and greens gain an elemental directness in Horse in a Landscape, emphasizing the clarity and simplicity of Marc’s composition. Marc, like Kandinsky in On the Spiritual in Art (1912),107 regards colour as a pictorial vehicle of meaning. He writes to Macke on 12 December 1910: ‘Blue is the male principle, severe and spiritual. Yellow is the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy, the colour that has come into conflict with, and succumb to the other two... Green always requires the aid of blue (the sky) and yellow (the sun) to reduce matter to silence.’ 108 The dominance of yellow in Marc’s Horse in a Landscape may thus be alluding not only to the grasses of summer, but also to the experiential delight of being alive. Marc’s red and blue horse – a ‘male’ presence anchoring the canvas – seems to contemplate the joyful expanse of ‘female’ yellow and pacifying green. In Horse in a Landscape, Marc may be focusing on chromatic composition and on the life of his motifs on canvas, but could also be exploring the relationship between materiality and spirituality, severity and happiness, female and male energies. His early twentieth-century perspective on colour is informed by his admiration for ‘primitive’ ways of connecting belief and artistic expression. 107 The current thesis focuses on the relationship between abstraction and representation as observed in the work of early twentieth-century artists. An examination of Kandinsky and Marc’s respective views on colour needs to make the topic of a different inquiry. 108 Marc as cited by Levine, ibid., p. 56. Fig. 12. Franz Marc. Horse in a Landscape [Pferd in Landschaft]. 1910. oil on board. 112 x 85 cm. Essen. Museum Folkwang. 182 However, despite the shared grounds of contemporary and ‘primitive’ art as observable in the works of Marc, Worringer signals in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ that a different sense of the inevitable animates the art of the past and the art of his epoch. For Worringer, contemporary art approaches feelings in sensuous or spiritual terms, while ‘primitive’ art communicates feelings of ambiguity towards the world. 109 Worringer finds greater refinement at work in the art of the early twentieth century, where knowledge is not imperfect – as Worringer sees it in ‘primitive’ epochs – but voluntarily renounced. Art that may look unskilled actually relies on the intentional abandonment of knowledge; in Worringer’s words from Abstraction and Empathy: ‘That which was previously instinct is now the ultimate product of cognition.’ 110 Turn-of-the-twentieth-century artists react against Impressionism and the European Renaissance, according to Worringer. In ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, he associates Renaissance and Impressionist art with factual learning, or learning from observation. This type of learning led to the impoverishment of German art, Worringer claims.111 For him, German art relies, by contrast, on very different processes: it is defined by ambiguity, uncertainty, sensuousness and instinctive response to the world. Arguing against ‘the rationalization of sight’ in the first person plural, Worringer thus implies that he is empathically joining the ranks of contemporary artists and demanding, like them, that art have a powerful emotional effect, that art move viewers more than illusionism ever could.112 When addressing art from a national perspective, Worringer stands against the separatism of Vinnen, which Worringer considers a narrow and oppositional standpoint.113 He observes: ‘... [W]e always take our cue first from outside Germany, ... we have always had to give up and lose ourselves first, in order to find our real selves. That has been the tragedy and the 109 Worringer, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art', 17-18. Worringer writes: ‘Not that primitive man sought more urgently for regularity in nature, or experienced regularity in it more intensely; just the reverse: it is because he stands so lost and spiritually helpless amidst the things of the external world, because he experiences only obscurity and caprice in the inter-connection and flux of the phenomena of the external world, that the urge is so strong in him to divest the things of the external world of their caprice and obscurity in the world-picture and to impart to them a value of necessity and a value of regularity.’ 110 ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 18. 111 Ibid., 28-30. 112 ———, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art', 11. 113 Ibid., 10, 12. 183 grandeur of German art from Dürer to Marées, and he who would cut our art from interaction with other art worlds is betraying our real national tradition.’ 114 The strategy that defines early twentieth-century art practice relies, according to Worringer, on the incorporation and transformation of symbolism.115 In his words: ‘We want to push external symbolism, hailed as a national trait of German art in particular, back into the innermost centre of the artwork, in order that it might flow out from there of its own natural energy, free of every dualism of form and content.’ 116 Worringer does not recommend that art renounce the symbolic aspects of representation; instead, he wants representational elements bearing symbolic value present at the core of contemporary artworks – in other words, representation and symbolism need to inform art-making intrinsically. Once representation becomes integrated in the art of his time, form and content can enter an effortless alliance, according to Worringer. In ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art,’ Worringer recognizes the activity of expression in current art-making as a meeting ground of representational features and abstract tendencies. Unlike Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ appraises and contextualises the efforts of early twentieth-century artists. Worringer points to key characteristics of contemporary French and German practices: simplification, an attention to the reworking of form, and an open, ‘elemental’ attitude towards art-making. Worringer’s observations from ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ reflect the explorations and interests of artists such as Marc (who became aware of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy in 1912), and Münter (who held Worringer’s writings in high esteem since their early days). Macke and Werefkin, also supportive of early Expressionist works, emphasized the role of form, colour and visual rhythm (rather than the importance of exact depiction) in their paintings and writings. As he observed in his forewords to Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer, sensitive to current art-making while engaged in researching the past, provided relevant historical and contemporary frameworks of reference for the artists of his time. Although his discussion of specific contemporary 114 Ibid., 12. 115 Worringer does not define the term ‘symbol’ in either Abstraction and Empathy or Form in Gothic, but employs it to refer to the capacity of an artistic motif to suggest a connection to an idea not represented directly. See, for instance, ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 59. 116 ———, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art', 12. 184 practices is once more postponed in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, Worringer highlights current artistic tendencies, pointing to key features of art-making, as well as to innovative approaches to form. 185 Worringer’s impact: Expressionism (1914) by Paul Fechter, and Expressionism (1916) by Hermann Bahr The inquiries of Worringer drew both direct and indirect attention to early twentieth-century art-making, and influenced the work of writers interested in Expressionism. For instance, Reinhart Piper, who published Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy in 1908, also issued Paul Fechter’s book, Expressionism [Der Expressionismus], in 1914. Acknowledging the influence of Worringer’s Form in Gothic on his own approach to Expressionism,1 Fechter wrote: ‘I was pleased, since there it was, what was all had long looked and wished for, and had found nowhere... We received from Wilhelm Worringer... finally solid ground beneath our feet for the constant meeting with the modern art that we considered and valued as our art, as the art of our generation of the eighties.’ 2 Indeed, Worringer and Fechter hold similar points of view on historical, theoretical and methodological matters. For Fechter as for Worringer, Impressionism seems an art practice of the past in 1914, due to the emphasis Impressionists place on the study of nature.3 The alternative to Impressionism, Fechter claims, was the decorative; like Kandinsky, he is dismissive towards it.4 Fechter summarizes the preoccupations of contemporary artists by citing three rallying calls: ‘abandon nature!’, ‘back to the picture!’, and ‘back to emotion!’.5 Following Worringer, Fechter encourages his contemporaries to rely less on the imitation of the world as observed; instead, he recommends that artists focus on rendering their emotions, as well as on particularities of picture-making (such as the relationship between lines, forms and colours on canvas). Fechter, much like Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy and ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’,6 notes that art-making does not involve only skill, but also 1 See, for instance, Gordon, 'On the Origin of the Word "Expressionism" ', 377. (Gordon mentions that Fechter refers to the influence of Worringer on the fourth page of Expressionism.) Also see Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch', 70. Bushart refers to Fechter’s Menschen auf meinen Wegen, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1955, 292. 2 Paul Fechter’s words are cited in Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch', 70. 3 Paul Fechter, 'From Expressionism [Der Expressionismus]' in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, eds. Rose-Carol Washton Long, Stephanie Barron, and Ida Katherine Rigby (New York: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993 [1914]), 81. 4 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, I, 197-199. Kandinsky‘s On the Spiritual in Art, where Kandinsky discusses the effect of ornament on contemporary viewers, had also been published by Piper. Also, Fechter, 'From Expressionism [Der Expressionismus]', 81, 83. 5 Fechter, 'From Expressionism [Der Expressionismus]', 81-82. 6 Worringer, ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, 10-11. 186 will, need, and an awareness of temperament (or, according to Fechter, of the ‘disposition of the soul’).7 He regards contemporary art as generically expressionistic.8 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer drew attention to artists’ emotional responses to environment;9 Fechter also addresses the importance of emotion in his own book. ‘The essential meaning of art always consists in expressing in a concentrated, direct way – the only possible way – the emotion arising from human existence on earth. The significance of Expressionism lies in this insight’, Fechter writes.10 When inquiring into the responses of artists to the world, Fechter echoes Worringer; however, where Worringer generalizes, Fechter connects his observations specifically to the Expressionist movement. Like Worringer, Fechter relies on antithetic terms when structuring his argument;11 he distinguishes between two strands of Expressionist practice, namely extensive and intensive Expressionism. Intensive Expressionism is associated by Fechter with the work of Kandinsky, and extensive Expressionism with Pechstein’s art-making.12 Extensive Expressionism, Fechter explains, allows artists to articulate their response to the world through depiction – a strategy that brings to light the personal resonance of creators with the deepest aspects of their motifs. Keeping the work of Pechstein in mind,13 Fechter observes: 7 ‘Need’, in the vocabulary of Worringer, is a synonym of ‘urge’, or ‘tendency’. Like Fechter, Worringer signals the importance of the disposition of the soul in art-making; he notes his interest in a ‘history of the feeling about the world’, and in disposition of the soul (or, in his vocabulary, état d’âme) in Abstraction and Empathy. For instance, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 13, 47. 8 Fechter, 'From Expressionism [Der Expressionismus]', 82. 9 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 14-17. Addressing the emotional responses of human beings to given environments had been one of Worringer’s major preoccupations in Abstraction and Empathy. 10 Fechter, 'From Expressionism [Der Expressionismus]', 81-82. 11 Worringer approaches the relationship between representation and abstraction in art mainly in terms of opposition in Abstraction and Empathy. Opposition, as subsequent sections show, is Worringer’s key methodological strategy in Abstraction and Empathy. See, for instance, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 5-8, 26. 12 Fechter, 'From Expressionism [Der Expressionismus]', 82-83. In following sections, this thesis focuses on the work of Kandinsky from the perspective of the relationship between representation and abstraction. Further inquiries could also address the work of Pechstein from the perspective of abstract-representational interplay. 13 For a review of Fechter’s book on Expressionism, see Randolph Schwabe, 'Expressionism', The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 33, No. 187, 1918, 141. Schwabe points to Fechter’s views on the work of Pechstein, and doubts Fechter’s enthusiasm with regard to the art of Pechstein and Hans von Marées (1837-87). The place of Pechstein in Expressionism, more precisely in Die Brücke association, is noted by Jay A. Clarke; see Jay A. Clarke, 'Neo-Idealism, Expressionism, and the Writing of Art History', Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 28, No. 1, 2002, 31-35. Using Pechstein’s example, Clarke draws attention to the German Expressionist tendency of echoing French art. 187 In contrast to Kandinsky, he [i. e., Pechstein] not only maintains a relation to the world, but intensifies it to the highest possible degree only just attainable by him... He thus expresses his own life as this felt existence of things, at the same time revealing their profoundest essence. Like Kandinsky, he makes contact with transcendence, but at the opposite pole. He takes the longer path, so to speak, since he first passes through the world and only then gets in touch with his inner being...14 In his Bridge over the Seine with Small Steamer [Brücke über die Seine mit kleinem Dampfer] (1908) (Fig.13), Pechstein’s response to the world assumes powerful pictorial rhythms. His varied brushwork and assertive chromatic contrasts claim key compositional roles; while colour supports the organization of his picture into closer and more distant planes, paint application suggests the dynamism of the scene. Longer brushstrokes become descriptive in Bridge over the Seine with Small Steamer, hinting to directions of movement; shorter brushstrokes create chromatic counterpoints. As depicted by Pechstein, the waters of the river appear to flow parallel to the surface of the canvas, facing their viewers in an emphatic display of energy. Pechstein engages interpretively with his motif in Bridge over the Seine with Small Steamer; his brushwork depicts and at the same 14 Fechter, 'From Expressionism [Der Expressionismus]', 83. Fig. 13. Max Pechstein. Bridge over the Seine with Small Steamer [Brücke über die Seine mit kleinem Dampfer]. 1908. oil on canvas. 46.3 x 54.9 cm. Canberra, National Gallery of Australia. 188 time draws attention to its own abstract dance within the canvas. Observing the world takes the shape of decisive personal expression in Pechstein’s approach to painting. In Fechter’s views on extensive Expressionism, artists pursue actively their relationship with the world, and representational characteristics of art-making come to the fore. Renouncing the world is not required, yet the connection between creators and their environments is intensified. Worringer’s urge to empathy had a similar effect, as pointed out in Abstraction and Empathy; however, naturalism proved one of the most important manifestations of empathic engagement for Worringer – a mode of art-making he distinguished from both abstraction and imitation. For Fechter, an emphasis on intensification in art-making is sufficient in his analysis of extensive Expressionism in 1914, whereas, in 1908, Worringer found the contrast between imitation, naturalism and abstraction necessary in his approach to representation. Fechter explains the process involved in intensive Expressionism by reference to the inner self of artists.15 According to him, intensive Expressionism as observable in the work of Kandinsky does not require reference to the world in its external aspects. Instead, intensive Expressionist artists respond to their emotions, to their inner life and its activity – or, to echo Fechter’s vocabulary, to the indefinite forms and colours they discover in their souls.16 With regard to the work of Kandinsky, Fechter notes: He [i. e., Kandinsky] finds pure spiritual substance only in the depths of his own soul – where neither idea nor reasoning has access, where a chaos of colour reigns, where experience is still unformed, shapeless, remote from conceptual reasoning and from entering any net of causal projections... it [i. e., the soul] tries to come as close as possible to the limits of transcendence by excluding everything external in order to express the emotions there in pure form and colour without the roundabout symbolism of significant objects. Thus landscapes of souls are created without any landscape 15 Fechter, 'From Expressionism [Der Expressionismus]', 82. 16 The term ‘soul’ is not defined by Fechter, but occurs frequently in Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art. For the purposes of this thesis, ‘soul’ is considered the domain of inner life, an aspect of existence where a diversity of sensations, feelings, and emotions are brought together, in the possible (but not necessary) absence of reasoning. 189 features, musical states are transposed into colors and lines; the distance between emotions and expression is shortened here to its minimum.17 Writing in 1914, Fechter emphasizes the abstract aspects of Kandinsky’s recent explorations. Kandinsky had indeed begun to rely less on representational motifs, and assert line, colour and form in paintings such as Picture with a White Border (1913), Black Lines I (1913), or Bright Picture (1913) (Fig. 14). However, Kandinsky had also worked observationally prior to and during the second decade of the twentieth century; he continued to include, in his abstraction-oriented canvases, references to motifs in the world.18 Kandinsky’s relating to observed motifs informs, for instance, a painting like Blue Mountain (1908-09) (Fig. 15), where seated and standing figures, trees reinforcing the vertical orientation of the canvas, a distant mountain, as well as riders on horseback are clearly 17 Fechter, 'From Expressionism [Der Expressionismus]', 82. 18 See, for instance, Elsa Smithgall’s inquiry into the social, political, and artistic contexts that fostered Kandinsky’s articulation of his Painting with White Border (1913). Elsa Smithgall, Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border (Washington and New York: Phillips Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2011), 17-41. Smithgall points to Kandinsky’s transformations of the horse, rider, troika (or Russian sled), landscape, Saint George and dragon motifs in his work. Fig. 14. Wassily Kandinsky. Bright Picture. 1913. oil on canvas. 77.8 x 100.2 cm. New York. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 190 discernible. Emergent in Kandinsky’s early twentieth-century art,19 the figure of the rider eventually becomes emblematic for the explorations encouraged by Marc and Kandinsky in the Blaue Reiter exhibitions of 1911, 1912 and 1914.20 The representational characteristics of Blue Mountain draw attention to the artist’s personal, emotional investment in the selection and combination of compositional elements, as well as to the abstract characteristics having already surfaced in his approach to colour and brushwork. Kandinsky’s focus on the simplification of form, the vibrancy of colour, and the expression of inner life are already at work in this painting. Intensive Expressionism, as described by Fechter and practised by Kandinsky, emphasizes the elemental aspects of colour, line and personal experience; it renounces the concepts of reason and the connections established through causal thinking, according to Fechter. He argues that, significantly, motifs in the world are not required for inspiration, since artists give form to their emotions; thus, art-making becomes more direct, more immediate in intensive Expressionism. Worringer considered that taking distance from the world is characteristic for the making and viewing of abstract art; Fechter’s intensive Expressionism 19 For instance, in Russian Knight (1902), Blaue Reiter (1903), The Farewell (1903), The Mounted Warrior (1903), Sunday (Old Russian) (1904), A Russian Scene (1904), In the Forest (1904), Couple Riding (1906), or Park of St. Cloud with Horseman (1906). 20 Lankheit, The Blaue Reiter Almanac, 13-15. Fig. 15. Wassily Kandinsky. Blue Mountain. 1908-09. oil on canvas. 129.3 x 194.3 cm. New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 191 requires artists not only to distance themselves from their surroundings, but also to immerse within the realm of the creative self.21 Although Fechter approaches Expressionism by discussing its aspects in antithesis, his extensive and intensive Expressionism highlight different aspects of art-making than Worringer’s representation and abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy. In the works of Expressionist artists such as Pechstein, Kandinsky, Heckel, Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, and Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), Fechter recognizes the drive of the old Gothic soul.22 Like Worringer before him, Fechter finds the Gothic soul expressed in the German Baroque and Rococo,23 where it assumes anti-rationalist and anti-materialist forms.24 As seen by Fechter, Expressionism offers freedom from the demands of the intellect crudely used, and provides kinship between the works of Expressionist artists. The collective value of Expressionist works is more important than their personal value, Fechter maintains, especially since Expressionism arises, according to him, less from a programmatic goal than from the resonance between ‘shared spiritual conditions’.25 For Fechter, Expressionism is an art movement characterised by its opposition to materialism and rationalism. Abstraction and representation are both valid approaches to art-making, according to him, provided that they rely on the cultivation of personal, emotive responses to the world. For Hermann Bahr (1863-1934) as for Fechter, Expressionism appears to be a critical response to illusionism-focused Impressionism.26 Bahr, in Expressionism [Expressionismus] 21 With regard to Kandinsky’s approach to emotion, colour and music, see Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, I, 176-189. 22 Fechter, 'From Expressionism [Der Expressionismus]', 84. 23 The Gothic is recognizable in Baroque and Rococo for Fechter, and from Baroque to Merovingian art for Worringer. Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 37. 24 Fechter, 'From Expressionism [Der Expressionismus]', 84. 25 Ibid. 26 Hermann Bahr, 'From Expressionism [Expressionismus]' in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, eds. Rose-Carol Washton Long, Stephanie Barron, and Ida Katherine Rigby (New York: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993 [1916]), 89. Also see ———, 'Expressionism' in Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History, eds. Jack D. Flam, Miriam Deutch, and Carl Einstein (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003). Worringer is a source of inspiration for Bahr as for Fechter. In Expressionism, Bahr writes: ‘I want to tell the reader who has not noticed yet that I have our late, great explorer Alois Riegl to thank for many of my opinions, and especially Wilhelm Worringer’s writings Abstraction and Empathy and Form Problems of the Gothic’. Bahr, 'From Expressionism [Expressionismus]', 90. 192 (1916), connects Impressionism with Classical art;27 he considers that Impressionism, like Classicism, tends towards the exclusion of inner qualities of seeing.28 Among Expressionist artists attentive to inner seeing and spiritual values, Bahr mentions Matisse, Pechstein, Kokoschka, Marc and Kandinsky.29 Like Worringer, Bahr considers that contemporary viewers misunderstand the art of their time; he imagines a dialogue taking place between Expressionist artists and their viewers,30 and argues that difficulties arise when viewers and artists employ and define vision differently. Bahr attempts to explain the workings of artistic vision in his book.31 He connects seeing to decision-making, and emphasizes that seeing as experienced by artists requires a transformation of physical seeing into seeing as characteristic for spirit. Contrasting ‘the eye of the body’ with ‘the eye of the spirit’, Bahr underscores the importance of artists’ balancing of physical and spiritual sight. In his words: Artistic seeing is based upon an inner decision: turning the eye of the body (to speak once again like Goethe) into the eye of the spirit; and how the artist settles this struggle is the only way in which he truly becomes an artist... The artist, who achieves complete seeing, that neither violates mankind through nature nor nature through man, but allows each their rights in both nature's work and human deeds, is one formed either in times of onesidedness, suddenly overcome by another onesidedness (Grünewald, Dürer, Cézanne), or when the artist is wilful enough to resist the onesidedness of the times equally strongly (Greco, Rembrandt).32 In adjusting the way they view the world, artists can reach a balance between will and nature, according to Bahr. He notes that complete artistic seeing brings together nature and will, and observes that such seeing arises to replace or to oppose already existent approaches. Like 27 Bahr, 'From Expressionism [Expressionismus]', 90. Bahr also mentions the influence of Alois Riegl on his own writings, as well as the importance of the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain where Chamberlain compares Goethe and Kant (Immanuel Kant: A Study and Comparison with Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Bruno, Plato and Descartes, 1914). 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 89. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 193 Worringer, Bahr is sensitive to the generic historical contexts that shape art,33 and constructs his argument by means of antithesis. Worringer signalled in Abstraction and Empathy that Classical art-making should not be regarded as the sole measure of artistic value;34 in his turn, Bahr remarks that contemporary education in Classical art is a source of discord. He draws attention to the external preoccupations that Classical art-making encourages in its reliance on observational approaches. Bahr sees Expressionism as connected to ‘primitive’ art rather than to Classical, representation-oriented art-making. He defines Expressionism as a movement reflecting a worldview and a collective emotional state.35 Writing in 1916, Bahr accounts for the state of mind of his contemporaries during the First World War. His darkened perspective underscores the sense of urgency and necessity associated with mid-war Expressionism. In the words of Bahr: Never was there a time shaken by such terror, by such dread of death. Never was the world so deathly silent. Never was man so insignificant. Never was he so afraid. Never was happiness so distant and freedom so dead. Misery cries out, man cries out for his soul, the entire time is a single scream of distress. Art too cries into the deep darkness, it cries for help, it cries for the spirit. That is Expressionism... So, brought very near the edge of destruction by “civilization,” we discover in ourselves powers which cannot be destroyed. With the fear of death upon us, we muster these and use them as spells against “civilization.” Expressionism provides the symbol of the unknown in us in which we confide, hoping that it will save us. It is the mark of the imprisoned spirit that tries to break out of the dungeon, a sign of alarm from all panic- stricken souls.36 Marc, one of the Expressionists admiringly mentioned by Bahr,37 anticipates the outbreak of the First World War in a painting from 1913, The Fate of Animals (Fig. 16). ‘The hour is unique. Is it too daring to call attention to the small, unique signs of the time?’, Marc writes 33 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 112-116. 34 Ibid., Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 13-21, 28-29, 45-48, 54-55. 35 Bahr, 'From Expressionism [Expressionismus]', 90-91. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 89. 194 in The Blaue Reiter Almanac (1912),38 attentive to the pace of historical changes. His canvas captures the tensions he senses in his epoch: asserting diagonal movement, the dynamism of geometrical structures takes over the natural world.39 Little room for serene living remains: except for the quieter lower left corner of the work, animals are depicted in a state of turmoil and tension. Abstraction and representation, the visual protagonists of Marc’s painting, turn into warring parties. In The Fate of Animals, innocence becomes impossible, and sacrifice inevitable. Reflecting on current events through painting and writing, Marc also takes direct part to the First World War.40 His service in the German infantry is brought to an end by his death in action in the same year that sees the publication of Bahr’s Expressionism. Worringer, like Bahr,41 draws attention to the relationship between current art and ‘primitivism’.42 Explaining that geometrical figures acquire symbolising value in ‘primitive’ 38 Franz Marc, 'Two Pictures' in The Blaue Reiter Almanac, eds. Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Klaus Lankheit (London: Tate, 2006 [1912]), 69. 39 Marc’s approach to abstract and representational aspects of painting is discussed by David Morgan in Morgan, 'The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to Expressionism', 331. With regard to Marc’s Deer in the Forest II (1914), Morgan describes the meeting of abstraction and representation in oppositional terms. According to him: ‘Marc achieved the revelatory clash of inner and outer aspects in such visual devices as the stark contrast of surface and depth... Marc subverted but did not efface the descriptive function of line and colour. Recognizable forms are framed within broken templates that both echo the forms and distil them into an abstract geometry. Contours disintegrate and reemerge within a restless grid that oscillates between opacity and transparency. The contrast between the brilliantly coloured animal family and the violence of the abstract scheme seems to suggest a transformative event.’ 40 John F. Moffitt, ' "Fighting Forms: The Fate of the Animals." The Occultist Origins of Franz Marc's "Farbentheorie" ', Artibus et Historiae, 6, No. 12, 1985, 124. 41 Bahr, 'From Expressionism [Expressionismus]', 90-91. Fig. 16. Franz Marc. The Fate of Animals. 1913. oil on canvas. 105 x 266 cm. Basel. Kunstmuseum. 195 art, and that such art arises in defence against the chaos of the world,43 Worringer approaches the abstract, elemental components of art-making from a different perspective than Marc in The Fate of Animals. Geometric forms, Worringer maintains, suggest stability and provide to ‘primitive’ people a feeling of protection from confusion and fear.44 However, despite the appreciation he had shown to both ‘primitive’ and contemporary explorations in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, Worringer’s opinion about later Expressionist art- making changes. In 1920, he explains his current views on Expressionism in a speech for the Munich Goethe Society; published in 1921 as Current Questions on Art, the speech signals Worringer’s doubts regarding the vitality of recent Expressionist inquiries.45 42 Bahr, 'From Expressionism [Expressionismus]', 90-91. Marc also underscores the heartfelt, genuine quality of the illustrations for Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1832); see Marc, 'Two Pictures', 67. Also see Franz Marc, 'The Savages of Germany' in The Blaue Reiter Almanac, eds. Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Klaus Lankheit (London: Tate, 2006 [1912]), 61, 64. Marc writes: ‘In this time of the great struggle for a new art we fight like disorganized “savages” against an old, established power. The battle seems to be unequal, but spiritual matters are never decided by numbers, only by the power of ideas. The dreaded weapons of the “savages” are their new ideas... Who are these “savages” in Germany? For the most part they are both well known and widely disparaged: the Brücke in Dresden, the Neue Sezession in Berlin, and the Neue Vereinigung in Munich... Their thinking has a different aim: To create out of their work symbols for their own time, symbols that belong to the altar of a future spiritual religion, symbols behind which the technical heritage cannot be seen.’ 43 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 17. 44 Ibid., 17-20. 45 Charles E. Haxthausen discusses the essays Worringer publishes in German magazines of the 1920s, highlighting the emphasis Worringer now places on writing about art rather than on art. Haxthausen, 'Modern Art After "The End of Expressionism": Worringer in the 1920s', 119-134. 196 Current Questions on Art (1921): Worringer revisits Expressionism For Worringer, as for Fechter and Bahr, emerging Expressionism was characterized by energy rather than logic.1 Yet in the second decade of the twentieth century Worringer considers artistic Expressionism exhausted. Addressing the reasons for its decline,2 Worringer looks into the creative and cognitive processes generated by the Expressionist movement. Expressionism, according to Worringer, directed the attention of his contemporaries to Gothic, Baroque, Asian, and ‘primitive’ art. The examination of these historically and geographically remote approaches to art-making led, Worringer explained, to a greater understanding of basic, elemental aspects of art, and suggested the possible ancestry of Expressionism. In the words of Worringer: We all know how much Expressionism was searching for its forebears. We know further how the lines of the great Expressionism of the past ran together and crossed each other when they passed through the small, delicate lens of our modern expressionist feeling – this passing agitation in us – and that we, receiving, recognizing – but not producing it, began to understand what elemental art is. Gothic, Baroque, primitive and Asiatic art: all suddenly revealed themselves as – it may be said, – as they never had to any generation before... And the closer they came to us as observers, the more completely they eluded us as creators.3 For Worringer, Expressionism found its historical roots in approaches to art where elementary, abstract forms were highlighted. Early twentieth-century Expressionism responded to the art of the past in a refined manner, he argued. However, like Impressionism, Expressionism was only a stage of artistic exploration, in Worringer’s opinion. He claimed that Expressionist art-making did not come to reflect an understanding of artistic models 1 Bahr, 'From Expressionism [Expressionismus]', 285. 2 Haxthausen underscores Worringer’s critical focus on Expressionism in art, as well as Worringer’s belief in the development of art criticism as an art form. Pointing to Worringer’s rhetorical discourse, Haxthausen mentions Worringer’s association of creativity with intellectuality and mind in 1921.Haxthausen, 'Modern Art After "The End of Expressionism": Worringer in the 1920s', 119-121. 3 Worringer, 'From Current Questions on Art', 285. 197 offered by past epochs. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Worringer maintained that Expressionist writing and Expressionist art had begun to engage on different paths. Lamenting recent Expressionist tendencies in art, Worringer insists that art needs to embody not decorative, but metaphysical concerns.4 Worringer does mention the existence of exceptions to this trend, yet signals the general mannerism of recent Expressionist art- making. Although dismissive of Expressionist painting in 1921, Worringer still defends the possibilities inherent in Expressionist thought. He remarks: It is difficult to capture in words and terms this atmosphere of a new spirituality equal to art in its creative capacity. It cannot be explained to somebody who does not sense it. For now we can only sense that our thinking is about to enter a new condition of totality and to acquire a new fluidity which will render the assumed polarity between creating art and thinking more invalid with every passing day... Until now we could visualise essence only through the medium of art: now we can take part in it directly through the medium of thinking, and this seems to me to be the creative achievement of our time.5 The polarity between Expressionist art-making and thought can be surpassed, Worringer suggests, through focusing on thought rather than art-making.6 He proposes to resolve the conflict between opposites by eliminating one of the parties, at least for a while.7 Although he does not refer to Hegel in Current Questions on Art,8 Worringer adopts a perspective on art’s sublimation into thought that echoes Hegel’s views on the art of the Romantic epoch. Romanticism brought along, Hegel explains, the perfecting of mind and emotion (or ‘spirit’ 4 Ibid., 285-286. 5 Ibid., 286. 6 Ibid. 7 Worringer believes that artistic Expressionism needs time to reassess its possibilities – he intends to grant this time to art-making. Worringer thus leaves a door open for future artistic developments. (Ibid., 287.) 8 Haxthausen also draws attention to the echoes from Hegel he discerns in Worringer’s Current Questions on Art. Haxthausen, 'Modern Art After "The End of Expressionism": Worringer in the 1920s', 130. As Ritchie Robertson points out, the thought of Hegel – especially Hegel’s interest in the relationship between reality and rationality – had marked the nineteenth century in Germany. Robertson explains that Hegel saw reality as a series of stages in the development of Geist [mind, or spirit], and that, according to Hegel, artistic practice would eventually be replaced by philosophical practice. See Ritchie Robertson, 'German Literature and Thought from 1810 to 1890' in Helmut Walser Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 261. Also, Robert Anchor, Germany Confronts Modernization: German Culture and Society, 1790-1890 (Lexington: Heath, 1972), 55-56. 198 and ‘heart’, in Hegel’s terms); Romantic art thus came to focus less on external expression than on inner reality, according to him.9 In Current Questions on Art, Worringer, like Hegel, is more interested in the intangible ‘pictures of our minds’ than in Expressionist art-making as practised around 1921;10 his essay suggests that Worringer considers the Expressionist art of the 1920s as a page in history rather than as an active field of investigation. 9 In Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1820-29), Hegel gives special attention to the key mode of art-making during his time: Romantic art. He argues that Romantic art emphasizes inwardness, and dissociates from elements that appeal to the senses. According to Hegel: ‘This inner world constitutes the content of the romantic sphere and must therefore be represented as this inwardness and in the pure appearance of this depth of feeling. Inwardness celebrates its triumph over the external and manifests its victory in and on the external itself, whereby what is apparent to the senses alone sinks into worthlessness... Thereby the separation of Idea and shape, their indifference and inadequacy to each other, come to the fore again, as in symbolic art, but with this essential difference, that, in romantic art, the Idea, the deficiency of which in the symbol brought with it deficiency in shape, now has to appear perfected in itself as spirit and heart. Because of this higher perfection, it is not susceptible of an adequate union with the external, since its true reality and manifestation it can only seek and achieve only within itself.’ Hegel and Knox, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 80-81. Due to Worringer’s silence with regard to Hegel’s theories in Abstraction and Empathy, ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art,’ Form in Gothic, and Current Questions on Art, the connections between the thought of Hegel and Worringer are only briefly noted in this thesis. 10 Worringer, 'From Current Questions on Art', 287. On Worringer’s change of focus from art to art criticism, Haxthausen comments: ‘If one strips away the refulgent cloak of Worringer’s rhetoric, his position comes down to this: If art had not fulfilled its prophecies, if it had not conformed to his prognosis, then that proved only that painting and sculpture were finished, not that his historicist paradigm was flawed... He and the other apologists of Expressionism had been too modest: they had failed to see that their discourse was the true artistic expression of their time.’ Haxthausen, 'Modern Art After "The End of Expressionism": Worringer in the 1920s', 121. 199 Questioning Worringer: critical discussions on the writings of Worringer and on his association with the Expressionist movement Writers such as Georg Lukács, Richard Sheppard, Joseph Frank, William V. Spanos, Ulrich Weisstein and Neil Donahue have highlighted Worringer’s contribution to Expressionism from various viewpoints.1 Lukács (1885-1971),2 one of Worringer’s most incisive critics, attends mainly to the literary dimension of Expressionism in ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline’ (1934).3 Although he refers to movements such as Naturalism, Impressionism 1 The pages that follow inquire into several instances of critical response to Worringer’s writings in the English- speaking world. This study cannot commit to an in-depth examination of Expressionist literature and art, which would require much more space than the current thesis can offer. Instead, I focus on Worringer’s relation to Expressionism as discussed in the literature on Worringer published in English, as well as on the interpretation of Worringer’s views on representation and abstraction where mentioned in critical perspective. Expressionist art and writing have received ample coverage in recent publications. See, among many others, Christian Weikop, New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History (Franham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). Also, Peter Lasko, The Expressionist Roots of Modernism (Manchester, England & New York, USA: Manchester University Press, 2003). Also, Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer. Also, Stephanie Barron and Bruce Davis, eds., German Expressionist Prints and Drawings (Los Angeles, California: Los Angeles County Museum of Art,1989). Also, Shulamith Behr, Women Expressionists (New York: Rizzoli, 1988). Also, Uhr, Masterpieces of German Expressionism at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Also, Vogt, Expressionism: German Painting, 1905-1920. Regarding the connection between Worringer’s thought and the art of his time, further sections of this thesis address the works of Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Wassily Kandinsky – three artists whose works are considered to belong to different art movements (Post-Impressionism, Impressionism and Expressionism). 2 A thinker associated with Central European philosophical traditions, Lukács held Marxist views. He was influenced by Hegel to a degree that made his writings difficult to accept unanimously for Leninists and Western Marxists. Lukács was awarded his doctorate in 1906 in Budapest, and attended Simmel’s lectures in Berlin (1909-10). He published his book, The Soul and the Forms, in Germany in 1911. See George Lichtheim, Lukács ([London]: Fontana, 1970), 9-13. Mary Gluck points out that, at the beginning of his career as a literary critic, Lukács saw life and work as fused (a position not dissimilar to Worringer’s, who underscores the link between art-making and feelings about the world in his books). See Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 1900-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 2-3. Gluck also notes that Simmel and Worringer wrote positive reviews for Lukács’s The Soul and the Forms. (Ibid., 93.) She points to the actual parallelism between the works of Lukács and Worringer (ibid., 163), and notes that researchers tend to favour Lukács’s early thought from and before the nineteen-twenties. (Ibid., 3.) In the nineteen-thirties and -fourties, Lukács was employed at the Moscow Marx-Engels Institute (1930-31), was involved with the German Communist Party in Berlin (1931-33), and then worked at the Philosophical Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow (1933-44). (Lichtheim, Lukács, 9-11.) He taught aesthetics and cultural philosophy in Budapest during the Mátyás Rákosi regime (1945-56), and retreated from activating in the Communist Party after being attacked by ultra-Stalinists (1948-49). Lukács served as Education Minister of the Imre Nagy (1953- 1955) government; he became involved once more in the Communist Party, as a member of its Central Committee, between October-November 1956. When Nagy fell from power and was executed (1958), Lukács fled to Romania. Under János Kádár (1956-88), Lukács’s writings could not be published in Hungary, but appeared in the West; nevertheless, Lukács could live in Budapest. He was readmitted to the Communist Party in 1967. In 1969, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, and was permitted to speak in public once more. George Lichtheim notes that philosophy and politics are difficult to separate in the work of Lukács. See Lichtheim, Lukács, 9-12. 3 Georg Lukács, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline' in Georg Lukács: Essays on Realism, ed. Rodney Livingstone (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1934), 77, 103, 105-106, 113. Richard Sheppard highlights that 200 and Symbolism in his study, Lukács discusses these movements ideologically, criticizing their absence of political commitment as reflected in their creative approaches.4 Like Worringer, he takes the perspective of generality with regard to art: the work of specific artists is not analysed in ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline.’ Nevertheless, writing on art interests Lukács, and in his argument from ‘Expressionism: its Significance and Decline’, Worringer occupies a key place.5 Georg Lukács and the decline of Expressionism ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline’ opens with a citation from the Philosophical Notebooks (1913) of Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924), and continues with an account of Current Questions on Art, the printed version of Worringer’s speech for the Goethe Society in Munich (1920). Emotionally connected to, yet also critical of recent Expressionist art,6 Worringer’s text meets with Lukács’s criticism. For Lukács, Expressionism appears as a bourgeois movement disregarding the social and economical aspects of its ideology; 7 Worringer’s very emphasis on emotion, vitality, and the effort to transcend relativity suggest to Lukács why Expressionism eventually reached its end.8 Although he mentions the pacifist ideology and left-wing leanings of German Expressionism,9 Lukács does not approve of the non-specific, abstract opposition of Lukács actually referred to late Expressionism (1916-1920) in ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline.’ (Lukács, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline', 111.) Also see Richard Sheppard, 'Georg Lukács, Wilhelm Worringer and German Expressionism', Journal of European Studies, 25, No. 3, 1995, 263. 4 For example, Lukács, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline', 104-105. 5 In his ‘Critical Bibliography of Recent Methods in German Literary Research’ (1930) Theodore Geissendoerfer mentions Worringer as one of the representatives of literary investigations based on the study of form and style. For Geissendoerfer, Worringer emphasizes style in art. See Theodore Geissendoerfer, 'A Critical Bibliography of Recent Methods in German Literary Research', The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 29, No. 3, 1930, 405-406. For Worringer’s own distancing from art-making and expressed belief in intellectuality (1920), see Wolf Lepenies and Barbara Harshav, 'Between Social Science and Poetry in Germany', Poetics Today, 9, No. 1, 1988, 125-126. 6 Lukács cites a passage from Worringer’s speech where Worringer employs the first person plural in his evaluation of Expressionism. (Lukács, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline', 77.) 7 Ibid., 77, 84-86. 8 With regard to the decline of Expressionism, Behr, Fanning and Jarman believe in emphasizing the importance of the movement rather than its insufficiencies. (Behr, Fanning, and Jarman, Expressionism Reassessed, 2.) 9 Lukács, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline', 77. 201 Expressionism to ‘middle-classness’ [Bürgerlichkeit].10 Yet Lukács employs a similarly general perspective when addressing Expressionism himself. Like Worringer, who did not distinguish between art viewing and art-making in Abstraction and Empathy, Lukács does not elicit the specific characteristic of literary Expressionism on the one hand, and artistic Expressionism on the other. In its pointing out the failings of the Expressionist movement, Lukács’s criticism was actually preceded by Worringer’s 1920 speech. However, where Worringer displayed sympathy and understanding, Lukács is trenchant towards Expressionist artistic practice. For Lukács, Expressionism approached the world subjectively, idealistically, while claiming to be objective,11 and did not criticize the middle class from an economical or political standpoint. Consequently, Lukács regards Expressionism as one of the tendencies that facilitated the rise of Fascism – a movement that added a reactionary edge to its borrowings from other sources, Expressionism included.12 Lukács considers Worringer’s connections with Expressionism and its perspective on the world to be profound.13 A key feature of Worringer’s argument is the opposition between empathy and abstraction, according to Lukács. Unlike Perkins, Lukács remains insensitive to Worringer’s discussion of Gothic, a mode of art-making where Worringer recognizes the meeting between empathy and abstraction.14 Nevertheless, Lukács signals ‘the striking effect’ of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy. 10 Ibid., 86-87. 11 See Lukács, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline', 102. Lukács also criticizes Expressionism for its ambition to grasp ‘essence’ without reflecting the world, for its missing content and emphatic form, for its abstraction and distortion. (———, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline', 91, 109-110. ) 12 Lukács, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline', 87. Also note Lukács’s later comment: ‘The very partial and problematic interest with which Expressionism is honoured by fascism can certainly not suffice to awaken Expressionism from its death.’ See ———, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline', 110. Lukács signals the incorporation of Expressionist aspects in the National Socialist ideology at a time when Expressionism had lost its progressive impetus. Uhr agrees with Lukács in this respect. See Horst Uhr, Masterpieces of German Expressionism at the Detroit Institute of Arts (New York: Hudson Hills Press and The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1982), 25. 13 Lukács, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline', 89. For a discussion of Lukács’s response to Worringer’s writings, also see Geoffrey C. W. Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Criticism' in The Turn of the Century: German Literature and Art, 1890-1915, eds. Gerald Chapple and Hans H. Schulte (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981 [1978]), 206-208. 14 Perkins, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism, 54. 202 For Lukács, Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy addresses early twentieth-century art more than with pre-modern modes of art-making. Lukács argues that the actual goal of Abstraction and Empathy is the defence of the art practices of Worringer’s contemporaries.15 In his forewords to Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer himself mentioned the positive reception his book had had on artists as well as writers.16 Yet Lukács emphasizes the early twentieth-century relevance of Abstraction and Empathy in order to question the historical aspects of Worringer’s inquiry. Regarding Worringer’s approach to representation and abstraction, Lukács remarks that Worringer considers the art of empathy (or representation) to be in decline.17 This, Lukács claims, reveals the escapist tendency manifest in Worringer’s thought, as much as in Expressionism.18 He connects escapism with Worringer’s discussion of agoraphobia, anxiety, and abstraction.19 As seen by Lukács, abstraction is a process of distancing from social issues and from the struggle between classes –20 it makes the target of one of the main objections Lukács brings to Expressionism, as well as to Worringer’s writings.21 According to Lukács, Expressionists left aside the distinctive features of their models in the world, and chose to employ a subjective method of rendering. In Lukács’s words: The expressionist precisely abstracted away from these typical characteristics, in as much as he proceeded, like the impressionists and symbolists, from the subjective reflex in experience, and emphasized precisely what in this appears – from the subject’s standpoint – as essential, in as much as he ignored the ‘little’, ‘petty’, 15 Lukács, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline', 89. Magdalena Bushart would agree in this respect. See Magdalena Bushart, ‘Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch’ in Neil H. Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, c.1995), 72-74, 79. 16 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, vii-viii, xiii-xiv. 17 Lukács, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline', 89. 18 Ibid., 90. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 102. 21 Lukács discusses abstraction in connection with Expressionism, but does not address Expressionism’s representational aspects. An exception would be Lukács’s mentioning of Expressionist emotionalism (a feature that, as we have seen, Worringer associates with empathy and representational art). For Lukács, emotion in Expressionism is exaggerated. However, the hybridity of Expressionism as a mode of making is nevertheless apparent to Ulrich Weisstein. See Ulrich Weisstein, 'German Literary Expressionism: An Anatomy', The German Quarterly, 54, No. 3, 1981, 272. 203 ‘inessential’ aspects (i. e. precisely the concrete social determinations) and uprooted his ‘essence’ from its causal connection in time and space.22 Bypassing concreteness, connections and references to the world, Expressionists, according to Lukács, sacrifice the spatial, temporal and social components their work might have included. Lukács thinks that this process of abstraction causes Expressionist art to lose meaning. He decisively supports representational processes where empathy could operate unhindered. According to Lukács, abstraction leads to escapism; Expressionism was not able to stand for a socio-political cause due to its reliance on abstraction. Lukács clearly writes in favour of representation, or empathy. He does not merely defend the representational function; he seems to militate for the representational duties of literature and art.23 Worringer regards the world as unknowable, ungraspable chaos: ‘a ‘lawless tangle’, in the words of Lukács.24 Isolation and passion, Lukács explains, are the methods proposed by Worringer to grasp ‘essence’ in the world.25 Neither of these alternatives meets with Lukács’s approval, who also questions Worringer’s emphasis on the rhetoric of opposition. Worringer’s contrast between reasoned understanding and irrational passion seems exclusive and rigid to Lukács. However, twentieth-century writers on art tend to remember Worringer mostly for his oppositional approach to abstraction and representation, as well as for his engaged approach to the writing of art history. 26 While Worringer tempers the antithesis between representation and abstraction by pointing to their common grounds in psychology, history and art-making, Lukács remains mostly critical towards abstraction. He emphasizes the opposition between abstraction and empathy, thus 22 Lukács, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline', 105. 23 Worringer, had he responded to the criticisms of Lukács, could have associated Lukács’s defence of representation with Classical-oriented approaches to art. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer offers the work of Kant as a point of reference for the end of Classicism; indeed, Lukács, as Richard Sheppard mentions, begins to admire Kant’s thought before the First World War. (See the paragraphs that follow, for Sheppard’s research of the relationship between the writings of Worringer and Lukács.) Embracing a Classical-oriented viewpoint, Lukács constructs his own argument on the basis of his rejection of Worringer’s perspective. He thus perpetuates the polar oppositions Worringer had cultivated in Abstraction and Empathy. 24 Lukács, 'Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline', 102. 25 Ibid., 102-103. 26 See, for instance, Hulme and Read, eds., Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, 75- 91. Also, Read, The Forms of Things Unknown: Essays towards an Aesthetic Philosophy, 141-156. Selz, German Expressionist Painting, 8-10, 12-13. Also see Holdheim, 'Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding', 350, 355. Also, Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century, 8-9. 204 employing the very method he had criticized in Worringer’s writings. Lukács discusses the connection between literature and art from a perspective also indebted to Worringer: he places the creative methods of Impressionism, Symbolism and Expressionism in social, historical, and ideological perspective, connecting literature and art with the worldviews that generate them. From his own psychologically oriented angle on the history and theory of art, Worringer had drawn attention to the connections between art-making and its contexts in Abstraction and Empathy. ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline’ points critically towards the writings of Worringer, yet reveals significant similarities between the methodologies of Worringer and Lukács. Richard Sheppard, and Lukács’ debt to Worringer The respective approaches of Lukács and Worringer bear similarities because Lukács had a thorough interest in Worringer’s work before the First World War. In ‘Georg Lukács, Wilhelm Worringer and German Expressionism’ (1995), Richard Sheppard inquires into the connections between the two writers. According to Worringer, Georg Simmel’s presence in the Trocadéro Museum had inspired him to choose a topic of study that later became Abstraction and Empathy.27 Lukács, like Worringer, had also studied with Simmel in Berlin.28 An annotated copy of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy was found in Lukács’ personal library, Sheppard remarks; these annotations, he comments, could have been made at different points in time.29 Sheppard demonstrates that the work of Worringer was important for Lukács in the early decades of the twentieth century; Worringer and Lukács even corresponded in 1911, after Lukács had sent a free copy of his book, Soul and Form (1911), to Worringer.30 However, Sheppard observes that Lukács changed his perspective on Worringer’s writings after reading Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) at a point in time between 27 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, ix. 28 Sheppard, 'Georg Lukács, Wilhelm Worringer and German Expressionism', 242. 29 Ibid., 244-245. 30 Ibid., 247. Also, Joanna E. Ziegler, 'Worringer's Theory of Transcendental Space in Gothic Architecture: A Medievalist's Perspective' in Neil H. Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, c.1995), 107. 205 1912 and 1914.31 Sheppard finds that Lukács’ own aesthetic came to revolve around concepts such as self-defining structure, objectivity, intentionality, the transcendental quality of experience in the world, and beauty as the meeting place of nature and art; such concepts, Sheppard explains, were at variance with the practices of pre-war Expressionists.32 As to Lukács’s interpretation of Worringer’s writings, Sheppard finds in favour of Worringer; 33 he maintains that Lukács’s criticism of Worringer and Expressionism allowed Lukács to articulate his own point of view.34 Worringer appears as a constant point of reference for Lukács, as Sheppard points out, even when Lukács’s references to Worringer take the form of negative commentary. Joseph Frank’s Worringer: expressiveness, emotion, and the passage of time For Joseph Frank in ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’ (1945), Worringer stands against the emphasis on Western aesthetics in art.35 Worringer, according to Frank, figures among the most significant art historians of the modern age. Frank mentions that he finds Worringer’s name to be highly visible in English criticism.36 Tracing his own interest for the ideas of Worringer to T. E. Hulme’s writings,37 Frank also signals the enthusiasm of Herbert Read towards Worringer’s accounts of abstract, geometric aspects of art-making.38 Worringer’s contribution to art, Frank highlights, consists in addressing emotions that reflect negative responses to a world of changes. 39 Writers such as Worringer regarded modes of art-making as reflective of the epoch during which they developed, Frank observes. According to him: The great modern masters of art history – Alois Riegl, Max Dvořák, Wilhelm Worringer, Erwin Panofsky – tended to explain shifts in style by refined versions of 31 Ibid., 251. 32 Ibid., 254-255. 33 See, for instance, Sheppard’s defence of Worringer with regard to Lukács’s criticism of Worringer’s writing in Aesthetics. Ibid., 268-272. 34 Ibid., 272-273. 35 Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form, 81. 36 Ibid., 31-66. 37 Ibid., xiv. 38 Ibid., 151, 171. 39 Ibid., 58. 206 the Hegelian idea of zeitgeist [‘spirit of the times’]. All manifestations of a culture were somehow linked together; and art styles were seen as one part of a complex whose ultimate explanation was located in the evolution of racial, religious, or metaphysical categories (a Marxist would of course locate this explanation in socio- economic categories).40 Early twentieth-century German and Austrian art historians and scholars interested in form, its definition and its changes, belong to Hegel’s lineage, Frank explains. He mentions that Hulme examined the work of such writers in order to configure his own approach to the question of form.41 Worringer’s ‘unusually expressive and incisive style’ gives Abstraction and Empathy its ‘noticeable quality of intellectual excitement and discovery’, according to Frank, 42 who favours Worringer’s view that the history of art should not account for artistic skill only. He notes: After Worringer, it was no longer possible to look on the development of Western art since the Renaissance as the slow attainment of perfection and to regard any infraction of its canons either as sensationalism or incompetence. It was necessary to recognize that non-organic styles, tending toward abstraction, might have their own validity and their own raison-d’être.43 Although Frank – unlike Lukács before him – does not take a critical approach to Worringer’s writings, he offers a specific orientation to his reading of Worringer. Frank focuses on the temporal aspects of the abstract-representational relationship as described by Worringer. Examining Worringer’s thoughts on the passage of time, Frank notes that, in Abstraction and Empathy,44 organic (naturalistic) and hieratic (non-naturalistic) styles succeed each other throughout history.45 This approach to the passage of time is indeed visible in the final chapter of Abstraction and Empathy, where Worringer mourns the decline 40 Ibid., 182. 41 Ibid., 52. 42 Ibid., 54. 43 Ibid., 171. 44 Ibid., 53-55. 45 Ibid., 171. Frank exemplifies by citing Worringer’s contrast between Greek and Renaissance art on the one hand, and Egyptian and Byzantine art-making on the other hand. 207 of Gothic and the beginnings of Renaissance;46 however, in Form in Gothic, Worringer finds traces of Gothic in the art of Northern and Central Europe throughout history.47 Worringer’s writings offer to Frank the starting point for discussing literature, which Frank regards as an art of time, in contrast with abstraction, a creative approach eluding time’s passage.48 William Spanos: empathy, abstraction, and the urge to engagement In ‘Modern Literary Criticism and the Spatialization of Time: An Existential Critique’ (1970), William V. Spanos points to the aspects he considers as downfalls in the writings of Frank and Worringer. Spanos underscores Worringer’s debt to Lipps, also addressing the articulation of abstract-representational antithesis in Worringer’s writings, and Worringer’s exemplification of this antithesis in art-making. Spanos disapproves of the extensive reliance of British modernism (more specifically, of Vorticism) on Worringer’s thought. In the inquiries of Worringer, Spanos finds room for alternative framings of the abstract- representational opposition. Unlike Lukács, Spanos regards Abstraction and Empathy as Worringer’s critique of Lipps’ aesthetics rather than as a defence of early twentieth-century art-making. 49 Spanos considers that T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) and Ezra Pound (1885-1972) appropriated Worringer’s angle on aesthetics and art historical periodization.50 Referring to Frank’s perspective, Spanos finds it uncritical, and maintains that Frank does not question 46 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 120-121. 47 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 37-38. 48 Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form, 60. Frank is interested in Worringer’s treatment of the disappearance of depth. Depth and time are connected, Frank argues – and time gives rise to imbalance and troubling change, according to Worringer. 49 Spanos, 'Modern Literary Criticism and the Spatialization of Time: An Existential Critique', 92-93. Spanos’ point of view is correct up to a certain point, since Worringer departs from Lipps’ aesthetics after having addressed its crucial impact on his own writings. (Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4-7.) For Worringer’s indebtedness to Lipps’ aesthetics, more specifically with regard to Lipps’ account of empathy as presented by Worringer, see Morgan, 'The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to Expressionism', 321-322. (———, 'The Idea of Abstraction in German Theories of the Ornament from Kant to Kandinsky', 234-235, 238.) 50 Spanos, 'Modern Literary Criticism and the Spatialization of Time: An Existential Critique', 92. 208 Worringer’s distinction between Western humanism and the traditions of other religious cultures with regard to art-making.51 Worringer’s contrast between naturalistic, vital art and geometric, dehumanized art interests Spanos. Discussing the psychological dimension of human response to environment as described by Worringer, Spanos differentiates between art that issues from harmony with the world, and art that stems from the fear of space, change, and instability. 52 Spanos pays attention to Worringer’s angle on geometric art (which Worringer regards as a search for transcendence) and notes that Worringer’s interpretation provided Hulme a starting point for his critique of Victorian positivism and Romanticism, as well as Western sentimentality.53 Addressing the psychological aspects of Worringer’s approach to art, Spanos underscores the existence of a third urge that remains unrecognized in Abstraction and Empathy.54 He criticises the arbitrariness of Worringer’s associating, on the one hand, empathy with faith in humanism and an interest in material forms, and, on the other hand, abstraction with highest religious preoccupations and a disinterest in materiality. 55 Like Gombrich, Spanos finds Worringer’s exemplifications of empathy-reliant and abstraction-oriented art to be imperfect.56 For Spanos, a third psychological urge exists: the urge to engagement, or dialogic encounter with the world of flux.57 The urge to engagement destabilizes the opposition between empathy and abstraction, Spanos argues. According to him, this urge is still naturalistic, yet communicates the disturbing impact of the world on artists, and reveals less explored depths of existence.58 51 Spanos emphasizes the religious basis of Worringer’s distinctions; he could have also addressed the geographical distance implicit in Worringer’s oppositions – yet another modality employed by Worringer to reinforce differentiation. See, for instance, Worringer’s placing alongside Greek and Oriental art, in Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 45-46. To assert differentiation even further, Worringer also discusses age groups and race groups in his book. See ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 54-55. 52 Spanos, 'Modern Literary Criticism and the Spatialization of Time: An Existential Critique', 92. 53 Ibid., 93. 54 Ibid., 94-95. 55 Ibid., 94. 56 Gombrich, ' "They Were All Human Beings: So Much Is Plain": Reflections on Cultural Relativism in the Humanities', 692. 57 Spanos, 'Modern Literary Criticism and the Spatialization of Time: An Existential Critique', 94-95. 58 Spanos’s account of this third psychological urge that reveals the dark side of naturalism brings to mind Expressionist practices as described by Guenther. See Peter W. Guenther, 'An Introduction to the Expressionist Movement' in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings: The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German 209 Four years after Spanos, Perkins recognizes the urge to engagement in Worringer’s approach to Gothic art.59 Spanos, on the other hand, finds the manifestation of the third urge in the Laocoon group, as well as in Alberto Giacometti’s Head of a Man on a Rod, and comments: ‘This naturalism [...] does not, as Worringer’s abstractionism does, reject or subdue the temporal, the existential world of nature. Indeed, the distortion is the distortion of impact: the projection of the natural movement of anguish or dread in an authentic encounter.’ 60 For Spanos, naturalism can operate in such a way as to reflect emotion, communicate experience, and accept distortions in form, without severing its links to the world. In such an approach to representation, the abstraction-oriented transformation or elision of details, as well as the contribution of artistic media to articulating art remain invisible to Spanos.61 Spanos finds Worringer’s approach to abstraction justified with reference to the plastic arts, which have a static quality. 62 However, he criticizes both Frank and Worringer for equating abstraction only with immobility and transcendence, and for discovering the optimistic acceptance of the world only in naturalism (or representation). The negative empathy Worringer had connected to abstraction is visible to Spanos within the field of naturalism as well; about the art that arises in response to the urge to engagement, Spanos remarks: ‘It is a “naturalism” that derives no “delight” or “pleasure” in the reproduction of natural life. Yet it is faithful for all that to the image of man in his encounter with the alien temporal universe.’ 63 He sees this naturalism of honest encounter manifest in Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil, Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters, or Giacometti’s late bronzes.64 Like Lukács, Spanos disagrees with Worringer’s apparently non-negotiable equivalences; however, he ignores Worringer’s approach to modes of art-making where the meeting ground of antithetical urges stands out.65 Expressionist Studies, eds. Stephanie Barron and Bruce Davis (Los Angeles, California; Munich, Federal Republic of Germany; New York, New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Prestel 1989), 35. 59 Perkins, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism, 53-54. 60 Spanos, 'Modern Literary Criticism and the Spatialization of Time: An Existential Critique', 95. 61After Spanos, Gilles Deleuze addresses the relationship between representation, abstraction and the Figure in Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, x-xv. 62 Spanos, 'Modern Literary Criticism and the Spatialization of Time: An Existential Critique', 95. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Worringer’s approach to Gothic art is addressed, in the current thesis, in ‘Interplay in the Gothic art of Northern Europe: memory, assimilation, interpolation’, and ‘Interplay: a dual, hybrid state in Gothic art’. 210 Ulrich Weisstein: Worringer, Expressionism, and abstract-representational middle grounds In ‘German Literary Expressionism: An Anatomy’ (1981), Ulrich Weisstein regards the writings of Worringer and the growth of the Expressionist movement as implicitly connected.66 For Weisstein, differentiating between Gothic art as presented by Worringer and early twentieth-century Expressionism seems superfluous. Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy is an ‘immensely influential’ book for Weisstein; nevertheless, he does not agree with Worringer’s perspective on the alternation of naturalistic and non-naturalistic modes of art-making.67 According to Weisstein, Worringer’s views on the historical succession of Classical (or realistic), and non-Classical (or non-realistic) styles has only historical interest. Weisstein also disagrees with Worringer’s thoughts regarding trans-historical approaches to art as delineated in Form in Gothic;68 for him, it is preferable to discuss Expressionism within the boundaries of the twentieth century. Weisstein, like Lukács, considers that Worringer actually addresses early twentieth-century art-making in his books. Abstraction and Empathy propagates Expressionism, according to Weisstein, although the term ‘Expressionism’ does not feature in Worringer’s text. Summarizing the Expressionist process of form-creation, Weisstein comments that Franz Marc’s depiction of animals, and the paintings of the Eiffel Tower by Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) bring to light the dynamism of Expressionism.69 In order to attain essence, Weisstein explains, Expressionists pierce the outer shell of appearances, reach the core (or the essence) of their subjects, and express with intensity the form of these subjects. Intensity causes distortion; according to Weisstein, the attention to inner necessity replaces the demand for beauty in Expressionist art.70 66 Donahue criticizes Weisstein’s approach to the writings of Worringer, especially with regard to Weisstein’s discussion of Expressionism as a timeless, or perennial, approach to art-making. See Neil H. Donahue, Forms of Disruption: Abstraction in Modern German Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 30-31. 67 Weisstein, 'German Literary Expressionism: An Anatomy', 265-266. 68 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 37. 69 Weisstein, 'German Literary Expressionism: An Anatomy', 281. 70 Ibid., 271. 211 Among Expressionist dichotomies, Weisstein mentions the relationship between representational (concrete) and non-representational (abstract) aspects in literature and art. Expressionism offers a middle ground between matter and idea, Weisstein argues. He explains that Expressionism is neither anti-mimetic nor fully abstract. In his words: ‘Inevitably – or so it seems – the Expressionist work of art is suspended between two poles, the realistic and the idealistic. Thus while, on the one hand, it is rabidly anti-mimetic, on the other it shies away from pure abstraction. Depending on the talent or inclination of the individual writer, painter, composer, etc., it moves in one or the other direction, neither succumbing to the extremes nor reconciling the opposites.’ 71 Weisstein thus emphasizes the capacity of Expressionism to articulate a dynamic balance between extremes in art-making. Worringer also pointed out that Gothic art does not cancel opposition, but incorporates it, maintaining the counterplay and interplay of representational and abstract aspects.72 Like Worringer, Weisstein sees abstract-representational interplay as an aspect of opposition.73 Neil Donahue: ‘world feeling’ and the history of ideas in Abstraction and Empathy Unlike Weisstein, Neil Donahue finds that Abstraction and Empathy holds more than historical interest for twenty-first century writers. He underscores the impact of Worringer’s book on his contemporaries, as well as the capacity of the general (therefore comprehensive) terminology Worringer employs to bring together different strands of scholarship.74 Worringer’s approach is specific to early twentieth-century inquiries into the history of ideas, Donahue points out; such an approach has its benefits (for instance, inclusiveness) and limitations (for instance, the lack of attention to particular artists and works of art), Donahue explains. Regarding Worringer’s views on art, Donahue notes that Worringer draws attention to psychological grounds of art-making,75 and to the limitations of the early twentieth-century 71 Ibid., 272. 72 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 63. 73 Weisstein, 'German Literary Expressionism: An Anatomy', 271. 74 Donahue, Forms of Disruption: Abstraction in Modern German Prose, 2. 75 Ibid., 15-16. 212 aesthetics of empathy. 76 Worringer, Donahue explains, prefers the term ‘world feeling’ [Weltgefühl] to ‘rational worldview’ [Weltanschauung]:77 empathy, emotion and instinct stand in the limelight of Worringer’s investigation.78 According to Donahue, Worringer brings ‘primitive’ art to the attention of his own contemporaries by connecting it to abstraction,79 and articulates an aesthetic for abstract art. Donahue writes: We might in fact note yet further that Worringer’s thesis on primitive and modern abstraction, despite its limitations as anthropology, provided a unified aesthetics for abstract, or nonnaturalistic art, when no other existed; and by associating primitive art with the modern condition and to developments in modern art, Worringer’s book, in its enormous popularity, certainly awakened an interest in “primitive” art that led to further research.80 Worringer, according to Donahue, creates a theoretical platform for approaching abstraction as a mode of art-making in pre-historical as well as modern times. The urge to abstraction Worringer addresses is thus based, Donahue points out, on a shared will to art-making. Donahue lucidly summarizes Worringer’s views on abstraction: Abstract art is elemental; abstraction reduces art to its fundamental elements of geometric construction. Instead of organic development, abstract art aggregates according to self-legitimating principles of necessary addition and combination. Therefore, abstract art is accumulative and inorganic, life negating and non-mimetic in favour of the permanence of pure form... The “object” of art is the immediate presentation of forms, not the mediated re-presentation of the recognizable natural world. The forms of abstract art are connected by proximity and juxtaposition, that is, by their very appearance of disconnectedness, their shared evasion of natural mimesis, their logic of apparent disorder.81 76 Ibid., 18. 77 Ibid., 22-26. 78 Ibid., 22. 79 Ibid., 4. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., 28. 213 Like Perkins, Donahue regards the relationship between early twentieth-century art and literature on the one hand, and Expressionist theory on the other hand, as questionable.82 Donahue points critically to the association of Worringer with the history of the Expressionist movement in contemporary scholarship.83 The criticism Lukács directs towards Worringer’s writings is insightfully approached by Donahue as Lukács’s attempt to distance his own work from the influence of Worringer.84 Unlike Spanos, Donahue mentions Frank’s ‘detailed summary and fair evaluation’ of Abstraction and Empathy,85 as well as Frank’s extended application of Worringer’s findings to the field of twentieth-century literary writing. Memorably framed in Forms of Disruption, the portrait of Worringer is, when addressed by Donahue, theoretically nuanced, historically relevant, and justly presented with regard to its limitations and successes. To summarize, this section brings together a number of critical texts on Worringer’s writings where Worringer, his thoughts and his connections to Expressionism are discussed. Lukács, for instance, finds that Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy makes a key contribution to Expressionism, yet reveals the very reasons that caused the decline of the movement. Sheppard shows that Lukács had studied himself with Simmel, had been in contact with Worringer in the early years of the twentieth century, and had actually drawn inspiration from Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy. Frank praises Worringer for his memorable writing, for his interest in non-Western aesthetics, for his tracing a connection between art-making and its epoch, as well as for addressing emotions reflective of negative responses to the world. According to Frank, Worringer’s approach constitutes a significant point of reference in the writing of art history. Spanos casts a critical glance on Frank’s reading of Worringer, which, according to Spanos, does not question Worringer’s approach enough; Spanos also points to the undesirable strictness of Worringer’s approach to opposition. Associating 82 Ibid., 31. 83 Ibid., 13. Donahue criticizes Weisstein’s perspective on Worringer’s writings. On the other hand, Donahue mentions Adolf Klarmann’s sympathetic reading of Worringer, and Klarmann’s emphasis on empathy, subjectivity and intuition in the texts of Worringer. See ———, Forms of Disruption: Abstraction in Modern German Prose, 31. 84 Donahue also points out that Mary Gluck (1985) notes the connections between Lukács and Worringer in her book, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 1900-1918 (1985). Donahue, Forms of Disruption: Abstraction in Modern German Prose, 30. Sheppard (1995) looks further into Worringer’s influence on Lukács, as the discussion above has highlighted. 85 Ibid., 13-17. 214 Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy with Expressionism, Weisstein disagrees with Worringer’s discussion of Expressionism as a timeless approach to art-making. He signals the inherent oppositions in Expressionism, much like Worringer had noted the counterplay and interplay characteristic of Gothic art. Finally, Donahue writes in favour of Worringer, drawing attention to the limitations as well as to the advantages of Worringer’s approach. For Donahue, Worringer paid much needed attention to ‘primitive’ art and abstraction at the beginning of the twentieth century. 215 Worringer and Expressionism: late twentieth-century perspectives As we have seen, twentieth-century writers have readdressed critically the connections between Worringer’s writings and his epoch, especially with regard to Expressionism. Various aspects of the association of Worringer with the Expressionist movement have been explored in the second half of the twentieth century; contemporary researchers have asserted the commonalities between the writings of Worringer and artistic Expressionism, yet have also questioned the extent of Worringer’s interest in the work of Expressionist artists. For instance, Charles E. Haxthausen points to Worringer’s direct assertion of a link between Gothic and Expressionist art in an article from 1925 entitled ‘The Late Gothic and Expressionist System of Form’ [‘Spätgotisches und expressionistisches Formsystem’] (Wallraf-Richartz Almanac [Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch]). Worringer’s inquiring into Expressionist art-making in 1925, and his connecting Expressionism to Gothic art, may appear as a drastic change of perspective after Worringer’s critique of artistic Expressionism in 1920-21. Nevertheless, Worringer did signal his intention of provoking debate and examining opposite viewpoints on given topics in both Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. His renewed attention to Expressionist art highlights the pervasiveness of the oppositional pattern in his approach to the writing of art theory and history. Yet, for Haxthausen, it is the limitations of Worringer’s approach that stand out in ‘The Late Gothic and Expressionist System of Form’. Haxthausen comments that the same characteristics of inquiry having generated dissatisfaction in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic inform Worringer’s later discourse on Expressionism. Discussing Worringer’s essays in ‘Modern Art After “The End of Expressionism”: Worringer in the 1920s’ (c. 1995), Haxthausen underscores that Worringer presents Expressionism as a systematic approach to art-making.1 In Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, Worringer focused on addressing his topics from art historical and theoretical perspectives, including only a small number of references to the art of his time. He did not assert the existence of an Expressionist movement in his books, and did not relate Gothic directly to Expressionism in 1908 and 1910. 1 Haxthausen, 'Modern Art After "The End of Expressionism": Worringer in the 1920s', 125. 216 Worringer, according to Haxthausen, argues in ‘The Late Gothic and Expressionist System of Form’ that German artists import formal systems and subsequently stylise them strictly. 2 Yet, where Worringer underscores the systematic quality of Expressionism, Haxthausen notes that many of Worringer’s contemporaries write about the diversity of the movement instead.3 Adolf Behne (1885-1948), Haxthausen points out, regards Expressionism as a composite movement; Wilhelm Hausenstein (1882-1957) sees no common ground between the works of painters as diverse as Kandinsky and Rousseau, while Paul Westheim (1886-1963) applauds the individuality of the Expressionists and the resultant stylistic variety of the movement.4 Worringer’s approach to Expressionism, Haxthausen remarks, provides no supporting evidence in favour of its argument; it suffers from a lack of reference to specific artists and artworks. Worringer had assumed a position of similar generality in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, where he had given priority to articulating and defending his interpretation of art, and had analysed stylistic trends throughout history. Haxthausen finds that the tendency towards generic arguments still characterizes Worringer’s writings between 1911 and 1925.5 Therefore, as Haxtahusen makes visible, Worringer’s writings assert their connections with artistic Expressionism after Worringer had completed Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. According to Michael Jennings, Worringer provides a number of landmarks for the writing of a history of Expressionism,6 such as an emphasis on emotion and inner experience, restlessness and fear of space.7 Yet, in ‘Against Expressionism: Materialism and Social Theory in Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy’ (c. 1995), Jennings finds that Worringer’s inquiry cannot be regarded as strictly reflective of Expressionism (an approach to art-making Worringer would have had but little time to follow, since Die Brücke was only founded in 1905). In the words of Jennings: ‘... [T]he equation Worringer equals Expressionism rests on 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 125-126. 4 Ibid., 126. 5 Haxthausen, 'Modern Art After "The End of Expressionism": Worringer in the 1920s', 127. 6 For the purposes of this section, Expressionism is regarded as emphasizing experimental, anti-naturalistic, anti- materialist, anti-industrialist, authority-questioning aspects in art-making. Rose-Carol Washton Long points to the complex, multilayered implications of a movement often associated with opposite characteristics such as nationalism and internationalism, utopianism and commercialism, inner aspects of art-making and public art practices. See Long, Barron, and Rigby, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, ixi-xxiv. 7 Jennings, 'Against Expressionism: Materialism and Social Theory in Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', 88-89. 217 an assumption in the Worringer literature, now explicit, now implicit, that Worringer’s major work represents a parallel exploitation of the same problems faced by the Expressionists, that it is Expressionism’s cognate in the theory of art history.’ 8 The commonalities Jennings notices between early twentieth-century Expressionist explorations and Worringer’s direction of research suggest that Worringer was interested in the art of his time; however, such commonalities do not confirm a bond that, in fact, remains unacknowledged in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. Writers addressing Expressionism tend to highlight the influence of Worringer’s thought at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as key characteristics of his texts that resonate with Expressionist ideas and techniques. For instance, in Expressionism: A Generation in Revolt (1963), Bernard Myers draws attention to the connections between Worringer and Expressionism. Myers regards Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy as a significant book for Expressionist artists; he underscores the role of subjectivity and intuition (two factors also valued by Expressionists) in Worringer’s text.9 Abstraction and Empathy, according to Myers, created an ideological basis for Expressionism; as Myers shows, Worringer employed the term ‘Expressionist’ in his much referenced article for Der Sturm [The Storm,] ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911).10 For Frank Whitford in Expressionism (1970), Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic signal a shift in aesthetic focus at the beginning of the twentieth century. Worringer, Whitford notes, defended the aesthetic value of art that did not follow Classical principles.11 The temperament of artists and their inner responses to the world become apparent in Gothic art, according to Worringer as paraphrased by Whitford. 12 Underscoring the connections between personal experiences of the world and specific modes of art-making in Form in Gothic, Whitford mentions that Worringer considers Gothic art to be a specifically German phenomenon.13 8 Ibid., 88. 9 Bernard S. Myers, Expressionism: A Generation in Revolt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), 12. 10 Ibid., 40. Also see Long, Barron, and Rigby, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, 9. 11 Frank Whitford, Expressionism (London, New York: Hamlyn, 1970), 30. 12 Ibid., 31. 13 Gordon also emphasizes the national aspects of Worringer’s approach to Gothic. See Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, 176. 218 Worringer pays special attention to the tendency towards abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy, as Paul Vogt remarks in Expressionism: German Painting, 1905-1920 (1980). Vogt finds that Worringer asserts the independence of art from nature: art, according to Worringer, does not need to rely on its connections with the world.14 Referring to Worringer’s 1920 speech for the Munich Goethe Society, Vogt notes that the crisis of artistic Expressionism was visible for Worringer in the second decade of the twentieth century. 15 Horst Uhr, highlighting one of the key arguments of Worringer’s early writings, observes that Worringer’s Form in Gothic articulated a contrast between Classical and Gothic art.16 In Masterpieces of German Expressionism at the Detroit Institute of Arts (1982), Uhr explains that Expressionist artists such as Emil Nolde, Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann (1884-1950), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein and Christian Rohlfs were motivated in their choice of religious subjects by their dissatisfaction with their context before, during and after the First World War. The Expressionists’ response to the world was, according to Uhr, inspired by Worringer’s inquiry into the conditions that led to the emergence of Gothic art.17 Discussing the political response German Expressionism attracted from the National Socialist Party in the 1930s, Uhr mentions the repression of Expressionism orchestrated by means of exhibitions organized by the Nazis in 1933 – Government Art from 1918 to 1933 (Karlsruhe), Cultural Bolshevism (Mannheim), and Art in the Service of Demoralization (Stuttgart) – and 1937 – Degenerate “Art” ( Munich).18 However, Uhr (in agreement with Worringer’s 1921opinion regarding the decline of Expressionism) also notes: ‘Ironically, German Expressionism in its most authentic form was already a thing of the past when it was ruthlessly suppressed by the National Socialists.’ 19 14 Vogt, Expressionism: German Painting, 1905-1920, 24. 15 Ibid., 8. 16 Uhr, Masterpieces of German Expressionism at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 23-24. 17 ———, Masterpieces of German Expressionism at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 23-24. 18 Ibid., 26-27. With regard to the Degenerate ‘Art’ exhibition from 1937, Christian Weikop examines the strong supportive response of British intellectuals for modern German art. Weikop shows that Lady Norton, Herbert Read, Irmgard Burchart, Herbert Einstein and Roland Penrose organized an exhibition entitled Twentieth- Century German Art at the New Burlington Art Galleries (London); the profits derived from this show were to be directed towards artists seeking refuge from National Socialist persecution. Read was an admirer of Worringer, whom Read had met after 1922, as Weikop explains. (Weikop, New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History, 251-264.) 19 Uhr, Masterpieces of German Expressionism at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 25. 219 For James P. Bednarz in 'The Dual Vision of Paul Klee's Symbolic Language' (1983), German Expressionism relied on two key texts: Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, and Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art.20 The connections between Worringer’s writings and Expressionism are also recognized by Stephen E. Bronner and D. Emily Hicks in ‘Expressionist Painting and the Aesthetic Dimension’ (1983). With regard to the aesthetic approach to painting as practiced in Expressionism, Bronner and Hicks point to Worringer’s observations on the interaction between abstraction and empathy; they engage with a less highlighted strand of Worringer’s inquiry (namely, the coexistence of abstract and representational aspects of art-making) and maintain that the distortion brought along by non- representational work requires empathic participation. 21 Like Uhr, Donald E. Gordon underscores the relevance of Worringer’s Form in Gothic for early twentieth-century German cultural contexts. Gordon also signals the spiritual preoccupations prevalent in the early years of the twentieth century.22 In Expressionism: Art and Idea (1987), Gordon suggests that Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy could have contributed to the emphasis painters such as Erich Heckel (1883-1970) placed on geometric aspects of nature.23 Discussing Expressionist approaches to form, Gordon notes that eclecticism characterizes Expressionism;24 he mentions Worringer’s defence of French- German artistic exchanges, and cites from Worringer’s article, ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’.25 With regard to the Expressionist tendency of referring to other modes of art-making, Gordon agrees with Worringer’s point of view from ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’.26 20 James P. Bednarz, 'The Dual Vision of Paul Klee's Symbolic Language' in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, eds. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (South Hadley, Massachussetts: J. F. Bergin, 1983), 280-281. 21 Stephen Eric Bronner and D. Emily Hicks, 'Expressionist Painting and the Aesthetic Dimension' in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, eds. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (South Hadley, Massachusetts: J. F. Bergin, 1983), 243. 22 Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, 49. 23 Gordon illustrates his point by drawing attention to Erich Heckel’s work, Glassy Day (1913), as well as to the works of artists and architects like Lyonel Feininger (mentioned for his paintings that reminded of Cubism), Bruno Taut (the architect of the Glass Pavilion at the Werkbund Exhibition, Cologne, 1914), or Paul Scheerbart (for his 1914 Glass Architecture, a book dedicated to Taut). Ibid., 50-53. 24 Ibid., 70. 25 Worringer’s ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ is discussed in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art (1911): Worringer’s early response to Expressionism’. 26 Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, 70. 220 Gordon, like Worringer before him, points to the tendency of German Expressionist artists to seek pre-defined formal solutions. He writes: ‘The Expressionist used existing forms rather than inventing new ones. He proceeded not by imitation of a source but by a transformation of it, in other words by a reactive process of simultaneous acceptance and partial modification or rejection.’ 27 For Gordon, German Expressionism relied on the creative transformation of influences: he recognizes this process at work in the paintings of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), Max Beckmann, and Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956). Worringer had signalled the tendency of contemporary German artists to respond to current or historical artworks; according to Gordon, Worringer ‘... actually elevated stylistic dependency to a central position in German art history from Dürer to the Expressionists.’ 28 Associating the writings of Worringer with the anti-Classical, renewal-oriented direction of early twentieth-century German art, Gordon observes that Worringer inspired further art historical research, from Paul Fechter’s Expressionism (1914) and Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History (1915) to Karl Scheffler The Gothic Spirit (1917) and Eckart von Sydow’s German Expressionist Culture and Painting (1920).29 Gordon emphasizes the distinctions drawn by Worringer, in Form in Gothic, between the sensuousness of Classical art and the spirituality of Gothic art;30 he notes Worringer’s views on Gothic as a specifically Northern artistic phenomenon.31 In Gordon’s account, German Expressionism cultivates art values he sees as particularly German, but also international connections with early twentieth-century French art-making, at least until the beginning of the First World War.32 Where Worringer engaged with the various aspects of Gothic art, Gordon brings to light the multiple facets of Expressionism. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 176-178. 30 Ibid., 176. 31 Also see Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 180. In the words of Worringer: 'For the Germans, as we have seen, are the conditio sine qua non of Gothic. They introduce among self-confident peoples that germ of sensuous uncertainty and spiritual distractedness from which the transcendental pathos of Gothic then surges so irrepressibly upwards.' 32 Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, 106. 221 In ‘The Revival of Printmaking in Germany’ (1989), Ida Katherine Rigby posits that Worringer’s research inspired early twentieth-century German artists.33 Rigby notes that Worringer’s writings, including Form in Gothic, supported a growing interest in German printmaking after 1910. However, she also mentions Worringer’s critical views regarding Expressionism, as formulated in his Munich lecture from 1920.34 Like Rigby, Rose-Carol Washton Long points to Worringer’s initial support of Expressionism in 1911, and then to Worringer’s 1920 dismissive comments regarding the movement.35 In ‘Scholarship: Past, Present and Future Directions’ (1989), Long emphasizes the key qualities Worringer had attributed to Expressionism as well as to primitive art: purity, simplicity, mysticism.36 Expressionism was seen as allied with Communism by conservatives such as Paul Schultze-Naumburg (1869-1949), and by the National Socialists, Long mentions. On the other hand, she also notes that a left-wing writer such as Alfred Kurella (1895-1975) considered Expressionism to have led to the acceptance of Fascism.37 Long underscores the significance of Worringer’s approach to Gothic art and to the metaphysical preoccupations of Northern artists; she also notes the interest of Expressionist artists in Gothic.38 Peter Guenther regards Worringer as a key theorist of Expressionism in ‘An Introduction to the Expressionist Movement’ (1989).39 For Guenther, Expressionism is an art movement specific to Germany and its early twentieth-century historical context. The features that characterise German Expressionism could have developed only within Germany, Guenther argues. In his words: 33 Ida Katherine Rigby, 'The Revival of Printmaking in Germany' in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings: The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, eds. Stephanie Barron and Bruce Davis (Los Angeles, California; Munich, Federal Republic of Germany; New York, New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Prestel 1989), 56, 58, 60. 34 Ibid., 58-60. 35 Rose-Carol Washton Long, 'Scholarship: Past, Present and Future Directions' in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings: The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, eds. Stephanie Barron and Bruce Davis (Los Angeles, California; Munich, Federal Republic of Germany; New York, New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Prestel 1989), 185. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 185-186, 186-188. 38 Ibid., 198. 39 Peter W. Guenther, 'An Introduction to the Expressionist Movement' in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings, eds. Stephanie Barron and Bruce Davis (Los Angeles, California: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1989), 35. 222 The emotional intensity, the frequently too honest and depressing subject matter, the strong social undertones, the spiritual ties to a pantheistic world view, the inherent religious fervor, and the harsh condemnation of materialism were understandable only within the historical context of Germany. No other country experienced the violent generational conflict that Germany did; none so fervently embraced the belief that the arts could and should change man and society. 40 Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy drew attention to Northern European art-making, Norbert Lynton points out in ‘Expressionism’ (1994). For Lynton, a defining characteristic of Worringer’s inquiry is the emphasis on the features of Northern art in contrast to the aesthetically dominant Southern art.41 Lynton connects Worringer’s explorations to the early twentieth-century work of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), and to Kandinsky’s first abstractions.42 According to Lynton, the common preoccupations of Worringer, Kandinsky and Franz Marc (1880-1916) are fostered by their shared environment, the city of Munich,43 at point in time when Theodor Lipps, one of the authors most cited by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy, was teaching at Munich University. 44 The influence of Worringer’s Form in Gothic on Paul Fechter’s Expressionism (1914) is signalled by Shulamith Behr.45 Worringer’s book provided the foundations for connecting the key tendencies of German art-making to Gothic art, according to Behr in Expressionism (1999). Inspired by Worringer’s association of Gothic and contemporary German art, Fechter connects Expressionism to a specifically German context, Behr observes. 40 Ibid., 36. 41 Lynton, 'Expressionism', 42. 42 Ibid. 43 The connections between the art of Kandinsky, the writings of Worringer, and the city of Munich at the turn of the twentieth century need to make the topic of in-depth inquiry. Research could begin with Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 44 Lynton, 'Expressionism', 42-43. Klaus Lankheit and Peter Vergo further bring to light the personal connections between Worringer, Marc and Kandinsky around the time of Worringer’s publishing Form in Gothic (1912) with Reinhard Piper, and Kandinsky’s issuing On the Spiritual in Art (1912) with the same printing house. See Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Klaus Lankheit, eds., The Blaue Reiter Almanac (London: Tate,2006), 17-18, 25-26, 30, 36. Also, Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 105, 117. 45 Shulamith Behr, Expressionism (London: Tate Gallery, 1999), 8. 223 Like Behr, Shearer West highlights the contribution of Worringer to early twentieth-century artistic inquiries.46 In The Visual Arts in Germany, 1890-1937: Utopia and Despair (2001) West draws attention to the historical aspects of Worringer’s argument: Worringer, West notes, points out that early twentieth-century artistic tendencies were leading towards abstract practices, away from the empathic art of previous epochs. West is critical towards Worringer’s approach views on aesthetic matters; nevertheless, he signals the connections between Worringer and the Blaue Reiter artists, showing that Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy illuminated the relationship between inner experience and abstraction, and provided a ground for the appreciation of ‘primitive’ art.47 In contemporary writings on Expressionism such as the studies of Myers, Bednarz, Gordon and Guenther, Worringer thus emerges as a writer having provided theoretical grounds for the development of the movement. Uhr, Gordon, Guenther and Behr underscore the connection Worringer’s writings enabled between early twentieth-century art-making and Gothic art. Worringer’s support of the relationship between French and German artists is noted by Gordon and Long. The writings of Worringer inspired, or defended, artists associated with the Expressionist movement, as Whitford, Gordon, Long, Rigby and Lynton show; however, Vogt, Rigby and Long also draw attention to Worringer’s 1920 growing disbelief in Expressionism. Further complications in appraising the relationship between artistic Expressionism and Worringer’s writings arise, as signalled by Haxthausen, with Worringer’s 1925 approach to Expressionism as a systematic mode of art-making. We have seen that Worringer was critical towards artistic aspects of Expressionism in 1920-21. Yet, in 1925, Worringer showed his renewed interest in Expressionism, delineating a strong profile for the movement while many of his contemporaries, according to Haxthausen, highlighted the variety and composite quality of Expressionism in art. In his turn, Michael Jennings observes that Worringer’s writings contain landmarks for addressing Expressionism in art. Jennings nevertheless cautions against the tendency of 46 Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 1890-1937: Utopia and Despair (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 68. 47 Ibid. 224 researchers to regard Worringer’s texts as direct reflections of the Expressionist movement. Indeed, Worringer does not address Expressionism in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, and becomes critical of Expressionism in the second decade of the twentieth century. However, many contemporary writers continue to regard Worringer’s texts as significantly connected to the Expressionist movement. 225 Part 4: Redrawing antithesis Antithesis: Classical, modern and contemporary contexts Aesthetic inquiries as practiced at the beginning of the twentieth century are bound to be incomplete, Worringer argues in the first pages of Abstraction and Empathy. Proposing to start his explorations by emphasizing the perspective of viewers – in other words, by accounting for human, emotional responses to art – Worringer notes that contemporary aesthetics should, and does not, address empathy alongside its opposite. The counter-pole of the urge to empathy is the urge to abstraction, Worringer explains; although he regards their relationship as antithetical, he perceives the opposition of empathy and abstraction as integral to aesthetic discourse. In his words: ‘It [i. e., modern aesthetics] will only assume the shape of a comprehensive aesthetic system when it has united with the lines that lead from the opposite pole.’ 1 Permeating Worringer’s opening argument, the vocabulary of opposition allows Worringer to contrast the urge to abstraction and the urge to empathy. Worringer thus establishes boundaries for his inquiry and at the same time defends the necessity of addressing the urge to abstraction. Empathy-reliant art and abstraction-oriented art, he writes, reflect two personal avenues of responding to the world. According to Worringer, both these avenues have their aesthetic significance, since they point to the changing perspectives of human beings on the contexts of their experience. Worringer posits that the history of art presents the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction in perpetual disputation, or debate.2 For him, the tendencies towards abstraction and representation respectively do not manifest in isolation from each other, but are 1 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4. For the purposes of this thesis, a number of terms are employed to highlight Worringer’s approach to oppositional relationships and the processes that support their articulation. ‘Polarity,’ or ‘polar antithesis,’ or ‘polar opposition,’ signal the extreme contrast between juxtaposed terms. ‘Antithesis,’ or ‘opposition,’ are employed interchangeably to point to a situation of contrast – as in the case of the relationship between the urge to abstraction and the urge to empathy, or between abstraction and representation in art-making. ‘Distinction’ refers to a form of differentiation that could rely on opposition, but does not necessarily do so. ‘Separation’ is a process that leads to distinction, and that involves the eliciting of the specific features of contrasted terms. 2 Ibid., 34, 35. 226 polemically interconnected. The interplay of psychological tendencies in art-making thus receives a negative, conflict-bent interpretation in Abstraction and Empathy.3 Although Worringer’s remark re-establishes the opposition between abstraction and empathy, it nevertheless signals their fundamentally dialogic exchange. Opposition as employed by Worringer generates lifelikeness: empathy and abstraction feature as theoretical concepts but 3 Worringer’s emphasis on antithesis as a method of inquiry relies on his readings of Schopenhauer. Another admirer of Schopenhauer’s work is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose resonance with the author of The World as Will and Representation was instantaneous. In the words of Nietzsche cited by Ritchie Robertson: ‘I am among those readers of Schopenhauer who, after reading the first page, know for certain that they will read every page and attend to every word he ever uttered.’ See Ritchie Robertson, 'German Literature and Thought from 1810 to 1890' in Helmut Walser Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 265-266. Also, Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 1890-1937: Utopia and Despair (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 59-60. If, as Robertson points out, Schopenhauer was widely read during the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche is considered a key figure of modernism. See Stephen E. Dowden, Meike G. Werner, 'The Place of German Modernism' in Helmut Walser Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 484. Also, Seth Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheans: The Politics of German Expressionism, 1910-1920 (Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter, 1990), 16-18. Worringer is likely to have been aware of Nietzsche’s work, although he does not mention Nietzsche in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s writings were widely known in Germany around the time of Worringer’s researching for Abstraction and Empathy. Donald Gordon, for instance, explains that Nietzsche influenced Die Brücke Expressionists decisively; Nietzsche’s texts inspired the naming of Die Brücke. Heckel even captured Nietzsche’s likeness in a woodcut from 1905, Gordon notes. Gordon also addresses the impact of Nietzsche on Kandinsky and Marc, commenting that Nietzsche’s influence was extensive, in Germany as well as France, around the turn of the twentieth century. See Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, 11-18. Bronner and Kellner also noye: ‘Practically all expressionists followed Nietzsche in opposing the society of the “Bildungsphilister” (“complacent bourgeois”) and, like Nietzsche, they perceived threats to individual subjectivity through new social forces and institutions. ... Almost all expressionist artists of the period absorbed Nietzschean ideas through osmosis, if not by direct study. Nietzsche’s ideas were “in the air” and helped create the intellectual atmosphere in which Expressionism emerged.’ See Stephen Eric Bronner, and Douglas Kellner, Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage (South Hadley, Massachussetts: J. F. Bergin, 1983), 11. Nietzsche’s books, Peter Russell explains, highlighted the gap between ideal and reality, and argued that the transvaluation of values (namely, the annihilation of the distinction between good and evil) was going to replace Christian ethic. See Peter Russell, The Divided Mind: A Portrait of Modern German Culture (Essen, Germany and Wellington, New Zealand: Verlag Die Blaue Eule and Victoria University Press, 1988), 78-82. However, in an early essay such as The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche emphasises separation rather than bridging: he finds that the progress of the science of aesthetics relies on the acceptance of duality, which can take amiable forms, but is most often oppositional. In the words of Nietzsche: ‘We will have achieved much for the scientific study of aesthetics when we come, not merely to a logical understanding, but also to the certain and immediate apprehension of the fact that the further development of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian [the domain of the visual arts and of the dream] and the Dionysian [the realm of non-visual arts and music], just as reproduction depends upon the duality of the sexes, their continuing strife and only periodically occurring reconciliation.’ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Raymond Geuss, and Ronald Speirs, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge, U.K., and New York, U. S. A.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9- 12. In the Dionysian, Nietzsche recognizes an abandonment of individuality that reminds him of experiences such as ecstasy and intoxication. From this point of view, Worringer could be said to highlight, in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, how the Dionysian takes form in art: more precisely, how early twentieth-century artists articulate the experiencing of inner depth through immersing symbolic motifs within the core of artworks and allowing these ‘hidden’ motifs to vitalise form. Worringer may not mention the influence of Nietzsche on his own writings, but the texts of Worringer certainly resonate with Nietzsche’s views on antithesis. 227 also as partners of discussion in Abstraction and Empathy. Worringer’s approach to the polarity of empathy and abstraction allows for the personification and animated communication between opposites. The debate between the urge to abstraction and the urge to empathy reflects, Worringer argued, the tension between human beings and the world. He writes: ‘... [A]ll artistic creation is nothing else than a continual registration of the great process of disputation, in which man and the outer world have been engaged, and will be engaged, from the dawn of creation till the end of time.’ 4 Yet the historical process of disputation with the world is obliterated, Worringer notes, by an emphasis on aesthetic theories of imitation. While he regards tension as necessary in the development of art, Worringer disapproves of imitation. Previous sections have noted that Worringer considers imitation to be distinct from naturalism or representation;5 for him, imitation cannot be considered to contribute to the development of art-making throughout the ages.6 Yet, Worringer argues, imitation is highly regarded in contemporary aesthetics, a domain where the influence of Aristotle (384-22 B. C.), a key figure of Greek Classicism, is still felt. Aristotle and antithesis In his Poetics (c. 335 B. C.), Aristotle examined the media, objects and modes of artistic imitation – in other words, its characteristics.7 He pointed to the imitation and representation of human beings in action using colour and form,8 and recommended that people be represented as better than in real life, worse than in real life, or simply as observed. 9 Imitation and representation were therefore distinct, sequential processes for Aristotle: while imitation referred to the psychological search for creating persuasive likenesses, representation (as an overall effect) connected to the mode of approaching a selected topic. As such, Aristotle 4 Ibid., 127. 5 See ‘Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory’ from the current thesis. 6 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 28-32. 7 Aristotle and S. H. Butcher, The Poetics of Aristotle (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University, 2000 [c. 330 B. C.]), 4-6. The media of imitation were, for Aristotle, epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic verse, and music; he regarded drama and narrative as two modes of artistic imitation. 8 Ibid., 5-6. The ‘objects of imitation’ are human beings, according to Aristotle. 9 Ibid., 6. 228 accepted that representation could actually make visible different degrees of lifelikeness; he thus accounted for variations of personal expression in art-making. In his Poetics, Aristotle recognized the intrinsic diversity of representation as an artistic approach for which imitation provided the psychological ground. Aristotle posited that human beings learned through imitation, and tended to imitate instinctively.10 Imitation that informs representational art, Aristotle observed, provided the necessary amount of distance from painful situations. For instance, Aristotle noted that the opportunity to examine detailed renderings of disturbing motifs turned into an occasion of aesthetic enjoyment, especially for the general public.11 Imitation and representation foster learning, according to Aristotle: ‘Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, “Ah, that is he.” For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the colouring, or some such other cause.’ 12 Learning, deduction and recognition were, according to Aristotle, among the benefits of representation. Nevertheless, Aristotle also noted that the faithfulness of imitation did not provide the only reason for aesthetic pleasure. He signalled that specific qualities of rendering could also lead to enjoyment, even when comparison with the rendered motif is impossible. In Aristotle’s Poetics, imitation is a key process that leads to representation, but not the only quality of representation. Worringer appreciative towards Aristotle and Greek Classicism in Abstraction and Empathy, yet underscores the excessive reliance of his contemporaries on Classicism. Explaining that Classical art makes visible a state of balance between human beings and the world,13 Worringer nevertheless looks down upon the inspiration his own contemporaries derive, he claims, specifically from Aristotle’s theory of imitation.14 Yet Worringer points out that scientific thinking and philosophy originated in Greek culture,15 which became a point of reference for conceptual work during his time. Despite Worringer’s composite viewpoint 10 Ibid., 7. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 128. 14 Ibid., 102, 127. 15 Ibid., 102. 229 with regard to Classicism, Abstraction and Empathy finds inspiration in Classical rhetoric (the art of spoken and written persuasion), especially concerning the role of antithesis in the structuring of discourse. Powerfully drawn contrasts intensify Worringer’s leading strands of thought throughout his book. Antithesis, hardly by coincidence, is singled out for its persuasive effect in Aristotle’s Rhetoric (c. 350 B. C.). Both persuasion and reasoning could be employed to explore opposite aspects of a topic, Aristotle explained in his text:16 when placed in antithesis, facts gained clarity, and the arguments of opponents could be countered. Even when facts did not suit opposite viewpoints equally well, Aristotle remarked that rhetoric could articulate opposite conclusions and remain unbiased at the same time. In rhetoric as discussed by Aristotle, intellectual exercise mattered more than factual validity. According to Aristotle, rhetorical success relied on prose that was either continuous (or free- running), or antithetical and condensed.17 Aristotle regarded antithesis as both effective and enjoyable in rhetorical argument. He wrote: ‘Such a form of speech is satisfying, because the significance of contrasted ideas is easily felt, especially when they are thus put side by side, and also because it has the effect of a logical argument; it is by putting two opposing conclusions side by side that you prove one of them false. Such, then, is the nature of antithesis.’ 18 Simply organized and clearly stated, antithesis seems to rely on reason, Aristotle commented; however, he explained that antithesis actually appealed to feelings in its presentation of opposites. Simplicity and order appeared to serve logic in rhetorical discourse; yet Aristotle remarked that both these means of organization actually aimed to elicit emotional responses. Aristotle’s Rhetoric recommended the use of antithesis in sayings intended to be memorable and lively. 19 The decisiveness and alertness of discourse depended on antithesis, Aristotle remarked. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Abstraction and Empathy certainly reflects Aristotle’s observations. Defining empathy and abstraction from an antithetic 16 Aristotle and W. Rhys Roberts, Rhetoric (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University, 2010 [c. 350 B. C.]), 6. 17 Ibid., 169. 18 Ibid., 171. 19 Ibid., 179-180. 230 perspective in the first pages of his text, Worringer establishes salient profiles for these psychological urges. His demonstration is engaging and memorable, even where art as made visible throughout its history may not support Worringer’s argument. Worringer’s rhetoric: Neil Donahue, Geoffrey C. W. Waite, and Joshua Dittrich The rhetorical approach practiced by Worringer has been the topic of recent critical explorations. For instance, in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (1995), Neil Donahue remarks that the work of Worringer relies significantly on rhetoric.20 In Donahue’s words: ‘He [i. e., Worringer] was never primarily a systematic, “scientific” scholar, but rather a rhetorician and cultural theorist of art and aesthetics. He wrote about general ideas in aesthetics in broadly historical terms, with a simple, powerful rhetoric that assured both an audience outside the academy and deep suspicion or even resentment within it.’ 21 Worringer’s construction of discourse has, Donahue comments, an important ingredient to succeed in terms of persuasion: simplicity, which yields discursive power. The simplicity Donahue highlights is particularly visible in Worringer’s antithetical framing of his argument. Pointing to the engagement of Worringer with the art of his time, Donahue mentions the speculative, engaged and creative aspects of Worringer’s scholarly approach – in other words, the rhetorical element on which Worringer’s writing relies. In 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism' (1995 [1981]), Geoffrey C. W. Waite inquires into the rhetorical structure of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy.22 He notices the discursive roles assumed by Worringer in his text; for instance, Waite observes that the history and psychology of style, the psychoanalysis of fear, the technique of the sacred, and cultural criticism, are all integral to Worringer’s discourse from Abstraction and Empathy.23 To articulate a personal direction 20 Donahue, 'Introduction: Art History or "Sublime Hysteria"?', 2. 21 Ibid. 22 Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism'. 23 Ibid., 23. 231 of research, Worringer, according to Waite, establishes the defining traits of the urge to abstraction and reshapes reductively Lipps’ interpretation of empathy. Worringer’s approach to empathy silences the subtlety of Lipps’ Aesthetics, Waite explains.24 He remarks that Abstraction and Empathy includes value judgments supporting abstraction and irrationality rather than representation and reason –25 judgments relying on rhetorical power rather than reflection in their defence of abstraction in art-making. For Waite, the articulation of Worringer’s discourse in Abstraction and Empathy makes it difficult for this text to be considered a classic,26 even in the context of modernity. 27 Indeed, as Waite points out, it is tenuous to associate Worringer’s text with the idea of Classicism; yet, while Worringer himself stood against Classicism, he remains its student and employed its methods of organizing discourse. A distinctive mechanism is at work in Abstraction and Empathy as read by Waite; this mechanism transforms Worringer’s historical and philosophical signposts into rhetorical figures of reference. According to Waite, key characters of Worringer’s text such as ‘Theodor Lipps’, ‘the “pure” Greek’, and ‘Gothic style’, become indicators of Worringer’s intentions and wishes – in other words, they are load-bearing elements in Worringer’s subjectivist argument rather than entities that assume self-standing historical, aesthetic, or artistic profiles.28 Signalling that Worringer does not separate between art-viewing and art-making in Abstraction and Empathy, Waite addresses the ambiguity of Worringer’s antithesis between empathy (which is perception-based, according to him) and abstraction (which, Waite notes, rather refers to the activity of art-making).29 Waite thus questions Worringer’s key method of discourse, further arguing that Worringer writes empathically about abstraction, and 24 Ibid., 23-25. 25 Ibid., 27. 26 Holdheim nevertheless opens his essay by pointing to the ‘classic’ status of Abstraction and Empathy in the second part of the twentieth century. Holdheim, 'Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding', 339. 27 Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism', 16. 28 ‘Subjectivism’ is the term Worringer employs to describe the aesthetic inquiries during modern times; he contrasts subjectivism with objectivism, and conducts a subjectivist inquiry in Abstraction and Empathy. (Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4.) As previously defined for the purposes of this thesis, subjectivism refers to an emphasis on inner processes and responses to the world; objectivism, on the other hand, seeks to reflect the connections between the observing self and the outer world. 29 Indeed, Worringer’s antithesis is not polar because its terms are not direct opposites, as this thesis has shown. 232 approaches empathy in a distanced manner.30 The memorability of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy relies on the persuasive power of the text; this power, Waite observes,31 is often beyond Worringer’s rational control. The uncontrollable aspects of Worringer’s discourse are also underscored by Joshua Dittrich, who analyses the rhetorical structure of Worringer’s text, and Worringer’s account of inorganic life, in ‘A Life of Matter and Death: Inorganic Life in Worringer, Deleuze, and Guattari’ (2011). Inorganic life is a key figure of thought in Worringer’s work; according to Dittrich, the expressive heightening observed by Worringer in the Gothic line is also specific to Worringer’s interpretation.32 Dittrich recognizes the complexity and instability of Worringer’s argument in Abstraction and Empathy,33 analysing its conceptual oscillation between the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction.34 Abstraction and Empathy, according to Dittrich, is a rhetorical performance,35 where history itself becomes a figure of discourse.36 However, Dittrich points out that rhetoric does not resolve the articulation of the relationship between the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction. Thus Worringer’s antithesis between urges remains undecided,37 and the conceptual coexistence of urges in ‘inorganic life’ appears unstable, Dittrich argues.38 While antithesis supports the rhetorical aspects of Worringer’s argument, it does so, Dittrich claims, without providing Worringer with an alternative approach.39 Dittrich implicitly points to the circularity of Worringer’s demonstration from Abstraction and Empathy – a characteristic of discourse that had become evident to Waite as well.40 The rhetoric of antithesis, for Dittrich, is without exit in Worringer’s text. Nevertheless, in his own binary terms, Worringer suggested that the interplay of opposites was actually observable throughout the course of the 30 Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism', 29. 31 Ibid. 32 Dittrich, 'A Life of Matter and Death: Inorganic Life in Worringer, Deleuze and Guattari', 256. 33 Ibid., 242-243. 34 Ibid., 244, 252, 289. 35 Ibid., 245. 36 Ibid., 253. 37 Ibid., 244, 252, 258. 38 Ibid., 252. 39 Ibid., 258. 40 Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism', 30-31. 233 history of art. Worringer may not venture too far from the antithetical situations he defines and defends in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic; yet, by addressing abstract- representational interplay, he indicates where an exit from antithetical situations could be found. Organizing Worringer’s argument from Abstraction and Empathy, antithesis becomes a key methodological choice for Worringer. However, antithesis serves the purposes of persuasion rather than science in Worringer’s handling – Donahue, Waite and Dittrich draw attention to the reliance of Worringer on rhetoric in this respect. Dissatisfied with the impact of Classicism on the art and scientific inquiries of his own time, Worringer nevertheless employs Classical rhetorical devices extensively in Abstraction and Empathy. Aristotle’s writings prove to have influenced Worringer’s articulation of argument and interpretive technique more than Worringer would have perhaps desired. Kant, Schopenhauer, Riegl, Wölfflin, antithesis Before Worringer, antithesis was widely employed in philosophical and art historical research; for instance, antithesis, or binary opposition, features extensively in Kant’s analytic discussions from The Critique of the Power of Judgment, and is considered by Schopenhauer a key relational aspect imposed by will onto the world. However, in the approaches of Kant and Schopenhauer, opposition is less emphasized than in the opening chapter of Abstraction and Empathy. Contrast receives nuanced employment in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. To articulate contrast, separations (or divisions) between terms of inquiry are necessary in philosophical practice, as The Critique of the Power of Judgment shows.41 Kant posits that the absence of division brings along a lack of clarity – an undesirable feature for cognitive work employing concepts. Division, he explains, sets principles in contradiction; this is a dynamic specific to philosophical discourse. For Kant, divisions can be two-fold or three-fold; he 41 Kant explains: ‘... [A]ny division... always presupposes an opposition between the principles of the rational cognition belonging to the different parts of a science.’ Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 59, 60. See Introduction (I). 234 defines two-fold divisions as oppositional and analytic (such a division is operated by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy, for instance), and three-fold divisions as synthetic and concept-productive.42 Kant notes his preference for three-fold divisions.43 In his approach to the writing of philosophy, differentiation and synthesis are preferred to opposition alone. The dynamic of differentiation can be observed at work in Kant’s approach to the beautiful and the sublime.44 According to Kant, beauty pleases freely, subjectively and universally, in the absence of concepts of reason.45 Beauty, Kant explains, retains its free purposiveness even when it becomes partially intellectualized due to its association with an idea. For him, beauty is associated with the form of objects, with imagination at play, and with indeterminate concepts of understanding.46 As to the relationship between the beautiful and the sublime, Kant finds that they both arise from reflective judgment, and please without a purpose.47 However, Kant points out that the sublime offers satisfaction through its very challenge to senses – a challenge due to the object-free magnitude or dynamism of its manifestations.48 The feeling of the sublime, Kant explains, leads to negative pleasure because it emerges in response to formless phenomena, while beauty produces positive pleasure due to its association with form-bound objects. Kant argues that, in the case of the sublime, reflection itself is being contemplated. In other words, 42 Ibid., 82-83. See Introduction (IX). 43 Ibid., 82. See Introduction (IX). 44 Ibid., 31-50, 82-83, 95-134. In his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant offers multiple definitions of beauty, or the beautiful, and the sublime. He explains, for instance, that beauty is ‘... the form of purposiveness of an object, insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end.’ (———, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 120. See ‘Definition of the beautiful inferred from this third moment’.) Further on, Kant defines the sublime as ‘...that which is absolutely great... That is sublime which even to be able to think demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses.’ (———, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 131, 134. See § 25: ‘Nominal definition of the sublime’.) However, these are only two of the definitions that Kant supplies for the beautiful and the sublime respectively. Kant’s contrast between the beautiful and the sublime arises from an accumulation of differentiating observations on nature, art, and the responses of viewers with regard to them. 45 For instance, Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 97-98, 107-120. See § 7: ‘Comparison of the beautiful with the agreeable and the good through the above characteristic’; § 13-17. 46 Ibid., 90-104. See § 2-9; for instance: ‘Definition of the beautiful derived from the first moment. Taste is the faculty of judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful’; § 6: ‘The beautiful is that which, without concepts, is represented as the object of a universal satisfaction’; ‘The definition of the beautiful drawn from the second moment. That is beautiful which pleases universally without a concept’. 47 Ibid., 128-131. See § 23: ‘Transition from the faculty for judging the beautiful to that for judging the sublime’; § 24: ‘On the division of an investigation of the feeling of the sublime’. 48 Ibid., 128-142. See § 23-27. 235 according to Kant, the sublime surfaces not in objects or phenomena, but in the mind of the viewer.49 Kant employs opposition to differentiate between the beautiful and the sublime. However, he analyses the sublime and the beautiful from a variety of angles, so that their opposition is never singular or monolithic, but remains open to continued reflection. As Kant shows, the sublime and the beautiful do not compete for the same place in subjective attention: seeing objects as beautiful does not diminish, contradict, or cancel out the possibility to have sublime experiences. The opposition Kant articulates between the beautiful and the sublime remains inclusive of both terms, further illuminating them in the course of his analysis. 50 For Worringer, the opposition between the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction begins by being polar – in other words, extreme. However, in the course of his argument from Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer points to the coexistence of the two urges in art. He observes the common artistic grounds between representation and abstraction, yet continues to emphasize opposition as a key method of inquiry throughout his text. When Worringer addresses Gothic art, negative satisfaction comes to the fore, even though Gothic brings abstract and representational tendencies together. Kant draws attention to the analytic potential of two-fold divisions; for Worringer, the analysis of urges and modes of art-making mostly reinforces their opposition –51 therefore, his personal point of view.52 49 Kant focuses on discussing the beautiful and the sublime as experienced in the contemplation of nature, pointing out that the same principles can be applied to the discussion of art. (Ibid., 129-130, 179-183. See § 23; also, § 42: ‘On the intellectual interest in the beautiful’, and § 43: ‘On art in general’.) His discussion of the sublime in terms of negative satisfaction could be connected to Worringer’s approaching abstraction in terms of negative empathy; however, for Kant the sublime is not object-based. See ———, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 136. (See § 26: ‘On the estimation of magnitude of things of nature that is requisite for the idea of the sublime’.) Worringer, on the other hand, analyses the urge to abstraction as materialized in art-making throughout Abstraction and Empathy. 50 Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 128-130. See § 23: ‘Transition from the faculty for judging the beautiful to that for judging the sublime’; § 24: ‘On the division of an investigation of the feeling of the sublime’. 51 Worringer stated his interest in subjectivist approaches at the very beginning of Abstraction and Empathy; therefore, opposition could be regarded as his personal, ‘subjective’ preference in point of methodology. 52 Waite signals the relevance of circularity with regard to Worringer’s discourse, both in the 1948 foreword to Abstraction and Empathy, and in Abstraction and Empathy. See Waite, 'Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: Remarks on Its Reception and on the Rhetoric of Its Criticism', 30-31. 236 Worringer’s opposition to aesthetic viewpoints he regards as generally accepted is a distinctive feature of his strategy of research.53 In Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, for instance, Classicism is associated with a balanced relationship between human beings and the world.54 However, Worringer notes the cultural dominance – therefore, the negative aspect – of Classicism in his epoch.55 The rhetorical strategy of opposition allows Worringer to build a strong profile for his discourse; his discussing the relationship between urges, as well as between modes of art-making, follows the same predominantly antithetic pathway. The writer having inspired Worringer’s articulation of polar antithesis between psychological urges is, according to Worringer, Schopenhauer.56 ‘... [O]pposites throw light on each other’, Schopenhauer remarked in The World as Will and Representation;57 for him, the root of opposition in the world is will, the force that gives the world its existence. Schopenhauer argues that will, striving to find objectification (or materialization), assumes various forms that enter oppositional relationships. Phenomena of higher objectification subdue and incorporate phenomena of lower objectification, in search for the highest objectification attainable, Schopenhauer explains.58 According to him, opposition characterizes the operation of natural forces.59 For instance, Schopenhauer notices opposition, subordination and assimilation at work in the relation between gravitation and magnetism, or between plants and animals. Yet Schopenhauer also points out that, in art, knowledge can operate independently from the pressures of will.60 53 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4-9. 54 Ibid., 28-29, 32, 128. 55 Ibid., 127. 56 Ibid., 10, 137. 57 Schopenhauer and Payne, The World as Will and Representation, 207. 58 Ibid., 145-152. For instance, Ideas are objectifications of will for Schopenhauer; in this respect, he follows Plato rather than Kant. Kant regards ideas as concepts of reason, and aesthetic ideas as intuitions of the imagination. See Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 117-18. Also see Arthur Schopenhauer and E. F. J. Payne, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1969 [1819]), xxii, 129-152, 202-209. Looking further into the relationship between the thought of Kant and Schopenhauer would very much exceed the scope of the current inquiry. 59 Ibid., 146-147. 60 Ibid., 152. 237 According to the absence or presence of opposition, Schopenhauer distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime.61 Will-less knowing, he explains, encounters no opposition when the viewer is engaged in contemplating the beautiful; in contrast, when experiencing the sublime, viewers must transcend the opposition arising between their will and the object of contemplation. Schopenhauer, like Kant, emphasizes the conflict that the experience of the sublime generates in the mind of the contemplating subject; yet, unlike Kant, Schopenhauer discusses the possibility of transitional steps between experiences of the beautiful and the sublime respectively. Subtle transitions from the beautiful to the sublime can be experienced in wintry landscapes, boundless planes or rocky deserts, according to Schopenhauer.62 In such places, he explains, human life is neither protected nor threatened; as a result, will-less contemplation comes to the fore. Schopenhauer thus draws attention to the fluidity of the boundaries between the sublime and the beautiful in contemplative experience. For him, observing and explaining the transitions between modes of aesthetic experience plays a part as important as highlighting distinctive features by means of opposition. Worringer also relies on opposition to distinguish between representation and abstraction in art-making. However, abstract-representational opposition softens where Worringer addresses the coexistence of abstraction and representation in the same epoch,63 as well as where Worringer explores the transition from one mode of art-making to another throughout history.64 History offers Worringer a repository of figures of reference: Classicism, Romanesque and Gothic are examined by him in terms of representation, abstraction, but also in terms of the meeting between modes of art-making.65 When articulating his theory, Worringer sets various approaches to art (and the urges that lead to them) in opposition; 61 Like Kant, Schopenhauer underscores the common ground between the beautiful and the sublime, namely their relationship to Ideas. He explains that, in the case of both the sublime and the beautiful, aesthetic contemplation has the Idea as its object. The sublime, Schopenhauer writes, finds its opposite in the charming, since the charming connects to appetites, stirs the will and interrupts contemplation. From this perspective, Schopenhauer disagrees with Kant’s discussing the beautiful and the sublime in terms of opposition. (Ibid., 200- 208.) 62 Schopenhauer and Payne, The World as Will and Representation, 203-207. 63 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 12. 64 Ibid., 79-80. 65 Ibid., 70-121. 238 however, when addressing art as made visible in the course of history, Worringer highlights abstract-representational interplay. Antithesis also supports the construction of argument in the writings of Worringer’s contemporaries. For instance, in his Late Roman Art Industry,66 Riegl contrasts between close viewing (or the tactile phase of art-making [Nahsicht]), and viewing from a distance (or the optical phase of art-making [Fernsicht]), in his discussion of the art of antiquity. 67 He remarks that close viewing invites an awareness of planes. According to Riegl, tactility, planarity and symmetry are preferred to optical recession in the art of ancient Egypt, since optical recession (as encountered in the art of the Late Roman Empire) suggests distance and deemphasizes materiality. The antithesis between close viewing and viewing from a distance provides Riegl with the possibility to explain historical changes of style in psychological terms. However, Riegl also points to the middle ground between these viewing modes: he addresses tactile-optical viewing as associated with experiencing Classical Greek art. Following Riegl, Worringer also underscores the balance observable in the art of Classical Greece; however, Worringer refers to the relationship between human beings and their environment when addressing Greek equipoise.68 For Riegl, antithesis supports critical, historical and psychological aspects of inquiry, yet does not become a key method of his investigations: it is a mode of drawing attention to differentiations between artistic approaches through time. Placing pairs of terms in antithesis is a procedure employed by Worringer as well as Wölfflin in their organization of argument. Wölfflin, in Principles of Art History (1915),69 illuminates the key concepts that inform art-viewing by means of binary opposition. He treats the alliance between form and personal expression with caution;70 for him, processes such as the 66 Worringer comments on Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry in Abstraction and Empathy. (Ibid., 9, 93-94, 136.) Further explorations of the connection between the two books are necessary, yet require much more emphasis than the current thesis can provide. 67 Previous sections have addressed this aspect of Riegl’s argument; see ‘Representation and abstraction in art- making: Worringer’s perspective’. 68 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 45-46. 69 At the time of writing Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer was an admirer of the work of Wölfflin. (Ibid., 137-138.) 70 Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1950 [1915]), 226. 239 transition from linear to painterly seeing emerge from experiencing – a mode of engagement which is not necessarily emotional, since apprehension and representation appear to Wölfflin in their formal, rather than expressive, guise.71 Wölfflin considers that an exclusive focus on the history of expression entails significant risks, since expression reflects differently in artistic form through time.72 He disagrees with approaching the history of art in terms of growth, apogee and decay. 73 Instead, Wölfflin proposes to focus on highlighting basic concepts that inform artistic development within given historical epochs. He organizes these concepts in five binary pairs: linear and painterly, plane and recession, closed and open form, multiplicity and unity, clearness and unclearness. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer considers that writing about art must account for psychological as well as formal factors.74 He notes that his inquiry focuses on general aesthetic categories; in other words, Worringer chooses to address forms of art that encourage the emergence of ‘elementary aesthetic feelings,’ and that facilitate theoretical discourse.75 Abstraction and Empathy thus engages with the art of ancient Egypt and Greece, with Oriental and Byzantine art, with Gothic and Renaissance art. Addressing landmark styles from the history of art provides Worringer a ground of investigation that has already won the favour of his contemporaries. However, Worringer supports the writing of a ‘history of feeling about the world’ where the variations of personal responses to life contexts are discussed in connection to art.76 The intuitive analysis of personal feeling takes place in reference to aesthetically accepted approaches to art-making in Abstraction and Empathy. 71 Ibid., 229. In the words of Wölfflin: ‘All five pairs of concepts [i. e., linear and painterly, plane and recession, closed and open form, multiplicity and unity, clearness and unclearness] can be interpreted both in the decorative and imitative sense. There is a beauty of the tectonic and a truth of the tectonic, a beauty of the painterly and a definite content of the world which is manifested in the painterly, and only in the painterly, style, and so on. But we will not forget that our categories are only forms – forms of apprehension and representation – and that they can therefore have no expressional content in themselves. Here it is only a question of the schema within which a definite beauty can manifest itself and only of the vessel in which impressions of nature can be caught and retained.’ Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, 227. 72 Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, 226. 73 Ibid., 12-17, 226-227. 74 Ibid., 13, 30-31. 75 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 30-31. Also see, from the current thesis, ‘ “Common to all”: form for Kant and Worringer’. 76 Ibid., 13. 240 The approach Wölfflin employs in Principles of Art History favours the examination of experience rather than feeling. In Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, Wölfflin had also addressed architectural form from the perspective of experience; yet, in this earlier study, the association of empathy and form surfaced more readily. Wölfflin had underscored that inanimate architecture could reveal its lifelikeness, its expressiveness, when compared with the human body. Attempting to understand built structures by means of imitation could reveal the organic qualities inherent in abstract form, Wölfflin explained.77 The imitation of architecture’s forms could lead to personal experiencing. Unlike Worringer, Wölfflin refers to imitation rather than feeling when approaching art that is difficult to understand; yet imitation appears to Wölfflin as a mode of embodied personal engagement, and supports a responsive – if unemotional – interpretation of inanimate form.78 In Principles of Art History, Wölfflin focuses on the concepts discernible in artistic expression. He prioritizes style and form in his search for key features of representation, and addresses various approaches to art-making during Renaissance and Baroque.79 Selecting the main terms of investigation and distinguishing between them from changing perspectives, like Kant in his own approach to analysing the beautiful and the sublime,80 Wölfflin organizes his findings by means of antithesis. In Principles of Art History, empirical concepts of increasing generality, as well as differentiation by means of contrast, play important parts. The structural clarity of Principles of Art History relies on Wölfflin’s employment of antithesis. One of his pairs of antithetic concepts brings together the linear (or limiting) and the painterly (or limitless) in art. Like Riegl in Late Roman Art Industry, Wölfflin explains linearity by association with the sense of touch and physical proximity, and painterliness by 77 For a discussion of empathy in Wölfflin’s Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, see previous subchapter on empathy. Also see Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture’ in Empathy, Form, and Space : Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, ed. Harry Francis Malgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: University of Chicago Press, 1886), 152-161. 78 Wölfflin’s approach to the experiencing of form emphasizes embodied aspects, but not emotion; his thought differs in this respect from Lipps’ theory, where complete apperceptive understanding includes an emotional aspect. See Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 30-31. 79 Ibid., 13-16. 80 For the influence of Kant on Wölfflin’s approach to the writing of art history, see Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006), 101. 241 association with sight and physical distance.81 Wölfflin observes that the linear and the painterly characterize both vision and style, as when he writes: We can thus further define the difference between the styles by saying that linear vision sharply distinguishes form from form, while the painterly eye on the other hand aims at that movement which passes over the sum of things... The great contrast between linear and painterly style corresponds to radically different interests in the world. In the former case, it is the solid figure, in the latter, the changing appearance; in the former, the enduring form, measurable, finite; in the latter, the movement, the form in function; in the former, the thing in itself; in the latter, the thing in its relations.82 Unlike Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy, Wölfflin analyses the art of representation in Principles of Art History. He discusses representational works in terms of outline, interior and exterior form, mass, patch, or movement, thus eliciting their abstract qualities. Although he often refers to visual schemas in his discussions, Wölfflin nevertheless addresses the dynamic of abstract characteristics as found within representational art. Returning to Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy after engaging with Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History reveals a number of significant continuities and differences between these texts and the methodologies their writers employ. Both Worringer and Wölfflin discuss the relationship between psychological factors and artistic form; both employ antithesis to structure their respective discourses. The inquiries of Kant play a significant part for Worringer as for Wölfflin.83 In Abstraction and Empathy and in Principles of Art History, Worringer and Wölfflin bring to light specific qualities of form. On the other hand, Wölfflin’s carefully structured approach could not be more different from Worringer’s exploratory discourse. Wölfflin acknowledges the role of seeing and of embodiment at the same time, providing relevant points of reference for art historical analysis through his pairs of contrastive concepts. Instead, Worringer emphasizes the subjectivity of 81 Riegl and Winkes, Late Roman Art Industry, 24-27. 82 Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, 18-19, 27. 83 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 30, 130. Also, Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, 227. 242 his inquiry and his interest in positive as well as negative feelings and emotions. Transcendence interests Worringer more than embodiment. For him, the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction (which support the surfacing of representational and abstract modes of art-making) enter a relationship of disputation throughout history. This relationship is described by Worringer in the terms of argumentative discourse, and carries an implicit negative tinge. Worringer, unlike Wölfflin, does not work towards constructing a systematic approach to the aesthetics of representation. Where Wölfflin employs focus, simplification and synthesis to arrive at principles of wide applicability,84 Worringer persuasively asserts oppositional relations while proposing that antithetic terms can and should be regarded as equal. Worringer’s antithesis between representation and abstraction did not aim to assert value differences in art – at least, this is Worringer’s expressed intention.85 According to him, urges towards art-making as well as modes of art-making coexist in Gothic. Organizing Worringer’s perspective on representation and abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy, antithesis also characterizes Worringer’s thoughts on the relationship between human beings and their environments. He regards the connections between people and their contexts in terms of perpetual opposition.86 This state of tension – which becomes visible in 84 Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, vii-ix. 85 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 30-31. 86 Ibid., 30-31, 127. Worringer does not mention Hegel in either Abstraction and Empathy or Form in Gothic; however, Hegel’s nineteenth-century approach to antithesis as well as to the union of opposites is relevant to consider alongside Worringer’s early twentieth-century views. Hegel’s impact on German culture was pervasive at the time of Worringer’s writing Abstraction and Empathy; see, among many others, Glenn Alexander Magee, The Hegel Dictionary (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 5-8. Also, Robert Anchor, Germany Confronts Modernization: German Culture and Society, 1790-1890 (Lexington: Heath, 1972), 55-56. It is likely that Worringer, who studied in Berlin before completing Abstraction and Empathy in Bern, would have had the opportunity to engage with the ideas of Hegel, who taught at the Berlin University between 1818 and 1831, and served as University Rector from 1830. In his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1820-29), Hegel explains the meeting of Idea and reality in Symbolic, Classical and Romantic art. For Hegel, Classical art provides a point of unification between mind and senses (Worringer follows Hegel in this respect, arguing that Classical art creates a bridge between instinct and understanding; see Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 123-132). On the other hand, in Symbolic and Romantic art, reality and Idea diverge, according to Hegel. Hegel finds that Romantic art offers ground for the Idea to reach its perfect shape not in the external world, but in the inner world of human beings. He explains: ‘[In romantic art,]... the separation of Idea and shape, their indifference and inadequacy to each other come to the fore again, as in symbolic art, but with the essential difference, that, in romantic art, the Idea, the deficiency of which in the symbol brought with it the deficiency of shape, now has to appear perfected in itself as spirit and heart. Because of this higher perfection, it is not susceptible of an adequate union with the external, since its true reality and manifestation it can seek and achieve only within itself.’ See Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and T. M. Knox, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [1820-29]). Worringer, like Hegel, signals the antithesis between artists and 243 the urge to abstraction, according to Worringer – proves to reflect in Worringer’s opinions on life in the world. Antithesis informs Worringer’s views on art as well as existence. Apart from antithesis, interplay is another methodological figure observable in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. Abstract-representational interplay becomes particularly visible in Worringer’s discussions of art. Although he begins both Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic by assigning a guiding methodological role to antithesis,87 Worringer addresses the ‘amalgamation’ of representational and abstract elements in both books.88 their world; abstract art makes this separation most visible for Worringer. However, where Hegel regarded negative relationships as dynamic, arguing that separation could be overcome and the unity of opposites could be achieved (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 21), Worringer emphasizes antithesis in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. Regarding the interplay of abstraction and representation as another facet of antithesis, Worringer provides a key methodological role to antithesis in his writings. ‘Union’ between opposites is possible in Hegel’s aesthetics; instead, Worringer approaches relationships between art-making modes in terms of ‘counterplay and interplay’. 87 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4, 26, 34. Also, Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 1-4. 88 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 43-44. Also, Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 63-64, 87. 244 Gradation, displacement and transposition: alternatives to antithesis in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy Worringer reserves a leading methodological role for antithesis in Abstraction and Empathy, yet also explores alternatives to abstract-representational opposition. For instance, Worringer discusses processes such as gradation, displacement, and transposition (or transfer), which he notices in the course of history. In the concluding pages of his ‘Theoretical Section’ from Abstraction and Empathy, for instance, Worringer argues that representation and abstraction are manifestations of different degrees of distancing from organic existence.1 Instead of contrasting abstraction and representation, Worringer presents them as modes of art-making that reflect lesser or greater proximities from the world. Such a statement draws attention to the gradual rather than polar relationship of abstraction and representation, as well as to the possibility of their interplay. Gradation thus comes forth as a relational modality where the contrast between representation and abstraction need not be absolute. Displacement and transposition are gradual processes Worringer also addresses in Abstraction and Empathy. Displacement (or the substitution of one mode of art-making by another), can be observed during the transition from the Doric to the Ionic style of architecture;2 Worringer explains that abstract features as observable in Doric style still feature in the representation-oriented Ionic style, which combines abstraction and representation, yet gives preference to the urge to empathy. 3 The displacement of Doric style by Ionic style is not radical, according to Worringer, but leads to the incorporation of features of the displaced style. Abstract-representational interplay thus becomes visible during times of transition between epochs and modes of art-making.4 1 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 13, 23. 2 Ibid., 79-80. 3 Ibid., 80. 4 The transition from abstraction to representation is also addressed by Worringer, from the perspective of history, in Form in Gothic. Worringer explains that, in Classicism as observable in ancient Greek art, the features that characterized the world of ‘primitive’ people are no longer in sight: chaos turns into cosmos, fear and relativity are replaced by knowledge and objectivity, anthropocentrism becomes dominant, and the ground for opposition disappears. See Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 21. 245 If displacement operates in historical terms for Worringer, transposition takes place on spatial and formal grounds. Worringer observes transposition (or the embedding of one form of art into another) in the Classical art of ancient Greece, where architecture assimilates sculpture.5 He explains that, despite of the dominance of abstract features brought along by architecture and the necessities of construction, Greek artists soften the impact of abstract elements through the highlighting of lifelike, organic values. According to Worringer, a generic tendency can be observed where architecture meets sculpture. In his words: ‘... [I]f this architectonic regularity is of an organic kind, as in Greek architecture, the constraint within which sculpture lives also has an organic effect, as for instance in the figures of a pediment; if, on the contrary, it is of an inorganic kind, as in Gothic, the figures are drawn into the same inorganic sphere.’ 6 The sculptures that contribute to a building reflect, for Worringer, the predominant architectural aspects of that building. Underscoring the resonance between arts, Worringer signals that in architecture abstract and representational tendencies coexist and interact. Transposition also leads to emphasis on inorganic, abstract aspects in ancient Egyptian art, according to Worringer. Egyptian art, Worringer notes, displays strong tendencies towards abstraction, yet that, despite the effort of artists to create in an abstract style, representational elements still inform their works.7 For instance, Worringer argues that Egyptian artists endeavour to eliminate suggestions of three-dimensionality in sculpture, yet approach the heads of sculptures from the perspective of representation. The reverse process is also visible: Egyptian sculptures, according to Worringer, transform lifelike details into geometrical pattern, as can be seen in the rendition of fabric folds and hairstyles.8 An emphasis on planes, geometry, decoration, and the transmission of information through writing predominate in Egyptian art, Worringer comments. For him, the coexistence of abstraction and representation 5 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 88-89. 6 Ibid., 89. 7 Ibid., 91-93. 8 Ibid., 70, 85-86, 88-89, 92, 108-109. Worringer’s discussion of secular style and court style in ancient Egyptian art draws attention to the historical coexistence of representation and abstraction. In Worringer’s words: ‘That the Egyptians had acquired an easy mastery over material is shown by the statues of the secular art of the Old Empire, which have been sufficiently admired for their realism – the village mayor, the brewer, etc. And at the same time the statues in the court style, that is the authentic monumental art, exhibit an unvividness of form and a severity of style as great as any archaic statue. Something else must, therefore, have contributed to this style than technical incompetence, as the artistic materialists would have us believe.’ ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 85-86. 246 in the art of Egypt makes room for representation in abstract contexts, yet cultivates abstraction. The relationship between representation and abstraction thus receives a dynamic treatment in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy. Opposition remains Worringer’s principal method of relating abstraction to representation in his book. Yet Worringer also discusses other modes of approaching the abstract-representational relationship, such as gradation (psychological, of emotions, of abstract and representational elements), displacement (historical, of one style by another) and transposition (spatial and formal, of representational elements into abstract contexts and vice-versa). In contrast with opposition, gradation, displacement and transposition do not organize Worringer’s discourse in Abstraction and Empathy. They do not become generic concepts that direct investigation, such as Wölfflin’s ‘linear’ and ‘painterly’ from his Principles of Art History.9 However, Worringer’s discussion of gradation, displacement and transposition reveals his interest in various facets of the abstract-representational relationship in art. Opposition simplifies and stabilizes Worringer’s approach to the relationship between abstraction and representation in Abstraction and Empathy. Nevertheless, Worringer’s attention to the unfolding of processes of gradation, displacement and transposition adds an exploratory edge to his inquiry. Abstraction and representation, two modes of art-making that might have been restricted to antithesis, actually receive a dynamic reading in Abstraction and Empathy. In his approach to psychological urges and to modes of art-making, Worringer is not content with the employment of opposition alone; he diverges from it to investigate its alternatives, and to reveal what opposition is bound to leave aside: the meeting ground of abstraction and representation. Gradation, displacement and transposition make visible various forms of interplay between representation and abstraction in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy. Pointing to the interplay of abstraction and representation throughout Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer notes that the meeting of representation and abstraction informed art-making since ancient times. Psychological urges to empathy and abstraction could be noticed operating side by side 9 Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, 14-15. 247 within the same epoch, Worringer argues. He implies that the historical coexistence of representational and abstract modes of art-making occasions various forms of interplay. From a psychological viewpoint, Worringer considers that specific styles of art-making reflect the enjoyment that artists and viewers derive from art. ‘Every style represented the maximum bestowal of happiness for the humanity that created it’, Worringer notes.10 He observes that styles – generally understood as specific creative approaches developed throughout history – give various forms of expression to happiness.11 He thus connects art- making to emotion – personal, as well as shared – rather than to externally imposed requirements. From this perspective, art appears as an activity depending on the expressive will of its makers,12 in all its forms. His comment is inclusive of representational expression, of abstract expression, and, last but not least, of the possibility of abstract-representational interplay [Wechselspiel in Abstraction and Empathy, Ineinanderspiel in Form in Gothic].13 Interplay (a multifaceted, inclusive process of relating between phenomena, thoughts, domains, or modes of art-making) becomes visible for Worringer in art, as well as in the natural world. In the opening pages of Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer asserts the independence of art from nature, and the equality of art to nature.14 He readdresses the relationship between nature (or the world as observed by human beings)15 and art from a psychological perspective at various points in his book, observing that the urge to empathy manifests in celebration of organic life, while the urge to abstraction signals a tendency to take distance from the world. For Worringer, the need of tranquillity he recognizes in Eastern art arises from seeing the world as flux, as an entanglement of interrelationships.16 Imaginatively assuming the perspective of the Eastern artist or viewer, Worringer explains that the state of interplay characteristic of phenomena is arbitrary and tormenting.17 Observed 10 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 13. 11 Worringer employs the term ‘style’ generically, as well as with reference to the urge to abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy. See, from the current thesis, ‘Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory’. 12 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 9. 13 See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 30. Also, Worringer, Form in Gothic, 44. 14 Ibid., 3-4. 15 Ibid., 3. 16 Ibid., 14-17. 17 For Schopenhauer, the world is in constant fluctuation: ‘Eternal becoming, endless flux, belongs to the revelation of the essential nature of the will.’ Worringer sees the world as a place of struggle, like 248 in the word of appearances and changes, interplay gives rise to abstraction and assumes a negative psychological connotation for Worringer. However, Worringer notes that the urge to abstraction does not lead to a complete exclusion of elements of environment. While the urge to abstraction can be considered antithetic to the urge to empathy, Worringer comments that to abstract could involve bringing representational elements and geometric elements together.18 This approach to abstraction in art-making, Worringer argues, has as a purpose the exclusion of temporality and change, yet does not renounce the depiction of objects in the world altogether. Worringer posits the coexistence of representational and abstract elements in cultural terms. Although he finds that the urge to abstraction receives its ultimate expression in Egyptian art,19 he observes that artists from different places in the world preferred to amalgamate abstract and representational elements.20 According to Worringer, Japanese art offers an opportunity to examine a mode of art-making that is fundamentally concerned with form, and at the same time organic.21 Ionic architecture (5th century B. C.), in contrast with Doric architecture (6th -5th century B. C.), seems to bring inanimate stone to life, Worringer comments.22 He also points to Byzantine style (c. 313-1453 A. D.) as inclusive of Hellenistic (c. 323-146 B. C.), Early Christian (c. 100-500 A. D.), and Oriental influences, therefore as a composite approach to art-making.23 Saracenic (or Islamic) arabesque balances, for Worringer, naturalism (or representation) and abstraction.24 In the interlaced ornament of Schopenhauer, yet associates the artistic manifestation of this struggle with abstraction-oriented art. Instead, Schopenhauer finds that art in all its forms is an opportunity of deliverance from the impositions of will, leading to pure contemplation and will-less knowing. (Ibid., 18.) Also, Schopenhauer and Payne, The World as Will and Representation, 149, 164, 184-267. 18 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 42. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 42-43. 21 Ibid., 55. Worringer writes: ‘The study of Japanese art in Europe must be accounted one of the most important stages in the history of the gradual rehabilitation of art as a purely formal organism, i. e. one that appeals to our elementary aesthetic feelings.’ 22 Ibid., 80. In the words of Worringer: ‘Whereas in the Doric temple the lofty, expressionless law of matter in its exclusivity frightens away all human empathy, in the Ionic temple all the sensations of life flow uninhibitedly in, and the joyfulness of these stones irradiated with life becomes our own joy.’ 23 Ibid., 96, 99-101, 104. 24 Ibid., 75. According to Worringer: ‘We find by analysis that this Saracenic ornament also represents a balance between abstraction and naturalism, but with a predominance of abstraction as pronounced as the predominance of naturalism in Greek ornament.’ 249 Northern Europe (c. 1000 A. D.), Worringer recognizes once more the interplay of representation and abstraction. He remarks: In spite of the purely linear, inorganic basis of this ornamental style, we hesitate to term it abstract. Rather it is impossible to mistake the restless life contained in this tangle of lines. This unrest, this seeking, has no organic life that draws us gently into its movement; but there is life there, a vigorous, urgent life, that compels us joylessly to follow its movements. Thus, on an inorganic fundament, there is heightened movement, heightened expression. Here we have the decisive formula for the whole medieval North. Here are the elements which later on, as we shall show, culminate in Gothic.25 Representational and abstract elements may cohabit in art; the degree of their interaction, Worringer notes, varies according to time and place. Distinguishing sharply between abstract and representational styles becomes increasingly difficult as Worringer turns his gaze towards art styles throughout history. Although Worringer posits that the urge to abstraction informs the beginnings of art-making,26 although he emphasizes the opposition of representation and abstraction in order to highlight their formal specificities and psychological points of emergence,27 addressing art (even in its most generic instances) eventually leads his argument towards an acknowledgment of the interplay between representation and abstraction. In the last chapter of Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer analyses Gothic art at length. He points out that Greek architecture primarily highlights organic values, while Egyptian architecture brings to the fore abstract values.28 Gothic architecture presents a third avenue of artistic investigation; according to Worringer: A third possibility now confronts us in the Gothic cathedral, which indeed operates with abstract values, but nonetheless directs an extremely strong and forcible appeal to our capacity for empathy. Here, however, constructional relations are not 25 Ibid., 76-77. 26 Ibid., 15. 27 Ibid., 4-23. 28 Ibid., 112-114. 250 illuminated by a feeling for the organic, as is the process in Greek temple building, but purely mechanical relationships of forces are brought to view per se, and in addition these relationships of forces are intensified to the maximum in their tendency to movement and in their content by a power of empathy that extends to the abstract. It is not the life of an organism which we see before us, but that of a mechanism.29 Worringer observes that the Gothic cathedral combines representational and abstract elements. Abstraction is specific to the architectural context of Gothic for him; nevertheless, he also notes that a Gothic cathedral generates an empathic response similar to the one he had previously deemed specific for representational art. To differentiate between Greek and Gothic architecture, Worringer associates Greek temples with the concept of ‘organism’ (a living form where parts work to support the whole) and Gothic cathedrals with the concept of ‘mechanism’ (a constructed form capable of movement). Animation is a characteristic of both ‘organism’ and ‘mechanism,’ Worringer notes, yet in a mechanism the abstract, structural, willed component comes to the fore. For Worringer, the Gothic cathedral infuses abstraction with lifelike qualities; he finds that the interplay of mechanical forces (in other words, of forces that modify or transmit movement) is intensified in Gothic architecture, providing the quality of life to an inorganic construction. In Gothic, abstract-representational interplay manifests as the coexistence of opposites, according to him; ‘mechanism’ is a term Worringer employs metaphorically to characterize the meeting of abstract structure and lifelike movement. Worringer’s analysis of Gothic architectural style casts a new light on the title of his book, Abstraction and Empathy. Empathy and abstraction, two psychological urges Worringer initially approaches as opposite, actually interweave in art-making. In his analyses of the common ground of representation and abstraction, Worringer responds empathically to Gothic while addressing its formal qualities. He thus demonstrates that abstract structure can encourage empathy, and articulates this demonstration in psychological and formal terms. Worringer points to abstract-representational interplay at various stages of his argument, especially when addressing artistic styles throughout history. To begin, he notes that opposite 29 Ibid., 114-115. 251 forms of aesthetic experience can lead to the same effect: self-forgetting (or, in his terms, self-alienation). The urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction, according to Worringer, can be considered as gradations of a generic human need to leave the world behind in imagination, and concentrate on the contemplation of art instead.30 Highlighting the psychological and aesthetic common ground of the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction, Worringer prepares his examination of the meeting of these urges in art. When addressing the urge to abstraction as the key impulse in art-making,31 Worringer points to abstract form as made visible in the world of nature, namely in crystalline, inorganic entities. The separation between organic and inorganic aspects is thus not absolute, Worringer implies; an affinity exists between them.32 Claiming he does not wish to insist on such matters, Worringer rhetorically summons the nameless, generic figure of ‘a convinced evolutionist’ to articulate his own speculations. Such an evolutionist, Worringer writes, could argue that human beings harbour memories of inorganic natural laws within their organism. Thus the urge to abstraction could be considered a longing for the inorganic, which Worringer’s ‘evolutionist’ regards as a primitive form of the organic.33 In addition to the psychological and aesthetic commonalities of the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction, Worringer also provides an ontological background to the possibility of abstract- representational interplay in art. Positing that the urge to empathy connects to naturalism (or representation), Worringer also specifies that empathy may attach to abstract form. He personifies the need for empathy to intensify its claims, thus adding rhetorical edge to his discourse; in his words: ‘... the need for empathy abandons the sphere of the organic, that naturally falls to its lot, and takes possession of abstract forms, which are thereby, of course, robbed of their abstract value.’ 34 30 Ibid., 23-25. 31 Ibid., 34-35. 32 Ibid., 35. From this point of view, Worringer’s argument echoes the thought of Schopenhauer, who writes: ‘Indeed, since all things in the world are the objectivity of one and the same will, and consequently identical according to their nature, there must be between them that unmistakable analogy, and in everything less perfect there must be seen the trace, outline, and plan of the next more perfect thing. Moreover, since all these forms belong only to the world as representation, it can even be assumed that, in the most universal forms of the representation, in this peculiar framework of the appearing phenomenal world, and thus in space and time, it is already possible to discover and establish the fundamental type, outline and plan of all that fills the forms.’ Schopenhauer and Payne, The World as Will and Representation, 144. 33 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 35-36. 34 Ibid., 48. 252 As imagined by Worringer, the meeting between the urge to empathy and actual abstract art may acquire invasive nuances. Worringer associates the encounter between empathy and abstraction with Northern and Gothic art, but also with Greek art (for example, with the Vitruvian scroll).35 From his perspective – which in this instance seeks to elicit emotional effect by favouring vivid yet aggressive figures of discourse – abstract-representational interplay may be approached in terms of imposition and inequality.36 However, Worringer also notes the harmonious coexistence of representational and abstract tendencies in art. He observes that in Classical art the synthesis of Mycenaean naturalism (or representation) and Dipylon abstraction becomes visible;37 these two tendencies are balanced in ornamental forms such as the wavy line and the festoon, although the tendency towards naturalism and empathy predominates.38 Saracenic arabesque also balances abstraction and naturalism, Worringer comments, although he thinks the urge to abstraction becomes more assertive in this case.39 For him, Northern interlaced ornament is linear, inorganic, yet lifelike:40 another instance of abstract-representational interplay. Summarizing his previous findings, Worringer draws attention to the meeting of representation and abstraction in the art of early epochs. He regards this encounter as a compromise artists make when accounting for natural models.41 Once more, interplay receives a negative interpretation, which Worringer counterbalances by examining the various forms abstract-representational interplay assumes throughout history. For instance, Worringer explains that architecture imposes either its representational or its abstract aspect on the sculpture it incorporates. Greek temple sculptures tend towards representation, while Gothic cathedral sculptures tend towards abstraction, Worringer remarks.42 He notes that an overall inclination towards abstraction at work in Egyptian art, pyramids being foremost instances of abstract art for him. Nevertheless, he remarks that standing sculptures specific to the hieratic court style actually rely on the verisimilitude of representation in order to suggest 35 Ibid., 66. 36 The implicit ethics and politics of Worringer’s discourse, and the positioning of Worringer’s ideas within early twentieth-century European contexts, need to make the topics of different inquiries. 37 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 71-73. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 75-76. 40 Ibid., 76-77. 41 Ibid., 86-87. 42 Ibid., 88-89. 253 vitality. 43 Byzantine art also sets representation and abstraction in interplay; 44 Worringer considers it composite, although more pronounced tendencies towards abstraction inform its late stages. Abstract-representational interplay becomes highly visible in Worringer’s analyses of art from Abstraction and Empathy. 43 Ibid., 91-93. 44 Ibid., 93-101, 104. 254 Form in Gothic: interplay readdressed Worringer continues his research of the meeting between representation and abstraction in Form in Gothic,1 a text that expands on Worringer’s early insights and provides further articulation to his theoretical standpoint. Where Abstraction and Empathy contrasts the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction, and surveys their points of encounter in art-making, Form in Gothic offers a theoretical outline to Worringer’s views on the role of antithesis in the writing of art history and theory. 2 The last pages of Abstraction and Empathy contain an essay written by Worringer in 1910, the year when Form in Gothic is published. This essay, entitled ‘Transcendence and Immanence in Art’, contrasts Classical and non-Classical art, the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction, immanence (or the tendency of seeking, in religion and art, reference points within the world, as in pantheism) and transcendence (the tendency to seek reference points beyond the world, as in Christianity). 3 In ‘Transcendence and Immanence in Art’, Worringer argues that seeing art from one perspective only is limiting. He claims that, during his epoch, art is addressed mostly in the terms of Classicism; he therefore approaches Classicism by reference to Greek culture in Abstraction and Empathy, and finds fault with the emphasis his contemporaries place on the heritage of Greek culture and Classical art.4 1 Joanna E. Ziegler underscores the special place Gothic art holds in Worringer’s inquiries. She writes: ‘... Gothic for Worringer was a metaphysical and phenomenological metaphor, one that contained and illuminated the intangible, expressive, and spiritual ideas of the Gothic. To frame this within the terms of recent discourse, Worringer saw Gothic architecture as the supreme cultural product of the Gothic past and mind.’ Joanna E. Ziegler, 'Worringer's Theory of Transcendental Space in Gothic Architecture: A Medievalist's Perspective' in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, c.1995), 109. Focusing on Gothic art and conducting a detailed investigation of its history and reflection in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic would much exceed the scope of the current inquiry. 2 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer had followed, explained, and expanded upon Lipps’s distinction between positive and negative empathy. See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4-7. 3 Worringer explains: ‘To the polar contrast between empathy and abstraction, which we found applicable to the consideration of art, correspond in the domain of the history of religion and of world views the two concepts of intra-mundaneity (immanence), which is characterised as polytheism or pantheism, and supra-mundaneity (transcendence), which leads over to monotheism.’ (Ibid., 101.) Also, ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 131-135. 4 Worringer connects Classicism with European art practices. He notes that the art of Classical epochs is an art of empathy, of adjustment to the world, of immanence, of balance between instinct and understanding. He regards Classicism as having completed its historical trajectory in the time of Kant. For Worringer, the polar opposite of Classical art is non-Classical, transcendental art, as practised in early cultures and in the Orient. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 123-132. ‘Transcendence and Immanence in Art’ is included in the third edition of Abstraction and Empathy (published in 1910). 255 Classicism, for Worringer, is persuasively portrayed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749- 1832). As Worringer observes in Abstraction and Empathy, Goethe drew attention to the resonance between human beings and the world during Classical times.5 Indeed, in ‘Ancient and Modern’ (1818), Goethe enthusiastically addressed the characteristics of ancient Greek art. He highlighted that art-making depended on its contexts,6 as well as on the state of mind of the artist at the time of creation.7 Positing that viewers found pleasure in works of art produced skilfully, without struggle,8 Goethe held the astute observation of nature in high esteem.9 Art-making needed to address worthy topics in a nimble yet faultless style, according to Goethe. In his words: To see distinctly, to apprehend clearly, to impart with facility, — these are the qualities that enchant us; and when we maintain that all these are to be found in the genuine Greek works, united with the noblest subjects, the most unerring and perfect execution, it will be seen why it is we always begin and end with them. Let each one be a Greek in his own way, but let him be a Greek!10 For Goethe, ancient Greek art provided a point of reference that needed to be acknowledged for contemporary artistic excellence to be attained. Style (the complex yet personal accounting for the world by means of representation) nevertheless had humble origins according to Goethe:11 it started from faithful imitation. Explaining the concept of imitation in ‘Simple Imitation of Nature, Manner, Style’ (1789), Goethe inquired into the positive aspects of the process of imitation. The practice of looking and rendering, as well as the attention dedicated to form and colour, led to accuracy, clarity, diversity and expressive power in art-making, according to Goethe.12 By means of imitation, he commented, artists learnt to classify and connect forms, eliciting their distinctive particularities. Imitation 5 Ibid., 128. 6 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 'Ancient and Modern' in Goethe's Literary Essays, ed. J. E. Spingarn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921 [1818]), 65. 7 Ibid., 66. 8 Ibid., 66-67. 9 Ibid., 69. 10 Ibid. 11 ———, 'Simple Imitation of Nature, Manner, Style' in Goethe's Literary Essays, ed. J. E. Spingarn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921 [1789]), 60-62. 12 Ibid., 58-59. 256 supported the articulation of style,13 which communicated empirical knowledge, denoted the achievement of representational excellence, and commanded admiration.14 ‘Simple Imitation therefore labours in the ante-chamber that leads to Style’, Goethe remarked.15 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer disagrees with the praise of imitation;16 he regards it as characteristic for art practices of the past (such as the art of Antiquity or the art of Renaissance),17 but detrimental if exclusively employed by contemporary artists. Arguing against the cultivation of one perspective on art-making only, Worringer writes: As long as our historical endeavours continue to revolve around the one pole which we call art, but which is in fact only Classical art, our vision will remain restricted and conscious of only one goal. Only at the moment when we reach the pole itself do our eyes become opened, and we perceive the great beyond, that urges us toward the other pole. And the road that lies behind us seems suddenly small and insignificant in comparison with the infinitude that is now unfolded to our gaze.18 For Worringer, understanding a given form of art brings along an awareness of different art forms as well. Engaging with one pole of art-making is only a part of the journey involved in the writing of art history, according to Worringer. The picture Worringer draws still places representation and abstraction at opposite standpoints in the landscape of art; however, Worringer presents the unexplored pole as a territory awaiting discovery rather than as an undesirable alternative. Worringer’s readers are indirectly invited to share the writer’s sense of revelation when faced with a less familiar form of art. In ‘Transcendence and Immanence in Art’, the figure of polarity allows Worringer to point beyond polarity. Worringer employs polar antithesis as well as a subjectivist perspective in the articulation of his argument from Abstraction and Empathy. For him (as previous sections have noted), the relationship between the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction is introduced and described productively by means of antithesis. Subjectivism permits Worringer to combine aesthetic and psychological strands in his research, to adopt (by means of intuition and 13 Ibid., 59-60. 14 Ibid., 61-62. 15 Ibid., 62. 16 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 21, 26-29. 17 Ibid., 32, 36-37. 18 Ibid., 127. 257 imaginative reconstruction) the standpoint of viewers as well as artists in his writing, to speculate rather than demonstrate beyond doubt, and to favour persuasion. In Form in Gothic, Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory brings together antithesis and subjectivism once more, proposing an integrated view on their collaboration. History and Ego: Worringer’s approach ‘Historical Methods’, the opening chapter of Form in Gothic, explains Worringer’s theoretical model.19 Since he considers knowledge to be filtered through Ego, Worringer posits that knowledge is indirect and subjective.20 He aims to widen the span of knowledge yet maintain a subjectivist perspective; as such, he seeks to expand Ego through ‘... an ideal 19 Worringer, who focuses on generic aspects of art and human experience throughout the ages in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, assumes the perspective of intellectual history, or Geistesgeschichte, in his writings. W. Eugene Kleinbauer explains that Geistesgeschichte (a division of the history of ideas having evolved from the works of Hegel and nineteenth-century Romantic theories) is an approach to the writing of art history practiced predominantly in Germany since the second half of the nineteenth century. Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Dvořák and Erwin Panofsky are key figures of Geistesgeschichte, according to Kleinbauer; Dilthey, for example, considers that knowledge arises when a human being develops generic views on the world, or Weltanschauungen. For Dilthey, knowledge is produced not through intellect, but through ‘living experience’. Worringer, who writes after Dilthey, and who must have been familiar with Dilthey’s work, aims to provide a ‘living interpretation’ to art in Form in Gothic, as this section further explains. Indeed, the works of Worringer exhibit the qualities as well as the shortcomings of Geistesgeschichte. Worringer approaches art in an intuitive and engaged manner, emphasizing the connections between objects, feelings and ideas, yet does not provide specific information on artists and their works. Kleinbauer describes Geistesgeschichte practices as follows: ‘The history of ideas examines works of art as documents and illustrations of prevailing unit-ideas or idea complexes, for which reason the method possesses great value. At its best, the method reveals how ideas were understood systematically and clearly by artists and how they are embodied (or rejected) in their works. But the gain in our grasp of the intellectual attitudes of artists represents a loss in our grasp of the distinctive aesthetic qualities that characterise their individual works. The history of ideas treats the visual arts not as art but as intellectual phenomena. It clouds an understanding of the significance of art as art. At the same time, the method reminds us of the function of art history as a humanistic discipline: to try to understand, intellectually, the visual arts as products in time and space. To this end, the history of ideas can make, and indeed has made, a substantial contribution. See W. Eugène Kleinbauer, 'Geistesgeschichte and Art History', Art Journal, 30, No. 2, 1970- 1971, 148-153. I wish to thank Neil Donahue for drawing my attention to Kleinbauer’s article, as well as to its relevance with regard to Worringer’s methods of inquiry. On the topic of Geistesgeschichte, also see August K. Wiedmann, The German Quest for Primal Origins in Art, Culture and Politics 1900-1933 (Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, c. 1995), 3, 224-227, 230-231. (Wiedmann points to the empathetic, reader-oriented style of argument employed in early twentieth-century writings, which aimed to engage the emotions and imagination of the public. Wiedmann cites Dilthey with regard to the role of emotion in the writing of history. According to Wiedmann, Dilthey argues: ‘We need a felt history as a foundation, for the mind on its own... knocks in vain at the doors of the past.’) 20 The capitalization of the word ‘Ego’ acquires theoretical resonance in Herbert Read’s translation of Worringer’s text. The term ‘Ego’ points to Worringer’s intensified attention to the subjective aspects of his approach. 258 auxiliary construction of purely antithetical application’.21 This construct emerges, Worringer explains, from a duplication of Ego. One part of the construct is a positive Ego (which offers a firm basis of inquiry); the second part of Worringer’s construct is the ideal, theoretical, imaginary double of the Ego: its opposite pole, its direct antithesis. Addressing the history of art from the perspectives of both these aspects of Ego, Worringer aims to incorporate opposite viewpoints in his writings, and to attain greater reliability than when examining externally provided data. Since it is bound to assume a positive as well as a negative shape in Form in Gothic, the concept of Ego as introduced by Worringer attempts to supersede subjective limitations, thus reaching towards objectivity and generality. The concept of Ego allows Worringer to assert the only inquiry standpoint that he considers both valid and immediately available to him as a historian and theoretician of art. His implicit pessimism with regard to human knowledge (which also surfaces in his interpretation of abstraction) echoes Schopenhauer’s thoughts on will and its manifestations in the world. For Schopenhauer, will – the force that gives the world its reality, and the only core of every phenomenon –22 sets its own manifestations in opposition, creating situations of conflict, competition, and continuous change in the world. Schopenhauer recognizes the workings of will at all levels of existence. Life, according to Schopenhauer, is animated by relentless struggle aimed towards the self-assertion of opposing parties. In his words: Every grade of the will’s objectification fights for the matter, the space and the time of another. Persistent matter must constantly change the form, since, under the guidance of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena, eagerly striving to appear, snatch the matter from one another, for each wishes to reveal its own Idea... Yet this strife itself is only the revelation of that variance with itself that is essential to the will.23 When duplicating Ego and proposing to set its negative and positive aspects in dialogue, Worringer replicates the process of relating Schopenhauer observes in a world guided by will. Accepting implicitly Schopenhauer’s assertion that struggle and opposition are characteristic 21 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 2-3. 22 Schopenhauer and Payne, The World as Will and Representation, 118. 23 Ibid., 146-147. 259 for existence in the world, Worringer thus designs an inquiry where knowing emerges from the dialogue between protagonist and antagonist Ego facets. In his pursuit of a radical form of truth, Worringer confronts Ego with its imaginary opposite by highlighting a point of view and then accounting for its very antithesis. Paradoxically, in its own terms, Worringer’s perspective thus becomes both self-reliant and inclusive. The vital qualities of writing are important for Worringer. Abstraction and Empathy signals Worringer’s preoccupation with accounting for aspects of a history of feeling about the world; following from it, Form in Gothic draws attention to Worringer’s intention to provide a dynamic view on art. In Form in Gothic, the gaze of Worringer remains focused on emotion, not only as made visible in art, but also as re-presented through his writing. Duplicating Ego and placing its aspects in antithesis must lead to ‘... a living interpretation’,24 according to him. In other words, Worringer seeks to articulate an inquiry that brings actuality to his topics, that makes his subject-matter engaging. The role of Worringer as an interpreter of art thus comes to the fore, in accordance with his subjectivist intentions. To experience, imagine, and persuade become Worringer’s primary self-assigned responsibilities in Form in Gothic. Worringer’s process of interpretation reveals its workings in his discussion of Northern ornament. For Worringer, Northern line is intensely vital – even more so when encountering obstacles.25 After describing the moments of pause and acceleration of Northern line, Worringer explains that he approaches it as an expression of the process of art-making. In the words of Worringer: ‘For here, too, we ascribe to the line as expression the sensation of the process of its execution felt afterwards at the moment of its apperception.’ 26 Worringer observes and articulates his sensations in response to the rhythm of line. As in Lipps’ Aesthetics, apperception involves sensations, feelings, inner reflection and understanding; 27 it is a process specific to the urge to empathy for Worringer as well as Lipps.28 The interpretive approach practiced by Worringer thus reveals its consciously empathic component. 24 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 4. 25 Ibid., 43. 26 Ibid. 27 Lipps, Estetica. Psihologia Frumosului și a Artei, 30. 28 Ibid., 132-135. Also, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 7. 260 In his writings, Worringer seeks to communicate the dynamism and urgency of his inner experiencing. He brings forward the processes he feels were at work at the time of art- making, drawing attention to form and its intuited engendering. His interpretations animate rather than monumentalize art; however, the benefits of this process reflect less onto the discussed artworks themselves than onto Worringer’s own engaging style and argument. In Form in Gothic as in Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer’s attention is primarily devoted to the defence of his point of view and its exemplification throughout history. A gap thus emerges between art and Worringer’s approach to writing about it.29 Emphasizing inner experience, Worringer’s texts meet the conditions of creativity sooner than the requirements of scientific research. Interplay in naturalism As we have seen, Worringer theorizes his approach to opposition in Form in Gothic, explicitly assigning to antithesis the role of method of inquiry. Nevertheless, Worringer continues to point to the interplay between elements that, according to his thought from Abstraction and Empathy, could be considered antithetic. He observes the opposition and interplay of imitative and creative impulses in naturalism, for instance,30 distinguishing between the imitative impulse and the artistic, or creative, impulse. However, when naturalism approaches actuality, he points to the rapprochement of these opposites.31 29 Dittrich also signals the difference between the actual history of art and Worringer’s reading and writing of art history. See Dittrich, 'A Life of Matter and Death: Inorganic Life in Worringer, Deleuze and Guattari', 245. 30 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 19. As he had explained in Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer sees imitation to be distinct from naturalism. See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 11-13, 21, 26-33. 31 Worringer operates a distinction between naturalism and actuality in Form in Gothic. Read’s translation of Worringer’s words points to the possible – though unmentioned – influence of Hegel on Worringer’s thought. In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel explains that philosophy focuses on determining the actual. Hegel defines actuality as living self-statement and activity, not equivalent to nature and not necessarily bound to objects. In Hegel’s words, the actual is ‘... that which posits itself and is alive within itself – existence within its own Notion. It is the process which begets and traverses its own moments, and this whole movement constitutes what is positive [in it] and its truth... Appearance is the arising and the passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is “in itself'” [i. e., subsists intrinsically], and constitutes the actuality and the movement of the life of truth.’ See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arnold V. Miller, and J. N. Findlay, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977 [1807]), 7, 11, 13, 27. In Form in Gothic, Worringer’s use of the term ‘actuality’ is similar to Hegel’s; it is also anticipated by Worringer’s earlier statement that the work of art stands 261 Although he notes that urges to imitation and urges to artistic creativity may come to coexist in naturalist art, Worringer regards their simultaneous manifestation with anxiety. In his words: ‘... [T]he closer naturalism comes to actuality – without being in any way identical with it – the nearer in that case also the imitative impulse and artistic impulse approach the one to the other, and the danger of confounding the two becomes almost unavoidable.’ 32 Worringer’s comment reveals his unease regarding the manifestation of interplay in naturalist art. A state of interplay between opposites may bring along a loss of differentiation, he observes. Seen as threatening, the absence of differentiation could signal the absence, inapplicability, or obsolescence of boundaries, not to mention antithetic separations. And if the effectiveness of antithesis were to be questioned, a shadow of doubt would inevitably be cast upon Worringer’s own methodological choices.33 Interplay in the Gothic art of Northern Europe: memory, assimilation, interpolation Worringer expresses his reserve towards abstract-representational (creative-imitative) interplay in naturalist art; nevertheless, he continues to address interplay throughout Form in Gothic. For instance, he inquires into the meeting of abstraction and representation in the pre- Renaissance art of Northern Europe. The Gothic art of Northern Europe appears as the main historical and geographical site of interplay in Worringer’s Form in Gothic. Memory-based linear representations of animals lead to abstract-representational interplay in Gothic art, according to him. While Gothic apart from nature and is unconnected to it (Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 3.). However, nature is not actuality for Worringer. In Form in Gothic, Worringer clarifies his understanding of the term ‘actuality’ while drawing an intuitive psychological profile for the medieval Northerner. Worringer writes: ‘The outer world offered him [i. e., Northern man,] only confused interpretations of actuality. He grasped these impressions with all their details quite accurately: but their mere material imitation had not, so far, had any artistic significance for him, for it had not freed any one single impression of actuality from the universal fluctuating sequence of appearances; objective imitation first became art when these impressions of actuality were combined with intensified intellectual complexes of expression.' (Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 62.) According to Worringer, actuality can be extracted from appearance by means of intellectual and expressive input; only then can imitation become art. 32 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 19. 33 Worringer’s discomfort with regard to the semantic coverage of the term ‘interplay’ also informs his comments on Northern ornament. He mentions that interplay in Gothic art should not be understood as associated with playfulness, but rather as connected with metaphysic content. (Ibid., 39.) 262 representations of animals retain a generic resemblance with animals as observed in the world, Worringer notes that the actual species having inspired Northern designs is problematic to identify.34 In Gothic art, according to Worringer, animal figures seem to have made the subject of observation, yet are rendered as abstractions. Representation can thus become a process supportive of abstract-oriented art-making in Gothic, as Worringer underscores. Gothic style provides historical and artistic support for many of Worringer’s analyses of interplay. Like representation and abstraction, representational-abstract interplay emerges from specific forms of response to environment for Worringer. The psychological responses of Northern artists to their surroundings lead to the shaping of Gothic style; yet Worringer points to the distance Northern artists take from the rendition of environment. Pondering upon the liberating effect of art-making that develops independently from environment and senses in the Northern European context, Worringer writes: ... to Northern man, fettered as he was to a chaotic picture of actuality, the merging into such a world [i. e., a world of super-sensuous spiritual expression] must have been an ecstatic liberation. His artistic adjustment to the world could, therefore, only aim at assimilating the objects of the outer world to his specific language of line, that is to say, at interpolating them into this activity intensified and increased to its highest point of expression.35 Processes such as assimilation and interpolation embody the response of Northern artists to their contexts, Worringer notes. Since, according to him, artistic expression encapsulates the feelings of artists about the world,36 a situation where representation-reliant and abstraction- oriented elements meet could perhaps appear as harmonious. However, Worringer points out that liberation from the struggles of life could only be attained through abstraction. Northern artists accept their surroundings, yet still seek to be free from their oppression; as such, they introduce representations of beings and objects in otherwise abstract, linear works of art. 34 Ibid., 59-60. 35 Ibid., 62. 36 The connection between art and the expression of feeling is one of the main points of continuity between Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 5-8. 263 Assimilation – a formal process – leads to the inclusion of representational elements in abstract contexts, Worringer explains, while interpolation – the visible result of assimilation – reveals the presence of observational elements in abstraction-oriented art. Worringer also finds assimilation at work in ‘primitive’ (or prehistoric) times.37 ‘Primitive’ creators begin by eliciting key characteristics of the world of appearances; Worringer explains that representational yet modified elements are then brought to contribute to a language of line free of reference to embodiment or expression. He also notices assimilation in Classical art, where it manifests as the communion between people and their world. In Classicism, Worringer muses, people and place are at one, assimilated to each other, and coexisting in harmony.38 37 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 18. 38 Ibid., 22. 264 Schiller, Worringer, interplay Form in Gothic also explores the interplay of representational and abstract qualities as observed by Worringer in Greek art. In ‘The Principle of Classical Architecture’,1 Worringer explains that the will to form specific to Greek architecture is the transformation of abstract, inorganic constructions into lifelike presences.2 Keeping the temples of ancient Greece in mind, Worringer notes that their architecture seeks to reconcile opposite forces by reference to the organic world.3 Ionic temples, for instance, make visible organic characteristics despite their tectonic, earth-bound, inorganic support. Contrasting Doric and Ionic temples, Worringer writes: The structural limitations of the Doric temple and the consequent compression of its general proportions certainly make it ponderous, but they also give it its unequal solemnity and majestic aloofness. In the Ionic style everything is lighter, more flowing, more vital, more supple, more humanly approachable. What is lost in structural gravity is gained in expressive cheerfulness. All restraint due to the demands of the material itself, that is to say, due to structural laws, has vanished: the stone is made completely sensuous, is replete with organic life, and all restraints which constitute the power and grandeur of the Doric style are as it were playfully overridden. The Doric temple presents itself to us as a sublime drama, the Ionic as an exhilarating play of free energies.4 Associating Doric architecture with abstract qualities of form, Worringer sees the inclusion of and preference for organic characteristics come to the fore in Ionic style. A modulation of abstract features, and de-emphasis of structure as such, can be encountered in Ionic architecture, according to him. Signalling the element of play in Ionic architectural style, Worringer notes its organic aspect, nevertheless pointing to its abstract, tectonic fundament. 1 Ibid., 88-103. 2 Ibid., 92. 3 Ibid., 94. 4 Ibid., 103. 265 In Form in Gothic as in Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer resorts to the thought of Goethe in order to highlight the key characteristics of Greek antiquity and Classicism.5 Worringer emphasizes the connection observed by Goethe between art and nature, between human beings and their environment in ancient Greece. Indeed, to Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), one of Goethe’s closest friends, Goethe appeared as significantly and beneficially influenced by Greek art and culture. Writing to Goethe in 1794 (the year when their correspondence began), Schiller admiringly points out to him: Had you been born a Greek..., and had a choice Nature and an idealising Art surrounded you from your cradle, your path would have been infinitely shortened. Then would you, on the first contemplation of things, have seized the form of the Absolute, and with your first experience would the great art of representation have developed itself in you. But, being born a German, and your Grecian spirit having been cast in this northern creation, there was left to you no other choice, but either become a Northern Artist, or, by the help of the power of thought, to supply to your imagination that which reality withheld from it, and thus, from within outwardly and through a reasoning process, to create as a Greek.6 Schiller, focusing on Goethe’s pathway in German culture, highlights the cultural leap Goethe took in his cultivation of a Greek model of thought. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the culture of Greece appeared removed from the immediate interests of Schiller’s contemporaries. Yet by the time of the publication of Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer was criticising a reversed situation: Greek influence had become predominant to the point of effacing modes of research and art-making that questioned its framework. In 1797, three years after his early letter of praise to Goethe, Schiller underscored the effort of German writers to elicit the key features of Greek art; according to him, his peers intended to employ such features as a standard of beauty. Schiller was critical towards the excesses of this process, which he regarded as too reliant on reason.7 He disapproved of the attention his 5 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 115, 128, 138. Also, Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 21, 32. 6 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and George H. Calvert, Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe from 1794 to 1805 (New York and London: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), 5. 7 Ibid., 280. 266 contemporaries lent to subject-matter when articulating their judgments regarding beauty; according to him, beauty also had to be sought in artistic approaches as such.8 Wishing that beauty had no longer been a term of reference, Schiller commented that truth, in the most generic sense of the term, should make the preferred topic of inquiry in aesthetics. Schiller’s comments followed his earlier explorations of aesthetics from On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), an inquiry that took the form of a series of letters. Slow in the making, as Schiller mentioned to Goethe,9 On the Aesthetic Education of Man connects psychological and aesthetic preoccupations, and draws attention to the necessity of bridging the sensuous and formal drives by means of the play drive. Like Schopenhauer and Riegl, Schiller inquires into the role played by aesthetics in human life in On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Schiller shares with Schopenhauer a declared interest in the philosophy of Kant.10 Yet the cognitive and systematic components of Schiller’s inquiry come to support his social and relational interests. Where Kant focuses on an ample, systematic investigation of mind and cognition in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Schiller’s letters examine psychological and social dynamics with the intent of bringing clarity to self-understanding, as well as to the relations between human beings, their social contexts and the wider world. Schiller and Worringer articulate decisive oppositions. For Schiller, human beings must bring into accord two opposite laws that stress absolute reality, and absolute formality respectively. Schiller explains in his ‘Eleventh Letter’ that the law of absolute reality requires human beings to manifest their potential and to provide materiality to form. On the other hand, he observes that the law of absolute formality demands that human beings transcend materiality and find harmony in a world of changes.11 8 Ibid., 281. 9 Ibid., 33. 10 Friedrich Schiller, Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, and L. A. Willoughby, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967 [1794]), 3. To Schiller’s letter, Goethe replied on 27 August 1794 from Ettersburg: ‘For my birth-day, which falls in this week, no more agreeable present could have come to me than your letter, in which, with a friendly hand, you give the sum of my existence, and through your sympathy, encourage me to a more assiduous and active use of my powers.’ Goethe, Schiller, and Calvert, Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe from 1794 to 1805, 7. 11 Schiller, Wilkinson, and Willoughby, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, 77. 267 Reality and form also range among Worringer’s main topics of inquiry in Abstraction and Empathy. For Worringer, the urge to empathy connects human beings to reality, while the urge to abstraction (which signals the search of human beings for the absolute) emphasizes a tendency towards transcending reality. 12 Yet, unlike Schiller, Worringer highlights the oppositional aspects of the relationship between human beings and their environment in the case of the urge to abstraction, while Schiller finds that harmony is the ultimate goal of the law of absolute formality. However, the commonalities between the approaches of Schiller and Worringer become increasingly apparent as Schiller develops his argument in On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Placing the sensuous drive and the formal drive in antithesis in his ‘Twelfth Letter’, Schiller shows that the sensuous drive ties human beings to physical form, matter, time, changes and particularities. He continues by explaining that the formal drive can be considered as generative of laws and supportive of morality. Before him, Kant had also distinguished between the activity of senses (which he regarded to be influential in the empirical judgment of taste) and the interest in form (made visible, according to him, in the pure judgment of taste).13 Both the beauty of purposeless forms and the sublime of formless natural manifestations could be associated with moral feeling for Kant.14 Aesthetics could provide support in matters of ethics, according to Kant and Schiller. During his examination of the forces that shape human behaviour, Schiller bestows the same degree of attention as Kant onto constructing theoretical demonstrations of general validity. Instead, Worringer’s inquiry becomes increasingly specific and subjectivist as he develops his argument in Abstraction and Empathy.15 His explorations, as previous sections have highlighted, rely on antithesis as an organizational method. Antithesis plays an equally significant role in On the Aesthetic Education of Man. However, Schiller is more open to the interplay of opposites than Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. For instance, in his ‘Fourteenth Letter,’ Schiller argues that the 12Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 16-17. 13 Kant and Guyer, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 108. See § 14: ‘Elucidation by means of examples’. 14 Ibid., 150-151. See ‘General remark on the exposition of aesthetic reflective judgments’. 15 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4. Worringer differentiates his inquiry from the objectively oriented writings of Kant, Hegel or Schopenhauer by establishing a subjective viewpoint of investigation. 268 sensuous drive and the formal drive require each other, and set boundaries to each other’s activity. For Schiller, sensuous-formal antithesis ultimately place senses and form in interplay. 16 He considers the possibility of a simultaneous and conscious experiencing of the formal and sensuous drives. He ponders: Should there, however, be cases in which he [i. e., the human being] were to have this twofold experience simultaneously, in which he were to be at once conscious of his freedom and sensible of his existence, were, at one and the same time, to feel himself matter and come to know himself as mind, then he would in such cases, and in such cases only, have a complete intuition of his human nature, and the object which afforded him this vision would become for him a symbol of his accomplished destiny and, in consequence (since that is only to be attained in the totality of time), serve him as a manifestation of the Infinite.17 According to Schiller, if the antithetic sensuous and formal drives were to be experienced simultaneously and consciously, they would connect feeling and knowing, matter and mind. Schiller accepts that the integration of opposites can take place in response to an object; he considers that such an object would then become a materialized reminder of an experience beyond time and human limitations. In his ‘Fourteenth Letter,’ Schiller thus provides a sketch for the psychological field of interplay between opposite drives.18 The integration of the sensuous and formal drives generates the play drive for Schiller. He regards the play drive as distinct from the sensuous and formal drives respectively, and as opposite to them. Schiller employs antithesis to define and ascribe a specific field to the play drive, much like he had done for the sensuous drive and the formal drive. (Worringer does not assign the same degree of theoretical attention to interplay in Abstraction and Empathy.) Schiller sees the play drive as a psychological tendency that brings harmony to the action of antithetic elements. In his words: The play drive, in consequence, as the one in which both the others act in concert, will exert upon the psyche at once a moral and a physical constraint: it will, therefore, 16 Schiller, Wilkinson, and Willoughby, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, 95. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 95-99. 269 since it annuls all contingency, annul all constraint too, and set man free both physically and morally... It will therefore, just because it makes both [i. e., both sense- drive and form-drive] contingent, and because with all constraint all contingency too disappears, abolish contingency in both, and, as a result, introduce form into matter and reality into form. To the extent that it deprives feelings and passions of their dynamic power, it will bring them into harmony with the ideas of reason; and to the extent that it deprives the laws of reason of their moral compulsion, it will reconcile them with the interests of the senses.19 The play drive, Schiller explains, sets human beings free by cancelling chance as well as restrictions, the extremes of emotional pressure as well as the obligations imposed by reason. According to him, the play drive balances opposites; it provides a middle ground for matter (or reality) and form, for feelings and reason, for senses and law; it excludes psychological extremes, and fosters harmony and the development of interconnections. Demonstrating that the play drive balances embodied senses and abstract form, Schiller readdresses their opposition and provides a theoretical solution for the achievement of personal and social harmony. Worringer also keeps in mind the continuity between form and embodied experience in Form in Gothic, yet, given his subjectivist perspective, refers to inner value rather than to senses and embodiment. For instance, he points to the goal of research conducted from a psychological-formal perspective. In his words: ‘... [T]he true psychology of form begins when the formal value is shown to be the accurate expression of the inner value, in such a way that duality of form and content ceases to exist.’ 20 Connecting personal experience with its formal rendering is an important aspect of the psychological interpretation of form for Worringer. However, Worringer focuses on the intuitive correctness of interpretation rather than on the articulation of generically valid principles in Form in Gothic. Worringer addresses interplay as actively as Schiller, yet does so by underscoring its problematic nature, and its inner differentiation. 19 Ibid., 97-99. 20 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 7. 270 Interplay: a dual, hybrid state in Gothic art For Worringer as for Schiller, interplay occurs where strongly articulated opposite tendencies find common ground. Schiller considers that aesthetics can reconcile feelings and reason, laws and senses in On the Aesthetic Education of Man. In his turn, Worringer observes the meeting of abstract and representational tendencies in Gothic art; he addresses representational-abstract interplay without sacrificing his methodological reliance on antithesis. Having explored the empathic aspects of the predominantly abstract Gothic style in Abstraction and Empathy,1 Worringer continues his analysis of the vital, organic features of Gothic abstraction in Form in Gothic. For Schiller – an admirer of Goethe’s allegiances to Greek culture – the exuberance of Gothic style belonged to the past.2 Worringer, unlike Schiller, defends Gothic art in his writings: he focuses on its distinctive characteristics, interprets them psychologically, and brings them to life for early twentieth-century readers. Gothic art combines abstract linearity and organic vitality, pre-Renaissance and Classical ornamental styles, Worringer observes in Form in Gothic. He notes the interweaving of formal, psychological, and historical elements in Gothic. Northern Gothic provides a significant opportunity to observe the interplay of abstraction and representation, according to Worringer. In his words: We see that, in spite of its abstract linear character, Northern ornament gives rise to the impression of vitality, which our own vital feeling, necessarily projecting itself into the object of perception, would immediately attribute solely to the organic world. This ornament seems therefore to unite the abstract character of primitive geometrical ornament with the vital character of Classical ornament, with its organic complexion. But this is not the case. It can in no way claim to represent a synthesis, a union of these elementary contrary principles; it would be more correct to describe it as a hybrid phenomenon. This is not a case of the harmonious interpenetration of two 1 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 106-121. 2 Schiller, Wilkinson, and Willoughby, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, 201. Schiller’s comment on Gothic style is embedded into a pointed remark directed towards the art critics of his time. With regard to the nostalgic opinions expressed by some of these critics, Schiller writes: ‘They regret the sincerity, soundness, and solidity of former times; but they would like to see reintroduced with these the uncouthness and bluntness of primitive manners, the heavy awkwardness of ancient forms, and the lost exuberance of a Gothick Age.’ For Schiller, the vitality of Gothic does not seem to belong in the context and with the values of the late eighteenth century. 271 opposite tendencies, but of an impure, and to a certain extent uncanny, amalgamation of them, a requisition of our capacity for empathy (which is bound up with organic rhythm) for an abstract world which is alien to it.3 Worringer recognizes the vitality of Gothic style, an abstract-oriented mode of expression that can nevertheless generate empathic responses. Yet Worringer explains that vitality (a feature of representational art) and abstraction are not united, or synthesized, in Gothic art. His approach to the meeting of opposites differs from Schiller’s ultimately harmonizing views. For Worringer, the opposite urges that animate Gothic style rather articulate a hybrid compound, where they remain simultaneously active. The ‘amalgamation’ Worringer had considered specific to the meeting of representation and abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy preserves its binary particularity in Form in Gothic. Having anxiously noted the proximity of the imitation impulse and artistic impulse in naturalist art, Worringer remarks the Gothic style to be an aggregate of antithetic characteristics: organic vitality and abstract line, lifelike animation and geometry. Duality characterizes Gothic art for Worringer. He summarizes: And thus we reach the specifically dual, or rather the hybrid, effect of the whole of Gothic art: on the one hand, the most acute direct comprehension of actuality, on the other hand, a super-actual, fantastic play of line, uncontrolled by any object, vitalized only by its own specific expression. The whole development of the Gothic art of representation is determined by this counterplay and interplay [Gegen- und Ineinanderspiel].4 Gothic art, according to Worringer, is a field of counterplay and interplay for opposite characteristics; counterplay (a form of antithesis) emphasizes the distinctive features of opposites, while interplay allows for their coexistence. Much like in Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer highlights the representational as well as abstract characteristics of Gothic art, repeatedly focusing on their dynamic interaction. The state of play between 3 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 40-41. 4 Ibid., 63. 272 antithetic elements can lead to their union in Schiller’s view. 5 Instead, Worringer prefers to acknowledge the differentiations as well as common ground of opposites, while placing oppositional differentiations in the limelight of his research. The complexity of Worringer’s approach is illuminated in ‘Transcendence and Immanence in Art’. Added by Worringer to Abstraction and Empathy in 1910,6 this article reflects on knowledge from a perspective that implicitly accounts for both antithesis and interplay. Worringer notes that, while the antithesis of objectivism and subjectivism cannot apply to Classical art, different epochs can operate only antithetically.7 For Worringer, the writing of art history needs to involve intuition in the examination of will as made visible in artworks. Worringer rhetorically (if excessively) defends the role of intuition in art historical investigations, and explains that Classicism is only one landmark in writing the history and theory of art.8 With reference to art historical interpretation, Worringer explains that to know phenomena means to have become aware of the fluidity of limitations. According to him: ‘Our knowledge of phenomena is complete only when it has reached that point at which everything which seemed to be a boundary becomes a transition, and we suddenly become aware of the relativity of the whole.’ 9 In the context of Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer’s observation is certainly unusual, since it promises to question the antithesis he articulated between the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction, and between modes of art-making. However, Worringer’s analysis of art-making from ancient times to Renaissance, his discussion of processes such as gradation, displacement, transposition, assimilation, interpolation, and his approach to Gothic art in particular, had already drawn attention to a pervasive feature of his inquiry: namely, to Worringer’s dynamic approach to his own key statements. In ‘Transcendence and Immanence in Art’, Worringer confirms he is not interested in positing an idea without testing its boundaries. He further explores this method of writing art history in Form in Gothic, where he affirms that opposites such as 5 Schiller, Wilkinson, and Willoughby, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, 100-109. 6 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, xv. 7 Ibid., 125-126. 8 Ibid., 127. 9 Ibid., 126. 273 representational and abstract elements coexist, without losing their respective identities, in Gothic art. The concept of hybridity allows Worringer to approach art from a perspective that accounts for the antithesis as well as for the interplay of its elements. Highlighting one side only of key issues is insufficient for Worringer; his subjectivist perspective often brings to the fore the attention he pays to his readership. With his readers in mind, Worringer may account for perspectives opposite to his own in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. 274 Part 5: Interplay in painting Worringer, his contemporaries, and early twentieth-century art-making in Abstraction and Empathy Worringer seeks to distinguish his argument from current art historical and theoretical practices, and does so by means of critical inquiry; 1 nevertheless, his writing reveals the attention Worringer bestows on his public. To diminish the distance between him and his readers, Worringer relies on rhetoric in ‘Transcendence and Immanence in Art’; he employs the first person plural when referring to contemporary aesthetic research, as well as to its difficult relationship with the writing of art history. According to him: ‘Any deeper inquiry into the nature of our scientific aesthetics must lead to the realisation that, measured against actual works of art, its applicability is extremely limited.’ 2 ‘[O]ur scientific aesthetics’ thus becomes a phrase of considerable ambiguity, 3 since Worringer starts his demonstration from Abstraction and Empathy by pointing to the insufficiency of contemporary aesthetic methods, and by mentioning he intends to pursue an alternative line of research.4 Yet the first person plural allows Worringer to create a sense of shared cultural context, where, by implication, his views and the perspectives of his opponents are equally welcome.5 As a contributor to the cultural debates of his time, Worringer thus claims his place in a context where Classicism is still favoured. Hence his remark: ‘Our aesthetics is nothing more than a psychology of the Classical feeling for art.’ 6 Yet Worringer’s critical perspective regarding the contemporary approach to Classicism surfaces unambiguously when he addresses the widespread reliance of contemporary 1 For instance, Worringer stands against the materialist views of Gottfried Semper (1803-79), and takes distance from the perspective Lipps has on empathy. Ibid., 4-9. 2 Ibid., 122. 3 Worringer also writes in unison with his contemporaries when addressing current opinion regarding stylistic distortion, the definition of art, or the capacity to empathise with abstract form. (Ibid., 124, 132, 137.) 4 Ibid., 4. 5 Worringer addresses the thoughts of Carl Vinnen, an opponent of internationalism in art, in an integrative manner in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’. According to Worringer: ‘Vinnen’s brochure is entirely understandable to me, psychologically, and I don’t hesitate to regard it as a symptomatic phenomenon. I even welcome it as a timely call for an honest discussion of principles. The crisis in which we find our conceptions and our expectations of art cannot be kept quiet: it must lead to open and decisive discussion.’ ———, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art', 10. 6 ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 123. 275 aesthetics and psychology on Classical values.7 For him, his contemporaries demonstrate the psychological tendencies and aesthetic preferences that he associates with Classicism.8 Aesthetics may incline towards Greek Classical art, Worringer comments in Abstraction and Empathy, but contemporary art gravitates towards different epochs. For instance, Worringer notes the preference of his generation for the Italian Quattrocento – a period he nevertheless describes in negative terms. This fifteenth-century approach to art-making appears to Worringer as inquisitive yet uncertain, emphatic in its realism, and prone to error.9 Yet Worringer seems to favour the Cinquecento even less, due to its austerity.10 His responses to the Quattrocento and Cinquecento indirectly remind his readers that abstraction and representation are also approached critically in Abstraction and Empathy. When discussing the art of the Quattrocento, Worringer also casts a pessimistic glance towards the current state of humanity. His contemporaries appear to him to distrust the pursuit of knowledge, which, as previous sections have underscored, is associated by Worringer with the heritage of Classicism.11 He observes: ‘Having slipped down from the pride of knowledge, man is now just as lost and helpless vis-à-vis the world-picture as primitive man’.12 This state of mind reflects in art practices where Worringer notices the predominance of confusion, complication, heterogeneity and diversity. Such a panorama of artistic approaches is difficult to address, he comments – except through the differentiation of otherwise comparable tendencies.13 To distinguish between artistic tendencies plays a particularly important role for Worringer. According to him, similar approaches to art-making may have substantially different points of emergence;14 Worringer examines the difference between naturalism (or representation) and imitation in this respect.15 He mentions that he appreciates the capacity of contemporary artists to differentiate between comparable modes of making art.16 Distinctions can be traced, 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 123-124. 9 Ibid., 28-29. 10 Ibid., 29. The Cinquecento is an Italian approach to art-making during the sixteenth century. 11 Ibid., 102. 12 Ibid., 18. 13 Ibid., 26-27. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 27-33. 16 Ibid., 26-27. 276 Worringer suggests, by inquiring whether art is the reflection of inner experience.17 Artistic feelings and intuition play key roles in Worringer’s views on art-making. If artists do not heed their inner voice, Worringer notes, art comes to rely on imitation. He criticizes post- Renaissance art precisely because he sees in it the predominance of imitation, and the suppression of personal perspective.18 According to him, genuine creative drive is lost in his day as well –19 namely, during a time when Classicism appears to provide art-making its norms. However, the criticism Worringer directs towards contemporary art does not prevent him from inquiring into its methods. He observes that the process of amalgamating representational and crystalline (inorganic, geometric, abstract) elements is specific to the art- making of his time, as well as to the art of ancient Egypt.20 At its core, early twentieth- century art brings together representation and abstraction, Worringer explains; it then makes the coexistence of representation and abstraction visible from within, and manifests it outwardly. 21 Formal regularity and the surfacing of empathic tendencies reveal abstract- representational interplay; Worringer considers the early twentieth-century abstract- representational amalgamation ‘discreet and purified’.22 Although Worringer does not address early twentieth-century art-making extensively in either Abstraction and Empathy or Form in Gothic, he notes that the abstract-oriented works of a painter such as Ferdinand Hodler confuse the modern public. In his words from Abstraction and Empathy: ‘One need only call to mind, for example, how bewildered even an artistically trained modern public is by such a phenomenon as Hodler, to name only one of a thousand instances. This bewilderment clearly reveals how very much we are accustomed to look upon beauty and truth to nature as a precondition of the artistically beautiful.’ 23 Worringer also 17 Ibid., 29. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 74. 20 Worringer looks at the meeting between abstraction and representation when addressing specific art periods and cultures, as this thesis has shown. 21 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 43. 22 Ibid. It is not clear what kind of art-making Worringer has in mind when commenting on contemporary abstract-representational interplay, yet the reader of Abstraction and Empathy may wish to refer to the early twentieth-century works of Ferdinand Hodler (an artist whose practice Worringer associates with recent tendencies towards abstraction). See, for instance, Hodler’s Thun, Stockhornkette (1904), Lake Geneva from Chexbres (1904), or Forest Brook at Leissingen (1904). 23 Ibid., 137. 277 refers to the writings of Hildebrand in the first paragraphs of Abstraction and Empathy, where he draws attention to the emphasis Hildebrand places on actual processes of art- making.24 Alongside Hildebrand, Worringer mentions Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) when signalling the interplay between three-dimensional representation and abstract tendencies in sculpture.25 Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic seem to focus exclusively on the art of the past; nevertheless, Worringer creates spaces within his argument where he acknowledges, albeit in passing, the art practices of his time. 24 Ibid., 4, 136. 25 Ibid., 84. According to Worringer, abstract-representational interplay manifested in sculpture as an encounter between the compact qualities of matter and the pressures of form (invisible and cubic, according to Worringer) on matter. Worringer referred to the work of Michelangelo in particular when addressing interplay in sculpture. 278 Pictorial contexts for abstract-representational interplay:1 Cézanne’s realized sensations2 When Worringer visited Paris in the early years of the twentieth century, 3 the work of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) was beginning to receive national and international recognition.4 After three decades of concentrated effort, the paintings and watercolours of Cézanne had finally started attracting the attention of gallery dealers and art collectors. Cézanne had a solo exhibition at the Rue Lafitte gallery of art dealer Ambroise Vollard in November 1895, two years after the gallery had opened;5 one hundred and fifty of Cézanne’s paintings and drawings were displayed for Paris viewers on this occasion (Vollard would also exhibit watercolours by Cézanne in 1905).6 The Luxembourg Museum acquired two of Cézanne’s works in 1895;7 the paintings of the artist also appeared at the Salon of Independent Artists [Salon des Indépendants] (1899, 1901, 1902), at the Centennial Exhibition in Paris (1900), and at the innovative Parisian Autumn Salon [Salon d’Automne] exhibitions of 1905 and 1906.8 1 For the purposes of the following sections, representation and abstraction are defined, following Worringer, as experiential processes of rapprochement or distancing from chosen motifs. More specifically, ‘representation’ signals the attempt of artists to generate, in painting, a high degree of resemblance between an observed motif and the resulting work of art. ‘Abstraction,’ on the other hand, points to artists’ emphasis on the employment of line, shape, value, form, colour in painting, especially when such elements of pictorial composition assert different degrees of freedom from the rendering of motifs. 2 The phrase ‘realized sensations’ is inspired by Cézanne’s comments on the realization of his sensations (or the pictorial aspect of his response to nature). See his letter to Paul, his son (Aix, 8 September 1906). Paul Cézanne and John Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters (Oxford: B. Cassirer,1976), 327. 3 Mary Gluck places Worringer’s visit to the Trocadéro Museum in Paris in 1906 approximately. See Gluck, 'Interpreting Primitivism, Mass Culture and Modernism: The Making of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', 156. Sebastian Preuss writes that Worringer visited Paris in 1905, during Easter. Preuss, 'Spiritual Intoxication: Sebastian Preuss on Wilhelm Worringer and Modernism', 16. 4 Jennings finds that Worringer’s inquiry is related more to the work of Cézanne that to German Expressionism. For Jennings, Worringer’s visit at the Trocadéro Museum actually places the writing of Abstraction and Empathy in a context where it becomes impossible to ignore Worringer’s awareness of contemporary developments in French art. Jennings, 'Against Expressionism: Materialism and Social Theory in Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy', 90-91. 5 Richard Kendall, Cézanne by Himself: Drawings, Paintings, Writings (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 319. 6 Marcel Brion, Cézanne (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 69. Also, Rewald, Cézanne: A Biography, 269. Also, Evmarie Schmitt, Cézanne in Provence, Pegasus Library (Munich: Prestel, 1995), 111. 7 Rewald, Cézanne: A Biography, 269. Cachin mentions that the press counted around fifty paintings on display, while Vollard mentioned that one hundred fifty paintings were on show. Rewald, Cachin explains, noted that Vollard’s gallery space could not accommodate all paintings simultaneously, so successive installations of Cézanne’s work had to take place. Cachin et al., Cézanne, 552. 8 Rewald, Cézanne: A Biography, 270. 279 Cézanne’s works were also exhibited in Germany. 9 In 1897, for instance, the National Gallery in Berlin purchased a painting by Cézanne.10 His works were on display at Paul Cassirer’s gallery in Berlin (1900, 1904, 1906),11 in the exhibitions of the Vienna Secession and Berlin Secession (1903). Emil Richter included artworks by Cézanne in an exhibition of Impressionist paintings at his gallery in Dresden.12 After visiting Cézanne in 1906, collector Karl Ernst Osthaus went to Vollard and bought two of the artist’s paintings for his own Folkwang Museum.13 Cézanne’s road to public acceptance had been long and difficult; however, his work was shown, collected, and widely discussed (if not admired) in the early years of the twentieth century. 14 The place Cézanne occupied in the attention of the press of his time was controversial.15 In 1888, for instance, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) noted the chromatic abilities of Cézanne in the Parisian magazine The Whip [La Cravache], but associated Cézanne’s art with the visual discomfort generated by the creative explorations of his epoch. Suggesting that the work of the painter was the outcome of a medical condition, Huysmans wrote: 9 Apart from Germany, the works of Cézanne were also exhibited in Brussels (with the group Free Aesthetics [La Libre Esthétique], in 1901 and 1904), and The Hague (on the occasion of an international exhibition, 1901). The Grafton Galleries (London) also displayed the work of Cézanne in a group show of Impressionist works organized by Durand-Ruel 1905. See John Rewald, Paul Cézanne: A Biography (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 269-270. Also, Cachin et al., Cézanne, 566. 10 Also see Rewald, Cézanne: A Biography, 269. Cachin notes that, when the National Gallery received an imperial visit from Wilhelm II (‘a fierce Francophobe’, according to Laure-Caroline Semmer), director Hugo von Tschudi removed Cézanne’s work (Mill on the Couleuvre at Pontoise) from display. See Cachin et al., Cézanne, 555. Also see Laure-Caroline Semmer, 'Birth of the Figure of the Father of Modern Art: Cézanne in International Exhibitions 1910-1913', Arts & Sociétés, 2006. 11 Uhr, Lovis Corinth, 130. Also, Rewald, Cézanne: A Biography, 270. Also, Cachin et al., Cézanne, 567. 12 Rewald, Cézanne: A Biography, 270. 13 Ibid., 222. Also, Cachin et al., Cézanne, 567. 14 Brion, Cézanne, 69-70. Also, Rewald, Cézanne: A Biography, 215-222. Among the admirers of Cézanne, Rewald counts poets Joachim Gasquet (1873-1921) and Léo Larguier (1878-1950), painter Charles Camoin (1879-1865), painters and writers Émile Bernard (1868-1941) and Maurice Denis (1870-1943), as well as Claude Monet (1840-1926), who had already met with fame in the first decade of the twentieth century. 15 Attending to the fascinating details of the reception of Cézanne’s work in the press of his time would much exceed the scope of the current inquiry. For a survey of critical writings on Cézanne in the English language, see Cachin et al., Cézanne, 24-74. For instance, Cachin cites the opinions of artists on Cézanne in 1905 (around the time of Worringer’s visit to Paris), as recorded by Charles Morice (1850-1932) in the Mercury of France [Mercure de France]. ‘Cézanne has managed to strip pictorial art of all the mildew that it had accumulated over time’, in the opinion of Paul Sérusier (1864-1927). For Paul Signac (1863-1935), ‘[a] still life by Cézanne, a cigarbox top by Seurat, these paintings are as beautiful as the Mona Lisa or the 200 square meters of Tintoretto’s Paradise.’ Kees van Dongen (1877-1968) remarks: ‘Cézanne is the most beautiful painter of this period. But how many moths are consumed by this flame!’ See ———, Cézanne, 42. In contrast, also see the predominantly negative opinions cited by Vollard in 1924. Ambroise Vollard and Harold Livingston Van Doren, Paul Cézanne: His Life and Art (London: Brentano's, 1924), 180-181. 280 In sum, [Cézanne is] a revelatory colorist who contributed more than the late Manet to the Impressionist movement, an artist with diseased retinas who, in his exasperated visual perceptions, discovered the premonitory symptoms of a new art – so might we sum up this too-neglected painter, Cézanne. He has not exhibited since the year 1877, when, in the rue Le Peletier, he showed sixteen canvases whose perfect artistic probity long kept the crowd amused.16 Despite the invisibility of the painter’s work on the art scene of Paris, Huysmans remembered the paintings of Cézanne for their remarkable honesty. The public of 1877 nevertheless took this honesty lightly, Huysmans observed; the French press of the time responded to the work of Cézanne in similar terms, as Vollard shows in Paul Cézanne: His Life and Art (1924).17 At the Autumn Salon of 1904,18 the painter had a special room reserved for his paintings. Yet, regardless of this sign of appreciation for the practice of Cézanne, most of the critics cited by Vollard (with the exception of Alcanter de Brahm (1868-1942) from Criticism [La Critique] and Charles Ponsonailhe (1855-1915) from The Illustrated Magazine [La Revue Illustrée] found Cézanne’s work primitive, hesitant, awkward, and unknowledgeable. Ponsonailhe was among the few to recognize that an aesthetic platform for the interpretation of Cézanne’s paintings was unavailable to contemporary art critics; he remarked: ‘My spirit is willing enough, but my eyes haven’t had the proper training.’ 19 When departing from representational standards as established in academies of art, painting practices appeared problematic to early twentieth-century viewers as well as writers. Worringer addressed this situation in Abstraction and Empathy,20 and revisited it in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’. ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911) draws attention to the influence of Paul Cézanne on early twentieth-century painters inquiring into new approaches to art-making.21 In his essay, Worringer responds to Vinnen’s opinion that Cézanne’s practice was too 16 Cachin et al., Cézanne, 27. Also, Henri Dorra, ed. Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press,1994), 229. The excerpt above belongs in Joris-Karl Huysmans, ‘Trois peintres – I Cézanne’, La Cravache, 4 August 1888. 17 Vollard and Van Doren, Paul Cézanne: His Life and Art, 186-205. Also see Vollard’s selection of artist opinions on the practice of Cézanne, in ———, Paul Cézanne: His Life and Art, 180-181. 18 Vollard and Van Doren, Paul Cézanne: His Life and Art, 187-193. 19 Ibid., 189. 20 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 137. 21 Worringer, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art', 10. 281 specific to the artist, and bound to have no followers.22 For Worringer, the inspiration provided by the work of Cézanne is obvious: it leads to the surpassing of personal limitations, to impartiality, to formal simplification, and to open-minded views on representational practices.23 Far from attracting no interest from younger artists,24 Cézanne’s approach to painting proves to be, according to Worringer, one of the sources of Synthetism and Expressionism.25 To Synthetist painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), for instance, Cézanne appears remarkable, although misunderstood. Gauguin was an early collector of Cézanne’s paintings, and quoted Cézanne in his own work.26 In a letter to Émile Schuffenecker (1885), Gauguin created an imaginary portrait of Cézanne, emphasizing the peacefulness of Cézanne’s paintings. Gauguin wrote: ‘He [i. e., Cézanne] is partial to forms that exude the mystery and the tranquillity of a man lying down in a dream. His sombre colours are in keeping with the oriental frame of mind. A man of the Midi, he spends entire days on mountaintops reading Virgil and gazing at the sky. Thus his horizons are very high, his blues very intense, his reds stunningly vibrant.’ 27 Gauguin’s Cézanne loves Classical authors as well as painting in the open air. Sensitive to Cézanne’s approach to form and colour, Gauguin is curious about Cézanne’s progress. ‘Has Monsieur Cézanne found the exact formula for a work acceptable 22 In Vinnen’s words: ‘The art of a Cézanne, a van Gogh, was too characteristic of its creator, with too little attention to structure to found a school and to make way for successors.’ Vinnen, 'Quousque Tandem', 7. 23 Worringer, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art', 10-11. 24 Evidence of Cézanne’s impact on fellow artists and response to contemporary art is provided in his letters. For instance, Claude Monet, Émile Bernard, Maurice Denis and Charles Camoin are some of the painters with whom Cézanne was in contact. Cézanne and Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters, 7-10. Also, Erle Loran, Cézanne's Composition: Analysis of His Form with Diagrams and Photographs of His Motifs (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1963), 7. 25 Worringer’s influence on Synthetist artists such as Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard, as well as his conceptual impact on Expressionist painting, need to be explored in a self-standing inquiry. For the purposes of this thesis, Synthetism is defined as a post-Impressionist approach to art-making where the observation of motifs combines with attention to qualities of form, feeling, and inner vision. For the anti-realistic, visionary aspects of Gauguin’s Synthetism, see Dario Gamboni, 'The Vision of a Vision: Perception, Hallucination, and Potential Images in Gauguin's Vision of the Sermon' in Visions: Gauguin and His Time, ed. Belinda Thomson (Zwolle and Amsterdam: Waanders Publishers and Van Gogh Museum, 2010), 12-13, 16. 26 Joseph J. Rishel, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2012), 5-6. Rishel mentions that Gauguin bought six works by Cézanne; Still Life with Fruit Dish (1879-80) was among them. This painting was quoted by Gauguin in Woman in Front of a Still Life by Cézanne (1890), Rishel shows. 27 Michel Hoog, Cézanne: The First Modern Painter (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 152. Gauguin’s words are extracted from his letter to Schuffenecker from Copenhagen (14 January 1885). 282 to everyone?’, Gauguin inquires in a letter to Pissarro in 1881.28 Cézanne did not welcome the interest of his fellow painter in his practice, and Gauguin’s admiration for his fellow artist remained unreturned.29 In his ‘Letters from Munich’ (Apollon, St. Petersburg, October-November 1910), Expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky mentions Cézanne’s ‘outstanding talent’.30 Cézanne, like Hodler, creates melodic compositions, Kandinsky explains in On the Spiritual in Art (1912). According to Kandinsky, one simple form organizes melodic compositions, which in turn emits one simple inner sound –31 this is the key characteristic of the works of Hodler and Cézanne. Kandinsky notices not only the musicality of Cézanne’s work, but also his particular ability to render inner life when focusing on inanimate objects. In the words of Kandinsky: ‘He [i. e., Cézanne] can raise “still-life” to a level where externally “dead” objects come internally alive. He treats these objects just as he does people, for he had the gift of seeing inner life everywhere.’ 32 For Kandinsky, Cézanne finds inspiration in objects, yet, starting from them, articulates self-standing pictorial entities, or pictures, where colour and form come to the fore.33 Like Worringer, 34 Cézanne believes that art develops alongside nature, yet is not subordinated to it. ‘Art is a harmony which runs parallel with nature’, according to Cézanne.35 To arrive at such harmony, Cézanne observes his motifs and identifies the simplest geometrical forms 28 John Rewald, The Ordeal of Paul Cézanne (London: Phoenix House, 1950), 96. To Gauguin’s question, Maurice Merleau-Ponty could possibly have answered that Cézanne did reach a form of pictorial practice that has generic validity. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 'Cézanne's Doubt' in Sense and Non-Sense, ed. Northwestern University Press (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964 [1945]), 11. Merleau-Ponty observes: ‘It is nonetheless possible that Cézanne conceived a form of art which, while occasioned by his nervous condition, is valid for everyone. Left to himself, he was able to look at nature as only a human being can. The meaning of this work cannot be determined from his life... It is thanks to the Impressionists, and particularly to Pissarro, that Cézanne later conceived painting not as the incarnation of imagined scenes, the projection of dreams outward, but as the exact study of appearances: less a work of the studio than a working from nature.’ 29 Rewald, The Ordeal of Paul Cézanne, 96. 30 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 79. Expressionism is defined, following Long, as an approach to art-making that questions authority and emphasizes experimental, anti- naturalistic, anti-materialist, and anti-industrialist aspects. See Long, Barron, and Rigby, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, ixi-xxiv. Also see ‘Worringer and Expressionism: late twentieth-century perspectives’. 31 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 215-216. 32 Ibid., 151. 33 Ibid. 34 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 3. 35 Cézanne and Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters, 261. Letter to Joachim Gasquet, from Tholonet, 26 September 1897. 283 underlying them. He advises Synthetist painter Émile Bernard to compose his pictures by attending to the geometry of objects, as well as to geometrical aspects of composition. In the words of Cézanne: ‘... [T]reat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point... [N]ature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air.’ 36 Painting means for Cézanne not only working in the open air and responding directly to chosen motifs, but also composing in awareness of the simplest, most generic form of objects. According to him, geometrical concerns need to be accompanied by attention to colour composition, especially in the rendering of depth and light. Understanding nature – a long, painful process – is an outcome of the art of painting for Cézanne.37 He consciously brings together representational and abstract aspects in his practice, articulating pictorial equivalents of thoroughly observed motifs in the world. Cézanne senses the endless possibilities of pictorial investigation; he accepts that the complexity of his response to the natural world slows down his process of inquiry. 38 He seeks to cultivate an accurate connection between seeing and feeling, between perception and emotion. The pictorial form taken by this connection must be expressed clearly and decisively, according to him. In other words, Cézanne considers that expression relies on seeing, feeling, and will. He mentions to Bernard that an awareness of the art of the past is helpful, yet that art practice is supported mainly by the study of nature. Relating to nature does not need extremes on the part of artists, Cézanne writes; however, artists must have their say with regard to their motifs – especially with regard to the expressive means employed in the rendering of these motifs.39 Cézanne’s statement reveals the abstract potential of artistic expression; however, Cézanne continues by pointing out that representation needs to account logically for the innermost aspects of the world; Cézanne believes in giving clear, observation-based expression to the unknown. As seen by Cézanne, artistic practice brings 36 Ibid., 301. Letter to Émile Bernard, Aix-en-Provence, 15 April 1904. 37 Ibid., 315. Letter to Bernard, Aix, 1905, Friday. 38 Ibid., 302. Letter to Bernard, Aix, 12 May 1904. 39 Ibid., 303. Letter to Bernard, Aix, 26 May 1904. 284 together perception and emotion, observation and will, logic and covertness. His understanding of painting makes the separation between representational and abstract strands of practice visible, yet difficult to operate. Given his reticence towards questions of theory, 40 Cézanne does not distinguish between perception, sensation and feeling in his letters;41 he therefore writes to Bernard about the transposition of optical sensations of light into colour sensations.42 Nevertheless, Cézanne is clear on one point: sensations (or instincts,43 as interpreted by him when discussing the advice of Thomas Couture to his students) need to acquire concrete form in art, much like perceptions do.44 To articulate his sensations in painting, Cézanne often travels to places that are difficult to reach, allowing observation and the passage of time to inform each brushstroke he places on canvas.45 In a 1906 letter to his son, Cézanne, seventy at the time, reflects on his relationship with the natural model. Although he mentions that his understanding of nature has reached greater clarity, Cézanne still finds the making of a picture difficult. In his words: ‘I must tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clear-sighted before nature, but that with me the realization of my sensations is always painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I have not the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature.’ 46 The process of communicating sensations pictorially remains challenging for Cézanne, even more so as his ability to see and understand the natural world enhances. For him, painting (or the realization of sensations) exposes its limitations when facing the world of nature. To 40 Ibid., 301-302. 41 A conversation between Cézanne and Bernard, related by Bernard in 1921, clarifies Cézanne’s perspective on sensation; however, the dialogue between painters is communicated from Bernard’s perspective, and in Bernard’s transcription of Cézanne’s thought. Bernard: ‘So you understand art to be a union of the world and the individual?’ Cézanne: ‘I understand it as personal apperception. This apperception I locate in sensation and require of the intellect that it should organize these sensations into a work of art.’ Bernard: ‘But what sensations are you referring to? Those of your feelings or of your retina?’ Cézanne: ‘I don’t think you can distinguish between the two; however, as a painter, I believe in the visual sensation above all else.’ See Émile Bernard, 'A Conversation with Cézanne' in Cézanne by Himself: Drawings, Paintings, Writings, ed. Richard Kendall (Boston, Toronto, New York: Little, Brown, 1988 [1921]), 289. 42 Cézanne and Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters, 310. 43 Ibid., 297-298. 44 Ibid., 303. 45 Loran, Cézanne's Composition: Analysis of His Form with Diagrams and Photographs of His Motifs, 30. Rewald, Paul Cézanne: A Biography, 190-193, 239-249. Pavel Machotka, Cézanne: Landscape into Art (London, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 23-30. 46 Cézanne and Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters, 326. Letter to his son, Paul, Aix, 8 September 1906. 285 represent (even when not working with the exclusive goal of imitation in mind) obliges the painter to face the unavoidable gap between the world as observed and the world as depicted, Cézanne seems to imply. (Worringer explained this gap as generated by threatening conditions of life, and as primarily reflected in abstraction;47 Deleuze calls it a chaos, an abyss, or a catastrophe.)48 Yet, despite the pain it brings along, the process of rendering the world by means of paint retains an extraordinary fascination for Cézanne: he writes to his son he could focus on one location only and find a multitude of motifs at the slightest change of viewpoint.49 Addressing Cézanne’s approach to painting in ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ (1945), Maurice Merleau- Ponty explains that Cézanne works with lived perspective. This type of perspective is neither geometric nor photographic,50 Merleau-Ponty argues, but relies on the close observation of phenomena – an activity that preoccupied Cézanne throughout most of his life in art.51 According to Merleau-Ponty, the distortion of perspective in Cézanne’s compositions creates order, allowing objects to emerge and organize themselves for the gaze of the contemplating viewers.52 Pictorial representation thus opens towards exposing abstract values. Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty points out, adds to nature instead of imitating it (an approach to painting Worringer could have seen as amalgamating abstraction and represemtation);53 in this process, the painter witnesses, and allows the viewers to witness, existence perpetually coming into being. In the words of Merleau-Ponty: ‘The painter recaptures and converts into visible objects what would, without him, remain walled up in the separate life of each 47 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 16-17. 48 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 102. 49 Cézanne and Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters, 326. Cachin shows that, at the time of writing his letter to his son, Cézanne was painting on the banks on the Arc (at the Trois Sautets bridge, and also at a place known as Gour de Martelly). See Cachin et al., Cézanne, 568. 50 As previous paragraphs have shown, Cézanne recommends keeping geometry in mind when looking at the world. However, Cézanne does not consider geometric perspective to be the key element of his pictorial process. Geometry is important to Cézanne, but only in combination with sensation, feeling and will. 51 Merleau-Ponty, 'Cézanne's Doubt', 14. In the first part of his artistic career, Cézanne drew and painted still lifes (Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup, 1866), portraits (Young Man Leaning on his Elbow, 1866), and the human body in action (Woman Diving into the Water, 1867-70). He rendered human passions and excesses (The Abduction, 1867; The Feast, c. 1867), as well as quiet interiors scenes (Young Girl at the Piano – Overture to Tannhäuser, c. 1869). However, after beginning to paint in the open air alongside Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) in 1873, Cézanne dedicated more of his attention to landscape and to the relationship between perception and painting. See Kendall, Cézanne by Himself: Drawings, Paintings, Writings, 16-17. Also, Cachin et al., Cézanne, 537-538. 52 Merleau-Ponty, 'Cézanne's Doubt', 14-15. 53 Ibid., 16-17. 286 consciousness: the vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things. Only one emotion is possible for this painter – the feeling of strangeness – and only one lyricism – that of the continual rebirth of existence.’ 54 If Cézanne intends to represent the world, then his particular approach to representation invites the surfacing of vital, connective rhythms of being; appearances as recognizable in painting are a consequence of this process rather than its goal.55 Like Merleau-Ponty, who draws attention to the expressive rather than imitative qualities of Cézanne’s painting,56 Gilles Deleuze signals Cézanne’s departure from representation understood strictly as illustration or figuration.57 In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1984), Deleuze explains that Cézanne follows the way of the Figure;58 this way, which for Deleuze is neither representational nor abstract,59 and distinct from both,60 relies on sensation.61 Sensible form connecting to a sensation: this is Deleuze’s definition of the Figure.62 Deleuze focuses on Cézanne’s emphasis on sensation (which is characteristic for subject and object simultaneously), 63 and the important role sensation plays in the articulation of Cézanne’s pictorial practice. ‘Sensation is what is painted’, Deleuze notes with regard to the work of Cézanne, underscoring the embodied quality of Cézanne’s approach in contrast 54 Ibid., 17-18. 55 Merleau-Ponty also signals the perpetual instantaneity of Cézanne’s practice of representation in ‘Eye and Mind’ (1961), where he writes: ‘The “world’s instant” that Cézanne wanted to paint, an instant long since passed away, is still hurled towards us by his paintings.’ For Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne’s work unfolds in the present, continuously, for each viewer. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 'Eye and Mind' in The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. Northwestern University Press (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964 [1961]), 7. 56 Merleau-Ponty, 'Cézanne's Doubt', 17-18. Merleau-Ponty points out that art does not rely on imitating, but on processes of expression. 57 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 35. 58 Deleuze defines the Figure as opposed to figuration. Ibid., 37. 59 Abstraction, for Deleuze, is associated with the physicality of the human head and bones; the brain (as in the case of representation) intermediates the impact of abstraction on viewers. On the other hand, sensation refers rather to the nervous system according to him. (Ibid., 34, 36.) Deleuze further defines abstraction as reductive, ascetic, optical, offering spiritual salvation and elaborating a symbolic (‘digital’) code starting from oppositions of form. See ———, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 103-104. 60 At a later point in his text, Deleuze explains that Cézanne did not actually follow a middle way between representation and abstraction, but invented his specific middle way. Deleuze remarks: ‘Few painters have produced the experience of chaos and catastrophe as intensely, while fighting to limit and control it at any price.’ Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 111, 118. 61 Deleuze mentions Merleau-Ponty’s approach to sensation in connection to Cézanne’s painting, explaining that, for Merleau-Ponty, each quality of sensation (or sense experience) opens a field connected to a multitude of other fields of sensation. Ibid., 178. 62 Ibid., 35. 63 Ibid., 34. 287 with the emphasis on light and colour as observed in Impressionist paintings. 64 Deleuze, like Merleau-Ponty, writes about the vitality of Cézanne’s pictures, where sensation and rhythm are associated.65 The work of Cézanne depicts the animating force of life for Deleuze. ‘... [W]as it not Cézanne’s genius to have subordinated all the techniques of painting to this task: rendering visible the folding force of mountains, the germinative force of a seed, the thermic force of a landscape, and so on?’,66 Deleuze muses. Life force becomes significantly visible in Cézanne’s pictorial response to the landscape of his birthplace, around the turn of the twentieth century. Cézanne engaged with the depiction of places in Provence in the last decade of his life, when his approach to landscape reached a simplicity, poise and persuasiveness associated by Maurice Denis and Roger Fry with Classicism.67 (Worringer would have disagreed with Denis and Fry, due to Cézanne’s emphasis on re-creating rather than imitating his motif, as well as due to the painter’s amalgamating space and geometrical considerations.) In 1897, after the death of Cézanne’s mother and the sale of Jas de Bouffan (the Cézanne family home), the painter returned to the small cabin (cabanon) he had rented in the Bibémus quarry.68 He painted at the quarry, 69 at Le Tholonet, and around Château Noir, from where Mont Sainte-Victoire could be seen.70 Cézanne’s engaging with motifs (his reasons to take action,71 as Pavel Machotka points out) was fostered by the painter’s familiarity with the area and by the opportunity for undisturbed work.72 The quarry, with which Cézanne engaged in pictures such as In the Bibémus Quarry [Dans la Carrière de Bibemus] (c. 1895), The 64 Ibid., 35. 65 Ibid., 42-43. 66 Ibid., 57. 67 Maurice Denis and Roger E. Fry, 'Cézanne-I', The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 16, No. 82, 1910, 208, 213-214. Denis explains that, although it is difficult to define ‘classicism,’ he intends to point to style, order and synthetic qualities when employing this term. Objective and subjective qualities are balanced in a Classical picture, according to Denis. (Denis and Fry, 'Cézanne-I', 208, 213.) Also, Roger Eliot Fry, Cézanne: A Study of His Development (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 87. Also, Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cézanne (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, and H.N. Abrahams, 1952), 4. 68 Rewald, The Ordeal of Paul Cézanne, 137-138, 166. 69 Rewald draws attention to the existence of many ancient quarries in Provence; he notes that the stones extracted from Bibémus have a distinctive soft ochre colour, often to be recognized in the facades of stately residencies of Aix-en-Provence, the town where Cézanne was born. The Bibémus quarry was active in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Athanassoglou-Kallmyer notes. See ———, Paul Cézanne: A Biography, 244-245. Also, Nina M. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in His Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 244-245. 70 Rewald, Paul Cézanne: A Biography, 240-249. 71 Machotka, Cézanne: Landscape into Art, 1. 72 Rewald, The Ordeal of Paul Cézanne, 166. 288 Bibémus Quarry [La Carrière de Bibemus] (c. 1895), or The Red Rock [Le Rocher Rouge] (c. 1895), provided much visual interest, as Rewald points out. According to Rewald: The quarry had been abandoned for some time, and trees and bushes had taken root among the ochre rocks. In the distance, the ever-present Mont Sainte-Victoire rises into the sky... Yet it appears as though no plan presided over the exploitation of the quarry, where the stone has been extracted here and left untouched there. It is a vast field of seemingly accidental forms, as if some prehistoric giant, constructing a fantastic playground, had piled up cubes and dug holes and then abandoned them without leaving a hint of his intricate plan.73 Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry [La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue de Bibémus] (c. 1897) (Fig. 17) combines representational and abstract aspects of painting, offering an experiential and structural vision of the natural world. Cézanne addresses his motif in terms that emphasize physicality and structural rhythm, distancing his approach from the modes of art-making adopted by his predecessors.74 He overlays brushstrokes, thus producing chromatic modulations that articulate mass, space and movement. However, this repetitive task, which could potentially lead to abstraction, allows Cézanne to explore geological, organic and atmospheric aspects of nature, and to communicate patiently observed outdoor rhythms. Cézanne does not cultivate imitative rendering, but engages in a personal, decisive reorganization of his motif on canvas. Abstract processes support, yet are not subordinated to, representational purposes in Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry. Articulating his picture by repeatedly adjusting and thus amplifying colour relationships, the painter highlights the abstract potential of his composition while representational elements remain recognizable (‘...One must look at the model and feel very exactly’, 75 according to Cézanne). Maintaining 73 ———, Paul Cézanne: A Biography, 245. 74 In the words of Cézanne: ‘The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. We must not, however, be satisfied with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go forth and study beautiful nature, let us try to free our minds from them, let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperament. Time and reflection, moreover, modify little by little our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us.’ Cézanne and Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters, 315. To Bernard, Aix, 1905, Friday. 75 Ibid., 302. (To Bernard, Aix, 12 May 1904.) The influence of Impressionism on Cézanne’s approach to art- making – namely, the attentive yet subjective response to outdoors motifs – is revealed in the words of the painter. Regarding the connections between Cézanne and Impressionism, see Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s 289 his observational commitments, the painter allows a recognizable image of mountain and quarry to emerge. Yet his picture reflects not only appearances, but processes in their temporal dynamism: the changing colours of weathering rocks and boulders, the play of light on uneven surfaces, the transit of air through foliage. Representation does not operate through imitation, but through chromatic approximations that often invite abstract aspects of picture- making to come to the fore. Juxtaposed, overlaid, and rarely interrupted by the outlines of depicted objects, Cézanne’s brushstrokes suggest mass and movement, engaging in a constant redefinition of form. They are compositional places of passage between abstraction and representation in Cézanne’s work. When indicating main compositional elements such as quarry, mountain, or tree trunks, Cézanne still traces outlines; otherwise, his approach to paint application emphasizes the structural connectivity of natural elements. Between the few horizontal and vertical boundaries, however, order emerges from the play of colour planes (the embodiment of brushstrokes on canvas). Abstraction, in a painting such as Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry, features not in its simplifying (geometric) function, but in its additive function (an employment that prioritizes the repetitiveness of paint application, chromatic Doubt’, 11. Also, for Cézanne’s subsequent impact on Symbolist painting, see Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 10. Fig. 17. Paul Cézanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry. c. 1897. oil on canvas. 64.8 x 81.3 cm. Baltimore. The Baltimore Museum of Art. 290 variation, and the resulting effect of movement). Visible in Cézanne’s approach to brushwork and colour handling, abstraction gives representational elements their distinctive vitality. Contrasting between representational and abstract aspects of painting proves ineffective with regard to the work of Cézanne, as Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze remark. Earlier in the twentieth century, Roger Fry inquires into Cézanne’s ability to bring together imagination and intellect, to create form and, at the same time, suggest colour, light and atmosphere. The seemingly casual aspect of Cézanne’s compositions relies on an underlying plan that bears architectural associations for Fry. In his words: ‘He [i. e., Cézanne] sees the face of Nature as though it were cut in some incredibly precious crystalline substance, each of its facets different, yet each dependent on the rest.’ 76 Fry highlights the abstract aspect of Cézanne’s approach to the natural world; Cézanne, according to Fry, addresses the materiality of objects, yet does so in a pictorial language of imagination rather than imitation. Representational and abstract tendencies interweave in Cézanne’s approach to painting, which Fry regards as impressively subtle and complex. In response to Fry’s invitation, Maurice Denis publishes his thoughts on Cézanne in The Burlington Magazine (January 1910). Denis contrasts between illustrative paintings, where narrative interest predominate, and pictures where, like in the work of Cézanne, the love of painting is celebrated as such.77 Reflecting on the interplay between representational and abstract aspects in Cézanne’s pictures, Denis muses: ‘Before the Cézanne we think only of the picture; neither the object represented nor the artist’s personality holds our attention. We cannot decide so quickly whether it is an imitation or an interpretation of nature.’ 78 The balance of objective and subjective aspects of painting, of style (or, in the words of Denis, ‘synthetic order’) and sensibility, characterizes the practice of Cézanne,79 where sensations inspire a method of art-making.80 For Denis, Cézanne may employ abstraction in his work,81 but not at the cost of representation. According to Denis: ‘... [H]e [i. e., Cézanne] never 76 Roger Fry, 'From "The Post-Impressionists - 2" ' in Cézanne: The First Modern Painter, ed. Michel Hoog (London: Thames and Hudson [Nation], 1989 [3 December 1910]), 154-155. 77 Denis and Fry, 'Cézanne-I', 208. 78 Ibid., 213. 79 Ibid. 80 Maurice Denis, 'Cézanne-II', The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 16, No. 83, 1910, 275. 81 By abstraction, Denis, citing Sérusier, means reference to and visibility of geometrical elements in painting, such as straight lines, arcs of circles, ellipses. Ibid., 279. 291 compromises by abstraction the just equilibrium between nature and style.’ 82 Abstract- representational interplay, Denis comments, emerges in the work of Cézanne where the painter’s attention to his motifs and his effort towards pictorial articulation meet. The interplay of representation and abstraction in Cézanne’s practice is also visible to James M. Carpenter. In ‘Cézanne and Tradition’ (1951), Carpenter notes that Cézanne depicts three- dimensionality by comparatively abstract means in his paintings. Carpenter writes: ‘Cézanne also attempted to create an illusion of three-dimensional form and space, not with means parallel to nature’s but within a more abstract language. Despite his greater abstraction he arrived at a kind of illusion in some ways more forceful than theirs [i. e., the Impressionists].’ 83 For Carpenter, two-dimensional and three-dimensional effects coexist in the work of Cézanne – hence the paradox of his approach to painting. A polar tension between flatness and illusion needs to be resolved by viewers when contemplating Cézanne’s paintings, Carpenter argues. Clement Greenberg also underscores the coexistence of abstract and representational aspects in Cézanne’s pictures.84 In ‘Cézanne’ (1952), Greenberg points to the visibility of the painter’s brushstrokes and to their bringing forward the canvas surface. However, Greenberg notes that Cézanne’s also attempts to suggest spatial recession in his paintings. Cézanne gives priority to abstraction in his work, according to Greenberg. He remarks: ‘... [W]hen Cézanne altered contours and proportions in an unrealistic manner, it was largely because he felt so strongly the need to enhance the unity and decorative force of the surface design that he let himself sacrifice the realism of the illusion to it.’ 85 Underscoring the emphasis on surface and design he recognizes in the work of Cézanne, Greenberg nevertheless signals that representation (or illusion) and pattern (or design) are both active in Cézanne’s paintings. 86 In Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (1984), Richard Shiff explains the interplay of abstract and representational aspects in the paintings of Cézanne from the perspective of 82 Ibid. 83 James M. Carpenter, 'Cézanne and Tradition', The Art Bulletin, 33, No. 3, 1951, 174. 84 Clement Greenberg, 'Cézanne', The American Mercury, June, 1952, 72. 85 Ibid., 73. 86 Ibid. 292 Cézanne’s debt to Impressionism.87 He underscores the uniformity of Cézanne’s paintings – a pictorial characteristic indicating Cézanne’s connections with the thought of Impressionist painters.88 Uniformity emerges from Cézanne’s approach to pictorial depth, colour, and value (or variation on a scale from black to white), Shiff observes. 89 Cézanne, according to Shiff, does not create hierarchical compositions, but correspondences between flatness and depth (or surface and illusion) in order to enhance atmospheric effects. When noting the dialogue between two-dimensional and three-dimensional aspects of composition in Cézanne’s work, Shiff indirectly points to the interplay of representational and abstract tendencies. The interaction of illusion and surface has a quality Shiff chooses to approach in terms of dynamism (or openness, or absence of hierarchy) rather than static integration. Highly regarded in contemporary writings on art, the work of Cézanne was viewed with reticence by many turn-of-the-twentieth-century critics;90 nevertheless, many notable artists of artists of Cézanne’s time admired his work. Painters such as Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso collected the paintings of Cézanne.91 ‘Degas himself has fallen for the charm of this refined savage; Monet, everybody. Are we wrong? I don’t think so’, Pissarro commented.92 Monet, for instance, proved not only an admirer of Cézanne’s,93 but also a friend: he provided support to the reclusive painter, (Cézanne was grateful for it),94 he visited Cézanne at L’Estaque (1883),95 and invited him at 87 Greenberg also notes the strong connection between Cézanne and the Impressionists. He writes: ‘At bottom Cézanne was an Impressionist always, and he learned painting from the Impressionists, though he did not belong to their orthodoxy.’ Ibid., 71. 88 In his book, Shiff shows that, while Cézanne relied on sensation in painting (an Impressionist approach), his practice was nevertheless regarded as exemplary by Symbolist painters. Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 10. 89 Ibid., 215. 90 Vollard and Van Doren, Paul Cézanne: His Life and Art, 186-205. 91 Denis Coutagne, Cézanne et Paris (Paris: Musée du Luxembourg, 2011), 164. 92 Paul Cézanne et al., Classic Cézanne (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998), 170. Pissarro’s words are excerpted from a letter to Lucien Pissarro dated 21 November 1895. 93 In the words of Gérôme Maësse: ‘Claude Monet is perhaps the painter who understands and loves Cézanne most completely. To top that, his admiration reaches all the way to his wallet.’ Gérôme Maësse, 'From "L'Opinion de Claude Monet" ' in Classic Cézanne, eds. Terence Maloon, Richard Shiff, and Angela Gundert (Sydney [Paris]: Art Gallery of New South Wales [Les Tendances Nouvelles], 1998 [December 1906]), 432. 94 Cézanne and Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters, 242. Letter to Monet, Aix, 6 July 1895. Rewald mentions that most of the correspondence between Monet and Cézanne is lost. ———, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters, 7-8. Cézanne’s well-known emotional outbursts led him to be ungenerous to even the closest of his friends, Monet included. John Rewald, 'Cézanne: A Biography' (doctoral, Sorbonne, 1990), 188-189. Also, Cachin et al., Cézanne, 553. However, despite his moments of inner turmoil, Cézanne genuinely admired Monet. Cézanne and Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters, 291-297. 293 Argenteiul (1876) and Giverny (1894).96 Visiting Monet at Giverny with Georges Clémenceau, journalist Michel Georges-Michel remembered the special place Cézanne’s work occupied in Monet’s home. In the words of Georges-Michel: ‘I went into the adjoining room where there was only one unframed painting hanging on the wall: the Garçon au gilet rouge by Cézanne... Monet, ... after a long silence, said to us in his beautiful, deep voice: “Yes, Cézanne, he’s the greatest of us all.” ’ 97 Monet, Worringer’s Impressionism, and abstract-representational interplay ‘I despise all living painters, except Monet and Renoir’, Cézanne writes in 1902.98 For Cézanne, Monet is a master of the art of painting;99 his influence, Cézanne advises young artist Charles Camoin, must be balanced with the study of nature. Cézanne’s awareness regarding the impact of Monet’s art on younger generations, as well as his admiration for the work of Monet, emerge unambiguously from the words addressed to Camoin in a letter from 13 September 1903. At the time of his letter to Camoin, Cézanne had known Monet for almost three decades. Monet was considered by Cézanne a key representative of Impressionism.100 Cézanne kept informed regarding the purchases of Monet’s work,101 and attended, at times, Monet’s exhibitions.102 When two Impressionist societies (the Anonymous Cooperative Society of Artists, Painters, Sculptors, Engravers [Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs] – liquidated in 1874 – and the Union [L’Union], founded in 1875) were competing for the attention of the public, Cézanne, who had joined the Union, 95 Cézanne and Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters, 211-212. To Émile Zola, Aix, 23 February 1884. 96 Cachin et al., Cézanne, 540-551. 97 Michel Georges-Michel, 'From Peintres et sculpteurs que j'ai connus, 1900-1942' in Classic Cézanne, eds. Terence Maloon, Richard Shiff, and Angela Gundert (Sydney [New York]: Art Gallery of New South Wales [Brentano's], 1998 [1942]), 170. 98 Cézanne and Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters, 291. To Gasquet, Aix, 8 July 1902. 99 Ibid., 297. To Charles Camoin, Aix, 13 September 1903. For the success of Monet’s work in the early years of the twentieth century, see Virginia Spate, Claude Monet: The Colour of Time (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 201. 100 Cézanne and Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters, 147. To Camille Pissarro, L’Estaque, 2 July 1876. 101 Ibid., 143, 190, 206. To Pissarro, Aix, April 1876; to Zola, Paris, 4 July 1880; to Zola, Aix, 10 March 1883. 102 Cachin et al., Cézanne, 551. 294 supported Monet’s initiative of re-establishing the Anonymous Cooperative Society. 103 Cézanne also asked Émile Zola, his friend, to write in favour of Monet and Renoir in 1880; at stake was the request of Renoir and Monet for a suitable exhibition space in the Palace of the Champs-Élysées, where their paintings could be displayed properly. 104 Zola obliged; Monet sold some of his works, while Renoir received portrait commissions.105 Cézanne and Monet exhibited together on a number of occasions – for instance, according to Isabelle Cahn, in the benefit show organized by Pissarro for Honoré Daumier (1808-79) in 1874,106 as well as in the first and third Impressionist exhibitions (April 1874, and April 1877).107 Cahn draws attention to the interest of Hugo von Tschudi (1851-1911), director of the Berlin National Gallery, in recent French painting – an interest resulting in the acquisition and display of works by Cézanne and Monet in the late years of the nineteenth century.108 Tschudi’s purchasing and exhibiting contemporary French art, Cahn remarks, provided recognition for the practices of artists such as Monet and Cézanne at a time when the works of these painters were regarded with greater caution by French museums.109 The enthusiasm of Tschudi for French art signalled a trend that appeared threatening towards contemporary German painting to Carl Vinnen. In ‘Quousque Tandem?’, his contribution to The Protest of German Artists (1911), Vinnen argued against the acquisition of recent French works in Germany – a movement he regarded as speculative.110 His criticism, Vinnen commented, was not addressed to the work of Monet; Vinnen mentioned that he supported the purchase of Monet’s Lady in a Green-Black Dress (1866) by the Bremen Museum. However, Vinnen did not miss the opportunity to point to the high cost of this work, as well as to the comparatively low sum received by the artist. 103 Cézanne and Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters, 147-148. To Pissarro, Aix, April 1876. 104 Ibid., 187-188. To Zola, Paris, 10 May 1880. 105 Ibid., 190.To Zola, Paris, 4 July 1880. 106 Cachin et al., Cézanne, 539. 107 Rewald, The Ordeal of Paul Cézanne, 80-84. 108 Cahn’s list of artists whose works were acquired by Tschudi for the Berlin National Gallery includes Édouard Manet (1832-83), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904), and Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Cachin et al., Cézanne, 555. 109 Ibid. 110 Vinnen, 'Quousque Tandem', 6-7. 295 Answering Vinnen in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911), Worringer defended the practices of artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh and Matisse, and pointed to the recent departure from Impressionist influences in art-making.111 For Worringer, Monet is one of ‘the great classic Impressionists’ in 1911;112 yet Impressionism and the emphasis it places on sight, Worringer argues, are no longer the choice of a generation of creators who seek to focus on emotional life instead.113 Without providing references to specific artists, Worringer addresses the Impressionist approach to art-making in Abstraction and Empathy. The urge to abstraction, Worringer explains, required creators to emphasize the unchanging, absolute aspects of objects by not representing three-dimensional space, not introducing subjective nuances, and not depicting transitory aspects of the world.114 Approximating objects to their fundamental, crystalline forms led to abstraction, Worringer notes. Impressionist representation, on the other hand, focused on appearances; it proposed a subjective approach to art-making, and emphasized opticality. Space, embodiment, three-dimensionality and illusion had to be avoided in abstract art. Worringer explains: ‘It is precisely space which, filled with atmospheric air, linking things together and destroying their individual closedness, gives things their temporal value and draws them into the cosmic interplay of phenomena’.115 For Worringer, the rendering of atmosphere asserted the passage of time, the connection and interplay of observed natural elements. Impressionist renderings captured the transformation of chosen motifs; as such, Impressionist art could not be associated with the urge to abstraction, according to Worringer. The attempt of Worringer to associate Impressionism with representational practices, and to distance it from abstraction, succeeds when the urge to abstraction is seen in its extreme expressions – for instance, when connecting abstraction to geometric art as recognizable in Egyptian pyramids. Atmospheric and attached to the world, Worringer’s Impressionism makes visible the interplay of phenomena; as such, it seems to offer ground to the very ‘dread of space’ Worringer associates with the emergence of abstract tendencies.116 However, once Worringer has explained the key characteristics of the urge to abstraction and of the urge to 111 Worringer, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art', 10-11. 112 Ibid., 10. 113 Ibid., 12. 114 ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 37. 115 Ibid., 38. 116 Ibid., 15-16. 296 empathy, he is ready to admit to the existence of art-making that intermediates between abstraction and representation.117 The rendering of appearances in abstract contexts is actually possible, Worringer explains, analysing the interplay of representation and abstraction at various points in the history of art.118 Worringer’s words on Impressionism need to be addressed from a perspective that accounts for his inclination towards oppositional discourse. As Magdalena Bushart remarks in ‘Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch’ (c. 1995), Worringer does not renounce tradition, nor does he seek to interrupt its connections with present-day art. Worringer, Bushart explains, rather signals the ‘epochal shift’ taking place in the first decades of the twentieth century, and criticizes the society of his time, where Impressionism is a favoured mode of art-making.119 In the words of Bushart: ‘His [i. e., Worringer’s] contemporaries were entirely correct when they read Worringer’s works as comments on contemporary culture.’ 120 To be appreciated in its own right, the art of the first decades of the twentieth century had to enter a process of disputation (to employ Worringer’s vocabulary) with its immediate antecedents – Worringer’s oppositional understanding of art history relied on such a pattern.121 The critique of current artistic practices (Impressionism,122 for instance) intensifies Worringer’s argument in support of ‘modern primitiveness’, which Worringer also regards as only a phase in the course of history.123 Impressionism provides to Worringer a set of valuable characteristics in support of his antithetic definition of abstraction, and reveals Worringer’s attention to current art-making. ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ re- entrenches Worringer’s point of view from Abstraction and Empathy, adding temporal 117 Ibid., 42-43. 118 For the instances of abstract-representational interplay as singled out by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy, see, from the current thesis: ‘Gradation, displacement and transposition: alternatives to antithesis in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy’, ‘Form in Gothic: interplay readdressed’, ‘Interplay in naturalism’, ‘Interplay in the Gothic art of Northern Europe: memory, assimilation, interpolation’, ‘Interplay: a dual, hybrid state in Gothic art’. 119 Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch', 72. 120 Ibid. 121 From this point of view, Worringer depends on the model of approaching the writing of art history provided by Hegel. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and T. M. Knox, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [1820-29]), 614. 122 For the critique of Impressionism during Worringer’s time, when Impressionism was regarded as connected to Renaissance, and as symptomatic for the decline of culture, see Bushart, 'Changing Times, Changing Styles: Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch', 73-74, 79. 123 Worringer, 'The Historical Development of Modern Art', 12. 297 urgency to his previously articulated theories: Impressionism needs to be seen as exiting the contemporary stage for different approaches to art-making to be able to claim the limelight. However, where Worringer considers Monet a ‘classic’ Impressionist, he indirectly draws attention to the coexistence of representational and abstract tendencies in Monet’s practice. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer had explained Classical art as a synthesis of representation (Mycenean style) and abstraction (Dipylon style), where the representational element was predominant.124 Classicism thus provided ground for the meeting of abstraction and representation, according to Worringer. By extension, Worringer placed Monet’s Impressionist art within the same conceptual frame, namely ‘abstract-representational art- making’ emphasizing representation.125 If Worringer considers Monet’s work of classical status, and associates it with Impressionism, then Worringer’s Impressionism is not exclusively representational, but predominantly representational. 124 ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 71. 125 From the perspective of Abstraction and Empathy, Monet’s work, in its representational, motif-connected aspects, can be associated with Worringer’s description of the process of empathy – more specifically, with the appreciation of life and nature as apparent in art. Worringer, we have seen, considers Impressionism representational, and uses it as a term of contrast for abstraction-oriented practices. However, the readers of Abstraction and Empathy need to keep in mind that Worringer was addressing the audience of his time, who was familiar with Impressionism and, according to him, less appreciative of newer artistic developments. Impressionism, as an artistic approach emphasizing its connections to nature, is presented by Worringer as antithetic to modes of art-making favouring the expression of feelings through art and the exploration of inner worlds. Worringer thus signals the change in focus recognizable in recent art – namely, the transit from observation-oriented to expression-oriented art-making. Nevertheless, an Impressionist artist such as Monet makes visible abstract features of painting in his works. As following sections of this thesis show, Monet experienced anxiety when confronted with the changeability of natural motifs and with the difficulties of depiction. Anxiety inspired by the world was associated by Worringer with abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy; he also acknowledged that different degrees of abstracting could be observed in art, and that some art forms made visible both representational and abstract characteristics. (See Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy, 14-15, 42-43.) A combination of abstract and representational features can indeed be noticed in Monet’s twentieth-century works. The representational mode and the connection between direct observation and art-making are central to Monet’s early paintings; however, his mature output allows abstract preoccupations and emphases to surface decisively. Monet never abandons painting from life, yet gives greater freedom to colour and to the rhythm of brushstrokes with the passage of time; he also completes canvases in the studio in his later years of practice, focusing more on his pictures rather than on the motifs that inspired them. Although his observation-oriented art differs in its generic impact and intention from the Expressionist works Worringer may have had in mind when writing Abstraction and Empathy, Form in Gothic and ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, Monet’s paintings nevertheless set abstraction and representation in interplay, as many contemporary researchers point out. 298 Monet and his motifs: representational and abstract aspects For an artist active around the turn of the twentieth century such as Claude Monet, to render a chosen motif involves a direct experiencing of the environment, as well as a reconfiguration, in pictorial terms, of the results of observation. Monet’s response to subject-matter requires emotional self-activation as well as distancing. His letters offer a glimpse into his pictorial process. When in Rouen in the last years of the nineteenth century, for instance, Monet paints indoors, yet the changing weather has a powerful impact on his mood and art-making. The flow and tumult of phenomena underscored by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy are an integral part of Monet’s experience:1 the painter renders his motifs at different times of the day, allowing changes of light and weather to influence his work. Struggling to adapt to external changes, especially when his paintings appear unsatisfactory, Monet complains to his wife, Alice, in the early days of March 1893: I’m working away like a madman but, alas, all your words are in vain, and I feel empty and good for nothing. It all happens at once, the weather isn’t very predictable: wonderful sunshine yesterday, fog this morning, sun this afternoon which disappeared just when I needed it; tomorrow it will be a dark grey day or rainy, and once again, I’m very much afraid I’ll leave everything and come home on an impulse... What’s the good of working when I don’t get to the end of anything? This evening I wanted to compare what I’ve done now with the old paintings, which I don’t like looking at too much in case I fall into the same errors. Well, the result of that was that I was right to be unhappy last year; it’s ghastly and what I’m doing now is quite as bad, bad in a different way, that’s all. The essential thing is to avoid the urge of doing it too quickly, try, try again, and get it right once and for all...2 Externalizing Monet’s internal dialogue, the letter brings to light a relevant aspect of his process: the painter abstains from looking at previously completed works in order to avoid making similar mistakes. Monet fears that abstract, predetermined formulae of composition could have a negative impact on his direct observation and experiencing. Monet wishes to 1 Ibid., 16-17. 2 Claude Monet and Richard Kendall, Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters (London: Macdonald Orbis, 1989), 178. Monet’s letter is sent to Alice from Rouen, Thursday evening, on 9 March 1893. 299 generate fresh responses to his motifs, work slower, and finalize his pictures in terms he deems acceptable; his pictorial practice thus emerges as a tensioned re-negotiation of his double allegiance to direct observation and artistic effect. ‘I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions’,3 Monet writes to art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922) in 1884.4 For Monet, the activity of painting relies on his personal ability to engage with his motifs; he places considerable emphasis on his response to conditions of site, light and weather. Beginning from impressions, Monet’s work nevertheless takes shape through the orchestration of pictorial effects. His attempts to capture effects of light and atmosphere yield intense emotional responses in his letters, as do the changing weather patterns.5 However, Monet does not renounce engaging observationally with his motifs, and does not resort to geometrical renditions to simplify his relationship with the world. Where Worringer suggests that the distress of artists faced with a perpetually changeable world can be appeased by abstraction,6 Monet, ever sensitive to the hardships imposed by nature, continues to work with representation. In his History of Impressionist Painters (1906), art critic Théodore Duret (1838-1927) notes that, although Monet paints from observed motifs, what he captures is their fleeting particularities. Monet’s work, according to Duret, renders atmosphere rather than permanence. Duret points out that the painter communicates the qualities of light, season, time of the day and temperature to his viewers, who thus come to experience the depicted atmospheric conditions themselves.7 For Duret, Monet’s canvases have the remarkable power of sharing the direct experiences of the painter: when contemplating a 3 Ibid., 108. This citation is extracted from a letter Monet wrote in Giverny, on 12 January 1884. 4 Art historian Moshe Barasch (1920-2004) explains that impression, or sensation, provides immediate access to the surrounding world. See Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art: From Impressionism to Kandinsky (Fredericksburg: New York University Press, 1998), 13-23. From my point of view, the term ‘impression’ emphasizes the process of reception and its result; it connects mostly to vision, hearing and distance. The term ‘sensation’ draws my attention to reception having already undergone processing by the mind as well as by the body; I regard ‘sensation’ as connected mostly to touch, taste, smell, temperature and proximity. Impression leaves lighter traces than sensation on viewers; sensation brings along an increased internalization of experience. However, Barasch observes that ’impression’ and ‘sensation’ have come to be equated in nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings. For the purposes of this section, which explores the relationship between representation and abstraction, I am referring to ‘impression’ and ‘sensation’ as to forms of personal response to environment. 5 Monet and Kendall, Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, 130-131. 6 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 20. 7 Théodore Duret, Histoire des Peintres Impressionistes (Paris: H. Floury, 1919 [1906]), 51-53. 300 painting by Monet, it is as if viewers could experience nature itself. Duret argues that viewers can undergo thermal sensations on the basis of Monet’s handling of colour. To communicate impressions and sensations,8 Monet relies on colour and paint. He records atmospheric effects, aiming to ‘... get a picture going for every kind of weather, every colour harmony’. 9 For him, rendering atmospheric changes is as important as reaching the pictorial solutions he deems appropriate; he ambitiously aims to translate the observation of weather patterns into complex chromatic compositions. In Monet’s works, chromatic variation springs from a limited palette. According to him: ‘The point is to know how to use the colours, the choice of which is, when all’s said and done, a matter of habit.’ 10 A few well-chosen colours lead to rich chromatic orchestrations in the recording of site and weather, he notes; his observation of motifs in the open air relies on the same initial colour choices. Monet’s approach to representation involves potentially abstract aspects – for instance, the assertion of personal preference in colour selection, and certain a degree of repetition in their employment – despite his focus on rendering the immediacy of experience. 8 For Duret, impressions are visual, and sensations arise in response to movement and light. Both impressions and sensations are connected to senses, but impressions connect more readily to visual effect, and sensations to embodied experience. Ibid., 28. 9 Monet and Kendall, Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, 189-196. See Monet’s letters to Alice Monet (London, 18 March 1900), respectively to Georges Durand-Ruel (Giverny, 3 July 1905). Writing to Georges Durand-Ruel about his colour palette, Monet notes: ‘Anyway, I use flake white, cadmium yellow, vermillion, deep madder, cobalt blue, emerald green and that’s all.’ 10 Ibid., 196. 301 The Doorway (Morning Effect) (1894): re-materializations In Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series (1892-94), representational and abstract approaches to painting coexist. The Doorway (Morning Effect) (1894) (Fig. 18), a work Monet completed towards the end of the series, de-emphasizes architectural detail and depicts effects of light and shading on the Cathedral’s facade. Pictorial form provides support to the rich overlays of colour tints and tones in Monet’s painting. As the gaze ascends towards the upper half of the work, chromatic differentiations are less and less asserted in Monet’s renditions of structure, mass and ornament. An image of the Flamboyant Gothic facade of Rouen Cathedral features in Form in Gothic (Fig. 19),1 where Worringer discusses the abstract yet vital characteristics of Gothic line.2 For 1 The stages of construction of the Rouen Cathedral, as well as the various architectural styles the Cathedral incorporates, need to make the topic of a different inquiry. See, for further reference, Kevin D. Murphy, 'The Historic Building in the Modernized City: the Cathedrals of Paris and Rouen in the Nineteenth Century', Journal of Urban History, 37, No. 2, 2011, 281. Also, Michael T. Davis and Linda Elaine Neagley, 'Mechanics and Meaning: Plan Design at Saint-Urbain, Troyes and Saint-Ouen, Rouen', Gesta, 39, No. 2, 2000, 162-164, 165- 167. Also, Linda Elaine Neagley, 'The Flamboyant Architecture of St.-Maclou, Rouen, and the Development of a Style', Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 47, No. 4, 1988, 374. 2 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 68, illustration 22. Fig. 18. Claude Monet. The Doorway (Morning Effect) [Le Portail (Effet du Matin)]. 1894. oil on canvas. 107 x 74 cm. Riehen/Basel. Fondation Beyeler. 302 Worringer, Gothic architecture as made visible in the ruins of the Abbey of Jumièges (Normandy, France), in the Church of Saint Quirinus of Neuss (Germany), in the Cathedrals of Rheims (France), Ulm (Germany), Rouen (Normandy, France), and Cologne (Germany), is characterised by pathos and ecstasy. 3 Worringer’s Gothic is super-sensuous and transcendental: it aspires to a world above the one presented by senses. 4 Repetitive, like the Northern ornament that announces it, and capable of developing motifs that appear never- ending, Gothic architecture allows the materiality of stone to be subdued by the will to form.5 According to Worringer, Gothic buildings reflect no representational connection to objects in the world; their tremendous dynamism seems to reach beyond material expression. In his words: ‘Common to all [i. e., to Northern ornament, Gothic architecture, as well as to the wild fantasies of immaturity] is an urge to activity, which, being bound to no one object, loses itself, as a result, in infinity.’ 6 Monet’s rendition of Rouen Cathedral does not underscore the dynamic pathos of Gothic, yet invokes, by means of paint, the fundamental similarities of stone and light. Monet represents Rouen Cathedral on the basis of direct experience, combining observation with a personal approach to pictorial technique. For him, painting The Doorway (Morning 3 Ibid., 68-79. Form in Gothic presents illustrations of French and German churches and cathedrals side by side. The interweaving of images of German and French places of worship hints to Worringer’s own artistic interests, as well as to the international aspect of Worringer’s views on contemporary art-making. 4 Ibid., 79. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 82. Fig. 19. Rouen Cathedral. Facade. In Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic [illustration 22, p. 72]. 1910 [edition of 1957]. Rouen. France. 303 Effect) begins with his response to a specific location; he establishes a vantage point that aligns his perspective with the perspective of a passer-by. Depicting Rouen Cathedral from the ground level looking up, Monet focuses less on offering a detailed representation of the majesty of the site than on addressing the meeting between light, structure and ornament in paint. His choice of place and perspective contribute to establishing the composition as well as the atmosphere of the picture. Remembering her conversations with the painter, Lilla Cabot Perry mentions that Monet had started working on the Rouen Cathedral series in the window of a milliner’s shop opposite the Cathedral. According to her, Monet built a little enclosure that isolated him from the shop, permitting him to stand back from the canvas for no more than a yard. ‘[H]e said he had never really seen these Rouen Cathedral pictures until he brought them back to his studio in Giverny’,7 Perry recalls. As her words suggest, Monet did not rely on creating an accurate connection between motifs as observed and motifs as depicted.8 He rather focused on recording lived experience, even when the visual appraisal of pictorial results proved difficult. Monet approaches painting from the perspective of representation: his works render people, places, natural elements; on the other hand, his technique creates distance from his motifs by veiling descriptive detail and emphasizing colour, light and paint effects.9 According to John House in ‘Time’s Cycles’ (1992), Monet intends to pursue the capturing of immaterial sensations rather than to achieve representational accuracy. Monet emphasizes the atmospheric rendition of pictorial motifs instead of depicting elements to which social, cultural or spiritual significance could be attached, House notes.10 He observes that Monet’s 7 Lilla Cabot Perry, 'Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1889 to 1909' in Monet and the Impressionists, ed. George T. M. Shackelford (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008), 206-207. 8 Karin Sagner-Düchting, Monet and Modernism (Munich and London: Prestel, 2002), 34-71. 9 For the tension between the perception-oriented and the process-oriented aspects of Monet’s work, see ———, 'Monet's Late Work from the Vantage Point of Modernism' in Monet and Modernism, ed. Karin Sagner- Düchting (Munich and London: Prestel, 2002), 21-22. 10 Also see Monet’s words from a letter addressed to Gustave Geffroy on 7 October 1890: ‘I'm hard at it, working stubbornly on a series of different effects (grain stacks), but at this time of the year the sun sets so fast that it's impossible to keep up with it... I'm getting so slow at my work and it makes me despair, but the further I get, the more I see that a lot of work has to be done in order to render what I'm looking for: “instantaneity”, the “envelope” above all, the same light spread over everything, and more than ever I'm disgusted by easy things that come in one go. Anyway, I'm increasingly obsessed by the need to render what I experience, and I'm praying that I'll have a few more good years left to me because I think I may make some progress in that direction’. Monet and Kendall, Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, 172. 304 late nineteenth-century series bring attention to sequenced variation and aesthetic qualities – in other words, abstract aspects become visible in Monet’s mature practice.11 In The Doorway (Morning Effect), Monet’s motif emerges from the overlay of brushstrokes rather than from directional lines and structuring planes. The painter renders the interaction of light with architectural form, and redefines form in this process. Composed by the repetitive touch of the brush rather than by unified planar treatment, colour varies within close ranges of tones and tints.12 The dominant hues of this painting, blue and yellow, are modulated by Monet to depict both lit and shaded areas of the Cathedral facade.13 A certain degree of dematerialization characterises Monet’s approach to his motif in The Doorway (Morning Effect); bathed in sunlight, the imposing figure of the Cathedral is depicted as an interweaving of blue, red, orange, green, yellow and purple tints. Architectural detail becomes chromatic harmony – the motif of the Cathedral stands as a landmark that makes visible the transformation of light and the passage of time. Monet’s approach to depicting Gothic architecture resonates with Worringer’s later findings; in Form in Gothic, Worringer writes: ‘... [A]ll expression to which Gothic architecture attained, was attained – and this is the full significance of the contrast – in spite of the stone’. 14 In Monet’s Doorway (Morning Effect), Rouen Cathedral, a building of historical, social, cultural and spiritual significance,15 provides a starting point for Monet’s exploration of 11 John House, 'Time's Cycles', Art in America, 80, No. 10, 1992. Also, ———, 'Monet and the Genesis of His Series' in Claude Monet Painter of Light, eds. Dominik Rimbault, Philip Hurdwood, and Christopher Scoular (Avalon Beach, NSW: Maxwell's Collection Distributor, 2000), 12, 16, 23. 12 In this subchapter, I use the term ‘tint’ to refer to a mixture of colour and white, and the term ‘tone’ to indicate that colour has been mixed with gray. ‘Value contrast’ refers to black and white contrast, and ‘hue’ points to colours specifically mentioned. ‘Saturation’ refers to the unmixed quality of a colour, while ‘desaturation’ implies that colour has been mixed with white (a desaturated colour is a tint). 13 According to Christopher Lyon, in the case of Monet’s triptych, Water Lilies (c. 1920), the painter composed his colour harmonies by bringing together an unexpectedly small number of pigments. Lyon explains that Monet varied the range of green by mixing small amounts of other pigments with viridian and lead white. Lyon’s observation highlights a feature of Monet’s pictorial technique already apparent in Doorway (Morning Effect), an earlier work of less chromatic diversity than the Water Lilies mentioned above. See Christopher Lyon, 'Unveiling Monet', MoMA, No. 7, 1991, 16. 14 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 106. 15 Regarding Monet’s decision to paint the Rouen Cathedral, Robert Herbert notes: ‘That Rouen Cathedral was a deliberate choice on Monet’s part is not to be doubted. He could have chosen to paint the Palais de Justice, or the Bourse, or another kind of governmental or financial institution. We know instinctively that this would be ludicrous for Monet, owing to the different associations with neo-classical architecture. Government buildings of classical style were associated with authority, that is, with government, with bureaucracy, rationality, rules and recipes. Gothic architecture was widely believed to be the result of the willing efforts of many artisans and 305 natural light and colour. The painter’s composition relies on the diagonal ascension (and graduated softening) of value; in his handling, value contrast achieves a different effect than in the case of traditional chiaroscuro technique. Chiaroscuro, or the graduated articulation of light and dark contrast throughout a picture, emphasizes the three-dimensionality of figures, and suggests spatial depth. Doorway (Morning Effect) orchestrates contrast by means of similarity in tints and tones instead, and allows the transition from dark to light to take place in one principal plane: on the depicted facade of the cathedral.16 Nevertheless, Monet continues to attend to representational aspects, establishing the composition of Doorway (Morning Effect) on the grounds of emplaced observation. Resemblance with Rouen Cathedral is still sought by Monet; however, visual similarities become relative due to the prominence of brushwork. In this respect, Monet’s pictorial technique appeals to the sense of touch as much as to the sense of sight. The brushstrokes of Monet dissolve detail and structure, and assert form, colour and texture in Doorway (Morning Effect). Paint creates a bridge between light and matter; on Monet’s canvas, stone becomes vibrantly present, while light finds embodiment. The overall, paradoxical effect of his picture is one of material weightlessness, articulated through visible, unblended, texturally particularizing brushstrokes. Monet is not alone in highlighting the shimmering qualities of Gothic architecture. In Principles of Art History (1915), Wölfflin examines the formal aspects of late (or Flamboyant) Gothic, and observes that Gothic architecture communicates movement in painterly rather than linear terms. For Wölfflin, late Gothic makes visible not static plasticity, but dynamic appearances, and three-dimensional depth. He writes: In contrast to [High Gothic], late Gothic seeks the painterly effect of vibrating forms. Not in the modern sense, but compared with the strict linearity of High Gothic, form has been divorced from the type of plastic rigidity and forced over towards the artists, who were given the freedom to choose their decorative motifs from nature.’ Robert L. Herbert, 'The Decorative and the Natural in Monet's Cathedrals' in Aspects of Monet: A Symposium on the Artist's Life and Times, eds. John Rewald and Frances Weitzenhoffer (New York: Abrams, 1984), 171. 16 Monet bridges value contrast and colour in Doorway (Morning Effect). He thus responds, in late nineteenth- century terms, to the observation of John Shearman that colour cannot be separated from chiaroscuro, since light in painting is actually rendered by means of colour. See John Shearman, 'Leonardo's Colour and Chiaroscuro', Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 25, No. 1, 1962, 13. 306 appearance of movement. The style develops recessional motives, motives of overlapping in the ornament as in space. It plays with the apparently lawless and in places softens into flux. And as now calculations with mass effects come, where the single form no longer speaks with a quite independent voice, this art delights in the mysterious and unlucid, in other words, in a partial obscuring of reality.17 Familiar with the work of Wölfflin, Worringer mentions his opinion on Gothic in Abstraction and Empathy. ‘Here [i. e., in Gothic] something magnificent came into being’, Wölfflin, as cited by Worringer, points out. ‘But it is a magnificence that lies beyond life, not life itself magnificently experienced’.18 Like Wölfflin, Worringer addresses the supra-sensuous characteristics of Gothic in Abstraction and Empathy. For Worringer, however, Gothic needs to be approached from a subjective, psychologically oriented viewpoint.19 Writing about the exterior of Gothic cathedrals, Worringer expressively points to the dynamism he finds specific to Gothic architecture. He remarks: ‘The upward striving energies, which in the interior have not yet come to rest, seem to press outwards, in order to lose themselves, freed from all limitation and confinement’. 20 While Wölfflin signals the apparent absence of laws of Gothic form, Worringer explains Gothic architecture as reflective of a striving to reach beyond the very structure and material that give a building its substantiality. Robert L. Herbert observes that, for Impressionist artists such as Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, Gothic architecture proved appealing on social, political and cultural grounds.21 According to 17 Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, 231. 18 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 138. 19 In the conclusion of Principles of Art History, Wölfflin, writing in 1915, cautions against the exclusive focus on the history of expression in art, which he finds one-sided, and signals his interest in form (or schema, to employ his terminology) instead. In Abstraction and Empathy Worringer noted he intended to cultivate a subjective approach to the ‘history of the feeling about the world’; he made vast employment of the term ‘expression’ in his discussions of art. The term ‘expression’ seems a synonym of ‘art-making’ in Abstraction and Empathy; Worringer focuses on ‘forms of artistic expression’ throughout his text. (Ibid., 30.) While Worringer was interested in charting emotional variations on the basis of their manifestation in artistic style, Wölfflin prefers to focus on defining and analysing concepts of general applicability in Principles of Art History. Nevertheless, in Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture (1886), Wölfflin had approached architectural form from a perspective that responded to expressive and psychological concerns. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, 226-227. 20 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 164-165. 21 Herbert, 'The Decorative and the Natural in Monet's Cathedrals', 171. However, the dematerialization mentioned by Herbert characterizes mainly the visual effect of Monet’s approach. From being the subject of the painter’s observation, the Rouen Cathedral actually transits to becoming a painted motif in Monet’s Doorway (Morning Effect). During this transition from observation to picture-making, Monet allows abstract aspects to 307 him, Impressionist artists appreciated that Gothic architecture had emerged as a community effort, where creative contributions permitted personal freedom in the interpretation of natural motifs.22 From the perspective of Herbert’s argument, Rouen Cathedral can be considered as an architectural extension of the natural world, brought into being through artistic collaboration. Herbert explains that Monet’s decision to paint the Rouen Cathedral was supported by the late nineteenth-century connection drawn between Gothic art and naturalism. He mentions that admirers of Monet’s work such as statesman Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) and writer Léon Bazalgette (1873-1928) regarded nature, medieval art, craft and decoration as associated.23 For Monet to focus on painting the Rouen Cathedral was contextually justified, Herbert maintains; he notes Monet’s attachment to naturalist values, but also highlights the decorative aspects of Monet’s practice. The decorative, according to Herbert, takes shape through Monet’s cultivation of surface effects, through his emphasis on colour, and through his selection of an architectural motif as a starting point for pictorial exploration. Twentieth-century writers have underscored the subtle interweaving of representational and abstract aspects in Monet’s work. Monet’s pursuit of abstraction is predominantly visible for Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935), who emphasizes the key role of painting as such (rather than of painting as representation) in the Rouen Cathedral series.24 Roger Fry draws attention to Monet’s deliberate simplifications and instinctive design while signalling Monet’s capacity to render appearances.25 For André Masson (1896-1987), Monet has the representational ability to record sensations, but also the abstraction-oriented capacity to select and organize sensations.26 In her turn, Karen Sagner-Düchting notes that critical approaches to Monet’s work tend to range from interpreting Monet’s paintings as precise records of perception to build into his process of representation: he depicts the Rouen Cathedral in the colours of light (thus suggesting its dematerialization), yet unforgettably re-materializes the Cathedral by means of paint. 22 Ibid., 171-173. 23 Ibid., 168-171. 24 Kazimir Malevich cited in Sagner-Düchting, Monet and Modernism, 35. 25 Roger Fry, 'Modern French Art at the Lefevre Gallery', The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 63, No. 364, 1933, 24. 26 André Masson, 'Monet the Founder' in Monet and the Impressionists, ed. George T. M. Shackelford (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008 [1952]), 90-91. 308 seeing Monet’s efforts – especially in his late works – as sensation-oriented, subjective explorations of colour.27 Representation and abstraction in Monet’s Water Lilies (1907) The abstract aspect animating Monet’s pictorial effects comes increasingly to the fore in his early twentieth-century series, for instance in Water Lilies (1903-09).28 His tendency towards abstraction develops gradually, in connection to his process of painting from chosen motifs.29 As early as 1893, Monet was predicating the success of his work on slowing down, on avoiding rapid completion; he often communicated instantaneity through ‘... a stubborn incrustation of colours’, a textural accumulation of paint which required repetitive overlaying.30 With the passage of time, Monet’s commitment to instantaneity becomes a matter of pictorial effect rather than a strategy of immediate response to his motifs; he continues to paint in response to environment, yet, as his early twentieth-century correspondence reveals, also re- addresses his works in the studio.31 In fact, the painter agonizes over finalizing his works, making numerous alterations before managing to articulate fleeting atmospheric impressions 27 Sagner-Düchting, 'Monet's Late Work from the Vantage Point of Modernism', 20-21. Kandinsky, in his Reminiscences (1913), notes he was particularly impressed with one of Monet’s Haystacks. 28 Apart from his Rouen Cathedral series (1892-94), Monet also worked on a series of Haystacks (1890-91), on a series of Poplars on the Banks of the Epte (1891), and on a series of London paintings (1900-04). See Virginia Spate and Claude Monet, The Colour of Time: Claude Monet (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 201-252. 29 Hajo Düchting observes that, although colour modelling and brushwork go beyond the purposes of representation in Monet’s Water Lilies, a hint to ‘nature’s intrinsic elemental character’ is still present in these paintings. See Hajo Düchting, 'Colour and Technique: Monet and His Influence on Abstract Painting' in Monet and Modernism, ed. Karin Sagner-Düchting (Munich and London: Prestel, 2002), 144-145. Regarding the diversity of painting techniques employed by Monet in the Water Lilies project, see Lyon, 'Unveiling Monet', 16-17. 30 Monet and Kendall, Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, 179. Regarding Monet’s constantly reworking and altering his paintings, see his letters to Alice (London, 28 March 1900, and London again, 2 March 1901). On Monet’s views regarding the exhibition of Water Lilies (which could only be shown together, according to the painter), see his letter to Paul Durand-Ruel (Giverny, 27 April 1907). ———, Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, 190-198. 31 Monet and Kendall, Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, 192-198. See Monet’s letters to his wife Alice (London, 2 March 1901), his letters to Paul Durand-Ruel (Giverny, 10 May 1903 and 12 February 1905), and his letter to Gustave Geffroy (Giverny, 11 August 1908). 309 and sensations to his relative satisfaction.32 Representational features remain discernible in his mature output, yet the painter’s preoccupations with colour, brushwork, form, space and composition also gain visibility. Monet, in his Water Lilies, does not strive to articulate pictures that render motifs accurately, in all their detail. To depict the world does not rely on imitation, but on communicating personal, embodied experience. In the words of Monet: ‘I only know that I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and that most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is. In short, I let a good many mistakes show through when fixing my sensations.’ 33 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer associates sensation with vitality and organic life – in other words, with representational art (or naturalism).34 He draws attention to Goethe’s remark that, for Classically oriented artists (or, according to Worringer’s main line of argument, representational artists), the sensations they experience are inner reflections of the natural world. Following Goethe, Worringer explains that nature appeared as the outer manifestation of inner feeling in representational art.35 He maintains that contemporary artists need to distinguish between naturalism and imitation, and signalled the role of artistic will in naturalism. According to Worringer: ... [W]hat is naturalism? The answer is: approximation to the organic and the true to life, but not because the artist desired to depict a natural object true to life in its corporeality, not because he desired to give the illusion of a living object, but because the feeling for the organic form that is true to life had been aroused and because the artist desired to give satisfaction to this feeling, which dominated the absolute artistic 32 See previously cited excerpt from Monet’s letter to Alice, written from Rouen, Thursday evening, on 9 March 1893. 33 Monet and Kendall, Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, 245. Letter to Gustave Geffroy, written from Giverny on 7 June 1912. 34 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 61, 72, 128. 35 Ibid., 128. For Worringer’s association of representation (or naturalism) with Classicism, see, from the current thesis, ‘Wilhelm Worringer: sketch for a portrait’, ‘Gazing in the mirror of history: Worringer’s forewords to Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic’, ‘Empathy, abstraction and representation in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy’, ‘Representation and abstraction in art-making: Worringer’s perspective’, “ ‘Common to all’: form for Kant and Worringer’, ‘Riegl and artistic will’. 310 volition. It was the happiness of the organically alive, not that of truth to life, which was striven after.36 For Worringer, naturalist art communicates the personal responses of artists to the world: more precisely, their enjoyment of organic form and intention of engaging with it. The boundaries of naturalist art as described by Worringer thus extend to include works that do not offer strict imitations of natural motifs. In his later works, Monet approaches painting from a perspective similar to Worringer’s point of view on naturalism. Balancing his interest in nature and direct observation with his attention to pictorial effects, Monet depicts his motifs while expressing his sensations; his process thus comes to interweave representational and abstract approaches to painting. Virginia Spate points to the complex connections developed by Monet between abstraction and representation in his early twentieth-century works. In Transcending the Moment – Monet’s Water Lilies 1899 –1926 (2000), Spate writes: ‘The central paradox of Monet's painting is nowhere more clearly exemplified than in the Water Lilies, which are both “abstract” and accurate, dream-like and intensely familiar.’ 37 Two pictorial elements that facilitate Monet’s interweaving of abstraction and representation are colour and form. In a canvas from the Water Lilies series, Water Lilies (1907) (Fig. 20),38 the larger violet and green areas of the canvas reveal the presence of ochre, yellow, pink, blue, indigo veils at close range. Due to their dissolved boundaries and textural variations, these veils of colour reflect the physical attributes of movement and fluidity. 36 Ibid., 27-28. 37 Virginia Spate, 'Transcending the Moment - Monet's Water Lilies 1899-1926' in Claude Monet Painter of Light, eds. Dominik Rimbault, Philip Hurdwood, and Christopher Scoular (Avalon Beach, NSW: Maxwell's Collection Distributor, 2000), 32-33. 38 In the discussion that follows, the term ‘Water Lilies’ refers specifically to Monet’s painting from 1907, unless otherwise indicated (e. g., Monet’s Water Lilies series). 311 Monet communicates effects of clustering, undulation, dissolution, enfolding, intermittence, refraction and reflection by building up subtle differences in brushwork, tint and tone in Water Lilies. Red, white and purple punctuate his composition, emphasizing the play of light on leaves and water. Nevertheless, the painter organizes his composition around protagonist colours: he establishes green and violet as key chromatic notes of Water Lilies. In Monet’s handling, paint reconfigures the physical specificities of his motif. His brushstrokes model pictorial planes by accumulation in Water Lilies. Blended when employed by Monet to depict water and reflections, brushstrokes become shorter and disclose their uneven edges as the painter renders leaves and petals. His application of paint alternates between smooth and textured passages. Much like colour and form, brushwork plays a key role in the articulation of Monet’s composition. Form surfaces from the meeting of colour and brushwork in Monet’s Water Lilies. His choice of motif emphasizes physical processes and levels of coexistence rather than the solid aspects of natural forms.39 The stability of built environment the Cathedral motif had suggested in the 39 Muriel Ciolkowska shows that Monet’s approach to form is characterized by melody and vibration rather than by structural aspects, as in the case of Cézanne’s work. Ciolkowska notes: ‘If Cézanne aimed at harmony through form, Monet aimed at melody through tone, and so from stage to stage, as his style acquired perfection and his eyes subtlety, it became more and more intangible, evading increasingly the matter-of-factness of definition through outline, and by means, I repeat, analogous to the Chinese artist’s method of translating the form of a bird by painting its feathers, or of a sea wave by numerous strokes building up a form within a form. In other words Monet’s preoccupation was not with co-related form, as Cézanne’s, but with vibrations within Fig. 20. Claude Monet. Water Lilies. 1907. oil on canvas. 96.8 x 93.4 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. 312 early eighteen-nineties disappears a decade later in the Water Lilies series. As Virginia Spate and William Seitz remark, Monet gradually comes to exclude the bank of the Giverny pond from his paintings; 40 his decision to focus on the rendering of water, plants and light thus influences the abstract-representational dynamics of his works. Water Lilies (1907), for instance, narrows the gap between depiction and pictorial effect.41 When Monet traces boundaries for representational elements, he emphasizes the sketch-like quality of contour, allowing it to dissolve into colour. His approach to form communicates the qualities of mobility inherent in his motif. In his Theory of Colours (1810), Goethe noted that colour had a distinctive capacity for transformation which made it a visual indicator of subtle natural processes.42 His remark is validated in a work such as Water Lilies, due to Monet’s approach to observation as well as pictorial rendition. For Monet, the motif of water lilies requires a sustained examination of physical qualities and processes. He begins by observing and recording colour change in front of his motif – a habit he had developed throughout his practice, as his works and letters show. one form.’ See Muriel Ciolkowska, 'Memories of Monet' in Monet and the Impressionists, ed. George T. M. Shackelford (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008 [March 1927]), 202. 40 Spate, Claude Monet: The Colour of Time, 258-263. Also, early twentieth-century writer Henri Ghéon describes Monet’s decision to focus on water surfaces in terms suggestive of increasing abstraction. Ghéon writes in 1909: ‘Remark how over the course of five years of studies by the shore of the same flowering pond, Claude Monet restricts the field of his vision in a progressive fashion. First he paints the pond ringed in by banks, then the banks give way, leaving their reflection; the next year, no more than the reflection of the trees, then nothing but the sky in the water. And thus, from the flower bed of water lilies scarcely a single flower remains at the end.’ See Steven Z. Levine and Claude Monet, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 240, 319. Also see William Seitz, 'Monet and Abstract Painting', College Art Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1956, 45. 41 Spate highlights the relationship between abstract and representational modes with regard to Monet’s Water Lilies works from 1907. She writes: ‘These abstract colour harmonies embody intensely observed effects: slight inflections of violet around the lowest island of the leaves – which seem to be coming to form in the thinning mist – suggest the translucent depths of the water, while the different intensities of colour are evocative of the different densities of mist in shadow, in the golden reflections or under the open sky.’ See Spate, Claude Monet: The Colour of Time, 263. 42 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1840 [1810]), xlvi. 313 In the 1880s, for instance, Monet focuses on depicting the interaction of water, rocks and light from Belle-Île (Fig. 21). According to him: ‘... I do know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its ways in that particular spot; and this is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even’.43 Through concentrated, emplaced looking and successive renditions, Monet charts the variations of a dynamic vista. He develops a pictorial approach that combines static and dynamic elements in order to render his chosen motif. A similar interweaving of repeated observation and pictorial rendition informs the Water Lilies series. However, rocks, clouds, the horizon, and the occasional spell of rain feature in Monet’s paintings from Belle-Île, where the artist engages in three-dimensional modelling and communicates atmospheric depth of field, as well as a sense of location. Two decades later, Monet’s Water Lilies series focuses on vegetation, water surfaces, and the effects of physical processes made visible by his chosen motif. The painter replaces the experience of seeing in the distance with close-range observation. By removing spatial signposts and boundaries, he can explore the interchanges between form and colour , and can bring the abstract potential of colour and brushwork to the surface. Gradual chromatic steps lead viewing from the definition to the dissolution of form in Water Lilies. 43 Monet and Kendall, Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, 122. This letter is sent by Monet to Alice from Kervilahouen, on 30 October 1886. Fig. 21. Claude Monet. Port Donnant, Belle-Île. 1886. oil on canvas. 65.6 x 81.3 cm. New Haven, Art Institute of Chicago. 314 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Monet’s painting articulates a multifaceted dialogue between representation and abstraction, two modes of art-making Worringer frames by means of antithesis in the opening pages of Abstraction and Empathy. This characteristic of Monet’s practice is signalled by Duret, for whom Monet’s Water Lilies appear to be ‘... decorative work, but a kind of decoration that relies on reality and is grounded in a long- standing practice of observing nature.’ 44 Duret draws attention to the relationship between abstraction and representation in Monet’s art as early as 1906. The abstraction-oriented Water Lilies series emerges after decades of sustained representational inquiry – a mode of art- making that continues to reverberate in Monet’s mature output, according to Duret. The interweaving of abstraction and representation in Monet’s painting, Water Lilies (1907), takes a different shape than the abstract-representational interplay in The Doorway (Morning Effect). For The Doorway (Morning Effect), Monet employed colour to re-materialize architectural structure and detail in pictorial terms. Instead, the motif of Water Lilies presupposes a distancing from physical values such as solidity, form and boundaries; consequently, Monet directs his use of colour less towards structuring and light-dark contrasts than towards blending and chromatic modulations. The painter employs primary hues only to create dynamic accents; he emphasizes tints, tones and secondary hues, more readily suggestive of harmony and of a fluid relationship between form and colour. Water Lilies records subtle shifts in Monet’s angle of vision. These changes in viewpoint further enhance the interweaving of abstract and representational values. In the lower left corner of the canvas, for instance, the water lilies seem rendered almost from above; the surface plane thus appears to curve towards the viewer, alluding to the roundness of three- dimensional space. The placement of lily clusters on the right of Monet’s composition suggests the possibility of diagonal movement for this visual group. Towards the top of the canvas, vegetation seems to glide away from the viewer, indicating spatial recession. Monet 44 Duret, Histoire des Peintres Impressionistes, 68. In the revised and translated edition of this book, Duret writes about Monet’s paintings of the pond at Giverny: ‘Monet thus reached that last degree of abstraction and imagination allied with reality, of which the art of landscape is capable.’ See Théodore Duret, Manet and the French Impressionists (London: Grant Richards, 1910), 146. However, as Steven Z. Levine shows, Monet’s pictorial approach provokes a variety of responses from his contemporaries. For example, Roger Marx regards Monet’s Water Lilies series as a token of egoism and self-absorption, while Charles Morice considers Monet’s work to place exclusive emphasis on physicality. See Levine and Monet, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self, 231, 239. 315 may have constructed pictorial space from an emplaced vantage point, yet included more than one angle of vision in his picture. His painting configures a composite space where the positioning and representation of elements allude to natural changes, as well as to the passage of time.45 For Monet, direct experience and formal considerations intermix in his approach to environment, work display and art-making. Refusing to show a selection of canvases from his Water Lilies series in 1907, Monet explains to Paul Durand-Ruel: ‘... [T]he whole effect can only be achieved from an exhibition of the entire group.’ 46 His attention to compositional aspects of painting comes to reflect in his views on exhibition strategy. In a letter from 1921 addressed to Georges Clemenceau, Monet requires that the Large Decorations he intends to donate to the State be exhibited in accordance with his views, in the space at the Orangerie Museum.47 The immersive atmosphere Monet wishes to rearticulate by means of display is rooted in his engagement with his garden, pond, and studio at Giverny. Bringing together direct experience and attention to effects of painting, light and space, Monet creates complex, lived connections between representational and abstract aspects of painting at the beginning of the twentieth century. 45 Roger Marx approaches Monet’s bridging of abstraction and representation in terms of change, movement and attentiveness to the brisk pace of modern life. With regard to early twentieth-century painting, Marx writes: ‘It is no longer a question of fixing the things that abide, but of seizing what is passing. The concrete reality of things is not so interesting as the temporary links between things, the interdependent rapports. Until recently artists prided themselves on representing a palpable reality, yet there is a delicate interrelatedness that comprises and surrounds reality and seems to elude any kind of detailed transcription – however, this is just what Monsieur Claude Monet aspires to do, and where he excels.’ See Roger Marx, 'The Waterlilies by Monsieur Claude Monet' in Monet and the Impressionists, ed. George T. M. Shackelford (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008 [June 1909]), 202. 46 Monet and Kendall, Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, 198. 47 Ibid., 258. Regarding Monet’s negotiation of the visual relationship between his series of Large Decorations [Grandes Décorations] and their exhibition space, The Orangerie in the Tuileries Gardens, Paris, also see Spate, Claude Monet: The Colour of Time, 269-302. 316 Towards the expression of inner worlds: Kandinsky, Worringer, and turn-of-the-twentieth century artist writings The transition between rendering outer aspects of the world to expressing inner life takes place gradually in the works of artists during the first years of the twentieth century. 1 In the practices of painters such as Hodler, Cézanne, Monet, and Kandinsky, responding to aspects of personal experience brings increased visibility to abstract-representational interplay. For Kandinsky, the development of his art relies on artistic experimentation as well as written reflection. Kandinsky employs the medium of writing throughout his life, as Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo remark.2 The articles of the painter reveal his engagement with early twentieth-century art and criticism,3 and bring to light his awareness of and direct involvement with international artistic developments.4 Kandinsky participates actively to the cultural and artistic scene of Munich, a city where, like Worringer, he resides in the early years of the twentieth century.5 In Munich, Kandinsky’s 1 See Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 153. Also, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 11, 26-29, 33. 2 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 11-13. 3 Ibid., 33-51. See Kandinsky’s ‘Critique of Critics’ (1901), an article where he requires art critics to combine sensitivity, consciousness, comprehension and knowledge in their judgments. Also see Kandinsky’s correspondence from Munich (1902), where he comments admiringly on the works of contemporary French and British artists in the International Exhibition of the Secession. 4 Ibid., 17, 45-46. 5 In English-language sources, the relationship between Kandinsky and Worringer tends to be mentioned without extensive detailing. Kandinsky, as Vivian Endicott Barnett, Helmut Friedel and Rudolf H. Wackernagel show, lived in Munich between 1896 and 1914. See Vivian Endicott Barnett, Helmut Friedel, and Rudolf H. Wackernagel, eds., Vasily Kandinsky: A Colorful Life: The Collection of the Lenbachhaus, Munich (New York: Harry N. Abrams,1996), 32. Worringer was also located in Munich between 1902 and 1909, according to Sebastian Preuss, so (at the very least) Kandinsky and Worringer would have had the chance to hear each other’s names in art-connected circles. See Preuss, 'Spiritual Intoxication: Sebastian Preuss on Wilhelm Worringer and Modernism', 16. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, Klaus Lankheit, Peter Selz, and Juliet Koss note that Kandinsky knew Worringer and was familiar with his writings; however, these authors do not comment further on the connections between the two. See Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 117. Also, Kandinsky, Marc, and Lankheit, The Blaue Reiter Almanac, 25-26, 30, 36. Also, Peter Selz, 'The Aesthetic Theories of Wassily Kandinsky and Their Relationship to the Origin of Non-Objective Painting', The Art Bulletin, 39, No. 2, 1957, 129. Carmen Giménez sketches a background for the links between Kandinsky and Worringer; she underscores that Piper published the works of both Worringer and Kandinsky, and that Marc – Kandinsky’s friend – read Abstraction and Empathy before the publication of The Blue Rider Almanac. According to Giménez: ‘Between 1908 and 1910 – the same years that Worringer’s book was beginning to circulate – he [i. e., Kandinsky] began to consciously develop an art that was purely abstract, working not from Cubism or any kind of representational style but from pure colour. Just a few years later he wrote On the Spiritual in Art (1912) and edited, with Franz Marc, The Blaue Reiter Almanac (1912). We know that Kandinsky was familiar with Worringer’s work – their books were put out by the same publisher, Reinhard Piper, and in December 1911 Marc wrote to Kandinsky that he was reading Abstraction and Empathy. 317 art-making incorporates a variety of influences that shape his writings as well. Sixten Ringbom, for instance, draws attention to the impact of the writings of philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) and writer J. W. Goethe (1749-1832) on Kandinsky’s thought.6 According to Peg Weiss, Kandinsky was familiar with the key figures of the Munich Jugendstil [Youth Style] movement, such as architect and designer Peter Behrens (1868- 1940), or sculptor Hermann Obrist (1862-1927). 7 In her turn, Vivian Endicott Barnett discusses the contexts and conditions that fuelled Kandinsky’s early twentieth-century relationships with artists like Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), Alexei Jawlensky (1864-1941), and Marianne von Werefkin (1860-1938).8 According to Shulamith Behr, Kandinsky resonated with the utopian worldview of writer and activist Dimitrije Mitrinovich (1887- 1953), and welcomed Mitrinovich’s contribution to the Blue Rider Almanac (1912).9 These authors do not draw attention to the relationship between Kandinsky and Worringer, to Kandinsky’s having read Worringer’s books, or to the significance of Worringer’s ideas for Worringer was a kindred spirit and had a very disciplined, concise, and extremely strong way of thinking. But Kandinsky wrote his own book as an artist, not a historian, so he never referred to him. And I think he had a strong personality, so perhaps he didn’t want to owe anything to Worringer, you know?’ See Carmen Giménez, and Nat Trotman, 'Lasting Impact: Carmen Giménez on Abstraction and Empathy.' Deutsche Guggenheim Magazine, 2009, 4-17. With regard to Worringer’s views on Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art, Juliet Koss mentions only one letter sent by Worringer to Kandinsky. She observes: ‘For his part, Worringer’s response to Kandinsky’s book was polite, but distant. With reference to the artist’s famous description of art as a large, unpwardly moving triangle, he wrote: “Briefly formulated, this is my position with regard to your book: I am not standing at the same point, but I find myself in the same triangle.” (Worringer to Kandinsky, January 7, 1912.) See Koss, 'On the Limits of Empathy', 150, 157. Kandinsky saw the triangle of spiritual life as fear-laden and materialist in its lower sections, and increasingly fearless, yet still a prey to confusion, in its higher compartments; artists could be found in every division of the triangle. Art historians belonged in a higher division of the triangle, yet, according to him, focused too much on the past. (Kandinsky cautioned: ‘...the external principles of art can only be valid for the past and not for the future.’ See Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 141.) It is unclear whether Kandinsky had Worringer’s work in mind when writing about contemporary art historical practices; he certainly did not point to Worringer in On the Spiritual in Art. On the other hand, Worringer tactfully claimed no specific standpoint in Kandinsky’s spiritual triangle, although he saw himself as included in the triangle itself. (See ———, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 133-142.) Further explorations of the connection between Worringer and Kandinsky, as well as of the influence of Worringer on Kandinsky, need to make the topic of self-standing inquiries. 6 Sixten Ringbom, 'Art in "The Epoch of the Great Spiritual": Occult Elements in the Early Theory of Abstract Painting', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 29, 1966, 386-389. 7 As Weiss explains, Behrens had offered Kandinsky a teaching position with the Düsseldorf Arts and Crafts School, while Obrist, who in time became Kandinsky’s friend, held a teaching studio across Kandinsky’s own Phalanx School. See Peg Weiss, 'Kandinsky and the "Jugendstil" Arts and Crafts Movement', The Burlington Magazine, 117, No. 866, 1975, 270-279. 8 Barnett shows that Münter was Kandinsky’s student at the Phalanx School in Munich, and later became his companion. Together with Jawlensky and Werefkin, Barnett explains, Kandinsky founded the New Artists’ Association of Munich [Neue Künstlervereinigung München]. See Wassily Kandinsky et al., eds., Vasily Kandinsky: A Colorful Life: The Collection of the Lenbachhaus, Munich (New York: Harry N. Abrams,1996), 45, 191-192. 9 Shulamith Behr, 'Wassily Kandinsky and Dimitrije Mitrinovic; Pan-Christian Universalism and the Yearbook 'Towards the Mankind of the Future through Aryan Europe'', Oxford Art Journal, 15, No. 1, 1992, 81-82. 318 Kandinsky. As made evident in English-language sources, the influence of Worringer on Kandinsky can be considered generic rather than specific; Kandinsky would have resonated with Worringer’s ideas, yet, unlike in the case of Nietzsche,10 did not mention Worringer in On the Spiritual in Art. Kandinsky’s early twentieth-century paintings take shape in conditions that encourage the rise of independent artistic associations, the emphasis on spiritual, intellectual, and interdisciplinary aspects of art-making,11 and the exploration but also the questioning of decorative art. The early years of the twentieth century find Kandinsky experimenting with designs for ceramics, outfits and handbags; 12 in 1904, he writes to Münter with regard to his involvement in printmaking: ‘It’s not playing, my love, I am learning a lot from these things and making headway.’ 13 As Weiss and Barnett show, Kandinsky brings together elements of fine art as well as craft in his practice;14 however, he is critical towards geometrical 10 Kandinsky pays tribute to Nietzsche rather than to Worringer in his own writings. For instance, in ‘Whither the New Art?’ (1911), an article published in Odesskie novosti, Odessa, Kandinsky refers to the impact of Nietzsche in his epoch. For Kandinsky, Nietzsche’s books provide ground for a focus on the inner world; the signs of this shift of attention from external to internal values manifest as disturbing outer changes. Kandinsky writes: ‘Consciously or unconsciously, the genius of Nietzsche began the “transvaluation of values.” What had stood firm was displaced – as if a great earthquake had erupted in the soul. And it is this tragedy of displacement, instability, and weakness of the material world that is reflected in art by imprecision and by dissonance. When we look at paintings from this point of view, we should not, I repeat, understand and not know, but simply feel, baring our soul completely.’ See Wassily Kandinsky, Kenneth C. Lindsay, and Peter Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art (Boston, Massachusetts: G.K. Hall, 1982), I, 103. In On the Spiritual in Art (1912), Kandinsky mentions once more Nietzsche’s contribution to the increased emphasis on inner preoccupations at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the words of Kandinsky: ‘When religion, science, and morality are shaken (the last by the mighty hand of Nietzsche), when the external supports threaten to collapse, then man’s gaze turns away from the external towards himself. Literature, music and art are the first and most sensitive realms where this spiritual change becomes noticeable in real form.’ See Wassily Kandinsky, Kenneth C. Lindsay, and Peter Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art (Boston, Massachusetts: G.K. Hall, 1982), I, 145. 11 In connection with an article published in Dekorative Kunst (March 1904) about the school Obrist and Wilhelm von Debschitz (1871-1948) had opened in 1902-03, Weiss underscores that instruction at the Obrist- Debschitz school was regarded as ‘geistige.’ Geistige is ‘spiritual-intellectual,’ in Weiss’ translation. Thus Weiss casts an indirect light on two key aspects that inform Kandinsky’s own text, On the Spiritual in Art [Über das Geistige in der Kunst], namely the preoccupation with spiritual pursuits as well as with intellectual expression. See Weiss, 'Kandinsky and the "Jugendstil" Arts and Crafts Movement', 272. 12 Kandinsky et al., eds., Vasily Kandinsky: A Colorful Life: The Collection of the Lenbachhaus, Munich, 96. 13 Ibid., 126. Also, ———, eds., Vasily Kandinsky: A Colorful Life: The Collection of the Lenbachhaus, Munich, 192. 14 Peg Weiss, 'Kandinsky and the 'Jugendstil' Arts and Crafts Movement', The Burlington Magazine, 117, No. 866, 1975, 275-279. Also, Kandinsky et al., eds., Vasily Kandinsky: A Colorful Life: The Collection of the Lenbachhaus, Munich, 79-81. 319 ornamentation in On the Spiritual in Art,15 highlighting instead the relevance of inner necessity in artistic practice. In his writings, Kandinsky proves familiar with contemporary French art.16 He notes the inner qualities of Cézanne’s paintings in ‘Letters from Munich’ (1909-10) and in On the Spiritual in Art,17 commenting on Cézanne’s ability to animate still life renditions by rendering form through colour, and thus creating harmony with mathematical and abstract inflections. Cézanne’s approach to representation leads, Kandinsky observes, to the creation of pictures rather than to the depiction of motifs. Monet’s work has a similarly intense effect on Kandinsky. In his ‘Reminiscences’ (1913), Kandinsky mentions the impression a Haystack painting by Monet had made on him at an earlier date.18 Seeing Monet’s work brings along a significant realization for Kandinsky: memory does not need to rely on recognizable motifs. Kandinsky recalls: And suddenly, for the first time, I saw a picture. That it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me. I didn’t recognize it. I found this nonrecognition painful, and thought that the painter had no right to paint so indistinctly. I had a dull feeling that the object was lacking in this picture. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably upon my memory, always hovering quite unexpectedly before my eyes, down to the last detail.19 In his response to Monet’s rendition of a Haystack, Kandinsky highlights his own preference for paintings that offer ground for empathic responses. Such paintings may postpone the recognition of motifs, or dissolve motifs altogether. Kandinsky does not empathise exclusively with representational aspects of painting: he records his vivid emotions upon 15 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 197-199. 16 As Barnett mentions, Kandinsky had exhibited in Paris since 1904 and had lived in Paris between 1906 and 1907. See Kandinsky et al., eds., Vasily Kandinsky: A Colorful Life: The Collection of the Lenbachhaus, Munich, 32,159. 17 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 57. Also, ———, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 79, 98, 151. 18 Lindsay and Vergo point to the possibility of Kandinsky’s having seen the painting of Monet in 1896, on the occasion of a touring exhibition of French art in Russia (St. Petersburg was one of the cities where Monet’s work was shown). However, according to Lindsay and Vergo, the precise identity of Monet’s work (cited in the exhibition catalogue as Haystack in Sunlight) is difficult to ascertain. Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 363, 888-889. 19 Ibid., 363. 320 seeing Monet’s Haystack, a painting he experiences as disturbingly vague, yet memorable. From this perspective, Kandinsky’s approach to empathy and abstraction differs from Worringer’s views as expressed in Abstraction and Empathy. For Worringer, Impressionism is mainly representational, and exemplifies an empathic approach to the world;20 for Kandinsky, Monet’s Impressionist paintings expose their abstract qualities. Pictorial emphasis on abstract elements does not need to exclude representational aspects, according to Kandinsky. He believes that representational motifs can be approached in the terms of abstraction. For instance, in ‘On the Question of Form’ (1912) – an essay he contributes to the Blue Rider Almanac – Kandinsky explains that the work of Franz Marc offers an abstraction-oriented rendition to a representational motif. Kandinsky writes: The strong abstract sound of corporeal form does not necessarily demand the destruction of the representational element. We see in the picture by Marc (The Bull) that here, too, there can be no general rules. The object can retain completely its own internal and external sound, and yet its individual parts can be transformed into independently sounding, abstract forms, which thus occasion an overall, abstract sound.21 Inner life (or the dynamic of personal, emotional experiencing) plays a key role in the writings and works of Kandinsky. 22 Abstraction was associated by Kandinsky with the manifestation of inner life through art-making. The journey from naturalism to abstraction (or style) is also discussed by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy, where Worringer distinguishes between naturalism, imitation and style. For Worringer, naturalism means ‘... the happiness of the organically alive, not that of truth to life’;23 he thus introduces a subtle distinction between types of representational approaches to natural models. 20 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 38. 21 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 255. 22 Regarding the role of interiority in Kandinsky’s thought, see Will Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1958), 90-91. Also see Jeremy Elie Caslin, 'Kandinsky's Theory of Art: Hegel, the Beginnings of Abstraction, and Art History' (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1998), 5. Also, Christopher Short, The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, 1909-1928. The Quest for Synthesis (Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien: Peter Lang, 2010), 60-74. 23 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 28. 321 Worringer associates style with abstraction. He defines style as ‘... that which lifts the rendering of the natural model into a higher sphere’.24 For him as for Kandinsky, abstraction presupposes a sublimation of natural models through art. In the writings of both Worringer and Kandinsky, the dynamic relationship between representation and abstraction unfolds throughout history and permeates cultural environments, as well as the inner realm of viewers and artists. Cézanne also points to the increasing presence of abstract features in his work from the early years of the twentieth century. He associates abstraction with sense-based responses to colours in the world. According to Cézanne, the representation of sensations actually requires of objects not to be enclosed within definite contours. His later canvases, that paint covers only partially, reveal his emphasis on sensations. In his words to Émile Bernard (1905): ‘Now, being old, nearly 70 years, the sensations of colour, which give the light, are for me the reason for the abstractions which do not allow me to cover my canvas entirely nor to pursue the delimitation of the objects where their points of contact are fine and delicate; from which it results that my image or picture is incomplete.’ 25 In June 1912, Monet, like Cézanne, notes the importance of emphasizing sensations in painting. Monet writes to Gustave Geffroy that he prioritizes sensations, attempting to render them even at the cost of representational accuracy. 26 For him, his work focuses on attentively attentive responding to the world, as well as on the communication of personal experience. Paul Ferdinand Schmidt (1878-1955) comments in similar terms on Expressionist practices in January 1912, when he explains that Expressionism develops in opposition to Impressionism.27 A student of medieval art, like Worringer, and a defender of early Expressionism, Schmidt published in Der Sturm [The Storm], a magazine cultivating an international outlook.28 The gallery associated with The Storm exhibited the works of artists 24 Ibid., 33. 25 This excerpt is taken from Cézanne’s letter to Bernard, Aix-en-Provence, 23 October 1905. See Paul Cézanne and John Rewald, eds., Paul Cézanne: Letters (Oxford: B. Cassirer, 1976), 316. 26 See the letter of Monet to Gustave Geffroy, Giverny, 7 June 1912, regarding the achievement of pictorial effects, in Monet and Kendall, Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, 245. 27 Long, Barron, and Rigby, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, 14. 28 The founder of The Storm magazine and gallery was Herwarth Walden, a defender of Expressionism. Ibid., 56-57. 322 such as Kandinsky and Marc. Schmidt’s 1912 article, ‘The Expressionists,’ inquired into the processes of contemporary artists and into their departure from Classical practices of representation. Writing about Expressionist artists in The Storm, Schmidt notes their commitment to personal aspects of art-making, and their working in the absence of a system. Nevertheless, he finds that Expressionists (among whom he counts Munch, Hodler, Pechstein, and Nolde) have in common their readdressing the rules of representation.29 Schmidt writes: ‘They [i. e., the Expressionists] are united in having pushed aside any obligation to be “correct”; but while one paints in sharply defined planes, another sets down a riot of color, and a third floods one color over into another, or contrasts bright with muted color... Instead of an external plausibility, these works possess the powerful configuration of inner truth.’ 30 Schmidt thus underscores the cultivation of personal approaches to art-making in his time. However, he emphasizes not sensations (which, as we have seen, were considered by artists to emerge in response to motifs in the world), but to the inner life of artists. ‘Inner truth’ is an important aspect of painting for Schmidt, as for Kandinsky in On the Spiritual in Art (1912). Expressionist artists, Schmidt remarks, communicate in terms of artistic will rather than in terms of observation. He considers attention to the natural world to be distracting, and points out that Expressionist art-making increases the focus of artists on the act of painting and underscores pictorial means. According to Schmidt: A real painterly fervor can now replace the simple slice of nature, whose presence terrorized painter and viewer alike. It often required attention to peripheral matters and so distracted rather than focused one’s attention. Now the crucial thing is to be able to “see correctly” in another way: not to insist on a comparison with reality, but to convey the perception of reality in such purity and intensity that the means become persuasive. Art is again exercising its ancient rights to extract its works from nature according to higher laws.31 29 Ibid., 14-15. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 15. 323 Echoes of Worringer’s views on abstraction inform the comments of Schmidt on Expressionist art-making. In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer observed the distressing impact of the world’s multifarious, interwoven phenomena on artists whose work favoured abstraction.32 Schmidt, in his turn, maintains that nature has come to place viewers and artists in a state of terror during the early years of the twentieth century, and argues that correct seeing can occur in art-making without requiring the representation of the world. Rendering the world can rely instead on the commitment, directness and persuasiveness with which reality is approached, according to him. Like Worringer, Schmidt regards art-making in more than representational terms. Worringer’s Form in Gothic includes, for instance, an account of the transition from abstraction to representation in history. Late Gothic (or advanced Gothic, to employ his terminology) appears to Worringer as a field of art-making where abstract and representational features meet. Throughout history, the passage from abstraction to representation occurs when ‘a change of temperature’ 33 informs the relationship between people and their environments, Worringer notes; late Gothic reflects such a transition, bringing together sensuousness (an attribute of representation) and super-sensuousness (a characteristic of abstraction). According to Worringer: This sensuous super-sensuousness of advanced Gothic is best described as the lyrical element of Gothic. The springtime of the soul becomes the springtime of the senses, the delight in the ego, a delight in nature, and a world of lyric exuberance is awakened. It is the most intimate, most delicate drama which the evolution of Gothic offers to our observation, to watch how this new lyric element in Gothic makes a compromise with the old, rigid, non-naturalistic will to form proper to its constitution, gradually clothing with bud and blossom the rigid world of abstract forms... The capitals become flowery wonders, there is no end to the luxuriance of creeping tendrils, and the tracery, once so formally and geometrically planned, develops into a 32 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 16. 33 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 174. 324 marvellous world of bud and blossom. Within the chaos of stiff lines there now develops a chaos of bloom.34 For Worringer, late Gothic art reveals contrasting elements without cancelling their differences. Late Gothic, an approach to art-making where dramatic aspects of form acquire delicacy and intimacy, addresses soul and senses at the same time, according to him. Artistic will as well as attention to nature, emphasis on abstract structure as well as on naturalistic representation, are acknowledged in late Gothic. From this perspective, Worringer signals the lyricism of late Gothic,35 while revealing his own interest in responding to art where representation and abstraction meet. Ernest K. Mundt draws attention to the impact and relevance of senses in Worringer’s writings. In ‘Three Aspects of German Aesthetic Theory’ (1959), Mundt emphasizes the Baroque, Romantic, and Dionysian features of Worringer’s perspective,36 introducing Worringer neither as an idealist (such as Erwin Panofsky), nor as a formalist (such as Hildebrand or Wölfflin), but as a sensualist, in the lineage of R. Vischer and Lipps. 37 For Mundt, Worringer’s defence of abstraction is less visible than Worringer’s empathic approach to apparently contrasting modes of art-making. Like Worringer, Kandinsky looks into the dynamic of abstract-representational exchanges in art. On the Spiritual in Art (a book published by Reinhart Piper in December 1911 with the date 1912),38 articulates Kandinsky’s views on contemporary social, economical, political and artistic contexts. In his book, Kandinsky discusses modes of art-making as visible at the beginning of the twentieth century, highlights the interplay between the arts, and approaches abstract-representational interplay from the perspective of art-making. Worringer emphasizes abstract-representational antithesis and points to abstract-representational interplay in his writings; instead, Kandinsky recognizes the conflicts and tumult of the early twentieth- 34 Ibid., 175-176. 35 Worringer also traces an alliance between art and religion throughout Form in Gothic. This aspect of Worringer’s views of art is another point of similarity with the perspective of Hegel on art-making. 36 Ernest K. Mundt, 'Three Aspects of German Aesthetic Theory', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 17, No. 3, 1959, 307. 37 Ibid., 310. 38 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, I, 114. 325 century, yet demonstrates his attention to contemporary artists, artistic practices and forms of abstract-representational interplay. Interplay in Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art (1912) and ‘On the Question of Form’ (1912) ‘Clashing discords, loss of equilibrium, “principles” overthrown, unexpected drumbeats, great questionings, apparently purposeless strivings, stress and longing (apparently torn apart), chains and fetters broken (which had united many), opposites and contradictions –, this is our harmony’, 39 Kandinsky writes in On the Spiritual in Art. For him, outer instability characterizes the beginning of the twentieth century; he emphasizes the tumult of his time from a point of view Worringer had also adopted with regard to the rise of abstraction. Observing the apparent longing for serenity of Eastern cultures, Worringer argues that Oriental artists are ‘[t]ormented by the entangled inter-relationship and flux of phenomena of the outer world’.40 Where Kandinsky approaches his topics in the terms of contrast, his debt to Worringer becomes most visible. On the Spiritual in Art: oppositions and interplay A contrast that resonates strongly throughout Kandinsky’s text can be traced, for instance, between inner (internal) and outer (external) realms. External and internal features of art and life are key points of differentiation for Kandinsky: they inform his analysis of social, personal as well as artistic environments. Kandinsky discerns the interest of contemporary artists towards the realm of inner nature, more specifically towards the expression of inner worlds.41 He discusses two groups of painters: on the one hand, painters who seek to render inner aspects by reference to the outer world; on the other hand, painters who work more closely with characteristics of art-making that Kandinsky associates with abstraction (namely 39 Ibid., 193. 40 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 16. 41 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 153-155. 326 form, colour, harmony, and self-expression). In the first group, Kandinsky places Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98), Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), Franz von Stuck (1863-1928), Giovanni Segantini (1858-99) and their followers; the second group comprises Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Despite differences in expression, Kandinsky recognises the presence of an inner perspective in the work of all these artists. The contrast between internal and external tendencies in art had been equally emphasized by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy. For Worringer, external strivings (or the urge to empathy) surfaced when the relationship between artists and their environment was harmonious; such a context was associated by Worringer with the art of representation and the culture of ancient Greece.42 Internal strivings (or the urge to abstraction), Worringer explained, became visible in art forms with abstract, geometrical, inorganic tendencies, and in traditional Eastern cultures.43 Worringer acknowledged the cohabitation of abstract and representational, inner and outer tendencies, in Gothic art.44 While Worringer directed his attention mainly towards the past in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, Kandinsky addressed his own times and looked into the processes of art- making visible around the turn of the twentieth century. 45 Less assertive contrasts were employed by Kandinsky, who presented the varied facets of apparently opposite artistic elements, and ultimately their constant interaction in painting. For Kandinsky, the representational work of Segantini had strong abstract undertones, while the work of Matisse oscillated between representation and abstraction, between the painter’s attention to the outer world and the cultivation of inner expression. As a practising artist, Kandinsky highlights the interplay between inner and outer artistic tendencies, between abstract and representational expression, more than Worringer does in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. However, both Kandinsky and Worringer 42 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 45-46. 43 Ibid., 46-48. 44 Ibid., 76-77. 45 David Morgan notes the differences between the views of Worringer and Kandinsky on topics regarding abstraction and representation. According to Morgan, Kandinsky chose to delimit representation and abstraction less strictly than Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy. See Morgan, 'The Idea of Abstraction in German Theories of the Ornament from Kant to Kandinsky', 238-239. 327 place particular emphasis on the role of emotion and inner life in their writings, thus making visible their affinities with Expressionism. Abstraction and Empathy and On the Spiritual in Art draw attention to the psychological factors that bring art into being; in Kandinsky’s book, inner changes are the cause of the dramatic reshaping of historical and social contexts at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contemporary artists, whose works reflect inner values, can lead the world towards a better future, in Kandinsky’s visionary interpretation. Kandinsky paints a multifaceted panorama of his epoch in On the Spiritual in Art.46 He reflects on the pressing problems of his context, noting that progress is ensured by artists who follow the call of spirit.47 The arts, according to Kandinsky, have opened towards interdisciplinary dialogue in the early twentieth century; 48 among them, painting moves away from realism towards Impressionism, then Neo-Impressionism, then abstraction.49 Inspired by music, early twentieth-century painting attends to questions of rhythm, Kandinsky observes.50 For Kandinsky as for Worringer, art can no longer rely exclusively on representational processes.51 46 With regard to Kandinsky’s book and its reception, Rose-Carol Washton Long notes: ‘By the spring of 1912, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was in the limelight in Germany. His manifesto on painting, On the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst), which went into three editions by the middle of 1912, his co-editorship of the Blaue Reiter almanac, and his paintings were attracting much attention.’ Long, Barron, and Rigby, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, 38. 47 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 133-143. ‘Spirit’ is an internal force for Kandinsky, according to his explanations from The Struggle for Art; it characterises the internal life of human beings. Art, for Kandinsky, is itself an internal, spiritual force; its internal element is content, and its external element is form. Spirit, therefore, manifests in the content of art; the forms taken by art change to accommodate content. ———, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 106-107. 48 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 153-154. 49 Ibid., 149-152. 50 Ibid., 154-155. 51 The current section of the thesis focuses on instances where interplay, especially abstract-representational interplay, is visible in Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art and ‘On the Question of Form.’ For an extensive inquiry into Kandinsky’s views on art and art-making, see, for instance, Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work. Also see Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art. Also, Short, The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, 1909-1928. The Quest for Synthesis. 328 Kandinsky’s approach to form and content: The Struggle for Art (1911), and the First Exhibition of the Editors of the Blaue Reiter (1911) Prior to the publication of On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky had contributed alongside Worringer to The Struggle for Art: The Answer to the Protest of German Artists (1911).52 Kandinsky focused on artistic form in his untitled essay.53 Relying on the rhetoric of opposition, like Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy, Kandinsky contrasted external and internal elements of art, namely elements of form and content.54 He argued that harmony could be attained between content and form, between the internal and external elements of art. However, such harmony was based on subordination, according to him: the element of content was to influence external form, in order to reflect the inner life of the artist. For Kandinsky as for Schmidt in ‘The Expressionists’, the representation of the world, and the attention of artists to external factors such as nature, were no longer necessary. 55 In the catalogue of the First Exhibition of the Editors of the Blaue Reiter (1911), Kandinsky underscored the formal, external elements that he considered as signals of an emphasis on inner experience. Form was not to be imitative of nature, but planned and purposeful, Kandinsky posited. He drew attention to the necessity of the process of construction in the art of his time, and noted: ‘The variety of forms: the constructive, compositional [aspect] of these forms; [t]he intensive turning toward the inner [aspect] of nature and, bound up with it, the rejection of any prettifying of the external aspect – THESE ARE IN GENERAL THE SIGNS OF THE NEW INNER RENAISSANCE.’ 56 52 Worringer’s contribution to The Struggle for Art is addressed in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art (1911): Worringer’s early response to Expressionism’. 53 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 107. 54 Kandinsky resumes the discussion of form and content in On the Spiritual in Art; in his terminology, form is associated with the question, ‘How?’, and content with ‘What?’. He emphasizes the significance of content in art. In his words: ‘This “What?” will no longer be the material, objective “What?” of the period left behind, but rather an artistic content, the soul of art, without which its body (the “How?”) can never lead a full healthy life, just like an individual or a whole people. This “What?” is that content which only art can contain, and to which only art can give clear expression through the means available to it.’ (Ibid., 137-138.) 55 Ibid., 106-107. 56 The employment of uppercase for the last sentence of the citation is Kandinsky’s choice, as reflected in Lindsay and Vergo’s edition. (Ibid., 113.) 329 Inner life, painting, and its relationship with the world in On the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky links spirit and emotional life in On the Spiritual in Art. He suggests that feeling can support artists in their discovering, through talent, the way to connect to spirit. According to Kandinsky, ‘[t]he spirit that will lead us into the realms of tomorrow can only be recognized through feeling (to which the talent of the artist is the path).’ 57 For artists as well as for viewers, according to Kandinsky, art operates on the basis of emotion.58 He contrasts emotional and logic-driven approaches to art-making, explaining that measuring, calculating, reasoning, are processes that may inform art, yet that the best artistic results are reached by starting from feeling and letting it guide art-making. Kandinsky regards emotions as ‘... material states of the soul’;59 in other words, as visible manifestations of inner life. Inner life, feeling and emotion assume decisive roles in On the Spiritual in Art; they articulate internal necessity, which influences artistic decisions. For Kandinsky, internal necessity and its laws must be followed at all times; he sees the laws of internal necessity as spiritual.60 Kandinsky addresses the distancing of painting from the rendition of nature in On the Spiritual in Art as well.61 He connects this phenomenon to the relationship between painting and music. For him, painting does not operate in terms of duration, like music, but of instantaneous presentation; yet music, unlike painting, is free from referring to external elements of nature. Kandinsky writes: Music, which externally is completely emancipated from nature, does not need to borrow external forms from anywhere to create its own language. Painting today is still almost entirely dependent upon natural forms, upon forms borrowed from nature. And its task today is to examine its forces and its materials, to become acquainted 57 Ibid., 141. ‘Talent,’ like ‘spirit,’ is a term Kandinsky does not define as such; in the citation above, Kandinsky explains that the talent of artists provides viewers access to their feelings; emotional life, in its turn, can reveal the spirit-driven way to the future. 58 Ibid., 176-177. 59 Ibid., 189. In this instance, Kandinsky uses the term ‘material’ to point to the increased degree of concreteness of human emotions (the soul, for instance, is less ‘material’ than human emotions). Materiality is connected by Kandinsky as a negative aspect of life when human beings focus more on immediate success, gains and technical developments, to the detriment of spiritual values. (———, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 135.) Yet negative nuances are lacking when Kandinsky associates materiality and human emotions. 60 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art. 61 See, for instance, Kandinsky’s references to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) with regard to the optional reliance of artists on the study of nature, on processes of imitation or on realism. Ibid., 208. 330 with them, as music has long since done, and to attempt to use these materials and forces in a purely painterly way for the purpose of creation.62 Early twentieth-century painting needs to employ media and focus on processes in order to emphasize painterly rather than external features, Kandinsky argues. In his view, the distancing from the rendering of external elements is to support increased artistic attention to inner aspects of experience and pictorial process.63 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer, following Lipps and Schopenhauer, argued that objects in the world existed only as long as they were vessels of the inner life of viewers;64 he considered that the attention and emotional interest of viewers actually brought objects into being. Four years later, Kandinsky requires artists to create precisely from the perspective of inner life:65 like Worringer, he emphasizes the role of internally felt artistic decision in art-making. In the words of Kandinsky: ‘The artist should be blind to “accepted” or unaccepted” form, deaf to the precepts and demands of his time. His eyes should be always directed towards his own inner life, and his ears turned to the voice of internal necessity.’ 66 Nevertheless, Kandinsky also addresses the role of external, organic elements in art-making. He senses the presence of organic components in abstract forms; for him, ‘... the sound of the organic element, even when pushed right into the background, is able to make itself heard within the chosen form.’ 67 Kandinsky wishes to extend painting in the direction of music; however, his preoccupation with organic aspects of the world usually recorded through representational processes still informs his thought in On the Spiritual in Art. Worringer associated the interest in organic, external aspects with the art of representation and with the 62 Ibid., 154. 63 However, distancing from the representation of the external world does not limit the importance Kandinsky attributes to senses. Kandinsky remains receptive to colours, sounds and scents in On the Spiritual in Art. Ibid., 158-159, 162-163. 64 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 6-7. Also, see, from the current thesis, ‘Empathy, abstraction and representation in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy’. 65 Regarding inner life as expressed in form, Kandinsky approves of construction, yet has his reserves regarding ornament. Worringer saw in ornament a key expression of artistic will. Kandinsky, less convinced, finds ornament ‘... not, admittedly, an entirely lifeless being.’ (Ibid., 28, 51-52. Also, Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 197.) 66 Wassily Kandinsky, 'On the Spiritual in Art' in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982 [1911-1912]), 175. 67 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 168. 331 psychological process of empathy; 68 nevertheless, he recognized that empathy could be experienced in response to art he considered predominantly abstract, such as Gothic art.69 Like Worringer, Kandinsky draws attention to the interplay of organic and abstract components in art; according to Kandinsky, the organic component preserves its sound within abstract form. Objects in the world – found in nature, or in art – are animated beings for Kandinsky. Where Worringer, following Lipps, considers that the attention and vitality of the viewer lend their animation to objects,70 Kandinsky believes that objects have their own life, communicate their own effects, and exert their influence on human beings.71 This influence, Kandinsky explains, may be processed consciously or unconsciously; it may also be cancelled through the redirecting of attention.72 Associating nature and music,73 Kandinsky argues that the soul is a piano played by nature, while the objects in the world are much like the keys of the piano. Kandinsky points to the colour and form of objects, in order to suggest directions of inquiry that could organize the information derived from nature. However, he does not miss to note the effect of objects themselves on viewers and artists. For Kandinsky, nature and objects may be less visible in art; however, their impact is still felt in art-making. Kandinsky mentions that renouncing the connections between art and nature would be difficult at the time of his writing.74 Nevertheless, despite his reserves regarding current explorations of form in the art of ornament, Kandinsky believes that an art of ‘pure composition’ will become possible in the future.75 He proposes that, in order to reach 68 See, for instance, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 14, 17, 27- 28. 69 Ibid., 48, 112-113. 70 Ibid., 6-7. 71 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 168-169. 72 Ibid. 73 Kandinsky defines nature as ‘...the ever-changing external environment of man’. (Ibid.) In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer had also highlighted the state of perpetual motion characteristic to the natural world, yet regarded this aspect of nature as negative. See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 16-17. Kandinsky approaches nature with less apprehension in On the Spiritual in Art, although he favours the association of painting and music more than the association of painting with the natural world. For instance, Kandinsky considers artists must fight against the influence of nature, as well as against the influence of fairy-tale effects in painting. See Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 204. 74 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 197. 75 Ibid. 332 abstraction, artists could omit representational (or, in his terminology, corporeal) elements; alternatively, artists could employ forms abstracted from corporeal elements.76 Worringer maintained that abstract art emphasized the articulation of planes rather than the rendition of three-dimensional space.77 According to Kandinsky, abstraction, although turning away from representing the third dimension, can nevertheless allude to three-dimensional space through the quality of line, through the placement of forms on surfaces, through the placement of forms in relation to each other, and through the employment of colours that seem to recede or advance.78 The painting of space – a key characteristic of representation, according to Worringer – is possible in representational as well as abstract art, from Kandinsky’s perspective.79 Kandinsky considers that his own works belong in three categories: impressions (inspired by external nature), improvisations (fostered by inner nature) and compositions (characterized by reasoning, purposefulness, deliberation, and conscious compositional effort).80 Revealing that external elements influence his process, Kandinsky creates a bridge between observational interests (usually associated with representation) and abstract outcomes. In On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky brings to light the tensions inherent in early twentieth-century approaches to art-making.81 However, he also points to various instances of interplay, where contrasting elements engage in interdisciplinary as well as intra-disciplinary dialogue. For instance, Kandinsky finds that the interplay between arts is favoured in the early years of the twentieth century. 82 He observes that the distances between arts diminish due to the very differentiations that separate one form of art from another. Artists turn gradually towards an examination of specific materials and elements in order to find their inner value, Kandinsky notes. The interplay between arts thus emerges from the acceptance of dialogue between disciplines, while the interplay between modes of art-making occurs due to the gradual transition from externally reflective art-making to internally reflective art-making. 76 Ibid., 169. 77 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 21-22, 38-42. 78 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 193-195. 79 Kandinsky makes space seen in his ‘abstract’ paintings, as following sections of this thesis show. 80 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 218. 81 For instance. Kandinsky is critical towards art that emphasizes skill, and responds to social and commercial pressures. (Ibid., 127-132.) 82 Ibid., 153. 333 Interdisciplinary and intra-disciplinary emphases characterize early twentieth-century painting, Kandinsky notes. Responding to music, painting addresses issues of rhythm, construction, repetition, and motion;83 thus art-making comes to involve both hearing and seeing, connecting senses in the process of its becoming. Synaesthesia, an instance of interplay between senses, is characteristic of Kandinsky’s work.84 Yet Kandinsky addresses compositional aspects of art-making as well. For instance, he explains that unexpected combinations and effects can be achieved when addressing the interplay between colour and form. In his words: ‘Since the number of forms and colors is infinite, the number of possible combinations is likewise infinite as well as their effects. This material is inexhaustible.’ 85 Kandinsky does not associate colour and form with representation; instead, he notes the possibilities opened by their interplay. Highlighting that external elements of form conceal internal elements of content, Kandinsky asserts that internal elements surface in various degrees. 86 For him, the contrast between external and internal elements leads to their differentiation, yet not to their mutual exclusion; the internal element is purposeful, and aims to move the viewer. Kandinsky writes: ‘... [T]he artist is the hand that purposefully sets the human soul vibrating by pressing this or that key (= form). Thus it is clear that the harmony of forms can only be based upon the purposeful touching of the human soul. This is the principle we have called the principle of internal necessity.’ 87 According to Kandinsky, inner content manifests through form in abstraction-oriented art- making. The interplay between form and content sometimes acquires symbolic overtones in his work;88 elements of powerful emotional value for Kandinsky (troika, horse and rider,89 for 83 Ibid., 154. 84 See, in this respect, Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky, the Development of an Abstract Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). Also, Judith Zilczer, '"Color Music": Synaesthesia and Nineteenth-Century Sources for Abstract Art', Artibus et Historiae, 8, No. 16, 1987. Also, Short, The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, 1909- 1928. The Quest for Synthesis. 85 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 163. 86 Ibid., 165. 87 Kandinsky, 'On the Spiritual in Art', 165. 88 Regarding symbolism in Kandinsky’s paintings, see Peg Weiss, 'Kandinsky and the Symbolist Heritage', Art Journal, 45, No. 2, 1985. Also, Peg Weiss and Wassily Kandinsky, Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Also, Rose-Carol Washton Long, 'Kandinsky's Abstract Style: The Veiling of Apocalyptic Folk Imagery', Art Journal, 34, 1975, ———, 'Kandinsky's Vision of Utopia as a Garden of Love', Art Journal, 43, 1983. 334 instance) still participate to Kandinsky’s pictures by assuming less recognizable aspects. Like Worringer before him, Kandinsky asserts oppositional relationships, yet remains sensitive to the interplay of antithetic elements such as inner and outer aspects of art-making. Representation and abstraction in interplay Representation and abstraction find common ground in On the Spiritual in Art. Kandinsky connects abstraction and representation to form (‘the expression of inner content’, 90 according to him), and to its capacity for description.91 Representation, Kandinsky explains, brings forms into being by means of contour, while abstraction is free from the need to describe altogether. He notes that abstract-representational interplay can occur between the respective territories of representational and abstract forms. According to Kandinsky: Between these two boundaries [i. e., of representation, which describes by means of contour, and abstraction, or pure form, which does not describe] lie the infinite number of forms in which both elements are present, and where either the material or the abstract [element] predominates. These forms are at present that store from which the artist borrows all the individual elements of his creations.92 Kandinsky notices that contemporary artists work with forms where representational and abstract tendencies meet. These hybrid forms (to employ Worringer’s terminology) 93 include both abstract and representational elements, yet one aspect of the two predominates. An infinite amount of abstract-representational, hybrid forms exist, Kandinsky writes, signalling their role as artistic resources for early twentieth-century artists. He also draws attention to the dialogue between self-sufficient forms, which are independent yet woven together by 89 Smithgall, Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border, 21-30. Also, from the current thesis, see ‘Worringer’s impact: Expressionism (1914) by Paul Fechter, and Expressionism (1916) by Hermann Bahr’. 90 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 165. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid., 166. 93 Worringer referred to Gothic art as hybrid, explaining that empathy and abstraction coexist within its boundaries. See Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 63. 335 pictorial composition.94 However, he finds there is a limit to interplay: for instance, a red horse would be an unnatural presence in a naturalistically rendered landscape.95 He explains: A normal, naturalistically painted landscape with modelled, anatomically precise figures would produce such a discord when placed together with this [red] horse that no feeling would follow from it, and it would prove impossible to fuse these elements into a single unity. What is to be understood by this “unity,” and what it might be, is shown by the definition of our modern-day harmony. From which we may conclude that it is possible to split up the entire picture, to indulge in contradictions, to lead [the spectator] through and to build upon any and every sort of external plane, while the inner plane remains the same. The elements of construction of the picture are no longer to be sought in terms of external, but rather of internal necessity. 96 Artists must listen to the call of inner necessity, according to Kandinsky; therefore, constructing a picture informed by contradictions and limitless diversity proves acceptable to him, despite its different approach to articulating compositional relationships. Such a picture is characterised by inner coherence as long as it is the materialization of personal experience; its formal variety does not affect its content, Kandinsky argues. On the Spiritual in Art thus traces a boundary of acceptability to the bringing together of contrasting elements; however, Kandinsky also points to the contemporary artistic tendencies of readdressing compositional expectations. Examining the processes that configure abstract-representational forms, Kandinsky notes that such processes can be understood, measured, and limitlessly employed in art-making. Worringer had emphasized the instinctual and wilful aspects of making art, detailing intuitively their psychological origin;97 for Kandinsky, art-making may appear will-driven, yet is in fact a materialization of definable processes. 94 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 167. 95 Ibid., 201. This limitation is specific to the time of Kandinsky’s writing On the Spiritual in Art and ‘On the Question of Form.’ The emergence of the art of collage readdressed this possibility later in the twentieth century. See, among many others, Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004). 96 Kandinsky, 'On the Spiritual in Art', 201-202. 97 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 171. 336 Kandinsky, explaining the interplay of forms within black and white compositions, notes the flexibility of forms, as well as their relationships when juxtaposed. Among inter-form relationships, he counts meeting, limitation, jostling, confluence and dismemberment; he mentions the similar approach to different groups of forms, the various degrees of delimitation between forms, the combination of hidden and revealed, rhythmic and arrhythmic elements, of describable and difficult to describe abstract forms. For Kandinsky, black and white compositions place the forms they include in complex yet comprehensible interplay. Colours influence each other specifically, Kandinsky observes. 98 He groups colours into opposing pairs such as yellow and blue, red and green, orange and violet,99 looked into their gradations,100 analyzes their temperature and movement,101and addresses them individually in order to single out the emotions they arise in viewers. 102 Kandinsky underscores that the art of painting of his time employs colour combinations previously considered to lack harmony.103 Like for forms, Kandinsky looks into the processes that colours undergo in painting. Approved and unapproved colour combinations may lead, according to Kandinsky, to clashes, to the dominance of a colour over another colour, or to the dominance of a colour over a group of colours. 104 He notes that colours may be contained between lines, and given precise boundaries, also mentioning that one colour may grow to reveal another, and that 98 See, for instance, the influence of yellow and blue on each other as explained by Kandinsky. According to Kandinsky, the advancing, boundlessly energetic, strident and earthly yellow is tempered by the centripetal, remote, impersonal, deep blue. The combination of these two colours yields peaceful, static green. Ibid., 180. 99 Ibid., 178, 184, 190. 100 For instance, Kandinsky explained that the colour red had no particular cold or warm tendencies, and consisted of actual gradations of red. Colours could not expand boundlessly for him, except in the eyes of the mind. (Ibid., 162.) 101 Ibid., 177-180. 177-180. For the indebtedness of Kandinsky to Goethe’s colour theory, see Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work, 90-91. Also, Short, The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, 1909-1928. The Quest for Synthesis, 29-40. 102 For instance, see Kandinsky’s thoughts on the colour blue, in Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 181-182. Kandinsky considers blue a heavenly colour that suggests sorrow but also encouraged spiritual tendencies. The ‘sound’ of blue varies from flute (for its lightest tones) to cello to double bass to organ (for its darkest tones). Concerning the emotions engendered by colours, Kandinsky notes that he regards his analysis as incomplete. ———, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 189. 103 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 193. 104 Ibid., 194. 337 colours may flow over each other’s boundaries, intermingle, or dissolve. 105 The interplay of colours, like the interplay of forms, holds endless possibilities for Kandinsky. Kandinsky has his reservations regarding the pictures where the employment of colour favours associations with ornament and fantasy.106 The path that leads to painting, Kandinsky finds, runs between two stations to be avoided: fantasy (a realist approach too connected to external elements), and ornament (a geometrical approach to abstraction).107 Beyond ornament lies pure abstraction, and beyond fantasy – realism, Kandinsky explains. Yet the middle ground between ornament and fantasy is a territory of interplay, of unbounded creativity. In Kandinsky’s words: Beyond these limits [i. e., imposed by abstraction and realism] (here I abandon my schematic path) lie, on the right, pure abstraction [i. e., greater abstraction than that of geometrical form] and, on the left, pure realism [i. e., a higher form of fantasy - fantasy in the hardest material]. And between the two – unlimited freedom, depth, breadth, a wealth of possibilities, and beyond them the realms of pure abstraction and realism – e v e r y t h i n g today is, thanks to the moment at which we find ourselves, placed at the service of the artist. Today is a day of freedom only conceivable when a great epoch is in the making.108 Having brought to light some of the manifestations of interplay in On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky casts a confident glance towards the art of his time. He reinforces his views on the relationship between representation (or realism, in his terms) and abstraction in an article entitled ‘On the Question of Form,’ announced in On the Spiritual in Art,109 and published in the Blue Rider Almanac in 1912. 105 Ibid. 106 Kandinsky is critical of ‘the fairy-tale effect,’ which he connects with the nature effect – both are to be renounced or cancelled in painting, due to their narrative and descriptive associations. For Kandinsky, the cultivation of the spiritual requires this sacrifice. (Ibid., 204.) 107 Ibid., 207. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid. 338 ‘On the Question of Form’: the inner similarity of representation and abstraction In ‘On the Question of Form’ as in On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky underscores that form must be a means to express content, or the inner life of the soul.110 He recognizes the temporality of form,111 and mentions that form needs to reveal necessity. Worringer emphasized the psychological aspects of form in his discussion of the connections between artists and their environments.112 Kandinsky also points to the relevance of expressing inner necessity in art-making. 113 However, unlike Worringer, Kandinsky places greater emphasis on the interplay between abstract and representational (or, in Kandinsky’s terminology, realist) aspects of art-making. Kandinsky regards abstraction and representation (or realism) as opposed. Nevertheless, he notes that their two distinct paths have one single purpose. Abstract-representational interplay manifests in forms that stand between the two poles Kandinsky identifies as Great Realism and Great Abstraction.114 The juxtaposition and combination of representation (or realism) and abstraction leads to an emphasis of balance, where one mode of art-making features within the other, or supports the other. The balance of abstraction and representation (or realism) is important for Kandinsky; in its absence, art, Kandinsky observes, seems to lose either its connection to the world of matter, or its capacity to embody an ideal.115 ‘[T]he most powerfully affective element’ can balance the polar relationship of representation and abstraction, according to Kandinsky. For Kandinsky as for Worringer, emotion provides a major impetus to the making of art.116 Yet Worringer looks primarily towards historical modes of art-making in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, and defends contemporary art from a historical viewpoint in ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art.’ On the other hand, Kandinsky prefers to focus on the key processes of art-making in ‘On the Question of Form’. 110 Ibid., 237. 111 Ibid. 112 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 32, 34-35, 45-47. 113 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 239. 114 Ibid., 242. 115 Ibid. 116 Worringer considers that the emotional responses of artists to their environments exert a decisive influence on art-making. See, for instance, Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4-8. 339 ‘On the Question of Form’ underscores that the most powerfully affective element in a work of art is a subordinate component that nevertheless informs decisively the predominant mode of artworks.117 Abstraction – which assumes a subordinate role in representational, or realist, art – is the most powerfully affective element in a representational, or realist, picture, Kandinsky posits. Likewise, according to him, representation (or realism) contributes the most powerfully affective element to an abstract work.118 In the words of Kandinsky: Thus, finally, we see that if in the case of great realism the real element appears noticeably large and the abstract noticeably small, and if in the case of great abstraction this relationship appears to be reversed, then in their ultimate basis (= goal) these two poles equal one another. Between these two antipodes can be put an = sign: Realism = Abstraction Abstraction = Realism T h e g r e a t e s t e x t e r n a l d i s s i m i l a r i t y b e c o m e s t h e g r e a t e s t i n t e r n a l s i m i l a r i t y. 119 Kandinsky sees representation and abstraction as inseparable in art. He finds that, both fundamentally and in purpose-oriented terms, abstraction and representation can be regarded as equivalent art-making modes. Like Worringer, Kandinsky employs logical reasoning to prove his point, examining relationships in terms of their most elemental demonstrable dynamics.120 Worringer underscored the polarity between representation (or naturalism, or realism) and abstraction (for instance, he associated abstraction with geometrical forms and 117 Kandinsky explains that an externally emphasized approach to art-making can result in the lessening of its inner strength. See Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 244. 118 Ibid., 243-245. Much like Worringer before him, Kandinsky associates abstraction with ‘artistic’ elements, and representation, or realism, with objective elements. Throughout Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer employs the term ‘artistic’ in a generic sense. See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 22-23. However, Worringer underscores that artistic impulse has its origin in abstraction. See ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 44. 44. For Worringer’s employment of the term ‘objective,’ or ‘objectivity,’ see ———, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 39, 58, 67. 119 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 245. 120 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer begins by asserting the polar opposition between representation and abstraction. See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4. 340 the fear of space, and representation with organic forms and the cultivation of three- dimensional spatial relationships); nevertheless, he accepted the possibility of abstract- representational interplay in Gothic art. Kandinsky, like Worringer, proposes a memorable formula for the relationship of abstraction and representation, equating them on the basis of their apparent, external opposition. The schematic approach of Kandinsky to demonstrating the relationship between representation and abstraction could reflect his belief in the role a scientific outlook could play in the articulation of form.121 ‘True form arises out of the combination of emotion and science’, he writes.122 Perhaps the interplay of abstraction and representation needed, after all, the validation of reason in the early years of the twentieth century. Kandinsky’s inquiry bears similarities to Worringer’s argument from Abstraction and Empathy in this respect; like Worringer, Kandinsky calls upon strategies of reasoning to buttress his point of view. For Worringer, the interplay of abstraction and representation as made visible in Gothic art is hybrid: in other words, it does not assert a reconciliation of opposites, but permits their coexistence while maintaining their differences.123 Yet Kandinsky goes further than Worringer with regard to interplay: for him, the key feature of abstraction and realism is their internal similarity. (Worringer could have disagreed, since he regarded the urge to abstraction and the urge to empathy as emergent from opposite tendencies: distancing and rapprochement.) As modes of art-making, realism and abstraction have similar inner constitutions, Kandinsky asserts: both contain a small proportion but significant proportion of their opposite. When placing the sign of equality between representation (or realism) and abstraction, Kandinsky aims to reveal their inner similarity; however, his formula requires his readers to leap intuitively towards fundamental truths rather than to engage with irrefutable systematic explanations. Although Kandinsky’s approach reaches towards the clarity of 121 Kandinsky regarded politics, economics, law and ethnography as sciences that facilitated the development of his abstract thinking. ‘I loved all these sciences,’ Kandinsky wrote, ‘... and today I still think with gratitude of the enthusiasm and perhaps inspiration they gave me.’ (Ibid., 362-3.) 122 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 244. 123 Worringer found common ground between artistic urges in contemplation, or the tendency towards taking distance from the world. See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 24-25. Yet Worringer adopted the perspective of aesthetics rather than art-making when drawing attention to distancing as a shared experience, regardless of the contemplated art form. Kandinsky points to modes of art- making instead; his assertion of abstract-realist equality is more paradoxical than Worringer’s claims for Gothic abstract-representational hybridity, and the generic loss of self entailed by contemplation. 341 science, it asserts an abstract-realist relationship that is difficult to demonstrate, but observable in art throughout its history. Worringer had written memorable pages on abstract-representational interplay in Gothic art, yet had approached interplay with caution in both Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. Where Worringer finds abstract-representational interplay manifested within historical contexts, Kandinsky recognizes abstract-representational interplay as a key component of art-making, and as a source of inspiration for contemporary artists. For Worringer, interplay is a process recognizable in the art of the past as well as the creative practices of his time: he discusses processes of gradation, displacement, transposition, remembering, assimilation and interpolation in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic.124 For Kandinsky, interplay is generic aspect of relating that assumes a crucial role within his epoch. In ‘On the Question of Form’, Kandinsky maintains that, due to the inner similarity of representation (or realism) and abstraction, artists can choose freely between these modes of art-making. He writes: ‘The combination of the abstract with the representational, the choice between the infinite number of abstract forms and those forms built out of representational material – i. e., the choice between the individual means within each sphere – is and remains entirely according to the inner wishes of the artist.’ 125 Kandinsky encourages contemporary artists to follow their intentions when selecting and combining abstract and representational forms. According to him, artists can guide their choices by appraising the inner effects of art- making components, and the combination of such components.126 124 Worringer recognizes the trans-historical aspects of Gothic art (a key site of interplay in both Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic), yet addresses mainly the historical aspects of abstract-representational interplay in his books. In other words, Gothic art (rather than abstract-representational interplay) is for Worringer a phenomenon that transcends the limits of given epochs, and is recognizable throughout history. See Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 37-38. Worringer focuses on psychological aspects of Gothic art, and on ideal types of Gothic art only; his purpose is to delineate ‘... the idea of Gothic’, and the Gothic will to form. See ———, Form in Gothic, 167. By underscoring the perennial aspects of the Gothic approach to form, Worringer transits towards approaching Gothic art from the perspective of the history of ideas. Donahue defends Worringer’s perspective from this point of view. See Donahue, Forms of Disruption: Abstraction in Modern German Prose, 2. 125 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 254. 126 Ibid., 248. 342 Antithesis as well as interplay can inform interdisciplinary dialogues, Kandinsky notes. He pays attention to both these aspects of relational exchanges. The dialogue between arts can be fostered, he argues, by reflecting and thus strengthening the ‘sound’ of one art through a similar ‘sound’ from another art. According to him, antithesis can first characterize the meeting of arts; yet, with the passage of time, this meeting can be negotiated in any terms emergent between the extremes of opposition and collaboration.127 Interplay thus appears as a key relational modality in Kandinsky’s early writings. Within the art of painting, Kandinsky discusses the interplay of potential opposites, such as external and internal elements, or representational and abstract modes of art-making. He also draws attention to the possibilities of interplay between various arts.128 Interplay informs Kandinsky’s own artistic practice as well: while his improvisations reflect inner life, his compositions rely on the complex organization of material from various sources, and his impressions respond to external natural elements. 127 Ibid., 258-259. 128 Kandinsky’s involvement in the cultivation of interdisciplinary relationships within his epoch have been briefly noted in this section. Further instances of interdisciplinary exchanges – generated by Kandinsky or to which Kandinsky participated – have been addressed, for instance, in Wassily Kandinsky et al., Kandinsky in Munich, 1896-1914 (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1982). Also, Kandinsky et al., eds., Vasily Kandinsky: A Colorful Life: The Collection of the Lenbachhaus, Munich. Also, Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art. Also, Kandinsky, Marc, and Lankheit, The Blaue Reiter Almanac. 343 Painting interplay: Kandinsky’s Impression V (Park) (1911), Picture with a Black Arch (1912), and Picture with Red Spot (1914) In Impression V (Park) (1911), Picture with a Black Arch (1912), and Picture with Red Spot (1914), Kandinsky’s increasing commitment to the exploration of abstraction becomes visible.1 The titles of his three works suggest that Kandinsky now connects the activity of painting with the registering of personal impressions, as well as with the exploration of specific features of picture-making such as line, colour and construction. Impression V (Park), for instance, still suggests an active attempt of the painter to observe and relate to a place in the world. In Picture with Black Arch, the arch mentioned by Kandinsky could be interpreted as an architectural or imagined, representational or abstract element at the same time. Similarly, the title of Kandinsky’s 1914 painting may be referring to an observational or remembered red detail that assumes particular significance for the painter; however, Picture with Red Spot remains the least specific, most abstract of Kandinsky’s three titles. Kandinsky continues to allude to representational elements in Impression V (Park) (Fig. 22). Communicating a sense of location has now become a secondary preoccupation for him, as the title of his work suggests; triangular shapes may hint to mountains, indistinct presences, or even directional motion in his painting. The rendering of impressions leads him, on the one hand, and an artist such as Monet, on the other hand, to different results. Monet prefers to work by himself, from his impressions, rather than in the company of other artists; 2 as his letters show, he directs great efforts towards sourcing the right motif and depicting it in a way he finds satisfactory. 3 For Kandinsky, an impression offers only a point of departure to his explorations.4 Kandinsky does not require impressions to generate representational 1 While referring to Kandinsky’s thoughts on the elements of composition, this analysis will not focus on examining the reflection of Kandinsky’s theory of line, form and colour into his own works, or the hidden symbolism of Kandinsky’s paintings. These topics have been investigated in Ringbom, 'Art in "The Epoch of the Great Spiritual": Occult Elements in the Early Theory of Abstract Painting'. Also, Maurice Tuchman, Judi Freeman, and Carel Blotkamp, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986). This section explores the meeting points between abstract and representational aspects of art-making, in order to highlight features of interplay in Kandinsky’s paintings produced around the time of his writing On the Spiritual in Art and ‘On the Question of Form’. 2 See Monet’s letter to Paul Durand-Ruel from Giverny, 12 January 1884, in Monet and Kendall, Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters, 108. 3 See, for instance, Monet’s letters to Alice Hoschedé from Bordighera, 24 January 1884, and 29 January 1884. Ibid., 108, 109. 4 In On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky regards Impressionism as an art movement that had already made its key contribution to the history of art. See Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 344 renderings. He prefers to employ his observations to articulate pictures where space, presence and movement are approached in abstract terms.5 In Impression V (Park), Kandinsky allows the elongation of his brushstrokes almost to dissolve the materiality of paint; he sets to work ‘... a delicate process of dematerialization’, to employ Worringer’s terminology. 6 Assertive of its embodiment to a minimum, paint appears as colour more than as pictorial medium.7 Chromatic variation leads to the definition of form; Kandinsky’s brushwork suggests texture, weight, three-dimensionality, advancement and recession. The edges that could have separated colours, and indicated forms, melt into dry brushwork or tints; in Kandinsky’s handling, both form and colour thus appear to cancel out their zones of beginning and end. Kandinsky models pictorial bodies that exhibit fluid and solid qualities at the same time, and that assume presence on canvas while making only distant reference to objects in the world. Monet used a similar technique in his series of 149. Worringer approached Impressionism critically in Abstraction and Empathy, due to the emphasis Impressionism placed on its connections with the world. See Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 38. 5 Grohmann writes about Kandinsky’s extraordinary visual memory in Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work, 46-51. Also see Kandinsky’s ‘Reminiscences’ (1913), in Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 357-382. 6 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 161. 7 This observation is the result of my examining Kandinsky’s paintings on display at Centre Georges Pompidou in 2012. Fig. 22. Wassily Kandinsky. Impression V (Park). 1911. oil on canvas. 106 x 157.5 cm. Paris. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. 345 works on the Rouen Cathedral, yet his canvases paid homage to the passage of hours, and to the effect of time on his motif.8 In Impression V (Park), Kandinsky suggests space, atmosphere, and animation without referring to a specific time and place, but relying on the interplay of colour and form instead. Kandinsky’s approach to line also combines representational and abstract aspects. He sets line free from the obligation of circumscribing and defining form in Impression V (Park). Line as employed by Kandinsky does not impose onto colour; Kandinsky assigns equally assertive roles to colour and line when he suggests natural forms, human-made structures, or details of gesture and presence. Worringer underscored the capacity of line to summarize expressive value, regardless of its connection to representational forms.9 For Kandinsky, interplay is revealed in his approach to line, which hints to the outer world, structures pictorial space, and expresses inner life. Black may stand for motionlessness and extinction in On the Spiritual in Art,10 yet the black lines in Kandinsky’s paintings are animated and potentially narrative, even when they do not need to make representational motifs visible. Picture with a Black Arch (1912) (Fig. 23) proposes a different approach to the interplay of colour and form. The territories of form and colour overlap more in Picture with a Black Arch than in Impression V (Park). An increased emphasis on separation yields greater clarity: Kandinsky employs one main colour – blue, red, or purple – to establish the boundaries of the three dominant forms. He anchors the soaring purple form to its blue and red counterparts by means of a black arch. 8 Robert Herbert inquires into Monet’s approach to colour-form. See Herbert, 'The Decorative and the Natural in Monet's Cathedrals'. 9 Worringer addresses this aspect of line in his discussion of Northern animal ornament in Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 61. 10 Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 185. Also see Kandinsky’s memories of a black coach and a gondola boarded at night, and the emotions he associated with these objects, in his Reminiscences/Three Pictures (1913), in ———, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 358. 346 An assertive element in Kandinsky’s picture, the black arch suggests the possibility of relating the purple form and the blue form, yet, due to its own lack of anchoring, preserves its independence and dynamism in the picture. Its positioning brings to mind Worringer’s discussion of the role of pointed arches in Gothic architecture. Worringer finds that the arch is an architectural expression of human consciousness. In Form in Gothic, he writes: It is as if, with the introduction of the pointed arch, the building were permeated by a great wave of self-awareness. The redeeming word seems to have been spoken which allowed its restrained craving for activity and its pathetic yearning for expression to find utterance. The whole building stretches itself upward in the glad consciousness of being freed from all weight of material, from all earthly confinement... The movement of thrust from both sides is gathered into unity by a keystone at the crown of the vault, which, in spite of its actual weight conformable with its structural function as Fig. 23. Wassily Kandinsky. Picture with a Black Arch. 1912. oil on canvas. 188 x 196 cm. Paris. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. 347 abutment, fails entirely to produce any aesthetic impression of weight, appearing rather as a natural termination light as a flower.11 For Worringer, the arch suggests liberation from material constraints and weightlessness, despite its material manifestation. He analyzes an architectural element of abstract expression; however, he empathically compares the arch with an element of nature. In this light, Kandinsky’s painted arch draws further attention to the dynamism of an abstract element, to its expressive potential, and to its possible association with structures built by human beings in response to their world. Kandinsky creates colour-line interplay through the placement of the black arch, as well as through the placement of the smaller black linear elements within his composition. His approach to colour mixing also suggests interplay: for instance, mixing blue and red (the colours of the largest forms in Picture with a Black Arch) results in purple (the colour of the form above the larger red and blue elements). Distinct from the blue and red forms, the purple form assumes a connective role in Kandinsky’s composition, much like the black arch that overlaps it. As a relational modality, interplay appears emphasized in Kandinsky’s Picture with a Black Arch by means of line, colour and form. The interplay of form and content can also be observed in Picture with a Black Arch. Kandinsky links content to inner life, while form is for him the outer reflection of content, and can change in response to content. In Picture with a Black Arch, Kandinsky uses predominantly abstract pictorial elements – elements that suggest various interpretations. For instance, the pointed arch motif could be regarded as suggestive of a house roof or a boomerang; the grid motif could appear to allude to ribs, or to a bird in flight; the rounded arch motif could suggest the presence of a portal, or the act of jumping. Allowing the equivalences between content and form to remain open, Kandinsky sets possible contents in interplay with their abstract formal expression. Although it takes distance from the direct depiction of the world, Kandinsky’s Picture with a Black Arch articulates an additive, inclusive, and relational aspect of abstraction. 11 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 156-157. 348 In Kandinsky’s Picture with Red Spot (1914) (Fig. 24), abstracted yet partially recognizable human figures occupy the four corners of the work.12 A floating presence in the top right corner seems to gaze towards the rest of the composition; in the top left corner, a group of figures in a marine-like setting appears also to examine the scene below. Kandinsky makes animated presences easily discernible in the rest of his painting. He reinforces suggestions of vitality by means of directional and radiating patterns of paint application. The distance between the representational and abstract impulses diminishes in Kandinsky’s Picture with Red Spot, although the bridging of imitation and creativity occurs in different terms than the ones discussed by Worringer.13 12 Kandinsky vividly describes his emotional connections to the colour red in his Reminiscences/Three Pictures (1913), where he records his impressions on his travels in the Vologda province, and his experiencing the interiors of old Russian wooden houses. In the words of Kandinsky: ‘Folk pictures on the walls: a symbolic representation of a hero, a battle, a painted folk song. The “red” corner (red is the same as beautiful in old Russian) thickly, completely covered with painted and printed pictures of the saints, burning in front of it the red flame of a small pendant lamp, glowing and blowing like a knowing, discreetly murmuring, modest, and triumphant star, existing in and for itself.’ See Kandinsky, Lindsay, and Vergo, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 368-369. Regarding Kandinsky’s views on the energy and intensity of the colour red, which Kandinsky also associates with masculinity, also see his reflections from On the Spiritual in Art, in ———, Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, 186-187. The inner and outer aspects of colours as seen by Kandinsky could make the topic of further investigation, yet require self-standing essay space. 13 Worringer notes that imitation and creativity unite in naturalism, in the absence of transcendentalism, when human beings and their environment are in harmony. In these conditions, Worringer finds the rapprochement of imitation and creativity dangerous. See Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 19. Fig. 24. Wassily Kandinsky. Picture with Red Spot. 1914. oil on canvas. 130 x 130 cm. Paris. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. 349 Abstract-representational interplay is balanced in favour of abstraction in Picture with Red Spot; however, some passages retain representational connections with spaces, presences and happenings in the world. Kandinsky emphasizes the clustering of detail – a compositional characteristic associated predominantly with the art of representation; in his work, dots, lines, forms and colours articulate a mostly abstract composition, yet their accumulation, inflection, dissolution, gradation, overlapping, occasional flatness, and overall animation provide as much visual information as can be found in a representational painting. Abstract elements of composition become Kandinsky’s characters in Picture with Red Spot. Kandinsky, in Picture with Red Spot, creates textural variety by means of brushwork. He reveals material aspects of paint in some passages; in other passages, he highlights the dynamics of paint application and the weightlessness of paint. Full brushstrokes anchor Kandinsky’s abstract motifs, asserting their mass by means of paint; emptying brushstrokes dissolve the materiality of paint into colour, and melt single colours into interwoven and graduated hues. When articulating the abstract and representational aspects of his work, Kandinsky activates both the sense of touch and the sense of sight. He evokes the interplay of senses in Picture with Red Spot. Abstract-representational interplay models the relationship between colours, between forms, between colour and form, between form and content in Kandinsky’s early twentieth-century works. His paintings include representational features such as the registering of impressions and presences, attention to details and to lifelike animation. At the same time, Kandinsky underscores the inflection, dissolution, gradation, overlapping of dots, lines, forms and colours; in his handling, abstraction is a process that fosters not the isolation, but the connection between compositional elements. Even though he creates boundaries and works with separations in Impression V (Park), Picture with a Black Arch, and Picture with Red Spot, he generates contexts for interplay within and between compositional groups of elements, focusing on the shared grounds that painting can bring to light. 350 Rethinking abstract-representational interplay: Worringer, Arnheim, Deleuze and Guattari In the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, Rudolf Arnheim recognizes an interest in the uncharted grounds between representation and abstraction. Arnheim, writing about the non- representational art of the early twentieth century, observes in Visual Thinking (1970): ‘... [A]rtists such as Wassily Kandinsky were exploring the mysterious zone between the representational and the abstract.’ 1 For Arnheim, the territories where abstraction and representation overlap may appear mysterious, but their actual manifestation in the paintings of Kandinsky leaves no room for doubt. Arnheim mentions Kandinsky’s paintings in his discussion of non-mimetic images.2 He explains that non-mimetic images do not cultivate resemblances as recorded by senses: instead, non-mimetic images have ‘non-sensuous content’ and exhibit ‘non-sensorial feelings of relations’.3 In other words, Arnheim considers that images need not display imitative representational content, and need not rely on the depiction of height, width and depth relations in order to be regarded as images. According to him, non-mimetic images support the exploration and solving of theoretical problems, and play a decisive role in the activities of the mind. Arnheim, like Worringer, finds that responses to the world do not manifest exclusively in terms of representation. However, Arnheim insists that abstraction reveals not the stirrings of instinct – as Worringer argues in Abstraction and Empathy –4 but the expression of thought. Worringer explains that abstraction is the manifestation of instinct;5 instead, Arnheim considers the capacity of human beings to abstract as a fundamental component of perceiving, thinking and picture-making. ‘Abstractness,’ to employ Arnheim’s terminology, thus contributes to the activities of the mind, senses, as well as to art; it does not aim to offer a route of escape from threatening surroundings. The attention Arnheim bestows on the negotiable boundaries between representation and abstraction becomes obvious in his 1 Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 114. 2 The term ‘image’ is defined in this thesis as the visual likeness that informs the relationship between beings, objects, events or phenomena, and their representation. 3 Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 115. 4 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 18-19. 5 Ibid., 40-41. Also, Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 32. 351 approach to ‘pictures.’ For him, a picture embodies a specific function of an image.6 Arnheim notes that pictures are not copies, or imitations, and that they can abstract in different degrees. He explains: A picture can dwell at the most varied levels of abstractness. A photograph or a Dutch landscape of the seventeenth century may be quite lifelike and yet select, arrange, and almost unnoticeably stylize its subject in such a way that it focuses on some of the subject’s essence. On the other hand, a totally non-mimetic geometrical pattern by Mondrian may be intended as a picture of the turmoil of New York’s Broadway. A child may capture the character of a human figure or a tree by a few highly abstract circles, ovals, or straight lines. Abstractness is a means by which the picture interprets what it portrays.7 For Arnheim, pictures that engage with representing the world also employ processes specific to abstraction, such as selection, arrangement and stylization. Abstractness is therefore indispensable to the making of art: as Arnheim underscores, it provides a passageway from observed motifs to their interpretation through picture-making, be this picture-making abstract or representational. Worringer’s abstraction and Arnheim’s abstractness cannot be considered as strictly equivalent. For Worringer, abstraction is a psychological urge, and a mode of art-making connected with style, that may include references to the world.8 Instead, Arnheim points towards a zone of perception, thinking and art-making where abstractness is specific to both abstraction and representation. Abstractness functions as an instrument of art-making, according to Arnheim; as such, it is not employed to articulate an antithesis with representation, but exposes abstract-representational common ground, overriding their differentiation. Worringer, as we have seen, asserted the polar opposition of representation and abstraction at the beginning of Abstraction and Empathy; he continued by apparently turning against his earlier statements when highlighting that art he regarded as abstract could comprise 6 Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 136. 7 Ibid., 137. 8 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 34. 352 representational characteristics. In the demonstration conducted by Worringer, abstract- representational opposition facilitated theoretical understanding, yet was difficult to connect to art historical evidence. Gothic art offered Worringer a prime example of coexistence between abstract and representational aspects. In contrast with Worringer’s standpoint from Abstraction and Empathy, Arnheim considers that abstract works of art do not invoke a wish of separation from the world, even though they may not include representational elements. In the words of Arnheim: ‘Since it [i. e., an “abstract,” non-mimetic work of art] does not portray the external shape of physical objects, it is closer to the pure forces it presents symbolically; but it portrays at the same time the inherent nature of the things and events of the world and thereby maintains its relevance to human life on earth.’ 9 The deep-rooted aspects of forces, things, and events in the world come forth for Arnheim in his consideration of abstraction. For him, abstraction is not an attempt to transcend the vicissitudes of unwelcoming surroundings, as Worringer had claimed, but a relevant approach to life as experienced by human beings. Art benefits from the coexistence of abstract and representational features, Arnheim explains – in fact, it improves when abstract work accounts for representational aspects, and when representational art attends to form. According to him: ‘... although a painting may be entirely “abstract” (non-mimetic), it needs to reflect some of the complexity of form by which realistic works depict the wealth of human experience. Inversely, a realistic portrayal, in order to be readable, generic, and expressive, must fit its presentation of objects to the pure forms, more directly embodied in non-mimetic art.’ 10 A beneficial overlap of abstraction and representation thus occurs, according to Arnheim, in compositions where formal complexity characterizes abstraction, and where representation has formal purity (or simplicity of form). Worringer insisted, in Abstraction and Empathy, that abstraction provides the basis of all art- 9 Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 148. 10 Ibid., 150-151. Arnheim points to no artworks in support of his ideas from the cited passage, yet mentions the varied levels of abstractness of photographs, Dutch landscapes, or paintings by Piet Mondrian (which Arnheim considers as geometrical patterns). ———, Visual Thinking, 137. He discusses the symbolic potential of representational images such as The Workshop [L’Atélier] (1855) by Gustave Courbet; he also mentions the picture quality (therefore particularity, and specific cognitive quality) of, for instance, a portrait by Rembrandt, or of a non-mimetic work of art . ———, Visual Thinking, 141, 148. Arnheim also nods towards approaches to art-making where the decision of abstracting elements from their initial context leads to a novel approach to representation: for instance, Arnheim notes that Picasso invokes the image of a bull’s head by re-assembling the components of an old bicycle. ———, Visual Thinking, 141. 353 making.11 In Visual Thinking, Arnheim takes Worringer’s viewpoint further, exploring its psychological grounds, yet also underscoring the shortcomings of Worringer’s emphasis on the opposition between empathy and abstraction. Although critical towards Worringer’s methodological approach, Arnheim acknowledges the lack of dogmatism of Worringer’s perspective in ‘Wilhelm Worringer on Abstraction and Empathy’ (1984). For instance, Arnheim notes Worringer’s observation that representation and abstraction can be regarded, theoretically, as opposites, while the history of art shows them engaging in dialogue.12 Worringer’s antithesis between representation and abstraction, and his connecting abstraction to a psychological response of withdrawal, may be questioned, Arnheim comments. However, Arnheim also mentions that Abstraction and Empathy points to the interplay of representation and abstraction – an alternative to opposition indeed highlighted by Worringer in his discussions of historical transitions between epochs, and in his interpretation of Gothic art. Gothic art, especially Gothic line and its lifelikeness, also fascinate Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987), Deleuze and Guattari turn to Worringer’s views on Gothic when inquiring into the transformational aspects of metallurgy.13 They underscore the contrast traced by Worringer between organic, Classical art and barbarian, Gothic art.14 Unlike Arnheim, they accept the oppositional strategy adopted by Worringer in his debut book. Pointing to the Gothic line as seen by Worringer,15 Deleuze and Guattari examine the ‘Nonorganic Life’ of metal – a material they regard as having a body without organs (namely, an active life that is not located within given organisms, but that travels between organisms).16 For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Nonorganic Life’ is the key aspect of Worringer’s interpretation of Gothic art. Worringer’s paradoxical phrase, which brings together opposite terms, is employed in A Thousand Plateaus to draw attention to the lifelike qualities of inanimate materials. 11 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 41-45. 12 Arnheim, New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 61. 13 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 410-411. 14 Ibid., 415. 15 Ibid., 411. 16 Ibid., 499. 354 Highlighting the continuity between the inquiries of Riegl and Worringer with regard to sight and touch, Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘close vision’ and ‘haptic space’ form an aesthetic couple.17 Indeed, Worringer had drawn attention to the tactile qualities of abstract art (especially with regard to sculpture), as well as to the optical features of representation in Abstraction and Empathy.18 Yet Worringer discusses tactility much less than Riegl in Late Roman Art Industry. Representation relies on the sense of sight, and on optical characteristics, for Worringer, whereas abstraction emphasizes planes and (to employ his phrase) the ‘closed material individuality’ of objects. 19 Worringer, unlike Riegl, connects abstraction with the flatness of planes rather than with experiential proximity. Although manifesting visually in art, abstraction comes to challenge senses, including the sense of sight, in Abstraction and Empathy. Deleuze and Guattari focus on human senses more than Worringer, who faced the difficult task of steering clear of Riegl’s influence. Underscoring the aesthetic relevance of distant and close viewing, as well as their possible coexistence with the sense of touch, Deleuze and Guattari nevertheless depart from the thought of Riegl and Worringer. For instance, ‘haptic’ is a term Deleuze and Guattari prefer to Riegl and Worringer’s ‘tactile,’ since ‘haptic’ allows for possible touch-sight interconnections.20 Deleuze and Guattari thus open their investigation to the overlapping and co-operation of senses: they link sight with physical distance, and the possibility of touch with proximity, recognizing the haptic function the eye can perform. For Worringer, the sense of sight supports the articulation of representational art; abstraction, on the other hand, is planar, and embodies the wish of viewers and artists to be released from the pressures of the world. Worringer’s abstraction comes to develop supra-sensuous, spiritual aspects in the process of attempting to leave the world behind.21 Worringer observes significant abstract aspects in Gothic art. For instance, in Form in Gothic, he explores the expressive qualities of Gothic line. To illuminate the contrast between line in Greek ornament and Gothic ornament respectively, Worringer refers to the activity of 17 Ibid., 492-493. 18 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 40-41, 84, 86. 19 Ibid., 34-48. 20 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 492. 21 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 42-44. 355 drawing in conditions of mental stress;22 in such instances, he explains, human will does not drive expression, and satisfaction does not follow the completion of work. Instead, Worringer argues that this type of stress-laden line appears to obey a will of its own, twisting, turning, and gaining momentum from the negotiation of obstacles. Worringer comments: ‘The essence of this specific expression of the line is, that it does not represent sensuous, organic values, but values of a non-sensuous, that is to say, a spiritual kind. It does not express organic activity of will, but a psychical, spiritual activity of will, far removed from any connection or conformity with the complexes of organic sensation.’ 23 Lines drawn under stress; such lines – the expressiveness of which Worringer likens to Gothic ornament –24 have non-sensuous, spiritual qualities, and power rather than beauty of expression. Egyptian art appeared predominantly abstract to Worringer; 25 Gothic art, he argued, was abstract with a difference: it cultivated lifelike movement as well as a preoccupation with structure. Worringer argues that all art begins with abstraction, Deleuze and Guattari observe. 26 Indeed, Worringer gave priority to the urge to abstraction; he explained in Form in Gothic: ‘... [A] vital impulse for empathy developed from a powerful impulse for abstraction.’ 27 As Deleuze and Guattari point out, Worringer associated the emergence of abstraction with crystalline, geometric qualities of form, made visible in the art of ancient Egypt; then Gothic art had driven geometry towards expressiveness. The ‘de-geometrization of line’ at work in Northern 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 43. 24 Ibid., 44. 25 Worringer reformulates his position on abstraction and its association with the culture of ancient Egypt in Egyptian Art (1927), Donahue points out. Comparing Egyptian and early twentieth-century American culture, Worringer, Donahue highlights, criticises their shared superficiality, emptiness and uniformity. Donahue points out that Egyptian Art proposes a reading that negates the appreciation Worringer had shown for the abstractness of ancient Egyptian art in Abstraction and Empathy. Worringer, as cited by Donahue, maintains: ‘It would be untrue to claim for the Egyptian, as the author himself has done on a former occasion, a feeling for the “awe- inspiring nature of the cubic,” and to assume that he overcame it by giving a geometrical form to his planes. This would be to introduce into the Egyptian’s feeling for life a dramatic element utterly at variance with our present sober conception.’ Donahue signals that intellectual history, or Geistesgeschichte, as practiced by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy, now expresses the nationalist tendencies of late Weimar culture (1918- 1933). Worringer’s argument from Egyptian Art is tendentious, but also frank; Donahue explains that Worringer is baffled by modern cities, which he does not approach in 1927 as in the past, namely from the perspective of ‘... the logic of artistic sensibility’. Donahue’s essay points to the limitations and dangers of ‘ecstatic Geistesgeschichte’ as approached by Worringer, who subjects art to his powerfully personal views. See Neil H. Donahue, 'From Worringer to Baudrillard and Back: Ancient Americans and (Post)Modern Culture in Weimar Germany' in Neil H. Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 134-135, 137, 140, 145-150, 151, 150-155. 26 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 496. 27 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 32. 356 (or Gothic) ornament interested Worringer.28 Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari disagree with his exemplifications. Abstraction – more specifically, abstract line – has mainly Gothic (or nomadic) characteristics for Deleuze and Guattari. They do not consider abstraction is observable most notably in Egyptian art, as Worringer did, nor do they accept that abstraction could be an expression of fear. According to Deleuze and Guattari: Whereas the rectilinear (or “regularly” rounded) Egyptian line is negatively motivated by anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows or varies, and erects the constancy and eternity of an In-Itself, the nomad line is abstract in an entirely different sense, precisely because it has a multiple orientations and passes between points, figures, and contours: it is positively motivated by the smooth space it draws, not by any striation it might perform to ward off anxiety and subordinate the smooth. The abstract line is the affect of smooth spaces, not a feeling of anxiety that calls forth striation.29 Deleuze and Guattari link abstraction with ‘close vision’ and smooth space. Bringing forth both touch and sight as functions of the human eye, smooth space has haptic characteristics according to Deleuze and Guattari.30 To smooth space they oppose striated space,31 a predominantly optical type of space that involves distant viewing. Worringer associated distant viewing with three-dimensionality and representation; for him, the distant viewing presupposed by representation could be contrasted with the non-sensuous tendencies of abstraction.32 The sense of sight had as an opposite the non-sensuous, or spiritual, in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari refer both the smoothness and the striation of space to the activity of senses. Having posited the antithesis of smoothness and striation, Deleuze and Guattari follow by noting their possible connections. According to them: ‘Once again, as always, this analysis must be corrected by a coefficient of transformation according to which passages between the striated and the smooth are at once necessary and uncertain, and all the more disruptive.’ 33 28 Ibid., 44. 29 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 496-497. 30 Ibid., 493. 31 Ibid. 32 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 37-41. Also, Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 31-33. 33 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 493. 357 Deleuze and Guattari, like Worringer, remain sensitive to the interplay of terms they introduce as opposites. For them, to oppose smoothness and striation brings along complications, and underscores the intermittence and overlays of the two characteristics of space. Yet, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the lack of symmetry between imperfect opposites confirms the very distinction between them.34 Smoothness and striation can be defined less through opposition than through distinction, according to Deleuze and Guattari – in other words, not as much through polar antithesis (a strategy preferred by Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy) as through an affirmative assertion of differences. Abstraction – a mode of art-making Worringer regards as an expression of negative emotions towards the world – appears in a positive light to Deleuze and Guattari. Unlike Worringer, they affirm the capacity of abstract (or nomad) line to travel in different directions between various standpoints. Deleuze and Guattari recognize the connections between abstraction and affect (or emotional expression) yet do not see abstraction as an anxiety-laden response to the world. Abstraction is not an aspect of viewers’ negative response to their surroundings, according to Deleuze and Guattari, but a mode of expression the characteristics of which can receive positive definition. The viewpoints articulated in Abstraction and Empathy and A Thousand Plateaus differ significantly with regard to abstract art and its alleged negativity. Representation and abstraction should not be contrasted, according to Deleuze and Guattari, as expressions of antithetic emotions experienced in response to the world. The approach of Deleuze and Guattari to the strategy of opposition reveals once more its subtlety towards the end of A Thousand Plateaus, especially with regard to the differentiation between the figurative and the abstract.35 For Deleuze and Guattari, the figurative is equivalent to representation or imitation. (Worringer, who considered that aesthetics should not be concerned with imitation, would have strongly disagreed with their viewpoint.)36 They assert that a figurative line cannot be contrasted with an abstract line, but only with a line that is not figurative.37 In other words, they draw renewed attention to the limits of the strategy of opposition, which may succeed in differentiating between artistic territories, but cannot 34 Ibid., 481-482. 35 Ibid., 497. 36 Worringer and Kramer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 27-29, 32-33. 37 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 497. 358 support their polar contrast. Deleuze and Guattari do not define the domain of non-figurative art, which they offer as a theoretical counterpart of the figurative;38 however, their observations expose the insufficiency of approaching the abstract and the figurative (or, in their terms, the representational, the imitative) from the point of view of polar antithesis. Despite their implicit criticism towards Worringer’s reading of abstraction in negative terms, Deleuze and Guattari praise Worringer’s approach to the contrast between the organic and the abstract.39 For them, Worringer excels in his articulation of the abstract-organic antithesis. However, Deleuze and Guattari find that Worringer’s opposition between the abstract and the organic cannot be sustained. Defining ‘the organic’ as the very form taken by representation,40 Deleuze and Guattari explain that ‘the organic’ connects the act of representation to represented motifs. ‘The organic’ is also associated with feeling, with empathy, according to Deleuze and Guattari – it is a key characteristic of life. They argue that ‘the organic’ cannot stand against ‘the abstract’ as discussed by Worringer in Greek and Egyptian art, since Greek art is actually inspired by Egyptian art, and continues to display geometric, rectilinear qualities of form.41 For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘the abstract’ rather finds its beginning in Gothic art. The perspective Deleuze and Guattari take on ‘the abstract’ observed in Gothic line powerfully brings to light abstract-representational interplay. Mechanical and dynamic, Gothic line appears to Deleuze and Guattari as lifelike, despite being inorganic. Worringer approached the ‘abstraction’ of Gothic art from a similar perspective in Abstraction and Empathy,42 as well as Form in Gothic:43 he noted Gothic’s inorganic vitality. However, Deleuze and Guattari expand on Worringer’s inquiries, distinguishing Gothic line from both ‘the geometrical’ and ‘the organic.’ In their words: 38 In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze approaches non-figuration when addressing resemblance in Bacon’s paintings. Deleuze remarks that Bacon creates nonfigurative resemblances. To articulate this type of resemblance, Deleuze explains, Bacon employs procedures such as scrambling, rubbing or hatching, and produces figural Images. Non-figuration is thus discussed by Deleuze in association with resemblance (a pictorial characteristic that could be considered its opposite). See Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 158-159. 39 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 498. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 48, 112-113. Also, Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic. 43 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 55-57, 106-107. 359 It is this nomadic line that he [i. e. Worringer] says is mechanical, but in free action and swirling; it is inorganic, yet alive, and all the more alive for being inorganic. It is distinguished both from the geometrical and the organic. It raises “mechanical” relations to the level of intuition. Heads (eve a human being’s when it is not a face) unravel and coil into ribbons in a continuous process; mouths curl in spirals. Hair, clothes... This streaming, spiralling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation liberates a power of life that human beings had rectified and organisms had confined, and which matter now expresses as the trait, flow, or impulse traversing it. If everything is alive, it is not because everything is organic or organized but, on the contrary, because the organism is a diversion of life. In short, the life in question is inorganic, germinal, and intensive, a powerful life without organs, a Body that is all the more alive for having no organs, everything that passes between organisms...44 To Deleuze and Guattari, Gothic (or nomadic line) seems to follow an intuitive path of expression; it exceeds the depiction of embodied form. Bodies are not recognizably rendered according to the principles of representation, but dynamically transformed by Gothic line, Deleuze and Guattari remark. Worringer’s Form in Gothic signalled the possible association of Gothic line and power. According to Worringer: ‘... [I]t is evident that the organically determined line contains beauty of expression, while power of expression is reserved for the Gothic line.’ 45 For Deleuze and Guattari as well, Gothic line shows the power of life liberated from the restrictions of organization. Gothic line is abstract, according to Deleuze and Guattari, but displays lifelike energy and movement nevertheless. ‘The abstract’ as observed by Deleuze and Guattari in the Gothic line actually presupposes the interplay of abstract and representational characteristics. Worringer also noted the predominantly abstract character of Gothic line, yet claimed Gothic line reflects neither the urge to abstraction, nor the urge to empathy. In the words of Worringer: ‘Gothic line being essentially abstract, and yet at the same time strongly vital, shows us that a differentiated intermediate state exists, in which the dualism is no longer sufficiently strong to seek artistic freedom in the absolute negation of life, but is on the other hand not yet so weakened as to derive the meaning of art from the organic orderliness of life 44 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 498-499. 45 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 44. 360 itself.’ 46 While underscoring the predominantly abstract character of Gothic line, Worringer finds it informed by representational characteristics. Gothic art, he argues, is neither abstract nor representational, but hybrid.47 Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic place abstraction in a positive context when discussing its capacity of transcendence and openness towards spirituality. 48 Yet the transcendent, spiritual tendencies of abstraction as seen by Worringer are still the outcomes of taking distance from the world – a response Worringer frames in negative terms. As long as Worringer considers abstraction a psychological urge opposed to empathy, he associates abstraction with negative emotional connections between artists or viewers and the world. Gothic, on the other hand, is a mode of art-making Worringer addresses in terms of form. His Gothic offers a particular avenue towards expression, where lifelike dynamism as well as the urge towards distancing from the world can be recognized. The opposition of abstract and representational characteristics becomes inactive in Worringer’s interpretation of Gothic art; abstract-representational interplay replaces it. Worringer may highlight the interplay of abstraction and representation in negative terms,49 yet asserts its visibility in Gothic art nevertheless; for him, as previous sections have noted, Gothic appears as a hybrid approach to art, a territory where the ‘counterplay and interplay’ urges considered opposite may be observed.50 In the later years of the twentieth century, Deleuze and Guattari argue that abstraction can be defined in association with smooth, haptic space, and close viewing; they do not need a negative framing for abstraction in order to better establish its aesthetic territory. Moreover, for Deleuze and Guattari, Gothic art is abstract rather than hybrid. Although abstraction offers an alternative to representation and striated space, it cannot open a door to salvation, according to Deleuze and Guattari. ‘Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us’, Deleuze and Guattari warn their readers.51 They explain that smooth spaces do not 46 Ibid., 68. 47 Ibid., 63-64, 85, 87. 48 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 18-19, 34-36, 46, 76, 102- 103, 129-131, 134. Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 38-39, 43-44, 63-66. 49 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 39. 50 Ibid., 63. 51 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 500. 361 liberate viewers from the restrictions of striation, but provide life an opportunity to re- articulate its challenges. Abstraction, as Deleuze and Guattari observe it in Gothic art, does not reach for the absolute, but is intensely active in the field between organisms. Combining inorganic and organic qualities, abstract linearity and lifelike movement, it makes available a pathway towards the interplay of opposites. Where Worringer emphasized the spiritual and transcendent aspects of abstraction, Deleuze and Guattari reinforce the connections of abstraction with the world. Although their respective methodologies highlight abstract-representational opposition, the three writers walk on common ground when inquiring into the particularities of abstract- representational interplay as observable in art. Towards the end of the twentieth century, Worringer’s most significant legacy proves to be his decisive articulation of oppositions that actually open to the interplay of their terms. 362 Conclusion According to many modern and contemporary researchers, the key feature of Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, and their most memorable aspect, is the antithesis Worringer draws between the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction.1 Having incorporated and re- addressed the ideas of Theodor Lipps and Alois Riegl, Worringer influenced the articulation of an antithetic approach to modern art in the writings of Paul Fechter, Hermann Bahr, T. E. Hulme and Herbert Read. Worringer’s ideas had a direct impact on the rise of German Expressionism, a mediated influence on the development of English Vorticism, and contributed to the validation of abstraction as an approach to fine art practice at the beginning of the twentieth century. Later twentieth-century explorations underscore the key role of Worringer’s ideas in his time, and the distinctive qualities of his writing. 2 For T. E. Hulme, Herbert Read, W. Eugène Kleinbauer, Hilton Kramer, Michael W. Jennings, Mary Gluck, W. Wolfgang Holdheim, Joseph Masheck, Neil Donahue, David Morgan, Madgalena Bushart, Mark Rosenthal, Mark Jarzombek, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh, Abstraction and Empathy draws decisive contrasts between epochs, locations and psychological tendencies, as observed in art throughout its history. Worringer’s polemical inclinations and his imaginative approach to the art of distant epochs are matched, as his supporters tend to observe, by his innovative approach to the writing of art history and theory. Yet the researchers of Worringer’s work also signal the lack of alignment between Worringer’s theory and the history of art,3 his narrowly defined antitheses,4 questionable generalizations,5 preference for debate rather than documentation,6 and focus on art historical interpretation more than on actual artistic motivation.7 1 Worringer’s employment of antithesis is highlighted, for instance, in the research of W. Eugène Kleinbauer, Hilton Kramer, W. Wolfgang Holdheim, Neil Donahue, Joseph Masheck, David Morgan, Geoffrey C. W. Waite, Mark Rosenthal, Allan Antliff, as well as Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh. See, from the current thesis, ‘Wilhelm Worringer: sketch for a portrait,’ 10-36. 2 See, from the current thesis, ‘Wilhelm Worringer: sketch for a portrait,’ 10-36, a section that briefly highlights the opinions on Worringer of twentieth-century writers. 3 W. Wolfgang Holdheim in ‘Wilhelm Worringer: sketch for a portrait,’ 10-36. 4 E. H. Gombrich in ‘Wilhelm Worringer: sketch for a portrait,’ 10-36. 5 Dennis Duerden in ‘Wilhelm Worringer: sketch for a portrait,’ 10-36. 6 Madgalena Bushart in ‘Wilhelm Worringer: sketch for a portrait,’ 10-36. 7 Mark Jarzombek in ‘Wilhelm Worringer: sketch for a portrait,’ 10-36. 363 The forewords Worringer wrote to Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic reveal key aspects of his discourse that also reflect into his books.8 Interweaving tendencies towards distancing and connectivity, the forewords emphasize Worringer’s interest in generating debate, his views on the limitations of the Classical framework in early twentieth-century approaches to art, and his attention to inner aspects of art-making. Worringer takes the opportunity of pointing to the experimental aspects of his research, strengthening and animating his statements by placing them within an oppositional framework. The vitality of his writing, his reliance on instinct, his attention to his readership, and his intention to provide a voice to the pressing artistic matters of his epoch, emerge with clarity in the forewords to Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. Relying on antithesis, Worringer’s writing of art history and theory also makes visible situations of significant coexistence between opposites.9 For instance, in Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer separates between nature and art, and sets urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction in opposition. However, he does not disconnect viewing from feeling and from art-making, thus bringing together art and aesthetics. Employing a subjectivist framework, Worringer underscores the diversity of the art-viewing experience. He argues that aesthetics cannot account only for instances where the urge to empathy is invited. Although the thought of Lipps influences Worringer’s initial perspective on empathy in its positive and negative aspects, Worringer implicitly equates empathy and positive empathy. Transferring the negative aspect of empathy onto abstraction, he discusses abstraction rather than negative empathy in Abstraction and Empathy. He thus articulates a narrower line of research than Lipps, accounting emphatically for the opposition of urges and modes of art- making in the early stages of his argument. Aiming to provide a critical re-reading of Lipps’ Aesthetics, Abstraction and Empathy succeeds in offering an incisive, selective reinterpretation of Lipps’ system. Worringer associates the urge to empathy with artistic naturalism, and the urge to abstraction with artistic style. He provides to the aesthetic and psychological terms of his inquiry a 8 See ‘Gazing in the mirror of history: Worringer’s forewords to Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic,’ 37-48, from the current thesis. 9 From the current thesis, ‘Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory,’ 49-64. 364 reflection in art-making.10 Nevertheless, as W. J. T. Mitchell, Juliet Koss and Andreas Michel show, twentieth-century researchers encounter difficulties in assessing and employing Worringer’s terminology. Empathy, Mitchell and Koss comment, is regarded from the perspective of its limitations in art historical discussions nowadays. In their turn, Clement Greenberg and Frances Colpitt contrast representation (or figuration) and abstraction in art-making instead of employing the naturalism-style pairing proposed by Worringer, and question the effectiveness of the abstract-representational polarity. Worringer’s opposition of the urge to empathy (and naturalism) and the urge to abstraction (and style) is partial rather than polar in Abstraction and Empathy. To emphasize the relevance of Worringer’s discussion of art-making, as well as late twentieth-century terminological preferences, ‘representation’ and ‘abstraction’ are contrasted in the current thesis with Worringer’s emphasis on differentiation in mind. Different urges lead to different artistic results, Worringer argues in Abstraction and Empathy.11 He notes that style, generically understood, provides occasions for enjoyment and satisfaction; however, he disputes the aesthetic supremacy of naturalism in his epoch, pointing to the words and works of Adolf Hildebrand and Ferdinand Hodler in support of his argument. Naturalism (or representation), a mode of art-making emphasizing the enthusiasm of artists and viewers towards the world, is not to be mistaken for imitation, Worringer notes; abstraction, according to him, can be effectively contrasted only with naturalism. Observing the tendencies towards abstraction of Oriental art, Worringer explains that the urge to abstraction sets single forms free from three-dimensional, spatial relations. Instead, the urge to empathy supports the rendition of space and three-dimensionality. Having asserted the opposition between urges and modes of art-making, Worringer nevertheless recognizes their similarities, especially at points of transition between epochs. As his argument advances, Worringer notes that representation occasions, much like abstraction, the contemplative distancing of viewers from the world, while abstract art does not require the 10 This topic is approached in ‘Empathy, abstract and representation in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic,’ 65-85, from the current thesis. 11 See, form the current thesis, ‘Representation and abstraction in art-making: Worringer’s perspective,’ 86-110. 365 exclusion of representational elements. The meeting of representational and abstract tendencies is recognisable, according to him, in Gothic as well as Classical art. The completion of Classicism is marked by the thought of Kant, Worringer specifies in Abstraction and Empathy.12 Although critical towards the impact of Classicism on his epoch, Worringer relies on Kant’s research when addressing the question of form in art. Separating between narrative and formal approaches to art-making, Worringer considers form a key component in aesthetics. Like Kant, Worringer recognizes the simplicity and generality of form; however, for Worringer form is associated mainly with regularity as emergent from instinct rather than intellect. Wölfflin, who also follows Kant’s direction of research, offers Worringer the opportunity to draw attention to the contrast between representation-inclined uniformity and abstraction- oriented regularity in art. The dynamism Wölfflin recognizes and criticises in the art of the late nineteenth century is specific to Gothic as approvingly described by Worringer. Gothic, Worringer mentions, departs from Classical balance as observable in Greek ornament, for instance. Even where such balance is missing, artists seek opportunities for peaceful contemplation in an unpredictable world often animated by conflict. Worringer’s views regarding the limits of representation are influenced by the thought of Schopenhauer on will and life in the world. The silencing of will opens room for aesthetic contemplation, Worringer remarks, following Schopenhauer.13 In Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer differentiates between two types of experience: the distancing from the world (which he associates with abstraction) and the distancing from the self (which occurs in conditions of empathy). Thus distancing emerges as a common psychological ground between modes of art-making for him, much like for Schopenhauer, who underscores the experiential loss of self that accompanies aesthetic pleasure. Art, according to Schopenhauer and Worringer, is a materialization of will, rooted in the emotional responses of artists to the world. 12 The influence of Kant on Worringer is addressed in ‘ “Common to all”: form for Kant and Worringer,’ 111- 121, from the current thesis. 13 ‘A matter of will: Schopenhauer and Worringer on life and art,’ 122-126, is a section that briefly discusses the influence of Schopenhauer on Worringer. 366 Worringer emphasizes the role of will rather than the importance of skill in art-making.14 He extends the research of Riegl in this respect. Riegl finds that artistic will becomes most visible in architecture or crafts, where representational elements are eluded. Artistic will, according to him depends on time and place, models technique and meaning, and makes progress visible. For Worringer, artistic will generates tendencies towards representation or abstraction, giving rise to divergent aspects of art-making; instead, Riegl sees will as a force determined by the views of the world at a given time, and recognizes it as a common ground in the interpretation of art. In late twentieth-century research, Worringer’s early twentieth-century writings are often discussed in connection to the growth of Expressionism in German art.15 Expressionism is a term featuring in a variety of sources around the turn of the twentieth century, and suggests the incorporation of various artistic influences.16 Signalling an interest in responding to the world intensely, from a subjective perspective, Expressionism reveals its discursive and emotional similarities with Worringer’s approach from Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. A significant contributor to the articulation of Expressionism in Germany is Gothic; this approach to art-making, as described by Worringer, extends beyond historical and national boundaries, yet assumes distinctive form in Germany. Asserting the ties between Gothic and German art, Worringer provides a historical foundation to the artistic explorations of his time, distancing them (as well as his inquiry) from the dominant approach inspired by Renaissance and Impressionist art-making.17 Worringer explains that, in early twentieth-century German art practices, external symbolism is immersed into the core of abstraction-oriented artworks and then brought to surface; the resulting works of art stand free from the dualism of form and content, according to him. Representational and abstract modes of art-making thus come to relate on new, inclusive grounds. 14 The question of artistic will is approached in ‘Riegl and artistic will,’ 127-131, in this thesis. 15 See ‘Worringer and Expressionism: late twentieth-century perspectives,’ 215-224. 16 ‘The words of Worringer: ‘Expressionism’ at the beginning of the twentieth century,’ 149-157, from the current thesis. 17 See ‘ “The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911): Worringer’s early response to Expressionism,’ 158-184. 367 Worringer’s influence becomes visible in the writings of Paul Fechter and Hermann Bahr on Expressionism.18 Mentioning that the books of Worringer support viewers’ access to modern art, Fechter emphasizes the attention contemporary art-making places on expressing emotion. For Fechter as for Worringer, antithesis provides an effective pathway to explaining artistic processes: intensive and extensive Expressionism are for Fechter key elements of inquiry. In his turn, Bahr contrasts ‘the eye of the body’ and ‘the eye of the spirit’, claiming that the two need to find balance in art-making. Bahr, who is also inspired by Worringer’s writings, notes that the acceptance of art relies on the alignment of viewers’ and artists’ modes of seeing. Expressionism offers more than an artistic exploration specific to current times for Bahr: it is the mark of enduring spiritual powers available to humanity under the extreme duress of war. Worringer proves a supporter of the experimental aspects of Expressionism, whether these manifest in art or in different forms of research.19 Later artistic Expressionism meets with his empathically articulated criticism; nevertheless, for Georg Lukács, Worringer remains a representative of Expressionism and of its ideology. 20 Harshly critical towards Expressionism as well as towards Worringer for their reliance on abstract aspects of art-making, Lukács is nevertheless inspired by Worringer’s writings, as Richard Sheppard points out. For Joseph Frank, Worringer’s lively, exciting prose has the merit of addressing emotions that reflect negative responses to a world of changes, and underscores the merits of abstraction as a creative approach eluding time’s passage. William Spanos, criticising Frank’s response to Worringer’s writings, underscores that a third urge can be discerned in art-making: the urge to engagement with the world, where representational and abstract aspects meet. Regarding Expressionism and the writings of Worringer as implicitly connected, Ulrich Weisstein disagrees with Worringer’s trans- historical views on Gothic, recommending instead that Expressionism be discussed within its 18 This topic is briefly discussed in ‘Worringer’s impact: Expressionism (1914) by Paul Fechter, and Expressionism (1916) by Hermann Bahr,’ 185-195, from the current thesis. 19 ‘Current Questions on Art (1921): Worringer revisits Expressionism,’ 196-198, looks further into Worringer’s approach to Expressionism in the early nineteen-twenties. 20 Lukács’ viewpoint is addressed in ‘Questioning Worringer: critical discussions on the writings of Worringer and on Worringer’s association with the Expressionist movement,’ 199-214. 368 own epoch. Worringer emphasizes feeling rather than reason in his writings; according to Neil Donahue, Worringer addresses his topics from the perspective of the history of ideas. Donahue draws attention to the impact of Worringer’s writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as to his generic terminology that brings together different strands of scholarship. Relying on the vocabulary of opposition, Worringer contrasts the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction.21 He thus establishes the domains of abstraction and representation in art- making, and underscores their characteristics. Approached by Neil Donahue, Geoffrey C. W. Waite, and Joshua Dittrich from the perspective of its rhetorical aspects, Worringer’s oppositional line of argument finds an antecedent in the thought of Aristotle, a writer Worringer mentions when criticising the dependence of contemporary art and thinking on Classical models. For Aristotle, antithesis is a key aspect of rhetorical discourse, employed for the specific purpose of persuasion. Worringer’s argument and interpretation, antithetically articulated, indirectly show his reliance on Classical rhetoric. Antithesis features in the writings of Kant, Schopenhauer, Riegl, and Wölfflin, yet is distinctively associated with subjectivism, emotion, and the defence of abstract art in Worringer’s texts. A key strategy in Worringer’s discourse, antithesis also characterises the views of Worringer on lived experience: he finds that human beings are engaged in a perpetually oppositional relationship with their environments. However, alternatives to opposition also feature in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic. Addressing instances of abstract-representational interplay, Worringer points to gradation, displacement and transposition in psychological, historical and formal contexts.22 For him, interplay is visible in Japanese art, Ionic architecture or Byzantine style, but most of all in Gothic art.23 Worringer contrasts representation and abstraction; nevertheless, he also notes that, once one pole of the antithetical relationship is reached, its opposite reveals its appeal. In Form in Gothic, Worringer explains that historical objectivity can only be attained 21 For a discussion of the role of the rhetorical strategy of opposition in Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory, see ‘Antithesis: Classical, modern and contemporary contexts,’ 225-243. 22 See ‘Gradation, displacement and transposition: alternatives to antithesis in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy,’ 244-253, in this thesis. 23 This thesis inquires into Worringer’s views on abstract-representational interplay in ‘Form in Gothic: interplay readdressed,’ 254-256. 369 through a duplication of Ego and through attending to the antithetic opinions of its parts.24 The interplay of opposites is thus revisited by Worringer from a new angle. Visible in naturalist (or representational) art, which actually draws together the imitative and creative impulses, interplay appears threatening to Worringer, since it promises to destabilize the antithesis of representation and abstraction.25 However, in Gothic art, Worringer recognizes abstract-representational interplay at work. Processes of remembering, assimilation and interpolation feature in the Gothic approach to rendering animal figures, according to him;26 he detects a connection with the world in such representations, but finds it difficult to establish specific sources for Gothic motifs. Gothic interplay is different from Classical interplay as observed in Ionic architecture, for instance; it also differs from the play drive as previously described by Friedrich Schiller.27 Schiller, like Worringer, employs strong contrasts when defining the key terms of his inquiry: he writes about the antithetic laws of absolute reality and absolute formality, and the sensuous and formal drives specific to them. Yet Schiller argues that the play drive mediates between these opposites, balancing matter and form, feelings and reason, senses and law, and fostering harmonious interconnections. Gothic art does not attract Schiller’s interest, yet becomes the main site of abstract-representational interplay for Worringer. Underscoring the duality and hybridity of Gothic, Worringer finds that opposite elements coexist without estranging their defining characteristics in Gothic art.28 Worringer approaches the relationship between representation and abstraction with his contemporaries in mind.29 Arguing in favour of abstraction, he seeks the attention and understanding of a public he regards as critical towards current abstract tendencies in art- 24 ‘History and Ego: Worringer’s approach,’ 257-259, casts a closer glance towards Worringer’s historical methods as explained in Form in Gothic. 25 Worringer’s hesitation regarding interplay as made visible in naturalism is approached in ‘Interplay in naturalism,’ 260, from the current thesis. 26 See ‘Interplay in the Gothic art of Northern Europe: memory, assimilation, interpolation,’ 261-263. 27 From the current thesis, see ‘Schiller, Worringer, interplay,’ 264-269. 28 Gothic hybridity is underscored in ‘Interplay: a dual, hybrid state in Gothic art,’ 270-273, from this thesis. 29 The attention Worringer directs towards his contemporaries is discussed in ‘Worringer: his contemporaries, and early twentieth-century art-making in Abstraction and Empathy,’ 274-277, from this thesis. 370 making. As his forewords point out, his strategy meets with success during his time.30 Relying on the opposition of abstraction and representation, Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic benefit from the advantages Worringer’s methodological preference brings along: clarity, persuasive power, memorability. These qualities explain the wide appeal of Worringer’s books in the early years of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the disadvantages of polar opposition are highlighted by Arnheim; 31 for him, abstract-representational antithesis fails to acknowledge the merits of abstraction as a fundamental activity of thinking, perception, and art-making. Deleuze and Guattari,32 who articulate memorable oppositions themselves, also inquire into the interaction between antithetic terms such as organic and inorganic, representational (or figurative) and abstract. Arnheim, Deleuze and Guattari – three writers who discuss Worringer’s approach at length – address abstract-representational opposition as well as interplay in their writings. They signal their disagreements with Worringer’s views, yet remain open to the complexities of his argument. For them as for Worringer, one perspective on the abstract-representational relationship does not suffice. When theorizing opposition in his books, Worringer proves more confident than when he discusses interplay. Denying the ‘play’ element in order to emphasize the seriousness of artistic pursuits, Worringer sees in abstract-representational interplay the threat of a loss of identity for abstract, respectively imitative impulses.33 However, he employs the term ‘interplay’ with assurance where ‘interplay’ is paired up with its opposite: ‘counterplay.’ 34 Interplay acquires predominantly negative associations in Worringer’s texts,35 yet this does not prevent Worringer from dedicating a significant number of pages to the analysis of the 30 This thesis has pointed to the reservations of early twentieth-century art historians such as Richard Hamann to Worringer’s approach. See ‘Gazing in the mirror of history: Worringer’s forewords to Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic,’ 37-48. 31 See, from the current thesis, ‘Abstraction, representation, opposition: Worringer and Rudolf Arnheim,’ 132- 139; also, ‘Rethinking abstract-representational interplay: Worringer, Arnheim, Deleuze,’ 350-361. 32 The approach of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, to Worringer’s writings is explored in ‘The relationship between abstraction and representation: highlights from Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, and Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation,’ 140-148, and ‘Rethinking abstract-representational interplay: Worringer, Arnheim, Deleuze,’ 350-362, two sections from this thesis. 33 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 19, 39. 34 Ibid., 63. 35 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 23, 38. Also, Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 39, 63, 177. 371 interplay of representation and abstraction as observed in Gothic art.36 He also highlights instances of abstract-representational interplay at points of transition between epochs and modes of art-making, for instance in connection to the passage between Romanesque and Gothic art,37 or between Gothic and Renaissance.38 Abstract-representational interplay develops artistic and historical nuances in Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic, where Worringer discusses it alongside the opposition of representation and abstraction. The title of Worringer’s debut book, Abstraction and Empathy, reveals the peculiar dynamic of opposition and interplay in Worringer’s writing. If interpreted according to the first chapters of Abstraction and Empathy, its title could appear oppositional. Nevertheless, when Worringer juxtaposes terms he regards as opposites, he creates common ground at the same time as differentiation. He gives no indication that the urge to abstraction has to be read as strictly opposite to the urge to empathy, but allows a fruitful ambiguity to connect the two terms instead. Abstraction and Empathy shows Worringer attending to both abstract-representational opposition and interplay. This dual focus is a key characteristic of his discourse. Associated with ‘disputation’ rather than dialogue in Abstraction and Empathy,39 and paired with ‘counterplay’ in Form in Gothic,40 interplay features in Worringer’s texts as an indispensable facet of artistic practice. The writings and works of painters active around the turn of the twentieth century indeed reveal various approaches to abstract-representational interplay. 41 For instance, Hildebrand brings together an interest in the study of nature and a structural approach to the unity of form and composition. Hodler welcomes personal emotion as well as formal parallelism in his work. Painting, according to Cézanne, needs to emerge from a 36 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 112-121. Also, Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 55-58, 111-126, 141-151. 37 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 111, 116-117. 38 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 119-121. 39 Ibid., 34, 45. 40 Worringer and Read, Form in Gothic, 63, 177. 41 See, for instance, ‘Pictorial contexts for abstract-representational interplay: Cézanne’s realized sensations,’ 278-292, ‘Monet, Worringer’s Impressionism, and abstract-representational interplay,’ 293-297, ‘Monet and his motifs: representational and abstract aspects,’ 298-300, ‘Representation and abstraction in Monet’s Water Lilies (1907),’ 308-315, ‘Towards the expression of inner worlds: Kandinsky, Worringer, and turn-of-the-twentieth- century artist writings,’ 316-324, ‘Painting interplay: Kandinsky’s Impression V (Park) (1911), Picture with a Black Arch (1912), and Picture with Red Spot (1914),’ 343-349. 372 complex combination of attentive observation, direct rendering, studying the Old Masters at the Louvre, finding the geometry of motifs, and bringing sensations to realisation. Working in the open air, Monet completes his paintings in the studio, where he readdresses the relationship between direct observation and pictorial engagement with the world. Kandinsky’s impressions rely on observed motifs, while his improvisations capture the sudden surfacing of inner life; both his impressions and improvisations echo his attention to the world, transfiguring direct observation and allowing it to inform increasingly abstract compositions. A characteristic of art-making particularly visible in the early 1900s, abstract- representational interplay draws together apparently opposite approaches whose actual exchanges highlight the formal, emotional and contextual processes that bring art into being. 373 Selected bibliography 'Guide to the Cassirer Collection, 1906-1933.' Stanford: Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, 1999. 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Vienna, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. 4. Ferdinand Hodler. Forest Brook at Leissingen. 1904. oil on canvas. 88.5 x 101.5 cm. Zurich. Kunsthaus. 5. Ferdinand Hodler. Eurythmy [Eurhythmie]. 1894-95. oil on canvas. 166 x 244 cm. Bern. Kunstmuseum. 6. Vincent van Gogh. Olive Grove. 1889. oil on canvas. 73.6 x 92.7 cm. Minneapolis. Minneapolis Institute of Arts. 7. Henri Matisse. Landscape at Collioure. 1905. oil on canvas. 39 x 46.2 cm. New York. Museum of Modern Art. 8. Franz Marc. Crouching Deer [Hockend Reh]. 1911. oil on canvas. 41.59 x 49.53 cm. Private collection. 9. August Macke. The Storm [Der Sturm]. 1911. oil on canvas. 84 x 112 cm. Saarbrücken. Stiftung Saarlandischer Kulturbesitz. 10. Gabriele Münter. Portrait of Marianne Werefkin. 1909. oil on board. 81 x 55 cm. Munich. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus. 11. Marianne Werefkin. The Red Tree [Die Rote Baum]. 1910. tempera on board. 76 x 57 cm. Ascona. Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna. 12. Franz Marc. Horse in a Landscape [Pferd in Landschaft]. 1910. oil on board. 112 x 85 cm. Essen. Museum Folkwang. 13. Max Pechstein. Bridge over the Seine with Small Steamer [Brücke über die Seine mit kleinem Dampfer]. 1908. oil on canvas. 46.3 x 54.9 cm. Canberra. National Gallery of Australia. 14. Wassily Kandinsky. Bright Picture. 1913. oil on canvas. 77.8 x 100.2 cm. New York. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 399 15. Wassily Kandinsky. Blue Mountain. 1908-09. oil on canvas. 129.3 x 194.3 cm. New York. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 16. Franz Marc. The Fate of Animals. 1913. oil on canvas. 105 x 266 cm. Basel. Kunstmuseum. 17. Paul Cézanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry. c. 1897. oil on canvas. 64.8 x 81.3 cm. Baltimore. The Baltimore Museum of Art. 18. Claude Monet. The Doorway (Morning Effect) [Le Portail (Effet du Matin)]. 1894. oil on canvas. 107 x 74 cm. Riehen/Basel. Fondation Beyeler. 19. Rouen Cathedral. Facade. In Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic [illustration 22, p. 72]. 1910 [edition of 1957]. Rouen. France. 20. Claude Monet. Water Lilies. 1907. oil on canvas. 96.8 x 93.4 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. 21. Claude Monet. Port Donnant, Belle-Île. 1886. oil on canvas. 65.6 x 81.3 cm. New Haven, Art Institute of Chicago. 22. Wassily Kandinsky. Impression V (Park). 1911. oil on canvas. 106 x 157.5 cm. Paris. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. 23. Wassily Kandinsky. Picture with a Black Arch. 1912. oil on canvas. 188 x 196 cm. Paris. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. 24. Wassily Kandinsky. Picture with Red Spot. 1914. oil on canvas. 130 x 130 cm. Paris. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. work_dqud2adhprei3jnj4zdro365pa ---- First principles study of the optical emission of cadmium yellow: Role of cadmium vacancies AIP ADVANCES 8, 065202 (2018) First principles study of the optical emission of cadmium yellow: Role of cadmium vacancies Laura Giacopetti,1,2,a Austin Nevin,3,b Daniela Comelli,4,c Gianluca Valentini,4,d Marco Buongiorno Nardelli,5,e and Alessandra Satta1,f 1CNR-IOM Cagliari, c/o Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Cagliari, Cittadella Universitaria, 09042 Monserrato, Italy 2Dipartimento di Scienze Chimiche e Geologiche, Università di Cagliari, Cittadella Universitaria, 09042 Monserrato, Italy 3CNR-IFN Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 20133 Milano, Italy 4Dipartimento di Fisica, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 20133 Milano, Italy 5Department of Physics, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas 76203, USA (Received 7 December 2017; accepted 18 May 2018; published online 1 June 2018) We study the role of structural defects in the CdS-based cadmium yellow paint to explain the origin of its deep trap states optical emission. To this end, we com- bine a first principles study of Cd- and S- vacancies in the wurtzite (101̄0) CdS surface with experimental photoluminescence spectroscopy of the commercial hexag- onal CdS pigment. Computational results clearly state that the presence of cadmium vacancies in the pigment surface alters the electronic structure of cadmium sulfide by forming acceptor levels in the gap of the semiconductor. Such levels are consis- tent with the optical emission from trap state levels detected in the CdS pigment. This finding provides a first step towards the understanding of the photo-physical mechanisms behind the degradation of this modern pigment, widely used in impres- sionist and modernist paintings. © 2018 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5018512 Metal-based semiconductors have been widely used as colour pigments in impressionist, post- impressionist and early modern works from the 1880s through the 1920s. In particular, the brilliant yellow pigment takes its colouration from cadmium sulfide (CdS), a II-VI wide-gap semiconducting compound. The strong yellow colouration appeared in the works of Vincent van Gogh followed by prominent artists such as Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Henry Matisse. It was early recognised that poor quality Cadmium yellow tended to loose its colour in light, and recommendations to insure the absence of free sulphur in cadmium yellows were made.1 Various cadmium yellow pigments undergo an irreversible degradation process, causes of which are still unclear. Discolouration (fading and darkening), formation of crumbly surfaces and of whitish semitransparent globules have been reported. Recent microscopy and spectroscopy studies on Ensor, Matisse, and Van Gogh paints2–6 have partially elucidated the chemistry behind discoloration mechanisms, with the identification and mapping of different photo-oxidation products in altered paint layers, cadmium carbonates, sulfates and oxalates. However, the trigger mechanism for this irreversible degradation is still unknown. It has been suggested that paint alteration could be ascribed to an initial photo-oxidation of CdS:7 excitation of the material by visible light results in the formation of electron/hole pairs which, following surface migration, produce redox chemistry and organic oxidation. Cadmium sulfide is observed in many pigments in the hexagonal wurtzite phase6,8 - that is confirmed to be the main crystalline constituent alaura.giacopetti@dsf.unica.it baustin.nevin@ifn.cnr.it cdaniela.comelli@polimi.it dgianluca.valentini@polimi.it eMarco.BuongiornoNardelli@unt.edu falessandra.satta@cnr.it; Corresponding author 2158-3226/2018/8(6)/065202/8 8, 065202-1 © Author(s) 2018 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5018512 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5018512 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5018512 mailto:laura.giacopetti@dsf.unica.it mailto:austin.nevin@ifn.cnr.it mailto:daniela.comelli@polimi.it mailto:gianluca.valentini@polimi.it mailto:Marco.BuongiornoNardelli@unt.edu mailto:alessandra.satta@cnr.it http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1063/1.5018512&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2018-06-01 065202-2 Giacopetti et al. AIP Advances 8, 065202 (2018) of the yellow paint. Beyond the specific field of Cultural Heritage, the physical properties of CdS have been widely studied due to their importance in fundamental science as well as in optoelectronic applications like solar cells,9,10 lasers,11,12 and recently in nanotechnology.13,14 In this Letter, we study the role of structural defects in hexagonal CdS to explain the origin of its well-known optical emission from deep trap states. Indeed, these crystal defects could be the precursors of the CdS degradation process. Among native defects we focus on cation and anion vacancies since other types of intrinsic defects were shown to give a yield that is not compatible with a deep trap state.15–17 In particular, we focus on the role of Cd- and S- vacancies in the most stable CdS surface, namely the {10.0}. Their influence on the electronic structure of cadmium sulfide is studied by means of a first principles method in combination with experimental photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy measurements on the commercial undeteriorated hexagonal CdS pigment. Photoluminescence emissions due to deep trap states are observed both in pure commercial18–20 and historical degraded pigments18,21 supporting the basic idea that traps are intrinsic to CdS. The identification of these trap states is an essential step to understand the chemical reactivity of the unaltered pigment and to provide a reliable starting point for future studies on the complex mechanisms involved in the deterioration of a CdS paint. In the present work, PL spectroscopy has been performed on hexagonal CdS-based pigment by employing a compact spectrometer and UV-laser excitation. Details on the employed PL spec- trometer and on analysis of experimental data are provided in the supplementary material. First principles calculations have been carried out within the density functional theory in the generalized gradient approximation (DFT-GGA) as implemented in the quantum-ESPRESSO22 package, using ultrasoft-PBE pseudopotentials.23,24 To improve the description of the electronic properties and to correct the band gap we used ACBN0, a novel pseudo-hybrid Hubbard density functional that was recently developed by some of us.25 Additional details on the computational set up are given in the supplementary material. The relaxed clean (101̄0) CdS surface showed the typical ridged profile where both cations and anions occupy two non-equivalent lattice sites, namely top and hollow positions (see supplementary material). We will refer to V top Cd , Vhollow Cd and to V top S , Vhollow S to indicate cadmium and sulfur vacancies, respectively. We focused first on cadmium vacancies since they were shown in benchmark calcula- tions26–28 to play a key-role in the surface reactivity. As for V top Cd , the corresponding density of states (DOS) (top panel in Fig. 1c) shows that the defective surface and the clean one (shaded area) differ in the presence of two states in the band gap due to a residual of the spin-down contribution: a shallow level close to valence band edge and a deep one. The projected DOS (central panel) reveals that this defect states are two acceptor levels, two electron holes, originating from the 3p-dangling bonds of sulfur nearest neighbours (SNN ) lying in-plane. No contribution is detected from S⊥ atoms in the inte- rior layers (bottom panel), as well as equally negligible are the contributions from Cd⊥. Similarly, for Vhollow Cd a double acceptor level appears on top of the valence band maximum. In Fig. 2c), top panel, the vacancy DOS (red curve) follows different spin up and down profiles and still, the acceptor state is a p-like spin-down residual due to SNN . At variance with what is shown for V top Cd , the S⊥ undergoes a remarkable upward relaxation where the 3p-states (green line in the bottom panel of Fig. 2c) partic- ipate to the formation of the acceptor level. Interior sulfur atoms lying in the bulk region of the slab (violet line in the bottom panel) do not show any spin-asymmetry and no contribution to the extra level in the gap confirming that unpaired p electrons of sulfur atoms decorating the vacancy site are solely responsible for: i) the formation of trap states in the gap; ii) a localised ferromagnetic behaviour. In fact, the total magnetic moment calculated in the defective surface, 1.45µB and 1.72µB for top and hollow cadmium vacancies, respectively, results only from the contributions of SNN . While the structural properties are reliably predicted in DFT-GGA, the electronic structure suffers the underesti- mation of the bandgap. To improve such a description the band structure and the DOS were also deter- mined, in few relevant cases of the present study, by the use of the ACBN0 functional that was recently successfully applied, among others, to CdS bulk.29 The calculated energy gap EACBN 0g =2.30 eV differs by 5% compared to the experimental one E exp g =2.42 eV with a remarkable improve of the the standard DFT-GGA value (EDFT−GGAg =1.19 eV). The recalculated band structure and the DOS are reported in Figure 3, where the deep trap electron state is confirmed to be located in the bandgap. It is interesting to note that there are several analogies with the isoelectronic ZnO {10.0} surface ftp://ftp.aip.org/epaps/aip_advances/E-AAIDBI-8-108805 ftp://ftp.aip.org/epaps/aip_advances/E-AAIDBI-8-108805 ftp://ftp.aip.org/epaps/aip_advances/E-AAIDBI-8-108805 ftp://ftp.aip.org/epaps/aip_advances/E-AAIDBI-8-108805 065202-3 Giacopetti et al. AIP Advances 8, 065202 (2018) FIG. 1. V top Cd - Top-view of unrelaxed (a) and relaxed (b) geometry of the CdS {10.0} defective surface. In red, vacancy surrounding bonds. Total DOS of clean (shaded area) and defective surface, and PDOS of S-3p dangling bonds (c). for which it was demonstrated30 that the green luminescence is only assigned, in the presence of Zn vacancy, to the unpaired O p-electrons that give rise to empty states in the gap and to a residual spin magnetisation. Sulfur vacancies both in top and hollow positions lead (see supplementary material) to a slight rearrangement of the band edges but no remarkable effects within the gap region. For this reason we will focus henceforth on cadmium vacancies. The presence of electrically active defects may affect recombination rates and cause optical absorption or luminescence. As already mentioned, a considerable underestimation of semiconduc- tor band gap is a shortcoming of the DFT approach.31 The moderately large size of the defective surface considered makes the use of proper GW32 and recent hybrid functionals33 computationally prohibitive. To estimate the optical transitions we adopted an affordable method based on the for- malism of formation energies, successfully applied in a variety of wide gap semiconductors and insulators34 that required some a posteriori corrections35 to remove long-ranged Coulomb interac- tions between charged-defects images due to the periodic boundary conditions. More specifically, we combined the formation energies of V top Cd and Vhollow Cd defects in the neutral and negative charge states, namely q = 0, −1, −2. The vacancy formation energies, Ef , were calculated in both S-rich and Cd-rich growth conditions. Results are summarised in Table I where Ef for V bulk Cd calculated in a bulk contain- ing up to 128 lattice sites is reported as reference. Formation energies for neutral surface vacancies are lower, as expected, than those calculated in the bulk. The value obtained with similar studies,36 2.26 eV for neutral Cd vacancies in hexagonal bulk under S-rich conditions, is in fair agreement with our model. Discrepancy is due to the different chemical potential adopted. In average, vacancy formation energies calculated under Cd-rich growth conditions (∼3.59 eV) are higher than those in S-rich (∼2.40 eV). Such values related to the non entropic part of the Gibbs free energy of formation ftp://ftp.aip.org/epaps/aip_advances/E-AAIDBI-8-108805 065202-4 Giacopetti et al. AIP Advances 8, 065202 (2018) FIG. 2. Vhollow Cd - Top-view of unrelaxed (a) and relaxed (b) geometry of the CdS {10.0} defective surface. In red, vacancy surrounding bonds. Total DOS of clean (shaded area) and defective surface, and PDOS of S-3p dangling bonds (c). allow us to have an estimate of the concentration of vacancies per cm3 (number of defects/number lattice sites) at thermal equilibrium through to the Law of Mass Action, i.e. ceq ∝e −Ef /kB T . It turns out that at calcination temperature (∼600◦C) the ratio ceq[S-rich] ≈ 10 9 cm−3 vs. ceq[Cd-rich] ≈ 102 cm−3 emphasizes that yellow pigments grown under Cd-rich environmental conditions are more stable than those created under S-rich. We found a deep acceptor level in PL measurements of the hexagonal CdS-based pigment: in experimental data, beside the narrow emission peak centered at 2.41 eV (see supplementary material) ascribed to radiative emission via near-band edge recombination, we have detected a broad near- infrared asymmetric emission (generically centered around 1.57 eV), ascribed to the presence of multiple energy levels inducing optical transitions in the range 1.4 - 1.8 eV (Figure 4). The emission lifetime τ = 6.0 µs (see supplementary material) confirms that this optical transition occurs from trap state levels. Also, part of an emission centered at energies lower than the ones achievable with the available detector (> 1.3 eV) is visible in Figure 4. The reported experimental results are in good agreement with the few research studies carried out on the near-infrared optical emission of cadmium- based pigments associated with trap states.18–20 Rosi et al.,20 following analysis of the commercial pigment based on hexagonal CdS, has reported two distinct trap state peaks at 1.24 eV and 1.64 eV. Interestingly, in the analytical-grade hexagonal CdS reference sample they detected only a single peak at 1.57 eV. Commenting on the observed difference, authors suggested that crystalline composition is not the only factor affecting the PL emission properties but the location of defects (bulk vs surface), the concentration, and the defect structure itself play a relevant role. In Cesaratto et al.19 the kinetic emission properties of commercially available cadmium-based pigments has been first reported, with near-infrared optical transitions from trap state levels being characterized by emission lifetimes on the order of tens of microseconds uncorrelated with pigment chemical composition. ftp://ftp.aip.org/epaps/aip_advances/E-AAIDBI-8-108805 ftp://ftp.aip.org/epaps/aip_advances/E-AAIDBI-8-108805 065202-5 Giacopetti et al. AIP Advances 8, 065202 (2018) FIG. 3. ACBN0 for V top Cd : Band structure (left) and DOS (right) of defective surface. Red and black curves represent spin up and down electron states, respectively. Dotted line at E=0 represents the Fermi energy. Different colours in the DOS refer to different chemical elements around the vacancy. The theoretical optical emission (luminescence) energy �opt (q/q′) due to the recombination from the defect level into the valence band maximum (VBM) was calculated as a linear combination of the formation energies of the defect in different charge states as illustrated in Refs. 34 and 37. Also, spurious electrostatic interactions of charged defects due to the periodic boundary conditions were removed in the calculations of formation energies. The ACBN0 gap for CdS (Eg = 2.30 eV) is here assumed as the gap amplitude. Fig. 5 summarises Ef [VCd ], calculated for top and hollow Cd-vacancies under S-rich (shaded area) and Cd-rich conditions, versus the chemical potential of the electron reservoir denoted as the Fermi energy offset from VBM up to conduction band minimum CBM = Eg. The white vertical region encloses the experimental range (1.4 - 1.8 eV) of the broad measured PL emission detected in our sample. TABLE I. Formation energies, Ef (eV), for surface top and hollow Cd vacancies both in neutral and negatively charged states, under S-rich and Cd-rich conditions. Ef computed in bulk CdS are also reported. V top Cd Vhollow Cd Vbulk Cd q 0 -1 -2 0 -1 -2 0 S-rich 2.12 3.09 4.83 2.68 3.80 5.30 2.81 Cd-rich 3.31 4.29 6.02 3.87 4.99 6.48 4.12 065202-6 Giacopetti et al. AIP Advances 8, 065202 (2018) FIG. 4. PL emission Spectrum of the hexagonal CdS pigment following continuous-wave excitation with a power density of 0.1 W/cm2. V top Cd under S-rich conditions appears as the most favoured defect inducing an optical transition state �opt (−1/ − 2)=1.74 eV in excellent agreement with our experimental result. Also Vhollow Cd shows the same kind of transition at 1.50 eV consistently with the measurements but at higher formation energies. Further, calculated optical transitions at 0.97 and 1.12 eV for top and hollow, respectively, attributed to transitions 0/− are consistent with the emission detected at energy < 1.3 eV. Under Cd-rich conditions we find the same behaviour with V top Cd favorite to Vhollow Cd and still, the transition (−1/ − 2) is the one compatible with the deep trap emission. As for the sample of hexagonal CdS examined in this work, information on the process used for its synthesis is not accessible, but is likely to be based on the use of excess sulfuric acid to yield CdSO4 which is then reacted with an alkali sulphide to precipitate CdS. Calcination of the precipitate converts cubic to hexagonal CdS.38 Thus it is not clear, in general, if synthesis results in the formation of Cd or S vacancies, both of which are reported in literature for CdS-based materials.38 In both cases, FIG. 5. Ef vs. Fermi energy for Cd vacancies in CdS surface under S-rich (shaded region) and Cd-rich simulated environmental growth conditions. Red and blue curves refer to hollow and top Cd vacancies, respectively. The zero of Fermi level corresponds to the valence band maximum. The slope of segments indicates the charge state. Kinks in the curves indicate transitions between different charge states. 065202-7 Giacopetti et al. AIP Advances 8, 065202 (2018) assuming unintentionally doped sample as an n-type,39 an excess of free electrons, i.e. donor states, would raise the Fermi level just below the CBM. We can propose two different scenarios: i) Cd-rich - the n-type sample would contain an excess of S vacancies (and/or Cd interstitials). From our calculations, the formation energy for S vacancies is the lowest (highest concentration), both in the bulk and in the surface. The surface Cd vacancies show the highest formation energy (lowest concentration). Their presence in the surface can be ascribed to oxidation mechanisms occurring after the growth. We determined the formation energies of V top Cd considering different chemical potentials for Cd calculated from solid CdO and CdO2. The values obtained, 1.23 and 1.63 eV, respectively, are significantly lower with respect to those reported in Table I. Similarly, considering cadmium chemical potential obtained from typical secondary compounds observed in historical deteriorated paints,40 i.e. CdCl2, CdSO4, CdCO3, Ef for V top Cd resulted in 0.21, 3.01 and 3.60 eV, respectively. Hence, we speculate that oxygen and chlorine present in the environment likely form Cd-based secondary compounds. CdSO4 and CdCO3, with higher formation energies, may support the hypothesis of residual starting reagents. ii) Cd-poor (S-rich) - the n-type sample would have an excess of free electrons but the concen- tration of S vacancies at thermal equilibrium in the as-grown sample would be lower while the concentration of surface Cd vacancies would be higher (lower formation energy) than those in Cd-rich. Further oxidising reactions would increase the level of superficial damage. In summary, we have combined a first principles study at different levels of theory on surface intrinsic defects with photoluminescence spectroscopy in hexagonal CdS in order to interpret the origin of a deep trap state often detected through photoluminescence both in commercial and historical deteriorated yellow pigments. Results clearly show, for the first time, that such emission represents an electron/hole recombination occurring in the presence of surface cadmium vacancies: the sulfur 3p dangling bonds created by the missing cation are the origin of the deep acceptor level in the gap experimentally observed. See supplementary material for a complete description of both experimental and theoretical setups. Additional theoretical results on S vacancy and Cd and S self-interstitial are also reported. L.G. and A.S acknowledge RAS (Regione autonoma della Sardegna) and Fondazione Banco di Sardegna for partial financial support. They also acknowledge the CINECA award under the ISCRA initiative, for the availability of high performance computing resources and support. Also, a part of the theoretical modelling was carried out using the HPC infrastructures of CRS4, Pula (Ca), Italy. A.S. acknowledges CNR award under the Short Mobility Program 2017. 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This was a formative moment in British art history, during which the professional status of the discipline was strengthened within the context of an expanding higher education system. This article investigates the intersections between professional legitimation and disciplinary critique that marked this period in recent history. In 2017, as the UK Association of Art Historians expansively rebrands itself as the Association for Art History, it is worth looking back and taking stock of this earlier moment of disciplinary self-recognition, institutionalisation and diversification. The coincident emergence of the professional organisation for art history scholars and feminist critique provides a fascinating glimpse of the contradictory forces at play in shaping the contemporary field. Women’s unprecedented academic inclusion and consequent investigations into their predecessors’ historical absence demanded the development of new theories, methodologies and ways of looking at, thinking and writing about art and its history. Feminist intellectual enquiry therefore ascended, entwined with the expanded participation of women in art and academia, but not reducible to it. As Deborah Cherry informed readers of Art History in 1982 this enquiry was not intended to be additive but deeply transformative: ‘Our project is not to add to art history as we know it, but to change it.’2 Thus, feminism’s explicitly political scholarship was fuelled by a profound aspiration to reshape the historical imagination of the late twentieth century. Through an analysis of the AAH records and its publishing history, this article attempts to capture the modes of feminist scholarship produced for, whilst critiquing, that professional context. This examination will demonstrate how the organisation and its publishing outlets created I am very grateful to Professors Richard and Belinda Thomson for generously gifting their collection of Art History journals to support my research 1 ‘Editorial’, The Burlington Magazine, 116: 861, Dec. 1974, 711. 2 Deborah Cherry, ‘Feminist Interventions: Feminist Imperatives’, Rev. of Old Mistresses by Pollock and Parker, Art History, 5: 4, Dec. 1982, 507. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 2 particular conditions of possibility for feminist research in art history – and, indeed, vice versa. Professionalising the discipline: art history in post-war Britain In 1932 the textile manufacturer and collector of modern French art, Samuel Courtauld, established an institute in London exclusively for the study of art. However, as Griselda Pollock has pointed out, even at the ‘institute’s birth there was no unequivocal embrace of art history as an academic study, or as a university discipline connected to the larger Humboldtian curriculum in the German sense’.3 Instead the Courtauld Institute remained intellectually indebted to a nineteenth-century connoisseurial attitude and produced art historians professionally trained for service to museums, galleries and private collections. Around the same time British art history received an intellectual and institutional boost when, under the directorship of émigré Fritz Saxl, the Warburg Institute opened in 1934. History of Art departments were thereafter instituted at the University of Glasgow in 1948, University of Leeds in 1949 and the University of Oxford in 1955. During the 1960s higher education experienced sudden expansion under the influential recommendations of the Robbins Report (1963), which ‘assumed as an axiom that courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so’.4 Almost simultaneously the first Coldstream-Summerson Report (1960) made ‘complementary studies’ a compulsory part of art and design degrees, and the combination of these developments contributed to new departments opening across the country, in both the established ‘red brick’ universities and the newer polytechnics (into which the independent art colleges were increasingly integrated).5 Given the rapid growth of the discipline, it is logical that greater formalisation of the art-historical field was desired. Delivered flexibly across historical departments, incorporating aesthetic philosophy, connoisseurship, or taught as complementary studies to film, fine art and design degrees, art history is what Francesco Ventrella aptly terms ‘an inherently undisciplined discipline’.6 The American College Art Association had formed in 1913 with similarly formalising motivations. Elizabeth Mansfield explains: ‘Holmes Smith [inaugural president of the CAA] and other proponents of professionalization sought to give art history the disciplinary character of established academic fields: well defined disciplinary boundaries, pedagogical standards, research guidelines, and peer review prior 3 Griselda Pollock, ‘Art History and Visual Studies in Great Britain and Ireland’, in Matthew Rampley ed., Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, Leiden: Brill, 2012, 358. 4 http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/robbins/robbins1963.html 5 For a discussion of these reports see Malcolm Quinn, ‘The Pedagogy of Capital: Art History and Art School Knowledge’, in Matthew Potter ed., The Concept of the ‘Master’ in Art Education in Britain and Ireland, 1770 to the Present, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. For more on the contested integration of art colleges within the polytechnic system see Lisa Tickner, Hornsey 1968: the Art School Revolution, London: Frances Lincoln, 2008. 6 Francesco Ventrella, ‘The Gender of the Art Writing Genre’ [review], Oxford Art Journal, 40: 1 (2017), 204. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 3 to publication or professional advancement.’7 By 1974, however, such impulses towards standardisation would be tempered by the transversal struggles of feminist, postcolonial and queer subjects; as well as an emergent wave of postmodern critique aimed at undermining the logic of the institution.8 Pollock reminds her readers that art history in the UK received ‘major intellectual boosts from two waves of continental migration – one of persons and ideas in the 1930s and another in the 1970s of theories and methods.’9 However, also of great importance was the example set by the more mature professional organisation in America. John White had recently returned from a stint teaching in the US and, as the association’s inaugural chair, his experiences were to have a lasting influence on the development of the organisation. Alan Bowness was one of White’s colleagues on the all-male steering committee that oversaw the establishment of the AAH during a series of meetings between 1972 and 1974. He recalls that: ‘[The CAA] gave people an opportunity to meet one another and I think we thought at that time that it would be a good idea to have something similar, because there was nothing like it.’10 The AAH launched in 1974 and quickly attracted 600 members; its appeal no doubt attributable in part to those collegiate, sociable ambitions of the organisation. At the time of writing in 2017, membership sits at around 1200 (having previously reached 1400), while its rebrand presumably aims to expand on those numbers.11 While the ‘prestigious Association of Art Historians’ was influenced by disciplinary practices in America, so too were the editors of a ‘radical forum for historians’ titled Block.12 Editor Jon Bird tells readers that ‘Block was inspired by a sabbatical awareness of the close relation between research, teaching and publishing in American colleges.’13 These recollections from Bird and Bowness indicate a decisive shift in the intellectual and organisational inclinations of the UK discipline, as North American attitudes towards both professionalization and liberalising curricula exerted influence. Intellectually it marked a diminishment of art historical methods grounded in German philosophy and of new alliances being forged throughout the 1970s, as postmodern theory filtered through journals such as the US October (1976), and UK Screen (renamed from Screen Education in 1969). Also significant were the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation Movements taking effect on American campuses, as these political contexts began to remake the terms of art historical study along the lines of radical social enquiry, latterly coalescing under the broad umbrella of ‘identity politics’. A radical augmentation in art history scholarship was taking place across the UK. A couple of months subsequent to the formation of the AAH, the Marxist art historian TJ Clark penned his landmark essay ‘On the Conditions of Artistic Creation’. Published in a 7 Elizabeth Mansfield, Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and its Institutions, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 142. 8 See for instance: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979 [1975]; Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 9 Pollock, ‘Art History and Visual Studies in Great Britain and Ireland’, 361. 10 Interviewed by Liz Bruchet for AAH Oral Histories, 2011. 11 Thanks to Claire Coveney for confirming the current membership figures. 12 These descriptions are borrowed from AL Rees and Frances Borzello, The New Art History, London: Camden Press, 1986. 13 Jon Bird, ‘Introduction’, The Block Reader in Visual Culture, London and New York: Routledge, xi. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 4 ‘Rewriting Art History’ segment of The Times Literary Supplement, Clark suggested the discipline was in a state of ‘dissolution’ and needed to reaffirm its serious ambitions through a renewed materialist approach to conceptualising art’s production and ideological relations. At Leeds University in 1975 the Social History of Art MA was founded under his direction. In 1978, the same year that Art History commenced publication, Oxford Art Journal was established (it is interesting to note the journal’s conservative, local emphasis in distinction to its later radical attitude).14 1978-79 also witnessed the short-lived but influential magazine Black Phoenix, published by Rasheed Araeen and Mahmood Jamal. Araeen’s later success with Third Text (1989) suggests that the late-1970s British art world was not yet ready for a journal dedicated to the discussion of race and contemporary art in a global context. From 1979 to 1989, an editorial collective at Middlesex Polytechnic published the ‘decidedly alternative’ or ‘cult’ magazine of art, design and cultural politics, Block.15 It is instructive to note parallel expansions occurring across the humanities beyond art history, mediated through periodicals including Radical Philosophy (1972), Race and Class (renamed from Race in 1974), and History Workshop Journal (1976). This overview, whilst selective, showcases the diversity of critical cultural research being produced at this dynamic moment, as differently positioned voices in socialist, feminist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist thought coalesced and found expression in an expansive periodical culture. In the UK the new models of art history being formulated to challenge institutionally dominant formations of knowledge were often markedly absolute. At Middlesex Polytechnic (home to rebellious journal Block) the drive to destabilise bourgeois art history’s distinction between high and low culture, by incorporating design history and new cultural studies approaches, led to the founding of Visual Culture as a field of study in the UK.16 At the same time, and often within the same journals, feminist writers seriously dismantled the gendered terrain upon which modern art’s heroic myths were founded. While latterly emerging psychoanalytical and poststructuralist readings called for the deconstruction of liberal humanist theories of art and culture altogether. This drive towards dismantling the boundaries traditionally demarcating the study of art might appear at first glance counteractive to the professionalising impulse motivating the AAH steering committee. And yet, both were intimately connected to the transformations in higher education already mentioned: the proliferation of teaching institutions, the relaxation of entry to previously excluded subjects, and the new objects and methods demanded by these classed and gendered transformations. In 1970s Britain, therefore, art historians were engaged in a two- fold, yet complexly intra-supportive, struggle towards structural professionalisation and 14 The first issue of the journal was dedicated to ‘Art in Oxford’ (Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 1, No.1, April 1978). Whilst a later editorial preface added: ‘The “Oxford” Section, which we intend always to retain as an essential part of the journal is a forum for articles, reviews, letters and contributions of local interest.’ Oxford Art Journal, 2: 2, April 1979, 2. 15 Jonathan Harris positively refers to Block as ‘cult’ in ‘Art History’, Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 1: 1, 1991, 172. Margaret Iversen refers to the journal as ‘decidedly alternative’ in ‘The Avant- Gardian Angels’, review of October, Art History, 6: 4, December 1983, 496. Block’s original editorial collective included Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Melinda Mash, Tim Putnam, George Robertson and Lisa Tickner. 16 The UK’s first Visual Culture MA was established at Middlesex in 1993, under the Programme Leadership of Jon Bird. For more on the history of this field see Marquard Smith’s introduction to Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers, London: Sage Publishing, 2008. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 5 intellectual diversification. By considering the dialectical forces of academic convention and political liberation this article seeks to nuance current perspectives on both the AAH (in ‘its self-appointed role as the regulator and overseer of mainstream art historical discourse’17) and of feminist interventions in art history.18 Feminism and the politics of participation Although it was also an era of intensifying conservative politics, 1974-90 was a hugely productive period for feminist culture in the UK. During the 1970s grassroots feminist art networks and collectives flourished, including, Feministo: Postal Art Event (1975-77), Women and Work (1973-75) and the Hackney Flashers (1974-80). In 1979 the interdisciplinary journal Feminist Review commenced publication, contributing to a ripe periodical culture that included Spare Rib (1972-93), Feminist Art News (1980-93), Trouble and Strife (1983) and The Women’s Slide Library Journal (1986-90).19 This journal was published by the Women Artists Slide Library, an organising hub established in London in 1978 that provided a vital space for women artists to archive documentation of their work.20 A number of significant exhibitions during this period publicised feminist art and curatorial strategies to the British public: Hayward Annual Exhibition (London, 1978); Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife (London: ICA, 1977); Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists (London: ICA, 1980); Difference: On Representation and Sexuality (London: ICA, 1985); The Subversive Stitch (Manchester: Cornerhouse, 1987). This overview is far from exhaustive, but demonstrates the variety of feminist work being done across several registers including art production, publishing, exhibiting and archiving. In the UK, feminist art scholarship was formed within activist contexts; in self- directed extramural reading groups, through participation in New Left and Union organising, and as part of the broader activities associated with the Women’s Liberation Movement.21 Within the academy, however, women were met with a fabricated historical absence. Pollock recalls her surprise encounter with a Suzanne Valadon painting at the Courtauld Institute during the early 1970s: ‘The shock, not only of my academically condoned ignorance of women as artists, but of the impossibility, within the existing framework of art history of imagining women as artists, led me to invite Linda Nochlin to 17 Harris ‘Art History’, Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 1: 1, 1991. 18 The establishment of feminist counterculture in British art history has been carefully recorded in a number of publications, e.g. Margaret Harrison, ‘Notes on Feminist Art in Britain’, Studio International no.196, 1977, 212-220; Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock eds., Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement: 1970-1985, London: Pandora, 1987; Hilary Robinson ed., Visibly Female: Feminism and Art, London: Camden Press, 1987. These have logically tended to focus on the management of independent or extramural spaces; therefore my examination aims to offer an alternative perspective by examining feminism’s interactions with an institutionally-dominant organisation. 19 It seems important to note that those feminist art periodicals have ceased publication, while the interdisciplinary Feminist Review continues; a development that requires further investigation. 20 The WASL was founded by Annie Wright, Pauline Barrie, and Felicity Allen. The Women’s Slide Library Journal was renamed a number of times and continued publication in one form or another until 2002. 21 For a vivid account of early feminist organising within the confines of the male-dominated left- wing see: Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties, London: Verso, 2002. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 6 speak at the Courtauld in 1973.’22 This anecdote illuminates the androcentric conditions of art historical knowledge at the time; it was not only that women’s art was ignored, but that its very existence was unimaginable. In response to that intellectual lacuna, in 1973 the Women’s Art History Collective was founded and at various points included Denise Cale, Anthea Callen, Pat Kahn, Tina Keane, Rozsika Parker, Pollock, Alene Straussberg, Tickner and Anne de Winter. The group came together at a public meeting to discuss the threatened censorship of Monica Sjoo’s painting God Giving Birth (1968), and thereafter worked collectively to research and educate themselves on women in the arts. According to Hilary Robinson, ‘[i]t was a group that met regularly for only two to three years, but members of it… went on to develop and publish feminist thinking about art that was enormously influential, shaping the way the field developed in the UK and beyond.’23 Indeed, some of that work was published on the pages of Art History. Theorist Nancy Fraser has written about the significance of such spaces for a democratic political practice: I propose to call these subaltern counterpublics in order to signal that they are parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs.24 The existence of alternative sites of knowledge mediation is thus conceived (as per Jürgen Habermas) as essential to the functioning public sphere; due to the possibility of new perspectives, imaginaries, or ‘counterdiscourses’. However, if one of feminism’s goals is to engage in consciousness-raising, to educate ambivalent audiences – and in so doing challenge the reproduction of hegemonic power – it is necessary also to engage with and work upon dominant cultural formations. This necessity is underscored by Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe who draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of discourse to propose that art history is a site of struggle between ‘the centripetal forces of the official, centralizing discourse, and the centrifrugal forces of unofficial, decentralizing discourses.’25 Although the binary logic sketched here might benefit from further nuancing, the notion of oppositional forces remains influential in shaping conceptions of institutions, power and participation. In the 1970s and ‘80s, feminism’s success in changing the discipline (rather than adding to it) depended upon working successfully across both central and decentralised discursive arenas. For, as Frances Borzello pragmatically enquired of feminist art publishing in the period: did feminism confine itself to a ‘ghetto’ where it was simply ‘preaching to the 22 Griselda Pollock, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, 11. 23 Hilary Robinson, ‘The early work of Griselda Pollock in the context of developing feminist thinking in art history and criticism’, in Raluca Bibiri ed., ‘Griselda Pollock: An Academic Odyssey’, special issue of Journal of Visual and Cultural Studies, forthcoming 2018. I would also like to thank Hilary for her generous and knowledgeable review of this article prior to publication. 24 Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, Social Text, No. 25/26, 1990, 67. Original emphasis. 25 Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, ‘Centripetal and Heteroglot Feminisms’, in Skrubbe and Malin Hedlin Hayden eds., Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practice, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, 86. Original emphasis. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 7 converted?’26 While Deborah Cherry has recalled that ‘placing work across different spaces/readerships was important in extending and expanding feminist art histories.’27 Therefore, although participation could be a fraught enterprise for feminist scholars, it was essential in providing an analysis of art history that would reach a new readership and redefine the boundaries of the discipline. The Annual Association of Art Historians’ conferences were heterogeneous and dynamic, bringing together university and museum professionals to engage with the history of visual and material culture conceived fairly broadly. Feminist participation in these conferences was evident from the outset. However, writing in 1990 of her experiences at academic conferences, Val Walsh described the risk run by feminist scholars ‘of being compromised by the dominant ethos of professionalism, unless we explicitly problematize it, make it visible, and actively work to dismantle it through our research and teaching.’28 At the 1986 AAH conference in Brighton an afternoon event ran alongside the usual visits and tours, offering a semi-autonomous space within which to tackle some of these issues. The poster for ‘Feminism and Art History’ advertised presentations from Linda Nochlin, Kathy Adler and Tamar Garb, Tag Gronberg, Margaret Iversen, Claire Pajaczkowska, Lynn Walker, Anthea Callen, Bridget Elliot and Lynda Nead, and Gudrun Schubert.29 Tickets were separately available for this event (unusually attendees did not have to pay the full conference fee) and a free crèche was provided to facilitate wider participation.30 Anecdotally, the event is said to have been attended by a couple of hundred people and its management became fairly chaotic after the panel Chair, Jane Beckett, announced that she would relinquish the post during discussion as she was an anarchist.31 The event concluded with an unrestricted ‘closing forum’, where a ranging discussion strove to provide an analysis of conference structure and the politics of professionalisation. Divergences emerged over whether the event should have been explicitly gender separatist (i.e. woman-only), or whether open participation was a valuable ‘publicity exercise to make feminist ideas known’. Contributors debated whether the 26 Frances Borzello, ‘Preaching to the Converted? Feminist Art Publishing in the 1980s’, in Katy Deepwell ed., New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies, New York and Manchester: Manchester University Press 1995, 20-24. 27 Deborah Cherry, email to author 2 May 2014. 28 Val Walsh, ‘Art Conferences: Pacification or Politics?’ (1991) in Hilary Robinson ed., Feminism-Art- Theory: 1968-2000, Basingstoke: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001, 71. Walsh specifically analyses the experience of ‘white women academics’, who may benefit from feminism’s creation of new opportunities at the expense of other, black or working-class, women. This was a key debate in 1980s feminism. In 1988 Lubaina Himid and Griselda Pollock debated the issue at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, with Clare Rendell responding later in print; see Pollock, ‘Framing Feminism’ (1988) in Feminism-Art-Theory, 2001, 207-16. 29 Workshop poster available at the AAH Papers in V&A Archive of Art & Design. Recordings of some presentations and the closing discussion are also available online at the Women’s Audio Archive: http://www.marysialewandowska.com/waa/index.php. 30 In preparation for the AAH Conference the following year, a notice appeared in Bulletin no. 26 stating: ‘We are hoping to offer a free crèche near to the Victoria and Albert Museum, but whether we are able to do so partly depends on the response from members… If there is insufficient response we will have to cancel it.’ Nov. 1986, 1. Whether or not the childcare was provided, this certainly suggests the influence of the organisation’s feminist members. 31 Thanks to Hilary Robinson for sharing her memories of the event. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 8 conventional academic language of the conference was exclusionary, and if the discussions of art historians had resecured an artificial division between theory and practice. Some voiced concerns that the establishment of a separate ‘feminist’ panel would preclude the diffusion of feminist ideas and political effects throughout the entirety of the professional organisation. One comment is especially valuable in indicating how the feminist participants conceived of their work in the context of the conference: ‘What’s significant about this event today is the insertion of those kinds of [alternative, political] moments into the institution of art history, as represented by the Association.’32 It is evident from these words that the AAH was regarded as a dominant institutional organisation and therefore a meaningful venue for ‘counterpublic’ voices to be expressed. It is implied that feminism (as an external, political discourse) is benefitted by an interventional engagement with that site. The forum ended with a conversation about the following year’s conference and a vote to judge whether an appetite existed for a second, similar event. It seems in any case that a subsequent event was not organised. Beyond this one-off workshop, however, the annual conferences also provided valuable networking opportunities for feminist researchers. Lisa Tickner recalls that as a lecturer in a polytechnic institution the conferences provided a valuable context to meet art historians from university and museum contexts.33 It was at the at AAH conference held in Glasgow in 1976 that Cherry and Pollock met and, ‘on discovering our mutual interest’, began a successful collaboration on the art and life of Elizabeth Sidall.34 According to Pollock their partnership was forged against a palpably hostile conference atmosphere, where a number of male audience members noisily disparaged women art historians and their contributions.35 It is evident from reading the paper titles published in the association’s Bulletin that the Victorian and Edwardian periods provided a rich source of study for feminist scholars in the early years of the conferences. Topics encompassed women in Victorian art, the work of Gwen John, constructions of the Victorian family, John Ruskin’s patronage, the depiction of sexuality in Victorian painting, and suffrage iconography. However, the audience reception of this politically motivated scholarship was predictably mixed; as Kathleen Adler reported, a respondent ‘at a recent [c.1985] Renoir symposium in London equated discussion of Renoir within the frameworks of feminist or Marxist discourse as akin to “playing the violin with a spanner”.’36 The historical focus of the papers is attributable to a number of practical, theoretical and political factors. Andrew Causey, an executive member of the AAH from 1974-77, recalls that the study of modern art after 1900 was only starting to gain reputability during the 1960s and that a lack of available publications created challenges for researchers.37 Although this perspective was changing (corroborated by the launch of popular left-leaning contemporary magazine Art Monthly in 1976) a marked temporal separation continued to be sustained between art history and art criticism. Indeed, a 1980 editorial in The Burlington 32 Women’s Audio Archive 33 Tickner, interviewed for the AAH Oral Histories Project. 34 Pollock, email to author 30 April 2014. 35 Ibid. 36 Kathleen Adler, ‘Reappraising Renoir’, review of Renoir ed. J House et al.; Renoir by BE White; Renoir by W.Pach, Art History, 8: 3, September 1985, 375. 37 Andrew Causey, AAH Oral Histories Project, 2011. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 9 Magazine discussed the ‘pitfalls in writing about recent art in an essentially historical magazine’.38 And although the magazine made an effort to expand in that direction, its myopic special issue on ‘Twentieth Century Art’ remained conservative in its focus.39 In logical response to such conditions of disciplinary knowledge those feminist art historians writing in Art History at this time – especially Pollock, Tickner, Cherry, Beckett, and Nead – emphasised the links between modernism’s ascendancy and the negation of women as cultural producers. Correspondingly, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided apposite case studies for feminism’s analysis of modernism’s formative moments and its consequent occlusion of women. In a review article of 1981 Cherry offers further justification of such a focus, suggesting that ‘[t]his period of our history can, I believe, teach us the dangers of reviving competitive capitalism, unemancipated womanhood, and expansionist empire in the later twentieth century, when our position in world politics is declining, our home economy is collapsing and the pound rather than the worker is strong.’40 In other words, nineteenth-century Britain experienced serious transformations to the economic and legal systems governing gender and class relations and, for feminists working in the ‘second wave’, there were good reasons to see their battles rooted in that period.41 There was generally at this time, in embryonic women’s studies across the US and UK, a powerful belief in the value of feminist history for current political struggles.42 By the mid-1980s the papers presented at the annual conferences embraced increasingly contemporary subjects, as well as evincing a methodological and theoretical focus. This was a fiercely debated area of study; as Margaret Iversen recalled in a review article of 1983, ‘a plenary session on Methodology ended in heated recriminations one could hardly call a debate’.43 The following year in Edinburgh, Iversen convened a panel on ‘Innovative Methods’ which included Abigail Solomon-Godeau discussing photography and a paper by Annette Kuhn on film noir and sexuality. At the close of the decade at the Tate Gallery in London, Barbara Kruger was invited to present the plenary speech, evidencing a recognition of women artists (if not necessarily of feminist perspectives on art history). Throughout this period feminist perspectives contributed meaningfully to the so- called ‘new art histories’, which were compelling a drift towards what Janet Kraynak has 38 Editorial, ‘Contemporary Art and the Burlington Magazine’, The Burlington Magazine, 122: 928, July 1980, 463. 39 I say myopic because the special issue featured writing about Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Roger Fry, Henri Matisse, and R B Kitaj. 40 Deborah Cherry, ‘History Repeats Itself as Farce’, review of German Romanticism by W Vaughan, William Dyce by M Pointon, Sir Charles Eastlake by D A Robertson, William Mulready by K M Heleniak. Art History, 4: 3, December 1981, 335. 41 In 2017’s current climate of ‘feminist emergency’ (as a June 2017 conference at Birkbeck termed it), there are interesting parallels in a new generation of scholars looking back to address women’s place in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art historiography: see Meaghan Clarke and Francesco Ventrella eds., ‘Women’s Expertise and the Culture of Connoisseurship’, special issue of Visual Resources, 33: 1-2, 2017. 42 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich offers a convincing argument to this effect in Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, New York: Vintage, 2008. 43 The AAH archive shows that Lisa Tickner and Griselda Pollock were invited to this session but unable to attend. Margaret Iversen, ‘The Avant-Gardian Angels’, review of October, Art History, 6: 4, December 1983, 496. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 10 termed the discipline’s ‘present tense’. 44 According to Kraynak the discipline of art history has conventionally defined itself against art criticism, its historical objectivity at odds with criticism’s necessary subjectivity. Such divisions became increasingly indistinct under postmodern conditions and changing historical attitudes; those changes also impelled by Marxist, feminist, and anti-racist academic methods that demonstrated objectivity is not possible, historically or contemporaneously. Publishing in Art History Writing in the AAH Bulletin in February 1977, John White announced the formation of the association’s new scholarly journal titled Art History.45 Whilst various publications mediated diverse articulations of feminist theory and politics, the task here is to demonstrate how feminism was represented on the pages of this new journal and how scholars chose to represent their politico-cultural ideas to a wider readership. In its early years Art History provided a somewhat favourable publishing location for emergent feminist interventions. The opening editorial by John Onians explained the journal’s ambition to ‘particularly encourage writers who show how a study of works of art can help us to understand more about our physiological and psychological make-up, our response to political, social and economic pressures, our reaction to religion, philosophy and literature and our relationship to the natural environment.’46 Onians’ words established an expansive vision for the new journal, and revealed a discipline beginning to look beyond its traditional scope of study to launch itself as a progressive, contemporary field. The book reviews section, added in 1981 with Alex Potts as first editor, provided a particularly fertile space in which writers could explore resonances between art’s history and contemporary issues. Key methodologies and subjects emerge from a reading of Art History during this period; particularly feminism’s relationship to a materialist paradigm grounded in the social history of art. A question posed by Fred Orton and Pollock in an article of 1980 neatly encapsulates this prevailing attitude: ‘How can we go about reclaiming these works for history? What kinds of practices do we, as historians of art practice, need to engage with in order to produce history instead of myth, knowledge instead of cliché and tautology?’47 A number of articles consequently returned to and revised interpretations of artistic depictions of the working-class, women and regional communities of France, emphasising the effects of ideology in the production, reception and historicisation of these artworks (thus dismantling 44 Janet Kraynak, ‘Art history’s present tense’, in Elizabeth Mansfield ed., Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and its Institutions, London; New York: Routledge, 2007. The value of the phrase ‘new art history’ has been debated on numerous occasions, including this journal’s 2012 symposium at the University of Birmingham. 45 John White, ‘“Art History”: Proposed Journal of the Association of Art Historians’, Bulletin of the Association of Art Historians, 4, February 1977. 46 John Onians, ‘Editorial’, Art History, 1: 1, March 1978, v-vi. Emphasis added. 47 Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, ‘Les Donnes Bretonantes: La Prairie de Representation’, Art History, 3: 3, September 1980, 317. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 11 those embedded ‘myths’ and ‘clichés’ that Orton and Pollock identified).48 Eunice Lipton’s 1980 article on Edgar Degas, for instance, argued that his well-known laundress paintings should be considered remarkably progressive in their attitude towards working-class women, during a period in which consolidating middle-class ideology emphasised ‘the sexuality of working-class women’ to rationalise their ‘exploitation’.49 Degas’ realism eschewed the hazily sexualised atmosphere preferred by his contemporaries in order to bring viewers ‘face-to-face with the boredom and alienation inherent in such labour’.50 Lipton’s materialist feminism highlighted the function of visual culture in reinforcing and legitimising the exploitation of women labourers, and, at the same time, art’s potential resistance to ideology. A further theme to emerge in this archive is the function of popular images in producing and affirming moralistic Victorian ideals of femininity, as charted through the culturally loaded figures of the mother, maiden, prostitute, and suffragette.51 In an article first presented as a paper at the annual conference of 1981, Lynda Nead reminded readers that Victorian art ‘could be seen to have a moral function – its purpose was didactic’, thus a ‘picture had to uphold the bourgeois standards of morality, it had to re-produce the dominant beliefs and attitudes, and it had to serve the “correct” moral purpose.’52 The picture to which Nead refers is Alfred Elmore’s On the Brink, first exhibited at London’s Royal Academy in 1865. Elmore’s painting portrays the moment that a young woman, perched outside a gambling hall after chancing away her money, is approached by a shadowy male figure through an open window; this is the supposedly decisive moment at which she rests ‘on the brink’ of seduction. Nead’s article inventively situates the painting in relation to newspaper reports and literary fictions concerning ‘seduced women’ during a period of moral panic on the subject. Thus she refocused the emphasis of art historical analysis upon wider discourses of the period that served to generate a profoundly classed notion of femininity, through the proscription of women’s sexuality. The painting, although imagined by Elmore, is ‘received as “truth”, as “fact”, and is then offered back as evidence for the reality of the seduction-betrayal-prostitution-suicide cycle.’53 Nead thus unpacked the politics of representation to demonstrate how pictures, newspaper stories and literary fiction served a powerful regulative function in regard to women’s sexuality. This was a radically new, feminist way of reading Victorian narrative painting by situating it within a broader cultural matrix of meaning production. 48 See also: Carol Zemel, ‘Sorrowing Women, Rescuing Men: Van Gogh’s Images of Women and Family’, Art History, 10: 3, September 1987; Judy Sund, ‘Favoured Fictions: Women and Books in the Art of Van Gogh’, Art History, 11: 2, June 1988. 49 Eunice Lipton, ‘The Laundress in Late Nineteenth Century French Culture: Imagery, Ideology and Edgar Degas’, Art History, 3: 3, September 1980, 303. 50 Lipton, 308 51 See also: Margaret Maynard, ‘I Dream of Fair Women: Revival Dress and the Formation of Late Victorian Images of femininity’, Art History, 12: 3, September 1989. Robyn Cooper, ‘Millais’ The Rescue: A Painting of a “Dreadful Interruption of Domestic Peace”’, Art History, 9: 4, December 1986. Katrina Rolley, ‘Fashion, Femininity, and the Fight for the Vote’, Art History, 13: 1, March 1990. 52 Lynda Nead, ‘Seduction, Prostitution, Suicide: On the Brink by Alfred Elmore’, Art History, 5: 3, September 1982, 315. 53 Nead, 1982, 319. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 12 As well as expanding understandings of gender at a visual-representational level, articles by Pamela Nunn, Adele Holcomb and Hilary Taylor investigated women’s legacies as cultural producers who had been excluded from or misrepresented within the annals of art history. These researchers exhumed the histories of individual women to investigate how their positions were materially structured and bounded because of gender. Nunn’s 1978 article on the artist Henrietta Ward provocatively begins: ‘The Victorian artist, one might think, has been studied at length… but what, in short, of the female Victorian artist? She has been studied at virtually no length at all.’54 Although Ward’s painting was well-received at the time, the intervening decades of modernist art writing systematically erased Victorian women from the records; Nunn therefore proposed that the feminist recovery of ‘lost’ women artists cannot be one of simple reintegration, but must address a system of institutional limitation (defined here as education, exhibition and patronage) to fully understand the logics supporting this erasure. Holbomb’s 1983 article echoed this approach in an examination of Anna Jameson, ‘the first writer to define herself as a specialist on Victorian art in England.’55 Holcomb provided a bibliographic recovery of the writer, demonstrating how Jameson developed her connoisseurial expertise in advance of art history’s increasingly professional (and masculine) status in the later nineteenth century. Thus the specialised historians who followed her, according to Holcomb, ‘tend to decry [Jameson’s] lack of footnotes’.56 A 1986 essay by Hilary Taylor explored the gendered framework of art education at The Slade during 1895 to 1899. Taylor investigated both the educational and professional limitations for middle-class women artists, arguing that common (mis)conceptions about gender are practically self-determining. The association of maleness with ‘fierceness and arrogance’ relegated femininity outside of the ideal ‘modern artist’, thus ‘a feminine temperament could not be compatible with an artistic one.’57 Taylor’s examination carefully emphasised femininity as a site of difference to which the romantic ideal of the male artist is relationally established. This is a theme that runs comprehensively throughout these articles. The analyses encompass the institutional limitations for women artists in art schools, studio spaces, exhibitions and publishing and, eventually, representation in historical narratives. All of these sites have concretely restricted access to women artists, but – these writers argue – the insidious replication of gendered mythologies, which render ‘femininity’ incompatible with artistic greatness, carries greater long-term significance for the maintenance of bourgeois sexual differentiation and political economies in relation to art. There is a concerted effort to not facilely reduce femininity to an obstacle that must be overcome, but to understand the production of sexual difference (on both material and representation levels) in all of its complexity. Although the so-called ‘sex wars’ were raging among feminists during this period (particularly in the US), discussions of sexuality, desire and pornography rarely made it 54 Pamela Nunn, ‘The Case History of a Woman Artist: Henrietta Ward’, Art History, 1: 3, September 1978, 293. Original emphasis. 55 Adele M Holcomb, ‘Anna Jameson: The First Professional English Art Historian’, Art History, 6: 2, June 1983, 171-187, 175. 56 Holcomb, 182. 57 Hilary Taylor, ‘”If a Young Painter be Not Fierce and Arrogant God… Help Him”: Some Women Art Students at the Slade, c.1895-99’, Art History, 9: 2, June 1986, 232-243. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 13 onto the pages of Art History.58 Albert Boime’s article on Rosa Bonheur is therefore notable for foregrounding the subject’s (probable) lesbian sexuality as relevant to a comprehensive understanding of her art; even as it presented some dubious inferences about the queer life of the painter.59 Heather Dawkins’ article, published six years later, more successfully explored the fetishistic sexual relationship between a Victorian housemaid and her employer, disentangling the complex, classed erotics of their clandestine liaison.60 Dawkins’ analysis is significant in this context for her adherence to poststructuralist psychoanalysis and its mechanisms for understanding the fragmentary nature of identity.61 The article roamed far beyond a discussion of artists and/or art, opening towards a broader cultural field of study in which an archive of housemaid’s diaries and collection of personal photographs become ‘texts’ subject to historical analysis. This points to the theoretical direction much feminist art history would develop in the 1990s. The relative scarcity of psychoanalytic perspectives during this period of Art History’s publication is striking. A review of Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem pointed to ‘the general failure of psychoanalysis (Alloula’s chosen paradigm) to articulate the multifarious and ambivalent manner in which colonial relations reproduce themselves at different moments in specific ways. To collapse this complexity into a generalised thesis of power and domination is to fall precisely into the trap so often laid at the door of “vulgar” historical materialism.’62 This remark insinuates a tension between the materialist paradigm that dominated the radical edges of Art History during the 1970s and 1980s, and an encroaching attention to psychoanalytical theories. And, although many feminists remained cautious of historical materialism’s inattention to gender,63 as Cherry wrote in a review of 1982, feminism was structurally indebted to Marx’s viewpoint that ‘the knowledge validated by a particular society is not neutral but constructed in the interests of the dominant class.’64 58 As a point of comparison, Feminist Review published a special issue on ‘Sexuality’ in Summer 1982 and Signs published ‘The Lesbian Issue’ in Summer 1984. For more on the topic of the ‘sex wars’ see Gayle Rubin’s 1984 essay ‘Thinking Sex’, reprinted in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader, Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 59 Some of these strange inferences include the argument that Bonheur openly expressed ‘sex reversal’ through the depiction of ‘certain species – oxen, mules, lions – whose sex roles are exceptional’. Albert Boime, ‘The Case of Rosa Bonheur: Why Should a Woman Want to be More Like a Man’, Art History, 4: 4, Dec 1981, 384-409, 399. 60 Heather Dawkins, ‘The Diaries and Photographs of Hannah Cullwick’, Art History, 10: 2, June 1987, 154-187. 61 William B Turner has fittingly put it: ‘poststructuralism is queer’. A Genealogy of Queer Theory, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000, 22. 62 Annie E Coombes and Steve Edwards, [Review] ‘Site Unseen: Photography in the Colonial Empire: Images of Subconscious Eroticism’ Art History, 12: 4, December 1989, 540-516, 512. Although beyond the scope of this essay, the late arrival of postcolonial discourse to the pages of Art History is of further interest. 63 As Pollock wrote in a review essay of 1984: ‘These publications bear witness to a shadowy presence of that which has been called the social history of art. Terms such as class, the bourgeoisie, ideology are trailed across their pages, usually dressing up entirely unchanged perspectives and practices of art history, stylistic history, iconography, compendia and the monograph. The striking absence, however, is of issues of gender and sexuality.’ ‘Revising or Reviving Realism’, Art History, 7: 3, September 1984, 359-366, 366. 64 Deborah Cherry, ‘History Repeats itself as Farce’ [review], Art History, 4: 3, December 1981, 335-339. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 14 Resonantly, in 1989, Jo Anna Isaak affirmed (via Pollock) that ‘feminism is committed, epistemologically, to realism.’65 It was here, in the reviews section, that writers vehemently staked a claim to or defended particular political and theoretical positions. The orthodoxies governing the scholarly field seemed to exert less influence on these back-pages and a number of reviews were collaboratively penned; while many made explicit links between art history and current conservative politics, often reflexively commenting on the ideological function of the discipline in 1980s Britain. This was a brief period in the journal’s publishing history in which art history did not seem academic or distant, but spoke urgently to contemporary political contexts, including feminism. Art historical backlash It is impossible to know with absolute certainty the editorial decisions that shape a journal’s output; how many articles were rejected, for example, or which contributors failed to meet deadlines. This is perhaps why moments of animated backlash or acrimony – whether stimulated by error or pointed intervention – tend to intrigue audiences.66 Such moments offer tantalising glimpses into the background workings of a publication (and by extension the disciplinary discourse) that only appear in normal circumstances as seamlessly complete to its readers. The controversy surrounding Lisa Tickner’s article ‘The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists Since 1970’ is one such moment offering insight to the tentative reception of feminism’s radically new art history.67 The heavily illustrated article refers to a range of canonical painting and sculpture (encompassing Duccio, Bellini, Titian, the Post-Impressionists) to suggest that ‘despite her ubiquitous presence, woman as such is largely absent from art. We are dealing with the sign “woman”, emptied of its original content and refilled with masculine anxieties and desires.’68 For women making art in the late twentieth century, Tickner asked how, ‘against this inherited framework, women are to construct new meanings which can also be understood.’69 This challenge of communicating new ideas was as equally true for the critics and historians tasked with making sense of feminism’s novel modes of art. By reference to a variety of contemporary artworks Tickner demonstrated how women were seizing control over female representation, in frequently subversive ways. The accompanying illustrations included Judy Chicago’s Red Flag photograph of 1971, revealing the artist in the act of 65 Jo Anna Isaak, ‘Representation and its (Dis)contents’, Rev. of Vision and Difference by Pollock, Art History, 12: 3, 1989, 362-366. 66 The tempestuous relationships of Artforum are perhaps the best example of this, as captured in Amy Newman’s oral history project Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-74, New York: Soho Press, 2003. It is worth noting that Artforum’s editorial board split over the publication of Lynda Benglis’s advertisement referred to later in this article. 67 Lisa Tickner, ‘The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists Since 1970’, Art History, 1: 2, June 1978, 236-251. 68 ‘The Body Politic’, 242. Tickner’s chosen language reflects the emerging significance of feminist psychoanalytic theory, which was particularly evident in the field of cinema studies. See: Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16: 1, 1975. Elizabeth Cowie, ‘Woman as Sign’, M/F, No. 1, 1978. 69 ‘The Body Politic’, 239. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 15 removing a bloody tampon; Lynda Benglis’ notorious centrefold-advertisement from a 1974 Artforum, in which the naked artist clutches a large dildo; Betty Dodson’s serial pencil drawings of naturalistic vulvas; and Sylvia Sleigh’s reversal paintings showing nude men in classically feminine repose, recalling the paintings of Ingres, Titian and Velazquez. Interviewed in 2011, Tickner evoked the struggle of bringing the contemporary politics of feminism ‘into some kind of conversation’ with the academic discipline of art history.70 In ‘The Body Politic’ she negotiated her coterminous allegiances to feminism and art history, consequently breaking the vow of aesthetic disinterestedness that negates invested political knowledge as well as the messy particularities of embodied female experience.71 In analysing conventional representations of women, and situating contemporary feminist practices against this ‘inherited framework’, Tickner’s article merged art historical traditions with a new, politicised visual paradigm and fulfilled her goal of bringing both discourses into conversation. Tickner first presented this research at a panel on ‘Erotic Art’ held at the Third Annual Conference of the AAH in London in March 1977. Thereafter it was accepted for publication in the first issue of Art History. Onians was attempting to shape a progressive identity for the journal, writing in his first editorial that ‘in the exploration of new fields for research no materials, no tools, no methods and no new language will be excluded.’72 He has, in retrospect, described his early editorial policy as ‘risky’ and ‘hot’ – adding that he ‘always wanted people to take more risks, be stronger, be more assertive.’73 In 2014 Tickner confirmed this, writing: ‘I think he was pleased to have something controversial and 20th century.’74 ‘The Body Politic’ was well received by feminist researchers; it was included two years later in a bibliographic essay in Oxford Art Journal, has been reprinted in a number of anthologies, and continues to be widely cited.75 However, the art historical establishment received it less favourably. One member of the Art History editorial board, John Shearman, went so far as to resign in protest against its publication and the article was deferred to the second issue. According to Onians, Shearman ‘took offence at the imagery’, while Tickner specifically proposes ‘the row they had was about the Benglis image’.76 The outrage therefore seems to have arisen from the publication of explicit female imagery, particularly 70 Tickner interviewed by Liz Bruchet for the AAH Oral History Project. For more on the policed institutionalisation of knowledge see Helen C Chapman, ‘Becoming Academics: challenging the disciplinarians’ in Breaking the Disciplines: reconceptions in art, knowledge and culture, ed. by Martin Davies and Marsha Meskimmon, London: IB Tauris, 2003. 71 For more on Kant and disinterestedness in relation to feminist body art, see Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 72 Editorial, Art History, 1: 1, March 1978, v. 73 John Onians, interviewed by Liz Bruchet for the AAH Oral History Project. 74 Tickner, email to author 29 April 2014. 75 Lamia Duomato, The Literature of Woman in Art’, Oxford Art Journal, 3: 1, April 1980. Rosemary Betterton ed., Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts, London: Pandora Press, 1987. Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock eds., Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, 1970-75, London: Pandora Press, 1987. The article has been cited in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2003: 249 n.45); Lynda Nead’s The Female Nude (1991: 65 n.62); The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Post- Feminism (2006: 311); Erotic Ambiguities (2000: multiple); The Ends of Performance (1998: 288); The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (2003: 44-46). 76 Onians and Tickner, interview for the AAH Oral History Project. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 16 in the context of art history’s established nude ‘masterpieces’, consequently exposing the inharmonious conjunction of feminist themes and the conventions of the discipline. The long-running arts magazine Apollo responded to the new journal’s expansive attitude with a churlish review essay written by its editor Denys Sutton. Sutton describes Tickner’s article as a ‘novelty […] at first reading this might be interpreted as a spoof, but it is clearly meant to be taken seriously.’77 Tickner is referred to diminutively as ‘Miss Lisa’ and prurient comments are made regarding the sexual content of the artworks. The editor attempts to shore up tradition by using mockery to delineate a boundary between conventional art history and this feminist interloper. Tickner’s article, he suggests, ‘makes a change for students as they plough through some of the more highbrow stuff.’78 In this, the article is not unique: sociologist Maria do Mar Pereira has observed similar methods of ‘epistemic splitting’ throughout the academy, whereby educators insidiously disavow feminist politics through ridicule and laughter.79 Tickner identified this strategy in a response, published in Art Monthly, where she accused Sutton of adopting a ‘patronising facetiousness’ rather than engaging in ‘head-on conflict’. This, she added, ‘is sneakier: is ridicules from a position of presumed urbanity whilst avoiding the main issues.’80 Apollo’s review of volume one of Art History is instructive in further ways; as Harris has pointed out, it ‘will stand well as an example of the values and perspectives of contemporary “institutionally dominant art history”.’81 Beyond Tickner, Sutton takes general aim at a new generation of art historians, plainly wary of the newly professionalised academic sphere. Although he admits, ‘now that art-historical doctors and professors abound, some effort might be made to examine the assumptions that underlie this “discipline”’.82 The reviewer gently criticises Potts’s Marxist perspective on eighteenth- century historicism for containing ‘unfamiliar material’. Thus it seems in regards ‘The Body Politic’, it was the profane combination of explicit female imagery, unequivocal feminist politics and the contemporaneity of the artworks under discussion that prompted such virulent response.83 As Harris clarifies: ‘Feminism, perhaps more than Marxism – which has always remained a set of intellectual traditions and political organisations overwhelmingly controlled by men – was perceived by Apollo’s editors as a threat, in art history and as a political movement for radical social change.’84 77 ‘Is there a Doctor in the House?’, Apollo: the magazine of the arts, October 1978, 222-23. Sections of this editorial and Tickner’s response are reprinted in Framing Feminism, 1987. 78 Apollo, 222. 79 Maria do Mar Pereira, ‘Feminist theory is proper knowledge but…’, Feminist Theory, 12: 3, December 2012. 80 Lisa Tickner, ‘Attitudes to Women Artists’ (correspondence section), Art Monthly, no. 23, 1979, 22- 23. The response was published in Art Monthly after Apollo failed to acknowledge Tickner’s correspondence. 81 The New Art History, 45. Harris quotes Orton and Pollock here. 82 Apollo, 232. 83 The issue of art history’s historical and contemporary focus crops up repeatedly during this period. See Onians’ editorial for the second issue of the journal. And Dawn Ades’ criticism of ‘British Art History’s obsession with chronology and history (as that which has passed), not recent or contemporary’, in The New Art History, ed. Rees and Borzello, London: Camden Press, 1986, 11. 84 Harris, The New Art History, page. Original emphasis. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 17 Conclusions The sections above aimed to uncover the contribution made by feminist scholars to the newly established Association of Art Historians and to consider how readers encountered feminist debate on the pages of its academic journal Art History. This summary ends in the 1990s for various intersecting reasons. An additional stage of development marked by the Further and Higher Education Act (1992) saw polytechnics merge with or transform into universities and in 1998 tuition fees were introduced, profoundly altering the educational terrain upon which the new social art histories of the 1970s and 1980s had been built. As Lisa Tickner mentions, ‘I think the emphasis shifted more towards visual culture for some of us.’85 This suggests that, faced with art history’s resistance to their critique, some feminists chose to relocate their intellectual originality to other disciplinary contexts; contexts that had been shaped by the very discourses traced here. The development of visual culture studies was catalysed by feminism’s critique of art history, alongside Marxism, postcolonialism and cultural studies methods. How successful these interventions were in remaking rather than diversifying the art historical discipline is something that has been debated since (at least) Clark’s TLS essay.86 This transference of intellectual energy is implied by Harris who, writing in 1991, pointed to a shift in editorial focus and dramatically decried the enclosing parameters of Art History: ‘The reviews section, a hotbed of marginal neo-Marxist, neo- feminist and neo-post-structuralist seething phillipic during the early and mid-1980s, has been tamed.’87 Feminism’s own institutionalisation also has to be considered at this historical juncture. Different publications suggested that in 1982 feminism was at the cutting edge of a ‘new art history’, or contributing to a ‘crisis in the discipline’.88 By 1987, however, a panel convened by Ann Cullis at the AAH Annual Conference investigated ‘Working in a Post- Feminist World?’.89 At the same time, Susan Faludi famously diagnosed a ‘backlash’ against feminism that she had observed mounting throughout the 1980s.90 This suggests that in the space of little under a decade, feminism had transitioned in general consciousness from ‘new’ to ‘post’. Writing in 1988, however, Linda Nochlin remarked that although feminism may appear ‘safely ensconced in the bosom of one of the most conservative of the intellectual disciplines. This is far from being the case.’91 Despite such uncertainty or limited recognition, institutional contexts had partially shifted; impelled in large part by two decades of feminist intervention. Amelia Jones’s article of 1994, for instance, included the photograph of Benglis that provoked controversy sixteen years earlier, alongside its diptych counterpart of Robert Morris in sadomasochistic clothing, and alarming images of 85 Tickner, email to author 29 April 2014. 86 Deborah Cherry has explored these contradictions in ‘Art History Visual Culture’, Art History , Vol. 27, No. 4, Sept 2004, 479-493. 87 Jonathan Harris, ‘Art History’, Year’s Work Critical and Cultural Theory, 1: 1, 1991, 137-175, 171. 88 ‘The New Art History?’ was a conference (and later book) organised by Jon Bird at Middlesex Polytechnic in 1982. That year a special issue of the US Art Journal was published to investigate ‘The Crisis in the Discipline’, ed. Henri Zerner, 42:2, Winter 1982. 89 Association of Art Historians, Bulletin, no.28, July 1987, 15. 90 Susan Faludi, Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women, New York: Crown, 1991. 91 Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, Power and Other Essays, Boulder CO: Westview, 1988. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 18 performance artist Bob Flanagan nailing his penis to a stool. ‘There was,’ according to Jones, ‘no resistance at all to publishing “Dis/playing” and no complaints that I know of either.’92 Debates concerning feminism’s institutional participation would continue into the new decade – and indeed, beyond. One area of dispute (of particular relevance to this journal’s readership), concerns the very writing of art history and criticism; that is the form these new ideas took in print. In the mid-1990s Borzello contended that, ‘[m]uch feminist art writing comes from academics and is couched in a language which many who are interested in the topic of women and art find opaque. Feminist book reviews in the journal Art History are like reading a foreign language, the language of academia, to be precise’.93 And indeed, although this article has not examined the writing of feminist art history specifically (concentrating instead on its content and institutional framing), upon reflection the texts published in Art History do extend the ‘language of academia’ to an extent that writing in, say, Spare Rib may not have. However, a rationalisation for this writerly ‘smuggling’94 can be found in an earlier declaration from Pollock: ‘I know why I write as I do: it is a political act of contesting the power invested in institutions of knowledge and demanding a space for women to redefine the world.’95 In his 1991 review, Harris offered the important observation that Art History ‘chooses material, on the whole, which reproduces rather than produces knowledge’.96 Indeed, the furore over Tickner’s article illustrates the difficulties encountered by stalwartly novel or political modes of scholarship. Feminist work was being done elsewhere – in independent reading groups, women’s art journals, collectives, and consciousness-raising groups – however, the Association of Art Historians acted as a site of disciplinary legitimation. This reproduction of knowledge (as Harris frames it) arguably brought awareness of feminist arguments to a wider, less immediately interested readership. Encountering feminist writing through the pages of Art History permits a glimpse of how these writers explored its theoretical and political conditions of possibility within that institutional space, and how some of those ambitions came into conflict with conservative forces. It can be surmised from this investigation that, during the 1970s and 1980s, at a crucial moment of disciplinary self- recognition, critique and consolidation, feminist participation in new professional spaces enabled a generation of scholars to establish critical authority in a contemporising discipline; whilst reciprocally determining the shape of that field of study. Victoria Horne is Lecturer in Art and Design History at Northumbria University. Her research focuses on feminist politics, art and historiography. She was co-editor of Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice (IB Tauris, 2017) and has 92 Jones, email to author 7 June 2013. Editor Marcia Pointon recalled trouble with the printers over the image, but on this occasion the controversy was not within the art historical community. Pointon interviewed by Liz Bruchet for ‘AAH Oral Histories’. 93 Frances Borzello, ‘Preaching to the Converted? Feminist Art Publishing in the 1980s’, in Katy Deepwell ed., New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies, New York and Manchester: Manchester University Press 1995, 20-24. 94 I borrow this phrase from Irit Rogoff, who has theorised smuggling as a form of institutional critique in an essay published on eipcp.net: ‘Smuggling: An Embodied Criticality’, 2006. 95 Griselda Pollock, ‘Framing Feminism’ (1988), in Feminism-Art-Theory ed. Robinson, 207-16, 210. 96 Jonathan Harris, ‘Art History’, Year’s Work Critical and Cultural Theory, 1: 1, 1991, 137-175. Victoria Horne ... the Association of Art Historians and the emergence of feminist interventions, 1974-1990 19 published essays in Third Text, Journal of Visual Culture, Radical Philosophy and Feminist Review. victoria.horne@northumbria.ac.uk This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ work_dt5lpkr3zrgsvhuvb4ouu72zji ---- nature biotechnology volume 26 number 9 september 2008 9 7 5 and disrupt field research that they deem unacceptable. There are important lessons here. First, you don’t conciliate thugs by capitulating to them. Second, the problem would have been avoided entirely, had public policy been crafted intelligently in the first place. And third, when universities permit intimidation to compromise academic freedom and the safety of their faculty and students, they become part of the problem. Henry I Miller The Hoover Institution, 434 Galvez Mall, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305- 6010, USA. e-mail: miller@hoover.stanford.edu 1. Anonymous. Nat. Biotechnol. 25, 950 (2007). 2. Schiermeier, Q. Nature 453, 263 (2008). for field testing with recombinant DNA– modified plants. In contrast, plants with similar or even identical traits that were created with less precise techniques, such as hybridization or mutagenesis, are subject to no government scrutiny or requirements (or publicity or vandalism) at all. And that applies even to the numerous new plant varieties that result from ‘wide crosses’ with embryo rescue, hybridizations that move genes from one species or genus to another; that is, across what used to be thought of as natural breeding boundaries. If recombinant DNA–modified plants were treated appropriately—that is, no differently from other new varieties—their testing would not need special warning signs or public announcements of test sites. There would be no way for the vandals to target ‘degenerate research’, and allowing persecution of practitioners of certain intellectual approaches, such as the use of the most precise and predictable techniques for genetic modification, the stridency and absolutism of the activists’ pronouncements—and their violent tendencies—will only increase. It is not hard to draw parallels with some of the excesses of intellectual persecution in the 1930s, when the regime’s objections to Entartete Kunst, or ‘degenerate art’, drove out such great minds and innovators as Albert Einstein, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch and Pablo Picasso. Those who ignore the mistakes of history are destined to repeat them. But Herr Hormuth has a different take on Germany’s past. In an e-mail to me, he wrote: “If we look at history then we should have also learned that we have to act responsibly with the results and possibilities of scientific research and are accountable to society.” A quite extraordinary statement. Given the existing achievements of recombinant DNA–modified plants—economic benefits to farmers, less use of chemical pesticides, more environment-friendly farming practices—he appears to have a peculiar view of what constitutes acting “responsibly with the results and possibilities of scientific research” and being accountable to society. Could anyone argue seriously that delaying or abandoning a demonstrably safe technology that is environmentally friendly and enhances food (and potentially, biofuel) production is beneficial to society? This time around, the German government is not directly culpable for the current situation, but it certainly has failed to protect freedom of expression and the personal safety and property of plant scientists against assaults by antitechnology activists. (In the United States, such groups have been officially designated as terrorist organizations.) How have we arrived at a position in the 21st century where thugs and vandals dictate the research and syllabus of the academic institutions of a major Western European democracy? One reason is that policy makers in both the European Union (EU) and in individual European countries like Germany have consciously and purposefully chosen not to apply scientific and risk-based regulatory policies to the oversight of recombinant DNA–modified plants. Flying in the face of the scientific consensus—including the EU’s own risk assessments—current EU and national regulations cast a veil of suspicion over agbiotech by requiring case-by-case government environmental assessments Trace and traceability—a call for regulatory harmony To the Editor: Genetically modified (GM) crops were grown commercially in 23 countries in 2007, with a further 29 allowing the import of GM crops for food and/or feed use and release into the environment1. Despite encouraging evidence concerning the positive socioeconomic and environmental benefits brought about by the adoption of GM technology1,2, we wish to highlight the fact that further development is being hampered by a lack of harmonization among national regulatory frameworks relating to research, biosafety and to the trade and use of GM crops. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the laws and regulations governing the tolerance levels for GM material in non-GM food and in the labeling and traceability of GM products. The definition of what is considered GM and non-GM food varies from country to country, with some nations enshrining precise tolerance targets in their GM regulations and some overlooking this important criterion. The European Union (EU; Brussels) follows the ‘precautionary approach’ and the consumers’ ‘right to know’, with stringent approval, labeling and traceability standards on any food produced from or derived from GM ingredients3. In contrast, US regulations are based on differences in the end product, and include a voluntary safety consultation and voluntary labeling guidelines for GM food4. Most other developed countries, including Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, have introduced regulations that share features of both the EU and US systems4. Developing countries often base their regulatory frameworks on models promoted by developed nations without considering the potential socioeconomic impact of such decisions, and the negative consequences of an overcautious regulatory environment on the health and well-being of their populations. The regulatory frameworks of selected countries are compared in Table 1. In the United States and Canada, as well as Japan and Taiwan, food and feed can be classed as non-GM, even if they contain up to 5% GM material. In contrast, other countries set much lower limits (e.g., 0.9% in the EU or 1% in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil and China). The EU actually has a two-tier tolerance policy, with the 0.9% limit applied to approved GM organisms, and a stricter 0.5% limit applied to GM organisms that have yet to be approved, but which have received favorable risk assessments. In many developing countries, there appears to be no established tolerance limit, which calls into question how such countries will distinguish GM and non-GM food and feed. Similarly, this global regulatory discord begs the question of how nominally GM-free food and feed imported from countries with high tolerance will be handled in stricter countries when it may breach local regulations concerning GM tolerance. This inevitably will c o r r e S p o N D e N c e © 2 0 0 8 N a tu re P u b li s h in g G ro u p h tt p :/ /w w w .n a tu re .c o m /n a tu re b io te c h n o lo g y mailto:miller@hoover.stanford.edu 9 7 6 volume 26 number 9 september 2008 nature biotechnology As the prevalence of GM crops continues to grow, we foresee real problems with the trade and use of food and feed if the regulations are not harmonized on a global level. US food exporters and biotech companies have already complained about the EU’s slow and obscure approval process, and bans by individual EU countries on GM products approved by the EU as a whole5. This ongoing dispute has been intensified by by disharmonious regulations concerning the labeling and traceability of GM food. The USA, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, The Philippines and South Africa have voluntary labeling practices, whereas the EU, Australia, New Zealand, China, Chile, Brazil and Taiwan require the mandatory labeling of GM produce. Still other countries, including Bangladesh, Egypt and Kenya, have no requirements for labeling at all. lead to disputes and the impounding of food and feed. The potential confusion caused by these conflicting tolerance levels will only become worse as more countries join the ‘GM club’. It is projected that the number of countries growing GM food and feed commercially will double over the next 10 years in line with the amount of land given over to GM crops1. The potential for conflict is compounded Table 1 Current GM biosafety regulations for selected countries Country Governing bodies/agencies Regulations/laws Product/ process based Transparency Labeling and traceability Tolerance levels Argentina comisión Nacional Asesora de Biotecnología Agropecuaria, Servicio Nacional de Sanidad y calidad Agroalimentaria, Instituto Nacional de Semillas, Direccion Nacional de Mercados Agroalimentarios Law 18284 on Argentine Food codex, Decree 1585/96, Decree 4238, Decree 815/99, resolution 289/97, resolution 511/98, resolution 1265/99 product Yes Voluntary n.d. Australia office of the Gene Technology regulator, Food Standards Australia New Zealand Gene Technology Act 2000, Standard 1.5.2- Food produced Using Gene Technology process Yes Mandatory 1% Bangladesh Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Science and Information & communication Technology, Ministry of environment & Forest Draft Biosafety Guidelines product n.d. No labeling regulation n.d. Brazil conselho Nacional de Biosegurança, comissão Técnica Nacional de Biossegurança Biosafety Law Number 11.105 process n.d. Mandatory 1% Burkina Faso National Biosafety Agency Decree 2003-208-/preS/pM/MAecr/ MFB/MecV process No n.d. n.d. canada canadian Food Inspection Agency consumer packaging & Labeling Act, Feeds Act, Fertilizers Act, Food & Drugs Act, Health of Animals Act, Seeds Act, plant protection Act product Yes Voluntarya 5% Health canada Food & Drugs Act, canadian environmental protection Act, pest control products Act environment canada canadian environmental protection Act chile Advisory committee for the release of Transgenics (Ministry of Agriculture, Agricultural and Livestock Service, National Agricultural research Institute, National commission on Scientific and Technical research) resolution of exemption 1927/93 Decree- Law 3554/81 n.d. n.d. Mandatory n.d. china Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine State environmental protection Administration, Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of commerce, Ministry of Health Under discussion process n.d. Mandatory 1% egypt National Biosafety committee No proper biosafety regulation but Ministerial decree No. 1648 (1998) is for commercialization of imported products; National Biosafety committee guidelines occur, however, not legally binding process n.d. No labeling required (no framework) Not estab- lished eU Member states’ competent authorities and european commission eU Directive 2001/18/ec (2001), ec regulation 258/97 (1997) process Yes Mandatoryb 0.9%; 0.5% food and feed India Ministry of environment & Forests, Department of Biotechnology epA 1986 &1989 rules process Yes proposed legis- lation for man- datory labeling occurs n.d. Japan Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, Ministry of the environment, Ministry of education, culture, Sports, Science and Technology Law concerning the conservation & Sustainable Use of Biological Diversity through regulations on the Use of LMos, Food Sanitation Law, Feed Safety Law process Yes Mandatory for selected prod- ucts 5% (continued) c o r r e S p o N D e N c e © 2 0 0 8 N a tu re P u b li s h in g G ro u p h tt p :/ /w w w .n a tu re .c o m /n a tu re b io te c h n o lo g y nature biotechnology volume 26 number 9 september 2008 9 7 7 earned $27 billion from the technology, split almost equally between developed and developing countries2. As well as direct economic benefits, GM crops reduce pesticide use, and reduce the use of fossil fuels in agriculture2. These benefits could be lost, or curtailed, if the regulations in different parts of the world are not brought into line, or at least made mutually compatible. It is also important to base the global regulations on scientific principles rather than unrealistic expectations of risk avoidance. Currently, many countries have in place regulations that erect unnecessary hurdles to the further development of the technology, especially banning GM products all together, even after they have been approved as safe by European Food Safety Authority (Parma, Italy), the EU’s own regulatory agency on GM6. Developing countries have also been drawn into this dispute as both sides try to win their support. Many developing countries have banned GM products owing to consumer and environmental concerns, only to find themselves excluded from markets and refused financial support from industrialized nations to conduct research and build human capital for biotech activities. In the decade since GM crops were first adopted, it is estimated that farmers have the EU’s introduction of mandatory labeling. The role of the World Trade Organization’s (Geneva) legal framework regarding trade in GM products (the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement, and the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade; http://www. wto.org has played a significant role in stifling the opportunities offered by GM products. Strict labeling, identity preservation and import requirements impose additional costs and reduce public confidence, which in turn affects trade. The decline in US corn exports to the EU has been blamed on the EU’s strict approval and labeling requirements, with some EU countries Table 1 Current GM biosafety regulations for selected countries (continued) Country Governing bodies/agencies Regulations/laws Product/ process based Transparency Labeling and traceability Tolerance levels Kenya National Biosafety committee, National environmental Management Authority, Kenya Bureau of Standards, Kenya Animal plant Health Inspectorate Services, Kenya Standing committee on Imports and exports, public Health Department, Department of Veterinary Services, pest control products Board Kenyan Draft Biosafety Bill of 2003, eMcA Act process Yes No labeling addressed in draft bill Not estab- lished Mexico Secretaria de Agricultura, Ganaderia, Desarrollo rural, pesca y Alimentacion, Secretaría de medio ambiente y recursos naturales, Secretaria de Salud, comision Federal para la proteccion contra riesgos Sanitarios, comisión Intersecretarial de Bioseguridad de los organismos Genéticamente Modificados Biosafety Law of Genetically Modified organisms (2005) process Yes Mandatory n.d. New Zealand environmental risk Management Authority, New Zealand Food Safety Authority, Food Standards Australia New Zealand, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry The Hazardous Substances & New organisms Act 1996 (HSNo Act) process Yes Mandatory 1% Nigeria Federal Ministry of environment, National Biosafety committee Nigeria Biosafety Guidelines, Draft biosafety bill process Yes (planned in draft bill) Mandatory as planned in draft n.d. South Africa executive council of Genetically Modified organisms, Department of Agriculture, Department of environment and Tourism, Department of Health GMo Act, 1997 (Act No. 15 of 1997), amended 2007; National Biodiversity Act product Yes Voluntary 1% Taiwan Taiwan Department of Health; council of Agriculture Article 14 of the Law Governing Food Sanitation product Yes Mandatory 5% The philippines National committee on Biosafety of the philippines (Departments of Agriculture, Science and Technology, Health, and environment and Natural resources), Institutional Biosafety committee e.o. 430 (1990) DA-A.o. No. 8 (2002) product Yes Voluntary 5% UK Health and Safety executive, Department for environment, Food, and rural Affairs Directive 2001/18/ec process Yes Mandatory c Food Standards Agency, Advisory committee on releases to the environment regulation (ec) No 1829/2003 USA US Department of Agriculture Federal plant protection Act product Yes Voluntarya 5% environmental protection Agency Federal Insecticide Fungicide and rodenticide Act, Federal Food Drug and cosmetic Act, Toxic Substances control Act Food and Drug Administration Federal Food Drug and cosmetic Act Zambia National Biosafety Authority, Scientific Advisory committeed National Biotechnology & Biosafety Bill process Yes n.d. n.d. aLabeling required if safety concerns (allergenic, change in nutritional composition) exist. bLabeling required at a 0.9% threshold for approved GM organisms or 0.5% for GM organisms given a favorable risk assessment but not yet approved (called ‘adventitious presence’) and 0% for unapproved GMos. cTo be established by the biosafety bill, however, the parliamentary committee on education, Science and Technology currently is in rule. dLabeling is required of seeds used for planting—the characteristics of the acquired genetic combination, implications with regard to special conditions and growing requirements, and changes in reproductive and productive characteristics should be stated. n.d., not disclosed. c o r r e S p o N D e N c e © 2 0 0 8 N a tu re P u b li s h in g G ro u p h tt p :/ /w w w .n a tu re .c o m /n a tu re b io te c h n o lo g y 9 7 8 volume 26 number 9 september 2008 nature biotechnology have neglected to consult a comparative pathologist during the evaluation of such manuscripts. One must wonder whether such a practice would be allowed if a submitted manuscript contained complex statistical analyses and no statistician was involved during the preparation or review of the manuscript, or crystallography was used to resolve a molecular structure but no expert was asked to check the X-ray diffraction data. Yet, it appears that when it comes to evaluation of human tissues and genetically engineered mouse (GEM) phenotypes, which is no less complex than statistics or X-ray diffraction, unvalidated1 DIY pathology’ has become common— and frequently accepted—practice2. We have previously noted the dwindling number of comparative pathologist- scientists who are qualified to coordinate and critique the pathological interpretation and the basic science in a manuscript3,4. There is an urgent need to make use of existing experts and encourage the growth of this discipline5. We recognize that a qualified expert may not be available for journal editors in some instances. However, when a pathologist-scientist who can review the entire manuscript is not available, both journal editors and grant study sections should, at least, seek the expert opinion of a pathologist to perform a fact and/or quality check of the pathology data, without necessarily commenting on the basic science. Implementing such a policy routinely during manuscript reviews in Nature journals would have an immense positive impact for the future health of scientific research. We, a group of concerned investigator-pathologists, have formed a nonprofit educational foundation, Center for Genomic Pathology (CGP; Davis, CA, USA; http://www. ctrgenpath.org/) to address these issues. We invite others who are interested in this issue to participate in a comprehensive debate to develop standards for the manuscript and the grant review process involving human and genetically engineered mouse tissues and use of pathology in research. We note that this letter represents a consensus opinion of the faculty of CGP and other cosigners below. Tan A Ince1, Jerrold M Ward2, Victor E Valli3, Dennis Sgroi4, Alexander Yu Nikitin5, Massimo Loda1,6, Stephen M Griffey7, Christopher P Crum1, James M Crawford8, Roderick T Bronson9 & Robert D Cardiff10 1Department of Pathology, Harvard Medical School, Division of Women’s and Perinatal 1Departament de Produccio Vegetal I Ciencia Forestal, University of Lleida, Avenue Alcalde Rovira Roure 177, E-25198 Lleida, Spain. 2Department of Biology, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK. 3Department of Biology, Calvin College, 1726 Knollcrest Circle, S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546-4403, USA. 4Institucio Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avancats, Passeig Lluís Companys, 08018, Barcelona, Spain. e-mail: christou@pvcf.udl.cat 1. James, c. ISAAA Brief No. 37. (ISAAA, Ithaca, NY, USA, 2007). 2. Brookes, G. & Barfoot, p. ISAAA Brief No. 36. (ISAAA, Ithaca, NY, USA, 2006). 3. Gruère, G.p. Food Policy 31, 148–161 (2006). 4. carter, c.A. & Gruère, G.p. in Regulating Agricultural Biotechnology. Economics and Policies (eds. Just, r., Alston, J.M. & Zilberman, D.) 459–480 (Springer publishing, New York, USA, 2006). 5. Fransen, L., La Vina, A., Dayrit, F., Gatlabayan, L., Santosa, D.A. & Adiwibowo, S. Integrating Socio- Economic Considerations into Biosafety Decisions: The Role of Public Participation (World resources Institute White paper, WrI, Washington, Dc, USA, 2005). 6. Bernauer, T. Genes, Trade and Regulation: The Seeds of Conflict in Food Biotechnology (princeton University press, princeton, NJ, USA, 2003). 7. christou p. & Twyman, r.M. Nutrition Res. Rev. 17, 23–42 (2004). 8. Bernauer, T. Intl. J. Biotechnol. 7, 7–28 (2005). developing countries where the benefits are most needed7. Several policy tools have been used to accommodate, reduce or eliminate international regulatory diversity8. One realistic approach is ‘mutual recognition’, where countries agree to recognize each other’s regulations; for example, the US and EU could agree to allow imports of each other’s products (GM and conventional) produced and marketed under home regulations, giving consumers on both sides of the Atlantic the choice. Perhaps if Europe and the US were to show such leadership, this type of compromise could be rolled out globally. Whatever the case, as more and more countries cultivate GM varieties, and national and international bodies continue to promulgate diverging regulatory approaches, there is little doubt that a more harmonious future for GM food and feed regulation would be in the interests of all. Koreen Ramessar1, Teresa Capell1, Richard M Twyman2, Hector Quemada3 & Paul Christou1,4 Do-it-yourself (DIY) pathology To the Editor: An exchange of correspondence in your November issue highlighted the importance of precise terminology for pathology data and terminology in scientific research and literature1. In the past few decades, several developments in technology have significantly increased the use of pathology in basic and translational research. For example, the development of genetically engineered mice has resulted in the creation of an ever-increasing variety of murine disease models. And more recently, availability of new technologies, such as mRNA expression arrays and tissue microarrays, has allowed basic researchers to work with patient tissue samples. Even so, the application of these technologies appears to have outpaced our ability to properly evaluate the resulting data2. The systematic analysis of disease phenotypes in mice, and their correlation with human disease, requires expertise in ‘comparative pathology’, encompassing training both in mouse and human gross anatomy, microscopic analysis of tissues (histopathology and immunopathology) and disease mechanisms (pathobiology), which even the most accomplished basic or clinical scientists frequently lack2. Formal training in one field of pathology might prepare one to become a self-taught expert in another field of pathology. However, we find it unlikely that one can become an expert pathologist with no prior formal training. Those of us with comparative pathology expertise have collectively noted that numerous tissue-based research studies have been published over the past decade without a pathologist among the authors, collaborators or consultants2. Furthermore, based on the frequently inaccurate use of pathology terms and misinterpretation of data in many of these studies, it appears that not only the authors but also the reviewers and editors often c o r r e S p o N D e N c e © 2 0 0 8 N a tu re P u b li s h in g G ro u p h tt p :/ /w w w .n a tu re .c o m /n a tu re b io te c h n o lo g y http://www.ctrgenpath.org/ http://www.ctrgenpath.org/ work_dur6qvtlwzgphd6wtjn6o6amuq ---- The taxonomy of “Romanesque” à la Zodiaque Journal of Art Historiography Volume 1 December 2009 Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series1 Janet T. Marquardt Figure 1 Example of early photogravures of Vézelay from Zodiaque 12-13 (January 1953), reused in Bourgogne romane, first edition (1954) [Les Nuit des temps 1], pages 212- 213, laid out by Angelico Surchamp, photographs by Pierre Kill, a professional from nearby Avallon. © Photothèque-Zodiaque Between 1951 and 2001, la Pierre-qui-Vire monastery in Burgundy published an illustrated journal, appearing three times a year, as well as multiple series of 1 This research would not be possible without the kind assistance of the monks from the abbey of la Pierre-qui-Vire: Abbot Luc Cornuau, Brothers Mathieu and Ambroise, as well as their generous permission to use figs. 1, 6 and 7 (Photothèque-Zodiaque, La Pierre-qui-Vire, 89630 Saint-Leger- Vauban, France). Equally helpful is Père Angelico Surchamp, who answers endless questions, both in person and via email, on a regular basis. Thanks are also due to two colleagues, Colum Hourihane and Alyce Jordan, who reviewed this essay and greatly improved it by their insightful suggestions, as well as the journal’s efficient editor, Richard Woodfield. I am also grateful to the wonderful staff at l'Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine (IMEC), the nicest archive in France, where I am working through the prodigious amount of papers deposited by the abbey of la Pierre-qui-Vire, and to my medieval taxonomy session colleagues (Laura Morowitz, Donna Sadler, and Mary Shepard) as well as the hosts of the Western Society for French History conference where this paper was first presented at Boulder, Colorado in October 2009. Many other colleagues have been supportive of this project. I would like to particularly mention Kathryn Brush, Yves Chevrefils Desboilles, Andrea Gibbs, Jean- Marie Guillouët, Todd Gustavson, Christopher Hanlon, Ruth Hoberman, Dominique Iogna-Prat, Danielle Johnson, Terryl Kinder, Gerd Koehler, Guy Lobrichon, Max Marmor, Christine Merllie- Young, Eric Palazzo, Anne Prache, Annie Pralong, Willibald Sauerländer, Mary Caroline Simpson and Otto-Karl Werckmeister. Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 2 lavishly illustrated books, nearly all focusing on Romanesque art.2 The central and most popular book series, La Nuit des Temps, ran to eighty-eight volumes.3 Another dozen series were spun off the collected material, pushing the total number of books to over three hundred. A printing workshop was established at the monastery, similar to the medieval scriptorium, for the text pages and a few color photographs. The primary illustrations, consisting of rich black-and-white photogravures, were from photographs taken first by professional photographers and later by the monks themselves [Fig. 1]. The glass negatives from these were burned to copper plates, touched up, and printed on thick paper with rich ink. The results are subtle with warm grays, contrasting light reflections and deep black shadows. The graphic intensity was maintained by the use of matte paper cut to a small scale, placed inside cloth covers and completed with ribbon bookmarks, suggesting precious religious texts. During the same period, other publishers, such as the Louvre and Arthaud, were bringing out books on medieval monuments, many also with photogravures.4 The monastery of La-Pierre-qui-Vire had been founded in the middle of the nineteenth century on the medieval Benedictine model, including the emphasis on scholarship as opus dei or ‘work of God’. These publications thus served founder Jean Baptiste Muard’s original intention to renew sacred life in France through the monastic ideal. Producing a series of illustrated books on religious subjects in the twentieth century gave the monks at La-Pierre-qui-Vire a project comparable to the opus dei of medieval scriptoria. Searching out the sites of Romanesque monuments and visiting them to make photographs, literally initiated ‘pilgrimages’ by small However, Zodiaque imagery stands out because the selected monuments and wealth of decorative details are presented in a highly aestheticized light, demonstrating deliberate artistic compositional manipulation of the subjects through lighting, cropping, angles, and framing. In addition, many of the styles among Romanesque art forms suggest corresponding graphic and spare qualities. In this way, the black-and-white medium often served to highlight and reinforce the artistic presentation of Zodiaque’s subjects. Finally, their simple clarity makes these photographs highly significant historical documents of monuments that have suffered erosion, restoration, or even demolition. 2 http://www.abbaye-pierrequivire.asso.fr 3 http://www.romanes.com/biblio/zodiaque_fr.html 4 For example: Marcel Aubert, La Cathédrale de Chartres, Paris: Arthaud, 1952; Maurice Gieure, Les Églises romanes en France. Series ‘Pierres Sacrées’ edited by Maurice Malingue, Paris: Editions du Louvre, 1953. Figure 2 Frères Surchamp and Norberto photographing a church in Aragon September 23, 1986. (Photo: Jaime Corbreos, Románico) Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 3 troupes of monks traveling across Europe to find Romanesque art from Spain to Scandinavia and from Ireland to the Holy Land [Fig. 2].5 brought to light many obscure monuments off the beaten path of the art-historical canon and rarely visible details of more famous sites, they also contributed to a growing literature debating the origins of the Romanesque style and its regional differences. One cannot deny the apparent nationalistic vision of such a project, especially in light of its appearance immediately succeeding two recent wars against Germany during which French medieval monuments had been gravely damaged. Certainly France had widely claimed medieval innovations from the nineteenth century onwards, for instance Pierre Francastel’s vehement argument published 1945. There were few publications on Romanesque art when the Pierre-qui-Vire team began. By disseminating the scholarship of key art-historical authors, the monks not only 6 This may not have been a conscious goal; nevertheless the thrust of the program seems reminiscent of the arguments over who invented Gothic architecture.7 The Zodiaque book series aided in the creation of a cultural history of Romanesque art along nationalistic lines. But it also helped define what is understood today by the very word ‘Romanesque’. A somewhat fluid term from its inception in the mid nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth, ‘Romanesque’ is sometimes defined in terms of date, sometimes style, architectural engineering or even circumstances of production (monastic versus urban, et cetera). These books seemed to visually and comprehensively document the existence of a European Romanesque art even as the wide variety of examples destabilizes the term. Zodiaque’s approach was wildly successful, selling over 46,000 copies of the first edition of the initial Nuit des Temps volume on the region of Burgundy, published in 1954. This single book went through nine more editions and eventually sold 140,000 copies, representing the most successful art book ever published in 5 Janet T. Marquardt, ‘La Pierre-qui-Vire and Zodiaque: A Monastic Pilgrimage of Medieval Dimensions’, Peregrinations 2/3, Summer 2009 [http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu]. 6 Pierre Francastel, L’Histoire de l’art, instrument de la propagande germanique, Paris: Librairie de Médicis, 1945. 7 This argument began in 1772 with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s On German Architecture and grew in intensity over the next two centuries. See Conrad Rudolph, ‘Introduction: A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art’, A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 16 ff. Figure 3 Advertisement used in Zodiaque for subscriptions showing covers of various issues. Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 4 France.8 The genesis of these Zodiaque books was in a little journal of the same title, which followed another, also from la Pierre-qui-Vire, entitled Temoignages. The latter appeared during World War II under the direction of Dom Jean-Nesmy, whose younger brother contributed articles on art. This younger brother, Angelico Surchamp, had trained with the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes and formed a painting atelier with two other young monks to create modernist wall paintings of religious subjects. Surchamp wrote an essay for Témoignages 21 (April 1949) defending abstract art after an exhibition, organized for tourists by this atelier at Vézelay that paired the medieval sculpture with contemporary Christian art, drew criticism. As two volumes were produced annually, the activity generated a printing workshop in the abbey of a dozen monks and the income helped fund the enlargement of la Pierre-qui-Vire’s physical layout. 9 He added a second essay on the same subject to create his own journal, Zodiaque, first appearing in March 1951 [Fig. 3].10 In both these essays, Surchamp addressed the problematic term ‘abstract art’ as part of the contemporary French debate over what constituted ‘sacred art’ (l’art sacré). This latter was a longstanding ‘quarrel’ of major concern to modern artists who sought to bridge the huge gap between what they perceived, on the one hand, as saccharine and meaningless religious art of the nineteenth-century ‘Saint-Sulpician’ variety and, on the other, cutting edge ‘abstract’ or less realistic forms of their own day. Saint-Sulpician art referred to naturalistic, often Romantic imagery popular in the nineteenth century that drew upon a revival of Gothic and Byzantine art styles.11 A typical example is the statue of the Virgin made by Joseph Fabisch in 1864 for the shrine at Lourdes.12 The name came from an association with the taste of the Sulpician society of clergy based at church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Contemporary artists, on the other hand, such as Henri Matisse with his decoration program at the chapel of Vence (1949- 1951) or Germaine Richier’s intense sculpture of the suffering Christ in the modernist church of Notre-Dame-de-Tout-Grâce at Assy (1950),13 The argument over sacred art had raged in France since the late nineteenth century, reviving after World War I. posed challenging questions on what truly represented nature, what generated spiritual contemplation, how aesthetic appearances could affect viewers, and which styles best conveyed religious content. 14 8 Dom Angelico Surchamp, ‘L'Aventure de Zodiaque’, Annales de l'Académie de Mâcon 13, series 4, 2001. The French Church felt strongly that there was a need for a renewal of faith; republican laicism, public education, the breakup 9 Dom Angelico Surchamp, ‘Note sur l’art abstrait’, Témoignages 21, April 1949, 174-181. 10 Dom Angelico Surchamp, ‘Deux notes sur l’art abstrait’, Zodiaque 1, March 1951, 1-23. 11 Michael Paul Driskel, Representing belief, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1992. 12 Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age, New York: Viking, 1999, figs. 9, 13. 13 The piece was withdrawn by Church authorities in 1951. A photograph can be seen in the newsletter Évangile et Liberté 217 (March 2008) on line at: http://www.evangile-et- liberte.net/elements/numeros/217/article8.html 14 Stephen Schloesser, Jazz age Catholicism: mystic modernism in postwar Paris, 1919-1933, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 5 of rural communities in the face of industrialism—all this contributed to the gestures of empty ritual. There had been a powerful counter movement to secularism by religious folk who were superstitious about France’s continual bad luck beginning with their defeat by the Prussians in 1870, the horrors of the Commune in 1871, the corruption of the Dreyfus Affair, the shocks of World War I and, soon, World War II. Cults to the Sacred Heart, Joan of Arc, and pilgrimage sites grew in response.15 Angelico Surchamp’s teacher, Albert Gleizes, wrote that Christian art between the sixth and twelfth centuries had the raw power of true artistic expression, the visible sign of the artist’s inner being. But these were popular movements that tended to cultivate the Saint-Sulpician style of Catholic imagery, an empty, user-friendly art that did not challenge the viewer and offered little profound complexity. 16 He was not the first to make the aesthetic connection to modern abstraction; late nineteenth-century painters such as Paul Gauguin, the Symbolists, and the Nabis had begun the search for a ‘mystical link between the visual and spiritual worlds’.17 Wassily Kandinsky’s 1911 essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art is one of the first articulations of modernist concerns about the fundamental truths lost in materialist philosophies and ‘art for art’s sake’, which stimulated the search for the deeper internal purity of ‘the primitive’, a term from art-historical discourse about ancient and medieval arts that was being applied around this time to colonial artifacts from outside the western tradition, such as in exhibitions at the Musée d'ethnographie in Paris where Pablo Picasso famously first saw African art in 1907.18 15 Joseph F. Byrnes, Catholic and French Forever: Religious and National Identity in Modern France, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. This appreciation for less naturalistic and polished arts that privileged expression over realism carried into a growing revival of earlier medieval material. That ethno-anthropological artifacts and medieval artworks were conceptually related by curators is clear from the 16 Although Gleizes began with a vague interest in late medieval cathedrals in the Romantic populist tendency, he soon turned against Renaissance and then even Gothic arts in favor of the arts produced prior to the twelfth century with his essay ‘La Peinture et ses lois’ originally appearing in the journal La Vie des Lettres et des Arts in March 1923 and reprinted as La Peinture et ses lois: Ce qui devait sortir du cubisme, Paris: Croutzet et Depost, 1924. See also: Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes: for and against the twentieth century, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001, 87-88. 17 Albert Boime, Revelation of Modernism: Responses to Cultural Crises in Fin-de-Siècle Painting, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008, 135. See also: ‘Packaging the Primitifs: the medieval artist, the Neo- Primitif and the art market’, in: Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in fin-de-siècle France, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, 37-60; Debora Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000. 18 It would later be codified by important art historians such as Roger Fry in his work on African art during the 1910s and 1920s and continued by Frank Boas in Primitive Art (Oslo: Skrifter, 1927) or Georges-Henri Luquet in L'art primitif (Paris: G. Doin, 1930). For an excellent and comprehensive anthology of early texts utilizing the term ‘primitive art’, see Jack Flam, ed. Primitivism and Twentieth- Century Art: A Documentary History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. The arguments about the pejorative connotations of the term have been extensively discussed in recent scholarship. See: Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989; Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Henri_Luquet� Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 6 proximity of the 1878 Musée d’ethnographie (later the Musée de l'homme) to the 1882 Musée du sculpture comparée (later to become the Musée des monuments français), which included prominent Romanesque examples, on the Trocadéro in Paris.19 Also around the turn of the twentieth century, Picasso and architect/art historian Josep Puig y Cadafalch, among others, sparked new awareness of Catalan medieval art.20 In fact, though it took Émile Mâle until 1922 to publish a book on Romanesque iconography, remaining caught up in the nineteenth-century romance with the Gothic, already in the 1880s architects and artists had begun to look beyond Viollet-le-Duc’s ideal Gothic style toward more powerful and expressive forms of art from the previous two centuries—witness the revival of the Romanesque architectural style in Germany, the popularity of H. H. Richardson in the United States, the nationalistic association of Celtic art in nineteenth-century Ireland, or Haseloff’s references to Hildegarde illuminations already in 1906.21 As Caviness states: ‘Contorted and disproportionate limbs gave Catalan Romanesque art its spiritual intensity. In Picasso they serve political ends and identify with the Republican struggle against General Franco, and with the Catalan cause’. 22 This political content was the direction that interested avant-garde art collectors such as Christian Zervos in Paris, whose Cahiers d’art gave modernism a powerful presence.23 In Germany, the intensity of modernist abstraction was exaggerated for Christian works by artists such as Ernst Barlach, but again, the emotion was linked to socio-political concerns.24 19 Risham Majeed, ‘The ‘Other’ Primitive: Revisiting Romanesque in the Age of Colonialism’, a paper given in the session ‘Shaping the Reception of Medieval Sites’ at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds University 2009, forming part of the research for her dissertation at Columbia University. For avant-garde French Catholic artists, such as Gleizes, it was specifically that spiritual intensity alone which caught their attention and suggested a way to renew sacred art. They felt that if they could link the religious spaces and subject matter of the early medieval past with the growing interest in a non-realist aesthetic, they could offer a new generation fresh visual stimulation to Christian symbolism and thoughtful meditation. 20 Madeleine Caviness recently suggested that we still do not credit them enough. See: Madeleine Caviness, ‘The Politics of Taste’, in: Colum Hourihane, ed., Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn, Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 2008, 57-81. 21 Curran, Kathleen. The Romanesque Revival: Religion, Politics, and Transnational Exchange, Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies Series 2. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003; James. F. O’Gorman, H.H. Richardson: Architectural Forms for an American Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Colum Hourihane, Gothic Art in Ireland, 1169-1550: Enduring Vitality, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003, 19-34. Haseloff’s essay appeared in A. Michel, Histoire de l’art II: Formation expansion et evolution de l’art gothique and is quoted in Caviness, ‘Politics’, 76. For background on the development of the distinction between ‘Romanesque’ and ‘Gothic’ styles of medieval art, see: Tina Waldeier Bizarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism: A Prehistory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, and Jean Nayrolles, L'invention de l'art romane à l'époque moderne: XVIIIe-XIXe siècles, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005. 22 Caviness, ‘Politics’, 65. 23 Christian Zervos, Cahiers d'art, Paris: Éditions Cahiers d'art, 1926-1960, 35 vols. 24 Caviness, ‘Politics’, 73. Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 7 Gleizes was a committed Catholic who read the works of the neo-Thomists, Raïssa and Jacques Mauritain, and argued the finer points of their theories about the civilizing power of art and the artist’s ‘purity of intention’.25 For Gleizes, the ultimate way to capture the spiritual energy of God’s creation was in rhythmic form, which he developed as a series of rotating lines drawing the eye in and around the various figures and shapes of his paintings.26 It was Surchamp’s creation of Zodiaque that really gave him the chance to visually as well as textually develop the connection between Romanesque art and the modern, cubist aesthetic. For him, the Romanesque style was not determined wholly by technical developments in architecture, sculpture, painting, and other arts during the Middle Ages, changes that many have seen as mere interim points on the inevitable progress toward Gothic naturalism and light-filled mega-churches. Instead, the style grew from the intensity of a minimalist aesthetic form for powerful spiritual expression, rich with linear sharpness, powerfully simple iconographic references, multiple viewpoints, and rhythmic patterns. He saw the terms ‘Romanesque’ and ‘Gothic’ as denoting more than successive time periods. Rather, for Surchamp, and thus eventually for the Zodiaque books, Romanesque art came to designate medieval art that was conceived differently from Gothic art. For sculpture in particular, he distinguished Romanesque art as that by artists who worked outside Greco-Roman realism, or at least made creative responses in adapting it. He felt that artists who worked on the deliberate revival of classical naturalism, beginning in the thirteenth century, did so at the expense of creativity and by giving into the laziness of copying nature. Thus the name, Roman-esque, which for someone like Marvin Trachtenberg is still an apt expression of an architecture that took its basic elements from the Roman forms of engineering, or which Linda Seidel sees as the raison d’être for the historical visual references at S. Lazare in Autun, was quite the opposite to Surchamp. His influence on the young Frère Angelico Surchamp’s ideas about religious art was enduring and nurtured a strong modernist aesthetic sense. Surchamp followed Gleizes into the fray over sacred art. The argument from their side concerned very powerful visual laws about good artistic composition; along with the importance of keeping imagery open to viewer’s imaginations. Realism became mere copying of the outer appearance of Nature; whereas modern, non-representational art could address the inner, profound meanings of existence. 27 25 Schloesser, Jazz age Catholicism,121-122. He appreciated pre-Gothic architecture for the precision of its parts and for sculptural decoration that he saw as stripped down and clarified in its response to classical models. He wanted to define this art as a rejection of Roman traditions in order to look to its abstraction 26 Examples of Gleizes’s paintings can be seen on line at: http://www.fondationgleizes.com/albert- gleizes-work.html. Especially relevant are those from the sections entitled ‘The Interwar Period’ and ‘The Last Years’. 27 Marvin Tractenberg, ‘Suger's Miracles, Branner's Bourges: Reflections on ‘Gothic Architecture’ as Medieval Modernism’, Gesta 39/2, 2000, 185-205; Linda Siedel, Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. http://www.fondationgleizes.com/albert-gleizes-work.html� http://www.fondationgleizes.com/albert-gleizes-work.html� Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 8 and creativity for an explication and justification of its spiritual power. He thus entirely separated derivative architectural structural forms from innovative architectural decoration. For him, even the way medieval columns were fluted or arranged carried a different aesthetic sensibility to that of the Classical ideal, and his images emphasize such effects. The central premise of Surchamp’s 1951 essays on abstract art was that power was conveyed by the formal properties of art which distinguished copying from creativity and form from figure. He illustrated his argument with examples of archaic Greek art, suggesting that the abstraction of the folds into regular patterns on the Hera of Samos, an Erechthion caryatid and the Charioteer of Delphi carried the same aesthetic balance as the forms carved onto the prehistoric stones from Gavr’inis in the Morbihan. These served as precursors to the ultimate pairing of aesthetic and spiritual visualization in Romanesque architecture, sculpture and painting. He did not yet name a key work, but rather cited a wide range of French examples.28 With this in mind, we can see a number of taxonomic complications arising: 1) If all aspects of this art are not, in fact, Roman-like, how can one link the various manifestations under a single term? This is not, in fact, a rogue question: It wasn’t until the publications of Henri Focillon during the 1930s that connections were made. Jean Nayrolles, in his 2005 study L’Invention de l’art roman, tells us ‘Romanesque art’ in the sense that one uses this term today, designating a universal consistency of forms, for a style inclusive from the architectural monument to the illuminated book, did not exist for the contemporaries of Viollet-le-Duc. ‘The expression itself was not employed: one spoke of Romanesque architecture, very rarely of Romanesque sculpture, never of Romanesque art’. It thus seems that Surchamp’s appreciation of Romanesque art grew directly from his desire to champion contemporary abstract art and to find a fresh Christian imagery to offer the post World War II world in the pages of his Zodiaque periodical and books. In this way, he particularly sought other forms from art history that related to the expressive and harmonious compositional treatment of the stone in Romanesque European sculpture in order to set up an opposition between naturalism and abstraction that served to justify his presentation of Romanesque in a new light. 29 Many scholars today hold firmly that the evidence of Romanesque’s indebtedness to Roman is indisputable.30 28 Surchamp also wrote a response to critics of these two statements, after their appearance in Zodiaque, in Témoignages 33, April 1951, 227-235. It would seem that one must allow for a variety of responses to the classical inheritance. Contextual studies of meaning attributed to Classical models have moved Surchamp’s close reading of artistic compositional techniques and religious iconography to broader questions of social reception. 29 ‘L’expression même n’est pas employée : on parle d’architecture romane, très rarement de sculpture romane, jamais d’art roman’. Jean Nayrolles, L'invention de l'art roman, 365. 30 Manuel Castiñeiras and J. Camps (eds.). El Románico y el Mediterráne: Cataluña, Toulouse y Pisa. 1120- 1180 [exhibition catalogue], Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya: Barcelona, 2008. Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 9 2) If there are no unifying Roman elements, is there at least a shared style among the arts generally contemporary with the period 1000-1200 across medieval France, across medieval Europe? The Zodiaque illustrations also serve to elucidate the clear lack of a unifying artistic style during these years in medieval Europe and the same can be said for any other arbitrary art-historical style designation when applied too broadly. The more one looks at the beautiful photogravures that illustrate the Zodiaque volumes, the more one realizes there are few defining shared elements, even among examples of the same media, of what the series consistently terms ‘Romanesque’ [Fig. 4]. Leaving aside Zodaique’s venture into early medieval art with the Irish and Scandinavian volumes and the post-1995 series on Gothic monuments, even the bulk of the material drawn from around the years 1000-1200 represents workshops of great cultural variety.31 Figure 4 La Nuit des temps series, covers showing range of locations. 3) Is there a geographic source for Romanesque, from which other regions received the impetus for its development? The Zodiaque books are all titled in French, and the most famous series, La Nuit des temps, lists every country or geographic subdivision under the name plus ‘roman/romane’ (i.e., ‘Romanesque’ in French, very easily confused with ‘romain’ which means ‘Roman’), giving the general impression that all forms of the art thus titled are, at their heart, French— 31 Françoise Henry, L'Art Irlandais 1-3, La Pierre-qui-Vire, Saint-Léger-Vauban: Zodiaque, 1963-64; Peter Anker and Aron Andersson, L’Art Scandinave 1-2, La Pierre-qui-Vire, Saint-Léger-Vauban: Zodiaque, 1969. Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 10 yet that was neither Surchamp’s avowed goal nor a position that has ever been justified.32 He simply began by documenting Romanesque art in each region he visited and the title was descriptive of the photographic content. Perhaps the Zodiaque publications unintentionally reinforced a tendency towards Franco- centrism that began as far back as Wilhelm Vöge, who went from Germany to France in order to study architectural sculpture in the 1890s.33 However, by beginning in Burgundy, drawing examples from that region throughout all early publications for visual evidence in theoretical arguments, the Zodiaque team implicitly privileged the Burgundian sites as a center from which their own understanding of Romanesque art grew, creating a sort of ‘ur- Romanesque’ or essential form from which to define the characteristics that would be emphasized in their search for Romanesque among other regions. 34 Raymond Oursel began to work closely with Zodiaque in the 1970s. He was a trained art- historian, archive director, and professor at the Catholic Institute in Lyon whose professional ideas about Romanesque art were an important model for Surchamp. He was also the son of Charles Oursel, a close colleague of Kenneth Conant who excavated the ruined abbey of Cluny from 1927-1950.35 Raymond adhered to the arguments of this earlier generation that made the construction of the third church at Cluny (begun 1088) into a center of a renaissance of foreign influences that then spread across the region and could be seen in other Romanesque churches, which were subsequently all dated after it. Conant, in particular, wanted to see Cluny as the model for all innovation in medieval architecture after its appearance. Although alternative theories have been presented since, this underlying orientation towards Burgundy by Zodiaque was easily absorbed into contemporary art-historical discourse.36 There are a number of different series within the Zodiaque books. Besides the geographic orientation by region of the La Nuit des temps (The Dark Ages) series which began with Bourgogne romane, others were organized on varied themes, such as the earliest Travaux des mois (The Labors of the Months) series which began with Autun and continued with other specific sites as well as some regional itineraries; Romanesque images of figures like angels, demons, Christ, and the Virgin; Christmas scenes; Romanesque cloisters; images of the Apocalypse, and so on. Another, Les Points cardinaux (The Cardinal Directions), focused upon images from 32 Angelico Surchamp, interview with author June 2009. 33 Kathryn Brush, The Shaping of Art History: Wilhelm Vöge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the Study of Medieval Art, Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 1996, 61-76. Dorothy Glass reminds us that Italy was the starting point in ‘‘Quo vadis’: The Study of Italian Romanesque Sculpture at the Beginning of the Third Millennium’ Studies in Iconography 28, 2007, 1-22. 34 Jean Baudry, Georges Barbier, Abbés André Gaudillière, Denis Grivot, et. al., Bourgogne romane, La Pierre-qui-Vire, Saint-Léger-Vauban: Zodiaque, 1954. 35 Janet T. Marquardt, From Martyr to Monument: The Abbey of Cluny as Cultural Patrimony, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, 150-252. 36 C. Edson Armi. Masons and Sculptors in Romanesque Burgundy: The New Aesthetic of Cluny III, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983. Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 11 individual monuments as illustrations to evocative literary, historical, or scriptural texts. A pocket-size series, La Carte du ciel (The Map of Heaven) seems to have been directed at travelers to key Romanesque shrines. The later La Voie lactée (The Milky Way), Les Formes de la nuit (Shapes in the Night), and Visages du Moyen Âge (Faces of the Middle Ages) revisited some topics and added new ones, including Gothic sites. The atelier was thus able to reuse photographs, combining and recombining disparate examples as necessary for each arrangement, that made any categorization fluid at best. Art from widely divergent periods and areas was subsumed into the series without any apparent dissonance, easily and simply extending the parameters of non-realist styles in medieval workshops. Although not all series included the French term for ‘Romanesque’ in the books’ titles, Zodiaque had already become intrinsically linked with that stylistic designation due to the popularity of the Nuit des temps series. It is interesting that the strong association of the Zodiaque books with Romanesque art caused most readers/collectors, from the very beginning, to consider the books which did not have that qualifier, such as L’Art Gaulois, L’Art Irlandais or L’Art Scandinave, as extensions of the same artistic group simply by association. How could this be? How could early Irish jewelry be so easily linked to twelfth-century Italian sculpture? For that matter, how could eleventh-century Catalan architecture live in the same world as twelfth- century stained glass from Champagne [Fig. 5]? Quite simply: The world of Zodiaque Romanesque art was not entirely coherent; each volume follows its own logic. Some record the way medieval art manifested itself within a country or region, others contrast variations of a single subject. One can often detect differences in the authority of individual authors, for example Françoise Henry’s presentation of Irish art over the course of three volumes. The Figure 5 La Nuit des temps series, covers showing variety of media and styles. Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 12 overriding principle at play in the choice of topics was Surchamp’s attraction to contemporary artistic sensibilities in the second half of the twentieth century and the desire to find medieval art that ‘spoke’ to modernist criteria. These publications were never designed to follow iconographic or technical or structural developments in a logical sequence as Focillon might have done.37 Yet, Focillon might nonetheless have looked back on the overall results with great interest. For the vision behind the Zodiaque photographs, the ‘Romanesque’ that Zodiaque produced, was quixotic and personal, decontextualized and powerful, unlike the contemporary art- historical focus of others, such as Meyer Schapiro, who took a broader view.38 Variation and richness reign. The strongest images are always the black-and-white photogravures, often demonstrating a new way of seeing highly colored originals [Fig. 7]. The Zodiaque essence, its élan, is the powerful pull of a fresh aesthetic, a modern reevaluation of an art that had been ignored in the first medieval revival of the nineteenth century. It is like that initial art class in high school when the instructor has everyone cut a tiny square hole in a piece of paper and use it as a boundary lens with which to search out shapes, to abstract the world into incoherent forms, to rediscover the converging lines of our volumetric dimension, even as these paper ‘finders’ The photographs came first and in many cases were the true subject of the publication, with the text serving as illustrative to their message. Zodiaque presented a three- dimensional world seen through the lens of the camera; it was perceived by the eye of the photographer; it came from the vision of a Cubist-trained painter whose sense of space is two-dimensional. Details predominate, whether of architectural viewpoints or pieces of sculpted figures, margins of painted miniatures or color blocks of glass and tesserae [Figs. 1 and 6]. 37 For an overall introduction to Focillon’s approach see Jean Bony’s preface to volume one of Henri Focillon, The Art of the West in the Middle Ages, London: Phaidon, 1963, 2 vols., ix-xxii. 38 For examples see Meyer Schapiro, Selected Papers: Romanesque Art, New York: Georges Braziller, 1977, especially 28-101. Figure 6 Detail from abbey church at Paray-le-Monial from Bourgogne romane, sixth edition (1974) [Les Nuit des temps 1], plate 50. Photograph by the abbey atelier. © Photothèque-Zodiaque Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 13 flatten the view into two dimensions. It is what Focillon saw in the adaptation of figural narrative sculpture to the rigor of medieval architecture’s structural conformity, when the artists had to ‘replace the harmony and proportions of life by the harmony and proportions of an abstract system’, or how Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger characterized the role of modernist painting in 1912 when they wrote the ‘…the joy of confining unlimited art within the limits of the picture is worth the effort it requires’.39 Willibald Sauerländer recently raised the question of whether the term ‘Romanesque’ is ‘A Worn Out Notion’. That is Romanesque à la Zodiaque. Yes, there are maps and ground plans, iconographic identifications and dates, histories and descriptions. But these merely nod to the requirements of the travel guide, the art book, identifying where to find the subjects. These elements were not the guiding thought underlying either the choices of monuments or the selection of photographs. The glue that held the enterprise together was the powerful belief in a fresh and edgy presentation of sacred art from the past. 40 He briefly surveyed the usage of various terms for art and architecture that appeared in Europe between the Carolingian and Gothic periods.41 Although there is general agreement that the ‘full flowering’ of Romanesque art came in the twelfth century, where this happened and from whence it came continues to be contested, along the lines of Arthur Kingsley Porter, Puig y Cadalfach and others at the beginning of the twentieth century.42 Sauerländer’s overview suggests that perhaps the blanket term ‘Romanesque’ has replaced these national associations, in spite of Zodiaque’s French domination but aided by its ubiquitous use of the term.43 39 Focillon, Art of the West, 104; Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Cubism, first English edition, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913, 5. Sauerländer also 40 Willibald Sauerländer, ‘Romanesque Art 2000: A Worn Out Notion?’ in Colum Hourihane, ed., Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn, Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 2008, 40-56. 41 Sauerländer lists the Ottonian style in Germany, the Capetian flowering in France, the ‘First Romanesque’ of Catalonia, the pre-Norman Saxon forms in England, Lombard decoration in Italy, and so on, Sauerländer, ‘Romanesque Art 2000’, 41-42ff. 42 Arthur Kingsley Porter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1923; Josep Puig i Cadafalch, Le Premier art roman, l'architecture en catalogne et dans l'occident méditerranéen aux Xe et XIe siècles, Paris: H. Laurens, 1928. 43 For a review of the historiography of medieval art and the development of the term ‘Romanesque’, again see Conrad Rudolph, ‘Introduction: A Sense of Loss’. The 2005 Louvre exhibition on Figure 7 Detail from the Escorial Beatus from Images de l’apocalpyse, [Les Travaux des mois 15] (1977), plate 32. Photograph by the abbey atelier. © Photothèque-Zodiaque Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 14 tried to address the apparent lack of interest in this art among contemporary students, concluding that study of the Middle Ages has changed overall because ‘…they [the Middle Ages] have become dead letters. We need new comprehensive studies on the function and life of monuments that have come down to us as empty stone shells and that as images have become isolated as objects of either aesthetic or iconographic interest’.44 Did Zodiaque contribute to this isolation? Perhaps—but we must remember that, as influential as they might have been, these volumes were not conceived as art history books. Sometimes art historians wrote accompanying texts that have become canonical studies, and in later years the abbey tried to contract with the very best scholars they could find, but often at the beginning, it was only the local cleric or Surchamp himself who provided their understanding of a site or the photographs accompanied religious texts. Certainly, for Zodiaque, the term ‘Romanesque’ never ‘wore out’ because it was a wholly different proposition. No one was asking the reader to judge whether or not something fit the standard taxonomy of art-historical styles or take sides about nationalistic origins or regional forms. There was no whiff of the rising interest, during the same period, of ‘social art history’. Zodiaque simply presented its own version of the art, which was so compelling and so attractive, with a bit of dark mystery and lot of graphic contrast, that most people simply forgot the questions when perusing the stunning images. In the end, we are left with an overwhelming catalogue of disconnected details evidencing the myriad manifestations of art in Europe between the seventh and fourteenth centuries, with a strong emphasis on the period 1000-1200. Surchamp had an artistic eye and he wanted artistic compositions to ‘work’ as structural forms that captured viewers’ attention and made them look more deeply, connect with an expressive content, and open up to intense new explorations of existence, away from rote Catholic formulae.45 He had inherited a legacy of the Neo-Benedictine culture in which he took his vows that can be identified with a certain nostalgia, previously couched in more or less kitschy neo- medieval manifestations, such as the products of the art school at the Benedictine monastery of Beuron, founded thirteen years after la Pierre-qui-Vire, in 1863, in Germany.46 Romanesque art raised concerns about nationalism and use of the term ‘Romanesque’, see: Kathleen Nolan and Susan Leibacher Ward, ‘La France romane au temps des premiers Capétiens (987-1152): Musée du Louvre, 10 March-6 June 2005’, Gesta 44/2 2005, 149-156. He did not identify with that notion of medieval art and wanted to use his personal aesthetic insights, based upon modernist painting and his awareness of contemporary theories about sacred art, to rehabilitate the messages of medieval Christian imagery. Perhaps we should credit the Zodiaque enterprise with playing a 44 Willibald Sauerländer, ‘Romanesque Art 2000’, 52. 45 Although the Zodiaque volumes were accepted, the journal L’Art sacré faced censure and one of the original monks from the painting atelier in which Surchamp began his work, Frère Yves, found his missals for children, illustrated with brightly colored, naively styled images strongly influenced by Romanesque, condemned and withdrawn from publication by the Church. 46 Thanks to Willibald Sauerländer for bringing this to my attention in his letter of July 2009. Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series 15 key role in the change of our perceptions and critical awareness about medieval art versus those of the Romantics, as enumerated by Conrad Rudolph in his introduction to A Companion to Medieval Art of 2006.47 The surprises and the harmonies, the balance of opposing irregularities, the liberty confined within an architectonic frame, the honesty and the subtleties— Surchamp thought he’d found both the most profound manifestation of Christian ideals as well as the model for modern artistic standards. He valued the creativity and clarity of early twelfth-century Burgundian non-mimetic representation, then took that interest on the road looking for proto, early, classic, late—the full spectrum—of ‘Romanesque’. And ultimately, for the Zodiaque project he had helped initiate, the term ‘Romanesque’ became a handy catch-all to designate what it presented as the purest visual expression from the western European Christian past. Janet Marquardt is full professor of art history and women’s studies at Eastern Illinois University. Her recent publications include Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages (with Alyce Jordan) (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing, 2009); From Martyr to Monument: the Abbey of Cluny as Cultural Patrimony (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007); Frames of Reference: Art, History, and the World (with Stephen Eskilson) (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005); ‘Un Romantique à la recherche du passé: K. J. Conant à Cluny’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 48 (2005), 327-340; ‘La Pierre-qui-Vire and Zodiaque: A Monastic Pilgrimage of Medieval Dimensions’, Special Issue of Peregrinations entitled: Placing the Middle Ages: Contextualizing towards a Geography of Material Culture, 2009 (http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu); ‘”Cluny in all its perfection”: Ur-Basilica or Romantic Reconstruction?’, Scholion/Kongressakten der Stiftung Bibliothek Werner Oechslin (Zurich: GTA Verlag, forthcoming 2010). Janet T. Marquardt Department of Art College of Fine Arts and Humanities Eastern Illinois University Charleston, IL 61920 jtmarquardt@eiu.edu 47 Conrad Rudolph, ‘Introduction: A Sense of Loss’, 39. work_dzxbthylsvhebmyguh6blhhiya ---- Journal of Art Historiography Number 7 December 2012 Making and seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern. 1 John Mack A new icon has entered the public domain in Britain as a result of the development of late twentieth century communication technologies. Some British railway companies now use a black and white image to indicate that you are travelling in a coach where mobile phone use is discouraged (albeit with varying degrees of success). The centre of the image is occupied by an irregularly-shaped solid black form. Curved upper and lower edges perhaps suggest that it is set in a circular frame, but in fact it is surrounded by a white expanse and has no continuous visible edge so that it appears to be a single isolated icon. Or so it initially seemed to me; for, on the first few occasions I noticed the image, it puzzled me - even though I had deliberately sought out the ‘quiet coach’ on the train and might have expected some entirely understandable warning to observe a muted presence. Yet, despite this, I saw the shape as something like an umbrella playing a saxophone. It took several trips before it dawned on me that what I was supposed to see was a face in profile holding an index figure to the mouth in order to encourage passengers to be unobtrusive. I was reading the solid black shape as having primacy when in fact it was the outline that I should have been paying attention to and the white shapes which it inscribed. Now I know what it is, I can shift back and forth between the two images, a kind of ‘lenticular’ way of visualising a single image.2 This essay explores how different ways of seeing the same image may co-exist, but how that may be obscured by a western preoccupation with the linear - a habit so ingrained that it has come to seem instinctive, as has been insightfully analysed recently by Tim Ingold.3 A crucial element of the discussion to be developed here concerns the differences in visual perception which arise from the ways in which objects and images are created. This, 1 Parts of this paper derive from a conference on Anglo-Saxon design in its wider contexts under the title ‘Why decorate?’ at the University of East Anglia and organised with Chris Gosden and J.D. Hill in 2007. They and other participants are thanked for their comments at the time. I also subsequently presented aspects of the paper at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Oxford and at my own university, The University of East Anglia, where again I received useful feedback. I have been particularly grateful to other colleagues who have commented on this paper in draft, especially Simon Dell, Sandy Heslop, Allen Roberts and Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts. I have been grateful for the encouragement of Richard Woodfield throughout. 2 I use the term here in a metaphoric sense. A true lenticular exploits the stereoscopic features of lenses to produce alternative images by slightly altering the angle at which a surface is viewed rather than, as here, by seeing the same image in alternative ways. For an insightful discussion of the significance a lenticular may have in contemporary visual culture see Allen F. Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts, ‘flickering images, floating signifiers: optical innovation and visual piety in Senegal’, Material Religion, 4:1, 2011, 4-31. There are also parallels to the argument to be developed here in Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, A Psychology of the Creative Eye, Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, (1954, 1974). 3 Tim Ingold, Lines, A brief history, London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Another related essay by Ingold is also echoed in this article: ‘The Textility of Making’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34, 2010, 91-102. The argument that different perspectives derive from working forwards from the creative act of making rather than backwards from a finished object to an assumed original intention is also evident in what follows. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 2 in its turn, has implications for the ways in which images are seen across cultures and even within them. This is especially notable in societies which draw a gendered distinction between the kinds of making that are appropriate to men and those which are restricted to women, as in the example discussed below. The question of whether different ways of making imply identifiably different ways of seeing has a limited bibliography. To the extent that we can find analyses which move in that direction, almost all discussions of the matter find it difficult to get to grips with the question or avoid it altogether. Neither Gombrich4 nor Berger5, though both rich in insight, quite tackle the issue in its cross-cultural context; nor indeed does Wittgenstein in his classic discussion of the image of a duck which is also a rabbit.6 We can find sympathetic phrases here and there in other works concerned with ways of seeing. Julian Spalding remarks: ‘To understand the art of other ages and cultures, we have to make an imaginative leap into the minds of the people who made it. And to do that, we have to forget our modern ideas about art, history and about seeing itself.’7 Agreed; but, working backwards from what we see now to how the same images and patterns might have been seen at other times and in other places, is far from easy. In the end the thesis Spalding develops is a rather bland one about art as a medium for creating a sense of wonderment – a perspective much more comprehensively argued by Alfred Gell.8 James Elkins explicitly discusses ‘the nature of seeing’ at length; again, though he examines pictorial images from beyond the western canon, the issue of whether there might be different ways of seeing based on different cultural and artistic practice - and, if so, what those differences might be - remains largely unexplored.9 The most sustained argument of the kind developed here is perhaps that by David Summers in his discussion of the idea of ‘facture’.10 Summers notes that the word ‘artefact’ combines the idea of the final object with the processes of its making. The term ‘facture’ expresses this sense of the artefact as evidence of the continuum of actions which are involved in its creation. The object or image as encountered by a subsequent viewer is a record of its having been made, most apparent in what he calls the autobiographical style. Van Gogh’s urgent brushwork speaks to his own technique and state of mind but at the same time the resulting painting is a record of the traditions of easel painting, the methods of preparing canvas and paints and the significance attached to painting in the first place. The same approach can be taken to work in other materials - in stone, clay, metals and so forth - which are collected, traded, assessed and then they are made into artefacts, all processes which are fundamental to the understanding of the final product. This does not necessarily lead Summers to a detailed discussion of how procedures of making may be 4 E.H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order, A Study in the psychology of decorative art, Oxford: Phaidon, 1979; The Image and the Eye: further studies in the psychology of pictorial representation, Oxford: Phaidon, 1982. 5 John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin, 1972; About Looking, London: Writers and Readers, 1980. 6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1953, part II ix; see also E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, London: Phaidon, 1977. 7 Julian Spalding, The Art of Wonder: A History of Seeing, London: Prestel, 2005, 7. 8 Alfred Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in J. Coote and A. Shelton, Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, 40-67. 9James Elkins, The Object Stares Back, On the Nature of Seeing, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. 10 David Summers, Real Spaces, World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, London: Phaidon, 2003, chapter 1 and especially 74-86. Richard Wollheim’s discussion of ‘Ur-painting’ is similarly suggestive in its sophisticated treatment of the emergence of artistic intentionality from the process of inscribing random marks on a surface (Painting as an Art, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 19-25) John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 3 implicated in the way things are seen, but the link of art to making through a focus on facture is none the less moving in the same direction as the argument in this essay. One specific instance is examined in some detail below: that of design practice in an equatorial African kingdom – how it has been presented in the literature and how it is regarded in indigenous terms. Its discussion in the art historical and ethnographic writing has from the start represented the pattern-making in question in linear form, drawing it out in illustrations and inviting the naming of individual motifs. It has, in effect, been consistently written up as if it is a uniform decorative system. As a result it is assumed that it is ‘seen’ in a particular way – or rather, that western ways of ‘seeing’ are replicated elsewhere without nuanced differences and subtleties. This approach, I argue, hides aspects that it otherwise purports to reveal as a result of focusing exclusively on the final product rather than reflecting the processes of its making. The implications are, however, potentially wider than this particular example in so far as linear models of design and pattern have dominated writing about cross-cultural visual encounter - just as linear modes have dominated writing about history or the representation of processes of thought, as Ingold has explored. Matisse and his ‘velvets’ My problem in reading the ‘quiet coach’ image may have been precipitated in part by thinking about Henri Matisse’s methods of using collage techniques to create compositions. Around the end of 1943, Matisse famously turned from painting and drawing to creating compositions by pinning vibrant coloured cut-out shapes onto a base surface to create the innovative collages which characterised the production of his later life.11 With the war in Europe and North Africa swirling close-by, he was living in the south of France, seriously ill and afflicted with failing eye-sight. Around him, arranged on his bedroom and studio walls for inspiration, were parts of his textile collection whose life-long influence on his art has been the subject of a recent exhibition and associated catalogue.12 Whilst some of his later work has clear paternity in the textile designs which filled his field of vision whilst he remained stranded indoors as an invalid, others have a less obvious connection. A large Egyptian tent-hanging with a giant coloured rosette at the centre has an evident relationship to his designs for stained glass windows. However, the presence of Kuba embroidered textiles from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (the former Zaire) - to be seen alongside Tahitian tapa, barkcloth, in photographs of Matisse taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1943/44 - has a less obvious, but intriguing significance. 11 There is a large literature on this. In addition to other texts cited here, substantive illustration and discussion is also to be found in John Elderfield, The Cut-Outs of Henri Matisse, London: Thames and Hudson, 1978; Olivier Berggruen and Max Hollein (eds.), Henri Matisse: Drawing with Scissors, Masterpieces of the late Years, Munich: Prestel, 2002. For a definitive life of Matisse, see Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, Volume One, The Early Years, 1869 – 1908 and Matisse the Master: A life of Henri Matisse, Volume Two, The Conquest of Colour 1909 – 1945, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1998 and 2005. 12 The exhibition was shown at three venues in 2004-5: the Musée Matisse, Le Cateau-Cambrésis; the Royal Academy, London; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The catalogue and catalogue essays are published as Matisse, His Art and His textiles: The fabric of dreams, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2005. An earlier exhibition exploring similar themes with specific reference to the Kuba was shown in Japan in 1992. The Catalogue by Mary Hunt Kahlenberg and Robert T. Coffland is published as Matisse’s Secret, Kuba Textiles of Zaire, Nogizaka Art Hall, 1992. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 4 The textiles in question are generally referred to in English as ‘Kasai velvets’, or in French as ‘velours’, referring to the region they come from on the southern fringes of the equatorial forest and, beyond that, to their appearance (though not to the technical details of their manufacture for they are not in fact ‘velvets’ but, rather, what is known as Richelieu embroidery). Matisse’s tribute to his study of these textiles – which he himself referred to as his ‘African velvets’ - would seem to be the large colourful composition laid out landscape- style (as are the Kuba embroideries when square panels are sewn together selvedge to selvedge), which he entitled Les Velours (1947). But, if so, there is an interesting puzzle which arises. Les Velours does not in fact look like Kuba embroidered textiles and deviates from the canon of Kuba textiles in a number of fundamental ways, most notably in the shapes of the collages which are often curvilinear, not rectilinear as Kuba embroideries always are.13 The picture also overlaps the vertical colours where Kuba design integrates different forms in a network but never elides them in this way. So, the cut-outs have moved a considerable distance from the prototypes on the walls around Matisse’s bed and his wheelchair. Indeed, to the extent that they have an identifiable visual connection to Kuba textile-making practices, it would seem – paradoxically – that the greatest affinities are with the Kuba’s own version of collage, their appliquéd cloth, and not with the embroideries. There, curvilinear forms are applied to a base textile which is worn as a wraparound skirt. These ostensibly cover a hole that has developed and follow the shape of the tear; however, other ‘patches’ are cut out and sewn onto the cloth to create balanced compositions in exactly the manner employed by Matisse with his cut-outs.14 That said, there is no evidence that Matisse owned any Kuba appliqués or that he was even aware of Kuba appliqué practices. So we are left with a Matisse work apparently inspired by Kuba embroideries, but which has diverged very considerably from the originals. I suggest that what is involved is a complex process of creative inspiration, an encounter not just with an otherwise unfamiliar decorative tradition from an unfamiliar culture in equatorial Africa, but with a distinctive way of seeing. Further, I argue that Matisse may lead us to an understanding of salient features of Kuba design which the more academic styles of writing to be reviewed shortly (and which have been in play for over a century) have steadily obscured. Indeed, it might be contended that it exposes the misapprehensions of a modernist preference for reverting to the linear and the representational when faced with understanding the complexities of a foreign practice of abstract design – one uncovered as Matisse himself was changing the whole format of his artistic practice when turning to cutting paper with scissors. Matisse remarked of his Kuba textiles: ‘I never tire of looking at them for long periods of time, even the simplest of them, and waiting for something to come to me from the mystery of their instinctive geometry.’15 One argument might be that when he turned to cut-outs he did so because, just as Kuba design is an experiment with interlocking blocks of geometric forms, so for Matisse in older age and with diminishing sight it was easier to work with bold shapes than to draw or paint, both of which required close-up looking. 13 I speak here of the cut-pile embroideries which are the focus of what follows. Some styles of ‘linear’ stitching do have a broadly curvilinear form, as mentioned below. 14 See John Mack, ‘De la nécessité naît la qualité; L’évolution de l’art textile chez les femmes Kuba’, in Au Royaume du Signe: Appliqués sur toile des Kuba, Zaire, Paris: Fondation Dapper, 1988, 21- 23. The holes are often produced in the process of softening the textiles which is done by pounding them with a wooden or ivory pestle. 15 As quoted in Hilary Spurling, ‘Material World: Matisse, His Art and His Textiles’, in Matisse, His Art and His Textiles: The fabric of Dreams, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005, 32. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 5 Indeed, contrary to his own statement, it seems from other evidence that looking for long periods of time did indeed cause him eye strain and that he was deeply concerned with what he feared was incipient blindness. By ‘looking’ for long periods of time he may actually have intended to imply not just examining what was strategically placed in his line of vision on the walls around him, but also the act of closing his eyes and re-imagining the textile designs. This, after all, is a technique he used throughout his life in his own work and which he recommended to students of painting. ‘Close your eyes and hold the vision’, he told one student in 1908, ‘and then do the work with your own sensibility’. Or, again, he is quoted as remarking: ‘Close your eyes and visualize the picture; then go to work, always keeping these characteristics the important features of the picture. And you must at once indicate all that you would have in the complete work. All must be considered in interrelation during the process – nothing can be added.’ 16 Not only did Matisse pre- conceive his work with eyes closed but he even on occasion drew and engraved whilst blindfolded. If ‘eyes closed’ was a part of his art practice, it could also be implicated in his notion of what he otherwise talks of as ‘looking’; it is part of the concentrated act of conceiving and then executing an art work. The purpose behind this was clearly to ensure that the detail, the individual motif, is considered not in isolation but in relation to the whole. His concern was with the overall organisation of pictorial space; and the whole, in fact, often gives the impression of extending well beyond the confines of the individual picture. It is characteristic of many of Matisse’s paintings that they are flat portrayals, often lacking either strong perspective or indeed a clear centre. Again a comparison with Kuba textile design is apposite. As a result they have the potential for expansion beyond the area they actually occupy. This, no doubt, is what Frank Stella meant when he said of Matisse’s pictures that he always remembered them as being bigger than they actually are.17 His intention is to deny the eye the possibility of settling on one spot and then working out to explore the rest of the picture. He is, in effect, seeking to invite the viewer to adopt the same way of looking as he adopts himself. ‘I try’, he is quoted as saying, ‘to make sure the image is whole as it enters the spectator’s mind, after which it acts in accordance with its depth of expression and that of the spectator’s mind.’18 The idea, he remarked is ‘to lose your way.’19 Looking ‘with eyes closed’ also had another implication. His cut-outs were not just about form but about the juxtaposition of colours, as in a related way his paintings had been. Matisse once remarked: ‘Turner lived in a cellar. Once a week, he abruptly opened the shutters, and then what incandescence! What dazzling sights! What jewelry!’20 The composition may be conceived in the mind’s eye, it may be created in a half-light, but it emerges in its true vibrancy in the final work. What Matisse was looking to create, however, was not an ‘avalanche’ of colour, as he put it, but ‘an organisation and construction which is sensitive to maintaining the beautiful freshness of colour.’21 Colour, he asserted (in what is a 16 Sarah Stein, ‘Sarah Stein’s Notes’, (1908), in Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art, London: Phaidon, 1973, 43 and 45. These statements are interesting as expressing the switch from a symbolist concern with interior vision towards more modernist preoccupations. For a fuller discussion of Matisse’s thinking in this period see Roger Benjamin, Matisse’s ‘Notes of a Painter’: Criticism, Theory, and Context, 1891-1908, Ann Arbor, Mi: UMI Research Press, 1987. 17 Yves-Alain Bois, ‘On Matisse: The Blinding: For Leo Steinberg’, translated by Greg Sims. October, 68, 1994, 64. 18 Bois, ‘On Matisse’, 67. 19 Bois, ‘On Matisse’, 83. 20 As quoted in Bois, ‘On Matisse’, 119. 21 Henri Matisse, ‘The Role and Modalities of Colour’, (1945) in Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art, 99. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 6 familiar distinction), is about the senses where drawing is about the spirit. Thus, his cut- outs had a strong sensory motivation behind them. Colour was his means of comprehending the essence of things and of translating that into an emotional impact reconceived in a finished work. Kuba textiles, he thought, had about them both the compositional qualities and the simplicity which he was seeking to create. Their form and especially their deployment of colour were (as he described them) ‘signs’ - but not in the semiotic sense current at the time. Rather he was interested in the extent to which a juxtaposed series of contrasting coloured shapes across a pictorial surface could give an abbreviated description of the character of an intended subject.22 In Les Velours, as Jack Flam has remarked, ‘the entire work is quite literally organised in terms of the structural principles of textile decorations.’23 It is, it could be argued, the culmination of a life-long preoccupation with seeking to represent emotion - rather than transcribing the mere physicality of things. As he wrote, There is no separation between my old pictures and my cut-outs, except that with greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials and of the object that I used to present in the complexity of its space, I have preserved the sign which suffices and which is necessary to make the object exist in its own form and in the totality for which I conceived it.24 If looking intently at his textiles, in the individualistic way Matisse himself recommended to budding artists, was complicit in this culmination of his pictorial agenda, what he was to take from the contemplation of his Kuba embroideries is markedly different from the conventional ways in which they are understood and interpreted in the extensive literature that has built up over the past hundred or so years. There are, in effect, two ways of regarding Kuba (and indeed any) textile tradition: one requires no enquiry of an ethnographic kind but is simply a response based on prolonged exposure to the visual qualities of the textiles, a form of connoisseurship; the other comes from asking questions of the Kuba themselves, searching for meanings - and much of it linked to the idea that far from being abstraction the designs are in some degree representational of, or have referents to, physical realities. But, for all that, are the proponents of the second approach (of which, by background and training, I am one) in a better position to portray the essence of Kuba design than, for example, Matisse? Of course, the separation between these two approaches is not perforce a yawning gap. There is a certain resonance between Matisse’s writings on his artistic intentions and the influential work of the social anthropologist Alfred Gell on the idea of the ‘agency’ of art. When Matisse talks of his ambition to produce pictures whose visual qualities initially defy the eye he is close to prescribing what, in writing about decorative art, Gell talks of as the ‘cognitive indecipherability’ of that form of pattern-making which tantalises and enchants.25 Gell, however, goes further than Matisse. The apotropaic qualities of intricate designs, he suggests, draw the viewer in only to frustrate the act of seeing and, as wholes are mixed up with parts, continuities are confounded by discontinuities. If Matisse sought to invite the viewer to find his way to an understanding of the work, for Gell the point of complex patterning was to leave the viewer irretrievably lost. In his making Matisse seeks to educate 22 For a useful summary of Matisse’s reflections on the use of colour see John Gage, Colour and Meaning: practice and meaning from antiquity to abstraction, London: Thames and Hudson, c. 1999, 21-22. 23 Jack Flam, ‘Matisse and the Metaphysics of Decoration’, in Matisse, His Art and His Textiles, 44. 24 Henri Matisse, ‘Testimonial’, (1951) in Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art, 137. 25 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, 95. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 7 the eye of the spectator in creating effects which are subtle rather than declaratory, which do not reveal their intentions but which all the same do not produce the perplexity that might lead to them being disregarded out of hand. He wants to move beyond the conventional ways of looking and shift seamlessly towards an evocation of emotion. The degree of perplexity is more of an issue for Gell. In a key statement he suggests that the ‘enchantment’ of things derives from pure wonder about how they came to be in the first place, as a Sunday painter (such as himself) might find the skill of a Vermeer unimaginable.26 And clearly for Gell ‘enchantment’ has a double significance as both the quality of visual delight and of magic.27 In that sense both Matisse and Gell see a significant entanglement of maker and viewer and by extension, we might suggest, the acts of making and those of seeing are intimately tied up with each other. For one it is a process of seduction, of drawing in and intriguing; for the other of repulsion, of confusing and thereby resisting the gaze. This entanglement of making and seeing, then, highlights the proposition that different cultures might have different approaches. But can we go further? Do different technologies and arenas of artistic practice within the same culture therefore imply differently modulated ways of seeing? In the case of a culture originally documented without the panoply of modern techniques of visual testing, it is, of course, difficult to do more than speculate. Yet gendered differences in ways of seeing are precisely what the first ethnographic reports of Kuba culture hint at. We begin by looking at these earlier encounters before presenting the relevant literature in more detail. Encountering Kuba pattern The Kuba are a people whose visual culture has only been known to outsiders for a relatively short period of time: the first coherent collections of Kuba art were made by William Sheppard, an African-American missionary, as late as 1892 and are now housed in the Hampton University Museum, Virginia. The influential ethnographer Leo Frobenius passed by Kuba country in 1905 and his collections are now in the Museum für Völkerkunde, Hamburg and in the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia.28 Then, shortly afterwards, a jaunty Hungarian-born ethnographer, Emil Torday, greatly extended knowledge of their history and culture making an extensive collection of objects, field-notes and photographs which are mostly housed in the British Museum where it arrived in 1908.29 Although he worked and documented more widely in the southern Congo, his greatest enthusiasm was for the Kuba, of whom he became a major proponent publishing extensively on Kuba culture before and after the 1914-18 war, in both scholarly and popular contexts.30 Around 1900 the society these first outsiders encountered was one which, like a number of historical kingdoms in sub-Saharan Africa, might be described as imploded. The 26 Gell, Art and Agency, 72. 27 Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment’. 28 David Binkley, ‘A Century of Collecting Kuba Art’, in Mary Lou Hultgren and Jeanne Zeidler, A Taste for the Beautiful, Zairian Art from the Hampton University Museum, Hampton Vi: Hampton University Museum, 1993, 27- 32. 29 John Mack, Emil Torday and the Art of the Congo, 1900-1909, London: British Museum Publications, nd (1990) 30 Emil Torday and T.A. Joyce, Notes ethnographique sur les peuples communement appelés Bakuba ainsi sur les peuplades apparentées: Les Bushongo, Tervuren: Annales du Musée du Congo Belge, Serie IV, 1911; Emil Torday, On the Trail of the Bushongo, London: Seeley Service & Co., 1925. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 8 Kuba were essentially self-referential. They had no overall name for themselves. There are nineteen named subgroups each with its own chiefly structure, but acknowledging the authority of the king (nyimi). The term ‘Kuba’ (or ‘BaKuba’) was an overall name given to them by others. For themselves, they were simply ‘the people of the king’. Torday also recorded the alternative term Bambala for the Bushoong sub-group - the term meaning ‘people of the cloth’. Like many centralised states, they conducted their external affairs and their trade at the borders of their territory where markets were located; foreigners rarely penetrated to the centre of the kingdom and its capital Nsheeng. Indeed, Sheppard first travelled to the heart of Kuba country by following traders returning to the capital from markets located at its boundaries. This, no doubt, is amongst the reasons why external knowledge of the kingdom was delayed until late in the history of exploration of this part of the African continent. Sheppard, and most notably Torday, could present a people who - by comparison with, say, the Kongo kingdom closer to the Atlantic coast - appeared to have developed in something much closer to what they thought could be presented as pristine isolation. It seemed they could be characterised as more completely paradigmatic of untrammelled ‘African-ness’, a feature which chimed with Matisse’s feeling for what he thought of as the ‘instinctive simplicity’ of their textile designs. And, in Torday’s promotion of Kuba culture, a great deal of positive advocacy flowed therefrom. The kingship was invested in the nyimi, selected by matrilineal descent amongst the Bushoong sub-group. He was heir to a dynasty which went back to the seventeenth century, the date determined by an oral tradition that the first king, Shyaam aMbul aNgoong, was ruling during a solar eclipse which astronomers were able to identify as having happened in 1680. Oral tradition recorded in varying detail events associated with the reigns of successive kings. Thus, when Torday began to write down accounts of the narratives of Kuba royalty he was able to describe a sumptuous kingdom with its own history; and by calculating forwards from the late seventeenth century to his own day it was possible to attribute approximate dates to successive rulers. In effect, he was able to convert unwritten accounts into a dynastic history of the kind familiar from archival sources for European kingdoms. In the narratives royalty is central to the development of all the arts which are distinctive of the Kuba, including the invention of pattern, as is interestingly affirmed in an account by the American missionary Conway Wharton. Wharton was in the Kuba region of Kasai in the 1920s and gives a vivid illustration of the royal authority which underlies pattern-making, as it does other arenas of Kuba artistic innovation. He was responsible for the introduction of a motorbike into the area and arranged for a special viewing in the presence of the king. As the motorbike shot off down the thoroughfare it was enveloped in a cloud of dust. But the wonder of the watching court was not reserved for the disappearing testament to the power of engineering technology. Rather it was the pattern left by the motorbike tyres on the sandy street which proved the miracle. It was copied by royal sculptors and is now known by the name of the nyimi who witnessed its appearance – literally - on the streets of the Kuba capital.31 The Torday collection from the Kuba went on exhibition soon after its arrival in London immediately attracting scholarly comment; and, as I have documented elsewhere, it 31 Conway Wharton, The Leopard Hunts Alone, New York: Fleming H. Revell co., 1927, 43-4. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 9 came to the attention of British artists of the second decade of the twentieth century.32 Since then a great deal has been written about Kuba pattern-making; and Kuba textiles are now marketed in such quantity that they are very readily available outside Africa whilst Kuba design has been extensively copied, originally by artists of the Omega workshops and subsequently by modern textile manufacturers. The designs have attracted the analytical skills of historians, art historians, anthropologists and museum curators alike,33 and at least one artist has conducted intense visual analysis of Kuba textile patterns published in an extensively illustrated monograph.34 Even a geometrician has been inspired to undertake a formal analysis of the distinctive patterns.35 But all this attention can be seen as both a strength and a weakness. In the end there is arguably a problem which arises precisely because Kuba decorative practice is so thoroughly construed as a ‘system’; indeed the ways in which this is expressed and illustrated in published accounts can be seen to obscure or skew aspects of the very phenomenon it seeks to explore. In the course of being interpreted Kuba pattern has ultimately been commodified. The on-going dialogue between those interested in Kuba visual culture and indigenous discussants and commentators has, I suggest, altered and reconfigured Kuba ideas of their own practice. The patterns themselves are predominantly rectilinear in form - though not exclusively so, as those on curved surfaces such as buffalo horn, the female abdomen and some styles of rounded cup are themselves often curvilinear. It might, of course, be argued this is because they have to be. When the geometrician Donald Crowe examined the objects in Sheppard’s collection he found that just over two-thirds of all the possible permutations of interlocking crochets, lozenges, crosses, diamond shapes and so forth were present in his otherwise relatively small sampling of Kuba artistry. These repeat across a surface but not always in a strictly symmetrical way. As one example of the practice, a textile collected by Torday (and familiar to many from its use as the cover image on the Journal of Material Culture) repeats a simple design in one half of the textile. However, although it has the same broad geometric form, as it repeats it becomes the negative of itself: black becomes yellow and yellow becomes black. It is typical of what might be called the ‘studied irregularity’ which is characteristic of many examples of Kuba design, especially those on embroidered textiles and the appliquéd skirts referred to in introducing this essay. In short, we might observe that a looser aesthetic seems to inform the design-work on textiles in general by comparison with the more regular, strictly-symmetrical, designs on carved surfaces or basketry mats, for instance. 32 John Mack, ‘Kuba Art and the Birth of Ethnography’, in Enid Schildkrout and Curtis Keim, The Scramble for Art in Central Africa, Cambridge University Press, 1998, chapter 3. 33 Monni Adams, ‘Kuba embroidered cloth’, African Arts, 12: 1, 1978, 24-39; ‘Where two Dimensions Meet’, in D. Washburn (ed.), Structure and Cognition in Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 40-55; ‘Beyond symmetry in Middle African Design’, African Arts,1989, 23: 1, 33-43. Joseph Cornet, Art Royal Kuba, Milan: Edizione Sipiel, 1981. Patricia Darish, ‘This is our Wealth: Towards an Understanding of Shoowa Aesthetic’, Elvehjem Museum of Art Bulletin, 1996. John Mack, ‘Bakuba Embroidery Patterns :A Commentary on their Social and Political Implications’, Textile History, 11, 1980, 163-74. Vanessa Drake Moraga, Weaving Abstraction, Kuba Textiles and the Woven Art of Central Africa, Washinton DC: The Textile Museum, 2011. Jan Vansina, The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba Peoples, Madison,Wi: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978, chapter 12. Dorothy Washburn, Style, Classification, and Ethnicity: Design Categories on Bakuba Raffia Cloth, Philadelphia:Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 80:3, 1990. 34 Georges Meurant, Shoowa Design, African Textiles from the Kingdom of Kuba, Thames and Hudson: London, 1986. 35 Donald Crowe, ‘The Geometry of African Art: Bakuba Art’, in The Journal of Geometry, 1:12, 1971, 169-83. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 10 Processes of making The process of producing most of the designs for which the Kuba are renowned in all the various media that they exploit involves working on restricted areas of a total design. In terms of making, this is not completely the same as the practices Matisse developed in turning to his bold cut-outs which involved trying out blocks of shaped colours in different juxtapositions to generate a decorative whole. However, Kuba patterns typically interlock and cover a complete surface such that a sense of the whole of the design is imagined in advance even when it is not laid out in plan before it is executed. The patterns, though numerous in various media, appear similar to each other in conception and look as if they form part of a common design ‘vocabulary’. Each is named, though as we shall see the significance of these names needs to be treated cautiously. In this respect the work of men and women could seem to be alike. However, carving designs in wood involves laying out an incised linear pattern; mat-making, like the weaving men do, proceeds by putting in place successive cane strands or threads which imply linear, symmetrical methods of making. There are, certainly, forms of embroidery which also involve linear stitching, notably those produced by women from the ruling group, the Bushoong. That, however, is not the case with the Kuba cut-pile textiles which Torday collected and which have been exported in such quantities that they are now found in many museums and private collections world-wide. And it is here, rather than in the other arenas of Kuba design, that asymmetry is observable. (Figure 1) Significantly, the textile embroidery on which we are focussing is an area of exclusively female design-work whereas carving, iron-working, mat-making, basketry and the weaving of the base cloth are all male activities. In other complex societies in sub- Saharan Africa it is common not just to find gender distinctions in craftwork but specialism, often (as, for instance, in the kingdoms of Asante or Benin) to the extent of there being formal crafts guilds with systems of apprenticeship and established practices of patronage. Kuba embroidery, on the other hand, is a skill expected of all women, whilst experience in basketry and mat-making is expected of adult men. Indeed skill in mat-making was a precondition of being able to marry. Some craft activities are regarded as requiring more expertise, as is the case with sculpture and weaving, and these are the basis of professional guilds represented at court. One commentator, Monni Adams, mentions (but does not draw particular significance from) the gendered aspects of Kuba specialism. She points out that two-dimensional arts are carried out in public spaces whereas three-dimensional specialist work is carried out in ateliers by professionals. Two-dimensional arts, she remarks, belonged to everyone whereas three-dimensional arts were of restricted ownership.36 Whilst this is not entirely the case for textiles, it is notable that much craft production took place in public, often in doorways or indeed in market places or central squares; and some were communal in their nature. Mat-making was not necessarily the work of a single hand but could be carried out by groups of men working together across a surface; and the lengthy period of time it took to create squares of embroidery was often essentially the product of one woman but with different people taking it up periodically and adding to the design over the month and more it took to complete. So in these areas making was not a notably exclusive activity, nor yet a private one – but it was gender-specific. 36 Adams, ‘Where two Dimensions Meet’, 48 John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 11 Figure 1 Shoowa (Bashoba), Kuba, textiles illustrated in Emil Torday and T.A. Joyce, Notes ethnographique sur les peuples communement appelés Bakuba ainsi sur les peuplades apparentées: Les Bushongo, Tervuren: Annales du Musée du Congo Belge, Serie IV, 1911, colour plate XIV. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 12 The base cloth to which the embroidery is applied is a square of woven raffia. Its size is determined by the dimension of a strand of prepared ‘thread’ from the inner foliole of the raffia palm leaf, approximately a meter in length.37 Larger textiles are made by sewing them together side by side. The method used by women to produce cut-pile designs is to thread a strand of raffia fibre on an iron needle and pull it under a thread and up on the other side so that it leaves a short loose strand visible above the surface. The end which has been pulled through is next cut with an embroidery knife so that it is the same height above the surface as the loose end. The blade is then run over the surface to break up the raffia fibres and leave a uniform finish and the characteristic velvet-like end product. So what is created thereby is a point of coloured fibre. But, unlike the practice of Seurat, who varied coloured dots across a surface to create figurative imagery, the Kuba apply successive points created with the same thread so the result are blocks of the same colour, sometimes divided by lines though even so made up of shapes which, as we shall see, are to be conceived as blocks of colour. If there is a similarity between these methods of constructing an image it is perhaps closest to European mosaics rather than with the practices of wood-carving or mat-making which Kuba are associated with.38 The one – cut-pile embroidery - is a ‘pointillist’ technique; the other – woodcarving or mat-making - linear. To take the observation further we are fortunate to have an authoritative and relatively recent description of how a sub-group of Kuba typically make and regard their textiles. In the early 1980s the art historian Patricia Darish was the first and only outside researcher to apprentice herself as an embroiderer and to ask some of the more fundamental questions. Darish trained amongst the Shoowa, perhaps the most celebrated of cut-pile makers. Instead of the focus on pattern names and on the finished textile which characterises many other accounts, she has been able to explore how making relates to how textiles are assessed, how they are seen and how used.39 Although there are regional variations and we should not assume that her observations necessarily apply to all cut-pile manufacture, they are revealing. Several distinctive points emerge from her observations which I summarise here. Firstly, Darish notes that embroidering is something women do alongside the often more pressing tasks of cultivating the fields or attending to domestic and family activities. It has more of the air of a pastime as women work on the embroidery in an informal setting. The square of woven cloth is prepared by folding under and hemming the edges and possibly dying it a background colour, though amongst Shoowa this is completely obscured on the upper surface by the completed pattern. The first design consists of a series of small evenly-spaced triangles along one edge of the panel. Work then moves to the body of the cloth. It may start with the embroiderer stitching in some of the lines to guide her as work proceeds. Alternatively work may progress gradually across the textile without any physical pre-conception of the design. Torday collected several unfinished embroideries and they suggest that both practices were current in his day. (Figure 2). Whether the example with some of the lines indicated is for the guidance of novices and the other used by experienced embroiderers, or whether the two methods of working on embroidered 37 John Picton and John Mack, African Textiles, London: British Museum Publications: 2nd impression, 1991, 33-5. 38 John Manley, ‘Decoration and Demon Traps: The meanings of Geometric Borders in Roman Mosaics’, in Chris Gosden (ed.), Communities and Connections: Essays in honour of Barry Cunliffe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 426-48. I am grateful to the author for pointing out this similarity and providing me with the reference to his own article. 39 Darish, ‘This is our Wealth’. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 13 textiles represent regional variations of practice as they were in the early twentieth century, is not clear. But, even where some indicative lines are laid out in advance, the embroidery is not simply a version of painting by numbers for the internal parts of each design element are usually varied as they repeat. Variation is expected. Strict rendering of a prototype is not the point; for, if it were, it would always be laid out symmetrically, followed precisely and constantly checked as work proceeds. And the plain weave base cloth, of course, has a regular structure to guide the embroiderer if she were looking to produce strict symmetry. However, Shoowa designs in particular display many subtle variations which suggests that the aesthetic is an exploratory one where the different possibilities of deploying pattern are tried out, varied and combined in an integrated whole across a single surface. Figure 2 Partly-finished Shoowa (Bashoba), Kuba, textile in Torday and Joyce, Notes ethnographique, Colour plate XVI no.6 As sections of the cloth are finished they are rolled up to protect the textile and keep it clean, or another cloth is stitched on to cover completed sections. This is an important aspect for it means that the finished areas of cloth are not always visible or referenced as work continues over the weeks and months it takes to complete a single textile. Thus embroidered textiles are not made flat or laid out as on an easel, nor intended for concentrated contemplation (after the manner in which Matisse regarded them). Darish compares them to Chinese scrolls that are rolled up and never seen in their entirety in the John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 14 process of making.40 Furthermore, as we also know from other sources, the finished textiles are not routinely displayed in public either, but are stored for use as grave goods. So, not only do older textiles from earlier generations rarely survive, but when complete they are not seen in daily life anyway. Women learn not by studying the patterns on existing cloths but from working alongside experienced embroiderers. Indeed, the creative process evident on a single raffia panel is also not infrequently the result of a shared practice as women may work on each other’s textiles introducing further variation and, potentially, further endorsing asymmetry.41 In terms of the patterns that are used, it appears that, although women may know of as many as twenty different patterns from a wider repertoire of design, in practice their technical competence and experience is limited to the creation of only a few and it is these that they explore in their work. Innovation was not identified with the invention of new patterns but with producing variations on established design themes and configurations. Perhaps it is for these reasons that Darish found that embroiderers were not concerned to assess each other’s efforts. Inviting opinions on quality is a somewhat contrived exercise in Shoowa villages; but, if shown anonymous work, women esteemed technical competence above other aspects.42 What do you call this? Despite this method of making, all discussion and analysis of two-dimensional pattern has systematically rendered it in a strictly geometric linear manner since Torday’s original documentation of Kuba design and has assumed the existence of something like a full dictionary of patterns and associated names. Neither practices of asymmetry, nor the individual maker’s restriction to only a small number of designs, are factored in. Joseph Cornet adopted the practice of drawing out and naming individual design motifs in his magnum opus Art Royal Kuba, based on a long-standing research interest fostered by friendship with one of the royal princes when he was Director of the Musée Nationale du Zaire. Georges Meurant in a lavishly-illustrated book goes in for intense interpretation which makes it at times difficult to fully understand. ‘A point’, he writes, ‘is immobile. By being repeated in one direction it can be made to imply a line which creates forms. The existence of tension between two points also forms an implicit line’.43 He seems to suggest the kind of thing Ingold explores in discussing the practice of linking the stars in constellations so as to create named figurative imagery.44 But surely this analogy has nothing to do with Kuba practice – the points in this case are juxtaposed, and of the same colour anyway, so they no longer appear as points but as blocks of colour connected in a deliberate and motivated way. None the less, he is suggesting that the essence of Kuba design is linear and it is therefore unavoidable that it should be rendered in linear form for the purposes of analysis and illustration. Pattern, in this understanding of it, is line enclosing discrete or interlinked space – and it can therefore be represented as separate linear form. 40Darish, ‘This is our Wealth’, 65. 41Darish, ‘This is our Wealth’, 60. 42 Darish,‘This is our Wealth’, 62-3. 43 Georges Meurant, Shoowa Design, 193. 44 Tim Ingold, Lines, 49. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 15 A visitor to Kuba territory in the 1970s, Monni Adams from the Peabody Museum at Harvard (as mentioned above), wrote extensively on pattern, though she had little to say about naming practices as such and does not seem to have enquired into this aspect. Much of what she subsequently reported concerned her stay at Nsheeng and specifically Bushoong embroidery (and for that matter mat-making and sculpted design). Here she is on Kuba pile cloth: The highest valued decoration is a form of embroidery that creates a pile about 5 mm thick on the surface…the pile traces linear designs which are juxtaposed with thick rows of embroidered lines altogether covering most of the surface of the cloth. These forms of ornamentation create heavy thickly layered cloth.45 She does not illustrate her discussion with the ubiquitous isolated patterns but is clearly on message. And then Dorothy Washburn, an archaeologist by background who has written extensively on the meaning and significance of design in different cultures, reported on her research on Kuba design carried out in the 1980s. She is otherwise well-known for her work on pattern and perception, particularly focussing on symmetry; some of this work has been conducted jointly with Donald Crowe. Her method was to take a large series of computer- generated designs and then ask Kuba to name them. Her conclusion is revealing of the assumptions inherent in the methodology. She writes: ‘The importance of line was reinforced in the naming of computer patterns.’46 Again the model for thinking about Kuba pattern is essentially and exclusively linear. This practice of drawing, of generating individual, geometrically-precise motifs in outline and attaching names to them implies the existence of some coherent and consistent notational system. Indeed it implies that pattern is like handwriting where variations are like deviations from the copperplate, from an Ur-like standard. It is revealing that in Torday’s notes the register of pattern names includes a significant number which have been translated as a ‘faulty’ version of something else, deviant forms which stray from the norm, versions of a pattern which – as he interprets it - have been poorly or inaccurately rendered. In Darish’s work with Shoowa women embroiderers, however, variation is shown to be anticipated and encouraged. They give the illusion of symmetry but not the actual symmetry of computer-generated images; and, of course, the embroideries have texture which again is missed in the abstracted analytical representations of them. Apart from these misgivings about the capacity of the analytical methods used to convey an appropriate understanding of the nuances of Kuba perceptions of design, these later accounts also miss some important subtleties that are found in the first description we have of the matter. True, the collection Emil Torday made and documented over one hundred years ago includes many of the elements which characterise later commentaries. He, too, abstracted individual motifs from a total design and asked the familiar question of Kuba artists: ‘what do you call this?’ (Figure 3). In the British Museum registers and in his published work these appear as isolated drawn images with the names of each configuration duly recorded. But this first attempt to record a Kuba vocabulary of pattern produced a much more nuanced response than subsequent inquiry has elicited. It is worth quoting in full. Torday described the fieldwork situation thus: 45 Adams, ‘Where two dimensions meet’, 49-50 46 Washburn, Style, Classification, and Ethnicity, 50. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 16 When we come, however, to designs derived from textile industries it is much more difficult to follow the native mind. As long as we had to deal with absolutely correct patterns which have come down from times immemorial there never was any hesitation in naming them; but when the artist had attempted to improve on these, or through sheer incapacity or inattention deviated from the form usage had sanctioned, even our native experts were often in disagreement, and the controversy became so lively that we expected them to come to blows at any time. No man ever claimed to be an expert in embroidered patterns; this belonged to woman’s realm, who again would give no opinion on carvings; and yet we find the same designs in both. We Europeans see a thing as a whole; the native considers one small part as essential and the rest as accessory; the name is derived from the detail. What complicates matters still further is that what is the basis of the design to the embroiderer, may be simply an unimportant detail to the sculptor; hence husband and wife may call the same thing by different names.47 Figure 3 Kuba patterns with the names as recorded by Torday in Torday and Joyce, Notes ethnographique, fig 207, 162. (Those with dots rather than lines are copied from female body decorations). Torday’s discussion includes a number of distinctive aspects of naming practice as it stood at the start of the twentieth century. One is the way in which pattern names are attributed to particular configurations of design. The whole, he suggests, is named after the 47 Torday, On the Trail of the Bushongo, 219-20. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 17 part. In other words the pictorial space as a whole should have a coherence which is achieved by variations around a visual theme, and it is this which naming practices acknowledge. Naming the whole after the dominant pattern theme is like naming a book after the leading theme where the chapters are at the level of detail and specificity. And this coheres with another anecdote recounted from the period. There is a story told about the first photographs which Torday took to Kuba country. Torday was far from being a talented photographer; nor was he, by his own admission, much good at developing negatives into prints in the field.48 Indeed the images in his collection of photographs were probably mostly taken for him by others (on his 1908 trip, by his companion W. H. Hilton- Simpson) or they were prints taken from other people’s negatives. He was, however, keen to share his photographs with those amongst whom he was working (as he was his phonographic recordings). When he showed one of the better photographs to Kuba he found they were initially unable to ‘read’ them. Their attention was drawn to trying to identify the detail such that they could not immediately understand the conventions of ‘seeing’ photographic representations. Based on a familiarity with pattern and the characteristic methods of naming complexes of design, Kuba were - as we might gloss it - looking for the contrasts which define blocks or shapes. Photographs lack sharp edges - they neither have the uniformity of colour of sculpture nor the contrasting colours of cut-pile textiles. The photographs of the period are effectively shades of grey which bleed into each other. It took some time before Kuba could see what the image was about. In fact, it took the adoption of a perspective whereby you can switch how and what you see between scanning for detail and surveying totalities: between seeing, first, the trees rather than the wood, and then the wood at the expense of the trees. Of course, line is important. However, it is less about lines as division and more a question of lines as edges. To that extent it is better to think in terms of blocks of colour arranged across a surface. The model is that of building, an architectonic conception rather than a linear one. As making patterns is a kind of performance undertaken in public, so it seems is naming them. It becomes a kind of game. But if it is a performance then the act of drawing patterns out - rendering them in linear form or having a computer standardise them - is to try and stabilise what is mobile and exploratory. And this is at odds with processes of making and with indigenous naming practice. However, the general point that emerges is that obliging people to name things also obliges them to see them in a particular way, in this case a linear way. It leads potentially to a convergence of perception or at least an ability to see things in two ways, in what we started by suggesting is a ‘lenticular’ manner. One is a way of seeing based on processes of making, the other is a result of externally-driven analytical thinking. Significantly, what Torday found in the first decade of the twentieth century was not uniformity but difference - something which has slipped out of the discussion since. Then the visual perception of men and women – or more particularly of female embroiderers and male sculptors – were divergent even, as he describes it, conflictual. Subsequent discussion has failed to pick up on any gendered significance to how pattern is seen and named. 48 John Mack, ‘Documenting the Cultures of Southern Zaire: The Photographs of the Torday Expeditions 1900- 1909’ African Arts, 24:4, 1991, 60-9. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 18 Conclusion The model of cut-pile embroidery, then, is that of building up a pictorial space rather than drawing it out. To that extent it is akin to the shift that occurred in Matisse’s work in the 1940s when drawing was replaced by cutting thick paper with scissors and constructing pictures by trying out different juxtapositions of blocks of colour across a surface. It is significant, perhaps, that Matisse did not apparently draw out the shapes he wanted to create and then cut round them but cut directly into the prepared sheets of colour with scissors. In forgoing drawing and painting he was in a sense also forgoing line. Matisse’s first and most comprehensive works in cut-out was Jazz, a folio of twenty colour plates accompanied by a text composed by him and written in his own hand (developed in 1943-44 and published in 1947, the same year as Les Velours).49 Musical tonality was a much- exploited image Matisse himself used when discussing how art work is constructed. ‘Jazz’ is also a possible analogy to describe Kuba pattern-making where the suggestion of improvising round a theme is to the fore. But if this is an alluring way of thinking about Kuba pattern-making as a whole, it does not sit entirely happily. The symmetries of pattern carved in wood, or created in basketry or mat-making, would seem too rigid for it to be appropriate; it works better as a description of the studied asymmetries of embroidery. Improvisation around a theme is a fundamental principle in both jazz and in embroidery pattern-making and is deliberately cultivated as a creative technique. All of which is to say that making and seeing are fundamentally interconnected (as, more obviously, are playing and hearing). What confuses the issue is naming. It is not even that on being invited to identify isolated motifs, Kuba use terms such as ‘knot’, ‘smoke’, ‘back of a python’s head’, ‘tortoise’, ‘xylophone’ - terms which could easily lead to further complications by suggesting that geometric motifs are representational and that behind their exploitation lies a discourse of visual symbolism, something that is far from clear. Only some, such as ‘Woot’, (the name of the Adamic figure of Kuba mythology) seem to have greater significance.50 It is rather that naming imposes structure and logic on what is often a more fluid process. A practice-based perspective might suggest that how you represent things is derived from how you see things. Here I am suggesting the importance of the converse: that how you see things is also related to how you make them. In the Kuba case an analytical focus on naming practices evident in ethnographic and art historical writing has obscured the second part of the equation and shifted discussion away from the significance of making. A closer reading would suggest that differences in making may indeed have been related to differences in seeing and that Torday was witnessing the implications of this. However, his own working methods – his privileging of the linear and the diagrammatic – was ultimately to dissolve the distinction when taken up and exploited by successive researchers. And since the 1980s Kuba men have taken up embroidery in the Kasai to exploit the international commercialisation of their distinctive textile designs paying little attention to the subtle, nuanced practices of women in earlier times.51 Any of the original gendered basis of the making/seeing complex has now been superseded. 49 Jack D. Flam, ‘Jazz’, in Jack Cowart, Jack D. Flam, Dominique Fourcade and John Hallmark Neff, Henri Matisse, Paper Cut Outs, New York: St. Louis Art Museum and The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1977, 37-48 50 As is implied in the title of the most comprehensive history of the Kuba, Vansina, The Children of Woot. 51 Darish, ‘This is our Wealth’, 65-7. John Mack Making and Seeing: Matisse and the understanding of Kuba pattern 19 Ingold’s insightful discussion of the emergence of ‘the line’ closes with the appearance of post-modernity and the fragmentation of the linear which is one implication of the emergence of the challenge to find a place within a world of dislocation.52 T.J. Clark concludes his study of modernism in art with the advent of Abstract Expressionism, with Jackson Pollock and his randomised ‘avalanches’ of colour which make no reference to drawing or to lines.53 In academic writing a preoccupation with the linear is readily associated with the various modernisms of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whether it be in art history, anthropology – or, for that matter, music. It is an aspect of that emphasis on certainties, on causal relationships, on predictability and explicability, which characterises the thinking of the period. It is perhaps significant in that context that Matisse should have surrounded himself with geometric textiles composed of blocks of colour when he himself took a definitive step sideways from a linear approach in his own art practice. If we are right in suggesting that Les Velours is a tribute to Kuba textile embroideries and that in the same period Jazz referenced a similar insight in the field of musical performance, they would both seem to highlight an interest in the disjunctions between forms of representation and objects. Matisse is not evoking the presence of an object but of the effects which it has on him, achieved by the arrangement of colour and composition rather than any more directly representational means. It was not a matter of line so much as of outline, a different way of making heralding a different way of seeing which we can rediscover in Kuba embroidery practices. Once we recognise such alternative ways of seeing, it is entirely possible to envision an umbrella playing tenor sax, premising rampant disruptive noise rather than its opposite - the orderly world of studious quiet which we are otherwise admonished to observe. Or indeed, as I conjecture Kuba women did, to switch between the two. John Mack is Chairman of the Sainsbury Institute for Art and Professor of World Art Studies in the University of East Anglia. Previously he held a senior curatorial position in the British Museum. He has researched and written extensively on the visual culture of sub- Saharan Africa. In recent years he has been working on comparative themes in art resulting in books such as The Museum of the Mind (2003), The Art of Small Things (2007) and The Sea (2011). John.mack@uea.ac.uk 52 Ingold, Lines, 167-70 53 T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999, chapter 7. work_e3tcy7fk6rfzjdqwhfwqg53jjy ---- Microsoft Word - 04김성혜, 전유아.doc 61 English Teaching, Vol. 69, No. 1, Spring 2014 Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency Sung Hye Kim (Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation) Yuah V. Chon * (Hanyang University) Kim, Sung Hye, & Chon, Yuah V. (2014). Test-taking strategies of L2 adolescent learners: Three multiple-choice items and L2 proficiency. English Teaching, 69(1), 61-90. The demand for test-taking has become an inevitable element of Korean secondary EFL learners’ academic lives in which learners strive to excel in the high-stakes exam- oriented milieu. However, current knowledge of practitioners, such as those of teachers and administrators, may be insufficient for ascertaining if the learners actually undergo the test-taking process they anticipate and assess what they aim to test. In contrast to the product-oriented view where the primary interest is on the outcome (i.e., scores or stanine levels), the purpose of the present study was to explore 165 Korean high school learners’ test-taking process via questionnaires with proficiency and item type as the grouping variables. There was avid use of conventional reading strategies among the high proficiency learners and test management strategies among the lower proficiency learners. Results present implications for teaching learners not only to become test- wise, but also to work consistently towards building reading skills and adopt long-term learning strategies. Key words: multiple-choice, reading strategies, test-taking strategies, item type 1. INTRODUCTION In line with the cognitive perspective of learning during the 1970s (Mayer, 1992), the process-oriented view of language learning has generated interest in the investigation of learner strategies and language learning strategies (O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990). In reading, the focus has largely been on the types of reading strategies and their * Sung Hye Kim: First author; Yuah V. Chon: Corresponding author Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 62 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon relationships with reading proficiency (Hosenfeld, 1977; O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Purpura, 1998), the first language’s impact on second language use (Nevo, 1989), and strategy-based instruction in language classrooms (Dreyer & Nel, 2003; Tian, 2000). However, the strategy research has been less extended to research for test-taking strategies in spite of the interactive nature of the language skills. For instance, some students even with substantial knowledge of a foreign/second language are unable to perform well in tests, and Cohen (1998) asserts that this is due to success in language tests that depend both on sufficient linguistic and strategic competence. Regarding testing situations, test-taking strategies for multiple-choice items are of primary importance in the present study since they have shown to be most susceptible to multiple-choice items (Chou, 2013; Cohen, 1998, 2006; Cohen & Upton, 2006). Also, multiple-choice items have extensively been used in second/foreign language programs to assess different aspects of language since they are regarded as highly reliable, convenient in scoring, efficient, and economical. In the Korean context, multiple-choice questions are the dominant forms of the high- stakes College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) so that research on the test-taking strategies can provide insights for test developers about how test-takers approach tasks. That is, if the actual test-taking process does not coincide with test developers’ (e.g., teacher-assessors) anticipation, there is a reason to doubt whether the testing tasks measured what they intended to measure. That said, the primary interest of the present study is on test-taking strategies, being essential issues in test development and validation, and illustrates the process that learners undergo to answer multiple-choice items. However, Anderson, Bachman, Perkins, and Cohen (1991), and Rupp, Ferne, and Choi (2006) have noted the scarcity of research in this area in spite of the common testing procedure used in educational contexts. Another emerging interest of the study would be to examine how different item types and learners’ L2 proficiency may prompt the use of different test-taking strategies. Most teachers and practitioners may not be aware of the different test-taking strategies of Korean adolescent learners, which remain covert due to the cognitive-oriented nature of the test- taking process. Another reason why the process-oriented view of test-taking has not received ample attention may be due to teachers being more involved in teaching English content (e.g., grammar, vocabulary) so that the development or the decisions for selecting strategies has been relegated to students. Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 63 2. BACKGROUND 2.1. Test-taking Strategies for Reading Comprehension One of the main implications of a purpose for reading is that it guides readers in the selection of their strategies, and the range of skills they draw on. This is particularly pertinent for multiple-choice reading comprehension tests, because they present a context in which readers apply a variety of strategies that are unique and different from those utilized in a non-testing context. In fact, previous research demonstrates that readers adjust their strategies and engage in the type of comprehension process that most suit their purpose for reading (Alderson, 2000). In the testing context, debates about test-taking revolve around differing views on their classification. However, in general, test-taking strategies have been classified into three distinct categories: (1) language learner strategies, (2) test management strategies, and (3) test wiseness strategies (Cohen, 2006; Cohen & Upton, 2006). Language learner strategies refer to “the ways that respondents operationalize their basic skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, as well as the related skills of vocabulary learning, grammar, and translation” (Cohen, 2006, p. 308). Users of language learner strategies draw from their reading strategies, such as skimming and scanning, memorizing text information, making educated guesses, and looking for definitions, examples, main ideas, or details of meaning in the passage. These language learner strategies, which are similar to the cognitive strategies primarily require cognitive processing to answer test questions. The second category of test-taking strategies are test management strategies which are used for responding meaningfully to test items. For example, test-takers read the questions before going to the reading passage and directly look for answers from the text. Learners may also reread information for clarification or confirmation, select options through elimination of other options, consider or postpone dealing with a question, find answers in the text through some vocabulary or synonyms, or change answers after completing other questions. Although test management strategies are considered a type of test-taking strategy, they require learners to plan, monitor, and coordinate the target language input to search for the best way to answer questions. Test management strategies thus share common features of metacognitive strategies. Test wiseness strategies, according to Cohen (2006), refer to “strategies for using knowledge of test formats and other peripheral information to answer test items without going through the expected linguistic and cognitive processes” (p. 308). This may include looking for answers in chronological order in the text or taking advantage of clues appearing in other questions or options, or choosing the longest option in a multiple-choice question without knowing its meaning. Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 64 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon All in all, test-taking strategies (i.e., language learner strategies, test management strategies, test wiseness strategies) have been largely investigated as part of test validation, establishing whether test takers used the expected strategies to answer test items (e.g., Cohen & Upton, 2006; Dougals & Hegelheimer, 2005; Lee & Ku, 2005; Storey, 1997). In our study, in addition to reading strategies, we collectively refer to test management and test wiseness strategies as “test-taking strategies.” Incidentally, the literature also suggests how employment of test-taking strategies may have relationships with features of the test items and learner variables. The following section reviews this. 2.2. Test-taking Strategies, Test Items, and Learner Variables The main purpose of responding to multiple-choice (MC) questions about reading passages is, undoubtedly, to answer them correctly, and so test-takers select their strategies accordingly to optimize their chances for success. That is, since testing provides a unique purpose for reading, it impacts the strategies that test-takers draw on when responding to questions, which are mediated by characteristics of the test input such as text type and question type. In relation to the focus of the present study, there is particular interest in studies that research learners’ test-taking strategies of reading in relation to MC item types and learners’ proficiency. Studies have demonstrated how item type (Alderson, 2000; Anderson, Bachman, Perkins, & Cohen, 1991; Cohen & Upton, 2006; Dollerup, Glahn, & Rosenberg Hansen, 1982; Lee & Ku, 2005; Rupp, Ferne, & Choi, 2006), as well as test-taking strategies for different languages (L1 and L2; Nevo, 1989) may have an impact on the test-taking process. Rupp, Ferne, and Choi (2006) demonstrate that item type, in particular MC items, have an influence on the response process, but that the quality and intensity of the reading comprehension process that test-takers engage in can vary considerably across items. According to their proposition, an analysis of the structure and content of MC questions on any reading comprehension test will typically reveal that very different levels of reading comprehension are assessed with different items. In a process-oriented, verbal report study related to describing the reading and test- taking strategies that test takers used with different item types on the reading section of the LanguEdge Courseware (ETS, 2002), materials developed to familiarize prospective respondents with the New TOEFL, Cohen and Upton (2006) investigated the strategies used to respond to more traditional single-selection MC formats (i.e., basic comprehension and inferencing questions) versus the new selected-response (multiple selection, drag-and- drop) reading to learn items. The findings indicated that as a whole, the reading section of the New TOEFL does, in fact, call for the use of academic reading skills for passage comprehension—at least for respondents whose language proficiency was sufficiently Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 65 advanced so that they not only took the test successfully, but could also tell the researchers how they did it as well. When analyzing data on test-taking strategies employed by three students with different reading abilities when answering MC questions on the test, Lee and Ku (2005) found for three item types (i.e., understanding main ideas, understanding direct statements, and drawing inferences) that the test-takers were seen to use the strategy on ‘understanding information from the text’ more than any other strategies. The researchers interpret this to be an indication of the test-takers’ engagement of in-depth reading and inferencing processes rather than surface-structure-based reading processes. Also, the test-takers were found to use more strategies in the item types of “understanding main ideas” and “drawing inferences” than in those of “understanding direct statements.” This implies that they depended on strategies concerning discourse-intersentential relationship more frequently than sentence level information. Subject variables researched with regard to test-taking strategies have been learners’ proficiency (Carrell & Grabe, 2002; Gordon, 1987; Lee & Ku, 2005; Phakiti, 2003; Purpura, 1997, 1998, 1999; Taguchi, 2001; Yoshida-Morise, 1998; Yoshizawa, 2002) and vocabulary knowledge (Carrell & Grabe, 2002). With regard to the proficiency level of test-takers and their reported use of strategies in test-taking and their performance on the L2 tests, Purpura (1997, 1998) had test takers from 17 language centers in Spain, Turkey, and the Czech Republic answer a cognitive and metacognitive strategy questionnaire (based on the work of O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990), then take a standardized language test. When Purpura (1997, 1998) examined the relationships between strategy use and L2 test performance with high- and low-proficiency test takers, the researcher found the use of monitoring, self-evaluating, and self-testing serving as significantly stronger indicators of metacognitive strategy use for the low-proficiency group than for the high- proficiency group. In addition, it was found that high- and low-proficiency test takers, while often using the same strategies or clusters of strategies, experienced differing results when using them. Another study related to test-taking strategies and respondents’ proficiency levels involved an investigation into the relationship between the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies on an EFL reading test and success on the test (Phakiti, 2003). The students, who were enrolled in a fundamental English course at a Thai university, took a reading achievement test (which included MC questions), followed by a cognitive– metacognitive questionnaire on what they had been thinking while responding to test items. The results suggested that the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies had a weak but positive relationship to the reading test performance, with the metacognitive strategies reportedly playing a more significant role. In addition, the highly successful test takers reported significantly higher metacognitive strategy use than the moderately successful Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 66 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon ones, who, in turn, reported higher use of these strategies than the unsuccessful test takers. In their study aiming to provide construct validity of the reading comprehension section of CSAT, Lee and Ku (2005) generally found the low level learner exploiting as many test- taking strategies at his disposal as the other two readers. They note that this was in contrast to how they had expected the high-achieving test-takers to be more frequent in the use of strategies. However, they also note how the low level test-taker was not able to apply a group of strategies that are most effective in arriving at the correct response. The studies as a whole provide insight into how given test formats (i.e., MC) and item types may affect learner responses, and how these may interact with proficiency and other contextual factors. However, despite the considerable literature on learner strategies in L1 and L2 learning (Macaro, 2001), and the importance that has been placed on types of reading strategies and their relationship with reading proficiency (Grabe, 2009; Hosenfeld, 1977; O’Malley & Chamot, 1990), comparatively little research has focused on how EFL high school students apply strategies to process different MC reading items. This type of information is important because it is expected to provide information on construct validity for item writers, test developers, or teacher-assessors (Cohen & Upton, 2006; Lee & Ku, 2005). Based on previous findings, the following research questions were posed, in particular for separate interest in three types of MC questions, which respectively required skills for inferring knowledge (i.e., fill-in-the-blank), comprehensive understanding (i.e., reordering paragraphs), and factual understanding (i.e., information not true of the passage). The items have been chosen for their different testing construct, and evident problem- orientedness of the items for test-takers. To conclude, there was also analysis of how the learners’ English L2 proficiency was attributable to test-taking strategies and learning strategies that the learners had been using to improve L2 reading. 1. To what extent were the repertoire of reading and test-taking strategies employed by the learners in solving MC items? 2. How is the employment of reading and test-taking strategies different according to item type and learners’ English proficiency? 3. How do the subcategories of reading, test-taking and learning strategies for L2 reading predict the learners’ English proficiency? 3. METHODS 3.1. Participants The participants were recruited from the Seoul and Incheon area so that this study may Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 67 be more representative of learners in the municipal areas. All the learners were in their sophomore years (n = 166) and there was an equal proportion of learners for different gender. Table 1 lists the distribution of the participants for location and type of schools. Information on student stanine levels with a mock version of their CSAT indicated that there was almost an equal proportion of learners from each of the levels between 1-5 (i.e., level 1 = 19.1%, level 2 = 15.3%, level 3 = 16.0%, level 4 = 17.6%, and level 5 = 16.8%), but there were a smaller portion of learners at the lower stanine levels (i.e., level 6 = 6.1%, level 7 = 5.3%, level 8 = 3.8%, and level 9 = 0%). When calculated, the mean score of 71.01/100 from the mock CSAT indicated that the learners were on average a group of high-intermediate learners. We attribute this to the learner populations from the “Autonomous High Schools (ja-youl-hyung-kong-lip-go/sa-lip-go)” whose students are considered above average. In fact, 43.37% (n = 72) of the learners were from these types of school so that data on their achievement level on the CSAT is not surprising. In addition to the learners that participated in the questionnaires, there were four learners that were also recruited for semi-structured interviews in order to gain a more detailed view of the test- taking process. There were two male and female students, and they were recruited on the basis of different stanine levels. With assistance from the teachers, the student-interviewees were chosen so that there were two students (i.e., one male and one female student) from stanine level 1 (i.e., higher proficiency), while the other two students (i.e. one male and one female student) had reached level 5 (i.e., lower proficiency) on the mock CSAT according to their teachers. However, the interview protocols were utilized more for triangulation to the quantitative analysis. TABLE 1 High School and Gender of Learners High Schools Gender Location Total Male Female KD High Sch. (Auto) 23 0 Seoul 23 PM Girls’ High Sch. 0 34 Seoul 34 HS High Sch. (Auto) 0 19 Incheon 19 SH Girls’ High Sch. (Auto) 0 30 Seoul 30 BK High Sch. 60 0 Incheon 60 Total 83 83 166 Note. Auto: Autonomous Public/ Private High Schools Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 68 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon 3.2. Instruments and Materials 3.2.1. Reading and test-taking strategies questionnaire Considering our interest in the reading and test-taking strategies of MC English items, we developed a questionnaire for the strategies. For the purpose of trying to distinguish the use of strategies for different test items, we concentrated mainly on three items which were each presented with subsequent common 15 questionnaire items on strategies, totaling 45 items. The taxonomy of reading and test-taking strategies was retrieved from Cohen and Upton’s (2006) coding scheme previously developed from their verbal report study. Their data collected from 32 students, representing four language groups consisted mainly of Asian test-takers (i.e., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) so that the strategy scheme that we adopted from their study can be deemed appropriate for Korean high school learners. As Cohen and Upton (2006) categorize, we devised the strategy questionnaire by selecting the subcategories of Reading Strategies (RS), and Test-taking Strategies. Test-taking strategies were further categorized as Test management (TM) and Test wiseness strategies (TW). Items 1-8 were RS, items 9-12 and 15-1/15-2/15-3 were TM strategies, and items 13-14 were TW strategies. The TM strategies 15-1/15-2/15-3 were designed differently according to the testing construct of each item (See Appendix for strategy items). The reading and test-taking strategies were presented in the questionnaire so that learners could rate 7-point Likert scales on the extent to which they had used the strategies, subsequently after the learners had solved each of the test items. The questionnaire was designed so that the learners could attend to answering questions about the RS, TM, and TW strategies almost immediately after they had solved an item. While we were concerned about the cognitive load that would arise when participants are asked to solve a test item and report on their metacognitive knowledge of the strategies they employ for solving a reading item, we made principled decisions in limiting the number of test items to three. That is, with the three items, the number of strategies that the learner had to mark was 45 since there were 15 statements to read and check after having solved a test item. We considered the number of items to be appropriate since the time and cognitive processing involved in solving the test items had to be considered. We eventually wanted to make sure that we were not creating a fatigue effect (Dörnyei, 2010), which in some cases may lead to insincere responses. The reliability analysis for internal consistency of the items with Cronbach’s α for the questionnaire results occurred at a moderate level for each set of questions in Item 1 (RS: α = .80, TM: α = .70, TW: α = .66), Item 2 (RS: α = .83, TM: α = .70, TW α = .80), and Item 3 (RS: α = .80, TM: α = .71, TW: α = .69). Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 69 For the incorporation of test items, MC questions were retrieved from the Level 2 reading section of NEAT (National English Ability Test) at http://www.neat.re.kr. The items were selected since they are illustrative of the archetypal forms of MC reading comprehension test items, and also related to the current Korean CSAT (See Appendix for the reading test items). We chose three different types of items according to how they are related to testing different constructs of reading: Inferring knowledge (“fill-in-the-blank”), Comprehensive Understanding (“reordering paragraphs”), and Factual Understanding (“information not true of the passage”). Items 1 and 2 were chosen so that they were of moderate length (i.e., more or less than 160 words), while item 3 was deliberately chosen for more reading (i.e., 266 words). The items were selected based on the different types of demands that they would make on the students’ level of cognition. That is, the “fill-in-the- blank” requires test-takers to infer the missing information based on a given passage. “Reordering paragraphs” requires the test-taker to be able to rearrange given paragraphs, and “Factual Understanding” would require learners to be able to understand the detailed information stated in a given reading passage. The features of the items are summarized in Table 2. TABLE 2 Information on Reading Comprehension Test Items Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 Skill required Inferring knowledge Comprehensive understanding Factual understanding Item type Fill-in-the-blank Reordering paragraphs Information not true of the passage Topic/ Theme Longevity of art How creative ideas take form Getting accepted for a job Length of passage 152 words 166 words 266 words 3.2.2. Retrospective semi-structured interviews In order to triangulate the results of the questionnaire on the test-taking process, four learners were recruited from the group that had completed the questionnaires. The learners were asked to report on their test-taking process by trying to recall their problem-solving process. After their general description of the process, the learners were asked if there had been execution of strategies that they had consciously used for the three items. Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 70 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon 3.3. Procedure The strategy questionnaire was distributed to the students at a time of the semester when they were not burdened with school work in the Fall of 2012. While kept anonymous in the questionnaire, the learners were also asked to provide their scores and stanine levels of the Mock CSAT in addition to reporting their use of reading and test-taking strategies. The learners were also asked to report on the learning strategies (i.e., what kind of resources they used to practice L2 reading) that they usually used to improve their English reading comprehension skills for later analysis. The learners were given sufficient time to solve each of the test items, and check on the extent to which they had used the strategies. Regarding stimulated recall interviews, the learners were recruited for the interviews on the basis of their stanine levels (i.e., two students from level 1 and two others from level 5). The students were interviewed in Korean by one of the researchers of the study on the same day subsequently after the students had completed the questionnaires. The interviews lasted no more than 10 minutes for each student. 3.4. Data Analysis The data obtained via the questionnaire were analyzed with SPSS 19.0. There was calculation of descriptive statistics for examining the mean scores of the reading and test- taking strategies. To examine how the strategies were employed by the learners for the three test items and learners’ English proficiency, three-way (3*3*3) mixed ANOVA was conducted with proficiency groups and item type as between-group variables, and strategies as the within-subject variable. The alpha level for analysis was set at .05 unless otherwise stated. The three subtypes of strategies were RS, TM, and TW strategies. The three item types were “fill-in-the-blank,” “reordering paragraphs,” and “information not true of the passage.” The learners’ proficiency was divided into three groups according to the learners’ stanine levels. That is, those learners who had scored levels 1-3 were categorized as the “high” proficiency, levels 4-6 as the “mid” proficiency, and levels 7-9 as the “low” proficiency. As a final analysis and to analyze the related variables comprehensively, there was examination of how the reading strategies, test-taking strategies, and learning strategies for L2 reading had contributed to the learners’ English proficiency (i.e., CSAT mock exam scores). This analysis was conducted to ascertain which of the strategies may deserve more attention for improving the learners’ English proficiency. Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 71 4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 4.1. Reading and Test-taking Strategies for Multiple-choice Questions This section, in dealing with research question one, reports on the reading strategies and test-taking strategies employed by the learners (See Table 3). A preliminary examination of the strategies as a whole indicated that the learners had most often utilized RS, that is, RS2 Reads a portion of the passage rapidly looking for specific information, RS8 Infers the meaning of new words by using the external context (neighboring words/sentences), and RS1 Reads the whole passage carefully which ranked 1-3 respectively. TABLE 3 Mean and Rank of Reading Strategies (N = 165) M Rank of TOTAL Strategies SD RS1 Reads the whole passage carefully. 4.19 [RS3] 3 1.34 RS2 Reads a portion of the passage rapidly looking for specific information. 4.61 [RS1] 1 1.29 RS3 Repeats, paraphrases, or translates (words, phrases, or sentences) to aid or improve understanding. 3.76 [RS6] 10 1.33 RS4 Identifies/Marks an unknown word or phrase 2.74 [RS8] 15 1.31 RS5 Adjusts comprehension of the passage as more is read 3.94 [RS4] 7 1.39 RS6 Identifies the key words of the passage as reading. 3.26 [RS7] 14 1.42 RS7 Looks for the sentence that conveys the main idea. 3.77 [RS5] 9 1.44 RS8 Infers the meaning of new words by using the external context (neighboring words/sentences) 4.23 [RS2] 2 1.49 Note. RS: Reading Strategies; [ ]: Rank within strategy type In fact, regarding RS8 (i.e., word attack skill; Nuttall, 1996), the strategy would have been employed when learners need to decode unknown words or phrases. For instance, in item 3, learners may have had a lexical gap problem due to the figurative meaning for out of the running (i.e., no longer being considered, or eliminated from a contest) (see Appendix for the passage). However, those learners that are successful in inferring the meaning of the new phrase may have been able to figure out from “Amy had an interview with the company she’d always wanted to work for, but was crushed” that Amy had not made it to the job. The interviews, in fact enabled the researchers to ascertain what the learners did when they had lexical gap problems. Between students of different proficiency (i.e., stanine Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 72 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon levels 1 and 5), the higher proficiency learner reported that the words had not been difficult anyway so that there was not much of a problem. The learner reported that sometimes skipping words had not caused him much problem. On the other hand, the lower proficiency learner clearly recognized that it was vocabulary that had caused problems for him. The following interview protocol of the lower proficiency learner from item 1 is presented below, translated from Korean: Researcher: So what was difficult about the test item? Learner (male, lower): The problem were the words….I knew the words that are useless for solving the problem. It seemed that I did not know the important words that are needed for finding the answer. Researcher: What kinds of words do you mean? Learner: Words such as adjectives…refuge, longevity, circumstances, permanently….They seem to be the words you need to know. The interview shows that the learner was clearly having lexical problems from the way he could not distinguish part of speech. He referred to the unknown words (i.e., refuge, longevity, circumstances, permanently) as adjectives. In fact, the student-interviewee later also reports that it is important for him to be able to infer the meaning of new words by using the external context, but he ends up with the wrong answer (② artistic tradition is based on culture) which shows that his execution of the strategy has been unsuccessful. According to Nation (2001), guessing from context will work only when more than 95% of the words are known. However, it can be understood from the learner’s proficiency that he will have probably known less than this pre-conditional level to be able to decode the given text successfully. Simultaneously, it was also reading strategies, as in, RS4 Identifies/Marks an unknown word or phrase, and RS6 Identifies the key words of the passage as reading that had been least useful for the learners. We suspect that some learners had not needed to physically underline the words or phrases, but another explanation for this may be that the test takers, when under time pressure, will use strategies they think are most efficient to finding the correct response. As seen among learners in Purpura’s (1999) study, this connects to how the learners employed a product-oriented attitude where they wanted to answer the items quickly and efficiently rather than spend time trying to comprehend or understand test input of the multiple choice item. As a whole, the pattern of RS indicates that reading for tests will also entail a similar process to the learners’ usual reading process where TM or TW did not necessarily rank high on the total rank of the strategies (See Table 4). Regarding test management strategies (TM), the item specific strategies as in 15-1. Insert option(s) in the blank, and considers the new sentence in context, 15-2. Considers the passage after having rearranged the passage, and 15-3. Consider each of the options against what is stated in the passage were most frequently used for the respective items, Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 73 that is, item 1 (“fill-in-the-blank”), item 2 (“reordering paragraphs”), and item 3 (“finding information not true of the passage”). For item 2, the strategies reported in the interviews indicated that one of the learners at the high proficiency level was generally relying on their prediction and background knowledge to foresee what should follow. The female student reported that she had used her schema in figuring out the outline of the story (i.e., picks an oyster off the bottom � paddles to shore � opens the shell � finds nothing but an oyster inside � “He’s wasting a lot of time. You’re right.” � Pearls are rare; a diver must open many oysters before finding one.) TABLE 4 Test Management and Test Wiseness Strategies (N = 165) M Rank of TOTAL Strategies SD TM9 Goes back/Rereads the question or passage for clarification. 3.95 [TM3] 6 1.33 TM10 Considers the options before reading the passage. 4.02 [TM2] 5 1.45 TM11 Considers the options and selects preliminary option(s) 3.46 [TM5] 13 1.42 TM12 Makes an educated guess using background knowledge 3.61 [TM4] 11 1.48 TM15-1/15-2/15-3 See Note (below) 4.12 [TM1] 4 1.42 TW13 Uses the process of elimination 3.81 [TW1] 8 1.34 TW14 Selects the option because it appears to have a word or phrase from the passage in it/ when some words, such as, key words help in selecting the answer 3.49 [TW2] 12 1.36 Note: TM: Test Management Strategies; TW: Test Wiseness Strategies; [ ]: Rank within strategy type; 15-1: Insert option(s) in the blank, and considers the new sentence in context; 15-2: Considers the passage after having rearranged the passage; 15-3: Considers each of the options against what is stated in the passage. Similarly, TM 15-3 (i.e., Consider each of the options against what is stated in the passage) would have helped learners most efficiently find the option that is not consistent with the information in the passage. That is, by considering the options, the learner would have been able to see that “ She was hired by the company without any interview ④ process” is untrue of the passage since the passage states that “Amy was interviewed and was finally in her dream job” (see Appendix for the passage). As previously mentioned, test wiseness strategies (TW) are those that are employed by test takers to answer items by using knowledge of test formats and other peripheral information without going through the expected linguistic and cognitive processes (Cohen, 2006). For TW strategies as indicated in Table 4, the mean values demonstrate that TW13 Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 74 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon Uses the process of elimination was a more useful strategy than TW14 Selects the option because it appears to have a word or phrase from the passage in it/ when some words, such as, key words help in selecting the answer. However, simply the descriptive figures do not provide whether this was related to any learner variables or item type. For a more detailed analysis, the following section will examine how the use of reading and test-taking strategies transpired according to learners’ proficiency and item type. 4.2. Relationship Between Test-taking Strategies, Test Items, and L2 Proficiency This section reports on the second research question which focuses on investigating how the reading and test-taking strategies were employed according to item type and learners’ English proficiency groups. Our analysis was conducted by first looking at the largest interaction and then working backwards, since main effects for single variables may not retain their importance in the face of interactions (Larson-Hall, 2010). The largest interaction, which is the three-way interaction between “item type,” “strategy type,” and the “three proficiency groups” was non-significant with Greenhouse-Geisser (F(6.069, 333.775) = 1.784, p = .101). However, Greenhouse-Geisser indicated significant two-way interactions respectively for “strategy type” and “three proficiency groups” (F(3.570, 196.346) = 2.677, p = .039), and “item type” and “strategy type” (F(3.034, 333.775) = 7.480, p = .000). The detailed comparisons are described in the subsequent sections. 4.2.1. Strategy type and proficiency groups The descriptive statistics for “strategy type” and “three proficiency groups” were observed as in Table 5. The “high” proficiency learners most frequently used strategies in the order of RS, TW, and TM. Both the “mid” and “low” proficiency learners favored the use of TM while the “mid” proficiency learners were more frequent in their use of RS. As a whole, it was the more proficient test takers that were keener on using the rudimentary RS while the less proficient learners were more conspicuously noted for using metacognitive strategies (e.g., TM), probably to make up for their perceived incomplete knowledge of English as found in previous studies (Purpura, 1997, 1998). A more detailed analysis via mixed ANOVA indicated significant differences between the use of three strategies and proficiency groups (F(3.570, 196.346) = 2.677, p = .039). Multiple comparisons indicated that the high proficiency learners (p = .018) had employed more RS than TM, and the low proficiency learners had employed more TM rather than RS (p = .020) (See Table 6). The explanation for the results is that the high proficiency learners preferred the employment of their conventional RS, and it was deemed necessary to see Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 75 which of the strategies they favored to adopt. The descriptive statistics on the “high” proficiency learners’ strategies indicated that RS2 Reads a portion of the passage rapidly looking for specific information had been most frequently used whereas RS4 Identifies/Marks an unknown word or phrase had been least used. In fact, the use of RS2 Reads a portion of the passage rapidly looking for specific information was statistically different between groups (F(2,126) = 5.101, p = .007) with the higher proficiency learners more frequently using the strategy than the low proficiency learners (i.e., Mean: high = 4.81, mid = 4.60, low = 3.58). There were statistical differences between the high and low (p = .005), and between the mid and low proficiency groups (p = .030), but not between the high and mid proficiency groups (p = 1.000). TABLE 5 Proficiency and Test-taking Strategies Proficiency Strategy M 95% Confidence Interval Lower Bound Upper Bound High RS 3.913 (1) 3.728 4.201 TM 3.730 (3) 3.191 3.736 TW 3.772 (2) 3.702 4.272 Mid RS 3.906 (2) 3.830 4.362 TM 4.070 (1) 3.523 4.136 TW 3.893 (3) 3.623 4.264 Low RS 2.962 (3) 2.715 3.793 TM 3.370 (1) 2.445 3.685 TW 3.212 (2) 2.576 3.874 Note. Numbers in ( ) indicate the rank for the mean of strategies; RS: Reading Strategies; TM: Test Management Strategies; TW: Test Wiseness Strategies TABLE 6 Post-hoc tests for Proficiency and Test-taking Strategies Proficiency (I) Strategy (J) Strategy Mean Difference (I-J) Sig. 95% Confidence Interval for Difference Lower Bound Upper Bound High RS TM .183 * .018 .032 .334 TW .141 .179 -.065 .348 TM TW -.042 .654 -.228 .143 Mid RS TM -.163 .059 -.333 .007 TW .014 .906 -.219 .246 TM TW .177 .096 -.032 .386 Low RS TM -.408 * .020 -.751 -.064 TW -.250 .294 -.720 .220 TM TW .158 .461 -.265 .580 *p < .05 Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 76 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon In contrast, the “low” proficiency learners had most popularly deployed TM10 Considers the options before reading the passage (M = 4.06, SD = 1.60), and the least for TM9 Goes back/Rereads the question or passage for clarification (M = 2.88, SD = 1.27). Scrutiny of other TM indicated that TM11 Considers the options and selects preliminary option(s) had been used more often by the mid proficiency learners than the high proficiency learners (p = .025). The pattern, as seen previously (Table 6), indicates that the more proficient learners may display a sense of confidence by relying on their strategic deployment of reading skills whereas the low proficiency learners will try to find ways to overcome their linguistic deficiency by using test taking tactics. In parallel, the learners were also reluctant to go back to the questions or the passage to check on their comprehension or the correctness of their response. Similarly, Lee and Ku (2005) found in their study that the “low” proficiency learner exploited as many test-taking strategies as he could, but that the execution of strategies was found not to be effective for obtaining the correct response. All in all, the findings on the strategies and proficiency demonstrate a relationship between learners’ proficiency and their preferences for different types of strategies (Phakiti, 2003; Purpura, 1997, 1998, 1999). Hereafter, how the use of strategies differed for the separate test items will be presented. 4.2.2. Item type and strategy type Regarding the significant interaction between “item type” and “strategy type,” Table 7 indicates how some strategies were more constructively employed according to item type. The RS were most frequently utilized for item 3 (i.e., not true of the passage) (M = 3.643) whereas TM (M = 3.824) and TW strategies (M = 3.925) were most often deployed for item 1 (i.e., fill-in-the-blank). Not surprisingly, it was RS2 Reads a portion of the passage rapidly looking for specific information (M = 4.58, SD = 1.604) that indicated to be most commonly used in item 3. The item will have entailed test-takers to do some careful reading when figuring out the mismatching piece of information. On the other hand, item 1 prompted the most frequent use of TM9 Goes back/Rereads the question or passage for clarification (M = 4.19, SD = 1.636). That is, to solve a “fill-in-the-blank” item, learners are likely to reread the passage in their attempt to find the best contextually matching word, phrase, or sentence. Regarding the use of TW strategies for item 1, two strategies were employed most frequently to a similar extent by the learners (i.e., TW13 Uses the process of elimination: M = 3.88, SD = 1.775; TW14 Selects the option because it appears to have a word or phrase from the passage in it: M = 3.86, SD = 1.682). For information on inferential statistics with mixed ANOVA, significant differences were noted only within TW strategies for different items (F(3.034, 333.775) = 7.480, p = .000) Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 77 (See Table 8). Multiple comparisons indicated that the TW strategies had been used more often in item 1 (i.e., fill-in-the-blank) compared to item 2 (i.e., reordering the passage) (p = .000), and that the strategies had been employed more often in item 3 (i.e., not true of the passage) over item 2 (p = .000). TABLE 7 Test-taking Strategies and Item Types Strategy Items M 95% Confidence Interval for Difference Lower Bound Upper Bound RS Fill-in- the-blank 3.565 (3) 3.349 3.781 Reordering the passage 3.573 (2) 3.330 3.816 Not true of the passage 3.643 (1) 3.400 3.887 TM Fill-in- the-blank 3.824 (1) 3.564 4.083 Reordering the passage 3.637 (3) 3.369 3.906 Not true of the passage 3.708 (2) 3.421 3.995 TW Fill-in-the-blank 3.925 (1) 3.621 4.229 Reordering the passage 3.148 (3) 2.797 3.500 Not true of the passage 3.803 (2) 3.475 4.132 Note. Numbers in ( ) indicate the rank for the frequency of strategies TABLE 8 Post-hoc tests for Item Type and Test-taking Strategies Strategy (I) Items (J) Items Mean Difference (I-J) Sig. 95% Confidence Interval for Difference Lower Bound Upper Bound Reading strategies 1 2 -.007 .932 -.179 .165 3 -.078 .376 -.251 .096 2 3 -.070 .374 -.227 .086 Test management strategies 1 2 .187 .092 -.031 .405 3 .116 .342 -.125 .356 2 3 -.071 .449 -.256 .114 Test wiseness strategies 1 2 .776 ** .000 .397 1.156 3 .121 .473 -.213 .455 2 3 -.655 ** .000 -.960 -.351 Note. Item 1: fill-in-the-blank; Item 2: reordering the passage; Item 3: not true of the passage In order to examine which of the TW strategies were contributing to this effect, one-way repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted for the individual TW strategies. For TW13 Uses the process of elimination, there was a difference (F(2, 328) = 11.706, p = .000) in the use of strategies where item 1 (i.e., fill-in-the-blank; M = 3.87) had more often prompted Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 78 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon the use of the strategy over item 2 (i.e., reordering the passage; M = 3.38) at a significant level (p = .011); item 3 (i.e., not true of the passage; M = 4.18) had also prompted more use of the strategy over item 2 (p = .000). The way TW13 was utilized underscores the importance that test takers attribute to the process of elimination so as to narrow down the target option, particularly in item 3. Another examination involved the use of TW14 Selects the option because it appears to have a word or phrase from the passage in it which resulted in significant differences between the items (F(2, 326) = 27.343, p = .000). Multiple comparisons indicated the strategy to be used more often in item 1 (i.e., fill-in-the-blank; M = 3.86) over item 2 (M = 2.95) at a significant level (p = .000); item 3 (i.e., not true of the passage; M = 3.65) also prompted more use of the strategy over item 2 (p = .000). The execution of TW14 illustrates how learners were trying to be test smart by spotting words in the passage and the options that may relate to each other, noticeably in item 1. The following interview protocol illustrates the use of both TW13 and TW14, and shows how the lower proficiency learner is unsuccessful: Researcher: When you were attending to the problem, what kind of an elimination process do you go through? Learner (male, lower ): I delete [an option] when it doesn’t fit in with the general idea of the passage. Researcher: How do you do this? Learner: In option number 4, I deleted the option because it has the word “philosophy” that I don’t know. In option number 3, conducting art does not seem to be related to human creativity, so I had to delete it. There has to be the word “test” but it’s not in the option. Option number 1 translates as “the best art stands the test of time,” but from what I read there is reference to “time” but it’s not what the passage is about so that I had to delete it. As such, the interview protocol demonstrates that he wrongly chose “② artistic tradition is based on culture” as the correct response. Although he had evidently used the strategy of elimination, the outcome illustrates that he has failed to select the target option. For instance, the learner could have inferred the main idea of the passage by noticing the sentence, such as “the artist’s work continues to have something new to say,” but he most critically does not understand the meaning of “test” in the option. This accords with the type of behavior found in previous research (Cohen & Upton, 2006) where students use a strategy of matching material from the passage with those in the item stem and in the alternatives, and prefer this surface-structure reading of the test items to one that calls for more in-depth reading and inferencing. The results as a whole allowed us to see that in spite of the most frequent use of strategies for item 3 (M = 3.900) when calculated separately, the total mean for the Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 79 individual strategies indicated that it was item 1 (i.e., fill-in-the-blank) that had necessitated the learners to use a variety of strategies (i.e., TM and TW strategies) for finding the problematic missing sentence. That is, the mean value was highest for the previously mentioned TW13 Uses the process of elimination, and the test taker would have been successful if the learner had been able to eliminate options and find that the passage is an exposition on how art has been able to last for a long time (i.e., ① The best art stands the test of time). 4.3. Strategies of Reading, Test-taking and Learning as Predictors of L2 Proficiency For a more comprehensive view of the learners’ test-taking behavior, the third research question concerned how variables (predictors), that is, the reading strategies, test-taking strategies, and learning strategies contributed to explaining L2 proficiency. The learning strategies had been reported by the learners as a part of the procedure for responding to the questionnaire where the learners were asked on the different types of learning strategies they usually used to improve their English reading skills. The choices were ① School Lesson, Exercise ② Book, ③ Private Education, Miscellaneous, and ④ ⑤ Don’t study. Using the enter method with multiple regression, a significant model emerged: F(7, 91) = 3.067, p = .006. Table 9 presents information for the predictors entered into the model. The results indicated RS (p = .008), TM (p = .032), and the learning strategies with using exercise books (p = .004) and private education (p = .018) to be significant for predicting the learners’ English proficiency scores, which in the study had been assessed by the proficiency test (i.e., CSAT). In fact, when compared to those who had relied mainly on school lessons for reading, the unstandardized coefficients (B) indicated that scores had increased by 19 points for learners studying with exercise books and more than 13 points for those that had reported on attending private institutes. Regarding the use of strategies, the unstandardized coefficients (B) indicated that a rise of a level in the use of a RS is related to a gain of approximately 12 points on the CSAT. In general, this indicates that the conscious employment of RS is a contributing factor for obtaining higher scores on the CSAT, potentially leading to improved L2 proficiency. Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 80 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon TABLE 9 Reading, Test-taking and Learning Strategies as Predictors of L2 Proficiency Note. *p < .05, **p < .01; RS Total: Total mean for Reading strategies, TM Total: Total mean for Test management strategies, TW Total: Total mean for Test wiseness strategies In comparison, those learners who had reported using TM strategies seem to have experienced a fall in their proficiency test (i.e., a drop of 10.852 points). We attribute this to how the use of the strategies per se had not been sufficient to compensate for the L2 learners’ linguistic deficiency. As seen in Lee and Ku’s (2005) study, the use of strategies, particularly among the low-proficiency learners did not necessarily lead to the successful use of strategies, which may imply that the learners depended on strategies concerning discourse-intersentential relationship more frequently than sentence level information. Nevertheless, the fall in scores compelled us to conduct a detailed analysis for the individual items in order to seek which of the TM strategies in the items had been rather detrimental to the test taking process. For all items, the regression models resulted to be significant (item 1: F(5, 108) = 7.243, p = .000; item 2: F(5,108) = 3.338, p = .008; item 3: F(5,109) = 2.366, p = .044) for explaining the relationship between TW strategies and L2 proficiency. For item 1 (i.e., fill-in-the-blank), we found that those strategies that are related to considering the options, such as Considers the options before reading the passage (p = .000) or Considers the options and selects preliminary option(s) (p = .012) had not been helpful for gaining higher scores or in finding the target option since their unstandardized coefficients (B) recorded negative values (-4.829, -3.635) for each of the strategies. In comparison, it was the TM strategy as in Goes back/Rereads the question/passage for clarification (i.e., rise of 4.418 in proficiency) that is expected to benefit the learners’ problem-solving process. For item 2 (i.e., reordering paragraphs), it was the item specific TW strategy as in Consider the passage after having rearranged the passage that contributed significantly (p = .032) with unstandardized coefficients (B) of 2.957 indicating a positive effect on the Unstandardized Coefficients Standardized Coefficients t Sig. B Std. Error Beta (Constant) 54.490 11.125 4.898** .000 RS Total 12.331 4.544 .489 2.714** .008 TM Total -10.852 4.973 -.474 -2.182* .032 TW Total .351 3.341 .017 .105 .917 School vs. Exercise Book 18.937 6.325 .320 2.994** .004 School vs. Private Ed 13.477 5.578 .267 2.416* .018 School vs. Miscellaneous 1.730 22.714 .007 .076 .939 School vs. Don’t study separately 8.115 8.900 .103 .912 .364 Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 81 performance of CSAT. In a similar way, the learners who had been using the item specific strategy Consider each of the options against what is stated in the passage (p = .003, unstandardized coefficients (B) = 4.091) as in item 3 (i.e., information not true of the passage) seemed to have performed better on the CSAT, reflecting improved L2 performance. 5. CONCLUSION Reading research on the process-oriented view of the test-taking process of Korean EFL high school learners yielded results that inform us on the strategic actions that learners adopt to obtain correct responses for MC items. A collective examination of the reading and test-taking strategies revealed that the learners’ test-taking process much resembled a general reading process, such as, Reading a portion of the passage rapidly to look for specific information, followed by strategies for solving a lexical gap problem, such as in Inferring the meaning of new words by using the external context. Interest in the proficiency level of learners with respect to the use of strategies produced significant results demonstrating a relationship between learners’ proficiency and their preferences for different types of strategies (Phakiti, 2003; Purpura, 1997, 1998, 1999). It was with the high proficiency learners that we saw efficient use of strategies, and this is likely when they do not experience the same type of difficulties that the low proficiency learners go through, for instance, with the case of lexical gap problems that were recognized in the interviews. Seemingly to overcome their deficiencies, the less proficient learners were more conspicuously noted for using metacognitive strategies, that is, TM. The use of TM as a whole illustrates that these may be a separate repertoire of strategies that learners will deploy when they find that their usual reading strategies are insufficient to help them decode the reading passage and obtain the correct response (Cohen & Upton, 2006). Analysis also indicated that the use of strategies was associated with particular items (Alderson, 2000; Anderson, Bachman, Perkins, & Cohen, 1991; Cohen & Upton, 2006; Dollerup, Glahn, & Rosenberg Hansen, 1982; Lee & Ku, 2005; Rupp, Ferne, & Choi, 2006). For the three items, RS (i.e., Reads a portion of the passage rapidly looking for specific information) were most frequently utilized in item 3 (i.e., not true of the passage) whereas TM and TW strategies were most often deployed for item 1 (i.e., fill-in-the-blank). For item 1, the most common TM was Goes back/Rereads the question or passage for clarification whereas the most common TW were Uses the process of elimination and Selects the option because it appears to have a word or phrase from the passage in it. This evidences how the “fill-in-the-blank” type of items are problematic for the learners, Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 82 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon compelling them to use an array of strategies perceived to them as being successful. Concurrently, we also found that TW Uses the process of elimination was a critical strategy for item 3 where learners had to find the option that did not corresponded with the given passage, and TW Selects the option because it appears to have a word or phrase from the passage in it was seen as an important strategy for the learners in item 1, which tested them on the ability to infer the missing sentence based on their understanding of the given reading passage. Multiple regression analysis with the predictors and English proficiency resulted in the use of RS, TM, and the learning strategies with using exercise books and private education to be the significant predictors for learners’ English proficiency. In fact, it was only with the selective choice of TM for specific items that benefited the learners’ English proficiency. For instance, in item 1, Considering the options before reading the passage or Considering the options and selecting preliminary option(s) were rather detrimental to the outcome. We can deduce that TW and any other kinds of test-taking strategies will be effective only when learners are facilitated with the threshold level of linguistic knowledge (e.g., vocabulary, grammar) that can be boosted for improved outcome by the use of reading and test-taking strategies. All in all, the study proposes implications for L2 reading and reading tests. First, our study was able to foresee that to perform well on tests of L2 reading, some of the preconditions for this would be to see that the learners are able to adopt basic reading strategies and practice them on a regular basis. As seen in the regression model, the utility of the reading strategies cannot be overlooked since this also appeared to have positive effects on L2 proficiency. In a similar vein, reading researchers have also shown that an integrated comprehension of a text relies heavily on fluid, accurate, and efficient application of bottom-up processes (e.g., Aebersold & Field, 1997; Anderson & Pearson, 1984; Carrell, 1984; Rumelhart, 1980; Stanovich, 1980). Teachers and learners will need to see that solving MC items of reading is a matter concerned with basic reading skills rather than the development on a variety of test-taking strategies, such as for test management or test wiseness. Another implication from the study is that learners will need to be eclectic in the execution of TM strategies (e.g., Considering the options before reading the passage) since some may rather be detrimental to the problem-solving process as we saw with Item 1 (i.e., fill-in-the-blank). Third, the problems of the low proficiency learners demonstrated in the interviews that some learners will need to be trained to meet words in context, preferably in dealing with a variety of topics. For instance, we saw how the learners were having problems with the polysemy “test” in the sentence “the best art stands the test of time.” Last but not least, the results also suggest how the extra time spent at the private institute, when based on self-regulation, may have a contributing effect on the development of L2 Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 83 proficiency. Inevitably, it seems that time well spent, for instance, at a private institute with utilization of exercise books for MC items will potentially have a positive effect for improving learners’ L2 proficiency. Nevertheless, it will be long-term employment of learning strategies for reading (e.g., extensive reading; Day & Bamford, 2009) that can lead to sustaining positive outcomes on an L2 reading test. REFERENCES Aebersold, J., & Field, M. (1997). From reader to reading teacher: Issues and strategies for second language classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alderson, J. C. (2000). Assessing reading. New York: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, N. J., Bachman, L., Perkins, K., & Cohen, A. (1991). An exploratory study into the construct validity of a reading comprehension test: Triangulation of data sources. Language Testing, 8(1), 41-66. Anderson, R., & Pearson, P. (1984). A schema-theoretic view of basic processes in reading comprehension. In, P. D. Pearson (Ed.), Handbook of reading research (pp. 255- 291). New York: Longman. Carrell, P. L. (1984). Schema theory and ESL reading: Classroom implications and applications. Modern Language Journal, 68, 332-343. Carrell, P. L., & Grabe, W. (2002). Reading. In N. Schmitt (Ed.), An introduction to applied linguistics (pp. 233-250). London: Arnold. Chou, M.-H. (2013). Strategy use for reading English for general and specific academic purposes in testing and nontesting contexts. Reading Research Quarterly, 48(2), 175-197. Cohen, A. D. (1998). Strategies and processes in test taking and SLA. In L. F. Bachman & A. D. Cohen (Eds.), Interfaces between second language acquisition and language testing research (pp. 90-111). New York: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, A. D. (2006). The coming of age of research on test-taking strategies. Language Assessment Quarterly, 3(4), 307-331. Cohen, A. D., & Upton, T. A. (2006). Strategies in responding to the new TOEFL reading tasks (Monograph No. 33). Princeton, NJ: ETS. Retrieved June 16, 2012, from www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/RR-06-06.pdf. Day, R. R., & Bamford, J. (2009). Extensive reading in the second language classroom (9 th ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dollerup, C., Glahn, E., & Rosenberg Hansen, C. (1982). Reading strategies and test- solving techniques in an EFL-reading comprehension test—A preliminary report. Journal of Applied Language Study, 1(1), 93-99. Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 84 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon Dörnyei, Z. (2010). Questionnaires in second language research: Construction, administration, and processing (2 nd ed.). London: Routledge. Douglas, D., & Hegelheimer, V. (2005). Cognitive processes and use of knowledge in performing new TOEFL listening tasks (2nd Interim Report to Educational Testing Service). Ames, IA: Iowa State University. Dreyer, C., & Nel, C. (2003). Teaching reading strategies and reading comprehension within a technology-enhanced learning environment. System, 31(3), 349-365. ETS. (2002). LanguEdge Courseware score interpretation guide. Princeton, NJ: Author. Gordon, C. (1987). 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Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 85 Purpura, J. E. (1998). Investigating the effects of strategy use and second language test performance with high- and low-ability test-takers: A structural equation modelling approach. Language Testing,15(3), 333-379. Purpura, J. E. (1999). Learner strategy use and performance on language tests: A structural equation modeling approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rumelhart, D. (1980). Schemata: The building blocks of cognition. In R. J. Spiro, B. C. Bruce, & B. W. Brewer (Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension. (pp. 33-58). NJ: Erlbaum. Rupp, A. A., Ferne, T., & Choi, H. (2006). How assessing reading comprehension with multiple-choice questions shapes the construct: A cognitive processing perspective. Language Testing, 23(4), 441–474. Stanovich, K. (1980). Toward an interactive-compensatory model of individual differences in the development of reading fluency. Reading Research Quarterly, 16, 32-71. Storey, P. (1997). Examining the test-taking process: A cognitive perspective on the discourse cloze test. Language Testing, 14(2), 214-231. Taguchi, N. (2001). L2 learners’ strategic mental processes during a listening test. JALT Journal, 23(2), 176-201. Tian, S. (2000). TOEFL reading comprehension: Strategies used by Taiwanese students with coaching-school training. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Columbia University, New York. Yoshida-Morise, Y. (1998). The use of communication strategies in language proficiency interviews. In R. Young & A. W. He (Eds.), Talking and testing: Discourse approaches to the assessment of oral proficiency (pp. 205-238). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Yoshizawa, K. (2002). Relationships among strategy use, foreign language aptitude, and second language proficiency: A structural equation modeling approach. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Temple University, Philadelphia. Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 86 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon APPENDIX ▣ Item 1 (“fill-in-the-blank”) ※ 다음 문항의 정답은 무엇입니까? Sometimes art can be a refuge from life, and in extreme cases it is a second chance at life. One familiar way to describe the relative longevity of art and life is to say that what makes great art great is that it remains eternally young, while we don’t. It is a common place observation that Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso or Vincent van Gogh becomes like a new artist every time his work is shown because, as time passes, circumstances change, generations change, but the artist’s work continues to have something new to say. Although a Matisse painting is a finite and finished object, it remains in flux and permanently fresh, affecting and being affected by other art over time. As the critic John Russel simply phrased it, "What we have seen this week will not look the same when we see it again next week." In other words, you might say _____________. *flux: 끊임없는 변화 1. Which one best fits in the blank? ① the best art stands the test of time ② artistic tradition is based on culture ③ art is the product of human creativity ④ art reflects the philosophy of a society ※ 1 번 문항 풀이에 적용한 읽기 전략의 사용 정도를 표시하여 주세요. 읽기 전략 전혀 아니다 대체로 아니다 약간 아니다 보통 이다 약간 그렇다 대체로 그렇다 매우 그렇다 1. 전체 지문을 주의 깊게 읽었 다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 2. 필요한 정보를 찾기 위하여 지 문의 일부를 빠르게 읽었다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 3. 내용을 이해하기 위하여, 반복 하여 읽고, 다른 말로 풀어보 거나 번역을 하여 보았다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 4. 이해가 되지 않는 단어나 문장 들을 표시하며 읽었다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 87 5. 예측했던 바와 다른 내용이 나 오면 새로운 정보에 따라 나의 이해력을 조정하 다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6. 지문의 핵심어를 표시하며 읽 었다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7. 주제를 나타내는 문장을 찾아 보았다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. 모르는 단어의 뜻을 문맥을 통 하여 파악하 다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9. 내용을 명료하게 이해하도록 질문을 다시 읽어 보았다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10. 지문을 읽기 전에 선택지를 먼 저 읽어보았다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 11. (답이 확실치 않을 경우) 정답 인 것 같은 선택지에 미리 표 시하여 보았다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 12. 알고 있는 배경지식을 활용하 여 지문 내용을 추측하여 보았 다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 13. 오답인 선택지를 하나씩 제거 하며 답을 확인하여 보았다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 14. 지문에 있는 단어를 포함한 선 택지를 답으로 선택하 다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 15. 선택지의 문장을 빈칸에 넣고 지문을 다시 읽어 보았다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ▣ Item 2 (“reordering the paragraphs”) 2. What is the best order of (A), (B), and (C) after the sentence in the box? Imagine a pearl diver pushes off his canoe from the shore, paddles out into the sea, dives deep into the water, picks an oyster off the bottom, paddles to shore, and opens the shell. (A) You’re right. Pearls are rare; a diver must open many oysters before finding one. Only a very foolish diver would waste time making a separate trip for each oyster. It is the same with producing ideas. (B) Foolish people think of a single solution to a problem and proceed as if that solution had to be creative. But creative ideas, like pearls, occur infrequently. So sensible Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 88 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon people produce many ideas before expecting to find a creative one. (C) Finding nothing but an oyster inside, he sets off in his canoe again. “Wait a minute,” you’re probably thinking. “He’s wasting a lot of time. The right way to do it is not to paddle back to shore with one oyster but to dive again and again, fill the canoe with oysters, and return to shore.” *paddle: 노를 젓다 ① (B)-(A)-(C) ② (B)-(C)-(A) ③ (C)-(A)-(B) ④ (C)-(B)-(A) ※ 2 번 문항 풀이에 적용한 읽기 전략의 사용 정도를 표시하여 주세요. 읽기 전략 전혀 아니다 대체로 아니다 약간 아니다 보통 이다 약간 그렇다 대체로 그렇다 매우 그렇다 1~14. (Same as the above questions for No. 1) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 15. 자신이 선택한 순서대로 지 문을 다시 읽어 보았다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ▣ Item 3 (“finding information not true of the passage”) Read the passage and answer the question. Do you think hearing a “no, thank you” at the end of your interview process is the end? It’s not. If you really want to work for this company, a “no” is just the beginning. Amy had an interview with the company she’d always wanted to work for, but was crushed when she heard she was out of the running. She decided, however, to use the connections she’d made during this process as potential networking opportunities. She sent a follow-up note to the hiring manager thanking and emphasizing she’d love to be considered for any opportunities that might be a good fit. She continued to send notes to this hiring manager to check in and stay “top-of-mind.” Amy had also made a connection with one of the people who had interviewed her; they had attended the same university. She sent the person an e-mail saying she truly enjoyed connecting with someone from her university and would love to get together for lunch someday. Amy ended up taking the person to lunch a few months later. They were able to make a successful connection and stayed in contact. It was a year later that her lunch-date contact saw an opening that matched her Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Test-taking Strategies of L2 Adolescent Learners: Three Multiple-choice Items and L2 Proficiency 89 qualifications and forwarded the information to her. Amy asked the hiring manager she’d been keeping in touch with to put in a good word. Amy was interviewed and was finally in her dream job. Many times the first round of interviewing for the job of your dreams is just that, a first round. You don’t need to take a “no” as the final answer. 3. Which one is NOT true about Amy? ① She continued to stay in contact with the hiring manager. ② She had attended the same university as one of the interviewers. ③ She was informed about an opening by her lunch-date contact. ④ She was hired by the company without any interview process. ※ 3 번 문항 풀이에 적용한 읽기 전략의 사용 정도를 표시하여 주세요. 읽기 전략 전혀 아니다 대체로 아니다 약간 아니다 보통 이다 약간 그렇다 대체로 그렇다 매우 그렇다 1~14. (Same as the above questions for No. 1) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 15. 각 선택지에 해당하는 내용 을 지문에서 찾아 확인하여 보았다. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Applicable levels: Secondary Sung Hye Kim Division of College Scholastic Ability Test Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation Jeongdong Bldg., 15-5 Jeong-dong, Jung-gu Seoul 100-784, Korea Phone: 02-3704-3817 Email: shkim@kice.re.kr Yuah V. Chon Department of English Education College of Education, Hanyang University 17 Haengdang-dong, Seongdong-gu Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO 90 Sung Hye Kim · Yuah V. Chon Seoul 133-791, Korea Phone: 02-2220-1144 Email: vylee52@hanyang.ac.kr Received in December 2013 Reviewed in January 2014 Revised version received in February 2014 Book Centre교보문고 KYOBO Abstract 1. INTRODUCTION 2. BACKGROUND 3. METHODS 4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 5. CONCLUSION REFERENCES << /ASCII85EncodePages false /AllowTransparency false /AutoPositionEPSFiles true /AutoRotatePages /None /Binding /Left /CalGrayProfile (Dot Gain 20%) /CalRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CalCMYKProfile (U.S. Web Coated \050SWOP\051 v2) /sRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CannotEmbedFontPolicy /OK /CompatibilityLevel 1.4 /CompressObjects /Tags /CompressPages true /ConvertImagesToIndexed true /PassThroughJPEGImages true /CreateJobTicket false /DefaultRenderingIntent /Default /DetectBlends true /DetectCurves 0.0000 /ColorConversionStrategy /LeaveColorUnchanged /DoThumbnails false /EmbedAllFonts true /EmbedOpenType false /ParseICCProfilesInComments true /EmbedJobOptions true /DSCReportingLevel 0 /EmitDSCWarnings false /EndPage -1 /ImageMemory 1048576 /LockDistillerParams false /MaxSubsetPct 100 /Optimize true /OPM 1 /ParseDSCComments true /ParseDSCCommentsForDocInfo true /PreserveCopyPage true /PreserveDICMYKValues true /PreserveEPSInfo true /PreserveFlatness true /PreserveHalftoneInfo false /PreserveOPIComments true /PreserveOverprintSettings true /StartPage 1 /SubsetFonts true /TransferFunctionInfo /Apply /UCRandBGInfo /Preserve /UsePrologue false /ColorSettingsFile () /AlwaysEmbed [ true ] /NeverEmbed [ true ] /AntiAliasColorImages false /CropColorImages true /ColorImageMinResolution 300 /ColorImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleColorImages true /ColorImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /ColorImageResolution 300 /ColorImageDepth -1 /ColorImageMinDownsampleDepth 1 /ColorImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeColorImages true /ColorImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterColorImages true /ColorImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /ColorACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /ColorImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000ColorACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000ColorImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasGrayImages false /CropGrayImages true /GrayImageMinResolution 300 /GrayImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleGrayImages true /GrayImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /GrayImageResolution 300 /GrayImageDepth -1 /GrayImageMinDownsampleDepth 2 /GrayImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeGrayImages true /GrayImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterGrayImages true /GrayImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /GrayACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /GrayImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000GrayACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000GrayImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasMonoImages false /CropMonoImages true /MonoImageMinResolution 1200 /MonoImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleMonoImages true /MonoImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /MonoImageResolution 1200 /MonoImageDepth -1 /MonoImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeMonoImages true /MonoImageFilter /CCITTFaxEncode /MonoImageDict << /K -1 >> /AllowPSXObjects false /CheckCompliance [ /None ] /PDFX1aCheck false /PDFX3Check false /PDFXCompliantPDFOnly false /PDFXNoTrimBoxError true /PDFXTrimBoxToMediaBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXSetBleedBoxToMediaBox true /PDFXBleedBoxToTrimBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfile (None) /PDFXOutputConditionIdentifier () /PDFXOutputCondition () /PDFXRegistryName () /PDFXTrapped /False /CreateJDFFile false /Description << /ARA /BGR /CHS /CHT /CZE /DAN /DEU /ESP /ETI /FRA /GRE /HEB /HRV (Za stvaranje Adobe PDF dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. Stvoreni PDF dokumenti mogu se otvoriti Acrobat i Adobe Reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /HUN /ITA /JPN /LTH /LVI /NLD (Gebruik deze instellingen om Adobe PDF-documenten te maken die zijn geoptimaliseerd voor prepress-afdrukken van hoge kwaliteit. De gemaakte PDF-documenten kunnen worden geopend met Acrobat en Adobe Reader 5.0 en hoger.) /NOR /POL /PTB /RUM /RUS /SKY /SLV /SUO /SVE /TUR /UKR /ENU (Use these settings to create Adobe PDF documents best suited for high-quality prepress printing. Created PDF documents can be opened with Acrobat and Adobe Reader 5.0 and later.) /KOR >> /Namespace [ (Adobe) (Common) (1.0) ] /OtherNamespaces [ << /AsReaderSpreads false /CropImagesToFrames true /ErrorControl /WarnAndContinue /FlattenerIgnoreSpreadOverrides false /IncludeGuidesGrids false /IncludeNonPrinting false /IncludeSlug false /Namespace [ (Adobe) (InDesign) (4.0) ] /OmitPlacedBitmaps false /OmitPlacedEPS false /OmitPlacedPDF false /SimulateOverprint /Legacy >> << /AddBleedMarks false /AddColorBars false /AddCropMarks false /AddPageInfo false /AddRegMarks false /ConvertColors /ConvertToCMYK /DestinationProfileName () /DestinationProfileSelector /DocumentCMYK /Downsample16BitImages true /FlattenerPreset << /PresetSelector /MediumResolution >> /FormElements false /GenerateStructure false /IncludeBookmarks false /IncludeHyperlinks false /IncludeInteractive false /IncludeLayers false /IncludeProfiles false /MultimediaHandling /UseObjectSettings /Namespace [ (Adobe) (CreativeSuite) (2.0) ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfileSelector /DocumentCMYK /PreserveEditing true /UntaggedCMYKHandling /LeaveUntagged /UntaggedRGBHandling /UseDocumentProfile /UseDocumentBleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /HWResolution [2400 2400] /PageSize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice work_e5lcgryhizg3db2xl53be7zoyy ---- CRISTINA VEZZARO CRISTINA VEZZARO Being Creative in Literary Translation: A Practical Experience This contribution focuses on the implications of creative processes with respect to translation. Translation offers, indeed, a great ambiguity as far as creativity is concerned. This paper explores by means of practical examples and professional experiences how translators relate to the creative act that comes with translating. Being in touch with one’s inner self, recognizing that the translation process cannot be left untouched by one’s own imagery and being aware of the act of choice that comes with every written sentence can help translators find their own creative voices. The combination of an awareness that allows translators to listen and be respectful of the author’s style and a deep sense of one’s creative possibilities can lead to a comprehensive creative act that includes the author, the translator and the readers. The Ambiguity of the Translation Process As a longtime translator, a recent literary translator and an even more recent writer, I am quite puzzled by the nature of creativity. For many years, I thought that I was doing a wonderful job as a translator but would never have considered myself an author. And when I finally started writing, I had to relate my role as translator and writer. Writing was definitely a creative act but what about translating? If literature is usually considered a result of creativity, is only writing a creative act or can translation be considered a creative act, too? These considerations led me to explore the origins of ideas (Johnson), and the nature of creativity (Tan), and eventually to study the relationship between choice and translation (Iyengar).   As literary translators, we are aware of our role as cultural interpreters. Yet we often tend to consider writing as noble creation and translating as mere interpretation. Respectful of the author’s intent, we try to provide excellent quality and in doing so are somehow happy that we can hide behind this professional attitude.   The process of translating offers, indeed, a great ambiguity as far as creativity is concerned. Where is the creative act if all the content is already written and we WRITING AND CREATIVITY  Vezzaro Being Creative in Literary Translation ‘simply’ need to rewrite it in our language? Just like myself, not all translators consider themselves authors. Last summer I was visiting the Museum of Modern Art in New York when I saw a painting by Henri Matisse after Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s ‘La Desserte’. I was intrigued by the painting because I understood that Matisse did not need to ‘copy’ any painting, but he was clearly taking something he thought was inspiring and reinterpreting it. The analogy with the translation process appeared evident. When we translate a novel, words are already there, of course, but translating them means reinterpreting them, just like Matisse did and many other painters or writers have done. Of course this fact raises a few intriguing questions: if they are not a hundred percent ours, where do ideas come from? How do we know that we are being creative? How can we find our creative voices? In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steve Johnson points out that we often take ideas from other people and combine them together in a different form and this is how new ideas are born. He also says that an idea is a network of neurons in our mind, and a lot of important ideas have a very long incubation period. Now, in translation, just like in writing, the ideas we come up with are often unsuspected, they are often the result of our living experience. They sometimes come from the past in form of a memory, sometimes become known in form of words we did not even know we had in our minds. Sometimes what we need is simply the time and space for us to feel. So if companies based on innovation as Google give their people some so-called ‘innovation time off’, translators should also find the time to invest in their potential of ideas, which in their case is often reading or living, simply. WRITING AND CREATIVITY  2 Vezzaro Being Creative in Literary Translation When you collect experiences, it is easier to see connections, or, as Steven Johnson puts it, chance will then favor the connected mind. So if our living experience allows us to deeply relate to the situation described in the book we are translating, we will make a connection with the author through languages and lives and we will be able to reproduce the author’s words. This connection with the author often emerges as a connection with other people’s minds. So it is probably worth spending time not only protecting and nurturing our own ideas, but also sharing them with others. Now, in one sense, protecting ideas has become more and more difficult and sharing them has become easier than ever, due to a rising globalization and to the power of the Internet. Another important result of the Internet generation is, as Ben Cameron recently pointed out, that anyone is now a potential author. And a potential translator, we might add. As an example, Google Translator offers the chance to have a first draft in almost every language, and many people naively believe that they do not need professional translators anymore. Now, as Cameron says, the number of so-called ‘proams’ (professional amateur artists) is increasing, but the real differentiator will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, i.e. the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy. And that is something that Google Translator won’t offer, which is the reason why machine translation will not be able to substitute human translators. Translation: from Technique to Creativity Not everyone can be a translator. In order to be a translator, you must not only have an excellent knowledge of the source language and master the target language and the rules of translation. You must also have a great ear for music and a love for literature. Compared to other arts, translation is more challenging as you have to comply to several restrictions, just like in jazz, as Wynton Marsalis recently pointed out in Sheena Iyengar’s The Art of Choosing: ‘Anyone can improvise with no restrictions, but that’s not jazz. Jazz always has some restrictions. Otherwise it might sound like noise.’ WRITING AND CREATIVITY  3 Vezzaro Being Creative in Literary Translation The ability to improvise, in jazz just like in translation, comes from fundamental knowledge, and this knowledge ‘limits the choices you can make and will make. Knowledge is always important where there’s a choice.’ (Iyengar) Translation is all about choice. Any word can be translated in a variety of synonyms, any sentence can be written with different rhythms, any paragraph can be interpreted in different ways and this is where your knowledge, or the acknowledgement of your lack of knowledge, is fundamental in determining the translation. In order to choose you must know your boundaries and restrictions and be able to explore the possibilities you have to express yourself. Distinguishing restrictions from creativity is an art. There is a fine line between translating and respecting the professional restrictions and creativity. I was editing a French book that had been translated into Italian and where the French verb ‘auréoler’ appeared several times, not only in the first chapter, but also in a few others. Now, ‘auréole’ is the French word for ‘aura’, ‘nimbus’, but the translator decided to choose a word that suggested the idea of a hero in a sentence that actually contained the concept of saint, so he actually changed imagery altogether. This word was clearly a stylistic choice by the author, and changing it into something else is not a sign of creativity but rather a lack of knowledge and experience. Furthermore, as Sheena Iyengar points out, ‘when there is a choice, insisting on more when one already has a lot is a sign of the failure of imagination.’ But if there is a fine line between restrictions and creativity, how do we choose when to be creative or not? In her book, Sheena Iyengar relates choice to different behaviors in life. If you ask people how much choice they have in their jobs, i.e. ‘the way they resolve problems at work’ or ‘the overall amount of freedom they have to make decisions entirely on their own during a typical day at work’, translators will show a great amount of choice possibilities. Thus, we can say that translation is one of the tasks which implies most freedom and choice. Now, we can have different attitudes when translating. We can experience the so- called ‘copycat impulse’: when the solution is difficult to find, it is easier to say that this is how everybody translates it and conform to the common use instead of going WRITING AND CREATIVITY  4 Vezzaro Being Creative in Literary Translation into a deeper analysis. Or we can feel the need to be absolutely unique in our choices, especially if they are supported by our experience or are the result of a choosing process. In this case, we are ready to defend them because we were personally involved in their creation. But if there is a previous translator or previous translations of the work we are translating, it is often more difficult because we feel the urge to distinguish ourselves and we are influenced. On the other hand, when we focus on one thing we can hardly notice other aspects or the whole, and this can also happen when we translate, for instance if we focus on false friends or other particular grammar difficulties. In this case, we will have a hard time exploring our creative choices, which is the reason why you cannot translate if you do not master the fine art between technique and creativity. When writer Amy Tan points out that ‘with everything in life there is a place and balance’ and that ‘out of nothing comes something’, she is saying that there is uncertainty in everything, and that is actually good, because it will give you the frame to find and create something new. So all the doubts and problems we can find in a translation, in entering the uncertainties of an author’s style, are actually an opportunity for us to create something new. What Amy Tan is talking about is natural creativity, i.e. the associations that we make in everyday life and that allow us to imagine, to come closer to feeling compassion, which is what writing and translating is ultimately all about. WRITING AND CREATIVITY  5 Vezzaro Being Creative in Literary Translation Awareness in Translation: Translation in Practice My awakening and awareness happened when I started working on the translation of a great novel by Ulrich Peltzer, which in English is called Part of the solution. In the time frame I worked on this, which was long and intense, I realized that I was doing more than simply a good translation job in the traditional sense of the word. And it was the first time I got close to the creative act that comes with translation. As naïve as it may seem, it was like an epiphany to me when I realized that my own personal contribution in terms of experience, knowledge and emotional insight – and not only as a language expert – were shaping my writing.   The question arises here as how conscious we are of the choices we make when we translate. Now, Iyengar indicates that 95 percent of mental behavior is subconscious and automatic, so if our brain is a web of associations, this process is mostly unconscious. What activates these automatic associations is known as a prime, and its effect on our mental status and subsequent choices is known as ‘priming’. For example, when we are reading a word or set of phrases in some book by an author we particularly like and then try to squeeze them in whenever we can, or when we associate a word or a sound to a past experience and we reproduce it, we are priming. Now, in my case, the book I was translating was full of priming. It expressed in words that could have been mine (and not only in translation), images that could have been mine, describing memories of a city (Berlin) where I had just spent some time, telling a love story that was not very different from the one I was living, and talking of political events in Italian history that I could recall from my childhood. Through an emotional closeness to the author’s perspective, I felt my imagery merge towards his. The two worlds I had experienced as a child, the one of the language I was translating from and the one of the language I was translating into, were overlapping and allowing me to find a style that I could finally recognize as my own, and this is something that the author perceived. WRITING AND CREATIVITY  6 Vezzaro Being Creative in Literary Translation Now, we can say with Iyengar that studies have shown that when they follow their doctor’s orders, patients believe they will get better so they do get better, suffering less and recovering more quickly. This placebo effect also occurs in translation. When we are connected with the author, when a lot of priming and associations happen in our minds, we believe that we can find the right choices. So we do find them. And the final result is a book that is not only translated, but rewritten by the translator. Let’s not forget that every reading implies an interpretation and that the translator is probably the first and most reflective reader of any writer. When this happens, the literary relationship between the author and the translator is not one of predominance. It becomes a collaborative act: the author implicitly gives the translator freedom of choice, he recognizes the translator’s independence as an ‘author’. We could say that the author acknowledges the translator’s creativity and creative process. So if the translator manages to create that relationship of trust with the author, the latter feels that he/she can delegate his/her decisions to the author, and this will affect the choosing process positively. The celebrated French mathematician and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré said that ‘Invention consists in avoiding constructing the useless combinations and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority. To invent is to discern, to choose.’ We can also say with Iyengar that to choose is to invent. Choosing is a creative process, one through which we construct our environment, our lives, our selves and thus also the book that comes out in a different language. Conclusions Going back to the painting by Henri Matisse after Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s ‘La Desserte’: not every book we translate can be just as inspiring to us, but when it WRITING AND CREATIVITY  7 Vezzaro Being Creative in Literary Translation WRITING AND CREATIVITY  8 happens, we take it and make it our own book just like Matisse took that painting and made it his own. In order to do so, we must feel like we want to do it and we are confident that we can do it. Once we are aware of our possibilities and we feel the urge to make our choices, everything we will be working on will be our own interpretation, because we will be expressing ourselves through it. Every book we translate is a series of choices we make, and this is how we are expressing ourselves, i.e. we are expressing our creativity. As Nobel Prize Daniel Kahneman says, it is different to think about life and to live. And this is all that translation, just like writing, is about: living and getting involved, feeling and putting your hands in the dirt and coming out with something that can make sense to you and thus will probably make sense to others, too. List of works cited Cameron, Ben 2010 ‘The true power of the performing arts’, TED Ideas worth spreading, at http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_cameron_tedxyyc.html (accessed 26 September 2010) Ghata, Yasmine 2010 Muettes, Paris: Fayard Iyengar, Sheena 2010 The Art of Choosing, New York: Twelve Johnson, Steven 2010 Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation, New York: Riverhead Kahneman, Daniel 2010 ‘The riddle of experience vs. memory’, TED Ideas worth spreading, at http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html (accessed 9 October 2010) Peltzer, Ulrich 2007 Teil der Lösung, Zürich: Amman Tan, Amy 2008 ‘On Creativity’, TED Ideas worth spreading, at http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_tan_on_creativity.html (accessed 9 October 2010) Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank Professor Andrea Basso for introducing her to creativity and research and for his precious comments; Marina Gellona and Eric Minetto for showing her the way through creative writing; author, translator and Professor Maureen Freely for confirming that her intuitions were significant. http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_cameron_tedxyyc.html http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_tan_on_creativity.html CRISTINA VEZZARO Being Creative in Literary Translation: A Practical Experience The Ambiguity of the Translation Process As a longtime translator, a recent literary translator and an even more recent writer, I am quite puzzled by the nature of creativity. For many years, I thought that I was doing a wonderful job as a translator but would never have considered myself an author. And when I finally started writing, I had to relate my role as translator and writer. Writing was definitely a creative act but what about translating? If literature is usually considered a result of creativity, is only writing a creative act or can translation be considered a creative act, too? These considerations led me to explore the origins of ideas (Johnson), and the nature of creativity (Tan), and eventually to study the relationship between choice and translation (Iyengar). As literary translators, we are aware of our role as cultural interpreters. Yet we often tend to consider writing as noble creation and translating as mere interpretation. Respectful of the author’s intent, we try to provide excellent quality and in doing so are somehow happy that we can hide behind this professional attitude. Translation: from Technique to Creativity Awareness in Translation: Translation in Practice My awakening and awareness happened when I started working on the translation of a great novel by Ulrich Peltzer, which in English is called Part of the solution. In the time frame I worked on this, which was long and intense, I realized that I was doing more than simply a good translation job in the traditional sense of the word. And it was the first time I got close to the creative act that comes with translation. As naïve as it may seem, it was like an epiphany to me when I realized that my own personal contribution in terms of experience, knowledge and emotional insight – and not only as a language expert – were shaping my writing. Conclusions List of works cited Acknowledgments work_e6zohesjqrhqniazzesy4g2haq ---- doi:10.1016/j.tics.2012.03.007 TICS-1071; No. of Pages 3 Doing science making art Bevil R. Conway1,2 1 Neuroscience Program, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA 2 Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA Scientific Life: My Word It is a challenge to balance doing both science and art, but I attempt both because each provides unique insight into perception and cognition, often to mutual benefit. The techniques I use in visual neuroscience (psycho- physics, fMRI, microelectrode recording) are different from those I use in visual art (etching, watercolor and oil paint, glass and silk), but the process is always empirical, testing hypotheses driven by observation, trial and error, while striving to be creative. Science has an apprentice system and its guilds establish the goal of publishing in peer-reviewed journals. My sci- ence interests dovetail two issues: the computations made by brain regions responsible for vision; and color, a model system for understanding how complex phenomena arise from neural networks [1]. In addition to doing science, I make art. The rules of making art are no longer well codified, but this, I argue, may represent a boon to scien- tists interested in perception and cognition. When I started making art as a child, like many novices I made figurative, representational work. I became reason- ably good at observational rendering because I did it obsessively. I was struck by the way artistic processes are often described by non-artists who think art comes about by a mystical, almost random act. In fact, the work of most artists is the result of deep deliberation and few accidents. Techniques are employed because they have predictable results: drawing with lines is useful in depict- ing object shape; painting a background green makes a red object stand out; portraits often capture precisely the line formed by closed lips because it provides a good cue to the sitter’s identity. Deploying these strategies, the ‘lie’ of art according to Picasso [2], is what making art is all about. Some neuroscientists have started to mine art for insight into neural computations – line drawings interpreted in terms of the orientation selectivity of visual neurons [3]; color contrast effects in terms of double-opponent cells [4]; and portraiture in terms of face processing [5,6]. It is a curious feature of our perceptual cognitive appa- ratus that insight into the artists’ strategies, whether gained through art or science, does not seem to diminish the power of the effects. In fact, the insight often enhances appreciation, much like knowledge of winemaking enriches the wine-tasting experience. On the one hand, this is not surprising: we all return to our favorite visual illusions even though we know what we will see in them and may even have some knowledge of how they play on the visual apparatus. On the other hand, it is often said that visual delight comes from the element of surprise. That we Corresponding author: Conway, B.R. (bconway@wellesley.edu). can derive pleasure from both the familiar and the unex- pected suggests that any single reductionist theory of vision is probably incomplete. A similarly complex inter- play is often at stake in celebrated works of art, which are usually recognizable yet afford a seemingly endless source of new discovery, inviting extended, repeated viewing. Besides pleasure, art serves a useful function: looking at pictures can make apparent the computations that the brain must be solving, which can guide the experiments we run. Making pictures, rather than just looking at them, might be even more instructive, since the process of mak- ing not only requires time, providing time to think, but is also invested with a salience brought about by activating muscles. Motor salience is important: pulling the muscles in your face into a smiling position is far more effective in bringing about happiness than just thinking about smiling. The elusive yet powerful connection between cognition and movement is what artists call muscle memory. By the same token, I have found that in considering the brain’s mecha- nisms of vision I have been inspired to take new approaches to making art. A few examples are given at the end of this essay. Although work at the interface of neuroscience and art can be fruitful in uncovering the nuts and bolts of vision and in inspiring new art, my hunch is that it will be impossible to gain insight into aesthetics simply by asses- sing what tricks artists use to represent the world or by looking at patterns of brain activity generated when people look at ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ pictures, for the simple reason that aesthetic judgments are mutable and shaped by cul- tural context. A red spot might pop out when surrounded by green, but whether this color combination is considered beautiful would seem to be dependent on the cultural baggage with which it is delivered. That aesthetic judg- ments are contingent on context should not come as a surprise to neuroscientists: almost every sensory phenom- enon is characterized by a contextual relationship (as the red-on-green example illustrates). Making unqualified associations of brain activity and aesthetics may be not only naı̈ve, but also detrimental to the integrity of science, and I think it misses the point of art. Against this back- drop, the nascent field of neuroesthetics is struggling to establish the terms by which it can be productive. Certain- ly, to be so it will be important for scientists, art historians, philosophers and artists to negotiate meaningful points of contact. Picasso quipped that he could do a decent portrait of a good friend without looking at him. Making art, as Picasso showed, is a cognitive act that has an indirect relationship with seeing. The success of Picasso’s portraits depended on hundreds of hours of careful observation, not while making 1 mailto:bconway@wellesley.edu Scientific Life: My Word Trends in Cognitive Sciences xxx xxxx, Vol. xxx, No. x TICS-1071; No. of Pages 3 art but in the course of life with his friends. From these hours, Picasso was able to extract a friend’s ‘essence’, which he pinned down with marks that bore little resemblance to those one might expect from a photograph, but were re- markably more recognizable. Through his work, Picasso advanced the Modernist spirit that placed a premium on subjective experience. Picasso’s portraits are celebrated even though few of us actually knew, or even saw, his subjects. How did Picasso’s private cognitive work trans- late into pictures that had, and continue to have, a pro- found effect on us? The legacy of Picasso is evident in contemporary art, almost all of which is concerned with ideas, some entirely divorced from materials (conceptual art). Art today is freed from the constraints of the codified apprentice system of an earlier time. This would seem to provide an even richer data set for neuroscientist interest- ed in brain mechanisms of cognition, as artists pursue the imperative of continuous innovation, constantly seeking new modes of expression, exploring the full range of cogni- tive space. Yet few neuroscientists have equipped them- selves with the skills to understand contemporary art. Scientists are not alone: many people find contemporary art esoteric and impenetrable. Most of us gravitate instead to work that has an objective basis, which is why galleries in vacation hotspots show pictures that look like some- thing, whereas major London galleries show sharks float- ing in formaldehyde. The penchant of the uninitiated for figurative work and the culturally literate for conceptual work underscores the challenges facing the field of neu- roaesthetics. Liberated from the professional requirements of many artists to make work that meets the public’s expectations, I have enjoyed making a wide range of work using a wide range of media. Figure 1a shows a watercolor inspired by the brilliant foliage seen on a hike through the rolling hills of New Hampshire in the fall. An art critic looking at the work remarked that the picture was ‘full of air’, which I attributed to the vacant regions of paper left white. These white regions buffer against chromatic induction, so that (a) (b) Figure 1. (a) New Hampshire hills, watercolor on paper, 2007. (b) A Rake’s Progress IV (At 2 the color of each mark as it appears in the final picture is similar to the color of the mark as it was made during the painting’s development. The importance of the white un- finished spaces to color relationships was obvious to the widely recognized colorist Paul Cézanne. Yve-Alain Bois recounts an exchange between the artist and his dealer, Vollard, concerning the two small spots on the hands in a portrait that had not yet been covered with pigment. Cézanne said ‘maybe tomorrow I will be able to find the exact tone to cover up those spots. Don’t you see, Monsieur Vollard, that if I put something there by guesswork, I might have to paint the whole canvas over starting from that point?’ Bois goes on to emphasize that another famous colorist, Henri Matisse, ‘was well aware that the appar- ently ‘‘unfinished’’ quality of Cézanne’s canvasses had an essential function in their construction’ [7]. Tackling color is a case in which art history, art practice and neuroscience can mutually benefit [4]. Rarely do I make art to illustrate perceptual phenomena, but occasionally on reflection I become aware of the deploy- ment of strategies (lies in Picasso’s sense) that prompt me to think about the brain mechanisms underlying perception. Figure 1b shows an etching I made by painting a sugar-ink solution directly onto a copper plate at Tanglewood, Mas- sachusetts. The piece explores the relationship between marks made to represent objects and marks made to com- municate written words – hand writing. The artistic issues at stake here are not unlike those of the transformation of retinal signals into position-invariant object codes and the cognitive function of forming symbols. Another example of my artwork tiptoes towards sculp- ture (Figure 2). In these 3D drawings, I define a set of conceptual rules on which I base the construction of a cube, which I make out of glass and silk. The approach is a nod to Sol Lewitt and minimalism, but came about from the echoes of computational neuroscience, which has charac- terized object identity as ‘read out’ from neuronal spikes [8]. Does a set of instructions describing how the spikes are read out adequately capture the representation of an TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Tanglewood, While They Had Dinner with Ellsworth Kelly), sugar-lift aquatint, 2007. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Figure 2. GB #5, four rows of four tufts of red silk, glass and silk, 2005–2012. Photo credits: (left) Stewart Clement; (right) Joanne Rathe (Boston Globe). Scientific Life: My Word Trends in Cognitive Sciences xxx xxxx, Vol. xxx, No. x TICS-1071; No. of Pages 3 object? By analogy, what is the difference in impact in how we feel about or expect we will feel about something pictured in the mind’s eye versus something physical, solid and real? Four rows of four tufts of red silk arranged in a grid and suspended by glass micropipettes. What does this look like? Thinking about smiling versus actually smiling. In this work, I am interested in the subtle and unavoidable variability that arises not just in the execution of an instruction (‘noise’ according to computational neurosci- ence) but also in the surprises that accompany the realiza- tion of something previously only visualized. This variability is the fingerprint of the handmade, and the surprise is a reminder that vision is only complete on experience. Unlike my science, which sets out to ask and answer questions, my art just seeks to raise questions. But I strive to be creative in both pursuits and to enrich the experience of seeing. It is a joy attempting to do something original, in both art and science. And life can be rich partly because of the variety, a lesson I learned from my mentor David Hubel. Finding something new in art or science, writing about it, teaching, developing the manual creativity to make a woodblock, etching, or electrode: it’s all great fun. References 1 Conway, B.R. et al. (2010) Advances in color science: from retina to behavior. J. Neurosci. 30, 14955–14963 2 ‘Picasso speaks’ [statement to Marius De Zayas] (1923) The Arts, May, pp. 315–326 [reprinted in Barr, A. (1946) Picasso – Fifty Years of His Art, Museum of Modern Art, pp. 270–271] 3 Cavanagh, P. (2005) The artist as neuroscientist. Nature 434, 301–307 4 Conway, B.R. (2012) Color consilience: color through the lens of art practice, history, philosophy and neuroscience. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2012.06470.x 5 Balas, B.J. and Sinha, P. (2007) Portraits and perception: configural information in creating and recognizing face images. Spat. Vis. 21, 119–135 6 Conway, B.R. and Livingstone, M.S. (2007) Perspectives on science and art. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 17, 476–482 7 Bois, Y-A. (1993) Matisse and ‘arche drawing’, In Painting as Model, MIT Press, p. 48 8 Hung, C.P. et al. (2005) Fast readout of object identity from macaque inferior temporal cortex. Science 310, 863–866 1364-6613/$ – see front matter doi:10.1016/j.tics.2012.03.007 Trends in Cognitive Sciences xx (2012) 1–3 3 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2012.06470.x http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2012.03.007 work_edckluok3zf7pfilznvdzbmlga ---- Nissim Gal, Traces of the Unrepresentable in the Modernist Discourse of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, RIHA Journal 0074 RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 Traces of the Unrepresentable in the Modernist Discourse of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried Nissim Gal Editing and peer review managed by: Regina Wenninger, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, München Reviewers: Joana Cunha Leal, Michael Zimmermann Abstract The present essay aims to remap the modernist writing of Clement Greenberg and his successor Michael Fried from the late 1930s to the 1960s. For many years these two critics/theorists were considered leaders of the American modernist camp that promoted the purity of the medium and the total dependence of reading art on the primacy of perception. Attentive reading of the canonical texts they authored will surprisingly reveal that between the theoretical lines of their writings dwells an essential element that contradicts the absolute dominance of eyesight. Lying at the heart of the Greenbergian act is a metaphysical foundation that poses the question of the invisible as part of the inquiry into the "essence of the visible". As such the modernist debate will be revealed not only as a means for assembling a canon of works, but also as a means to formulating an experience of revelation in terms of the visual. Attentive reading of the writings of Clement Greenberg and the early Michael Fried, reveals a theoretical element or regulative idea that will be termed here "the unrepresentable". Contents "Modernism" according to Greenberg Flickering of the unrepresentable in the early writings of Michael Fried Kafka cast his own history of the history-less Diaspora in legendary form. But it does not follow from this that the content of that form is legendary. In fact, it is hardly fiction.1 "Modernism" according to Greenberg [1] The concept of Modernism gained prominence concomitantly with the years of abstract American expressionism from its inception until its acme, i.e., from the 1940s to the 1960s. This specific period, however, is not a precondition for the validity of the concept since definitions of the borders of the period, the phenomenon and the concept from the eighteenth to the twentieth century change in accordance with the narrative and position presented by the writers. In any event, in a discourse on the history of art and in critical discourse in general, this concept was accorded added validity and prominence during Clement Greenberg's years of critical and theoretical activity. Francis Frascina proposes a series of practices embodying the institutionalization of "Modernism" in the context of the artistic discourse of those years: accelerated trading in art, a rise in the status of museums, the reality and implications of the Cold War, the role of imperialist ideology in 1 Clement Greenberg, "At the building of the Great Wall of China", in Franz Kafka Today, ed. Angel Flores and Homer Swander (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), 77-82, reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism; IV Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 52. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 the formulation of the socio-cultural matrix in American culture, and so forth.2 Greenberg's writing raises the importance of the independent dimension he ascribes to art: for him, art is a concept that cannot be defined hermetically; it is related to a state of purity and embodies an aspiration towards uniform and indivisible absoluteness. Worthy art embodies a state of pure autonomy: The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. … Modernism used art to call attention to art.3 [2] Modernism is therefore distinguished from other periods by one decisive characteristic: its commitment to a critical endeavor that sheds everything not deriving from that same aspiration towards the pure. The various artistic media at work in Modernism participate in its inherent drive, moving along a path of self-criticism. In this spirit, the most significant medium of the Modern Era is painting. The "origin" and nature of painting are its exclusive characteristics. The exclusive characteristics of painting are the subject of the act of painting, but they are also the motivator of the act. The painter, the artist, seeks the elemental condition of the painting, its flatness. He attempts to document or discover it, i.e., the essence of the completed painting is the exposure of a lost beginning (the flat canvas that came before the painting) which is sought by the artist. The nature of the painting exists as a decisive point and its essence is related to the point of purity. As pure essence it is static, unchanging, and the subject of recurring inquiries by artists. The painter will attempt to remove the excess masses from the pictorial essay on the way to seeking the pure form; this will surface at the moment the makeup adorning the face of aesthetics is removed, and at the moment the superfluous mannerisms of the traditional painting are cleared away, the "thing itself" will appear. The artistic object is bound up in a dimension of exposure; the moment the shackles of the simulacra of excess reality that inundates its essence like a superfluity are removed from it, it will become aesthetic; aesthetic practice aspires towards a state in which the final configuration is an image that is flat planes, and ridding it of the excess is removal of the effect on the way to revealing the "thing itself". Greenberg outlines a modus operandi for revealing the primal state, the essence, while engaging with the primary artistic medium, painting, its tools, the conditions of its creation, its materials. The more the foreign excess is removed from the medium, the more its uniqueness and exclusiveness will be revealed. It would not be an exaggeration to say that in Greenbergian theory the painting becomes an epistemic tool, one that enables an investigation of the essence, a tool that is a prerequisite, albeit its sufficiency is uncertain, for the distinction of art from the 2 Francis Frascina, "Introduction", in Pollock and After – The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 5. 3 Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting" (first published in Forum Lectures, Washington D.C: Voice of America, 1960), reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism; IV Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, 85-86. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 objecthood characterizing quotidian things. This epistemic tool also determines the conceptual borders of art. The technical tools of representation are what rescue the representational object from the routine experience of quotidian objects. For Greenberg, to assume that immanent essence known as painting is an assumption that there is a clear frame that guards the border of art; the existence of art is conditional upon it being contained within a frame; in the absence of the ability to discern the (formal) content of the frame, art cannot exist. The frame will be established from within the medium, its tools, and its loss will be the loss of art that is conditional upon its distinguishability from objects outside the frame. In this context, art as painting is a restricted area that preserves a certain essence and the possibility of an existence separate from the effects and quotidian objects that have no place inside the frame. On the other side of Greenberg's aesthetic equation stands the beholder, who is meant to internalize or encounter the essence revealed before him. The autonomy of the medium projects onto the degree of the beholder being a no less complex entity, whose existence emerges as a reaction to the pure appearance of the aesthetic object as a state uncompromisingly revealed to the eye, and which the beholder cannot defile. [3] The formalistic writing of Greenberg, who took his first steps in the world of critique in the 1930s, should be viewed in its connection with the early essays of Alfred Barr, who emphasized the unique formal characteristics of a work of art. Barr proposed a particular model for the historical narrative of modern art that leaned on formal history. Greenberg took the baton from him and not only did he deepen Barr's proposal, he also enhanced its application to contemporary art.4 [4] In his early essay in 1939 Greenberg, inspired by Marxism, explains the role of the avant-garde in blazing a trail to "culture" within the violent historical mass. According to Greenberg, the artist extols absoluteness as something lacking content or narrative (which are defined as excess), which is a state of nothingness that does not allow the eye to be diverted to what is perceived as inconsequential. Phrases like "art for art's sake" and "pure poetry" make all excess redundant. The objective of the arts is the abstract, the non-object; the avant-garde places itself in the position of The Creator since it has no need of external reference: The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape – not its picture – is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals.5 4 While Greenberg took his first steps in the 1930s, his later writing also reveals his relationship with Barr's formalism together with other writers that are a source of inspiration in his writing. See Frascina, "Introduction", 11. In this context see also Leja's arguments on reformulating the 1940s- 1960s subjectivity model in relation to developments in the 1920s and 1930s: Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1993). It would also be interesting to examine the connections and debts of Greenberg to Clive Bell and Roger Fry. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 [5] The work is endowed with the status of a self-sufficient object that cannot be compared or understood as something that is beyond itself, and yet Greenberg says, "The very values in the name of which he (the poet or artist) invokes the absolute are relative values, the values of aesthetics. And so he turns out to be imitating, not God… but the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves. This is the genesis of the 'abstract'".6 This perception diverts attention from the quotidian to a different sphere that is manifested in engagement in the medium itself. The turning of art to an examination of its own technique and medium is brought to fruition in Greenberg's specific story of Modernism: "The very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have already imitated … become the subject matter of art and literature …, what we have here is the imitation of imitating".7 To demonstrate the modernist model that Greenberg carves from history, while at the same time also structuring it, he lays out the history of art in a manner that leads him to conclusions on the uniqueness of Modernist art. The advantages of artists like Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Joan Miró, Cézanne, Matisse and Paul Klee over Surrealism are that their source of inspiration is the medium itself. Following a lecture by Hans Hofmann, Greenberg wrote that "Surrealism in plastic art is a reactionary tendency which is attempting to restore 'outside' subject matter. The chief concern of a painter like Dali is to represent the processes and concepts of his consciousness, not the processes of his medium."8 [6] I would like to present a new reading of several of Greenberg's principal texts and attempt to identify, in what are perceived as the defining texts of a formalistic agenda, a more dialectical position wherein the concrete materialism, the visuality of the work of art, is also bound up with an invisible component; in other words, a dialectical position whose visual and visible framework also expresses the impossibility of gridding or mapping that component; they express non-sight, a vision of antivision.9 Much can be 5 Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (first published in Partisan Review, 1939), reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism; I Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 8. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 9. 8 Ibid., 9, n. 2. Greenberg's stance on Surrealism was more complex than we tend to think; he wrote about the relationship between the New York School and Surrealism in his "L'art américain du XXe siècle" (1946). See also a brief presentation of this subject in Leja, Reframing, 33-34. 9 The significance of my reading is found for example in the lack of explanation as to why Greenberg was drawn to artists who grappled with "the appearance of the unrepresentable". An analysis of his writings reveals the insufficiency of the standard critical readings, as if Greenberg is committed solely to the blank materialism of the strictly formalist approach. Greenberg's art critical theories have had a massive impact on art historians, such as James Ackerman, who followed his approach, and Leo Steinberg who opposed it, and on curators such as William Rubin and other participants in the modernist and post-modernist art critics and historians debate. If the traditional perception of American art criticism contrasts between the Apollonian Greenberg and the Dionysian Harold Rosenberg, and in due course there appeared the project of Rosalind Krauss and the October group that countered the radical opticality and materialism of Greenberg, this article seeks to expose an ignored dialectics that can be found at the heart of Greenberg and his followers. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 learned about this component from Greenberg's attempt to distinguish between an object that in his view functions as kitsch and one worthy of being called art. Surprisingly, it transpires that in his opinion a work of art must set out conditions for the appearance of a miraculous component that is related to blindness no less than sight. We shall see later that Greenberg's above-mentioned puristic demand is an attempt to diminish the value of elements that will divert the eye from the appearance of the unrepresentable: the painting's most basic material, its essence, seemingly undergo reduction to metaphor. I shall ultimately argue that the curtains of material that are parallel to the picture's plane as an expression of flatness, planes defined by Greenberg as slamming into one another, mark the opacity of (the painting's) language, opacity that attests to a revelation related to the sublime of the terribilità, in Greenberg's own words. As we shall see, this concept also permeates Michael Fried's critical writing of the 1960s. [7] In his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), Greenberg writes that one of the most contemptible things about kitsch is the erasure of the distinction "between those values only to be found in art and the values which can be found elsewhere".10 To illustrate the cost of this erasure he gives a hypothetical example of the ignorant peasant standing before two paintings, one by Picasso and the other by Repin. In the first there is an analytical/modernistic representation of the figure of a woman, while in the second is a figurative description of a battle. This comparison is interesting since it reflects the Greenbergian insight that the aesthetic experience is bound up with a miraculous event. In Picasso's work the simple peasant discovers signs of the icons he remembers from his village, whereas when he looks at Repin's work he is introduced to a completely unfamiliar technique. The very fact that he is not familiar with this technique causes him to prefer Repin's work because of the sense of vitality and miraculousness it evokes.11 The images in Repin's painting are located on the continuum between life and art without interrupting it; this is realism evoking a sense of the miraculous, in which "identifications are self-evident immediately and without any effort on the part of the spectator".12 Repin's work is connected with kitsch since it heightens reality without deviating from the self-evident, whereas Picasso's attests to experience inherent in the worthy aesthetic experience. "The recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic"13 are not immediately attainable (as with Repin) but rather indirectly, through the encounter with the plastic qualities of the work. The works call for a sort of attention (from the beholder) that Greenberg calls "reflected effect". Repin's work embraces all these without constituting a reason for their appearance; it offers the beholder a synthetic experience.14 10 Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", 15. 11 Greenberg speaks of the miraculous and the sympathetic in ibid., 16. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 By contrast, Greenberg subscribes to a synthetic experience wherein introduction to the representation is not digested, it is not introduction to the miraculous per se but acknowledgement that the work of art sets out conditions for the appearance of something; the power of the work is that it charts the path for the appearance of presence. Clearly, here the appearance is effect, but it is still signified as a type of absolute, primordial component. Elsewhere Greenberg's text does not directly argue for the appearance of the invisible (appearance that never becomes a static presence), but rather identifies an element of antivision in his very demand to "overpower the medium", to expose while overcoming the purity; the Greenbergian demand to maximize the plastic quality is the other aspect of the aspiration to minimize disturbances that will corrupt the appearance of the unrepresentable. [8] When discussing the purpose of any aesthetic medium in going beyond its purest position, Greenberg suggests that: [P]ure plastic art [strives, N.G.] for the minimum … the painting and the statue are machines to produce the emotion of "plastic sight". The purely plastic or abstract qualities of the work of art are the only ones that count. Emphasize the medium and its difficulties, and at once the purely plastic, the proper, values of visual art come to the fore. Overpower the medium to the point where all sense of its resistance disappears, and the adventitious uses of art become more important.15 [9] The above quotation connects between purity, set as a source of the aspiration of any artistic medium, including painting and sculpture, and the need to overpower this purity, overpower the medium. Overpowering the medium is deviating from it, it is what will enable the appearance of the unrepresentable, of wonderment at the appearance of the image. The other side of the equation is the power of the medium: The history of the avant-garde painting is that of a progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium; which resistance consists chiefly in the flat picture plane's denial of efforts to "hole through" it for realistic perspectival space. The motto of the Renaissances artist, Ars est artem celare, is exchanged for Ars est artem demontrare.16 [10] In "Towards a Newer Laocoon" (1940), Greenberg presents "the emotion of plastic sight", the experience of beholding, not only as being introduced to the action, not as the inward movement of the beholder towards what is signified beyond the canvas, but as wonderment at what is supposed to appear in the painting. The realistic perspectival space he criticizes is the space of the illusion, in the sense of illusory imitation; Greenberg rejects this movement of the eye because it does not enable the appearance of the unrepresentable. 15 Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon" (first published in Partisan Review, July-August, 1940), reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism; I Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, 34. 16 Ibid. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 [11] The "reflected effect" that Greenberg connects with the "emotion of plastic sight", in his text, enables the encounter with the presence of the unrepresentable, before which one can only stand in wonder. Two principal strategies are combined in this encounter: the impinging of the flat planes on the picture's surface to create all-over flatness as an expression of a metaphysical event, and the creation of an optical illusion connected with impenetrability, which in turn constitutes a precondition for the appearance of the unrepresentable. [12] We shall first address the act of beholding. Greenberg describes the beholding experience as an event that takes place in time and thus unfurls the appearance of the unrepresentable. The surface of the picture slowly becomes shallow, the various possible layers are blocked by each other, their illusionism takes on a material quality, they converge into material reality, into the most concrete material sphere, into the surface of the canvas itself; they become transparent to each other and skip from the space of illusion to the concreteness of the support. Any attempt to preserve a state of reference will dissipate on this support, each shape will dissolve on its surface. This will then facilitate the occurrence that we perceive as one of metaphysical validity: "In a further stage," he writes, "realistic space cracks and splinters into flat planes which come forward, parallel to the plane surface."17 [13] But Greenberg does not relinquish illusion entirely. He suggests, for instance, that the action of planes in a painting is an attempt at slamming one illusion onto another, an attempt that does not create an image that is Renaissance trompe l'oeil; that the conjoining of planes with one another on the closest surface creates "an optical illusion, not a realistic one",18 and that this illusion is meant to embody the impenetrability of the surface. [14] The emergence of impenetrability is not a product of a religious search per se in the soul of the artist-believer, but rather one of praxis, of discovering the pictorial technique as a subject and theme on the road to appearance. This engagement with the technical leads to a situation of flattening which becomes clear in terms of impenetrability. It is impossible to penetrate the religious depth of the signified there. Modernist painting sheds the excess, the realistic illusion, in order to enter the cul-de-sac. Thus the size of the New York School's works is presented as a constraint imposed upon them because they turn their back on the illusion of depth: "The flattening surfaces of their canvases compelled them to move along the picture plane laterally and seek in its sheer physical size the space necessary for the telling of their kind of pictorial story."19 This 17 Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon", 35. 18 Ibid. 19 Clement Greenberg, "American-Type Painting" (first published in Partisan Review, Spring 1955), reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism; III Affirmations and Refusals, 1950-1956, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 226. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 impenetrability does not mean a barrier between the work and the truth, or a conceptual brick wall splitting between the truth there and the appearance in the present, but that facets exist within the surface that leave the depth solely as an allusion. This is the basis for reading Pollock's work when Greenberg explains the latter's engagement with his all over style in which the surface of the picture is uniformly covered; through repetition of the same motif he claims that the motivation for this is a desire to attain a dense and decorative immediacy. Covering the entire surface does not create unidimensional uniformity and hermeticity, as one might think, but the possibility "to control the oscillation between an emphatic physical surface and the suggestion of depth beneath it as lucidly and tensely and evenly as Picasso and Braque had controlled a somewhere similar movement with the open facets and pointillist flecks of color of their 1909-1913 Cubist pictures".20 "American-Type Painting", as Greenberg calls the New York School, is bound up with impenetrability that reveals gaps. The gaps are revealed in the wake of the Kantian traces in Greenberg's writing, traces that are not only revealed in the enlightened narrative of the discipline being committed to self-criticism on the way to revealing and refining the subject, but also in the actual perception of the sublime. Although this determination will no doubt astonish some, in Greenberg's essay, written in 1955, we can read a teleological presentation in which representation shifts towards a state of awesome splendor, or a quality of tremendous force that is perceived in terms of revelation or appearance. De Kooning is presented by Greenberg as an artist who discovers control through abstract painting, which is a symptom of his being part of Modernist tradition; in his work he is related to Picasso through his mixing of color with the outline and framing of a shallow space. According to Greenberg, like Picasso, de Kooning "hankers after terribilità",21 but the relationship between flatness, impenetrability and the sublime must be clarified particularly. The sublime is embodied in the unresolvable conflict between it and its subject, it is linked to the moment when interpretation seemingly falls silent, it is mapped in the invisible field between the subject of the representation, the act of representation and the representation itself. Greenberg's discussion of flat planes enables us to understand that impenetrability is the expression of the same unrepresentable space in which flatness moves and vanishes just before it appears. In the following I shall attempt to clarify the meaning of this space. [15] Greenberg comes down on the side of the existence of a vital dynamism in the plane. He declares that the intention is not to arrive at visual stagnation by the reduction of color in the painting to the hermetic rectangle of the surface, but rather as a better means for the appearance of the unrepresentable. From the Greenbergian perception we can learn 20 Greenberg, "American-Type Painting", 225. 21 Ibid., 219. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 that aesthetic production is intended to indicate "the enduring presence of flatness underneath and above the most vivid illusion of three-dimensional space".22 He writes: The flatness towards which Modernist painting orients itself can never be an absolute flatness. The heightened sensitivity of the picture plane … does and must permit optical illusion. The first mark made on a canvas destroys its literal and utter flatness, and the result of the marks … is still a kind of illusion.23 [16] In other words, in Greenberg's hands flatness does not serve as a point revealed as the core once the illusion is removed, but rather functions itself as an expression of appearance. This appearance is, of course, of a condition of absence. Whereas the (non- Modernist) art of painting is perceived in its entirety, first and foremost as content, the term "Modernist painting" is a picture before it is content, flatness appears before it is content. Modernism is typified by the understanding that the exhibit is first and foremost a picture, it is the only way to the "success of self-criticism". On the face of it Greenberg proposes an expression of the transcendental logic of flattening. The painting seemingly begins from the exposed canvas, from the support, the plane format; the support is seemingly the ontological starting point of the pictorial practice. The artist attempts to represent flatness on the canvas, the apparent object, he searches for it like a blind man trying to present what he cannot see; within the canvas support he seeks flatness, the visible, for flatness is the visible support. Flatness as an object, like the invisible given the artist seeks, is also the crutch he leans on when trying to isolate flatness. The attempt to isolate flatness and bring it to the canvas confirms that the flatness of the canvas is like the flatness that is sought, the flatness of the support is the flatness long past. The flatness of the support is the flatness of flatness, the flatness sought is conditional upon the flatness of the support, i.e., Greenberg seemingly proposes the transcendental logic of "flatness as flatness". However, a reading of some of Greenberg's texts, as will be shown in the following, reveals a further hypothesis that provides a different horizon in which different flatnesses function as curtains on the surface in which an unrepresentable element lays hidden. Greenberg speaks of unique objects produced in a vital connection with the concept of the aesthetic experience, experience which is a significant tool and prerequisite for inducing representation, object and concept. If the appearance of the canvas is flat, then flatness is the condition for the possibility of the painting; when the painter paints flatness he is in fact inventing it; when he turns his eye from the flatness of the canvas to the support of the painting, or conversely when he shifts from the flatness he wants to paint as a model towards the copy on the canvas he is painting (i.e., he in any case jumps from the object of his observation), a field of invisibility is opened that must be crossed in order to paint. This space, the gap that is a non-site of non-sight, i.e., an invisible place, is the place to which "the trait-not-yet- 22 Greenberg, "Modernist Painting", 87. 23 Ibid., 90. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 traced withdraws".24 This trait is a vestige of the object the artist seeks to represent and it is the raw material that will later appear as an image whose incubation space is, as aforementioned, invisible. The space of flatness that exists between and within the painting's different surfaces therefore outlines the unrepresentable as a definitive element of modern painting. [17] In this context the painting serves Greenberg as a kind of frame, as a question enabling the creation of a conceptual structure that explains the conditions of the appearance, the absence of the image, and the linguistic framework that can explain the experience of wonderment vis-à-vis the emergence of the image within the field. Greenberg sets himself the objective of describing the course of pictorial history as it emerges from a series of works and artists that doubtlessly function in his words as a canon that outlines points of reference enabling a discussion of painting. The basic premise is that the art of painting that functions as a preferred medium in "Modernist time" produces sculpture as its absolute Other, and only by persistent negation of what is perceived as its being can it prepare or create its own autonomy. Sculpture plays a structural role in Greenberg's discourse on Modernism. Painting needs sculpture dialectically; it must exclude it despite being dependent on it for its very definition. Greenberg's formalistic mission is to formulate the limits of the discourse and propose the scaffolding for the conceptual structure that leans on aesthetic distinctions, or, as de Duve would say, on aesthetical judgments,25 on the way to signifying the "painting" as a conceptual framework for formulating the impossibility of the appearance of the image on the one hand, and wonder at its very oxymoronic appearance on the other. [18] Painting as a conceptual framework that patches within it concepts like flatness, impenetrability and unrepresentable space, is discussed by Greenberg by means of estranging painting from sculpture whose specific concreteness is liable to be perceived literally, as opposed to the optical materiality of painting. According to Greenberg, the estrangement of sculpture does not mean relinquishment of the illusion in painting, but rather the uniqueness of one specific illusion of the type he perceives as a clearly optical illusion. This illusion that enables movement "can only be seen into; can be traveled through, literally or figuratively, only with the eye".26 This sentence is significant since it explains the importance of optics and because it declares that the aesthetic experience means the possibility of ocular movement along the breadth of the support, perhaps towards flatness. 24 On this "spread of invisibility" in the context of and discrete from transcendental logic, see: Robert Vallier, "Blindness and Invisibility: The Ruins of Self-Portraiture (Derrida's Re-reading of Merleau-Ponty)", in Écart & différance: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Seeing and Writing, ed. M.C. Dillon (New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1997), 194. 25 Thierry de Duve, Clement Greenberg Between The Lines, B. Holmes (trans.), (Paris: Édition Dis Voir, 1996). 26 Greenberg, "Modernist Painting", 90. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 [19] American painting of the 1940s and 50s offered "space in depth", space that became "a matter more of trompe l'oeil illusion". According to Greenberg this is not a space of greater (deeper) withdrawal, but "it did become more tangible, more a thing of immediate perception and less one of reading".27 In the same context he remarks that in the June 1948 issue of Partisan Review, George L. K. Morris accused him of giving preference to "behind-the-frame painting".28 According to him, artists like Hofmann, Pollock and Gorky offer pictures that stay behind their frames far deeper than Mondrian or Picasso's post-1913 works. In Greenberg's narrative the 1950s were years in which abstract impressionist paintings "cry out for a more coherent illusion of three-dimensional space, and to the extent that it did this it cried out for representation".29 In my opinion, the behind-the-frame concept he proposed in 1962 as a point in favor summarizes the leitmotif of Greenbergian theory. The understanding of impenetrability or flatness as material predicates par excellence is but partial. Although the aesthetic issue is not representation of a concrete given, neither is it a dead end of reduction towards the rectangular embodiment of the material in the form of the support per se. The Modernist narrative that leaves out anything that might be construed as excess or exaggerated is what creates the conditions for the possibility of the appearance of the unrepresentable. The aesthetic endeavor creates the appearance of the latter as a kind of testimony to the wonderment at there being an image at all.30 Essentialist logic is therefore revealed as supplemental logic, everything is revealed, as a supplement for the unrepresentable turns all the aesthetic tools and pictorial measures into makeup, highlighting its features. I disagree with the position that Greenberg proposes, to place flattening as the formal focus of the painting, as if it were insignificant and apparently channeled towards revealing the absence of immediate content, whatever it may be. At the heart of the Greenbergian move stands a metaphysical project that poses the question of the invisible, or invisibleness as a central question, as part of tracing the "essence of the visible". The aesthetic experience is therefore one of revelation in visual terms.31 This stance emerges from Greenberg's perception of the painting as a law, its ultimate metaphor. According to Greenberg, Judaism expresses a religion of law that was given as a revelation, and as such Judaism is outside history, and he writes: "Their law protects the exiled Jews not only from the profane, but from history – Gentile history".32 The 27 Clement Greenberg, "After Abstract Expressionism" (first published in Art International, October 1962), reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism; IV Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957- 1969, 124. 28 The intention behind this term is to an in-depth illusion that penetrates, so to speak, beneath the painting's surface and behind its frame, ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Irad Kimchi in a conversation with Naomi Siman-Tov, see: "Outside History" [Mihutz La-Historia], Hamidrasha 3 (May 2000), 182 (Hebrew). 31 And see ibid., 184. 32 Greenberg, "At the Building of the Great Wall of China", 48. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 religion of the Jew living in exile is one lacking the sacred, the holy place is absent, an absentee which in turn reinforces the validity of the law. He writes: "Jewish law … has come into being discontinuously. The Law… must remain forever incomplete and vulnerable".33 According to Kimchi, Greenberg perceives secularization as relinquishment of the loss bound up in the law, relinquishment of the absence of the sacred, of existence outside history. The analogy is that, like Judaism, the avant-garde is a movement of law.34 As opposed to the above-mentioned "secular" perception, I view Greenberg as arguing for the technical and ethical commitment of those active in the aesthetic field not to accept this absence as a working hypothesis, and occupation with the law as a sort of praxis forever bound up in grieving, but to accept the onus of delineating the borders of the inherent absence in order to enable the appearance of the unrepresentable. Here I see a connection between Clement Greenberg's writings and Lyotard's discussion of the sublime. Outlining the absence is part of the practice of expressing the impossibility of presenting and an attempt to create the conditions for the appearance, an action harnessed to the tradition of the sublime. [20] It often seems that the above-mentioned commitment is not reserved solely for painting. According to Greenberg, modern poetry is pure and abstract, and both it and the plastic arts are not interested in quotidian material, but concentrate "on the effort to create poetry and on the 'moments' themselves of poetic conversion". "Moments of poetic conversion" may be interpreted as moments in which there is an appearance of the absolute within the space of the artistic endeavor, whereas here preoccupation with the medium is read as a path that outlines the conditions for the appearance of the unrepresentable. In its materiality, its body, it embodies the conditions for the possibility of the appearance of the unrepresentable, that which is related to the "true culture" of avant-garde as opposed to kitsch.35 The moment of poetic conversion marks the appearance of the unrepresentable, it is connected with the sublime which, as Lyotard explains, cannot be acculturated by the recurrence of techne. It constitutes a kind of disturbance in which the artist's practice is an inevitable appearance, the beholders become the addressees in search of the unbeholdable. In other words, Lyotard is cautious about mentioning the name of what appears, or alternatively, the appearance of the name, but he does mention the wondrous quasi-revelation of a different reality – a separate world; through what can be imperfect, distorted and ugly, the different steps in the work embody "the shock effect"36 in a sublime creation. This is the effect of wonderment that we encountered earlier when faced with the appearance of the image. 33 Ibid. 34 Kimchi, "Outside History" [Mihutz La-Historia], 195, 196. 35 Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", 13. 36 Jean François Lyotard, "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde" (first published in Artforum 22:8, April 1984), reprinted in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 203. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 [21] The accepted argument in the theoretical discourse is that Greenberg's writing in the 1940s persistently presents the material element, "anti-illusionist flatness", as a response to the question of what constitutes a (proper) painting. Greenberg promotes tactility and the dominance of flatness as the principal parameter for judging/reading a painting. By contrast, in Greenberg's later writing he proposes optical elements that preserve fragments of illusion. This is the basis of Yve-Alain Bois' explanation for Greenberg's rejection of Frank Stella, whose works from the late 1950s and early 1960s apparently constitute a faithful illustration of Greenberg's earlier credo of reducing the illusory depth of the painting.37 [22] This approach is based on the argument that the status of illusion changes in the course of Greenberg's later writing, and moreover it presumes a polarity between radical flatness and optical illusion. As we have seen, however, a common and significant conceptual axis is evident in Greenberg's writings. In both "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939) and "Towards a Newer Laocoon" (1940) traces of the vision of antivision or the emotion of "plastic sight" can be identified, which in "American-Type Painting" (1955) converge into the notion of slamming planes and the concept of terrabilità, culminating in "Modernist Painting" (1960), in a description of the logic of flatness that establishes the invisible within it. In these writings one can trace the conceptual axis that intersects Greenberg's writing and which I term the unrepresentable. Even in the first stage of Greenberg's writing that emphasizes tactility, as well as in the later stage that places greater emphasis on optical illusion, Greenberg writes from an epistemic commitment to the unrepresentable. In other words, flatness and optical illusion alike contain a dimension of exposure and of creating conditions for the appearance of the unrepresentable, and both indicate a path for the appearance of the conditions for appearance (of the unrepresentable). [23] Like Lyotard, Greenberg presumes an indeterminate situation at the heart of the representation mechanism in the Modern Era, and this indetermination is expressed throughout Modernism in Manet and Cezanne in repeated attempts to call into question the particular rules that were formulated throughout the history of art. The preoccupation with the pictorial tool, Lyotard explains, does not aim to examine the functionality of line/frame/support and so forth, but rather to answer the question "What is a painting?" Cézanne's pictorial practice strives to reveal the basic components that shape our perceptions and, moreover, modern painting is measured by its ability "to make seen what makes one see, and not what is visible". The attempt to demarcate individual figures in the field of artistic practice, attempts to define groups in a formalistic manner 37 For Bois' observations, see: Yve-Alain Bois, "The Limits of Almost", in Ad Reinhardt (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 15-17. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 that isolates particulars according to the facial features of the object, are destined to collapse against the basic wish "to bear witness to the indeterminate".38 [24] Corresponding with the Greenbergian move of defining (pictorial) Modernism as an impulse that drives aesthetic practice towards a basic essence – flatness – the avant- gardist presents the impossibility of representation, the impossibility of documenting sensory data, and "inscribes the occurrence of sensory now as what cannot be presented and which remains to be presented in the decline of great representational painting".39 "The sublime, no doubt, has been and continues to be a reaction against the matter-of- fact positivism and the calculated realism that governs the former, as writers on art such as Stendhal, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire and Breton all emphasize".40 [25] In 1981 a symposium was held under the aegis of Critical Inquiry that revolved around "The Politics of Interpretation", and accorded an important place to interpretation of Clement Greenberg's thought, especially in the exchange between two central figures in American visual discourse, Michael Fried and T.J. Clark.41 Clark indicates two central texts in Greenberg's writing, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" and "Towards a Newer Laocoon", which articulate the critical and theoretical consciousness of their author. He harnesses the Greenbergian move that engages in the dominance of the medium as an expression of an act of negation to an historical and even political reading of Modernism. The medium, in Clark's view, is "the site of negation and estrangement".42 The narrative of "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" presumes a period wherein the bourgeoisie as the ruling class clung to the culture and art that were part of its assets. Aesthetic activity investigated and elucidated the class experience, its premises and demands. In contrast with avant-garde art, according to Clark, kitsch is the sign of a bourgeoisie attempting to invent the loss of its identity, "it is an art and culture of instant assimilation, of abject reconciliation to the everyday, of avoidance of difficulty, pretence to indifference, equality before the image of capital".43 Rather than leaning on familiar representational models like a centered composition or a concept that places talent as a relevant frame of reference, Modernism creates practices of negation that emerge from a meticulous examination of the method, the material and the image, the decomposition of perspective space alongside exposure of the disparity between mechanisms of presentation; practices of negation create 38 Lyotard, The Sublime and the Avant-Garde, 206-207. 39 Ibid., 208. 40 Ibid., 209. 41 T.J. Clark, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art" (first published in Critical Inquiry 9:1, September 1982, 139-156), reprinted in Pollock and After – The Critical Debate, 47-63. The original issue of Critical Inquiry was entitled The Politics of Interpretation, based on a symposium of the same name organized by journal, and held at the University of Chicago's Center for Continuing Education, October 30th – November 1st 1981. 42 Ibid., 58. 43 Ibid., 53. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 discord between different aspects of representation and the visible they are supposed to represent. In effect, for Clark, any inversion of classical renaissance representation participates in practices of negation.44 [26] According to Clark the most fundamental fact attending the Greenbergian narrative is, of course, "flatness", which in Clark's hands becomes representative of a range of not necessarily formal properties that attend the entire modernist historical move as he perceives it in the Greenbergian version of the history of modern art between 1860 and 1918. According to this approach, flatness is not deciphered as a refinement of conventions; it is not a movement towards the core of the medium as a formal aesthetic concept, but a shift towards that which is outside the above inward movement. Consequently, Clark can argue, for example, that flatness can be understood in terms of the "popular" by means of the abundant images reproduced from reality. Formal flatness becomes fettered by the material shackles of modernity in addition to its validity as the embodiment of our ability to recognize things as real, to become acquainted with the truth of seeing.45 Flatness is also a sort of buffer, a means of blocking the bourgeois movement that skips with ease from the painting to a detached space of fantasy; flatness is the detachment of the movement from the world towards that which is beyond life, that which cannot be articulated in language. Clark's version of flatness is denial of the bourgeois fantasy of a state of unrestricted freedom that is enabled by means of the transparency of art. Thus, the flat support, the material register emphasized by preoccupation with the technical, ceases to represent an empirical argument; flatness is a tool, a medium, a support that conveys meanings and content. The refusal to assimilate is an expression of the practices of negation that estranges and opens empty spaces as material facts that refuse the establishment of a phantasmic continuum and endless continuity; flatness is a practice of negation.46 The meaning of Modernism is to be found in pushing the medium beyond its possible limits, processing it to the point at which it decomposes and becomes unprocessed and reinvented material; this is a practice of negation. "Negation," says Clark, "is the sign inside art of this wider decomposition: it is an attempt to capture the lack of consistent and repeatable meanings in the culture – to capture the lack and make it over into form."47 In response to the criticism leveled against him, Clark clarifies that the negation position behind which he stands does not mean that a nihilistic impulse is hiding behind modernistic practice; namely an argument whereby in every aesthetic act considered modernist is planted a destructive self-serving virus. Rather, he proposes to view Modernism's perpetual analysis of its materials and tools by examining the mechanism of 44 Clark, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art", 55. 45 Ibid., 57. 46 Ibid., 58. 47 Ibid., 59. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 representation and the modes of its engagement in various aspects of experience as a practice of negation.48 [27] It can therefore be said that an analytical argument creeps into Clark's social/historical reading that is connected with the notion of the unrepresentable with which we began. Clark claims that practices of negation also mean the perpetual appearance of vacuity, which in his interpretation functions as a recurring message in Modernism, a target it unfailingly hits. Vacuity is manifested in the infinite ambiguousness arising from the permanent existence of "an Other which is comfortably ineffable, a vacuity, a vagueness, a mere mysticism of sight".49 It is interesting to note that in his characterization, Clark, who is supposedly proficient in accurate social reading, deviates toward our initial proposition of viewing Greenberg as representative of a trend that considers the existence of the absent as an inherent part of the discourse and reality of the (artistic) object towards a state of epiphany. He quotes critic F.R. Leavis on poet T.S. Eliot's "effort to express formlessness itself as form", citing two lines to which this applies, "Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion".50 This is an almost exemplary illustration of my argument regarding the appearance of the image as a state towards which the modernist approach turns, striving by investigating the medium to allow the appearance of the unrepresentable. [28] Michael Fried rejects Clark's thesis outright, and claims that his contention that Modernism proposes practices of negation is simply erroneous. He does not dispute the fact that there are, as he says, moments in Modernism in which negation appears in the form of relinquishing or rejecting other possibilities. He speaks out against the approach whereby negation guides modernistic practice, or what Clark proposes, according to him: a move whereby art is negation. Fried, as if demonstrating a classical oedipal complex, condemns Greenberg as someone who holds an essentialist and reductive position, as does Clark, who, according to Fried, attempts to found Modernism on negation.51 On the focus of aesthetic practice, Fried presents the artist's need to determine at what stage his artistic work is worthy of being perceived as a finished aesthetic object that possesses linkage to past art and is aptly present in the present with an eye to the future on the continuum of tradition. 48 T.J. Clark, "Argument about Modernism: A Reply to Michael Fried" (first published in The Politics of Interpretation, ed. W.T.J. Mitchell, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983, 239-243), reprinted in Pollock and After – The Critical Debate, 82. 49 Clark, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art", 59-60. 50 Ibid., 62, n. 10. 51 Michael Fried, "How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J. Clark" (first published in Critical Inquiry 9:1, September 1982, 217-234), reprinted in Pollock and After – The Critical Debate, 66, 68. It is important to note that Fried is referring to texts from the 1960s, whereas Clark refers to the earlier Greenberg, from the 1930s and 40s. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 [29] In his book, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines,52 Thierry de Duve engages in an analysis of three different Greenbergs that shift between various dichotomies: avant- garde/kitsch, critic/theoretician, Marxist/Hegelian. De Duve's basic premise is that there are no descriptions or historical reviews underlying Clement Greenberg's works that are not matters of judgment; the dominance of aesthetic judgment draws its validity from the experience of the person beholding the work, that is to say, there is something that leaves its mark on the experience and it is that which is judged. De Duve deciphers Greenberg's medium as that which embodies a (material) state of "opacity" and reads it through a sort of communication model; the work is created with an eye to the past, but addresses the future. De Duve, who lends credence to the Kantian sentiment of dis- sentiment, argues for the necessity of this process for recognition of the existence of the work to be created in us.53 [30] In his discussion of Greenberg, de Duve dwells on the first seminar the latter gave, in which he proposed a broad understanding of the concept of aesthetic experience.54 The possibility of perceiving everything on an aesthetic level enables it to be experienced as an artistic object. The general point of departure here makes it possible to argue that aesthetic experience is characterized by a distancing from one's self, a reflective distance; a distance that is indicated by the transition proposed by de Duve from perceiving art as a proper name, art that is dictated for example by the specificity of the medium, to art as a general term, as proposed by Duchamp.55 Melville's interpretation of Greenberg's proposal as it is presented in this section of de Duve's book, is actually deciphered in Michael Fried's terms as "theatricality", namely the proposal to view aesthetic experience as a type of experience that can be termed the "experience of experience" and nullifies, according to Melville, Greenberg's first requisite, i.e., it leads to a situation whereby we no longer need a singular object in order to create the aesthetic experience. On the other hand, I believe that the argument regarding the importance of the "experience of experience" does not undermine the status of the specific object as generating this understanding. The experience created from understanding art or a specific object, even when it is the product of an immediate experience between beholder and art, does not converge exclusively into this understanding, but certainly projects it time and again. That is to say, recognition of the "experience of experience" joins all the specific parameters that are revealed in every act of beholding and specific analysis of a work of art. 52 De Duve, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines. 53 See Stephen Melville, "Kant after Greenberg – Essay Review", in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56:1 (Winter 1998), 70. 54 De Duve in Kant After Duchamp, here according to Melville in ibid., 70-71. 55 Ibid., 71 for Melville's criticism. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 [31] "Art", says de Duve quoting Clark, "wants to address someone", but that someone is absent. His reading of Clark enlists the impulse of negation within the modernist medium which the latter identifies in order to pose a question: "Why would Modernism have its medium be absence of some sort?" The medium stands for that which is not present, the absent addressee. But whereas for Clark the medium is primarily an expression of the site of a social class struggle, for de Duve it is also the site that marks the work's reference to or orientation with the historical legacy of the artistic object (à la Michael Fried).56 Clark's mistake with regard to this communication formula lies in his positioning of the modernist medium's primary addressee: the bourgeoisie, as de Duve explains: "In aesthetics matters, address cannot be collective but instead touches individuals living through singular experiences and establishing a fragile and contradictory pact with themselves, founded on the sentiment of dissent".57 Clark and Fried position two different addressees in the de Duvian formula. For Clark the perception of the medium as the site of the addressee positions the bourgeoisie who do not heed him as the addressee, whereas for Fried the addressees are the artists of the past; for one it is a social class, and for the other a specialist class.58 Flickering of the unrepresentable in the early writings of Michael Fried [32] Michael Fried frequently wrote about the same artists as Greenberg, continuing a Greenbergian tradition of describing the history of the modernist object in terms of evolution towards abstraction.59 Greenberg, in whose footsteps Fried continues, is the author of "Modernist Painting" and of additional later texts from the 1960s that enable an intra-history of art reading. According to Clark, both Greenberg and Fried share the "priority-of-perception thesis", a term expressing the close reading of a work of art that exclusively, ahistorically discusses the object.60 [33] In his writings from the 1960s, Michael Fried proposes a visual and ideological history of abstract American painting, whose primary characteristic is the tendency of the medium to subject itself to self-criticism, i.e., to impose on itself a commitment to criticism that attempts to refine its distinct essence as a medium. The medium is the conductor that enables a discussion of different genres. According to Fried, following Greenberg, the modernist move proposes that any medium, and by implication any aesthetic genre, has 56 De Duve, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, 54. 57 Ibid., 68. 58 Ibid., 75. 59 He writes as follows: "The history of painting from Manet through Synthetic Cubism and Henri Matisse may be characterized in terms of the gradual withdrawal of painting from the task of representing reality… in favor of an increasing preoccupation with problems intrinsic to painting itself". Michael Fried, Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (Cambridge: Fogg Art Museum & Harvard University, 1965), reprinted in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 214. 60 Clark, "Argument About Modernism", 85. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 to examine itself further and further to the point wherein it can formulate the most basic of its premises, to distinguish itself absolutely from other genres with which it is affiliated, as well as from those that are clearly different from it. [34] Positioning the criterion of the medium's self-analysis, its attempt to completely set itself apart, fundamentally presumes the approach according to which no compromise between genres is possible, i.e., there is an absolute difference between one genre and another, and one medium cannot cross over into another, i.e., any medium, any genre can be defined in terms of Wittgenstein's language games, and there can be no skipping, as it were, between one game and another.61 The limitation of this kind of interpretation is that although there can be no skipping from one language game to another, and it is art that must discover the gaps, the friction, or the inconsistencies between different groups of objects, in Greenberg's and Fried's theory painting still functions as a sort of meta- medium, or meta-discourse, and the discourse of the painting is read there as an art discourse, and as such advances one medium over others. Nonetheless, the understanding that these are different games enables us to understand the moral implications implied by purism of the medium. It consequently transpires that positioning self-criticism at the heart of the modernist debate has ethical implications, i.e., the moral/ethical anchor is not provided due to an inherent linkage between art and life, but because the medium subjects itself to perpetual criticism. The echoes of the Greenbergian stance here are no coincidence. Fried might be considered the most notable successor to Greenberg, who positioned flatness as the most significant paradigmatic characteristic of modernist painting. [35] Both Greenberg and Fried hold that flatness and emphasizing the surface are an essential predicate for the definition of modernist painting. In the narrative proposed by Fried, he writes that modernist art finished what 19th-century society began: divorcing itself from the culture, the concerns, aims and ideals of the society in which it is embedded.62 Like Greenberg he proposes a teleological move towards the abstract. Fried, however, more so than Greenberg, neutralizes materialism in favor of illusionism, i.e., he leads a move of a critical and formal emptying of art in favor of outlining the attributes of the absent. In this sense, and not only because of it, he is a significant successor of the positioning or presencing and outlining the conditions for the possibility of the appearance of the unrepresentable. One could say that whereas for Greenberg, with reference to Newman's works for example, the question in which the painting engages is the painting, i.e., outlining the conditions for the possibility of the appearance of the unrepresentable, with Fried the pictorial mechanism shifts to a modus of this premise, that extra-cultural 61 "The formal critic of modernist painting, then, is also a moral critic: not because all art is at bottom a criticism of life, but because modernist painting is at least a criticism of itself". Fried, Three American Painters, 217. 62 Fried, Three American Painters, 217. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 yearning, as it were, to escape from the representation, resulting in a state of debate on optical illusion as a space where Fried's moment of grace, "presentness", appears. [36] In his discussion on the works of Frank Stella, Fried claims that the beholder of a modernist work does not experience it as a fully literal form, as a coherent and concrete entity, but as a kind of dynamic movement that constructs his view in a changing manner; the eye moves from one part of the composition to another, the different segments are the wholeness of the painting and not their total and material existence. In other words, compositions can be seen as composed of separate segments, compositions that contradict the concept of the single, binding appearance. According to Fried, the work presents illusionism by means of these transitions from one segment to another; this dynamic frames the beholder's view but also preserves the hierarchal primacy of the visual regime, and optics are a necessary condition for the work and for deciphering the color or formal dynamic that takes place on the canvas. The importance of perceiving the work as a fragmentary whole that maintains necessary relationships between the different components is not only a formal property. The limits of the work, says Fried, are not the physical limits of its support; the physical limits themselves are tangible as an entity, but in fact it is the movement of one segment after another, i.e., there is a continuity between what is perceived as "outside" and what is perceived as "inside", the material burden is conditioned within the inside. The dynamic presented is supposed to lead us, to paradoxically assemble us, for the optical activation of the surface will ultimately reveal that one shape encounters another and together they will lead "into the heart of the canvas, taking the beholder with it".63 From this we learn that Stella's literalness "does not belong to the support at all" but to "the individual shapes themselves". Modernist works promote an optical experience between shapes and not the material support.64 [37] Neutralizing the concrete dimension commonly attributed to the literal is connected to neutralization of the material as a valid substance; this is the reverse side of or the explanation for neutralizing the importance of the support concept. The negation of substantivity and the presence of the support combine into a concept of visual illusiveness. Instead of concrete materiality Fried proposes a series of adjectives like "indeterminate" or "ambiguous" that elucidate his search for this allusive element, and his description of the works accords importance to gaps and to the complex relationships between the different images and between them and the support in which they are framed. This enables characterization of Frank Stella's later works, after his stripe paintings, as a collection of colorful configurations that the eye can reveal from the illusionistic space, and consequently literalism is not a property of the medium but of the 63 Michael Fried, "Shape as Form: Frank Stella's Irregular Polygons" (first published in Artforum 5, November 1966, 18-27), reprinted in Art and Objecthood, 92. 64 Ibid., 92-93. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 shapes themselves. Thus, Stella's work is situated on the modernist axis, and literalism itself, says Fried, becomes illusive.65 [38] Fried employs formalistic description as a tool to reveal the (illusive) optical truth, which is conditioned by the eye, by its power and action, and at the same time claims that formalistic description negates the existentialist position as it is proposed by writers like Harold Rosenberg or Thomas Hess. Fried's assertion that it is impossible to determine which of the visual configurations seen in the work is superior results, in effect, in a reading based on a model that renders the entire act of observation contingent. Perhaps even more acutely, the act of seeing that serves as the principal conductor towards the formalistic debate about the configurations on the canvas, creates in Fried a feeling that the work embodies that of which nothing can be said, or alternatively that which cannot be presented, for it ultimately becomes embodied in the eye of the beholder as something that is absent: the feeling is that none of the shapes "is sufficiently privileged to make one feel that it, at any rate, is really there. There is, one might say, no it at all".66 [39] On the linkage between the optical and the absent one can learn from Fried's discussion of Pollock's works. Although Fried analyzes particular examples, such as Cut-Out and Out of the Web, one can learn from them about the prevailing perceptions in the discourse of the time. Cut-Out is a work in which some of the canvas has been cut out and then recombined into the support as a kind of blind canvas, a segment within the colorful mass. The attempt to decipher this aesthetic act presents a model of the limited ability to acknowledge, the necessity of assuming a place where eyesight ends, i.e., to acknowledge the role of the painting to repeatedly indicate its inability to represent the unrepresentable. The discussion of this work illustrates the way in which the figure on and within the canvas support is neutralized from every dimension of presence and takes the form of absence; it has no linkage as an object in the world or as a shape whose validity is merely morphological; it functions as absence within the visual field. This absence is what typifies, what indicates the optical in the context of the discussion on Pollock. Optical reading, therefore, implies the primacy of eyesight, and this primacy is embodied in the absence emerging from the all-embracing space Pollock draws. The other aspect of this visual primacy is the neutralizing of touch; the dominance of the visual nullifies the existence of the body as a valid concept or material in the visual discourse. The figure is the absence, it is invisible, and it is the expression of our inability. In other words, it functions as absence in the visual field, but by the same token it outlines the limitations of the visual apparatus at our disposal. Consequently, the figure expresses the inherent mutilation that composes and decomposes the retina.67 65 Ibid., 94. 66 Emphasis in the original. See, Fried, "Shape as Form", 94. 67 He writes: "The result is that the figure is not seen … in fact it is not seen as the presence of anything – but rather as the absence, over a particular area, of the visual field. This enhances, I License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 [40] The optical history outlined in modernist theory ascribes the exploration and development of the synthesis of configuration and opticality that emerged in Pollock's stain paintings from 1951 to Morris Louis. He, too, develops figuration that is unrestricted or conditioned by the drawing function of the line, and with him, too, it is difficult to determine the gap between image and background. The image/background are presented as mutual conditions, one conditioned by the other and vice versa, and Louis, too, proposes an optical work addressed to eyesight alone. The difference lies in the integrative appearance of Louis' images. The discussion about the image in his works is one of the sites where Fried's perception flickers very clearly; what is seemingly presented as a morphological property reveals the epistemological foundations of his approach. It seems "as if the image were thrown onto the latter [the ground/canvas, N.G.] from a slide projector".68 The slide projector provides a clear metaphor for the momentary appearance, which flickers from a place "where we don't see", in Fried's words; the aesthetic arrangement is what enables the appearance of that which the work cannot represent, the unrepresentable that is projected onto perception, presents itself and vanishes. This is a moment of epiphany. [41] The impression one gains is that Fried's language positions the unrepresentable as a kind of nothingness, a site of absence on the second pole of existence. This nothingness is polarized with something, with being thrown in the world, to employ Heideggerian terminology. Greenberg's and Fried's critical surrender to the optical runs counter to the perception of the beholding experience or that of the beholder as an "intentional fabric" that is connected with the body, in line with Ponty's position. The emphasis of the eye is likened to a Sartrean proposition to regard "consciousness" as existing "beyond freedom". Ponty, by contrast, proposes viewing the focus of acting in the world through the body, a proposal attesting to the emergence of limitedness or blocking our modes of acting in the world, for the body is bound by blocking and collision, thus meaning is constituted from a linkage to the tactile, the sensory. Greenberg's and Fried's focus on the optical can actually be linked to the Heideggerian position that analyzes things by employing a terminology of gazing at things, whereas Ponty proposes focusing the discourse through the actions of the body as a site of activity and of producing happenings and meanings in the world that transfer the discourse to the world of action. In other words, for Fried the body does not exist as a site, it is absent, an excess of think, the force of the word 'optical' …. Figuration is achieved in terms of eyesight alone, and not in terms that imply even the possibility of verification by touch. The figure is something we don't see – it is, literally, where we don't see … we do see. More than anything, it is like a kind of blind spot, or defect in or visual apparatus; it is like part of our retina that is destroyed or for some reason is not registering the visual field over a certain area. .... In the end, the relation between the field and the figure is simply not spatial at all", Fried, Three American Painters, 227-228. It is worthwhile comparing the figure that appears in Fried with Lyotard's discussion on the figure in his book, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Discourse/Figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). 68 Ibid., 227 License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 tactile space that has to be omitted on the way to the metaphysical fusion between beholder and beheld. [42] The relevant space for a debate on the aesthetic experience, in Fried's opinion, is "a space addressed exclusively to eyesight", and he refers to Phénomenologie de la perception as the source upon which he bases himself in his discussion on the issue of space.69 According to Fried a good work is one that addresses itself wholly to eyesight. Although the painting exists both as a tactile and visible object, the experience to which the modernist painting addresses itself, for example Newman's paintings, is a purely visual illusion. "In a painting such as Cathedra the eye explores the colored field not by entering a traditional illusionistic space full of conventional clues to the tactility of objects or their relations to one another in tactile space, but by perceiving nuances, fluctuations, and properties of color alone, which together create the different but closely related illusion of space addressed exclusively to eyesight – an illusion which tactile metaphors may help to describe."70 Consequently, tactility remains a metaphor to describe the indescribable experience in available terms; the pure visual experience cannot be quantified and acts against the materialization of the image, it attempts to signify the absence in order to indicate the condition within which the representation acts. In other words, any attempt to represent is destined to find itself in the limbo of inability. The narrative emerging in Newman's works, for example in the way the tactile space is limited or contained within an illusive space – an optical space – concatenates with Noland's works that are loaded with perceptual intensiveness, and with Olitski's work that is aimed at the pleasure of sight as it is embodied in his works. In other words, Noland's and Olitski's works expose the space in Newman's works as the appearance of optical space through the interpretations they accord to it in their own space. [43] The encounter between the beholder and the work is saturated with illusionism. The encounter does not evoke in the beholder experiences associated with the actual reality in which he exists; paradoxically, it resembles an encounter with an image, a photograph or film. The kind of understanding obtained by the beholder when he attempts to decipher the pictorial signifier, like the color in Olitski's work, "is not unlike the shock of recognition we might feel suddenly meeting in the flesh someone previously seen only in news photographs or in the movies".71 It is an encounter with outside content, with a signified in whose light every pictorial signifier is nothing more than an illusion. The Other signifier has the advantage of quality and intensity, it is "more real", and the painting joins the continuum of signifiers on the way to getting to know it. Consequently, the 69 Fried, Three American Painters, 264, n. 26. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 246 License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 beholding experience, or the encounter with this signifier, is an experience of shock that corresponds with what Fried would later term "presentness". [44] Although Fried speaks of a momentary experience, filtering through his words there is always an assertion regarding the perceptual act being such that occurs in time. At times it seems that Fried's perceptual debate deviates from the act itself of beholding to a state wherein perception, as pure perception, generates the entire happening; it is pure perception that produces the painting. At others it seems that perception is an action attributed to the beholder and that the painting is produced under his gaze. Clearly, this perception, a kind of perception to itself, is a mechanism that acts towards the creation of the work as it will be perceived, and is also that which will construct the beholder's awareness. In this context a further component emerges in Fried's hermeneutic act; perception, the action of the eye, is the only thing that can enter "into the alien, impersonal, yet incomprehensibly moving life",72 of the pictorial signifier. The image is the product of the perceptual imperative, the image appears and is not described, the image is the nature of the outside and the ultimate figuration is a response to "impersonal forces" embodied in the deductive structure of the painting. [45] In conclusion, if we attempt to summarize Fried's principal views we shall see that in the first stage his writing proposes channeling the materiality and support to a reading that views them as signifiers of illusionism that I read as an expression of the conceptual act of examining the conditions of possibility for the appearance of the unrepresentable. Renaissance illusionism can now be understood as one of the motivators for the shunting aside of eyesight, and modernist flatness is perceived as a catalyst for epistemological questions concerning the matter of representation and not as a literally represented object. Illusionism is replaced by optical illusion, i.e., associated with the purely visual and not narrative or traditional illusionism. The movement of the beholder's eye discovers that literalism is merely a catalyst to stimulate an optical experience; the beholder encounters an element or space that exists between the shapes, and not the material support itself. From a reading of Stella's works, literalism is revealed as an illusion, as a property of shape and not of medium. At the same time it also emerges that optical truth is connected to the multiple possible configurations in the work; the inability to determine a preferred configuration attests to a gap or an absence, a crack in the heart of representation as a necessary condition for appearance. The figure in Pollock's works, for example, is read as an image that expresses absence in the visual field. What is signified in Pollock as absence and limited eyesight is revealed in Morris Louis and his generation as a flickering, a momentary appearance, almost, one might say, as the embodiment of the representation, of the appearance of the happening; the unrepresentable is thrown into the perception. The space of debate is a perceptual space, exclusively of eyesight. 72 Ibid., 248. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0074 | 19 August 2013 The beholder's encounter is not a material experience of acceptance between entities, but an encounter with an image. The primacy of eyesight is connected with the positioning of "pure perception", which seemingly turns the artist into a relay station of absolute perception; the image is the expression of an impersonal perception imperative.73 [46] The significant status of the unrepresentable as it emerges from its being the regulator of the visual act and simultaneously its addressee, by creating the conditions for its appearance and by outlining the absence within the medium, offers a possibility for reading an ethical model in the art discourse of the 1940s and 50s; works of art and criticism can be read with a linkage that exists between the object/subject relationship and the I/Other relationship. This examination will enable an inquiry of the distinctness and meaning of each of the concepts and of their projection onto the perception of the subject. 73 Fried's "opticality" can also be understood as a strategy to rationalize what for Greenberg was a way of emptying the medium in order to make it visible in its pure potentiality. Fried finds the criteria for self-reflection of the medium in the strategies of staging the way in which an artwork addresses or does not address the spectator. Thus Fried's "art-as-procedure"-Formalism is more than simply a reshaping of Greenberg's thought. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en "Modernism" according to Greenberg Flickering of the unrepresentable in the early writings of Michael Fried work_eddh6e24vjgnddxsiiulmcng2i ---- FASCINACIJE TEORIJOM / FASCINATED BY THEORY | ART+MEDIA 27 Članak je primljen: 25. decembar 2011. Revidirana verzija: 10. januar 2012. Prihvaćena verzija: 15. januar 2012. UDC: 7.072.2 Buhloh B. ; 7.037 Milica Ivić studentkinja doktorskih studija Grupa za teoriju umetnosti i medija, Interdisciplinarne studije Univerziteta umetnosti u Beogradu ivic.milica@gmail.com Benjamin Buhloh. Recepcija nasleđa avangarde Apstrakt: Ovaj se rad bavi jednim od najrelevantnijih aspekata teorijskog i kritičkog rada kritičara i istoričara umetnosti Benjamina Buhloha. Pored toga što je jedan od kourednika časopisa Okto- bar i profesor moderne umetnosti na Univerzitetu Harvard, Buhloh je ključni svedok fenomena koji su od suštinskog značaja za savremeni razvoj umetnosti. On je posvedočio trenutak nji- hovog nastajanja izbliza ili na najznačajnijim mestima njihovog uticaja na ostatak sveta. Inter- pretirao je istorijske avangardne i neo-avangardne pokrete sa posebnom pažnjom, u nameri da definiše kriterijume (istorijske, ideološke i estetičke) za razlikovanje evropske i američke neo- avangarde. Njegova geopolitička biografija, njegov uvid u relacije umetnosti i politike u poslerat- noj Nemačkoj, kao i rezultati njegovog istraživanja avangardi jesu predmet ovog teksta. Ključne reči: istorija umetnosti, avangarda, neoavangarda, industrija kulture, političko; Benjamin Buhloh (Benjamin H. D. Buchloh) je jedan od kourednika časopisa „Oktobar“ (October)1 i profesor moderne umetnosti na Katedri za istoriju umetnosti i arhitekture na Uni- verzitetu Harvard. Do sada je već predavao na Univerzitetu Kolumbija, kao i na Masačusets insti- tutu za tehnologiju. Njegov kritičarski i teorijski rad izuzetan je uvid u tokove i struje savremene umetnosti. Sa posebnom pažnjom je interpetirao istorijske avangardne i neoavangardne pokrete tokom duge istorije 20. veka. U svojim esejima se bavi pokušajem da ustanovi kriterijume (istori- jske, ideološke i estetičke) za razlikovanje evropske i američke neoavangarde. 1 Časopis Oktobar su osnovale 1976. godine u Njujorku Rozalind Kraus i Anet Majklson. Njegov naziv referira na Ejzejnštanov film koji postavlja ton intelektualnog, politički angažovanog pisanja koje je bilo obeležje ovog časopisa. Časopis je značajan zbog uvođenja francuske poststrukturalističke teorije na akademsku scenu engle- skog govornog područja i postao je glavno uporište interpretacije postmoderne umetnosti. Buhloh postaje član uredničkog odbora časopisa 1992. godine. Za Buhloha je Oktobar prostor otpora, izvan institucionalnih kompro- misa na koje su drugi časopisi morali da pristanu u periodu industrijalizacije sfere akademske avangarde. Buhloh vidi Oktobar kao model otpora koji je morao da nastane zbog toga što Artforum više nije ono što je bio šezdesetih godina. ART+MEDIA | Časopis za studije umetnosti i medija / Journal of Art and Media Studies Broj 4, decembar 2013 28 Od mnogobrojnih mogućih načina za predstavljanje vrlo raznolikih problematika kojima se Buhloh u svojoj praksi bavio i još uvek se bavi, ovde je izdvojeno nekoliko vrlo dominantnih i karakterističnih, ali opet ograničenih u odnosu na raspon celokupnog opusa. Metodologija za ovakav prikaz uslovljena je glavnim izabranim izvorima za proučavanje, ali je i suštinski inherent- na Buhlohovom radu u polju umetničke kritike. Ona je zasnovana na mešavini njegovih biograf- skih (i šire istorijskih, prostornih i vremenskih) odrednica i ključnih umetničkih i političkih ideja i koncepata u istoriji 20. veka. Geopolitika njegove biografije, prostorno-temporalna izmeštanja, konteksti koji se menjaju, ali ostavljaju svoje tragove, ukršteni su sa stalnom revizijom sopstvenih pozicija. Teorijski rad Benjamina Buhloha biće predstavljen iz perspektive obimnog intervjua o političkom potencijalu umetnosti od 1960–1997. godine, koji su vodili Žan-Fransoa Ševrije (Jean-François Chevrier)2 i Ketrin Dejvid (Catherine David)3. Intervju je objavljen u monumen- talnoj knjizi koja je bila prateći deo izložbe Documenta X 1996. godine u Kaselu, kao antologija tekstova i vizuelnih materijala o razvoju zapadne kulturne i kritičke teorije od 1945. godine.4 Govoreći o svom životu, Buhloh je ukazao na karakteristične trenutke u kojima je stupao u kon- takt sa markističkim misliocima, poststrukturalistima ili američkom kritikom i kako je, samopre- ispitivanjem svog rada u polju umetničke kritike koji je započeo šezdesetih godina u Nemačkoj, pratio i važne pojave umetničkih pravaca, umetnika, grupa, kao i novih umetničkih tehnika, kao što je tenhika foto-montaže i prisvajanja.5 Njegova intelektualna biografija kao da predstavlja sažet kurs o kontradikcijama i previranjima umetničkih praksi i pozicija od šezdesetih godina 20. veka do danas. Ona prolazi kroz najvažnija pitanja istorije savremene umetnosti (odnos prema muzejima, prema recepciji nasleđa avangarde...), osvešćujući tokove kojima se kretalo mišljenje o savremenoj umetnosti, mogućim sagledivim razlikama između nemačke kulture, i šire, evrop- ske i američke kulture. Uporedno sazrevanje Buhlohovih teorijskih pozicija i onoga što zovemo posleratnom umetnošću, omogućava nam da pratimo promene u njenoj percepciji, zablude i preterani optimizam koji je bio moguć u pojedinim fazama nastajanja. Geopolitička biografija Buhloh je već tokom prvih godina studija u Kelnu došao u kontakt sa savremenim kulturnim i umetničkim praksama, pratio performanse Fluksusa, prisustvovao Fluxus Fluxorum festivalu u Dizeldorfu na kojem su bila izvedena dela Kejdža (John Cage), Brehta (Bertold Brecht), Bojsa (Joseph Beuys) i Paika (Nam June Paik). On je svedok trenutka kada se novi realisti pojavljuju u Berlinu, svedok trenutka kada pop-art dolazi u Berlin 1968. godine. Sve pojave koje podrazume- vamo kao temeljne tačke razvoja savremene umetnosti, on je sagledavao u trenutku kada su nas- tajale, tamo gde su nastajale ili na mestima gde se prelamao njihov uticaj na ostali deo sveta, na primer na Evropu. U Keln je ponovo došao 1971. godine, posle dve godine provedene u Londonu. U tom periodu prvi put odlazi u Ameriku, organizuje izložbe Dana Grahama (Dan Graham), Gerharda Rihtera (Gerhard Richter) i Marsela Brudersa (Marcel Broodthaers). Od 1975. do 1977. godine predaje istoriju savremene umetnosti u Dizeldorfu, gde počinje da uređuje časopis Inter- funtionen. 2 Žan Fransoa Ševrije je kustos, istoričar i kritičar umetnosti, profesor istorije savremene umetnosti na École na- tionale supérieure des Beaux-Arts u Parizu. 3 Ketrin Dejvid je kustoskinja i teoretičarka savremene umetnosti. Bila je kustoskinja Muzeja moderne umetnosti Georges Pompidou u Parizu i kustos mnogih izložbi, kao i umetnički direktor Documenta X u Kaselu 1996. godine. 4 Catherine David,“1960–1997: The Political Potential of Art”, Pol(e)itics, Documenta X – The Book, Kassel, Cantz,1997, 375–403 i 624–643. 5 Ovim tehnikama Buhloh se bavi u eseju Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art iz 1982. godine, koji je važan i zbog toga što je tu prvi put pisao o novoj generaciji ženskih umetnica, konačno prepoznajući njihovu ključnu ulogu za period osamdesetih godina 20. veka. FASCINACIJE TEORIJOM / FASCINATED BY THEORY | ART+MEDIA 29 Sa otkrićem američke kritike, Buhloh otkriva ograničenja savremene evropske estetičke misli. Godine 1978. konačno odlazi iz Nemačke u Novi škotski koledž u istočnoj Kanadi, univerzitet okrenut konceptualnoj umetnosti, koja je u trenutku kada Buhloh tamo dolazi već na zalasku. Ono što ga je opredelilo da napusti Nemačku jeste jačanje desničarskih tendencija i naivno verovanje o sličnostima između kulture i umetnosti Amerike i Kanade. Pored toga, najvažnije kritike, kao i umetničke prakse koje su ga interesovale dolazile su iz Amerike. U tom trenutku, kasnih sedam- desetih godina, naročito iz perspektive posleratne Nemačke, činilo se da je umetnička proizvod- nja u Americi (pre svega pop-art, fluksus, minimalizam i konceptualna umetnost), kao i diskursi istorije umetnosti i kritike o umetnosti 20. veka i savremenoj umetnosti (Klement Grinberg / Clement Greenberg/ i Rozalind Kraus /Rosalind E. Krauss/), već prisvojila model posttradicio- nalne formacije identiteta. U Los Anđeles odlazi 1981. godine da predaje istoriju savremene umetnosti na Kalifornijs- kom institutu umetnosti, na odseku za umetnost „posle ateljea“ (post-studio), gde je postojalo interesovanje za konceptualnu umetnost. Period kasnih sedamdesetih i kasnih osamdesetih je period regresivnog talasa, nove hegemonije slikarstva, koji dovodi Buhloha u položaj otpora, opozicije ali, kako i sam priznaje, bez načina da pruži neka druga sredstva za borbu. Prva stvar koju je uradio 1982. godine, kada se preselio u Njujork, bilo je specijalno izdanje časopisa Okto- bar o Brudersu.6 Za njega je to bio pokušaj motivisan željom da se ponovo poveže sa evropskim nasleđem koje je ostalo nepoznato u Americi, kao i da se razvije retrospektivna kritika koncep- tualne umetnosti kroz Brudersov rad. Od tada do danas živi i radi na istočnoj američkoj obali. Posleratna Nemačka – umetnost i politika Ako govorimo o teorijskim pozicijama sa kojih pristupa istoriji umetnosti, važno je da za Buhloha Evropa, kao tvorac narativa modernizma, ostaje prostor u kojem se ovaj narativ čuva, koji suštinski omogućava dvosmislenost u pozicioniranju prema njemu, dvosmislenost koja je u Americi nemoguća zbog toga što je njena verzija modernizma krajnje pojednostavljena. Na početku Buhlohovog uzbudljivog gepolitičkog kretanja u svetu umetnosti 20. veka, on se suočava sa situacijom u kojoj je u Nemačkoj politizacija u vizuelnim umetnostima bila nemoguća, koliko i promišljanje fašističke prošlosti. Sa druge strane, u pozorišnoj umetnosti i književnosti postojao je element politizacije u delima Pitera Vajsa (Peter Weiss), Gintera Grasa (Gunter Grass), Hajnriha Bela (Heinrich Böll). Iako u tom trenutku, sredinom šezdesetih godina, Rihter već radi na svom Atlasu7, koji će se pojaviti znatno kasnije kao projekat umetničkog promišljanja uslova pamćenja, očigledan je različit položaj ovih umetničkih disciplina u odnosu na pitanje političkog. Jedno od mogućih objašnjenja za Buhloha leži u činjenici da su se plastične umetnosti bavile objektom, koji je bio važan element tržišta. Stepen identifikacije sa potrošačkom groznicom koja je pratila američki model čini deo nemačkog posleratnog projekta, koji se sastojao u tome da se omogući prostor za identifikaciju sa nečim osim sa sopstvenom istorijom. To se ogledalo u potiskivanju vajmarske avangardne kulture, u sprečavanju bilo kog pokušaja da se ponovo ispita istorija fašizma i konačno u preoblikovanju zemlje prema internacionalnom modelu potrošnje. U skladu sa situacijom u posleratnoj Nemačkoj, Buhloh postavlja pitanje odnosa između politike i umetnosti u potpunosti nezavisno od nadrealizma. Za razliku od toga, u francuskoj kulturi je nadrealizam bio trenutak u kojem su umetnost i politika mogle da se sukobe. Buhlo- hov skepticizam prema nadrealizmu potiče, sa jedne strane, iz anti-frojdizma koji je obeležio 6 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (ed), Broodthaers − Writtings, Interviews, Photographs, London–Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1988. 7 Atlas Gerharda Rihtera je jedan od nekoliko, po strukturi sličnih projekata, koje su izveli evropski umetnici od ranih do sredine šezdesetih godina, koji se odlikuju formalnim postupcima sakupljanja pronađenih ili intenciona- lno proizvedenih fotografija u manje ili više regularnim koordinatnim sistemima. ART+MEDIA | Časopis za studije umetnosti i medija / Journal of Art and Media Studies Broj 4, decembar 2013 30 posleratnu Nemačku, sa druge strane, iz skepticizma ili kritičke pozicije prema slikarstvu koji je obeležio Buhlohove estetičke intrese tokom šezdesetih, kao i to što je nadrealizam isuviše brzo postao eksploatisan u reklamnoj industriji. Kompleksnije objašenjenje zanemarivanja nadreal- izma leži u tome što je Buhloh političko sagledavao u vezi sa preobražajem vlasništva nad sred- stvima za proizvodnju, nad proizvodnim odnosima, a ne sa preobražajem nesvesnog.8 Za njega je umetničko delo zasnovano na modelu komunikacije, veoma kompleksne i kontradiktorne ko- munikacije između otpora i opozicije, negativne kritike, a ne na modelu libidinalne intervencije ili intervencije u podsvesnim strukurama formiranja subjekta. Ako se uzme u obzir i kritika nad- realizma, kakva je Deborova (Guy Debord) ili Birenova (Daniel Buren), dolazi se do zaključka da ona nije bila toliko neuobičajna tokom šezdesetih. Sa druge strane, Buhloh je bio posvećen proučavanju ruskog formalizma i sovjetske umetnosti, pa je minimalizam promišljao kroz recep- ciju ruske avangarde. Buhloh smatra da su postojala dva puta za mišljenje o umetnosti i politici: ili nadrealizam ili sovjetska avangarda. Prednost nadrealizma bila je tome što je omogućio da iskustvo mita postane dostupno u individualnoj formi nesvesnog i sna. U vajmarskom kontekstu, mit je postao ekvivalent fašističkoj kulturi i u tome leži objašnjenje zbog čega je pristup nad- realizmu bio onemogućen u svim onim kulturama koje su prošle kroz, ili bile blizu fašizmu ili staljinističkom totalitarizmu u 20. veku. Posle rata je postalo jasno da će prostorom nesvesnog zavladati industrija kulture. Avangarda i neoavangarda Kao što naslov njegove zbirke eseja Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Essays on Euro- pean and American Art from 1955 to 1975 sugeriše, Buhloh vidi odnos između međusobno isključujućih sila umetničke produkcije i industrije kulture kao krajnje suprotstavljen, ali tako da još uvek može da prati njihove neprekidne interakcije. Ova zbirka od devetnaest eseja obuhvata najznačajnija pitanja kojima se Buhloh bavi tokom celokupne svoje karijere istoričara i kritičara umetnosti, kao i najznačajnije figure i pojave evropske i američke umetnosti u periodu od 1955. do 1975. godine, uključujući novi realizam (nouveau réalisme) u Francuskoj, posleratnu nemačku umetnost, američki fluksus i pop-art, minimalizam i postminimalističku umetnost, kao i evrop- sku i američku konceptualnu umetnost. Važna opsesija njegovog rada jeste pokušaj da se razjasne kompleksni i stalno promenljivi odnosi između perioda istorijske avangarde od 1915–1925. godine9 i neoavangarde tokom peri- oda rekonstrukcije u Njujorku i posleratnoj Evropi od 1945 do 1975. godine.10 U predgovoru Buhloh kaže da mu je nedostajao teorijski okvir u trenutku kada je pisao ove eseje. Kada retrospe- ktivno sagleda nedostatak tog teorijskog okvira, vidi ga u formi pitanja: „kako su različite struk- ture javnog iskustva, od buržoaske javne sfere u opadanju (sa očajničkim pokušajima za njeno spasenje i oživljavanje) u delima umetnika kao što je Anri Matis (Henri Matiss) do avangardnih 8 Catherine David,“1960–1997: The Political Potential of Art”..., op. cit. 393. 9 „Istorijska avangarda je nadstilski pojam koji označava radikalne, ekscesne, kritičke, eksperimentalne, proje- ktivne i intermedijske pokrete od sredine XIX do kraja tridesetih godina XX veka. Ona je nadstilski pojam koji je skup različitih slučajeva, pokreta i škola. Za Bukloha je možda najvažnija njena hronološka pozicija kao nečega što dolazi pre rata jer njega zanimaju kontinuiteti, mogućnosti da se se uspostavi komunikacija sa nasleđem posle Drugog svetskog rata.“ Miško Šuvaković, Pojmovnik teorije umetnosti, Beograd, Orion Art, 2012, 120. 10 „Peter Birger je odredio avangardu kao istorijski završen projekat, specifičan za rani XX vek. On neoavangardu, tumači kao institucionalizaciju izvornih avangardističkih namera, a to je samo jedan od mogućih interpretacija ovog fenomena. Moglo bi se reći da je Bukloh bliži određenju neoavangarde kao specifičnog i relativno autonom- nog skupa pokreta i individualnih učinaka od 1958. do 1968. godine koji tvore složenu sliku zamisli i projekata modernosti.“ Miško Šuvaković, Pojmovnik teorije umetnosti, Beograd, Orion Art, 2012, 120. FASCINACIJE TEORIJOM / FASCINATED BY THEORY | ART+MEDIA 31 pokušaja Džona Hartfilda (John Hartfield) da konstruiše proletersku javnu sferu u nastajanju, dramatično uticale na koncepciju i recepciju umetnosti u predratnom i posleratnom periodu?“11 Iz perspektive teorijskog okvira Jirgena Habermasa (Jürgen Habermas), za Buhloha postaje nužno da pokuša da opiše javnu sferu umetnika (kao što je Vorhol /Andy Warhol/) u trenutku kada kulturna industrija i spektakl u velikoj meri napadaju nekada relativno autonomne prostore, institucije i prakse neo-avangardne kulture i počinju da ih kontrolišu. Levica je tradicionalno ovakav prostor i prakse neo-avangarde određivala kao iskvarene, komercijalne, kontaminirane i saučesničke. „Nemačka nova levica je šezdesetih godina optuživala neoavangardnu kulturalnu proizvodnju da nije mnogo više od proizvoda interesa tržišta i da nema drugu funkciju osim da opremi muzeje i domove luksuznim potrošačkim objektima i pruži legimitimitet posleratnom neokapitalizmu. Bilo koja kulturna proizvodnja se smatrala reakcionarnom, afirmativnom po definiciji (na primer Vorhol), i konstitutivnim delom sistema. To je pozicija koju je u tom trenut- ku zastupao neko kao Gi Debor i koja je našla izraz u knjizi Petera Birgera (Peter Bürger) Teorija avangarde 1972. godine. Birgerova knjiga je u potpunosti neupućena u savremenu umetničku praksu i u ovom smislu podseća na Lukačevo falsifikovanje modernosti (...)“12 Nova levica je zapravo izjednačavala neoavangardu i neokapitalizam, a tu poziciju je zastupao i Buhloh do 1971. godine. U svom kasnijem kritičarskom radu, Buhloh teži da se distancira od tog isuviše udobnog stava levice i da dijalektiku međusobno isključujućih sila umetničke proiz- vodnje i industrije kulture posmatra u stalnoj interakciji. Buhloh eksplicitno poistovećuje rad Petera Birgera sa novom levicom i u njegovom odbijan- ju da prepozna relevantnost posleratnih praksi vidi uzrok prezrivog odnosa prema savremenoj kulturnoj proizvodnji i duboke sumnje u njenu legitimnost, iako je tokom šezdesetih godina i sam Buhloh odbacivao neoavangardu kao buržoaski oblik lepe umetnosti i rekonstrukciju elitne buržoaske kulture. Buhloh zaključuje da je jedna od velikih Birgerovih zabluda13 bila posma- tranje neoavangarde u edipalnom odnosu prema roditeljskoj poziciji istorijskih avangardi i ne- priznavanje njene specifičnosti i legitimnosti. Druga velika zabluda, koju Buhloh priznaje da je donekle delio sa Birgerom, bila je pretpostavka da bi „(…) kriterijumi za estetsko prosuđivanje morali da budu uvek povezani, ako ne sa modelima potpuno instrumentalizovane političke efi- kasnosti, onda bar sa obaveznim modusom kritičke negativnosti.“14 I tada i sada Buhloh tvr- di da je jedna od beskonačnih funkcija estetskih struktura zapravo da omoguće bar trenutnu i konkretnu iluziju univerzalno dostupnog ukidanja moći (suspension of power). Estetske struk- ture razaraju svaki oblik dominacije u bilo kojoj formi da je upisana u kodove i konvencije (bilo da su to lingvističke, vizuelne, reprezentacione ili bihejvioralne strukture socijalne interakcije). Proučavajući rad nemačkog umetnika Gerharda Rihtera, Buhloh se usredsredio na kapacitet es- tetskog da konstruiše mnemoničko iskustvo kao jedan od nekoliko činova otpora totalitarizmu spektakularizacije.15 Sa druge strane, on nastoji da tumači odnos između evropskog nasleđa i posledica njegove američke recepcije. Za apstraktni ekspresionizam, koji se javlja četrdesetih godina 20. veka u Am- erici, kaže, da je u mnogo aspekata, logičan razvoj direktnog prenošenja slikarskog nadrealizma na ovu novu teritoriju. U tom smislu, pozivajući se na strogo Birgerovo razlikovanje istorijskih avangardi i neoavangardi, Buhloh kaže da ovaj pokret ne bi ni mogao da se okarakteriše kao 11 Benjamin Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 2000, xxi. 12 Catherine David, “1960–1997: The Political Potential of Art”..., op. cit. 377. 13 Benjamin Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry..., op. cit. xxiv. 14 Ibid. xxiv. 15 Ibid. xxv. ART+MEDIA | Časopis za studije umetnosti i medija / Journal of Art and Media Studies Broj 4, decembar 2013 32 stvarno neoavangardan, zbog toga što samo ponavlja ključne paradigme istorijske avangarde. Za razliku od Birgera, Buhloh postavlja tezu da se tek sa usponom konceptualne umetnosti oko 1968. godine, što kulminira sredinom sedamdesetih, suočavamo sa odvajanjem umetnika od nasleđa istorijskih avangardi. Sa konceptualnom umetnošću ustanovljena je radikalno drugačija osnova za kritičke intevencije u diskurzivnim i institucionalnim okvirima koji određuju proizvodnju i recepciju savremene umetnosti. Pošto je pratio razvoj i domete konceptualne umetnosti, Buhloh postaje svedok njenih iluzija, kraja i povratka figuralnog, objekta, što se čini da ne može lako da prežali.16 U eseju Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions17, Buhloh priznaje da su „(...) prosvetiteljski trijumf konceptualne umetnosti, njena transformacija publike i distribucije, njeno ukidanje statusa objekta i forme robe – bili pre svega kratkog daha, i da su skoro odmah ustupili mesto povratku utvara uklonjenih slikarskih i vajar- skih paradigmi prošlosti, kako bi mimetički režim, koji je konceptualna umetnost navodno bila poremetila, ponovo bio uspostavljen sa obnovljenom snagom.”18 Tipičan Bukolohov doprinos recepciji avangardnog nasleđa u SAD-a ogleda se u tekstu From Faktura to Factography19, objavljenom u jesen 1984. godine u časopisu Oktobar, u odeljku Histori- cal Materialism. U osnovi, u ovom radu Buhloh se bavi promenom koja se dogodila u sovjetskoj avangardi u vezi sa slikovnom koncepcijom koja je zasnovana na pojmu faktura (shvaćenom kao tekstura) i njenom transformacijom u ono što on naziva faktografijom (factography), zasnova- nom na mehaničkom i dokumentarnom kvalitetu fotografije. Buhloh ukazuje da se promena paradigme dogodila 1928. godine sa foto-muralom koji je proslavljao godišnjicu revolucije, a čiji su autori bili Lisicki i Klucis (El Lissitsky, Gustav Klutsis), napravljenim za Pressa Exhibition u Kelnu. Odbijajući uobičajenu teoriju o viktimizaciji avangarde (kroz ideju umetnika koji je prinuđen da stavi svoju umetnost u službu države), Buhloh je pokazao svojevoljno učestvovanje ovih umetnika u proizvodnji sovjetske propagande čak i tokom Staljinovog režima. Zapravo, ovim tekstom Buhloh je odlučio da uputi oštar izazov američkom okviru za recep- ciju sovjetske avangarde, na koju je presudno uticao prvi direktor Muzeja moderne umetnosti Alfred Bar (Alfred Barr). Za razliku od Buhloha koji je sa evropskog tla došao u Ameriku, Bar je 1927. godine otputovao u Sovjetski Savez da se upozna sa dostignućima avangarde. U ovom tekstu on odlučno osporava način na koji je Alfred Bar učinio sve što je mogao da istorijski negira ili umanji činjenicu sa kolikim su žarom predstavnici konstruktivizma prihvatili svoj politički angažman, što mu je omogućilo da osmisli i izveze depolitizovani internacionalistički diskurs o savremenoj umetnosti.20 Ono što se kasnije pokazalo jeste da je takav koncept bio potreban interesima liberalnog modela društva u borbi za kulturalnu hegemoniju tokom Hladnog rata. Ali, pored faktora koji su doprineli uobličavanju istoriografskog okvira za diskusiju, Buhlohov tekst pokazuje da je politički žar, koji se prvobitno pokazao kroz produktivističke i faktograf- ske hipoteze, zapravo bio u skladu sa prevazilaženjem utvrđenih okvira nasleđenih od institucija umetnosti. U suprotnosti sa stavom akademske, istoriografske, umetničke i političke tradicije, ovo prevazilaženje nije vodilo napuštanju eksperimentalnih procesa koji su se razvili tokom 16 Cf. Benjamin Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression – Notes on the Return of Representation in Europian Painting”, October, no. 16, 1981, 39–68 17 Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institu- tions”, October, Vol. 55, 1990, 105–143. 18 Ibid. 143. 19 Benjamin Buchloh,“From Faktura to Factography”, October, Vol. 30, 82–119. 20 Iako se u poseti Rodčenku suočio sa činjenicom da je on prestao da slika još 1922. godine, Bar zaključuje da mora da pronađe slikare ako je to moguće, u čemu ne uspeva ni u susretu sa Lisickim. Ipak, na spektakularnoj izložbi Cubism and Abstract Art 1936. godine, koja je bila rezultat Barovog putovanja u Sovjetski Savez, nije bilo tragova njegovog susreta sa produktivizmom o kome govori u svojim dnevnicima sa putovanja. Cf. ibid. 4. FASCINACIJE TEORIJOM / FASCINATED BY THEORY | ART+MEDIA 33 stadijuma autonomnog razvoja avangardne vizuelne umetnosti, književnosti i pozorišta, već ih je produbilo. Produktivistička i faktografska iskustva su pokazala da politizacija umetnosti u smeru ka industrijskoj proizvodnji i društvenom aktivizmu ne uništava kompleksnost hipoteze, tenhičkih i formalnih alata avangardne umetničke prakse. Buhloh tvrdi da je već tokom ranih dvadesetih godina u sovjetskoj Rusiji postojala opšta svest među umetnicima i teoretičarima da učestvuju u konačnoj transformaciji modernističke estetike, time što neopozivo menjaju uslove proizvodnje i recepcije umetnosti nasleđene iz buržoaskog društva i njegovih institucija. Buhloh zapravo otkriva ono što je posredstvom Barovog prikaza sovjetske avangarde ostalo nevidljivo. On eksplicitno kaže da je posledica Barovog delovanja bila upravo to što je produk- tivizam ostao potpuno nepoznat američkoj akademskoj i umetničkoj svesti do šezdesetih godina 20. veka. Ovaj kompleksan tekst, koji je samo deo Buhlohovih napora ka osvetljavanju recepcije evropskih avangardi, doprineo je daljim obimnim istraživanjima američkih istoričara i kritičara umetnosti u oblasti evropskih avangardi. Njegov utemeljivački rad je bio preduslov za buduće projekte21, a njegov uticaj je toliki da je postavio nove neupitne okvire za razumevanje avangard- nog nasleđa. Radikalno osporavajući dotadašnji institucionalni okvir, on uspostavlja novi. Buhloh danas Posmatrano danas, važan problem u vezi sa Buhlohovom teorijskom pozicijom leži u uveren- ju da umetničke prakse moraju da se bore protiv podleganja moćima kulture spektakla, konven- cijama percepcije i komunikacije koje ukidaju bilo koju vrstu otpora, kao i u ideji da je odbrana od univerzalizacije kao kontrole u ponovnom pojavljivanju koncepcije umetnosti kao negativne teologije, sekularizovanog iskustva sakralnog, kao mogućnosti za legitimisanje bilo koje vrste umetničke prakse uopšte. Buhloh i dalje začudno ne odobrava prisvajanje i fuziju avangardnog, čak anarhističkog nasleđa, od strane visoko kapitalističke potrošačke mašinerije. Kao grešku u svojoj karijeri umetničkog kritičara, Buhloh navodi tradicionalnu ambiciju kritičarki i kritičara da konstruišu veličinu, kada govori o tome kako mu je žao što o nekim ev- ropskim umetnicima nije dovoljno pisao i tako učinio da budu prihvaćeni u Americi, dok su neki drugi isuviše precenjeni (Jozef Bojs i Iv Klajn). Sada shvata da to ima za cilj obezbeđivanje kriteri- juma i normi za prijem u hegemoni kanon i želi da se distancira od toga, jer je razumeo da je upravo to korak ka institucionalizaciji i kontroli kulturalnih praksi.22 Druga stvar jeste primetno odsustvo ženskih autora, do kojeg je došlo nesvesnim potčinjavanjem patrijarhalnom poretku i ostalim pozicijama moći koje često upravlju konvencionalnim odnosima umetnik-kritičar i umetnik-kustos.23 Ostaje činjenica da je Buhloh danas jedan od najuticajnih istoričara umetnosti, čiji rad pokriva period od šezdesetih godina 20. veka do danas. U tom povlašćenom položaju leži mogućnost da sagleda i prati pojave na umetničkoj sceni u njihovom nastajanju i retrospektivno procenjuje nji- hove domete u širokom geopolitičkom rasponu od Istočne i Zapadne Nemačke, sa njihovim raz- likama, i šireg područja Evrope do severne Amerike. Važnost Buhlohovih istorijsko-kritičarskih uvida leži u otvaranju mogućnosti da Evropa posle Drugog svetskog rata upozna svoju predratnu prošlost, a da se posleratna umetnost razumeva u odnosu na tradiciju na koju neizbežno referira, bez obzira da li stupa u odnose njene radikalne negacije ili retrogradnog potvrđivanja. 21 Cf. Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph 1924–1937, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996. 22 Benjamin Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry..., op. cit. xxviii. 23 Ibid. xxix. ART+MEDIA | Časopis za studije umetnosti i medija / Journal of Art and Media Studies Broj 4, decembar 2013 34 Literatura: − Michelson, Annette, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Joan Copjec (eds.), October – The First Decade, 1976–1986, Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1987. − Buchloh, H. D. Benjamin (ed.), Broodthaers – Writtings, Interviews, Photographs, Lon- don–Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1988. − Buchloh, Benjamin, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions”, October, Vol. 55, 105–143. − Buchloh, Benjamin, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression – Notes on the Return of Representation in Europian Painting”, October, Vol. 16, 1981, 39–68. − Buchloh, Benjamin, “From Detail to Fragment: Décollage Affichiste”, October no. 56, 1991, 99–110. − Buchloh, Benjamin, “From Faktura to Factography”, October, Vol. 30, 1984, 82–119. − Buchloh, Benjamin, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive”, October, Vol. 88, 1999, 117–145. − Buchloh, Benjamin (ed.), Gerhard Richter, Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 2009. − Buchloh, Benjamin (ed.), Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, 2005. − Buchloh, Benjamin, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 2000. − Buchloh, Benjamin, “Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop”, u: Hal Foster (ed.), Dis- cussions in Contemporary Culture, Seattle, Bay Press, 1987, 71–86. − Buchloh, Benjamin, Catherine David, Jean-Francois Chevrier, “1960–1997: The Political Potential of Art”, Pol(e)itics, Documenta X – The Book, Kassel, Cantz, 1997, 375–403 i 624–643. − Foster, Hal, Roslaind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (eds.), Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, London, Thames and Hudson, 2005. − Krauss, Rosalind, Annete Michelson, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Dennis Hollier, Sylvia Kolbowski (eds.), October. The Second Decade, 1986–1996, Cambridge MA,1997. − Šuvaković, Miško, Pojmovnik teorije umetnosti, Beograd, Orion Art, 2012. Benjamin Buchloh. Reception of Avant-Garde Heritage Summary: This work deals with some of the most important aspects of the theoretical and critical work of art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Beside being co-editor of October and professor of modern art at Harvard University, he is the key withness to all the phenomena we find essential to the contemporary art development. He withnessed the moment of their emergence from up close or from the key places of their influence on the rest of the world. He interpreted historical avant-garde and neo-avantgarde movements with special attention, in an attempt to define cri- teria (historical, ideological, and esthetical) for distinguishing between European and American neo-avantgarde. His geopolitical biography, his insight into the relation between art and politics in the afterwar Germany, as well as the results of his research of the avantgards were presented in the essay. Keywords: art history, avant-garde, neoavantgarde, culture industry, political; work_ehn5tdmkezbuzbpjzsfpbykoti ---- Shibboleth Authentication Request If your browser does not continue automatically, click work_ejuchsj4qrfebb4wcmrtfklxg4 ---- American Artists Paint the City 31 0026-3079/2007/4804-031$2.50/0 American Studies, 48:4 (Winter 2007): 31-57 31 American Artists Paint the City: Katharine Kuh, the 1956 Venice Biennale, and New York’s Place in the Cold War Art World Mary Caroline Simpson “Though it is common practice to consider the Middle West more American in appearance and feeling than New York, still most artists use this, the largest metropolis, as their symbol.” Katharine Kuh (1904-1994), curator of modern art for the Art Institute of Chicago, made this remarkably frank and controversial observation as she promoted American Artists Paint the City in 1956. Held in the American pavilion during the 28th Venice Biennale, and so positioned as a showcase for the nation’s best and brightest talents, the exhibition united paint- ings by early twentieth-century realists, those in Alfred Stieglitz’s circle, and Abstract Expressionists around thematic representations of New York City by artists who worked there. By linking the New York School to a diverse array of domestic artists, Kuh hoped to cement its place in an American modernist canon that her exhibition would help to define. Sadly, Lawrence Alloway’s historical analysis of the Venice Biennale, published in 1968 and the sole account for so many decades, failed to acknowledge the curator’s contributions and her vision of continuity among twentieth-century American art movements was effectively buried for decades. Kuh’s forgotten role in mediating representations of Ameri- can art deserves rehabilitation because by heralding New York painters as the ambassadors for an American national art, she prefigured an achievement widely credited to Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).1 American Artists Paint the City positioned the New York School as inheri- tors of a new world modernist heritage in the mid-1950s, a view only recently 32 Mary Caroline Simpson taken up by revisionist art historians. By grounding her exhibition concept in American exceptionalism and uniting it thematically around the iconic American city, Katherine Kuh appeared to reinforce the case for an American modernist pantheon. Yet, despite its compatibility with cold war exceptionalism, widespread public interest in America’s cultural identity, and the popularity of stylistic pluralism among domestic curators in 1956, Kuh’s Biennale show precipitated widespread criticism and elicited powerful opposition from established interests. Her diverse, historically infused program antagonized those domestic dealers and collectors most eager to identify a mature and singularly American brand of modernism emerging out of the world’s newest cultural center, Manhattan. Her juxtaposition of realist and abstract canvases confused and upset many artists and critics, who doubted that the urban theme could meaningfully connect such varied techniques. The exhibition especially enraged Chicago’s art community, which had long struggled against its marginalized place in the art world and perceptions that regional painting was too idiosyncratic to exemplify the shared artistic values of the nation. Above all, Kuh’s American modernist continuum struck most international jurors as a chauvinistic and pretentious effort to un- dermine European ascendancy in the transatlantic art world. By antagonizing significant segments of the art world, Katharine Kuh opened the door for other champions of Abstract Expressionism to align it with a broader international narrative. Just two years after the 1956 Venice Biennale, several touring and domestic exhibitions actively promoted a small group of New York School painters including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning as the culmination of a European-inspired, American-produced aesthetic embodying universal values. Intellectually bolstered by Clement Greenberg and promoted actively by MoMA, this interpretation of Abstract Expressionism quickly crowded out alternative voices. In the end, Greenberg’s formalist, internationalist inter- pretation of Abstract Expressionism proved much more flexible in negotiating and reconciling many—though not all—the competing interests of the western art establishment. Its rapid dominance of art historiography, facilitated by the cold war utility of international modernism as a tool with which to win over the moderate European left, obscures the importance of institutional politics in shaping canonical aesthetic priorities. The fate of American Artists Paint the City reveals this hidden history.2 International competitive juried exhibitions like the Venice Biennale are sites where innumerable individuals—artists, curators, jurors, critics, and spectators —participate in the creation of canons that over extended periods of evaluation and reevaluation are either supported and upheld or challenged and then modified. The Italian showcase of world art established in 1895 initially resembled in its spirit, purpose, and organization the many World’s Fairs of the turn-of-the-century. As the twentieth century progressed this genteel competi- tion, an artistic Olympics of sorts that lasted from June to October every other year, became more openly competitive as artists from around the globe vied for prizes awarded by a jury of international experts. Thoroughly in keeping with the American Artists Paint the City 33 Fascism of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and the political polarization to the extreme right and left worldwide, prizewinning artworks were clearly emblematic of national cultural achievement by the 1930s, when the Venice Biennale became a state-sponsored event independent of the city and overseen by a governing committee. At this time, many participating countries began to build permanent pavilions designed in national vernacular styles in the city’s Giardini di Castello, the official site for this event. Opened on May 4, 1930, and still standing today, the American pavilion designed by Delano & Aldrich of New York has a Doric portico and frieze on the exterior and contains inside four equally sized galler- ies placed around a cupola. Although inspired by an architectural idiom readily associated with the United States capitol building, America’s pavilion received no federal funding and these circumstances made it unique. Private benefactors with ties to the Grand Central Galleries in New York City and led by Walter L. Clark, a business partner of J.P. Morgan, paid for both its construction and its maintenance for two decades.3 Ownership changed hands in 1953 when MoMA purchased the American pavilion with the assistance of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which also pro- vided a five-year $125,000 annual grant to support exhibitions in Venice. Porter A. McCray, head of the museum’s International Council (IC) between 1953 and 1962, also used these funds for touring exhibitions abroad. Presided over by its president Nelson Rockefeller and guided by Barr’s vision, MoMA had both the deep pockets and discriminating tastes needed to cultivate effectively Europe’s appreciation of the aesthetic merits of contemporary American art. Its support was never just about the art, however. MoMA’s directors, presidents, and donors had close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and accepted open and indirect subsidies for organizing anti-communist cultural campaigns abroad. In May 1955 George F. Kennan, a former director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Committee and former Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1949-1953), spoke to the International Council about using touring exhibitions to persuade Western Europeans that American culture was more than just commercialized popular entertainment. It was imperative, he explained, that America “show the outside world both that we have a cultural life” and that “we care enough about it, in fact, to give it encouragement and support here at home.” Assaults on ab- stract and non-representational painting by Michigan Congressman George A. Dondero and other conservatives in government and the private sector made the latter more difficult. During his infamous 1949 address “Modern Art Shackled to Communism” Dondero declared that “so-called modern art” was a “weapon of communism, and the Communist doctrinaire names the artist as a soldier of the revolution.” He also named Barr a leading Communist in America’s art world. In response to such attacks, MoMA lessened the “risk of having its patriotism impugned” by sending progressive art overseas rather than exhibiting it domesti- cally where it was more likely to upset conservative museum trustees, lawmakers, and newspaper editors.4 34 Mary Caroline Simpson By 1953, Alfred Barr had already curated numerous overseas traveling exhibitions of American art and the newly appointed United States Commis- sioner for the Venice Biennale had specific plans for the American pavilion. The advancement of American painting and sculpture to a status comparable with or even surpassing contemporary trends in Europe preoccupied Barr and his as- sociates. Not since 1895 when jurors selected James Abbott McNeill Whistler for the premier painting prize had an American received this recognition and consequently, receipt of a major honor became the primary indicator of success for Barr and the art press. Pursuit of this goal led to his rejection of the conven- tional practice of featuring one or two works by a sizeable number of artists in the national pavilions in favor of more experimental formats. For the 25th Venice Biennale of 1950, for instance, he hoped to direct critical attention to large-scale canvases by three “young leaders” of American painting—Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, who had created in his opinion “perhaps the most original art among the painters of his generation.” The decision to devote half of the American pavilion to a retrospective for the 80-year-old painter John Marin, however, drew attention away from the younger artists. Although Euro- pean authorities saw Marin as a true star among America’s artists, this admiration did not result in an exhibition prize. Instead, the judges awarded the top honors in both painting and sculpture to a pair of Frenchmen, Henri Matisse and Os- sip Zadkine. Some success came in 1952 when Alexander Calder received the Grand Prix for Sculpture at the 26th Biennale, but the prestigious painting award remained elusive.5 Two years later in 1954, when Surrealism provided a broadly defined orga- nizing theme for the entire festival, Barr and his co-organizers heavily featured the still unorthodox gestural paintings of Dutch-born artist Willem de Kooning. The American pavilion presented 27 canvases ranging from his earliest abstrac- tions to his more recent figural works as an outgrowth of Surrealism. The format annoyed critics on both sides of the Atlantic. As Time complained, the exhibi- tion did not provide a “representative showing” of modern American painting, which it rightly observed had “neither a dominant style nor authoritative quality.” MoMA struggled to elevate de Kooning’s status at the 1954 Venice Biennale and evidence suggests that he remained to many a foreign-born U.S. resident rather than a true American artist. More significantly, within the broader international scene, de Kooning and his fellow Abstract Expressionists hovered at the periphery of the inner circle in 1954. That year Biennale judges awarded the top prize in painting to the German-born Surrealist Max Ernst, whose prodigious output had already been sufficiently historicized as well as validated through inclusion in private and museum collections. During the early 1950s, representatives from the United States vigorously pursued a prize, but lacked a clear strategy to win one. Awareness that European jurors failed to take the Americans as seriously as they wanted led to a more heavy handed play for recognition in 1956.6 To alleviate the pressures of the time-consuming and costly process of or- ganizing exhibitions for the Venice Biennale, MoMA periodically invited other American Artists Paint the City 35 museums to curate for the American pavilion. In 1955 Daniel Catton Rich, the Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, accepted an invitation to serve as com- missioner for the 28th Venice Biennale scheduled to open in the summer 1956. The Chicagoan was a logical choice given his prior involvement with the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Art, the National Commission of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), for which he had served as president. Although MoMA’s International Council provided supplementary funding, Rich was obliged to secure a financial backer. Arnold Maremont, a contemporary art collector and the board chairman of the Chicago-based Thor Corporation, agreed to contribute $30,000 towards the installation of an exhi- bition in the American pavilion. Aware that extensive press coverage at home and abroad could either enhance or impair his own museum’s reputation; Rich assigned all curatorial responsibilities to a trusted ally, Katharine Kuh.7 My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Cura- tor, published posthumously in 2006 and edited by Avis Berman, provides the most comprehensive account of Katharine Kuh’s long life (she died at age 89 in 1994), and her many professional accomplishments as an art dealer, educator, curator, and critic. Guiding the general public along a path towards understanding and acceptance of modernism, and especially abstract art, was the overarching goal connecting the various phases of her career. This commitment first surfaced in 1935 when the Katharine Kuh Gallery located on North Michigan Avenue became the first in Chicago devoted to such prominent European modernists as Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso as well as American ab- stractionists like Alexander Calder and Stuart Davis and photographers Ansel Adams, Man Ray, and Edward Weston. Such forward-thinking views and a willingness to forgo profits to promote an art that had genuinely captivated her drew the unwelcome attention of Josephine Logan’s reactionary Sanity in Art group. Members disrupted business by accosting potential clients outside Kuh’s gallery and loudly denouncing modern “trash” within its walls. Incited by Eleanor Jewett, the Chicago Tribune’s intransigent art critic, such complaints continued to dog Kuh long after abandoning her business in 1942. Joining the Art Institute of Chicago as curator of the Gallery of Art Interpretation two years later, her thought provoking yet accessible exhibitions for this adult education space quickly led to more challenging, high-status curatorial opportunities and progressively louder complaints. One of the more notable events was American Abstract and Surrealist Art, a thematic invitational exhibition that opened in November 1947 to mixed reviews. A “great deal of hostility on the part of the people” prompted the Institute to circulate via press releases the praise of East Coast authorities like Barr, who commended Kuh’s assembly of a noteworthy exhibition containing “a great many new faces and real talent.” Her local admir- ers also praised it. Frank Holland of the Chicago Sun-Times observed that in “New York and Eastern museum circles there is a feeling of wonderment and chagrin that the Art Institute in Mid-Western Chicago had the imagination and 36 Mary Caroline Simpson courage to organize such a remarkable and worthwhile show.” Many more fresh exhibitions and imaginative educational programming would follow, but only American Artists Paint the City and the extraordinary opportunity to serve as America’s curator would subject Kuh’s curatorial vision to international scrutiny and debate.8 American Artists Paint the City married a cold war American studies sensi- bility to an enthusiastic spirit of outreach. An educator at heart, Katharine Kuh conceived of the American pavilion as a didactic space in need of an upbeat and celebratory unifying theme promoting an art “as American as skyscrapers and hot-dogs.” Heartland imagery, which brought to mind the government’s direct involvement in the arts during one of the nation’s worst economic crises, was unsuitable because it did not demonstrate the economic, cultural, and political stature America had acquired after World War II. Agrarian themes also neglected the growing international importance of Manhattan’s art market. With these thoughts in mind, she envisioned an exhibition that would guide spectators through a series of comparisons between abstract and representational treat- ments of a common theme, the American city. She offered this justification of her thematic choice in a 1955 press release: Our cities amaze us, outlined against both coasts or seen from a distance across the vast plains of Texas, Illinois, and Iowa. The light in America, almost always brighter than in Europe, defines our surroundings with intense precision, accounting in part for the American artist’s emphasis on the specific rather than the general. American Artists Paint the City seems an appropriate theme for a group of paintings, which have developed, chiefly from our own roots. Since American cities differ from those in Europe both in appearance and in history, our painters have tended to evolve a personal method of interpreting them. This is not to say that European influences are absent from such works, but rather that native expression is here more strongly felt.9 Kuh’s statement suggests a thematic inclusiveness that embraced a variety of American places and traditions. She alluded to skylines on both seaboards and the plains as beacons providing a common inspiration. The distinctively American “appearance” and “history” of the cities provided an environmental rationale for the development of an American modernist tradition, since “our painters have tended to evolve a personal method of interpreting them” with minimal Euro- pean precedents. The breadth of Kuh’s stylistic choices suggested the metropolis could bring together people of diverse backgrounds. Yet by focusing on New York as an emblem of urban life, and urban life as a representation of American exceptionalism, the exhibition labored to disguise myriad antagonisms. The paintings exhibited systematically ignored conflict and confrontation between American Artists Paint the City 37 social groups, just as Kuh avoided fundamental differences between aesthetic principles or regional artistic interests to create the appearance of consensus and continuity.10 Opening in June 1956, and closing in October, American Artists Paint the City did not continue Barr’s selective focus but rather contained 46 stylistically diverse paintings by 35 artists of different ages. Works by Lyonel Feininger, John Marin, and Charles Sheeler greeted visitors as they entered the American pavilion. Emerging as mature painters during the first three decades of the 20th century, they had infused realism with various aspects of European modernism to express the futuristic look and energetic pace of New York City. Meanwhile realist peers such as Edward Hopper had captured the “loneliness” that was “typical of life in large American cities,” according to Kuh. This mood, as revealed in Early Sunday Morning (1930), linked Hopper to a diverse assortment of urban scene painters who had exposed the “less privileged side of American city life” without turning their canvases into “forums for propaganda.” In a preemptive maneuver Kuh neutralized any potentially controversial content that could conceivably have been read into the paintings by government officials or private citizens by deftly avoiding any discussion of crime rates, growing racial tensions, white flight to suburban communities, or the slum clearance programs that accompanied urban renewal in major American cities. Although she acknowledged that “cacopho- nous traffic, soaring architecture, mammoth factories and sprawling slums are commonplaces,” she underscored that “it remained for the writers and painters of America to discover new romance in these very elements.” Viewed in this manner, the commuters in George Tooker’s The Subway (1950) merely tried to keep up with the hurried pace of modern city life rather than struggled with the anxiety-inducing culture of surveillance in cold war America. The crowded composition of Jacob Lawrence’s Chess on Broadway (1951) simply reflected the “chaos” of daily life under “Broadway’s glaring neon lights” rather than an African American’s perspective on the resiliency needed to endure and fight the racism contributing to urban poverty. Kuh’s emphasis on the celebratory or the purely aesthetic possibilities of urban imagery typified the work of curators and art historians at mid-century, well before the widespread adoption of Marxist theoretical approaches and social art history popular since the 1970s.11 Far more interested in the promise of the city than urban realities, Katharine Kuh clearly preferred paintings like Joseph Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme (1939) that depicted the monuments and skyscrapers that had made Manhattan the embodiment of an entire nation’s aspirations. The catalog revealed this preference by strategically placing literary excerpts exalting the beauty of the skyscraper next to reproductions of paintings like Georgia O’Keeffe’s New York, Night (1929). It “seems to soar up with an aspirant, vertical glittering magnificence to meet the stars,” read the accompanying passage by American novelist Thomas Wolfe. The city’s “jewel-like luminosity” at night particularly appealed to Kuh’s polished sensibilities. Like O’Keefe’s crisp, simplified forms, 38 Mary Caroline Simpson the many nocturnes on display both sanitized and obscured the urban ugliness she wished to avoid.12 Believing that the Seattle-based painter Mark Tobey best expressed “all the shining lights of America,” the curator made him the star attraction of American Artists Paint the City. Whereas one or two works represented all of the other artists, four Tobey canvases hung in the American pavilion. The painter’s fa- vorable reputation in New York art circles and the curator’s own efforts to help dealer Marian Willard sell his elegant, Asian-inspired canvases to Chicagoans partly explains this decision. His semi-representational renderings made of rhythmic lines, which had a graceful fluidity inspired by an eastern economy of means, proved critical. City Radiance (1944) and Neon Thoroughfare (1953), for example, each expressed the city’s iridescence at night through his “white writing” technique, a method that the painter insisted was not wholly abstract. Kuh later conceded that Tobey’s small scale paintings were never directly “re- lated to Abstract Expressionism, despite the occasional resemblance to it,” but at the time his work allowed her to connect a realist vein of American painting to the controversial turn toward non-representation taken by a relatively small, but much discussed group of artists in Manhattan.13 The exhibition catalog assumed special significance as a means to con- vince others of the theme’s soundness and the merits of the most contemporary artworks. “If American artists paint their cities abstractly,” Kuh wrote, “they may be recording quite realistically what they see, for the angularity, speed and transparency of their surroundings often appear abstract when viewed out of context. Steel buildings under construction become skeletons to look through as glass windows turn into reflecting mirrors.” To underscore this point visually, a photograph of an I-beam from a construction site appeared in the catalog next to reproductions of two canvases. Kuh encouraged viewers to see the broad black strokes in New York, a 1955 canvas by Hedda Sterne, as a “skyscraper’s steel skeleton” set against “the scintillating colors of city lights” at dusk. Similarly, she suggested that Franz Kline exaggerated the features of a single building to “symbolize a whole metropolis” in his 1953 painting of the same name. Through brushwork both Sterne and Kline had captured the “staccato excitement” of New York and this energy linked their work to the “vibrant rhythms” of “life in this teeming, swarming city” expressed by Jackson Pollock’s Convergence (1952). Dwelling on Pollock’s overall lack of compositional focus, Kuh identified the painting as an object “intended less to be looked at than entered into.” That is why, she explained, it “envelops one with the same insistence as the city itself.” The “picture, like the city itself, seems to have no beginning, no boundaries, no end,” she observed of both Pollock’s canvas and de Kooning’s Gotham News (1955).14 As Katharine Kuh formulated her exhibition concept in 1955, she worked in the gap between an Americanist canon then restricted to art created before WWII and a Modernist canon originating from the art and aesthetic philoso- phies of Western Europe. At the time, it was unclear to which canon Abstract American Artists Paint the City 39 Expressionism properly belonged. Kuh’s presentation of new art by younger artists solely within the context of American modernism made the 28th Venice Biennale especially notable at a time when few histories of American art had been published. Art and Life in America (1949) stands apart because Oliver Larkin examined painting and sculpture within a broader social context and, as publishers Rinehart and Company claimed, it told the story of “the growth of democracy through art in a free country.” A similar theme runs through the catalog for American Artists Paint the City, which also reveals the growing influ- ence of cold war American studies scholarship. Kuh drew inspiration from the myth-symbol approach popularized by Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1948), which examined national legends, icons, artifacts, and rituals to ascertain the es- sential characteristics of the “American Mind” or consciousness. Encouraged by cultural commentators such as Harper’s Magazine editor John Kouwenhoven to determine “What’s ‘American’ About America,” sympathetic museum curators established galleries of American art to accentuate the unique circumstances of its creation. Published as the Venice Biennale opened, Kouwenhoven’s essay identified soap operas, comic strips, jazz, and above all Manhattan’s skyscrapers as quintessential American forms for emphasizing the process of creation over the end product. Always complete but never finished, the New York skyline could conceivably extend itself upward or (following the gridiron street plan) outward indefinitely. According to Kouwenhoven, New York skyscrapers reflected the vitality, mobility, and opportunity of their native land, highlighting the absence of similar values in the Soviet Union’s closed, static society.15 After World War II, when the Venice Biennale attracted on average 200,000 visitors from around the world per season, the American pavilion’s contents stirred increasing interest among critics. America’s emerging superpower status inevitably escalated this attention, which increased during the 1950s as traveling art exhibitions assumed a central place in the United States cultural-exchange program. The 1956 Venice Biennale opened just days after jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie completed a tour of the Middle East on behalf of the state department. Designed in part to counter Soviet accusations that American materialism stifled artistic creativity, Gillespie’s tour repeatedly connected jazz to democratic free- dom of expression through the lectures of government escort (and jazz critic) Marshall Stearns. Similarly, the Soviet Union’s participation in the Venetian art fair for the first time since 1932 provided a unique opportunity in 1956 for the United States press corps to connect visual art to the political circumstances of its production in each country. Not surprisingly, reporters applauded an American system that provided the freedom for artistic individualism to flourish, a theme that would come to dominate the discourse surrounding Abstract Expression- ism just as it framed the promotion of jazz. Conversely, Soviet artists suffered because, as Art News reported, “politics” took “precedence over esthetics.”16 Widespread support in the domestic press for art’s cold war mission may have convinced Katharine Kuh that an exhibition uniting Abstract Expressionism with an American modernist tradition would receive a favorable reception at home 40 Mary Caroline Simpson and at least thoughtful consideration abroad. Instead, she was both surprised and hurt by the overwhelmingly negative response to American Artists Paint the City. Only Arts magazine considered her thematic approach both daring and relevant. America’s realists and its abstract painters, it agreed, had indeed grappled with a common problem—finding a form and a style to express the “multiplicity” and the “turbulence” of the urban experience. The curator’s inclusion of recent work by the New York School, the reviewer nevertheless anticipated, would surely make it the most controversial exhibit at the Venice Biennale. This prediction proved true.17 The New York School’s dominance by 1956 has been vastly overstated in scholarship and many reviewers at the time questioned the quality of the rep- resentative artworks hanging in the American pavilion. Although the London Sunday Times declared Pollock’s Convergence the “finest entry in the entire Biennale,” most art critics and other journalists disagreed. Time magazine, for instance, openly admired older painters such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper because their paintings appeared more skilled and accomplished than canvases by Pollock or de Kooning. It described the latter’s Gotham News as possessing “no relation to any city unless it was the City of Dreadful Night.” The Paris based journal Beaux-Arts concurred, identifying it as the “most unsightly and the least readable painting” in the entire Venice Biennale.18 Critics also questioned the relevance of Abstract Expressionist paintings to Kuh’s urban motif. The Züricher Zeitung conceded that in the main her choices expressed the “experience of city life, skyscrapers, chains of light, the madness of urban tempo and sensations of loneliness among tumultuous crowds.” The Abstract Expressionist paintings, however, did not pertain to her city theme. Kuh, it opined, had included their work simply because it was “the last word in style.” More importantly, European newspapers insinuated that Kuh had misrepresented the new abstraction, which did not require a literal subject. “In the future,” the Züricher Zeitung advised, “would it not be better to allow the freedom which artists need and thus reject the idea of a theme with its suggestion of dogmatic discipline?”19 Many American reviewers agreed that Kuh’s thesis had confused the foreign public’s understanding of contemporary American painting. The most damning appraisal of the exhibition concept appeared in the September 1956 issue of Art News. Reviewer Milton Gendel described it as “agilely strung together, on the slender thread of the city theme” and “almost comic in the liberal interpretation of its subject.” Rejecting the curator’s suggestion of an environmental influence, he denied that the New York School artists painted the city and claimed they objected to such strict analysis of their work. The artists themselves expressed more ambivalent reactions than Gendel suggested. “It’s not so much that I’m an American: I’m a New Yorker,” mused Willem de Kooning. “I think we have gone back to the cities.” Jackson Pollock, on the other hand, refuted such overly literal readings of his work during a 1956 interview with Selden Rodman, who described the painter’s reaction to American Artists Paint the City: American Artists Paint the City 41 “What a ridiculous idea,” he said, “expressing the city— never did it my life!” “I don’t think it’s so ridiculous,” I said. “Aren’t you all doing it—consciously or unconsciously? I feel it in your paint- ing, and in Kline’s and Bill de Kooning’s, not to mention artists like Tobey and Hedda Sterne and O’Keefe, who admittedly are doing it. What are you expressing, if you’re not expressing the turbulence of city life—or your reaction to it?” He thought hard, grimacing with the effort. “Nothing so specific…My times and my relation to them…No. Maybe not even that. The important thing is that Cliff Still—you know his work?—and Rothko, and I—we’ve changed the nature of painting.”20 Pollock was correct. Abstract Expressionism had reoriented painters and its lessons would lead them to explore divergent paths. Appearing in the October 1958 issue of Art News, painter Allan Kaprow’s “The Legacy of Jackson Pol- lock” declared the end of painting’s primacy in the arts and rejected the artwork as an object thus leaving the artist “preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life.” All of this lay in the near future in the fall 1955 when Kuh traveled to Manhattan on a quest for Abstract Expressionist paintings. “I had made up my mind that Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline must be included” and “I was inclined to believe that all three of them were at least partially indebted to New York,” she recalled in her memoir. Kuh’s calculated choice of titles shored up her selections and the artists participated in the naming process. Franz Kline often used place names, especially locations near his birth- place Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for titles and so he was unperturbed when Kuh after surveying the contents of his Third Avenue studio christened one untitled canvas New York. Kline then escorted the curator to Willem de Kooning’s nearby studio where the genial spirit of cooperation continued. “After a sociable drink or two,” Kuh reminisced, “I noticed the occasional and nearly invisible traces of newsprint pressed into the pigment. According to de Kooning, this technique gave texture to the painting and at the same time amused him, so the picture was promptly baptized Gotham News.” De Kooning perhaps had a greater say in the naming process than Kuh acknowledged. The title fit nicely with others used by the painter, who had already alluded to the urban environment through embedded imagery in Excavation (1950) and later used titles, Merritt Parkway (1959) for instance, and analogies comparing his energetic merging, diverging, and converging broad strokes of color to the circulation of traffic via on and off ramps. Connecting Pollock’s paintings to the city was not so easy. When Kuh arrived at his studio in 1955, the precedent of allowing others to title the classic drip paintings, and thereby shape the public’s understanding of their significance, had already been established by Clement Greenberg, who accentuated the enig- matic vaporous qualities of Number 1, 1950 by renaming it Lavender Mist. Kuh 42 Mary Caroline Simpson followed his lead. After noticing a fan shaped arrangement of paint trails termi- nating at the center lower edge of one three-year old canvas, the curator titled it Convergence; a word she explained “had a little something to do with city life.” Pollock complained, but did little to challenge the curator’s contextualization of his painting. A sizeable international audience saw Convergence and many reporters discussed it albeit within the context of the city theme and in the end, this benefited the artist far more than it ever harmed him.21 Katharine Kuh exercised far greater control over the meanings assigned to Abstract Expressionist canvases than her detractors realized then or historians do today. More significantly, little evidence exists to suggest that she was daunted by the task or cowed by the opinions of now vaunted authorities like Clement Greenberg whose pioneering role in winning critical and institutional acceptance for Abstract Expressionism has been well documented, mythologized, and some- times demonized. Indeed, the critic and curator used similar strategies to make bold claims about the enduring importance of a body of artworks they mutually admired. For various reasons, Greenberg’s relentless promotion of the New York School as “the most original and vigorous art in the world today” did much more to ensure its short-term success and enduring art historical importance. “American Type Painting,” an essay that first appeared in 1955, provides an early version of Greenberg’s formalist position that fortified this push for recognition. “It seems to be a law of modernism—thus one that applies to almost all art that remains truly alive in our time—that the conventions not essential to the viability of a medium be discarded as soon as they are recognized,” he declared. In an address to an estimated five million listeners as part of the Voice of America’s Forum Lecture series broadcast in May 1960, which solidified his reputation as the critical voice of his era, Greenberg elaborated on his interpretation of modern art’s inherently self-referential trajectory. “The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself—not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence,” he explained. Greenberg envisioned modern art upholding “past standards of excel- lence” by repeatedly dismantling established conventions. His stance dictated a separation between the internal logic of painting as a practice and the aims and needs of the individual painter. Greenberg summarized his eventual dismissal of non-technical criteria when he told Saul Ostrow in 1994, “I never fooled around with meaning.”22 While Clement Greenberg is commonly thought to have focused exclusively on formal ties between Abstract Expressionism and various European “isms,” and especially Cubism, he explored other canonical points of departure to connect the style to American traditions in the 1940s. In particular, he exploited notions of fraternity and paternity to unite John Marin and Jackson Pollock for the pur- pose of shaming MoMA into increasing its support for the New York School. The museum had already exhibited and collected work by Marin, yet in the late 1940s Greenberg complained to Alfred Barr about “how remiss the museum has been lately in its duty to encourage modern American art . . . how little, how American Artists Paint the City 43 woefully little the Museum has to show for the expenditure of so much money, space, time, energy and—at least on the part of some—devotion.”23 By stressing commonalities between Marin and Pollock, Clement Greenberg helped persuade MoMA to adjust its exhibition schedule in favor of Abstract Expressionism. In 1942 Greenberg identified Marin as possibly “the greatest living American painter.” This opinion spread as Art News editor Thomas Hess reported in 1948 that he was “accepted without question as one of the greatest living American artists” and the same year readers of Look magazine ranked Marin first in response to the question: “Which ten painters now working in the United States, regardless of whether they are citizens, do you believe to be the best?” During this same period, Greenberg declared Pollock among the “six or seven best young painters we possess” in 1944 and “the most powerful painter in contemporary America” in 1947. Life questioned this assessment in August 1949 with its feature story “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” but the following year the two painters appeared together in the 25th Venice Biennale. Marin, as previously noted, drew greater admiration in Europe because his paintings sprang from his experiments with Impressionism. Greenberg took notice and, encouraged by the contrived comparison with Marin, began to reposition Abstract Expressionism as both grounded in an American modernist past and progressing through its mastery and assimilation of the les- sons of Europe’s avant-garde.24 Unlike Greenberg, many members of America’s arts establishment demon- strated open skepticism about Pollock’s accomplishments and Abstract Expres- sionism in general, seeing it simply as one of many artistic achievements worthy of inclusion in a history of the nation’s art. Nevertheless, this attitude also facili- tated the New York School’s incorporation into an American modernist pantheon. Significantly, Greenberg’s peers approached canon construction as a consensual decision-making process and demonstrated tolerance of dissenting opinions and contrasting tastes. Prominent art authorities like John I. H. Baur, Lloyd Goodrich, Dorothy C. Miller, and James Thrall Soby, who co-authored and published New Art in America: Fifty Painters of the 20th Century in 1957, believed that they lived in an “age of individualism in the arts.” By featuring a wide spectrum of artists from John Sloan to Jackson Pollock, the book acknowledged the breadth of approaches used by American painters. “In spite of the recent popularity of abstraction,” its concluding statement reads, “it is apparent that the last fifteen years has produced, in America, a greater diversity of styles, subjects and attitudes than any comparable period of the past.” MoMA shared this perspective and curator Dorothy Miller selected stylistically and conceptually diverse artworks by well-known and emerging artists living throughout the United States for the museum’s closely followed “Americans” exhibition series, which did not feature Abstract Expressionism before 1952. Despite Greenberg’s best efforts, many important powerbrokers and institutions in America’s art world, in particular Alfred Barr and MoMA, refused to support fully Abstract Expressionism. The museum’s permanent collection and rotating exhibitions featured a spectrum of 44 Mary Caroline Simpson creative activity rather than focusing attention on the work Greenberg valued most.25 In 1956, when Greenberg’s formalism was neither fully formed nor widely discussed, the competing and evolving interdisciplinary contextual approach to American art and culture used by Katharine Kuh was equally viable. By focusing the viewers’ attention on something unique to the United States, its skyscrapers, and portraying the artists as responding to this distinctly American environment rather than working with European subjects, the curator underscored the nation’s urban development that had encouraged the maturation of American arts. She defied convention at the 1956 Venice Biennale by constructing a unique thematic exhibition, confident of widespread if not universal backing for her inclusive approach. In another departure from custom, she distributed a free illustrated catalog containing instructional aides (primarily photographs and literary pas- sages about the city) to help visitors, critics, and judges better understand the continuities between the old and the new American art, which had finally shaken both the “narrow nationalism” of the 1930s and its “over-dependence” on the masters of European modernism. Well aware of the future importance of catalogs as documentary evidence validating works of art, Kuh astutely manipulated the power of the printed word and the visual appeal of reproductions in an attempt to persuade an international audience to accept American modernism on its own terms. Despite her best promotional efforts, Kuh struggled to effectively communicate and defend her thesis against considerable skepticism and ire. The mixed reviews typified this fractious period of trial and error, when the nation’s art authorities squabbled over the best ways to contextualize American mod- ernism and persuade audiences to accept it. The growing notoriety of Abstract Expressionism, and attempts to integrate it into an American canon, brought these tensions to the fore. The curator’s ineffective effort, and the subsequent manipu- lation of Abstract Expressionism within an alternative international narrative, owed much to the changing internal dynamics of the art world at mid-century. Growing concerns about the fate of regional movements and much discussion about national identity, artistic pluralism, and cultural elitism accompanied this paradigmatic shift.26 Katharine Kuh and the Art Institute’s director Daniel Catton Rich arrived in Venice in June 1956 for four days of opening ceremonies, which she described in a letter as a “crazy marathon with too much wine, champagne, artists, differ- ent languages and the interminable Chicagoans,” a flock of wealthy collectors requiring her undivided attention. We “got through without any major disaster” she wrote her mother seemingly unaware that American Artists Paint the City had angered several constituencies in Chicago’s art community. A variety of newspapers carried an open letter written by University of Chicago professor and local Artists’ Equity president Harold Haydon, who drew attention to an escalating curatorial predisposition to present Manhattan as a distinct geographic zone of artistic achievement by literally counting the number of references in the catalog to major cities besides New York City. As it happened, Kuh had American Artists Paint the City 45 mentioned her hometown only six times in a catalog essay that made no mention of Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, or Boston. Her assertion that the nation’s largest metropolis was “the cumulative symbol of urban America,” while the “smoke drenched silhouette” of Chicago was simply an apt expression of the “decadence and dustiness of middle western life,” also smacked of geographic prejudice. Far worse, in Haydon’s opinion, the curator had rhapsodized over the “greater loftiness and complexity” found in paintings by the New York School and this had given outsiders the impression that Chicago was “unimportant as a cultural center and not a fit subject for painting.”27 Haydon and members of Artists’ Equity rightfully argued that Kuh had masterfully twisted her theme to include New Yorkers, but had failed to use it to benefit her hometown arts community. The thoughtless decision to use a map of downtown Chicago to decorate the catalog’s cover only served to accentuate their exclusion. Work by two Chicago artists did appear in the exhibition, however. Multiple Exposure, a commissioned photomural by noted Chicago photographer Harry Callahan, hung at the pavilion’s entrance. Aside from Beaux-Art, which declared it the best artistic interpretation of the city in the entire show, critics and visitors alike appear to have considered it a decorative embellishment rather than part of the exhibition. A second Chicago artist, Ivan Albright, was represented by a still unfinished canvas titled Poor Room—There Is No Time, No End, No Today, No Yesterday, No Tomorrow, Only the Forever, and Forever, and Forever, Without End (1942-1963). To connect the painting to the exhibition’s theme, Kuh pointed to affinities between the “microscopic intensity” of the painter’s approach and the “dreary detail” of city life and Chicago’s literary tradition, especially Upton Sinclair’s brutally graphic account of conditions in the city’s stockyards in The Jungle (1906). Unconvinced, A. James Speyer, who covered Chicago for Art News, insinuated that Albright had simply added the prefix “Poor Room” to the title at Kuh’s request to conjure up the image of tenement housing. No evidence supports this claim, at least in this instance. Instead, hints of architecture from a bygone age, the painter’s celebrity, and the admiration for his work in some circles both in and outside of Chicago primarily accounts for his inclusion in the exhibition.28 Accusations of collusion offended Albright. “[Artists’ Equity] behave[d] like a union looking for an employer,” he snapped to a Newsweek reporter. “The Art Institute just didn’t see fit to employ them.” Albright missed the point of a protest fueled by many years of actual and perceived neglect. After a long hard battle for local recognition and respect, the national art press had finally begun to cover the activities of Exhibition Momentum, a progressive artist run exhi- bition society. Formed in 1948 and born out of strained relations between the museum and M.F.A. students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, this group led by painter Leon Golub challenged Rich, the administrative head of both entities, to do more to support the city’s younger, emerging artists. Exhibi- tion Momentum sought to secure regional and national recognition for Chicago artists through annual competitive exhibitions juried by such important members 46 Mary Caroline Simpson of the New York School as painter Jackson Pollock, critic Clement Greenberg, and Manhattan gallery owner Betty Parsons. By 1956 both the artists and the Institute had established ties with the same group of art authorities in Manhattan, who interestingly enough acted as gatekeepers of America’s regional art centers. These promising conditions made Kuh’s omission of Exhibition Momentum art- ists difficult to accept, but understandable. The theme that had complicated her integration of Abstract Expressionist paintings contributed to their exclusion. Today classified loosely with the Chicago Imagist artists of the 1960s, Golub, H.C. Westermann, and other group members developed an idiosyncratic body of imagery that drew from politics, mythology, psychology, and deeply personal sources. Although Kuh simply did not see the city or feel urban energy in any of their paintings, she was sensitive to their needs and made efforts to promote regional artists. In 1956, as chair of the selection committee for New Talent in the USA, she chose seven Chicago artists for an exhibition featuring twenty-four “young, gifted, and relatively little known American artists” that with the sup- port of the influential magazine Art in America toured the nation. For some, this was too little too late. Chicago’s younger artists began moving to Manhattan and Paris in greater number during the final years of the decade. Location mattered by 1956 in the promotion of American art both at home and abroad.29 Whereas many of Chicago’s emerging artists belonged to Exhibition Momen- tum, Artists’ Equity attracted a cross section of people united by such concerns as fair treatment in the art marketplace and censorship. Group members resisted what they perceived as an emerging set of national artistic standards generated by New York’s authorities and they challenged suggestions that most regional artworks were either derivative of those created in Manhattan or of a lesser quality. Like other factions of Chicago’s art community, Equity members regarded Kuh a traitor to her city and her exhibition a “blow to civic pride.” Among others, critic Eleanor Jewett of the Chicago Tribune insisted that the Institute exhibit American Artists Paint the City so that all could see this “bitter betrayal of both Chicago art and American art.” An abridged version was incorporated into the museum’s 62nd Annual American exhibition opening in January 1957. Tempers soon flared after a jury of three New Yorkers awarded substantial prizes to can- vases by Franz Kline and Hedda Sterne previously exhibited in Venice. Shortly after, the Society for Contemporary American Art, a consortium of prominent collectors, acquired Sterne’s painting for the Institute’s permanent collection. The year before it had added Pollock’s Grayed Rainbow (1955); an acquisition that Kuh later recalled “incurred the wrath of many Chicago art patrons” because the Tribune, under the headline “Kuh Kuh Must Go,” had presented the purchase “as a civic calamity.” For years, the Institute’s detractors had accused Kuh of encouraging high profile collectors to buy only art with the “New York seal of approval” and this, they complained, had reduced Chicagoans to “consumers rather than creators” of their own culture. Adversaries overestimated the curator’s power and persuasiveness. Kuh often failed to convince the Institute’s trustees to acquire contemporary artworks including Gotham News and Convergence, American Artists Paint the City 47 which the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo purchased in 1956 and then lent to her for display in the American pavilion. In any case, growing concern about the museum’s acquisitions program coupled with “very hot domestic criticism” of American Artists Paint the City enabled the city’s artists to apply greater pressure on the museum. However, the press also made them seem bitter, the city’s residents overly conservative in their tastes, and its elite—especially the museum’s staff—foolishly determined to prove themselves au courant.30 Katharine Kuh’s contribution to New York’s status as America’s—and the world’s—premier art center alienated her potential supporters in the Chicago art world by marginalizing her hometown’s contributions to American artistic identity. Outside Chicago, the curator’s willingness to place her educational ob- jectives above a prize-winning strategy at the 1956 Venice Biennale drew sharp criticism. Unsympathetic reviewers complained that the theme misrepresented contemporary American painting and directed attention away from the unique talents of those painters most capable of impressing the national commissioners belonging to the jury. As a result, no American won the Grand Prix for painting. “None of our people could win prizes because we had no one-man show,” an exasperated Kuh told the press. Filling an entire pavilion with one artist’s work was not required, but more work by fewer than five artists had become the norm. This misinformation and the curator’s defensiveness simply added credibility to her detractor’s claims about America’s pavilion. Within the mélange, no one painting or painter—not even Tobey—stood out as the obvious focal point.31 The critical reaction to American Artists Paint the City reveals a struggle among art experts to find the right combination of artists and styles to secure desired recognition in the form of a major painting prize. Biennale historian Lawrence Alloway complained that American commissioners in the 1950s “never hit on the right artist in sufficient quantity at the right time; it amounted almost to a kind of accidental collaboration with the European desire to ignore American art.” Between 1948 and 1956, the jurors awarded the top prizes to new work by elderly artists like Henri Matisse rather than recognizing the excellence of emerging or mid-career artists. Alloway concluded that they intended to pay tribute to the “still-productive greatness” of Europe’s modern masters who had survived WWII. But this explanation does not fully account for America’s failure to win a prize in 1956, as not all the prizes went to older artists and not all the participating countries clung to the past. Whereas Jacques Villon, the 80 year-old brother of Marcel Duchamp, received the top painting prize in 1956, the sculpture prize went to Lynn Chadwick, a 41 year-old British sculptor. Instead, Europe’s commissioners, the custodians of a European originated canon, bristled at New York’s self-proclaimed status as the world’s art center and were not yet ready to accept American modernism on an equal footing to the western European tradi- tion. It remained, therefore, for leading critics and museums to embrace Abstract Expressionism as a representation of universal values that rose above nationality and politics and to emphasize transatlantic contributions to its development. Paradoxically, this endeavor received the support of eminent institutional figures 48 Mary Caroline Simpson in the United States who had previously championed Abstract Expressionism’s place in a distinctively American canon.32 MoMA’s embrace of Abstract Expressionism and wholehearted promotion of the style abroad stemmed in part from the demands of its cooperation with the American government’s cultural exchange program. Support for the Soviet Union in Western Europe following its participation in a 1955 World Peace conference, which continued to grow despite its use of military force to suppress Hungarian liberalization in November 1956, unsettled American foreign policymakers. Around this time, the international council realized fully the propaganda potential of Abstract Expressionism. Hyped as “free enterprise painting,” a catch phrase coined by Nelson Rockefeller, these artworks were packaged to convincingly articulate an anti-Communist ideology. Rockefeller money ensured the support needed to send paintings by self-avowed apolitical artists abroad on both overt and covert anti-Communist cultural campaigns that never would have succeeded without a substantial body of clearly superior artworks capable of attracting fol- lowers or generating resistance and debate. These canvases may have been an emblem of liberal democracy, but they illustrated nothing. Wonderfully blank in some respects and highly evocative in others, these artworks were “politi- cally silent” when compared to contemporaneous realist paintings, which some commentators, Greenberg among them, associated with Soviet aesthetic values. Emphasizing the artwork rather than the artist’s nationality or politics, Green- bergian formalism proved ideologically useful to MoMA and its international council because it effectively removed the analysis of Abstract Expressionism from a specific historical, social, and political context. A new formalist narrative was more palatable to Europeans, and helped split the European Left between those who embraced Modernism (and hence admired the U.S. contribution) and the Stalinist Left that debunked Modernist decadence.33 American art, especially Abstract Expressionism, struggled to win inter- national acceptance during the 1950s to a much greater extent than art history textbooks generally acknowledge. During the late 1940s, Clement Greenberg’s claim that “the main premises of Western Art have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center gravity of industrial production and political power” drew charges of “chauvinist exaggeration” of American artistic might. Such claims grew louder in the 1950s, when Katharine Kuh’s overly patriotic exhibition catalogue declared “the light in America, almost always brighter than in Europe” and thus intimated that everything about America was somehow more innovative and intrinsically superior. Widespread criticism of American Artists Paint the City suggests that Abstract Expressionism’s success at home and abroad was hardly inevitable. It required appropriate institutional support and a suitable intellectual context. Kuh’s attempt to link the country’s artistic past (the realist tradition) to its future (non-objectivity) represented the most cogent contemporary effort to place America’s abstractionists in a larger developmental structure that demonstrated the sequential growth of the country’s art. Her approach, however, offended nu- merous entrenched interests and unwittingly weakened ongoing efforts to earn American Artists Paint the City 49 international respect and recognition for Abstract Expressionism. Its supporters were acutely aware that this painterly approach was no longer new, and given a growing penchant for novelty in art world—a byproduct of the embrace of avant- gardism—time was passing rapidly. Their concern over repeated failures to win a prize increased following the premature death of Jackson Pollock in August 1956. A tribute in Art News set the tone for future discussions when it declared him the “first successfully to liberate painting from the dominant conventions of the School-of-Paris cuisine.” Yet the break was hardly as complete as the journal suggested. Jackson Pollock 1912-1956 and The New American Painting, two exhibitions touring Europe in 1958, drew attention to the interconnection between Pollack’s American and French influences. As Nancy Jachec notes, the retrospectives “highlighted the way in which his painting derived from yet departed in an uniquely American way from European precedents, thus placing him at the tip of international modernism’s trajectory of development.”34 Scholars frequently discuss these two exhibitions as if the success of the New York School was a fait accompli by 1958. Discussions over the decade had led to its inclusion in a domestic canon by 1956, but a place in an internationalist canon was hardly assured. Manhattan may have become the global center of art publishing and sales, but Europe’s most prestigious competitive juried exhibi- tion remained one of the real proving grounds of merit and French modernism the yardstick of accomplishment. The 1958 exhibition in the American Pavilion, co-curated by Frank O’Hara and Sam Hunter, featured two New York School sculptors—Seymour Lipton and David Smith—and two ageing abstractionists— Mark Rothko and Mark Tobey. While Rothko, a central member of the New York School, received a second-place prize for painting the less celebrated artist Mark Tobey won the Premio de Comune di Venezia for Capricorn (1958). This triumph validated Kuh’s assessment of his importance two years earlier. Tobey’s peripheral relationship to the New York School calls into question claims that Abstract Expressionism enjoyed a widespread institutional “ideological domi- nance” by the decade’s end and that Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were widely regarded as its most important painters. Even when the Ministries of Public Instruction awarded Franz Kline a first prize at the Venice Biennale of 1960, jurors commended the painter’s singular achievement rather than Abstract Expressionism as a school.35 Although the New York School paintings have functioned historiographically “as the collective image or the representation of a nation,” in reality a broader spectrum of paintings continued to represent “national beliefs and objectives” abroad in the 1950s. Katharine Kuh’s placement of Abstract Expressionism within a distinctly American narrative was never idiosyncratic and the USIA continued to use this approach after 1956. The American National Exhibition, which opened in Moscow in July 1959 and was seen by 2.7 million Russians over a six-week period, presented Abstract Expressionism within a broad de- velopmental narrative. Curated with input from Lloyd Goodrich, Edith Halpert, and Alfred Barr, it featured paintings by William Glackens and John Sloan, Ben 50 Mary Caroline Simpson Shahn and Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper and Jackson Pollock among others. Composed entirely of reproductions of paintings by a similar group of artists, Twentieth Century Highlights of American Painting, sent overseas by the USIA in 1958, brought the broadest spectrum of American painting to more diverse locales—Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East—than any other touring exhibition of the period.36 These large-scale, inclusive exhibitions organized by the USIA and the Smithsonian Institution in the 1950s and 1960s were meant to persuade Europeans of the nation’s cultural achievements and innovations. Repeat appearances of Abstract Expressionism at the Venice Biennale and other international art fairs helped it finally win international acceptance by the end of the 1950s. Despite the many declarations of support for individual artistic expression and appreciation for a diversity of painterly styles, a rethinking of standards, goals, and strategies by the international council between 1956 and 1958 resulted in a repackaging of Abstract Expressionism that effectively removed it, albeit temporarily, from an American canon and placed it securely within the universal modernist canon. American Artists Paint the City aided ongoing efforts to position New York as the world’s premiere art center and the New York School as America’s artists as part of a larger effort to demonstrate the freedom of creative expression in a democratic society. Kuh’s Chicago detractors had bitterly opposed the concen- tration of influence in Manhattan but Abstract Expression, its talismanic form, was well on its way to becoming a national art of international significance by 1956. American Artists Paint the City proved a turning point in the ascendancy of both the city and the style. More significantly, perhaps, the failure of Katharine Kuh’s exhibition to secure the endorsement of European jurors opened the door for formalist critics such as Clement Greenberg to win widespread recognition for Abstract Expressionism—America’s leading contemporary innovation—as a culmination of European internationalist rather than peculiarly American de- velopments. Illustrations Figure 1: “Views of the American Pavilion at the 28th Venice Biennale.” See The Art Institute Quarterly 50 (1956). Figure 2: Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning (1930). Oil on canvas, 35 3/16” x 60 1/4”. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York. See Artchive http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hopper/earlysun.jpg.html Figure 3: George Tooker, The Subway (1950). Egg tempera on gesso panel, 18” x 36”. The Whitney Museum of American Art. See website for George Tooker: A Retrospective Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Philadelphia, Pennsyl- vania, January 30–April 5, 2009 http://www.pafa.org/Museum/Exhibitions/ American Artists Paint the City 51 Past-Exhibitions/George-Tooker-Exhibition/Exhibition-Images/Exhibition- Images/162/vobId__541/ Figure 4: Joseph Stella, Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme (1939). Oil on canvas, 70” x 42”. The Whitney Museum of American Art. See The AMICA Library Through Cartography Associates http://amica.da- vidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/view/search?q=AMICOID=WMAA.42.15%20 LIMIT:AMICO~1~&sort=INITIALSORT_CRN%2COCS%2CAMICOID&s earch=Search Figure 5: Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, Night (1928-29). Oil on canvas, 40 1/2” x 19 1/8”. The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, The University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska. See Katharine Kuh, American Art- ists Paint the City, xxviii th Biennale, Venice, 1956 (Chicago; R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, The Lakeside Press, 1956). Figure 6: Mark Tobey, City Radiance (1944). See Katharine Kuh, American Art- ists Paint the City, xxviii th Biennale, Venice, 1956 (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, The Lakeside Press, 1956). Figure 7: Photograph of an I-beam. See Katharine Kuh, American Artists Paint the City, xxviii th Biennale, Venice, 1956 (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, The Lakeside Press, 1956). Figure 8: Hedda Sterne, New York (1956). Oil on canvas, 32 1/8” x 50 1/8”. The Art Institute of Chicago. See Art Institute of Chicago http://www.artic.edu/aic/ collections/artwork/86286 Figure 9: Franz Kline, New York (1953). Oil on canvas, 79” x 51”. The Al- bright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. The Artchive http://artchive.com/ artchive/K/kline/new_york_ny.jpg.html. Figure 10: Jackson Pollock, Convergence: Number 10, 1952 (1952). Oil and enamel on canvas, 7’ 91/2” x 12’11”. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. The Artchive http://www.artchive.com/artchive/P/pollock/pollock_ convergence.jpg.html Figure 11: Willem de Kooning, Gotham News (1955). Oil on canvas, 69” x 79”. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Albright Knox Gallery Education http://www.albrightknox.org/ArtStart/Kooning_t.html Figure 12: Map of Chicago on Exhibition Catalogue Cover. See Katharine Kuh, American Artists Paint the City, xxviii th Biennale, Venice, 1956 (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, The Lakeside Press, 1956). 52 Mary Caroline Simpson Figure 13: Ivan Albright, Poor Room: There Is No Time, No End, No Today, No Yesterday, No Tomorrow, Only the Forever, and Forever, and Forever, Without End (1942-1963). See Ivan Albright, edited by Susan F. Rossen (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago; Distributed by Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1997), figure 40. Notes 1. Katharine Kuh, American Artists Paint the City, xxviii th Biennale, Venice, 1956 (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, The Lakeside Press, 1956), 8; Lawrence Alloway, The Venice Biennale, 1895-1968: From Salon to Goldfish Bowl (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 136, 140, 144. Alloway possibly overlooked Kuh’s effort to promote contemporary art because he first attended the Venice Biennale in 1958. 2. Nancy Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 1940-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 159-160; Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 51. 3. Alloway, Venice Biennale, 17-18; Philip Rylands and Enzo Di Martino, Flying the Flag for Art: The United States and the Venice Biennale, 1895-1991 (Richmond, VA: Wyldbore and Wolferstan, 1993), 13, 29, 34, 50, 59, 62. Pavilion rental fees as well as entry ticket and catalogue sales subsidized the otherwise state sponsored art fair. Walter L. Clark, president of Central Art Galleries; a not-for-profit exhibition space opening in 1922 at New York’s Grand Central Station raised $25,000 in 1929 for the construction of the American Pavilion and William A. Delano, president, New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, designed it free of charge. 4. Rylands and Di Martino, Flying the Flag, 108-109; Jachec, Philosophy and Politics, 166; Alexander Eliot, “Art; Under the Four Winds,” Time, June 28, 1954: 74; Milton Gendel, “The Iron Curtain in the Glass Factory,” Art News 55 (September 1956): 26, 59; Lynn Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller’s ‘Americans’, 1942-63,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad, ed. John Elderfield (New York: The Museum of Modern Art/Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 82, 91; Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999), 257, 260, 262, 267, 272. Saunders quotes George Kennan, “International Exchange in the Arts, Address to the Council of MoMA,” 1955, printed in Perspectives (Summer 1956). MoMA president Nelson Rockefeller, son of the museum’s co-founder Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, recruited the Viennese born Rene d’Harnoncourt for the directorship following Barr’s departure in 1943. Saunders contends that both Rockefeller and former Secretary of State for Air William Burden, who became MoMA’s president in 1956, had CIA ties, as did d’Harnoncourt, who “openly lobbied Congress during the 1950s to finance a cultural campaign against Communism.” See Saunders, 257, 260. In 1954, the Grand Central Galleries sold the American Pavilion to MoMA for $25,000 and its staff organized five exhibitions before the United States Information Agency assumed the responsibility in 1962 followed by the National Collection of Fine Arts of the Smithsonian Institution in 1965. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum bought the pavilion in 1987. 5. Alloway, The Venice Biennale, 136, 139-140; Duncan Phillips, “7 Americans Open in Venice—Marin,” Art News 49 (June 1950): 22. In 1950, Barr shared the Commissioner position with Alfred M. Frankfurter of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Art News featured curatorial statements by both men. 6. Alexander Eliot, “Art; Under the Four Winds,” Time, June 28, 1954: 74, 77; Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller’s ‘Americans,’” 69; Rylands and Di Martino, Flying the Flag, 90-92, 105-106, 108-110, 280, 282-284; Clement Greenberg, “American Type Painting,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 234-35. For a thorough discussion of the 1954 exhibition, see Francis Pohl, Ben Shahn: New Deal Artist in a Cold War Climate, 1947-1954 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). The Grands Prix was established in 1938 and in 1952, Alexander Calder was the first American recipient. See Rylands and Di Martino, Appendix III (Prizes Awarded to American Artists at the Venice Biennale, 1895-1990) and Appendix X (The Grands Prix, 1938-1990). 7. Avis Berman, ed., “Preface,” My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2006): xxiii; “Real Yankee Art Traveling to Italy; Chicago’s Institute Aide to Pick 50 Works for ‘56 Venice Show,” Chicago Daily News, 23 May1955: 3; Art Institute Scrapbook, vol. 85-89, 1950-1956, Roll 16; “American Artists Paint the City,” News Releases from the Art Institute of Chicago, March 27, 1956 and “Art Institute Director Resigns,” News Releases from the Art Institute of Chicago, April 28, 1958, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago, News Releases, 1956-1959. 708.1 C53n: 31 and one-page letter from Porter A. McCray, Director of International Programs, The Museum of Modern Art to Katharine Kuh dated August 24, 1955, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1000-D190. Correspondence, Office of the Registrar, American Artists Paint the City 53 Loan Exhibitions, Venice Biennale, 1956. Chicago newspapers broke the story before, as Porter A. McCray chided Kuh, “Dan’s appointment as commissioner had been confirmed and the invitation for participation in the Biennale had been officially issued.” 8. Katherine Kuh, Who’s Who of American Women, 8th edition, 1974-1975 (Chicago, IL: Marquis Who’s Who, Inc., 1973), 535-536; Berman, “Preface,” xxv; Daniel Catton Rich, “The Windy City, Storm Center of Many Contemporary Art Movements,” Art Digest 26 (November 1, 1951): 28; Avis Berman, “The Katharine Kuh Gallery: An Informal Portrait,” in The Old Guard and the Avant- Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 155-57; Susan F. Rossen and Charlotte Moser, “Primer for Seeing: The Gallery of Art Interpretation and Katharine Kuh’s Crusade for Modernism in Chicago,” Museum Studies 16, no. 1 (1990): 8, 11-14; John W. Stamper, Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue: Planning and Redevelopment, 1900-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 165-167; Avis Berman, “An Interview with Katharine Kuh,” Archives of American Art Journal 27, no. 3 (1987): 2, 5, 9; John W. Smith, “The Nervous Profession: Daniel Catton Rich and The Art Institute of Chicago, 1927-1958,” in One Hundred Years at the Art Institute: A Centennial Celebration, Museum Studies 19, no. 1 (1993): 65, 67-68; “Committee on Painting and Sculpture Meeting” (February 27, 1947) Record of the Art Institute of Chicago, vol. 19: 51, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago; Frank Holland, “World of Art: All Abstract Show to Form Next American Exhibition,” Chicago Sun-Times, 4 May 1947 and Eleanor Jewett, “Voice of the People: Modern Art,” Chicago Tribune, November 26, 1947 Scrapbook of Art and Artists of Chicago, Rolls 7-9, 1947-1950, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago, and “58th Annual American Exhibition: Abstract and Surrealist Art from November 6 through January 11, 1948,” News Releases from the Art Institute of Chicago, November 11, 1947, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago, News Releases, 1945-47. 708.1 C53n: 31. Kuh earned art history degrees at Vassar College (AB. 1925) and the University of Chicago (MA. 1929). Her doctoral studies at New York University ended in 1930 with marriage to Chicago businessman George E. Kuh. Following a divorce in 1936, Kuh ran a gallery in the now demolished Diana Court Building (Holabird and Root, 1928-1929) located at 540 North Michigan Avenue. World War II and Kuh’s aversion to selling art both contributed to her gallery’s demise in April 1942. Kuh later attributed her daringness to her friendship with Alfred Barr, who had been her art history survey professor at Vassar. See Katharine Kuh, “Alfred Barr: Modern Art’s Durable Crusader” in The Open Eye: In Pursuit of Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 40-46. Kuh and her co-curator Frederick Sweet spent months traveling “over twenty-four thousand miles” of the country by car, bus, and train looking for fresh talent and their emphasis on the American followers of Surrealism reveals the influence of a book, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America (1944), by gallery owner Sidney Janis. 9. Rossen and Moser, “Primer for Seeing,” 11, 14-16 and Kuh, American Artists, 7, 8. Paintings of New York by Leading American Artists, a 1953 exhibition at the Downtown Gallery celebrating the Tercentenary of New York City organized by friend Edith Gregor Halpert inspired Kuh. For more information, see Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution, Downtown Gallery Papers, Reel ND 13, Celebrating the Tercentenary of the City of New York, Paintings of New York by Leading American Artists, February 17 through March 7, 1953, The Downtown Gallery, 32 East 51 Street, New York and “Tercentenary of New York Shown at Art Exhibit,” Town and Village, New York (February 19, 1953). 10. Kuh, American Artists, 7-8. 11. Rylands and Di Martino, Flying the Flag, 63-64, 111, 238; Kuh, American Artists, 7, 16-18, 21, 38, and Francis Frascina, “Institutions, Culture, and America’s ‘Cold War Years’: The Making of Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’” Oxford Art Journal 26.1 (2003): 79. In 1947, Dondero alleged that both Rich and Barr were Communists. See Stonor Saunders, Cultural Cold War, 256. 12. Kuh, American Artists, 9, 13, 22, 27. 13. Kuh, American Artists, 11, 22, 29; “Mark Tobey, Painter of ‘White Writing,’ One-Man Exhibition in Gallery of Art Interpretation,” News Releases from the Art Institute of Chicago, April 11, 1955, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago, file 4: 17, Gallery of Art Interpretation, Mark Tobey, January 15-March 15, 1955, and Kuh, My Love Affair, 215, 220, 223, 225. Tobey’s friend and fellow painter Lyonel Feininger lent City Radiance (1944) to Kuh for 1956 Biennale. His statement originated from a 1954 essay submitted to the Art Institute of Chicago Quarterly. “His method, no matter how inventive, was never the final message; it was merely an indispensable tool,” Kuh later observed of a painter she considered “an essential influence on twentieth-century American art.” 14. Kuh, American Artists, 22, 30-31. For another discussion of the “urban or landscape overtones” of Kline’s abstractions, see Harry F. Gaugh, The Vital Gesture: Franz Kline (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 107. 15. Wanda Corn, “Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art,” in Critical Issues in American Art: A Book of Readings, ed. Mary Ann Calo (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 2, 3, 7; Cynthia Mills, “Textbooks for a New Generation,” American Art 16 (Summer 2002); Richard Meyer, “Mind the Gap: Americanists, Modernists, and the Boundaries of Twentieth-Century Art,” American Art 18, (Fall 2004): 5, 7, and Alan Wallach, “Oliver Larkin’s Art and Life in America: Between the Popular Front and the Cold War,” American Art 15 (Fall 2001): 80. Wallach refers to Rinehart and Company flyer for Art and Life in America (ca. 1949), box 494 (Larkin files), Smith 54 Mary Caroline Simpson College Archives, Northampton, Mass. See also John A. Kouwenhoven, “What’s ‘American’ About America,” Harper’s Magazine 213 (July 1956): 25-33. 16. Hugo van Wadenoyen, “Big Biennale; Awards,” Time, July 9, 1956: 52, Milton Gendel, “The Iron Curtain in the Glass Factory,” Art News 55 (September 1956): 24, 25, and Jachec, “Abstract Expressionism and the International Council,” 161, 189. On Gillespie’s tour see Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 27-43. Claims of greater freedom were ironic given the controversy surrounding Sport in Art, which had been organized by the American Federation of Arts (AFA), the USIA, and Sports Illustrated, to represent the United States during the 1956 Summer Olympic Games in Sidney, Australia. In the spring 1956, Texas tycoon H. L. Hunt, a supporter of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, organized a campaign against the exhibition because it featured ten artists mention in HUAC’s annual report that prompted USIA to cancel its appearance in Australia. Dismayed by this action, AFA issued “A Statement of Artistic Freedom” encouraging the nation’s government to embrace and promote cultural openness because “freedom and diversity are the most effective answers to totalitarian thought control and uniformity, and the most effective proof to the strength of democracy.” See “A Statement of Artistic Freedom,” Arts (July 1956). 17. “American Artists Paint the City,” Arts 30 (June 1956): 26, 28, 29. Most critics quoted verbatim passages from Kuh’s catalogue text. 18. “New Worlds of the New World,” Time 67, June 18, 1956: 80; Archives of American Art/ Smithsonian Institution, Katharine Kuh Papers, Reel 2226, “International press excerpts, American Artists Paint the City, xxviii Biennale, Venice, 1956, Beaux-Arts, Paris, 26 June 1956, unpaginated; Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution, Katharine Kuh Papers, Box 1 of 8, Handwritten letter dated June 23-morning-Paris to Mother from K (Katharine Kuh), Villa Capponi Arcetri, Florence, the home of Henry Clifford, and Kuh, My Love Affair, 139. 19. Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution, Katharine Kuh Papers, Reel 2226, “International press excerpts, American Artists Paint the City, xxviii Biennale, Venice, 1956, Züricher Zeitung, Summer, 1956, unpaginated. 20. Milton Gendel, “The Iron Curtain in the Glass Factory,” Art News 55 (September 1956): 23, 26-27, 59-60; Willem de Kooning, “Content is a Glimpse,” excerpts from an interview with David Sylvester in Location (Spring 1963): 46; quoted in Harold Rosenberg, de Kooning, 2nd ed. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1978), 206; Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), 84. Critics had already suggested that Abstract Expressionism reflected the urban environment. See Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 103; Clement Greenberg, “The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture” (1947) in Clement Greenberg, the Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, ed. John O’Brian, 166. 21. Kuh, “A Day with Franz Kline,” My Love Affair with Modern Art, 229, 232-233; Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News (October 1958), 56-57. Aside from acknowledging that Pollock “vehemently disapproved of any theme,” Kuh kept her commentary about the painter brief. Once his painting entered the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York in 1956, the title became permanent but the word convergence soon lost its association with the city. 22. Clement Greenberg, “The New York Market for American Art,” The Nation, June 11, 1949, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, ed. John O’Brian, 322; Clement Greenberg, “American-Type Painting” (1955/1958), Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 208, 210, 220; Frascina, “Institutions, Culture,” 69; Saul Ostrow, “Clement Greenberg: The Last Interview” (1994) in Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, ed. Robert C. Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 239; Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 1993), 774, 779. First published in Forum Lectures (Voice of America), Washington, DC, 1960, “Modernist Painting” was reprinted in Art and Literature, no. 4 (Spring 1965), 193-201. Greenberg stressed the autonomy of the art object and a self-critical mission to “eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any art.” This push towards flatness began with Impressionist Claude Monet, who had “threatened the easel-picture convention” through mural scale canvases with all-over compositions and was furthered by Pablo Picasso, who dismantled the illusion of real objects in a deeply receding space through their monochromatic color gradations and value contrasts in conjunction with faceted forms. See Clement Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” (1948), Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 155, 157. 23. Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Missionary for Modern Art (Chicago & New York: Contemporary Books, 1989), 248; quoted in Marcia Brennan, “The Contest for the Greatest American Painter of the Twentieth Century: Alfred Stieglitz and Clement Greenberg,” Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001), 240. 24. Thomas B. Hess, “Marin,” Art News 46 (January 1948): 25; “Are These Men the Best Painters in America Today?” Look 12, February 3, 1948: 44 quoted in Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory, 233, 243-244, 245, 259, 263. American Artists Paint the City 55 25. John I. H. Baur, Lloyd Goodrich, Dorothy C. Miller, James Thrall Soby, and Frederick S. Wright, eds., New Art in America: Fifty Painters of the 20th Century (Greenwich, CT: The New York Graphic Society/Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), 222; Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller,” 61. A change in MoMA’s stance on Abstract Expressionism occurred in 1956, when “12 Americans” paired Franz Kline with West Coast abstractionist Sam Francis and an assortment of peripheral New York School artists— Ernest Briggs, James Brooks, Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, and Larry Rivers. The late date of this exhibition and others like it demonstrate the provisional status of Abstract Expressionism. Portrayals of Clement Greenberg as an all-powerful figure have skewed our understanding of the attitudes, values, and activities of the nation’s art world by the mid-1950s, when his reputation reached an all time low following his loss of an editorial position with the journal Commentary in 1957 and widespread contempt following a 14 month stint as a salaried art consultant for the French and Company Gallery in New York. Most of his revisions to earlier published essays were completed between December 1958 and February 1960. See Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life (New York: Scribner, 1997), 205-15, 222, 238-239; Frascina, “Institutions, Culture,” 73-74. For other perspectives, see Tim Hilton, “Clement Greenberg,” New Criterion 19, no. 1 (September 2000); “Clement Greenberg: As the Art World Remembers Him” (Interviews with John Russell, Hilton Kramer, William Rubin, Robert Rosenblum, and Linda Nochlin), The Art Newspaper (June 1994): 4. 26. Kuh, American Artists, 7-8; Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value, 46-47. “As for the show in general, it continued [sic] to be a definite success. Attendance is very good and comments continue to be decidedly favorable. I have had innumerable requests for catalogue and photographs both here and through the mail. I feel the ‘propaganda’ aspect of the thing has been very successful,” observed Institute employee Bill Bradshaw, who dismantled the exhibition. See one-page letter from Bill Bradshaw to Daniel Catton Rich dated October 6, 1956, Correspondence, Office of the Registrar, Loan Exhibitions, Venice Biennale, 1956, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1000-D190. Much like E. P. Richardson in Painting in America: The Story of 450 Years (1956), Kuh attempted to show how American art had successfully moved beyond the influence of European movements and she stressed that its full appreciation required “understanding of the sources, interrelationships, and difficulties that produce this art.” See Corn, “Coming of Age,” 6; Katharine Kuh, “Art’s Voyage of Discovery,” The Open Eye: In Pursuit of Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 194. 27. Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution, Katharine Kuh Papers, Box 1 of 8. Handwritten letter dated June 23-morning-Paris to Mother from K (Katharine Kuh) and Handwritten letter dated Monday, May 28, 1956 to Mother from K (Katharine Kuh), Villa Capponi Arcetri, Florence, the home of Henry Clifford; Kuh, American Artists, 18, 22, 27; Emery Hutchinson, “Smoked-Drenched...Decadence? Artists Here Get Civic Dander Up,” Chicago Daily News, 18 June 1956; Madeline Tourtelot, “Equity Hits Institute Selections,” Chicago American, 29 June 1956, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago, Art Institute Scrapbook, vol. 85-89, 1950-1956, Roll 16; “Does City Favor Its Own Art?” Chicago American, 23 April 1956, 8 and “Artists Riled Over Display’s Slur to City,” Chicago Tribune, 6 June 1956, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago, Scrapbook of Art and Artists of Chicago, Rolls 10-15, 1951-1959. Hayden noted that 29 of the 35 painters selected lived in New York and that Joseph Friebert and Fred J. Berman, both painters from Milwaukee, were the only other Midwesterners. 28. Kuh, American Artists, 7; “American Artists Paint the City,” Arts 30 (June 1956): 28; Gendel, “The Iron Curtain in the Glass Factory,” 59; A. James Speyer, “Art News from Chicago; Biennale Fever,” Art News 55 (May 1956): 18; Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution, Katharine Kuh Papers, Reel 2226, “International press excerpts, American Artists Paint the City, exhibition assembled by Katharine Kuh, Curator of Modern Painting and Sculpture, The Art Institute of Chicago, xxviii Biennale, Venice, 1956,” Beaux-Arts, Paris, 26 June 1956; “American Artists Paint the City, Insurance Valuation,” Correspondence, Office of the Registrar, Loan Exhibitions, Venice Biennale, 1956, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1000-D190 and two-page letter from Bill Bradshaw to Katharine Kuh dated October 15, 1956, Correspondence, Office of the Registrar, Loan Exhibitions, Venice Biennale, 1956, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1000-D190. High humidity in Venice had “slightly warped” Callahan’s photomural mural measuring 9’ x 6 1/2’ but it was in good enough condition to appear in the 1956 American Annual. 29. “Art: Tempestuous,” Newsweek, July 1956: 46; Katharine Kuh, “Foreword...New Talent in the U.S.A.,” Art in America 44 (February 1956): 10-16. In January 1956 letter co-signed by gallery owners Sally Fairweather and Shirley G. Hardin, collectors Earle Ludgin and Joseph R. Shapiro, and Daniel Catton Rich, Kuh invited Miller to tour the studios of 13 Chicago artists because curators from the east “so rarely visit this city.” The seven Chicago artists featured in New Talent in the USA were Don Baum, Cosmo Campoli, Leon Golub, Roy Gussow, Max Kahn, Le Roy Neiman, and Abbott Pattison. See Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller’s ‘Americans,’” 75. 30. Frank Getlein, “Painting Moderns in Chicago,” The New Republic, March 11, 1957: 22; “Art: Tempestuous,” Newsweek, July 1956: 46; Sydney J. Harris, “Strictly Personal: Why Should New York Have Monopoly on Art?” Chicago Daily News, 1 June 1953, Scrapbook of Art & Artists of Chicago, 1951-1959, Rolls 10-15, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago; “Art; What Wins a 56 Mary Caroline Simpson Prize?” Time, January 21, 1957, 54; Kenneth Shopen, “Have We Got an Inferiority Complex? If N.Y. Did It, It’s Art, If Chicago Does It, It’s Doubtful,” Chicago Daily News, 17 September 1954,” and Eleanor Jewett, “Biennale Is Under Fire by Critics,” Chicago Tribune, 22 July 1956, Art Institute Scrapbook, vol. 85-89, 1950-1956, Roll 16, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago; “16th Annual exhibition Society for Contemporary American Art Members Select 40 Paintings and Sculptures,” May 10, 1956, “Ten Prizes Amounting $6,100.00 Awarded 62nd American Exhibition, ” January 9, 1957 and “1956 Acquisitions by the Art Institute,” November 6, 1957, News Releases from the Art Institute of Chicago, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago, News Releases, 1956-1959. 708.1 C53n, and Katharine Kuh, “Introduction: Sorting Out and Summing Up,” My Love Affair with Modern Art: 30, 233. The jury (MoMA curator Dorothy C. Miller, sculptor Theodore Roszak, and painter Arthur Osver) awarded the Ada S. Garrett Prize of $750.00 to Hedda Sterne and the Norman Wait Harris Silver Medal and Prize of $500.00 to Franz Kline. Members of the Society for Contemporary American Art, a non-profit organization affiliated with the Institute included such notable Chicago collectors as Leigh and Mary Block, Maurice Culberg, Noah Goldowsky, Earle Ludgin, Samuel and Florene Marx, Walter P. Paepcke, and Joseph Shapiro as well as Joseph Hirshhorn of New York. Seymour Knox and Gordon Smith, director of the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York checked to see if the Institute wanted to acquire the Pollock and de Kooning paintings. “Of course, I wanted them all—they were marvelous paintings and marvelous bargains—but my trustees wouldn’t back me up,” Kuh remarked in her memoir. 31. Avis Berman, in My Love Affair with Modern Art, xxiii & xxv. See also “Oral History of Katharine Kuh, Interviewed by John W. Smith,” January 26-27, 1993. The Art Institute of Chicago, 72, 76. Both Kuh’s papers and a 1993 interview reveal her struggles against real and perceived ostracism because of her gender and Jewish ethnicity, which may have contributed to her inability to deflect successfully criticism of her handling of the 1956 Venice Biennale. Under normal circumstances, the curator of the American pavilion also received the title of U.S. commissioner and with it the honor of serving on an international jury selecting prizewinning artists and artworks. “Katharine took it for granted that she would be commissioner,” remarked long-time friend Avis Berman, who concluded, “No woman commissioner had ever represented the United States to date, and the government authorities were not ready to break the tradition.” 32. Shelley Hornstein, “The Shape of Time and the Value of Art,” in Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art, ed. Jody Berland and Shelley Hornstein (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2000), 220, 221-222, 229; Gendel, “The Iron Curtain in the Glass Factory,” 59, 60; Alloway, The Venice Biennale, 137, 140, 144, 149; “American Artists Paint the City,” News Releases from the Art Institute of Chicago, March 27, 1956. Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago, News Releases, 1956-1959. 708.1 C53n: 31. Daniel Catton Rich served with other national commissioners on a jury responsible for the award of major prizes, while Kuh shouldered the blame in the press for the failure of an American to win one. Previous winners included Georges Braque (1948), Henri Matisse (1950), Raoul Dufy (1952), and Max Ernst (1954). See Rylands and Di Martino, Appendix IV (American Commissioners, Curators, Committee and Jury Members, 1897-1991), Appendix VII (Principal One-Man Exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, 1895-1990), and Appendix X (The Grands Prix, 1938-1990). 33. Jachec, Philosophy and Politics, 159-160, 166; Stonor Saunders, Cultural Cold War, 258, 267-268; Frascina, “Institutions, Culture,” 92. See also Hilton Kramer, “Clement Greenberg and the Cold War,” The New Criterion 11 (March 1993), 4-9. Greenberg’s resistance to such readings is evident in a 1978 interview with Saul Ostrow. When asked if the emphasis on autonomy in “Avant-Garde and Culture” (1939) and other essays was a “political stance” and a “form of resistance to bourgeois cultural dominance,” he responded, “If you read me carefully you won’t find any political factors entering my writing about art. Maybe about culture in general, yes, but about art as art, never.” See Ostrow, “Clement Greenberg: The Last Interview,” 237. 34. Clement Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” (1948), Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 155; Alloway, Venice Biennale, 28; Thomas Hess, “Jackson Pollock, 1912- 1956,” Art News 55 (September 1956): 44, 57; Jachec, Philosophy and Politics, 159. Jackson Pollock 1912-1956 (January-December 1958) toured Rome, Basel, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, London, and Paris. Touring Europe in 1958, The New American Painting, an exhibition curated by Dorothy Miller, also helped create a narrative for Abstract Expressionism within an internationalist modernist tradition specifically indebted to Europe but coming to fruition in America. MoMA responded to repeat requests by European curators for such an exhibition and this calls into question claims by Frascina and Saunders that MoMA’s International Council backed by Rockefeller’s money foisted these exhibitions upon a European public. See Frascina, “Institutions, Culture,” 97; Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller,” 91. 35. Michael Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 197; Gendel, “The Iron Curtain in the Glass Factory,” 59, 60; Alloway, Venice Biennale, 137, 140, 144, 149, and Rubenfeld, “Clement Greenberg,” 210-211. Robert Rauschenberg’s win in 1964 was controversial because the American Commissioner, Alan R. Solomon of the Jewish Museum in New York City, elected to exhibit his work in the former offices of the U.S. Consulate located outside the Giardini. For more information American Artists Paint the City 57 see Jane De Hart Mathews, “Art and Politics in Cold War America,” American Historical Review 81 (October 1976): 762-87 and Christine J. Mamiya, “We the People: The Art of Robert Rauschenberg and the Construction of American National Identity,” American Art (Summer 1993): 40-63. 36. Hornstein, “The Shape of Time and Value of Art,” 220, 222, 228 and Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters, 148-149,154, 156, 158-159. work_enjndnzo7fbc7a3yebetl66bvy ---- WSEE_A_490935 215..225 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=wsee20 Slavic & East European Information Resources ISSN: 1522-8886 (Print) 1522-9041 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wsee20 Drawings and Prints by Slavic and Slavic-Born Artists in the Collection of the Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Phyllis Rosenzweig To cite this article: Phyllis Rosenzweig (2010) Drawings and Prints by Slavic and Slavic- Born Artists in the Collection of the Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Slavic & East European Information Resources, 11:2-3, 215-225, DOI: 10.1080/15228886.2010.490935 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15228886.2010.490935 Published online: 08 Sep 2010. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 548 View related articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=wsee20 https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wsee20 https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/15228886.2010.490935 https://doi.org/10.1080/15228886.2010.490935 https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=wsee20&show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=wsee20&show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/15228886.2010.490935 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/15228886.2010.490935 Drawings and Prints by Slavic and Slavic-Born Artists in the Collection of the Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden PHYLLIS ROSENZWEIG Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, District of Columbia, USA This essay surveys and examines the prints and drawings by Slavic and Slavic-born artists in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, most of which were donated to the museum by Joseph H. Hirshhorn and were formerly in his private collection. Many of the artists whose works on paper Hirshhorn acquired were refugees from Jewish communities in Tsarist Russia or immigrated after the Russian Revolution. This essay considers the fact that Hirshhorn himself was an �emigr�e from a Slavic country, having come from Russian-controlled Latvia as a child. KEYWORDS Joseph H. Hirshhorn, Latvia, Great Depression, Russian Revolution, modern art, contemporary art, American Contemporary Artists (ACA) Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Slavic When the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden opened to the public in Washington, D.C. in 1974, it was designated as the nation’s museum of modern and contemporary art. At its opening its collection consisted entirely of works of art that had been acquired by Joseph H. Hirshhorn and gifted to the Smithsonian Institution in 1966 and 1972. The collection was then known for This article is not subject to U.S. copyright law. The author would like to thank Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn Museum’s Chief Curator, Susan Lake, Collections Manager, and Roni Polisar, Paper Conservator, for the opportunity to work on this project, and Lee Stalsworth and Amy Densford for their assistance in providing photographic images. Address correspondence to Phyllis Rosenzweig, Curator Emerita, Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, 2009 Belmont Rd. NW, Apt. 203 Washington, DC 20009, USA. E-mail: prosenzweig1@earthlink.net Slavic & East European Information Resources, 11:215–225, 2010 ISSN: 1522-8886 print/1522-9041 online DOI: 10.1080/15228886.2010.490935 215 its in-depth holdings of sculpture by world-renowned artists such as Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, and paintings by American modernists and artists such as Morris Louis and other representatives of the Washington Color School. Early exhibitions of the collection attempted to present it as reflecting, if in a somewhat skewed and quirky manner, a mainstream history of recent Western art. Since then, through its acquisition and exhibition programs, the museum has both broadened and focused its mission and enhanced its status as a world-class institution devoted to the collection and display of significant contemporary art on an international scale. Because the thousands of works of art that came to the museum with Joseph Hirshhorn’s original gifts—and the additional thousands that were added by bequest after his death in 1981—were received on such a massive scale, many objects in the collection, and especially works on paper, have yet to be fully catalogued. Many have not been on public display in the museum’s galleries, photographed for the museum’s Web site, or published or exhibited elsewhere. At the core of this unpublished and un-exhibited and thus “hidden” collection are a large number of prints and drawings by Slavic and Slavic-born artists that, for the most part, had been acquired by Joseph Hirshhorn in his lifetime. Collections of works on paper by the artists Isac Friedlander (1908–1968), Raphael Soyer (1899–1987), and Abraham Walkowitz (1880–1965) number in the hundreds. Many other Baltic, Slavic, and Slavic-born artists are represented in the collection by works of art on paper as well, if not always in such great numbers. The objects themselves, and letters and documents related to them that are in the museum’s curatorial files, constitute a rich source of information about the artists and, since many of them came to the United States either with their families from Tsarist Russia, or after the Revolution, and established their careers in the United States during the Great Depression, provide an intimate view of significant periods in Slavic and American history. The approximately 300 prints and drawings in the collection by Isac Friedlander, mostly scenes of Russian farm and village life, Depression-era New York City, and religious subjects, hint at a particularly interesting and personal story. Friedlander is not generally well-known today, and very little primary documentation on him exists in the museum’s curatorial files. However, according to secondary sources in the files, he was well-regarded in his lifetime as a print- maker, received many printmaking awards, and is represented in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Library of Congress, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Brooklyn Museum, and the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. Additionally, the artist’s widow and daughter donated a large collection of Friedlander’s papers and prints to the Special Collections of the Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C., and his widow later donated 120 works to the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, State University of New York. Friedlander was born in Latvia in 1908. Friedlander was also Joseph Hirshhorn’s cousin, and Hirshhorn assisted or urged his emigration to New 216 P. Rosenzweig York some time in the early 1930s. In correspondence between the artist, the artist’s widow, and Joseph and Olga Hirshhorn in the museum’s curatorial files, he is affectionately and familiarly referred to as “Itzik.”1 According to one of the letters from Friedlander’s widow in the museum’s files, Hirshhorn visited his cousin in Latvia in 1928, and brought back many of Friedlander’s prints from that trip.2 About half a dozen paintings and works on paper by Friedlander are listed in a 1945 Hirshhorn insurance inventory, but no formal invoices for any works by him have so far been found. Since works by Friedlander in the collection date through the 1960s, it is possible to surmise that Hirshhorn continued to acquire his cousin’s work, either by purchase or gift, throughout his life. Most of the work by Friedlander in the museum’s collection, however, was not part of Hirshhorn’s original gift to the Smithsonian, but was acquired later, by bequest, after Hirshhorn’s death. Further research is needed in order to document Friedlander’s life, his relationship with Hirshhorn, and to learn more about how or if they may have influenced each other’s thinking about art. Friedlander’s arrival in New York coincided with Hirshhorn’s desire to become a collector of work by contem- porary living artists, and that the cousins socialized and continued to look at art together is evident. In a letter from Hirshhorn to Herman Baron, director of the ACA Gallery, September 11, 1943, which also includes his thoughtful observa- tions on the work of several artists, Hirshhorn wrote: I saw my cousin last night. He had dinner with me. We both discussed how beautiful the gallery looks and how friendly and warm it is. I have the feeling just as you that the gallery cannot help but be successful, because of you and Ella [Baron’s wife] and what you both stand for. 3 Although it is difficult to determine to what degree the personal relationship between Hirshhorn and his cousin may have affected Hirshhorn’s acquisition of so much of his work, Friedlander’s prints and drawings fall within the scope and are typical of the kind of work that Hirshhorn began investing in as a collector in the late 1920s and 1930s, and that he continued to collect into the 1940s and 1950s. Many of the works Hirshhorn acquired early in his collecting career were through the ACA Gallery, which he began to frequent soon after Baron—who was also Slavic in origin, born in Lithuania in 1892—opened it in downtown Manhattan in 1932. Hirshhorn also began to meet many artists there. In his gallery Baron promoted what he referred to as “Social Art,” 4 and showed the work of many politically active, leftist-oriented artists who espoused themes of social justice in their work. The gallery’s initials, ACA, stood for American Contemporary Artists. Not all, but many, of these contemporary “American” artists to whom Hirshhorn was attracted were of Slavic origin. Among the Slavic- born artists Hirshhorn got to know through the ACA Gallery were David Burliuk (1882–1967), Moses (1899–1974) and Raphael Soyer, Abraham Walkowitz, and Drawings and Prints by Slavic & Slavic-Born Artists 217 Max Weber (1881–1961), and, through these artists, others in their circle such as Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), a refugee from what was then Turkish Armenia. Gorky was born Vosdanik Manuk Adoian, in Khorkom, Armenia, came to the United States and lived with relatives in Massachusetts in 1920, and went to New York in 1925. There, perhaps laying claim to what he perceived to be the more prestigious cultural heritage of the artists he knew, he changed his name and pretended to be related to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky (whose name is also a pseudonym). Hirshhorn was an early collector of Gorky’s paintings, but four drawings by him in the collection were not purchased until the 1960s, and date from the 1940s when Gorky had already broken with this group of immigrant artists and had begun to establish a reputation for his lyrical, some- what Surrealist-inspired, abstract paintings. The fact that Hirshhorn himself was an immigrant from a Slavic country— Latvia was under Tsarist rule at the time—adds a human dimension and focus to the story ofhis collectingactivity. Although a truly scholarly biographyofhim has yet to bepublished, thebroad outlines ofHirshhorn’s lifemaybe found in several publications, including one full-length book, several journal articles, and an interview in the Archives of American Art.5 Born in Jukst, a town southwest of Riga, Latvia, in 1900, he was brought to the United States as a child in 1907, was raised in relative poverty in Brooklyn, along with his nine siblings, by his widowed mother. He began working on Wall Street as a teen-ager, did well in the stock market even through the Great Depression and went on to make a fortune in mining interests in Canada. As he acquired greater wealth he also acquired, asmany do, thedesiretoaccumulate those complexsymbols ofhuman expression and higher values as well as of status and taste; that is, works of art. Hirshhorn often related to interviewers that, as a child, he saved the illustrations from wall calendars in his family’s Brooklyn apartment. By the late 1920s Hirshhorn had begun to purchase rare books and manuscripts, and conventional, academic, sometimes sentimental pictures, most of which he later sold. In the 1930s, about the time he brought his cousin Isac to the United States, in the midst of the Depression, and while he was also cultivating an interest in French artists such as Matisse, Picasso, and Rouault, Hirshhorn began buying the work of his contemporaries, living artists, working in New York City. Records of many of Hirshhorn’s early purchases are lacking but, in a 1959 recollection of his gallery, Baron recalled Hirshhorn’s early patronage. He wrote: “The ACA opened in August 16, 1932 ... the year the art market shrank to insignificant proportions. The proverbial artist starving in a garret became a horrifying reality. . .I remember a rainy day when Joseph H. Hirshhorn came into the gallery. He said [falsely], ‘I am an ice and coal peddler, but I like that painting. How much is it?’ He has now become a legendary figure in the art world [known for] [h]is visits to galleries and his rapid-fire decisions on what to acquire. . .[h]is catholic tastes, his munificence when he hears of artists in distress and his generosity. . .” 6 218 P. Rosenzweig Raphael and Moses Soyer are among the artists that Hirshhorn was likely to have met, and supported, through the ACA Gallery in its early days. Like Hirshhorn and his cousin, the Soyers were born in Tsarist Russia, in Borisoglebsk, in 1899. They emigrated with their parents and younger brother Isaac, who also became an artist, first to Philadelphia in 1912, and then to New York, in 1913. One work on paper by Moses Soyer, a lithographic self-portrait, along with two small oils, is in the Hirshhorn Museum collection while his perhaps better known twin brother, Raphael is represented by almost three hundred prints and drawings. Many of these are portraits and figure studies but, like Friedlander, his subjects were also often the poor, the downtrodden, and the everyday. Although he did not start collecting Raphael Soyer’s work seriously until the 1950s, Hirshhorn stated, in a 1973 letter, that he had “known Raphael Soyer since 1938 or 1940” and owned a great many of his paintings. 7 The earliest invoices for a work by Raphael Soyer in the museum’s files are from the Associated American Artists gallery, from 1951, and the ACA Gallery from 1953. But only a few of Soyer’s works on paper in the museum’s collection, as well as a number of major paintings, are from Hirshhorn’s original gift. In 1981 Soyer made a large donation of graphic work to the museum in honor of Hirshhorn who, he said: “bought my paintings early on and has put into the collection of the museum some of my major works. . .” 8 Although they do not constitute a complete set of the artist’s prints, the collection of so much of his graphic work in one place affords an intimate look at Soyer’s working practices and, along with his paintings, reflections of a community.9 Abraham Walkowitz, another artist associated with the ACA Gallery and who is also represented in the Hirshhorn Museum collection by hundreds of works on paper, was born in Tiumen’, Russia. He came to the United States as a child in the 1880s. He later studied art at the Académie Julian in Paris and returned to New York bringing with him a modernist style, producing Cubist- inspired cityscapes, abstractions, and hundreds of drawings and watercolors of the dancer Isadora Duncan (see Figure 1). According to a 1943 letter from Hirshhorn to Milton Avery (1885-1965), another (American-born) artist in the ACA circle, Walkowitz had seen a work by Avery that Hirshhorn had recently purchased, in Moses Soyer’s studio, where Hirshhorn had brought it to be framed. 10 From the letter we get a glimpse of the interconnectedness of this art world community, a hint that Walkowitz was a bit jealous of Avery, and the information that Moses Soyer was framing works of art for Hirshhorn at the time. The first record of a purchase by Hirshhorn of a work by Walkowitz in the museum’s files is of an Isadora Duncan watercolor, purchased from the ACA Gallery in 1952. Hirshhorn continued to collect Walkowitz’s work consistently through the 1970s, and attempted to convince the Whitney Museum of American Art to organize a retrospective after Walkowitz died. Drawings and Prints by Slavic & Slavic-Born Artists 219 Another artist in the ACA Gallery and Soyer brothers circle, and who was well-known and important in his day, was David Burliuk. Burliuk was regarded as the most established and “worldly” artist of the group, and his studio was often the site of dinners and gatherings of these fellow Russian immigrants and their friends. Burliuk was born in a small town in Ukraine. Unlike the Soyers and Walkowitz who came to the United States as children, Burliuk studied art in Russia, Munich, and Paris, and exhibited with the Blaue Reiter group in Munich and with Kazimir Malevich and other avant-garde Russian artists in Moscow before coming to the United States in 1923. By then he also practiced a faux Russian folk art style in which he depicted peasant and farm scenes. Hirshhorn’s 1945 collection inventory indicates that he owned over thirty watercolors and oil paintings by Burliuk at that time, along with two pencil portraits from the 1940s, one of Burliuk’s wife, Marussia, and the other of Arshile Gorky. These and other acquisitions support Barry Hyams’ account of weekend trips made by Hirshhorn in the 1940s, when he was dividing his time between New York and Toronto, where his mining business was. “[A]fter lunch at the Sherry-Netherlands” he would go, with other collec- tors, “to galleries, studios, and homes of artists such as Milton Avery, David Burliuk, Philip Evergood, Chaim Gross and the Soyers.” 11 FIGURE 1 Abraham Walkowitz, Isadora Duncan, n.d. Pencil, watercolor, and pen & ink on paper, 17 13/16 � 12 ¼ in. (45.3 � 35.1 cm). Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966. Photograph by Lee Stalsworth. 220 P. Rosenzweig Chaim Gross (1904-1991) who was born in Wołów, Poland, and came to the United States in 1921, is representedin the museum’s collection by many sketches and watercolors, as well as sculpture. Nicolai Cikovsky (1894-1984), another painter in the ACA circle and a friend of Burliuk’s, was born in Russia, had studied art there, and came to the United States in 1923. He is represented in the museum collection by several paintings and four works on paper. Max Weber, who was also associated with ACA gallery, was born in Białystok, Poland, and came to the United States in 1891. He is represented in the collection by many Cubist-inspired paintings, sculptures, and drawings (see Figure 2). Hirshhorn’s collection grew and his collecting interests broadened in the 1950s and 1960s, but he continued to be drawn to artists of Baltic and Slavic descent. His acquisitions included works on paper by Ben Shahn (1898-1969), a painter well-known for his portrayals of social injustice. Shahn, who was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, and came to the United States in 1906, is represented in the museum’s collection by a number of images in gouache on paper. There is also the interesting but little-known painter Eugenie Baizerman (1899-1949), who was born Eugenie Silverman in Warsaw, Poland and came to New York in 1913. Although Hirshhorn did not begin to purchase her work until the 1960s (the first record of a purchase by him is from the Oscar Krasner Gallery, in FIGURE 2 Max Weber, Kneeling Female Nude, n.d. Pencil on paper mounted to paper, 8 � 5 in. (20.3 � 12.7 cm). Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966. Photograph by Lee Stalsworth. Drawings and Prints by Slavic & Slavic-Born Artists 221 1961), she is represented in the museum by many works on paper, as well as by oil paintings, in an expressive figurative style. Works on paper by many other Slavic and Slavic-born artists collected by Hirshhorn contribute to the museum’s holdings. Some of the artists are more well-known than others. They represent many different historical periods and diverse movements and styles. The Russian avant-garde artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) is represented in the collection by a portfolio of woodcuts (see Figure 3), and two additional prints. Kandinsky was born in Moscow, lived in Germany, returned to Moscow in 1914, then left again for Germany, where he taught at the Bauhaus until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933, when he then went to France. The prints are fine examples of his work from the Bauhaus years. The artist, designer, photographer, and graphic artist El Lissitzky (1890–1941), an important figure in the development of an art of geometric abstraction was, like Kandinsky, born in Moscow, lived in Germany, and returned to Russia in 1914. Unlike Kandinsky, he remained in Russia. Two lithographs by him in the collection are of figures from a 1921 recreation of the Russian avant-garde opera, Victory Over the Sun. Naum Gabo (1890–1977) who, along with his older brother, Antoine Pevsner (1886–1962), was an abstract Constructivist sculptor whose work emphasized the exploration of space rather than mass. Born in Briansk, Russia, he studied in Munich, where FIGURE 3 Wassily Kandinsky, Small Worlds #6, 1922. Woodcut on paper, 14 � 10 in. (37.5 x 27.4 cm). Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1974. Photograph by Lee Stalsworth. 222 P. Rosenzweig he met Kandinsky. He returned to Russia in 1917, then also returned to Germany and taught at the Bauhaus until the Nazis came to power. In 1936 he relocated to England and then came to the United States in 1946. Both brothers are represented in the museum’s collection by sculpture, but only Gabo is also represented by a work on paper: one monoprint woodcut. Eugene Berman (1899–1972) and Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957), two Russian-born artists working in a figurative, romantic, Surrealist vein, are amply represented in the collection by works on paper. Berman was born in Saint Petersburg, left Russia duringthe Revolution, lived in Paris where he became part of a group of Neo-Romantic, semi-Surrealist painters that also included his countryman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and came to the United States in the late 1930s. Berman is represented in the museum’s collection by drawings from the 1940s and 1960s, some of which Hirshhorn purchased directly from him. Tchelitchew, who was born near Moscow in the village of Kalugo, also fled the Revolution and lived in Berlin and Paris before coming to New York in 1934. He is represented by several paintings and ten works on paper, some of which are related to his famous painting Hide and Seek, 1940-42 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Hirshhorn purchased work directly from Tchelitchew as well. Some of the works on paper by Slavic and Slavic-born artists in the museum’s collection that Hirshhorn acquired in the 1960s are directly related to his interest in modern sculpture. For example, Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967), who was born in Smolensk, Russia, but later lived in France, is represented in the collection by sculpture and several cubist-inspired works on paper from the 1920s. Theodore Roszak (1907–1981), was born in Poznań, Poland, came to the United States when he was young, lived in Chicago, and then came to New York in the 1930s. His early work was influence by Constructivism, but later became more expressionistic. He is represented in the collection by several sculptures from the 1940s, and several drawings related to them (one of which was purchased by the museum in 1977). Louise Nevelson (1900–1988) was born Louise Berliawsky, in Kiev, and was brought to the United States in 1905. She grew up in Maine but came to New York in 1932, where she studied sculpture with, among others, Theodore Roszak. She became well-known in the 1950s for her sculptural constructions of black wooden boxes. She is represented in the collection by many sculptures, as well as by several series of collages and prints from the early 1970s. Ilya Bolotowsky (1907–1981)wasborninPetrograd,RussiaandcametotheUnitedStatesin1923.A major practitioner of geometric abstraction in two and three dimensions, he is represented in the collection by drawings, paintings, and sculpture from the 1960s and 1970s. Some less well-known Baltic- and Slavic-born artists from whom Hirshhorn acquired works on paper that are now in the museum’s collection include: Arbit Blatas (1908-1999), a sculptor and painter who was born in Kaunas, and came to the United States in 1940, is represented by one drawing; Joseph Solman (1909–2008), who was born in Vitsebsk, Russia (now in Belarus) and came to the United States in 1912, is represented by several Drawings and Prints by Slavic & Slavic-Born Artists 223 works in tempera on paper; Raymond Breinen (1910-2000), also born in Vitsebsk, and fled with his family to the United States in 1922, is represented by a gouache from the 1930s in a Surrealist style; and Yosef Foshk. o (1891/ 2–1971), who was born in Odesa, Ukraine and was in the United States by the 1930s, is represented by two watercolors: East Side Market, and Elderly Gentleman, both ca. 1945, in a social realist manner. The abstract artist Adja Yunkers (1900–1983), who was born in Riga, is represented in the collection by two pastels from the 1950s, and there are fourteen works on paper from the 1960s by Victor Vasarely (1908–1997), born in Pécs, Hungary, who is well-known for his boldly colored, intricate, geometrically patterned work. The extent and range of works on paper by Baltic, Slavic and Slavic-born artists “hidden” within the Hirshhorn Museum’s collection is, thus, surprisingly large, and the collection offers many opportunities for research. Biographical information on some of the artists is incomplete or contradictory. No doubt more Slavic-born artists represented by works on paper can be found than are mentioned here. Many other artists of Slavic origin are represented in the museum’s collection, but not by works on paper, and so have been omitted from this essay. Altogether, the collection provides a rich resource for the study of Slavic artists working at different periods and under varied social conditions. Further information about artists and their works in the museum’s collection may be found by going to the museum’s Web site, http://hirshhorn.si.edu/ info/, and clicking on Search Art Collection. NOTES 1. Secondary sources in the museum’s curatorial files on Friedlander include: Kathe Beals, “Friedlander Art on View at SUNY,” Westchester Weekend, December 27, 1927, 3; and JoAnn Lewis, [review of an exhibition of Friedlander’s prints at the Bethesda Art Center], Washington Post, March 7, 1981 (the title and the page number of the review are missing). See also: Barry Hyams, Hirshhorn: Medici From Brooklyn (New York: Dutton, 1979). Primary sources referred to here, and throughout this essay, are from the museum’s files unless otherwise indicated. Much information in these sources is undocumented and some- times contradictory. For instance, JoAnn Lewis gives Friedlander’s arrival date as 1930, while Hyams (p. 104) gives it as 1932. Hyams (p. 30) records that Hirshhorn lived with his mother’s brother, Peretz Friedlander and his wife Zette in 1906 before joining his mother in New York, but it is not clear if these are Isac’s parents. 2. According to Hyams (p. 47), Hirshhorn made a trip to Latvia with his mother and his then wife in 1927. It is not clear if Hirshhorn made two trips or if there is some confusion about the dates of one of them. 3. Joseph H. Hirshhorn to Herman Baron, September 11, 1943, ACA Galleries records, 1917–1963, Archives of American Art, Roll D304, Frame 486. The gallery opened on West 8th Street, but had moved to 63 East 57th Street by the time this letter was written. 4. Herman Baron, [unpublished manuscript], ACA Galleries records, Frame 591. 5. Barry Hyams, Hirshhorn: Medici From Brooklyn: A Biography (New York: Dutton, 1979); Jay Jacobs, “Collector: Joseph H. Hirshhorn,” Art in America 57 (July-August 1969): 56–71; reprinted as “Quality as Well as Quantity: Joseph Hirshhorn,” in Jean Lipman, ed. The Collector in America (New York: Viking, 1971), 74–88; Abram Lerner, “Introduction,” Selected Paintings and Sculpture from the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden (New York: Abrams, 1974), 11–24; Aline B. Saarinen, “Joseph Hirshhorn,” in The Proud Possessors: The Lives, Times and Tastes of some Adventurous American Art Collectors (New York: Random House, 1958), 269–286; and Joseph H. Hirshhorn, Interview by Paul Cummings, New York, December 16, 1976, Archives of American Art, transcript in Hirshhorn Museum files. 224 P. Rosenzweig 6. Herman Baron, “The ACA Gallery: Impressions and Recollections,” 31 American Contemporary Artists: [Exhibition Catalog] (New York: ACA Gallery, 1959); copy in ACA Galleries records, Archives of American Art, Frames 984, 986–7. 7. Raphael Soyer curatorial files, Hirshhorn Museum. 8. Raphael Soyer files, Hirshhorn Museum. 9. Soyer’s prints include many portraits of his family, friends and other artists, including Arshile Gorky. There are also oil portraits of fellow immigrant artists David Burliuk and Abraham Walkowitz. 10. Abraham Walkowitz curatorial files, Hirshhorn Museum. 11. Hyams, Medici From Brooklyn, 113. Drawings and Prints by Slavic & Slavic-Born Artists 225 work_eo2ddmjuenfxbdcswow67jomg4 ---- Pietro Cavallini and The Ruins of Rome 3 4 Y P I E T R O C A V A L L I N I A N D T H E R U I N S O F R O M E R U S S E L L F R A S E R Pietro Cavallini ranks among the great painters. Born in Rome in the 1240s, he became a man to reckon with in his native city. Late in life he moved to Naples, joining the entourage of the Angevin king. But Rome drew him back, perhaps the urge to finish in the place he began. In his last years, said Giorgio Vasari in The Lives of the Painters, piety grew on him and he was ‘‘almost considered a saint.’’ He wasn’t an ascetic, though, but among the grand old men of art – Titian is one, Henri Matisse another – with all that implies for vivacity and toughness. For more than half a century he labored at his craft, dying at a great age in the 1330s or 1340s. These are the bare bones of the life. Unluckily for Cavallini, he wasn’t one of the famous Floren- tines, and future generations let him sleep in his grave. Vasari, at a loss to explain how an artist of such quality could have preceded Giotto, simply reversed the relation. He enlisted Cavallini among his hero’s ‘‘other pupils,’’ turning him into a derivative painter. But his star has been rising, and an article in the Times tells of long- buried work coming to light again or of work once assigned to others now re-assigned to him. Some art historians put him north of Rome in his middle period, maybe at Assisi, where he gave a 3 5R lead to Giotto. Perhaps the pupil was the master, who created part or all of the great St. Francis cycle on the walls of the basilica. I don’t mean to inflate his claim on us, however, but to say what I know to be true. Mostly, that depends on three contemporary records. In 1273, he witnessed a legal agreement to transfer land near the church of Sta. Maria Maggiore. When I lived in Rome in the 1970s, I walked by the site every day. Signing himself ‘‘Petrus dictus Cavallinus de Cerronibus,’’ he lets us know that he was a member of the ancient Roman family of the Cerroni, also that his nickname was Cavallini. Italian ‘‘cavallino’’ is horse-like, and readers will make of this what they choose. Three decades or so later, he received the grant of a house in Naples with an annual pension ‘‘for as long as the king wishes.’’ After his death his son Giovanni scribbled a note commemorating the painter, ‘‘whose life spanned a hundred years, who never covered his head even in the cold, and who was my father.’’ Every credentialed artist has two strings to his bow, even in times when art serves a greater end than itself or when, self- delighting, it is its own su≈cient end. Cavallini is no exception, and his art both pleases and instructs us. But it doesn’t gratify our modern avidity for sensational detail, and though more is known about him than any artist of his time, he keeps to the shadows. In this he resembles Shakespeare, a mystery man whose biography is replete with matter-of-fact. The fact breeds, if you look at it hard enough, suggesting a type of the artist as opportunist, like Shake- speare the ‘‘botcher’’ of plays. Not solicited by the Muse but dis- charging a commission, he did what he could to give value. Time and bad luck have much diminished his oeuvre. His ghost haunts about Roman churches like S. Francesco a Ripa, close to the river where the flea market is today. Once frescoes of his brightened the interior, like those he made for the Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls. A picture gallery’s worth of scenes from the Old and New Testaments, they took two decades of his life. In 1823 fire gutted the basilica, destroying what he made, and how such rage can be in heaven is a mystery. Seventeenth-century watercolor copies, now in the Vatican, tell us what the frescoes were like. But in painting as in poetry, paraphrase falls short, and Cavallini’s most prestigious work is lost. Frescoes in St. Peter’s, ‘‘of extraordinary size,’’ said Vasari, 3 6 F R A S E R Y disappeared when Pope Julius knocked down the old church to build his city on a hill. Michelangelo and Bernini did their best for the pope, but I’d like to have seen old St. Peter’s. Vasari remem- bered Cavallini’s frescoes for the Trastevere church of S. Crisogono, a ‘‘titular’’ church – that is, one where primitive Christians assem- bled. The fantastic floor – great swirling circles and hourglass shapes, surrounded by cubes, rectangles, and octagons – is a gift to posterity of the Cosmati, members of a single clan domiciled in Rome from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. Their business and pleasure was beautifying the city, and they left their gorgeous telltale in dozens of churches like this one. The same motive that inspired them drove Cavallini, loyalty to craftsmanship, raised to the ultimate power. But though much of him is gone, much remains. (Laying it out here, I draw on Paul Hetherington’s monograph of 1979, the chief scholarly authority.) Trastevere across the Tiber, the oldest part of Rome and incorrigibly provincial, seemed to touch a spring deep inside him. He was provincial in the best sense, delighting in lowercase things. The apse mosaic in Sta. Maria in Trastevere is his, and enough to establish his greatness. Lorenzo Ghiberti, he of the famous Doors of Paradise in Florence’s Baptistery, had ‘‘never seen this medium used better.’’ Working in it needed a strong arm and an estimating eye. Having blocked out his cartoon on the wall of the church, he applied a thin coat of cement, enough to fix his bits of colored stone, glass, or marble. Like other artists in his time, he let the dead bury their dead, chiseling these materials from the ruins of Rome. He took care, in fitting his tesserae into the wet cement, to make the planes of the surface uneven. That way, the light bent, shooting o√ at odd angles. The bulging eyes of the piping shep- herd in his Nativity scene are owing partly to the play of light on the surface. Cavallini’s mosaics, depicting the life of Mary and the birth and childhood of Jesus, look unstained by time, as fresh as when he finished them in the last decade of the thirteenth century. His Mary and Joseph satisfy convention, she a young woman dressed in a colorful robe and mantle, he an old man with gray hair and a receding hairline. But the ‘‘ancient aspect’’ touches a new mind, a C A V A L L I N I A N D R U I N S O F R O M E 3 7 R U N I V E R S A L J U D G M E N T — A n g e l s ( l e f t d e t a i l ) , P i e t r o C a v a l l i n i B a s i l i c a d i S . C e c i l i a i n T r a s t e v e r e , R o m e 3 8 F R A S E R Y phrase of Wallace Stevens’s that catches the relation of convention to the individual talent. Mary in the Annunciation scene plays the role convention assigns her, and it supplies the lilies on the table to her left. Atop a second table, however, Cavallini sets a bowl of figs, something new. He needed them to ratify his sense of composi- tion, but the figs are important for their own sake as well, like the stewed prunes in a fruit dish of threepence we hear about in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. ‘‘No matter for the dish, sir,’’ says the impatient magistrate, wanting to get on to the heart of the matter. What that is is hard to say in so many words, but we can’t come to it without referring to the dish and its contents and even the room where the action goes forward, ‘‘an open room and good for winter.’’ For Cavallini’s mosaic, the life is in the details. That is new, altering our sense of the familiar grouping he inherits. Most of the details are given, like the rude cave and the ox and ass watching over the infant. But the artist re-invests this ancient aspect, adding to it his special apprehension of things. On the day Christ was born a fountain of oil, bubbling up where the church is now, ran all day long to the Tiber. Cavallini accommodates this story in his mosaic, linking the fabulous birth to the piazza in Trastevere, no place more prosaic, and a brownish stream flows away from the manger. The emotional pull in the stu√ of his art will be to flesh or spirit, depending on who renders the story. In him, the pull isn’t to heaven but to earth. Other mosaics of the time are more strained of impurities, Torriti’s, for instance, in the apse of Sta. Maria Maggiore. Cavallini is coarser grained and his figures fill a place. They aren’t stolid, however, like convention when it atrophies, but refined in shape and feature. Gravity, tinged with melancholy, marks his St. Joseph, trepidation the aged Simeon, presenting the youthful Christ in the Temple. (In his mind’s eye he sees the tragedy to come.) Caval- lini’s figures seem sculpted, bringing to mind Arnolfo da Cambio – he has a marvelous Nativity under the floor in Sta. Maria Mag- giore – or the Pisani, father and son, who did the pulpit in Pisa Cathedral. Or they are like late Byzantine mosaics in Istanbul’s Kariye Camii, work of an unknown master. All lived when Caval- lini did. But it isn’t influence that connects them, allegiance to the last flowering of Byzantium or the new Italian art of the C A V A L L I N I A N D R U I N S O F R O M E 3 9 R U N I V E R S A L J U D G M E N T — A p o s t l e s ( d e t a i l ) , P i e t r o C a v a l l i n i B a s i l i c a d i S . C e c i l i a i n T r a s t e v e r e , R o m e 4 0 F R A S E R Y fourteenth century. The common denominator is a√ection for the physical world. Like a good cobbler whose skill brings in custom, Cavallini kept busy. While at work on his mosaics, he painted the nave in the nearby basilica of Sta. Cecilia, also a Last Judgment for the con- vent next door. ‘‘All with his own hand,’’ said Ghiberti – that is, without an assistant. Eighteenth-century remodeling did for the nave painting, but the Last Judgment survives, together with frag- ments from the Old and New Testaments. For a long time the convent frescoes were lost, bundled away behind the nuns’ choir stalls, but in 1900 they came to light again, and the world recog- nized a great painter. The twelve apostles, seated on thrones, divide in two groups, facing a magnificent Christ in the center. Around him are angels and two standing figures, Mary on one side, John the Baptist on the other. Below Christ an altar holds the symbols of his Passion, and flanking it, pairs of angels blowing trumpets. To their left the elect, among them St. Cecilia, patron saint of the church, are ushered to their reward, to their right the damned descend into Hell. Flames are licking up from the bottom of the fresco, and the damned, going into them, are naked. Some are old heads, one tonsured. Italian ‘‘fresco’’ is fresh, and Cavallini’s is that but something besides. Known as ‘‘buon fresco,’’ it didn’t flake o√, like paint on dry plaster. Rough-plastering the wall, he traced his cartoon on the surface while it was damp. Mixing his pigments with water heavy on lime provoked a chemical reaction, and his colors, inte- grated with the wall, stayed fast. He worked with thick, dragging brushstrokes, sometimes charging his brush with too much paint, but he painted from top to bottom, blotting out accidents as he went down. When he put up his brushes at day’s end, he cut away any unpainted surface, applying a new coat of plaster in the morn- ing. That way, his working surface stayed damp. If you look closely, you can see joins in the plaster, separating one day’s work from the next. Add them up and you can tell how long the job took him. The Last Judgment took approximately sixty-three days. A long time for a wall, it was ‘‘vale la pena,’’ as Italians say, worth the pains. The herringbone-like wings of the angels blush with color, red, brighter red, teal green, and lavender. Eyes in the C A V A L L I N I A N D R U I N S O F R O M E 4 1 R painting seem to search out a beholder’s eyes. Christ’s are inquisi- tive, Mary’s near-Oriental, the angel’s leading the elect full of wonder at what she sees – for angels in the fresco are female. Cavallini knew about hair. St. James the Great’s is beautiful, like the hair of a Botticelli Venus, and a wavy rope of it cascades down his neck. The thick hair and long beard of St. Simeon, mingling white and gray, might model God the Father’s. Like all the apos- tles, he is one of a kind. Wrinkles gather the skin at the corner of an eye, and the creases in his forehead and pursed lips hint at the misgiving of a man for whom judging is hard. Loath to condemn, he condemns without reprieve, though. Did Cavallini study Roman togas on some old sarcophagus? The drape and fold of his garments make you think so. Light and shadow chase each other across his chiseled faces, apparently flesh and bone. Vasari called him a sculptor as well as a painter, and perhaps he knew something we don’t. A record dating from his middle age tells of a ‘‘petrus romanus civis’’ – Peter, citizen of Rome – at work on the tombs in Westminster Abbey. Ever hope- ful, I prick up my ears at this. Shakespeare, some say, went to Italy, and why not Cavallini to England? His Last Judgment stands with Giotto at the pinnacle of medi- eval art. If you don’t know the painting, you are likely to sco√. But the nuns, who used to bar the door to visitors, have recently got on to the good thing in their midst, and for a few euros you can see it and decide for yourself. Re-crossing the Tiber early in the new century, Cavallini put his signature on the Aracoeli church in the heart of classical Rome. Saint Mary of the Altar of Heaven marks the spot where the pagan Sibyl showed the Christ Child to Augustus. Astride the Capitoline Hill, it overlooks Rome’s greater peaks, St. Peter’s in the far back- ground, nearer at hand the baroque splendors of Sant’ Andrea della Valle and the Gesù. Ignatius Loyola, whose new Jesuit order promoted a ‘‘casuistical’’ reading of truth, is buried in this church. On its trompe l’oeil ceiling, painted angels merge easily with sculpted angels above the windows, blurring the line between real and fictive. The damned occupy the ceiling, too, spilling over from our middle earth into Hell. ‘‘From morn to noon they fell, from noon to dewy eve,’’ a vertiginous progress. This impositional art 4 2 F R A S E R Y delights us partly as it beguiles us, the last thing Cavallini in- tended. His art advances nature and, though improving it, never aims to displace it. Frescoes in the Aracoeli’s transepts are his, and Vasari called his Sibyl in the apse, prophesying to the Emperor, his ‘‘best work in the city.’’ All that is left is a haloed face with rueful eyes. But the fresco in the south transept has survived time’s tooth, despite or perhaps because of successors who did their best to wipe it from memory. Romans are thrifty, overpainting the surfaces their pre- decessors worked on, and only now is this fresco emerging from its baroque encrustation. Saints on the wall, their faces seamed by hard thinking, are like the apostles in Sta. Cecilia, not ideal but idiosyncratic. You can tell one from another. Looking at the plain brick facade of the church, all color leached away by the fierce Roman sun, you feel that you have got down to bedrock. Inside is a di√erent story. Pinturicchio’s frescoes throb with color, and above the nave the co√ered ceiling, inlaid with gold, remembers Lepanto, where the Christian West beat back Islam. The marbles of the dancing floor say that the Cosmati, ‘‘golden smithies’’ who worked in mosaic, have been here. Maybe or maybe not their sumptuous decoration is a carpet thrown over the void. If so, and all is emptiness, the Christian Middle Ages, more than any other time, made life supportable. Some medieval Christians, like puritanical St. Bernard, de- plored the work of our hands, calling it vanity. Only decades before Cavallini, Joachim of Flora, a mystic and estranged from the world, wanted to usher in a reign of pure spirit. He saw it begin- ning in Cavallini’s young manhood. The artist, silent in his person, spoke through his art. Like that St. Odo of Cluny who said on his deathbed, ‘‘Lord, I have loved the beauty of thy house,’’ he found much in our middle earth to sustain him. The dizzying flight of stairs leading down from the church to the piazza dates from the first half of the fourteenth century, about the time Cavallini himself died. A thank o√ering to Heaven for Rome’s deliverance from the Black Death, the stairs, by my count, number 124. First man up was Cola di Rienzo, a latter-day Caesar who meant to restore the city’s ancient grandeur. That no doubt was vanity, and the Roman mob, ever fickle, tore him to pieces. Four hundred years later, Edward Gibbon passed this way. Art is C A V A L L I N I A N D R U I N S O F R O M E 4 3 R longer than life, so he must have thought, as he looked up at the church and saw, as in a vision, the Decline and Fall, still to come. The tomb fresco in the north transept shows Cavallini tending to business. Adorned with Cosmatesque work, a gothic canopy surmounts the tomb, on it the e≈gy of a forgotten prince of the Church. (But Dante remembers him in the Paradiso.) He needed a memorial, and since he could a√ord it, Cavallini answered the need. Above him is the fresco – a Virgin and Child with attendant saints – and in a roundel in the center Christ the Pantocrator. Al- ways in Cavallini it’s the eyes that compel attention, and Christ’s, slightly elevated, almost skeptical, look past the cardinal on his ‘‘lit de parade.’’ Cavallini’s art has its cantle of mystery, and what they are looking at is outside our ken. Of Rome’s seven hills, the Aventine is fourth in line, moving away from the Capitoline. Near its foot on the Tiber, the ancient church of S. Giorgio in Velabro sets o√ vibrations, powerful even for Rome. In the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman was its titular cardinal, the church, a special preserve, belonging to him when he came to the city. If you care about our English language, the association will seem worth a footnote. The fourteenth cen- tury was young when Cavallini embellished S. Giorgio. Plainness, mounting to austerity, describes his new venue, a flat ceiling, round arches lining the nave, carried on simple Ionic columns. This muted enthusiasm for the world of the senses bespeaks pri- orities, and entering the church you feel that salvation comes first. But some columns, Corinthian, flower in exuberant shapes, and though the interior is dim, colored like an eggshell, bits of bright tesserae spruce up the altar. Framing it, the ciborium tells of self- conscious art. In the empty church, Newman seems palpably there, positing an eternal enmity between salvation and the things of the world. On the other hand, ‘‘philosophy is its own end,’’ he tells us (in The Idea of a University), maintaining that ‘‘there is a knowledge worth possessing for what it is, and not merely for what it does.’’ The psychology of S. Giorgio in Velabro, and that of the artist who painted it, is like that, honoring the form that is func- tional and the form that pleases but gets nothing done. Cavallini’s minatory Christ in the apse has come to bring not peace but a sword, and his ‘‘red right hand’’ seems raised to chas- tise us. St. George, clad in armor, flanks him on one side, on the 4 4 F R A S E R Y other St. Peter, keeper of the keys. Gray-haired and bearded, he wears an abstracted look, the narrowing eyes turned inward, the forehead wrinkled with thought. There is air about the portrait, and what the saint’s mind is beating on is personal to him. Ver- sions of the preoccupied man come up often in Cavallini. Perhaps he is giving his own likeness, a man plagued with questions. St. Sebastian is part of the ensemble, not the naked boy stuck over with arrows but a stern-faced soldier equipped with lance and shield. Was he of the Church Militant, doing battle for the Lord when he fell? After his martyrdom, his mutilated body went into the sewer. Called the Cloaca Maxima, it entered the Tiber just across from the church. Nothing is ever forgotten in Rome, and Cavallini, remembering, means to bear witness. In the center of the piazza, the Arch of Janus holds its own after two thousand years. Janus, the god of gates and beginnings, is two- faced, and the doors of the arch, closed in peacetime, swung open for war. Every door looks two ways, like Cavallini’s art, didactic but also concessive. One eye is on eternity, the other inspecting the ground at his feet. The faux-gothic building on the edge of the piazza was once home to Clara Petacci. Mistress of Benito Mus- solini, she died with him, hung upside down from a meathook. Between the building and church, the arch ‘‘of the moneychang- ers’’ frames a patch of rising ground where a lemon tree flowers in springtime. In bas relief on the arch, the boy making a sacrifice is the young Caligula, his name not yet a byword for horrors. Cavallini was nearing seventy, perhaps already in his eighth de- cade, when he set o√ for Naples. He might have stayed where he was, dwindling into a slippered pantaloon, but absorption in his craft kept him moving. ‘‘Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new.’’ Little in Italian art before him prepares us for his apocalyp- tic Virgin Clothed with the Sun, painted for the Neapolitan church of Sta. Maria Donna Regina. His Virgin stands upright, hands raised, palms outward in the ‘‘orans’’ position. At her breast is the head of Christ, a bizarre pendant, enclosed in a mandorla. Evi- dently she is pregnant, remembering Isaiah, ‘‘Behold a virgin shall conceive.’’ But the dragon menacing the woman, and the arch- angel who casts him out, remembers Revelation. Though this painter is primarily a realist, his late work shows him out on the C A V A L L I N I A N D R U I N S O F R O M E 4 5 R periphery of representational art. He wanted to get everything down before nightfall. Art historians credit Cavallini with other paintings in Naples, but when attribution isn’t sure, it all depends on whose divining rod is keener. Frescoes in the Angevin church of S. Domenico Maggiore, site of the city’s first university, seem to bear his im- primatur. The church’s custodian is learned in its treasures and proud to be part of a greater whole than himself. Did I know that Thomas Aquinas wrote part of his Summa while a monk of St. Dominic’s? The Crucifixion, ‘‘certainly Cavallini’s,’’ awaits me in the Brancaccio Chapel (second on the right). A vulpine St. Do- minic stands beside the Cross, and I vote yes to his fine-combed hair and lowering eyes, set in a heavy, sensual face. Cavallini’s Virgin in the Donna Regina church shares the west wall with a Last Judgment, scenes from the Passion, and a trio of female saints. All are close in style to the frescoes of Sta. Cecilia, made a generation before. Too close, Hetherington thinks, as if time had stood still for the artist. That seemed unlikely, and he supposed a tried-and-true assistant, practiced enough to do the master in his sleep. I know the painting only from photos, so mustn’t express an opinion. That doesn’t preclude my letting o√ steam. See Naples and die, says the old proverb, true in more senses than one. The Donna Regina church, o√ the beaten track like the Chapel Perilous, hugs itself to itself up a dank, narrow alley. De- consecrated and no longer a church, it has become a city museum. Italians have a sense of humor, and calling it ‘‘civico’’ makes a good joke. No hours are posted and the phone book lists no number. If you go along anyway, you find a courtyard choked with rubbish and a rusty chain with padlock closing o√ the portone. Beyond it are the frescoes, like the Holy Grail. Barring a miracle, Cavallini’s public won’t see them. Not far away in the Duomo, the blood of S. Gennaro, patron saint of Naples and New York’s Little Italy, liquefies every year. This is a miracle but doesn’t rub o√. A photo in Hetherington lets me know what I’m missing. St. Thomas in the fresco is a doubter like me and wants to thrust his finger in the wounds. His strong aquiline nose above the sensuous lips, most of all the cold, almost somnolent eyes, more than doubting, incredulous, put me out of 4 6 F R A S E R Y temper with Naples. The sleep and dream of the Dark Ages still hold this city captive, my bad luck and reason for Cavallini to leave it. Near the end of his life, he went back to Rome, finishing where he began, in the Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls. Pope John XXII wanted a mosaic for the church’s facade, and accepting the commission, Cavallini assembled a heavenly conclave. His Christ and angels, Virgin and Child, the four Evangelists, and other saints, Paul conspicuous among them, look west to the setting sun. Or rather they used to. After the great fire of 1823, the mosaic, still undamaged, was taken down from its wall, divided in two, and set up inside the church, on the triumphal arch and the apsidal arch over the altar. Sadly out of kilter, it makes one sigh for Cavallini, not for the first time. His curved surface on the exterior wall, ‘‘flattened to a planisphere,’’ relates to the re-fabricated mosaic like the globe of the world to a one-dimensional map. Returning to St. Paul’s gratified nostalgia but came with a price. In winter, miasmas poisoned the air around the basilica; in summer, malaria laid low the farmers who worked the land. Cen- turies were to pass before the monks of the Tre Fontane monastery not far to the south planted eucalyptus trees to ward o√ the mos- quitoes. Perhaps Cavallini, having lived a long time, thought him- self immortal or believed he owed God a death. Standing all day in the damp, he pieced his mosaic together. Two hundred years later Vasari remembered the hatless old man, dying of the cold he took, ‘‘caused by working at a wall.’’ The huge church where they buried him look like a cenotaph on the grand scale. How splendid it once was, though, and is still, even in its diminished state. In the eighth century its portico extended to the Porta S. Paolo, a full mile away. There the apostle began the long walk that led to his death. If you follow in his footsteps, your way takes you past gas works and stunted hovels, home to the urban poor. St. Paul, his head struck o√, is buried under the altar, encased by the Emperor Constantine in a sar- cophagus of marble and bronze. Above his grave the canopy is the work of Arnolfo da Cambio ‘‘and his partner Pietro,’’ most likely Pietro Cavallini. Outside the church is Rome’s most beautiful cloister, not an C A V A L L I N I A N D R U I N S O F R O M E 4 7 R adjunct but a living part of the whole. Insisting on symmetry, it accommodates wildness. Squares of clipped boxwood shape up the garden, cordoning o√ clumps of feathery papyrus. Writhing pillars seek to deny the rigor of the arches that bind them. The constraint and the abandon, both needful, give the sense of the place. On the wall enclosing the cloister, a fragment of antiquity – the head of a horse with an arm and hand tugging at the bit in its mouth – seems an emblem of the blasted church and the truncated work of the master. He came into his force in the 1280s and 1290s, a time of artistic burgeoning in Rome, rivaled only by the great days of Pope St. Paschal I (817–24). Not gilding the lily but making it afresh in the likeness of the thirteenth century, painters and mosaic workers beautified the city’s four major basilicas, St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s, the Lateran, and Sta. Maria Maggiore. Cavallini’s part in this is mostly gone with the wind, but Ghiberti, who saw it, said that among his contemporaries he was ‘‘the most noble master.’’ The best of the contemporaries is Jacopo Torriti, whose name should roll o√ the tongue at least as easily as Jackson Pollack’s, though no one today recalls it. How he di√ers from Cavallini is worth spell- ing out. Pope Nicholas IV, when he renovated Sta. Maria Maggiore, chose this Franciscan monk to do the apse mosaic. Its subject is the glorifying of women, something new beneath the sun and re- served to the High Middle Ages. On the conch of the apse, Christ and the Virgin sit enthroned together, making a majestic ensem- ble. She is our mother and humble, befitting the role women played. But she is also Heaven’s Queen, crowned with a diadem, bedecked with jewels, and robed as a Byzantine princess. This mosaic of Torriti’s lifts the heart. But like illuminations in old missals, it is static, its figures frozen in God’s holy fire. Cavallini’s art is natural, not naturalistic but more nearly human. That doesn’t make it better. Though talent may be greater or less, there isn’t any progress in art, only di√erence. But sometimes an artist is lucky, and his sails catch the new wind. Torriti didn’t have that kind of luck. He looks to the past and the hieratic art of Papa Pasquale Primo, as a√ectionate Romans still call him. Caval- lini looks forward, his psychology aligning him with the introspec- tive art of the future. 4 8 F R A S E R Y In the church of Sta. Cecilia, chance juxtaposes old and new, letting us inspect and contrast them. The apse mosaic is old, made at the behest of Papa Pasquale. Tradition mandates its furnish- ings, the two cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem and the twelve lambs that come from their portals, the ground Jesus stands on, dark blue, green, and red, like nothing in nature, artificial palm trees, the martyred saint and the reigning pope. You know him by his square halo, denoting the living. Except for the iconography, tipping us o√, he and the others might be anyone or no one. Cavallini, next door in the convent, is new. His apostles are one of a kind, their features expressing doubt, solicitude, or approval. But in the ninth-century mosaic the individual disappears, sunk in the type. No asymmetries call attention to the body, no flickering eye or ‘‘foolish hanging of the nether lip.’’ Characters stand side by side, full faced, their eyes immobile and looking beyond the sight line to the world over yonder. These stereotypical figures resemble childish cutouts when you pink a piece of paper across the fold. In the older art of Rome, pre-Cavallini, history hasn’t been invented yet. The time is now, and all action occurs on one contin- uous plane. Point of view is egalitarian. To put it another way, this art is paratactic, devoid of ‘‘subordinate clauses.’’ No one is front and center, no one takes a back seat, and perspective gets its quietus. It wasn’t that they couldn’t do it, they didn’t want to. But the lowered prestige of the particular is overset by the greater prestige of the general. In St. Paul’s Basilica, roundels of the popes, beginning with the first one, Peter the rock on whom the Church is founded, make an unbroken sequence, girdling the walls. They run on to the crack of doom, it seems to this fascinated beholder. Thrilling to contemplate, such continuity in a world of change. Meanwhile Cavallini, looking higher or lower, commits to the mutable world. His focus is on the particular man and his special subject is our ‘‘human face divine.’’ Back in the beginning, his best mosaic, the one he did for Sta. Maria in Trastevere, signals his break with the past. On either side of the sanctuary arch, he hangs a wicker birdcage. Next to it, an Old Testament prophet holds a scroll in his hand. Isaiah’s reads: ‘‘Behold a virgin shall conceive,’’ the very text Cavallini renders again many years later in the Donna Regina fresco in Naples. Jeremiah’s scroll tells us that ‘‘Christ the Lord is captive in our C A V A L L I N I A N D R U I N S O F R O M E 4 9 R sins.’’ Born of the womb and dowered with human nature, He – and we – are like the bird in its cage. However, this inheritance is lucky. For the body saves us as it defines us. Otherwise, we should leak away into air. Soft-pedaled in platonizing times when the spirit wars on the flesh, this truth is at the heart of Cavallini’s new dispensation. The impulse in earlier mosaics is to skimp on the surface of the natural world, with its myriad of particular ex- emplifications. Pope St. Paschal’s artisans, supposing that the spe- cial case is half-baked, give it only a cursory glance. Though Cavallini understood how our mortality leave us open to decay, he didn’t seek to transcend it. He immersed himself in the world of the flesh, and that is why he lives to the future. work_er3b6bwywrcevmzlvnro5mz2ni ---- John Vanderpant and the Cultural Life of Vancouver, 19 20-1939 S H E R Y L S A L L O U M T h e Canadian photographer John Vanderpant (1884-1939) achieved world-wide recognition for his black and white images and was "a major influence on Canadian photography in the 1920s and 1930s."1 He was also a major influence on the cultural development of the Vancouver area in those years. Vanderpant is an example of the patron who, according to Maria Tippett, helped to make Canadian culture "richly-textured, diver- sified, and spontaneous" in the period between the two world wars.2 His endeavours to encourage the arts were extraordinary; his contributions to the cultural milieu of the West Coast are as unique and intriguing as his photography. Vanderpant emigrated from Holland in 1911, but he did not become a permanent Canadian resident until 1913. At that time he settled in the beautifully rugged region of southern Alberta. Attracted by its resource- rich economy and scenic expanses, Vanderpant felt that the area offered viable employment possibilities and creative freedom. These were espe- cially important to the young man as he was beginning a career as a portrait photographer, and he wanted to escape restricting European traditions.3 T o Vanderpant's dismay, he found that the area was artistically isolated; he yearned for a more vibrant cultural environment. It is not surprising, therefore, that he began importing American and European publications and musical recordings in order to keep himself attuned to new and avant- garde movements. Over the years he would disseminate that information, and the ways in which he would do so were distinctive. In 1919 Vanderpant moved from Fort Macleod to New Westminster, B.C. There he operated a successful portrait studio, and he began partici- 1 J o a n M . Schwartz, in The Canadian Encyclopedia: Volume I V , 2nd éd., s.v. " V a n d e r p a n t , J o h n . " 2 Maria Tippett, The Making of English-Canadian Culture, / 9 0 0 - 7 9 5 9 : The External Influences (Downsview, O n t . : York University, 1988), 2. 3 Information given to the author from V a n d e r p a n t ' s daughter, A n n a Ackroyd. All subsequent references to Anna Ackroyd will a p p e a r in the body of t h e text. 38 BC S T U D I E S , no. 97, Spring 1993 John Vanderpant and the Cultural Life of Vancouver 39 paring in the cultural life of the community. From 1922 to 1923 he was the vice-chairman of the art committee of British Columbia's Annual Provincial Exhibition ( 1869-1929), held under the auspices of the Royal Agricultural and Industrial Society; he was chairman from 1924 to 1928.4 Under his direction the Fine Arts section, which had "for years . . . lan- guished and deteriorated into an annex to the display of women's work," grew to a large and diverse visual arts gallery.5 In 1920 Vanderpant inaugurated the New Westminster Photographic Salon; in 1923 it became an international salon. Fairgoers had the oppor- tunity to view the work of local and international photographers. By 1925 "the number of prints . . . [displayed was] well over five hundred."6 Vanderpant supervised the jurying, hanging, judging, and returning of all the works. According to the 9 September 1924 issue of the British Columbian, the "international exhibit, . . . [is] one of striking proportions in addition to displaying many works of wonderful merit, from almost every part of the world. . . . T h e success of the photographic art display is attributable to the ability and the untiring zeal of Mr. J. Vanderpant." 7 From 1919 to 1928, the National Gallery loaned paintings to the Provin- cial Exhibition, and works from the members of the Group of Seven were always included. Over the years Vanderpant became acquainted with the Group's work, and the artists themselves. Acceptance of the "new school" was slow in B.C., and Vanderpant became one of the painters' ardent supporters. He advocated their paintings in his lectures, many of which were accompanied by slides of the artists' work, along with examples of other "modern" paintings.8 4 I n John Vanderpant: Photographs ( O t t a w a : National Gallery of C a n a d a , 1976), p . 16, Charles C. Hill notes t h a t V a n d e r p a n t resigned from the a r t committee in 1927; however, h e did not quit the position until 1928. I n an article on page 2 of the 5 Sept. 1928 issue of the British Columbian, V a n d e r p a n t "announced t h a t he had decided to retire a n d t h a t . . . [1928 was] the last exhibition a t which he would . . . be chairman of t h e F i n e Arts Committee." 5 " A r t Exhibit Is Worthy of N o t e , " British Columbian, 29 Sept. 1920. 6 "Pictorial Photography," British Columbian, 10 Sept. 1925. 7 " A r t Salon a n d Photographic Art Will Be F e a t u r e , " British Columbian, 9 Sept. 1924. 8 Manuscripts in the V a n d e r p a n t Papers (National Archives of C a n a d a , M G 30, D 3 73 ) indicate that, besides those in his private collection, V a n d e r p a n t used lantern slides loaned from t h e National Gallery to complement his lectures: Emily Carr's Gitwangak, A. J. Casson's Clearing, L. L. Fitzgerald Doc Snider3s House, Clarence Gagnon's Village, Lawren Harris's Lake Superior and Maligne Lake, Edwin Hol- gate's Nude in Landscape, Paul Kane's White Mud Portage, Cornelius Krieghoff's White Landscape, A r t h u r Lismer's September Gale, J. E . ' H . MacDonald's Tangled Garden and The Solemn Land, Paul Peel's Venetian Bather, G. D . Pepper's Totem Poles, T o m Thomson's Northern River and The Jack Pine, and F . H . Varley's John and Georgian Bay. V a n d e r p a n t ' s lantern slides (National Archives of C a n a d a ) in- clude 170 of his images and 45 works by painters and photographers. Included are 40 BG S T U D I E S Vanderpant held nationalist, mystical, and artistic tenets similar to those of the Group of Seven.® These, and a close friendship with one of the Group's members, F. H. (Frederick) Varley ( i 8 8 1 - 1 9 6 9 ) , made him especially interested in their work. In a 1933 lecture, "Art in General; Canadian Painting in Particular," Vanderpant stated that he thought paintings by the Group of Seven were inspired by their intuitive desire "to express living, moody rhythms, movement in spaces, [and] the inevitable relationship between these forms." His own inspiration was derived from a similar desire to express "the consciousness of life . . . in aesthetic form, pattern, rhythm, and relationship."10 Vanderpant often championed the Group in local newspapers, calling it "a yearly privilege to draw the pen" on their behalf and "a glorious duty." In an article for Vancouver's Daily Province, Vanderpant wrote that the aim of the School of Seven is not representation, but interpretation. These men hold that a mere copy of the beauty in Nature always falls short of Nature itself, and that this attempt, therefore should not be made. . . . [They] . . . felt that the immensity of Canada could not be truly painted with a European brush, . . . so they . . . went for the soul of our land . . . using freedom to emphasize either in form or color, what was personally most striking to interpret. . . . What is urged is the unbiased, open mind required to come to an under- standing of its [the Group of Seven's] aims, and so as to judge for oneself its achievements. . . . . . . When Europe has recognized this Canadian movement, can the West afford to stay indifferent?11 works by Emily Carr, F . H . Varley, H a n s Arp, Raoul Dufy, F e r n a n d Léger, Vladimir Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, H e n r i Matisse, Lâszlo Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Amédée Ozenfant, Salomon Ruisdael, K u r t Schwitters, and V i n c e n t V a n Gogh. 9 A thorough discussion of the history and philosophy of the G r o u p of Seven is given by Ann Davis in her unpublished Ph.D. thesis, An Apprehended Vision: The Phil- osophy of the Group of Seven (York University, 1973). V a n d e r p a n t ' s writings show t h a t he believed t h a t Canadian artists had to break away from European traditions and influences in order to create a "heroic vision" of their country. His writings also demonstrate that h e shared spiritual beliefs similar to those of the Group's members, a n d that those beliefs were an impetus, as they were to the Group of Seven, to explore increasingly abstract images. As Charles C. Hill has pointed out in John Vanderpant: Photographs, V a n d e r p a n t ' s most successful work includes close-up studies of grain elevators a n d commonplace subjects such as vegetables. 1 0 J o h n V a n d e r p a n t , untitled, u n d a t e d manuscript. Unless otherwise indicated, all further references to V a n d e r p a n t ' s unpublished writings are from a collection t h a t was made available to the a u t h o r by V a n d e r p a n t ' s heirs. T h a t collection, including copies of V a n d e r p a n t ' s published writings, is now held at the National Archives of C a n a d a : M G 30, D 3 7 3 . 1 1 J o h n V a n d e r p a n t , " A r t and Criticism," (letter to the e d i t o r ) , Vancouver Daily Province, 17 Aug. 1928; "Appreciates the Art Exhibition," Vancouver Daily Province, (letter to the e d i t o r ) , 18 Aug. 1927. V a n d e r p a n t ' s comment on European recogni- John Vanderpant and the Cultural Life of Vancouver 41 Vanderpant's interests in promoting the arts also led him to join the British Columbia Art League ( i 920-1931). This group was responsible for the establishment of the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts ( V.S.D.A.A. ) , and the Vancouver Art Gallery. As an executive mem- ber, Vanderpant had a prominent role in the activities of the League. H e also joined the B.C. Pictorialists, the Vancouver-New Westminster Photo- graphers' Association, and the Photographers' Association of the Pacific Northwest; he held executive positions with these groups. In 1926 Vanderpant and Harold Mortimer-Lamb ( 1872-1970: a retired mining engineer, art critic, and Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society) opened the Vanderpant Galleries at 1216 Robson Street, Vancouver. T h e partnership ended in 1927, and Vanderpant purchased Mortimer-Lamb's share of the business. Until Vanderpant's death in 1939, he and his gallery were to play a vital role in the city's cultural development. Vanderpant believed that "the artless community is more intensely poverty stricken, than is the one penniless." When he wasn't tripping his camera shutters he was engaged in numerous activities which made new trends in art and music available to Vancouverites. He became a catalyst to the local art scene, promoting artists and art; and he exhibited the works of local, national, and international artists in his gallery.12 This was important for three reasons: first, the general artistic tastes of the com- munity were conservative; second, Vancouver did not have a civic art gallery until 1931 ; third, the work of European artists, especially those from Britain, were favoured over the work of Canadian and, in particular, B.C. artists. Situated in a two-storey wooden building (the structure has been the site of La Côte d'Azur restaurant since 1969), Vanderpant's atelier was spacious and comfortable. T h e room contained a large fireplace and was furnished with ornate china, elegant antique chairs, oriental rugs, vases of flowers, candelabras, camera studies, and the works of local painters such as Frederick Varley, J. W. G. (Jock) Macdonald, Charles H. Scott, and Emily Carr. Over the years different groups such as the B.C. Art League, the Arts and Letters Club, the New Frontier Club, and the Van- tion was a reference to the favourable reception given the G r o u p of Seven by the British press when the G r o u p exhibited at Wembley in 1924 a n d 1925. In the exhibition catalogue First Class: Four Graduates from the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, 192g, (Vancouver: Women in Focus Gallery, 1 9 8 7 ) , p . 14, Letia Richardson first described V a n d e r p a n t as a catalyst. She wrote t h a t he, Frederick Varley, and M o r t i m e r - L a m b "were a catalytic force which fueled the exuberance of the visual arts [in Vancouver] in the early 1930's." 42 BC S T U D I E S couver Poetry Society used the gallery as a meeting place.13 Many notable Canadians, including Dorothy Livesay, Arthur Lismer, A. Y. Jackson, Charles G. D. Roberts, and Bliss Carman attended the gallery; others such as Philip Surrey, Jock Macdonald, and Frederick Varley were fre- quent visitors. For eight years, 1928 to 1936, Vancouver's intellectual and artistic com- munities were drawn to musical evenings at the Vanderpant Galleries. Over the years others, including the painter Lawren Harris, were also to host musical evenings; however, Vanderpant's musicales appear to have been the first, to have been the longest running, to have attracted the largest audiences, and to have had the greatest impact on the community. His "music room," which could accommodate over 100, was usually filled. His "evenings" were particularly vital as, until 1930 when the Vancouver Symphony began a regular concert schedule, orchestral presentations in the city were infrequent. Moreover, the musical tastes of Vancouverites parallelled their conservative artistic tastes. John Becker has pointed out that "the most memorable aspect" of a concert given by Ravel "was the mass exodus of the audience during the first couple of pieces."14 O n designated evenings guests would listen to selections from Vander- pant's extensive record collection, which included classical works by Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, as well as "modern" works by Sibelius, Berlioz, Paganini, Ravel, Stravinsky, and the avant-garde German Gebrauch- musik.15 Anna Ackroyd, Vanderpant's eldest daughter, remembers that her inventive father created a dual speaker system for his Columbia gramo- phone. " I t had a heavy wood frame with a twelve to fifteen inch opening . . . in which was mounted a speaker identical to the gramophone speaker. He set the gramophone in one corner of the room, and set the other speaker 1 3 N o records of the Arts and Letters Club appear to have survived. Information from a number of former members indicates t h a t the group met once a month a t the V a n d e r p a n t Galleries. T h e r e they would listen to guest speakers, selections from V a n d e r p a n t ' s recordings or piano recitals were enjoyed, a n d many topics were dis- cussed. T h e dates on which the Club started and ended are not k n o w n ; b u t former members think t h a t the first meetings were held some time in the 1920s and t h a t the last occurred some time during the Depression years. I t is also not clear whether the club was initiated by V a n d e r p a n t , or H a r o l d Mortimer-Lamb, or w h e t h e r they were both responsible; however, none of those interviewed can remember Mortimer-Lamb ever being in attendance. A letter from Dorothy Livesay to V a n d e r p a n t , dated 9 May 1937, ( V a n d e r p a n t Papers, National Archives of C a n a d a ) indicates t h a t at least one of t h e "literary gatherings" of the New Frontier Club were held at the V a n d e r p a n t Galleries, 1 4 John Becker, Discord: The Story of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (Van- couver: Brighouse Press, 1989), 6. 1 5 This information comes from A n n a Ackroyd, and from Peter Varley's published recollection, " J o h n V a n d e r p a n t : A Memory," in John Vanderpant: Photographs ( O t t a w a : National Gallery of C a n a d a , 1976), 10. John Vanderpant and the Cultural Life of Vancouver 43 in a n opposite c o r n e r . B o t h speakers w e r e a b o u t t h r e e feet off t h e floor. T h e t o n e w a s f a n t a s t i c . " A n n a also recalls t h a t s t u d e n t s f r o m t h e V . S . D . A . A . , t h e short-lived British C o l u m b i a College of A r t s ( 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 3 5 ) , a n d t h e U n i v e r s i t y of British C o l u m b i a w e r e i n v i t e d o n different n i g h t s of a l t e r n a t e m o n t h s t o " d r o p in for refreshments, sit o n t h e [ c a r p e t e d ] floor . . . a n d listen. A n d if t h e y w a n t e d t o talk, t h e y t a l k e d ; otherwise, t h e r e w o u l d b e ev en in g s w h e n n o b o d y said a n y t h i n g a n d after t h e c o n c e r t t h e y just t i p t o e d o u t . . . . T h e y just loved i t . " I v a n D e n t o n , a r e p o r t e r for a V a n c o u v e r n e w s p a p e r called t h e West End Breeze, a t t e n d e d o n e of t h e e v e n i n g c o n c e r t s in 1 9 3 3 , a n d his p u b - lished d e s c r i p t i o n conveys a sense of w o n d e r , e n j o y m e n t , a n d s t i m u l a t i o n . I c a m e r a t h e r late on a dismal, rainy night. M r . V a n d e r p a n t ' s musical eve- nings begin a t t h e unfashionable h o u r of 8 o'clock. H o w shall I describe t h e r o o m ? — it was dim, spacious — great bulks of shadow were balanced by lighted spaces. Like a canvas perfectly composed — no one p a r t of the com- position of t h a t picture could have been taken away without m a r r i n g the completeness of its sombre beauty. M a n y people, sitting in the shadow, m a d e u p p a r t of the picture. Surely in a r o o m like this something interesting must take place — so I waited for it to h a p p e n . At the far end — a long way off it seemed — a wood fire b u r n e d briskly on a n open h e a r t h , a n d on the high mantel shelf, the light quivered from three wax tapers, held aloft in an old Sheffield c a n d l e a b r a [sic]. I t seemed a t this m o m e n t a crying shame t h a t electric lights h a d even been conceived. T h e room was filled with t h e sound of a great symphony. . . . I a m trying to think how I would describe this music — it was like moving masses of color — chords as vibrant as t h e crash of a waterfall — melodies as delicate a n d elfin as the pipes of Pan. I likened the music also to t h e shadows a n d lighted spaces of the room — or the t h u n d e r o u s r h y t h m of old Latin verses q u o t e d by a master steeped in classic lore. Outside, in the m u r k a n d the wet, the great world-wide depression prowled like a lean old wolf. If you h a d been there with m e you would u n d e r s t a n d w h a t I m e a n a n d w h a t I felt. I c a n n o t quite p u t it into words. For instance, I saw t h e h a n d s of a girl n e a r m e — shapely h a n d s they were — sometimes relaxed a n d sometimes tense — I saw the diminutive spheres of her a m b e r earrings swing to a n d fro, catch the candlelight a n d shatter it into a t h o u s a n d splinters of yellow radiance. F o r quite a p a r t from the music a t M r . V a n d e r p a n t ' s old house on Robson Street, there is b o t h time a n d inclination to delight in such jocund beauty as a swaying earring in the light of a candle. 1 6 1 6 Ivan Denton, "Surely in a Room Like This, Something Interesting Must Take Place," West End Breeze vol. 1 (13 April 1933) ; copy in the Vanderpant Papers, National Archives of Canada. PLATE 1 Interior view of the Vanderpant Galleries, circa 1928. The back room was used for taking patrons' portraits, for the musicales, and for any gatherings hosted by Vanderpant. The large painting on the left wall is Frederick Varley's, The Immigrants. (Photograph courtesy of the Vanderpant family.) 4^ 4» W a H c o i—( w John Vanderpant and the Cultural Life of Vancouver 45 T h e musical evenings were a special event for the city's art students. Margaret Williams, who was a student at the V.S.D.A.A. and later taught at the British Columbia College of Arts, recalls that going to Vanderpant's "was so wonderful because he introduced us to all sorts of things that were modern then [and] that we didn't know about . . . and [he] contributed very much to our education and pleasure."17 For the B.C. painter, Irene Hoffar Reid, the musicales were a wonderful experience. . . . I remember the feeling of music pouring over me. In particular, I recall hearing a very modern composition. It was more strident and unharmonious than Stravinsky. . . . It was like seeing an abstract painting for the first time. . . . I was shocked and amazed. I think that was Vanderpant's aim: to expose us to new "ways."18 Anna recalls that in 1936, in another attempt to present Vancouverites with challenging musical experiences, her father "arranged with one of the local radio stations [CKFC] to do a half-hour, weekly, modern music radio show. He provided his own narrative on the history of the composer, and . . . the music." Every Wednesday, from 4 : 0 0 to 4 : 3 0 , Vanderpant played what he described as "the recorded music of modern composers seldom or never heard in British Columbia." He was aware of the initial effect his selections would have and tried to prepare the listeners for con- temporary pieces by composers such as Roy Harris, Constant Lambert, Francis Poulenc, and Sergei Prokofiev. He counselled the audience "to listen rather than to hear. Only in active listening rather than passive hearing lays the progress of musical appreciation." He also suggested that if the music sounded "strange" or "weird," it was "better to be . . . dis- turbed at first than by immediately agreeing with certain melodic develop- ments . . . [and that] listening with irritation is far more enriching than 'hearing'." Apparently, Vancouverites a n d / o r the management did not like "irritation," for the program was cancelled after three months. Vanderpant also seems to have worked behind the scenes to encourage the presentation of modern musical compositions. In 1934 the Hart House String Quartet gave two concerts in Vancouver. Peter Varley, son of the painter Frederick Varley, recalls: The first concert kept to safe ground. The second, however, was to cause "R.J.", the critic, to write: "True, some of the listeners did find much food 1 7 From an interview conducted by Ann Pollack, 1969, and held at the National Gallery of Canada. 1 8 Irene Hoffar Reid, interview with author, 7 December 1989. 46 BC STUDIES for thought, but the majority must have wondered at times what it was all about " The program consisted of two works : Respighi's Doric Quartet and Ernest Bloch's Quartet in B Minor. It is likely that John Vanderpant had a hand in selecting the program.19 Another of Vanderpant's initiatives appears to have indirectly led to the establishment of Malkin Bowl in Stanley Park. H e thought that outdoor symphony concerts would be enjoyed by enthusiasts and, at the same time, would familiarize others with classical music. According to Anna, her father also felt that outdoor summer concerts "would help increase atten- dance at the winter symphony concerts." (In 1988, the Vancouver Sym- phony Orchestra again began presenting outdoor summer concerts to bolster its season ticket sales.) He thought that "the perfect spot was a gently sloping grass area [below the dining facility known as the Pavilion] in Stanley Park . . . Father invited [the conductor of the Vancouver Sym- phony Orchestra, Mr. Allard] de Ridder to view the area . . . [and he] was most enthused. T h e Symphony Society was approached, and agreed to the concert. My father met with Mr. Willie Dalton, a prominent businessman who, in turn, involved . . . Mr. Malkin." In 1934 William Harold Malkin (1868-1959), a wealthy businessman who was an active participant in Vancouver's cultural affairs, donated a shell-style bandstand to the Parks Board as a memorial to his late wife, Marion. It replaced an earlier structure (erected in 1911) on which the Vancouver City Band had "played only martial or religious music."20 Anna remembers that "Symphony in the Park . . . was always well attended . . . [and] during the Great Depression, people had free food for the soul and spirit, via beauti- ful music, as my father had hoped." Today, Malkin Bowl is used to stage Theatre U n d e r the Stars : outdoor theatrical productions presented during the summer months. Vanderpant's influence was always invigorating. In 1927, under the auspices of the B.C. Pictorialists, of which he was then president, Vander- pant's gallery hosted an International Salon of Pictorial Photography. According to Charles C.Hill (p. 18, John Vanderpant: Photographs) itwas the first international salon to be held in Vancouver. T h e exhibition must have been especially exciting to the city's growing number of amateur photographers. From 23 June to 9 July, 9 : 0 0 a.m. to 9 : 0 0 p.m., Van- 1 9 Peter Varley, Frederick H. Varley, ( T o r o n t o : Key Porter Books, 1983), 26. 2 0 R i c h a r d M . Steele, The Stanley Park Explorer ( N o r t h Vancouver: W h i t e c a p Books, 1987), 129. John Vanderpant and the Cultural Life of Vancouver 47 couverites were free to view 140 prints from Austria, Holland, Spain, Germany, the U.S.A., Italy, England, and Belgium. T h e twelve photo- graphers included in the exhibition were, for the most part, noted partici- pants in the salon circuit. This was especially true of H . Berssenbrugge ( H o l l a n d ) ; Julius Aschauer, F.R.P.S. (Austria); Francis O. Libby, F.R.P.S. (U.S.A.) ; and Alexander Keighley, Hon. F.R.P.S. (England). 2 1 In 1931 the Vanderpant Galleries held two significant and stimulating exhibitions. In April the work of B.C.'s most modern artists — Frederick Varley, Jock Macdonald, Emily Carr, G. H. Scott, M. S. Maynard, W. P. Weston — was displayed, as was that of three promising young painters— Fred Amess, Irene Hoffar ( R e i d ) , and Vera Weatherbie. According to Vancouver's Daily Province, " O n e of the defiite [sic] objects of having the exhibition . . . was to give the purchasing committee . . . [of the new Civic Art Gallery] an opportunity of viewing the type of work that British Columbia artists produce."2 2 (It is interesting to note that according to the Vancouver Art Gallery's acquisition files, it took six more years for the gallery to follow Vanderpant's encouragement to purchase the paintings of B.C.'s then most intriguing artists: in 1937 Emily Carr's Totem Poles— Kitseukla was acquired; in 1938, the gallery bought Jock Macdonald's Indian Burial, Nootka, and Carr's Loggers' Culls.) In September the Vanderpant Galleries exhibited the photography of two Americans, Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) and Edward Weston ( 1886-1958). This was the first Canadian showing for Cunningham and the second for Weston. (In 1914, he exhibited ten prints with the Toronto Camera Club. ) For Vancouverites, it was a stimulating example of t h e new "pure photography." In her view of the exhibition, columnist Rita Myers wrote : No tricks of the camera are relied on to lend glamor to the work, only the pure form of the subject, plus imagination of the artists in arrangement and placing of lights and shadows, is drawn on for results. It is photography at its most modern point, where the absence of detail emphasizes the mood of the picture.23 Vanderpant also included a number of his prints in the exhibition. Un- fortunately, other than those mentioned in Myers's review, there are no 2 1 International Master Salon of Pictorial Photography, held under the auspices of the B.C. Pictorialists (exhibition catalogue; Vancouver: Vanderpant Galleries, 1927). This catalogue is in the Vanderpant Papers, National Archives of Canada. 2 2 "In the Domain of Art," Vancouver Daily Province, 12 Apr. 1931. 2 3 "In the Domain of Art," Vancouver Daily Province, 20 Sept. 1931. 48 BG STUDIES records to indicate which prints were hung. Overall, there must have been quite a sampling: Gunnigham, alone, sent forty-seven prints.24 Vanderpant also had literary interests. Before emigrating to Canada, he had attended the universities of Amsterdam and Leiden, where he studied literature and the history of language. In his youth Vanderpant had written prose and poetry, and a number of his early writings were published in Dutch literary magazines. In the 1920s and 1930s he wrote numerous articles for American and Dutch photographic journals, and prepared lectures on art and photography for Canadian and American audiences. Vanderpant joined the Vancouver Poetry Society (1916-1974) and was an active member until his death. T h e man and his studio became well known to the members of the Society and their guests. Like other members, Vanderpant took his turn hosting the literary evenings. T h e ambience of his gallery made it such an ideal meeting place that from 1931 to 1932 the Society held all its meetings there for a nominal fee. By 1933 the Depression was taking its toll on the Society's finances, and the executive decided that meetings would again have to be held in members' homes. T h e Vanderpant Galleries continued to be used on a rotating basis and for special occasions: for example, a "Soiree" in honour of Charles G. D. Roberts and the Canadian Authors' Association was held in 1936, and approximately one hundred guests attended; from 1932 to 1939, an annual "Gala Night" to mark the close of the Poetry Society's yearly activities was held at the Galleries.25 In addition to poetry readings, the Vancouver Poetry Society asked special lecturers to present papers on art and literature. T h e guest speakers included writer Dorothy Livesay, editor and poet Alan Crawley, and such noted University of British Columbia academics as Dr. G. G. Sedgewick, Dr. A. F. B. Clark, and Dr. Hunter Lewis. From 1930 to 1939 Vander- pant not only read some of his poems and "lively compositions," but also presented a number of lectures, some of which were illustrated with lantern slides depicting a variety of art works. A few of his topics, which were also presented to other audiences or published in journals, included "Concern- ing Matters Artistic," "Art in General; Canadian Art in Particular," and "Endeavors in Expression." The diversity of his lecture topics ranged from Surrealism, modern poetry, education, patriotism, and electric music, to the 1930s architecture of Vancouver which he felt "lacked originality." 2 4 From a list of prints, dated 10 Sept. 1931, that Cunningham sent to Vanderpant. This information was provided by The Imogen Cunningham Trust, California. 2 5 From the minutes of The Vancouver Poetry Society MSS 294, Vancouver City Archives. John Vanderpant and the Cultural Life of Vancouver 49 Minutes of the Poetry Society indicate that Vanderpant's lectures often resulted in both "a somewhat controversial discussion" and an "inspiring evening."26 Vanderpant's poetry was not as successful as his photography. T h e lyrical nature of his photographic titles, however, was an important facet of his work. His poetic imagination also proved useful for his prose. For example, he wrote: "Spoken words about art are like butterflies, they hover about, they hesitate — they touch — but they never enter its essence — which is the silence of understanding expressed in balanced action." Although he often wrote verses that reflect images of nature, perhaps his most poignant poem is one that sardonically highlights the plight of the Canadian artist — a topic that was always paramount to Vanderpant. The Poor Contemporary A buoyant artist (one can hardly laugh or blame him for his pride) called at the hall of fame and knocked . . no answer . . knocked with care again . . then somewhere asked a voice: "Can you explain why this abode should open to your glam'rous claim and in its golden halls, your greatness entertain?" "Well," spake the artist, "Did I paint and work in vain there are a hundred noble works signed with my name!" Then looked he wond'ring at the great blind walls, no door or window opened to his ent'ring, so he knocked again : "Would please for once the voice its silence now explain?" And through the golden dome it did respond once more : "My artist friend, you are not wholly bad, not that, but too alive; to enter here you must be dead!" In 1937, Jock Macdonald referred to Vanderpant as "the only 'living' being" in Vancouver. After Vanderpant's death Macdonald wrote: " T h e city seems different without Vanderpant around."2 7 T h e impact of Vander- pant's artistry and his vibrant character have not, however, been lost. He has left a unique legacy: his photographs, negatives, lantern slides, and writings ; and a significant contribution to the cultural development of this country. In his photography, Vanderpant sought to convey an interpreta- 2 6 Mss 294, Vancouver City Archives. 27 Jock Macdonald, Vancouver, to John Varley, Nootka, 8 December 1936; copy in the Burnaby Art Gallery; Macdonald to John Varley, Ottawa, 9 September 1939; copy in the Burnaby Art Gallery. 50 BC S T U D I E S tion of reality that went beyond the surfaces of his subjects so that they carried an "underlying vibration."28 His impact on the West Coast also went beyond the surfaces and carried an "underlying vibration" that reverberates through our cultural history. 2 8 English was a second language for V a n d e r p a n t ; consequently, spelling and usage mistakes sometimes occur in his writing. T h e author has corrected his phrase "under- laying vibrations" to read "underlying vibrations." work_euohbjfyjnfe7b6p5uslhnl6fe ---- doi:10.1016/j.cub.2006.04.012 Dispatch R361 Dispatches Eye Development: Random Precision in Color Vision In insect and vertebrate eyes, different types of color-detecting photoreceptors are randomly distributed throughout the retina. A recent study has provided important new insights into the developmental mechanisms that generate the retinal mosaic required for color vision. Thomas Hummel and Christian Klämbt It is not quantity which counts [with colors], but choice and organization (Henri Matisse) To collect information about the outside world, eyes have evolved in different animal species as highly specialized sensory structures which, although anatomically quite diverse, show common organizational features. The visual system not only allows the perception of shape and motion, but also can often discriminate colors. Light of different wavelength is detected by a set of Opsin type receptor molecules with distinct spectral properties. They are expressed in specific photoreceptor types following the ‘one-receptor-one-neuron’ rule characteristic for most sensory neurons [1,2]. Interestingly, within the human and the fly retina, the different color detectors are distributed in a random fashion, but so far the developmental mechanisms underlying stochastic pattern formation have been elusive. Using the Drosophila eye as a model, the Desplan lab [3] has now been able to link the stochastic pattern of color- sensitive photoreceptors to the expression of a single transcription factor. The Drosophila compound eye has been an extremely useful model system for understanding the logic of pattern formation [4,5]. Here 750–800 single eye units called ommatidia are assembled into an almost crystalline-like arrangement. This ordered pattern continues in the organization of the eight photoreceptor cells (R cells) inside each ommatidium. On the basis of their different spectral sensitivities, the eight R cells can be grouped into two functional classes. Six monochromatic outer photoreceptor cells (R1–R6), the functional homologues of vertebrate rods, express only one type of rhodopsin (Rh1) and are involved in motion detection [6]. In contrast, two inner photoreceptor cells, R7 and R8, express one out of several rhodopsins with distinct spectral sensitivities (Rh3–Rh6), allowing them to function in color discrimination, much as cone cells do in vertebrate eyes [7]. In the fly retina, two invariable R7/R8 combinations define the corresponding two color-sensitive ommatidia classes (Figure 1A). In ‘pale’ ommatidia, sensitive to shorter wavelengths, an R7 cell expressing Rh3 always matches with an R8 cell expressing Rh5; and in ‘yellow’ ommatidia, specialized in the perception of longer wavelengths, an Rh4-positive R7 cell is housed together with an Rh6-positive R8 cell. The distribution of pale and yellow ommatidial subtypes does not follow the morphologically homogeneous retinal pattern, but seems to be random, resulting in a functional mosaic inside the retina [8]. Although the distribution is stochastic, however, the ratio of photoreceptor cell types is well defined, with 30% pale and 70% yellow ommatidia (Figure 1A). How is a random but biased mosaic pattern generated in an otherwise regularly organized sensory field? The process of R cell differentiation in Drosophila extends over a period of five days and can be divided into an early specification period, in which the different R cell subtypes first acquire their neuronal ground states, followed by their terminal differentiation into functional photoreceptors with class-specific rhodopsin expression [9]. Important insights into the mechanisms underlying photoreceptor maturation came from the analysis of mutations that disrupt the strict pairing of Rh3/ Rh5 and Rh4/Rh6 in the pale and yellow ommatidia, respectively [10]. When all R7 cells are missing, as in the sevenless mutant, the number of R8 cells is unaffected, but they express exclusively Rh6, indicating that the decision between a yellow or pale fate is initiated when the R7 cell in each ommatidium makes a choice of whether to express Rh3 or Rh4 (Figure 1B,C). An Rh3 decision is then communicated to the adjacent R8 cell, leading to the induction of Rh5 expression. Although the signal from R7 to R8 is still obscure, we now have a satisfying understanding of what triggers the initial choice of R7 between the Rh3 or Rh4 status. Genetic studies identified the spineless gene, which encodes a bHLH-PAS transcription factor, as the critical determinant of both the initial yellow R7 fate choice and the stochastic distribution of the two types of color-sensitive ommatidia [3]. In spineless mutants, R cells develop normally through the first phase of cell type specification, leading to a regularly patterned and normal sized compound eye. Visualizing rhodopsin expression, however, revealed the presence of only the pale ommatidia subtype with a wild-type Rh3/Rh5 pairing. Subsequent clonal analysis demonstrated a strictly cell- autonomous function of spineless in the yellow R7 cell for the induction of Rh4 expression. The notion that spineless expression triggers Rh4 expression received further support from gain-of-function experiments: spineless expression in all developing photoreceptor Current Biology Vol 16 No 10 R362 Yellow 70%Pale 30% R6R1 R7 R8 rh4 rh6 rh3 rh5 spineless 20–40% spineless Pupae R6R1 R7 R8 R7 R8 60–80% R7 R8 R7 R8 R7 R8 A B C Adult Current Biology Figure 1. Organization and development of Drosophila color-sensitive photoreceptors. (A) In the adult retina, each ommatidium contains 6 outer (R1–R6) and 2 inner (R7 and R8) photoreceptor cells. Specific combinations of rhodopsin expression define pale (Rh3/Rh5) and yellow (Rh4/Rh6) ommatidia, which are randomly distributed throughout the retina in a 3:7 ratio. (B,C) Different stages of R7/R8 differentiation in late (B) and mid (C) pupal development. Different levels of spineless expression lead to a cell-autono- mous Rh3/Rh4 fate choice in R7, followed by an induced or default R8 differentiation. neurons resulted in an efficient ectopic Rh4 activation. In R8, the endogenous, cell type specific rhodopsin expression was maintained leading to a violation of the ‘one-receptor-one-neuron’ rule; in R7 cells, however, spineless induced a perfect switch from Rh3 to Rh4 terminal differentiation status. Furthermore, expression of spineless even in late differentiating pale R7 cells, using a rhodopsin promoter construct, was able to trigger the switch from Rh3 to Rh4 expression. The induced Rh5 expression in the neighboring R8 cell cannot be reverted, however, resulting in untypical ommatidia with Rh4/Rh5 inner receptor cells pairing. From these results, Wernet et al. [3] concluded that a single transcription factor, Spineless, is both necessary and sufficient to initiate the assembly of the yellow type ommatidium, first specifying Rh4 expression in R7, which then prevents the induction of the R8 cell to express the Rh5 protein (Figure 1C). Spineless also has a direct role in establishing the stochastic distribution of the color-sensitive ommatidia in the retina [3]. Expression of spineless RNA occurs in only a randomly distributed 60–80% of R7 cells, which presumably will later differentiate into yellow type R7 photoreceptors (Figure 1C). Furthermore, the level of expression varies greatly among the Spineless-positive R7 cells, suggesting a direct link between a Spineless threshold and Rhodopsin expression choice. Temporally enhanced spineless expression leads to a clear increase in the number of yellow at the expense of pale ommatidia. In contrast, this ratio decreases following experimental reduction of spineless expression, either by inactivating one gene copy or by adding transgenes carrying the spineless eye enhancer, which compete for endogenous activating factors. These data thus support a two-step model combining cell-autonomous mechanisms and cell–cell communication to establish cell fate and distribution of the two color-sensitive ommatidia types. The cell autonomous function of Spineless implies the existence of R7-specific or combinatorial acting upstream factors acting on a 1.6 kilobase enhancer fragment of the spineless regulatory region. Neither the activating factors nor the final mechanisms that set the Spineless threshold for inducing Rh4 expression are known. It is possible that, once the fate choice is made, further stabilization is needed, as it has been reported for the Rh5/6 decision in the R8 cell [11]. At the same time, Spineless, which is expressed only in a short pulse during eye development, likely activates downstream targets that control the expression of Rh4 sensory receptor, but concomitantly leads to the exclusion of Rh3 receptor co-expression. In vivo, spineless and rhodopsin expression are temporally separated by one day, but even when spineless expression is forced during the time of rhodopsin expression, it can reprogram terminal fate [3]. Additionally, Spineless or its downstream targets antagonize the generation of an inductive signal, yet to be identified, emanating from the R7 cell. Interestingly, like Spineless, other members of the bHLH/PAS transcription factor family often control the initial choice in various cell fate decisions [12]. As bHLH/ PAS transcription factors commonly act as heterodimers, the identification of Spineless interaction partners will be very informative regarding the mechanism through which Spineless leads to a selective activation of distinct differentiation programs. Finally, sensory receptor specificity in the peripheral nervous system has to be matched with precise synaptic connections Dispatch R363 in the central brain to allow color discrimination. In Drosophila, the integration of sensory information coming from randomly distributed receptor neurons into the visual system’s topographic organization has not been analyzed. Although most of the cellular components and their projection patterns in the fly visual system have been described [13], our understanding of how the brain ‘sees’ the colorful world is still in its beginnings. References 1. Mombaerts, P. (2004). Odorant receptor gene choice in olfactory sensory neurons: the one receptor-one neuron hypothesis revisited. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 14, 31–36. 2. Mazzoni, E.O., Desplan, C., and Celik, A. (2004). ‘One receptor’ rules in sensory neurons. Dev. Neurosci. 26, 388–395. 3. Wernet, M.F., Mazzoni, E.O., Celik, A., Duncan, D.M., Duncan, I., and Desplan, C. (2006). Stochastic spineless expression Bacterial Cell Bio Magnetosomes Sensing of magnetic fields by living best understood in magnetotactic ba new insight into the biogenesis of ba these organelles to a newly recognize which organizes magnetosomes into aligning cells with the geomagnetic Craig Stephens Several centuries ago, humans learned to construct navigational compasses that could sense the earth’s magnetic field [1]. By that time, the living world was millions of years ahead of us in geomagnetic sensing technology. While the significance and mechanisms of magnetosensing in animals, such as migratory birds, fish and insects, that execute remarkable global navigational feats have been debated for years, the biological compass mechanism we know the most about at the cellular level is found in magnetotactic bacteria. These aquatic microbes are thought to use their internal magnets for the relatively mundane task of pointing themselves downward, toward their preferred homes in oxygen- depleted sediments [2]. We will creates the retinal mosaic for colour vision. Nature 440, 174–180. 4. Voas, M.G., and Rebay, I. (2004). Signal integration during development: insights from the Drosophila eye. Dev. Dyn. 229, 162–175. 5. Reifegerste, R., and Moses, K. (1999). Genetics of epithelial polarity and pattern in the Drosophila retina. Bioessays 21, 275–285. 6. Heisenberg, M., and Buchner, E. (1977). The role of retinula cell types in visual behavior of Drosophiila melanogaster. J. Comp. Physiol. 117, 127–162. 7. Chou, W.H., Hall, K.J., Wilson, D.B., Wideman, C.L., Townson, S.M., Chadwell, L.V., and Britt, S.G. (1996). Identification of a novel Drosophila opsin reveals specific patterning of the R7 and R8 photoreceptor cells. Neuron 17, 1101–1115. 8. Franceschini, N., Kirschfeld, K., and Minke, B. (1981). Fluorescence of photoreceptor cells observed in vivo. Science 213, 1264–1267. 9. Mollereau, B., Dominguez, M., Webel, R., Colley, N.J., Keung, B., de Celis, J.F., and Desplan, C. (2001). Two-step process for photoreceptor formation in Drosophila. Nature 412, 911–913. 10. Chou, W.H., Huber, A., Bentrop, J., Schulz, S., Schwab, K., Chadwell, L.V., logy: Managing organisms — magnetosensing — is cteria. Recently work has provided cterial magnetosomes, and links d prokaryotic cytoskeletal filament a sensory structure capable of field. discuss here recent insights into how ‘magnetosomes’, the membrane-enclosed magnetite crystals central to bacterial magnetosensing, are produced and organized [3,4]. Magnetosome-like structures have been observed in many animals, and the work discussed here may provide insight into the development, function and evolution of magnetosomes in eukaryotes. Experimental work on bacterial magnetotaxis began over 30 years ago, when Richard Blakemore made the curious observation that a population of motile bacteria from salt marsh mud responded dramatically to magnetic manipulation [2]. Since Blakemore’s initial discovery, magnetotactic bacteria have been found in freshwater and marine sediments around the world [5]. Paulsen, R., and Britt, S.G. (1999). Patterning of the R7 and R8 photoreceptor cells of Drosophila: evidence for induced and default cell-fate specification. Development 126, 607–616. 11. Mikeladze-Dvali, T., Wernet, M.F., Pistillo, D., Mazzoni, E.O., Teleman, A.A., Chen, Y.W., Cohen, S., and Desplan, C. (2005). The growth regulators warts/lats and melted interact in a bistable loop to specify opposite fates in Drosophila R8 photoreceptors. Cell 122, 775–787. 12. Crews, S.T. (1998). Control of cell lineage-specific development and transcription by bHLH-PAS proteins. Genes Dev. 12, 607–620. 13. Fischbach, K.F., and Dittrich, A.P. (1989). The optic lobe of Drosophila melanogaster. I. A Golgi analysis of wild-type structures. Cell Tissue Res. 258, 441–475. Institut für Neuro- und Verhaltensbiologie, Universität Münster, 48149 Münster, Germany. E-mail: hummel@uni-muenster.de; klaembt@uni-muenster.de DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2006.04.012 Most magnetotactic bacteria seen in the Northern hemisphere are north-seeking, and most in the Southern hemisphere are south- seeking [6,7]. Why is this? Blakemore hypothesized that, because of the significant vertical component of the geomagnetic field at latitudes away from the equator, alignment of a bacterial cell with the geomagnetic field would facilitate downward migration by north-seeking bacteria in the northern hemisphere (and conversely in the south) [2]. Since the magnetotactic bacteria isolated so far prefer anaerobic or microaerobic conditions, if they find themselves in an O2-rich environment, such as the water column above the sediment, following the geomagnetic field downward — and supplementing magnetotaxis with O2 and/or redox sensing and taxis — should help them to find more anoxic sediments [2,8]. The cell biology of magnetotaxis is under active investigation [9,10]. Magnetosomes contain crystalline particles of magnetite (Fe3O4) or greigite (Fe3S4). The individual crystals are generally 35–100 nm in size, and constitute a permanent single magnetic domain [11,12]. To generate a sufficiently large mailto:hummel@uni-muenster.de Eye Development: Random Precision in Color Vision References work_evhxhw6tardqhcvso3buefaxcm ---- 135_158_____Colin C. Venters.hwp Query by Colour : Investigating the Efficacy of Query Paradigms for Visual Information Retrieval 색에 의한 질의: 시각정보 검색을 위한 질의 패러다임의 유용성 측정 Colin C. Venters* ABSTRACT The ability of the searcher to express their information problem to an information retrieval system is fundamental to the retrieval process. Query by visual example is the principal query paradigm for expressing queries in a content-based image retrieval environment yet there is little empirical evidence to support its efficacy in facilitating query formulation. The aim of this research was to investigate the usability of the query by colour method in supporting a range of information problems in order to contribute to the gap in knowledge regarding the relationship between searchers’ information problems and the query methods required to support efficient and effective visual query formulation. The results strongly suggest that the query method does not support visual query formulation and that there is a significant mismatch between the searchers information problems and the expressive power of the retrieval paradigm. 초 록 탐색자가 정보 요구를 정보검색시스템에 표 하는 능력은 검색과정의 기본이다. 시각 시에 의한 질의는 내용기반 이미지 검색환경에서 질의 표 을 한 요한 패러다임이다. 하지만, 이 방법이 질의 구성의 편의성에 있어 얼마나 효과가 있는지에 한 실험 입증은 아직 미미하다. 이 연구의 목 은 다양한 정보요구와 효율 이고도 효과 인 시각 질의 구성을 지원하기 해 탐색자의 정보요구와 질의 방법 사이에 발생하는 지식 격차를 고려하여 색을 이용한 질의 방식의 사용성을 조사하기 한 것이다. 본 연구결과를 통하여 색을 이용한 질의 방법이 시각 질의 구성을 히 지원하지 못한다는 것과 탐색자의 정보요구와 검색 패러다임의 표 력 사이에 뚜렷한 불일치가 있다는 것을 알 수 있다. Keywords: colour retrieval, content-based image retrieval, image retrieval, query by visual example, query by colour, visual information retrieval, usability 컬러 검색, 내용기반 이미지 검색, 이미지 검색, 컬러에 의한 질의, 시각 정보검색, 유용성 * Assistant Professor, Department of Library and Information Science, Kyungpook National University(venters@knu.ac.kr) ■ Received : 6 May 2011 ■ Revised : 24 May 2011 ■ Accepted : 3 June 2011 ■ Journal of the Korean Society for Information Management, 28(2): 135-158, 2011. [DOI:10.3743/KOSIM.2011.28.2.135] 136 Journal of the Korean Society for Information Management, 28(2), 2011 1. Introduction Advances in technology have been the catalyst for an unprecedented increase in the volume of institu- tional and personal image data. In the UK, approx- imately three million mammograms are taken and stored each year as part of the Breast Screening Programme with the number estimated to increase to six million per year under new recommendations, which require two mammograms per breast to im- prove breast cancer detection rates (Brady, et. al. 2004). However, while there have been significant technological advances with image data capture and storage, developments in effective image retrieval have not kept pace. To address this, research into the retrieval of image data in the last two decades has focused primarily on the use of visual properties and characteristics; commonly referred to as con- tent-based image retrieval. Within this field, a number of key research areas have been identified that are advocated as crucial to its advancement. Despite a long recognition as a key area of research, query interfaces to support effective information retrieval including their ex- pressive power and the impact of the query on re- trieval performance, especially with real end users, has still to receive serious attention by the research community (Gudivada and Raghaven 1995; Flickner et. al. 1997; Rui, Huang, and Chang 1999; Venters et. al. 2003; Hanjalic, Sebe, and Chang 2006; Datta et. al. 2008). A plethora of content-based image retrieval sys- tems supporting a range of retrieval features and functionality have been reported in the literature (Venters and Cooper 2000; Veltkamp and Tanase 2002). This increasing number of systems is a re- flection of the research activity and growing interest in the field. Despite this, the majority of systems are research prototypes designed to test and demon- strate the performance of a retrieval algorithm. Nevertheless, Jaimes and Chang (2002) state that content-based image retrieval systems should consist of three basic components at the highest level of abstraction: the database, the indexing information, and the user interface. When users’ conduct searches, they interact with the system to express their in- formation requirements through a user interface. They suggest that two important aspects of the user interface are its expressive power and its ease of use; where expressive power relates to what can be expressed using the language and ease of use is concerned with how difficult it is for the user to formulate the desired query using the language. This paper reports the results of an investigation that aimed to explore the usability of the query by colour method from a user satisfaction perspective in supporting a range of information problems. Section two provides the background to the research outlining the retrieval method and query paradigm for colour retrieval, image information seeking be- haviour, and related experimental evaluation studies. Section three outlines the methods and procedures used in the experiment. Section four presents the results that emerged from the experiment. Section five discusses the implications of the results and draws conclusions. Query by Colour : Investigating the Efficacy of Query Paradigms for Visual Information Retrieval 137 2. Research Background The origins of content-based image retrieval lie in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer vision, image processing, pattern recognition, and signal processing. Advancement of the approach has been attributed to the early experiments conducted by Kato (1991) into the automatic retrieval of images by col- our and shape feature. The process involves a direct matching operation between a query image and a database of stored images. For each image a feature vector is computed for its unique visual properties f I f1 I , f 2 I , f 3 I ,... f d I( ) Image Feature Vector where f is the feature vector, I is the representation of the image content, and d is the dimensionality. Similarity is calculated by comparing the feature vector of the query image against the feature vectors of images stored in a database using a distance model such as Euclidean distance. Other commonly used metric distance functions include Kullback-Leibler divergence, Mahalanobis distance, and minkowsky distance. The most common image matching feature characteristics are colour, shape, and texture. A num- ber of review papers have surveyed the feature and matching techniques utilized in the process of con- tent-based image retrieval and readers are directed to those publications for detailed descriptions of the techniques and approaches used (Idris and Panchanathan 1997; Del Bimbo 1999; Lew and Huang 2001; Castelli and Bergman 2002; Feng, Siu, and Zhang 2003). Nevertheless, the ability to provide effective and efficient image retrieval using this ap- proach has proved challenging and its efficacy as a primary retrieval method is open to debate. 2.1 Colour Retrieval Colour retrieval has been a major focus of con- tent-based image retrieval since its inception (Kato 1991) and research into the development of effective retrieval approaches continues unabated despite a lack of empirical evidence regarding its efficacy as a re- trieval mechanism (Hua 2010; Yu, Luo, and Lu 2011). Colour for humans is a visual perceptual property corresponding to the categories called red, green, blue etc., derived from the electromagnetic spectrum of light interacting with the eye, which is sensitive to the spectral energy at particular wavelengths between 380-750 nm. Colour retrieval techniques allow images to be retrieved on the basis of their global or local distribution of colour. Global colour features analyse the overall distribution of both the dominant colour and variations of colour within the entire image, in- dependent of location. Colour histogram is the most commonly used colour feature representation and de- notes the joint probabilities of the intensities of the three colour channels, red R, green G, and blue B (Rui, Huang and Chang 1999). Smith and Chang (1996) defined the colour histogram as hR,G,B[r,g,b]=N.Prob{R=r,G=g,B=b} Colour Histogram 138 Journal of the Korean Society for Information Management, 28(2), 2011 where R, G, and B are the three colour channels and N is the number of pixels in the image . The colour histogram is computed by separating the colours within the image into bins and counting the number of pixels of each colour. Since the number of colours is finite, the three colour channels can be transformed into a single variable histogram. Alternative approaches to colour histogram include colour histogram intersection (Swain and Ballard 1991), colour moments (Stricker and Orengo 1995), and colour sets (Smith and Chang 1996). The posi- tions of the colour values are not significant within global colour retrieval methods and images that have similar chromatic property values regardless of posi- tion are retrieved. To improve the precision of the retrieval results, local colour techniques divide an image into ni sub-blocks and then extract the colour values from each block. Image similarity is based on the position of the colour values. Examples of this approach include quadtree-based colour layout (Lu, Ooi, and Tan 1994), colour tuple histogram (Rickman and Stonham 1996), and colour correlo- gram (Huang et al. 1997). Chromatic-based retrieval is effective in retrieving images containing identical and similar regions or distributions of colour within an image but can result in a high level of false colour positives. Readers are directed to the paper by Smith (2002) for a detailed description of the techniques and approaches used in colour image retrieval. It is suggested that this approach is suitable for in- formation problems where the user is knowledgeable about the chromatic content of the image and where there are large homogenous colour regions within the data. The field of remote sensing provides an exemplar application area where colour retrieval could be effectively applied but has yet to be inves- tigated thoroughly
. Nevertheless, it is suggested that the effectiveness of the method de- pends largely on the users’ ability to express their information problem using purely chromatic features (Del Bimbo 1999). While there is some evidence to support this further exploration is required to test the boundaries of the findings. a. Three Level Classification b. Four Level Classification
False Colour Composite Landsat Data Query by Colour : Investigating the Efficacy of Query Paradigms for Visual Information Retrieval 139 2.2 Query by Visual Example Image retrieval is the process of identifying rele- vant images from a database that satisfies an in- formation need. In the context of this research, an information need is a requirement to find relevant information in response to a searcher’s specific in- formation problem. This is formally expressed as a query Qn using the input language provided by the retrieval system. To provide both structure and access mechanisms to image data, concept-based im- age retrieval queries are expressed as keywords using either controlled or uncontrolled vocabularies sup- ported by the retrieval system. In contrast, con- tent-based image retrieval requires searchers to ex- press their information problems as visual queries. Query by visual example (QVE) is the general term used to describe the overall approach and was first coined by Hirata and Kato (1992) to describe the interaction paradigm of their sketch query tool devel- oped for the Art Museum image retrieval system developed by Kato, Kurita and Shimogaki (1989). Under this umbrella term, a number of query para- digms have been proposed for specifying a query Qn in an image database I. Del Bimbo (1999) and Lew and Huang (2001) distinguish between different methods of QVE including query by browsing, query by icon, query by image, and query by sketch. This research explores the usability of the query by colour method, which is outlined in Section 2.2.1. To initiate a content-based image retrieval search, the user provides, selects or creates the visual repre- sentation of their information need. Smeulders et. al., (2000) defined an abstract query space to represent user interaction in a content-based image retrieval system: Q={IQ,FQ,SQ,ZQ} Abstract Query Space where IQ is the selection of images from the data- base I, FQ is the selection of features derived from the images in IQ, SQ is the similarity function, and ZQ is a set of labels to capture the goal dependent semantics. When no knowledge about past or antici- pated use of the system is available, the initial query space Q0 should not be biased toward specific images or made to make some image pairs a priori more similar than others. Rui and Huang (2001) proposed an alternative model to represent the query . They state that an image object O can be modeled as a function of the image data D, features F, and representations R: O=O(D, F, R) Object Model where D is the raw image data, F is a set of visual features associated with the image object, such as colour, texture or shape, and R is a set of representa- tions for a given feature such as colour histogram or colour moments. However, they suggest that speci- fying object O, feature F, and R representation level weights imposes a dual burden on the user of the retrieval system and its developers. For example, specifying the object level weights U imposes a bur- 140 Journal of the Korean Society for Information Management, 28(2), 2011 den on the user, as it requires them to have compre- hensive knowledge of the visual features used in the retrieval system and how they relate to their information need. Similarly, specifying features and their representation level weights Vi and Wij imposes a burden on system developers who do not know which rij and rijk match users’ perceptions of the image content. In general, the majority of content-based image retrieval systems exemplify the interaction model proposed by Rui and Huang (2001). The models emphasize that user interaction is currently a com- plex interplay between the user and the system. Eidenberger and Breitender (2002) argue that user interfaces for content-based image retrieval systems are overly complicated and that casual users would be overtaxed by the demands of selecting similarity measures, retrieval features, and setting of weights. They suggest that in order to improve the acceptance of future systems, simpler user interfaces are required, proposing a framework for their design as part of the VizIR project; an open-framework to develop a Java API for visual information retrieval. The frame- work includes a description of the visual components and their class structure, and the communications between panels, visual components and the query engines based on the Multimedia Retrieval Mark-up Language (MRML) proposed by Müller et. al., (2000). The proposed framework implements two methods of the QVE paradigm, which they consider are the most intuitive: query by image and query by sketch. While there is considerable merit in their proposal to develop a framework for user interfaces for visual information retrieval, their decision to im- plement the two query methods does not take into account whether these methods support the for- mulation of searcher’s information problems. 2.2.1 Query by Colour Query by colour allows the user to specify the percentage or the percentage and distribution of col- our within the query image: query by colour percent- age and query by colour layout. Percentages of col- our within an image can be expressed by selecting colours from a colour space or by mixing colour components and then specifying the percentage of colour, e.g. fifty percent green and fifty percent white
. Query by colour layout
extends this by allowing the distribution and absolute location of the primary colour features to be specified on a virtual query canvas. For example, the user may specify ni colour values in positions xy on the query canvas. Examples of this approach have been utilised by Flickner et. al., 1995; Colombo, Del Bimbo, and
Query by Colour Percentage Query by Colour : Investigating the Efficacy of Query Paradigms for Visual Information Retrieval 141 Genovesi, 2000; Lai, 2000.
Query by Colour Layout Bird, Elliott, and Hayward (1999) investigated the usability of QBIC developed by IBM at the Almaden Research Centre (Niblack et al. 1993). Twenty-five participants from a variety of back- grounds and with a range of experience took part in the evaluation, including curators, graphic design- ers, photographers, librarians, and IT specialists. Query formulation was restricted to query by internal image and query by colour layout. Participants were required to complete twelve search tasks, ranked approximately in order of difficulty, which involved searching or browsing for a target image. The results of the experiment revealed that participants varied significantly in their ability to formulate a visual abstraction of their information requirement. The most common expression of this was a tendency to include too much colour detail, in the form of small blocks, which significantly affected the re- trieval performance of the system. One of the most interesting findings was that participants demon- strated remarkably little irritation with the retrieval performance of the system when the retrieval results deviated from their expectations, blaming their own ability to formulate an accurate representation of the information need as the primary reason for the poor results. However, it is likely that continued exposure to non-relevant retrieval results will lead to significant user frustration with the system. In a study that aimed to test the hypothesis H1 that structured browsing would facilitate effective image retrieval where the user had only a vague concept of their information need, Lai, Tait, and McDonald (2000) compared the CHROMA system’s query tools: a colour navigation tool and a query by colour location tool. The CHROMA navigation tool provides access to a hierarchical set of ten colour groupings based on an extended perceptual colour model proposed by Berlin and Kay (1991) with col- ours transformed using the HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) colour model. Twenty-four undergraduates participated in the study and were required to com- plete fourteen search tasks: seven specific and seven non-specific. The results show that there was no significant difference, p>0.01, in user satisfaction measures for tool type or in the number of successful searches between the tools in either task condition. Overall, tasks were performed significantly quicker using the navigation tool than when using the colour location tool particularly when the task was non- specific. As a result, they concluded that this was an indication that the provision of structured browsing facilitates fast and effective image retrieval where the user had only a vague concept of their information need. This is not a surprising result given the nature of the task and tool, and reaffirms the relationship 142 Journal of the Korean Society for Information Management, 28(2), 2011 between browsing and non-specific queries (Batley 1988). However, the results suggest that their ap- proach improves the browsing process by limiting the range and depth of the colour groups, thereby minimising the risk of the user becoming disoriented. In a second experiment, McDonald, Lai, and Tait (2001) compared the performance of the CHROMA colour navigation tool against the QBIC colour layout tool to test the hypothesis H1 in their previous experiment. The evaluation involved ten under- graduates who had no experience with either user interface and were required to complete fourteen search tasks: seven specific and seven non-specific. In contrast to their previous experiment, the results show that while there was no significant difference in user satisfaction with the retrieval results using the tools, there was a significant difference in the ratings of the participants’ satisfaction with the search tool, Z=-2.46, p>0.01. The restriction to the ten perceptual colours of CHROMA’s navigation tool clearly affected user satisfaction in a positive direction over the more extensive colour combina- tions that could be selected from QBIC’s colour space. This suggests that limited retrieval features may not be a barrier to effective retrieval and supports the findings of Bird, Elliott, and Hayward (1999) that the amount of colour information contained in the query Qn affects retrieval performance. However, it was acknowledged that the image collection used in both experiments only contained one thousand images and evidence suggests that the viability of such an approach is heavily dependent on the size of the image collection (Enser 1995; Markkula and Sormunen 2000). In a two-part experiment to investigate users’ apti- tude to differentiate between single and multiple block colours, Chan and Wang (2006) demonstrated that participants average estimates for both blocks was higher than the real size in both cases and that there was greater uncertainty with more dispersed estimates for mid-size colour blocks than for small or large. What effect colour size estimates have on retrieval performance is unclear and further inves- tigation focusing on retrieval performance is required to understand the significance of these findings. However, it is highly likely that over and under esti- mates of colour in the query Qn will significantly affect the retrieval performance of the system. To compound the problem further, Purves and Lotto (2011) argue that colour perception is ‘a reflex- ive manifestation of past behavioral success rather than the result of a logical processing of present stimuli’. In other words, what we see is based on the history, experience and knowledge of the in- dividual as a means of translating the present light stimuli. This is a profound and controversial position, which raises serious questions regarding searchers ability to accurately represent their information prob- lems using chromatic features as well as having sig- nificant and far-reaching consequences for how the human visual system is modelled now and in the future. 2.3 Image Queries In contrast to the field of text retrieval, studies Query by Colour : Investigating the Efficacy of Query Paradigms for Visual Information Retrieval 143 of end users and their information seeking behaviour are strictly limited. The seminal work on image query analysis was conducted by Enser and McGregor (1992). Their analysis of two thousand seven hundred and twenty two requests from the Hulton Deutsch picture collection revealed that approximately sev- enty percent of requests were for a unique person, object or event and that the majority of other request included refinements based on time. From this exami- nation they concluded that queries could be allocated either unique or non-unique categories and were sub- ject to refinement
. An example of non- unique would be castles
and an example of unique would be Edinburgh Castle
. Therefore, an example of a non-unique refined would be castles at night whilst an example of a unique refined query might be Edinburgh Castle at Hogmanay, 2010
. However, they acknowledged there was a process of pre-meditation in the ex- pression of the query, which was filtered and reformu- lated through an intermediary picture expert. Armitage and Enser (1997) extended this work by analyzing the image queries from seven picture libraries in order to develop a general-purpose catego- risation of image information behaviour. They ana- lysed one thousand seven hundred and forty nine image queries using the unique, non-unique and re- fined categorization proposed by Enser and McGregor (1992) and found that there was a notable degree of overlap between the sample data and the previous results. However, despite the synergy with the pre- vious work, they argue that the simplicity masked the complex nature of the relationship between unique and non-unique objects in the visual domain as it was not obvious at what level uniqueness of an entity was encountered in a hierarchy of related super-con- cepts and sub-concepts. Fidel (1997) conducted an investigation which analysed one hundred requests submitted to a stock photograph collection using Jörgensen’s (1995) twelve classes: literal object; people; people related attributes; art historical information; colour; visual a. Castle b. Edinburgh Castle c. Edinburgh Castle at Hogmanay, 2010
Non-Unique, Unique and Unique Refined Categories 144 Journal of the Korean Society for Information Management, 28(2), 2011 elements; location; description; abstract concepts; content or story; external relationships; viewer response. As noted previously by Armitage and Enser (1995), it was observed that attribute assignment was challenging, as the distinction between objects and the abstract concepts they could represent was an intractable and complex problem to resolve. This led Fidel to consider the nature of the retrieval task, concluding that images can be used as both sources of data or objects which can be classified as extreme poles on a continuum of retrieval tasks with varying degrees of significance determined by the searcher
.
Retrieval Task Continuum It was suggested that although there was no empiri- cal evidence on which to base further explorations, these polar constructs could be used as a conceptual framework for future retrieval experiments. Impor- tantly for the field of content-based image retrieval, it was also noted that none of the queries included requests for shape or texture, with only two from the sample referring to a specific colour, which raises serious doubts concerning its efficacy as a viable approach to address the challenge of providing effec- tive and efficient image retrieval. The studies of user queries suggest that information needs’ fall into three broad categories: specific items or instances, general topical or subject category, and abstract or affective responses. Broadly translated as specific, semi-specific and non-specific where spe- cific is when only one image will satisfy the request e.g. a specific painting or X-ray; semi-specific is where only one of a subset is acceptable e.g. specific conditions or criteria are attached, such as Impres- sionist paintings; non-specific is where the searcher is unsure exactly what is required or has only fuzzy criteria (Conniss, Ashford, and Graham 2000). How- ever, Taylor (1968) argued that the analysis of user information needs’ solely through the analysis of query data as an approach to understanding in- formation behaviour should be treated with a degree of caution. He suggested that as a result of the original information problems exposure to a process of nego- tiation, interpretation, and synthesis through an inter- mediary, it potentially represents a compromised need as a result of the filtering process against the contents of the image collection, the capabilities of the retrieval system, and the human searcher. Nevertheless, the results provide a useful insight into information seeking behaviour and provide a founda- tion for future research. 3. Query by Colour Evaluation Information retrieval systems have traditionally been evaluated by measuring their retrieval effective- ness using two measures: precision and recall. Since their inception these measurements have been central to numerous text retrieval experiments including the TREC experiments. However, a number of objections have been raised regarding their suitability as in- Query by Colour : Investigating the Efficacy of Query Paradigms for Visual Information Retrieval 145 dicators of retrieval performance. The major criticism levelled at the measures has largely focused on the pre-mathematical concept of relevance (Korfage 1997). van Rijsbergen (1979) stated that evaluation of information retrieval systems has proved ex- tremely difficult and, despite numerous measures of effectiveness that have been proposed, a general theory of evaluation has not emerged; a position that still holds true. In contrast, Lancaster and Warner (1993) report that studies have consistently demon- strated that usability is the principal factor affecting the selection of an information source. Emerging attempts have shifted their focus away from measures of retrieval effectiveness to consider user satisfaction and to understand its importance (Dunlop 2000; Johnson, Griffiths, and Hartley 2001; McDonald, Lai, and Tait 2001). This experiment focused on satisfaction as defined in the ISO 9241 standard; the level of comfort that the user feels when using a product or system and how effective that product or system was in supporting their goals. The aim of the experiment was to assess whether query by colour supported visual query expression of a range of information problems. The experiment was a within-subjects experimental design. The in- dependent variable was tool type and the dependent variable was user satisfaction with a focus on overall reaction, learning and system capabilities. The sys- tem used in the experiment was the version of QBIC was that available at The State Hermitage Museum, which supports query formulation by colour percent- age and colour layout (Mintzer et. al. 2001). The evaluation involved twenty-eight, senior Library and Information Science undergraduate students who had no previous exposure to the system and included twenty females and eight males with an age range between 20-27. Participants were required to com- plete six search tasks; two specific, two semi-specific, and two non-specific. Specific search tasks where to find the specific images in Figure 6. The semi-specific tasks were to find paintings of sunflowers and Paris. Non-specific tasks were to find paintings of the “grandeur, simplicity and indestructibility of nature” and a “festival.” The tasks were ordered from the specific to non-specific to provide an increasing level of task difficult. Data
Specific Search Tasks 146 Journal of the Korean Society for Information Management, 28(2), 2011 was collected via a post-search questionnaire which contained twenty nine items on a ten-point differential negative and positive rating scale i.e. -5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The post-session questionnaire was a modified version of the Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction (Chin, Diehl, and Norman 1988) and was designed to ascertain the subjective satisfaction of participants. The granularity of the rating scale was modified from its linear scale of 1-9 and NA to a negative and positive scale, as studies have suggested that this scale reading corresponds more accurately to the opinions of users (Hix and Hartson 1993). The scale contained no neutral value in order to reduce the error of central tendency thereby forcing participants’ to make a negative or positive choice. Statistics were calculated for measures of central tendency, dispersion, and distribution. The data was analysed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test at an alpha level of p=0.001. 4. Results Table 1 shows the mean x and standard deviation σ for overall reaction to the query tools. The results show that the colour layout tool was rated positively on two out of four measures and the colour search tool was rated positively on one out of four measures. The colour layout tool was considered wonderful ( x d=2.25) and easy ( x d=1.75) in spite of being rated frustrating ( x d=-0.38) and inadequate ( x d=-0.63). Similarly, despite being considered easy to use ( x d =1.38), the colour percentage tool was rated as terrible ( x d=-1.50), frustrating ( x d=0.13), and inadequate ( x d =-1.50). However, scores for both tools are clustered around low mean negative and positive values. The difference between the scores on three out of four semantic differential measures is negligible: frustrat- ing-satisfying ( x df =0.25), difficult-easy ( x df =0.38), and inadequate-adequate ( x df =0.87). The scores be- tween the query tools on the terrible-wonderful se- mantic differential are diametrically opposed with the colour layout tool being rated positively and the colour search tool rated negatively ( x df =3.75). Figures 7 and 8 show the distribution of scores for overall reaction. The results show that there is a clustering between the individual scores within range of one or two points in the inter-quartile range with the exception of the frustrating-satisfying se- mantic differential for the colour layout tool, which was more widely distributed in comparison to the other measures suggesting that participants’ opinion Colour Layout Colour Percentage Terrible-Wonderful 2.25 (0.886) -1.50 (1.773) Frustrating-Satisfying -0.38 (2.446) -0.13 (2.100) Difficult-Easy 1.75 (1.832) 1.38 (1.996) Inadequate-Adequate -0.63 (2.200) -1.50 (2.563) Overall Reaction, Mean and Standard Deviation Query by Colour : Investigating the Efficacy of Query Paradigms for Visual Information Retrieval 147
Overall Reaction, Colour Layout
Overall Reaction, Colour Percentage was more widely divided with regards to how frustrat- ing or satisfying participants perceived it (Q1=-2min, Q3=1.5max). A Wilcoxon signed rank test for the combined scores for overall user reaction revealed that there was no significant difference, p>0.001, in overall reaction between the two query tools, Z=-2.142, p=0.032. Correspondingly, a Wilcoxon signed rank test on individual measures also shows that there was no significant difference, p>0.001, of user sat- isfaction between the two tools
. Wilcoxon Signed Rank Terrible-Wonderful Z=-2.384, p=0.017 Frustrating-Satisfying Z=-0.512, p=0.609 Difficult-Easy Z=-0.108, p=0.914 Inadequate-Adequate Z=-0.921, p=0.357
Wilcoxon Signed Rank Scores for Individual Measures of Overall Reaction Table 3 shows the mean x d and standard deviation σ for learning the query tools. The results show that the colour layout tool was positively rated on all four measures and the colour percentage tool being rated positively on three out of four measures. Both tools were considered easy and fast to learn, and easy to correct errors. The colour percentage tool has a negligible higher mean rating for overall learning and time to learn measures than the colour layout tool with a difference of x df =0.87. Notably, both query tools were rated poorly with regards to task performance. Despite the colour layout tool hav- ing a having a positive rating score for task perform- ance it is only marginally positive at x d=0.12. Tasks using the colour percentage tool had a negative mean rating score although the score is not highly negative at x d=-1.38; the difference between the two scores is also negligible at x df =1.50. Figures 9 and 10 show the distribution of scores for learning. The results show responses are not widely distributed suggesting some broad consensus of opinion. 148 Journal of the Korean Society for Information Management, 28(2), 2011 Colour Layout Colour Percentage Learning (Difficult-Easy) 2.13 (1.885) 3.00 (1.309) Time to Learn (Slow-Fast) 2.13 (2.100) 3.00 (2.268) Error Correction (Difficult-Easy) 1.63 (2.326) 1.38 (2.615) Tasks Performance (Never-Always) 0.12 (1.642) -1.38 (2.387)
Learning, Mean and Standard Deviation
Learning, Colour Layout
Learning, Colour Percentage A Wilcoxon signed rank test for the combined scores for learning revealed that there was no sig- nificant difference in overall leaning between the two tools, Z=-0.456, p=0.648. Similarly, a Wilcoxon signed rank test for individual measures also shows no significant difference in individual learning meas- ures between the two tools
. Table 5 shows the mean x d and standard deviation σ for the capabilities of the query tools. The results show that the colour layout tool has a positive mean rating on three out of four measures as opposed to the colour percentage tool, which has a negative mean rating across all measures. However, the neg- ative x d ratings of the colour percentage tool gravitate to the low-end of the scale suggesting that despite the participants’ rating, the degree of their dissat- isfaction was not highly negative. Both tools were considered not to support visual query formulation with the colour layout and colour percentage tools receiving mid-level negative scores of x d=-2.38 and x d=-2.13 respectively. The implications of this result will be discussed in Section 5. The usability of the colour layout tool was not considered to effect either visual query expression or the retrieval results. As observed by Bird, Elliott, and Hayward (1999), this may be the result of users blaming their own ability to formulate an accurate representation of their in- formation need rather than the systems ability to Query by Colour : Investigating the Efficacy of Query Paradigms for Visual Information Retrieval 149 Wilcoxon Signed Rank Learning (Difficult-Easy) Z=-1.552, p=0.121 Time to Learn (Slow-Fast) Z=-1.823, p=0.068 Error Correction (Difficult-Easy) Z=-0.333, p=0.739 Tasks Performance (Never-Always) Z=-1.802, p=0.072
Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test for Individual Measures of Learning Colour Layout Colour Percentage Tools Supports Visual Query Expression(Never-Always) -2.38 (1.685) -2.13 (2.031) Usability Effects Query Expression(Always-Never) 1.25 (1.035) -1.75 (1.581) Usability Effects Retrieval Results(Always-Never) 3.00 (0.756) -2.13 (2.295) RGB Values Effects Results(Always-Never) 3.38 (1.188) -2.25 (1.909)
Capabilities, Mean and Standard Deviation
Colour Layout, Capabilities
Colour Percentage, Capabilities support them in this activity. While the mean value for usability effecting query expression is low at x d=1.25, the mean value with regards to usability effecting the retrieval results is rated high at x d=3.00. In contrast, the usability of the colour percentage tool was considered always to effect both query ex- pression and the retrieval results, x d=-1.75 and x d =-2.13 respectively. Participants considered that the RGB colour values used with the colour percentage tool also considerably effected the retrieval results with a mean score of x d=-2.25 which is diametrically opposed to the colour layout tool at x d=3.38 given a difference of x df =5.63. Figure 11 and 12 show the distribution of scores for system capabilities. A Wilcoxon signed rank test for the combined scores of system capability revealed a significant 150 Journal of the Korean Society for Information Management, 28(2), 2011 Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Tools support visual query expression? Z=-0.324, p=0.746 The usability of the tool effects visual query expression? Z=-2.322, p=0.020 The usability of the tool effects the retrieval results? Z=-2.410, p=0.016 Retrieval results are effected by the RGB colour values? Z=-2.533, p=0.011
Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test for Individual Measures of Capability difference in overall capabilities between the two tools, Z=-4.197, p<0.001. However, a Wilcoxon sign- ed rank test on individual measures showed no sig- nificant difference in individual capability measures between the two tools
. 5. Discussion This works has important implications for the de- sign of query methods for content-based image re- trieval systems or hybrid systems that include a con- tent-based retrieval features and in particular query by colour. Overall reaction by participants to both query methods was mixed. The data revealed that there was no significant difference, p>0.001, between the two query methods on two of the three measures: overall reaction (Z=-2.142, p=0.032) and learning (Z=-0.456, p=0.648). In contrast, the combined re- sults for system capability show a significant differ- ence between the two query methods at Z=-4.197, p<0.001, although not at an individual level. In gen- eral, the colour layout tool was rated more positively than the colour percentage tool. It has been suggested that two important aspects of a query interface are its expressive power and its ease of use i.e. what can be expressed using the systems language combined with how difficult it is for the searcher to articulate their information prob- lem using that language. In terms of ease of use, the results of this experiment suggest that both query methods were considered easy to use by the partic- ipants although the mean rating scores for this was at the lower end of the positive rating scale suggesting considerable scope for improvement. That both query methods were considered frustrating and inadequate suggests that while they may have been easy to use their expressive power was somewhat questionable. This is supported by the data concerning learning and system capabilities, which revealed that partic- ipants in this experiment considered that tasks using either tool could not be performed in a straight for- ward manner or that they did not support visual query expression. This strongly suggests that there is a significant mismatch between searchers information problems and the query methods available to support efficient and effective visual query formulation using this approach. In addition to the data generated via the post-ses- sion questionnaire a number of phenomena was also observed. Firstly, participants expressed having a mental image of the information need for the semi-specific and non-specific information tasks. For example, one tasks was to retrieve paintings of Query by Colour : Investigating the Efficacy of Query Paradigms for Visual Information Retrieval 151 sunflowers. A number of participants expressed that their mental image of this information problem was that of van Gogh’s painting of Sunflowers
. This was also noted by Jose, Furner, and Harper (1998) who observed that users had a well-defined mental image of their information need. However, within the dataset only two images of sunflowers exist: Vase of Sunflowers (circa. 1898-99) by Henri Matisse
and Sunflowers (1901) by Paul Gauguin. Despite all being pictures of sunflowers, the colour properties and their distribution within these images differ quite significantly which is illustrated in Figure 13. This in itself will have a significant effect on retrieval performance of the system. The use of purely chromatic features to represent an information prob- lem presents unique challenges to the searcher. It requires the searcher to think about their information needs and its representation in a way that deviates significantly from what they are used to. While this was not measured empirically, it is also clear that a searchers mental representation of their information problem can also have a significant effect on retrieval performance as it influences the chromatic features selected including their quantity and distribution. This is an important aspect to consider with regards to information problems that are less well clearly defined. What effect the mental representation of an information problem plays in the retrieval process presents an interesting avenue for research as well as the emerging theories related to the processing of colour stimuli and its effect on colour selection. Similarly, it was also noted that participants’ abil- ity to formulate a visual abstraction of the experiment information problems varied significantly. It was ob- served that despite significant efforts to reproduce a viable representation of their information need a number of participants were unable to accurately a. Sunflowers, van Gogh b. Vase of Sunflowers, Matisse
Sunflowers 152 Journal of the Korean Society for Information Management, 28(2), 2011 represent their query. This was both the product of the expressive power of the query tool and the searchers mental model of the information problem. For example, the colours selected for the sunflower query did not represent either the colours used in the target image or the colours of the physical flower head. While all participants used yellow for the outer petals the colour used for the kernel of the flower head was generally orange. Depending on the type of sunflower e.g. Helianthus Annuus, the kernel col- our can range from various shades of green to black. As observed by Bird, Elliott, and Hayward (1999), there was also a tendency to include too much detail in the form of small blocks, which affected the re- trieval performance of the system. As a result, re- trieval performance was severely affected making it challenging, if not impossible, for the searcher to refine the retrieval results in a relevance feedback loop. These findings have important implications for the efficacy and utility of content-based image re- trieval as an approach although there is a need to examine the usefulness of both the tools and retrieval features in context. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the colour retrieval method depends largely on the users’ ability to express their information problem using purely chromatic features. While the results are based on a small sample conducting generic search tasks on an art image database the data indicates that there are limits in which query by colour can be used effectively. The results of this experiment suggest that the effective and efficient retrieval of relevant images is not only dependent on robust re- trieval algorithms but on supporting the querying needs of the searcher. This experiment focused solely on participant’s satisfaction as defined in the ISO 9241 standard focus- ing on their overall reaction, learning and system capabilities as measures of user satisfaction. However, it is acknowledged that all three measures of usability - effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction - may be required in order to reduce the risk of making un- founded assertions about the overall usability of the system under investigation (Frøkjær, Hertzum, and Hornbæk 2000); where effectiveness is the extent to which a goal or task can be achieved and is indicated by a quantitative measure of the number of errors and efficiency is the amount of effort required to complete a task and is reflected in a quantitative measures of task completion time and learning time. To what extent the use of indicators such as time play in measuring usability in information retrieval experiments, particularly where there is a significant element of subjective interpretation required to com- plete a task, is open to debate. However, the number of errors and in particular their type gives an insight into the usability of systems. Employing an error classification with a fine level of granularity, such as that proposed by Norman (1981), may reveal more interesting data regarding measures of effec- tiveness experienced by participants during the course of an experiment. Nevertheless, the develop- ment of such taxonomy was beyond the scope of this research. Query by Colour : Investigating the Efficacy of Query Paradigms for Visual Information Retrieval 153 6. Conclusions This paper presented the results of an experiment that investigated the usability of the query by colour method in supporting a range of information problems. The ability for users’ to communicate their infor- mation requirements effectively and efficiently is cru- cial in any information retrieval system. The success and value of any information resource can therefore be maximised by ensuring that its content is effectively exploited and is accessible to those users whose in- formation requirements it is intended to support. A powerful image retrieval system with no effective method by which the searcher can formulate visual queries of their information problems has little value. Content-based retrieval research has generally oper- ated in a vacuum isolated from the real activities and tasks of the searcher focusing primarily on the technical aspects of delivering effective image retrieval. As a consequence, the design of query inter- faces for content-based image retrieval has been driv- en by the underlying retrieval mechanism and not by the requirements of the end user. To address the challenges of and deliver effective image retrieval requires more than the sum of retrieval algorithms. The importance of the user in the design and the evaluation of content-based image systems have been grossly underestimated by the research community. What the information needs of users of image collec- tions are and how successfully these can be expressed in a content-based image retrieval environment is far from clear. This is a complex field and no single solution or approach will solve the multi-dimensional issues to achieve effective and efficient retrieval of the data. The fusion of work from a diverse range of disciplines, including mathematics and statistics, information and computer science, neuroscience and psychology, will all contribute to the development of accessible image retrieval systems. 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The paintings Zuo La Lu and Nude, which represent two of Liu Kang’s early and distinct artistic phases—Paris and Shanghai—were investigated for the first time using a combination of non- and micro-invasive techniques. The aim of this study was to identify the main pigments used by the artist and to add to the existing research on the artist’s painting methods. The results show that the majority of pigments used in both paintings are similar and include Prussian blue, ultramarine, viridian, strontium yellow, chrome yellow, cadmium yel- low, iron oxides, lead, zinc and barium whites, bone black and organic red. Particularly interesting is the predominance of lead white in Zuo La Lu and zinc white in Nude. A comparison of the ground layers also indicates the presence of a lead white admixture in Zuo La Lu while its absence in Nude may point to a characteristic difference between two artistic phases, possibly determined by the availability of materials. The imaging methods revealed hidden composi- tions: the view of a canal house behind Zuo La Lu, and a mystery outdoor view behind Nude. Although these inves- tigative methods permitted some visualisation of the discarded compositions, it remains difficult to determine their details. Keywords: Liu Kang, IRFC, MA-XRF, SEM–EDS, Pigment identification, Hidden painting © The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creat iveco mmons .org/publi cdoma in/ zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Introduction Liu Kang was born in Yongchun, Fujian province, China, in 1911. He graduated from Xinhua Arts Academy in Shanghai in 1928. He stayed in Paris from 1928 to 1933, during which time he went on painting trips across Europe to assimilate the artistic essence of the West- ern masters. In 1933, he taught at the Shanghai Acad- emy of Fine Art. He moved to Malaya in 1937 when the Sino-Japanese War broke out, and moved to Singapore in 1942. Liu Kang was active as an artist, educator and cultural commentator for about 60  years in Singapore. When he died in 2004, he was regarded as a pioneering Singapore artist who had profoundly influenced genera- tions of Singapore artists [1]. During his formative years in Paris, Liu Kang formu- lated modernist art concepts before he found his own approach to painting, influenced by Impressionist, Post- Impressionist and Fauvist styles [2]. In an essay from 1980, Liu Kang made a reference to his stay in Paris: “As for myself, I have loved Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gau- guin, and have also been infatuated with Henri Matisse. They have inclined me to adopt an optimistic and open- minded approach [3].” In an 1981 interview, he said: “One of the first things I saw when I arrived in Paris was the 60th-anniversary exhibition works by Matisse. The impact was powerful and lasting [4].” Open Access *Correspondence: damian_lizun@nhb.gov.sg Heritage Conservation Centre (National Heritage Board), 32 Jurong Port Rd, Singapore 619104, Republic of Singapore http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8340-0701 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1186/s40494-020-0363-x&domain=pdf Page 2 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 Liu Kang’s early explorations met with some success and his works were exhibited at Salon d’Automne in 1930 and 1931. After returning to China, Liu Kang taught Western art at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Art and he was also at the centre of the Chinese modern art movement. He felt a strong need to search for and develop his own manner of painting, one that would bear the mark of his Chinese ethnicity. He combined Chinese ink technique with the colourful tones of Post-Impressionist works. Bands of bright, raw colours and quick, bold strokes characterised his works from that time onwards. The use of dark lines to delineate objects also became a dominant feature in his work [2]. Although there is an extensive literature on Liu Kang’s works, none of these discussions included technical examination. Two paintings from the National Gal- lery Singapore, Zuo La Lu (1930) and Nude (1936), are amongst very few works from Liu Kang’s Paris and Shanghai periods that have survived the Second World War. They exemplify the artist’s early explorations of the Western painting style and his attempts at bridging East and West. Zuo La Lu is an oil-on-canvas painting measuring 46 × 55  cm (Fig.  1). It is an outdoor scene depicting a townhouse behind a wall and some shrubs at Emile Zola Street. The palette of colours is characterised by differ- ent hues of blue, brown and green. Although the painting style is expressive, it betrays some attention to detail in the characterisation of the house. Nude is a studio work painted in oils on a canvas meas- uring 46 × 54.5  cm (Fig.  2). The painting shows a female model sitting in front of a simple backdrop. The colour block division of the background hints at the influence of the Post-Impressionists. The use of a broad brown line around the model’s body betrays the influence of Chinese ink painting, a style that would later become Liu Kang’s trademark [5]. This rapidly executed painting reveals the decisive use of a few strong colours. As these two works represent different dates, genres and painting methods, they were selected to study the artist’s painting materials. The paintings were investi- gated for the first time using a combination of in  situ analytical non-invasive methods, and the results guided further micro-invasive techniques to characterise the pigments in detail. Methods Technical photography High-resolution technical photography was conducted according to the workflow proposed by Cosentino [6–8]. A Nikon D90 DSLR modified camera with a sensitivity of between about 360 and 1100 nm was used with following filter sets: a. X-Nite CC1 coupled with B + W 415, for visible, rak- ing, transmitted light photography and ultraviolet fluorescence (UVF) photography at 365 nm; b. Heliopan RG1000, for near-infrared (NIR) photog- raphy at 1000  nm with an additional aim of infrared false-colour imaging (IRFC); c. Andrea “U” MK II for reflected ultraviolet photog- raphy (UVR). The lighting system was composed of Fig. 1 Liu Kang, Zuo La Lu, 1930, oil on canvas, 46 × 55 cm. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of National Heritage Board. White arrows indicate sampling areas Fig. 2 Liu Kang, Nude, 1936, oil on canvas, 46 × 54.5 cm. Gift of the artist’s family. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of National Heritage Board. White arrows indicate sampling areas Page 3 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 two 500  W halogen lamps as an illumination source for visible, raking, transmitted light and NIR photog- raphy. Two lamps equipped with eight 40 W 365 nm UV fluorescence tubes were used for UVF and UVR photography. The camera was calibrated with the X-Rite Color- Checker Passport. The American Institute of Conserva- tion Photo Documentation Target (AIC PhD Target) was used for images white balance and exposure control. The images were further processed by Adobe Photoshop CC in accordance with the standards described by the Amer- ican Institute of Conservation [9]. Reflectance transformation imaging Reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) was carried out according to the workflow proposed by the Cul- tural Heritage Imaging [10]. The images were processed using Adobe Photoshop, followed by RTIBuilder and RTIViewer software, proposed by the Cultural Heritage Imaging [11, 12]. X‑ray radiography The digital X-ray radiography (XRR) was carried out at the radiology department of the Singapore General Hos- pital using a Siemens Ysio Max Digital X-ray System with a 35 × 43  cm detector that delivers high-pixel resolution images (over 7 million pixels). The X-ray tube operated at 40 kV and 0.5–2 mAs. The images were first processed with an X-ray medical imaging software, iQ-LITE, then exported to Adobe Photoshop CC for final alignment and merging. Macro X‑ray fluorescence The elemental mapping of the entire surface of the paint- ings was conducted with a macro X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF) scanner, the M6 Jetstream from Bruker Nano GmbH. The instrument consists of a 30  W Rh-target microfocus X-ray tube, with a maximum voltage of 50 kV and a maximum current of 600  µA. The instrument is equipped with a 30 mm2 active area XFlash Silicon Drift Detector with an energy resolution of < 145  eV for Mn Kα. A detector is mounted on an X–Y–Z motorised stage Table 1 Pigments detected in the painting Zuo La Lu by SEM–EDS and PLM a Major elements are given in bold, minor elements in plain type and trace elements in brackets Samples Colour/ stratigraphy layer Location SEM–EDS detected elementsa SEM–EDS possible assignment PLM identification 1 White Ground layer O, C, Ca, Pb, Zn, Na, (Si, Al, Mg) Calcium carbonate, lead white, zinc white Calcium carbonate, lead white, zinc white 4 Blue Street name sign Pb, C, O, Ca, Ba, (Fe, Na, Al, Si, Mg) Prussian blue, lead white, barium white Prussian blue, lead white 13 Blue Sky Pb, C, O, Ca, (Zn, Mg, Na, Si, Al) Prussian blue, ultramarine, lead white, zinc white Prussian blue, ultramarine, lead white, zinc white 8 Green Shrubs above the fence C, O, Cr, Cd, S, Pb, Ba, Al, Zn, (Ca, Fe, Mg, Na, Cl, Si) Ultramarine, viridian, Prussian blue, lead white, cadmium yellow or light cadmium yel- low, zinc white, barium white or lithopone Ultramarine, viridian, Prussian blue, lead white, cadmium yellow Yellow cluster O, Pb, C, Ca, Cr, S, (Al, Ba, Zn, Mg, Si) Chrome-containing yellow(s) and green(s) Green cluster O, C, Pb, Ca, Cr, Ba, (S, Al, Cd, Fe, Si) Chrome-containing yellow(s) and green(s), traces of cad- mium yellow 7 Yellow Wooden blinds O, C, Pb, Si, Fe, Al, Ca, Sr, As, (Ba, K, Cr, P, Na, Mg) Yellow iron oxide, chrome yel- low, barium white, gypsum, kaolin, strontium yellow, possible other chrome- containing yellow(s) Yellow iron oxide, chrome yel- low, strontium yellow 19 Brown House wall C, Pb, O, Ca, Fe, Si, Al, As, (Ba, P, Na, Sr, Zn, Cr, Mg) Brown iron oxide, strontium yellow, bone black Brown iron oxide, strontium yellow 5 Red Tile from the roof of the smaller house O, C, Pb, Ca, Cr, P, Al, Fe, (Si, As, Zn, Na, Cl, Ba, Mg) Red iron oxide, chrome yellow, possible other chrome- containing yellow(s) Red iron oxide, chrome yellow 6 Black Tree branch O, Pb, C, Fe, Ba, Ca, S, Na, Si, (K, Al, P, Zn) Prussian blue, bone black, lead white, barium white Prussian blue, bone black, lead white Page 4 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 Ta b le 2 P ig m en ts d et ec te d in  t h e  p ai n ti n g N u d e b y  SE M –E D S an d  P LM a M aj o r e le m en ts a re g iv en in b o ld , m in o r e le m en ts in p la in t yp e an d t ra ce e le m en ts in b ra ck et s Sa m p le C o lo u r/ st ra ti g ra p h y la ye r Lo ca ti o n SE M –E D S d et ec te d e le m en ts a SE M –E D S p o ss ib le a ss ig n m en t P LM id en ti fi ca ti o n 1 W h it e G ro u n d la ye r C , O , C a, Z n , B a, S , ( N a, C r, Si , A l) C al ci u m c ar b o n at e, z in c w h it e, b ar iu m w h it e C al ci u m c ar b o n at e, z in c w h it e 4 Vi o le t Vi o le t fa b ri c C , Z n , O , N a, (S i, C a, A l, Fe , B a, S , C r) U lt ra m ar in e, y el lo w ir o n o xi d e, z in c w h it e, b ar iu m w h it e U lt ra m ar in e, y el lo w ir o n o xi d e, o rg an ic re d 9 Bl u e To p -r ig h t co rn er C , Z n , O , N a, C r, Ba , S , C a, S i, A l U lt ra m ar in e, v ir id ia n , z in c w h it e, b ar iu m w h it e U lt ra m ar in e, v ir id ia n , z in c w h it e 11 Bl u e Sh ad o w o f t h e fo ld C , O , B a, Z n , C r, N a, S , S i, A l, (C a, F e, K ) U lt ra m ar in e, v ir id ia n , y el lo w ir o n o xi d e, z in c w h it e, b ar iu m w h it e U lt ra m ar in e, v ir id ia n , y el lo w ir o n o xi d e, z in c w h it e 5 G re en Bo tt o m -l ef t co rn er C , O , Z n , C r, Ba , P b , N a, C a, S , ( Si , A l, Fe , S r) Vi ri d ia n , u lt ra m ar in e, P ru ss ia n b lu e, s tr o n ti u m ye llo w , z in c w h it e, c h ro m e ye llo w , p o ss ib le ex te n d er s su ch a s: b ar iu m w h it e, g yp su m , ka o lin o r o th er c h ro m e - co n ta in in g y el lo w (s ) Vi ri d ia n , u lt ra m ar in e, P ru ss ia n b lu e, s tr o n ti u m ye llo w , z in c w h it e, c h ro m e ye llo w 7 G re en C u rt ai n C , O , Z n , B a, C r, N a, S , ( Sr , C a, S i, A l) Vi ri d ia n , u lt ra m ar in e, s tr o n ti u m y el lo w , z in c w h it e, b ar iu m w h it e, p o ss ib le o th er c h ro m e - co n ta in in g y el lo w (s ) Vi ri d ia n , u lt ra m ar in e, s tr o n ti u m y el lo w , z in c w h it e 21 G re en To p e d g e C , O , B a, Z n , C r, C a, P b , S , F e, S i, N a, (A l, C d , S r, K ) Vi ri d ia n , u lt ra m ar in e, P ru ss ia n b lu e, s tr o n ti u m ye llo w , z in c w h it e, c h ro m e ye llo w , p o ss ib le ex te n d er s su ch a s: b ar iu m w h it e, g yp su m , ka o lin o r o th er c h ro m e - co n ta in in g y el lo w (s ), tr ac es o f c ad m iu m y el lo w Vi ri d ia n , u lt ra m ar in e, P ru ss ia n b lu e, s tr o n ti u m ye llo w , z in c w h it e, c h ro m e ye llo w 23 G re en R ig h t ed g e O , C , C r, B a, Z n , C a, S , ( Si , N a, P b , F e, S r, A l) Vi ri d ia n , u lt ra m ar in e, P ru ss ia n b lu e, s tr o n ti u m ye llo w , z in c w h it e, c h ro m e ye llo w , p o ss ib le ex te n d er s su ch a s: b ar iu m w h it e, g yp su m , ka o lin o r o th er c h ro m e - co n ta in in g y el lo w (s ) Vi ri d ia n , u lt ra m ar in e, P ru ss ia n b lu e, s tr o n ti u m ye llo w , z in c w h it e, c h ro m e ye llo w 12 Ye llo w M o d el ’s kn ee C , Z n , O , N a, (S i, Fe , A l) Ye llo w ir o n o xi d e, z in c w h it e Ye llo w ir o n o xi d e, z in c w h it e 14 Br o w n Sh ad o w fr o m m o d el ’s ca lf C , Z n , O , F e, N a, S i, (A l, Ba , C a, S , C r, Pb , S r, M g , A s) Br o w n ir o n o xi d e, c h ro m e ye llo w s tr o n ti u m ye llo w , b o n e b la ck Br o w n ir o n o xi d e, c h ro m e ye llo w s tr o n ti u m ye llo w 6 Pi n k C u rt ai n C , Z n , O , N a, B a, (S r, S, S i, Fe , P b , A l, C a, M g , C r, C l) St ro n ti u m y el lo w , y el lo w ir o n o xi d e, z in c w h it e, b ar iu m w h it e, c h ro m e ye llo w O rg an ic re d , s tr o n ti u m y el lo w , y el lo w ir o n o xi d e, zi n c w h it e, c h ro m e ye llo w 16 R ed M o d el ’s lip s C , O , B a, S , S r, Z n , C l, (C a, S i, N a, P b , F e) R ed ir o n o xi d e, s tr o n ti u m y el lo w , z in c w h it e, b ar iu m w h it e R ed ir o n o xi d e, o rg an ic re d , s tr o n ti u m y el lo w , zi n c w h it e 15 Bl ac k M o d el ’s h ai r C , O , Z n , S i, (N a, C a, B a, F e, C r, S, P , A l) Bo n e b la ck , u lt ra m ar in e, v ir id ia n , y el lo w ir o n o xi d e, z in c w h it e, b ar iu m w h it e Bo n e b la ck , u lt ra m ar in e, v ir id ia n , y el lo w ir o n o xi d e, z in c w h it e Page 5 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 with a maximum scanning range of 80 × 60 × 9  cm. The instrument offers an adjustable spot size from 100 to approximately 500  µm [13]. The elemental distribution maps of the paintings were collected with a dwell time of 10 ms/pixel, a pixel size of 300 µm and an anode cur- rent of 599  µA. The acquired spectra were collected and analysed using Bruker’s M6 software, which allows the elemental distribution maps to be produced. Optical microscopy and polarized light microscopy Optical microscopy (OM) of the samples was carried out in visible and ultraviolet reflected light on the Leica DMRX polarized microscope at magnifications of ×40, ×100 and ×200 equipped with Leica DFC295 digital camera. Polarized light microscopy (PLM) was carried out using the methodology developed by Peter and Ann Mactaggart [14]. Scanning electron microscope with energy dispersive spectroscopy All samples (powdered paint samples and cross-section) were mounted on high purity carbon tapes and exam- ined with a scanning electron microscope (SEM) Hitachi SU5000 SEM, coupled with energy dispersive X-ray spec- troscopy (EDS), Bruker XFlash 6|60. In SEM, the back- scattered electron mode was used in 60 Pa vacuum, with 20  kV beam acceleration, at 50–60 intensity spot and a working distance of 10  mm. The distribution of chemi- cal elements was mapped using Qantax Esprit processing software. Fig. 3 Details of Zuo La Lu: a, b photographed in raking light; c, d photographed by RTI technique. Both imaging techniques reveal texture details corresponding to the earlier painted composition Page 6 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 Samples Based on the preliminary non-invasive investigation, eight micro-samples from Zuo La Lu and thirteen sam- ples from Nude were analysed for this study. Samples of the paint for cross-section structure obser- vation and analysis were embedded in a fast-curing acrylic resin ClaroCit (supplied by Struers) and pol- ished with abrasives down to grade 4000. The mounting medium for PLM pigment dispersion was Cargille Melt- mount nD = 1.662. A summary of the identified materials is given in Tables 1 and 2. Results and discussion Hidden painting beneath Zuo La Lu The raking light and RTI examination revealed the pres- ence of impastos that do not correspond to the present paint scheme. The impastos was evident in the areas of sky, house, fence and road in the bottom-left corner of the painting (Fig.  3). Subsequent MA-XRF scanning revealed the underlying view of a canal house painted in vertical orientation (Fig.  4). The hidden composition is visualised in the Pb, Zn and Ca distribution maps. Interestingly, the Zn and Ca maps appear as a negative image of the Pb distribution, indicating that the Zn- and Ca-signals source is the ground layer blocked locally by the Pb-containing paint of an underlying painting. This observation finds confirmation in the upper part of the underlying painting where what was probably the sky colour has a high concentration of Pb-containing pig- ment corresponding to the heavy impastos imaged in XRR. The XRR additionally revealed expressive brush- strokes that are much more visible than in the RTI, sug- gesting an attempt to imitate van Gogh’s style (Fig.  5). The primary source of contrast in the radiographic image was the thickness variations of paint layer which Fig. 4 Visible light image and MA-XRF maps of Zuo La Lu showing the distribution of the detected elements. The greyscale corresponds to the intensity of the signal of each element; white equals high intensity, black means low intensity. Distribution maps of Ca, Zn and Pb reveal the hidden composition rotated at 90° anticlockwise Page 7 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 is rich in heavy metal, applied over a thinner ground of a similar chemical composition [15]. Hidden painting beneath Nude A visual examination of the painted edges of Nude revealed the presence of green and blue paint to be unre- lated to the final image (Fig.  6). An examination of the painting’s surface with the raking light and RTI pointed out the impastos and other expression effects that do not correlate to the final composition. The underlying paint layer is characterised by marks probably achieved by scratching into wet paint with a palette knife, the end of a brush handle or any sharp tool. In the area of the feet, the marks have a form of crossed lines, like a net or gar- den fence. In the area of the model’s left calf, small cir- cles were scratched. Additionally, thick impastos were noticed in the area of the breast and the adjacent green background (Fig.  7). The XRR of Nude remains incon- clusive; however, it suggests that the unveiled composi- tion was painted in the horizontal orientation and that there might be shrubs or other greenery on the left side of the painting, where the scratching marks were noticed (Fig.  8). Similarly to Zuo La Lu, the thickness variations in the hidden paint layer play a role in the absorption of X-rays and rendering the X-ray image. This observation finds confirmation in the MA-XRF distribution map of Pb (Fig. 9) compared with XRR. A strong Pb-signal from the underlying composition corresponds to the impas- tos recorded with RTI and XRR. However, the Pb-signal from the model’s face does not correlate with the thick brushwork recoded with raking light photography, RTI and XRR (Fig.  10), suggesting that the Pb-containing paint was applied at an earlier stage of the painting and covered with a thick application of a Zn-containing paint. Consequently, this assumption is supported by the Zn map, which appears as a negative image of the Pb distri- bution in the area of model’s face (Fig. 9). The underlying composition partially visible in the Pb distribution map is also not sufficiently recorded in the distribution maps for other elements present. However, some paint fragments along the painting turnover edges provide limited information about the pigment composi- tion and will be discussed in the next chapter. Ground layer SEM–EDS measurements combined with PLM observa- tions indicated that the composition of the ground layer in both paintings differs. In Zuo La Lu, the ground layer probably consists of a mixture of calcium carbonate (coc- coliths were visible in normal and polarized light), lead white (particles appear greenish and show hexagonal angles in normal light), and zinc white (small particles appear yellow in normal light). The ground layer in Nude probably involves calcium carbonate with the addition of zinc white and barium white based on the co-location of Ba and S in the sample examined with SEM–EDS. Blue and violet paints In Zuo La Lu, the dark blue colour from the street sign and light blue from the sky were analysed. An IRFC Fig. 5 Visible light (a) and XRR image (b) of Zuo La Lu rotated at 90° clockwise. XRR reveals the hidden painting of canal house Page 8 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 (Fig.  11) was very effective, with preliminary indica- tion that the painted areas contain Prussian blue. This pigment is known for its strong absorption of infra- red; thus the blue street sign appears dark blue in IRFC imaging. Moreover, Prussian blue has very high tinting strength, so a low concentration of pigment is needed to achieve a blue shade. An MA-XRF scan of the area (Fig.  12) and a SEM–EDS analysis of the paint sam- ple confirmed a small concentration of Fe, which was further identified with PLM as Prussian blue (parti- cles appear greenish with Chelsea filter) (Fig.  13). An SEM–EDS analysis also recorded a signal of Pb, Ca and Ba, suggesting the use of lead white, chalk and barium white in the paint mixture. The blue sky was imaged violet in an IRFC (Fig.  11), suggesting the use of a complex paint mixture. The SEM–EDS recorded traces of elements characteristic for Prussian blue and ultramarine, confirmed with PLM (ultramarine particles appear red with Chelsea filter). The MA-XRF was not able to visualise ultramarine due to the low atomic number of the element content of this pigment; its concentration was below the detection limit of the instrument. The final result seems to be consistent with the IRFC imaging as the purple and dark blue repre- sentation of ultramarine and Prussian blue can produce violet when combined. The brighter tone of the blue sky was achieved by adding lead and zinc whites identified by SEM–EDS and PLM. In Nude, a blue paint from top-right corner turns purple in the IRFC image (Fig.  14), suggesting the use of ultramarine or cobalt blue. MA-XRF detected a Cr-signal (Fig.  9), which could be related to the use of Cr-containing yellow or green pigment(s). SEM– EDS combined with PLM allowed the identification Fig. 6 Details of Nude showing paint fragments corresponding to the earlier painted composition: a green at the top edge; b blue at the top-right corner; c green at the bottom-left corner; d green at the right edge Page 9 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 of ultramarine with an admixture of viridian (the par- ticles are large and rounded, with a rough surface, and appear warm grey with Chelsea filter). These findings correspond to the purple colour in the IRFC image of the area. The blue paint was brightened with the addi- tion of zinc and barium whites based on the SEM–EDS co-location of Ba and S. The microscopic observation of the paint cross-section reveals that the blue paint was laid directly on the ground layer, thus suggesting that it may relate to the previous paint scheme (Fig. 15). Liu Kang, while creating the present painting, decided to retain this fragment of the previous work; therefore it was included in the study. Based on the SEM–EDS and PLM analysis of the paint from the violet fabric in Nude, it is possible to conclude that the mixture contains ultramarine with yellow iron oxide-containing pigment and organic red. Iron oxide pigment was identified with PLM by anisotropic yellow and brown particles with high refractive index. Organic red can be distinguished from the other reds with PLM by its unique low refractive index; however, a full identi- fication of the organic red pigment is needed. The pres- ence of Zn and the analogous location of Ba to that of S may indicate the use of zinc white—identified with PLM and barium white extender—which could be assigned to an organic red [16]. In the same painting, the dark-blue shadows of the folds of the green background were painted mainly with a mixture of ultramarine, viridian, yellow iron oxide, zinc and barium whites. Fig. 7 Details of Nude: a, c, e photographed in raking light; b, d, f photographed employing RTI technique. Both imaging techniques reveal texture details corresponding to the earlier painted composition Page 10 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 Green paints The green shrubs painted above the fence in Zuo La Lu are imaged in IRFC partially violet and purple, sug- gesting a complex paint mixture (Fig.  11). The MA-XRF recorded strong Cr- and Ba-signals, which could sug- gest the presence of Cr-containing green and/or yellow pigments (Fig.  4). The SEM–EDS and PLM identified a mixture of viridian and ultramarine (both appear pur- ple in the IRFC), Prussian blue (responsible for partial violet imaging in the IRFC), lead white and cadmium yellow. Cadmium yellow was characterised by strong Cd- and S-signals, recorded with SEM–EDS (Fig. 16) and PLM observation (yellow, anisotropic particles with high refractive index turn green in crossed polarized filters). The intensity of SEM–EDS peaks of Zn and Ba may sug- gest a presence of zinc and barium whites or lithopone but they also can be attributed to the light cadmium yel- low commonly extended with barium white and called cadmopone [17]. Paint cross-section microphotogra- phy (Fig.  17) shows another layer beneath the top green that consists of clusters of not properly mixed yellow and green paints. The SEM–EDS analysis of the yellow (Fig.  18) and green (Fig.  19) clusters and elemental dis- tribution maps (Fig.  20) of the entire sample indicate a strong Pb-, Ca- and Cr-signals, suggesting a presence of Cr-containing yellow and green pigments with possible extenders. Hermann Kühn and Mary Curran mention that chrome yellow may have extenders such as barium white, gypsum or kaolin [18], while calcium chromate was also used as an admixture [18]. Although pigments identified beneath the top layer of green paint provided some information about the paint mixture, it is unclear whether this layer is part of the current composition build-up or belongs to the underlying painting. In Nude, the green curtain behind the model was vis- ualised with MA-XRF distribution maps of Cr, Ba, Sr, S and Zn (Fig.  9), while IRFC imaged the area in purple (Fig.  14). Although both results indicated a probable use of Cr-containing green and yellow pigments, a tur- quoise hue of the green paint suggested that blue could have been added as well. This observation was further confirmed by the identification of viridian and ultrama- rine with SEM–EDS and PLM (Fig.  21). The artist prob- ably modified a green colour by adding strontium yellow (distinct large needles are visible in PLM) and brightened it with zinc and barium whites; however, strong Ba-, Zn- and Cr-signals would also account for the presence of other Cr-containing yellow pigments, which were not detected with PLM but cannot be excluded [18]. Four fragments of green paint along the bottom, top, left and right edges of Nude are part of the hidden paint- ing (Fig.  6). Liu Kang did not intend to cover the earlier artwork while painting Nude, therefore the green paint fragments are included in this study. The MA-XRF ele- mental distribution maps (Fig. 9) showed that these green paint fragments consist of several elements that could be made up of Cr-containing green and yellow pigments identified by SEM–EDS and PLM as viridian, stron- tium and chrome yellow (the particles between crossed polarized filters appear as tiny rods with high refractive index). The source of other elements like, Al, S, Ca and Ba, is difficult to pinpoint as their presence may be due to a number of materials, such as extenders for chrome yellow [18]; although these additions were not identified with PLM, they cannot be excluded. Admixtures of ultra- marine and Prussian blue were also identified with SEM– EDS and PLM. The green paint sample from the right edge contains a very high concentration of Cr, which was assigned to viridian with SEM–EDS and PLM. Thus, the elemental analyses are consistent with the IRFC image (Fig.  14), indicating that viridian and ultramarine are responsible for the purple appearance, and the admixture of Prussian blue contributes to the violet appearance. All fragments of green paint were brightened with zinc white, identified with SEM–EDS and PLM. Yellow and brown paints In Zuo La Lu, different hues of yellow paint appear on the house wall, windows and road while brown was used for the roof and fence tiles. In Nude, yellow and brown were used for the flesh tones rendering and outlining the model’s body. These parts of the paintings are imaged with different hues of yellow-green in the IRFC (Figs. 11, 14) and are well visualised with the MA-XRF Fe dis- tribution maps (Fig.  4, 9), suggesting the use of ferrous Fig. 8 The XRR image of Nude remains inconclusive; however, it suggests that the unveiled composition was painted in the horizontal orientation and that there might be shrubs or other greenery on the left side of the painting, where the scratching marks were noticed Page 11 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 Fig. 9 Visible light image and MA-XRF maps of Nude showing the distribution of the detected elements. The greyscale corresponds to the intensity of the signal of each element: white equals high intensity, black means low intensity. The distribution map of Ca indicates areas of later conservation infills. The distribution map of Pb corresponds mainly to the underlying composition and its impastos recorded with RTI and XRR, except for the Pb-signal from the model’s face, which links directly with the final composition Fig. 10 Close-up of the model’s face imaged by means of: a raking light photography; b RTI; c XRR; d MA-XRF Pb-distribution map. The Pb-signal from model’s face does not correlate with a thick brushwork recoded with raking light photography, RTI and XRR Page 12 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 pigment(s). The SEM–EDS and PLM identified them as yellow and brown iron oxides. In addition, traces of As were detected with SEM–EDS in the areas with a higher concentration of Fe, indicating a natural origin of iron oxide pigments [19]. The sources of Pb, Ca and Ba are difficult to determine as these elements co-exist naturally with iron oxides [20], but together with Cr, which is also present in the paint samples, they can make up chrome yellow, confirmed in PLM and other Cr-containing yel- low pigment(s) not identified with PLM. However, it is known that ochres had been enhanced during the manu- facturing process by a small addition of chrome yellow, [18, 20], which can also have its own extenders, such as barium white, gypsum and kaolin, and may be present in the paint samples [18]. In Zuo La Lu, an addition of strontium yellow is suspected in the yellow and brown paints, based on the SEM–EDS Sr-signal, while the pres- ence of Ca and P in the brown paint may indicate the admixture of bone black. In Nude, the model’s flesh tone was mainly achieved by mixing yellow iron oxide with zinc white. Traces of Pb, Cr and Sr may suggest low con- centration of chrome yellow and contamination with of strontium yellow. Interestingly, the MA-XRF scan (Fig. 9) reveals a strong signal from Pb and S, present in the fore- head, right cheek and chin, suggesting the use of a Pb- containing paint at an earlier painting stage, and covered later by a thick application of a Zn-containing paint. Fig. 11 Infrared false-colour image of Zuo La Lu Fig. 12 Close-up of the detail of the blue street sign from Zuo La Lu and MA-XRF maps. The distribution of the three main elements, Fe, Ba, Pb, is shown. Fe-signal relates to the Prussian blue later identified with SEM–EDS and PLM. The greyscale corresponds to the intensity of the signal of each element: white equals high intensity, black means low intensity Page 13 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 Red and pink paints Red paint from the roof of the smaller house in Zuo La Lu probably contains a red iron oxide pigment (aniso- tropic and uniform red particles between polarized filters with high refractive index) with the admixture of chrome yellow. Other Cr-containing yellow pigment(s), although not identified with PLM, cannot be excluded. In Nude, red paint was used for the definition of the model’s lips. Based on SEM–EDS and PLM, it is probably composed of red iron oxide, organic red, an admixture of strontium yellow and zinc white. Strong MA-XRF and SEM–EDS signals of Ba and S may suggest the presence of barium white extender for organic red. Based on the MA-XRF, SEM–EDS and PLM analysis of the pink curtain, I deduce that the area consists mainly of several elements that could be assigned to strontium yellow, yellow iron oxide, zinc and barium whites and chrome yellow. The PLM allowed the identification of an organic red, which would be consistent with the yellow colour in the IRFC image. Although other red pigments are also imaged yellow in the IRFC, none of them was detected with the instrumental methods; nonetheless, further analyses are required to identify the red pigment. Black paints The black paint from the tree branches in Zuo La Lu is characterised by the strong Fe-signal recorded by MA- XRF and SEM–EDS. The detection of Fe is usually related to both the presence of iron oxide pigments and Prussian blue, which was further identified with PLM. A presence of a small admixture of bone black is possible, based on the SEM–EDS detection of Ca- and P-signals in the paint sample and PLM observation (anisotropic grey and black particles). The additional presence of Pb, Ba and S can suggest the use of lead and barium whites. Fig. 13 Prussian blue particles from sample 4 taken from blue street sign from Zuo La Lu photographed in transmitted polarized (a) and with Chelsea filter (b) Fig. 14 Infrared false-colour image of Nude Fig. 15 Cross-section of sample 9 from Nude. The image shows that the blue paint was laid directly on the ground layer, thus suggesting that it may relate to the previous paint scheme Page 14 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 The model’s black hair in Nude is imaged black but with a warm, reddish hue in the IRFC, suggesting that the black colour was obtained by mixing several pig- ments. This information was found relevant with the SEM–EDS results where elements characteristic for bone black, ultramarine and viridian were detected and iden- tified later with PLM. The yellow iron oxide-containing pigment with a possible addition of zinc and barium whites were found in the mixture as well. White paints In both paintings, Liu Kang did not apply a pure white paint; however, white appears in mixtures with other pig- ments already identified. It is quite clear that lead white is predominant in Zuo La Lu and appears in mixtures with zinc and barium whites. In Nude, the artist preferentially used zinc and barium whites; lead white appears only on the model’s face and was clearly visualised with MA-XRF scanning. Conclusions The analytical investigations carried out in this study proved to be complementary and gave insights into the pigments used by Liu Kang in the paintings represent- ing his two early and distinct artistic phases—Paris and Shanghai. The MA-XRF scanning provided an opportu- nity to visualise the distribution of elements indicative of pigments; however, it didn’t allow the pigments asso- ciated with the underlying paintings to be fully char- acterised. Although the IRFC imaging did not provide conclusive results, it proved to be a useful tool for the tentative identification of the pigments and the selec- tion of potential sampling areas for the SEM–EDS and Fig. 16 SEM–EDS quantitative elemental analysis of the top green layer in sample 8 from Zuo La Lu. The spectra indicates elements that were assigned to viridian, ultramarine, Prussian blue, lead white and cadmium yellow. Cadmium yellow is characterised by strong Cd- and S-signals. The findings were correlated with PLM observations Fig. 17 Cross-section of sample 8 from Zuo La Lu. Layer 2 is characterised by clusters of green and yellow paint Page 15 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 PLM [8]. The provided results show that the majority of pigments used in both paintings are similar and include Prussian blue, ultramarine, viridian, strontium yellow, chrome yellow, cadmium yellow, iron oxides (yellow, brown and red), lead, zinc and barium whites. The ana- lytical methods also suggest the use of bone black and Fig. 18 SEM–EDS quantitative elemental analysis of yellow cluster in sample 8, layer 2 from Zuo La Lu. Cr-containing pigment with possible extenders can be attributed to the yellow paint Fig. 19 SEM–EDS quantitative elemental analysis of green cluster in sample 8, layer 2 from Zuo La Lu. The green paint probably contains Cr-based green and yellow pigments with possible extenders. The weak Cd-signal indicates a trace amount of cadmium yellow Page 16 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 organic red. Particularly interesting is the predominance of lead white in Zuo La Lu while zinc white was exten- sively used in Nude. A comparison of the ground layers also indicates the presence of a lead white admixture in Zuo La Lu while its absence in Nude may point to a char- acteristic difference between the two artistic phases, pos- sibly determined by the availability of materials. Fig. 20 SEM–EDS maps showing the distribution of the detected elements in sample 8 from Zuo La Lu. The greyscale corresponds to the intensity of the signal of each element: white equals high intensity, black means low intensity. Cadmium, which was assigned to cadmium yellow, is confined only to the upper layer while the second layer is characterised mainly by Ca, Pb and Cr Page 17 of 18Lizun Herit Sci (2020) 8:21 The combination of RTI, XRR and MA-XRF permitted the visualisation of the hidden canal house behind Zuo La Lu and allowed the detection of a discarded compo- sition, probably an outdoor view, which was later over- painted with the final image of Nude. The details of the compositions remain unknown; however, different ana- lytical techniques permitted the preliminary identifica- tion of some pigments used in the creation of the hidden paintings. The interpretation of the collected data highlighted some points that require further research. These aspects include the clarification of whether, other than chrome and strontium yellow, Cr-containing yellows were used; and of the characterisation of the organic red pigment from Nude. The fragmentary presence of the Pb-contain- ing pigment on the model’s face is particularly interesting and requires further analysis to fully identify the pigment composition in this area. The revelation of the two hid- den paintings creates an opportunity for further analysis to determine the composition details and the materi- als used. Extending the research over a broader group of paintings could determine whether the composition of the ground layers and the usage of lead white actually underwent an important transition after 1933. The iden- tification of the canvas supports and paint binding media used for these works was beyond the scope of this study and will be addressed in the next phase of the research. The study contributes to the knowledge on Liu Kang’s painting materials and habits. The results of this study may be interesting for conservators and art historians investi- gating the painting materials and techniques of this artist and other artists active during the same period. Abbreviations UVF: Ultraviolet fluorescence; UVR: Reflected ultraviolet; NIR: Near-infrared; IRFC: Infrared false-colour; RTI: Reflectance transformation imaging; XRR: X-ray radiography; MA-XRF: Macro X-ray fluorescence; SEM–EDS: Scanning electron microscope with energy dispersive spectroscopy; OM: Optical microscopy; PLM: Polarized light microscopy. Acknowledgements The author is grateful to Professor Jaroslaw Rogoz PhD at Nicolaus Copernicus University for reviewing this paper; the National Gallery Singapore for allowing him to analyse the paintings; the Heritage Conservation Centre for supporting this study; Gretchen Liu for sharing the Liu Kang’s family archival materials; Bruker Nano GmbH for lending the MA-XRF (M6 Jetstream) and facilitating the scanning; Kenneth Yeo Chye Whatt (Principal Radiographer from Division of Radiological Sciences of Singapore General Hospital); and Dr Steven Wong Bak Siew (Head and Senior Consultant from the Department of Radiology at Sengkang General Hospital) for facilitating the X-ray radiography; and Roger Lee (Assistant Painting Conservator from Heritage Conservation Centre) for his assistance at RTI. Authors’ contributions DL carried out the examination of the paintings, using technical photography, sampling, SEM–EDS and PLM analysis; provided the interpretation of the datasets; and wrote the manuscript. The author read and approved the final manuscript. Funding Not applicable. Availability of data and materials The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the author upon request. Competing interests Author declares that he has no competing interests. Received: 4 January 2020 Accepted: 5 February 2020 References 1. Liu K. Liu Kang drawn from life. Singapore: Singapore Art Museum; 2002. p. 102. 2. Kwok KC. Journeys: Liu Kang and his art = Yi cheng: Liu Kang qi ren qi yi. Singapore: National Arts Council; 2000. p. 49, 57. 3. Liu K. Western painting in Singapore in the last 45 years. In: Liu K, edi- tor. Liu Kang: essays on art & culture. Singapore: National Art Gallery; 2011. p. 231. 4. Sabapathy TK. Romance of art. 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Guide to highlight image capture. Cult Herit Imaging; 2013. http://cultu ralhe ritag eimag ing.org/What_We_ Offer /Downl oads/RTI_Hlt_Captu re_Guide _v2_0.pdf. Accessed 9 Oct 2019. 11. Schroer C, Bogart J, Mudge B, Lum M. Guide to highlight image process- ing. Cult Herit Imaging; 2011. http://cultu ralhe ritag eimag ing.org/What_ We_Offer /Downl oads/rtibu ilder /RTI_hlt_Proce ssing _Guide _v14_beta. pdf. Accessed 9 Oct 2019. 12. Schroer C, Bogart J, Mudge B, Lum M. Guide to RTIViewer. Cult Herit Imaging; 2013. http://cultu ralhe ritag eimag ing.org/What_We_Offer / Downl oads/rtivi ewer/RTIVi ewer_Guide _v1_1.pdf. Accessed 9 Oct 2019. 13. Matthias A, Pedroso JV, van Eikema Hommes M, Van der Snickt G, Tauber G, Blaas J, Haschke M, et al. A mobile instrument for in situ scanning macro-XRF investigation of historical paintings. J Anal At Spectrom. 2013;28(5):761–2. https ://doi.org/10.1039/C3JA3 0341A . 14. Mactaggart P, Mactaggart A. A pigment microscopist’s notebook, 7th rev. Sommerset; 1998. 15. Schalm O, Vanbiervliet L, Willems P, De Schepper P. Radiography of paint- ings: limitations of transmission radiography and exploration of emission radiography using phosphor imaging plates. Stud Conserv. 2014;59:10– 23. https ://doi.org/10.1179/20470 58413 Y.00000 00088 . 16. Feller RL. Barium sulfate—natural and synthetic. In: Feller RL, editor. Artists’ pigments: a handbook of their history and characteristics, vol. 1. Washington: National Gallery of Art; 1986. p. 47. 17. Fiedler I, Bayard MA. Cadmium yellows, oranges and reds. In: Feller RL, editor. Artists’ pigments: a handbook of their history and characteris- tics, vol. 1. Washington: National Gallery of Art; 1986. p. 65. 18. Kühn H, Curran M. Chrome yellow and other chromate pigments. In: Feller RL, editor. Artists’ pigments: a handbook of their history and char- acteristics, vol. 1. Washington: National Gallery of Art; 1986. p. 190, 196, 207, 201–7. 19. Manasse A, Mellini M. 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Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in pub- lished maps and institutional affiliations. https://doi.org/10.1186/2050-7445-2-8 https://doi.org/10.14568/cp2015006 https://doi.org/10.14568/cp2015006 http://culturalheritageimaging.org/What_We_Offer/Downloads/RTI_Hlt_Capture_Guide_v2_0.pdf http://culturalheritageimaging.org/What_We_Offer/Downloads/RTI_Hlt_Capture_Guide_v2_0.pdf http://culturalheritageimaging.org/What_We_Offer/Downloads/rtibuilder/RTI_hlt_Processing_Guide_v14_beta.pdf http://culturalheritageimaging.org/What_We_Offer/Downloads/rtibuilder/RTI_hlt_Processing_Guide_v14_beta.pdf http://culturalheritageimaging.org/What_We_Offer/Downloads/rtibuilder/RTI_hlt_Processing_Guide_v14_beta.pdf http://culturalheritageimaging.org/What_We_Offer/Downloads/rtiviewer/RTIViewer_Guide_v1_1.pdf http://culturalheritageimaging.org/What_We_Offer/Downloads/rtiviewer/RTIViewer_Guide_v1_1.pdf https://doi.org/10.1039/C3JA30341A https://doi.org/10.1179/2047058413Y.0000000088 https://doi.org/10.1127/0935-1221/2006/0018-0845 https://doi.org/10.1127/0935-1221/2006/0018-0845 A preliminary study of Liu Kang’s palette and the discovery and interpretation of hidden paint layers Abstract Introduction Methods Technical photography Reflectance transformation imaging X-ray radiography Macro X-ray fluorescence Optical microscopy and polarized light microscopy Scanning electron microscope with energy dispersive spectroscopy Samples Results and discussion Hidden painting beneath Zuo La Lu Hidden painting beneath Nude Ground layer Blue and violet paints Green paints Yellow and brown paints Red and pink paints Black paints White paints Conclusions Acknowledgements References work_eyttdmp5hba2dgjgj6ay2x5pna ---- <31363DB1E8BCAEC8A32E687770> 수번호 : #091005-004 수일자 : 2009년 10월 05일 심사완료일 : 2009년 11월 12일 교신 자 : 김석호, e-mail : ssuko@hanmail.net 큐비즘적 요소를 응용한 도자 조형 The Formative Ceramic Arts by Applying Expression of Cubism 김석호̇ * , 김승연 ** , 김승만 ** 목원 학교 미술 학 * , 홍익 학교 교양학부 ** Seok-Ho Kim(ssuko@hanmail.net) * , Seung-Yeon Kim(uli81@hanmail.net) ** , Seung-Man Kim(ksm840555@naver.com) ** 요약 의 도자 조형은 순수 조형사고에 의해 보다 신선하고 개성 인 조형물의 개념으로 넓게 확장되어가 고 있으며 다양한 요구에 의해 개성과 취향을 만족시킬 수 있는 디자인 개발이 이루어지고 있다. 이에 따라 본 연구에서는 우리의 생활 반에 정서 인 기여를 할 수 있는 조형물을 제시하고자 입체주의의 표 양상을 도입하는 과정에서 주어진 상을 복수시 으로 감지하고도 2차원 인 평면에 표 한 입체주의 시 회화의 한계를 넘어 입체감과 공간감의 표 을 해 조형 측면에서 근하여 제작하 다. 따라서 연구자는 작품을 제작하기에 앞서 20C 미술계의 커다란 환 이었던 입체주의의 표 양상과 도 의 역확장에 한 선이해가 요하다고 단되어 이에 한 근을 시도하 다. 의 연구를 통하여 기존개념에서 탈피해 새로운 에서 근해보니 창의 이며 실용성을 겸비한 개성 인 조형물로서 새 로운 가능성이 엿보 다. 이는 생활 속의 술로 도자 조형의 역을 확 시켜 연구 상으로서 도 의 한 분야가 될 수 있으리라 생각된다. ■ 중심어 :∣입체주의∣도자조형∣ Abstract Modern figurative work is designed to have more creativity and characteristic traits by pure thought of the formative ceramic arts. In compliance with the demand which is various the design development could be satisfied an individuality and a taste is become accomplished. In this view, this study looks over expressive aspect of Cubism to present partition as a independent formative ceramic arts is able to contribute emotionally to our whole lives. In this procedure, this work is produced to express a three-dimensional effect and a spatial effect, approaching a figurative side. This is to overcome the limitation of Cubism art expressed in a two-dimensional surface in spite of its multi-dimensional observation of a given object. Accordingly, this study tries approaching pre-understanding of expressive aspect of Cubism which was the important turning-point in 20c art and expansion of the modern ceramic art field before producing the work. This study shows the possibility to become a creative and practical ceramic art work, approaching the new point of view breaking from the established conception. Consequently, the field of ceramic art could be expanded to a part of modern ceramic art as an object of study in art of life. ■ keyword : ∣Cubism∣Multi-dimensional Observation∣Formative Ceramic∣ 큐비즘적 요소를 응용한 도자 조형 623 Ⅰ. 서 론 1. 연구목적 는 산업의 고도화로 인한 량생산체제하에서 획일 이며 비개성 인 환경의 지배를 받고 있다. 이러 한 에서 볼 때 인간성의 회복과 정서 환경을 조 성하기 한 방법으로써 인간과 한 계에 있는 실 내 환경은 보다 개성 이면서 정신 인 여유와 안락함 을 수 있도록 조성되어야 한다. 이러한 시 에서 입 체주의 시 회화의 자유롭고 활달한 감성을 도입하여 인의 다양한 표 욕구에 부응할 수 있는 새로운 디자인 모티 를 제시하고자 한다. 이 과정에서 주어진 상을 복수시 으로 감지하고도 2차원 인 평면에 표 한 입체주의 시 회화의 한계를 넘어서 입체감과 공 간감을 지닌 도재 조형물을 제작하여 다양한 각도에서 변화를 주고자 하는데 목표를 두고 있다. 본 연구에서 는 입체주의 작품의 표 양상을 도 의 표 역으로 끌어들여 작품창작에 한 가능성을 살펴보고 작품을 제작해 으로써 그 발 방향을 모색해보고 개발 연구 하고자한다. 2. 연구 방법 및 범위 본 연구는 문헌 조사를 통한 이론 배경연구와 그것 을 토 로 한 작품제작으로 구성되었다. 이론 배경으 로는 각종 문헌과 선행연구 결과물들을 통해 큐비즘의 개념과 문헌자료 그리고 박물 개인소장품으로 해 지는 실증 인 자료를 통해 큐비즘 회화의 선이나 구도 등 조형 인 특징을 분석하여 그 표 양상을 살펴보고 미술에 끼친 향까지 고찰해 보았다. 사람의 얼굴 형상을 주 소재로 하여 빠른 시각 인 달을 해 그 색상은 백매트유, 흑매트유. 투명유, 꽃유 그리고 벌화장토를 사용하여 간결하고 세련된 이미지를 표 하 다. 그리고 아래 부분에 구멍을 뚫어 철제 구조물 을 끼워 넣음으로써 다른 재료와의 조합도 함께 시도해 보았다. Ⅱ. 작품형성의 이론적 배경 1. 입체주의의 개념과 표현 가. 입체주의의 개념과 의의 20C 미술계의 커다란 환 이었던 입체주의(큐비즘 cubism)는 1908년부터 1914년 까지 랑스 리를 심으로 하여 유럽지역에 된 미술 신운동이다. 이 명칭은 1908년 마티스(Henri Matisse)가 라크 (Georges Braque)의 연작인 「에스타크 풍경」<도 1>이라는 입체주의 인 풍경화를 평가하면서 “이것은 작은 입방체(cube)일 뿐이다”라고 말한 것에서 연유했 다. 즉 큐비즘이란 용어는 인상주의를 비롯한 근 의 신운동이 일반에게 인정받지 못하자 그로 인한 경멸 이나 비난의 의미로 사용되었다. 입체주의는 세잔(Paul Cézanne)의 통 원근법의 무시와 상의 해부학 인 분해에서 아 리카 조각의 상징 인 단순화와 조형상 의 자율성을 그들의 서구 인 인식 안에서 수용하고 이시켰던 회화 명에서 비롯되었다. 1787년 칸트 (Immanuel Kant)는 그의 서 ‘순수이성비 ’에서 공 간과 시간의 정의를 엄격하게 규정지으면서 이를 철학 으로 규명하기 시작하 다. 그는 어떠한 직 이라도 모두 시간을 선험 조건으로 제하므로 시간이 공간 보다 우선한다고 하 다. 즉 공간을 생각할 수 없는 곳 에서는 시간은 폐지된다고 주장하 다. 략 1880~1914 년의 짧은 시간에 유럽에서 일어난 문화 사회 상황 은 빠른 속도로 변화하고 있었다. 그 에서도 1905년 아인슈타인(Albert Einstein)은 비공간의 시간 은 끝났다고 보는 특수상 성이론을 발표하여 칸트의 철학 인 연구 안을 자연과학 으로 해석함으로써 뒷 받침해 주었다. 그 원리에 의하면 천문학 거리를 포함 하는 공간속에서는 시간과 공간이 서로의 함수이며 시 간이 공간의 3차원에 포함된다고 하는 것이다. 공간 요소를 이루는 조형 술은 작품과 람자의 만남에서 형성되는 심리 시간성, 작품자체의 고유한 시간 그리 고 작품과 작가의 사이에서 일차 으로 끝나 버릴 수 있는 창조행 등 시간과 매우 한 계를 가지고 있기 때문에 공간과 시간을 분리하여 생각할 수 없다 [1]. 3차원의 정 인 개념에 시간이 부가된 4차원의 개 념은 입체 를 형성했으며, 유럽회화를 르네상스 이래 의 사실주의 통에서 해방시킨 회화 명으로 지칭되 한국콘텐츠학회논문지 '09 Vol. 9 No. 12624 고 있다. 나. 입체주의 작품의 표현 양상 19c말 이후로 격히 변화한 회화공간은 20c 큐비 즘의 태동과 함께 그 모습이 새로워졌다. 큐비즘 회화 태동은 그 기원을 세잔과 흑인 술에 두고 시작되었으 며 그 어떤 시 의 회화공간과 차별화된 획기 인 공간 의 표 을 시도하 다. 미술사에서 15세기 원근법을 제1의 명이라 한다면 제2의 명은 20C 큐비즘이라 할 수 있다. 르네상스 이래로 서구 회화의 바탕이 되어온 원근법은 2차원인 평면에 3차원의 물체를 그리는 기본이었다. 하지만 세 잔은 평면의 존재를 자연에서의 깊이와 질량에 한 자 신의 감각과 조화시키려고 하 고 그 결과 원근법의 괴가 수반되었다. 즉 큐비즘은 공간 악에 있어서 르 네상스 원근법이 무 지는 계기를 마련해 주었다[4]. 다른 특징은 상을 바라보는 시 의 복수화를 통한 분 해이다. 복수시 이란 방향성의 상실 즉, 여러 시 이 동시에 상을 악한다는 것으로 어떠한 시 도 인 시 이 될 수 없다는 제하에 상의 체 인 실체를 악하려 하 다. 시 의 다양성은 화면의 평면성을 강조한다. 그 결과 주어진 상을 복수시 으로 감지하고도 2차원 인 평 면에 유기 으로 통합된 4차원성을 표 하고자 할 때 에는 그 상은 왜곡되고 분해될 수밖에 없다. 즉 큐비 즘의 변형 수법은 이 게 필연 으로 이루어진 것이 다. 입체 는 사물을 단편으로 분할하여 면을 확장시키 는 방법을 사용하 는데 이 단편들은 화면의 수직면에 약간의 각도로 기울어져 수평, 사선, 수직의 기하학 형태로 결정화 된다. 그리고 이러한 단편들이 첩되고 공통 으로 첩된 부분을 양보하지 않으려 할 때 공간 차원의 모순에 직면하게 된다. 이를 해소하기 해 능동 으로 투명성이 부여되거나 단편들의 모서리가 서로 유출되어 해체됨으로써 불투명성을 띄기도 한다. 여기까지는 사물을 기하학 으로 표 한 분석 큐비 즘시 이며 지 까지 배제되었던 색채가 다시 사용되 어 평면 인 색면 구성과 사실 인 상 는 화면에 악보, 신문지, 벽지 등의 인쇄물을 붙이는 콜라주 (College), 피에콜 (Papiercolle) 기법이 사용된 종합 큐비즘시 가 형성되었다. 즉 분석 형태를 재구성 하여 상을 좀 더 알아보기 쉽도록 색 면으로 넓게 나 타내어 단순성과 역동성을 표 하 다. 2. 현대미술과 입체주의 가. 입체주의가 현대미술에 끼친 영향 리에서 시작된 입체주의는 유럽 체, 심지어 러시 아 회화에까지 되어 나갔다. 유럽에서 수많은 작가들이 이 양식으로 그림을 그리기 시작했고, 랑스 에서 발원한 입체주의를 기 로 새로운 양식들을 이끌 어냈다. 이러한 상은 회화에서만 나타난 것이 아니라 조각. 나아가 기하학 기본도형에 의존해서 건물을 지 었던 건축 부문에도 어느 정도 해당되었다. 입체주의 회화가 등장하고 곧바로 입체주의 조각도 함께 개되 었다. 입체주의 조각은 피카소의 조형 실험을 그 출발 으로 삼았다. 피카소는 스스로 화가라고 생각하고 있 었음에도 불구하고 계속 조각 작업에도 몰두했다. 피카 소는 이후 수년 동안 회화의 형상언어를 새롭게 발 시 키려 노력한 결과 콜라주를 생각해 냈는데 그 연장선상 에서 새로운 조형작품이 만들어지게 된다. 컨 캔버 스에 종이 조각을 붙이는 것 자체가 이미 평면 인 회 화의 2차원성을 넘어서는 일이다. 피카소는 다양한 소 재들을 사용하여 부조작품을 제작하 는데 이러한 발 은 당연한 논리 결과 다.<도 2,3>피카소에게 새로운 자극을 받은 것은 특히 이미 리 입체주의 내 에서 활동하고 있던 조각가들이었다. 그 에서 이몽 뒤샹-비용(Raymond Duchamp-Villon)은 양감과 부피 에 변화를 으로써 역학과 움직임이라는 새 주제들을 취해 역동성과 리듬감이 배어나오도록 하고 있다. <도 4> 아르키펭코(Alexandr Porfiryevich Archipenko)는 20 세기 작가들 가운데 가장 신 인 인물에 속한다. 그는 입체주의 단상들을 흡수하여 이것을 기 로 회화 와 조각의 결합체 즉 입체회화라는 분야를 발 시켰다. <도 5,6>입체 와 거의 동시에 리에 모습을 드러 낸 움베르토 보Umberto Boccion(1882~1916) 이탈리아, 조각가 ․ 화가 니(Umberto Boccioni)와 같은 미 큐비즘적 요소를 응용한 도자 조형 625 래 작가들 역시 조각 작업을 했고 그들의 주제인 움 직임ㆍ리듬ㆍ역학 들을 묘사하기 해 동시성이 스며 든 새로운 양태의 작품을 만들었다. 그러나 이들이 설 정한 목표는 상당히 달랐다. 미래 작가들은 애 부터 사회 통과 상아탑 인 것 일체와 싸우기 해 나섰 다.<도 7>[10] 이와 같은 담한 요구를 조형 으로 실 한 작품들이 속속 뒤따랐으며 20세기의 구성 조 형이라 불리는 경향은 미술의 새로운 이해의 길을 마련 해 오늘날에 이르게 했다. 참고도판 <도판 1> 브라크,「에스타크풍경」,1908 <도판 2> 보초니, 「공간속에서 일회적으로 지나가는 연속 형태물」, 1913 <도판 3> 뒤샹-비용 「거대한 말」, 1914 <도판 4> 피카소 「압생트 술잔」, 1914 <도판 5> 피카소 「구성:바이올 린」, 1915 <도판 6> 아르키펭코 「권투시합」, 1914 <도판 7> 아르키펭코 「두 여인」, 1920 나. 현대 도예개념의 변화 도 의 양상은 한 지역에만 국한된 것이 아니라 반 인 경향이라고 할 수 있으며 크게 세부분으로 나 수 있다. 통 인 방법으로 작업하고 실생활에 활 용되는 실용 이고 기능 인 도자, 통 인 방법으로 작업하고 있으나 기능 인 면보다 장식 인 면에 우 를 둔 독특하고 섬세한 도자 그리고 기물의 형태를 벗 어나 조각화한 역으로 토가 표 의 상 수단이 되고 형태에 인 개념을 부가하여 시각 인 조형 물로 인식되는 도자이다[25]. 이러한 도 의 발생 과 형성에 지배 향력을 끼친 사건으로 크게 세 가 지가 있다. 빅토리아 시 의 미술공 운동, 버나드 리치 (Bernard Howell Leach)에 의한 국과 일본의 미술공 철학의 향 그리고 1950~60년 미국을 심으로 발표된 순수 술의 형식으로서의 도 를 들 수 있다[6]. 특히 도자 술의 진 인 환기로 도자 술을 순수 술 역으로 규정지을 수 있는 본격 인 양상들은 1945년에서부터 1965년까지로 본다. 이 시 의 작품들 은 도자 조각이 주된 경향을 이루면서 통 인 제작방 식과는 다른 새로운 창작의 시발 이 되는 시기이다. 먼 미국에서는 추상표 주의 도 가들이 심이 되 었으며, 유럽에서는 조각가, 화가들이 공방 도 가들과 업을 통해 작품을 제작했고, 일본에서는 도 가 들이 출연하 다. 미국, 유럽, 일본에서 개된 도자 술의 진 변환은 문화 시 배경이 다른 지역 인 차이 을 보이지만 공통 으로 통을 극복하여 새 로운 양식을 추구하는 양상으로 개된다. 20세기 반에 이르자 술가들은 유행처럼 도 작 업에 빠져들었고 이 의 단순한 근에서 벗어나 토 를 이용하여 다양한 실험을 하는 등 보다 극 인 시 도를 하게 되었다. 피카소의 유희정신을 바탕으로 한 도 작품<도 9>, 샤갈(Marc Chagall)의 몽상 이며 시 인 도자<도 10>, 제의 기계시 의 미학을 통 한 도자 조각과 부조<도 11>, 폰타나(Lucio Fontana)의 공간개념을 바탕으로 한 도자 오 제<도 12>, 미로(Joan Miró)의 조각 오 제와 특유의 기호 와 선으로 장식된 도자벽화<도 13>, 그리고 실험 술집단인 코 라(COBRA)그룹의 표 주의 이고 한국콘텐츠학회논문지 '09 Vol. 9 No. 12626 실주의 인 도자기 오 제<도 14> 등 많은 술가들 이 그들의 개성 미의식이 투 된 도 작품을 남겼다. 이것은 통을 극복하고 자신의 양식을 추구하려는 의 도 가들에게 큰 호응을 얻었다[9]. 참고도판 <도판 8> 후앙 미로 「다색의 얼굴」, 1946 <도판 9> 파블로 피카소 「콘도르」, 1947 <도판 10> 페르낭 레제 「노란사과」, 1951 <도판 11> 아스거 요른 「무제」, 1954 <도판 12> 마르크 샤갈 「여인과 꽃」, 1962 <도판 13> 루치오 폰타나 「무제」, 1968 1950년 는 미국 회화와 같이 미국 도자에서도 추상 미술의 향으로 인한 신의 시기 다. 이 기간은 오 랫동안 미국 도 가들이 유럽의 도자와 디자인의 양식 과 가치에 속박되었던 구속을 탈피하여 자체 내의 역량 을 발견하고 키워나간 시기 다. 새로운 통을 수립 하고자하는 모색기에 국의 도 가인 버나드 리치는 동서양의 안내자로 불릴 정도로 서로 간에 도자 술의 조화와 결합을 해 노력한 도 작가이다. <도 15> 그는 과거로부터 이어져 내려오는 미에 한 일 된 기 을 지니지 못하는 서구의 새로운 통을 수립하기 해서는 동서 문화를 통합시키는 일이 실히 요청된다 고 주장하 다[9]. 리치의 이론에 힘입어 더욱 보편화된 공방도 는 1940년 후반에 이르러 두 가지 방향으로 개되었다. 하나는 리치의 향력에 힘입은 실용도자 기들로 도공의 장인 통에 을 둔 것이고 다른 하나는 피카소와 같은 술가들의 도 작품과 그 향 을 받아 실험 이고 창의 으로 근하여 조각 성격 이 강한 작품들이다[7]. 도 태동은 로스앤젤 스 의 피터 볼커스(Peter Voulkos)의 자유분방한 지도하에 발생한 오티스 그룹(Otis Art Institute)을 통해 나타나 고 있으며 이들은 도자의 개념에 한 변역을 시도하 다. 참고도판 <도판 14> 버나드 리치 「전투」, 1950 <도판 15> 피터 볼커스 「5,000 피트」, 1958 <도판 16> 피터 볼커스 「갈라스 바위」1959-61 <도판 17> 루디 오티오 「구성」, 1961 <도판 18> 존 메이슨 「창 형태」, 1963 <도판 19> 케네스 프라이스 「메아리」, 1997 이후 피터 볼커스<도 16,17>, 존 메이슨(John Mason)<도 18>, 루디 오티오(Rudy Autio)<도 19>, 네스 라이스(Kenneth Preiss)<도 20>등이 큐비즘적 요소를 응용한 도자 조형 627 주축이 되어 자신의 도자언어를 성숙시키면서 이때에 이르러 미국 도자는 새로운 면모의 발 기로 어들게 된다. 이들이 공통 으로 추구했던 것은 공 에 한 습으로부터 자유로워진 해방감과 자유에 의한 창작 활동이었다. 표면처리에서 나타나는 유희성, 그리고 형 태와 색체, 직업자체의 유희는 그들 작품의 근본미 학이라 할 수 있으며 이들의 사고를 이어 받은 도 가 들에게 계속해 이어져 오고 있다. 조각 인 표 을 한 토의 응용에 해 새로운 세계를 개척해나가던 볼 커스는 1955년부터 어셈블리지의 개념과 방법들을 수 용하 고 에폭시(epoxy)를 사용하여 분리된 유니트 (unit)들로 용기들을 조립하기 시작했다. 결국 형태 인 면에 있어서 담을 수 있는 공간의 역할을 하는 볼륨으 로서의 항아리를 덜 다루게 되었고 주로 매스로서의 항 아리를 제작하 다[19]. 이러한 과정들을 통하여 알 수 있는 것은 토의 개념 혹은 도자의 개념에 한 완 한 변화를 추구하는 가운데 나타나고 있는 새로운 방식 에 의한 제작방법들이다. Ⅲ. 작품연구 1. 디자인의도 사람의 얼굴 형상을 주 소재로 하여 빠른 시각 인 달을 해 간결하게 이미지화하 다. 여기에 시 의 복수화를 통해 상을 분해한 입체주의의 표 양상을 도입하여 신선하고 지루하지 않도록 유도하 다. 하지 만 주어진 상을 복수시 으로 감지하고도 2차원 인 평면에 표 한 입체주의 시 회화와는 달리 입체감과 공간감을 지닌 조형물로 제작하여 다양한 각도에서 변 화를 주고자하 으며 표면처리도 다양한 색상을 사용 한 입체주의시 회화와 같이 밝고 화려하게 연출하 다. 기존에는 도자의 회화 인 표 을 해 주로 도 에 그림을 그리는 소극 인 방법이 선택되었다. 여기에 서 토는 주원료라기보다 회화에서의 캔버스의 역할 을 신할 뿐이었다. 하지만 본인은 붓 없이도 도자의 주원료인 토를 붓으로 용하여 극 인 방법으로 마치 그림을 보는듯한 효과를 주고자한다. 2. 제작과정 곡선이 많은 본인의 작품에는 내구성이 강하고 력 이 뛰어나 다양한 형태로 성형하기 용이한 조합토가 합하 다. 성형과정에서 도 으로 일부분을 막아 투시 와 비투시의 공간 비 효과를 의도하여 2차원 인 평 면을 3차원 인 공간감을 가진 덩어리 형태로 입체 으로 보이도록 유도하 다. 건조시에는 이어붙인 부분 을 비닐로 워 건조시간을 다른 부분보다 비교 오래 걸리게 함으로써 그 문제를 해결할 수 있었다. 거친 표 면과 그 표면에 유약 착을 해 1차 소성 후 작품의 표면에 벌화장토를 스펀지로 두드려 발라주고 백매 트유, 흑매트유. 투명유, 꽃유를 분무기로 뿌려 시유 하 다. 건조시킨 작품은 0.3루베 기 가마에서 10시간 동안 800℃로 1차 소성하 다. 시유단계를 거친 후 1250℃로 14시간 동안 2차 소성하 으며 일부작품은 3 차 소성까지 하 다. 마지막으로 철 에 산볼트를 안 하게 용 시킨 후 미리 뚫어 작품 하단의 구멍에 맞춰 트로 고정시켜주었다. 3. 작품사진 작품명 작품사진 He is 조합토, 흑매트유, 1250℃ 산화(2차소성), 820×250×620 mm She is 조합토, 눈꽃유, 1250℃ 산화 (2차소성), 820×250×620 mm 소년.. 소녀를 만나다 조합토, 백매트유+안료, 1250℃ 산화 (2차소성), 1000×250×800 mm 한국콘텐츠학회논문지 '09 Vol. 9 No. 12628 작품명 작품사진 꿈꾸는 여인 조합토, 백매트유+안료, 1250℃ 산화 (2차소성), 700×200×800 mm coffee & wine 조합토, 초벌화장토, 투명유+안료, 1250℃ 산화 (2차소성), 710×300×800 mm my parents 조합토, 초벌화장토, 흑유, 1250℃ 산화 (2차소성), 500×300×780 mm we're the one 조합토, 백매트유, 던컨유, 1250℃ 산화소성, 540×100×560 (mm) Ⅳ. 결론 본 연구에서 연구자는 작품 표 방법에 있어서 개인 인 독창성과 표 성을 불어넣어 술성을 가미하 다는 에서 새로운 도자조형 소재로서의 가능성을 제 시하고자 하 다. 형태를 변화시켜 무한한 조형성을 추 구하 고 다양한 기능을 할 수 있도록 그 의미를 확 해석해 보았으며 환경과의 조화 역시 작품 디자인에 있 어서 주요 건이었다. 첫째, 티션은 본래 공간을 차 단하고 구획하는 본연의 역할에서 꽂이나 선반으로의 부가 인 역할을 함으로써 그 개념의 의미가 확장, 통 합되었다. 둘째, 티션을 제작함에 환경과의 조화가 가 장 요하 으며 그 이 작품 디자인에 있어서의 큰 어려움이었다. 셋째, 흙의 내열성과 소성과정에의 문제 로 인해 형 티션 제작에의 어려움은 분리하여 소성 한 후 산 볼트로 이어 그 규모를 크게 제작하여 해결 책을 찾을 수 있었다. 넷째, 아쉬운 은 이동을 해 작품을 분리할 때 손의 험이 크며 산볼트에 고정 시키는 과정이 번거롭다는 이었다. 이는 앞으로 연구 개발을 통해 개선되어야 할 문제 이다. 이상에서와 같이 본 연구는 우리의 생활 환경 곳곳에 조형물을 제작하여 그 안에서 생활하는 사람들로 하여 이제껏 경험하지 못했던 새로운 미 즐거움을 주는 것이 주된 목 이다. 작품 제작에 있어서 기존개념에서 탈피한 새로운 에서의 근은 기발하고 창의 인 작품의 개발로 이어지고 그 발 가능성은 무궁무진하 다. 그 결과 탄생한 작품들이 각박하고 고단한 사 회를 살아가는 우리들에게 미 즐거움과 기능 편리 함을 제공하기를 기 한다. 참 고 문 헌 [1] 김 숙, 「모더니즘에 나타난 시간성과 공간성」, 충남 학교 학원 석사학 논문, 1994. [2] 신상호 『 도 -미래를 향한 움직임』, 홍익 학교 도 연구소, 1996. [3] 안연희, 『 미술사 』, 서울: 미진사, 1999. [4] 오 수, 『서양근 회화사』, 서울: 일지사, 1976 큐비즘적 요소를 응용한 도자 조형 629 [5] 임두빈, 『한 권으로 보는 서양미술사 이야기』, 서울: 가람기획, 2003 [6] Clark, Garth. 신 석 역, 『도자 술의 새로운 시 각』, 서울: 미진사, 1986. [7] Cooper, Emmanuel. Ten Thousand Years of Pottery. Pennysylvania University of Pennysylvania Press, 2000. [8] Cox, Neil. 천수원 역,『입체주의』, 주: 한길아 트, 2003. [9] De Waal, Edmund. activist 20th Century Ceramics, New York: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2003. [10] Duchting, Hajo. 김재웅 역, 『(어떻게 이해할 까?) 입체주의』, 서울: 미술문화, 2003. [11] Durozoi, Gerard. 곽동 역, 『세계 미술사 』, 지편, 2008. [12] E.H, Gombrich. 백승길ㆍ이종숭 역, 『서양미술 사』, 서울: 경, 2003. [13] Gleize, Albert. 『큐비즘』, 서울: 과학기술, 1995. [14] Golding, John. 황지우 역, 『큐비즘』, 서울: 열 화당, 1988. [15] HH, Arnason.『 미술사』,형설출 사, 1979. [16] Naylor, Gillian. 박연실 역,『미술공 운동』, 서 울: 창미, 1995. [17] Strickland, Carol. 김호경 역, 『클릭, 서양미술 사』, 서울: 경, 2000. [18] 강재 , 「 도 의 장르 해체 경향에 한 연 구」, 홍익 학교 학원 석사학 논문, 2007. [19] 모인순, 『 토 명- 술언어로의 환』, 보문 당, 1995. [20] 김문정, 「후기 도 의 탈근 주의 시각 과 기표해체에 한 연구」, 홍익 학교 학원 석사학 논문, 2004. [21] 박승순, 「큐비즘이 미술에 끼친 향」, 홍 익 학교교육 학원 석사학 논문, 1988. [22] 엄 용, 「추상 표 주의 도조의 미술사 , 환경 동인과 특성에 한 연구」, 원 학교 학 원 박사학 논문, 2007. [23] 이인숙, 「피카소의 입체주의 특성에 한 연 구」, 홍익 학교교육 학원 석사학 논문, 1987. [24] 정계옥, 「 블로 피카소의 회화에 한 연구」, 홍익 학교교육 학원 석사학 논문, 1987. [25] 정담순, 「 토조형물에서 추상성 연구」, 단국 학교 논문집, 1980 [26] 홍 숙, 「20C 조각에 있어서의 입체주의」, 홍익 학교 학원 석사학 논문,1984 저 자 소 개 김 석 호(Seok-Ho Kim) 정회원 ▪1998년 6월 : 홍익 학교 학원 미술학석사 ▪2008년 3월 ~ 재 : 목원 학 교 디자인학부 도자디자인과 교 수 < 심분야> : 제품디자인, 공 문화 마 김 승 연(Seung-Yeon Kim) 정회원 ▪2009년 8월 : 홍익 학교 산업 학원(미술학석사) ▪2009년 ~ 재 : 홍익 학교 교 양학부 강사 < 심분야> : 제품디자인, 공 문화 마 김 승 만(Seung-Man Kim) 정회원 ▪2008년 2월 : 단국 학교 디자인 학원 미술학석사 ▪2008 3월 ~ 재 : 홍익 학교 교양학부 강사 < 심분야> : 제품디자인, 공 문화 마 << /ASCII85EncodePages false /AllowTransparency false /AutoPositionEPSFiles true /AutoRotatePages /All /Binding /Left /CalGrayProfile (Dot Gain 20%) /CalRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CalCMYKProfile (U.S. Web Coated \050SWOP\051 v2) /sRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CannotEmbedFontPolicy /Warning /CompatibilityLevel 1.4 /CompressObjects /Tags /CompressPages true /ConvertImagesToIndexed true /PassThroughJPEGImages true /CreateJDFFile false /CreateJobTicket false /DefaultRenderingIntent /Default /DetectBlends true /ColorConversionStrategy /LeaveColorUnchanged /DoThumbnails false /EmbedAllFonts true /EmbedJobOptions true /DSCReportingLevel 0 /EmitDSCWarnings false /EndPage -1 /ImageMemory 1048576 /LockDistillerParams false /MaxSubsetPct 100 /Optimize true /OPM 1 /ParseDSCComments true /ParseDSCCommentsForDocInfo true /PreserveCopyPage true /PreserveEPSInfo true /PreserveHalftoneInfo false /PreserveOPIComments false /PreserveOverprintSettings true /StartPage 1 /SubsetFonts true /TransferFunctionInfo /Apply /UCRandBGInfo /Preserve /UsePrologue false /ColorSettingsFile () /AlwaysEmbed [ true ] /NeverEmbed [ true ] /AntiAliasColorImages false /DownsampleColorImages true /ColorImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /ColorImageResolution 300 /ColorImageDepth -1 /ColorImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeColorImages true /ColorImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterColorImages true /ColorImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /ColorACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /ColorImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000ColorACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000ColorImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasGrayImages false /DownsampleGrayImages true /GrayImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /GrayImageResolution 300 /GrayImageDepth -1 /GrayImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeGrayImages true /GrayImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterGrayImages true /GrayImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /GrayACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /GrayImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000GrayACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000GrayImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasMonoImages false /DownsampleMonoImages true /MonoImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /MonoImageResolution 1200 /MonoImageDepth -1 /MonoImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeMonoImages true /MonoImageFilter /CCITTFaxEncode /MonoImageDict << /K -1 >> /AllowPSXObjects false /PDFX1aCheck false /PDFX3Check false /PDFXCompliantPDFOnly false /PDFXNoTrimBoxError true /PDFXTrimBoxToMediaBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXSetBleedBoxToMediaBox true /PDFXBleedBoxToTrimBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfile () /PDFXOutputCondition () /PDFXRegistryName (http://www.color.org) /PDFXTrapped /Unknown /Description << /FRA /ENU (Use these settings to create PDF documents with higher image resolution for improved printing quality. The PDF documents can be opened with Acrobat and Reader 5.0 and later.) /JPN /DEU /PTB /DAN /NLD /ESP /SUO /ITA /NOR /SVE /KOR /CHS /CHT >> >> setdistillerparams << /HWResolution [2400 2400] /PageSize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice work_ezxjbsudfbb2jockr54wcnhigi ---- CRJ172&3.vp Creative Cognitive Process of Art Making: A Field Study of a Traditional Chinese Ink Painter Sawako Yokochi and Takeshi Okada Nagoya University ABSTRACT: This study investigated the drawing pro- cesses of a Chinese ink painter through field observa- tion, interviews, and a field experiment. Compared to many studies using a single method such as interview only, this multimethod study enabled us to capture the creative processes from various perspectives. We ob- served processes of drawing in a temple and asked the painter to draw 16 pictures in a field experiment (8 cre- ated from random lines that the audience drew and 8 created on blank paper). We found that (a) the painter seemed to gradually form a global image of the draw- ing as he drew each part one by one, (b) lines that the audience drew seemed to create new constraints for his drawing and forced him to create a new style of pic- tures, and (c) the painter moved his brush in the air be- fore actually drawing lines on the paper. This hand movement seems to have one of the following func- tions: positioning (where to draw), rehearsal (how to draw), and image generation (what to draw). How do artists create artwork? When artists were asked about how images and concepts in their artwork had been generated, the artists told us that they did not know what happened in their minds while they were creating the works, and some of them said, “New ideas and images suddenly fall from the sky.” Therefore, art- ists have seemed to believe that artistic creations are mystic phenomena. In contrast, psychologists (e.g., Gruber, 1979; Weisberg, 1986) claimed that accumula- tion of creative activities was necessary for artists and scientists to generate new ideas and concepts. Citing experiences of various types of artists, composers, po- ets, and so on, Weisberg (1986) suggested that the cre- ative leap is based on artists’ existing works, and that ordinary cognitive processes underline the sudden emergence of images or concepts. To test this claim, it is necessary to capture online processes while artists make artwork. Although there have been some studies with related interests, the great majority of psychological research on artistic creation has not focused on the artists’ actual working processes in detail. For example, some studies have attempted to model the cognitive, affective, behavioral, and contex- tual factors associated with the making of a work of art (e.g., Cawelti, Rappaport, & Wood, 1992; Glueck, Ernst, & Unger, 2002; Jones, Runco, Dorman, & Freeland, 1997; Kay, 1991; Mace & Ward, 2002; Stohs, 1991). Also, studies of creative individuals in various domains have focused on their products and self-report to embrace their creative breakthroughs (e.g., Franklin, 1989; Gardner, 1993; Raina, 1997; Wallace & Gruber, 1989). Although these studies have focused on real art- ists, they have used techniques such as interviewing to understand what artists actually do during the creation, while neglecting online methods such as observation. Other studies of artists (e.g., Eindhoven & Vinacke, 1952; Israeli, 1981; Patrick, 1937) could not reveal cre- ative cognitive processes in detail either. For example, Eindhoven and Vinacke (1952) compared the behavior of real artists versus nonartists during painting of an il- Creativity Research Journal 2005, Vol. 17, No. 2 & 3, 241–255 Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Creativity Research Journal 241 This study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid of Scientific Research 2000–2001, Exploratory Research 12871017, from the Japan Soci- ety for the Promotion of Science to the second author. Because this field study was carried out over 4 years, we indeed want to show gratitude to Mr. K for his participation and coopera- tion. We also thank Kevin Crowley and many other colleagues and graduate students who gave us useful comments on earlier drafts or at conference presentations. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Takeshi Okada, Graduate School of Education and Human Develop- ment, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, 464–8601, Japan. E-mail: j46006a@cc.nagoya-u.ac.jp or to Sawako Yokochi, E-mail: t74sawa@interlink.or.jp lustration for a poem. They suggested that the artists re- structured their final products more than nonartists did. However, these studies are relatively old, predating the information-processing revolution, which had since oc- curred in the cognitive psychology field. Thus, results of the studies remained conjectural because they could not capture whole processes of creation using presently available technology such as video cameras, and ad- vanced analytical methods. More recently, Israeli (1981) studied artistic decision making through inter- views, examination of sketchbooks, notes and finished works, and observation. Although this study character- ized the types of decision making from episodes of each artist, it is unclear what cognitive processes underlie the generation of creative works. Thus, despite these ef- forts, creative cognitive processes are not yet well un- derstood. What kinds of creative cognitive processes can we find from online processes of an artist’s creation? Through collecting and analyzing the online data of an artist at work, this study focused on the following gen- eral questions: (a) processes of image generation in an actual artist at work, (b) processes of transcending the artist’s previous works, and (c) relationship between creativity and body movement. First, how do artists generate their new ideas and im- ages? Do artistic images and ideas suddenly come up in their minds? In the episodic studies of a famous artist, Pablo Picasso, Gardner (1993) and Weisberg (1986) both mentioned that Picasso drew a number of sketches in preparation for Guernica to create great artwork. In addition to the studies of artists, in the field of architec- tural design research, researchers have claimed that sketches are a good medium for reflective conversation with one’s own ideas and imagery (e.g., Dorst & Dijkhuis, 1995; Goel, 1995; Goldschmidt, 1991; Schon, 1983; Suwa & Tversky, 1997). In other words, design is seen as a process in which each designer constructs his or her own reality by his or her own actions that are re- flective, responsive, and opportunistic to the design situ- ation. It seems that designers gradually form their im- ages while drawing their sketches. From results across studies of famous artists and studies of architectural de- sign, we may be able to predict that artists, especially painters, do not have entire images of their works at the beginning, but they gradually form their mental image through drawing objects. Second, how do artists transcend their previous works when creating new artwork? If creation is based on artists’ previous works as Weisberg (1986) claimed, it might be difficult for artists to create a new style of art- work. In experimental studies of creative thinking using undergraduates, researchers have shown that people tend to have difficulties in crossing the boundary of an ordinary concept to create new products (e.g., March, Landau, & Hicks, 1996; Smith, Ward, & Schumacher, 1993; Ward, 1994; Ward & Sifonis, 1997). These stud- ies have focused on the effects of prior experiences and existing category information in the creative idea gener- ation task. They asked participants to generate imagi- nary animals living on a planet somewhere else in the galaxy. The results showed that people tend to adopt at- tributes of animals living on earth. Thus, they claimed that people become constrained within the properties of existing examples in generating new ideas and concepts. In the case of artists, it seems that their previous artwork is a constraint toward creating a new style of work. How do artists manage conformity to transcend their previous artworks? This study focused on cognitive processes in transcending artists’ previous works and overcoming conformity. Third, what is the relationship between cognition and body movement? Do artists’body movements influence their minds? Creative cognitive processes are compli- cated. The processes combine a diverse collection of cognitive activities, such as mental activities and physi- cal activities. In studies of embodied representation, re- searchers have argued that sensory-motor systems, such as body movement, could affect the cognitive processes (e.g., Barsalou, 1999; Prinz & Barsalou, 2000). It seems that artists’ skills and body movements may be needed not only for substantializing their images and ideas in their minds, but also for generating their images and ideas while creating artwork. If so, it is necessary to ob- serve online creative processes of artists at work to in- vestigate the relationship between cognition and body movement. In this exploratory study, we tried to answer these questions focusing on a fine artist. The authors pres- ent a field case study based on observations, inter- views, and a field experiment with detailed cognitive analyses of the drawing processes of a Suibokuga (Chinese ink painting) painter. We conducted a case study because this methodology is one of the most useful means for understanding talented people. Con- sequently, it has been widely adopted not only in psy- chology, but also in diverse fields such as medicine, physiology, history of science, literature, and sociol- 242 Creativity Research Journal S. Yokochi and T. Okada ogy (see Wallace, 1989). This method has made par- ticularly important contributions in the field of cre- ativity psychology because of its ability to account for the uniqueness of talented individuals from the viewpoint of the whole person (e.g., Gruber, 1988, 1989; Gruber & Wallace, 1999; Miller, 1992; Raina, 1997; Rothenberg, 1990; Wallace, 1989; Wallace & Gruber, 1989). Whereas studies employing large sam- ple sizes intend to test hypotheses and generalize the- ories, single case studies are best suited for gathering detailed information from unique individuals, and for generating new hypotheses. Furthermore, in this study the authors enhanced the role of the case study by employing multiple means of observation. Such a multimethod approach is best suited to account for a phenomenon across several viewpoints (e.g., Brewer & Hunter, 1989; Denzin, 1989). This approach is based on the idea that a given phenomenon will be uncovered by deliberately com- bining various types of methods (e.g., questionnaire, experiment, interview, and so on) within one study. For example, Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1976) approached creativity from various perspectives by us- ing several test batteries, such as IQ tests, creativity tests, personality tests, and observations and inter- views during art-making processes. Although each method has limitations to capture the whole figure of the phenomenon, combing each method can effec- tively overcome the limitations. Unlike laboratory experiments, field studies are dif- ficult in terms of control of variables. Also, because this is a single case study, it may be difficult to general- ize our findings to artists in general. However, through field studies, we can propose new hypotheses or offer useful insights with high levels of ecological validity as mentioned earlier. Especially in domains where very few previous studies exist, starting from field studies can be very useful to identify questions and hypotheses that might lead to further research projects. Method Participant Mr. K is a Suibokuga (traditional Chinese ink paint- ings) painter in his early 60s with about 20 years of ex- perience in this particular style of painting. With brush and Chinese ink (Sumi ink), Suibokuga painters draw landscapes, people, animals, plants, and so on. Suibokuga was developed in China during the Tang dy- nasty and introduced later to Japan as a part of Bud- dhist culture during the 13th century. Mr. K usually draws Sansuiga (which is a type of Suibokuga featur- ing Chinese landscapes of mountains and valleys) on fusuma (Japanese sliding doors) or folding screens in temples and shrines. In addition to many places in Ja- pan, he has also exhibited his works at museums in China, France, and the United States (e.g., the Dallas Museum and Pittsburgh Children’s Museum). He was also awarded a grand prize at Fusuma-e competition (Chinese ink painting on Japanese sliding doors) in Ja- pan, 1987. Period of Observation This field study was conducted mainly from 1998 to 2001, with a follow-up interview in 2003. The present authors observed Mr. K’s drawing processes, and col- lected substantial online data while he was drawing. We also investigated his drawing processes through a field experiment. Data There were two data sets in this field study: (a) pro- cess data of a fusuma drawing in a temple and (b) data from a field experiment. In the temple, spending about 1½ hrs, the painter drew a picture of mountain and valley across four fusuma sliding doors. Two video cameras were set up on both sides of the fusuma doors to capture his draw- ing process. After he finished his drawing, he was in- terviewed about his drawing process. Mr. K sometimes improvises his drawing in front of audiences by incorporating random lines that the audi- ence drew onto blank paper, although he did not ask the audience to do so while drawing in this temple, because the master of the temple asked him not to do so. There- fore, in the field experiment, Mr. K was asked to draw eight pictures created from 15 random lines drawn by two experimenters (we call this the LINES condition) and eight pictures created on blank paper (we call this the BLANK condition) to capture the differences. The theme of the paintings was the four seasons. He was asked to draw two pictures of each season in each condi- tion: spring, summer, fall, and winter. The order of task presentation was counterbalanced by condition, Creativity Research Journal 243 Creative Cognitive Processes of Art Making whereas the order of the season for each task was ran- domized. The processes of his drawing were recorded with two video cameras. He drew three or four pictures in his studio in a day, and it took a total 5 days between June and December 2001 to complete the field experi- ment. Usually, it took him about 20 to 30 min to finish a picture. In the second day of the experiment, he thought a picture in the BLANK condition was not good enough, hence he drew another picture with the same theme once more in the final day. In the third day of the experiment, he reported that he could not concentrate on his drawing and drew just one picture. Results and Discussion The following three main features were identified through our field study: 1. The painter seemed to form a global image of the drawing gradually as he drew each succes- sive element. 2. He drew pictures in fairly patterned ways. Lines that the audience drew, however, seemed to create new constraints for his drawing and forced him to create a new style of pictures. 3. He often moved his brush in the air before actu- ally drawing lines on the paper. Based on our data analyses, the present authors describe three possible functions of these movements. The authors describe each feature one by one in detail. Processes of Drawing Images Mr. K drew his paintings very smoothly and quickly. Although it may have looked as if he had al- ready formed an image of the entire picture before starting to draw, our analyses of the drawing process and an interview with him revealed that he started drawing with local images. He then gradually formed a global image as he drew each part one by one. When he was interviewed just after he finished drawing fusuma doors in the temple (See Figure 1), he noted, Not the entire picture. Starting from here, the pine tree that I first drew, then there and this bridge and here, then the cedar trees above the stairway. Then the roof of the hut. I had an image of only those parts at the beginning.1 It seems that he did not form the entire image before he started drawing. How did he draw so smoothly with- out forming the whole image or complete plans in his mind? We analyzed his drawing processes in detail to search further. Figure 2 shows the process of his drawing on the fusuma doors of the temple. The circled numbers on the fusuma doors indicate where and in what order he drew while those on the tatami mats indicate where and in what order he moved. The process was divided into five sections based on his movements. The first four sections were segmented when he moved backward to survey the entire picture for more than 1 min. The rest of his drawing processes were combined into one section, because he moved backward and forward frequently without long pauses. In the first section, he sat on a tatami mat and started drawing a tree on the left-most part of the fusuma door. After he drew the central part of the left fusuma doors for about 22 min, he stepped back to see the entire pic- ture. Then he started drawing on the second door from the right, and paused to observe what he drew many times. When this part of the picture became more formed, he moved backward and looked at the picture occasionally. At almost the end of his drawing in the last section, he moved back and forth frequently, add- ing a few lines here and there. This analysis of his drawing processes and his interview in the temple sug- gests that he actually formed his plans for the painting gradually while he was drawing. Although this is a sin- gle case analysis, we observed that he drew on fusuma doors in the same manner on many other occasions. Mr. K cannot look at the entire picture without step- ping backward when he draws on such big fusuma doors. Although he can take in the entire picture when he draws on a small-sized paper, he still has to spend a certain amount of time planning and monitoring when he draws. Therefore, the duration and timing of pauses in the data were measured from the field experiment to infer his planning and monitoring process while drawing. The drawing processes were divided into small cycles. 244 Creativity Research Journal S. Yokochi and T. Okada 1All the quotations from the painter were translated from Japa- nese by the authors. One cycle consisted of the period from his soaking the brush in the Chinese ink plate, lifting up, drawing on the paper, and soaking it in the ink plate again. We counted the distribution of pauses by length and found that the frequency drastically dropped beyond 9 sec. This suggests that there might be some functional dif- ferences in pauses shorter than nine seconds and those greater. The frequent occurrence of the shorter pauses probably indicates that he moved the brush from one place to another, or to the ink plate, and so on. The less frequent occurrence of pauses longer than 9 sec sug- gests that he might have spent time thinking about the pictures, planning, and monitoring his drawing pro- cesses.2 Examining the video record confirmed this conclusion. Table 1 shows the data from the field experiment. In counting pauses equal to or longer than 9 sec, there was about the same number of pauses in the first and the sec- ond half of his drawing in each condition, t(7) = –2.37, p = .050, and t(7) = –1.80, p = .86, respectively (two-tailed). This suggests that he planned and moni- tored his drawing through the entire process of drawing. There were more pauses in the LINES condition than in the BLANK condition, F(1, 7) = 19.17, p < .01. When we focused on the frequency of pauses just before draw- ing from random lines, there was about the same fre- quency of pauses as the difference between the two con- ditions, F(1, 7) = 3.16, p = .12. This probably means that he needed to think about local drawing plans to incorpo- rate those random lines into his picture. In summary, it appears that the painter plans and monitors through the entire process of drawing. He first forms a mental image of a small area (creates a lo- cal drawing plan), and gradually forms the entire men- tal image of the picture as he draws each object. This finding is consistent with the findings in design studies mentioned earlier. Lines as Constraints Analyses of the contents and patterns of Mr. K’s drawing suggest that he drew pictures in a fairly pat- terned way. Through our observation, the authors found that he drew objects one by one. In the field ex- periment, he started to draw his paintings with a tree in 15 out of the 16 pictures.3 Then rocks, houses, people and mountains followed (see Figure 3). We observed in many other occasions that he drew pictures in the same manner. It appears that he used certain strategies to draw particular objects in a relatively stable order throughout various situations. This is probably one of the reasons why he drew pictures so smoothly without forming the entire image before he started to draw. Creativity Research Journal 245 Creative Cognitive Processes of Art Making Figure 1. Picture on fusuma doors at temple X. This painting was drawn by Mr. K on sliding doors in temple X, December 1998. The painter has the copyright of this painting. Mr. K grants the publisher of Creativity Research Journal the permission to reprint this painting. 2Our criterion gained plausibility from experiments in previous studies. For example, Chase and Simon (1973), with perception and memory tasks in chess, presumed a long time interval while glancing at chess pieces placed on the board was needed to combine several chunks, and while a short time interval was needed to access to a sin- gle chunk. Thus, it is also reasonable to think that the difference in time interval reflects on the processes of thinking during drawing. 3The main coder identified the contents of all sixteen pictures created in the field experiment. After being taught the coding proce- dure and practicing coding independently, a second coder coded one picture. The inter coder reliability was 96%. 246 Figure 2. Processes of drawing on the fusuma doors in temple X. Rectangles with dots represent fusuma doors (sliding doors), and lower rectan- gles represent tatami mats. The fusuma doors are in the vertical orientation, and the tatami mats are in the horizontal orientation. The circled numbers on the fusuma doors indicate where and in what order he drew. The circled numbers on the tatami mats indicate where and in what order he moved. Arrows represent directions that Mr. K moved on tatami mats during drawing fusuma doors. In an interview with Mr. K, he remarked, “All of the pictures that I created from random lines are more unique and nicer than those created in a traditional way.” What are the differences in drawing between both conditions? We investigated the differences in time of drawing and the number of drawing cycles between pictures in the LINES condition and pictures in the BLANK condition (see Figure 4 and Table 2). First, the mean time for drawing (except for the time of painting shadows or shading ink lines, which always occurs at the end of his drawings) was calculated in each condition. In the BLANK condition, the mean time for drawing was about 10 min (M = 640.13 sec, SD = 170.91 sec) and, in the LINES condition, it was about 18 min (M = 1050.38 sec, SD = 199.40 sec). The time for drawing in the LINES condition was signifi- cantly longer than that for the BLANK condition, t(14) = 3.87, p < .01 (two-tailed). We also counted the num- ber of drawing cycles in each condition and calculated the mean number. The mean number of drawing cycles in the LINES condition was significantly higher than that in the BLANK condition, t(14) = 3.91, p < .01 (two-tailed). These results indicate that it took more time and more drawing cycles to create new pictures from random lines. This suggests that preexisting lines somehow influ- enced his drawing. Therefore, we investigated how these lines were used in his drawing. There were 15 random lines drawn by the experimenters on each pa- per in the LINES condition. With an average of 9.3 out of 15 lines, he created new objects starting from these lines. In the other 5.7 instances he incorporated the lines into an existing object. Thus, the random lines most often triggered his drawing process and created new constraints on his drawing. To determine whether there were differences in terms of quality between pictures in the LINES and BLANK conditions, 20 undergraduate students were asked to rate their impressions of the drawing using a semantic differential method. The procedure was as follows: 20 undergraduates were presented pictures randomly with 12 word pair op- posites. All words were adapted from adjectives used in a study of emotions when appreciating pictures (Ichihara, 1968), as well as insights gained through in- terviews with the painter. Participants were asked to rate the pictures based on a 7-point scale for each word pair. Factor analysis with a principal factor solution was used to create scales across the word pair items. Three distinct factors with an eigenvalue above 1.0 were re- covered and the ratio of variance contribution was 65%. These factors were rotated with Varimax and the factor loadings were calculated (see Table 3). Four items were strongly correlated with the first factor, which we named good composition: modu- lated/nonmodulated; well composed/poorly com- posed; focused/unfocused; and well-balanced/ill-bal- anced (α = .82). The second factor, which we named liveliness, was strongly correlated with the items: lively/dull; static/dynamic; energetic/nonenergetic; and powerful/powerless (α = .77). The final factor, which we named simplicity, was strongly correlated with the items: clear cut/mixed up; simple/complex; relaxed/crowded; and light/heavy (α = .73). The present authors conducted a one-sample ver- sion of Hotelling’s T2 to compare students’ rating scores of drawings from the two conditions (see Figure 5). The mean scores of good composition and simplic- ity in the BLANK condition were significantly higher than those in the LINES condition, Fs(1, 159) = 93.84 and 28.48, respectively, ps < .001. This result indicates that pictures in the BLANK condition were well com- posed. Also, because there is fair amount of white space in these pictures, it creates the impression of a simple picture. Mr. K drew the BLANK pictures in the traditional Suibokuga style of paintings. On the other hand, the mean score of liveliness in the LINES condi- tion was higher than that in the BLANK condition, F(1, 159) = 4.15, p < .05. This result indicates that pic- tures in the LINES condition were characterized by liveliness and dynamism. Thus, the character of LINES pictures is different from traditional Suibokuga paintings. Mr. K also thinks that drawing from existing lines is more exciting than the traditional ways. When we in- terviewed him about why he wanted to draw from ran- dom lines, he answered: Creativity Research Journal 247 Creative Cognitive Processes of Art Making Table 1. Mean Number of Pauses (9 or More Seconds) During Drawing Condition Whole Drawing First Half: Second Half Before Drawing With Lines BLANK 3.8 1.4 : 2.4 — LINES 11.4 5.6 : 5.8 4.5 248 Figure 3. Contents and order of the objects in the pictures in the field experiment. Tr = trees, Ro = rocks, Pe = people, Wa = water, rivers, lakes, boats, bridges, Ho = houses, Bi = birds, Mt = mountains. 249 Figure 4. Picture in the BLANK condition (upper) and picture in the LINES condition (lower). These paintings were drawn by Mr. K for the ex- periment. The painter has the copyright of these paintings. Mr. K grants the publisher of Creativity Research Journal the permission to reprint these paintings. Table 2. Differences Between the BLANK Condition and the LINES Condition BLANK Condition LINES Condition Measures M SD M SD p of t Tests Time of drawing (sec) 640.13 170.91 1050.38 199.40 < .01 Number of drawing cycles 30.0 8.80 43.5 4.92 < .01 Time of one cycle (sec) 23.3 7.50 25.5 6.85 ns Creating from random lines, I have to incorpo- rate the others’ world into my world … I have to use them with my lines … Seriousness! I enjoy playing this game in earnest. There is not just myself. I get serious about drawing in this way. Yes. I am highly motivated with this way. Thus, these lines seem to create new constraints for his drawing and force him to create new styles. This finding is important when we consider the nature of creativity. Previous studies have shown that people tend to adhere to the central properties of known con- ceptual structures when trying to create new things (e.g., Ward, 1994; Ward & Sifonis, 1997). That is, peo- ple tend to have difficulty in crossing the boundary of an ordinary concept to create new products. However, as shown in this study, a professional artist seems to adopt a strategy for boundary crossing such as using others’ lines, and Mr. K also developed an awareness of the importance of doing so for creating new styles. Roles of Hand Movements in Drawing Processes From our observations in this field study, the au- thors also noticed that Mr. K moved his brush in the air very often before he actually drew any lines on paper. This kind of hand movement is not unique to this painter. For example, Henry Matisse moved his brush in a similar way in the video, “Matisse: Voyage” (1987). The hand movement might have some impor- tant roles for drawing a picture. Although researchers have not focused on such physical activity in studies of creative cognition, there is a study of hand movement to understand the relation- ship between cognition and body movement. Sasaki and Watanabe (1983) found that, when writing Kanji characters, Japanese people often moved their fingers in the air. They interpreted this phenomenon to mean that people use their body to remember Kanji Charac- ters. Thus, it would be reasonable to hypothesize that moving in the air would have some important func- 250 Creativity Research Journal S. Yokochi and T. Okada Figure 5. Mean scores of three factors (good composition, liveli- ness, and simplicity) in BLANK (n = 160) and LINES (n = 160) con- ditions. Error bars represent 1SD. Table 3. Factor Loadings for the Impression of the Paintings Item Good Composition I Liveliness II Simplicity III Communality Nonmodulated—Modulated .70 .27 .05 .57 Unfocused—Focused .80 .11 .13 .67 Ill-balanced—Well-balanced .80 .11 .16 .67 Poorly composed—Well-composed .79 .07 .15 .66 Dull—Lively .13 .86 –.03 .75 Dynamic—Static .06 –.65 .28 .50 Nonenergetic—Energetic .20 .85 .13 .77 Powerless—Powerful .42 .62 –.31 .65 Mixed up—Clear cut .56 –.15 .63 .72 Complex—Simple .29 –.16 .62 .49 Crowded—Relaxed .37 .20 .70 .67 Heavy—Light –.15 –.18 .75 .62 Proportionate variance contributions .410 .319 .271 Note. The factors were extracted using the principal-factor method and rotated by varimax rotation. tions, not only when writing Kanji characters, but also when drawing pictures. The authors identified the timing of when Mr. K moved his brush in the air to investigate the role of the movement in his drawing. The cycles of drawing that we mentioned were divided into three sections to iden- tify the timing of his brush movement in the air. The first section, beginning section, was from his soaking the brush in the Chinese ink plate until just before putt- ing it on paper. The second section, middle section, was from his starting to draw until finishing. The final sec- tion, ending section, was from his lifting up the brush from the paper until just before soaking it in the ink plate. Then, the number of brush movements in the air was counted for each section. The following coding scheme was used to identify brush movements. If the painter moved his brush more than once in a circle in the air, except for changing the posture of holding his brush or moving the brush from one place to another, the movement was identified as drawing in the air. A main coder coded the drawing processes of all 16 pictures. After being taught this scheme and practicing coding independently, another coder coded one pic- ture. The consistency between two coders was 90%. The percentage of intracoder consistency of the main coder was 96%. Table 4 shows the mean number of drawing in the air movements, and the percentage in each condition. Although the frequency of drawing in the air in the LINES condition was higher than in the BLANK con- dition, the percentage of drawing in each section was about the same between the two conditions. In the be- ginning section, the percentage of the drawing in the BLANK condition was 60% and that in the LINES condition was 56%. In the middle section, the percent- age of drawing in the BLANK condition was 35%, whereas that in the LINES was 36%. This indicates that Mr. K often drew in the air at the beginning and middle of drawing cycles. Thus, it would be reasonable for us to assume that drawing in the air has some im- portant functions in drawing processes, because they occur before he actually draws on paper. Next, we focused on the relation between pauses and hand movements. The percentage of pauses with hand movement in the BLANK condition was 59%, whereas that in the LINES condition was 86%. This suggests that he often moved the brush in the air to think about drawing plans to incorporate lines into his picture. Furthermore, in the LINES condition, the per- centage of pauses with hand movement when he added onto others’ lines was 97% and when he drew without adding lines to others’ lines it was 59%. These results suggest that, by moving the brush in the air, he gener- ated a mental image to facilitate incorporating others’ lines. To further investigate the function of the hand movement, the authors interviewed him about his drawing process while showing a video record of his drawing a Sansuiga picture. While watching a part of the videotape in which he was drawing in the air, he said to us, I might be checking how I feel when I touch the brush. Umm. Is this my habit? I always do this, don’t I … I may move my hand in the air to re- hearse my brush stroke … I always draw in the air before starting to draw on the paper. This seems to be my habit, doesn’t it? Although I do not draw any actual objects on the paper, through drawing the form in the air, I can judge if the bal- ance of the objects is OK. I have never realized my habit before you pointed it out. But, now I noticed it. Because I cannot redo the lines once it is put on the paper, I move my hand in the air be- fore drawing. I knew I draw in the air. But, I have never thought about the reason of the hand movements. Since you asked me, I realized it. By drawing in the air, I probably judge how it is like if I draw a line around here. This quotation tells us that he probably moves his hands to plan how to use his brush, and actually draw the image of objects in his mind. This is a quite reason- able candidate function of this hand movement. But, we need to be careful before making any conclusions on this issue based on the data from this field study. It would be, however, worth proposing some plausible hypotheses for future research. At this moment we pro- pose the following three functions as plausible candi- Creativity Research Journal 251 Creative Cognitive Processes of Art Making Table 4. Percentage of Drawing in the Air in Three Different Sections Condition Beginning Section (%) Middle Section (%) End Section (%) BLANK 19.1 (60) 11.0 (35) 1.5 (5) LINES 29.0 (56) 18.5 (36) 4.0 (8) dates: First, by drawing in the air, the painter decides where to put the brush on the paper. We call this posi- tioning. Second, the painter rehearses his brush move- ment so that he can draw smoothly. This is related to how to draw. We call this rehearsal. These two func- tions are related to implementing an image in the painter’s mind onto the paper. Third, by drawing an ob- ject in the air, the painter generates a mental image of what he plans to draw next. We call this image genera- tion. This function is related to generating an image based on what was drawn on the paper. If all of these functions take place in drawing, it would mean that body movements such as drawing in the air connect two essential activities in creative drawing: generation of image in one’s mind and generation of image onto the paper. General Discussion In this article, we tried to answer the question, “How does an artist create his or her work?” We de- scribed three features of a Suibokuga painter’s drawing processes. Feature 1: The painter starts drawing with a local image of the picture. Then, he gradually forms a global image as he draws each part one by one. Feature 2: Based on his knowledge and skills, he draws pictures in a fairly patterned way. However, ran- dom lines that the audience drew can create new con- straints for his drawing and force him to create new style of pictures. Feature 3: Drawing in the air seems important and may have the following functions: Positioning, re- hearsal, and image generation. In the rest of this article, we discuss three issues re- lated to our findings. On the Process of Artistic Creation This study focused on a traditional art, Chinese ink painting (Suibokuga). Mr. K is an experienced artist in this field. He has an enormous amount of knowledge and skills in this painting style (see Takagi [Yokochi], 2001). The knowledge and skills, accumulated over years of expertise, enable him to create artwork fairly quickly and smoothly. It seems that each brush of drawing evokes a local image of Suibokuga in Mr. K’s memory. He creates his pictures combining those im- ages based on certain rules that he learned from books or from his own experience. Like Monet, who painted series of water lilies for 30 years, the painter creates a series of artwork around the same concept. Although each work is a new creation, making similar artwork requires routines. This is similar to the case of Jazz improvisation (e.g., Bailey, 1992; Johnson-Laird, 1988, 2002). Al- though playing improvisational Jazz may seem to re- quire the constant creation of new musical patterns, Jazz players actually use limited patterns and combine them using certain rules to produce Jazz music. This process is highly effective when producing certain kinds of artwork. However, artists often be- come bored while producing similar works repeatedly. When bored, artists want to try something new to stim- ulate their artistic motivation. In this Suibokuga painter’s case, the method of asking the audience to draw random lines and then incorporating them into his own picture is one such example. Creation of new patterns in artistic works can emerge through artists’ intentional manipulation of constraints in a creation process. The present authors found that, even in the case of traditional art, artists sometimes conduct this kind of manipulation intentionally. We acknowledge that drawing processes could be different depending on the type of art. The authors are not claiming that all types of art have similar processes. In the processes of creating traditional Sansuiga pic- tures, the mental image of the picture is gradually formed as the actual drawing on the paper progresses. It is possibly because this kind of traditional painting is relatively well structured, and room for new patterns is fairly limited. A painter evokes images of objects to draw, based on a search of his memory triggered by the current status of the picture. We need further research to investigate how far this finding can be generalized to other types of artists. On the Role of Body Movement Artistic creation requires hands-on activities. Just having an image or a concept is not enough. To imple- ment an image or a concept into actual artwork, an art- ist needs to use his or her body. Sasaki and Watanabe 252 Creativity Research Journal S. Yokochi and T. Okada (1983) suggested that people imagine the figure of Kanji characters by moving their hands in the air. They claimed that this hand movement has two types of cog- nitive functions: imagining the figure of Kanji charac- ters and externalizing the processes of thought. This means that this hand movement controls processes of consciousness. Also, researchers of gestures have ar- gued that gesture and body movement in a conversa- tion advance speech (e.g., Kita, 2000; Krauss, Chen, & Chawla, 1996; McNeill, 1992). Body movement in ar- tistic creation, such as moving a brush in the air, seems to play a similar role. By drawing in the air, the painter may decide where to put the brush on the paper, re- hearse his brush movement so that he can remember how to draw, and generate a mental image of what he plans to draw next. His body movement was also important for effec- tive problem space search. When he drew the picture in the temple, he often went back and forth to coordinate his image and actual drawings on the paper. Also, he occasionally covered the picture in progress with his hands to narrow down the space of focus. That is, he limited the drawing space such as to make planning or monitoring the picture easier. It seems that he used his body to constrain his search for drawing plans and im- ages. Thus, we could say that artistic creation is a highly embodied process. On the Research Method The interview data suggest that the painter was not fully aware of his hand movements as he was drawing. If we had only used interviews without analyses of video record of his drawing process, we could not have uncovered this phenomenon. Thus, this finding sup- ports our claim that careful process analyses have unique roles in addition to questionnaire surveys or in- terviews to gain better understanding of artistic cre- ation processes. As we mentioned, unlike laboratory experiments or questionnaire surveys, field studies are difficult in terms of control of variables and collecting sufficient data for statistical analyses. However, field studies have strong advantages in proposing new hy- potheses or offering useful insights with high ecologi- cal validity. We think that potential role of constraints and body movements are two such findings. In future research, taking these advantages and disadvantages into consideration, it would be useful to adopt a multimethod approach, integrating interviews, video analyses, experiments, and so on, to study artistic cre- ation processes. In the study of problem solving, the think-aloud method has been used to reveal cognitive processes (e.g., Anzai & Simon, 1979; Okada & Simon, 1997), even in the study of creativity (e.g., Khandwalla, 1993; Ruscio, Whitney, & Amabile, 1998). Those studies un- covered the processes of creative thinking by using tasks, such as a divergent thinking task, and a col- lage-making task, that were relatively suitable for ver- balizing thinking processes. In these cases, the think-aloud method was effective to collect rich pro- cess data. However, Ericsson and Simon (1984) pointed out that visual thinking processes could be affected by thinking aloud in certain occasions, such as visual problem solving. In fact, Mr. K was not able to ver- balize his thoughts well while drawing Sansuiga paintings when he was asked to do so. He said, “It is difficult to speak during drawing … It’s so difficult … I may not be thinking consciously what and where to draw,” and cleared his throat nervously to speak again and again. Studies of verbalization with visual cognitive tasks have indicated that verbal recall re- duced access to nonverbal knowledge (e.g., Schooler, 2002; Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990; Schooler, Fiore, & Brandimonte, 1997; Schooler, Ohlsson, & Brooks, 1993; Lloyd, Lawson, & Scott, 1995, Ward & Sifonis, 1997). Furthermore, Schooler, Fiore, and Brandimonte (1997) speculated that the negative ef- fect of verbalization might be greater for nonverbal experts than verbal experts. As an expert of Chinese ink painting, it seems that his drawing activities are highly automatized so that he can create his pictures very smoothly and quickly. Therefore, it was very dif- ficult for him to verbally talk about his processes while drawing. It was only when he failed to draw a part of his drawings that he was able to talk aloud. Thus, in this study, right after his drawing a Suibokuga painting, and showing a videotape record of his drawing, we asked Mr. K to remember what he was paying attention to when drawing. Mr. K was in- terviewed about his drawing process each time he started drawing a new object. Although there is con- cern about reliability of the introspective reports (e.g., Ericsson & Simon, 1984), we used this introspective data to support and interpret the findings with the be- Creativity Research Journal 253 Creative Cognitive Processes of Art Making havioral data from the observations and the field ex- periment. Conclusion Overall, using a multimethod approach, this study generated hypotheses regarding artistic creation pro- cesses, and found intriguing results. 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Creativity Research Journal 255 Creative Cognitive Processes of Art Making work_f3apmctpofbural37srvzrqgu4 ---- ERWARTUNG BY ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, A NEW TRANSLATION AND PROPOSED PRODUCTION by {CATHERINE ELIZABETH HARDER B.Mus., University of British Columbia, 1977 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR"~THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF MUSIC in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of Music, University of British Columbia) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA April, 1979 © Katherine Elizabeth Harder, 1979, In p r e s e n t i n g t h i s t h e s i s i n p a r t i a l f u I f i " m e n t o f t h e r e q u i r e m e n t s f o r an a d v a n c e d d e g r e e a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f B r i t i s h Columbia, I agree that t h e L i b r a r y s h a l l make i t f r e e l y a v a i l a b l e f o r r e f e r e n c e and study. I f u r t h e r a g r e e t h a t p e r m i s s i o n f o r e x t e n s i v e c o p y i n g o f t h i s t h e s i s f o r s c h o l a r l y p u r p o s e s may be g r a n t e d by t h e Head o f my Department or by h i s r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s . It i s u n d e r s t o o d t h a t c o p y i n g o r p u b l i c a t i o n o f t h i s t h e s i s f o r f i n a n c i a l g a i n s h a l l n o t be a l l o w e d w i t h o u t my w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . D e p a r t m e n t o f Mus i c The U n i v e r s i t y o f B r i t i s h C o l u m b i a 2075 Wesbrook P l a c e Vancouver, Canada V6T 1W5 Date April 25, 1979 ABSTRACT Arnold Schoenberg's "monodrama in one act," ERWARTUNG opus 17 (1909), was written during the composer's expressionist compositional period (1908-1913). ERWARTUNG (EXPECTATION) was Schoenberg's f i r s t completed stage work; however, i t did not receive i t s stage premiere until 1924. This monodrama is an atonal work, a revolutionary style of composition which Schoenberg created during the early twentieth century. ERWARTUNG became the main generating force which encour- aged the composer's contemporaries to attempt to create new musical and dramatic compositional styles. In studying the importance of ERWARTUNG as an "expressionist music drama," i t was also necessary to examine the expressionist movements in art and literature. These movements greatly influenced Arnold Schoenberg's compositional style, as can be seen in the harmonic and dramatic structure of ERWARTUNG. Their influence, specifically that of the expressionist literary movement, can also be seen in the character study of the sole protagonist, "the Woman." Foremost in this project was the writing of a singable English translation for ERWARTUNG, (Appendix I.) A proposed production including stage direction and lighting, costume design, and publicity posters completed this study. The production was designed for a typical proscenium stage, specifically the Frederick Wood Theatre at the University of British Columbia. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I INTRODUCTION 1 II ERWARTUNG AS AN EXPRESSIONIST MUSIC DRAMA, AND ITS 6 LINKS WITH PSYCHOLOGY AND THE EXPRESSIONIST MOVEMENTS IN ART AND LITERATURE III THE DRAMATIC AND HARMONIC STRUCTURE OF ERWARTUNG /20 IV THE CHARACTER OF THE WOMAN 28 V LIGHTING 34 VI PUBLICITY 40 BIBLIOGRAPHY 48 APPENDICES: I XEROX COPY OF SCORE INCLUDING TRANSLATION AND KEY TO 52 SYMBOLS USED IN STAGE DIRECTION II ACTING AREA GRID 100 III LIGHTING GRID 101 IV INSTRUMENT SCHEDULE 102 V LIGHTING CUE SHEET 106 VI COSTUME DESIGN 108 VII LIGHTING'PLOT - CnPclS C o ( | c ^ VIII LIGHTING SECTION. " Wei*! Co) i i i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE PAGE I Woodcut of the cover of the Blue Rider Almanac 13 II Photographs of galaxies as should be projected 41-42 on the cyclorama III Posters 45-47 iv, ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank the following people who have been of much assistance in preparing this thesis: Prof. Donald Brown Mr. Jeffrey Holmes Mr. Ian Pratt Mrs. Mary Ann Quiring Prof. French Tickner Dr. Richard Wilcox v PICTURE CREDIT Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944): Woodcut for cover of Blue Rider Almanac. 1912. From: Vergo, Peter. The Blue Rider. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977. v i CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Arnold Schoenberg was born September 13, 1874, in Vienna. Although a self-taught musician, Schoenberg did not decide until he was sixteen years of age that music would be his l i f e ' s work. At this time he was introduced to Alexander von Zemlinsky from whom he received his only formal instruction, counterpoint. The two became good friends, and in 1901 Schoenberg married Zemlinsky's sister, Mathilde. In 1903, already established as a prominent musician and composer, Schoenberg began his long teaching career. Among his f i r s t students were Anton von Webern and Alban Berg, soon to become re- spected musicians themselves. His teaching was carried on mainly in Vienna and Berlin until he moved to the United States in 1933. Settling in California, he continued to teach and compose, until his death in 1951. Afnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) composed the one-act mono- drama ERWARTUNG opus 17 in a fury of inspiration, completing the reduced version in a total of seventeen days, August 17 to Sept- ember 12, 1909, and the orchestral score by October 4, 1909. ERWARTUNG was Schoenberg's f i r s t completed stage work. He had previously started but never completed the composition of an opera based on Gerhard Hauptmann's play Uiid Pippa Tarizt. 1 2. Anton Webern described the score of ERWARTUNG in the f o l - c lowing fashion; The score of the monodrama is an unheard-of event. In i t , a l l traditional form is broken with; something hew always follows according to the rapid change of expression. The same is true of the instrumentation: an interrupted succession of sounds never before heard. There is no measure of this score which f a i l s to show a completely new sound picture....And so this music flows onward,...giving expres- ^ sion to the most hidden and slightest impulses of the emotions. The year 1909 was a very p r o l i f i c one for Arnold Schoenberg. In addition to completing DAS BUCH DER HANGENDEN GARTEN opus 15, a song cycle based on poems written by Stefan George, and the mono-' drama ERWARTUNG opus 17, he composed two instrumental works -- THREE PIANO PIECES opus 11, and FIVE PIECES FOR ORCHESTRA opus 16, both written during the f i r s t eight months of 1909. With ERWARTUNG Arnold Schoenberg reached the point stated in Style and Idea: he "discovered how to construct larger forms 2 by following a text or a poem." In ERWARTUNG, as well as his subsequent works, Schoenberg did not attempt to impose any known form or forms on the libretto. ERWARTUNG opus 17, often termed an expressionist music drama, is about half an hour in length, and is composed for female voice (soprano) and large orchestra. The orchestra consists of 4,4,5,4;4,3,4,1; harp, celesta, percussion and strings. This work is an "atonal" work or "pantonal" one, as Schoenberg preferred i t to be called. He considered the term "atonal" to suggest the re- jection of past compositional styles. Unlike "atonal-;1" "pantonal" expressed his belief that his work was not based on a rejection, but 1 Anton Webern, Schoenberg's Musik, pp.-45-46. 2 Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, p.-217. rather on the acceptance, extension, and renovation of* the Nineteenth Century German traditional method of composition. ERWARTUNG, then, includes revolutionary uses of consonance and dissonance as well as a complex structure of textual and musical symbolism, a l l of which w i l l be discussed in detail in the following chapters. With this important aspect of Schoenberg's new and revolu- tionary compositional style came the new practiceoof "composer collaborating with his l i b r e t t i s t . " Schoenberg presented Marie Pappenheim, his l i b r e t t i s t , the outline he wished her to follow in writing the text of ERWARTUNG. This collaboration between the com- poser and l i b r e t t i s t shows the beginning of the tendency which led Schoenberg to write his own l i b r e t t i for the subsequent operas DIE GLUCKLICHE HAND opus 18 (1910-1913) and MOSES UND AARON (1932), of which only two acts were completed. It is important to realize that in expressionist works such as ERWARTUNG and DIE GLUCKLICHE HAND, Schoenberg's main concern was to make i t clearly understood that the characters were not so much individuals as universal human types. In ERWARTUNG in partic- ular, Schoenberg was interested only in projecting a hysterical woman' "stream of consciousness" in word and music. The general outline of the score as well as i t s details were governed completely by the content of the libretto. The English translation of ERWARTUNG included in Appendix I is my own, completed in December of 1978. It i s , for the most part, a l i t e r a l translation, expressing as closely as possible the meaning of the German text. My preoccupation in writing the trans- 4 lation was to convey the relentless expressiveness of the German poetry by means of the English language, and to retain a l l the subtle and the radical changes of mood of the sole protagonist, "the Woman." Several attempts were made to bring about a production of ERWARTUNG, but i t was not accomplished until 1924. Its stage premiere took place at the musical festival in Prague on June 6, 1924, with Alexander von Zemlinsky conducting. The character of "the Woman" was f i r s t created by Marie Gutheil-Schoeder; producer, Louis Laber. The f i r s t American production of ERWARTUNG td&k place on December 28, I960, in Washington with Robert Craft conducting. Helga Pilarczk portrayed "the Woman;" the general manager of the production was Bliss Hebert. One must realize that by the time ERWARTUNG f i n a l l y received i t s f i r s t stage premiere in 1924, expressionism was already losing significance as an a r t i s t i c movement in central Europe. Therefore, in considering the historical importance of ERWARTUNG, one must study the musical scene in Germany in 1909 when i t was written rather than in 1924 when i t was f i r s t produced. Wagnerian drama was, heedless to say, extremely influential in Germany at the turn of the century. Richard Strauss (1864-1949) had recently emerged as an important composer. Schoenberg's two works for the stage, ERWARTUNG and DIE GLUCKLICHE HAND, coincide with the years in which Richard Strauss turned from the highly dramatic expression of ELEKTRA to the more restrained and elegant style of DER ROSENKAVALIER. Claude Debussy's (1862-1918) impres- sionistic and symbolic approach tGocomposition as seen in his work 5 for the stage PELLEAS ET MELISANDE was s t i l l new. Two other very important and influencial composers were Pietro Mascagni (1863- 1945) and Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) of the Italian v e r i s t i c school which flourished in Italy at the end of the nineteenth and begin- ning of the twentieth centuries. The expressionist movement during the early twentieth century was most clearly reflected in the operas of Arnold Schoenberg and his pupil, Alban Berg (1885-1935). Arnold Schoenberg's stage works, particularly ERWARTUNG, were the main generating force which encouraged his contemporaries to attempt to create totally new, fresh musical and dramatic styles of composition. Without this v i t a l stimulus, the early operas of Kurt Weill (1900-1950) such as AUFSTIEG UND FALL DER STADT MAH0G0NNY and those of Ernst Krenek (b.1900), whose ORPHEUS AND EURYDIKE clearly follows Schoenberg's compositional style, would not have been conceivable. Paul Hindemith's (1895-1963) three one-act operas were also strongly influenced by Schoenberg's works for the stage. Perhaps Schoenberg's strongest influence was on his contemporary Alban Berg whose opera WOZZECK is considered the dramatic master- piece of the Viennese school of composers. CHAPTER TOO EWARTUNG: AN EXPRESSIONIST MUSIC DRAMA, AND ITS LINKS WITH PSYCHOLOGY AND THE EXPRESSIONIST MOVEMENTS IN ART AND LITERATURE. Expressionism, a term adopted from visual arts, applies to music written in a subjective and introspective style. Moreover, musical expressionism describes works which solely express the com- poser's thoughts, feelings, and visions. From the interplay of the composer's imagination and knowledge of compositional techniques, we learn to recognize his unique compositional style. Arnold S Schoenberg'stated that there is only one overriding goal toward which the artist strives, that of expressing one's self. In Germany in the years 1910 to 1925, a new burst of activity in the arts, including literature and drama, carried with i t a new set of attitudes which today is referred to as expressionism. With expressionism came the eruptive breakup of conventional esthetics. A l l artists strived to create new, fresh standards and ideas on which to base their works. Schoenberg also stated that art is not derived from "can," but from "must." Musical expressionism, then, defied the laws of what had been accepted as beauty and brought forth new conceptions of melody, harmony, rhythm, tonality, and form. In ERWARTUNG and a l l his works to follow, Schoenberg was pre- occupied with the musical representation of the inner mind. He stated in an article: 6 7 Science aims at presenting i t s thoughts f u l l y and in a way that no question remains unanswered. Aft, on the con- trary, is satisfied with a complex presentation from which the thought emerges unambiguously, but without being expres- sed directly. Thus, a back door is left open to let in im- agination (that is as far as knowledge goes).3 In addition to the representation of the inner mind in music, the composer was also concerned with the problem of relationships between a r t i s t i c creation and freedom within that creation. Schoen- berg states in his theoretical work Harmonielehre that any harmonic progression is possible; however, there are certain conditions on which the use of specific dissonances depend. These relationships between freedom and a r t i s t i c creation comment on Schoenberg's sense of form. He had taken a revolutionary step over the limits of tonality into atonality, thus implying that the tonal functions of tonic and dominant no longer existed. ERWARTUNG as an atonal work is discussed in more detail in Chapter Three, "The Dramatic and Harmonic Structure of Erwartung." In dealing specifically with the libretto of ERWARTUNG we find i t to be a psychological study of the subconscious mind. It is a product of imagination and intellect and foreshadows the modern dramatic idioms that were to come. The idea of the mohodrama was Schoenberg's own. With the detailed knowledge of his requirements, Schoenberg asked Marie Pappenheim, a poet and medical student, to write him an opera-text. She produced what Schoenberg termed an "Angsttraum" or anxiety dream monodrama heavily influenced by the techniques of psychoanalysis. The sole protagonist is "the Woman," who wanders through a dark forest seeking her lover and ultimately 3 Josef Rufer, Aspekte der Neuen Musik, p.-53. 8 finds only his corpse. In the short time space of thirty minutes, the Woman goes through several states of mind experiencing feelings of love, hate, exaltation, depression, fear, horror, anguish, and distraction. Her subconscious states, as well as her hallucination, are revealed in quick succession. In this monodrama the audience is l e f t with the question, "Did the Woman k i l l her lover, or is ERWARTUNG a hallucination of her disordered mind?." This question was not of primary importance to Schoenberg. His main interest was in penetrating the Woman's subconscious and in unifying this visual aspect with the realization of the objectives in sound. The symbolism in ERWARTUNG is as much a form of expression as is i t s dissonant harmonic structure. According to Carl Gustav Jung, "A symbol is an indefinite expression with many meanings, pointing to something not easily defined and therefore not fully known.There are three symbols in particular that are repeat- edly expressed in the text of ERWARTUNG: f i r s t , the referral toe the "black object dancing" and to other shadows; second, the vision of "a hundred hands;" and third, the vision of "the garden." Carl, Jung, the world-renowned Swiss psychologist who has contributed immensely to our knowledge and understanding of the human mind, particularly in the f i e l d of the importance of symbol- ism as revealed in dreams, has theorized that "shadows" represent the hidden, repressed, and unfavorable aspects of the personality. For most people this negative aspect of the personality remains a part of the unconscious mind. Taking this theory and applying i t to the character of the Woman in ERWARTUNG, we can assume that 4 Carl Jung, The Collected Words of C.G. Jung, Vol. V,p. 124. 9 each time she sees shadows, we are actually looking at the dark ' or negative side of her personality. Our sole protagonist obviously realizes that the shadow does indeed exist; however, she does not succeed in coming to terms with i t . Understanding this, one can see the potential strengths of her realization of the negative side of her personality turn into a destructive power, resulting in the Woman1s dement i a. According to Carl Jung, the hallucinations involving vivid images are intimately connected with the psyche. The image of '"a hundred hands" seen by the Woman in ERWARTUNG represents, in very simple terms, the peculiarities of her. personality. The visions of "a hundred hands" reveal by their shapes and functioning i n t e l - l i g i b l e clues to the character of the Woman, in this case her pro- gressive state of dementia. Our protagonist's vision of the garden with i t s constant state of tranquility is somewhat more complex. Suffice i t to say that the garden represents contentment and happiness and, above a l l , protection and security from outside forces. This, of course, is a fantasy land, an i l l u s i o n existing only in the mind of the pro- tagonist. This symbol, like a l l other symbols, is more than we can understand at f i r s t encounter. One does well to remember Carl Jung's words, "A symbol does not disguise; i t reveals in time.""' To understand f u l l y the expressionist movement in painting and how i t influenced Arnold Schoenberg, one must understand how the movement originated. The f i r s t signs of a nev; movement in ' painting in the twentieth century appeared in Paris in 1905. In 5 Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Vol. XVIII, p. 212. 10 that year, a group of young painters led by the artist Henri Matisse held an exhibition of paintings characterized by simplicity of design and the use of b r i l l i a n t colours. A shocked c r i t i c described the artists as "fauves" (wild beasts), hence the derivation of their name, the Fauves. The Fauves were influenced by the newly-discovered exotic arts which conveyed more personal forms of expression. Im- p l i c i t in the works of the Fauves and fundamental to expressionism is the philosophy that the a r t i s t s ' presentations should represent their own emotional reactions to the subject through bold colours and strong linear patterns and should be completely free of tradition. The Fauves helped contemporary artists open the door to the use of colour as an expressive end in i t s e l f , freeing colour of i t s tradition- a l role as the description of the local tone of an object. Henri Matisse put the matter of expressionism clearly and concisely in the words: What I am after, above a l l , is expression....1 am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for l i f e and my way of expressing it....The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive....everything plays a part. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements at the painter's disposal for the expression of his feelings^...All that is not useful in the picture is detrimental. The Fauve movement, never a successful organization, was short-lived; however, i t s influence was almost immediately f e l t outside France, especially in the German schools of art in the early twentieth century. The element of immediate personal expres- sion strongly appealed to artists in Germany. Two fraternities of German artists organized into two individual societies--DIE BRUCKE 6 Robert Goldwater, Artists on Art, pp. 409-410. 11 (The Bridge), in Dresden, and DER BLAUE REITER (The Blue Rider), in Munich. These two fraternities symbolize that renewal of German art which occurred during the years immediately before World War I when German artists extended the techniques of the Fauvists. In German expressionism the artist's subjective feelings toward objec- tive reality and the realm of imagination were revealed. Their powerful canvasses were particularly expressive of intense human feeling. Arnold Schoenberg's most influential friend in the f i e l d of German art was Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Kandinsky and his companions founded, in 1909, an exhibiting society called the "Neue Kiinstler Vereinigung Munchen" (New Artist's Association of Munich) whose aims were to promote exhibitions, lectures, publication, and other related events in Germany and abroad. The most important art book to appear during that time was The Blue Rider Almanac, published by Reinhard Piper. The Almanac was i n i t i a l l y Kandinsky's idea, and his original aims for the art book were clearly stated in a letter to Paul Westheim, editor of the periodical Das Kuristblatt: ...to compile a book....in which the articles would be written exclusively by a r t i s t s . I dreamed of painters and musicians at the front rank. The harmful separation of one art from another, of Art from folk art of children's art from "ethnography," the stout walls which divided what were to my mind such closely related, even identical phe- nomena, in a word their synthetic r e l a t i o n s h i p s — a l l this gave me no peace. Today, i t may appear remarkable that for a long time I was able to find no collaborator, no resources, simply no support for such a project. The Blue Rider was f i r s t conceived as a yearbook, although only the f i r s t number actually was publicized. Horse and rider were 7 Peter Vergo, The Blue Rider, p. 5. 12 common motifs in the early paintings of Kandinsky. A l l his pre- liminary drawings for the cover of the Almanac include the figure of a rider with flying cloak, hence the origin of the book's name, The Blue Rider. The final design is reproduced on page 13. Specifically, Vasily Kandinsky, along with his collaborator Franz Marc, set the new standard for art that Kandinsky had form- ulated. Kandinsky explained i t in detail in his essay "Ubes das geistige in der Kunst.", His main concern in painting was the pre- sentation of the inner nature of things. Instead of making state- ments about the nature of things.in pictures, one was to feel that nature was speaking to the viewer through the pictures. In this way one would not be distracted by the outer appearance which hides and in some cases f a l s i f i e s the true meaning of nature. In 1912, Kandinsky wrote, "It has no significance whether the a r t i s t uses g a real or an abstract form. Both are inwardly equal." At the same time, Schoenberg, independent of Kandinsky, was led by his musical imagination in a similar direction. Schoenberg gave priority to the unconscious in the creative process. "If more things happen than one can think of, they must happen unconsciously." Both men rejected the rather vague notion of beauty as a standard of value of art. Rather, they preferred the notion of truthfulness in a l l phases of art. Arnold Schoenberg began to paint in 1907. Between 1908 and 1910, he painted in short bursts of creativity two-thirds of his ninety pictures, most of which are now in the hands of his heirs. To Schoenberg painting was not forced by a specific set of rules 8 Peter Vefgo, The Blue Rider, p. 9. 9 Josef Rufer, Aspekte der Neuen Musik, p. 52. i. V A S I L Y K A N D I N S K Y (1866- 1944): Woodcut for the cover of the 'Blue Rider Almanac'. igi2 14 but rather by his personal a r t i s t i c sensitivity. Painting.began to, in Schoenberg's words, "make music with colours and forms. In an essay t i t l e d Die Dilder, Kandinsky clearly states Schoenberg's exact philosophy of art: "Painting, for him, is the same as music, a way to express himself, to present feelings, thoughts, and other impressions."'''''" This is precisely what Kandinsky meant when he stated that the inner nature of things could be simply and immediately realized in music--in i t s tones, sounds, and rhythms. He demanded that the p i c t o r i a l a r t i s t turn toward music and try to find the same means for his art. It is important to remember that during the years when Schoenberg's painting activity reached i t s peak (1908-1910), he composed several atonal works including his f i r s t two works for the stage--the monodrama ERWARTUNG (1909) and DIE GLUCKLICHE HAND (1909- 1913). Schoenberg called many of his paintings and drawings "visions" and used the same word to describe the musical detail and insight into the nature of the Woman in ERWARTUNG. Understanding this, one can clearly see the connection between expressionist art and the expressionist compositions Schoenberg wrote during the same period of time. We are not given a precise date as to when Kandinsky and Schoenberg f i r s t met; however, from their exchange of letters i t is believed to have been around the year 1906. Their relationship culminated five years later in Schoenberg's help with the almanac Per Blaue Reiter. He f i r s t presented an essay about song compo- sition called"The Relationship "to the Text,"one of the most import- 10 Ibid.. p. 52. 11 Ibid!., p. 52. 15 ant of a l l Schoenberg's t h e o r e t i c a l statements. In f a c s i m i l e , he wrote the song Herzgewachse@(for soprano, c e l e s t e , harmonium, and harp) on December 9, 1911, f o r the Almanac; and f i n a l l y , he c o n t r i b u t e d a reproduction of h i s s e l f - p o r t r a i t (1910). One can f i n d strong t i e s between the e x p r e s s i o n i s t movement i n the l i t e r a r y world, s p e c i f i c a l l y German e x p r e s s i o n i s t drama, and the e x p r e s s i o n i s t music drama due t o p a r a l l e l i n t e l l e c t u a l trends i n the a r t s g e n e r a l l y . L i t e r a r y expressionism, i n c o r r e l a t i o n w i t h the e x p r e s s i o n i s t movements i n a r t and music, represented a r e v o l t against t r a d i t i o n a l nineteenth century l i t e r a r y s t y l e s , and f o r approximately f i f t e e n years from 1910 to 1924 dominated German l i t e r a r y h i s t o r y . I t i s imperative t o understand that these years were a time o f great unrest i n Germany, a p e r i o d which i n c l u d e d the Great War. The nightmare o f anxiety caused by the s o c i a l and p o l i t i c a l unrest i n Germany i n the e a r l y t w e n t i e t h century a f f e c t e d every p a r t o f the a r t i s t ' s l i f e i n a poignant and powerful way. The a r t i s t r e a l i z e d that the then current l i t e r a r y phase of the e a r l y t w e n t i e t h century, neo-romanticism, was not at a l l concerned w i t h the r e a l i t i e s o f l i f e and lacked i n t e r e s t i n the p o l i t i c a l and s o c i a l needs o f the time. The e x p r e s s i o n i s t movement q u i c k l y became the new v i s i o n , the new energy i n German l i t e r a r y h i s t o r y , assuming a l e a d i n g r o l e i n the i n t e l l e c t u a l l i f e o f the country. Hatred o f war, hope f o r a b e t t e r world, and concern f o r human l i f e became the three c e n t r a l ideas i n expressionism. With these ideas came the emphasis on i n n e r v i s i o n , p a r t i c u l a r l y the c r e a t i v e powers o f the w r i t e r . We f i n d the b i r t h of a new, much more intense s u b j e c t i v i t y which d i d not h e s i t a t e t o 16 destroy the conventional picture of reality in order that "expression" could become the dominant aspect of literature. To understand clearly the relationship of German expressionist drama to the libretto of the monodrama ERWARTUNG, i t is necessary to discuss the formal features of expressionist drama. One of i t s most striking features is i t s abstraction, i t s lack of concern with pro- jecting the i l l u s i o n of reality on the state. Expressionism pro- duces constant stress created by preoccupation with deep images rather than with surface appearances. A l l unnecessary detail is eliminated, leaving one to deal only with the most important outlines and crucial situations in the actions and plots. Likewise, dramatics figures show no characteristic features. Rather, they represent important principles the author v/ishes to convey to the audience. Often characters are simply designated as Child, Wife, or the Woman. Expressionist writers, then,were not concerned with creating dramatic characters in their plays but were more concerned with representing man's eternal and transcendental values. One of the most outstanding formal elements found in expres- sionist drama was the dream. The great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud opened the doors to the age of psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century with the publication of Interpretation of Dreams. This book was an introduction to the concept of the world of un- conscious experience. He attached particular importance to dreams as a point of departure from normal reality. The expressionist dramatist Arthur Strindberg (1849-1902), influenced by Freud, wrote of his characterizations in A Dream Play, "The characters s p l i t , 17 double, multiply, vanish, s o l i d ify, blur, c l a r i f y . But one conscious- ness reigns above them all--that of the dreamer; and before i t there are no secrets, no incongruities, no scruples, no laws. There is 12 neither judgement nor exoneration, but merely narration." In A Dream Play, Strindberg attempted to depict the disconnected but strangely logical quality of dreams. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1901) was another writer of crucial importance during this time. In his book Thus Spake Zarathustra, on which Richard Strauss later based his symphonic poem of the same t i t l e , Nietzsche dealt with the philosophy of man's self-awareness. Nietzsche, with his friend August Strindberg, emphasized the extreme, often pathological, psychological aspects of man. This change in concentration from surface human emotions to the deeper aspect of man's self-awareness gave the expressionist literary movements i t s keenest impetus. The real beginning of theatrical expressionism began with Oskar Kokoschka's play Murder HOpe Of Womankind (1907). Walter Sokel states, "In Kokoschka's play, the projection of psychic s i t - uations into symbolic images, an essential function of the sub- 13 conscious mind, becomes action on the stage." With the elimination of r e a l i s t i c detail, the use of colour symbolism, and the sensual, carnal responses of the characters in this play and others, Kokoschka opened the doors to a whole new realm of literary expression. The s a t i r i s t and polemicist Karl Kraus, a personal friend of both Kokoschka and Schoenberg, started what is most-often referred to as the Wedekind wave in Vienna. Wedekind was the f i r s t author to 12 C.L. Dalstrom, Strindberg's Dramatic Expressionism, p. 177. 13 Walter Sokel, An Anthology of German Expressionist Drama, p. 17. 18 to deal w i t h subjects that were u n t i l t h i s time unmentionable— t o p i c s such as sex, mental i l l n e s s , e t c . In h i s own j o u r n a l Die Fackel (founded i n 1899), Kraus s t r o n g l y condemned the abuses" o f the language of the Viennese f e u i l l e t o n i s t e s ( s e r i a l i s t s ) . In the ded- i c a t i o n sent t o Kraus w i t h a copy o f h i s Harmonielehre (1911), Schoenberg s t a t e d , " I have l e a r n t more perhaps from you than one can l e a r n i f one i s t o remain independent."""'* , A f t e r the dream, the most important formal element i n the e x p r e s s i o n i s t drama was the monologue. The monologue served as the p r i n c i p a l v e h i c l e by which the l y r i c a l - d r a m a t i c p r o t a g o n i s t expressed the s u b j e c t i v e developments o f the i n n e r man. Another important aspect o f e x p r e s s i o n i s t drama was the f a c t t h a t i t s c e n t r a l focus was on one p r o t a g o n i s t . A l l other characters i n the drama revolved e n t i r e l y around t h i s one c e n t r a l f i g u r e . The l e a d i n g a c t o r was u s u a l l y found i n an extreme s i t u a t i o n o r circumstance w i t h which he o r she could not cope. The a c t u a l s t r u c t u r e of the e x p r e s s i o n i s t drama was u s u a l l y found t o be a sequence o f scenes which followed each other i n r a p i d succession. These scenes were r a r e l y l i n k e d together i n an obvious, systemetic way. This s t r u c t u r e served t o heighten the dramatic impact o f the drama, p a r t i c u l a r l y the audience's awareness o f the u s u a l l y unhealthy circumstance or c r u c i a l s i t u a t i o n of i t s lone p r o t a g o n i s t . I t i s g e n e r a l l y an easy task t o i d e n t i f y the w r i t i n g s t y l e o f the e x p r e s s i o n i s t dramatist. He u s u a l l y employed f r e e verse i n which a l l sentences were t o the p o i n t , o m i t t i n g a l l n o n e s s e n t i a l 14 Frank F i e l d , K a r l Kraus and His Vienna, p. 25. 19 details from the actions and plots. One finds that even the longer sentence structures were broken into shorter units, characterized by missing particles. The page was characterized by the prolifefation of exclamation marks and dashes as well as the free use of both the verb and the dynamic metaphor. Images and symbols usually abstracted from common experience were frequently used ine-the expressionist literary style to express an inner world of meaning. One of the most characteristic features of expressionist drama was that the play never reached a specific conclusion but rather was open-ended, leaving the audience to imagine and draw whatever conclusions they chose. In comparing the libretto of the monodrama ERWARTUNG to the formal features of expressionist drama, i t is clear that Marie Pappenheim, with the close collaboration of Arnold Schoenberg, wrote an expressionist drama. Without desiring to be repetitive, suffice i t to say that the stress in ERWARTUNG (as in other expressionist music dramas) is on the theatrical aspect of the production, not on the esthetic worth of the text. The text served only as a means to an end, to provide innumerable musical p o s s i b i l i t i e s to the composer. During the crucial early stage in the development of his mature twelve-tone style of composition, Schoenberg f e l t strongly that "expressionism" was the only medium in which he could success- f u l l y relate his feelings to the world. His expressionist compo- sitional period (1908-1913), interestingly enough, proved to be one of the most p r o l i f i c times of this extraordinary composer's l i f e . CHAPTER THREE THE DRAMATIC AND HARMONIC STRUCTURE OF ERWARTUNG ERWARTUNG is classified as a "monodrama in one act" and is divided into four scenes--the f i r s t of thirty measures' length; the second, of fifty-two measures; the third, of twenty-four measures; and the fourth and longest scene a total of 321 measures. Each scene is bracketed by the entrance and exit of the Woman, the sole protag- onist of the work. The three extremely short interludes might be termed "static music" consisting of pedal points, reiterated ostinato rhythmic figures, or sustained harmonies. A constant level of tension is maintained in the monodrama by avoiding resolution of the dissonant chord. ERWARTUNG is an outstanding example of sustained, free com- position. Dramatically speaking, with each new scene comes a more i n - cisive portrayal of the Woman's desperate circumstances. With each realization there also comes a new burst of colour in the orchestration. One i s constantly aware of the growing intensity and hysteria of the protagonist. This constantly-increasing tension becomes almost unbearable in measure 190, when the Woman, feeling the impact of the realization that her lover is truly dead, screams for help. It is my opinion that, from this point on, the Woman loses a l l contact with reality, f a l l i n g deeper and deeper into her state of dementia. Looking yet more closely at the dramatic structure of ERWARTUNG, 20 we find six major climaxes and six predominantly l y r i c sections. The climaxes occur generally where the Woman receives a major shock. The l y r i c sections generally recall the Woman's past pleasures shared with her lover. A l l l y r i c sections immediately precede the six climactic sections. The six major climaxes are: Measures 1. 110-113 2. 154-155 3. 190-193 4. 348 5. 415-416 6. 424 The climaxes are characterized by the u t i l i z a t i o n of the f u l l orchestra as well as the use of the character's extreme vocal range. The climaxes are also characterized by extreme rhythmic v i t a l i t y . It is of interest to note that there is a pause after the second, third, and fourth climaxes, in each case representing a complete change of thought and mood of the Woman. The l y r i c sections are characterized by rather lighter orchestration. A prominent use of the solo woodwind and string instruments becomes evident. These sections are characterized by much quieter dynamic levels, expressive feelings, and generally longer vocal lines which avoid wide skips. In looking at this work in detail, one can clearly see the close coordination of the music and stage action. Stage directions are clearly reflected in the music. In measure 104 the written stage directions c a l l for a "Leichter Windstoss" or light breeze. The light breeze is mirrored in the music by the thirty-second note 22 figure in the muted violins and contrabasses. Similarly, the i n - strumental passage in measures 385-388 clearly indicated the appearance of dawn. In this passage Schoenberg approaches pure impressionism in his use of orchestral colour. In discussing the harmonic structure of ERWARTUNG as the most important work intthe development of Schoenberg's mature twelve- tone style of composition, i t is v i t a l to grasp the principle that dissonance is the primary means of the musical expression. Dissonance is simply any musical sound that must be resolved by the use of a consonant chord or note, that i s , a musical sound that does not need a resolution. The harmonic system, then, is defined by the relation of consonance to dissonance. The secondary elements of musical expression were thought to be tone colour, accent, form, and counter- point. Schoneberg considered a l l these elements of importance, not definable as primary or secondary. In a l l his works Schoenberg termed the oscillation between tension (dissonance) and resolution (consonance) the complete "emancipation of the dissonance." This "emancipation of the dis- sonance," foreshadowed by the nonfunctional harmonies of Claude Debussy, was the i n i t i a l step taken in the direction of the gradual process of the complete breakdown of tonality. This refusal of resolution was the key to Schoenberg's style of composition in his expressionist period (1908-1913). For the f i r s t time in Schoenberg's works of this period we see expression as an element of the total structure of the composition, a symbol of the new attitude which prevailed in a l l arts during the early twentieth century. Another interesting aspect of ERWARTUNG is the composer's use of textual and rhythmic symbolism within the score. One of the most outstanding examples of rhythmic symbolism is the symbol of the waltz which traditionally denotes pleasure and gracefulness. The waltz rhythms are notated in the score as eighth-note triplets of 9/8 time superimposed on 3/4 time. Two clear examples of this are found in measures 31-34 and measures 370-371. In both instances the musical indication is "sehr zart" (very sweet). An example of mus- i c a l symbolism found in ERWARTUNG is the descending half-tone legato figure, a simple figure symbolizing suffering or supplication found in measure 297, "in your drowsiness.... like a name...." Generally speaking, highly broken textures or, in other words, constant changes of tone colour, rhythms, etc., in the music symbolize "Angst" (anxiety) Two words which are treated symbolically in the music are "Nacht" (night) and "Mond" (moon). Both of these words are portrayed symbolically by the use of ostinati. In measure 9 we find a low- pitched ostinato fluctuating between two notes which symbolizes the word Nacht; in measure 22 we find an ostinato which contains two notes a minor-third apart, symbolizing the word Mond. This l i s t of symbols is purposely incomplete and is only intended to make one aware of this important, i f often-neglected, aspect of Schoenberg's musical language. In Chapter Two I have already b r i e f l y alluded to the fact that ERWARTUNG is an atonal work, i.e., a work in which the tonal functions of the tonic and dominant do not exist. Schoenberg, as previously noted, objected to the term "atonal," preferring the term 24 "pantonal." It is important to realize that Schoenberg's expression- i s t works can be viewed as a suspension of the modal system. Though no longer tonal, the works s t i l l imply recognized principles of the tonal system such as individual harmonic progressions and tonal idioms. It would be beneficial to discuss the general aspects of the new world of sound and to apply them to the expressionist mono- drama ERWARTUNG. First, the dissolution of tonal functions is clearly seen in atonal works. In ERWARTUNG there are few perfect triads that could even suggest the tonal functions of the tonic and dominant. Certain chordal structures do, however, create momentary sources of s t a b i l i t y in the work. Practically a l l of the chords in ERWARTUNG encompass six notes generally consisting of two three-note chords outlining the seventh. This consistency helps to unify the harmonic texture of the monodrama. The chords are characterized by aggregations of fourths, f i f t h , and tritones. Clusters of seconds are also common. There is a definite avoidance of octave doublings in ERWARTUNG as well as in a l l of Schoenberg's subsequent compositions. eg- J ° / V P i V Secondly, we find the element of perpetual variation in the musical structure of Schoenberg's expressionist works. Schoenberg refused ctD use traditional compositional techniques such as thematic repetition and the transformation of motifs in his expressionist works. 25 In a recent study t i t l e d "Studien zur Entwicklung des dodekaphonen Satzes bei Arnold Schoenberg," (1972) Jan Maegaard goes further to say that the athematic structure of ERWARTUNG is a direct result of the "absolute equivalence" and "interchange of harmony and melody."15 There seems to be a great deal of disagreement over the issue, "Is ERWARTUNG athematic or not?." Herbert Buchanan for example, states in his essay "A Key to Schoenberg's ERWARTUNG opus 17" that Schoenberg quoted a portion Of one of his early songs in D minor in ERWARTUNG (just before the end of measure 401) . According to Buchanan, i t appears f i r s t in the cel'los and is repeated in i n - version in the bass clarinet and bassoons. Other writers such as George Perle state that Schoenberg's later twelve-tone technique is foreshadowed in ERWARTUNG. Robert Craft, on the other hand, does not use the terms "athematic" and "atonal" at a l l . He states that in ERWARTUNG there is a constant motivic development, the principal motif being A-B flat-A. H.H. Stuckenschmidt refers to the three- note motif D-F-C sharp. The atonal melody, independent of the harmony, follows i t s own laws and polyphic tension. Melody is the most important element in ERWARTUNG, constantly mirroring the Woman's extreme emo- tions. H.H. Stuckenschmidt points out that ERWARTUNG can be compared in form to a "pre-Wagnerian opera finale" or to a "scena and aria." One point upon which a l l agree is that the harmonic and melodic aspects of Schoenberg's atonal works (including ERWARTUNG) should be treated as a combined unit. A "symphonic bond" exists between the human voice (melody) and the instrumental accompaniment that must not be 15 Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg, p. 39. 26 broken. Thirdly, one is immediately aware of the new instrumental style used in ERWARTUNG. There is increasingly bolder use of chromaticism. With this we find a growing tendency for composers to create harmonic and melodic forms for their own means of expres- sion. Schoenberg's wealth of imagination brought to this score a perpetual renewal, a constant inventiveness of idea and form. The entire force of the large orchestra is selifom used in ERWARTUNG. Small groups of solo instruments are generally used in chamber-music fashion. By treating the orchestra as a chamber orchestra, Schoenberg created an inexhaustible source of instrumental colour, u t i l i z i n g different instrumental combinations. Charles Rosen states, "This emancipation of tone colour was as significant and as characteristic of the f i r s t decades of the twentieth century as the 16 emancipation of dissonance." Influenced by the techniques of orchestration of Gustav Mahler, Schoenberg's innovative handling of the orchestra brought about important changes in orchestration which influenced his contemporaries as well as modern-day composers. Closely related to the instrumental style are the revolution- ary innovations in texture found in ERWARTUNG, specifically, Schoenberg's use of rhythm and orchestral colour. ERWARTUNG consists of alternations of two kinds of rhythmic textures--sections of continuously repeating figures known as ostinati and other sections of either stable or continuously-changing material. These alternating sections define the dramatic action of the monodrama. They also control the degree of tension relayed to the audience. 16 Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg, p. 43. The wide range of orchestral colour so apparent in ERWARTUNG is created by the use of several devices. Flutter-tongue and such special effects as sulpponticello (bowed near bridge), col legno (bowed with wood), harmonics, glissandi and fingered and bowed tremelos are often called for in the score. To produce the atmosphere Schoenberg wished to create in the orchestra and on the stage, the uses of the proper sd/namics and tempo were essential. Dynamic markings ranging from f f f to ppp f i l l each page of the score. There are 111 tempo changes and sixty-five additional tempo controls such as accelerando and ritardano plus numerous tempo changes indicated by markings such as J = J . . One can quickly realize the d i f f i c u l t y for the performer in relating to and connecting a l l of these tempo changes. These elements of the new sound were to guide Schoenberg towards the laws of organization of new music, specifically his twelve^tone compositional style. His chief goal was to u t i l i z e the total resources of chromaticism to construct a new and more expressive tonal system. CHAPTER FOUR THE CHARACTER OF THE WOMAN In order to create successfully a consistent character on stage, the actor must understand the motivation(s), the inner thoughts and the feelings of the character of "theWWoman" in the monodrama ERWARTUNG opus 17. In the f i r s t scene of the monodrama we are introduced to a lone Woman who contemplates entry into a dark and eerie forest. From her f i r s t words one can clearly see the Woman suffers from great stress and conflict. "Shall I go here? One cannot see the way..." (P/VS p.3) The reason she suffers from such tremendous anxiety i s not im- mediately known to the audience. The Woman's great fear of her surroundings is vivedly expressed in the words, "How threatening the stillness i s . . . the moon is f u l l of horror..." (p.6) Her unstable emotional state becomes very clear in the words, "I am alone in the heavy shadows..." (p.6) In the second scene, we learn that the Woman has actually en- tered the forest. It is very dark, and she finds herself having to grope with outstretched arms to guide her along the path. In this short scene of fifty-two measures, i t becomes more and more apparent that the Woman suffers from psychopathic i l l n e s s . She is haunted by unseen presences. 28 29 anxiety quickly grows to hysteria, as she imagines the rising gentle breeze as a kind of negative force trying to suffocate her. In this scene she makes references also to a "garden," to which I had alluded previously in Chapter Two. The turning point in the understanding of the Woman's motivation for entering the forest alone is found in her last words of scene two. "Oh, oh, What is it? A body... No, only a tree trunk." (pp. 11-12) In these words, the Woman hints that there has been a murder, a murder which, I suggest, she committed. In scene three, as we watch the woman approaching a clearing deep in the forest, we develop yet more insight into the serious nature of the Woman's psychopathic state. Her hysteria progresses to a stage of dementia, partial loss of the control of her mind. Her hallucinations become more vivid. She imagines shadows of many descriptions including "a black object dances...a hundred hands," (pp.12-13). By free association, these shadows remind the Woman of her lover's shadow on the wall of the garden. Her moment of tender reflection is interrupted when she imagines the shadow crawl- ing. Her hallucinations are symbols which help us more clearly to understand the state of the Woman's subconscious mind. In scene four, by far the longest scene of this monodrama, we recognize that the path through the forest leads to a house. The Woman enters the scene, her hair dishevelled, and her dress torn. From the Woman's f i r s t words, we clearly see she has retreated into a 30 deep state of depression. "He cannot be found. On the whole, long way nothing v i s i b l e . . . and no sound..." (p. 16) We poignantly feel the Woman's despair, the burden weighing heavily on her heart. She imagines a bench beneath a grove of trees; how- ever, at closer range she sees the bench is in reality the dead body of her lover. With the Woman's one great, long cry for help (measure 190) we reach the main climax of the monodrama. This cry i s , interestingly enough, her only plea for help. At this point in the monodrama the Woman's mind "snaps" and hereafter the Woman becomes totally demented, never again re-entering the world of reality. The individual micro-worlds of her love, hate, and jealousy are developed at length. The Woman discloses in measures 284 and 285 that she has not seen her lover for three days. She also suggests for the f i r s t time in measures 295 to 300 that there was another woman involved. "Ah, now I remember... your sighs in your drowsiness... like a name... You tenderly kissed the question from my lips...(p.33) In measures 331 to 333 she clearly states that the other woman was the cause of the divergence in relationship. "Oh but how you love her, those white arms... how hard you kissed them..." (p.36) Her hatred turns to repulsion, a state in which she actually abuses and indeed kicks the dead body of her lover. Almost instantly her act of rejection and repulsion turns to utter loneliness and despair (measures 349-351). 31 "For me there is no room." (p.38) - In the remaining pages of the monodrama, she senses that dawn is rapidly approaching and that light w i l l come for a l l but her. At the very close of the work her mind withdraws again into the night where she finds her lover alive one again. "Oh, are you there... I sought you..." (p.47) ERWARTUNG ends the same way i t began...that i s , with a search for peace. It is unclear how much of the action in ERWARTUNG is r e a l i s - t i c and how much of this nightmarish vision is symbolic. It is a question each one must answer for oneself... did the Woman in fact murder her lover, or merely wish i t upon him? We are faced with the question, "What happened to the Woman after the monodrama?" An audience is left without a comfortable f i n a l i t y . This i s , interest- ingly enough, one of the main characteristics of modern art and thought of Schoenberg's time. We must remember that Schoenberg did not concern himself with an answer but only with the Woman's sub- conscious thought patterns within the time lapse of the monodrama. It is possible to look at the Woman's whole nightmare as a symbolic representation of a psychoanalyist's dealings with a patient. Several writers have expanded this idea, suggesting that ERWARTUNG is a Freudian music drama and that a l l the Woman's experiences are symbolic of her "true personality." I, too, sug- gest that to look at ERWARTUNG in su*6li a fa§Ki5ii is certainly plausible; however, any relationship between Freudian theories and 32 the monodrama ERWARTUNG are purely coincidental. Arnold Schoenberg and Sigmund Freud certainly must have heard of each other; however, there was definitely no formal friendship established between these two men. In delving more deeply into the character of the Woman, one cannot help but consider her background and whether i t had an effect on her current unstable state of mind as we find her at the very outset of the monodrama. We know that Schoenberg wrote ERWARTUNG during a period of great unrest in Germany. The Franco-Prussian War had been waged some years earlier, and the country was now experi- encing the uneasiness preceding the approaching Great War. It would be logical to assume that the Woman had experienced hardship or traumatic shock, possibly the loss of a loved one or loved ones in war. Since this is a l l only hypothetical, we may conclude that because of something in the Woman's past she has become unable to deal successfully with her own emotions. Her reactions to stress and conflict are, at the very least, immature, as seen in her phy- s i c a l symptoms, her psychopathic i l l n e s s , her hallucination, her hysteria, and her final dementia. We have learned from the libretto of ERWARTUNG that this "murder of passion," as I have termed i t , was the result of "another woman" coming between our protagonist and her lover. This brings up the question, "What caused the d i f f i c u l t i e s to arise between her and her lover?" I cannot help but suggest that the Woman may have had sexual d i f f i c u l t i e s with her lover. Some inadequacy on her part to f u l f i l l his sexual needs may have caused him to look elsewhere to satisfy his desires. The Woman was not able to deal rationally 33 with this, and her failure culminated in the murder of her lover. This brings me to my last and perhaps most important question, "What was the major drive or goal of the Woman in ERWARTUNG?" I f one wishes to discuss the subject only superficially, the ansvrer would simply be "to find her lover." I suggest a deeper meaning: the Woman searching for absolution of the terrible burden of her guilt! This destroying guilt not only included the brutal murder of her lover but also a l l of her own deep-set inadequacies as a woman. CHAPTER FIVE LIGHTING The main objective in designing the lighting for my pro- duction of ERWARTUNG was to use light as "scenery." With the exception of four scrims which are painted to depict the forest, the stage is bare. In the twentieth century, the use of light as scenery has become a popular way to illuminate a production. Among the many reasons for this procedure is the increased use of theatre designs other than the traditional proscenium stage. In other theatre forms such as thrust and arena stages, light plays a more intense role in the production's total visual effectl The recent techniques of film have had an enormous impact on the theatre with the use of film projections as well as a number of other special cinematic effects. Another basic reason for the growing popularity of the use of light as scenery is simply, the visual spectacle, the new and enchanting combination of light and sound which the audience can experience. The result of a l l these influences on stage lighting is obviously great, and is leading to the formation of new attitudes regarding the use of stage lighting as an element of scene design. The twentieth century and i t s s c i e n t i f i c achievements have refined the role of stage lighting, allowing i t to gain stature as a v i t a l com- munication factor in the theatre. In a letter Schoenberg wrote to Ernst Legal, the Intendant of 34 35 the Kroll-Oper in Berlin, dated April 14, 1930, the composer gave detailed directions for the performance of ERWARTUNG.. In ERWARTUNG, these are the greatest problems: I. It is necessary always to see the woman in the forest, in order to understand her fear of i t , for the whole piece can be understood as a night- mare. But, for that very reason, i t must be a real forest, and not just an "abstract" one! That kind of abstraction is gruesome, but not frightening. II. In composing, I l e f t hardly any time for the three scene-changes, so that they must happen on an "open" stage. III. On top of that, the background becomes important only in the final (fourth) scene; then the fore- ground must be empty, and everything that could impede the view must be removed. I decided to heed the composer's f i r s t and second wishes but not the third. As anyone knowledgeable of modem theatre knows, the most familiar way. to produce light as scenery i s , of course, projected scenery. After consultation, I have chosen to use in this production two Pani 4000 watt HMI scenic projectors to project on the cyclorama during the f i r s t three scenes of this monodrama, pictures of galaxies such as found on pages 40 and 41. This Strand Century projector is the most powerful scenic projector available, producing up to 58,000 lumens. It is built to use 7-1/8" X 7-1/8" slides, and when using a 220mm f/2.8 lens, i t creates an image of 18.5 feet at a distance of 25 feet. This creates the perfect size and illumination (148 F.C.) for this production of ERWARTUNG, designed for the Frederick Wood Theatre at the University of British Columbia. One of my basic preoccupations in the lighting of ERWARTUNG 17 Josef Rufer, The Works of Arnold Schoenberg, p. 36 was that the audience should always be aware o f the "expression- i s t " character of the work, not only i n the a u r a l but i n the v i s u a l aspect o f the p r o d u c t i o n . The l i g h t i n g i s to accompany the music c o n t i n u a l l y as i t expresses what i s happening on the stage. The music must always dominate; the stage l i g h t i n g must be subordinate to i t . To create s u c c e s s f u l l y t h i s aspect of s u b o r d i n a t i o n of l i g h t to sound on stage, I decided t h a t i n c r e a s i n g l y v i v i d splashes o f c o l o u r were t o appear on stage w i t h each scene change, the f i n a l change t a k i n g place at the opening o f scene f o u r when the pro- j e c t i o n s o f g a l a x i e s fade from the background and reappear as an a b s t r a c t colour p a t t e r n on the f l o o r o f the stage where the Woman i s standing. These continuous a p p l i c a t i o n s of stronger colours on - stage symbolize the r e a c t i o n t o the c o n s t a n t l y deeper probing o f the Woman's subconscious mind. To accomplish t h i s , I a p p l i e d a s i m p l i - f i e d v e r s i o n o f the Rosenthal method o f l i g h t i n g , or what i s other- wise known as the "jewel theory," s p e c i f i c a l l y i n scene f o u r , the longest scene o f the monodrama. The "jewel theory" i s simply the i l l u m i n a t i o n of the acgor from every p o s s i b l e angle. (See diagram below.) I used two b a s i c c o l o u r patterns to symbolize the Woman's 37 tender reflective moments during scene four, and I used the combination of the following gels: light amber (#2), and double pale gold (#52- 52), steel blue (#17), medium amber (#4), and golden amber (#34). To symbolize her fear, anxiety, and later hysteria, I chose the com- bination: light blue (#18), steel blue (#17), steel t i n t (#67), magenta (#13), and white light (0). The patterns which are created on the stage floor are indicated in the diagrams below. A l l combinations used in the previous three scenes are simplified versions of these two gel combinations with the addition of a tur- quoise gel (#62) which, in combination with amber gels, produces a green t i n t . The use of this turquoise gel helps to create the eerie atmosphere of a foreboding evergreen forest. The expressionist character of the monodrama lends i t s e l f to the creation of many special effects. Most important in this production are the silhouettes, created by hanging a transparency made of loosely woven muslin cloth closely behind the scrims. When this transparency is illuminated from directly behind, the actor standing directly in front of the transparency w i l l appear as a silhouette to the audience. Instead of having the actress leave the stage after each scene, I have directed that she retreat behind the scrim, allowing this silhouette effect to symbolize the passage 38 of time between each scene. The "shadow" effects as well as what I term the "staring eyes" effect are important. Both take place between measures 94-114 of the score. The shadow effect is created by placing appropriate gobos (small, thin plates of metal, most commonly aluminum, out of which different patterns or designs can be excised) in the pattern 223 lighting instruments in the second FOH. When this effect is generated correctly, allowing the shadows slowly to creep upstage, i t may be most striking from the audience point of view. The "staring eyes" effect is created by hanging pairs of Christmas tree lights (yellow) behind the scrims. To the audience these flashing lights symbolize the piercing eyes of the unseen beasts the Woman imagines on page 14 in the universal Edition score of ERWARTUNG. A successful special effect is the "dawn" lighting which is used in the last pages of ERWARTUNG. It is produced by using six- foot striplights equipped with red gels situated behind a ground row in front of the cyclorama. Two 8-inch Lekos equipped with yellow gels locateM on the extreme right and left sides of the cyclorama add a great streak of yellow just above the red haze. The rest of the cyclorama appears black. This is caused by the black Hansen cloth scrim hanging directly downstage of the two scenic projectors. The "star" effect used in scene four is produced by pattern 123 lighting instruments equipped with perforated aluminum templets, (Gestetner plates work very well.) The lighting instruments, when focused on the cyclorama, create tiny bright spots which are seen 39 downstage of the black Hansen cloth scrim. One of the oldest and s t i l l most effective special effects is the use of the follow spot to serve as a special focus on the actor as she enters and exits the stage. In this production, the follow spot is located on the bridge of the theatre and is used to illuminate the Woman's face as she f i r s t enters area six in scene one and f i n a l l y leaves area six at the end of scene four. The lighting in this production, then, is a l l symbolic in nature and serves to enhance both the poetic and musical content of the score. The stage lighting represents an important part of my understanding of the depth and scope of the work. The costume design and particularly i t s colour also have an effect on the stage lighting. In this case, the costume design (Appendix VI) is a combination of two popular 1952 dress patterns. The fabric chosen for the dress is a Dundune hemp made of one hundred per cent polyester. I purposely chose beige as the colour for the fabric because of the f l e x i b i l i t y i t allows to the stage lighting. 40 CHAPTER SIX PUBLICITY P u b l i c i t y i s an e s s e n t i a l part o f any p u b l i c p r o d u c t i o n . Two b a s i c media used t o p u b l i c i z e upcoming events i n g a i n i n g p u b l i c exposure are, o f course, r a d i o and t e l e v i s i o n . These media, p a r t i c u l a r l y the t e l e v i s i o n broadcasting system, are very c o s t l y and g e n e r a l l y too expensive f o r low-budget productions. Therefore, the p u b l i c i t y p o s t e r remains the most economical means f o r a production t o gain needed p u b l i c exposure. The more o r i g i n a l and eye-catching the p o s t e r the greater the chance people w i l l read i t and, i n t u r n , attend the p r o d u c t i o n . In designing a p o s t e r f o r ERWARTUNG, my f i r s t o b j e c t i v e was to determine which were the most important elements i n the mono- drama and to i n c o r p o r a t e them, s y m b o l i c a l l y , i n t o the p o s t e r . I chose three symbols t o appear i n the p o s t e r : the f o r e s t , a s k u l l , and a broken, red rose. The Woman's changes o f l o c a t i o n i n the f o r e s t i n the four scenes o f ERWARTUNG symbolize her continuously changing s t a t e of mind. Throughout the monodrama, the Woman f a l l s deeper and deeper i n t o a demented s t a t e , c o n s i s t i n g o f a multitude o f t e m p o r a r i l y obscured thoughts, impressions, and images. The s k u l l represents not only the death o f her l o v e r , but the death o f her productive mind. The broken, red rose represents the "murder o f p a s s i o n . " As I s t a t e d p r e v i o u s l y i n Chapter Hour, I b e l i e v e the 4 2 43 Woman, drawn by her own dementia, revisits the scene of the murder she herself committed. My second objective was to design an "expressionistic" poster u t i l i z i n g the three symbols, the forest, the skull, and the rose. To accomplish this, I chose to use photography. With the permission of the University of British Columbia Faculty of Dentistry, I was allowed to photograph a skull. I used a 32 ASA (American Standards Association) Kodak film which enabled me to enlarge the print without producing unpleasant grain. The forest scene was taken on the University of British Columbia endowment lands using 400 ASA Kodak film. The 400 ASA Kodak film creates an opposite effect to the 32 ASA film by causing the coarseness of the granular structure to become visible when enlarging the picture. I chose to develop these two films on a matt surface, high contrast paper, specifically 8x10 Kodak RC2 (resin-coated) paper. I chose this paper purposely to increase the contrast of the print to the point where half-tones disappear, emphasizing only the essential pattern of the picture. In the development of the background of the poster, the forest scene, I used a process called "solarization." Solarization is the partial reversing of the image on print or film. This special effect is produced by the action of light on the partially developed material. Prints solarized during the developmental process appear almost completely reversed. That is to say, the print appears to have black highlights and white shadows. The best results are achieved by using rather high-contrast subjects such as those I have used. 44 The print of the skull and of the red rose were later applied with masking tape on to the forest scene. The lettering, done with Letraset, was the f i n a l step in producing the poster. The poster was once again photographed and appears on the following page. An additional poster done in the same manner is also included. These posters can, of course, be reproduced in any desired size. The additional poster found on page 47 was designed by my dear friend and a r t i s t Mrs. Mary Ann Quiring. The original was done in water colours, specifically, Symphonic 30-17 B r i l l i a n t Water Colours for Artists (made in U.S.A.). The black background was produced by using a free flowing black ink called Osmirodid. The f i n a l poster was sprayed by a Grumbacher product called Tussilm, which simply protects the water colours from smudging should i t be subject to moisture. One can easily appreciate that this poster too is hightly symbolic, as indicated by the artist's preoccupation with the state of the Woman's inner consciousness. In summary, Schoenberg's ERWARTUNG opus 17 is an expressionist music drama. Each aspect of this work as discussed in this paper forms an integral part of an understanding of the opera as a whole. The reader, be he an observer or participant in a future production of ERWARTUNG, w i l l hopefully have gained a f u l l e r appreciation of this most intriguing work. 45 46 47 E R W A R T U N Q • B Y A . SCHOLNblRG 48 BIBLIOGRAPHY A p e l , W i l l i . Harvard D i c t i o n a r y o f Music. Second e d i t i o n , Cambridge: The Belknap P r e s s , 1969. Armitage, Merle. Schoenberg. New York: Books f o r L i b r a r i e s Press, 1971. Bellman, W i l l a r d . L i g h t i n g the Stage A r t and P r a c t i c e . Second e d i t i o n , New York: Chandler P u b l i s h i n g Company, 1967. C r a f t , Robert, r e c o r d notes f o r "The Music o f Arnold Schoenberg," V o l . 1. Columbia Records, 1963. Crawford, John. The R e l a t i o n s h i p o f Text and Music i n the Vocal Works of Arnold Schoenberg. d i s s e r t a t i o n , Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1963. Dalstrom, C.L. Schoenberg's Dramatic Expressionism. New York: AnnArbor, 1930. F i e l d , Frank. The Last Days Of Mankind: K a r l Kraus and His Vienna. New York: MacMillan, 1967. Furness, R.S. Expressionism. London: Methuen and Company L i m i t e d , 1973. Goldwater, Robert. A r t i s t s on A r t . New York: Pantheon Books L i m i t e d , 1945. Grout, Donald. A Short H i s t o r y o f Opera. Second e d i t i o n , New York: Columbia U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1965. Jung, C a r l . The C o l l e c t e d Works of C.G. Jung. V o l s . 5 § 18, Second e d i t i o n , London: Routledge § Kegen P a u l , Ltd 1 ., 1967. L e i b o w i t z , Rene. Schoenberg arid His School. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1949. MacDonald, Malcolm. Schoenberg. London: J.M. Dent § Sons L t d . , 1976. M a c h l i s , Joseph. The Enjoyment o f Music. New York: W.W. Norton § Company Inc., 1963. Payne, Anthony. Schoenberg. London: Oxford U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s ; E l y House, 1968. 49 P e r l e , George. S e r i a l Composition and A t o n a l i t y . Fourth e d i t i o n , Los Angeles: U n i v e r s i t y o f C a l i f o r n i a P r e s s , 1977. P i l l i n , B o r i s . Some Aspects of Counterpoint i n S e l e c t e d Works of Arnold Schoenberg. Los Angeles: Western I n t e r n a t i o n a l Music, Inc., 1971. Reich, W i l l i . Schoenberg, A C r i t i c a l Biography. New York: Praeger P u b l i s h e r s , 1971. R i c h i e , J.M. German E x p r e s s i o n i s t Drama. Boston: Twayne P u b l i s h e r s , 1976. Rosen, Charles. Arnold Schoenberg. New York: The V i k i n g Press, 1975. Rosenfeld, P a u l . Musical P o r t r a i t s . London: Kegan P a u l , Trench, Trubner $ Company, L t d . , 1922. Rosenthal, Jean. The Magic o f L i g h t . New York: Theatre A r t Books, 1972. Rufer, J o s e f . Aspekte der Neuen Musik. K a s s e l : B e r n e r e i t e r - V e r l a g K a s s e l , 1968. !-•-- . The Works of Arnold Schoenberg. London: Faber § Faber, 1962. R u s s e l l , Douglas. Stage Costume Design: Theory Technique and S t y l e . New York: Appleton Century C r o f t s , 1973. Samuel, Richard. Expressionism i n German L i f e , L i t e r a t u r e , and the Theatre (1910-1924). Cambridge: W. H e f f e r $ Sons L t d . , 1939. Schoenberg, Arnold. S t y l e and Idea. E d i t e d by Leonard S t e i n , London: Faber § Faber, 1975. S p i l l m a n , Ronald. Darkroom Techniques. England: Fountain P r e s s , 1974. S t e i n , Erwin. Orpheus i n New Guises. London: C. T i n l i n g and Company L t d . , 1953. S o k e l , Walter. An Anthology o f German E x p r e s s i o n i s t Drama. New York: Doubleday, 1963. Stuckenschmidt, H.H. Arnold Schoenberg. Hassocks, Sussex: The D i t c h l i n g Press, 1959. 50 Tansey, Richard. Art Through the Ages. Sixth edition, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1975. Vergo, Peter. The Blue Rider. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977. Webern, Anton. Schoenberg's Musik. Munich, 1912. 51 P e r i o d i c a l s Herbert Buchanan, "A Key to Schoenberg's ERWARTUNG, Opus 17", J o u r n a l of the American M i i s i c o l o g i c a l S o c i e t y , XX (1967), 434-449. Alan Lessem, "Schonberg and the C r i s i s o f Expressionism", Music and L e t t e r s , LV (1974)-, 429-436. H.H. Stuckenschmidt, "Kandinsky und Schonberg", Melos, XXXI (1964), 209-211. K a r l Worner, "Arnold Schoenberg and the Theatre", Musical Q u a r t e r l y , XLVIII (1962), 444-460. 52 DO NOT COPY LEAVES 52-98; PREVIOUSLY COPY- RIGHTED MATERIAL A . S C H O E N B E R G E R W A R T U N G ( M o n o d r a m ) op. 1? Dichtung von M A R I E P A P P E N H E I M K l a v i e r a u s z u g (E. Steuermann) LTD U N I V E R S A L E D I T I O N 5 3 Besetzung des Orchesters 1 kleine Flote 3 groBe FlOten (3. auch 2. kleine) 3 Oboen 1 Englisch Horn (auch 4. Oboe) 1 D-K!arinette 1 Klarinette in B 2 Klarinetten in A 1 Ba6-Klarinette,in B 3 Fagotte • 1 Kontrafagott Pauken, Becken, groBe Trommel, kleine Trommel, Tamtam, Ratschen, Triangel, Glockenspiel, Xylophon. 4 HOrner in F 3 Trompeten in B 4 Posaunen 1 BaB-Tuba 1 Harfe 1 Celesta I. Geige (wenigstens 16) II. Geige (wenigstens 14) Bratschen (10—12) Violoncell (10—12) Kontrabasse (8—10) U . E . 5 3 6 2 Auffiihrungsrecht vorbehalten. Droiit d'execution reserves. E R W A R T U N G (Monodram) Dichtung von Marie Pappenheim Arnold Schoenberg Op. 17 I. Szene A m R a n d e e i n e s W a l d e s . M o n d h e l l e S t r a f i e n u n d F e l d e r ; d e r W a l d h o c h u n d d u n k e ' l . N u r d i e e r s t e n S t a m m e u n d d e r A n f a n g d e s b r e i t e n W e g e s n o c h h e l l . E i n e F r a u k o m m t ; z a r t . w e i f i g e k l e i d e t ; t e i l w e i s e e n t b l ' a t - t e r t e r o t e R o s e n a m K l e i d . S c h m u c k . 1 + is M t «x#n.n«. <•*». j • 1 'if; I f I f Hi schim-mern... rf O b . sehr zart Wie sll too s i bern die Stam me wle Blr - ken!... % _= 1 1 I pppsehr leicht PP H" bedentet H a o p t s t i m m e , N* N e b e n s t i m m e . D i e G e s a n g s s t i m m e ist (we tin nichts gegenteiliges angegeben ist) i m m e r HAxrptstimme. C o p y - r i ^ t 1 9 2 2 b y U n i v e r s a l E d i t i o n U n i v e r s a l E d i t i o n N r . 5 3 6 2 . R e n e w e d C o p y r i g h t 1 9 5 0 b y E d u a r d S t e u e r m a n n © T R W " * - " * ™ * ' |CftT«S"}-'Ne ttAW)eR.. ( v e r t i e f t z u B o d e n s c n a u e n d ) poco rail. ± if oh_ un - ser Gar - ten. H r . , _ V c l . Die Blu - men fur ihn sind si - cher ver- fliefiend "CLtt 2. s*f* b . I . welkt. F l . H~ H P I 'J: Uppity If ify P I ^ f l l If f ^ J - J Id n4 j n4 j J J j : m PPl rascher J = 76 ( i n p l b t z l i c h e r A n g s t ) ( h u r c h t i n d e n W a l d , b e k l o m r a e n ) Iuh furch te mich... was fiirschwe-re Luft herausschlagt.. a. l̂ikieu .. vjkaA- Saltan, air Ii OuA twe. .. H" H r f . i i i F g # . P o s . m . D . \ V #71 B K b . B B S — 7 ' 1st v H^+ttxHs.loototout-.s/" $ 7 V ^ ^ rit molto rit. ( r i n g t d i e H a n d e , s i e h t z u r i i c k ) > i* ?r \ nji ^ ^ ^ ^ ft Wie ein Sturm grau - en-voll ru - hig und 4eer... i t t a * j L tare • • U . E . 5 3 6 2 . A-berhierists we-niff-stenshell.. tier Mond war fru "her KO hell £]viel langsamer (J = so) P ( s i e h t h i n a u f ) Oua* r clou* .IrtteKjcci^dwoH^ ( k a u e r t n i ^ d e r . l a u s c h t , s i e h t A-berhier ists we-nig-stenshell.. der Mond war frii-Flier KO hell... ft** heft it i* a U*Ue- -bfi^A-... »WQGI\— w u torlier So "brî UA-. • molto rit sehr rasch ( a u f f a h r e n d ) (rt**l*. a / -me-runff... _ bei dir. der Mond_ 1st in der Dam-me-rung. •tie. MJ»or\- i<> i«. "*^«- -Wi lujrt v 3F * A ^ 7 K b . U . E . 5 3 6 2 . 57 6 h e f t i g ( J . 9 6 ) J— -. 5 S w i e d e r l a n g s a m e r — ab(«pt Mrtn U.S. ftWr\-to Hj. bist du willst ihn nicht su feig H" T r p . A chen?... 11 So still) doch hiur * 7 fc-l^b-fP 1 A A F l V c l . K b . K b A c l . a m S l e g J S l r i t - . - - - - . . - l a n g s a m ^ ^ { w e n d e t s i c h g f - g ^ n d e n W a l d ) abrupt 4urm t>. S . U . E . 5 3 6 2 . 59 g U . S z e n e CT i e f s t e s D u n k e l , b r e i t e r W e g , h o h e . , d i c h t e B i i u m e . S i e t a s t e t v o r w a r t s ) | wieder etwas langsainer 153 wieder viel rascher , , , . _, x ° ( b u c k t s i c h , e r e i f t rait d e n H a n d e n , a u f s c h r e i e n d ) , j n o c h h i n t e r d e r S z e n e ; i . . . i , K _ . U.S. o f O w C d l f ) 5 l o u 3 l v w a l k **** ow**. J«J.»itK K * ~ A « , i c / e * ~ u D.V«cWot Ist dasnochder Weg?.. Hier ist es e Xs -4«.t sktt+ke uiaij?-- H«fe'(t is pirn* - lj > esoress. Was? laii los!... 1 K F 3 •bubble. •*« control (*uut% ( z i t t e r n d a u f > v e r s u c h t i h r e H a n d z u b e t r a c h t e n ) / P o s . ( w i l d , g r e i f t s i c h i n s G e s i c h t ) a6 Ein - ge-klemmt?.. Nein ist was ge -'kro - chen... Und hier / T s c h l i g t m i t d e n H a n d e n u r n s i c h ) ' r U . E . 5 3 6 2 . 60 45 C ^ e h t w e i t e r , n u t v o r y e s t r e c k t e n A r m e n ) wieder ruhig J = so fliefiende J (sehr ruhig) Es war a ft* so still Sc. J[i "hin-ter den Mau-ern des Gar tens.. Kei-ne Sensen mehE.kein Ru- nfc loom &yWi><*̂t i i r t . _^ _ v o n A s t . i / n n ( v o l ] E n t s e t z e n s e i t w a r t s It rustl '3 es schliigt_ it qsU J.ki •Stip von Ast "zu Ast.. Es f l i i c h t e n d ) ( S c h r e i e i n e s N a c h t v o g e l s ) a K . W J M - * • » » « & » U * ( t o b e n d f J - 8 4 U . E . 5 3 6 2 . J) = 8 4 etwas drangend U . E . 5 3 6 2 . 65 1 4 A iaM-^u^u^iut, v i e l r a s c h e r J = 7 6 ( L e i c h t e r W i n d s t o B ( S i e sieht w i e d e r h i n j A - bend 1st es so lang . 3 - ber derSchat-ten krlecht doch!.. 1 nicht rascher, aber heftiger i m A u s d r u c k ( L a u t des S c h a u d e r n s ) quel - lend.. wte an Stie - len **^X^— (Jiî -sf" S|'lA '̂ Wie es glotzt... Hsu3 i t . 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E . 5 3 6 2 . -6-9- e r s c h r o c k e n ) t*jNfit ©v^y, l<«tt^. ( B e u g t s i c h n i e d e r , h u r c h t ) ( S i e t a s t e t h i n u n t e r ) 8 t̂ o oat e»( 4k« aKoelouas ,vV>'-H^ Maoihli^t- ( S i e t r i t t a u s d e m S c h a t t e n i n s M o n d l i c h t ) seJir aufgeregt, aber pp ( V e r s u c h t m i t entaeLz- Esglanzt rot... Ach, mei-ne Han-de sindwund ge-ris-sen... Nein, es istnochnaii, es ist von do K r . Esglanzt rot.. D- looks red.. Ach, mei-ne Haiilde sindwund ge-ri: M i , ^ - a/a. b l o o d y aAd. Soft • Nein, es istnochnaii, es ist vondort. it is still H fe -ftmHOifc. . 1 0 4 l i c h e r A n s t r e n g u n g d e n G e g e n s t a n d h e r v o f z u z e r r e n ) •V'^i'oa urntoat ~h> tscaftg h o o V c o n s t a r t s i u » *Cd»ux».^* (V+o p.*. s«chok Ich kann nicht K b .'v ( B i i c k t sich^mjt f a r c h t b a r e m S c h r e i ) I\A« -V> W w (05. tei-ii' ( S i t sinkt nieder) 70 langsam(»!a/%: J= 6 0 ) p. ( E r h e b t s i c h h a l b , a o d a B i h x G e s i c h t d e n B a u m e n z u g e w e n d e t i s t . V e r w i r r t ) (sieht unverwandt hin) JUL 5 das istderschreckU-che Kopf... das Ge-spensl... wenn es nur end-Uch verschwande... wie das Im M l Wuld... Used* Etn Baumschatten. .ein la-cher-li-cherZweig... a. ri-oiic-a-lo*s Weh...C*L Der Mond Ist tuk-kisch... U . E 5 3 6 2 . 71 20 poco rit. etwas l a n g s a m e r ( m i t a u s g e s t r e c k t e n F i n g e r n h i n w e i s e n d , f l i i s t e r n d ) . weil er blut-leer ist... malt er ro - tesBlut... A-ber eswirtlgleichzerflie - £en... Nioht hin-sehn...Nichtdrauf ach"tun... Es zer-geht si-cher... DoA-t look iW.. Do »>ot- *A>kd it-.- «# Mf- j (Flag.g/u*., PP l r . i ffliss. ( S i e w e n d e t s i c h m i t g e z w u n g e n e r . . U n b e w e g l i c h k e i t ) ( F a s t i a u c h z e n d ) „ , R u h e a b , g e g e n d i e S t r a f i e z n ) . „ _ . » _ - + • [ » ! ( » M t W ) s ; W « * . w i t i X . ^ \ » u ( S c h w e ( S i e w e n d e t s i c h j a h u r n , a b e r n i c h t v o l l s t a n d i g ) [ g e n , F r . Ichwill fort... ichmuCihn fin-den... E s m u f i s c h o n s p a l s e i n . M » , Es ist nichtmelir t̂ to JC-Swujoe-ol. K.V... x-̂ s oA«Wvi \ a * s . . - % lo««/ wie das imWald.. r i t . . l a n g s a m ' J». 112 _ ( S i e h a t s i c h w e i t e r g e w e n d e t , e r b l i c k t p l o t z l i c h w i e d e r d e n G e g e n s t a n d ) ^•3 F r . da... Ich wufi - te.. Es ist noch X*. - * U. E. 5362. 7 2 Xk H * . «fa- ( i h r O b e r k o r p e r f a l l t n a c h v o r n , s i e s c h e i n t z u s a m m e n z u s i n k e n , 21 a b « r s i e k n e c h t m i t g - e s e n k t e m H a u p t b i s h i n , t a s t e t ^ ( S i e b e u g l s i c h g a n z z u r S e i t e , a l s w o l l t e s i e i h m i n s G e s i c h t s e h e n ) 7,3 pppi K«.̂ «rf,b«1w«*>etwas zuriickhaltend J = 100 ( E n t s e t z t , b e u g t s i c h g a n z ) ( a t e m l o s ) -t>i4«Hil«5S PP U E . 5 3 6 2 . 74 J - 84 sofort im Tempo (m'dpige J ) z u m H a u s e h i a a u f j 195 23 (schaut look back Um Got - tes - wil-Tlen ra8ch!... hort mich denn n o OAC nie-mand ?... hedr me.?... etwas langsaraer ^u.***,* ̂ ^ •*«• - /̂""̂ K*'""1 (onn verzweifelt u m s i c E ) I z u r u c k u n t e r d i e B a u m e ; ' ~ ; + 205 Pi rit.. -molto_riL. = 6 6 fliefiend J = so ( z a r t l i c h , e i n d r i n g l i c h ) F r . h K' nJn-ser Zimnler i; tot sein... ich lie be dead... X. Ii - be dich so... you. SO IUIUX--' Jn-ser Zimraer ist halb - O u r civA^be^ +iov0*«^ i E . H . ppzart J T j U E . 5 3 6 2 . 75 24 langsamer J = 5 0 rit. . . . . X ^ J * Y *p H" hell... Al - les war - let.. — ' J n J J ) ^ p nJ> 1 Die Blu - men duf-ten "so ¥ J . . stark... ™ i Was soil ich tun , dafi er auf-wacl Was soil ich nur tun, dafi 'er auf-wacht?... "L langsamer J = 58 ( S i e g r e i f t i n s D u n k e l h i n e i n , , f a f l t s e i n e H a n d ) ( S i e z i e h t d i e H a n d a n s i c h , k u f i t s i e ; s c h i i c h t e r n , s c h m e i c h e l n d ) ( z u s a m m e n z u c k e n d , f r a g e n d ) 76 Oje+ofroue)! r,,i - p « r h Kan4 o « l a p J = 9 2 lebhaft (nicht zu rasche J ) ( a u s b r e c h e n d j ^ , d teg poco rit maBig J = so (wesentlich langsamer) \jl k J p H f . "Ipf• Hi iff- in iiff- a ( f ^ - f — — ^ V — : M — : *^ mir? DieSon - negliiht a j/1 - »/ • W 'IB . uf uns... dei-ne ] - " y—r^yj—T* ian - de l i e - g — : ! Y.— jnauf mir... dei - ne Fr. Pas. B.Tb. 26 breit J [2301 niolto r i t . . ^ C ^ , a ? b o r f ? r°**~) S i e h m i c h d o c h a n , L i e b s t e r . • • ' « r ' l e h l i e - g e ' n e - b e n d i r S o s i e h So look- 1 f- 1 t ' ' ' o u n k i n a U i . l o o k a-V- h l a n g s a m ° ( s i e h t i h n a n , e r w a c h e n d ) J1- 8 0 ( s e h r t r a u r i g j m i c h d o c h a n Kl.i m A h , Gg. am Steg w i e S t a r r . . . w i e l u r c h - t e r - l i c h d e i - n e A n - g e n ' s i n d . . . hoo dncA - ̂ ul-l^ eoW- a/«- y o u ' eyts- K l . Simp I I 5 pp Pos. m. U. ' s e h r l a n g s a m J . 5 0 J = 6 0 etwas w e n i g e r l a n g s a m _ P w a r s t F r . •! w - d r e i T a - g e w a r s t d u n i c h t b e i m i r . . •*W ^ 5 H0" W > ( c . nrt W u w t t . M . - iSrj^-J- ' A - b e r h e u - t e . . 3A- ^ - «**•)••• i *kflr,.Ki, s o a h . s i - N c h e r . . S u . e e . I j - • http://Su.ee w i e d e r l a n g s a m e r (J = J) % - J . = 40 , , i - f = , r i t . 27 schau - te undwar. - tePfe. Fr. der A-bend war so voll Frie - "den... Ich schau - te undwar - tetfTe.. U-bef die Gar - ten-mail - er dir ent-ge Over ^ * r ^ d e j ^ ^ X w«M a +P w t A gen.. so nie - drig ist sie.. U . E . 5 3 6 2 . fliefiender J = so do\ _ np fitim _ mp «n nflh ;in "mpi.npm Ohr E - ben noch im Wald..._ E-veft«ou i N +1̂ -ft, r « t dei - ne Stim - me so nah an "mei-nem Ohr, - 1m - WKCI — So oloM. "to ~ j « " * K f r ' - a l * Hauch auf mei-ner Wan - ge... dei - ne Hand auf hiei - nein U . E . 5 3 6 2 . 8 0 langsamer J = 63 nocn un-ter me noch langsamer J = 60 29 Mund bog sich doch e- ben nocli un-ter mei-nen KUs TO ait* pp WJT^ £ l T > V i 1 l J 1 * C ^'f—' Cel.PPP 1 < j £ 'J mpespr" f.St"**]&*dly |270| E r i n n e r u n g l i i c h e l n d , g e h e i m n i i i v o r i , z i i r t l i c h ) klSS h i m kiili Ich mich an dir zu To U . K . 5 3 6 2 . 82 ininier noch langsam J = 54 (Sie sieht ihn unverwandt an.' Nach einer Pause pliitzlich, verwundert) 31 pp espr. ~- l> *F in: selt - sam îst dein Au - ge. are yew u-n. n Cel. Wo - hin 275 Etwas bewegter J-. J = 60 vioi««+(v (heftiger) sehaust ' du? Srt-up took areuxd dutcttrr. o-f Csieht sich um.. nach dem Balkon) U. E. 5362. 1-3— ( w i e d e r z u r i i c k . d i e H a n d a n d e r S t i r n ) 280 (Gesang noch immer ruhig, also etwas schleppendj ( i m m e r v e r t i e f t e r ) 7 plotzlich viel langsamer J1 ( a n g e s t r e n g t i n d e r E r i n n e r u n g s u c h e n d ) ; 8S wieder rascher J- = 60 ( i m m e r k l a r e r w e r d e n d ) 285 und plotzlichbezwangst du dich... Und drei Ta - ge warst du nichtbei mir... da»p you " ' ^ 1 , 4 • kei-ne Zeit... so oft hast du kei-neZeit ge-habt in die-sen letz-tenMo-na-ten steigernd ^ c & T * * wonutA> kei-ne Zeit... so oft hast du kei-ne Zeit ge-habt in die-sen letz-ten Mo-na-ten... a*a KB -H'fvMi... of-hir. — — MKL tiaw. KanL no •h'wt. 4ar m m HKatf tot- t u m r h — . . . U E. 5362. 84 B r . H r f . C e l . X y l . U E . 5 3 6 2 . .85 langsamer J .= 76 H B.Kl.Fg. etwas breiter J = 7 2 (bewegte J) a t>r«p1- H e a d 4t*r« S - K . ( i n r a s e n d e r A n g s t ) ,86 ( a u f s c h r e i e n d , w i e s i c h a n k l a m m e r a d ) Sc-Mcu*' . . 315 molto rit. - 3 5 i Nein,. nein... no... ein - zig Ge - O n - "Ua • i A 3E langsamer J = so 4 ^ nochlangsamer J = 56 (zitternd) * schwankt... ich kann nicht Swcup ... X Catv - n o t se - hen.. Schau. r r ^ d 1 mich ooch — ^ # i r : —*•/ ' > M — — < Y—'—r 1 y p p p _ ^ ^ ^ P P P =— y J 1 — P P > u. Q rit- r*̂ ™̂̂ ! k V verrimetta ~ mafiige a). (J = too) FY. '.I n a? pespr. took* i"o •/*.€. o f i < , < £ * < o < \ ' » f * * n « u < * H r . r - i l 1 ^ F l -Hi U. E. 5362. 8 7 36 [325 ( r a s t p l o t z l i c h ) Sehr rasch J. = eo Dusiehst wie-der ^J^jj* Wo ist sie denn molto rit.. v wieder sehr lebhaft />5»E. H . - U. E. 5362. -9 0- i S e h r m a f i i g lapu am* -p*** 39 ( S c h l u c h z t auf) * olto r i t . fliefiendeJU Adagio) J = ion I Rial I Oh! OKI H"Br. nicht ein not e-ve die •Kt S.Gg. ppsehr zaftespress. flJ It. Gna - - de, m < i g f f e z , - it Sir b btrt ster - - ben v zu dit , die 'i'rv J ^ • aiir - fen... your ar¥*s- . T if- w y ~= ==~^.—-r~~\ ppsehr zart » w = H PPP J = 92 , ^ ^ y r § (sinkt n i e d e r , w e i n e n d ) 360 •WcK s i ° u . o f h i « Quae. J = 104 etwas fliefiender ( i n T r a u m e r e i v e r s i n k e n d ) m ich dich ge - habt . bab'... I k a \ l t , h a d ' - f o r • ' . 1 *f0u,-•• c IT. H . — " f f l r J3J 4 Al - len Din - gen fer - ne U. E. 5362. 91 40 (1 i k | . _ 365 rit. . VV = _ - _ - 1 l A -1 I J 1, • 1 v -"\—1 r~ ^Mr* 4= leb - le icl I . . . al —vr - Ie n fr emd Icl ̂ ^ i wuB - . \e nichts als ' ' " w H» B» w • R* r dich... die-ses gan-ze Jahr seit du zumer-stenMaimei-neHandnahmst... y o u . . . . ^ i s - k * » l e - PP U . E . 5 3 6 2 . 92 Softly t 3iic*i<&ly ( l e i s e , s i c h a u f r i c h t e n d ) 41 PPPP, '/J . I L J, - hast du sie ral g< Mein Lie - ber... mein ein H y loy - Of... ""^ or, ieb-Iin zi - ger LiebTing... hast du sie ral ge-kiiflt?... 1̂ ^ - lov- /(a** you-fwo ofk*. khtid?-•• noch etwas langsamer fapforiMfy ( f l e h e n d j ^ - rit. , . W T f ^ t t J ^ J , ^ i ^ ^ f r fr •orSehn-sueht ver-ging... nast du sie sehr ge - iiebt? Sag nicr wah-rend ich vorSehn-sucht ver-ging... loK'ilg M>( b°4y &i. i ^ i - - \ielIeichthastduauchge-liUen..vielleichtriefdeinHerznachihr:. perkajJs youhajt S n ^ f A a U o - fsrkof* your Kearf callft*-roĵ fKer . 3_ IB f motto esyr. noch etwas langsamer (J) = 6o) ( s t i l l e r , w a r m ) U E. 5362. 93 42 r u h i g e V i e r t e l ( J . 6 0 ) - ber dein Mit - leid mach-te mich gliick you* Cowvrpa* - W r*Ms - me Nap te, war r i m OlLick-lich... ich glaub Was f̂rf*"vt+4. 1 6 C o « . i 3 ( S t i U e . ; D a m m e r u n g i m O s t e n , t i e f a m H i m m e ] W o U c e n , v o n s c h w a c h e m S c h e i n d u r c h l e u c h t e t , g e l b l i c h s c h i m m e r n d w i e K e r z e n i i c h t ) Soft-^ car Hj" T K i 6 #ce S.Gg. ( S i e s t e n t a u f ) 1 " • F l " VPf- F r . PPP J * 66 r u h i g flieftende J (ruhig, fast freundlich I ohne Leidenschaft) Lieb O b . ster, H" Lieb - ster, der Mor gen kommt... Was soil ich "ul ^ H" —m p / t o esp/T F l . U . K . 5 3 6 2 . 94 (J.J) rit. molto rit. Fr. du warst.. ^ D U J ? — ... und al - le Far - ben der Welt oil Hn Co - lourt o( •** world. seAr warm bra-chen aus dei - neu Au w e * 4 mutated. iV\ e^oi QPJSehr langsam (J = 42) J . J Fr. f * - neve. •boeK C U r c i H t j I L S . C . B e n — sehr ruhig — " r f ft- Das Licht wird fiir al - le kom - T V * . \>oyt — k,-,U — co~t -&>/ a l l f 95 ! - breiter A 72 Mor-gen tiennt uiis...im E H ' 11-/. J££ merderMor- - gen-. So schwer. kiiCt du zum Ab-schied •HA OiKed w » - ">9i--- So So rShp^li) you. feegi4iWQzrt-iwj • etwas l a n g s a m e r J = 46 I f f l f l i e f i e n d e r J . P # V : 1 Wie-derein e-wi-gerTag des War-tens... oh du \v - wachst janichtmehr... li+aywj *>f ^ z A> — ^x>>~efrcv^l x̂̂ | c4 UalVi'*^ ... oU. ôw. bho will no Fg.Bkl U.E. 5362. 97 ) 46 Sehr langsam J. = 36 (J1- ios Es istdunkel... deinKufi wie ein Flam - men - zei - chen In meinerNacht... 14- is d o / k - ... you., I M C f,l(e a -fwr> - e j ^ b f l&nj rn^k+...J9.\f!: S i I S Hrf. (ev. SV.a bassa) n Fr. nnH l n i m h _ * f Ifjprlf ^ j r JLTfg.f U . E . 5 3 6 2 . 98 Sehr langsam (i mafiig) 47 F igen... to you.... SlouMf w a l k U . S . ($oc*. a ^ i e w t ) W a l d h e i m - E b e r l e . W i e n V I I . 99 KEY TO SYMBOLS USED IN STAGING DS Downstage US Upstage SL Stage l e f t SR Stage r i g h t USC Upstage centre 101 A P P E N D I X I I I 102 APPENDIX IV INSTRUMENT SCHEDULE Numaee CAroP NOTES / &rs tooo w. o £901 ip to rrw 4o6t> M o A i X l f ARe*. 1 WASH ECT l o c o W. tt. o * . AU- LEKOS £q>copp£o i«J>rH S*mTTeRS 3 t i SffcCiAl W26AA WASH t t 3 4 47 4 II « l > T s 11 M A . 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"'«=> WITH «f 3 II 1 O 9 6 » V A ) C WITH T 104 Hitne&l UJtATiOM Pu«PoS£ LAMP e c u t MOTES H 5 L (. L£KO k T H I R P P I P C II II AteAi 4 WASH S P E C I A L A # E A A B * C K a B T L S 0 0 1 4 . £ & F TSOui. it 3 n 13 8 (0 '! £A*tiwiTVl9 WiTH I O 7 H I I Af3£A- ^ S>«: u & ^ T V / J f i M 18 8 tc It n &AA* z 4 I I Necker cube 초현실주의(surrealism)의 자동기술법(automatism)10)에서 강력한 영향을 받았다. 인간 정신의 해방을 위한 일종의 신비사상으로, 원시성과 신화의 관심을 부활시켰으며 이 시기 화가들은 프로이드(Sigmund Freud)보다는 융(Carl Gustav Jung)의 견해를 받아들였다.11) (3) 추상표현주의에서 색의 고찰 추상표현주의는 크게 액션페인팅(Action Painting)12)과 색면추상(Color-Field Abstract)13)으로 나뉜다. 액션페인 팅은 주로 선형적이지만, 색면추상은 캔버스 전체에 색 을 채운다. 폴록의 푸어드(poured)와 드리핑(dripping), 뉴먼(Barnett Newman)과 로드코의 컬러필드(color-field) 는 표면적으로는 다른 형식의 색을 취하지만, 캔버스의 전면을 덮는(all over) 무초점과 무한성의 공통점이 있다. 이러한 즉각적 색채 감각을 증강시키기 위해 형태는 최 소로 단순화시킨다. 또한 무한성의 효과를 극대화하기 위해 거대성을 반영한다. 이는 보는 사람의 시야를 가득 채우는 일종의 환경색채로 확대된다. 즉 작은 규모의 실 (室) 전부는 공간색채가 되고, 전시된 작품들은 대상색채 가 된다. 이는 에드먼드 버크(Edmund Burke)가 ‘마음이 그림에 완전히 빠져들어 다른 모든 것을 잊는다.’는 언급 과 일맥상통한다. 보다 중요한 관점은 그림과 공간의 관 계가 물감과 캔버스의 작용과 무관하지 않다는 것이다. 구분 차이점 공통점 액션페인팅 (Action Painting) 선형, 푸어드, 드리핑 최소화한 형태, 캔버스의 전면을 덮는, 무초점, 무한성, 거대성색면추상 (Color-Field Abstract) 면, 컬러필드 <표 1> 추상표현주의와 색 10) 프로이트 정신분석에서 영향을 받아 무의식과 꿈의 세계를 지향하 는 20세기 예술사조로, 1924년 앙드레 브르통(Andre Breton)의 《초현실주의 선언(Manifeste du surréalisme)》에서 명확한 개념 을 갖춘다. 일체의 미학적, 윤리적 선입견 없는 사유의 기록으로 의식 하의 세계를 탐구하여 습관적 기법, 고정관념, 이성 등을 배 제하고, 무념무상의 상태에서 손이 움직이는 대로 그린다. 라리오 노프(Mikhail Fyodorovich)의 레요니슴(rayonnisme), 밍게스(Oscar Dominguez)의 데칼코마니(décalcomanie), 에른스트(Max Ernst)의 프로타주(frottage), 마그리트(René Magritte)의 데페이즈망 (dépaysement)이 있다. Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century, University of California Press; New edition edition, 1998, pp.68-99 11) Jolande Jacobi, Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C.G. Jung, Manheim(translator), R. Manheim, Ralph(translator), Princeton University Press, 1971, p.20 12) 초현실주의의 자동기술법에서 유래되었으며, 실재 사고체계는 칼 야스퍼스(Karl Jaspers)와 마틴 하이데거(Martin Heidegger)가 논 하던 창조 행위의 과정에서 인간 생명과 직결되는 행위적 특징이 있다. Irving Sandler, Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, Harper & Row, 1976, p.148 13) 행위의 기록이나 흔적밖에 남지 않는 액션페인팅의 오류를 보완하 여, 순수회화의 표현성은 유지하여 회화의 명료성이 있다. Irving Sandler, Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, Harper & Row, 1976, p.149 2.3. 추상표현주의에서 색면의 원리 (1) 색면의 의미 추상표현주의에서 색면이란 초벌칠을 하지 않은 캔버 스에 직접 물감이 스며드는 것을 말한다. 1962년부터 주 로 아크릴 물감의 고채도, 중명도의 강렬한 색채로 대체 되었다. 또한 염색 기법을 고수하여 캔버스에 칠해진 색 채와 캔버스 표면을 완벽하게 일치시켰다. 색과 면으로 야기되는 색면은 색 자체에 관심을 두어 인간 내면을 표출하므로 재현(representation)14)의 색채 보다 표현의 색조를 선호한다. 광활한 캔버스는 무한히 펼쳐지는 색면을 통해 비가시적인 세계-대자연의 경외감 에서 느껴지는 추상적 숭고-를 색 자체의 중량감으로 표 현하여, 즉각적이고 애매한 환각으로 색면의 안팎을 돌 아다닌다. 즉 추상표현주의는 사람, 풍경, 정물 등의 특 정한 재현은 없으나, 대상과 배경이 색채로 생성된다는 점은 동일하다. 즉 평면성-정면성, 단순성, 대치성-이 있 으나 근본적으로 피겨와 그라운드의 관계는 유지한다. (2) 색과 면의 관계 몇 초간 <그림 1>을 응시하 면 붉은 점이 큐브 내부의 모서 리에 있는지, 큐브 정면에 있는 지 불분명해진다. 이는 2차원에 서 3차원 이상의 지각 습관이 적 용되기 때문이다. 즉 네거 큐브 는 망막 위의 2차원 데이터에 모 순되지 않으므로 하나의 시각 자극이 여러 가지 방식으 로 해석된다.15) 이러한 원리를 토대로 추상표현주의를 처음 인지할 때 는 색과 형이 동시에 지각되어 외곽선이 중시되지만, 시 간이 흐르면 관찰 대상에만 집중된다. 평면성과 얕은 깊 이감에도 색면은 캔버스에서 떠 있것처럼 돌출되어 튀어 올라오는 움직임이 관찰된다. 특히 캔버스 안으로 들어 가는 빛-색채-과 캔버스 표면 바로 앞의 공간-색면-의 안팎을 이동하는 색채 재배치가 시작된다. 피겨 (figure) 그라운드 (ground) 빛 ↔ 표면 공간 색채 ↔ 캔버스 <표 2> 색과 면의 관계 14) 이미 실재하고 있는 대상을 다시 드러내므로 실재 대상의 존재를 전제한다. 즉 재현은 재현하고 있는 대상과의 대치를 뜻하며, 스스 로 존재할 수 없고 실재 대상에 의존해야 하므로 타율적 속성이 있다. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Semiotext(e), 1983, pp.39-58 오늘날의 재현은 ‘원본 없는 재현’, 자기 동일성 없는 복제인 ‘시뮬 라크르’로 ‘모본과 원본’, ‘가상과 현실’, ‘이미지와 실재’를 대체하는 것으로 양자의 유사함이 발생한다. 즉 색면은 추상적인 색과 면으 로 존재하지만, 이미 존재하는 모든 빛을 포함한다고 연구자는 고 찰한다. 15) Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, Random House, 2007, p.227 한국실내디자인학회논문집 제22권 1호 통권96호 _ 2013.02242 <그림 2> Caspar David Friedrich, Monk By The Sea, Staatliche Museen Berlin, 1809 출처: http://www.theartwolf.com/10_seascapes.htm (3) 색면의 속성 추상표현주의에서 색과 면은 피겨와 그라운드의 경계 를 확장시킨다. 특히 넓은 영역에 칠해진 색채는 드로잉, 제스츄어, 심볼리즘 등을 거세한 색면으로 포화된다. 이 는 파울 클레(Paul Klee)의 ‘회색 점’16)이며, 화가의 사유 로 재구축된 대상물의 ‘변형’으로 볼 수 있다. 이처럼 추상표현주의의 색과 면은 단순히 피겨와 그라 운드의 관계로만 규명하기에 부족한 부분이 있다. 특히 색면은 일반적인 예술작품의 의미와 내용적 이데올로기 뿐 아니라, 색들의 병치와 충돌로 색의 이동, 교환, 뉘앙 스, 반영17)을 생성하기 때문이다. 또한 정적으로 일체화 (united)된 색면 창조를 위해 기존에 활용되던 색 조화와 배열을 재조정하면서, 보다 복잡한 관계를 갖게 된다. 이 를 에르곤과 파레르곤으로 설명하고자 한다. 근대 미학에서 에르곤(ergon)은 칸트(Immanuel Kant) 에 의해 사용된 그리스어로, 예술에서 작품을 뜻한다. 파 레르곤(parergon)-‘주변’을 의미하는 ‘파라’(para)와 ‘작품’ 을 뜻하는 ‘에르곤’(ergon)을 합침-18)은 작품에 부수하는 것으로 일종의 장식적인 것이다. 그는 파레르곤의 3가지 예를 회화의 액자, 조각상에 걸쳐진 천, 건물의 기둥을 들었다. 즉 파레르곤은 상대적이고 모호한 것이다. <그림 2>는 독일의 극작가 하인리히 빌헬름 폰 클라 이스트(Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist)가 ‘무한하고 균일한 공간 앞에서 마치 눈꺼풀이 잘려나간 듯한 느낌’ 이라고 묘사했던 작품이다. 구름으로 가득 찬 하늘과 세 피아(sepia)의 바다, 안개가 자욱한 대기 의 수평선을 가르는 왜소한 수도승의 ‘뒷 모습’의 수직선이 존 재한다. 화면 전체는 명확한 형태가 배제 된 채, 색채 그러데 이션-유기체처럼 변 화하는 빛-으로 구축되어 있다. 어떠한 행위나 사건의 재현보다 대자연에 마주 선 혼돈과 절망, 무력감, 좌절감 을 숭고미(the sublime)19)로 표출한다. 이렇게 시각적 포 16) 회색 점(들뢰즈는 바로크적 유동성을 설명하기 위한 맥락에서 클 레의 회색 점을 원용한다.)이란 차원이 없고 위치 지정이 불가능한 카오스이다. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press; 1 edition, 1987, p.20 본 연구자는 회색 점을 ‘예술은 눈에 보이지 않는 것을 복사하여 제시하는 것이 아니라, 보이지 않는 것을 보이게 하는 것이다.’라는 클레의 사유를 응축하는 핵심어로도 본다. 17) Rene, ed. Huyghe, Art and Mankind: Larousse Encyclopedia of Prehistoric and Ancient Art, 1962, p.176 18) Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, University of Chicago Press, 1987, p.38 19) 숭고의 어원은 그리스어 hypsous(높이)에서 유래한다...숭고는 인간 이 인간 이상의 위대함을 초월하여 높은 것을 동경하는 정신적 반 화를 통한 색면은 파레르곤의 속성을 띈다. 재구축 재조정 비재현의 색채 일체화(united)된 색조 <표 3> 색면의 속성 3. 색의 확장성의 이해 3.1. 색면추상에서 색의 확장성 색의 확장성은 색면추상 작품 바로 앞, 인간 지각이 시작되는 지점에서 출발하며, 인간 무의식 영역에서 파 생되는 숭고미와 관련 있다. 따라서 관찰자는 작품의 내 적 구성에 관여하여 색면 본질을 이해하게 된다. 재현의 의미작용을 떠나 여러 겹의 중첩된 장을 경험한다. 이 때 색면은 캔버스 밖에 있는 관람자에게 작품의 안도 밖 도 아니고, 내부도 외부도 아니며, 위도 아래도 아닌 모 든 대립을 뒤흔드는 파레르곤의 개념을 갖는다. 이러한 색의 확장성은 낮은 조도의 닫힌 공간에서 거대 면적의 캔버스에 다양한 기술을 활용하여 표현한다. 3.2. 색의 확장성 요소 및 내용 ‘나는 시각적 형식의 추상화를 그린 게 아니라, 추상적 사유를 통한 공간연출 그 자체(Makom)20)를 인스톨레이 션 하였다.’21)는 로드코의 관점에서 색의 확장성 요소를 추출하였다. 그의 색면은 기하학적 추상이 아닌 관념의 표현으로, 형식적 내용은 사라지고 색면의 질료와 처리 로 표현적 의미만 구체화한다. 그러므로 표현의 원리, 과 정, 형식, 방법, 기술 등의 요소에서 살펴보기로 한다.22) 향이다. Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, On the sublime, Amazon Digital Services, Inc., 2012, p.12 부정적 쾌감이 관념적 고통으로 존재할 때, 자기보존의 욕구에서 숭고가 발생한다. Edmund Burke, A philosophical enquiry Into the origin of our Ideas of the sublime and beautiful, Nabu Press, 2010, p.34 미가 삶의 직접적인 쾌감인데 반해, 숭고는 대상이 불분명하거나 존 재하지 않는 한계에서의 공포이다. 수학적 숭고(인간의 인식과정)와 역학적 숭고(공포를 수반한 쾌의 과정)로 체계화한다. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Biblio Bazaar, 2009, pp.109-111 대상을 묘사, 표현하는 것이 아니라 재현할 수 없는 것이 존재한다는 사실을 실현함으로써 숭고의 영역을 암시한다. Jean-François Lyotard, The Sublime and the Avant-Garde, Art Forum, 1984, p.455 숭고란 정확히 말로 옮길 수 없는 것으로 새로운 언어와 형식을 필 요로 한다. 즉 여러 감정들이 복합적으로 뒤섞여, 오성의 법칙을 파 기하여 인간으로 하여금 자유를 상기시킨다. Karsten Harries, Meaning of Modern Art, Northwestern University Press, 1979, p.72 이 작품에서는 구체적인 형상의 부재, 미지의 세계에 고통과 쾌의 모순성, 초월적 존재 등 숭고의 원리를 원경과 전경에 걸쳐 화면에 연장되는 무한한 공간색채로 구체화하였다고 본 연구자는 본다. 20) 종교적 관점에서는 성소(聖所)를 뜻하지만, 로드코에게는 모든 세 계와 사유를 담은 전부이자 무의 개념으로 응용했다고 본 연구자 는 본다. 21) BBC documentary, Simon Schama's Power of Art: Rothko, 2008 22) 진중권, 진중권의 현대미술 이야기(4), 경향신문, 2012.9.28 한국실내디자인학회논문집 제22권 1호 통권96호 _ 2013.02 243 (1) 표현원리 재현의 대상이 무너지면서 색면은 부동의 평면성으로 실체를 갖는다. 일루젼에 지배받지 않는 색면 그대로가 인간에게 전달되어, 표상 및 이미지를 초월한 직관적이 고 총체적인 숭고미를 관통한다. 이로써 가시적인 대상 성을 지워, 비가시적인 근원을 추구한다. (2) 표현과정 휴먼 스케일의 닫힌 공간(confined spaces)23)은 친밀 하고 일상적이라, 색면으로 심금을 울리는데 효과적이다. 또한 낮은 높이에 좁은 간격으로 작품을 설치하여 사방 의 벽체를 완전히 에워싼다. 색면의 빛이 파레르곤으로 발현되기 위해서는, 모든 것이 씻겨 사라지는 듯 강렬한 스포트라이트 대신 주광색 램프를 사용한다. 좁은 공간 과 낮은 층고, 균질하게 퍼지는 저명도의 조명은 물리적 인 빛의 속성을 제어하여 작품의 안과 밖을 넘나든다. 이는 사색적 아우라와 몰아일체를 통해 서서히 색의 확 장성 속에 도달하게 하는 연극적 장치도 포함한다. (3) 표현형식 면적이 넓어진 캔버스는 동일 색조보다 명확한 명시도 로 색의 확장성을 증폭시킨다. 작품은 액자 없이 스테이 플러가 박힌 그대로의 거친 표면과 캔버스의 외곽 부분 을 불분명하게 채색하여, 색면과 작품이 설치된 공간색 채의 경계를 파레르곤 시킨다. 이는 색면과 대기의 색조 를 동일한 의미로 간주하는 것이다. (4) 표현방법 밑칠작업 없이 채도와 광택도 조절, 빠른 건조, 두툼한 마티에르에서 해방된 아크릴 물감 사용은 색상배치와 명 암대비를 피하면서 부유하는 색면을 전개한다. 얼룩지고 흐릿해진 빛은 사각 캔버스의 초점(관점)을 증발시킨다. 특히 부드러운 일루젼은 다른 빛을 뚫고 지나가거나 스 며들어 광도를 융해시킨다. 즉 옅은 색상을 여러 번 얇 게 칠하여 타오르는 용광로의 광채처럼 표현한다. (5) 표현기술 색면의 가장자리에 여러 번 칠해진 톤은 부드러운 하 드에지(hard edge)24)를 형성하여, 캔버스 표면 밀도를 비 물성화한다. 스테이닝(staining)-수채화기법을 유화기법 으로 변용시켜 색의 겹침/중간색채의 녹아 배어 스며드 는 표현 활용-은 수채화 같은 성질로 색면에 스며들어 파레르곤화된다. 이러한 자연스러운 빛 번짐은 시간의 흐름과 부드러운 색조를 동시에 담아, 3차원의 일루젼보 다 2차원의 본질적 마티에르를 표현한다. 또한 조인티드 스킴(jointed scheme)은 벽화가 걸리는 실내 공간의 상 23) Mark Rothko, Letter to Katharine Kuh, editor Miguel López- Remiro, November 29, 1954, p.99 24) ‘면도칼의 날과 같이 예리한 테’란 뜻으로, 1950년 말 미국에서 일어 난 추상미술의 경향이다. 처음 쓴 것은 1959년 랭스너(Jules Langsner)이지만 알로웨이(Lawrence Alloway)에 의해 일반화되었다. 황을 고려하여 관람자의 인식을 조절한다. 구분 요소 세부 내용 표현원리 비가시적 근원 일루젼/재현/대상 제거, 직관적/총체적 숭고미 표현과정 연극적 장치 통제된 공간 및 낮은 조도, 주광조명, 아우라, 몰아일체 표현형식 거대 캔버스 거친 표면, 불분명한 채색, 색면과 대기의 무경계 표현방법 중첩된 장 무초점화, 색채병치, 색면의 부유, 광도에 의한 발색 표현기술 마티에르 하드에지, 스테이닝, 마티에르, 조인티드 스킴 <표 4> 색의 확장성을 위한 요소 및 내용 4. 마크 로드코 작품의 색의 확장성 4.1. 마크 로드코의 색채 세계 로드코에게 색채는 또 다른 리얼리티로 향하는 출구이 자, 파레르곤을 형성하는 주요 수단이었다. 그가 디자인 과 색채를 처음 접한 것은 포틀랜드(Portland) 극단에서 였으며25), 사각 캔버스에서 색면을 극대화하였으나 클리 셰(cliché)적 색채 어휘에서 자유로울 수 있는 실질적 계 기로 본다. 즉 그에게 색채란 빛의 물리적 표현이 아닌 선험적 의미를 담는 사유작용이었다. 그는 ‘어두운 색상이 밝은 색상보다 더 힘차고 즐거우 며 밝은 색상은 어두운 색상보다 엄숙하고 심오하다.’26) 고 역설했다. 이는 ‘어떤 진술이 파란색이나 초록색일 수 없는 것처럼 회화의 색도 진실이나 거짓일 수 없다.’27)는 의미와 상통한다. 또한 감산혼법은 렘브란트(Rembrandt Harmensz)에게, 안료의 흡수정도, 광택여부, 색조와 무색 조의 관계 등의 색채효과28)는 에버리(Milton Avery)와 25) 로드코는 학비 중단으로 예일대학교의 졸업을 포기하고 제2의 고향 포틀랜드로 돌아와서《작은극단(the Little Company)》을 거쳐 러시 아에 뿌리를 둔《미국실험극단(American Laboratory Theatre)》 입 단을 시도한다. 러시아계 유대인인 그가 ‘회화와 연극’사이에서 진지 하게 흔들리던 시기로, 러시아 문학에 감정이입이 된 계기가 된다. Mark Rothko, Writings on Art: Mark Rothko, Miguel Lopez- Remiro, ed., Exhibition of January 9-February 4, 1945, p.42 빛의 효과로 감정과 연결 짓는 연상 작용을 습득하였으며, 상이하 게 번지는(blur) 빛, 명암의 정도, 하이라이트와 깊은 음영 사이의 대조 등 극적인 색채표현을 익힌다. 또한 베토벤(Ludwig van Beethoven), 모차르트(Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), 슈베르트 (Franz Peter Schubert)의 음악을 사랑했고, 셰익스피어(William Shakespeare), 니체(Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche), 키에르케고르 (Søren Aabye Kierkegaard)를 주요 사상으로 삼았다. Mark Rothko, The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art, Yale University Press, 2006, p.34 26) Diane Waldman, Mark Rothko 1903-1970, Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2001, p.26 27) Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, Art and Illusion, Princeton University Press, 2000, p.68 28) Michael Compton, Mark Rothko 1903-1970, Tate, 1987, p.41 한국실내디자인학회논문집 제22권 1호 통권96호 _ 2013.02244 작품 이미지 원리 과정 형식 방법 기술 -여러 개 의 색점들 은 색면, 색점 등으 로 변화 - 색 면 을 마치 배우 처럼 회화 적 미장센 으로 연출 -채도 차 이로 피겨 ( 대 상 ) 와 그 라 운 드 ( 바 탕 ) 를 불명확화 -색상배치, 명 암 대 비 를 피하면 서 중첩의 장 형성 - 스테이 닝 기 법 으 로 빛 번짐 나타남 No.15, 1949 -여러 개 의 색점들 은 직사각 형의 색면 으로 발전 - 수평으로 중첩된 색 면이 억누 르는 팽창 과 수축의 분위기 - 피 겨 ( 대 상)와 그라 운드( 바탕) 의 단순화 -옅은 색 을 여러 번 얇게 칠해 광도 에 의한 발 색 으 로 중첩의 장 표현 - 스테이 닝 기 법 으 로 빛 번짐 나타남 No.8, 1952 -알 수 없 는 곳에서 유 래 하 여 부 유 하 는 수평의 빛 으로 재현 성 탈피 - 수평으로 중첩된 색 면이 억누 르는 팽창 과 수축의 분위기 - 피 겨 ( 대 상)와 그라 운드( 바탕) 의 단순화 -옅은 색 을 여러 번 얇게 칠해 광도 에 의한 발 색 으 로 중첩의 장 표현 - 스테이 닝 기법이 본 격 화 되 어 화면이 염 색되는 듯 한 색조 Saffron, 1957 작품 이미지 원리 과정 형식 방법 기술 - 아메 바나 미지의 미 생 물 같 이 숨 쉬는 유 기 체 의 다 형 으 로 기존 회화 의 재현성 탈피 시작 - 색 점 을 마치 배우 처럼 회화 적 미장센 으로 연출 - 피 겨 ( 대 상)와 그라 운드 (바 탕) 의 명확한 구분 없는 채색 -밑칠 작업 없이 채도 및 광택도 의 조절로 마 티 에 르 가 해방되 어 명확한 초점 상실 - 스테 이닝 기 법 으 로 빛 번짐 나타남 Untitled, 1946 - 재현성 이 거의 사라 져 여러 개 의 색점들 이 마블링 ( ma r b l in g ) 처럼 표현 - 색 점 을 마치 배우 처럼 회화 적 미장센 으로 연출 - 피 겨 ( 대 상)와 그라 운드 (바 탕) 의 명확한 구분 없는 채색 -밑칠 작업 없이 채도 및 광택도 의 조절로 마 티 에 르 가 해방되 어 명확한 초점 상실 - 스테 이닝 기 법 으 로 빛 번짐 나타남 Untitled, 1948 마티스(Henri Matisse)로부터 영향을 받는다. 그는 색면 의 안과 밖에서 움직이는 색의 확장성을 감지하는 이상 적인 거리는 18㏌(540㎜)라고 했다. 그 거리에서 색면을 바라보면 색면 내부의 움직임과 색면 외부의 경계가 사 라지는 것을 경험할 것이라고도 했다. 4.2. 멀티폼(multiform): 1946-1948 1946년부터 로드코는 새로운 연작 멀티폼을 제작한다. 이는 고전적인 추상회화에 이르는 교량 같은 역할을 했 다. 신화, 상징주의, 풍경 등 대상을 형상화하던 이전의 주제들에서 일시적이고 공간감이 존재하지 않는 색덩어 리를 모색한다. 따라서 이전 작품들처럼 설명적인 제목 대신, 작품번호와 제작연대만을 활용하거나 특정 작품의 지배적인 색조를 작품 제목으로 삼기도 하였다. <표 5> 멀티폼 시기29) 4.3. 번호(Number) 및 무제(Untitled): 1949-1957 그는 1950년에 이르러 완전한 색면추상에 도달한다. 이 시기 색면은 완벽한 정면성으로 자연계의 일루젼을 제거한다. 멀티폼에서 두드러지던 색점은 3-4개의 직사 각형 색채덩어리로 바뀌어 캔버스의 가장자리를 부유한 다. 다양한 색상은 중첩부위에서는 한 개의 색상만을 사 용한다. 즉 밑 작업이 안 된 캔버스 위에 전색제를 얇게 칠하면, 바탕칠을 고정하는 오일은 테두리까지 퍼진다. 물감은 매우 옅어서 깊이 착색되지 않고 표면에만 머물 러, 투명성과 발광성으로 연무 같은 연출이 나타난다. 29) 그림출처: Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Mark Rothko, Taschen, 2008, p.46 <표 6> 번호 및 무제 시기30) 4.4. 블랙 페인팅(Black Painting): 1958-1970 1958년부터 그의 색면은 점점 어두운 색조(maroon, scarlet, vermilion, dark bundy, slate grey, navy, black) 로 변하여, 1970년 2월 25일 자살로 생을 마감할 때까지 거의 모노크롬(monochrome)에 집중한다. 1958년부터 1967년까지 벽화시리즈는 로드코 초기(1920년-1920년대) 의 표현주의적 인물화의 분위기도 되살아난다. 그는 블 랙 페인팅 시기부터 색면추상을 본격적으로 탐구하였다. 시그램 벽화31)는 공간의 특성 때문에 처음으로 가로 로 긴 직사각형 캔버스에 수직 형태의 사각형을 그린다. 색면은 니체에게 영향 받은 기억을 바탕으로 결국 죽음 에 이르는 인간의 비극적 운명을 표현한다. 즉 ‘사각형 색면’은 파레르곤에 도달하기 위한 출발점인 동시에 마 지막 관문인 셈이다. 30) 그림출처: http://neo-alchemist.com/tag/mark-rothko/ 31) 시그램 빌딩 내의 포시즌즈 레스토랑(Four Seasons Restaurant) 벽 화는 3부작, 총 40점으로 1부는 버밀리언과 스칼렛을 사용, 2부는 다크 버건디를 활용, 3부는 2개로 제한된 바룬과 검정으로 점점 명 시성이 낮아진다. 이 후 시그램 빌딩의 고급 레스토랑을 장식한다는 불편한 감정과 거들먹거리는 분위기가 불쾌해져서, 그는 작업을 그 만둔다. 이로써 작품들 중 9점은 데이터 모던(Tate Modern)에, 몇 작품은 카와무라 기념관(Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art)에, 나머지는 워싱턴DC 국립현대미술관(National Gallery of Art)에, 몇 개는 자녀들이 소장하게 된다. http://onewhole.sprin gnote.com/pages/2936764?print=1 한국실내디자인학회논문집 제22권 1호 통권96호 _ 2013.02 245 <표 7> 시그램 벽화 (Seagram Murals, 1958)32) 작품 이미지 원리 과정 형식 방법 기술 - 사 각색면 은 파레르 곤으로 도 달하기 위 한 관문 - 현 존 과 부재의 이 원성 상징 - 일 루젼을 완전히 제 거하여 재 현성, 대상 성 탈피 - 비 가시적 근원 모색 - 통 제 된 공간에 낮 은 층고로 사 각 형 의 색면과 관 람자의 몰 아 일 체 화 로 연극적 장치 -액자 없 이 거대 캔버스 활 용 - 캔버스 의 색면과 대기의 색 채를 동일 하게 취급 - 명 확 한 명시성 및 거친 표면 으로 피겨 ( 대 상 ) 와 그 라 운 드 ( 바 탕 ) 의 불 분 명 함 증폭 -마룬 바 탕에 다크 버 건 디 와 버 밀 리 언 으로 색 채 병치 - 재 현 성 거세로 무 초점화 -색면 부 유로 중첩 된 장 형 성 -붓자국으 로 평면성 ( 정 면 성 , 단순성, 대 치성) 강조 - 3 차 원 의 일 루 젼 을 삭 제 하 여 2 차 원적인 마 티 에 르 표현 -하드에지, 스 테 이 닝 , 조 인 티 드 스 킴 으 로 비물질화 Tate Modern Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art National Gallery of Art <표 8> 하버드 벽화 (Harvard Murals, 1964)33) 작품 이미지 원리 과정 형식 방법 기술 - 사 각색면 은 파레르 곤의 문이 열리는 것 처럼 기둥, 벽, 창문으 로 닫힌 느낌 전달 - 일 루젼을 완전히 제 거하여 재 현성, 대상 성 탈피 - 직 관적이 고 총체적 인 숭고미 - 비 가시적 근원 모색 - 통 제 된 공간에 낮 은 층고로 사 각 형 의 색면과 관 람자의 몰 아 일 체 화 로 연극적 장치 -이전 작 품보다 더 욱 격정적 이고 거칠 어짐 -액자 없 이 거대 캔버스 활 용 -마룬 바 탕에 검정 색 톤과 베 이 지 색 기둥 모양 의 형태는 상 호 작 용 으로 무경 계화 -색면 안 팎으로 움 직이는 색 -기둥 모 양 형태의 상 단 부 와 하 단 부 에 는 섬광 같은 좁은 띠가 맞닿 아 부유하 는 색면 - 광 도 에 의한 발색 으로 중첩 된 장 - 재 현 성 거세로 무 초점화 -색면 부 유로 중첩 된 장 형 성 -붓자국으 로 평면성 강조 - 3 차 원 의 일 루 젼 을 삭 제 하 여 2 차 원적인 마 티 에 르 표현 -하드에지, 스 테 이 닝 , 조 인 티 드 스 킴 으 로 비물질화 Guggenheim Museum TryptychPanel I-III 하버드 벽화34)는 시그램 빌딩의 색면추상과 폼페이 (Pompeii)의 ‘비밀 저택(Villa dei Misteri)’ 벽화에서 영 감을 얻어 블러색채(blur color)35)를 구체화한다. ‘이 공 32) 그림출처: Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Mark Rothko, Taschen, 2008, pp. 61-62, p.69 33) http://www.markrothkopaintings.org/ 34) 하버드 대학(Harvard University) 홀요크 센터(Holyoke Center)의 펜트하우스를 위한 벽화로 24개의 스케치 중, 3면화의 종교적 상징 론을 바탕으로 1파트의 3면 패널과 별개파트의 작품 2개로 2파트, 5점으로 구성된다. 시그램 벽화보다 명시성이 높은 색상과 기둥 모양의 형태 및 상인방으로 구성되어 있으며, 이는 시그램 빌딩을 위해 구상했던 이미지를 발전시킨 것이다. 35) 블러색채란 빛 번짐 작용으로 대상과 환경의 범위 및 영역이 불분 명해지므로 조형적인 공간색채 구조가 허물어진다. 색의 3요소와 간은 문, 창문, 벽으로 밀폐되어 갇힌 느낌과 낮은 조도 로 막다른 골목에 다다른 것처럼 표현했다.’36) 그가 언급 하던 상황조절(situation controlling)을 사각형 색면으로 최초로 시도한 작품이 시그램 벽화였다면, 하버드 벽화 는 어둠 속에서 ‘사각형의 문이 열리는 것’처럼 실내공간 에서 색의 확장성을 실재로 연출하였다. <표 9> 로드코 채플 (Rothko Chapel, 1970)37) 작품 이미지 원리 과정 형식 방법 기술 -무 한함과 유한함 동 시 표현하 여 프레임 밖의 무대 주시 - 디 오니 소 스 니체의 직 관 적 이 고 총 체 적 인 숭 고 미 의 절정체 - 일 루 젼 을 완전히 제 거하여 재 현성, 대상 성 탈피 - 비 가 시 적 근원 모색 -통제된 공 간, 낮은 층 고, 주광색 램프로 사 각형의 색 면과 관람 자의 사색 적 아우라 및 몰아일 체화 - 가 시 적 인 시 공 간 에 디오니소 스 적인 무정 형 이미지 -액자 없이 거대 캔버 스 활용 -명확한 명 시성 및 거 친 표면으 로 피겨(대 상)와 그라 운 드 ( 바 탕 ) 의 불분명 함 증폭 -색면 안팎 으로 움직 여 관객과 소통 -다크 버건 디로 균질 하게 칠하 여 점점 어 두 워 지 는 색면은 영 적 절망감 부여 - 검 정 색 은 부재, 텅빔, 무의 개념 이 아닌 모 든 것의 통 합의 의미 -재현성 거 세로 무초 점화 -색면 부유 로 중첩된 장 형성 -미묘한 색 조가 신비 롭고 안개 긴 듯 미묘 한 표면 평 면성 강조 -미세한 붓 자 국 으 로 평면성 강 조 -하드 에지 가 장 자 리 를 마스킹 테 이프 처리 한 모노크 롬의 마티 에르로 색 면의 비물 질화 Houston 로드코 채플38)은 그가 늘 염원하던 일체화(united)된 빛을 채우기 위해, 낮은 조도 밑에서 대규모 색면에 둘 러싸인 ‘관람자’를 끌어들인다. 단일한 하나의 캔버스에 완결된 오브제적 소통 방식은, 여러 개의 색면을 ‘동시에 전달’하는 형식으로 변모한다. 또한 무초점, 무한성, 거대 성을 활용하여 클리셰적 색채 어휘를 배제시킨다. 예컨 대 다크 버건디로 밑 작업을 한 후, 그 위에 검정색으로 몇 번 덧칠을 했느냐에 따른 광도와 휘도를 활용한다. 빛의 3요소의 지속적인 색채 변화로 단일 색조가 상실되어 일루젼, 이멀젼의 효과가 있다. 특징은 소실점 해체, 차원의 이동, 톤의 그 러데이션, 시각적 허구 등이 있다. 김선영, 올라퍼 엘리아슨의 작품 에 나타난 블러 색채 특성 연구, 한국실내디자인학회논문집 통권92 호, 2012.4, pp.89-91 36) Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Mark Rothko, Taschen, 2008, p.62 37) http://www.rothkochapel.org/ 38) 로드코 채플 공간 배치와 구성은 로드코가 여러 차례 아이디어와 조정을 거쳐, 9개 벽면에 좌우대칭으로 색면을 설치했다. 입구 근 처의 9ft 색면 1점을 제외한 모든 색면 폭은 11ft이다. 그는 1950년 부터 1966년까지 3번의 유럽 여행에서, 관람자를 품에 안은 듯 낮 은 층고와 자연광을 활용한 색면 어휘를 전달하고자 했다. 따라서 맨하튼 작업실을 예배당과 비슷한 규모와 비율로 시뮬레이션 했으 나, 강렬하고 변화가 잦은 휴스턴의 자연광을 숙지하지 못해 실제 효과는 적절치 않았다. Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Mark Rothko, Taschen, 2008, pp.73-83 한국실내디자인학회논문집 제22권 1호 통권96호 _ 2013.02246 5. 결론 본 연구는 마크 로드코의 색면추상이 본격화된 1946년 이후 작품에서 색의 확장성을 고찰하였다. 색면추상의 안과 밖으로 부유하는 여러 겹의 장을 통해 색의 확장성 이 나타났다. 즉 현대미술에서 리얼리티의 파괴는 캔버 스와 색면 자체로 피겨와 그라운드를 봉합하려는 예술가 의 리얼리티로 완성된다. 따라서 대상과 사건의 기록은 물감과 그 빛이 칠해지는 캔버스의 관계로 재편성되었 다. 본 연구의 결과는 다음과 같다. 첫째, 인간 이성으로 분별하던 미는 보이지 않는 세계 를 재현함으로써 원초적 지각을 지향한다. 피겨와 그라 운드의 관계에 집착하지 않는 거대 색면은 대상 너머의 피안에 수렴한다. 요컨대 동일한 공간의 다중 색면은 파 레르곤에 도달하기 위한 관문인 것이다. 즉 질료와 처리 로 존재하는 거대한 색면은 색 자체의 중량으로 재현의 형식을 완벽하게 탈피한다. 둘째, 여러 겹으로 공명(共鳴)된 얕은 색면은 피겨와 그라운드를 병합시켜 항구적이며 초월적인 실재(idea)의 가치를 추구한다. 특히 블랙 페인팅 시기 이전의 색채 덩어리들 사이에 밝은 장(scene)과 캔버스 가장자리 내 부에 침투하여, 캔버스 표면을 부유한다. 이러한 색면은 모호한 깊이로 파레르곤을 조절한다. 즉 색들의 병치와 충돌, 겹침은 캔버스에 반사, 흡수되는 빛과 캔버스 표면 바로 앞의 색면의 재배치로 내용의 형식을 소멸시킨다. 셋째, 닫힌 시공간에서 일체화된 빛은 지속적인 소통 을 조성한다. 낮은 층고, 색면으로 뒤덮인 벽체, 주광색 조도, 무한한 색면 변주 등 전시공간의 통제와 연출은 새로운 관계 형성으로 예술가의 색채사유를 실현한다. 즉 작가 리얼리티의 재구축 및 초월적 실재의 재조정은 색면 움직임을 통해 색의 확장성으로 재편성된다. 즉 시 각적 형태에서 완전히 자유로운 색면은 공간의 모든 의 미와 상호작용하는 생물처럼 생성, 변이된다. <그림 3> 색의 확장성 마르셀 프루스트(Marcel Proust)는 ‘진정한 발견의 여 정은 새로운 풍경을 찾아다니는 것이 아니라, 눈을 새롭 게 하는 데 있다.’39)고 하였다. 본 연구자도 마크 로드코 의 작품에서 새로운 사실을 제안하기보다, 기존의 이론 을 새로운 관점과 방법으로 보는 게 더 중요한 공헌이라 고 믿는다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 마크 로드코의 색면추 상을 에르곤과 파레르곤 원리에서 색의 확장성의 관점을 제언하였다. 이는 가시적 현상들보다 그 뒤에 포진한 무 형의 의미를 음미하는 현대미술을 구체화하는 주요 담론 이 되리라 믿는다. 참고문헌 1. Bernard Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, Forgotten Books, 2012 2. Bianca Bromberge, The Experiential Sublime: Perception, Conception, & Emotion in Mark Rothko's Classic Color-Field Paintings, Bryn Mawr College Dept. of History of Art, 2008 3. Bonnie Clearwater, The Rothko Book: Tate Essential Artists Series, Tate; annotated edition edition, 2007 4. Irving Sandler, Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, Harper & Row, 1976 5. Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Mark Rothko, Taschen, 2008 6. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, University Of Chicago Press, 1987 7. Lee Seldes, The Legacy Of Mark Rothko, Da Capo Press; Updated edition, 1996 8. Mark Rothko, The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art, Christopher Rothko Editor, Yale University Press, 2006 9. STC, Mark Rothko, Stewart, Tabori and Chang; First Edition edition, 1997 10. Todd Herman, Christopher Rothko, Harry Cooper , David Anfam & Bradford R. Collins, Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade: 1940-1950, Skira Rizzoli, 2012 11. Gridley MC, Concrete and abstract thinking styles and art preferences in a sample of serious art collectors, Heidelberg College, Psychol Rep. 2006 Jun;98(3) 12. Ravin JG, Hartman JJ & Fried RI, Mark Rothko's paintings, suicide notes?, Ohio State Med J. 1978 Feb;74(2) 13. Turco R. The object and the dream: Mark Rothko, J Am Acad Psychoanal. 2002 Spring;30(1) [논문접수 : 2012. 12. 23] [1차 심사 : 2013. 01. 20] [게재확정 : 2013. 02. 08] 39) The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. Julian Spalding, The Art of Wonder: A History of Seeing, Prestel Publishing, 2005, preface work_fbedmsry2fd5ljzo32yb3arnmq ---- Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 17:9 ETHICS IN SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS Ethics Sci Environ Polit Vol. 17: 9–18, 2017 https://doi.org/10.3354/esep00173 Published May 17 INTRODUCTION Fish play an important role in aquatic ecosystems, spanning trophic levels from 2, for purely herbivorous fish such as Siganus spp., up to 5, for predatory spe- cies such as bluefin tuna Thynnus thunnus, swordfish Xiphias gladius, and several species of sharks (Cortés 1999, Stergiou & Karpouzi 2002, Froese & Pauly 2015). Humans have historically had very strong bonds with fish and fishing, with both playing an important role in ancient life and economy and thus in human well- being. This is very well illustrated by the fact that fish represented one of the 2 greatest passions of the ancient Athenians (Davidson 1997). Citing McEvoy (1986), Merchant (1997, p. 25) stated that ‘Like the gold that had been discovered in California, fish were treated as gold nuggets, serving as the coin of trade.’ Fish are an important, protein-rich, healthy food source (see Cunnane & Crawford 2003 for the re - lation between fish diet and evolution of human brain © The author 2017. Open Access under Creative Commons by Attribution Licence. Use, distribution and reproduction are un - restricted. Authors and original publication must be credited. Publisher: Inter-Research · www.int-res.com *Corresponding author: kstergio@bio.auth.gr The most famous fish: human relationships with fish as inferred from the corpus of online English books (1800−2000) Konstantinos I. Stergiou1, 2,* 1Institute of Marine Biological Resources and Inland Waters, Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, Aghios Kosmas, 16777 Athens, Greece 2Laboratory of Ichthyology, Department of Zoology, School of Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, UP Box 134, 541 24 Thessaloniki, Greece ABSTRACT: Despite the historically close connection between humans and fish, the question ‘What is the most famous fish species?’ has never been asked. I used Google Ngram viewer to estimate the frequency of times the common names of 250 fishes appear in the corpus of digitized English books published between 1800 and 2000. I propose the ‘famon’ as a unit of fame, with 1 famon = 10−6 rela- tive % Ngram frequency. Twelve of the 250 common names are words which also have other uses in English and were thus not considered here, and 57 species had 0 famons. For the remaining 181 species, fame increased for 139 (76.8%), during or part of 1800−2000. Goldfish Carassius auratus, the most common laboratory and aquarium fish and the second fish to be domesticated, is the most famous fish, reaching 80 to 117 famons after 1930. It was introduced to Europe from China about 325 to 450 yr ago and then to North America around 1850. Goldfish have penetrated into cultural as- pects of human civilization (e.g. stamps, art, music). ‘Goldfish’ also appears in the corpus of simpli- fied Chinese, French, German, Italian, and Spanish books. The results show the universality and dominance of goldfish in the digitized published heritage. This likely indicates that non-consump- tive cultural aspects, including aesthetic, spiritual, and recreational components, play a central role in defining the relationship of humans with fish, being equally important as provisioning, re - gulating, and supporting services, and thus should be valued accordingly for conservation. How- ever, cultural services have not yet been adequately integrated within the ecosystem service frame- work and are generally excluded from economic evaluations, a fact raising ethical issues with respect to their relative evaluation. KEY WORDS: Fame · Famon · Goldfish · Carassius auratus · Darwin · Ecosystem services · Cultural services OPENPEN ACCESSCCESS Ethics Sci Environ Polit 17: 9–18, 2017 size) with unique psychotropic properties (Reis & Hi- bbeln 2006). Fish are also a cultural source of inspira- tion for artistic/pictorial representations (e.g. wall paintings and frescos, mosaics, sculptures, coins), with the Minoan fresco the ‘Little Fisher from Thera’ from Santorini Island (dated back to ~3600 yr ago) be- ing the most famous (Stergiou 2005, 2011). Such a close relationship is depicted in the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans in specialized books on ‘natural history’ (e.g. ‘History of Animals’ by Aristotle [384−322 BC] and ‘Naturalis Historia’ by Pliny the Elder [23−79 AD], in which both describe various aspects of the life histories of fishes and other mar - ine organisms), in books on fishing (e.g. a poem on fishing, entitled ‘Halieutika,’ by Oppianos of Cilicia [2nd half of the 2nd century]; Egerton 2001), in Greek tragedies (e.g. those of Aeschylus [4th to 5th century BC]) and in other writings (e.g. ‘Histories’ by Polivios [203−120 BC], ‘The Deipnosophists’ by Athenaeus [2nd to 3rd century AC]; Stergiou 2011). In their review of the cultural symbolism of fish and the psychotropic properties of their omega-3 fatty acids, Reis & Hib - beln (2006) maintained that fish have also been cul- turally considered as symbols of social healing and emotional well-being in religious and medical prac- tices in different cultures, for at least 6000 yr. Fish are also among the 3 top favorite pets (together with dogs and cats) even topping the list (in terms of the number of households with fish as pets) in some countries (e.g. Italy; https:// en. wikipedia. org/ wiki/ Pet # Pet _ popularity). The strong relationship be tween humans and fish is also indicated by recent, popular books such as Kurlansky’s (1998) ‘Cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world’ and the New York Times best seller ‘Four fish’ by Greenberg (2010). The im- portant role of fish for humans becomes clear when one considers that out of the 33 200 currently recog- nized fish species (Froese & Pauly 2015) about one- third are used by humans as food, in the fishmeal in- dustry, for bait, in aquaculture, in recreational and subsistence fishing, and in the aquarium trade. The relationship between humans and other ani- mals, including fish, is very important because it largely determines how humans will interact with them (Kudo & Macer 1999), and there is deep and diverse philosophical thinking on the moral status of animals with which we share our lives (Gruen 2014, and see www. iep. utm. edu/ anim-eth/ #H4) as well as for the management of their populations (Merchant 1997). In fact, despite the close relationship between humans and fish, the latter generally do not enjoy a level of compassion similar to that enjoyed by ‘warm- blooded’ vertebrates (Brown 2015). Given the close relationship between humans and fish, it is no surprise that the latter attract a lot of media attention because of the alarmingly poor sta- tus of their stocks (e.g. Pauly et al. 1998, Vasilako - poulos et al. 2014), their occasional extremely high market prices (e.g. bluefin tuna), when very large- sized or rare fish species are accidentally caught and landed, and in the case of shark attacks. Yet, despite such a historically close connection be tween humans and fish, the question of which fish species is the most famous has never been asked or answered. The answer to this question will cast light on which fac- tors (i.e. cultural, aesthetic, economic, recreational, subsistence) play a role and eventually define the relationship of humans with other organisms, in this case fish, and thus should be considered when eval- uating different ecosystem services. This might have ethical implications given that these factors are not all considered to be of equal importance when evalu- ating ecosystem services. Fame, or reputation (i.e. what is said or reported about a name), can be objectively quantified by esti- mating the frequency with which the name of an entity appears in various sources such as books (Michel et al. 2011). Michel et al. (2011) constructed a corpus of digi- tized books, developed a computational tool (Google Ngram viewer; later expanded by Lin et al. 2012), which estimates the percentage of times a word (or a phrase) appears in the corpus of books, and investi- gated its usefulness in social sciences and humanities. Ngram has been successfully used in many fields of knowledge, from linguistics, literature, accounting, computer and environmental sciences, to ethics and estimating university reputation rankings (Table 1). This shows the importance of the digitized availability of the millions of books online as well as of Michel et al.’s (2011) tool for all sciences and the humanities. Here I used Ngram to investigate patterns in the use of the common names of 250 fish species in the corpus of digitized English books with the aim of identifying the most ‘famous’ fish in the modern, English-speaking world. MATERIALS AND METHODS Ngram is an online tool (http:// books. google. com/ ngrams) that produces a graph in which the y-axis shows how many times a phrase occurs in a corpus of books (making up about 6% of all books ever printed; Lin et al. 2012) relative to all remaining phrases composed of the same number of words (i.e. relative frequency) during the same time (x-axis). A 10 Stergiou: The most famous fish detailed account of the Ngram tool is given by Michel et al. (2011) and Lin et al. (2012), whereas an applica- tion guide is available online (http:// books. google. com/ ngrams/ info # advanced). The analysis is avail- able for 1800−2008 but data are more consistent for 1800−2000 (Lin et al. 2012). I used Ngram to estimate the relative frequency of appearance of the common names of different fish species in the corpus of English books published between 1800 and 2000. Herein I define and use the famon (Gr. fími, fame, from which L. fama, fame, is derived) as a unit of fame, with 1 famon = 10−6 rela- tive % Ngram frequency. Currently, 33 200 fish species are recognized (Froese & Pauly 2015). Since it is not possible to check the rel- ative frequencies of all 33 200 species in the online books, I used a subset (see Tables S1 & S2 in the Supplement at www. int-res. com/ articles/ suppl/ e017 p009 _ supp. xls). Firstly, I checked the relative fre- quency of occurrence of the common names of the 100 most viewed species in FishBase and of the 50 most important marine game fish (Table S1). The latter were taken from ‘Sport Fishing Magazine,’ which constructed the list based on the suggestions of the 61 top anglers and skippers of the world. I further esti- mated the relative frequencies of the common names of all fish species with landings > 235 000 t (for 2013) and of those farmed, both from the Food and Agricul- ture Organization (FAO), as well as of several other well-known ‘top’ fish species from various sources (Table S1). Finally, I checked the relative frequencies of 26 species randomly selected from FishBase (i.e. the first species that has a common name for each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet; Table S1). For all sources providing only com- mon names, I used only those that corresponded to one particular scien- tific name in FishBase. If the common name in the source differed from that in FishBase, then I checked for both common names in Ngram and used the one with the highest relative fre - quency. Overall, I checked 250 unique species, which cover the different uses of fish by humans (i.e. commer- cial fishing, fishmeal industry, aqua- culture, game fishing, bait, aquarium trade). Common names were checked for other uses in the English language with the ‘* word’ and ‘word *’ Ngram option. Fame may be related to the age of an entity’s name (e.g. for universities: Stergiou & Tsikliras 2014). Thus, I also tested whether a relationship exists between the age of common names (i.e. 2015 minus the year of the first appearance of a common name in the books) and maximum fame for the 181 species which had fre- quencies > 0 famons. Finally, one might hypothesize that the larger a fish is (i.e. more conspicuous or charismatic), the larger its fame will be. Thus, I also tested whether a relationship exists between maxi- mum length, Lmax (taken from Froese & Pauly 2015), and fame for the 181 species with fame > 0 famons. RESULTS Only 1 of the 250 species checked did not have a common name (Copadichromis azureus; top 100 FishBase species). Fame ranged between 0 famons (i.e. no Ngram frequencies for 1800−2000) for 57 spe- cies, to 117 famons for goldfish Carassius auratus. The common names of 7 species (flier Centrarchus macropterus, haddock Melanogrammus aeglefinus, meagre Argyrosomus regius, molly Poecilia sphe - nops, oscar Astronotus ocellatus, permit Trachinotus falcatus, and stur geon Acipenser sturio) are words which also have other uses in the English language (e.g. person names, locations; Table S1). As a result, these common names attain fame levels as high as 4900 famons, depending on the common name (Table S2). For instance, haddock/Haddock exhibits a peak of 100 to 147 famons in 1922−1930 (Fig. 1). However, Haddock is also a common surname in English. Indeed, part of the 1922−1930 frequency peak is attributed to ‘Mr. Haddock’ and ‘Mrs. Had- 11 Application/use Reference Tracking poverty enlightenment Ravallion (2011) Tracking emotions in novels Mohammad (2011), Acerbi et al. (2013) As a grammar checker Nazar & Renau (2012) Studying the evolution of computing Soper & Turel (2012) Studying the evolution of women’s status Twenge et al. (2012) Accounting Ahlawat & Ahlawat (2013) Poetry Diller (2013) Tracking pronoun use in books Twenge et al. (2013) Studying the evolution of novels Egnal (2013) Analyzing the drug research literature Montagne & Morgan (2013) Estimating university reputation and rankings Stergiou & Tsikliras (2014) Studying the evolution of trophic flows Libralato et al. (2014) Ethics Pauly & Stergiou (2014) Studying the evolution of resource economics Sumaila & Stergiou (2015) Table 1. Applications and uses of Michel et al.’s (2011) Ngram tool in different disciplines http://www.int-res.com/articles/suppl/e017p009_supp.xls http://www.int-res.com/articles/suppl/e017p009_supp.xls Ethics Sci Environ Polit 17: 9–18, 2017 dock,’ which together amount to about 50 famons (Fig. 1), whereas other names appearing in Ngram are ‘admiral/Admiral Haddock,’ ‘Richard Haddock,’ and ‘Captain Haddock.’ Thus, the above mentioned 7 species were excluded from the analyses. From the remaining 243 common names, which have frequen- cies ≤117 famons, 5 species also have common names, which again have other uses in English (white cloud Tanichthys albonubes, morari Cabdio morar, bogue Boops boops, sergeant major Abudefduf saxatilis, beluga Huso huso; Tables S1 & S2) and thus their records were also not considered here. Several other common names also have other uses in English, but the frequency of these uses was very low (Table S1). Overall, 131 of the 238 English common names considered in the analysis have frequencies <1 famon (median 0.56). Of the 181 species having non- 0 values, fame exhibited an increasing long-term trend for 139 species (76.8%), a declining trend for 8 species (4.4%), and no trend or another type of trend for 18 (9.9%) and 16 species (8.8%), respectively, between 1800 and 2000 or part of this period (Table S2). For 124 of the 181 species (68.5%), fame exhib- ited long-term cycles. For the study period (i.e. 1800− 2000), almost 60% of the common names (108/181) appeared in the English books for the first time between 1800 and 1899 (Fig. 2). Goldfish dominates the fame spectrum after 1920, being the most famous fish (Fig. 3). Its fame exhib- ited long-term cycles and reached levels generally higher than 80 famons between 1930 and 2000, with a maximum of 117 famons in the late 1980s (Fig. 3). Of the remaining species, among the most dominant ones in the fame spectrum were: (1) rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss, reaching 60 to 80 famons between 1980 and 2000 (maximum in 1990; Fig. 3); (2) sea trout Salmo trutta, which generally domi- nated between 1800 and 1910, with frequencies as high as 50 famons, with a maximum of 53 famons in the late 1940s (Fig. 4); (3) swordfish Xiphias gladius, with 30 to 53 famons between 1980 and 2000 (Fig. 3); (4) guppy Poecilia reticulata, which peaked in 1865−1900 (maximum 35 famons) and 1920−1930 (maximum 48.7 famons) (Fig. 3); (5) Atlantic salmon Salmon salar with 20 to 40 famons between 1980 and 2000 (Fig. 3); and (6) striped bass Morone sax- atilis, brook trout Salvelinus fontinalis, and walleye Sander vitreus, with 25 to 33 famons between 1980 and 2000 (Fig. 4). Four more examples are shown in Fig. 5, which shows 2 species for which fame de - clined with time (turbot Psetta maxima and sterlet Acipenser ruthenus) and 2 species (bluefish Pomato- mus saltatrix and John Dory Zeus faber), for which fame displayed no trend. Turbot, in particular, had 12 0 160 80 F a m e ( in f a m o n s) 1800 Year 1840 1880 1920 1960 2000 Fig. 1. Usage in famons (1 famon = 10−6 relative frequencies) of ‘Haddock’ (blue), ‘Mr. Haddock’ (red), and ‘Mrs. Haddock’ (green) in the corpus of English books published between 1800 and 2000 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 N o . o f c o m m o n n a m e s Year 19 80 19 60 19 40 19 20 19 00 18 80 18 60 18 40 18 20 18 00 Fig. 2. First appearance of the common names of the fish species examined in Ngram published between 1800 and 2000 120 60 0 F a m e ( in f a m o n s) Year 1800 1840 1880 1920 1960 2000 Fig. 3. Usage in famons (1 famon = 10−6 relative frequencies) of all forms of ‘goldfish’ (dark blue), ‘rainbow trout’ (light blue), ‘swordfish’ (orange), ‘Atlantic salmon’ (green), and ‘guppy’ (red) in the corpus of English books published be- tween 1800 and 2000. For ‘guppy,’ part of the frequency be- tween 1800 and 1920 is attributed to ‘Mr. Guppy’ and less so to ‘Mrs. Guppy,’ ‘Henry Guppy,’ ‘B. Guppy,’ and ‘Dr. Guppy,’ but these terms contribute verylittle after 1920 Stergiou: The most famous fish the highest frequency, 40 to 70 famons, among all species checked between 1800 and 1880 (Figs. 3−5). Maximum fame in English books was significantly related to the age of the English common names for the 181 common names that had frequencies > 0 (Fig. 6). In contrast, no relationship was found be - tween Lmax and maximum fame (log scale; r = 0.143, n = 181, p = 0.055). DISCUSSION In the present study, Ngram was successfully used for identifying the most famous fish in the English- speaking world. Undoubtedly, apart from books there are several other sources (e.g. newspapers, maga- zines, media, news archives: Leetaru 2011, Michel et al. 2011; blogs and social networks: Dodds et al. 2011, Altmann et al. 2011, Ratkiewicz et al. 2011; Face- book: Schwartz et al. 2013; Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar: for determining the most famous fish in the scientific literature, including journals and conference proceedings) that are also important and useful for studying various scientific and cultural aspects, including fame of entities, and which were not considered here. The results of the Ngram analysis showed that the goldfish is the most famous fish in the English speak- ing world based on the number of famons. Goldfish is a freshwater species of the family Cyprinidae, which is characterized by a wide phenotypic variability and a global distribution (Froese & Pauly 2015). It has been a model fish for laboratory experiments (Balon 2004) and is among the most popular aquarium fish species. It was the second fish species to be domesti- cated after common carp Cyprinus carpio (Balon 2004). It is noteworthy here that despite the fact that Darwin had an apparently small interest in fishes (i.e. only 0.7% of the total words written by Darwin refer to fishes) he wrote extensively on goldfish; in fact, this is the only fish that was given a section heading (Pauly 2008) in one of his books (Darwin 1868, p. 296− 297), in which its domestication and variability in color and size are discussed. Goldfish form a mo - nophyletic lineage, with all varieties being derived from one domestication event (Rylková et al. 2010) in China more than 1000 yr ago (i.e. at least since the Song dynasty, 960−1279; Darwin 1868, Smartt 2001), although semi-domestication took place earlier (Smartt 2001). Goldfish appeared in Beijing in 1330, and by 1506− 1521 occurred in large numbers outside the Forbidden City; by the late 1540s, keeping goldfish in houses was a popular hobby throughout China (Balon 13 0 60 30 F a m e ( in f a m o n s) 1800 Year 1840 1880 1920 1960 2000 Fig. 4. Usage in famons (1 famon = 10−6 relative frequencies) of all forms of ‘sea trout+brown trout’ (blue), ‘striped bass’ (green), ‘brook trout’ (orange), and ‘walleye’ (red) in the corpus of English books published between 1800 and 2000 0 80 40 Year F a m e ( in f a m o n s) 1800 1840 1880 1920 1960 2000 Fig. 5. Usage in famons (1 famon = 10−6 relative frequencies) of all forms of ‘turbot’ (green), ‘sterlet’ (red), ‘bluefish’ (or- ange), and ‘John Dory’ (blue) in the corpus of English books published between 1800 and 2000. For ‘turbot,’ <1 famon is attributed to ‘Turbot Francis’ and very small frequencies to ‘Mr. Turbot’ and ‘Timothy Turbot’ –2.5 –1.5 –0.5 0.5 1.5 2.5 1.45 1.65 2.05 2.25 F a m e in f a m o n s (lo g ) 1.85 Age in years (log) Fig. 6. Relationship (r2 = 0.51, n = 181, p < 0.05) between maximum fame (log) and age of a common name (2015 mi- nus year of first appearance in the books; log) for 181 fish species Ethics Sci Environ Polit 17: 9–18, 2017 2004). By the early 1500s this species was introduced to Japan (Balon 2004), and it was first introduced to Europe in 1611 or 1691 (Mulertt 1883, p. 7) or as early as the 1550s (Darwin 1868), most probably in Portugal from where it spread to Great Britain (in 1691) and other European countries (Mulertt 1883, p. 7). It had become a very popular pet by the 1700s (Brunner 2003) and was so popular in Europe that it was con- sidered as a symbol of good luck and fortune and was offered by husbands to their wives on their first wed- ding anniversary (Mulertt 1883, Brunner 2003). Al- though Smartt (2001) mentioned that the earliest record of the introduction of goldfish from Europe to the US dates back to 1874, it was probably introduced earlier, sometime in the 1850s, given that by 1865 it was sold in a New York pet shop and the first hatchery started in Ohio in 1882 (Brunner 2003). Thereafter, it became popular throughout the US (Brunner 2003), a fact that is also reflected in its relative frequency in the English books, which increased exponentially since 1850 (Fig. 3). Undoubtedly, one expects a famous entity to be the subject of different aspects of human culture. Indeed, goldfish are the protagonists in several movies (e.g. see www.imdb.com/ title/ tt2555048/), TV series (e.g. ‘Being Human’, a UK television series), children’s lit- erature (e.g. Dr. Seuss’s 1957 ‘The Cat in the Hat’, Helen Palmer’s 1961 ‘A Fish Out of Water’), and poems, and are featured in paintings (e.g. see www. artistsandart. org/ 2009/ 09/ goldfish-in-painting.html), including many by Henri Matisse, and on stamps (see the Appendix). Goldfish are also the subjects of many quotes attributed to celebrities (e.g. Henri Matisse, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, Princess Mar- garet, actor Paul Rudd, and writer Ashwin Sanghi)1. Interestingly, the raising of goldfish by children mod- ifies children’s biological interference (i.e. raisers use their knowledge of goldfish to predict and explain the reactions of other aquatic animals; Hatano & Ina- gaki 2002). Thus, as Smartt (2001, p. 1) put it ‘… gold- fish could be proclaimed as the Millennium fish!’ Given that fame is relative, one question that arises is how famous goldfish are when compared to other domesticated animals or even humans. For instance, horses and dogs were the only domesticated animals appearing in the top 10 most favorite animals voted in 2004 by more than 50 000 viewers (from 73 coun- tries) of the Animal Planet cable and satellite channel (http:// news. bbc. co. uk/ cbbcnews/ hi/ newsid _ 4070000/ newsid _ 4073100/ 4073151. stm). The fame of goldfish (maximum 117) is more than 40 times smaller than that of horses (i.e. the word ‘horse’ displays frequen- cies that decline from 9000−11 000 famons in 1800− 1900 to 4000−5000 in 1960−2000) and dogs (the fre- quency of the word ‘dog’ increases from 2300 famons in 1800 to over 4000 famons in 2000). This agrees with the fact that when exploring the relationship of Japanese people with animals, Kudo & Macer (1999) found that this relationship depends on how familiar they are with a particular species and its perceived function and role. The Japanese were overall more familiar with dogs and cats than with fish (which were mentioned by 3% of the people interviewed). Both horses and dogs were domesticated many thou- sands of years before goldfish and played a vital role in human well-being (Balon 2004), with horses hav- ing a direct and indirect impact on the US economy of more than $100 billion (The American Horse Council 2005). Yet, the fame of goldfish is slightly higher than that of Albert Einstein and Alexander the Great (74−95 and 91−107 famons, respectively, be - tween 1980 and 2000), but lower than those of, e.g. Aristotle and Plato (for both of which frequencies fluctuate around 1500 famons between 1800 and 2000). The analysis presented here suffers from certain biases with respect to the frequency estimations. Firstly, several species might have more than one common name, a fact affecting their Ngram frequen- cies. In the present study, the common names in the sources from which the 250 species were extracted matched the FishBase English common names, with the exception of 23 species (Table S1 in the Supple- ment). For 3 out of the 23 species, either the FishBase or the source common name has other uses in English and thus the corresponding frequencies were not used. For Salmo trutta, the common name in one source is ‘brown trout’ whereas in FishBase, it is ‘sea trout.’ Because both common names appear with 14 1Celebrity quotes are available at www. brainyquote. com/ quotes/ keywords/ goldfish. html. Examples listed here in- clude Henri Matisse: ‘I wouldn’t mind turning into a vermil- ion goldfish.’ Stephen Hawking: ‘A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?’ Princess Margaret: ‘I have as much privacy as a goldfish in a bowl.’ Paul Rudd: ‘I think there’s something great and generic about goldfish. They’re everybody’s first pet.’ Ash- win Sanghi: ‘The average human attention span was 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds in 2013. A drop of 33%. The scary part is that the attention span of a goldfish was 9 sec- onds, almost 13% more than us humans. That’s why it’s get- ting tougher by the day to get people to turn the page. Maybe we writers ought to try writing for goldfish!’ Stergiou: The most famous fish similar, high frequencies, this was the only case in which their frequencies were summed. For the remaining 19 species, the differences in the maxi- mum frequencies between the FishBase and source common names were very small. In 5 cases, both common names had 0 famons, in 9 cases the differ- ence between the frequencies of the 2 common names was <1 famon (with all maxima being also <1 famon), and in 5 cases the difference was between 1.59 and 6.66 famons (with all maxima being < 6.8 famons). Thus, this bias does not affect the results with respect to the dominance of goldfish. Secondly, for species having a common name that is a word which also has other uses in the English language (e.g. person names, locations, adjectives, other ani- mal species), sophisticated disambiguation algo- rithms must probably be used on the downloaded Ngram dataset (see Acerbi et al. 2013) in order to identify the correct frequency of this common name within a conceptual context related to fish. In any case, this bias leads to smaller frequencies for the implicated species and thus does not affect the fame status of goldfish. The above mentioned 2 biases also show the importance of coining a unique common name corresponding to only one organism (e.g. oscar or flier vs. bluefish, goldfish). Thirdly, common names of fish could change over time and this might affect the estimates of relative frequencies. This effect was not examined here. However, the facts that about 60% of the common names appeared in the English books for the first time between 1800 and 1899 (with- out excluding the possibility that they had appeared much earlier in English books or books in other lan- guages), and that the frequencies of about 77% of the common names exhibited long-term increasing trends during the study period both indicate that the effect of such a bias would be minimal. Finally, the potential effect of the relative availability of books was also not examined here. The present analysis refers to the corpus of English books (and English common names). The corpus of digitized books includes books in many other lan- guages (i.e. Spanish, French, German, Italian, He - brew, Russian, simplified Chinese), and the results of a similar analysis could be different in these (and other) languages, especially so for languages that were more important than English until recently. It is worth mentioning here, however, that ‘goldfish’ is not only used as a common name in English-speaking countries but also in several other countries (e.g. Mex- ico, Russia, Uzbekistan, Austria; Froese & Pauly 2015). In fact, the word ‘goldfish’ appears in the corpus of books in other languages with relative frequencies ranging from 3.1 to 67 famons and years of first ap- pearance ranging from 1800 to 1929 depending on the language (i.e. simplified Chinese: first appearance in 1929, maximum 67 famons; French: first appearance in 1800, maximum 7.4 famons; German: first appear- ance in 1840, maximum 11. 7 famons; Italian: first ap- pearance in 1886, maximum 3.8 famons; Spanish: first appearance in 1876, maximum 3.1 famons). This shows the universality and dominance of goldfish among fishes in the digitized published heritage. I found that the older a common name is, the greater the fame of that species, irrespective of body size. This indicates that fame is not related to the apparent conspicuousness of a species (e.g. a big fish) but rather to its historical relation to humans. Fish are generally characterized by continually in - creasing fame, which must be attributed to the fact that fish are there forever and their fame is accumu- lated through experiences that are shared from gen- eration to generation. The same is also true of univer- sity reputations (Stergiou & Tsikliras 2014). This fame accumulation certainly reflects the continually grow- ing importance of fish to the well-being of humans and agrees with the new common names appearing in the books over time. Linguistically, trends in rela- tive frequencies are also related to the birth and death of words (see Petersen et al. 2012), in this case of common names. Finally, the frequencies of the majority of the fish species examined here are char- acterized by long-term cycles, which might reflect various events. However, this is outside the scope of this work (but see Gao et al. 2012, for analyzing long- range correlations in Ngram frequencies). The results of the present study give rise to cultural and conservation implications as well as ethical con- siderations. The fact that the goldfish is the most famous fish indicates that non-consumptive cultural aspects, including aesthetic, spiritual, educational, and recreational components, play a central role in defining the relationship of humans with other organisms, in this case fish. This agrees with the find- ings of Kudo & Macer (1999), who reported that peo- ple interviewed on why they like animals ranked the aesthetic/spiritual aspects (i.e. their cuteness or their behavior) very high. It is logical to assume that this also applies to the ecosystems in which these organ- isms are embedded. Ecosystems provide various services, which generate benefits contributing to human well-being (MEA 2005). Ecosystem services have become important for planning, conservation, decision making, and management, and research on cultural services is growing as a multidisciplinary research field (Chan et al. 2012a,b, Hernández-Mor- 15 Ethics Sci Environ Polit 17: 9–18, 201716 cillo et al. 2013, Milcu et al. 2013, Satz et al. 2013). The present study shows that ecosystem cultural services and benefits, which are closely associated with the remaining services (Chan et al. 2012a,b), are as important as the provisioning (e.g. food, fresh water), regulating (e.g. climate regulation), and sup- porting services (e.g. nutrient cycling) (see also Holmlund & Hammer 1999 for services generated by fish). Yet, despite their importance, cultural services have not yet been adequately integrated within the ecosystem service framework and, with the excep- tion of tourism (Hernández-Morcillo et al. 2013), they are excluded from economic evaluations because there is no commonly accepted framework for doing so, and/or because nonmaterial values cannot be characterized using monetary methods (Chan et al. 2012a,b, Daniel et al. 2012, Hernández-Morcillo et al. 2013, Milcu et al. 2013, Satz et al. 2013). This raises ethical issues related to the recent attempts for eco- system planning and management based on or using ecosystem services (see also Jax et al. 2013). In fact, there is an ‘ethical’ need to assess cultural services (Hernández-Morcillo et al. 2013) and to integrate them with other services (Satz et al. 2013). 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Examples of the use of goldfish Carassius auratus in artistic representations work_ff6mnzj25zegrct2ipe5o6jtxq ---- 2D X-ray and FTIR micro-analysis of the degradation of cadmium yellow pigment in paintings of Henri Matisse I N V I T E D P A P E R 2D X-ray and FTIR micro-analysis of the degradation of cadmium yellow pigment in paintings of Henri Matisse E. Pouyet1,2 • M. Cotte1,3 • B. Fayard1 • M. Salomé1 • F. Meirer4 • A. Mehta5 • E. S. Uffelman6 • A. Hull7 • F. Vanmeert8 • J. Kieffer1 • M. Burghammer1 • K. Janssens8 • F. Sette1 • J. Mass9 Received: 20 March 2015 / Accepted: 13 May 2015 / Published online: 3 June 2015 � Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 Abstract The chemical and physical alterations of cadmium yellow (CdS) paints in Henri Matisse’s The Joy of Life (1905–1906, The Barnes Foundation) have been recognized since 2006, when a survey by portable X-ray fluorescence identified this pigment in all altered regions of the monumental painting. This alteration is visible as fad- ing, discoloration, chalking, flaking, and spalling of several regions of light to medium yellow paint. Since that time, synchrotron radiation-based techniques including elemen- tal and spectroscopic imaging, as well as X-ray scattering have been employed to locate and identify the alteration products observed in this and related works by Henri Matisse. This information is necessary to formulate one or multiple mechanisms for degradation of Matisse’s paints from this period, and thus ensure proper environmental conditions for the storage and the display of his works. This paper focuses on 2D full-field X-ray Near Edge Structure imaging, 2D micro-X-ray Diffraction, X-ray Fluorescence, and Fourier Transform Infra-red imaging of the altered paint layers to address one of the long-standing questions about cadmium yellow alteration—the roles of cadmium carbonates and cadmium sulphates found in the altered paint layers. These compounds have often been assumed to be photo-oxidation products, but could also be residual starting reagents from an indirect wet process synthesis of CdS. The data presented here allow identifying and map- ping the location of cadmium carbonates, cadmium chlo- rides, cadmium oxalates, cadmium sulphates, and cadmium sulphides in thin sections of altered cadmium yellow paints from The Joy of Life and Matisse’s Flower Piece (1906, The Barnes Foundation). Distribution of various cadmium compounds confirms that cadmium carbonates and sul- phates are photo-degradation products in The Joy of Life, whereas in Flower Piece, cadmium carbonates appear to have been a [(partially) unreacted] starting reagent for the yellow paint, a role previously suggested in other altered yellow paints. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00339-015-9239-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & E. Pouyet emelinepouyet@gmail.com 1 European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, 6, rue Jules Horowitz, 38000 Grenoble, France 2 ARC-Nucléart - CEA/Grenoble, 17 rue des Martyrs, 38054 Grenoble Cedex 9, France 3 LAMS (Laboratoire d’Archéologie Moléculaire et Structurale) UMR-8220, 3 rue Galilée, 94200 Ivry-sur-Seine, France 4 Inorganic Chemistry and Catalysis, Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science, Utrecht University, Universiteitsweg 99, 3584 CG Utrecht, The Netherlands 5 Stanford Synchrotron radiation Lightsource, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 2575 Sand Hill Rd., Menlo Park, CA, USA 6 Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA 24450, USA 7 Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA 8 AXES Research Group, Department of Chemistry, University of Antwerp, Groenenborgerlaan 171, 2020 Antwerp, Belgium 9 Scientific Research and Analysis Laboratory, Conservation Department, Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, DE 19735, USA 123 Appl. Phys. A (2015) 121:967–980 DOI 10.1007/s00339-015-9239-4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00339-015-9239-4 http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s00339-015-9239-4&domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s00339-015-9239-4&domain=pdf 1 Introduction With the rapid rise of chemical industry during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, numerous new inorganic and organic pigments were developed and introduced as alternatives to well- established traditional pigments, often outclassing them thanks to their colour intensity, purity, cost, and covering power. However, in Impressionist and early Modernist paintings, various synthetic inorganic pigments have started to undergo chemical and physical degradation phenomena ranging from fading and colour shifts to spal- ling and flaking. Several examples of the discoloration of synthetic yellow pigments from the turn of the twentieth century (e.g. zinc yellow (K2O�4ZnCrO4�3H2O) [1], chrome yellow (PbCrO4) [2–6], and cadmium yellow (CdS) [7, 8]) have been recently reported. In particular, despite having a good reputation regarding permanency, physical manifestations of photo-oxidative degradation of yellow cadmium sulphide (CdS) pigments have been observed over the past decade in works by Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Henri Matisse, Ferdinand Leger, Edvard Munch, and James En- sor [7–10]. This degradation appears in many different ways; from paint chalking, i.e. drying and crumbling, to fading, flaking, spalling, and in its most advanced cases to the formation of a thick (20–50 lm) ivory to tan alteration crusts covering the original yellow paint. The first systematic study of CdS pigment degradation was performed in 2005 by Leone et al. [9] on 12 paintings dating from 1887–1923. In this study, based on X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy com- bined with an energy-dispersive spectrometry (SEM–EDS), the presence of different oxidized Cd species, including cadmium carbonate (CdCO3), cadmium hydroxide (Cd(OH)2), and cadmium sulphate (CdSO4) was observed at the surface of paintings; these materials were identified as the main products of the degradation process. Combining these observations with the results from artificially degraded mock-ups and supplementary time-of-flight-secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) analyses of the surface of the painting samples, a preliminary degradation mechanism was suggested. The photo-oxidation of the CdS pigment was proposed to generate CdO, CdSO4, and SO2 gas, which in high relative humidity environments, convert to H2SO4 re- sulting in acid hydrolysis of the paint binding medium. In 2009 and 2012, Van der Snickt et al. [7, 8] extended the study of CdS pigment degradation to paintings by James Ensor and Vincent van Gogh by using synchrotron radiation (SR)-based techniques. In the case of Still Life with Cabbage by James Ensor [7], the degradation of yellow CdS was related to the photo-oxidation of the cadmium sulphide to (hydrated) cadmium sulphate (CdSO4�nH2O). Repeated hydration and drying of the paint surface resulted in the formation of a thin (a few microns thick) layer of semi-transparent whitish globules of CdSO4�nH2O on the surface of the CdS-based paint. Another notable finding of this study was the identification of (NH4)2�Cd2(SO4)3 in the pigment layer, thought to be related to a previous aggressive cleaning treatment with dilute ammonia. Two supplementary degradation products were identified in the case of the Flowers in a blue vase by Vincent Van Gogh [8]: cadmium oxalate (CdC2O4) and lead sulphate (PbSO4). The presence of an apparently unoriginal varnish, likely applied after the initial dete- rioration of the CdS yellow, was the possible source of C2O4 2- and Pb 2? ions. These ions could have then reacted with Cd 2? and SO4 2- ions, produced during the initial photo- oxidation of CdS, leading to the formation of a thin layer of CdC2O4 on the top of the painting surface and the pre- cipitation of PbSO4 in the varnish layer. Simultaneously, Mass et al. [11], from the Conservation Department of the Winterthur Museum, initiated a study to characterize visible changes observed in cadmium yellow areas of The Barnes Foundation’s The Joy of Life (Henri Matisse, 1905–1906, Barnes Foundation 719, Fig. 1a), in particular for preservation purposes. Studies were per- formed at different synchrotron facilities: at ID21 (ESRF), at BL4-3 (SSRL) [11], and at the IRENI (Synchrotron Radiation Center, SRC) [12, 13]. By combining micro- Fourier transform infrared (lFTIR) spectroscopy with mi- cro-X-ray fluorescence (lXRF) and micro-X-ray near edge structure (lXANES) spectroscopy (at the Cd LIII-edge and at the S K-edge in scanning mode), spectra were collected over dozens of points. Degradation products were identi- fied in the altered cadmium yellow area from the darkened yellow foliage at the upper left of the painting (three samples: S111, S112, and S113 in Fig. 1b), the yellow fruit in the tree with an ivory-coloured alteration crust at the upper right, (one sample: S115 in Fig. 1b), and in the faded yellow field beneath the central reclining figures (two samples: S117 and S5 in Fig. 1b). CdCO3 was present in high concentrations in all altered regions, supporting the hypothesis that it is more likely a poorly soluble photo- degradation product than a filler or residual starting reagent. In the unaltered yellow paint, the identification of CdS and CdCl2�nH2O suggested that chloride was intro- duced as the starting reagent for the synthesis of the cad- mium yellow. CdSO4�nH2O was also found to be enriched in the off-white alteration layers of the samples studied; as a more soluble species, it was also found elsewhere in the cross sections. Alteration crusts identified had no remain- ing CdS, all of which had degraded into a mixture of cadmium sulphates, carbonates, and oxalates. 968 E. Pouyet et al. 123 These examples illustrate several advantages of com- bining synchrotron radiation-based X-ray techniques, such as lXRF, lXANES, and lXRD to elucidate the degrada- tion processes of paint containing CdS yellow pigment. First, combined techniques allow the identification of mi- nor and major components even when present as amor- phous/nanocrystalline materials (as in the case of CdS) or in a crystallized form. The sensitivity of these SR-tech- niques is critical for the identification of photo-alteration products in paintings, allowing for preventive conservation measures (such as closer management of light levels and relative humidity) to be implemented when degradation is observed. Secondly, the micrometric resolution of these probes is essential to reveal the presence of the degradation/alteration layer on the painting’s surface, which is typically only a few microns thick, and to establish the stratigraphy of the alteration/degradation products. The identification of CdCO3 and CdSO4- nH2O alone does not constitute a conclusive proof for a photo-oxidation process. Both compounds are known to be reagents in the wet and/or dry synthesis process of CdS. Thus, their identification as either unreacted starting reagents, side products of the original syn- thesis, or as degradation compounds relies mostly on their location and distribution in regards to the original paint layer. Mass et al. [11] demonstrated the interest of using a scanning probe to accurately localize and identify the stratigraphy of various species in order to decide whether a particular species can be categorized as unreacted starting reagents or as degradation compounds. However, the recent use of 2D full-field XANES (FF-XANES), combined with 2D lFTIR, lXRF and lXRD measure- ments when speciation through XANES is ambiguous, has allowed faster and more detailed identification and dis- tribution of various chemical compounds, even in highly complex and heterogeneous sections. The new approach allows for a deeper elucidation of the degradation phe- nomena under way, leading to more specific preservation recommendations, and the ability to identify degradation at an earlier stage. In particular, the full-field analysis appears to be an ideal way to extend this study over an entire 2D region and to eliminate some of the ambiguities that are inherently present when only a point-by-point analysis is performed. Fig. 1 a Henri Matisse, French, 1869–1954 The Joy of Life, between October 1905 and March 1906, oil on canvas, 69� 9 94� in. (176.5 9 240.7 cm), oil on canvas, The Barnes Foundation, BF719; c upper left zoom showing tan-brown alteration crusts on the yellow foliage and on the yellow fruit in the tree at the upper right, and zoom on the faded region below the central reclining figures, sampling locations for this study are represented by black cross; b Henri Matisse, French, 1869–1954 Flower Piece, 1906, 21 7/8 9 18� in. (55.6 9 46.4 cm), oil on canvas, The Barnes Foundation, BF205; d altered (brown) and non-altered (yellow) regions of yellow paint to the right of the pitcher, sampling locations are represented by black cross 2D X-ray and FTIR micro-analysis of the degradation of cadmium yellow pigment in paintings of… 969 123 2 Experimental 2.1 Paintings and samples location In order to complete the identification and localization of the original paint components and the degradation mate- rials, two micrometric fragments S111 and S5 were sampled from The Joy of Life painting (Fig. 1a), in the altered cadmium yellow paint from the darkened yellow foliage at the upper left of the work, and in the faded yellow field beneath the central reclining figures, re- spectively (Fig. 1b). Two other fragments (named BF205-darkened and BF205-undarkened) were sampled from the Flower Piece painting (Fig. 1c), from the dry and cracked darkened re- gion below the right side of the pitcher, and the intact yellow region above this darkened area (Fig. 1d), respec- tively. This sampling strategy was devised to compare degradation phenomena in two of Matisse’s artworks showing two different stages of photo-degradation and to obtain information on the cadmium yellow pigment syn- thesis in the paints used by Matisse. 2.2 Sample preparation and mounting In previous work [11], X-ray analyses were carried out on the surfaces of polished cross sections of painting fragments embedded in polyester resin, the most classical approach to prepare transversal sections from paint fragments. One unpublished result obtained following this sample prepa- ration method is detailed below for sample S5. The ex- amination of samples from historical paintings using combined elemental, molecular, and structural methods benefits from the preparation of thin sections [14]. Ideally, hyperspectral analyses are performed on a unique section. However, the sample preparation requirements (thickness, embedding media, etc.) differ as a function of the tech- niques involved [15]. Accordingly, in the present study, two adapted thin sections were prepared: one for combined XANES and XRD analyses, and another one for FTIR analyses. For X-ray-based techniques, the sample was first embedded using synthetic resin (Historesin, Leica) and microtomed to obtain a section thinner than 20 lm. The section was then sandwiched between two ultralene foils (4 lm thick, from Spex Sample Prep) to provide me- chanical stability during data acquisition. For lFTIR ana- lysis, micro-compression was favoured because it prevents spectral contamination from the embedding material [12, 13]. Considering that lXRF results are not affected by any of these forms of sample preparation (compressed sample between diamond windows, cross section, and thin section from embedded fragment), the resulting elemental maps allow the combination of results from X-ray and infrared spectroscopies together with the visible observations. 2.3 Analytical methods and data processing 2.3.1 Micro-X-ray fluorescence and chemical maps in scanning mode lXRF data were collected at the X-ray micro-spectroscopy beamline ID21 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) [16]. Monochromatic radiation was ex- tracted from an undulator coupled with a fixed-exit double- crystal monochromator equipped with a Si(111) crystal and focused using a Kirkpatrick-Baez mirror pair to a typical beam size of 0.2 lm ver. 9 0.6 lm hor. with a flux rang- ing from 10 9 to 10 10 ph/s and an energy ranging from 2 to 9 keV. The samples were mounted in a vertical plane, at an angle of 60� with respect to the beam, and raster scanned in the beam using a combination of stepper motors and piezo actuators. The XRF data were collected by a single channel solid state detector. This allowed the distribution of the different elements present in the paint cross sections, in particular of the Cd- and S-containing compounds, to be mapped at sub-micrometre resolution. In a few cases, the elemental composition maps were complemented by sul- phur speciation maps. Two maps were recorded setting the energy of the incoming X-rays to 2.4728 and 2.4825 keV, respectively, i.e. to energies where the absorption and consecutively the XRF from sulphides (S 2- ) or sulphates (S 6? ) is enhanced. By assuming a binary composition consisting of CdS and CdSO4�nH2O and determining the absorption of these two compounds at these two specific energies, it is possible to derive the concentration maps of CdS and CdSO4�nH2O, as detailed elsewhere [7, 17]. The XRF data were batch fitted using the PyMca software package [18]. 2.3.2 Full-field XANES In FF-XANES measurements, a stack of X-ray radiographs of a thin sample is acquired, while tuning the X-ray energy across the absorption edge of the element of interest [19]. This novel technique allows the acquisitions of millions of XANES spectra in a very short time (less than 1 h per acquisition) and makes possible the acquisition of full XANES spectra at the micrometre scale over millimetric 2D regions. FF-XANES data were collected at ID21 in the full-field configuration, across the S K-edge, Cl K-edge, and Cd LIII- edge. The beam size of 1.5 9 1.5 mm 2 was defined using slits; the spatial structures of the beam were smoothed using an X-ray decoheror (rotating graphite foil, 125 lm 970 E. Pouyet et al. 123 thick). Samples were mounted vertically, perpendicular to the beam, and radiographs were acquired with a detection ensemble comprising a scintillator, a magnifying objective, and a CCD camera. It resulted in images with a pixel size of 300 9 300 nm 2 and a field of view of 315 9 360 lm2. For data analysis, the 10 6 XANES spectra acquired in full-field mode were fitted as a linear combination (LC) of references, using the TXM-Wizard software [20]. The primary set of Cd reference compounds (spectra presented in Fig. 2) was composed of: cadmium sulphate (CdSO4, 99.99 % metals basis), hydrated cadmium sulphate (CdSO4�nH2O, 99.999 % metals basis), cadmium sulphide (CdS, 99.995 % metals basis), cadmium nitrate tetrahy- drate (Cd(NO3)2�4H2O, [99.999 % metals basis), cadmi- um oxide (CdO, [99.99 % metals basis), hydrated cadmium chloride (CdCl2�nH2O, [99.99 % metals basis), cadmium carbonate (CdCO3, [99.999 % metals basis) (all purchased from Sigma Aldrich) and cadmium oxalate (synthesized at Washington and Lee University). The final choice of references for the least squares fitting (LSLC) varies from one sample to another, with regards to com- plementary lXRD and lFTIR results. In the case of FF- XANES measurements across the S K-edge, the low en- ergy of incoming photons led to a strong absorption by the sample. Even the thinnest section obtained by microtome was insufficiently thin to prevent over-absorption effects, drastically reducing the white line intensity of sulphur species, distorting spectral features, and making LSLC analysis untenable. For these data sets, the selection of Region of Interest (ROI) characteristics of the different sulphur species present was preferred as a qualitative approach. At the Cd LIII-edge and Cl K-edge, the transmission obtained on a 10 lm section was sufficient to allow LSLC treatment. One of the most important assets of LSLC is its quantitative character, since it provides information on the relative contribution of each reference present in the mix- ture. However, this strategy presents an important draw- back, as it necessitates an a priori knowledge of the phases constituting the sample. As for single XANES LC fitting, the method also relies on: (1) an accurate energy calibra- tion of references and data sets; (2) a reliable choice of references (guided for example by complementary analyses by methods such as XRD, FTIR, and Raman); and (3) a reference set as close as possible to the actual composition of the sample itself to minimize differences in the back- ground shape and in the pre- and post-edge regions be- tween references and data sets. These constraints and the massive data set size moti- vated the use of another strategy for data analyses in the case of sample S111, namely principal component analyses (PCA) and subsequent k-means clustering. Pixels with similar XANES spectra were pooled in reduced PC space (in the score plot), effectively segmenting the image based on the variance in the recorded XANES features into a pre-defined number of regions (k areas) consisting of pixels with a similar XANES signature. PCA and clustering were performed using the TXM-Wizard soft- ware [21]. 3530 3580 3630 N or m al iz ed a bs or pt io n Energy (eV) CdSO4·nH2O CdSO4 Cd(NO3)2·4H2O Cd(OH)2 CdC2O4 CdCl2·nH2O CdCl2 CdO CdS CdCO3 Fig. 2 Cd LIII-edge XANES spectra acquired in transmission mode using FF-XANES technique on various cadmium references: cadmi- um sulphate (CdSO4, 99.99 % metals basis), hydrated cadmium sulphate (CdSO4�nH2O, 99.999 % metals basis), cadmium sulphide (CdS, 99.995 % metals basis), cadmium nitrate tetrahydrate (Cd(NO3)2�4H2O, [99.999 % metals basis), cadmium chloride (CdCl2, [99.99 % metals basis), hydrated cadmium chloride (CdCl2- nH2O, [99.99 % metals basis), cadmium oxide (CdO, [99.99 % metals basis), cadmium carbonate (CdCO3, [99.999 % metals basis) (all purchased from Sigma Aldrich), and cadmium oxalates (synthe- sized at Washington and Lee University) 2D X-ray and FTIR micro-analysis of the degradation of cadmium yellow pigment in paintings of… 971 123 2.3.3 Micro-X-ray diffraction Some samples (BF205 darkened and undarkened) were further studied by lXRD at the ID13 (ESRF) and P06 (PETRA III) beamlines. At ID13, the X-ray beam energy of 12.9 keV was selected by means of a Si(111) double- crystal monochromator. The beam was focused with a Kirkpatrick-Baez mirror optic down to 2.5 9 1.5 lm2 (hor. 9 ver.). Diffraction signals were recorded in trans- mission geometry with a 2 k 9 2 k ESRF FReLoN de- tector (50.0 (h) 9 49.3 (v) lm2 pixel size). At P06, a hard-X-ray micro- and nanoprobe beamline at the PETRA III storage ring (DESY, Hamburg, Germany), the X-ray beam energy of 21 keV was selected by means of a Si(111) double-crystal monochromator [22]. The beam was focused with a Kirkpatrick-Baez mirror optic down to 0.6 9 0.8 lm2 (hor. 9 ver.). Diffraction signals were recorded in transmission geometry with a PILATUS 300 K area detector. Data were unwrapped using both XRDUA [23] and PyFAI [24]. The Match! and EVA packages were used as well during the preliminary phase identification. 2D maps of compounds were then generated with PyMca by using ROIs (each ROI corresponding to a particular diffraction angle range). These ranges were chosen based on the peak intensity and the absence of overlaps with other phases (defined in Online Resource (1)). 2.3.4 Micro-FTIR analyses Organic compounds are known to play an important role in the degradation mechanisms of paint layers (e.g. through hydrolysis of the drying oil binder); moreover, some of the alteration products are organometallic compounds. Thus, complementary lFTIR analyses in the mid-IR domain were performed at ID21. The FTIR spectromicroscope is based on a commercial instrument and is composed of a Thermo Nicolet Nexus infrared bench associated with an infrared Thermo Continuum microscope [25]. The infrared beam was emitted from a short straight section (containing fo- cusing electron lenses) upstream of a bending magnet of the ESRF ring. The edge radiation was collected, collimated, and transferred to the spectrometer and microscope using a set of 12 mirrors. In the microscope, a 932 Schwarzschild objective was used in confocal mode; an aperture defined the size of the spot illuminating the sample. The signal was detected using a liquid N2-cooled single element 50 lm MCT detector. In this configuration, the beam size was 8 9 8 lm2 and FTIR spectra were acquired in transmission mode using the diamond compression technique. The OMNIC and PyMca packages were used for data analysis. 3 Results 3.1 The Joy of Life (1905–1906): study of the degradation process 3.1.1 S5 sample: faded yellow field beneath the central reclining figures Following the above strategy, analyses were performed on two thin sections from the same initial S5 fragment, which had previously been analysed in scanning mode as a cross section [11]. lFTIR was performed on a fragment prepared with the micro-compression cell (Fig. 3a). Chemical maps (record- ed with a step size of 6 9 6 lm2) are presented in Fig. 3d. FF-XANES was acquired on an embedded thin section of 10 lm (Fig. 3f), at the Cd LIII-edge and the Cl K-edge (pixel size 0.6 9 0.6 lm2). Cd LIII-spectra were fitted with the following set of references: CdS, CdCO3, CdCl2�nH2O, and CdSO4�nH2O based on the previous lXANES results [11]. Results of LSLC fitting are presented in Fig. 3i. lXRF maps were acquired at 7.2 keV (step size: 1 9 1 lm2) on the two sections, allowing, together with the optical observations, the correlation of results obtained with the three techniques. The elemental maps obtained on the pressed sample and the thin embedded section are shown in Fig. 3c, h, respectively. Additional speciation maps obtained in lXRF mode at the S K-edge from the same sample but prepared as a cross section, (pixel size: 1 9 1 lm2) are presented in Fig. 4. The visible images and chemical maps reveal a complex mixture and stratigraphy of Cd-based compounds in the predominately unaltered yellow region and the alteration white crust (Fig. 3b, g). In the yellow internal region, Cd is highly concentrated (lXRF, Fig. 3h) and mainly present as CdS (confirmed by XANES at Cd LIII-edge, Fig. 3i and Online Resource (2)). XANES at the Cd LIII-edge allows the identification of other cadmium-based species as well: carbonates (con- firmed by lFTIR, Fig. 3d), sulphates (confirmed by lFTIR, Fig. 3d, and chemical maps at S K-edge, Fig. 4), and chlorides, CdCl2 (confirmed by lXRF, Fig. 3c and h, and XANES at the Cl K-edge, Online Resource(3)). For sul- phates and chlorides, improved data fitting was obtained when spectra of hydrated references were employed. The imaging capability combined with micrometric resolution achieved with the full-field microscope reveals that CdS is heterogeneously present in the yellow layer and is intermixed with CdCO3 and CdSO4�nH2O (Fig. 3i). Cadmium chlorides have been previously identified in several regions of this painting (sample S115: yellow fruit in the tree at the upper right and sample S112:darkened 972 E. Pouyet et al. 123 upper left corner) and are thought to be the residual starting reagent from the wet process synthesis of the CdS used for this painting [11]. This conclusion is also supported by our present findings where cadmium chlorides are found in the internal yellow region, rather than accumulated in the al- teration white crust (which would be the case if introduced as a contaminant from the environment). Concerning the white altered layer, chemical mapping highlights a complex stratigraphy mainly composed of CdCO3 (lFTIR, Fig. 3d, e point1, and XANES at Cd LIII- edge, Fig. 3i and Online Resource(2)). In the upper part of the white layer, both sulphates and oxalates are also identified (lFTIR, Fig. 3d, XANES at the Cd LIII-edge, Fig. 3i and Online Resource (2), and chemical maps at the C2O4CO32- SO42- Remainder CdCO3 CdS O-H = Carbonates Sulfates Cl, Cd Acrylic polymer Carbonates, Cd Zein Oxalates Carbonates Sulfates Cl, Cd S Cl Cd S Cl Cd CdS, CdCO3, CdSO4·nH2O, CdCl2·nH2O, Cd, K, S, Cl CdCO3 Cd, K, Cl CdC2O4 CdSO4·nH2O Cd, S, Ca, Si 50 μm 50 μm (b)(a) (c) (g) (d) (f) (h) (i) O C-O-C = O C-N (e) 1 3 2 Point 1 Point 2 Point 3 900140019002400290034003900 A bs or ba nc e (a rb it . u ni ts ) Wavenumber (cm-1) Fig. 3 Combination of SR lFTIR, lXRF, and FF-XANES for the study of a fragment from The Joy of Life (S5). Schematic views of results obtained with b lFTIR and lXRF; g FF- XANES at the Cd LIII-edge and lXRF; c–e results from the compressed frag- ment displayed in a Visible light microscope image; c lXRF elemental maps of Cd, S, and Cl (step size: 1 9 1 lm2). d lFTIR maps of esters (1710–1750 cm -1 ), amides (1616–1700 cm -1 ), hydroxyls (3320–3450 cm -1 ), sulphates (1022–1206 cm -1 ), oxalates (1306–1327 cm -1 ), and carbonates (1342–1535 cm -1 ) (step size: 6 9 6 lm2); e IR spectra of carbonates (point 1), poly (vinyl acetate) polymer (point 2), and zein (point 3)-rich area; f–i results from the 10-lm-thick section displayed in f Visible light microscope image. h lXRF elemental maps of Cd, S and Cl (step size: 1 9 1 lm2); i Speciation maps (FF-XANES) of CdCO3, CdS as well as the sum of the remainder Cd components used in LSLC fitting (CdCl2�nH2O and CdSO4�nH2O) (pixel size: 0.3 9 0.3 lm2) 2D X-ray and FTIR micro-analysis of the degradation of cadmium yellow pigment in paintings of… 973 123 S K-edge, Fig. 4). Since the oxalates, carbonates, and sulphates are all colourless, it explains the chemical cause of the fading observed in the altered region. The cadmium carbonates are enriched in the white su- perficial layer (Fig. 3d, i) where CdS is completely absent (Figs. 3i, Fig. 4). They can also be observed in smaller quantities in the yellow paint layer. This distribution con- firms similar results found in the altered yellow fruits from the same work, suggesting that in the off-white alteration layer, the cadmium carbonate is a photo-degradation pro- duct, even though it has been suggested as a residue of the CdS synthesis in other systems [10, 11]. The presence of CdC2O4 is limited to the uppermost alteration layer (Fig. 3d, i and Online Resource (2)). Also observed in the darkened foliage in the upper left corner of The Joy of Life [11] and a painting by Van Gogh [8], this product is identified as a degradation product, derived from either varnish residues on the painting (residues of a par- tially removed natural resin varnish have been observed in several paint cross sectional samples removed from the piece) or from the oil binder. Such degradation could be the result of a cleaning treatment, natural ageing, or the breakdown of the binder during the photo-degradation process. As seen in earlier examples of altered cadmium sul- phide-containing paints, cadmium sulphates are distributed throughout the paint layer [11] (Fig. 3d, i), see, for ex- ample, the data from sample S115. The distribution of sulphide and sulphate species (Fig. 4), obtained in lXRF mode on cross sections [7]), shows that sulphates (pre- sumably cadmium sulphate) are dispersed in the original paint layer, but are also enriched on the surface of the off- white alteration crust. Cadmium sulphide is virtually absent in this upper layer, consistent with the absence of a yellow colour in this region, whereas it is intact beneath the alteration crust. These data are again consistent with cad- mium sulphates being photo-degradation products rather than residues of the CdS synthesis in The Joy of Life paints. lFTIR also revealed the presence of an organic com- pound made up of a poly(vinyl acetate) polymer (Fig. 3e, point 2) characterized by a strong peak in the C–O stretching absorption region (1300–900 cm -1 ). This pro- duct is likely a restoration/consolidation material used to reduce flaking. Flaking and spalling were particularly problematic in this region of the painting, and several campaigns of consolidation have been carried out, in par- ticular to allow the work to travel in 1992. In a Cd-free area of about 50 lm (Fig. 3c), the lFTIR spectra exhibit a pe- culiar feature, characteristic of amides. Comparison with databases suggests the presence of zein, characterized by a band at 3286 cm -1 from amide A (Fig. 3e point3). Zein is the major storage protein of maize and was proposed as a possible base material for polymer applications in the early twentieth century [26]; here, it is again interpreted as a restoration treatment—the painting is known to have been stabilized with a glue lining in the early twentieth century, prior to the polymer-based consolidation treatments. 3.1.2 S111 sample: darkened yellow foliage Another discoloured area of The Joy of Life (1905–1906), from the darkened upper left corner, was also sampled: sample S111. Since this fragment was very small, it was impossible to employ more than one sample preparation strategy. Priority was given to XANES analysis at the Cd and S edges, and thus, a 10-lm-thick thin section was prepared. Contrary to the previous fragment, no white al- teration zone was observed (Fig. 5a). The white thick layer visible in the optical image relates to the lead white-rich ground layer identified by lXRF analyses as a mixture of sulphide sulphate 50 μm 0,00 0,50 1,00 1,50 2,00 2,50 3,00 3,50 2460 2470 2480 2490 2500 2510 2520 N or m al iz ed a bs or p� on Energy (eV) CdSO4·nH2O CdS (b)(a) (c) 2.4728 2.4728 Fig. 4 lXRF maps of sulphur, in The Joy of Life (BF 719), sample S5 from below the central reclining figures. a UV picture of S5 cross section; b XRF maps were acquired at 2.4728, 2.4825, and 2.5189 keV highlighting the relative distribution of sulphides (red) and sulphates (green), respectively; c Reference XANES spectra at the S K-edge of CdS and CdSO4�nH2O. 974 E. Pouyet et al. 123 Ba- and S-containing coarse grains (previously identified as barium sulphates, Fig. 5b), dispersed in a Pb white- based matrix (lead white, Fig. 5b). The degradation seems to be limited to a few micrometres on the uppermost part of the Cd yellow paint and is related to the browning of the original yellow pigment. The section has been analysed using FF-XANES at the S, Cl K-edge, and Cd LIII-edges. Supplementary lXRF maps were also acquired at a primary energy of 3.7 keV. After exposing the sample to these multiple XANES and XRF acquisitions, the embedding resin started to lose its mechanical strength, thus preventing further investigation using other techniques such as FTIR or XRD. At the S K-edge, over-absorption issues prevented reliable LSLC fitting, limiting data analysis to the localization of both sulphide and sulphate species based on ROI calculations (as described in Online Resource (4); results not shown). At the Cl K-edge, the main information obtained was the identification of CdCl2�nH2O as the single chlorine-con- taining compound present. Both results were used to con- firm the results obtained at the Cd LIII-edge. [At the Cd LIII-edge, some pixels suffered from over-absorption and were set to zero (and therefore not taken into account during data fitting).] LSLC, using similar references to those used for the S5 sample, presented a large difference between experimental data and fit results, suggesting the presence of species not covered by the reference data set. In order to identify the relevant cadmium spectral basis set, principal component analysis was used. PCA followed by k-means clustering using the PC basis identified four main clusters (Fig. 5c): clusters 1, 3, 5, and 6 (cluster 2 and 4 are related to low absorbing area with noisy pixels and were not retained for further analysis). From each cluster, the average XANES of the cluster was extracted and fitted with the complete list of references presented above. Mixtures of CdS, CdSO4, Cluster 6Cluster 5Cluster 2Cluster 3 Cluster 4Cluster 1 Cd K Pb S S Cl(b)(a) (c) 40 μm 40 μm 40 μm 40 μm 0 0,2 0,4 0,6 0,8 1 1,2 1,4 1,6 1,8 3535 3585 3635 N or m al iz ed a bs or pt io n Energy (eV) XANES of cluster 1 XANES of cluster 3 XANES of cluster 5 XANES of cluster 6 Fig. 5 a Visible light microscope images of S111 10 lm-thick thin section; b lXRF elemental maps of Cl, K, S, Cd, and Pb acquired at 3.7 keV(step size: 0.7 9 0.7 lm2); c Results of k-means clustering combined with PCA analyses of FF-XANES acquisition at Cd LIII- edge (step size: 0.7 9 0.7 lm2) 2D X-ray and FTIR micro-analysis of the degradation of cadmium yellow pigment in paintings of… 975 123 CdSO4�nH2O, CdCO3, and CdCl2�nH2O were able to fit the XANES for the four clusters adequately. The full spectral stack was then refitted using the spectra for the clusters identified above, leading to a significantly improved fit. Cluster 1 is representative of most of the sample. Its content of CdCO3 is higher than that of any other cluster; it also contains traces of CdS and CdCl2�nH2O. On the sur- face of this cluster is cluster 3, which displays a similar composition but with added CdSO4�nH2O, again in sig- nificantly lower concentration than CdCO3. Below the surface of the left corner (yellow), cluster 5 reveals an area where the CdS content increases but still contains a relatively high amount of CdCO3. Consequently, even in the CdS-rich yellow region, the CdCO3 is found in high amounts, suggesting that a large fraction of the CdCO3 present is possibly unreacted starting reagent [11]. How- ever, further investigation is needed because the cadmium yellow hue in this region of the painting was intended to be a dark yellow/orange (based on comparison with a 1905 study of The Joy of Life at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copen- hagen), and CdCO3 has typically been observed at high concentrations in the paler shades of cadmium yellow. Another explanation for the CdCO3-rich interior of this yellow paint is the relatively thin paint layer being studied here compared to samples S115 [11] or S5, which represent more advanced states of alteration where discrete alteration crusts are visible. The entire yellow paint layer in this case may be in the process of converting into an alteration zone. On the surface of this area is cluster 6 that is highly concentrated in Cd (lXRF), present mainly as CdS, and CdCO3. The high concentration of CdS in this region of the sample may be due to the morphology of the brushstroke observed (Fig. 5a). The top of the sample would be more exposed to direct ambient light, whereas the texture/im- pasto of the paint that causes yellow paint to appear on both the side and top of this sample may have protected the side from direct exposure. Contrary to S5, this sample is missing the thick white alteration crust, maybe explaining the lack of a distinct layering structure for the alteration products. However, the distribution and amount of sulphates species suggest ad- vanced photo-degradation. The degradation mechanism appears to be a two-step process; in the first step, sulphides are directly photo-oxidized to sulphates, and in the second stage, sulphur-based species, in particular cadmium sul- phide, are completely lost, replaced by cadmium carbonate, as seen for cluster 1. The presence of some CdSO4 in cluster 5 suggests that the degradation process is still not complete. However, the visible colour of the degraded sample (ochre brown) is not directly linked here to the identification of Cd-based compounds. Consequently, supplementary lXRD analyses and organic phase analyses are now mandatory to fully understand the photo-degradation mechanism in this sample. 3.2 Flower Piece: degradation and synthesis processes study 3.2.1 Darkened BF205 sample Another micro-sample of cadmium yellow paint from the painting Flower Piece (1906), demonstrating photo- degradation, was taken from the dry, cracked, and darkened region below the right side of the painting’s pitcher. The sample was too brittle to allow sectioning without adding strengthening material, consequently the surface of the resin block was first covered with a sulphur-free tape in- suring the integrity of the 10 lm section during slicing with the microtome (Fig. 6a). The optical stratigraphy is very similar to that observed in sample S5, with an off- white layer at the surface of the painting. A residual ground layer was also identified on the left corner of the section. Four main experiments were carried out on this section in order to identify the degraded materials present: lXRF sulphur valence maps (step size 2 9 2 lm2); results are presented in Fig. 6b. lXRF at 7.3 keV (step size 2 9 2 lm2); elemental mapping results are illustrated in Fig. 6c. FF-XANES at Cd LIII-edge (pixel size 0.7 9 0.7 lm2); results of LSLC fitting are presented in Fig. 6d. lXRD 12.9 keV (ID13, step size 2 9 2 lm2); phase maps based on the integrated diffraction intensity over regions of interest are shown in Fig. 6e. Based on these four techniques, the painting’s ground layer, paint layer, and alteration layer could be chemically characterized. lXRD (Fig. 6e) combined with lXRF (Fig. 6c) allowed for the identification of sphalerite (ZnS), barite (Ba0.99Sr0.01(SO4)), anglesite (PbSO4), and hydrocerussite (Pb3(CO3)2(OH)2) in the ground layer area. Two different ground layers were more accurately identified: the first one (innermost) contains mainly hydrocerussite with sphalerite and barite on which a very thin second layer containing hydrocerussite and barite with grains of anglesite is ap- plied. The presence of sphalerite and barite together sug- gests the use of lithopone, a co-precipitate of BaSO4 and ZnS introduced in 1874. The first layer may be a com- mercial ground, while the second has probably been pre- pared and applied by Matisse himself. The anglesite was also seen by l-FTIR in The Joy of Life and may result from the interaction of the unstable CdS with the lead white in the ground. By combining FF-XANES at ID21 at the Cd LIII-edge with lXRD and lXRF at sulphide and sulphate absorption- specific energies, the composition of the painting layer is 976 E. Pouyet et al. 123 defined mainly as a mixture of CdS, CdCO3, and CdSO4�nH2O. The white degraded area is mainly composed of CdCO3 with a small amount of CdC2O4 and CdSO4�nH2O, iden- tified by FF-XANES and lXRD, similar to what was ob- served for samples S5 and S115 [11]. A small increase in the CdC2O4 and CdSO4�nH2O content is observed at the surface of this area in FF-XANES data; however, no clear stratigraphy inside the degraded area was observed from the lXRD results. The high concentration of CdCO3 in the off-white al- teration crust of the paint layer may suggest that this compound as well as CdSO4�nH2O and CdC2O4 are the products of degradation processes. However, the presence of CdCO3 in a high amount in the paint layer as well suggests that at least some of it may have been initially present as a filler or residual starting reagent for this work. Though the former possibility is less likely since CdCO3, used as cadmium white, would have been an expensive filler [10]. 3.2.2 Undarkened BF205 sample Cadmium carbonate (CdCO3), as illustrated above, has been identified in the altered cadmium yellow (CdS) paints found in Impressionist, early modernist, and post-Impres- sionist works. As CdCO3 is highly insoluble (Ksp of 1.0 9 10 -12 ), when it is formed solely as a result of photo- alteration, it is mostly confined to the location where it is formed, i.e. at the surface of the paint layer. However, when an unclear stratigraphy is present and CdCO3 is distributed throughout the paint layer, conclusions about its origin in the paint layer are equally unclear. In cadmium yellow paint in works such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream (c. 1910, The Munch Museum, Oslo), the hypothesis has recently been proposed that CdCO3 was used in the indirect wet process synthesis of CdS (for example, through reac- tion of CdCO3 with Na2S) [10, 11]. To address the question of the origin of CdCO3, a flake of (to the naked eye) undegraded pale cadmium yellow paint was removed from Henri Matisse’s Flower Piece so that the distribution of CdCO3 could be studied, both as a function of depth in the paint layer and in individual pig- ment particles. The visible fluorescence of the ultraviolet- illuminated paint cross section removed from Flower Piece (Fig. 7a) shows that in the top half of this sample, the cadmium yellow is dispersed in a zinc white base and in- dividual cadmium sulphide particles are visible thanks to their orange fluorescence in the ultraviolet. A section of 15 lm thickness was prepared from a visually non-de- graded paint fragment from the lemon yellow area (Fig. 7b). Three main measurement types were carried out on this section to identify possible residual starting reagents: 300 μm Greenockite (CdS) Otavite (CdCO3) Hydrocerussite (Pb3(CO3)2(OH)2) Barite (B0.99Sr0.01(SO4) Cadmium oxalates (CdC2O4) Cadmium sulfates hydrated (CdSO4·nH2O)CdS CdCO3 CdSO4·nH2O CdC2O4 Cl Pb S Ba Cd Cr μ-XRD (2×2μm² ) μ-XRF (2×2μm²) Full-field XANES LC results at Cd L3-edge (0.7×0.7μm²) Sulfur valence map (2×2μm²) min max min max (a) (b) (d) (e) (c) sulphide sulphate Fig. 6 a Optical image of BF205 darkened sample prepared as 10-lm-thick thin section (bottom); b Sulphide and sulphate distribu- tion from sulphur valence maps in lXRF (step size: 1 9 1.2 lm2); c Elemental mapping results from fit of XRF map (step size: 2 9 2 lm2); d LSLC fitting results of full-field stack acquired at Cd LIII-edge on the thin section using CdS, CdCO3, CdCl2�nH2, and CdSO4�nH2O (pixel size: 0.7 9 0.7 lm2); e lXRD maps of sphalerite (ZnS), barite (Ba0.99Sr0.01(SO4)), anglesite (PbSO4), hydrocerussite (Pb3(CO3)2(OH)2), CdS, cadmium oxalate (CdC2O4), cadmium sulphate hydrated (CdSO4�nH2O), and otavite (CdCO3) (step size: 2 9 2 lm2) 2D X-ray and FTIR micro-analysis of the degradation of cadmium yellow pigment in paintings of… 977 123 lXRD at 21 keV (P06, step size 2 9 2 lm2), results pre- sented in Fig. 8b; FF-XANES at the S K-edge (ID21, pixel size 0.7 9 0.7 lm2), analysed as ROI integration (Online Resource (4)); and FF-XANES at the Cd LIII-edge (ID21, pixel size 0.7 9 0.7 lm2), analysed by LSLC fitting and presented in Fig. 8c. The Cd concentration map derived from FF-XANES at the Cd LIII-edge reveals that cadmium-containing particles show up as ‘‘hot spots’’ evenly dispersed throughout the zinc white base. The presence of CdCO3 grains is estab- lished by FF-XANES at the Cd LIII-edge and by lXRD (Fig. 8b, c). The XRD measurements show CdS as a dif- fuse halo in the vicinity of the larger CdCO3 grains. The Cd LIII FF-XANES results suggest that cadmium sulphide and sulphate form rings/shells surrounding the CdCO3 grains. This observation is supported by sulphide and sulphate maps acquired at S K-edge in FF-XANES mode (Online Resource (4)). However, the larger beam size and the relative insensitivity of XRD to poorly crystalline material did not allow confirming the sulphate/sulphide/carbonate morphology suggested by the FF-XANES measurements by diffraction imaging. Even though XRD cannot confirm the core/shell mor- phology of the CdCO3 particles surrounded by CdS or CdSO4, it clearly shows that in this sample, CdCO3 is co- localized with CdS instead of forming a surface degrada- tion layer. The co-localized core and shell morphology suggests that a large fraction of CdCO3 in this sample is residual Fig. 7 a Lemon cadmium paint cross section from Flower Piece (BF 205) showing cadmium yellow particles dispersed in a zinc white matrix (405 nm illumination), b Optical image of the lemon-hued cadmium paint prepared as thin section, 15 lm thick 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 3520 3570 3620 N or m al iz ed a bs or pt io n Energy (eV) 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 3520 3570 3620 N o rm al iz ed a b so rp tio n Energy (eV) Full-field XANES LC results at Cd-L3edge (0.7x0.7μm²) μ-XRD maps (2x2μm²)15 μm thin-sec�on CdSO4.nH2O CdS CdCO3 CdS CdCO3 25 μm min max 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 3520 3570 3620 N or m al iz ed a bs or pt io n Energy (eV) XANES spectrum of CdS rich area XANES spectrum of CdSO4·nH2O rich area XANES spectrum of CdCO3 rich area tlusertifSLCLtlusertifSLCLtlusertifSLCL (a) (b) (c) Fig. 8 lXRD and FF-XANES acquisition on the thin section presented in a; b lXRD maps of CdS and otavite (CdCO3) (step size: 2 9 2 lm2), and l-XRD Q-patterns acquired on CdS-rich grain; c CdS, CdCO3, and CdSO4�nH2O maps obtained by FF-XANES at the Cd L-III edge, and examples of LSLC fitting results of single pixel XANES spectra acquired in CdCO3, CdS, and CdSO4�nH2O-rich areas 978 E. Pouyet et al. 123 starting reagent. Conversion to CdS was incomplete; the large and poorly soluble CdCO3 particles were trapped during the precipitation reaction of CdS, coated by a thin layer of nanocrystalline CdS. This example might be the first evidence confirming the precipitation process hy- pothesized by Plahter and Topalova-Casadiego [10] for the role of cadmium carbonate identified in the yellow paints of the Munch Museum version of The Scream. To fully confirm their theory, a similar investigation should be performed on a cross section from a relatively non-de- graded region to ascertain whether or not this same pattern of precipitation (CdS coating CdCO3 starting material) is also present in yellow paints of the Munch Museum ver- sion of The Scream. Further analyses of this cross section, as well as analyses of replicate cadmium yellow pigments synthesized from CdCO3 following early twentieth century recipes, should also be considered at better resolutions. 4 Conclusion The composition of sub-millimetre fragments of cadmium yellow paints from The Joy of Life and Flower Piece as a function of depth using SR-lFTIR, lXRF, lXRD, and FF- XANES imaging confirmed that CdCO3, CdC2O4, and CdSO4�nH2O are degradation products rather than paint fillers, and, in the case of The Joy of Life, that these compounds are not residual synthesis reagents either. These colourless compounds are responsible for the observed fading of the cadmium yellow paint in The Joy of Life. Despite the high solubility that causes cadmium sul- phate to migrate through the paint layers in many of the samples studied, cadmium sulphate is also identified as a photo-degradation product. In the case of sample S5 (from The Joy of Life) and sample BF205-darkened (from Flower Piece), an oxidation of the original CdS pigment, probably induced by UV–visible irradiation and uncontrolled rela- tive humidity levels is the initiation point and basis of the observed fading and discoloration. Based on previous work [8, 11], the oxidation of CdS to CdSO4�nH2O at or just below the paint surface explains the formation of the CdSO4�nH2O compound which, as it is highly water sol- uble, may then diffuse through the paint layer. The surface enrichment of CdSO4�nH2O in the case of S5 suggests that while CdSO4�nH2O has the potential solubility to migrate through the paint layer, surface accumulation resulting from photo-degradation can also be observed. As suggested previously [11], this compound can initiate the subsequent stages of degradation by reacting with CO2 to form CdCO3. Acid hydrolysis of the organic binder or the varnish which leads to spalling and cracking of the paint layer allows for further photo-oxidation of the newly exposed CdS in the micro-cracks. The very high insolubility (Ksp of 1.0 9 10 -12 ) of CdCO3 explains its presence as the dominant end product of a series of degradation reactions. A tertiary degradation process involving the further breakdown of cadmium oxalate into cadmium carbonate cannot be excluded. The presence and the location of CdC2O4 are for the moment not fully understood, although TOF-SIMS data from this same painting (see this volume) show that long-chain fatty acids are depleted in the regions of CdS alteration, suggesting that the acid hydrolysis of the binding medium is a possible mechanism for the formation of oxalate anions. Alternatively, the presence of varnish, as observed in the case of the S5 sample, may have partially dissolved CdSO4 and freed Cd 2? ions, which in turn may then have precipitated out with C2O4 2- instead of SO4 2- , explaining the formation of a cadmium oxalate film [8]. The pale brownish appearance of the S111 sample ap- pears to be organic in nature as no evidence for the for- mation of a dark brown inorganic photo-degradation product was established. Soil and other fine particulate may lodge in the interstices of the crumbling paint surface, formed or enhanced during photo-oxidation, giving rise to the darkening observed [11]. Acid hydrolysis of the drying oil paint binder may also result in the formation of chro- mophores contributing to the darkened appearance. In ei- ther case, further analyses of organic degradation products and trace analyses of other particles embedded in the paint are required to fully understand the observed darkening. Both the intact lemon cadmium paint and photo-oxi- dized cadmium yellow paint from Flower Piece were ex- amined by UV and VIS photo-microscopy, XRD, and FF- XANES. Investigation of undarkened lemon cadmium paint from Flower Piece reveals that a large amount of cadmium carbonate is present; however, it is not accumu- lated at the paint surface but co-located with individual CdS yellow pigment particles suspended in a zinc white base. Co-location of CdS and CdCO3, possibly in a core/ shell morphology suggests that the CdS pigment used by Henri Matisse to paint this work may have contained a large fraction of unreacted starting reagents, leftovers of an incomplete synthesis. This finding provides the first phy- sical evidence supporting the theory of Plahter et al. that cadmium carbonate-rich cadmium yellow paints in the first decade of the twentieth century were likely prepared by the indirect wet process method, and are not invariably indicative of photo-alteration. Consequently, in the case of photo-oxidized paint, the high ratio of CdCO3 compounds present in yellow paint may be related to this starting reagent, whereas the white crust may combine both CdCO3 as a starting reagent and CdCO3 as second degradation product of photo-alteration, as it is found in the presence of CdSO4�nH2O and CdC2O4. In final conclusion, analytical methods with a high sensitivity for chemical speciation and ability to map the 2D X-ray and FTIR micro-analysis of the degradation of cadmium yellow pigment in paintings of… 979 123 distribution of various compounds at sub-micron resolution are essential for deciphering the synthesis and degradation pathways of pigments in hierarchically complex objects such as paintings. The access to both molecular and structural mapping capabilities by combining FF-XANES, lXRF, lXRD, and lFTIR in 2D is opening new possi- bilities for the rigorous study of degradation products and mechanisms in paint layers, and more generally for the micro-analysis of artworks for the benefit of these works’ long-term preservation. Acknowledgments This work is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Barnes Foundation, the Lenfest Foundation, and the National Science Foundation DMR 0415838. The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility are acknowledged for providing beamtime. Barbara Buckley of the Barnes Foundation and Unn Plahter of the University of Oslo are thanked for their many helpful discussions. References 1. L. Zanella et al., The darkening of zinc yellow: XANES spe- ciation of chromium in artist’s paints after light and chemical exposures. J. Anal. At. Spectrom. 26(5), 1090–1097 (2011) 2. L. 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Pouyet et al. 123 2D X-ray and FTIR micro-analysis of the degradation of cadmium yellow pigment in paintings of Henri Matisse Abstract Introduction Experimental Paintings and samples location Sample preparation and mounting Analytical methods and data processing Micro-X-ray fluorescence and chemical maps in scanning mode Full-field XANES Micro-X-ray diffraction Micro-FTIR analyses Results The Joy of Life (1905--1906): study of the degradation process S5 sample: faded yellow field beneath the central reclining figures S111 sample: darkened yellow foliage Flower Piece: degradation and synthesis processes study Darkened BF205 sample Undarkened BF205 sample Conclusion Acknowledgments References work_ffpddqu6s5gotcryac6mxxfluu ---- doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2005.08.005 Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 www.elsevier.com/locate/actpsy Entitling art: Influence of title information on understanding and appreciation of paintings Helmut Leder a,b,*, Claus-Christian Carbon a, Ai-Leen Ripsas b a Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Liebiggasse 5, 1010 Vienna, Austria b Department of History and Cultural Sciences, Special Research Division Aesthetics, Freie Universität Berlin, Altensteinstr, 2-4, 14195 Berlin, Germany Received 21 September 2004; received in revised form 17 August 2005; accepted 18 August 2005 Available online 11 November 2005 Abstract There is evidence that presenting titles together with artworks affects their processing. We inves- tigated whether elaborative and descriptive titles change the appreciation and understanding of paintings. Under long presentation times (90 s) in Experiment 1, testing representative and abstract paintings, elaborative titles increased the understanding of abstract paintings but not their appreci- ation. In order to test predictions concerning the time course of understanding and aesthetic appre- ciation [Leder, H., Belke, B., Oeberst, A., & Augustin, D. (2004). A model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments. British Journal of Psychology, 95(4), 489–508] in Experiment 2, abstract paintings were presented under two presentation times. For short presentation times (1 s), descriptive titles increased the understanding more than elaborative titles, whereas for medium presentation times (10 s), elaborative titles increased the understanding more than descriptive titles. Thus, with artworks a presentation time of around 10 s might be needed, to assign a meaning beyond the mere description. Only at medium presentation times did the participants with more art knowledge have a better understanding of the paintings than participants with less art knowledge. Thus, it seems that art knowledge becomes significant, if there is sufficient time to assign a meaning and the present stud- ies reveal the importance of considering the time course in aesthetic appreciation. � 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 0001-6918/$ - see front matter � 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2005.08.005 * Corresponding author. Address: Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Liebiggasse 5, 1010 Vienna, Austria. Tel.: +43 1 4277 47821; fax: +43 1 4277 47819. E-mail address: helmut.leder@univie.ac.at (H. Leder). mailto:helmut.leder@univie.ac.at H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 177 PsycINFO Classification: 2323; 2340; 2610 Keywords: Cognitive processes; Meaning; Aesthetic preferences; Contextual associations; Visual; Art perception; Entitling 1. Introduction Since the late 19th century (Fechner, 1876), the individual aesthetical experience, pro- voked by a stimulus or an artwork, became the main topic in psychological aesthetic research. The appreciation of artworks is thought to involve an ongoing elaboration of meaning in an ‘‘open’’ and ‘‘indeterminate’’ image (Cupchik, Shereck, & Spiegel, 1994). The appreciation of artworks is not the mere assignment of an established meaning, but involves an ongoing evaluation of the painting, which generates an incomplete impression, leaving room for further interpretation. It is assumed that part of the pleasure derived from looking at a painting is the feeling of having grasped the meaning and the under- standing of it (Russell, 2003; Russell & Milne, 1997). Recently, Leder, Belke, Oeberst, and Augustin (2004) proposed a stage model for aesthetic processing, which combines aspects of understanding and cognitive mastering with affective and emotional processing. A short version of the model is depicted in Fig. 1. According to the model, aesthetic processing of an artwork involves a number of pro- cessing stages, which might somehow proceed sequentially and therefore allow the formu- lation of hypotheses concerning time sensitive processing of art. After initially classifying a stimulus as an artwork, features such as colour, shape, contrast, etc. are analyzed in the perceptual processing stage. In the next stage, implicit memory effects such as familiarity and prototypicality are analyzed. The content (in representational paintings) and style (particularly in abstract art) are analyzed through a stage of explicit classification. With increasing expertise, the processing of style becomes more dominant (Cupchik, 1992). Essential in the model is the need to understand an artwork. This is accomplished in a stage of ‘‘cognitive mastering’’ which builds a feedback-loop with a stage of evaluation, in which affective and cognitive measures trigger further processing or the formation of aesthetic judgments and the experience of aesthetic emotions. Fig. 1. Processing stages in aesthetic experiences (adapted from Leder et al., 2004). 178 H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 If understanding and grasping the meaning is essential, as proposed in the model, then information which helps to interpret the image must affect aesthetic processing. Here we present a study in which we investigate how verbal information affects cognitive and affec- tive components in the processing of abstract and representational artworks. However, the temporal structure of the model is not yet clear. Although Bachmann and Vipper (1983) showed that some information in artworks is available after short presentation times, it might well be that understanding an artwork requires some time. In the present study, we test the temporal properties of aesthetic appreciation indirectly in that we compare the effect of descriptive titles and elaborative titles for artworks under short and longer presentation times (Experiments 2a and 2b). Descriptive titles should be effective when the output of the model is based on the results of earlier stages such as perceptual analyses and explicit classification of content, while elaborative titles presumably affect the stage of evaluation and understanding which according to the model comes later and presumably needs more time. Some studies investigated changes in aesthetic evaluation of artworks as a function of accompanying verbal information. Cupchik et al. (1994) showed that interpretative activ- ity increased the perception of the artworks concerning their power, challenge, and per- sonal meaning. Cupchik and Gebotys (1988) suggested that an indication of such an elaboration process would be a heightened appreciation of the interpretative challenge of the artwork. As liking and preference are most frequently measured in studies of art appreciation, it would be important to see whether an elaboration process also results in higher ratings for liking. Short verbal information in the form of titles, besides the purpose of identification, serves as a guide to the interpretation of an artwork (Franklin, 1988). Some artworks cause tension between title and artwork. This can be resolved by reworking the visual con- figuration and the meaning of the title until some kind of correspondence or ‘‘fit’’ is estab- lished between the two. This process was seen as an important part of aesthetic experience, for example by Kreitler and Kreitler (1972). In order to investigate these hypotheses, Franklin, Becklen, and Doyle (1993) studied how viewers responded to a painting under different titling conditions. Viewers were shown each of the two paintings twice—on one occasion with the original title, on the another occasion with a fabricated one. In the first session, participants viewed both the paintings with one of its two titles. In the second ses- sion, they viewed both paintings again, in the same order. For the first painting shown, the title was the same as in the first session, for the second painting, an alternate title was pre- sented. The researchers found that a change of title shifted the description of the artwork towards the meaning of the title, although the looking pattern measured by registering eye movements did not change. Thus, while the visual processing was rather unaffected by the title, the semantic processing changed. However, affective responses to the paintings (e.g., liking) were not measured. Millis (2001) examined the effects of different titling conditions, where participants rated illustrations and photographs for understanding and four qualities of the aesthetic experience (liking, interest, elicited thoughts and emotions). Descriptive and elaborative titles increased the comprehension of both materials. Furthermore, for illustrations, elab- orative titles, which provided an explanation or a metaphoric interpretation of the scene, increased the aesthetic experience more than descriptive titles. This was interpreted as an increase of aesthetic experience due to elaboration. Millis assumed that titles only increase aesthetic experiences when they contribute to rich and coherent representations. As the H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 179 stimuli used by Millis did not consist of artworks, it is worthwhile to study the effect of paintings by artists of high art. Leder et al. (2004) considered this to be of particular importance, because a preclassification of an object as an artwork might be a necessary condition for aesthetic experiences. Moreover, in Millis�s study, the analysis of aesthetic experience as a combination of four variables did not show which of the aspects of aes- thetic experience changed due to the elaboration effect. Thus, in the present study we investigated the effects of elaboration separately for the four variables of aesthetic experi- ence, using reproductions of artworks. Recently, Russell (2003) performed a similar study, also by using artworks to test Bartlett�s concept of effort after meaning (Bartlett, 1932). In accordance with Bartlett�s pre- diction, in a within-subjects design, Russell (2003) found an increase in the meaningfulness and hedonic value from first to second ratings when the paintings were presented with descriptions in the second phase (description plus title and the artist�s name). In Russell�s study, images of abstract and semiabstract art were presented. A comparison between abstract and representational art was not made. Two dependent variables, meaningfulness and pleasingness, were studied. Influences of other aspects like art interest, and art knowl- edge were not considered. Consequently, in our study we used measures similar to Millis (2001). We also examined expertise and interest in art and applied a within-participants experimental design. In Experiment 1, we systematically compared participants� ratings to abstract and rep- resentational artworks. Studies on art perception and evaluation have shown that art nov- ices prefer representational artworks to abstract artworks (e.g., O�Hare & Gordon, 1977). Moreover, abstract artworks carry meaning either in terms of free interpretations, often referring to the painter�s expressiveness (Parsons, 1987) or simply by their style. With expertise, an abstract painting can be meaningful in terms of its historical background or conceptual level. For example, Malevich�s ‘‘white square’’ stretched the concept of abstract art to its limits by presenting a shape that was mainly determined by the canvas and by using a ‘‘non-colour’’. The meaning is often revealed in the title, which either accompanies the painting or is part of the perceiver�s knowledge. In contrast, representa- tional artworks also carry meaning in terms of what is depicted and their content (Leder et al., 2004). In this study, we investigated how these classes of paintings are affected by either descriptive or elaborative titles. Another aim of the present study was to get a better understanding of the time course of aesthetic processing. If aesthetic experience consists of a sequence of processing stages (Kreitler & Kreitler, 1972; Leder et al., 2004), then the effect of titles accompanying the artwork might also depend on temporal properties. However, Bachmann and Vipper (1983) found that by limiting presentation times of artworks, a lot of information could be very swiftly accessible, including major information on art styles. In the present study, we investigated whether different presentation times reveal a differential effect of descrip- tive and elaborative titles. When processing time of an artwork is limited, a descriptive title might enhance understanding because it helps to access the content, particularly in abstract art. On the other hand, elaborative titles might change the processing of meaning at a later processing stage, and thus might require more time to have an effect. In order to investigate effects of exposure times, we selected presentation times (in Experiment 2) similar to previous studies where artworks were also used in the investiga- tion. In Experiment 2a, we used a short presentation time of 1 s, which presumably elicits a spontaneous judgment. In Experiment 2b, a presentation time of 10 s was used. Cupchik 180 H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 and Gebotys (1988) asked their participants to arrange slides of three paintings or sculp- tures, which were presented in a sequence for 10 s each, which reflected the stylistic change between the paintings. Hess and Wallsten (1987) presented artworks for 10 s, after which participants were asked to assign the artworks to two artists. In a paired comparison task, O�Hare and Gordon (1977) asked the participants to judge the similarity of two artworks. After a familiarization time of 1 min, the artwork pairs were presented for 10 s. Therefore, we assume that a presentation time of 10 s would be sufficient for an interpretative activity of a painting. 2. The present study In the present study, we examined the influence of descriptive and elaborative titles on paintings. Additionally, we varied the presentation time between Experiments 1 and 2. The first experiment was designed similar to Millis (2001) to replicate his elaboration effect with images of artworks. Two levels of representativeness in artworks were investigated (abstract versus representational). Ratings were collected before and after presenting a title, thus within-subjects comparisons could be made. We chose two paintings similar in an artistic style and contents from 24 artists each, and presented each painting only once to avoid an increase of appreciation due to mere exposure. In the first experiment, the effects of the titling conditions (as independent variables) were investigated for six different seven-point scales (the dependent variables) which comprise cognitive as well as affective aspects of aesthetic processing (Leder et al., 2004): (a) Under- standing was measured by the scale whether the participants believed to have understood the artist�s intention; (b) Meaning by whether they found a personal meaning in the artwork; (c) Liking by whether they liked the artwork; (d) Interest by whether the artwork evoked their interest; (e) Emotion by whether the artwork affected them emotionally; and (f) Thoughts by whether the artwork evoked thoughts in them. All ratings were given on a seven-point scale from 1 (fully agree) to 7 (fully disagree). The aim of Experiment 1 was to identify which aspect of aesthetic processing of artworks is affected by descriptive or elaborative titles. In general, as aesthetic experiences with artworks require a certain level of understanding, thus elaborative titles were thought to affect cognitive measures such as understanding and meaning. Moreover, interest in art was also measured as a quasiexperimental interpersonal difference in order to confirm that increased interest reveals higher understanding, but also to see whether interest in art interacts with any of the other variables. To better understand the changes in understanding found in Experiment 1, Experiment 2 investigated the effects of presentation time on ratings of liking and understanding of abstract paintings. Reaction times were collected and effects of art interest, and art knowl- edge considered. 3. Experiment 1 3.1. Method 3.1.1. Participants Forty-eight students, 24 of them females, participated in Experiment 1. Mean age was 26.2 years [range: 19–45]. Thirty-five of the participants were Psychology students from H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 181 the Freie Universität Berlin. They received course credit for their participation. Thirteen students from other departments were paid 10€ for their participation. 3.1.2. Materials Forty-eight images of paintings, two by 24 artists, both similar in artistic style and con- tent, were selected from art books and magazines for the experiment. For example, two paintings by the artist Lovis Corinth were chosen which both depicted views of the Walchensee. Twenty-four representational paintings from 1900 to 1930 were selected from art styles such as Expressionism and Cubism, e.g., paintings by Lovis Corinth and Lyonel Feininger (see Appendix A for a list of stimuli). The representational paintings depicted landscape sceneries and buildings. Paintings likely unknown to art novices were chosen in order to avoid preferences due to previous encounters. Another set of 24 abstract paint- ings (from 1950 to 1990) contained artworks of Abstract Expressionism and Action Paint- ing, e.g., paintings by Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. The paintings were presented consecutively in four sets of 12 paintings put together in a pseudo-randomized order. Each participant was exposed to a total of 48 paintings. For each picture pair of two paintings by the same artist, two different titles were pro- duced. Three members of our research team invented two different types of titles for the paintings, partly referring to the descriptions of the artistic styles in art books. The descriptive titles summarized the most important aspects of the painting in a few descrip- tive words, e.g., ‘‘Lakeside View’’ or ‘‘Fine curved lines in colour’’. Elaborative titles pro- vided a possible interpretation or explanation of the artwork. For example, the paintings by Jackson Pollock were entitled ‘‘Impulsiveness’’ (see Appendix A for a complete list of all artists and titles). In a pre-study with six art novices (mean age: 29.3 years; four females), we ask for classifying the material in order to validate that the pictures belong to the correct class of Representativeness (abstract, representative) and whether the selected titles were fitting with the pictures. Concerning the classification of Representativeness, participants agreed by 91.0% with the pre-selected assignment. For the validation of the title assignment, a list of all titles of pictures used in Experiment 1 were provided to the participants, from which they had to select three most suitable out of all possible for every single picture. Of these three selected titles they had to rank them according to the order of plausibility. In 79.4% of all cases, the assigned title matched with the group of three titles selected by the partic- ipants; in 54.6% of all cases, the participants first choice matched with the assigned title. Thus, the assignment of being abstract/representative and the assignment of titles were highly plausible. 3.1.3. Procedure Experiment 1 was conducted in small groups consisting of two to five persons. Stimuli (resolution: 1280 · 1024, 85 Hz) were presented by PsyScope 1.2.5 PPC (Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt, & Provost, 1993) on a Macintosh G4 computer. The participants were asked to sit in a semicircle around the monitor (2100). The distance between partic- ipant and the computer screen was about 1.20 m. The paintings were presented with a visual angle of about 7.2�. All participants completed one questionnaire for each painting, containing the six scales concerning (a) understanding the artist�s intention, (b) personal meaning, (c) liking, (d) whether the artwork evoked their interest, (e) whether the artwork affected them emotionally, and (f) thoughts evoked by the artwork. 182 H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 All participants completed the questionnaires within the presentation time for each painting. Experiment 1 consisted of two parts, one using the abstract artworks, the other using the representational artworks. Each part consisted of two phases. This allows us to analyze both sorts of paintings separately. First participants were shown 12 artworks without titles in a randomized order to view for 60 s each (P1). During that time participants rated each painting separately. In the second phase (P2), the participants were given 12 similar art- works with one of the three possible title conditions: descriptive title, elaborative title, or no-title in a pseudo-randomized order to view. In order to make sure that there was enough time for processing the artworks and the titles the presentation time at test was increased to 90 s. As both presentation times allow exhaustive aesthetic experience these times were chosen, the additional time at test seemed not be critical, as it is no longer in a range in which presentation is critical, but rather both conditions support the partic- ipants in having full aesthetic experiences (Leder et al., 2004; Smith & Smith, 2001). The pseudo-randomized order ensured that the same titling condition did not appear more than twice in a row. The order of presentation of representational and abstract paintings, i.e. the order of Representativeness, was fully balanced between the participants. More- over, assignment of paintings to each title condition also was balanced by using the Latin Square procedure and using groups of four images which were randomly put together into one title condition. Two practice trials at the beginning of the first part familiarized the participants with the questions asked and the procedure of the experiment; these trials were not further analyzed. The experiment was completed in about 90 min. At the end of the experiment, the participants were asked nine questions about their interest in art (see Appendix B). All ratings were given on a seven-point scale from 1 (fully disagree) to 7 (fully agree). We calculated mean ratings for the questions about art interest. A cor- relation analysis for the nine questions on art interest showed high correlations between all nine questions. 3.2. Results 3.2.1. Effects of titling conditions and representativeness on the aesthetic experience First, we analyzed the mean ratings (and standard deviations) for Title (no-title, descriptive, elaborative), and Representativeness (representational, abstract) for the six scales (Table 1). Pearson product moment correlations revealed medium up to highly significant corre- lations between the six variables, which enabled us to run a multivariate analysis of var- iance (MANOVA). Importantly, we separated the pictures used in test phase P1 in three different sets (no-title, descriptive, elaborative) corresponding with the three titling con- ditions in test phase P2. Thus, if, for instance, a painting of Paul Cézanne was assigned to the descriptive title condition in P2, then the corresponding painting of Cézanne pre- sented in P1 was assigned to the so-called descriptive P1 condition. Note that this assign- ment does not reflect any change in the presentation mode but was only used to create matches of picture sets between P1 and P2 for analyzing the data in a full balanced anal- ysis design. We analyzed the means of the six variables on aesthetic experience by a three-way MANOVA for repeated measurements. The within-subjects factors were Phase (P1, P2), Representativeness (representational, abstract) and Title (no-title, descriptive, elaborative). Mean ratings sampled over participants on each of the scales (understand- Table 1 Mean aesthetic scores (and standard deviations) as a function of Scale, Title Representativeness in Experiment 1 Scale Title No-Title Descriptive Elaborative M SD M SD M SD P1 Understanding Representational 4.01 1.24 4.03 1.16 3.87 1.23 Abstract 2.40 1.22 2.42 1.00 2.41 0.94 Meaning Representational 4.09 1.45 4.19 1.29 4.00 1.33 Abstract 2.82 1.22 2.90 1.21 2.88 1.14 Liking Representational 3.91 1.08 4.04 1.17 3.99 1.06 Abstract 3.29 1.11 3.30 1.15 3.47 1.12 Interest Representational 3.47 1.11 3.61 1.20 3.62 1.01 Abstract 3.22 1.17 3.28 1.23 3.53 1.16 Emotions Representational 3.88 1.13 4.05 1.16 3.98 1.10 Abstract 3.26 1.08 3.54 1.17 3.53 1.31 Thoughts Representational 3.56 1.17 3.68 1.19 3.62 1.10 Abstract 3.39 1.12 3.53 1.18 3.68 1.00 P2 Understanding Representational 3.92 1.32 4.03 1.23 4.16 1.27 Abstract 2.38 0.94 2.68 1.25 3.17 1.14 Meaning Representational 3.91 1.59 3.83 1.33 3.93 1.34 Abstract 2.80 1.07 2.70 1.15 2.88 1.11 Liking Representational 3.88 1.23 3.79 1.07 3.94 1.09 Abstract 3.28 1.03 3.06 0.99 3.16 1.04 Interest Representational 3.39 1.25 3.15 1.10 3.46 1.14 Abstract 3.00 1.08 2.80 1.17 2.93 1.11 Emotions Representational 3.79 1.20 3.72 1.17 3.85 1.09 Abstract 3.31 1.01 3.26 0.97 3.30 1.18 Thoughts Representational 3.36 1.27 3.17 1.81 3.52 1.19 Abstract 3.25 1.02 3.03 1.18 3.20 1.07 H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 183 ing, meaning, liking, interest, emotions, and thoughts) were analyzed as dependent variables. The values of the MANOVA were calculated according to Wilks� Lambda. There were sig- nificant main effects of Phase, F(6,42) = 13.11, p < .001, g2p ¼ .65, Representativeness, 184 H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 F(6,42) = 21.60, p < .001, g2p ¼ .75, and Title, F(12,178) = 2.80, p < .01, g2p ¼ .16, as well as a significant interaction between Phase and Title, F(12,178) = 4.32, p < .01, g2p ¼ .23. Furthermore, we computed univariate tests on each of the six dependent variables. Main effects of Phase were found on all scales (Understanding, F(1,47) = 10.62, p < .002, g2p ¼ .18; Meaning, F(1,47) = 6.29, p < .02, g2p ¼ .12; Liking, F(1,47) = 9.32, p < .005, g2p ¼ .17; Interest, F(1,47) = 38.79, p < .001, g2p ¼ .45; Emotion, F(1,47) = 7.39, p < .01, g2p ¼ .14; Thoughts, F(1,47) = 23.63, p < .001, g2p ¼ .34). With the exception of the scale Understanding, all ratings decreased from P1 to P2. Moreover, main effects of Representativeness were found on all scales but the Thoughts Scale (Understanding, F(1,47) = 104.77, p < .001, g2p ¼ .69; Meaning, F(1,47) = 54.08, p < .001, g2p ¼ .54; Liking, F(1,47) = 30.66, p < .001, g2p ¼ .40; Interest, F(1,47) = 5.59, p < .02, g2p ¼ .11; Emotion, F(1,47) = 27.89, p < .001, g2p ¼ .37). Representational paint- ings revealed higher ratings than abstract paintings in all of these scales. Furthermore, main effects of Title were found for Understanding only, F(2,94) = 8.78, p < .001, g2p ¼ .16. Ratings given on elaborative titles were significantly higher than ratings on descriptive titles (p < .05) and higher than in the no-title condition (p < .001). Ratings on descriptive titles were significantly higher than ratings on no-title (p < .05); all differ- ences were analyzed by Bonferroni-adjusted post hoc tests. The interaction between Phase and Representativeness was only significant for Understanding, F(1,47) = 7.31, p < .01, g2p ¼ .14. The same was found for the interaction between Phase and Title, F(2,94) = 14.88, p < .001, g2p ¼ .24 and the interaction between Title and Representative- ness, F(2,94) = 4.35, p < .02, g2p ¼ .09. An analysis of simple main effects of Title on Representativeness revealed that the factor Title was significant for the abstract paintings, F(2,46) = 8.57, p < .001, g2p ¼ .27, but not for the representational paintings, F(2,46) < 1, n.s. No other effects were significant. 3.2.2. Influence of titles on understanding As the understanding of paintings was only affected by different types of titles for abstract paintings, we ran a second ANOVA for the scale understanding including only abstract paintings. A two-way repeated measurement ANOVA with Phase and Title as within-subjects factor revealed that Phase, F(1,47) = 17.31, p < .001, g2p ¼ .27, and Title, F(2,94) = 10.27, p < .001, g2p ¼ .18, had a significant effect. Most interestingly, there was also an interaction between both factors, F(2,94) = 11.99, p < .001, g2p ¼ .20. An analysis of simple main effects of Title on Phase revealed that the factor Title was significant for P2, F(2,46) = 20.58, p < .001, g2p ¼ .47, but not for P1, F(2,46) < 1, n.s. 1 This interaction is illustrated in Fig. 2. Ratings of understanding were significantly higher for elaborative than descriptive titles (p < .01) and higher than in the no-title condition (p < .001). Ratings on descriptive titles were significantly higher than ratings on no-title (p < .05). 1 Note that it is an important pre-condition that pictures used in P1 that were matched to the paintings of the same painters for Title conditions elaborative, descriptive and no-title, were expected not to differ in any scales as the treatment (here: Title) is not yet given. Exactly this criterion is confirmed here indicated by a non-existing effect of Title at P1. 2.0 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8 3.0 3.2 3.4 U n d e rs ta n d in g P1 P2 elaborative descriptive no-title abstract paintings Fig. 2. Interaction between Phase (P1 and P2) and Title (no-title, descriptive and elaborative) on the mean ratings of the scale Understanding (error bars indicate standard errors of the mean). H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 185 3.2.3. Influence of interest in art on aesthetic experience In order to analyze the effect of interest in art and effects of titles and Representative- ness, a composite art interest score was computed as a mean score of all nine items on the questionnaire. For the assignment of high and low Art Interest, we computed a med- ian split. Scores of 30 and above [range: 12–57] were assigned to high art interest. In order to test effects of Art Interest, we first conducted a mixed-design MANOVA with all six scales. As between-subjects factor Art Interest was used and as within-subjects factors Phase, Representativeness and Title were used. There was a main effect of Art Interest, F(6,41) = 2.34, p < .05, g2p ¼ .26, but no interaction of Art Interest with any other variable. As Art Interest was found significant in the multivariate analysis, we fur- ther conducted six independent mixed-design ANOVAs for every scale. As before, we used Art Interest as between-subjects factor and Phase, Representativeness and Title as within-subjects factors. Participants with more interest in art showed higher ratings for Understanding, F(1,46) = 5.75, p < .05, g2p ¼ .11, Interest, F(1,46) = 6.05, p < .05, g2p ¼ .12, Emotions, F(1,46) = 8.44, p < .01, g2p ¼ .16, and Thoughts, F(1,46) = 7.93, p < .01, g2p ¼ .15. However, there were no interactions between Art Interest and any other factor for any scale. 3.3. Discussion The results of the MANOVA analysis revealed main effects of Representativeness and Title, and most important a significant interaction between them. Experiment 1 revealed that an elaborative title accompanying an abstract artwork increased its understanding. This finding supports the special need for interpretation of abstract art as assumed by Leder et al. (2004). Interestingly, no significant effects of titles were found on liking. Thus, the presentation of a title per se did not increase the hedonic value of the artworks. Russell (2003) added the artist�s name and a description of the painting, which presumably increased the level of elaboration with the painting. However, similar to the effects found 186 H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 by Cupchik et al. (1994) descriptive titles in our Experiment 1 decreased affective and cog- nitive evaluations. The titles presumably somehow might have reduced the aesthetic mean- ing of the artworks and made them less interesting. In accordance with the stage model of cognitive processing, further processing concerning the contents or the meaning of the art- works was probably disrupted when a trivial content was recognized (Leder et al., 2004). The finding, that the artworks shown with descriptive titles did not elicit further thoughts, supports this argument. The participants interested in art understood the representational paintings better and also assigned a higher personal meaning to them. They also showed higher ratings on affective scales. However, the differences in art interest found in our participants were rather small because we mainly tested art novices. In Experiment 2, we were interested in the nature of the elaboration effect on the understanding of abstract paintings. Because only abstract paintings revealed effects of titling condition in Experiment 1, only these paintings were used in Experiment 2. The main question concerned the effect of titling, when presentation time was restricted. 4. Experiment 2 Experiment 2 was designed as a two-group experiment to investigate time effects of elaboration. In Experiment 2a, abstract paintings with descriptive and elaborative titles were presented for 1 s; in Experiment 2b, the same paintings and titles were presented for 10 s. Participants were asked to rate the paintings on liking and understanding. They were instructed to rate spontaneously and reaction times were measured. Afterwards, questionnaires on art interest, and art knowledge had to be completed. Different assumptions are possible concerning aesthetic experiences after the short pre- sentation time in Experiment 2a. For the ratings, especially on understanding, a replica- tion of the results from Experiment 1 would assume higher ratings for elaborative than for descriptive titles. Due to the short presentation time, it also seems likely that this might not be the case, because elaboration and understanding presumably require more time. Moreover, we expected a difference in the speed at which ratings were given. According to the model of Leder et al. (2004), perceivers can continuously access their affective processing during the time course of aesthetic experience. Understanding, however, is a process requiring a deep level of processing and therefore presumably takes more time than 1 s. Thus, we expected ratings concerning the liking of a painting to be given faster than ratings for understanding. Other studies which investigated processes of similarity judgments (e.g., Cupchik & Gebotys, 1988; Hess & Wallsten, 1987) indicate that an increase of presentation time up to 10 s should enable sufficient information processing for an interplay between title and judgment in terms of understanding. 4.1. Method 4.1.1. Participants Participants were 48 students of the Freie Universität Berlin who were randomly assigned to one of two groups for both experimental conditions (Experiments 2a and H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 187 2b). Both groups consisted of students from the Freie Universität Berlin, 21 of them females (mean age in years; Experiment 2a: 25.8, Experiment 2b: 24.5). In order to assess inter-individual differences, all participants completed a questionnaire consisting of nine questions about art interest and a questionnaire about art knowledge. 4.1.2. Materials Twenty-four abstract paintings, two paintings similar in artistic style and content, cre- ated by 12 artists, were selected from art books and magazines for the experiment. The paintings, dated between 1945 and 1999, included for example painting pairs by Dorazio and Noland. The paintings were presented consecutively in two sets of 12 paintings, each set consisting of 12 paintings by 12 different artists. Each participant was shown a total of 24 paintings. For each painting pair, two different titles were selected in the consensus amongst three researchers working in the field of empirical aesthetics, as in Experiment 1. Descriptive titles summarized the most important aspects of the scene in a few descriptive words, e.g., ‘‘Strokes of colour’’ or ‘‘Frames in Shades of Blue‘‘. The elabo- rative titles provided a possible interpretation or explanation of the artwork. For exam- ple, the paintings by Dorazio were entitled ‘‘Speed of Light’’ (see Appendix C for a complete list of all artists and titles). The data of the rating experiment support our assignment of painting pairs, title creations, and title assignments as descriptive and elaborative titles. 4.1.3. Procedure In Experiment 2, we presented a total of 24 abstract paintings in two consecutive parts. In one part, the participants were asked to rate their liking, in the other part their understanding. The order of the ratings was balanced between participants. The paint- ings were combined into two groups of six artists, respectively. In order to assign the two title conditions (descriptive, elaborative), artist groups, title conditions, and the order of the two variables (liking, understanding) were assigned to participants using a fully balanced design for title conditions and the two variables. Four different groups of sequences were used, which differed in their titling conditions and sequence of paintings. Each painting was presented for 1 s (Experiment 2a) or 10 s (Experiment 2b). The rat- ings were given on a seven-point-scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much). Reaction times (RT) were measured from stimulus offset on. Participants were asked to rate spontane- ously after the paintings disappeared. Titles and paintings were presented in a pseudo- randomized order. The experiment was conducted individually. The paintings (1280 · 1024 pixels, 85 Hz) were presented by PsyScope 1.2.5 PPC on a Macintosh G4 computer. The dis- tance between the participant and the computer screen (21 in.) was about 0.60 m, result- ing in visual angles of the presentations of about 9.5�. Reaction times were measured from stimulus onset on until the participants pressed a target key on the computer keyboard. At the end of the experiment, the participants were given the same questionnaires about their interest in art and their specific art knowledge as in Experiment 1. The questionnaire about art knowledge referred to famous artists, e.g., Joseph Beuys, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian. First, the participants indicated whether they knew the names of 10 artists, 188 H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 their nationality, and the style the artists were famous for. In a second part, the partici- pants were shown a list of nine famous paintings and were asked whether they knew the painting, and to name the artist and the artistic style. A median-split of the averaged score of these questionnaires assigned the participants to high and low art knowledge scores. Both versions of the experiment were completed in about 15 (short presentation time) and 25 min (longer presentation time), respectively. 4.2. Results First, effects of titling conditions on the aesthetic experience (liking and understanding) are reported. For Experiments 2a and 2b, the means of both ratings for all paintings were calculated for both titling conditions (Fig. 3). The rating data were analyzed by a three-way mixed-design ANOVA with Title (descriptive, elaborative) and Scale (Liking, Understanding) as within-subjects vari- ables and the Presentation time as between-subjects factor. No main effect was found for Presentation time, i.e., the ratings of Experiments 2a and 2b did not differ. The results showed a main effect of Scale, F(1,46) = 16.67, p < .001, g2p ¼ .27 and an interaction between Presentation time and Title, F(1,46) = 9.03, p < .01, g2p ¼ .16. Most interestingly, there was a three-way interaction between Presentation time, Scale and Title, F(1,46) = 4.34, p < .05, g2p ¼ .09. In order to analyze the effects of the three-way interaction in more detail, we conducted separate ANOVAs for Liking and Understanding. The liking ratings were not influenced by the titles for both presentation times, F(1,23) < 1.72, n.s. However, there was an inter- action between Title and Presentation time on the variable Understanding, F(1,46) = 10.32, p < .001, g2p ¼ .18. For a presentation time of 1 s only, paintings 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 5.0 5.5 6.0 M e a n R a ti n g L: desc L: elab U: desc U: elab 10 s 1 s Liking Understanding Note. desc = descriptive title elab = elaborative title desc elab desc elab Fig. 3. Mean ratings (and standard errors of the mean) of Liking and Understanding as a function of Presentation time and Title in Experiments 2a and 2b. 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 M e a n R T in m s _L: descRT_L: elab RT_U: descRT_U: elab 10 s 1 s Liking Understanding desc elab desc elab Fig. 4. RTs (and standard errors of the mean) of Liking and Understanding as a function of Presentation time and Title in Experiments 2a and 2b. H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 189 presented with descriptive titles (M = 4.80, SD = 1.01) were better understood than paint- ings presented with elaborative titles (M = 4.24, SD = 0.93), F(1,23) = 5.38, p < .05, g2p ¼ .19. In contrast, given a longer presentation time of 10 s, elaborative titles (M = 4.24, SD = 0.93) were better understood than paintings presented with descriptive titles (M = 4.85, SD = 1.09), F(1,23) = 5.02, p < .05, g2p ¼ .18. For a comparison between RTs of liking and understanding in both experiments, the RT data were analyzed by a three-way mixed-design ANOVA, with Scale (Liking and Understanding), and Title (descriptive, elaborative) as within-subjects variables, and Pre- sentation time (1 s, 10 s) as between-subjects variable. The distribution analysis of the RTs showed a few values above 8000 ms. All RTs above this value were excluded from further analyses, the resulting range was between 300 ms and 8000 ms. Mean RTs for both presen- tation times are shown in Fig. 4. The results showed a significant main effect of Presentation time, F(1,46) = 5.42, p < .05, g2p ¼ .11 with longer RTs for rating paintings presented for 1 s (M = 2882 ms, SD = 1282) than paintings presented for 10 s (M = 2217 ms, SD = 979). This is not sur- prising as participants in the condition of longer presentation times were presumably more readily prepared to react. Therefore, the RTs under short presentation times seem to be more informative as they more validly reveal differences in speed of processes underlying appreciation or understanding. A further main effect was found on Scale, F(1,46) = 11.36, p < .01, g2p ¼ .21. Taken the RTs of both the experiments together, the mean RTs for liking (M = 2327 ms, SD = 1054) were shorter than those for understanding (M = 2772 ms, SD = 1207). No interaction effects were significant. 4.2.1. Influence of art interest, and art knowledge According to their results in the questionnaires about art interest and art knowledge, the participants were divided into two groups by a median split. The ratings and the corresponding RTs for descriptive and elaborative titles were analyzed by separate Note. A.K.: Art Knowledge 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 5.0 5.5 6.0 M e a n R a tin g Low A.K., 10 s Low A.K., 1 s High A.K., 10 s High A.K., 1 s Liking Understanding Fig. 5. Mean ratings (and standard errors of the mean) of Liking and Understanding as a function of Presentation time and Art knowledge in Experiments 2a and 2b. 190 H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 between-subjects ANOVAs for liking and understanding. For the 1 s presentation time condition, art interest and art knowledge did not show significant effects for the ratings or the corresponding RTs. In Experiment 2b (10 s presentation time condition), art inter- est did not show significant effects for the ratings nor the RTs, but art knowledge did show significant effects for Understanding. Mean ratings of the participants in both presentation time conditions are presented in Fig. 5. We conducted a four-way repeated measures ANOVA with Scale and Title as within- subjects variables, and Presentation time and Art knowledge as between-subjects variables. There was a three-way interaction between Scale, Art knowledge and Presentation time, F(1,44) = 6.12, p < .05, g2p ¼ .12. Analyses of simple main effects revealed that participants with higher Art knowledge only showed more Understanding if the paintings were pre- sented for 10 s. Art knowledge did not influence the Liking in none of the presentation times. 4.3. Discussion Similar to the results in Experiment 1 with long presentation times (90 s), titles did not affect the liking of the paintings for short presentation times in Experiment 2a (1 s) and medium presentation times in Experiment 2b (10 s). In contrast, the results for Under- standing were affected by the titles. Given a medium long presentation time of 10 s, elab- orative titles increased the understanding of a painting quite similar as shown in Experiment 1 with a presentation time of 90 s, whereas descriptive titles resulted in higher values of understanding than elaborative titles when paintings were only shown for 1 s. In the model of aesthetic appreciation (Leder et al., 2004), we assume that the processing of artworks consists of a number of processing stages, which are supposed to be mainly serial. When processing time is restricted then aesthetic judgments have to be based on analyses which only comprise the earlier processing stages. As these include the analyses of ‘‘what is depicted’’ we conclude that, within the short presentation time it was only H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 191 possible to accomplish early stages of information processing, including perceptual anal- yses and identifying the content which in abstract art are closely related (Leder et al., 2004). These results challenge the temporal structure of this model which needs further refinement in the future. This, of course, requires more research concerning the possibility that restrictions in presentation time allow different processes to take place (Kreitler & Kreitler, 1984). There were no effects of art interest in both experiments, but relative experts seemed to understand the paintings better. This is presumably not only due to the greater experience with artworks but also probably due to a higher level of explicit knowledge. As predicted by Leder et al. (2004), the judgment of liking can be accomplished very quickly, after the perceptual analysis has been completed. However, it seems that at least a medium presen- tation time of around 10 s is needed for a first interpretation of an artwork that is already sensitive to titles affecting the understanding of an artwork. 5. General discussion Two experiments investigated the role of titles in the processing of paintings. Exper- iment 1 revealed that abstract paintings received higher ratings of understanding when accompanied by elaborative titles. Descriptive titles did not improve evaluations. When presentation time was restricted to 1 s in Experiment 2a, descriptive titles improved the understanding more than elaborative titles. Such short presentation times seem to restrict information processing of paintings to representations sensitive to such descriptive infor- mation. According to the model of aesthetic appreciation proposed by Leder et al. (2004), which predicts a mainly serial information processing, these findings address the possible time needed to allow different ways of aesthetic processing. Short presenta- tion times allow the access to the explicit classification of content. In accordance with the model this kind of processing is found under short presentation times and it is affected by descriptive titles. In contrast, the full, or at least rather elaborated aesthetic experience consists of later stages of interpretation and understanding which Leder et al. (2004) called ‘‘cognitive mastering’’. Elaborative titles presumably affect this later stage of understanding and assignment of meaning. The results of Experiment 2b, using medium long presentation times of 10 s, support this hypothesis. Although the model does not make strict predictions on temporal aspects, the distinction between the two presentation times in Experiment 2 revealed that in accordance with the model, rather descriptive and elaborative titles do differentially affect aesthetic experiences with art. As Bachmann and Vipper (1983) found that many aspects of artworks are available quite fast, at least the findings in the 10 s condition support a more complex interplay of seeing and understanding. Moreover, judgments concerning the liking of a painting were made faster than judg- ments concerning the understanding of a painting (particularly at short presentation times in Experiment 2a). This is also in accordance with a time sensitive processing of artworks. Preferences can be made faster because they are presumably based on an affec- tive processing, which is permanently available throughout the processing stages as assumed by Leder et al. (2004). In contrast, understanding, as a cognitive process, requires more time, because it is presumably based on explicit processes of interpretation 192 H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 and structures of knowledge. However, more systematic variation in presentation time (e.g., Carbon & Leder, 2005) might be promising in future research. Bachmann and Vipper (1983) for example, found that many of the visual properties of art are available after relatively short presentation times. This, however, does not exclude that an under- standing in art requires more time. The idea that art requires some time for understand- ing is also in accordance with the hypothesis that particularly contemporary art offers cognitive and knowledge related challenges which often include an explicit disruption of usually fluent application of skills that are effective in everyday object identification and understanding (Leder, 2001; Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004). Expertise and interest in art showed rather weak effects, presumably because the range of these variables was relatively small due to our sample consisting of art novices. The effects in Experiment 2b need to be studied further. Systematic variation using art experts might be useful for these investigations, particularly as research in the past has shown con- siderable difference in art processing (Nodine, Locher, & Krupinski, 1993) and apprecia- tions (Cupchik, 1992; Parsons, 1987). The implications for our understanding of how art is processed are as follows. First, the results reveal that information accompanying art has effects depending on the nature of the information. Descriptive information can help to classify artworks in situations where fast judgments and classifications are required. However, in the more realistic sit- uation in which perceiver perceives paintings for longer, descriptive titles are not helpful, but elaborative information increases the understanding. As artworks in museums are often perceived under time conditions which rather correspond to the 10 s presentation time as in Experiment 2b (Smith & Smith, 2001), we conclude that understanding usually depends on interpretations that take more time. This was also suggested by the temporal structure of the model of aesthetic experience (Leder et al., 2004). Consequently in muse- ums accompanying information should consider the possibility that understanding could be increased by carefully selected, understandable information which goes beyond mere descriptions. Concerning the nature of aesthetic experience we believe that the combina- tion of different dependent variables, as used in the present study, covers the main dimen- sions of the aesthetic process. However, in future research, the application of a combination of psycho-physiological, neuropsychological and eye tracking measures might also be promising. To summarize, we have shown that accomplishing titles plays a role in the processing of artworks in that they support the assignment of content or meaning, depending on tem- poral constraints, particularly in abstract art. Acknowledgements This project was supported by a Grant from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; DFG) SFB 626 C5 to the first author. We thank Nicole Griesam for her valuable suggestions and her great support in conducting the experiments and contributing to this publication. Moreover, we thank Paul Locher and Johan Wagemans, as well as an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. We also thank Andries Oeberst and Katharina Kuntz for acquiring the data from Experiment 2. Finally, we thank Beatrice Chew for proof- reading the manuscript. Appendix A. List of artists, paintings, and titles used in Experiment 1 Artists Year Original title Descriptive title Elaborative title Representational artworks Amiet, Cuno 1921 Winterlandschaft Houses in snow Hibernation 1908 Winterlandschaft Breyer, Benno 1927 Park Schloss Grunenfeld Houses surrounded by trees Insights 1930 Bauernhof mit Dünen auf der Insel Amrum Cézanne, Paul 1900 Mont Saint Victoire Mountain Different proportions 1904 Mont Saint Victoire Corinth, Lovis 1922 Ostern am Walchensee Lakeside view Midsummeridyll 1923 Walchensee mit Springbrunnen Delaunay, Robert 1910/11 Eiffelturm Eiffeltower Breaking into the technical era1911 Marsfeld, der rote Turm Derain, André 1927 Landscape Southern France Southern Scenery Paralyzing midday heat 1925 Paysage du midi Feininger, Lyonel 1924 Gaberndorf II Building Escape routes 1925 Torturm II Jawlensky, Alexej 1910 Gebirgsdorf Mountain landscape Flaming mountains 1910b Das Oy-Tal bei Oberstdorf Kokoschka, Oskar 1934/35 Prag von der Kramer-Villa gesehen View of a town Timeless 1936 Prag. Blick von Moldauufer . . . Modersohn-Becker, Paula 1899 Sandkuhle am Weyerberg Pastoral landscape Autumn mood 1902 Garben, Haus und Mond (continued on next page) H . L e d e r e t a l. / A c ta P sy c h o lo g ic a 1 2 1 ( 2 0 0 6 ) 1 7 6 – 1 9 8 1 9 3 Appendix A (continued) Artists Year Original title Descriptive title Elaborative title Slevogt, Max 1923 Winterlandschaft—Neukastel House on slope Longing 1923b Winterlandschaft—Schneeschmelze Vlaminck de, Maurice 1908–10 Der Schleppzug Ship Impetus 1905 Peniche huile sur toile Abstract artworks Hartung, Hans 1989 Untitled Composition in yellow, green and violet Part of a firework 1989 L50 Kirkeby, Per 1989 Blick in den Garten I Dark zigzag lines on subdued background Water reflection 1991 Skowhegan I Klein, Yves 1961 Untitled fire-painting Running colour in light and dark Tears 1961 Untitled fire-colour-painting Kline, Franz 1957 Untitled Wide black beams Loading capacity 1953 New York, N.Y. Kooning de, Willem 1988 Untitled Coloured wavy lines on light ground Exuberant atmosphere1984 Untitled XVII 1 9 4 H . L e d e r e t a l. / A c ta P sy c h o lo g ic a 1 2 1 ( 2 0 0 6 ) 1 7 6 – 1 9 8 Pollock, Jackson 1946 Eyes in the Heat Fine curved lines in colour Impulsiveness 1947 Full Fathom Five Rae, Fiona 1994 Untitled Colour patterns Implosion 1994 Untitled Reichert, Hubertus 1987 Untitled Square in the right half of the picture Look inside 1988 Bldv. IV Richter, Gerhard 1984 Ingrid Coloured areas Revolution 1982 Eule Rothko, Mark 1954 Untitled Coloured fields Inner balance 1951 Number 7 Schuhmacher, Emil 1983 Dunkle Wolke Dark coloured cloud in diagonal direction Enclosed plot 1983 Fluß Velde van, Bram 1936–41 Untitled Contrasting coloured elements Harmony in contrast 1945–58 Untitled H . L e d e r e t a l. / A c ta P sy c h o lo g ic a 1 2 1 ( 2 0 0 6 ) 1 7 6 – 1 9 8 1 9 5 196 H. Leder et al. / Acta Psychologica 121 (2006) 176–198 Appendix B. Nine items presented in the questionnaire on art interest I am interested in art I am involved in art during my leisure time I often visit art exhibitions I enjoyed attending art classes at school I visit events on art or art history in my leisure time or because of my studies I always seek new artful impressions and experiences I enjoy talking to other people about art I enjoy reading articles written by artists or about art in general It often happens in my everyday life, that art objects attract my attention and fascinate me Appendix C. List of artists, paintings, and titles used in Experiments 2a and 2b Artists Year Original title Descriptive title Elaborative title Abstract artworks Abad, Pacita 1997 Feeling something inside Colourful ornaments Wanderlust 1998 It�s time to pop the champagne Bazaine, Jean 1949 L�arbre au plongeur Dense play of colours Flush of senses 1982/3 Variations II Dachlan, Umi 1998 Red Brown Surface of red and brown Constructions of clay 1999 Komposisi dari Nuansa Coklat Terang dengan Uang Logam dan Emas Dorazio, Piero 1960 Qualités jaunes Strokes of colour Speed of light 1962 Marmaraviglia Halley, Peter 1989 Out Like a Light Coloured surface Destillery 1990 Character Generator Lasker, Jonathan 1990 Rustic Psyche Curved lines Sabotage 1988 The Big Picture Marden, Brice 1988/9 Couplet IV Net of colours Tangle of voices 1987 6 (Course) Nay, Ernst Wilhelm 1957 Untitled Colours and forms Hide-and-seek 1948 Der Hirte II Appendix C (continued) Artists Year Original title Descriptive title Elaborative title Noland, Kenneth 1960 Bloom Frames in Shades of Blue Journey of time 1983 Cornet Riopelle, Jean-Paul 1951/2 Sans titre Dots of colour Ice dancing 1954 Peinture Scully, Sean 1999 Four Large Mirrors (3) Stripes in light and dark Disagreement 1993 Colonsay Steir, Pat 1990 Red Blue Silver Waterfall Colour gradient Rainforest 1989 Secret Night Waterfall H. 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Entitling art: Influence of title information on understanding and appreciation of paintings Introduction The present study Experiment 1 Method Participants Materials Procedure Results Effects of titling conditions and representativeness on the aesthetic experience Influence of titles on understanding Influence of interest in art on aesthetic experience Discussion Experiment 2 Method Participants Materials Procedure Results Influence of art interest, and art knowledge Discussion General discussion Acknowledgements List of artists, paintings, and titles used in Experiment 1 Nine items presented in the questionnaire on art interest List of artists, paintings, and titles used in Experiment 1 References work_fis5jqyzjrfzrn2aklakmhuyra ---- Science Journals — AAAS Monico et al., Sci. Adv. 2020; 6 : eaay3514 15 May 2020 S C I E N C E A D V A N C E S | R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E 1 of 11 C H E M I S T R Y Probing the chemistry of CdS paints in The Scream by in situ noninvasive spectroscopies and synchrotron radiation x-ray techniques Letizia Monico1,2,3*, Laura Cartechini1,2, Francesca Rosi1,2, Annalisa Chieli1,2, Chiara Grazia1,2, Steven De Meyer3, Gert Nuyts3, Frederik Vanmeert3, Koen Janssens3,4, Marine Cotte5,6, Wout De Nolf5, Gerald Falkenberg7, Irina Crina Anca Sandu8, Eva Storevik Tveit8, Jennifer Mass9,10, Renato Pereira de Freitas1,11, Aldo Romani1,2, Costanza Miliani1,2,12* The degradation of cadmium sulfide (CdS)–based oil paints is a phenomenon potentially threatening the iconic paint- ing The Scream (ca. 1910) by Edvard Munch (Munch Museum, Oslo) that is still poorly understood. Here, we provide evidence for the presence of cadmium sulfate and sulfites as alteration products of the original CdS-based paint and explore the external circumstances and internal factors causing this transformation. Macroscale in situ noninvasive spectroscopy studies of the painting in combination with synchrotron-radiation x-ray microspectroscopy investiga- tions of a microsample and artificially aged mock-ups show that moisture and mobile chlorine compounds are key factors for promoting the oxidation of CdS, while light (photodegradation) plays a less important role. Furthermore, under exposure to humidity, parallel/secondary reactions involving dissolution, migration through the paint, and re- crystallization of water-soluble phases of the paint are associated with the formation of cadmium sulfates. INTRODUCTION The Scream motif, created by Edvard Munch between 1893 and 1916  in several versions, is one of the world’s most famous repre- sentations of the existential anguish, melancholy, and loneliness of modern people. The series comprises four different versions in paint and pastel as well as a series of lithographic prints, several drawings, and sketches. The two paintings, made in 1893 and ca. 1910, are the most well-known versions and belong to the National Gallery and the Munch Museum in Oslo, respectively (1–3). Munch described the basic experience behind the picture as follows (4): “I walked one evening on a road. I was tired and ill — I stood looking out across the fjord — the sun was setting — the clouds were colored red — like blood — I felt as though a scream went through nature — I thought I heard a scream. — I painted this picture — painted the clouds like real blood. The colors were screaming.” Technical examination of the two painted versions (5) has revealed how Munch experimented with the use of diverse binding media (tempera, oil, and pastel) in mixtures with brilliant and bold synthetic pigments from the late 18th to 19th century (such as zinc white, Prus- sian blue, synthetic ultramarine blue, chrome yellow, chrome green, cad- mium orange, and cadmium yellow) to make “colors screaming” by combinations of brightly saturated contrasting colors and varia- tions in the degree of glossiness of their surfaces. The extensive use of these new colored materials poses a challenge for the long-term preservation of Munch’s artworks because of their tendency to undergo (photo-)chemical transformations causing color changes and/or structural damage (6–11). The version of The Scream (ca. 1910) that belongs to the Munch Museum clearly exhibits signs of degradation in the sunset cloudy sky and in the neck area of the central figure, where cadmium yellow brushstrokes have altered to an off-white color, and in the lake water, where a thickly applied opaque cadmium yellow paint is affected by flaking and by paint loss (Fig. 1). This fact raised so many concerns that since 2006, after the recovery from the theft of the painting (which caused additional damage to the cardboard), it has been rarely shown to the public. Instead, it was preserved in a protected storage area, under controlled conditions of lighting, temperature (~18°C), and relative humidity (RH) (~50%). Cadmium sulfide–based yellows (CdS/Cd1-xZnxS), present in a number of artworks by masters contemporary to Edvard Munch, such as Henri Matisse (12–15), Vincent van Gogh (16), and James Ensor (17), have been documented to suffer from discoloration, flaking, and chalking of the paint films. In these cases, whitish compounds, namely, cadmium sulfate (CdSO4·nH2O) (12–17), cadmium oxalate (CdC2O4) (13–16), and cadmium carbonate (CdCO3) (12–15), were identified and tentatively proposed as either photodegradation products of the original cadmium yellow pigment or as residues of its synthesis process. Assessment of the condition of cadmium yellow paints is complicated by the fact that the chemical stability of these pigments may depend on their manufacturing process. Two routes, a “dry” and a “wet” method, were used for synthesizing late 19th to early 20th century cadmium yellow pigments (18). In the dry process, either metallic cadmium, cadmium oxide, or cadmium carbonate is calcined (ca. 300°C to 600°C) in an anoxic environment with pure sulfur in excess. The wet process involves the precipitation of one or more cadmium salts (e.g., CdCl2, CdSO4, and CdCO3) with a soluble sulfide compound (e.g., Na2S, H2S, Na2S2O3, and BaS). If a soluble zinc salt, usually with the same anion as the cadmium salt, is added 1CNR-SCITEC, via Elce di Sotto 8, 06123 Perugia, Italy. 2SMAArt Centre and Department of Chemistry, Biology, and Biotechnology, University of Perugia, via Elce di Sotto 8, 06123 Perugia, Italy. 3AXES Research Group, NANOlab Centre of Excellence, University of Antwerp, Groenenborgerlaan 171, 2020 Antwerp, Belgium. 4Rijksmuseum, Con- servation & Restoration—Scientific Research, Hobbemastraat 22, 1071 ZC Amsterdam, Netherlands. 5ESRF, 71 Avenue des Martyrs, 38000 Grenoble, France. 6LAMS, CNRS UMR 8220, Sorbonne Université, UPMC Univ. Paris 06, 4 place Jussieu, 75005 Paris, France. 7DESY, Notkestraße 85, 22603 Hamburg, Germany. 8Munch Museum, Tøyengata 53, 0578 Oslo, Norway. 9Bard Graduate Center, 86th St., New York, NY 10024, USA. 10Scientific Analysis of Fine Art LLC, 843 Old State Rd., Berwyn, PA 19312, USA. 11LISComp Laboratory, Federal Institute of Rio de Janeiro, Paracambi, RJ 26600000, Brazil. 12CNR-ISPC, via Cardinale Guglielmo Sanfelice 8, 80134 Napoli, Italy. *Corresponding author. Email: letizia.monico@cnr.it (L.M.); costanza.miliani@cnr.it (C.M.) Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). o n A u g u st 3 1 , 2 0 2 0 h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / D o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ Monico et al., Sci. Adv. 2020; 6 : eaay3514 15 May 2020 S C I E N C E A D V A N C E S | R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E 2 of 11 before precipitation, then a Cd1-xZnxS is obtained to provide different yellow hues according to the Cd/Zn ratio (18). In the earlier productions based on wet processes, CdS may co- exist with a number of residues of the starting reagents and/or secondary products, including various chlorine compounds [e.g., NaCl, CdCl2, and Cd(OH)Cl], sulfates (e.g., Na2SO4 and CdSO4), and CdCO3 (18–21). Studies dating back to late 19th and early 20th century (22, 23) have suggested that the presence of these additional components may be one of the reasons why the cadmium yellow varieties produced by the wet processes are, in general, more prone to chemical changes than those synthesized via the dry processes. Earlier scanning electron microscopy–energy-dispersive x-ray and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) investigations of selected micro- samples of The Scream (ca. 1910) revealed that CdCO3 is the main paint component in the paler yellow tones of the sky and the neck of the central figure, whereas the same compound was shown to be present mixed with variable amounts of S, Cl, and Na compounds in the lake region (3). These observations leave the following key questions to be answered: (i) Is there any correlation between the extent of deg- radation observed on the CdS-based paint surface and its chemical composition? (ii) What is the nature of the alteration compounds of cadmium yellow paints? (iii) Which environmental factors contribute to promote degradation of cadmium yellow paints? Finding an answer to these questions is highly relevant for setting the basis of appro- priate preventive conservation strategies for The Scream (ca. 1910) that have the ultimate ambition to allow the painting to be returned to the public galleries of the Munch Museum. Aimed at shedding light on these issues, we benefitted from a combination of macroscale in situ noninvasive elemental and molecular techniques (from the IR to the x-ray range) and synchrotron radiation (SR)–based x-ray microspectroscopy methods to obtain a complete overview of the different CdS-based paints used throughout The Scream (ca. 1910). In addition, we assessed the current condition of the paint in the lake region by analyzing a microsample by means of SR-based x-ray methods, and results were compared with outcomes arising from accelerated aging treatments (light and moisture) of a series of CdS-based oil paint mock-ups. This allowed for a deeper understanding of the role played by compositional and environmental factors on the decay of the cadmium yellow paints. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Noninvasive chemical characterization and mapping of CdS-based paints in The Scream (ca. 1910) A selection of results from the noninvasive analytical MOLAB campaign carried out at the Munch Museum in 2017 is presented in Fig. 2 for the scenery of the background. The macro–x-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF) elemental map of Cd (Fig. 2B) shows an extensive use of Cd-based pigments in the red, orange, and yellow hues. Selenium was detected only in a few small spots related to past restorations, thus proving that Munch, assumed to have created this painting in 1910, made use of CdS-based pigments and not of cadmium sulfur selenide ones [reported to be commercially available since 1910 (24)]. Ultraviolet–visible–near-IR (UV-vis-NIR) reflection and fluores- cence spectroscopy, both by imaging and single- point analysis mode, with the support of FTIR reflection spectroscopy and MA-XRF mapping permitted us to differentiate three different CdS-based paints. Paint (a) The orange Cd-based paints (Fig. 2A, pt. 1) are characterized by UV-vis-NIR reflectance spectra with an inflection point at about 530 to 540 nm (Fig. 2D), which are not assignable to a specific CdS-based pigment because they are affected by the copresence of vermilion (-HgS); the latter is largely present in the red/orange hues of the background landscape (fig. S1). The specific nature of the CdS pigment can be determined via analysis of its vis-NIR emission spectrum, which shows the presence of a weak fluorescence in the range 840 to 860 nm (Fig. 2D). The band is attributable to a mixture of hexagonal and cubic CdS (hereafter denoted as hex-CdS and cub-CdS, respectively; see fig. S1E) and is originated from trap states at the semiconductors’ surface, called DLEs (deep-level emissions) (19). Strong signals of zinc oxalate (ZnC2O4·2H2O) were observed by FTIR (Fig. 2G). Generally, the widespread occurrence of oxalates is an evidence for oxidative stress of the binder (25) that, in this painting, is characterized by a lipid component variably observed in the different Cd-based paints. Paint (b) The paints of the sky and the neck of the central figure have altered to off-white (Fig. 2A, pts. 2 and 3, and fig. S1, pt. 7) and show UV- vis-NIR reflectance profiles very similar to those registered on the cardboard, without any clear spectral contribution due to a CdS Fig. 1. Degraded cadmium yellow paints and ultraviolet–visible–near-infrared spectroscopy single-point analysis in The Scream (ca. 1910). Photograph of The Scream (ca. 1910) (Munch Museum, Oslo; catalog no. Woll.M.896) and overview of the areas where ultraviolet–visible–near-infrared (UV-vis-NIR) reflection and flu- orescence spectroscopy single-point measurements were performed (see Fig. 2 and fig. S1 for the corresponding spectra). Arrows show the sampling spot and the degraded cadmium yellow paints. Photo credit: Irina Crina Anca Sandu and Eva Storevik Tveit, Munch Museum. o n A u g u st 3 1 , 2 0 2 0 h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / D o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ Monico et al., Sci. Adv. 2020; 6 : eaay3514 15 May 2020 S C I E N C E A D V A N C E S | R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E 3 of 11 pigment. However, the higher sensitivity of vis-NIR fluorescence spectroscopy allowed us to detect a weak emission from residual CdS (Fig.  2E and fig. S1). The shape and position of the lumi- nescence (max = 790 to 795 nm) indicate the presence of hex-CdS, as shown by comparison with the spectra of powders of commer- cial crystalline hex-CdS and historical semicrystalline hex-CdS (fig. S1). Paint (c) The opaque yellow impasto paints of the sky (Fig. 2A, pt. 6) and of the lake water (Fig. 2A, pts. 4 and 5) are characterized by UV-vis- NIR reflectance profiles showing a broad sigmoidal shape (Fig. 2F), which is attributable to a low degree of crystallinity (26). The shape and position of the strong DLE band at max = 775 to 785 nm suggest the main presence of hex-CdS (Fig. 2F). The paints belonging to group (c) can be spatially visualized by luminescence imaging at 775 nm (Fig. 2C). As shown by the MA-XRF maps of Cd and Cl (Fig. 2B), these areas are also characterized by a larger relative abundance of chlorine with respect to the faded off-white strokes [Paint (b)] and the orange paints [Paint (a)]. Through vis-NIR and FTIR reflection spectroscopies, chlorine is associated with the presence of cadmium Fig. 2. Sky and lake regions: In situ noninvasive spectroscopic results. (A) Photograph of a detail of the sky and lake areas of The Scream (ca. 1910) and (B) correspond- ing composite red-green (RG) MA-XRF maps of Cd (red) and Cl (green). Photo credit: Irina Crina Anca Sandu and Eva Storevik Tveit, Munch Museum. (C) Spatial distribution of CdS luminescence with max at 775 nm [Paint (c)]. (D to F) UV-vis-NIR reflectance and fluorescence spectra and (G to I) FTIR pseudo-absorbance profiles recorded from selected CdS-based areas of the sky (pts. 1 to 3 and 6) and of the lake (pts. 4 and 5) compared to those of chosen reference compounds (gray). In (E), (F), (H), and (I), numbers in brackets refer to the spectra showing similar features to those shown (see Fig. 1 and fig. S1 for additional UV-vis-NIR spectroscopy results). Asterisks in (D) to (F) indicate a signal not related to CdS but likely due to both the reflection/scattering of the excitation source and the emission of the binder and/or other fluorophores. o n A u g u st 3 1 , 2 0 2 0 h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / D o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ Monico et al., Sci. Adv. 2020; 6 : eaay3514 15 May 2020 S C I E N C E A D V A N C E S | R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E 4 of 11 hydroxychloride [Cd(OH)Cl] (Fig.  2F, band at 1455 nm; Fig.  2I, bands at 4336, 4240, and 3848 cm−1). This compound was only detected (in varying amounts) in the yellow impasto of the lake and the sky (Fig. 2, A, F, and I, pts. 4 to 6). In all the yellow CdS-based paints [Paint (b) and Paint (c)], the presence of both CdCO3 and one or more types of oxalates (pos- sibly of Zn and/or of Cd) is observed (Fig. 2, H and I). The pres- ence of both Cd(OH)Cl and CdCO3 [Paint (c)] may be related to the older practice of producing lighter shades of cadmium yellow most likely via a wet process (18, 21–23). This hypothesis is also consist- ent with the low degree of crystallinity of hex-CdS, as revealed by UV-vis-NIR spectroscopy. Actually, earlier productions based on wet processes (i.e., without calcination) were found to usually yield high levels of poorly crystalline CdS (21). Assessment of the degradation state of the cadmium yellow paint in the lake area A selective microsampling of the flaking-off region of the lake area [Paint (c)] offered the opportunity to study more in depth the state of degradation of the CdS-based paint at this specific location (Fig. 1). A paint microsample was obtained by scraping the surface, resulting in six discrete micrometric flakes. All of them were directly analyzed, without any additional preparation, by -Raman spec- troscopy and SR-based x-ray microspectroscopy methods, namely, micro–x-ray diffraction (-XRD), -XRF, and micro–x-ray absorp- tion near-edge structure (-XANES) spectroscopy at S K-, Cl K-, and Cd L3-edges to obtain speciation information on the S, Cd, and Cl compounds present. The results related to two of the microflakes (ScMM01 and ScMM02; see Figs. 3 and 4), representative of the composition of the micro- sampling spot, are discussed here. The composition of the flake ScMM01 corroborates the noninvasive characterization, by revealing the presence of hex-CdS with a low degree of crystallinity (fig. S2) along with sparse aggregates of crystalline Fig. 3. Microflake ScMM01: S speciation results. (A) Photomicrograph of microflake ScMM01 taken from The Scream (ca. 1910) (see Fig. 1 for the sampling spot) and cor- responding SR -XRD distribution of (B) hex-CdS and (C) Cd(OH)Cl/CdSO4/CdCO3 [step size (h × v), 2 × 2 m2; exp. time, 10 s per pixel; energy, 8.5 keV]. (D) Composite red-green-blue (RGB) SR -XRF maps of S-II/SVI/Cd [step size (h × v), 0.8 × 0.8 m2; exp. time, 100 ms per pixe]. (E) Selection of S K-edge spectra (black) and result of the linear combination fitting (LCF) (cyan) of different S-based compounds obtained from the spots indicated in (D). In gray, the spectral profiles of selected reference compounds are reported for comparison. Numbers in brackets refer to the spectra showing similar features to those reported (see Fig. 4 for the corresponding Cl spe- ciation results). Fig. 4. Microflakes: Cl speciation results. Composite RG SR -XRF maps of Cl/K recorded from microflakes (A) ScMM01 and (B) ScMM02 [step size (h × v), 0.8 × 0.8 m2; exp. time, 100 ms per pixel]. Selection of the Cl K-edge spectra (black) compared to those of different Cl reference compounds (gray) obtained from (C) ScMM01 and (D) ScMM02. Spectral profiles were recorded from the spots indicated in (A) and (B). In (C) and (D), numbers in brackets refer to the spectra showing similar features to those reported (see Fig. 3 for the corresponding S speciation results). o n A u g u st 3 1 , 2 0 2 0 h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / D o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ Monico et al., Sci. Adv. 2020; 6 : eaay3514 15 May 2020 S C I E N C E A D V A N C E S | R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E 5 of 11 hex-CdS (Fig. 3B). In addition, CdCO3 was found as main crystal- line phase (Fig. 3C and fig. S2). SR -XRF and S chemical speciation maps (Fig. 3D) reveal that Cd and S-II species are homogenously distributed throughout the yellowish paint, while SVI compounds are localized as agglomerates with diameter of ~3 to 12 m. S-II and SVI species are unambiguously identified in the S K-edge -XANES spectra (Fig. 3E) by the signals at ~2.473 and ~2.482 keV, for sulfides (S-II) and sulfates (SVI), re- spectively. Moreover, the spectral feature positioned at ~2.4783 keV points toward the sporadic occurrence of sulfite (SIV) compounds (27). Regarding flake ScMM02, similar S speciation results were obtained (data not shown). To determine the nature and the relative concentrations of various S species, we described each S K-edge -XANES spectrum as a linear combination of three to four S reference compounds [the best linear combination fitting (LCF) being obtained by including the XANES spectra of CdS, Na2SO3, Na2SO4, and/or CdSO4]. Among the S-containing phases, the LCF results (Fig. 3E) reveal that the paint matrix is mainly composed of CdS, whereas sulfates with minor abundances of sulfites (Na2SO3) are locally present. The sulfate agglomerates consist of Na2SO4 along with a variable contribution of CdSO4 [some of them are also revealed by SR -XRD (Fig. 3C)]. SR -XRF maps of ScMM01 and ScMM02 (Fig. 4, A and B) also revealed that Cl and K species are both diffused within the paint and Fig. 5. Unaged early 20th century cadmium yellow oil paint mock-up (7914). (A) Photomicrograph of 7914 thin section before aging and corresponding RGB composite (B) SR -XRD maps of hex-CdS/Cd(OH)Cl/CdCO3 [step size (h × v), 1 × 1 m2; exp. time, 1 s per pixel; energy, 21 keV] and (C) SR -XRF maps of S-II/Cl/Cd [step size (h × v), 1×1 m2; exp. time, 100 ms per pixel] recorded from the area shown in (A). Selection of -XANES spectra at (D) S K-edge and (E) Cl K-edge obtained from the points indicated in (C) and LCF results (cyan) of different S-based reference com- pounds. In (D) and (E), the spectral profiles of selected reference compounds are re- ported in gray color for comparison, whereas numbers in brackets refer to the spectra showing similar features to those reported (see table S1 for additional results). Fig. 6. Artificially aged 7914 mock-up. (A) Photomicrograph of 7914 thin section after thermal aging (RH ≥ 95%, T = 40°C, 90 days). (B) Quantitative Cd phase images obtained from the LCF of the full-field (FF)–XANES stack using the profiles of CdS (red), CdSO4·nH2O/(Cd,Cl) chlorides (green), and CdC2O4·3H2O/CdCO3 (blue). RGB composite (C) SR -XRD images of hex-CdS/Cd(OH)Cl/CdCO3 [step size (h × v), 1.5 × 1.5 m2; exp. time, 1 s per pixel; energy, 21 keV] and (D) SR -XRF maps of S-II/ SVI [step size (h × v), 1 × 1 m2; exp. time, 100 ms per pixel] acquired from the regions shown in (A). Selection of -XANES spectra at (E) S K-edge and (F) Cl K-edge ob- tained from the points indicated in (D) and LCF results (cyan) of different S-based reference compounds. In (E) and (F), the spectral profiles of selected reference compounds are reported in gray color for comparison, whereas numbers in brack- ets refer to the spectra showing similar features to those reported (see figs. S3 to S5 and table S1 for additional results). o n A u g u st 3 1 , 2 0 2 0 h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / D o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ Monico et al., Sci. Adv. 2020; 6 : eaay3514 15 May 2020 S C I E N C E A D V A N C E S | R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E 6 of 11 sometimes colocalized. The series of Cl K-edge -XANES spectra acquired from ScMM01 (Fig. 4C) strongly resemble the profile of Cd(OH)Cl, a compound also revealed by SR -XRD (Fig. 3C). In the other investigated flake (Fig. 4D), although having a similar compo- sition, NaCl and KCl particles were also identified. In addition, in selected locations, the broad XANES feature at 2.8258 keV suggests the presence of other inorganic Cl compounds, possibly chlorides of Al, Ca, and/or Fe (SR -XRF maps are not shown) (28). The detection of various chlorine compounds [NaCl, KCl, and Cd(OH)Cl] and CdCO3 further supports the hypothesis that the semicrystalline hex-CdS pigment used here was produced by a wet process, which may explain the presence of sulfates (Na2SO4 and CdSO4) as residues of the pigment synthesis (18). On the other hand, the identification of sulfites, which are reported to be intermediates of the oxidation of sulfides to sulfates (29), suggests that CdSO4 is also an oxidation product of the original CdS pigment. Study of CdS oxidation in oil paint mock-ups made of historical pigment formulations To assess the effect of different environmental parameters on the oxidation process of the CdS-based oil paints on The Scream (ca. 1910), we studied a series of oil paint mock-ups prepared using (i) an early 20th century cadmium yellow pigment powder (henceforth referred to as “7914”) from the collection of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE) (19) mixed with linseed oil and (ii) an oil paint tube used by Munch himself (hereafter denoted as “LFG 2.4”), labeled Jaune de cadmium citron (cadmium yellow lemon) and manu- factured by Lefranc (see Materials and Methods for details). The mock-ups were subjected to accelerated aging under UVA-vis light at RH  =  45%, UVA-vis light at RH  ≥  95%, and thermal aging at T = 40° and RH ≥ 95% (in table S1, Figs. 5 to 7, and figs. S3 to S6 denoted as “UVA-vis45%RH”, “UVA-vis95%RH”, and “thermal95%RH”, respectively). In what follows, a selection of the most meaningful results for the discussion is provided. Early 20th century cadmium yellow pigment 7914 The historical pigment powder 7914 was specifically selected for having absorption and emission properties [fig. S1 and (19)] and a chemical composition similar to that of the cadmium yellow paint in the lake area. From the presence of both Cd(OH)Cl and CdCO3 as additional major phases in the CdS (Fig. 5), along with a smaller amount of KCl (table S1), we infer that pigment 7914 is composed of poorly crystalline hex-CdS, possibly produced by a wet process. Neither sulfates (e.g., Na2SO4 and CdSO4) nor sulfites (e.g., Na2SO3) were detected as original constituents of the pigment powder. As a first step, we have evaluated the stability of the 7914 oil paint mock-up after exposure to UVA-vis light at RH = 45% (fig. S3). After aging, no evidence of photo-oxidation of hex-CdS to CdSO4 was found, in line with our previous studies on pure CdS oil mock-ups (i.e., without any synthesis residues, such as Cl compounds) (30). However, the formation of cadmium carboxylates was revealed by FTIR (data not shown; see table S1 for details). In a second step, the effects of thermal aging at RH ≥ 95% (without exposure to light) were studied. This resulted in a highly relevant phenomenon: the formation of SVI-rich aggregates within the S-II-based matrix, as evidenced by the S speciation distributions (Fig. 6, A and D). The LCF result of the S K-edge -XANES spectra (Fig.  6E) shows that the aggregate (pt. 02S) is mainly composed of CdSO4/CdSO4·nH2O and that lower amounts of the same compounds (pts. 01S and 03S) are sporadically present in the CdS-based matrix. In the SVI-rich aggregate (pt. 02S), an additional peak at 2.4783 keV is ascribable to SO3 2− species (~15%) that are likely formed as intermediates of the oxidation process of the pigment (29). These newly formed Cd species are better visualized in the full- field (FF)–XANES Cd phase images and SR -XRD maps (Fig. 6, B and C, and fig. S4) in which, within the hex-CdS/CdCO3-based 7914 paint matrix, minor amounts of CdC2O4·3H2O, CdSO4·nH2O, and CdCl2·nH2O are observed and localized in small aggregates (ca. 10 m in diameter). The three latter compounds were not detected by -XRD, possibly because of their amorphous nature. Furthermore, the formation of Cd carboxylates was revealed by FTIR (spectra not reported; see ta- ble S1 for details). It is notable that the results also reveal the colocalized presence of Cl species and cadmium sulfates: Cd(OH)Cl is mainly localized in the SVI-rich aggregate that formed in situ during aging (Fig.  6, B to D). The -XRD patterns recorded from this region (fig. S5) show an extensive broadening of the Cd(OH)Cl signals compared to those that are visible in the profiles of sample 7914 before artificial aging. We assume that this is due to the nanometric crystal size of this com- pound (>10 nm) (31). In agreement with the SR -XRD analysis, the slight broadening and shifting toward lower energies (from 2.8277 to 2.8262 keV) of the most intense post-edge absorption feature in some Cl K-edge -XANES spectra (Fig. 6F) is ascribable to amor- phous (Cd,Cl) compounds. Overall, these results suggest that the original Cd(OH)Cl may have dissolved, migrated, and recrystallized as nanoparticles, possibly simul- taneously with the oxidation of CdS to CdSO4. Whether the presence of Cd(OH)Cl has effectively stimulated the oxidation process is not clear. In a third experiment, the effect of combined aging, i.e., exposure to UVA-vis light and humidity (RH  ≥  95%) (data not shown; see table S1 for an overview of the results) were considered. The chemical transformations induced in this manner are very similar to those only exposed to thermal aging (Fig. 6), pointing out the dominant role of moisture on the oxidation process of the CdS-based oil paint in which (Cd,Cl) compounds are present. In summary, the above-described findings demonstrate the joint action of (Cd,Cl) compounds and moisture in the oxidation of the CdS pigment to CdSO4 in the oil binder. The results also show that the exposure to moisture promotes the migration of (Cd,Cl) species through the paint along with the oxidation of the original CdS to CdSO4. Note that the formation of neither CdSO4 nor cadmium carboxylates was observed on Cl-free CdS oil paint mock-ups aged under similar conditions (30). Therefore, this strongly suggests that the presence of Cd(OH)Cl [and possibly other (Cd,Cl) compounds] is a key factor promoting degradation of CdS. The photodegradation of CdS, on the other hand, does not appear to be influenced by the absence or presence of (Cd,Cl) compounds. Munch’s oil paint tube “cadmium yellow lemon” LFG 2.4 by Lefranc To further explore the influence of moisture and that of the pres- ence of (Cd,Cl) and Na compounds [the latter being observed in the available paint microflakes from The Scream (ca. 1910)] in a more complex paint system, we have also investigated mock-up samples pre- pared with the material from paint tube LFG 2.4, used by Munch. Before artificial aging, hex-CdS, cub-CdS and CdCO3 are homo genously distributed throughout the paint (fig. S6). The Sulfur speciation maps (Fig.  7,  A  and  B) in combination with S K-edge -XANES o n A u g u st 3 1 , 2 0 2 0 h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / D o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ Monico et al., Sci. Adv. 2020; 6 : eaay3514 15 May 2020 S C I E N C E A D V A N C E S | R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E 7 of 11 investigations (Fig. 7D) reveal the presence of a rather uneven dis- tribution of SVI species (likely CdSO4·H2O; ≈5 to 15%) and S IV compounds (possibly Na2SO3; ≈10%). These findings suggest that a partial natural aging of the paint might have already occurred during the one century lifetime of the paint tube. In addition, the presence of (Cd,Cl) compounds is revealed by -XRF (Fig. 7C) and Cl K-edge -XANES spectroscopy (data not shown), having a ho- mogeneous distribution. Thermal aging of the paint (RH ≥ 95%, T = 40°C, 90 days) clearly promoted the formation of Cd/SVI and Na/SVI aggregates [see -XRF maps and S speciation distributions in Fig. 7 (E to G)]. Further- more, after aging, Cl compounds, originally homogenously distributed throughout the paint, became mainly localized in the Cd/SVI aggre- gates (Fig. 7, F and G). In these areas, CdSO4·nH2O and CdS were found to be the main components along with SO3 2− compounds as minor phases (Fig. 7, F and H, pts. 01S to 04S). In the two Na/S VI aggregates (pts. 05S and 14S), Na2SO4 and CdS are the dominant phases together with smaller amounts of CdSO4·nH2O and possibly SO3 2− compounds. This migration of the (Cd, Cl) compounds either proceeds in parallel or becomes triggered or is itself responsible for triggering the oxidation of CdS to CdSO4. Other aging experiments (e.g., with observation at the nanoscale of Cl-containing CdS) are required (and planned) to obtain definite insights in this matter. The identification of highly water-soluble materials such as Na2SO4 and (Cd,Cl) compounds, both in the LFG 2.4 paint and in the micro- flakes from The Scream (Figs.  3 and 4), also leads to the question of whether and to what extent their solubility influences the degradation state of the cadmium yellow paint under high humidity conditions. This was further investigated by thermal aging (RH ≥ 95%, T = 40°C) of two oil paint mock-ups prepared by mixing pure hex-CdS with Na2SO4 and CdCl2. The results (see section S4 for details) confirmed that after exposure to moisture, soluble Na2SO4 and CdCl2 dissolve, migrate through the paint, and, upon recrystallization, give rise to CdSO4- and NaCl-based compounds. It follows that cadmium sulfate may be present Fig. 7. Munch’s cadmium yellow lemon oil paint tube (LFG 2.4). Photomicrographs of LFG 2.4 thin sections (A) before and (E) after thermal aging (RH ≥ 95%, T = 40°C, 90 days). RGB composite SR -XRF images of (B) S-II/SVI and (C) Cl/Cd [step size (h × v), 1 × 1 m2; exp. time, 100 ms per pixel] recorded from the area shown in (A). (D) Selection of S K-edge -XANES spectra (black) obtained from the points indicated in (B) and corresponding LCF results (cyan). RGB composite SR -XRF images of (F) S-II/SVI and (G) Na/Cl/Cd [step size (h × v), 1 × 0.8 m2; exp. time, 80 ms per pixel] acquired from the region illustrated in (E). (H) Selection of S K-edge -XANES spectra (black) obtained from the points indicated in (F) and LCF results (cyan). In (D) and (H), numbers in brackets indicate the profiles showing similar spectral features to those shown (see fig. S6 and table S1 for further results). o n A u g u st 3 1 , 2 0 2 0 h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / D o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ Monico et al., Sci. Adv. 2020; 6 : eaay3514 15 May 2020 S C I E N C E A D V A N C E S | R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E 8 of 11 not only as an oxidation product of CdS or as a direct leftover reagent but also as a secondary product arising from the dissolution and re- crystallization of soluble sulfate-containing leftover reagents. CONCLUSIONS A two-length scale approach has been presented here to investigate the chemistry of CdS-based pigments of The Scream (ca. 1910) by combining noninvasive elemental and molecular spectroscopies at the macroscale with SR–based x-ray methods at the microscopic lev- el. The results from the extensive in situ noninvasive investigation pro- vided us with a representative overview of the chemical composition and distribution of the different CdS-based paints used by Munch in his masterpiece. Notably, two different types of the cadmium yellow pigment were identified: poorly crystalline hex-CdS and cub-CdS. Evidence of degradation either in the form of flaking detachment (opaque yellow impasto paints of the lake water) or discoloration to an off-white color (in the sunset sky area and the neck region of the central figure) was primarily observed for CdS yellow oil paints made of hex-CdS pigments that exhibit a low degree of crystallinity and contain significant amounts of CdCO3 along with a variable content of chlorine compounds. The compositional profile has revealed the use of a CdS yellow pigment produced by the wet process without calcination. On the other hand, orange paints, composed of a mixture of hex-CdS/ cub-CdS and variable amount of HgS, without CdCO3- and Cl-based compounds, do not show evident signs of degradation. Insight into the nature of the alteration compounds present in the flaking impasto paint was provided by microspectroscopy inves- tigations of a microsample obtained from the lake area. The most important result was the first ever reported evidence of the presence of oxidized sulfur compounds in the CdS-based paints of The Scream (ca. 1910). Notably, variable amounts of CdSO4 and sulfites species were found to be widespread throughout the paint matrix, whereas Na2SO4 was present in the form of aggregates. Different chloride-based com- pounds, including Cd(OH)Cl, NaCl, and KCl, were identified as well. The combination of these results with the findings obtained from artificially aged paint mock-ups (with a composition similar to that of the lake region of the painting) leads us to conclude that the sulfates and sulfites can be interpreted as alteration products of the paint. As the most important outcome of this study, we observed that in high moisture conditions (RH ≥ 95%) and in the presence of different types of cadmium chloride compounds, the oxidation of the original CdS to CdSO4 also takes place in the absence of light. Whether the migration of (Cd,Cl) compounds is a cause or an effect of the CdS oxidation or simply takes place in parallel is not yet resolved. This observation has opened the way for a targeted research on the oxi- dation mechanism of CdS-based pigments in oil binder under high moisture conditions and in the presence of various chloride compounds (e.g., KCl, NaCl, CdCl2·nH2O, and CdCl2). Studies are still ongoing, and their results will be published in follow-up papers. Upon exposure to humidity, next to the oxidation of the original CdS pigment, secondary reactions involving dissolution, migration through the paint, and recrystallization of water-soluble phases such as Na2SO4 and Cd(OH)Cl/CdCl2 may have further contributed to the formation of cadmium sulfates and of various Cl compounds. The nature and distribution of the water-soluble and “mobile” phases determined in the sampled material from The Scream (ca. 1910) con- tribute to explain the instability of the paint in the lake area and the related flaking issue. Overall, we consider that our findings provided important clues about the degradation mechanism of CdS-based paints, having meaningful implications for the preventive conservation of The Scream (ca. 1910). In particular, the degradation of the cadmium yellow paints might be mitigated by minimizing the exposure of the painting to exces- sively high moisture levels (i.e., RH < 45%) while keeping the light- ing at normal values foreseen for lightfast painting materials (32). MATERIALS AND METHODS The Scream (ca. 1910) (Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway) and corresponding microsample The version of The Scream (ca. 1910) (tempera and oil on unprimed cardboard, 83.5 cm by 66 cm; catalog no. Woll.M.896) belonging to the Munch Museum is neither signed nor dated. Earlier research has established that the painting probably stems from around 1910 (1–3). The painting, stolen in 2004, has been extensively studied since its return at the Munch Museum in 2006 (3, 5). The paint microsample that was studied was taken from a spot of the flaked-off yellow paint surface of the lake region in the painting (Fig. 1). It was obtained by scraping the surface, resulting in six discrete micrometric flakes; all of them were directly investigated without any additional preparation. The results obtained from two of them (ScMM01 and ScMM02; see Figs. 3 and 4), representative of the com- position of the microsampling location, are discussed above. Preparation of CdS-based oil paint mock-ups Early 20th century cadmium yellow pigment The pigment powder (sample “7914”) is dated back to the early 20th century and was provided by the RCE. Paint mock-ups were obtained by mixing the pigment powder, composed of CdCO3, Cd(OH)Cl, KCl, and poorly crystalline hex-CdS [see table S1 and (19) for further information], with linseed oil (Zecchi) in a 4:1 mass ratio and applied on polycarbonate slices. Munch’s oil paint tube The analyzed sample (LFG 2.4; table S1 and Fig. 7), produced by Lefranc (Paris) and labeled as Jaune de cadmium citron (cadmium yellow lemon), is from the collection of oil paint tubes (more than 900 in total) that Edvard Munch (1863 to 1944) used in the last period of his life, in the atelier in Ekely (1916 to 1944). It is likely that some paint materials were bought before these dates (3). The tubes are part of a corpus of atelier materials that the painter donated to the city of Oslo after his death, now hosted at the Munch Museum. The paint sample (less than 1 g) was obtained by softly squeezing the paint tube (still with cap; fig. S6A) in small vials; afterward, this paint was applied on a polycarbonate support. Commercial hex-CdS pigment Paint mock-ups were prepared by mixing powders of crystalline hex-CdS (Sigma-Aldrich) with an equal amount of both Na2SO4 and CdCl2 (sample “hex-CdSNa2SO4-CdCl2”) in a 4:1 mass ratio (table S1 and figs. S7 and S8). A blend of the powder mixtures with linseed oil (4:1 mass ratio) was applied on areas of about 1.5 cm by 1.5 cm on a polycarbonate support. Accelerated aging experiments of CdS-based oil paint mock-ups UVA-vis photochemical aging experiments of the 7914 oil paint mock-ups were carried out by allocating the touch-dried paints (i.e., after about 1 month since their preparation) inside an in-house–made o n A u g u st 3 1 , 2 0 2 0 h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / D o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ Monico et al., Sci. Adv. 2020; 6 : eaay3514 15 May 2020 S C I E N C E A D V A N C E S | R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E 9 of 11 aging chamber equipped with a UV-filtered 300-W Cermax xenon lamp [ ≥ 300 nm; see (33) for the corresponding emission spectral profile] either at RH = 45% (indoor humidity level, measured daily using a thermohygrometer) or at RH ≥ 95% (obtained using distilled water). These aging conditions are referred to as UVA-vis45%RH and UVA-vis95%RH, respectively. The measured irradiance and tempera- ture at the sample position were 1.8 × 103 to 2.7 × 103 W/m2 and 25° to 30°C, respectively. Paints were irradiated for 430 to 640 hours to achieve radiant exposure values of ca. 1.2 × 106 W/m2·hour. Thermal aging treatments (denoted as “thermal95%RH”) of all CdS-based oil paint mock-ups were performed by placing the touch-dried paints in a vessel maintained in the dark at RH ≥95% (obtained using distilled water) and at 40°C for an overall period of 90 to 100 days (2160 to 2400 hours). MA-XRF mapping MA-XRF scanning was carried out using the CRONO instrument by XGLab (Bruker Nano Analytics) (34). The system has a measurement head equipped with a large area silicon drift detector and a Rh anode tube operating at 50 kV and 200 A. The measurement head is mounted on a motorized XYZ stage (scanning area, 450 mm by 600 mm and focusing axis, 75 mm). The painting was scanned using a 1-mm pinhole collimator with a linear speed of 20 mm/s and acquisition time of 40 ms per spectrum. XRF elemental maps were produced by the PyMca (35) and Datamuncher (36) software packages. Fluorescence hyperspectral imaging Two Honle LEDLINE 500 light-emitting diode systems with emission at 405 nm were used as excitation sources for the luminescence mea- surements. Investigations were performed by means of a Surface Optics Corporation SOC710 hyperspectral camera. The system uses a whiskbroom line scanner, producing a 696 × 520 pixels hypercube in the spectral range of 400 to 1000 nm, with 128 bands and 4.5 nm spectral resolution, radiometrically calibrated in the whole spectral range. The lateral resolution was continuously modulated by an adjustable focal length of the mounted objective. The fluorescence hypercube of the whole painting has been reconstructed by assem- bling 15 single frames collected at a resolution of about 70 dots per inch, using the pixel-based mosaicking routine present in the ENVI Classic software. From the whole hyperspectral fluorescence image, any single spectral band (i.e., band at 775 nm of Fig. 2C) was mapped by adjusting the brightness to obtain the dark (or zero) contribution from an area that clearly does not contain the species emitting at the selected spectral band. UV-vis-NIR measurements UV-vis-NIR reflection and fluorescence investigations at selected locations of the painting were performed by a self-assembled portable instrument. A deuterium-halogen lamp (AvaLight-DHc, Avantes), a highly sensitive charge-coupled device (CCD) spectrometer (AvaSpec- 2048 USB2, Avantes; range, 200 to 1100 nm and spectral resolution, 8 nm), and a thermoelectrically cooled InGaAs detector (AvaSpec- NIR256-1.7TEC; range, 950 to 1600 nm and spectral resolution, 24 nm) were used for carrying out reflection measurements. An ultracom- pact diode laser (Toptica Photonics AG, DE; 445 nm, 1-mW nominal power), integrated into the same apparatus and coupled with two high- sensitivity calibrated CCD spectrometers (i.e., AvaSpec-NIR256- 1.7TEC and AvaSpec-ULS2048 XL-RS-USB2; range, 300 to 1150 nm and spectral resolution, 9.2 nm), was used for performing fluores- cence measurements. The instrument has a dedicated fiber-optic system, designed to direct all the excitation sources to the same point of the analyzed surface and, at the same time, collect both the reflected and emitted light, bringing them to the different detectors. The probe area is less than 2  mm2. Measurements were carried out with an integration time of 600 ms and 30 averages for each acquisition. FTIR measurements A portable ALPHA spectrometer (Bruker) was used for performing reflection investigations at selected spots of the painting and attenuated total reflection (ATR) measurements at the surface of all CdS-based oil paint mock-ups before and after aging. Pseudo-absorbance spectra [log(1/R); R is reflectance] were obtained using an external reflec- tion module from areas of about 7 mm2. Data were acquired in the range of 7400 to 345 cm−1, at a resolution of 4 cm−1 and for 3 min. ATR spectra were collected by means of a Platinum QuickSnap ATR sampling module (A220/D-01) equipped with a diamond crys- tal plate. Data were recorded in the range of 4000 to 345 cm−1, with 4 cm−1 spectral resolution and 168 scans. -Raman investigations Microflakes obtained from The Scream (ca. 1910) and thin sections (~5 m in thickness) prepared from hex-CdSNa2SO4-CdCl2 paint mock-ups were investigated by means of a JASCO NRS-3100 double-grating spectrophotometer. The instrument is connected to an optical microscope (×100 objective) and is equipped with a CCD detector cooled down to −47°C. The analyses were performed using a 514.5 nm argon-ion laser and a grating with 1200 lines/mm. Profiles were collected in the range of 2130 to 120 cm−1, with ca. 2 cm−1 spectral resolution, 2 to 3 s exposure time, 40 to 60 scans, and 0.4 to 1 mW power. Mapping experiments of paint mock-ups before and after thermal aging were performed by recording the spectra point by point by means of a 785.0 nm diode laser and with step size down to 2 × 1 m2 (h × v). Each profile was acquired in the range of 1855 to 120 cm−1, with a spectral resolution between 2 and 4 cm−1 and by using a grating with 600 lines/mm . The exposure time varied between 3 and 4 s per point, with three scans per point and 7 to 8 mW power. SR-based -XRF and XANES measurements S, Cl, and Cd speciation investigations of the microflakes obtained from The Scream (ca. 1910) and thin sections (5 to 10 m in thickness) of CdS-based oil paint mock-ups were performed at the scanning x-ray microscope (SXM) and the FF-XANES end stations hosted at the X-ray Microscope Beamline ID21 of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF, Grenoble, France) (37). Investigations were carried out by means of a fixed exit double-crystal Si(111) mono- chromator at both the SXM and FF-XANES end stations. The energy calibration was performed using CaSO4·2H2O, NaCl, and a Cd foil as standards and by setting the position of the peak maximum of their first-order derivative spectrum at 2.4829, 2.8261, and 3.5418 keV, respectively. At the SXM-end station, the incident beam was focused with Kirkpatrick-Baez mirrors down to a diameter of 0.6  ×  0.3 m2 (h × v). XRF signals were collected at 69° with respect to the inci- dent beam direction by means of a single energy-dispersive silicon drift detector (XFlash 5100, Bruker). Single-point -XANES spectra were acquired in XRF mode by scanning the primary energy at the absorption edge of the following o n A u g u st 3 1 , 2 0 2 0 h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / D o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ Monico et al., Sci. Adv. 2020; 6 : eaay3514 15 May 2020 S C I E N C E A D V A N C E S | R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E 10 of 11 elements: S K-edge (2.46 to 2.53 keV; energy step, 0.18 eV), Cl K-edge (2.79 to 2.89 keV; energy step, 0.25 eV), and Cd L3-edge (3.5 to 3.7 keV; energy step, 0.4 eV).The normalization and the LCF of the spectra against a library of XANES spectra of S, Cl, and Cd reference com- pounds were performed by means of the ATHENA software (38). The LCF procedure permitted to quantitatively determine the av- erage relative amount of sulfate (SVI), sulfite (SIV), and sulfide (S-II) compounds (expressed as %[SVI]/[Stotal], %[S IV]/[Stotal], and %[S -II]/ [Stotal]) and of different Cd and Cl compounds. During the S K-edge -XANES analysis, care was taken to ensure that the sulfite-related signals were not artifacts of the measurement process (e.g., due to beam-induced reduction of sulfates). -XRF mapping experiments were performed by using a mono- chromatic primary beam of fixed energy around the S K- and Cd L3-edges. Maps of the same region of interest were recorded using either 80 or 100 ms per pixel at three different energies: (i) 2.473 and 2.482 keV to favor the excitation of the S-II and SVI species, respec- tively, and (ii) 3.7 keV to obtain the XRF intensity of all S, Cl, and Cd species. The software PyMca (35) was used to fit the XRF spectra and to separate the contribution of different elements. The experi- mental procedure used for recording and producing the S-II and SVI chemical state maps is described in a previous study (17). Cd L3-edge FF-XANES imaging of a thin section (~2 µm in thickness) obtained from the thermally aged paint 7914 was carried out by means of an unfocused beam (size of ~1.5 mm by 1.5 mm). A Lu2SiO5:Tb scintillator (located less than 2 mm downstream the sample) was used to convert x-ray transmission images into visible images. A ×10 optical objective was used to magnify the image onto a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor camera (PCO edge, Germany), giving a pixel size of ~0.65 m by 0.65 m and a spatial resolution of ~1.5 m. The maximum field of view is around 1.5 mm by 1.5 mm. A stack of 214 x-ray radiographs was recorded while tuning the x-ray energy across the Cd L3-edge with the following variable step sizes: (i) 5 eV in the range of 3.4880 to 3.5239 keV and 3.6380 to 3.7180 keV, (ii) 0.5 eV in the region of 3.2530 to 3.5980 keV, and (iii) 1 eV in the range of 3.5980 to 3.6380 keV. The dark- and flat-field correction and the image alignment were performed by using the Spectrocrunch library (37). The TXM-Wizard software package (39) was used to produce the chemical state maps of different Cd compounds. After determination of the edge-jump, noise filtering, and normalization, Cd phase maps were obtained by describing the XANES spectra at each pixel as LCF of a set of XANES spectra of different Cd reference compounds. SR-based -XRD mapping Microflakes obtained from The Scream (ca. 1910) were analyzed at the -XRD/-XRF end station of beamline ID21 at ESRF (37), whereas thin sections of the CdS-based oil paint mock-ups were investigated at the microprobe hutch of the Hard X-ray Micro/Nanoprobe beamline P06 of the PETRA III storage ring (DESY, Hamburg) (40). Incident energies of 8.53 and 21 keV were used at ESRF-ID21 and DESY-P06, respectively, and were selected by means of a Si(111) crystal mono- chromator. A Kirkpatrick-Baez mirror system was used to focus the beam down to 2 × 1 m2 (h × v) and down to around 0.7 × 0.7 m2 (h  ×  v) during the investigations at ESRF-ID21 and DESY-P06, respectively. XRD signals were recorded in transmission geometry using two different detection systems: a taper optics CCD ‘FReLoN’ camera (2048 × 2048 pixels, pixel size of 52 m) was used during the analysis at ESRF-ID21, while a PILATUS 300K area detector was used for measurements at DESY-P06. -XRD patterns were acquired with either 10 or 1 s per pixel at ESRF-ID21 and DESY-P06, respectively. Calibration of the diffraction setups was performed using either a corundum (Al2O3) or a LaB6 reference sample at ESRF-ID21 and DESY-P06, respectively. Crystalline phase distribu- tion maps were obtained by full pattern refinement using the XRDUA software package (41). 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Funding: The research was financially supported by the European research project IPERION-CH, funded by the European Commission, H2020-INFRAIA-2014-2015 (grant agreement no. 654028); the project AMIS, within the program Dipartimenti di Eccellenza 2018-2022 (funded by MIUR and University of Perugia); and the program “Ricerca di Base 2017” (funded by University of Perugia). S.D.M. and K.J. acknowledge the GOA Project SolarPaint from the University of Antwerp Research Council and projects G056619N and G054719N from FWO (Brussels). F.V. and K.J. acknowledge support from Interreg Project Smart*Light and thank BELSPO (Brussels) for financial support via FED-tWIN mandate PRF055. L.M. acknowledges the Erasmus+ program (Staff Mobility for training, A. Y. 2018 to 2019) of the European Commission. In situ noninvasive analyses were performed using the European MOLAB platform, which is financially supported by the European project IPERION-CH. For the beamtime grants received, the authors thank the ESRF-ID21 beamline (experiment nos. HG32, HG64, and HG95), DESY-P06 beamline, a member of the Helmholtz Association HGF (experiment nos. I-20130221 EC and I-20160126 EC), and the project CALIPSOplus under the Grant Agreement 730872 from the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation HORIZON 2020. Author contributions: MOLAB investigations and data processing: L.M., L.C., F.R., C.G., I.C.A.S., R.P.d.F., A.R., and C.M. Experiments at SR facilities and data processing: L.M., A.C., S.D.M., G.N., F.V., M.C., K.J., W.D.N., G.F., and J.M. Data interpretation: L.M., L.C., F.R., K.J., A.R., I.C.A.S., E.S.T., and C.M. Manuscript writing: L.M., L.C., F.R., K.J., A.R., and C.M. All authors contributed to the revision of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. Additional data related to this paper may be requested from the authors. Submitted 13 June 2019 Accepted 6 March 2020 Published 15 May 2020 10.1126/sciadv.aay3514 Citation: L. Monico, L. Cartechini, F. Rosi, A. Chieli, C. Grazia, S. De Meyer, G. Nuyts, F. Vanmeert, K. Janssens, M. Cotte, W. De Nolf, G. Falkenberg, I. C. A. Sandu, E. S. Tveit, J. Mass, R. P. de Freitas, A. Romani, C. Miliani, Probing the chemistry of CdS paints in The Scream by in situ noninvasive spectroscopies and synchrotron radiation x-ray techniques. Sci. Adv. 6, eaay3514 (2020). o n A u g u st 3 1 , 2 0 2 0 h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / D o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ synchrotron radiation x-ray techniques by in situ noninvasive spectroscopies andThe ScreamProbing the chemistry of CdS paints in Jennifer Mass, Renato Pereira de Freitas, Aldo Romani and Costanza Miliani Vanmeert, Koen Janssens, Marine Cotte, Wout De Nolf, Gerald Falkenberg, Irina Crina Anca Sandu, Eva Storevik Tveit, Letizia Monico, Laura Cartechini, Francesca Rosi, Annalisa Chieli, Chiara Grazia, Steven De Meyer, Gert Nuyts, Frederik DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aay3514 (20), eaay3514.6Sci Adv ARTICLE TOOLS http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/20/eaay3514 MATERIALS SUPPLEMENTARY http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2020/05/11/6.20.eaay3514.DC1 REFERENCES http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/20/eaay3514#BIBL This article cites 31 articles, 0 of which you can access for free PERMISSIONS http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions Terms of ServiceUse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of AAAS.Science AdvancesYork Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005. 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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of o n A u g u st 3 1 , 2 0 2 0 h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / D o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/20/eaay3514 http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2020/05/11/6.20.eaay3514.DC1 http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/20/eaay3514#BIBL http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://advances.sciencemag.org/ work_fszn4zg5cnh37ftwi3s77uq7om ---- Dossier central 123123 (2) 2012: 123 - 138 Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá 21 Dossier central21 Espacios de centralidad urbana y redes de infraestructura la urbanidad en cuatro proyectos urbanos* Urban Centrality Spaces and Infrastructural Networks The Concept of “Urbanity” in Four Urban Projects Resumen La ruptura de la interacción entre es- pacio de movilidad y espacio edificado, y el distanciamiento, segregación y autonomía entre los componentes del espacio urbano produce una gran cantidad de “centros ur- banos sin urbanidad”. La crisis de los centros tradicionales y la potenciación de nuevas polaridades, centros especializados y nodos de actividades, con soporte en las redes de infraestructuras, obligan a una reflexión sobre la relación entre centralidad, movilidad y espa- cio urbano. A través de la interrelación entre centro, centralidad e infraestructura propo- nemos el estudio comparado de cuatro casos de centralidades. Centros planteados a partir de estrategias urbanas, criterios proyectuales y soluciones urbano-arquitectónicas que han configurado espacios centrales para cada ciu- dad con distintas formas de interacción con las infraestructuras, y han dado como resultado diferentes tipos de “centralidad” y condiciones de “urbanidad”. Se establecen diferentes tipos de centralidad y de sistemas de organización de la centralidad, a la vez que se indaga sobre cómo determinadas soluciones proyectuales favorecen o no lógicas de interacción, de ri- veranidad y adherencia, de los espacios de la movilidad dentro del espacio urbano. Palabras clave: centralidad urbana, Euralille, Rive Gauche, Illa Diagonal, Centro Internacional Tequendama-Bavaria. Abstract The breakdown of interaction bet- ween spaces of mobility and fixed spaces, and the distance, segregation, and auto- nomy within the components of urban spa- ce. These have produced a large number of urban centers with no urbanity. The crisis of traditional centers and the strengthening of new poles, specialized centers, and nodes of activity, supported by infrastructural net- works, bring us to reflect on the relationship between centrality, mobility, and urban spa- ce. Emphasizing the relationship between center, centrality, and infrastructure, we de- veloped a comparative study for four centra- lities. These centralities have been planned based on urban strategies, project criteria, and urban-architectural solutions that have shaped different forms of interaction with infrastructures and different conditions of centrality and degrees of "urbanity". We defi- ne different types of centralities and different systems for their organization. At the same time we ecxplore how specific architectural solutions favour or not the logics of interplay, interaction, riveraineté and adhérence, of mobility spaces within the urban space. Key words: Urban centrality, Eurali- lle, Rive Gauche, Illa Diagonal, International Centre Tequendama-Bavaria. Resumo A ruptura da interação entre espaço de mobilidade e espaço edificado, e o dis- tanciamento, segregação e autonomia entre os componentes do espaço urbano produze uma grande quantidade de “centros urbanos sem urbanidade”. A crise dos centros tradicio- nais e a potenciação de novas polaridades, centros especializados e nodos de ativida- des, com soporte nas redes de infraestrutura, obrigam a uma reflexão sobre a relação entre centralidade, mobilidade e espaço urbano. Através da inter-relação entre centro, cen- tralidade e infraestrutura propõem o estudo comparado de quatro casos de centralida- des. Centros planejados a partir de estraté- gias urbanas, critérios projetivos e soluções urbano-arquitetônicas que tem configurado espaços centrais para cada cidade com dis- tintas formas de interação com as infraestru- turas, e tem dado como resultado diferentes tipos de “centralidade” e condições de “urba- nidade”. Estabelecem-se diferentes tipos de centralidade e de sistemas de organização da centralidade, à vez que se indaga sobre como determinadas soluções projetivas favorecem o não logicas de interação, de riveranidade e aderência, dos espaços da mobilidade dentro do espaço urbano. Palavras-chave: Centralidade urba- na, Euralille, Rive Gauche, Illa Diagonal, Cen- tro Internacional Tequendama-Bavaria. Recibido: 30 de abril de 2012 Aprobado: 21 de diciembre de 2012 * Este artículo recoge algunas de las reflexiones desarrolladas en las tesis doctorales de los autores del artículo: Espacios de centralidad urbana y redes de infraestructura (UPC- Barcelona) de Miguel Y. Mayorga, actualmente en proceso de finalización y El espacio urbano moderno. El Conjunto Tequendama-Bavaria en Bogotá. 1950-1982 (UPC-Barcelona) de María Pía Fontana, leída en febrero de 2012. Miguel Y. Mayorga Arquitecto, Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Máster en proyectación urbanística, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, UPC. Profesor de Urbanismo, Escola Tècnica Superior de Camins, Canals i Ports de Barcelona, ETSCCPB-UPC. Colombiano-Español miguel.mayorga@upc.edu Maria Pia Fontana Arquitecta, Università degli Studi di Napoli. Doctora Arquitecta, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - UPC. Profesora de Proyectos Arquitectónicos, Escola Politècnica Superior, Universitat de Girona, EPS-UdG. Italiana mariapia.fontana@udg.edu julio - diciembre de 2012 Miguel Y. Mayorga, Maria Pia Fontana 21124124 21 Miguel Y. Mayorga Candidato a Doctor y DEA en Urbanismo por la UPC. Ha tenido acti- vidad profesional con sede en Bogotá hasta 1998 en proyectos de arquitectura, urbanismo y paisajismo: Paseo Urbano Carrera 15 (Bogotá, 1996-98), Parque Eco- lógico Cerro El Volador (Medellín, 1996), Parque Ecológico Embalse San Rafael (Bogotá, 1996). En Barcelona desde 1998, ha participado en diversos planes y pro- yectos urbanos y de infraestructuras, y en la elaboración de consultorías, planes de ordenamiento y de movilidad, en Ita- lia, Brasil, Honduras y España. Investiga sobre la relación espacio urbano-infraes- tructura y sobre la revisión de propues- tas de la modernidad arquitectónica. Hace parte de la asociación profesional Mayorga+Fontana y pertenece al grupo EXIT e IntraScapeLab de la UPC. Maria Pia Fontana Con estudios de Postgrado en Proyectación urbanística y en Diseño gráfico y editorial. Ha tenido experien- cias de estudio y profesionales en Graz (Austria), Bogotá (Colombia) y Honduras. Reside en Barcelona, desde 1999 donde hace parte de la asociación profesio- nal Mayorga+Fontana, desarrollando proyectos y estudios urbanos. En 2012 han sido primer premio del jurado en el concurso “Ideas Urbanas 2.0” ETSAB- Institut Français. En 2009 han ganado el segundo premio en el concurso in- ternacional “Un lungomare per Cann- giones-Laconia” (Italia). Investiga sobre la relación espacio urbano-arquitectura, con especial referencia a la modernidad arquitectónica y con énfasis en la aproxi- mación interescalar e interdisciplinar al proyecto. Ha sido editora de la revista DPA (ETSAB-UPC) y actualmente editora de la colección "Microgrames" (UdG). The earth to be spann’d, connected by networks/ The lands to be welded together W. Whitman Porque, en efecto, la definición más certera de lo que es la urbe y la polis se parece mucho a la que cómicamente se da del cañón: toma usted un agujero, lo rodea de alambre muy apretado y eso es un cañón. Pues lo mismo, la urbe o polis comienza por ser el hueco, para delimitar su contorno. La polis no es primordialmente un conjunto de casas habitables, sino también el lugar del ayuntamiento civil, un espacio acotado para funciones públicas. La urbe no está hecha, como la cabaña o el domus, para cobijarse de la intemperie y engendrar, que son menesteres privados y familiares, sino para discutir la cosa pública. J. Ortega y Gasset [1937] (2004). La rebelión de las masas. Centro, centralidad e infraestructura El centro se ha constituido, por antonomasia, en el espacio de principal referencia en la ciudad; hoy la crisis de los espacios centrales marcados por relaciones urbanas en contraste: cen- trífugas y centrípetas, de concentración y desconcentración, de centralización y descentralización, refleja la perdida de urbanidad de la misma ciudad1. El centro tradicional entra en crisis por excesivo uso, falta de valoración e inversión, procesos de saturación y deterioro que lo vacían de su significa- do, por reubicación de servicios avanzados, o por falta de uso, provocada por la aparición de nuevos centros especializados (de negocios, comerciales, direccionales, etc.) y de grandes conjuntos habi- tacionales periféricos que tienen garantizado su acceso y conexión con el resto de la ciudad, gra- cias a las infraestructuras de transporte. Constatamos que “urbanidad y centralidad, son conceptos complementarios, interdependientes y muy vinculados a la figura de la ciudad” (Busquets, 1987: 10). El término centro2 según la definición del diccionario de la RAE proviene del latín centrum, y éste del griego kévtpov, “aguijón, punta del compás en la que se apoya el trazado de la circunfe- 1 Este concepto se refiere a las “buenas maneras” o condiciones de calidad del espacio urbano perceptibles por el ciudada- no, el cual ha sido abordado por varios autores. Ver: “Por otra urbanidad”, Bohigas (1986), “Urbanidad material”, en M. De Solà Morales (2008), “Centralitat i implantació urbana”, Busquets (1987) 2 Centro: “Punto interior que aproximadamente equidista de los límites de una figura, superficie, territorio, etc. / Lugar de donde parten o donde convergen acciones particulares coordinadas. / Punto donde habitualmente se reúnen los miem- bros de una sociedad o corporación. / Ministerio, dirección general o cualquier otra dependencia de la Administración del Estado. / Parte central de una ciudad o de un barrio. / Punto o calles más concurridas de una población o en las cuales hay más actividad comercial o burocrática. / Lugar en el que se desarrolla más intensamente una actividad determinada. C. comercial, C. industrial. / Lugar donde se reúnen, acuden o concentran personas o grupos por algún motivo o finalidad. / Lugar donde se reúne o produce algo en cantidades importantes. / etc.” Diccionario de la Lengua Española, vigésima segunda edición. Real Academia de la Lengua Española, 2009. Espacios de centralidad urbana y redes de infraestructura Dossier central 125125 rencia”. Por lo tanto, tal centro se establece como la relación exis- tente entre el punto –origen del círculo–con toda el área contenida en el perímetro que tiene ese punto de origen. Por lo tanto, un centro como espacio sería un lugar que, concentrado en un pun- to, tiene la capacidad de atraer y de influir en un ámbito espacial más amplio, cuyo alcance e importancia relativa varían según las características del centro como tal y, a la vez, de las condiciones de relación con otros espacios y con el entorno. En términos urba- nos, Roberto Barocchi además de identificar varios tipos de cen- tros (centro histórico, centros ubicados en zonas extra-urbanas y centros con usos especializados) plantea la dificultad de su delimi- tación en términos de planificación urbana, dado que se suele ana- lizar y planificar la ciudad mediante lógicas de zonificación, a partir de la diferenciación de los usos, donde al máximo se llega más o menos a identificar y dar denominación a una sola zona específica, el centro histórico (Barocchi, 1982). Para Panerai y Mangin, existen tres grandes categorías de centros: los centros históricos, que coinciden con los centros tradi- cionales y mantienen su vitalidad cuando se garantiza su identidad en el tiempo; los centros corredor, ubicados en barrios modernos, dispuestos a lo largo de las grandes vías de acceso estructuran- do relaciones urbanas mediante usos comerciales y de ocio; y los grandes centros comerciales, que se disponen estratégicamente en el territorio y buscan competir con los anteriores. En los centros más reconocibles sus cualidades urbanas se deben a la mezcla de usos y a la superposición y coexistencia de actividades variadas (comercial, institucional, administrativa y asociada a equipamien- tos culturales, de ocio y educativas). Esto explica que la definición de espacios centrales parte de algunos usos principales; el comer- cio ejerce un papel aglutinador, al que se añaden la presencia insti- tucional, administrativa y simbólica del poder, y los equipamientos educativos, de cultura y ocio que también actúan como espacios de atracción en el espacio urbano (Panerai y Mangin, 2002). Por su lado Beaujeu-Garnier plantea tres tipos de centros, histórico, topológico y de negocios, cuyas características son visua- les, estructurales y/o funcionales y dependen de su evolución eco- nómica, técnica y de las condiciones políticas, condiciones opuestas a las de la periferia (Beaujeu-Garnier, citado en Merlin y Choay, 1988). A partir de una visión geográfica, con el término centro se identifican diferentes ámbitos: una parte privilegiada de la ciudad, calificada a menudo como city (ej. la City de Londres)3; y la ciudad principal dentro de una aglomeración urbana formada por una red urbana, regional o nacional de ciudades. Igualmente, se llama centro al pueblo que dentro de un área rural adquiere un rol principal respecto a otros núcleos más pequeños. También pueden aparecer polaridades secundarias que conforman sub- centros: centros del barrio, pequeños ejes comerciales, nuevos centros administrativos, o centralidades emergentes con poten- ciales aun débilmente reconocibles que acabarán reforzándose como nuevas centralidades o se incorporarán a los centros exis- tentes (Panerai y Mangin, 2002). 3 En esa misma línea aparecen voces en diversas lenguas con significados más o menos equivalentes (urban centre, city centre, downtown, central city, centre-ville, centre de la ville, centre urbain, coeur de ville, innenstadt, stadtmitte, städtisches zentrum, centro da cidade, centro della città, etc.) Son considerados como centros los espacios que con un rol de polo, ya sea rural o urbano, establecen relaciones de relativa im- portancia con su entorno, debido a una característica implícita de esos centros de atraer y concentrar algún tipo de actividades con influencia dentro de un área que va más allá de su mismo núcleo. A la vez, además de un centro principal en la ciudad reconocido como lugar central de máximo nivel, existen subcentros extraurba- nos que se extienden hacía al territorio circundante, y subcentros intraurbanos dentro de los límites la misma aglomeración (Demat- teis, 1966). Esta situación nos aproxima a una realidad urbana com- pleja en donde coexisten multiplicidad de centros. Hablar de “centro” en urbanismo y geografía implica su definición compleja como “punto medio o central de un espacio cualquiera; como punto central dotado de propiedades activas dinámicas; y como punto de convergencia o de radiación, donde las actividades se concentran” (Le Petit Robert, 1986: 274), en estas definiciones se destacan, por lo tanto, el valor de su posición, su capacidad de atracción de flujos y su capacidad de concentrar ac- tividades. Un centro, entonces, no es punto, es un espacio que se formaliza de diferentes maneras, es un área de concentración de actividades y de relación con otras áreas, y que atrae flujos, o sea se trata de una condición espacial que está implícitamente vincu- lada a las lógicas de conectividad. En este sentido entra en juego un tema primordial, el de la relación centros-infraestructura, o sea la manifestación de una relación estructural para la ciudad y el te- rritorio, que influye tanto en su forma como en su organización funcional (Lynch, (1961) “The Pattern of Metropolis” y (1954) “The Form of the Cities”, citados en Lynch, Banerjee, Southworth 1995)4. A partir de estas premisas y reflexiones, es inevitable ha- blar de “espacios de centralidad” sin hablar de “redes y espacios de infraestructuras”: los centros se han multiplicado, pero tam- bién se ha ido perdiendo su valor de identidad urbana, ya sea por exceso de especialización o por autismo urbano o territorial; mientras que las vías –los elementos urbanos que tienden a per- manecer más en el territorio, frente a la edificación y a la parcela- ción– han ido perdiendo su papel estructurante en el territorio y en la ciudad y, además, se han convertido en unos de los princi- pales agentes de su desarticulación. La calle, con función de conexión longitudinal y trans- versal entre los edificios y los espacios públicos, y espacio de in- tegración y de articulación, se ha banalizado convirtiéndose en espacio exclusivo del flujo y causante de segregación5. Enfoque que en los años sesenta del siglo XX tuvo su apogeo en la cons- trucción de calles rápidas (urbanas o extraurbanas) concebidas 4 Lynch ha definido tanto los elementos cruciales de la forma metropolitana: ca- minos nodos y distritos especiales, el sistema de caminos principales (calles, vías férreas, canales, “caminos”, vías aéreas); el sistema de centros mayores, espacios focales y nodos; y las áreas o distritos especiales, como también unos modelos urbanos: en plano disperso, en galaxia urbana, en estrella, en ring y en red poli- céntrica. 5 “Durante mucho tiempo se ha buscado en el trazado de la ciudad el elemento más estable, aquel que constituiría la matriz de todas las distribuciones urbanas. Casas y calles, espacios edificados y espacios abiertos sufren con mayor facilidad, en sus dimensiones y cantidad, los efectos de los cambios económicos y sociales. Se llega así a una superposición de niveles, de duración y límites estructurales desiguales” (Roncayolo, 1988: 66). julio - diciembre de 2012 Miguel Y. Mayorga, Maria Pia Fontana 21126126 21 para una capacidad de respuesta a importantes desplazamien- tos producidos en el ámbito urbano, donde se asumió el uso del automóvil como medio de transporte principal. Las prioridades proyectuales, en estos casos, asumieron el máximo rendimiento en términos de velocidad y de seguridad, sin atender a aspec- tos morfológicos y de relación con el entorno, tales como el pai- saje, el relieve y el tejido urbano o entorno construido. Frente a esta manera de concebir el viario en la ciudad, varios autores (Buchanan, 1973; Mumford, 1963; Jacobs, 1961) denunciaron en su momento la problemática del automovil en las ciudades, en detrimento del espacio público y del espacio urbano en general. La calle, que históricamente ha sido un elemento urbano con desarrollo longitudinal que establecía relaciones con su en- torno a lo largo de sus bordes y focalizada en los cruces, muestra una pérdida de relación con al adquirir una autonomía y tridimen- sionalidad propia inusitada, hecho que ha provocado procesos de degradación del espacio urbano contemporáneo por el distancia- miento entre sus ele mentos constitutivos, tanto en la planta como en el alzado: bordes totalmente cerrados y segregados, trazados con geometrías de difícil encaje con el entorno, separación respec- to a la topografía, existencia de pasos sobreelevados o en túnel y enlaces a distinto nivel y con exceso de ramales generan una gran ocupación y despilfarro de suelo urbano y producen importantes efectos de barrera, corte y frontera en el territorio (Herce, 2009). Lefebvre describe el problema de la ciudad actual como una falta de composición y relación con el territorio, una “des- composición analítica” de las funciones y de las necesidades (Le- febvre, 1971). Cada disciplina que tiene su campo de acción sobre el espacio urbano, se ha ensimismado realizando propuestas que Figura 1. Ejemplos de proyectos de infraestructuras viarias que potencian urbanidad y centralidad en torno al espacio calle, en distintas épocas y escalas: a. La Strada Nuova de Génova (principios del siglo XVII), b. Ringstrasse de Viena (1900) y c. Propuesta del Ring Road “Ring Culture” de Amberes (Neutilings, 1989). Infraestructura Volumetría a. b. Programa Usos del suelo c. Espacios de centralidad urbana y redes de infraestructura Dossier central 127127 conviven sobre un mismo territorio sin interactuar entre ellas, di- cha problemática la denunciaba también Buchanan: “No se trata de proyectar arterias o edificios sino de proyectar ambas cosas simultáneamente, dentro de un solo y único planteamiento” (Bu- chanan, 1973). Así, los nuevos centros especializados, sin identidad y sin calidad urbana, han sido promovidos gracias a estas calles segre- gadas y anti-urbanas, con una implícita relación entre centralidad y conectividad basada en parámetros totalmente diferentes res- pecto a los de la ciudad tradicional. En la ciudad compacta mo- nocéntrica las calles principales llegaban a un centro, y la relación entre centro e infraestructura se basaba en una jerarquía de re- laciones ciudad/campo y ciudad/centro, y el centro de la ciudad era el lugar de referencia e identidad inequívoco de la colectivi- dad a partir de relaciones de conexión pero también de proximi- dad y de concentración de actividades. Las calles siempre han sido “algo más que un servicio público, más que una serie de espacios físicos lineales que po- sibilitan el desplazamiento. Son también lugares de encuentro e intercambio, tanto desde el punto de vista social como comer- cial; el medio donde unas personas se encuentran las unas a las otras, y esta es la principal razón de ser de las ciudades” (Jacobs, 1995), además, en todas la épocas han existido propuestas urba- nas ejemplares y “grandes calles” que así lo constatan (figura 1). estrictamente por el planeamiento –zoning–, ni la infraestructu- ra deberá considerarse solo como un simple canal de flujo –red tubería– (Dupuy, 1997), el espacio de centralidad y el espacio y repercusión espacial de las redes de infraestructura, deberán ser asumidos como solidarios y complementarios en los procesos de la construcción y transformación de la ciudad (figura 2). Figura 2. Análisis de la centralidad en Barcelona: a. Forma construida y base geográ- fica, b. Centro geométrico o área central, c. Centros locales y núcleos históricos, y d. Centralidad urbana distribuida en zonas y corredores de mayor actividad. Fuente: Reelaboración a partir de Sergio Porta et al. (2007). Las ciudades actuales podrían tender a ser casi todas poli- céntricas, pues el proceso de urbanización del territorio se ha apo- yado –y siempre cada vez más– en las redes de infraestructuras de transporte y comunicación, produciendo nuevos espacios y siste- mas de centros, donde la idea de centro debería acercarse más a la “noción” de centralidad urbana, o sea a la capacidad de un lugar de ser centro, de ser reconocido, utilizado o apropiado socialmente como un espacio de confluencia. Tengamos en cuenta que cen- tralidad es una palabra compuesta por dos partes, una, relativa al centro, y otra, que surge del sufijo “dad”, es decir, que se trata de un adjetivo que representa “la cualidad de centro”6. Esto significa que en la ciudad esta cualidad es un valor diferencial atribuible a espacios o lugares que poseen la capacidad de destacarse, de ser importantes, de ser referencia focal, de ser espacio de concentra- ción, de convergencia-divergencia de relaciones de diverso tipo. Este valor representa una noción de difícil delimitación espacial estrechamente relacionada a la posición, pero también a la jerar- quía que ocupa dicho espacio o lugar respecto a sus relaciones, sus límites de influencia y a los otros centros, una noción variable en el tiempo y el espacio. A este punto, la centralidad no deberá ser considerada más como un punto o zona fija o determinada 6 -dad. Sufijo de origen latino que en español forma, a partir de adjetivos, swus- tantivos abstractos de cualidad: artificialidad (‘cualidad de artificial’), vistosidad (‘cualidad de vistoso’). La forma -dad aparece solamente detrás de las conso- nantes “n”, “l” o “r” en sustantivos que proceden directamente del latín, como cristiandad, crueldad, igualdad, maldad, vecindad, verdad, etc., o en creaciones tempranas en castellano, como hermandad, liviandad y ruindad; pero no se em- plea en la actualidad en la creación de sustantivos abstractos a partir de adjeti- vos. Hoy, este sufijo, dependiendo del adjetivo al que se une, adopta las variantes -idad, -edad o -eidad. Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, 2005, Real Academia Española. Asumiendo esta interdependencia entre centralidad e infraestructura, ¿cuáles serían las condiciones que garantizan la calidad de esta relación en términos urbanos, o sea su habitabili- dad y urbanidad? a. b. c. d. julio - diciembre de 2012 Miguel Y. Mayorga, Maria Pia Fontana 21128128 21 El sentido de urbanidad de los asentamientos –entendido como percepción de la calidad urbana–, y el sentido de pertenencia a un lugar –entendido como percepción del grado de ciudadanía–, quedan obviados por la pérdida de identidad del centro principal y por la dispersión de las actividades en centros especializados a par- tir de relaciones de conexión entre lugares –distantes pero accesi- bles en un tiempo reducido–. La respuesta, por lo tanto, consistiría, por un lado, en promover el derecho a la centralidad (Borja, 2009)7 al inducir cambios tanto en las prácticas sociales como en las formas urbanas, y al conformar centralidades en donde se anteponga la re- lación de apropiación del lugar por encima de la dominación que es más imperante dentro del modelo capitalista de producción del es- pacio urbano (Lefebvre, 1971)8, Y, por otro lado, en volver a articular los elementos urbanos con proyectos de centralidad que planteen la relación e integración física y funcional entre el espacio de la mo- vilidad y el espacio de la estancia, entre los flujos y las actividades, mediante operaciones que permitan re-estructurar, re-componer y re-habilitar la ciudad existente. La urbanidad en cuatro proyectos de centralidad urbana Apropiación, en términos sociales, e integración, en térmi- nos urbanísticos, son dos aspectos determinantes para comprobar el grado de urbanidad de un espacio de centralidad. Propone- mos el análisis de cuatro casos de estudio –uno latinoamericano (1950-1982) y tres europeos (entre 1989 y 1995)–, que son todavía espacios de transformación urbana y que han sido visitados por los autores para identificar las estrategias urbanas, los criterios proyectuales y las soluciones urbano-arquitectónicas aplicadas para cada uno de ellos. El Centro Tequendama-Bavaria, en Bogotá, y la Illa Diagonal, en Barcelona, surgen de una forma de actuación donde unos proyectos urbanos-centros principales irradian cen- tralidad directamente hacía su entorno y hacía la ciudad existente (figuras 3a y 3b); mientras que Euralille, en Lille, y Rive Gauche, en París, son grandes operaciones urbanas, dentro de las que recono- cemos un ámbito que ejerce el papel de centro principal (figuras 3c y 3d). Los cuatro proyectos que representan diferentes formas de actuación –conforman diferentes sistemas de centralidad y variados tipos de centralidad según los usos y muestran diversas soluciones de integración con las infraestructuras de movilidad y el entorno urbano–permiten confrontar respuestas distintas a un problema común, el de la relación infraestructura/centralidad e infraestructura/espacio urbano, hecho que nos permite verificar el grado de urbanidad de cada proyecto. 7 Todas las áreas de la ciudad deben poseer lugares con valor de centralidad y to- dos sus habitantes deberían poder acceder con igual facilidad a los centros urba- nos o metropolitanos. La articulación de los centros viejos y nuevos, el acceso y la recualificación de los centros históricos no solo de la ciudad central sino también de las áreas periféricas, la creación de nuevas centralidades polivalentes en sus funciones y mixtas en su composición social son elementos consubstanciales de la democracia urbana (Borja, 2009). 8 “Con este término [apropiación] no nos referimos a propiedad; es más, se trata de algo totalmente distinto; se trata del proceso según el cual un individuo o grupo se apropia, transforma en su bien, algo exterior”. (Lefebvre, 1971: 186). a. Conjunto Tequendama-Bavaria, en Bogotá (1950-1982), nú- cleo catalizador del sector Centro Internacional, que conforma una centralidad expandida del centro histórico. Superficie: 4,5 ha. Proyectistas: Holabird, Root y Burgee (Hotel Tequendama), Cuéllar, Serrano y Gómez (Conjunto Tequendama), Obregón y Valenzuela con Pizano, Pradilla y Caro (Conjunto Bavaria). b. Proyecto Illa Diagonal, en Barcelona (1990-1993), comple- jo comercial, hotelero, de oficinas y equipamiento, que es el núcleo del área de nueva centralidad de los Juegos Olímpicos de Barcelona 1992, denominada Diagonal-Sarria. Superficie 5,7 ha. Proyectistas: Manuel de Solà Morales, Rafael Moneo y otros. c. Operación Euralille, en Lille (1989-1994), cuyo núcleo prin- cipal es el conjunto Estación TAV- Torres de hotel y oficinas- Centro comercial, Superficie: 120 ha. Proyectistas: OMA, Rem Koolhaas (Plan urbanístico), Claude Vasconti (WTC), Christian de Portzamparc (Torre Lyonnais), François y Marie Delhay (ho- tel), Jean Marie Duthilleul (Estación TAV), Jean Nouvel (centro comercial), Rem Koolhaas (Grand Palais), Gilles Clément (par- que), y otros. Espacios de centralidad urbana y redes de infraestructura Dossier central 129129 El conjunto Tequendama-Bavaria en Bogotá El Centro Internacional es una zona que se ha consolida- do en el área de San Diego de Bogotá, al norte del centro histó- rico –a 1,5 km de la plaza principal, plaza de Bolívar–, en donde se han localizado edificios representativos de entidades finan- cieras y bancarias, hoteles, edificios de oficinas y de vivienda, junto a importantes parques y equipamientos. Su ámbito cen- tral, que acá se denomina Centro Tequendama-Bavaria, es un destacado conjunto urbano que dio inicio al proceso de conso- lidación del área, que no se basó en un proyecto o plan general, ni tampoco obedeció a las lógicas exactas de un master plan, pero que, sin embargo, se materializó bajo una “idea de centro” con reglas, premisas y criterios proyectuales comunes (Téllez, 1988; Salazar, 2008; Mayorga y Fontana, 2011; Fontana, 2012), as- pecto que permitió su conformación gradual a partir de pautas implícitas (Fontana, 2012). El conjunto, construido entre 1950 y 1982, está formado por ocho edificios en altura, compuestos volumétricamente por cuerpos bajos y altos: el Hotel Tequendama y dos conjuntos que denominamos Conjunto Tequendama y Conjunto Bavaria. El Hotel Tequendama9 –hito y principal sede de la activi- dad hotelera por mucho tiempo– es el edificio que da inicio a la construcción de todo el centro hotelero y de negocios. El Con- junto Tequendama10 está compuesto por cuatro edificios: edificio 9 El Hotel Tequendama (1950-1953; ampliado en 1978). Proyectistas: Holabird-Root- Burgee. Ampliación: Cuéllar-Serrano-Gómez. Constructores: Cuéllar-Serrano- Gómez. Usos: comercio, hotel. 10 El Conjunto Tequendama (1952-1982). Proyectistas: Cuéllar-Serrano-Gómez. Constructores: Cuéllar-Serrano-Gómez. Usos: oficinas, hotel, comercio, ocio. Bochica (oficinas/comercio), edificio Residencias Tequendama Sur (hotel/comercio), edificio-conjunto Bachué (teatro/comercio/ofi- cinas) y edificio Residencias Tequendama Norte (hotel/comercio). Es un proyecto unitario en su concepción pero realizado en dis- tintas fases entre 1952 y 1982, a partir de la agregación de edificios individuales en un arco temporal muy amplio. El Conjunto Bava- ria11 está formado por tres edificios, dos de viviendas y uno de oficinas, superpuestos a un gran cuerpo bajo único de dos/tres plantas de altura. Es un proyecto unitario en su ideación y en su ejecución, llevado a cabo entre 1962 y 1965. A nivel metropolitano el Centro Tequendama-Bavaria hace parte de la estructura lineal de centros del centro expandido de la ciudad12, es área de intersección entre el principal sistema de ca- lles longitudinal centro-norte (carreras Séptima, Décima y Trece); y del importante eje centro-occidente (Calle 26, también llamada avenida Eldorado), que establece una conexión directa del centro con el aeropuerto (figura 4a). A nivel urbano consolida la secuen- cia de espacios urbanos emblemáticos que a partir de la plaza de Bolívar y a lo largo de la carrera Séptima estructuran el centro prin- cipal (Mayorga, 2008). Finalmente, a nivel urbano-arquitectónico, los edificios dispuestos dentro de la amplia manzana (definida por las carreras Décima y Séptima, al oriente; por la carrera Trece, al oc- cidente; por la calle 26/avenida. al sur; y por la calle 29, al norte), conforman un conjunto en el que la secuencia de espacios libres y recorridos peatonales interiores a la manzana, y las soluciones ar- quitectónicas y urbanas adoptadas en planta baja, garantizan con- tinuidad, permeabilidad y transparencia (Mayorga y Fontana, 2011). A nivel viario se plantean relaciones urbanas de proximidad hacia el centro histórico (carreras Séptima, Décima, Trece) y de conectividad directa hacia el aeropuerto (por la calle 26, vía tipo autopista urba- na). La conformación de circuitos para atravesar a pie el conjunto mediante pasajes interiores y exteriores cubiertos, la prolongación de las calles existentes en correspondencia con espacios comercia- les y privados con acceso público, así como la superposición de las calles longitudinales (carreras Séptima, Décima y Trece) respecto al viaducto de la calle 26, en continuidad y conexión con el centro histórico, son condiciones que garantizan integración entre este espacio urbano y su entorno (figura 4b). El Centro Tequendama- Bavaria, es un espacio central que favorece la apropiación social y establece formas de integración con los espacios de movilidad por su valor simbólico; por su localización estratégica; por incorporar en su ámbito usos culturales y espacios públicos; por configurar un polo terciario, hotelero y cultural, que se mezcla con el comercio y la vivienda; y por conformar un sistema unitario de espacios urbanos que resuelven la relación con la ciudad a nivel peatonal (figura 4c). Actualmente su condición de urbanidad está sometida a riesgo13. 11 El Conjunto Bavaria (1962-1965). Proyectistas: Obregón-Valenzuela y Pizano-Pradilla- Caro. Constructores: Pizano-Pradilla-Caro. Usos: vivienda, oficinas, comercio, ocio. 12 En el planeamiento y a nivel descriptivo en la ciudad de Bogotá se ha denomi- nado centro expandido a la zona central de Bogotá que sin límites claros agrupa actividades terciarias y comerciales en torno al centro histórico. 13 Las troncales de autobuses articulados de Transmilenio, que se plantea que pa- sen por el sector central de la ciudad, poseen dimensiones y características de vías especializadas que pueden causar efecto barrera. Por otra parte, también hay discusiones sobre la construcción de la primera línea del metro, y también se estudia re-densificar el entorno del centro internacional mediante edificios en torres de gran altura. Todas estas propuestas pueden afectar ambientalmente el entorno del conjunto Tequendama-Bavaria. Figura 3. Comparación de centralidades urbanas: a. y b. Proyectos urbanos que ejercen de centro-núcleo para promover la centralidad hacía su entorno de manera directa. c. y d. Grandes operaciones urbanas con un centro-núcleo principal que irradia centralidad de manera indirecta. Fuente: Mayorga, a partir de GoogleEarth, 2011. d. Operación Paris Rive Gauche (1991-2011), amplia zona de transformación urbana que tiene como núcleo la Biblioteca Nacional de Francia y que pretende extender la centralidad desde el centro histórico de París. Superficie: 130 ha. Pro- yectistas: Roland Schweitzer (sector Tolbiac), Pierre Gang- net (sector Tolbiac-Chevaleretr), Christian de Portzamparc (sector Massena), Bruno Fortier (rue du Chevaleret), Paul Andreu (avenue de France), Dominique Perrault (Biblioteca Nacional de Francia) y Christian Devillers (edificio Insight). julio - diciembre de 2012 Miguel Y. Mayorga, Maria Pia Fontana 21130130 21 Figura 4. (1950-1982) Bogotá. Centro Tequendama-Bavaria: centralidad en continui- dad, polaridad de uso hotelero-terciario y relaciones infraestructurales de proximidad y conexión. La Illa Diagonal de Barcelona La llamada Illa –o manzana–, localizada en la avenida Diago- nal de Barcelona14, hace parte de una de las estrategias urbanas de nueva centralidad más conocidas a nivel internacional, las Áreas de Nueva Centralidad (ANC), que constituyó el marco general de las pro- puestas de transformación de la ciudad para los Juegos Olímpicos de 1992. “La estrategia de ANC para Barcelona asume el rol de instru- mento de promoción económica y reequilibrio urbano” (Busquets, 1987). Se plantearon inicialmente 4 zonas olímpicas principales a las cuales se agregaron otras 8, para un total de 12 áreas de oportuni- dad15, en espacios con actividades en obsolescencia o intersticios en la ciudad consolidada, lugares con localización estratégica y con condiciones de accesibilidad previas y/o futuras (figura 5a). En el área de oportunidad Diagonal-Sarriá, en una man- zana de forma triangular –solar del antiguo Hospital de Sant Joan de Deu– y objeto de un concurso internacional de ideas16, a partir del cual se construyó el proyecto de la Illa Diagonal (1992, Manuel de Solà-Morales, Rafael Moneo17), un amplio complejo de usos mixtos18, comercial, de oficinas, hotelero y de ocio. Desde 1950 el entorno vecino de la plaza Francesc Macià adquiría un gran va- lor de centralidad a pesar de su distancia al centro de negocios tradicional –a 1,3 kilómetros del paseo de Gracia–, y a lo largo de la Diagonal se presentaba una estructura de centralidad inter- mitente, por lo cual se plantearon desde 1958 propuestas para extender la centralidad hacia zonas periféricas19. Después de la apertura del primer cinturón de Ronda y de la construcción del centro comercial en el cruce de la calle Carlos III con la Diagonal, se impulsó un proceso de terciarización que caracterizo el tramo de la Diagonal desde la plaza Francesc Macià hasta la zona Uni- versitaria, quedando el ámbito de la Illa entre estos dos nodos de actividades –a 800 m y 1.600 m, respectivamente–. El nuevo centro está localizado en la parte sur oriental del ensanche de Barcelona, sobre la avenida Diagonal, en el barrio 14 La ejecución de la red viaria básica del sector había quedado pendiente por la existencia de grandes solares, “la Diagonal ha permanecido subutilizada como vía principal de acceso y de distribución del tráfico hacia el centro por la inexis- tencia de las calles transversales que le dan coherencia al sistema viario. La re- ciente apertura de Numancia y Entença, y la prevista de las calles Gandesa y Dr. Fleming, acabarán de facilitar una correcta accesibilidad al sector conectando los barrios de Sarriá y Les Corts con el sector izquierdo de Eixample y Montjuic” (Busquets, 1987: 24). 15 1. Diagonal-Sarrià. 2. Carrer Tarragona. 3. Renfe-Meridiana. 4. Plaça Cerdà. 5. Car- les I-Avinguda Icària. 6. Port Urbà. 7. Plaça de les Glòries. 8. Vall d’Hebron. 9. Sagre- ra. 10. Diagonal-Prim. 11. Zona universitària. 12. Montjuic. De estas 12 áreas Carles I-Avinguda Icària, Vall d’Hebron, Zona universitària y Montjuic, hacían parte del proyecto olímpico de Barcelona 92. 16 El Servicio de Planemiento del Ayuntamiento de Barcelona convocó para parti- cipar en el concurso a reconocidos arquitectos como Mario Botta, Wilheim Holz- bauer, Giancarlo de Carlo, Derek J. Walker y Manuel de Solà y Rafael Moneo. 17 Con la colaboración de: Mariano Moneo, ingeniero de Caminos Canales y Puer- tos, y Luis Tobella, Antón Pámies, Andrea Casiraghi, Francesc Santacana, Lucho Marcial, Felix Wettstein, arquitectos. 18 La superficie del solar es de 34 hectáreas y el programa de usos es: residencial (35.110 m2), oficinas (72.395 m2), hotelero (55.600 m2), deportivo-recreativo (5.784 m2) y comercial (73.385 m2). La gestión se realizó mediante la participación de la iniciativa privada promovida sectorialmente. 19 Plan Especial de la Diagonal, de 1958. a. Ejes de centralidad y centralidades urbanas en los años ochenta. Fuente: Mayorga sobre imagen, revista Escala, No. 154. b. Planta baja y sección urbana. Fuente: Fontana, 2010. c. Vistas del conjunto desde la ca- rrera Séptima, desde el espacio libre interior del conjunto Tequendama y del acceso peatonal al conjunto Bava- ria. Fuente: archivo autores, 2008. Espacios de centralidad urbana y redes de infraestructura Dossier central 131131 Les Corts, una zona residencial y de oficinas. Todo el ámbito se convierte en una amplia supermanzana conformada y conecta- da en sentido sur-norte por la calle Numancia y la calle Entença (relacionada con la plaza Francesc Maciá) y por la calle Constança, prolongación de la calle Caravel·la de la Niña, que no pierde su continuidad y atraviesa el proyecto con un tramo soterrado bajo la avenida Diagonal, llegando a la calle de Déu i Mata. La conexión del sector en automóvil y autobús se ha garantizado desde el prin- cipio, y más recientemente la inserción de la red del tranvía ha me- jorado la conectividad, mientras que las estaciones de metro no se encuentran a distancias cercanas. Por otro lado, la accesibilidad peatonal está garantizada gracias a la sección de la avenida Dia- gonal caracterizada por amplios espacios de circulación. La Illa Diagonal está compuesta por cinco volúmenes dispuestos perimetralmente respecto a las calles del entorno y alrededor de un espacio libre central: un gran bloque principal esca- lonado en su remate con un rascasuelos de 400 metros de longitud localizado a lo largo de la avenida Diagonal, con el centro comercial ubicado en planta baja y sótano; un hotel (L’Illa) en las plantas supe- riores; un edificio de oficinas preexistente sobre la calle Entença; un centro escolar y un equipamiento deportivo de nueva implantación sobre la calle Numancia; otro edificio con uso hotelero (Hotel NH) sobre la calle Dèu i Mata, y un pequeño edificio cúbico que alberga el auditorio (Auditorio Axa y discoteca) (figura 5b). La Illa Diagonal es un espacio central a diferentes escalas: destaca formalmente por su volumen principal sobre la Diago- nal, un gran bloque unitario con identidad formal, que sin re- currir a arquitecturas llamativas colabora para dar continuidad en planta y en alzado a la avenida. Los usos existentes en el barrio (vivienda) y la mezcla de nuevos usos a escala de barrio (equipamientos y parque), así como de usos-ancla principales – con potencial de atracción más amplio a nivel comercial (gran superficie-supermercado, Decathlon, Fnac, Auditorio) o con uso terciario u hotelero, confieren mucha vitalidad al centro–. La ca- lle peatonal comercial interior, intersecada por varios pasajes y ámbito de acceso transversales, el espacio público de la avenida Diagonal, el parque y los espacios interiores de la manzana, es- tán conectados mediante un sistema de recorridos peatonales en planta baja –de propiedad privada pero acceso libre– que ga- rantizan la apropiacion del espacio urbano y la definición de un espacio-calle permeable e integrado con el entorno (figura 5c). Figura 5. (1990-1993) Barcelona. Illa Diagonal: centralidad en continuidad, polaridad terciaria-comercial y relaciones infraestructurales de proximidad. Euralille en Lille Eurallille es una operación de renovación urbana de in- fluencia a escala metropolitana y europea que incide a escala lo- cal urbana. Tuvo como objetivo conformar un nuevo centro de actividades terciarias en la ciudad, en torno a la nueva estación del TGV (Tren de Gran Velocidad), un nodo infraestructural y de actividades, un hub internacional interconectado con el nordeste de Europa20, que a nivel económico y de empleo da respuesta al 20 Las decisiones internacionales y nacionales de construir el canal de La Mancha y de plantear un nuevo trazado del TGV, en su paso por Lille, le convierten en un nodo estratégico en el centro del triángulo que conecta las ciudades de París (60 min.), Londres (80 min.) y Bruselas (40 min.) Sus condiciones de uso, conexión y a. Estrategia de Áreas de Nueva Centralidad en Barcelona con localización de la Illa Diagonal. Fuente: Mayorga, 2009. b. Planta baja y sección urbana. Fuente: Mayorga sobre base tomada de Zardini, 1999. c. Vistas desde la Diagonal, desde la calle Constança y vista del interior del centro co- mercial. Fuente: www.manueldesola.com julio - diciembre de 2012 Miguel Y. Mayorga, Maria Pia Fontana 21132132 21 lico el conjunto crea una imagen mediática representativa de Li- lle, a partir de la acumulación y superposición de edificios y de elementos infraestructurales, proyectados mediante criterios de maximalismo formal y funcional25, y es una centralidad con usos mixtos que intenta crear un lugar compatible con la ciudad exis- tente. Sin embargo, las soluciones de continuidad urbana centro histórico - Euralille-Lille Este son limitadas física y visualmente, dado que el nodo infraestructural presenta una adherencia ter- minal asimétrica y parcial hacia el entorno, y la “riveranidad” de sus ejes viarios y espacios de movilidad es incierta. El mismo viaducto Le Corbusier, calle-puente en rampa que da acceso a la estación, es un elemento segregado, mientras que la calle hacia el oeste, entre el centro comercial y la antigua estación, así como la carretera bulevar Louis Pasteur son áreas de servicio del centro comercial y espacios de borde que no favorecen la articulación entre el conjunto y su entorno26. El conjunto es un espacio central por su uso logístico y de transporte, mientras que, respecto al uso terciario asociado a una baja densidad residencial y al flujo de paso de los viajeros, es un espacio urbano banal que ha traído algo de periferia a este nuevo centro27, convirtiendo Euralille en una ciudad complementaria a Lille (Morandi, 2004). 25 Koolhaas, el proyectista principal, retoma en este proyecto su aproximación teórica a la “ciudad genérica”, así reconoce un valor en el caos de la realidad me- tropolitana, y hace énfasis a nivel infraestructural en la idea de conseguir una “máxima superposición de redes”, y a nivel de espacio urbano, un espectáculo de la simbiosis entre cultura y economía. 26 Los bordes del proyecto hacia las calles perimetrales –del sur y el oriente–, re- presentan un problema de configuración a partir de la localización de usos y de relación con el entorno; el bulevar Louis Pasteur, sus enlaces y pasos a distinto nivel, son aspectos por resolver si se quiere establecer una continuidad física y visual con el costado oriental de Lille, así como también una conexión vehicular y peatonal más clara con el edificio Congrexpo. 27 “Cuando el proyecto anticipa con la mixtura de funciones, nada garantiza el resultado positivo de urbanidad. Sobre todo cuando la logística multiplica sus espacios y aumenta la complejidad funcional del sector” (Cuñat, 2000). Rive Gauche-Bibliothèque Nationale de France en París Las actuaciones urbanas de los últimos veinte años en París, se enmarcan en la realización de “los grandes proyectos”28 cuya programación, según directivas del Schema directeur de 1965, tuvo su referente en la planificación y en algunas políticas territoriales de escala metropolitana donde se ponía como obje- tivo el homogeneizar en cuanto a accesibilidad, las áreas centra- les y la periferia, la banlieu, a través de un consistente sistema de conexiones infraestructurales (Morandi, 2004:18). Las interven- ciones en infraestructura fueron la base de esta reorganización a través de la implantación de las villes nouvelles, y de la proyecta- ción de espacios públicos mediante el programa Banlieu 89. En cuanto a las actuaciones sobre el centro de París –es decir, el área dentro de la antigua muralla de Thiers–,en los años ochenta se propusieron una serie de proyectos para reorganizar la centrali- dad con actuaciones de carácter estatal y municipal, mediante una estrategia de aprovechamiento de espacios obsoletos y con po- 28 Impulsados en su momento por el presidente François Mitterrand y el alcalde Jacques Chirac. proceso de desindustrialización de la ciudad de Lille. Para su em- plazamiento se aprovecharon los espacios obsoletos y en desuso cercanos al centro histórico, en el centro de la ciudad de Lille y de toda la aglomeración metropolitana (Cuñat, 2000)21 y su pro- grama se basó en un centro de negocios con actividades mixtas (oficinas, centro comercial, hotel, ocio, etc.) vinculado a un inter- cambiador modal terrestre (ferroviario y viario principalmente). Euralille se sitúa en la parte oriental de la ciudad, en una zona intermedia entre el centro histórico y la periferia, y ocupa una parcela de gran tamaño, delimitada hacia el norte por el viaducto Le Corbusier, hacia el este por una calle paralela a la estación Lille- Flanders y hacía el oeste por una carretera denominada Bulevar Louis Pasteur. Actualmente el centro, que no ha sido desarrollado en su totalidad22, se encuentra en proceso de consolidación en sus relaciones respecto al entorno urbano (figura 6a). Euralille es un artefacto complejo, proyecto donde la in- fraestructura ferroviaria y viaria se incorporan en un intercambiador modal conformado por la estación del tren de alta velocidad Lille- Europe (con destinos Londres, Bruselas y Francia), un estaciona- miento de 1.370 plazas, la estación de metro y las paradas del tranvía. El viaducto Le Corbusier es el principal eje de conexión vehicular y peatonal entre el centro del municipio, la estación Lille-Flanders y la estación del TGV (figura 6b). En la esquina norte de la actual es- tación Lille-Flanders está ubicado el acceso al centro comercial que en su planta baja presenta dos ejes peatonales principales23. La nue- va estación del TGV, al este, es un cuerpo bajo sobre el cual se su- perponen tres torres alineadas (edificios World Trade Center, Credit Lyonnais y hotel). El centro incluye también el parque Henri Matisse, localizado al norte en un gran espacio interior de manzana, y al sur el Gran Palacio de Lille, llamado Congrexpo24, separado del conjunto por la carretera Louis Pasteur y las líneas férreas de la estación Lille Flanders. El principal espacio de conexión entre el centro existente, la antigua estación Lille Flanders y el centro comercial se produce a nivel de la calle en la Plaza des Buisses, en el costado norte de la estación, con el flujo de turistas y viajeros, así como de residentes y vecinos que van al centro comercial (figura 6c). Euralille ejemplifica una estrategia de centralidad urbana de tipo nodal, en torno a un elemento principal, el nodo de la estación TGV-Gare Lille Europe, con superposición e hibridación entre infraestructuras, edificación y espacio libre. A nivel simbó- dimensión harán que el centro de negocios Euralille se posicione como el tercero más importante de Francia. 21 “Se ubica en la periferia del centro urbano, aprovechando la devolución legal de los terrenos ocupados por la última muralla derrumbada entre los años 1920 y 1950. Aprovechando la disponibilidad de unas 120 hectáreas de terreno, se consi- gue hacer entrar el tren de alta velocidad (TGV) en el centro de la ciudad de Lille y de toda una aglomeración metropolitana”. Federico Cuñat i Lopez Zaragoza, conferencia, 7 de abril de 2000. 22 No se construyeron el ala sur de la estación ni la totalidad de las torres super- puestas previstas debido a problemas técnicos, pero en cambio, hacia los extre- mos sur y norte del complejo se tiene programado construir, en áreas cercanas, dos nuevos barrios. 23 Según Jean Nouvel, proyectista del centro comercial, se intentará en este gran espacio cubierto recrear una estructura tipo “pueblo” basada en la disposición de arquitecturas autónomas. 24 El palacio de congresos posee zonas de exposiciones, de congresos, sala de con- ciertos de rock y un estacionamiento de 1.230 plazas. Espacios de centralidad urbana y redes de infraestructura Dossier central 133133 Figura 6. (1989-1994) Lille. Euralille: centralidad nodal, polaridad terciaria-comercial y nodalidad infraestructural. a. Estrategia territorial y solar existente Fuente: www.zoomsurlille.fr/euralille y El Croquis. b. Implantación y planta baja del conjunto. Fuente: Mayorga, 2008. c. Relaciones con el entorno: plaza des Buisses entre Gare Lille-Flanders, vista desde el centro comercial Eura- lille al centro histórico, vista del Gare TGV Lille-Europe y torres Lyonnais y World Trade Center. Fuente: archivo autores. tencial relación infraestructural a distintas escalas, en los ámbitos nacional, metropolitano y también local. El sistema de centralidad propuesto planteó la potenciación, mediante nuevos usos, de un eje urbano que empieza en el noreste con el Bois de Boulogne, pasa por la avenida des Champs Élisées y la Ille de France, y se extiende al sureste por el río Sena hacia Bois de Vincennes. A partir de este eje se definió un área a su alrededor donde se dispusieron los denomina- dos “Grandes proyectos” (Grand Arche, Defense, Gare d’Orsay, Grand Louvre, Halles, Beauburg, Institut du Monde Arabe, Bastille Opera, Mi- nistère des Finances, Bibliothèque Nationale, Chaveleret-Jeane d’Arc, Tolbiac- Massena), intervenciones de diverso tamaño y función, con distintos procesos de gestión y tiempos de materialización, que han tenido repercusiones hasta la actualidad, en sus entornos específi- cos y en el sistema general de centralidad (figura 7a). Para mostrar en parte los efectos de las estrategias ur- banas en curso, nos centraremos en una de las intervenciones, la operación Rive Gauche-Bibliothèque Nationale François Mit- terrand, ubicada en la Rive Gauche, un área de transformación urbana que tiene como principal elemento de referencia este equipamiento. La propuesta de la Rive Gauche29 comprendió inicialmente la reordenación de tres barrios Austerlitz, Tolbiac y Massena, localizados en sucesión en la rivera oeste del Sena, y a nivel infraestructural comprendió el cubrimiento de las líneas férreas30, la construcción de la avenida de France y de una nueva línea de metro (Meteor 14), también la edificación de una nue- va sede para el Banco de Francia y la localización de la Université Paris VII. La Bibliothèque Nationale está en medio de Tolbiac en un sector comprendido entre dos ejes transversales al río Sena, el bulevar de Bercy y la rue Neue Tolbiac, y dos ejes paralelos, la avenida Quai François Mauriac con el muelle sobre el Sena, y la avenida de France, en colindancia con las líneas férreas que llegan a la vecina estación de Austerlitz (figura 7b). 29 En 1991 se realizó un Plan d’Amenagement de Zone –PAZ– y las transformaciones se iniciaron desde 1994, en un área total de 130 hectáreas, que se extienden a lo largo de una franja de dos kilómetros sobre la rivera suroeste del río Sena. 30 En un momento se discutió la posibilidad de trasladar la estación ferroviaria de Austerlitz; sin embargo la propuesta se abandonó por sus elevados costos. julio - diciembre de 2012 Miguel Y. Mayorga, Maria Pia Fontana 21134134 21 La biblioteca, ubicada en una manzana de grandes di- mensiones, ocupa una posición central en el sector donde las viviendas, oficinas, parques y equipamientos –a norte y sur– son de densidad media y escala de barrio. El bulevar de Bercy y la rue Neue de Tolbiac son dos calles de conexión este-oeste a través de puentes sobre el río. Frente al uso dominante de la bibliote- ca, con repercusiones urbanas más allá del barrio, se mezclaron a su alrededor usos y edificios de menor dimensión que produ- Figura 7. (1989-1995) París. Rive Gauche-Bibliothèque Nationale de France: centralidad en agregación, polaridad en equipamiento y relaciones infraestructurales de proximidad y conexión. a. Estrategia urbana de centralidades y localización de la Rive Gauche. Fuente: Macchi Cassia, 1991. b. Operación Rive Gauche e implantación urbana de la Bibliothèque Nationale. Fuente: www.parisrivegauche.com. c. Planta baja y sección urbana de la biblioteca. Fuente: elaboración propia a partir de Perrault, Ferre y Migayrou (1999). d. Vistas de la pasarela S. Beauvoir, del frente sobre Quai Mauriac y desde el costado Este del Sena. Fuente: archivo autores. Espacios de centralidad urbana y redes de infraestructura Dossier central 135135 jeron un cambio de escala a la intervención, que además aportó al equipamiento-ancla una relación de vecindad. La biblioteca monumental está elevada sobre una plataforma –excepto sobre la avenida de France–, y genera una nueva topografía más que una arquitectura31, con un bosque interior de acceso y con gradas en tres costados, que permite conformar un mirador hacia el río Sena y el entorno urbano (figura 7c). Las calles perimetrales están conformadas en sus bordes mediante las escaleras-gradas de ac- ceso a la biblioteca y la conexión hacia el Sena para llegar al parc de Bercy se realiza a través de un puente peatonal y de bicicleta. El edificio es un espacio central por su localización, por su valor simbólico en cuanto a lo arquitectónico, dado el gran tamaño y las dimensiones monumentales del proyecto, y por su condición de gran mirador urbano hacía el río y el entorno. Sin embargo, la respuesta indiferenciada de las fachadas y de los bordes de la plataforma que conforman la calle, provocan a nivel del pea- tón desorientación y falta de legibilidad de los accesos al edifi- cio, conformando espacios urbanos muy amplios y extendidos y poco articulados con la escala del barrio cercano (figura 7d). 31 “La Biblioteca Nacional en un cierto modo no existe, en el sentido de que el con- junto no tiene fachada principal, solo una entrada ostentosa y su centro formado por un vacío lleno de árboles. Los elementos visibles, las torres, no son accesibles. Además “se sube” a la biblioteca antes de acceder a ella como si se tratase no de una arquitectura sino de un territorio” (Perrault, 1995). Integración infraestructura- espacio urbano. Una cuestión de mediación: “rivenaridad” y adherencia en el espacio-calle Para Georges Amar, el movimiento representa un hecho esencial en la ciudad como generador de urbanidad: la “rivera- nidad” (Amar, 1993) es el tipo de relación que se establece entre la vía o canal para el movimiento, con los bordes de su entorno, y puede ser continua, discontinua o nula, mientras que la adhe- rencia (Demorgon, 1991) es la relación que se establece entre el modo de locomoción y el entorno, y esta puede ser terminal o longitudinal, es decir, puntual o en tramos. Los proyectos aquí analizados muestran un conjunto de aspectos que se deben te- ner en cuenta para la propuesta e implantación de centralidades urbanas, se hace énfasis en el papel crucial de las vías y espacios de movilidad para lograr su integración urbana y su apropiación social. Son centralidades urbanas caracterizadas por diferentes condiciones de “riveranidad” y adherencia32 (Brès, 2007), según las infraestructuras involucradas en cada caso (figura 8). 32 Es decir, una típica calle urbana, produce una relación constante de fricción con el entorno, una “riveranidad” continua con los bordes del espacio calle, y si en ella nos desplazamos a pie la “adherencia”, es decir la posibilidad de desplazarnos y de acceder a los edificios será longitudinal a lo largo de todo el eje. En el otro extremo tendríamos la movilidad en avión donde la “riveranidad” será nula y la adherencia será de tipo terminal en torno a los aeropuertos. Estas dos relaciones en conjunto establecerán entonces el grado de urbanidad de una infraestructura, asociado a las relaciones que favorece el espacio canal de movimiento y a la predisposición de un modo de movimiento a crear relaciones concretas con su entorno. Figura 8. “Riveranidad” de la vía y adherencia del movimiento según el tipo de vía. Fuente: Mayorga a partir de A. Brès (2007). Las condiciones de “riveranidad” y de adherencia se ma- terializan a partir de diferentes relaciones físicas, espaciales y/o funcionales continuas, discontinuas, puntuales o en red: por adya- cencia (por transparencia, permeabilidad, etc.); por conexión pun- tual (con puentes o conectores); por niveles (con superposiciones, elevaciones, enterramientos, etc.); por circuitos (recorridos o siste- mas de recorridos mediante itinerarios organizados o aleatorios). Así como mediante diferentes soluciones de relación por mezcla de usos, continuas, discontinuas o puntuales: por hibridación (cuando el espacio de la infraestructura alberga actividades dis- tintas, por ejemplo, espacios públicos, equipamientos, etc.); por acupunturas (repetición de las mismas actividades en secuencia a lo largo de un sistema infraestructural, por ejemplo, estaciones de metro, tranvía, etc.)33. En cada uno de los casos analizados, la rela- ción entre espacios de centralidad y espacios de infraestructura ha sido planteada y resuelta de diferentes maneras con resultados más o menos logrados en términos urbanos y con diferentes gra- dos de integración respecto al entorno y respecto a la ciudad. Vea- mos para cada uno de ellos cómo se concretan estas relaciones. El Centro Tequendama-Bavaria, una polaridad de uso hote- lero-terciario, propone soluciones de adyacencia respecto al viario perimetral en los costados oriental, sur y norte mediante relaciones de continuidad y permeabilidad en toda la planta baja; soluciones de adyacencia y niveles en el costado occidental hacía la carrera Trece ubicada a un nivel inferior de tres metros respecto a los es- pacios públicos, donde se garantizan las relaciones en planta baja mediante accesos y actividades y la conexion al nivel superior me- diante escaleras y vestíbulos públicos; además presenta soluciones de circuitos con recorridos y accesos peatonales. El espacio urbano 33 Las diferentes soluciones adoptadas en la resolución de la relación entre espa- cios de centralidad y espacios de movilidad están desarrolladas en diferentes casos de estudio en la tesis doctoral en elaboración de uno de los autores del texto. Espacios de centralidad urbana y redes de infraestructura (UPC-Barcelona), de Miguel Y. Mayorga. En este texto los casos de estudio son representativos de algunas de estas soluciones julio - diciembre de 2012 Miguel Y. Mayorga, Maria Pia Fontana 21136136 21 relaciones infraestructurales principales son de escala extraur- bana y las soluciones de relación entre espacio de la movilidad con el espacio urbano son mediante niveles y conexiones en el caso de la estación, de adyacencia en las calles perimetrales, y de circuitos en la planta baja del centro comercial. En todos los casos la “riveranidad” de las vías es baja por la escasa interacción con los bordes físicos y las actividades (figura 9c), y la adheren- cia infraestructura-espacio urbano se concentra puntualmente en la plaza de acceso al centro comercial y en los accesos a la estación del TGV. Estos aspectos hacen que en su conjunto el complejo Euralille funcione asimétricamente respecto a su inser- ción urbana, y que la estación funcione como un espacio nodal ensimismado y distante respecto a su entorno. La centralidad propuesta en París en la operación Rive Gauche, en torno a la Bibliothèque Nationale, es de tipo nodal respecto a un uso principal, un equipamiento de gran esca- la que, mediante una estrategia de difusión de centralidad a través de otros usos mixtos cercanos y de conexiones viarias y de tipo peatonal, pretende irradiar y concentrar flujos y urba- nidad35. En el proyecto de la biblioteca se han adoptado dife- rentes soluciones: por niveles para las tres calles perimetrales, configuradas mediante graderías-mirador, que generan poca permeabilidad, distanciamiento y aislamiento del edificio en su planta baja respecto al entorno; una solución por adyacencia en la avenida de France hacia el borde este, que garantiza en cambio relación directa con el barrio; una conexión puntual me- diante una pasarela peatonal sobre el río que sirve de canal de paso y mirador. La “riveranidad” de los ejes viarios y su potencial de arraigo de la biblioteca al sitio es mínima debido a la falta de actividades y accesos en planta baja (figura 9d), y la adherencia, que se establece mediante la conexión tipo puente, configura una respuesta urbana mínima en los extremos donde no se pro- ducen soluciones de relación sino de simple contacto. Se trata de soluciones que evidencian la importancia de la relación del área de centralidad con la ciudad y con su entorno; de la disposición e interrelación mutua de los elementos urba- nos (viario, espacio libre y edificación) y, finalmente, de la confi- guración del “espacio- calle”, el que se percibe a escala peatonal, que fomenta el contacto, físico y visual, y que garantiza su gra- do de integración. Todos estos proyectos muestran soluciones que ejemplifican la importancia de la relación entre espacios de centralidad y espacios de movilidad a todas las escalas, donde la infraestructura aporta condiciones logradas o menos acertadas de adherencia y “riveranidad” al espacio urbano garantizando en mayor o menor medida su grado de urbanidad. ción de sistemas de redes y ciudades superpuestos en el territorio, generando un espacio dual de múltiples consecuencias sociales y económicas: “Ferrocarril de alta velocidad impactos socioeconómicos, efectos territoriales y oportunidades de renovación urbana” (Herce, 2009b: 62). 35 Esta centralidad en torno a una biblioteca de gran tamaño –una de las realiza- ciones de polaridad urbana más grande de los últimos decenios–, parte de un planteamiento con una gran carga simbólica, donde además se tendrá que com- probar con el tiempo la consolidación de su capacidad relacional a escala más grande, dentro del eje de centralidad propuesto para el centro de París. en general presenta un buen grado de “riveranidad” en todos los espacios de circulación peatonal, con un grado mayor en el ámbito sobre las carreras Décima y Séptima, y presenta una importante condición de adherencia con lo que respecta a la movilidad en au- tomóvil, a lo largo de los bordes y mediante dos estacionamientos subterráneos de grandes dimensiones (figura 9a). Respecto al sistema de centralidades, el Centro Tequen- dama Bavaria configura relaciones en secuencia de centros, en relaciones de proximidad y en conexión; es un espacio urbano- cruce que ocupa una manzana de gran tamaño relacionada con dos vectores importantes de la ciudad –uno, centro-norte, y otro, centro-occidente– con características diferentes: el vector centro norte, que conecta el conjunto con el centro de la ciudad, es un sistema lineal de centralidades de proximidad que se desarrolla dentro de un tejido tradicional, donde las calles presentan un alto grado de “riveranidad” longitudinal, mientras que el vector que se extiende al occidente, la avenida Eldorado-Calle 26, es una centralidad en secuencia a mayores distancias, que opera a lo lar- go de una autopista urbana donde los núcleos urbanizados se conectan mediante adherencia puntual –a la autopista– que se caracteriza por “riveranidad” discontinua. El proyecto de la Illa Diagonal es una centralidad en se- cuencia y continuidad del eje de la avenida Diagonal, una polari- dad terciaria-comercial que por su respuesta a la configuración de las calles vecinas y la permeabilidad y multiplicidad de itinerarios de la planta baja plantea soluciones de relación entre edificios y canales de movilidad por adyacencia, circuitos y niveles. Respecto a las calles perimetrales, las soluciones de adyacencia se dispo- nen en plantas bajas con accesos y conexiones pasantes a nivel de la calle, donde la avenida Diagonal tiene un papel destacado ya sea por la dimensión de la acera como por la fachada propues- ta que siendo larga y unitaria, es también permeable y presenta accesos al conjunto (figura 9b). La planta baja del conjunto tiene una serie de recorridos internos y externos que conectan a los diferentes edificios y espacios libres, se establece así una red de circuitos que permite la posibilidad de atravesar la manzana de diversas maneras. Respecto al uso de niveles, el paso inferior bajo el edificio limitado en su relación con los bordes en todo el reco- rrido resulta iluminado y bien articulado en los puntos de contac- to superiores –cruces con calles– e inferior –accesos– bastante cercanos. Es un proyecto que presenta un nivel de “riveranidad” y de adherencia importante con el entorno residencial, de equi- pamientos y oficinas del barrio de Les Corts, y establece una co- nexión al otro lado de la Diagonal con el de Sarrià. Euralille es una centralidad de tipo nodal, en torno a un nodo infraestructural de adherencia puntual o terminal –rela- ción propia de las redes ferroviarias y de autopistas, con acti- vidades con alto grado de especialización y autonomía urbana respecto al centro tradicional, un polo terciario-comercial que genera expectativas de gran escala con un doble plano de re- percusión, nivel de ciudad y nivel territorial–34. En Euralille las 34 En general, como expone Manuel Herce respecto a la mayoría de operaciones en torno a estaciones del TAV, las expectativas de la introducción del tren de alta velocidad se han cumplido en lo que afecta a la integración de los sistemas de ciudades, pero esto ha de ser leído en el doble plano que supone la conforma- Espacios de centralidad urbana y redes de infraestructura Dossier central 137137 El espacio-calle es el ámbito que agrupa con coherencia acontecimientos y personas en un trazado claro, en el que los espacios públicos son los más importantes de la planta de la ciudad, y donde todas las demás funciones se sitúan, convincentemente, a lo largo de las calles y dando a ellas (Gehl, 2006). a. Centro Tequendama-Bavaria. Condición de “riveranidad” sobre las carreras Sépti- ma y Décima. Fuente: Mayorga y Fontana, 2008. b. Illa Diagonal. Condición de “riveranidad” sobre la avenida Diagonal. Fuente: ar- chivo autores, 2010. c. Euralille. 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(2007). “Correlating Densities of Centrality and Activities in Cities: The Cases of Bologna and Barcelona”. Politécnico de Milán. En: www.humanspacelab.com RONCAYOLO, Marcel (1988). La ciudad. Barcelona: Paidós. SALAZAR, José (2008). “Bogotá. Los planes y sus pro- yectos. 1940-2000”. En: revista Dearq, No. 1, enero, Bogotá, Uniandes. TÉLLEZ, Germán (1988). Cuéllar, Serrano, Gómez. Ar- quitectura 1933-1983. Bogotá: Editorial Escala. ZARDINI, Mirko (1999). Manuel de Solà. Progettare città. Milano: Electa. Lotus Quaderni Documents. work_fw5hn5vfkjbwfjszhpzvrlh7ry ---- Апстракт ослањајући се на ставове познатог уметничког критичара Херберта Рида (Herbert Read), по коме реализам, идеализам и експресионизам нису посебни правци у уметности, већ представљају сталне основне чиниоце у свим уметностима, у овом раду се разматра могућност постојања елементарних стваралачких опредељења и у архитектури. Полазећи од основних видова опажања и представљања света око нас, путем компаративне анализе и примера из других области, изложена је теза да би адекватан пандан Ридовим основним чиниоцима у уметности - реализму, идеализму и експресионизму, у архитектури били појмови мимезиса (мимикрије), асоцијативности и експресије. У зависности од друштвено-политичких, културно- историјских и других околности, неки од ових чинилаца с времена на време излазе на површину и заогрнути миљеом времена, јављају се у неком новом или старом облику, који можемо препознати као уметнички правац или стил. Кључне речи: визуелни израз, мимезис, мимикрија, асоцијативност, експресија. 3 UDK: 72.01:159.955; 72.038 Прегледни радН АУЧНИ РАДоВИ ВИЗУЕЛНИ ИЗРАЗ У АРХИТЕКТ УРИ Ђорђе Алфиревић рад примљен: децембар 2010, рад прихваћен: јануар 2011. Увод Анализирајући токове идеја и стилских праваца у архитектури, можемо приметити да су се током историје многе појаве понављале, у више или мање измењеном облику. Повремено су на свет долазиле нове идеје, са различитим могућностима креације архитектонских облика и садржаја, али су се најчешће гасиле још на самом почетку, јер нису могле дуго да егзистирају у створеним условима, тј. нису биле примерене актуелном времену и простору (сл.1). Дешавало се да неке од идеја буду прихваћене шире и да успеју да се развију у нови, чист и значајан архитектонски правац. Такви стваралачки токови, готово ниоткуд настају, брзо се развијају, доживљавају кратак врхунац постојања, а затим се дуго и постепено гасе (готово никад у потпуности). Њихов настанак и лагано гашење претапају се у „сивило” паралелних токова. У већини случајева појава архитектонских токова везана је за преломне историјске моменте, у којима долази до коренитих друштвених, економских и других промена. Цикличност ових тенденција је давно примећена и сматра се да оне настају у одсутним и критичним тренуцима развоја архитектуре и уметности, када су сазрели услови да се дефинише ново осећање света и да се уобличи форма (Трифуновић, 1969). VISUAL EXPRESSION IN ARCHITECTURE Abstract Relaying on standpoints of the renowned art critic Herbert Read, according to which realism, idealism and expressionism are not separate art movements, but represent permanent basic factors in all arts,  this paper considers the possibility of existance of elementary creative orientation in architecture as well. Starting from basic aspects of perception and representation of the world around us, and through a comparative analysis and examples from other fields, a thesis is presented according to which notions of mimesis  (mimicry), associativity and expression in architecture are adequate counterparts to Read’s basic factors of art - realism, idealism and expressionism.  Depending on socio- political, cultural and historical, as well as other circumstances,  from time to time some of these factors come to the surface, wrapped up in time,  and emerge in some new or old form which we can recognize as an art movement or style.  Key words:  visual expression, mimesis, mimicry, associativity, expression. mr Djordje Alfirevi, d.i.a. e-mail: djordje.alfirevic@gmail.com Сл. 1. Развој и преклапање стилова у архитектури Fig. 1. Evolution and overlaying of styles in architecture Чанак, М. „osnovne tendencije u istorijskoj arhitekturi’’. ARd Review (Београд) бр.30 (2004), стр.31. 4 Ђорђе Алфиревић/АУ31/2011/страна 3-15/Визуелни израз у архитектури Ако бисмо покушали да сведемо број архитектонских тенденција на неколико основних, могли бисмо да разликујемо три елементарне групе: а) инвентивну (креативистичку); б) прагматичну (рационалну); в) тради- ционалистичку (исто рицистичку) архитектуру (Џенкс, 1986). Средином 20. в., Херберт Рид, уметнички критичар, изнео је тезу да је уметност „израз осећања појединих стања интуиције, перцепције или емоције појединца” (Рид, 1957). У даљем тексту, покушаћемо да успоставимо релацију између Ридових тврдњи о постојању елементарних стваралачких чинилаца у уметности - реализма, идеализма и експре­ сионизма, и основних архитектонских тенденција, с циљем да укажемо на евентуално постојање елементарних ствара- лачких опредељења и у архитектури, које ћемо радно назвати: мимезис, асоци јативност и експресија. МИМИКРИЈА - MIMEZIS Мимикрија (гр. mimikos - подражавање) представља сталну или привремену сличност по облику, боји и другим спољним особинама неких елемената са околином у којој се налазе, услед чега их је тешко разликовати, иако између себе немају никакве друге везе сем спољних сличности. Често је поистовећивање термина мимикрије и мимезиса, иако су они поред сличности у значењу суштински различити. Појам мимикрије је у употреби када се говори о подражавању у природи, тј. имитирању визуелних и других карактеристика живих бића међу собом, док је појам мимезиса више део уметничке терминологије и представља подражавање у ширем смислу. Мимикрија у природи Мимикрија није својствена само људима, већ се јавља и у биљном и животињском свету, као један од основних принципа заштите и самоодржања у природи. опстанак сваке врсте зависи од степена прилагођености условима околине, било да је у питању заштита од грабљиваца, или подражавање с циљем долажења до лакшег плена. Подражавање је човеку урођено од детињства. На тај начин он стиче прва сазнања о околини којој се прилагођава. Појава прилагођавања околини јавља се и код људи и позната је у психологији као интројекција (уживљавање), што подразумева процес уношења објекта у субјективни круг интересовања (Јунг, 2003). о овом феномену писао је и наш познати географ Јован Цвијић, помињући моралну мимикрију и рајинске особине, које се јављају у случајевима када се народ који је поробљен, поистовећује са освајачем. Мимезис у уметности Више треба узимати оно што није могуће, али је вероватно, неголи оно што је могуће, али невероватно (Аристотел). Мимезис је један од најстаријих античких принципа на ком почива однос уметника и његовог дела према стварности. Дело не представља копију неког модела, блед обрис идеје, већ то што представља кад понавља или опонаша није објект, него артефакт или биће фикције (Коклен, 2005). Полемика о томе да ли, или не, уметност треба ропски да подражава природу (Платон), и, ако већ подражава да ли треба да преобрази конкретан лик, стварајући идеализован тип или парадигму (Аристотел), која надилази стварност, провлачи се у истом или сличном облику све до времена модернизма, када бива одбачена са првим авангардним експериментима. од самог почетка уметничког стваралаштва па до данас, постојао је низ уметничких праваца који су претпостављали мимезис као основни принцип ства ра- лаштва: релизам, натурализам, импресионизам, хипер- реализам и др. Суштина сваког покрета који се базира на мимезису је у тежњи за достизањем стваралачког идеала, који постоји изражен у својој савршеној појавности једино још у природи. Зато велики мајстори мимезе попут Микеланђела (Michelangelo), Леонарда (leonardo da Vinci) и Дирера (Albrecht dürer), нису тежили копирању појавног, већ су успевали да удахну живот својим визијама, чиме је њихово стваралаштво успевало да досегне оквире савршенства. Ако посматрамо природу као отелотворени идеал, ипак постоји извесна доза релативитета у људском опажању која је различита код сваке индивидуе, те се поставља питање сврсисходности миме- тичког (реалистичног) израза. Мимезис у архитектури Права архитектура је увек рефлекс простора. Без обзира кад је настала, она је таква као да је тамо одувек (Алеш Водопивец). С обзиром да архитектура, за разлику од осталих уметности, има много већи степен ограничења, условљена је месним и временским факторима, поставља се питање да ли је уопште могуће одвојити се од мимезиса, јер објекат мора да буде прилагођен потребама корисника да би се уопште могао назвати архитектуром. Стога можемо констатовати да је мимезис (најшире схваћено) у суштини сваког архитектонског дела, само је питање ширине његовог тумачења. оног тренутка када се зграда позиционира на одређено место, испоштују регулације и други локациони услови (мимезис у ширем смислу), отвара се могућност за примену мимезиса у ужем смислу, као и асоцијативности и експресије, који се огледају у архитектоничности основа и фасада („пластике” и материјализације). За разлику од опште уметности, појам мимезиса у архи- тектури се широко тумачи. Можемо издвојити три основне категорије миметичности: 1. Мимикрија објекта представља копирање елемената неког стила или комплетних архитектонских облика из непосредне или шире околине. 2. Мимикрија околине подразумева визуелно сједињење или „нестајање” у природном или вештачком окружењу – принцип дематеријализације (Чарапић, 2008). 5 Ђорђе Алфиревић/АУ31/2011/страна 3-15/Визуелни израз у архитектури MIMICRY - MIMESIS Mimicry (Greek mimikos - mimicking) represents a permanent or temporary similarity of elements in shape, color or other external properties with their surrounding, making it difficult to distinguish between them, although there is no other connection, except for these external similarities. The terms mimicry and mimesis are often equated, although apart from their similarity in meaning they are essentially different. The term mimicry is used when talking about mimicking in nature, i.e. species that are mimicking visual or other characteristics of each other, while the term mimesis is related more to art terminology and represents mimicking in a wider sense. Mimicry in nature Mimicry is not characteristic of people only, but it is found in flora and fauna as one of the main principles of protection and self- preservation in nature. The survival of the species depends on the degree of their adaptation to the surroundings; whether they are protecting themselves against vultures, or using mimicry for capturing their food more easily. Mimicking is a natural trait of human beings from their childhood. In this way, they acquire their first knowledge about the surroundings to which they are trying to adapt. The phenomenon of people trying to adapt to their surroundings is known in psychology as introjection, meaning the process of drawing objects into our subjective circle of interest (Jung, 2003). Our famous geographer Jovan Cvijić also wrote about this phenomenon, mentioning moral mimicry and subservient mentality (rajinski mentality), which occur when enslaved people equate themselves with their conqueror. Mimesis in art something that is impossible, but probable, is more desirable than something that is possible, but improbable (Aristotel). Mimesis is one of the oldest antique principles, on which rests the relation of artists and their work towards reality. Artwork is not a copy of some model, a pale shadow of an idea, and what it represents when it repeats or mimics is not an object but an artifact or a fictional being (Cauquelin, 2005). Сл.02. Миметична кућа, Feevaghmore (Д. Стивенс) Fig.02. Mimetic house, Feevaghmore (D. Stevens) http://en.urbarama.com/project/mimetic­house INTRODUCTION Analyzing flaws in ideas and stylistic tendencies in architecture, it may be noticed that many phenomena have been repeated in the course of history in a more or less altered form. New ideas have occasionally emerged with different possibilities for creating architectural forms and contents, but they would very often vanish at the very beginning, because they could not exist long- term in given circumstances, i.e. they were not appropriate to that particular time and space (Fig. 1). Certain ideas have been more widely accepted and have managed to develop into a new, pure and important architectural direction. Such creative tendencies usually emerge out of nowhere, develop quickly, experience their short culmination and then gradually fade away over a long period (but almost never completely). Their appearance and gradual extinction blend into a ”grayness” of parallel tendencies. In most cases, the emergence of architectural tendencies is related to historical turning-points in which radical social, economic and other changes take place. The cyclic character of these tendencies has long been observed and considered to have emerged in crucial and critical moments of the development of architecture and art, when the conditions were ripe for defining a new perception of the world and for establishing new forms (Trifunović, 1969). If one tried to reduce the number of architectural tendencies to only several basic ones, it would be possible to distinguish three different elementary groups: a) inventive (creative); b) pragmatic (rational); and c) traditionalistic (historical) architecture (Jencks, 1986). In the mid-20th century, Herbert Read, an art critic, introduced the thesis that art ”is an expression of feelings of the certain stat es of an individual’s intuition, perception or emotion” (Read, 1957). In the following text, we will attempt to make a relation- ship between Read’s assertions about the existence of elemen - tary creative factors in art - realism, idealism and expressionism and the main architectural tendencies, with the aim of also indi- cating the possible existence of elementary creative orientations in architecture, which herein we will call: mimesis, associativity and expression. 6 Ђорђе Алфиревић/АУ31/2011/страна 3-15/Визуелни израз у архитектури остварења архитекате Ф. Л. Рајта (f. l. Wright), познатог по истанчаном осећају за суштину непосредног и ширег окружења, представљају одличне примере оваквог кре а- тивног виђења. Попут дела великих мајстора мимезиса (Леонарда и Микеланђела), Рајтова кућа на водопаду (сл. 4) не подражава директно окружење око себе, већ кореспондира са духом природе. Форма објекта се каскадно провлачи кроз шуму, евоцирајући приказ окамењене воде која „тече” низ стене. АСОЦИЈАТИВНОСТ Асоцијација (лат. - веза, удружење, братство) Асоцијација мисли је изазивање мисли о једном предмету услед помињања или подсећања на други, који је са претходним био у некој вези, обично по сличности или различитости. Асоцијативност у психологији Асоцијације се, као специфичан вид естетског опажања и одлучивања, могу јавити на више квалитативно различитих начина. У зависности од дужине трајања доживљаја и дубине когнитивне анализе, постоје три модуса естетског опажања, тј. нивоа анализе визуелних, појмовних и др. информација, која имају учешћа у процесу асоцирања (Огњеновић, 1997). Х ниво - подразумева процес појмовне и обликовне симплификације, инсистирање на доброј форми, нагла- шавању ритма, симетрији и златном пресеку. основна идеја овог начина обраде јесте хармонија и склад (отуда и слово Х). Когнитивни процеси на којима се заснива овај ниво асоцијативности, у основи су једноставнији и бржи у односу на преостала два. Р ниво - подразумева принцип кићења - редунданце, тј. поновљених информација, као и обогаћење детаљима и 3. Грађење у духу места је основни принцип кон тек сту- ализма, као највишег нивоа мимезе. Примери копирања елемената неког стила или елемената из окружења чести су у пракси. Класичан пример мимезиса јавља се код грчких храмова код којих су облици првобитних храмова превођени из дрвета у камени материјал, уз подражавање стилских карактеристика. У данашње време заступање оваквог става све мање има оправдање, сем у случајевима када је неопходно да се ојача целовитост неке просторне или амбијенталне целине, и то ако има изузетну архитектонску, културну или неку другу вредност. Увођењем нових стилских карактеристика у већој мери у неки заштићени амбијент, умањује се значај и вредност оригинала. Други вид миметичности јавља се код објеката који су ви- зуелно камуфлирани и привидно нестају у окружењу (сл. 2). Примењује се у случајевима када се из одређеног разлога (капацитет, неодговарајући програмски садржаји и сл.), не може успоставити дијалог са окружењем. У том случају користи се „илузија” дематеријализације, тј. визуелно неутралисање волумена. Један од познатих примера дематеријализације је нови, реконструисани део Лувра са садржајима који су сакривени испод музејског платоа и са главним приступом кроз прозрачну, стаклену пирамиду, која не омета визуре ка заштићеном окружењу. Код павиљона Вlur Вuilding, који је предвиђен за светску изложбу swiss Expo 2002. и изведен на језеру у Швајцарској, форма привидно нестаје у облаку водене паре, која се вештачки формира око фасаде објекта (сл. 3). Контекстуализам у архитектури је став код кога се у први план истиче толерантан однос према окружењу („духу места”), из кога се црпе мотиви и тражи инспирација за стваралачко деловање у простору. овај приступ има најшире тумачење појма мимезис, чиме се у великој мери приближава појму асоцијативног. Сл.03. „Замагљена’’ зграда, језеро Neuchatel (Дилер и Скофидио) Fiг.03. Blur building, Lake Neuchatel (Diller & Scofidio) http://rebarcollective.wordpress.com/2009/10/ Сл.04. Кућа на водопаду, Mill Run (Ф. Л. Рајт) Fig.04. Fallingwater house, Mill Run (F. L. Wright) http://aaschorsch.com/_ae/01_ curriculum/06_3ddesign/3ddesign_Home.htm 7 Ђорђе Алфиревић/АУ31/2011/страна 3-15/Визуелни израз у архитектури The controversy over whether or not the art should mimic nature (Plato), and, if it does mimic it, whether it should transform a concrete figure, thus creating an idealized type or paradigm (Aristotle) which surpasses the reality, was waged in the same or similar form until Modernism, when it was rejected with the first avant-garde experiments. Since the very beginning of artistic creativity until today, there have been many art movements which have assumed the mimesis as a basic principle of creativity: realism, naturalism, impressionism, hyperrealism, etc. The essence of any movement based on mimesis is in the aspiration to achieve a creative ideal which exists expressed in its perfect manifestation so far only in nature. That is why great masters of mimesis like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer did not aspire to copy the phenomenon, but managed to breathe life into their visions, whereby succeeding to reach perfection in their creativity. If nature is observed as an embodied ideal, there is still a dose of relativity in human perception that is different for every individual, thus raising the question of the expediency of mimetic (realistic) expression. Mimesis in architecture True architecture is always a reflection of space. Regardless of when it was created, it is as if it had always been there (Aleš Vodopivec). Considering the fact that in architecture compared to other arts, the degree of limitation, which is conditioned by factors of time and place is greater, the question arises as to whether it is at all possible to depart from mimesis, because the structure must be adjusted to the needs of the beneficiaries in order to be called architecture in the first place. Therefore, it can be concluded that mimesis (understood in its widest sense) is in the essence of each architectural creation; it is only a question of how widely it is interpreted. Only when a structure is positioned in a certain place, and when the regulations are met together with the other location conditions (mimesis in its wider sense), there is a possibility of applying mimesis in its narrower sense, as well as associativity and expression, which are reflected in the layout and elevation (”plastics” and materialization). Compared to art in general, the notion of mimesis in architecture is widely interpreted. Three main categories of mimetism can be singled out as follows: 1. Mimicry of structures means copying elements of a certain style or complete architectural shapes from immediate surroundings or a wider surrounding area. 2. Mimicry of surroundings implies a visual unity with or the ”disappearance” in the natural or artificial surroundings – principle of dematerialization (Čarapić, 2008). 3. Development in the “spirit of the place” (genius loci) is the main principle of contextualism, as the highest level of mimesis. Examples of copying elements of a certain style or elements from the surroundings are often found in practice. A typical example of mimesis is found in Greek temples where original forms of temples have been translated from the wooden into stone materials by mimicking the stylistic features. Today, advocating such an attitude is less justified, except in cases when it is necessary to strengthen the wholeness of a spatial or ambience entity, and only if it has an exceptional architectural, cultural or some other value. By introducing new stylistic features to a greater extent in some protected ambience, the importance and value of the original is diminished. Another form of mimetism occurs with objects that are visually camouflaged and seemingly blend into the surroundings (Fig.2). It is applied in cases when, out of certain reasons (capacity, inappropriate program contents, etc.) it may not be possible to establish a dialogue with the surroundings. In such a case, the ”illusion” of dematerialization, i.e. visual neutralization of volume, is employed. One of the well-known examples of dematerialization is the new, reconstructed part of the Louvre Museum with facilities hidden beneath the museum plateau and the main access through a transparent, glass pyramid which does not disturb the view of the protected surroundings. In the exhibition pavilion ”Blur Building”, which was built for the world exhibition swiss Expo 2002 on a lake in Switzerland, the form seemingly disappears in a cloud of steam artificially created around the building’s facade (Fig.3). Contextualism in architecture is a viewpoint where tolerant relationship to the surroundings (”spirit of place”) is brought to the fore, from where the motives and inspiration are drawn and sought after for creative action in the space. This approach involves the widest interpretation of the notion of mimesis, thus getting close to the notion of the associative. Achievements of architect F.L.Wright, known by his refined feeling for the essence of both the immediate surroundings and the wider surrounding area, provide an excellent example of such creative perception. Like the works of the great masters of mimesis (Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo) Wright’s house on the waterfall (Fig.4) does not mimic its immediate surroundings, but corresponds with the spirit of nature. The form of the house cascades through the forest evoking an image of stoned water ”running” down the rocks. ASSOCIATIVITY Association (in Latin – connection, association, brotherhood) Association of thoughts means causing the occurrence of a thought about an object as a result of mentioning or recalling the other object, which has been in some connection with the previous one, usually by its similarity or difference. 8 Ђорђе Алфиревић/АУ31/2011/страна 3-15/Визуелни израз у архитектури (директније асоцијације). Дистантни модус асоцијативности у највећој мери је изражен код уметничких ставова концептуализма и симболизма, путем апстраховања облика и појмова – идеализације. Арнхајмово (Rudolf Arnheim) поређење Короове (Camille Corot) „Мајке са дететом” и Мурове (Henry Moore) „Две форме” то добро илуструје. Наиме, Арнхајм указује на истоветност тема ова два дела и различите видове асоцијативности којима су оне изражене. У оба приказа основна тема је саопштена структуралним скелетом композиције, повијеном фигуром (мајке) која се заштитнички надвија над мању форму (лик детета), која је статично постављена и благо тежи већој форми (Арнхајм, 1985). Асоцијативност у архитектури Примери који на адекватан начин презентују ово креатив- но опредељење у архитектури нису толико чести, јер су у већи ни случајева у питању објекти јавног карактера (музеји, културни центри и сл.), који чине мањи део светског архитектонског фонда. Уобичајени методи којима се архитекти користе приликом стварања неког архитектонског дела су појмовно и формално асоцирање - стилизација. Стилизација подразумева поступак којим се путем апстраховања, тј. поједностављивања простора и облика до формалне суштине, без непотребних детаља, формира потпуно нова композициона целина, која је различита од првобитног узорка, али на који у већој или мањој мери подсећа (Марић, 2006). Стилизација спада у групу формалних асоцијативних метода, код којих се стваралац бави интерпретацијом визуелних представа. Поступак појмовног асоцирања води ка дубљим сферама стваралачког деловања, приликом чега настају дела која у обликовном смислу могу бити у потпуности различита у односу на оригинал, али која имају дистантне, семантичке везе са узором. Међу успешне примере асоцијативности могу се сврстати дела Р. Пјана (Renzo Piano) (сл. 5) и Калатраве (santiago Calatrava) (сл. 6), који често у свом раду користе ово украсима. Сензибилитет за овакав начин опажања и одлу- чивања своди се на количину, број детаља у стимулацији, или на њихово истицање и улепшавање. Д ниво - води ка мистериознијим тумачењима и одлукама, вероватно, на основу отварања новог (семантичког, естетског) простора за већ виђено, стога је за овакав начин опажања и одлучивања потребно највише времена. осетљивост за овакав доживљај или естетски израз своди се на способност за вишеслојну и паралелну обраду информација приликом које се појмови који су претходно већ били сагледани, виде на други начин. овакав начин асоцијативног виђења највише се приближава уметничком. Асоцијативност у уметности Уметност не понавља видљиво, она чини видљивим (Пол Кле). Појам асоцијативности у уметности може бити вишезначан, у зависности од аспекта сагледавања проблема. С једне стране, посматрач доживљава (опажа) уметничко дело, тумачи га на основу „менталних слика” које су ускладиштене у уму и апстраховане из претходног искуства. оне ће директно утицати на начин обраде опажених информација, тј. на препознавање одређеног предмета или теме. С друге стране, уметник може да путем асоцијација пренесе пос матрачу поруку, која врло често због специфичности умет ничког виђења, може бити херметична (као код Д модуса). За ову тему од важности је случај када се асоцијације уметника у мањој или већој мери поклапају са асоцијативним виђењем посматрача, што представља једно од основних питања односа уметник ­ уметничко дело – прималац (перципијент). С обзиром да се асоцијативност налази у самој суштини уметничког начина стварања, веома је тешко поистоветити одређени уметнички правац са искључивим пољем деловања асоцијативног доживљаја. Такође, од три наведене асоцијативне категорије, дистантни модус (Д) највише се приближава уметничком виђењу, јер преостале две категорије представљају примаран начин опажаја Сл.05. Национални центар „Немо’’, Амстердам (Р. Пјано) Фиг.05. National center Nemo, Amsterdam (R. Piano) hттп://www.глоwимагес.cом/сеарch/Немо.hтмл С л.06. Аеродром, Лион (С. Калатрава) Fig.06. Airport, Lyon (S. Calatrava) http://thedenverelement.com/tag/denver­international­airport/ 9 Ђорђе Алфиревић/АУ31/2011/страна 3-15/Визуелни израз у архитектури Associativity in psychology Associations, as a specific form of aesthetic observance or decision-making, may occur in several qualitatively different ways. Depending on the duration of emotional experience and depth of cognitive analysis, there are three types of aesthetic observance, i.e. levels of analysis of visual, phenomenal or other information, which are involved in the process of associating (ognjenović, 1997). H level – implies a process of phenomenon and shape simplification, insisting on a good form and emphasizing the rhythm, symmetry and golden section. The main idea of such a way of processing is harmony (therefrom the letter H). Cognitive processes on which this level of associativity is based are basically simpler and faster compared to the other two. R level – implies a principle of decoration, redundance, i.e., repeated information, as well as enrichment with details and ornaments. Sensibility for such a way of observing and decision- making is reduced to quantity, number of details in stimulation, or to their highlighting and beautifying. D level – leads to mysterious interpretations and decisions, probably based on opening of new (semantic, aesthetic) space for “déjà vu”. Therefore, such a way of observing and decision-making is the most time-consuming. Sensibility for such an emotional experience or aesthetic expression is reduced to the ability of multi-layered and parallel information processing, whereby previously perceived phenomena are perceived in some other way. Such a way of associative perception is closest to the artistic perception. Associativity in art Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible (Paul Klee). The notion of associativity in art may have a multiple meaning depending on the aspect from which the problem is perceived. On the one hand, the observer experiences (perceives) a work of art and interprets it based on ”mental images” that are stored in his/ her mind and abstracted from the previous experience. They will have a direct impact on the way of processing the observed information, i.e. on the recognition of a certain object or theme. On the other hand, an artist may convey a message to the observer through associations which often, due to specific artistic perception, may be hermetic (as with D mode). The case when the artist’s associations coincide to a lesser or greater extent with the associative perception of the observer is of importance for this theme, and this is actually one of the basic issues of the relationship artist – work of art –percipient. Considering that associativity is in the very essence of the artistic way of creation, it is very difficult to equate a certain art movement with the sole field of associative experience action. Furthermore, out of the three associative categories, the distant mode (D) is closest to artistic perception because the remaining two categories represent a primary way of perception (or more directly - association). The distant mode of associativity is to a greatest extent expressed in artistic stands of conceptualism and symbolism through abstracting shapes and phenomena - idealization. Rudolf Arnheim’s comparison of Camille Corot’s ”Mother and Child” and Henry Moore’s ”Two Large Forms” best illustrates this. Namely, Arnheim points out that the themes of these two works are identical. He also points out the different forms of associativity by which they are expressed. In both cases, the main theme is communicated through the structural skeleton of the composition, a reclining figure (mother) which in a protective manner is bending over the smaller figure (child), which is statically placed and slightly moved towards the bigger form (Arnheim, 1985). Associativity in architecture Examples that in an adequate way depict this creative orientation in architecture are not often found, because, in most cases, it is a question of public buildings (museums, cultural centers, etc.), which account for a smaller part of the world architecture stock. Usual methods employed by architects in creating an architectural work are phenomenon and form association - stylization. Stylization implies a procedure by which a completely new wholeness of the composition, different from the original model but resembling it to a lesser or greater extent, is formed without unnecessary details through abstraction, i.e. simplification of the space and shape by reducing them to formal essence (Marić, 2006). Stylization belongs into the group of formal associative methods, whereby the creator deals with the interpretation of visual perception. The phenomenon association procedure leads to deeper spheres of creative action, during which works are created that may be completely different compared to the original in the sense of their shape, but which have distant, semantic ties with the model. Among successful examples of associativity are the works of Renzo Piano (Fig. 5) and santiago Calatrava (Fig. 6), who have often employed this orientation in their work. The following works may also be singled out: the daniel libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin (Fig. 7), which may be considered as an expressive rather than associative work, because the associations it carries are distant by nature (abstract composition of the train), and the frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (reminiscence of ships and one of the ports from which the conquest of the New World has began), as well as interpretations of birds with airport buildings, etc. In most cases, the form is abstracted to the level of main elements, lines or surfaces. In certain examples, and at first glance, it is more difficult to realize what is the association which the form carries, like in the example of the embassy of Nordic countries (Fig. 8) where the common head office has been represented by an embracing envelop and thus, unifying the dismembered elements. 10 Ђорђе Алфиревић/АУ31/2011/страна 3-15/Визуелни израз у архитектури опредељење. Такође, издвајају се: Либескиндов (daniel libeskind) Јеврејски музеј у Берлину (сл. 7), за који би се пре могло рећи да је експресивно него асоцијативно дело, јер су асоцијације које носи са собом дистантне природе (апстракт- на композиција воза) и Геријеви (frank Gehry) Гугенхајмов музеј у Билбау (сећање на бродове и једну од лука из које су почела освајања „Новог света”) и интерпретације птица, када су аеродромске зграде у питању и др. У већини случајева се форма апстрахује до нивоа основних елемената, линија или површина. У одређеним примерима је, на први поглед, теже докучити на шта је обликом асоцирано, као код амбасаде нордијских земаља (сл. 8), где је заједничко седиште представљено опном која обавија и уједињује рашчлањене елементе. ЕКСПРЕСИЈА Експресија или експресивност (лат. expressio - израз, изражавање) подразумева јасно и аутентично исказивање карактера и личности индивидуе. Често је поистовећивање експресије са правцем експресионизма, којем је главно исходиште и циљ приказивање и изражавање онога што је унутрашњошћу, срцем и душом, „виђено” и доживљено, тј. са изражавањем субјективних расположења и осећања, без осврта на конвенционалне и „објективне” вредности, судове и истине (Вујаклија, 1970). Појам експресивности је у овом тексту посматран у ширем контексту, с намером да се обухвате и оне, на први поглед мање видљиве манифестације карактера личности, које су због своје интровертне природе ефемерне. Стога ће даље бити речи о екстровертној и интровертној експресивности, тј. о експресијама простора и облика, мисли и идеја. Сл.07. Јеврејски музеј, Берлин (Д.Либескинд) Fig.07. Jewish museum, Berlin (D.Libeskind) http://www.daniel­libeskind.com/projects/show­all/ jewish­museum­berlin/ Сл.08. Комплекс нордијских амбасада, Берлин (Бергер+Паркинен) Fig.08. Nordic embassy complex, Berlin (Berger+Parkkinen) http://www.arcspace.com/architects/bergerparkkinen/cbmp_index.html Карактер и темперамент личности Карактер јединке одређен је хармоничним односом психе и душе, тј. скупом свих функција које формирају један психолошки тип, као и његовом манифестацијом према објекту у околини, или самој јединки као објекту, у виду душевне изразне форме - темперамента (Вујаклија, 1970). Психолошки тип, по Јунгу (Carl Gustav Jung), представља при- мер или образац, према коме се на карактеристичан начин, константно изражавају основне психолошке функције као што су: мишљење, осећање, осет (сензитивитет) и инту иција, чиме јединка добија одређено, специфично обе лежје. Типови који су засновани на овим психолошким функцијама, могу се назвати: мисаони, осећајни, опажајни (осетни) и интиутивни, и могу се поделити према квалитету на: рацио налне (мисаони и осећајни) и ирационалне (осетни и инту и тивни). Према кретању и усмерености психичке енер гије (либида) могу се појавити као екстровертни или интро верт ни. Темперамент представља скуп карактеристика једне лич- ности, путем којих се манифестује однос њеног психолошког типа према објектима у спољашњости, као и према несвесном, тј. објекту у унутрашњости (Јунг, 2003). Најпоз- натија и најчешће коришћена типологија је Хипократова (Hippokrates), према којој се темпераменти могу поделити на: колеричан, сангвиничан, флегматичан и меланхоличан. Видови експресивности С обзиром да је у литератури веома мало писано о видовима изражавања, у даљој анализи ослонићемо се на Хипократове и Јунгове ставове о карактеру личности, јер су још увек актуелни и најподобнији за појашњење експресивних појава. Неопходно је разграничити, да ли се појам експресије односи на темперамент ствараоца или на карактер архитектонског дела. Питање повезаности ових појмова је изузетно комплексно и превазилази оквире овог рада, међутим, у тексту се првенствено мисли на карактерне особине дела које 11 Ђорђе Алфиревић/АУ31/2011/страна 3-15/Визуелни израз у архитектури EXPRESSION Expression or expressiveness (Lat. expressio – expression) implies a clear and authentic displaying of the character or personality of an individual. The expression is often identified with the art movement of expression- ism, whose main starting point and aim is to present and express what has been ”seen“ or experienced in the inner eye of the mind, heart and soul, i.e. to express the subjective moods and feelings without referring to conventional and ”objective” values, judgments and truths (Vujaklija, 1970). The notion of expressiveness is herein considered in a wider context with the aim to also comprise those, at first glance less visible, manifestations of a person’s character which are ephemeral due to their introvert nature. Therefore, we will discuss below the extrovert and introvert expressiveness, i.e. expressions of space and shapes, thoughts and ideas. Person’s character and temperament A person’s character is determined by a harmonious relationship between the psyche and the soul, i.e. a set of functions forming a psychological type, as well as its manifestation to the object in the surrounding, or to an individual as an object, in the form of spiritual expression - temperament (Vujaklija, 1970). A psychological type, according to Carl Gustav Jung, represents an example or pattern based on which main psychological functions such as thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition are continuously expressed in a characteristic way, whereby an individual acquires certain specific characteristics. Types based on these psychological functions are: feeling, thinking, intuitive and sensing types, and may be classified according to the quality into: rational (thinking and feeling) types and irrational (sensing and intuitive) types. According to movement and orientation of psychic energy (libido), they may be extrovert or introvert types. Temperament is a set of characteristics possessed by a person through which the relationship of his/her psychological type is manifested to outer objects, as well as to unconscious, i.e. inner objects (Jung, 2003). The best known and most often used typology is the Hippocrates’ typology according to which temperaments are classified into: sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic and Phlegmatic. Forms of expressiveness Given that there is very little literature on the forms of expression, we will hereafter rely on the Hippocrates’ and Jung’s views of a person’s character because they are still valid and most suitable for explaining the expressive phenomena. It is necessary to clarify whether the notion of expression refers to the creator’s temperament or to the character of architectural work. The issue of how these phenomena are related is extremely complex and beyond the scope of this paper. However, herein, it is primarily the matter of ”character traits” of the created work, i.e. how it is interpreted; which does not explicitly mean that the creator also has the same or similar character traits. Therefore, we can recognize two main expressive personality types: a) Extrovert (choleric and sanguine types); b) Introvert (phlegmatic and melancholic types). The notion of choleric could imply a fierce and energetic expression (Fig. 9), with a great dose of exaggeration and angry and aggressive release of energy, due to which the shape becomes crumpled, broken, split or cracked, whereby the edges and fractures are brought to the fore as a main composing motive (Palmier, 1995). Creation is spontaneous and accompanied with a large amount of coincidence, with very little or no meaning. An excessive extroversion is mostly initiated by a strong desire for putting one’s self forward in relation to the surrounding – principle of contrast. Rhythmicity, as any other repetition, almost does not exist as it disturbs the unique quality of visual expression. Dramatic and energetic quality is additionally intensified by the contrast of colors. Sanguine expression is cheerful, moderate and optimistic (Fig. 10), where liveliness and delightfulness of shape and space are brought into the fore (Hrnjica, 1994). Expression of energy is controlled with occasional accentuation, which by its nature may be in the heat of the moment. Extroversion is a natural tendency by which an object opens itself towards its surrounding and engages in dialogue with it. Some of the main characteristics of this expression are expressions of naturalness and the spontaneous and arrhythmic composition which emphasizes a playful form. The use of colors and materials is also in accordance with the above stated. It seems that the notion of phlegmatic is the farthest from expressiveness. However, if there is a notion of expression of thought, then anybody could be related to the phlegmatic expression which, by its nature and at first glance, seems expressionless (Fig. 11). It is characterized by a minimal and visually barely noticeable expression of energy, while a great and “unarticulated” power of thoughts and ideas, which is sometimes felt in the power of gesture, lies in its essence. Natural introversion leads to deliberation and accentuation of a concept and idea over objectivity (Jung, 2003). Abstraction, as well as the need for harmony and meaning, to a great extent contributes to mystification and thoughtfulness of statement. Colorism is reduced and most often based on symbols. Melancholic type is the opposite of sanguine type and is characterized by deep and very strong feelings which are pessimistic by their nature. Emptiness and reduction to ultimate reality-limit (Fig. 12), as well as the need for introversion, are deeply rooted in this expression and represent a prime “moving force”, because the static quality and extra-temporal existence lie in the essence of this expression. The power of melancholy emotions is expressed in excessive abstraction and dema- terialization, but not uncommonly, the monumental emotions also occur as a thoughtful and formative counterpart. The use of colorism almost does not exist, or occurs to a lesser extent, in the form of a cold color tone scale. 12 Ђорђе Алфиревић/АУ31/2011/страна 3-15/Визуелни израз у архитектури природности и спонтана и аритмична ком позиција којом се наглашава разиграност форме. Кориш ћење боја и материјала је, такође, у складу са претходно наведеним. Чини се да је појам флегматичног најдаље од експре- сивности, међутим, ако постоји појам експресије мисли, онда би се свакако могао везати за флегматичан израз, који по својој природи, на први поглед, делује безизражајно (сл. 11). одликује се минималним и визуелно једва приметним исказивањем енергије, док у његовој суштини лежи велика и „неисказана” снага мисли и идеја, која се понекад осећа у јачини потеза. Природна интроверзија води ка промиш- љености и истицању концепта и идеје изнад објективног (Јунг, 2003). Апстраховање, као и потреба за хармонијом, складом и значењем, у великој мери доприноси мисти- фикацији и мисаоности исказа. Колористика је сведена и најчешће заснована на симболима. Меланхолично је опозит сангвиничном и одликује се дубоким и веома јаким осећањима песимистичне природе. Празнина и сведеност до крајњих граница (сл. 12), као и потреба за интроверзијом у овом изразу су дубоко укорењени и представљају основне „покретаче”, јер је у суштини изра за статичност и ванвременско постојање. Јачина сетних емоција исказује се прекомерним апстраховањем и де матери- јализацијом, али се неретко јавља и монументалност као мисаони и обликовни пандан. Коришћење колорита готово да не постоји, или се јавља у мањој мери, у виду хладне скале тонова. је створено, тј. како се оно тумачи, што не мора експлицитно да значи да стваралац такође нема исте или сличне карактерне особине. Према томе, можемо препознати два основна типа експресивности: а) екстровертна (колерична и сангвинична); б) интровертна (флегматична и меланхолична). Под појмом колеричног могао би се сматрати жесток и енергичан израз (сл. 9), са великом дозом претераности, бесним и агресивним пражњењем енергије, приликом чега се облик гужва, ломи, цепа или пуца, чиме се ивице и фрактура истичу у први план као основни мотиви ком- поновања (Палмије, 1995). Стварање је спонтано и праћено великом количином случајности, са веома мало или без значења. Прекомерна екстроверзија у углавном ини цирана јаком жељом за истицањем у односу на околину –принцип контрастирања. Ритмичност, као и било какво понављање, готово да не постоје, јер нарушавају уникатност визуелног израза. Драматичност и енергичност додатно се појачавају контрастима боја. Сангвиничан израз је весео, умерен и оптимистичан (сл. 10), у првом плану је живахност и разиграност облика и простора (Хрњица, 1994). Испољавање енергије је контролисано, са повременим акцентирањем које може бити афективне природе. Екстровертност је природна тенденција којом се објекат отвара према околини и води дијалог са њом. Неке од главних одлика овог израза су исказивање Сл. 9. Стата центар, МИТ (Ф. Гери) Fig. 9. Stata center, MIT (F. Gehry) http://www.flickr.com/photos/atelier79033/2769238162/ Сл. 10. ’’Wozoco’’ апартмани, Амстердам (МВРДВ) Fig. 10. Wozoco apartments, Amsterdam (MVRDV) http://scophy.com/category/architecture­mondays/ 13 Ђорђе Алфиревић/АУ31/2011/страна 3-15/Визуелни израз у архитектури the time when created and to works with rather clearly defined attitudes towards themes and techniques (fierceness of expression, denial of reality, abstraction, high intensity of colors and lighting, furrowing, breaking, tearing), while a work which is authentic and recognizable and which expresses the essence of an artist’s personality and character may be called an expressive work in its more general meaning. If we consider things in this way, we will notice that the phenomenon of expressiveness has existed in art since ancient times, having culminated in a unique art movement - expressionism in the beginning of 20th century. In this context, we can say that certain works of Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Jusepe de Ribera, J. M. W. Turner, Caspar Friedrich David, or El Greco represent spiritual precursors to expressionism given that they possess a high level of expressiveness. We can also conclude that notions of expressionism and expressiveness also imply expression of thoughts and ideas, and not only expression of emotions. g) Expression in architecture Expressionism in architecture occurred somewhat later than in other arts (around 1913), although the idea of glass and steel architecture was promoted earlier (in the mid-19th century). Evidently, there is a similarity between expressionism (Glass Pavilion designed by Bruno Taut and Crystal Crown designed by Hans Poelzig) and Gothic architecture which has emerged out of Expression in art Most of the authors dealing with art criticism equate the notion of expressiveness with the art movement of expressionism, which has not been only an art movement, but a vision of the world with hopes, dreams and hatred. It has actually been a special sensibility. In order to make a clear distinction between these two phenomena, it is necessary to explain the main characteristics of this art movement. The very origin of the notion of expressionism is quite unclear. It emerged for the first time around 1850 (Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine), describing expressionists as those ”who wish to express a particular emotion” (Palmier, 1995). It has often been the case that works of artists such as Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, having some features of expressionism, have been called expressionistic artworks, and this has led to confusion. In France, artists with expressive elements in their works have been called ”cubist artists’’ or ”fauvists”, while in Germany they have been called the ”expressionists”, and in Italy the ”futurist artists”. Kandinsky, for example, makes a difference between his Expressionist period and Cubist period and the period of transition to abstract art, while the same phenomenon has also been observed with other artists – visual characteristics of their works have been changed (they belonged to some other art movement) but the kind of expression, i.e. expressive features, have not been changed. It is definitely certain that the term “expressionism” primarily refers to works which have been considered to be reactionary in Сл.11. Португалски павиљон, Лисабон (А. Сиза) Fig.11. Portugal pavilion, Lisbon (A. Siza) http://www.mimoa.eu/projects/ Portugal/lisbon/Pavilion%20of%20 Portugal Сл.12. Управна зграда Диор-а, Токио (Сеџима & Нишизава) Fig.12. Dior building, Tokyo (Sejima & Nishizawa) http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/ topic/20926123/sANAA 14 Ђорђе Алфиревић/АУ31/2011/страна 3-15/Визуелни израз у архитектури Poelzig) и готичке архитектуре, која се јавила из дубоког поштовања према готичком дематеријализованом бићу и средњо вековном грађевинарству, као изразу епохе задојене духом и метафизиком. Изразите примере експресивности у архитектури представљају дела готике, барока, чешког кубизма, сецесије и експресионизма, па све до савремених примера hi­tech-а и деконструкције. Међутим, поред наведених примера, постоји читава област архитектонског стваралаштва, која у експресивном смислу није толико очигледна, јер је заснована на мисаоном и појмовном изражавању (Василски, 2008). овакав вид изражавања поседује велику неисказану енергију која остаје спутана оковима материјалног. Примери оваквог стваралаштва могу се наћи у правцима концептуализма, симболизма и минимализма. Закључак Анализирајући основаност Ридових тврдњи о постојању основних стваралачких опредељења у уметности (реализма, идеализма и експресионизма), која су базирана на елементарним видовима опажања код човека (перцепцији, интуицији и емоцији), неоспорно се долази до закључка да постоји релација између ових опредељења и основних савремених архитектонских тенденција у свету, које је као тезу поставио Ч. Џенкс. Компарација Ридових и Џенксових ставова доводи до следећих закључака: 1. Једно од основних стваралачких опредељења, које се јавља у уметности реализма (Рид), а присутно је и у традиционалистичким тендецијама у архитектури (Џенкс) јесте мимикричан израз или мимезис. 2. Идеализам у уметности (Рид) и рационалистичке тенденције у архитектури (Џенкс), засноване су на асо ци- јативности. 3. Експресионизам у уметности (Рид) и креативистичке тенденције у архитектури (Џенкс), засноване су на експре- сивности као стваралачком опредељењу. Експресија у уметности Већина аутора који се баве критиком уметности појам експресивности поистовећује са покретом експресионизма, који заправо и није био само уметнички покрет, него визија света са надама, сновима и мржњама, био је један посебан сензибилитет. Да би се направила јасна дистинкција између ова два појма неопходно је укратко објаснити основне карактеристике овог уметничког правца. Само порекло појма „експресионизам” доста је нејасно. Први пут се јавља око 1850. године (Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine), означавајући експресионисте као оне „који желе да изразе посебне емоције” (Палмије, 1995). Чест је био случај да су дела уметника као што су Матис (Henri Matisse), Кандински (Василий Кандинский), Брак (Georges Braque) и Пикасо (Pablo Picasso), која су имала неке од одлика експресивности, називана експресионистичким, што је доводило до забуне. У Француској су уметници са елементима експресивности у свом изразу називани „кубистима’’ или „фовистима”, у Немачкој „експресионистима”, а у Италији „футуристима”. Кандински нпр. разликује свој експресионистички период од кубистичког и од преласка на апстрактну уметност, док се слична појава јавља и код других уметника – њихова дела мењају своје ликовне карактеристике (припадају другом правцу), а не мењају врсту израза, тј. изражајне карактеристике. Сасвим је извесно да се термин експресионизам првенствено односи на дела која су сматрана реакционарним за период свог настанка и која су имала прилично јасно дефинисане ставове у погледу тема и техника (жестина израза, порицање реалности, апстракција, жестина боја и осветљења, браз- дање, ломњење, кидање), док се експресивним, у општијем значењу, може назвати дело које је аутентично, препоз- натљиво и изражава суштину личности и карактера уметника. Уколико ствари поставимо на овакав начин, приметићемо да феномен експресивности егзистира у уметности од давнина, да би почетком 20. века кулминирао у јединствен уметнички покрет - експресионизам. У том контексту, можемо рећи да и одређена дела Рембранта (Rembrandt), Каравађа (Caravaggio), Де Рибере (Jusepe de Ribera), Тарнера (J. M. W. Turner), К. Ф. Давида (Caspar friedrich david) или Ел Грека (El Greco), представљају духовне претече експресионизма, обзиром да поседују висок степен експресивности, а такође можемо закључити да појмови експресионизма и експресивности подразумевају и изра- жавање мисли и идеја, а не само изражавање емоција. Експресија у архитектури Експресионизам се у архитектури јавља нешто касније него у осталим уметностима (око 1913. год.), иако је идеја о архитектури челика и стакла промовисана знатно раније (средином 19.в.). Евидентна је сличност експресионизма (Стаклени павиљон Б. Таута (Bruno Taut) и Кристална круна Х. Пелцига (Hans 15 Ђорђе Алфиревић/АУ31/2011/страна 3-15/Визуелни израз у архитектури Literatura / Literature Arnhajm, R. (1985): Vizuelno mišljenje ­ jedinstvo slike i pojma, Beograd, Univerzitet umetnosti. (nasl.orig. Arnheim, Rudolph. Visual Thinking.) Vasilski, D. (2008): Minimalizam kao civilizacijska paradigma na početku XXI veka, Arhitektura i urbanizam, br.22-23. Vujaklija, M. (1970): leksikon stranih reči i izraza,Beograd, Prosveta. Jung, K. G. (2003): Psihološki tipovi, Beograd, dereta (nasl.orig. Jung, Carl Gustav. Psychological Types.) Koklen, A. (2005): Teorije umetnosti, Banja Luka, Besjeda.(nasl. orig. Cauquelin, Anne. les théories de l’art.) Marić, I. (2006): Tradicionalno graditeljstvo pomoravlja i savremena arhitektura, Beograd, Institut za arhitekturu i urbanizam srbije. Ognjenović P. (1997): Psihološka teorija umetnosti, Beograd, Institut za psihologiju. Conclusion Analyzing the grounds of Read’s assertions regarding the existence of creative orientations in art (realism, idealism and expressionism), which are based on the elementary forms of perception in humans (perception, intuition and emotion), we come to a direct conclusion that there is a relationship between these orientations and the main contemporary architectural tendencies in the world, which Charles Jenks set up as a thesis. By comparing Read’s and Jencks’ views, the following conclusion may be drawn: 1. One of the main creative orientations occurring in the art of Realism (Read), also present in traditionalistic tendencies in architecture (Jencks) is a mimicric expression or mimesis. 2. Idealism in art (Read) and rationalistic tendencies in architecture (Jencks) are based on associativity. 3. Expressionism in art (Read) and creativist tendencies in architecture (Jencks) are based on expressiveness as a creative orientation. deep respect to the Gothic dematerialized being and medieval architecture, as an expression of the epoch imbued with the spirit and metaphysics. Prominent examples of expressiveness in architecture are works created during the Gothic and Baroque periods, periods of Czech Cubism, the Secession and Expressionism, up to the contemporary examples of hi­tech and deconstruction. However, besides the listed examples, there is an entire field of architectural creativity which, in terms of expression, is not that much obvious because it is based on thoughtful and phenomenal expression (Vasilski, 2008). Such form of expression has a great unuttered power which remains hampered by the frameworks of the material. Examples of such creativity may be found in movements of conceptualism, symbolism and minimalism. Palmije, Ž. M. (1995): Ekspresionizam kao pobuna, Novi Sad, Matica srpska. (nasl.orig. Palmier, Jean-Michel. l’expressionnisme comme revolte : contribution a l’etude de la vie artistique sous la Republique de Weimar.) Rid, H. (1957): Umjetnost danas, Zagreb, Mladost. (nasl.orig. Read, Herbert. Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern Painting and sculpture.) Trifunović, L. (1969): stara i nova umetnost, Ideja prošlosti u modernoj umetnosti, Zograf, br.3. Hrnjica, S. (1994): opšta psihologija sa psihologijom ličnosti, Beograd, Naučna knjiga Čarapić, A. (2008): da li je materijalizacija arhitekture neophodno materijalna, Arhitektura i urbanizam, br.22-23. Dženks, Č. (1986): Moderni pokreti u arhitekturi, Beograd, Građevinska knjiga. (nasl.orig. Jencks, Charles. Modern Movements in Architecture.) work_g43il6loobdbdcvkz72th65r6a ---- Books by Artists This PDF is an edited version (essay texts only) of the catalogue Books by Artists ISBN 0 9536076 07 Published by Impact Press as part of Impact International Multi-disciplinary Printmaking Conference, to accompany the exhibition Books by Artists at the University of the West of England, Bristol 21-30 September 1999 ©1999 catalogue Impact Press ©1999 texts individual authors The exhibition, catalogue and research project have been generously sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Board Faculty Research Committee, UWE Bristol, Faculty of Art Media and Design Impact Press Centre for Fine Print Research UWE Faculty of Art, Media and Design Clanage Road off Kennel Lodge Road Bristol BS3 2JT A • H • R • B arts and humanities research board The original version of this catalogue also contains artists images, illustrations and listings for the 111 artists involved in the exhibition. We have reproduced the essays here to allow you to download them. The images have not been included because the catalogue was scanned and printed in 1999, and due to the changes in technologies, we no longer have copies of the original image files. Copies of the original catalogue are still available from Impact Press, full details are on the publications page. Contents Preface 3 Sarah Bodman Mortality, Immortality and Books 4 Chris Taylor Rereader 6 Colin Sackett The Ordinary Made Extraordinary 7 Deirdre Kelly The Dictatorial Perpendicular: the artists’ print and the book 9 Dr Stephen Bury Wild Conversations Press 11 Iain Biggs If it hasn’t got a spine - is it a book? 13 Carinna Parraman A few comments about a few books 15 Meg Duff A Throw of the Dice 17 Sarah Bodman Book Works 19 Sarah Bodman Preface The exhibition Books by Artists is part of the Impact international multi-disciplinary printmaking conference hosted by UWE, Bristol. This has been a wonderful opportunity to showcase some of the best in British artists’ books to an international audience. Over 100 artists have participated in the exhibition and survey by filling in and returning a questionnaire along with their book. The information amassed from this survey has shown that printmaking and artists’ books are more than a means to an end. Artists are as passionate about the methods of production used to make their books as they are about the finished piece itself. When asked to define the processes used (and why) to make their work, answers have ranged from one specific process, to “photocopy, inkjet, stencil printing (roneo, gestetner and gocco), rubber stamping, collage…immediacy, accessibility, ownership of means of production”. 1 Many artists view the developing computer and print technologies as “another string to my bow”,2 or the “scanner and computer often provide a short cut, quicker way of producing work”3. The benefits of applying new technology to traditional methods are evident in the number of artists who have turned to artists’ books as a format with which they can produce their own works in multiple without the need to hand over the production to someone else. Helen Douglas of Weproductions has been producing artists’ books with an offset-litho press for years, and has now found that “working with Apple-Mac it is possible to work with colour and prepare pages and artwork… gives back control to the originator” and modern technol- ogy “will change and develop my work in books.”4 As for artists’ books existing in their current form in the future, many feel that they will still exist as “hand-held, interactive objects as opposed to purely virtual or computer based”. 5 There will of course be new formats created in book making in the future, but as Patrick Eyres states, with the exciting potential of new CD-Rom, video and web bookworks “what happens to the pleasure of handling the book?… This is a key reason for maintaining the existing format”.6 It is very likely that alongside the new developments in technology, artists’ books will still be recognisable in their current format. As Penelope Downes has pointed out “artists’ books have always been around. In the last 10 years they have become more fashionable, personally I like artists’ books because they bring together so many of the arts in one object”.7 Artists’ books are also popular as a means of artists collaborating on a single piece, whether through a text and image collaboration, or working together on the entire contents. Julia Farrer and Ian Tyson have collaborated on the Partwork imprint over a three year period “…the experience of two Partwork collaborations has strengthened and broadened both our work and has been a strong influence on its subsequent development”.8 This format of producing joint works is part of the appeal of artists’ books. The opportunity to make work with oth- ers and the democracy of production and distribution is part of the essence of why artists make books. I would like to thank all the artists who have participated in this exhibition with both their artwork and their form completions. Opening the post each morning has never been such fun, receiving parcels that only artists’ book makers could have sent; even the packaging was a delight. The following artists and authors have also very kindly contributed written pieces for the catalogue, and I would like to thank them for their time spent and the thoughtful essays that have resulted from their interests: Iain Biggs, Dr Stephen Bury, Meg Duff, Deirdre Kelly, Carinna Parraman and Chris Taylor. Thanks are also due to Colin Sackett, and Jane Rolo of Book Works who have both also contributed written pieces for the catalogue, and to Annabel Other of the Bristol Art Library for arranging a visit and providing the information for my written contribution to this catalogue. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank both the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the UWE Faculty Research Committee for their generous support of this project.Thanks are also due to the Centre for Fine Print Research, EPI and Print Centre staff for their help, with particular thanks to Carinna Parraman for her dedication to this project, Emmeline Brewer for her proof reading, and to Keith Jones for his expert help in the production of this catalogue. Sarah Bodman notes 1 Mark Pawson, 2 John Dilnot, 3 Patricia Collins, 4 Helen Douglas, 5 Sue Doggett, 6 Patrick Eyres, 7 Penny Downes, 8 Julia Farrer (all quotes above are from the artists’ exhibition survey forms) Mortality, Immortality and Books 1 Harmless an event as it may seem, the artist’s book fair plays a pivotal role in the development and continuity of the artist’s book genre, greater than what is readily perceived. Let’s assume artists make books with the intention that not only will they be ‘read’, but also handled by the viewer as part and parcel of the experience of that particular medium. Displayed behind glass, as more often they are, the function of an artist’s book as an artefact requiring proactive intervention through touch and timing is completely lost.The books take the form of historical remnants, museum pieces rendered useless because we, the viewers, are forbidden to interact. By preceding ‘book’ with the word ‘artists’ do we subjugate these objects to the same artificial reverentialism that we apply to the majority of art works in other media? Are we denying ourselves the one thing which makes artists’ books quite different and special in the visual arts world - the requirement to touch, hold and manoeuvre? Encouraging as it is to see exhibitions of artists’ books in galleries, they often fall foul of those incessant conservation and/or insurance indemnity problems that rear their ugly heads at the slightest sniff of an artwork run loose.Whatever the arguments for protecting these book works, whether rarity and value, curatorial inexperience or insurance constraints, the fact remains that the handling of such objects is essential to their conceptual as well as physical existence. As we are well aware, many artists’ books are constructed of materials that will neither stand the test of time due to environmental conditions nor the physical stresses of handling over long periods. So, is it not a fait accompli that many of these books will eventually end up as a pile of debris, the result of an ongoing natural process and finite material existence? During the last decade three artist’s book exhibitions in particular ; Bookworks2, Change the Context: Change the Text 3 and Work & Turn4 broached the handling issue head on, successfully demonstrating that if the viewer is allowed to manipulate the exhibits freely the books will in turn be treated sympathetically incurring no greater damage than what would normally be expected when handling any artifact of a delicate nature. Displaying a single or double page spread behind glass may illustrate a sense of space or textual interaction, but only partially. The role of the book and its concept as a whole from cover to cover, is being ignored. By allowing the freedom of access the viewer experiences the book’s third dimension. A book is not a painting, a book is not a film. A book is a three dimensional object that requires handling. It has its own set of values that single it out within contemporary art practice whilst highlighting its particular status and importance as part of an expanded field of disciplines. As long as the context and environment in which artists’ books are being encountered is one of mutual respect (together with a certain amount of faith on the part of the exhibitor and curator) then a dialogue between artist, curator and viewer can be formed. Within this dialogue, the role of the curator is a major factor with involvement encountered at a number of different levels. As the originator of an exhibition, the exhibition designer, the commissioner or simply the facilitator, a curator is fundamental in the continual development and expansion of the areas in which we can engage with the artist’s book. Some might argue that the curator is unnecessary within the sequence; that the contents of the book, the pages, are the ‘exhibition’ self-curated within a space wholly defined by the front and rear covers.A simple and neat concept maybe, but one that possibly results in the exclusion of artists’ books from ‘serious’ critical research and prominent curatorial consideration - their insularity being a cause for concern within a traditionally extrovert environment. The portability of a book allows it to be easily removed/transferred from the gallery/exhibition context into the personal and, dare I say it, domestic environment, a venue some would argue, more suitable to craft rather than the fine arts. In many ways, this flexibility, together with the general historical understanding of the book as a channel/vehicle for disseminating information (as opposed to being an object of critical debate in relation to its visual aesthetic and conceptual qualities) has created its own set of problems and issues from which it may never be able to escape.The book can document, can respond to, can be as a result of - the book has many possibilities. When the artist’s book is produced in conjunction with an exhibition is it a work of art or merely a catalogue? Even within the realm of the converted the overlap between these possibilities can be problematic. An alternative arena for viewing/reading book works in whatever form is the book fair.Where many galleries fail, the book fair can succeed, appealing to both a specialist and mass audience with an ever increasing diversity of participating artists and imprints. Most importantly, it provides an opportunity for the viewer to experience the exhibited works in a manner appropriate to their function.The ‘fair’ might at first seem like a cattle-market way of encountering this particular genre of contemporary art practice, but the nature of the book, usually small scale, handleable and primarily a one to one experience, is perfect for this type of occasion. Whilst gallery policies continue to deny hands-on access to artists’ books in exhibition situations the book fair, book shop (of which there are a small number stocking artists’ books) and specialist galleries such as the Hardware and Eagle will remain the most enjoyable places to encounter this type of work. Outside London the availability is negligible. Despite the North having one of the most comprehensive collections of artists’ books based at Manchester’s All Saints’ Library5, retail outlets are few and far between. However, the instigation of an annual Artist’s Book Fair located centrally in the UK6 will hopefully help to solve this dilemma to a degree, providing greater exposure of the art form and an increased market from a new and broader audience. For the past eight years the London Artist’s Book Fair7 has acted as a magnet to the interested and the curious, building up a reputation second to none with a high per- centage of international imprints regularly taking part. With humble beginnings on the South Bank, it has become the main event in the UK’s book art calendar. Such fairs as the one now held annually at The Dean Clough Galleries in Halifax aim to fill a gap that has always existed outside the capital, though undoubtedly they will always lack the concentration of artists, buyers and the kudos that London commands. Only through the sheer determination of the participants and the will of the organisers will the book fair in the regions continue to exist and flourish.Yet the fair is not immune to its own set of problems. Over the past few years major players in artist’s book publishing have been noticeable by their absence at the annual events. Maybe these particular publishers have become disinterested in what can be a long, drawn-out period sitting behind a stand, have created their own particular niche markets that dispel the need to publicly sell, or have found foreign interests to be a more lucrative and valuable pursuit? In both Europe and North America the book fair has a long and successful history, one of the reasons why a number of major UK book artists spend a larger proportion of their time abroad promoting and selling their work and, as in a number of cases, have actually emigrated. Whatever the reason, their absence must be viewed positively, providing space for artists new to the genre to participate, bringing fresh faces and products to what could easily become a repetitive and stagnant event. The fair plays a pivotal role, a high-point or low- point depending on your experience, a kick-start to another year of creativity, publishing and marketing. The fair may not provide the financial return that one would obviously desire but it does encourage appreciation, development and investment into a practice more and more relevant to an increasing number of artists. To encourage and strengthen the discourse currently surrounding artists’ books and to uphold the momentum and position that has been created during the last decade, the book fair has to be complemented by the temporary exhibition and the retail outlet (despite the afore-mentioned problems). Only through the continual interplay of these three avenues of access will the genre succeed during the next decade and beyond, from being a specialist area for a relatively small number of collectors and the occasional buyer to becoming a generally accepted art form for the gallery visitor and curator alike. Chris Taylor Artist, curator and lecturer, Department of Fine Art, University of Leeds notes 1 Adapted by the author from Dust to Dust, Ashes to Ashes, also by the author and published in Contact Point magazine, Leeds, Summer 1998 2 Bookworks, Gallery II, University of Bradford, 14 November-9 December 1994 3 Change the Context: Change the Text, The Dean Clough Galleries, Halifax, 9 March-28 April 1996 4 Work & Turn, curated by David Blamey, touring 1992-94 5 All Saints’ Library, Manchester Metropolitan University (curated by Gaye Smith, Senior Subject Librarian) 6 Contemporay Artist’s Book Fair, The Dean Clough Galleries, Halifax 7 The London Artist’s Book Fair, currently held annually at the Barbican Centre, London and organised by Marcus Campbell and Isabella Oulton REREADER In 1989 I published Black Bob which marked for me the beginning of a continuing project of work concerned with the ‘direction’ of reading; whereby a book could offer a compositional structure beyond a linear, or sequential form. I had previously made several books that presented small texts in non-sequential structures, but this title seemed to involve an engagement with the reader where virtually nothing was prescribed in terms of ‘how’ one was to read the book. The repetition of the identical image throughout the sixty-three spreads is a formally static device (with a tentative reference to the lineage of the minimal ‘blank’ book). Conversely, the ‘reading’ of the first (or first-encountered) individual image is narrative and directional: the passage from left to right of the shepherd, sheep-dog, sheep and flowing river. This representation of movement implies that there is to be a similar, larger development in the whole book, from beginning to end. Although the content is wholly visual, the problem is inherently one of reading. My view of the accumulation of the fifty or sixty publications during this period, is not that each new work is simply an addition to a linear progression: a mono- directional and handicapping structure contrary to the active structures of the books themselves. Rather, each publication finds a position on the perimeter of a potentially expanding circle. It is the interrelationships between works that define and articulate the specific concerns of each individual work. (Black Bob is, in relative terms, by far the most ‘known’ of my books; the most direct in its intent and arguably the most visually seductive; it has been in more exhibitions and there has been more discussion of its nature than any other of my titles.) For the purposes of this survey exhibition I felt it most appropriate to propose the inclusion of a publication which was made with the intention of investigating the nature of these sorts of reflex and which ‘used’ as material the work itself. During the first half of 1996 I edited and published a relatively extensive work, comprising nearly six hundred texts, ordered alphabetically. This work is a broad selection from the publications and their workings made during the period of the previous five or six years, along with unpublished texts and direct references or ‘readings’ that I felt informed my work. The texts are alphabetical: this is probably the most random form, all proximities are made and determined by spelling alone. While most entries consist of a single word or two, the texts vary in extent from a single two-letter word to passages of up to a hundred words; the accumulation and equality of structure and typography propose or imply a reading best described by drawing a parallel with the continual use, while listening, of the fast-forward and rewind buttons of a tape machine. The overall ‘meaning’ or subject of Rereader is its entirety: the intention of its editing and format is to provide via the detail of the single part, and the relationship of each single part to the whole, some critical overview of the project of my work during the period. Colin Sackett The Ordinary made Extraordinary Why books? I am reminded of The Ordinary made Extraordinary by Les Bicknell, one of the most memorable artists’ books exhibitions at Hardware Gallery. His use of the familiarity and simplicity of the book format, in experimental book forms and typography (made during his residency at the University of Essex in 1994) surprised and delighted viewers. Hardware Gallery was established in London in 1986, to focus on contemporary printmaking. In 1988 with the exhibition Curved Space it firmly launched itself as a leading exponent of the artist’s book. The gallery has had a continued interest in promoting and exhibiting artists' publications ever since and the recent resurgence of interest in artists’ books, make it one of the most vibrant areas in British art today. Curved Space: New British Livres d’Artiste was presented in collaboration with Matthew Tyson, who arrived with the books in a suitcase, a common mode of transport for artists’ books. Cathy Courtney describes the exhibition Curved Space was one of those rare exhibitions which positively encouraged visitors to touch and examine the books on show. They were displayed on shelves at eye-height against walls washed with colour, to leave little shrines of blank space behind individual books. Information about each volume- materials and processes used, edition size and price - was revealed only when the book was taken down, having been pencilled in the wall behind it. …Readers were able to savour the quality of the various papers used and to feel the differences in weight and form of the fifteen books included. 1 The show was enormously successful with visitors from as far afield as Scotland and Devon! The key factor was the lack of white gloves and glass cases, as reported by Sarah Kent “a final plus is that one can handle the items, which makes this an absorbing look at the book”. 2 Whether in a book shop, library, or gallery, the bookwork does not fit in easily; the context can often be defined in terms of accessibility. If the book shop shelf is home to the book, the library a repository, then the gallery must be the display case. Simon Cutts opened Coracle in 1976 on Camberwell New Road and spent 5 years exploring the gallery as a format, through exhibitions and publications. The Itinerant Bookshop in 1984 even involved installing an active book shop in one of the gallery spaces at the Serpentine Gallery. The book shop offers an established distribution network for the circulation of published books, and the possibility of a wider mainstream audience. Some bookworks which may contain intimate or complicated ideas do not fit easily within this environment. Be reassured however, by the fact that in major galleries, visitors often spend more time in the book shop than in the gallery itself. Art galleries can be seen as either shrines or shops and sometimes both. Their business is to act as promoters and purveyors of artworks. Two galleries I have been associated with, Coracle Press and Hardware Gallery, were originally built as shops giving them a functionality not normally associated with the exhibiting of art. Both these shop/gallery spaces have qualities that I found suggestive of creative possibilities. My exhibition Made to Measure at Hardware Gallery in 1995… provided me with the opportunity for the space to become an active, rather than passive, aspect of the work so that each informed the other. Without the commitment of galleries like Hardware, who in my case were prepared to support an exhibition of sited, temporary sculptures, I am aware that certain aspects of imaginative development are being denied by an art market increasingly eager to encourage ‘commodity’. 3 In 1993, Hardware Gallery launched a new premises in Highgate, with a renewed commitment to promoting artists' publications, by establishing a regular programme of artist’s book exhibitions. Threshold: an exhibition of unique books was the first in a series aiming to maximise the potential of the gallery as a place for viewing books. Sixteen invited artists contributed diaries, sketchbooks, ‘found’ books, sealed and concealed books ranging from miniature ceramic pages by Sophie Artemis, to sculptural lead pages by Adam Reynolds in Alchemists’ Dictionary. “Few of them tell straight stories…using an alchemy of materials…they create a synaesthetic mixing of objects for the ‘reader’ to see, touch or smell. ”4 This was a vibrant time with regular private views, poetry readings and performances. The gallery floor became a living platform of artists, publishers, collectors and visitors; making introductions, developing ideas and hatching projects. The artist’s book world thrives on a small network of passionate and enthusiastic individuals. Guiding influences and motivation for projects relies on networks and long term relationships and is not necessarily market-led. Many of the reasons why artists have made books in the past remain true today.Crevice/ Map, was a journey by Susan Johanknecht and Jenifer Newson, a collaboration mapped out in the gallery space, by hanging and projected pages. Forget Us, Not… with Chris Taylor & Simon Lewandowski was another journey documented by a film, book and a set of rings. The gallery played an important role in these collaborations where the means of conception, production and dissemination, must be seen as part of the whole experience. The book has been the starting point for, the focus of, and/or a product of, many exhibitions. Bound to Happen curated by Jonathan Ward in 1996 to showcase the work of Plaatsmaken (a Dutch publishing company) and MakingSpace his own imprint, illustrated the potential for diversity in production which has been facilitated by the advent of desk-top publishing. Hardware has been showing and selling their publications ever since. “I find the Hardware Gallery makes my bookarts 40% fluffier than other outlets specialising in artists’ books. The text survives at lower temperatures too. ”5 There are a few artists for whom artists’ books are a principal means of expression, in this respect few can match Ron King of Circle Press. His support and encouragement over the years has been invaluable, and his imagination continues to fuel new book projects. There are few opportunities to view such an output since books are produced, launched and distributed via networks which are very often as individual and innovative as the publishers themselves. Some of a Kind in 1994, was a rare opportunity to see an exhibition of bookworks by Ian Tyson, whose relationship with Ron King and the Circle Press spans 30 years of publishing. This retrospective, ‘off the bookshelf ’ included his collaborations with Jerome Rothenburg, from Sightings I-IX published by Circle Press in 1967, to Six Gematria (1992) represented for the first time in one place. Hardware Gallery provided an excellent solution to the problem of showing a book ‘on the wall’. It was a very deep frame without glass in which the book could sit leaning against the backboard. These frames together with free standing boxes made it possible to mount a chronological display of the work. As the show was a retrospective this was a wonderful facility. The whole exhibition was mounted with great care. 6 Books are as noted for their similarities as for their differences. Individual shelves and reading lights were designed for each individual book, in Looking at Words, Reading Pictures (funded by London Arts Board 1994), to create a reverential atmosphere. More than 2000 visitors made the pilgrimage to see publications by Pavel Büchler, Andy Goldsworthy, Ian Hamilton-Finlay, Cornelia Parker, Richard Long and other British artists, curated by David Blamey, and memorable performances by Brian Catling and Les Coleman. Bookworks have been sold to collectors from all around the globe; whether they be artists, writers, musicians, designers, typographers, illustrators, educationalists, publishers, or librarians, they all share the same passion. As a gallery maintaining a permanent selection of artist’s bookworks available for inspection, the Hardware is a place where I can discover new bookworks and meet other collectors and artists. My first encounter with Deb Rindl was at the Hardware when we both admired the same exhibit. Subsequently, I discovered I was the first collector to purchase one of her bookworks. 7 Bookworks are part of a broader world of publishing which extends from mail art, to limited edition prints. The gallery has twice featured at the London Art Fair, by invitation from the Contemporary Art Society, presenting work by 40 artists including Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Richard Long, Bruce McLean and Simon Patterson, and also presents books annually at the Contemporary Print Show held at the Barbican Centre. “10 years at the Hardware: energy and enthusiasm; artists’ books to be touched and read; walked through and listened to. I’m glad that my books are there too!”8 Perhaps it is because bookworks have a propensity to deliver a ‘new’ experience to each viewer, that they retain a freshness and fascination for those interested in making, buying, collecting, and even exhibiting them! Deirdre Kelly Director, Hardware Gallery, London notes 1 Cathy Courtney, Art Monthly, March 1989 2 Sarah Kent, Time Out, January 1989 3 Les Coleman, June 1999 4 David Lillington,Time Out, 1993 5 Jonathan Ward, June 1999 6 Ian Tyson, June 1999 7 Neil Crawford, June 1999 8 Sophie Artemis, June 1999 The Dictatorial Perpendicular: the Artist’s Print and the Book If centuries ago it (writing) began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed word into the dictatorial perpendicular.1 The abandoning of narrative can be seen as one of the characteristics of modernism: avant-garde painting, sculpture (and perhaps relatively belatedly) printmaking replaced the narrative conventions of history and literature in favour of an investigation of formal properties of their particular medium. For over three centuries subject-matter derived from The Bible, Bunyan, Shakespeare and Milton, had held sway over English art - and printmaking in the form of engraving and etching had almost been the dominant art form, with some paintings almost being marketing ploys for subscriptions to print series.2 At the same time, the book format was becoming available again as a possible medium for the artist. In early manuscripts, decorative initials, borders and carpet pages suggested the exuberance that scribes - whether we call them 'artists' too is debatable - felt about the texts they were copying and their concern for the total appearance of the book. The spread of printing in the late fifteenth century changed all this: the artist was reduced to becoming a provider of woodcut- block or plate, and often merely of a design to be transferred to a block or plate by someone else.3 William Blake, in such books as Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) using text and image, engraved together (in a process that is still not completely understood) and hand coloured, and William Morris at the Kelmscott Press (founded in 1890), protested in their different ways against this development. But it was the adoption of technological advances in reproduction that enabled the artist to recapture control over the final appearance of the book. Henri Matisse, hand-writing and decorating the text directly in wax- crayon on lithographic stone as in Jazz (1947) or Alexandr Kruchenykh’s use of transfer paper and lithographic pen in The Letter as Such (1913) showed what the artist could do if he had control of the means of reproduction. As if in a refutation of Walter Benjamin's thesis that mechanical means of reproduction would erode the aura of art works, these books do have ‘aura’. The exclusion of narrative from the picture plane and, at the same time, the availability of the book format to artistic control would help explain the vogue for the livre d'artiste, which coincides with the onset of modernism. Patrick Caulfield's Some poems of Jules Laforgue (1973) for the Petersburg Press as a later example. Artistic control is exercised by the choice of screenprint process, the paper - Neobond synthetic, grey leather covers, typeface - Futura Bold, with its typographical layout by Eric Ayers “as agreed by the artist”, Twenty-two studies were made for the original screenprints: the print process is used as a means of reproduction, not as an end in itself. The result is a satisfying sense of closure as text and image meet, mix and meld together. The prints, however, also exist as a separate suite. The artist’s book has a similar pedigree: it allowed the artist to exploit such means of reproduction as offset or photocopying and to explore notions of narrative which had largely been expelled from the pictureplane: and during the hegemony of conceptual art - for some the 'golden age' of artists’ books - it permitted the continued existence of some trace of an art object, and therefore something to sell. However paratactic the construction, through a process of metonymy, the juxtaposition in the book format of text and text, image and text, image and image, inevitably generates narrative, as in Victor Burgin's Family (1977) or John Baldessari's Brutus killed Caesar (1976). Books too are self-evidently three dimensional as opposed to the (usually) two dimensional print. Compare Daniel Spoerri's three dimensional tableaupiège, the pop-up photolithograph and matchstick collage mounted on board for Les Nouveaux Réalistes portfolio (1973) with his Something Else Press book, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (re-anecdoted version) (1966): the book alone allows access to temporal incrustations and anecdotal accumulations to the objects on Spoerri's table, as it allows the reader to shuffle forward and back through the book and its notes: it also suggests that the reader can make accidental addition of his/her own marks.4 The book format in its one-to-oneness also allows a degree of intimacy between reader and artist that has been used to explain the popularity of the genre with women artists.5 But the relative horizontality of the book against the phallic vertical may well be another attractive quality of the artist’s book to women.6 Nevertheless, the horizontal qualities - ergonomic, psychological, or sexual - of the book are to be considered by anyone setting out to make an artist’s book. The question must be constantly asked and answered: why have you chosen the artist’s book as the vehicle for your idea rather than a print, or, to put it another way, why have you turned your back on the ‘dictatorial perpendicular’? Dr Stephen Bury Chelsea College of Art & Design, The London Institute notes 1 Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, London 1979, p62 2 See Ronald Paulson, Book and Painting: Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible; literary texts and the emergence of English painting, Knoxville, 1982 3 I qualify these simplifications in artists’ books: the book as a work of art, 1963-1995, Aldershot, 1995, p5 4 The Spoerri print is reproduced in Weny Weitman, Pop Impressions Europe/USA: prints and multiples from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999, pp 30-1 5 See My Grandmother, My Mother, Myself: artists’ books with poetry and storytelling, Southampton, 1994 6 See Rosalind E. Krauss ‘Horizontality’ in Formless: a user’s guide, New York, 1997, pp 93-103, and ‘Dans cette affaire de point de vue, pouvons-nous compter plus loin que “un”?’ in Féminin/Masculin: le sexe de l’art, Paris, 1995, pp 312-21 Wild Conversations Press I set up Wild Conversations Press in 1997, in part as a result of having made screenprints since I was a student, and in part because of acting for some years as the commissioning editor for Drawing Fire: the Journal of the National Association for Fine Art Education - something which gave me a taste of the joys and frustrations of publishing. My original intention was simply that it would be a good strategy to give a more personal and practical focus and identity to my growing interest in the artist’s book, seen largely as a particular form of collaborative art practice. I was encouraged to develop this idea by a num- ber of other staff working in the Faculty of Art, Media and Design at the University of the West of England, Bristol, who not only shared my interest but had also set up group projects to create books of various sorts to which I had contributed. Although hardly more than a competent printer myself, I felt that there was scope to use the notion of a press to explore some of the areas of overlap between my educational work and my own concerns as an artist. Although not seen officially as ‘research’ in the strict academic sense now so important to art and design institutions, I believe that, in a wider social and cultural context, truly collaborative art practice involves some of the most radical aspects of research available to us. Making collaborative books is, it seems to me, an ideal way to develop this alternative approach to art practice. Looking at this from another angle, as our understanding of the constitution of the self changes, and as its relationship to the shared social world is seen to be more complex, so collaborative creative work must become more important within our culture. In retrospect, the circumstances which led up to the creation of Wild Conversations Press derive from at least two, rather different, areas of my work and experience. The first area is my long-term engagement with groups of people from a psychological perspective, something that has always gone beyond my work as a lecturer and artist, together with my interest in the writing of James Hillman and associated thinkers. Both educational practice and theoretical study have convinced me that there are compelling practical, social and psychological reasons for the growing interest in collaborative, project-based artmaking and, in addition, that this form of work has real value as a model for badly needed creative collective activity in our society. A number of artists I knew were equally interested in collaboration, as were many of my students; so making artists’ books with some of them seemed an ideal starting point to test out an alternative way of working from the model I absorbed through my own education as a painter and printmaker. Since I wanted control of the process of publishing, I applied for ten ISBN numbers and, without more ado, set up my very own press. The second area of interest is more specifically to do with ideas I had been trying to articulate, through my teaching, conference papers and book chapters. This has to do with cultural issues focused on ideas of place and region, many of them ultimately derived from Paul Ricoeur and Kenneth Frampton’s writings on ‘Critical Regionalism’. To date the press has published three books, each part funded by research money from the Faculty of Art, Media and Design at UWE, Bristol. There are two further books currently in production and a commitment to producing at least two more. Building on experience elsewhere, I am now seeking more exposure for the press’ output, with the intention of eventually looking for a distribution deal of some sort. In 1997 the press published its first book, Berlin-Bristol/ Bristol-Berlin, in conjunction with Jonathan Ward of MakingSpace publishers, who did the typography and binding. The book was made jointly between the German artist Tanja Isbarn and myself. It is colour screenprinted throughout in an edition of 15. It measures 65. 5cm x 48cm and has 33 pages, including 1 cover sheet, 26 pages of images and 6 pages of text. Made in part in both cities, although printed in Bristol, it offers a complex reflection of the exchange between two artists, each with an interest in the home city of the other. In many respects this first book reflects the type of collaboration and outcome I had in mind when I established the press. Needless to say, it is the only one which has done so to date. A textless book with the artist Jane Millar, begun in the same year but delayed for a number of reasons, is currently nearing completion. Through my work with Jane Millar I became involved with FOLD, a project to publish a newspaper of the unconscious. This now involves some 40 artists and designers and is jointly edited by Jane Millar, Andrea Duncan (from the University of East London), and myself. Although the press will not be publishing the paper itself, it has had a major part in its conception, funding and production and I feel that the experience will feed back into the press’ work in future. In 1997 I inadvertently talked myself into finding the funds to produce and publish Art Works, a collection of artists’ prints in slip cases, bound with an introductory text, as a book. This project was established to help the Arts Dyslexia Trust raise funds for its work. The book was produced in an edition of 50 velvet bound copies, with an additional unique leather bound copy, signed by all the artists, for auction. The book includes work by 20 artists, architects and designers; some directly associated with the trust and its work in the UK, others major international figures, for example Robert Rauschenberg and Antony Gormley. A complex project done on a shoe string budget and a great deal of good will, the logistics involved tested the production team in the Centre for Fine Print Research at UWE to the full. This book was launched by the trust at a special international gathering at the House of Lords on June 14th 1999. This year the press has also published Alexander Gorlizki's Seven (Unknown) Famous Belgians, which accompanied the exhibition of the same name at De Chiara / Stewart Gallery, New York. Put together by Gorlizki in collaboration with the designer Nick Eagleton, this book reflects Gorlizki’s commitment to working with artists and craftspeople, sixteen of whom are credited in the book as contributing to the project. In addition to the main run, a special edition with knitted cover, CD and loose prints was also produced. In this case, the press left design and production to Eagleton and Gorlizki, and took on the role of enabling the project through finding fund- ing. My role being little more than that of an advisory editor. Working on a current project, to produce a book provisionally entitled Osmosis in collaboration with the sculptor Helen Smith, has demonstrated the very real value of making collaborative books as a means of bringing two artists to the point where they are ‘in tune’ with each other. Helen and I have been astonished at the way in which what we had seen, as relative strangers, as our rather different practices and ideas, have gradually drawn together ; without there being any sense of loss or compromise of quality from our perspective as individual makers. As such the book has provided us with the ideal basis for other, more complex, joint projects where we will be working with larger teams of people. Increasingly, the collaborative side of working with other artists is drawing me away from the concern with artists’ books with which I started. This seems all to the good, and it may be that Wild Conversations Press will become little more than a means to facilitate the documentation and dissemination of the work of groups of artists produced through these larger projects; but in a printed form which itself allows for creative work with beautiful materials and design possibilities. At least the income derived from larger projects might resolve one of the ongoing problems facing anyone running a small press - namely, where on earth does the money for the next project come from? That said, the pleasures of making collaborative artists’ books is such that, in the end, the money to continue always gets found. Iain Biggs Principal Lecturer Fine Art, MA Programme Director UWE, Faculty of Art, Media and Design, Bristol If it hasn’t got a spine - is it a book? What can the book format achieve that cannot be achieved in another form? Stephen Bury suggests, The book is intended as a work of art in itself. They are not reproductions of an artist’s work, about an artist, or just with a text or illustrations of an artist. In practice, this definition breaks down as artists challenge it, pushing the book format in unexpected directions.1 The book therefore can be seen as integral to the conceptual repertoire of the artist’s creative output. It is not a secondary work that lies in the shadow of painting, sculpture or print but an original means of expression. But what is a book? Traditional notions of what might constitute a book would include a cover, a spine, and pages with text and illustrations. It might contain a narrative, leading the viewer along a journey, either through image or text or both. In the area of artists’ books and especially sculptural books, their format might be considered as a very distant cousin. This article will look at books made by artists that combine sculptural elements, found materials and a variety of print processes. The article will present and investigate the type of novel books made by artists who are included in this survey exhibition. The notion of the sculptural book has long held a fascination for myself. My own books have included paper folding and mixed media. I was therefore interested in investigating this area in relation to other artists in this survey. Pop-up, mechanical, sculptural or three dimensional are terms that could be used to describe books that conceal, reveal, surprise or take the viewer on a journey of the unexpected. The art of pop- up is closely linked with a childish desire to play and interact with the object. Traditional books may be viewed as one directional or solely for imparting information where no interaction is involved other than turning the page. The desire to interact is born out of our need to play, to engage, be entertained or perhaps just be inspired. Historically, books that had moveable sections originated mainly to entertain and educate children. Many modern children’s books have used a similar approach but include buttons for activating sound and light, which enhance the enjoyment and understanding of the story. Some books include complicated paper engineering. They combine all the traditional paper folds of transformational slats, pull out and pull up flaps or folded sections, which are rendered with innovative, rich and colourful illustrations. Many of these paper engineering techniques can be traced back to the turn of the century through the work of German artist Lather Meggendorf. He made a variety of pop-up and moveable books, which were based on his interest in puppetry and the theatre. The criteria for the books chosen from this survey are based on an investigation of material, form and text to create a book of sculptural quality. Books range from a simple concertina or three dimensional structure, to boxes containing books and artefacts. Perhaps for the artist, during the decision process of making, extra consideration and planning is required to achieve a sculptural book. These considerations might include the type of paper, the materials used and the three dimensional visual effect of the book. Similarly, how the paper is folded might contain more significance with the subject matter. The concertina fold or leperello is the simplest form of sculptural book. A length of paper is folded backwards and forwards upon itself. When opened the book reveals a series of images, as exampled by Kate Farley, or a panorama if extended fully as in the works of Tracey Bush. Farley’s book, Two Sides of the Same Street (1998), provides a scene of a series of terraced houses that can be appreciated as single houses on the separate pages or as a street when elongated. She uses the notion of a narrative as a journey as the eye walks along the street. The journey is similar, but from a bird’s eye view, as we look down on Bush’s historical London’s Lost Rivers (1997). She presents a historical narrative of the changes that occur to the river spanning some several centuries. Some of the rivers have been lost over the passage of time, and can only be recognised now as London street names. The folding of her book relates to how maps or in the case of Bush’s reference source, how sea charts are folded. The concertina structure is also utilised by Julia Farrer and Ian Tyson in Dedication I and II (1989). The eye is guided by the use of broad areas of intersecting colour to create a three dimensional space. Here these works are concerned with the interplay of the vertical lines of the concertina fold and the strong shapes produced by the areas of colour. Similarly Mark Hudson’s Cley (1998) utilises the folded paper as integral to sculptural expression. He only introduces a nuance of colour in the form of a continuous horizontal band of coloured precious metal leaf. My own book, which does not involve any folding, is an elongated image on a length of paper. It is scrolled into a vertical cylindrical cover entitled Circular Walk (1998). The tube is bisected vertically to form a spine and front opening. The length of paper is scrolled and tightened to fit into the tube. The image is generated from a leaf collected during one of a series of walks in Malaysia. More complicated folded, or paper engineered books can be seen in the work of Les Bicknell. He combines computer-generated text and folded paper to create a three dimensional book. The structure of Cosmic Maths (1996) is intended to be viewed at all angles. His work can be seen as a combination of the concertina and pop up and the book as object. Brendan Hansbro’s book, The Third Ark (1998) is one of a series of popups. He has combined text, dry point and collage. Pages and intersecting elements of the image are glued together, so that when the book is opened we are presented with an image of an ark, which expands beyond the confines of its cover. These intersecting engraved elements contribute to the sense of three dimensional space. Similar to Bicknell’s book one can look at the ark from different angles. By looking from the top we can see parts of the picture that are hidden if viewed from another angle. Hansbro’s book reflects the sense of fun associated with pop-up and the visual voyage of discovery. A sense of fun, the interplay with words, an understanding of shape are important elements of the sculptural book. Patricia Collins’ Apple Pie Order (1994) perhaps reflects all three. It is very simply bound, comprises 10 pages and is arranged so that the pages are opened to reflect the shape of an apple. Each page has the name of an apple, such as Cox’s Orange Pippin. The book is beguilingly uncomplicated, but presents a synthesis of idea, text and shape integral to the notions of what constitutes a sculptural book. So far I have explored books that use paper as the primary medium, however artists such as Elizabeth Hobbs, Helen Snell, Andrea Hill and Susan Johanknecht have introduced other textures. Hobbs has printed onto blocks of wood and then binds her book Françoise (1997) with ribbon to create a traditional Jacob’s Ladder. The Jacob’s Ladder is a series of blocks, which when held vertically drop down to reveal an animated series of images. She has recently become interested in the moving image and animation - perhaps this book reflects her interest. Helen Snell combines lino-cut images onto pre printed floral fabrics for her book Cautionary Tales of Two Armchair Travellers (1995). She is interested in what she refers to as to the ‘accessibility and inherent irony in the production of multiples’, which is also informed by her chosen subject matter of birth and reproduction. She will often print the same image onto a variety of surfaces, exploring the notion of combining the multiple and the unique. The material on which she prints suggests elements of domesticity and a sense of security, whilst her subject matter might suggest an altogether different notion. Andrea Hill combines a variety of media and found objects. In her work Achevé (1993), she uses scrim, wax, plaster, silk and black and white photocopies. The photographic image is pivotal to the narrative and her use of different materials reflects the significance of an autobiographical element to the work. In Emissions (1992) Susan Johanknecht combines text, written by Katherine Meynell, onto clear polyester and encapsulates hair, wax and wire. The lines generated by the hair and wire become her drawing medium. She combines fragments of image, material and text which, due to its transparent nature interact with other pages of the book to alter the composition of each page. A common link to all the book works is the open invitation to touch. We are prohibited from touching so much art, such as paintings or sculpture, even though the compulsion is overriding. Similarly, with the books we want to touch, hold, open, close and turn over in our hands. In this instance the book through its structure, hidden text or images, its series of folds and flaps invites us to do so. The fascination for the book and its tactile quality encourages interplay, where the same book can mean different things to different people, thus creating a highly personal relationship. The combination of sculpture, text, image, texture and the ability to handle the work provides the potency, perhaps unavailable in other art forms. Here in these works, we can see the development of a rich history of sculptural books. I hope it will continue. Carinna Parraman Research Fellow in Fine Print UWE, Faculty of Art, Media and Design, Bristol notes 1 Stephen Bury Artists’ Books -The book as a work of Art 1963-1995, Scolar Press, 1995, p1 A few comments about a few books Artists’ books should be read, not written about. They should be handled, not locked in glass cases. Only by examining them can we appreciate them. Only by turning the pages can we see their meaning emerging. It is therefore perverse of me to accept an invitation to write about some of the books in this exhibition. I have chosen them arbitrarily, the only criterion being that they are also represented in the Tate Gallery Library’s extensive collection. This has given me the opportunity to examine them at leisure. I could have made other selections, because we are fortunate in owning many more of the books displayed than I can possibly comment on. I was spoiled for choice. What follows is a personal interpretation. My aim is to explain how these books work for me. To me a successful artist’s book is one in which form and meaning are in harmony. An idea of extreme simplicity may be presented with great sophistication. In Deb Rindl’s The Thin Blue Line every physical detail, from the blue and white striped cord used in the binding to the clear perspex box in which the whole is housed, suggests the sensuous experience of swimming. The object in its box has the proportions of a swimming pool. This book can be displayed as a free standing sculpture with the thin blue line, clearly visible, running through it, but it is best experienced as a book where the turning of the pages indicates the progression from the shallow end, with its short white pages, to the longer dark blue page of the deep end. The pages, with their curved edges, sometimes translucent paper, increasing width, and deepening colour, are like a series of waves, super- imposed. The text is a series of single words or very brief phrases summarising the sensations of swimming and deployed in the manner of concrete poetry. The pages themselves are cut and folded with ingenuity, to emphasise the idea of gliding through the water, and even the notion of breath is expressed as a gap shaped like the mouth of a fish. It is beautifully constructed. Everything is this book is recognisable but seen afresh through the artist’s eyes. The quality of personal experience is found in many other books. Andi McGarry’s Campsite celebrates an evening spent at a rainy campsite. This small book, completely hand-made and hand-lettered, has a sense of artless spontaneity. Each copy is unique; there are small variants in the text (and probably in the spelling!) while the freely-washed illustrations, torn and collaged, are lively and bright. They reflect the text, with its fleeting but contrasting images: a girl’s laughter ; nightshrouded mountains; and air that was ‘damp, delicious and full of expectancy…’. An even smaller book, by Stuart Mugridge, records a similarly ephemeral moment, but in a completely different manner. Undwelt-in-Wood is tiny but impeccably made, its narrow green box containing a minute, neat book with minuscule text. This records a specific place and incident, capturing the moment much more formally than McGarry does. The text is distilled into a few words, delicately typeset, suggesting deer footprints and the vanishing deer itself. The colours used - grey and green pages, the cover a black and white tangle of undergrowth, dull green for the containing box - evoke the shadowy thicket. In scale this book is very private and enclosed. The final element, therefore, comes as something of a shock, as the box also contains a found object, mentioned in the text - a spent shotgun cartridge, corroded and brutal. Artists have a habit of seeing things that no-one else has noticed and drawing them to our attention, to delight and surprise us. Zoë Irvine’s By Air and Sea invites us to consider a detail of modern life that we would normally overlook - the franking marks on envelopes, which she has reproduced using a set of rubber stamps. Without the title, and the list of places and dates which she provides at the beginning of the book, we might be contemplating a series of minimalist seascapes. The list itself is curiously exotic. Where is Campibisenzio? The book is appropriately coloured, with a sky-blue cover and sea-blue stamps, or it could be the other way round. I find this book strangely satisfying, and in a few years’ time, as communications technology changes the postal service beyond recognition, it will probably be seen as an historic record. Not all books are so easy to interpret. Emissions book, by Susan Johanknecht and Katharine Meynell, contains many uncertainties within its transparent pages. When the book is viewed from the central opening everything it contains is visible through its crystalline layers - the blood- coloured text, a diagram, small transparencies and film footage, wire, hair, ‘body prints’, and indeterminate fluids in plastic containers. However, it is not entirely clear what we are looking at, although the book is heavy with sug- gestion, from its title to the whitish fluid found towards the back of the book. The diagram looks scientific, but it has no label. (I have discovered that it is in fact a diagram of the immune system, evoking the fear of AIDS. The sample body fluids turn out to be representative of spittle and semen, rather than the real thing. )1 Although printed with clinical precision, the text is subjective, flowing in a stream of consciousness. Recurrent themes are of lust, eroticism, pain, flowing, milk, blood and fear. The transparencies are small and difficult to decipher : the old fashioned sink and (possible) toilet bowl could be institutional or domestic; a meaty object on a tray could be an organ in a hospital or it could come from the butcher’s counter of a supermarket. The way in which the images are stitched to the pages, reminiscent of surgical stitches, makes me favour the hospital, but I can’t be sure. Not being entirely sure leads to a sense of unease, especially as the objects and substances depicted have many emotional associations. While a card accompanying it explains that the book ‘comes from the realisation that fear of body fluids has gone beyond the menstrual taboo…Emissions is a container for words and images taken from the notion of the body being a receptacle for liquid, slime and solids, ideas, banalities and prejudices’, I feel that the book deliberately presents the reader with ambiguities that allow for a range of personal responses. There is a tension here between the personal and the sociological, between privacy and transparency. Similarly, The Collector, by Sarah Bodman is not all it seems. An elegant and restrained book, it has no formal text but relies for its effect on an accumulation of images and their suggestive placement. On the left side of each opening there appears an image of plants in a greenhouse; on the right side, reproductions of biological slides, whose labels are hand-written or typed on an ancient typewriter. The colour wash used in conjunction with the screenprints gives a muted, old-fashioned look to the images. Faded pinks, yellows, sepia tints and gloomy browns evoke the Victorian era in which the unnamed collector may have lived. No explanation is given of either the plants depicted or the arrangement of slides. No information is given about the collector. Many of the plant images are not crisp but blurred, either bleached or dark, so that not all the backgound details are clear. It is up to the reader to work out which plants are represented. I identified chrysanthemums, pitcher plants, venus fly traps and cacti. Chrysanthemums suggest old ladies and Queen Mother hats, but pitcher plants and venus fly traps are carnivorous plants which devour insects, and cacti are spiky. The glass slides may represent the objectivity of science and the discipline of collecting, but the labels that are decipherable suggest otherwise. Certain words stand out: ‘legs of spider, foot of house fly, section of tongue, proboscis of house fly, sting of wasp, feet of house fly, jaws of garden spider, tongue of bee…’ and so on. And then there are the human parts represented: ‘thymus gland (human), spermatozoa (human), hair human from head…’ The cumulative effect of these details is at odds with the subdued beauty of the book’s presentation. The words which appear are evocative of spells and potions, potential ingredients of a witch’s brew; they have a sinister poetry. The choice of plants (no surprise to anyonefamiliar with Sarah Bodman’s other books) reminds us that plants can sting, cut, consume and poison. The Collector may not be so benign after all. The world presented here is not clearly explained; it seems remote in time, and mysterious.Yet laboratories, greenhouses and scientific experimentation, especially the genetic engineering of plants, are very much of our own time. The world of The Collector does not strike me as emerging directly from the artist’s personal experience, but rather from her imagination. Imagined worlds abound in artists’ books, as numerous as the artists themselves. Such a world is Randy Klein’s Florida (or,You can’t fight progress) which bears only a passing resemblance to the real thing. In this epic tale of creation and destruction, the car and the television - but particularly the car - play major roles. These icons of American life are joined by images of freeways and rockets, suntanned surfers and curling waves, Florida oranges, yachts and suburban houses. The text, beginning grandiloquently ‘In the beginning there was the void…’ is gloriously subverted by the images chosen to accompany it: the first appearance of man on earth is represented by a diver in flippers and mask; ‘the lands which became more bountiful’ are illustrated by a picture of a dolphin leaping through a rubber ring. Folded pages, cutouts and pop-ups are used to excellent effect to conceal and reveal meaning, to slow down the text and then to twist it in unexpected directions, as in the sequence ‘It was a new race… (picture of jet, cutout behind of yachts and dirigible)…to the home…(four layers of tightly packed clapboard houses)…pink messy birds’…(picture of flamingoes). The text soars biblically then dives into banality. The final image is of palms in the sunset. The illustrations include the artist’s drawings, collages and many found images. The flavour of naïve 1950’s America is strong, and nowhere more extravagantly celebrated than in the cloth binding with its stiff, swimsuited couple, palm trees and tropical fruit. The book comments ironically on the American way of life, then and now. In a moment of crisis: ‘We tried to ignore it…even when the sky belched black…“it will pass”, we thought…“We will wait in our cars”. Every stereotype is lovingly illustrated. The variety of techniques employed and the shifting narrative make this a lively book full of mostly delightful surprises. However, even this light-hearted depiction of the American dream has a darker side. Beneath the quirky humour lie images of slavery, race riots and the depredations of progress, hinted at in the subtitle. The book’s structure allows us to follow a narrative and to uncover layers of meaning in a way that could not be done with any other form of art. Although the books described above in no way encompass the whole range of this exhibition, they indicate a wide diversity of subject matter and technique. Each book needs to be examined on its own terms, and, if the artist has been successful, every aspect of the book will contribute to the impact made by the whole. Text (or absence of it), materials, dimensions, structure, what is included and what left out, all communicate some sort of meaning. I have attempted to enumerate some of the ways in which individual artists have succeeded in drawing forth very different responses. Contact with the books themselves is the ideal path to understanding. Meg Duff Librarian, Tate Gallery 1 Speaking of book art: interviews with British and American book artists, Cathy Courtney, Los Altos Hills: Anderson Lovelace; London, Red Gull Press, 1999, pp183-4 A Throw of the Dice It was purely by chance that I first discovered the Bristol Art Library, during its infancy in March 1998. Since then, the library has amassed 75 volumes, 450 ticket holding members and has travelled throughout Britain, to the USA and Spain. The artist Andrew Lanyon describes the Bristol Art Library as a “truly mediaeval idea” which in essence it is. Mediaeval court audiences were entertained by travelling players, magicians and storytellers who brought with them new experiences of encounters with the world at large. It is in this vein that the Bristol Art Library has made its way around the country, as a work of informative entertainment, since its first official appointment in October 1998. The collection so far includes books by artists, poets, musicians, animators, a mathematician and a heating engineer, all offering their view of a particular subject. The library operates as a performance piece, complete with head librarian Annabel Other, who meticulously unfolds the case, sets up the library desk and issues tickets for new members at each venue. Readers are invited to browse the shelves, or use the Dewey cataloguing system to select three books at a time during the library's visit. The whole library is catalogued by both name and subject, but it is far more rewarding to take a gamble and select at random from the shelves. Chance discoveries set the reader on a metaphysical journey which leaves much more of an imprint when there has been no prior indication of its nature. Readers of all backgrounds will appreciate many of the topics covered, the loss of a parent, the tribulations of growing old, pop- up swimmers or a collection of old shreds of stamps. Every book within the library contains something that people can engage with on a visual level. The collection of books crosses the boundaries of high art and popular culture very easily, and is received with equal fascination in venues ranging from private houses to community centres and museums. Each of the books in this miniature art tour is made as a one-off piece for the library, although it may be adapted from the artists’ editions. Contributing artists are supplied with the blank pages to use as they wish. The finished pages are returned to the head librarian, who binds them all in regulation brown bookcloth and hand tools the name and title on the cover. Apart from the Dewey classification number on the spine, the books appear to be identical when shelved, but as each book is selected it is apparent that they are all very individual. The theatrical nature of the library’s visits has included a viewer sight reading a musical score to the room, to elderly ladies laughing knowingly on reading Body Language by the library’s oldest contributor Graham Wilson. This book of wittily observed drawings is full of snippets of life as a pensioner. Old men greet each other in the street with “you’re not dead then”, others take great delight in annoying visitors to their care home, proving that old people can be as aggravating and amusing as the next generation. Part of the fun of the library is the absolute chance by which stories are found, and the diversity of contents in the collection; love affairs, arms and legs, bullets, insects, mathematical equations, music, the reverse sides of labels, darkness, conversations, all spill out of the books as the first page is turned. Each of these unique books opens up a new world to viewer after viewer, and their reactions, in turn, add another dimension to the history of each book. The readers become an important part of each book’s past as they divulge their own feelings about the subject. The head librarian may pass this on to a subsequent viewer, the books then becoming like a game of chinese whispers as information is received and forwarded. The range of subjects enclosed within the library is infinite, Music for Inert Repetitions by Joanna Hoffmann is a heartfelt testament of “how little time we have to fulfil ourselves, how little of ourselves we have to fill up time” the two statements interspersed with light sensitive photographs which will eventually fade out in time. The text is printed in tiny white type on a black background, shining out from the depths of the darkness. The Hoppo Stencil Book by David Hopkinson is a series of stencils for the viewer to spray through and create a copy of the artist’s name and a caricature of his face, in true comic book style. Tragic Magic, or Conjuring for Christians by Jonathan Allen is an irreverent series of magic tricks for Christians. Conjurers’ wands combine into a cross, magicians’ balloons are sculpted to spell GOD, matches levitate above their box and poker cards land on 666. The objects appear out of thin air, unattached to any reality with no linking perspective to any form of landscape, like an apparition they float in unreal time. This book was made for the library’s launch at a New York party which fittingly included a troupe of magicians as part of the soirée. In situations like these the library seems to have a magnetic quality which captures everything around it, incorporating it into the theatre. Some visitors to the library have noticed an unfilled category in the Dewey system, and have offered to make a book to fill the gap. This way the library builds a collection of all the subjects usually found in traditional libraries. Quite often, enquiries about a favourite subject result in a book being made by an expert who is not an artist, and so the variety of styles within the library widens. This brings a diversity of language; books made by a mathematician or engineer will vary in their text or image style from books by poets or visual artists. It is this exchange of ideas within such a compact arena which makes the Bristol Art Library so fascinating, that such a vast selection of information can fit into something so small. In spirit, the Bristol Art Library is a public amenity, and encourages people with little experience of art culture to involve themselves through its quirky approachability. Although some libraries can be quite intimidating in their austerity, universally, they are places of discovery and cultural enrichment. The advantage of this library is that its portable nature keeps it small enough in size to encourage participation in visitors. As more libraries now are increasingly under threat of closure, or suffering from lack of funds, the existence of the Bristol Art Library (named after the now defunct art library in Bristol) is a welcome addition to both art and popular culture. If this experience encourages people to visit a library, or make a book then it has provided a public service. The Bristol Art Library has developed its own services as it has grown. The library has a miniature notice-board for exhibitions, adverts and exchanges, and has recently published the first issue of The Contributor its own newsletter in the style of a parish journal, complete with cartoons and listings. The head librarian has also expanded on the educational aspects of the library, and works with many sections of the community to encourage others to make artists’ books. There will be a new branch library created and run by 13-18 year olds in the Bath area as part of the Babel project for Bath Festival. This is part of a commitment by the head librarian to bring art in this format to those who would not usually make the visit themselves. Each time the library pays another visit, it brings new ideas and another perspective on life to an unsuspecting audience. It does entertain in the manner of the mediaeval, by tricks and surprises the books can trigger reactions and play with words and images to draw in even the most apprehensive visitor, curiosity often overwhelms any doubts. As Mallarmé said “all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book”,1 so, if you see a librarian walking your way, with a bulky yet unassuming looking trolley case, follow her, you never know what you may discover. Sarah Bodman Research Associate in Fine Print UWE, Faculty of Art, Media and Design, Bristol notes 1 Stéphane Mallarmé; Selected Poetry and Prose ed. M. Caws, New Directions, New York, 1982 Book Works Book Works is a London based organisation dedicated to publishing work by contemporary artists either in traditional or experimental formats. It was founded in 1984, and has grown since then to include a wide variety of commercial work and commissioning artists to work on new pieces, from books and exhibitions to installation works. Book Works has published artists’ books and text works by artists including: Susan Hiller, Sharon Kivland, Douglas Gordon, Lothar Baumgarten, Brian Catling,Verdi Yahooda, Jimmie Durham, Joseph Kosuth and Liam Gillick in the forms of limited editions and multiples. It has also commissioned installations and performance pieces by Cornelia Parker, Langlands and Bell, and Richard Layzell (Site Works I in 1986) and more recently two major event-based works, The Reading Room (1994) and Itinerant Texts (1996), for which Book Works commissioned a series of texts, artworks and performances. In 1992 Book Works organised the first international conference on women’s artists’ books to be held in the UK, Book Works: A Women’s Perspective. Speakers included Susan Johanknecht, Joan Lyons, Ulrike Stolz and an interview and talk with representatives of the New York based ‘Guerilla Girls’. A major exhibition of artists’ books by women was also held in conjunction with this conference, providing views of the ways in which women have worked with the book format. Book Works has created two new series of books within a varied publishing programme, the New Writing Series and the Format Series. The Format Series is represented in this exhibition by Rex Reason a book playing on the associa- tions of chemical symbols and word associations by Simon Patterson, and The Brazen Oracle by Mel Jackson made as part of Library Relocations at the University of London in 1997. The Brazen Oracle was originally a book of legends about the philosopher Roger Bacon, and this work is a result of Mel Jackson’s research and interpretation of the brazen oracle. The Palaver, a collaboration between the artist Andrew Bick and writer Gad Hollander (also part of the Format Series featured in this exhibition) is a personal, seamless rhythm of text and photographs, a thread of blue hand-rendered loops stringing their way across the pages, the whole work a continuous uninterrupted flow of text and image. From the New Writing Series David Shrigley’s Err and Virgil Tracy’s Under Hempel’s Sofa are also included. Under Hempel’s Sofa, is a totally absorbing catalogue of owned items, their histories and reasons for purchase. Err by David Shrigley is full of hand drawn diagrams and lists of a multitude of ideas, from a version of things that come in threes, to stories and charts which can amuse and confuse in a thoroughly entertaining manner, even down to the design for the book jacket. Book Works is one of the largest UK organisations devoted to artists’ books, and the size of their back catalogue of publications and related output is indicative of the scale of their commitment. The amount of writers and artists involved in their projects over the years is inspiring to all those involved in the book arts. Participants and exhibitors have ranged from Ron King, Natalie d’Arbeloff, Laurie Anderson and Tom Phillips to Sophie Calle, Barbara Kruger and Adrian Piper. Book Works has succeeded in bringing contemporary, experimental art to the attention of mainstream culture through affordable, innovative and appealing publishing. The selection of Book Works publications in this exhibition is a small part of their work from the last fif- teen years. For further information about Book Works publications contact: Book Works, 19 Holywell Row, London, EC2A 4JB. Tel: 0207 247 2536 www. bookworks.org.uk work_g7qkcaeg3jbqrcgyqp7nnlpira ---- Thermal Interaction for Improving Tactile Artwork Depth and Color-Depth Appreciation for Visually Impaired People electronics Article Thermal Interaction for Improving Tactile Artwork Depth and Color-Depth Appreciation for Visually Impaired People Jorge Iranzo Bartolomé 1,*, Jun Dong Cho 2, Luis Cavazos Quero 1 , Sunggi Jo 2 and Gilsang Cho 1 1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Korea; luis@skku.edu (L.C.Q.); Jus5041@skku.edu (G.C.) 2 Department of Human ICT Convergence, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Korea; jdcho@skku.edu (J.D.C.); whtjdrl410@skku.edu (S.J.) * Correspondence: jorgedavid@skku.edu Received: 6 October 2020; Accepted: 11 November 2020; Published: 17 November 2020 ���������� ������� Abstract: Visually impaired people can take advantage of multimodal systems in which visual information is communicated through different modes of interaction and types of feedback. Among the possible interaction modes, thermal interaction in the context of assistive devices for visually impaired people lacks research in spite of its potential. In this paper, we propose a temperature-depth mapping algorithm and a thermal display system to convey depth and depth-color of artworks’ features in the context of tactile exploration by visually impaired people. Tests with a total of 18 sighted users and six visually impaired users were performed both during the mapping algorithm design and after developing a tactile temperature prototype artwork model to assess the potentials of thermal interaction for recognizing depth and color-depth in tactile art appreciation. These tests showed both an existing correlation between depth and temperature and that the mapping based on that correlation is appropriate for conveying depth during artwork tactile exploration. Keywords: visually impaired people; accessibility; art appreciation; color; temperature-depth coding; thermal interaction 1. Introduction 1.1. Introduction Multimodality, or combining several modes in order to communicate information, is an important technique in the field of HCI (Human Computer Interaction). Since each type of interface and interaction has its own strengths and weaknesses, the combination of many modes of communication results in a more efficient user-machine communication compared to the one accomplished through a system that is based on only one type of user interaction. As a result, researchers have extensively studied different types of interaction and sensing modalities that could be used by combining several of them together in assistive technology solutions for the VIP (Visually Impaired People) [1]. However, even though research related to cross-modal associations based on haptic interfaces exists, research about thermal cues as a possible sensing modality for assistive technologies for VIP is quite small, especially when compared to other haptic interfaces such as vibrotactile actuators. In this work, the correlation between temperature and depth was studied and evaluated with real users in order to find out a proper mapping between temperature and depth. After that, the algorithm was applied to two different contexts: for conveying depth and for conveying color-based depth (effect known as chromostereopsis [2]). Also, a physical prototype was designed, implemented, Electronics 2020, 9, 1939; doi:10.3390/electronics9111939 www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics http://www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5120-1644 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/electronics9111939 http://www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/9/11/1939?type=check_update&version=3 Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 2 of 26 and evaluated always in the context of tactile artwork exploration for VIP. The system contains an array of petlier devices in which the artwork can be installed. The user can explore the artwork with the hands while feeling the temperature of the different features of the artwork as a way of conveying the depth levels. All information related to the prototype and the mapping algorithm will be given in the corresponding sections. This work is the continuation of a series of works whose main goal is the development of a multi-modal tactile artwork system that can help blind people appreciate bi-dimensional pieces of art. The main system, presented in [3,4], consisted of a 3D-printed 2.5D relief replica of an artwork installed on top of the multimodal guide system. In those works, the 2.5D relief model is a replica of the bi-dimensional artwork but with a z dimensional depth added to the different features. The user’s finger positions were recognized in real time through the use of conductive paint and real-time audio feedback was triggered by double or triple tapping on the different features of the artwork. Double tapping activated explanatory audio feedback and triple tapping activated a sound effect feedback related to what is touched. A user voice interface was also added to facilitate the control of the system by giving the users the chance of using their voice as input. Feedback from the visually impaired users during the tests encouraged us to add thermal interaction to the system, first for representing colors, as can be seen in [5]. There, a double petlier device was used to communicate a total of 54 different colors to the visually impaired user through temperature cues. Lastly, exploring the possibilities of thermal interaction in the context of artwork tactile exploration led us to the current work, in which temperature cues were used as a way of conveying depth levels of the different features of the artwork. To sum up, in this work thermal interaction, a way of mapping it to depth, and the applications of that thermal-depth mapping will be explored with the goal of assigning temperature to objects in the painting that enables conveying depth and/or color-based depth. Tests were performed to a total of 18 sighted users and six visually impaired users both during the mapping algorithm design and after developing a tactile temperature prototype artwork model to assess the potentials of thermal interaction for recognizing depth and color-depth in tactile art appreciation. These tests consisted of both prototype testing and interviews with the users. The tests showed both an existing correlation between depth and temperature and that the mapping based on that correlation successes on conveying depth in a new way during artwork tactile exploration. Also, it proved to be a promising technique for improving visually impaired people’s artwork exploration assistive devices. Particularly, eight users assessed the similarity between the depth feeling created by the temperature tactile perception and the one which arose from the visual perception. The results showed that the temperature-depth mapping algorithm was able to successfully translate the visual depth feeling into temperature cues. All these results and tests will be shown in the corresponding section. 1.2. Background and Related Work 1.2.1. Thermal Perception and Thermal Interaction Humans are able to detect temperature and temperature variations thanks to the thermoreceptors located in the dermal and epidermal skin layers. These thermoreceptors located in the skin code the relative changes and the absolute temperature and send the information to the brain. Thermoreceptors can be of two types: high-threshold receptors and low-threshold receptors. Low-threshold receptors are activated by temperatures that fall within the range of 15 ◦C and 45 ◦C. On the contrary, high-threshold detectors are activated by temperatures falling outside of that range. In general, within the 15–45 ◦C range, the activation of low-threshold receptors are not accompanied by pain. On the contrary, any temperature outside of that range can be painful and temperatures below 0 ◦C or above 50 ◦C can even cause tissue damage [6]. The non-painful temperature range has been used extensively for adding thermal feedback to a large variety of applications. For example, in [7] the authors designed structured thermal cues for conveying icons when using the phone. They created both thermal icons and intramodal tactile icons Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 3 of 26 that mixed both thermal cues and vibrotactile cues. The users were successfully able to identify most of the icons correctly. Another interesting application of thermal interaction is the one found in [8]. There, thermal cues are used for car driving assistance. Thermal cues are provided in both sides of the steering wheel indicating the driver which way to turn next. These works are some examples of all the potential possibilities of thermal interactions in the field of HCI. Similarly, our work contemplates possible new applications of thermal interaction but in the context of tactile artwork exploration by VIP. 1.2.2. Thermal Interaction for Assistive Devices There has been some research about thermal interaction in the context of mobile device applications and even some design guidelines about it [9]. However, the research about thermal interactive assistive devices for the VIP is not extensive and only a few examples exist. In [10], a system for VIP to feel a virtual sun while exploring virtual environments is presented. The virtual sun is produced by means of a device consisting of twelve infrared lamps. Also, in [5] a thermal interactive assistive device was used to aid VIP know the color of the different features of an artwork. In spite of the fact that this works also explore thermal interaction in the context of artistic or recreational activities, there are no other common traits with our present work. The present research focuses on the existing correlation between depth and temperature and some of the potential applications which arise from it for aiding visually impaired users explore tactile artworks. Semantic applications of temperature (such as recreating a virtual sun) or temperature-color mapping are not part of this work’s scope, which instead focuses on temperature-depth correlation, possible mappings, and derived applications. 1.2.3. Thermal Interaction for Artwork Exploration Thermal interaction has already been used in the context of artwork exploration for the VIP. Nevertheless, the common way of applying it has been using temperature as a way of conveying color, since previous research has suggested the existence of a color-temperature association given by the warm-cool spectrum, based in the amount of red and blue. This led research to investigate about the possible mapping between temperature and color, some of them with an art exploration application in mind, such as in [5,10]. While both of those works focused on the design of a tactile-thermal display for haptic exploration of paintings with temperature conveying color, in the case of [10], this was done only as a concept design, without implementation. On the other hand, in [5] a whole tactile-thermal display was prototyped and user tests, as well as interviews, were performed. The results showed not only that the users were able to recognize colors by feeling temperature, but also that they enjoyed the thermal interaction and that the use of thermal interaction in the context of tactile artworks was promising. Our present work follows the same path and tries to extend the possible uses of thermal interaction for tactile artwork exploration. However, this work does not focus on conveying color but, instead, on conveying the depth of the different features of the artwork. 1.2.4. Assistive Devices for Communicating Depth There are many ways of communicating depth, or how near or far an object is, to the VIP, both in a general context and also in the particular context of artwork tactile exploration. However, to our knowledge, none of them has used temperature interaction as a way of communicating depth. In non-artistic contexts, VIP are usually communicated how far or near objects are when using navigation assistive device. For example, in [11] an obstacle detection system was implemented in a navigation assistive device. The system used ultrasound to detect the nearest obstacle via stereoscopic sonar system. Once the obstacle was detected, a vibrotactile feedback was used to inform the blind person about the obstacle’s location. Similarly, in artistic contexts there are several methods for communicating depth levels to VIP. We can find all of them at museums in what are called ‘guides’. There are several types of guides, but all of them share the same goal: giving information about the artwork to the visually impaired user. This information might or might not include depth, but in general it does include it. The three types of Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 4 of 26 guides are: audio guides, relief guides, and volumetric guides. Audio guides are the most common method for providing descriptions of the artwork to VIP. They provide a verbal description of the different features of the artwork. Most of the time, the relative distance and depth of the different features from the artwork are also explained with words. Relief guides are a type of tactile guides that allow the user to comprehend the visual information by means of the sense of touch. In the case of relief guides, the artwork is translated into an embossed picture or relieve image. Sometimes, only the contour of the different features is salient, so the user can only feel those contours. In those types of relief guides, the depth information is not given to the user in a tactile way. However, in many instances, all the features of the artwork are extruded and have a third dimension added to them, which allows the user to feel the depth of the different artwork features with the fingers. This type of relief guides can be called 2.5D guide. An example of a 2.5D image artwork model can be seen in [12]. The other type of tactile guides are volumetric guides. These are completely three-dimensional volumetric works that the visually impaired user is able to explore by touching. They are usually the types of guides that gives more information through tactile interaction. However, if the original work is bi-dimensional, it is usually hard or not possible to transform it into a volumetric form. As a result, most of the research related to bi-dimensional art for visually impaired people takes advantage of audio and relief guides, rather than volumetric guides. In the case of this work, the copy of the artwork is a relief model based on tactile paper embossing technology. The result is a relief guide where only the contours of the features are embossed. This type of thin tactile paper allow us to add thermal interaction so the user can feel the temperature in the fingers while exploring the relief model. This temperature is what communicates depth to the user by way of a novel and intuitive temperature-depth mapping algorithm whose foundation will be explained in the next section. 1.2.5. Temperature-Depth Cross-Modality Some studies have researched color-concept or color-emotion association. For example, some previous research examined existing beliefs, either subconscious or conscious, about color through color-emotion association by means of an adjective list [13]. Their test consisted of a list of 30 adjectives, randomly ordered, so the users could associate any of the adjectives with any of the colors that were given to them. While some temperature-concept association research exists, there has not been similar adjective list approaches for inferring the emotional and conceptual responses of the users towards temperature. The existing research focuses on cases such as exploring heat as an expression medium when focusing on interpersonal communication [14] or mapping temperature to the dimensional models of emotion by ratings along valence and arousal dimensions, based in Russell’s circumflex model [15]. However, even with these few pieces of research and approaches about temperature and the conceptual and emotional association that arises from it, there are some results that give a hint about the fact that cold temperatures and warm temperatures are interpreted subjectively as a feeling of remoteness or nearness, respectively. In [16], tests for figuring out subjective interpretations of thermal stimuli in three different scenarios (social media activity, colleague’s presence, and the extent of use of digital content) were performed. The results showed both that there was a strong degree of agreement among participants about what temperature conveyed and that warm temperatures conveyed the presence of a colleague while cool temperatures conveyed absence. In this work we continue researching in that direction by performing some tests to find out whether users find any correlation between temperature and depth (near–far). These tests, which were performed before the temperature-depth mapping design, are shown in the following section. The results were the basis for the final temperature-depth mapping algorithm. Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 5 of 26 2. Materials and Methods 2.1. Temperature-Depth Correlation 2.1.1. Temperature Range Used Before going forward, it is important to define the range of temperatures that will be used from now on, both for the tests and for the design of the algorithms. Our algorithms are designed to help visually impaired people being aware of depth in a more interactive way through thermal interaction. Therefore, the temperature range to use during the tests and for defining the algorithm needs to be fixed from the start. As stated above, the temperature pain threshold is [15, 45 ◦C] although some research suggest it might be [11, 45 ◦C] [17], so the temperature range needs to be within those extreme limits. In [5], it was experimentally validated that the temperature range of [14, 38 ◦C] was convenient and comfortable for the visually impaired users, so it is also the range used in this work. 2.1.2. Temperature-Depth Correlation Test As has been shown in the background section, temperature-depth correlation has not been extensively researched and only a rough relationship between temperature and the presence or absence of a person has been found. These results give us a glimpse about the possibility of the concepts near/far being somehow correlated to warm/cold temperatures. As a result, our team felt encouraged to figure out whether the hypothesis of depth and distance (near/far) being correlated to temperature might make sense or not. The test was based, as in [13], on an adjective list for the users to select associations with the warm and cold temperatures. The list had similar adjectives to the ones found in there, with the exception of two added adjectives: the adjectives ‘near’ and ‘far ’. The list was made so every adjective had another one with the opposite meaning, creating a list of adjective pairs. The main purpose for having so many adjectives when the research was focused on the depth-temperature relationship was to make the user select adjectives without having any clue that the near/far dichotomy was the one the test was focused on. Two different adjectives lists were prepared: one with all the adjectives ordered randomly (Table 1) and another one with the adjectives ordered in pairs (Table 2). Each one of the lists was used at a different stage during the test, which will be explain next. The test was performed twice, first with a total of ten users, five women and five men. The users had an average age of 24 years and were volunteer college students. Each test lasted around 25 min. Then, for verifying whether the findings could be applied to visually impaired people, the same test was carried out again with six visually impaired users. The users were an average age of 17 years and all of them were students from Chungju Sungmo School, a Korean school for visually impaired people. Two of them were nine-year-old kids and all of them where totally blind from birth. Each test lasted around 30 min. The temperature actuators consisted on two petlier devices, a fan, and a heat-sink, which were controlled by an Arduino Mega board. Both temperature actuators can be seen in Figure 1. The test was performed according to the following four steps: Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 5 of 27 2. Materials and Methods 2.1. Temperature-Depth Correlation 2.1.1. Temperature Range Used Before going forward, it is important to define the range of temperatures that will be used from now on, both for the tests and for the design of the algorithms. Our algorithms are designed to help visually impaired people being aware of depth in a more interactive way through thermal interaction. Therefore, the temperature range to use during the tests and for defining the algorithm needs to be fixed from the start. As stated above, the temperature pain threshold is [15, 45 °C] although some research suggest it might be [11, 45 °C] [17], so the temperature range needs to be within those extreme limits. In [5], it was experimentally validated that the temperature range of [14, 38 °C] was convenient and comfortable for the visually impaired users, so it is also the range used in this work. 2.1.2. Temperature-Depth Correlation Test As has been shown in the background section, temperature-depth correlation has not been extensively researched and only a rough relationship between temperature and the presence or absence of a person has been found. These results give us a glimpse about the possibility of the concepts near/far being somehow correlated to warm/cold temperatures. As a result, our team felt encouraged to figure out whether the hypothesis of depth and distance (near/far) being correlated to temperature might make sense or not. The test was based, as in [13], on an adjective list for the users to select associations with the warm and cold temperatures. The list had similar adjectives to the ones found in there, with the exception of two added adjectives: the adjectives ‘near’ and ‘far’. The list was made so every adjective had another one with the opposite meaning, creating a list of adjective pairs. The main purpose for having so many adjectives when the research was focused on the depth-temperature relationship was to make the user select adjectives without having any clue that the near/far dichotomy was the one the test was focused on. Two different adjectives lists were prepared: one with all the adjectives ordered randomly (Table 1) and another one with the adjectives ordered in pairs (Table 2). Each one of the lists was used at a different stage during the test, which will be explain next. The test was performed twice, first with a total of ten users, five women and five men. The users had an average age of 24 years and were volunteer college students. Each test lasted around 25 minutes. Then, for verifying whether the findings could be applied to visually impaired people, the same test was carried out again with six visually impaired users. The users were an average age of 17 years and all of them were students from Chungju Sungmo School, a Korean school for visually impaired people. Two of them were nine-year-old kids and all of them where totally blind from birth. Each test lasted around 30 minutes. The temperature actuators consisted on two petlier devices, a fan, and a heat-sink, which were controlled by an Arduino Mega board. Both temperature actuators can be seen in Figure 1. The test was performed according to the following four steps: Figure 1. Thermal devices. Figure 1. Thermal devices. Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 6 of 26 Step 1 The tester was given an explanation about the procedure of the test and its purpose. However, the testers were told that the main purpose was to find out which concepts were correlated to temperature, without giving any kind of stress or importance to the near/far concepts as to not make the users tempted to select those options on purpose. Step 2 After the explanation, the user was asked to touch two different petliers, one which was at a temperature of 15 ◦C and another one which was at a temperature of 38 ◦C. After having felt both petliers for as long as desired, they were asked to touch only one of them and to select any number of adjectives that seemed to be related to or conveyed by the temperature they were feeling. Then, the same process was done with the remaining petlier. For each one of the users, the order of the petliers were changed. In other words, if one user started describing the adjectives that suited the warm temperature, then the next user was asked to select the adjectives which were correlated to the cool temperature first. Step 3 Finally, the same process was repeated. However, this time the adjectives were purposely ordered in pairs, with the option of ‘Not Applicable’ added to each pair for the cases when the user felt none of both concepts were related to the temperature. This last step was performed for two main reasons: First, the freedom given to the user during the previous step of choosing any adjective from a randomly ordered long list could cause the user to not consider all of them seriously, but rather to just skim through some of them without paying too much attention. On the contrary, the ordered list would force them, at least once more, to go over the near/far adjective dichotomy and consider it in relationship to the felt temperature. Secondly, forcing the user to consider all adjectives and its correlation to the temperatures twice could aid in making the user be more aware of the reason for his/her choices. Table 1. Complete list of adjectives from the test, ordered randomly. Here the user would choose as many adjectives as desired if he/she felt the experienced temperature was somehow correlated to them. Vivid Modern Mysterious Near Classical Sad Happy Confidence Tiring Dynamic Depressive Fearful Cheerful Far Simple Boring Table 2. Complete list of adjectives from the test, ordered in pairs. Also, the “Not Applicable” option was added for each pair. The users were asked to choose one option per row. Vivid Boring Not applicable Sad Cheerful Not applicable Classical Modern Not applicable Happy Depressive Not applicable Tiring Dynamic Not applicable Confidence Fearful Not applicable Near Far Not applicable Simple Mysterious Not applicable Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 7 of 26 Step 4 Lastly, the testers were asked about the reasons why they chose (or did not choose) the near and far adjectives. Basically, they were asked to justify their answers in order to find out which was the reasoning behind their choice. Also, a brief five-minute conversation about it took place. 2.1.3. Results from Temperature-Depth Correlation Test with the Sighted Users The results of the tests for the case of the ten sighted users for each one of the two stages can be seen in Figures 2 and 3. The data related only to the near and far adjectives can be seen more clearly in Tables 3 and 4, where the number of people that selected each option is indicated next to the percentage in relation to the total number of sighted participants. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 7 of 27 Step 4 Lastly, the testers were asked about the reasons why they chose (or did not choose) the near and far adjectives. Basically, they were asked to justify their answers in order to find out which was the reasoning behind their choice. Also, a brief five-minute conversation about it took place. 2.1.3. Results from Temperature-Depth Correlation Test with the Sighted Users. The results of the tests for the case of the ten sighted users for each one of the two stages can be seen in Figures 2 and 3. The data related only to the near and far adjectives can be seen more clearly in Tables 3 and 4, where the number of people that selected each option is indicated next to the percentage in relation to the total number of sighted participants. Figure 2. Results during the first stage when users were given the adjective list shown in Table 1. Figure 3. Results during the second stage when users were given the adjective list shown in Table 2. Table 3. Results during first stage only for the “near” and “far” adjectives. First Stage Near Far Warm 8 (80%) 2 (20%) Cold 1 (10%) 3 (30%) Table 4. Results during second stage only for the “near” and “far” adjectives. Second Stage Near Far Warm 6 (60%) 2 (20%) Cold 2 (20%) 8 (80%) 0 2 4 6 8 10 N ea r Fa r Vi vi d Bo rin g Sa d Ch ee rf ul Cl as si ca l M od er n H ap py D ep re ss iv e Ti rin g D yn am ic Co nf id en … Fe ar fu l Si m pl e M ys te rio … First Stage cold warm 0 2 4 6 8 10 N ea r Fa r Vi vi d Bo rin g Sa d Ch ee rf ul Cl as si ca l M od er n H ap py D ep re ss i… Ti rin g D yn am ic Co nf id e… Fe ar fu l Si m pl e M ys te ri… Second Stage cold warm Figure 2. Results during the first stage when users were given the adjective list shown in Table 1. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 7 of 27 Step 4 Lastly, the testers were asked about the reasons why they chose (or did not choose) the near and far adjectives. Basically, they were asked to justify their answers in order to find out which was the reasoning behind their choice. Also, a brief five-minute conversation about it took place. 2.1.3. Results from Temperature-Depth Correlation Test with the Sighted Users. The results of the tests for the case of the ten sighted users for each one of the two stages can be seen in Figures 2 and 3. The data related only to the near and far adjectives can be seen more clearly in Tables 3 and 4, where the number of people that selected each option is indicated next to the percentage in relation to the total number of sighted participants. Figure 2. Results during the first stage when users were given the adjective list shown in Table 1. Figure 3. Results during the second stage when users were given the adjective list shown in Table 2. Table 3. Results during first stage only for the “near” and “far” adjectives. First Stage Near Far Warm 8 (80%) 2 (20%) Cold 1 (10%) 3 (30%) Table 4. Results during second stage only for the “near” and “far” adjectives. Second Stage Near Far Warm 6 (60%) 2 (20%) Cold 2 (20%) 8 (80%) 0 2 4 6 8 10 N ea r Fa r Vi vi d Bo rin g Sa d Ch ee rf ul Cl as si ca l M od er n H ap py D ep re ss iv e Ti rin g D yn am ic Co nf id en … Fe ar fu l Si m pl e M ys te rio … First Stage cold warm 0 2 4 6 8 10 N ea r Fa r Vi vi d Bo rin g Sa d Ch ee rf ul Cl as si ca l M od er n H ap py D ep re ss i… Ti rin g D yn am ic Co nf id e… Fe ar fu l Si m pl e M ys te ri… Second Stage cold warm Figure 3. Results during the second stage when users were given the adjective list shown in Table 2. Table 3. Results during first stage only for the “near” and “far” adjectives. First Stage Near Far Warm 8 (80%) 2 (20%) Cold 1 (10%) 3 (30%) Table 4. Results during second stage only for the “near” and “far” adjectives. Second Stage Near Far Warm 6 (60%) 2 (20%) Cold 2 (20%) 8 (80%) Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 8 of 26 2.1.4. Results from Temperature-Depth Correlation Test with the Visually Impaired Users The results of the tests for the case of the six visually impaired users for each one of the two stages can be seen in Figures 4 and 5. The data related only to the near and far adjectives can be seen more clearly in Tables 5 and 6. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 8 of 27 2.1.4. Results from Temperature-Depth Correlation Test with the Visually Impaired Users. The results of the tests for the case of the six visually impaired users for each one of the two stages can be seen in Figures 4 and 5. The data related only to the near and far adjectives can be seen more clearly in Tables 5 and 6. Figure 4. Results during the first stage when users were given the adjective list shown in Table 1. Figure 5. Results during the second stage when users were given the adjective list shown in Table 2. Table 5. Results during first stage only for the “near” and “far” adjectives. First Stage Near Far Warm 5 (83.3%) 0 Cold 0 5 (83.3%) Table 6. Results during second stage only for the “near” and “far” adjectives. Second Stage Near Far Warm 5 (83.3%) 0 Cold 0 5 (83.3%) 2.1.5. Temperature-Depth Correlation Test Results In general, a correlation between warm and near, and cold and far, can be clearly seen in both stages with both groups. In particular, it is really interesting to see that, in the case of the VIP group, both stages of the test gave quite similar results (totally similar as far as the near/far adjectives are concerned), which indicates that the visually impaired people were probably putting attention and effort during the test since they are more used to, and find more meaning, in trying out different types of interactions. On the contrary, the sighted people seemed to show less interest during the test, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 First Stage cold warm 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 N ea r Fa r Vi vi d Bo rin g Sa d Ch ee rf ul Cl as si ca l M od er n H ap py D ep re ss iv e Ti rin g D yn am ic Co nf id en ce Fe ar fu l Si m pl e M ys te rio us Second Stage cold warm Figure 4. Results during the first stage when users were given the adjective list shown in Table 1. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 8 of 27 2.1.4. Results from Temperature-Depth Correlation Test with the Visually Impaired Users. The results of the tests for the case of the six visually impaired users for each one of the two stages can be seen in Figures 4 and 5. The data related only to the near and far adjectives can be seen more clearly in Tables 5 and 6. Figure 4. Results during the first stage when users were given the adjective list shown in Table 1. Figure 5. Results during the second stage when users were given the adjective list shown in Table 2. Table 5. Results during first stage only for the “near” and “far” adjectives. First Stage Near Far Warm 5 (83.3%) 0 Cold 0 5 (83.3%) Table 6. Results during second stage only for the “near” and “far” adjectives. Second Stage Near Far Warm 5 (83.3%) 0 Cold 0 5 (83.3%) 2.1.5. Temperature-Depth Correlation Test Results In general, a correlation between warm and near, and cold and far, can be clearly seen in both stages with both groups. In particular, it is really interesting to see that, in the case of the VIP group, both stages of the test gave quite similar results (totally similar as far as the near/far adjectives are concerned), which indicates that the visually impaired people were probably putting attention and effort during the test since they are more used to, and find more meaning, in trying out different types of interactions. On the contrary, the sighted people seemed to show less interest during the test, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 First Stage cold warm 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 N ea r Fa r Vi vi d Bo rin g Sa d Ch ee rf ul Cl as si ca l M od er n H ap py D ep re ss iv e Ti rin g D yn am ic Co nf id en ce Fe ar fu l Si m pl e M ys te rio us Second Stage cold warm Figure 5. Results during the second stage when users were given the adjective list shown in Table 2. Table 5. Results during first stage only for the “near” and “far” adjectives. First Stage Near Far Warm 5 (83.3%) 0 Cold 0 5 (83.3%) Table 6. Results during second stage only for the “near” and “far” adjectives. Second Stage Near Far Warm 5 (83.3%) 0 Cold 0 5 (83.3%) 2.1.5. Temperature-Depth Correlation Test Results In general, a correlation between warm and near, and cold and far, can be clearly seen in both stages with both groups. In particular, it is really interesting to see that, in the case of the VIP group, both stages of the test gave quite similar results (totally similar as far as the near/far adjectives are concerned), which indicates that the visually impaired people were probably putting attention Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 9 of 26 and effort during the test since they are more used to, and find more meaning, in trying out different types of interactions. On the contrary, the sighted people seemed to show less interest during the test, which might be the reason why the answers from stage 1 and stage 2 were somehow different. Nevertheless, even in the case of the sighted people, at some point of the test, eight of the ten users agreed that the conceptual dichotomies warm—near and cold—far were correlated. This fact was proven during the test with VIP, where 83% of the users (a total of five out of six) linked in both stages the warm temperature to the concept of being near something, and the cold temperature to the concept of being far. The exception was one of the nine-year-old young kids, who, after hesitating, decided to select the “not applicable” answer, arguing that even though there was some correlation felt, it was not a clear and transparent feeling. This is really interesting since it might not be a matter of chance that the user who had more troubles correlating temperature to the near/far concept was a child. The process which defines temperature-depth association (or temperature and its association to any other concepts whatsoever) is an interesting issue, which should also be taken into account in the future. 2.1.6. Temperature-Depth Correlation Test Interviews To make sure what their answers and thoughts were, we asked participants the reasons for their choice and what the feeling or thought was that made them choose that particular adjective. The interviews were useful both for finding out the real thoughts of the users and the feeling and thinking behind their answers. In general, every answer considering a correlation between the warm temperature and the concept of “near” were related to the feeling of warmness we feel when we are surrounded by people, when someone is near us. For example, some of the testers said: “I chose near because I remembered how I feel warm and nice when I am close to people”. “I chose near because I felt a warm feeling like in a warm atmosphere with people coming towards me”. However, there were also two users who believed the concept of “far” was better suited to the warm temperature, and they also had their own reasons to feel that. One of the most interesting comments was the following: “I chose far for the warm temperature because I felt a warm hazy feeling like that of smoke, like distant far away memories”. Regarding the far–cold correlation, it is interesting that most of the users that chose far for the cold temperature seemed to agree on the reasons. Eight users answered something related to feeling cold because of being lonely and away from people. Some of the exact words were: “The cold temperature reminded me of winter and of feeling lonely, away from everything” “The cold temperature made me feel sad and dead, so I felt far away from others and life” However, there were also answers that justified the opposite: that the cold temperature was a reminder of something being near: “The cold temperature was felt fast, immediately, like a knife. So it reminded me of something that is really near and true, something that I can easily feel”. In spite of this differences, it is important to note that most users justified the near–warm and far–cold correlation by sharing similar ideas, feelings and conceptualizations, which in turn, proved that the correlation between farness and cold temperatures, and nearness and warm temperatures can be useful for designing a temperature-depth mapping. Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 10 of 26 2.2. Temperature-Depth Mapping The existing correlation between warm and near, and cold and far, was utilized for conveying depth and distance by means of temperature cues. The main idea is simple: the nearer an object is to the user, the warmer the temperature cue. Similarly, the farther an object from the user, the cooler the temperature cue for that object. This idea can be applied in many ways, but we decided to follow a simple mapping method which is explained next, in four steps: First step The temperature range is selected. This can be selected freely (as long as it falls within the comfortable temperature range stated above). In general, the visual perceived distance between the extreme depth levels will be assessed and the extreme temperatures selected accordingly (higher temperature difference for higher distances). However, if the simpler algorithm is to be used, then the extremes depth levels will always be linked to the extreme temperatures of 14 and 38 ◦C, regardless of their perceived relative distance. Second step The total number of perceived depth levels are counted. For example, in the case of an image with two objects, one in front of the other, there are two depth levels: front and back. Third step The temperature is equally divided in as many temperatures as needed for assigning a temperature to each depth level. The highest temperature and the lowest one are usually assigned to the nearest and the farthest depth level respectively but the use of other initial temperatures might also be possible if is it is considered more appropriate by the designer. Fourth step Optionally, if the difference between the temperatures of two consecutive depth levels is less than 3 ◦C, some of the consecutive depth levels are clustered together. In other words, some objects from different depth levels are put into a similar intermediate depth level. This helps the user recognizing the different depth levels better by decreasing the total different temperatures to be felt and recognized. Following these four steps creates a simple mapping that does not consider the absolute distance between depth levels (except for the nearest and farthest depth levels, whose relatively absolute distance is considered for choosing the initial temperature range), but only the number of depth levels and the order in which they approach the user. More complex mappings could be designed, such as a mapping which took into consideration the absolute depth levels of all the features. However, this simple mapping is enough for conveying the different depth levels through temperature cues to give an idea to the VIP of where the different features of the artwork are placed according to depth. Next, this temperature-depth mapping will be applied and examples of its use will be given in two different types of applications: for representing depth of the different objects of a bi-dimensional artwork and for representing color-based depth of a bi-dimensional image (an effect called chromostereopsis). 2.2.1. Application 1: Artwork Depth The temperature-depth mapping can be used to convey through temperature the different depth levels of the objects of an artwork. In that way, the visually impaired user can sense more deeply the depth presented in a painting. In this case, different temperatures for the objects that are at different levels of depth are assigned by following the method presented above. Before applying the method, first, some techniques used by artists for creating the illusion of depth in visual arts will be contemplated and the method applied to those simple cases. After that, Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 11 of 26 some examples of the temperature-depth mapping method presented above will be applied to two real famous artworks. Illusion of depth in 2D visual arts In 2D visual arts, there are many ways of creating the illusion of depth, such as: - Overlapping and layering - Size and placement and perspective - Shading - Texture and detail - Color, hue, and value The most relevant ones are layering and overlapping, shading, and size, placement and perspective. However, color, hue, and value can also contribute to create strong feelings of depth, an effect called chromostereopsis [2]. This effect will be explored separately in the following section. First, shading and size, placement and perspective techniques will be explained (since layering and overlapping is a really intuitive and common technique, no explanation will be given). Shading Volumetric objects always create shade when being hit by a source of light. As a result, in 2D visual arts, the use of light and shade is one of the methods for creating the illusion of depth. Figure 6 shows an example of an effect called “the crater illusion” [2] in which the central square seems to be in front of the background (right image) or behind the background (left image) depending on the position of highlighted or shadowed edges. The results of applying the depth-temperature algorithm in this case can be seen in Table 7, for the left side of the figure, and in Table 8 for the right side of the figure. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 11 of 27 - Overlapping and layering - Size and placement and perspective - Shading - Texture and detail - Color, hue, and value The most relevant ones are layering and overlapping, shading, and size, placement and perspective. However, color, hue, and value can also contribute to create strong feelings of depth, an effect called chromostereopsis [2]. This effect will be explored separately in the following section. First, shading and size, placement and perspective techniques will be explained (since layering and overlapping is a really intuitive and common technique, no explanation will be given). Shading Volumetric objects always create shade when being hit by a source of light. As a result, in 2D visual arts, the use of light and shade is one of the methods for creating the illusion of depth. Figure 6 shows an example of an effect called “the crater illusion” [2] in which the central square seems to be in front of the background (right image) or behind the background (left image) depending on the position of highlighted or shadowed edges. The results of applying the depth-temperature algorithm in this case can be seen in Table 7, for the left side of the figure, and in Table 8 for the right side of the figure. Figure 6. The crater illusion. Table 7. Temperature-depth mapping of right side of Figure 6. The central square seems much nearer than the external square, so they are given both extreme temperatures of 38 and 14 °C, respectively. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Central Square 1 38 Background 2 14 Table 8. Temperature-depth mapping of left side of Figure 6. The external square seems much nearer than the central square so they are given both extreme temperatures of 38 and 14 °C, respectively. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Central Square 2 14 Background 1 38 Size, placement, and perspective Vertical placement: we perceive objects that are placed lower in the image as closer to us, and objects that are placed higher as being further away. A really clear example of this will be seen later when we apply the temperature-depth mapping algorithm to the artwork “Starry Night” by Vincent Van Gogh. Diagonal perspective: we perceive diagonal lines as receding into the distance. As shown in Figure 7 and Table 9, the red-colored square seems to recede due to the diagonal perspective. Figure 6. The crater illusion. Table 7. Temperature-depth mapping of right side of Figure 6. The central square seems much nearer than the external square, so they are given both extreme temperatures of 38 and 14 ◦C, respectively. Color Layer Depth Temp. (◦C) Central Square 1 38 Background 2 14 Table 8. Temperature-depth mapping of left side of Figure 6. The external square seems much nearer than the central square so they are given both extreme temperatures of 38 and 14 ◦C, respectively. Color Layer Depth Temp. (◦C) Central Square 2 14 Background 1 38 Size, placement, and perspective Vertical placement: we perceive objects that are placed lower in the image as closer to us, and objects that are placed higher as being further away. A really clear example of this will be seen later when we apply the temperature-depth mapping algorithm to the artwork “Starry Night” by Vincent Van Gogh. Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 12 of 26 Diagonal perspective: we perceive diagonal lines as receding into the distance. As shown in Figure 7 and Table 9, the red-colored square seems to recede due to the diagonal perspective. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 12 of 27 Figure 7. An example of diagonal perspective: Josef Albers, Homage to the Square [18]. Table 9. Temperature-depth mapping for Figure 7. The temperature range selected was [26–38 °C], since the external square and the central one seem to be quite far from each other, but not that much far away. The range was then divided by four and each temperature assigned to each one of the depth levels. In this case, basically, the user would feel the temperature decreasing as he/she approached the central square. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated yellow 1 38 Dull yellow 2 34 Dull red 3 30 Saturated red 4 26 Examples In this painting, by Matisse (Figure 8), there are seven different elements, which can be seen in Table 8. The dancers have been numbered to aid identification. By looking at the drawing, sighted people can generally agree on five different levels of depth, these levels of depth have been linked to the different depth layers from 1 to 5, with 1 being the nearest layer and 5 being the farthest depth layer from the viewers’ location as a reference. Nearer depth layered elements need to have higher temperatures so temperatures are assigned to the extreme layers (38 °C for the Dancer 5 °C and 14 °C for Sky) and then that temperature range is divided by five (since we have five depth layers). The reason for choosing 38 °C and 14 °C was because Sky and Dancer 5 are visually really far away from each other, so the temperature for those extreme depth layers were chosen in a way that the temperature difference was maximum: the lowest and highest temperatures from the defined [14 °C, 38 °C] temperature range in which we are working. The resulting temperatures are linked to their respective layers and they can all be seen in Table 10. Figure 8. Dance II by Henri Matisse, 1910 (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia). 1 B C D E A Figure 7. An example of diagonal perspective: Josef Albers, Homage to the Square [18]. Table 9. Temperature-depth mapping for Figure 7. The temperature range selected was [26–38 ◦C], since the external square and the central one seem to be quite far from each other, but not that much far away. The range was then divided by four and each temperature assigned to each one of the depth levels. In this case, basically, the user would feel the temperature decreasing as he/she approached the central square. Color Layer Depth Temp. (◦C) Saturated yellow 1 38 Dull yellow 2 34 Dull red 3 30 Saturated red 4 26 Examples In this painting, by Matisse (Figure 8), there are seven different elements, which can be seen in Table 8. The dancers have been numbered to aid identification. By looking at the drawing, sighted people can generally agree on five different levels of depth, these levels of depth have been linked to the different depth layers from 1 to 5, with 1 being the nearest layer and 5 being the farthest depth layer from the viewers’ location as a reference. Nearer depth layered elements need to have higher temperatures so temperatures are assigned to the extreme layers (38 ◦C for the Dancer 5 ◦C and 14 ◦C for Sky) and then that temperature range is divided by five (since we have five depth layers). The reason for choosing 38 ◦C and 14 ◦C was because Sky and Dancer 5 are visually really far away from each other, so the temperature for those extreme depth layers were chosen in a way that the temperature difference was maximum: the lowest and highest temperatures from the defined [14 ◦C, 38 ◦C] temperature range in which we are working. The resulting temperatures are linked to their respective layers and they can all be seen in Table 10. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 12 of 27 Figure 7. An example of diagonal perspective: Josef Albers, Homage to the Square [18]. Table 9. Temperature-depth mapping for Figure 7. The temperature range selected was [26–38 °C], since the external square and the central one seem to be quite far from each other, but not that much far away. The range was then divided by four and each temperature assigned to each one of the depth levels. In this case, basically, the user would feel the temperature decreasing as he/she approached the central square. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated yellow 1 38 Dull yellow 2 34 Dull red 3 30 Saturated red 4 26 Examples In this painting, by Matisse (Figure 8), there are seven different elements, which can be seen in Table 8. The dancers have been numbered to aid identification. By looking at the drawing, sighted people can generally agree on five different levels of depth, these levels of depth have been linked to the different depth layers from 1 to 5, with 1 being the nearest layer and 5 being the farthest depth layer from the viewers’ location as a reference. Nearer depth layered elements need to have higher temperatures so temperatures are assigned to the extreme layers (38 °C for the Dancer 5 °C and 14 °C for Sky) and then that temperature range is divided by five (since we have five depth layers). The reason for choosing 38 °C and 14 °C was because Sky and Dancer 5 are visually really far away from each other, so the temperature for those extreme depth layers were chosen in a way that the temperature difference was maximum: the lowest and highest temperatures from the defined [14 °C, 38 °C] temperature range in which we are working. The resulting temperatures are linked to their respective layers and they can all be seen in Table 10. Figure 8. Dance II by Henri Matisse, 1910 (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia). 1 B C D E A Figure 8. Dance II by Henri Matisse, 1910 (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia). Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 13 of 26 Table 10. Temperature-depth mapping of Matisse’s “The Dance”. Element Layer Depth Temp. (◦C) Dancer A 2 32 Dancer B 3 26 Dancer C 3 26 Dancer D 2 33 Dancer E 1 38 Soil 4 20 Sky 5 14 In the case of “Starry Night” (Figure 9) by Van Gogh, there are many depth layers, as can be seen in Table 11. As before, these depth layers are selected in a visual way, by contemplating the artwork and choosing the main depth levels defined by the features. In our case, nine depth layers were defined. However, since such a high number of layers would force the user to feel and differentiate many different temperatures, we decided to simplify the number of depth layers. For that, elements were visually and conceptually grouped to check whether some of the elements from different depth levels could be grouped under a common depth level. As a result, the starts and the moon, and the mountain and the forest (both pairs of elements having both conceptual common traits and being visually near to each other) were grouped together in two common depth levels. This can be seen in Table 11 where Forest and Mountains share depth layer number 3, and Stars and Moon share the layer number 4. In this way, the number of temperatures is less and the user can identify the different temperatures and depth layers in an easier way. Therefore, even though technically the forest and the mountains are not in the same depth level, we can simplify it to aid identification. In general, this technique should be performed when the temperature difference between layers becomes less than 3 ◦C. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 13 of 27 Table 10. Temperature-depth mapping of Matisse’s “The Dance”. Element Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Dancer A 2 32 Dancer B 3 26 Dancer C 3 26 Dancer D 2 33 Dancer E 1 38 Soil 4 20 Sky 5 14 In the case of “Starry Night” (Figure 9) by Van Gogh, there are many depth layers, as can be seen in Table 11. As before, these depth layers are selected in a visual way, by contemplating the artwork and choosing the main depth levels defined by the features. In our case, nine depth layers were defined. However, since such a high number of layers would force the user to feel and differentiate many different temperatures, we decided to simplify the number of depth layers. For that, elements were visually and conceptually grouped to check whether some of the elements from different depth levels could be grouped under a common depth level. As a result, the starts and the moon, and the mountain and the forest (both pairs of elements having both conceptual common traits and being visually near to each other) were grouped together in two common depth levels. This can be seen in Table 11 where Forest and Mountains share depth layer number 3, and Stars and Moon share the layer number 4. In this way, the number of temperatures is less and the user can identify the different temperatures and depth layers in an easier way. Therefore, even though technically the forest and the mountains are not in the same depth level, we can simplify it to aid identification. In general, this technique should be performed when the temperature difference between layers becomes less than 3 °C. Figure 9. The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, 1889 (Museum of Modern Art, New York City). Table 11. Temperature-depth mapping of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”. Element Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Tree 1 38 Village 2 32 Forest 3 26 Mountains 3 26 Stars 4 20 Figure 9. The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, 1889 (Museum of Modern Art, New York City). Table 11. Temperature-depth mapping of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”. Element Layer Depth Temp. (◦C) Tree 1 38 Village 2 32 Forest 3 26 Mountains 3 26 Stars 4 20 Moon 4 20 Sky 5 14 Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 14 of 26 2.2.2. Application 2: Chromostereopsis Another possible application of the temperature-depth algorithm is for conveying the effect of chromostereopsis through temperature. Chromostereopsis [2] is the effect produced by colors on a flat two-dimensional surface by which each color seems to be located in different depth planes, in spite of the two-dimensionality of the image [19]. It is important not to mistake this effect with the association made by artists between red colors and blue colors as advancing and receding colors, since that idea might be based on the brightness produced by atmospheric haze, which is associated with distance, rather than with the effect of chromostereopsis [20]. Chromostereopsis is produced by an effect called chromatic aberration, which is the result from the differential refraction of light depending on its wavelength, causing some light rays to converge before others in the eye and/or to be located on non-corresponding locations of the two eyes during binocular viewing. Next, an exploratory analysis of the main features that make a color seem farther or nearer will be given, followed by a simple algorithm for conveying chromostereoptic depth by means of temperature. However, first, a brief explanation about colors needs to be given. Color The spectrum of color is a continuous one for which there has been several representation models [21]. One of the earliest models is called the Munsell color model, which organized the color perception into a color cylindrical space with three dimensions: hue, chroma (or saturation), and value (or lightness), as can be seen in Figure 10. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 14 of 27 Moon 4 20 Sky 5 14 2.2.2. Application 2: Chromostereopsis Another possible application of the temperature-depth algorithm is for conveying the effect of chromostereopsis through temperature. Chromostereopsis [2] is the effect produced by colors on a flat two-dimensional surface by which each color seems to be located in different depth planes, in spite of the two-dimensionality of the image [19]. It is important not to mistake this effect with the association made by artists between red colors and blue colors as advancing and receding colors, since that idea might be based on the brightness produced by atmospheric haze, which is associated with distance, rather than with the effect of chromostereopsis [20]. Chromostereopsis is produced by an effect called chromatic aberration, which is the result from the differential refraction of light depending on its wavelength, causing some light rays to converge before others in the eye and/or to be located on non-corresponding locations of the two eyes during binocular viewing. Next, an exploratory analysis of the main features that make a color seem farther or nearer will be given, followed by a simple algorithm for conveying chromostereoptic depth by means of temperature. However, first, a brief explanation about colors needs to be given. Color The spectrum of color is a continuous one for which there has been several representation models [21]. One of the earliest models is called the Munsell color model, which organized the color perception into a color cylindrical space with three dimensions: hue, chroma (or saturation), and value (or lightness), as can be seen in Figure 10. Figure 10. Munsell color system [22]. Hue refers to the color itself. Luminance means the brightness of a color. The higher the luminance, the closer it is to white, and the lower the luminance, the closer it is to black. Saturation is the vividness (clearness) of a color. As an example, 27 colors of varied hue, luminance, and saturation can be seen in Figure 11. Figure 10. Munsell color system [22]. Hue refers to the color itself. Luminance means the brightness of a color. The higher the luminance, the closer it is to white, and the lower the luminance, the closer it is to black. Saturation is the vividness (clearness) of a color. As an example, 27 colors of varied hue, luminance, and saturation can be seen in Figure 11.Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 15 of 27 Figure 11. Colors of varied hue, luminance, and saturation [23]. Chromostereopsis The chromostereoptic effect is complex and its effects can vary due to many different reasons. Nevertheless, for simple images and in a dark background, red objects tend to appear closer to the observer than blue objects, as can be seen in Figure 12. There, the red and blue stripes will seem to be in separated depth levels for most observers, with the red being apparently nearer to the observer. Figure 12. Red and blue stripes on top of a dark background. The red stripes tend to be seen as being nearer by most people. This can be extrapolated to warm and cool colors, since, in general (and always when in a black background) warm colors come forward and cool colors retreat [16,19]. However, in [20] researches have also proved that, when the background is white, the effect is reversed, and the warm color seems to be further away than the cool one, as can be seen in Figure 13, which sets the same blue and red colored image to both a black and white background. Figure 11. Colors of varied hue, luminance, and saturation [23]. Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 15 of 26 Chromostereopsis The chromostereoptic effect is complex and its effects can vary due to many different reasons. Nevertheless, for simple images and in a dark background, red objects tend to appear closer to the observer than blue objects, as can be seen in Figure 12. There, the red and blue stripes will seem to be in separated depth levels for most observers, with the red being apparently nearer to the observer. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 15 of 27 Figure 11. Colors of varied hue, luminance, and saturation [23]. Chromostereopsis The chromostereoptic effect is complex and its effects can vary due to many different reasons. Nevertheless, for simple images and in a dark background, red objects tend to appear closer to the observer than blue objects, as can be seen in Figure 12. There, the red and blue stripes will seem to be in separated depth levels for most observers, with the red being apparently nearer to the observer. Figure 12. Red and blue stripes on top of a dark background. The red stripes tend to be seen as being nearer by most people. This can be extrapolated to warm and cool colors, since, in general (and always when in a black background) warm colors come forward and cool colors retreat [16,19]. However, in [20] researches have also proved that, when the background is white, the effect is reversed, and the warm color seems to be further away than the cool one, as can be seen in Figure 13, which sets the same blue and red colored image to both a black and white background. Figure 12. Red and blue stripes on top of a dark background. The red stripes tend to be seen as being nearer by most people. This can be extrapolated to warm and cool colors, since, in general (and always when in a black background) warm colors come forward and cool colors retreat [16,19]. However, in [20] researches have also proved that, when the background is white, the effect is reversed, and the warm color seems to be further away than the cool one, as can be seen in Figure 13, which sets the same blue and red colored image to both a black and white background. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 15 of 27 Figure 11. Colors of varied hue, luminance, and saturation [23]. Chromostereopsis The chromostereoptic effect is complex and its effects can vary due to many different reasons. Nevertheless, for simple images and in a dark background, red objects tend to appear closer to the observer than blue objects, as can be seen in Figure 12. There, the red and blue stripes will seem to be in separated depth levels for most observers, with the red being apparently nearer to the observer. Figure 12. Red and blue stripes on top of a dark background. The red stripes tend to be seen as being nearer by most people. This can be extrapolated to warm and cool colors, since, in general (and always when in a black background) warm colors come forward and cool colors retreat [16,19]. However, in [20] researches have also proved that, when the background is white, the effect is reversed, and the warm color seems to be further away than the cool one, as can be seen in Figure 13, which sets the same blue and red colored image to both a black and white background. Figure 13. A white background inverts the effect of chromostereopsis. In the top image, most people would see the red color as receding into the distance and the blue nearer to the viewer, while in the bottom image it will mostly be seen as nearer than the blue color. An algorithm for conveying the chromostereoptic effect in simple images through temperature cues will be presented. However, first it is necessary to find out why some of these colors seem to recede or advance when in company with other colors. Even though warm colors tend to be felt nearer and cool colors tend to be felt further away, that is not always the effect produced. It seems that the most important features for this chromostereoptic effect in simple images are luminance and saturation. Luminance In [20], it was observed that one of the reasons why some colors seemed nearer than others was luminance difference, with bright objects appearing closer than dim ones. This would support the claim that “warm colors tend to advance and cool colors recede” since warm colors tend to be brighter than cool colors. In the following Figure 14, and Tables 12 and 13, the same color can be seen next Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 16 of 26 to each other with different luminance levels. In both cases, the high luminance version of the color seems to be nearer than the dark color. Table 12. Temperature-depth mapping of the left side of Figure 14. Even though both colors were visually similar and the depth difference conveyed was not too large, the extreme temperatures of 14ºC and 38ºC were selected but since there are only two depth levels, other temperature difference could have been used, but with the brighter color being warmer. Color Layer Depth Temp. (◦C) Light red 1 38 Dark red 2 14 Table 13. Temperature-depth mapping of right side of Figure 14. Color Layer Depth Temp. (◦C) Dark blue 2 14 Light blue 1 38 Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 16 of 27 Figure 13. A white background inverts the effect of chromostereopsis. In the top image, most people would see the red color as receding into the distance and the blue nearer to the viewer, while in the bottom image it will mostly be seen as nearer than the blue color. An algorithm for conveying the chromostereoptic effect in simple images through temperature cues will be presented. However, first it is necessary to find out why some of these colors seem to recede or advance when in company with other colors. Even though warm colors tend to be felt nearer and cool colors tend to be felt further away, that is not always the effect produced. It seems that the most important features for this chromostereoptic effect in simple images are luminance and saturation. Luminance In [20], it was observed that one of the reasons why some colors seemed nearer than others was luminance difference, with bright objects appearing closer than dim ones. This would support the claim that “warm colors tend to advance and cool colors recede” since warm colors tend to be brighter than cool colors. In the following Figure 14, and Tables 12 and 13, the same color can be seen next to each other with different luminance levels. In both cases, the high luminance version of the color seems to be nearer than the dark color. Table 12. Temperature-depth mapping of the left side of Figure 14. Even though both colors were visually similar and the depth difference conveyed was not too large, the extreme temperatures of 14ºC and 38ºC were selected but since there are only two depth levels, other temperature difference could have been used, but with the brighter color being warmer. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Light red 1 38 Dark red 2 14 Table 13. Temperature-depth mapping of right side of Figure 14. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Dark blue 2 14 Light blue 1 38 Figure 14. Higher luminance colors tend to be seen as been nearer than low luminance ones. Saturation In [24], patches of colored paper against a black background were shown to a total of 17 subjects. In general, they seemed to agree that a desaturation of a color made its depth effect be diminished. This can be seen in Figure 15, where two colors appear at different levels of saturation. In both cases the muted color (the one that is less clear) seems to be farther away. As before, the range of temperature between both colors can be selected freely after assessing the visual depth contrast (similar to applying the first step of the mapping method stated above) as long as the saturated color is the warmest. We chose again the extreme temperatures, as can be seen in Tables 14 and 15. Table 14. Temperature-depth mapping of left side of Figure 15. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Figure 14. Higher luminance colors tend to be seen as been nearer than low luminance ones. Saturation In [24], patches of colored paper against a black background were shown to a total of 17 subjects. In general, they seemed to agree that a desaturation of a color made its depth effect be diminished. This can be seen in Figure 15, where two colors appear at different levels of saturation. In both cases the muted color (the one that is less clear) seems to be farther away. As before, the range of temperature between both colors can be selected freely after assessing the visual depth contrast (similar to applying the first step of the mapping method stated above) as long as the saturated color is the warmest. We chose again the extreme temperatures, as can be seen in Tables 14 and 15. Table 14. Temperature-depth mapping of left side of Figure 15. Color Layer Depth Temp. (◦C) Saturated red 2 38 Muted red 1 14 Table 15. Temperature-depth mapping of right side of Figure 15. Color Layer Depth Temp. (◦C) Saturated blue 2 38 Muted blue 1 14 Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 17 of 27 Saturated red 2 38 Muted red 1 14 Figure 15. A saturated color will appear to advance where muted color will appear to recede. Table 15. Temperature-depth mapping of right side of Figure 15. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated blue 2 38 Muted blue 1 14 Chromostereoptic Temperature-Depth Algorithm Considering all these features, an algorithm for representing simple chromostereoptic effects with temperature was designed. The algorithm consists of several steps: First step First, the background needs to be chosen (sometimes there is no background or the background color can be simplified and not used, especially when it is a color that is not black nor white). If there is a clear background and it is black or white, it will influence the direction in which the chromostereoptic effect is produced so it is important to take it into consideration. Second step For each color that is not the background, the saturation and luminance level needs to be calculated, summed up, and halved. So, for each color, a value representing its level of saturation and luminance is acquired. Third step The defined temperature range (which is again selected freely through visual relative distance assessment, like was explained in the first version of the temperature-depth mapping method above) is divided by the total number of colors. Fourth step Each one of the temperatures is then assigned to each color in order, according to their luminance-saturation level value. If there is no background or there is a background and it is black, higher luminance-saturation values correspond to higher temperatures; if the background is white, lower luminance-saturation values correspond to lower temperatures. The algorithm is presented in a more formal and concise way here: (1) For each color (except background) => find saturation and luminance level (2) For each color (except background) => (saturation + luminance)/2 (3) Order colors by its luminance-saturation value from highest to lowest into a vector V (4) If white background: reverse V. (5) Select temperature range and divide it by number of colors. (6) For each color in V, assign the temperatures in order from highest to lowest. As an example, the temperatures of the different colors of two artworks will be shown next. Figure 15. A saturated color will appear to advance where muted color will appear to recede. Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 17 of 26 Chromostereoptic Temperature-Depth Algorithm Considering all these features, an algorithm for representing simple chromostereoptic effects with temperature was designed. The algorithm consists of several steps: First step First, the background needs to be chosen (sometimes there is no background or the background color can be simplified and not used, especially when it is a color that is not black nor white). If there is a clear background and it is black or white, it will influence the direction in which the chromostereoptic effect is produced so it is important to take it into consideration. Second step For each color that is not the background, the saturation and luminance level needs to be calculated, summed up, and halved. So, for each color, a value representing its level of saturation and luminance is acquired. Third step The defined temperature range (which is again selected freely through visual relative distance assessment, like was explained in the first version of the temperature-depth mapping method above) is divided by the total number of colors. Fourth step Each one of the temperatures is then assigned to each color in order, according to their luminance-saturation level value. If there is no background or there is a background and it is black, higher luminance-saturation values correspond to higher temperatures; if the background is white, lower luminance-saturation values correspond to lower temperatures. The algorithm is presented in a more formal and concise way here: (1) For each color (except background) => find saturation and luminance level (2) For each color (except background) => (saturation + luminance)/2 (3) Order colors by its luminance-saturation value from highest to lowest into a vector V (4) If white background: reverse V. (5) Select temperature range and divide it by number of colors. (6) For each color in V, assign the temperatures in order from highest to lowest. As an example, the temperatures of the different colors of two artworks will be shown next. Examples In Figures 16 and 17, two artworks of the artist called Mark Rothko can be seen. The temperatures were chosen by following the chromostereopsis-temperature algorithm presented above. For calculating the saturation and luminance level of each color, an app called “Visual Color Picker 2.6”, created by NOVOSIB software co., was used. The saturation (S), lumination (L), and the hexadecimal color code are shown in both Tables 16 and 17, where the final depth temperatures of each color is also given. The temperature range selected was the 14 ◦C and 38 ◦C. As commented before, this is the temperature range to select when the simplest temperature-depth mapping is desired, one in which the extreme depth levels are always mapped to the extreme temperatures, which users can feel without pain. Similarly, the number of depth layers in each image are three, since those are the number of clearly differentiated colors which contribute to the chromostereoptic effect. Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 18 of 26 Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 18 of 27 Examples In Figures 16 and 17, two artworks of the artist called Mark Rothko can be seen. The temperatures were chosen by following the chromostereopsis-temperature algorithm presented above. For calculating the saturation and luminance level of each color, an app called “Visual Color Picker 2.6”, created by NOVOSIB software co., was used. The saturation (S), lumination (L), and the hexadecimal color code are shown in both Tables 16 and 17, where the final depth temperatures of each color is also given. The temperature range selected was the 14 °C and 38 °C. As commented before, this is the temperature range to select when the simplest temperature-depth mapping is desired, one in which the extreme depth levels are always mapped to the extreme temperatures, which users can feel without pain. Similarly, the number of depth layers in each image are three, since those are the number of clearly differentiated colors which contribute to the chromostereoptic effect. Figure 16. No 1 (Royal Red and Blue) by Mark Rothko, 1954 [25]. © Mark Rothko. Figure 17. No 5/No 22 by Mark Rothko, 1950 [26]. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 16. No 1 (Royal Red and Blue) by Mark Rothko, 1954 [25]. © Mark Rothko. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 18 of 27 Examples In Figures 16 and 17, two artworks of the artist called Mark Rothko can be seen. The temperatures were chosen by following the chromostereopsis-temperature algorithm presented above. For calculating the saturation and luminance level of each color, an app called “Visual Color Picker 2.6”, created by NOVOSIB software co., was used. The saturation (S), lumination (L), and the hexadecimal color code are shown in both Tables 16 and 17, where the final depth temperatures of each color is also given. The temperature range selected was the 14 °C and 38 °C. As commented before, this is the temperature range to select when the simplest temperature-depth mapping is desired, one in which the extreme depth levels are always mapped to the extreme temperatures, which users can feel without pain. Similarly, the number of depth layers in each image are three, since those are the number of clearly differentiated colors which contribute to the chromostereoptic effect. Figure 16. No 1 (Royal Red and Blue) by Mark Rothko, 1954 [25]. © Mark Rothko. Figure 17. No 5/No 22 by Mark Rothko, 1950 [26]. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 17. No5/No22 by Mark Rothko, 1950 [26]. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Table 16. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 14. Color Layer Depth Temp. (◦C) Saturated red (S = 92, L = 92) Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 19 of 27 Table 16. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 14. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated red (S = 92, L = 92) #EB3812 1 38 °C Cool red (S = 80, L = 87) #DC2B51 2 26 °C Saturated blue (S = 82, L = 76) #2373C3 3 14 °C Table 17. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 15. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated yellow (S = 95, L = 79) #CA9C09 1 38 °C Saturated red (S = 73, L = 61) #9E332A 3 14 °C Saturate orange (S = 81, L = 76) #C47C24 2 26 °C 2.3. Thermal Display System Prototype We designed and developed a thermal display system prototype where the artworks can be installed to feel the different temperatures while exploring them. The system consists of an array of petliers, each one with its own heat-sink and fan, which are driven by a dual H-bridge board controlled through an Arduino Mega microcontroller. The peltier element is a device that releases heat through one side while absorbing heat through the other side when an electric current goes through it. The direction of the current determines which side heats up and which one cools down. Each petlier from the setup was able to adjust their temperature from as low as 13 °C to as high as 40 °C. The array of petliers can be seen in Figure 18. The artwork is placed on top of the petlier array. The artwork is printed on Thermal Foamed Capsule Paper by means of a braille printer called TactPlus by Kanematsu USA Inc. Tactplus is a printer that uses thermal technology. By heating the paper, braille and graphics can be easily made. As a result, the user can explore the artwork with the hands while feeling the different temperatures. However, for the different temperatures to be felt more clearly, a thin copper layer was placed between the petliers and the artwork. The schematic of this set up can be seen in Figure 19. #EB3812 1 38 ◦C Cool red (S = 80, L = 87) Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 19 of 27 Table 16. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 14. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated red (S = 92, L = 92) #EB3812 1 38 °C Cool red (S = 80, L = 87) #DC2B51 2 26 °C Saturated blue (S = 82, L = 76) #2373C3 3 14 °C Table 17. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 15. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated yellow (S = 95, L = 79) #CA9C09 1 38 °C Saturated red (S = 73, L = 61) #9E332A 3 14 °C Saturate orange (S = 81, L = 76) #C47C24 2 26 °C 2.3. Thermal Display System Prototype We designed and developed a thermal display system prototype where the artworks can be installed to feel the different temperatures while exploring them. The system consists of an array of petliers, each one with its own heat-sink and fan, which are driven by a dual H-bridge board controlled through an Arduino Mega microcontroller. The peltier element is a device that releases heat through one side while absorbing heat through the other side when an electric current goes through it. The direction of the current determines which side heats up and which one cools down. Each petlier from the setup was able to adjust their temperature from as low as 13 °C to as high as 40 °C. The array of petliers can be seen in Figure 18. The artwork is placed on top of the petlier array. The artwork is printed on Thermal Foamed Capsule Paper by means of a braille printer called TactPlus by Kanematsu USA Inc. Tactplus is a printer that uses thermal technology. By heating the paper, braille and graphics can be easily made. As a result, the user can explore the artwork with the hands while feeling the different temperatures. However, for the different temperatures to be felt more clearly, a thin copper layer was placed between the petliers and the artwork. The schematic of this set up can be seen in Figure 19. #DC2B51 2 26 ◦C Saturated blue (S = 82, L = 76) Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 19 of 27 Table 16. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 14. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated red (S = 92, L = 92) #EB3812 1 38 °C Cool red (S = 80, L = 87) #DC2B51 2 26 °C Saturated blue (S = 82, L = 76) #2373C3 3 14 °C Table 17. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 15. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated yellow (S = 95, L = 79) #CA9C09 1 38 °C Saturated red (S = 73, L = 61) #9E332A 3 14 °C Saturate orange (S = 81, L = 76) #C47C24 2 26 °C 2.3. Thermal Display System Prototype We designed and developed a thermal display system prototype where the artworks can be installed to feel the different temperatures while exploring them. The system consists of an array of petliers, each one with its own heat-sink and fan, which are driven by a dual H-bridge board controlled through an Arduino Mega microcontroller. The peltier element is a device that releases heat through one side while absorbing heat through the other side when an electric current goes through it. The direction of the current determines which side heats up and which one cools down. Each petlier from the setup was able to adjust their temperature from as low as 13 °C to as high as 40 °C. The array of petliers can be seen in Figure 18. The artwork is placed on top of the petlier array. The artwork is printed on Thermal Foamed Capsule Paper by means of a braille printer called TactPlus by Kanematsu USA Inc. Tactplus is a printer that uses thermal technology. By heating the paper, braille and graphics can be easily made. As a result, the user can explore the artwork with the hands while feeling the different temperatures. However, for the different temperatures to be felt more clearly, a thin copper layer was placed between the petliers and the artwork. The schematic of this set up can be seen in Figure 19. #2373C3 3 14 ◦C Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 19 of 26 Table 17. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 15. Color Layer Depth Temp. (◦C) Saturated yellow (S = 95, L = 79) Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 19 of 27 Table 16. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 14. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated red (S = 92, L = 92) #EB3812 1 38 °C Cool red (S = 80, L = 87) #DC2B51 2 26 °C Saturated blue (S = 82, L = 76) #2373C3 3 14 °C Table 17. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 15. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated yellow (S = 95, L = 79) #CA9C09 1 38 °C Saturated red (S = 73, L = 61) #9E332A 3 14 °C Saturate orange (S = 81, L = 76) #C47C24 2 26 °C 2.3. Thermal Display System Prototype We designed and developed a thermal display system prototype where the artworks can be installed to feel the different temperatures while exploring them. The system consists of an array of petliers, each one with its own heat-sink and fan, which are driven by a dual H-bridge board controlled through an Arduino Mega microcontroller. The peltier element is a device that releases heat through one side while absorbing heat through the other side when an electric current goes through it. The direction of the current determines which side heats up and which one cools down. Each petlier from the setup was able to adjust their temperature from as low as 13 °C to as high as 40 °C. The array of petliers can be seen in Figure 18. The artwork is placed on top of the petlier array. The artwork is printed on Thermal Foamed Capsule Paper by means of a braille printer called TactPlus by Kanematsu USA Inc. Tactplus is a printer that uses thermal technology. By heating the paper, braille and graphics can be easily made. As a result, the user can explore the artwork with the hands while feeling the different temperatures. However, for the different temperatures to be felt more clearly, a thin copper layer was placed between the petliers and the artwork. The schematic of this set up can be seen in Figure 19. #CA9C09 1 38 ◦C Saturated red (S = 73, L = 61) Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 19 of 27 Table 16. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 14. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated red (S = 92, L = 92) #EB3812 1 38 °C Cool red (S = 80, L = 87) #DC2B51 2 26 °C Saturated blue (S = 82, L = 76) #2373C3 3 14 °C Table 17. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 15. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated yellow (S = 95, L = 79) #CA9C09 1 38 °C Saturated red (S = 73, L = 61) #9E332A 3 14 °C Saturate orange (S = 81, L = 76) #C47C24 2 26 °C 2.3. Thermal Display System Prototype We designed and developed a thermal display system prototype where the artworks can be installed to feel the different temperatures while exploring them. The system consists of an array of petliers, each one with its own heat-sink and fan, which are driven by a dual H-bridge board controlled through an Arduino Mega microcontroller. The peltier element is a device that releases heat through one side while absorbing heat through the other side when an electric current goes through it. The direction of the current determines which side heats up and which one cools down. Each petlier from the setup was able to adjust their temperature from as low as 13 °C to as high as 40 °C. The array of petliers can be seen in Figure 18. The artwork is placed on top of the petlier array. The artwork is printed on Thermal Foamed Capsule Paper by means of a braille printer called TactPlus by Kanematsu USA Inc. Tactplus is a printer that uses thermal technology. By heating the paper, braille and graphics can be easily made. As a result, the user can explore the artwork with the hands while feeling the different temperatures. However, for the different temperatures to be felt more clearly, a thin copper layer was placed between the petliers and the artwork. The schematic of this set up can be seen in Figure 19. #9E332A 3 14 ◦C Saturate orange (S = 81, L = 76) Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 19 of 27 Table 16. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 14. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated red (S = 92, L = 92) #EB3812 1 38 °C Cool red (S = 80, L = 87) #DC2B51 2 26 °C Saturated blue (S = 82, L = 76) #2373C3 3 14 °C Table 17. Temperature-depth mapping of Figure 15. Color Layer Depth Temp. (°C) Saturated yellow (S = 95, L = 79) #CA9C09 1 38 °C Saturated red (S = 73, L = 61) #9E332A 3 14 °C Saturate orange (S = 81, L = 76) #C47C24 2 26 °C 2.3. Thermal Display System Prototype We designed and developed a thermal display system prototype where the artworks can be installed to feel the different temperatures while exploring them. The system consists of an array of petliers, each one with its own heat-sink and fan, which are driven by a dual H-bridge board controlled through an Arduino Mega microcontroller. The peltier element is a device that releases heat through one side while absorbing heat through the other side when an electric current goes through it. The direction of the current determines which side heats up and which one cools down. Each petlier from the setup was able to adjust their temperature from as low as 13 °C to as high as 40 °C. The array of petliers can be seen in Figure 18. The artwork is placed on top of the petlier array. The artwork is printed on Thermal Foamed Capsule Paper by means of a braille printer called TactPlus by Kanematsu USA Inc. Tactplus is a printer that uses thermal technology. By heating the paper, braille and graphics can be easily made. As a result, the user can explore the artwork with the hands while feeling the different temperatures. However, for the different temperatures to be felt more clearly, a thin copper layer was placed between the petliers and the artwork. The schematic of this set up can be seen in Figure 19. #C47C24 2 26 ◦C 2.3. Thermal Display System Prototype We designed and developed a thermal display system prototype where the artworks can be installed to feel the different temperatures while exploring them. The system consists of an array of petliers, each one with its own heat-sink and fan, which are driven by a dual H-bridge board controlled through an Arduino Mega microcontroller. The peltier element is a device that releases heat through one side while absorbing heat through the other side when an electric current goes through it. The direction of the current determines which side heats up and which one cools down. Each petlier from the setup was able to adjust their temperature from as low as 13 ◦C to as high as 40 ◦C. The array of petliers can be seen in Figure 18. The artwork is placed on top of the petlier array. The artwork is printed on Thermal Foamed Capsule Paper by means of a braille printer called TactPlus by Kanematsu USA Inc. Tactplus is a printer that uses thermal technology. By heating the paper, braille and graphics can be easily made. As a result, the user can explore the artwork with the hands while feeling the different temperatures. However, for the different temperatures to be felt more clearly, a thin copper layer was placed between the petliers and the artwork. The schematic of this set up can be seen in Figure 19.Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 20 of 27 Figure 18. Peltier temperature sensor and controller. Figure 19. Squematic set up of the prototype, with the relief paper on top of the copper layer and the array of petliers below it. Each petlier is set to the desired temperature that the visually impaired user feels with the fingers while exploring that zone of the thermal interactive relief artwork. Mark Rothko’s work was used as the artwork model due to the strong chromostereoptic effect present there and the simplicity of the shapes. However, under the limitation of the array of twelve petliers, any artwork could be installed and the petliers used both for representing either real depth or chromostereoptic depth. An image of the final prototype can be seen in Figure 20. Figure 20. Completed thermal display prototype with the artwork installed on top of the petlier array. 2.4. Mark Rothko’s Artwork Experiment To verify the accuracy of the proposed algorithm, a final test was performed. The test was announced through the university bulletin board and, in total, eight college students agreed to form part of the experiment. All of them claimed to be interested in arts and technology. The average age was 26.6 years. The purpose of this experiment was to test whether visual color depth appearing in Rothko’s work could be transmitted through tactile sense by means of temperature cues, which resulted from the designed temperature-depth mapping algorithm. For this, the relative distance between two objects or colors was defined in a scale from 0 to 5, with 0 meaning no relative distancing at all, and 5 meaning a really strong distance variation between objects. Negative numbers meant the second object was felt farther away than the first. The intention of this test was not notified to the participants Figure 18. Peltier temperature sensor and controller. Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 20 of 26 Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 20 of 27 Figure 18. Peltier temperature sensor and controller. Figure 19. Squematic set up of the prototype, with the relief paper on top of the copper layer and the array of petliers below it. Each petlier is set to the desired temperature that the visually impaired user feels with the fingers while exploring that zone of the thermal interactive relief artwork. Mark Rothko’s work was used as the artwork model due to the strong chromostereoptic effect present there and the simplicity of the shapes. However, under the limitation of the array of twelve petliers, any artwork could be installed and the petliers used both for representing either real depth or chromostereoptic depth. An image of the final prototype can be seen in Figure 20. Figure 20. Completed thermal display prototype with the artwork installed on top of the petlier array. 2.4. Mark Rothko’s Artwork Experiment To verify the accuracy of the proposed algorithm, a final test was performed. The test was announced through the university bulletin board and, in total, eight college students agreed to form part of the experiment. All of them claimed to be interested in arts and technology. The average age was 26.6 years. The purpose of this experiment was to test whether visual color depth appearing in Rothko’s work could be transmitted through tactile sense by means of temperature cues, which resulted from the designed temperature-depth mapping algorithm. For this, the relative distance between two objects or colors was defined in a scale from 0 to 5, with 0 meaning no relative distancing at all, and 5 meaning a really strong distance variation between objects. Negative numbers meant the second object was felt farther away than the first. The intention of this test was not notified to the participants Figure 19. Squematic set up of the prototype, with the relief paper on top of the copper layer and the array of petliers below it. Each petlier is set to the desired temperature that the visually impaired user feels with the fingers while exploring that zone of the thermal interactive relief artwork. Mark Rothko’s work was used as the artwork model due to the strong chromostereoptic effect present there and the simplicity of the shapes. However, under the limitation of the array of twelve petliers, any artwork could be installed and the petliers used both for representing either real depth or chromostereoptic depth. An image of the final prototype can be seen in Figure 20. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 20 of 27 Figure 18. Peltier temperature sensor and controller. Figure 19. Squematic set up of the prototype, with the relief paper on top of the copper layer and the array of petliers below it. Each petlier is set to the desired temperature that the visually impaired user feels with the fingers while exploring that zone of the thermal interactive relief artwork. Mark Rothko’s work was used as the artwork model due to the strong chromostereoptic effect present there and the simplicity of the shapes. However, under the limitation of the array of twelve petliers, any artwork could be installed and the petliers used both for representing either real depth or chromostereoptic depth. An image of the final prototype can be seen in Figure 20. Figure 20. Completed thermal display prototype with the artwork installed on top of the petlier array. 2.4. Mark Rothko’s Artwork Experiment To verify the accuracy of the proposed algorithm, a final test was performed. The test was announced through the university bulletin board and, in total, eight college students agreed to form part of the experiment. All of them claimed to be interested in arts and technology. The average age was 26.6 years. The purpose of this experiment was to test whether visual color depth appearing in Rothko’s work could be transmitted through tactile sense by means of temperature cues, which resulted from the designed temperature-depth mapping algorithm. For this, the relative distance between two objects or colors was defined in a scale from 0 to 5, with 0 meaning no relative distancing at all, and 5 meaning a really strong distance variation between objects. Negative numbers meant the second object was felt farther away than the first. The intention of this test was not notified to the participants Figure 20. Completed thermal display prototype with the artwork installed on top of the petlier array. 2.4. Mark Rothko’s Artwork Experiment To verify the accuracy of the proposed algorithm, a final test was performed. The test was announced through the university bulletin board and, in total, eight college students agreed to form part of the experiment. All of them claimed to be interested in arts and technology. The average age was 26.6 years. The purpose of this experiment was to test whether visual color depth appearing in Rothko’s work could be transmitted through tactile sense by means of temperature cues, which resulted from the designed temperature-depth mapping algorithm. For this, the relative distance between two objects or colors was defined in a scale from 0 to 5, with 0 meaning no relative distancing at all, and 5 meaning a really strong distance variation between objects. Negative numbers meant the second object was felt farther away than the first. The intention of this test was not notified to the participants until the test was over since the goal was to capture natural feelings through their vision and touch. Therefore, the only information given to the users was the context in which the test was placed (improving art exploration experience for the visually impaired people) and the scale system for defining relative distances that was going to be used during the test. The test sessions included an explanation of the test and its procedure, visual exploration of the artwork with depth degree scale questionnaire, and tactile exploration of the artwork with temperature conveyed depth degree scale questionnaire. Test duration was about 20 min per person. The testing procedure was the following: (1) Introducing the context of the research, explaining about visually impaired people, art exploration, and thermal cues as a way of presenting different features such as color and depth; (2) Introduction of the petlier display prototype and the artwork installed on it. Also, explanation about depth, color-depth and temperature as a way of conveying nearness Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 21 of 26 and farness; (3) The tester was asked to assess and give a scale degree of the relative distance between color 1 and 2, and color 3 and 2 of the Rothko artwork that can be seen in Figure 21. This assessment was done both visually and though tactile exploration with temperature feedback. The order was reverted for each person, so if one user started exploring the artwork and giving a scale to the relative depth visually, then the next user would start assessing the depth by touching the artwork. While touching the artwork, the petliers under it controlled the temperature of each color. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 21 of 27 until the test was over since the goal was to capture natural feelings through their vision and touch. Therefore, the only information given to the users was the context in which the test was placed (improving art exploration experience for the visually impaired people) and the scale system for defining relative distances that was going to be used during the test. The test sessions included an explanation of the test and its procedure, visual exploration of the artwork with depth degree scale questionnaire, and tactile exploration of the artwork with temperature conveyed depth degree scale questionnaire. Test duration was about 20 minutes per person. The testing procedure was the following: (1) Introducing the context of the research, explaining about visually impaired people, art exploration, and thermal cues as a way of presenting different features such as color and depth; (2) Introduction of the petlier display prototype and the artwork installed on it. Also, explanation about depth, color-depth and temperature as a way of conveying nearness and farness; (3) The tester was asked to assess and give a scale degree of the relative distance between color 1 and 2, and color 3 and 2 of the Rothko artwork that can be seen in Figure 21. This assessment was done both visually and though tactile exploration with temperature feedback. The order was reverted for each person, so if one user started exploring the artwork and giving a scale to the relative depth visually, then the next user would start assessing the depth by touching the artwork. While touching the artwork, the petliers under it controlled the temperature of each color. Figure 21. Rothko’s artwork (No 1 (Royal Red and Blue)) used during the experiment and temperatures associated to each color (as calculated through the color-based temperature-depth mapping in Section 2). 3. Results The results of the test can be seen in Table 18. V (A ⇒ B) and T (A ⇒ B) indicate the degree of feeling of the difference in depth between colors A and B perceived through visual and tactile sense, respectively. After having all the results, the visual and tactile feeling of the difference in depth between colors were subtracted as a way to measure the difference of depth feeling between the visual and the thermal cues. As an example for understanding the table, the columns related to (3 ⇒ 2) will be explained. V(3 ⇒ 2) is the visual different of depth created when looking at color 2 after color 3. Because of the chromostereoptic effect, most people find the red to be nearer than the blue and, as a result, the effect is that of looking at a color that is nearer than the first one. This effect is related to the positive scale from [0, +5], with a higher number if the depth difference between both colors is felt higher. Similarly, T(3 ⇒ 2) is the depth sensation created by touching the color that is at 26 °C after the one that is at 14 °C, also graded in the same manner (considering that, as has been proved before, most people feel warmer temperatures as that of something being nearer to us). As a result, we can compare V(3 ⇒ 2) to T(3 ⇒ 2) to assess how similarly or differently the thermal cue allows the user to be aware of the depth difference between two objects or colors compared to the depth difference acquired by the visual sense. As can be seen in the results, most of the times the difference between the visual and thermal tactile depth feeling was less than one whole scale degree. However, there seem to be some extreme differences in some cases, usually given by the fact that the chromostereoptic effect is not totally Figure 21. Rothko’s artwork (No 1 (Royal Red and Blue)) used during the experiment and temperatures associated to each color (as calculated through the color-based temperature-depth mapping in Section 2). 3. Results The results of the test can be seen in Table 18. V (A ⇒ B) and T (A ⇒ B) indicate the degree of feeling of the difference in depth between colors A and B perceived through visual and tactile sense, respectively. After having all the results, the visual and tactile feeling of the difference in depth between colors were subtracted as a way to measure the difference of depth feeling between the visual and the thermal cues. As an example for understanding the table, the columns related to (3 ⇒ 2) will be explained. Table 18. Results of the final test. User V(1 ⇒ 2) V(3 ⇒ 2) T(1 ⇒ 2) T(3 ⇒ 2) V(1 ⇒2)–T(1 ⇒ 2) V(3 ⇒ 2)–T(3 ⇒ 2) P1 −3 +3 −2 +2 −1 +1 P2 +2 +3 −3 +2 +5 +1 P3 −3 +3 −2 +2 −1 +1 P4 −3 +2 −3 +2 0 0 P5 −3 −3 −2 +1 −1 −4 P6 +1 +2 −2 +2 +3 0 P7 +3 +3 −4 +3 +7 0 P8 −2 +2 −3 +2 +1 0 Avg. −1 1.9 −2.6 2 1.63 −0.13 V(3 ⇒ 2) is the visual different of depth created when looking at color 2 after color 3. Because of the chromostereoptic effect, most people find the red to be nearer than the blue and, as a result, the effect is that of looking at a color that is nearer than the first one. This effect is related to the positive scale from [0, +5], with a higher number if the depth difference between both colors is felt higher. Similarly, T(3 ⇒ 2) is the depth sensation created by touching the color that is at 26 ◦C after the one that is at 14 ◦C, also graded in the same manner (considering that, as has been proved before, most people feel warmer temperatures as that of something being nearer to us). As a result, we can compare V(3 ⇒ 2) to T(3 ⇒ 2) to assess how similarly or differently the thermal cue allows the user to be aware of the depth difference between two objects or colors compared to the depth difference acquired by the visual sense. As can be seen in the results, most of the times the difference between the visual and thermal tactile depth feeling was less than one whole scale degree. However, there seem to be some extreme differences in some cases, usually given by the fact that the chromostereoptic effect is not totally Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 22 of 26 universal and a few people seem to perceive the depth levels differently. Such is the case with the participant number seven, who felt that, visually, color 1 was actually farther away than color 2 by a considerable distance. However, even with this little differences, the average difference between visual and thermal tactile depth cues was less than two whole scale degrees for the comparison between color 1 and color 2, and only −0.1 degree of difference between color 3 and color 2. These are promising results that show that the temperature mapping is a proper translation for depth. Nevertheless, some statistical data analysis can also be performed for narrowing down the confidence interval of the mean difference between visual and temperature cue-based depths. However, since the sample data is not too large, any outlier should be properly spotted and deleted from the sample. For that, first, the median and quartiles of both columns are calculated as in equations 1 and 2. For ease of reading, the column representing V(1 ⇒2)–T(1 ⇒ 2) will be called A, and the column representing the value V(3 ⇒ 2)–T(3 ⇒ 2) will be called B. QA1 = −1 − 1 2 = −0.5 QA2 = 0 + 1 2 = 0.5 QA3 = 5 + 3 2 = 4 (1) QB1 = 0 + 0 2 = 0 QB2 = 0 + 0 2 = 0 QB3 = 1 + 1 2 = 1 (2) The interquartile range is then calculated: IQRA = QA3 − QA1 = 4.5 IQRB = QB3 − QB1 = 1 (3) Any value that is below the first quartile or above the third one by an amount of 1.5IQR would be considered an outlier. However, in this case there is no outlier so all data needs to be used for the statistical analysis. For calculating the confidence interval of both column A and column B values, the t-distribution is used since not the mean nor the standard deviation of the population are known. Also, other distributions, such as the normal distribution, give better results only when the number of samples exceeds 30. First, the mean and the standard deviation of columns A and B can be calculated as in (4), where µ is the mean, σ is the standard deviation, N is the number of values, and xi is each individual value. µ = √∑ (xi) N σ = √∑ (xi −µ) 2 N (4) The results after applying those formulas are: µA = 1.63, µB = −0.13, σA = 3.07, σB = 1.64. The confidence interval for the population mean following a t-distribution can be calculated as in (5), where tn−1. is the cumulative probability of the t-distribution given a degree of freedom and confidence level, and n is the degrees of freedom calculated as N − 1. µ± tn−1 σ √ n (5) As can be seen in Figure 22, in this case, for a confidence level of 95%, the value of tn−1 is 2.365. As a result, the population average of column A and column B falls, with a 95% of confidence, within the range that can be seen in (6). It can be observed that in the case of column B, the difference between the visual and temperature-based depth assessment would not be larger than a scale degree and a half (of the 5-point scale degree that has been defined above). In the case of column A, there is more uncertainty due to the small sample size, but the result is still promising and encouraging for considering temperature-depth mapping and its based temperature interaction for artwork exploration as an interesting option for future assistive devices for the VIP. µA = [−0.9366, 4.1966] µB = [−1.5011, 1.2411] (6) Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 23 of 26 Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 23 of 27 ± √ (5) As can be seen in Figure 22, in this case, for a confidence level of 95%, the value of is 2.365. As a result, the population average of column A and column B falls, with a 95% of confidence, within the range that can be seen in (6). It can be observed that in the case of column B, the difference between the visual and temperature-based depth assessment would not be larger than a scale degree and a half (of the 5-point scale degree that has been defined above). In the case of column A, there is more uncertainty due to the small sample size, but the result is still promising and encouraging for considering temperature-depth mapping and its based temperature interaction for artwork exploration as an interesting option for future assistive devices for the VIP. = −0.9366, 4.1966 = −1.5011, 1.2411 (6) Figure 22. T-distribution table indicating the cumulative probabilities depending on the confidence level. (https://www.tdistributiontable.com). In conclusion, the accuracy of the proposed algorithm was verified through the experimental process and the temperature cues were found to be a promising way for conveying the chromostereoptic depth of the artwork. The next step was to install the prototype at an exhibition hall in Chungju Sungmo school for the visually impaired in Korea (Figure 23) to assess the responses of the visually impaired users. The reaction of the users was observed and visitors were briefly interviewed for finding out their impressions about the prototype. Figure 22. T-distribution table indicating the cumulative probabilities depending on the confidence level. (https://www.tdistributiontable.com). In conclusion, the accuracy of the proposed algorithm was verified through the experimental process and the temperature cues were found to be a promising way for conveying the chromostereoptic depth of the artwork. The next step was to install the prototype at an exhibition hall in Chungju Sungmo school for the visually impaired in Korea (Figure 23) to assess the responses of the visually impaired users. The reaction of the users was observed and visitors were briefly interviewed for finding out their impressions about the prototype. Electronics 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 24 of 27 Figure 23. Temperature-depth system prototype being exhibited together with other art assistive devices for the visually impaired at the Chungju Sungmo School for visually impaired people, in Korea. The temperature prototypes, of which there are two, are placed in the right side. Comments from the visually impaired users at exhibition hall Visually impaired and sighted visitors were briefly interviewed after using the temperature- depth art prototype exhibited in the Chungju Sungmo School for the blind of Korea. They were asked to comment about their feelings and thoughts regarding the temperature interface and its use for representing depth. In general the responses were positive, with some people stating that it was really interesting to explore the artwork in different ways for which they had not been able to do before. Also, some sighted school teachers pointed about the fact that this kind of new interactions keeps some of the visually impaired people interested in learning since most of the books and tools they use to learn are only braille books or audio recordings. Most of the VIP agreed that temperature was an intuitive way of describing depth because of the correlation between warm and near, and cold and far that we stated above. Also, some of them added, especially the children, that the temperature gave a gamification-like feeling to the prototype, making the artwork exploration more enjoyable and engaging. This statement about the gamification making art exploration engaging and interesting seems to be directly correlated to the teachers’ comments about VIP getting a lot of benefit from new and unusual ways of interaction for keeping up interest by trying out new ways of learning. There were also some complaints, particularly about the fact that in the boundaries of the objects, the temperature from adjacent objects would mix a little bit and the distinction between temperatures was not very clear at those points. Also, some of them suggested that the same system could also be used for adding temperature to some hot or cold objects, such as the sun or water, instead of for representing depth, which could be done instead by adding a third dimension to the tactile model. 4. Conclusions Throughout this work, two types of tests were performed with sighted and visually impaired users to assess a method to convey depth information by using temperature cues. The first test showed that warm and cold temperatures can be used as cues to communicate to the user how near or far the features of an artwork are. Based on these results, a complete thermal display prototype was designed and developed. Similarly, a relief artwork was designed and installed on top of the prototype, which was used for performing the final test. This final test’s results proved that thermal interaction is a proper way of conveying depth information of the artwork to the VIP. This is an addition to the current technologies which, as was seen above, used to communicate the depth of the features of an artwork either by using audio, or by adding depth into a tactile model by extruding the features. The addition of thermal interaction as a way of communicating depth can open the door to many new ways of experiencing art for VIP. Moreover, the developed thermal display system can be used for adding thermal interaction to any type of paper-based relief artwork, not only by using the thermal cues as a substitute for depth, but also by giving them another role, such as expressing Figure 23. Temperature-depth system prototype being exhibited together with other art assistive devices for the visually impaired at the Chungju Sungmo School for visually impaired people, in Korea. The temperature prototypes, of which there are two, are placed in the right side. https://www.tdistributiontable.com Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 24 of 26 Comments from the visually impaired users at exhibition hall Visually impaired and sighted visitors were briefly interviewed after using the temperature-depth art prototype exhibited in the Chungju Sungmo School for the blind of Korea. They were asked to comment about their feelings and thoughts regarding the temperature interface and its use for representing depth. In general the responses were positive, with some people stating that it was really interesting to explore the artwork in different ways for which they had not been able to do before. Also, some sighted school teachers pointed about the fact that this kind of new interactions keeps some of the visually impaired people interested in learning since most of the books and tools they use to learn are only braille books or audio recordings. Most of the VIP agreed that temperature was an intuitive way of describing depth because of the correlation between warm and near, and cold and far that we stated above. Also, some of them added, especially the children, that the temperature gave a gamification-like feeling to the prototype, making the artwork exploration more enjoyable and engaging. This statement about the gamification making art exploration engaging and interesting seems to be directly correlated to the teachers’ comments about VIP getting a lot of benefit from new and unusual ways of interaction for keeping up interest by trying out new ways of learning. There were also some complaints, particularly about the fact that in the boundaries of the objects, the temperature from adjacent objects would mix a little bit and the distinction between temperatures was not very clear at those points. Also, some of them suggested that the same system could also be used for adding temperature to some hot or cold objects, such as the sun or water, instead of for representing depth, which could be done instead by adding a third dimension to the tactile model. 4. Conclusions Throughout this work, two types of tests were performed with sighted and visually impaired users to assess a method to convey depth information by using temperature cues. The first test showed that warm and cold temperatures can be used as cues to communicate to the user how near or far the features of an artwork are. Based on these results, a complete thermal display prototype was designed and developed. Similarly, a relief artwork was designed and installed on top of the prototype, which was used for performing the final test. This final test’s results proved that thermal interaction is a proper way of conveying depth information of the artwork to the VIP. This is an addition to the current technologies which, as was seen above, used to communicate the depth of the features of an artwork either by using audio, or by adding depth into a tactile model by extruding the features. The addition of thermal interaction as a way of communicating depth can open the door to many new ways of experiencing art for VIP. Moreover, the developed thermal display system can be used for adding thermal interaction to any type of paper-based relief artwork, not only by using the thermal cues as a substitute for depth, but also by giving them another role, such as expressing color warmness and color coolness, or for making hot objects (such as the sun) warm and cold objects (such as the water) cold. Future Work There are many ways in which this work could be continued or improved on, such as: 1. Increasing the number of petliers adding the possibility of creating more complex temperature regions on the artwork; 2. Finding a way to make the system smaller and more portable; 3. Changing the use of temperature cues from depth representation to an artwork feature semantic mapping, such as making the water feel cold. 4. A necessary addition for this semantic mapping would be to be able to make the prototype work with 2.5D relief artworks, which present depth by extruding the features in the z direction, and not only with tactile paper artworks. In that way the visually impaired people could be aware of depth through tactile exploration while also feeling the temperature of the different Electronics 2020, 9, 1939 25 of 26 artwork features while exploring. For that, a method to make the petlier temperature reach all the way to the surface of the 2.5D relief model should be found. Last Words In this work, a temperature-depth cross modal mapping for conveying depth in the context of tactile artwork exploration for visually impaired people was designed. The mapping was based in a conceptual and intuitive correlation between temperature and depth. In addition, the developed mapping was applied to two different types of contexts, a complete prototype for adding temperature interaction to paper relief artworks designed and developed, and that same prototype was tested both with sighted and visually impaired users to assess its functionality and the temperature-depth mapping algorithm performance. The results showed that a relationship between depth and temperature exists and that, on the basis of that relationship, depth of artwork features can be transmitted successfully through temperature cues during tactile exploration of an artwork. We hope this work can encourage researchers to consider thermal interaction both as a substitute for depth and as a viable way to improve accessibility for visually impaired people in tactile artwork exploration contexts. Author Contributions: Conceptualization, J.D.C.; data curation, S.J.; formal analysis, J.I.B.; funding acquisition, J.D.C.; methodology, J.I.B. and L.C.Q.; project administration, J.D.C.; software, J.I.B. and G.C.; supervision, J.D.C.; validation, J.I.B., S.J., and G.C.; writing—original draft, J.I.B. and J.D.C.; writing—review & editing, J.I.B. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. Funding: This research was supported by the Science Technology and Humanity Converging Research Program of National Research Foundation of Korea (2018M3C1B6061353). Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest. References 1. Bhowmick, A.; Hazarika, S.M. An insight into assistive technology for the visually impaired and blind people: State-of-the-art and future trends. J. Multimodal User Interfaces 2017, 11, 149–172. [CrossRef] 2. Kitaoka, A. Chromostereopsis. 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This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICSPC.2007.4728491 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3155286 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/col.20294 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-011-0424-y http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858205 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702219 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grafik_nach_Josef_Albers.jpg http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1444-0938.2007.00212.x http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18271777 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0141-9382(93)90093-K https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munsell-system.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HLSColorSpace.png http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0042-6989(65)90007-6 https://www.wikiart.org/en/mark-rothko/no-1-royal-red-and-blue-1954 https://www.wikiart.org/en/mark-rothko/no-5-no-22 http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Introduction Introduction Background and Related Work Thermal Perception and Thermal Interaction Thermal Interaction for Assistive Devices Thermal Interaction for Artwork Exploration Assistive Devices for Communicating Depth Temperature-Depth Cross-Modality Materials and Methods Temperature-Depth Correlation Temperature Range Used Temperature-Depth Correlation Test Results from Temperature-Depth Correlation Test with the Sighted Users Results from Temperature-Depth Correlation Test with the Visually Impaired Users Temperature-Depth Correlation Test Results Temperature-Depth Correlation Test Interviews Temperature-Depth Mapping Application 1: Artwork Depth Application 2: Chromostereopsis Thermal Display System Prototype Mark Rothko’s Artwork Experiment Results Conclusions References work_gkiht3f6dvf77dt2snzzol4f6i ---- Home > Jacques E. C. Hymans > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Home Bio CV Academic Writings Opinion Course Information Contact Info and Useful Links Jacques E. C. Hymans Associate Professor, School of International Relations University of Southern California   Jacques E. C. Hymans USC School of International Relations 3518 Trousdale Parkway, VKC 330, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA Phone: (213) 740 - 8837 Email: hymans@usc.edu work_gtdysu3cofhs5e2mhztywvtw2a ---- PII: S1364-6613(00)01626-0 TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.5 No.5 May 2001 http://tics.trends.com 1364-6613/01/$ – see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S1364-6613(00)01626-0 211Review James Tanaka* Daniel Weiskopf Dept of Psychology, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH 44074, USA. *e-mail: jim.tanaka@ cs.oberlin.edu Pepper Williams Dept of Psychology, University of Massachusetts-Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd, Boston, MA 02125, USA. In a memorable scene from The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is catapulted by a ferocious tornado from a drab, grey-scale Midwest existence into the land of Oz, a world that is portrayed in full-scale, technocolor vision. In the film, the transition from black-and-white to color images is a striking cinematographic technique alerting Dorothy and the audience that we are indeed ‘not in Kansas anymore’. However, whilst the aesthetic value of color in the visual arts is undeniable, the contribution of color to everyday vision, especially the stage of vision concerned with object recognition, is more controversial. Does the presence of color help us recognize objects in our world? Are we any faster or more accurate in recognizing an apple when it is seen in color versus black-and-white? This article focuses on the functional contributions that color makes to the way humans perceive and recognize objects. Drawing upon converging evidence from behavioral, neuroimaging and neuropsychological methodologies, we present a framework that emphasizes the interaction between object color perception and object color knowledge in recognition. Color in low-level vision Neurophysiological research has revealed that a significant amount of visual processing is dedicated to the analysis of color information. When light enters the eye, the composition of wavelength energy is captured by specialized retinal photoreceptors (cones), which in turn send their outputs to specific cells in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) (Ref. 1). Wavelength- coded signals from the LGN, which are essential for the processing and perception of color information, are then transmitted along specialized pathways to cortical visual areas V1, V2 and V4 (Ref. 2). Given that the brain has developed specialized mechanisms to handle the color information in the visual environment, it is a fair question to ask what functional role color might play in everyday vision. Whereas other mammals possess dichromatic or monochromatic color vision, it is only primates that are endowed with three types of cone photoreceptors and thereby have trichromatic color vision. What ecological advantage does this give primates over animals with dichromatic or monochromatic vision? Recently, Sumner and Mollon found that the photopigments of primates are optimized for differentiating edible fruits and young leaves amongst a background of mature leaves3. In this case, the additional dimension of trichromatic color vision gives primates a behavioral advantage when having to select edible fruits and plants from a complex scene. Similarly, during the early stages of low-level visual processing, it has been shown that color is a useful cue for segregating and organizing visual input into three-dimensional objects and scenes4–6. For example, very brief presentations (16 ms), of natural scenes are matched more accurately by subjects when shown in color than when shown as luminance-controlled grey-scale images7. Thus, studies in low-level vision indicate that color provides an important source of information in the pre-recognition stage of visual processing. Color in high-level vision Although keen color vision might give humans an adaptive edge in the early stage of visual processing, the role that color plays in later stages of object recognition has been a point of contention in the literature. On one side of the issue, ‘edge-based’ theories, such as Biederman’s recognition-by- components model8, claim that objects are recognized solely on the basis of their shape properties. According to the edge-based approach, representations mediating initial object recognition contain information about an object’s shape, but no information about the surface properties of an object, such as its color or texture. By contrast, ‘surface-plus-edge-based’ theories allow for object representations to include information, not only about an object’s shape, but also about its surface properties, such as color and texture9,10. The competing claims of the two approaches should be testable in behavioral experiments by examining whether there is an advantage for recognizing the chromatic version of an object over its achromatic version. However, this relatively straightforward test has yielded mixed results. Some studies have shown that recognition times are essentially unaffected when objects are presented in their appropriate colors (e.g. a yellow banana), inappropriate colors (e.g. a purple banana) or in black-and-white11–13, which would support the Traditional theories of object recognition have emphasized the role of shape information in high-level vision. However, the accumulating behavioral, neuroimaging and neuropsychological evidence indicates that the surface color of an object affects its recognition. In this article, we discuss the research that examines the conditions under which color influences the operations of high-level vision and the neural substrates that might mediate these operations. The relationship between object color and object recognition is summarized in the ‘Shape + Surface’ model of high-level vision. The role of color in high-level vision James Tanaka, Daniel Weiskopf and Pepper Williams TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.5 No.5 May 2001 http://tics.trends.com 212 ReviewReview edge-based theories. However, other studies have found that appropriately colored objects are recognized faster than monochrome objects and inappropriately colored objects14–16, which is consistent with the surface-plus-edge-based position. There are several reasons why color might influence recognition in one situation and not another. First, the relative contribution of color to object recognition will greatly depend on the structural properties of relevant comparison objects. For example, when shopping for fruit, ‘yellow’ is an a important cue for differentiating lemons from limes, but yellow would not be critical for selecting lemons from pineapples. Thus, shape and color interact; color facilitates recognition of objects within structurally similar categories (e.g. animals, birds), but not necessarily structurally dissimilar categories (e.g. body parts, musical instruments, tools)16. Color diagnosticity in object and scene recognition Color can provide useful information for the recognition of some, but not all, objects. For example, although ‘red’ might be an informative cue for identifying fire engines, red is certainly not a very useful cue for identifying automobiles or bicycles. Objects that that are high in color ‘diagnosticity’ – that is, objects such as fire engines and lemons that appear in a consistent color – are the most likely candidates to show the effects of color in recognition (see Fig. 1). By contrast, objects such as cars and hammers, that do not consistently appear in a characteristic color are low in color diagnosticity and should be little affected by the availability of perceptual color information. Consistent with this prediction, Tanaka and Presnell showed that the presence or absence of color information has a significant impact on the recognition of isolated objects with high color-diagnosticity and little effect on the recognition of objects with low color- diagnosticity17. In a control condition, when the high-and low-color-diagnostic objects were matched for structural complexity, reliable color effects were still found, indicating that color made a unique contribution to recognition independently of shape. In addition to the recognition of isolated objects, color can also be diagnostic for recognition of everyday scenes7,18. For example, one experiment showed that scenes that are rich in color-diagnostic content (e.g. coast, canyon, desert, forest) are best recognized in their normal colors18. When the same scenes were shown in a luminance-only condition, they were recognized more readily than when shown in inappropriate colors (see Fig. 2). Non-color- diagnostic scenes (e.g. city, shopping area, road and bedroom), on the other hand, showed no difference in recognition across the normal-color, luminance-only and abnormal-color conditions. Thus, the concept of color diagnosticity generalizes to the recognition of color-diagnostic scenes as well as color-diagnostic objects (see also Box 1). What are the ecological benefits of representing objects and scenes in terms of both color and shape? Objects represented by color and shape might show a recognition advantage over objects represented by shape only in conditions where access to edge information is limited. For instance, given its distinctive yellow color, identifying a partially occluded banana should be easier than identifying a partially occluded can opener. That is, under less than ideal viewing conditions, multi-coded objects will suffer less than objects that are coded by a single dimension. It could be argued that in the real world, recognition-under-occlusion is more the rule than the exception, and hence, color might play an critical role in everyday object recognition. Perception and knowledge of object color in the brain Perceiving that an apple is red versus knowing that an apple is red are distinct cognitive operations. Above perception, the knowledge of object color requires an association between the color ‘red’ and the object ‘apple’. At the neuroanatomical level, distinct neural regions appear to be differentially engaged during the processes of color perception and the retrieval of visual color knowledge19–21. In color perception, when human subjects passively view Mondrian color displays (arrays of different colored patches), areas of the lingual and fusiform gyrus are differentially activated relative to when viewing the same patterns shown in grey-scale19,20. On the other hand, if subjects are asked to generate the color associate to an achromatic object (e.g. responding ‘yellow’ to a line drawing of a bulldozer) the left inferior temporal, frontal and Review Fig. 1. Images of high color-diagnostic objects shown in their appropriate colors (left) and inappropriate colors (right). For such objects, color plays an important role in recognition. Fig. 2. Images of a high color-diagnostic beach scene shown in appropriate colors (left) and inappropriate colors (right). Images provided courtesy of Aude Oliva and Philippe Schyns. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.5 No.5 May 2001 http://tics.trends.com 213ReviewReview posterior parietal areas of the brain are differentially activated relative to naming the object. It is noteworthy that these are the same brain structures that have been closely linked to visual object perception and recognition22, which suggests that modality-specific, visual representations are activated by the object-color association task. Moreover, because the left inferior temporal area showed increased activation during retrieval of color knowledge relative to color naming of a colored version of the same picture (e.g. responding ‘yellow’ to a picture of an achromatic bulldozer versus responding ‘yellow’ to a picture of a yellow bulldozer), this region would seem to be related to the access of object color knowledge rather than simple lexical access (the word ‘yellow’). Similarly, the right anterior fusiform gyrus, hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus showed increased activation during the mental imagery of high color-diagnostic objects (e.g. apple, banana)23. Collectively, these studies make two important points. First, retrieving information about an object’s color activates many of the same visual brain areas that are known to be involved in object recognition. Second, the neural areas activated by the retrieval of object color knowledge are separable from those areas activated by color perception. A more direct link between color knowledge and object recognition processes is demonstrated by a neuroimaging study by Zeki and Marini24. In their Review Artists are often well ahead of cognitive scientists in their experimentation with perception. For centuries artists have been aware that color can play a key role in object and scene recognition as a result of humans’ strong associations between colors and certain objects or scenes. Artists in the Impressionist era relied heavily on viewer’s color knowledge, realizing that color is sometimes the most integral element of scene recognition. If the colors and the interaction between colors are captured, then accurate shape representations of a scene are not necessary – and may even detract from the experience of the painting. For example, a painting from Monet’s famous series of water lilies (Fig. I) depicts forms that are so strongly associated with particular colors, such as blue water and green vegetation, that the colors themselves convey the objects and mood of the scene without the need for detailed shape representations. In direct contrast to the Impressionist artists, who exploited color associations, artists from the Fauvist tradition tried to ‘free color from its descriptive role in representation’ (Ref. a, p. 779). Finding unique applications for color was one of the main goals and achievements of artists such as Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice Vlaminck. The Fauves used brilliant blocks of colors, often in ways that seemed inappropriate, to disrupt our traditional associations between colors and objects. Water was not necessarily blue for the Fauves, and trees were not always green. For example, the colors used in Derain’s The Pool of London (Fig. II) are vibrant and unnatural, such as the bright pink steamboat, the blue mountains, and the orange faces of the workers. This audacious use of color forces the viewers’ knowledge of color and shape to be at odds, bringing a new emotional dissonance to scenes that might otherwise be mundane. Artists have long been experimenters in perception, using color and shape to suggest, to reinforce, to violate, or simply to complicate what they assume to be their viewers’ traditional associations between color and form. Reference a Honour, H. and Fleming, J. (2000) The Visual Arts: A History, Prentice-Hall Fig. II. Derain The Pool of London. (Reproduced with permission of the Design and Artists Copyright Society). Fig. I. Monet Waterlilies. (Reproduced, with permission, from the Art Institute of Chicago.) Box 1. Color knowledge from an artist’s perspective study, participants viewed normally colored objects, abnormally colored objects and grey-scaled Mondrian displays. As expected, the naturally and unnaturally colored objects activated visual areas known to be involved in color processing – V1 and V4. However, naturally colored objects (e.g. red strawberries) also engaged the same brain structures, specifically, the fusiform gyrus, hippocampus, and ventrolateral portion of the frontal cortex, that were found to be activated by other tasks requiring the retrieval of object color. Curiously, unnaturally colored objects (e.g. purple strawberries) activated the dorsolateral area of the frontal cortex. It is not clear why different pathways should be activated by appropriately and inappropriately colored objects. However, the critical finding was that object color knowledge was demonstrated by the differential activity of specific brain regions during the recognition of high color- diagnostic objects. Neuropsychology of object color knowledge Neuropsychological studies have indicated that brain injury can result in a separation of object color knowledge from shape knowledge. For instance, patient JB demonstrated preserved shape knowledge in the absence of object color knowledge25. This patient could easily discriminate real objects from ‘nonsense’ objects (composites of other real objects) and could discriminate perceptual differences between colors. However, JB was not able to judge whether objects had appropriate or inappropriate colors suggesting that his color- knowledge system was compromised. Similarly, Luzzatti and Davidoff 26 described two patients who demonstrated an intact ability to name colors, but an impaired ability to associate the appropriate color with an object. Despite a preserved ability to perceive and name colors, these patients experienced a selective impairment in their knowledge of object color. Neuropsychological studies also suggest that within the system of object color knowledge, a finer division exists between visual color knowledge and verbal color knowledge. For example, patient RV could perform verbal tasks that involved the color naming of abstract terms (e.g. ‘What color name would you give communists?’) and concrete objects (e.g. ‘What color is a gherkin?’)27. However, despite intact color perception, when asked to point to the correctly colored picture of an object, RV was severely impaired unless he was allowed to rely on verbal mediation. Thus, his verbal knowledge of object color seemed to be intact whereas his visual knowledge of color was compromised. By contrast, patient MP demonstrated intact visual and verbal knowledge about colors, but was not able to link the two types of knowledge. For instance, MP could point to the correct color of an imagined or visually presented line drawing of an object, as well as verbally report the color associated with an object (e.g. an apple is ‘red’). Thus, within the verbal or visual modality, he demonstrated intact object color knowledge. However, he was unable to report verbally the color of a visually presented picture or point to the color of a verbally spoken object (e.g. ‘point to the color of a strawberry’). Thus, MP seemed to lack the ability to integrate information across the visual and verbal domains of object color. In summary, the neuropsychological evidence indicates that knowledge of color is stored in both a verbal format and a visual format with close ties that normally bind the two types of knowledge. The Shape ++ Surface model of object recognition According to the ‘Shape + Surface’ model of object recognition (Fig. 3), color provides one of the perceptual inputs into the object representation system. As depicted by the larger ‘shape’ input box, the model acknowledges that object recognition is primarily a shape-driven system (e.g. blue rabbits are still recognized as rabbits). However, the model maintains that the color plays a supporting role in the recognition of high color-diagnostic objects and scenes. Thus, in contrast to other theories of object recognition (e.g. Ref. 28), the Shape + Surface model allows for objects to be represented in terms of both their shape and color. As indicated in Fig. 3, an unanswered question that we are currently pursuing in our laboratory is whether other types of surface information, specifically texture information, can influence the recognition process. The Shape + Surface model also draws a distinction between the perceptual object color at the input level versus stored visual color knowledge. According to the model, visual color knowledge can be triggered either by the perceptual object during object recognition or by its lexical label during mental imagery. The bi-directional arrow between color knowledge and the object representation (Fig. 3) indicates that prior color associations can have TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.5 No.5 May 2001 http://tics.trends.com 214 Review TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Color Shape Texture? Object name Visual color knowledge Verbal color knowledge Object representation P e rc e p tu a l i n p u ts Fig. 3. The ‘Shape + Surface’ model of object recognition. As seen from the inputs on the left, this model allows for objects to be represented in terms of both their shape and color (and possibly texture). Visual color knowledge can be triggered either by the perceptual object during object recognition or by its lexical label during mental imagery (right). top-down effects on the perceptual processes involved in recognition. For example, it has been shown that, in an object recognition task, stronger interference effects were produced by inconsistent semantic color associations than by inconsistent perceptual color associations29. Similarly to other interactive models of letter and object perception30, the Shape + Surface model posits that object recognition is jointly determined by the bottom-up influence of perceptual color and the top-down influence of color knowledge. Finally, to take into account the neuropsychological evidence, the model maintains a separation between linguistic and visual representations of object color. For example, it is possible to know that apples are red without having to consult some kind of visual representation. Conclusion In summary, the converging behavioral, neurophysiological and neuropsychological evidence demonstrate that color plays a critical role in both low-level and high-level vision. At the lower level, color segments the complex visual input into coherent regions, thereby helping to differentiate objects from the background. At the higher level of recognition, objects and scenes imbued with characteristic colors are recognized more readily when seen in their natural colors than when not. Thus, beyond its aesthetic qualities, color enhances the manner in which we perceive and recognize objects in our everyday world. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.5 No.5 May 2001 http://tics.trends.com 215Review • The converging evidence suggests that objects are recognized by virtue of their color as well as their shape. Do other types of surface information also influence object recognition processes – specifically, is recognition affected by an object’s surface texture? If so, what are the neural substrates related to the processing of an object’s texture? Like object color, can the perception of object texture be neurologically distinguished from knowledge of object texture? • What is the relationship between object color and the expertise of the perceiver? One hallmark of expert recognition is that experts initially recognize objects in their domain of expertise at a more specific level of categorization than novices. For example, expert birdwatchers recognize birds at the subordinate level of ‘greenfinch’ or ‘sparrow’ whereas novices recognize bird objects at the basic level of ‘bird’. To what extent does knowledge of object color facilitate the rapid subordinate-level recognition of the expert? Does the presence (or absence) of accurate color information affect the recognition performance of experts more than novices? • For the recognition of rigid and semi-rigid objects, the encoding of shape information takes precedence over the encoding of surface information. However, for the recognition of mass objects (e.g. water, sand), the converse seems true: surface information is more important than shape information. For example, blue rabbits are still recognized as rabbits, but are clouds still recognized as clouds if they are blue rather than white, or smooth rather than fluffy? What are the mechanisms underlying the recognition of mass objects and how might they differ from the mechanisms governing the recognition of rigid and semi-rigid objects? Questions for future research References 1 Livingstone, M.D. and Hubel, D.H. (1987) Psychophysical evidence for separate channels for the perception of form, color, movement and depth. J. Neurosci. 7, 3416–3468 2 Zeki, S. et al. (1991) A direct demonstration of functional specialization in the human visual cortex. J. Neurosci. 11, 641–649 3 Sumner, P. and Mollon, J.D. (2000) Catarrhine photopigments are optimized for detecting targets against a foliage background. J. Exp. 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In Parallel Distributed Processing Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition (Vol. 1), pp. 45–109, MIT Press work_h4s4fa6jbvhlfhrv4jbluxadmy ---- Microsoft Word - JTchalenko_2012-0490_DECISIONfinal2013.docx THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   1     TITLE: The Gaze-Shift Strategy in Drawing RUNNING HEAD: The Gaze-Shift Strategy in Drawing REVISED and accepted Sept 2013 Please cite this works as: Tchalenko J, Nam S-H, Moshe & Miall RC (2014) The Gaze-Shift Strategy in Drawing Psychol. Aesthetics. Creat. Arts, 8(3), 330-339. This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. AUTHOR BYLINE, AFFILIATION: John Tchalenko University of the Arts London Se-Ho Nam University of Birmingham Moshe Ladanga University of the Arts London R. Chris Miall University of Birmingham AUTHOR NOTE: John Tchalenko and Moshe Ladanga, Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Se-Ho Nam and R. Chris Miall, Behavioural Brain Sciences, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK. This work was funded by a Leverhulme Grant F/09 986/D. R. Chris Miall is also funded by the Wellcome Trust and the HFSP. We are grateful to Angie Brew for help with conducting the tests, Jem McKay for help with the figures and Tyler Freeman for helpful discussions and comments. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to john@tchalenko.com   THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   2     Abstract Alternating the point of gaze between an original (model or sitter, object or scene) and a picture (paper, canvas or digital touch screen) is the most common observational drawing strategy. However, a number of investigations into eye-hand interactions in drawing have revealed the existence of some “blind” drawing taking place (drawing the picture while the eye remains on the original or during gaze shifts between the original and the drawing). These observations of a direct visual-to-motor transformation challenge the commonly held assumption that the gaze-shifting strategy reflects a memory process in which the gaze on the original is used to encode a visual detail to short or long term memory, subsequently retrieved during the gaze on the picture. To study the blind drawing strategy in more depth during naturalistic drawing, we compared three basic drawing tasks - copying, contouring, and drawing of graded zones as lines, where original and picture were placed side by side on a vertical plane. We found that subjects drew almost continuously, thus exhibiting periods of blind drawing while the eye was on the original. The amount of blind drawing increased progressively between the copying task, the contouring task, and the graded zone task. When gaze shifted to the picture, it was generally to a fixation point located in advance of the hand on the part of the line not yet drawn. For individual tests, gaze ratios (gaze duration on original divided by gaze duration on picture) were approximately equal to drawing ratios (drawing duration during original gaze divided by drawing duration during picture gaze). We propose a general gaze-shift strategy that takes into account these observations. Keywords: drawing, copying, eye-hand interaction, blind drawing, drawing strategy Introduction Gaze shifting is probably the most common form of eye movement during observational drawing or drawing from life. It consists of the eyes alternating between an original – the model or sitter, object or scene being observed– and a picture – the paper, canvas or digital touch screen. During these gaze shift cycles, the hand moves intermittently or continuously, drawing the picture, which is constructed detail by detail with this dynamic pattern of eye and hand interaction. The strategy at the heart of these alternating gaze shifts during drawing has often been assumed to be based on a visual memory process in which the artist encodes a detail to memory when looking at the original, and then draws it from memory when looking at the picture. For example, art historian David Sylvester, sitting for the artist Alberto Giacometti in 1960 (Sylvester, 1995) remarked: “Working from life is working from memory: the artist can only put down what remains in his head after looking” (p. 47) and cognitive psychologists Phillips, Hobbs, and Pratt (1978) wrote: “Since normal drawing involves looking away from the object being drawn, any information acquired during perception must be remembered while actually drawing” (p.30). However, a number of recent studies have suggested that this sequential process of memory encoding and retrieval may not fully explain what is taking place during gaze-shift drawing. Tchalenko and Miall (2009) studied THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   3     subjects copying an original drawing of a cartoon head placed next to the drawing surface, the distance between original and picture being about 25o visual angle. Drawing was on a vertical easel with charcoal on paper. In these tasks, the hand was drawing almost continuously, which meant that while the eye was still on the original, drawing was proceeding “blind” – with at most only peripheral vision. Mean duration of the gaze shift cycle was 1.10 sec, and for about 54% of the time the gaze was on the original, and 46% on the picture. The fact that drawing took place simultaneous with perception of the original suggested a more direct visual to motor transformation process not dependant on memory. In additional tests where the drawing hand and picture were completely blocked from the subject’s view, the original was copied with good shape accuracy, although spatial positioning accuracy was deficient. Based on these results, we postulated a drawing hypothesis (Tchalenko & Miall, 2009) whereby the drawing of shape was the result of a visual to motor transformation that could be executed directly while perceiving the original, and without vision of the hand or the drawing surface; in contrast, correct spatial positioning of the drawn shape on the paper required vision of the hand on the drawing surface. This hypothesis proposes that each detail to be drawn is not retained as a visual memory, subsequently transformed to a drawing action, but is transformed to an action and, we proposed, retained in short term memory as an intended drawing action. The drawing hypothesis was also supported by functional brain imaging work (Miall, Gowen & Tchalenko, 2009) in which brain activation levels were measured during the encoding and drawing phases of a task directly comparable to the copying task in the eye tracker investigation. In that work, brain activation patterns were consistent with visuomotor mapping during the encoding phase, and no evidence for retention and recall of a mental visual image was found. In a further study of copying using eye tracking, a complex line drawing of a standing nude was placed at a visual angle distance of about 50o from the easel (Tchalenko, 2009a). Drawing took place on a vertical easel with charcoal on paper. With 4 expert artists, mean gaze shift cycle durations was 1.71 sec, and the gaze was on the original about 61% of the time. Drawing proceeded segment by segment rather than continuously, with the hand often starting to draw a given segment while the eye was still on the original, or while it was saccading to the picture. Again the simultaneity of visual perception of the original and of the drawing action suggest a direct visuomotor transformation, without the necessity of a memory encoding phase. Finally, when shifting gaze to the picture, a frequently observed strategy was what we term ‘target locking’, that is, drawing towards a stable eye fixation point that defined the segment’s end point (Tchalenko, 2007). This implies the gaze is providing a spatial target towards which the line is drawn, while the shape of the drawn line is already encoded as an action. All these observations add support for the proposition that a fundamental component of the gaze-shift drawing process is independent of visual memory. Although blind drawing episodes were frequently observed in the studies mentioned above, their durations were not systematically measured, thus making their role and importance difficult to assess. Another concern about these studies was that many of the reported observations were made during copying tests for which the original itself was a line drawing. Although copying lines is a recognized type of drawing, its use in observational drawing is relatively rare. For example, the frontal view of the human head contains only a few well-defined lines to copy such as the separation line of the lips, the pupil, and sometimes the hair line on the brow. More frequently the task of portrait drawing is one of defining contours of the face and its principle elements: nose, lips, cheeks, etc., a more complex undertaking than copying an existing line. For example, depending on light conditions, the outline of the chin and cheeks can appear softly defined and can change with THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   4     the slightest movement of the artist or model. In addition, in line drawing, the artist needs to consider how to depict the borders of graded zones resulting from subtle changes of light falling on the face, or changes of skin tone and texture, using discrete lines. Most drawing from life therefore includes, in varying proportions, copying, contouring, and graded zone drawing, but as yet very little research has concentrated on the latter two, or on drawing tasks where all three were important. The purpose of the present study is to compare these three types of drawing tasks - copying, contouring, and zone drawing - in a unified experimental setup permitting accurate measurement of hand and eye movement. The main question examined is whether a general strategy in gaze-shift drawing can be formulated across these three different drawing tasks, on the basis of the recorded spatial and temporal eye-hand interaction schemes. We test the two hypotheses: first that the proportion of time spent viewing the original drawing varies with the drawing task being performed, because of the different demands on defining the line to be drawn, and second, that blind drawing occurs across all three drawing tasks and, because it is subsequent to the decision process, the proportion of blind drawing varies with the proportion of gaze time spent on the original drawing. Method Definition of Cycle, Gaze Ratio, and Drawing Ratio We define three key measures of the eye-hand interaction during drawing: the gaze shift cycle, the gaze ratio, and the drawing ratio. The gaze shift cycle, C, is the duration of the interval between two consecutive gazes to the original. It defines the mean period over which an element of the original is viewed, some part of the on-going drawing is observed, and a return to the original is made. The few published measurements of cycle durations during portrait drawing vary from about 1.7s to 5.9s (Cohen, 2005; Cohen & Bennett, 1997; Konecni, 1991; Land, 2006; Land & Tatler, 2009; Tchalenko, 2009a, 2009b; Tchalenko, Dempere-Marco, Hu, & Yang, 2003). The gaze ratio G is defined as the proportion of time spent viewing the original compared to the picture. A ratio of G=1 indicates equal gaze duration on the original and picture; values less than 1 indicate more time spent on the picture, and values greater than 1 indicate more time on the original. Only a few sample measurements are available in the literature for this parameter: an artist drawing a sketch portrait provided a value of G=0.89 (Land, 2006); the artist Henri Matisse filmed drawing a charcoal portrait with G=0.58 (Tchalenko, 2009b); and a contemporary professional artist compared to a first-time beginner drawing a pencil portrait from life with values of G=0.35 and G=1.70 respectively (Tchalenko, 2009a). Finally, we define the drawing ratio D as the ratio of drawing time when the gaze is on the original to the drawing time when gaze is on the picture. Drawing which takes place while the eye is on the original is referred to here as “blind” drawing, although in practice some peripheral vision may be available. A recent study by Glazek (2012) comparing expert and novice artists copying familiar and novel line- drawing pictures, provides gaze durations on the original and total drawing durations, but unfortunately these measurements alone do not allow us to infer the parameters G or D. While blind drawing has been observed in some of the studies cited above, we have not found specific data allowing calculation of the drawing ratio in the specialized literature. THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   5     Experimental Setup To allow as natural drawing as possible, all movement restriction devices such as chin- rests and forehead supports were avoided. Subjects wore a head-mounted eye tracker (the ASL 501, Applied Science Laboratories, Bedford, MA, running at 50 Hz) and were seated about 50 cm away from a vertical graphics tablet/monitor screen. Head position was monitored with an Ascension Flock of Birds magnetic tracker, with the integrated system providing fixation accuracies better than 1 degree. The graphics tablet/monitor was the Cintiq 21UX (Wacom) with a screen size of 432 x 324 mm and a resolution set at 1024 x 768 pixels. Drawing took place with a stylus directly on the screen. The stylus position was sampled at 25 Hz with a resolution of 1 pixel (better than 0.5 mm) and was then interpolated to 50 Hz. For right-handed subjects, the screen’s left half acted as display containing the image – the original - to be copied or drawn, and the right half acted as graphics tablet on which the copy or drawing – the picture - was produced. The actual distance between a stimulus image on the original and its drawn reproduction on the picture varied between 21o and 25o visual angle, depending on the precise point where the subject decided to start drawing. This setup will also be referred to as the side-by-side setup. A scan converter recorded the entire screen continuously as an audiovisual video file (.avi) showing the eye’s position provided by the eye tracker (but not seen by the subject) and the progress of the line being drawn. Simultaneously, the combined eye tracker and stylus position parameters were recorded as digitized data for subsequent analysis. During the analysis stage, the video image could be examined frame by frame in conjunction with the corresponding eye and hand data supplied by the eye tracker and graphics tablet. A fixation was identified when the point of gaze remained continuously within a small area covered by 1o visual angle for a minimum of 60 ms (standard ASL algorithm). After a 9-point eye-tracker calibration, a test session started with a blank screen on which the subject was invited to try out the stylus pen. The principal instruction to ‘draw as accurately as possible’ was then given together with the explanation that the experimenters were essentially interested in the act of drawing (effort of precision) rather than in the aesthetical result of drawing (attractiveness of the finished picture). Subjects were asked to use lines only, not toning or shading. The experimenters also made clear that drawing could be interrupted at any time if subjects wanted to rest their hand. All participants performed the same set of tasks, in the same order. This involved performing a short practice trial, three drawing tasks, as described below, followed by a debriefing session. The test series started with a trial in which the subject had to copy a line drawing. In two cases where the experimenters felt that the instruction had not been fully understood by the subject, a second trial was performed and proved satisfactory. No time limits were imposed on the tests, and the drawings took between 32 and 186 seconds to complete. Having completed all tests, subjects were interviewed on questions regarding their previous drawing experience and any comments they might have about the tests. The Original Images Two series of tests with identical experimental setups were used in the analysis, but with different original images. In Series A, the copying original was a pen and ink sketch drawing of a face made up of about 30 separate line segments (Figure 1). The contouring original was a high-definition colour photograph of a frontal head lit from the back; this reduced the contrast of internal facial features while emphasizing the overall contour which subjects were instructed to draw (Figure 2). The graded zone original was a high-definition colour photograph of a head lit directionally from the left to produce a graded zone on the face separating light from shade which subjects were instructed to draw (Figure 3). THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   6     Figure 1. An example of the copying task performed by subject LN. The original is on the left, the picture drawn on the right. Numbered small circles indicate the sequence of fixations and the fixation durations shown for drawing the first hair strand marked a-b (left) and a1-b1 (right). Mean fixation durations for LN were 0.192s on the original and 0.414s on the picture. The dotted circle indicates 2 degrees of visual angle, and approximately 1.2 seconds duration for the fixation. In series B, a separate group of participants were tested using exactly the same experimental set up and procedure. This series provided us with the opportunity to validate the results found in series A. The original image for the copying tests in series B was a pen and ink sketch drawing of a standing nude by Gaudier-Brzeska as used in Tchalenko (2009a). The sketch, representing a slightly twisted upper torso seen from the back, one hand on hip and the other arm straight down, was made up of approximately the same number of segments as the face of series A. The contour and graded zone stimuli of series B were similar to those of series A, but used photographs of different persons at somewhat higher light/shade contrasts. 2˚ a b 2 1 3 6 7 4 5 10 9 11 8 12 1413 15 16 17 1b 1a THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   7     Figure 2. An example of the contouring task. The original is on the left, the picture drawn by subject LN, on the right. The sequence of fixations is shown as small circles for drawing segment a-b (left) as a1-b1 (right), drawn at the start of the test. Mean fixation durations for LN were 0.260s on the original and 0.317s on the picture. The dotted circle indicates 2 degrees of visual angle, and approximately 1.0 seconds duration for the fixation. The Subjects Participants for both test series A and B were first and second year students at colleges of the University of the Arts London. In series A, the 10 subjects (7 female) had an age range of 21 to 37 years (average 30 years). The results of two subjects had to be discarded, the first due to poor eye tracker calibration and the second due to squinting while drawing. Series B had an age range of 20 to 34 years (average 25 years). All participants gave written consent to the tests, which had the approval of the local ethical committee. In their interviews after tests, most subjects said that their drawing experience varied from very little to moderate. This included drawing experience not connected with observational drawing, such as graphic design or computer arts. Some had attended two-week life courses, which, however, emphasized self-expression rather than the learning of drawing skills. Initial clustering and statistical analysis of the subjects into two groups based on level experience revealed no major differences in any of the analysis carried out on the data. Thus, despite their disparity in past experience, we decided to treat all subjects as belonging to a same group characterized by little to moderate drawing experience across different areas of drawing including observational drawing. Definitions and Analysis Frame-by-frame analyses of the video record provided a direct means of studying fixation locations and timings relative to the lines being encoded and drawn. 2˚ a1 b1 b a THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   8     Gaze is the time during which vision is directed towards a specified region of a scene. A gaze starts when vision first enters the region and ends when it leaves the region. A gaze can include one or several consecutive fixations. Original gaze is a gaze directed towards the original and picture gaze is a gaze directed towards the picture. Gaze shift is the redirection of gaze from the original to the picture or vice-versa. Mean gaze duration is the sum of all gaze intervals divided by the number of intervals. Blind drawing is drawing during an original gaze. Note that when we use the term blind we do not exclude peripheral vision guidance. For analysis purposes, a vertical border mid-way between the original and picture was defined to separate the two regions of interest, the original and picture. It should be noted that gaze durations measured with this method include both fixation and interfixation eye movements. They are therefore slightly longer than conventional dwell durations calculated by considering only fixations. We elected to use this spatially defined measure of gaze durations because the ASL eye tracker had a sample rate of 50 Hz, insufficient to allow accurate measurement of the time course of these brief saccadic eye movements. The gaze ratio G is calculated as the original gaze duration divided by the corresponding picture gaze duration: G=to/tp. The start and end of each drawing epoch was recorded from the video record and the drawing durations deduced for periods when the gaze was on the original or on the picture. The drawing ratio D is calculated as the amount of time spent drawing during an original gaze divided by the amount of time spent drawing during a picture gaze: D=do/dp. The blind ratio B, calculated as B=do / (do + dp), is the amount of blind drawing as a proportion of all drawing time. Note that when D=G, do/dp= to/tp and hence do/to=dp/tp . This means that the proportion of time spent drawing when gaze is on the original is equal to the proportion of time drawing when gaze is on the picture. Results Spatial Pattern of Eye and Hand Positions: Test series A and B The results of subject LN are used to illustrate the different experiments in Series A. At the time of testing, LN was following a Master of Arts drawing course which did not include observational or life drawing. She did, however, have some experience in both these disciplines. Unless specifically mentioned, the eye and hand behaviour of the other subjects did not contradict LN’s results although it will be seen that performance levels could vary appreciably. In the copying task, LN reported understanding the instructions to mean “transcribe with your own hand, i.e. copy, the line on the screen”, and she tried to include all details, correct line lengths and positions - “everything on the screen”. For all participants, copying was achieved through a segmentation strategy subdividing the original line drawing into segments of one or a few simple lines of uniform curvature, as described in Tchalenko (2009a). In the copying task, subject LN started by drawing the hair strand ab shown on the left panel in Figure 1. Fixations 1-5 took place as she located the stylus’ starting point a1 (right panel) and this was followed by fixations 6-8 which demarcated the start and end positions of the segment about to be drawn. The hand started drawing “blind” from point a1 during original fixation 8, continuing during the saccade 8-9 and during picture fixations 9 and 10. Fixation 9 appeared to act as a target lock position as described in Tchalenko (2007), i.e. a THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   9     stable gaze point towards which the hand moved during drawing. Gaze then shifted back to the original at fixation 11, followed by another target lock, fixation 12 on the picture during the drawing of segment 9-12. A similar process was used with the next 2 target locking fixations 14 and 17 leading to the end of the line b1. The inferred subtasks for drawing the hair strand in the copying task therefore included: examining the strand’s starting point on the original (fixations 1-3), transferring this spatial information to the picture (4-5), finding the start and finish of the line’s principal section on the original (6-7), starting to draw blind (8), locating a target on the original (11), transferring gaze to this target locking position on the picture (12) and drawing towards this point. The cycle rhythm and gaze ratio regularity seen in this episode were also evident before and after the hair strand event, i.e. during rendering of the right eye’s pupil and during the exploration of the right forefront region (Figure 4). Such regularity of the gaze shift pattern while the hand engages in different subtasks suggests a leading role for the eye during this type of eye- hand interaction. After drawing the first hair strand, the gaze-shift rhythm slowed down slightly while drawing the next two hair strands. The contouring task produced a fixation pattern very similar to the copying task, for subject LN and the other participants, using single or multiple fixations along the line section of the original during which time the hand drew blind (Figure 2). On shifting gaze to the picture, fixations either landed in advance of the stylus, as target locking fixations toward which the hand would then draw, or on a point very near the stylus, remaining locked there while the hand drew through and beyond that point. This latter variant of target locking is referred to as position locking. It was noticed in copying and contouring that subjects who spent the most time drawing blind shifted gaze to the picture at the very last moment (when the hand had just about completed the segment). For the graded zone drawing task, LN’s fixations on the original were typically in the form of tightly packed sequences of 2 to 5 fixations each (Figure 3 left). The paths of these sequences crossed the zone’s borders from dark to light, sometimes also following for short lengths the general direction of the zone’s border. This dark to light direction coincided with the direction of the picture to original gaze shift. For example, sequence 3 started in the shade near the nose, crossed the zone under the eye and then followed it downward – a path exploring a region of about 3o diameter. During this time, the hand drew the short segment 3. Gaze then shifted to the picture with a single position locking fixation 4 well ahead of the line being drawn, while the hand continued drawing the line it had started blind. Many of the changes in the line’s direction were undertaken blind. With LN, and even more so with LL, blind drawing was noticeably more extensive during this task than during copying or contouring. The pattern of eye and hand positions observed in Series B was very similar to that seen in Series A. As before, fixations on the original during the encoding phase were accompanied by some blind drawing on the picture, and gaze shifts to the picture ended in target or position locking fixations relative to the drawing hand. The slight difference of original stimuli and the new group of subjects (see Method) did not seem to affect the overall pattern of eye-hand interactions. THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   10     Figure 3. An example of blind drawing in the graded zone drawing task. The original is on the left, the picture drawn by subject LN, on the right. Fixation locations are shown as small circles. Numbers 1 – 16 on the original (left) are fixation sequences, and on the picture they indicate the corresponding sections of the line (shown in black) being drawn blind. Mean fixation durations for LN were 0.388s on the original and 0.324s on the picture. The dotted circle indicates 2 degrees of visual angle. Figure 4. The time line for the copying test illustrated in Figure 1. Numbers indicate fixations as in Figure 1. Gaze shifts for which no drawing took place are shown fine grey, those with drawing, in thick black. The drawing event starting at time point 2s is the drawing of the right eye’s pupil, and the event at 15s is the drawing of the next adjacent hair strand. Eye data were sampled at 50 Hz. 1 2 3 4 5 2˚ 2 1 3 4 5 6 16 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 7 -10 -5 0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 ho riz on ta l e ye p os iti on c m seconds picture original 123 67 8 11 131516 4 5 9 10 12 14 17 THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   11     Eye-Hand Interaction Metrics Test series A. In all three types of drawing tasks, cycle rhythms and gaze ratios remained relatively unchanged over periods lasting 10 seconds or more and covering different subtask demands (Figure 4). The amount of time spent actively drawing was always less than the task duration, due to short pauses in the hand’s movement as can be seen in the case of subject LN (Figure 5). The flat steps in the graph of the cumulative line length show that the hand’s drawing action occasionally slowed down and stopped for intervals of about 0.5s during both original and picture gazes. The hand movement data, sampled at the video scan rate of 50 Hz, showed additional shorter non-drawing intervals throughout the tests. Table 1: Gaze, drawing and blind ratio statistics and cycle durations Test series A Copy Contour Graded zone Parameter Mean Stdv LN Mean Stdv LN Mean Stdv LN Gaze ratio G 0.798 0.266 0.672 1.248 0.935 1.071 1.707 0.811 2.252 Draw ratio D 0.823 0.267 0.560 1.216 1.003 0.928 1.852 0.867 1.987 Blind ratio B 0.433 0.050 0.361 0.498 0.151 0.476 0.619 0.177 0.665 Cycle C (s) 1.771 0.318 1.488 2.118 0.137 1.566 2.469 0.485 2.055 Test series B Gaze ratio G 1.027 0.365 1.421 0.773 1.923 1.402 Draw ratio D 1.126 0.527 1.663 1.094 2.093 1.631 Blind ratio B 0.503 0.115 0.570 0.148 0.619 0.129 Cycle C (s) 1.582 0.316 2.255 1.208 2.254 0.534 Group statistics for the Series A (8 subjects) and Series B test (20 subjects) are given for each of the three tasks, Copy, Contour, and Graded Zone. The column labelled LN is the data from one exemplar subject, LN, in series A. Cycle durations are measured in seconds (s); ratios are calculated from durations with gaze on the original versus the picture; see main text for parameter definitions. Mean = group average, Stdv = standard deviation of the group. Table 1 shows mean gaze ratios (G), drawing ratios (D), blind ratios (B) and cycle durations (C) calculated from measurements of gaze and active drawing periods. Results obtained with the exemplar subject LN are also shown for test series A. A notable feature of these tests was that, for a given subject and test, the gaze ratio G of original to picture gaze duration was strongly correlated (r2 = 0.956) to the drawing ratio D of original to picture drawing durations (Figure 6 top). The relationship between G and D across all three tasks was found by linear regression to be: THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   12     G = 0.95D + 0.103 (Eqn. 1) with 95% confidence intervals for the coefficient and constant terms spanning 1.0 (0.86:1.04) and 0.0 (-0.04:0.24), respectively. In other words, in this dataset, the relationship was not distinct from G=D. The mean gaze ratios increased from 0.80 (+/-0.09 SEM) to 1.25 (+/- 0.33) to 1.71 (+/- 0.29), for the copying, contouring and zone tasks, respectively, although the G and D values for one subject were identified as an outlier in the copying task (Figure 7), and for a different subject in the contouring task. Likewise, drawing ratios increased from 0.82 (+/- 0.08) to 1.22 (+/- 0.37) to 1.85 (+/- 0.30). Mean values of blind to total drawing proportion B were 43%, 50% and 62%, for copying, contour drawing, and zone drawing. The wide distribution of G and D values found in the contour task suggest that some subjects tackled it as a copying task, whereas others, as a graded zone task. Although for each task, ratios differed between subjects, a constant feature of these tests was that for all subjects the graded zone drawing task showed higher gaze and drawing ratios than copying task (Figure 6 bottom). These higher ratios were mainly due to gaze durations increasing on the original while remaining relatively unchanged on the picture. Test series B. The analysis described for series A was also carried out on the separate test series B made with 20 different subjects and similar stimuli (see Method). The mean gaze ratios for series B increased from 1.03 (+/-0.08 SEM) to 1.42 (+/- 0.12) to 1.92 (+/- 0.31), for the copying, contouring, and zone tasks, respectively, while drawing ratios increased from 1.13 (+/- 0.12) to 1.66 (+/- 0.24) to 2.09 (+/- 0.36), although again 2 subjects had unusually high G and D scores, and are identified as outliers in Figure 7. Mean values of blind to total drawing proportion B were respectively 50%, 57% and 62%. Eighteen out of the 20 subjects drew the graded zone drawing with higher ratios than when copying, the two remaining showing nearly equal values for both tasks (Figure 8 bottom). A strong positive correlation was again found between the gaze ratio G and drawing ratio D (Figure 8 top). The relationship between G and D for this group was found to be G = 0.76D + 0.23 (Eqn. 2), with 95% confidence intervals of 0.67:0.84 and 0.06:0.40, respectively, for the coefficient and constant terms. Thus both Equations 1 and 2 suggest that the values of G and D are approximately equal for each participant although they differ between participants and across trials. To test if this is true, we determined the value of (G/D)-1 for each task and participant, which should be zero if G=D. This measure is amenable to direct comparison across the full set of data, from all three tasks and both series using a 2-way mixed model analysis of variance (ANOVA) with one main between-subject factor of series (A and B) and one within- subjects factor of task (Copy, Contour, and Graded Zone). The test revealed that the value of (G/D)-1 was not significantly different from zero in any of the 6 data sets, and that there were no significant differences in this measure between tasks (F(2,52)=1.00, p=0.37, eta- squared=0.037) or between the two series (F(1,26)=0.61, p=0.442, eta-squared=0.023). Thus, the approximation G=D appears to hold across tasks and participant groups. However, additional data sets will be required to resolve if the relationship does differ systematically between participants, for example on the basis of their life drawing experience. THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   13     Figure 5. The time line for the graded zone test illustrated in Figure 3. Horizontal eye position (grey line, left ordinate axis), and line length (black line, right ordinate axis) were each sampled at 50 Hz. Time is in seconds from an arbitrary start time determined by the computer clock. The gaze shifts repeatedly from the original picture (negative horizontal position values) to the picture (positive values). Drawing takes place during much of the period, with brief pauses indicated by the horizontal segments in the diagonal line – the cumulative length of the line being drawn by the participant. Superimposed numbers 1 to 15 at the bottom of the panel indicate gaze periods on the original, corresponding to sequences shown on Figure 3. Figure 6. Drawing metrics from test series A. Top: comparing gaze ratios, drawing ratios and blind ratios for copying (squares), contouring (triangles) and graded zone drawing tasks (diamonds). Each data point is from one subject. Bottom: comparing drawing ratio values in the copying and graded zone tests for all 8 participants, identified by their initials. 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 -20 -15 -10 -5 0 5 10 15 0 5 10 15 20 25 ho riz on ta l e ye p os iti on c m seconds cu m ul at iv e lin e le ng th c m original picture 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 2222222222222222 00 1 2 3 4 0 1 2 3 4 B lin d ra tio B D ra w in g ra tio D Gaze ratio G copy graded zone 0 1 2 3 4 AA EW SW LN LB TR D ra w in g ra tio D KB LL LN LN LN 0.50 0.67 0.75 0.80 THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   14     Figure 7. Summary statistics for the gaze and drawing ratios across the 3 tasks and both series of experiments. Each bar plot shows the mean and inter-quartile range for the group, while the vertical lines indicate the range of the data, and dots indicate the data points for outlying subjects, identified as >2.3 SD away from the group mean. Black bar plots are for gaze ratio data, grey bars are for drawing ratio data. Figure 8. Test series B. Top: comparing gaze ratios, drawing ratios and blind ratios for copying (squares), contouring (triangles) and graded zone drawing (diamonds). Larger open circles are the corresponding results for the same three tasks from test series A, for comparison (see Figure 6, top). Bottom: comparing drawing ratio values in copying and graded zone tests for all 20 participants, identified by their initials. 1 0 0.88 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 B lin d ra tio B D ra w in g ra tio D Gaze ratio G copy 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 GC SS NF VS MB KM MR MN CA MH LS ZG JB IF JBG JC DG VSC LSC JCK D ra w in g ra tio D 0.86 0.83 0.80 0.75 0.67 0.5 graded zone THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   15     Additional mixed model ANOVAs confirmed that when compared across series and tasks, the differences in both the G and D ratios were highly significant between the three tasks. For the G-ratio: F(1.6,42.0)=14.6, p<0.001, eta-squared=0.36, with degrees of freedom adjusted for non-sphericity with the Greenhouse-Geisser method; and for the D-ratio: F(2,52)=9.96, p<0.001, eta-squared=0.28). However, these ratios were not significantly affected by the series: the main factor of series A vs B was not significant for each data set (for G-ratio: F(1,26)=0.19, p=0.67, eta-squared=0.007; and for D-ratio: F(1,26)=0.84, p=0.37, eta- squared=0.03). Furthermore, the interactions between series and task were also not significant (for G-ratio: F(1.6,42.0)=0.11, p=0.76, eta-squared=0.008; and for D-ratio: F(2,52)=0.06, p=0.95, eta-squared=0.002). Finally, since these ANOVA tests failed to support a difference between Series A and B, we combined the data across the two groups, ignoring which series the data were from. Using pair-wise t-tests, the differences between the values of G across the three tasks were all statistically significant; the same was true for values of D (hence for both sets of 3 paired t- tests, all t>2.2, and all p<0.034). Thus, we can confidently say that both G and D were smaller in the copying task than in the contouring task, and smaller in the contouring task than in the zone task. Altogether, fundamental eye-hand drawing patterns and timing characteristics found in test series A were reproduced with little change in series B. Discussion The Gaze-Shift Strategy in Drawing Most line drawing from life includes three main subtasks: copying or reproducing a pre- existing well-defined line, contouring or delineating the boundary of a three-dimensional entity, and rendering a graded zone or a transition between light and shade with a discrete line. By comparing eye and hand patterns in these three tasks, we observed the following typical characteristics. First, visual information appeared to be captured from the original image in a series of fixations that helped define what would be drawn as a distinct line segment. Each line segment was therefore encoded with the help of one or several fixations on the original stimulus. Next, the hand often started drawing the segment on the picture while the eye was still centred on the original. The “blind” drawing, in which the hand begins to move while the gaze remains on the original, implies a direct visuomotor transformation of the visual representation of the chosen detail into the corresponding drawing action, rather than a visual encoding into memory, and subsequent recall to guide the hand action, a point we discuss later on. Some time into the drawing of a segment, the gaze would typically shift to the picture to make a target- or position-locking fixation towards which the line would be drawn, and the segment would be completed with the gaze held in this fixed position. The gaze-locking aspect of drawing is analogous to gaze-locking reported in object manipulation tasks, as will be further discussed below. Finally, at about the time the hand finished drawing the segment, the gaze would shift back to the original. This cycle would then be repeated for new segments. We believe that these anecdotal observations, based on frame by frame review of the eye and hand movements of two groups of participants performing copying, contour drawing, and zone drawing with different stimulus sets, describe the common features of much of the eye- hand interactions that take place during observational drawing. They were supported by detailed quantification of three indices – the gaze shift cycle duration, the G-ratio, defining THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   16     the proportion of time spent with gaze on the original compared to the picture, and the D- ratio, the proportion of time spent drawing while the gaze was on the original vs the picture. At one extreme, one might hypothesize that gaze on the original encodes a segment of the image into visual memory, gaze is then transferred to the picture and the drawing is performed. In this case, the G-ratio would reflect the relative viewing vs drawing periods, and might be approximately 0.5, while the D-ratio would be zero. At the other extreme, one might hypothesize that gaze would remain largely on the original, and that almost all drawing was performed blind. In this case, both the G-ratio and the D-ratio would be very high (near infinite), and the gaze cycles long. In fact, our analysis shows that G and D varied between about 0.5 and 4 (Figures 6 and 8), and were very highly correlated across tasks for each participant. This favours the second scenario, where significant portions of the drawing are achieved blind, while the eye is on the original. The duration of “blind” drawing was lowest in the copying task and greatest in the graded zone task. Hence, across both participant groups, the mean range of gaze ratio extended from G = 0.80 for the copy task to G = 1.92 for the zone drawing task. For the drawing ratio, the means were D = 0.82 and D = 2.09, respectively. Furthermore, to a first approximation, G=D, indicating that the proportion of time drawing when the gaze was on the picture did not change significantly from when gaze was on the original. Expressed in terms of the mean blind ratio B, this meant that between 43% and 62% of drawing time was taken up by blind drawing. This observation is important: subjects, although free to combine looking and drawing periods in any way they wanted, were using a strategy of drawing for a significant proportion of the time while looking at the original stimulus. A likely explanation for the differences in G and D across tasks would be that copying involved essentially the visual capture of an existing line, whereas contouring required, in addition, the resolution of a volume’s edge into a discrete line. This boundary could be constituted of subtle detail, as for example, with the upper head and hair limit, where the subject needed to decide what level of detail of the complex edge to take into account, a decision process that appears to require more time with the gaze on the original. The decisions are probably even less clear in graded zone drawing where the transition between light and shade was gradual, and the resultant boundary line contained a number of complex convolutions. We suggest therefore that, under the test conditions used in the present investigation, our results show that the amount of blind drawing reflected task difficulty: the more difficult the task of determining the line segment to be drawn, the greater the amount of time required for visuomotor encoding during gazes on the original. Since drawing occurred over the majority of each trial, and drawing rates were largely unaffected by gaze direction, the increase in G ratio as the participants look for a greater proportion of time at the original leads to a greater amount of blind drawing achieved. Our observation that subjects maintained gaze on the original while beginning drawing suggests that during these blind episodes, they were working directly from the original rather than from an image of the original held in working memory. A similar preference for referring to the original source of visual information rather than to a memory image of that source has been observed in block-moving tasks. Ballard, Hayhoe, and Pelz (1995) devised a copying task in which a set of virtual blocks (images on a computer display) of different colours had to be assembled into a pattern that duplicated that of a model. The scan paths of the subjects imply that they rely on visual or spatial memory less than might be supposed, preferring instead the strategy of looking back toward the model to check the colour and the location of each block added to their construction. The idea of referring to the original, external object, rather than to memory was also suggested by O’Regan (1992) who argued THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   17     that the outside world may be considered as a kind of external memory store which can be accessed instantaneously by casting one's eyes to locations relevant to the task at hand. In other words, the participants are willing to trade off the cost of making additional saccades between the original and the model, in order to gain the most recent visual input. Our tests were performed with original and picture placed side-by-side on a same vertical plane and at an average angular distance of 25o from each other. It is likely that some peripheral visual information was available even with this angular separation between original and picture, so we do not imply that “blind” drawing was strictly without any visual control. At this stage, we do not known whether drawing at other angular distances would also follow the behaviour we report here. Blind drawing has been previously reported at both smaller and greater separations, for example in copying tests where original and picture were on a same plane and separated by about 15o (Tchalenko & Miall, 2009), and in copying and drawing tests where they were on different planes separated by about 50o (Tchalenko, 2009a, 2009b). However, the precise rates of drawing were not measured in any of those studies, with the consequence that drawing ratios are not available. A companion study (Tchalenko & Miall, in preparation) has examined the case of line copying with separations increasing from 2o to 30o, and included completely blind conditions where a divider between original and picture precluded all peripheral vision. Blind drawing was observed under those conditions too, and we suggest that considerable drawing can be achieved with complete absence of vision of the hand. However, under more natural drawing conditions, including the arrangement we used here with the original and paper side-by-side, there is a complex mix of actions within each gaze shift cycle. These include the visual fixations on both the original and on the paper that seem associated with the selection of the segment to be drawn and its positioning on the paper; the blind drawing periods in which at best only peripheral vision is used and the line segment is drawn, we suggest, through a direct visual-to-motor transformation; target locked drawing in which the gaze position acts as a spatial reference to which the line is drawn; and the final fixations on the paper to assess the drawn line. What would be the advantage of working directly from the original rather than from a memory image? Cohen and Bennett (1997) demonstrated that drawing errors have their foundation in the stage referred to here as the original gaze. In a further study of portrait drawing, Cohen (2005) observed that a high frequency of gaze shifts (drawing with frequent reference to the original) was associated with more accuracy. He argued that this is because the high rate of original gazes replaces drawing from an image held in memory with drawing directly from the perceived stimulus. This, in turn, avoids ineffective and distorting strategies such as, for example, assimilating the to-be-drawn stimulus with prior knowledge of a prototype. Although Cohen’s task of rendering a realistic, recognizable likeness of a face is different to ours, his argument suggesting the negative influence of working memory on accuracy could equally apply to the present investigation. Prior knowledge of a prototype was also considered by Glazek (2012) who observed that expert artists were less affected than novices by prototype images held in memory. The experts used shorter encoding and longer drawing durations, and produced more accurate drawings. Where blind drawing is used the drawn line may be less influenced by prior knowledge of a prototype, because subjects do not see what is being drawn, that is, they cannot visually guide the hand to produce the preconceived prototypic representation. In this context, the blind drawing strategy suggested by our tests could be seen as a method for overcoming top-down conceptual influences frequently mentioned in the literature on cognitive drawing skills (Cohen, 2005; Cohen & Bennett, 1997; Kozbelt & Seeley, 2007; Lee, 1989; Seeley & Kozbelt, 2008; Thouless, 1932). This is well captured in remarks by Auguste Rodin in 1906 and quoted by his secretary A.M. Ludovici: THE  GAZE-­‐SHIFT  STRATEGY  IN  DRAWING   18     Not once while describing the contour of that form did I shift my eyes from the model. (…) Thus not a thought about the technical problem of representing it on the paper was allowed to arrest the flow of sensations from my eyes to my hand. Had I looked at my hand this flow would have ceased. (Ludovici, 1926, p 139) In summary, our tests have shown that the relative proportion of blind to sighted drawing varied between subjects, and across the three tasks. The ratios D and G were strongly correlated across both groups of participants studied and this further suggests that the amount of blind drawing is governed mainly by the proportion of time spent in gazes on the original. It is not known at this stage whether at the lower limit, where little or no blind drawing takes place, the same gaze-shift strategy still applies, or whether a separate strategy of encoding and retrieving from visual short term memory takes over. It may also be possible that the style of drawing affects these strategies. A memory strategy including minimal blind drawing and allowing for a top-down mediation of a line’s appearance during drawing may be better adapted to fine detailed stimuli such as formal portraits or landscapes where precision and control of detail are paramount. In contrast, if immediacy and spontaneity are important, as for example in rapid sketching, preliminary outlining of a life drawing, or capturing a subject in motion, the artist may opt for a strategy containing significant blind drawing episodes, and a direct visuomotor transformation of the scene into the hand actions. Further quantified data on rates of drawing would be necessary to answer such questions. References Ballard, D.H., Hayhoe, M.M., & Pelz, J.B. (1995). Memory representations in natural tasks. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 7, 66-80. Cohen, D.J. (2005). Look little, look often: The influence of gaze frequency on drawing accuracy. Perception and psychophysics, 67, 997-1009. Cohen, D.J., & Bennett, S. (1997). Why can't most people draw what they see? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 23(3), 609-621. Glazek, K. (2012). Visual and motor processing in visual artists: Implications for cognitive and neural mechanisms. Psychology of Aesthetics , Creativity, and the Arts, 6, 155- 167. Konecni, V.J. (1991). An experimental study of the creative process. Leonardo, 24, 325-328. Kozbelt, A., & Seeley, W.P. (2007). Integrating art historical, psychological, and neuroscientific explanations of artists’ advantages in drawing and perception. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 1, 80-90. Land, M.F. (2006). Eye movements and the control of actions in everyday life. Progress in Retinal and Eye Research, 25, 296-324. Lee, M. (1989). When is an object not an object? The effect of “meaning” upon the copying of line drawings. British Journal of Psychology, 80,15–37. Ludovici, A.M. (1926). Personal Reminiscences of Auguste Rodin. 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Steinman, R.M. (2003). Gaze control under natural conditions. In: Chalupa, L.M., & Werner, J.S. (Eds.) The Visual Neurosciences (pp. 1339-1356). Cambridge, USA: MIT Press. Sylvester, D. (1995). Looking at Giacometti. London, U.K.: Pimlico. Tchalenko, J. (2007). Eye movements in drawing simple lines. Perception, 36, 1152-1167. Tchalenko, J. (2009a). Segmentation and accuracy in copying and drawing: Experts and beginners. Vision Research, 49, 791-800. Tchalenko, J. (2009b). Henri Matisse drawing: An eye-hand interaction study based on archival film. Leonardo, 42, 433-438. Tchalenko, J., Dempere-Marco L., Hu X.P., & Yang, G.Z. (2003). Eye movement and voluntary control in portrait drawing. In: Hyona, J., Radach, R., & Deubel, H. (Eds.) The Mind’s Eye: Cognitive and Applied Aspects of Eye Movement Research (pp. 705- 727). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier Science BV. Tchalenko, J., & Miall, R.C. (2009). Eye hand strategies in copying complex lines. Cortex, 45, 368-376. 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British Journal of Psychology, 21, 339–359. work_ha6pihe6zvaojke4u7uhjsdlde ---- A quantitative approach to painting styles Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Physica A journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/physa A quantitative approach to painting styles Vilson Vieira∗, Renato Fabbri, David Sbrissa, Luciano da Fontoura Costa, Gonzalo Travieso Instituto de Física de São Carlos, Universidade de São Paulo (IFSC/USP), Brazil h i g h l i g h t s • Applied statistical mechanics methods to the analysis of painting styles. • Philosophical concepts like dialectics were modeled as quantitative metrics. • Wider dispersion of characteristics for Modern Art while superposition for Baroque. • Confirms art history: Moderns are independent in style while Baroques share techniques. • Painting shows increasing innovation. High opposition in Baroque–Modern transition. a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 19 May 2014 Received in revised form 31 July 2014 Available online 20 September 2014 Keywords: Pattern recognition Arts Painting Feature extraction Creativity a b s t r a c t This research extends a method previously applied to music and philosophy (Vilson Vieira et al., 2012), representing the evolution of art as a time-series where relations like dialectics are measured quantitatively. For that, a corpus of paintings of 12 well-known artists from baroque and modern art is analyzed. A set of 99 features is extracted and the features which most contributed to the classification of painters are selected. The projection space obtained provides the basis to the analysis of measurements. These quantitative measures underlie revealing observations about the evolution of painting styles, specially when compared with other humanity fields already analyzed: while music evolved along a master–apprentice tradition (high dialectics) and philosophy by opposition, painting presents another pattern: constant increasing skewness, low opposition between members of the same movement and opposition peaks in the transition between movements. Differences between baroque and modern movements are also observed in the projected ‘‘painting space’’: while baroque paintings are presented as an overlapped cluster, the modern paintings present minor overlapping and are disposed more widely in the projection than the baroque counterparts. This finding suggests that baroque painters shared aesthetics while modern painters tend to ‘‘break rules’’ and develop their own style. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Painting classification is a common field of interest for applications such as painter identification – e.g. assessing the authenticity of a given art work – style classification, paintings database search and more recently, automatic aesthetic judgment in computational creativity applications. Determining the best features for painting style characterization is a complex task on its own. Many studies [1–4] applied image processing to feature extraction for painter and art movements ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +55 016981087007. E-mail addresses: vilson@void.cc (V. Vieira), fabbri@usp.br (R. Fabbri), davidsbrissa@hotmail.com (D. Sbrissa), ldfcosta@gmail.com (L. da Fontoura Costa), gonzalo@ifsc.usp.br (G. Travieso). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2014.09.038 0378-4371/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2014.09.038 http://www.elsevier.com/locate/physa http://www.elsevier.com/locate/physa http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1016/j.physa.2014.09.038&domain=pdf mailto:vilson@void.cc mailto:fabbri@usp.br mailto:davidsbrissa@hotmail.com mailto:ldfcosta@gmail.com mailto:gonzalo@ifsc.usp.br http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2014.09.038 V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 111 identification. Manovich [5–7] uses features like entropy, brightness and saturation to map paintings and general images into a 2-dimensional space and, in this way, to visualize the difference between painters. There are also many related works dealing on feature selection for painting classification. Penousal et al. [8] use features based on aesthetic criteria estimated by image complexity while Zujovic et al. [9] evaluate a large set of features that most contribute to classification. This study also analyzes a set of features which most contribute to the classification of paintings. Although, in contrast with previous works, it goes forward: the historic evolution of painting styles is analyzed by means of geometric measures in the feature space. Those measures are based on key concepts from Philosophy: opposition, skewness and dialectics. The dialectics, for instance, is defined by Hegel [10] as a method of argument where a synthesis solves the tension between two opposing ideas: thesis and antithesis. Those concepts are originally qualitative. In this study, thesis, antithesis and synthesis are defined as states in a time-series. The dialectics is then calculated as a quantitative measure: it is defined as the inverse distance between the synthesis state and the perpendicular bisector between thesis and antithesis states. The lower the distance, the greater the dialectics, because the synthesis state is near the perpendicular bisector that models the ideal synthesis. This quantitative approach is not meant to surpass the qualitative approach but to contribute in the understanding of human history. To create the feature space, a set of 99 features is extracted from 240 images of 12 well-known painters. The first six painters of this group represent the baroque movement while the remaining six represent the modern art period. A feature selection process yields the pair of features which most contributed for the classification. Similar results using LDA (Linear Discriminant Analysis) are obtained, which reinforce the feature selection method. After feature selection, a centroid for each group of paintings is calculated which defines a prototype: a representative work-piece for the respective cluster. The set of all prototypes following a chronological order defines a time-series where the main purpose of this study is performed: the quantitative analysis of the historical evolution of art movements. Extending a method already applied to music and philosophy, [11] opposition, skewness and dialectics measurements are taken. These concepts are central in philosophy – e.g. philosophers from antiquity like Aristotle and Plato developed their ideas using the dialectics method while it is also found in modern works like Hegelian and Marxist dialectics – and humanistic fields, however lack studies from a quantitative perspective [10]. Represented as geometric measures, these concepts reveal interesting results and patterns. Modern paintings groups show minor superposition when compared with baroque counterparts suggesting the independence in style found historically in modernists and strong influence of shared painting techniques found in baroque painters. Dialectics and opposition values presented a peak in the transition between baroque and modern periods – as expected considering history of art – with decreasing values in the beginning of each period. Skewness index is presented with oscillating but increasing values during all the time-series, suggesting a constant innovation through art movements. These results present an interesting counterpart with previous results in philosophy – where opposition is strong in almost entire time-series – and in music—where the dialectics is remarkable [11]. The study starts describing the corpus of paintings used and a review of both aesthetic and historic facts regarding baroque and modern movements (Section 2). The image processing steps used to extract features from these paintings are presented followed by the feature selection. The results are then discussed in Section 3 with basis on geometric measurements in the projected feature space—considering the most clustered projection and LDA components. 2. Modeling painting movements 2.1. Painting corpus A group of 12 well-known painters is selected to represent artistic styles or movements from baroque to modernism. Six painters are chosen to represent each of these movements. The group is presented in Table 1 together with their more representative style, in chronological order. It is known that painters like Picasso covered more than one style during his life. For example, only the Cubist style is considered for Picasso, even though the artist developed other styles during his career. For each painter, 20 raw images are considered from the database of public images organized by Wikipedia. Examples of selected paintings titles and their respective creation years are listed in Table 2 and all the paintings are listed in Table B.1 in Appendix B.1 It is interesting to review some historical and aesthetic characteristics from baroque and modern movements before entering into the quantitative analysis in Section 3 where those hypotheses are further discussed. Baroque is marked by tradition, a desire to portray the truth (found in Caravaggio, Frans Hals and Velázquez), the beauty (Poussin, Vermeer), the nature and the sacred (Caravaggio, Rembrandt). A remarkable use of light contrast (as in the ‘‘chiaroscuro’’ technique mastered by Caravaggio), disregarding simple equilibrium in composition and preference for complex oppositions, both compound aesthetic characteristics which baroque artists used to represent their ideas. The transmission of those techniques from one painter to another is common in baroque. Modernists, on the other hand, did not follow ‘‘rules’’. Each modern painter employed or created new ways to represent ideas. As noted by Gombrich: ‘‘[they] craved for an art that does not consist of tricks that could be learned, for a style that is not a mere style, but something strong and powerful like the human 1 The source code together with all the 240 raw images are available online at http://github.com/automata/ana-pintores. http://github.com/automata/ana-pintores 112 V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 Table 1 Painters ordered chronologically with the artistic style they represent. Artists Remarkable styles/movements Caravaggio Baroque, Renaissance Frans Hals Baroque, Dutch Golden Age Nicolas Poussin Baroque, Classicism Diego Velázquez Baroque Rembrandt Baroque, Dutch Golden Age, Realism Johannes Vermeer Baroque, Dutch Golden Age Vincent van Gogh Post-Impressionism Wassily Kandinsky Expressionism, Abstract art Henri Matisse Modernism, Impressionism Pablo Picasso Cubism Joan Miró Surrealism, Dada Jackson Pollock Abstract expressionism passion’’ [12]. van Gogh pursued this artistic trend in his intense use of colors and the caricature aspect of his paintings. Paul Gauguin searched for ‘‘primitive’’ in his paintings. Others, like Seurat, applied physical properties of the chromatic vision and started painting the nature like a collection of color points, and ended creating the pointillism. Modernists created a new style for each of their experiments using their own techniques to represent a nature outside the domains already covered by their predecessors. 2.2. Image processing All 240 images are resized to 800×800 pixels and cropped to consider a region positioned in the same coordinates and with same aspect for all original paintings. Although details are lost from the original image, windowing is necessary as the paintings have varying sizes and aspect ratios (for instance, Pollock has paintings with larger width than height when compared with Caravaggio or van Gogh) and some of the image measurements are size dependent. After windowing, the images are pre-processed by applying histogram equalization and median filtering with a 3-size window. Feature extraction algorithms are applied to colored, gray-scale or binary versions of images as necessary (e.g. convex-hull used a binary image, whereas Haralick texture used the gray-scale image and SLIC segmentation analysis was applied to color images). Curvature measurements are extracted from segments of paintings identified by the SLIC segmentation method [13] as presented in Fig. 2. The whole process is represented schematically in Fig. 1 and covers all the steps from image processing through measurements, discussed in the following sections. 2.3. Extracted features To create a painting space a number of distinct features extracted by computational methods from raw images of the paintings are considered. The features are related with aesthetic characteristics and aim to quantify properties well-known by art critics. All the features are summarized in Table 3 and detailed, grouped in classes, in the following list. Shape features: after image segmentation, a number of shape descriptors are calculated for each segment, represented as a binary matrix. Perimeter is measured as pixel-length of the segment contour. Area is estimated by counting the number of pixels representing the segment. A convex-hull of the segment is used to calculate the convex area and its ratio to the original segment area. The number of constituent segments for each painting is also considered as a descriptor. Circularity reveals how much a shape remembers a circle and is obtained by the ratio between perimeter and area of the segment. Texture and complexity features: to estimate image complexity, a number of entropy measures of its energy (squared FFT coefficients) are computed—listed in the first quarter of Table 3. Together with entropy, a more specific family of measurements is considered for texture characterization: the 14 Haralick texture features [14] are calculated for this purpose. Curvature: this descriptor has an interesting biological motivation related to the human visual system—e.g. object recognition is related to the identification of corners and high curvature points [15]. These points have more information about object shape than straight lines or smooth curves. In this sense, curvature is well suited for the characterization of the considered paintings. Curvature k(t) of a parametric curve c(t) = (x(t), y(t)) is defined as: k(t) = ẋ(t)ÿ(t) − ẏ(t)ẍ(t) (ẋ(t)2 + ẏ(t)2) 3 2 (1) t being the arc-length parameter and ẋ(t), ẏ(t), ẍ(t) and ÿ(t) are respectively the first and second order derivatives of x(t) and y(t). These derivatives are obtained through Fourier transform and convolution theorem: ẋ =ℑ−1(2πiωX(ω)) (2) ẏ =ℑ−1(2πiωY (ω)) (3) V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 113 Table 2 Some of the 240 selected paintings and their respective authors and year of creation. All the paintings are listed in Appendix B in Table B.1. Painter Painting title Year Caravaggio Musicians 1595 Judith Beheading Holofernes 1598 David with the Head of Goliath 1610 Frans Hals Portrait of an unknown woman 1618/20 Portrait of Paulus van Beresteyn 1620s Portrait of Stephanus Geeraerdts 1648/50 Nicolas Poussin Venus and Adonis 1624 Cephalus and Aurora 1627 Acis and Galatea 1629 Diego Velázquez Three musicians 1617/18 The Lunch 1618 La mulatto 1620 Rembrandt The Spectacles-pedlar (Sight) 1624/25 The Three Singers (Hearing) 1624/25 Balaam and the Ass 1626 Johannes Vermeer The Milkmaid 1658 The Astronomer 1668 Girl with a Pearl Earring 1665 Vincent van Gogh Starry Night Over the Rhone 1888 The Starry Night 1889 Self-Portrait with Straw Hat 1887/88 Wassily Kandinsky On White II 1923 Composition X 1939 Points 1920 Henri Matisse Self-Portrait in a Striped T-shirt 1906 Portrait of Madame Matisse 1905 The Dance (first version) 1909 Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907 Guernica 1937 Dora Maar au Chat 1941 Joan Miró The Farm 1921/22 The Tilled Field 1923/24 Bleu II 1961 Jackson Pollock No. 5 1948 Autumn Rhythm 1950 Blue Poles 1952 ẍ =ℑ−1(−(2π ω)2X(ω)) (4) ÿ =ℑ−1(−(2π ω)2Y (ω)) (5) where ℑ−1 is the inverse Fourier transform, X and Y are the Fourier transform of x and y respectively, ω is the angular frequency and i is the imaginary unit (see Fig. 2). The calculation of the derivatives (ẋ(t), ẏ(t)) and (ẍ(t), ÿ(t)) by a numerical method (i.e. Fourier transform) is sensitive to high frequency noise [15]. A low-pass filter can be used to compensate this effect. A Gaussian filter is then applied to the signal and defined as g(t) = 1 2π σ 2 exp  − t2 2σ 2  (6) and its Fourier transform is given by G(ω) = exp  −(2π )2ω2 (2/σ )2  . (7) Using the convolution theorem it is possible to apply the Gaussian filter g(t) to the signal: ˆ̇x(t) = ẋ∗g(t) =ℑ−1  Ẋ(ω)G(ω)  (8) ˆ̇y(t) = ẏ∗g(t) =ℑ−1  Ẏ (ω)G(ω)  (9) ˆ̈x(t) = ẍ∗g(t) =ℑ−1  Ẍ(ω)G(ω)  (10) 114 V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 Fig. 1. A summary of all steps from image processing through feature extraction through time-series and measurements calculation (skewness, opposition and dialectics). ˆ̈y(t) = ÿ∗g(t) =ℑ−1  Ÿ (ω)G(ω)  (11) where∗ represents the convolution operation, obtaining the first and second order multi-scale derivatives (ˆ̇x(t), ˆ̇y(t)) and (ˆ̈x(t), ˆ̈y(t)) for both x(t) and y(t). These are the derivatives used to calculate curvature k(t) (Eq. (1)) free from high frequency noise. The corresponding features are calculated from the curvature k(t): the mean and standard deviation of data, the number of peaks and the distance (geometric and in pixels) between peaks. It is important to note that a peak is defined as a high curvature point. A point a is considered a peak if its curvature k(a) satisfies the following criteria: k(a) > k(a−1) (12) k(a) > k(a+1) (13) k(a) > τ (14) τ being the corresponding threshold defined as median (k) γ (15) where γ is a factor obtained empirically as values which reveal the desired level of curvature details. 2.4. Measurements Nf features define an Nf -dimensional space, also called painting space where the following measurements are calculated [11]. For simplification, a prototype p⃗i is defined for each class Ci of all the Ni feature vectors f⃗j. Each prototype summarizes a painting class, being its centroid, calculated in the projected space as: p⃗i = 1 Ni Ni j=1 f⃗j. (16) V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 115 Fig. 2. (a) The original paintings image. (b) A segmented region. (c) The extracted curvature of segment. (d) The parametric curve k(t) with peaks given by a particular threshold. A sequence S of p⃗i states ordered chronologically defines a time-series. The average state at time i of states p⃗1 through p⃗i is defined as: a⃗i = 1 i i j=1 p⃗j. (17) The opposite state defines an opposition measure from p⃗i as r⃗i = p⃗i +2(a⃗i − p⃗i) (18) and in this way an opposition vector can be defined: D⃗i = r⃗i − p⃗i. (19) Knowing that any displacement from one state p⃗i to another state p⃗j is defined as M⃗i,j = p⃗j − p⃗i (20) it is possible to define an opposition index to quantify how much a prototype p⃗j opposes p⃗i (a displacement in direction of r⃗i) or emphasizes p⃗i (a displacement in−r⃗i direction): Wi,j =  M⃗i,j, D⃗i  ∥D⃗i∥2 . (21) However, the movements in such painting space are not restricted to confirmation or refutation of ‘‘ideas’’. Alternative ideas can exist out of this dualistic displacement. When an idea shows an alternative movement – besides the opposition 116 V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 Table 3 Extracted features. Number of features Features 4 Energy µ of image rows 4 Energy σ of image rows 4 Energy µ of image columns 4 Energy σ of image rows 4 Energy centroids of image rows 4 Energy centroids of image columns 4 Energy µ of rows and columns 4 Energy σ of rows and columns 4 Angular second moment 4 Contrast 4 Correlation 4 Sum of squares: variance 4 Inverse difference moment 4 Sum average 4 Sum variance 4 Sum entropy 4 Entropy 4 Difference average 4 Difference entropy 4 Correlation coeff. 1 4 Correlation coeff. 2 4 Max. correlation coeff. 2 µ of distance between curvature peaks 2 σ of distance between curvature peaks 1 µ of number of curvature peaks 1 µ of segments perimeter 1 µ of segments area 1 µ of circularity (Per.2/Area) 1 µ of number of segments 1 µ of convex-hull area 1 µ of convex-hull and original areas ratio 99 Total of extracted features movement – that explores a new region of the painting space, it is said the idea is an innovation. This is modeled as a skewness index which quantifies how much a prototype p⃗j is innovative when compared with p⃗i: si,j =  |p⃗i − p⃗j|2|a⃗i − p⃗i|2 −[(p⃗i − p⃗j)(a⃗i − p⃗i)]2 |a⃗i − p⃗i|2 . (22) Another measure arises when considering three consecutive states at times i, j and k. p⃗i being the thesis, p⃗j the antithesis and p⃗k the synthesis, a counter-dialectics index can be defined as being di→k = p⃗j − p⃗i, p⃗k + 12 p⃗i − p⃗j, p⃗i + p⃗j |p⃗j − p⃗i| (23) or, the distance between p⃗k and the perpendicular bisector (or middle-hyperplane for Nf -dimensional spaces) between p⃗i and p⃗j. In other words, a p⃗k state with higher di→k is far from the synthesis (low dialectics) and vice-versa. 2.5. Feature selection To select the most relevant features a dispersion measure of the clusters is applied using scatter matrices [15]. For all the Np paintings, considering all possible combinations of feature pairs FNp,a and FNp,b, the Sb (between class) and Sw (within class) scatter matrices are calculated with K = 12 classes, one class Ci for each painter: Sw = K i=1 Si (24) Sb = K i=1 Ni(µ⃗i − M⃗)(µ⃗i − M⃗) T (25) with Ni the number of paintings in class Ci and the scatter matrix for class Ci defined as Si =  i∈Ci (f⃗i − µ⃗i)(f⃗i − µ⃗i) T (26) V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 117 Table 4 Feature pairs FNp,a and FNp,b ordered by α. Pairs with higher α present better dispersion and clustering. The best feature pairs µ of curvature peaks and µ of number of segments are selected for analysis and metrics calculation. Pair nr. Feature a Feature b α 1 µ of curvature peaks µ of number of seg. 42.445 2 µ of number of seg. µ of convex-hull area 37.406 3 µ of segments perimeter µ of number of seg. 36.703 4 µ of segments area µ of number of seg. 36.214 5 µ of number of segments µ convex/original 34.885 6 µ of circularity (Per.2/Area) µ of number of seg. 33.540 7 Energy µ of image rows (green) µ of number of seg. 32.954 8 Energy µ of rows and columns (green) µ of number of seg. 32.954 9 Energy σ of image rows (green) µ of number of seg. 32.932 10 Energy σ of rows and columns (green) µ of number of seg. 32.906 11 µ of local entropy (5-size window) µ of number of seg. 32.898 12 Entropy (Haralick adj. 4) µ of number of seg. 32.898 13 Entropy (Haralick adj. 3) µ of number of seg. 32.883 14 Entropy (Haralick adj. 1) µ of number of seg. 32.874 15 Entropy (Haralick adj. 2) µ of number of seg. 32.869 16 Energy µ of image rows (r.) µ of number of seg. 32.865 where f⃗i is an object of the feature matrix F whose rows and columns correspond to the paintings and its features F =  ← f Ti →  and µ⃗i and M⃗ are the mean feature vectors for the Ni objects in class Ci and for all the Np paintings in the projection, respectively: µ⃗i = 1 Ni  i∈Ci f⃗i (27) M⃗ = 1 Np Np i=1 f⃗i. (28) The trace of within- and between-class ratio can be used to quantify dispersion: α = tr(SbS −1 w ). (29) Large values of α reveal larger dispersion and the features which relate with large values of α are selected for the analysis (Section 3.1). 3. Results and discussion 3.1. Best features By calculating α using Eq. (29) for all possible feature pairs FNp,a and FNp,b of the Nf = 99 features and ordering the results by α, it is possible to select the features which are most relevant to classification: pairs with high α present better dispersion and clustering than pairs with lower values. As shown in Table 4 (and Fig. 3), features µ of curvature peaks and µ of number of segments have the higher α and are selected to opposition, skewness and dialectics analysis—both features are shown as predominant also in LDA, discussed in the next section. It is interesting to note the nature of selected features: the number of segments and curvature peaks is the most prominent characteristics for the classification of paintings, even better than texture or image complexity. Other features presenting large values of α – like µ of convex-hull area, segments perimeter and area, and circularity – are also related with shape characteristics. Both features presented a similar projection and clustering properties of Fig. 3 as shown in Fig. A.1. The projected painting space considering all the K = 12 groups of paintings that are ‘‘represented’’ by their prototype (i.e. centroid) p⃗i is presented in Fig. 3. The time-series S – a sequence of all the prototype states p⃗i arranged in a chronological order (Section 2.4) – is also shown in the figure as vectors. The projection reveals well clustered groups with minor superposition, mainly for modern paintings. A striking result is the high distance which Pollock stays when compared with the other painters: it is a consequence of the lag number of segments present in works of Pollock (the y-axis being the projection of this feature: µ of segments number). Therefore, both the x-axis (µ of curvature peaks) and y-axis are relevant to separate the baroque and modern art movements. It is possible to note a separation between baroque and modern painters where the baroque paintings are arranged in an overlapping group while the modern painters are more clustered and separated from each other while covering a widely region of the painting space. This is confirmed by the history of art with modern painters being more individualistic in their styles while baroque painters share aesthetic characteristics in their paintings. The same observation arises when following the time-series, the difference between the movements is clear: while baroque artists tend to present a recurring pattern, 118 V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 Fig. 3. Projected painting space considering the best pair of features: µ of curvature peaks and µ of number of segments. an abrupt displacement separates van Gogh – the first modern painter in the painting space – from the previous, and breaks the cyclic pattern. van Gogh, although located near the baroque painters and in the opposite extreme of modern painters, represents a transition to the modern period and after him the following vector displacements will continue until the higher transition in Pollock. Using an index for clustering evaluation – based on Davies–Bouldin [16] index – it is possible to check how clustered each group of paintings is around a given centroid p⃗i. This measure is defined as a cluster scattering index Ti for each cluster Ci: Ti =  1 Ni Ni j=1 |f⃗j − p⃗i|2 (30) which represents the mean distance from each painting f⃗j to its centroid p⃗i. This index was normalized by a global scattering index Tg⃗: Tg⃗ =  1 Np Np i=1 |f⃗i − g⃗|2 (31) where g⃗ is the global centroid: the mean vector considering all Np paintings. The ratio Ti/Tg⃗ (Table 5) gives a measurement of how scattered each cluster is relative to the global dispersion of paintings. In other words, it is possible to check the uniformity of painting style for a single author: painters with higher Ti/Tg⃗ values present less uniformity of style, while lower values reveal more homogeneous works by a given painter. In general, baroque painters present more homogeneous works than modern painters. Modern painters seem to explore more the painting space than baroque painters. While analyzing the baroque group separately, it is possible to observe a trajectory drawn by Caravaggio and Frans Hals through Poussin which ends with the opposite (and back forth) movement of Velázquez. It can be attributed to the influence of the ‘‘chiaroscuro’’ master on these painters, mainly in Velázquez who is known to have studied the works of Caravaggio [12]. It arises again in the return to the Caravaggio movement by Vermeer—some critics affirm [17] that painters like Vermeer could not have even existed without Caravaggio’s influence: Vermeer and Caravaggio clusters are the most superimposed considering all the portraits in the painting space. Both facts are confirmed by the histograms of gray levels shown in Fig. 4. Velázquez and Vermeer histograms are more similar to Caravaggio’s histogram than the remaining baroque painters. V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 119 Table 5 Cluster scattering index Ti for each cluster Ci and the ratio between Ti and the global cluster scattering index Tg⃗ . The ratio measures how scattered the paintings in a given cluster are. Painters with lower Ti/Tg⃗ values present more homogeneous works than painters with higher values of Ti/Tg⃗ . Artists Ti Ti/Tg⃗ Caravaggio 0.026 0.110 Frans Hals 0.074 0.302 Poussin 0.028 0.117 Velázquez 0.016 0.066 Rembrandt 0.051 0.212 Vermeer 0.031 0.130 van Gogh 0.029 0.120 Kandinsky 0.063 0.260 Matisse 0.085 0.349 Picasso 0.033 0.139 Miró 0.053 0.217 Pollock 0.073 0.302 Fig. 4. Mean gray levels histograms for all the baroque painters. Vermeer and Velázquez show more similarity with Caravaggio than other baroque painters. In summary, the baroque group shows a strong inter-relationship by comparing with modern painters where the absence of super-impositions is remarkable. Again, this suggests a strong style-centric distinction among artists of the modern era while baroque artists shared techniques and aesthetic characteristics. This is also confirmed when comparing the histograms of modern paintings in Fig. 5: smaller similarities are observed between the considered artists, contrasting with baroque painters shown in Fig. 4. When considering opposition and skewness, more interesting results arise, as shown in Table 6 and Fig. 6. Clearly, the larger value for opposition is attributed to Rembrandt. This is surprising given that the Dutch master figures as a ‘‘counterpoint’’ of baroque even being part of this art movement [12]. Vermeer also presents strong opposition and the nature of his paintings (e.g. domestic interior, use of bright colors) could explain this phenomenon. A pattern is shown in the beginning of baroque and modern art: an opposition decrease is present in both cases, which is followed by an increase in opposition. Henceforth, a following plateau of high opposition values is observed in baroque painters. This plateau happens in the transition period between baroque and modern art, gradually decreasing while the modern artists begin to take their place in history. These decreasing opposition values reflect a low opposition role between first artists of baroque period and increasing opposition as long as the period is moving into modernism, although skewness values remain oscillating and increasing during almost all the time-series. This characterizes again a common scene in arts, mostly in modernists, each one trying to define his own style and preparing to change into a new movement. In summary, the painting space is marked by constantly increasing skewness, strong opposition in specific moments of its evolution (the transition between baroque and modern) and minor opposition between the artists of the same movement. 120 V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 Fig. 5. Mean gray levels histogram for all the modern painters. There are minor similarities between modern artists. Fig. 6. Opposition Wi,j and skewness si,j values for the two best features. Table 6 Opposition and skewness indices for each of the twelve moves from a painter to the next. Painting move Wi,j si,j Caravaggio→Frans Hals 1.0 0.0 Frans Hals→Poussin 0.111 0.425 Poussin→Velázquez 0.621 0.004 Velázquez→Rembrandt 1.258 0.072 Rembrandt→Vermeer 1.152 0.341 Vermeer→van Gogh 1.158 0.280 van Gogh→Kandinsky 0.970 0.452 Kandinsky→Matisse 0.089 0.189 Matisse→Picasso 0.117 0.509 Picasso→Miró 0.385 0.325 Miró→Pollock 2.376 3.823 The counter-dialectics, shown in Table 7 and Fig. 7, draws a parallel with the opposition and skewness curves. It reinforces the already observed facts: painters of the same movement show initially decreasing followed by increasing counter- dialectics reflecting the concordance of members of the same movement and their preparation to change into the next movement. The larger counter-dialectics happens in van Gogh and Kandinsky: again, the point where baroque ends and modern art starts, regarding the painters selected for this study. V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 121 Fig. 7. Counter-dialectics values considering the two best features. Table 7 Counter-dialectics index for each of the ten subsequent moves among painters states for the best two features. Painting triple di→k Caravaggio→Frans Hals→Poussin 0.572 Frans Hals→Poussin→Velázquez 0.337 Poussin→Velázquez→Rembrandt 0.151 Velázquez→Rembrandt→Vermeer 0.608 Rembrandt→Vermeer→van Gogh 1.362 Vermeer→van Gogh→Kandinsky 1.502 van Gogh→Kandinsky→Matisse 1.062 Kandinsky→Matisse→Picasso 0.183 Matisse→Picasso→Miró 0.447 Picasso→Miró→Pollock 2.616 Table 8 Opposition and skewness indices for each of the twelve painters states moves. Painting move Wi,j si,j Caravaggio→Frans Hals 1.0 0.0 Frans Hals→Poussin −0.101 0.132 Poussin→Velázquez 0.588 0.037 Velázquez→Rembrandt 1.526 0.050 Rembrandt→Vermeer 1.101 0.143 Vermeer→van Gogh 1.153 0.157 van Gogh→Kandinsky 1.279 0.512 Kandinsky→Matisse 0.179 0.149 Matisse→Picasso −0.201 0.516 Picasso→Miró 0.432 0.163 Miró→Pollock 4.031 2.662 3.2. All the features Although features FNp,a (µ of curvature peaks) and FNp,b (µ of number of segments) are shown as an interesting choice for classification, LDA is applied considering all the Nf = 99 features to test the relevance of these features and the stability of the results. The LDA method [15] projected the features in a 2-dimensional space that better separates the paintings and yields a time-series as done for the two most prominent features. The first two components give the time-series shown in Fig. 8. It is possible to note, as expected, a similarity with results from Section 3.1. The skewness indices show even more an ascending curve along the entire evolution, as presented in Table 8 and Fig. 9. The opposition and dialectics (Table 9 and Fig. 10) patterns remain. 122 V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 Fig. 8. Time series yielded by 2-dimensional projected ‘‘painting space’’ considering the two first components obtained by LDA transformed into the N = 99 feature matrix. Fig. 9. Opposition and Skewness values considering the time series for all the features. The same patterns observed when analyzing the best feature pair remains in this observation. For LDA validation, the total set of paintings is split into two groups: a training set with 10 random selected paintings for each artist and a test set with the remaining 10 paintings for each artist, without repetition. Such a validation is performed 100 times. The confusion matrix (Fig. 11) reveals the quality of the predicted output. Diagonal elements represent the mean number of samples for which the predicted class is equal to the true class, while off-diagonal elements indicate the ones that are unclassified by LDA. Higher diagonal values indicate more correct predictions. As observed, the LDA method performed V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 123 Table 9 Counter-dialectics index for each of the ten subsequent moves among painters states for the best two components of LDA projection. Painting triple di→k Caravaggio→Frans Hals→Poussin 0.587 Frans Hals→Poussin→Velázquez 0.317 Poussin→Velázquez→Rembrandt 0.268 Velázquez→Rembrandt→Vermeer 0.736 Rembrandt→Vermeer→van Gogh 1.192 Vermeer→van Gogh→Kandinsky 2.352 van Gogh→Kandinsky→Matisse 0.974 Kandinsky→Matisse→Picasso 0.241 Matisse→Picasso→Miró 0.704 Picasso→Miró→Pollock 1.924 Fig. 10. Counter-dialectics values (higher values reveal lower dialectics) considering all the features. The pattern observed in the best pair projection became stronger here: it is possible to observe clearly the highest value along the movement transition period (van Gogh and Kandinsky). as expected for the considered set of paintings. The best classified samples are Pollock paintings which is expected given the high detachment of this cluster observed in the presented projections. In general, the confusion matrix reflects facts previously discussed: a similarity between baroque painters, mainly Velázquez, Caravaggio and Rembrandt and a separation between painters before and after van Gogh which defines the frontier between the baroque and modern movements. 4. Conclusions It is shown that two features: (a) the number of curvature peaks and (b) the number of segments of an image – both related with shape characteristics – can be used for the classification of the selected painters with remarkable results, even when compared with canonical feature measures like Haralick or image complexity. Such relevance is supported by the analysis of a dispersion index calculated for every pair of features and reinforced by LDA analysis. The effective characterization of selected paintings by means of these features allowed the definition of a ‘‘painting space’’. While represented as states in this projected space, the baroque paintings are shown as an overlapped cluster. The modern paintings clusters, in contrast, present minor overlapping and are disposed more widely in the projection. These observations are compatible with the history of art: baroque painters shared aesthetics while modern painters tend to define their own styles individually [12]. A time-series – composed by prototype states representing each painter chronologically – allowed the concepts of opposition, skewness and dialectics to be approached quantitatively, as geometric measures. The painting states show a decrease in opposition and dialectics considering the first members of the same movement (baroque or modern) followed by increasing opposition and dialectics until it reaches the strong opposition momentum between the two movements. Also, the skewness curve increases during almost entire time-series. This could reflect a strong influence role of a movement in its members together with an increasing desire to innovate, present in each artist, stronger in modernists. 124 V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 Fig. 11. Confusion matrix for LDA. Half of the paintings are used as a training set and the other half as a test set. The validation is performed 100 times. Diagonal elements show the mean number of paintings in the predicted class (a painter) which equals the true class. Both opposition, skewness and dialectics measurements can be compared with results already obtained for music and philosophy [11]. Music composers seem to be guided by strong dialectics due to the recognized master–apprentice role. Philosophers movements, otherwise, are strong in opposition. Painters, as this study reveals, show increasing skewness, and strong values for both opposition and counter-dialectics in specific moments of history—i.e. baroque–modern transition. While not sufficient to exhaust all the characteristics regarding an artist or its work, this method suggests a framework to the study of arts by means of a feature space and geometrical measures. As a future work, the number of painters could be increased and a set of painters could be specifically chosen to analyze influence (e.g. works of Frans Hals’ sons can be included to verify the influence of their father and master, or paintings by Rafael, Poussin and Guido Reni [12] or Carracci can be compared to confront the already known similarity of both painters). A larger number of paintings for each artist could be considered for analysis as well. Although this study promotes a quantitative approach, qualitative features can be used, as done in a previous work for musicians and philosophers [11]. A comparison between results obtained for quantitative and qualitative features can then be applied. The same framework can be applied to other fields of interest like Movies or Poetry. Another interesting use of this framework – being currently developed by the authors – is a component of a generative art model: geometrical measures in the painting space (like the already defined dialectics or opposition and skewness) can guide an evolutionary algorithm, assigning the value of measures as the fitness of generated material. This model complements a framework to the study of creative evolution in arts. Acknowledgments Gonzalo Travieso thanks CNPq (308118/2010-3) for sponsorship. Luciano da F. Costa thanks CNPq (308231/03-1) and FAPESP (05/00587-5) for sponsorship. Vilson Vieira is grateful to CAPES. Appendix A Although the first features pair (µ of curvature peaks and µ of number of segments) is selected for the analysis, other features with large α values can be used as shown in Fig. A.1. Appendix B See Table B.1. V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 125 Fig. A.1. Scatter plots for each feature pair i listed in Table 4 with large values of α. The first projection (pair 1) was used for the analysis, however other projections (pairs 2–16) can be used. Table B.1 All the 240 selected paintings and their respective authors and years of creation. Painter Painting title Year Caravaggio Musicians 1595 Judith Beheading Holofernes 1598 David with the Head of Goliath 1610 Supper at Emmaus 1602 Entombment 1603 Narcissus 1599 John the Baptist 1610 Denial of Saint Peter 1610 Tooth Puller 1609 Annunciation 1608 Sleeping Cupid 1608 Beheading of Saint John the Baptist 1608 Saint Jerome Writing 1607 Salome with the Head of John the Baptist 1607 Christ at the Column 1607 (continued on next page) 126 V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 Table B.1 (continued) Painter Painting title Year Madonna and Child with St. Anne 1606 Ecce Homo 1605 John the Baptist 1604 Madonna of Loreto 1604 Taking of Christ 1602 Frans Hals Portrait of an unknown woman 1618/20 Portrait of Paulus van Beresteyn 1620s Portrait of Stephanus Geeraerdts 1648/50 Portrait of Pieter van der Broecke 1633 Portrait of a man 1645 Portrait of Ren Descartes 1649 Regenten of the Grote of St. Elisabeth Gasthuis 1641 Portrait of Isaak Abrahamsz Massa 1626 The Officers of the St Adrian Militia Company 1633 Two singing boys with a lute and a music book 1620/25 The rommelpot player 1618/22 The ‘Mulatto’ 1628/30 Wedding portrait of Isaac and Beatrix 1622 The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia 1627 Portrait of the family Gijsbert Claesz van Campen 1620 Young Man and Woman in an Inn 1623 Shrovetide Revellers 1616/17 Laughing man with crock 1628/30 Young Man with a Skull 1626/28 Young woman (The Gypsy Girl—Malle Babbe) 1625 Nicolas Poussin Venus and Adonis 1624 Cephalus and Aurora 1627 Acis and Galatea 1629 The Adoration of the Golden Calf 1634 A Dance to the Music of Time 1633 Apollo and Daphne or Apollo in love with Daphne 1664 The Four Seasons: Autumn 1660/64 The Four Seasons: Spring 1660/64 Landscape with Hercules and Cacus 1659/61 Queen Zenobia found on the banks of the river Arax 1657/60 Lamentation over the dead Christ 1657/58 The Flight into Egypt or resting on the journey 1657/58 Saint John baptizing Christ 1648 The Miracle of saint Francis Xavier 1641/42 The Institution of the Eucharist 1641 Landscape with saint John on Patmos 1640 Venus presenting arms to Aeneas 1639 Finding of Moses 1638 Camillus hands over the schoolmaster of Falerii 1637 The Triumph of Neptune or The Birth of Venus 1635 Diego Velázquez Three musicians 1617/18 The Lunch 1618 La mulata 1620 Old Woman Cooking Eggs 1618 Christ in the House of Martha and Mary 1618 Adoration of the Magi 1619 Demócrito/El geógrafo 1628/29 The Triumph of Bacchus 1628/29 La cena de Emaús 1628/29 Joseph’s Tunic 1630 Temptation of St. Thomas 1631/32 Las Meninas 1656/57 Christ Crucified 1632 Equestrian Portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares 1634 The Surrender of Breda 1634/35 The Needlewoman 1635/43 The Jester Calabacillas 1637/39 Menipo 1639/41 Mars Resting 1639/41 Rokeby Venus Rembrandt The Spectacles-pedlar (Sight) 1624/25 The Three Singers (Hearing) 1624/25 Balaam and the Ass 1626 V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 127 Table B.1 (continued) Painter Painting title Year History Painting 1626 The Baptism of the Eunuch 1626 Andromeda 1630 St. Peter in Prison 1631 The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp 1632 The Rape of Europa 1632 Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee 1633 Diana Bathing with her Nymphs 1634 The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq 1642 The Holy Family with Angels 1645 Bathsheba Bathing 1645 A Woman Bathing in a Stream 1654 The Syndics of the Draper’s Guild 1662 Self-portrait 1660 The Polish Rider 1657 The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Jan Deyman 1656 Jacob Blessing the Children of Joseph 1656 Johannes Vermeer Lady Seated at a Virginal 1673/75 The Guitar Player 1672 Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid 1670 The Love Letter 1669/70 The Lacemaker 1669/70 The Geographer 1668/69 The Astronomer 1668 Girl with a Red Hat 1668 Mistress and Maid 1667/68 The Allegory of Painting 1666/67 Portrait of a Young Woman 1666/67 Girl with a Pearl Earring 1665 Girl Interrupted at her Music 1660/61 The Girl with the Wineglass 1659 The Milkmaid 1658 Christ in the House of Martha and Mary 1654/55 Diana and Her Companions 1655/56 Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window 1657 A Girl Asleep 1657 The Music Lesson 1662/65 Vincent van Gogh Starry Night Over the Rhone 1888 The Starry Night 1889 Self-Portrait with Straw Hat 1887/88 A Wheat Field, with Cypresses 1889 Wheat Field with Crows 1890 The Red Vineyard 1888 Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers 1889 Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear 1889 Prisoners’ Round 1890 Road with Cypress and Star 1890 Bedroom in Arles 1889 Child with Orange 1890 Portrait of Dr. Gachet 1890 Cypresses and Two Women 1890 The Sower with Setting Sun 1888 Olive Grove: Orange Sky 1889 Mountains at Saint-Rémy 1889 Olive Orchard 1889 Olive Trees in a Mountainous Landscape 1889 View of the Asylum and Chapel of Saint-Rémy 1889 Wassily Kandinsky On White II 1923 Composition X 1939 Points 1920 Ensemble Multicolore 1938 Composition VIII 1923 Composition VI 1913 Composition IV 1911 Farbstudie Quadrate 1913 Black and Violet 1923 Yellow, Red, Blue 1925 (continued on next page) 128 V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 Table B.1 (continued) Painter Painting title Year At Rest 1942 Conglomerat 1943 Temperered Elan 1944 Last Watercolour 1944 Untitled 1944 Composition 1944 White Figure 1943 A Floating Figure 1942 Intime Message 1942 Reciprocal Accords 1942 Henri Matisse Self-Portrait in a Striped T-shirt 1906 Portrait of Madame Matisse 1905 Le bonheur de vivre 1905/6 The Dance (first version) 1909 Blue Nude 1907 Portrait of the Artist’s Wife 1913 The Moroccans 1915/16 The Gourds 1916 Bathers by a River 1909/16 La Nu Rose 1935 Reclining Nude 1917 Dancer and Rocaille Armchair on a Black Background 1942 Asia 1946 Red Interior, Still Life on Blue Table 1947 Still Life Still Life 14 Head white and pink Woman In A Purple Coat 1937 Still Life after Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s ‘‘La Desserte’’ 1915 Coffee 1917 Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907 Guernica 1937 Dora Maar au Chat 1941 Massacre in Korea 1951 The Guitar Arlequín 1917 La Table 1919 Woman with Pears 1909 Femme nue assise 1909 Le pigeon aux petits pois 1911 Guitar, Bottle, Fruit Dish and Glass on a Table 1919 Lovers 1919 Jacqueline 1961 Femme au chapeau assise dans un fauteuil (Dora Maar) 1941 Seated woman 1953 Jacqueline with flowers 1954 Les femmes d’Alger 1954 Les femmes d’Alger XV 1955 Deux Femmes Sur La Plage 1956 Portrait of woman (Dora Maar) 1942 Joan Miró The Farm 1921/22 The Tilled Field 1923/24 Bleu II 1961 Nocturne 1940 Le Coq 1940 Figure at Night Guided by (...) 1940 Dancer 1925 Harlequin’s Carnival 1924/25 Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird 1926 Painting 1936 Woman Encircled by the Flight (...) 1941 The Bull Fight 1945 The Smile of the Flamboyant Wings 1953 Hermitage 1924 Maternity 1924 Landscape 1924/25 Head of a Catalan Peasant (2) 1925 V. Vieira et al. / Physica A 417 (2015) 110–129 129 Table B.1 (continued) Painter Painting title Year Nude 1926 The Hunter 1923/24 Ciphers and Constellations, in Love with a Woman 1941 Jackson Pollock No. 5 1948 Black and White (Number 20) 1951 Number 8 1949 Number 11 1952 Number 31 1950 Number 1 1948 Number 3 (Tiger) 1949 Untitled 1942 Alchemy 1947 Number 23 1948 Galaxy 1947 Enchanted Forest 1947 Lucifer 1947 Reflection of the Big Dipper 1947 Number 4 (Gray and Red) 1948 Summertime: Number 9A 1948 Number 6 1949 Autumn Rhythm 1950 Blue Poles 1952 Number 7 1949 References [1] AnaIoana Deac, Jan Lubbe, Eric Backer, Feature selection for paintings classification by optimal tree pruning, in: Bilge Gunsel, Anil K. Jain, A.Murat Tekalp, Bülent Sankur (Eds.), Multimedia Content Representation, Classification and Security, in: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4105, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006, pp. 354–361. 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Ediz. tedesca, in: Basic Art Series, Taschen Deutschland GmbH, 2000. http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0378-4371(14)00796-1/sbref1 http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0378-4371(14)00796-1/sbref3 http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0378-4371(14)00796-1/sbref4 http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/08/style-space-how-to-compare-image-sets.html http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/06/mondrian-vs-rothko-footprints-and.html http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/06/mondrian-vs-rothko-footprints-and.html http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/06/mondrian-vs-rothko-footprints-and.html http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/07/arthistoryviz-mining-200000-images-of.html http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0378-4371(14)00796-1/sbref8 http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0378-4371(14)00796-1/sbref10 http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0378-4371(14)00796-1/sbref11 http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0378-4371(14)00796-1/sbref12 http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/149300 http://ivrg.epfl.ch/research/superpixels http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0378-4371(14)00796-1/sbref14 http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0378-4371(14)00796-1/sbref15 http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0378-4371(14)00796-1/sbref16 http://refhub.elsevier.com/S0378-4371(14)00796-1/sbref17 A quantitative approach to painting styles Introduction Modeling painting movements Painting corpus Image processing Extracted features Measurements Feature selection Results and discussion Best features All the features Conclusions Acknowledgments Appendix A Appendix B References work_glgzrbza2fgnxg7j7wpxpqieum ---- A DISCUSSION OF THE STYLISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE DATED OIL PAINTINGS OF LIONEL LEMOINE FITZGERALD (1890-1956) by KAREN LINDA SENS B.A., University of British Columbia, 1973 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER O F ARTS THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (The Department of Fine Arts) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA September 1978 (c^ Karen Linda Sens, 1978 In p r e s e n t i n g t h i s t h e s i s in p a r t i a l f u l f i l m e n t o f the requirements f o r an advanced degree at the U n i v e r s i t y of B r i t i s h Columbia, I agree that the L i b r a r y s h a l l make i t f r e e l y a v a i l a b l e f o r reference and study. I f u r t h e r agree t h a t p e r m i s s i o n f o r e x t e n s i v e copying o f t h i s t h e s i s f o r s c h o l a r l y purposes may be granted by the Head o f my Department or by h i s r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s . It i s understood that copying or p u b l i c a t i o n o f t h i s t h e s i s f o r f i n a n c i a l gain s h a l l not be allowed without my w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . Department o f FINS ARTS The U n i v e r s i t y o f B r i t i s h Columbia 2075 Wesbrook Place Vancouver, Canada V6T 1W5 Date OCTOBER 5, WIS II ABSTRACT This thesis discusses the stylistic development of Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald (1890-1956) as seen in his dated oil paintings. Chapter I outlines FitzGerald's formative years (1890-1919). It attempts to explain how his love of the prairies and interest in art developed. It suggests the dominant influences in his study of art. It includes a stylistic discussion of FitzGerald's earliest works, including his well known, Late Fall, Manitoba (1918). Chapter II attempts to explain why FitzGerald suddenly lightened and brightened his palette. It explores the sources which may have influenced the development of FitzGerald's impressionistic style (1920-October 1921) and it provides a stylistic analysis of two of his impressionistic works, Summer East Kildonan (1920) and Summer Afternoon, The Prairie (1921). Chapter llldiscusses the importance of FitzGerald's first trip to New York, his study at the Art Students' League (December 1921 - May 1922) and his study of the works of European masters at the Metropolitan Museum. It explores the influence his two art instructors, Boardman Robinson and Kenneth Miller may have had on his work. It also suggests the importance of the works of Cezanne to FitzGerald's development. Chapter IV discusses the new directions FitzGerald pursued upon his return from New York. It reveals that FitzGerald's new style of painting, as seen in Potato Patch, Snowflake (1925) was fairly dependent on the external influences he had seen while in New York. This chapter also discusses the importance of • • • III FitzGerald's appointment as instructor for the Winnipeg School of Art, to his development of a new more studied style, as seen in Williamson's Garage (1927). Chapter V explores the influences of his second trip to the East (June 1 - July 1, 1930) on his artistic development, through revealing statements drawn from FitzGerald's Diary. Chapter VI reveals FitzGerald's striving towards more personal expressions during the thirties and forties, as seen in three major works from this period, Doc Snider's House (1931), Jar (1938), and Still Life: Two Apples (1940). Chapter VII discusses FitzGerald's gradual move towards abstraction. Suggestions of this direction, are already noted in From an Upstairs Window, Winter (1948). It includes a stylistic analysis of two abstract works, Composition N o . 1 (c. 1950-51) and Abstract: Green and Gold (1954). The last major o i l , Hat (1955), is discussed in terms of a final statement made by the artist. An attempt is made to determine the essential characteristics of FitzGerald's paintings, which enable them to transcend their regional boundaries and speak to all of Canada. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST O F SLIDES v A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S vi Chapter I FORMATIVE YEARS (1890 - 1919) 1 II IMPRESSIONISTIC PERIOD (1920 - OCTOBER 1921) . . 19 III NEW YORK PERIOD (1921 - M A Y 1922) 30 IV NEW DIRECTIONS (JUNE 1922 - M A Y 1929) 39 V SECOND TRIP EAST (JUNE 1 - JULY 1, 1930) 48 VI TOWARDS MORE PERSONAL EXPRESSIONS (JULY 1930 - AUGUST 1947) 67 VII TOWARDS ABSTRACTION (SEPTEMBER 1947-AUGUST 1956).. 89 BIBLIOGRAPHY 100 APPENDIX (LIST OF FITZGERALD'S DATED OIL PAINTINGS) I l l LIST OF SLIDES & * t i * 4 0>lk^'^ 1. Seated Man (1909) 2. Manitoba Winter (1914) lower painting 3. Late Fall, Manitoba (1918) 4. Summer, East Kildonan (1920) 5. Summer Afternoon, The Prairie (1921) 6. Broken Tree, Kildonan Park (1920) 7. Riviere des Prairies, P . Q . (1922) 8. Potato Patch, Snowflake (1925) 9. Williamson's Garage (1927) 10. Poplar Woods (1929) 11. Doc Snider's House (1931) 12. Jar (1938) 13. Still Life: Apples (1940) 14. Sketch: From an Upstairs Window, Winter (1948) 15. From an Upstairs Window, Winter (1948) 16. Three Apples on a Purple Plate (1949) 17. Composition N o . 1 (c. 1950-51) 18. Abstract: Green and Gold (1954) 19. Hat (1955) drawing 20. Hat (1955) oil A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S I would like to especially thank Doreen Walker, Department of Fine Arts, for her encouragement and very valuable assistance and Miss Melva Dwyer, Fine Arts Librarian, for her assistance regarding bibliographic and footnote entries. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to the many individuals and institutions which allowed me to photograph FitzGerald's work and to study any additional information they possessed. My special thanks is extended to the staff of: The Winnipeg Art Gallery (especially to Ann Davis, Pat Bovey and Cathy Stewart) The National Gallery of Canada The Art Gallery of Ontario The Queen's University Archives The Hart House, University of Toronto The FitzGerald Study Centre, Winnipeg School of Art, University of Manitoba (expecially to Helen Coy) Mr. and Mrs. Patricia Morrison (died, October 1976) M r . and Mrs. Earl Green Dr. Ferdinand Eckhardt Mr. Robert Ayre Mr. John A . MacAulay M r . Bill Riley Professor Gissur Eliasson Miss Lynn Sissons Dr. A . J . W . Alcock Mrs. Doris Booth Finally I wish to thank my family for their encouragement and support. 1 CHAPTER I FORMATIVE YEARS (1890 - 1919) "The faculty of being able to see in their surroundings something beautiful no matter how apparently ordinary they may be, is invaluable."^ These are the words of Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, a man who never tired of the prairie landscape and who found beauty in the simplest still life arrangements; comprising only of a jug or a discarded milk can. Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald was fortunate in having that rare gift that only master artists possess, that enables them to turn the commonplace — be it a small corner of the landscape or everyday objects — into works of art. Primarily a landscape artist, FitzGerald saw and experienced the prairie in a way that few people have done or ever w i l l . FitzGerald's own description of a train ride to Regina reveals the depth of this man's perception. The day was especially lovely, with a fine sky and plenty of lights and shadows to break up the visible expanse of land seen through the car windows. I was more than ever impressed with the wide variations in the contours from the flatness outside Winnipeg to the gradually increasing roll of the ground as we went westward. A marked blue in the distance, gave the feeling of low lying hills and, sometimes, close up a higher mound, topped with trees, broke the long line of the horizon in a most pleasant way. Even where flatness dominated and the horizon seemed one long straight line, bluffs of poplar, farm buildings and the wide variety in the fields from the light of the stubble to the dark of the freshly ploughed land, relieved the possible monotony and kept the interest.^ FitzGerald spent his early life in Winnipeg, except for the summers when he went to visit his grandparents' farm in Snowflake, Manitoba, a small town south of Winnipeg. It was in Snowflake, that FitzGerald developed his appreciation for nature and, in particular, for the prairie. This love of nature and the prairie developed simultaneously and was later strongly reflected in his drawings and paintings. FitzGerald said, "The summers spent at my grandmother's farm in southern Manitoba were wonderful times for roaming through the woods and over the fields and the vivid impressions of those holidays inspired many 3 drawings and paintings of a later date." According to Robert Ayre, a close friend of the mature artist, FitzGerald's only boyhood daily farm chore was to bring the cows home. "FitzGerald respected the placid undemanding cows, which kept their own counsel and let 4 him keep his, leaving him to his thoughts and dreams." He was a dreamy child of modest upbringing who grew to become a quiet man who enfoyed working independently. FitzGerald was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba on March 17, 1890. From his sister, Mrs. Perry, can be traced his family origins. His father was Lionel Henry FitzGerald, a descendant of Irish nobility, who was brought to Canada from Nassau in the Bahamas while a young boy and reared by his uncle, Sir Issac Lemoine, at the Grange Estate near Quebec City. It was from Sir Issac that FitzGerald received his middle name. According to Patricia Bovey, "Lionel Henry FitzGerald had come West with a survey party, and he later returned to Winnipeg as a bank messenger."^ Mrs. Perry stated that "Henry FitzGerald came to Manitoba when he was seventeen. ..In 1889 he married Belle Wicks, a native of Exeter, Ontario, whose parents owned a farm in Snowflake, Manitoba. n / Belle Wicks was a descendant of yeoman farmers of Devonshire who had settled in Exeter. Even though LeMoine's maternal grandfather had died when he was only five or six years old, his grandmother kept up the farm. According to FitzGerald, his first interest in art came when he was in Grade III. t My first recollection of an interest in pictures goes back to the day when I was a pupil in a Grade III class at the Isbister School here in Winnipeg. The teacher - all I remember about her now is that she was a motherly sort of person - showed us some of those small brown reproductions of art masterpieces known as Perry Pictures. She explained that these cost one or two cents each and that if we wished to buy some we could bring the money to her and she would order them for us. She also told us that there were larger ones that cost twenty-five cents each. I had been saving my money to buy my father and mother a gift for their wedding anniversary and I decided right then that I'd get one of those larger prints for them.^ This interest in art grew with each successive year. FitzGerald, wishing to increase his knowledge about art and artists, frequently visited the small art section of the William Avenue Branch of the Winnipeg Library, that had recently opened in 1904. Recounting his early exposures to art through the medium of books, FitzGerald wrote, I read Ruskin at almost the beginning and all that clings to me as closely as my vacation days at Snowflake at my grandmother s f a r m . . . Strange books I read at that time trying to find out something about art. Ruskin pretty weighty stuff, but through a lot of wading and looking at the illustrations.a lot of avenues opened just a little and naturally, Turner became something of a god. I still retain something of that illusion with the greater knowledge that has come with the passing years and contact with many reproductions of his work and the seeing of a few original works. For the first time, I read of the other artists that Ruskin wrote of in comparison with Turner and began a study of the history of art in this way. I got a wonderful thrill from the two volumes of Holman Hunt's Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite 4 Brotherhood. The earlier days of the brotherhood existence naturally interested me the most and I read and looked at the production of these days with something of awe, at the, to my mind then, terrific achievements of such young men. . . .Perhaps Ruskin's Elements of Drawing was the most fascinating to me, of all the books. Here I had something definite, a plan of study, that might lead me into the way of doing things that promised possibilities in the future. . . . N o t from the library but from a friend came the loan of an issue ,of the Studio containing a long article on Bonington with numerous illustrations, one in colour, very lovely, a street in Rouen. From a watercolour drawing with some body-colour, I made a copy of this and read and reread the text and learned some of the reproductions almost by "heart". From this I became pretty intimate with Bonington and my admiration of that time has only increased. Gradually, by such a hit and miss method I got started. The Q library was invaluable and I always look at it with a special feeling. Thus at an early age, FitzGerald had absorbed aspects of the history of art through the writings of Ruskin. What was the thrust of Ruskin's teaching and how did they influence the later artistic development of FitzGerald? According to Elizabeth Holt, "For Ruskin the artist's whole function was to be seeing, feeling, — (quoting Ruskin) — 'an instrument of such tenderness and sensitiveness that nothing shall be left unrecorded 1 ."^ According to Ruskin, "The greatest thing a human being ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what he saw in a plain w a y . ^ These words appear to have formed the guiding light for FitzGerald. His mature oils like Jar of 1938 (Slide 12) and Still Life: Two Apples of 1940 (Slide 13), reveal that FitzGerald retained a considerable amount of Ruskin's philosphy of the artist as the 'seeing and feeling recorder'. It is obvious from FitzGerald's letter that he immensely enjoyed reading Ruskin's Elements of Drawing (1857). One of the interesting aspects of this 5 book, with respect to the study of FitzGerald's work, is the section on colour theory. According to Holt, Elements of Drawing presents an advanced colour theory advocating a stippling technique of pure colour over a white ground. This also influenced the Neo-lmpressionists, since Ogden Rood in his book Modern Chromatics (1879), entitled Theorie Scientifique des Couleurs (1881) 12 in the French version; included large sections of Ruskin's colour theory. Several of FitzGerald's works done in a dapple technique (for example, Three Apples on a Purple Plate of 1949 (Slide 16), may have had their origins in his early involvement with Ruskin's theory. FitzGerald never adhered strictly to any theory, yet he seemed to absorb fragments from many different sources, and modified them to serve his own ends. It is likely that the young FitzGerald had also read at least one of Ruskin's volumes on Modern Painters (1843-60) which extolled the virtues of Turner as the ideal painter. After reading Ruskin, FitzGerald, as quoted, had felt that Turner was something of a god. In Modern Painters Ruskin wrote: Turner is the only painter, so far as I know, who has ever drawn the sky.. .all previous artists having only represented it typically or partially, but he, absolutely and universally... He is the only painter who ever drew the stem of a tree, Titian having come the nearest before him, and excelling him in the muscular development of the large trunks ' (though sometimes losing the woody strength in a serpent like flaccidity), but missing the .grace and character of the ramifications.^ in Poplar Woods of 1929 (Slide 10), FitzGerald has also portrayed the muscular development of the large trunk, without losing its "woody strength", and has given the tree a certain universal quality and a pervading grace. No doubt, Ruskin would have commended his vicarious student for this work. 6 According to Holt, "The Pre-Raphaelites received Ruskin's endorsement 14 for they were earnest men." FitzGerald, too, was an earnest man, a man whose lifestyle was not divorced from his art. He was a sincere, quiet, casually dressed prairie artist who worked diligently at his art. His works reveal his diligence, and are sincere, quiet and unadorned depictions relating to his prairie experience. FitzGerald's life style and the style of his works mirror each other fairly accurately. Did FitzGerald's readings on Pre-Raphaelitism have any effect on his later works? It would appear that the stylistic influence of the Pre-Raphaelistes (Holman Hunt, William Rossetti and John Everett Millais) was very minimal or non-existent. FitzGerald probably enjoyed Holman Hunt's Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905) more as a piece of literature than a philosophy of art. The young FitzGerald had felt awe for these artists, yet the mature FitzGerald realized their frailties. The only direct correlatipn between FitzGerald and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (and this is one reason why the latter was supported by Ruskin would seem to be their insistence on studying directly from nature). The last artist, which FitzGerald made reference to having read about during his formative years, was Richard Parkes Bonington (1801 - 1828), in an article published in The International Studio magazine. Through reading his article, FitzGerald felt that he "became pretty intimate with Bonington's 15 works., .and my admiration of that time has only increased." 7 This article written by Henri Frantz in December of 1904, established Richard Bonington as a renowned artist and as a direct precursor of Impressionism. Referring to Bonington's works, Frantz wrote, Naturalism succeeds to Romanticism only to give way its turn before Impressionism, and still the water-colours and oils from this artist's hand retain all that freshness of charm, all that modern feeling, which is as enchanting for us as for our fathers. Bonington's oil paintings and watercolours might well be divided under three general heads. . . . In the secondary category . . . Bonington became more closely attached to Romanticism, and followed a course parallel to that of Delacroix; nay. perhaps it would be more exact to say that he followed h i m . ^ The third . . . are canvases . . . all shimmering with light, all overflowing with the glorious rays of that Italian sun. . . . ' ^ Bonington, I consider, shares with Turner the title of the most luminous colourist of the English nineteenth i i 19 century school. Since FitzGerald read this article, presumably shortly after it was published in December of 1904, he was also aware, at least to some degree, of the works of Delacroix and Constable, and he had heard of the term "Impressionism" as early 20 as 1904-05. Thus prior to receiving any formal art training, FitzGerald had learned a certain amount about nineteenth century English and French painting through art books and periodicals. It was also during his formative years, that he first became acquainted with the works of Millet, the great French master, who depicted the quiet dignity of farm life. His Grade IV teacher had several prints of Millet's paintings in the 21 classroom. According to Ayre, FitzGerald had appreciated them but did not grasp their importance. Ayre wrote, these "had struck a note but he had not 22 understood i t . " Bovey asserts that he certainly understood Millet's works by the 23 time he painted The Potato Patch, Snowflake of 1925 (Slide 8). Thus 8 FitzGerald, while still a youth, had been exposed to several famous artists through reading and seeing colour reproductions. FitzGerald enjoyed the school art classes which allowed him to create his own art. Several of his art sketch books from his school days are still extant. These sketch books were formerly in the possession of Mrs. Pat Morrison, FitzGerald's daughter, but are now located in the FitzGerald Study Centre at the University of Manitoba. Bovey writes, "These show a remarkably steady hand and a keen interest in drawing. His later concentration on detail and command of 24 technique are certainly foreshadowed in these early works." FitzGerald wrote his own comments about these early sketches years later in a letter to Robert Ayre, Very recently I ran across some drawings made as exercises and I think the ideas good. They were simple and Ruskin-like, called for great honesty of purpose, and a reverence for the finest things. Not a bad programme for the young mind — or for the older one for that matter.^> One of the more finished sketches in one of the sketch books, dated probably around 1906, is an untitled pencil drawing of two large bags which are firmly tied up with string. Already his natural sense of balance in compositional arrangement is apparent. The drawing itself is very fine and has that subtlety of line which FitzGerald,retained all his life. He attended school only until the age of fourteen which was the common practice for children of families of moderate means. In later years, FitzGerald tried to reassure his mother that "he had an education deeper than any he could 26 have squeezed out of books and lectures." 9 It was after he had left school and started working at a wholesale drug office, that his childhood enjoyment of art began to develop as an increasingly more important part of his life. FitzGerald wrote, After leaving school (in 1904), I worked in a wholesale drug office, and finding the job not quite satisfying, I felt the first real urge to draw, so I got some drawing-paper, a pencil, and eraser andstarted work. One of the first efforts, out-of-doors, was the drawing of a large elm tree and I remember a friend and I making great preparations and walking a long distance to find a subject that appealed to us. I think perhaps the walk into the country held as much fascination for us as the work. However, we did find this lovely old tree and tried our best to put down what it looked like but my remembrance is chiefly of the soft warmth of the sunny day, the quiet country around us, and our walk home. From 1909 to 1912, FitzGerald spent his days working at various jobs. 28 His first job was in Stovel's publishing house, which was probably owned by Mr. J . Stovel, who later became an M . L . A . and was on the Board of Directors 29 for the Winnipeg School of Art during its early years (1921 - ). Later, FitzGerald worked in an engraver's plant for three months and then, until he was 30 twenty-two years old, in a stockbroker's office. Around 1909, he began his formal study of art by taking one of A . S . Keszthelyi's evening courses given at the Keszthelyi School of Art (also called the Winnipeg School of Fine Arts), located in the old Stobart Block in downtown Winnipeg. A Hungarian, Keszthelyi, had recently moved to' Canada after having been a professor at the Carnegie Schools in Pittsburgh. Ann Davis writes, Little is known about this teacher's Canadian interlude except that he only stayed about four years, instructing 'Drawing and Drawing from the living model, Decorating, Designing and Portraiture'. . . .Keszthelyi's few extant works would suggest that he concentrated on figure painting. 10 It was not until later in FitzGerald's career that he too developed an interest in figure painting. An advertisement in The Winnipeg Free Press dated from July 11/ 1910, reveals that A . S . Keszthelyi was an artist who had received several honours both abroad and in Winnipeg including: the Hungarian Scholarship (1901); the Harkanyi Prize, Budapest International Exhibition (1903); the Rothschild's Travelling Scholarship (1903); as well as a medal for "Best Collection of Pictures in the Winnipeg Exhibition" of 1909, including the "First Prize for Portraits in O i l " , "First Prize for Miniatures on Ivory" and "Gold and Silver 32 Medals for Best Paintings". Unfortunately so little else is known about Keszthelyi's works and his teachings, that his influence upon FitzGerald's works cannot be determined. Seated Man of 1909 (Slide 1) was probably a classroom figure study that FitzGerald had done while a student at the Keszthelyi's School of Art. It portrays a middle-aged man resting on a simple wooden chair, his shoulders rounded and his hands resting between his legs. This charcoal drawing reveals the latent talent the young FitzGerald possessed, both in draughtsmanship and the modelling of forms. In 1911 he exhibited for the first time a few of his landscapes at his old haunt, the Winnipeg Public Library. Unfortunately, it is not known which these are. It is possible that one of the works was a small (8" x 10-1/2") landscape oil entitled Woodland (listed in the Appendix), since it is the only known work of that year. This was exhibited at the Morris Gallery in February 1973, but its present location is known, and no reproduction of this work has been found to date. 11 It was not until 1912, at the age of 22, that FitzGerald decided to 33 commit himself wholly to the field of art and in particular, to painting. This was to be his full time profession. On November 25th this same eventful year, he married Felicia Vally Wright, a singer who had been born and raised in 34 Ottawa. On March 30, 1916, their first child, Edward, was born and three years later on March 25, 1919, their daughter, Patricia, was born. Although he devoted a considerable amount of time to his development as a painter up until the middle of the 1920's, he also (for financial reasons) had many related short term jobs. While the real estate boom lasted, he drew maps 35 for an advertising agency. Then, he took up decorating windows for Eaton's display department, as well as designing and painting scenery for theatre groups like the Community Players of Winnipeg. According to Bovey, through the Winnipeg Little Theatre, FitzGerald made a number of very close friends, including Arnold and Florence Brigden of Brigdens of Winnipeg Ltd., the photoengraving firm, and Claude and Mrs. Sinclair. Both Mrs. Brigden and Mrs. Sinclair acted in the theatre and both couples were avid art collectors, 36 and through the years bought many of his works. 37 In 1912 the Winnipeg Art Gallery was opened. According to Robert Ayre, FitzGerald shared a studio with Donald MacQuarrie, the new curator, and that "MacQuarrie, himself "a painter in the Corot tradition, had some influence on 38 the younger man's work." Unfortunately, so little is known about the works of MacQuarrie that it is very difficult to surmise what influence his works may have had on F i t z G e r a l d . ^ 12 In 1913, FitzGerald exhibited a work entitled The Dying Embers of 40 Autumn in the Royal Canadian Academy Exhibition held in Montreal. This was the first of his paintings to be exhibited with the Royal Canadian Academy and he continued to exhibit with them regularly for the next several years. Unfortunately, little is known about The Dying Embers of Autumn; there is no reproduction available and its present location is unknown. It would be assumed that the medium would have been o i l , but even that is uncertain. It is known that FitzGerald had a preference for the colours of the last stages of autumn, and that this was a preference he retained all of his life. Speaking of the beauty of late autumn, he once said, Even though all the autumn colour had gone from the trees, there was definitely colour. True, it was of a delicate nature, and required more concentration to see than the richer tones of early f a l l . But the very delicacy gave it a charm and a sense of vastness that more obvious colour would never have achieved. If I have any preference in the seasons, perhaps, this time of the year comes closest to it. The greyness and delicacy of land and sky have a particular appeal for me, a greater emotional impact than any other period. . . . The high delicate key of colour in the late fall has a particular quality that is the most satisfying and has dominated my selection in colour arrangement.^ This statement is also important for considering the colour of FitzGerald's later autumn coloured still lifes like Jar of 1938 (Slide 12). This preference for this greyness and delicacy of the land and sky is also seen in an oil painting from 1914, which is perhaps typical of his earliest works (up to 1920). It is an untitled work referred to as Manitoba Winter (Slide 2). This small oil painting (6-1/2" x 8-1/2") is in a private collection in Winnipeg.^ The colouring of the work ranges from pastel browns, greys to off-whites, giving the work a calm and sombre quality. In comparison to his later works, it appears 13 quite loosely organized, although the eye is led by the inverted V curve of the line of barren trees, from the right foreground into the left middle-ground and back into the right background, to the focal point which is the small farm house. The painted surface is only slightly textured. This painting appears to have the flavour of a fairly quickly executed oil sketch, where details are left quite vague and the artist is simply attempting to capture the overall feeling of the scene. In 1916, FitzGerald received some recognition for his Prairie Trail of c. 1916, which he had exhibited in Montreal at the R . C . A . annual exhibition. H. Mortimer-Lamb, The Studio correspondent, wrote, "something of the vastness of the prairie country and the feeling it inspires was well suggested in Mr. 43 FitzGerald's Prairie T r a i l . " Locally, FitzGerald was also beginning to receive recognition. He exhibited at the Fourth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by Western Artists held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, then located in the Industrial Bureau. This exhibition was held on June 13, 1916. The catalogue of the exhibition unfortunately provides little information. It only lists the name of the artist, title of the work, and the price of each of the fifty works on display. L.L. FitzGerald exhibited eight works, all landscapes/ ranging in price from $15.00 for his work entitled Grey Day, to $150.00 for his work entitled Prairie Trail. (Other well known local artists of the period who exhibited at this exhibition were W . J . Phillips, F.H. Fripp and H. Valentine Fanshaw.) In 1918, FitzGerald received some national recognition. The National Gallery of Canada purchased Late Fall, Manitoba of 1918 (Slide 3). It is 14 somehow appropriate that the first oil painting that the National Gallery chose to buy for their collection should have been a work depicting FitzGerald's favourite time of the year — late autumn. In writing of FitzGerald's earliest works, including his Late Fall, Manitoba, Davis writes, these "are characterized by quick application of rather thin paint, resulting in a somewhat scrubbed and 44 hazy image. Here volume and colour predominate over line." In his earliest works, like Manitoba Winter (1914) and Late Fall, Manitoba (1918) perhaps certain relationships between the work of the young FitzGerald and the works of 'Corot influenced1 MacQuarrie can be seen. Both of these works use a very limited palette of sombre greys, greens and browns, avoiding strong value contrasts. The influence of MacQuarrie, his former colleague, might also be detected in the depiction of the soft hazy fluffiness of the foliage in Late Fall, Manitoba, which suggests the late works of Corot. However in his early works, he is basically interested in recording nature; it is in the mature FitzGerald that his own unique vision will be found. FitzGerald's works from boyhood to 1919, centred on one subject, landscape ~ in particular landscape of his home region, the prairies of Southern Manitoba. He enjoyed depicting the prairies in each of the four seasons, but — as acknowledged —: it was the late fall that he most preferred. He drew and painted not only vast prairie scenes, but also the woods and rivers around Winnipeg. His choice of landscape as the theme for the works of his youth (and indeed landscapes formed the majority of his life's works) is not at.all surprising since FitzGerald had an enormous love of nature. His earliest works tended to be small in size and pastel in colour, and more concerned with depicting the scene as it actually appeared rather than imposing any intellectually structured modifications. This was also true of his colour. He chose the colours of nature, the subtle greens and browns.ofthe prairies, and applied them in a strictly naturalistic way. At this stage in his development, FitzGerald was not yet as involved in the study of colour and li t as he was to become in his impressionistic works of the early 1920's. 16 CHAPTER I F O O T N O T E S ^The Wanderer, "I First Saw, " The Winnipeg Tribune," December 21, 1923. In this statement, FitzGerald is referring to school children. 2 Thomas Papers, L.L. FitzGerald, "Painter of the Prairies," C . B . C . Wednesday Night Talk, December 1, 1954, typescript, p. 1. 3 Ibid. 4 Queen's University Archives, Ayre Papers, Robert Ayre, "Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald," typescript unpublished article, p. 3. 5 Dale Amundson, "Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald," (unpublished B.F.A. thesis, University of Manitoba, 1963) p. 7. Records information obtained from Mrs. Perry, FitzGerald's sister. ^Patricia Bovey, "The Man, " Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, The Development of an Artist, Exhibition Catalogue (The Winnipeg Art Gallery: 1958) p. 12. " ^Amundson, "Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald," p. 7. .) 8 Nellie H. George, " L . L . FitzGerald, The Prairie Artist, " The Manitoba Teacher (March - April, 1958), p. 12. Unfortunately the artist represented in this large reproduction is not known. 9 Queen's University Archives, Ayre Papers, Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Robert Ayre, July 25, 1949. ^Elizabeth Holt, From the Classicists to the Impressionists: A Documentary History of Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Doubleday and C o . , Inc., 1966), p. 117. Includes a quote by Ruskin as recorded in Holt. '^Ruskin's writings as recorded in: Harold Osborne, The Oxford Companion to Art (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1970), p. 1026. 12 Holt, Classicists to the Impressionists, p. 118. 17 13 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Volume I: Of General Principles and of Truth (Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1873) as recorded in: Holt, Classicists to the Impressionists, p. 124. 14 Holt, Classicists to the Impressionists, p. 118. 15 ^Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Robert Ayre, July 25, 1949. *6Henry Frantz, "The Art of Richard Parkes Bornington, 1801 - 1828." The International Studio, 24 (December 1904), p. 99. l 7 | b i d _ . , p. 104. 1 8 | b i d . , p. 108. 19 Ibid., p. 111. 20 Refer to Chapter II: Impressionistic Period 1920 - October 1921, for a more comprehensive handling of Impressionism and how it relates to FitzGerald's work. 21 Probably one of the Millet prints was of The Angelus, since it was more widely known from reproductions than any other in that century. Millet's The Sower and The Gleaners were also very popular, and many school and church Classrooms had reproductions of these three works hanging on the wall. 2 2 A y r e , " L . L . FitzGerald, " p. 6. 23 Refer to the stylistic discussion of Potato Patch, Snowflake, 1925, for more information regarding Millet's influence on FitzGerald. 24 Bovey, "The M a n , " L.L. FitzGerald Catalogue, p. 12. 25 Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Robert Ayre, July 25, 1949. 2 6 A y r e , " L . L . FitzGerald," p. 5. 27 Dr. Ferdinand Eckhardt, "Introduction," L.L. FitzGerald 1890 - 1956: A Memorial Exhibition (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, Mortimer Ltd., 1958). 28 University of Victoria, Creative Canada - A Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth Century Creative and Performing Artists (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), p. 111. 29 Winnipeg School of Art, "Prospectus 1921 - 1922," n.p. 18 -Robert Ayre, "Painter of the Prairies, " Weekend Magazine, 8, 12 (1958), p. 26. 31 Ann Davis, "A North American Artist," Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, The Development of an Artist, Exhibition Catalogue (The Winnipeg Art Gallery: 1958), p. 28. Contains a quote from: "Winnipeg School of Fine Arts, " The Winnipeg Free Press, July 11, 1910. 32 Winnipeg Art Gallery Files, "Winnipeg School of Fine Arts," The Winnipeg Free Press, July 11, 1910. 33 Peter Mellen, The Group of Seven (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970), p. 182. 34 Letter from Dr. Eckhardt to Mrs. Hagmeier, February 10, 1968. Lists the marriage date as November 22, 1912. 35 Ayre, "Painter of the Prairies," p. 26. 36 Bovey, "The M a n , " L.L. FitzGerald Catalogue, p. 14 (paraphrased). 37 Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 160. States that the Winnipeg Art Gallery opened in 1913. 38 Ayre, " L . L . FitzGerald," p. 7. 39 Refer to the stylistic discussion of FitzGerald's Late Fall, Manitoba, 1918. Suggests certain possible influences that MacQuarrie had on FitzGerald's work. 40 Reid, Concise History, p. 160. States that the 1913 R . C . A . Exhibition was held in Winnipeg to inaugurate the new art gallery. There appears to be some discrepancy over its location. Davis, "A North American Artist," L.L. FitzGerald Catalogue, p. 28. States that it was held in Montreal. 41 Thomas Papers^ "Painter of the Prairies," C . B . C . Wednesday Night Talk, p. 1. 42 I was fortunate to have been allowed to photograph this work, while I was in Winnipeg in the summer of 1975. The owners, however, did not wish to be acknowledged. 43 H. Mortimer-Lamb, "Studio Talk," The International Studio, 67 (February - May, 1916), p. 66. The present location of Prairie Trail is unknown and there is no available reproduction of this work. 44 Davis, " A North American Artist," L.L. FitzGerald Catalogue, p. 28. 19 CHAPTER II IMPRESSIONISTIC PERIOD (1920 - OCTOBER 1921) In FitzGerald's works of the early 1920's (1920 - October 1921), it is apparent that the artist has entered a new phase in his stylistic development.^ The two best and most characteristic examples of this period are Summer, East 2 Kildonan of 1920 (Slide 4) and Summer Afternoon, The Prairie of 1921 (Slide 5). These works, unlike his more sombre-toned earlier works (up to 1919), are light, vibrant works with a freer handling of paint and a concern for the effect of sun- light on a landscape. What could have caused FitzGerald to have suddenly lightened and brightened his palette? FitzGerald, certainly, had not seen any original paintings done by the French Impressionist painters when he painted these works, yet their influence is apparent. It is probable that FitzGerald's development of an impressionistic technique was derived from three sources. First, from looking at reproductions of the works of the French Impressionists. Indeed, The Winnipeg Tribune of December 21, 1923, mentioned that FitzGerald had "gained experience through looking at what others have done in reproductions." The author of this article quotes FitzGerald as follows: 'We (in Winnipeg) have a wonderful background for the development of artists here and a freedom from some unnecessary influences. But we at the same time are handicapped by a lack of representative works of the old and new masters of painting which are essential in the progress of the 20 artist, and in increasing appreciation on the part of the general public. Further it is of great importance that the younger generation be able to see these things of beauty when they are building their mental attitudes for the future, when the contact with fine examples would be of the greatest significance in not only their appreciation of art, but of nature.1 The author continues, . . .Mr. FitzGerald has given expression to a view, endorsed by many other artists, that in these days of fine reproductions and their comparatively low cost it would be an excellent idea to have a number in the schools where children could live with them from day to day.^ The above article highlights two important points. First, that FitzGerald believed that the knowledge of the great masters in painting was essential to an artist's development. Second, that good quality, low cost reproductions were 4 available in Winnipeg at this time. The second source responsible for FitzGerald's change in technique was probably illustrated art magazines like The International Studio. From 1904 - 1920, The International Studio published many good articles on the Impressionist 5 artists. Even the early 1904 article on Bonington contained several references to Impressionism. FitzGerald, intrigued by this article, surely must have tried to gain more information about Impressionism. The December issue of this [ournal contained a one page advertisement for a series of articles entitled "The Impressionists and Impressionism" by Charles Louis Borgmeyer, which were to be published in Fine Arts Journal. The ad reads this series will contain, . . .at least one hundred and twenty reproductions of pictures by Manet, Claude Monet, Cezanne, Degas, Renoir, Pissaro, Sisley, • . . etc. etc. Therefore, certainly by 1920, FitzGerald, through his reading, would have been aware of the works of the Impressionists and their technique. 21 The third source, probably in part responsible for the development of FitzGerald's impressionistic technique, was the influence of other contemporary Canadian artists. This third source is difficult to substantiate or pinpoint to a specific contact with a specific artist. According to Joan Murray, Impressionism 7 was introduced into Canada in the mid-1890's. Some Canadian artists felt the impact of Impressionism, indirectly, through their contacts with American artists, who were working in an impressionistic style. Between 1890 - 1920 many Canadian artists, including Maurice Cullen,A.Suzor-Cote, James Morrice and A . Y . Jackson went to France to study. These artists would have had the opportunity to see and study, directly, from the original works of the French Impressionists. Concerning the Canadian artists' interest in Impressionism, Joan Murray, has stated: The works of the Impressionist influenced painters were poorly received by the public. To combat this indifference Canadian artists formed the Canadian Art Club of 1907. Through the influence of the Club and Montrealers such as A . Y . Jackson, the style became one of the sources of inspiration for the founding members of Canada's national school, the Group of Seven, which held its first group exhibition in 1920, by which time most of the Group had developed, beyond Impressionism to an acceptance of Post-Impressionism ideas. By 1920, knowledge of artists such as Maurice Cullen and Marc-Aurele de Foy Suzor-Cote should have penetrated as far west as Winnipeg. In The International Studio, FitzGerald would certainly have read about and seen reproductions of their works and those of Tom Thompson and the Group of Seven 9 artists, even if he had not had the opportunity to as yet see any originals. Writing to Frank Johnston on October 19, 1921, from a train passing through Algoma on the way to Ottawa, FitzGerald remarked, " . . . t o just see your 22 interpretation and then the real thing gives me a more intimate feeling towards the work that you and the others have been d o i n g . " ^ This statement reveals that FitzGerald was aware of the works of the Group of Seven painters prior to October of 1921. FitzGerald may have seen his first original painting by A . Suzor-Cote in October of 1921. The Canadian Art of Today Exhibition held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery from October 15th to December 10th, 1921, contained one of Suzor- Cote's oils, Veil lard de Chez Nous, valued at $ 1 , 0 0 0 . 0 0 . ^ The exhibition catalogue contains this caption below this work: A . Suzor-Cote, R . C . A . Born in Quebec. Studied abroad. He is a most gifted artist and his models of the habitant have a quaint appeal. His subjects are varied and colourful. He has received many honours at home and a b r o a d . ^ This quote reveals the excellent reputation Suzor-Cote had already developed by 1921 in Canada and abroad. FitzGerald was also represented at this exhibition, with his o i l , Summer, East Kildonan, valued at $375.00. Even a strictly monetary value comparison, shows the degree to which Suzor-Cote was already considered a well established and recognized artist. It would seem that FitzGerald would have seen reproductions of Suzor-Cote's works prior to this date. Having considered possible sources for the development of FitzGerald's impressionistic style, it might be of interest to consider how closely FitzGerald's work compares with the work of the French Impressionist painter, Claude Monet. Monet's The Garden, Giverny (1902) might be considered a characteristic example of Impressionism. 23 The Garden, Giverny portrays the effect of sunlight on a landscape. In order to capture the effects of outdoor light, the artist has disregarded local colour. Colour became only the result of the play of light. The artist endeavoured to achieve these effects by juxtaposing small strokes of pure colour to obtain the desired brilliancy. The transitional greys, ochres, browns and blacks, were avoided in favour of these brighter, often unmixed hues. In Monet's The Garden, Giverny it is the depiction of sunlight reflecting on flowers, trees and garden path which is the artist's main concern. This passion for recreating the effects of light causes Monet to almost abandon contour, modelling and any precise details of the scene. His technique (which was characteristic of the Impressionists) to capture the shimmering quality of light, was to apply thick small flecks or. dabs of pure colour using short, quick brush strokes. FitzGerald through his readings of Ruskin's Elements of Drawing was already aware of the theory, which-advocated using a stippling technique of pure colour over a white ground. Having read about Impressionism and having studied the reproductions of the Impressionists, FitzGerald probably decided to experiment and try to create his own variation of this style using the prairie landscape as his subject. Summer, East Kildonan of 1920 displays his interpretation of Impressionism. Like the French Impressionists, FitzGerald probably painted this work out-of-doors (plein air), and his works of this period emphasize the effect of sunlight on the prairie. Although Bovey writes; 24 FitzGerald did not work like the Impressionists. He did work outdoors but usually in watercolours or even pencil. . . . Also FitzGerald executed studies and sketches.'^ This would not seem to be true in the case of Summer, East Kildonan or his other painting from this period, like Summer Afternoon, the Prairie (1921). Both these works appear to have been executed out-of-doors, in a spontaneous fashion without the use of preparatory sketches. This seems to be substantiated by Ayre's quote, that FitzGerald (referring to his works prior to 1924) "gave up the quick and easy 14 style of his oil paintings and turned to watercolour, etching and drawing." The words "quick and easy" imply that they were executed in a short period of time and without the use of preparatory drawings. FitzGerald's technique of painting in these works is certainly that of French Impressionism. A comparison of Monet's The Garden, Giverny and FitzGerald's Summer, East Kildonan reveals certain similarities between these two works. Both portray basically the same subject matter, including a path leading to a small country house, encircled by trees, and completely showered in sunlight. Both artists have portrayed beautifully the sunlight breaking through the trees, creating dappled sparkles of light on the ground below. In both paintings the actual subject is the beautiful and complex quality of light which creates such gorgeous patterns, and not merely a depiction of a local summer landscape. The landscape has become only a vehicle for the expression of the effect of sunlight on the colour in nature. FitzGerald's interest in the depiction of sunlight was already recognized in 1921. In the catalogue of the Canadian Art of Today Exhibition, in which FitzGerald had exhibited his o i l , Summer, East Kildonan, is written, " L . L . FitzGerald, 25 Winnipeg's native son, whose studies have been greatly to his own credit. He 15 specializes in the painting of light." In The Garden, Giverny, Monet has increased the emphasis shadows play in his work and minimized the role of contour and form. FitzGerald's Summer Afternoon, The Prairie (1921) is a definite step closer to Monet, in its disintegr ation of mass, than his earlier, Summer, East Kildonan (1920) which reveals a clearer expression of form as seen in the depiction of the trees and the house. In Summer Afternoon, The Prairie (1921) the contours and forms of the house, wagon and row of trees are barely discernible. The broken dab technique, results in FitzGerald's elimination of all precise details, and has the effect of minimizing perspective. Painted in a naturalistic way, this scene would have revealed the feeling of wide open spaces ending in a distant horizon which is typical of the prairies. Instead, FitzGerald's impressionistic handling draws attention to the actual textured surface of the painting. Like the Impressionists, FitzGerald rejects the local colours of nature (for example, green grass) and reveals the colours of nature as a result of the play of light and reflections (for example, green grass that contains shades of blue, pink, red, orange, purple and yellow). The vibrancy of this work is a result of the use of broken strokes of juxtaposed complementaries, which create a rhythm over the painted surface of the canvas. In Summer Afternoon, The Prairie, his handling of paint has become more textured than his early oil Summer, East Kildonan. FitzGerald has now laid his paint on in thicker, more distinctive dabs. However, FitzGerald soon turned from this "quick and easy" style of painting. Like Seurat and Cezanne, whom he admired, he outgrew his early 26 impressionistic style of painting and in the years to come began searching for alternate modes of expression. He was to develop a strong concern for structure and to become interested in capturing the essential quality of the scene, rather than accidental or transitory effects. It was also in 1921, that he began to realize how much he admired the works of the Group of Seven painters. According to Reid: The decorative side of FitzGerald's art found support with the arrival in September, 1921, of Frank Johnston of the Group of Seven to become principal of the Winnipeg School of Art. Johnston would have seen FitzGerald's show (One Man Exhibition, September, 1921), of course, but it was FitzGerald who was impressed. Writing to Johnston, (on October 19, 1921) from a train passing through Algoma on the way to Ottawa, FitzGerald remarked 'how already I appreciate the truth that you have caught in your things and the big decorative values. . . . To just see your interpretation and then the real thing gives me a more intimate feeling towards the work that you and the others have been d o i n g . ' 1 6 There had been a small opportunity for FitzGerald to be influenced by the decorative works of Johnston. Johnston, no doubt, saw FitzGerald's work at this One Man Exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and they would have discussed art in general and their own works in particular. But Johnston's direct influence was minimal, since after having met Johnston, FitzGerald began preparing for his trip to New York. Probably Johnston's greatest influence was an indirect one, in that it was he who probably suggested to FitzGerald to study at the Art Students' League in New Y o r k . ' 7 Johnston, having studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and worked in New York in 1910, knew the value of getting formal art training outside of Canada and felt that the most progressive American school in the early 1920's was the Art Students' League in New York. Johnston had valued his New York 27 experience and in 1914, with the financial help of Dr. MacCallum, returned for another year. ^ Had FitzGerald chosen to remain in Winnipeg, with the newly appointed principal of the Winnipeg School of Art, he might have developed a decorative style of painting similar to Johnston's The Dark Woods of c. 1921. Instead, at the age of 31, with only a little money, either in his pocket or to support his family while he was away, he left to study in New York. Robert Ayre, writes of this turning point in FitzGerald's career, stating that until about 1921, he had . . .painted quickly and easily, developing a breezy Impressionism. People liked it and FitzGerald might have slipped into a formula and become a popular painter. But he wasn't satisfied. It was too easy. It had nothing to do with the thing inside that was struggling for expression. After nearly ten years, he realized that the time had come for another break. In December, 1921, he went to New York and enrolled in the Art Students' League. To pay for the adventure, he helped an interior decorator paint mansion on Long Island and his wife ran a tearoom in Toronto. For the first time, he was away from home.'^ 28 CHAPTER II F O O T N O T E S It is possible that FitzGerald could have experimented with his own variation of Impressionism prior to 1920, but there are no known dated oils to substantiate this theory. 2 Summer Afternoon, The Prairie was included in FitzGerald's first One Man Exhibition, held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery from September 10th to 27th, 1921. The Exhibition Catalogue lists a total of 41 works on display; 30 oils, 10 pastels and 2 decorative paintings. All of these according to their titles, would appear to have been landscapes. ^The Wanderer, "I First Saw, " The Winnipeg Tribune, December 21, 1923. 4 By 1920, the French Impressionists were so well known in Europe and in many parts of the United States and Canada, that reproduction of their works would certainly have been available in Winnipeg for FitzGerald to study. Unfortunately, FitzGerald does not make reference to having seen reproductions of the works of the French Impressionists in any of his later writings. 5 Two of the better articles were: Martin Wood, "The Grosvenor Howe Exhibition of French A r t , " The International Studio, 54 (November 1914), pp. 3-11. Martin Wood, "Modern French Pictures at the National Gallery," The International Studio, 63 (November 1917: February 1918), pp. 53-56. ^The International Studio, 48 (December 1912), p. 23. ^Joan Murray, Impressionism in Canada (Art Gallery of Ontario, 1973), p. 10. " g Ibid., p. 11. 9 The International Studio had a fairly good coverage of well known Canadian artists. There is an excellent article on Tom Thompson, refer to: H. Mortimer-Lamb, "Studio Talk," The International Studio (July - September 1919), pp. 119-126. 29 Peter Mellen, The Group of Seven (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970), p. 221. Actual source of FitzGerald's quote is a letter in the possession of Paul Rodrik. ^The present location of this work is unknown. At present, there is no reproduction of this work available. It is assumed that this work would have been executed in an impressionistic technique since (according to Joan Murray, p. 90) Suzor-Cote had been influenced by Impressionism as early as 1893. 12 Canadian Art of Today Exhibition Catalogue (Winnipeg Art Gallery: 1921), p. 5. 13 Patricia Bovey, "Some European Influences, " Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Exhibition Catalogue, Winnipeg Art Gallery: 1978), p. 78. 14 Queen's University Archives, Ayre Papers, Robert Ayre, "Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald," unpublished article, nd. typescript, p. 9. 15 Canadian Art of Today Exhibition Catalogue, p. 5. '^Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 160-161. Contains a FitzGerald quote found in a letter in the possession of Paul Rodrik. Refer to: Mellen, p. 221 . Helen Coy (FitzGerald Study Centre) suggests that FitzGerald's contact with Augustus Vincent Tack in 1920 may have influenced FitzGerald's choice of New York for study. According to Coy, Augustus Vincent Tack, a teacher at the Art Students' League in New York, had come to Winnipeg in 1920, to install his murals in the Manitoba Legislative Chamber. (Helen Coy, L. LeMoine FitzGerald Exhibition Catalogue (March 7-29, 1977), p. 5.) It appears that FitzGerald assisted A . V . Tack to install these canvases. This is further clarified in a letter from Helen Coy to Karen L. Sens, dated August 3, 1978. There is an interview in The Manitoba Free Press, dated November 22, 1924 which details FitzGerald's recent experience, and states, 'He assisted A . V . Tack in connection with the latter's decoration of the Manitoba Legislature Chamber.' . . . It is unlikely FitzGerald did more than help with the actual installation of the Tack canvases, since The Winnipeg Free Press of July 16, 1920 reports that these same canvases had previously been exhibited by Tack in New York and had 'created a decided sensation'. ^ M e l l e n , The Group of Seven, p. 209. 19 Robert Ayre, "Painter of the Prairies, " Weekend Magazine, 8, 12 (1958), p. 26. 30 CHAPTER III NEW YORK PERIOD (DECEMBER 1921 - M A Y 1922) During the 1920's, New York was unquestionably the centre of modern art in America. The sympathetic critics were there and a number of new progressive art galleries had opened on 57th Street. Aspiring artists were drawn to this metropolis to obtain their formal art training and to see the great art collection contained in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many artists chose to study at the well known Art Students' League, where freedom rather than tradition was emphasized. Students were interested in the development of art following Impressionism and in artists such as Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso. No doubt, FitzGerald, having made his decision to study at the Art Students' League, was determined to learn as much as possible in the few months that he could afford to devote to a full-time study of art. He must have been filled with the hope of returning to Winnipeg in the spring of 1922, full of inspiration and new knowledge and perhaps with even a new style. When FitzGerald arrived in New York in December of 1921, a large exhibition, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings had recently closed, on September 15th, after having been on view since May 3rd at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This exhibition contained over a hundred paintings, including twenty-three by Cezanne, seven by Van Gogh, ten by Gauguin and nine by 31 Matisse.^ This exhibition was ranked as the most important exhibition of Cezanne's work ever assembled in America to that date. The mere fact that this exhibition was organized by the Museum was regarded as proof that Post- 2 Impressionism had 'arrived' in America. Just prior to the closing of the exhibition, an anonymous protest was launched against the Museum's Exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings. A group, calling themselves "a Committee of Citizens and Supporters 3 of the Museum" voiced their protest in print denouncing Post-Impressionism. This protest circulated widely through the mail and in the public press. The controversy that developed inspired letters to the Editor, as far away as in the London Times. The notoriety this exhibition received assures us that FitzGerald would have heard about this show even though it had closed in mid-September. He would surely have seen the Exhibition catalogue, with the introduction written by Bryson Burroughs, an Art Students' League instructor. It contained 5 reproductions of over forty of the paintings exhibited. No doubt, FitzGerald's curiosity must have been stimulated and he would have gone to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see and study the small collection of Post-Impressionists'works contained in the museum's own collection. One of the works he would have seen was Cezanne's View of the Domaine Saint Joseph of c. 1895-1897. This painting was purchased by the Museum at the Armory Show in 1913, for a price higher than any other painting in the Show ($6,700).^ It also has the distinction of being the first Cezanne to enter a public collection in America. According to the Metropolitan Museum's Catalogue of French Paintings, 32 This landscape is one of the very few that satisfied Cezanne sufficiently to lead him to sign his name. The fact that he considered as finished, and affixed his signature to, a painting which shows many areas of bare canvas proves his regard for the contrast he achieved by deliberately leaving these places unpainted. The feathery touch of the brush and these bare areas relate the picture in style to works of his maturity.'' This painting was the only Cezanne in the Metropolitan Museum's art collection at the time of FitzGerald's first trip to New York in 1921-22. Aside from looking at and studying Post Impressionist works on his own, FitzGerald may even have attended a talk, Post-Impressionism and its Sequel, given by Frank J . Mather, Jr. on January 28, 1922, at 4:0 p.m. at the g Metropolitan Museum of Art. Talks on Degas and Seurat were given on 9 February 18 and March 4, respectively. It is apparent that the interest in Post- Impressionism had not waned during FitzGerald's stay from December 1921 to May 1922. FitzGerald's main objective in coming to New York was to study at the Art Students' League. The account records of theLeague show that FitzGerald took four classes under the direction of Boardman Robinson from December to March and two classes under the direction of Kenneth Hayes Miller in March and May of 1 9 2 2 . ^ Ayre describes the New York experience, as follows: FitzGerald got, as he said afterwards, "a sudden jolt into everything" and it knocked him off his balance. For six weeks he did nothing but struggle to get his bearings, worried that he was wasting his time. Then, with a sudden burst of energy he really started to work. Pausing to look at what he was doing one day, the teacher, Boardman Robinson, exclaimed in surprise, "What's happened to you?" " O h , I just got mad," FitzGerald replied. "Then stay mad." was Robinson's advice. FitzGerald stayed mad. He worked almost violently to make use of what he was learning. 1 1 33 A drawing, its whereabouts is now unknown, is reported by Dr. E.J. Thomas, to have a notation on the back to the effect that he had found a satisfactory means of expression and that this represented a new beginning.^ It is difficult to pinpoint what FitzGerald learned at the Art Students' League, since it imposed no prescribed courses of study, and therefore no prescribed methods of instruction. The standards of instruction were the standards of individual instructors who were permitted complete freedom of method. All League instructors were practicing artists, selected for their contributions to contemporary art. Instructors were hired on a yearly basis and on yearly salaries, so that the number of students attracted to an instructor did not in any way determine the instructor's salary. The student was as free as the instructor. He could enroll in any class for 13 any period. Therefore it can be assumed that FitzGerald selected to study under Boardman Robinson (listed as a Muralist) and Kenneth Miller (listed as a Figure Painter). According to Reid, "It was a moment at the League when ideas were first developing that by the end of the decade would emerge as American Scene painting. The smooth sculptural modelling that later became the hallmark of that style was 14 then being advanced." An analysis of the works of Boardman Robinson and Kenneth Miller of the early 1920's, perhaps will shed some light on how FitzGerald's study at the Art Students' League influenced his later style. In the early 1920's Boardman Robinson was primarily recognized for his political cartooning style in The Liberator. According to Milton Brown, he . . .had broken away from the older pen and ink tradition of cartooning and developed a style of drawing based on that of Michelangelo and Daumier, and the more recent French satirists, Forain and Steinlen. It was a style of crayon drawing, sketchy, powerful and realistic. 34 One of Robinson's earlier political cartoons entitled Cross Breaker (July 1912), is typical of his works of the teens and early twenties. It is a depiction of the social injustice that impoverished people must face. But rather than portraying an actual contemporary incident, Robinson choses to use symbolism, depicting a large Christ-like figure pleading for Justice with the 'poor' portrayed as the masses at his feet. It would appear that FitzGerald admired Robinson's work, but that he was more influenced by his mural paintings than his political cartoons. For it is known that later, during his trip East in 1930, FitzGerald made a special detour to see Robinson's ten murals on the History of Commerce for the Kaufmann Department Store in Pittsburgh. On June 11, 1930, FitzGerald wrote in his diary, . . .spent about an hour (in the Pittsburgh Shop). . . going from one (mural) to another . . . . Fairly thinly painted with very definite colors and fine drawing and modelling they are indeed a fitting climax to the rest of the decoration. They are possibly over robust, if anything, but for a departmental store being that is an asset. They would, I am sure, improve on second seeing and sorry I haven't the time or energy to tackle them in the afternoon. l o FitzGerald also tried to see his old art instructor when he visited the Art Students' League on June 19, 1930, but unfortunately Robinson was out of town at the time of his visit. ^ While on his way back to his native Winnipeg in 1922, FitzGerald executed Riviere des Prairies, P . Q . (Slide 7), which reveals a solid trace of Boardman Robinson's teaching. FitzGerald has completely changed his technique of painting, from using the rich impasto, as seen in his impressionistic works, like 35 Summer Afternoon, The Prairie, to using (FitzGerald's own description of Robinson's murals) "a fairly thinly painted (composition) with very definite 1 g colours and fine drawing and modelling." FitzGerald's second instructor while at the Art Students' League was Kenneth Miller, whose importance as an art instructor overshadows his efforts as a painter. His importance as a teacher is twofold. First, he urged his students to see the life of New York around them and second, he revived an interest in the technical methods and compositional theories of Renaissance and Baroque masters. The latter had the most effect on FitzGerald's art, and the compositional arrangements (e.g., pyramidal structure) sometimes used in his paintings stem from his awareness of the Renaissance painters, learned under the direction of Miller. Miller's own work is described unflatteringly by Milton Brown, as being, Influenced at first by Davies and Ryder, Miller whose sentimentally romantic early style leaned heavily upon the Renaissance, was groping for idyllic beauty. Being primarily a teacher, he was too prone to academicism, too concerned with theories and methods. Even in assimilating Renoir, after 1919, he managed to drain all the juice out of the master's lushness, producing globular, porcelain surfaces instead of warm vibrant f l e s h . ^ This is evident in Miller's painting Fourteenth Street, in that his people appear to be only vehicles for the study of human forms. Their bodies are totally revealed beneath their twentieth century clothes as though they had been clothed in classical wet drapery. Exactly what FitzGerald learned from Miller's paintings is difficult to surmise. No doubt, his teachings had strengthened FitzGerald's knowledge of the anatomy of the human body. The Art Students' League was then, primarily a life 36 school. Later, FitzGerald made use of his League training, when he executed his nudes of the 1930's - 1940's. FitzGerald's six month stay in New York was extremely important to his development as an artist, not only because he received his first full-time formal art training at the renowned Art Students' League, but also because it provided him with an opportunity for a firsthand study of the great masters in painting. Ayre writes, "For ever since FitzGerald discovered Cezanne as a student that winter in New York, he was intensely aware of structure, and the inevitability of forms is to be felt even in his drawings so faint that they can scarcely be seen." Certain other characteristics of Cezanne can be seen in FitzGerald's paintings of the twenties, which followed his New York experience. 37 CHAPTER III F O O T N O T E S /'An excellent series of articles on this exhibition are contained in: Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 16 (1921), pp. 46, 70, 94-96, 118, . 162, 179, 204-205. 2 | b i d . , p. 118. 3 l b i d . , p. 179. 4 l b i d . , pp. 204-205. 5 Loan Exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings (Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1921), pp. 1-28. ^Milton Brown, Armory Show, 50th Anniversary Exhibition Catalogue (New York, 1963), p. 51. ^Charles Sterling, French Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, III, 19th and 20th centuries (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 115. 8 Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 17 (1922), p. 23. 9 Ibid., p. 47 '^Winnipeg Art Gallery Files, Art Students' League Account Files, Account N o . 3413, Register N o . 1412. ^RobertAyre, "Painter of the Prairies," Weekend Magazine, 8, 12 (1958), p. 29. 12 Dale Amundson, "Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald." (University of Manitoba, 1963) unpublished B.F.A. thesis, p. 10. 13 For an excellent account of the aims and history of the Art Students' League, refer to: Marchal Landgren, Years of Art: The Story of the Art Students' League of New York (New York: Robert McBride and Company, 1940J, pp. 83-112. 38 14 Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 15. 15 Milton Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), p. 30. '^Karen L. Sens Papers, L.L. FitzGerald, 1930 Diary, June 11, 1930. 1 7 | b i d . , June 19, 1930. " 1 8 lb?d., June 1.1, 1930. 19 Brown, American Painting, p. 183. 20 Robert Ayre, "Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald," Montreal Star, May 3, 1956. 39 CHAPTER IV NEW DIRECTIONS (JUNE 1922 - M A Y 1929) .When FitzGerald returned to Winnipeg in the spring of 1922, he brought with him a changed style reflecting his New York experience. What was this style and whose influences can be seen in it? The first dated expression of his new style is a work, which has already been briefly discussed, Riviere des Prairies, P . Q . of 1922. This painting was executed on his trip back to Winnipeg, while his New York experience was still fresh in his mind. This oil reveals a solid trace of Boardman Robinson's mural technique of a "fairly thinly painted composition with definite colours, fine drawing and modelling." Yet this is not the only influence evident in this painting. It would appear that this work, and Potato Patch, Snowflake of 1925 (Slide 8) were influenced by Cezanne's View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph. No doubt, he had studied this work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at which time he likely would have discovered how effective leaving certain areas of the canvas unpainted had proved to be in Cezanne's famous painting and, consciously or unconsciously, began experimenting with this method. FitzGerald has used this method particularly effectively in his Potato Patch, Snowflake, 1925. Even the general compositional arrangement is similar to Cezanne's work. Both paintings depict a large hill 40 sloping in front of two smaller hills seen in the right background, only leaving a small band of sky at the top of the work. FitzGerald's treatment of the trees and surrounding vegetation is also somewhat reminiscent of Cezanne. He blocks in his tree and potato plant forms by building up patches of greens and browns, and by partially outlining their contours in a darker shade. The very subtle variations of tone, even within very small areas, is another characteristic of this work which recalls the work of Cezanne. Like Cezanne, he lays a great emphasis on weight and balance. He concentrates on the essential physical aspects of his subjects, seemingly endeavouring to bestow on them a quality of permanence and timeless- ness. Still other influences than that of Cezanne can be seen in Potato Patch, Snowflake of 1925. The apparent influence of Millet has been noted by Bovey. She states that FitzGerald . . . used a number of devices which Millet himself had worked to advantage. FitzGerald shows the figure's full height, giving him a monumentality by extending him through three-quarters of the height of the canvas. By repeating the colour of the field in the figure itself, and by using a rough technique throughout, he successfully fuses the farmer with the land. The impact of the figure is increased by the strong emphasis FitzGerald gives the hands.' Perhaps additional influences of the best known works of Millet can be detected in Potato Patch, Snowflake. One must remember that as a grade IV student he had seen reproductions of Millet, which according to Ayre, "had 2 struck a note but he had not understood." After having seen Millet's paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art he would have grasped wherein lay the greatness of Millet's works. A closer analysis of Potato Patch, Snowflake reveals characteristics other than those cited above which suggest Millet's influence. 41 FitzGerald has chosen to depict his farm workers as generalized types, by placing no emphasis on the figures' facial features. This gives the figures a universal quality as being 'types' or 'symbols', rather than individuals. In the manner of Millet, he composes a balanced painting, using a slightly modified pyramidal arrangement. Like Millet, he sets the figure or group of figures in a deep, landscape.in which their large size gives them a monumental quality. Reminiscent too of Millet is his unconvincing portrayal of his figures, in their roles as hard-working farmers. The position of the figure is vague with respect to the actual chore being done. The figure seems to be hoeing the row of cabbage- like potatoes, yet it appears to be very easy work, requiring little effort. There is a certain romantic quality, suggesting the 'good life on the farm1 apparent in works of both artists. No doubt, FitzGerald remembered his boyhood days on the farm with slightly romanticized memories. One major difference is found in the purpose of Millet's paintings and in that of Potato Patch, Snowflake. Whereas Millet it would seem intended his figures to be revered as symbols of the good life, FitzGerald apparently was not concerned with direct symbolism or reverence for his farm figures: the work appears to be a more casually executed painting which contains no hidden meanings. These works which FitzGerald executed upon his return from New York, reflect a new style of painting, which is fairly dependent upon external influences. His interest in this new style of painting did not last long and soon after he began teaching at the Winnipeg School of Art, he began searching for a new more personal style. 42 The teaching job at the Winnipeg School of Art represents the beginning of a new period in FitzGerald's life. For the first time since his decision to make art his livelihood, he was financially secure. The pay was low, but it was a steady income on which he could support his family. Prior to this it was through small commissions that he was able to provide, however meagerly, for his wife and children. His full-time appointment began in September 1924 as an "instructor 3 4 in Antique, Still Life and Design." He also acted as assistant principal. At this time the Winnipeg School of Art had a very limited staff consisting of the newly appointed director, Mr. C . K . Gebhardt, an Honour Graduate and past instructor at the Chicago Art Institute, who now taught Life Painting, Composition, Perspective, Applied and Graphic Arts; L.L. FitzGerald; Mr. W . C . Metge, who was an instructor in modelling; and Miss Vera Man, who was the instructor of the 5 Saturday Morning Class of Juvenile Antique. It is interesting to determine why FitzGerald was selected for this full-time position. His relatively recent return from studying in New York, and his known interest in art education and in the use of art reproductions in the schools, certainly would have made him a good choice for the position of instructor at the Winnipeg School of Art. Being a native of Winnipeg would also have added support to his selection, as well as the fact that his paintings were receiving increasing recognition, particularly in Eastern Canada. Yet, in addition to these reasons, it is probable that Frank Johnston, the former Principal of the Winnipeg School of Art, was at least partly responsible for the appointment. It has already been noted that he probably had suggested to FitzGerald that he should go to New York for study. Upon his return, Johnston had offered him a part-time position at the 43 School teaching evening classes.^ Before Johnston left his position as Principal of the Winnipeg School of Art in the summer of 1924, he undoubtedly recommended FitzGerald for a full-time appointment for the fall of that same year. The relationship between FitzGerald and Johnston had been quite close during the past few years and there is reason to believe that a mutual respect had developed. FitzGerald was known to have been impressed with Johnston's work and it is probable that Johnston admired FitzGerald's post New York period paintings. Likely Johnston would have been impressed with the fact that the National Gallery of Canada had purchased their first work from FitzGerald in 1918, while Johnston himself had not received this recognition until 1922. Through an article in The Winnipeg Free Press, is revealed the extent of happiness and pride this National recognition had meant to Johnston, "Johnston gave expression to the great pleasure it gave him by announcing that he was going to show what he felt about it by kissing the first policeman he'd m e e t . " 7 Thus Johnston must have respected FitzGerald for having received this recognition four years earlier. FitzGerald's period as an instructor at the Winnipeg School of Art was of great importance and represents a new development in his artistic growth. Ann Davis writes, In this second period, he turned inward, moving towards a greater concentration on a limited number of subjects. He chose to explore the variables inherent in his microcosm — be that the view from his window or the objects on the window sill — generalizes from there. Herein lies the secret and power of his work . . . To help solve some of his problems, FitzGerald switched medium, a tactic he was to use time and time again. He turned from painting to drawing and drypoint.^ 4 4 Although his days as art instructor were rich days for experimentation (primarily in his drawings and watercolours), the time restraints teaching made on FitzGerald also limited the number of oil paintings he executed during these years. The teaching position demanded long hours of concentrated effort. This left little time for his own work, except on week ends and holidays. The first dated oil which is representative of a new direction and a more personal style of painting (that he developed during this period), is Williamson's Garage of 1927 (Slide 9). The new clarity and solidity found in this work is a result of the endless pencil studies FitzGerald had executed since the mid-twenties. In both drawings and dry points, experimenting with various spatial and volumetric problems, he developed a clear linear method of working which he later adapted to his paintings. This clear solid approach is apparent in his Williamson's Garage, as well as in his other works of the late twenties and early thirties. In later life, he reflected on how he had developed his new style — first, in pencil and then — in paint. When I returned to Winnipeg I worked for a long time on small pencil drawings . They were very careful studies of trees thoughtfully composed into space and carried to as detailed a finish as I could take them. This was later extended to prairie studies of large skies and low horizons, developed with the same care. When I finally felt I could tackle a large canvas, in colour, I made only small preliminary composition notes and then painted the whole picture from nature making a most detailed drawing on the canvas before beginning the painting.^ This statement also helps to reveal FitzGerald's method of working during the mid to late twenties. 45 According to Robert Ayre, "Williamson's Garage was painted in FitzGerald's own backyard in St. James, when the temperature was below zero. The only concession he made to the cold was to work within a shell, a small shack with a stove in it, which he hauled about the yard on runners."^ Unlike his post New York paintings (1922-25), which appear to be casually executed and in which sections of the canvas were left unpainted, FitzGerald's new style of painting is more studied, and employs a very smooth overall technique. Instead of using patches of colour to suggest forms, FitzGerald builds up his forms through careful modelling. The trees are portrayed with individual qualities, while the garage is portrayed in a generalized fashion. It appears to be no more than a roofed cube, that acts as a backdrop for the trees. FitzGerald always retained a special feeling for trees. In a letter to Brooker, FitzGerald wrote, The seeing of a tree, a cloud, an earth form always gives me a greater feeling of life than the human body I really sense the life in the former and only occasionally in the latter. I rarely feel so free in social intercourse with humans as I always feel with trees. 1 1 Williamson's Garage, like his post New York period works (1922-25), still reveals a very classically arranged composition, once again employing the modified pyramidal arrangement to give the work its stability. FitzGerald, very conscious of balancing his composition, has framed this painting by placing a fence post on the extreme left on the canvas and a tree trunk on the extreme right. The positioning of the tree and their shadows establish diagonals which direct one's attention to the garage depicted in the immediate centre of the canvas. The range of colour in this work is fairly limited. 46 Unlike Potato Patch, Snowflake, Williamson's Garage is a more realistic portrayal of a prairie landscape, displaying a greater concern for form and space. FitzGerald would have composed this picture to a certain degree, adding or eliminating a tree, to achieve the desired effect, a unified balanced composition. Most often this would reduce the scene to its basic elements. It is this 'reduction to the essentials' that endows his paintings with their quiet reserved beauty. Williamson's Garage of 1927, was purchased in 1929 by the National Gallery of Canada for their permanent collection. Bertram Brooker's Yearbook lists it as one of the important acquisitions made by the National Gallery in that 12 year. The Winnipeg Free Press writes of this important event in FitzGerald's career (June 15, 1929). "FitzGerald has been informed from Ottawa that his oil painting Williamson's Garage had been acquired for the Canadian National •Collection. This came after it was shown at the Ontario Society of Artists and the Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, and also the exhibition of the 13 National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa." 47 CHAPTER IV F O O T N O T E S ' Patricia Bovey, "Some European Influences," Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Exhibition Catalogue (Winnipeg Arg Gallery, 1978), p. 74. 2 Ayre Papers, Robert Ayre, "Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, " unpublished article, n d . , typescript, p. 6. 3 Winnipeg School of Art, "Prospectus, 1924-25," n.p. ^Letter from Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald to Mr. McFaddin, dated October 1, 1951. 5 " Prospectus," 1924-25. ^Ann Davis, "A North American Artist, " Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald (Winnipeg Art Gallery: 1978), p. 32. Davis refers to actual source as being in: Ayre Papers, notes on The Winnipeg Tribune article of September 17, 1932, by Jocelyn Baker. 7 Winnipeg Art Gallery Files, The Winnipeg Free Press, June 15, 1929. 8 Davis, Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, p. 32. 9 Thomas Papers, L.L. FitzGerald, "Painter of the Prairies," C . B . C . Wednesday Night Talk, (December 1, 1954) typescript, p. 4. p. 29. 1 0Robert Ayre, "Painter of the Prairies, " Weekend Magazine, 8, 12 (1958), " Brooker Papers, Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Bertram Brooker, February 19, 1937. 12 Bertram Brooker, e d . , Yearbook of the Arts in Canada (Toronto: Macmillan C o . of Canada, 1936), p. 75. 13, The Winnipeg Free Press, June 15, 1929. 48 CHAPTER V SECOND TRIP EAST (JUNE 1 - JULY 1, 1930) Writing to his friend Bertram Brooker on January 11, 1930, FitzGerald mentions that he is planning a trip east, that is to go as far as New York, and that he intends to visit Toronto for a part of the time he is away.^ On June 1, 1930, he embarked on his important trip east which included stops at Minneapolis, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto. He left the Winnipeg School of Art prior to the end of the Winter Session, being able to get leave early because his journey was primarily a business trip in the interests of the Winnipeg School of Art. FitzGerald kept a diary while on his trip and faithfully wrote anywhere from a paragraph to a few pages each day he was away.^ The importance of this trip should not be underestimated. First, the trip provided FitzGerald with a good representation of current teaching methods and theories in American Art Schools as well as information about their administration, undoubtedly some of which could hopefully be implemented by the Winnipeg School of Art at a later date. Second, the trip gave him an opportunity to make contacts in the East, particularly in New York, for future exhibitions and sales of his work. It allowed him to establish friendships with his former Art Students' League acquaintances, including former students and teachers of the School. 49 Third, this trip provided an ideal opportunity to see current American Art. Last, but most important in terms of FitzGerald's stylistic development, was his rediscovery of the original works by the great modern masters, particularly those of the French, like Cezanne, Seurat, Courbet, etc. On June 3, 1930, FitzGerald visited the Malker Gallery in Chicago and saw a small art school showing. He records in his Diary that there were "mostly paintings all showing a decided leaning to the more modern thought and really not 3 so sincere in effort as the work being done in our own place." He visited the Chicago School of Art and talked to Mr. Kopietz, the Director, for about one hour, mostly concerning teaching methods and discipline in the School. FitzGerald wrote, Returned to school at this time and went from room to room looking at equipment and whatever work was on the walls. Possibly the commercial side a little over emphasized but they explained that it seemed necessary, still believing that the best course for commercial workers, the most fine of the Fine Art. . . . Numbers of the classes go into the sculpture gallery and draw from the casts. They have a great variety including many fine architectural things. . . . A museum is indeed a great advantage. FitzGerald also talked to Miss Vanderpool, one of the lady instructors at the Institute, he wrote, Just recently they made it compulsory that every student . . . must carry a sketch book. The first time that Miss Vanderpool asked them to hand them in, she found the usual thing that is they were making drawings rather to fill up the pages than because of a desire to analyse a subject that keenly interested them. . . • . she deplored the fact that the students that they have today seemed very little inclined to exhaust any given subject, to analyse with all the power they possessed. And she sighted Monet and his method of spending a whole summer on painting a single subject, at various times of the day. Of course, that was only one way.*' 50 He continued, S . . . This idea of more self-expression and the relating of all the various brands to one thing, seems to again assert itself in this school and apparently is a dominating idea in art instruction in the States. She is rather elderly and was educated in the old academic idea. She expressed the thought that it was difficult to fall in line with present art expressions and also difficult to know how far to let the students go along these lines. Being reasonably openminded and appreciating some of the things being done, the old thought came out that feeling has disappeared from paintings. As thoroughly aware "that they are done with great thought and draughtsmanship and not to be done quickly as they appear on the surface. Also after seeing a number of the modern things for a little time it was impossible to go into a room of later 19th Century painting and get anything from them or want to look at them. The Institute is certainly full of conflicting outlooks, as all large school are, from the most academic to the most radical and a healthy place for i t . ° After having talked to several representatives of the American Art Schools including those of the Chicago School of Art and the Pratt Institute, FitzGerald concluded that the problems American Art instructors were having, were similar to those facing the staff in his own school. One advantage the American schools have is that "practically all instructors only spend part time in the school; the balance being devoted to their own work. They find this a very good system as they 7 keep right up with the*time. " FitzGerald went to Lesch's Print Shop in New York City, where he saw a lot of very fine colour reproductions of the Moderns. He got information about photographic reproductions for the Winnipeg Art School and requested they send a copy of their Catalogue of Reproductions to the School. Unfortunately, he does not state which reproductions he saw. Having talked to the Directors of a few of the more important Art Schools of the East, FitzGerald now had gained another perspective on "how art is taught 51 It also reaffirmed his own confidence in the methods they were using in his own School. The contact he made with Lesch's Print Shop provided him with the opportunity to use good quality reproductions of the Moderns. These fine reproductions would attempt to balance out the disadvantage of not having a famous Museum or Gallery as a resource, where the students could see and study the originals. FitzGerald was interested in visiting New York for two additional reasons, first, a desire to make contacts for future exhibitions and the sale of his works and second, to re-establish friendships with old Art School acquaintances, both former teachers and students. FitzGerald's overview of New York's receptiveness to aspiring Canadian artists is best described in his own words, written in his Diary on June 24. "It is a most difficult place to get contacts with people and means a considerable effort and much time. One really has to have something to give and then give it most enthusiastically." This realization occurred after having talked 9 to A . V . Tack and F . K . M . Rehn, two New York Art acquaintances. On June 23, FitzGerald had shown his drawings to Tack, and was somewhat disappointed by Tack's comment that "he had a long road ahead and to just keep on was his advice. He thought the drawings exquisite and the line very sensitive but too realistic. FitzGerald found that last remark particularly interesting since it "sounds different to what Winnipeg thinks." Tack suggested that FitzGerald contact Rehn at the Rehn Gallery and that FitzGerald should say that 12 Tack had sent him and "to pile it on thick". When FitzGerald met Rehn, the next day, Rehn still remembered him from the old Art School Days. The following is FitzGerald's description of Rehn's response to his drawings, 52 He looked over the drawings rather hurriedly I thought, making very few comments and asking no questions when he was through I rather felt that they hadn't impressed him very much leaving me with the feeling that there wasn't much chance of any business. I told him a few things about myself such as the unsolicited invitations from the Arts and Letters Club and the Group of Seven and my own attitude towards art and also that I was not in need of money so that sales were not necessary and that the artists were buying drawings here and there. He suggested I send him six drawings down between now and October and he would start with these. Asked the prices I charged and told me 33 1/3% was his charge for the sales which sounded businesslike enough. This is a very small beginning but it is a start and I would much rather develop slowly anyway. He is on Fifth A v e . , near 57th St. in a comparatively new building and a very nice gallery so that he is really growing as Tack said. 'He would be a fine chap to get with.' I like the type of thing he is showing and feel quite interested to be in such company. He told me his first thought is that he must really like the things he (is showing) to be able to sell them and they must not be merely so called merchandise to be sold, which I would say is an excellent point of view. 1 ̂ FitzGerald's trip East was only a moderate success in terms of establishing contacts in New York and re-establishing friendships with his former Art School acquaintances. Due to the shortness of his visit to New York, he was not able to locate many of his old art colleagues. In particular, he had hoped to see Boardman Robinson, his former instructor at the Art Students' League during 1921-22. Unfortunately, Robinson was out of town, so FitzGerald was unable to discuss his artistic development of the last eight years with his old colleague. It is interesting to discover and to analyze which American artists were enjoying some respect and popularity in New York in June of 1930 and FitzGerald opinion of their works. The names of the artists who were then currently represented in Rehn's Gallery will perhaps provide some insight as to what the progressive art galleries were showing. According to FitzGerald's Diary (written in cryptic style), 53 A l l the work they are showing is by American painters following the modern trend, and some really fine things, Luks, Speicher, Kroll, McFee, John Bellow's lithos, (Chas Rosen), Karf I, etc. . . . One of Kenneth Hayes Miller's paintings. A particularly lovely drawing of two female figures, nude by Carroll in (f ) rubbed and then a very direct simple line. I liked this very much. McFee pencil drawing of some buildings in trees a hill behind, all liney and much in the manner of Cezanne but really fine in conception and an individual character, very unified. An early thing by Burchfield of a bank of trees, rhythmic swaying lines running across, in greens, had a fine feeling and was very simply done. A common ordinary frame house treated by Edward Hopper in a most unusual manner became quite beautiful. . . . oil by Carroll, I think painted at Woodstock has a fascinating quality both of colour and texture and a great sense of unity. The whole group looked like carefully selected things each containing some very interesting qualities and each distinctive . . . I like the type of thing he (Rehn) is showing and feel quite interested to be in such company.'^ Milton Brown's American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression, describes the developments in art in New York in the twenties and thirties. In the 1920's, realism though submerged, grew with cumulative strength along various lines. Out of the Ash Can tradition emerged three distinct streams — the rural American Scenists, the Social Realists, and the Fourteenth Street School. Although all three gained momentum during the 1920's, it was not until the economic debacle of 1929 and the subsequent depression of the 1930's that new social relationships, basic changes in the function of art, and new esthetic conceptions were to thrust realism into prominence again. ^ The year 1930 was midpoint between these two different directions in art, the 1920's had been the decade of "French Modernism", while the 1930's were to become the decade of "Social A r t " . It would appear that although there was an undercurrent of realism, it was the "modern trend", meaning "French Modernism" that was prevalent at the time of FitzGerald's trip to New York in 1930. What was this "French Modernism" in American painting? Numerous artists in the twenties had looked to the great French masters, such as Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse for inspiration. The artists FitzGerald mentioned as having been on 54 display at the Rehn Gallery were all followers of the "modern trend". Leon Kroll had absorbed enough Cezanne to give his work a plasticity and slightly modern flavour; . . . Henry Lee McFee was considered to have been influenced by Cezanne and Cubism; . . . and Bernard Karfoil's technique of linear accents, the broken edges, and colour brickwork was reminiscent of C e z a n n e . l o Other American artists, like Charles Burchfield, Edward Hopper, John Bellows and George Luks were familiar with the "modern trend" but were much more interested in realism. Realism in America had continued in the 1920's, though it had been somewhat submerged by the stronger and more sensational current of modernism. FitzGerald's brief visit to New York in June of 1930 had enabled him to see the two different directions in American art; "French Modernism" and "American Realism". FitzGerald absorbed aspects from these movements and he evolved his own method of merging the "regional" aspect, in his case, of the prairies, with the new formal values he learned from the Moderns. FitzGerald's trip east provided him with a second opportunity to study the original works of the "Modern French" artists. He saw most of these works in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is known that FitzGerald immensely enjoyed the works of the "Modern French" masters. On June 8, 1930, he sat for more than an hour in the Modern Room of the Chicago Art Institute and found it to be the most restful room. FitzGerald particularly admired Georges Seurat's Un Dimanche d'ete a la Grande-Jatte (1884-86), The very serene and exquisite Seurat; "Sunday in the Park" particularly enthused me. In this is a great feeling of reality and the people are really doing the things people will do in parks the world over. There is a real naivety through it all that only emphasizes the • real quality and the colour is beautiful, the feelings of sunlight extremely 55 fine and the colour, seems to give the glow that sunlight has. The very remarkable thing is that on such a huge canvas, such a technique would hold together and be so simple in the great masses all little strokes or spots of broken pigment superimposed. According to FitzGerald's Diary, this was the major work in the Modern Room. FitzGerald was impressed by the common reality of Seurat's subjects, i.e. his portrayal of an everyday scene of people in the parks, as well as by the universality of the subject, i.e., his portrayal of "parks the world over". Like Seurat, FitzGerald, too, was concerned with both common reality and universality. In this work, Seurat was still adhering to certain characteristics of Impressionism; in the depiction of a contemporary scene, and the interest in sunlight. FitzGerald admired the way Seurat could capture "the feelings . . . and . . . glow that sunlight has". Seurat juxtaposed light, bright, pure colours, which he applied using a broken technique to achieve greater brilliancy. Seurat, like the Impressionists, believed that the colour would be more luminous if they were mixed by the eye rather than on the palette. However, Seurat became more scientific in his application of paint adhering fairly closely to known colour theories. In order to study more carefully the interplay of colours and their complementaries, Seurat constructed, according to Chevreul's principles, a disc on which he brought together all of the hues of the rainbow, joined together by a number of intermediate colours: blue, natural ultramarine, artificial ultramarine, violet, purple, purple-red, carmine, red, vermilion, minium, orange, orange-yellow, yellow, greenish yellow, yellow-green, green, emerald green, very greenish blue, greenish cyanic blue, greenish blue, cyanic blue I and cyanic blue II, leading back to blue and thus closing the circle. In addition, Seurat used white which he mixed on his palette with the colours of this circle, thereby obtaining a host of tones, from a colour with only a trace of white in it to almost pure white. His disc could thus be completed in such a way that the pure hues would be concentrated around the center from which they would slowly fade toward white, a uniform ring of pure white forming the periphery. With the aid of this disc, Seurat could easily locate the • complementary of any colour or tone. . . . According to the law of 56 contrast a colour achieves its maximum of intensity when brought close to its complementary. But while two complementaries enhance each other through juxtaposition, they destroy each other when mixed. . . . The law of complementaries permits a colour to be toned down or intensified without becoming dirty; while not touching the colour itself, one can fortify or neutralize it by changing the adjacent colours. It is not altogether surprising to discover that Seurat worked on his canvas La Grande-Jatte for two years and that he prepared at least twenty preliminary 19 drawings and forty colour sketches. Seurat's method of creating this work is described by John Rewald in his book Post Impressionism from Van Gogh to Gauguin. His description highlights Seurat's formalized and scientific approach to painting. During the latter part of 1884 he started to make careful studies of the landscape and crowds in the public park or the island of La Grande Jatte. . . . For these studies done of the spot, on small wooden panels, Seurat did not use the slow and meticulous execution of little dots, but rather . . . vivid brush strokes, similar to those of the Impressionists. His colours, however, were pure, the elements balanced, and the law of contrasts observed. These panels, on which Seurat registered the particularities of the site and the incidental figures he saw there, were to provide the necessary "information" for his work, after being subjected to the rigorous requirements of his composition. Whenever he needed further details, he had models pose in his studio for drawings in which he finally determined the attitudes he wanted. . . . Seurat wished to synthesize the landscape in a definite aspect which would perpetuate his impression, and to achieve in the figures the same avoidance of the accidental and the transitory. . . . Following the precepts of Delacroix, he would not begin a composition until he had first determined its organization. Guided by tradition and science, he would adjust the composition to hhs conception, that is to say he would adapt the lines (directions and angles), the chiaroscuro (tones), the colours, to the features he wished to make dominant.^ Seurat's emphasis on capturing the essential quality of the scene, by adjusting the compositional arrangement, was not a concept that was entirely new to FitzGerald. In his Williamson's Garage of 1927, this tendency was already beginning to reveal itself. Whether this had been a result of his own personal 5 7 search, or whether it perhaps was a delayed development stemming from his earlier New York experience cannot be determined. Yet this direction was to become even stronger upon his return to Winnipeg and can be seen in works, like Doc Snider's House of 1931. FitzGerald was impressed with Seurat's technique. He wrote in his Diary, "The very remarkable thing is that on such a huge canvas, such a technique would hold together and be so simple in the great masses all little strokes or spots of 21 broken pigment superimposed." Rewald describes Seurat's technique of painting, Standing on a ladder, he patiently covered his canvas with tiny multi-coloured dots, applied over a first layer of pigment which was broadly brushed in. The original layer bound the loosely applied dots together and relieved Seurat from the necessity of always assembling them tightly. At this task, Seurat invariably centered his attention on a single section of the canvas, having previously determined each stroke and colour to be applied. Thus he was able to paint steadily without having to step back in order to judge the effect obtained or the result of optical mixture. . . . He no more needed to consult Chevreul's disc than a true poet must count syllables; the law of simultaneous contrast had become the guiding principle of his thinking.^ Although he admired Seurat's technique and even for short periods of time — 1948 to 1948 — was strongly influenced by it; he always maintained a certain freedom of expression. He appreciated and chose to employ primarily the surface texture of Seurat's technique. He also often made use of certain basic colour practices like using a complementary colour in shadows, but, ultimately his paintings are not so controlled, but rather they represent his personal portrayal of the scene. In New York, on June 22, FitzGerald went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he once again saw works by the Modern French artists. During this visit, he was impressed by the works of Claude Monet. Of the twelve Monets in the Metropolitan Museum's collection of 1930, eight were from Mrs. H . O . 58 Havemeyer Bequest of 1929. Out of all these paintings, the one that impressed him the most was Monet's Sunflowers of 1881. A magnificant Sunflower thing of Monet, . . . Painted absolutely free and full of movement, much more clear than his later things, and lovely in colour. It is very enlightening to see the different things by these men and note the development through the different periods, see the way they changed. This flower piece of Monet's gave me a ( ) and the free technique gives it great charm. All the big men seem to automatically do the right thing at the right time and with such apparent ease that it seems to have just grown t h e r e . ^ The "later things" FitzGerald was referring to were Monet's paintings of the early 1890's, like Poplar (1891), Haystacks in the Snow (1891) and Rouen Cathedral (1894) owned by and on display at the Metropolitan Museum. These paintings are individual works of three of Monet's famous series in which he tried to capture every possible different light, atmosphere and weather condition as it affected the colour of his subject. All three works show great boldness of vision and an attitude of detachment from the subject for the sake of visual impression. The forms are so simplified that it gives an almost abstract effect. The colour, particularly in Haystacks in the Snow, appears unnaturalistic, and almost arbitrary, with violet tones and greenish ochres side by side and shadows depicted in a dominant blue. Knowing FitzGerald's concern for structure and precise contours, as opposed to the disintegration of mass and form prevalent in these late Impressionistic works, it is not surprising that the work FitzGerald most admired by Monet was his much earlier, and more naturalistic, Sunflowers (1881). Monet's golden sunflowers appear to glow before their complementary background. The technique is one of heavy intertwining strokes of pigment which give this canvas its expressive and decorative quality. 59 On June 21 and 22, while at the Metropolitan Museum, FitzGerald was also attracted to the works of Daumier, Corot and Courbet. On June 21, he had been particularly impressed with Daumier's The Railway Carriage because of its "apparent ease of execution, its powerful drawing and forms and its simplest of colour, very much brown being used." The next day he returned to the Metropolitan-Museum hoping to absorb and appreciate the "modern stuff" again. This time he was attracted by the nudes of Corot, Courbet and Degas. FitzGerald was particularly interested in nudes at this time, since he had just been put in charge of teaching all the life classes before coming on his trip east. He wrote in his Diary, These give one an entirely new view of man and it is for the better. Fine big simple forms and lovely colour, but very clean distinct painting only the backgrounds showing the (painter's) feeling. A Courbet nude and one by Corot are together and are equally fine and very much the same feeling. That, one could not say of the two landscapes by the same men, at least not the feathery ones by Corot. . . . (There are) two or three nudes in pastel by Degas, small ones of ladies after the bath. Very beautiful drawing and colour, full of great subtleties yet very d i r e c t . ^ FitzGerald greatly admired "big simple forms", "lovely colour", which meant subtle colour, and "very clean distinct painting". All of these words accurately describe FitzGerald's artistic output of the 1930-40's. During FitzGerald's visit to the Valentine Gallery on June 20, he saw the works of Henri Matisse^ Andre Derain and Raoul Dufy. FitzGerald was enthralled by a Dufy of a road with some blue trees. He felt that it was "all treated in a 25 most crude way but (was) full of fascination." The next day, while at the Metropolitan Museum, FitzGerald reflected back to the Dufy with the blue trees and commented, "The Dufy that I saw yesterday had, with all its apparent unreality, a great sense of real. Much more than many of the so called realistic things." FitzGerald made this comment directly after having discussed Cezanne's paintings and the fact that in these works there was "always a great sense of reality, no 27 matter how abstract the things may b e . " FitzGerald saw the works of Renoir, Van Gogh, Rousseau and Toulouse Lautrec as well as traditional artists, like Durer, Breughel, Velasquez, Goya and El Greco. Yet the artist that had the most effect and influence on FitzGerald was Paul Cezanne. When FitzGerald visited the Metropolitan Museum on June 21, he went "to the rooms containing the Havemeyer bequest, immediately to the Cezanne's, five in a l l . " FitzGerald described these works in his Diary, The still life is a most simple thing with a rather unusual background. Rather full in pigment much in the same manner as the head in the Phillips collection very freely painted and low toned in colour. All three landscapes contain many things that are most useful thoughts. Always the edges of the canvas is treated in a most careful manner, never at any point overdone but enough variety to keep the eye within. A great variation in the colour scheme of the three. One, St. Victoire, again, Two, Interior of Woods at Fontainebleau, and Three, the Estaque very much the same as the one in Chicago but taken from slightly around to the left. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1930 had six paintings by Cezanne in their collection. The View of Domaine Saint Joseph purchased in 1913, which FitzGerald probably had seen on his 1921-22 trip to New York, and the five recently acquired works from the Mrs. H . O . Havemeyer Bequest of 1929. These five works were Man in a Straw Hat (c. 1875), Still Life (c. 1875), The Gulf of Marseilles seen from L'Estaque (c. 1883), Mont Sainte-Victoire (c. 1885) and Rocks in the Forest, formerly called Forest of Fontainebleau (c. 1898). FitzGerald makes no mention of the portrait, A Man in a Straw Hat, presumably 61 it did not impress him as much as the other four works. In Still Life, Cezanne used wallpaper with a geometrical pattern and flowers as a background. This is the "unusual background" FitzGerald is referring to in his comment about this work. He also felt this work was "rather full in pigment, very freely painted and low toned in colour." FitzGerald admired this work for its simple composition and subdued colours, but it was the three land- scapes that FitzGerald admired the most. The earliest, The Gulf of Marseilles seen from L'Estaque (c. 1883). FitzGerald remembered a similar painting in the Chicago Art Institute which had a compositional resemblance to the one in the Metropolitan Museum, but was much less detailed, and was "taken from slightly around to the left." This work, in spite of the rich and subtle harmonies of many colours, has a strong blue as its dominant tone, which is the source of the painting's unified effect of great depth and space. The Mont Sainte-Victoire (c. 1885) must have been particularly admired by FitzGerald. Meyer Schapiro provides an excellent description of this delicate and beautiful work. Admirable is the thought of opposing to the distant landscape the high tree in the foreground, a form through which the near and far, the left and right, become more sharply defined, each with its own mood and dominant. Breadth, height, and depth are almost equally developed; the balance of these dimensions is one of the sources of the fullness and calm of the painting. . . . The contrast of the vertical and horizontal is tempered by the many diagonal lines which are graded in slope through small intervals. The central, almost vertical tree is one of a series of trees more or less tilted, and the most inclined trunk approaches the slope of the mountain and the strong diagonal of the road. But this road, too, resembles in its sinuous form the long silhouette of the mountain. . . . with so many diagonals, there are none that converge in depth in the usual perspective foreshortening. On the ground plane of the landscape, Cezanne selects diagonals that diverge from the spectator towards the sides of the canvas and thus overcomes the tension of a vanishing point, 62 with its strong solicitation of the eye. . . . The depth is built up by the overlapping of things and through broad horizontal bands set one above the other and crossed by the vertical tree and the long diagonals. The play of colour contrasts is also a delicate means of evoking depth . . . The contrast of warm and cool shifts gradually from the foreground couplings of green and yellow to distant couplings of blue and rose. . . . The brush work is among the essential beauties 99 of this painting and is worth the most careful attention. FitzGerald was groping to understand the subtleties and quality of Cezanne's works and upon viewing these works, FitzGerald wrote, The outstanding quality in all these big things which is being more impressed on me, is the terrific sense of unity, everything being thought of to keep the eye within the picture and still it remains a thing of apparent ease. And always a great sense of reality, no matter how abstract the thing may be.^^ The last work FitzGerald mentioned was The Forest of Fontainebleau (c. 1898). In this late painting Cezanne has expressed the vital force and essential rhythms of this landscape. This purple landscape has a disturbing quality, unlike his earlier serene and calm work, like The Mont Sainte-Victoire. Although FitzGerald may have appreciated the "reality" of this painting, it would appear that Cezanne's earlier works had more influence on FitzGerald's style upon his return to Winnipeg. On June 22, he returned to the Metropolitan Museum, he writes, "Had 31 a long time with the Cezanne's again and more in love with them than ever." FitzGerald was most impressed by two important aspects of Cezanne's work, his "terrific sense of unity", and by the "great sense of reality, no matter how abstract the things may b e . " On June 29, FitzGerald summarizes the effect, seeing the works of the "French Moderns" and the works of Cezanne, in particular , had on him. FitzGerald now felt that, 63 Purely abstract (work) has a tendency to lose contact with the living. . . and that the move today is rather a swing towards an inspiration from nature. An eternal contact with humanity and nature and a greater sense of unity. This has been very strongly impressed on me during this trip. The sense of unifying all the elements in a picture to the making of a creation. The picture, a living thing, one great thought made up of many details but all subordinated to the w h o l e . ^ On June 3 0 , he went over to the Metropolitan Museum "for a final review of some of the things to try and find a little more wherein lay the greatness of 33 Cezanne and Courbet, e t c . " The final comments clearly shows; what he felt the influence of having seen the works of the Moderns would have on the development of his own personal style. Enjoyed them all over again and got a little more intimate with some of the things? Finally, I feel that each one of us must go on with ' our ideas as they present, themselves, and try and work out our salvation that way, as one feels all the big men did. It is a great inspiration seeing these things and how they are developed but only an inspiration, because they went right on as they f e l t . ^ 64 CHAPTER V F O O T N O T E S ^Brooker Papers, Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Bertram Brooker, January 11, 1930.' 2 In July of 1975, I met Pat Morrison, FitzGerald's daughter in her home in Toronto. She allowed me to xerox FitzGerald's Diary and certain letters in her possession. I also saw his early sketchbooks at this time. Mrs. Morrison still owned, and I photographed, many of the still life objects which her dad had used as subjects in his paintings . Just prior to her death in October 1976, Mrs. Pat Morrison gave FitzGerald's Diary, his sketchbooks as well as a number of drawings to the University of Manitoba. The University has now opened a FitzGerald Study Centre. 3 Karen L. Sens Papers, L.L. FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, June 3, 1930. 4 l b i d . , June 7, 1930. 5 i b i d . 6 l b i d . 7 l b i d . , June 27, 1930. 8 ! b i d . , June 24, 1930. 9 As previously stated, FitzGerald had met Augustus Vincent Tack (1870 - 1949) in 1920. (Refer to Chapter II, footnote 17.) In 1930, while in New York, FitzGerald went to see-Tack's decoration of the Paulist Church. FitzGerald wrote (June 23, 1930), "Tack's decoration is very fine. A big simple thing and much in the spirit of the building." Tack was a friend of Frank Knox Morton Rehn, an artist who owned the Rehn Gallery on Fifth Ave. (New York), which primarily exhibited American prints and sculptures. 1 0Sens Papers, L.L. FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, June 23, 1930. 1 1 Ibid. 65 1 2 l b i d . 1 3 | b i d . , June 24, 1930. 14 Ibid., Unfortunately this section of FitzGerald's Diary is particularly is particularly difficult to read. 15 Milton Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), p. 196. 1 6 ! b i d . , pp. 82, 196, 156. 1 7Sens Papers, L.L. FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, June 8, 1930. 18 im 19 f P 20 Ĵohn Rewald, Post-Impressionism from Van Gogh to Gauguin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, n.d.), pp. 82-83. ^H.H. Arnason, History of Modern Art (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., n.d.), p. 37. Rewald, Post-Impressionism, p. 84. 2 1 Sens Papers, L.L. FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, June 8, 1930. 22 Rewald, Post-Impressionism, p. 86. 23 Sens Papers, L.L. FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, June 22, 1930. Unfortunately one cannot always decipher FitzGerald's handwriting. 2 4 ! b i d . 2 5 | b i d . , June 20, 1930. 2 6 | b i d . , June 21, 1930. 2 7 | b i d . 2 8 ! b i d . 29 Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cezanne (New York: Harry N . Abrams, Inc., n.d.), p. 66. 30 Sens Papers, L.L. FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, June 21, 1930. 3 1 Ibid., June 22, 1930. 32 Ibid., June 29, 1930. 3 3 I b i d . , June 30, 1930. " i b i d . 67 CHAPTER VI TOWARDS MORE PERSONAL EXPRESSIONS (JULY 1930 - AUGUST 1947) Prior to the trip to the East, in December of 1929, FitzGerald had started a large oil painting, which would take him two years to complete. This work is entitled Doc Snider's House (Slide 11). In FitzGerald's letters to Bertram Brooker, he makes several references to this work. On January 11, 1930, he wrote, During the two weeks of the Christmas holidays, I put in some time each day, working on a larger canvas of some trees in the front yard with the buildings next door. This will keep me busy for the rest of the winter over the weekends. I am putting in every bit of my spare time on some kind of work and hope that my winter will be generally profitable. Saturday afternoons are spent drawing or painting from the model, just so I won't get out of touch with the structure, etc. keeping up with my life class. This year, I am in charge of all the life work we do in the school so that I am really studying, theoretically from the model every day. This, of course, is a great advantage. On April 18, 1931, FitzGerald wrote, responding to Brooker's request to send some paintings for exhibition purposes, I have a goodly number of drawings from the nude, made this winter from which might be selected two or three that would be suitable for an exhibition but the painting that I am working on is not in any condition for that purpose, nor as far as I can judge, will be till next winter sometimes. The other paintings that I have are not things that I would feel like showing in such an exhibition as you suggest. Nevertheless, I certainly would like to be in on it, if at all possible. 68 On June 13, 1931, FitzGerald happily announces to Brooker that this large painting, Doc Snider's House, is completed. The large winter picture is finished and I am almost tempted to say that it has some satisfying qualities, that is if I don't look at it for any great length of time. You will be interested at any rate because it is a little more unified than some of the more recent ones, in the last two or three years. Two others of lesser dimensions are on the way and as all things at this stage of development look promising and hopeful as usual. The artist is most decidedly an optimist at all 'times, hopeful that the next one will be the supreme effort and so we live between the great heights and greater depths. At the moment, I have decided to spend most of the holidays painting rather than working in pencil, hoping that a steady spell of work with colour will assist me to a greater appreciation of form and the means to express it.^ The year 1931 was a particularly productive year for FitzGerald in terms of oils, completing more than nine dated oil paintings, including his large Doc 4 Snider's House. FitzGerald's Eastern trip must have provided him with the stimulus to be able to draw on so much creative energy, while maintaining his 5 teaching and administrative role at the Winnipeg School of Art. Doc Snider's House is the highlight of this stage in his development. The style and concerns FitzGerald displays in this work are typical of his works of the early thirties. Doc Snider's House is a natural extension of his Williamson's Garage, and appears to be the culmination of his smooth sculptural technique of painting. Doc Snider's House is somewhat reminiscent of Cezanne's Mont Sainte- Victoire (which FitzGerald had seen at the Metropolitan Museum while in New York in 1930) in its compositional arrangement. FitzGerald has clearly defined his space by placing a high tree in the foreground. There is also a satisfying balance achieved in the relationship between the height and breath of the composition, as well as in the arrangement of horizontals and verticals. Like Cezanne, FitzGerald selects diagonals that diverge towards the edges of the canvas thereby eliminating the strong focal point, that was evident in Williamson's Garage. Even FitzGerald's method of creating depth through overlapping evokes the works of Cezanne. Unlike Williamson's Garage which depicted three large, almost entirely independent free standing trees, the ten trees depicted in Doc Snider's House appear to be almost interwoven and are definitely interdependent. The beautiful correlation between forms is evident throughout this painting. One fine example is how the one branch of the tree in the foreground reflects the sloping snow covered roof line of the house on the left of the canvas. The delicate changes in colour,also help to create depth in the painting. The snow in the foreground and on the roofs of the houses closer to the viewer is lighter in colour than the snow in the more distant space and on the roof of the house in the background. His delicate colouring also helps to create the unity apparent in this work. The dominant colour in this work is mauve, which is used to depict the shadows in the rainbow-coloured snow, and is reflected in the sky. Even the trees due to their fuxtaposition with the snow, appear to have a purplish tone. FitzGerald, it is known, enjoyed working directly from nature in all types of weather. While painting Doc Snider's House, FitzGerald stayed in a little shack with a stove in it, which he pulled about on runners.^ Although FitzGerald often painted directly from nature, he, like Cezanne and Seurat, was not opposed to eliminating, adding or simplifying the features of the scene in front of him, to 70 create a more harmonious and unified painting. Doc Snider's House is a care- fully thought out and executed painting, which leaves nothing to chance. A sense of order prevails. A sense of static, timelessness is achieved by his use of light. It is not the impressionistic light of early morning or evening or of noon, it is a light that is uniform, enduring, strong, steady and clear. This all revealing light also acts as a unifying agent in the painting. Doc Snider's House reveals and expresses in paint the discoveries FitzGerald made during his trip to New York. FitzGerald's own Diary description of the characteristics of works of Cezanne, Seurat, and of the other "big men" now seem to apply to his own works. The outstanding quality in all these big things which is being more impressed on me, is the terrific sense of unity, everything's being thought of to keep the eye within the picture and still it remains a thing of apparent ease. The sense of unifying all the elements in a picture to the making of a creation, the picture, a living thing, one great thought made up of many details but all subordinated to the whole.^ FitzGerald himself realized that his Doc Snider's House was more unified than his previous works had been. This unification, no doubt, came as a result of having seen and studied the works of Cezanne. A relationship between FitzGerald and Cezanne was already noticed by a member of the Group of Seven in 1931. Arthur Lismer, referring to a FitzGerald still life that Brooker had hanging on his wall next to a fine Cezanne reproduction, commented that 9 FitzGerald's painting "stood up extremely welI beside i t . " Yet, FitzGerald's Doc Snider's House is very different to the works of Cezanne or Seurat, with respect to the technique. FitzGerald's painting shows much more concern for 71 linear clarity, smooth sculptural forms and a meticulous paint application. What other influences had FitzGerald absorbed that may be found in this painting? It is possible that FitzGerald's interest in structure was, in part, a result of his constant opportunity to work on life studies at the Winnipeg School of Art. Yet perhaps a more important influence on FitzGerald was his two trips to New York. It is probable that FitzGerald, while a student at the Art Students' League t (1921-22), was introduced to the smooth sculptural modelling, which later became associated with "American Scene" p a i n t i n g . ^ Certainly his instructor Kenneth Miller was already in 1921-22 painting in a technique which is not unlike FitzGerald's smooth and precise technique of the early 1930's. FitzGerald's interest in a precise, smooth method of painting, a technique which does not compete for the viewer's attention, but acts as a means to reveal the subject, was reaffirmed during his trip to the East in 1930. While at the Chicago Art Institute (1930), FitzGerald admired the work of Charles Sheeler, and wrote, "a drawing by Sheeler particularly attracted me, a pencil drawing of some low buildings seen against some skyscrapers a very powerful, extremely careful rendering . . . " " He also saw and admired the works of other "American Scene" painters like Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper. -Seeing the works by these artists simply reaffirmed FitzGerald's own conviction that one should only, Consider technique as a means by which you say what you have to say and not as an end in itself. What you have to say is of first importance, how you say it is always secondary.1^ 72 FitzGerald's remarks, regarding the role technique should play in a painting, are recorded in his Diary, while in Chicago on June 7, 1930. . . . from it all there comes the thought that good honest work, without any tricky technique is fust as it has always been the great thing. The technique is so much a part of all the bigger things that one only sees it by thinking of it from a painter's angle. Each of us has something to say in paint about our contact with life, no matter how small it may be and the conclusions arrived at seems always the same, that is to work first and foremost and to be as little conscious . of the way we are saying it as possible. To be so wrapped up in the thing to be said, that the means are very much in the background. And these conclusions are the same now as previous to studying these things.'^ Doc Snider's House (1931) was FitzGerald's first major work completed upon the return of his second trip to the East. FitzGerald's smooth sculptural technique is ideally suited to the subject matter, a frozen winter landscape on a clear day. The crisp clarity so typical of winter days on the prairies is perfectly .expressed by the clear delineation of forms. FitzGerald's careful modelling gives the forms their solidity. Even the snow displays the weight and firmness, that differentiates the frozen snow drifts typical of Winnipeg, from the more fluffy variety found in the warmer parts of Canada. In this work the smooth technique is such an integral part of the painting that, as already noted, "one 14 only sees it by thinking of it from a painter's angle." Unfortunately, 1931, a year of good productivity in terms of oil painting, ended in December with FitzGerald getting pneumonia. This illness weakened his physical condition to the degree that up to a year afterwards he was still not completely recovered. His illness also seems to mark the beginning of a long drought in terms of oil painting. During this period, which lasted up until 1937, FitzGerald turned his limited energies towards drawing. 73 During this period, the demands of his job were quite strenuous. He was teaching art five and one-half days as well as three evenings a week, and his working time was further reduced by his rule of painting only in daylight hours. This limited his time to draw and paint to lunch and supper hours, week ends and 15 school breaks. To add to this already heavy load, the Winnipeg School of Art was now trying to get a gallery started, which required a great deal of time and drained a considerable amount of energy from an already tired FitzGerald. In a letter to Brooker dated January 12, 1933, FitzGerald wrote, We are still trying to get our gallery started. It seems a large task, requiring a lot of discussion from many sides, with the result that the action is very slow. Like all civic affairs, it has awakened people that have been more or less unknown in the art worldwho seemed to have suddenly come to the surface looking for a little publicity . . . . The School seems to require all the energy that I can spare or nearly so and if I have any left plus time I very much prefer to paint than enter into the wrangling over this t h i n g . 1 6 From 1932 up to 1937, although FitzGerald executed a few small oils, none were considered by him to be of any major importance and he did not complete even one large canvas during this period. Writing to Brooker on December 4, 1937, FitzGerald explains that he feels he has only been "marking time" when it comes to painting. No one regrets more than I do, my not being represented at the show with a painting. The one that I was working on, a still life, wasn't finished in time and now that it is finished, I doubt if it would have gone. It is interesting but I don't feel that it quite hit the mark. For quite a time I have been more or less marking time with the painting part of the game, working at something but never quite reaching a satisfactory conclusion. For the last four months, I have been working all the spare time on this and am feeling hopeful that I may reach some satisfactory results.1^ 74 On March 18, 1937, FitzGerald responds to the request of Harry McCurry (Assistant Director of the National Gallery of Canada) for paintings for exhibition purposes, and very openly explains why he does not have many paintings to offer for exhibition at this time. I wasn't holding out on you but was quite honest when I sent the "Apples" as the only painting I had worthy of being submitted for such an important exhibition. Possibly, I might go further and say that I haven't any painting to submit to any show, not even a house party. For some reason, I haven't been painting for quite a while, but drawing. Result no paintings. I am not defending my position but just giving you the facts. For the time being the drawings seem to.satisfy my desire to create and I am egotist enough to think that some of them are darn fine things with just as much in them as any painting I have done. Granted they are not dramatic enough either in size or technique to make good exhibition material, but then I haven't been for many years, an exhibition hound, as you well know. Another thing, I demand a great deal, in either a drawing or a painting of myself, being satisfied with only what I feel is the best I can produce at the time, with the result that I work very slowly and a long period over each work. "Doc Snider's House" represents two winters, including two full weeks each Christmas vacation as well as all weekends. I can't go home Saturday and by Monday morning have a canvas completed, as seems possible to so many others. That, is impossible. Still another phase of this thing, as you are well aware and I am sure regret, the artists in our country, with few exceptions, find it necessary to make their "bread and butter" by other means than painting pictures. After all, continuous practice is essential to the maximum development in any craft, how much more essential is it, where the craft is combined with such a subtle quantity as creative force. (And this is not so called "artistic temperament" but just honest to goodness common sense.) Again there are well defined phases in the development of the artist. Periods of distinctive growth and those of questioning and experiment, when during the latter, everything done is a struggling towards a larger outlook, yet has the appearance on the surface of "marking time". Thank goodness I have been face to face with a few of these and have managed to scramble over the top each.time. As a matter of fact, I am glad of having had to face them no matter how difficult rather than to have gone on blindly repeating myself. . . . I felt I should make plain the reason for the lack of paintings which I hope I have done to some extent.^ This letter is very revealing and helps to shed light on FitzGerald's stylistic development. This trip to the East resulted in a lot of discoveries, which made 1931 a very profitable year. Yet having taken his smooth sculptural style to its full expression in Doc Snider's House, FitzGerald realized he needed a new means of expression. He did not want to just go on blindly repeating himself. 19 From 1932 to 1937, FitzGerald had felt that he had been just marking time. Yet this period, through the medium of drawings, had been a time of questioning and experimenting, which resulted in the late thirties and early forties (1938-40) once again being a time of distinctive growth. The first work which displays FitzGerald's new means of expression is Jar of 1938. While similar in many respects to his earlier Doc Snider's House, there are also some important differences, that are apparent. (These differences find their fullest expression in Still Life: Apples of 1940.) Many of the works of the late thirties and forties, are still lifes. The major importance of FitzGerald1 apparent preference for still lifes at this time, is that they allowed him a more intense search into the formal concerns of painting. By concentrating on a limited subject, of only one or two objects, FitzGerald could focus his attention more directly and intensely. FitzGerald must have been pleased with his new means of expression, 20 because he selected Jar to be included in the important 1938 Tate exhibition. 76 Had he felt this painting had not met the mark, he certainly would not have sent it to the National Gallery to be included in this important Canadian exhibition to be held in London. An unsigned letter, though unquestionably written by Harry McCurry of the National Gallery to FitzGerald, dated May 4, 1938, reads, As you may have heard, we are pulling off a grand Canadian exhibition at the Tate Gallery this autumn. It is to be called "A Century of Canadian Art" beginning with Krieghoff, Kane . . . with emphasis on the last twenty-five years. The writer humorously adds, Most of the work is being drawn from the National Gallery Collection and other public and private collections but where an outstanding work by an important artist (like yourself) is not available then ye poor artist must get to work and paint one unless he can find one in the attic some- where. Seriously, this is a very important occasion and we must have a good FitzGerald of an adequate size to include in this exhibition. We would be happy to send "Doc Snider's House" if it were here but the trouble is we lent it to the Southern Dominion Exhibition and that will not be back in Canada for another six months or a year. The only other thing of yours we have is "Williamson's Garage" and while it is excellent it is a bit too small and besides we would prefer to have one of your pictures for sale because who knows the Tate authorities may be persuaded to buy one or two. So do your best.^ Jar (Slide 12) represents the "best" in FitzGerald's work from the 1932 to 1938 period. In this painting he has retained the emphasis on form and the solidity found in Doc Snider's House, but his depiction of space in the former is very unnaturalistic. It is evident that FitzGerald is now moving towards more purely formal concerns. Jar provides an interesting comparison with Cezanne's Still Life (c. 1875) which FitzGerald saw while at the Metropolitan Museum in 1930. Upon seeing 22 it he had remarked that it had "an unusual background". For his background 7 7 Cezanne had used wallpaper with a geometrical diamond-shaped design. In the centre of this painting, there is a mug with a prominent handle protruding from the side. Directly behind and slightly to the left of this mug is the only intersection of the two whole diamond shapes on the wallpaper. This intersection tends to focus our attention on the mug. In Jar a similar compositional arrangement is evident. In the centre foreground, there is a large fug with a protruding handle and directly behind and slightly over to the left is the dominant inter- section of forms. Exactly what these forms are, is not clearly evident. Although the red form is presumed to be the table the jug is resting on. The purpose for using this type of background appears to be the same in both cases. It places the objects in a very limited space and focuses our attention, more intensely on them. This background of intersecting angles and planes also reveals FitzGerald's formal concerns which would later lead him to abstraction. Another device FitzGerald uses is tilting the table top towards the viewer, which serves — in the manner of Cezanne — to compress the space. Schapiro explains this concept very concretely in his description of Cezanne's Still Life with Basket of Apples (Art Institute of Chicago), The odd tilting of the bottle must be understood in relation to other instabilities as part of a problem: to create a balanced whole in which some elements are themselves unbalanced. In older art this was done with figures in motion, or with a sloping ground, or hanging curtains and reclining objects. What is new in Cezanne is the unstable axis of a vertical object — a seated figure, a house, a bottle. Such deviations make the final equilibrium of the picture seem more evidently an achievement of the artist rather than an imitation of an already existing stability in nature.^3 FitzGerald's Jar, likely under the influence of Cezanne, also is tilted forward into the viewer's space. Tilting the objects compresses the space, therefore the table and jug seem nearer to the viewer and can be more strongly felt as objects. It would appear that since FitzGerald's 1930 trip to New York, he responded at least to some degree to these "new" compositional methods. FitzGerald probably had admired Cezanne's selection of still life objects and how they are depicted. This awareness and admiration of Cezanne's still lifes is apparent in FitzGerald's attempt to render the dignity of commonplace objects. Traditional still lifes suggest man as the master and the objects of the still life as intended for his use: sensuous foods to be eaten, books to be read, utensils to be handled, etc. Neither Cezanne's nor FitzGerald's objects display this purpose. Both render their apples as hard roundish forms, which were never intended to be regarded as something to eat. Their objects are always above this servitude to man. Dignity permeates every object whether it is a common brown jug or two apples. Like Cezanne's works, FitzGerald's subjects assume a character of permanence, monumentality and universality. Jar retains the clarity of outline found in his earlier, Doc Snider's House. In technique there has been a noticeable change from the smooth sculptural style seen in Doc Snider's House which almost denied the painted surface, to a still meticulous but more stippled technique which tends to attract the viewer's attention more readily than the previous technique. This stippled technique tends to soften the very angular qualities of Jar. The modelling of forms in Jar is also quite different to those in Doc Snider's House. While the emphasis is still on 'plastic sculptural qualities', the smoothness of the earlier work has gone. Instead the jug, reminiscent of Cezanne's treatment, is not depicted with naturally smooth rounded sides, but rather is depicted as having fairly angular facets, particularly noticeable on the body of the jug directly below the handle. The subdued autumn-toned colours of the work were FitzGerald's preference and give the work its still and 'reverent' quality. Still Life: Two Apples of 1940 (Slide 13) is the culmination of the new means of expression and interest in formal concerns seen in Jar of two years earlier. * FitzGerald appears to have'been obsessed by apples and drew and painted them throughout the thirties and even well into the forties. According to Robert Bruce, an art instructor at the Winnipeg School of Art, FitzGerald "painted apples for 24 three winters, " during the 1930's. Why was FitzGerald so fascinated with apples? Perhaps by looking to Cezanne, a reason may be suggested. According to H . H . Arnason, Cezanne himself was obsessed by a desire to paint apples because they were a challenge, a problem. He states that, It was the three dimensional form most difficult to control as a separate object or to assimilate into the larger unity of the canvas. To attain this goal and at the same time to preserve the nature of the individual object, he modulated the circular forms with small, flat brush strokes distorted the shape, and loosened or broke the contours to set up spatial tensions among the objects and thereby unifying them as colour areas.^5 It would seem that apples also offered a challenge to FitzGerald probably for similar reasons. He was certainly aware of the relationships between objects in a painting, and how they effect the unity of the composition. He also had a strong desire to explore, "to exhaust (a)given subject, to analyse with all the 26 power (he) possessed." FitzGerald recognized that Monet had done this by "spending a whole summer painting a single subject, at various times of the day. 80 Of course this was only one method. He also realized that this would not be his method. Ayre records FitzGerald's method. It is necessary to get inside the object and push it out rather than merely building it up from the outer aspect to appreciate its structure and living quality rather than the surface only. This requires endless search and contemplation. Continuous effort and experiment. An appreciation for the endlessness of the living force which seems to pervade and flow through all natural forms, even though these seem on the surface to be so ephemeral. . . . It is evident that no one object can be segregated in space without the feeling of something around it, and usually it is associated with other objects. The appreciation of the relation, of one object to another and their effect on one another will help to suggest the sense of solidity of each. The obvious section of any object that will be effected most by its surroundings is the edge with the result that in drawing or painting, this part is given greatest attention and most careful consideration. The solidity of the objects depends to a great extent on how the transition from one to the other is carried out. And at this point also the homogenity of the composition is to a great extent developed.28 Thus apples provided him with a convenient, inexpensive subject through which to explore relationships and compositional unity. In Still Life: Two Apples, FitzGerald answers the problem of how to depict two apples, revealing their relationship and effect on each other and how to assimilate them into the larger unity of the canvas. FitzGerald has chosen to depict only two apples which adds to the challenge of unifying the composition. By choosing three and placing them in a pyramidal group would have immediately resulted in a stable composition. Two apples, however, is more challenging since their positioning (formal arrangement) is all important to making it an interesting and complete painting. FitzGerald places the larger apples slightly right of centre and tilts it slightly right and forward, while he places the smaller apple slightly left of centre and tilts it to the left and away from the viewer. The delicate relationship between these two forms is both complex and beautiful. While the larger apple is seen from the top, revealing the high viewpoint, FitzGerald has placed the smaller apple so that the viewer can see a 29 suggestion of the bottom of the apple. The modelling of the larger apple's left side with its flat brushstrokes allowing distortion of the apple's shape and creating three noticeable facets, breaks the naturally round contour and sets up a spatial tension with the smaller apple. By using a similar but less noticeable treatment on the smaller apple, FitzGerald has unified them as colour areas. Balance is achieved through FitzGerald's colouring. He has placed the red side of the larger apple next to the green side of the smaller apple, knowing the vibrancy that results from the juxtaposition of complementary colours. This arrangement also sets up a nice pattern of green, red, green, red as the viewer's eye moves from left to right across the canvas. The larger apple's physical size is balanced by smaller apple's more dominant shadow, as well as by its closer positioning to the viewer. FitzGerald's still life appears once again to be resting on a tilted table which compresses the space and makes us more aware of the two apples as solid objects. In Still Life: Two Apples the table is covered with a white tablecloth, the folds, perhaps evident in a tablecloth that has been firmly pressed and folded away in a closet, are exaggerated to create small ridges and valleys. The intersection of these folds occurs directly below and slightly to the right of the centre of the larger apple. In Jar FitzGerald found that the intersecting plane of the table was an effective way to set off the jug. Now in Still Life: Two Apples, FitzGerald directs the viewer's attention to the smaller apple by the 82 use of the same slanted intersecting line. He must have been pleased with the formal arrangement found in Jar, because even the slant of the window ledge, reoccurs in the slant of the extreme left of the tablecloth. Thus Still Life: Two Apples bears many similarities with its earlier counterpart, Jar. Both paintings display the same high viewpoint which tends to flatten the objects. Both are very simple compositions containing few objects seen with respect to the inter- secting lines of their very limited background space. FitzGerald's interest in formal concerns is paramount. In Jar and Still Life: Two Apples FitzGerald's later tendency towards abstraction is already revealed. These paintings by FitzGerald were the product of meticulous formal organization and in a sense are nearer to abstraction than to realistic representation. Still Life: Two Apples has taken the stipple technique emerging in Jar, to an even further degree and this technique becomes fairly typical of his works of the forties. Yet the richness of texture was never again as forcefully expressed. In Still Life: Two Apples, FitzGerald painted the longer dabs of paint with the sides of his narrow brush or with his curved palette knife while the point-like dabs he created by using just the tip of his brush. Using a thick solid paint, these dabs stood out in relief from the canvas. This created a quite noticeable pattern in the painting, and being an overall technique added to the unity of the composition. In FitzGerald's later works, like From An Upstairs Window, Winter (1948), this technique is far less noticeable although a definite trace of it is still evident. 83 The technique displayed in Still Life: Two Apples appears reminiscent of the works of Georges Seurat. Yet this apparent resemblance is a purely super- ficial one. FitzGerald, as previously noted, had admired Seurat's technique of 3C painting, when he saw his La Grande Jatte at the Chicago Art Institute in 1930. But the techniques of the two artist are very different. Seurat's was based on colour theories, whereas FitzGerald adapted the technique into a purely personal interpretation, which was not involved in scientific principles. Therefore, although FitzGerald's paintings of the thirties and forties reveal certain influences of the works of "Modern" French artists, he has evolved a style, that is strictly his own. These works are a reflection of the quiet, contemplative, questioning man that created them. FitzGerald was pleased with his new means of expression and his new technique. Yet he wished to further intensify his search. Writing to Harry McCurry on October 25, 1940, he reflects back on his past two years of painting, . . . I have been working in a little different direction, through some smaller paintings and larger drawings, and through these, new ideas have taken form that could be matured more rapidly with continuous, concentrated effort.^' On March 28, 1941, he wrote, I am working along a little different line and have been doing so for the past two years, trying to broaden the previous approach and I think the work is now showing signs of something interesting. With a ^ year of steady work I am sure the results would warrant the experiment. These references to "a year of steady work" and "continuous, concentrated effort", express FitzGerald's sincere desire to take a leave of absence from teaching. In 1940, he had applied for a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. 84 He wrote, "My project is for a year of painting, free from the necessity of 33 worrying about a salary to keep things going." Unfortunately, he did not receive the Guggenheim fellowship, but this time for growth remained a dominant concern. He wrote, For some reason I feel the desire to do this now more than at any previous time. With all the experience of the past to back a new experiment and a very strong urge for the new adventure, it seems a shame the old and ancient obstacle money, should be there a g a i n . ^ Unfortunately, although FitzGerald desperately needed this time to explore and make further developments in his oil paintings, this was not to be made available to him until September of 1947. His friends, realizing his need, tried everything to obtain funds for his self-directed study. On February 8, 1946, Harry Adaskin wrote to Prime Minister King in an attempt to secure a pension for his talented friend. FitzGerald can paint only for a few weeks each summer because his duties as principal occupy all his time. He is in his fifties now, and he feels that he HAS something important to say, but can't say it because he cannot afford to retire for a few years to paint. A pension even for a few years, would pay high artistic dividends to Canada. What do you think, Mr. King? Is it possible?^ This plan, like all the rest, was doomed to failure. The result: the years 1941 - 1947 were lean years in terms of oil painting, and no major works were completed during this time. Knowing his time limitations and anxious to experiment he worked primarily in watercolours or in drawings, where results could be achieved quickly. On March 31, 1942, he wrote, I have managed to get in a lot of study in my own work during the winter so far. I am still on the large watercolour with anything as subject matter and finding out quite a lot that I hadn't experimented with before. How successful they are as pictures I have not been 85 worrying about but the solving of certain problems has been the main issue. And I think there has been some advance in that direction. The continued enthusiasm in the search intrigues me and this rather grows than diminishes.^6 Like the period from 1932 - 1937, this period from 1941 - 1947 was a time of questioning, experimenting and storing up for the future. This active period resulted in the late forties and early fifties once again being a time of distinctive change in FitzGerald's means of expression. 86 CHAPTER VI F O O T N O T E S Brooker Papers, Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Bertram Brooker, January 11, 1929. Letter was incorrectly dated, actual date was January 11, 1930, and was written in response to Brooker's letter of December 26, 1929. 2 | b i d . , April 8, 1931 . 3 l b i d . , June 13, 1931. 4 Refer to compiled List of Dated Oils.(Appendix) 5 In 1929, FitzGerald was appointed as Principal of the Winnipeg School of Art. 6 RobertAyre, "Painter of the Prairies, " Weekend Magazine, 8, 12 (1958), p. 29. 7Sens Papers, L.L. FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, June 21, 1930. 8 | b i d . , June 29, 1930. 9 FitzGerald Papers, Letter from Bertram Brooker to L.L. FitzGerald, March 26, 1931. ^Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 161. ] 1 L . L . FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, June 7, 1930. 12 Dr. F. Eckhardt, Introduction, Memorial Exhibition Catalogue, Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1958), n.p. 13 L.L. FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, June 7, 1930. FitzGerald was not impressed by the large mural works of Goya (Sordlas), since the technique appeared to outweigh the importance of the subject. On June 23, 1930, FitzGerald wrote, 87 The smaller paintings by him (Goya), I have seen, are very much finer to my way of thinking but at that I am not a great admirer of his. I always find the technique is uppermost. 1 4 | b i d . , June 7, 1930. 15 Helen M . Coy, L. LeMoine FitzGerald Exhibition (University of Manitoba, School of Art, 1977), p. 5 refers to a conversation, Helen Coy had with Robert Bruce, on October 4, 1976. ^Brooker Papers, Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Bertram Brooker, January 12, 1933. ' * 7 | b i d . , December 4, 1937. 18 National Gallery Papers, Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Harry McCurry, March 18, 1937. 19 Refer to Ann Davis, "A North American Artist, " L.L. FitzGerald Exhibition Catalogue (Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1978), pp. 42-44, for an excellent account of FitzGerald's relationship with the Group of Seven. FitzGerald was invited to join the Group of Seven in 1932. Davis asserts that the paintings by the Group of Seven had very little influence on FitzGerald's stylistic development. Davis wrote (p. 43), The artistic connection between FitzGerald and the Group was minimal. Only in FitzGerald's early works can one see any bold exuberance which characterized the Seven's approach, and in FitzGerald's case, these works were done when he was restricted to acquaintance through catalogue reproductions and the like. But they all shared an abiding belief in nature and a conviction that this subject was the most revealing, the most satisfying, the most demanding, 20 A Century of Canadian Art (London: Tate Gallery, 1938), cat. N o . 56, p. 14. 21 National Gallery Papers, Unsigned and unaddressed letter, May 4, 1938. There is no doubt that this letter was written by Harry McCurry to L.L. FitzGerald. 2 2 L . L . FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, June 21, 1930. 23 Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cezanne (New York: Harry N . Abrams, Inc., n.d.), p. 90. 24 L. LeMoine FitzGerald Exhibition (University of Manitoba, School of Art, 1977), pTT^ 88 25 H. Arnason, History of Modern Art (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., n.d.), p. 46. 2 6 L . L . FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, June 7, 1930. 2 7 ! b i d . 28 Ayre Papers, L.L. FitzGerald notes, n.p. 29 It is interesting to note that Cezanne in his Still Life (c. 1875) arrived at a very similar method of positioning two of his apples in this composition. 30 Refer to Chapter V for a discussion of Seurat's works and theories and their effect on FitzGerald's works. 31 National Gallery of Canada Papers, Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Mr. H . O . McCurry, October 25, 1940. 32 Ibid., March 28, 1940 (sic) letter was misdated, 1941 was the actual date. Ibid., October 25, 1940. ^ I b i d . , March 28, 1940 ( s i c \ 1941. 35 National Gallery of Canada Papers, Letter from Harry Adaskin to Prime Minister King, February 8, 1946. 36 Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Mr. McCurry, March 31, 1942. 89 CHAPTER VII i TOWARDS ABSTRACTION (SEPTEMBER 1947 - AUGUST 1956) Ordinarily I would have gone to the school today for the opening of registration, with holidays officially over at midnight last night. Instead I did go to the school, at the same time as usual on any similar date in the. past years, but merely to introduce the acting principal to the staff and return home for a year. I will really only know just how I feel about the long time ahead after I have been working at the new job till, say the end of September. Then a long enough time will have elapsed so that I will fully realize the new situation. But I had a feeling, this morning, of release when I didn't feel the necessity to taking command and no need to plan how everything was to be arranged for the incoming students. (September 8, 1947) 1 For the first time since FitzGerald began teaching in 1924, he was totally free to pursue his first love, painting. His wish had finally come true. Through Mrs. C . V . Ferguson, J . W . McConnell, of the Montreal Star, had given FitzGerald a year's salary so he could give up teaching and have an uninterrupted 2 period of painting. Writing to Mrs. Ferguson on September 8, 1947, FitzGerald describes his new long range program now that he had sufficient time to tackle his task. During the summer I have been definitely getting myself switched over to a new routine and it is now well imbedded in my habit centre. I am sure as I go on painting and drawing that more and more I will have a feeling of great satisfaction under the new programme. In the planning of my work during this past three months I have been working on a long range programme and have been doing things in a different way than if my time had been limited to the first week in September. I have been doing drawings in black wash in the mornings and watercolours in the afternoons for the past two months outside, with exception of the rainy days when I did some quick drawings in black chalk in the house. I expect 90 to continue this plan until the weather breaks and it is definitely too cold for regular outside work except on the occasional warm day. Then I will be working inside. Just at the moment I am thinking of part of the time devoted to painting in oils which will ultimately develop into some larger canvases. I already have a few good subjects in mind when the snow arrives, with some smaller things in the meantime to get my hand into the use of the medium.^ The fruits of FitzGerald's new program are found in his large major o i l , From An Upstairs Window, Winter of 1948 (Slide 15). This exquisite painting is a mature summation of FitzGerald's works of the early (1931) and late (1938 - 1940) thirties. He has brought the landscape typical of Doc Snider's House and has ingeniously combined it with his appreciation of common still life forms. This painting bears many similarities with his Doc Snider's House of 1931 . He retains the lighting found in Doc Snider's House and has even increased its static quality and sense of timelessness by minimizing suggestions of light and shadows. A sketch for From An Upstairs Window, Winter of 1948 (National Gallery of Canada (Slide 14) provides a more natural view of the scene FitzGerald actually saw while looking out his window. Comparing the sketch with the finished oil reveals FitzGerald's strong formal concerns. Reminiscent of Jar, FitzGerald has moved the white pitcher further along the window sill to achieve the desired outlining the window frame provides. He also has adjusted the position of the pencil and the tree for compositional purposes. One even finds satisfying correspondences in the shapes of the forms themselves. In the o i l , FitzGerald adds a large window-less house to the right middleground. This large undefined surface acts to hold and redirect the viewer's attention to the foreground. Between the houses there is a small visual escape into the distance. The finished work is personalized by the inclusion of FitzGerald's initials on 91 the back of his chair, seen in the extreme right corner. This comparison of the sketch with the finished oil shows that FitzGerald added and rearranged the elements of the composition, yet in the interest of unity kept them subordinate to the whole. In From An Upstairs Window, Winter, FitzGerald returns to the smooth sculptural modelling of forms seen in Doc Snider's House and his other works of the early thirties, but the clarity has been reduced to a small degree. This is due to two reasons. First, through the choice of uniformly toned muted colours (gone is the rainbow-coloured snow of Doc Snider's House) and second, through the reintroduction (as in Jar) of the stipple or ridge technique which tends to soften, and haze the contours. In From An Upstairs Window, Winter (like his still lifes of the late thirties) his concerns are all but exclusively formal ones. Thus in this way these works are more related to abstraction than to realistic portrayal. For although they contain a high degree of verisimilitude; realism was certainly not the primary aim. It was thus only one short step to pure abstraction. The first abstract oil that FitzGerald executed was entitled Composition N o . I (1950-51) (Slide 17) and was painted upon the request of Dr. E.J. Thomas. FitzGerald had been encouraged directly and indirectly by many of his friends towards abstraction. His close friend Bertram Brooker had been painting abstracts 4 since the 1920's. After Brooker's visit to FitzGerald in the summer of 1929, he wrote, on January 11, 1930, referring to their long talks on art, of the previous summer. I fear your conversation had a very definite effect on Edward. His Christmas card was a very abstract thing cut in linoleum. This ' outlook seems to have appealed to him very much. One never knows what children are absorbing and storing up for the future.^ FitzGerald, too, had been storing up for the future. However, it was not until the 1950's that he had gathered, seen and digested enough abstract art, and had himself done a few experimental abstract drawings, that he decided to attempt his first o i l . FitzGerald must have been satisfied with his results because this marked the beginning of a number of abstract compositions in o i l . "During his trips to British Columbia in the 1940's, he had become more acutely aware of the abstract works of Lawren Harris. On August 29, 1948, in a letter to Robert Ayre, FitzGerald expresses his admiration for the latest abstracts. Lawren is doing some new abstracts, which seem to me to be quite a development since I saw him in 1944. They have to my mind, a greater depth, finer colour relations and a greater sense of realization. They seem to be occupied with more design and colour. 0 Through his friends, his readings on art, and his 1930 trip to the Eastern States, FitzGerald had been exposed to a considerable amount of abstract art. The style he evolved although entirely his own, was a composite of the wealth of his experiences over the last forty years. Composition N o . I provides some interesting comparisons with Brooker's Sound Assembling of 1928, which FitzGerald admired and had procured for the Winnipeg Art Gallery. While both works are geometrical abstraction, FitzGerald painting is not that far removed from his earlier representational works. Unlike Brooker's painting, FitzGerald's colours are subtle, soft muted greys, browns and blues with the occasional stronger accents. Whereas space and perspective play an important role in Brooker's work. FitzGerald has further compressed the space evident in Jar, to the point where all the forms are virtually two-dimensional. Depth in the canvas is only suggested by overlapping and subtle modulations in 93 colouring. FitzGerald has retained the clarity of contour of his works of the early 30's, yet this appears to be somewhat at the expense of the unity of the composition. By 1954, after considerable experimentation, FitzGerald achieved a more harmonious and satisfying abstract composition entitled Abstract: Green and Gold (Slide 18). He first executed a study for this composition in watercolour and then painted the finished composition in o i l . This work can be seen as the culmination of FitzGerald's searching and experimenting with abstraction in the early 1950's. In a letter to Robert Ayre, dated December 18, 1952, FitzGerald discusses his new abstract approach, Have been experimenting pretty steadily, with a sort of abstract approach. I wanted to find out more about colour and composition and thought a good change from the objects would be a refreshing thing and perhaps open a new field. Have done endless drawings in black and white as well as colour and carried a few of these into large spaces in o i l . Will be interesting to see what will happen in the future.^ Abstract: Green and Gold is a delicate blending of forms. These forms, primarily elliptical are gently intertwined, becoming a harmonious whole, and their colours are as subtle as their shapes. Although the painting does not appear to be based on any representational subject, the choice of forms and their harmonious arrangement suggest affinities with his still life painting. Like many of FitzGerald's paintings, there is very little recession of space in this work, enabling the viewer to concentrate more intensely on the forms. Thus his abstract works came as a natural summation of his previous artistic developments in painting. The fifties were not solely a time of abstract painting, FitzGerald continued to paint still lifes using a similar style to the one he had first developed in the 94 thirties. The last major oil painting he completed was Hat of 1955 (Slide 20). This work is not important in terms of FitzGerald's stylistic development, but g rather as a final major statement made by the artist. Of all of FitzGerald's works, this painting lends itself most readily to interpretation. In his Diary on October 25, 1955, FitzGerald wrote, "Finished painting "Hat" still life, painting signature and touching up unfinished little bit — going 9 to Montreal for Canadian Painters Show." Two weeks later, on November 8, 1955, the Hat was packaged ready for shipping to Montreal. FitzGerald records, " 'The Hat' 24" x 30" oil goes to Montreal for Group Show at Museum of Fine A r t s . " ' ^ On December 5, 1955, FitzGerald, disappointed that the oil painting was not seen at the Group Show, wrote, . . . got notice from Montreal " O l d Hat" painting not accepted for Canadian Group Painters show — Teddy [Dr. Ted Thomas?] had bought it before it left for the East — too b a d . 1 1 It was only on July 23, 1953, after a lapse of twenty-three years, that FitzGerald had begun once again to write in his Diary. At this time, he wrote a chronology of important events starting with his trip East in 1930. This brief chronology reads, "1938 trip to Ottawa; 1947-48 leave of absence; 1948-49 trip to West Vancouver; January 1949 resignation from the School; 1950 spring 12 flood and, 1951 trip to Mexico." Records concerning Hat and Bertram 13 Brooker's death on March 21 were hisonly entries of 1955. His later dated entries were sporadic. Why FitzGerald began writing again after so many years is a mystery. Perhaps he realized that his life was reaching an end. He may have wished to somehow sum up and grasp his experience; laying out his own chronology, may 95 have seemed to be one means of doing this. It would also seem from his Diary that the Hat, his last major oil perhaps also was intended as a kind of personal summation, almost a self portrait. FitzGerald began working on the subject in August of 1955, and is known to have executed at least one preparatory drawing. This very detailed drawing (Slide 19), dated August 18, 1955, was executed in 15 pen and ink on paper and reveals an underlying pencil grid. The finished oil matches this drawing almost perfectly. The only minor difference is that the book in the completed oil is somewhat closer to the centre and tilted slightly to the left. The painting is believed to have been started on August 23, 1955.'^ The main subject of the work as its title implies is the hat. The "old hat" belonged to FitzGerald. It shared with him many memories of painting trips out into the prairie countryside. Miss Lynn Sissons, a former student of FitzGerald remembers how he would usually wear his old felt hat and casual tweed jacket when taking a group of students on a sketching field trip. As Miss Lynn Sissons so aptly put ir, "Through his years of wearing it, the hat had taken on something of h i m s e l f . " ' 7 This gives this painting its intimate and poignant quality. The painting also includes other possessions of the artist. In the foreground there is a spread newspaper with an open book lying on top of it. The background also depicts three closed books, shelved in a row. All his life FitzGerald had been an avid reader, these references to books and printed matter, probably reflect FitzGerald's love of reading and the means through which he gained most of his information about the world of art. A closer examination of the open book reveals a simplified geometrical hourglass shape on the pages. This perhaps alludes to the fact, that FitzGerald's art often used geometry (e.g., use of grids), and that he 96 had learned these principles through books. Or it may reveal the artist's knowledge that time was running out. His friends, Bertram and Rill Brooker, had died during the last year and probably this had increased FitzGerald's awareness of his own approaching death. The remaining two objects in the painting were the apple and bottle that FitzGerald depicted over and over again in his paintings. The apple with its round shape, and the bottle with its reflections had always presented challenges to the artist; it was now that he painted them for the last time. Is there an underlying meaning to this work? If so, it remains a mystery. But certainly an interpretation is tempting. In this connection a very revealing statement is found in FitzGerald's Diary, Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously . by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feeling he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.'^ FitzGerald may have felt that this painting expressed the summation of his feelings and the experience that he had lived through and wished other people to share in his experiences. Early Sunday morning, on August 5, 1956, FitzGerald died of a heart failure. Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald was an artist who had over the years "taken the 19 time to penetrate a litfle deeper into the meaning of things." His search was a never ending one, that began in his childhood and only ended with his death. During this time he had experimented with different means of expression, different styles and techniques, sometimes returning and reworking a technique he had used years before. But there are certain qualities found in all his works, which are 97 totally independent from his changing technique. These essential characteristics are simplicity, clarity, harmonious colour, and a sense of order, all of which tend to induce a feeling of quiet reverence in the viewer. The art of FitzGerald "Painter of the Prairies", due to the depth of his vision, possessed a universality that held meaning for those beyond his own native region. 98 CHAPTER VII F O O T N O T E S ^National Gallery of Canada Papers, Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Mrs. Ferguson, September 8, 1947. 2 National Gallery of Canada Papers, Letter from J.W. McConnell to Mary Ferguson, September 25, 1947. See also L.L. FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, Chronology 1947 - 1948. 3 Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Mrs. Ferguson, September 8, 1947. 4 Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 182. 5 Brooker Papers, Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Bertram Brooker, January 11, 1929 (sic) 1930. ^Robert Ayre Papers, Letter from L.L. FitzGerald to Robert Ayre, August 29, 1948. 7 l b l d . g Ayre Papers, Letter from Dr. Ted Thomas to Robert Ayre, May 24, 1972. 9 L.L. FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, October 25, 1955. 1 0 1 b i d . , November 8, 1955. ^ ^ Ibid., December 5, 1955. 12 lbid.> Chronology. 1 3 l b i d . , March 21, 1955. 14 . FitzGerald only made three entries in 1956, one on July 20, describing his recent visit to the Gallery to see the Picasso etchings, drypoints and lithographs, one on July 21, recording Rill Brooker's (Bertram Brooker's wife) death and his last entry on August 3, 1956, two days before his own death. 99 Finished building front steps - painting to do now - Geraldine and Earl came for dinner til eleven - rainy, cool day - been cool most of summer - flowers in box on balcony very beautiful. 1 5 Refer to Pen Drawing: Hat, Art Gallery of Ontario (A60 70/50). '^Karen Sens in conversation with Dr. Alcock August 3, 1957. Dr. Alcock, a friend of FitzGerald, has kept files on the artist. In his files he noted that this work was started on August 23, 1955. 17 Karen Sens in conversation with Miss Lynn Sissons, August 10, 1975. 18 L.L. FitzGerald, 1930, Diary, March 3, 1927 (Notes on Russian Art). 19 Ayre Papers, Unpublished Notes; Memorial Catalogue, n.p. 100 BIBLIOGRAPHY BOOKS Arnason, H.H. History of Modern Art. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1968. Boggs, Jean Sutherland. The National Gallery of Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1971. Brooker, Bertram, ed. Yearbook of the Arts in Canada. Toronto: Macmillan C o . of Canada, 1929, 1936. Brown, Milton. American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Buchanan, D.W., ed. Canadian Painters from Paul Kane to the Group of Seven. Oxford, Phaidon Press, 1945. . The Growth of Canadian Painting. London: Collins, 1950. Canaday, John. Mainstreams of Modern Art. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. ~~ Colgate, William. Canadian Art/Its Origin and Development. Scarborough: McGraw-Hill, 1943. Duval, Paul. Canadian Drawings and Prints. Toronto: Burns and MacEachern, 1952. . Four Decades/The Canadian Group of Painters and Their Contemporaries, 1930 - 1 9 7 0 : Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & C o . , 1972. . High Realism in Canada. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & C o . , 1974. Feldman, E.B. Varieties of Visual Experience. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972. Fry, Roger. Cezanne, A Study of his Development. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1927. 101 Gardner, Helen. Art Through the Ages. Revised by H. de la Croix and R. Tansey. New York-! Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1970. Godsell, Patricia. Enjoying Canadian Painting. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1976. The Group of Seven Fiftieth Anniversay 1920 - 1970. Montreal: Globe Publishers, 1970. Haftmann, Werner. Painting in the Twentieth Century. 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Pictures from the Douglas M . Duncan Collection (assembled by Frances Duncan Barwick). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975. Read, Herbert. A Concise History of Modern Painting. New York: Frederick A . Praeger, 1966. Reid, Dennis. A Concise History of Canadian Painting. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973. Rewald, John. The History of Impressionism. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1961. . Post Impressionism from Van Gogh to Gauguin. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, n.d. Robson, A . H . Canadian Landscape Painters. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1932. Ross, Malcolm, ed. The Arts in Canada/a Stock-Taking at Mid-Century. Toronto: Macmillan C o . of Canada, 1958. Schapiro, Meyer. Paul Cezanne. New York: Harry N . Abrams, Inc., n.d. 103 Seitz, William. Claude Monet. London: Thames and Hudson, 1960. Sterling, Charles. French Painting. A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ill, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. University of Victoria. Creative Canada - A Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Cenrury Creative and Performing Artists. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971. Weismann, Donald. The Visual Arts as Human Experience. New Jersey: Prentice- Hall, Inc., 1974. PERIODICALS Ayre, Robert. "Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald 1890 - 1 9 5 6 . " Canadian Art, 14, ' 1 (Autumn, 1956), 14-16. . "Painter of the Prairies." Weekend Magazine, 8, 12 (1958), 26, 27, 29. . "Western Painting Comes to Montreal." Canadian Art, 9, 2 (1951-52), 59. Bell, Keith. "Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald." Artscanada, 34, 2 (May/June 1977), 55-56. Brown, Eric. "Studio Talk." The International Studio, 40 (1910). Buchanan, D.W. "The Story of Canadian A r t . " Canadian Geographical Journal, 17, 6 (December, 1938), 280. Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 16 (1921), 46-70; 94-96; 118, 162, 197, 204-205; 17, (1922), 23, 47. "Canada's National Painters." The Studio, 103, 471 (1932), 315. Eckhardt, Ferdinand. "The Technique of L.L. FitzGerald." Canadian Art, 15, 2 (Spring 1958), 115-149. Fairly, Barker. "What is Wrong with Canadian A r t . " Canadian Art, 6, 1 (Autumn 1948), 29. "FitzGerald on A r t . " Canadian Art, 15, 2 (Spring 1958), 118-119. 104 Frantz, Henri. "The Art of Richard Parkes Bonington, 1801 - 1828." The International Studio, 24 (December 1904), 99-111. George, Nellie. " L . L . FitzGerald, The Prairie Artist." The Manitoba Teacher (March - April, 1958), 12-14. Harper, J . Russell. "Three Centuries of Canadian Painting." Canadian Art, 19 (November/December, 1962), 431, 433. Harris, Lawren. "LeMoine FitzGerald - Western Artists. " Canadian Art, 3, 1 (November 1945), 10-13. Heinrich Theodore A . "In the Galleries/Toronto." Artscanada, 29, 5 (December 1972), 73. The International Studio, 48 (December 1912), 23. James,'Geoffrey. "Painting in the 30's: A World Apart." Time (Canada) Magazine (February 10, 1975), 16. Lamb, Mortimer. "Studio Talk, Montreal." The International Studio, 58 (1916), 63-67. Mactavish, Newton. "Some Canadian Painters of the Snow." The International Studio, 66 (1918-19), 78-82. ~~ ~~ . "Studio Talk, Toronto." The International Studio, 58 (March-June 1916), 269-274. "Manitoba/Home Grown Painter." Time (Canada) Magazine (March 10, 1958), 11. Mclnness, Graham Campbell. "Art of Canada." The International Studio, 114 (August 1937), 60. Mortimer-Lamb, H. "Studio Talk." The International Studio, 68 (July- September 19.19), 119-126. "The Private Collector/Douglas Duncan." Canadian Art, 18 (May/June 1961), 167-168. Ponte, Nello. "Impressionism." Encyclopedia of World Art, 7, New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1959, 828-856. Reproduction. Artscanada, 24, 106 (March 1967), sup. 5. 105 Reproduction. Artscanada, 32, 1 (March 1975), inside cover. Reproduction. Arts Weekly, 1, 2 (March 18, 1932), 28. Reproduction. The Beaver (Winter 1973), 56. Reproduction. The Beaver (Summer 1977), cover. Reproduction. Canadian Art, 7, 4 (1950), front cover. Reproduction. Canadian Art, TO, 4 (Summer 1953), 134. Reproduction. Canadian Art, 14, 3 (Spring 1957), 123. Reproduction. Canadian Art, 17 (March 1960), 92. Reproduction. Canadian Art, 18 (March/April 1961), 86, 92. Reproduction. Canadian Art, 23, 4 (October 1966), 6. Reproduction. The Curtain C a l l , 7, 3 (December 1936), 6, 11. Reproduction. The Mennonite (January 30, 1970), cover. "The Resonance of Batterwood House." Canadian Art, 21, 90 (March, April 1964), 100. "A Selection of Acquisitions by Canadian Galleries and Museums." Canadian Art, 16, 1 (Winter 1959), 41. The International Studio, 67, 275 (February 15, 1916), 66. Venturi. "Cezanne." Encyclopedia of World Art, 3, New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1959, 340-356. Wood, Martin. "The Grosvenor House Exhibition of French A r t . " The International Studio, 54 (November, 1914), 3-11. . "Modern French Pictures at the National Gallery." The International "Studio, 63 (November 1917 - February 1918), 53-57. Zemans, Joyce. "Reviews and Notes." Artscanada, 30, 2 (May 1973), 77. EXHIBITION CATALOGUES Bovey, Patricia. L.L. FitzGerald & Bertram Brooker/Their Drawings. Winnipeg: The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1975. Bovey, Patricia and Davis, Ann. Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, The Development of an Artist. V/innipeg: The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1978. Brown, Milton. Armory Show, Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition Catalogue. New York: 1963. Canadian Art of Today Exhibition Catalogue. Winnipeg: The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1921. Coy, Helen. L. LeMoine FitzGerald Exhibition. Winnipeg: Gallery III, 1977. The Development of Painting in Canada 1665 - 1945. Toronto: Art * Gallery of Toronto, 1945. Eckhardt, Ferdinand. A New FitzGerald. Winnipeg: The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1963. 150 Years of Art in Manitoba/Struggle for a Visual Civilization. Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1970. First Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting. Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 1955. Hill, Charles C . Canadian Painting in the Thirties. Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 1975. Hubbard, R.H. Canadian Landscape Painting 1670 - 1930. Madison: Elvejohn Art Centre, 1973. • . Vincent Massey Bequest/The Canadian Paintings. Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 1968. Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald/A Memorial Exhibition. Winnipeg: The Winnipeg Art Gailery, 1959. L.L. FitzGerald (1890 - 1956)/Drowings and Watercolours from the Winnipeg Art Gallery. St. John: New Brunswick Museum and Charlotrerown, Confederation Art Gallery and Museum, 1966. Lord, Barry. Painting in Canada. Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1967. 107 Jarvis, Alan, foreword, and Ferdinand Eckhardt, intro. FitzGerald - Memorial Exhibition. Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, in collaboration with the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Memorial Room for LeMoine FitzGerald. Winnipeg: The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1957. Murray, Joan. Impressionism in Canada 1895 - 1935. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1974. Williamson, Moncrieff. Through Canadian Eyes/Trends and Influences in Canadian • Art 1815 - 1965. Calgary: Glenbow-Alberta Institute, 1976. UNPUBLISHED SOURCES Amundson, Dale, Lionel Le Moine FitzGerald. Unpublished B.F.A. thesis, University of Manitoba, 1963. Art Students' League Account Files. Account N o . 3413, Register N o . 1412. Winnipeg Art Gallery Files. Ayre Papers. Ayre, Robert. Unpublished articles and notes. Queens University Archives. FitzGerald, L.L. Diary, 1930, 1953 - 1956. Xeroxed by Karen L. Sens; with the permission of Mrs. Pat Morrison, FitzGerald's daughter. FitzGerald, L.L. "Painter of the Prairies," C . B . C . Wednesday Night Talk. December 1, 1954. Typescript. Dr. E.J. Thomas Papers, Winnipeg. Hoogstraten, Mrs. Vinia. Morning Comment Broadcast. November 18, 1959. 9:45 - 9:55 a.m. on C . S . T . FitzGerald Study Centre Files, University of Manitoba. Winnipeg School of Art, Prospectus. 1917 - 1948. UNPUBLISHED LETTERS Copies of the following letters can be obtained from: THE FITZGERALD STUDY CENTRE Arthur Lismer to Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald. October 19, 1930; October 31, 1930; December 24, 1930; May 24, 1932; June 17, 1932; undated; September 12, 1936; April 15, 1940; February 15, 1940. 108 J . E . H . MacDonald to Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald. February 10, 1928; April 8, 1931; October 14, 1931; August 19, 1932. Lawren Harris to Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald. undated; December 10, 1929; December 29, 1929; January 9, 1929; October 10, 1931; October 11, 1933; December 21, 1942; January 26, 1943; February 21, 1943; August 21, 1943; October 10, 1943; February 6, 1944; March 18, 1945; May 21, 1945. N A T I O N A L GALLERY OF C A N A D A ARCHIVAL FILES Bertram Brooker to Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald. December 28, 1929; October 17, 1930; March 26, 1931; August 6, 1931; November 27, 1931; January 10, 1932; March 20, 1933; September 1, 1933; March 15, 1934; fall 1934; February 5, 1935; April (?), 1935; May 9, 1935; May 17, 1935; May 23, 1935; June 6, 1935; June 30, 1936; September 22, 1936; February 25, 1937; . November 16, 1937; March 14, 1938; November 1, 1938; March 21, 1939; May 16, 1939; June 25, 1942; July 27, 1945; September 20, 1945; October 5, 1945?; November 27, 1945; December 27, 1945. Brooker's Papers - Lionel Le Moine FitzGerald to Bertram Brooker. January 11, 1930; April 18, 1931; June 13, 1931; December 21, 1931; January 12, 1933; November 6, 1933; January 20, 1935; May 7, 1935; May 10, 1935; June 17, 1935; December 4, 1937. Mr. J . W . McConnell to Mary Ferguson. September 25, 1947. Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald to Mr. McFaddin. October 1, 1951. Alan Jarvis to Mrs. FitzGerald. August 29, 1956. Q U E E N ' S UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES (ROBERT AYRE PAPERS) Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald to Robert Ayre. March 8, 1934; January 9, 1939; February 3, 1942; January 31, 1945; June 11, 1945; January 29, 1945 (postmarked); August 22, 1947; August 29, 1948; July 25, 1949; January 8, 1950; undated c. 1950; December 18, 1952; August 27, 1954. 109 Robert Ayre to Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald. January 7, 1942; April 30, 1945?; Hallowe'en, 1945; February 12, 1947; April 3, 1947; February 13, 1948; April 19, 1948; October 14, 1948; June 10, 1949; November 22, 1949; May 27, 1950. Patricia Morrison to Robert Ayre. September 5, 1956. Arnold Brigden to Robert Ayre. April 2, 1957. Florence Brigden to Robert Ayre. January 7, 1957. Mr. Harry McCurry to Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald. May 4, 1938; October 25, 1940; October 29, 1940; August 21, 1951. Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald to Mr. Harry McCurry. July 6, 1932; March 18, 1937; October 16, 1939; March 28, 1940; March 31, 1942; June 16, 1945; June 27, 1945; July 24, 1945; August 6, 1945; October 25, 1948; June 7, 1949; February 10, 1950; August 18, 1951. Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald to Gertrude. July 21, 1949. Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald to Miss Fenwick. September 13, 19441 Miss Fenwick to Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald. October 29, 1948. Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald to Lawren Harris. May 23, 1945. Lawren Harris to Donald Buchanan (Includes article entitled "Recent Work of LeMoine FitzGerald.") May 27, 1945. Mr. Harry McCurry to Lawren Harris. June 20, 1945. Harry Adaskin to Prime Minister King. February 8, 1946. Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald to Mrs. Mary Ferguson. September 8, 1947. n o Robert Ayre to Florence Brigden. January 18, 1957. Mr. Hugh Morrison to Robert Ayre. December 6, 1968; March 17, 1969. Robert Ayre to Mr. Hugh Morrison. December 31, 1968; May 8, 1969. NEWSPAPER ARTICLES In the collection of Karen L. Sens: A great number of newspaper clippings dating from 1923 to 1978, primarily from The Winnipeg Tribune, and The Winnipeg Free Press, but also includes articles from: Saturday Night, The Province, B.C. . Herald, Vernon News, Montreal Gazette, Le Droit, Montreal Star, Toronto Globe and Mail, St. James, Manitoba Leader, Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa Journal, Quebec Chronicle Telegraph, Windsor Daily Star, Detroit News, London Evening Free Press, et cetera. I l l APPENDIX LIST OF FITZGERALD'S DATED OIL PAINTINGS (compiled by author) Date 1911 Title Woodland Medium O H Dimensions 8" x 10-1/2' Location: unknown no reproduction available (n.r.a.) Source: Morris Gallery Exhibition 1912 Lockport Location: oil on 25.2 x 20.0 cm cardboard Winnipeg Art Gallery ( W . A . G . ) G70-186 1912 Additional Information: signed and dated (s.d.) on reverse upper corner (u.c.) Trees Location: W . A . G . G70-195 oil on canvas 31.0 x 45.7 cm Additional Information: s.d. on reverse upper right (u.r.) 112 Date Title Medium Dimensions 1913 River oil on canvas Location: W . A . G . G70-169 Additional Information: signed bottom left (s.b.l.) below: d . on reverse u . c : June 13 1913 Kildonan on Location: unknown n.r.a. 24.5 x 32.1 cm 9-1/4"x 10-1/2' Source: Morris Gallery Exhibition 1914 Untitled (Manitoba Winter) oil 6-1/2" x 8-1/2' Location: Private Collection, Winnipeg 1917 Late Fall, Manitoba oil on canvas Location: National Gallery of Canada Collection ( N . G . C . ) N . G . C . 1438 30" x 36" 1917 Sketch for Panel over Fireplace Location: Tom Thompson Gallery oil on 20" x 24" canvas 1918 Assiniboine River from Maryland Bridge Location: Agnes Etherington Art Centre Collection oil on 17-5/8" x 23-5/8" canvas Additional Information: not signed (n.s.) Title Medium Dimensions Cottage Location: unknown oil n.r.a. Source: Morris Gallery Exhibition Head of Sleeping Boy Location: W . A . G . G64-26 Additional Information: s.d. on back Mrs. Wheaton Location: W . A . G . G70-31 oil on canvas Additional Information: d. on reverse top right (t.r.) The Bridge oil Location: unknown n.r.a. Source: Morris Gallery Exhibition 7 - 1 / 4 " x 9 " 6-1/2" "x 8-7/8" 63.0 x 45.0 cm 7-1/4"x 9" River Landscape Location: unknown n.r.a. Source: Morris Gallery Exhibition oi il 6-3/4"x 9" The Prairie (Snowflake, Manitoba done for Geraldine) oil c. 11" x 14" Location: Private Collection, Winnipeg 114 Date Title Medium Dimensions 1920 Summer, East Kildonan Location: Private Collection, Winnipeg Source: Winnipeg Art Gallery (slide collection) Additional Information: s.d. bottom left (b.l.) oil on canvas 127.0 x 106.7 cm 1920 Winter Landscape (Garden) oil on canvas 33" x 35' Location: M r . & M r s . John MacAulay Source: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Memorial Exhibition Catalogue, 1958 Additional Information: s . d . lower right (I .r.) 1920 Yellow Tree oil on canvas Location: Gallery of Hamilton Additional Information: dated in pencil off painted surface top left (t.L) September 17, 1920 1920 Park Location: W . A . G . G70-167 21-3/4" x 23-1/2' oil on 19.1 x 24.1 cm masonite Additional Information: d. on reverse u.r.:25.00 May 16. 20 115 Date Title 1920 Ponemah Medium Dimensions oil on canvas Location: W . A . G . G70-151 Additional Information: s.b .1. d . on reverse b . l . 1920 East Kildonan oil on canvas Location: W . A . G . G70-40 Additional Information: s.b.I.: off composition (comp.) Sep 18 1920 East Kildonan Location: W . A . G . G70-44 Additional Information: u.r. off comp.: Sep. 17 1920 East Kildonan Location: W . A . G . G70-56 Additional Information: d . l . l . 1920 East Kildonan Location: W . A . G . G70-182 1920 East Kildonan Location: W . A . G . G70-190 oil on canvas oil on canvas oil on canvas 32.5 x 4 0 . 5 cm 22" x 23-3/8" 17-5/8" x 19-1/2' 39.7 x 25.2 cm 35.7 x 40.3 cm Additional Information: s.b.I. 116 Date Title 1920 East Kildonan Location: W . A . G . G70-191 Additional Information: s . d . l . r . 1920 East Kildonan Location: W . A . G . G70-]92 Mediu m oil on canvas Dimensions 35.9 x 4 2 . 6 cm oil on canvas 1920 1920 E ^ i J S i l d o n ^ y ^ Location: W . A . G . G70-194 Additional Information: s.d. on reverse: Sept. i i East Kildonan Location: W . A . G . C70-39 Additional Information: s.b.r.: d . b . c . off comp. Standing Nude Location: W . A . G . G70-U7 Additional Information: s.d.u.r. 1920 Broken Tree, Kildonan Park Location: Private Collection Additional Information: s.d.b.r. oil on canvas oil on canvas 1920 oil on canvas 34.0 x 40.0 cm 35.3 x 39.4 cm 69.5 x 64.0 cm 56.8 x 39.2 cm oil on canvas 83.8 x 88.9 cm 117 Date Title 1920 Ponemah Location: W . A . G . G70-189 Additional Information: s.d. on reverse u . l . Medium Dimensions oil on canvas 40.6 x 34 cm 192.1 Summer Afternoon The Prairie (also referred to as Prairie Landscape (Summer) ) Location: W . A . G . L-90 Source: W . A . G . list (Lily Hobbs), Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Memorial Travelling Exhibition Catalogue 1959-60 Additional Information: s.d.b.r. oil on canvas 4 2 " x 35' 1921 Prairie Sky oil Location: n.r.a. Source: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Travelling Memorial Exhibition Catalogue 1959-60 not stated 1921 Assiniboine River Location: W . A . G . oil on 9-3/4" x 11-7/8' plywood Provenance: donated by Mrs. Philip Chester Additional Information: s . d . b . l . 118 Date 1921 Title Path Location: Source: Medium >il Dimensions 7_l/4" x 8-1/4" unknown n.r.a. Morris Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, Feb. 1973 1921 1921 Palisades, Hudson River (also referred to as Hudson River) Location: W . A . G . G73-328 Provenance: M r . & M r s . A . O . Brigden Source: Amundson's thesis contains a small black and white contact print of this work. Additional Information: s.b.I. C h a l e m j j £ u n e r ^ From Parliament Hill Location: W . A . G . G70-185 Ion 19-3/4" x 16" oi canvas oil on canvas 1 9 2 2 Max's Studio On 9th St. Near 6th, New York Location: W . A . G . G70-143 1 9 2 2 Nude With Red Hair Location: W . A . G . G70-35 oil on canvas 25.4 x 30.5 cm 25.1 x 30.2 cm oil and 6 6 . 3 x 5 1 . 0 cm charcoal on canvas Additional Information: d across bottom under comp.. New York, 1922/Miller's class? 119 Date 1922 1922 1922 Title Medium Dimensions Riviere des Prairies, P . Q . Location: N . G . C . 16, 532 Additional Information: d . and titled, b.r.: June 1922 Seated Nude Location: W . A . G . G70-36 Additional Information: s . d . b . l . comp.: New York Landscape Location: W . A . G . G70-144 oil on canvas oil on canvas on on canvas 18" x 20" 65.5 x 50.0 cm 22.1 x 32.2 cm Additional Information: d . l . r . : also indistinguishable marks 1922 Seated Nude Location: W . A . G . G70-29 Additional Information: s . d . b . l . : New York oil on canvas 57 x 47.5 cm 1922 Spring Farmyard Location: W . A . G . G70-176 oil on canvas 30.5 x 25.1 cm Additional Information: d . on reverse c . : N . Y . Date Title 1923 Oakdale Place oil on canvas Location: W . A . G . G70-58 Additional Information: d . b . l . off comp. 1923 Pembina Valley oil on canvas Location: Dr. &Mrs. C D . Lees, Winnipeg Source: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Memorial Exhibition Catalogue 1958 Additional Information: s . d . b . l . 1923 Country Road Location: Gallery of Hamilton Collection Additional Information: d.l .r. oil on canvas 120 Medium Dimensions 44.0 x 54.5 cm 18" x 2 2 " 11-7/8" x 1 5 " 1923 River Bank, Maryland Bridge Location: Agnes Etherington Art Centre Additional Information: n.s. oil on canvas 17" x 20' 1924 Landscape With Fir Tree Location: W . A . G . G70-202 oil on canvas 28.9 x 32.7 cm Additional Information: d. on reverse b. I. 121 Date Title 1924 Still Life with Jars Medium Dimensions Location: Art Gallery of Ontario Collection 1924 Assiniboine. at Park Location: Mr. & M r s . S.J. Drache, Winnipeg, owners Additional Information: Endorsed by Mrs. Felicia FitzGerald as a work of her husband. oil on canvas oil on 30-1/8" x 24' canvas 15-1/2" x 17-3/4" c. 1924 Farmhouse Interior - Snowflake, Manitoba oil on canvas 61.0 x 51.0 cm Location: W . A . G . G75-16 1925 Potato Patch, Snowflake Location: Private Collection oil on canvas on board 43.3 x 51.2 cm Additional Information: s.d.b.r. 1925 River Scene oil 7" x 9 " Location: unknown n.r.a. Source: Morris Gallery Exhibition Catalogue Feb. 1973 1926 Harvest Location: W . A . G . G70-166 oil on canvas 29.5 x 38.0 cm Additional Information: s.d.b.r. Date Title 1926 Trees and Window Medium oil on canvas Location: Mr. &Mrs. A . O . Brigden, owners Source: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Memorial Exhibition Catalogue 1958 Additional Information: s.d.b.r. 122 Dimensions 20" x 17-1/2" 1927 Untitled (Winter Oakdale Place) Location: Private Collection, Winnipeg Additional Information: initialled & dated L . L . F 2 7 / on 1927 Williamson's Garage Location: Collection: N . G . C . 3682 Additional Information: s . d . b . l . oil on canvas 2 2 " x 18" 1927 Portrait of C . K . Gebhardt Location: W . A . G . G69-96 Additional Information: s.d. back: c. 1927 oil on canvas not given 1928 Hislop's Barn oil on canvas Location: Collection: Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery, University of Regina 14" x 17-3/4" 123 Date 1929 Title c. 1928 Pritchard's Fence Medium oil on canvas Location: Collection: Art Gallery of Ontario ( A . G . O . ) Additional Information: s.d-.b.r. 192(8) 1929 . Untitled (Prairie Farm) Location: Dr. &Mrs. E.J. Thomas Poplar Woods Location: W . A . G . G75-66 Provenance: C . C . Sinclair Source: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Memorial Exhibition Catalogue 1958 Additional Information: s.d.b.r. oil on canvas 1929 Portrait of Artist's Daughter Patricia FitzGerald, aged 10 o i l Location: Estate of Mrs. Pat Morrison 1929 The Red Tower oil on board Location: Dr. & Mrs.. J . J . Lander Dimensions 28-3/16"x 30-1/8' oil on c. 10" x 12-1/2" canvas 28" x 36' 13" x 15-5/8" 1 1 " x 12-3/4' 1929 The Prairie Location: W . A . G . G73-332 Provenance: Arnold O. Brigden Additional Information: s.d.b.l oil on canvas 28.5 x 33.5 cm 124 Date Title Medium Dimensions 1930 Stooks and Trees Location: W . A . G . G75-13 Provenance: Mr. &Mrs. A . O . Brigden Source: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Memorial Exhibition Catalogue 1958 Additional Information: s.b.r. oil on 11-1/2" x 15" canvas on board 1930 Untitled (Tree Trunks) Location: N . G . C . 16366 Additional Information: b . l . 30 on on canvas 11-5/8" x 14-1/4' .1931 Broken Tree in Landscape (also referred to as Dead Tree) Location: W . A . G . G56-29 Additional Information: s.d.b.I. oil on canvas 14" x 16-7/8' 1931 Farm Yard Location: N . A . G . 15474 Provenance: Bequest of Honorable Vincent Massey 1968 Source: Charles Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, p.81 Additional Information: s.d.1.1. oil on canvas on board 13-3/4" x 16-3/4' 125 Date Title Medium Dimensions 1931 Prairie Farm Location: Private Collection, Toronto Source: C . Hill, Canadian Painting In the Thirties, p. 81, 172 Additional Information: s.d.b.r. oil on canvas on panel 14" x 17' 1931 1931 Prairie Farm oil on canvas Location: Mr. R. Riley, Winnipeg on panel Source: Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Memorial Exhibition Catalogue 1958 Additional Information: s.d.b.r. Summer Location: Hart House, University of Toronto Additional Information: s . d . b . l . oil on canvas 1 4 " x 17" 13-1/2" x 16-3/4' 1931 Assiniboine River Location: W . A . G . G73-326 oil on canvas on board 14" x 17' Provenance: Mr. &Mrs. Arnold O.Brigden Source: W . A . G . List (Lily Hobbs) Additional Information: s . d . b . l . 126 Date Title 1931 Assiniboine River Location: W . A . G . G73-326 Medium Dimensions oil on 7-1/4" x 9' canvas on board Additional Information: s . d . b . l . 1931 Landscape with Trees Location: N . G . C . 5,473 oil on canvas on board 13-3/4" x 16-3/4" 1931 Doc Snider's House 1934 Location: N . G . C . 3993 Additional Information: s. d. b. I. The Pool oil on canvas oil on board Location: N . G . C . 17,612 Provenance: urchased from Harry Adaskin, Vancouver, 1973 Source: C . Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, p.75 Additional Information: s . d . b . l . 29-1/2" x 33-1/2" 14-1/4" x 17-1/4" 1935 Winter Sunset oil Location: Saskatoon Gallery 1 2 " x 14" 127 Date 1937 Title Garage Location: Source: Medi um oil on canvas Mr. &Mrs. George Ferguson, Montreal Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald Memorial Exhibition Catalogue 1958 Additional Information: s.d.b.r. Dimensions 2 8 " x 24' 1938 Jar_ oil on (also referred to as Still Life - Jug) canvas Location: W . A . G . C56-25 (purchased by The Women's Committee) Additional Information: s.d.b.r. 24" x 21" c. 1940 Still Life - Two Apples Location: W . A . G . G56-28 Additional Information: s . b . l . oil on canvas 16-1/2" x 19-1/4" 1941 Still-life Location: N . G . C . 17,611 Provenance: purchased from Harry Adaskin oil on board 16-1/8" x 14" 1945 Untitled (Green Apple) Location: N . G . C . 16,361 Additional Information: s.d.b.r. Lionel Lemoine FitzGerald 45 oil on canvas 11-1/4" x 12-5/8" 128 Date Title Medium Dimensions c . 1945 Jugs, Inkwell and Book oil 14" x 12" Location: not given Source: Morris Gallery Exhibition Catalogue Feb. 1973 (illustrated) c. 1945 Still Life with Jug oil 10-1/2" x 8" Location: not given Source: Morris Gallery Exhibition Catalogue Feb. 1973 (illustrated) 1947 The Little Plant oil on 23-1/2" x 17-3/4" (also referred to as the Little Flower) canvas on board Location: The McMichael Canadian Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario Source: Harper, Painting in Canada, p. 321 Additional Information: s . d . b . l . 1948 Still Life with Plant oil on 19-3/4" x 14" plywood Location: Mr. Riley, Winnipeg Additional Information: s.d.b.r. 1948 Still Life - Bottle and Jar with Leaves oil on 23-1/2" x 29-1/2" canvas Location: unknown n.r.a. Additional Information: s.d. in red paint 129 Date Title c. 1948 From an Upstairs Window, Winter Location: N . 5800 Additional Information: s.b.r. Refer to: Sketch for From An Upstairs Window, Winter 11-15/16" x 8-3/16' N . A . G . 16298 Medium Dimensions oil on canvas 24" x 18' 1949 Geranium and Bottle Location: W . A . G . L-9 oil on 24" x 15" canvas on mason ite Additional Information: s . d . b . l . c. 1949 Manitoba Maple oil not stated Source: appeared on Brigden's Christmas card 1949 c. 1950 Composition N o . 1 - 1951 Location: Dr. &Mrs. E.J. Thomas (done on request) oil on canvas 58.0 x 53.0 cm Additional Information: s.b.I. August Trees 1950 Location: W . A . G . 73-325 oil on 16-3/4" x 9-3/8" hardboard Source: Arnold Brigden Collection Catalogue 1974 Additional Information: signed 130 Date Title August Trees 1950 Location: Medium Dimensions oil on 13-3/4" x 8-1/4' hardboard W . A . G . G73-324 Source: Arnold Brigden Collection Catalogue 1974 Additional Information: unsigned 1950 Abstract - Landscape Location: W . A . G . G70-154 Additional Information: d. on reverse u.r. oil on canvas 21.6 x 35.4 cm 1951 Composition, 1951 Location: W . A . G . G70-165 Additional Information: d . b . l . : 6.9.51 oil on 20.3 x 15.2 cm masonite 1951 Abstract, 1951 Location: W . A . G . G70-174 Additional Information: d . b . r . : 8.9.51 oil on 15.2 x 20.3 cm masonite 1952 Abstract, 1952 Location: W . A . G . G70-200 Additional Information: d . b . l . : 11.12.52 oil on canvas 28.0 x 26.0 cm Date Title 1952 Deer Lodge Location: W . A . G . G70-175 Additional Information: d . b . l . 1952 Abstract, 1952 Location: W . A . G . G70-172 Additional Information: d.b.r. 1953 Abstract, 1953 Location: W . A . G . G70-170 Additional Information: s.b.I.: d.u.r. 23.10.53 1953 Abstract, 1953 Location: W . A . G . G70-201 Additional Information: d . b . r . : 1.9.53 Medium Dimensions oil on canvas oil on 20.3 x 27.9 cm masonite oil on 20.3 x 27.9 cm masonite oil on 28.1 x 35.7 cm masonite 17.9 x 21.3 cm 1953 Sun Ray Location: W . A . G . G70-206 oil on canvas 19.7 x 20.3 cm 1954 Autumn Sonata Location: School of Art, University of Manitoba Additional Information: marked on reverse, t . l . oil on board 59.5 x 75.0 cm 132 Date Title Medium Dimensions 1954 Abstract: Green and Gold Location: W . A . G . G63-287 Provenance: Mr. & M r s . Joseph Harris Additional Information: s.b.r. dated on back 1954 oil on canvas 28" x 36" 1955 Grapefruit - Abstract Source: Dr. Alcock's file card (b+w photo) Additional Information: initialled & dated b.r. oil on 11-1/4" x 12-3/4' canvas on masonite 1955 Untitled (Apple) Location: N . G . C . 16,362 Additional Information: u.r.d. 13.5.55 oil on 7-5/8" x 11 canvas on board 1955 Hat Location: Private Collection Source: Morris Gallery Exhibition Catalogue Feb. 73 Additional Information: According to Dr. Alcock, this painting was started August 23, 1955. (Refer to Pen Study: Hat) Collection: A . G . O . dated 18.8.55 oil on masonite 2 4 " x 30" work_haiefteiizbx7f223nydwwjsjm ---- ANEKWE, EMANUEL AND MATISSE, VOICES IN BIOETHICS, VOL. 1 (2014-15) © 2015 Obiora N. Anekwe This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction, provided the original author and source are credited. Emanuel and Matisse: Two Distinct Perspectives on Aging Obiora N. Anekwe After reading Ezekiel J. Emanuel’s “Why I Hope to Die at 75” in The Atlantic (October 2014), I could not help but think about how the few and privileged have countless opportunities to fulfill their lifetime goals and aspirations, often left with a choice as to when and how they may end their life. Emanuel is only able to feel that living too long is a loss or that by 75 his life will be complete because he has been lucky enough to be afforded a choice. For him it’s easy to see old age simply as a time where we are deprived of creativity and intelligence – to say that what comes after ultimately amounts to nothing is indicative of the assumption that everyone has access to the same resources and social capital. In reality, most people are left with little to no choice in rapidly navigating through their age in order to fulfill their destiny. Although Emanuel may feel that he would prefer to live until age 75, most people do not have the privilege to decide because of racial, wealth, gender, class, economic, educational, and religious inequalities. Life simply gets in the way. They have families to feed and bills to pay. Unfortunately for most, the achievements in which Emanuel references in his own life’s journey are few and far between. It can take a lifetime to achieve a goal for people without access to opportunity, despite hard work and effort. Emanuel’s perspective on aging is also troubling because life can and should be fulfilling at every stage. His perspective may be unfairly influenced by medicine’s several failures, failures he has witnessed firsthand in the hospital. However, after learning about the life and art of Henri Matisse I found a different perspective on aging. In Matisse’s later life it’s easy to see that not all is right with Emanuel’s stance. Henri Matisse is considered by many art critics as one of the greatest visual artists of his generation. He was an innovator, most famous for the “cut-outs” he created later in life that highlighted the array and spectrum of life’s ups and downs. Matisse’s inspiration for these pieces came during the 1940s when his own life was turned upside down. He was diagnosed with abdominal cancer and then left wheelchair- bound after his operation. He used this newfound physical challenge as a means to re-discover his love for cut-outs. As his surgery had left him debilitated, bound to his wheel chair and bed, painting and sculpture became more of a physical challenge. So, Matisse, ever so the creative genius, sought to reinvent himself by turning to cut-outs. Cut-outs are created by painting paper and cutting them into figurative forms before pasting or nailing the pieces on paper, canvas, or another palette. Ultimately, cut-outs were a simple and sensible solution: sheets of paper paint-washed by assistants, large sturdy scissors, and plain tailor pins were far more manageable materials and tools. Yet, what he managed to create was just as elaborate and beautiful as any of his prior work. For a man invigorated by the process of making art for art’s sake cut-outs became a kind of physical therapy as well as his trademark until his death at 84 in November of 1954. The exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, which ran at the Modern Museum of Modern Art from October 12, 2014 till February 10, 2015, reflected Matisse’s renewed interest in form and color, but most http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5792a137ff7c5081cb88ace7/57d06fdd8748e3aacbe022cd/57d071228748e3aacbe045d0/1473278242030/?format=original http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5792a137ff7c5081cb88ace7/57d06fdd8748e3aacbe022cd/57d071228748e3aacbe045d0/1473278242030/?format=original ANEKWE, EMANUEL AND MATISSE, VOICES IN BIOETHICS, VOL. 1 (2014-15) 2 strikingly, his commitment to art during his years as a seasoned forerunner and elder in the modern art movement. Most art critics believe Matisse’s psychological relief at having survived mortal crises was the cause of the creative rush he went through in his later years. The legacy he left after passing continues to influence modern artists, its greatest takeaway that vigor and passion for art is ageless. What is meant by a fulfilling life? What does such a life consist of? Does achievement have a time limit? I tend to see the life Matisse lived as my plausible frame of reference. Through his latest exhibition, Matisse moves us to think and explore without limit, no matter our age or status. He directly challenges Emanuel’s belief that past 75 we lose our chance at creativity and success. At the age of 40, my greatest desire is to light a flame of hope within myself so that my experiences, education, and talents can all be used in a meaningful way in order to transform society. It is my profound belief that we are never limited by who we are now or what others may perceive us to be. We are only limited by what we perceive of ourselves. For me, Matisse will always represent timeless, unlimited creativity, and beauty. The dignity he displayed, even at his seasoned age as a master artist, has reminded me that our best is yet to be. ____________________________________________________________ work_hfaw5fqpm5g47bukyrgehi23oq ---- S t u d i e S i n c o n S e rvat i o n 5 6 ( 2 0 1 1 ) pa g e S 1 0 4 – 1 1 4 104 Received August 2010 On the Utility of Spectral-Maximum- Based Automated Thread Counting from X-Radiographs of Paintings on Canvas c. richard Johnson, Jr., don H. Johnson, naoto Hamashima, Heui Sung Yang and ella Hendriks INTRODUCTION Manual thread counting is possible from the weave pattern visible at sufficient enlargement of the intensity pattern in an X-radiograph of a painting on canvas. a recently introduced algorithm [1] for automated thread counting relies upon the topography of the two- dimensional Fourier transform of the X-radiograph. (For a description of the two-dimensional Fourier transform see the appendix.) a procedure based on a two-dimensional Fourier transform is at the heart of ongoing automated thread counting campaigns among paintings by van gogh, vermeer and the delft School, Matisse, renoir, Monet and gauguin. in combination with knowledge of the artist’s studio practice, such as van gogh’s rapid usage of rolls of pre-primed canvas during his late French period, thread count data can be used to assist in art historical issues such as dating and authentication. this paper presents the results of a number of numer ical exper iments intended to elaborate on This paper establishes that the two-dimensional Fourier transform, spectral-maximum-based extraction of thread density appears suited to automatic thread counting from scanned X-radiographs of paintings for a range of European painters from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. With regularly woven canvas, striping occurring in color-coded maps of local thread count can be used to identify rollmate candidates originally separated by as much as a few meters, maybe more. These results suggest that recently developed spectral-maximum-based thread counting algorithms are sufficiently sophisticated to support major efforts in archival thread counting as key forensic data in a variety of art historical investigations. Still, the canvas and priming used by some artists require a more refined approach to automated thread counting than a simple spectral-maximum-based scheme. some of the presumptions in a spectral-maximum- based approach to automated thread counting from X-radiographs of paintings on ‘plain’ weave canvas. the degree of satisfaction of these presumptions is critical to the utility of such an algorithm. For example, reliance on the dominant spike in the two-dimensional Fourier transform is validated by experiments during algorithm development (repeated here) that indicated the spectral- maximum-based scheme produced a result close to the corresponding spot count in a high percentage of cases for paintings by vincent van gogh. is this dominant spike assumption of a spectral-maximum-based scheme valid for other artists and other periods as well? this paper presents an experiment on X-radiographs of paintings on plain weave canvas by van gogh, vermeer, Matisse and rembrandt. it is discovered that the dominant spike presumption, while quite valid for van gogh and satisfactory for other artists such as Matisse and vermeer, is much less often satisfied by the X-radiographs of paintings of other artists, such as rembrandt. When the dominant spike presumption is suitable, the thread counts in overlapping evaluation squares (e.g. 1 cm squares on 0.5 cm centers) can be color-coded spectral-maximum-based automated thread counting: x-radiographs oF paintings on canVas 105 S t u d i e S i n c o n S e rvat i o n 5 6 ( 2 0 1 1 ) pa g e S 1 0 4 – 1 1 4 and provide a map of the weave density [2]. one feature that emerges from these weave maps is striping. a bundle of threads, either hor izontal or vertical, can maintain roughly the same density (in threads cm–1) across an entire painting. therefore, why not on into the originally neighboring canvas? is the weave density pattern retained further (e.g. meters) along the same bundle of threads? a suitably normalized cross-correlation of density profiles is used to provide a measure of similarity [3]. cross-correlations internal to large paintings by Matisse are examined, and it is observed that the level of cross-correlation between X-radiographs with shared threads only gradually decays within 2–3 m of separation. this means that pieces of canvas sharing threads need not be adjacent to show a strong cross-correlation. thus, rollmates can be identified even when canvas between two rollmate paintings is not available. one loss is that a weak connection between separation distance and cross-correlation means that the cross-correlation values cannot be used to quantify, or even rank, precisely the distance of separation. Finally, an experiment is conducted to test the utility of X-radiographs for thread counting relative to direct photographs of the canvas. the presumption is that the grooves between the canvas threads are filled evenly and uniformly with radio-opaque paint so that the X-radiograph is essentially identical, in terms of thread counting, to a photograph of the raw canvas. there are numerous practicalities that challenge this presumption. the reason verso photographs are not used is that the vast majority of old master paintings in museums are lined on their backs with another canvas such that the original canvas is hidden. an additional problem with a photograph of the back of an unlined painting is that the stretcher hides the edges thereby blocking observation of cusping at the canvas edge. For examples from the few unlined paintings by van gogh in the collection of the van gogh Museum, the weave maps generated from the X-radiographs are compared with those from photos of the backs. the weave maps for each painting are strikingly similar. altogether the experiments reported here support the claim of broad, if not complete, applicability for spectral-maximum-based thread counting from scanned X-radiographs. the automated collection and analysis of thread count data expands the information available for supporting advances in a variety of art historical inquiries. SPOT COUNT COMPARISON TO SURROUNDING SWATCH COUNT in the original development of a two-dimensional Fourier-transform-maximum-based scheme relying on the dominant peak in the frequency range of interest corresponding to the thread density, a set of test line segments and the number of crossing threads were recorded for over 900 spots in 21 van gogh paintings. roughly the same number of horizontal and vertical spot counts were taken from the following 21 paintings in the collection of the van gogh Museum: Still Life: French Novels, The White Orchard, Peach Tree in Blossom, Blossoming Peach Tree, Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles, Orchard in Blossom, Wheat Fields with Reaper at Sunrise, Cypresses and Two Women, The Pietà (after Delacroix), The Plough and the Harrow (after Millet), The Sheep-Shearers (after Millet), Les Peiroulets Ravine, Evening: The Watch (after Millet), The Walk: Falling Leaves, The Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital, Reaper with Sickle (after Millet), The Thresher (after Millet), At the Foot of the Mountains, Entrance to a Quarry, Tree Trunks with Ivy and Tree Roots and Trunks. Manual counts were performed independently by two individuals for each spot and archived upon agreement. a 751 × 751 pixel square swatch (which for 600 dpi is approximately 1.25 × 1.25 inches or 3.18 × 3.18 cm) centered on the midpoint of the test line segment for each spot was extracted from the X-radiograph scans. this provided a test bed for algorithm assessment. the spectral-maximum-based algorithm [1] begins by performing a two-dimensional Fourier transform on each evaluation square after high-pass pre-processing. With the X-radiograph displaying waves of vertically and horizontally oriented threads, the tall peaks quanti- fying thread density are to be found near the horizontal and vertical axes in the two-dimensional Four ier transform. the algorithmically generated thread count is then compared to the manual spot count associated with the test line segment. this match is not expected to be precise. after all, the thread density across the test line segment need not be fully representative of the ‘average’ behavior extracted by the two-dimensional Fourier transform across the entire surrounding evaluation square. the original experiments during algorithm develop- ment suggested that this strategy could achieve an accuracy of within 1 thread cm–1 of the associated spot count over 90% of the swatches. However, a number of situations were observed where the tallest peak was just slightly higher than the next tallest. this challenges confidence that the tallest peak is the overwhelming 106 c. r. Johnson, d. h. Johnson, n. hamashima, h. s. Yang and e. hendriKs S t u d i e S i n c o n S e rvat i o n 5 6 ( 2 0 1 1 ) pa g e S 1 0 4 – 1 1 4 dominant component in the periodic thread pattern and can be used to quantify the thread count. therefore, more recently experiments were conducted with a modification of the algorithm to provide a count only when the height of the tallest peak exceeded that of the the next-tallest peak by an amount labeled the dominance factor (δ). the test set was also increased to 1000 swatches by adding swatches from Peasant Woman Cutting Straw (after Millet) from the collection of the van gogh Museum and the modified algorithm was run for all 1000. For each dominance factor, the absolute error was recorded between the manual spot count and the corresponding automatic swatch count for all swatches satisfying that dominance factor. excluding swatches with less dominant peaks reduces the absolute error bound for 90% compliance to less than 1 thread cm–1, as shown in Figure 1. For Figure 1, all swatches passing a particular domin- ance threshold are ordered from smallest to largest in terms of absolute error between the manual spot count and automatic swatch count. to produce a percentage, the index of each term in a dominance-threshold- specific set of errors is divided by the total number of swatches satisfying the specific dominance threshold. For each swatch in the dominance-threshold-specific set of ordered errors, a point is plotted with the x-coordinate as the ordered percentage and the y-coordinate as its absolute error. For each dominance factor, the resulting monotonically non-decreasing curve begins at (0, 0). For a dominance factor of one, the plotted maximum of 1 thread cm–1 occurs for over 90% of the swatches. a maximum absolute error of 0.8 thread cm–1 is met by just over 80% of the swatches. to assure an absolute error of less than 0.8 thread cm–1 for 90% of those satisfying the associated dominance-threshold δ requires a δ greater than 1.5. over 90% compliance with a lower absolute error requires an even higher δ. However, as δ increases, the percentage of satisfactory swatches decreases, as indicated in Figure 2. the percentage of swatches satisfying a dominance factor of 3 or more is less than 40%. DOMINANT SPIKE PRESUMPTION While the X-radiographs of the late nineteenth-century paintings of vincent van gogh appear to provide a high percentage of swatches that satisfy the dominant spike presumption that the location of the dominant spike designates the weave periodicity, this condition need not be met by X-radiographs of the paintings of other artists. testing of the satisfaction of such a presumption by the X-radiographs of paintings on canvas by other artists and from other periods relied on scanned X-radiographs of early twentieth-century paintings by Henri Matisse, and seventeenth-century paintings by Johannes vermeer and rembrandt van rijn. For 400 count comparisons, swatches were taken sur rounding 200 coincident pairs of vertical and horizontal spot counts on four Henri Matisse paintings in the collection of the Museum of Modern art: Bather, Goldfish and Palette, Gourds and The Moroccans. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 % A b so lu te T h re a d C o u n t E rr o r (t h /c m ) Figure 1 Spot–swatch count comparison ordered by absolute error among 1000 Van Gogh test swatches passing particular dominance threshold δ: curves left to right for δ = 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5 and 3. 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8 3 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 dominance threshold % Figure 2 Van Gogh dominance threshold percentages: passing dominance test (solid), absolute error less than 1 thread cm–1 (dashed). spectral-maximum-based automated thread counting: x-radiographs oF paintings on canVas 107 S t u d i e S i n c o n S e rvat i o n 5 6 ( 2 0 1 1 ) pa g e S 1 0 4 – 1 1 4 the resulting diagram of percentages passing with suffi ciently large peak dominance factor δ and of percentages – among those passing – performing within an absolute error less than 1 thread cm–1 is plotted in Figure 3. in comparison to the plot for 1000 swatches (each surrounding single, either vertical or horizontal, spot counts) from van gogh paintings in Figure 2, the Matisse paintings exhibit a lower percentage of swatches displaying satisfactory performance for the same dominance threshold. the dominance threshold needs to be set to approximately 1.4 or higher to get the per centage of dominance-threshold-satisfying swatches with satisfactory performance (i.e. automatic counts within 1 thread cm–1 of the corresponding spot counts) above 90%. Just over 60% of the swatches surpass a dominance threshold of 1.4. Fewer still satisfy higher thresholds. also, notice that in comparison to the van gogh swatches producing Figure 2, the number of Matisse swatches possessing a dominance factor greater than 3 is much lower. a similar exercise was performed for 200 swatches (each surrounding a pair of spot counts, one for vertical threads and one for horizontal threads) from four vermeer paintings: Diana and Her Companions and Girl with a Pearl Earring from the Mauritshuis and The Milkmaid and The Little Street from the rijksmuseum. the same was done with four rembrandt paintings: Self- Portrait from the Mauritshuis, Man in Oriental Costume from the Metropolitan Museum of art and The Jewish Bride and The Denial of Peter from the rijksmuseum. the results for the vermeer paintings and the rembrandt paintings are shown in Figures 4 and 5, respectively. despite the large differences in the ages of the works, the results for vermeer’s paintings are similar to those for Matisse (i.e. in the nearly 60% of swatches satisfying a dominance threshold of 1.4, just under 90% are within 1 thread cm–1 of the corresponding spot count). the results displayed in Figure 5 for rembrandt’s canvases are considerably worse. a dominance factor approaching 3 is required to get over 90% of the swatches satisfying this dominance factor to have absolute error less than 1 thread cm–1. unfortunately, less than 20% of the original swatches remain in consideration once the dominance factor is above 2.5. thus, the basic spectral-maximum- based procedure is not suited for application with the X-radiographs of these paintings by rembrandt. the X-radiographs of the rembrandt paintings reveal a weave pattern of substantial irregularity both in the number of threads cm–1 and in individual thread thickness. their image quality can be low in places, as well. the suitability of a spectral-maximum-based thread counting strategy to the vermeer paintings counters the feasible speculation that satisfactory canvas regularity might be a feature only of more modern canvases (such as used by van gogh and Matisse). typically, the level of satisfactory performance by those swatches passing the dominance threshold test is different in the two directions. For example, consider a pair of numbers – one for each thread direction – stating the percentage of spot counts matched to within 1 thread cm–1 by the tallest peak (i.e. with a unity dominance threshold) [4]. among the four vermeer 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8 3 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 dominance threshold % Figure 3 Matisse dominance threshold percentages: passing dominance test (solid), absolute error less than 1 thread cm–1 (dashed). 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8 3 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 dominance threshold % Figure 4 Vermeer dominance threshold percentages: passing dominance test (solid), absolute error less than 1 thread cm–1 (dashed). 108 c. r. Johnson, d. h. Johnson, n. hamashima, h. s. Yang and e. hendriKs S t u d i e S i n c o n S e rvat i o n 5 6 ( 2 0 1 1 ) pa g e S 1 0 4 – 1 1 4 paintings examined, these pairs of percentages listing the higher value first in each pair were approximately 94:50, 77:70, 78:58 and 88:80. these four combined to produce the y-axis intercept in Figure 4 of approximately 74% by the upper dashed curve. in Figures 3 through 5, the dips in the percentage with satisfactory absolute error between the spot and swatch counts as the dominance threshold increases to 2 or greater can be attributed to a small group of swatches with strongly dominant, substantially mislocated peaks. characterizing these errant swatches to permit count avoidance triage or to inform algorithmic resolution is a current topic of interest. a suitability index is proposed for the use of a spectral-maximum-based thread counter. consider the percentage of swatches exceeding a particular dominance threshold and the separate percentage among this dominance-threshold-surpassing group that have less than 1 thread cm–1 error with their corresponding spot counts. the proposed suitability index is the value at which these two percentages match for the same dominance threshold. this value is the y-coordinate of the intersection point of the ‘x’ formed by the solid and dashed curves in Figures 2 through 5. For these figures, the suitability indices (also known as the x-factor) for van gogh, Matisse, vermeer and rembrandt are approximately 92, 84, 82 and 73, respectively. Based on experience to date, an x-factor of 80% is proposed as the cutoff for utilization of the current spectral-maximum- based thread counting software. indeed as the 80% value is approached from above, it becomes likely that, in some density weave maps composed from the current software of paintings from the group in question, one of the two thread directions will appear speckled rather than striped. PROFILE CROSS-CORRELATION TESTING assuming spectral-maximum-based thread counting is suitable for the X-radiograph of interest, the thread counts within overlapping swatches covering the entire X-radiograph can be accumulated with very little human user time. user time is devoted primarily to image cropping to exclude elements in the X-radiograph image from outside the canvas and to taking a few manual spot counts to acquire sufficient information for tuning the user-selected range over which the search for the maximum spectral peak is to be conducted. Labeling the center of each swatch with a color related to its calculated thread density (with one figure for horizontal threads and another for vertical threads) produces weave maps that readily reveal patterns in the density variations. one immediate observation in the weave maps of paintings by van gogh is the appearance of stripes (Figures 8 and 9): horizontally oriented ones in the maps of the density of horizontal threads and vertically oriented in maps of the density of vertical threads. in each of these four-part figures, the left column provides the horizontal and vertical weave maps for a painting (with the black rectangle indicating the location of the inner edge of the stretcher). For each canvas, the observed str ipes display a particular pattern of variation that can be described by averaging thread counts along the stripe direction and assembling a density profile vector for each thread direction. presumably, this profile would be a close match to the profile of its original neighbor on the pre-primed canvas roll. assessing the similarity of two signals is a common engineering task accomplished with computation of their cross-correlation at various relative shifts. at the relative shift that aligns the peaks and valleys of one signal with those of a similarly shaped signal this cross-correlation will take on a large value. thus, the location of a strong peak in a cross-correlation curve drawn as a function of the relative shift between two similar curves indicates the relative shift providing the most agreeable alignment. a strong peak in the cross- correlation of two X-radiograph profiles suggests the two radiographs (and their associated paintings) shared threads on the same canvas bolt [2, 3, 5, 6]. a reasonable question to ask is whether or not the strength of a normalized cross-correlation is related to 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8 3 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 dominance threshold % Figure 5 Rembrandt dominance threshold percentages: passing dominance test (solid), absolute error less than 1 thread cm–1 (dashed). spectral-maximum-based automated thread counting: x-radiographs oF paintings on canVas 109 S t u d i e S i n c o n S e rvat i o n 5 6 ( 2 0 1 1 ) pa g e S 1 0 4 – 1 1 4 the distance of separation of two paintings exhibiting a weave match. to test this question we rely on the X-radiographs of large paintings on canvas by Matisse. Such uncut expanses are obviously from a single roll. Fifteen Matisse paintings were examined: Bather, Blue Window, Goldfish and Palette, Gourds, The Moroccans, The Rose Marble Table, Still Life after Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s ‘La Desserte’ and Woman on a High Stool from Museum of Modern art and Apples, Bathers by a River, The Geranium, The Green Sash, Interior at Nice, Lorette with Cup of Coffee and Woman before an Aquarium from the art institute of chicago. these canvases were up to 18 X-radiographs ‘wide’ horizontally and 11 X-radiographs ‘high’ vertically. the standard X-radiograph size used is 42.5 × 30.5 cm. the cross-correlation of profiles of any pair of X-radiographs within a row (column) that shares hori- zontal (vertical) threads is expected to show a prominent peak. if the painting is five X-radiographs wide, with the X-radiographs numbered left to right as one to five, then X-radiographs one and two, as well as X-radiographs two and three, three and four, and four and five are all one X-radiograph apart. Similarly, X-radiographs one and three, two and four, and three and five are all two X-radiographs apart. X-radiographs one and four are three X-radiographs apart, as are X-radiographs two and five. the pair of X-radiographs one and five is the only pair four X-radiographs apart. For each of these pairs it is possible to compute the peak in the normalized cross-correlation and plot these peak values as the y-coordinate and the number of separating X-radiographs as the x-coordinate. Similar values can be obtained for vertically aligned X-radiographs. values from the 15 Matisse paintings for which data were available are plotted in Figure 6. the formula for normalized cross-correlation from [3] compensates for different amounts of overlap between different X-radiographs in the same row. this is needed because X-radiographs are typically not laid down according to a precise grid and have varying degrees of overlap with their immediate neighbors. alignment is even more haphazard when considering X-radiographs from different paintings relative to their potential original arrangement. For the vertical cluster at each separation value, the square marker indicates the average and the triangular markers the standard deviation on either side of this average. admittedly, the distance measure along the x-axis is woefully imprecise due to the typically casual assembly of the X-radiograph films laid out to cover a painting. However, it is apparent that the average values in Figure 6 exhibit a slight decay with increasing Figure 6 Profile correlations versus separation for 15 paintings by Matisse: Squares indicate mean at each separation value; ∇ one standard deviation above mean; Δ one standard deviation below mean. 110 c. r. Johnson, d. h. Johnson, n. hamashima, h. s. Yang and e. hendriKs S t u d i e S i n c o n S e rvat i o n 5 6 ( 2 0 1 1 ) pa g e S 1 0 4 – 1 1 4 distance. However, this decay rate (per separating X-radiograph) is quite small in Figure 6 relative to the variability of the cross-correlation peak values, as measured by their standard deviation. While the cross- correlation distribution exhibited in Figure 6 may not be so helpful in ordering placement of near neighbors, its strength retention over 15 separating X-radiographs allows rollmate candidates to be identified despite unfilled gaps in roll reconstruction of paintings such as those by van gogh that are typically three or less X-radiographs across in either dimension. the histogram of all cross-correlation values for all aligned X-radiograph pairs within all paintings in both directions (i.e. the data in Figure 6) and a similar histogram for unaligned X-radiograph pairs from the same painting over the set of 15 Matisse paintings appear in Figure 7. the top plot indicates that 0.2 would be a normalized cross-correlation threshold with few false negatives (i.e. rejecting pairs that are actually aligned). However, the bottom plot indicates that with a threshold of 0.2 there would be a number of false positives (i.e. passing pairs that are not actually aligned). as shown in [7], the histograms of X-radiographs sharing threads and of those not sharing threads have much less overlap among a group of van gogh paintings tested. the lower tail of the thread-sharing group’s histogram for the van gogh paintings is smaller for higher cross- correlation values than the Matisse paintings, while the cross-correlation value histogram for the group not sharing threads is similar in range and shape to that for the Matisse paintings in the bottom plot in Figure 7. threshold selection is clearly critical to the candidate weave matches that will be identified numerically. Setting the cross-correlation threshold midway between the peaks of the two histograms balances the incidence of false positives and false negatives. Setting the threshold higher, e.g. for this Matisse example to 0.5 or 0.6, reduces the incidence of false positives, under the presumption that false negatives will be made up for by other X-radiograph pairings from the candidate paintings. X-RADIOGRAPH AND UNLINED BACK PHOTO WEAVE MAPS COMPARISON thread counts of lined paintings are typically performed on X-radiographs of the painting because the original canvas weave is usually no longer visible. this approach always raises the question of how accurately the X-radiographs, whose intensity measures the thickness of radio-opaque materials stacked on the canvas, reflect the canvas weave. in addition to the interference of Figure 7 Histograms of profile correlations of X-radiographs in the same Matisse painting: pairs sharing threads – top, pairs not sharing threads – bottom. spectral-maximum-based automated thread counting: x-radiographs oF paintings on canVas 111 S t u d i e S i n c o n S e rvat i o n 5 6 ( 2 0 1 1 ) pa g e S 1 0 4 – 1 1 4 the artist-applied paint, inappropriate X-ray exposures and canvas deterioration also inhibit thread counting. Fortunately, the image does not have to be a pristine replica to permit thread counting. as long as the suitably magnified intensity pattern reflects the periodic weave pattern, counting is feasible. unlined paintings offer an opportunity to determine if X-radiog raphs provide an image sufficient for automatically generating a weave map that depicts the actual weave accurately. For two unlined paintings by van gogh (Portrait of a Woman with Hat and At the Foot of the Mountains) in the collection of the van gogh Museum weave maps were not only drawn from the X-radiographs but also from high resolution photographs of the unlined backs of the canvas not covered by the stretcher. in Figures 8 and 9 the left column presents the weave maps from the X-radiograph for the vertical and hor izontal threads. the black spots are locations where the X-radiograph quality is determined by the software to be of insufficient quality for a reliable count to be obtained automatically, and therefore are blacked out. the striping is indicative of the orientation of the threads (i.e. vertical above horizontal). the black rectangle outlines within the maps in the left columns of Figures 8 and 9 indicate the inside edge of the stretcher. the right column stacks weave maps composed from cropped photographs of the unlined backs of the paintings leaving just the portion inside the stretcher. the similarities of the weave maps from the X-radiographs and those from photos of the unlined backs are quite striking. Figures 8 and 9 provide evidence of the potential for trustworthiness of X-radiograph data in revealing the weave pattern, as well as the utility of the spectral- maximum-based thread counting software on verso photos. CONCLUSIONS each of the experiments described in this paper helps enrich the understanding of the bounds of utility of recently developed spectral-maximum-based thread counting algorithms producing full-painting weave maps useful in identifying rollmate candidates [1–3, 5, 6]. evidence is presented of the accuracy of such automated thread counts collected in collaboration with the van gogh Museum as part of its studio practice project [8] for paintings done in the 1880s by vincent van gogh. it was confirmed that X-radiographs displaying a regular weave – with little in-band interference – of paintings by other artists as well as van gogh satisfy the naive Figure 8 Weave maps of X-radiograph and back photo of Portrait of a Woman with Hat: top row – density of vertically oriented threads; bottom row – density of horizontally oriented threads; left column – X-radiograph; right column – photo of unlined back; black outline in images in left column denotes inside of stretcher which matches full size of images in right column. dominant spike presumption relied upon by the current automated scheme. it was observed that X-radiographs from paintings by yet other artists will require either more time-consuming, less comprehensive semi- automatic procedures or more sophisticated algorithms for fully automated counting of less regular weaves. analyses done in conjunction with the ‘Matisse: radical invention 1913–1917’ exhibition at the art institute of chicago and the Museum of Modern art [9] show that the cross-correlation of X-radiograph-wide weave density profiles can be a strong indicator of shared threads despite a few meters of separation. using both X-radiographs and photographs of unlined canvases, it was possible to mediate potential concerns with thread counting from X-radiographs, which show only an impression of the threads and not the threads themselves. 112 c. r. Johnson, d. h. Johnson, n. hamashima, h. s. Yang and e. hendriKs S t u d i e S i n c o n S e rvat i o n 5 6 ( 2 0 1 1 ) pa g e S 1 0 4 – 1 1 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS the authors are grateful to the following museums for access to the X-radiographs of their paintings used in this study: van gogh Museum, Museum of Modern art, Metropolitan Museum of art, rijksmuseum, royal picture gallery Mauritshuis, and art institute of chicago. in addition, the authors thank the van gogh Museum for the digitized photos of the unlined backs of Portrait of a Woman with Hat and At the Foot of the Mountains with rulers included for scaling. APPENDIX Two-dimensional Fourier transform as a visualization of the calculation of a two-dimensional Fourier transform, consider standing in shallow water with regularly separated plane waves coming at you from a particular direction. Further assume you have an image from directly above the water’s surface that registers the height of the water with a grayscale intensity pattern of tilted, uniform-width stripes. the two-dimensional Fourier transform of this image of waves will produce an image with two narrow tall peaks in its grayscale intensity pattern. the two peaks are a symmetric pair about the origin, i.e. one peak is located at (x, y) and the other at (–x, –y). the line through the origin joining these two peaks is perpendicular to the wavefront. the wave frequency (i.e. thread count per unit distance) is proportional to the distance of either peak to the origin. thus, the location of these peaks can be used to compute the frequency and orientation of the waves in the or iginal image. the scanned X-radiograph of a painting on canvas is a snapshot of an ocean dominated by two sets of waves – threads – approaching you from directions (approximately) 90° apart. the two-dimensional Fourier transform of this ideal image consists of four peaks, a pair for each wave. From this viewpoint, thread counting for horizontal and vertical threads – and finding their angles as well – can be performed simultaneously by computing the two-dimensional Fourier transform and finding peak locations near the positive portions of the x and y axes. if the waves are not in the shape of sinusoids, then the two-dimensional Fourier transform is not simply two narrow peaks. non-sinusodially shaped, but regularly periodic, waves will add a variety of minor peaks to the two-dimensional Fourier transform. the previously solitary peaks will now be the dominant ones among a landscape of peaks. add the slice of a vessel across the waves, i.e. artist’s brushstrokes, and more peaks appear. due to the smoother, i.e. less oscillatory, pattern of the mark in the waves made by the vessel, the added peaks can be tall but will not be in the vicinity of the peaks representing the pattern of the waves. the presence of disturbances in the periodicity of the waves from a highly regular pattern further complicates the computational task. Here, the case of interest is when the wave pattern is sufficiently regular that the location of the tallest peak in its two-dimensional Fourier transform quantifies the wave frequency. REFERENCES 1 Johnson, d.H., Johnson, c.r. Jr., Klein, a.g., Sethares, W.a., Lee H., and Hendriks, e., ‘a thread counting algorithm for art forensics’, in Proceedings of the 13th IEEE DSP Workshop, Marco Island, FL, 4–7 January 2009 (2009) 679–684, doi:10.1109/ dSp.2009.4786009. `Figure 9 Weave maps of X-radiograph and back photo of At the Foot of the Mountains: top row – density of vertically oriented threads; bottom row – density of horizontally oriented threads; left column – X-radiograph; right column – photo of unlined back; black outline in images in left column denotes inside of stretcher which matches full size of images in right column. spectral-maximum-based automated thread counting: x-radiographs oF paintings on canVas 113 S t u d i e S i n c o n S e rvat i o n 5 6 ( 2 0 1 1 ) pa g e S 1 0 4 – 1 1 4 2 Johnson, c.r. Jr., Hendriks, e., noble, p., and Franken, M., ‘advances in computer-assisted canvas examination: thread counting algorithms’, American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works Paintings Specialty Group Postprints 21 (2009) 25–33. 3 Johnson, d.H., Sun, L., Johnson, c.r. Jr. and Hendriks, e., ‘Matching canvas weave patterns from processing X-ray images of master paintings’, in Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Dallas, TX, 14–19 March 2010 (2010) 958–961, doi:10.1109/icaSSp. 2010.5495297. 4 Hamashima, n., Triage of X-ray images for automated spectral- maximum-based thread counting, Master of engineering report, cornell university (2010). 5 Hendriks, e., Johnson, d.H. and Johnson, c.r. Jr., ‘interpreting canvas weave matches’, http://people.ece.cornell.edu/johnson/ canvas.pdf (accessed 30 august, 2010). 6 Johnson, d.H., Hendriks, e., geldof, M. and Johnson, c.r. Jr., ‘do weave matches imply canvas roll matches?’, American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works Paintings Specialty Group Postprints 22 (2011, in press). 7 Yang, H., Development of Evaluation Tools for Weave Matching Algorithm of Canvas X-Ray Images, Master of engineering report, cornell university (2010). 8 ‘research into van gogh’s studio practice in context’, http:// www3.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp?page=13321 &lang=en (accessed 30 august, 2010). 9 d’alessandro, S., and elderfield, J., Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917, art institute of chicago (2010). AUTHORS C. RiChaRd Johnson, JR. was born in Macon, georgia, uSa, in 1950. He received a phd in electr ical engineering from Stanford university, california, uSa along with the first phd minor in art History granted by Stanford, in 1977. He is currently the geoffrey S.M. Hedrick Senior professor of engineering and a Stephen H. Weiss presidential fellow at cornell university, ithaca, nY, uSa. at the start of 2007, after 30 years of research on adaptive feedback systems theory and blind equalization in communication receivers, professor Johnson accepted a five-year appointment as an adjunct research Fellow at the van gogh Museum, the netherlands charged with facilitating the interaction of art historians and conservation specialists with algorithm-building signal processors. Address: School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 390 Rhodes Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. Email: johnson@ece.cornell.edu don h. Johnson received a phd in electrical engineer- ing from the Massachusetts institute of technology, uSa in 1974. in 1977, he joined the faculty of the electrical and computer engineer ing department at rice university, Houston, texas, uSa where he is currently the J.S. abercrombie professor emeritus. He is a former president of the Signal processing Society, a fellow of the institute of electrical and electronics engineers (ieee), uSa and a recipient of the ieee Millenium Medal and the Signal processing Society’s Meritorious Service award. He co-authored the graduate-level book Array Signal Processing, published in 1993, and holds six patents. His current research interests concern developing signal processing techniques for technical art history studies. Address: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, MS 380, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, Houston, TX 77005, USA. Email: dhj@rice.edu naoto hamashima currently works as a system engineer at nS Solutions corporation in Japan. He received a Master of engineering from cornell university, in electrical and computer engineering in 2010. He graduated from trinity college, Hartford, ct, uSa with a BS in electrical engineering in 2009. Address: 4-31-6- 302 Kichijoji-Honcho, Musashino-shi, Tokyo, Japan 180-000. Email: nhamashima@gmail.com or nh245@cornell.edu heui sung Yang was born in Seoul, republic of Korea, in 1987. He received a Bachelor of Science in 2009 and Master of engineering in 2010 both in electrical and computer engineering from cornell university. in october 2010, he began employment as an interface analyst at epic Systems in verona, Wi. Address: 2933 Fish Hatchery Road, #205, Madison, WI 53713, USA. Email: hy96@cornell.edu ella hendRiks has a Ba (university of Manchester,, uK, 1982) and a phd (university of amsterdam, the netherlands 2006) in art history (dissertation: ‘new views on van gogh’s development in antwerp and paris: an integrated art historical and technical study of his paintings in the van gogh Museum’). She was trained as a conservator of easel paintings at the Hamilton Kerr institute, university of cambridge, uK (1987). From 1988 to 1999 she was Head conservator at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and since 1999 has been Head conservator at the van gogh Museum in amsterdam, the netherlands. Address: Van Gogh Museum, Paulus Potterstraat 7, 1071 CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Email: Hendriks@vangoghmuseum.nl 114 c. r. Johnson, d. h. Johnson, n. hamashima, h. s. Yang and e. hendriKs S t u d i e S i n c o n S e rvat i o n 5 6 ( 2 0 1 1 ) pa g e S 1 0 4 – 1 1 4 Résumé — Cet article établit que l’ extraction de la densité de fils, basée sur le maximum spectral par transformée de Fourier 2D semble fiable pour s’appliquer aux comptage automatique de fils des peintures utilisant des scans des radiographies des peintures et ca pour les oeuvres d’une serie de peintres européens du XVIIe siècle au début du XXe siècle. Sur une toile tissée régulièrement, l’entrelace s’étant reproduit sur les cartes en codes de couleur du comptage de fils locaux peut être utilisé pour identifier les candidats «rollmate» initialement séparés de quelques mètres, voire plus. Ces résultats suggèrent que les algorithmes récemment développés pour le comptage automatisé de fils basé sur le maximum spectral sont suffisamment sophistiqués pour soutenir des efforts importants de comptage de fils pour des banques de données qui serviront comme archive dés données clé de type médico- légal dans le contexte de l’histoire de l’art. Pourtant, les toiles et les preparations utilisées par certains artistes exigent une approche plus fine qu’un simple comptage. Zusammenfassung — Der Artikel weisst nach, daß die zweidimensionale, sich am spektralen Maximum orientierende Fouriertransform-Extraktion der Fadendichte für eine automatische Fadenzählung an gescannten Röntgenbildern von Gemälden einer Reihe europäischer Maler des 17. bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert geeignet zu sein scheint. Bei gleichmäßig gewobenem Maltuch kann das in farbkodierten Karten (maps) auftretende Streifenmuster der lokalen Fadenzahl dazu dienen, Tuchstücke von der gleichen Rolle zu identifizieren, auch wenn sie einige Meter auseinander liegen, vielleicht sogar mehr. Diese Ergebnisse lassen annehmen, daß kürzlich vorgestellte, auf spektralem Maximum gestützte fadenzählende Algorithmen hochentwickelt genug sind, um größere Projekte archivalischen Fadenzählens zu rechtfertigen, die so forensische Eckdaten für eine Vielzahl kunsthistorischer Untersuchungen zu liefern imstande sind. Allerdings verlangen die von einigen Künstlern benutzten Maltücher und Grundierungen einen, gegenüber einem einfachen Schema auf der Basis des spektralen Maximums verfeinerten Ansatz für automatisiertes Fadenzählen.. Resumen — Este artículo establece que la obtención de la densidad de hilos mediante el cálculo bidimensional por transformada de Fourier, basada en el máximo espectral, se presenta como método posible para un cuenteo automático de hilos, a partir de radiografías escaneadas de cuadros de pintores europeos entre el siglo XVII y comienzos del XX. En telas tejidas regularmente ciertas tiras que aparecen en mapas de códigos de color en cuenteos locales de hilos pueden ser usadas para identificar piezas de tela del mismo rollo que pudieran estar separadas por algunos metros e incluso más. Estos resultados sugieren que estos cálculos algorítmicos de cuenteo de hilos son lo suficientemente sofisticados para llevar a cabo esfuerzos mayores en el cuenteo de hilos como datos forenses claves en una amplia variedad de investigaciones en la historia del arte. Adicionalmente hay que considerar que los lienzos e imprimaciones utilizadas por algunos artistas requieren un criterio mucho más refinado de cuenteo automático de hilos que un simple esquema basado en el máximo espectral. work_hhmgq7d6erdfxp6yp57yemznby ---- Life on the ground floor: letters from the edge of emergency medicine | Semantic Scholar Skip to search formSkip to main content> Semantic Scholar's Logo Search Sign InCreate Free Account You are currently offline. Some features of the site may not work correctly. DOI:10.1080/10796126.2017.1384531 Corpus ID: 45108448Life on the ground floor: letters from the edge of emergency medicine @article{Pal2017LifeOT, title={Life on the ground floor: letters from the edge of emergency medicine}, author={Nicole E. Pal}, journal={Medicine, Conflict and Survival}, year={2017}, volume={33}, pages={232 - 234} } Nicole E. Pal Published 2017 Medicine Medicine, Conflict and Survival Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, ‘demonstrates the influence that health professionals can have in global politics’ (P30). The tone throughout is calm, factual and doesn’t hector, but it’s not without passion. Each chapter has helpful summaries at the end which make the booklet a very effective teaching aid. It is also well referenced for further reading. Overall, its summary of the case against nuclear weapons is of great value at this time when the threat of nuclear war is very much back in the… Expand View on Taylor & Francis ncbi.nlm.nih.gov Save to Library Create Alert Cite Launch Research Feed Share This Paper Topics from this paper emergency medicine (field) Cessation of life Fear (Mental Process) Street (environment) Related Papers Abstract Topics Related Papers Stay Connected With Semantic Scholar Sign Up About Semantic Scholar Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the Allen Institute for AI. Learn More → Resources DatasetsSupp.aiAPIOpen Corpus Organization About UsResearchPublishing PartnersData Partners   FAQContact Proudly built by AI2 with the help of our Collaborators Terms of Service•Privacy Policy The Allen Institute for AI By clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Dataset License ACCEPT & CONTINUE work_hmeboxeqj5a7da3fd6mufvwxsu ---- UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Previously Published Works Title Adham Isma'il's Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56v6p5g5 Journal Muqarnas, 34(1) ISSN 0732-2992 Author Lenssen, A Publication Date 2017 DOI 10.1163/22118993_03401P009 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56v6p5g5 https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ LEIDEN | BOSTON 2017 Muqarnas An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World Editor Gülru Necipoğlu Managing Editor Maria J. Metzler volume 34 Sponsored by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV CONTENTS Heba Mostafa, From the Dome of the Chain to Miḥrāb Dāʾūd: The Transformation of an Umayyad Commemorative Site at the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Julio Navarro, Fidel Garrido, and Íñigo Almel, The Agdal of Marrakesh (Twelfth to Twentieth Centuries): An Agricultural Space for Caliphs and Sultans. Part I: History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Ana Marija Grbanovic, The Ilkhanid Revetment Aesthetic in the Buqʿa Pir-i Bakran: Chaotic Exuberance or a Cunningly Planned Architectural Revetment Repertoire? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Nicole Kançal-Ferrari, An Italian Renaissance Gate for the Khan: Visual Culture in Early Modern Crimea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Michele Lamprakos, Life in the Khans: The Venetians in Early Ottoman Aleppo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Muzaffer Özgüleş, A Missing Royal Mosque in Istanbul that Islamized a Catholic Space: The Galata New Mosque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Cristelle Baskins, Writing the Dead: Pietro della Valle and the Tombs of Shirazi Poets . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Anneka Lenssen, Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria . . . . . . . . 223 NOTES AND SOURCES Bernhard Schirg, (Re)writing the Early Biography of the Alhambra’s Fountain of Lions: New Evidence from a Neo-Latin Poem (1497) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Yui Kanda, Kashan Revisited: A Luster-Painted Ceramic Tombstone Inscribed with a Chronogram Poem by Muhtasham Kashani . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Guy Burak, Between Istanbul and Gujarat: Descriptions of Mecca in the Sixteenth-Century Indian Ocean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 223 AnnekA Lenssen AdhAm IsmAʿIL’s ArAbesque: The mAkIng of rAdIcAL ArAb PAInTIng In syrIA Muqarnas Online 34-1 (2017) 223-258 An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World DOI: 10.1163/22118993_03401P009 ISSN 0732-2992 (print version) ISSN 2211-8993 (online version) MUQJ This article was the winner of the 2014 Margaret B. Ševčenko Prize, awarded by the Historians of Islamic Art Association. In the final days of 1951, the painter Adham Ismaʿil (1922–63), a quiet but ambitious artist in syria’s nascent national art world, sat down to compose a letter to an Iraqi colleague, the artist Jamil hamoudi (1924–2003), who was then studying in Paris.1 Ismaʿil had been follow- ing hamoudi’s frequent dispatches to beirut’s al-Adīb, a leading Arabic-language cultural journal, which gave detailed reports on the main players in postwar Paris and the city’s ascendant trends in abstract art.2 ham- oudi, who claimed the role of both patriotic participant- observer and promoter of Arab artists in the metropole, had even issued a call to artists of the Arab countries requesting that they send him reports and photographs of their work for compilation into a survey text.3 Ismaʿil, meanwhile, as he wrote to hamoudi that december, had just weathered a distressing national salon in damascus, the country’s second annual. he had exhibited the large and startling painting The Porter as the public debut of his new method of composition in “unending, spontane- ous line” and “inspired” colors (fig. 1).4 but despite the fact that the work thrilled the more avant-garde ranks of intellectuals who, like Ismaʿil, yearned for a transforma- tion of the syrian cultural order, it had failed to move the exhibition jury, which awarded all prizes to academ- ic genre works. This outcome, Ismaʿil notes in his letter, confirmed the unfortunate truth of the salon’s bourgeois character: it was functioning to procure decorations for ministerial offices, not to cultivate meaningful modern art.5 Ismaʿil’s letter testifies to the ongoing struggle to pro- duce a modern art appropriate to an Arab region of newly independent states, and to do so by some mea- sure of collective, interlinked effort. but it also takes a second step, namely outlining a programmatic approach to this desired collectivity—and this step, a crucial one for the international formation of an idea of Arab mod- ernism, is my focus here. As Ismaʿil relates in the open- ing paragraph of his missive from damascus to Paris, he and his cohort of “cultured youth” had committed to pursuing meaning in a realm apart from that of the state and its materialistic concerns, industrial conditions, and reactionary fears of change.6 They had come to perceive that “the genius latent in the people,” which had per- sisted in a potential state for years and years, was begin- ning to vanish and die. And against that suffocation, they called for a turn towards an encompassing, creative Arab life as a reservoir of energy, containing not only the means to reclaim and reshape the status quo, but also the fountainhead of meaningful art. As Ismaʿil puts it to hamoudi, We want to resurrect this originary genius, setting it forth within the currents of international art, coloring them with its spirit, and making the Arab east into a source for abiding, vital art.7 This particular confession of commitment to a living dynamism in resistance to the deadening effects of mechanization resonates in numerous ways with the influential vitalist thought of the french philosopher henri bergson, which helped to shift critical artistic dis- course, in the early twentieth century, to matters of bodily and affective experience.8 yet in proposing his collective artistic program in this way, and in speaking For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen224 fig. 1. Adham Ismaʿil, The Porter (al-Ḥammāl), 1951, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. national museum, damascus. (Photo: Anneka Lenssen) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 225 of a resurrection of collective genius, Ismaʿil also insists on a specificity of cultural access to immanence and ex- perience. he and his cohort recognized the Arab east (rather than spirit in general, or god, or the nation- state) as the procreative source of their living art; this specificity regarding the basis of unity mattered dearly during the region’s first decades of independence.9 What follows in this article is an exploration of the im- plications of Ismaʿil’s artistic and political recourse to the Arab collective. my reading of his theory and prac- tice highlights the radical charge it holds for the syrian context in particular, since Ismaʿil desired not only to bring about change through his painting, but also to ef- fect a structural transformation in relations and values.10 In aiming to disidentify his art from the ordered repre- sentational categories of syria’s ministries and wealthy officials, Ismaʿil organized it instead as an interaction with, and even an extension of, an unbounded reservoir of Arab popular energies. In point of fact, the syrian state held no monopoly on national culture in these years. Political conditions were highly unstable; in 1949 alone, citizens witnessed a suc- cession of three military coups d’état, which removed the civilian president shukri al-quwatli and installed colonel Adib shishakli at the head of the army and in shadow control of other government functions. further- more, most new cultural discourses emanated from the ideological opposition parties that had emerged as for- ces in syrian politics—including the communist Party, the baʿth Party, the syrian social nationalist Party, and the muslim brotherhood—and were organized against the corruption and narrow-mindedness of the national bloc, the party of the land-owning elite.11 These opposi- tion parties drew the bulk of their membership from a new generation of upwardly mobile youth educated in the french brevet system, who read both the Arabic and francophone press avidly, debated the current ideas about society and civilization, and demanded more comprehensive social change as a basis for a trans- formed national future.12 They also represented a sig- nificant audience for the country’s young, self-identified artists. These artists, many of whom maintained affilia- tions with the parties, had organized into cultural circles and civic organizations in support of their work.13 In these forums for cultural debate, the government’s au- thority was not necessarily taken as a given, nor was the syrian nation-state reified.14 In Ismaʿil’s case, it was the cultural arm of the baʿth Party, which included his brother sidqi Ismaʿil (1924–72) as well as Wahib al- ghanim, sulayman al-ʿIsa, and youssef shaqra, that pro- vided the crucible for his politically engaged practice.15 Their movement espoused pan-Arab unity and socialist property reform while contesting the authority of the national bloc.16 The syrian ministry of education and directorate of Antiquities had organized the first national art salon, held in december 1950, under the uncertain circum- stances of colonel shishakli’s new regime.17 The result, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to present a fully cohesive view of the national arts. Though sympathetic damas- cus newspapers had heralded it as a step toward “our modern artistic resurgence,”18 no sooner had the exhibi- tion opened than journalists and citizens raised spirited critiques of the jury’s decisions and the government’s motivations. To observers attuned to world prestige politics, syria’s adoption of a version of a modern euro- pean salon model—looking to Paris’s salon d’Automne, among others—signaled a welcome commitment to in- ternational norms.19 yet the same group also worried about the failure of the event to uphold those norms, most notably within the expansive “exhibition of hand Painting” structure the organizers adopted, which fea- tured calligraphy, carving, and textiles alongside beaux- arts painting and sculpture.20 As the cosmopolitan critic for al-Naṣr lamented, event organizers had focused on quantity, not quality.21 Very few of the pieces would have been competitive in Paris, he asserted, and some, such as drawing exercises from an old schoolbook and copies of postcards, even failed to qualify as art at all.22 Artists on the other side of the divide voiced concerns as well, with calligraphers and craftsmen critiquing the jury’s preference for oil paintings, which they decried as a bias toward the “individualistic” format of european art over works of an “oriental spiritual” character.23 no one yet felt that the question of the nature of syria’s modern art had been settled. furthermore, the execu- tion of the exhibition raised questions about leadership: Who should be entrusted with the responsibility for cul- tivating taste, spiritual health, cultural development, international recognition, and other imperative but elu- For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen226 sive outcomes accorded to the modern art object? These questions are reflected in Ismaʿil’s contribution to the inaugural salon as well, for he took the event as a forum in which to wage a critique of the state’s failure to fulfill its obligation to its citizens. his Family of Refugees in Abu Rummana Street called visitors to witness an allegoriz- ing depiction of the titular refugee family, left to huddle in a park in damascus’s new, upscale Abu rummana neighborhood (figs. 2, 3). When the second salon was held, in november 1951, opening as an elevated “exhibition of Painting and sculpture” and a society affair, Ismaʿil was ready to use its space to stage a counter-demonstration of the na- tional self, bringing the full force of his aesthetic convic- tions to bear in The Porter as a public work.24 In his selection of content for The Porter, he expounded on the theme of social neglect he had raised the previous year by inflecting it into an economic register as well. The work’s titular porter is a day laborer, engaged in a si- syphean effort to haul materials for new villas in the urban milieu and climbing over the broken bodies of his own family members in order to do so. similar themes had appeared in the work of other leftist syrian artists, including subhi shouaib’s A Mistake in Distribution, which also used a porter as a central figuration of class antagonism (fig. 4). At the level of its compositional mode, however, Ismaʿil’s painting asserts its exception- ality by undermining its own representational status and calling forth impulses of liveliness and animation. To make The Porter, Ismaʿil began by tracing the outlines of the porter’s body and the city background in a con- tinuous line. having thereby flattened the relationship between figure and ground into an armature of side-by- side shapes, he then filled the spaces with oscillating, non-illusionistic color. employed thus within what might otherwise be illusionistic space, the mode works to disperse the original structure into attenuated color patterns—with surreal, even anti-artistic results. one sees melting, biomorphic forms. A clutch of fingers and cloth, when filled with candy-red pigment, becomes a beating heart. The dull gray façade of the city eats into a child’s face like acid. syrian critics later settled upon the term “arabesque” to describe the technique Ismaʿil employed in The Por- ter, thereby invoking both a heritage-oriented commit- fig. 2. Adham Ismaʿil, Family of Refugees in Abu Rummana Street (Usra min al-Lājīʾīn fī Shāriʿ Abū Rummāna), 1950, oil on canvas, 65 × 85 cm. samawi collection, dubai. (Photo: provided by the Ayyam gallery) fig. 3. Abu rummana street, 1940s, photographic view through new suburbs toward qasiyun mountain. (Photo: courtesy of syrianhistory.com) ment to Arab-Islamic modes of ornamental expression based on twisting, doubling, and mirroring lines and, at the same time, the modern prestige of the technique in the world’s canon of formal devices.25 In the moment of its 1951 debut, however, descriptive responses varied widely as newspapers reported that it grabbed attention, For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 227 astonishing onlookers with its vivid content and unclas- sifiable style.26 The elitist critic at al-Naṣr, for example, lauded the modern conceptualism of Ismaʿil’s approach, writing that the literalism of preceding efforts had fi- nally been overcome with a mode of distillation in ac- cordance with the “rational scientific age.”27 meanwhile, the newspaper al-Ishtirākiyya, the mouthpiece of the Arab socialist Party, celebrated Ismaʿil’s apparently populist mode of address: the use of bright points of color (such as the red sparks in the porter’s head, thigh, and foot and the yellow in his face and spinal cord) to convey the “shining” physical and mental effort of his struggle directly to viewers, including those who were not “well-studied.”28 In the main, syria’s newspaper crit- ics were fully engaged in emphasizing Ismaʿil’s break with academicism and stressing his commitment to an underlying concept or theory. Very few, however, went so far as to articulate the parameters or stakes of said theory. This hesitancy of articulation mattered to its meaning, I would like to suggest. As Ismaʿil conveys to hamoudi as well as (in more coded fashion) to his da- mascus audiences, his guiding concept is the totality of the Arab east, as a nonrational, timeless vitality.29 As such, it necessarily evades verbalization or other con- ventional representation, manifesting instead in the matching of moving color to moving forces and acting upon a realm of apperception. furthermore, its mecha- nism of manifestation, as we shall see, parallels the col- lective political mechanisms embraced by the baʿth movement intellectuals. As the artist’s brother, sidqi Ismaʿil, who was then the cultural editor of al-Baʿth newspaper, liked to assert, they saw their political pro- gram as a lived resistance bearing little relation to elec- toral representation in parliament.30 To put Ismaʿil’s “arabesque” painting within a broad- er art-historical perspective, the artist, like many other painters in the penumbra of the francophone art world after the second World War, conceptualized his paint- ing as a site of potentially free experience—including the artistic freedom of separating the joy of artistic means from service to a representational end.31 As I shall explore in the final section of this article, the many influences and sources engaged by Ismaʿil form a dense intertextual matrix of associations with the ara- besque, including european studies of Islamic art, the modern art of the early twentieth century, drawing ped- agogy, and comparative cultural analysis. Within this intellectual field, the phenomenon of abstract composi- tion in unending line and inspired color could be recog- nized as a transhistorical phenomenon at work in medieval Arab-Islamic ornamentation as well as in the pictorial inventions of the fauves. Accordingly, we see Ismaʿil playing with capricious twists of line in ways that rework the relationships among multiple civilizational inheritances. In the late 1940s, his drawings sometimes betray an interest in Picasso, forming faces from the overlay of red and green tracery, but others emphasize the eastern spirituality of the dancing line (figs. 5, 6). The caprice of his lines can even exert an anti-artistic effect on his pictures, mapping processes that evade fig. 4. subhi shouaib, A Mistake in Distribution (Khaṭāʾ fī-l- tawzīʿ), 1951, ink and watercolor on paper, 32 × 24 cm. (re- printed from Said Tahseen, Soubhi Shouaib, syrian Plastic Arts series 2 [damascus: salhini Printing and Publishing, 1989], 21.) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen228 closure as picture—as if to signal their allegiance to a different force (fig. 7). As such, Ismaʿil’s body of work invites closer exploration of the tensions implicit in the eurocentrism of the postwar historiography of modern painterly arts, which placed Paris-based modernists such as henri matisse at the head of a single continuous development into ever more perfect abstraction.32 finally, given the complexity of Ismaʿil’s negotiations with art-historical genealogies, constructions of Arab- ness, and state cultural policy (with the latter two in frequent conflict), his work must also be taken as a chal- lenge to the nation-state framing that has hitherto struc- tured the literature on the region’s modernism. In seeking to forge a coherent narrative arc, many of the foundational studies of modern art in the Arab coun- tries place it squarely within a notion of a vertically in- tegrated state, with the result that individual artworks have been analyzed as affirmative contributions to na- tion-building projects.33 These readings resonate at the broad interpretative level of world political and eco- nomic history, particularly given the authoritarian cast of the military regimes that seized power in the region in the 1960s. In the 1970s, for example, when the legacy of The Porter was consolidated in syria, the leading crit- ics emphasized its early deployment of Arab heritage and an ethos of Arab resistance, which were the cul- tural mantras of that era’s baʿth Party state.34 As Tariq al-sharif puts it in a 1972 study, Ismaʿil first “spoke” the word “arabesque” in The Porter and thereby linked a modern idiom to national culture and shared social con- cerns.35 such readings do not, however, allow for con- siderations of painting practice in syria as contingent, dissonant, and even oppositional. I do not, in the main, disagree with al-sharif’s suggestion that the artist aimed to forge a newly activated visual language as a means to a populist goal; however, I propose a shift in focus. Let us consider the arabesque in these paintings not as a nativist motif but, rather, as the project of activation that Ismaʿil proposed in his own testimony. I return to the archival record of personal letters, writings, and journalism to uncover a concept of Arab painting that is at once more pointed and more ambitious than subsequent discussions have allowed: Arab painting as a means to address and enact an uncoerced political unity.36 fig. 5. Adham Ismaʿil, no title, 1948, gouache on paper. Private collection, damascus. (Photo: provided by Issam darwish) fig. 6. Adham Ismaʿil, Warm Breeze (Nasama Ḥārra), 1948, watercolor on paper. Private collection, nicosia. (Photo: Anneka Lenssen) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 229 fig. 7. Adham Ismaʿil, no title, 1952, gouache on paper. Agial gallery, beirut. (Photo: Anneka Lenssen) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen230 AbsTrAcTIng The ArAb homeLAnd Ismaʿil formed an intellectual bond with his party cohort long before the inauguration of the baʿth movement in the early 1940s. The group hailed from the same neigh- borhood in Antioch, a city in the administrative district of Alexandretta (present-day hatay Province).37 This natural port region located between french mandate syria and republican Turkey formed part of a strategic trade route to Aleppo and beyond, into british Imperial south Asia. for most of the duration of the french man- date, the district was administered as part of syria. be- ginning in the 1930s, however, Alexandretta became the subject of a Turkish irredentist campaign that culmi- nated in its annexation in January 1939.38 As Turkish and Arab groups made competing claims to Alexandretta, the crisis of sovereignty broke along highly ethnicized lines, which—among other sociopolitical effects— raised the concept of Arabness to a meta-category meant to establish a shared basis for territorial rights. The Ismaʿil family, who were native Arabic speakers and ʿAlawites (lit. “followers of ʿAli,” a syncretic branch of Twelver shiʿism), volunteered for the politicized Arab cause with great dedication.39 When it became clear in 1938 that Turkish claims would prevail, however, Ismaʿil’s Antioch group left for syria proper, going first to Aleppo, then hama, and eventually damascus. They brought the bitter experience of having lost the battle with them, which gave lasting shape to their political subjectivities.40 many continued to draw on the memo- ry of the Arab cause for years, making Arabism a source of identity and community as well as a basis for progres- sive politics and a framework for creative activity. In damascus, they banded together to form the first nucle- us of a political movement that went on to grow, diver- sify, and incorporate as the Arab baʿth Party in 1947.41 As the Iraqi historian hana batatu notes in his examination of the class origins of the baʿth, the Alexandretta stream contributed the distinctive ardor of “injured people” to the movement.42 bearing in mind Ismaʿil’s personal experience of dis- placement, his first contribution to the national salon in 1950, Family of Refugees in Abu Rummana Street, takes on a heightened poignancy (fig. 2). The painting pres- ents destitution as if it were a holy virtue, showing its human subjects within the compositional schema of the christian holy family. made both timeless and timely, the family stands in for the entire series of tragic losses of homeland suffered by Arabs, which by 1950 included not only Alexandretta but also Palestine after the 1948 creation of the state of Israel and the wars that followed it, uprooting nearly a million people and sparking an ongoing international quarrel over obligations to pro- vide for such stateless persons.43 At the same time, Ismaʿil’s scrupulous attention to detail adds a strong class dimension to his depiction of Arab loss, highlight- ing the wealthy, hostile environment: the manicured shrubbery of the new al-madfa park, the interior warmth of the expensive villas, and the u-shaped string of elec- tric streetcar lights extending up the foothills of qasiyun mountain. In The Porter, the very same Abu rummana backdrop once again provides the frame for a commen- tary on acute class divisions in damascus, but the details of place are transposed into a condensed plane of color oscillation, with a transformative effect. The city façades become a pattern of splicing tones that not only cross the central figure but also strip him of matter, making him unreal as a body. The political charge of the work manifests in its compositional dissolution via the inter- nal life of its component line and color. so as to better understand the political stakes of this artistic pivot from objects to rhythms and from syrian stasis to Arab immanence, it is necessary to consider the Alexandretta crisis of 1936–39 in more detail. under the ottoman empire at the turn of the century, the district had been a remarkably diverse one in terms of linguistic, religious, and racial difference, home as it was to com- munities of muslims, ʿAlawites, Arab christians, Arme- nian christians, kurds, circassians, and others, most of whom spoke several languages each.44 following the first World War and the defeat of the ottomans, how- ever, a new rubric of national self-determination came to bear in international disputes over territorial sover- eignty, and with it the corollary concern of extending sufficient protection to the minority cultures within these new nation-states.45 The Treaty of Versailles, for example, created states for certain aggrieved nationalist groups and revised european borders to accommodate the demands of others.46 In the case of france’s admin- istration of its “mandate” over syria, as granted by the For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 231 League of nations, a colonial version of ethnic territo- rial determination was applied: Lebanon was separated from syria on religious grounds and within syria itself, there were further communal and religious subdivisions into druze, ʿAlawite, and Arab regions. Alexandretta presented a particular challenge to this dispensation, however. faced with a complex population of intermar- ried ethnic and linguistic groups with no apparent “na- tional” majority in the district, authorities treated Alexandretta as an exception. It was designated a semi- autonomous entity within the state of syria, with its own appointed government and tariff system and special provisions for the schooling and cultural protection of its Turkish residents.47 At the time, this hedged solution to an administrative problem was recognized as provi- sional, with a renegotiation of the territorial terms of trade anticipated in the eventual independence of a “mature” syrian nation-state. france’s administrative vision of an intact syria was not the only one promulgated as rightful under the prin- ciples of the League of nations, however. As the Turkish state agitated for control of the district during Ismaʿil’s adolescence in Antioch, it did so on the basis of the same legal concerns for self-determination and minority rights.48 This point proved particularly salient to the eventual shape of Ismaʿil’s commitments. on the ground in the Alexandretta of the 1930s, as the Turkish irreden- tist cause worked to render racial identity into the determinant of self-rule, the obverse characterization— Arabness—was reinforced, and also operated as a per- formative cultural framework. both the Turkish and Arab identities became supra-religious categories that contained any number of other subgroups within them, and both entailed a more complex commitment than the simple ascription of national affiliation.49 A turning point came in 1936, when the Popular front rose to elected power in france, which returned the question of syrian independence to the diplomatic table and brought a syrian delegation to Paris to draft a franco- syrian independence treaty.50 When politicians in An- kara saw how the treaty presumed to keep Alexandretta as a territory of the future syrian nation-state, they moved quickly to contest it. Initially focusing their cam- paign on the cause of the Turkish residents, they argued to the League of nations that those residents would be left vulnerable to Arab persecution. The ante was upped over the course of the following year, as some began to advocate for a vote to determine popular will, with the cause reaching a fever pitch in november 1936, when mustafa kemal Atatürk gave a speech claiming that the district’s population was “purely Turkish.”51 by then, ac- tivists on both sides had brought the dispute to organi- zations on the ground, seeking to code the citizens who belonged to various minority communities into the mas- ter categories of Turkish or Arab. As the social order in Alexandretta deteriorated under the stress of these de- velopments, the League of nations entered the fray. It dispatched a five-person commission to the district on January 1, 1937, which precipitated large-scale demon- strations by both Turkish and Arab syrian nationalists, each trying to assert majority status (fig. 8), which in turn spurred violent clashes and gunfights. In Antioch, the Ismaʿil family—which included a fa- ther, ʿAli; mother, Amina; four brothers (Adham, sidqi, naʿim, and ʿAziz); and one sister, rafiqa—actively em- braced Arab identity as the rubric for their future self- determination and got involved in pamphleteering. Their choice was informed by everyday experience: Ad- ham and sidqi, for example, felt their Arabness acutely during the walk to their french preparatory school on the other side of town, passing through increasingly hos- tile and predominantly Turkish neighborhoods.52 but their self-recognition was equally driven by an already existing aspiration to renew the cultural collective. Their middle-class ʿAlawite neighborhood in Antioch, ʿAfan, had lobbied successfully to establish an Arabic-language primary school. And at the city’s french high school, Zaki al-Arsuzi (1899–1968)—a nationalist leader, a Par- is-educated teacher of ʿAlawite origins, and a future co- founder of the baʿth Party—had also launched an Arab renaissance club soon after his return from studies in Paris in 1930.53 This club, which reinvented a former christian-run fine Arts club as an Arabist platform, was an act of radical incorporation. It posed a mirrored re- sponse to the Turkish youth clubs that had sprung up in the region, while also aiming to foster unity against french sectarianism.54 such initiatives laid the ground- work upon which the Ismaʿil brothers (as well as many other students in their neighborhood) were mobilized for the Arab cause. In the early days of the crisis, they For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen232 joined the youth brigades of the League of national Ac- tion, a pan-Arab movement that syria’s more activist Arab nationalists had formed out of frustration with the national bloc, and which al-Arsuzi, a founding member, used in Alexandretta as a network for material sup- port.55 Ismaʿil’s work as a scout included helping to or- ganize strikes and rallies, to which he contributed his calligraphic skill and ideas for stage décor.56 Al-Arsuzi also launched the newspaper al-ʿUrūba and created an Arabism club as a community rallying point, which of- fered evening lectures and Arab plays in the squares and sports clubs. When the commission from the League of nations began to issue its recommendations for managing the crisis of representation it had witnessed in Alexandretta, the idea that ethnic identity ought to determine nation- al status became reified. In late January 1937, the com- mission proposed to maintain the autonomous status of the district and to treat it separately from the rest of syr- ian territory. four months later, the League ratified a new statute and fundamental Law for Alexandretta, which was intended to make communal differences more distinct and legible through a system of parliamen- tary representation based upon the relative size of each recognized community (Turkish, ʿAlawite, Arab, Arme- nian, greek orthodox, kurdish, and “other”).57 so as to implement this distribution of legislative power, the fundamental Law in turn called for a comprehensive registration of adult men. In march 1938, the registration policy was clarified, so that it was now based upon per- sonal disclosure: each man in the district would be re- quired to appear before a board and declare his affiliation with one community to the exclusion of the others.58 These developments intensified the work of the youth brigades, who traveled the countryside as foot soldiers in a campaign to promote the racial abstraction of “Arab” over “Turk,” imploring peasant communities to think and feel like Arabs.59 one tactic was to make un- lettered Arab persons “whole” as political subjects by teaching them to read and write Arabic, a strategy whereby the shape and sound of the common language was first incorporated in individual bodies and then mapped onto territory and rights. The students ventured into the villages and used elementary reading and writ- ing exercises as an occasion to present their philosophy of Arabism.60 The project was not unlike the alphabet modernization efforts in Turkey that had recently con- cluded, but with the distinction that the Arabic language could be claimed as a natural symbolic product of Arab life rather than a break with historical modes. As others have shown in detail, the communal regis- tration process proved singularly useless as a mecha- nism for due process in Alexandretta, with collusion and coercion being the standard practice at registration fig. 8. Photograph of protests staged in Antioch for the January visit of the League of nations commission. The cap- tions read “Protests of Arab Antioch” and “syrians depend on the League of nations.” (reprinted from committee for the defense of Alexandretta, Irādat al-ʿArab Taḍmanu Ḥuqūqahum: al-Iskandarūna ʿArabiyya Raghma Kull Quwwa [damascus: Ibn Zaydun Printers, 1937].) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 233 stations.61 moreover, the outward display of the vote had already been undermined, for Turkey had struck a secret agreement with france to ensure that the results would clear the way for annexation. by the time Alexandretta was incorporated as the Turkish province of hatay in January 1939, some fifty thousand people, including Ismaʿil’s group, had already left the district to resettle elsewhere in syria.62 The students among these mi- grants hoped to complete their degrees in the syrian Arabic system, yet Ismaʿil’s group found itself bouncing from school to school, for the french authorities viewed their politicized status as a threat to the administrative order (a fear that was buttressed by french intelligence reports about ongoing student protests against the co- lonial presence, many of which noted that Alexandret- tans played leadership roles).63 At the end of the year, Ismaʿil and his group tried to return to Antioch but were turned back at the border, after which time they made their way to damascus (while others went to Iraq). In syrian parlance, the Alexandrettans were called the liwāʾiyyūn, or “people from the liwāʾ”—with liwāʾ being an Arabic term used in ottoman administration, mean- ing a part or subdivision (i.e., Liwāʾ Iskandarūna). fit- tingly, the term gave recognition to their status as citizens of a detached territory—a place that had once been part of syria but was no longer legally so—and as a bracketed populace consisting of persons who were of syria but not completely within it. In damascus, the liwāʾiyyūn from Ismaʿil’s neighbor- hood reunited with a similarly uprooted al-Arsuzi, and the group spent the difficult war years of 1940 to 1944 together, with many sharing an unheated house in the neighborhood of shaʿlan while the students among them tried to complete their preparatory and university studies.64 organizing their life collectively, they main- tained a keen sense of the alterity of the Arab ontolo- gy—its difference from the indignities of their daily grind, and its principled separation from the hegemonic syrian state. The group followed a regular schedule that included preparing shared meals, completing school les- sons, passing time in nearby cafés, and then listening to al-Arsuzi deliver an evening lecture, followed by debate into the night.65 The themes of these evening gatherings tended to be either historical or metaphysical, with al- Arsuzi speaking to the past strengths of Arabic and the Arabs, mechanisms of revolution and nationalism in the world, and the genius of the Arab umma.66 one early witness to their brotherhood described the group as a kind of “sufi order” in recognition of their organization around a search for internal, immanent knowledge.67 This collectivism also foregrounded the capacity of Ara- bism to be an animating force, buttressed by al-Arsuzi’s readings of german romantic philosophy and bergson’s theories of creative élan, which al-Arsuzi had studied during his time in Paris from 1927 to 1930.68 Theirs was a powerfully allusive version of vitalism, one that brought notions of religious illumination into alignment with a belief in the latent popular energy of the Arabs as a people. At times, the project also took on a secularized messianic cast, as al-Arsuzi reminded the group that their suffering carried the responsibility for liberating seventy million Arabs.69 finally, in 1941, at the end of that year’s extraordinarily cold winter, al-Arsuzi called for the formation of a political movement, one that would give a new organizational structure to their soli- darity in dispossession. members went out into the city and scrawled an inaugural declaration of existence in chalk on an urban wall, writing: “We are here living un- der a great Arab socialist state” and “We are here under a single Arab homeland.”70 With these declarations, they not only enunciated their existence as a solidarity movement (understood as a “state” responding to a unity of cultural and class interests), but also located the movement in a “here” that transgressed territorial boundaries. Their space of politics, in other words, would manifest as a recuperation or renaissance (liter- ally al-baʿth) of an Arab self, correlated to an encompass- ing Arab nationalism. over the next few years, the movement pursued out- reach via a person-to-person system of networked en- lightenment, bringing awareness of their version of Arabism to new elements of the community. The move- ment expanded significantly in 1942 through a merger with a student movement directed by michel Aflaq and salah al-din al-bitar. In these years, their imagination of Arab political change became integrated, to a certain extent, with other registers of civic agitation for inde- pendence. Prior to 1946, baʿth members attended dis- cussions held at the café moulin rouge on tactics for ousting the french, and also joined a volunteer gendar- For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen234 merie to counter france’s monopoly on military force.71 nevertheless, the liwāʾiyyūn intellectuals remained ever conscious of the difference between their version of pa- triotism and that of their national politicians. In sidqi Ismaʿil’s voluminous correspondence with friends and comrades, he expresses his alienation with moving ar- dor. one letter, dated July 1944, describes his feeling that dictatorship had persisted in the world in spite of Allied successes, with oppression simply moving from indi- vidual rulers to entire governmental systems.72 Another, from 1945, expresses ambivalence regarding his instru- mentalized work for the party’s cultural committee, confessing to feeling nostalgic for the nights they had spent listening to al-Arsuzi teach, eyes “aglow” with the light of Arabism.73 yet another, written on evacuation day in 1946, deems the participation of egyptian, Iraqi, and hijazi troops a hollow display of unity, made mean- ingless by a lack of commitment to Arabism on the part of shukri al-quwatli and other elites.74 even the official party documents to which sidqi Ismaʿil contributed, such as their April 1947 constitution as the Arab resur- rection Party (Ḥizb al-Baʿth al-ʿArabī), acknowledge a current condition of “strife” in the service of a reawaken- ing Arab nationalism.75 The rhetoric is oriented to a fu- ture amelioration of alienation, including a promise that all the “artificial” differences found among the members of the Arab nation will disappear once the Arab con- sciousness is awakened. further, the 1947 party constitu- tion again emphasizes the individual act of electing into the whole without recourse to the state and its mecha- nisms. It defines “Arab” as an identity that can be be- lieved in and performed, extending the status to “anyone whose language is Arabic, who lives in the Arab home- land or aspires to live therein, and who believes in his connection to the Arab people.”76 In his role as an intellectual within a movement pro- fessing creative power, sidqi Ismaʿil frequently directed his attention to artists and artistic theories, and particu- larly so in letters to university colleagues. one of the most telling letters, dated october 5, 1947 (six months after the Party congress), discusses his and his brother’s convictions regarding the role of an animate and ani- mating imagination (khayāl) as a basis for art.77 The let- ter, which is written to a female colleague, discusses the visionary nature of Leonardo da Vinci’s approach to his craft, the achievements of modern french artists, and then finally the greatness of Picasso and his “astonish- ing” recent drawings. The “strongest possible” definition of art, he writes, is the one a critic had formulated in a reading of Leonardo da Vinci’s process: that art is a “mental thing,” une chose mentale.78 The mental aspect is derived from the synthesizing and abstracting work of composition, work that the inspired artist performs in recognition of the underlying, abiding imagination of human existence—making any one work of art a slen- der phantasm of the whole. sidqi Ismaʿil goes on to write about the same liberated understanding of painting in renoir and his glowing version of Impressionism, the genius of corot’s use of light and shade, and cézanne’s capacity to reveal emotional heat even within the white- ness of snow. by his account, the genius of free dyna- mism can also be discerned in true contemporary art, even in movements (such as cubism) that emphasize deformation and incongruity. he describes how he and his brother Adham had devoted two hours of contem- plation to one of Picasso’s recent pictures, a painting of a woman and cat depicted with virtuosic red, green, and white lines (fig. 9).79 The work had come under criticism in europe for its perceived ugliness, they knew, but after immersing themselves in the whole, they came to per- ceive its underlying harmony of color and flowing lines, and its “eternal plastic value” in such passages as the white linear variegation (raqsh) on the woman’s breast. ultimately, such a work seemed to sidqi Ismaʿil to dem- onstrate Picasso’s greatness. The artist answered to no god other than the “omnipotent god” of the imagination. his lines, unencumbered by a relationship to material things, work in the realm of internal motivation, there producing eternally resonant form. sidqi Ismaʿil chronicles his brother’s painting, too, most frequently with descriptions of the metaphysical effects of color or the act of deploying it. one letter, from August 15, 1949, describes how Ismaʿil’s use of vivid col- ors effects an inverse condition in his own body: as vola- tile reds appeared in the skies he painted, conveying “revolution, fire, blood, and tragedy,” a pallor seemed to overtake Ismaʿil himself.80 The letter was composed by sidqi Ismaʿil on the day after the second of the three coups d’état of 1949, yet it makes no direct mention of that event. Instead, it seems, he transposes national For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 235 while the government builds glorious things from the people’s money, the people are left to live in pens. fi- nally, in a poem written in 1951, he makes the painter’s struggle to extract art from the world into a struggle for legibility as himself: I have a brother who gave his life to art. neither fame nor a few dirhams beguiled him. Those who saw him, know him but deny it, saying with curiosity: “Is that Adham?” his brush approached exhaustion, painting upon every wall in the streets.82 here, sidqi Ismaʿil’s conception of art fully parallels the movement’s conception of Arabism—its source is a living inspiration that drew from and gave to bodies. We can now consider these attitudes alongside the drawings and paintings Ismaʿil made after 1947, a year that marks not only the normalization of the baʿth Par- ty but also Ismaʿil’s decision to normalize himself as a professional artist by completing the credentials neces- sary for teaching art in syrian high schools.83 much of the work he produced during this time takes the form of exercises in technique and follows two paths of experi- ment. The first path consists of paintings depicting land- scapes, often recollected ones from Alexandretta. In these, Ismaʿil takes an expressive turn, using rough dots and touches of color to make abstract fields (fig. 10). daubs of dark, opaque pigment appear in flat arrays of texture, from which glints a surface pattern of brilliant yellow marks that, by their lack of mediation, claim a garish presence in the eye (fig. 11). In this sense, they manifest vital qualities that are akin to the ones sidqi Ismaʿil recognizes in Vincent van gogh’s paintings, where “living yellow color” seems to manifest the very sense of “greater blessedness” that is also to be found in the music and poetry in the east, in Japan and beyond.84 Insofar as each component mark in the landscapes shows itself to be an illuminating presence, we might describe them as evincing a baʿthist notion of inspira- tion. In the second path Ismaʿil follows in his exercises, he concentrates on faces as the central subject, includ- ing riffs on the styles of other artists. one particularly fascinating gouache sketch from 1948 (already refer- enced earlier) appears to respond to the very composi- tion of the Picasso painting of woman and cat to which he had responded with sidqi Ismaʿil (figs. 5, 9). render- ing it into an elegant visual study in rose and green line, fig. 9. Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar with Cat (Dora Maar au chat), 1941, oil on canvas, 128.3 cm × 95.3 cm. Private collec- tion. (Artwork: © 2017 estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists rights society (Ars), new york. Photo: courtesy of sotheby’s, Inc. © 2006) uncertainty into a consideration of mortality and im- mortality in painting. When he does write reflectively about the calamities of 1949, in an end-of-the-year poem that he composed for circulation among party com- rades, he folds the life-to-death inversions of Ismaʿil’s painting into a broader account of the syrian govern- ment’s procedural undoing of their natural talents.81 one friend lives without a salary, another is a navigator without a boat, another has been passed over for the military, another gambles in politics for sport, another is a poet who has lost his voice, and so on, with his “painter brother” (Ismaʿil) left to listen to his own colors “weep” in the lightlessness of their world. In every case, sidqi Ismaʿil writes, the succession of “coups, upturned things, and overturners” has changed very little, for, For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen236 such would seem to be Ismaʿil’s personal preoccupa- tions as an artist. but after having taken on teaching work in the schools, which were still a hotbed of ideo- logical activism, he now also faced the new challenge of mobilizing the conjunction of performative Arab iden- tity, creative spirit, and political solidarity that the liwāʾiyyūn had first proposed a decade earlier. In 1950, he landed a coveted teaching position in damascus at the preparatory high school in maydan, a neighborhood where the baʿth Party enjoyed wide support among both educated youth and their middle-class trader fathers.85 from all reports, Ismaʿil took his work as an educator as an opportunity to put egalitarian ideals into practice, and he taught with the spirit of noncoercive self-realiza- tion that the movement pursued elsewhere.86 he even managed, in may 1951, to arrange a counter-exhibition to the national salon, securing permission to install an exhibition of student work in the very same museum hall that had hosted the 1950 event. The party’s al-Baʿth newspaper devoted a page of coverage to the achieve- ment, detailing its demonstration of faith in the poten- tial of the country’s youth against the state’s bourgeois mores and reprinting Ismaʿil’s short speech from the opening, which takes a prophetic tone.87 As “fruits” of Arab talent, the pieces on display give an indication of a great fertility that promises to soon overflow and re- turn them all to the helm of their fate. Their creative forces, he proclaims, would “spread their wings” in the faraway skies, driving them in the direction of immortal- ity.88 he concludes his remarks by emphasizing the need to push onward and to “cover hundreds of years in a few leaps,” but with the assurance that the resources for doing so include the richness of both external and internal material: We have the advantage of the Western art movements lying before us and the flames of individual talents burning within us, ready to burst into fire and light, destroying every obstacle and illuminating every path.89 A vision of almost supernatural rejuvenation, this con- clusion serves to ratify a mode of political change that relies on the capacity of art to tap into and mobilize a living Arab culture. In light of Ismaʿil’s invocation of the abstract power of Arabism as a pre-representational force, we can re- turn to consider what he may have understood to be at fig. 10. Adham Ismaʿil, no title, 1940s, acrylic on paper, mounted in an album. Private collection, nicosia. (Photo: Anneka Lenssen) fig. 11. Adham Ismaʿil, no title, 1940s, oil on canvas. Private collection, damascus. (Photo: provided by Issam darwish) Ismaʿil retains the ambiguous internal relationships be- tween facial profile and full-face rendering that make eyes, nose, and lips into floating signifiers. yet he em- phasizes the movement of the line over any sense of hu- man personality, attenuating its twists and turns into a trace of movement or music. heightening the impres- sion of its self-contained suspension in space, Ismaʿil uses only washed tones of cream and pink beneath the painted lines and adds a hint of biomorphic energies in the final curling of the line into a shell or breast. If Pi- casso’s woman suggests animal presence, then Ismaʿil’s is an immaterial entity: curtains that flutter in the breeze, color that twists into dance, and a body that in- dexes a creativity that extends beyond either thing or self. For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 237 stake in his submission of The Porter to the 1951 salon, coming as it did only five months after the maydan counter-exhibition. In the previous year, his Family of Refugees had offered visitors a mournful genre scene, showing the uprooted families who haunted daily nor- malcy in syria. It had also tendered a view on class an- tagonisms, showing the luxury façades of the new homes aglow with the light of inaccessible comfort. In The Por- ter, these impulses assume a different appearance, as Ismaʿil isolates line and color in ways that dissolve its subject rather than preserving it in paint. As we have seen, in 1951 the critics developed various interpreta- tions of this visual difference: al-Ishtirākiyya gave a par- ticularly socialist-realist value to the mechanism of such a transfer, suggesting that The Porter reconfigured the academic devices of painting so as to reach the every- man.90 The critic from Al-Naṣr was more concerned with the need to keep step with the times, praising Ismaʿil’s abandonment of literary illustration and his use of painting as a plane of inquiry. but by Ismaʿil’s own assessment, as I shall now explore through a closer study of his engagement with the art movements of the Pari- sian metropole, it was insufficient simply to put form forward as an autonomous event. If we place Ismaʿil at the center of the catalytic creation of Arab feeling that he forecasts in his may 1951 speech, we can understand his desire to transcode the arabesque from a formal ele- ment to an active entity, which is to say into a means to instantiate a natural unity. nATurALIZIng ArAb unITy At the same time that Ismaʿil was carving out the role of a quiet activist amid his more obstreperous comrades in the baʿth movement, he was also working to cultivate his skills and recognition in the painterly arts.91 he un- dertook these latter tasks in the company of artist friends outside the party circles, many of whom possessed greater social capital in damascus than did the displaced Alexandrettans. soon after his arrival in damascus at the age of seventeen, he had gotten to know mahmoud hammad (1923–88) and nasir shoura (1920–92) in the arts room of the damascus national club near marja square.92 Through hammad, Ismaʿil sometimes also at- tended studio Veronese, which had been established by damascus artists in 1941 as the first dedicated painters’ circle in syria and which featured figure-drawing ses- sions as well as theoretical debates.93 In its earliest days, the group’s approach to training also involved an effort to compensate for a lack of museum access by collecting color reproductions of paintings from journals. for this endeavor, the french mass-circulation picture maga- zine L’Illustration served as a particularly reliable source.94 In this section, I examine Ismaʿil’s readings of different modalities of modern painting and their use of arabesque line for greater insight into the radical aspects he developed in his work. for the artists of Ismail’s generation in syria, Leba- non, and Iraq, the outbreak of war in europe in 1939 had the effect of bringing heightened visibility and impor- tance to the artistic craft. As the Iraqi artist Jewad selim later put it, “Paris and europe stopped producing beau- tiful work, but baghdad did not,” and meanwhile its art- ists labored to “prepare the public to appreciate and understand art.”95 buttressing the local efforts to boost artistic activities, there was a flood of Allied cultural pro- paganda following the July 1941 victory in the middle east theater. The free french established radio offices in the near east and north Africa from which they broadcast texts celebrating the spirit of youth, courage, cheer, and hope as the living forces of the country.96 They entered the field of art criticism as well. In its first year of operation, 1942, beirut’s al-Adīb published essays on french art and values by Jacques Lassaigne—a critic who was working for the free french in the near east— which detailed the liberal values for which Paris had once stood as a kind of civilizational currency.97 And Allied networks even brought foreign artists into the re- gion, including a contingent of Polish painters attached to the Polish II corps, who were stationed in baghdad.98 These artists—several of them Paris-trained—joined their Iraqi colleagues in café debates and even exhibi- tions, with one, Józef Jarema (1900–1974), also coming to damascus to install a goodwill exhibition of work at the orient club.99 Jarema visited the studio Veronese, engaging its members in discussion about the tenets of post-Impressionism as well as new problems of com- parative national aesthetics. These exchanges, which were intensified by the uncertainties of wartime, contin- For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen238 ued to echo after the Liberation. once Lassaigne re- turned to Paris, he acted as a conduit for Arab artists into the city’s reopening circles of exhibition and criticism. he introduced hamoudi to the abstractionists of the salon des réalités nouvelles, the preeminent interna- tional forum for concrete, nonfigurative, and abstract artists.100 As for Jarema, after he shipped out through Palestine and egypt to Italy in 1944, he converted the aspirational commitment to life and hope of the war years into the institutional form of an international as- sociation of Art clubs, which he dedicated to facilitating direct contact between artists without regard for na- tional borders and toward the goal of renewing universal culture in the shared language of “shapes and colors.”101 settling in rome, he and his Art club provided an exhi- bition home for a new Italian avant-garde of young geo- metric abstractionists, with Jarema himself also “converting” to abstraction in 1948.102 club branches were even established in egypt and Turkey, but not in syria, which was still fighting for independence and lib- eration.103 In this way, one kind of international threshold ma- terialized for Ismaʿil in his understanding of his mission as a modern Arab artist. by dint of the mandate occupa- tion, the immediate modernist legacy in syria was mark- edly french and was also universalized as an open and cosmopolitan platform (characteristics that were the opposite of those of the Vichy years) in defense against the catastrophic racialized regionalism of the second World War.104 crucially, as we have observed, although Ismaʿil developed his work in the 1940s from the very conceptual heart of the baʿth party’s cultural programs, he never acted as a party artist in the strict sense of de- pending on its patronage for a living or upholding any prescribed style (such as socialist realism). Indeed, his comrades would never have expected him to do so. Like many other thinkers in the aftermath of the war, they privileged a model of creation that was free, auto- nomous, and essentially unmotivated. These points of discursive affinity make it all the more important to con- sider the expanding field of international modernism in the postwar years of decolonization as a basis for under- standing the ambitions of Ismaʿil’s local group, which endeavored to create a movement and to push their world forward. As the art historian natalie Adamson carefully shows, while critics in Paris were announcing the “return” of modern art after the Liberation, they also set about reinventing the memory of the city’s dynamic and heterogeneous art world as an École de Paris.105 rené huyghe, a curator for the Louvre and consultant to the united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization (unesco), for example, mobilized a con- fected memory of how all artists—whether foreign-born or not—had contributed to the universal heritage of this École, making openness and assimilation the very defi- nition of the french modern tradition.106 These promotional schemata directly affected the re- ception of Arab artists in Paris, where critics had begun to invoke a “nouvelle École de Paris” for the postwar era. As the anthropologist kirsten scheid writes regarding the reception of the Lebanese abstract painter saloua raouda choucair, who studied and exhibited in Paris from 1948 to 1951, Parisian commentators took the work of Arab aspirants in the city as proof of the renewed vi- ability of the École de Paris. In choucair’s case, positive reviews highlighted the presence of an eastern genius, tradition, and “magnanimous spirit” even in her hard abstractionist paintings.107 Lassaigne, the critic who had formerly contributed free french content to al-Adīb, actively promoted the “nouvelle École de Paris,” writing exhibition essays in 1950 on young artists from Iran, Tur- key, and egypt who found the city of Paris to be condu- cive to “their national genius.”108 hamoudi, too, upheld this position in his narratives about modern Iraqi and Arab art, describing a dynamic rapprochement between the natural resources of bright color and evocative po- etry and the “new” preoccupation with abstraction at the Parisian center.109 In 1950, hamoudi wrote a guest article for the french journal Arts that described how a select few artists in the country—his colleagues selim, fahrelnissa Zeid, and faiq hassan—had undertaken to recover tradition as a basis for their contributions to the world’s modern art, doing so with the knowledge that their traditions included a lineage of accomplished ab- stract elaboration in baghdad and Andalusia, where Arab artisans had applied their minds and hands to con- structing dazzling monuments.110 hamoudi’s own ap- plication of these convictions in painting manifested in compositions of zigzagging black lines derived from Arabic letterforms, punctuated by bright, flat color, For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 239 which he exhibited in the 1950 salon des réalités nou- velles (fig. 12). he also enthusiastically championed the work of Zeid, the Turkish-born painter who had become an Iraqi princess through her marriage to Iraq’s Prince raʿd bin Zeid (of the hashemite dynasty). reporting to his countrymen about Zeid’s 1949 solo exhibition at Paris’s renowned galerie colette Allendy, he describes how her oil paintings and assemblages of stones pro- duce a “forest garden” experience that impressed fa- mous abstract artists such as francis Picabia, while transporting other viewers (fig. 13).111 In Zeid’s case, he writes, the lines and color of the works seem to float on a ground of eastern sensibilities. here is where the term “arabesque” enters, the mode or “structure” of surface design that Islamic art scholar- ship has long upheld as exemplary of the Islamic religio- cultural system, but which also plays a role in the historiography of the École de Paris and romantic lit- erature and music (though I will not address that here).112 from the viewpoint of the first centuries of Is- fig. 12. Jamil hamoudi, Don Quichotte, 1950, oil on canvas. Private collection, baghdad. (Photo: provided by Ishtar hamoudi) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen240 lamic art, as oleg grabar notes in his landmark study The Formation of Islamic Art, the arabesque might best be understood not as an innovation per se but rather as a way of treating forms syntactically and of producing ornament through the endless repetition and modifica- tion of shapes. As grabar also notes, the ambiguity of the arabesque creates a fundamental challenge for interpre- tation: as it seems to present both iconographic and or- namental meaning simultaneously, it is experienced as a “parallelism of contradictory sorts of meanings.”113 Whereas grabar offers his description of this parallelism in a cautionary way, the artists of the nouvelle École de Paris milieu often courted the ambiguity of arabesque as a sign of artistic progress, wherein a representational motif might be distilled into pattern and vice versa. We see this in hamoudi’s commentaries on work in france, certainly, in which the term “arabesque” signals a re- vival of native resources and a rapprochement with Pa- risian modernism.114 And we also see it in his selection of self-promotional texts, such as the two essays he so- licited for his solo debut at ga lerie Voyelles in April 1950: a french-language introduction from Lassaigne and an Arabic one from bishr farès (1906–63), the Lebanese- egyptian scholar and historian of Islamic art who lived and worked between cairo and Paris.115 Lassaigne’s text invokes the already recognized “superior expressive value of the arabesque line” as evidence of a shared af- finity for abstract synthesis among modern artists of both eastern and Western origin and goes so far as to invoke as evidence scholars’ “most recent discoveries” of how the Arab tradition of nonfigurative art emerged from a long process of synthesis rather than a prohibi- tion on human representation.116 farès’s notes, by con- trast, position the origins of abstracted Arab ornament in a religious episteme, making the Islamic art of bagh- dad “an art that expresses the transience of the object in the path of an understanding of eternity.”117 Taken to- gether, this pair of texts enacts the parallelism of contra- dictory interpretations associated with the arabesque, thereby keeping open the possibility of affinities be- tween Iraq and france without actually resolving them—and rendering hamoudi’s abstractions into an ambivalent project of neither solely formal nor fully con- ceptual aims. In these mid-century oscillations, we also see reflect- ed elements of a longer and more varied history of the arabesque as a keyword in cultural analysis. The word “arabesque” itself, as the art historian roger benjamin has shown, seems to derive from Italian rather than Arabic origins. It first came into use in the Italian renais- sance as rabesco, a description of the scrolling ornamen- tal frames in ancient roman wall painting, which reminded contemporary viewers of Islamic designs.118 but the heyday of the term “arabesque” as a movable descriptor for a particular mode of decorative composi- tion came in the nineteenth century. This usage of the word was buoyed by a proliferation of research in orna- ment studies, which in turn was supported by a concern for the modular analysis of applied arts and industrial design. As early as 1850, the term “arabesque” had come to be mobilized in discussions of such varied instances of ornament as renaissance scrollwork, the “moorish” style of decorative program at the Alhambra, and even fig. 13. Photograph of fahrelnissa Zeid’s home studio, 1949 or 1950. (reprinted from Jamīl Ḥamūdī, “al-Amīra al-ʿIrāqiyya fakhr al-nisāʾ Zayd,” al-Adīb 9, no. 3 [march 1950]: 9–12.) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 241 the characteristic ornament of the gothic period, with its scroll-cut forms that burgeon forth from the architec- tural masses themselves, fusing together animal figures and foliage.119 As gülru necipoğlu demonstrates, this wide-ranging engagement with ornament took shape around a search for universal design principles in eu- rope, which overlapped with an equally ahistorical ori- entalist discourse.120 one outcome of the intersection of formal and civilizational studies for the emerging field of the history of Islamic art, then, was a kind of interpre- tive narrowing, with scholars seeking to match a char- acteristic form to a particular cultural tendency or spirit. most influential in this regard is the Austrian art historian Alois riegl’s pioneering comparative orna- ment study, Stilfragen, published in 1893. riegl identifies the “full-fledged Islamic arabesque” by its characteristics of infinite planar correspondence and denaturalized, intertwining ornament, linking it to the locomotive force of the oriental spirit.121 A half century later, when ernst kühnel published his definitive pamphlet-length study Die Arabeske (1949), he maintained a similar civi- lizational remit for the arabesque’s impetus. kühnel presents the arabesque as an expression of Arab charac- ter and analyzes its reciprocal reflection and unbroken interlacing (with its subsidiary effects of eschewing the individual ego and avoiding three-dimensional illusion- ism) as an index of the abiding monotheism of Islam.122 In the 1970s, syria’s cultural critics started from a similar take on the arabesque as symbolic form and developed it into a postcolonial call for an authentic Arab art based on natural faith and unity. As the syrian critic and arts administrator Afif bahnassi formulated it in 1974, the Arab artist employing the arabesque places neither worldly men nor things at the center of art, and never resorts to trompe l’oeil. The impetus for his arabesque lies in “creating a beautiful subject rather than express- ing the beauty of the object itself.”123 for other art critics, however, the civilizational va- lences of the arabesque as a compositional element are decidedly different. concurrent with the specialized in- quiry of the Islamic art historian, a second discourse on the arabesque developed from the nineteenth century’s considerations of ornament and decoration—and it took form within an art-historical model based on indi- vidual volition and sensation, on the opposite side of bahnassi in terms of schemata of intent. This is the ara- besque of french modernist painting, which, as roger benjamin has shown, arose from the new modes of land- scape painting adopted by fauvist artists and other ad- vanced painters in the first decade of the twentieth century. These painters, who rejected the Impressionist practice of transcribing the fleeting feeling of a land- scape, turned instead to the task of elaborating a fully decorative composition by means of determined, ab- stracting devices. for their purposes, the “insistently artificial twist” of the arabesque s-curve served to main- tain a new space of rhythmic relations between figure and ground.124 In this context, the term “arabesque” works to bundle already existing concerns for the figura serpentinata and other pleasing arrangements of the curve, and to anchor them in the two-dimensional con- cerns of modern painting, including excessive outlining and exaggerated elaboration.125 Thus, for the quasi-mys- tical band of french painters known as nabis, who were active from 1888 to 1900 and followed gauguin in seek- ing to establish a symbolic idiom of decorative painting, the arabesque offered a tool for treating wall painting as a decorative object, refashioning space altogether.126 And for the fauves who followed after them, the ara- besque twist provided a device for pure composition, as in matisse’s celebrated Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life, 1905–6), with its tree-branch arabesques that work to establish a dance-like visual rhythm. In these instances of the arabesque as a decorative structure in painting, importantly, the arabesque is brought to bear within a French tradition of pictorial improvement. certainly, its sinuous curve can deliver a frisson of alterity, particularly in the context of a grow- ing commercial trade in Islamic art and the occasional high-profile exhibition.127 yet, as the art historian Alastair Wright points out in the case of matisse’s overt- ly eastern modes of composition in his morocco paint- ings of 1912, much critical writing worked to characterize even those works as an exclusively french enterprise.128 Wright shows that a wide swath of critics viewed ma- tisse’s morocco paintings as discomfiting precisely be- cause they seem to slip too fully into actual eastern abstraction.129 What the slippage threatens is not a purely formal sensibility regarding the best way to put a picture together; rather, the propriety of racial standards For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen242 is at stake as well. Indeed, rightwing french commenta- tors had already matched the foreign characteristics of Arab art to the purported characteristics of Arab people: the arabesque’s “gentle glare of raw colors” and “undu- lating lines” were construed as the product of an Arab desire to rest and prolong pleasure.130 finally, and perhaps ironically, given the turn-of-the- century fear of the dilatory effects of Arab pattern, a third component of the contradictory and parallel meanings of the arabesque in syria arises from its per- ceived disciplining function as a process of synthesis. We know that Ismaʿil made use of Arab designs in the drawing classes he taught at maydan high school, where such designs would have held a nationalist charge as object lessons in cultural history.131 (he likely assigned patterns such as the one shown in fig. 14.) And further, we know that the lessons in Arab ornament in the syrian national curriculum followed a long-established french precedent of using world ornament in instruction. As the art historian molly nesbit shows, practical ornament studies had been introduced to france’s primary school curriculum at the start of the twentieth century in re- sponse to an anxiety about industrial readiness.132 This was a single, systematic curriculum that moved pupils forward from classes on line and geometry, through or- nament and perspectival renderings of things, to ideal- ized leaves, and so on.133 furthermore, as nesbit demonstrates, these abstracting exercises in design also occupied the crux of the modern project to construct a universal subject: a single, standardized french child- subject at every point of the educational and industrial system, whether in marseille or Paris or—adding in the colonial expansion of the mandates in 1920—beirut, Antioch, or deir ez-Zor. concomitantly, in syria the fig. 14. Page from the fifth-level Workbook for Boy and Girl Students (Ashghālī li-l-Talāmīdh wa-Tilmīdhāt) (damascus, late 1940s). The instructions say, “Arab engraving. for boys: Transfer and carve it on wood, then color it, or use it to decorate a piece of cardboard for a book cover. for girls: decorate a book cover, border of a tablecloth, or china.” For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 243 mandate administration included steps to codify local crafts, with the intention of stimulating commodity pro- duction, taking a page from colonial administration in north Africa.134 This included the establishment of a short-lived school of modern Arab Arts attached to the french Institute in damascus from 1926 to 1930, over- seen by the orientalist scholar eustache de Lorey, who was then the director of the Institute. The school admit- ted a handful of local students to help with the tasks of tracing and distilling six types of replicable Arab pat- terns, running the gamut from Nour-eddin (inspired by the ornamentation in the maristan of nur al-din in damascus and on the minbar of nur al-din in hama) to Comnenus (created by de Lorey from byzantine sources).135 In pairing ornamental studies with produc- tivist goals, the project upheld a comprehensive french approach to artistic education that, as nesbit notes, devoted its lessons to the production of objects and yet at the same time considered the object only in its most highly realized form—that of decorative art.136 (The same easily collapsed line between objects and decora- tive schema would also manifest in de Lorey’s other projects, many of which were promotional rather than scholarly.137 After presiding over the 1928 rediscovery of the mosaics of the umayyad mosque, for example, he employed students to produce full-size color drawings of the mosaics and then sent the drawings on a world tour as fine art objects in themselves.138) Whereas the colonial treatment of the arabesque had raised questions of racial difference in french north Af- rica and problems of educational stewardship in the mandate Arab east, however, the neocolonial treatment of the arabesque in the 1940s tended to limit its scope to a formal and universal (rather than epistemological) de- vice. The Paris offices of unesco (to which syria be- came a signatory in 1946), in particular, disseminated this understanding of the arabesque.139 In 1948, for ex- ample, when unesco worked with huyghe to organize a traveling print exhibition of high-quality color repro- ductions of modern painting from Impressionism to the present day, the exhibition catalog offered a narrative of artistic innovation versus illusion, in which abstracted versions of formal strategies were the primary driver.140 huyghe’s introductory essay enshrines the arabesque as the defining operation in the development of modern painterly art, invoking Toulouse-Lautrec’s use of “boldly stylized arabesques,” followed by the nabis’ use of “ arabesques and splashes of color” to mediate between tradition and innovation, and so on.141 huyghe’s pres- entation of the arabesque as a formal feature drawn from ornament and music limits its function to altering a motif and achieving a more harmonious composition. of course, even this flatly formal version of the ara- besque performed ideological work for the postwar era. It was used to tout the capacity of Paris in particular to incorporate the best insights of others and then, as huyghe claims outright, to “radiate” its modernism back over the whole world.142 considering the show’s exclu- sive focus on european achievements, even huyghe’s brief references to foreign influence, such as his note that “matisse’s feeling for colored arabesque attracted him to the east,” serve to buttress the french center.143 The matisse painting in the exhibition, Woman in White, was a relatively recent composition from 1946 in which matisse had most likely adapted the brilliant color ef- fects of egyptian tent piecework into appliqué-like white gaps between gold skin, violet couch, and violet zigzag lines (fig. 15).144 In the narrative of a continuous french development toward abstraction as set forth by huyghe, however, there is no space for understanding these compositional moves as signifying the kind of in- tercultural play that others recognized in matisse’s oeu- vre.145 unesco intended its exhibition of reproductions to act as a kind of equalizer, providing those citizens of the world who had no easy access to great works of painting with an opportunity to inspect them. In 1950 the exhibi- tion traveled to syria and Iraq as well as to bolivia, co- lumbia, the dominican republic, new Zealand, and Pakistan.146 And when it arrived in damascus, the edu- cational community did by and large receive it as the instructional aid it purported to be. huyghe’s essay was duly translated into Arabic and published in the second- ary school teachers’ bulletin al-Muʿallim al-ʿArabī, with badiʿ al-kasim, a scholar of philosophy and member of the baʿth party, completing the translation.147 overall, al-kasim remains quite faithful to huyghe’s prose, save for redacting a few minor art-historical asides. but from al-kasim’s particular treatment of the term “arabesque,” we can glean some insight into the cultural recoding of For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen244 the moment, for he takes liberties with its function as an analytical term and puts greater stress on its significance as a form of Arab identity. for example, he opts not to print the term in roman characters (as the journal did for the artists’ names), nor to transliterate it (as syrian critics would do in the 1960s), nor to make use of the term raqsh, from the verb raqasha, meaning to variegate or make multicolored (the coinage that farès officially proposed in 1953).148 Instead, al-kasim uses the phrase tazayyunāt ʿ arabiyya, which has the very literal meaning of “Arabic decoration.” relating more to the modalities of artisanal work than to those of fine arts, this phrase casts french artists who employ the arabesque—Tou- louse-Lautrec, the nabis, and the like—in the role of compositors working with the codified forms of syrian crafts and design education. Indeed, the only other time al-kasim breaks from his convention of leaving french names in the roman script is with his translation of the group name nabis. here he uses the Arabic word al- anbiyāʾ, the conjugated Arabic plural word meaning “the prophets,” which has the effect of Arabizing the history of modern art and naturalizing its resulting aesthetic forms to the syrian setting.149 In other words, al-kasim casts the nabis’ arabesque as prophetic revelation rath- er than an orientalizing motif. given this matrix of arabesques and varying modes of subjectivity and objective presence, how, then, are we to position the work of Ismaʿil, an artist we know had come to recognize Arabism as a first cause in his creativ- ity? I have endeavored to convey the multitude of inten- tions that the arabesque afforded those artists who used its expansive repetitions of line and color. Ismaʿil knew the practical applications of Arab design from his class- room. he had engaged the Arab line as a symbol of spir- itual subjectivity, if not through the analysis of riegl and kühnel then through the art-historical and critical stud- ies of bishr farès. he had read and viewed the french painterly take on the arabesque as a compositional twist as well, and may even have discussed the problem of its translation with al-kasim. The record shows that, not long after the unesco exhibition opened in damascus, Ismaʿil wrote about matisse’s work for al-Baʿth newspa- per, upholding the notion of pure composition as the central concern of the paintings.150 Ismaʿil’s article pro- poses a pan-cultural basis for matisse’s insights, attribut- ing the strong, unadulterated colors in the paintings to eastern inspiration; he also highlights the synesthetic aspect of the interplay of colors and spontaneous line, calling it the “artist’s music.”151 yet Ismaʿil does not use the word “arabesque” in his article, nor in any of his other published works from 1950.152 rather, his reading of the legacy of the fauves and other french moderns would seem to recognize their success in reminding the world of the power of repeated, sinuous line and bright color. This is not to suggest that they had definitively established the origin of that power, however. for Ismaʿil, there remained the question of the underlying source of meaningful artistic experience. In order to interpret the conceptual (and non-visible) aspect of Ismaʿil’s practice, it is crucial to recall that his fig. 15. henri matisse, Woman in White (Dame à la robe blanche), 1946, oil on canvas, 96.5 × 60.3 cm. (Photo: rich sanders, courtesy of des moines Art center) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 245 first formal training in the use of decorative line came as a colonial subject in Alexandretta and not as a student of the fine painterly arts. In such a setting, academic di- visions between ornament, design, and art could easily be collapsed into a practice of free drawing. These les- sons, as I have discussed, were meant to instill a sense of separation between line and things and to produce a kind of industrial subject. To Ismaʿil’s childhood psyche, however, the same separation also opened up vistas for the expression of anti-rational feeling—of mystical sub- jectivity over tangible object. even while still a school- boy, he began to activate the line’s more automatic or pre-aesthetic qualities as a means to free other truths. his Antioch friends later recollected how he liked to use the schoolroom’s portable blackboard as a site for re- leasing his imagination, running his chalk into “every corner,” producing images of “marvelous energy.”153 he was also remembered for sometimes manipulating his dancing lines in ways that contested french authority. When, for example, he played drawing guessing games with cousins, he would draw a line or two and then ask them to guess what image he intended (for example “duck” or “sheep”), asking again after he had drawn an- other line or two (“house”) and so on, until a correct guess was made—and the lines sometimes channeled latent anti-colonial feeling into image.154 one day, his cousin reports, Ismaʿil’s drawing coalesced into the im- age of an arrow, and then the arrow came to pierce a french soldier. The resulting image became a talisman for the group, and they used “piercing arrow” as a secret password phrase at their school. notably, in these ac- tivities, the lines themselves (and not Ismaʿil per se) are made agents of unfurling a truth about the collective condition. giving expression to the latent desire of lines to form eternal shapes could also serve to solidify an op- positional community. once Ismaʿil came to damascus and got to know other young intellectuals there, his work with instinc- tual line intersected with literary efforts to convey a ro- mantic notion of transformative natural experience, producing another phase of drawing. In 1942, for exam- ple, he worked with his damascus friend badiʿ haqqi, a law student and eventual baʿth adherent, to create im- ages to accompany haqqi’s free-verse evocation of a wintertime snow flurry in the city.155 haqqi wrote “snowfall” as an account of synesthetic impressions: jag- ged pieces freezing against the blue sky; jasmine explod- ing in a heavenly smell; and the twice-repeated phrase “from the whiteness of snow, dreams of a bride scatter, shadows scatter.”156 As a gift to his friend, and as a testa- ment to the inspirational force of snow, Ismaʿil respond- ed to the bridal tropes of the poem in an ink drawing of anthropomorphized snowflakes: the white silhouette of a dancer set within a dark ground, spiraling in a fractal- like recursive sequence of inversion and reflection (fig. 16).157 elements of this drawing, such as the cinched waist, bouffant hair, and tapering limbs of the dancer, recall the motifs of french graphic design in L’Illustration, including popular advertising for perfumes (fig. 17). but any cultural specificity of the referent is ultimately en- compassed by the suffusing impression of flowing, fe- brile femininity achieved by the floating twists of outline, arranged in an exploding pattern of optical whiteness. Another of Ismaʿil’s drawings from this early period, the colored-pencil work Solitude, reveals a complemen- tary interest in those compositional models Ismaʿil iden- tified as eastern (fig. 18). The drawing shows a woman clad in a black dress beneath a single, twisting tree branch amid a landscape suffused by colored mist and golden sky. It would seem to enfold the romantic pan- Asian visual lexicon that the Indian artist Abanindra- nath Tagore devised in the first decades of the twentieth fig. 16. Adham Ismaʿil, Snowfall (Thulūj), 1942, originally ink, here shown in surviving reproduction. (reprinted from badīʿ Ḥaqqī, “Thulūj,” al-Maʿrifa 134 [April 1973]: 80–82, at 80.) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen246 would return to such linear distillation, too, in composi- tions less explicitly related to any eastern source. In the 1948 watercolor Warm Breeze, for example, Ismaʿil works directly with the theme of nature as a source of the spir- its embodied in the arabesque line; a surface pattern of reeds, birds, and pure graphic marks appears to breathe out elegant loops that hint at an entrelac or other Arab- Islamic motif but do not finally resolve as such (fig. 6). for Ismaʿil, the ultimate reconciliation of the ara- besque’s multiple possibilities comes not by electing one or the other side of its parallel genealogies, eastern or Western, but rather through the populist element of the baʿth cultural equation and its claim to the creative genius of an uncoerced, natural collective. recall how, during the registration drives in Alexandretta in 1938, the Arabic mother tongue had provided the basis for a transcendent unity. To physically practice Arab identity in speech and writing in that context was to embody this unity. After syrian independence in 1946, and the chal- lenges to the representational authority of the national bloc mounted by the ideological parties, Ismaʿil’s work sought out additional pathways to the greater imagina- tion of Arabism. In his arabesque experiments, he plays with models of Arab embodiment in culture, associating its visual form with other poetic and musical forms. The 1947 painting Syrian Zajal, for example, takes its title from a form of colloquial poetry performance associated with feast days, often involving percussion and song (fig. 20).160 Ismaʿil’s evocation of its extended, temporal form moves several vectors of energy into visual overlay: a sky containing both day and night; a vision of ancient trees with foliage that dissolves into clouds; a central cruci- form shape that appears to conduct electricity into curl- ing forms of genie-like life; and a skein of colored arabesque lines that, in the far right corner, appear to outline a fawn, a woman’s eye, and other hallucinatory beings. Another painting in this vein, Dabke (1950), takes its title from the Arab folk dance that is customary at weddings and celebrations, where whole communities perform its syncopated foot movements in rhythmic co- ordination. In this case, the experience is evoked by short flecks of contour lines in atmospheric space, which hint at (female) bodily form as if it were a distillate of the fertile atmosphere of the eastern landscape (fig. 21). Although all these works include clear markers of an century, distinguished by the watercolor wash tech- niques that imbue the spare compositions with atmo- spheric luminescence.158 one 1902 Tagore watercolor, which depicts the mughal king shah Jahan in solitary reflection in his garden, where he sits beneath a tree branch gathering a cloud of delicate mist, circulated widely in europe in the 1920s as an illustration of V. c. scott o’connor’s exotic travelogue The Charm of Kash- mir (fig. 19).159 Ismaʿil’s Solitude drawing employs a modal composition of person and atmospheric blank- ness that is akin to Tagore’s image of noble ascesis, al- beit with the further stylization of its elements into a rounded s-curve of the branch against bright striations of color in pink, green, blue, and gold. Amid such fugitive visual qualities and their suggestion of eastern meta- physics, this s-curve becomes more an abstraction of ephemeral energies than a depiction of things. The artist fig. 17. Print advertisement for Lancôme perfume, “con- quête,” in L’Illustration, november 15, 1941. For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 247 fig. 18. Adham Ismaʿil, Solitude (al-Waḥda), 1945, colored pencil on paper. (reprinted from naʿīm Ismāʿīl, Adham Ismāʿīl: Ḥarqat Lawn wa-Khaṭṭ Lā-Nihāʾī [damascus: al-Jumhuriyya Press, 1965].) fig. 19. Abanindranath Tagore, Nasim Bagh, 1902, watercolor. (reprinted from “Les Jardins du kashmir,” L’Illustration no. 4103 [october 22, 1921]: 382–84.) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen248 Arab cultural identity, they are not ethnographic in pur- pose. Instead, each manages the relationship between idealized form and folk practices by means of (imag- ined) rhythm, letting rhythm act as a mediating pres- ence as well. That relationship, established across nested realms of being, is at once natural, replicative through the body, protean, and transcendent. by the time Ismaʿil debuted The Porter, then, his own assessment of the possibilities of the “arabesque” hinged upon his recognition of the timeless metaphysical as- pects it held in common across its many instantiations, and its internal coherence as energy. for his extended circle, the term “arabesque” itself came to describe “the permanent movement” within any work of art, its con- stitutive animating force.161 some of the drawings Ismaʿil made after The Porter produced beautiful results from the search for this kind of plenitude. We can, for in- stance, consider the 1953 watercolor drawing shown in fig. 22. As an image, it is the result of a single physical interaction by the artist on his paper support, involving Ismaʿil pushing a single continuous line through a se- quence of loops and points so as to articulate the inter- nal and external forms of a face in profile, not unlike the method employed in The Porter. The resulting enclo- sures have been filled in with flat hues of local color: bright, acidic hues oscillate with naturalistic skin and hair tones as well as neutral mauves. but a difference here is the open surface of the paper, which allows the image so produced to register as a being in active trans- formation. As Ismaʿil traced the outlines, he exploited the capacity of his line to elicit different states of living, and even to produce other beings. In the areas where Ismaʿil’s lines accrue around the particularly detailed passages of the human visage, the color variations be- come so dense that a transubstantiating effect is achieved: flowers sprout and a hummingbird appears at the crown. here in its final resting form, the arabesque expresses an internal propensity to Islamic ornament. To use the categorical terms of the history of Islamic art, we can say that the extremities of this drawing have be- come “floriated.”162 Again, the impetus is not to conform to a determined heritage motif, but rather to set a col- lective energy free into new, fecund forms. In other drawings, by contrast, the push and pull of Ismaʿil’s slicing line against the brightness of the color produces such defamiliarizing effects that the images verge on ugliness. These images are particularly telling of the conceptual process, for they leave no sense of the pleasures of play, instead making the moment of repre- sentation into a subject of dark reflection. one gouache, dated 1952 (discussed above), allows the tracing of ob- jects to transport the image into a space of unstable color relationships (fig. 7). beginning from one draw- ing—probably again the drawing of a head—Ismaʿil fig. 20. Adham Ismaʿil, Syrian Zajal (al-Zajal al-Sūrī), 1947(?), oil on unknown surface. (reprinted from naʿīm Ismāʿīl, Ad- ham Ismāʿīl, 14.) fig. 21. Adham Ismaʿil, Dabke, 1950, oil on unknown surface. (reprinted from naʿīm Ismāʿīl, Adham Ismāʿīl, 27.) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 249 fig. 22. Adham Ismaʿil, no title, 1953, gouache on paper. samawi collection, dubai. (Photo: provided by the Ayyam gallery) For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen250 adds an overlay of what may be a standing figure, filling in the resulting structure with color. by doubling the scenes depicted, and then suturing them again into a field of shifting colors that hint at living beings but do not show them, the image breaks not only with repre- sentation but also with formal satisfaction. second and third heads sprout in the place where a nose might once have been, while the eyes have become flowers and the forehead a swamp. The drawing as a whole would seem to offer a disturbing image of stripped human features. but more properly, we might say that it succeeds in dis- turbing the presumed purpose of drawing. rather than offering a satisfying composition in which relations be- tween signifier and signified are roughly coherent, the meandering line and punctuating color work to disclose an underlying flux. Vision comes to feel nearly impos- sible; one cannot look at the drawing and see any one thing. quite unlike either hamoudi’s or Zeid’s paintings in Paris, both of which traced abstract entities with a heavy black line, Ismaʿil’s drawing uses line as a means to disperse appearances. his “arabesque” here manifests in a refusal of objects or their permanence. having now thoroughly tracked the range of Ismaʿil’s use of sinuous and unending line, it becomes possible, finally, to clarify the goal of resurrected unity that the baʿth movement pursued at the same time, a unity that they located somewhere between the “purely” cultural and the “naturally” political. beginning in the 1940s, the artist used the apparently autonomous energy of the dancing line to invoke the natural synthesis of Arab na- tional feeling, in which form and identity are equivalent. It is not by accident that Ismaʿil’s turn to Arab vitality took place precisely as political conditions in syria seemed to move in a conservative direction, under the consolidating power of the national bloc, in the years 1946 to 1949. his opposing version of an ideal national artistry—one that is vivifying in its location in the un- adulterated self—came to wield a contestatory power. but the radicalism of Ismaʿil’s arabesque did not lie merely in its capacity to undercut appearance. rather, the liwāʾiyyūn intellectuals conceived of the Arab total- ity as a perfect congruence between the imagined future and the communal past, which politicized their creative claims in the present and set the activated line to the task of revealing rhythmic, felt arrangements of refract- ed, distributed color. Thus, Ismaʿil’s method renders the urban poverty of the present, along with other daily de- tails, as mere historical anecdote. Interior outlines of things are made to dissolve their own exterior boundar- ies; façades become provisional. The red flashes on the painting’s surface communicate feeling, but they also serve as visual punctuation in the meandering line of a boundless arabesque—a conceptual total that may be sensed, but not seen. As an abstracting force, such paint- ing remained antagonistic toward the visual illusions proposed by the parochial syrian state, whether parlia- ment assemblies or bourgeois neighborhood planning. Linking the experience of a dissolving picture plane to the active production of a restorative unity, and linking the consciousness of the audience to the “here” of an alternative Arab totality, Ismaʿil and the baʿth move- ment located modern Arab painting in a future-oriented socialist Arabism. Their arabesque performed a funda- mentally anti-mimetic demonstration of the cultural awareness that the Arab people already contained with- in themselves. ePILogue The dissonant qualities of Ismaʿil’s work did not achieve the radical ends they might have seemed to promise in this uncertain period of struggle for sovereignty. At the end of 1952, Ismaʿil received the first syrian state fellow- ship to study in Italy at the Academy of fine Arts in rome, an opportunity secured by a bilateral agreement with an Italy eager to present itself as a cultural sponsor of Arab rebirth in a mediterranean mold.163 The fact that Ismaʿil received the honor is itself an index of changing politics, for it was likely the result of special arrangements by the politician Akram al-hawrani, a fiery advocate of property and agrarian reform who had managed to forge alliances with colonel shishakli as well as the baʿth Party.164 once Ismaʿil arrived in rome, he studied fresco painting and developed a more sche- matic use of arabesque lines as a mode of graphic testi- mony to the political plight of the Arab people. The students who had witnessed the debut of The Porter did not forget its powerful call to a new integrity of inner national vision, however. on the occasion of a 2008 For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 251 retro spective of the syrian modern art movement, as part of damascus’s designation as the Arab capital of culture, the syrian artist and critic elias Zayyat com- posed a semi-fictional vignette about the 1951 salon that captures the mixture of self-effacement and visionary assertion in Ismaʿil’s painting practice and articulates its political stakes. for Zayyat, The Porter announced the end of the era of a deadening european vision. Adopting the perspective of one of the maydan students who would have attended the opening, he writes: We four in the maydan secondary school who loved draw- ing followed our teacher Adham to the damascus museum to see the painting The Porter, which he had created espe- cially for the Autumn exhibition. beside it, we saw our teachers’ paintings decorating qaṣr al-Ḥayr, and were drowned in the light of color. And in the museum’s garden stood a painter, of foreign appearance and language, who was drawing the ancient garden with the minarets of the Takiyya al-sulaymāniyya in paints of gray.165 In Zayyat’s staging of the momentous turn toward sov- ereignty enacted in 1951, it is Ismaʿil who leads the way to terminating a long tradition of orientalist “views” of syrian antiquity. The tables have been turned against the stifling academic model, and it is the foreign visitor whose painting becomes colorless and drained. History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley noTes Author’s note: This article is drawn from a book in progress tenta- tively entitled Beautiful Agitation: The Mobilizing Arts of Painting in Syria and the Arab East, 1920–1967 and is based on research undertaken in damascus, beirut, cairo, rome, and Paris as part of my doctoral dissertation (made possible by support from the u.s. fulbright commission and the social science research council, International dissertation research fellowship). The argument took form first as a paper for the 2013 college Art Association panel “Abstraction and Totality,” chaired by Ara h. merjian and Anthony White; it was further developed as a lecture at the university of california-berkeley in december 2013; and was workshopped at the menA colloquium at the American university in cairo, may 2014. I thank robin greeley, caroline A. Jones, ellen kenney, gülru necipoğlu, stefania Pandolfo, nasser rabbat, nada shabout, Adam Talib, Lisa Wedeen, and especially the anonymous Muqarnas reviewer for their questions and sug- gestions. finally, I wish to acknowledge the generosity of the families of the artists here discussed—including in particular Alma Ismaʿil, Lubna hammad, and Ishtar hamoudi—in giving time and care to this project of recuperation. 1. Adham Ismaʿil to Jamil hamoudi, december 27, 1951, pri- vate archive of Ishtar hamoudi, baghdad, Iraq. consulted via photographic scan. All translations from Arabic by the author, unless otherwise noted. 2. Articles by Jamil hamoudi include “al-Amīra al-ʿIrāqiyya fakhr al-nisāʾ Zayd,” al-Adīb 9, no. 3 (march 1950): 9–12; “Ṣālūn al-Ḥaqāʾiq al-Jadīda li-sanat 1950,” al-Adīb 9, no. 9 (september 1950): 25–32; and “al-fannān al-Ḥamūdī,” al-Adīb 10, no. 1 (January 1951): 66–67. for a relevant dis- cussion of the immediate postwar abstractionist trends, see Tom mcdonough, “The mercurial monochrome, or the nihilation of geometric Abstraction,” in Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society, 1915–2015, ed. Iwona blazwick et al. (new york: Prestel, 2015), 243–51; nancy Jachec, Politics and Paintings at the Venice Biennale, 1948–64 (new york: manchester university Press, 2007); and marcia e. Vetrocq, “Painting and beyond: recovery and regenera- tion, 1943–1952,” in The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968, ed. germano celant (new york: guggenheim museum, 1994), 20–31. 3. Jamīl Ḥamūdī, “Ilā Jamīʿ al-fannānīn fī al-bilād al-ʿArabiyya,” al-Adīb 9, no. 1 (January 1951): 63. 4. These descriptions appear in nāqid al-Ishtirākiyya al-fannī (Ishtirākiyya’s Art critic), “al-Ishtirākiyya fī maʿraḍ al-funūn al-Jamīla,” al-Ishtirākiyya, november 3, 1951. The Arabic title of the painting is al-Ḥammāl. In later studies of Ismaʿil’s work, the title is sometimes given as al-ʿAttāl, which is synonymous with al-Ḥammāl, but with a more colloquial tone. 5. Ismaʿil to hamoudi, december 27, 1951. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. As we will see later in this article, Ismaʿil’s cohort stud- ied bergsonian notions of the creative spirit in the early 1940s with their philosophical mentor Zaki al-Arsuzi. for discussions of bergson’s impact on modern movements and modern artists, see mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 1993); Jonathan crary, Sus- pensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Cul- ture (cambridge, mA: mIT Press, 1999); and Todd cronan, Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism (minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota Press, 2013). for a consideration of these ideas in a postcolonial literary context, see donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (new york: columbia university Press, 2010). 9. on competing schemes of unity in this era, see Patrick seale, The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-War Arab Poli- tics, 1945–1958 (London: oxford university Press, 1965). 10. my definition of “radical” here draws on Ilham khuri-mak- disi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen252 Radicalism, 1860–1914 (berkeley, cA: university of california Press, 2010). 11. Philip shukry khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945 (Princeton, nJ: Princ- eton university Press, 1987); and elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (new york: columbia university Press, 2000). 12. khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 423. Patrick seale gives additional details on the charged atmosphere within the schools in Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East (berkeley, cA: university of california Press, 1990), 25–26. 13. for a discussion of such groups as constitutive of the middle class of the Arab east, see keith david Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colo- nialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 2006). discussions of the nongovernmen- tal art associations in particular may be found in ghāzī al-khāldī, “al-Jamʿiyyāt al-fanniyya fī sūriyā mundhu ʿĀm 1925 ḥattā al-yawm,” al-Baʿth, december 11, 1968; and elias Zay[y]at, preface to Revival of Plastic Art Memory in Syria, 4 vols. (damascus: capital of Arab culture, 2008–9), 1:n.p. 14. for a model analysis of artists’ negotiations with a similar slippage between nation and state in Pakistan, see Iftikhar dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (chapel hill, nc: university of north carolina Press, 2010). 15. The intellectual atmosphere of the group is best described in sulaymān al-ʿĪsā, “bidāyāt al-baʿth al-ʿArabī fī Ḥayāt al-shāʿir sulaymān al-ʿĪsā wa-dhākiratihu,” pt. 1, al-Munāḍil 84 (April 1976): 52–73. 16. details about the baʿth Party’s opposition to the national bloc are given in fāʾiz Ismāʿīl, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” in Adham Ismāʿīl: Qirāʾa fī Thalāthat Abʿād, ed. khalīl Ṣafiyya (damascus: ministry of culture, 1991), 143–55, at 151. see also the letter of sidqi Ismaʿil to a friend, novem- ber 14, 1945, in Ṣidqī Ismāʿīl, Rasāʾil Lam Tunshar, ed. ʿAbd al-nabī Aṣṭīf (damascus: ministry of culture, 2009), 102–3. 17. my account of this exhibition is informed by the follow- ing sources: journalistic coverage in al-Nuqqād, al-Naṣr, al-Baʿth, al-Fayḥāʾ, al-Iṣlāḥ, and al-Inshāʾ; organizational memos contained in the uncataloged archive of the mod- ern art wing of the national museum, damascus (hereafter nm-d modern); and a report in the national teachers’ jour- nal, al-Muʿallim al-ʿArabī. 18. “nahḍatunā al-fanniyya al-ḥadītha.” see [no author] “Iqāmat maʿraḍ kabīr li-l-rasm wa-l-funūn al-Jamīla,” al-Inshāʾ, december 4, 1950. 19. The salon d’Automne is mentioned in the french diplo- matic correspondence gathered in “Échanges culturels 166 (1948–53),” direction générale des relations culturelles, ministère des Affaires Étrangères, at Paris-La courneuve. A letter from the french ambassador in damascus dated Jan- uary 15, 1951 relays a request received from the syrian gov- ernment to examine the statutes for the salon d’Automne. 20. Maʿraḍ al-Rasm al-Yadawī. The phrase connotes a gen- eral notion of dexterous artistry and is not limited to two- dimensional painting. The inclusion of decorative objects in exhibitions appears to have been relatively common at least since the 1930s, perhaps as a colonial inheritance from the universal exhibition of the nineteenth century. design specimens also appeared in an exhibition of the Women’s cultural forum held in damascus in may 1950. 21. Ṣalāḥ al-dīn al-dahanī, “Jawla fī maʿrad al-rasm li-l- maʿārif,” al-Naṣr, november 25, 1950. 22. Ibid. similar criticisms were also leveled by sulaymān al- khish in “al-fann fī maʿraḍ al-rasm al-yadawī,” a two-part article published in al-Nuqqād, december 25, 1950, and January 1, 1951. 23. “kalima munṣifa li-Wizārat al-maʿārif,” al-Naṣr, January 1, 1951. 24. The organizing committee even put together a tea party for the opening (memo from the President of the exhibition organizing committee and general director of Antiqui- ties to the council of ministers, october 23, 1951, nm-d modern). The coverage in both al-Naṣr and al-Ishtirākiyya makes explicit mention of the fact that Ismaʿil’s friends and sympathizers had eagerly anticipated his submission, which suggests to me that he had shared in advance his inten- tion to make a shockingly new work. see “al-Ishtirākiyya fī maʿraḍ al-funūn al-Jamīla”; and “dunyā al-fann,” al-Naṣr, november 4–5, 1951. 25. The earliest instance I have found of the term “arabesque” being applied to Ismaʿil’s technique is in the 1964 volume his brother naʿim Ismaʿil published after the artist’s prema- ture death in 1963, Adham Ismāʿīl: Ḥarqat Lawn wa-Khaṭṭ Lā-Nihāʾī (damascus: al-Jumhuriyya Press, s.n., 1964), 22–25. As naʿim Ismaʿil notes in that discussion, “arabesque” was more a european term than a native one. he writes that numerous painters, from Tintoretto to Paul klee, had made use of it, but that Ismaʿil’s work, by contrast, emerged from within it. Later in this article I discuss the many different pathways by which the idea of an Arab-inflected european modernism circulated to syria in the 1940s and 1950s and bore upon Ismaʿil’s conception of his practice. (because I discuss several members of the Ismaʿil family in this article, sometimes even in the same paragraph, I have opted to differentiate them by using the family name Ismaʿil to refer to Adham Ismaʿil and using both first and family names for his brother sidqi Ismaʿil, brother naʿim Ismaʿil, and cousin fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil.) 26. “Al-Ishtirākiyya fī maʿraḍ al-funūn al-Jamīla” and “dunyā al-fann.” 27. “dunyā al-fann.” 28. “Al-Ishtirākiyya fī maʿraḍ al-funūn al-Jamīla.” 29. Ismaʿil’s one published statement on the subject seems to have been a short speech he delivered in 1951 that was reprinted in al-nāqid al-fannī (The Art critic), “Jawla fī al-maʿraḍ al-fannī li-Thānawiyyat al-maydān,” al-Baʿth, may 26, 1951, 5 and 8. (I discuss this later in the present article.) 30. sidqi Ismaʿil, letter to a friend, march 12, 1951, in Rasāʾil Lam Tunshar, 159–60. see also sidqi Ismaʿil’s letter to a For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 253 friend from march 28, 1950, identifying the presence of life as “deeper and stronger than struggle”; ibid., 156–57. of the brothers, it was sidqi Ismaʿil who was most publicly involved in the party, contributing to both its political and cultural arms. 31. see the periodized institutional accounts in natalie Adam- son, Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944–1964 (burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); and Jachec, Poli- tics and Paintings at the Venice Biennale. 32. This attitude is exemplified by rené huyghe, introduction to UNESCO Travelling Print Exhibition: From Impressionism till Today (Paris: unesco, 1949), 5–10, which was designed for dissemination to the developing world, and which I discuss later in this article. 33. foundational studies that preserve the nation-state con- tainer, to varying degrees, include ʿAfīf bahnassī, al-Fann al-Ḥadīth fī al-Bilād al-ʿArabiyya (Tunis: unesco, 1980); silvia naef, À la recherche d’une modernité arabe: L’évolution des arts plastiques en Egypte, au Liban et en Irak (geneva: slatkine, 1996); and Wijdan Ali, Modern Islamic Art: Devel- opment and Continuity (gainesville, fL: university Press of florida, 1997). These all build on the art scenes’ own telling of their national histories, as beginning with inde- pendence as states and continuing through staged attempts to recover artistic authenticity. 34. on the consolidation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Anneka Lenssen, “The Plasticity of the syrian Avant-garde, 1964–1970,” ARTMargins 2, no. 2 (June 2013): 43–70. 35. Ṭāriq al-sharīf, ʿIshrūn Fannānan min Sūriya (damascus: ministry of culture, 1972), 19. 36. for sidqi Ismaʿil’s explicitly political discussion of this mode of Arab unity, see “al-ʿArab wa-Ittijāh al-ʿAṣr al-Ḥāḍir,” al-Baʿth, August 3–4, 1946, reprinted in sidqi Ismaʿil, al-Muʾallafāt al-Kāmila, 5 vols. (damascus: ministry of culture, 1977– 81), 1:69–73. 37. due to the multilingual population of the administrative district of Alexandretta (al-Iskandarūna in Arabic and İskenderun in Turkish), place names are often multiple and contested. for the sake of simplicity, I here use the place names favored by the french mandate administration in syria (1920–46), the period corresponding with Ismaʿil’s childhood years. 38. for an archival account of the crisis, using french and Turkish sources, see sarah d. shields, Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II (oxford: oxford university Press, 2011). The Arabist politics of the conflict are carefully ana- lyzed in keith d. Watenpaugh, “‘creating Phantoms’: Zaki al-Arsuzi, the Alexandretta crisis, and the formation of modern Arab nationalism in syria,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28, no. 3 (1996): 363–89. 39. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” 148; and naʿim Ismaʿil, Adham Ismāʿīl, unpaginated biographical summary. 40. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl”; and al-ʿĪsā, “bidāyāt al-baʿth.” for an invaluable summary of the life of Zaki al-Arsuzi, which details the Alexandretta struggle and the youth movements it sustained, see hiroyuki Aoyama, “A biography of Zakī al-Arsūzī,” revised by malek salman, in hiroyuki Aoyama, Wafiq khansa, and maher al-charif, Spiritual Father of the Baʿth: The Ideological and Political Sig- nificance of Zakī al-Arsūzī in Arab Nationalist Movements, trans. and revised by mujab al-Imam and malek salman, middle east studies series 49 (Tokyo: Institute of develop- ing economies, Jetro, 2000), 1–35. 41. This group joined forces with another group, led by the teachers michel Aflaq and salah al-din al-bitar, in the mid- 1940s. I return to this merger later on in the article. for a variety of reasons, this early history of the party was later contested, with some voices emphasizing the contributions of the group from Alexandretta and others emphasizing Aflaq and al-bitar. The most comprehensive account of the Alexandretta “stream” of the party may be found in Aoyama, “A biography of Zakī al-Arsūzī.” 42. hanna batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolution- ary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 1978), 723. 43. The two fateful decisions, the one surrendering Alexan- dretta in 1937 and the one surrendering Palestine in 1947, shared the single calendar date of november 29. In 1950, large student demonstrations against this double surren- der were staged in damascus. see “Taẓāhurat al-Ṭullāb bi-dhikrā al-Taqsīm wa-salkh al-Liwāʾ,” al-Inshāʾ, novem- ber 30, 1950. In 1949, the united nations’s count of Palestin- ian refugees outside Israel was 726,000. The syrian press closely covered the creation of the united nations relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the near east in 1949, as well as its operations in beirut. 44. According to figures collected by the french high commis- sion in 1936, the district held a population of two hundred and twenty thousand, with 39 percent consisting of ethnic Turks, 28 percent ʿAlawite, 11 percent Armenian, 10 per- cent sunni Arabs, 8 percent christians, and the remainder divided among kurds, circassians, and Jews (khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 495). 45. shields, Fezzes in the River, 59. 46. Ibid., 242–47. 47. Watenpaugh, “‘creating Phantoms,’” 266. 48. Ibid., 370; shields, Fezzes in the River, 59. 49. for a discussion of a comparable instance of performative nationalism in Pakistan, see dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, 30. 50. shields, Fezzes in the River, 28. 51. from the address by Turkish President mustafa kemal to the grand national Assembly in Ankara. see “Turks cheer demand for rights in syria,” The New York Times, novem- ber 2, 1936, 12. 52. details from naʿim Ismaʿil, Adham Ismāʿīl; and fa⁠ʾ iz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” 143–55. both of these accounts, written long after the fact, use the meta-cate- gories established in the struggle, designating the hostile For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen254 neighborhood as Turkish without reference to a particular religious or communal composition. 53. Watenpaugh, “‘creating Phantoms,’” 366. Al-Arsuzi, too, was an ʿAlawite with ties to the Ismaʿils’ neighborhood of ʿAfan. 54. Watenpaugh demonstrates how the Arab clubs established by al-Arsuzi in many ways mirrored Turkish initiatives to foster national affiliation in the same period, such as the Turkish sports club Gençspor Kulübü established in Antioch in 1926. 55. dalal Arsuzi-elamir, “Zakī al-Arsūzī and syrian-Arab nationalism in the Periphery: The Alexandretta crisis of 1936–1939,” in From the Syrian Land to the States of Syria and Lebanon, ed. Thomas Philipp and christoph schumann (beirut: ergon Verlag in kommission, 2004), 307–27. 56. details of the scouting initiatives come from Watenpaugh, “‘creating Phantoms’”; Arsuzi-elamir, “Zakī al-Arsūzī”; fa⁠ʾ iz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl”; al-ʿĪsā, “bidāyāt al-baʿth”; and muḥammad ʿAlī Zarqa, Qaḍiyyat Liwāʾ al-Iskandarūna: Wathāʾiq wa-Shurūḥ (beirut: dār al-ʿurūba, 1994). 57. As Watenpaugh points out (“‘creating Phantoms,’” 369), these community designations were highly idiosyncratic. They divided Arabic speakers on the basis of religious affiliation while maintaining the “Turkish community” as a single voting group. moreover, sunni muslims would have comprised the majority in either the “Turkish community” or the “Arab community” if religious affiliation had been made the sole determinant. nor does a linguistic basis for the separation hold across categories, as many Armenians in the district spoke Turkish dialects rather than Armenian. 58. shields, Fezzes in the River, 172. 59. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” 148. 60. Ibid. shields cites french surveillance reports that corrobo- rate these initiatives (Fezzes in the River, 123, 151). 61. shields, Fezzes in the River, 204–31. 62. Ibid., 235; and khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, 513. The elder Ismaʿil brothers opted to take advantage of an agreement france had made with Turkey allowing non- Turkish inhabitants of Alexandretta to acquire syrian or Lebanese passports and to emigrate over the newly policed border. see Watenpaugh’s description of citizenship options in “‘creating Phantoms,’” 377. 63. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl.” reports include direction de la sûreté générale, beirut, Infor- mation no. 223, 10 Jan 1939, and Information no. 1982, 20 march 1939, folder cabinet Politique no. 873, 2nd verse- ment, Instruction Publique, fonds beyrouth, mAe-nantes. 64. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl”; al-ʿĪsā, “bidāyāt al-baʿth”; and ʿAbd al-khāliq al-naqshbandī, “al-bidāyāt fī dhākirat al-duktūr al-rafīq ʿAbd al-khāliq al-naqshbandī,” pt. 2, al-Munāḍil 100 (August 1977): 6–16, at 8. The artist himself did not sleep in this house, but his brother sidqi did stay there from time to time. 65. Ismaʿil marwa, “sulaymān al-ʿĪsā: Ḥulm ʿArabī damuhu wa-nabḍuhu wa-fikruhu al-ʿurūba,” Bayt Filasṭīn li-l-Shiʿr, April 2012, http://www.ppbait.org/ . 66. A critical discussion of the gist of the lectures may be found in sāmī al-Jundī, al-Baʿth (beirut: dār al-nahār, 1969). I also draw from fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil’s list of the topics the group published in their handwritten newsletter, in “al-bidāyāt fī dhākirat fāʾiz Ismāʿīl,” pt. 2, al-Munāḍil 102 (october 1977): 37–57, at 39. 67. designation in al-Jundī, al-Baʿth, 27. The term “sufi” was used to designate not membership in an institutionalized ṭarīqa, or way, but rather a practice of seeking internal knowledge. Tellingly, al-Arsuzi considered henri berg- son to be a sufi. see salīm barakāt, “al-fikr al-qawmī wa- ususuhu al-falsafīya ʿinda Zakī al-Arsūzī” (master’s thesis, damascus university, 1979), 79. 68. Al-Arsuzi often mentioned his debt to bergson; he is said to have quoted passages from L’évolution créatrice from memory. many historians have cited this bergsonian influence, alongside other borrowings from european thin- kers. see Watenpaugh, “‘creating Phantoms,’” 365; barakāt, “al-fikr al-qawmī,” 31; eric rouleau, “The syrian enigma: What Is the baath?” New Left Review, 1st ser., 45 (septem- ber–october 1967): 53–65, at 56; and Antoine Audo, Zakī al-Arsouzī: Un arabe face à la modernité (beirut: dar al- machreq, 1988), 20–21. 69. al-ʿĪsā, “bidāyāt al-baʿth,” 68–69. 70. “naḥnu hunā naʿīsh fī ẓill al-dawla al-ʿarabiyya al-ishti- rākiyya al-kubrā” and “naḥnu hunā fī ẓill al-waṭan al-ʿarabī al-waḥīd.” see al-ʿĪsā, “bidāyāt al-baʿth,” 72. 71. seale, Struggle for Syria, 41; and al-naqshbandī, “al-bidāyāt fī dhākira,” pt. 1, al-Munāḍil 99 (July 1977): 5–18, at 14. Vol- unteer gendarmes from the group included sidqi Ismaʿil, youssef shaqra, and masʿud al-ghanim. 72. sidqi Ismaʿil to friend, July 14, 1944, in Rasāʾil Lam Tunshar, 95–96. 73. sidqi Ismaʿil to friend, november 14, 1945, in ibid., 102–3. 74. sidqi Ismaʿil to friend, April 17, 1946, in ibid., 106–7. 75. Leonard binder, trans. and commentary, “The constitution of the Arab resurrection (baʿth) socialist Party of syria,” Middle East Journal 13, no. 2 (spring 1959): 195–200. most likely Ismaʿil attended the congress that ratified this docu- ment. 76. Ibid. 77. sidqi Ismaʿil to friend, october 5, 1947, in Rasāʾil Lam Tun- shar, 116–18. 78. Ibid. he writes the sentence in french in the letter, “L’art est une chose mentale.” sidqi Ismaʿil does not indicate the source of the quote, but I suspect that it was henri berg- son’s 1904 essay, “notice sur la vie et les oeuvres de m. félix ravaisson-mollien,” which had been reprinted in La pensée et le mouvant: Essais et conférences (Paris: félix Alcan, 1934). The essay considers a passage from Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting, which states that art must endeavor to capture the “undulous or serpentine line” within each living being. ravaisson’s summary of the practice is that “la peinture est chose mentale.” sidqi Ismaʿil seems to have all of this in mind in his letter, for he also mentions the artistic production of “living pictures of our souls.” For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 255 79. It is not entirely clear to which Picasso painting sidqi Ismaʿil refers. his description of the placement of the eyes in the face, red tinged with black at the woman’s seat, and the pattern of white-in-green on the breast would seem to match the painting now known as Dora Maar with Cat (1941), which was auctioned in 2006 and is in a private col- lection. I have not been able to confirm that a color repro- duction of the painting was circulating in 1947, however. 80. sidqi Ismaʿil to friend, August 15, 1949, in Rasāʾil Lam Tun- shar, 145–46. 81. sidqi Ismaʿil, “al-shallāl,” in al-Kalb: Jarīdat Siḍqī Ismāʿīl (damascus: al-Idāra al-siyāsiyya, 1983), 422–24. 82. sidqi Ismaʿil, “malḥamat al-ʿĀm li-sanat 1951,” in ibid., 438– 39. 83. naʿīm Ismaʿil, Adham Ismāʿīl, 109. 84. sidqi Ismaʿil to friend, november 8, 1944, in Rasāʾil Lam Tunshar, 97–98. 85. The best description of the atmosphere in maydan in these years, including a reference to the Ismaʿils, may be found in ʿAbd al-raḥmān munīf, Marwān Qaṣṣāb Bāshī: Riḥlat al-Ḥayā wa-l-Fann ([damascus]: m. q. bāshī, 1996). Prior to this position, Ismaʿil taught at a private elementary school in damascus and at the state preparatory high school in Aleppo from 1948 to 1950. 86. Art critic, “Jawla”; and eid yakoubi (artist and former stu- dent of Ismaʿil), interview by author, Paris, June 13, 2011. 87. Art critic, “Jawla.” 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. This is boris groys’s analysis of the operation that defined both art and politics in stalinist russia, in The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. charles rougle (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 1992), 43. 91. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil (“Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” 151–52) describes the artist as only sporadically attending meet- ings but acting as a “natural” and trusted participant in their underground work. Ismaʿil worked with members to design the party’s first logo (an image of a tiger under a palm tree), for example. 92. maḥmūd Ḥammād, “dhikriyātīmaʿ Adham Ismāʿīl,” in Ṣafiyya, Adham Ismāʿīl, 175–86, at 175. 93. Ibid.; and al-khāldī, “al-Jamʿiyyāt al-fanniyya.” 94. reference to L’Illustration in mamdūḥ qashlān, “maḥmūd Ḥammād wa-Ibdāʿ al-Ṣiyagh al-Jadīda,” in Niṣf Qarn min al-Ibdāʿ al-Tashkīlī fī Sūriya (damascus: Īblā li-l-funūn al-Jamīla, 2006), 69–77. They also consulted the british journal The Studio, as mentioned in Ismaʿil’s letter to Jamil hamoudi, december 27, 1951. 95. cited in nada shabout, “A dream We call baghdad,” in Zainab bahrani and nada shabout, Modernism and Iraq (new york: Wallach Art gallery and columbia university, 2009), 23–40, at 34. from quote in shākir Ḥasan Āl saʿīd, Fuṣūl min Tārīkh al-Ḥaraka al-Tashkīliyya fī al-ʿIrāq (bagh- dad: ministry of culture and Information, 1983), 100. 96. bruno Paoli, “Jean gaulmier le syrien,” Les carnets de l’Ifpo (hypotheses.org), April 24, 2012, http://ifpo.hypotheses. org/3334 . 97. I have located five of these essays in total, with four appear- ing between february and october 1942 and the fifth in 1945. The most comprehensive presentation of french modernist art is Jacques Lassaigne’s “al-fann al-fransī fī miʾat ʿĀm,” al-Adīb 1, no. 7 (July 1942): 9–11. This article introduces Lassaigne as the director of publications and radio for the free french in the east and notes that he had organized an exhibition in Palestine on the topic of one hundred years of french art. Lassaigne subsequently moved to Algiers, where he would cofound the literary journal L’Arche in 1944 with the Algerian writer and poet Jean Amrouche, with support from André gide. for a con- temporaneous account of those developments, see hélène bokanowsky, “french Literature in Algiers,” Books Abroad 19, no. 2 (spring 1945): 125–30. 98. The second corps was commanded by general Wladis- law Anders and consisted of the Allied units of the exiled government of Poland. After fighting alongside russia on the eastern front, it had retreated through Persia to british-held baghdad and would subsequently transfer to the Apennine Peninsula to fight against the germans in the battles for monte cassino. The artist contingent is described in detail by Jan Wiktor sienkiewicz in his book, Artyści Andersa: Continuità e novità (Warsaw: oficyna Wydawnicza kucharski, 2013) and his pamphlet, Polish Artists in Beirut 1942–1952, trans. Adam kunysz (beirut: embassy of the republic of Poland, 2013), 7. 99. details about the Polish artists’ intellectual contributions in baghdad can be found in diary entries by the Iraqi artist Jawād salīm, reprinted in Hiwar 2, no. 2 (Jan.–feb. 1964): 99–100. Works of the Polish painters were even collected by the Iraqi directorate general of Antiquities. see Dalīl Qāʿat al-Rusūm al-Waṭanī (baghdad: government Press, 1944). A discussion of the visit to damascus can be found in qashlān, “maḥmūd Ḥammād wa-Ibdāʿ al-Ṣiyagh al-Jadīda.” 100. hamoudi details Lassaigne’s help in “al-fannān al-Ḥamūdī,” and describes the importance of the salon des réalités nouvelles in “Ṣālūn al-Ḥaqāʾiq al-Jadīda li-sanat 1950.” Las- saigne had also helped to facilitate introductions for the Lebanese painter shafic Abboud in Paris in 1947. see shafic Abboud, Rétrospective: peintures 1948–2003 (Paris: claude Lemand, 2011). 101. Transcripts of the founding documents may be found in gabriele simongini et al., eds., Art Club, 1945–1964: La Linea Astratta (Parma: galleria d’arte niccoli, 1998), 96–105. “The universal language of forms and colors” is cited in edmond muller, “L’Art club est fondé au caire,” L’Égypte Nouvelle, february 1, 1946, and Ahmed rassim, “Le journal d’un pein- tre raté,” L’Égypte Nouvelle, march 1, 1946. 102. conversion reported by michel seuphor, Dictionary of Abstract Painting, with a History of Abstract Painting, trans. Lionel Izod et al. (new york: Paris book center, 1958), 194. For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen256 103. The cairo branch was launched in Alexandria in late 1945 or early 1946. see notice in Valeurs 4 (January 1946): 128. mention of the Turkish national branch of the Art club appears in nurullah berk, La peinture turque, trans. münev- ver berk (Ankara: general directorate of Press and Tour- ism, 1950). The syrian artist hammad indicates knowledge of the club and also mentions that the studio Veronese had exchanged letters with Jarema circa 1945, in qashlān, “maḥmūd Ḥammād wa-Ibdāʿ al-Ṣiyagh al-Jadīda.” 104. for a discussion of Vichy’s treatment of modernist move- ments such as fauvism, see michèle c. cone, Artists Under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 1992), 47–55. 105. Adamson, Painting, Politics, and the Struggle, 73. much art- historical attention has been paid to the ideological rivalry between the french promotion of the École de Paris and the American “new york school” of abstract expression- ism. The classic polemical account is serge guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expression- ism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur goldhammer (chicago: university of chicago Press, 1983). 106. Adamson, Painting, Politics, and the Struggle, 75. The impor- tant interwar history in france of a highly racialized con- struction of the foreign (read Jewish) membership of the École de Paris is detailed in romy golan, “The ‘École fran- çaise’ versus the ‘École de Paris’: The debate over the status of Jewish Artists in Paris between the Wars,” in kenneth e. silver and romy golan, The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris 1905–1945 (new york: Jewish museum, 1985), 81–87. 107. kirsten scheid, “distinctions that could be drawn: chou- cair’s Paris and beirut,” in Saloua Raouda Choucair, ed. Jes- sica morgan (London: Tate modern, 2013), 41–55, at 53. 108. Jacques Lassaigne, “Il est,” in Jamil Hamoudi: Un Artiste de Baghdad (Paris: Voyelles, 1950), exhibition booklet in pri- vate archive of Ishtar hamoudi, baghdad, Iraq, consulted via photographic scan. “national genius” is also repeated in r. V. gindertael, “hamoudi,” Art d’Aujourd’hui 3, nos. 3–4 (feb.–march 1952): n.p. 109. for example, in his article “al-Amīra al-ʿIrāqiyya fakhr al-nisāʾ Zayd,” hamoudi recounts taking pleasure in alert- ing french abstract artists to the fact that Arab artists had already devised the form centuries earlier. 110. Jamil hamoudi, “L’Art en Irak,” Arts: Beaux-Arts, Littérature, Spectacles (April 28, 1950): 8. 111. Ḥamūdī, “al-Amīra al-ʿIrāqiyya fakhr al-nisāʾ Zayd.” 112. The characterization of arabesque as a structure is from oleg grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (new haven: yale university Press, 1973), 204. but the french postwar milieu also included work in aesthetic philosophy that synthe- sized these strands of artistic history and instantiated the arabesque as a structural feature. see étienne souriau, La correspondance des arts: Éléments d’esthétique comparée (Paris: flammarion, 1947), which uses the term “arabesque” to designate “first-order” arts of nonderivative sense experi- ence, as opposed to “second-order” arts of representation. 113. grabar, Formation of Islamic Art, 190, 204. 114. hamoudi even uses the term in articles dealing only with Paris artists, such as his “Joseph csaky wa-l-naḥt al-bāriz,” al-Adīb 8, no. 12 (december 1949): 26–28, discussing csaky’s work with sinuous line in relief sculpture. Interestingly, hamoudi here includes a footnote giving al-zakhrafa, which means “embellishment” or “ornament,” as the Arabic translation of the french “arabesque.” 115. Lassaigne, “Il est,” and bishr farès, no title, in Jamil Ham- oudi: Un Artiste de Baghdad. This exhibition publication identifies farès as a member of the Institut d’Égypte in cairo; he was also a consultant to unesco, although this is not mentioned in the publication. farès had long been a leading cultural voice in the Arab region, having served as editor-in-chief for the venerable cultural maga- zine al-Muqtaṭaf since 1941, then published in egypt. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil reports (in “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” 148) that the Ismaʿils read al-Muqtaṭaf in Alexandretta. farès already knew hamoudi and had contributed to at least one issue of al-Fikr al-Ḥadīth, the cultural journal hamoudi had published in baghdad before relocating to Paris. 116. because Lassaigne does not cite any particular scholar, one is left to wonder which recent works he had in mind. more than Lassaigne, it was farès who actively participated in the international community of Islamic art historians. farès had already published the widely read Une miniature reli- gieuse de l’école arabe de Bagdad (cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1948). The german historian of Islamic art ernst kühnel, who published his own study Die Arabeske: Sinn und Wandlung eines Ornaments in 1949 (Wiesbaden: dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1949), reviewed the farès volume for the journal Oriens 4, no. 1 (1951): 171–73. farès also lectured on Islamic ornament in cairo, Paris, and beirut, finally publishing his own study in 1952: Essai sur l’esprit de la décoration islamique (cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1952). 117. farès, no title, in Jamil Hamoudi: Un Artiste de Baghdad. 118. roger benjamin, “The decorative Landscape, fauvism, and the Arabesque of observation,” The Art Bulletin 75, no. 2 (June 1993): 295–316, at 297. 119. see, for example, the entry on “arabesque” in “A biographi- cal, Technological, and Topical dictionary of Art (contin- ued),” Bulletin of the American Art-Union 5 (August 1, 1851), 76–78, at 77. citing owen Jones’s Details and Ornaments from the Alhambra (London: Jones, 1845); Wilhelm Zahn’s Ornamente aller klassischen Kunstepochen (berlin: reimer, 1843); and Ludwig grüner and Jacques Ignace hittorff’s Descriptions of the Plates of Fresco Decorations and Stuc- coes of Churches and Palaces in Italy during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (London: J. murray, 1844), the article traces various iterations of the “arabesque style” across time and space. 120. gülru necipoğlu, The Topkapı Scroll—Geometry and Orna- ment in Islamic Architecture: Topkapı Palace Museum Library MS H. 1956 (santa monica, cA: getty center for the history of Art and the humanities, 1995), 61–71. For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria 257 121. Ibid., 65; finbarr barry flood, “The flaw in the carpet: dis- junctive continuities and riegl’s Arabesque,” in Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local, ed. gülru necipoğlu and Alina Payne (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 2016), 82–93, at 83. 122. I have relied on the ettinghausen translation: ernst kühnel, The Arabesque: Meaning and Transformation of an Orna- ment, trans. richard ettinghausen (graz: Verlag für samm- ler, 1977). 123. Afif bahnassi, “L’Arabesque contemporaine,” in Consul- tation collective sur les problèmes contemporains des arts arabes dans leurs relations socio-culturelles avec le monde arabe (hammamet, Tunisia: unesco, march 1974), 3–4. This text was published again, with minor modifications, in unesco’s 1977 Cultures bulletin. 124. benjamin, “decorative Landscape,” 297. 125. Ibid., 309–10. benjamin notes that gustave moreau’s dis- cussions of the arabesque, for example, usually employ examples from sculpture, and that matisse, too, recognized precedents in statues by michelangelo and giambologna. he also sees evidence of matisse’s “sculptural investigation” in the heavy outlines of The Joy of Life. 126. gloria groom, Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bon- nard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890–1930 (chicago: Art Institute of chicago, 2001), 21. 127. A number of exhibition catalogs have explored points of overlap between Islamic art and european modernism at the level of the object, its display, and its reception. see markus brüderlin, ed., Ornament and Abstraction: The Dia- logue between Non-Western, Modern, and Contemporary Art (basel: fondation beyeler, 2001); rémi Labrusse, ed., Purs décors? Arts de l’Islam, regards du XIXe siècle, Collections des Arts Décoratifs (Paris: musée des Arts décoratifs/musée du Louvre, 2007); and chris dercon, León krempel, and Avinoam shalem, eds., The Future of Tradition, The Tradi- tion of Future: 100 Years after the Exhibition Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art in Munich (munich: Prestel, 2010). 128. Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton, nJ: Princeton university Press, 2004). 129. Ibid., 201–9. 130. Ibid., 209. 131. details of the curriculum of these drawing courses in the years 1947 to 1950 are available in ghazi al-khaldi, “Abdul- Wahhab Abou al-sououd,” in M. Jalal, A. A. Al Sououd, K. Mouaz, A. A. Arnaout (damascus: salhini Printing and Publishing, 1991), 26–29; and ʿAlī ghālib salīm, “Iṣlāḥ man- haj al-rasm,” al-Muʿallim al-ʿArabī 3, no. 5 (march 1950): 526–29. Target skills included a practical understanding of the construction of different ornaments (zakhārif) in both plant and animal forms. 132. molly nesbit, Their Common Sense (London: black dog Pub- lishing, 2000). 133. Ibid., 29–39. 134. for the history of applied art instruction in morocco, see hamid Irbouh, Art in the Service of Colonialism: French Art Education in Morocco, 1912–1956, rev. ed. (London and new york: I.b. Tauris, 2012). see also the discussion of british colonial applied art pedagogy and commodity production in Arindam dutta, Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility (new york: routledge, 2007). 135. The school of modern Arab Arts is thoroughly discussed in Loreline simonis, Les relevés des mosaiq̈ues de la grande mosquée de Damas (Paris: musée du Louvre, 2012). for my dates and details, I also draw on archival documents: réunion du comité de rapprochement de la science fran- çaise et de la culture arabe, April 10, 1928; supplemental report sur l’École des Arts Arabes modernes, damascus, April 23, 1928; and Licenciement du personnel du Palais Azem, June 2, 1930, all in Institut d’archéologie et d’art musulman folder, carton 77, Instruction Publique 2nd versement, fonds beyrouth, in ministère des Affaires étrangères, Archives diplomatiques-nantes. further information about students at the school comes from renaud Avez, L’Institut français de Damas au Palais Azem (1922–1946): À travers les archives (damascus: L’Institut français de damas, 1993), 35–36; and ʿĀdil Abū-shanab, Ḥayāt al-Fannān ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Abū al-Saʿūd (damascus: al-fann al-Ḥadit̄h al-ʿĀlami,̄ 1963), 37, 103. 136. nesbit, Their Common Sense, 153. 137. complaints about de Lorey’s lack of focus and rigor appear in Jean gaulmier, “La «section des arabisants», 1928–1929, berceau de l’IfeAd,” in Jean Gaulmier, un orientaliste: Recueil des textes publiés dans le Bulletin d’études orientales (1929–1972) (damas: Presses de l’Ifpo, 2006), 10–14, also available at http://books.openedition.org/ifpo/2429 . 138. simonis, Les relevés des mosaiq̈ues, 17–18. The initiative can be compared to the full-size copies of wall frescoes from the ʿAli qapu in Isfahan, which momA exhibited in 1932 (rich- ard meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? [cambridge, mA: mIT Press, 2013], 127–38). In both cases, the press response follows a template of pseudomorphic play, likening the non-modern pieces to the aesthetics of modernist painting. 139. Although there is not enough space to discuss it further here, cultural journals in the Arab east also engaged with the formalist version of global heritage that the french critic André malraux promulgated via unesco’s event and print forums, including his concept of the musée imaginaire (a dematerialized “museum” of black-and-white reproduc- tions that would enable all persons to engage in a com- parative analysis of global heritage). The June 1947 issue of hamoudi’s baghdad cultural journal, al-Fikr al-Ḥadīth, printed translated excerpts from malraux’s 1946 unesco speech, “L’homme et la culture Artistique.” one can also trace the discussion in cairo’s french-language periodicals, including gerald messadié, “notes sur la naissance et le symbolisme de l’arabesque,” La Femme Nouvelle (december 1951): 35–36. 140. UNESCO Travelling Print Exhibition: From Impressionism till Today (Paris: unesco, 1949). 141. huyghe, “Introduction,” 7. 142. Ibid., 10. 143. Ibid., 13. For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV Anneka Lenssen258 AbsTrAcT The essay explores how the syrian artist Adham Ismaʿil (1922 –63) linked his modernist painting strategies to the activism of the baʿth political movement during syria’s independence decade through a conceptual rework- ing of the “arabesque”—the rhythmic pattern of unending line and pure color that orientalist scholars considered a product of the Arab and muslim episteme and french modernist painters adopted as a fresh composi- tional device. It draws on a new archive of correspondence, writings, and sketches, supplemented by political memoirs detailing Ismaʿil’s experience of displacement after the 1939 transfer of his native Alexandretta to Turkey, to uncover his efforts to forge new aesthetic unities as a mechanism for Arab activation and rebirth. Ismaʿil and his comrades accorded a radical charge to the concept of vital Arab energy in particular; once manifested in the sensory experience of line and color, it promised to assemble audiences in new collectivities and to help topple the syrian status quo. The essay thus analyzes Ismaʿil’s radical Arab painting as evidence of not only the complexity of the intellectual debates in the middle east but also the generative fragmentation of modernist tenets under the (not quite) postwar, postcolonial world order. keyWords Adham Ismaʿil – baʿth Party – syria – damascus – Arabism – abstract painting – arabesque – vitalism – political art – global modernism – comparative modernisms 155. reprinted in badīʿ Ḥaqqī, “Thulūj,” al-Maʿrifa 134 (April 1973): 80–82. I have not been able to determine the chro- nology of haqqi’s connections to the baʿth movement, but note that he dedicated a 1947 poem titled “Arabism” to michel Aflaq. see badīʿ Ḥaqqī, “ʿurūba,” al-Adīb 6, no. 1 (January 1947): 24. 156. see also badīʿ Ḥaqqī, Al-Shajara allatī Gharasathā Ummī: Sīra Dhātiyya (damascus: Ittiḥād al-kuttāb al-ʿArab, 1986). 157. Ḥaqqī, introductory remarks to “Thulūj,” 80. 158. Tapati guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New “Indian” Art: Artists, Aesthetics, and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (cambridge: cambridge university Press, 1992), 242–69. 159. V. c. scott o’connor, The Charm of Kashmir (London: Long- mans, green and co., 1920). Two color illustrations and a report on the book appear in L’Illustration in 1921, under the title “Les Jardins du kashmir,” L’Illustration no. 4103 (october 22, 1921): 382–84. It would appear that literature of this type circulated widely in syria in the 1920s, as the Aleppo-born artist fateh al-moudarres mentions reading books about the “maharaja of India” as a child. see samar Ḥamārna, Kayfa Yarā Fātiḥ al-Mudarris? (damascus: s. Ḥamārna, 1999), 10. 160. The context for Ismaʿil’s attempts to bring poetic and other aural structures into the space of his painting warrants more investigative work. It should be mentioned that al-Adīb published several studies of the Lebanese zajal in the 1940s, including a two-part historical study by Adib nakhla in 1945. These likely provided the impetus for Ismaʿil’s painting. 161. As explained by naʿim Ismaʿil in Adham Ismāʿīl, 23. he suggests that the arabesque is daymūma, or continuous and permanent. Ismaʿil’s articles in al-Baʿth advance a similar view about art’s internal drive toward abstraction, including his profile on henri matisse, which describes the artistic process as distilling the heart of the matter (jawhar al-mawḍūʿ). 162. As, for example, in contemporaneous studies of the devel- opment of the floriated variety of kufic calligraphic script in epigraphic inscriptions. I am thinking of the catalog of syrian specimens of this type that the french art historian Janine sourdel-Thomine compiled, as in Les monuments ayyoubides de Damas, vol. 4, Épitaphes coufiques de Bâb Saghîr (Paris: e. de boccard, 1950). 163. direzione generale per gli Affari Politici e di sicurezza, “Appunto,” sept. 3, 1951, buste 1092 (medio oriente), Affari Politico 1950–1957, ministero degli Affari esteri, rome. 164. mamdouh kashlan, interview by author, damascus, february 25, 2010. 165. Zay[y]at, preface to Revival of Plastic Art Memory in Syria, 1:n.p. 144. matisse’s study of these egyptian fabrics is discussed in Avinoam shalem, “Leggere tra le righe: Attraverso i papiers découpés di matisse,” in ester coen, ed., Matisse Arabesque, exhibition catalog (milan: skira, 2015), 55–63. 145. The term “intercultural play” is used in benjamin, “deco- rative Landscape,” 296. Wright proposes a complication of this “play” as an actual, felt risk of the loss of Western clarity. studies that give serious consideration to matisse’s affinity with Islamic composition include rémi Labrusse, Matisse: La condition de l’image (Paris: gallimard, 1999), and catherine bock-Weiss, Henri Matisse: Modernist against the Grain (university Park, PA: Pennsylvania state university Press, 2009), which links Labrusse’s study to the phenomenon of the “byzantine matisse.” 146. List given in united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization, Some Suggestions for Co-Operation between Youth Organizations and UNESCO (Paris: unesco, 17 february 1950), 12. In 1949 it had traveled to Australia, the british colonies in Africa and the far east, ecuador, haiti, India, Iran, mexico, norway, Tunisia, and uruguay. 147. badiʿ al-kasim, trans., “madhāhib al-rasm al-Ḥadīth,” al-Muʿallim al-ʿArabī (April 1950): 605–12. 148. In 1947 farès delivered a lecture in cairo, in french, about the spirit of Islamic decoration. The lecture was followed by a bilingual volume on the theme in 1952, including a french-Arabic glossary of specialized vocabulary. There, farès suggests that the art of the arabesque be translated as al-raqsh, and that a single arabesque be rendered as raqsha. A summary of his talk and glossary appeared in the journal of the Arabic Language Academy in damascus as well as bishr fāris (farès), “sirr al-Zakhrafa al-Islāmiyya,” Majallat al-Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmī al-ʿArabī bi-Dimashq 27, no. 3 (July 1953): 479–83. 149. huyghe’s essay explains the term in the following way: “This was the oriental name (meaning ‘prophets’) which at the end of the century a group of young painters, influ- enced mainly by gauguin, gave themselves” (“Introduc- tion,” 7). 150. Adham Ismaʿil, “henri matisse,” al-Baʿth, July 8, 1950. 151. This would seem to be a reference to matisse’s famous 1947 profession that his colors had “come from the east.” see “Le chemin de la couleur: Propos de henri matisse,” Art Présent 2 (1947): 23. 152. The article was part of a series of introductory columns to the painterly arts as a field, commissioned from Ismaʿil by sidqi Ismaʿil. other artists profiled by Ismaʿil are Picasso, de Vlamnick, chagall, and braque. 153. fa⁠ʾiz Ismaʿil, “Adham Ismāʿīl fī darb al-niḍāl,” 145. 154. Ibid., 146. For use by the Author only | © 2017 Koninklijke Brill NV vrw.pdf Contents Heba Mostafa From the Dome of the Chain to Miḥrāb Dāʾūd: The Transformation of an Umayyad Commemorative Site at the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem Julio Navarro, Fidel Garrido and Íñigo Almela The Agdal of Marrakesh (Twelfth to Twentieth Centuries): An Agricultural Space for Caliphs and Sultans. Part 1: History Ana Marija Grbanovic The Ilkhanid Revetment Aesthetic in the Buqʿa Pir-i Bakran: Chaotic Exuberance or a Cunningly Planned Architectural Revetment Repertoire? Nicole Kançal-Ferrari An Italian Renaissance Gate for the Khan: Visual Culture in Early Modern Crimea Michele Lamprakos Life in the Khans: The Venetians in Early Ottoman Aleppo Muzaffer Özgüleş A Missing Royal Mosque in Istanbul that Islamized a Catholic Space: The Galata New Mosque Cristelle Baskins Writing The Dead: Pietro Della Valle And The Tombs Of Shirazi Poets Anneka Lenssen Adham Ismaʿil’s Arabesque: The Making of Radical Arab Painting in Syria Bernhard Schirg (Re)writing the Early Biography of the Alhambra’s Fountain of Lions: New Evidence from a Neo-Latin Poem (1497) Yui Kanda Kashan Revisited: A Luster-Painted Ceramic Tombstone Inscribed with a Chronogram Poem by Muhtasham Kashani Guy Burak Between Istanbul and Gujarat: Descriptions of Mecca in the Sixteenth-Century Indian Ocean work_i5dlnapo25h7hihycoz2ac46sm ---- Aldo Manuzio in Los Angeles JLIS.it Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016) DOI: 10.4403/jlis.it-11426 Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles. La collezione Ahmanson-Murphy all’University of California Los Angeles Angela Nuovo Nell’appena trascorso quinto centenario della morte di Aldo Manuzio (2015), hanno avuto luogo numerose celebrazioni non solo a Venezia, sede di attività del più grande tra gli editori umanisti, ma anche nei centri ove si trovano oggi custodite ampie collezioni di sue edizioni. Uno di questi è l’Università della California a Los Angeles (UCLA), prestigioso ateneo pubblico collocato in uno dei più bei campus degli Stati Uniti. Qui, l’anniversario aldino è stato celebrato in combinazione con quello di Andrea Vesalio in un importante convegno internazionale. 1 Los Angeles non è solamente il Getty Center, che pure, tra le massime istituzioni artistico-museali al mondo, è di sicuro la più ricca e innovativa (Nuovo 1998).2 La regione di Los Angeles sin 1 The Illustrated Body: Printing, Anatomy, and Art in the Renaissance, convegno tenutosi nei giorni 27 e 28 febbraio 2015, http://www.library.ucla.edu/events/illustrated-body-printing-anatomy-art- renaissance-conference-exhibit. 2 Rimando al sito http://www.getty.edu, completo di ogni informazione anche storica sul creatore Jean Paul Getty (1892-1976) e sulle attività di esposizione, conservazione e ricerca del grande istituto. Mi sia concesso di rinviare a una http://dx.doi.org/10.4403/jlis.it-11426 http://www.library.ucla.edu/events/illustrated-body-printing-anatomy-art-renaissance-conference-exhibit http://www.library.ucla.edu/events/illustrated-body-printing-anatomy-art-renaissance-conference-exhibit A. Nuovo, Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles… JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 2 dagli anni Sessanta è infatti sede di grandi collezioni librarie incentrate sul Rinascimento, sia in istituzioni come lo Huntington a San Marino (Thorpe 1999; Dickinson 2003),3 che in collezioni private come quella di Elmer Belt relativa a Leonardo da Vinci.4 Gli anni Sessanta rappresentano una svolta anche nella storia della University of California Los Angeles. Nel 1960, Franklin D. Murphy (1916-1994) fu eletto Chancellor dell’UCLA, il sesto della sua ancora breve storia (Davis 2007).5 mia breve descrizione della biblioteca (The Getty Research Institute Library) pubblicata poco dopo l’apertura al pubblico del nuovo edificio di Richard Meier nel 1997. 3 The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens ha sede a San Marino, vicino a Pasadena (Los Angeles); frutto della passione collezionistica di Henry E. Huntington e Arabella Duval Huntington, il grandioso complesso comprende una biblioteca ricca di mezzo milione di libri antichi e 7 milioni di manoscritti, con focus prevalente sulla storia e letteratura inglese, e sulla storia della scienza, aperta nel 1919. L’accesso alla biblioteca è riservato a studiosi qualificati. Della straordinaria collezione di incunaboli fa parte una copia della B42 in pergamena (James Thorpe, The Gutenberg Bible. [San Marino. Ca.]: Huntington Library, 1999). Per una storia complessiva si veda: Donald C. Dickinson, Henry E. Huntington’s Library of Libraries. [San Marino, Ca.]: Huntington Library, 2003. 4 Il grande urologo e chirurgo Elmer Belt (1893-1980), pioniere della tecnica di ri-attribuzione chirurgica del sesso, svolse la sua intera attività presso l’UCLA. La sua collezione di opere di e relative a Leonardo da Vinci (The Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana) venne donata nel 1961 all’UCLA, che ha provveduto ad ampliarla sensibilmente negli anni successivi (http://www.library.ucla.edu/arts/elmer-belt-library-vinciana). 5 Il punto di riferimento per lo studio del personaggio è la monografia di Margaret Leslie Davis, The Culture Broker: Franklin D. Murphy and the Making of Los Angeles. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2007. http://www.library.ucla.edu/arts/elmer-belt-library-vinciana JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016) JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 3 Figura 1: Franklin D. Murphy (1916-1994), Chancellor della University of California Los Angeles. Medico di formazione, cardiologo per professione, Murphy iniziò presto, presso l’Università del Kansas, il suo servizio in posizioni amministrative e dirigenziali per gli atenei statunitensi, culminato per l’appunto con la responsabilità dell’intera UCLA (Abrahamson 2013, 205).6 Egli è unanimemente ritenuto uno dei protagonisti del processo di determinazione dell’assetto culturale di Los Angeles, un’immensa metropoli la cui vita intellettuale non si identificava e non si identifica esclusivamente con l’industria cinematografica e televisiva. Gli studi dedicati a Murphy danno 6 La partenza di Murphy dall’Università del Kansas venne vissuta come un vero disastro da questa istituzione. Murphy, in Kansas, si era guadagnato l’immagine di «most brilliant and most personable man». A. Nuovo, Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles… JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 4 conto del suo instancabile lavoro culturale, e sottolineano la sua capacità di creare reti di relazioni con tutti i grandi mecenati suoi contemporanei, da J. P. Getty ad Armand Hammer,7 da Paul Mellon a Nelson Rockefeller.8 Franklin Murphy credeva nel ruolo e nella responsabilità di un’élite progressista in una città che stava velocemente crescendo e arricchendosi, ma che stentava a trovare una sintesi culturale specificatamente elaborata in cui identificarsi. Egli non era economicamente in grado di intraprendere iniziative mecenatistiche, ma fu capace come pochi di suscitare l’impegno di coloro che disponevano di tali risorse, coinvolgendoli in un disegno di costruzione culturale da lui stesso elaborato in tempi estremamente veloci. Murphy sapeva bene che trasformare la 7 Armand Hammer (1898-1990), manager della Occidental Petroleum, fu uno dei massimi mecenati statunitensi del XX secolo. Il padre, originario di Odessa, era un attivista comunista e anche Armand ebbe profondi e controversi legami con l’Unione Sovietica. La sua collezione artistica comprende soprattutto Impressionisti e post-Impressionisti e costituisce il cuore dell’attuale UCLA Hammer Museum di Los Angeles. Fu anche proprietario del Codice Leicester di Leonardo, chiamato infatti anche codice Hammer, oggi proprietà di Bill Gates. Ben cinque biografie e due autobiografie sono disponibili per documentarsi su questo eccezionale personaggio. 8 Paul Mellon (1907-1999), filantropo americano possessore di una delle più grandi fortune del suo tempo, estese le sue attività mecenatistiche oltre i confini del suo Paese: legatissimo alla cultura britannica, nel 1999 donò otto milioni di dollari all’Università di Cambridge per il Museo Fitzwilliam. La sua fondazione, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, il cui apporto allo sviluppo della cultura umanistica e artistica è stato nei decenni incalcolabile (si pensi solo al finanziamento di iniziative quali Artstore e JSTOR) venne da lui intitolata al nome di suo padre. Nelson A. Rockfeller (1908-1979), importante figura di uomo politico che giunse a ricoprire l’incarico di vice-presidente degli Stati Uniti durante la presidenza di Gerald Ford, fu collezionista e filantropo. Da governatore dello Stato di New York, promosse un’enorme espansione del sistema di istruzione; da collezionista, fu interessato soprattutto all’arte contemporanea ed extra-europea. Con la propria collezione fondò nel 1954 il Museum of Primitive Art a New York. Molto ampia è la bibliografia di questo personaggio così rappresentativo della vita pubblica statunitense del XX secolo; online è disponibile anche l’archivio della famiglia. JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016) JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 5 University of California Los Angeles in «a world-class institution» implicava una grande crescita qualitativa anche della città che la ospitava, Los Angeles: e quindi si impegnò a creare ciò che lui stesso definiva «a community rich in cultural and spiritual values» (Abrahamson 2013, 262).9 Figura 2: Veduta del Campus dell’UCLA nel contesto della città di Los Angeles. Quella di Murphy fu forse la personalità che marcò più profondamente la storia della University of California Los Angeles in un ampio raggio di iniziative, benché, come sempre 9 Si tratta di un concetto centrale nella costruzione del patrimonio culturale americano: si pensi ad esempio all’esemplare lavoro sulla comunità che svolgono i musei californiani, in primis il Getty. A. Nuovo, Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles… JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 6 nel caso di personalità estremamente energiche, non fosse un uomo facile: ogni ritardo, ogni esitazione lo irritavano, e la sua suscettibilità era leggendaria, cosa che lo condusse a frequenti conflitti con il Presidente della UCLA, Clark Kerr (Pelfrey 2012, 167–168).10 All’iniziativa di Murphy deve essere ricondotto un prolungato, illuminato e approfondito impegno di costituzione del patrimonio dell’istituzione, verso la quale si calcola fosse in grado di indirizzare donazioni per circa un miliardo di dollari (Burlingham 2007).11 Le biblioteche della Università della California Los Angeles rimasero sempre al cuore dei suoi interessi. La sua prima iniziativa fu l’annessione alla biblioteca universitaria della collezione Vinciana di Elmer Belt, donata dal proprietario. Due anni dopo, e in conseguenza a questa grande acquisizione, ebbe luogo la fondazione del Centro di studi sul Medioevo e Rinascimento (Abrahamson 2013, 264).12 10 Significativamente, un grande numero di schermaglie sorsero per questioni simboliche, come ad esempio chi dei due, President o Chancellor, dovesse aprire la processione accademica durante le cerimonie più importanti, una questione di precedenza insomma, non dissimile da quelle che per secoli avevano scosso la diplomazia europea. 11 Forse il più noto intervento all’interno del Campus fu la creazione del magnifico giardino delle sculture che oggi porta il suo nome, con opere di Alexander Calder, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, Auguste Rodin. 12 Il Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu) è da allora intensamente attivo. Il suo direttore attuale è il Professor Massimo Ciavolella. http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/ JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016) JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 7 Figura 3: La Royce Hall, iconica sede degli studi umanistici nell’UCLA. Costruita ad imitazione della basilica di Sant’Ambrogio di Milano, ospita tra gli altri il Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. La visione che Franklin Murphy aveva di una biblioteca universitaria è riassunta in questa sua affermazione (per altro largamente condivisa nel mondo accademico americano): «the quality of the library is a measure of the quality of the institution» (The Aldine Press 2001, 14). Di conseguenza, egli stabilì un canale preferenziale con i bibliotecari e soprattutto con i direttori delle collezioni speciali. Certamente non si trattava solo di costituire una grande biblioteca moderna, compito non difficile con le ingenti risorse economiche disponibili; si trattava di costruire una collezione di manoscritti e libri antichi, una collezione che fornisse all’insieme delle biblioteche del campus un nucleo identitario e culturale corposo e indiscutibile, materializzato in oggetti librari il cui valore fosse sia simbolico che antiquario. L’avvio della collezione aldina fu possibile grazie all’acquisizione di collezioni private preesistenti, e andò ad inquadrarsi nella A. Nuovo, Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles… JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 8 crescita generale delle biblioteche dell’UCLA. Il tasso di incremento delle biblioteche di questa università è significativo. Nel 1926 si trattava di un posseduto di soli 100.000 libri. Ci vollero 25 anni per arrivare a un milione di volumi, divenuti 2 milioni nel 1964, 3 milioni nel 1971, 4 milioni nel 1979. Poi, sempre più velocemente, i libri divennero 5 milioni nel 1983, 6 milioni nel 1990, 7 milioni nel 1997. Oggi sono più di 11 milioni, e continuano a incrementarsi a un tasso notevolissimo, benché nella situazione attuale la crescita delle biblioteche non si misuri più solamente con il numero di libri fisicamente posseduti. Attualmente, il budget annuale delle biblioteche dell’UCLA è di 44 milioni di dollari, 10 dei quali impiegati nell’acquisizione di collezioni fisiche e digitali.13 Figura 4: Acquisti di libri per le biblioteche dell’UCLA (1926-2014). 13 La UCLA Library è formata da dieci biblioteche di grandi dimensioni e undici biblioteche dipartimentali, più altre collezioni minori. JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016) JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 9 Anche la collezione manuziana andò costantemente accrescendosi, sia grazie ad acquisizioni di biblioteche preesistenti che con acquisti mirati. Nel 1961, la UCLA procedette all’acquisto di 45 Aldine dalla biblioteca del collezionista di San Francisco C. Templeton Crocker (1884-1948), il cui nonno, Charles Crocker, era stato uno dei ‘quattro grandi’ costruttori della Central Pacific Railroad.14 Nel 1953, la biblioteca acquistò insieme i cinque volumi della prima edizione di Aristotele e l’esemplare dell’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) appartenuto a John Ruskin. Nei primi anni, il focus collezionistico era incentrato solo sulle edizioni di Aldo senior, ma dagli anni Settanta fu chiaro che la portata dell’impresa stava cambiando, anche perché dal 1973 essa guadagnò l’appoggio della fondazione Ahmanson (Abrahamson 2013, 207). A questo punto gli acquisti si estesero a comprendere la produzione di tutti i membri della famiglia Manuzio. Si calcola che dal 1961 al 1998, la fondazione erogò in un ritmo crescente di elargizioni circa 9 milioni di dollari. Si spiega perciò che dal 1979 la collezione prenda il nome ‘Ahmanson-Murphy’. Le risorse disponibili però crescevano a tal punto che si iniziò a voler contestualizzare le edizioni dei Manuzio, arricchendo nel contempo la biblioteca di molti libri celebri e importanti per vari aspetti. La fondazione Ahmanson rese possibile la costruzione di una nuova collezione chiamata ‘il primo secolo della stampa italiana’ (pre-1564, il ‘secolo d’oro’ dell’editoria italiana) comprendente altri filoni collezionistici come le pubblicazioni di Nicolas Jenson (grande passione di Murphy), dei Giolito, Giunta, Scoto e Torrentino, un insieme che rende la biblioteca ancora più 14 I ‘Big Four’ (Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington e Leland Stanford) furono i protagonisti della costruzione del Central Pacific Railroad e dello sviluppo del sistema ferroviario della California tra il 1861 e il 1900. Si distinsero anche per le loro attività mecenatistiche: Leland Stanford ad esempio fondò la Stanford University. A. Nuovo, Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles… JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 10 significativa per gli studiosi del Rinascimento italiano. Fondi appositi vennero in seguito ottenuti sotto forma di un Getty Trust per estendere la collezione a comprendere il periodo 1564- 1600, post-Controriforma, in un primo momento escluso dal raggio degli interessi della biblioteca. L’estensione fu segnalata con il mutamento del nome della collezione in “Ahmanson- Murphy Collection of Early Italian Printing (1465-1600)”, comprendente oggi circa 5.000 libri. La crescita della raccolta di libri rinascimentali e post- rinascimentali è stata così veloce da non aver consentito la formulazione di un paradigma bibliografico esplicito che definisse i criteri di acquisizione, se non a grandi linee. Secondo una tradizione orale, viva all’interno della biblioteca, la filosofia che reggeva l’accrescimento della collezione era una sola: «buy, buy, buy» (The UCLA Ahmanson-Murphy Aldine Collection, Through the Eyes of James Davis and David S. Zeidberg 2014, 8).15 I metodi di acquisizione per l’accrescimento della biblioteca si sono perciò basati da una parte sulle bibliografie annalistiche e descrittive, dall’altra sulla collaborazione (scientifica e non solo commerciale) di colti librai antiquari. Questo significa innanzi tutto aver usato per la collezione aldina gli annali di Renouard come una lista di desiderata (Renouard 1834), un metodo certamente molto efficace per costruire una collezione, la cui impressionante crescita numerica esemplifica perfettamente le dimensioni dell’impegno collezionistico sostenuto dall’UCLA. Da un insieme di 181 edizioni nel 1981, si 15 Questa pubblicazione, stampata dai membri del Zamorano Club per i membri del Roxburghe Club in 300 copie in occasione del loro incontro a San Francisco nel novembre 2014, riporta un dialogo orale tra i due bibliotecari registrato nel 1998, che conserva memoria di alcuni dati e fatti che altrimenti si sarebbero dimenticati. Ringrazio di cuore Jane Carpenter della Special Collections Library dell’UCLA per avermi consentito l’accesso a questa pubblicazione. JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016) JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 11 passa a 290 edizioni nel 1982, 493 nel 1985 e 660 nel 1991. Nel maggio 1996 si giunge a una collezione che comprendeva 1.095 libri; la maggiore crescita quantitativa si realizzò nel periodo 1983- 1997, quando responsabile delle Special Collections era il compianto e rimpianto James G. Davis.16 Figura 5: James G. (Jim) Davis (1936-2000), Rare Book Librarian presso l’UCLA. Una catalogazione adeguata al livello di questa collezione fu raggiunta in diverse tappe, dato che esistono svariati cataloghi 16 Una borsa di studio della Rare Books School (University of Virginia) è intitolata al suo nome, si veda http://rarebookschool.org/admissions- awards/scholarships/davis. http://rarebookschool.org/admissions-awards/scholarships/davis http://rarebookschool.org/admissions-awards/scholarships/davis A. Nuovo, Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles… JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 12 parziali della collezione. Alla fine degli anni Novanta, Nicolas Barker e Anthony Hobson soggiornarono a Los Angeles per prestare il loro aiuto nel campo dell’analisi dei caratteri tipografici, delle legature e delle provenienze. Altri studiosi, come Martin Lowry, furono in seguito invitati ad esaminare alcuni documenti appartenenti alla collezione. L’istituzione non si limitò a promuovere le loro ricerche, ma se ne assunse anche l’onere editoriale.17 Il catalogo a stampa include ben 1.370 descrizioni in quanto comprende anche una serie di materiali limitrofi quali le pubblicazioni di Andrea Torresani, le cosiddette contraffazioni di Lione, ed altri documenti di interesse manuziano. Certamente inconsueta è la scelta dei curatori di includere nella sequenza numerica delle aldine anche le edizioni non possedute dall’UCLA, ma la cui esistenza è certa. Ciò discende sia da un doveroso omaggio al maggiore bibliografo manuziano, Renouard, la cui bibliografia come si è detto è stata il punto di partenza e la guida alla costruzione della collezione californiana, che dalla fiducia di poter un giorno integrare i numeri mancanti (The Aldine Press 2001, 17). I maggiori librai antiquari del mondo hanno lavorato insieme ai bibliotecari dell’UCLA nella costruzione di questa mirabile risorsa scientifica. Bastino alcuni nomi: Warren Howell, Hans P. Kraus, Fred Schreiber, Bernard Breslauer, Jacob Zeitlin, Christopher Sokol, e, in Italia, Carlo Alberto Chiesa, Guido Bortolani, Fiammetta Soave (The Aldine Press 2001, 15–16). Al nome di Carlo Alberto Chiesa sono ricondotte alcune delle più significative operazioni di acquisto. Chiesa godeva della massima fiducia perché in grado di offrire gruppi consistenti e altamente pregevoli 17 In seguito a questi soggiorni di studio vennero pubblicati: Barker 1989; Lowry 1989; Lowry 1991. Anche a chi scrive è stata assegnata nel 2013 una Fellowship per studiare i materiali della collezione aldina. JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016) JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 13 di libri antichi, permettendo ai bibliotecari dell’UCLA di spendere nel minor tempo possibile le ingenti cifre di cui disponevano.18 Non solo Chiesa preparò un’intera collezione di edizioni Giolito per un acquisto in blocco, ma nel 1985 concluse una vendita record di 85 edizioni aldine di grande pregio, comprendente la maggior parte degli incunaboli di Torresani e di Manuzio oggi posseduti dall’UCLA e la prima edizione in ottavo, il Virgilio del 1501, il tutto negoziato per telefono per un totale di 400.000 dollari. Certamente di provenienza italiana, il lotto non viene identificato in quanto tale nel catalogo a stampa, e sono perciò avanzabili solo delle ipotesi al proposito dei precedenti possessori (The Aldine Press 2001, 67, scheda 39).19 Vale la pena di ricordare che, seguendo l’impostazione di Murphy, le aldine e in generale i libri del Rinascimento non vennero comprati con un particolare interesse per gli aspetti materiali degli esemplari quali le legature o le provenienze ma per il loro contenuto testuale, alla ricerca semmai di varianti tipografiche. Questa decisione era basata sulla finalità della collezione che voleva diventare una risorsa per la ricerca 18 La stima di cui godeva Chiesa nel mondo anglo-americano è ben sintetizzata nell’Obituary scritto da Nicolas Barker sull’Independent del 16 febbraio 1998, ove specificatamente si ricorda l’apporto fondamentale alla costruzione della collezione dell’UCLA. 19 In effetti, la descrizione del Virgilio del 1501 riporta la presenza della fattura di Leo S. Olschki dell’11 dicembre 1896 che attesta la vendita del libro per 1.000 lire all’«Ill. Sig. M.sg Goffr. de Foragna, Parma». Naturalmente si tratta di un errore di trascrizione (purtroppo ripetuto nell’indice) per Goffredo Meli Lupi, Principe di Soragna (1837-1911), grande collezionista di libri antichi, che grazie alla sua amicizia col libraio antiquario Olschki venne in possesso di preziosi esemplari delle edizioni di Aldo. Non si intende con ciò affermare che tutte le 85 aldine vendute da Chiesa nel 1985 fossero di provenienza Soragna. La biblioteca di questa famiglia si era del resto formata nei secoli grazie al collezionismo di diversi importanti membri. Ancora nel 2004, Pierre Bergé metteva in vendita diversi esemplari Soragna (ma non di Goffredo) in una vendita dedicata solamente alle edizioni di Aldo senior. A. Nuovo, Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles… JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 14 universitaria, e differenziare la collezione Ahmanson-Murphy da quella di bibliofili puri, come J. P. Morgan. Allora infatti questi aspetti dell’oggetto-libro (provenienze o legature) non erano ricompresi nel paradigma della ricerca accademica. La scelta di non ricercare libri con lussuose legature o provenienze illustri ha fatto sì che l’apporto dei librai antiquari francesi alla collezione sia piuttosto ristretto, dato la loro predilezione per questo tipo di oggetti librari (The UCLA Ahmanson-Murphy Aldine Collection, Through the Eyes of James Davis and David S. Zeidberg 2014, 21–22). Naturalmente, questo non significa affatto che la collezione non annoveri molti pezzi di grandissimo interesse anche da questo punto di vista. Figura 6: Scaffali di aldine nella sala di lettura dedicata presso l’UCLA. JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016) JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 15 Oggi è molto difficile per i bibliotecari trovare altre edizioni dei Manuzio da comprare, come richiede l’incarico che essi hanno dalla fondazione Ahmanson. Infatti, le edizioni acquistabili sul mercato sono già tutte possedute, mentre quelle che si conoscono in un unico esemplare, ad esempio lo statuto dell’Accademia Aldina, non saranno mai disponibili.20 Tuttavia non mancano acquisizioni recenti del massimo interesse. Un’aggiunta di grande rilievo si è potuta mettere a segno nel 2013 quando l’UCLA ha comprato l’esemplare appartenuto a Jean Grolier dell’edizione del 1520 degli Adagia di Erasmo. Una pagina a parte, certamente poco nota, è stata scritta in epoca successiva alla scomparsa di Murphy, ma sempre nel filone collezionistico manuziano segnato da Renouard. Quest’ultimo aveva allestito delle aggiunte agli annali dei Manuzio, ove aveva segnalato la produzione di altri stampatori che avevano prodotto libri nella scia di Aldo. In questo settore, l’attivismo dell’UCLA è stato rilevantissimo. Non solo la biblioteca conserva una delle più ampie collezioni delle cosiddette ‘contraffazioni lionesi’, ma ha acquistato una collezione eccezionale per ampiezza di edizioni di Alessandro Paganino, uno dei responsabili delle ‘éditions faites en imitation de celles d’Alde’ (Renouard 1834, 317–320).21 La collezione di Paganino comprende ben 48 copie, un insieme inferiore soltanto ai 53 esemplari della biblioteca Queriniana di Brescia.22 Il metodo collezionistico è stato lo stesso: gli annali della produzione editoriale di Paganino, pubblicati nel 1990 (Nuovo 1990), sono stati usati come un elenco di libri da 20 Scipione Fortiguerri, Carteromachus, Lex Neacademiae (in greco). [Venezia, Aldo Manuzio, circa 1500-1501], ISTC if00272500, GW 1022710N; unico esemplare al mondo presso la Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Stamp. Barb. AAA. IV. 13, digitalizzato e disponibile all’indirizzo http://digi.vatlib.it/view/Stamp.Barb.AAA.IV.13/0002. 21 Un primo elenco di ‘contraffazioni lionesi’, (Renouard 1834, 305–316). 22 La famiglia degli stampatori Paganini è infatti originaria di Brescia. http://digi.vatlib.it/view/Stamp.Barb.AAA.IV.13/0002 A. Nuovo, Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles… JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 16 comprare e in una ventina d’anni tutto ciò che era disponibile sul mercato antiquario è stato acquisito. Per la maggior parte i libri sono di provenienza italiana e una volta di più Carlo Alberto Chiesa ha fornito il suo aiuto qualificato. Tanta determinazione collezionistica spinge a interrogarsi sulle ragioni profonde che hanno portato a queste scelte. È presumibile che la motivazione culturale vada inquadrata in quella stagione della cultura americana che vide nel Rinascimento italiano, con gli eccezionali valori artistici e culturali, il pensiero repubblicano, le personalità dei geniali protagonisti (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Aldo) una sorta di antefatto della storia statunitense. Il Rinascimento italiano diventava così una fase fondamentale del formarsi della cosiddetta Western Civilization, un passato integrabile nella propria narrazione storica, anzi indispensabile ad essa. Occorre anche ricordare che gli studiosi tedeschi fuggiti dai regimi europei dittatoriali e razzisti (bastino i nomi di Hans Baron, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Felix Gilbert, Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky) portarono negli Stati Uniti l’intero bagaglio degli studi tedeschi sul Rinascimento italiano, al punto che esso oggi non fa più parte del curriculum umanistico in Germania. Per gli americani, la storia italiana si sintetizza in tre distinte epoche: l’antichità romana, con tutti i suoi valori artistici e civili, il Rinascimento (soprattutto fiorentino e veneziano) con la rinascita di quei valori, e l’emergere dell’uomo rinascimentale, il genio, l’individuo che forgia la sua realtà; e il Risorgimento, con le sue conquiste politiche. Di queste età, solo le prime due hanno dato origine al grande collezionismo americano, e in ispecie, californiano, nutrendo le passioni delle più celebri figure di mecenati. Oggi il numero degli specialisti di Rinascimento italiano nelle università statunitensi è certamente molto elevato, e gli approcci di ricerca, indipendenti e innovativi rispetto alla tradizione accademica italiana, si sono fatti molto più sofisticati e dialettici di questa prima ideologia: basti pensare all’attività di una società scientifica quale la Renaissance Society of America con i JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016) JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 17 suoi 5.000 soci. Le collezioni però restano, e anzi si incrementano seguendo ancora la forza propulsiva di quegli ideali: ora però sono adoperate per rispondere a ricerche e inchieste molto diverse da quelle che appassionavano i fondatori.23 L’ambiziosa visione di Franklin Murphy includeva la realistica presa d’atto che nella zona di Los Angeles non esistevano studiosi in grado di insegnare a capire e usare adeguatamente la collezione che andava costruendo, donde il reclutamento all’UCLA di vari professori italiani: bastino i nomi di Alfredo Chiappelli, Carlo Pedretti e dell’appena pensionato Carlo Ginzburg per capire quale consapevolezza vi fosse della necessità di perpetuare e rinnovare l’uso di quelle fonti messe insieme con grandi investimenti. 23 L’approccio storiografico degli studiosi americani del Rinascimento è diventato oggetto di studio soprattutto negli anni Novanta del secolo scorso. (Chittolini 1991); (Muir 1995); (Molho 1998). A. Nuovo, Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles… JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 18 Figura 7: Scaffali di aldine nella sala di lettura dedicata presso l’UCLA. Morto Murphy nel 1994, il motore principale dell’impresa è inevitabilmente venuto a mancare. La stagione accademica che si è aperta dopo la sua scomparsa è segnata da interessi diversi da quelli che portarono alla costituzione della collezione (basti pensare all’esplosione del digitale); l’attenzione per i manoscritti medievali sembra permanere più forte di quella per i libri antichi a stampa.24 Gli interessi della maggior parte dei lettori si rivolgono a quelli che in biblioteca sono denominati gli archives, cioè collezioni 24 Grazie soprattutto a Richard e Mary Rouse, eccellenti studiosi e consulenti per la costruzione della collezione di manoscritti, e a loro volta donatori della propria biblioteca. JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016) JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 19 speciali ed archivi privati (da carte di scrittori ad archivi di riviste cessate, da materiali in ogni lingua e in ogni formato e vastissimi archivi di immagini e fotografie, anche in connessione con le varie industrie dello spettacolo e della comunicazione di Hollywood). Si tratta di insiemi di documenti che hanno un assai più profondo legame con la cultura locale, sia pure volendo conferire al termine ‘locale’ un significato commisurato alla multietnica e multilinguistica area di Los Angeles. La collezione aldina fatica a ritrovare spicco, una volta che il catalogo è stato completato. Significativamente, la docente di storia del libro, Johanna Drucker, la cui posizione accademica è precisamente intitolata Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, è una studiosa di media, alfabeto (dal punto di vista visivo e non linguistico), design dell’informazione, digital humanities e persino un’acclamata autrice di libri d’artista.25 Il suo interesse al libro come elemento artistico e non più come strumento di comunicazione e di istruzione, nonché alle forme visive e sociali della comunicazione digitale, è perfettamente coerente al contesto dell’università in cui opera, oggi completamente immersa nella dimensione digitale. La metodologia storica e bibliografica, indispensabile almeno come punto di partenza per dare un senso alle vaste collezioni di libri antichi presso l’UCLA, sembra arretrare sensibilmente tra le discipline di studio in università. Eppure, lo spazio di lettura ove sono ospitati i lettori delle Special Collections all’UCLA non potrebbe essere più accogliente per uno studioso del Rinascimento italiano. 25 L’ultima importante monografia pubblicata da Drucker (2014) riassume efficacemente i temi principali della sua ricerca. Una sua opera è stata tradotta in italiano (Drucker 2000). A. Nuovo, Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles… JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 20 Figura 8: Sala di lettura per i manoscritti, libri rari e archivi presso l’UCLA. La sala di lettura comunica al lettore la percezione di essere giunto in un tempio dedicato al mito accademico di Venezia: una riproduzione della veduta di Venezia di Jacopo de’ Barbari domina lo spazio, le aldine sono collocate a vista nelle librerie a parete, il busto in bronzo di Murphy sorveglia l’ordinato svolgersi delle procedure. Fin troppo ordinato, si direbbe, data la complessa burocrazia di accesso, inconsueta negli States (Davis 2007, 364–365).26 Il divieto di varcare la soglia della sala di lettura muniti di carta e matita,27 dal momento che si è ammessi soltanto con un dispositivo elettronico (computer o tablet), veicola anche 26 Sulla particolare attenzione di Murphy alla sicurezza delle collezioni. 27 Per la precisione, è consentito usare solo matita e carta fornite dalla biblioteca. Per ragioni di sicurezza, la carta è colorata, di un arancione vivace, non proprio l’ideale per la scrittura con mina. JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016) JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 21 simbolicamente una cesura con un antico modo di studiare, che in Europa non è ancora del tutto liquidato. Rimane che la magnifica collezione aldina presso l’Università della California a Los Angeles è uno dei numerosi gioielli che quella città offre in relazione al patrimonio culturale italiano. La storia della sua formazione racchiude il meglio della cultura americana. Un entusiasta e visionario trasformatore della cultura di Los Angeles come Franklin Murphy ha presieduto allo sviluppo della biblioteca manuziana con l’accanita passione di un collezionista privato, ma con i fondi di una ricchissima fondazione. Anche qualora Aldo Manuzio e la sua opera di restitutore tipografico della cultura greca in Occidente divenissero ancor più periferici rispetto agli interessi dell’UCLA, iniziando a sbiadire nel Pantheon delle icone californiane, la memoria di Franklin Murphy e della sua eccezionale energia innovativa manterranno la collezione aldina al suo posto ancora per molti anni. Bibliografia Abrahamson, Eric John. 2013. Building Home: Howard F. Ahmanson and the Politics of the American Dream. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press. Barker, Nicolas. 1989. Aldus Manutius, Mercantile Empire of the Intellect. Los Angeles: Dept. of special collections, University research library, University of California. Burlingham, Cynthia. 2007. The Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden at UCLA. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum. Chittolini, Giorgio, ed. 1991. “Storici americani e Rinascimento italiano.” Cheiron: Materiali E Strumenti Di Aggiornamento Bibliografico 8 (16). A. Nuovo, Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles… JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 22 Davis, Margaret Leslie. 2007. The Culture Broker: Franklin D. Murphy and the Making of Los Angeles. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. Dickinson, Donald C. 2003. Henry E. Huntington’s Library of Libraries. San Marino, Ca.: Huntington Library. Drucker, Johanna. 2000. Il labirinto alfabetico. Le lettere nella storia e nel pensiero. Milano: Sylvestre Bonnard. ———. 2014. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press. Lowry, Martin. 1989. Facing the Responsibility of Paulus Manutius. Los Angeles: Dept. of special collections, University research library, University of California. ———. 1991. Book Prices in Renaissance Venice: The Stockbook of Bernardo Giunti. Los Angeles: Dept. of special collections, University research library, University of California. Molho, Anthony. 1998. In The Italian Renaissance Made in U.S.A., edited by Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, Imagined Histories: American historians interpret the past:263–94. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nuovo, Angela. 1990. Alessandro Paganino 1509-1538. Padova: Antenore. ———. 1998. “Una neo-acropoli in California: Il Getty Center di Los Angeles e la sua Biblioteca.” Biblioteche Oggi 16 (9): 26–34. Pelfrey, Patricia A. 2012. Entrepreneurial President: Richard Atkinson and the University of California, 1995-2003. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. Renouard, Antoine-Augustin. 1834. Annales de L’imprimerie Des Alde Ou Histoire Des Trois Manuce et de Leurs Éditions. Paris: Renouard. The Aldine Press: Catalogue of the Ahmanson-Murphy Collection of Books by or Related to the Press in the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles Incorporating Works Recorded Elsewhere. JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016) JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 23 2001. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. The UCLA Ahmanson-Murphy Aldine Collection, Through the Eyes of James Davis and David S. Zeidberg. 2014. Los Angeles. Thorpe, James. 1999. The Gutenberg Bible. San Marino, Ca.: Huntington Library. A. Nuovo, Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles… JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016). Art. #11426 p. 24 ANGELA NUOVO, Università degli studi di Udine. angela.nuovo@uniud.it. Nuovo, Angela. "Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles. La collezione Ahmanson- Murphy all’University of California Los Angeles". JLIS.it. Vol. 7, n. 1 (January 2016): Art: #11426. DOI: 10.4403/jlis.it-11426. ACKNOWLEDGMENT: Una prima versione di questo testo è stata letta il 16 aprile 2015, a Venezia, presso la Scuola Grande di San Marco - Aula San Domenico, nel quadro della manifestazione Cultura del libro, carità e scienza nella Venezia di Aldo Manuzio, giornata di studi promossa dal Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali dell'Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia e dalla casa editrice Novacharta e organizzata da Alessandro Scarsella. ABSTRACT: Despite its recent foundation, the Ahmanson-Murphy collection at the University of California Los Angeles counts the highest number of Aldine books outside Europe, and it is one of the richest collections in the world. This paper retraces the steps of its development and cataloguing, placing the collection among the main rare books collections in Los Angeles. Franklin D. Murphy (1916-1994), who was the sixth chancellor at UCLA, emerges at the real promoter of this great cultural venture. KEYWORDS: Ahmanson-Murphy collection; Manuzio, Aldo; Murphy, Franklin D.; Rare book collections; UCLA. Submitted: 2015-07-12 Accepted: 2015-10-01 Published: 2016-01-15 http://dx.doi.org/10.4403/jlis.it-11426 Aldo Manuzio a Los Angeles. La collezione Ahmanson-Murphy all’University of California Los Angeles Angela Nuovo Bibliografia work_i5yios5iijd2rgg76z2hy5b3d4 ---- Authentic Primitive Art and Indigenous Global Desires between Reality and Hyperreality Roberto Costa Introduction Some twenty years ago, Shelly Errington discussed the “double death of authentic primitive art” in her influential work The Death of Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress.1 Emerging in the first half of the twentieth century in the West, the category of authentic primitive art has comprised all those “exotic” objects with “authentic” ritual or practical functions in their source communities. After a golden epoch, which, to Errington, and other authors,2 spanned from the 1957 opening of the New York’s Museum of Primitive Art to MoMA’s 1984 exhibit “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art,” authentic primitive art began to die out. As Errington argues, this was mainly caused by the anti- evolutionary and ethical turn of disciplines such as history and anthropology, along with the “vanishing” of non-literate societies and their “authentic” material cultures (which provoked its “double” death). More recently, Errington has observed that artefacts made by Third- and Fourth-World art makers have continued to be seen as bearing attributes of authentic primitivism, even though they are chiefly targeted at the global (art) market and hence are “inauthentic.” 3 Moreover, a further point she raises is that the concept of art has become loose. Thus, differences between low and high art, but also authentic and inauthentic or primitive and non-primitive (if it can be put so) are more and more blurred. That being so, Errington eventually contends that the terms “authentic” and “primitive” have “lost credibility, at least when linked to the term ‘Art’.”4 1 Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 2 Cf. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (University of Chicago Press, 2001 [1989]). 3 Shelly Errington, “Globalizing Art History,” in Is Art History Global?, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007); Shelly Errington, “Entangled Subjects and Art Objects,” in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology, ed. Simon Coleman, Susan B. Hyatt, and Ann Kingsolver (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 4 Errington, “Entangled Subjects and Art Objects,” 360. 195The Journal of Transcultural Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 2019) While I am persuaded of the general validity and genuineness of Errington’s analysis, her final deduction seems to be controversial. Indeed, within what Errington defines as “Art Zone”5—that is, the zone of interaction between art makers, patrons, buyers, and other (f)actors—notions of “authentic” and “primitive” seem to maintain a crucial role: for instance, primitivism in art—although often disguised behind milder and politically-correct labels such as “ethnic art”—still animates the production and sale of artefacts and plays a role in differentiating “others” from “us.” In addition, it continues to relate extant source communities with their “primitive” ancestors. Similarly, “authenticity” is still the determinant of profit-making in ethnic art sale transactions and processes of cultural restoration and reinvention. Thus, more than losing credibility in connection with art in their multiple acceptations and mutual entanglements, the notions of “authentic” and “primitive” seem to retain their topicality within the relational and hierarchical space of the Art Zone. As such, the point at stake here is to understand how these notions evolve and are employed by the different agents in the Art Zone. To explore these permutations and different modalities, in this paper I discuss the case of one of the most iconic art traditions belonging to the category of authentic primitive art, the Asmat of West Papua. Framed as “art” (kunst) by Dutch missionaries and colonial administrators in the late 1950s, the reception of Asmat material culture culminated overseas in the exhibition of Michael Rockefeller’s Asmat collection in the Museum of Primitive Art and, in Asmat, in the opening of the local Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress, on August 17, 1973, and the subsequent launch of the Asmat Cultural Festival in 1981. So around the time of the death of primitive art, Asmat art’s fame reached its zenith and began to gain centrality in the Indonesian nationalistic cultural plan, mainly through the establishment of the Asmat Museum in the visionary theme park of Taman Mini “Indonesia Indah” in 1986.6 My enquiry will, therefore, attempt to qualify notions of “authentic” and “primitive” by investigating Asmat art today both in the reality of Asmat land, and the above-mentioned hyperspace of Jakarta’s Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (henceforth Taman Mini). This will allow me to reflect on the value of authentic primitive art to Asmat art makers. At the same time, 5 Errington, “Entangled Subjects and Art Objects,” 378. 6 Taman Mini is the Indonesian edutainment park that was built by then-President Suharto and his wife Siti Hartinah to visualise their highly political and cultural project of the Indonesian nation through the juxtaposition of the main customary traits of a selection of ethnicities of the Archipelago. 196 Authentic Primitive Art and Indigenous Global Desires it will shed light on their “glocal”7 proclivity—or, as per Pierre Bourdieu, habitus8—in innovating and cultivating global aspirations while acting locally, adhering to local customary norms, and perpetuating ancestral ways of making art. As I will demonstrate, this habitus also becomes a form of resistance to typical neo-liberal forces of the current global art market that undermine the continuity of Asmat art.9 The analysis is introduced by a brief sketch of the historical process of art formation—or “artification”10—of Asmat material culture that precedes the ethnographic explorations. The artification of Asmat material culture The material culture of Southern West New Guinea has been known since the first explorations of the Southern Seas.11 It was significantly popularised through the post-Second World War period when its design “caused a sensation in art collecting circles and led to the extensive collecting expeditions carried out by Michael C. Rockefeller and others.”12 Western artists, such as the Swiss avant-garde painter and sculptor Serge Brignoni (also the founder of the ethnographic museum of Lugano) or, allegedly, Henri Matisse, were particularly inspired by the Oceanic style and in particular that of Sepik and Asmat. This specific bond with Western art, which was labelled as “affinities” 7 Here I employ the term “glocal” to indicate the particular attitude that, according to George Ritzer, stresses the centrality of the local, relations, and authenticity, and that, within the global world, aspires at “something.” In contrast, the “grobal”—which is a portmanteau word combining “growth” and “global”—alludes to global growing imperialistic and neo-liberal tendencies of massification, standardisation, and hyperrealisation, which aim for devaluation, delocalisation, stigmatisation, falsification, and ultimately “nothing.” See George Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing 2 (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2007), 36–38. 8 For example, in Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 78–87. 9 See note 7. 10 See Roberta Shapiro, “Artification as Process,” Cultural Sociology 13, no. 3 (September 2019): 265–275. 11 The first recorded explorations are those of Captain Cook in 1770, Kolff in 1826, and Salomon Müller (the “Triton”) in 1828. With the turn of the century, we can remember the expeditions of Jan Gooszen in 1907–1913, and Paul Wirz in 1922. See Fons Bloemen, Initial Encounters between Europeans and Papuas of South New Guinea from the 17th until the Early 20th Century (Jabeek: Fons Bloemen, 1998), 27–28, 30–32, 147–148, 169–174; René Wassing, “History: Colony, Mission and Nation,” in Asmat Art: Woodcarvings of Southwest New Guinea, ed. Dirk Smidt (New York: George Braziller, 1993), 27–28; Adriaan Lamme and Dirk A. M. Smidt, “Collection: Military-Explorers and Anthropologists,” in Asmat Art, ed. Smidt, 137–146; Alphonse Sowada, “Perspectives of Art in the Context of Asmat,” in Asmat: Perception of Life in Art: The Collection of the Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress, ed. Ursula Konrad, Alphonse Sowada, and Gunter Konrad (Mönchengladbach: B. Kühlen Verlag, 2002), 48–49. 12 Dirk A. M. Smidt, “Introduction,” in Asmat Art, ed. Smidt, xiii. 197The Journal of Transcultural Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 2019) in the MoMA’s 1984 exhibit “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art,”13 was one of the main and probably best-known reasons for the categorisation of Asmat carvings as high authentic primitive art.14 Interestingly, the attribute “high,” as Errington also specifies by quoting Arthur Danto,15 refers not to the link with Western fine arts but to the vernacular ritual function of the object. As such, the paradigm of authentic primitive art is intimately linked to the sacred “aura” of the work of art and its role in accessing higher realities, without which it loses its raison d’être. With the establishment of Dutch colonial administration and the Catholic mission in the early 1950s, Asmat became increasingly familiar with metal tools, such as iron nails rudimentarily mounted on wooden handles (Asmat seipiri) and, later, proper chisels, gouges, and files.16 These new woodcarving tools altered woodcarvers’ techniques at a rapid pace, enabling the usage of harder woods (as the ironwood, Asmat pes) that, until then, were not commonly employed because of the frailness of the available source material for tool making (human and animal bones, snail shells, wild boar canines, petrified wood). Furthermore, Dutch missionaries (in particular the members of the congregation of the Sacred Heart, Huub von Peij and Willem van Dongen) aided woodcarvers in imagining and shaping new artistic models like the two-dimensional openwork board called ajour or the storyboard.17 This development had the double objective of attuning Asmat production to aesthetic and formal canons of Western art, such as durability, portability, and accuracy, and guiding Asmat expressivity towards a more naturalistic and self-evident 13 See William Stanley Rubin, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, vol. 1 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994). 14 See Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress, 89–100. 15 Arthur C. Danto, “Artifact and Art,” in ART/artifact: African Art in Anthropological Collections, ed. Susan Vogel (New York: Centre for African Art and Preston Verlag, 1988), 18–32. 16 Although these were the main tools, since the early twentieth century, the Asmat have also used rough metal pieces retrieved from the remains of shipwrecks, called kas ndes by Atsj people—on this see Tobias Schneebaum, Secret Places: My Life in New York and New Guinea (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000)—or bartered with Chinese crocodile hunters, who were probably among the very first to have come into contact with Asmat people. 17 Ursula Konrad and Alphonse Sowada, “The Collection of the Museum of Agats,” in Asmat: Perception of Life in Art, 127; Tobias Schneebaum, “Change in Asmat Art,” in People of the River, People of the Tree: Change and Continuity in Sepik and Asmat Art, ed. Minnesota Museum of Art, Crosier Asmat Museum, and Landmark Center Galleries (St. Paul: Minnesota Museum of Art, 1989), 55. 198 Authentic Primitive Art and Indigenous Global Desires style.18 In addition, it reinforced the individualisation of art production.19 Remarkably, the missionary-induced conversion of Asmat abstract-symbolic vernacular style to a representational language occurred in the very same years as when the abstract expressionistic movement was thriving in the West. Despite this process of transformation that has been altering Asmat expressivity internally, the production of ritual and traditional objects—the authentic primitive art—continued. These, in fact, were produced according to the vernacular standards and sold to collectors and tourists after ceremonies instead of being left to decay in the jungle. However, external causes brought this production to a (temporary) halt. Starting from the mid-1950s, the activity of lumber companies, such as the Dutch IMEX, diverted Asmat people from their own woodcarving practices.20 On May 12, 1964, the Indonesian government—which in the meantime had taken control of the Papuan region from the Dutch colonial possessions—began to ban Asmat traditional rituals and objects because of their link with headhunting and cannibalism.21 The production continued underground, and from the late 1960s, the intervention of the local Catholic diocese, in conjunction with the UN, persuaded the state to ease their policy on the grounds that carvings are basically the only source of income for most communities. The Development and Marketing of Asmat Handicrafts project (1968–1974), financed through the Fund of the United Nations for the Development of West Irian (FUNDWI) and the Indonesian provincial industrial development programme (Perindustrian), brought a further push to the process of art formation in Asmat, raising awareness of concepts such as “economic and monetary value” and “aesthetical quality” while opening new trade channels for artefact sales overseas and within Indonesia.22 18 Dirk A. M. Smidt, “Innovation in Asmat Art and its Presentation in Museums,” in Asmat: Perception of Life in Art, 442. 19 A seminal work on Asmat artists is Adrian Gerbrands, Wow-Ipits: Eight Asmat Woodcarvers of New Guinea (The Hague: Mouton & Co. Publishers, 1967), in which he portrays works and personalities of eight of the most renowned woodcarvers of the village of Amanamkai. 20 Tobias Schneebaum, “Touring Asmat,” Pacific Arts 7 (1993): 52. 21 For a detailed account, see Alphonse Sowada, “Asmat Art in Transition,” in Time and Tide: The Changing Art of the Asmat of New Guinea: From the Collection of the American Museum of Asmat Art at the University of St. Thomas, ed. Molly Hennen Huber, et al. (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2009), 19–25. 22 Jac. Hoogerbrugge, “Development and Marketing of Asmat Handicrafts FUNDWI 18. Project Findings and Recommendations: Report Prepared for the Government of Indonesia by the International Labour Organisation Acting as Executing Agency for the United Nations Development Programme” (Geneva: United Nations Development Programme – International Labour Organisation, 1975). 199The Journal of Transcultural Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 2019) Three subsequent events are worth noting in the process of art formation. On Indonesia’s Independence Day, August 17, 1973, the Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress in Agats, the capital city of the region, was opened. Its main goal was to preserve the local cultural heritage, raise awareness on Asmat identity and enhance Asmat artistic genius. In line with the concept of indigenous museums, local people, such as former curator and then Asmat governor Yuvensius Biakai, were selected and trained in universities and museums in Indonesia and overseas to operate the museum. Also linked to this was the ensuing inauguration of the yearly festival and art woodcarving competition in 1981,23 which was established to maintain quality standards and provide visibility for the woodcarvers. It was indeed essential for woodcarvers to adhere to (Western) aesthetic canons for their artefacts to be selected, win the competition and the prize money, and be sold.24 Lastly, in 1986, the first museum entirely dedicated to the Asmat was officially opened in Jakarta at the Taman Mini miniature park, after the then-First Lady, Ibu Tien Suharto, evaluated Asmat art to be consistent with the values of the Indonesian state philosophy (Pancasila).25 Asmat artistic production entered the elite of the most representative culture of the archipelago, and the Suhartos’ Our Hope Foundation (Yayasan Harapan Kita) sponsored promotional tours of Asmat woodcarvers (and dancing groups) overseas26 as well as commissioning a number of works throughout the archipelago.27 The artification of Asmat material culture has therefore rapidly brought Asmat culture to be renowned worldwide and traditional artefacts to be very much sought after by art collectors and members of the general populace 23 The “Lomba ukir” or “Pesta budaya” is the yearly festival that takes place in Agats, the capital of the region, and consists of cultural and artefact exhibitions and an auction of contemporary artworks selected on a competitive basis. See Nick Stanley, The Making of Asmat Art: Indigenous Art in a World Perspective (Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2012), 143–170. 24 As Nick Stanley puts it, the “decision about whether a work was of an adequate standard was now exercised by an outside purchaser with his own aesthetic values that carvers had to recognise if they wanted their work to sell.” Stanley, The Making of Asmat Art, 110. 25 Filsafah Negara Pancasila (National Philosophy of Pancasila) is the 1945 ideological programme for the Indonesian nation which is articulated in five principles: belief in the Almighty God; a just and civilised humanity; a unified Indonesia; democracy led by the wisdom in a consensus of representatives; social justice for all Indonesians. 26 In 1987, Asmat woodcarvers, musicians, and dancers participated in several festivals throughout Europe thanks to the support of the Yayasan Harapan Kita. The same happened for events in the US in 1991. See Jac. Hoogerbrugge, “Art Today: Woodcarving in Transition,” in Asmat Art, ed. Smidt, 149–153. 27 According to my woodcarver informants, around those years they received a number of commissions for works from Jakarta. 200 Authentic Primitive Art and Indigenous Global Desires looking for a sound investment.28 However, starting from the mid-1990s, a decrease in tourism and art trade slowed down the positive trend of recent decades and initiated a period of a general decline in Asmat art in which the ideas of “authenticity” and “primitive,” and consequently “art,” have started to be challenged. Asmat art in the reality of Asmat land Already in my first few days in the Asmat region,29 it became immediately clear to me that the area was far more isolated than I had expected. Access to the region is difficult because of the volatile political situation in the province of Papua and the limited transportation services.30 In addition, missionaries and aid workers, who until the late 1980s were mostly Westerners and acted as brokers between Asmat and outsiders and facilitated international tourism, are almost all Indonesian these days.31 Sales of artefacts are experiencing a lull amidst a general economic decline in the region. The local government-owned art shop that once traded contemporary Asmat artefacts is hardly doing any business,32 and for those who are looking for fine art pieces or souvenirs in the city, there are only a few art galleries owned by non-Asmat that offer old high qualities pieces—and a few contemporary artefacts—at very high prices.33 During my conversations with the Asmat woodcarvers in several villages of central Asmat (Atsj, Amanamkai, Ambisu, and Yow), I noticed a constant and rather grave concern about this declining situation. In fact, these conditions are discouraging Asmat youths from taking up a career in woodcarving and this will lead to cultural obliteration. To avoid this, woodcarvers, often 28 In this regard, it is interesting to mention that, in the column “Where to put your money” in the Far Eastern Economic Review in the early 1990s, Asmat art is indicated as “an opportunity to build a reasonable collection in a particular artistic genre before prices have gone sky-high.” Jonathan Friedland, “Asmat Art: Carving Out a Niche,” Far Eastern Economic Review, March 28, 1991, 42. 29 The study was conducted between 2016 and 2018. 30 A few small aircraft connect Asmat and its Ewer airstrip with the cities of Timika and Merauke. Due to multiple factors, flights can be delayed or cancelled at any time. The ferry can be an alternative mode of transportation, although it runs only a few times a month, and the duration and the conditions of the trip can be rather tough. 31 They mostly come from the Indonesian provinces of Sumatra, Kei, Flores, Java, and Timor. Up to now, Father Vince Cole, from the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, is the only international Catholic missionary working in the area. 32 Very few people in Agats know about the shop, which lies out of the city’s busiest area and is not well advertised. 33 Prices are expressed in US dollars and, in most cases, amount to thousands of dollars. Artefacts are purchased from local woodcarvers for a very modest price. 201The Journal of Transcultural Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 2019) with the support of the local Catholic mission, are trying to adapt their production of artefacts to the formats and the aesthetic taste dictated by the market (which is mainly domestic, i.e., Indonesian). They are therefore more and more engaged with applied art, which comprises architectural elements embellished with Asmat inlay work and Asmatised furnishings (lamps, church supplies, and pieces of furniture). Moreover, they are increasingly trying to attune their craftsmanship to the standard of accurateness (kehalusan) that in Indonesia is set by the more “civilised” handicrafts of the Balinese and Javanese traditions. Yet, if on the one hand, these concerns are pushing Asmat woodcarvers to reorient and commodify their art, on the other hand, they are implicitly confident that their traditional art will never vanish or succumb to any crisis. After all, the woodcarvers I have been working with believe that adhering to their customary prescriptions is the way to please the ancestors and God and, consequently, preserve their artistic traditions. Put differently, the practice of their “authentic primitive art” will secure its perpetuity and, in turn, the survival of their culture. In my enquiry into the evolutions of the concepts of authenticity and primitiveness in Asmat art, woodcarvers have usually referred to it in terms of “uniqueness.” As explained to me by Yohanis Tuanban (fifty-five years old), the leader of the woodcarving workshop in the village of Atsj, and confirmed by other woodcarvers, uniqueness entails several levels of understanding. The object is unique, which is a unicum not to be replicated (“every woodcarving is unique”).34 The source of inspiration is also unique (“whatever the tale or the image, everything is stored in our mind”)35 and the stylistic motives of the work of art that are typical of a specific woodcarver, family, or community (“every woodcarver has got his own motif”).36 Uniqueness also implies improvisation and spirituality. Every object is unique (and authentic) not just because it is not duplicated, but also because there is not any preparatory sketch, unlike, for instance, Balinese handicraft. This lack of a script is what connects uniqueness with the transcendental component, that is, a further hallmark of Asmat material culture and art. As Tuanban remarks, “sinking the chisel properly into the wood involves the aid of God and ancestors,”37 who therefore become co-makers of the objects. Indeed, ancestors usually interact with makers 34 “Setiap ukiran itu unik.” 35 “Ceritera apa, gambar apa, ada tersimpan dalam otaknya.” 36 “Setiap cescuwipitsj punya motif sendiri.” 37 “Ketika kami tanam, mereka mendukung—Tuhan, Nenek Moyang, leluhur—mereka mendorong.” 202 Authentic Primitive Art and Indigenous Global Desires through dreams or visitations.38 However, it is the woodcarver who needs to invoke the ancestors, and for that he has to behave ethically and customarily, practice religion (both traditional and Christian), and know specific techniques (e.g., sleeping techniques). Once the association has been established, ancestral and supernatural assistance runs throughout the whole making process, up until the sale of the artefact. The spiritual power that intervenes, which in Indonesian is generically termed roh (Asmat ceser), gives the object an aura that people see as contributing to its ceremonial and economic success. This aura is perceivable by woodcarvers and therefore hardly falsifiable.39 A further hallmark in reference to Asmat authentic art is the material used. Only specific kinds of woods found in Asmat forests can be used to make Asmat art. Pes (ironwood), pit (weeping paperbark), tow (a nutmeg species), and ci (tropical almond) are among those more frequently used materials. Every object is carved from a specific wood because of 38 This particular aspect will be tackled in my PhD thesis. See also Astrid de Hontheim, “Imagination Behind Shape: The Invisible Content of Asmat Artefacts,” Anthropological Forum 20, no. 3 (2010): 240. 39 Instances of forgery are usually perpetrated by Balinese or Javanese woodcarvers. Several of the woodcarvers with whom I have talked believe that apart from formal discrepancies, the most critical differentiation lies in the absence in the copies of Asmat roh (spirit). Fig. 1: Master woodcarver Tuanban at work in the workshop of the village of Atsj. 203The Journal of Transcultural Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 2019) distinct inherent properties and on customary grounds. As confirmed by Tuanban, the utilisation of other kinds of wood is not conceivable—“It is not allowed!”40 Wood is, indeed, part of the process of making Asmat art and responds to the solicitations of the maker who has to interpret the log correctly and know the qualities of the wood to chisel with ease (“We look at the log thoroughly, and we understand what can be done with it”).41 There are traditional norms that prevent makers from using different kinds of wood than those customarily allowed for the specific item.42 Moreover, certain species of trees (e.g., mangrove) are generally not employable for woodcarving because of their high level of sacredness. However, several woodcarvers would be happy to work with other types of wood for purposes that are different from the ceremonial ones, as Tuanban explains: For instance, to make a mbis pole [ancestor pole] we have to use tow tree [a local kind of nutmeg]. If there is a customary feast, we must use tow. Then, we want to carve something for a museum. We can do this by using ironwood; but if the object is for a customary ceremony, it can be tow only. A further example: let’s suppose we want to make an em [drum]—you have to use pes, gambir, or jowob [see footnote 36]. It can’t be made of any other kind of wood, because it is against adat [customary law]. Nenek Moyang won’t agree; we could experience serious repercussions [lit. “we may become victims”].43 [Should we carve] in Europe, we can do differently [with different wood]. Asmat power enters the matter anyway. There is already a design from our will. When there is that, we put it into practice, and the chisels move accordingly; that is Asmat. In 2007 we brought wooden material to build the jeuw [Asmat traditional house and socio-cultural centre] from here 40 “Tidak bisa!” 41 “Kami lihat kayu begitu, begitu dan memahami apa yang bisa diciptakan.” 42 For instance, the em, the traditional Asmat drum, can be made from three different species of tree: jowob (peltophorum pterocarpum), kawir (uncaria gambir), or sakar (nauclea orientalis); the mbi or ancestor pole can only be made from two kinds: tow (a local species of myristica fragrans) and fesak (canarium ovatum). 43 “Kalau contoh mau bikin mbis, harus pake kayu tow. Kalau pesta harus pake kayu tow. Terus, mau buat macam apa untuk museum, ini bisa kayu besi, tapi kalau untuk pesta punya, untuk atraksi pesta, tidak bisa kayu lain. Contoh lain, buat em. Harus pake kayu pes, gambir atau jowob, tetapi tidak, tidak bisa bahan lain, karena lawan adat, ya Nenek Moyang tidak setuju, paling kita korban.” 204 Authentic Primitive Art and Indigenous Global Desires to Jakarta by plane. If woodcarving material is not available there, we can just carry it inside our suitcase!44 What Tuanban suggests is that even if the wood that is used is different, the resulting artefact will still be Asmat, for it is the maker who authenticates the object and not (merely) the matter. Asmat power, which mainly originates in the connection between the maker and the spiritual forces (ancestors), is always transmitted to the object.45 So, if Asmat ritual objects cannot be made of woods other than those customarily prescribed for their rituals, woodcarvings “for a museum” (which stands for the global art market) can be done with different kinds of woods. In this latter case, Asmat woodcarvers are nonetheless required to comply with their customary rules: Outside ceremonies, we can directly fell trees, but we have to talk to the tree first [that is, with the spirits dwelling inside]. They deserve this kind of respect. We do also have to make an offering and pray. We must make an offering. If you can’t make an offering, what is important is that we [respectfully] worship it. All ethnic groups have a culture. The Moyang [ancestors] get happy like that. What is important is that we utter different words that we intone. When we sing, they [Moyang] are glad. No doubt that this is the way to act, we can worship, this is the way.46 Tuanban highlights that customary rules also apply in different contexts. Indeed, Asmat ethical behaviour is what should guide them in relation to other cultures. The “authentic” and “primitive”—in its etymological sense—way of making art is therefore still of the utmost importance. Would this also apply to the hyperspace of Taman Mini where the Asmat art is more exposed to forces of the global art market? 44 “Kalau di Eropa bisa beda. Gaya Asmat langsung masuk di bahan. Sudah ada gambaran dari ingatan. Yang ada itu, sudah langsung dituangkan, dan pahat jalan begitu, tetap Asmat. Tahun 2007 kami bawa bahan jew dari sini ke Jakarta dengan pesawat angkatan udara. Bahan ukir, kalau di sana kekurangan, bisa bawa di dalam kopor saja!” 45 This is, for example, the case of etsjopok, particular valuable objects (such as soulships, weapons, various sculptures, etc.) that are connected to life-cycle rituals (pokmbu), and are used to remember and “avenge” the ancestors. For instance, see Gerard Zegwaard, “Headhunting Practices of the Asmat of Netherlands New Guinea,” American Anthropologist 61, no. 6 (December 1959): 1029; Pauline Van der Zee, Etsjopok, Avenging the Ancestors: The Bisj Poles of the Asmat and a Proposal for a Morphological Method (Ghent: University of Ghent, Department of Ethnic Art, 1996), 25. 46 “Di luar pesta bisa tebang saja, tetapi harus bicara sama kayu. Mereka punya kehormatan itu begini. Harus derma juga, berdoa. Harus derma. Kalau tidak bisa derma, yang penting kami harus percaya, Semua suku punya budaya. Moyang senang begitu, yang penting kita mengucapkan suatu kata-kata yang kita melagu. Kalau menyanyi mereka senang, pasti begitu sesuai dengan keyakinan, bisa percaya, begitu.” 205The Journal of Transcultural Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 2019) Fig. 2: Asmat woodcarvers and trees. 206 Authentic Primitive Art and Indigenous Global Desires Asmat art in the hyperreality of Taman Mini My visit to Taman Mini “Indonesia Indah” coincides with my very first trip to Indonesia in 2012, and is part of an organised tour aimed at familiarising foreigners with Indonesia’s cultural and ethnic variety. During the visits to the park’s exhibitions, museums, and the various pavilions displaying different Indonesian provinces, I am struck by the stark contrast between the general cheerful atmosphere of the park and the bad mood of a man who is carving a sculpture in a shack selling souvenirs in the Papua Pavilion. Indeed, he appears somewhat irritated and annoyed by the presence of visitors. As I am later able to reconstruct through photos and pieces of memory, that man is there not only to make art for selling but also to embody a living witness of a distinct and singular set of cultural traditions. Coming back after several years, in 2016, I go to look for him, but the lady in the pavilion’s souvenir shop (the same shack in which the woodcarver was chiselling) tells me that the man has passed away recently. His name was Deki Asiam (and was known simply as Deki) and he was an Asmat man coming from the village of Amaru, in the outback of the Casuarina Coast (the southern coast of Asmat). He had apparently left the Asmat region in the 1990s and gone to work as a woodcarver in Surabaya and Bandung, and later moved to Jakarta, where he married a Javanese woman. He was in his mid-eighties when I saw him, even though I thought he was much younger, perhaps also because of the psychedelic make-up of his body decorations (much more flamboyant than those of the Asmat, which are naturally extracted). He died after a trip to Bali, where he went to get boards, planks, and various materials for his woodcarving activity. The spot where he used to carve is nearly unaltered, with chisels, wooden blocks, and shaving chips scattered all over, and a cardboard sign asking tourists for a donation if photographed. Everything seems to be in place. A portrait of Deki in a coloured pastel pencil hangs on the wall amid a collection of Asmat and Papuan woodcarvings. Now his grandson, Benyamin Birif (twenty-eight years old)—known as Benny—has taken up the baton and takes care of the woodcarvings made and left by his grandfather. He is employed at the Papua Pavilion and plays the Asmat-living-witness role as his grandfather did. He belongs to the generation of Asmat millennials, those who have started to attend university. He also married a Javanese woman. As he explains to me, he is keen on carving—although he admits being not as good as the grandfather yet—as well as conversing with and performing for the pavilion’s guests: My work is done [at the pavilion]. I undress; I put [traditional] make-up on all my body, on my face [he mimes the gestures of wearing makeup], done! I start chiselling and singing an 207The Journal of Transcultural Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 2019) [Asmat traditional] song: “Wo—Wo—Wo—Yooooooo, ooo…” I keep singing. “Yoong yong yoong…” [imitation of Chinese language]—Chinese tourists come straightaway. That’s it.47 Looking around the shop, what catches my attention are the various woodcarvings showcased: several old objects and a number of sculptures 40 cm to 90 cm in height, rather sloppily displayed, and expressing Asmat and Kamoro styles and at times a combination of both. Most of these objects were carved by Deki, who used to make a living by selling them to the (non-Asmat) shop owner. Benny says these are all kenang-kenangan (remembrances, mementoes), probably also from Deki’s life in Asmat where, according to my Asmat woodcarver informants in Asmat, he was a talented carver or cescuwipitsj.48 The combination of styles is the testimony to the experimental and adaptive style of Deki, reflecting the philosophy of the park, wherein the juxtaposition of diverse cultures is aimed to render a homogenous identity modeled upon administrative provinces (thirty-four to date). I am struck by the fact that many of the objects are not properly finished. I think this is probably because of the age of the man, but Benny clarifies that in Taman Mini neither buyers nor the shop owner pay attention to the artefacts’ neatness: Some time ago I made a small sculpture, but I hadn’t finished it yet. I had just refined the head. But the shop’s owner sold it to a Korean. I said: “It is not finished yet!” “Ah, don’t worry,” she replies, “it’s authentic!” She takes it, sells it, and I get some money. I mean, it wasn’t finished yet! It was still rough! She took the original piece, which was still coarse, and wrapped it because she already knew [that it could be sold]. That’s the story, that’s how it is.49 47 “Dang-dang, terus habis, kerja selesai. Buka pakaian; cat semua, muka… udah! Memahat; sambil nyanyi: ‘Wo Wo Wo Yooooo ooo…’ nyanyi. ‘Yung yong yung…’ Datang langsung orang Cina. Begitu.” 48 Cescuwipitsj identifies particularly talented woodcarvers, and also masters in other domains than art (hunting, performing rituals, etc.). This term differs from wowipitsj, which is the common term to refer to a person who can carve. 49 “Kemarin saya bikin patung kecil, tapi saya belum bikin semua. Cuma bikin kepala doang. Cuma dia beli sama orang Korea. Saya bilang ‘Belum bikin semua!’ ‘Ah, bukan, itu karena asli’ kata dia. Dia ambil, dia beli pada dia, saya jual. Karena dia sudah tahu, kan? Ah ah! Oh, berarti ini nggak terlalu halus! Dia ambil orisinil, masa kayak belum rapi, bongkar, karena dia udah tahu. Sejarahnya begitu, kayaknya begitu.” 208 Authentic Primitive Art and Indigenous Global Desires Fig. 3: The souvenir shop at Taman Mini’s Papuan Pavilion. In the middle, the spot where woodcarver Deki used to carve for tourists. Fig. 4: Artefacts in Kamoro-Asmat style allegedly carved by Deki. 209The Journal of Transcultural Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 2019) Just opposite to these artefacts, tourist merchandise is stockpiled at the counter: key rings with miniaturised Asmat drums, ethnic bracelets and necklaces, printed batik shirts with bird of paradise motifs, and small wooden statues caricaturing Asmat people in various ways: playing hockey, holding an ashtray on their backs, or having bestial sexual intercourse. These products are displayed as if they were the hot deals of the shop, right at the front of the counter. The same caricaturing statues can also be easily found at souvenir shops elsewhere in Indonesia (e.g., at Jakarta’s Soekarno Hatta International Airport and Makassar’s Sultan Hasanuddin International Airport, or in shopping malls), as well as on the Web,50 where they can be sold as “modern Asmat art.”51 In the Papua Pavilion’s display, elements highlighting “savagery,” “nature,” and “wild instinct” are quite recurrent, demonstrating that the park’s underlying credo is to portray a static and hierarchical view of the nation, wherein the narrative of the timeless and grotesque primitivism of peripheral provinces has remained over the years well-nigh unaltered. When I ask what Benny thinks about these souvenirs, he replies, “These are not of good quality because they are copies [tempel-tempel]. The wood is not authentic. This way of making is not original [tidak asli].”52 Not too far from the Papua Pavilion, the park offers a place entirely dedicated to Asmat art: the Asmat Museum. This museum is located at the opposite side of the Papua Pavilion, immersed in the Flower Park 50 From the most common global trade websites, say eBay, to the more local ones (e.g., the Indonesian Bukalapak), or trade-specific ones (e.g., indonesiaexport.com), the Asmat-mocking sculptures portrayed in Figs. 5–7 are quite often advertised as Asmat artefacts. 51 To further confirm this point, the sociologist and former director of the Melanesian Institute Franco Zocca, SVD showed me similar caricaturing statues. These had been given to him by guests as contemporary Asmat art. 52 “Ini kurang bagus, karena dia tempel-tempel, nggak asli kayu, Ini kayaknya tidak asli.” Figs. 5–7: Grotesque and inauthentic Asmat souvenirs typically sold as Asmat original art on the Internet and in souvenir shops. 210 Authentic Primitive Art and Indigenous Global Desires (Taman Bunga) and in between the Aquarium, Insectarium, and the Heirloom Museum on one side, and the Imax Theatre and Confucian Temple on the other. It is hosted in a Kariwari-style building, the customary house of the Papuan Tobati-Enggros ethnic group, and is decorated with Asmat motifs and typical colours (red, white, and black). At the heart of this hyperreal and Disneyland-like setting of the park,53 there is this striking paradox: personalised replicas of Asmat carvings are sold as objects more valuable than the archetypes. Their maker, Awaluddin, is one of the employees of the museum. He guides me through the exhibition, which is organised in a modern and interactive fashion. Spirit canoes, noken (Asmat bags), shields, spears, sculptures, and even a human skull lie behind the display glasses. Certain spots are dedicated to living experiences: in the last room, visitors can get their photo taken holding signs in emoji language with life-sized Asmat people drawn on a photo booth background delimitated by replicas of mbis poles. Right between this room and the previous one, it is possible to play reproductions of the em (traditional drum) or fu (signal horn) under the direction of the museum staff who imitate Asmat music performances in a hoo! hoo!-tribal-mocking fashion. Close to that spot, a label in English on the wall reads: Every piece of art they [Asmat] create has a special meaning. This is an artwork that serves as a correlation symbol between the dead and the living […]. Their carving works developed into artworks have a selling value and are desired by many societies. The resulting sale can help their economy. Awaluddin, a jovial man—particularly generous for letting me in for free and giving me a complimentary museum booklet—admits that he has never been to Asmat. Nonetheless, his genuine passion for Asmat art (and probably his need to make some extra money) pushed him to start this business, competing in a way with wowipitsj (Asmat woodcarvers). His artefacts, mostly stone axes and sculptures, are shown under lock and key in the glass counter, right at the exit, surrounded by key rings, publications on Asmat culture, and miniatures of Sulawesi traditional houses. Carvings are made after the objects displayed in the museum, which has an extremely precious collection counting more than a thousand Asmat objects from different 53 E.g., Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, “Cartoons and Monuments: The Evolution of Political Communication under the New Order,” in Political Power and Communications in Indonesia, ed. Lucian W. Pye and Karl Jackson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 282–321; John Pemberton, “Recollections from ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ (Somewhere beyond the Postmodern),” Public Culture 6, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 241–262; Greg Acciaioli, “Pavilions and Posters: Showcasing Diversity and Development in Contemporary Indonesia,” Eikon 1 (1996): 27–42. 211The Journal of Transcultural Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 2019) areas.54 When I ask the employee standing at the exit to show me Awaluddin’s artefacts, he explains that these objects are kombinasi, a term to express the hybrid nature of the objects, which uses a combination of techniques not exclusively Asmat. He adds that the artist (Awaluddin) carved the objects himself and that these objects are particularly precious for being smoother and neater (lebih halus) than the Asmat ones. He concludes that authentic Asmat art can hardly be bought in Jakarta, while such kombinasi can be easily ordered and even customised. Reconsidering authentic primitive art today Ethnographic exploration of the Asmat region and Taman Mini thus points us to questions about what authentic primitive art is today, and what the reasons are for its topicality. The Asmat conceptions of uniqueness, Tuanban’s reflections on the adherence of vernacular ethics in global settings, Awaluddin’s kombinasi style, as well as Benny’s colourful anecdotes at the Papua Pavilion, guide us to multifarious understandings of the notions of “authentic” and “primitive” in relation to art. These different 54 Risetyawati, “Museum Asmat TMII Sebagai Museum Identitas” (Master’s thesis, Universitas Indonesia, 2014). See also Soemadio, et al., Museum Asmat Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (Jakarta: Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, 1986). Fig. 8: The Asmat Museum at Taman Mini. 212 Authentic Primitive Art and Indigenous Global Desires interpretations, in turn, characterise the polysemic and dynamic nature of authentic primitive art that originates from the asymmetrical interplay between the different agents involved in the Art Zone. Reflecting on the reasons for the centrality of this paradigm at present, it is interesting to note that if the increasing hybridity of low and high art, or of different styles, might seem to go against authentic primitive art, this is not the case. Indeed, as also remarked by Gunter Konrad, Ursula Konrad, and Carolina Winkelmann, the process of modernisation of Asmat art does not trigger cultural obliteration in the Asmat, but rather a “return to old values […] [to] their own world and the cultural heritage of their past.”55 This return to the past, in the ethnographic investigation, can be remarked in the strict and loyal adherence of Tuanban to the customary rules, but also in the “rough” style of Deki and Benny. These instances demonstrate Asmat attachment to ancestral traditions whose degeneration, within the dynamics of the global art market, can be found in the completely fake and sloppy Asmat souvenirs sold to tourists in Taman Mini. In turn, all of these, and each in its own way, are forms of resistance to the gentrification56 of Asmat art that is epitomised by the “original” Asmat attempts of applied art and the non-original kombinasi style of Awaluddin. To this view, authenticity and primitivism—again, in the meaning of primeval—can be seen as their response to change. 55 Gunter Konrad, Ursula Konrad, and Carolina Winkelmann, “Asmat Art,” in Asmat: Perception of Life in Art, 314. 56 For the ideas of “civilisation” and “cultivation” in art, see Philip Yampolsky, “Forces for Change in the Regional Performing Arts of Indonesia,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 151, no. 4 (1995): 700–725. Fig. 9: Kombinasi style sold at the Asmat Museum. 213The Journal of Transcultural Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 2019) This alludes to a further aspect emerging from the field that pertains to the Asmat people’s rather bold spirit of adaptability to new (global) scenarios. Despite Asmat obstinate adherence to the customary norms, Tuanban demonstrates that Asmat hallmarks of authenticity can also adjust to unprecedented global settings. Given that, along with Edward Bruner,57 authenticity has to be considered not intrinsic in the object per se, but the result of processes of authentication, Tuanban explains how the customary usage of certain kinds of wood can be altered for specific purposes (non-ceremonial objects) and under certain conditions (absence of raw material). This manifests the “glocal” habitus of the Asmat woodcarvers, that is, their particular attitude of manifesting global aspirations and openness to innovations while maintaining their ties with their artistic ethos. Indeed, as per Jac. Hoogerbrugge and Simon Kooijman,58 their art is regarded as “vital art capable of translating new ideas and impressions in a creative way and thus represent[ing] an expansion of the traditional Asmat art.”59 At the same time, their habitus can also be framed as a form of resistance against the growing tendencies that promote massification, standardisation, falsification, and stigmatisation, which challenge and endanger Asmat authentic primitive art. In conclusion, while the paradigm of authentic primitive art is obsolete and, sensu Errington, double dead, the relevance of the attributes “authentic” and “primitive” in reference to art seem to be in their original meanings and further understandings still alive. The comprehension of these notions can be fully grasped only by considering the intricate weave of relations of the Art Zone, and the heterogeneous constructions that emerge out of it. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Benyamin “Benny” Birif, Yohanis Tuanban, and the woodcarving community of the Asmat villages of Atsj, Yasiw, and Bakasei for their trust and generous insights, and to the Catholic Diocese of Agats and the Parish of Atsj for the logistic support during my fieldwork. I thank Jens Sejrup for the opportunity to contribute to this issue. Jaap Timmer’s input and comments on the paper draft were invaluable. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers for The Journal of Transcultural Studies for their remarks, A. Sudiana Sasmita for proofreading the Indonesian text, and 57 Edward Bruner, “Epilogue: Creative Persona and the Problem of Authenticity,” in Creativity/ Anthropology, ed. Smadar Lavie, Kirin Narayan, and Renato Rosaldo (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 331. 58 Jac. Hoogerbrugge and Simon Kooijman have been among the early promoters of the Asmat art formation process. 59 Jac. Hoogerbrugge, and Simon Kooijman, 70 Jaar Asmat Houtsnijkunst = 70 Tahun Seni Pahat Asmat = 70 Years of Asmat Woodcarving (Breda: Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, 1977), 23. 214 Authentic Primitive Art and Indigenous Global Desires managing editor Russell Ó Ríagáin for his most precious suggestions and assistance. An early version of this paper was presented at the Museum Fünf Kontinente of Munich during the European Society for Oceanists 2017 Conference. The research has been supported by the International Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship 2016–2020. work_hbyhfwmqn5ctrkhl7avdcfwule ---- Familiar beyond Recognition: Translation in Contemporary Abstraction Simon C. Degroot BFA (Hons) Queensland College of Art Arts, Education and Law Griffith University Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy February 2017 i Statement of Originality This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself. Simon C. Degroot 17 February 2017 ii Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgements ..............................................................................................................v List of Illustrations ............................................................................................................. vi Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 Modernist Shapes in Abstract Painting .............................................................15 1.1 Simplification, Construction, Design....................................................................17 1.2 Transcription and Translation ...............................................................................23 1.3 The Power of Shapes ............................................................................................37 Chapter 2 Samples and Shapes in Contemporary Painting ................................................44 2.1 Shaped and Reshaped: Secondary Forms ............................................................45 2.2 Visual Poetics: Scale and Arrangement ...............................................................60 2.3 Confusion and Complexity: Visual Grammar, Abstract Rhyme .........................63 Chapter 3 Familiar Beyond Recognition: Studio Methodology and Outcomes ................81 3.1 Select Reshape, 2014, Spiro Grace Art Rooms, Brisbane ....................................82 3.2 Shallow Space, 2014, Australian National Capital Artists, Canberra ...................84 3.3 Hilton Mural, 2014, Brisbane ...............................................................................86 3.4 The Pillars Project Mural, 2014, Brisbane ..........................................................88 3.5 Indirect Response, 2015, Postgraduate and Other Projects, Brisbane ..................90 3.6 Nundah Train Station Mural, 2015, Brisbane ......................................................97 3.7 Hard Graphics, 2016, Spiro Grace Art Rooms, Brisbane ....................................99 3.8 Picture Building, 2016, Kick Arts Contemporary, Cairns ..................................102 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................105 References ........................................................................................................................109 Illustrations ......................................................................................................................119 iii Abstract This research contributes to discourse on abstract art in relation to a contemporary context of image sharing and exchange. Many contemporary artists working with abstraction use visual elements from art history, popular culture, product design, the computer desktop and architecture in their work. The once unrecognisable non- figurative forms of Modernist abstraction have now become recognisable objects and forms in contemporary abstraction. Artists such as Charline von Heyl, Christine Streuli, Natalya Hughes, Peter Atkins, and Ryan Gander make visual reference to pre- existing forms in their work, shifting our understanding of abstraction as being based only in formal qualities. Translation as process and concept is a useful model to interrogate how particular abstract forms are re-employed in contemporary abstraction, how they are recognised, why they are familiar, and why this is important to understanding contemporary abstraction. I argue that both a history of Modernist abstraction and a developing visual culture brought about by commercial printing techniques have popularised abstract forms, and that both favour techniques of visual communication that are expedient, direct, easily disseminated, and easily recognised. I consider what an analysis of translation in language is able to bring to the analysis of contemporary abstract painting. Translating an original text for dissemination to a wider audience is similar to the way in which contemporary artists use existing abstract forms to make new works. I compare theories of visual representation from W. J. T. Mitchell, Hubert Damisch and Arthur C. Danto to consider how particular abstract forms are reused in contemporary environments and how they are able to continue to evoke feelings of familiarity in different contexts while remaining abstract. My own abstract paintings, which form the major part of this degree submission, make use of pre-existing visual elements from diverse sources, including architectural motifs and forms in the built environment. I take advantage of varying degrees of viewer recognition of these elements as I translate them into the context of my work. This is important in contemporary image ecologies where visual communication engages in a complicated process of recognition and identification, of image use and reuse. My artworks demonstrate that the most effective contemporary art is post- medium and anti-hermetic, where shapes from the history of abstract art are iv recognised as they move between mediums and communicate in ways that acknowledge that history while also making new meaning that is relevant to their contemporary context. I explore this capacity in my work, translating and manipulating abstract forms from art history, technology, and the built environment into paintings and large-scale murals to engage the familiar in a way that moves beyond recognition into new meaning. v Acknowledgements Sincere gratitude goes to my supervisors Assoc. Prof. Donal Fitzpatrick and Dr. Rosemary Hawker for their continued support and expertise. Their knowledge and critical feedback has been central to the success of my research. Thank you to Rachael for her continued support over the past three years and to Reuben, my most honest critic. vi List of Illustrations Figure 1 Kazimir Malevich Black Square 1915, oil on canvas, 53 x 53cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. 2. Figure 2 Ellsworth Kelly Black Square 1953, oil on wood, 110 x 110cm. 2. Figure 3 Pablo Picasso Guitar and sheet music on a pedestal 1920, gouache on paper, 22.8 x 29.1cm. Musee Picasso, France. 5. Figure 4 Stuart Davis, Egg Beater No. 1 1927, oil on canvas, 73.9 x 91.4cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 5. Figure 5 Simon Degroot, sketch book page, 2014, graphite on paper, 21 x 42cm. 7. Figure 6 Georges Braque, Violon et Pipe (Le Quotidien) (Violin and Pipe [The Everyday]) 1913, chalk, charcoal, imitation wood, and pasted paper, 74 x 196cm. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 17. Figure 7 Pablo Picasso, Head of a Man with a Hat 1912, cut-and-pasted newspaper and coloured paper, ink, and charcoal on paper, 62.2 x 47.3cm. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. 17. Figure 8 Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension 1915, oil on canvas, 71.1 x 44.5cm. MoMA, New York. 17. Figure 9 Henri Matisse, Le Lagon (The Lagoon) 1947, screenprint for Jazz, plate XVIII, 41.6 x 64.8cm. The Art Gallery of New South Wales. 20. Figure 10 Honoré Daumier after Charles Philipon, ‘Les Poires’ Le Charivari, 16 April 1835, lithograph, 33.3 x 25.4cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 34. Figure 11 Marianne Brandt, Tea Infuser and Strainer 1924, silver and ebony, 7.3cm (h). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 40. Figure 12 Liubov Popova, Embroidery Design for the Artisan Co-Operative Verbovka 1917, cut-and-pasted papers on paper, 12 x 17.5cm. Source: Margarita Tupitsyn, ed. Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 41. 40. Figure 13 Dick Watkins, The Fall No. 2 1968, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 183 x 152cm. Private collection. 45. Figure 14 Laura Owens, Untitled 2012, oil, flashe, resin, collage, and pumice on canvas, 275 x 213cm. Tate Britain, London. 45. vii Figure 15 Charline von Heyl, Untitled (Wall at WAM) 2010, acrylic and latex paint, 518 x 2042cm. The Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts. 45. Figure 16 Christine Streuli, Ableger (Offshoot) (installation view) 2013, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland. 45. Figure 17 Ellsworth Kelly, Black (Noir) from Suite of Twenty-Seven Color Lithographs 196465, 89.5 x 61.1cm. MoMA, New York. 54. Figure 18 Simon Degroot, Shape Poems (detail) 2017, laser-cut acrylic, 29 x 34cm. 54. Figure 19 Ellsworth Kelly, Concorde IV (State) 1981, etching and aquatint on paper, 40.5 x 32cm. Tate Britain, London. 56. Figure 20 Iran do Espírito Santo, Twist 7A 2011, pencil on photogram, 29.2 x 21cm. Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. 56. Figure 21 Susan Kare, New Blank Document 1984, Apple Computer Inc., 32 x 32pixels. 56. Figure 22 Natalya Hughes, Looking Cute 2013, acrylic on plywood, 140 x 240cm. Milani Gallery, Brisbane. 60. Figure 23 Peter Atkins, Talk + Text 2012, acrylic on canvas, 61 x 61cm. Bett Gallery, Hobart. 60. Figure 24 Wendy White, No Pressure 2016, edition of 2 + AP, dibond, rainbow webbing, nylon rope, ball chain, 127 x 152cm. Eric Firestone Gallery, New York. 67. Figure 25 Wendy White, Pleasure I 2016, digital billboard. Override: A Billboard Project, Expo Chicago, USA. 67. Figure 26 Ryan Gander, Your Present Time Orientation (Second Act)—Random Abstraction 2011, custom-painted glass, Perspex clip frames, 600 x 110 x 20cm (installation dimensions). Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands. 71. Figure 27 Vincent Hawkins, Untitled 2015, monotype print on Fabriano paper, 42 x 29.7cm. 76. Figure 28 Christopher Wool, Untitled 2011, silkscreen on linen, 304.8 x 243.8cm each. Luhring Augustine, New York. 78. Figure 29 John Young Moment III 2015, oil on Belgian linen, 76.2 x 103.4cm. University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane. 79. Figure 30 Simon Degroot, Cloud #1 2015, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm. 69. Figure 31 Simon Degroot, Cloud #2 2015, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm. 69. viii Figure 32 Piet Mondrian, Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow 1930, oil on canvas, 46 x 46cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland. 71. Figure 33 iPhone iOS 7 User Interface 2013, Apple Computer Inc. 73. Figure 34 Allan McCollum, The Shapes Project: 144 top parts 2005ongoing, dimensions variable. Rhea Anastas ed., Allan McCollum (Letzigraben, Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2012), 128. 73. Figure 35 Simon Degroot, White and Blue Flat Lay 2017, oil on canvas, 198 x 137cm. 73. Figure 36 Jason Fulford, This Equals That 2014. Source: Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin. This Equals That (New York: Aperture, 2014), n.p. 75. Figure 37 Internet Meme, Raw Chicken or Donald Trump? 2016. Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/HUYPLX. 75. Figure 38 Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman 1937, oil on canvas, 60 x 49cm. Tate Modern, London. 76. Figure 39 Apple ‘iPod Silhouettes’ 20002011, advertising campaign. Source: Sooke, Alastair. "Modern Masters: Why Modern Art Is Everywhere." The Telegraph, 27 April 2010. 77. Figure 40 Henri Matisse Icarus 194344, screenprint for Jazz, 42.2 x 65.7cm. The Art Gallery of New South Wales. 77. Figure 41 Ian Fairweather, Pelléas et Mélisande no date, synthetic polymer on board, 71.5 x 96cm. 79. Figure 42 Simon Degroot, Floating in a New Sky Design (detail) 2014, pencil and acrylic on paper, 10 x 200cm. 82. Figure 43 Simon Degroot, Floating in a New Sky 2014, synthetic polymer, 150 x 3000cm. Shaun Lockyer Architects and W22, Brisbane. 82. Figure 44 Simon Degroot, Floating in a New Sky 2014, designs layered in Adobe Photoshop. 83. Figure 45 Simon Degroot, Cove Dupont 2014, oil on canvas, 260 x 198cm. Moreton Bay Art Collection, Caboolture. 83. Figure 46 Simon Degroot, Shallow Space (installation view) 2014, Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA) Gallery, Canberra. 84. http://imgur.com/gallery/HUYPLX ix Figure 47 Simon Degroot, Shallow Space #03 2014, collage on paper, 25 x 35cm. 85. Figure 48 Simon Degroot, Shallow Space #04 2014, oil on board, 25 x 35cm. 85. Figure 49 Simon Degroot, Vintaged Bar Mural 2014, synthetic polymer, 500 x 900cm, Brisbane Hilton. 87. Figure 50 Landini Associates, Vintaged Bar Mural Design 2014, digital file. 87. Figure 51 William Jolly Bridge detail 2014, artist photograph, Brisbane. 89. Figure 52 Simon Degroot, sketch book page, 2014, graphite and collage on paper, 21 x 26cm. 89. Figure 53 Simon Degroot, Pillars Project Mural Design 2014, painted paper and collage on board, 19.5 x 15cm. 89. Figure 54 Simon Degroot, Pillars Project Mural 2014, exterior acrylic, 900 x 600cm, South Brisbane. 89. Figure 55 Lorna Jane, Active Warehouse 2016, printed flyer, 21 x 14.5cm. 90. Figure 56 Lorna Jane, Instagram image to promote Active Warehouse 2016. 90. Figure 57 Simon Degroot, Composite Orders Green 2015, oil on board, 20.5 x 15.5cm. 91. Figure 58 Simon Degroot, Composite Orders Magenta 2015, oil on board, 20.5 x 15.5cm. 91. Figure 59 Simon Degroot, Indirect Response 2015, installation view including, Composite Orders Green Screen 1, 2, and 3, Postgraduate and Other Projects (POP) Gallery, Griffith University. Photograph courtesy Louis Lim. 92. Figure 60 Simon Degroot, Indirect Response 2015, installation view, POP Gallery, Griffith University. Photograph courtesy Louis Lim. 94. Figure 61 Lady Cilento Exterior Façade 2014 Lyons Architecture, Brisbane. Source: http://www.lyonsarch.com.au/lady-cilento-children-s-hospital. 95. Figure 62 Simon Degroot, Cilento 2015, oil on canvas, 122 x 122cm. Lady Cilento Art Collection. 95. Figure 63 Simon Degroot, Indirect Response 2015, installation and detail view of Off Cuts (2015), POP Gallery, Griffith University. Photograph courtesy Louis Lim. 95. http://www.lyonsarch.com.au/lady-cilento-children-s-hospital x Figure 64 Simon Degroot, Indirect Response 2015, oil on canvas, 140 x 125cm. 97. Figure 65 Simon Degroot, Tint 2016, oil on canvas, 183 x 167cm. Private Collection. 97. Figure 66 Simon Degroot, Nundah Train Station Mural Design 2015, painted paper and collage, 12.5 x 40.5cm. 98. Figure 67 Simon Degroot, Nundah Train Station Mural 2015, exterior acrylic, 900 x 2400cm. 98. Figure 68 Simon Degroot, Purple Additions 2016, digital animation, dimensions variable. 100. Figure 69 Simon Degroot, Purple Additions 2016, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm. 100. Figure 70 Andy Warhol, Ten Foot Flowers 1967, synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas, 304.8 x 304.8cm. 101. Figure 71 Simon Degroot, Flower 2016, digital animation, dimensions variable. 101. Figure 72 Simon Degroot, Flower 2016, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm. 101. Figure 73 Simon Degroot, Picture Building 2016 (installation view), Kick Arts Contemporary Artspace, Cairns. 102. Figure 74 Simon Degroot, Picture Building 2016, oil on canvas, 244 x 183cm. 103. Figure 75 Simon Degroot, Sketchbook Page 2014, graphite on paper, 22 x 20cm. 106. Figure 76 Simon Degroot, Shape Poems 2017, laser-cut acrylic shapes, 50 x 35cm. 106. 1 Introduction Much contemporary abstract painting is closely connected to the culture of rapid image circulation and exchange that we live in. This distinguishes contemporary abstraction from the abstraction of other periods because forms of art and previous details are now continually available and searchable by electronic devices. The once non-figurative forms of Modernist abstraction have now become recognisable and familiar because of our contemporary experience of image sharing. In contemporary art and visual culture, shapes from historical abstraction that typically resisted interpretation are isolated and recast as familiar shapes. Artists sort through and choose these familiar and contingent everyday shapes for reuse in their own work. I refer to this process as a translation of form, which takes place from the original artwork to its digital dissemination, then into contemporary abstract painting. This exegesis investigates artists who have selected particular visual elements from art history and used them in their work. Of course, artists have a long history of using everyday image forms. For example, in 1863, Charles Baudelaire observed that artists “distil the eternal from the everyday” and advocated the ‘sketch’ as the most appropriate way to capture the “ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent”. 1 This sketch initiates a fundamental abstraction of everyday visual forms, an abstraction of shapes that is reflected in the studio practice of Modern artists. I propose that this rapid sketch embodies a methodology of translation through which one can investigate how artists distil images from the everyday, and how they use and reuse abstract forms in their work, creating a legacy of familiar abstract forms. In this thesis, this legacy is explored through two recent exhibitions in New York that compared and contrasted specific abstract works from art history with contemporary works to identify formal similarities and artistic influence. Picasso and American Art (2007) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Malevich and the American Legacy (2011) at Gagosian Gallery, brought together physical artworks at a time when one can see similar (virtual) comparative searches being easily performed by 1 Charles Baudelaire writes that early Modern artists turn away from historical and m ythical themes to focus on urban life and everyday activities. See Jonathan Mayne, ed., The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays by Charles Baudelaire (London: Phaidon Press, 1995). 2 anyone using the Internet and image search software. 2 Today, artists can search online and select, copy, and match isolated image details with their own work and in the process reanimate art historical and cultural forms and introduce them to new audiences. While comparisons such as these have always possible, it is now infinitely easier to see and search a broad range of images due to the power of search engines. Figure 1 Kazimir Malevich Black Square 1915, oil on canvas, 53 x 53cm. Figure 2 Ellsworth Kelly Black Square 1953, oil on wood, 110 x 110cm. While comparing artworks and images online is fast and superficial, comparing abstract artworks in the gallery is slow; however, doing this reveals subtle similarities and differences between artworks, highlighting a perceptual process of recognition. This process is a key concern for this research, which asks to what degree are painted forms recognised in abstract painting. In Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983), Norman Bryson writes, “Recognition involves a direct comparison between two terms, the anterior and the posterior occurrence. An act of recollection is performed: the new or present datum is referred to and placed alongside an earlier datum retrieved from memory.” 3 Bryson assigns recognition to a model of communication where details are matched according to degrees of resemblance. Comparing art historical works in the gallery reinforces their similarities and encourages us to recall other similarities from 2 For example, artist Paul Kremer uses Google Image Search for his series IMG_SRCH. Paul Kreme r James Turrell Red 2016, digital print on canvas, no size. http://imgsrch.tumblr.com/. 3 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (London, UK; New Haven, USA: The Macmillan Press Ltd; Yale University Press, 1983), 43. http://imgsrch.tumblr.com/ 3 memory. For example, the two exhibitions referred to above bring together Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921) with Stuart Davis’s Colonial Cubism (1953), and Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915, figure 1) with Ellsworth Kelly’s Black Square (1953, figure 2) to outline the various ways that artists have interpreted Picasso and Malevich or been influenced by them. Understanding the way that artists interpret images from art history is particularly pressing in our global environment because “so much of the art that interests us was produced in distant places and times”, 4 so in order for it to transcend time and space—to communicate to our contemporary lives—it must be interpreted, understood, and recognised. However, as Bryson writes, “recognition involves the activation of socially constructed and maintained codes”. 5 Recognition is particularly complicated in a contemporary global environment of mixed cultural codes. This research explores how abstract forms are recognised and perceived as they are translated using different technical and social codes. For example, Stuart Hall’s communication model, “Encoding, Decoding” (1999) “inserts a semiotic paradigm into a social framework”. Hall writes that for effective communication to occur, there must be some “reciprocity between encoding and decoding moments”, 6 and that any image (sign, text, or message) is recognised according to “the structure of social practices”. 7 That is, images are interpreted and sometimes transformed by a social and cultural performance of codes. This performative process of interpretation and decoding similarly occurs in literature. Hans-Georg Gadamer writes, “reading with understanding is always a kind of reproduction, performance and interpretation”, 8 a process that is active and prejudiced. Because a translation is a work of approximation and likeness, one who translates must have “a talent and some experience to perform it well”. 9 4 Karol Berger, A Theory of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 214. 5 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (London, UK; New Haven, USA: The Macmillan Press Ltd; Yale University Press, 1983), 39. 6 Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” Chapter 36 in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 515. 7 Ibid., 509. 8 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 160. 9 Ibid., 216. 4 Translation is normally understood as a literary process of rewriting an original text, an historical process of substitution and a search for equivalence. In “The Task of the Translator” (1923), Walter Benjamin writes that translations are in fact where “the life of the originals attains its latest, continually renewed, and most complete unfolding”. 10 In Translation/History/Culture (1992), André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett similarly write of an increasing process of exchange and manipulation in texts of all kinds and they also argue that translation is influenced by other cultural texts. As such, we can understand their account of translation as expanding on Walter Benjamin’s ideas. Lefevere and Bassnett write “translation can help us towards a greater awareness of the world in which we live”. 11 It is toward this awareness that this research is directed. A theory of translation can also be applied to the reuse and manipulation of abstract shapes. For example, painted shapes are reformed and manipulated by Modernist artists to different effect. Abstract forms that share an approximate or exact likeness do not always share the same meaning. In the catalogue essay for Malevich and the American Legacy, Yve-Alain Bois makes this point by discussing the different circumstances surrounding the development of Malevich’s Suprematist Black Square and Kelly’s Black Square, explaining that while they share a visual affinity, they are “entirely unrelated from a genetic point of view”. 12 Bois diagnoses this developmental difference as a case of pseudomorphosis, a term used by Erwin Panofsky to describe two analogous or identical forms that are entirely unrelated in their genesis. 13 As this example suggests, a comparison of art historical painted shapes that share formal similarities is complex, prone to confusion, but also open to the production of meaning. 10 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 255. 11 André Lefevere, Translation/History/Culture, ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), xi. 12 Bois classifies Ellsworth Kelly’s black square as a “transfer”, where “the art ist mechanically records something flat from the world at large”. Yve-Alain Bois, “The Availability of Malevich,” in Malevich and the American Legacy (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2011), 23. 13 Erwin Panofsky describes pseudomorphosis as “the emergence of a form A, morphologically analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view”. Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture (New York: Harry N Abrams, 1964), 26–27. 5 Translation can negotiate this complexity and account for the formal similarities between these works and any number of other black squares. Craig Owens writes that in postmodernism, we must negotiate a plurality of different cultural forms. Pluralism, he writes, “reduces us to being simply an other among others; it is not recognition, but a reduction of difference to absolute interchangeability”. 14 In postmodern culture, abstract painted forms are interchangeable—individual difference is absorbed in such a way that one black square is exchanged for another. However, when comparing abstract shapes reproduced online and in books, these kinds of subtle differences are important because they maintain the integrity and individuality of the work. The popularity and availability of Modernist reproductions, as well as everyday encounters with architectural forms in the built environment, have prepared contemporary audiences with the visual acuity to identify minor differences between abstract forms. Looking again at the example above, differences become exaggerated. The painted black squares exhibit many differences that separate their shared geometry. They differ in size, paint application, and their edges are different— Malevich’s are irregular and imperfect while Kelly’s are clean and exact. These differences are important because they connote a tightening or stiffening of abstract form from Modernism into postmodernism. Figure 3 Pablo Picasso Guitar and Sheet Music on a Pedestal 1920, gouache on paper, 22.8 x 29.1cm. Figure 4 Stuart Davis Egg Beater No. 1 1927, oil on canvas, 73.9 x 91.4cm. 14 Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1992), 167. 6 Other comparisons are less straightforward. In the catalogue essay for Picasso and American Art, Michael C. FitzGerald charts the influence of Picasso’s paintings in America. For example, he notes that Stuart Davis’s paintings in his ‘Egg Beater’ series are “based on the flat, brightly coloured geometries he had seen in Picasso’s gouaches at the Whitney Studio” 15 (figure 3) and that he employs a “playful combination of flat colours, patterns, and representational fragments” in his work (figure 4). 16 Davis’s Synthetic Cubist shapes are enriched by reference to other art “past and present” and contribute to building new American traditions albeit against criticisms of not being “original”. 17 These two works share many similarities in composition, shape overlay, colour relations, and technique. However, it is important to note that their differences are just as pronounced. For example, like the painted edges of Malevich’s Black Square, Picasso’s gouache shapes are imperfect while Davis’s shapes have clean and exact painted edges. As with the Malevich and Kelly examples above, these comparative differences communicate an emerging precision in abstract painting. My research explores the comparative differences between abstract shapes as they are translated from Modernism into contemporary abstract painting. My discussion of translation is based loosely around the painted flat shapes found in Russian Constructivism, Synthetic Cubism, Henri Matisse’s paper cut-outs, Hard Edge Painting, graphic design and computer desktop graphics. Also, I observe abstract shapes in architecture and the built environment to highlight how and where specific shapes appear and reappear in contemporary abstraction. While the strategies of translation described in this exegesis could be applied to a wide range of contemporary artistic practice, this research aims to locate repeated formal similarities and to consider how a concept of translation can assist in unpacking how contemporary abstract painting makes meaning through the use of shapes that recall earlier art and design from often diverse sources. I started this research to try to understand why some shapes in contemporary abstract painting can seem familiar to me even when I have not seen them before. While this 15 Michael C. FitzGerald, Picasso and American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2007), 73. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 119. In a 1929 article for the New York Sun, “Attractions in the Galleries”, Henri McBride criticised Stuart Davis for “painting French”. 7 description might sound vague, this search set me on a path of investigating my painting practice and interrogating the visual world around me. This exegesis explores how I have tested my perception and visual literacy in the studio and in large-scale murals, and what I have discovered about the relation of forms across time and space as expressed in abstract painting. Reflecting on my practice, I noticed that I paint shapes as a way to examine existing forms and respond to the world. I discovered at an early age that I had an interest and faculty for copying, and that drawing and painting were a good way to communicate. I observed and copied everyday childhood images of the sort that appear in cartoons, computers, magazines, art reproductions, and architecture. I observed and made simple drawings of things that appear like ideograms in my journal, arranged as a visual rebus (figure 5). Later, using these drawings to make paintings, I arranged individual elements on the canvas to tell a visual story. In this way, my early drawings and paintings were not about exact copying but about engaging particular image details from the world so as to build a visual vocabulary and to communicate through using these similar abstract shapes. Figure 5 Simon Degroot Sketch Book Page 2014, graphite on paper, 21 x 42cm. However, it is simplistic, even irresponsible, to suggest that shapes that share a visual and formal similarity in contemporary painting all communicate to audiences in the same way. Because the way we understand and decipher visual elements is culturally and socially determined, 18 this research will explore only visual affinities in the 18 In Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen study translations of Western visual designs that interact with “the specificities of locality, wherever global 8 translation of visual shapes from Western art history, visual culture and the built environment, and how they appear in my contemporary context. Finding shapes that look similar and have shared formal elements is an important part of this research. I think back to my early artistic development in the 1980s and Fredric Jameson’s famous description of reflexive copying in a superficial pastiche of surface and style; describing how in postmodernism, artists can only imitate “other styles”. 19 Thirty years later, contemporary culture is engaged in complex visual interactions. Artists and makers of visual culture wear “stylistic masks” 20 and reference other images, styles, or periods of the “imaginary museum”. 21 In this environment of cultural production, artists complicate a range of always-already mixed sources using processes, such as sampling, remixing, and remaking, to combine visual texts. This postmodern pastiche is complicated in contemporary visual culture when artists paint abstract shapes and where these forms are “contaminated” 22 with worldly concerns. In postmodern practices of hybridity and heterogeneity, artists identify, select, and use shapes in their work. In my early art practice in the 1990s, I experimented with visual samples: I copied and combined images and shapes from reproductions and paid special attention to the formal qualities of colour and shape. This copying was further galvanised when I worked as a commercial offset printer, mixing and matching colours and learning the mechanical processes of image reproduction. Throughout this time, I was laying the foundations for what seemed to be a practice of appropriation, of combining different image details to make new work. Indeed, an artistic program of appropriation and copying was closely aligned with Australian art practice at this time. In 1982, Paul Taylor curated Popism at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), which focused on artists working in “the second degree”; 23 that is, Western culture is the dominant culture”. Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images (London: Routledge, 1996), 4. 19 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 113. 20 Ibid., 114. 21 Ibid., 115. 22 Homi Bhabha, “Culture’s in Betweens,” Artforum 32, no. 1 (September 1993): 167. 23 Rex Butler describes appropriation as a postmodern art form that is particularly a ligned with Australian culture and identity, since our experience of the world is often through mediated images. He outlines this in response to Paul Taylor’s seminal exhibition Popism at the NGV in 1982; Rex Butler, ed., What Is Appropriation? An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art in the 1980s & 1990s, 2nd ed. 9 artists who were engaging with popular culture as a source of styles to be “superficially scavenged and redeployed”. 24 Artworks were made in response to an expanded field of visual culture and artists foregrounded their sources so as to emphasise meaning. Like their Pop Art predecessors, these artists “boldly use the most recognizable quotations”, 25 taking images and fragments from art history and visual culture and using them in their own work. The way these artists made use of image details developed alongside the rise of technology and methods of image reproduction. Artists accessing the emergent capabilities of the Internet and its always-accessible archive of images made contemporary art that, according to Hans Belting, “manifests an awareness of a history of art but no longer carries it forward”. 26 This decline of the forward momentum of the Western art historical narrative is liberating because it opens a space where artists can play with, rearrange, and remake images and details from art history in order to create new work. This exegesis discusses artists who emerge from this art-historical-narrative decline, appropriating decontextualised image fragments to recreate and make works that are newly relevant with changed meanings. Arthur C. Danto confirms “it is part of what defines contemporary art that the art of the past is available for such use as artists care to give it”. 27 This opens the possibility for contemporary art to become post-historical, to be made, as Belting argues, “without the benefit of a reassuring sort of narrative in which it was seen as the appropriate next stage of the story”. 28 This exegesis locates the post-historical in contemporary abstract art that engages in the “philosophy or logic” 29 of appropriation rather than adopting it as a style. That is, appropriation needs to be redefined for contemporary practice as more accurately belonging to a process of translation, because, while artists continue to use existing images, they are also changing these cultural texts and representing them in novel ways. (Brisbane: IMA Publishing, 2004). See also Paul Taylor (ed.). Anything Goes: Art in Australia 1970– 1980, (Melbourne: Art & Text, 1984), and Anneke Jaspers, “Art of the Second Degree: Post Pop and Popism,” In Pop to Popism (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2014). 24 Jaspers, “Art of the Second Degree,” 234. 25 Jean Lipman and Richard Marshall, Art about Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978). 26 Hans Belting in Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 4–5. 27 Danto, After the End of Art, 5. 28 Ibid., 4–5. 29 Butler, What Is Appropriation?, 15. 10 Nicolas Bourriaud redefines a methodology of appropriation for contemporary art. In Postproduction (2002), he describes how contemporary artists create work using “objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market”. 30 He writes that artists are working “well beyond” appropriation to erode distinctions between “production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work”. 31 In The Radicant (2009), he further elaborates these ideas, proposing that contemporary artists should “set themselves the task of effacing their origin in favour of a multitude of simultaneous or successive enrooting”. 32 Bourriaud focuses on strategies of meaningful exchange, a contemporary responsibility that is explored in this research as artists search for ways to translate images and ideas in a communicative exchange. The possibility of painting after appropriation occurred to me serendipitously one day in 2004 when I was working as a commercial printer. At the time, the press I was working for was printing the second edition of What Is Appropriation? An Anthology of Writings in Australian Art in the 1980s & 1990s, Rex Butler’s anthology of essays on Australian postmodernism. While reading the book’s introduction at the printing press, I took note of the following point made by Butler: a work of art does not record an original experience, but rather presents “a translation of this experience from one language to another”. 33 This quotation—relying heavily on the semiotic meaning of images and recalling Roland Barthes’s “ceaselessly deferred” identity of form from his essay “Is Painting a Language?” (1985) 34 —resonated with me at the time and it informs the central argument of this exegesis. That is, by introducing translation as a term to describe a process of visual abstraction, I am aligning abstract painting with a visual communication from ‘one language to another’. Translation is not a neutral process, but embodies a type of manipulation where the painted artwork both recreates existing meaning and creates new meaning. This is one of the arguments that Jacques Derrida makes in The Truth in Painting (1987) where he writes, “it is the principal example, the unique specimen which gives meaning and 30 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, trans. Jeanine Herman, ed. Caroline Schneider (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002), 13. 31 Ibid. 32 Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009), 22. 33 Ibid., 18. 34 Roland Barthes, “Is Painting a Language?” trans. Richard Howard, in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation (Toronto: Collins Publishers, 1985). 11 orientates the multiplicity”. 35 This creates potential confusion, however, because the translated form is separated from any concepts “which belong to it or are specifically reserved for it”; 36 in other words, it is decontextualised. Translation in abstraction necessarily requires a review of the semiotic value of formal shapes, to think further about what they mean. Abstract painted shapes are seldom arbitrary; rather, as pointed out by Kress and van Leeuwen, they are motivated signs created by the artist during the act of making. They describe that “sign-makers use the forms they consider apt for the expression of their meaning”. 37 Even the abstract circular shapes drawn by children have meaning and metaphorically ‘stand in’ for something else. Indeed, when discussing a translation of abstract shapes in my own work, I argue that metaphors are particularly useful. However, the most common type of image translation is not metaphorical but rather a literal one enacted through technically or mechanically mediated image reproduction; for example, by the computer screen (digital) or printed media (analogue). This kind of reproduction is particularly useful in contemporary abstraction and implicates Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), 38 Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage (1967), 39 and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972). 40 These texts, among others, provide an important introduction to the various ways that audiences navigate a dynamic circulation of visual image forms where shapes and ‘texts’ are not fixed but ‘float’. For instance, of televisual images, Susan Sontag writes that the “image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content. Image-flow precludes a privileged image.” 41 Similarly, in Convergence Culture (2008), Henry Jenkins writes that today “content flows across multiple media channels”, 42 releasing contemporary culture from any medium specificity. This 35 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 42. 36 Ibid., 41. 37 Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images, 8. 38 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin Group, 2008; orig. pub. 1936). 39 Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1967). 40 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Great Britain: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books Ltd, 1972). 41 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 94. 42 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 254. 12 statement is important to my research as it maps the complex interactions that artists have with existing images that are simultaneously present in the studio, online, and in the built environment, suggesting how abstraction is disseminated in contemporary visual culture. Being able to navigate, organise, and arrange multiple texts, and to search, identify, retrieve, and connect discrete cultural objects in a visual ecology is identified by many as critical to understanding contemporary visual culture. 43 Looking at, or ‘reading’ visual images, produces a considerable visual vocabulary of images and shapes. As Jacques Rancière argues, “‘abbreviated forms’ are, in their very principle, an aesthetic and political division of a shared world without hierarchy where functions slide into one another”. 44 For Rancière, visual literacy and an ability to identify the relevant mix of sources that make up cultural outputs is a foundational skill in contemporary culture. Identifying and recognising intertextual visual references in images from art history and broader Western culture is dependent on many factors (including cultural exposure, age, education, and interests). I use the term ‘recognition’ to describe the relative degree of figured meaning in translated shapes and extend this term when meaning becomes confused beyond recognition—for example, in mistranslation. Hall’s televisual model is particularly useful here again, suggesting that there are “degrees of ‘understanding’ and ‘misunderstanding’”, 45 which are attributed mainly to a lack of equivalence between encoding and decoding ‘moments’ in a communicative exchange. Translation occurs in the studio as pre-existing and rapidly moving shapes and image forms are arrested and reformed in new work. In many ways, art historical examples of appropriation and reproduction are antithetical to the practice of translation of abstract shapes described in this exegesis. The former deals in discrete image details 43 See Barthes, “Is Painting a Language?”; Jean Baudrillard “The Ecstasy of Communication,” trans. John Johnson, in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 126–34; Bourriaud, The Radicant; Bourriaud, Postproduction; James Elkins, “What Are We Seeing, Exactly?” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 2 (1997): 191–98; Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”; David Jose lit, After Art, ed. Sarah Whiting (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013); and W. J. T. Mitchell What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 44 Jacques Rancière, “The Surface of Design,” in The Future of the Image (London: Verso, 2009), 107. 45 Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” chap. 36 in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 510. 13 while the latter apprehends fleeting and sometimes virtual image impressions. Translation as a process and concept is a useful model to explore how these rapidly moving image forms change in a culture of image sharing and exchange. This discussion is organised into three chapters. Chapter 1 surveys abstract shapes in Modernism and considers four abstract paintings from art history. I discuss how early Modern artists recreate the real and imaginary as contoured flat shapes that are assembled, out of context, on the surface of their work. I align this process with a strategy of manipulation where abstract shapes are decontextualised and estranged from their original use and recognisability. This abstraction of the figurative is similar to processes adopted by early commercial printmaking for the purpose of visual communication and the dissemination of images, including political commentary and satire in the popular press. Demonstrating the similarity of these techniques, I propose that the abstracted forms in Modernist painting increasingly became part of an emerging visual culture centred on the communicative image. I also argue that abstract shapes change as they transition between painted and printed material states and that translation is an appropriate metaphor for this change. I expand this metaphor of translation to include ways that abstract shapes were manipulated to advance ideas of authority and power at the time of early abstraction. Chapter 2 discusses how samples and shapes from Modern abstract painting find their way into contemporary painting and are recognised as familiar. I consider more recent artwork examples to illustrate how contemporary artists employ a methodology of translation in their work. I explain how translation is different from other more conventional types of image quotation or copying associated with appropriation art, in that artists assert their own authorial presence while reconstituting an existing author by making use of already existing imagery. I expand my discussion of the dissemination of images in commercial printing from Chapter 1 to include abstract shapes within contemporary global image ecologies. I describe how artists interact with and incorporate architectural shapes from the built environment and screen- based images using software in new paintings and large-scale murals. I explore why some abstract shapes are more popular than others in visual communication and put forward a hypothesis that translated shapes can feel familiar without being easily recognised in contemporary abstract painting. 14 Chapter 3 details my studio methodology and outcomes. I argue that artists employing contemporary abstraction use formal strategies of visual rhyme and metonymy as a kind of referential game with artists from other time periods. I propose that an appropriate studio methodology for this cultural production consists of identification, selection, and translation of visual elements in contemporary abstraction. In my practice, I turn existing visual elements from diverse sources into painted motifs as a way to reanimate shapes from art history and visual culture. I extrapolate these ideas in the context of my studio practice, outlining key projects that explore methods of translation to create new work. I conclude with a detailed summary of my research and how an approach to contemporary art through the metaphor of translation in language can assist in the analysis and production of contemporary abstract painting in the studio. In particular, that a methodology of translation is ideally placed to communicate with contemporary visual culture because the best contemporary abstraction is expedient, seductive, playful, and communicative in ways that privilege exchange and multiplicity. 15 Chapter 1 Modernist Shapes in Abstract Painting …my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1948 1 It is after all possible for two things to resemble one another with radically different meanings… —Arthur C. Danto, 1974 2 Things objectively unlike can strike us as very similar, and things objectively rather similar can strike us as hopelessly unlike. There is no way of finding out except by trial and error, in other words, through painting. —E. H. Gombrich, 1977 3 Abstract painting is such a large field of study that it is useful to approach it as a series of narratives. The purpose of this discussion is not to document the history of abstract painting but rather to explore some narratives of abstraction to provide an art historical context for my own studio practice. It is organised into three sections. In the first section, I discuss the art-historical process of abstracting real world forms into simple shapes, and then discuss how these shapes become vehicles for meaning. I turn to a ‘materialist formalism’, which Yve-Alain Bois notes, “seeks to grasp the means of production in its slightest detail”. 4 In the second section, I consider how the commercially printed replica affects Modernist painting. Informed by my experience of working for a time as a commercial offset printer, I propose that when artisans transcribed paintings into printed replicas, they inadvertently helped to develop a common visual literacy for abstracted forms. I then introduce translation as a more accurate metaphor for this process and in the third section describe the power of abstract shapes in a process of visual translation. Early Modern painting is intimately connected with industrial development and cultural change. European and American artists simultaneously challenged imitative illusion while undertaking a new kind of painting that quickly developed in many new 1 In Maurice O’Connor Drury, The Danger of Words and Writings on Wittgenstein, ed. D. Berman, M. Fitzgerald, and J. Hayes (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996), 157. 2 Arthur Danto, “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33, no. 2 (1974): 140. 3 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study of the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 5th ed. (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 279. 4 Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Massachusetts: October, 1990), xix. 16 directions: towards a reduction of natural appearances to essential forms, towards a construction of formal non-representative elements, and later towards spontaneous expression. Alfred H. Barr captured his view of these developments in a diagram created for Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Artists working toward abstraction transformed the visual grammar of painting, graphic design, illustration, commercial art, and architecture. This chapter details some of this transformation and interrelation by way of art historical analysis in order to reveal the repeated use of particular forms. The following four paintings from the early history of Western abstraction use the type of flat shapes that are important in this research: Georges Braque’s Violon et Pipe (Le Quotidien) (Violin and Pipe [The Everyday]) (1913–1914, figure 6); Pablo Picasso’s Head of a Man with a Hat (1912, figure 7); Kazimir Malevich’s Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension (1915, figure 8); and Henri Matisse’s Le Lagon (1947, figure 9). During the early years of the twentieth century, Picasso and Braque worked together and developed their papiers collés. These include semi-abstracted flat shapes, charcoal drawings, cut and pasted paper, and newspaper clippings. 5 The Cubist shapes in these works overlap and connect with one another on the white surface of the paper. These Cubist collage techniques were also a partial influence for Malevich’s small Suprematist paintings, where he painted flat shapes as if they are cut and pasted. Removing all figurative elements, Malevich pursued non-figurative colour and shape relationships, aiming for “the reality of existence: pure feeling”. 6 It could also be said that Matisse captured pure feeling in a similar way as he cut and pasted his memories of Tahiti, resulting in an approximation of form. He used the abstract organic shapes of his late oeuvre to illustrate a screenprinted page for the publication Jazz. I have chosen these works because they reveal the beginnings of a visual repertoire of shapes in visual culture that look the same or similar, but on closer inspection do not signify or mean the same thing. 5 See Leah Dickerman, “Inventing Abstraction,” in Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, ed. David Frankel (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 1237. 6 Larry Gagosian, Malevich and the American Legacy (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2011), 11. 17 Figure 6 Georges Braque Violon et Pipe (Le Quotidien) (Violin and Pipe [The Everyday]) 1913, chalk, charcoal, imitation wood, and pasted paper, 74 x 196cm. Figure 7 Pablo Picasso Head of a Man with a Hat 1912, cut-and-pasted newspaper and coloured paper, ink, and charcoal on paper, 62.2 x 47.3cm. 1.1 Simplification, Construction, and Design These abstract artworks share common formal strategies of simplification, construction, and design that were developed and sustained in Modernism. Early European Moderns were finding new ways to conceptualise and represent the fast- paced and increasingly fragmented nature of early modern life. In particular, artists responded to the developing technology of the camera and film, questioning the nature of vision and turning their attention to established traditions of painting. Arguably, the most established tradition attacked by Modern artists is the nature of mimetic representation, as demonstrated by Picasso and Braque in their search for new ways to represent the visible world. Braque’s Violon et Pipe (Le Quotidien) introduces fundamental challenges to representation during the early years of Synthetic Cubism by collaging fragments and painting simplified details to represent still life objects. An abstract shape or a real piece of fabric in an artwork is sometimes meant as a stand in for the whole object, a metonym. Krauss observes that cut and collaged fragments from real things in fact become a synecdoche for real life, that “the slightest representational 18 information…[gives] more rather than less information about the world”. 7 The individual components of the work together communicate meaning. Along with Picasso, Braque pioneered the construction of new papier collés techniques. Through their works, Braque and Picasso attacked traditions of painting, particularly by making use “of ‘prefabricated’ stuff and the most ordinary, everyday materials”. 8 In Violon et Pipe (Le Quotidien), Braque has attached real objects such as newsprint, imitation wood veneer, and coloured paper. As the title of this work suggests, Braque aimed to leave representation behind to achieve a greater intimacy with real life and the everyday. Braque elevates the status of everyday materials in this work by including different papers and imitation wood, cutting them into shapes, and arranging them on a drawing of an oval table. Each of the cut shapes separately signifies something in the still life. The imitation wood is understood as ‘table’, the piece of wallpaper is understood as ‘tablecloth’, the newspaper headline cut out refers to the whole newspaper, and, finally, the black paper shape signifies ‘violin’. This abstracted and flattened still life leaves behind traditional modes of representation, conventions such as the depiction of light, the modelling of three dimensions, and, perhaps more importantly, the representation of the illusion of space. Braque famously remarked, “To be pure imitation, painting must make an abstraction of appearances.” 9 While this might seem a pithy statement about attempts to make sense of the rapidly changing landscape of the early twentieth century, it also reveals something of the nature of painting and its long history of imitation. Abstracting the appearance of everyday objects meant that Braque could reconstruct individual forms in his collage. This is a useful development for this research because it liberates everyday objects from their physical materiality and allows the artist a kind of agency to reconstruct the world on the surface of the canvas by way of abstracted appearances. 7 Dickerman, “Inventing Abstraction,” 29. 8 Serge Fauchereau, “Papiers Collés,” in Braque (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1987), 1921. 9 Edward F. Fry, “Georges Braque: Thoughts on Painting 1917,” in Cubism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), 147. 19 The way that Violon et Pipe (Le Quotidien) communicates is by exploiting the readability of “pictorial signs”, 10 elements in the work that operate together as a series of symbols to be ‘read’. Bois cites Picasso and Braque’s dealer and art historian, Daniel Henri Kahnweiler, who writes, These painters turned away from imitation because they had discovered that the true character of painting and sculpture is that of a script. The products of these arts are signs, emblems, for the external world, not mirrors reflecting the external world in a more or less distorting manner. 11 Understood in this way, the abstracted shapes in Braque’s Violon et Pipe (Le Quotidien) are not to be understood as a picture of a violin or a picture of a pipe but rather as individual signs that refer to ‘violin’ or ‘pipe’. This separates the papier collés from questions of painterly verisimilitude and instead locates them squarely in the field of visual semiotics, aligning their imagery with the readability of the visual and visual literacy. Picasso also challenged pictorial representation in his Synthetic Cubist papier collé, Head of a Man with a Hat. Picasso saw the semiotic potential of abstracted shapes to be ‘read’ by the spectator. In The Picasso Papers (1999), Rosalind Krauss locates this semiology in the flatness of collage and the “level of the sign: front, solid, shape; behind, transparent, surround”. 12 Writing about the abstract forms of Head of a Man with a Hat, Krauss (adopting the semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure) describes a binary paradigm where “the ‘same’ physical shape” 13 has two opposite meanings. In Painting as Model (1990), Bois writes that Picasso systematically reduced “his plastic system to a handful of signs, none referring univocally to a referent, caus[ing] their value to meet with numerous significations”. 14 In these works, the black shape signifying ‘hair’ is visually similar to Braque’s black shape that signifies ‘violin’. This is important to this research where similar abstract forms reappear in different contexts and with altered meanings. 10 Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Massachusetts: October, 1990), 82. 11 Daniel Henri Kahnweiler in ibid., 74. 12 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 28. 13 Ibid. 14 Bois, Painting as Model, 90. 20 Figure 8 Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension 1915, oil on canvas, 71.1 x 44.5cm. Figure 9 Henri Matisse Le Lagon (The Lagoon) 1947, screenprint for Jazz, plate XVIII, 64.8 x 41.6cm. Malevich’s painted geometric shapes embody the numerous significations of Synthetic Cubism; however, because they are less specific or particular than the shapes used by Picasso or Braque they exacerbate the polysemy of abstract form. For The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (1915–1916), Malevich assembled coloured planes in a desire to surpass the conceptual breakthroughs of Cubism, “on Suprematist canvases, ‘painterly masses’ translate into pictorial planes, which derive from Cubist collage but have acquired a generative autonomy”. 15 Malevich asserted that his geometric shapes surpassed mimetic illusion, arguing that they constituted “New Painterly Realism”, 16 which held supremacy over the forms in nature. For Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, Malevich composed a black square and a red square painted on a white background. Malevich used the title of this work to encourage audiences to ‘read’ the painting in a particular way. This work challenges representation because the painted squares do not easily align with the artwork’s title – the two painted squares may indicate the boy and his knapsack but do not share a figurative resemblance. This painting, like the collage works described above, is formed by the interrelationship of individual component parts. Malevich’s individual shapes do not refer to signifiers that are external to the work but are a direct presentation of painterly masses. 15 Masha Chlenova, “0.10.,” in Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 edited by David Frankel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 208. 16 Ibid., 207. 21 This directness of painterly mass is an important foundation of abstract painting, foregrounding the material properties of the painted form, Malevich rejects any reference to things in the world, turning instead to numbers and semiotics. Writing about this work in Picture Theory (1994), Mitchell describes the “language game of abstract art”, making a distinction between “there is a … red square” and not a “picture of a red … square”. 17 Mitchell argues that the real world becomes a narrative surrounding abstract painting. He writes that in order to understand abstract painting, “language, narrative, and discourse can never—should never—be excluded from it”. 18 The fundamental difference here separating Picasso and Braque’s abstract paintings from Malevich’s abstract painting is that Malevich paints less-readable pictorial signs. In Malevich’s Painterly Realism, the red and black painted squares become a simplification and construction of a new world—one that would soon provide its own pictorial references in, for example, the rectilinear architecture in the International Style. In the collage Le Lagon, Matisse also used simplified forms to evoke a memory of his travels to Tahiti. As with the works discussed above, for this work, Matisse arranged individual coloured shapes on a white background so that meaning emerges from their interrelation. The shapes in this work are more suggestive than Malevich’s black and red squares and, like Picasso’s handful of shapes that meet “numerous significations”, they adopt “a multitude of significations”. 19 The shapes constitute a suggestive and semi-abstract “visual language”. 20 For example, the undulating curves recall natural vegetal forms. They become part of a “repertory of cut forms” 21 used by Matisse in his late works. Similar abstract shapes can be made to mean different things. In Philosophical Investigations (1953), Ludwig Wittgenstein introduces the notion of “family resemblances” to highlight the way that language is sometimes a “complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing”. 22 We use these similarities to 17 W. J. T. Mitchell “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and Lan guage,” chap. 7 in Picture Theory (Chicago: London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 225, original emphasis. 18 Ibid., 226. 19 Samantha Friedman, “Avant La Lettre,” in Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, ed. Nicholas Cullinan, Karl Buchberg, Jodi Hauptman, and Nicholas Serota (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 89. 20 Ibid., 87. 21 Ibid., 89. 22 See sections 6667 of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1997; orig. pub. 1953), 32e. 22 classify individual things that are connected by a common name. Wittgenstein emphasises that confusion arises in communication because language lacks clarity and precision. He argues that the same word can have different meanings depending on how it is used. 23 In a discussion with Maurice Drury, he says, “Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different.” 24 Wittgenstein’s comments are pertinent to my approach to art; my aim is to show that abstracted shapes, just like words, can have a multiplicity of meanings, depending on how they are used. This brief outline of four works of early Modernism has helped to introduce the two fundamental concerns of this research. Firstly, that one path to abstraction is to simplify observations, memories, or ideas of things from the real world, creating abstract forms that continue to communicate meaning as they relate with other forms⎯both as symbols from the world and part of the world. Secondly, that individual abstract shapes can look similar to each other but not necessarily mean the same thing. This is because artists are selecting shapes made available due to the emerging visual ecology associated with the printed image. In the next section, I argue that the commercially printed image is central to creating an image economy of easily accessible forms. Modernist abstract shapes are familiar features in contemporary design, architecture, and painting. As Mitchell notes, abstract art “probably has more institutional and cultural power as a rearguard tradition than it ever did as an avant-garde overturning of tradition”. 25 That is, the utopian or spiritual aims embedded in Modernist abstract shapes have been abandoned as their superficial elements have been reassigned as stylistic form, influencing contemporary art and design. For this reason, it is important to develop a more nuanced understanding of abstract painting and to identify how contemporary artists have copied and changed abstract shapes over time. 23 This is particularly evident in other non-English European languages such as French, which has fewer words but more potential meanings. 24 Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990), 536. 25 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 214. 23 The history of painting is also a history of influences. It is an exciting path of discovery to observe and speculate visual similarities across works and to untangle this complex web. However, because abstract paintings are hard to “decipher”, 26 it is more difficult to attribute their influences. Comparing artworks and identifying similarities to suggest that one may have influenced another is normally aligned with a postmodern understanding of appropriation. According to the catalogue for Art about Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978, an appropriation artist is one whose methodology is to “boldly use the most recognizable quotations” in their work in order to “deliberately encourage the viewer to participate in discovering the genesis of the work”. 27 This aligns a practice of appropriation with recognisability and a conspicuous display of already painted forms. However, as discussed here, the visual similarities between Picasso and Davis, or Malevich and Kelly, are not conspicuous, easily recognisable, or bold, and are therefore not aligned with a postmodern understanding of appropriation. Contemporary artists are similarly engaged with a practice that engages sources that are not easily recognisable or conspicuous, by using multiple forms that are easily accessible through devices searching the Internet. This allows for greater interpretation and manipulation but also ensures that the artist becomes part of what Leo Steinberg calls “the historic relay”. 28 Using the Internet, artists reference the once-unrecognisable elements of Modernist abstraction, turning them into recognisible objects and forms in contemporary abstraction. 1.2 Transcription and Translation Abstract shapes relate to one another, sharing a visual similarity that is separate from postmodern appropriation. There are many ways to describe artistic copying; for example, homage, reference, influence, transposing, stealing, etc. However, to better 26 Leah Dickerman notes that for abstract artists such as Picasso and Picabia, “the work’s indecipherability was played out in the press, the subject of jest”. Dickerman, “Inventing Abstraction,” 17. 27 Jean Lipman and Richard Marshall, Art About Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978), 7. 28 Leo Steinberg, “The Glorious Company,” in Art About Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978), 9. 24 understand this type of practice, it is useful to look at a history of visual transcription and literary translation. I discuss these terms below with reference to Stephen Bann’s Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in 19 th Century France (2001), 29 André Lefevere’s Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992), 30 and Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (1921). 31 Visual transcription is a process of copying or recreating an otherwise ephemeral, discrete, individual event, utterance, or creative artwork into another medium for the purpose of dissemination. Bann describes transcription as an art-historical process, a tool for engravers to copy—or transfer—a painted artwork interminably ‘inscribed’ on copper for the purposes of producing commercially available prints. 32 To understand this art-historical practice of transcription, it is useful to consider the ways that printmaking, painting, and photography influenced each other in the nineteenth century as emerging processes of image reproduction. It is revealing to see how the printed replica resembles or deviates from the original artwork at a time when artists frequently made copies of their own paintings. 33 A history of the printed image is an ideal model with which to demonstrate how artists move from representation into abstraction. Literary translation is a process of converting an original text into another language so that it becomes accessible to new audiences. Translation thus shares with transcription its intent to disseminate. Importantly, however, translation cannot be evaluated according to such ideals as equivalence or synonymy because, as Lefevere writes, “all rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain ideology and a poetics and as such manipulate literature to function in a given society in a given way”. 34 To translate is to exercise power and control over what should and should not 29 Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in 19th Century France (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2001). 30 André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (USA and Canada: Routledge, 1992). 31 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 25363. 32 Bann, Parallel Lines, 2. 33 This early exploration of the printed image represents a commitment to the later media theory of Marshall McLuhan who writes, “all media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms”. Marshall McLuhan, “Media as Translators,” chap. 6 in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Routledge, 2001), 63. 34 André Lefevere, Translation/History/Culture, ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (London and 25 be included in a translated work. Literary works are also changed when translated into other languages. For example, the translation of poetry is also a manipulation of meaning that results in a text where “something gets lost”. 35 I propose that translation is a useful metaphor to describe the way that contemporary abstract forms relate to one another. 1.2.1 Transcription and the Printed Image The emerging middle class in nineteenth-century France represented a new and large audience for art. The development of the public art museum combined with increased leisure and disposable income of the bourgeoisie saw an emergence of a public appreciation for art. The increased popularity of exhibitions and artworks presented a challenge to printmakers and later photographers to accurately reproduce copies of paintings for publication in the popular press and for promotional sale. However, Bann describes reproduction as “first and foremost carried out by artists, whether it involves a process of conversion of the image … within a specified medium, or a transfer of the image from one medium to another”. 36 He describes this reproduction as motivated by an artist’s desire for an increased ‘diffusion’ of their work, to spread printed images of their work beyond the studio in order to reach new audiences. This is significant for my own research, as abstracted forms leave the studio in different material states. Throughout history, artists have employed different types of reproduction techniques to disseminate copies of their works. In early guild-based atelier or studio training, pupils made replicas of their masters’ works by hand to practice their craft. These were often signed by the masters and sold as their own work creating confusion for contemporary historians. 37 It is not strictly studio training that concerns this research but rather the change from hand-made reproductions to mechanical reproduction introduced by mass printing techniques. Bann identifies how the printed image “from the primitive woodcut to the development of etching and engraving … has given New York: Routledge, 1992), xi. 35 Ibid., 99. 36 Bann, Parallel Lines, 15. 37 See Rembrandt Research Project (website), http://www.rembrandtresearchproject.org/. http://www.rembrandtresearchproject.org/ 26 progressively enhanced power of multiplication to the visual image over the centuries”. 38 Walter Benjamin also describes how, with lithography, printing reached an irreversible stage of “growing intensity” in nineteenth-century France, 39 a time just before photography, where hand-made copies struggled to meet the demands of printing technology. This irreversible stage in the development of the printed image exemplifies how a process of transcription and reproduction can function as a visual and cultural phenomenon. Importantly, in order to disseminate their work, artists engaged the services of skilled printmakers. Bann describes how, following the 1834 Paris Salon, Paul Delaroche (1797–1856) engaged the art publisher House of Goupil and printmaker Paul Mercuri to produce a painstaking burin engraving of his painting The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833). At the same time, rival publishers Magasin pittoresque and Magasin universal also rushed to produce copies of Delaroche’s popular exhibition for publication and sale in the catalogue. These secondary versions, both of which are titled Jane Grey (1834), “sacrificed the nuances of physiognomy in the interests of a crude, but visually effective, distribution of highlights”. 40 Because each of these printers needed to move quickly in order to be at the front of the market, these reproductions of the painted artwork are derivative or poor copies of the original. The printer took liberties with the reproduction in order to distribute the copies of the artwork as soon as possible. In the wood engraving for the catalogue, tonal areas are flattened, and outlines are transcribed as flat shapes. While Bann cites many examples where the printed engraving achieves a status as the “definitive reproduction” of a painting, it is “the very ‘fecundity’ of the proliferating modes of image-making” 41 that concerns this research. The modes of image making that Bann describes made it possible for artists such as Delaroche to be a new kind of artist, one who always works “with a view to reproducibility”. 42 New printing and publishing avenues enabled artists to disseminate their work reproduced as simple lines and flat shapes. 38 Bann, Parallel Lines,15. 39 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin Group, 2008; orig. pub. 1936), 3. 40 Bann, Parallel Lines, 33. 41 Ibid., 30. 42 Ibid., 39. 27 Therefore, the nineteenth century saw a new kind of artist emerge—one who considered the bourgeoning printing technologies while making paintings in the studio. The Modern artists introduced at the start of this chapter had access to a new type of image: the reproduced, derivative, and relatively abstracted copy. Printed reproductions of images reproduced as simplified outlines and flat shapes—abstracted images that share similar techniques as those used by avant-garde artists who produced artwork at the beginning of the twentieth century. Accompanying the newly expanded audience for art also existed “a great French culture press”, new publishing avenues that represented an alternative to the salons and dealers as a way to disseminate artworks and ideas. 43 Indeed, it is in this “self- consciously avant-garde” press that Louis Vauxcelles coined the title ‘Cubism’. 44 This enlarged and complex market offered painters a variety of ways to relate to their cultures, and, as Bann describes, it is toward this market that Picasso directed his efforts. In addition to the cultural press, Michael Baxandall explains the historical importance of “widely and visually circulated” 45 engravings in securing commissions. However, as Bann writes, the reproduced artwork image should also be understood for the way it effected a change in the artwork’s “philosophical and social identity”. 46 What is noteworthy here is that, from the nineteenth century onward, the transcribed image became liberated from the studio. As it moved from painted image to printed replica, the image becomes an interdisciplinary object that is also more autonomous. The transcription of engravings for publication in the popular press occupies a unique position in the developing technological accuracy of the reproducible image. This unique position is at the threshold of change because, as I have described, the reproduced or transcribed image differs from and changes the original. The ‘abridged’ transcription detailed above that sacrifices detail in the name of expediency is particularly interesting. There is discrimination between the replica and the copy in nineteenth-century France: “replicas sometimes show slight differences with regard to 43 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 52. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 53. 46 Bann, Parallel Lines, 3. 28 the original, but if these differences are quite important, one should speak rather of a new version”. 47 These visible differences were described as “bad copies”, “derivative images”, and “line drawings”. 48 The implication is that these transcribed images are inferior ‘translations’ of the original paintings. That paintings were abridged and simplified for reproduction in the emerging commercial printing industry in nineteenth-century France is particularly useful for this research of the abstracted image form, as it provides an opportunity to observe how transcribed images differ from the original and to what degree they are abstracted. The printed transcription replaced the individual painting in a new cultural age of popularised reproductions and prompted the move toward today’s image economy of seemingly endless exchange. The popularisation of the image was achieved using modern means of commercial printing. A substitution of the multiple for the singular is the topic of Benjamin’s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, where he welcomes a loss of aura and authenticity for the sake of reproducibility. 49 However, as Bann importantly notes when observing a printmaker’s preparatory drawing of the Mona Lisa in 1859, “for the visitors to the studio, ‘aura’ was temporarily invested in an object that epitomised one of the specific stages of the reproductive process”. 50 For the printed image of the nineteenth century, perhaps aura and authenticity are relative. In this example, aura is independent of the individual painting and momentarily embodied in the abstracted and transcribed form. The popularisation of images that occurred because of transcription is worth exploring; Mitchell describes it as ‘the pictorial turn’, whereby the visual image became the dominant vehicle of communication in modern society. 51 This pictorial turn includes drawings and caricatures that appeared in the popular press of nineteenth-century France. For example, while the printed copy of Jane Grey abstracted the image and ‘sacrificed the nuances of physiognomy’ in the name of expediency, David Summers observes an opposite exaggeration of the image in 47 Leo Ewals, cited in Bann, Parallel Lines, 26. 48 Bann, Parallel Lines, 31. 49 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 50 Ibid., 17. 51 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria.” 29 caricature which “is closely related to physiognomy”. 52 Like the expedited reproductions of high art, caricature is rooted in Modernist problems of visual representation and popular visual communication. The developing mass media in France employed artisans to recreate popular paintings as engravings for popular consumption. At times, these artisans took liberties with the image to expedite its reproduction or, as I shall show, to adjust the reproduction toward the idealised or aesthetic—or, as is the case with caricature, toward the individualistic, ugly, and arrestingly singular. 53 In other words, acts of transcription are not accurate reproductions at all but contain the personal style of the artisan. No matter how practiced the artisan is in their craft or how considered the reproduction, a work will always include the individual temperament and ‘point of view’ of the maker: the hand-made replica is always a subjective reaction. 54 I call this changed hand-made replica a translation of the original. As with translating from one language to another, when an image is manipulated and changed in this way, something gets lost. 1.2.2 Translation: From Representation to Abstraction As indicated, translation is normally associated with a literary process of rewriting an original text. At first, the terms ‘translation’ and ‘abstraction’ do not seem to be related. The quality of a translation is commonly judged against criteria of equivalence, fidelity, and synonymy. Thus, translation, like the transcription in print processes, is about trying to attain an accurate reproduction through a process of change so that the new object looks similar to but also differs from an original. Like the processes of transcription described above, literary translations are similarly manipulations that reflect certain ideologies. In Translation/History/Culture, Lefevere notes that translation manipulates literature to function in society in a given way. As a positive force, translations can introduce “new concepts, new genres, … and 52 David Summers, “The Conditions of Western Modernism,” chap. 7 in Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2003), 593. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 594. 30 innovation”, but they can also “repress innovation, distort and contain”. 55 Translation is a process of recasting, of rewriting the original, at times “in terms of the poetics of … [one’s] own culture, simply to make it pleasing to the new audience”. 56 Lefevere goes on to describe translators who rewrite texts to reflect the “objects, customs, and beliefs” of their own culture. This is captured in an introductory paragraph to an eighteenth-century translation of Homer’s Iliad by Houdar De la Motte who wanted his translation to be palatable to his eighteenth-century French readership: “I have tried to make the narrative faster than it is in Homer, the descriptions larger and less burdened by details, the comparisons more exact and less frequent …”. 57 These larger descriptions “less burdened by details” are the literary equivalent of the transcribed images of Lady Grey that “sacrificed the nuances of physiognomy”, which reveals something of the discretionary power wielded by translators of literary texts and printmakers alike. This unburdening of details for simplicity is something like what occurs to the individual collaged elements in Synthetic Cubism. Traditional still life objects are simplified by translation into abstract shapes that sacrifice nuances of representation in favour of faster communication. For example, compare the painted violin in Pieter Claesz’s Vanitas with Violin and Glass Ball (1628) with the violin in Braque’s Violon et Pipe (Le Quotidien). It is clear that the violin in Braque’s work—simplified to an abstract shape—is familiar because it is associated with the still life genre and anchored by the artwork’s title. This shape is not recognised as such and is vulnerable to future mistranslations. Poetry is particularly vulnerable to translation where an exchange of individual words effects a change of meaning. A substitution of one word for another effects a mistranslation of the original, where the actual meaning of the text is partly deleted. 58 This mistranslation is visible when an individual shape is used to represent different objects in Violon et Pipe (Le Quotidien) and Head of a Man with a Hat. Like the mistranslated text, the abstracted image opens a space where we might similarly 55 Lefevere, Translation/History/Culture, xi. 56 Ibid.,10. 57 Cited in Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, 89. 58 For example, consider the translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s, “Da ich ein Knabe war ...”by David Constantine as “When I was a boy” and Michael Hamburger as “In my boyhood days…”. 31 misrecognise ourselves, 59 a vulnerable space in abstraction where ideology can assert its influence. Written text is itself something of an abstraction. The Roman alphabet evolved from “image-based scripts” through a series of steps, “where each step involved considerable abstraction”. 60 Letters developed from iconic hieroglyphs, becoming signs that are combined using grammar and syntax to give indirect meaning through an act of writing. Written text, like the abstract shapes in Modern abstraction, communicate indirectly. Roland Barthes writes that, in painting, as in language, the “identity of what is ‘represented’ is ceaselessly deferred”. 61 Similarly, Benjamin Buchloh writes that the work of art “can never be restored to an original level of a primary functional language”; 62 it can only reveal its impact ‘indirectly’. Written language and artworks are never primary or direct, like the forms in nature, but are rather secondary and manipulated mediations that communicate indirectly. One form of mediation is translation. Like literature, the painted world is a manipulation that is looked at, interpreted, and ‘read’. 63 The painted surface represents a fictional translation of the world that is likewise an opportunity to innovate or distort. The painted surface is a translation of the world, never the original. The work of art is therefore a form of communication to be read and understood. As Hans-Georg Gadamer argues in Truth and Method (2013), “aesthetics has to be absorbed into hermeneutics”; that is, for Gadamer, art is about interpretation. 64 Karol Berger adds that “all we have access to are translations; the originals are not available”, 65 which means that for abstract painting, communication is also a matter of translation. 59 This is a reference to Jacques Lacan’s “méconnaissance”, a misrecognition of the self in order to develop a mature identity. See “Jacques Lacan,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online), 2 April 2013, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/#MirStaEgoSub. 60 Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images (London: Routledge, 1996), 21. 61 Roland Barthes, “Is Painting a Language?” trans. Richard Howard, in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation (Toronto: Collins Publishers, 1985), 150. 62 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Formalism and Historicity,” chap. 1 in Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth Century Art (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2015), 2. 63 Karol Berger, “Hermeneutics: Interpretation and Its Validity,” chap. 6 in A Theory of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 213. 64 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (Bloomsburg, NY: Seabury Press, 2013), 164. 65 Berger, “Hermeneutics,” 214. 32 Modernist abstract painting engaged this methodology of translation: abstract artists communicated with a “talent” for translation and “some experience to perform it well”. 66 Berger writes that historical artworks can only be “interpreted” by comparing the formal similarities of their metonymic parts to reveal something illuminating. Identifying and comparing abstract forms with one another is a useful exercise in recognition, which reveals aspects “one might not notice otherwise”. 67 Translation is similarly a process that is anchored in recognition. As in poetry, visual similarities allow abstract shapes to be communicated through metaphor. If the translation is to be successful, metaphors “must be fitting, which means they must fairly correspond with the thing signified”. 68 The once unrecognisable non-figurative forms of Modernist abstraction have now become recognisable objects with an almost limitless array of comparable shapes in contemporary culture. This means that recognising the abstract painted form is particularly problematic, since, as Mitchell writes, “we feel overwhelmed and embarrassed by the number of things it can be made to say”. 69 The challenge is to identify the familiar in abstract art so as to make connections and open discussion about what particular shapes may communicate. Today it is easy to see that abstract art “leads back to the ordinary world”: 70 shapes from paintings are used in advertising and popular design elements are recycled and reused, like “the dynamic movement in automobile styles or dress fashions”. 71 By contrast, Clement Greenberg denied recognisability in Modern abstraction and resisted any association with popular culture, instead appealing to a medium purity that is simultaneously scientific, religious, and ethical-political. 72 According to various critics, Modernist abstraction was an “aristocratic form made by and for a tiny elite in the cosmopolitan centers of advanced capitalist countries”, 73 promoting a visual language that was not universal but rather “culturally specific”. 74 Modernism 66 Ibid., 216. 67 Ibid., 218. 68 Aristotle, Rhet, 1414a811 cited in ibid., 219. 69 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 223. 70 Ibid., 236. 71 Ibid., 230. Also consider Leo Steinberg’s “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 55–91. 72 Clement Greenberg cited in Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 229. 73 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 229. 74 Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images, 4. 33 was complicit with the developing hegemony of Western capitalism where its abstract forms have become echoed in graphic and industrial design. This means that as Modernist practitioners emerged in the international space of visual culture, abstract forms were particularly problematic, and, like metaphors, prone to misunderstanding. As mentioned in my Introduction, abstract shapes are complicated in a contemporary global environment of mixed cultural codes. This begins with Synthetic Cubism, when abstracted, abbreviated, and simplified shapes share multiple meanings that are exacerbated by abstracted images in the popular press. Like the printed transcriptions of the painting Lady Grey described above, printed cartoons and caricatures in the popular press are “typically abbreviated, achieving resemblance through the least of means”. 75 This economy of means creates the simplified and abstracted shapes that are also a comic exaggeration of particular characteristics. Leaving humour aside, it is interesting to consider how caricatures might be considered as a translation of representation; how an image can continue in its resemblance beyond the transcribed artwork-replica into something more subjective and abstract. Caricatures are often seen in political cartoons as “deeply democratic”, as a levelling of hierarchy and status, and in the case of mass media, “places us in a position superior in some way to the caricatured”. 76 In his research, Alan Krell explores how caricature was used by the popular press to ridicule the work of Manet and other early Modern artists of the Salon des Refusés of 1863. 77 75 Summers, “The Conditions of Western Modernism,” 594. 76 Ibid., 596. 77 See the caricature by Gillot depicting Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, among others, in Alan Krell, Manet and the Painters of Contemporary Life (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 44. 34 Figure 10 Honoré Daumier after Charles Philipon, ‘Les Poires’ Le Charivari, 16 April (1835), lithograph, 33.3 x 25.4cm. The printed caricature, like the printed artwork-reproduction, moved from élite circles to popular mass formats in nineteenth-century France. Consider Honoré Daumier’s caricature of King Louis Philippe becoming a pear (figure 10). 78 This caricature is exaggerated, distorted, and abstracted as Louis Philippe undergoes a series of changes in the press from King to pear, a “metamorphoses as much determined by earlier images in the series of caricatures as by resemblance to the King”. 79 Thus, the caricature is part of a temporal process of abstraction, where the image of the King is ultimately replaced with an image of a pear over the course of several installments, much like the simplification from representation into abstraction in Pablo Picasso’s later series of eleven lithographs The Bull (1945). Such a process represents a kind of teaching through images. 80 78 Le Charivari was a daily satirical periodical issued in Paris from 1832 to 1937. “Le Charivari began publishing caricatures satirizing daily life after the 1835 ban on political satire. Artists including Honoré Daumier and Cham contributed lithographs and wood engravings.” “ Le Charivari, December 1, 1832–May 31, 1835,” Metropolitan Museum of Art (online), http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/347359. 79 Summers, “The Conditions of Western Modernism,” 597. 80 Teaching in this manner is consistent with the Church, whose “images may serve to teach the illiterate”, and is integral to directing the opinions of a rapidly developing body politic. Summers, “The Conditions of Western Modernism,” 599. http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/347359 35 The image of the King as pear is performing a form of cultural production by developing visual literacy among the population, and even wielding power over them. In short, the abstracted caricature is influencing ideology. The caricature, like the stereotype and the cliché, is popularised and made possible by printing. In order to communicate quickly, the caricature makes use of visual shortcuts, or a synecdoche, in which a part is made to stand in for a whole. The caricature combines these visual shortcuts in a synthesis, so that if Louis Philippe “‘looks like’ a pear … other similarities may ‘spring to mind’ and extend the metaphor; the king is soft, easily bruised, green, yellow, ripe, overripe, perishable, quick to corrupt”. 81 The public image of the king is irrevocably changed by the power of caricature, made possible by an act of translation, abstraction and metaphor. The abstracted image often shares a visual resemblance with other abstract forms. Krauss discusses Picasso’s and Braque’s papier collés, noting “the slightest representational information…[gave] more rather than less information about the world”. 82 In the same way, Berger notes that “a fragment discloses, or rather, suggests, a larger whole, a whole world”. 83 This helps us to understand how abstract artworks can interrogate and communicate with the world using a visual synecdoche and a translation of forms into abstraction. The difficulty, however, is to understand how a representation is abstracted, how exactly artists use visual shortcuts and the simplest of means to signify meaning, and in particular, how the artists introduced at the beginning of this chapter manipulated images in their paintings by using translation and metaphor. By understanding the techniques employed by the caricaturist, one can begin to take account of the strategies employed by early abstract artists, who retain a visual referent in their work. As in the work of the caricaturist, Braque’s Violon et Pipe (Le Quotidien) and Picasso’s Head of a Man with a Hat employ metaphor; it “is a matter of moving the mind where one wants it to go”, writes Danto. 84 Just as Daumier leaves a few vestigial facial features of the King for people to still identify a face, so Picasso permits two black dots for eyes and the curve of an ear. Similarly, Braque inscribes 81 Ibid., 597. 82 Dickerman, “Inventing Abstraction,” 29. 83 Berger, “Hermeneutics,” 221. 84 Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in a Post-Historical Perspective (Berkley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1992), 74. 36 the scroll and tuning pegs of a violin before leading the eye down to the more abstract black shape onto which he draws an F Hole using white chalk. These small additions allow an entry point into the work, providing signposts for how the abstracted form should be recognised. Through images and metaphor, the caricature and the collages both teach us something about the world. The image of Louis Philippe as a pear teaches us through a sequence of drawings to see metaphorically the King as a pear. This occurs through a formal appeal to the shape of a pear, as if Daumier “had seen a pear inscribed in Louis’s head, and taught us to see it through steps”. 85 The collaged works similarly appeal to shared shapes and similar forms. However, these works do not teach us through a series of steps; only the finished abstracted form of translated objects from the world are presented. These works therefore use metaphor to teach us to see such flat shapes as three-dimensional objects. In the Suprematist work of Malevich, a more complex metaphorical relation exists between real things of the world and their translation as flat-painted shapes. Malevich considered his geometric-painted shapes to have no reference to the outside world, famously declaring to have “escaped from the circle of things”. 86 His paintings extend beyond the particular object or figure (as in Picasso and Braque) toward the more general non-figurative, or non-objective. In Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, the red and black painted squares become a simplification and construction of a new world, a world that is more real than mere representation because the painted shapes are foregrounded as solid objects; they do not refer to something outside of themselves. The simplified geometry present in Malevich’s work has now been made concrete for contemporary eyes. The black and red squares in this work appear almost as prototypes for later developments in minimal art, architecture, and graphic design. Thus, the abstract geometric relations in Malevich, which were once a search for the absolute, have now become engaged in the relative. When it comes time to explain this work, we are often at a loss for words and so return to formal descriptions of colour, line, and form. 85 Arthur C. Danto, “Metaphor and Cognition,” chap. 6 in ibid., 75. 86 Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting,” in Essays on Art 1915 (New York: George Wittenborn, 1971), 19. 37 Such a loss for words is due to the ideology of silent meditation surrounding abstract art. As previously mentioned, “language, narrative, and discourse” 87 should never be excluded from abstract art, and it is towards this task that many practitioners of contemporary abstraction direct their research. For the meantime, it is important to note that flat-painted shapes are common features of early Modernist abstract painting and are central to this research. Arguably, the most articulate flat shapes in Modernism are found in the work of Henri Matisse. In his late oeuvre of coloured paper ‘cut-outs’, Matisse expanded his practice with the help of studio assistants, who painted large sheets with gouache colours from which he cut organic abstract shapes. For Matisse, “the act of cutting was inextricably intertwined with the almost playful process of constantly adding new shapes and removing others, of rearranging and re-pinning”. 88 This productive period of work culminated with the reproduction of several works published in Jazz (1947). One of these works, Le Lagon, is a composition of abstracted shapes recalled from memories of travel to Tahiti. This work represents a developing “vocabulary of forms”, 89 a group of simplified shapes that Matisse used to communicate. The flat-cut-shapes were perpetually rearranged in different configurations in the studio. This deferred commitment to the composition suggests a playful approach. Matisse likened the movement of his collage shapes to a game of chess, where the “meanings of the pieces can change throughout the course of a game”. 90 The next section explores how this game, where shapes change meaning through translation, can be one of authority, legitimacy, and power. 1.3 The Power of Shapes How abstract shapes are used and who has the authority to use them developed into a complex and powerful game during Modernism. As I have already described, the translation of the painted image into the printed replica is also a movement from representation into abstraction for the purpose of expediting visual communications that are direct, quickly disseminated, and easily recognised. Painted shapes began to 87 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 226. 88 Buchberg et al., Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, 258. 89 Ibid., 17. 90 Ibid., 129. 38 operate as a popular visual language directed toward the initiated and privileged. During Modernism, the early abstraction introduced in the beginning of this chapter becomes an important cultural export. Many commentators have rightly accused Modern artists of using so-called ‘primitive art’ as a way “to consolidate Western notions of quality and feelings of superiority”. 91 These notions were reinforced in Modernism, as artists working with abstraction co- opted shapes from other cultures and used them in the context of their own work. Artists have, however, always made use of existing image-forms and are forever “foraging”, “quoting, imitating, transposing, and echoing”. 92 This tendency was accelerated in the expanding colonisation of Modernism, where abstract artworks and their copies were disseminated across borders and between languages. The flat shapes of early Modernist painting were well suited to this dissemination. The shapes of Synthetic Cubism galvanised themselves in simplicity and flatness, forms simultaneously demoted from the realm of high art and repositioned in the everyday of visual culture. Robert Morris identifies this as a “removal process”, an act of sublation in the Modernist program, preparing the art object in readiness to pit itself against the world. 93 As such, painting became “combative”, the flat shapes of early abstraction became lean, agile, and ready to compete with the impending “massive increase in the flood of imagery across a vast array of visual reproduction modalities” 94 of twentieth-century visual culture—Mitchell’s ‘pictorial turn’. Abstract shapes in painting as well as design were employed in the service of Western hegemony wherever it could reach. Abstract shapes in visual culture performed a role of cultural production in Modernism. Reflecting on the philosophy of Michel Foucault and Louis Marin, Craig Owens writes that the importance of artworks lies not in what they say but rather in what they do. He identifies that just as artworks “perform” cultural production, they 91 See Thomas McEvilley, “On ‘Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984,” Artforum 23 (1984): 5460. 92 Steinberg, “The Glorious Company," 25. 93 Robert Morris, “Toward an Ophthalmology of the Aesthetic and an Orthopedics of Seeing,” chap. 15 in Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice , ed. Francis Hasall, Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor (California: Stanford University Press, 2009), 228. 94 Ibid. 39 also take part in “differentiation, exclusion, incorporation, and rule”. 95 They are socially active agents in culture. Successive Modernist movements and avant-garde artists attempted to be still more socially active. Abstract painted shapes slowly migrated from the confines of the studio into graphic design, typography, commercial art, and architecture. Modern artists with utopian “communal aspirations” 96 worked to develop new ways to merge art with technology and redefine modern living. In Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), Peter Bürger laments the aims of art historical avant-garde movements to adapt art to what Hegel describes as a “sublation of art … to the praxis of life”. 97 For Bürger, the “only sublation of art in life is a false one: commodity aesthetic and popular culture”. 98 Nevertheless, contemporary art has inherited Modernist abstract shapes in a variety of changed material forms. The Bauhaus and the Vkhutemas incorporated these Socialist utopian aims into their teaching, which rapidly developed a widespread following as artist-teachers fled persecution during the Second World War. The gridded armature of Piet Mondrian’s Compositions (1920–1942), the colour swatches of Joseph Alber’s Homage to the Square (1950–1976), the rounded corners of Herbert Bayer’s Proposal for a Universal Type (1925–1930), and the similarly rounded curves of bent tubular steel in Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Sling Back Chair (1925–1926), are all exported shapes that have gained traction in the wider context of visual culture and the built environment due to the combined efforts of advertising, marketing and advances in technology. 99 Given the shapes already discussed, perhaps the most interesting commercial form is the black semi-circular ebony handle of Marianne Brandt’s Tea Infuser and Strainer (1924, figure 11), manufactured at the Bauhaus metal workshop. 95 Craig Owens, “Representation, Appropriation, and Power,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994), 91. 96 Margarita Tupitsyn, “Being-in-Production: The Constructivist Code,” in Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism, ed. Margarita Tupitsyn (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 13. 97 Peter Bürger, “The Negation of the Autonomy of Art by the Avant -Garde,” chap. 3 in Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw. Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: Manchester University Press, 1984), 49. 98 Ibid., 54 99 This has been the topic of several publications and exhibitions; for example, Dominic Bradbury, Mid-Century Modern Complete (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014); Campbell Bickerstaff, Interface: People, Machines, Design (NSW: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 2014), and John MacArthur, Deborah Van Der Plaat, and Janina Gosseye, Hot Modernism: Queensland Architecture 1945-1975 (Queensland: Artifice Books on Architecture, 2015). 40 Modern artists seemed to share abstract forms with one another. Flattened abstract shapes play what Mitchell calls the “language game of abstract art”. 100 Consider how similar the abstract shapes are in Braque’s Violon et Pipe (Le Quotidien), Picasso’s Head of a Man with a Hat, Marianne Brandt’s Tea Infuser and Strainer, and Liubov Popova’s Embroidery Design for the Artisan Co-Operative Verbovka (1917, figure 12). As I have already noted, Picasso saw the semiotic potential of abstracted shapes to be ‘read’ by the spectator; for example, in his work, the black shape is the signifier for ‘hair’. However, in Popova’s design, this similar shape forms part of a “non- objective pictorial lexicon”. 101 Picasso’s black ‘hair’ and the blue rectangle are remade as impersonal Constructivist elements to be used in the reorganisation of everyday life of the Russian revolution. Figure 11 Marianne Brandt Tea Infuser and Strainer 1924, silver and ebony, 7.3cm(h). Figure 12 Liubov Popova, Embroidery Design for the Artisan Co-Operative Verbovka 1917, cut and pasted papers on paper, 12 x 17.5cm. This ability to reach ‘everyday life’ almost finds its possible fulfilment in Brandt’s Tea Infuser and Strainer, which, along with other Bauhaus designs, has had an incalculable influence on subsequent artists. Like Popova’s, Brandt’s design foregrounds a relationship between formal elements: the “D-shaped slice of ebony … provides a strong vertical contrast to the object's predominant horizontality”. 102 As shapes were moved from abstract painting into commercial and industrial production during Modernism, they became powerful carriers of meaning. The 100 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 225. 101 Tupitsyn, “Being-in-Production,” 13. 102 See “Tea Infuser and Strainer,” Metropolitan Museum of Art (online), http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/491299. http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/491299 41 utilitarian and optimistic nature of this movement, however, was brief and bound to the early twentieth century. In Writing Back to Modern Art (2005), Harris cites Greenberg, who observes that, for Modern artists, “the suspicion arose that capitalism … no longer commanded perspectives of infinite expression”. 103 Artists quickly realised that their work could no longer compete with the economic imperatives of capitalism. Abstract art needed to either turn towards the metaphysical (such as in Mondrian’s work) or engage firmly with events in the physical world in a way that exceeded previous utopian ideals, and become something like Picasso’s Guernica (1937), “ideological-propagandistic”. 104 Therefore, abstraction, which began as a challenge to art historical representation and materialism, quickly became a tool communicating ideology in Modernism. Matisse’s flat shapes embody this ideological communication and as such became a model for American abstract art in the decline of European Modernism. As Matisse predicts, “by creating these coloured, paper cut-outs, it seems to me that I am happily anticipating things to come”. 105 This thing to come is nothing less than an international space for culture. Frank Stella describes a new ‘working space’ where abstract artists “need ambition to drive abstraction out of its miasma of self satisfied materialism”. 106 Ever since 1863 where Charles Baudelaire observes, “a rapidity of movement which calls for an equal speed of execution from the artist”, 107 artists have worked toward this rapid response through abstraction. For example, Picasso generated an “outpouring” and “repetition” of “hundreds of ‘preparatory studies’”; 108 and Matisse employed his paper cut-outs to expedite his work in the studio. Through Modernism, abstract-painted shapes left the surface of the canvas to engage in the real world. For example, Matisse’s paper cut-outs were used to realise commissioned work “in another medium”, 109 such as his mural The Dance (1932– 1933). The flat shapes that comprise this work exist simultaneously in two material 103 Jonathan Harris, “Cubism’s Complexities,” chap. 4 in Writing Back to Modern Art: After Greenberg, Fried and Clark (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 125. 104 Ibid. 105 Buchberg et al., Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, 23. 106 Frank Stella, Working Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 66. 107 Jonathan Mayne, ed. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays by Charles Baudelaire (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 4. 108 Rosalind E. Krauss, “The Im/Pulse to See,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Washington: Bay Press, 1988), 6869. 109 Friedman, “Avant La Lettre,” 91 42 states: as a coloured paper collage (original) and a painted mural (translation). In a strange way, however, something is lost when the collaged vignette is translated as a painted mural—something poetic. The abstract shape here has an excess meaning that cannot be translated into the painted mural. 110 To understand how abstract shapes gain agency to move between mediums in Modernism, it is again important to turn to a metaphor of translation. Benjamin speaks of translation as a “form”, and that “translatability is an essential quality of certain works”. 111 While he admits that there are certain qualities that exceed translation, such as the ‘poetic’⎯the element in the work that is beyond mere communication⎯he writes that “a real translation is transparent”. 112 Sarat Maharaj challenges this view of translation in the “international space” of contemporary culture, arguing that we presume translation to occur imperceptibly and with transparency, “like stacking panes of glass one on top of another”, but that in reality, translation “creates something different, something hybrid”. 113 It is this ‘something different’ that occurs as painted shapes are translated in abstraction. How meaning is communicated with abstract shapes is not clear, but rather opaque and difficult. Abstract shapes have a power and influence that originated in Modernism but that quickly became involved in social history. Artists employ methods of visual translation to engage and form a dialogue with the world around them through images, objects, and design. For example, shapes from other cultures as well as emerging capitalism influenced the early abstraction of Braque, Picasso, Matisse, and Malevich. As abstract-painted shapes were translated in Modernism by the artists and designers who employed them, so they became a kind of visual currency. They became involved in the styling of manufactured goods in the name of capitalism, for example, 110 The difference between Matisse’s vignette and the finished mural might be more accurately described as a différance. See Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Jacques Derrida Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Great Britain: The Harvester Press Limited, 1982). 111 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 254. 112 Ibid., 260. 113 Sarat Maharaj, “Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other,” in Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. Jean Fisher (London: Kala Press in association with the Institute of International Visual Arts, 1994), 2835. 43 Marcello Nizzoli’s Olivetti Lettera 22 (1949) typewriter design which drew “heavily” upon Modernism and “the organic fluid forms of artists such as the sculptor Henry Moore”. 114 They also began to represent the absolute in science, for example Bern et al. N=8 Supergravity Diagram (2007) is sometimes referred to as a “Mondrian” diagram. 115 Lastly, Modernist abstract shapes were also used to illustrate the symbolic arrangement of knowledge in information technologies, such as in El Lissitzky’s Prounen drawings of the 1920s, which today seem “like a precursor to computer graphics”. 116 Unsurprisingly, then, the decline of the Modernist project, alongside an increased development of the digital, has resulted in an increased use of abstract shapes in postmodernism. 114 Campbell Bickerstaff, Interface: People, Machines, Design (NSW: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 2014), 14. 115 See Hermann Nicolai, “Viewpoint: Vanishing Infinity,” Physics 2, no. 70, 17 August 2009, http://physics.aps.org/articles/v2/70. 116 Alessandro Ludovico, Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1894 (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Onomatopee, 2012), 35. http://physics.aps.org/articles/v2/70 44 Chapter 2 Samples and Shapes in Contemporary Painting One may often search through two or three hundred men without finding amongst them more than one or two points of beauty. You therefore … must take the head from some and the chest, arm, leg, hand and foot from others. —Albrecht Dürer, circa 1500 1 …I’ll turn that one element into a painting. Instead of looking at the art, the totality of the artwork… I’ll take little pieces, and I think of that as a more personal and interpretive quality that’s coming from within. —Laura Owens, 2003 2 Identifying instances of translation in abstract painting through art history is complex. I am not interested in exact copies but in degrees of recognition and a scale of resemblance in contemporary abstraction. Unlike the appropriated copy, where artists “boldly use the most recognizable quotations”, 3 the origins of translation explored in this research are more difficult to attribute. Four examples from recent years illustrate how translation is different from a more conventional use of image quotation or copying associated with appropriation art: Dick Watkins’s The Fall No. 2 (1968, figure 13); Laura Owens’s Untitled (2012, figure 14); Charline von Heyl’s Wall at WAM mural (2010, figure 15); and Christine Streuli’s Ableger (Offshoot) (2013, figure 16). Each of these artists translate shapes from the work of other artists and uses them in their own work. These practices of translation in abstraction are the antonym of image quotation used in postmodern appropriation; rather, contemporary translated shapes communicate in a self-determined and motivated forward momentum. By adopting a methodology of translation, contemporary abstraction can use painted shapes to reanimate existing forms and build new ones. 1 Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art 1400-1600: Sources and Documents (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 114. 2 Rachel Kushner, “Laura Owens,” The Believer 1, no. 2 (2003), http://www.believermag.com/issues/200305/?read=interview_owens. 3 Jean Lipman and Richard Marshall, Art about Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978), 7. http://www.believermag.com/issues/200305/?read=interview_owens 45 Figure 13 Dick Watkins The Fall No. 2 1968, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 183 x 152cm. Figure 14 Laura Owens Untitled 2012, oil, acrylic, flashe, resin, collage, and pumice on canvas, 275 x 213cm. Figure 15 Charline von Heyl Untitled (Wall at WAM) 2010, acrylic and latex paint, 518 x 2042cm. Figure 16 Christine Streuli Ableger (Offshoot) (installation view) 2013, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland. 2.1 Shaped and Reshaped: Secondary Forms The way contemporary artists use existing images expands the quotation and copying normally associated with appropriation art. However, it is important first to note the influence of 1980s’ Australian appropriation-art on my practice. In 2014 the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) curated Pop to Popism examining the legacy of 1960s’ Pop Art in Australian appropriation-art of the 1980s. This exhibition was informed in part by Paul Taylor’s group show Popism (1982) at the NGV, outlined in my Introduction. 46 When Popism opened, I was twelve months old. That is to say, the postmodern temperament of this exhibition is a good place for me to start when thinking about how I approach my own practice. The catalogue from the Pop to Popism exhibition recounts themes of “appropriation and pastiche, repetition, mediation, and relative meaning”. 4 The exhibition acknowledged Taylor’s observation that the local artist’s “experience of Australia is mediated by images—and images principally generated overseas”. 5 This establishes a kind of creative position for Australian artists and an approach to art-making that is particular to an Australian identity. In the first chapter, I explored how early Modern artists developed abstraction as a method of translating elements of the real world into flat shapes. I also considered the ways that these shapes were translated into other mediums, objects, and designs to become a kind of visual currency used to develop Western capitalism. In the global reach of contemporary visual culture, this currency becomes a multinational commodity because abstract shapes are used and reused to style goods, as visual devices to simplify and arrange complex knowledge in the digital, and as templates for architectural forms. 2.1.1 Printed Shapes, Screen Shapes Contemporary built environments are configured using a multitude of shapes. Printed media and screen technologies mostly use shapes that have a long history. It is once again important to establish some parameters around what types of shapes I am referring to here. As I explained in my Introduction, I am interested in painted flat- shapes that are decontextualised from their source in a process of abstraction. I am interested in how these shapes are represented in contemporary visual environments and how they have been used and reused in art history. I use my practice to explore how shapes can represent individual or discrete units of information, how shapes form an abstract visual language, and how they can communicate using a type of visual translation. 4 Anneke Jaspers, “Art of the Second Degree: Post Pop and Popism,” in Pop to Popism, edited by Wayne Tunnicliffe and Anneke Jaspers (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2014), 235. 5 Rex Butler, ed. What Is Appropriation? An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art in the 1980s & 1990s, 2nd ed. (Brisbane: IMA Publishing, 2004), 17. 47 Abstract-painted shapes can connect works across time and space. In a similar way to Picasso and American Art, Pop to Popism arranged and compared paintings to make formal and thematic connections. It included Dick Watkins’s painting The Fall No. 2, which consists of simplified flat shapes and abutting planes. Wayne Tunnicliffe describes the painting as an abstraction that is working through “cubist” and “constructivist” influences. 6 Again, it is interesting to observe the shapes in this work as transformations of shapes from early Synthetic Cubism. These shapes seem to have come from somewhere but it is difficult to know where; they appear to refer to art historical and design elements more generally. Against the criterion of originality associated with the avant-garde, it is easy to malign the work of Watkins, along similar lines as Stuart Davis’s work, as an inauthentic example of provincial abstraction. His work is representative of an art- historical period where abstract shapes and cultural forms were exported from artistic centres to colonial outposts. Watkins’s work, like Davis’s, embodies a strategy of importing undeclared forms morphed and synthesised into local abstraction. In its exhibition, the AGNSW positioned the purloined shapes used by Watkins as a precursor to Australian appropriation art, however I argue that this work more accurately embodies an act of translation. It is important to identify how art-historical instances of reuse in translation operate in a different way to appropriation art. Acts of quotation span Western art history in a complex way in which appropriation is only a part. Leo Steinberg outlines some of this history in his catalogue introduction to an exhibition about appropriation in Art about Art (1978) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He describes several printed etchings from which artists have sourced details for use in their own work. 7 Two printed images provide particularly useful examples. It is often cited that Manet “translated” the seated picnickers in Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) from a detail in 6 Wayne Tunnicliffe, “‘The Easel Did Not Go Pop: It Went Bang!’ Australian Pop Art,” in Pop to Popism, 144. 7 Leo Steinberg, “The Glorious Company,” in Art about Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978), 17. 48 Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael for Judgement of Paris (1515). 8 Similarly, Gustave Courbet’s The Meeting (1854) is “unequivocally based upon a source in popular imagery”; 9 in this case, The Wandering Jew (1826–1830), Épinal print and broadside frontispiece of Champfleury’s Histoire de l’imagerie populaire (1784). These examples are important, as they reinforce my claims from Chapter 1; namely, that the popular print is responsible for the passage of certain forms into painting and establishing a visual economy of images. Abstract shapes are part of this trafficking of visual communication. They can be found in many printed forms, such as pictograms, hieroglyphs, logos, and printer’s ornaments. Steinberg further implicates commercial printing in the multiplication of abstract shapes when he describes Saul Steinberg’s cover design for The New Yorker in 1964. This design depicts typographic ornaments—floral designs arranged as a “reflexive” and “historiographic” 10 open source garden of abstract shapes from which we can all share. In 1928, Fredric Warde described printer’s ornaments as “opportunities for invention”, especially “printer’s flowers” such as quatrefoils that blur the line between letters and ornaments as they become part of the family of printing types. 11 I am interested here in extending the simplification of shapes expressed in Chapter 1, with an aim to understanding how the printed image produces abstracted shapes that are popular, and how these popularised shapes are composed according to a particular syntax or arrangement. As I have already shown, commercial printing technologies helped to create visual culture in the early twentieth century. Artists make use of the printing process to disseminate their work and expand the possibilities of their practice, developing “a rich variety of visual forms … [and] also powerful emotions”. 12 8 Alan Krell, Manet and the Painters of Contemporary Life (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 28. 9 Linda Nochlin, “Gustave Courbet’s Meeting: A Portrait of the Artist as a Wandering Jew,” The Art Bulletin 49, no. 3 (1967): 20922. 10 Steinberg, “The Glorious Company,” 20. 11 It is important to note that “stereotypes” and “clichés” are terms that describe the solid metal cast of an original typesetting forme. In the history of printing, these were used to save time, labour and wearing of original types and were used to print reproductions. See Fredric Warde, “Printers Ornaments on the ‘Monotype’,” in Typographers on Type: An Illustrated Anthology from William Morris to the Present Day, ed. Ruari McLean (London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 1995; orig. pub. 1928), 5556. 12 Alessandro Ludovico, Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1894 (Rotterdam, 49 The printing process is particularly useful for contemporary abstraction as it encourages artists to redefine the constraints of the printed page and to reconsider the book as a dynamic object that has its own type of ‘space’. In Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1894 (2012), Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of media technology and implicates early Modern abstraction in its development. He notes that El Lissitzky viewed the future printed book as being a composite of visual effects, ‘THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY’. This remarkable prediction of the future capacity of the book, which also resembles the computer and the Internet, goes some of the way to explaining how artists were thinking about graphic shapes during Modernism. The legacy of Modernist design has enabled abstract shapes to communicate with art history and popular culture. El Lissitzky’s work influenced the teachers of the Bauhaus who worked toward the “sublation of art … to the praxis of life”. 13 The result is that similar graphic shapes now appear in painted artworks, graphic design, advertising, architecture, and computer desktop graphics. As demonstrated in the first chapter, abstract shapes rapidly gained traction in the wider context of visual culture. Shapes that appear in abstract painting were reshaped and recontextualised as they passed from art history into visual culture and are then returned in contemporary abstraction. This is particularly evident when comparing the histories of commercial printing, computer visuals, and abstract painting. Postmodern and contemporary artists deliberately create samples, shapes, and secondary forms in their work in a pastiche that is often nostalgic and self-reflexive. Recreating images and image details from art history in new work is, however, “intergenerational”; as Steinberg writes, “artists find serviceable material and put it to work”. 14 Artists at all stages in history have engaged image details for use in their work, so this is not an especially contemporary activity. What is contemporary, however, is an accelerated and altered relationship with past images that are now continually present in electronic devices. Netherlands: Onomatopee, 2012), 34. 13 Peter Bürger, “The Negation of the Autonomy of Art by the Avant -Garde,” chap. 3 in Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Manchester University Press, 1984), 49. 14 Steinberg, “The Glorious Company,” 21. 50 The intersection of visual culture, technology, and painting practice represents a rapid change in how images are used. This is paralleled by the developments of personal technology in the last decades of the twentieth century. The rise of personal computers, digital cameras, image-editing software, and social media all cumulated and became available in a mobile phone during the late 2000s. In The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006), Anne Friedberg outlines the change in perception that occurred from this change, examining the window as another use of metaphor, where the computer screen is both a “page” and a “window”. Friedberg writes, “the space mapped onto the computer screen is both deep and flat”. 15 There is an obvious connection here with the painted shapes at the centre of this research. Today, many contemporary artists paint abstract shapes and respond to the visual effects of the computer desktop in various ways. It is important to outline some of the ways that artists recreate or record desktop interactions in painting—such as in Miltos Manetas’s Internet Paintings (On) (2002) or Albert Oehlen’s Computer Paintings (2009)—or as a way of combining paint with digital media, such as in Michel Majerus’s Depression (2002) or Michael Williams’s Maybe I Wiped A Boogie On Your Coat (2014). Recent group exhibitions such as Painting after Technology at Tate Modern (2015), The Forever Now at MoMA (2015), and Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture at the University of Washington (2010) help to demonstrate that computer processes and the computer interface are changing how contemporary artists are approaching painting. To focus on the formal effects that digital technologies have on contemporary painting is to misunderstand how artists engage with them. The change brought about by computer technologies is twofold: first, digital technologies change the way contemporary artists approach the painting surface; second (and arguably more important), contemporary abstract painting can influence the graphic interface of the screen. Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning … Was the Command Line (1999) gives a short history of the development of computer interfaces, in which he charts a changing user-relation to abstracted forms on the computer screen. Stephenson 15 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 227. 51 explains that abstracted icons are developed to short-circuit the “laborious, explicit verbal communication” associated with the command line of MS-DOS. 16 This description finds its parallel in The Interface Effect (2012), where Alexander Galloway describes how the computer gaming interface contains both “diegetic” and “non-diegetic” 17 elements. Diegetic elements are those found within narrative fiction, whereas non-diegetic elements engage the reader or user directly. Non-diegetic elements in the computer interface are normally represented in a “thin, two- dimensional overlay containing icons, text, progress bars, and numbers. It deploys an entirely different mode of signification, reliant more on letter and number, or iconographic images rather than realistic representational images”. 18 The graphical user interface conflates the illusion of space in the screen with an interactive anterior space. This conflation of illusionary and interactive space has had an important effect on some contemporary abstract painting, which can be observed in works where the painting surface appears to be a proxy for screen technologies; for example, Trudy Benson’s For RL (2013) or Laura Owens’s Untitled (2012). In Owens’s work, abstract shapes appear alongside painted calligraphic swirls; as Laura Hopton observes, here “manufactured marks, photo silk-screen and painting … coalesce”. 19 Combinations of shapes float simultaneously on the surface of the canvas with trompe l’œil effect. An illusion of space projected outwards is created when individual shapes appear to float in front of the picture plane. This effect is caused by the various shadows or penumbrae painted to suggest physical layering. It is wrong to attribute this painterly effect entirely to the influence of computer desktop aesthetics. Indeed, the opposite may be argued, as these kinds of floating abstract shapes find their art-historical precedence in Barbara Rose’s “Abstract Illusionism” 20 of the 1970s and the paintings of Jack Lembeck or Michael 16 Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning … Was the Command Line (New York: Avon Books, Inc., 1999), 52. 17 Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 42. 18 Ibid. 19 Laura Hoptman, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 49. 20 Barbara Rose, “Abstract Illusionism,” Artforum October (1967): 33–37. 52 Gallagher. 21 Made popular using similar strategies of dissemination as those described in Chapter 1, the shapes in these works were quickly appropriated by commercial and graphic design. For example, the squiggle shapes and shadow effects of Gallagher’s Seabedabbled (1978) can be found in Nathalie du Pasquier’s Memphis print and fabric designs of the 1980s, or animated in MTV music videos. 22 The abstract shapes used by the artworks in this chapter are also found in both postmodern artwork and popular visual culture. The abstract shapes in my work undergo a material or physical change, as they are adapted for different types of interactions; for example, between the optics of the computer screen and the tactility of paint. Brenda Laurel discusses in Computers as Theatre (1991) how computer screen interfaces aim to impersonate the interactivity of paint on canvas. In her chapter “Interface Evolution”, Laurel describes a kind of “conversationality” between human and computer, where the desktop shows “evidence of the task’s evolution”. 23 Laurel refers to a concept of “direct manipulation”; that is, a transfer of real world interactions into the virtual. 24 Because artwork images are increasingly transferred between material states, it is important to consider what these material differences might conceal. When the early printmakers simplified images for print reproduction, they sacrificed nuances and detail for the sake of expediency. This loss of detail is exacerbated in a contemporary context of image circulation and exchange. James Elkins argues that where images are converted into digital code, we see “the disappearance of detail and the emergence of blur”. 25 Importantly, he attributes the difference in the quality of images produced to each person’s ‘output device’, whether a computer, television, phone, etc. Like the painstaking burin engraving of The Execution of Lady Jane Grey produced by Paul Mercuri as discussed in Chapter 1, high-resolution digital images 21 Nathaniel Lee, “Trudy Benson,” Artforum, 3 June 2016, http://artforum.com/picks/id=60414. 22 For examples of animated graphic elements using rotoscope, see music videos for INXS, Richard Lowenstein, “What You Need,” 3:35 (Atlantic, 1985), and A-Ha, Steve Barron, “Take on Me,” 3:24 (Warner Bros., 1985). 23 Brenda Laurel, “Interface Evolution,” in Computers as Theatre (Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1991), 7. 24 Contemporary examples of this manipulation can be found in programs such as Sketchbook Pro th at work with the Apple iPad Pro using the Apple Pencil. 25 James Elkins, “What Are We Seeing, Exactly?,” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 2 (1997): 192. http://artforum.com/picks/id%3D60414 53 are restricted to the few, while low-resolution digital images are easily circulated using email and social media—a crude distribution of highlights. Abstract forms favour techniques of visual communication that are expedient, direct, quickly disseminated, and easily recognised. We can see, however, that expediency and easy dissemination necessarily require some type of abstraction. Images are changed both during a process of transcription for print or conversion into the digital. Because they are translated in a process of abstraction, image forms are no longer easily recognised. Translating an original text for dissemination to wider audiences means sacrificing recognition. This also occurs in different modes in painting. In Painting as Model (1990), Bois describes paintings as being organised and modelled on codes or “rules that govern the formation of an image and its interpretation”. 26 He outlines four models of painting with different rules that govern their production and reception. For the ‘Perceptive Model’, Bois describes a mode of seeing in abstract painting where the perceptual meaning of a work is both “ambiguous” and “without assignable end”. 27 This model gives rise to a disturbance of perception. Initially, this disturbance is between the figure and ground of abstract painting, such as in the work of Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock, which also aligns with the confusion of space in the graphical user interface of the digital screen. In the fourth and final ‘Strategic Model’, Bois describes works of art as being “like chess pieces”; 28 that is, a work has significance within a strategic system, which also includes other artworks, museums, and different modes of representation. This way of thinking is important to this research because it confirms that abstracted image-details are translated between material states and accelerated in contemporary digital networks and social media. As an example, I will return briefly to a shape from Chapter 1, a black ‘B’ shape with one flat edge and two curves, which has been translated several times—initially being abstracted in Synthetic Cubism, then reappearing as a Constructivist fabric design, and then finally as a Bauhaus teapot handle. 26 Hubert Damisch, “Syntactical Space,” A Theory of /Cloud/, trans. Janet Lloyd (California: Stanford University Press, 1972), 87. 27 Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Massachusetts: October, 1990), 248. 28 Ibid., 254. 54 Figure 17 Ellsworth Kelly Black (Noir) from Suite of Twenty-Seven Color Lithographs 196465, 89.5 x 61.1cm. Figure 18 Simon Degroot Shape Poems 2017 (detail), laser cut acrylic, 29 x 34cm. Bois evokes the Strategic Model to clarify a movement and interrelation of artists and artworks, which applies to the translation of this ‘B’ shape. Most recently, and updated for contemporary audiences, this shape is translated into minimalist abstraction in Ellsworth Kelly’s Black (Noir) (19641965) (figure 17). I have also translated this shape into my own work as an installation element for Shape Poems (2017, figure 18) so as to test the limits of recognition in translation. 2.1.2 Popular Artworks: Little Image Details Some abstract shapes are more likely than others to reappear time and again. As I have already shown through the example of the ‘B’ shape, an abstract form is able to pass through several different art-historical and popular iterations. This abstract shape, like others introduced below, is particularly suited to translation. This is because shapes that are seductive, playful, iconic, or designed are more likely to reappear as translations in contemporary abstraction. Discovering the legacy of Modern abstract painting in contemporary environments is made easier with Internet search engines. The abstract shapes first disseminated by commercial printing are now continually present in electronic devices. Contemporary painting distinguishes itself from these other periods by the speedy way that artists incorporate elements from visual culture; specifically, identifying, selecting, and 55 translating abstract form, turning them into painted motifs. Common visual elements can be easily identified and discussed using image-searching technology. As Steinberg observes, “the spotting of imported items requires little more than a superabundance of comparative images at one’s elbow”. 29 Technology grants access to such images. Comparing component shapes between artworks reveals a preference for particular types of abstract shapes. Of course, this interrelation of fragmented image details is symptomatic of a wider postmodern understanding of post-structuralism. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), Jean-François Lyotard describes a post-structuralist game of language where communication is also performative, …consider the form of popular sayings, proverbs, and maxims: they are like little splinters of potential narratives, or molds of old ones, which have continued to circulate on certain levels of the contemporary social edifice. 30 If we replace ‘popular sayings’ with ‘popular artworks’ and ‘little splinters’ with ‘little image details’, it is easy to see how contemporary painting can circulate a particular artwork detail as a splinter across a social edifice—a construction that includes artwork, design, and electronic media. The work of Ellsworth Kelly provides a good opportunity to analyse image details in isolation and compare them with other artworks. Kelly maintains that the abstract shapes in his work originate from observations in “nature”. 31 While this is significant, it is arguably equally important for contemporary art that the shape in Black (Noir) is also “recognisable” 32 in other artworks and visual culture. Similarly, a right-angled trapezoid in Kelly’s Concorde IV (State) (1981, figure 19) can also be found in art history and popular culture. This is important for contemporary artists who may see the work and incorporate the shape into their own practice. 29 Leo Steinberg, “The Glorious Company,” 12. 30 Jean-Frâncois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 10, ed. Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1979), 9. 31 The term “nature” is used here to refer to shapes in the built environment. For example, the Concorde series (1981–82) finds parallel shapes in Kelly’s photographs of Place de la Concorde in Paris, or in the case of Concorde IV (State) (1981), “Doorway to Hangar, St Bartholemy,” 1977. 32 Andrew Graham-Dixon, “Like Memories That Haven't Quite Gelled,” The Telegraph, 2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3651351/Like-memories-that-havent-quite-gelled.html. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3651351/Like-memories-that-havent-quite-gelled.html 56 Figure 19 Ellsworth Kelly Concorde IV (State) 1981, etching and aquatint on paper, 40.5 x 32cm. Figure 20 Iran do Espírito Santo Twist 7A 2011, pencil on photogram, 29.2 x 21cm. Figure 21 Susan Kare New Blank Document 1984, Apple Computer Inc, 32 x 32pixels. Arthur C. Danto considers how these formal similarities are to be understood. In “The Comedies of Similarity”, Danto, citing Joseph Masheck’s “A Humanist Geometry” (1984), writes: It is as though there might be a lexicon of forms—squares, half-moons, trapezoids, circles, triangles—with the names of artists and works of all periods which have the shapes in question as the lexicon’s entry. It is as though all these works are affines with one another, and the erudite art historian is then positioned to survey the landscape of forms and “to be reminded” of distant affinities. I think the art history lecture, with its quantity of slides that underscore resemblances, that enable the lecturer to use post-structuralist idiom and speak of Palladio and “inscribed” in Mangold, is somewhat responsible for this way of thinking, which may be legitimate, but only pending what no one has given us, namely a good analysis of affinity. 33 This way of thinking is legitimate in contemporary environments because shapes are available in a context of image sharing and exchange. Artists have individualised their experiences with pre-existing images and how they use these to make new work. Artists can identify formal relationships and affinities in the work of others and develop these into causal relationships in their own work. For example, an artist may view a particular abstract trapezoid in Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921), or Henri Matisse’s The Snail (1953); or Robert Mangold’s Attic Series #5 (1991), or Iran do Espírito Santo’s Twist A (2011, figure 20), and insert this into their own work. The 33 Joseph Masheck, “Mangolds Humanist Geometry,” cited in Arthur C . Danto, “The Comedies of Similarity,” chap. 4 in Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in a Post-Historical Perspective (Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 50. 57 meaning of this shape is then multiplied because it is shared and made common in contemporary visual culture. Even Susan Kare’s computer icon, New Blank Document for Apple Computer Inc. (1984, figure 21) seems relevant in this context. Specific shapes reappear in art history as well as in visual culture with a certain amount of regularity. In Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, Kress and van Leeuwen note that abstract shapes have a degree of “interchangeability” and are used and combined into meaningful compositions using visual “grammar”. 34 As already noted, the abstract shapes from early Modernism have reappeared in subsequent artworks, designs, and architecture to build a visual culture. For instance, the avant-garde rectangles of De Stijl may have started as abstractions from nature, but they very quickly became templates for a ‘new reality’ in the designs of Gerrit Rietveld. It is easy to see how abstract shapes became popularised through the built environment of Modernism. Another flat shape that appears in several iterations is an ancient stylised floral arrangement known as a quatrefoil. The four-leafed floral design has a long history associated with Gothic architecture and is used in artwork, design, and commercial printing. This stylised flower appears as a paper cut-out maquette in Matisse’s Chinese Fish (1951), as a partial element inspired by Art Deco design in Watkins’s The Fall No. 2 (1968), 35 as a screenprinted example of Pop Art in Andy Warhol’s Ten Foot Flowers (1967), as a work of reimagined neo-pop art in Takashi Murakami’s KaiKai KiKi flowers, and as a painted steel sculpture in Christopher Hodges’s Garden (2013). A stylised floral design, the quatrefoil is also crucial in the history of print such as in Printers Ornaments on the ‘Monotype’ (1928), 36 as well as a form of tracery in architecture and stained glass. Ornamental designs were printed in reference books in the nineteenth century as inspiration for designers and architects. For The Grammar of Ornament (1856), which became extremely popular, Owen Jones visited the Alhambra Palace, where he observed the quatrefoil. He instructed its correct use according to the following 34 Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images (London: Routledge, 1996), 57. 35 Wayne Tunnicliffe observes that The Fall no 2 shows Watkins working through “a cubist, constructivist and Fernand Léger-inspired abstraction, part of an international resurgence of interest in the art of the 1920s and 30s, and in art deco design”. See Tunnicliffe, “‘The Easel Did Not Go Pop: It Went Bang!’,” 144. 36 Warde “Printers Ornaments on the 'Monotype’.” 58 proposition: “flowers or other natural objects should not be used as ornaments, but conventional representations founded upon them sufficiently suggestive to convey the intended image to the mind…” 37 This conventionalised ornament is sufficiently suggestive in Frank Stella’s Flin Flon (1970), where intertwining curves and vaulting arcs have a “close relationship” 38 with Islamic ornament. Here, the quatrefoil is identifiable as a shape that undergoes a visual change as it is translated into painting. The above shapes demonstrate how image details become familiar through reuse and a process of translation. In the book Working Space (1986), Frank Stella observes that “the excitement of the pictorial past haunts the invention of the pictorial present”; 39 that is, shapes maintain something of an echo as they enter into the context of his practice. As such, righ- angled trapezoids and quatrefoils are used for different reasons in abstract painting. These different contexts produce shapes with multiple meanings that become generally familiar and ‘haunt’ contemporary painting. A contemporary and globally networked visual economy is an ideal environment for the spectres of abstract shapes to frequently manifest. David Joselit observes that images “possess vast power through their capacity for replication, remediation, and dissemination at variable velocities” to form connections with one another. 40 As I have already described, this power begins with the printing process and is expanded by television and digital media giving even more power to images and shapes by inserting them into popular culture. Televisual images communicate in a series of ‘distinctive moments’. Stuart Hall writes that for messages to “‘have an effect’, influence, entertain, instruct, or persuade”, 41 they must first be decoded by social practice. However, Susan Sontag also writes that television is “organised to arouse and to satiate by its surfeit of images [which] keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content”; 42 that is, light and ephemeral images are at the same time influential and persuasive. 37 Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (New York: DK Publishing, 2001; orig. pub. 1856), 25. 38 Anthony White, “Frank Stella: Discussion of the Work,” National Gallery of Australia (website), 2002, http://nga.gov.au/International/Catalogue/Detail.cfm?IRN=37841&BioArtistIRN=15599 &MnuID=SRCH&GalID=1. 39 Frank Stella, Working Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 99. 40 David Joselit, After Art, ed. Sarah Whiting (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013), xiv. 41 Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” chap. 36 in The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 509. 42 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003), 94. http://nga.gov.au/International/Catalogue/Detail.cfm?IRN=37841&BioArtistIRN=15599 59 What better example of this compound-complex televisual form than a “show about nothing”, 43 Seinfeld, in which Stella’s Flin Flon appears in an episode titled “The Red Dot”. 44 This contributes both to the dissemination of Stella’s work and makes the quatrefoil shape even more familiar. Numerous artists redirect the power of television to produce a familiarity in their work, among them David Reed, who inserted his painting #328 (1990) into Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958) and Rodney Graham who, inversely, reconstructed his own Modern abstract wall installation Psychomania (2010), “reconfiguring the composition of the original paintings whilst maintaining a basic vocabulary of form” from a British low-budget zombie film of the same name. 45 Artists make visual selections from familiar images and image details and translate these in their work. For example, when Laura Owens borrows image details from a variety of sources, she selects things that “when you pick them and maybe rearrange them, look like other things”. 46 This suggests that Owens is searching for shapes that have ambiguous meanings. Abstract forms are like objects that interact on the surface of the canvas which “is a container that people are shifting things into”. 47 Artists translate details from art-historical images, architecture, and design into contemporary abstract painting. This kind of process can be observed in the practices of some contemporary Australian painters. Consider Natalya Hughes’s reinterpretation of a detail from Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s nineteenth-century ukiyo-e print in Looking Cute (2013, figure 22) and Peter Atkins’s translation of the design from a Telstra print advertisement in Talk + Text (2012, figure 23). 43 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “About Nothing,” chap. 2 in Seinfeld. BFI TV Classics (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 19. 44 “The Red Dot,” Seinfeld, Season 3, Episode 12, 02:26. 45 "Painter, Poet, Lighthouse Keeper," Lisson Gallery, http://www.lissongallery.com/exhibitions/rodney-graham-painter-poet-lighthouse-keeper. 46 Kushner, “Laura Owens.” 47 In conversation with Laura Hoptman The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 50. http://www.lissongallery.com/exhibitions/rodney-graham-painter-poet-lighthouse-keeper 60 Figure 22 Natalya Hughes Looking Cute 2013, acrylic on plywood, 240 x 240cm. Figure 23 Peter Atkins Talk + Text 2012, acrylic on canvas, 61 x 61cm. Both of these works show how artists translate popular image details into their own practices. Of Looking Cute, Hughes says she is, “interested with the way people engage with things that might otherwise be overlooked, like decoration”. 48 Similarly, Atkins describes how he selects “what I am attracted to, what I find beautiful at a particular time”. 49 These shapes undergo a translation upon entering the context of the new painting and are changed by the artists. These works promote an ambiguity in which the origin of the abstract shapes is difficult to identify. Thus, by adopting a methodology of translation, contemporary abstraction can use painted shapes in a dialogue with visual culture to reanimate existing forms and build new ones. 2.2 Visual Poetics: Scale and Arrangement For contemporary abstract painting to form a dialogue with wider visual culture, it must move outside the studio in some way. In addition to commercial printing and digital reproduction, this can be achieved by recreating studio works as large-scale murals in a mode of expanded painting. Murals connect abstract forms with the built environment so that artworks become monumental in scale and accessible to new audiences. Murals⎯including graffiti and public art⎯have recently moved into a more mainstream cultural position, partly due to “the forces of commodification in 48 Saskia Edwards, “Natalya Hughes at Milani Gallery: Warping the Woodblock,” http://www.aestheticfixation.com/2014/06/natalya-hughes-at-milani-gallery.html. 49 Peter Atkins, “Painting and Drawing,” Greenaway Art Gallery, http://www.greenaway.com.au/Artists/Peter-Atkins.html#essay2011PAtkins. http://www.aestheticfixation.com/2014/06/natalya-hughes-at-milani-gallery.html http://www.greenaway.com.au/Artists/Peter-Atkins.html#essay2011PAtkins 61 fashion, music, publishing and architecture”. 50 Therefore, contemporary murals feature in museums, galleries and urban design. Expanded abstract painting formed a close relationship with the built environment during Modernism. 51 With a combined interest in formal qualities, the rectilinear shapes, flat surfaces, and free plan of the International Style provided increased mural opportunities for artists and architects. 52 To take advantage of these opportunities and with the increased scale of mural work, artists often painted small maquettes to work out composition and colour. As described above, Matisse employed his cut-outs as maquettes in this way. Artworks created in the studio form the initial designs⎯the blueprints⎯for translations into a different medium and a larger scale. Images and details from art history, architecture and design, are scaled up when artists apply methods of translation to large-scale murals. A small-scale translation of design elements in the studio is extended as artists align their work with architectural forms and the built environment. for example, Charline von Heyl’s Wall at WAM (2010) (figure 15) for Worcester Art Museum in the US mirrors the arched entries that lead into the gallery below. This mural is connected with the architecture of the building but is also based in part on Ellsworth Kelly’s Orange White (1963) from the museum’s collection. In an interview about the use of this image, von Heyl says that, “it was a two second decision” and that she wanted to make something decorative “that gives an immense satisfaction”. 53 Selected from a brochure at the museum, Kelly’s work is translated from its original context and enlarged by von Heyl into a mural design and a background template for an Abstract Expressionist landscape. When selecting the 50 Alison Young, Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination (Oxford & New York: Routledge, 2014), 151. 51 This is a renewed relationship, as artists have painted the walls and ceilings of buildings since antiquity. For example, consider Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (15081512). 52 For example, Eileen Gray’s E1027 modernist house at RoquebruneCap Martin proved irresistible to Le Corbusier who vacationed there without Gray’s knowledge and painted murals on the walls. Le Corbusier’s Sgraffite à Cap Martin (1938) recreates his architectural “technique of mariage de contours to a figurative subject”, applied as a mural depicting a black painted outline of three intertwined and abstracted figures. See Peter Adam, “Building for Others,” in Eileen Gray: Architect / Designer: A Biography (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2000), 291314. 53 Charline von Heyl “The Man Podcast: Charline von Heyl,” in The Modern Art Notes Podcast, 17 November 2011, https://manpodcast.com/portfolio/no-2-charline-von-heyl-kristen-hileman/, 37:23. 62 Kelly image, von Heyl notes that she never saw the original work in the museum, and that in the studio, she “almost only works through books and printed images”. 54 Thus, the six-leafed floral shape Orange White was initially translated from its original context into the printed brochure and then later by its reuse in the mural. Abstract shapes chosen for their design or decorative potential are indicative of a wider tendency in contemporary painting⎯an attitude that is unique in a visual economy of surplus historical references. Artists take what they wish to make their paintings “without guilt, and equally important, without an agenda based on a received meaning of a style”. 55 It is with this attitude that von Heyl selected Kelly’s Orange White from a printed brochure. Reproduced as a printed image the shapes from this artwork enter a wider image network in order to perform the role of promotional image. 56 Printed images—and, by extension, images online—prepare the way for a type of contemporary artist to emerge, “who inserts things into a frame”. 57 Entering this larger network, Orange White joins other images and shapes that are already circulating in popular culture, where artists may select whatever they want from all available images. From within this context of image choice, artist Christine Streuli has selected one of a brushstroke, which she has repeatedly stencilled in her installation Ableger (Offshoot) (2013) at Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland. The brushstroke is applied across the surface of the canvas, spilling onto the wall of the gallery in an act of expanded painting where “paintings and wall are treated as equals in carrying colour”. 58 The brushstroke, like Kelly’s six-leafed floral shape, is removed from its historical context and given new meaning as a painterly installation arranged according to the specific requirements of the mural site. 54 Ibid., 09:3034. 55 Hoptman The Forever Now, 13. 56 Eshelman notes that the artist has the “unique power to renew value in the cultural archive”. Raoul Eshelman, Performatism, or, the End of Postmodernism (Aurora: The Davies Group, 2008), 218. 57 As an example, Eshelman cites the “collage like figures” in Neo Rauch’s Pfad (The Path) (2003). Ibid., 225. 58 Ibid., 49. 63 Like von Heyl’s desire to create “immense satisfaction”, 59 Streuli has selected the brushstroke image because of its capacity for seduction, “a term the artist repeatedly uses when talking about her own work”. 60 Unlike von Heyl’s quick selection however, Streuli’s was a calculated continuation of a type of translation that can be traced to Roy Lichtenstein’s Brushstroke (1965). Lichtenstein writes that his brushstroke, a Pop comment on the authorial mark in Abstract Expressionism, is a ‘cliché’, a visual shorthand, and ‘archetype’. He describes that these kinds of archetypes are of the kind that can also be located in Cubist works by Picasso and cartoons by Walt Disney. 61 These are the values that Streuli trades on when she recasts the brushstroke as a stencilled shape that is painted across the installation. In contemporary image economies abstract shapes are popularised and become easily recognisable. Indeed, while access to an abundance of images provides increased exposure, it also enhances the confusion and complexity about the origin, meaning, and use of abstract shapes. Contemporary artists benefit from this confusion, making use of particular forms from a circulating network of images and shapes. Von Heyl and Streuli translate specific shapes from this network, painting them in large scale, foregrounding their importance and reinserting them into contemporary visual culture. These works are examples of translation writ large: abstract shapes that have moved from the studio and fulfil the edifying potential of art. 2.3 Confusion and Complexity: Visual Grammar, Abstract Rhyme Translating flat abstract shapes from art history is not limited to mural painting but also includes laser-cut plastic, digitally manipulated screenprints, and computer- assisted painting. The shapes discussed in this chapter have transcended their medium specificity and are extended by a practice of expanded painting described above. Like the textual translations of language considered in the first chapter, individual and discrete abstract shapes are mediated by contemporary visual culture. They are encountered indirectly and reanimated so that each shape exists like a photocopy, a 59 von Heyl, “The Man Podcast,” 37:23. 60 Katja Blomberg, Christine Streuli – Nonstop-Painting (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2013), 51. 61 Hal Foster, “Roy Lichtenstein, or the Cliché Image,” chap. 2 in The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012), 91. 64 ghost that echoes alongside the artwork examples above. Each contemporary abstraction is haunted by previous contexts even as shapes enter into new contextual relations or are remade in other media. Some artists visually rhyme abstract shapes in their work with existing forms, translating shapes from contemporary visual culture. These may include design elements, packaging shapes, architectural forms, and shapes from digital screens, such as that seen in Wendy White’s No Pressure (2016, figure 24) and Pleasure I (2016, figure 25); Ryan Gander’s Your Present Time Orientation (Second Act—Random Abstraction) (2011, figure 26); Vincent Hawkins’s Untitled (2015, figure 27); Christopher Wool’s Untitled (2011, figure 28); and John Young’s Moment III (2015, figure 29). Arranged individually or together in compositions, the shapes in these works communicate with audiences using a visual grammar that is provisional and flexible. Artists make use of this compositional flexibility in their work in three ways: by 1) treating the detritus of everyday visual culture as easily obtainable readymades to work with; 2) as a steady flow of images and details ripe for appropriation into new compositions; or 3) by scanning this same steady flow of images for particular details that can be used in abstract painting. These three approaches engage with other forms of visual culture and direct abstraction towards objects and images in the world. The first technique of translation that artists employ when engaging with visual culture continues the legacy of Cubist collage. Artists make use of the designs and pictorial layouts of newspapers, advertising, packaging, and websites as a way to respond to the world around them. One strategy employed by contemporary practice is to use the structure of commercially produced shapes and designs as a readymade surface for the hand-drawn image or gestural painterly mark. Activating the newspaper and using other printed images as armatures for painting has a long history of political critique or dissent, ranging from Pablo Picasso’s Head of a Man with a Moustache (1913) and Max Weber’s The Sunday Tribune (1913) to the more recent examples of Robert Rauschenberg’s People for the American Way Print (1991) and Arnulf Rainer’s Bible Overpaintings (1995–1998). 65 A second technique that artists use to communicate with popular visual culture is to appropriate its images, collaging or repainting them. Artists approach popular culture in this way in a campaign of agency; to own images and use them. Artists who employ traditional appropriation techniques are at a disadvantage because their images will always refer to a source that has already set the parameters and terms of communication. By contrast, this research of familiarity in abstraction seeks to explore ways that contemporary abstraction can affect visual culture in a proactive way, how it might be able to initiate visual communication. To do this, abstract painting must translate visual images in a third way. Artists scan visual culture to identify and select image details and shapes that they can recreate in their work in such a way that they carry with them an approximate similarity or resemblance; i.e., they make abstract forms that ‘look like’ some other existing form. Groups of shapes are then organised in compositions that resemble the visual grammar used in wider visual culture. This approach, like the others, has a long history in art. For example, shapes in abstract painting are sometimes organised in simple formal arrangements for pragmatic reasons, such as in Matisse’s The Heart (1947), composed as a double-page layout for printing in Jazz. Compositional layout is sometimes used for ideological reasons, such as an hierarchy between top and bottom in Kazimir Malevich’s Painterly Realism Boy with Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, discussed above. Abstract paintings composed using shapes are particularly useful when discussing a concept of visual grammar. Suprematist paintings such as Malevich’s provide a simple illustration of the principles of Rudolf Arnheim’s Gestalt psychology of visual perception. 62 Compositional balance, movement, dynamics, colour, and space are all important shared principles in Modern art and design. Importantly, I have indicated how this sharing results in a cross-disciplinary use of shapes where details appear and reappear in artwork, design, architecture, etc. This kind of sharing is accelerated in a contemporary visual ecology where abstract shapes are composed using a shared visual grammar. 62 For further discussion about composition, see Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, rev. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1974). 66 Contemporary painting sometimes adopts a visual grammar and syntax from other forms of visual culture. Artists attract attention with a “visually assertive” 63 and energetic attitude toward graphic elements employed and composed in ways that are shared with visual communication—graphic elements whose history is shared between painting, design, and architecture. For example, consider the starburst, a familiar shape from graphic design history used in advertising to announce sales or in comic books as a stylised explosion. This shape was initially appropriated in Pop Art as a wry comment on the American military and the Cold War. For example, in relation to Explosion (19651966) and Whaam! (1963), Roy Lichtenstein describes how he only “nominally” copied from an original image and that in his work, “the original acquires a totally different texture”. 64 The starburst in these works acquires the value of a graphic full stop, a comically exaggerated exclamation that underscores and caricaturises any semblance of violence. Familiar forms from advertising and graphic design are also used in contemporary abstract paintings. For example, the starburst is also used as a central abstract element in Jacqueline Humphries’s Untitled (2009), or variously by Charline von Heyl as a violent comic bang in Pink Vendetta (2009) and a tenebrous outline in P (2008). In her work, von Heyl translates existing materials, “swaying from [the] recognizable to the intangible”, 65 in a practice that seeks to invent something. Contemporary artists use elements such as the starburst in their work with a similar visual grammar or communicative quality as it might be used in wider visual culture because the painterly quotation “first singled out for completely different purposes is the essential first step in the stumbling, unmapped journey towards something never seen before”. 66 As objects carrying information, flat, abstract shapes are icons that shortcut the otherwise lengthy textual communications of visual culture. This is particularly useful for computer and other screen interfaces where abstracted graphics provide a quick access to a program or file. As noted earlier, Alexander Galloway has described an 63 Susan Hudson, Painting Now (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 70. 64 Roy Lichtenstein cited in Nathan Dunne, “Wow! Lichtenstein: A Retrospective at Tate Modern Il.” Tate Etc. Spring 2013, no. 27 (2013). 65 Kirsty Bell, “Its Own Reality,” Frieze, 5 May 2009, https://frieze.com/article/its-own-reality. 66 Hubert Damisch cited in ibid. 67 effect issuing from computer icons, observing that “an interface is not a thing; an interface is an effect”. 67 This ‘interface effect’ can also be detected in contemporary abstract painting and visual culture where abstract icons are dematerialised and float like buttons in front of a background, much like the flat design of Windows 8 or Apple iOS7, where graphic abstract shapes communicate “without the need for any graphical parallelism to real world objects”. 68 This effect is particularly striking when used with recent games such as Pokémon Go (2016), where distinguishing a diegetic from a non-diegetic element becomes difficult. It is also important to consider how this effect is used in expanded practices of contemporary abstract painting. Consider the iconic, laser-cut, black cloud shape used by Wendy White in her installation No Pressure. This cloud shape is a familiar presence in visual culture. It provides a key for weather forecasts on multiple platforms, the stylised background graphics from (the often appropriated) Mario Brothers, 69 and, most importantly, has become synonymous with the online storage and download of digital files. White uses this cloud and other iconic graphics in different material modes in her work. This cloud shape appears in several paintings, a billboard, as the face of a limited-edition smart watch, and as a support graphic alongside an image of Hillary Clinton for the 2016 American Presidential Campaign. Figure 24 Wendy White No Pressure 2016, edition of 2 + AP, dibond, rainbow webbing, nylon rope, ball chain, 127 x 152cm. 67 Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 36. 68 Roman Po “A Look at Microsoft, Google and Apple’s Approach to Flat Design,” Hongkiat, http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/google-apple-microsoft-flat-design/. 69 See Cory Archangel’s Super Mario Clouds 2002. http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/google-apple-microsoft-flat-design/ 68 Figure 25 Wendy White Pleasure I 2016, digital billboard, Override: A Billboard Project, Expo Chicago, USA. The cloud is also an important conceptual tool in art history, one that works against traditional two-dimensional linear perspective in order to create a new space in painting. In A Theory of /Cloud/ (1972), Hubert Damisch argues that the cloud is used both as “pictorial accessory” and constructively as “gap filler”. 70 For Damisch, the cloud is detached from representation and instead assumes the role of a pictorial sign that is distributed across the surface of a painting according to a pictorial system. He writes, “If such a thing as a pictorial system exists, that system has no reality, even of a theoretical nature, outside the products in which it can be instituted in various strict forms.” 71 This new space is important because it positions the cloud somewhere between the painted surface and the digital screen, a space that I explore in works such as Cloud #1 (2015, figure 30) and Cloud #2 (2015, figure 31). The way that abstract shapes are organised using visual grammar is culturally specific. For example, visual perception is “deeply affected” 72 by cultural experiences of reading and writing, which informs the organisation of pictorial elements in artwork and design. Looking again at the use and reuse of the cloud from No Pressure, it is interesting to note the different effects that are enacted as White changes the relative location and scale of the shape, where it is placed in each artwork installation, and how this plays a role in its reception. 70 Hubert Damisch, Theory of /Cloud/, ed. Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Cultural Memory in the Present (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), 231. 71 Ibid., 86. 72 Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images, 4. 69 Figure 30 Simon Degroot Cloud #1 2015, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm. Figure 31 Simon Degroot Cloud #2 2015, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm. In contemporary visual culture, abstracted shapes are arranged or composed according to a particular logic. Shapes are liberated from their supports in a logical extension of Bois’s “figure/ground opposition” that he says originated in the superimpositions and overlapping layers of Modernist painting. Abstract shapes are dematerialised as they are translated in contemporary painting, floating on and around the surface of the painting, the digital screen, the billboard, and the mural. This is clear in the installation view of recent exhibitions, including Wendy White’s Santa Cruz at Eric Firestone Gallery, New York (2016), and Christine Streuli’s installation Ableger in a group exhibition Revolution: John Chamberlain, Ida Eckblad, Christine Streuli at Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2013). Liberated from their canvas supports, the shapes in these works are free to engage the built environment. In this situation, artists work as architects and construct their visual environments, translating shapes from a wide variety of sources to produce paintings, products, and popular culture. However, it is not my intention to provide an exhaustive list of translated shapes in contemporary abstraction but to demonstrate the shared way that abstract shapes are used. My aim is to show that contemporary artists work with a visual grammar that is shared by popular visual culture, using shapes that rhyme with existing shapes in a kind of intertextuality. Using visual literacy to spot intertextual references is an important indication of social belonging and inclusion. Writing over twenty years ago, Kress and van Leeuwen foresaw that to understand and use images and to be visually literate “will begin to be 70 a matter of survival, especially in the workplace”. 73 This kind of literacy is not always made explicit when reading images in visual communication. For example, Barthes notes that while photographic images are implicitly understood and presumed to be easily read because of their verisimilitude, they are actually encoded at their “different levels of production”, 74 such as technical treatment, layout and framing. Contemporary abstract artists also encode their work with different meanings as they incorporate different technologies and types of production such as computer imaging, halftone screenprinting, and digital laser cutting. Techniques of production and reproduction also constitute processes of translating images in this research. Photographic images are abstracted, stylised and conventional in their abstracted production or reproduction (similar to what occurs through copying or caricature, described above). They become “culturally produced semiotic resources” that are available to individuals—including abstract artists—who have the capacity to “transform” and “reshape” them. 75 This kind of reshaping is foregrounded in contemporary abstraction where artists employ strategies of translation to confuse and obfuscate the origins of painted shapes. Photographic reproductions are particularly interesting when the photograph itself reproduces an abstract painting. For instance, Piet Mondrian’s original painting Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930, figure 32) has hand-painted uneven lines and modulated colours. However, in photographic reproductions, the lines often appear straight and the colours flat. This translation from hand-made unevenness into photographic exactness in reproduction acts to “reinforce and reproduce a particular (incorrect) version of Mondrian and a particular (ideological) version of abstract painting” 76 as exact. It is these ideologically-charged photographic reproductions of Mondrian that give rise to an interpretation that assumes his abstract rectilinear shapes to be exact. Consider Ryan Gander’s Your Present Time Orientation (Second Act)—Random Abstraction where he dissects the paintings of Mondrian into “their solid blocks of 73 Ibid., 3. 74 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: FontanaPress, 1977), 17. 75 Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images, 13. 76 Ibid., 221. 71 colour”, 77 recreating them in coloured glass. This work is described as a “meaningful recontextualisation of existing artefacts”; 78 however, its coloured shapes leaning against the wall are crisp, reflective, and exact. Thus, instead of referring to the Mondrian painting, they more accurately refer to photographed reproductions of Mondrian paintings. The contemporary installation here denies the human touch and the hand-made. Figure 26 Ryan Gander, Your Present Time Orientation (Third Act)—Random Abstraction 2010, custom painted glass, Perspex clip frames, 600 x 110 x 20cm (installation dimensions). Figure 32 Piet Mondrian Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow 1930, oil on canvas, 46 x 46cm. Contemporary abstraction works in a space of visual communication that it shares with advertising and computer interface technologies. In a 2012 article for Artforum, Claire Bishop describes how many artists use technology “at one if not most stages of … production, dissemination and consumption”, 79 also suggesting that artists select, reformat, and recontextualise existing artefacts. Gander’s rectangles can easily be imagined as icons on the computer desktop, or as design elements in visual culture. 80 Translation is used in contemporary abstraction as a way to stay connected with and engage a complex interconnected archive from art history and visual culture. 77 Emily Stokes, “Ryan Gander,” in Illuminations (Venice, Italy: La Biennale di Venezia, 2011), 19293. 78 Claire Bishop, “Digital Divide: Whatever Happened to Digital Art?” Artforum International 51, no. 1 (2012): 435–41, 534. 79 Ibid., 534. 80 For example, see the album cover designs: Hackett Films, “Silverchair: Young Modern,” CD album artwork (Surry Hills: Eleven: A Music Company, 2007), and Steve Keene, “The Apples in Stereo: Tone Soul Evolution,” CD album artwork (Burbank: Warner Bros. Records, 1997). 72 A methodology of translation is best suited to this dialectic of complexity. Contemporary artists use shapes from a variety of sources with a “new kind of freedom”; 81 that is, they work without an anxiety of influence. Abstraction becomes something of a ‘filter’ through which “the recognisible passes and is transformed”. 82 Artists work in a “compound-complex” 83 conceptual frame of mind, which is described by critic Jerry Saltz as an attitude that says, I know that the art I’m creating may seem silly, even stupid, or that it might have been done before, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t serious. At once knowingly self-conscious about art, unafraid, and unashamed, these young artists not only see the distinction between earnestness and detachment as artificial; they grasp that they can be ironic and sincere at the same time… 84 This complexity is amplified when contemporary abstract-painted shapes are ambiguous in their representation. Gander’s installed painted-glass rectangles are laid out in a semi-organised way so that each shape can be compared to the one next to it. This is indicative of the organised flat design of contemporary computer interfaces where abstract forms embody an interface effect. Abstract shapes such as those in White’s No Pressure connote an interactivity inherited from computer technology. Contemporary abstraction arranges shapes in parallel, aligned to an invisible grid in an organised display of difference. 85 For example, when comparing Apple’s iOS 7 interface design with Allan McCollum’s The Shapes Project (2005–6, figure 31) or Rebecca Shore’s 15 (2008, figure 32), it is easy to see that abstract shapes painted in an organised way embody an interface effect from the computer screen. 81 Bob Nikas, Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2009), 8. 82 Ibid., 11. 83 Jerry Saltz, “Sincerity and Irony Hug It Out: At P.S 1’s ‘Greater New York,’ and New Union of Opposing Attitudes.” New York Magazine, 27 May 2010. 84 Ibid., original italics. 85 This type of organisation is elsewhere connected as an arrangement of tools. In Frank Gehry’s furniture fabrication workshop, Andrew Kromelow described this organisation as “knolling”. Sophie Hay, “The History of Knolling,” The Long Lyst, last updated 2015, www.lyst.com,https://web.archive.org/web/20160304064743/http://www.lyst.com/longlyst/art- knolling/. http://www.lyst.com/longlyst/art- 73 Figure 33 iPhone iOS 7 User Interface 2013, Apple Computer Inc. Figure 34 Allan McCollum The Shapes Project: 144 top parts 2005ongoing, dimensions variable. Figure 35 Simon Degroot White and Blue Flat Lay 2017, oil on canvas, 198 x 137cm. Flat abstract shapes like these are organised and arranged in a way that is different from the early-twentieth-century Cubist deconstructions of Picasso and Braque. Artists today take ownership of discrete individual shapes to use in their work, which they manage and arrange in a grid format with a visual order that seems to reflect the ‘mapping’ of the computer interface. Shapes are presented without a particular hierarchy; they are not composed, but are rather organised. Modernist abstract painting makes extensive use of the grid to organise shapes on the flat surface of the canvas. Krauss argues that in Modernism, the ‘grid’ is an organised armature that “logically … extends, in all directions, to infinity”. 86 This is important for contemporary painting that is anti-hermetic and outward-facing. The computer screen provides an updated version of the Modernist grid, an armature where shapes are ‘mapped’ in a space that is both deep and flat. 87 Krauss argues that any boundary of the grid—such as the edge of a painting—is only an arbitrary section. The grid also evokes the sublime and, in a repetitive sequence of successive parts, creates an “artificial infinite”. 88 The Modernist grid reaches its ultimate form as the artificially 86 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Grids,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1985), 18. 87 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 227. 88 In 1756, Edmund Burke described infinity as an attribute of the sublime, “the ‘artificial infinite’ an effect produced by succession—that is, a repetitive sequence of identical parts”. For a discussion of the sublime in photography, see Alix Ohlin, “Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime,” Art Journal 61, no. 4 (2002): 22–35. the Perception of Ambiguous Objects,” Science Direct 1322 (2010): 81–91. 74 infinite armature for the computer screen desktop that extends into virtual space. Contemporary artists are exploring how abstract shapes can make use of this grid, employing what Krauss calls ‘centrifugal’ logic, extending outward from the painting or the screen back into the world. This is important to my research because it demonstrates an interactive space between contemporary abstraction and wider visual culture. Abstract painting becomes a locus of activity for an expanded interaction with wider visual culture where already-existing shapes are selected and translated by artists and reinserted into a complex visual network. As Bourriaud observes, “to learn how to use forms … is above all to know how to make them one’s own, to inhabit them”. 89 The contemporary artists mentioned above collect abstract shapes from various sources in visual culture, making their own inventories of adopted shapes that they can use time and again in their work. For instance, this is reflected in the “repertory of cut forms” 90 created by Matisse or, more recently, the “inventory of components” 91 comprising Julie Mehretu’s Black City (2007) paintings. Artists identify and adopt abstract shapes from art history and visual culture for use in their own practice and reinsert them into contemporary visual economies. The painted shape in “the artwork is no longer an end point but a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions”. 92 When multiplied, these contributions confound recognition and complicate a categorisation of abstract shapes. Recent scientific research comparing a typology of objects suggests that “learning and experience” have important effects on “categorical perception”. 93 Scientists argue that recent visual experience affects the perception of ambiguous objects. Contemporary image economies exploit this phenomenon in a procedure known as ‘priming’. Priming occurs when exposure to a stimulus induces an attraction or an 89 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, trans. Jeanine Herman, ed. Caroline Schneider (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002), 18. 90 Buchberg et al., Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, 89. 91 Mark Godfrey, “Julie Mehretu: Black City,” in The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol (Skira Rizzoli, 2012), 115. 92 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 20. 93 Valentina Daelli, Nicola J. van Rijsbergen, and Alessandro Treves. “How Recent Experience Affects http://imgur.com/gallery/HUYPLXW. 75 equivalence effect on a subsequently presented one. 94 Abstract shapes invite—or lead—audiences to use their own visual experiences and memories of similar shapes to make sense of what they see. This technique is often used in visual communication to achieve a particular outcome, or in children’s books such as This Equals That (2014, figure 36) where each page is paired to establish conceptual associations. Simply put, priming is a formal relay where one shape influences the next. Figure 36 Jason Fulford This Equals That 2014, Aperture Foundation book, n.p. Figure 37 Internet Meme Raw Chicken or Donald Trump? 2016, www.imgur.com. The computer accelerates this relay because it encourages a rapid scan or sweep through information. Artists share and compare painted abstract shapes using social media. Users of Instagram and Facebook are quick to point out formal similarities between painted flat shapes and other image shapes in popular culture. 95 Visual similarities between objects—where something also looks like something else (pareidolia)—is popular in Internet memes that show two images side by side to demonstrate their visual similarities. Some well-known examples include ‘Dog or Muffin?’ (2016), or the lampoon ‘Raw Chicken or Donald Trump’ (2016, figure 37) 96 which somewhat recalls the caricature of King Louis Philippe becoming a pear drawn 94 Ibid., 81. 95 One interesting local example can be found in the comments section of Melbourne artist David (Ghostpatrol) Booth’s Instagram account. In 2016, Booth posted a progress photograph of a mural collaboration with Carla McRae at Melbourne café Manchester Press. The mural shows several flat painted shapes arranged, or knolled, on the wall of the café. Most are easy to recognise, a kangaroo, a horse and a reclining figure. There is also a yellow shape to the left that appears to be a four-legged animal, which, in the following photo with added black outlines is revealed to be a poodle. In the comments section of the first image, one person asks, “Do I see a ghost in the shell tank in ther e?” This question is understandable because the tank shares a comparable silhouette to the painted yellow shape. See https://www.instagram.com/p/BA27Rg9RA_V/?taken-by=ghostpatrol. 96 See “Raw Chicken or Donald Trump,” posted by Cerulean Blue, 11 March 2016, http://imgur.com/gallery/HUYPLXW http://www.imgur.com/ http://www.instagram.com/p/BA27Rg9RA_V/?taken-by=ghostpatrol of Pictorial Representation (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1961), 202. 76 by Honoré Daumier (1831), discussed in the first chapter. Figure 27 Vincent Hawkins Untitled 2015, monotype print on Fabriano paper, 42 x 29.7cm. Figure 38 Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman 1937, oil on canvas, 60 x 49cm. Comparing abstract shapes and artworks side-by-side is helpful for observing visual similarities. As noted, abstract shapes have increased potential for rapid circulation when they enter a virtually connected network. 97 Contemporary artists use social media as a platform to contextualise their work within art history. For example, in 2015, Vincent Hawkins used social media to highlight the ways that the shapes in his Untitled (2015) are analogous to Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1937, figure 38). Viewing images of these works side-by-side on Hawkins’s Instagram account, one can easily see that they are similar. Gombrich observes, “among the familiar things we can read into pictures, none may be more important than other pictures”. 98 Hawkins uses social media to prime audiences and reveal the pareidolia in his work, positioning Untitled in the context of art history. 97 Joselit, After Art. 98 Ernst Gombrich, “The Image in the Clouds,” chap. 6 in Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology everywhere.html. 77 As I have already outlined, contemporary advertising design shares formal similarities with art-historical images. Companies align their products with particular values by reusing similar shapes, compositions, and colours. For example, the Apple ‘iPod Silhouettes’ (20002011, figure 39) campaign of “silhouettes of sinuous dancers against blocks of vivid colour” resembles Matisse’s Icarus (194344, figure 40). 99 Of course, designers make use of these famous images to imbue products with cultural capital. Conversely, contemporary artists also make use of advertising design in their work. As such, we must always consider what coded messages—if any—are transferred in formal elements as they are translated from abstract painting into design and then back again. Figure 39 Apple iPod Silhouettes 200011, advertising campaign. Figure 40 Henri Matisse Icarus 194344, screenprint for ‘Jazz’, 65.7 x 42.2cm. Abstract shapes become confusing and complex when they are translated in art and design. Identifying particular shapes becomes an intertextual game of recognition in image economies where, “when we look at something, we are unconsciously 99 Alastair Sooke, “Modern Masters: Why Modern Art Is Everywhere,” The Telegraph, 27 April 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/alastair-sooke/7640258/Modern-Masters-why-modern-art-is- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/alastair-sooke/7640258/Modern-Masters-why-modern-art-is- 78 ‘guessing’ or forming a hypotheses about what we can see”. 100 To make sense of painted shapes, we apply what we already know to ‘false guesses’ that we then correct until we find a reasonable solution. Making sense of abstract shapes involves an individual dialectic of searching, locating, and identifying similarities. To understand this process, one needs to look to a philosophy of perception. In Philosophical Investigations (1953), Ludwig Wittgenstein examines what he calls seeing in “aspect” 101 to describe an ability to see one thing in multiple ways. For example, he shows that the duck-rabbit can be “seen as” 102 either a duck or a rabbit, but not both at once. Such forms induce a phenomenon of “multistability in perception”, 103 confusing what is seen and confounding any ability to classify images and shapes. Figure 28 Christopher Wool Untitled 2011, silkscreen on linen, 304.8 x 243.8cm (each). Contemporary abstract shapes are especially confounding when artists remove them from previous contexts and change them by using mechanical and digital processes. For example, Christopher Wool’s Untitled is a selection of eight works depicting a 100 Nicky Hayes and Sue Orrell, “Perception,” chap. 2 in Psychology: An Introduction (New York: Longman Inc., 1987), 185. 101 Ludwig Wittgenstein, chap. 2 in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1997; orig. pub. 1953), 195. 102 Ibid., 194. 103 Fred Attneave, “Multistability in Perception,” chap. 9 in Readings from Scientific American: Image, Object, and Illusion (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1971), 91. 79 screenprinted “blotch” 104 in black and sepia halftones. Wool asks, “is a painting based on another abstract painting itself abstract?” 105 He creates these works by selecting, then photographing, and enlarging details from “small old drawings”. 106 These enlarged details are hard to decipher, which is the point of the work. Wool employs analogue and digital processes to estrange each shape, also enlarging them to billboard size. These works defy the readability of commercial billboards normally designed for advertising and branding. The shapes ghost across each work as “metaphors for consciousness or memory” 107 that are made familiar by their reproduction. In these works, Wool retains an echo of resemblance to redirect attention from the real to the simulation. Like a hall of mirrors, these works only hint that they come from an original, confounding easy recognition. Damisch describes an eighteenth- century text which instructs that landscape painting should turn away from the imitation of nature and toward “the potential information to be derived from stains and blotting…”. 108 Are these works in which we can make out other image-forms, such as clouds or Rorschach abstractions, or is it the stain, drip and splash that we recognise? Are these violent painterly splashes loaded with political charge, as in Kelley Walker’s Black Star Press (Rotated 90 Degrees) (2006), or do they reference the stain of bodily fluids, as in Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings (1978)? Wool subversively uses a strategy of translation and “dedifferentiation” 109 —a reversion to simpler forms—in order to confuse and obfuscate. As such, his work only hints at some original; he keeps the narrative of this work a secret. 104 Mark Godfrey, “Close Up: Stain Resistance,” Artforum 49, no. 10 (2011), wool735.com/cw/essays_and_press/Godfrey%20Artforum_Summer_20110.pdf. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 108 Damisch, Theory of /Cloud/, 185. 109 Foster describes a problematised distinction between figure and ground in these works; however, that “dedifferentiation is explicit in all the Camouflages (1986) where the imbrication of figure and ground exists patently on the canvas”. See Hal Foster, “Roy Lichtenstein, or the Cliché Image,” 135. 80 Figure 29 John Young Moment III 2015, oil on Belgian linen, 76.2 x 103.4cm. Figure 41 Ian Fairweather, Pelléas et Mélisande no date, synthetic polymer on board, 71.5 x 96cm. John Young also employs a method of translation and a reversion to simpler forms in Moment III. However, whereas Wool creates an abstract work from blotches and details from his own previous work, Young translates the work of another artist⎯Ian Fairweather’s figurative Pelléas et Mélisande (no date, figure 41)—using computerised digital processes. Young selects images from the Internet and manipulates them using a set of visual parameters in what he calls “the human– computer friendship”. 110 The computer program turns the source image into an abstraction that can then be hand-painted. In this work, Young has translated Fairweather’s linear figures into a “tangle of softly toned shapes and patches of colour”. 111 This is an abstract translation that refers to an original painting from art history. The processes detailed here represent the wide-ranging and accelerated relation that contemporary artists have with visual culture. They identify, select, and translate individual artworks and ephemeral visual elements into painted motifs. This chapter has shown that translation can be used to complicate and confuse abstract shapes. Contemporary abstract painting engages with visual culture, technology, and art history, using visual grammar in order to take part in a complex game of translation and recognition between art history and visual culture. 110 Emily Poore, “New to the Collection: John Young,” UQ Art Museum (website), https://uqartmuseum.wordpress.com/2016/02/25/new-to-the-collection-john-young/. 111 Ibid. 81 Chapter 3 Familiar Beyond Recognition: Studio Methodologies and Outcomes In the mark that a sponge leaves on a wall, just as in ever changing cloud formations, people see whatever they wish to see: configurations of their desires, images from their theatre of life, signs of their culture. —Hubert Damisch, 1972 1 …to learn how to use forms … is above all to know how to make them one’s own, to inhabit them. —Nicolas Bourriaud, 2002 2 My studio practice and research have developed through several exhibitions and mural projects that explore methods of translation to create new work. By considering translation as methodology, I make paintings that rely upon familiar but not easily recognised visual elements. Architectural shapes from the built environment are a key source of shapes for my new paintings and large-scale murals. This literal sense of the visual environment is at work alongside images from a virtual environment in my practice, which involves a movement between image forms and material states. I select image details with particular qualities (described above as being variously seductive, playful, iconic, designed), and then abstract and reuse them in my work. This movement underscores the dynamic capacity of abstract painting to respond to and engage with visual culture in real time and to arrive at new image forms with altered meanings. My practice and research are informed by a general concept of expanded painting. Examining how contemporary painting can interface with broader visual culture, my practice aims for a reciprocal dialogue not dissimilar to that of socially networked and interfaced technologies. Studio paintings become a site of interaction where abstract shapes are translated from maquettes into paintings for exhibition, digital interactions, 1 Hubert Damisch, Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting. Cultural Memory in the Present. Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries eds. (California: Stanford University Press, 2002. 1972), 185 2 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002), 18. 82 and large-scale murals. My practice is directed toward the anti-hermetic, and through the following outcomes, I engage with visual culture according to my contemporary context and the complexities and opportunities of its image economy. 3.1 Select Reshape, 2014, Spiro Grace Art Rooms, Brisbane I started my research by tracking the passage of forms as they are translated from the real world into abstract flat shapes and between material states. I produced a suite of paintings and two collages for a solo exhibition titled Select Reshape at Spiro Grace Art Rooms, Brisbane (2014). The exhibition title refers to a studio method or procedure inherited from computer software. Selecting images and shapes from various sources, including popular media, architecture, and animation, I made simple line drawings that I then reshaped and reformed as abstract paintings. In addition to sourcing imagery from visual culture, I begin my studio research by reviewing the considerable archive of abstract forms that I have accumulated in sketchbooks. For example, some of these early forms found their way into the design and installation of a thirty-metre interior frieze. This mural, Floating in a New Sky (2014, figures 42 and 43), is a composition of abstracted architectural fragments and clouds painted with bright colours along a corridor. I selected shapes from the built environment and then recreated these as abstract shapes in the mural, including architectural mouldings such as the cavetto and ovolo, stepped gables, and the ogee arch. Figure 42 Simon Degroot Floating in a New Sky (detail) 2014, synthetic polymer, 150 x 3000cm. Figure 43 Simon Degroot, Floating in a New Sky Design (detail) 2014, watercolour and ink on paper, 15 x 300cm. 83 Drawing and scanning this mural design, I used image manipulation software to make changes to the composition. The scanned image also enabled the expansive design to be viewed at once and in comparison to the finished work. The extreme length of this mural and the limitations of the space meant that I could not see the entire work at once. This frustration informed the initial premise for the exhibition and title artwork Select Reshape. That is, the incomplete but tantalising views of the finished mural provoked me to experiment with ways to condense the design and force all of the shapes into one smaller work. Figure 44 Simon Degroot Floating in a New Sky 2014, designs layered in Adobe Photoshop Figure 45 Simon Degroot Cove Dupont 2014, oil on canvas, 198 x 260cm To do this, I assembled the abstracted shapes layer upon translucent layer, using the computer (figure 44). The hand-drawn shapes are reformed in the operating space of the digital and become endlessly manipulable and reproducible. This is important because it introduces a metaphoric relation between the painted canvas and the logic of the computer desktop. Arranged in the space of the computer screen, the designs use transparency and overlay to adumbrate space. Just as the computer places the working document at the front of the screen, anterior shapes are seen first in this suite of works. This sense of extended space informed the works that follow, especially Cove Dupont (2014, figure 45), where architectural shapes have been translated into abstract forms reassembled on the surface of the canvas. The works for this exhibition were created with shapes that had already been liberated from their original context. For example, architectural and industrial forms, calligraphic and typographic ornaments, and other shapes that embody a particular capacity for translation, which, as Benjamin describes, is an “essential quality of 84 certain works”. 3 It is in translation, writes Benjamin, that an original attains “its latest, continually renewed, and most complete unfolding”. 4 I explore how particular shapes continue to retain a sense of their origin through a process of translation, while at the same time are renewed by selection and being reshaped into abstraction. 3.2 Shallow Space, 2014, Australian National Capital Artists Gallery, Canberra Reflecting on methods of translation in my research, I next explored how abstract shapes can translate between material states. I produced a new suite of works for a solo exhibition titled Shallow Space at Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA), Canberra (2014, figure 46). This exhibition included nine artwork pairs, an abstract collage, and a painted replica installed in a long thin gallery space. The works in this exhibition explore representation, illusion, and construction. Figure 46 Simon Degroot Shallow Space 2014, installation view, ANCA Gallery. Made using coloured paper and translucent cellophane to construct a shallow illusion of space, these works are a metaphor for the digital logic of the computer desktop. The collaged works are repeated as a copy in a second work. The painted double is produced using layers of paint, carefully applied in a specific order. 3 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 254. 4 Ibid., 255. 85 In both artworks, each shape partially covers another shape, creating an illusion of compressed space. The collages make this compressed space materially real while the painted replica is a flattened illusion of this same space. Each work supports and challenges the other as copy and material translation. Installed in the long-thin gallery space, each artwork (figure 47) faces its replica (figure 48) on the opposite wall of the gallery. Looking at one work means turning your back on the other. The after-image of the work informs the subsequent view in each pairing. These cut-and-pasted shapes recall Matisse’s cut-outs that he used as vignettes for other artworks or murals, and they embody what Bois’s calls “architectural painting”, suggesting an expanded “truly plastic space” 5 in the artwork. Because of their material construction, the collages retain and even foreground their potential mobility: at some time in the future, the cut shapes could be deconstructed and made to come apart, a potential mobility only suggested in the painted works. Figure 47 Simon Degroot Shallow Space #03 (2014), collage on paper, 25 x 35cm. Figure 48 Simon Degroot Shallow Space #04 (2014), oil on board, 25 x 35cm. Because each work is viewed with the memory of just having seen the other, it promises something in excess of its literal materiality. For example, if the collage is viewed before the painted artwork, we can say that the painted work is ‘read through’ 5 Yve-Alain Bois and Greg Sims, “On Matisse: The Blinding: For Leo Steinberg,” October 68 (1994): 65. 6 Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (Spring 1980): 69. 86 the collage construction. In The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism (1980), Craig Owens describes how when “one text is read through another”, it works allegorically. If an artist uses allegory, writes Owens, they do so in order to “add another meaning to the image” and in doing so, “the allegorical meaning supplants an antecedent one”. 6 This is useful when considering the role of translation in my works because it suggests that the translated image not only adds meaning to the image, but also has potential to replace it. 3.3 Hilton Mural, 2014, Brisbane In 2014, I was invited to paint a large-scale mural for Brisbane Hilton’s Vintaged Bar (figure 49). Specifically, I was asked to recreate—to the best of my ability—the design put forward by the interior designer (figure 50), presented as a black photocopy of a Modernist design, Photoshopped, and superimposed onto a red background. The design for the mural was sourced from local archives of paperwork from the hotel’s architect, the late Harry Seidler. An unidentified photocopied image was presented in the context of the commission as being the unrealised work of the architect. After some investigation, I found that the origin of the design was actually a detail section from a photocopy of Henri Matisse’s Le Lagon (The Lagoon). This work issues from Jazz (1947) a limited-edition artist’s book in which Matisse reproduced a selection of the paper cut-outs of his late oeuvre. This misattribution reveals something of the cyclical relationship of translation. The mural design was based on a photocopied reproduction of another screenprinted reproduction of an original collage; this twice-removed reproduction was then removed a third time as I recreated the artwork design in a large-scale mural. This project provides an opportunity to observe instances of translation as they relate to my research. I have tested a relationship between different material states to observe the recognition of forms separated by temporal distance, and the confusion of image 87 details as they are removed from previous contexts and recreated at a large scale. Figure 49 Simon Degroot Brisbane Hilton: Vintaged Bar Mural 2014, synthetic polymer, 500 x 900cm. Figure 50 Landini Associates Brisbane Hilton: Vintaged Bar Mural Design 2014, digital file. This work employs simplified forms to evoke an idea of tropical paradise. Matisse translated vegetal forms that connote nature as specific to Tahiti. This romantic re- imaging is evident in Le Lagon: the undulating forms float in front of a green and blue ground. My mural for the Hilton has replaced this natural ground with a violent red. The floating forms are recreated as a pattern of half-tone dots, so as to foreground the painted image as a copy. As described above, the mural is estranged from its original context through three stages of translation. The natural forms are translated into Modernist abstraction by Matisse, then re-translated by the interior designer through ignorance as postmodern appropriation, then finally re-re-translated in my painted mural, an expression that reveals the fundamental tautology of this process. Using translation, I “invest the work …with renewed relevance”. 7 The forms used by Matisse become so familiar as to be beyond recognition; yet my translation of these forms into half-tone dots spells out the debts owed, but so visibly as to be overlooked. This movement beyond easy recognition began when the abstract paper-cut forms were translated into limited-edition screenprints for publication in Jazz (1947). Matisse laments that stencilled images lose their “charm” in translation; however, he accepts that “for someone who has not seen the originals it is the impression that is 7 Leo Steinberg, “The Glorious Company,” In Art about Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978), 25. 88 given by the book that is the main thing”. 8 What exactly does Matisse mean by ‘impression’? Perhaps he refers to the immediate impression of the forms on the page, that there is a reasonable approximation between the book form and the original in terms of immediacy. It is this immediate impression that most informs the reception of abstract shapes in this research. 3.4 The Pillars Project Mural, 2014, Brisbane The Pillars Project was a joint project between the Department of the Premier and Cabinet and Queensland Rail for the G20 Cultural Celebrations. This mural involved a cultural exchange workshop to develop ideas and to unearth some of the historical significance of the artwork site. This process informed my abstract interpretation of local architectural details to highlight some of the overlooked history of the area and produce architectural forms on a larger scale. I designed the artwork for this site to highlight the way that local identity and a sense of place are closely related to the built environment. Buildings, public art, and murals make important contributions to the cultural landscape, developing both a personal and collective sense of identity. This sense of place is well established in South Brisbane because of its long history. South Brisbane has a great genius loci; it is a place imbued with a magnetism that naturally attracts visitors and interactions. My mural celebrates this attraction, referring both to the historical architecture of the local area as well as looking towards the future. Architecture and building design have a long history of incorporating organic shapes and curves. As discussed in Chapter 2, stylised details of plants including the arabesque and the quatrefoil have a long association with art history and architectural design where they are often used as decorative flourishes or motifs. Art Deco architecture, including “skyscrapers, commercial buildings, airports, civic structures, shops, hospitals, schools, universities, theatres, houses and apartments—even bridges!” 9 transform organic shapes into 8 Karl Buchberg, Nicholas Cullinan, Jodi Hauptman, and Nicolas Serota, Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 23. 9 Robin Grow, Brisbane Art Deco: Stories of Our Built Heritage, ed. Kimberley Wilson (Brisbane: Jubilee Studio, 2015), 7. 89 streamlined and geometric and decorative designs. Figure 51 William Jolly Bridge Brisbane (detail) (2014), artist’s photograph. Figure 52 Simon Degroot Sketchbook Page 2014, graphite and collage on paper, 21 x 26cm. Looking to the built environment of South Brisbane, I considered how to translate details from buildings and the William Jolly Bridge (figure 51) into shapes that I could use in my mural design (figure 52). My initial designs repeated previous studio methods of composing floating shapes on a white ground, although this approach was inappropriate for a public mural. While cutting the positive shapes from the coloured paper, I was struck by the remaining negative paper shapes. These negative shapes then went on to inform the final mural design, where layered collage elements were scaled up to the actual size of the architectural forms that inspired them (figures 53 and 54). Figure 53 Simon Degroot Pillars Project Mural Design 2014, painted paper and collage on board, 19 x 15.5cm. Figure 54 Simon Degroot Pillars Project Mural 2014, exterior acrylic, 900 x 600cm. 90 The Pillars Project Mural is reinserted into the circulation of popular visual imagery in an interesting postscript to this project. In 2016, it was used as a background image in a promotional campaign for sportswear brand Lorna Jane (figure 55) and shared on their Instagram account (figure 56). 10 This expanded use of the mural-image in a contemporary and globally networked visual economy constitutes an extended translation in this research. The shapes in this artwork are successfully redistributed across the contemporary social edifice, with the reuse of abstract shapes returning to haunt visual culture. Figure 55 Lorna Jane Active Warehouse 2016, printed flyer, 21 x 14.5cm. Figure 56 Lorna Jane Instagram image to promote Active Warehouse 2016. 3.5 Indirect Response, 2015, Postgraduate and Other Projects (POP) Gallery, Brisbane My practice consists of the formal interrogation of shapes from architecture, animation, advertising, design and art history. Using processes of disassembly and reassembly, abstraction and fragmentation, I create layers of paint that refer both to my own training as a commercial printer and to our contemporary experience with digital image technologies. I am interested in arresting ephemeral and contingent shapes and then translating these in painting. Until this point in my candidature, my research outputs had explored ways that real 10 See Instagram account @lornajaneactive #simondegroot 91 shapes can be translated into abstract, flat shapes and how these can then be used in large-scale mural projects; how a contemporary practice of expanded-painting can communicate with visual culture and the built environment. This next suite of paintings considered ways that architecture and the computer desktop have an impact on the organisation of abstract shapes in painting. Before discussing the works in this section, it is important to first introduce two small experimental paintings from a series of works titled Composite Orders (2015, figures 57 and 58), exhibited at Rubicon Ari, Melbourne. Figure 57 Simon Degroot, Composite Orders Green 2015, oil on board, 20.5 x 15.5cm. Figure 58 Simon Degroot Composite Orders Magenta 2015, oil on board, 20.5 x 15.5cm. ‘Composite order’ refers to the delicate appearance of architectural columns used in churches during the Renaissance. They are a mixed capital design, combining and restructuring elements from previous orders in new ways and in a different order. This double use of the word ‘order’ is important here as it suggests an architectural relation and structural arrangement. I explore ordering in these works, the layering of abstract shapes in my paintings reflect a visual arrangement or grammar. Arranging and ordering is reflected in layers of computer code, equations, and commands determining an order of operations. This ordering is often visually depicted using the phosphor green of early monochrome computer monitors where lines of text or code are written with green on a black background. In these works, I 92 have employed green to consider how contemporary painting can abstract, build, and combine visual structures to explore a space between the digital and the real. In particular, these paintings make visible what was previously hidden. Translucent layers of paint reveal what is behind pieces of collaged coloured paper and shapes underneath layers of paint that are otherwise present only as pentimenti. In other words, the translucent layers of paint in these works allow a visual penetration beneath the surface, something that I had not previously been able to achieve. Figure 59 Simon Degroot Indirect Response 2015, installation view including, Composite Orders Green Screen 1, 2, and 3, POP Gallery, Griffith University. Photograph courtesy Louis Lim. These works of layered green monochromatic shapes also recall the digital special effects screen of contemporary film. The green connotes an invisible or liminal space, the updated curtain of the theatrical proscenium. 11 In this way, these works capture 11 The curtain simultaneously veils and unveils the space of the stage; it is about representation and the illusion of representation. The proscenium has a doubled and unstable effect in contemporary culture, the theatrical curtain of the stage “covered and revealed the stage opening with ritual deliberateness that signaled the beginning and ending of performance”. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From 93 and make visible a pictorial space that is normally associated with illusion and deceit. Composite Orders Green Screen 1, 2 and 3 (2015) are the three acts in a visual and painterly performance captured on a metaphorical surface (figure 59). They employ a formal visual language of the digital as each abstract form is layered on top of one another deepening the monochromatic colour. This is similar in effect to the screen burn of early monochrome phosphor-based computer screens. Like the spatial compression of visual information in the work for the Select Reshape exhibition, these paintings compress a temporal process of construction. Each green shape is a record of its construction and, as they build upon each other, so they conflate their temporal sequence into a single visual moment. This is something that photography can explore by using an extended exposure, as in Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Movie Theatres (1976). Hans Belting writes of Sugimoto’s photographs that, because the screens are empty, they represent either “the everything of all possible images or else as their nothingness as vehicles of illusion”. 12 Like the flat surface of the film screen and the misused phosphorous computer screen, the picture plane of the canvas has a similar all-or-nothing relation to the image. Indirect Response represented an expanded investigation of the possibilities of visual penetration of the painted surface. Some of the abstract shapes that featured in the exhibition are translucent and invite a penetrating gaze, while other shapes resist this gaze by using opaque paint. Other paintings, such as Composite Orders Green Screen and Indirect Response (2015, figure 60), resist visual penetration by an accumulation of translucent veils, operating like tinted glass. This exhibition refined a process of translation in the studio as hand-cut sculptural shapes are used to make colourful abstractions and monochrome paintings. Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006),163. 12 Hans Belting cited in Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 166. 94 Figure 60 Simon Degroot Indirect Response 2015, installation view, POP Gallery, Griffith University. Photograph courtesy Louis Lim. The studio environment at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, has had an unescapable influence on my work. Because I am surrounded by a rapidly developing urban environment, the shapes from new buildings have entered my work in the form of abstract shapes. For example, the shapes forming the exterior façade of the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital (2014, figure 61) 13 have found their way into my work Cilento (2015, figure 62). The green shapes of the hospital find a parallel in the painted shape in my painting. This literal sense of shapes in the visual environment is at work in this painting. 13 See “Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital,” Lyons Architecture (website), http://www.lyonsarch.com.au/lady-cilento-children-s-hospital/. http://www.lyonsarch.com.au/lady-cilento-children-s-hospital/ 95 Figure 61 Lady Cilento Exterior Façade 2014, Lyons Architecture, Brisbane. Figure 62 Simon Degroot, Cilento 2015, oil on canvas, 122 x 122cm. Observing and drawing architectural and advertising shapes in my journal, I combine these in paintings as a personal type of rebuilding. This initiates a process of translation that is important in this research. The difficulty does not seem to lie in what shapes to pick, but rather in what to do with them after they enter my visual journal. For Indirect Response, I decided to create a three-part cycle of shapes, large sculptural cut-outs, colourful abstractions, and monochromatic paintings. Each of these three manifestations of shapes creates a cycle of communication between artworks in the exhibition. The shapes in these works are translated between different material states, expanding previous material translations; however, this time, with a greater potential for deferral. The Off Cuts (2015, figure 63) are presented almost as the building blocks of the coloured abstractions, while monochromatic works such as Composite Orders Green Screen 1 become digitally mediated ruminations on those same colourful abstractions. 96 Figure 63 Simon Degroot Indirect Response 2015, installation and detail view of Off Cuts 2015, POP Gallery, Griffith University. Photograph courtesy Louis Lim. This exhibition revealed a personal translation between different material states. The built environment informs the shapes in these works but they remain hand-made with a degree of human error and human decision. They are colourful imaginings for future works, much like the shapes in Robert Venturi’s Eclectic House Series (1977), drawings that are not actually copies of buildings but are rather drawings that contain a particular personal inflection. In a similar way, there is an important personal element in my abstract translations. The monochrome works in this exhibition highlight another important question in this research. That is, how can I highlight that the shapes in the work have come from elsewhere? To answer this question, it is useful to think about photocopies and how we know that they always refer to some other original. For example, when looking at Lindy Lee’s The Silence of Painters (1987), it is clear that the work contains a photocopy of Rembrandt’s Self Portrait (1629). What are the particular devices that signify this element as a photocopy? I have tried to employ the semiotic devices of the photocopy in my monochromatic work to highlight that these shapes have originated from elsewhere. This is particularly evident in my black and grey monochromatic works that are in conversation with art-historical imagery. This conversation is most clearly articulated in the title piece to the exhibition, Indirect Response (2015, figure 64), which I revisited the following year with Tint (2016, figure 65). These works refer to a history of black and minimal painting, such as Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) and Ellsworth Kelly’s Black Square (1953), but also contemporary references such as the origami-inspired design of Issey Miyake, or the misprinted black monochromes of Wade Guyton’s Untitled (2011). In my research, the black square, which is usually associated with an end-point in art history, is used as a starting point from which a new series of paintings can be explored. 97 Figure 64 Simon Degroot, Indirect Response (2015), oil on canvas, 140 x 125cm. Figure 65 Simon Degroot Tint 2016, oil on canvas, 183 x 167cm. 3.6 Nundah Train Station Mural, 2015, Brisbane In the exhibition described above, I employed a metaphor of building to describe the potential for painting to influence visual landscapes. This next mural project made this metaphor real by impressing large abstract shapes on the visual landscape. Painted on the side of a building and viewed by passengers on the passing train, this design translates illustration into contemporary abstraction. I have used abstracted shapes of people and place to highlight the way that local identity and a sense of place are closely related to the built environment. Buildings, public art, and murals make important contributions to the developing cultural landscape, both in terms of a personal and collective sense of identity. Murals become part of the built environment, a discrete visual object in a collection of heterogeneous elements that create place. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the relation between these heterogeneous elements produces a flow of “desire” that “exists as a process that changes the connections and social relations of a society”. 14 Murals inform this change because they are part of a constantly evolving urban 14 Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire. Theory, Culture & Society, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 1996), 74. 98 “assemblage” between parts. 15 Contemporary artists impact and affect place by employing strategies of seduction in their work and appealing to a bodily response to sensation. This is seen in Charline von Heyl’s mural where she worked to “give immense satisfaction” 16 through translating Ellsworth Kelly’s work and adding her own gestural flourishes to produce an image based in desire. Figure 66 Simon Degroot, Nundah Train Station Mural Design (2015), painted paper and collage, 12.5 x 40.5cm. Figure 67 Simon Degroot, Nundah Train Station Mural 2015, exterior acrylic, 900 x 2400cm. For the Nundah Train Station mural design (2015, figure 66), I abstracted thick line drawings of people and places in Nundah 17 . I selected segments of these drawings and magnified them ‘beyond recognition’ until they became abstract shapes. The shapes 15 Ibid., 4. 16 Charline von Heyl “The Man Podcast: Charline Von Heyl,” in The Modern Art Notes Podcast, 17 November 2011, https://manpodcast.com/portfolio/no-2-charline-von-heyl-kristen-hileman/, 37:23. 17 The line drawings of people and places in Nundah were initially created by artist Daniel Brock. 99 in the final mural (figure 67) establish a degree of ambiguity while simultaneously retaining a specificity, maintaining a local connection with the people and places of Nundah during a process of translation. This procedural aspect of translation is important. In many ways, what is at work here is something like the photographic and computer filters applied to blur, distort, or pixelate images. There is a “controlled play of difference” 18 in my translation of existing images that is closely related to both the graphical user interface and the technique of caricature. That is, the abstract shapes in this mural are simplifications of existing shapes that still maintain a reference to some lost original. The work embodies a process of copy and collage that is flattened by the finished mural. 3.7 Hard Graphics, 2016, Spiro Grace Art Rooms, Brisbane The collages and paintings in this exhibition suggest a reciprocal process of translation in contemporary visual culture, where samples and shapes move across screens and painting surfaces. I reinserted ephemeral abstracted forms from the Internet into my practice for an online exhibition with Spiro Grace Art Rooms entitled Hard Graphics (2016). These included new paintings exploring tensions between drawing, painting, and computer techniques. This exhibition captures a process of translation as hand-drawn sketchbook shapes are made into vector files before returning to the hand made in contemporary painting. This expands a methodological process of translation that I first employed in Shallow Space (2014), exploring collage and paint replicas. These new works incorporate digital processes and allow greater compositional flexibility and control. Using Adobe Illustrator, I can manipulate the size, order, colour, or composition of any painted form until I am completely satisfied with the artwork design. Comparing each digitally composed artwork-design with its painted replica reveals minor but important differences of translation. Most obviously, each work is 18 Rosalind E. Krauss, “The Im/Pulse to See,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Washington: Bay Press, 1988), 68. 100 materially different insofar as the digital composition is immaterial. Firstly, the abstract shapes in the computer-generated work exist as a mathematical ideal; they are weightless vectors, pure, and transcendental. What does it mean to engage and compose these shapes based only on their appearance before painting them? One possible answer is to consider abstract forms as becoming liberated by a process of translation. That is, by undergoing the kind of translation discussed in this research, abstract forms exist beyond, behind, and in excess of their discreet manifestations— like the translated poems of Hölderlin, where the actual meaning of the text remains hidden, in-between, and behind the translated words. Abstract shapes are mobilised in this process and as Joselit writes, possess “vast power through their capacity for replication, remediation, and dissemination at variable velocities”. 19 The digital composition and subsequent painted translation of Purple Additions (2016, figures 68 and 69, respectively) encompasses unity and multiplicity into its production. Figure 68 Simon Degroot Purple Additions 2016, digital animation, dimensions variable. Figure 69 Simon Degroot Purple Additions 2016, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm. The works in this exhibition also explore how other artwork-details might be similarly liberated from their original source and inserted into my practice using a process of translation. This is clearly aligned with Pop Art processes where artists reproduced 19 David Joselit, After Art, ed. Sarah Whiting (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013), xiv. 101 images from popular culture, design, and art history. For example, Andy Warhol’s Flower Paintings (1964) have been liberated from Modern Photography (1964), 20 a commercially printed magazine. Importantly, this commercial process of image reproduction is reflected in Ten Foot Flowers (1967, figure 70), which uses a similar photomechanical process of image reproduction. This is fundamentally different from the method of translation I have used in this research. My work departs from a process of mechanical reproduction as the hand- drawn forms become abstract—the flower is liberated from its mechanical verisimilitude because of a process of translation. The flower is familiar when placed next to its source; however, I propose that on its own would be difficult to recognise. This reveals a complicated situation where all visual similarities suggest a possible relation between artworks. Figure 70 Andy Warhol Ten Foot Flowers 1967, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, 304.8 x 304.8cm Figure 71 Simon Degroot Flower 2016, digital animation, dimensions variable. Figure 72 Simon Degroot Flower 2016, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm. The minor differences between the computer-generated image (figure 71) and the painted replica (figure 72) are important for this research. Foster identifies this difference in early Pop Art, which layers “mechanical reproduction, and handwork”, 21 confusing an easy categorisation of component parts. Artists such as Roy 20 In the 1960s, Andy Warhol faced several lawsuits for the unauthorised use of copyright images. The photograph that Warhol used for Ten Foot Flowers was taken by photographer Patricia Caulfield. 21 Hal Foster, “Roy Lichtenstein, or the Cliché Image,” chap. 2 in The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012), 67. 102 Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, and Andy Warhol create a confounding mix of the hand-made, readymade, painterly and photographic—selecting, re-drawing, editing, enlarging, transposing and refining. In art-historical terms, this material confusion was a complex timely response to Greenberg’s “medium purity”, as artists opposed hermetic formalism in order to “let the world in again”, Steinberg observes. 22 3.8 Picture Building, 2016, Kick Arts Contemporary, Cairns I pursued the monochrome and translucent paint layering in an exhibition titled Picture Building at Kick Arts Contemporary, Cairns (2016, figure 73). These works expand a persistent architectural quality that continues to reappear in my practice. I am interested in an expanded practice of ‘architectural painting’ in these works to suggest what Matisse called “a greater space, a truly plastic space”. 23 This exhibition considered a process of painting and drew upon my experience as a commercial printer. Figure 73 Simon Degroot Picture Building installation view 2016, Kick Arts Contemporary Artspace, Cairns. 22 Steinberg describes for example that Rauschenberg and Johns treat their work as “a flat documentary surface that tabulates information”. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 90. 23 Matisse cited in Buchberg et al., Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, 21. 103 For me, painting is about building and about making your own visual environment. This analogy with building is quite literal in this exhibition because I was literally looking at the built environment and translating elements that I then used to remake or rebuild my own visual environment in painting. I am interested in what these paintings can communicate, in light of the fact that viewers bring their own visual experiences with them to make sense of abstract shapes. For this exhibition, I called upon individual histories of visual experience—a person’s “visual literacy” 24 —to create works that feel vaguely familiar but are beyond easy recognition. It is important that these works are not didactic references to another source because there is a poetic element in not knowing that source but sensing it. Figure 74 Simon Degroot Picture Building 2016, oil on canvas, 244 x 183cm. In these works, I also replay some of my experiences as a commercial printer. This is most evident in Picture Building (2016, figure 74), where I have used oil paint in the studio as a type of ink. Applying this paint in a sequence of layers, I have glazed each shape over the other to create a rich and deep surface. As the translucent layers of paint in these works multiply, they ironically become more opaque; like layers of 24 Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images (London: Routledge, 1996), 3. 104 tinted glass, they deny easy visibility. However, it is precisely because these shapes are applied as individual layers that they allow the “viewer to visually pass in and out (and eventually through) the static…” 25 The layered shapes in the work allow multiple entry points into the painting because each layer is confused as to which came first, or last for that matter, and what first and last mean in this context. This creates a temporal compression, a flattening of time in the work, creating a painting that is all at once forever in the present. 25 Cameron Hope, “Simon Degroot: Indirect Response, a Synthesis of Abstract Concepts”, Panoptic Press, http://panopticpress.org.au/?page_id=3095. http://panopticpress.org.au/?page_id=3095 105 Conclusion This research offers the model of translation as a useful way to think about artists who use existing shapes in their work in such a way that they are familiar but not easily recognised. Turning to the history of Modern abstraction as well as commercial printing techniques, I have outlined an art-historical preference for visual translations that are expedient, direct, and easily disseminated. I have discussed how the most effective contemporary abstract art is post-medium and particularly anti-hermetic. Many artists today use similar abstract shapes to those that can be found in and around advertising, packaging, architecture, product design, and the computer desktop. Contemporary abstract artists engage with the world around them using shapes that echo their history of use. As both a process and a concept, a methodology of translation can also assist contemporary abstraction to build visual environments outside the studio. Artwork shapes and other details that appear in advertising campaigns, television commercials, and social media are outside art history and so contribute in a new way to visual culture and to developing an identity of place. In this exegesis, I have detailed some of the specific methodological processes in my practice and contextualised these in relation to art-historical and philosophical discussions. I have focused on the way that artists identify, select, and translate visual elements, translating them into painted motifs. My research thus contributes to and complements existing art-historical and theoretical discourse surrounding abstraction. It is encouraging to see the ideas in this research explored in real time as the artists discussed in this exegesis continue to employ techniques of translation in the creation of new work. Historically, painting has been considered slow in comparison to new media and images on the screen. Contemporary abstract painting distinguishes itself from these other time periods by the speedy way that artists use translation to process visual information. Artists paint with speed in order to communicate with the world. Indeed, this kind of speed has been accelerating for more than 150 years since Baudelaire wrote, “in the daily metamorphosis of external things, there is a rapidity of movement 106 which calls for an equal speed in the execution from the artist”. 1 This is especially so for contemporary visual culture and a context of image sharing and exchange. In this research, I have focused on ways that contemporary abstraction can match this speed. In the studio, rapid sketching becomes a driving momentum for thinking about how the translation of image details can contribute to contemporary visual culture. I quickly sketch abstract notations of shapes as I watch television or browse the Internet. On 18 September 2014, I tested this approach, filling a sketchbook with abstract flat shapes to use in future artworks (figure 75). This has now come full circle as the shapes in this sketchbook have been translated into laser-cut interactive acrylic shapes for Shape Poems (2017, figure 76). Figure 75 Simon Degroot Sketchbook Page 2014, graphite on paper, 22 x 20cm. Figure 76 Simon Degroot Shape Poems 2017, laser cut acrylic shapes, 50 x 35cm. I have approached the artwork for this research in two interconnected ways. Firstly, I painted in the studio. Looking at the visual world around me—including online and in books—I identified, selected, and translated individual shapes from visual culture into my painting practice. This is a self-evident studio-based research strategy; however, the benefits of this approach are revealed when reflecting on particular image details. I observed that I was selecting shapes with specific qualities—their being, seductive, playful, iconic, and designed. Secondly, I painted large-scale murals away from the studio. I created abstract shapes by looking at the historical architecture of the local area and translated these three- 1 Jonathan Mayne, ed. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays by Charles Baudelaire (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 4. 107 dimensional shapes into the flat shapes of my practice. I looked specifically to a long architectural and building design history of incorporating organic shapes and curves, including the stylised details of plants, such as the arabesque and the quatrefoil. There continues to be a great synergy between the shapes used in architecture, design, advertising, commercial printing, and abstract painting. It is particularly important to continue to observe how abstract shapes can form a dialogue with other forms of visual culture and to examine the capacity for painting to interact with a contemporary environment in order to further develop our “visual literacy”. 2 Reflecting both on studio-based artwork and large-scale mural projects, I am certain that they are connected on a level of expedited communication and recognisability. Large murals in a collage style are linked to playfulness because they are not overly predetermined, and a lack of systematic figuration opens these murals to audiences in public spaces. The contemporary artists working in abstraction considered in this exegesis have learnt expediency from art-historical abstraction. For example, Matisse initially used his cut-outs “as an expedient”, and predicted that, “it will only be much later that people will realise to what extent, the work I am doing today is in step with the future”. 3 Indeed, contemporary artists have fallen in step with the paper cut-outs. 4 They enjoy a renewed popularity in contemporary abstract painting, perhaps because of their speedy construction, directness, and easy dissemination. Focusing my research on methods of translation has allowed me to investigate an aspect of the manipulation of images and shapes in abstraction. To translate is to exercise power and control over images. Translation of image forms into abstraction grants utilitarian control over images and the tools to enter them into the remarkably productive circulation in heterogeneous networks. 5 Translation opens the possibility for contemporary art as post-historical, to be made “without the benefit of a reassuring sort of narrative in which it is seen as the appropriate next stage of the 2 Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images (London: Routledge, 1996), 3. 3 Karl Buchberg, Nicholas Cullinan, Jodi Hauptman, and Nicolas Serota, Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 23. 4 For example, see Shirley Jaffe’s The Gray Phantom (2009), Kirra Jamison’s Hum (2012), Chad Kouri’s A Sophisticated Balancing Act (2013), or Hayal Pozanti’s 81 (Percentage of CEOs with High Intuition Scores Who Doubled Their Business in Five Years) (2016). 5 David Joselit, After Art, ed. 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Originally published in 1953. http://nga.gov.au/International/Catalogue/Detail.cf 119 Illustrations Figure 1 Kazimir Malevich Black Square 1915, oil on canvas, 53 x 53cm. Figure 2 Ellsworth Kelly Black Square 1953, oil on wood, 110 x 110cm. 120 Figure 3 Pablo Picasso, Guitar and sheet music on a pedestal 1920, gouache on paper, 22.8 x 29.1cm. Figure 4 Stuart Davis, Egg Beater No. 1 1927, oil on canvas, 73.9 x 91.4cm. 121 Figure 5 Simon Degroot, sketch book page, 2014, graphite on paper, 21 x 42cm. Figure 6 Georges Braque, Violon et Pipe (Le Quotidien) (Violin and Pipe [The Everyday]) 1913, chalk, charcoal, imitation wood, and pasted paper, 74 x 196cm. 122 Figure 7 Pablo Picasso, Head of a Man with a Hat 1912, cut-and-pasted newspaper and coloured paper, ink, and charcoal on paper, 62.2 x 47.3cm. 123 Figure 8 Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension 1915, oil on canvas, 71.1 x 44.5cm. 124 Figure 9 Henri Matisse, Le Lagon (The Lagoon) 1947, screenprint for Jazz, plate XVIII, 41.6 x 64.8cm. 125 Figure 10 Honoré Daumier after Charles Philipon, ‘Les Poires’ Le Charivari, 16 April 1835, lithograph, 33.3 x 25.4cm. 126 Figure 11 Marianne Brandt, Tea Infuser and Strainer 1924, silver and ebony, 7.3cm(h). Figure 12 Liubov Popova, Embroidery Design for the Artisan Co-Operative Verbovka 1917, cut-and-pasted papers on paper, 12 x 17.5cm. 127 Figure 13 Dick Watkins, The Fall No. 2 1968, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 183 x 152cm. 128 Figure 14 Laura Owens, Untitled 2012, oil, acrylic, flashe, resin, collage, and pumice on canvas, 275 x 213cm. Figure 15 Charline von Heyl, Untitled (Wall at WAM) 2010, acrylic and latex paint, 518 x 2042cm. 129 Figure 16 Christine Streuli, Ableger (Offshoot) 2013, installation view, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland. Figure 17 Ellsworth Kelly, Black (Noir) from Suite of Twenty-Seven Color Lithographs 196465, 89.5 x 61.1cm. 130 Figure 18 Simon Degroot, Shape Poems (detail) 2017, laser-cut acrylic, 29 x 34cm. Figure 19 Ellsworth Kelly, Concorde IV (State) 1981, etching and aquatint on paper, 40.5 x 32cm. 131 Figure 20 Iran do Espírito Santo, Twist 7A 2011, pencil on photogram, 29.2 x 21cm. Figure 21 Susan Kare, New Blank Document 1984, Apple Computer Inc, 32 x 32 pixels. 132 Figure 22 Natalya Hughes, Looking Cute 2013, acrylic on plywood, 240 x 240cm. Figure 23 Peter Atkins, Talk + Text 2012, acrylic on canvas, 61 x 61cm. 133 Figure 24 Wendy White, No Pressure 2016, edition of 2 + AP, dibond, rainbow webbing, nylon rope, ball chain, 127 x 152cm. Figure 25 Wendy White, Pleasure I 2016, digital billboard, Override: A Billboard Project, Expo Chicago, USA. 134 Figure 26 Ryan Gander, Your Present Time Orientation (Second Act)—Random Abstraction 2011, custom-painted glass, Perspex clip frames, 600 x 110 x 20cm (installation dimensions). Figure 27 Vincent Hawkins, Untitled 2015, monotype print on Fabriano paper, 42 x 29.7cm. 135 Figure 28 Christopher Wool, Untitled 2011, silkscreen on linen, 304.8 x 243.8cm (each). Figure 29 John Young, Moment III 2015, oil on Belgian linen, 76.2 x 103.4cm. 136 Figure 30 Simon Degroot, Cloud #1 2015, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm. Figure 31 Simon Degroot, Cloud #2 2015, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm. 137 Figure 32 Piet Mondrian, Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow 1930, oil on canvas, 46 x 46cm. Figure 33 iPhone iOS 7 User Interface 2013, Apple Computer Inc. 138 Figure 34 Allan McCollum The Shapes Project: 144 Top Parts 2005ongoing, dimensions variable. 139 Figure 35 Simon Degroot White and Blue Flat Lay 2017, oil on canvas, 198 x 137cm. Figure 36 Jason Fulford, This Equals That 2014. 140 Figure 37 Internet Meme, Raw Chicken or Donald Trump? 2016. Figure 38 Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman 1937, oil on canvas, 60 x 49cm. 141 Figure 39 Apple ‘iPod Silhouettes’ 20002011, advertising campaign. Figure 40 Henri Matisse Icarus 194344, screenprint for Jazz, 42.2 x 65.7cm. 142 Figure 41 Ian Fairweather, Pelléas et Mélisande no date, synthetic polymer on board, 71.5 x 96cm. Figure 42 Simon Degroot, Floating in a New Sky Design (detail) 2014, pencil and acrylic on paper, 10 x 200cm. 143 Figure 43 Simon Degroot, Floating in a New Sky 2014, synthetic polymer, 150 x 3000cm. Figure 44 Simon Degroot, Floating in a New Sky 2014, designs layered in Photoshop. 144 Figure 45 Simon Degroot, Cove Dupont 2014, oil on canvas, 260 x 198cm. Figure 46 Simon Degroot, Shallow Space, installation view, 2014, Australian National Capital Artists Gallery. 145 Figure 47 Simon Degroot, Shallow Space #03 2014, collage on paper, 25 x 35cm. Figure 48 Simon Degroot, Shallow Space #04 2014, oil on board, 25 x 35cm. 146 Figure 49 Simon Degroot, Vintaged Bar Mural 2014, Brisbane Hilton. Figure 50 Landini Associates, Vintaged Bar Mural Design 2014. 147 Figure 51 William Jolly Bridge (detail) 2014, artist photograph, Brisbane. Figure 52 Simon Degroot 2014, graphite and collage on paper, 21 x 26cm. 148 Figure 53 Simon Degroot, Pillars Project Mural Design 2014, painted paper and collage on board, 19.5 x 15cm. Figure 54 Simon Degroot, Pillars Project Mural 2014, exterior acrylic, 900 x 600cm. 149 Figure 55 Lorna Jane, Active Warehouse 2016, printed flyer, 21 x 14.5cm. Figure 56 Lorna Jane, Instagram image to promote Active Warehouse 2016. 150 Figure 57 Simon Degroot, Composite Orders Green 2015, oil on board, 15.5 x 20.5cm. Figure 58 Simon Degroot, Composite Orders Magenta 2015, oil on board, 15.5 x 20.5cm. 151 Figure 59 Simon Degroot, Indirect Response 2015, installation view including, Composite Orders Green Screen 1, 2, and 3, POP Gallery, Griffith University. Photograph courtesy Louis Lim. Figure 60 Simon Degroot, Indirect Response 2015, installation view, POP Gallery, Griffith University. Photograph courtesy Louis Lim. 152 Figure 61 Lady Cilento Exterior Façade 2014, Lyons Architecture, Brisbane. Figure 62 Simon Degroot, Cilento 2015, oil on canvas, 122 x 122cm. 153 Figure 63 Simon Degroot, Indirect Response 2015, installation and detail view of Off Cuts 2015, POP Gallery, Griffith University. Photograph courtesy Louis Lim. Figure 64 Simon Degroot, Indirect Response 2015, oil on canvas, 140 x 125cm. 154 Figure 65 Simon Degroot, Tint 2016, oil on canvas, 183 x 167cm. Figure 66 Simon Degroot, Nundah Train Station Mural Design 2015, painted paper and collage, 12.5 x 40.5cm. 155 Figure 67 Simon Degroot, Nundah Train Station Mural 2015, exterior acrylic, 900 x 2400cm. Figure 68 Simon Degroot, Purple Additions 2016, digital animation, dimensions variable. 156 Figure 69 Simon Degroot, Purple Additions 2016, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm. Figure 70 Andy Warhol, Ten Foot Flowers 1967, synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas, 304.8 x 304.8cm. 157 Figure 71 Simon Degroot, Flower 2016, digital animation, dimensions variable. Figure 72 Simon Degroot, Flower 2016, oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm. 158 Figure 73 Simon Degroot, Picture Building 2016, installation view, Kick Arts Contemporary Artspace, Cairns. Figure 74 Simon Degroot, Picture Building 2016, oil on canvas, 244 x 183cm. 159 Figure 75 Simon Degroot Sketchbook Page 2014, graphite on paper, 22 x 20cm. 160 Figure 76 Simon Degroot Shape Poems 2017, laser-cut acrylic shapes, 50 x 35cm. work_i6wyhdtt2rfztm27clqz7t7uc4 ---- I 31 http://dx.doi.org/10.7230/KOSCAS.2013.33.031 디즈니 애니메이션에 나타난 모더니즘 회화스타일 : 색, 형태, 공간을 중심으로 I. 서론 II. 모더니즘 시대의 애니메이션 Ⅲ. 초기 디즈니 애니메이션의 모더니즘 성격 IV. 디즈니 장편분석 1. 색 2. 형태 3. 공간 V. 결론 참고문헌 ABSTRACT 문재철, 김유미 초 록 20세기 초 모더니즘 예술의 다양한 실험은 필름과 카메라의 발명과 함께 애니메이션을 탄생시켰 다. 초창기에는 영화, 사진, 미술 등 예술가들에 의해 이미지와 시간을 접목한 다양한 분야의 이미지 실험이 이루어졌다. 그러나 이후 애니메이션이 상업적으로 성공을 거두면서 점차 흥미위주의 작품이 주류로 자리 잡아 갔으며, 초기 애니메이션의 실험적 특성은 소위 비주류 애니메이션으로 명맥이 유 지되었다. 디즈니 애니메이션 역시 상업적인 작품을 제작하면서 초기작품의 실험적 형태, 움직임의 표현, 그리고 초현실주의적 관점이 반영돼 모더니즘 예술로 긍정적인 평가를 받아왔었지만, 점차 영 화적 리얼리즘을 표방하여 3차원적 영상 이미지 표현에 몰두하였다. 그 예로 애니메이터들에겐 드로 잉과 라이브액션 푸티지(liveaction footage)를 연구하는 클래스를 열어 사람과 동물의 움직임을 재현 하는 테크닉을 발전시켜갔다. 또한 2차원 원급법의 표현적 한계를 극복하고자 기술적으로 멀티플레 인 카메라(multiplane camera), 3D컴퓨터그래픽스와의 합성 등 이미지의 입체감을 강화시켜갔다. 더 욱이 내용면으로 대중적인 동화 소재의 선택과 월트 디즈니 개인의 실사영화에 대한 관심은 애니메 이션 연출에서 헐리우드 영화적 내러티브의 관습과 이미지 재현의 사실성을 강화시켜 초기 작품들이 갖고 있던 고유의 특성이 변질되면서 디즈니 애니메이션은 하위 영상문화 또는 아동적인 것으로 인 식되는 원인이 됐다. 그러나 사라진 듯 보인 초기 모더니즘의 특성들은 이미지 표현에 있어 현재에 도 디즈니 애니메이션에 계승되고 있다. 여전히 장르의 특성상 내러티브의 범주에서 디자인의 대상 성은 중요시되지만 그 표현에 있어서는, 모더니즘 회화가 추구했던 이미지의 단순화와 과장으로 형 태와 색이 줄 수 있는 심리적작용은 애니메이션 디자인에 활용되어 과거에 비해 그 특성은 더욱 강 화됐다. 먼저 간단한 도형의 형태로 단순화된 모더니즘 회화의 특성은 캐릭터 디자인에 차용되고, 색 은 대상의 장식이나 고증적 재현의 일차원적 목표를 넘어 카메라와 인물의 움직임으로 한 하면에서 배치가 바뀌면서 충돌 상쇄하여 관객에게 내적 경험을 유도하게 한다. 추상회화에서 색의 해방이 평 면성으로 귀결된 것과 같이 캐릭터의 단순화된 개념적 색상의 사용은 캐릭터를 평면적으로 보이게 할뿐더러 이와 대조되는 공간은 더욱 평면적으로 나타나게 된다. 또한 카메라 움직임에 따라 드러나 는 배경의 다중시점은 다양한 각도에서 대상의 본질을 표현하려한 모더니즘 회화를 연상시키기에 충 분하다. 이러한 특성들이 초기 모더니즘 회화가 줬던 경험을 환기시킨다는 점에 입각하여 본 연구는 현대 작품들 사례를 중심으로 단순화 또는 과장된 형태, 내적표현의 색, 그리고 공간 사건의 배경의 역할을 유지하면서 움직임이 주는 경험을 20세기 초 모더니즘 회화의 특성과 비교 분석한다. 주제어 : 애니메이션, 디즈니, 모더니즘, 리얼리티, 회화 32 I. 서론 1908년 최초의 애니메이션 <판타스마고리(Fantasmagorie)>가 제작된 시기는 서구유럽의 경우 모더니즘 예술의 시대였다. 그러 한 시대적 배경에서 애니메이션은 무엇보다 20세기 초 모더니즘 예술의 실험을 적극 실현하는 새롭고 혁신적인 예술적 가능성을 가진 장르로 받아들여졌다. 이는 전통의 부재와 더불어 테크놀로 지를 어떤 예술보다 적극 껴안은 탓에 예술의 첨병(advance guard)역할을 할 수 있을 것이라는 생각 때문이었다. 이는 모더 니즘적 실험을 했던 애니메이션의 경우에만 국한되지 않는다. 초 기 디즈니 애니메이션 역시 고정되고 안정된 형태를 거부한 변형 과 유연함으로 다양한 표현 가능성들을 보여줬다는 점에서 모더 니즘 예술로서의 특성을 지니고 있었다. 가령, 구소련의 영화감 독 에이젠슈테인(Eisenstein)은 이것을 원초적 형태의 전능한 변 화 능력으로 봤다. 또한 스티븐 와츠(steven Watts)는 <꽃과 나 무>(Flowers and Trees, 1932)의 결혼식을 방해하는 고목의 폭력 행위 장면에서 인간정신을 프로이드 식으로 이해하고 있었던 모 더니스트들의 사고를 엿볼 수 있다고 주장했다. 다시 말해 그 장 면에는 후기 프로이드학파의 리비도(libido)와 수퍼에고 (superego)가 표현되었다는 것이다.1) 이처럼 초기 디즈니 애니메 이션은 형식의 측면에서나 내적인 측면에서나 모더니즘 예술로 평가될 수 있는 요인들이 존재했다. 그러나 동화적 판타지를 그럴듯한 이야기로 상업화 한 디즈니 애니메이션이 주도를 하게 되면서 초기 디즈니가 보여주었던 모 더니즘적 실험정신은 약화되고 아동용 오락거리로 간주되기에 이 르렀다. 이러한 배경엔 크리스틴 탐슨(Kristine Tompson)이 주장 했듯이 1930년대 이후 내러티브 관습과 리얼리티를 우선시 한 흐 름이 놓여 있고 그 결과 디즈니 애니메이션은 모더니즘보다는 내 1) Steven Watts, Walt Disney: Art and Politics in the American Century, The journal of American History, 1995, p. 89. 33 러티브 중심의 리얼리즘 장르로 이해되기 시작했다. 그러나 애니 메이션은 모더니즘 예술의 실험적 장르로 출발한 이래, 여전히 모더니즘 예술의 특징을 지니고 있다. 실험적인 형태의 애니메이 션이 되었든 내러티브 애니메이션이 되었든 각각의 영역에서 나 름의 방식으로 그 흐름을 간직하고 있는 것이다. 본 논문은 디즈니 애니메이션을 주로 할리우드식 리얼리즘의 관점에서 바라본 탓에 상대적으로 간과되어 온 모더니즘적 가능 성에 대해 논의 하고자 한다. 먼저 모더니즘 예술로 실험된 초창 기 애니메이션의 특징들과 모더니즘적 관점에서 이해할 수 있는 초기 디즈니 애니메이션의 특성을 살펴보고 그러한 애니메이션이 어떤 식으로 할리우드의 고전적 리얼리즘으로 변화되었는지 살펴 볼 것이다. 그 다음 오늘날 디즈니 작품에 나타난 모더니즘적 비 주얼 스타일을 색, 형태, 공간을 중심으로 20세기 초기에 성행했 던 모더니즘 회화와 비교해 볼 것이다. 이를 통해 현재의 디즈니 애니메이션에도 여전히 모더니즘의 명맥이 유지되고 있음을 주장 하고자 한다. II. 모더니즘 시대의 애니메이션 움직이는 대상을 재현하려는 시도는 8개의 다리를 가진 동물의 역동적인 모습을 그린 선사시대의 라스코 동굴의 벽화에서부터, 크로노포토그래피(Chronophotography)기법을 사용한 뒤샹의 <계 단을 내려오는 누드 No.2>(1912)에 이르기까지 여러 작품에서 포 착된다. 정지된 포즈를 취한 모델을 화폭에 옮기는 단순한 재현 에서 벗어나, 이러한 일련의 움직임들은 살아 움직이는 대상의 본질을 포착하려는 표현 욕구로, 웰스(Wells)는 수잔 랭거 (Susanne K. Langer)의 말을 인용하면서 순수미술에서 정지된 형 태에 움직임을 포착하려는 시도는 계속되어 왔으며 애니메이터들 은 필름이라는 매체로 움직임의 욕망을 충족시켰다고 했다.2) 조 2) Paul Wells, Animation: Genre and authorship, Wall Flower Press, 2002. pp. 31-33. 34 르주 멜리에스(Georges Melies), 윈저 맥케이(Winsor McCay), 이 드위드 머이브리지(Eadweard J. Muybridge) 등 여러 예술가들은 일러스트, 영화, 사진 등 다양한 분야의 예술 영역에서 애니메이 션을 이미지와 결합하는 실험을 하였다. 또한 캐리커쳐리스트였 던 에밀 콜(Emile Cohl)은 빛을 쏘인 유리판 위에 완성된 그림을 올려둔 후 그 위에 새로운 종이를 얹어 다음 동작을 트레이스한 다음 완성된 그림들을 다시 네거티브 필름으로 프린트하여 <판타 스마고리(Fantasmagorie)>를 제작하였다.3) 내용은 다음과 같다. 극장에서 관람하던 부인의 모자 장식이 거슬렸던 뒷자리의 남성 은 모자의 장식물을 하나씩 제거한다. 그러자 이내 부인의 머리 는 원으로 변화된다. 점점 커지는 원 안에서 광대가 등장하는 등, 인물이나 사물을 가리지 않고 형태들은 끊임없이 계속적으로 변화되는데 정지된 카툰으로는 표현할 수 없었던 몰핑 과정이 애 니메이션으로 표현된 것이다. 또한 입체파 화가였던 한스 리히터 (Hans Richter)의 <리듬21>(Rhythmus 21)(1921)은 검정 배경에 서로 크기가 다른 하얀색 사각형들이 계속적으로 크기와 배열을 바꾸는 움직임을 보여준다. 데스틸(De Stijl)4) 운동에 참여한 한 스 리히터는 몬드리안과 같이 평면에 표현되는 추상화가 아닌, 사각형이 변화하는 과정에서 생성되고 변화하는 프레임과 면으로 음악과 같은 시각적 리듬을 만들려고 시도했다. 이처럼 초기 애니메이션은 필름이라는 새로운 매체의 등장과 더불어, 정형화된 스타일을 갖지 않고 다양한 실험으로 움직임이 줄 수 있는 애니메이션의 미학을 발견하기 위해 여러 시도를 했 다. 후에 미국의 카툰 스타일 애니메이션이 내러티브와 결합하고 대중적 인지도를 얻어가면서 점차 상업적으로 발전하였지만, 변 3) http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/07/05/animation-pioneers/ 4) 데스틸(De Stijl)은 양식(the style)에 해당하는 네델란드어. 1917년 몬드리 안과 반데스버그(Yheo van Deoesburg)를 중심으로 몬드리안 등에 의해 1917년 네델란드에서 결성된 기하학적 추상미술 그룹. 데 스틸 운동은 그 원칙을 완 전한 추상에 기반을 두고 있다. 데 스틸 운동의 원리는 조화와 균형이며 그 원리는 엄격하게 적용 될 기하학적 요소들에 의해서만 실현 될 수 있다고 밝 히고 있다. 박동욱,“新造形主義에 立脚한 立體表現 方法 硏究 : 본인 작품을 중심으로”,공주대학교 미술학과 디자인전공 석사학위논문(2012.2), pp.3, 9. 35 방에선 여전히 사진, 순수미술 등을 차용한 실험 애니메이션이 카툰 외적인 영역에서 다양한 이미지 실험을 하면서 초기 애니메 이션의 전복적 성격을 계승하고 있다. 이를테면, 1961년 작품 듀 샹 뷰코틱(dusan vukotic)의 <슈로갓(Surogat)>을 보자. 해변은 유화 캔버스와 같은 거친 텍스추어로 표현되어 있다. 해변에 도 착한 남자 캐릭터가 색종이를 아무렇게 자른 것처럼 생긴 납작한 판에 펌프로 공기를 넣어주면 이 도형들은 각종 캠핑 도구로 변 하고 심지어는 여자로 변하기도 한다. 피카소의 그림을 연상시키 는 옆모습인지 앞모습인지 모를 형태의 캐릭터들은 삼각형이나 반구를 합성한 듯 기본 도형으로 단순화 돼있다. 구상적 재현에 서 벗어나 예술의 순수성을 찾으려고 했던 초현실주의, 입체주 의, 야수주의의 예술의지가 필름이라는 새로운 매체와 결합되어 파생된 것이 애니메이션의 실험 아방가르드 예술이었다면 그러한 경향은 사라진 것이 아니라 여전히 이어지고 있는 것이다. 그림 1. <슈로갓>(Surogat)의 인물은 단순한 도형으로 나타난다. III. 초기 디즈니 애니메이션의 모더니즘적 성격 디즈니의 초기작에서 찾아 볼 수 있는 특징 중 하나는 형태를 단순화하고 자유롭게 변형하는 실험적 경향인데 이는 애니메이션 만의 미학과 가능성을 보여주는 것으로 모더니즘 의 실험적 경향 을 반복하고 있는 듯하다. 가령 <해골의 춤>(The Skelton 36 Dancing)에서 해골의 흐느적거리는 움직임과 공중에 걸어놓은 듯 머리를 중심축으로 한 웨이브는 중력의 상식을 상실하고 있는데, 질량을 무시하고 늘어나거나 줄어드는 해골의 다양한 형태변화는 정형화되지 않은 무한한 가능성을 보여준다. 이러한 형태는 초현 실주의 작가 살바도르 달리(Salvador Dali)의 <기억의 고집>(The persistence of memory)(1931)을 연상시킨다.5) 달리는 축 늘어진 시계로 과거의 자신과 억눌린 욕망의 무의식을 표현했다. <해골 의 춤>에서 흐느적거리는 해골의 모습은 달리의 작품과 같이 꿈 과 같은 비현실 세계를 나타낸 듯 보인다. 디즈니 애니메이션에서 모더니즘적 회화성향은 다양한 형태에 서 찾아볼 수 있는데, 삼각형, 원, 네모 등의 단순한 도형을 기 본으로 한 입체주의적 캐릭터 디자인이나 그라데이션이 없는 원 색의 표현이 그것으로 웰스(Wells)가 형태를 만들고 애니메이션 으로 만드는 과정이 브라크(Braque)와 칸딘스키(Kandinsky)와 맥 을 같이 한다고 본 것과 같다. 브라크가 대상을 격자로 분석한 다음 다시 종합적 입체주의로 표현한 것, 칸딘스키가 자유로운 색으로 음악과 같은 리듬을 만들어내는 것이 디즈니 애니메이션 스타일에 나타나 있기 때문일 것이다. 이렇게 1930년대 중반까진 월트 디즈니는 새로운 형태의 모더 니즘 예술가로 평가될 수 있는 흔적을 강하게 지녔지만, 시리즈의 이후, 사업성과 영화적 사실주의 를 표방한 재현 테크닉을 발전시키면서 디즈니 애니메이션에 모 방(Mimesis)적 성격이 강화되었다는 시각이 우세하다. 기술적으 로 1930년대에 테크니칼라(technicolor)와 멀티플레인 카메라 (multiplane camera)를 작품에 성공적으로 적용하고, 현실 대상 의 색 재현과 3차원적 환영의 공간감을 만들어내면서 디즈니 애 니메이션은 상업적 성공과 대중적 인기를 얻게 되었다. 실제 이 기술들은 (1932), (1937)의 5) <기억의 고집>(The persistence of memory)은 여러 레이어의 백그라운드에 대 비되어, 전경의 세 시계는 달팽이와 같이 늘어져 사라져가고 유린된 시간을 상징화한다. Cathrin Klingsohr-Leroy, Surrealism, Taschen, 2008, pp. 38-39. 37 제작에 사용되었고 <백설공주>(snow white and the seven dwarfs)(1937)의 성공과 함께 디즈니 애니메이션의 비주얼 스타 일로 정착하게 된다. 컴퓨터 그래픽의 발전과 함께 더욱 현실적인 공간을 연출할 수 있게 되었고, 다양한 각도의 카메라 워크가 가능하게 됨에 따라 이러한 리얼리즘 스타일은 더욱 영화적인 스타일로 발전해갔다. 컴퓨터 그래픽 합성은 초기엔 2D 이미지 합성에 적용되었지만 이 후 역동적이고 실제와 같은 연출을 위해 3D 그래픽이 사용되었 다. 1985년 <타란의 대모험>(The Black Cauldron)에서는 여주인 공의 황금빛 마법 구체에 3D 컴퓨터 그래픽이 사용되었고, CAPS(Computer Animation Production System)를 도입하여 <미녀 와 야수(Beauty and the Beast)>(1991)에서는 입체적 카메라 워 크로 배경을 현실감 있게 표현했다.6) 이 애니메이션은 카메라에 맞춰 인물의 형태와 동작을 자연스럽게 표현하기 위해 풀 애니메 이션(full animation)으로 제작되어 현실감을 증진하였다. 테크 놀로지의 이러한 경향은 디즈니 애니메이션을 초기의 모더니즘의 특징들과 더욱 멀어지게 하면서 라이브 액션 영화의 사진적 리얼 리티와 경쟁하는 단계로 나아가게 했다. 그러나 영화와 같은 연출과 스토리 그리고 그래픽 스타일에도 불구하고 소위 디즈니적 움직임과 비주얼 스타일은 여전히 모더 니즘의 흔적으로 보이는 특징들을 지니고 있다. 스티븐 와츠 (Steven Watts)는 그의 논문에서 월트 디즈니를 ‘하이브리드 센 티멘탈 모더니스트(a hybrid sentimental modernist)’라 하면 서, 애니메이션은 생명력과 움직임의 케리커쳐로써 자연의 법칙 에 위배되는 전의식적 정신세계(preconscious mental life)를 체 화하는데 리얼리즘을 차용했다고 봤다. 그에 의하면, 월트 디즈 니는 그 표현방식에서 고전예술의 전제를 따랐지만, 이는 내러티 브 리얼리즘을 표현하고 상상과 현실사이에서 설득력을 얻기 위 해서라는 것이며, 또한 2차 대전 이후 월트 디즈니의 애니메이 6) 박재윤, 「디지털 테크놀로지발전에 따른 디즈니 장편 드로잉 애니메이션 연 구」, 『만화애니메이션연구』,통권 제26호(2012.3), pp. 57-78. 38 션에 대한 열정이 영화로 옮겨가고, 컴퓨터 그래픽의 발전이 디 즈니 애니메이션 스타일을 더 3차원의 세계에 가깝게 만들었지 만, 이미 1930년대에 완성된 디즈니 애니메이션의 비주얼 스타일 은 지금까지도 모더니즘적 특성을 유지하고 있다.7) 다음 장에서는 이와 같은 문제의식을 바탕으로 구체적인 텍스 트 분석을 통해 여전히 디즈니 애니메이션에 존재하는 모더니즘 적 스타일을 찾아보고자 한다. IV. 디즈니 장편 분석 1. 색(color) 보통 애니메이션에 등장하는 인물의 의상이나 배경의 색은 내 러티브에 맞춰 인물의 신분을 표현하거나 이야기의 배경적 특성 을 나타내기 위해 사용되지만, 디즈니 애니메이션에서는 보다 자 유롭고 원색적으로 사용되는 경우가 있다. 이런 식으로 색을 사 용하는 것은 스토리의 세계를 그럴듯한 현실적 세계로 표현하는 것에서 표현에서 벗어나, 색의 따뜻함이나 차가움 등 다양한 특 성들을 이용하려는 작가의 해석에 의한 것으로 모더니즘 회화에 서 두드러지는 표현방식이다. 특히 디즈니 애니메이션에서 찾아 볼 수 있는 특징 중 하나는 색들이 서로 충돌하거나 조화를 이루 면서 음악적이고 생동감 있게 사용된다는 점이다.8) 동적이고 음 악과 같은 내면의 색이란‘재현적 고유색’이라는 관념에서 벗어 나 있는 것으로, 19세기 초 추상주의 화가인 칸딘스키가 색을 정 신성의 표현으로 본 것과9) 구상적 형태로 내면의 색을 표현한 앙 7) Steven Watts, op. cot., pp. 84-110. 8) 칸딘스키는 순수색의 심리학적 효과, 이를테면 빨강색이 트럼펫 소리와 같은 느낌을 불러일으킬 수 있다는 것을 강조하였다. 이러한 방법으로 정신과 정신 을 결합시키는 것이 가능하며 또 그것이 필요하다는 신념으로, 그는 색채로 표현된 음악을 최초로 시도하여 전시하는 용기를 보여주었다. E.H. 곰브리치, 『서양미술사』, 백승길, 이종숭 역, 예경, p. 569. 9) <미술에 있어서 정신적인 것에 관하여>에서 칸딘스키는 예로 밝은 빨강색이 트럼펫 소리와 같은 느낌을 불러일으킬 수 있다는 것을 강조했다. E.H.곰브리 치, 백승길, 이종숭 역, 앞의 책, p. 569. 39 리 마티스10)를 연상시킨다. 디즈니의 애니메이션 <쿠스코? 쿠스코!>(The Emperor's New Groove)를 보자. 이 영화에서 배경의 채색은 음영으로 3차원의 공간을 보여주지만, 캐릭터들의 뚜렷한 외곽선은 인물을 배경에 서 분리해 내고 있고 또 단색으로 채색되어 비구상회화와 같은 평면성을 보여준다. 평면성이란 모더니즘 회화의 특징이다. 모더 니즘 회화는 조형성을 강조한 과거 사조들을 부정하면서 회화에 서 입체의 환영을 걷어내고 평면성을 전면에 내세웠다. <쿠스코? 쿠스코!>에서 디테일과 음영이 생략된 평면적인 색은 사실적으로 표현된 배경과 대조를 이루면서 색의 인상을 전면에 드러내고 있 다. 이것은 인물과 연결되어 있는데, 이기적이고 철부지 같은 왕 쿠스코(Kuzco)엔 빨강과 노랑을 주색으로 사용해 그를 조금은 경 박하지만 활발하고 긍정적인 모습으로 표현한다. 한편 난색인 빨 강과 노랑의 배색은 쿠스코를 단순히 탐욕스러운 왕의 모습이 아 닌 온화한 내면의 소유자로 비춰지도록 한다. 칸딘스키의 색채론 에 영감을 준 괴테는 노랑과 빨강은‘화창하고 웅장한 효과’를 지닌다고 했다. 그러나 쿠스코가 라마의 모습으로 변했을 때에, 그의 의상(털)의 색은 명도와 채도를 낮춘 노랑과 빨강의 유사 색을 사용하여 캐릭터 간의 연관성은 유지하면서도 과거의 부와 권력이 박탈된 것을 나타낸다. 칸딘스키가 색을 따뜻함과 차가 움, 밝음과 어둠의 네 가지 음향으로 분류한 것과 같이 색이 주 는 내적효과는 내러티브의 맥락에 맞추어 연출되어 왔지만, <쿠 스코? 쿠스코!>의 색은 보다 강렬한 색채의 사용으로 인물의 표 정이나 제스처 보다는, 칸딘스키의 작품이 주는 색이 주는 리듬 감처럼 캐릭터의 퇴장에 맞춰 음악적 리듬을 형성해 유희를 느끼 도록 해준다.11) 10) 앙리 마티스(Henri Matisse)는 프랑스화가로, 장식적인 단순화에 재능을 가 지고 있었으며, 오리엔트의 양탄자와 북아프리카 경치에서 색채의 짜임새를 연구했고 현대 디자인에 커다란 영향을 끼친 양식을 발전시켰다. 그는 빛과 광채의 인상을 보존하려는 단계에서 더 나아가 눈 앞에 전개된 장면을 장식적 인 패턴으로 변형시키려고 했다. E.H.곰브리치, 백승길, 이종숭 역, 앞의 책, p. 571. 11) 칸딘스키는 색조의 따뜻함과 차가움, 밝음과 어두움으로 보았으며, 노랑은 40 그림 2. <쿠스코? 쿠스코!> 쿠스코의 색상표 그림 3. 칸딘스키, <노랑 빨강 파랑(Jaune-rouge-bleu)>(1925) <카우 삼총사(Home on the Range)>(2004)에서 소도둑의 두목 은, 마치‘피리부는 사나이’가 쥐들을 강가로 유인하는 것처럼, 요들송으로 소들을 최면상태로 빠지도록 한 다음 은폐장소로 끌 고 간다. 소들이 최면에 빠지기 시작하면서 군대 같이 일사분란 하게 열을 맞추며 행진하기 시작하는데 소들과 푸른 톤(tone)의 따뜻함으로 보는 사람 쪽으로 가깝게 가며(육체적, 원심적), 파랑은 차가움으 로 보는 사람에게서 멀어져 가는(정신적, 구심점) 색으로 서로 대립을 한다고 봤다. 또한, 하양은 밝음을 검정은 어두움으로, 하양이 탄생의 영원한 저항, 가능성 있음을 나타낸다면, 검정은 죽음, 절대적인 무저항, 가능성 없음을 의 미하여 대립관계를 이룬다고 했다. 색들을 배치함으로 이러한 네 개의 주요 음향은 대립과 조화로 의미를 생성한다. 칸딘스키, 권영필 역, 『예술에서의 정신적인 것에 대하여』, 열화당미술책방, 2010, pp. 83-87. 41 주변 환경은 고명도와 고채도의 색으로 변하고, 요들송의 박자에 맞춰 계속적으로 색을 바꿔간다. 환각상태의 소들이 속한 세계는 분홍색 또는 고명도의 노란색의 톤이 주로 사용되고, 최면에 걸 리지 않은 카우 삼총사가 속해있는 영역은 저녁의 푸른색으로 서 로 충돌한다. 칸딘스키는 노란색을 전형적인 지상의 색이며 광 포, 맹목적인 착란증, 광조의 상태를 나타내고, 빨간색은 사방으 로 자기 힘을 소모하는 노란색의 경솔함이 없는, 자기 내부에서 분출하고 작열하는 색으로 봤다. 밝고 따뜻한 빨강(새턴 레드)에 대해서도 힘, 에너지, 지향성, 결단성, 기쁨, 승리 등의 감정을 일깨워 주고, 파란색은 노랑, 빨강과 같이 따뜻한 색들과 대립을 이룬다고 봤다.12) 최면상태의 소들을 통해 보여주는 색채들은 재 현의 색을 버리고 강렬한 색채로 주관성을 솔직하게 표현한 야수 파의 색채해방을 떠올리게 한다. 그림 4. <카우 삼총사>에서 최면상태의 소 떼 배경의 색조 역시 특정한 색으로 긴장감을 조성하고 인물의 심 리와 극의 긴장감을 가시적으로 드러내는 등 내러티브에 충실하 다. 보통 이러한 연출은 장소의 특성 맞게 색을 사용하여 관객들 이 색의 변화를 눈치채지 못하게 하지만, <쿠스코?쿠스코!>에서 는 라마가 정글의 맹수와 조우할 때 배경색은 갑자기 높은 명도 12) 칸딘스키, 권영필 역, 『예술에서의 정신적인 것에 대하여』, 열화당미술책 방, 2010, pp. 89-97. 42 의 빨간색으로 바뀌고, 이들이 맹수의 추격에서 벗어나면 서서히 파란색으로 변한다. 이렇게 다양하게 연출된 색은 주제가 다른 여러 씬(scene)들에서 관객에게 노출되는 시간을 조절함으로써 리듬을 만들어 관객과 이미지와의 내적 교류를 이끌어 낸다. 그림 5. <쿠스코? 쿠스코!(The Emperor's New Groove)>(2000) 2.형태 칸딘스키는 동일한 색상이라도 형태에 따라 각기 다른 정신적 가치를 가진다고 봤다.13) 작품에 사용된 형태는 구상이나 추상의 문제보다는 어떠한 형태가 됐든 내면의 표현이 될 수 있다는 것 이다.14) 애니메이션에 있어서 형태의 재현은 내러티브와 관계되 어 이루어지는 데 대상의 형태를 어느 정도 과장 또는 단순화하 는 것으로 내적 반응을 이끌어 낸다. 특히, 디즈니 애니메이션의 특정 작품의 경우 인물의 두개골은 간단한 구(sphere)에서 시작 되고 턱은 날카롭거나 사각형 또는 밀가루 부대와 같이 넓게 늘 어지는 형태로 붙여지고, 전체적인 체형 또한 의상과 함께 다양 한 실루엣을 만들어 캐릭터의 특성을 나타내는데 이 모든 과정은 간단한 도형에서 시작된다. 입체파 전기에 피카소는 세잔의 충고를 문자 그대로 받아들여 형태를 구, 원추, 원통의 비구상적15) 형태로 단순화하여 눈앞의 현상을 도형으로 표현하려 했다. 피카소는 <바이올린과 포 13) 파버 비렌, 김진환 역, 『색채의 영향』, SIGONGART , p. 88. 14) 진중권, 『미학오디세이』, Huminist, 2011, pp. 92-93. 15)'추상’이라는 용어는 ‘비구상(non-objective)’ 또는 ‘비구상 (non-figurative)’란 말로 대체되어야 한다는 주장이 있다. E.H.곰브리치, 앞의 책, p. 570. 43 도>(1912)에서 사물의 특징이 가장 잘 드러나는 단위로 분해하여 화면을 구축했다. 이 그림에서 바이올린은 눈으로 부분을 관찰한 인상을 조합해놓은 듯하다. 바이올린의 옆선의 과장된 곡선은 악 기를 손으로 만졌을 때 우리가 받는 느낌을 표현하고 있는데, 즉 신체의 눈과 마음으로 생각하는 재해석된 바이올린을 표현하고 있는 것이다.16) 디즈니 애니메이션에서도 피카소의 <바이올린과 포도>에서 바 이올린처럼 구상적 형태에 과장과 단순화를 가미해 내적인 느낌 을 디자인 한 캐릭터를 발견할 수 있다. 예를 들어 <알라 딘>(1993)에서 캐릭터의 형태는 다음의 그림과 같이 디자인 되었 다. 그림 6. <알라딘(Aladdin)> (1993) 17) 16) E.H.곰브리치, 앞의 책, pp. 573-574. 17) John Musker, Ron Clements (2004). Art Review (DVD). Aladdin: Platinum Edition (Disc 2): Walt Disney Home Video. 44 그림 7. <바이올린과 포도>, 파블로 피카소(Pablo Picasso) 앞에서도 언급한 바와 같이, 애니메이션에 있어서 스토리와 캐 릭터 형태의 관계는 긴밀하여 재현의 문제에서 완전히 자유로울 수 없다. 그러나 애니메이션에서 인물은 장면의 조형요소 또는 상징수단으로 작용함에 있어 훨씬 자유롭다. 다시 말해 라이브 액션영화와 달리 이미 외적으로 인물의 성격이 뚜렷이 표현되는 경향이 크다는 것이다. 예컨대 얼굴 형태나 실루엣 디자인은 캐 릭터의 성격을 말해주고 나아가 그로인해 앞으로 일어날 일에 대 한 복선이 된다. 물론 이러한 대응관계들은 상징성만을 나타내는 것은 아니다. 여러 이미지들이 한 장면에서 배치되고 충돌하면서 새로운 이미지의 경험을 발생시키기도 한다. 이러한 경향은 셀 애니메이션과 3D 이미지의 합성으로 보다 사 실적이고 입체적인 배경을 지닌 <아틀란티스: 잃어버린 제국 (Atlantis The Lost Empire)>(2001)에서도 분명히 나타난다. 캐 릭터는 배경에 비해 단순화된 형태로 디자인되는데, 언어학자이 자 지도제작자인 마일로(Milo)는 스테레오타입 캐릭터의 전형을 따르지만, 연필과 같이 좁고 아래로 기울어진 어깨와 턱선은 각 진 형태로 최소한의 곡선을 사용하여 디자인되어 있다. 요컨대 이와 같은 형태의 디자인은 비록 내러티브의 흐름 속에 서 캐릭터의 성격을 암시하는 등 의미생산의 역할을 하지만, 동 시에 그와 같은 내러티브적 기능 외에 모더니즘 회화의 경우처럼 45 형태성 그 자체에 주목하게 한다. 즉 관객은 이중의 경험을 하게 되는 것이다. 내러티브 리얼리즘에 맞춰 캐릭터를 수용하는 동시 에 모더니즘 회화의 경우에서와 같이 형태 그 자체를 관람할 수 있게 된다. 그림 8. <아틀란티스: 잃어버린 제국(Atlantis The Lost Empire)>(2001) CG의 합성과 사실적인 배경묘사에서도 인물의 형태는 과장된 스타일화로 표현 3. 공간 내러티브 애니메이션에서 배경공간은 일차적으로 인물의 심리 상태나 극적 상황 등 스토리를 위한 장치로 사용된다. 따라서 대 게 애니메이션의 배경 공간은 리얼리즘에 기초에 디자인된다. 가 령, 조형적으로 극에 리얼리티를 부여하기 위해 원근법이 활용되 는 것이다. 하지만 애니메이션의 공간이 스토리의 공간적 사실성만을 추구 하는 것만은 아니다. 때로 이 공간은 선 원근법을 뒤틀거나 원근 법을 과장하거나 또는 여러 개의 원근법을 사용하여 독특한 시각 효과를 만들어내기도 한다. 예를 들어 카메라 팬(pan)이 이루어 지는 장면을 보자. 그와 같은 경우에서는 보통 시작점과 끝점의 원근법이 각기 다르게 되는데, 카메라가 수평으로 이동할 때 화 면에 가까운 물체의 시점이 변하지 않고 한결같은 형태를 보여줌 으로써18) 복수의 원근법을 사용한 테크닉이 드러나게 된다. 그 18) 만일 카메라 앞에 박스가 위치하고 있고, 카메라가 좌에서 우로 이동한다면 그 박스는 보통 좌측과 앞면이 보이고 카메라 이동에 따라 점점 시점이 변화 46 결과 배경은 더 이상 현실의 공간이 아닌 조작된 공간이 되어 공 간적 리얼리티의 환영은 깨지게 된다. <피노키오(Pinocchio)>(1940)에서 카메라는 밤하늘 달의 클로 즈업에서 시작해 마을의 지붕 위를 지나 제페토(Gepetto)의 오두 막을 향해 하강한다.19) 카메라의 위치와 수평선이 일치할 땐, 배 경의 공간은 안정적으로 보인다. 하지만 카메라가 이동하게 되면 서로 다른 원근법사이에 놓인 집들의 벽면들이 서로 다른 공간상 에 소실점을 갖고 있어 관찰자의 시점을 알 수 없는 모호한 공간 이 되어 버린다. . 그림 9. 세잔 <사과와 오렌지 (Pommes et oranges) > (1895년경~1900년경) 디즈니 애니메이션의 이와 같은 공간재현은 역시 모더니즘 회 화의 공간구성을 떠올리게 한다. 위의 <피노키오>의 장면은 관찰 자가 어느 지점에서 바라보는지 모를 세잔의 다중시점을 연상시 킨다. 폴 세잔의 <사과와 오렌지(Pommes et oranges)>20)를 보자. 4개의 소실점으로 이루어진 이 공간은 하나의 시선이 아닌 여러 각도에서 관찰된 이미지들을 조합하고 있어 관람자는 시선을 옮 되면서 정면만 보이다가 카메라가 우측에 도달했을 땐 박스의 정면 일부와 우 측이 보이게 된다. 19) Daniel N. Wood, Adam Finkelstein,John F. Hughes, Craig E. Thayer, David H. Salesin, , Siggraph 1997. 20) 꽃병은 화면 왼쪽 위에서, 설탕 단지는 수평선 높이, 과일바구니는 화면 아 래쪽, 바구니 속 과일은 화면 오른쪽에 위치. 47 기면서 대상을 보는 듯한 느낌을 받는다.21) <피노키오>에서 하나 의 원근법 지점에서 다른 지점으로 카메라가 움직일 때 관객은 마치 한 지점에서 다른 지점으로 고개를 돌려 보는 것과 같은 경 험을 하게 된다 그림 10. <카우 삼총사(Home on the Range)>(2004) <카우 삼총사(Home on the Range)>(2004)에서는 깊이감을 최소 화하여 원경을 뚜렷히 구분한 탓에 배경은 평면적으로 나타난다. 평면성이란 모더니즘 회화가 환영적인 3차원 공간을 재현하기 위 한 사용되었던 선과 색채의 원근법을 버리고 이를 단순화하면서 나타난 특징이다. <카우 삼총사>에서는 캐릭터들의 연기가 행해 지는 공간인 중경을 제외하고는 나머지 공간층위는 디테일과 음 영이 없는 형태로 단순화되거나 때론 단색으로 평면 처리되어 있 다. 여기서 근경엔 사물이 배치되지 않고, 지평선 멀리 보이는 산이나 바위가 위치한 후경은 하나의 덩어리처럼 같은 레이어 (layer)로 처리된다. 조르주 블라크의 <스타크의 집들>(1908)에 서 공간이 분석적으로 분해된 것처럼, 배경이 몇 개의 그룹으로 나뉘고 서로 다른 층위에 존재하여 그 공간들은 단절되어 표현된 다. 여기서 배경은 다시 텍스처나 음영이 없이 단색으로 채색된 탓에 캐릭터는 배경과 분리돼 각기 다른 레이어에 존재하고 있음 을 드러내 주게 된다. 특히 애니메이팅 되는 인물이나 소품은 명 확한 외곽선을 갖고 있고 배경과 대조되게 채색되어 있어 대비가 21) 진중권, 『서양미술사 모더니즘편』, Huminist, 2011, pp. 61-62. 48 강해진다. 이것은 관객의 시선이 움직이는 대상에 집중하게 되면 서, 배경은 애니메이팅 되는 대상을 강조해주는 네거티브 스페이 스(Negative space)로 남는 것과 같다. V. 결론 초기 디즈니 애니메이션은 많은 평론가들에게 모더니즘 예술의 가능성을 구현하는 장르로 평가받았지만, 어린이 대상의 판타지 소재로 상업성에 치중한 결과 전반적으로 아동적인 오락거리라는 인식을 얻게 되었다. 또한 보다 실제 같은 움직임과 장면을 만들 기 위한 기술과 스타일이 개발된 탓에 디즈니 애니메이션은 초기 모더니즘 예술로서의 성격이 차츰 약화되게 되었고 대신 이른바 고적적 할리우드의 사실주의 미학으로 포섭되기에 이르렀다. 그 러나 모더니즘 예술로서의 특징은 리얼리즘적 테크닉에 희석되거 나 숨겨져 있을 뿐 여전히 잔존하면서 여러 작품에서 다른 형태 로 드러내 왔다.22) 디즈니의 관심사가 라이브 액션 스타일로 옮겨간 후, 이전의 모더니즘 경향은 나인 올드 맨(nine old men)’23)에 의해 하나의 비주얼 스타일로써 그 성격이 유지되었다. 인물들은 단색으로 음 영이 없이 채색되고, 장식이나 무늬가 없는 단순화된 형태와 색 의 의상을 입고 있다. 고채도, 고명도의 원색에 가까운 색들은 색 그 자체로 캐릭터의 일부이다. 관객은 그 인물의 목소리를 듣 기 전에 그리고 스토리를 이해하기 전에 색을 통해 그 인물에 대 해 많은 것을 알게 된다. 평면적인 색과 더불어 인물의 신체는 22) 예로 <덤보(Dumbo)>에서 술이 섞인 물을 마셔 취한 덤보가 분홍 코끼리의 퍼 레이드 환상을 보는 장면은 모더니스트의 초현실주의적 관점으로 나타난다. 또한 에이젠슈테인(Eisenstein) 역시 퍼레이드 씬(scene)에서 공중에 떠다니 는 방울이 코끼리로 변하는 몰핑장면을 ‘플라즈마(Plasma)’개념으로 설명하 면서 애니메이션이 메타모포시스(metamorphosis)의 능력을 가지고 있다고 했 다. 즉, 이들은 디즈니의 작품이 초현실주의자적 모더니스트의 스펙트럼에 포 함되는 것으로 보았던 것이다. Steven Watts, op. cit., p. 89. 23) 월트 디즈니가 신입 교육을 맡긴 9명의 애니메이터들은 '나인 올드 맨(Nine Old Men)'으로 불리며 월트 디즈니와 끝까지 함께 일했다. 49 해부학적으로 불가능한 형태로 과장되거나 단순화 된다. 종종 배 경은 음영을 줘서 채색하거나, 컴퓨터 그래픽스의 효과로 실사의 느낌을 재현하지만 실루엣만을 따라 그린 듯한 인물의 선은 배경 과 분리되어 초현실의 공간처럼 보일 때가 있다. 이와 같은 색과 형태의 단순화와 과장, 왜곡, 그리고 본문에서 살펴보았듯이 원 근법의 파괴나 변형 등은 20세가 초반의 모더니즘 회화의 특징이 라는 관점에서 이해될 수 있는 것들이다. 최근까지 3D 컴퓨터 애니메이션만을 내놓는 디즈니가 최소한의 비주얼 스타일만 갖고 그와 같은 모더니즘적 미학에서 완전히 벗 어나느냐 하는 것은 중요한 문제일 것이다. 미야자키 하야오는 2013년 7월 <바람이 분다> 공식 기자회견에서 2D 애니메이션만을 제작할 것이라고 밝혔고, 지브리 프로듀서 스즈키 토시오는“미 국 역시도 현재 3D는 쇠퇴해가고 있다. 영화계가 불황기에 접어 들면 3D 붐이 일어나지만 3년 정도면 끝이 난다. 지난해 미국에 서 3D 영화가 약 100편밖에 만들어지지 않았다”고 덧붙였다.24) 현재 디즈니가 시장원리에 맞춰 수익성이 좋은 3D 애니메이션만 제작하게 됨에 따라 시장이 재편되는 것은 당연한 시대적인 흐름 일 것이다. 그러나 여기에서 2D 애니메이션이 가졌던 고유한 모 더니즘의 미학과 정체성이 무시되어 사라졌다거나, 3D 애니메이 션만의 새로운 미학의 평가가 제대로 이루어지지 않은 상황에서 무조건적으로 과거 스타일로의 회귀를 주장하는 건 시기상조일 것이다. 디즈니의 모더니즘적 특징이 더 이상 지금 여기의 현대 적인 것이 아니듯, 그리고 서양미술사를 볼 때 예술이 시대적 상 황과 유기적으로 발전하고 자기반성을 통해 오랜 시간 변화와 반 복을 거듭한 것처럼, 2D 애니메이션의 변화 속에서 어떤 새로운 미학이 만들어질지는 계속적인 연구가 필요할 것이다. 24) 매일경제 스타투데이, http://star.mk.co.kr/new/view.php?mc=ST&no =640181&year=2013 50 참고문헌 김지영,『월트 디즈니』, 살림출판사, 2009. 진중권, 『진중권의 서양미술사 모더니즘편』, 휴머니스트 , 2011. 진중권,『미학 오디세이1』, 휴머니스트, 2009. 진중권,『미학 오디세이3』, 휴머니스트, 2009. 칸딘스키, 권영필 역,『예술에서의 정신적인 것에 대하여』, 열화당미술 책방010, 2010. 파버 비렌, 김진환 역,『색채의 영향』, SIGONGART , 2008. E.H. 곰브리치, 백승길, 이종숭 역, 『서양미술사』, 예경, 2009. 박동욱,“新造形主義에 立脚한 立體表現 方法 硏究 : 본인 작품을 중심 으로”,공주대학교 미술학과 디자인전공 석사학위논문(2012.2). 박재윤, 「디지털 테크놀로지발전에 따른 디즈니 장편 드로잉 애니메이 션 연구」, 『만화애니메이션연구』,통권 제26호(2012.3), pp.57-78. 최정윤,「초기 디즈니 애니메이션의 유토피아적 가능성 - 미키 마우스에 관한 벤야민의 사유를 중심으로」, 『한국콘텐츠학회논문지 』제10 권 제7호, 2010년 10월. 본질과 현상 | 2010년 겨울 22호 | pp.296-325 | 2010년 12월 | 본질과 현상 김윤지, “미야자키 하야오 "3D 애니메이션? 전혀 계획 없다"”, 『매일 경제 스타투데이』, 2013년 7월 26일. http://star.mk.co.kr/new/view.php?mc=ST&no=640181&year=2013. 『월간미술』 2000년 4월호: http://www.monthlyart.com/200004 /special_01.htm 『매일경제』, www.mk.co.kr, 검색어: 미야자키 하야오 2D. Cathrin Klingsohr-Leroy, Surrealism, Taschen, 2008. Jayne Pilling 편집, Animation Studies, 1997. Paul Wells, Animation and Ameraca, Rutgers University Press, 2002. Paul Wells, Animation: Genre and Authorship, Wall Flower Press, 2002. -- , Understanding Animation, Routledge, 2009. Steven Watts, Walt Disney: 「Art and Politics in the American Century」, The journal of American History, 1995. 51 Daniel N. Wood, Adam Finkelstein,John F. Hughes, Craig E. Thayer, David H. Salesin, 「Multiperspective panoramas for cel animation」, Siggraph 1997. CFA, www.hfs.hr 검색어: Cartoon realism by Walt Disney. YOUTUBE, www.youtube.com, 검색어 : Paleolithic cave drawings, 2013.03.04. BRAINPICKINGS: http://www.brainpickings.org, 검색어: Before Walt Disney: 5 Animations by Early Cinema Pioneers. <덤보> (Dumbo, 1941) <리듬21>(Rhythmus 21, 1921) <백설공주>(Snow White, 1937) <슈로갓> (Surogat, 1916). <아틀란티스: 잃어버린 제국> (Atlantis The Lost Empire, 2001). <카우 삼총사> (Home on the Range, 2004). <쿠스코? 쿠스코!> (The Emperor's New Groove, 2000). <판타스마고리>(Fantasmagorie, 1908) <해골의 춤>(The Skelton Dancing, 1929) <꽃과 나무>(Flowers and Trees, 1932) 52 ABSTRACT Modernist painting style in Disney animation Moon, Jae-Cheol ․ Kim, Yu-Mi In the early twentieth century, history of animation began by modern artists, they produced various experimental images with the newly invented film and cameras. Artists in the field of movie, photography, paintings and others manipulated images in motion. But as some animated movies won industrial success and popularity, they became the trend but experimental style of early animation preserved by so-called non-mainstreamers or experimental animators, counteracting commercialism. Disney animation also followed the trend by applying realistic Hollywood film style, the worse critics placed a low value on the animation and it tarnished the image, although it was profitable investment from a business standpoint. To make images realistic, they opened a drawing class that animators developed skills to imitate motions and forms from subjects in real life. Also some techniques and gizmos were used to mimic and simulate three dimensional objects and spaces, multiplane camera and compositing 3D CG images with 2D drawings. Moreover, they brought animation stories from fairly tales or folk tales, and Walt’s personal interest in live-action movies, they applied Hollywood-film-like narratives and realistic visual, and harsh criticism ensued. On the surface early disney animations’potential seems to be weakened, but in reality it still exists by simplifying and exaggerating forms and color as modern arts. Disney animation employs concepts of the modernism paintings such as simplified shapes and colors to a character design, when their characters are placed together in a scene, that visual elements cause mental reaction. This modification gives a new internal experience to audiences. As conceptual colors in abstract paintings make images appeared to be flat, coloring characters with no shading make them look flat and comparing to them, background images are also appeared to be flat. On top of that, multi-perspective at background images recalls modernist paintings. This essay goes in details with the animation pioneers’works and how Disney animation developed its techniques to emulate real life and analyses color schemes, forms, 53 and spaces in Disney animation compared with modern artists’works, in that the visual language of Disney animation reminds of impression from abstract paintings in the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Key Word : Animation, Disney, Modernism, Reality, Painting. 문재철 중앙대학교 영상학과 교수 (156-756) 서울시 동작구 흑석로 84 중앙문화예술관(301동) Tel : 02-820-5718 jcmoon@cau.ac.kr 김유미 중앙대학교 영상학과 영상예술학 박사과정 (156-756) 서울시 동작구 흑석로 84 중앙문화예술관(301동) Tel : 02-814-9110 yumik777@gmail.com 논문투고일 : 2013.11.01 심사종료일 : 2013.11.24 게재확정일 : 2013.11.29 work_ihstidltsbaq7l3gajye4rtpna ---- Reconstructing Histories: Analyzing Exhibition Photographs with Computational Methods arts Article Reconstructing Histories: Analyzing Exhibition Photographs with Computational Methods Sabine Lang * and Björn Ommer Heidelberg Collaboratory for Image Processing, IWR, Heidelberg University, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany; ommer@uni-heidelberg.de * Correspondence: sabine.lang@iwr.uni-heidelberg.de Received: 31 July 2018; Accepted: 4 October 2018; Published: 9 October 2018 ���������� ������� Abstract: Displays of art in public or private spaces have long been of interest to curators, gallerists, artists and art historians. The emergence of gallery paintings at the beginning of the seventeenth century and the photographic documentation of (modern) exhibitions testify to that. Taken as factual documents, these images are not only representative of social status, wealth or the museum’s thematic focus, but also contain information about artistic relations and exhibition practices. Digitization efforts of previous years have made these documents, including photographs, catalogs or press releases, available to public audiences and scholars. While a manual analysis has proved to be insufficient, because of the sheer number of available data, computational approaches and tools allowed for a greater access. The following article describes how digital images of exhibitions, as released by the New York Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2016, are studied with a retrieval system to analyze in which artistic contexts selected artworks were presented in exhibits. Keywords: art history; computer vision; digitization; exhibition histories; photographs; visual search; retrieval systems 1. Introduction The invention of photography in the nineteenth century has allowed to capture exhibitions of modern times faster and in large numbers. This has been done by museums, galleries and other cultural institutions for various purposes. The invention of digitization technologies in the late twentieth century has also produced digital repositories of photographic records of museum displays and recently, institutions publish them for everyone to see. For art historians, these collections provide a rich source to study installation practices over time, displayed artworks and their suggested relations to other artworks. The interest in displays of artworks, however, can be traced back to the pre-modern period, when, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the genre of the gallery painting was established in the Netherlands. Famous examples include David Teniers’ (the Younger, 1610–1690) paintings of archduke Leopold Wilhelm’s (1614–1662) art collection in Brussels, works by Johann Michael Bretschneider, the Francken family, Adriaen Stalbemt, Hendrik Staben or Jean-Antoine Watteau’s ‘The Shop Sign of Gersaint’ (1720–1721) Nicholls (2006). The research presented in this paper makes use of digital records of exhibits and demonstrates how these can be studied with computer-based methods to analyze in which artistic context artworks were shown and ultimately support with provenance research—both important task of art historians. The method further stresses the possibility of a visual instead of a textual reconstruction of exhibition histories and provenance research; the latter strongly relies on the availability of text documents, which are often difficult to access, lack completeness or contain erroneous information. While it is impossible to evaluate these digital exhibition records manually, computer technologies are able to process millions of images, thus allowing to formulate universal statements or to find broader patterns in art—this is one great potential of retrieval systems. Arts 2018, 7, 64; doi:10.3390/arts7040064 www.mdpi.com/journal/arts http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2543-0085 http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/7/4/64?type=check_update&version=1 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/arts7040064 http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Arts 2018, 7, 64 2 of 21 For photographs of exhibitions this means that we are able to evaluate a great number of images, to make general statements about exhibition practices for specific artworks and trace its inclusion in shows through time and place. To evaluate images, an interactive interface was used, which was developed within the Computer Vision Group at Heidelberg University1. Since 2009, the group hosts an interdisciplinary project between computer vision and art history, resulting in various projects, which applied various computational methods to art data. The interface enables to object and part retrieval in art datasets, which has been tested on diverse image collections, such as architectural prints, paintings of Christ’s Crucifixion and medieval manuscripts. Preceding works studied legal communication in the Sachsenspiegel (c1220), a medieval law book containing heavily illustrated text sheets Bell et al. (2013), or included a computational analysis of reproduction processes of medieval images Monroy et al. (2011). The present study benefits from previous works and analyzes a set of exhibition photographs, released by the Museum of Modern Art2, by retrieving user-selected artworks. This article hypothesizes that computational tools can correctly retrieve user-selected artworks from exhibition photographs to assist with the reconstruction of exhibition histories. Although object retrieval has been used in humanities research for quite some time now, to the knowledge of the author, prior work has neither demonstrated its usage for exhibition study nor highlighted the possibility of a visual provenance research. Eventually, this interest in art displays highlights the importance of installations for the reading and meaning of individual works Grießer (2013). Literature Overview The literary overview consists of two parts, which are a direct result of the thematic focus and selected method of this article: while the first presents past works in art history on the topic of exhibits, the second provides an overview of works done in computer vision on object retrieval. Literature was selected, because it either gives an insight into the great variety of topics relating to exhibits and exhibition history or applications for object retrieval systems. Also, compiled literature is representative of different approaches and interests of scholars in the field of art history, computer vision and its intersection. Art historians have studied museum and exhibition history and installation3 practices in great depth; numerous books and articles are a result of this interest. Previous works discussed historic exhibits, the exhibition space, presented artworks and provided more practical guidelines for curators. Scholars pointed to developments in museum practices, based on changed social or economic values in society and the art world. In 1976, Brian O’Doherty published his influential article ‘Inside the White Cube’ O’Doherty (1999), where he studies the white gallery space and its meaning; he elaborates on the sociological, economic and aesthetic context in which viewers experience art and studies the relation between the content of the image and spatial context. He concluded that the museum space transforms everyday objects into art, that the white cube is a work of art itself and thus not neutral. The question, if artworks can endure without this context, was highly also significant to him. O’Doherty also elaborated on the installation photograph, which is central to this article, and notes the photogenic nature of the white cube and disappearance of the viewer in it; this is also visible in the MoMA records. While this article focuses on artworks and less on the space, future work should also explore the relation between space and images; computer-based tools might be used to examine different modes of hanging or the inclusion of benches, plants and other decor. In 2007, O’Doherty issued his follow-up ‘Studio and Cube’ O’Doherty (2012), focusing on the relation between an artist’s studio and the gallery space; he concludes that both are spaces in which 1 The interface is available for other scholars upon request. Inquiries can be send to sabine.lang@iwr.uni-heidelberg.de. 2 The article is referring to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, when it uses ’Museum of Modern Art’ or the abbreviation ’MoMA’ in the text, also in references to archival material or other sources. 3 The following article uses the term ’installation’ to refer to museum displays of artworks and not to the modern genre of installation. Also the phrase ’installation views’, in this context, always refers to photographic records of museum displays instead of the genre ’installation’. Arts 2018, 7, 64 3 of 21 art obtain meaning. O’Doherty dedicated much consideration to the exhibition space and thus is included in this overview. His writings are still relevant; although the present study is more interested in displayed artworks, it should be regarded that the MoMA as a cultural institution and space influences images and that both cannot be separated. Literature also includes practical handbooks on exhibition organization Pöhlmann (2007), Bertron et al. (2006) and more scientific discourses on exhibition histories, practice and discourses in museums. Grießer (2013) write extensively on the history of exhibits and relevant ’fields of action’ in museums. In her essay on ’Museology’, Monika Sommer discusses the origins of museums, its tasks of collecting, categorizing and presenting and the great meaning of museums for society. The term ’display’ is further studied by Christine Haupt-Stummer, who emphasizes the crucial role of art displays for exhibits and states that an increasing awareness of the importance of forms of presentations characterize modern museum practices; beginnings can be traced back to Edgar Degas proposals for the installation of the Paris Salon in 1870. Especially the last essay and accounts on aspects of exhibition organization and curating are relevant for this article, which is also based on the assumption that the way artworks are displayed in exhibitions and in which artistic context is crucial. Other scholars have focused on individual shows and their importance for a global exhibition history, encompassing the period from the late seventeenth century to the present day. The following are examples of historic accounts of exhibits, which either focus on single or provide an overview of multiple shows. Bruce Altshuler’s ‘Exhibitions that made art history’ is a compendium of shows from 1863 until 2002, divided in two volumes Altshuler (2009). It is inarguably one of the most comprehensive reference books on exhibitions and records the development of modern art through art shows. It includes archival material, historic reviews and installation photographs and gives information on twentieth century art, exhibition design and curatorial practices. By doing so, it combines various aspects: stating historic accounts while also laying out practical recommendations for curators. Its comprehensiveness is exceptional and relevant for every scholar, who studies exhibits, the history of modern art and its display. Similar, Bernd Klüser and Katharina Hegewisch compiled thirty art exhibitions, held throughout the twentieth century for ‘Die Kunst der Ausstellung’ Klüser and Hegewisch (1991). Selected shows are representative of the symbiosis between exhibition room and art; the modern space became a Gesamtkunstwerk, where architecture and decor reflected the thematic scope and style of artworks. Although collected essays mainly provide general information, they elaborate on included artworks and their display. While accounts remain sketchy, they resemble attempts of this article. There is much literature on popular exhibitions, such as the ’Armory Show’ in New York City (1913) or the ’Degenerate Art Show’, held in Munich in 1937 as part of a series of shows Brantl (2007); those shows are well researched—also because photographic records are available—and much information is available about historic context, organization, installation and display of artworks. There would be great potential, if these textual and visual exhibition records, printed partially in books, can be linked, based on a computational analysis of digital images. Although methods exist, missing data is still an issue. While exhibitions have been a continuous topic in art history, photographic records have not been studied with computational technologies so far. However, the exponentially increasing amount of visual data has resulted in great research activity in image search and retrieval; although approaches exist since the early 1990s, image search with visual queries has experienced great popularity in recent years (Zhou et al. 2017). Also, works in computer vision and digital art history have described the application of retrieval systems on art data. (Crowley and Zisserman 2014, 2016), detected objects in paintings using classifiers, which were trained on object-categories of natural images. However, approaches, which rely on natural images, are insufficient, because they do not adapt to the specific characteristics of art, such as abstraction or unknown object categories and thus, results are not convincing. Schlecht et al. (2011) used a detection system to retrieve identical and similar gestures in medieval manuscripts, also studying compositions and object relations Bell et al. (2013). Other work described the automatic retrieval of illustrations from a set of medieval ballad sheets Chung et al. (2014). A retrieval system to find visual links in artworks Arts 2018, 7, 64 4 of 21 was created by Seguin et al. (2016). In 2018, the Google Arts and Culture Lab publicly announced an ongoing project with the MoMA. Scientists developed an algorithm, which searches through the collection of exhibition photographs to find matches with the works included in the MoMA’s online collection Museum of Modern Art, New York (2018). The present article can be assigned to both, to exhibition studies in art history and present work on object retrieval in computer vision. The investigation contributes to the state of research in that it studies photographic records of exhibitions with computational tools, which, to the knowledge of the authors, has not been done before. While the project of the Google Lab and the MoMA resembles the approach taken in this article, it presents completed work, where scholars are not actively engaged and can use the method for their own research. Eventually it has also missed to demonstrate how this can be used for art historical research. The used method in this article is thus very different to previous works, which analyzed exhibition displays manually, and because it mainly relies on visual data. We present a large scale study of exhibition photographs of the MoMA and examine the reappearance of singular artworks in shows over time. An approach, which has been rare in art history. Eventually, we aim to demonstrate that tracing back the exhibition history of artworks is an essential aspect of provenance research and hope to trigger further research in that field. 2. Studying Installation Views with Computational Methods To examine art datasets, the Computer Vision Group of Heidelberg University has developed an interface for a visual search. Since 2009, the group hosts an interdisciplinary project between computer vision and art history, resulting in various projects, which applied object retrieval methods to art images to find similarities between artworks, identify (visual) patterns over time and reveal artistic networks Lang and Ommer (2018). So far, diverse image collections have been evaluated, including architectural prints, paintings of the Crucifixion of Christ and medieval manuscripts. The project team studied legal communication in the ’Sachsenspiegel’ (c1220) by retrieving most common gestures, determining their spatial relation and occurrence with other objects or motifs Bell et al. (2013), Schlecht et al. (2011), or a computational analysis of reproduction processes of medieval images Monroy et al. (2011). Currently, digital images of street art are being analyzed with the aid of the retrieval system: results will be presented in the following section. The present study benefits from previous works and analyzes a set of exhibition photographs, released by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The next two sections introduce the interface and also give some additional information on previous projects, including search results and notes on failure cases. 2.1. An Interface for Visual Search The Computer Vision Group has developed an interactive interface to search for image regions, selected by users, in large art-historical image collections. The interface operates on a search algorithm, where the previously selected query(ies) form the positive exemplar. For every image collection, uploaded and initialized on the interface, a set of generic negatives is created. To perform a search, the user is marking an image region, which is regarded as the one positive query exemplar; hand-crafted HOG features are used to extract the feature from the positive query. The histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) is a feature descriptor in computer vision, which provides edge orientation histograms and is particularly used for detection Dalal and Triggs (2005). An exemplar-based Support Vector Machine (SVM) is then used to train a classifier, where the user-selected query functions as the positive exemplar and the previously gathered generic negatives as negatives. SVMs are commonly used for classification, where a hyperplane is created in a higher dimensional space to separate data in two categories—in object detection, to distinguish between positive and negative retrievals in relation to the query Adankon and Cheriet (2009). A sliding window moves over all images in the dataset and the trained classifier extracts features for every region; the classifier then measures the similarity to the positive query feature for every feature. The highest rated image regions are displayed as results by the interface, thus not only showing identical but also similar regions to the query. A feedback system Arts 2018, 7, 64 5 of 21 was introduced to refine the classifier, eventually providing better search results through additional (visual) information Takami et al. (2014). It is also important to note that while for other retrieval systems manual tagging is necessary, the used algorithm purely operates on visual image qualities, which is especially useful for unlabeled data; this is often the case for art image collections, where large number of the data are not labeled. The step-by-step use of the interface and its functions are described in the following section. The retrieval system contains various image collections, which are displayed on the front page (Figure 1); the user is able to select one of the existing datasets or upload a new one. The initialization process uploads the images and corresponding metadata. Consequently, the collection can be used for image search; an overview of images included in selected dataset is provided, simplifying the selection process for users. After selecting an image, the user can mark up to five bounding boxes as queries and define spatial relations between individual regions, this is crucial, for example, for an iconographical analysis, which relies on specific compositions of figures and objects. Bounding boxes are tools to mark regions of interest, while also excluding the effect of the background (Zhou et al. 2017); examples of selected regions marked with bounding boxes can be seen in (Figures 2 and 3). The user then triggers the search process, where results are being displayed in a new window, ordered with decreasing similarity. A user feedback, where positive results are marked in green and negatives in red, retrains the model and refines returned results. The interface offers additional features, such as to enlarge individual results, access metadata and pin positive results, which appear in a separate space and facilitate a comparative analysis (Figure 4). In the past, the tool was successfully tested on diverse image collections, where thematic scope, genre, technique and quality of digital reproductions varied. Despite this variety, the algorithm was able to perform well on all collections and proved its adaptability to different data and search queries. The website of the Computer Vision Group includes an overview of conducted work and shows more results on art data Computer Vision Group, Heidelberg University (2018). 2.2. Performance Results on Other Datasets Since 2009, the Computer Vision Group carries out interdisciplinary work, applying computational methods and tools—the interface being one—to diverse art historical data, such as medieval manuscripts, architectural drawings, religious paintings, and photographs of street art. This confirmed the efficiency of algorithms and encouraged to test the system on other challenging data: digital exhibition records of the MoMA being examples. However, to further promote the usefulness of retrieval tools for art historical research, and eventually for every visual discipline in the humanities, the following section wants to share additional performance results obtained by the interface on above mentioned data during past projects. Because of the limited scope, this section presents search results from medieval manuscripts and street art photography. The interdisciplinary project team has analyzed the Sachsenspiegel (c1220), a medieval law book, using the interface to find recurring objects, study compositions and formal changes and developments. The manuscript exists in four versions, named after their current locations in Heidelberg, Dresden, Wolfenbuettel and Oldenburg, and contains heavily illustrated text sheets; the original version was produced by Eike von Repgow (c1180–c1235). Illustrations are standardized and identical and similar figures and objects reappear throughout the manuscript; unarguably, this standardization as well as clear object contours support a good retrieval performance; tests on the interface have shown that algorithms perform less confident on modern styles, such as Impressionism or Expressionism, where outlines are less distinct and objects are highly distorted. Also, reproduction quality is still a major issue, which influence performance and results of retrieval systems. Analyzing the Sachsenspiegel, the group was interested, for example, in gestures to study relations between figures and medieval communication. Because the interface also allows to select multiple regions, the authors also studied compositions: for the present search the user was interested in a crown and flag, which is depicted to the figure’s right (Figure 2). Algorithms retrieved identical and similar image regions to the query, allowing a formal comparison to identify developments or alterations due to, for example, Arts 2018, 7, 64 6 of 21 aesthetic preferences of printers Lang and Ommer (2018). It can be concluded that the motif of the crowned figure with flag appears various times throughout the manuscript; while posture and positioning are almost identical, the form of crown and flag vary, also the general appearance of the figure. Figure 1. Current image collections on the interface developed by the Computer Vision Group; the first row shows a test set, a collection of art, depicting the Crucifixion, architectural drawings and medieval manuscripts. Image rights: Computer Vision Group, Heidelberg University. (a) (b) Figure 2. (a) Shows the user-selected queries on a sheet from the Sachsenspiegel (c1220); (b) presents the obtained search results using the interface. Image rights: Heidelberg University Library, https: //digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg164. https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg164 https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg164 Arts 2018, 7, 64 7 of 21 (a) (b) Figure 3. (a) Shows the user-selected queries; (b) presents the obtained search results after the second training round. Image rights: Computer Vision Group, Heidelberg University. Displayed images are taken from the Instagram page of the artists ’OsGemeos’. (a) (b) Figure 4. (a) The interface offers the function to enlarge search results to view entire image and metadata; (b) pin function to separately display correctly retrieved images. Image rights: Computer Vision Group, Heidelberg University. Displayed photographs/details belong to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The group is currently carrying out a project, using a dataset of street art photographs; the project is interested in repetitions of motifs across time and in different geographical locations, the positioning of street artworks in cities and relations between viewer, urban context and artwork. First tests were carried out to test the usability of the interface, since the data proposes new challenges to algorithms, such as large context regions, a great variety of motifs and styles and distortions due to perspective. Authors, for example, studied street artworks of Brazilian artists OsGemeos; we were interested in the figure seen from behind and a text to its right, where the spatial relation between the regions should be considered by the algorithm (Figure 3). Although first results were already sufficient, user feedback was provided to obtain even better results. Figure 3 displays the results after the second iteration. Relevant details were pined to simplify a comparative analysis; results highlighted that the artists used the figure quite frequently and that its appearance remains relatively similar, despite some color variations: cloths, backpack, posture, raised arm and invisible face are constants; the reading of the texts revealed that the artists addressed issues of their time, mostly relating to their hometown of São Paulo. The group was then interested in the tradition of the figure seen from behind and the use of text in art history. Both examples indicate, how retrieval systems can be used for art historical research and that algorithms perform well, even on challenging datasets; the present investigation will further demonstrate its efficiency. Arts 2018, 7, 64 8 of 21 2.3. The Data: Photographic Records of Exhibitions Held at the MoMA, New York In the fall of 2016, the MoMA released a large set of archival material, which documents their exhibition history. It includes photographs of exhibitions, catalogs and press releases. Documents provide additional information about artists, displayed artworks, exhibition planning and involved curators; while the photographs are main sources for this article, other material is used to further enrich search results and analysis. Digital photographs of exhibitions give insight into past shows and, because of their sheer number, require new ways of analysis: can we evaluate these images with the help of computer vision? This article demonstrates how computational tools can be used to study the exhibition history of artworks and the artistic context in which they were shown. For evaluation purposes, a collection of exhibition photographs from the publicly available dataset of the MoMA was acquired. As of 30 July 2018, the museum provides digitized material for 4845 exhibitions, including bespoken photographs. The dataset consists of a selection of exhibitions, where each show is represented by a varying number of photographs. 48 exhibitions of the MoMA are included in the collection, which is used for this article, the earliest being the inaugural show ‘Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and van Gogh’, which opened on 7 November and closed on 7 December 1929. The latest is the 2013/14 exhibition dedicated to Belgian Surrealist René Magritte, entitled ‘Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary 1926–1938’, held from 28 September 2013 to 12 January 2014. The selection is reflective of the great variety of exhibitions staged at the MoMA from 1929 to the present day; it includes a variety of exhibition types, such as monographic and group exhibitions, exhibitions of the permanent collection or shows dedicated to the museum’s newest acquisitions. Also, different genres of art in a range of techniques are presented, such as sculptures, oil paintings, drawings, prints or photographs. Access to such a large dataset enables to ask research questions, which address universal issues and aim to find broader patterns; this requires innovative methods to answer them (Figure 5). Due to the nature of photographs, the data possesses new challenges for algorithms: rooms offer a perspective view and are therefore much more complex to grasp than well-aligned digital images of singular artworks. Also, artworks are multiple in exhibition views, vary in size and are mostly not presented parallel to the image’s margins but distorted, which makes it harder for the algorithm to detect individual works. Searching for single artworks in exhibition photographs is thus aggravated, also by additional decor, benches or plants, which might occlude artworks. Lastly, the lightning of the rooms creates stark contrasts in the photographs and therefore poses an additional challenge. All aspects require the algorithm to be very flexible and adaptable to visual variances in the dataset. 2.4. Studying Exhibition Photographs with Computational Tools Earlier research has demonstrated the potential of computational object retrieval for art images; while these mainly detected objects, such as dogs, horses, figures or gestures, the present article uses identical models to find artworks. In this way, exhibition histories for artworks can be recreated. The present study demonstrates this, using exhibition photographs provided by the MoMA. Once other museums release comprehensive collections of installation photographs, this task can be significantly enhanced; allowing more detailed and encompassing statements about where and when artworks were shown, among which other artworks and if this varied for different museums. By connecting these exhibition views with additional digitized sources, such as other photographs and auction catalogs, one significantly extends the potential of computer-based methods, also for provenance research. Arts 2018, 7, 64 9 of 21 Figure 5. The interface for visual search holds a collection of exhibition photographs as released by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. As expressed in the top region of the interface, at this point, in order to select a search region, users can either click on an existing image or upload a new one to the collection. Image rights: Computer Vision Group, Heidelberg University. Displayed photographs/details belong to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 2.4.1. The Detection of de Chirico’s Nostalgia of the Infinite (c1912–c1913) A large tower dominates Giorgio de Chirico’s (1888–1978) metaphysical painting ‘The Nostalgia of the Infinite’ (c1912–c1913, oil on canvas, MoMA). Sunlight illuminates the image and cuts it in two halves; the place in front of the tower is deserted with the exception of two figures, whose silhouettes are still visible but soon might disappear. The oil painting was executed in 1912/13 and first sold to the Parisian art dealer Paul Guillaume (1891–1934) in 1918 and was eventually acquired by the MoMA in December 1936 through the Galerie Bonaparte in Paris—as the provenance entry on the museum’s website states. The interface was used to search for de Chirico’s work in the MoMA’s exhibition images; the painting was selected in an installation photograph from the ‘Painting and Sculpture from the Museum Collection’ show, which was held between 23 October 1940 and 12 January 1941 (Figure 6). The archival material for the exhibition also holds a ‘Master Checklist’, where all included works are listed, a press release and four installation photographs. Arts 2018, 7, 64 10 of 21 Figure 6. User’s selection of Giorgio de Chirico’s The Nostalgia of the Infinite on the Interface. As expressed in the region beneath, users can define, if the algorithm should search for both queries or also for single ones. Image rights: Computer Vision Group, Heidelberg University. Installation view taken from the exhibition “Painting and Sculpture from the Museum Collections.” 23 October 1940– 12 January 1941. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN110.1B. In the query image, de Chirico’s painting is shown next to ‘Parade’ (1930), an oil painting by American artist Peter Blume (1906–1992); the latter was acquired in 1935 and has been a part of the museum’s collection ever since. Blume confronts the viewer with an industrial landscape: the painting is dominated by a surreal factory, positioned along a diagonal line; the sky appears to threaten the scenery, emphasized by contrasting clouds of white and dark color. In the right foreground, we see a man holding a knight’s armor; he is about to leave the image’s reality, thus entering the viewer ’s world. The armor suggests his metamorphosis into a mechanical being. Blume used different tones of white and gray and highlights in red and yellow to create his surreal landscape. His works are often linked to Surrealism, which ultimately validates his connection to de Chirico. For the search, the user marked de Chirico’s work with a bounding box; after initializing the search, results are presented in another window, visualized in rows of eight in decreasing similarity (Figure 7): evidently, algorithms were able to retrieve de Chirico’s ‘The Nostalgia of the Infinite’ (1912–13) correctly. His work was found in four other exhibitions, correct retrievals are included in the first three rows of the results’ page. Information about exhibitions can be concluded from the metadata, which is provided for every single image and saved on the interface; once results are given for a search query, this information can be accessed through the system. Besides the 1940 show, ‘Nostalgia of the Infinite’ was included in ‘Paintings, Sculpture, and Graphics form the Museum Collection’ (2 July 1946, until 12 September 1954), ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’ (7 December 1936, until 17 January 1937), ‘Permanent Collection Exhibition’ (29 March 1972, until 21 April 1980) and the Giorgio de Chirico solo exhibition (6 September until 30 October 1955). The confident findings encourage to look at individual exhibitions in more detail and study in which artistic context the image was shown and if that changed over time. As stated, the query painting is exhibited in the ‘Painting, Sculpture, and Graphics from the Museum Collection’ exhibition; the installation photograph shows it alongside Blume’s ‘Parade’; unfortunately, this is the only link the image reveals, since other artworks are not visible. Because of the relatively small set Arts 2018, 7, 64 11 of 21 of photographs for this show (only four), other photographic records provide no further information about other artworks, with which de Chirico’s painting was presented. However, the ‘Master Checklist’ Museum of Modern Art, New York (1940) lists both paintings in the section ‘Magic Realism’; thus, it can be assumed that other works in this category hung in close proximity or indeed formed a group. In this case, ‘The Nostalgia of the Infinite’ would have been displayed alongside Blume’s ‘Parade’, de Chirico’s ‘Toys of a Prince or Evil Genius of a King’ (oil on canvas, 1914–15), Dalí’s ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (oil on canvas, 1931) and ‘Portrait of Gala’ (oil on canvas, 1935), Max Ernst’s ‘The Nymph Echo’ (oil on canvas, 1936), Richard Oelze’s ‘Expectation’ (oil on canvas, 1936), Pierre Roy’s ‘Danger on the Stairs’ (oil on canvas, 1927–28) and ‘Agricultural Conference’ (oil on canvas, c1930), Yves Tanguy’s ‘Mama, Papa is Wounded!’ (oil on canvas, 1927) and Henri Rousseau’s ‘The Sleeping Gypsy’ (oil on canvas, 1897). Creation dates for individual works reveal that most have been painted during the late 1920s and 1930s, with Rousseau’s Gypsy being an exception and that all are linked to Surrealism. In this way, de Chirico’s work was mainly presented alongside contemporaries and precursors. The exhibition introduced him as a forerunner of Surrealism—as such he was viewed by Surrealist artists, who celebrated his mystical, deserted architectural views. Regarding style, de Chirico’s artwork was presented within a homogeneous group of works; assumingly it was not the intention of the curator to display contrasting images in order to highlight differences. However, minor semantic contrasts can be found within the group. Although artists’ nationalities and connections to specific art movements and groups varied, all images exemplified a strong preference for figuration, depicted dream-like worlds and used bright colors—with the exception of Tanguy, who included abstract elements. As an example, the urban landscapes of de Chirico or Blume were opposed to Max Ernst’s nature-dominated representation of the nymph or Rousseau’s depiction of a sleeping gypsy in the desert. Depictions of natural fertility were contrasted against images of desertedness—as seen in the paintings of de Chirico or Dalí. Figure 7. Search results using the interface for Giorgio de Chirico’s The Nostalgia of the Infinite. Image rights: Computer Vision Group, Heidelberg University. Displayed photographs/details belong to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Four years prior to the Museum Collection exhibition, the painting was included in the ‘Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism’ show, which presented an extensive overview of one of the two most important art movements of modernity. At the time of the exhibition’s opening, Dada was already superseded, while Surrealism was internationally established and at a height; Surrealist groups in various European cities and numerous exhibitions, such as the ‘International Surrealist Exhibition’ held in the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936, exemplify this. The exhibition at the MoMA presented a great number of works, dating back to the sixteenth century, such as Hans Baldung Grien’s ‘Seven Horses Fighting in a Wood’ (woodcut, 1534). De Chirico and his paintings (in total, 10 oil paintings and 16 drawings were shown) were again linked to a Surrealist tradition. Doing so, the show of 1936/1937 already picked up, what would be visible in the ‘Museum Collection’ exhibition in Arts 2018, 7, 64 12 of 21 1940. However, in the section, where de Chirico’s work was shown, organizers exclusively placed him among his own works. An installation shot shows ‘The Nostalgia of Infinite’ next to ‘Toys of a Philosopher’ (1917), ‘The Duo’ (1914–15, MoMA) and ‘Mystery and Melancholy of a Street’ (1914) (see photograph 1). All paintings were executed around the same time and are representative of de Chirico’s classical metaphysical style, showing deserted cityscapes, mannequins and stark contrasts of light. At least within this spatial section, the painting was not positioned within a greater art historical context, but remained positioned within de Chirico’s oeuvre—creating a homogeneous group of works. However, if we consider the entire exhibition, links to the past and to forerunners of modern art movements were certainly emphasized. The next search result links to the ‘Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Arts from the Museum Collection’ exhibition, which again included de Chirico’s work and opened its doors in 1946; the more permanent show remained on display until 1954. For the first time an exhibition was staged at the newly remodeled galleries on the second floor, where all except for two were used for showcasing the museum’s collection of paintings Museum of Modern Art, New York (1946). Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1902–1981) was responsible for the hanging and organization of the exhibition: “Installing the painting galleries has been a problem of compression. The new space, now permanently set aside on the second floor, has made available three additional galleries for the Museum Collection, yet there is even now room for only 120 paintings. [. . . ] In the remaining galleries varieties of lyric fantasy, dream realism, and factual painting include the work of Klee, Masson, Graves, Tanguy, de Chirico Dix, Sheeler, and others” Museum of Modern Art, New York (1946). Indeed, the installation photograph (see photograph 2) shows two of de Chirico’s works— ‘The Nostalgia’ and ‘The Evil Genius of a King’—on one wall, opposing Tanguy’s abstract painting ‘Slowly Toward the North’ (1942) and Ernst’s ‘Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale’ (1924). Similar to the ‘Museum Collection’ show in 1940, the exhibition of 1946 showed de Chirico’s work within a Surrealist tradition. This might indicate that the exhibit—maybe museum collection shows in general—were arranged in homogeneous groups, representing established styles, themes, or artists, rather than in a contrasting manner. This is further validated when looking at other installation photographs of the same exhibition: an image shows a room dedicated to post-Impressionist artists, such as Cézanne and van Gogh, whose ‘Starry Night’ (1889, oil on canvas) is visible in the right corner. This observation is validated by previous remarks on the presentation of de Chirico’s work in shows by the MoMA, which also elaborated on the homogeneity of displays. Scholars have indeed noted that historically group or mono-graphic exhibitions4 were organized chronologically, geographically or according to themes; this structure represented the Western art historical canon and is visible in the mentioned shows, which include the Italian artist’s works. It was not until the 1990s, with the reflexive turn, that traditional practices were criticized and new curatorial approaches were taken: new forms of representation were established, which were interdisciplinary, offered a critical perspective on canonical knowledge and created new contexts for artworks. Also museum collection shows aimed to showcase the quality and diversity of the collection and announce the museum’s identity—this was at least one main purpose of exhibits until the 1990s Grießer (2013). A collection thus had a specific purpose, being aesthetically, economically or because of personal taste, and was gathered accordingly; also, collections seldom remained static, but changed and increased over time. By exhibiting their collection, the MoMA publicly proclaimed their identity and thematic focus. It must be added however that these shows only displayed a small number of the collection, which were additionally curated and picked according to a specific pre-defined 4 Art history and museum studies generally distinguish between group and monographic exhibitions; these can be organized chronologically, thematically or geographically. Museums then display objects from their own collection or items on loan from other institutions. Versions of our modern museums already existed before Christ; then palace rarities, church treasuries and cabinets of curiosities are generally seen as predecessors. The modern museum, however, emerged in the Age of Enlightenment and experienced its first climax around 1800. More information on the (modern) museum and its history can be found in Simmons (2016). Arts 2018, 7, 64 13 of 21 purpose Simmons (2016). The ’Master Checklist’ (Museum of Modern Art 1940) of the 1940 show, presenting the museum’s collection, reveals that various artists and styles were included, however, most of them were European; this was representative of the zeitgeschmack. Almost twenty years after the previous show ended, the MoMA staged another exhibition dedicated to its extensive permanent collection (Permanent Collection, 29 March 1972 until 21 April 1980). Again, de Chirico’s image of the infinite tower was displayed; an installation view (see photograph 3) displays it next to ‘The Anxious Journey’ (1913, oil on canvas) and ‘Gare Montparnasse’ (1914, oil on canvas), both painted by the Italian artist. The subsequent walls show Rousseau’s ‘Sleeping Gypsy’ (1897, oil on canvas) and two other paintings, which were not identifiable. However, most likely they are from an earlier period, possibly around the late nineteenth century, because of their stylistic similarity to the works of Odilon Redon. Unfortunately, no archival material is given for this exhibition, so no further information was provided. Exhibiting de Chirico in close proximity to Rousseau resembles the arrangement in the ‘Painting and Sculpture from the Museum Collection’ exhibition (1940). Interestingly, both shows displayed the museum’s own collection but were held under different directors, namely Barr and Richard Oldenburg (1972–1995). For the show in 1940, Barr was again responsible for the hanging, for the exhibition in 1972, it is unclear whether Oldenburg was actively engaged in the installation or if it was the sole responsibility of one of the MoMA’s curators. However, since both displayed works of the museum’s collection, it can be assumed that similar installation practices and forms of representation are employed; not least, because exhibits, dedicated to the collection, had specific aims and purposes, namely to promote the museum’s taste and present masterworks, which testify to the collection’s quality. Other installation photographs of the ‘Permanent Collection’ exhibition (1972) illustrate that rooms were dedicated to Cubism (Braque, Picasso, Roger de la Fresnaye), Expressionism (Kokoschka), ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ or Abstract Art. Artists were mixed and works grouped together according to specific styles. In conclusion, the show presented an overview of the major (European) art movements and some of the most prominent works within the MoMA’s collection. While de Chirico’s ‘The Nostalgia of the Infinite’ was repeatedly shown in group exhibitions so far, the next search result assigns it to a show, which was held in 1955. Entitled ‘Giorgio de Chirico’ (6 September until 30 October 1955), it was solely dedicated to the Italian artist. An exhibition shot (see photograph 4) displays the oil painting ‘The Enigma of a Day’ (1914, oil on canvas) to its left and ‘Ariadne’ (1913, oil on canvas) to its right. This artistic context is highly similar to the ‘Fantastic Art’ exhibition (1936), organized by Barr, where de Chirico’s painting is also exhibited among his own works. The show gathered twenty of his most famous paintings, mainly from his early metaphysical period, visualizing popular characteristics, such as abandoned city streets, mannequins and dark/bright contrasts. The show was directed by James Thrall Soby, curator of the MoMA, and installed by Margaret Miller (Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture), under the directorship of Rene d’Harnoncourt (1949–1968) Museum of Modern Art, New York (1955). 2.4.2. The Detection of Balthus’ portrait of Joan Miró and his Daughter Dolores (1938) To demonstrate the consistency of the algorithm, the interface was used to search for Balthus’ (1908–2001) portrait of ‘Joan Miró and his daughter Dolores’ (1938, oil on canvas, MoMA). The Spanish artist is portrayed sitting on a chair with his daughter, who stands between his legs; their gazes directly confront the spectator, captivating him with their undivided attention. The room, in which the scene takes places, seems empty, almost abandoned. The Paris-born artist chose brownish, very muted colors for his double portrait. Again, the interface developed by the group was used to search for the portrait; the same process as described for the example of de Chirico was triggered: the 1940 exhibition of the museum’s collection includes an installation photograph, where Balthus’ work is visible (Figure 8); a bounding box was used to mark the painting and then the search was initiated. Similar to de Chirico’s search, the algorithm performed well and detected the artwork four times, as can be seen on the results’ page, where retrievals are shown in declining similarity (Figure 9). The first three images in the first row show Balthus’ work, followed by an image of another artist and then again followed by the portrait Arts 2018, 7, 64 14 of 21 of Miró and his daughter. How incorrect retrievals might be interpreted will be discussed at a later stage in this paper. As stated, the first result is from the 1940 exhibition of the ‘Museum Collection’. To its right, Christian Bérard’s ‘Jean Cocteau’ (1928, oil painting) was exhibited, the left painting could not have been identified. Cocteau is depicted in half-length and parallel to the viewer; he is dressed in an orange shirt, set against a brown background. A loose brush stroke and application of paint suggest a short execution time of the painting. The second search result stems from the same exhibition; the painting was found in another exhibition photograph (see photograph 5). The photograph reveals additional links to other works; the image of Miró and his daughter was shown alongside Franklin Chenault Watkins’ ‘Boris Blai’ (1938, oil on canvas); Blai is shown in half-length, with his body turned to the left and directly looking at the viewer. Similar to Bérard, the artist used muted brownish tones, which he applied very loosely to the canvas. The show of 1940 embedded Balthus’ work within a group of portraits—the ‘Master Checklist’ reveals that the group also included Oskar Kokoschka’s ‘Portrait of Dr. Tietze and his Wife’ (1909, oil on canvas) and ‘Self Portrait’ (1913, oil on canvas) Museum of Modern Art, New York (1940). The group presented a mix of nationalities, where the Expressionistic style and the genre were constants tying works together. This corresponds to historical exhibition practices, where artworks were organized and displayed in homogeneous groups Grießer (2013). Figure 8. User’s selection of Balthus’ portrait of Miró and his daughter Dolores on the Interface. Additionally, users can define, if the algorithm should search for both queries or also for single ones. Image rights: Computer Vision Group, Heidelberg University. Installation view taken from the exhibition “Painting and Sculpture from the Museum Collections.” 23 October 1940–12 January 1941. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN110.2A. Arts 2018, 7, 64 15 of 21 Figure 9. Search results for Balthus’ Joan Miró and His Daughter Dolores (1937, MoMA), first search process, figure shows user’s feedback, where positive detections are marked in green, negatives in red. Previously defined search constraints are visible at the top. Image rights: Computer Vision Group, Heidelberg University. Displayed photographs/details belong to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Balthus’ image was again included in the exhibition entitled ‘Portraits from the Museum Collection’ (4 May–18 September 1960) twenty years later. The corresponding installation shot provides further information about the artistic context in which the painting was displayed (see photograph 6). To its right, Balthus’ portrait of André Derain (1936, oil on canvas) was hung, followed by two works by the French artist Christian Bérard ‘On the Beach—Double Self Portrait’ (1933, oil on canvas) and ‘Jean Cocteau’ (1928, oil on canvas). On the far right, the photo shows the portrait of ‘Boris Blai’ (1938, oil on canvas) by Watkins. The exhibition thus showed a group of works, which are very similar in terms of date and style. All paintings were created in the 1930s—with the exception of Bérard’s portrait of Jean Cocteau—and painted in an Expressionistic style. The group is almost identical to the one in the ‘Museum Collection’ exhibition of 1940, where Bérard’s Cocteau and Watkins portrait were also shown alongside the portrait of Miró. The last result shows Balthus’ work in the ‘Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse’ exhibition (5 August–28 September 1975) (see photograph 7). The retrieval of this result is surprising since the painting in the photograph is highly distorted by the perspective and small in scale. However, the algorithm was able to detect it, which testifies to the efficiency of the developed interface. The shot includes a large number of paintings and reveals the following works (from left): Balthus’ ‘The Mountain’ (1936–37, oil on canvas), Yves Tanguy’s ‘Fear’ (1949, oil on canvas), Matisse’s ‘Large Interior in Red’ (1948, oil on canvas), Giacometti’s ‘Peter Watson’ (1953, oil on canvas) and ‘The Apple’ (1937, oil on canvas), Miro’s ‘Maternity’ (1924, oil on canvas) and ‘Diana’ (1931, oil on canvas) by German painter Paul Klee. The exhibition catalog, which is available online, provides additional information: “[the exhibition] surveys almost a century of European painting which starts with Manet in 1861 and closes soon after the death of Matisse in 1954. The selection has been conceived in eight chapters: Impressionism; Post-Impressionism; Matisse [. . . ]; Expressionism [. . . ]; Cubism [. . . ]; the “painted dream”, which in this exhibition refers to painters of fantasy before, during, and after Surrealism; portraits, a personal predilection [. . . ] and last [. . . ] ten painters of the School of Paris [. . . ]” Museum of Modern Art, New York (1975). Groups displayed the full variety of art, suggesting an interconnected reading of the paintings—Balthus’ portrait is seen among Surrealist imagery, abstract as well as figurative paintings. Whereas previous exhibitions mainly exhibited Balthus’ work within a portrait tradition, the present show places it within a less homogeneous group, including different styles, motifs and artists’ nationalities. Assumingly, the aim was to present the variations known in modern art, resembling more modern approaches, which less reflected canonical Arts 2018, 7, 64 16 of 21 knowledge Grießer (2013). Previous exhibitions mainly focused on presenting the image among other portraits; ‘Modern Masters’, however, enlarges the artistic context in which the query is shown. While the interface is able to detect the query image in the set of exhibition photographs correctly, the search process also retrieves results, which are not identical to the query, but regarded as similar by the algorithm. These additional images are not relevant for the exhibition history of the specific artwork, but might suggest new and interesting links. General observations can be obtained from the results (Figure 9): other images mainly consist of portraits, which are characterized by a central alignment of a figure, a simple background or style, similar to Balthus’ Expressionism. The first row shows Paul Cézanne’s ‘The Bather’ (c1885, oil on canvas), presently in the MoMA’s collection; although the painting was executed more than fifty years before the query image, its style and general composition bears resemblance to Miró’s portrait. The bather is shown in the center of the image, accentuating a vertical line, which divides the painting almost in equal parts. This is comparable to Balthus’ portrait, where Miró and his daughter also emphasize strong vertical lines, while the transition between floor and background additionally creates a distinct horizontal line. The background, consisting of different shades of blue and a rocky landscape, is simple and also suggests a horizontal line. Because of its reduced content and central position of the figure, the painting is easy to comprehend and Balthus’ image eventually inherits the same qualities. Cézanne’s image of the bather was exhibited in the 1929 exhibition dedicated to van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat; an installation shot reveals that it was shown among other portraits, including Cézanne’s ‘Portrait of a Man in a Blue Cap’ (or ‘Uncle Dominique’, c1866, oil on canvas) and ‘Harlequin’ (1890, oil on canvas), Paul Gauguin’s ‘Melancholic’ (1891, oil on canvas), followed by Cézanne’s ‘Self-Portrait with Beret’ (1890, oil on canvas). The show thus presented the male figure of the bather among other portraits, mainly by Cézanne. By identifying Cézanne’s work as similar to Balthus, the algorithm detected an image, which is not only formally similar, but was also displayed among a very homogeneous group of works — an obervation, which has been made for Balthus’ portrait also. The motif of the bather was again detected in Picasso’s ‘Bather’ (1908–09) as shown in the second row, last image on the right. Although executed in a Cubist style and holding a white towel in his left hand, the figure, its composition and background indicate a strong link to Cézanne’s male figure, which was painted almost twenty years prior. Again Picasso’s work displays similar qualities to the paintings of Cézanne and Balthus; it is thus comprehensible why the interface would suggest a similarity between the three paintings. The third image in the second row shows Henri Matisse’s ‘Portrait of Michael Stein’ (1916, oil on canvas), which was included in the ‘Henri Matisse Retrospective’ in 1993, where it was presented among a group of portraits. In contrast to the painting by Balthus, which showed a full-length figure — the present work portrays Stein in half-length. He is positioned parallel to the viewer, his suit and background are painted in different shades of brown. While prior works bore greater resemblance to Balthus’ work, it is less obvious, why the algorithm detected the portrait. When contrasting both images, it is evident that both artists used a similar color palette –mainly brown tones –, style and facial expression. Comparing exhibition photographs highlights that Matisse’s work was embedded within a similar group of artworks than Balthus’ painting. Curators and directors of the MoMA— in this case Richard Oldenburg for ‘Henri Matisse: A Retrospective’, 1992 and Alfred H. Barr for ‘Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh’, 1929 and ‘Painting and Sculpture form Museum Collection’, 1940 — thus preferably hung works of identical genres together. The result page shows another work by Matisse, namely his oil painting ‘Nude with a White Towel’ (1902–1903), which depicts a female nude standing next to a chair in a brightly colored room. The motif is more similar to Cézanne, Picasso and Balthus’ Miró than the portrait of Stein, because it shows a figure in full-length, depicted at a central position in the image. Concluding, it is noticeable that most of the retrieved artworks are full-length portraits, with the exception of Matisse’s ‘Michael Stein’ (1916), characterized by a central alignment and similar in style to Balthus’ portrait; most works presented a reduced visual language and results were considered to be similar to the query image because of formal and semantic qualities. Arts 2018, 7, 64 17 of 21 The second search, based on the user’s evaluation of the results, leads to improved results and possibly to new findings and connections. In the case of Balthus’, a second round was initialized to demonstrate the usability of the interface, based on the user’s feedback; the four detected paintings by Balthus were marked as positive, others in red (Figure 9). Results revealed that detections were rather similar to the first round and did not improve significantly, a first search already provided satisfying results (Figure 10). However, it is noticeable that a new work appears: the second row now features Vincent van Gogh’s ‘L’Arlésienne’ (Mme. Ginoux) (1888), which was displayed in the van Gogh exhibition (1935–1936). Again, the algorithm’s detection indicates a strong connection to Balthus’ work, because both are portraits and similar in terms of central alignment and formal qualities. Figure 10. Search results for Balthus’ Joan Miró and His Daughter Dolores (1937, MoMA), second search process based on user’s feedback; van Gogh’s painting L’Arlésienne (Mme. Ginoux) (1888) is highlighted. Previously defined search constraints are visible at the top. Image rights: Computer Vision Group, Heidelberg University. Displayed photographs/details belong to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 3. Discussion The task of object retrieval is highly relevant for art history to evaluate large datasets, which would be impossible to do manually; the authors have presented an interface for visual search, developed by the Computer Vision Group. In contrast to text searches, it does not rely on metadata, which is often erroneous or completely missing and thus complicates searches. It has been shown that the system of the group is applicable to diverse image sets, including different techniques, genres or styles. Eventually, it was developed to be actively used by scholars, who have different research questions and aims. Tests have proven that the interface can successfully detect artworks in exhibition photographs; this article has demonstrated how this can be used for art historical research: to find exhibitions, where the image was included and study in which artistic context selected artworks were presented. Other results further validate its usefulness: Figure 11 shows search results for Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s ’Street, Berlin’ (1913, oil on canvas, MoMA), which was included in the ’German Art’ show in 1957 and the ’Permanent Collection’ exhibit (29 March 1972 to 21 April 1980). The exemplary search for de Chirico’s ‘The Nostalgia of the Infinite’ revealed that different directors tended to display paintings among a similar group of artworks. In the ‘Museum’s Collection’ (1940) and ‘Permanent Collection’ (1972) shows, ‘The Nostalgia’ was displayed in close proximity to Henri Rousseau’s ‘Sleeping Gypsy’, suggesting a semantic and formal connection; this was also the case for Balthus’ portrait of Miró and his daughter. The homogenity of display groups is a constant throughout the MoMA exhibits, which have been discussed in this article, and are representative of historical practices Grießer (2013). Arts 2018, 7, 64 18 of 21 Figure 11. Search results for Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s ’Street, Berlin’, 1913. Image rights: Computer Vision Group, Heidelberg University. Displayed photographs/details belong to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The previous section has also highlighted, how ‘incorrect’ retrievals can be used for art historical research. Systems for object retrieval might thus be used to study the exhibition history and artistic context of an artwork; the article presented an innovative application of computer-based methods, which is of great assistance to art historians—also with the great potential to propel provenance research. The release of digital archival material, including photographic records of museum displays, catalogs, press-releases and checklists, by the Museum of Modern Art has enabled to ask and answer questions related to exhibition histories and displays with innovative methods. By adding other archival material and connecting, so far, separate digital collections, this method offers the opportunity to study exhibition displays on large scale, over time and space. This article also aimed to highlight the potentials of applying computational methods to art data and the necessity of interdisciplinary work—in this case computer vision and art history. However, these methods can only work in combination with traditional methods and human efforts. Computer-based methods certainly do not replace, but rather assist art historians with their work, where obtained results must be assessed in order for methods to improve and disciplines to progress. Object retrieval is relevant for many visual disciplines and the article aimed to demonstrate its wide applicability on very diverse data. Eventually, studying objects or image regions is very much related to the issue of establishing links between images and finding similarities and therefore is reflective of similar questions raised in the whole of humanities. 4. Sources This research article has heavily relied on the availability of exhibition data, as provided by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. An initial dataset was released in the fall of 2016, but has since been extended. As of 27 July 2018, the museum’s website holds data for 4845, including exhibition photographs, catalogs, press releases and other archival documents. All image rights belong to the Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. The following is a list of all referenced visual archival material and contains accession numbers for images displayed and Arts 2018, 7, 64 19 of 21 referred to in this article. Cited written documents are incuded in the reference list, but also belong to the archival material of the MoMA. Also, details (Figure 2a,b) from the medieval manuscript of the Sachsenspiegel have been presented; full digitized images can be found under the following link: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg164, University Library, Heidelberg. Lastly, Figure 3a,b shows images taken from the Instagram page of Brazilian street artists OsGemeos https://www. instagram.com/osgemeos/?hl=en. Exhibition Photographs Photograph 1. installation view of the exhibition ’Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’, 7 December 1936–17 January 1937. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN55.8A. Photograph by Soichi Sunami [online] https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2823/ installation_images/12548?locale=en, accessed 9 May 2018. Photograph 2. installation view of the exhibition, ‘Paintings, Sculpture and Graphic Arts from the Museum Collection’, 2 July 1946 [unknown closing date]. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN324.4. Photograph by Soichi Sunami [online] https://www. moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2856/installation_images/14618?locale=en, accessed 9 May 2018. Photograph 3. installation view of the exhibition, ‘Permanent Collection’, 29 March 1972 [unknown closing date]. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN1002.21. Photograph by Katherine Keller [online] https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/ 1919/installation_images/23497?locale=en, accessed 9 May 2018. Photograph 4. installation view of the exhibition, ‘Giorgio de Chirico’, 6 September 1955— 30 October 1955. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN583.2. Photograph by Soichi Sunami [online] https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1967/ installation_images/20969?locale=en, accessed 9 May 2018. Photograph 5. installation view of the exhibition, ‘Painting and Sculpture from the Museum Collections’, 23 October 1940—12 January 1941. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN110.2B [online] https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2813/ installation_images/13112?locale=en, accessed 9 May 2018. Photograph 6. installation view of the exhibition, ‘Portraits from the Museum Collection’, 4 May 1960—5 July 1960 (Auditorium and First Floor); 6 July 1960—18 September 1960 (Auditorium re-installation). Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN664.2. [online] https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2806/installation_images/17647?locale=en, accessed 9 May 2018. Photograph 7. installation view of the exhibition, ‘Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse’, 5 August 1975—28 September 1975. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN1105.10. Photograph by Katherine Keller [online] https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/ 1894/installation_images/23624?locale=en, accessed 9 May 2018. Author Contributions: S.L. conducted the data collection, analysis using the interface for visual search and the interpretation of obtained results. B.O. contributed to the creation of the interface for visual search, supervision and revisions to the manuscript. Funding: “This research was partly funded by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.” Acknowledgments: Thanks to the Computer Vision Group of Heidelberg University for their support, input regarding computer-based approaches and words of encouragement. In particular, thank you to Nikolai Ufer for his general help and providing information about the method and interface and to Anja Lang for proofreading the manuscript. Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest. https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg164 https://www.instagram.com/osgemeos/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/osgemeos/?hl=en https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2823/installation_images/12548?locale=en https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2823/installation_images/12548?locale=en https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2856/installation_images/14618?locale=en https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2856/installation_images/14618?locale=en https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1919/installation_images/23497?locale=en https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1919/installation_images/23497?locale=en https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1967/installation_images/20969?locale=en https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1967/installation_images/20969?locale=en https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2813/installation_images/13112?locale=en https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2813/installation_images/13112?locale=en https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2806/installation_images/17647?locale=en https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1894/installation_images/23624?locale=en https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1894/installation_images/23624?locale=en Arts 2018, 7, 64 20 of 21 References Adankon, Mathias M., and Mohamed Cheriet. 2009. 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This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Introduction Studying Installation Views with Computational Methods An Interface for Visual Search Performance Results on Other Datasets The Data: Photographic Records of Exhibitions Held at the MoMA, New York Studying Exhibition Photographs with Computational Tools The Detection of de Chirico's Nostalgia of the Infinite (c1912–c1913) The Detection of Balthus' portrait of Joan Miró and his Daughter Dolores (1938) Discussion Sources References work_ipv2x2evpvabzhici7yzw6ieiq ---- 03(11-98)p.184-192.fm 한국의류산업학회지 J. Kor. Soc. Cloth. Ind. 제14권 제2호, 2012 Vol. 14, No. 2, pp.184-192(2012) <연구논문> http://dx.doi.org/10.5805/KSCI.2012.14.2.184 184 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣 표현 연구 최유진 1) ·최정화 2) 1) 경북대학교 의류학과 2) 경북대학교 장수생활과학연구소 A Study of the Expressions of the Silhouette in the Fashion Illustrations Yoo-Jin Choi 1) and Jung-Hwa Choi 2) 1) Dept. of Clothing and Textiles, Kyungpook National University; Daegu, Korea 2) Center for Beautiful Ageing, Kyungpook National University; Daegu, Korea Abstract : This study analyzed silhouette expressions in the fashion illustrations by theory based on results of studying the characteristics of the forms and meanings of the silhouette expressions in art historically. For the actual considering this study collected and categorized fashion illustrations from 1990 to the present limitedly, and clarified the meaning of the silhouette expressions. Those expressions in fashion illustrations were categorized to the 5 items; black & white sil- houette, color silhoutte, pattern silhouette, paper silhouette, line silhouette. Silhouette expressions of the fashion illus- trations were categorized to 3 items: metaphorical fantasy, essential minimization, anonymous representation. Key words: silhouette(실루엣), fashion illustration(패션 일러스트레이션), metaphorical fantasy(은유적 환상), essen- tial minimization(본질적 최소화), anonymous representation(익명적 재현) 1. 서 론 패션 일러스트레이션의 표현 중에는 구체적이고 사실적으로 대상을 표현하는 방법도 있지만 이와는 반대로 대상을 단순화 시켜 표현하는 경우도 있다. 본 연구는 이러한 표현 중의 하나 인 실루엣 표현에 관한 연구이다. 실루엣은 빛에 의해 만들어 지는 그림자를 말한다. 실루엣 표현은 실체를 구체적으로 표현 하지 않기 때문에 보는 이에게 새로운 이미지를 연상시키기도 하며 때로는 실제 이미지보다 더 강렬하게 이미지를 전달하기 도 한다. 미술에서의 실루엣 표현은 초기에는 기록, 기억의 의미가 강 했다. 실루엣 표현이 대중적으로 받아들여지게 된 것은 18세기 중엽이며 이 시기 실루엣 표현은 초상화 기법으로 도입되었다. 앞서 언급한 기록이나 기억의 개념 외에 실루엣은 19세기말 프 랑스 회화에서 상징적인 표현이나 익명의 대중을 표현하기 위 해 도입되었다. 이후 마티스의 페이퍼 컷팅 회화에서 다시 등 장하여 예술의 하나의 기법이 되었으며 미국의 흑인 작가인 카 라 워커는 검은색 실루엣을 이용하여 성에 대한 편견을 비판하 는 작품을 제작하기도 했다. 또한 실루엣에 움직임을 부여하여 제작된 애니메이션은 내부가 보이지 않는 실루엣 표현으로 인 해 보는 이에게 상상을 유발하면서 환상적인 세계를 보여주기 도 했다. 이처럼 실루엣은 하나의 기록을 위한 그림에서 예술기법으 로 성장했으며, 패션일러스트레이션에서도 작가들마다 표현방 법과 의미를 달리하며 시지각적인 임팩트를 형성하는 주요한 표현방법 가운데 하나로 나타나고 있다. 이는 또한 보이지 않 는 부분에 대한 감상자만의 지식과 경험이 더해져 각기 다양한 상상력을 발휘하게 하는 등 흥미로운 효과를 거둘 수 있는 방 법이 될 수 있을 것이다. 현재까지 패션 일러스트레이션의 경우 실루엣 표현이 다양 한 방법으로 소개되고 있지만 이에 관한 구체적인 사례 분류와 의미에 관한 논의는 없는 실정이다. 단지 단순화된 표현 기법 의 하나로 실루엣 표현을 언급하거나(Kang & Kim, 2002), 현 대화의 하나의 양상으로 단순하게 실루엣 표현을 언급한 연구 (Sung, 2010) 등 패션 일러스트레이션에서 실루엣이 가지는 표 면적 특징에 초점을 두고 있어 다양한 의미 해석과 효과에 대 한 보다 체계적이고 심도 있는 연구가 필요한 실정이다. 이에 본 연구에서는 예술 분야에서의 실루엣 표현을 통사적 으로 고찰하고 그 속에서 형태적인 특징과 의미를 분석하여 이 론적인 토대를 마련한 후, 현대 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣 표현을 해석하고자 했다. 그리고 이러한 연구를 통해 실 루엣 표현에 대한 감상자들의 인식을 새롭게 하고 패션 전공인 들에게는 다양한 표현방법과 효과에 대한 교육적 지침 자료로 Corresponding author; Jung-Hwa Choi Tel. +82-53-950-6225, Fax. +82-53-950-6219 E-mail: jhchoi0@knu.ac.kr 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣 표현 연구 185 활용하는데 그 의의가 있다. 본 논문의 연구 방법으로서는 실증적인 고찰을 위해 실루엣 표현이 나타난 패션 일러스트레이션을 1990년부터 현재까지를 대상으로 하며, 유명 패션 일러스트레이터들의 작품을 수록하 고 있는 Nicholas(1994), Le Musées de la Ville de Paris (1995), Borrelli(2004a, 2004b), Dawber(2004a, 2004b), Klanten et al(2004), Robert and Hendrik(2005, 2008), Walton and Cogriantry(2008) 등의 서적의 일러스트레이터의 작품과 작가 개 인 홈페이지, 광고에 활용된 패션 일러스트레이션 등 다양한 작 품을 수집, 분류하여 그 특성을 고찰했으며 또한 그 표현이 가 지는 의의를 분석했다. 2. 실루엣에 대한 이론적 배경 2.1. 실루엣의 개념 및 기원 실루엣이라는 용어는 그림자를 의미하는 불어식 표현이다. 또한 실루엣은 18세기 무렵부터는 옆모습의 형태를 종이를 이 용해 잘라 붙여 제작한 소형의 초상화를 말한다(Rutherford, 2009). 이 이름은 당시의 실루엣 장관(Étienne de Silhoutte, 1709-1767)이 제작 방법이 간단하여 경제적인 점을 감안해 실 루엣화를 장려했다는 점이 고려되어 후에 실루엣이라 명명되었 다고 한다. 이 후 실루엣은 모든 사물의 외곽선을 지칭하는 말 이 되었고 현재는 인물 또는 사물의 외관을 대충 나타낸 그림 을 가리키게 되었다. 특히 복식용어로 사용되는 경우가 많은데 이때에는 복장의 세부적인 부분의 디자인을 제외한 윤곽 또는 외형을 말한다(Yu, 2006). 실루엣의 사실적인 표현은 석기시대의 동굴벽화들, 특히 프 랑스와 스페인의 것들에서 처음 시작한 것으로 생각되는데, 근 원은 구석기 시대와 고대 그리스와 에트루리아 도자기에 그려 진 검정색의 프로필 초상화까지 거슬러 올라간다. 이에 관해서 는 1806년 괴테가 동시대의 실루엣 표현과 고대의 재현을 연 결시켜 인식하려는 시도를 하였다. Rutherford(2009)에 의하면 가장 초기의 예술가는 기원전 600년경의 Dibutade라 할 수 있 다고 한다. Dibutade는 자신의 딸이 사랑하는 이가 여행을 떠 나기 전, 그를 기억하기 위해 촛불에 의해 벽에 만들어지는 프 로필 초상을 선으로 그리자 그 위에 외곽선을 따라서 진흙을 덮어 그림으로 남겼다고 한다. 엄밀히 말하자면 Dibutade의 도 자기에 프로필을 새기는 이러한 작업은 실루엣 초상의 시초적 인 작업이라고 할 수 있을 것이다. 이에 관해 Schama(2004)는 이 에피소드는 초상화가 어떤 존재의 부재중에 얼마나 그 사람 을 생각나게 하는 매개체가 될 수 있는가를 이야기 해주는 테 마라고 지적한다. 촛불이나 등불을 활용한 초기의 기법은 17세기 유럽에서 널 리 유행했다. 이 그림자 초상은 송아지 가죽이나 종이 등 여러 재료들에 그려졌으며 액자에 보관되었다. 1631년에는 처음으로 기계로 실루엣화를 그릴 수 있는 축도기가 개발되었으며 18세 기에는 프랑스 사람에 의해 인상추적기가 발명되어 정확한 윤 곽 드로잉을 기계로 수월하게 작업할 수 있게 되었다. 1826년 경에 검정색으로 처리된 종이가 개발되었으며 종이로 작업된 초상화가 보다 더 대중화되었다(Rutherford, 2009). 2.2. 예술에 표현된 실루엣의 시대적 표현 특성 2.2.1. 18세기-19세기 18세기 독일의 문호 괴테(1749-1832)는 손가락 두 개를 들어 올려 토끼의 머리를 만들어내어 친한 사이였던 콘스탄틴 남작 의 실루엣(Fig. 1)을 표현했다(Jin, 2005). 덴마크의 동화 작가 안데르센(1805-1875)도 실루엣화를 즐겼다고 한다. 그의 문학 적 상상력은 늘 조형적 상상력에서 기인했다. 그는 구상한 동 화의 장면을 드로잉하거나 인형극의 형상을 바느질로 직접 만 들기도 했으며 때로는 가위로 종이를 오려 상상하는 장면이나 무대를 실루엣 예술로 남겼다고 한다(Cho, 2008). 안데르센이 남긴 1000여 작품의 실루엣 작품들은 낭만적 판타지 세계를 보 여준다. 실루엣 표현은 옆 모습의 초상화가 성행한 18세기의 초상화 를 통해 대중화된다. 실루엣으로 처리된 측면 초상화가 크게 유 행한 시기는 1750년부터 1850년경까지이며 싼값에 신속히 초 상화를 만들 수 있는 이점 때문에 흔히 가난한 자의 세밀화라 불렸다. 실루엣은 신고전주의 취향에 부합되어 인기가 상승했 고 1800년 이후 다양한 기법이 개발되었다(Lee, 2002). 18세기 에 제작된 측면 초상화를 수집한 카탈로그 레조네 Fig. 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, count constantin, 1783. Fig. 2. Anonymous, unknown lady wearing hat with feathers, late 18th century. Fig. 3. American school, unknown lady, early 19th century. 186 한국의류산업학회지 제14권 제2호, 2012년 에서 Rutherford. E.는 다양한 기법으로 제작된 초상화를 수집 하고 있다. 그림으로 그린 ‘그림자’와 종이를 오려 만든 실루엣은 18세 기의 유럽과 미국에서 개인적인 기념물로서 널리 유행했다(Kim, 2009). Fig. 2, Fig. 3과 같은 초상화가 제작되었는데 그림에서 보는 바와 같이 검정색으로 실루엣으로 처리된 경우와 화이트 와 가까운 색으로 표현된 경우로 나타나고 있다. 초기의 측면 초상화의 제작 방식은 실루엣상의 화면을 오려내어 뒤에 종이 를 대어 그림을 표현하는 형식이었다. 이와 같이 전통적 개념 의 실루엣 표현은 블랙이나 화이트로 표현된 인물 옆면의 외곽 묘사를 의미함을 알 수 있다. Fig. 4와 같이 부분적으로 의상 의 장식을 세밀하게 표현한 경우도 찾아볼 수 있다. 19세기 중반에 은판사진법과 사진촬영술이 발전하면서 그림 자 그림과 실루엣은 일종의 민예가 되었으며, 주로 길 가장자 리나 간이식당, 시장 등지에서 뜨내기 미술가들에 의해 만들어 졌다(Kim, 2009). 이렇게 19세기 후반까지 소박한 민예로 남아 있던 실루엣 표현은 나비스와 세기말 프랑스 화가들에 의해 재 조명되었다. 나비스를 중심으로 한 프랑스 상징주의 화가들은 당시에 주 류를 이루고 있었던 인상주의 화가들이 빛에 의해 시시각각으 로 변화하는 표면의 변화에 주목했던 반면 내면에 대한 철학적 인 면에 보다 더 관심을 가졌다. 대표적인 방법 중의 하나가 인물을 그림자, 즉 실루엣으로 처리하는 방법이다. 에밀 베르나 르의 작품 (Fig. 5)에는 실루엣으로 표현된 남녀가 산책하는 모습이 그려져 있으며 다리 아래가 음 영으로 표현되어 있는 반면 그림자로 표현된 남녀의 묘사에는 그림자가 생략되어 있다. 19세기말에는 인쇄기술의 발달로 컬러풀한 포스터가 많이 제 작되게 되는데 빛은 문명, 근대를 나타내는 전형적인 상징이 되 었고 빛과 동시에 발생하는 그림자는 같은 맥락으로 해석될 수 있었다. 민속, 신화, 전설 속에서 인간 그림자는 영혼, 삶의 본 질, 개인의 힘이라는 생각을 일반적으로 포함한다(Forgione, 1999). 19세기말 대중문화를 나타내는 포스터에는 이러한 그림 자 표현이 적지 않게 나타난다. Fig. 6의 로트렉의 포스터와 같이 그림자로 표현된 익명의 도시인들이 대중문화를 즐기는 모습이 표현되어 있다. 아르누보 시기에 나타난 포스터들은 이 러한 실루엣 기법을 많이 사용하였다. 포스터에 필요했던 요구 사항이었던 간결함을 표현하기 위해 윤곽선과 실루엣이라는 방 법으로 사용하였다고 할 수 있다(Chang, 2008). 2.2.2. 20세기 이후 1950년 이후 실루엣 표현을 입체적으로 회화에 도입한 마티 스의 회화가 주목을 받는다. 이는 지금까지 실루엣이라 하면 흑 백의 컬러로만 표현한 경우와는 달리 다양한 컬러의 색상으로 표현했으며 아카데미 회화 표현 방식으로 사용되지 않았던 종 이를 잘라 표현한 점이 특이할 만하다. 마티스는 색종이를 가 위로 오려 붙이는 작업에 몰두했으며 그의 작품(Fig. 7)은 콜라 주의 형태를 띄고 있지만 마치 채색을 한 것과 같이 보이기도 한다. 붓이 아닌 가위로 그림을 그리는 시도를 한 것이라고 할 수 있는데, 마티스는 이러한 작업을 통해 인체를 단순하게 표 현하고 있다(Cho, 2008). 프랑스 작가인 크리스티앙 볼탄스키 의 작품, Fig. 8은 설치예술을 이용한 그림자놀이라 할 수 있 다. Jin(2005)에 의하면 볼탄스키의 원래 목적은 덧없이 금방 사라지고, 실체가 없어 만질 수 없는 그런 작품을 만드는 것이 었다고 한다. 카라 워커(Kara Walker, 1969~)는 1994년에 뉴욕의 드로잉 센터에서 길이 50피트 높이 13피트의 전례에 없던 형식과 재 료로 만든 큰 규모의 첫 번째 종이 실루엣 벽화 <남북 전쟁의 역사적인 로맨스는 그것이 한 흑인 여자 아이의 검은 허벅지와 심장 사이에서 일어난 순간 사라졌다>를 선보였다(Kim, 2009). Fig. 9는 작품의 일부이다. 미국의 흑인 작가인 워커는 검은색 실루엣을 자신 작업에 적극적으로 사용하여 인종차별, 성에 대 한 편견, 전형적인 것들에 대한 사람들의 생각 등을 자신의 사 회적 위치와 관련시켜 표현했다. Lee(2002)는 워커의 작품은 그 등장인물을 실루엣 표현을 이용하여 전부 흑인으로 표현하 는 상징적인 의미가 있으며, 미술에서 Low Art로 여겨졌던 실 루엣을 미국의 인종차별적 금기를 공격하는 무기로 사용했다는 점에 의의가 있다 지적한다. 실루엣 미술의 기본적인 원칙들은 주로 20세기에 월트 디즈 니와 로테 라이니거(Lotte Reiniger)가 그린 프린스 앤 프린세 스와 같은 실루엣 애니메이션을 통해 지속된다. 초기 애니메이 터 감독이었던 독일의 라이니거는 실루엣 이미지를 가져와 움 Fig. 4. James Hosley Whitecomb, a part of husband- and-wife pair, early 19th century. Fig. 5. Emile Bernard, Iron bridge at Asnieres, 1887. Fig. 6. Henri Toulouse- Lautrec, Moulin Rouge, 1891. 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣 표현 연구 187 직임을 부여해 애니메이션으로 제작했다. 라이니거는 당시의 아 방가르드의 경향과 독일의 그림자극의 전통을 받아 실루엣 애 니메이션을 처음으로 만들게 된다. 관절 부위를 조금씩 움직일 수 있게 만든 종이 인형을 빛이 투과하는 배경 위에 올려놓고 조금씩 움직임을 주어 애니메이션을 만들어냈다(Chang, 2008). Fig. 10의 아크메드 왕자의 모험은 실루엣 애니메이션 제작기 법을 이용한 최초의 장편 애니메이션이다. 1926년 5월에 시사 회를 갖고 7월에 프랑스에 개봉되어 대단한 반향을 일으켰다 고 한다. 이 작품은 검은 종이를 섬세하게 재단하여 캐릭터를 만들고, 역광을 비춰 인물, 동물, 사물의 연기를 표현했다(Yoon, 2009). 실루엣 애니메이션에 쓰이는 실루엣 이미지는 그림자극 의 인형 그림자처럼 실체가 있거나 컷아웃 애니메이션의 캐릭 터처럼 실제 모습을 재현한 것이 아니라 사물이나 캐릭터의 그 림자처럼 보이도록 의도적으로 실루엣으로 표현한 것이다. 이 러한 그림자극에서의 실루엣은 보는 사람들로 하여금 다양한 스토리와 모습을 상상하게 만든다. 또한 움직임을 부여한 애니 메이션 작품은 보는 이를 환상의 세계로 이끈다. 애니메이션에서 실루엣 이미지가 갖는 역할 중에 캐릭터의 그림자로서 어두운 내면을 표현하는 제 2의 자아를 나타내기 도 한다. 보통 애니메이션에서는 그림자를 길게 드리워 불안한 상태를 표현하거나 도둑이나 악과 같은 나쁜 인물을 나타내고 자 할 때 실루엣 이미지를 표현하기도 한다. 특히, 나 아닌 타 자를 이질적이거나 낯선 존재를 표현하고자 할 때 의식적으로 그림자로 표현하기도 한다(Chang, 2008). 지금까지 설명한 예술에 표현된 실루엣 표현은 시대 순으로 그 표현 특성을 Table 1에 정리했다. 3. 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣의 표현유형 본 연구에서는 미술사에 나타난 실루엣 표현의 의미를 고찰 한 결과를 통하여 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣 표현 을 분석하고자 한다. 이를 위해서는 우선 형태적인 유형을 분 류한 다음 내용적인 의미를 살펴보고자 한다. 통사적으로 살펴 본 미술에서의 실루엣의 형태가 주로 블랙과 화이트의 전통적 실루엣으로 나타난 데 반해 패션 일러스트레이션에서는 전통적 인 실루엣 표현 이외에도 다양한 컬러로 채색된 실루엣 표현이 많이 나타나는 특성을 보였다. 때문에 본 연구에서는 패션 일 러스트레이션에 표현된 실루엣 표현의 내적 의미를 살펴보기에 앞서 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣 표현을 흑백, 컬 러, 패턴, 페이퍼, 라인 실루엣의 5가지로 나누어 살펴보았다. 그 후 종합적으로 실루엣 표현이 나타난 패션 일러스트레이션 의 의미를 은유적 환상, 본질적 최소화, 익명적 재현의 세 개의 항목으로 나누어 고찰하였다. 3.1. 실루엣 표현 분류 3.1.1. 흑백 실루엣(black & white silhouette) 가장 먼저 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣의 표현 유 Fig. 7. Henri Matisse, blue nude, 1952. Fig. 8. Christian Boltanski, Angel, 1984. Fig. 9. Kara Walker, cut, 1998. Fig. 10. Lotte Reiniger, the adventure of prince achmed, 1923-1926. Table 1. expression characteristics of the silhouette art Period Artist Expression Meaning 18th-19th Johann Wolfgang von Goethe expression of the friend's portrait through finger's shadow play Anonymous profile portrait(black, white, color added) record, memory Symbolism artists figuring the people or trees having important meanings of the description into shadow essence graphics figuring the public consuming mass culture into silhouette anonymous after 20th century Henri Matisse simplified body expression by paper cutting simple Christian Boltanski untouchable art making through shadow transience Kara Walker African-American representation through shadow prejudice, alienation Lotte Reiniger adding movement to shadow fantasy, disparate being 188 한국의류산업학회지 제14권 제2호, 2012년 형의 하나로 흑백 실루엣을 들 수 있다. 흑백 실루엣은 앞서 언급한 바와 같이 전통적 개념의 실루엣 표현이다. 미술에 나 타난 전통적 개념의 실루엣과는 달리 패션 일러스트레이션에는 Fig. 11, Fig. 12와 같이 흑백의 실루엣이 함께 표현된 경우도 나타나고 있다. 이러한 실루엣 표현은 미술사에서도 살펴본 바 와 같이 전통적인 실루엣 표현을 이어오고 있는 경우이다. 3.1.2. 컬러 실루엣(color silhouette) 앞서 언급한 블랙 앤 화이트 실루엣이 전통적인 실루엣 개념 을 표현한 경우라면 지금부터 언급하는 실루엣 분류는 패션 일 러스트레이션에서 나타나는 차별된 경우이다. 컬러 실루엣은 실 루엣으로 처리된 형태를 블랙으로 처리하지 않고, 실루엣을 밝 은 컬러로 채색한 경우로 말한다. Fig. 13의 Bo Lundbag의 작 품에서와 같이 내추럴한 컬러로, 무채색인 블랙과 화이트가 아 닌 채도가 있는 컬러로 채색된 경우를 말하며 Fig. 14의 Piet Paris의 작품과 같이 그러데이션을 주어 표현한 경우 등이 있다. 3.1.3. 패턴 실루엣(pattern silhouette) 컬러 실루엣이 흑백의 컬러 대신 채도가 있는 컬러로 실루 엣을 채색한 경우라면 패턴 실루엣은 좀 더 다양한 컬러와 모 티브 등으로 채색한 경우이다. 최근의 작품 중 이러한 패턴 실 루엣의 방법을 사용하는 대표적인 일러스트레이터로 카림 일리 야(Kareem Iliya)를 들 수 있다. 일리야는 지금까지 W magazine, Marie Claire, 우리나라를 비롯한 이탈리아, 독일, 프랑스, 일본 등에서 발간된 Vogue에 작품을 게재하면서 인기를 얻고 있다. 카림은 얼굴의 세부를 표현하는 경우는 거의 없으며 Fig. 15와 같이 실루엣으로 표현한 얼굴 위에 독특한 컬러를 반복시켜 패 턴화시켜 채색하는 경우가 많다. 또한 뒷부분에 제시한 Fig. 28 에서도 그 특징을 살펴볼 수 있다. 또한 Fig. 16과 같이 옵아 트를 연상시키는 패턴으로 컬러링하거나 Fig. 17과 같이 반복 되는 타이포그래피로 면을 채우거나 Fig. 18과 같이 하나의 미 술 작품과 같은 작품을 원패턴으로 채우는 경우를 들 수 있다. 3.1.4. 페이퍼 실루엣(paper silhouette) 18세기에 유행한 실루엣 초상화의 경우 실루엣 부분을 오려 내고 그 뒷면에 다른 색상을 덧대어 프로필을 표현하였다면 패 션 일러스트레이션의 경우는 얼굴 뿐 만 아니라 신체와 의상을 포함한 전체적인 실루엣을 페이퍼 컷팅의 기법으로 표현한 경 우를 페이퍼 실루엣으로 분류하였다. Fig. 19의 경우와 같이 신 체와 의복의 일부를 컷팅한 후 짙은 색의 종이를 뒤에 덧대어 실루엣을 표현한 경우와 Fig. 20의 경우와 같이 의상의 실루엣 은 화이트로 표현하고 피부톤은 짙은 구리빛으로 처리하여 각 각의 실루엣 표현을 페이퍼 컷팅 기법으로 표현한 경우 등으로 나타났다. 3.1.5. 라인 실루엣(line silhouette) 마지막으로는 페이퍼 실루엣과 유사한 특성을 가지고 있는 라인 실루엣이다. 라인 실루엣은 실루엣이 되는 내부 형태를 채 색하는 경우가 아니라 Fig. 21의 나이키 광고 일러스트레이션 과 같이 외부를 채색함으로써 내부의 실루엣을 강조하는 방법 과 Fig. 22와 같이 굵은 라인으로 실루엣을 표현하는 경우 등 으로 나타났다. 3.2. 실루엣 표현 해석 여기에서는 예술 분야에서의 실루엣 표현을 통사적으로 고 Fig. 11. Yoko Ikeno, untitled, 1999. Fig. 12. Anja Kroencke, Lingerie, 1997. Fig. 13. Bo Lundbag, technical : digital, 2004. Fig. 14. Piet Paris, publisher contact number one-book cover, 2001. Fig. 15. kareem Iliya, Slow Down, Get Fast- Nike Yoga, ca.2009. Fig. 16. Ito Keiji, altered states of consciousness on a poolside 3, 1999. Fig. 17. lucy macleod, nyc style, 2003. Fig. 18. Chris Keegan, darfur(http:/ /www.chriskeegan.co.uk). 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣 표현 연구 189 찰한 결과를 통해 현대 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣 표현을 해석하고자 했다. 실루엣 표현을 통사적으로 고찰한 각 각의 표현은 유희, 기록, 기억, 본질, 익명, 덧없음, 편견, 소외, 환상, 이질적 존재라는 의미를 내포했다. 이러한 표현 중에서 패션 일러스트레이션 표현에서 두드러지게 나타나는 표현은 환 상, 본질, 익명이라는 항목이었다. 이 각각의 항목을 패션 일러 스트레이션에 도입되었을 때 나타나는 특성과 결부시켜 은유적 환상, 본질적 최소화, 익명적 재현이라는 항목으로 분류하여 살 펴보았다. 3.2.1. 은유적 환상 앞서 예술에서 보여 졌던 실루엣이 가진 의미를 고찰한 내 용 가운데 로테 라이니거의 실루엣 애니메이션을 다시 한 번 언급하면 그림자극이라는 장치는 캐릭터의 실제 모습을 제작하 여 그림자로 보이게 하는 것이 아니라 그림자로 비춰질 부분을 예상하여 그림자로 제작하여 상영된다. 그림자극에서의 실루엣 은 보는 사람들로 하여금 검게 그림자로 보이는 내면을 상상하 도록 만든다. 이러한 그림자에 부여된 움직임은 스토리의 흐름 을 보여주기에 유용하다. 앞서 예술에서의 실루엣 표현에 나타난 그림자 중에서 애니 메이션에 도입된 실루엣 표현에서 은유적 환상이라는 개념을 도출했다. 환상의 세계를 직접적으로 보여주는 것이 아니라 은 유적 표현으로 인해 간접적으로 제시하기 때문이다. 최근의 연 구에서 환상이라는 표현은 판타스틱이라는 용어로 연구되어 지 고 있다. 판타스틱이라는 단어는 ‘나타나 보이게 하다’, ‘착각 을 주다’, 기이한 현상이 ‘나타나다’, ‘드러나다’라는 의미로써 시각적인 부분과 관련되어 있다. 프랑스어로 ‘fantastique’라는 형용사가 쓰이기 시작한 것은 중세부터이며 ‘귀신들린’, ‘공상 적인’, ‘상상 속에서만 존재하는’, ‘유형의 존재의 흔적만을 지 닌’, 환상담(일반적으로 요정이야기, 유령 이야기)을 가리킨다 고 한다(Choi, 2003). 이후, 18세기말 낭만주의의 대두로 시작된 판타스틱은 Choi (2009)의 연구에 의하면 인간의 내적 심상과 금기시된 영역의 해방에 대한 욕구 표현으로 나타났으며, 비현실적이고 초자연 적인 부분을 포함하고 있는 판타스틱은 특히 비이성과 공포, 상 상력을 토대로 한 고딕 소설을 통해 사회 전반적으로 억눌린 형식적 체제를 전복시키는 기능을 했다고 한다. 또한 판타스틱 은 SF적 우성변이체, 투사분열에 의한 다중체 및 파편체, 신화 적 이종복합체, 인격화된 의사유기체, 초자연적 경계의 비실체 로 나타나고 있다고 지적한다. 앞서 살펴본 바와 같이 실루엣 이미지는 세부적인 표현이 생 략됨으로 인해 보는 사람으로 하여금 선입견을 갖지 않고 실루 엣 표현을 해석할 수 있도록 여지를 제공한다고 할 수 있다. 이러한 실루엣 이미지를 일러스트레이션에 도입한 작품을 살펴 보면, Fig. 23의 경우는 쌍둥이 모티브를 다중체의 형태를 통 한 컬러 실루엣으로 모호함을 보여주고 있으며 Fig. 24의 경우 는 빅터 앤 롤프 컬렉션에서 보여준 파워풀한 블랙 의상과 블 랙의 바디페인팅을 두께감이 느껴지는 블랙 실루엣을 통해 모호 한 공포감을 전달하는 초자연적 형상을 은유화하여 표현했다. 이 외에도 Fig. 25의 경우는 스포티브한 운동화 모티브를 패턴 실 루엣으로 표현하여 기괴한 변신이나 돌연변이를 주제로 하는 판타스틱한 신체를 나타내거나 모호하면서도 신비로운 느낌을 주는 컬러 실루엣을 통해 비실체적 형상을 표현했다. 3.2.2. 본질적 최소화 패션 일러스트레이션 작업에 도입된 실루엣 표현의 주요한 효과 중의 하나는 우리가 보는 대상을 단순화 시켜 본질적인 요소만을 축약하여 표현하는데 중요한 기능을 한다는 것이다. 예술에서 단순화란 작가가 의식적으로 그렇게 되게 만드는 것 으로써 대상 그 본연의 복합성을 그대로 재현하지 않고, 간결 한 표현으로 변화시키는 것을 뜻한다(Kim, 2010). 심리학 측면 Fig. 19. Pierre- Louis Mascia, première classe, 2004. Fig. 20. Maria Cardelli, wedding dress, ca.2007. Fig. 21. touratier maxime, jump nike, 2000. Fig. 22. John Prikryl, bag program, 2005. Fig. 23. shiv, the rorchaus test, 2003. Fig. 24. francois berthoud, black angel, Viktor & Rolf, 2001. Fig. 25. Kerry Roper, a series of designs created for Nike Jordan, 2006. 190 한국의류산업학회지 제14권 제2호, 2012년 에서 게슈탈트주의자들은 모든 물리적 활동에 있어서 모든 심 리적인 현상은 단순하고 균형적이며 규칙적인 체제로 향하고자 한다는 이론을 내세우며 인간의 시 지각은 어떠한 이미지든 주 어진 조건이 허락하는 한 단순화하여 수용하려는 특성이 있다 고 주장한 바 있다(Arnheim, 1981). 실루엣 표현 기법은 미니멀한 패션 이미지를 전달하기에 적 합하다. 현대적인 도시의 세련되고 기능적이며, 차가운 패션이 미지인 미니멀은 도시색인 무채색과 차가운 색상이 기본 컬러 로 표현되며 예리하고 직선적인 표현으로 나타나는 게 특징이 다. 미니멀은 모던한 이미지 중 하나이며, 단순함에서 더 나아 가 최소한으로 억제된 생략의 표현법을 사용한다(Kim et al., 2001). 이러한 미니멀한 패션 이미지를 전달하는 데 유용한 것 이 실루엣 표현 기법이라고 할 수 있다. Fig. 26은 페이퍼 실루엣으로 인체를 가장 단순한 도형의 형 태로 환원하여 극도로 절제된 형태로 나타난 미니멀 테마를 보 여준다. Fig. 27은 신체를 대칭반복시키고 블랙과 화이트의 컬 러를 대비시킨 후 그 위에 단순한 이너웨어를 실루엣만으로 표 현해 본질적인 요소를 최소화하여 표현하고 있다. 블랙 혹은 화 이트 실루엣은 의복과 통합된 신체의 아웃라인만으로 패션에 대한 메시지를 전달하게 된다. 이때는 의복의 이미지를 가장 잘 보여줄 수 있는 미니멀한 의복과 정적인 포즈를 통해 시각적인 주목성의 효과를 거둘 수 있다. 형이상학에서는 조형예술에 있어 단순성을 통찰에 입각해서 모든 것을 본질로 예속시키는 가장 현명한 정돈 상태라고 하였 는데 이는 불필요한 부분들은 제외시켜야 비로소 본질을 볼 수 있다는 것으로 정의한다고 한다(Kim, 2010). 본 연구에서 수집 한 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣 표현 중에서는 패션 아이템을 부각시키기 위해서 신체를 단순화시켜 표현하는 경우 가 적지 않았다. 즉, 중요한 부분을 강조시키기 위해 나머지 부 분을 단순화시키는 경우라고 볼 수 있는데, 가장 중요한 속성 인 패션 아이템을 부각시키기 위해 부수적인 신체를 단순화의 과정을 통해 축소시키는 것이다. 패션 일러스트레이션에서의 본 질이란 신체보다는 의상을 강조하는 표현이라고 할 수 있을 것 이다. 예를 들면, Fig. 28과 같이 루이비통의 광고 일러스트레이션 에서 카림 일리야는 특유의 패턴 실루엣으로 추상적으로 표현 된 인체와 함께 사실적으로 그린 핸드백을 배치함으로 인해 패 션 아이템을 보다 더 부각시켜 표현하고 있다. Fig. 29의 경우 는 파라솔과 핸드백으로 보이는 액세서리만을 강조하기 위해 신체가 단순화되어 실루엣으로 표현되고 있으며 Fig. 30의 경 우는 재킷만을 강조하기 위해 다른 패션 아이템이 실루엣 속으 로 포함되고 있는 경우를 볼 수 있다. 이와는 대조적으로 Fig. 31과 같이 주요 패션 아이템 자체를 실루엣으로 처리하여 강조 하는 경우도 적지 않다. 이러한 실루엣 표현은 앞 서 언급한 프랑스 상징주의 회화에서 살펴본 바와 같이 중요한 속성을 가 진 요소를 구체적으로 표현하지 않고 그림자 실루엣에 포함시 킴으로 인해서 본질적인 요소를 축약시키는 경우라고 할 수 있 을 것이다. 3.2.3. 익명적 재현 앞서 19세기말의 로트렉의 포스터에서 대중문화를 소비하는 주체인 대중들이 검정색 실루엣으로 표현된 예를 살펴본 바와 같이 패션 일러스트레이션에는 패션이라는 문화를 소비하는 익 명의 사람들이 구체적인 얼굴 표현이 생략된 채 표현되고 있다. Fig. 32, Fig. 33과 같이 구체적으로 배경이 되는 장소가 어디인 지를 확인할 수 없지만 도시적인 느낌이 나는 건축의 실루엣과 함께 다수의 도시인이 실루엣으로 처리되어 표현되어 있다. 또 한 Fig. 34는 라인 실루엣 기법으로 얼굴의 형태가 실루엣으로 Fig. 26. Anita Mrusek, sexy divas for squint magazine, ca.2012. Fig. 27. Bertrand le pautremat, personal studies, 1993. Fig. 28. Kareem Iliya, bags: a lexicon of style, 1999. Fig. 29. Sophie Rob ert, illustration book agent 002, 2007. Fig. 30. Francois Bert houd, ensemble de Gianni Versace, 1993. Fig. 31. Uwe Eger, feature for licht magazine, 2006. Fig. 32. Anja Kroencke, New york city opera mailer young listeners campaign, 1999. Fig. 33. Karine Faou, play at power station, ca.2000. Fig. 34. Dustin & Jemma Hostetler, studio sans nom for L'oreal, 2006. 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣 표현 연구 191 표현되기 보다는 생략된 채 주변 부분의 컬러링으로 인해 부각 되어 나타나고 있다. 유사하게 보이지만 이질적인 사람들의 얼 굴 외곽선은 현대를 살아하는 다양한 인간상을 보여주고 있다 고 할 수 있다. 지금까지 살펴본 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣 표 현의 유형, 내용, 의의를 고찰한 내용을 정리하면 다음의 Table 2와 같다. 4. 결 론 미술에서의 실루엣 표현은 역사적으로 그 유래가 오래된 표 현이지만 18세기 중엽의 초상화 기법에 도입되면서 그 표현기 법이 대중화되었으며 19세기말 프랑스 회화에는 상징적인 표 현 기법으로 사용되기도 했다. 실루엣 기법은 인체를 단순하게 표현하거나 실체를 만질 수 없는 그림자로 표현하여 덧없음을 표현하거나 흑인으로 살아가면서 느꼈던 편견이나 소외를 나타 내기도 했으며, 그림자에 움직임을 부여하여 환상적인 표현으 로 연출하는 등 다양화되면서 현재에 이르고 있다. 패션 일러스트레이션에서 실루엣 표현을 1990년대부터 현재 까지의 패션 일러스트레이션을 수집하여 고찰한 결과, 패션 일 러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣 표현을 유형별로 흑백 실루엣, 컬러 실루엣, 패턴 실루엣, 페이퍼 실루엣, 라인 실루엣의 5 가 지로 분류할 수 있었다. 또한 실루엣 표현을 은유적 환상, 본 질적 최소화, 익명적 재현이라는 세 가지 항목으로 나누어 해 석했다. 결과적으로 이러한 패션 일러스트레이션에서의 실루엣 표현 은 판타스틱한 패션 이미지, 미니멀 패션 이미지를 연출하는 데 있어서 유용한 방법이며 패션 아이템을 강조해야 하는 패션 일 러스트레이션 고유의 역할을 수행할 수 있도록 패션 아이템 이 외의 것을 실루엣으로 처리해 부각시키지 않음으로 인해 패션 아이템이라는 본질적인 요소를 강조할 수 있도록 해 준다. 그 리고 익명의 다수를 실루엣으로 처리해 특정인이 아닌 불특정 다수를 표현하고 있으며 이러한 실루엣으로 표현된 불특정 다 수는 도시에서 현대를 살아가고 있는 패션 소비자를 표현함에 있어 유용한 것으로 보인다. 패션 일러스트레이션에 나타난 실루엣 표현은 구체적인 이 미지의 표현이 나타나지는 않지만 새로운 이미지를 연상시키며 실체 이미지보다 더 강렬한 인상을 심어주고 있기 때문에 앞으 로의 패션 일러스트레이션에서도 꾸준히 표현되는 방식이 될 것으로 보인다. 본 연구는 현대 패션 일러스트레이션을 해석하 는 하나의 척도로 실루엣 표현을 도입하여, 미술사에 나타난 실 루엣 표현을 통사적으로 고찰하여 이론적인 토대를 마련한 후 패션 일러스트레이션을 분석한 연구로써 앞으로의 패션 일러스 트레이션 표현 분석을 위한 연구의 기초적인 학술 자료로 활용 될 수 있을 것이라고 본다. References Arnheim, R. (1981). Art and visual perception (Kim, C. I, trans.). Seoul: Hong Sung Sa(Original work published 1956). Borrelli, L. (2004a). Fashion illustration now. London: Thames & Hudson. Borrelli, L. (2004b). Fashion illustration next. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Chang, Y. I. (2008). Inner consciousness in the silhouette animation - focusing on 'princes and princesses' by michel ocelot. Digital Contents and Culture Policy, 3, 87-99. Cho, W. Y. (2008). Study of modern people's neglect through silhouette image. Unpublished master's thesis. Hanman University, Daejon. Choi, J. H. (2009). The expression of fantastic body in fashion illustration. Journal of the Korean Society for Clothing Industry, 11(5), 867-878. Choi, K. S. (2003). Fantasy, Seoul: Yonsei University Press. DawBer, M. (2004a). Big book of fashion illustration. London: batsford. DawBer, M. (2004b). Imagemakers : cutting edge fashion illustration. London: Mitchell Beazley. Forgione, N. (1999). 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Table 2. contents analysis of the silhouette expression Type Contents Meaning Metaphorical fantasy • twin motif • supernatural figure • fantastic body directing of the fantastic fashion image Cssential minimization minimal • simple color mixing • black & white color directing of the minimal fashion image essence • figuring most significant part into silhouette • figuring all of the insignificant part into silhouette emphasizing fashion item Anonymous representation • memory of the city figuring of the fashion attribution 192 한국의류산업학회지 제14권 제2호, 2012년 Unpublished master's thesis, Kyung Hee University, Seoul. Kim, H. Y. (2010). Study on human body expression through deformation. Unpublished master's thesis, Hongik University, Seoul. Kim. E. K., & Kim, O. K., & Han, J. Y. (2001). Modern fashion. Seoul: Hakmun Publishing. Klanten, R., & Ehmann, S. & Meyer, B. (2004). Wonderland. Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag. 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Shadow play and silhouette animation film. Journal of the French Culture and Art, 28, 233-254. http://imaginer.pe.kr/544 http://www.chriskeegan.co.uk (2011년 9월 27일 접수/2012년 2월 7일 1차 수정/ 2012년 2월 28일 2차 수정/2012년 2월 28일 게재확정) work_isggktgsl5gw5fxih43evvgpei ---- Gergely Barki, The Steins and the Hungarians, RIHA Journal 0090 RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 The Steins and the Hungarians Gergely Barki Institute for Art History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest Peer review and editing managed by: Judit Faludy, Institute for Art History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest Reviewers: Jack Flam, Rebecca Rabinow Abstract The traveling exhibition entitled "The Steins Collect" (2011-12) again drew attention – and on this occasion in a manner perhaps more vivid than any exhibition to date – to the importance of the systematically canon-shaping work that took place in two tiny Parisian ateliers (one in the Rue de Fleurus, the other in the Rue de Madame) in terms of the new painterly movements that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. Leo, Gertrude, and Michael, three siblings from the Stein family, a family of Jewish origin from San Francisco, along with Michael's wife Sarah, not only built within the space of a few years the most important contemporary art collection in Paris, but through their lively salons came to be the most influential shapers and propagators of universal modernism, making their influence felt to this day on assessments of avant-garde art. In the course of preparations for the exhibition and the publication of the accompanying catalogue, both of which provide a comprehensive survey of the Steins' activity, light was cast on the family's Hungarian connections as well. Consequently, one painting by the Hungarian Vilmos Pelrott-Csaba was included at the American venues (San Francisco and New York) of the exhibition, and a presentation on the family's ties to Hungary was held at the scholarly conference organized in connection with the exhibition. Despite the fact that several essays have been published on this subject, the written sources have not been collected – neither those dealing with the large number of Hungarians present at the Steins' Saturday evening gatherings, nor those covering the Hungarian pupils at the Académie Matisse, which was closely aligned with the Steins. This essay is a revised version of the presentation held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, supplemented with additional source-material. Contents Introduction Hungarian Invasion at the Steins' Leo Stein, the True Mediator; or, the Montparnasse Apostle Assimilated Jews from Budapest and San Francisco in Montparnasse L'Académie Matisse In Henri Matisse's Studio Visits by Hungarian Cubists and Other "Oddballs" to the Steins Introduction [1] "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde," a traveling exhibition accompanied by an ambitious catalogue that showcased many facets of the Stein family's collection and canon-creating activity, offered many pleasant developments for researchers in Hungary.1 Although there are only a few Hungarian threads, sparsely 1 The exhibition was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), May 21 - September 6, 2011; Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais, Paris, October 5, 2011 - January 22, 2012; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 21 - June 3, 2012. The English-language catalogue appeared as The Steins Collect. Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 interwoven in the history of the American family, the topic deserves additional attention, given the exclusively Hungarian sources that can contribute to international scholarship on early 20th-century art. Much of this material is unpublished and available only in Hungarian, so it has remained unknown to foreign scholars and, for that matter, to many Hungarian scholars as well.2 1 The Stein children, together with their tutor and governess, Vienna, 1877 (?). Archive photo (Pokorny & Reuter, Vienna). Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Image ID: 1357928 [2] The richness of the source material is made even more compelling thanks to the Hungarian connection at the early stages of the Stein family's collecting. We could even assert (with some strong exaggeration) that the Steins' collecting endeavors were thanks to a Hungarian. (Fig. 1) In Brenda Wineapple's book about Gertrude and Leo Stein, we find, "Since his youth, when his tutor had introduced him to the joys of collecting, [Leo Stein] relished its satisfaction."3 According to this, the Hungarian governess, who was Avant-Garde. Janet Bishop, Cécile Debray, and Rebecca Rainbow, eds. New Haven and London, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale University Press, 2011 [hereafter, The Steins Collect, 2011]. The French catalogue featured somewhat different content with more French authors and was titled Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso ... l'aventure des Stein, exposition catalogue. Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba's painting Female Nude (Rippl-Rónai Múzeum, Kaposvár, Item No.: 55.403), which was painted in Matisse's studio, was exhibited in both San Francisco and New York. Additionally several essays cited the Hungarian sources that I forwarded to Rebecca Rabinow, curator of the New York exhibit and co-editor of the catalogue. I would like to thank Shelley Wertheim and Robert McD Parker for their contributions, as well as Rebecca Rabinow, for her assistance in gathering Stein documentation for the documentary film In Search of The Eight, as well as for inviting me, the only foreign guest, to speak at the Scholars' Day organized in conjunction with her presentation of "The Steins Collect" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 2, 2012. Special thanks are due to Prof. Jack Flam for his friendly support of my presentation. 2 Many of the sources that I used in my presentation (as well as the re-worked version published here) were translated into English specifically for "The Steins Collect" exhibition catalogue. See also catalogues for the Hungarian Fauves exhibition series and The Eight exhibition, published in English, French, and German. 3 Wineapple, Brenda. Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1996. At first, Leo collected moths and other animals, then (together with his siblings) reproductions clipped from periodicals, and later Japanese woodcuts and antique furniture during his university years. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 responsible for the boys' upbringing during the family's three-year residence in Vienna (1875-1878), was responsible for a defining experience in the Steins' lives (or at least Leo's). For Leo Stein collecting was the medium through which he formed relationships with others. Hungarian Invasion at the Steins' [3] Because she very publicly took credit for the discovery and patronage of Matisse and Picasso in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude has erroneously been considered responsible for the formation of the Stein family collections. Her claims have been supported by her strong temperament (diametrically opposed to Leo's), her astounding self-promotional skills, and most of all to the success of her autobiographical book, which was also translated into Hungarian.4 Nevertheless, as "The Steins Collect" so carefully documents, this predominant role is not in accordance with reality at all. The Steins' Hungarian relationships were overwhelmingly due to Leo. [4] Nonetheless, in terms of Hungarian connections, Gertrude Stein's book still proves to be a presious resource. At the start of the book, she conjures up the spirit of the atelier, established in the now famous 27 Rue de Fleurus, with the passage: "The room was soon very very full and who were they all. Groups of Hungarian painters and writers, it happened that some Hungarian had once been brought and the word had spread from him throughout all Hungary, any village where there was a young man who had ambitions heard of 27 Rue de Fleurus and then he lived but to get there and a great many did get there. They were always there, all sizes and shapes, all degrees of wealth and poverty, some very charming, some simply rough and every now and then a very beautiful young peasant."5 [5] Well into the book, while attempting to revive an entire era, the time of beginnings around 1906, she writes, "It was at that time that the Hungarians began their pilgrimages to the Rue de Fleurus."6 It can be no accident that Gertrude Stein should single out the Hungarians' visits or should consider their presence so striking. Indeed, among the Hungarians, the doorknob passed from hand to hand, and word spread from mouth to mouth that in the Parisian studio that Gertrude and Leo shared, one could view an unrivaled concentration of Matisse and Picasso works. Later, when the flat in Montparnasse became a famous destination for those both from Europe and abroad who were interested in art, the dominant Hungarian presence among the guests was still remarkable. Gertrude Stein described the early 1910s, "The Saturday evenings in those 4 Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas [1933]. New York: Vintage, 1990. (In Hungarian: Alice B. Toklas önéletrajza. Tibor Szobotka, trans. Budapest: Gondolat, 1974.) Capitalization has been altered, but punctuation and stylistic idiosyncracies are left unchanged. 5 Ibid., p. 14. 6 Ibid., p. 45. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 early days were frequented by many Hungarians, quite a number of Germans, quite a few mixed nationalities, a very thin sprinkling of Americans, and practically no English."7 [6] Although this extraordinarily rich source makes frequent mention of Hungarians, it can be challenging to identify the individuals to whom the author's remarks apply. [7] Hungarians are mentioned in the chapter devoted to the opening of Matisse's school, although not at all in a flattering light: "One of the Hungarians wanted to earn his living posing for the class and in the intervals when some one else posed go on with his painting. There were a number of young women who protested, a nude model on a model stand was one thing but to have it turn into a fellow student was another. A Hungarian was found eating the bread for rubbing out crayon drawings that the various students left on their painting boards and this evidence of extreme poverty and lack of hygiene had an awful effect upon the sensibilities of the Americans."8 We know that, among Matisse's Hungarian pupils, József Brummer, a sculpting apprentice from Szeged, served as a model9 (all the while filling the school's stoker position).10 The identity of the impoverished Hungarian student who devoured bread erasers, however, is still unknown. Brummer posed as a model in different schools and in his compatriots' studios,11 but he soon opened an art dealership in the French capital, where he amassed such a fortune in the trade of African sculpture and Far East works that, moving to New York, he quickly became one of America's most influential art dealers and gallery owners.12 In New York's Metropolitan Museum, the site of my presentation, thousands of the file cards which enumerate art pieces feature his name. [8] We are also able to identify the Hungarian described later in the book: "Speaking of Spain also reminds me that once we were in a crowded restaurant. Suddenly in the end of the room a tall form stood up and a man bowed solemnly at Gertrude Stein who as solemnly replied. It was a stray Hungarian from Saturday evening, surely."13 This episode takes place in 1911. That is, it occurred the same year that Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba 7 Ibid., p. 85. 8 Ibid., pp. 60-61. 9 Géza Bornemisza recalls that he took Brummer to the school as a model. See Béla Horváth's interview with Géza Bornemisza, undated manuscript. Béla Horváth's art history legacy, Research Centre for the Humanities – Hungarian Academy of Sciences – Institute of Art History, Archive [hereafter, RCH-HAS-IAH, Archive], Item No.: MDK-C-I-217. 10 Barr mentions that Brummer strove to earn money as the school's stoker. See: Barr, Jr., Afred. H. Matisse. His Art and his Public. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1951, p. 117. 11 According to András Mikola, Brummer posed at the Académie Delécluse. (Mikola, András. Colors and Lights. Memoirs of a Nagybánya Painter. Kolozsvár [Cluj-Napoca, Romania]: Dacia, 1972, p. 44.) Czóbel, however, recalls that Brummer modeled in his studio. See: Czóbel's letter to Iván Dévényi, October 15, 1963. RCH-HAS-IAH, Archive, Item No.: MKCS-C-I-159/469. 12 For more on Brummer, see: Passuth, Krisztina. "A festő és modellje. Henri Rousseau: Joseph Brummer portréja (1909). Kép és recepció [The Painter and his Model. Henri Rousseau's Portrait of Joseph Brummer (1909). Picture and Reception]," Művészettörténeti Értesítő, vol. 51, 2002, pp. 225-249. 13 Stein, 1990, p. 90. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 traveled in Spain. We can assume therefore that he was the anonymous stray Hungarian in question, although Gertrude Stein surely would have remembered him as one of Matisse's favorite pupils and one of the Saturday night evenings' permanent Hungarian members. [9] The only Hungarian that the author mentions by name in her book is Béla Czóbel. Upon visiting the 1907 Salon des Indépendants, Gertrude passionately describes how at the exhibition she encountered Matisse's style-altering masterpiece Blue Nude,14 which would soon enrich her and Leo's collection. She continues, "In the same room as the Matisse, a little covered by a partition, was a Hungarian version of the same picture by one Czóbel whom I remembered to have seen at the Rue de Fleurus, it was the happy independent way to put a violent follower opposite the violent but not quite as violent master."15 [10] Unfortunately, this painting, in all certainty one of Czóbel's most significant, has not been located. A few years ago, an archive photo surfaced from the estate of György Bölöni (Fig. 2), featuring a previously unknown reclining female nude by Czóbel.16 Initially, I supposed that this image could be the version which Gertrude Stein mentioned with such distinction – which, in all probability, is also the painting that Cultural Minister Albert Apponyi had removed from the wall at the 1908 exhibition of MIÉNK (=Circle of Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists).17 After a careful re-examination of the information at my disposal, I now suspect that there existed among Czóbel's work a much rawer – if you prefer, a more primitive – nude than this one. The American author Gelett Burgess, who visited the Hungarian painter in his Cité Falguière studio, describes a painting that is more brutal and wilder than the nude seen in the photograph: "In the center of the room is a revolting picture of a woman. Did I say woman? Let us, in decency, call it a female. Czóbel, no doubt, like Braque, would prefer to call it Woman. She is naked and unashamed, if one can judge by her two large eyes. Others of her ilk lie about. As a rule, they are aged 89. They have very purple complexions, enlivened with mustard-colored spots and yolk-yellow throats; they have orange and blue arms. 14 Matisse, Henri. Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra, 1907. Oil on canvas, 36¼ x 55¼ in. The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland. 15 Stein, 1990, p. 18. 16 Budapest, National Széchényi Library, Manuscript and Letter Archive [hereafter, NSL Archive]. On the photo's discovery and the painting visible in it, see: Gergely, Barki. "Yes, Gertrude! Czóbel lappangó aktja. Emléktöredék a századelő Párizsából [Yes, Gertrude! Czóbel's Missing Nude. Shard of Memory from her Turn-of-the-Century Paris]," Art Magazin, vol. 8, 2010, 2, pp. 36-40. 17 Béla Czóbel spoke of it many times. "When I showed a female nude at the MIÉNK, it had to be removed under Apponyi." See: Béla Horváth's interview with Béla Czóbel, undated manuscript. Horváth Béla's art history legacy, RCH-HAS-IAH, Archive, Item No.: MDK-C-I-217. "I displayed at the MIÉNK – for example, a female nude which had to be taken down, because it scandalized Apponyi." See Béla Horváth's interview with Béla Czóbel, manuscript, September 24, 1961. Horváth Béla's art history legacy, RCH-HAS-IAH, Archive, Item No.: MDK-C-I-217. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 Sometimes, not often, they wear bright green skirts. […] Czóbel observes them through the bars of his cage, roaring out in mauve and cinnabar tones."18 2 Photograph of Béla Czóbel's lost painting Reclining Female Nude in a Paris studio, 1907. National Széchényi Library, Archives, György Bölöni's legacy [11] It is worthwhile here to pose a question. How did Burgess hear of the Hungarian painter, and why should he have paid him a visit? With reference to Edward Fry, I, too, for a long time supposed that Matisse must have been the intermediary.19 Now, however, I suspect that Burgess could have gathered information on those who represented the newest directions during visits to the Steins. We know that Burgess attended the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1908, and that additionally, around the same time, he visited Gertrude Stein in the company of the American feminist author Inez Haynes Irwin.20 In all certainty, Irwin's contact with the Steins was thanks to Burgess,21 but how did Burgess himself arrive there? The intermediary may well have been the American 18 Burgess, Gelett. "The Wild Men of Paris," Architectural Record, vol. 27, May 1910, pp. 400-414. (I would like to thank Kálmán Makláry for bringing the reproductions in this article to my attention.) The following year when the article and its reproductions appeared as "The 'Cubists' Dominate Paris' Fall Salon," New York Times, October 8, 1911, a reproduction of Female Portrait was included. 19 Fry, Edward F. "Cubism 1907-1908: An Early Eyewitness Account," Art Bulletin, vol. 48, 1966, p. 70. 20 Braun, Emily. "Saturday Evenings at the Steins'," The Steins Collect, 2011, p. 66 – in reference to Inez Haynes Irwin's writing entitled "Adventures of Yesterday" (Inez Haynes Gilmore Papers, 1872-1945, Schlezinger Library, Radcliff Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, vols. 23-25, fols. 3-16). 21 Inez Haynes Irwin remembered, "One day Gelett Burgess said to me, 'There's a new school of art here in Paris. I think I am going to write an article on it. Would you like to come with me when I visit the studios of some of these men?'", "There were four Steins living in Paris. [...] We went to Rue Madame first.", "A second time we called on Mr. and Mrs. Stein.", and "From there we went to the studio of Gertrude and Leo Stein." I thank Emily Braun for forwarding me passages from Inez Haynes Irwin's recollections. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 painter Max Weber,22 who was a key point of contact between certain Hungarian painters and the Steins. After all, in 1906, he lived in a house of studios at 9 Rue Campagne Première, along with Róbert Berény, Dezső Czigány, Lajos Gulácsy, and György Bölöni, in addition to maintaining a relationship with Béla Czóbel.23 [12] At the Steins', Burgess had the opportunity to view a great number of works by Matisse for the first time and to meet the chief of the Fauves and his followers. I think it is likely that Burgess gained access to the French capital's most progressive painters – in order to interview the "wild men of Paris," as he called them – through his conversations with Max Weber and the Steins. [13] Stunned by the force of innovation, Burgess did not publish his article, "The Wild Men of Paris," which is based on interviews he conducted in the spring of 1908, until 1910. Why did he wait two years before informing America of the newest developments in artistic life seething in Europe? Soon after his return to America, he released a volume of short stories, presenting readers with his Paris experiences wrapped in a fictional narrative.24 Of the eight painters that he interviewed, four are mentioned by name in his book, and Czóbel several times. [14] In other words, the article in Architectural Record was not the first publication to bring word of the Fauves and the Cubists stateside. Instead, the honor goes to Burgess's almost unknown book of short stories. [15] It is worth quoting here, because once again, it underscores that Czóbel's Fauve style was more elementary and primitive than scholars might imagine based on his pictures which are known today. "He, who had never been in France, who had never seen a single disciple of its school, was of 'les fauves' – he was a Wild Beast – wilder, if possible, than Derain, as wild as Czóbel or Picasso. […] The rudely carven African gods that had delighted and stimulated Derain, the Alaskan totem poles to which Picasso was indebted for his fury, the Aztec graven images that had urged Czóbel to his ferocity, were all unknown to Haulick Smagg. […] Derain's shrill blues and tumultuous reds, Czóbel's 22 Again, thanks to Emily Braun, for drawing my attention to Fitzgerald, Michael. Picasso and American Art. New York – New Haven: Whitney Museum of American Art – Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 22-23. 23 For the relationship formed between the American painter and Berény in 1906, see: Max Weber's letter to István Varró, New York, May 19, 1958. Budapest, Hungarian National Gallery Archive [hereafter, HNG Archive], István Varró – Béla Szíj documents. Some of the letter's details are published in: Szíj, Béla. "Berény Róbert életútja gyermekéveitől a berlini emigrációig [Róbert Berény's Life from his Childhood Years until his Emigration to Berlin]," Hungarian National Gallery Bulletin, vol. 4, 1963, pp. 114-115. Max Weber alludes to his friendship with Bölöni in an unpublished letter which he sent to Bölöni, addressed to Paris from his study tour in Spain (NSL Archive, File 127/623). On Czóbel and Max Weber's acquaintance, see: Barki, Gergely. "Béla Czóbel," The Eight, exhibition catalogue. Csilla Markója and István Bardoly, eds. Pécs – Budapest: Janus Pannonius Museum – Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Art History Research Institute, 2010, pp. 237-239. 24 Burgess, Gelett. Lady Méchante or Life as it Should Be. Being Diverse Precious Episodes In the Life of a Naughty Nonpareille. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1909. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 harsh greens, and Picasso's hot yellows Smagg, in his artistic orgy, rewove into crazier forms."25 [16] Czóbel was a significant figure among the pack of fauves that had formed around Matisse.26 It is striking to see Czóbel's name in Burgess's writings, especially since he is an artist who has faded from international awareness.Yet, there are many sources from the period that mention him. He was at the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde, more so than his countrymen, and perhaps as a result, was considered aloof. At least, this is how his young Hungarian peers – presumably, not without envy– recalled him: "Czóbel was a terribly selfish man. We were at the Steins'. I was talking with Picasso. Introductions were not the custom then. I knew who he was, he didn't know me. Later, Czóbel showed up. Picasso asked him who I was. Czóbel said, 'a Hungarian' with a wave of the hand. [...] Czóbel had a handwritten sign on his studio door: 'Frappez la porte, aprés déter votre [nom] S.V.P.' [Knock on the door, then state your name, please.] He would only open the door if it was someone he wanted to allow in. Once Perlrott-Csaba played a joke on him. He knocked and said it was a money delivery. Czóbel opened the door for that."27 [17] Czóbel was already a well-known painter when Amedeo Modigliani became his studio neighbor in 1906. Although their relations were marked by constant grumpiness and quarreling, Modigliani was basically a novice at the time. As their mutual friend Paul Alexandre recalled, "In [Modigliani's] drawings there is invention, simplification and purification of form. This is why African art appealed to him. [He] had reconstructed the lines of a human face in his own way by fitting them into primitive patterns. […] This search for simplification in drawing also delighted him in certain paintings by Rousseau (Le Douanier) and in Czobel's figures from fairground stalls."28 Some of Czóbel's marketplace pictures have been rediscovered in recent years, and some of his remarks about the abovementioned friendship have been preserved. "I often met with Modigliani and his friend, Dr. Paul Alexander, who is still living, though at the time he was finishing his medical studies. We would come together in a studio somewhere near Rue Douai. The place had no owner. A painter named Doucet worked there, and he was handled by Charles Vidrac, a poet and art dealer at the time on Rue de Seine. All this was quite removed from Montmartre and the Hungarians. Mr. Paul Alexandre would bring hashish, une sorte de pâté verte que nous avons mâché [a sort of green pâté that we would munch on]. It was probably weak. I didn't feel any effect. Modi was still going to the Caf. Con. At that time, it was called Européen. I can also mention the Atelier Humbert, where 25 Ibid., pp. 349-350. 26 Regarding Czóbel's former significance and lost works, see also: Barki, 2010, pp. 237-239. 27 See: Béla Horváth's interview with Géza Bornemisza, undated manuscript. Béla Horváth's art history legacy, RCH-HAS-IAH, Archive, Item No. MDK-C-I-217. 28 Paul Alexandre, as quoted by his son Noël Alexandre. Modigliani inconnu. Paris: Fonds Mercator- Albin Michel, 1993, p. 65. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 I would go with Berény for the evening nude. Derain, Marquet, Manguin, etc., went there. They are famous now, but then they were not famous. This could have been around 1906, 1907."29 [18] We learn from a number of memoirs that many of the Hungarians in Paris attended the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière. According to both Géza Bornemisza's and Max Weber's accounts, Henri Matisse would "not infrequently appear" for the nude sketches in the evening in 1906-07.30 In other words, just a few years before opening his own academy, Matisse took advantage of the nude drawing opportunities at the free schools; Matisse and Czóbel may have drawn shoulder-to-shoulder. Curiously, the literature, both in Hungary and internationally, has stated that Czóbel was Matisse's pupil.31 There is no evidence to support this supposition. Its original source may have been the artist Maurice Denis32 or the dealer Berthe Weill.33 Alfred Barr took these statements as fact,34 and repeated it in his writings. When I gave my presentation in New York, audience members questioned why the already up-and-coming Czóbel would feel the need to become Matisse's student. No, Czóbel was almost surely not a pupil of Matisse, nor did he attend his academy. Czóbel's position within the Fauve group alone 29 Czóbel, Béla. Letter to Endre Bajomi-Lázár, Budapest, July 20, 1964. Petőfi Literary Museum, Archive, V.5253/164. Portions of the letter are published in: Bajomi-Lázár, Endre. A Montmartre. Budapest: Corvina, 1967, pp. 194-195. The studio was probably rented by Paul Alexandre for his painter friends on the Rue Delta. Paul Alexander remembered Modigliani's interest in meeting Czóbel well. See: Alexandre, 1993, p. 65. 30 Bornemisza, Géza. "Henri Matisse," Kékmadár, vol. 1, 1923, 2, p. 62. For Max Weber's recollection, see: Barr, 1951, p. 535. Also: Pariser Begegnungen 1904-1914. Café du Dome. Gerhard Häandler, ed. Duisburg: Académie Matisse – Wilhelm-Lehmbruck Museum, 1965. 31 For more information about confusion in identifying Hungarian students of Matisse, see: Barki, Gergely. "Párizsi előzmények és a modern francia művészet hatása a Nyolcak aktfestészetében," A modell – Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben ["Parisian Precedents and French Modern Art's Effect on Nude Painting among The Eight," Model – The Female Nude in 19th-Century Hungarian Art], exhibition catalogue. Györgyi Imre, ed. Budapest: Hungarian National Gallery, 2004, p. 468, note 13. It was also erroneously published that Róbert Berény was Matisse's pupil. 32 In his famous and often quoted treatise, "Liberté épuisante et stérile" (La Grande Revue, April 10, 1908; republished by Philippe Dagen in Pour ou contre le Fauvisme. Paris: Somogy, 1994, p. 155), Maurice Denis wrote that Mr. Castelucho and Mr. Matisse each had an academy. ("M. Castelucho a, croyons, une académie, et M. Matisse en a aussi une!") What the author probably intends to express is that a group had formed around each of these men, so both had actually "established schools." Especially in the case of Matisse, we must distinguish between the two meanings of the word "académie" – the school, as an institution, and the artistic circle, which refers to his group of followers. See: Lee, Jane. "Denis and the 'École de Matisse,'" Maurice Denis, 1870-1943, exhibition catalogue. Guy Cogeval, Claire Denis, eds. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994, pp. 61-71. Denis mentions Czóbel among the group surrounding Matisse and criticizes that "he cares little for nature and dispenses with Greco-Roman art." – It should be clarified that Czóbel was a follower and not student. And in his defense, it is hard to imagine that in only a few months, Denis had familiarized himself with the (mostly foreign and to a large extent insignificant) artists studying at the academy. 33 Berthe Weill organized a solo exhibition for Czóbel in 1908. Twenty-five years later she reminisced, "Tres inspiré de Matisse, dont il suit les enseignements a son académie, je le crois très doué." See: Weill, Berthe. Pan! dans l'œil!... avec une préface de Paul Reboux. Orné des aquarelles et dessins de Raoul Dufy, Pascin et Picasso. Paris: Lipschutz, 1933, p. 148. In this case, too, the académie expression rather refers to Matisse's followers, not his students. 34 Barr, 1951, p. 117. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 makes this difficult to imagine, and Hungarian pupils at the Académie Matisse (who were present since its inception in 1908) do not mention him as one of the students. Czóbel did not consider his French colleague as a Master, but as a predecessor and an inspiration. [19] It is worth citing a letter that Czóbel wrote to an older colleague, József Rippl- Rónai:35 "Honored Sir, I enclose the Matisse reproductions. If I can, I will send more. How do you like them? I kiss your dear wife's hand. Your devoted follower, Béla Czóbel."36 3 Part of Michael and Sarah Stein's Matisse collection on Rue Madame (Picture sent by Béla Czóbel to József Rippl-Rónai), 1907. Hungarian National Gallery, Archive, Item No.: 5134/1950/29. 4 [20] In this letter from Paris, dated February 23, 1908, Czóbel enclosed a photograph taken in Michael and Sarah Stein's apartment on Rue Madame.37 (Fig. 3) Like the nearby apartment that Leo and Gertrude shared, the Rue Madame flat served as an open house 35 György Szücs drew my attention to the letter jointly written by Béla Czóbel and Károly Kernstok. See: Szücs, György: "Disszonancia vagy új harmónia? A 'neós' művészet Nagybányán," Magyar Vadak Párizstól Nagybányáig 1904-1914 ["Dissonance or New Harmony? The 'Neos' Art in Nagybánya," Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904-1914], exhibition catalogue. Krisztina Passuth, György Szücs, eds. Budapest: Hungarian National Gallery, 2006, p. 59. Orsolya Danyi found the photo, separate from the letter. See: Danyi, Orsolya. "Egy előbújt fotó a Rippl- Rónai hagyatékból [Photo Resurfaced from Rippl-Rónai's Estate]," Artmagazin, vol. 4, 2006, 5, pp. 74-75. 36 Béla Czóbel and Kernstok Károly's letter. HNG Archive, International Critics about Rippl-Rónai's works until 1912, Item No.: 5118/1950. Rippl-Rónai-kritikák III. The text written by Kernstok: "My dear little Joe, I saw the Vuillard exhibit at the Bernheim; a little boring. I like your things better. What about your exhibition? I heard Drouet was a flop; he's closing up shop and just maintaining the photo business. Good-bye. I kiss you honored wife's hand. A hug, your friend, Károly Kernstok." 37 HNG Archive. Rippl-Rónai, József, Item No.: 5134/1950/29. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 on Saturday nights. Michael and Sarah's gatherings were less casual than Leo and Gertrude's Saturday evenings. They started earlier, and there were those who simply strolled from one venue to the next, although more simply arrived at the latter address for the events that regularly began at 9 p.m. Here, Leo Stein, who had invited them, already held the role of both host and moderator. This was where the otherwise withdrawn Leo found his true self, and the majority of Hungarians preferred to establish a relationship with him, the "missionary of progressive art." Presumably, Czóbel himself gained access to the Saturday soirées thanks to Leo. What is completely sure, however, is that they maintained contact even after Leo left Paris. They almost certainly met in the 1930s, which a drawing of Leo prepared by Czóbel seems to prove.38 (Fig. 4) 4 Béla Czóbel. Portrait of Leo Stein, c. 1930 (?). Charcoal on paper, 10½ x 8 in. Hungarian National Gallery, Item No.: F.2011.1 Leo Stein, the True Mediator; or, the Montparnasse Apostle In Paris, I often ran across a tall man of about fifty who would go about bareheaded in loose black velvet pants and sandals – even in winter. I took him for some eccentric oddball, or Russian nihilist. I would see him without fail at some new exhibition opening, or an open house for some private collection either at Durand-Ruel's flat or on the Rue Lafitte, or at one of the more interesting auctions at the Hôtel Drouot. I grew accustomed to his presence and took his being there for granted, not giving it a second thought. The artistic population of Paris ran to 33,000 at the time, so one more eccentric barely counted for anything among all those artists. The man was Leo Stein. Later, he attended the Académie Delécluse, drawing with the rest of us. One day I completed a rather successful study, a painted female form. He stopped behind me, looked at it for a long time, and then asked in German if I would not mind paying him a visit. He would 38 Béla Czobel's drawing of Leo Stein was displayed at an exhibit in Duisburg in 1965 (Pariser Begegnungen 1904-1914. Café du Dôme, 1965, cat. no. 15). At that time, it was still in the artist's possession, but surprisingly is not among the thousands of graphic works currently in the Czóbel Museum. A recent drawing turned up at auction and is now in the collection of the Hungarian National Gallery's Graphic Art Department. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 receive me on Saturday night. I thanked him for the invitation, and at my affirmative response, he gave me a name card with his address. I didn't see much in him. I took him for a poor devil like myself, but what is a hungry man to do? I thought that if he invited me, he would serve me some hot tea. Even that would be something! Saturday night around nine o'clock, I knocked on the door of the ground-floor apartment. He opened the door. After the mutual greeting, I found myself in an immense hall with walls filled up to the ceiling with books. The only furniture in this library was an iron barracks-style bed. The surprise left me practically speechless, but I was even more surprised by another oblong room with overhead lighting where the pictures on display pulled me like a magnet. There was Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, Degas, and so on. Along the walls there were also carved antique Renaissance chests teeming with Chinese and Japanese silk paintings, woodcuts, estampes, and drawings. At that time, Picasso had not yet turned to Cubism, and I especially enjoyed a picture of his painted with a pale, pleasant pink in mild blue tones. It depicted a female circus performer balancing on a ball, while another circus performer, a giant of a man, stood in the foreground with his back to us. Today the picture is the property of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. I certainly learned a great deal from my highly refined, art connoisseur friend Leo Stein. I received books from him. Even now I possess some ten books about art that were presents from him. In the course of our talks, which we continued at the art school – which he frequented – many times he directed my attention to some worthy goal and refined my opinion of it. I proved fertile ground, and drank in the plentiful knowledge. I became a regular guest on Saturday evenings, and I met several exceptional artists besides Picasso and Matisse. Picasso was a short, stocky man, the chauffeur type. Had I seen him in Nagybánya in a sports cap, I would never have distinguished him from countless others, and his exterior would not have betrayed that he was a world- famous artist. Matisse was a bespectacled professor type. He was a student at the Académie des Beaux Arts until the age of forty. After such a thorough grounding, he embarked on new paths. At that time, his studio was in a building once part of a convent. He would hold open houses, and I saw him at work with an unusually small palette bearing hardly any colors. He would arrange his various tools and brushes with a pedantry more like a dentist's than a great artist's. I met two more members of the Stein family, Leo's older sister and older brother, who were also among the first collectors of Picasso and Matisse. I knew that their parents came from Vienna and became millionaires in the Chicago meatpacking industry. All three Stein children lived in Paris and lived off their inheritance. I believe that in devoting themselves to collecting art, besides their love and appreciation of art, their fortune played a role from the point of view of sound investments and patronage. It is a fact that they were particularly significant in promoting the reputations of the two artists mentioned above. Through their purchases, they directed their money to these painters, which made their further work possible.39 [21] This long, detailed quotation from Mikola is worthy of study, and not just from a Hungarian perspective. Despite a few factual errors,40 it provides certain information which could supplement Leo Stein's biography. It is also interesting that Leo spoke German, and not French, to the Hungarians. This was the common tongue, in which the American raised in Vienna and the Hungarians (who had strayed from the territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Paris) could best understand each other. Moreover, allusions to Leo's affiliation with the Académie Delécluse are exclusively confined to Hungarian 39 Mikola, 1972, pp. 46-48. 40 For complete biographical information on the Stein Family see Kate Mendillo's Chronology in The Steins Collect, pp. 312-333. The Steins siblings were all born in Pennsylvania. Gertrude was twenty-one months younger than Leo. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 sources. It is not only Mikola, the school's custodian, who provides such information, but also Géza Bornemisza. What makes the quotation truly significant is that, unlike other Hungarian sources, Mikola expresses a profound esteem for Leo Stein's aesthetic knowledge, his vocation for taste formation, and his role as a propagator. Whereas a majority of memoirs in the Hungarian language are fairly superficial and tend to characterize the Stein siblings' eccentric appearance or extraordinary behavior, Mikola portrays very credibly the side of Leo Stein that probably had the most impact on the Hungarians in general. Many considered Leo to be an extraordinarily learned connoisseur and collector with refined powers of discrimination. His extensive knowledge and erudition was apparent in his conversations with artists and qualified him to take on such a major role at his "Saturday nights," that of moderator, aesthete, and theorist. He very consciously created a canon and propagated modern art internationally.41 [22] Therefore, from the point of view of assessing the artistic views of the Hungarian Fauves between 1905 and 1909 – as well as those of The Eight, since this period was just prior to their formation – Consequently it is especially important to know how Leo Stein interpreted the works of the 1870s generation, Gauguin and Cézanne, and more importantly, Matisse and Picasso, who, more than any other absolutely contemporary artists, occupied the pinnacle of the mainstream. Of the future Eight, Czóbel, Kernstok, Orbán, and Pór, as well as their younger colleague Róbert Berény regularly visited the Steins. Berény may have been among the first to come to know the Steins' collection. In his works from 1905 and 1906, we can already appreciate the influence of Matisse and Cézanne. These pictures are not mere imitations; they testify to a refined understanding, a profound knowledge and feeling for aesthetics. Surely the Leo-dominated Saturday night conversations impacted Berény and other Hungarians – even if it was primarily the direct study of the collection itself, its visual acceptance, that altered and influenced their later art. Leo was extremely well-read and additionally well acquainted with two of the period's most influential art historians, Julius Meier-Graefe and Bernard Berenson. He interpreted them critically and often strongly pointed out his own opinions which were at odds with theirs. One focal point of his personal aesthetic creed was a comment upon the art of Cézanne in relation to the role of space and mass, which was a drastic departure from Meier-Graefe's analysis, for instance. Indeed, Leo believed that, besides color, Cézanne's main challenge was the emphasis of mass. It is no accident that this theory – although it could be derived from other sources – applies to most of the artists in The Eight, particularly the aesthetic that Berény represents. [23] Bernard Berenson had a significant effect upon Leo Stein's views. They regularly met every summer just outside of Florence, where both men maintained homes. Berenson boldly compared Cézanne to Michelangelo, two giants whose (opposite) poles 41 For more on this topic, see: Tinterow, Gary and Kwon, Marci. "Leo Stein before 1914," The Steins Collect, 2011, pp. 71-85. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 defined the scale of The Eight's dualistic aesthetic; though, in truth, it developed from a point of origin defined by both of them. [24] Róbert Berény's and Bertalan Pór's trip to Italy in the summer of 1907 was typical of The Eight, not to mention a symbolic manifestation of their simultaneous efforts with regard to modernism's classicizing tendency. In the course of their journey, they consciously sought out classic (and primitive) roots and parallels to the avant-garde which was emerging in Paris. Pór later recalled that their Grand Tour had such an influence upon them that in emulation of the great masters they grew out their beards.42 Somewhat contradicting this anecdote is a ferrotype which has recently come to light. It was taken in Nizza, at the outset of their journey, and both men can be seen with beards.43 (Fig. 5) In addition, a portrait which showed Pór sporting a sparse beard was displayed by Berény in the Salon des Indépendants exhibit months before they began their tour.44 We are also aware that, among Parisian students and painters at the time, a beard was a commonplace accessory. Only at home in Hungary were they able to create a sensation with it.45 5 Bertalan Pór and Róbert Berény in Nizza, Spring 1907. Ferrotype, private owner Assimilated Jews from Budapest and San Francisco in Montparnasse [25] Berény's ruddy beard caused a stir in Paris. As Dezső Orbán recalls, "He could have been 22 then [actually, just 20] with a reddish beard like Christ, which was still 42 "A 70 éves Pór Bertalan [Beretalan Pór Turns 70]," Magyar Nemzet, November 12, 1950, p. 2. 43 The ferrotype was certainly taken by a street photographer and placed in a mailing card with an oval cut-out for that purpose. Bertalan Pór sent it to his parents on April 6, 1907. My thanks to Bertalan Pór's relatives, Júlia Bernát and Pál Farkas, for placing the picture at my disposal and to Ildikó Felicides and Zita Sor for restoring, conserving, and digitalizing the ferrotype. 44 Berény, Róbert. Portrait of Bertalan Pór, 1907, oil on cardboard, 22 x 18 in. Private collection. 45 András Mikola relates a similar story in his autobiography, in the chapter beginning "My beard caused a stir in Nagypeleske." Mikola, 1972, p. 64. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 shocking to Parisian tastes. And there was an episode that I'll never forget. We were walking along some boulevard when along comes a rather young shopgirl. She looked at Róbert for a moment and was speechless, but then she quickly composed herself and said to him, 'Dit donc Jésu Christ, quesqu'il fait le bon dieu ?' [sic! – Tell me Jesus Christ, how is doing the Good Lord?] It was an unimaginably funny scene."46 [26] Interestingly enough, the mention of a red beard occurs often in Hungarian recollections of Leo Stein – for example, that of Márk Vedres, a sculptor and guest artist at The Eight's group exhibit in 1911. Neither Leo nor Gertrude followed the Parisian bohemian trends in fashion; Leo, for his part, sported a sizable beard, which was the subject of many snide remarks. Vedres recounts meeting the Steins in an Italian studio in Fiesole "Leo Stein was a braggart American. He'd crumple up the newspaper and declare it art. His older sister was a strange woman. She went to Florence in sackcloth and sandals. Fat woman. And Leo Stein was a red-bearded Jew. Kernstok sent them to me in Florence. Leo Stein and his sister bought from a business point of view, rather than for public interest. The children used to rush after her down the street."47 [27] The account is surprisingly malicious. Vedres was clearly not aware of Leo's Berensonesque grasp of art history, with which perhaps he could have identified. In any case, we must note here that The Eight's understanding of modernism is debated even today. With respect to the sculptor, how much did his notions differ from the most radical views of Berény and Tihanyi, or the most conservative classicizing view represented by Kernstok?48 [28] Further, we must mention that Vedres made contact with a number of American collectors in Italy. It is possible that the Steins helped facilitate these relationships. For example Kernstok presumably drew the Steins' attention to his Hungarian sculptor friend with the intention of acquiring patrons. Moreover, many of the Stein's well-to-do American friends visited their villa in Fiesole. These are exactly the people who would have been attracted to the classicizing trend represented by Vedres. Vedres's blunt remark about Leo's Jewishness is particularly odd, especially since Vedres, like many of The Eight, was of Jewish descent himself. Although the Steins' parents had been 46 Dezső Orbán's letter to István Varró, April 23, 1961 [?]. HNG Archive, István Varró and Béla Szíj documents. 47 Béla Horváth's interview with Márk Vedres, undated manuscript. Béla Horváth's art history legacy. RCH-HAS-IAH, Archive, Item No.: MDK-C-I-217. 48 Károly Lyka's sharply illuminating remark was that Vedres was the Donatello among the Hungarian Fauves (for our purposes, The Eight). "Vedres was smuggled into The Eight. After all, he copied Florentine quattrocento, so stylistically he had nothing to do with them. I don't know why [Kernstok] appreciated Vedres's sculptures so much when they did not suit the movement. He brought Vedres in." Béla Horváth's interview with Károly Lyka, manuscript, January 1957. Béla Horváth's art history legacy, RCH-HAS-IAH, Archive, Item No.: MDK–C–I–217. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 observant Jews, the grown children were assimilated; some even celebrated Christmas.49 Berény did as well; he spent Christmas Eve 1909 in Paris with the composer Béla Bartók. [29] The literature has addressed Jewish circles in Paris, in particular in Montparnasse. The Steins did not really belong to any of these groups, despite the fact that their lifestyle, disposition, and interests clearly appealed to the new generation of assimilated Jews. Most of the artists promoted by the Steins were not Jewish, a number of their Saturday evening guests were. At the same time, I will venture that it could be no accident that they held their gatherings not on society's accepted day of rest, Sunday, but on Saturday, the Jewish day of rest. Further, they did not refer to these events as salons or soirées, but Saturday nights, which undoubtedly held some significance. L'Académie Matisse [30] The non-Jewish artists who circulated in this cosmopolitan community received their share of vitriol from the contemporary French conservative men of letters, chiefly right-wing with nationalist sentiments. Matisse was the target of especially fierce attacks, since so many foreign students attended his school.50 The Dreyfus Affair was just then drawing to a close, so Matisse was especially vulnerable to charges. Artists of Jewish background arrived at his academy in great numbers, even from Hungary – for example, the previously mentioned Brummer or Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba, who could undoubtedly consider himself close to Matisse. Through his master's good graces he became sociéter of the Salon d'Automne.51 Because Matisse's school kept no logs, yearbooks, or admission records, art historians' estimates of the number of pupils at the short-lived academy are based upon later recollections and show a great deal of discrepancy.52 Just as the numbers of students among the largest groups at Matisse's school (Scandinavian, German, and American) are unclear, we have no precise knowledge of the number of Hungarians either. We have inconsistent information and nothing approaching a complete list of names. [31] The painter Gyula Andorkó is little-known in Hungary, although he is remembered in New York as the first owner of a Van Gogh painting, Bouquet of Flowers in a Vase 49 Braun, 2011, p. 63. 50 For more on this theme, see: Silver, Kenneth E. and Golan, Romy. The Circle of Montparnasse Jewish Artists in Paris 1905-1945. New York: Universe Books, 1985, pp. 17-18; and Stein, 1974, p. 60. 51 According to Géza Bornemisza's recollections, "Matisse brought Csaba into the S. Dautomne [sic!]. That's how he became societér." See: Béla Horváth's interview with Géza Bornemisza, undated manuscript. Béla Horváth's art history legacy, RCH-HAS-IAH, Archive, Item No.: MDK–C– I–217. 52 Citing the written work of a Swedish pupil of Matisse's (Grünewald, Isaac. Matisse och expressionismen. Stockholm: Wahlström & Wildstrand, 1944), Barr supposes there were 120 students in all over the school's three-year operation (Barr, 1951, p. 117), while Jack Flam mentions 80 pupils (Flam, Jack. Matisse. The Man and His Art 1869-1918. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986, p. 221). License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 (1890) that now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum.53 The young Andorkó committed suicide in 1909, and after his death, an exhibition and sale of his collection was organized. The title assigned in 1920 to one of his paintings, "Matisse's Moorish model", implies that he may have been a pupil of Matisse (although the title could have been born out of speculation for the Ernst Museum's auction).54 Like Matisse and Marquet, who had borrowed Matisse's studio since 1908, Andorkó also painted the landscape from the Seine-spanning bridge Pont Saint-Michel,55 as did his compatriot Lajos Tihanyi on several occasions. [32] Contemporary sources prove that there were at least three Hungarian women who studied with Matisse and who were, by no means accidentally, also artists' wives: Valéria Dénes, Erzsi Fejérváry, and Márta Ferentzy.56 When they arrived at the academy, the school was already approaching its final days. Besides the aforementioned József Brummer, however, the most consistent Matisse pupils were Géza Bornemisza and Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba, who were present around the time of the school's opening, roughly in January 1908. Although Perlrott mistakenly associated it with the year 1906,57 he recalls the time when the school was founded, thus asserting that he was among its first pupils. Géza Bornemisza, in a letter to István Réti dated March 1908, also informs us that he spent the previous months at Matisse's academy; that is, he was present at the time of the school's inception.58 Moreover, he possessed a document, issued by Matisse in 1909, certifying that he was a student at the school.59 Surprisingly the Scandinavian, German, and American founders of Matisse's school do not mention the names Perlrott and Bornemisza. Jean Heiberg recalls that, when he was accepted to the school in the winter 53 Molnos, Péter and Geskó, Judit. Vincent van Gogh művei Magyarországon. Van Gogh Budapesten [Vincent Van Gogh's Works in Hungary. Van Gogh in Budapest], exhibition catalogue. Judit Geskó, ed. Budapest: Szépművészeti Múzeum, 2006, pp. 105-129. See also: Molnos, Péter. "The First Hungarian to Have Owned a Van Gogh," http://www.kieselbach.hu/magazine/discovery/first- hungarian-to-have-owned-a-van-gogh, December 9, 2011 (last accessed April 30, 2014). 54 Ernst Museum Auctions XI, Budapest, February 1, 1920. Andorkó, Gyula. Matisse's Moorish Model, 1907. 55 Andorkó, Gyula: A Bridge of the Seine, 1908. Oil on canvas, Hungarian National Gallery, Item No.: 4139. 56 Valéria Dénes, wife of painter Sándor Galimberti, probably spent mere months at Matisse's school, instead of the two years that has been previously supposed (Dénes, Zsófia. Tegnapi új művészek. Budapest: Kozmosz, 1974, p. 88; Dénes, Zsófia. Galimberti Sándor és Dénes Valéria. Budapest: Corvina, 1979; Mezei, Ottó: "Les Galimberti, couple des artistes hongrois, des années 1910," Acta Historiae Artium, vol. 23, 1977, pp. 329-355). She arrived in 1910, and Matisse stopped teaching in 1911. Erzsi Fejérváry, wife of sculptor Jenő Körmendi-Frimm, was metioned as Matisse's pupil in a publication of the Nemzeti Szalon [National Salon] in 1912 (Almanach. Képzőművészeti lexikon. Béla Déry, ed. Budapest: Nemzeti Szalon, 1912, p. 165), and the same applies to Márta Ferentzy, the future wife of Elemér Kóródy (ibid.). Also see: Dévényi, Iván. "Henri Matisse magyar kapcsolatai [Henri Mattise's Hungarian Connections]," Forrás, vol. 7, 1975, 10, p. 80. 57 Perlrott-Csaba, Vilmos. "Magamról," Perlrott Csaba Vilmos művészete ["About Myself," The Art of Perlrott-Csaba], with an introduction by Géza Bornemisza. Budapest: Dante, 1930, pp. 12-13. 58 HNG Archive, Item No.: 8242/1955 59 Published in: Pápai, Emese. "The Painter Géza Bornemisza and his Fauve Period," Müvészettörténeti Értesítő, vol. 51, 2002, pp. 309-321. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en http://www.kieselbach.hu/magazine/discovery/first-hungarian-to-have-owned-a-van-gogh http://www.kieselbach.hu/magazine/discovery/first-hungarian-to-have-owned-a-van-gogh RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 of 1908, the total number of students jumped to 12 or 15, and there were Hungarians among them.60 Perlrott – for the time being, the only identifiable Hungarian – can be recognized in the often reproduced group photo taken in Matisse's school (Fig. 6), which Alfred Barr dated 1910, based on a statement by Carl Palme.61 According to Palme, Howarth, a German painter, took the photograph in October 1910. This is contradicted, though, by another copy of the picture (existing in a tattered condition, but also reproduced several times), where we can read the year 1909. This caption was presumably provided by a Norwegian student.62 6 Group picture of Matisse's students, 1909. Archive photo, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo 7 Group picture of Matisse's students, 1909. Archive photo (source: http://postpop.blogg.se/2010/april/) 60 Swane, Leo. Matisse. Oslo: Gyldendal, 1950. In English translation: Académie Matisse – Henri Matisse and his Nordic & American Pupils. New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, 2001, p. 28. 61 Barr, 1951, p. 117. 62 The photo is kept in Oslo's Nasjonalgalleriet. Its reproduction is published in Hoff, Svein Olav and Schrumpf, Fredrikke. Matisse-Elevene. De forste ar. Tegninger og maleri. Lillehammer: Lillehammer kunstmuseum, 2001, p. 2. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en http://postpop.blogg.se/2010/april/ RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 [33] Meanwhile, a Swedish blog63 contains a previously unknown photo (Fig. 7) that appears to have been taken at the same time. It is very similar but blurrier and the participants are in slightly different poses. In this version Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba faces forward (whereas, in the well-known photo, he is turned toward Matisse); and it appears to have a wider angle, so the complete figure of the woman on the right-hand side can be seen. When this snapshot emerged, I examined a third archive photo from around the same time in which Géza Bornemisza can be seen with his two painter friends.64 [34] Based upon the physiognomic similarities, I propose that the man with the moustache, above Perlrott and a little to the right in the group photo, may be Géza Bornemisza.65 According to contemporary sources and memoirs, Perlrott and Bornemisza studied under Matisse at the same time. They both demonstrated an uncommon interest in sculpture. In a letter written to István Réti in April 1908,66 Géza Bornemisza related that he began to sculpt at the urging of Matisse. We are unaware if any of these pieces have survived; still, we may note his interest in the plastic from in several works.67 In a still-life from 1910,68 the centerpiece is a (presumably painted) plaster statue quite similar to the sculpture that appears in several still-lifes by Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba. Certainly, this statue appearing in Perlrott's paintings holds some significance for him, and not only in the nature of a reoccurring theme or prop. We may also conclude that in his most representative self-portrait, which quotes Renaissance portraiture,69 the statuette that appears in his hand functions as a sort of attribute. It may be an allusion to Matisse's school. (It is as though he is saying, "Master, I followed your instructions! Here, I prepared a work of sculpture.") [35] Like other students at Matisse's school, Perlrott painted a number of studio nudes during his time there. We know of only two (Fig. 8); the rest were either lost or cut apart 63 The Swedish blog deals with the life of Sigrid Hjertén, a Scandinavian pupil of Matisse. http://postpop.blogg.se/2010/april/ 64 Magyar Vadak, 2006, p. 92. 65 Pariser Begegnungen 1904-1914. Café du Dôme, 1965. On the opening page of the catalogue's chapter entitled "Académie Matisse," the figures in the familiar photo are numbered. A question mark is placed after six of the numbers, and a further two women are not even counted – that is, eight pupils remain unidentified. The individual I believe to be Géza Bornemisza (No. 6) also has a question mark beside his number. 66 HNG Archive, Item No. 8240/1955. 67 Even earlier, before Matisse's school, they would begin by copying paintings and making drawings of ecorché scultptures in plaster casts. In a Géza Bornemisza drawing from 1907, a small sculpture erroneously attributed to Michelangelo appears ("Csöndes óra. Rajz," Művészet, vol. 6, 1907, p. 347). Like Matisse himself, other students of his made use of the so-called "muscle man" ecorché sculpture – for example Hans Purrmann. We can also find a small plaster statue in a photo taken of his studio (Pariser Begegnungen 1904-1914. Café du Dome, 1965). 68 Bornemisza, Géza. Studio Still-life with Statue, 1910, oil on canvas, 25½ x 27½ in. See: Magyar Vadak, 2006, p. 177. 69 Perlrott-Csaba, Vilmos. Self-portrait with Statue, c. 1910, oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in. Tamás Kieselbach Collection. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en http://postpop.blogg.se/2010/april/ RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 so that the canvas on the other side could be reused.70 In terms of identifying the place where these paintings had been executed, I would like to draw attention to some new evidence or data which perhaps will be of interest to Matisse scholars as well. In the The Steins Collect catalogue, there appeared a certain photograph of the sculpting course at Matisse's school, taken around 1909.71 (Fig. 9) Just like in the case of the class photo earlier, it shows several deviations from a previously known and widely reproduced version.72 However, the snapshot is not only intriguing on account of small nuances in posture and hand placement. The angle of the picture is shifted a little to the left, revealing a particular corner of the room which – at least, as far as I am aware – we could not observe in any other photographic record. The board with the clock hung above it, as seen in the background, can also be observed as a minimalist motif in the backgrounds of several nude studies made by Matisse's students, including the aforementioned nude by Perlrott, held in Kaposvár. Up until the discovery, I only presumed that the board visible in the paintings displayed photos of the Chartres Cathedral, which Henrik Sørensen mentioned as the only decoration on the school's walls.73 In light of this snapshot, this is easily verified. 8 Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba. Female Nude, 1910. Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, 20½ x 16 in. Kaposvár, Rippl-Rónai Múzeum, Item No.: 55.403. Photo: György Darabos 70 For identification of these works, see: Barki, Gergely. "A Juliantól Matisse akadémiájáig. A 'Párizsba gravitáló művészgeneráció' iskolái [From the Julian to Matisse's Academy, Schools of the Artist Generation that Gravitated to Paris]," Magyar Vadak, 2006, pp. 85-94. 71 The Steins Collect, 2011, p. 155. 72 Magyar Vadak, 2006, p. 89. 73 Barki, 2006, p. 94. See also: Swane, 1950. In English translation: Académie Matisse – Henri Matisse and his Nordic & American Pupils, 2001, Note 38. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 9 Sculpting class at Matisse's school, c. 1909. Archive photo, Paris, Matisse Archives [36] In those years, every summer, Perlrott returned to Nagybánya (now Baia Mare, Romania). It appears that if he took some of the paintings of nudes that he made in Paris and added Hungarian landscapes to them. It is difficult to determine from the figures' relationship to the space and to each other. [37] They become compositions of rhythm and color their own sake. From an archive photo taken in Nagybánya,74 (Fig. 10) it appears that he actually painted the composition of nude males (Fig. 11), now held in the Janus Pannonius Museum (Pécs, Hungary), en plein air.75 It is likely that the photograph was only taken outdoors for the sake of the pose. 10 Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba with his painting Boys Bathing, c. 1909-11. Archive photo, property of Alan and Diane Bauer 74 I must thank Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba's relatives, Diane and Alan Bauer, for placing this previously unpublished photo at my disposal. 75 Perlrott-Csaba, Vilmos. Boys Bathing, c. 1911 (?), oil on canvas, 30½ x 36 in. Pécs, Janus Pannonius Múzeum, Item no.: 76. 259. In my opinion, the official date of this work is questionable. I find the period 1909-10 more probable. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 11 Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba. Boys Bathing, c. 1909-11. Oil on canvas, 30½ x 36 in. Pécs, Janus Pannonius Museum, Item No.: 76. 259. Photo: György Darabos [38] We do not know whether Perlrott was still attending Matisse's school when he painted this composition, since one of Bornemisza's unpublished letters reveals that Perlrott did not stay at the academy until it closed.76 In the same letter, he notes additional information of interest: [T]his school opened in 1908. In the beginning, there were not 6, but 10 Americans, and Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba and I enrolled in the first weeks. Later, the number of pupils grew, so in 1909, we had to seek more appropriate studio space at No. 33 on the Boulevard des Invalides. The following year, the school became so crowded that Matisse would not undertake it any longer. The school had no particular name besides 'École Matisse'. It started up near Luxembourg, if I remember well, lasting for a little while on Rue Vaugirard. It was then I was commissioned by Gyula Színi to write an article for his Kék madár [Bluebird] periodical.[77] This journal soon folded, but I noted the place well, and I had a better recollection of the whole area then. It was in a former convent building owned by the state. Later, a Hungarian, József Bató, went there, and still later (as far as I know) János Nyergesi.78 That was when Vilma Balogh, working for Világ [World], visited Matisse and wrote a report about it. She asked, 'What Hungarian painters do you know?' 'I know few,' he replied, 'Rippl-Rónai, Perlrott, and Bornemisza.' You can locate this interview. Who were the foreigners? Bruce, an American, was the messier. The other American names I've forgot. There was a German, Hans Purrmann, professor at a Berlin academy. (He didn't learn much, I can tell from a Purrmann picture I found in a catalogue.) Then I remember Bé de Ward,79 a beautiful Dutch girl, and Edward Witte (Vienna), whom I brought into the school. I'll tell you how I came to know Matisse. Before this time, I worked at the Delécluse Academy on Rue Notre Dame de Champs. Kind old Delécluse let me work there, because my material state was rather poor. It was also frequented by a half-deaf man – older, hard-of-hearing, and a rich American: Leo Stein. He often came during breaks to look at my works, and I his. But Stein, though he was apparently 'after something', was not a painter, just a dilettante. The school was 76 Géza Bornemisza's letter to Béla Horváth, September 24, 1962. Béla Horváth's art history legacy, RCH-HAS-IAH, Archive, Item No.: MDK–C–I–217. 77 The article was written and published much later. Bornemisza, 1932, p. 62. 78 Considering his age alone, János Nyergesi (1895-1882) could not have been there. He studied in Paris later. 79 Bé de Waard, a.k.a. Beatrice de Waard, was Leó Popper's fiancée. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 rather worthless, but there were models, and it was warm. That was the main attraction for me. Stein kept inviting me to visit him on Saturdays, in his flat at No. 9 on Rue de Fleurus. I finally went one time. I also got to know his brother, Michael Stein. He was a collector, too. Both of them had pictures by Matisse and Picasso (they were his first managers, that is), and Michael Stein's wife also studied at the Matisse School. I met Matisse and Picasso, too, at the Steins', and I also went to Picasso's place a couple of times on Rue Victor Massé with Perlrott- Csaba. Later, I would come to call my relationship with Matisse friendly. When he lived in a small castle in Issy, I took André Lhote to meet him, whom he hadn't known, and they eventually got on well. I had a long, warm friendship with Lhote. […] I exchanged polite words with Picasso. I confess, he interested me less. […] Rousseau (Le Douanier) came to my flat at No. 7 Cité Falgière, and we argued. […] Rousseau liked to play jokes. For instance, he stuck a card under my door recommending himself as a model for tête de Noël [head of Father Christmas], and things like that. [39] The interview conducted with Matisse that Bornemisza cites,80 was published and since it is informative, it is included below in full: In Henri Matisse's Studio For everyone interested in painting, Henri Matisse is the cynosure. In France, where painting has influenced the entire Continent's painting since the start of the 19th century, he is the grand master, seeking a new trend that will yield grand results. He is an innovator whom the entire world regards as a prophet. For we Hungarians, he is twice as intriguing, since a number of young Hungarian painters have made Matisse's various stages and results their starting points, departing from his path in search of their own goals. They declare him their master; or, even if they do not, once they see Matisse's pictures, they cannot deny the spiritual kinship. Matisse lives in one of the suburbs of Paris, beyond the fortifications, having settled in a charming little castle in Ronte de Caumart [Route de Clamart]. Bernheim, a great art dealer, organizes exhibitions of Matisse collections, and he was kind enough to bring me to the master's attention. I rang at the garden gate, and the piano music cascading through the castle's open window suddenly ceased. A pretty female head peeked out between the white silk curtains curiously. This was the master's 17-year-old daughter, who, blessed with prodigious musical talents, is preparing for a career as a pianist … Prancing among the bushes, a few beautiful pedigree dogs rushed forward, then came the gardener in blue overalls to take the visitor's name card inside to Monsieur Matisse. He later hurried back and showed me the way to the studio. 'Kindly step inside. The Master will come immediately …' The studio stands in the clearing of the large garden, a few paces from the chateau. It is a spacious, round, and sunny place with a few steps leading to a terrace decorated with Greek urns. Inside the furniture is very sparse. There are two imposing, carved armchairs, an interesting grandfather clock, and two works by different masters: a beautiful copy of the Ares Borghese found in the Louvre 80 Balogh, Vilma [B. V.]. "Henri Matisse műtermében," Világ, March 31, 1912, pp. 34-35. Here I must thank Árpád Timár for providing me with a typed copy of the article. It is worth noting that Vilma Balogh (1873-1944) was one of the owners and co-editors of the Kékmadár [Bluebird] periodical that Bornemisza mentions. In addition, she was the wife of theatre director and author László Bánóczi (1884-1945). License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 and Rodin's bust of Rochefort. Scattered about are all manner of Matisse's pictures, sketches, and sculptures in progress; each of these interesting and valuable pieces bears witness to the master's many aims, pursuits, and absorptions. Opposite the door is the study for the immense decorative mural commissioned by the Moscow billionaire and collector Shchukin. It shows four [sic!] dancing nude female figures with linked arms on the crest of a hill. The firmament's deep blue appears in the picture as a pure patch of color. Another enormous canvas, upon which the master intends to make changes, leans against the wall. It depicts the dawn as the master once saw it with the moon retreating and the sun smiling forth. In this picture, the sun and stars serve as sheer decoration. In the ether, a suspended female form emerges from her veils. On the easel set in one corner of the room, Matisse's newest work in progress awaits completion. Its Pompeian red background ties together the interior and the details of the master's own studio. Matisse's sculptural works, bronzes, and terra-cottas are all extraordinarily intriguing. All of the master's recent pictures express aspiration. One's attention is especially captured by a block of wood carved relief-style. Gauguin learned this type of wood sculpture in Tahiti. In answer to my question, Matisse (whose word is absolutely trustworthy) replied that although he is very interested in Gauguin, he had not seen the artist's wood carvings. This further proves that the search for style in modern art instinctively turns towards the art of primitive times. At the open terrace door, from the threshold of which a lovely greyhound followed my steps with vigilant attention and pricked-up ears, Matisse now appears… He is a rather beautiful man, around forty years old with broad shoulders and a brown beard. His manner is engagingly cordial, simple and benevolent. He willingly shows and explains his pictures. 'My master was Moreau,' he relates about himself. 'At the beginning of my career, I was under the sway of Impressionists.' From one corner, he produces a canvas that had been turned around and calls my attention to it. The picture shows a sunny provincial courtyard, painted in the Impressionist fashion. 'This is how I painted ten years ago,' Matisse continued. 'Naturally, at that time, the tastes of the critics and the general public were closer to mine. Now I travel less trodden paths. However, the main thing is that the path ahead of me be clear! ... And what does not lie clear before me, I will find that, too. That is certain … Please take a look,' he said, showing the painting with the red background in progress. 'I'm in trouble with this picture. I know that all of the items painted on it – the clock, the pictures, the flowers – only the dark brick-colored background holds them together … I have been painting this picture for about half a year, and it hasn't become the way I originally envisioned it. I like it, but I don't completely understand it. I don't know why I painted it precisely this way. I am going to let it rest for a while, then the whole thing will either be clear before me, or I'll rub it out, what I've been painting for half a year.' 'Can the Master be very productive working that way?' 'Of course not! I work a lot, but I am not productive. Truly, I had a picture that I worked on for two years.' 'Such artistic perseverance requires a fortune as well.' License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 'You know that there is no longer a question of money with me. I am rich now. Each of my paintings sells for such a price that I can calmly work on the next one. Although when I was poor, I did the same thing, as an honorable artist should.' 'Who are the Master's best customers?' 'The Russians and the Americans. They have the most money, and they understand art the best. They travel a lot, study up on the world's art treasures, and they do not spare their money … I owe a lot of thanks to a family that came to Paris from San Francisco. Actually, they are not remarkably wealthy, but they are willing to sacrifice when it comes to paintings. When my pictures were not selling for such high prices like now, they practically bought them all. Now, on Saturdays, they allow friends of Matisse to see the canvases, which hang in their salons and show the developmental stages. My new pictures go to Moscow, almost without exception. Two enthusiastic collectors live there, and they have billions at their disposal. One of them – Shchukin – is my customer … I've also had a Hungarian customer. Marcell Nemes wanted to sign a contract for a year's worth of my work. Of course, I could not consent to the price. It is quite possible that in one year's time I may not complete a single picture.' 'It is amazing in our country, in Hungary, how many followers you have, Master! Have you had any Hungarian students?' 'I don't have any students now. I need every minute of my time, so I do not teach. However, two years ago I had 50-60 pupils. There were some Hungarian lads among them. I remember Perlrott and Bornemisza very well. I am familiar with Rippl-Rónai's old pictures, although he, too, must have changed a lot. Talented men do not remain in one place.' 'Do you know Klimt, Monsieur Matisse?' 'No!' 'Well, among the modern French artists, who is close to you?' Matisse smiles. 'You know, it is difficult to answer this question. I do not wish to offend anyone, but if I considered anyone close to myself, I wouldn't bother about new paths with such limitless ardor … I like Picasso and Bonnat [Bonnard].' 'And what about the other arts, Monsieur Matisse? Are you interested in them?' 'I get so worn out during the day that at night I am rarely in the mood to go to a serious theater or get into serious literature. In the evenings, I lie in bed and fall asleep leafing through some book of little importance. As for theatrical spectacles, productions with clowns, acrobats, or people who work with their bodies interest me the most. Anyway, I don't consider acting a serious art, although music I love. Every Sunday afternoon I attend the Lamoureux concerts with my daughter.' 'If I may ask the Master, if you could say in words what you are trying to express with your paintbrush, what would you say?' Matisse replies with conviction, 'I am seeking an expressive decorativeness!' License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 [40] Presumably, the interview was conducted well before the article was published. Matisse finished his Red Studio painting in the autumn of 1911;81 the article describes the painting as half-finished.82 One year earlier, the future wife of György Bölöni, Ottília Márkus (a.k.a. Itóka), interviewed Matisse as well,83 but unfortunately the text is lost. At the time of Vilma Balogh's visit, Matisse had recently stopped teaching, and one assumes that his estimate of students is correct. In addition the article provides a sense of Matisse's opinions about his contemporaries and his relationship with the Steins. Visits by Hungarian Cubists and Other "Oddballs" to the Steins [41] At the time of the interview, around 1911, winds of change were already blowing through Rue de Fleurus. Leo gradually withdrew,84 and after the arrival of two wealthy Russians, Morozov and Shchukin, Matisse barely took part in the gatherings. The Fauve era was past, and Picasso had long since become the central figure for Gertrude Stein. Nonetheless, during this period, the Hungarian pilgrimages continued; only the new Hungarian arrivals were not under the spell of Matisse, they sought out the Steins because of Picasso. [42] Zsófia Dénes, Valéria Dénes's cousin, went to Paris for the first time that year. Her escort, the Cubist Alfréd Réth, initiated her into the world on the very first day: For example, Picasso, you must have heard of him, he's the leading Cubist. He doesn't exhibit with us either [in the Salon des Indépendants], because he lives off the art dealers and collectors. Status, you know. Well, among others, you'll see in my neighborhood of Montparnasse two oddball art collectors, Americans, the Stein siblings. They go about in wrinkled corduroys, smocks, and beat-up sandals. If they strike people as misers or bohemians, it's all the same to them. They have a remarkable nose for pictures, and they invest in outsiders – those who aren't big names yet, but who have great future potential. They were Picasso's first art collectors. […] They say that they only have shares in a rural department store in the US. They've lived here since the start of the century and have amassed a very fine collection. Before Picasso, they bought Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne. Dirt cheap … They don't live far from here, on the Rue de Fleurus in the Luxembourg quarter. Gertrude Stein is a writer, Cubist poet, and publicist. She has a large body and a masculine face with regular features. Her little brother Leo is thinner, blond, with a thin beard. When he talks, you'd think a woman was speaking, a soprano … They 81 Matisse, Henri. Red Studio, Autumn 1911, oil on canvas, 71 x 86¼ in. New York, Museum of Modern Art, Item No.: 8.1949. 82 I thank Jack Flam for also drawing my attention to the fact that that the year 1911 is also probable, because Matisse's daughter would have been 17 years old. 83 "On Monday, I went to Henri Matisse's. I've begun a small article about him." Itóka's letter to György Bölöni from Paris, August 3, 1910. Quoted in: Párizstól pocsolyavárosig. Bölöni György és Itóka levélnaplója 1906-1912 [From Paris to the City of Puddles. György Bölöni and Itóka's Letter Diary]. Csaba Nagy, ed. Budapest: Petőfi Literary Museum, 2005. p. 95. 84 After Alice B. Toklas moved in with Gertrude in the fall of 1910, Leo's participation in the gatherings became increasingly rare. For more, see: Braun, 2011, p. 50. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 met Picasso at Vollard's, and on the very first occasion, they bought pictures from him for 800 gold francs.85 [43] Not everyone who came to Rue de Fleurus was enamored with Picasso. In the same year, Lipót Herman visited the Steins in the fall and recorded in his journal: "I visited the Stein art collection after dinner. There were works by Renoir (weak), Matisse, a few Cézannes, and a couple of others, modern and old. The versatility of Picasso – the Great – was on fine display. He appears to be talented, but I am not yet convinced of his godlike quality. On the other hand, I recognized anew how much we copy them in our country, and how poorly. […] Another thing about Stein. He is a bearded vegetarian who goes about in sandals. This evening he was having a reception – Englishmen, sweet souls, and modern enthusiasts. Among them, his fat sister, with a cigar in her mouth and her 'reform clothes', seemed a somewhat droll figure."86 [44] Many Hungarian visitors regarded the Steins' apartments in Montparnasse as modern art Meccas. Others, though, made pitying observations about their clothing and beat-up sandals – designed, by Isadora Duncan's brother Raymond87 – and even made disparaging remarks about Picasso. Lipót Herman was rather blunt in the pages of his journal, but presumably restrained himself in the Steins' presence. Another visitor of Hungarian descent, Márton Birnbaum,88 became persona non grata at the Steins' for mistaking one of Gertrude's favorite Picassos for a Cézanne.89 It is worth noting that Birnbaum was the main organizer of a traveling exhibition of Austro-Hungarian graphic art that included examples of Hungarian cubism.90 [45] A few years ago, on the occasion of Kriszta Passuth's 70th birthday, I drew attention to these unknown Hungarian Cubists. At that time, we could only hope that a few of these artists' works would come to light – and among them, perhaps, graphic 85 Dénes, 1974, pp. 7-8, 45. 86 Portions of Lipót Herman's journal, dated September 16, 1911. HNG Archive, 1911 volume. Quoted in: Molnos, Péter. "The Eighth: Dezső Orbán," The Eight, 2010, p. 333. 87 Braun, 2011, p. 63. 88 Márton Birnbaum (Martin Birnbaum) was an art critic, historian, collector, and dealer who was born in Miskolc in 1878. He lived in America from 1883 until his death in 1970. 89 Braun, 2011, p. 60. Birnbaum maintained a relationship with the Steins, particularly Leo. They can be seen in a group photo, in the company of Maurice Sterne, Alfred Polltron, and Ned Bruce, in front of his house in Anticoli Carrado, outside Rome (Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 16, 1976, 2, p. 27). In my opinion, the photo is wrongly dated 1915-16, both in the periodical and on the Smithsonian Archives of American Art website. After all, Leo looks much older in the photograph. 90 Contemporary Graphic Art in Hungary, Bohemia, and Austria at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, exhibition catalogue. Introduction by Martin Birnbaum. New York: Albright Art Gallery, 1914. From the catalogues produced, we known of three sites for the traveling exhibition: New York (December 6-27, 1913) and Buffalo (January 4 - February 1, 1914) shared a catalogue, while there was a separate publication in Chicago (The Art Institute of Chicago, March 5 - April 1, 1914). According to data in American Art Annual (vol. 11, 1914, 185, p. 137), there were two more sites: St. Louis (February 8 - March 1 (?), 1914) and Boston (April 7-28, 1914). License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 works that had appeared on the American tour.91 I never dreamed that the site of my presentation, New York's Metropolitan Museum, owned some of these very drawings. [46] A few months previously, my colleague Péter Molnos informed me that many Hungarian-related works (and perhaps the graphic works by the unknown Cubists, Elemér Kóródy and Árpád Késmárky, which I was seeking) are listed on the museum's new website. (Figs. 12 and 13) These pieces entered the museum as gifts from Martin Birnbaum.92 I have thoroughly examined these drawings and am convinced that they are the very ones that were touted as the most progressive Hungarian art in five large American cities in 1914. These drawings include the only extant pieces from Kóródy's and Késmárky's œuvres, as well as works by József Csáky, the well-known Cubist sculptor of Hungarian descent. (Fig. 14) 12 Árpád Késmárky. Golgotha (Crucifixion), 1913. Brown ink on paper, 20½ x 15 in. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Arts, Item No.: 59.63.16 91 Barki, Gergely. "A magyar művészet első reprezentatív bemutatkozása(i) Amerikában [Hungarian Art's First Representative Introduction(s) in America]," Nulla dies sine linea. Tanulmányok Passuth Krisztina hetvenedik születésnapjára. Ágnes Berecz, Mária L. Molnár, and Erzsébet Tatai, eds. Budapest: Praesens, 2007, pp. 99-113. 92 Altogether, Martin Birnbaum donated eight Késmárky and six Kóródy graphic works to the museum. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0090 | 22 May 2014 13 Elemér Kóródy. Cubist Study of a Head, c. 1913. Pencil on paper, 9 x 9 in. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Arts, Item No.: 59.63.18 14 József Csáky. Cubist Head, 1913. Pencil on paper, 10½ x 8 in. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Arts, Item No.: 59.63.4 [47] Hopefully, further research into the Steins and their Hungarian connections will yield more information, both documents and as yet missing works.93 93 I would like to thank Dr. Rebecca Rabinow and Prof. Jack Flam for editing the English translation of this article. License: The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en Introduction Hungarian Invasion at the Steins' Leo Stein, the True Mediator; or, the Montparnasse Apostle Assimilated Jews from Budapest and San Francisco in Montparnasse L'Académie Matisse In Henri Matisse's Studio Visits by Hungarian Cubists and Other "Oddballs" to the Steins work_itk56zzqyneblkmm6sn7eeivie ---- Historical lessons to watch your assumptions about aging: relevance to the role of International Psychogeriatrics International Psychogeriatrics (2009), 21:3, 425–429 C© 2009 International Psychogeriatric Association doi:10.1017/S1041610209008540 Printed in the United Kingdom G U E S T E D I T O R I A L Historical lessons to watch your assumptions about aging: relevance to the role of International Psychogeriatrics “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.” Daniel J. Boorstin For too long, too many in science and society alike viewed aging as offering little that was of value. There was a collective illusion of knowledge that aging was characterized by inevitable, unalterable decrements in functioning that led to a dismal des- tiny in later life. This was a widespread perspective on aging, especially in the scientific community. To the extent that scientists considered aging as a wasteland of scientific opportunity, they had little interest in studying it. By not studying aging, little new was discovered about it, thereby preserving negative assumptions about what later life held for all of us. Both Freud and Piaget, for example, viewed development of the mind as essentially a first quarter of the life-cycle phenomenon – psychologically for Freud, intellectually for Piaget (Freud, 1978; Piaget, 1972). But by the mid-1970s the first of two funda- mental sea changes in how aging was perceived began to emerge. New hypotheses were generated that attempted to explain negative changes accom- panying aging, not as representing normal aging but instead reflecting age-associated problems – modifiable disorders. For the scientist, the idea that a negative change is caused by a problem, and not normal aging, creates a new sense of opportunity to modify the problem. For the policy-maker, this recognition results in a new sense of responsibility to do something about the problem. This sea change in thinking about modifiable age-associated problems launched serious attention to growth of the field of geriatrics in the last quarter of the 20th century. The transition from seeing progressive, unalter- able negative changes with aging as being one’s destiny to a new view of modifiable age-associated problems was an enormous leap in itself. While this was happening it was too big a leap to go the next step – to see that aging could be accompanied by potential beyond problems. But by the end of First published online 26 February 2009. the 20th century, the view that aging could be accompanied by potential beyond problems was emerging. The “potential” focus of aging reflected the emergence of the second major conceptual sea change about aging and is reflected in my book The Creative Age (Cohen, 2000), the first book to focus totally on creativity and aging, published at the start of the 21st century. The ultimate manifestation of potential with aging is creativity. I had written my first major piece on creativity and aging in 1988 in my book The Brain in Human Aging (Cohen, 1988). It was here that my new sense of the history of the field was germinating, and, along with it, a sense that the time was right internationally to bring the dissemination of the latest knowledge about aging to a new level – especially in relation to psychogeriatrics. Hence, I was honored and thrilled to be invited to be the first Editor-in-Chief of the new journal International Psychogeriatrics, launched in the spring of 1989. Here, I felt, was an opportunity on an international scale to confront the illusions of knowledge about aging through a new worldwide sharing of the latest findings and developments in psychogeriatrics for addressing both disorders and health-promotion with aging. This goal is reflected in the opening editorial to Volume 1, Number 1, that I wrote with my colleagues – Associate Editors Manfred Bergener, M.D. and Kazuo Hasegawa, M.D., and Managing Editor Sanford I. Finkel, M.D. The first paragraph says it well: Welcome to International Psychogeriatrics. It is with pride, excitement, and a sense of challenge that we launch this first issue of our new journal. Why this new Journal? The impetus and the credit go to the field—specifically to the growing community of researchers, teachers, and clinicians around the globe who are interested in and contribute to psychogeriatric knowledge. This truly is the historic moment in the fields of gerontology and geriatrics, a period marked by the coming together of societal concern and scientific curiosity about issues of aging and the problems of the elderly. It is a moment not confined to any one nation, nor to any one continent; that is what makes it all the more important and exciting. It is in this context that this new journal, international in scope, is being launched. (Cohen et al., 1989) 425 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1041610209008540 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S1041610209008540 https://www.cambridge.org/core 426 Gene D. Cohen Watch your assumptions about the brain, mind and behavior with aging A long series of false assumptions and conclusions lacking evidence-based research to support them have interfered with research, practice and policies relevant to psychogeriatrics. A number of the best and brightest in the history of science have contributed to these flawed perspectives. Sigmund Freud In 1905 Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) asserted that “About the age of 50, the elasticity of the mental processes on which treatment depends, is, as a rule, lacking. Old people are no longer educable.” Freud expressed this view despite the fact that after 50 he produced some of his most intellectually elastic and outstanding works: his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis in 1917 (age 61); The Ego and the Id in 1923 (age 67); Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930 (age 74). This perspective certainly did not encourage work with older persons. Fortunately, in 1919, Karl Abraham offered a much more positive view, but it was not until the fourth quarter of the 20th century that evidence-based research on psychotherapy with older patients more substantially corrected the picture as to what was possible in psychogeriatric work with older adults (Abraham, 1979; Gallagher and Thompson, 1983). Jean Piaget Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was the father of the field of intellectual development. He described four developmental stages, with the fourth and final reflecting the highest level of intellectual growth at the end of adolescence and early adulthood. He referred to this highest stage of intellectual development as being characterized by “Formal Thought.” To the extent that further intellectual development was not described with aging, interest in lifelong learning was impeded along with limited program development in this area. Fortunately, Piaget’s students continued his work, and they discovered that intellectual development continues with the emergence of a fifth stage as we enter middle age and the second half of life—that of “Postformal Thought” (Sinnott, 1999). Whereas formal thought was characterized by strong analytic reasoning and a focus on finding the right answer, postformal thought added strength in synthetic reasoning and the recognition that in many situations there are competing and contradictory solutions, as opposed to a single correct answer. Ramón y Cajal In his 1913 masterpiece Degeneration and Regen- eration, Nobel Laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) wrote that in the adult brain “the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated” (Doidge, 2007). Influenced until the end of the 20th century by the work of this giant in the field of neuroscience and other leading neuroscientists, the view among the top brain researchers was that neurogenesis was impossible. Their gold standard in this reasoning was that neurons are not like skin cells or liver cells: neurons cannot regenerate. Hence, neurogenesis is impossible. But at the end of 1998, a nest of stem cells was discovered in the hippocampus that led to the genesis of new neurons (Kempermann et al., 2004). The best and the brightest had been unable to step outside the box with their assumptions that linked neurogenesis to regeneration. They failed to hypothesize that through another process, de novo brain cells could be produced (Cohen, 2006). New findings on brain plasticity have catalyzed the exploding attention to brain fitness, which is as important now to most older persons as physical fitness. New concepts and findings about potential with aging, apart from problems While remarkable progress was being made in treating problems and minimizing loss with aging, little attention was being paid to the reality of potential with aging and how tapping this potential could promote health. It was a huge step to establish that decline could be minimized as reflected in the view of successful aging. It was still too big a step to look beyond problems to actual potential with aging. In their important paper, Rowe and Kahn (1987) effectively brought the field to the pinnacle of the “problem focus” through their concept of successful aging, defined as “people who demonstrate little or no loss in a constellation of physiologic functions”, regarding these individuals as “more broadly successful in physiologic terms” (Rowe and Kahn, 1987). What their elegant concept lacks, though, is attention to where actual growth and development can occur with aging – views and findings emerging from the new focus on potential with aging that are challenging previous limited or negative assumptions about the capacity for positive change with age. This occurred with the second major sea change in thinking about aging and is reflected in the “Creativity and Aging Study” discussed below. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1041610209008540 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S1041610209008540 https://www.cambridge.org/core Guest Editorial 427 Pragmatic creativity with aging With the new focus on potential, many researchers have, for example, described the concept of “prag- matic creativity” or “practical intelligence,” finding that it actually increases with aging (Willis and Schaie, 1986). In my own work on psychological growth and development in the second half of life, I have described four psychological growth phases that continue through to the end of the life cycle (Cohen, 2006). The second of the four – the liberation phase – helps us understand the reporting of increased pragmatic creativity with aging. The liberation phase in effect begins to phase in during our 50s, as we are approaching our mid-50s. It then matures further as we enter and move through our 60s, and what is experienced stays with us. The liberation phase is characterized by metaphorical friendly inner voices that say to us, “Why not?”; “If not now, when?”; and very powerfully, “What can they do to me?” This latter feeling instills us with a new sense of confidence, comfort, and courage to try something new – even something bold. It is illustrated in the following example from my own family: My in-laws, Howard and Gisele Miller, were stuck. They had just emerged from the Washington, DC subway system into a driving snowstorm. Both in their early 70s, they were coming to our house for dinner and needed a cab, since it was too far to walk. But it was rush hour and no cabs stopped. Howard tried calling us to get a lift, but both my wife Wendy and I were stuck in traffic and weren’t home yet, and it was before we all had cell phones. As his fingers began to turn numb from the cold, Howard noticed the steamy windows of a pizza shop across the street, and a smile came on his face. He and Giselle walked through the slush to the shop, stepped up to the counter, and ordered a large pizza for home delivery. When the cashier asked where to deliver it, Howard gave him our address, and added, “Oh, there’s one more thing.” “What’s that?” the cashier asked. “We want you to deliver us with it,” Howard said. And that’s how they arrived – pizza in hand – for dinner that night. Old age that adds as it takes away In later life more than any other part of the life cycle, if an older person experiences a loss, it is too often seen as the beginning of irreversible decline. But research on creativity and aging reveals that loss in later life can be a powerful motivator for positive change. There is nothing romantic about loss, but it is part of the human condition that when we experience a decline in a capacity that we cannot restore, we often attempt to transcend this loss by tapping into or developing new strategies. This is well illustrated by Henri Matisse who, in his early 80s, suffered heart disease, lung disorder and gastrointestinal problems that sapped his energy, making it impossible to paint the way he used to. But it was not good enough for him to be able to paint the old way – less well. He responded by advancing a new art form – his Cut Outs – where in creating them his experience was that of cutting pure color. William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician better known for his poetry. In his 60s he suffered a stroke that left him with paralysis, preventing him from continuing his practice of medicine. He became very depressed and was hospitalized for nearly a year in his late 60s. But he emerged from this seemingly overwhelming challenge by turning full time to poetry, and 10 years later, in his late 70s, published Pictures from Bruegel, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. In his second half of life poetry, Carlos Williams wrote about old age that adds as it takes away (Cohen, 2001). The creativity and aging study My own contribution to research on potential and creativity with aging in relation to health promotion began in 2001 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, in coordination with the National Institutes of Health and four other sponsors, to conduct a rigorous national study examining the effects of community-based art programs on the health and functioning of older adults. The study compared the physical and mental health and social functioning of 150 older persons involved in arts programs to a comparable group (controls) of 150 adults not in such programs. All the participants were aged 65 or older and most were living independently when the study started; both groups were comparable in their health and functioning at the start of the study. The adults who were not in the arts group were free to socialize, attend classes, or do any of their normal activities, including art (though none in the control group became involved in rigorous and sustained participatory art programs). We wanted to see if it was the creative process involved in the arts programs that made a difference, rather than the mere fact that these participants were engaged in a regular, structured social situation. This study was theory driven, being based on two prior bodies of research on aging showing positive health outcomes from two dynamics – a sense of control and social support (Rodin, 1986; Avlund et al., 1998). The sense of control research shows that older adults who experience a growing sense of https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1041610209008540 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S1041610209008540 https://www.cambridge.org/core 428 Gene D. Cohen mastery have positive health outcomes; those in the art programs on a weekly basis vividly experienced their growing sense of mastery. The cardiovascular literature demonstrates the value of social supports in improving outcomes from heart attacks and coronary bypass surgery. Each art program offered a participatory and very supportive group experience. In these studies, the two dynamics – sense of control and social support – were combined, creating a synergy for improved health outcomes. Both factors had previously been shown to influence positive immune system changes, and contributed to the growth of the field of psychoneuroimmunology and the mind/body movement (Pert et al., 1998; Kiecolt- Glaser et al., 2002). The arts groups met for 35 weekly meetings – analogous to a college course. There were also between-session assignments as well as exhibitions and concerts. For example, a chorale at one site gave some 10 concerts a year in addition to their regular weekly practice sessions. We assessed each person’s health and social functioning with comprehensive questionnaires at the beginning of the programs, at the half-way mark, and again at the end, two years after starting. Our hypothesis was that the people participating in the arts programs (the intervention group) would show less decline than the control group who did not participate in those programs. We were pleasantly surprised, therefore, when the initial results exceeded these expectations. Many people in the arts groups stabilized their health, i.e. they didn’t decline at all. And, as a whole, those in the art programs actually improved their overall health. This occurred in a group of people with an average age of 80, which is greater than the current life expectancy! Here are the major findings from the first phase of the study, which was conducted in the Washington, DC area. (Similar paired study groups were researched in Brooklyn at “Elders Share the Arts,” under the direction of Susan Perlstein, and in San Francisco at the “Center for Elders and Youth in the Arts,” under the direction of Jeff Chapline; data are still being analyzed but point to improved overall health in these two sites as well.) All the results were statistically significant, reflecting real differences between the two study groups. Compared to the control group, those who participated in the community arts program: • had better health after two years (those in the control group reported that their health was not as good after the same elapsed time; see Figure 1); • had fewer doctor visits (though both groups had more visits compared to two years earlier); Figure 1. The problems in the intervention group fall over time but rise in the control group. Source: Cohen et al., 2007. • used fewer medications (note: in the U.S.A., where more than 36 million Medicare eligible older adults now receive coverage for medication, 8 cents per day reduction in medication usage extrapolated for the year would result in a saving of $1 billion dollars; a saving of $1 a day would extrapolate to $13 billion a year saved); • felt less depressed; • were less lonely; • had higher morale; and • were more socially active. Clearly the community-based art programs, tapping into potential, were having a real effect on health promotion and disease prevention. These effects, in turn, support the independence of the individuals and their ability to live in their communities, reflecting a reduction in risk factors driving the need for long-term care (Cohen et al., 2006; 2007). The bottom line is that “It’s never too late for positive change with aging.” Dickens’ subliminal psychogeriatric message in the case history of Ebenezer Scrooge – a.k.a. A Christmas Carol – is to watch your assumptions about aging and that it’s never too late to get out of a rut regardless of age. This reality is conveyed in the ahead-of-its-time 1843 outreach intervention by a multidisciplinary team of three, employing psychodynamic dream work – 50 years before Freud’s classic work on “the Interpretation of Dreams” – to treat a chronic undiagnosed depression (Cohen, 2002). For the past 20 years, International Psycho- geriatrics has done a similarly outstanding job of disseminating knowledge and dispelling false assumptions about aging, to enhance the positive impact of psychogeriatric know-how. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1041610209008540 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S1041610209008540 https://www.cambridge.org/core Guest Editorial 429 GENE D. COHEN Director of the Center on Aging, Health and Humanities, Professor of Health Care Sciences and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, George Washington University, Kensington, MD, U.S.A. Email: GENCOwdc@aol.com website: www.gwumc.edu/cahh References Abraham, K. (1979). Applicability of psycho-analytic treatment to patients at an advanced age. In: H. C. Abraham (ed.), Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Avlund, K., Damsgaard, M. T. and Holstein, E. E. (1998). Social relations and mortality: an eleven year follow-up study of 70-year-old men and women in Denmark. Social Science and Medicine, 47, 635–643. Cohen, G. D. (1988). The Brain in Human Aging. New York: Springer Publishing Company. Cohen, G. D. (2000). The Creative Age. New York: Avon Books. Cohen, G. D. (2001). The Creative Age: Awakening Human Potential in the Second Half of Life. New York: Harper Collins. Cohen, G. D. (2002). Depression in later life: an historic account demonstrates the importance of making the diagnosis. Geriatrics, 57, 38–39. Cohen, G. D. (2006). The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of the Aging Brain. New York: Basic Books. Cohen, G. D., Bergener, M., Hasegawa, K. and Finkel, S. I. (1989). Editorial. International Psychogeriatrics, 1, 3–4. Cohen, G. D., Perlstein, S., Chapline, J., Kelly, J., Firth, K. and Simmens, S. (2006). The impact of professionally conducted cultural programs on the physical health, mental health, and social functioning of older adults. The Gerontologist, 46, 726–734. Cohen, G. D., Perlstein, S., Chapline, J., Kelly, J., Firth, K. and Simmens, S. (2007). The impact of professionally conducted cultural programs on the physical health, mental health, and social functioning of older adults – 2-year results. Journal of Aging, Humanities and the Arts, 1, 5–22. Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain that Changes Itself. New York: Viking. Freud, S. (1978). On psychotherapy (1905). In J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), Complete Psychological Works (Volume 7). London: Hogarth Press. Gallagher, D. and Thompson, L. (1983). Effectiveness of psychotherapy for both endogenous and nonendogenous depression in older adult outpatients. Journal of Gerontology, 38, 707–712. Kempermann, G., Wiskott, L. and Gage, F. H. (2004). Functional significance of adult neurogenesis. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 14, 186–191. Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K., McGuire, L., Robles, T. F. and Glaser, R. (2002). Emotions, morbidity, and mortality: new perspectives from psychoneuroimmunology. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 83–107. Pert, C., Dreher, H. E. and Ruff, R. (1998). The psychosomatic network: foundations of mind-body medicine. Alternative Therapies, 4, 30–41. Piaget, J. (1972). Intellectual evolution from adolescence to adulthood. Human Development, 15, 1–12. Rodin, J. (1986). Aging and health: effects of the sense of control. Science, 233, 1271–1276. Rowe, J. W. and Kahn, R. L. (1987). Human aging: usual and successful. Science, 237, 143–149. Sinnott, J. D. (1999). Creativity and postformal thought: why the last stage is the creative stage. In: C. E. Adams-Price (ed.), Creativity And Successful Aging. New York: Springer Publishing Company. Willis, S. L. and Schaie, K. W. (1986). Practical intelligence in later adulthood. In: R. J. Sternberg and R. K. Wagner (eds.), Practical Intelligence: Nature and Origins of Competence in the Everyday World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1041610209008540 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:46:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S1041610209008540 https://www.cambridge.org/core work_j2ad6gu5v5hblfhoou6dlgm4ka ---- 01_Todas_as_Letras_v18_n3.indd 53 53 O gêniO e O(s) gênerO(s) de Laura erber Milena Magalhães* Resumo: Este texto trata do livro Esquilos de Pavlov, de Laura Erber, naquilo que permite pensar a questão do romance e seus transbordamentos ocasionados pelo diálogo com outros gêneros; no caso, as artes visuais e, especificamente, a fotografia. Para aventar a hipótese de que tudo se passa na literatura, ao con- trário do que possa parecer, analisa-se, primeiro, a posição da escritora na cena literária contemporânea; em seguida, estabelece-se a proximidade com os traços do romance de formação; e, por último, fazem-se as correspondências entre tex- to e fotografia, em uma leitura que busca estar próxima da composição do ro- mance. Para tanto, vale-se de estudos de Jacques Derrida e Roland Barthes acerca do gênero, bem como se dialoga com algumas autoras que pesquisam a relação entre texto e imagem, como Florencia Garramuño e Natalia Brizuela. Palavras-chave: Literatura brasileira contemporânea. Fotografia. Gênero. Veja, é assim que se passa... O tempo acaba mas o homem, ele nunca realiza nada. Quer dizer, o homem, ele fabrica sonho, ele sonha, sonha e depois é engolido pelos seus sonhos... É isso... Para que serve, então, sonhar... No fim é mesmo cômico... (VISNIEC, 2012, p. 43). Os gênerOs dO gêniO1 ■ N este texto, tratar-se-á, antes, do romance do que da escritora; e isso como prova das tantas possibilidades de escrita suscitadas por uma expressão como “literatura de autoria feminina”. Essa sobrelevação da autoria pode acarretar o desaparecimento de questões que parecem pró- * Universidade Federal do Sul da Bahia (UFSB) – Teixeira de Freitas – BA – Brasil. E-mail: milena_guidio@yahoo.com.br MiLENa MaGaLhãEs TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 54 DOSSIÊ prias a esse tema, porém é justamente essa impropriedade que torna desafia- dor o “caso” Laura Erber, artista visual, poeta, romancista, professora e crítica contemporânea, cuja obra dificilmente pode ser considerada como exemplar de uma literatura que acompanha um epíteto, embora tampouco se possa dizer que seja desprovida de uma assinatura que demarca suas concepções, o que a coloca, pela qualidade do trabalho, ao lado de escritoras que, atentas aos apri- sionamentos das formas e das posições, não se contentam em reproduzir o que se espera delas. Para utilizar uma palavra que funcionou como um operador de leitura de sua obra, no artigo “Corpos petulantes: desafios, esquivas, deri- vas”, de ana Chiara (2011), diria que a “petulância” mais evidente de Laura Erber é movimentar a copresença de mais de uma linha de força em sua obra, como a literatura e as artes visuais, em um exercício sempre plural de consti- tuição de seus espaços de atuação. Qualquer um dos seus textos carrega a possibilidade de mais de um gênero, sendo testemunhos das expansões dos campos literário e artístico brasileiros. Não seria difícil, portanto, catalogar o seu corpus como um dos exemplares da indefinição a que parece estar sujeita parte da literatura produzida atualmente. Nas resenhas sobre suas publicações, pululam frases como a dita pelo escritor e artista visual Ricardo Domeneck (2009): “sua prática artística vem se caracte- rizando pelo constante trânsito entre linguagens e pelo modo como articula re- lações e descontinuidades entre palavra, imagem e corpo”. a professora e poeta Masé Lemos (2011) também afirma: “a passagem por diversos gêneros e lingua- gens é característica do trabalho de Laura Erber”. Duas linguagens se contaminam – a arte e a literatura – de maneira mais evidente na produção dessa carioca nascida em 1979, cujas atividades transi- tam entre o ensino, o fazer artístico e o literário. No registro de seus livros publi- cados, advém sempre a dúvida se incluímos ou não um livreto como O incrível álbum de Picolina, a pulga viajante (2014) ou Águas furtadas (2014), resultado de seus trabalhos como artista visual. E essa dúvida resulta da dificuldade de delimitação. É um dos impasses que realçam de antemão os fluxos de seus tra- balhos. Poeta, publicou os livros Insones (2002), Vazados e molambos (2008) e Os corpos e os dias (2008). Em 2012, ensaísta, publicou Ghérasim Luca, na co- leção “Ciranda de poesia”, sobre o poeta romeno que estudou em seu mestrado. Em 2013, romancista, foi a vez de Esquilos de Pavlov, livro com o qual este texto dialoga. ainda há os “poemas desenhados”, Bénédicte vê o mar (2011) e Bénédic- te não se move (2014), disponíveis em formato digital. Não deve haver dúvida, portanto, de que o título é uma provocação que pers- cruta se ainda é possível suscitar a figura do gênio, num estado de coisas em que tudo remete a um duplo ter-lugar. Este texto não pretende dar resposta direta à questão, mas marcar tão somente a impressão causada por Esquilos de Pavlov, tanto no seu sentido de publicação quanto de perturbação. suscitar a palavra gênio para referir-se a Laura Erber só é possível se propiciarmos uma espécie de torção para marcar a correlação com a “generalidade dos gêneros”, utilizando uma expressão advinda a partir do vocabulário de Jacques Derrida1. Um gênio, ainda que expulso do seu caráter inumano, perturba a ordem estabelecida das 1 A leitura feita aqui é devedora não apenas do livro Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie: les secrets de l’archive, de Jacques Derrida (2003), mas, de certa maneira, carrega a ideia de “gênio não original”, de Marjorie Perloff (2013), que em seu livro analisa diversos trabalhos que rasuram a ideia de originalidade por meio de processos próximos aos de Laura Erber, como a apropriação, a citação, a recontextualização. 55 DOSSIÊ O GêNiO E O(s) GêNERO(s) DE LaURa ERBER TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 coisas, confundindo os gêneros, sejam os que se referem aos gêneros sexuais, sejam os que concernem aos gêneros literários e artísticos. Em razão de esses termos serem cada vez mais usados conjuntamente, constituindo, de fato, um novo gênero como “literatura de autoria feminina” (considerando suas nuances, também denominado de “literatura feminina”, “literatura feminista”, “literatura do feminino”), é essa “perturbação” que gostaria de ressaltar no trabalho de Erber, mas detendo-me na questão da delimitação dos gêneros literários e artísticos. sua produção perturba a genealogia, as regras da gênese, uma vez que não demarca nenhuma filiação imediata. a genialidade consistiria, consequentemente, nas di- ficuldades impostas na apropriação de seu arquivo, que é continuamente pertur- bado pela indistinção de seus trabalhos. a “perturbação dos espaços de arquiva- mento”, segundo Derrida (2003, p. 24), ao tratar de hélène Cixous, se dá devido a “procedimentos de escrita indecidíveis dos quais ainda não existe qualquer for- mulação completa”. É essa “formulação incompleta” que tem lugar cada vez mais nos discursos críticos acerca do contemporâneo, dando-se ênfase à pluralidade, à diversidade, não apenas de poéticas de diferentes escritores, mas à indetermina- ção, à inespecificidade, de poéticas distintas de um mesmo escritor. Em relação a isso, uma ressalva é importante. apesar de palavras como in- determinação, hibridismo, inespecificidade serem mais afeitas à experimenta- ção linguageira, boa parte da literatura brasileira contemporânea não investe no desarranjo da estrutura fabular. a investidura na desestruturação romanesca e, sobretudo, o ataque à gramática quase sempre se dão de maneira a manter a articulação entre as partes narrativas. a ênfase no caráter plural de muitos ro- mances contemporâneos, muitas vezes, serve tão somente para agrupar um certo número de obras, produzindo o oposto do que se pretende, uma vez que o agrupamento tende a generalizar traços que possuem sua força apenas se lidos a partir de um princípio de alteridade. seria preciso abdicar, como sugere Celia Pedrosa (2008, p. 42), de “uma figuração uniforme, positiva ou negativa, tanto do literário quanto de seu contexto”, estabelecendo […] gestos de responso, isto é, de pergunta devolvida, por meio da qual um dis- curso e a subjetividade que nele se constitui vão se afirmar através mesmo de sua própria crise, de uma diferença e uma alteridade própria a sua própria identidade [...]. Na medida das limitações, o que se pretende aqui é ensaiar um desses “ges- tos de responso”, refletindo sobre os modos como Laura Erber encena um su- posto estar-fora da literatura em um livro como Esquilos de Pavlov, estabelecen- do sua diferença, ao tratar a crise da literatura – e também das artes – como algo que lhe diz respeito e sobre a qual ela acaba por dar uma resposta ficcional. seu trânsito entre linguagens e poéticas distintas prefigura, pelo menos, uma dupla pertença. E nesse sentido, apesar de considerar de suma importância para a compreensão de práticas artísticas contemporâneas uma formulação co- mo a proposta por Florencia Garramuño (2014), que denomina de formas da impertinência, ou formas de não pertencimento, práticas que exploram o uso de meios e suportes diferentes, como faz Erber, gostaria de aventar uma hipótese que somente até certo ponto está em consonância com essa formulação. ao analisar essas formas de não pertencimento, Garramuño (2014, p. 92) “quer apontar mais para um modo ou dispositivo que evidencia uma condição da estética contemporânea”. No meu caso, o apelo à singularidade da obra de MiLENa MaGaLhãEs TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 56 DOSSIÊ Laura Erber, em que requerer seu gênio é apenas a provocação mais evidente, reconhece as constantes estruturais que constituem essa condição, mas solicita o que há de menos generalizável, isto é, a experiência de leitura do romance Esquilos de Pavlov, e de nenhum outro, naquilo que o faz um acontecimento, que o torna único nessa longa série de romances cujos interiores acolhem tantos outros gêneros. Na questão dos gêneros, seria possível considerar um gênero maior que o outro, não no sentido valorativo nem genérico, mas nos modos como se realizam a cada vez, obrigando-nos a observar cada caso? Embora em um livro coabitem mais de um gênero, seria possível identificar a cada vez qual oferece a “hospitalidade gene- rosa ao outro gênero”, sob o risco de “parasitá-lo”, “habitá-lo” (DERRiDa, 2003, p. 22)? a respeito de Cixous, Derrida (2003, p. 28) levanta tal hipótese: Nela os gêneros, aliás, não se juntam, não se justapõem. Seria fácil mostrar a partir de mil exemplos que, em sua poética geral, cada gênero permanece ele próprio, em si mesmo, oferecendo ao mesmo tempo uma hospitalidade generosa a outro gênero, ao outro de qualquer gênero que venha parasitá-lo, habitá-lo ou tornar refém seu hospedeiro, sempre segundo a mesma topodinâmica do menor maior que o maior. as fotografias seriam os parasitas de Esquilos de Pavlov, contaminando todo seu corpo; ao todo, 40 imagens do arquivo pessoal da autora, de seus amigos e de artistas contemporâneos. No entanto, não se trata de um livro de artista, tampouco catálogo de fotografias ou ensaio sobre arte. as fotografias não estão expostas a um discurso crítico. Erber, comentando sobre a presença delas, afir- ma: “Muitas imagens foram geradoras do texto, como se a escrita fosse um mo- do de criar versões possíveis que exploram a carga ficcional das fotografias”2. O efeito de contaminação, portanto, é violento e afeta a tudo; o que se explora nas fotografias é já também contágio: sua ficção. O mesmo se pode dizer de Os corpos e os dias, livro da autora, de 2008, que, na sua última parte, em papel distinto do que contém os poemas, vemos natu- rezas-mortas, às vezes, manipuladas por uma mão. O primeiro é um romance, e o segundo, um livro de poemas, mas esse reconhecimento é perturbado não apenas pelas fotografias dos dois livros, mas também pela materialidade das palavras que ora soam estranhas ao “romance”, ora à “poesia”. O transtorno é duplo. Estamos já no movimento citacional, em que o enxerto das fotografias produz incessantemente novos sentidos, engendrando textos híbridos cujas ori- gens se disseminam, o que nos lança em uma expropriação que é da ordem da iterabilidade – e penso aí na genealogia do romance e do poema para supor que os mesmos enxertos que desapropriam o gênero são também os que os identifi- cam. Esse termo, que, em Limited Inc., Derrida (1991) distingue da simples cita- ção, da simples iteração, tem um caráter transgressivo de fazer a citação dizer outra coisa que não o que se espera. Mais adiante, direi que há uma espécie de alegria no gesto citacional de Erber, como se ela percutisse o romance em movi- mentos contínuos e simultâneos de apropriação e expropriação. Nos tópicos seguintes, estando bem próxima do livro, analiso esses dois movimentos sepa- radamente: no primeiro, aponto alguns dos traços que ajudam a manter a pro- 2 Entrevista concedida a Camila von Holdefer, no site Livros abertos, logo após sua resenha sobre o livro. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 15 jul. 2016. 57 DOSSIÊ O GêNiO E O(s) GêNERO(s) DE LaURa ERBER TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 priedade do romance, como a proximidade com o romance de formação; no se- gundo, demonstro como as fotografias e as discussões sobre o campo das artes produzem o movimento contrário, em uma espécie de desapropriação do gênero. O gêniO dO gênerO Em Esquilos de Pavlov, Ciprian Momolescu narra a sua trajetória de artista nascido na Romênia durante o regime comunista de Nicolae Ceausescu, de mo- do que sua história atravessa esse período e também a sua dissolução. O per- curso do narrador-protagonista é marcado pela deriva por vários países da Eu- ropa devido a bolsas artísticas que lhe permitem, mais do que sobreviver, criar a sua condição de artista. Como Ciprian está sempre em trânsito, a palavra deriva não é por acaso. “Derivar” solicita tanto a demarcação de uma origem quanto a saída dessa origem em direção a outro lugar. a possível indefinição do lugar caracteriza-se de forma mais nítida na locução adverbial “à deriva”, que designa uma perda de controle, um desvio do caminho traçado, como quando dizemos “entregue à própria sorte”, “ao sabor das ondas”. O modo de vida de Ciprian é, assim, sem modos, cuja errância é explorada como um dos possíveis da condição do artista contemporâneo. a deriva também está representada na forma dos capítulos, cuja disposição dos títulos faz com que se assemelhem a cenas, que se abrem, muitas vezes, não para a sequenciação do enredo – entendido como encadeamento de fatos narra- dos. são “cenas de escritura” que portam os traços de cenas carregadas da as- sinatura de outrem e que estão à deriva no livro, em movimentos especificados mais adiante3. Também se pode pensar em cena como uma ação em que se passa um acontecimento, um drama, enfim, uma questão a ser resolvida e que, no entanto, fica em suspenso, evidenciando as errâncias do protagonista. a origem problemática que avança sem cálculo, sem plano, está predita em uma das falas de Ciprian: “Eu queria sair dali o mais rápido possível mas tam- bém queria tempo de crescer lentamente” (ERBER, 2013a, p. 48). a voz indecisa, que se coloca entre duas vontades aparentemente inconciliáveis, narra os seus deslocamentos iniciados na juventude, quando começa “quase por acaso a fazer umas coisas” (ERBER, 2013a, p. 48). Essas “coisas” que servem para desviar “pensamentos mais escuros” são nomeadas de arte: “Em 1986 comecei a fazer coisas que por inércia ou petulância receberam esse nome. Uma curadora de Lubliana disse estupendo estupendo e foi fogo se alastrando” (ERBER, 2013a, p. 54). apresentar o trabalho artístico de Ciprian como se fosse resultado de um acaso faz parte da estratégia da narrativa de abordar as questões da arte con- temporânea em um tom que varia entre o melancólico e o sarcástico, o que pro- duz uma dupla dessacralização: tanto da própria narrativa quanto do assunto de que trata. Um ponto é bastante contundente nesse tratamento e diz respeito aos modos de trânsito do artista no campo artístico contemporâneo, constante- mente perturbado pelos seus fins. Bem mais adiante, quando Ciprian explicita o seu fazer, definindo-o e exem- plificando-o, fica manifesta a tensão entre o passado e o presente na história da 3 Essa colocação é devedora da noção de “cena de escritura”, tratada por Derrida (1995), no livro A escritura e a diferença, no qual ele discute proposições de Freud, para, a partir daí, elaborar as noções de escrita e arquivo, tendo como uma das hipóteses de que toda escrita carrega seu traço, o que, entre outras implicações, destitui a ideia de presença plena, estando o signatário de um texto já em relação com a assinatura do outro. MiLENa MaGaLhãEs TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 58 DOSSIÊ arte. Na relação com os seus meios, se assim pode ser dito, o imaterial (perfor- mances, intervenções), que sequer pode ser compreendido, especificaria a fragi- lidade, a transitoriedade; e o material (pinturas, esculturas) significaria a pere- nidade, a eternidade, enfim, a permanência. ao descrever seu trabalho, numa cena que não por acaso é uma cena de interrogatório, como se o artista contem- porâneo tivesse sempre que prestar contas de seu ofício, de confessar o seu cri- me, o tom, embora didático, ao expor a voz castradora do investigador, evoca, na verdade, as diversas vozes que banalizam o fazer artístico contemporâneo: Tentei explicar: eu era um artista em residência, com uma bolsa de uma fundação local [...]. Disse também que já estava de saída daquele país, estava indo para Paris, sim, Paris com uma bolsa, outra bolsa, eles riram. No lugar deles eu tam- bém teria rido [...]. Eles não paravam de rir [...] Eu disse que fazia intervenções na organização dos livros. Intervenção? Rá rá rá. Insuportáveis aqueles dois. Inter- venção quer dizer uma ação pontual que interfere na lógica de uso e na compreen- são funcional dos espaços. Crio novos lugares para os livros e com isso crio de certo modo novos livros para os lugares (ERBER, 2013a, p. 132-133, grifo nosso). Essas vozes sobrepostas, em off, resumem o que Didi-huberman (2013, p. 56) chamou de “dupla banalidade do nosso tempo”, ao evocar as vozes daqueles que desconfiam de tudo que se passa no “presente”, baseados na crença de que a “ver- dade [está] do lado do passado (DiDi-hUBERMaN, 2013, p. 54). a primeira “bana- lidade” consiste no dito de que a arte acabou, e a segunda, de que, por conta dessa morte, “tudo é visível”. segundo Didi-huberman (2013, p. 191), deve-se renunciar a essa “dupla banalidade” que ele identifica como própria do esquematismo da história da arte por meio da “rasgadura” – “pelo menos fazer uma incisão, rasgar” – das imagens, sem absolutizar nem a força do ver nem do saber: [...] não se trata de modo algum de escolher um pedaço, de fatiar – saber ou ver: isso é um simples ou de exclusão, não de alienação –, mas de saber permanecer no dilema, entre saber e ver [...]. Em nenhum dos casos se trata de substituir a tirania de uma tese pela antítese. Trata-se apenas de dialetizar: pensar a tese com a antítese, a arquitetura com suas falhas, a regra com sua transgressão, o discurso com seu lapso, a função com sua disfunção (mais além de Cassirer, portanto), ou o tecido com sua rasgadura (DIDI-HUBERMAN, 2013, p. 190). apesar de a inscrição de Esquilos de Pavlov consistir na apropriação de uma grande rede de discursos, mobilizando um sem-fim de visões apocalípticas do atual estado da arte, parece apontar mais para essa “rasgadura”, e isso devido tanto ao tratamento a que as imagens são submetidas, retirando-as das asser- ções do lugar-comum, a cada vez sendo lidas de modo distinto, quanto à forma como os discursos assertivos sobre a arte são distribuídos, como vimos no tre- cho anterior, de maneira a expor suas injunções, seu autoritarismo. Para aludir a uma imagem conhecida no campo das artes, Erber escreve com a “tesoura”, recortando outros dizeres, apossando-se de discursos, mobilizando teses, reescrevendo histórias de vidas de artistas; tudo identificável até certo ponto4. Uma das passagens mais significativas em relação ao seu método da te- soura, de recorte e colagem, encontra-se logo após o fragmento intitulado 4 Faço alusão ao texto “Esse brinquedo barato: o disruptivo Jazz de Henri Matisse”, publicado por Laura Erber (2013b), no qual ela se refere à técnica do “desenho com a tesoura”, em Matisse. 59 DOSSIÊ O GêNiO E O(s) GêNERO(s) DE LaURa ERBER TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 “O discurso de Ulrikka Pavlov”. O grupo de artistas residente na instituição Das Beckwerk, presidida por Pavlov, após ouvir o discurso (colado na íntegra nas páginas 115 a 122 do livro), sentindo-se pela primeira vez como um coletivo, discute sobre o que se ouviu, cujo conteúdo, por sua vez – ficamos sabemos –, não foi exatamente o discurso que lemos no livro: O triste foi termos perdido para sempre o discurso da Senhora Pavlov. O que sobreviveu foi o que conseguimos reconstituir com a ajuda da memória de Miki e das anotações de Barbara Visser. Tudor interveio no léxico e a mim coube o trabalho de arremate. Hasse que gostava de composições barrocas deu a ideia de substituirmos uma longa explicação ininteligível por um parágrafo retirado do Manual de estilo da Arte contemporânea, de Pablo Helguera. O resultado era certamente menos inquietante do que o original, mas o próprio original era feito de retalhos de falas, entrevistas, reportagens e ensaios disseminados nas duas últimas décadas (ERBER, 2013a, p. 124). as estratégias de recorte e colagem são muitas, desde as que explicitam o método de montagem do discurso de Pavlov até as menos explícitas, como a que se refere ao nome da instituição, o qual, na verdade, alude ao projeto do artista dinamarquês Claus Beck-Nielsen, que por dez anos se autodenominou Das Beckwerk. O projeto envolveu uma série de atividades, dentre elas escritas de artigos, livros e performances. sem revelar o caráter ficcional dos textos, Claus Beck-Nielsen/Das Beckwerk escreveu, inicialmente, artigos em jornais sobre os sem-teto, em que narrava a história de um deles que não conseguia obter ajuda devido ao fato de não possuir um número de identificação pessoal. somente após a comoção da população, revelou tratar-se de um projeto artístico. O artis- ta discutiu, com seu gesto, os modos como a arte lida com a questão da identi- dade na sociedade contemporânea. há, em todo o romance, um jogo de cifragem que se relaciona também com questões como identidade, autoria, originalidade. Por exemplo, esse projeto que, no romance, se transforma no nome da institui- ção, se traduz também em duas historietas5. Ciprian cruza com os sem-teto (os sem-identidade, os sem-documento da sociedade contemporânea) em dois mo- mentos de intenso lirismo na narrativa, de modo que em Esquilos de Pavlov a inventio explicita já um processo de releitura, de tradução. Como disse em outro contexto, uma cena pode derivar de um puzzle de acon- tecimentos advindos de outros lugares, cabendo ao leitor delatar o segredo6. Eu diria que aqui os acontecimentos se disseminam no interior do texto a tal ponto que o sentido de oposição, se há, de dentro-fora perde, em definitivo, sua razão. Por outro lado, o que se descortina nas 170 páginas desse livro poderia ter uma nomeação ainda mais antiga, a qual é, inclusive, aventada na contracapa: um romance de formação. Ou melhor: as “bases do romance de formação”. No espa- ço-tempo da narrativa, a linearidade cronológica até existe, mas é comandada pelo tom mordaz e melancólico do narrador, que distende suas rememorações desde o nascimento até àquilo que pode ser o prenúncio da velhice. a formação propriamente dita é constituída por uma sucessão de encontros, desencontros e reencontros – com artistas, amigos, amantes – que ocorrem a partir das residên- 5 No programa Cidade de leitores, ao ser entrevistada por Leila Richers, Erber denomina-as historietas e pequenas fábulas con- temporâneas. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 20 jul. 2016. 6 Refiro-me ao artigo “O poeta carroceiro”, no qual analiso a obra de Marcos Siscar (MAGALHÃES, 2013). MiLENa MaGaLhãEs TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 60 DOSSIÊ cias artísticas. Encena-se a “ficção de origem” – expressão que se encontra logo no início do livro – de um modo lírico como raramente se vê na literatura brasi- leira contemporânea. E o tom de nostalgia que escorre, contido pela sagacidade mordaz, dá-nos notícia da violência do exílio voluntário. Nesse sentido, a “ficção de origem” é a dos romances de formação. Ciprian Momolescu é outro David Copperfield, um dos romances de formação mais co- nhecidos, em uma época na qual não é mais possível atentar para a possibilida- de de ser herói: “Quando nasci uns braços peludos me ergueram acima da ca- beça dos médicos. Eis o mundo, filho. será que você cabe? alguns cabem, outros entalam” (ERBER, 2013a, p. 13). No romance de Charles Dickens (2014, p. 21), publicado originalmente em livro em 1850, o heroísmo é aventado desde o início: Se serei o herói de minha própria vida, ou se essa posição será ocupada por alguma outra pessoa, é o que estas páginas devem mostrar. Para começar mi- nha vida com o começo de minha vida, registro que nasci (conforme me informa- ram e acreditei) numa sexta-feira, à meia-noite. O acontecimento que é o romance de Erber faz ressoar outros acontecimentos, marcados por assinaturas que impõem uma singularidade em que uma operação maquínica aparenta interpor-se. Derrida (2004, p. 105), no texto “a fita de máqui- na de escrever”, propõe esse aparente paradoxo: o que há de mais irredutível no acontecimento pode ser obsedado pelo programável, esteja ou não em jogo algo como a intencionalidade, sendo o que garante a sobrevivência da obra: Toda obra sobrevivente guarda o rastro dessa ambiguidade. Guarda a memória do presente que a instituiu, mas, nesse presente, já havia, quando não o projeto ao menos a possibilidade essencial desse corte, do corte com vistas a deixar um rastro, que por vezes garante a sobre-vivência mesma, se não houve desígnio de sobre-vivência. O começo “límpido como uma fábula” está, portanto, impregnado pela herança advinda da obra sobrevivente. Entretanto, não se trata de uma ligação com o origi- nal, nem mesmo uma relação paródica. O que acontece é da ordem das questões que determinam tanto o gênero quanto o seu esgarçamento. instala-se, nesse movimen- to, alguma coisa da ordem da “remodelagem dos gêneros”; possibilidade aventada em Roland Barthes por Roland Barthes. a certa altura, em um comentário sobre o próprio fazer, Barthes (2003, p. 137) escreve: “que o ensaio confesse ser quase um romance: um romance sem nomes próprios”. No livro de Erber, com os nomes pró- prios sob o manto da primeira pessoa, é possível dizer que é um romance quase ensaio. E nisso reside sua singularidade. O tom do que por economia chamamos de romance empresta sua voz ao ensaio praticamente sem suspensão do que lhe é pró- prio, salvo que essa propriedade é o tempo todo obsedada pelo tom do ensaio, cuja forma, no entanto, não ganha a prevalência. Essa propriedade, não facilmente iden- tificável, pode estar no que Barthes (2003, p. 136) nomeia por imaginário: Pois o imaginário, matéria fatal do romance e labirinto de redentes nos quais se extravia aquele que fala de si mesmo, o imaginário é assumido por várias más- caras (personae), escalonadas segundo a profundidade do palco (e no entanto ninguém por detrás). Desse modo, a estrutura narrativa de Esquilos de Pavlov, esse “livro do Eu”, recoberto pelo “imaginário”, realiza-se como se não houvesse “ninguém por de- 61 DOSSIÊ O GêNiO E O(s) GêNERO(s) DE LaURa ERBER TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 trás”, nenhum autor para comandar os acontecimentos. a presença da autora é barrada pela do narrador. afirmar que se trata das ideias da escritora, já que ela é também artista visual, seria incorrer em uma causalidade típica da crítica biográfica – e seus sucessivos enganos. ainda considerando o que Barthes afir- ma, tão mais interessante seria pressupor que pode ser um livro de “resistên- cias” às próprias ideias da autora, um livro “recessivo” que, talvez, “toma distân- cia” do trabalho artístico da autora e do próprio lugar que ela ocupa no campo artístico para poder daí lançar hipóteses sob esse campo; hipóteses que não precisam reivindicar o estatuto de teses. atentar para essas máscaras ajuda a não fazer desaparecer a dimensão do imaginário. E o cuidado com o revestimento do imaginário é uma das forças de Esquilos de Pavlov. O fato de ser um narrador-protagonista, do sexo masculino, demarca a distância autora-narrador na própria formação dos discursos que o constituem como tal. É uma persona que passa por situações típicas de um ar- tista homem, branco, europeu, que desenvolve seus trabalhos num período de abertura de seu país. O momento em que o livro, na sua operação de recorte-co- lagem, mais cede ao tom do ensaio é no discurso de Pavlov, mas o fato de ser uma cena destacada das outras, em que a voz do narrador empresta a voz a Ulrikka Pavlov, já aponta para a artificialidade do recurso. a passagem de um capítulo a outro é engendrada da seguinte maneira: “Finalmente havia chegado a noite do discurso de Ulrikka Pavlov” (ERBER, 2013a, p. 114). Não há, então, estranheza. O discurso sobre a situação da arte – e o anúncio apocalíptico de seu fim (ou, pelo menos, de seus modos de constituição) – passa a ser de inte- resse de Ciprian, tendo implicações em sua vida e no seu ser-artista. Não saímos do nível da narrativa. É nela que tudo se desenrola. ainda em relação às leis do gênero “romance de formação”, duas figuras im- bricam-se na figura do narrador Ciprian: a do viajante e a do expatriado. É uma odisseia sem retorno para casa. Novamente, a imagem do herói é interditada. sua primeira partida, por conta de uma bolsa de residência, faz derivar outras partidas que não cessam no momento de retorno para casa, e sim terminam num lugar de exílio, Paris. as viagens passam a ser um exílio voluntário. a ori- gem perde-se sem redenção, de modo que, apesar da possibilidade de retorno, sair de uma situação familiar para outra desconhecida é acolher o risco. Deri- var-se de algo e/ou de algum lugar não é, portanto, garantia de seguir para um fim determinado. E essa é uma das imagens poderosas do livro. Nos tópicos fi- nais, a viagem de retorno do narrador-protagonista aponta para a impossibilida- de de relacionar o passado à figura do “mesmo”. a derradeira chance de uma forma de existir não vivenciada até então, a partir de uma viagem desejada mais pelo afeto por pessoas do que por oportunidades de trabalho, é marcada pelo sentimento de desterritorialização. a inadequação de Ciprian vai além da sensa- ção de desconforto de sujeitos diante de situações sociais e políticas desfavorá- veis, o que, sem dúvida, é também uma das questões do livro. ao buscar as mulheres importantes de sua vida, Ciprian encontra toda uma situação outra – da ordem do incalculável e da surpresa. Resta-lhe, então, continuar. O percurso está feito. a questão do tempo e do espaço e como o homem os atravessa, sendo engolido pelos seus sonhos, sem que ao menos os pronunciem, é o suporte, o assunto, de Esquilos de Pavlov – assim como dos romances de formação. Uma passagem sem realizações – e aqui faço alusão ao que é dito em A máquina Tchékhov – carrega os traços dessa herança. a diferença com que a MiLENa MaGaLhãEs TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 62 DOSSIÊ história de Ciprian se constitui, rasurando a sua herança, faz parte também da mesma herança. a história da arte está repleta de esquilos, esses mamíferos roedores que com suas presas fortíssimas possuem grande habilidade para jun- tar e enterrar comida, para depois se alimentar na época de escassez. Não é, porém, essa habilidade que se aprecia nas pinturas clássicas de esquilos. Tra- tados como animais de estimação na era medieval e no Renascimento, ao con- trário, aparecem presos a seus donos por uma coleira ou corrente de prata ge- ralmente destacada nas imagens. Os esquilos, na arte, portanto, estão presos à vontade de seus donos, sem poderem exercer suas habilidades. É a síntese da vontade expressa por Ulrikka Pavlov, como mecenas, em seu discurso. A fOtOgrAfiA cOmO O OutrO dO rOmAnce ao contrário da história do homem da tesoura relatada por Compagnon (1996, p. 30-31), em O trabalho da citação, que lia com a tesoura nas mãos para cortar trechos que lhe desagradavam, conservando nos livros apenas as páginas que não o ofendiam, a escrita com a tesoura de Erber é de outra ordem. Os re- cortes não são condenados à desaparição. Pelo contrário, em Esquilos de Pavlov, as colagens, os enxertos, produzem associações entre texto e fotografia. Em um ensaio sobre Matisse, a escritora afirma: “Nos desenhos com tesoura, o impacto de uma cor sobre outra é resolvido sobretudo em termos de ritmo e de intensi- dade, o que conduz inevitavelmente a uma associação entre música e pintura” (ERBER, 2013a, p. 7). Em seu romance, Erber também resolve o “impacto” das 40 fotografias enxertadas entre o texto a partir de um pleno domínio do ritmo narrativo e da intensidade da disposição dos acontecimentos. Natalia Brizuela (2014), em Depois da fotografia: uma literatura fora de si, relata diversos casos na literatura brasileira em que se faz uso da fotografia, analisando alguns livros de Bernardo Carvalho e Nuno Ramos. Em nenhum desses trabalhos, no entanto, há um acúmulo tão grande de fotografias quanto no de Erber, nem a sua menção é tão constante. Em Esquilos de Pavlov, as ima- gens formam uma espécie de cartografia. são como clarões no meio das páginas, ora servindo de passagem aos parágrafos, ora cortando frases ao meio. a maio- ria é colocada depois do fim de um parágrafo e antes do início de outro, mas outras estão entre eles, entram neles, criando um só corpo, ao mesmo tempo textual e imagético. são fotografias-narrativas. Entretanto, não são ilustrativas, no sentido de preencherem vazios textuais. Pode-se dizer que, como um compó- sito, formam outros textos. as imagens são de procedências autorais distintas, advindas de arquivos pessoais7. Nas páginas em que se encontram, não há nenhuma assinatura que as distinga de imediato. além de Laura Erber, os arcontes são Karl Erik schol- lhammer, teórico e crítico da literatura, com quem a escritora fundou, em 2015, a Zazie Edições, pequena editora independente especializada em livros digitais de artes; anna sokolova, ilustradora, artista e designer russa, que vive atual- mente em Berlim; sophie Nys, artista belga, nascida na antuérpia, que desen- volve seus trabalhos em Bruxelas e Zurique; e, por fim, aleksei Kazantsev, fotó- grafo de origem russa, que vive e trabalha também em antuérpia, na Bélgica. 7 As informações dos créditos das imagens estão disponíveis no verso da folha de rosto do romance, no qual se indica o número das páginas de cada imagem e a quem pertence o arquivo. 63 DOSSIÊ O GêNiO E O(s) GêNERO(s) DE LaURa ERBER TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 Pelo menos, dois desses artistas que cedem as fotografias se transformam em personagens do romance de Erber. sophie Nys é a “garota belga, [que] fazia um vernissage improvisado no seu quarto com cerveja polonesa amarga comprada em um quiosque clandestino” (ERBER, 2013a, p. 66). sua única fotografia é uma daquelas que atravessam um trecho do romance, amalgamando-se nele. Em pri- meiro plano, ocupando cerca de um terço da fotografia, um grupo de pessoas conversa; nos outros dois terços, com um efeito de profundidade, figuras geomé- tricas compõem o formato retangular de um quadro. a fotografia descreveria, as- sim, o vernissage narrado por Ciprian quando encontra Nys? E o trecho no qual irrompe a fotografia é de conversas típicas de encontros entre artistas (“Como é a passagem do projeto ao ato? Você é mais intuitivo ou do tipo socrático? acha que o mercado é um incentivo ou execrável? É casado? Foi a Cuba? E Moscou? Por que não? Com quantos bons projetos se faz um bom artista? [...]” – ERBER, 2013a, p. 55-54)? sim e não. Por associação, sem dúvida, salvo que tanto o trecho quan- to a fotografia estão citados nas páginas 53 a 54, e nada ali explicita essa relação. No romance, aleksei Kazantsev é O marido de Luda [que] era um sujeito de Minsk, de família digna [...]. Foi envia- do para uma fábrica de filmes AGFA nos arredores de Antuérpia. Um emprego administrativo, sem grandes atrativos além da garantia de um salário todo fim de mês. Mas a moça não soube dizer onde Aleksei vivia agora, pois havia mais de ano que chegavam envelopes semanais com fotos que ele enviava pelo cor- reio e cada vez o selo indicava uma cidade diferente (ERBER, 2013a, p. 161). Mais uma vez, o procedimento é o mesmo. Deduz-se que as fotos que chegam semanalmente formam a coleção de fotos que, pouco antes, Ciprian descreve quando visita Luda, uma das mulheres por quem se apaixonou durante a resi- dência na instituição Das Beckwerk, em Copenhague. No quarto com Luda, agora moribunda, seu olhar desvia-se do corpo adormecido e pode, enfim, olhar ao redor: “só então reparei sobre as paredes do quarto uma série de pequenas imagens em preto e branco, uma delas, a que mais me reteve, mostrava um de- do enfiado num ralo de pia” (ERBER, 2013a, p. 160). a fotografia com essa des- crição está na página 46 do romance, antes de uma passagem em que o narra- dor, no meio de uma série de elucubrações, diz: “eu também usei frases dos meus livros prediletos como se fossem minhas”. Mais adiante, em trecho ante- rior a uma fotografia de Laura Erber na qual há a expressão latina tempus fugit, há outro trecho que parece referir-se à mesma fotografia: “No fim da vida, encon- traria uma pia com um ralo escuro para deixar escorrer suas piores lembranças, mais ou menos como eu” (ERBER, 2013a, p. 49). O porvir é previsto por meio da prolepse, a qual antecipa a relação problemática do narrador com o tempo. Penso que esses exemplos dão conta de especificar as relações intricadas entre imagem e texto no romance de Erber. O puzzle de acontecimentos volteia desordenadamente, de uma página a outra, demarcando origens múltiplas para o que acontece, em um movimento de aparição-desaparição das imagens no texto, o que força o leitor a se perguntar a todo momento se determinada cena é uma narração ou uma descrição. há um misto de rigor e fascínio por aquilo que se dá a ver, advindo da liberdade composicional que produz uma rasgadura nos modos de se ler, pois são imagens exigentes, que não se contentam apenas com uma descrição associada ao seu contexto de fotografia. aqui, a moldura das fo- tografias é o texto. há uma espécie de direcionamento dos modos de ver, que MiLENa MaGaLhãEs TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 64 DOSSIÊ advém dos arranjos feitos por Erber, que “[n]ão nos diz[em] o que devemos olhar, mas como olhar o que vemos” (aRassE, 2014, p. 23). Essa frase, dita pelo críti- co francês Daniel arasse, a respeito da pintura Anunciação (c. 1470-1472), de Francesco Del Cossa, preconiza um novo tipo de olhar, mais livre das leituras instituídas pelo campo artístico, instigando associações ainda não experimenta- das, mas perfeitamente possíveis, se se deflagrar uma escrita expansiva, poten- cialmente infinita em suas correspondências. as cenas em que Luda e Ciprian se encontram no apartamento dela (na pri- meira, a convite e, na segunda, quando vai procurá-la anos depois) apontam uma dessas associações a partir da qual se forma uma estrutura especular. ambas são marcadas pelo silêncio e pela irrupção de outra cena na cena. No primeiro encontro, é a janela que funciona como um “filme”: [...] o grande vidro da janela me salvou, porque era grande e porque era vidro e funcionava como um filme e me permitia dar àquela nova amiga o tempo que ela precisasse para se recompor ou me pedir para sair. Uma menina vinha de bici- cleta. Um cachorro manco andava rumo ao meio-fio. Uma ruiva decidida. Um carro vermelho passou varado (ERBER, 2013a, p. 84). No último encontro, é a televisão que proporciona a abertura: Fiquei ali durante uma hora talvez, em silêncio, Luda semiadormecida, mas ainda sentada, na mesma posição diante da televisão onde o Snoopy bebia drinques cor-de-rosa no maravilhoso quintal da Patty Pimentinha. Quando o desenho terminou Luda pediu de novo e de novo e de novo. Finalmente adorme- ceu (ERBER, 2013a, p. 160). Em todas as duas, é a presença da ausência de Luda que fica nítida. são vários momentos como esses que sofrem algum tipo de interferência ex- terna, com a irrupção de alguma outra imagem que não a que está sendo lança- da. as diversas máquinas de ver – janela, televisão, fotografias – perfuram o andamento narrativo, criando outro, por meio do efeito ecfrástico: “De repente senti Pernille me cutucar no pescoço com a ponta de alguma coisa. Era uma foto de muro e diante dele uma pessoa numa pose curiosa, acariciando o muro talvez [...]” (ERBER, 2013a, p. 104). Outras vezes, é a narração dos efeitos da fotografia. No seu discurso, Ulrikka Pavlov refere-se a Miroslav Tichy, fotógrafo tcheco cuja atividade marginal, de certo modo, condiz com o discurso de ruptu- ra com o establishment artístico propagado por ela: [...] um jovem [...] saía todas as manhãs com uma câmera fotográfica de brinque- do, feita de papelão e latas de sardinha. [...] Fiquei muito nervosa quando che- gamos a um horto florestal e ele começou a fotografar de bem perto, embora sem se deixar ver, uma mulher que estava estirada na grama pegando sol de biquíni com uma toalha sobre o rosto [...]. O voyeur era Miroslav Tichy, o menino Mogli da fotografia checa [...]. Eu também não sei, mas poucas vezes vi algo tão como- vente e excitante quanto Tychi fotografando as mulheres de biquíni da sua cida- de (ERBER, 2013a, p. 117-118). Creio não ser preciso dizer que a relação com o fotógrafo tcheco é também aproximativa. Embora sua história seja narrada em um registro próximo ao que se diz sobre ele na história recente da arte, trata-se de uma citação que mantém a indecidibilidade entre o fato e a ficção. 65 DOSSIÊ O GêNiO E O(s) GêNERO(s) DE LaURa ERBER TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 Na cena de interrogatório já aludida anteriormente, o procedimento corriquei- ro de reconhecimento de culpados por meio de fotos também estabelece novas relações com a visão. sem saber quem deve reconhecer, Ciprian cria outras cor- respondências, que têm a ver com a alegria da desobediência à lei (são soldados que o questionam, sem que ele mesmo saiba a razão). E ao falar em alegria, pen- so nos procedimentos de leitura de arasse (2014, p. 6), que, em suas críticas de arte não convencionais, como em “Cara Giulia”, no livro Não se vê nada, instiga, de modo irônico, sua interlocutora a distanciar-se dos “guardas de cemitério que se entrincheiram na pretensa dignidade da sua disciplina” e “fazer com alegria a história da arte”. Em contraposição à dignidade da lei, a alegria da imaginação: O homem não disse nada, abriu um envelope e despejou um monte de fotos sobre a mesa. Num tom muito neutro perguntou se eu conhecia as pessoas na- quelas fotos. Eu não conhecia. Numa delas havia uma mulher nua que poderia ter sido a jovem Senhora Ulrikka Pavlov. Numa outra um homem que poderia ser Iancu aos 50 se ele tivesse chegado lá com um chapéu-panamá e um amor de saia rodada. [...] Mas eu poderia dizer, se quisesse: eis a estória da minha vida. Esse sou eu tocando violão, essa é sicrana, esse é beltrano pai de fulano irmão de fulana (ERBER, 2013a, p. 134). Esse poder-dizer que leva a cena para além-da-cena, criando-as e recriando- -as continuamente, abrange todo o romance por meio de processos de incorpo- ração e transformação. a história de Ciprian cede lugar a muitas micro-histórias sobre as pessoas que ele encontra nos lugares por onde passa. E essa cessão se dá, sobretudo, pelo uso do nome próprio; ou melhor, o uso de nomes próprios que não o seu, cujos correlatos pertencem, primeiro, ao “real”, ganhando caráter ficcional quando, no romance, alguns de seus traços são usados para compor os acontecimentos a que estão ligados. Tomam-se de empréstimo, por assim dizer, diversos nomes, geralmente de artistas, sem descaracterizá-los, mas também sem garantir-lhes nenhuma fidelidade biográfica. a desapropriação é, portanto, uma constante. O fluxo narrativo da história de Ciprian deixa-se invadir por outras à maneira do hipertexto, pois, devido à enorme recorrência dos referentes intertextuais, o leitor logo percebe que cada nome próprio que surge é a promes- sa de outras histórias, de modo que a tentação de saber mais sobre cada uma das personagens citadas – e não criadas, como se diz comumente – é enorme. Funcionando como índices, as referências compõem um imenso catálogo de ar- tistas contemporâneos, que transitam nos mais diversos gêneros artísticos: fo- tografia, artes visuais, performances etc. O princípio de contaminação que norteia a composição do romance, como já dito, faculta ao gênero um lugar fronteiriço. E à guisa de conclusão, cabe per- guntar se a metáfora da fronteira ainda é suficientemente forte para sustentar o que acontece em um livro como esse e, mesmo, para descrever o estado de coi- sas da literatura contemporânea. Ou se, ao contrário, é já uma metáfora gasta que não dá conta de responder às injunções críticas que surgem a todo momen- to. E um não dar-conta que não necessariamente tem a ver com uma possível im-potência da palavra diante do que acontece. Gostaria de arriscar, como o prenúncio de uma pesquisa, se não o contrário, pelo menos uma saída, cuja proposição coloca em suspenso o atravessamento das fronteiras, mais no seu sentido de passagem do que de retardamento. afirmar a passagem de limites, parece-me, seria destruir a metáfora, concluindo que não há mais fronteiras, ou MiLENa MaGaLhãEs TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 66 DOSSIÊ seja, seria afirmar que a literatura agora é outra coisa que não aquilo que supor- ta as contaminações e, portanto, não carrega mais seu nome. a escolha por um suporte como o livro de Erber, aparentemente, dificulta a hipótese de que se deve “permanecer no dilema”, mas talvez possa deixá-la mais evidente. apesar da carga conceitual de Esquilos de Pavlov, não se reconhece uma justaposição de gêneros. Dito de outro modo, talvez ingênuo, em nenhum momento levanta-se a dúvida de que não seja um gênero ligado à literatura, seja romance, seja novela. apesar de outros gêneros o atravessarem, como de- monstrado, não há confusão quanto à sua identidade, o que não é o mesmo – e isso é importante frisar – de dizer que não haja perturbação nessa identidade. antes que se diga, há duas questões tratadas aqui como se fossem uma só e é importante distingui-las. O romance não está sendo visto como sinônimo de literatura, embora seus conceitos estejam intrinsecamente ligados, mas, sim, como pertencentes ao mesmo campo de discussão. Quando examino a possibi- lidade de não ter havido passagem, de não estarmos em um “fora”, levo em con- sideração que essa passagem somente deveria se dar se fosse para algo ainda não conhecido, ainda sem nome. ao transportarmos o campo literário para outro campo igualmente sujeito à interferência, como o artístico, realizamos um movi- mento, no mínimo, ambíguo. Mantemos os nomes – arte, estética, como se quei- ra – e passamos a considerar que esses, sim, suportam o enxerto, a contamina- ção, a interferência, os quais o outro nome – no caso, a literatura – não suporta senão à custa de seu próprio desaparecimento. Decerto, essa lógica é herdeira de todo um pensamento que liga a sobrevivência de algo como a literatura à sua própria possibilidade de desaparição. Em relação a isso, gostaria de lembrar que esses gestos de desaparição normalmente estão relacionados a obras limítrofes – como a de Kafka, Joyce, Beckett etc. – que, por fim, comprovaram ser possível dar toda sorte de estocadas à literatura e, ainda assim ou por conta disso, ga- rantir a sua sobrevivência. há uma sutileza que não deve ser desconsiderada: não se trata de descentrar para criar outro centro mais adiante – no caso, o ar- tístico. O movimento de descentramento deveria abarcar tudo ou, no mínimo, barrar a sacralização de outra prática, senão perde-se a sua potência. De fato, pode-se ler um livro como Esquilos de Pavlov sem se perguntar se é ou não literatura, mas, a partir do momento em que se faz essa pergunta, não me parece produtivo deslocá-la, garantindo a impossibilidade de lê-lo como lite- ratura, devido aos corpos estranhos enxertados em sua composição. De certo modo, é o que me parece fazer Josefina Ludmer (2010), em Literaturas pós-autô- nomas. Logo no início do texto, ela afirma: Muitas escrituras do presente atravessam a fronteira da literatura (os parâme- tros que definem o que é literatura) e ficam dentro e fora, como em posição dias- pórica: fora, mas presas em seu interior. [...] Aparecem como literatura, mas não se pode lê-las com critérios ou categorias literárias como autor, obra, estilo, es- critura, texto e sentido (LUDMER, 2010, p. 1). Uma reflexão como essa, tamanha a sua justeza, é difícil de rebater, no en- tanto gostaria de arriscar uma ressalva. a rapidez com que as palavras são agrupadas pode originar concepções estanques. Tratá-las da mesma maneira é empobrecê-las. se palavras como autor, obra, estilo são carregadas de sentidos teleológicos, outras como escritura e texto surgiram, de certo modo, em contra- posição a esses mesmos sentidos. a própria palavra escritura foi forjada em ra- 67 DOSSIÊ O GêNiO E O(s) GêNERO(s) DE LaURa ERBER TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 zão dos limites da noção de literatura e, vale lembrar, surgiu justamente em uma época de extrema intolerância com qualquer análise que se reportasse a noções como contexto, vivência, como foi o estruturalismo. O fato de serem co- locadas como “categorias literárias” apaga essas diferenças. Talvez seja preferível pensar que a expansão do literário esteja a serviço tam- bém da reafirmação de seu lugar no qual todas as correspondências sejam possí- veis. se há alguma distinção da literatura em relação a outras disciplinas (e pode- ríamos pensar nas circunvizinhas como a filosofia, a sociologia, a antropologia), é essa abertura ao poder dizer tudo. isso produz não apenas proximidades, mas também tensões, deslocamentos, rupturas, que, no entanto, não resultam apenas em um “fora de si”. Essa desapropriação da literatura não é desprovida do traba- lho de resistência e daí ser preciso avaliar não apenas o “fora”, mas também o “dentro”, o “entre”, o “antes”, o “além”, da lei da obra. Pensando em uma expres- são como “oni-potência-outra” que Derrida (2003) empresta de Cixous, talvez pos- sa dizer que a potência da literatura, sua toda-potência-outra, consiste em man- ter o indecidível, barrando a escolha de um desses termos. apresentando um “exemplo de indecidibilidade”, Derrida (2003, p. 26) discorre: [...] – lá, na impossibilidade em que se encontra o leitor de escolher entre o acon- tecimento fictício, inventado, sonhado, o acontecimento imaginado (inclusive a imaginação do acontecimento que não existe) ou o acontecimento tido como “real”, lá, nessa situação criada ao leitor, mas também ao bibliotecário e ao ar- quivista, lá se encontra o próprio segredo do que se designa comumente sob o nome de literatura. Levando em consideração todos os “segredos” que Laura Erber expõe à nossa vista, marcados pela indecisão entre “o acontecimento fictício, inventado, so- nhado, o acontecimento imaginado [...] ou o acontecimento tido como ‘real’”, o literário é o espaço em que ela usufrui da grande herança que é incessantemen- te gasta por todos aqueles que a recebem, ao mesmo tempo, tornando-a ainda maior, abrindo uma cadeia infinita de coabitações, para retomar a ideia de “hos- pitalidade generosa” aventada inicialmente. Em síntese, tudo se passa na litera- tura, nesse lugar constantemente posto à prova e que se deixa estar à prova. Por último, talvez porque o título Esquilos de Pavlov jogue com nosso repertó- rio mais imediato, remetendo-nos inevitavelmente à ideia de condicionamento, mas desloque o animal do seu experimento (passa dos cachorros de ivan Pavlov para os esquilos da história da arte), como a nos forçar a ver a diferença, seja preciso dizer que intentei também deslocar uma ideia forte, que é a de ruptura dos gêneros, no momento mesmo em que essa ruptura parece estar mais eviden- te e a palavra “gênero” pareça ser ainda mais démodé. E se isso me parece pos- sível é devido a uma certa indisciplina, que é distinta do gesto interdisciplinar. O esforço foi o de retornar a um princípio quase impossível: diante de tantas rasu- ras, tantos cortes, é possível reconhecer, ainda, um romance na inscrição de Erber? a tendência crítica seria responder que não. Ela rompe com as “clausu- ras” do gênero, fazendo ver uma “lei de impureza” na lei instituída, visto que é cada vez mais difícil confinar um texto a um só gênero. No fundo, abdicar da ideia de “não pertencimento” e reiterar a hipótese de uma “pertença sem perten- ça”, reconhecendo que a primeira é devedora da segunda, significa apontar para outra hipótese igualmente arriscada, que é a de sobrevivência e talvez requerê-la seja necessário em razão de vivermos em um tempo em que as metáforas demo- MiLENa MaGaLhãEs TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 68 DOSSIÊ ram a ser compreendidas. Provavelmente, por tempo demais o espaço literário afirmou-se a partir da ideia de desaparecimento a ponto de agora ser preciso re-afirmar: sim, isto é literatura. É uma prática literária. É uma prática do literá- rio – ainda que seja preciso continuamente rasurar a sua carga teleológica. the genius And the genre(s) Of LAurA erber Abstract: This text deals with the book Esquilos de Pavlov, by Laura Erber, for it allows us to consider the issues of the novel and of its spillovers induced by the dialogues established with other genres; in this case, with the visual arts and, specifically, with photography. To suggest the hypothesis that everything is related to Literature, contrary to what it may seem, firstly, the writer’s posi- tion in the contemporary literary scene is analyzed; secondly, the proximity with the characteristics of the novel of formation is established and, finally, the correspondences between text and photography, aiming at a close reading of the composition of the novel. Therefore, this text uses the studies of Jacques Der- rida and of Roland Barthes about the genre, as well it dialogues with authors who research the relationship between text and image, such as Florencia Gar- ramuño and Natalia Brizuela. Keywords: Contemporary Brazilian literature. Photography. Genre. referênciAs aRassE, D. Não se vê nada. Tradução R. P. Cabral. Lisboa: KKYM, 2014. BaRThEs, R. Roland Barthes por Roland Barthes. Tradução L. Perrone-Moisés. são Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2003. BRiZUELa, N. Depois da fotografia: uma literatura fora de si. Tradução C. Nou- gué. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2014. ChiaRa, a. Corpos petulantes: desafios, esquivas, derivas. Revista Letras, Curi- tiba, n. 84, p. 59-75, jul./dez. 2011. COMPaGNON, a. O trabalho da citação. Tradução C. P. B. Mourão. Belo hori- zonte: Editora UFMG, 1996. DERRiDa, J. Limited Inc. Tradução C. M. Cesar. Campinas: Papirus, 1991. DERRiDa, J. A escritura e a diferença. Tradução M. B. M. N. da silva. são Paulo: Perspectiva, 1995. DERRiDa, J. Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie: les secrets de l’archive. Paris: Galilée, 2003. DERRiDa, J. a fita de máquina de escrever. in: DERRiDa, J. Papel-máquina. Tradução E. Nascimento. são Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2004. DiCKENs, C. David Copperfield. Tradução J. R. siqueira. são Paulo: Cosac Nai- fy, 2014. DiDi-hUBERMaN, G. Diante da imagem. Questão colocada aos fins de uma história da arte. Tradução P. Neves. são Paulo: Editora 34, 2013. DOMENECK, R. Dois livros de Laura Erber. Ricardo Demencock blog, 24 mar. 2009. Disponível em: . acesso em: 6 jan. 2017. 69 DOSSIÊ O GêNiO E O(s) GêNERO(s) DE LaURa ERBER TODas as LETRas, são Paulo, v. 18, n. 3, p. 53-69, set./dez. 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v18n3p53-69 ERBER, L. Os corpos e os dias: body and days. Tradução R. s. Carvalho. são Paulo: Editora da Cultura, 2008. Edição bilíngue. ERBER, L. Esquilos de Pavlov. Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2013a. ERBER, L. Esse brinquedo barato: o disruptivo Jazz de henri Matisse. O perce- vejo online, Rio de Janeiro, v. 5, n. 1, p. 1-14, jan./jul. 2013b. GaRRaMUÑO, F. Formas da impertinência. in: KiFFER, a.; GaRRaMUÑO, F. Expansões contemporâneas: literatura e outras formas. Belo horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2014. p. 91-108. LEMOs, M. Experimentações literárias em formato digital. O Globo, 15 out. 2011, p. 3. Disponível em: . acesso em: 6 jan. 2017. LUDMER, J. Literaturas pós-autônomas. Tradução F. Cera. Sopro. Panfleto po- lítico-cultural. Desterro, jan. 2010, p. 1-6. MaGaLhãEs, M. O poeta carroceiro. Estudios Portugueses y Brasileños 13, salamanca, n. 13, p. 155-173, 2013. PEDROsa, C. Poesia contemporânea. Crise, mediania e transitividade (uma poética do comum. in: PEDROsa, C.; aLVEs, i. Subjetividades em devir: estu- dos de poesia moderna e contemporânea. Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras, 2008. p. 41-50. PERLOFF, M. O gênio não original. Poesia por outros meios no novo século. Tradução a. scandolara. Belo horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2013. VisNiEC, M. A máquina Tchékhov. Tradução R. Mallet. são Paulo: Realizações Editora, 2012. Recebido em agosto de 2016. aprovado em novembro de 2016. work_j52g66khljas5apbqzejujmomm ---- 508 ARTÍCULO ESPECIAL Rev Med Chile 2017; 145: 508-513 Paul Cézanne, el solitario padre de la pintura moderna Marcelo Miranda Paul Cézanne, the lonely precursor of modern painting Paul Cézanne is an acknowledged pioneer of modern painting. His work was poorly recognized during most of his solitary life. He progressively withdrew from people and society during his life, in part due to his introverted personality and a supreme effort to obtain a unique form of expression of his art, in which nature and its inner secrets played a pivotal role. In this review, we discuss aspects of his life and art, his pathological personal relationships and how they influenced his transcendental work. (Rev Med Chile 2017; 145: 508-513) Key words: Medicine in Art; Neural Pathways; Neurosciences; Paintings. Departamento de Neurología. Clínica Las Condes, Santiago, Chile. Recibido el 5 de mayo de 2016, aceptado el 22 de octubre de 2016. Correspondencia: Dr. Marcelo Miranda Antonio Varas 175 of 302 marcelomirandac@gmail.com 5103 “Quisiera asombrar a París con una manzana”. Paul Cézanne, 1895 P aul Cézanne (1839-1906) permanece como uno de los más grandes, originales e in- fluyentes pintores de la historia del arte. Según Pablo Picasso y Henri Matisse, “Cézanne es el padre de todos nosotros”1. En el desarrollo de su arte influyeron de manera fundamental aspectos de su vida familiar que determinaron su peculiar carácter. Cézanne nació en Aix-en-Pro- vence, Francia, primer hijo de 3 que tuvieron Louis-Auguste Cézanne y Anne-Elisabeth Hono- rine Aubert. Cézanne tuvo 2 hermanas, Marie y Rose, de las cuales sólo Marie tuvo una estrecha relación con él1-4. Su padre, un comerciante de sombreros, llegó a ser un exitoso banquero. Ejerció una tiránica influencia sobre su hijo, oponiéndose a sus inquietudes artísticas. Paul Cézanne jamás pudo liberarse de la influencia paterna y dependió económicamente de él gran parte de su vida. Sólo en los últimos años, cuando ya había logrado cierto éxito, pudo independi- zarse en el aspecto material. Sin embargo, en el aspecto emocional, siempre estará presente la figura autoritaria del padre. Tal fue la influencia de su progenitor, que mantuvo oculta por más de 6 años su relación con Hortense Fiquet, la que fue su única relación amorosa. La conoció a los 30 años y tuvieron un único hijo, también llamado Paul, que nació en 18721-4. Sin embargo, gracias a la fortuna que le dejó su padre al morir, en 1886, 400.000 francos y su casa, Cézanne pudo, a partir de 1888, dedicarse sin apre- mios sólo a su arte. Esto contrasta completamente con la situación de gran parte de los artistas de esa época, salvo Toulouse- Lautrec, quienes sufrieron grandes apuros económicos1. Se relación con Émile Zola Cézanne mantuvo una estrecha relación de amistad con Émile Zola, que había empezado en la infancia cuando ambos asistían a la misma escuela básica en su tierra natal. Zola influyó po- sitivamente a Cézanne para que desarrollara sus habilidades artísticas y fuera a París a perfeccionar su arte. Así Zola le escribió a Cézanne: “cobra pues nuevo valor, coge otra vez tu pincel y dale rienda suelta a tu fantasía. Yo creo en ti”1,3. La correspondencia entre ambos es numerosa 509 ARTÍCULO ESPECIAL Paul Cézanne padre de la pintura moderna - M. Miranda Rev Med Chile 2017; 145: 508-513 y Cézanne llegó a ser padrino de bodas de Zola. En 1886, la relación se rompió por Cézanne, quien se sintió ofendido por reconocer rasgos suyos en el personaje principal de la novela “La obra” de Zola, el artista Claude Lantier, quien acaba suicidándo- se. Zola, por otro lado, también ofendido, en una editorial de Le Figaro, reniega del valor artístico de Cézanne, llamándolo “un gran talento abortado”. A pesar de esa aseveración, Zola conservó al menos una docena de cuadros de Cézanne1-4. El carácter de Cézanne Cézanne era de carácter huraño, hermético, taciturno, muy terco, perseverante, de maneras toscas y considerado como “mal educado” en su trato social (Figura 1)1-8. Muy inseguro de sí mismo, ironizaba y consideraba que se reían de él cuando era alabado por su arte. Era tal su in- seguridad que demoraba demasiado en terminar una obra por constantes retoques a sus modelos humanos, que fueron muy escasos, los hacía posar incontables veces; por ejemplo, a su marchante Ambroise Voillard lo hizo posar 115 veces para un cuadro que no llegó a terminar1-5. A su esposa Hortense la retrató unas 25 veces durante un período de 20 años5,7-9, sin variar demasiado la postura. Pintó con muy pocos modelos por sus problemas de interrelación humana y patológica timidez con la mujer, no toleraba tener modelos mujeres desnudas y prefería pintar de imaginación los desnudos de sus cuadros. A Renoir le confiden- ció: “Yo pinto bodegones. Los modelos femeninos me asustan, todo el tiempo están al acecho para atacar por sorpresa”1. Cézanne, a pesar de sus maneras toscas, era una persona de gran cultura, que podía recitar de memoria tanto versos en latín como lo más nuevo en literatura. El permanente alarde de inconfor- mismo ha de ser interpretado como una protesta ante los convencionalismos, al que Cézanne tra- taba de contraponer una genialidad todavía muy incompleta e incomprendida. El arte de Cézanne Cézanne nunca se sintió cómodo en el am- biente de París, se sentía provinciano y prefería serlo. Su relación con los impresionistas fue ambigua, los criticaba esencialmente, pues para Cézanne el arte no pasaba por copiar la naturale- za sino expresar las emociones que la naturaleza motiva en el ser humano, develar la real esencia de la naturaleza. En esta búsqueda y necesidad de lograr algo nuevo se aparta de los impresionistas, si bien recibe importante influencia de Camille Pizarro y Claude Monet1. Pizarro, particularmen- te, le enseña a pintar al aire libre y se aprecia un notorio cambio en el colorido de los cuadros de Cézanne desde ese período. Monet expresó sobre Cézanne: “Qué mala fortuna que este hombre no haya contado con mejor apoyo en su experiencia. Es un artista auténtico, pero ha llegado tan lejos, que duda demasiado de sí mismo”1-4. Cézanne decidió, entonces, recluirse definitivamente en su ambiente natal, perfeccionarse y hacer su propio camino. Para Cézanne “pintar un cuadro significa componer… una gran sensibilidad es la dispo- sición más propicia para una buena concepción artística”. Cézanne fue en búsqueda, no de la luz como lo muestra la superficie de los objetos que fue la motivación de los impresionistas, sino la geometría como se vislumbra más allá de esa superficie. A través de variaciones del color ob- jetiva los planos geométricos que él esperaba le permitirían mostrar la estructura de los objetos dando una masa y solidez que aumentaría su realidad. De los motivos habituales de los cuadros de Cézanne, sus bañistas, montañas, jugadores de cartas, su esposa Hortensia, quizás ninguna es tan familiar como las naturalezas muertas, especialmente sus manzanas: estas junto a jarros, botellas, manteles, se repiten una y otra vez (Fi- guras 2-4)1,7-9. El mismo Cézanne reconoce su predilección y mayor perfección en esta forma de representación artística y así se explica su frase de 1895 “asombraré a París con una manzana”1. Constituyen verdaderos cilindros, esferas y co- nos que crean la geometría de la naturaleza que deseaba mostrar. Cézanne logró reconocimiento en vida más por sus naturalezas muertas que por retratos o paisajes, a menudo considerados por la crítica más benévola como distorsionados y primitivos (Figura 5), sus bodegones rara vez dejaban impasibles a algún observador cono- cedor de arte1. Las obras de Cézanne, más que cuadros, reflejan pensamientos. La belleza, según Cézanne, tal como el alma de otra persona, no se puede poseer, solo puede apreciarse y para aquellos que tienen la voluntad, compartirla de 510 ARTÍCULO ESPECIAL Figura 5. Los grandes bañistas. 1898-1905. Museo de Arte de Filadelfia. Figuras 1 . Tanto en la fotografía de Cézanne de 1874, a los 34 años, camino a pintar (A), como en el autorretrato de 1873-6, París, Museo de Orsay (B), es evidente, como en la mayoría de sus otros autorretratos, el rostro serio, atormentado del artista. Figura 2. Figuras 2 a 4 muestran el extraordinario colorido de los bodegones de Cézanne Naturaleza muerta con manzana y naranjas.1895-1900. París, Museo de Orsay. Figura 3. Naturaleza muerta con cortina, 1898-9. Museo del Hermitage, San Petersburgo. Figura 4. La cesta de manzanas.1895. Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection. Paul Cézanne padre de la pintura moderna - M. Miranda Rev Med Chile 2017; 145: 508-513 511 ARTÍCULO ESPECIAL alguna manera misteriosa. Su visión, más allá del Impresionismo, queda reflejada en su afir- mación: “quiero hacer del Impresionismo algo sólido y duradero, como el arte de los museos” y para esto decía que “recreaba al artista clásico francés Nicolas Poussin a través de la naturaleza”, lo que implica su deseo de unificar su forma de observar la naturaleza con la permanencia de la composición clásica1,3,4. Cézanne trató de expresar la totalidad de la forma, dando al objeto en su tela su real forma y volumen. Pintaba directamente, no dibujaba previamente, sus figuras eran modeladas prác- ticamente por la pintura. Modela con el color y, a diferencia de los impresionistas, se adhiere al colorido natural. Sentía que la luz no podía sobreagregarse sino que ser producida por medio del mismo color. Creaba la impresión de líneas también a través del color. Hasta esa fecha, la re- presentación del espacio había sido lograda por la perspectiva y claroscuros. Los impresionistas sacri- ficaron todo a la interpretación de la luz, Cézanne cambia este sistema al hacer la interpretación de la luz una forma de interpretar el espacio. Utilizó el color para representar la luz y sugerir volumen, mientras que con la correcta interpretación de los tonos consigue crear las formas1. Joris-Karl Huysmans, poeta simbolista, quiso atribuirle a Cézanne un defecto visual a raíz de su particular falta de perspectiva en sus cuadros. Huysmans comentó respecto de las naturalezas muertas de Cézanne: “expuestas a plena luz sobre platos de porcelana o sobre manteles blancos, se ven peras y manzanas plasmadas en grandes trazos y modeladas con el pulgar; visto de cerca, el cuadro parece un desorden caótico de rojo vivo y amarillo, verde y azul. Más, si se guarda la distancia adecua- da, se convierten en frutas suculentas y jugosas que despiertan el apetito. Y de pronto, se percibe una verdad completamente nueva, nunca antes percibida, tonalidades extrañas y no obstante rea- les, manchas de color de una originalidad única, sombras que se proyectan por detrás de las frutas, sobre el mantel, mágicas en su colorido azulado apenas perceptible; todo esto hace de estas obras una revelación si se comparan con las naturalezas muertas habituales, ejecutadas en absurdos colores de asfalto”1. En sus bodegones, los objetos podían rozarse y mezclarse, disolverse en la armonía del color y representar situaciones, de alguna manera como sustitución de la vida misma, a la que Cézanne no era capaz de enfrentarse. Cézanne pinta estas co- sas sencillas con mucho amor y sentimiento, con una inimitable sensualidad, con una intensidad como ningún otro pintor lo había hecho excepto Jean Baptiste Chardin, admirado por Cézanne1. Las frutas que pinta Cézanne parecen tener el brillo de las frutas del paraíso, dice Cézanne al poeta Gasquet “he renunciado a las flores. Se marchitan rápidamente. Las frutas son más fieles. Es como si quisieran pedirte perdón por perder color. Su idea se exhala con su perfume. Llegan a ti en todos sus aromas, te cuentan de los campos que abandonaron, de la lluvia que las nutrió, de la aurora que las contempló. Cuando con toques pulposos de pincel se reproduce la piel de un hermoso melocotón, la melancolía de una manzana vieja, se puede entrever en los reflejos que ellos intercambian la misma sombra tenue de renunciación, el mimo amor del sol, el mismo recuerdo del rocío”. Para Cézanne “no existe ninguna línea, no existe ningún modelado, sólo existen los contras- tes. Cuando el color alcanza su mayor riqueza, entonces la forma alcanza su plenitud”1,3,4. Los cuadros de árboles que pintó al final de su vida documentan su manera poética de sentir la naturaleza. Estos árboles tienen un movimiento que parece venir de una dinámica que Cézanne percibía en todas las cosas: “He sentido un gran escalofrío. Si yo lograra, por el misterio de mis colores, comunicar este escalofrío a los otros, ¿no llegarán ellos a tener un sentido de lo universal, más obsesivo tal vez, pero cuanto más fecundo y más delicioso?... ¿los árboles como seres sensibles? ¿Qué hay en común entre los árboles y nosotros? ¿Entre un pino que se muestra ante mis ojos y uno tal cual es en realidad? Ah, si yo pintara eso. ¿No sería ello la realización de un parte de la natura- leza, que el cuadro nos da al caer sobre nuestra mirada? ¡Los árboles como seres sensibles!”. “Yo quise copiar la naturaleza, pero claramente no lo logré. Más quedé satisfecho, en parte, conmigo mismo al descubrir que el sol, por ejemplo, no podía ser reproducido, sino que era indispensable representarlo por medio de otra cosa… con el color”1,3,4. Denis, biógrafo de Cézanne, plantea que toda obra de arte sería entonces “la transmi- sión… de una sensación recibida, o dicho de una manera más general, la transmisión de un hecho psicológico”1. Paul Cézanne padre de la pintura moderna - M. Miranda Rev Med Chile 2017; 145: 508-513 512 ARTÍCULO ESPECIAL ¿Cézanne como neurocientista? En sus últimos años y dando cuenta de cómo funcionaba su creación, Cézanne mencionó claros y sorprendentes conceptos neurológicos para esa época (fines siglo XIX) y para una persona sin es- tudios de medicina10. Cézanne afirmó en sus cartas al poeta Gasquet: “Hay 2 partes en un pintor que son básicas: los ojos y el cerebro; y ambas necesitan ayudarse mutuamente, tienes que trabajar en su mutuo desarrollo, pero a la manera del pintor; en los ojos mirando las cosas de la naturaleza; en el cerebro, por la lógica de sensaciones organizadas que dan los medios de expresión… los ojos deben concentrarse, fijarse, tomar el objeto, y el cerebro encontrará la forma de expresar esa información”. Los cuadros de Cézanne ilustran cómo él coor- dinaba su mente, cerebro, ojos y manos. La temática a que tantas veces recurrió en su vida, El Monte Santa Victoria, naturalezas muertas y bañistas, se ven tan frescos recreados en períodos de décadas, que nos permiten ver cómo la excepcional obra de Cézanne evolucionó a través de su vida de acuerdo a su capacidad de, primero decodificar lo que quería comunicar, y luego codificar estas percepciones y sensaciones en una pintura. Dos años antes de morir, Cézanne resumió su trabajo como artista en una carta a su amigo Louis Aurenche, diciendo: “Usted habla de mi realización en el arte. Creo que lo logro día a día, aunque un poco laboriosamente. Ya que, si el fuerte sentimiento por la naturaleza, y ciertamente lo tengo muy vívido, es una base necesaria para toda concepción artística en la cual descansa la grandeza y belleza de toda obra futura, el conocimiento de las formas de expresión de nues- tras emociones no es menos esencial, y sólo se puede adquirir a través de una muy larga experiencia”10. En palabras dichas al pintor Emile Bernard, un mes antes de morir, Cézanne reflejó su constante insatisfacción con lo logrado y su necesidad de seguir buscando: “¿alguna vez llegaré al final de lo que tanto he buscado por tanto tiempo?, espero que sí, pero hasta que lo obtenga, una vaga sen- sación de desasosiego me oprime y que no se irá hasta que llegue a puerto seguro, es decir, que haya logrado algo mejor que lo hecho en el pasado… así es que, continúo estudiando”8. El arte de pintar puede interpretarse como un producto de nuestro cerebro, específicamente, como producto de toda la compleja circuitería neuronal que traduce una señal física, como la luminosa en conducta, experiencia y emoción. No corresponde acá revisar las vías involucradas que son bastante más que un receptor como la retina y un decodificador como la corteza visual y sus complejas conexiones con sistema límbico, áreas de asociación y sistema frontal ejecutivo. Esta maquinaria neural cerebral ha sido modelada por múltiples influencias, no sólo durante el desarrollo biológico, social y cultural del propio individuo, sino que también durante la evolución11. Patologías que afecten distintos componentes de esta vía neuronal involucrada en el proceso artístico, desde la retina (retinopatía diabética como se plantea en Cézanne, degeneración ma- cular en Degas, etc.), hasta enfermedades más difusas neurodegenerativas tipo demencia fron- totemporal y Parkinson (siendo en esta última, en parte, debido a la terapia dopaminérgica), pueden sorprendentemente facilitar el proceso creativo en algunos artistas12-14. Un aspecto que hace particularmente tras- cendente en la historia del arte a la producción artística de maestros, no sólo como Cézanne, sino también Monet y Matisse, es la importancia capital del manejo del color. La interacción dinámica que se produce entre el artista y su obra durante su producción está especialmente determinada por mecanismos de control visual y feed-back visual, para así regular el contraste de colores que, pro- bablemente, determina en parte su originalidad y relevancia artística11. Como ya mencionamos, al contrario de los artistas de la época, Cézanne no comenzaba sus cuadros con un dibujo, en cambio, él comienza inmediatamente con un color intenso y continúa desarrollando la imagen con parches de color distribuidos sobre la superficie de la pintura, así se logra discernir los objetos con claves, que son esencialmente colores. Con esta aproximación, Cézanne recluta a su sistema visual como medida del color exacto a usar11. A partir de 1890, a los 51 años, se le declara una diabetes mellitus, que tendrá una seria des- compensación en el año 1900 y, probablemente, contribuyó a los cuadros infecciosos respiratorios que motivaron su muerte1. Se ha planteado que Cézanne desarrolló como complicación una reti- nopatía diabética con ceguera parcial para colores azul-verde, lo que explicaría que su pintura cam- biara a colores más tenues15. Se plantea que esta alteración oftalmológica sería responsable, en los Paul Cézanne padre de la pintura moderna - M. Miranda Rev Med Chile 2017; 145: 508-513 513 ARTÍCULO ESPECIAL últimos años de su carrera, de la transición del estilo de pintura a una más abstracta15. Como otros maestros del Impresionismo, Cézanne fue también miope, pero rehusaba usar lentes, por considerarlos algo vulgar15,16. En cuadros de un mismo año, 1890, es posible ver naturalezas muertas pintadas a corta distancia muy nítidas y, a la vez, paisajes de larga distancia en que los detalles son borrosos y distorsionados, propios de alguien con miopía16. La frustración fue evidente en la vida de Cézan- ne: mala relación con su padre, pobre relación de pareja y con su hijo, quienes preferían la vida de París, se enemistó con su mejor amigo de la infan- cia y en los últimos años de su vida recibió a muy pocas personas, entre ellas al pintor Émile Bernard y al poeta Gasquet. Su única relación perdurable y más satisfactoria, pero siempre con la sensación de estar imperfecta, fue con su obra artística. Hay argumentos razonables para postular que la conducta de Cézanne podría ser descrita como lo que actualmente denominamos trastorno de personalidad límite. Su conducta podría ser ex- plicada por la persistente inestabilidad en varios ámbitos que caracteriza a este cuadro, tanto en el estado de ánimo como en la autoimagen. Los epi- sodios de ira y agresión manifiesta son frecuentes en este trastorno, especialmente cuando se pre- senta en varones. Los portadores de este trastorno típicamente establecen relaciones interpersonales inestables e intensas. Un episodio que grafica estas características es lo ocurrido en 1895, cuando Monet organizó un pequeño homenaje, con otros colegas, a Cézan- ne, en su casa de Guiverny. Monet dijo en dicha ocasión: “al final estamos todos acá reunidos y valoramos la ocasión de decirte cuanto te quere- mos y cuanto admiramos tu arte”. Cézanne, sor- presivamente, contestó rudamente: “¡Tú también te ríes de mí!”. Se dio media vuelta, tomó su abrigo y se retiró con un portazo17. Esta hipersensibilidad, desconfianza, senti- mientos de ser traicionado e irritabilidad son una constante en la vida emocional de Cézanne y se asemejan a las ideas de autorreferencia que los pacientes con este trastorno pueden presentar cuando se ven enfrentados a estrés. Su creación fue muy poco reconocida, a pesar de dedicarle su vida entera. Literalmente le entregó la vida, ya que por estar pintando en el campo su última obra, que fue un retrato de su jardinero, fue sorprendido por una tormenta. Cae enfermo en cama, se levanta al día siguiente para intentar terminar su cuadro y es encontrado inconsciente. Se diagnosticó una neumonía, que le provoca la muerte el 22 de octubre de 19061,3,4. Realmente, Cézanne estaba intentando un im- posible: crear sin abandonar la realidad y sin basarse en la imaginación. Sus últimas palabras, que refle- jan descontento, son explicables, ya que no era un artista inventivo, sino un gran artista imaginativo, para quien era necesaria tener alguna visión de la realidad como punto de partida de su obra3. Referencias 1. Duchting H. Paul Cézanne. La naturaleza se convierte en arte. Taschen, Colonia, 2003. 2. Torpy J. Portrait of Madame Cézanne. JAMA 2008; 299: 389. 3. Douglas L. Paul Cézanne. Burlingt Mag 1936; 69 (400): 32-5. 4. Southgate T. The Cover. JAMA 2003; 200: 993. 5. Southgate T. The Cover. JAMA 2005; 293: 1954. 6. Southgate T. Madame Cézanne in Blue. JAMA 1999: 281: 111-2. 7. Brion M. Paul Cézanne. Thames and Hudson, Londres. 1974. 8. Rewald J. Paul Cézanne: a biography. Abrahms H, New York. 1996 9. Rewald J. El postimpresionismo: de Van Gogh a Gauguin. Madrid. Alianza Editorial. Col. Alianza forma 31. 540. 1999. 10. Ione A. An Inquiry into Paul Cézanne. J Conscious Stud 2000; 7 (8-9): 57-74. 11. Conway B. Color consilience: color through the lens of art practice, history, philosophy, and neuroscience. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1251 (2012) 77-94. 12. Miller BL, Ponton M, Benson DF, Cummings JL, Mena I. Enhanced artistic creativity with temporal lobe dege- neration. Lancet 1996; 348: 1744-5. 13. Inzelberg R. The awakening of artistic creativity and Parkinson’s disease. Behav Neurosci 2013; 127: 256- 14. Chatterjee A, Hamilton RH, Amorapanth PX. Art produced by a patient with Parkinson’s disease. Behav Neurol 2006; 17: 105-8. 15. Ivanišević P, Ivanišević M. The influence of retinal eye diseases on painting. Coll Antropol 2015; 39 (1): 243-6. 16. Polland W. Myopic Artists. Acta Ophthalmologica Scandinava 2004; 2: 325-6. 17. Buckley PJ. Paul Cézanne (1839-1906). Am J Psychia- try 2011; 168 (7): 680. Paul Cézanne padre de la pintura moderna - M. Miranda Rev Med Chile 2017; 145: 508-513 gjdgxs _GoBack _GoBack _GoBack _Ref326419420 _GoBack _GoBack _GoBack work_jdm6sgbahngmjeztevuymgkami ---- CUADERNO DE NOTAS TRES ARTÍCULOS DE DUIKER PRESENTACIÓN Se traducen a continuación tres artículos aparecidos en la revista 8 en Opbouw (8+0), en ¡932, periodo en el que Duiker era redactor de la misma. Desde este año hasta ¡935 en que prematuramente falleció, su presencia en la redacción además de imprimir un indiscutido sello personal, contribuyó decisivamente a su consolidación, tras fundarse como publica- ción independiente precisamente en 1932. Duiker escribió para la misma un gran número de artículos sobre temas de actualidad cultural y arquitectónica, y es característico de ellos su personal estilo periodístico directo, y con frecuencia irónico, con el que entra en los debates y controversias del momento. Los tres artículos seleccionados son eminente- mente representativos de las polémicas suscitadas en torno a la lucha por una arquitectura moderna. Aunque gran parte de su contenido está dedicado a la exposición de opiniones ajenas -por tratarse de recensiones de entrevistas, artículos o libros- entre sus comentarios se traslucen, a menudo muy explícitamente, los puntos de vista del propio Duiker y constituyen significativas referencias sobre los debates contemporáneos. A través de ellos, los conceptos de Nueva Objetividad y funcionalismo, el cartácter artístico o no de la arquitectura, tos problemas que la nueva arquitectura debe afrontar perentoriamente, o la economía como ley general del diseño, son confrontados a través de las opiniones de autores como Berlage, Le Corbusier, Wright, Giedion, Van Loghem, Oud o Gratama. Los dos primeros artículos recogen declaraciones de los cuatro primeros autores y en particular el segundo de ellos, dedicado al manifiesto de Wright, es una exposición explícita del antagonismo entre ¡os "nuevos constructores" europeos y el maestro americano. El último artículo, si bien puede parecer más local al ser reseña de un libro holandés, es en realidad la recensión del libro más importante escrito contemporáneamente en Holanda sobre la Nueva Objetividad, y es una referencia obligada al tratar de la arquitectura moderna holandesa. Escrito por Van Loghem, uno de los arquitectos holandeses más comprometidos ideológicamente, el libro manifiesta en su título -liouwen, Baten, Batir, Building-, y en su redacción 33 CUADERNO DE NOTAS D U I K E R plurilingüe su vocación internacional, y es cotejado en el artículo con los comentarios de Gratama, representante de sectores más conservadores de la profesión. Gratama a su vez codirigía un interesante proyecto de publicación de las novedades más importantes de la arquitectura holandesa. el cual es contrapuesto por Duiker al libro de Van Loghem. Los artículos han sido traducidos del inglés por Ana Guadaño, y seleccio- nados y supervisados por quien esto escribe. Todos fueron originalmente escritos en holandés (o neerlandés para ser más precisos) en 8+0, y aquí nos hemos valido de sus traducciones al inglés aparecidas en la revista holandesa Fomm voor architectuur en daarme votbonden Kunsten, ns. 5 y 6 de ¡972, (reimpresión posterior en ¡976) dedicados monográficamente a Duiker y recopilados por E.J. Jelles y C.A. Alberts. En la medida de lo posible, se ha mantenido la organización tipográfica de los artículos, respetando la separación original de los bloques de texto y su aspecto general Rafael García García DR. BERLAGE Y LA NUEVA OBJETIVIDAD (8+0, 5, 1932 pp. 43-59) Tengo ante mi unos cuantos recortes de prensa; últimamente la prensa ha mostrado gran entusias- mo por el "funcionalismo", y no sólo eso, sino que incluso si en alguna pane de Amsterdam se cortan árboles innecesariamente, se supone que el funcionalismo es el responsable. Con su creciente interés, la prensa se suma a la confusa creencia existente, y a menudo es parti- daria de hacerse intérprete del fenómeno típica- mente patológico: la manía antieficacia. Podemos dejar de lado estos recortes de prensa ya que no añaden nada a nuestra argumentación. quienes los escriben no saben hacer nada mejor que mofarse, o expresar su disgusto. Ni tan siquiera tratan de encontrar un significado más profundo a este fenómeno internacional. Pero lo que sigue es muy importante. La entre- vista realizada al Dr. R P. Berlage en el Voorju.it la edición para La Haya del Het Volk. Lejos de mí condenar las ideas del Dr. Berlage expresadas en la entrevista. La necesidad de dedicar en este periódico importancia a la entre- vista a un líder, ha tomado cuerpo ante el peligro no imaginario de que otros inteligentes periodis- tas puedan tergiversar a su favor los argumentos filosóficos de Berlage (argumentos de un hombre grande y honesto) y liquidar el funcionalismo sin darle siquiera el beneficio de un juicio justo. Siguiendo la entrevista: "No veo el nuevo funcionalismo como un medio sino como un fin. Es el símbolo del fin de la sociedad burguesa. El nuevo funcionalismo encaja completamente con nuestra época de racionalismo ya que deja de lado todas las consi- deraciones sentimentales y acepta exclusivamente los méritos técnicos. El nuevo funcionalismo con su tendencia capitalista está también regido al igual que la producción racionalizada por una idea: tan rápido y barato como sea posible. Los sindicatos no pueden aceptar un estilo sin consi- deraciones sentimentales como suyo propio. No pueden funcionar sin sentimiento. Se que soy diametralmente opuesto a los marxistas ortodo- xos, pero al mismo tiempo encuentro similitudes entre el nuevo funcionalismo y el marxismo dogmático. Marxismo unilateral Hoy en día, el marxismo dogmático que hace remontar todo desarrollo al crecimiento económi- cos es contestado enérgicamente, porque Marx con toda su grandeza olvidó el sentimiento. Existen también algunos elementos psicológicos que definen el desarrollo de la sociedad. Los 34 http://Voorju.it CUADERNO DK NOTAS DUIKER psicólogos están ahora intentando proporcionar al marxismo esta necesaria adición. La arquitectura necesita también el añadido del sentimiento del que carece el nuevo funcionalis- mo. Todos los estilos arquitectónicos alcanzan su cima cuando consiguen una armonía completa entre las consideraciones racionales y las senti- mentales. Veo el nuevo funcionalismo como una transición pero realmente es un síntoma de la decadencia de la sociedad burguesa. No creo que esto esté en un conflicto con el hecho de que la nueva arquitectura de Rusia sea racionalista. Pienso que el interés de Rusia por el nuevo funcionalismo está basado en el Plan Quinquenal, que urge solucionar la carencia de viviendas. Pero realmente la actual arquitectura rusa es por el momento antinisa: es como con muchas otras cosas que se le imponen a la gente en contraposición con sus sentimientos. No más eslóganes No podemos solucionar estos problemas con eslóganes a los que los alemanes son tan aficio- nados. 'Die Architektur fángt erst an, wo das Ornament aufhórt', -La arquitectura comienza donde terminan los ornamentos- como declaran los defensores del Nuevo Funcionalismo. Esto me parece una arrogancia ya que parecen querer decir: antes de que apareciésemos nosotros nada adecuado o digno había sido construido. Por el contrario, se impone la mayor humildad cuando vemos la arquitectura del pasado. No quiero decir que nunca hayamos conseguido nada. A esa afirmación yo contrapondría la siguiente: 'Die Kunst fangt erst an, wo die Technik aufhórt, - El arte comienza donde tennina la técnica-'. Tengo la sensación de que e! arte del arquitecto debería mostrar la técnica de una forma bella. Los medios no son importantes, pero la técnica por sí misma tampoco es suficiente. Las catedrales están obsoletas dicen con aire de suficiencia señalando fábricas y llamándolas catedrales del trabajo. Pero, qué piensa la gente que trabaja en ellas, están de acuerdo con esta glorificación. El arte debe ser útil Comprenderán Vds. que no quiero volver a un individualismo romántico. Somos afortunados al estar superando el espíritu de individualismo que degeneró en la autoadulación que no es más que i . i M i \ n k í 4 . , i \ ¡ » i „ i i i i i ! i i - w : i '.1N...V una caricatura de la auténtica personalidad. No nos situemos por encima de la gente normal. Debemos estar entre ellos. También los artistas tendrán que adoptar una actitud diferente frente a la sociedad. La arquitectura ha sido siempre un arte subordi- nado pero en realidad, este debería ser el papel de todas las artes. La presente crisis del teatro es consecuencia del hecho de que el teatro ha sido apartado de la sociedad. Hay signos de que por fin llegaremos a tener un teatro como el que se hacía en la antigua Grecia o en la Edad Media. El último trabajo de Henriette Roland Hoist apunta decididamente en esta dirección. Estilo de vida "Estoy convencido de que la nueva cultura no estará sustentada por una base intelectual sino religiosa. Al decir religión no me refiero a dog- mas de la iglesia sino al sentido de la vida del hombre que se considera parte del cosmos y que es consciente de que una comprensión superior une a los hombres. Sin este sentimiento religioso no será posible la realización del socialismo, portador de la nueva cultura. El arte nunca es causa de una cultura sino su consecuencia. En un tiempo de cambio, el arte muestra las tendencias de una futura cultura pero sólo se alcanzará su culmen cuando la vida misma se realice de acuerdo con un cierto estilo. Los griegos al igual que quienes vivieron en la Edad Media y durante el Renacimiento, tenían un estilo de vida. Pero durante el desarro- llo del capitalismo, el estilo de vida pereció. 35 CUADERNO DF- NOTAS DUIKER El capitalismo no tenía contenido espiritual. No era un plan consciente de producción sino sola- mente un método para conseguir los mayores beneficios. Sólo con la desaparición del capitalis- mo será posible un nuevo estilo de vida". A pesar de estos pronunciamientos es curioso observar cómo la obra de Berlage tiene el gran mérito de haber alentado conscientemente, en una época en que el romanticismo más exacerbado estaba en pleno auge, ideas de eficiencia y haberlas difundido en diarias, escritos y en su propia obra. Sus ideas no eran en absoluto "tan rápido y barato como sea posible". Aunque por el momento, no hay que yo sepa, una filosofía sobre el exacto significado del funcionalismo, acepto de todo corazón el pronun- ciamiento del Dr. Berlage de que de la expresión "tan rápido y barato como sea posible" no se obtendrá ninguna validez cultural. Si el principio del funcionalismo de la obra de Berlage tiene algún valor cultural, se debe a que no tiene ninguna relación con la economía finan- ciera sino sólo con la economía espiritual. Esta economía espiritual nos conduce a una construcción de lo estrictamente posible, depen- diendo del material usado, y se desarrolla más allá, hacia la inmaterialización y la espiritualidad. Dr. Berlage, a qué se debe que los agrupamientos de ventanas en sus numerosos sean diferentes de los de sus muchos imitadores,¿al reducido pilar de ladrillo?. Podemos llamarlo contraste; el pequeño y esbelto pilar de ladrillo muestra las posibilidades constructivas que nos ofrece el material. ¿Por qué diseñó los vanos inferiores del interior de la Bolsa como un soporte constructivo de forma tensions] tan extrema que tuvieron que ser "materializados"?. Porque la inspiración, la intuición, el sentimiento, el sentido artístico o como quiera Vd. llamarlo, le condujo a las máximas posibilidades técnicas y de esa forma definieron el valor espiritual de la arquitectura resultante. Sin embargo no es acertado decir que "el arte comienza donde termina la técnica", dado que en toda la historia de la técnica la inspiración y lo relacionado con ella, precede a la realización material ya sea en el campo de la construcción o en cualquier otro. Después de todo, la inspiración es el impulso primario no solo de la técnica sino también de la ciencia, de todas las expresiones culturales, de todo lo que sea realizable y de todos los fenóme- nos naturales. Sin embargo, el desarrollo del impulso solo tiene valor cultural si sigue las leyes de la economía. La naturaleza nos ofrece en sí misma manifesta- ciones de esta ley cósmica. Un cuerpo en caída libre, un rayo de luz, una explosión, un cuerpo celeste girando en su órbita o el proceso cons- tructivo, todo sigue el camino más corto, aunque existan muchas otras posibilidades. Un estudioso de la historia de la técnica, de la técnica de la construcción o cualquier otra, puede observar que su desarrollo sigue las misma ley y debe seguirlas aun bajo el dolor de un rápida decadencia causada por la falta de importancia de la cultura. El estilo griego muestra evolución a partir de la más forma más simple de construcción: dinteles de piedra sobre columnas de piedra; pero este desarrollo evolutivo se basa únicamente en un creciente ahorro del material: columnas más esbeltas, mayores vanos. La arquitectura medieval se caracteriza por formas constructivas mas elevadas. La bóveda de piedra transforma este elemento, desde el más bajo sistema romano de construcción masiva, en algo impresionante, en la edificación en piedra más alta posible: la bóveda de arista con un análisis en nervaduras, plementos, arcos y contra- fuertes. Aquí encontramos una posibilidad de evolución al reducir la cantidad de material lo que da lugar a una ampliación del espacio. Esto pudo ser llevado a cabo porque el espíritu humano penetró la substancia de la dirección de las tensiones en la construcción de los vanos. Allí estaban presentes la incitación, el impulso, el floreciente sentimiento religioso, así como la intuición de los arquitectos medievales , pero el crecimiento fue, siguiendo leyes de economía, hacia una mayor amplitud, hacia la utilización de menos material; el estilo se hizo más espiri- tual hasta que alcanzó su cima en la Catedral de Beauvais: se alacanzó la economía más extrema e incluso se la sobrepasó. Después de la arquitectura en piedra del Gótico que supuso el culmen de la artesanía, apareció la economía de las máquinas, la fabricación de mejores materiales y el dominio en la elabora- ción del hierro. Este paso fue el comienzo de 36 CUADERNO DE NOTAS D U I K E R nuevas posibilidades económicas y nuevos avan- ces: la construcción en hierro y hormigón arma- do. La intuición y el sentimiento sacaron el mayor provecho de las potencialidades de estos materiales: el cable de acero sostiene puentes de un 1 kilómetro de luz, la economía es capaz de obtener grandes cantidades de potencia de una masa comprimida de acero y cobre y de esta forma consigue elevar en el espacio cuerpos muy pesados. Los intereses financieros y espirituales se desa- rrollaron de forma paralela, pero el resultado que vemos es exclusivamente una obra de la mente. Es injusto decir que muchos científicos, quími- cos, ingenieros etc., carecen de intuición, senti- miento, inspiración o imaginación, ya que su labor espiritual se lleva a cabo en forma colecti- va, a diferencia de los arquitectos, compositores y otros "artistas. ¿Por qué la especial denominación "arte" cuando lo que se quiere significar es "un estado de ánimo altanero"? ¿No es la altanería de las catedrales medievales un "fenómeno de economía" donde cada una de sus partes, las columnas y las bóvedas que coronan los arcos y los pináculos responde a los requerimientos de la construcción? ¿Podemos negar que una fuga de Bach tiene una pureza de construcción inexorable que la convierte en "altanera"? ¿No es Einstein un artista por la gracia de Dios? Aun cuando la arquitectura de su formulación matemática del universo posee una grandeza que los seres humanos normales no pueden siquiera intuir y les estremezca, perciben su grandeza. ¿El arte o el sentimiento comienzan con los ornamentos? Hemos visto cómo la naturaleza, la técnica y la arquitectura una vez que han alcanzado el impul- so, sólo pueden desarrollarse por medio de la economía; la sociedad misma sólo conoce una ley: la economía. (Es el nombre correcto para una ciencia que estudia el desarrollo de la socie- dad). Mientras falte la conscience cósmica, como la denomina Berlage, la sociedad seguramente permanecerá en el caos. Sin embargo, el sistema de Taylor, la racionalización, es el primer esfuer- zo consciente o subconsciente para conseguir una ordenación sobre bases económicas. El valor de frugalidad del sistema Taylor tiene también un significado espiritual. Este método de producción es un eslabón muy importante en el proceso de desarrollo de la sociedad, al menos en caso de ser capaces de dominar nuestro deseo de auto destrucción. Podemos observar una concordancia entre mu- chos puntos de vista sobre la vida, lo que condu- cirá a un mejor entendimiento y por tanto no es una esperanza obsoleta. Si pensamos con amplitud de miras llegaremos a la conclusión de que este desarrollo social tiene que significar la libertad para muchas personas que ahora son esclavos en su trabajo. Una vez que el sistema Taylor haya alcanzado la perfec- ción como sistema de producción y la distribu- ción se lleve a cabo de la forma más rápida y económica, amanecerá el día en que podamos vislumbrar una reducción en las horas de trabajo obligatorias. Lo que viene a continuación es el extracto de una conferencia del Profesor Kohnstamm con ocasión del 25 aniversario de Vereeniging voor Wijsbe- geerte (sociedad de filosofía) aparecido en el Telegraaf del 14 de octubre: "Estamos asistiendo al nacimiento de nuevos campos de la ciencia: sociología y especialmente filosofía de la técnica. La sociedad, que ha cambiado profundamente por medio del control de la naturaleza, camina por medio de una extra- polación empírica hacia una nueva filosofía de la historia y una nueva evaluación del trabajo relacionada con una atención vigilante. La glorifi- cación, adulación incluso del trabajo, que el siglo 18 antepuso a todo, sobrevive probablemente hoy en día. Podríamos considerar la crisis que actual- mente asóla a nuestra sociedad como los dolores del parto de una nueva era. El intenso análisis, por otra pane curioso, de los acontecimientos económicos llevado a cabo por la ciencia del siglo 20 nos hace confiar en que llegará un momento en que los ideales de Platón, a pesar de nuestro mezquinopresente, se materialicen en un sentido más profundo del que hubiéramos soña- do. Cuando controlemos en mayor medida la naturaleza y cuando la población permanezca estacionaria, la lucha por la subsistencia y los bienes vitales requerirá menos atención . La consecuencia será una sociedad viable en la cual la importancia del "conseguir" será desterrada por la del "ser". Las necesidades materiales del hombre son finitas, solo son infinitas las espiri- tuales y estas requerirán más y más atención." 37 CUADERNO DE NOTAS DUIKER Hasta aquí el Profesor Kohnstamm. Vemos aquí un nuevo impulso espiritual: la liberación del hombre; también el funcionalismo en arquitectura es el único medio para obtener esta libertad; no un seudofuncionalismo que se cierra en sí mismo y juega con materiales de alta calidad como hierro, cristal y cemento, regalos de nuestra época, sino un "funcionalismo" de alta conciencia moral que encuentra sus posibilidades en la inmaterialización de la arquitectura de acuerdo con la ley cósmica de la economía, para proporcionar al hombre de la sociedad futura, la necesaria luz solar y las alegrías de la naturaleza en sus inmediato entorno, de los que se le ha privado desde las épocas oscuras. El ser conscientes de esto nos proporciona el impulso necesario para progresar; ahí reside la gran importancia de hombres como Le Corbusier que ven esto claramente. "...Si mi estancia en vuestro país pudiera tener algún significado, creo que sería este: coraje, mirar hacia adelante, ir al fondo de la cuestión, sintéticamente. Todo lo que el espíritu pueda prever, que hoy en día es teoría, será práctica mañana. Luis XIV preparó la "vida automóvil" en Francia porque tenía grandes ideas y porque su espíritu era insaciable. Hace falta que nuestras concepciones sean de largo alcance, hace falta crear un sistema com- pleto. En el futuro la armonía se hará realidad por medio de una adaptación vigilante del espiri- tu a las condiciones de la vida moderna. Por todas partes veo miedos y temor al fracaso. Lo que finalmente triunfará será le línea general cuya trayectoria de largo alcance debe apuntar a una meta justa. Antes que nada -más allá de consideraciones prácticas- debemos aspirar a una meta: un fin profunda y completamente humano".* Creo que el Dr. Berlage ha sido tergiversado por el seudofuncionalismo o el funcionalismo barato, y que no fue capaz de reconciliar la naturaleza cósmica de la ley de la economía con el funcio- nalismo. Es evidente que esta ley no está sujeta a configuraciones políticas o abuso social. El sentimiento religioso que el Dr. Berlage tenía en mente puede ser aunado en parte en el ideal universal de libertad que le inspiró la inscripción en el panteón del hombre: "Ser libres y que nos sea permitido permanecer en el limite de la tierra a todas horas y contemplar el universo como un hombre libre, auténticamente libre. * En francés en el original 38 CUADUKNO DE NOTAS DUIKER MANIFIESTO DE FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT (8+0, 1932 p. 177-184) Como recordarán, mi colega Wijdcveld organizó el año pasado una exposición itinera me de obras del conocido arquitecto americano Frank Lloyd Wright que en Amsterdam se expuso en el Stedelijk Museum. Más tarde fue exhibida en varias ciudades euro- peas donde tuvo que soportar ciertas críticas que no eran una falta de aprecio del genio de Wright, sino una demostración de que la arquitectura es la primera de las artes, que bajándose de su pedestal, se integra en las necesidades sociales, biológicas y técnicas de toda la humanidad y en consecuencia está sujeta a un estándar diferente de juicio crítico. Estas críticas son las que lleva- ron a Wright a escribir lo que sigue: A mis críticos de las tierras del Danubio y del Rin Habiendo leído las críticas hechas a mis planos y maquetas por Mendelssohn, Behrendt, Behne, Donath, Schmidt, Techier, Friedrich, Deri, Bie- deynski, G.L., Riedrich, Gramatki, Ganske, Meissner, Bie, E.V.N., Muner, Memann, Embell, Dulberg, Stein, B.Y., H.W.R., Scholz, Scharfe, H.A., H.S., Osbom, V. Brochhusen, Paulsen, Dargel y otros, llego a la conclusión de que en lugar de haber enviado esas obras, debería haber ido yo a hablar con ustedes. Mis queridos alema- nes, no falta por su parte aprecio y conectas alabanzas, no soy desagradecido, pero han con- vertido en un misterio lo que es puerilmente sencillo. Les habría explicado, que he enviado una peque- ña parte de mi obra porque creo que mi ejemplo ha sido malinterpretado y ya no se percibe clara- mente. También que he notado en los últimos años en Alemania una concentración de formas que no se resuelven en mayor riqueza de expre- sión sino que se limitan a planchas desnudas y cubos de un estilo calculado. Cualquier principiante puede imitar este estilo calculadamente superficial. Mientras que gran parte de la discusión sobre principios coincide con este calculado esfuerzo, el resultado es una racionalización posterior a los hechos. Si los principios se complican, no llegarán a fertilizar una creación. Qué ha sucedido? Se ha cometido el error habitual. La línea recta y el plano, bases necesarias para las formas de nuestra era mecánica, han sido capitalizadas como algo por, para y en sí mismas. La regla de T, la escuadra y la superficie plana del papel se han convertido en norma y así permanecen: i negativas y estériles!. No hacer nada durante un tiempo está bien, pero si la vida aspira a desarrollarse por encima de su propio mecanismo, se necesita algo más. De ahí esta advertencia amistosa y esta censura fraternal contra los que protestando niegan la riqueza del hombre para realizar esfuerzos de cualquier índole. No piensen caballeros arquitectos, que las mate- máticas son música, aunque la música se sublime en matemáticas. Tampoco la geometría de la línea recta y el plano de la era de la máquina es arquitectura. Una vez desterrados la anterior insignificancia y derroche del indefinible orna- mento no funcional, parece que habría llegado su hora. Sin embargo no avanzan, parecen muy satisfechos. Algunos de ustedes piensan que se puede llegar al estilo del futuro a través de la negación de la personalidad. No hay nada más absurdo. Mientras que la máquina se ha convertido en la herramienta de nuestra era, ha surgido paralelamente un nuevo 39 CUADERNO DE NOTAS D U I K E R ideal. Lo llamamos: Libertad. Una evolución interna de la personalidad. Esta evolución es la esencia humana de una cultura como la que se ha desa- rrollado en nuestra época. Para ser libre, ¿tiene la humanidad que triunfar sobre ustedes y su nueva abstracción creada por las máquinas? O por el contrario, ¿podría imponerse con su ayuda, sobre toda la maquinaria y todas las abstracciones? El estilo ya no es necesario excepto cuando es individual y por tanto libre. Un estilo internacional es una espantosa pesadi- lla: un error más; el potencial y los sentimientos de la vida humana aprisionados por la restringida visión e incapacidad de mentes estrechas. Las fuentes de la actividad humana son profun- das y están más secas de lo que nunca antes lo estuvieron. La sed de vida se ha hecho mas intensa y al mismo tiempo es negada por la herramienta con la que vivimos: la máquina. La única ocupación del artista no debe ser triun- far sobre la máquina usándola con inteligencia para conseguir efectos de planos aislados, compo- siciones, afectaciones y mentiras, por mucho sentido común que pretendan tener, sino saciar con su ayuda la natural sed de belleza del alma humana. He visualizado y manejado líneas rectas y planos solo como medio para conseguir una meta más alta. Pero esta meta no es el "estilo internacional" ni la "falta de estilo". Todo lo que les he mostrado está dirigido a conseguir una mayor individualidad a través de una mayor imaginación y de la profundización en el sentido de la vida. Por ello la vida no debe girar sin sentido bajo la superficie a expensas de cubos, planos y de la indisoluble línea recta. Los tres elementos son necesarios, pero no son más que conceptos abstrae tos. Al igual que todas las nuevas liberaciones, éstas deberían ser contempladas con duda y recelo y mantenidas cuidadosamente en su sitio. No deben ser elevadas a la categoría de estilo por una sensación momentánea de descubrimiento. La imitación de tales abstracciones aprisionó al mundo. Por qué no vamos a ser capaces de liberar al mundo de nuevas prisiones a través de una mayor imaginación, técnicas nuevas y mejores y aprendiendo a aplicar mayores recursos? Esta liberación no significa ya imitación, remedo o emulación por emulación como solía llamarse a un estilo. Las cosas son ahora mucho más sencillas. La liberación sólo significa el libre ejercicio de los recursos espirituales, vuestro don individual, disciplinado pero no controlado por la nueva herramienta: la máquina, Así el patrimonio de nuestra época, será una riqueza de formas nunca antes alcanzada. Conózcanse unos a otros y nada más. No intenten sacar de la vida más de lo que puedan devolverle, porque alguien que roba a la naturaleza siempre es castigado por ésta. Les digo esto desde lo profundo de mi experien- cia vital intensamente feliz. Concedí gran aprecio a la vida y me ha sido devuelto. La vida no es tacaña más que para los tacaños. Cuanto más demos con espíritu abierto, más recibiremos. La fuerza aumenta a través de su ejercicio, nunca mirando alrededor para comprobar si otro lo hace igual o mejor que nosotros. Algunos modos de emulación son cobardía. Ser un cobarde significa estar continuamente muriendo y no morir nunca en realidad porque nunca se ha vivido. Si los planos y las maquetas que les envié pudie- ran tener un sentido para ustedes, entonces ése sería únicamente el sentido general. Sin embargo, podemos ayudar a un joven técni- camente ya que puede ver como se crea la forma desde la naturaleza, el carácter de los materiales y las condiciones materiales al igual que una flor obtiene su forma de los cimientos de la semilla. Queridos amigos de las tierras del Danubio y el Rin, critíquenme por cómo soy, no por cómo les gustaría que fuera, porque a mi no me gustaría ser como a ustedes les gustaría. Como no me gustaría ser como ustedes quisieran, a menos que cambien ustedes nunca nos encon- traremos. Y dense cuenta que sigo trabajando con el mayor aprecio por la vida. Lo que han visto realizado por mis manos toda- vía no esta terminado, A continuación de este manifiesto de Wright, el 40 CUADERNO DE NOTAS D U I K E R Dr. S. Giedion de Zurich escribió un artículo titulado: Die archilektonische Front (El Frente Arquitectó- nico) Admiramos a Wright, dijo Giedion, como el primer arquitecto que a principios de los años 90 ideó el plano de la casa en la forma actual. Lo hizo partiendo de la base de lo que entonces era la más elevada cultura de la vivienda: la inglesa y la americana. No tenemos derecho a permanecer indiferentes ante la palabra de Frank Lloyd Wright, incluso aunque no estemos totalmente de acuerdo con él. Un critico alemán, el Dr. Walter Curt Behrendt a raíz del manifiesto de Wright estableció la antíte- sis: ¿Le Corbusier o Wright? Wright significa el símbolo del desarrollo orgáni- co en contraste con la dirección matemáticamente formal de Le Corbusier. ¿Cómo está la situación? Nuestros conceptos arquitectónicos, son confusos en lo que se refiere a la estética. Posiblemente este desconcierto proviene del actual "architektonische Front"; el lenguaje de la forma ha quedado obsoleto; hoy en día la forma es sólo un medio con el que trabajamos y no un fin. El problema de si el estilo llegará a ser interna- cional nos deja fríos. Nuestra preocupación ya no es por un cieno estilo, porque vemos una larga trayectoria de desarrollo cuyo punto de partida será el hombre de forma más intensa que lo haya sido nunca antes. De cualquier modo no estamos interesados en diferencias individuales sino en el apenas contemplado ser humano en general. ¿Uniformidad? Cada coche en el sonido del motor y sus marchas lleva el carácter del país que lo fabrica. Una casa mucho más. No queremos buscar razones más profundas, el clima, el suelo, los materiales de construcción y las necesidades nos bastan. EI "architektonische Front" tiene tareas más urgentes. Una vez más, la realidad ha evolucionado más rápidamente que la arquitectura. El arquitecto moderno consciente, no puede aislarse y ocuparse solamente de sus problemas de artista. La realidad es, que al igual que hace cien años cuando los obreros industriales tenían que vivir en sótanos, los actuales trabajadores desemplea- dos o no escolarizados producto de nuestra sociedad no tienen un lugar donde vivir. Al igual que entonces, nos sentimos desespera- dos e impotentes por mor de los problemas que nos cogieron por sorpresa y demandan urgentes soluciones. Es imposible arrastrar las problemas no solucionados sin solucionarlos. Hay un quinto estado no registrado en la comunidad; el hombre tiene que tener un lugar para vivir. No puede ser construido, porque la organización de la industria de la construcción sus métodos y precios, compa- rados con otras industrias lleva 50 años1 de retraso. Además nadie sabe cómo mantener a los trabajadores sobrantes en nuestra inestable orga- nización económica. Probablemente tengamos que utilizar también en nuestros países métodos primitivos de construcción. El trabajo realizado en Rusia por May, Schmidt, Stam y otros, nos parece de mayor importancia de lo que piensa la mayoría que siempre está haciendo referencia al alto nivel de la industria europea. Este alto nivel de nuestra industria ha permaneci- do indiferente en lo que se refiere a la vivienda realmente barata. ¿Cómo puede aplicarse de forma práctica? Tapas de embalajes y latas de comida vacías es lo que se utiliza cuando hay que construir barato. Alrededor de casi todas las grandes ciudades francesas se esta formando un cerco de esta clase de suburbios. Por ello observamos con interés los resultados de lo hecho en Rusia en el campo del montaje con madera ligera, porque quizá podamos aprovechar- nos de estos resultados antes de lo que imagina- mos. El concepto de individualidad tiene muchas acepciones y p ° r ello no sabemos lo que Wright quiere significar con él. Si con individualidad se refiere a la afirmación de un hombre en particu- lar, confesamos que estas particularidades no son prioritarias para nosotros. Si por el contrario Frank Lloyd Wright, se refiere a las diferentes necesidades del hombre que sólo esporádicamente han sido estudiadas, entonces todo el "architektonische Front" estará de acuerdo con él, porque la falta de un estudio sistemático 41 CUADERNO DE NOTAS ammmmmmmmtmmmmimmmmm>m*»minmm m^^i^^^-^y-w^^a^wx-^'^oiccinMini) DUIKER de estas necesidades hu sido en gran medida la causa del insuficiente desarrollo de la arquitectu- ra actual; un conocimiento fragmentado de la influencia de la luz, la radiación, la humedad o incluso el rudimentario conocimiento de las posibilidades de descanso del cuerpo y el mobi- liario necesario. ¿Y qué hay de la temida superficialidad? Los programas de la actual construcción son cada vez más precisos, incluso la industria de la construcción, que ha vacilado durante tanto tiempo, está evolucionando lentamente. ¿Estamos realmente siendo superficiales? ¿No es cierto que los problemas de la técnica y la física están mucho más especializados desde el siglo pasado? Puede que hayan renunciado a su punto de vista técnico para seguir métodos de comprobación orgánicos. Hoy en día somos capaces de fotogra- fiar la tensión de un material después de la polarización de la luz que lo atraviesa . Es decir, podríamos lentamente oponer la medición orgáni- ca al cálculo matemático a través de un estudio más profundo de las leyes naturales2 No nos basamos en este hecho aislado, sino en una perspectiva científica del espíritu de nuestro tiempo. No queremos ser mal interpretados, "orgánico" no significa "naturalista". Un estudio más profundo de la arquitectura, no debe ser expresado a través de la aplicación de una forma naturalista. El modo de expresión en el siglo veinte seguirá siendo en la forma, funcional- abstracto. El que durante las últimos años Wright haya marcado sus bloques de cemento con alguna clase de ornamento, no significa que haya hecho un cambio, sino que probablemente se debe a la influencia de sus románticos recuerdos de infan- cia. Wright tiene miedo de la superficialidad en la arquitectura y del mal uso de su atrevido ejemplo. En 1908 Wright publicó en el Architectural Record uno de sus famosos artículos: "In the cause of Architecture" (Por la Arquitectura) en el cual tomaba partido por la máquina que no desaparecerá cuando decía: "El arquitecto de nuestro tiempo no debería tener un cometido más importante que la aplicación de esta moderna herramienta, pero, ¿qué hace? la mal utiliza cuando realiza formas originadas en otros princi- pios que hoy en día no tienen interés. Todo con la ayuda de una máquina cuyo objetivo principal es destruir las formas". Wright afirmó en América, sin que nadie le escuchara, lo que se ha venido repitiendo una y otra vez en Europa y especialmente en Francia desde el comienzo de la industrialización. Hoy Wright ataca el mal uso que se ha hecho de su ejemplo con la linea recta y el plano en la era de la máquina!. Pero, ¿se ha hecho realmente mal uso de sus ¡deas? ¿Existe hoy en día peligro de superficialidad? Como todos los grandes arquitectos Wright tuvo sus seguidores especialmente en Holanda que después de 1910 llevó adelante una mayor evolu- ción. Entonces fue muy útil, enseñó a ver de forma diferente. Pero sólo los que ampliaron sus princi- pios y los ligaron más intensamente a nuestras actuales posibilidades técnicas y nuestra nueva óptica, aprendieron realmente de Wright. Ese fue el trabajo de la siguiente generación. Le Corbusier desarrolló en su obra las ideas de Wright, lo que no es chocante. Ningún arquitecto centró el problema de la vivienda como lo hizo Wright. Fue el primero en disolver los rígidos cubos de la casa y destruir la idea de fachada así como de unir la casa con el paisaje. No es coin- cidencia que Le Corbusier comenzara a partir de los mismos principios. Como no hemos visto en persona los curiosos edificios de Wright no queremos emitir un juicio. Sin duda, hay en el tratamiento respetuoso de cada recoveco del paisaje en el que sus construcciones se esconden a menudo, una cierta clase de finalidad interior en el construir, una desviación del concepto "arquitectura", una inclinación hacia lo cósmico con lo que ésto significa de futuro. Es también posible que en esas casas que cons- cientemente evitan cualquier rígida expresión estructural, se esconda un vuelo en solitario que al implicar una estricta individualidad no pode- mos seguir. En cualquier caso, con sus casas desde 1893 hasta 1910 Wright ha dado el más importante ejemplo para la historia. No debemos olvidar que el joven Tony Garnier, cuando en 1900 era pensionado de la Academia de Bellas Artes en Roma, diseñó su "Ciudad industrial". Previo en su diseño la construcción de toda una ciudad, décadas antes que otros lo hicieran 42 CUADERNO DE NOTAS DUIKER empleando un nuevo método de construcción: hormigón armado. Esto sucedía sin saber nada de Wright a quien se conoció en Europa diez años más tarde a través de Berlage; tampoco Wright conocía la existencia de Tony Gamier. La consciencia del tiempo trabaja de forma independiente. Insistamos: lo que hizo a Wright superior compa- rado con otros arquitectos de su tiempo, fue su deseo de hacer de la vivienda el problema cen- tral, ya que es la parte de la arquitectura más cercana a las necesidades orgánicas del hombre. El profundo sentido de la vida que de nuevo requiere Wright, se encuentra en todas sus cons- trucciones y le asegura su cualidad de imperece- dero aunque sus formas exteriores tengan o no el sello de su época. El problema de alojamiento es todavía el centro del interés de la construcción. El trabajo de los franceses fue el estudio cons- tructivo del problema de la vivienda en el que los ingleses, los holandeses y Wright habían hecho tanto hincapié, así como conseguir un medio común de expresión íntimamente ligado a las nuevas potencialidades constructivas: hierro y hormigón armado. Ahora sabemos que la existencia de nuevas potencialidades constructivas no es suficiente por si misma. Para vencer las dudas y vacilaciones de las nuevas formas, tenemos que aprender a ver las nuevas imágenes. No está suficientemente admiti- do el hecho de que la forma de expresión de la arquitectura empleada hoy en todas partes, hubie- ra permanecido en la oscuridad para siempre sin la ayuda de la pintura contemporánea, es decir sin las nuevas imágenes aparecidas en primer lugar en la pintura. El punto de partida general se llama: cubismo. Este nombre todavía hoy suscita ideas equivoca- das. Jacques Cocteau relata en su librito sobre Picas- so, que cuando Henri Matisse vio algunas pintu- ras de Georges Braque de casas de Provenza, exclamó: "demasiado cubismo". Sin embargo, el cubismo, lo repito una vez más, es lo opuesto a cubos o volúmenes cerrados. Significa análisis, falta de ataduras, fluencia. Sin haber asimilado íntimamente su apariencia extema nadie puede comprender un edificio realmente moderno. Entonces, ¿por qué Auguste Perret, Tony Gamier y Frank Lloyd Wright no llegaron a una forma de expresión generalmente válida? Porque su lenguaje arquitectónico formal, permaneció vinculado ya fuera al clasicismo (Perret y Gar- nier) o a un romántico concepto asiático (Wright). Le Corbusier es también pintor. La nueva genera- ción se lo reprocha y no puede negarse que de vez en cuando sus inclinaciones de pintor tienen prioridad. Las circunstancias en las que nació, le ayudaron a que su visión de pintor del lenguaje formal de la arquitectura, hoy en día objetivamente válido, tenga una influencia decisiva. Con ocasión de la muerte de Theo van Doesburg señalamos que la arquitectura hubiera permaneci- do prisionera y dependiente sin el empuje de la pintura, a pesar de los modernos métodos de coastrucción. Toda la nueva arquitectura sigue siendo ininteligible sin el revolucionario cambio de visión consecuencia del cubismo. Las casas ya no están sobre la tierra, ya no hay piso de arriba y piso de abajo. Cómo podemos entender las salas de hierro flotante del siglo XIX, cuya fijación es un único punto si los miramos con la perspectiva unidireccional, "Blickfestnagelung - punto de vista fijo", del Renacimiento? Hoy en día se dominan los medios de expresión de la arquitectura. La siguiente generación se ha habituado hace mucho tiempo a los nuevos medios de expresión y trabaja con ellos sin preguntar los nombres de los inventores. Esto nos parece perfecto. Pero no debemos olvidar que sin la creación de una nueva óptica de la imagen del mundo, estos medios de expre- sión nunca habrían sido descubiertos. La mejora en las condiciones de la arquitectura no depende por tanto del dilema Wright o Le Corbusier; esos no son más que diferentes esta- dios de la misma evolución. La pregunta a la que tiene que contestar la arquitectura es esta: ¿puede con los medios actuales solucionar el problema de alojamiento para el público en general? No podrá hacerlo, a menos que se desarrollen en los laboratorios y los gobiernos subvencionen, una edificación auténticamente de bajo costo, digámoslo franca- mente: sistematización de edificios como alber- gues. Sólo unos pocos arquitectos pueden hoy día crear en este campo. Es perentorio un cambio 43 CUADERNO Dli NOTAS DUIKER social. Se podría objetar si no hay nada más urgente para la arquitectura que la solución del problema del edificio albergue. Creemos que no hay nada más importante, porque según están ahora las cosas, y el largo y constante desarrollo que prevemos, será imposible si no se soluciona este problema. La gran arquitectura cuyo objeto no es crear una celda para un hombre, sino cubrir las necesidades de toda una población, tiene que encontrar una solución. En ella pueden encontrar satisfacción todos los deseos de eternidad y los grandes gestos. Para construir en Moscú un palacio para el Soviet con una sala en la que puedan acomodarse 15.000 personas, se requiere una capacidad de visión que sobrepasa con mucho la de los arqui- tectos del gótico. Hasta aquí el Dr.Giedion. Si queremos añadir algo por nuestra parte, no es porque haya tantas diferencias de opinión. Wright dijo: Por qué no liberar al mundo por medio de una mayor imaginación, nueva y mejor técnica, nuevos y mejores recursos para evitar más "edificios cárcel". Según Giedion el "gynze architetktonische Front - todo el frente arquitectó- nico" está de acuerdo. Por ello sólo deseamos resumir las posibilidades. La casa dymaxion de Buckininster Fuller es la última por el momento. Si no me creéis, leed los titulares. Olvidé mencionar que la casa tiene un anillo en su mástil de sujección del cual puede ser colga- da completamente de un zepelín y ser trasladada a un sitio más conveniente. Si no me equivoco la casa dymaxion es ahora el albergue del Dr. Giedion, aunque en estos mo- mentos se bastante grande y también cara, pero Ford puede encontrar una solución para ello. Una mezcla de palafito, caravana y casa flotante en forma higiénicamente cultural. Los arquitectos no podemos hacer mucho más que esperar los "nuevos y mayores recursos" anunciados por Wright. Apuntan como muestran los ejemplos, a un vínculo cada vez más laxo con la tierra. Pensamos con alguna agorafobia en el globo del Profesor Piccard que alcanzó una altura de \6 km. y soportó temperaturas de -56° Cel- sius. El punto del cero absoluto no está probablemente más lejano de nosotros que Viena o Berlín. El Profesor Keesem ha demostrado satisfactoria- mente que una electricidad quántica ilimitada, podría estar disponible en la superficie del globo en la región (bastante extensa) del punto de cero absoluto... Lo mismo se puede aplicar a la barata cápsula de cohete con luz y calefacción gratis, sin impuestos catastrales, de urbanización, ni de alcantarillado. Añádanse unas pocas vitaminas y la vivienda para los desempleados del año 2500 está lista. Se nos ocurre que esta arquitectura será suma- mente cósmica. Hasta entonces nuestros arquitec- tos tendrán que esperar por los "nuevos y mayo- res" recursos antes de que su individualidad pueda expresarse en una libertad sublimada. Duiker 1. De acuerdo con Buckminster Fuller 5.000 años, cuestión de apreciación. 2. Giedion se refiere a la medida de las tensiones en maquetas de cristal o mica a través de la refracción por lo que pueden ser calibradas a través de fotografías, pero nunca calculadas sin el conocimiento de las matemáticas puras. Creo que no es correcto oponer una a la otra, la siguiente secuencia me parece la mejor para estos momen- tos: la intuición seguida del cálculo, seguida de la introspección, seguida por el control de la observación para poder construir con certeza. 44 CUADERNO DE NOTAS D U I K E R BOUWEN - BUILDING (8+0, 1932 pp. 231-233) J.B. van Loghem, ingeniero civil Amsterdam, Holanda Publicado por N.V. Uitgevers Mij. "¡Cosmos", Amsterdam Precio / 8,50, diseño de encuademación, portada y tipografía de Paul Schuitema. Varios críticos se han pronunciado sobre este libro en algunos periódicos y revistas. Había en él algo que les preocupaba y que interrumpió su siesta cual irritante rayo de sol. Sin embargo, otros de piel más resistente protestaron un poco, se dieron la vuelta y durmieron algo más. Otros, puede que se queden despiertos después de leer el primer resumen de lo que está sucediendo en este país en el campo de la "nueva construcción", y es incluso posible que revisen sus puntos de vista tan firmemente arraigados. El crítico del Nieuws van den Dag voor Neder- landsch Indie (Noticias diarias de las Indias Orientales Holandesas) simplemente mencionó el hecho de que el libro no tenía mayúsculas y que las mayores letras de la cubierta se empleaban para la palabra Holanda. Se dio la vuelta y siguió roncando. Por supuesto que las Indias Orientales son un país propicio a la siesta. Si Van Loghem expone sus teorías de forma honesta, ni el aspecto exterior, ni el modo en que esté planeando llevar a cabo sus ideales, tiene importancia. Lo importante es la sinceridad que determina el valor del libro. Ningún lector puede poner en duda esta sinceri- dad basada en los fenómenos sociales de nuestro tiempo, en los que él se apoya para establecer una conexión con la "nueva construcción". Esta es la causa de que van Loghen no dude en acercarse a todos los problemas, que sabe sólo podrán ser solucionados por una sociedad renova- da. Ningún hombre razonable puede poner en duda esta necesidad de renovación. Dejando de lado el medio político a emplear para conseguir la nueva organización social, hay acuerdo en que tiene que ser alcanzada. En este proceso, el nuevo funcionalismo jugará sin duda un papel importante, aunque su desarro- llo pueda llevar algún tiempo. No hay hombre inteligente que crea que solo con la ayuda del librito "La Arquitectura del Tercer Reich"1, cambiará por completo la arquitectura Nacionalsocialista. No, no es tan simple. Si por el contrario, como está sucediendo, los jóvenes de todo el mundo muestran un creciente deseo de organización, si sienten de forma sub- consciente que tal organización redundará en una mayor libertad, y potencialidad y como conse- cuencia una visión más amplia de la vida, en la naturaleza, en el espíritu o en los deportes, estamos ante un fenómeno general claramente definido que no existía hace unas cuantas déca- das y que debería marcar una tendencia distinta a los arquitectos. Se trata de una evolución que debería conducir a una vuelta al amor por la luz del sol, el aire y la higiene rompiendo abiertamente con la estrechez 'Die Architektur ¡m dritten reich, Karl Willy Straub. Observen la portada "funcionalista" 45 CUADERNO DE NOTAS DUIKER de miras y el exclusivismo de hace medio siglo. En esle camino, el arquitecto encontrará la fuerza para dar solución a las tendencias elementales y poderosas que seguramente apuntarán en la dirección de la "nueva coastrucción" tal como Van Loghem prevé en este libro. Esta gran apertura junto con las posibilidades técnicas del momento presente, serán las que nos fuercen a proyectar nuestras ciudades, estable- ciendo mayores distancias entre las viviendas, prolongando así la libertad individual de sus habitantes, más de lo que lo hicieron las casas "íntimas" con las que nos dotó el período ante- rior. Ciertamente el movimiento de "nueva construc- ción" tiene una gran tarea por delante. Según Van Loghen: "Mientras por medio de la ventilación y la aper- tura de las construcciones la nueva arquitectura busca una mayor y más amplia conexión entre el interior y el exterior en una ciudad y vivienda abiertas, es obvio que el mobiliario de las nuevas edificaciones tendrá que tener un carácter com- pletamente diferente al que estamos acostumbra- dos. La apetencia de espacio, de apertura, de luz y aire lleva al deseo de mobiliario ligero y reduci- do. La industria, que en este momento ofrece ya una amplia gama de mobiliario en acero ligero y madera, - a pesar de que nuestras casas todavía no reúnen las condiciones de apertura - se antici- pa en el tiempo con su deseo de reforma. Aun más, cuando la industria está dirigida por gente seria puede influir a la larga de forma importante al público, abriendo sendas para que reaccione más fácilmente a las pequeñas reformas que a los grandes cambios de la vida. Sería lógico que las nuevas ciudades y las nuevas viviendas tuvieran nuevo mobiliario, pero dado que no existen nuevas ciudades y solo esporádi- camente nuevas viviendas, el espíritu humano al hacerse mas saludable, quiere ser capaz de demostrar en las casas imperfectas que tenemos, que podemos librarnos de la idea de pesadez y oscuridad, y que el espacio debería ser tan grande como sea posible. Esta es la razón de las paredes y mobiliario ligeros. Así, las cosas pequeñas preparan el camino de las grandes". Hasta aquí con Van Loghem. Este puede ser el principio básico de un gran estilo. Es un librito escrito de forma soberbia, lo que supone una gran ventaja ya que el mencionar muchos temas hace que sea comprensible para todo el mundo. No intenta dar la impresión de que el fin pro- puesto ha sido ya alcanzado y el autor no se muestra nunca complacido ni pagado de sí mismo, i Otra gran ventaja! J.Duiker (8+0, 1932, pp. 236-37, continuación) Otra cuestión distinta es cuando se intenta com- prender el "funcionalismo" como fenómeno, y uno se pregunta por qué debería desarrollarse en una determinada situación social, de la que forma parte la arquitectura, como indica Van Loghem. La ley natural de la economía sigue siendo el fenómeno más fácil de comprender (ver n ° . 5 de esta revista) cuando estudiamos los fenómenos de civilizaciones pasadas. Una y otra vez vemos al hombre como un peque- ño creador que lucha por la perfección, de la misma forma que lo hace la naturaleza: de acuerdo con la ley de la economía. Nuestro trabajo sólo será válido si estudiamos más de cerca esta ley fundamental. Por ello solo podemos disfrutar más de la vida a través de la liberación individual. También la arquitectura debería evolucionar con ese propósito. Es por esto que no estoy de acuerdo con Oud cuando escribió en la última edición: "Todos los hechos que permitan alguna clase de libertad en el diseño (y, ¿cuál es el que no lo permite?, incluso la ingeniería más técnica permi- te alguna libertad) llevan a una labor más o menos personal que se eleva por encima del puro funcionalismo. Vemos cómo arquitectos que insisten en el "funcionalismo", casi nunca ponen en práctica sus teorías y realizan una obra que incluye no solo funcionalismo sino también belleza. Por supuesto me refiero a aquellos que intentan expresar su fe en su trabajo, no los parásitos que nunca pueden ser consideradas como pauta. Está claro para todo estudioso, que el diseño en las actuales circunstancias no es independiente de lo intentado antes en una forma 46 CUADERNO DE MOTAS D U I K E R menos "funcional" en el "Nuevo Funcionalismo". Si el hombre supiera cómo llegar a la perfecta economía en un determinado trabajo, después de haberlo definido de forma perfectamente humana, entonces solo una podría ser la mejor solución: la más concisa. El hombre no es perfecto y por tanto sus creaciones no pueden ser nunca perfec- tas. En cada sucesiva gran civilización sus crea- ciones se aproximarán a la economía y de esa forma alcanzaran una mayor espiritualización. Como contrapartida al mencionado libro vamos a analizar otra publicación: Modeme liouwkunst en Holanda (Arquitectura Moderna en Holanda) Publicado por W. L y J. Brusse, N.Y., Rotter- dam, 1932 20 monografías en rústica f 2.25 cada monogra- fía; en tapa dura f. 2,50 cada monografía. y su prefacio sobre "Nuevo funcionalismo" por Jan Gratama. Lo que aquí hayamos no es una revisión de hechos probados sino pensamientos filosóficos acerca de la Naturaleza, El Ser y el Espíritu. Cuando más intentamos comprender los razona- mientos del autor, más entices nos hacemos. El autor acusa al Nuevo Funcionalismo de "orgu- lloso intelectualismo". Si esto fuera cierto, la cuestión sería establecer si sus razonamientos están completamente libres del fenómeno que considera. Creo personalmente que la "nueva arquitectura" es consciente de sus limitaciones y que no se puede hablar de "orgullo". Gratama da por supuesto sin probarlo, que la naturaleza no evoluciona. Sin embargo, existen muchas razones para creer que la naturaleza por supuesto evolu- ciona, incluso muy rápidamente, pero de acuerdo con la misma ley por la que lucha consciente- mente el Nuevo Funcionalismo: la ley de la economía. Esto hace tambalearse la base del razonamiento. Continúa: "Tenemos razones para considerar el hecho de que el arte egipcio, desarrollado en una civiliza- ción de poco pensamiento y mucha vida natural es más encantador, profundo y tranquilo que el arte moderno desarrollado en un período de gran expansión de la ciencia". Esta consideración, esta aseveración objetiva, le hace continuar: "El nuevo funcionalismo es un esfuerzo resuelta- mente heroico por desarrollar un estilo de vida no basado en la vida natural y sus emociones, sino exclusivamente con el pensamiento puesto en un intelectualismo abstracto. Esto es lo que hace del arte moderno algo formal y sin vida". ¿Cree él entonces que es arte? El leer mucho puede inducir a confusión. Me había acostumbrado a la afirmación periodística de Egon Erwiii Kisch con la que comienza el libro de Van Loghem: "Nichts ist phantasievoller ais die Sachlichkeit" (Nada es más imaginativo que el funcionalismo.) Para conseguir lo que el autor desea, deberíamos volver a la naturaleza que nos permita convenir- nos en artistas una vez más. Eliminemos el cristal, el hierro, el hormigón y el aluminio y en consecuencia las abstracciones espirituales. Solíamos funcionar bien con el ladrillo, la cerá- mica, la madera y bueno, un poco de cristal. Por tanto: volvamos a la naturaleza. ¿Hasta dónde? el arte Kaffir es, sin duda, mucho más conmovedor que el egipcio. Se huele la selva Volver a la prehistoria cuando el hombre tenía rabo? t Si supiéramos como! 47 CUADERNO DE NOTAS • • • • El autor mencionando a Spengler afirma: "Los hechos y no las teorías controlan el mun- do". De acuerdo, ¿son o no hechos, los actuales e impracticables solares? ¿Y no es también un hecho que primero tenemos que contraer una tuberculosis o algo parecido en nuestro artístico "refugio" del "habitat" tradicio- nal, personificación del "Ser"» para llegar de alguna forma al "no Ser" con la ayuda de habita- ciones inhumanas, funcionales, soleadas, airea- das, ligeras e higiénicas? Mientras tanto, se hace mucho ruido por nada: "Moderne Bouwkunst in Nederland" (Arquitectu- ra Moderna en Holanda) una publicación en veinte números de los cuales han aparecido las siguientes: 1. Prefacio y 3. Viviendas de bajo costo. Edificios de poca altura, editado por el Dr. H. P. Berlage, W.M. Dudok, Jan Gratama, A.R. Hulshoff. Herman van der Kloot Meyburg, J. F. Staal y J. Luchman, secretario, que ha descartado los bien conocidos tipos góticos de irritante misticismo de curvas no funcionales y enfáticas sinuosidades y se presenta de forma magnífica- mente funcional carente de misticismo. De la misma forma que censurábamos a los críticos del libro de Van Loghem que basaban su juicio, exclusivamente en la apariencia de la cubierta, no vamos a decir nada sobre la cubierta del "Moderne Bauwkunst in Nederland", para concluir que por otra parte la publicación es muy cuidada, J. Duiker (1932 pp. 236-37) 48 work_jl3ufvuuwzacbac4s4k4slx7mi ---- REVIEWS 445 Brittsan’s monograph is therefore welcome, as it considers “the multifaceted yet converging histories of Manuel Lozada’s life, peasant rebellion, political boundaries, contraband trade, property disputes, and religion in order to disinter the story of how residents in Jalisco’s seventh canton engaged the national political process on their own terms” (12). This is an altogether challenging task. Lozada himself was not formally educated, and his recorded statements and those of his followers are few. And although Brittsan has mined archives in Guadalajara and Mexico City, along with a few other sources, to recreate the political culture of Lozada and his peasant supporters, they remain distant to the twenty-first century reader. Once a hacienda worker, then an outlaw and bandit, by late 1855 Lozada had begun to assert a stronger and more politicized presence in his native region. He was as an opponent of Liberals and a champion of local interests, including, at times, those of Barron y Forbes (26–34). As the three-year civil war between Conservatives and Liberals broke out (La Reforma), Lozada identified with the conservative cause, even allying himself with French forces. Although he recognized the restoration of the Liberal republic in 1867, Brittsan contends that he continued to embody a political culture that was distinctively conservative, as ultimately expressed in his call for insurrection in January 1873 (the Plan Libertador). Despite popular support for Lozada’s uprising, Lerdo de Tejada’s liberal government quickly defeated the rebel, and in July 1873 he was executed. This “popular conservatism” of Lozada merits further attention. For Brittsan, it is constituted by “defense of the Catholic Church, the integrity of communal landholdings, and local political autonomy” (4). Acknowledging that this ideology was “rarely articulated,” Brittsan is able nonetheless to describe its implementation. In this connection, he traces Lozada’s advocacy for a greater Church presence in his home territory through his occasional statements of religious faith. Land conflicts between indigenous communities and haciendas, along with Lozada’s varying position towards them, are discussed at length, too. This book is thus a full account of one important, regional aspect of Mexico’s nineteenth-century politics (both formal and informal), although there is room for further research. That research might help us to better comprehend the dynamics of the commercial interests and the legal processes surrounding land disputes, which Brittsan’s study references and which have been of significance for the trajectory of the country’s political and social conflicts, from independence through the 1910 revolution. WILLIAM SUAREZ-POTTSKenyon College Gambier, Ohio At the Crossroads: Diego Rivera and His Patrons at MoMA, Rockefeller Center, and the Palace of Fine Arts. By Catha Paquette. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. 130 photos. Pp. 342. $95.00 cloth; $29.95 paper. doi:10.1017/tam.2017.176 https://doi.org/10.1017/tam.2017.176 http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1017/tam.2017.176&domain=pdf 446 REVIEWS Potential readers noting the title of this book might think that the world does not need yet another discussion of Diego Rivera and the mural proposed for Rockefeller Center. Has not everything about that incident already been said and written? Yet, as Paquette shows in this study, there are still more facts and insights to be explored. And those in turn lead to still more interesting ones yet to be examined. Thanks in part to Diego Rivera, but also to Jose´Clemente Orozco and others, Mexico enjoyed a vogue in the United States in the 1930s, as represented in Helen Delpar’s work, The Enormous Vogue of All Things Mexican (1995). Certainly that was true of the New York art scene, spearheaded by the newly founded Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, largely a Rockefeller project. Its first three one-man shows featured Henri Matisse, followed by Diego Rivera and then Pablo Picasso. Rivera and Orozco got mural painting commissions in Detroit and Dartmouth as they became better known. Then came Rockefeller Center. Paquette situates the entire project in the history of the Great Depression, in the struggle between capitalism and communism, in the streets and in the plans of the Rockefellers, and in the role Rockefeller Center was to play in all. Central to this drama is the figure of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who was the ultimate “decider” for the center and the Man at the Crossroads mural. Although Rivera was known to be a Communist, his agent in New York, Frances Flynn Payne, a noted gallery owner herself, presented the artist as a painter first and a devotee of politics secondarily. After all, was not he completing a mural for Henry Ford in Detroit? Conversely, Rockefeller’s wife Abby bought the sketchbook of May Day marches that Rivera had produced in the Soviet Union. As it happened, Rivera had been kicked out of the Mexican Communist Party for his sympathy with Leon Trotsky, leading his patrons to think he would shed his Marxist beliefs. Rivera, for his part, was intent on seeing just how far artistic expression could go. As is well known, Rivera insisted on putting a portrait of Lenin in the mural to represent Communism while denigrating the rich and powerful under capitalism as idle and degenerate. Rockefeller Jr. decided that such a display, which would include syphilis organisms near his painted face, was not suitable for a shrine of capitalism like Rockefeller Center. While Abby and his son Nelson tried to get the mural moved to MoMA, the work of art was destroyed. The New York left used that obliteration to mobilize their followers in New York. Rivera soon repainted the mural on a smaller scale at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Paquette does an excellent job in discussing the Mexico City phase of the mural and its rebirth, particularly on the ways in which the aims of the mural fit with those of Mexican politicians at the time. Yet, she does not go much farther in looking at the life and work of this important artist. For example, she does not look at how the conflictive situation in New York affected Rivera’s art and how it came to be that he would never again paint a major mural for a capitalist in the United States. We may never know if and how marriage to another Communist artist, Frida Kahlo, affected his work, and whether she pulled him even further toward the political left. REVIEWS 447 The book itself is beautiful, filled with stunning plates in color and black-and-white. However, it is oversized, and wherever there are no works of art depicted, the text can be rather slow going. Yet, Paquette has given us a significant study of cultural relations between the United States and Mexico in the 1930s. BARBARA A. TENENBAUMUS Library of Congress Washington, DC Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico. By Sandra C. Mendiola García. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Pp. 294. $30.00 cloth. doi:10.1017/tam.2017.177 Clashes between popular classes and the forces of government who represented upper classes and business interests on the streets of Puebla, from the 1960s to the present day, afford us a new perspective on the Mexican Revolutionary project. Mendiola García explores the historical experience of the street vendors as they resisted corrupt politicians, vicious police, and inexorable neoliberal transformations. In this way, she represents the ways that informal economic sectors resisted state repression. Vendors formed independent unions, like the Popular Union of Street Vendors (UPVA), they built grassroots movements, and they petitioned and sued and organized. They also suffered. Inspired by international ideas and Maoist thought, they seized public spaces in demonstrations, theater, and even hijackings. Officials at street, city, state, and federal levels responded with confiscations, arrests, violence, and torture. Mendiola García aptly demonstrates the numerous methods by which the reactionary government attempted to “cleanse” the streets of Puebla. Street Democracy asserts that the role of vendors in providing services and living spaces to the poorest classes collided with the interests of the PRI and neoliberal capital, and that the vendors did not break. To chronicle the movement, Mendiola García has drawn extensively on city archives of petitions and complaints, lawsuits and newspapers, inter- views with vendors, and the files of the secret police (DFS), whose members infiltrated the UPVA. These she complements with a broad secondary literature that situates the conflict within the realm of the Dirty War, the Cold War, and the neoliberal turn. Mendiola García’s interviews with street vendors and student organizers offer rare insights into the popular classes as politically engaged agents quite aware of the larger context in which they operate. Her use of the secret police files, increasingly difficult to access in Mexico, demonstrates the violence of the state. She begins with a solid historical overview and goes on to focus on vendors’ interactions with student groups, the politics of the union, repression by the government, the neoliberal turn of 1986, and, finally, the impact of global capital as it erased old markets. Throughout, she persuasively shows the resilience and adaptability of the street vendors and their importance as actors in Mexican political spheres. https://doi.org/10.1017/tam.2017.177 Hiram Bingham Clarence H. Haring Leo Rowe, Isaiah Bowman, and Edward Ross work_jqgxeftjybccdlwuuefcletebu ---- Accueil de DSpace Toggle navigation Search Ouvrir une session Deposit Toggle navigation Toggle navigation For Librarians For Publishers For Researchers Funders Resources OAPEN For Librarians For Publishers For Researchers Funders Resources OAPEN   Accueil de DSpace JavaScript is disabled for your browser. 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Box 90407 2509 LK The Hague Websites: OAPEN Home: www.oapen.org OAPEN Library: library.oapen.org DOAB: www.doabooks.org ©2020 OAPEN     work_jum53bzee5e4hg6h6rxwidrbvy ---- Okumuş & Yavan / Geçmişte ve Günümüzde Seramiğin Kullanım Alanları *Bu çalışma, 6-7 Eylül 2018 tarihlerinde Lviv /UKRAYNA’ da gerçekleşen 3. Uluslararası Rating Academy Kongresi: “Uygulamalı Bilimler” konulu kongrede sunulmuş aynı isimli bildirinin gözden geçirilmiş halidir. JOURNAL OF AWARENESS E-ISSN: 2149-6544 Cilt:3, Sayı: Özel, 2018 Vol:3, Issue: Special, 2018 http://www.ratingacademy.com.tr/ojs/index.php/joa RESİM SANATINDA 1940-1960 YILLARI ARASINDA SOYUT DIŞAVURUMCU AKIMLAR ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST MOVEMENTS BETWEEN 1940 AND 1960 IN PAINTING ART Deniz GÖKDUMAN Trakya Üniversitesi E-mail: denizgokduman@trakya.edu.tr MAKALE BİLGİSİ ÖZET Anahtar Kelimeler: Soyut, Soyut Dışavurumcu, Sanat, Taşizm, Lirik Soyutlama, Sert Kenar, Renk Alanı Resmi, Hareket Resmi Soyut dışavurumculuk, aşırı duygusal ya da ifadeli içerikleriyle birbiriyle ilişkili çok farklı resim üsluplarını tarif eden bir terimdir. İkinci Dünya Savaşı'ndan sonra Amerika’da oluşmaya başlayan bu akım Pollock, Baziotes, Gottlieb, Motherwell ve Rothko gibi çağdaş Amerikan sanatçıları tarafından ortaya çıkarılmıştır. Daha sonra bu akım farklı özellikler göstererek Hareket Resmi, Renk Alanı Resmi, Lirik Soyutlama, Serbest Biçimli Sanat, Kobra, Sert Kenar, Taşizm gibi farklı isimlerle tüm dünyaya yayılmıştır. Makalemizde soyut dışavurumculuk bu bağlamda ele alınmıştır. DOI: 10.26809/joa.2018548634 ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Keywords: Abstract, Abstract Expressionist, Art, Tasism, Lyrical Abstraction, Hard Edge, Color Field Painting, Hard Edge Abstract Expressionist is a term that describes very different picture styles that are related to each other by emotional or expressive content. This trend, which is began in America after the Second World War, revealed was from contemporary American artists such as Pollock, Baziotes, Gottlieb, Motherwell and Rothko. After then this current has spread to all over the world with different names such as Action Painting, Color Field Painting, Lyrical Abstraction, Art Informel, Cobra, Hard Edge, Tasiszm. In our article, the Abstract Expressionist is addressed in this context. DOI: 10.26809/joa.2018548634 1. SOYUT-DIŞAVURUMCULUK (Abstract-Expressionism) Soyut dışavurumculuk, aşırı duygusal ya da ifadeli içerikleriyle birbiriyle ilişkili çok farklı resim üsluplarını tarif eden bir terimdir. Birbirinden farklı niteliklerin oluşturduğu akımın adıyla niteliği arasında pek bir uyum yoktur. Ancak hepsinin ortak yönü Gerçeküstücülüğün temel ilkelerinden olan “Çağrışımlar ve Özdevinimler”den yola çıkmalarıdır. 1940’ların başında New York’ta meydana çıkmaya başlayan akımın oluşmasında önemli etkenlerden biri II. Dünya Savaşı’nın Avrupa’da yarattığı olumsuz etkilerden kaçan Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, http://www.ratingacademy.com.tr/ojs/index.php/joa mailto:denizgokduman@trakya.edu.tr GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 236 Andre Masson ve Roberto Matta gibi Gerçeküstü sanatçıların o sırada dünyanın yeni sanat merkezi durumuna gelen New York’a gitmeleridir. Bu durum Amerika’daki sanatçıları aşırı derecede etkilemiştir. 1940’ların sonuna doğru Amerikalı sanatçıların özgüvenleri artmış, Gerçeküstücü sanatın etkilerinden sıyrılmaya başlamışlardır. Bu gelişmeler sonucunda Soyut Dışavurumculuk yeni bir nitelik kazanmaya başlamış, tuvalin sınırları aşılarak büyük panolar üzerinde çalışılmaya başlanmış ve savaşın gerilimi bu tuvallere de yansımıştır. Hareketle ilişkili sanatçılar İkinci Dünya Savaşı'ndan sonra muhafazakâr Amerikan toplumuna yabancılaşma duygusunu paylaşma eğiliminde olsalar da Soyut Dışavurumculuk her zaman bir "Amerikan" görüngüsü olarak algılanmıştır. Soğuk Savaş döneminde üretilen bu sanat Sovyet sanatını karakterize eden katı uyumun tam tersi olarak değerlendirilmiştir. (Sanat Kitabı, 2017: 320) 1934 yılında Anatoly Lunaçarski tarafından ana ilkeleri belirlenen Sosyalist Gerçekçilik Kuramı Sovyetler Birliği’nin resmi sanat çizgisi kabul edilmiştir. Buna karşılık Amerika Birleşik Devletleri'ndeki 1929 yılındaki borsa iflasına rağmen Roosevelt idaresi sanata istihdam yaratmaya karar vermiştir. 1935 yılında Works Progress Administration'ın (WPA) yönettiği Federal Art Project kurulmuştur. Proje Amerikan sanatının gelişiminde temel bir rol oynamıştır. Resim yapmaları için sanatçılara para ödenmiş bu da çok sayıda genç sanatçının (Gorky, Pollock, De Kooning, Baziotes, Rothko, Gottlieb…) resim yaparak yaşamasını sağlamıştır. (Bonfand, 2015: 112) İlginç olan bu projede desteklenen sanat akımının Sosyalist Gerçekçiliğin tam zıttı olan Soyut-Dışavurumculuk olmasıdır. ABD’nin dünya sanatını yönlendirmedeki etkinliği de yine bu tarihlerde Soyut- Dışavurumculuk’la ilk kez uluslararası düzeye çıkmaya başlamıştır. (Rona, 1997: 1688-1689) Ancak Soyut-Dışavurumculuk, oluşmaya başladığı ilk yıllarda Gerçeküstücü sanatçıların etkilerini Newman, Reinhardt ve Rothko'nun tek renkli (monokrom) resimlerinin; Kline ve Motherwell'in atılgan, zaman zaman Kaligrafiye kaçan soyutlamalarının; Pollock'un akıtma resimlerinin (drip-paintings); De Kooning, Gottlieb ve Hofmann'ın birbirinden farklı nitelikteki yapıtlarının oluşturduğu akımın, adıyla niteliği aslında pek bir uyum yoktu. (Rona, 1997: 1688- 1689) Bu uyumsuzluk Soyut-Dışavurumcuğun kendi içinde bölünmelerine sebep oldu. Sanatçıları, William Baziotes, Lousie Bourgeois, James Brooks, Alberto Burri, Jack Bush, Elaine Fried de Kooning, Willem De Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, Sam Fancis, H. Frankenthaller, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, Al Held, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Norman Lewis, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Barnet Newman, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitsky, Jackson Pollock, Conrad Marca-Relli, William Ronald, Mark Rothko, William Scort, Aaron Siskind, David Smith, Hedda Sterne, Clyfford Still, Bradley Walker Tomlin ve Esteban Vicente. 1.1. Adolph Gottlieb: 1903 yılında New York'ta doğan Adolph Gottlieb 1923 yılında Parson School of Design'da öğrenim görür, Soyut-Dışavurumculuk akımı içinde ver alan Gottlieb, bu grup içinde Uzakdoğu etkilerini ve kaligrafinin anlatımsal değerini en fazla vurgulayan sanatçıdır. (Erzen, 1997: 694) 1936 yılında WPA için çalışır, Onlar Grubu’nun kurucularındandır, 1974 yılında New York’ta ölür. (Bonfand, 2015: 124) 1.2. Arshile Gorky: 15 Nisan 1904 yılında Van Türkiye’de doğdu. Asıl adı Manug Adoyan’dır. 13 yaşında Ermenistan’a, 17 yaşında Amerika'ya gittiğinde, adını Arshile Gorky olarak değiştirmiştir. Arshile'i Yunan mitologyasının yiğit ve yakışıklı yarı-tanrısı Akhilleus'tan türetmiş;. Gorky soyadını da, yazar Maksim Gorki'nin adından almıştır. (Üster) GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 237 Sanat tarihçileri bu anlaşılmaz ressamı bir gerçeküstücü olarak mı yoksa tam biçimini almamış bir soyut dışavurumcu olarak mı kabul etmek gerektiği konusunda kararsızdır. Ama her koşulda, bu sanatçı kuşağını insani ve estetik bakımdan belirlediği konusunda tanıklıklar uyuşmaktadır. (Bonfand, 2015: 124) ABD'nin en önemli ressamlarından biri olduğu sırada art arda yaşadıkları yaşamını altüst etmiştir. 1946'da atölyesinde çıkan yangında resimlerinin çoğu yanan Gorky, kısa bir süre sonra bir kanser ameliyatı geçirmiştir. Haziran 1948'de geçirdiği bir araba kazasında boynu kırılan ve bir ay kadar sonra karısı tarafından terk edilen (Üster) Arshile Gorky 21 Temmuz 1948 yılında Connecticut’ta intihar etmiştir. 1.3. Hans Hofmann: Savaş sonrası Amerikan sanatının en önemli figürlerinden biri olan Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) çoşkulu ve renk dolu tuvalleriyle öne çıkmış ve sanatçılar üzerinde derin izler bırakan etkili bir öğretmen olarak ünlenmiştir. Amerika Birleşik Devletleri'nin en önemli modern sanat profesörü olduğu söylenen Hans Hofmann verdiği derslerle geleceğin çok sayıda soyut dışavurumcusunu, aynı zamanda da Clement Greenberg ve Harold Rosenberg gibi eleştirmenleri etkilemiştir. (Bonfand, 2015: 114) 1.4. Mark Tobey: Mark Tobey, 11 Aralık 1890'da Centerville, Wisconsin'de doğmuştur. 1906-1908 yılları arasında Chicago Sanat Enstitüsü'nde derslere katılmıştır. 1918 yılında Tobey, Batı uygarlığına duyduğu nefret, Tobey’i insanların barış içerisinde yaşamalarını öngören Bahâîlik inancına kabul etmeye iter. (Gökduman, 2002: 22) Bu da onu sanattaki manevi temsili keşfetmeye götürür. Ayrıca o yıl Çin kaligrafisini incelemeye başlayan Tobey,1926’da Orta Doğu’ya yaptığı seyahatler sonucunda Farsça ve Arap alfabesiyle de ilgilenmeye başlamıştır. Tobey, 24 Nisan 1976'da Basel'de ölmüştür. 1.5. Robert Motherwell: Action Painting’e damgasını vuran ressamlar arasında Robert Motherwell'i de saymak gerekir. 1915 yılında Washington eyaletinde Aberdeen'de doğan Robert Motherwell’in ailesi 1918 yılında California'ya yerleşmiştir. 1932-1938 arasında San Francisco'daki California School of Fine Arts, Standford ve Harvard'da öğrenim görmüş ve Paris'e gitmiştir. New York'taki Hunter College'de ders vermiştir. Motherwell’in temel eserleri, farklı ve daha jestüel olmakla birlikte, color-field ressamlarının eserlerine son derece yakınlık gösterir. Dolayısıyla, onun eseri soyut dışavurumculuğun iki eğilimini iç içe sokmaktadır. (Bonfand, 2015: 124) Motherwell 1991 yılında Massachusetts’te vefat etmiştir. 1.6. Theodoros Stamos: 31 Aralık 1922'de New York’da doğan Stamos büyük ölçekli jestsel soyutlamalar ile tanınmıştır. Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt ve Clyfford Still gibi ressamların yanı sıra soyut Soyut Dışavurumcu grubun en genç üyesidir. Stamos'un resimlerinde, çoğunlukla Doğu Asya estetiği ve Doğu felsefesinden esinlenerek kısaltılmış renksiz paletin yanında biyomorfik soyutlamalar da yer alır. Stamos, 2 Şubat 1997'de Yunanistan'da 74 yaşında vefat etmiştir. 1.7. William Baziotes: William Baziotes 1912 yılında Pittsburgh'de doğmuştur. Amerika'da gelişen Soyut- Dışavurumculuk akımının çeşitli etkinlikleri içinde yer alan ve doğadan kaynaklanan Biyomorfik Biçimli Gerçeküstücü nitelikli resmiyle özgün bir tavır ortaya koymuştur. (Erzen, 1997: 207) 1936-1940 arasında WPA için çalışmış ve dersler vermiştir. 1952- 1963 yılları arasında Hunter College'de resim öğretmenliği yapan Baziotes, 1963 yılında vefat etmiştir. GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 238 1.8. Mark Rohtko: 1903 yılında Rusya Dvinsk (şu anda Letonya'da) kentinde doğan Rothko’nun, ilk tabloları çoğunlukla portreler, çıplaklar ve kentsel sahnelerdi. 1950 ve 1960’ların soyut resminin en önemli kişilerinden biri olan Rothko yalnızca Soyut-Dışavurumculuk akımının en zengin yorumlara açık örneklerini yapmakla kalmamış, uluslararası düzeyde Amerikan resminin öncülüğünü kabul ettiren bir sanatçı olarak neredeyse kahramanlaştırılmıştır. (Erzen, 1997: 1591) 1970 yılında 66 yaşındayken anti-depresan içerek ve bir jilet ile bileklerini keserek intihar etmiştir. 1.8.1. Eserin Çözümlenmesi: Mark Rothko’nun bu eseri tuval üzerine yağlıboyadır (101 × 189 cm.). Şu anda Londra’da Tate Galeri’sinde bulunmaktadır. İsimsiz bir eserdir. Tahminen 1951-55 yılları arasında yapılmıştır. Resimde çok katı olmamak kaydıyla genel anlamda geometriksel bir soyut anlayış hâkimdir. Rothko’nun diğer resimleri de buna yakındır. Üç farklı renk kullanmıştır. Mor renk soğuk bir renktir. Sarı, sıcak renk olmasına rağmen bu resimde soğuk renkleri andırmaktadır. Aradan geçen beyaz renk, iki renk arasında dengeleyici bir unsur oluşturmaktadır. Renklerde ve şekillerdeki azlık sanatçının kişiliğini yansıtmakta ve yalnızlığı simgelemektedir. Resimde pek ışık düzeni yoktur. Resmin kompozisyonuna baktığımızda ise altta bir dikdörtgen onun üstünde iki adet kare ve iki kare arasında bir çizgi bulunduğunu görürüz. Yalın ve sade bir kompozisyon. Resim 1. Mark Rothko, İsimsiz, 189 × 101 cm., Tuval üzerine yağlıboya, 1951-55, Tate Galeri, Londra 2. HAREKET RESMİ (Action Painting) Pollock ve De Kooning’in öncülüğünde gelişen Hareket Resmi, Soyut- Dışavurumculuğun Gerçeküstücülükten aldığı “çağrışımlar ve özdevinim” ilkelerinden kaynaklanmış ve 1950’lerde ABD’de Soyut-Dışavurumculuğun iki ayrı doğrultuda gelişmeye başlaması sonucunda oluşmuştur. Action Painting terimi, ilk kez Amerikalı eleştirmen Harold Rosenberg tarafından 1952 yılında kullanılmıştır. Terim, kullanımının ardından New York Okulu eleştirmenlerinin estetik perspektifinin yönünü değiştirici bir etkide bulunmuştur. (Keser, 2009: 23) Bu akımda önemli olan yapıtların bir ön tasarım olmadan, çağrışımların oluşturduğu düşünceler neticesinde meydana getirilmesidir. Bu nedenle resmin tamamlanmış hâlinden çok resmin oluşum süreci önem kazanır. Jack Tworkow, Franz Kline, De Kooning ve Pollock bu tarza iyi bir örnek teşkil ederler. Örneğin De Kooning resimlerinde içten ve kendiliğinden GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 239 oluşan bir yaklaşımla bilinçaltını ve ruh hallerini açığa vurmak için tuvali hareketli fırça darbeleriyle renklendiriyordu. Pollock ise yere yaydığı tuvale gelişigüzel boya akıtarak ya da çeşitli araçlarla boyayı tuvale yayarak rastlantısal biçimler oluşturuyordu. 2.1. Jack Tworkow: Polonya kökenli olan Jack Tworkow 13 yaşındayken ailesi ile birlikte ABD gelmiştir. Eğitimini California Üniversitesi, New York Ulusal Tasarım Akademisi ve son olarak New York Sanat Öğrencileri Birliği’nde tamamlamıştır. Çeşitli üniversitelerde ders veren Tworkow 1937-1941 yılları arasında Amerikan hükümetinin desteklediği Federal Sanat Projesi’nde çalışmıştır. Soyut-Dışavurumculuk’un önemli temsilcilerin olan Tworkow, özellikle 1950’lerde hızlı renk tuşlarının üst üste gelmesiyle oluşturduğu hareketli kompozisyonlarla tanınır. Bu tip resimleri Hareket Resmi içerisinde yer alır. Ufak ton farklılıklarıyla homojen bir renge boyanmış tuval üstüne şaşırtmacalı geometrik çizgiler içeren resimler yapan Tworkow’un yapıtları Soyut-Dışavurumcuların çoğuna oranla daha yumuşak, gizemli ve şiirseldir. (Erzen, 1997: 1827) 2.2. Jackson Pollock: Soyut-Dışavurumculuk akımı içinde yer alan Pollock, tuvalin geniş ve serbest kol hareketleriyle renklendirilmesine dayanan Hareket Resminin de önde gelen temsilcilerindendir. 1938-42 arasında Federal Sanat Projesi’nde (WPA-FAP) görev almıştır. Sanatçının, resimleri kendiliğindenliğe rağmen, değişik etkilerin şekillendirdiği uzun ve karmaşık sanatsal çalışmaların ürünüdür. ABD'de kentsel ve kırsal yaşam sahnelerinde uzman olan Thomas Hart Benton'dan ders alan ve daha sonra, Meksikalı duvar ressamı David Allaro Siqueiros'un yönettiği Deneysel Atölye'de çalışan Pollock, boya damlalarının sanatsal kullanımı gibi tekniklerle orada karşılaşmıştır. 1938'de alkolizm tedavisi gören Pollock’u bu süreçte Jungcu analisti bilinçdışı simgeciliği çizmeye ve araştıramaya teşvik etmiştir. Pollock'un hareket resimleri, hem hayranlıkla hem alayla karşılanmış ve kendisine ün de kazandırmıştır. 1949'da Life dergisinde bir makalede Pollock’un Amerika'nın yaşayan en büyük sanatçısı olduğunu öne sürülmüştür ama Pollock 1952'den sonra hareket resimlerinden vazgeçip figüratife yönelmiş ve sanatında tanınabilir imgeler yeniden ortaya çıkmaya başlamıştır. (Sanat Kitabı, 2017: 322) 1956 yılında, alkollü bir şekilde araba kullanırken yaptığı kaza sonucu ölen Pollock, arkadaşları Kligman’nın ağır yaralanmasına ve Edith Metzger’in ölümüne neden olmuştur. 2.3. Willem de Kooning: Willem De Kooning 1904 yılında Rotterdam'da doğmuştur. On iki yaşında okulu bırakan ve reklâm grafikçisi olarak çalışmaya başlayan De Kooning geceleri resim kurslarına devam etmiştir. 1926’da ABD’ye göç eden ve1927 yılında New York'a yerleşen sanatçı, burada bina ressamlığı yapmıştır. Akımın en güçlü ve dinamik sanatçılarından olan De Kooning 1935- 1936 yılında WPA için çalışmış, 1948 yılında Black Mountain College’de ders vermiştir. 1940'lı yılların başından itibaren yaklaşık otuz yıllık bir süre boyunca büyüler üzerine araştırma yapan Willem De Kooning, ilk sergisini 1953'te Sidney Janis Gallery'de açmıştır.1963 yılında Long Island'a kesin olarak yerleşen sanatçı hayatının son yıllarında alzheimer hastalığıyla mücadele etmiştir. Hastalığın olumsuz etkilerine rağmen seksenlerinde bile manzara resimleri yapmaya devam eden Willem De Kooning 1997 yılında vefat etmiştir. 2.4. Franz Kline: 1910 yılında Pennsylvania'da doğan Franz Kline, yetimhanelerde büyüdü. 1931 – 1935 yılları arasında Boston Üniversitesi’nde sanat eğitimi almıştır. 1947'de, figürden soyut tekniğe GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 240 geçiş yapar. Kâğıt skeçlerde bir seri mürekkeple siyah-beyaz bir paleti keşfetmeye başlayan Kline, bu tekniği tuvallere uygulamış ve siyah-beyaz geçişli geniş vuruşlar kullanmıştır. 2.4.1. Eserin Çözümlenmesi: Franz Kline’ın bu eseri tuval üzerine yağlıboyadır. (186.7 × y148.3 cm.) New York Modern Sanatlar Müzesi’nde bulunmaktadır. 1950 yılında yapılan eserin ismi Chief (Şef)’tir. Resmin geometrik bir yapısı yoktur. Kullanılan diyagonal kalın çizgiler, resme kaligrafik bir görünüm kazandırmıştır, siyah beyaz renkler ise Franz Kline’ın Uzakdoğu kaligrafisinden etkilendiğini göstermektedir. Üslup olarak Hareket Resmi’nin karakteristik bir örneğidir. Resim 2. Franz Kline, Şef, 148,3 x186.7 cm., Tuval üzerine yağlıboya, 1950, Modern Sanat Müzesi, New York. 3. RENK ALANI RESMİ (Colour Field Painting) 1950'lerin başlarında akım içinde iki farklı grup gelişmeye başlamış, De Kooning ve Pollock'un öncülüğünde Hareketli Soyut anlayışı oluşmuştur. Bu grup, resmin yapım sürecine büyük önem vermiş ve resmi, bu sürecin bir kaydı ve sanatçının bu yaratma süreci içindeki düşüncelerinin bir simgesi olarak nitelendirilmiştir. İkinci grupsa Newman ve Reinhardt öncülüğünde tek renkli resim üzerimde çalışarak, sonraları Renk Alanı Resmi’nin oluşmasında etken olmuştur. (Rona, 1997: 1688-1689) Yalınlığı, renk alanları arasında kesin sınırları ve geometrik gibi duran biçimleri barındıran bu akım daha sonraları Minimal sanata ön ayak olmuştur. Claude Monet’in Nilüfer Yaprakları serisinin etkisiyle oluşan Renk Alanı Resmi’nde tuvaller yere koyularak resim yapılır. 1960’lara doğru ise etkisini yitiren akımın başlıca sanatçıları Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Francis, Morris Louis, Philip Guston, Conrad Marca- Relli, James Brooks, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Grace Hartigan, Ada Junkers, Hedda Sterne, Esteban Vicente ve Jules Olitski’dir. 3.1. Ad Reinhardt: Adolph Frederick Reinhardt, New York Buffalo'da göçmen bir ailenin çocuğu olarak 1913 yılında dünyaya gelmiştir. Sanatla ilgilenmeye erken yaşlarda başlayan Ad Reinhardt 1936-1941 yılında WPA için çalışmıştır. Reinhardt olgun dönemindeki çalışmaları mutlak bir soyutlama arayışıyla karakterize edilir. Soyut Dışavurumculuğun, düşündüren biyomorfizm ve çok sayıda duygusal anlatı veya duygu önerisi içermeyen, tuval dışındaki herhangi bir şeye en ufak bir gönderme yapmayan bir soyut sanat yaratmaya çalışan sanatçı 1967'de 53 yaşındayken New York’taki stüdyosunda kalp krizinden ölmüştür. GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 241 3.2. Barnett Newman: Barnett Newman, 1905 yılında Rus Polonyalı bir göçmen olarak New York'ta doğmuştur. Yaşamı boyunca büyük ölçüde takdir edilmemesine rağmen soyut Ekspresyonist hareket içinde değerlendirilmiş ve Minimalizm'in öncüsü olarak görülmüşse de kendisini hiçbir zaman belirli bir hareketin bir parçası olarak görmemiştir. Resim ve renklerin temsili olmayan anlamlarına odaklanan keskin tuvallerin aksine Newman, resimlerine daha fazla felsefi bir sınır getirdi. Newman, 1970 yılında New York'ta kalp krizinden öldü. 3.3. Clyfford Still: 1904'te Grandin, Kuzey Dakota'da doğan Clyfford, çocukluk yıllarını Spokane, Washington'da ve Kanada'nın Alberta eyaletinde geçirmiştir. 1933'te Spokane Üniversitesi'den mezun olduktan sonra 1935'te Washington Eyalet Koleji'nden Güzel Sanatlar dalında yüksek lisans eğitimi almış ve birkaç yıl Washington eyaletinde öğretmenlik yapmıştır. Belirgin bir konudan yoksun, yeni ve radikal bir şekilde soyut stile giren ilk kişi olan Clyfford Still, ikinci nesil Renk Alanı ressamlarını önemli ölçüde etkilemiştir. New York sanat sahnesinde hayal kırıklığına uğramasından sonra Rothko, Pollock ve Newman gibi ressamlar ile uzun süren arkadaşlıklarına son veren, kendi çağdaşlarına bile çatan Still, galerilerle de bağları kopardı.1957'de, Venedik Bienali'nin Amerikan Pavyonu'ndaki sergileme teklifini bile reddeden Still, bu süre zarfında, kurumlarda bulunan resimlerinin nasıl sergileneceğine bile ciddi kısıtlamalar getirdi. 1961 yılında Westminster, Maryland'deki bir çiftliğe taşınan sanatçı, 23 Haziran 1980 yılında vefat edene kadar bu çiftlikte sanat yapmaya devam etti ama anlamsız ve çökmüş olarak gördüğü New York sanat sahnesine geri dönmedi. (URL-1, 2018) 3.4. Helen Frankenthaler: Helen Frankenthaler, 1928 yılında Manhattan’da doğmuştur. Babası New York Eyalet Yüksek Mahkemesi'nde bir yargıçtır. Zengin bir aileye mensup olan sanatçının sanatsal yeteneği erkenden fark edildi. Ailesi tarafından ilerici ve deneysel okullara gönderilen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann’dan da özel dersler almıştır. On bir yaşındayken babasını kanserden kaybetmesi Frankenthaler’i derinden etkilemiştir. 19 yaşında Clement Greenberg'le bir sergide tanışan Frankenthaler, Greenberg ile birkaç yıl sürecek romantik bir ilişkiye adım atmış ve böylece sanat camiasına girmiştir. Soyut-Dışavurumculuğun sert dinamizmine karşı sulandırılmış boyalarla akıtma tekniği kullanan sanatçı 1957 yılında Robert Motherwell ile tanışmış ve evlenmiştir. On üç yıl süren bu evlilik, ikilinin sanat çalışmalarında karşılıklı etkilenme dönemini başlatmıştır. “Altın çift” olarak anılan ikilinin birlikteliğinden doğan ayrıcalık parasız yoksul Soyut-Dışavurumcu sanatçılar arasında kıskançlık uyandırmıştır. 1971'de Motherwell'den boşanmasından sonra Frankenthaler Amerika’nın Güneybatı'sına gitmiştir. Bu dönemdeki çalışmalarında Güneybatı coğrafyasının renklerini ve tonlarını kullanmıştır. Yale Üniversitesi’ne seçilen ilk kadın üye olan Frankenthaler, 2011'de Connecticut'ta Darien'deki evinde ölmüştür. 3.5. Morris Louis: Morris Louis Bernstein, 1912'de Baltimore, Maryland'de orta sınıf bir Yahudi ailesinde dünyaya geldi. Baltimore Uygulamalı Güzel Sanatlar Enstitüsünde eğitim gördükten sonra 1937'de Meksikalı muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros'la çalışmıştır. New York’a giderek Federal Sanat Projesine katılmıştır. Renk Alanı resimleriyle tanınan sanatçı genellikle akrilik boya kullanır. Tuvalin büyük bir kısmını boyamamakla tanınır. Tuvallerinde renk şeritleri vardır. Bu şeritlerde boyayı hiçbir anlatımcı değer taşımadan tüpten çıktığı gibi uygulamıştır. 1962'de Louis,’e boya buharlarını yoğun şekilde soluması nedeniyle akciğer kanseri teşhisi konmuştur. Sanatçı birkaç ay sonra, 49 yaşında, Washington DC'deki evinde ölmüştür. GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 242 3.6. Sam Francis: 1923 yılında Kaliforniya San Mateo'da dünyaya gelmiştir. II. Dünya Savaşı sırasında ABD Hava Kuvvetleri'nde görev yapmış, ancak bir test uçuşu sırasında yaralanınca askerlik görevinden ayrılmıştır. Sonrasında sanat eğitimini Berkeley California Üniversitesi’nde yaptıktan sonra Fransa’ya gidip Fernand Leger Atölyesinde eğitim almıştır. Time Magazine tarafından “Paris'teki en ateşli Amerikalı ressam” olarak adlandırılmıştır. Kariyerini önemli ölçüde etkileyen Monet'nin nilüferleri üzerine araştırmalar yapan Sam Francis, Matisse ailesi, Al Held, Joan Mitchell ve Jean-Paul Riopelle ile yakın arkadaşlıklar kurmuştur. İkinci kuşak Soyut-Dışavurumcuları temsil eder. Renk Alanı Resmi içerisinde yer alır. En büyük özelliği astarlanmamış tuval bezi üzerine serbestçe lekeler yaymasıdır. Tuvallerinde bazı bölgeleri boyamaz. Boyamadığı bölgeleri açık alan olarak gösterir. Los Angeles Çağdaş Sanat Müzesi'nin kurucusu olan Francis, 4 Kasım 1994'te Kaliforniya Santa Monica’da 71 yaşındayken ölmüştür. 3.7. Jules Olitski: Jules Olitski, 1922'de Snovsk, Rusya (şimdiki Ukrayna) Jevel Demikovsky'de doğmuştur. Bolşevik babası, doğumundan birkaç ay önce Beyaz Rus ordusu tarafından idam edilince 1923'te annesi ve büyükannesiyle birlikte Brooklyn, New York'ta yaşamaya başlamıştır. Annesi 1926'da yeniden evlenmiş ve kocası Hyman Olitski'nin soyadını almıştır. New York Ulusal Tasarım Akademisi ve New York Tasarım Güzel Sanatlar Enstitüsü’nde okuyan sanatçı ayrıca Paris’te de heykel ve resim eğitimi almıştır. Long Island Üniversitesi ve Benningon Koleji’nde dersler vermiştir. 1959'da ünlü eleştirmen Clement Greenberg'in danışman olduğu Fransız & Co.'daki galeride ilk kişisel sergisini açan sanatçının çalışmaları Renk Alanı Resmi içerisinde değerlendirilir. Üst üste uyguladığı ince renk tabakalarıyla göz kamaştırıcı berraklıkta resimleri vardır. Genellikle akrilik kullanır. 1965’lerden sonra heykelle de ciddi boyutta ilgilenmiştir. Olitski, 2007'de kanserden vefat edene kadar resim yapmayı sürdürmüştür. 3.7.1. Eserin Çözümlenmesi: Jules Olitski’nin bu eseri tuval üzerine akriliktir. Eni 162.6 boyu 233.7 cm. Özel koleksiyonda bulunmaktadır. Yeşil Caz adlı eser 1962 yılında yapılmıştır. Resmin geometrik bir yapısı bulunmaktadır. Kullanılan diyagonal kalın çizgiler resme kaligrafik bir görünüm kazandırmıştır. Asal renkler olarak kabul edilen sarı, kırmızı ve mavi; ara renklerden yeşil ve moru kullanmış, nötr renklerden ise sadece beyazı kullanmıştır. Farklı renklerin birbirine geçme olasılığını ortadan kaldırmış. Basit bir kompozisyondan oluşan Yeşil Caz, Renk Alanı resminin iyi bir örneğidir. GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 243 Resim 3. Jules Olitski, Yeşil Caz, 233,7×162,6 cm., Tuval üzerine akrilik, 1962, Özel koleksiyon. 4. LİRİK SOYUT (Lyrical-Abstraction): 1950’ler de ABD’de yaygınlaşmış bu akımda genellikle fırça kullanılmaz boya sıkılarak yani tüpten çıktığı şekilde kullanılır. İçten, duygusal ve spontone bir anlayışı vardır. Renge büyük önem verilir. Doğu ve İslam kaligrafisinden etkilenmiş olan Lirik Soyut’un bir diğer adı da Anlatımcı Soyut’tur. Öncüleri Wols, Georges Mathieu, Hans Hartung, Jean Fautrier’dir. Soyut dışavurumculuğa çok benzemektedir ve 1947 yılında Paris'te soyut dışavurumculuğa paralel olarak gelişmiştir. Lirik soyutlama, resmin elemanlarının (özellikle renk, leke, çizgi, doku) tesadüfî ilişkilerine ve ressamın psikolojik yaklaşımına dayanmıştır. Bu akım, kısa sürede diğer Avrupa ülkelerine de yayılmıştır. Link soyutlamanın belli başlı sanatçıları Wols, Roger Bissiere, Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, Alfred Manessier, Georges Mathieu, Michel Tapie’dir. 4.1. Alfred Manessier: 5 Aralık 1911'de Fransa'nın Saint-Ouen kentinde doğan sanatçı Paris Okulu çerçevesinde Lirik Soyutlama akımının önde gelen temsilcilerinden biridir. Amines’daki Güzel Sanatlar Okulu’nda mimarlık eğitimi görmüştür. (Babacan, 1997: 1164) Sonrasında Paris’teki Ranson Akademisi’ndeki hocası Roger Bissière’den büyük ölçüde etkilenmiştir. II. Dünya Savaşı sırasında manastıra çekildikten sonra gerçekleştirdiği yapıtlarında soyut biçim ve renklerden oluşan mistik bir nitelik belirmiş, son derece dinsel bir bağlam içinde doğa ve doğa olaylarının düzenini yansıtan simgeler yer almaya başlamıştır. Taşist sanatçılar üzerinde büyük etkisi olan (Babacan, 1997: 1165) sanatçı, 1 Ağustos 1993'te Fransa'nın Orleans şehrinde vefat etmiştir. 4.2. Georges Mathieu: 27 Ocak 1921'de Fransa'nın Boulogne-sur-Mer kentinde doğan Mathieu, hem ressam hem de teorisyendir. Felsefe ve Hukuk eğitimi aldıktan sonra resim yapmaya başlamıştır. İlk başlarda Gerçeküstücülüğe yaklaşan soyut yapıtlar vermiştir. Paris’e yerleştikten sonra Wols’le tanışma olanağı bulmuş ve eserlerinden çok etkilenmiş ve Lirik-Soyutlamaya yakınlık duymuştur. Aynı zamanda Amerikalı Soyut-Dışavurumculardan etkilenmiştir. Sanatçı, resimlerin oluşturulmasında önemli bir araç olan hızın önceliğini, referansların inkârını ve akılcı ruh hâlini ön plana çıkaran Lirik Soyutlamanın inançlarını özetleyen çeşitli manifestolar GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 244 yayınlamıştır. (URL-2, 2018) Daha sonraları Tokyo gezisi sırasında kaligrafi ile tanışmış ve çok etkilenmiştir. Hiçbir hazırlık yapmadan çok hızlı çalışan ve kaligrafiyi kullanan Georges Mathieu son dönem çalışmalarında ise Osmanlı tuğralarnı konu edinmiştir. Eserleri, New York'taki Solomon R. Guggenheim Müzesi ve Chicago Sanat Enstitüsü'nün koleksiyonlarında bulunmaktadır. Mathieu, 10 Haziran 2012'de Fransa'nın Boulogne-Billancourt şehrinde 91 yaşında vefat etmiştir. 4.3. Henri Michaux: 24 Mayıs 1899'da Belçika'nın Namur kentinde doğmuştur. Üniversite eğitimini Asya ve Güney Amerika'da seyahat etmek için terk eden Michaux burada kariyerinin geri kalanında etkisinde kalacağı felsefi ve kültürel fikirlerle karşılaşmıştır. (URL-3, 2018) 1922'de yazmaya başlayan sanatçı kısa zamanda edebiyat çevrelerinde tanınmış ve 1924'te Paris'e gitmiştir. İlk çizim ve resimlerini 1926-27 arasında yapmıştır. 1927-37 arasındaysa Türkiye, İtalya, Portekiz ve Güney Amerika'yı gezmiştir. Bu gezileri sırasında çoğunlukla yazmış, az sayıda da çizim yapmıştır. (Tükel, 1997: 1230) Onun görsel sanatı çoğu zaman, sanatçının duygu durumuna bağlı olarak değişen figüre ya da mimariye işaret eden organik soyutlamalardan oluşuyor. Serbest Biçimli sanatın biçimsizliğine karşıt olarak uyumlu düzenlemelere yönelmiş ve giderek figüratif birtakım çağrışımlar ve araştırmalar sunmuştur. Sanatçının uyuşturucu deneyimleri, bu ilaçları kullanmadığı zaman gerçekleştirdiği düzenlemeler için de temel oluşturmuştur. Michaux 1965'te Ulusal Edebiyat Büyük Ödülü'nü reddetmiştir. (Tükel, 1997: 1230) Michaux, 18 Ekim 1984'te Paris’te vefat etmiştir. 4.4. Jean Fautrier: 16 Mayıs 1898 yılında Fransa’da doğan sanatçı daha sonra 1909'da annesiyle İngiltere'ye giderek önce Kraliyet Akademisi'nde, daha sonra Slade Sanat Okulu'nda öğrenim görmüştür. I. Dünya Savaşı sırasında bozuk sağlığı nedeniyle ordudan ayrılmıştır. 1917 yılında tekrar doğduğu kent olan Paris’e dönmüştür. II. Dünya Savaşı sırasında Fransız vatandaşlığına başvurduğu sırada Gestapo tarafından tutuklanmış ve işkenceye maruz kalmıştır. Bu durum onu derinden etkilemiştir. İlk çıkışını Dante’nin İlahi Komedya’sının Cehennem adlı birinci bölümünün özel bir baskısı için hazırladığı taş baskılar Serbest Biçimli Sanat’ın habercisi sayılmaktadır. (Babacan, 1997: 578-579) Lirik Akımın en önemli sanatçılarındandır. Spatula ile tuvale aktardığ resimleri çoğunlukla elyazımsı, kalın boya katmanlarından oluşur. Resim konusunu ise çıplaklar, nesneler ve manzaralardan oluşur. Sanatçı 21 Temmuz 1964'te Châtenay-Malabry, Fransa'da ölmüştür. 4.5. Wols: Sanatçı, 27 Mayıs 1913’te Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze adıyla Berlin’de dünyaya gelmiştir. Bir memur çocuğu olan Schulze, 1931 yılında Yahudi bir sınıf arkadaşını ateşli bir biçimde savununca, liseyi bitirme sınavlarına çok az bir süre kala, okulunu terk etmek zorunda kalmıştır. (URL-4, 2018) Sonrasında Frankfurt Afrika Çalışmaları Enstitüsü’nde etnoloji ve antropoloji eğitimi almıştır. Ardından Bauhaus okulunda eğitim almıştır. 40’lı yılların başında gerçekleştirdiği çalışmalarında kristaller, yıldızlar, fallus sembolleri ve mikroba benzer biçimler ayırt edilmektedir. Büyük resim üretmek kendi görüşüne göre bir tür jimnastik yapmak anlamına geldiği ve “hırslı” olmayı gerektirdiği için, Wols önceleri küçük boyutlarla yetinmiştir. (URL-5, 2018) Fransa’da illegal olarak bulunan Wols, II. Dünya Savaşı patladıktan kısa bir süre sonra gözaltına alınmış ve bir yıl tutuklu kalmıştır. Tutukluluğu sırasında kâğıt parçacıkları üzerine küçük çini mürekkebi ve suluboya ile resimler yapmıştır. Bu süreçte alkol bağımlısı hâline gelen Wols, Sürrealistlerin psikolojik otomatizmini geliştirdi ve resim yapmayı “parmaklarının hareketi”ne bıraktı. Soyutlamacı çalışmalarıyla Taşizm’in gelişmesini sağladı. Bu dönemde büyük boyutlu tuvallere çalışmıştır. Ama asıl ününü suluboya ve çizimlerine borçludur. Lirik Soyutlama ve Serbest Biçimli Sanatı da uygulamıştır. Wols, boş Rom GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 245 şişelerinin istiflendiği ucuz otel odalarında yaşamış ve çalışmıştır. 1950’de New York’ta ilk sergisi açmış ve ertesi yıl alkol bağımlılığından kurtulmak için gördüğü tedaviden sonra, 38 yaşında, 1 Eylül 1951’de yediği etten zehirlenerek ölmüştür. (URL-6, 2018) 4.6. Hans Hartung: 21 Eylül 1904'te Almanya'nın Leipzig şehrinde doğmuştur. Leipzig, Dresden ve Münih akademilerinde eğitim gördüğü sırada felsefe ve sanat tarihiyle de ilgilenmiştir. 1935’de Nazi Almanya’sından kaçan Hans Hartung, Paris’e yerleşmiştir. II. Dünya Savaşı’nda Fransız Yabancı Lejyonu’nda hizmet vermiştir. Gestapo tarafından hapsedilmiş ve bir bacağını da savaşta kaybetmiştir. Hartung resimlerinde ve litografilerinde farklı kıvrımlar, karalamalar, siyah çizgiler ve mürekkep lekelerini anımsatan lekelerle kendine özgü kaligrafik bir soyut anlatım geliştirmiştir. Resimlerini fırçanın yanı sıra başparmağıyla ya da ucuna bez sarılı sopayla yapan sanatçı, 7 Aralık 1989'da Fransa'nın Antibes kentinde vefat etmiştir. 4.6.1. Eserin Çözümlenmesi: Hans Hartung’un bu eseri litografi baskısıdır. Eni 30 cm. boyu 48.5 cm. Özel koleksiyonda bulunmaktadır. 1957 yılında yapılmış olan eserin ismi L 24’tür. Resimde siyah çizgiler ve mürekkep lekeleri ile kullanılan diagonal kalın çizgiler Uzak Doğu kaligrafilerini anımsatmaktadır. Aynı zamanda X harfine de benzemektedir. Kullanılan renkler monokrom bir etki yaratsa da aradaki mavi renk monokrom özelliğini kırmıştır. Resimleri dinamik ve deneysel yönü ile kendini güçlü bir şekilde ifade eder. Bu da onu Lirik Soyutlamada lider konumuna getirir. Resim 4. Hans Hartung, L 24, 48.5 x 30 cm., Litografi, 1957, Özel koleksiyon 5. SERBEST BİÇİMLİ SANAT (Art Informal-Taşizm): Art Informal ilk kez Fransız eleştirmen Michel Tapié tarafından kullanılmıştır. Geometrik olmayan Lirik (Anlatım) Soyut’un bir alt kademesidir. II. Dünya Savaşı sonrası akımlarından birisidir. Art Informel sanatçıları geometrik soyutlamadan kopuşun yanında sezgisel ve doğaçlamacı bir karakteri vurgular. Akımın yaygınlık kazanmasında Alman Wols ve İspanyol Antoni Tápie etkili olmuştur. Daha sonraları Hans Hartung’un güçlü fırça darbeleri, GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 246 Henri Michaux’un kaligrafik ve rastlantısal soyutlamaları, Jean Paul Riopelle’nin spatula ile uyguladığı kalın boya tabakaları, Pierre Soulages’ın koyu renkli boya şeritleri ve Georges Mathieu’nun üst üste uyguladığı çizgi lekeleriyle bilinen akım, Amerikan Soyut- Dışavurumculuğunu andırır. Ülkemizde bu akım Taşizm olarak da bilinir. Taşizm sözcüğü ise Fransız sanat eleştirmeni Charles Estienne tarafından, 1950'li yıllarda etkinlik gösteren ve soyut dışavurumculuğun karşılığı olan, rengin leke ve damlalar halinde uygulandığı soyut resim anlayışını nitelendirmek için kullanılmıştır. (Eczacıbaşı Sanat Ansiklopedisi, 1997: 1750) 5.1. Alberto Burri: 12 Mart 1915'te İtalya'nın Citta di Castello kentinde dünyaya gelmiştir ve II. Dünya Savaşı sırasında Mussolini'nin ordusunda doktor olarak hizmet etmeden önce tıp eğitimi almıştır. Tunus'ta ele geçirilen Burri, Teksas'taki Camp Howze'de savaş esiri olarak tutulduğu dönemde atılmış çuval bezleri üzerine resim yapmaya başlamıştır. 1946'da serbest bırakıldıktan sonra, sanat pratiğinin soyutlamaya dönüştüğü Roma'ya taşınmıştır. (URL-7, 2018) Doktorluğu bırakıp ressam olmaya karar verdikten sonra ilk sergisini 1948'de açan Burri 20.yy İtalyan sanatının en ünlü soyut ressamıdır. Burri'nin 1949-51 arasında yaptığı Katran dizisini, 1952 tarihli Çuvallar, 1956 tarihli Yanıklar, 1957 tarihli Tahtalar, Demirler ve Plastikler dizileri izlemiştir. Sanatçı bu yapıtlarında yanma, kir ve yıpranma olgusuna yer vermiş; artık, çöp vb atılmış nesnelerin anlatım olanaklarından yararlanarak (Babacan, 1997: 304) Serbest Biçimli Sanat’ın yanında Yoksul Sanat türünde de eserler üretmiştir. 15 Şubat 1995'te Fransa'da Nice'de vefat etmiştir. 5.2. Antoni Tápie: 13 Aralık 1923'te İspanya'nın Barselona kentinde doğmuş ve gençliğinde birçok hastalık geçirmiştir. Barselona Üniversitesi’nde hukuk eğitimi alan Tápie, 1942’de sanatoryumda kaldığı iki yıllık süre içinde Van Gogh ve Picasso’nun resimlerinin kopyalarını yaparak resim öğrenmiştir. Antoni Tápie’nin resimleri çok keskin sınırlamalar içinde biçimlenemez. Her resminde içten gelen bir fırça darbesinin ve iç dünyasını anlatan lekelerin egemen olduğu, yalnız öğelerin farklılaştığı bir tavır görülür. (Erzen, 1997: 1735) Tápies 6 Şubat 2012’de Barselona, İspanya'da vefat etmiştir. 5.3. Emilio Vedova: Emilio Vedova, 9 Ağustos 1919'da Venedik'te doğmuştur. Kendi kendini yetiştiren bir sanatçı olarak, 1942 yılında Renato Birolli, Renato Guttuso, Ennio Morlotti ve Umberto Vittorini'yi de içeren Milan’lı Faşizm karşıtı sanatçı derneği Corrente'ye (1938-43) katılmıştır. 1943’ten 1945’e kadar Vedova direnişine katıldı. 1946'da Milano'da “Oltre Guernica” (Guernica'nın Ötesinde) manifestosuyla Morlotti ile işbirliği yapmış ve Venedik'teki Fronte Nuovo delle Arti'nin (Yeni sanat cephesi, 1946-50) kurucu üyeleri arasında yer almıştır. Bu dönemde yaptığı resimler geometrik (siyah geometriler) olarak tanımlanmıştır. (URL-8, 2018) İtalya’da Serbest Biçimli Sanat’ın en önemli temsilcilerindendir. Eserlerinde Fütürizm ve Picasso etkileri görülür. Vedova, 25 Ekim 2006'da Venedik'te ölünceye kadar resim ve baskıresim çalışmalarını aktif olarak sürdürmeye devam etmiştir. 5.4. Ernst Wilhelm Nay: Almanya'nın Berlin kentinde 1 Haziran 1911'de doğmuştur. Nazi rejimi çalışmalarını Dejenere sanat olarak gösterene kadar, hatta eser üretmesini engelleyene kadar, Almanya'da başarılı bir şekilde kariyerini sürdürmüştür. Art Informel hareketi içerisinde İkinci Dünya Savaşı sonrası sanatçıları arasında en bilinen Alman ressamıdır. Sadece soyutlama içinde çalışmasına rağmen, Nay'un tekstil benzeri desenleri ve farklı renkleri kullanması, Ernst GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 247 Ludwig Kirchner ve Henri Matisse gibi temsili ressamların etkisini göstermektedir. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, 8 Nisan 1968'de Köln, Almanya'da vefat etmiştir. 5.5. Jean-Michel Atlan: Fransız Ressam Jean Michel Atlan, 1913’te Cezayir’in Constantine şehrinde doğmuştur. Yahudi bir aileye mensup olan sanatçı 1930 – 1934 yılları arasında Paris Sorbonne Üniversitesinde Felsefe eğitimi almıştır. Fransa’nın Almanya tarafından işgali nedeniyle eğitim hakkını kaybeden sanatçı Montparnasse civarında yokluk içinde yaşamıştır. 1942’de tutuklanan ve bir ruh hastalıkları kliniğinde tecride mahkûm edilen Atlan, bu süreçte resme ilgi duymaya başlamıştır. (URL-9, 2018) Fransa’nın işgalden kurtulmasıyla 1944 yılında ‘Le Sang Profond’ isimli şiir kitabını yayınlamıştır. Resim çalışmalarını, Galeri Charpentier’de düzenlenen Ecole de Paris sergisinde sunmuş, 1956’da Galerie Bing’de düzenlenen sergisiyle övgü toplamıştır. Sanatçı 1960 yılında kanser nedeniyle hayatını kaybetmiştir. (URL-10, 2018) 5.6. Jean-Paul Riopelle: 7 Ekim 1923'te Kanada'nın Montreal kentinde doğan Riopelle, erken yaşta resim eğitimi almış, daha sonra Mobilya Okulu’nda eğitim görmüştür. İlk önceleri Gerçeküstücü eğilim gösteren sanatçı Pollock’tan etkilenerek Serbest Biçimli Sanat akımı tarzında resimler yapmaya başlamıştır.. Belli biçimlere bağlı olmayan soyut resimlerin doğallığıyla, güçlü fırça vuruşlarının oluşturduğu renk ve doku arasında bir bağlantı kurmaya çalışan sanatçı eserlerinde yoğun renk ilişkilerine de yer vermiştir. Kullanılan parlak renkler, yüzeye mekanik bir katılık getirmiştir. Amerikalı ressam Joan Mitchell ile 15 yıl romantik bir ilişki yaşayan sanatçı 12 Mart 2002'de Île-aux-Grues, Kanada'da vefat etmiştir. 5.7. Jean René Bazaine: Jean René Bazaine, 1904'te Paris'te doğmuştur. Çocukluğundan beri heykele yatkın olan sanatçı Ecole des Beaux-Arts'ta heykel okumuş ancak 1924'te resim eğitimi almak için Julian Akademisi’ne geçmiştir. İlk kişisel sergisini 1931 yılında Salon d'Automne'da açan Bazaine bu sergiden sonra Bonnard tarafından takdir görmüş ve cesaretlendirilmiştir. (URL-11, 2018) Dini sanat ile ilgilenen Bazaine, kiliseler için vitraylar, seramik duvarlar yapmıştır. 1948-51 yılları arasında uluslararası üne kavuşmuştur. Taşizm’in güzel örneklerini vermiş olan Bazaine 1975 yılında Paris, Fransa’da vefat etmiştir. 5.8. K.R.H. Sonderborg: 5 Nisan 1923'te Danimarka’nın Als adasında doğmuştur. II. Dünya Savaşı sırasında gestapo tarafından tutuklanan Sonderborg, savaş sonrası Avrupa sanatında önemli bir rol oynamış ve Serbest Biçimli Sanatın önemli savunucuları arasında yer almıştır. Sonderborg, ilk önceleri mekanik yapıların bir kısmını boyayarak tuvale yerleştirmeyle başlamıştır. Sonraları spontan jestler kullanara caz ritimlerinden ilhamla titreşen çizgilere yer vermiştir. 1968’li yıllarda Beuys ile birlikte Düsseldorf Sanat Akademisinde öğretmenlik yapan Sonderborg’un eserleri birçok koleksiyonda yer almıştır. Sanatçı 18 Şubat 2008 yılında Hamburg, Almanya’da vefat etmiştir. 5.9. Karl Otto Götz: Almanya’nın Aachen kentinde 22 Şubat 1914’de doğmuştur. Serbest Biçimli Sanat akımı tekniğinde resimler yapmıştır. Sanatçı büyük ölçekli kompozisyonlar kurarak 20. yüzyıl Alman çağdaş sanatının ilerlemesine vesile olmuştur. Sigmar Polke ve Gerhard Richter gibi sanatçıları etkilemiştir. İlk kişisel sergisini 1947 yılında açan sanatçı Düsseldorf Sanat GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 248 Akademisinde öğretmenlik yapmış ve birçok sanatçının yetişmesini sağlamıştır. 19 Ağustos 2017 yılında 103 yaşında Niederbreitbach, Almanya’da vefat etmiştir. 5.10. Pierre Soulages: 24 Aralık 1919'da Fransa'nın Rodez kentinde doğmuştur. II. Dünya Savaşı sonrası Yeni Paris Okulu’nun en özgün sanatçılarından biri olarak kabul edilen Pierre Soulages, kısa bir süre sonra Montpellier Sanat Okulunda eğitim gördükten sonra savaşa katılmıştır. Serbest Biçimli Sanat içinde gösterilir. Büyük boyutlu tuvaller kullanarak geniş siyah çizgilerle kaligrafik resimler yapmıştır. 2001 yılında St. Petersburg'daki Hermitage Müzesi'nde sergilenen ilk çağdaş sanatçı olmuştur. Fransa'nın Sète kentinde yaşamaktadır. Sanatçı, 2014 yılında memleketinde kendi adına açılan Musée Soulages'e 500 eser bağışlamıştır. 5.10.1. Eserin Çözümlenmesi: Pierre Soulages’in bu eseri tuval üzerine yağlıboyadır. Boyutları 195 x 130 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum koleksiyonunda bulunmaktadır. 1953 yılında yapılmıştır. Işıltılı açık zeminle siyah imgelerin çatışmasından doğan bir gerilimin söz konusu olduğu büyük boyutlu tuvallerdeki açık renk zemin üstüne siyah, geniş çizgiler kaligrafiyi çağrıştırır. Ancak bunlar kaligrafik imgelerden çok serbest biçimli bir anlatım ürünü olan işaretlerdir. (Gökduman, 2002: 29) Resim 5. Pierre Soulages, Resim, 195 x 130 cm., Tuval üzerine yağlıboya, 1953, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 6. KOBRA (Cobra): İkinci Dünya Savaşı'ndan sonra, Paris’te Hollandalı Deneysel Grup ile Belçikalı Genç Beloica Resmi üyelerinin birleşmesiyle Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Corneille, Asger Jorn öncülüğünde kurulmuştur. Grup adını kurucularının geldiği ülkelerin başkentlerinin harflerinden almıştır. Kopenhag (Copenhagen), Brüksel ve Amsterdam şehirlerinin ilk harfleri ve kobra yılanından gelmektedir. (Rona, 1997: 1029) Ancak Kobra, sadece bu şehirde yaşayan sanatçılarla sınırlı değildir; sekiz ülkeden yaklaşık elli sanatçıdan oluşmuştur. 1948 ve 1951 yılları arasında etkinlik göstermiştir. Bütün avangart akımlarda olduğu gibi Kobra için de geleceğin kurulması, ancak geçmişin reddedilmesiyle mümkündür. Kobra ve Dada arasında yakın benzerlikler vardır. Dada, Kobra'dan otuz yıl kadar önce Birinci Dünya Savaşı'ndan GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 249 hemen sonra ortaya çıkmıştır. Her iki hareket de savaş sonrasının kültürel değerlerine kuşkuyla bakmış ve onları sorgulamaya başlamış; bütün sanat biçimleriyle (edebiyat, müzik, sinema, fotoğraf vb.) kaynaşmış; felsefe, psikoloji ve politikayla ilişki kurmuştur. Bu anlamda her iki akım da sürrealizmle çok benzeşir. (Keser, 2009: 73-74) Kobra'nın sanatçıları Amerika’daki Hareket Resmi gibi el ve kol hareketleri ile ilintilidir. Bilinci reddeder, sadece doğaçlama hareketler ile oluşan resimlerdir. Bunun sebebi Batı kültürünün bulandırdığı yaratıcılık kaynaklarından kurtulmak isteyip; Doğu hat sanatı, efsaneler, folklor, çocuklar ve akıl hastalarının sanatlarıyla yakından ilgilenmiş olmalarıdır. 6.1. Asgern Jorn: 3 Mart 1914'te Vejrum, Danimarka'da doğan Asger Oluf Jørgensen, 1936'da Paris'e gitmiş ve burada Fernand Léger'in özel sanat okuluna kaydolmuştur. Sonrasında Danimarka'ya dönenerek, eğitimini Kopenhag'daki Danimarka Kraliyet Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi'nde tamamlamıştır. Karel Appel ile birlikte Kobra grubunun kurucuları arasında yer alır. Jorn, sayısız soyutlama ve canavar formlarını, bitpazarlarından topladığı geleneksel manzara resimlerinin üstüne yapmıştır. (URL-12, 2018) Yaratıcı düşünceyi beklenmedik, bilinmeyen, tesadüfî, düzensiz, saçma ve imkânsız olarak tanımlayan Jorn, 1 Mayıs 1973 yılında Danimarka'nın Aarhus kentinde ölene kadar resim yapmaya devam ettmiştir. 6.2. Corneille: Hollandalı bir ailenin çocuğu olan Corneille, 3 Temmuz 1922 yılında Belçika'nın Liège kentinde doğmuştur. Asıl adı Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo'dur. Amsterdam Rijksakademie’den mezun olduktan sonra kendi kendini yetiştirmiş bir ressam olarak kabul edilmektedir. Akademi’den arkadaşları Appel, Alechinksy ve Jorn ile 1948 yılında Kobra Grubunun kurucuları arasında yer almıştır. Corneille, 1950'lerin başlarında muhafazakâr Hollanda sanat camiasında kendine iyi bir yer edinmiştir. Kuşları, kedileri, kadınları, manzaraları, mitolojik ve çoğunlukla çocuksu hareketlerle düzenleyen sanatçı modern sanatı kabul edilir kılmıştır. (URL-13, 2018) Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee ve Vincent van Gogh'dan etkilenmiştir. 5 Eylül 2010 yılında Paris, Fransa’da vefat etmiştir. 6.3. Karel Appel: Karel Appel, 25 Nisan 1921'de Amsterdam'da doğmuştur. 1940'dan 1943'e kadar Amsterdam'daki Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten'de eğitim görmüştür. 1946'da ilk kişisel sergisini Hollanda'nın Groningen şehrinde Het Beerenhuis'de açan Appel, Amsterdam Stedelijk Müzesi'nde Jonge Schilders (Genç ressamlar)'a katılmıştır. Bu süre zarfında, önce Pablo Picasso ve Henri Matisse sonra Jean Dubuffet’den etkilenmiştir. (URL-14, 2018) 1948'de Hollandalı bir grup sanatçıyla birlikte Deneysel Grup’u kurmuş ve 1949'dan başlayarak bu grubun açtığı sergilere katılmıştır. Reflex adıyla yayımladıkları dergide ise soyut sanatın ilkelerini savunmuştur. Bu dönemde çoğu kez doğrudan doğruya tüpten tuvale sıktığı yoğun boya katmanlarıyla kompozisyonlar yaratan sanatçının tabloları, kullandığı canlı renkler ve ilkel biçimlerle Kuzey Dışavurumculuğu'nun coşkulu, huzursuz niteliğini yansıtır. 1950'den sonra Paris'e yerleşerek uluslararası bir üne kavuşan ressam, 1953 Sao Paulo Bienali’ne katılmış, 1954'te de Venedik Bienali'nde UNESCO Ödülü'nü almıştır. Sanat yaşamının ileri dönemlerinde daha yalın ve iki boyutlu kompozisyonlar yaratmakla birlikte, resimlerindeki soyut imgeler, bir yandan dehşet, bir yandan da çocuksu bir saflık izlenimi veren masklar, hayvan ve doğadışı yaratıklardan esinti taşımaktadır. (Babacan, 1997: 118) Karel Appel, 3 Mayıs 2006 yılında Zürih'te vefat etmiştir. GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 250 6.4. Pierre Alechinsky: 19 Ekim 1927'de Brüksel'de doğan Pierre Alechinsky, grafik teknikleri, halk sanatı ve ortaçağ kitap illüstrasyonları üzerine yoğunlaşmıştır.1948 yılında Brüksel'de Ulusal Mimarlık ve Dekoratif Sanatlar Yüksekokulu'nda sanat eğitimi alan Alechinsky ilk kişisel sergisini 1947 yılında Brüksel'deki Galerie Lou Cosyn'de açmıştır. Kobra Grubu’nun kurucuları arasında yer almıştır. Japon kaligrafisi, Halk sanatı ve çocuk sanatından esinlenen çalışmalarında cesur ve etkileyici kompozisyonlar bulunur. Sanatçı çalışmalarına Paris’teki atölyesinde devam etmektedir. 6.4.1. Eserin Çözümlenmesi: Pierre Alechinsky’nin bu eseri tuval üzerine yağlıboyadır. Boyutları 151,1 x 238,4 cm. 1954 yılında yapılan eser, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum koleksiyonunda bulunmaktadır. Alechinsky’nin eserlerinde genellikle somut ve soyut birleşir. Bu durum, bu eserde de görülmektedir. Tuval ortasında bir kadın figürü bulunmaktadır, tuvalin arka planına doğru ise figür kaybolmaktadır. Ortaya çıkan şekilde ve arka planda, yoğun bir şekilde beyaz ile renklendirilmiş mavi çizgilerden oluşan bir resim bulunmaktadır. Resimde eski resimlerini karakterize eden allover deseninin izleri vardır. Bu eserde aynı zamanda 1955 yılında Japonya’ya yaptığı yolculuklarda gözlemlediği Japon kaligrafisinin etkileri de görülmektedir. Resim 6. Pierre Alechinsky, Ant Tepesi, 151,1 x 238,4 cm., T.ü.y.b., 1954,Solomon R. Guggenheim Müzesi, New York. 7. SERT KENAR (Hard Edge): Sert Kenar akımı resminde ana konu renktir. Resimler adeta saf renkten ibarettir. Bu akıma göre rengin bittiği yerde resim bitmiş demektir. Geometrik Soyutlama içinde tanımlanabilir. 1950-1960 yılları arasında etkin olmuştur. “Sert-Kenar” adını ilk kez 1959’da Claremont’ta açılacak bir sergi için California’lı eleştirmen Jules Langsner önermiş, ama sergi "4 Soyut Klasikçi” adı altında açılmıştır. Bu terim ise giderek yüzey düzgünlüğü, renk canlılığı, biçim yalınlığı taşıyan resim türleri için kullanılmış; biçim ve renk alanlarının sınırıyla oluşan keskin çizgiyi vurgulamıştır. Özellikle ABD'de yayılan bu soyutlamada yüzey düzgün ve dokusuzdur. Az sayıdaki biçim ise tüm yüzey boyunca uzanmasa da onu parçalara böler. Her ne kadar Sert-Kenar resimleri, 1920 ve 30’larda Avrupa'da yaygınlaşan Geometrik-Soyutlama'yla bir benzerlik gösterse de onun yanında çok yalın, tüme varan, çarpıcı bir görünüşe sahiptir. (Erzen, 1997: 1646) Sert-Kenar akımı içerisinde yer alan sanatçılar; Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly ve Lorser Feitelson gibi sanatçılardır. GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 251 7.1. Ellsworth Kelly: 31 Mayıs 1923 yılında Newburgs, New York’ta doğmuştur. 1945'te Boston Güzel Sanatlar Müzesi Okulu'nda başladığı sanat eğitimini 1948'de gittiği Paris'te Güzel Sanatlar Yüksekokulu’nda tamamlamıştır. Meslek yaşamının başlarında figüratif nitelikli yapıtlar üreten Kelly’nin Soyut Sanat’a yönelişi Paris’te gezdiği bir sergi sırasında gözüne çarpan pencere ve kemer aralıklarından esinlenmesiyle başlamıştır. (Erzen, 1997: 979) Ellsworth Kelly, savaş sonrası sanat dünyasında çok etkili bir güç olmuştur. İlk olarak 1950'lerde parlak, çok panelli ve büyük ölçüde tek renkli tuvalleriyle dikkatleri çekmiştir. Biçim ve renk arasındaki dinamik ilişkilere odaklanmayı sürdüren Kelly, düzensiz şekilli tuvaller yaratan ilk sanatçılardan biridir. Daha sonraki tabakalı kabartma rölyefleri, düz heykelleri ve gökkuşağını çağrıştıran resimleriyle, izleyicilerin boşluk kavramını daha da zorlamıştır. Herhangi bir sanatsal harekete bağlı kalmamakla birlikte, Minimalizm, Sert kenarlı resim, Renk Alanı ve Pop Sanatı’nı etkileyen Kelly, (URL-15, 2018) 27 Aralık 2015 yılında Spencertown, New York’ta vefat etmiştir. 7.2. Kenneth Noland: 10 Nisan 1924’te Asheville, Kuzey Carolina’da doğmuştur. Birçok Amerikan Avangard sanatçısını yetiştiren Black Mountain College'da eğitim görmüştür. 1948-49 yılları arasında da Paris'te Zadkine Heykel OkuIu'na devam etmiştir. Daha sonraki yıllarda ABD’deki çeşitli okullarda öğretmenlik yapmış olan Noland soyut ve minimal sanatın yaygınlaşmasında, kavramsal sanatın gelişiminde önemli rol oynamıştır. (Erzen, 1997: 1352) Noland, hedef tahtasını andıran resimler, zikzaklar ve çizgiler dâhil olmak üzere basitleştirilmiş soyut formlara dayalı bir stil geliştirmiştir. Noland'ın resimleri çarpıcı biçimde Sert Kenar ile Minimalist renkli kompozisyonlar ile karakterize edilir. Bu bağlamda, Noland'ın sanatı, çağdaş soyutçuları etkilemiştir. 5 Ocak 2010 yılında Port Clyde, Maine’de vefat etmiştir. 7.3. Lorser Fietelson: 1898 yılında Savannah, Georgia’da dünyaya gelmiştir. 1927 yılında New York ve Paris'te yaşarken kabul ettiği modernist fikirleri beraberinde Los Angales’e getirdi. Sanat topluluğunda bir lider ve öğretmen olarak son derece etkili olan Feitelson, Pasadena'daki son derece etkili Chouinard Sanat Enstitüsü ve Art Center Tasarım Koleji'nde öğretmenlik yaptı. Bugün o kurum Feitelson sayesinde Los Angeles'ta önemli bir sanat merkezi hâline gelmiştir. 1940'tan 1960'a kadar Feitelson, soyut formları keşfemeye çalışmıştır ve bu doğrultuda sanatı figürden geometrik olana doğru evrilmiştir. Soyut Klasizim veya Sert Kenar resmi olarak bilinen resmi, geleneksel klasizim ile ilgili derin mekân ve biçim duygusunu koruyan eşsiz görüntüler sunmuştur. 1960'lı yılların ortalarından itibaren Minimalizm'e kayarak, arka plandaki renge göre ayarlanmış çizgilerden oluşan şık tablolar yaratmıştır. 1978 yılında Los Angeles, Kaliforniya’da vefat etmiştir. 7.4. Frank Stella: 12 Mayıs 1936 yılında Malden, Massachusetts’de doğan Stella, Princeton Üniversitesi'nde Tarih Bölümü’nde okurken bir taraftan da sanat dersleri almaya devam etmiştir. New York’taki sanat gezilerinde Jackson Pollock ve Franz Kline ile tanışmıştır. Monokromatik bir palet anlayışı ile birlikte düz bir boya uygulamasına geçmiştir. Böylelikle Soyut-Dışavurumcu anlayıştan kopmaya başlamıştır. Stella, siyah resimleriyle Alüminyum Resim Sergisi (1960) ve Bakır Resim Sergisi (1960-61) açmıştır. Kendi oluşturduğu geometrik şekilli tuvaller ile geleneksel dikdörtgen biçime meydan okumuştur. İlk retrospektif sergisini 1970 yılında New York Modern Sanatlar Müzesi'nde açan Stella, retrospektif sergisi açan en genç ressamdır. İkinci retrospektif sergisini de yine New York Modern Sanatlar Müzesi'nde on yedi yıl sonra açmıştır. GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 252 1980'lerden sonra üç boyutlu resimler yapmaya başlayan Stella, parlak ve canlı renkler kullanmaya başlamıştır. Kendisini Minimalist olarak görmemesine rağmen Minimal Sanatı etkilemiş bir sanatçıdır. 7.4.1. Eserin Çözümlenmesi: Frank Stella’nın Harran II adlı bu eseri tuval üzerine polimer ve flüoresan polimer boyadır. Boyutları 304.8 x 609,6 cm. Eser 1967 yılında yapılmıştır. Solomon R. Guggenheim Müzesi koleksiyonuna Bay Irving Blum’un hediyesi olarak 1982 yılında katılmıştır. Eser ismini Anadolu’nun antik şehri Harran’dan almıştır. Harran adı 4000 yıldan beri değişmeden günümüze kadar gelmiştir. Sümerce ve Akatça “Seyahat-Kervan” anlamına gelen “Haranu”dan gelmektedir. Bazı kaynaklar bu kelimenin “keşişen yollar” veya “şiddetli sıcak” anlamına geldiğini de kaydetmektedirler. (URL-16, 2018) Bu seri de tıpkı Harran’ın ismi gibi büyük birleşimlerin kesişen yollarını andırır. Lirik motifleri olan dekoratif desenler bulunmaktadır. Geleneksel dikdörtgen biçime meydan okuyan bir resimdir. Resim 7. Frank Stella, Harran II, 304.8 x 609,6 cm. T.ü. polimer ve flüoresan polimer boya, 1967, Solomon R. Guggenheim Müzesi, New York, Bay Irving Blum’un Hediyesi 1982. 8. SOYUT İZLENİMCİLİK (Abstract Impressionism): Soyut İzlenimcilik, sanatçıların, objektif temsillere ihtiyaç duymadan renklerin kullanımıyla kendilerini ifade ettikleri soyut resim sanatıdır. Soyut İzlenimcilik terimi ilk kez Robert Coates tarafından 1946 yılında yeni sanat eserleri hakkındaki eleştirilerinden birinde kullanılmıştır. Fakat etki alanı daha sonraki yıllara rastlar. Soyut İzlenimcilik’te boya, yoğun bir duygu ve enerjiyle uygulanır. Fırça darbeleri geniş ve cesurdur, şiddetli biçimde uygulanabilir. Sanatçıları; Nicolas de Staël, Joan Mitchell, Milton Resnick ve Richard Pousette- Dart gibi sanatçılardır. 8.1. Nicholas de Staȅl: 5 Ocak 1914 yılında St. Petersburg, Rusya’da doğmuştur. Eğitimini Brüksel Kraliyet Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi’nde tamamlamış ve yaşamının çoğunu Fransa'da geçirmiştir. Genellikle spatula kullanarak kalın boya tabakaları ile oluşturduğu soyutlanmış peyzajlarıyla tanınır. Resimleri, New York ve Paris gibi sanat ortamlarında yüksek talep görmesine rağmen De Staël yaşamı boyunca depresyondan kurtulamamıştır. 16 Aralık 1955 yılında Fransa Antibes'de bulunan atölyesinin penceresinden atlayarak intihar etmiştir. GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 253 8.2. Joan Mitchell: 12 Şubat 1925 yılında Chicago, Illinois’de doğmuştur. Chicago Sanat Enstitüsü'nden mezun olduktan sonra Edward L. Ryerson Seyahat Bursu ile ödüllendirilmiştir. Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse ve Paul Cézanne'ın geç dönem çalışmalarından etkilenmiştir. Amerika Birleşik Devletleri’ndeki erkek egemen sanat sahnesinde büyük başarı kazanmıştır. Yine erkekler tarafından temsil edilen New York’taki Soyut Dışavurumculuk ekolünün rekabetçi mücadelesine dâhil olmuştur. Kronolojik olarak Jackson Pollock’tan sonraki dönemde çalışmış ve “ikinci nesil” soyut dışavurumcu olarak anılmıştır. (Barret: 2015: 116) Sonraları Mitchell’in resimleri Soyut İzlenimcilik içerisinde de değerlendirilmiştir. Uzun süre New York - Paris arasında gidip gelen sanatçı 1959 yılında kalıcı olarak Fransa’ya taşınmıştır. Bu cesur adım onu New York’ta gelişmekte olan sanat dünyasından uzaklaştırmıştır. Paris’te ise Jean-Paul Riopelle de dâhil olmak üzere birçok farklı sanatçıyla tanışma imkânı bulmuştur. Başarılı bir Kanadalı sanatçı olan Riopelle ile birlikte yaşamıştır. İkisinin birlikteliği 1979 yılına kadar sürmüştür. Hayatının sonuna kadar soyut resim yapmaya devam eden sanatçı 30 Ekim 1992’de Vetheuil, Fransa’da vefat etmiştir. 8.2.1. Eserin Çözümlenmesi: Joan Mitchell’in Barnes Hole’a Yüzmeye Gitti Ancak Çok Üşüdü adlı bu eseri tuval üzerine yağlıboyadır. Boyutları 216.535 x 198.755 cm. Eser 1957 yılında yapılmıştır. Mitchell, köpeği George ile kumsala gittikleri bir yaz gününün anısını resmine aktarır. Resmi yaptığı sırada Sandler ile gerçekleştirdiği röportaj boyunca Mitchell manzaralarını yanında taşıdığını söyler, Sandler da onun yorumunu Baudelaire’in “Açık bir pencereden sokağa bakan biri hiçbir zaman kapalı bir pencereden dışarı bakan birisi kadar çok şey görmez,” sözleriyle ilişkilendirir. Mitchell’in eseri soyut ve taraflıdır, ancak bir kumsala, bir köpeğe, anılarına ve duygularına gönderme yapar. Resminde ifade ettiği duygular gerçek dünyaya aittir ve çok güçlüdür. Sandler’a göre Mitchelll “hem hatırladığı manzarayı hem de gerçekte içinde olduğu duygu hâlini yeniden yaratmaya kalkışır (…) Sanatçının kendi köprüsü, gölü ya da kumsalı çelişkileri ve belirsizlikleri aktarmak suretiyle sınırlı olanın (görülebilenin) ötesine geçmek ve sınırsız olanın bir kısmına katılmak zorundadır.” Mitchell, “Resim çalışmalı ama aynı zamanda resmin çalışmasından daha fazlasını söylemelidir,” der. (Sandler, 1957: 45) (Barret: 2015: 133) Resim 8. Joan Mitchell, George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold, (216.535 x 198.755 cm. T.ü.y.b. 1957.) GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 254 9. SONUÇ Görüldüğü üzere 1940-1950 yılları arasında New York’ta ortaya çıkan Soyut Dışavurumcu resim anlayışının, ortaya çıkışıyla ilgili farklı görüşler öne sürülmesine rağmen, uluslararası sanat ortamına yeni bir soluk getirdiğini ve sanatçılara kendilerini özgürce ifade etme olanağı sunduğunu kabul etmek gerekir. Öncülüğünü Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, William Baziotes ve Willem De Kooning’in yaptığı Soyut Dışavurumcu akımın öne çıkan diğer isimleri arasında Lousie Bourgeois, James Brooks, Alberto Burri, Jack Bush, Elaine Fried de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, Sam Fancis, H. Frankenthaller, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, Al Held, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Norman Lewis, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Barnet Newman, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitsky, Conrad Marca-Relli, William Ronald, William Scort, Aaron Siskind, David Smith, Hedda Sterne, Clyfford Still, Bradley Walker Tomlin ve Esteban Vicente gösterilir. Bu isimlerin kendine özgü üslupları ve kullandıkları plastik dildeki farklılıklar nedeniyle Hareket Resmi, Renk Alanı Resmi, Lirik Soyutlama, Serbest Biçimli Sanat, Kobra, Sert Kenar ve Soyut Empresyonizm gibi başlıklar altında ele alınsa da Soyut Dışavurumculuk görsel gerçekliğin temsilini değil de onun etkisini elde etmek için form, renk, çizgi, ton ve doku unsurlarını öznel biçimde kullanmaya dayanır. Bu nedenle sanatçıyı merkeze alır. Özetle, sözü edilen akımların ortak noktası, sanatçıyı merkeze alarak ona kendini modern sanatı kısıtlayabilecek tüm geleneklerden bağımsız bir biçimde ifade etme olanağı sunarken aynı zamanda yaratma işlemi ve sürecinin de resmin konusuna dâhil olmasına olanak sağlamasıdır. GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 255 KAYNAKLAR: BABACAN, İ., 1997, “Alberto Burri”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 1, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. BABACAN, İ., 1997, “Alfred Manessier”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 2, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. BABACAN, İ., 1997, “Jean Fautrier”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 1, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. BABACAN, İ., 1997, “Karel Appel”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 1, YEM Yayın, İstanbul BARRET, T., 2015, Neden Bu Sanat? Çağdaş Sanatta Estetik ve Eleştiri, Hayalperest Yayınevi, Çev.: Esra Ermert, İstanbul BONFAND, A., 2015, Soyut Sanat, Dost Kitabevi, Çev: Işık Ergüden, Ankara EATON, M., Basic Issues in Aesthetics, ERZEN,J.N., 1997, “Adolph Gottlieb”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 2, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. ERZEN, J.N., 1997, “Antoni Tápies”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 3, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. ERZEN,,J.N., 1997, “Ellsworth Kelly”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 2, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. ERZEN,J.N., 1997, “Jack Tworkow”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 3, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. ERZEN,,J.N., 1997, “Kenneth Noland”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 2, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. ERZEN,J.N., 1997, “Mark Rothko”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 3, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. ERZEN,,J.N., 1997, “Sert-Kenar”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 3, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. ERZEN,J.N., 1997, “William Baziotes”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 1, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. GÖKDUMAN, D., 2002, Soyutlama ve Kaligrafi, İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, İstanbul. KESER, N., 2009, Sanat Sözlüğü, Ütopya Yayınları, 2. Bs., Ankara. RONA, Z., 1997, “Kobra”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 2, YEM Yayın, İstanbul RONA, Z., 1997, “Soyut-Dışavurumculuk”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 3, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. SANAT KİTABI, 2017, Alfa Yayınları, Çev: Ahmet Fethi, İstanbul. SANDLER, Irving, 1957, “Mitchell Paints a Picture,” ARTnews, October. “TAŞİZM”, 1997, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 3, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. TÜKEL, U.. 1997, “Henri Michaux”, Eczacıbaşı Ansiklopedisi 2, YEM Yayın, İstanbul. URL-1, https://www.theartstory.org/artist-still-clyfford.htm (24.08.2018, Saat: 02:25) URL-2, http://www.artnet.com/artists/georges-mathieu/ (21.08.2018 Saat: 19:12) URL-3, http://www.artnet.com/artists/henri-michaux/ (21.08.2018, Saat: 21:17) URL-4, http://www.kimkimdir.gen.tr/kimkimdir.php?id=2987 (21.08.2018 Saat: 18:50) URL-5, http://www.kimkimdir.gen.tr/kimkimdir.php?id=2987 (21.08.2018 Saat: 18:55) URL-6, http://www.kimkimdir.gen.tr/kimkimdir.php?id=2987 (21.08.2018 Saat: 18:57) URL-7, http://www.artnet.com/artists/alberto-burri/ (24.08.2018, Saat:00:48) URL-8, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/Emilio-Vedova (24.08.2018, Saat: 01:35) URL-9, https://www.istanbulsanatevi.com/sanatcilar/soyadi-a/atlan-jean-michel/jean-michel- atlan-1913-1960/ (24.08.2018, Saat:01:01) https://www.theartstory.org/artist-still-clyfford.htm http://www.artnet.com/artists/georges-mathieu/ http://www.kimkimdir.gen.tr/kimkimdir.php?id=2987 http://www.kimkimdir.gen.tr/kimkimdir.php?id=2987 http://www.kimkimdir.gen.tr/kimkimdir.php?id=2987 https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/Emilio-Vedova https://www.istanbulsanatevi.com/sanatcilar/soyadi-a/atlan-jean-michel/jean-michel-atlan-1913-1960/ https://www.istanbulsanatevi.com/sanatcilar/soyadi-a/atlan-jean-michel/jean-michel-atlan-1913-1960/ GÖKDUMAN / Resim Sanatında 1940-1960 Yılları Arasında Soyut Dışavurumcu Akımlar Journal of Awareness, Cilt / Volume:3, Sayı / Issue: Special, 2018, 235-256 256 URL-10, https://www.istanbulsanatevi.com/sanatcilar/soyadi-a/atlan-jean-michel/jean-michel- atlan-1913-1960/ (24.08.2018, Saat:01:01) URL-11, http://www.askart.com/artist/Jean_Rene_Bazaine/11009331/Jean_Rene_Bazaine.aspx (24.08.2018, Saat: 01:23) URL-12, http://www.artnet.com/artists/asger-jorn/ (27.08.2018, Saat: 02:38) URL-13, http://rogallery.com/Corneille/corneille_bio.htm ( 27.08.2018, Saat: 22:26) URL-14, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/karel-appel (27.08.2018, Saat: 02.03) URL-15, https://www.theartstory.org/artist-kelly-ellsworth.htm (28.08.2018, Saat: 12.05) URL-16, http://ekitap.kulturturizm.gov.tr/TR,80698/harran-ve-harrandaki-mimari-eserler.html (29.08.2018, Saat: 14.05) ÜSTER, C., Arshile Gorky’yi kim öldürdü? http://www.edebiyathaber.net/arshile-gorkyyi-kim- oldurdu/ (Erişim Tarihi: 26.08.2018, Saat: 00:36) https://www.istanbulsanatevi.com/sanatcilar/soyadi-a/atlan-jean-michel/jean-michel-atlan-1913-1960/ https://www.istanbulsanatevi.com/sanatcilar/soyadi-a/atlan-jean-michel/jean-michel-atlan-1913-1960/ http://www.askart.com/artist/Jean_Rene_Bazaine/11009331/Jean_Rene_Bazaine.aspx http://rogallery.com/Corneille/corneille_bio.htm https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/karel-appel https://www.theartstory.org/artist-kelly-ellsworth.htm http://ekitap.kulturturizm.gov.tr/TR,80698/harran-ve-harrandaki-mimari-eserler.html work_k4yggdeepjewra4b364sh36qle ---- EUROGRAPHICS 2010 / T. Akenine-Möller and M. Zwicker (Guest Editors) Volume 29 (2010), Number 2 Puzzle-like Collage Stas Goferman Ayellet Tal Lihi Zelnik-Manor Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Abstract Collages have been a common form of artistic expression since their first appearance in China around 200 BC. Recently, with the advance of digital cameras and digital image editing tools, collages have gained popularity also as a summarization tool. This paper proposes an approach for automating collage construction, which is based on assembling regions of interest of arbitrary shape in a puzzle-like manner. We show that this approach produces collages that are informative, compact, and eye-pleasing. This is obtained by following artistic principles and assembling the extracted cutouts such that their shapes complete each other. 1. Introduction A collage is a work of the visual arts, made from an as- semblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole, of- ten having a purposeful incongruity. This paper focuses on photo-collages, which assemble a collection of photographs by cutting and joining them together. A photo-collage can be used for art [Ade89] as well as for summarizing a photo collection, such as a news event, a family occasion, or a con- cept (e.g., the Beatles’ album cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”). Manually creating a collage is a difficult and time- consuming task, since the pieces should be nicely cut and matched. Therefore, automation could be a welcomed tool. Prior work on automating collage creation extracts rectan- gular salient regions and assembles them in various fash- ions [RBHB06,WSQ∗06,BCG∗07,Pic]. This produces beau- tiful collages, however, since the extracted regions are rect- angular, the variety of possible compositions is limited and uninteresting regions are included. In [RBHB06] the rectan- gular shapes are modified by graph cuts and alpha blending. This creates nicer transitions between images, however, the uninteresting regions (typically from the background) can- not be eliminated. This approach to assemblage, while informative, does not match in spirit the way in which many artists construct col- lages. Artists extract the expressive regions of interest, which can be of arbitrary shape, as noted by Henri Matisse: “The paper cutouts allow me to draw with color”. This approach is expressed in numerous artistic collages, for instance see the pioneering works of “Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” by Richard Hamil- ton and the “Dada Siegt” by Raoul Hausmann. The critical boundaries of the important information are considered sig- nificant and are thus maintained. This artistic form of collage has gained popularity also among amateurs as can be seen by the hundreds of collage groups on Flickr and hundreds of thousands users in Polyvore [Pol], a web-based application where collages are manually assembled by users. We propose a method for automating collage creation, which is inspired by artistic collage work and glues mostly the pur- poseful cutouts (see Figure 1). The fundamental difference between prior work and ours is that we compose a puzzle- like collage of arbitrary shaped images rather than rectangu- lar ones. A user-study shows that this creates collages that are often considered more appealing. Moreover, this allows us to generate space-efficient collages, which are useful for summarization of image data sets. The main contribution of this work is a complete system for image collage whose key idea is to assemble arbitrary- shaped cutouts of interesting regions. This requires solv- ing two challenges: extraction of non-rectangular regions- of-interest, and assembly of arbitrary shapes. For the former we propose an algorithm that extracts non- rectangular regions that coincide with the meaningful infor- mation – object boundaries and salient background features (Section 4). Image segmentation is a well studied and dif- ficult problem. Here, we do not claim to solve it but rather we propose an effective solution for our specific application. c© 2010 The Author(s) Journal compilation c©2010 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. S. Goferman, A. Tal, L. Zelnik-Manor / Puzzle-like Collage (a) Our puzzle-like collage (b) AutoCollage [RBHB06] Figure 1: Dark zoo collages created from 9 images. Note how the assembly of the animals in our collage is like a puzzle. This is both more aesthetic as our user-study shows and uses the canvas more efficiently (hence most of the animals appear larger). Unlike segmentation, the region-of-interest may include sev- eral objects and parts of the background to convey the con- text. Moreover, an important observation is that a perfectly accurate extraction is not compulsory due to the following three reasons. First, even when some ROIs are not perfect, their overall shape is typically close to the correct one and a placement can be computed. Second, the overlaps between the ROIs in the collage often conceal the inaccuracies. Fi- nally, any remaining visible imperfections can then be man- ually corrected using, for example, Soft Scissors [WAC07]. For the assembly we propose an algorithm that composes the ROIs while finding a good balance between compact- ness and informativeness (Section 5). Since the shapes are non-rectangular, this resembles puzzle-solving. The shapes, however, cannot perfectly match, as assumed in a standard puzzle, and some overlap is allowed. 2. Related work Techniques of collage were first used at the time of the in- vention of paper in China around 200 BC. Since then, these techniques have been used in various forms in other cultures. In spite of its early creation, the term “collage” was coined at the beginning of the 20th century, by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. These were the times when the use of col- lages made a dramatic appearance among oil paintings and became a distinctive part of modern art. Methods for automatic creation of photo-collages were pro- posed only recently. For example, [ADA∗04] make collages of aligned nearly-identical images, while [Atk04] orga- nize whole pictures on a page and [GC04] assemble faces. The works most related to ours are [RBHB06, WSQ∗06, BCG∗07, Pic]. [RBHB06] define a method, AutoCollage, for constructing a seamless collage from an image set. In this work, rectangular salient image regions are stitched to- gether seamlessly using edge-sensitive blending. In picture collage [WSQ∗06], a 2D spatial arrangement of rectangu- lar images is optimized in order to maximize the visibility of the salient regions. [BCG∗07] propose an improvement to picture collage, by exploiting semantic and high-level in- formation in saliency computation and a genetic algorithm to positioning. Google’s Picasa [Pic] features automatic col- lage generation of whole (or cropped) images, supporting different styles of compositions. We propose to use ROI im- ages of arbitrary shapes, rather than rectangular ones. Most previous work on ROI extraction was limited to de- tecting rectangular ROIs by finding a rectangular bound- ing box of the salient pixels [RKKB05, RBHB06, WSQ∗06, BCG∗07]. Usually such ROIs include many non-salient pix- els. In [HXM∗04], more space-efficient ROIs are created by using the convex hull of the salient points. This reduces the number of non-salient pixels, but is still not accurate enough. Methods for image segmentation [RKB04,LSTS04, LRAL08] aim at accurately extracting foreground pixels by cutting along image contrast boundaries. In images where the region-of-interest corresponds to a foreground region, such segmentation-based methods could suffice for ROI ex- traction. However, in many images parts of the background are essential for capturing the message they convey. Our ap- proach combines saliency and contrast information, thus ad- dressing both accuracy and informativeness. Constructing a collage from image fragments of irregular shapes resembles assembling a 2D puzzle. The jigsaw puz- c© 2010 The Author(s) Journal compilation c©2010 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. S. Goferman, A. Tal, L. Zelnik-Manor / Puzzle-like Collage (a) Input (b) ROIs (c) Final collage Figure 2: Our collage construction framework applied to an image collection describing highlights of the 2008 Olympic games. zle problem is often approached in two stages (e.g. [RB80, KK01, SKKC00]). First, local shape matching finds pairs of fragments that fit perfectly. Then, a global solution is ob- tained by resolving ambiguities. Collages differ from puz- zles in that the fragments typically do not match perfectly, and they are allowed to overlap each other. Therefore, our assembly algorithm aims at finding an informative, yet com- pact composition, rather than a unique and exact assembly. 3. Framework Given a collection of images, we wish to construct an infor- mative, compact, and visually appealing collage. Figure 2 illustrates the steps of our algorithm on a set of images de- scribing events from the 2008 Olympic games. Given the im- ages in Figures 2(a), we first extract the regions-of-interest (ROI), as shown in Figures 2(b). Note the non-rectangular ROIs that accurately cut out the salient regions. Figure 2(c) illustrates the final assembly, in which the runner and the for- ward spinning diver fit in the crevices created by the back- flipping diver’s arched back and spread arms, respectively. To construct informative collages, most of the ROIs should remain visible after assembly. For many images, the ROI consists of foreground pixels alone. This is typical for im- ages with a shallow depth-of-field or images having a blank background (see Figure 3(top)). For images like these, stan- dard image segmentation could suffice. However, for many images, both professional and non-professional, the infor- mative regions consist of both foreground as well as back- ground pixels that provide the context. For instance, in Fig- ure 3(bottom), a meaningful ROI should include the car, the fire and part of the surrounding, and the kids as well as part of the bed they are sitting on. The proposed ROI extraction algorithm incorporates saliency and edge-based information, thus it can handle both types of images (Figure 3(d,g)). To generate a collage the user can choose to click a button (a) Input (b) Polyvore (c) GrabCut (d) Ours (e) Input (f) GrabCut (g) Ours Figure 3: ROI extraction. GrabCut is a semi-automatic seg- mentation algorithm, capable of extracting ROIs in images with a simple background like those on the top. It is less successful for complex images like those on the bottom. The result by Polyvore is fully automatic but less successful even for simple images. Our method can handle both cases. and get a fully automatic composition. Alternatively, the user can do the following to better control the final result: • Set the desired aspect ratio of the generated collage. • Tune a parameter controlling the amount of allowed over- lap between images. c© 2010 The Author(s) Journal compilation c©2010 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. S. Goferman, A. Tal, L. Zelnik-Manor / Puzzle-like Collage • Attach importance weights to images, which will influ- ence their size in the final collage. • Manually fix the position of some images. • "Glue" images together to be treated as one. When the user selects the automatic mode, the images are randomly scaled (within a limited range) and default overlap and aspect ratio are applied. The assembly algorithm gener- ates a puzzle-like collage by fitting the pieces. Most of the collages in this paper were created fully automatically, ex- cept for setting the aspect ratio. We mention explicitly when user interaction was applied. 4. Region-Of-Interest (ROI) extraction To obtain informative collages, our goal is to extract from each image a region of interest (ROI) of an arbitrary shape, which takes a binary decision at each pixel and labels it as either "interesting" or "not interesting". To achieve this goal we define the following desired properties of an ROI: 1. The ROI should enclose most of the salient pixels. 2. The boundary of the ROI should coincide well with the natural edges of the image. 3. The boundary curve should enable visually appealing compositions (e.g., jagged boundaries are undesired). These requirements emphasize the difference between ROI extraction and foreground-background segmentation. Image segmentation aims at accurately extracting the foreground objects, satisfying only Requirement 2. Conversely, ROIs should include most of the informative regions (Require- ment 1) and enable pretty compositions later on (Require- ment 3). In other words, ROIs should include pieces of the background, when these are helpful for understanding the picture. Note that not all the background should be included – only enough of it for conveying the context. Our algorithm consists of four steps, which incorporate saliency and edge information, in order to comply with the requirements, as illustrated in Figure 4. First, a saliency map is computed and an initial curve is constructed from it. This curve is propagated towards the natural image edges and smoothed based on the saliency. Saliency computation: We first compute the saliency of each image (Figure 4(b)). Though saliency can be com- puted using a variety of previously proposed algorithms [IK01, HZ07, LSZ∗07], we apply our own implementation. For each pixel we consider the patch surrounding it and find the patches in the image that are most similar to it. Salient pixels are those that do not have similar patches elsewhere in the image. The result of this stage is a saliency map where each pixel i is assigned a saliency value Si, which indicates the dissimilarity of the pixel to its K nearest neighbors: Si = 1−ex p { − 1 K K ∑ k=1 d ( pi, qk )} (a) Input (b) Saliency map (c) Initial ROI (d) After curve (e) Final ROI propagation Figure 4: The 4 steps of our ROI extraction algorithm. The initial ROI contains the salient pixels, but is not visually ap- pealing. After curve propagation, the ROI boundary coin- cides with the image edges, however, it is noticeably jagged. The final ROI is smooth in regions where the saliency is low (e.g., above the head), but coincides well with more salient image edges (e.g., knees and arms). Here d ( pi, qk ) is the appearance difference between patches pi and qk . This is enhanced by a standard face detec- tion [VJ01]. Curve initialization: Curve initialization aims at satisfying the first requirement. Initialized by an empty ROI, pixels are added to it sequentially, starting from the highest saliency values to the lowest. This continues until the total saliency of the included pixels reaches 90% of the total image saliency. This results in a binary mask of one or more connected com- ponents of "interesting" regions. The boundary of the largest connected component serves as an initial contour C(t = 0) for the next step (Figure 4(c)). Curve propagation: To satisfy Requirement 2, the initial curve is propagated towards the image edges, while keep- ing in mind the saliency map. We base our approach on a geodesic active contours model [CKS97] and modify it to incorporate saliency. Here the curve C is represented implic- itly via a function φ , by C(t) = {(x, y)|φ (t, x, y) = 0}, and the evolution of the curve is given by the zero-level curve at time t of the function φ (t, x, y): ∂ φ ∂ t = λ|∇φ|G(φ ) + γ|∇φ|H(φ ), G(φ ) = div ( g(|∇u0|) ∇φ |∇φ| ) + ν g(|∇u0|), H(φ ) = hκ(φ ). (1) In Equation (1) u0 is the lightness channel, g(.) is an edge indicator function, h is a saliency indicator function and ν is a positive constant pushing the curve inwards. The curvature c© 2010 The Author(s) Journal compilation c©2010 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. S. Goferman, A. Tal, L. Zelnik-Manor / Puzzle-like Collage Figure 5: Examples of our ROIs. Our approach can handle single objects as well as complex scenes. Irrelevant background is excluded while parts of informative background are kept. of the level-set function is defined by κ = div(∇φ /|∇φ|). Note that setting γ = 0 results in a geodesic model, where the zero-level curve moves in the normal direction with speed G and stops on the desired boundary, where g vanishes. Setting λ = 0, we get a saliency-based evolution in the normal direc- tion with speed H, where the curve stops on salient regions. The importance of our saliency term H is twofold. First, it accelerates the curve evolution in non-salient regions. This is especially important when the curve encounters locally strong, but non-salient edges, which occur at many back- ground non-salient pixels. Second, it slows down the evo- lution in salient regions. We set g(∇u0) = 1/(1 + |∇Gσ ∗u0|2), where Gσ ∗u0 is a smoothed version of u0. Gσ is the Gaussian kernel with standard deviation 1.5. The saliency indicator function is se- lected by h = ex p{−Ŝ2/σ 2s }, where Ŝ is the saliency map and σ 2s is its variance. The level-set evolution is implemented using a numerical scheme of [LXGF05], which eliminates the need of re- initialization of φ , where the zero-level curve at t = 0 is the curve from the previous step. In our implementation, we used λ = 3, γ = 5, ν = 1. The evolution continues until either a maximal number of steps (1000) is reached (i.e., we cannot go too far from the initial curve) or the sum of the image saliency values in- side the curve drops below a certain level (50% of the total saliency). Curve visual enhancement: As can be seen in Figure 4(d), the propagated curve bounds the region of interest. However, the curve itself might be still jagged, since it was pushed to pass through the image edges (which may be non-smooth). To satisfy the third requirement on ROIs we next further smooth the curve in accordance with the saliency, so that later on it can be nicely matched to other shapes in the col- lage (see the result in Figure 4(e)). This is done by applying the level set-evolution with saliency term only (λ = 0), and enforcing the same stopping crite- ria. Note that in this formulation, the curve’s curvature is smoothed while its length barely changes since its propaga- tion is stopped by high-saliency values. Moreover, the evo- lution is stronger where the saliency is low, as intuitively it should be. Results: Figure 5 presents several extracted ROIs. Our ROIs are of smooth irregular shapes that bound nicely the re- gion of interest. When the boundary between foreground and background is clear, our approach cuts out the foreground accurately, as can be seen in the pictures of the blue-dressed Italian and the excited American speaker. In more complex images, such as the cheering kids and the weight-lifter, the ROI includes parts of the background, as expected. 5. Collage assembly The last step of our framework is the assembly of the ROIs. Our assembly algorithm expects as input a set of n images, together with their ROIs and saliency maps. A set of addi- tional, however optional, parameters such as the desired as- pect ratio of the final collage, the amount of allowed over- lap, preferences of ROIs (importance weights between 0 and 1), and constraints on their location lets the user control the creativeness of the final result. We next describe the fully automatic solution and how user input is incorporated. Our goal is to generate collages that are: (1) Informative: The collage should include as much as possible from every image’s region of interest. (2) Compact: The collage should utilize the canvas efficiently, subject to a desired aspect ratio. To achieve this, we first formulate a cost function whose minimization would produce collages adhering to these properties. We then propose an algorithm that aims at mini- mizing the cost function in two steps: initial placement and local refinement. In the first step, the ROIs are scaled ran- domly (or according to importance weights when these were provided) and then efficiently packed in a puzzle-like man- ner, subject to a desired aspect ratio. To further improve col- lage properties, we apply local refinements in the second step, by allowing the following ROI transformations: scal- ing, shifting, rotating, and changing layering position. Composition cost: Given a placement of ROIs and their lay- ering, we define the composition cost C as a combination of c© 2010 The Author(s) Journal compilation c©2010 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. S. Goferman, A. Tal, L. Zelnik-Manor / Puzzle-like Collage informativeness Cin f o and compactness Ccompact cost func- tions subject to a desired aspect ratio δAR : C = (α ·Cin f o + (1−α)·Ccompact )δAR . (2) where 0 < α < 1 controls the amount of overlap. Overlap: The two cost terms Cin f o and Ccompact aim at oppo- site goals – a highly informative layout is not compact and vice versa. The tradeoff between them is controlled by the parameter α . Setting α to a low value could lead to a cre- ative composition with high overlap, while informative im- age parts might be occluded. High values of α could elimi- nate occlusions at the cost of losing compactness. A typical value of α = 0.5 is a good compromise between the two cost terms. Aspect ratio: Let AR be a user-desired aspect ratio and ar be a current aspect ratio. To penalize placements of an unde- sired aspect ratio we define the penalty term δAR as: δAR = ex p{− 1 2σ 2AR (AR−ar)2}, (3) where we set σAR = 0.2. Informativeness cost: Given a placement of k ROIs and their layering, we define the informativeness cost as the sum of occluded salient regions normalized by the total amount of all salient regions. Let S̃i be the saliency map of image i normalized by its ROI area, Ri be its ROI, and Rocci be the occluded part of Ri. Then, Cin f o = ∑⋃k i=1 R occ i S̃i ∑⋃k i=1 Ri S̃i . (4) Compactness cost: The compactness of a given configura- tion of ROIs can be measured by the amount of empty space captured in its axis-aligned bounding rectangle. Let bound be the area of the bounding rectangle. We wish to minimize Crect = 1− ⋃k i=1 Ri bound( ⋃k i=1 Ri) . (5) This guarantees compact layouts, although it might be insuf- ficient for matching protrusions and depressions of the ROIs (Figure 6(a)). Therefore, we also minimize the empty space between the ROIs. Let conv be the area of the convex hull of the union of ROIs, we minimize the empty space in conv: Cconv = 1− ⋃k i=1 Ri conv( ⋃k i=1 Ri) . (6) Minimizing each term alone does not suffice, since min- imizing only Cconv could result in diagonal or elongated shapes which are unappealing (see Figure 6(e)) and mini- mizing only Crect might create rectangular, yet less puzzle- like, compositions (Figure 6(d)) . Therefore, we incorporate both terms and define the compactness cost as: Ccompact = Crect ·Cωcconv, (7) (a) First ROI (b) BB & CH (c) Second ROI (d) Minimizing Crect (e) Minimizing Cconv (f) Combined Figure 6: The ROI of the current assembly (a) needs to be combined with a new ROI (c). The bounding rectangle of the current assembly is marked in gray and its convex hull marked in yellow (b). Minimizing only Crect (d) can place the strawberry at the top left corner since it does not change the bounding rectangle. But, this increases Cconv (in red). Minimizing only Cconv (e) places the strawberry at the top right. The increase in Cconv (red) is small but the bounding rectangle is now much larger (marked in green). The combi- nation (f), which minimized Ccompact , places the strawberry at the bottom right. This way the bounding rectangle it not increased at all and Cconv is increased only a bit and signifi- cantly less than when minimizing only Crect . where in our experiments we set ωc = 0.5. Initial Placement: In search for an assemblage algorithm that minimizes the defined cost we turned to the puzzle- solving literature. Their solutions, however, were found in- adequate, since in our case the shapes do not perfectly match as they do in puzzles. A more fruitful avenue to follow was to consider the fundamental problem of 2D bin pack- ing. Our assembly problem can be viewed as a generaliza- tion of 2D bin packing, where in our case the parts are not constrained to be rectangles and overlaps are allowed. 2D bin packing has been shown to be NP-hard [Sle80], nevertheless, there exists a variety of approximation strate- gies [LMM02]. We draw inspiration from the general strat- egy proposed by [Joh73], in which a best-first decreasing approach is proposed. The best-first strategy is well suited to our task both since it provides a near-optimal solution to the bin-packing problem, and due to its visual implications. Inspired by artistic collage principles we define the “best” ROI to place as the largest (i.e. the most important) one. Placing ROIs in a decreasing order of importance (and size) usually results in nicer com- positions, where larger ROIs are condensed together near the center of the image. To realize this approach, the ROIs are first scaled, then placed in a “best-fit” manner, and finally layered. We elaborate below. c© 2010 The Author(s) Journal compilation c©2010 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. S. Goferman, A. Tal, L. Zelnik-Manor / Puzzle-like Collage (a) Before (b) After Figure 7: Local refinement First, the ROIs are scaled. In spirit of art, collages created from images of different sizes are usually more visually in- teresting. When no input is provided by the user we ran- domly scale the ROIs such that the smallest ROI is at most 4 times smaller than the largest one (we never enlarge an ROI to maintain high quality). The creative user can manu- ally set importance weights, wi, to preferred (or all) images, which serve as scaling weights instead of the random scal- ing. For example, to create desired compositions we man- ually assigned high weights to the runner in Figure 2, the theme images in the fashion collages of Figure 8 and the portrait of Obama and 2008 logo in Figure 11. The rest of the images in these collages were scaled randomly. Then, the ROIs are sorted by their area. After placing the ROIs the user positioned manually, if any, we start from the largest and position the ROIs one-by-one. At each iteration we consider the ROIs already placed as a single ROI. This reduces the problem to placing one new ROI with respect to one other. We compute the composition cost function of Eq. (2), for a subset of possible placements and select the one yielding minimal cost. We limit the computation of compo- sition cost function to placements satisfying the following three conditions: (1) The intersection between the ROIs is not empty. (2) The aspect ratio of the composition must be within +/-0.5 from the desired one. (3) Placements are cho- sen on a sparse grid (10x10 pixels). Finally, recalling that the merged ROI is a union of the al- ready placed ROIs, there are multiple layering options for the new ROI. After a placement has been selected, we layer the new ROI such that the informativeness cost function, Cin f o is minimized. Local refinement: We further refine the assembly via a random sampling process, which improves the collage compactness, informativeness and its visual appearance. Our method is inspired by a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methodology and is based on a hit-and-run algo- rithm [SC91]. We adopt an effective random sampling pro- cess that reduces the composition cost function by applying random transformations (scale, rotation and translation) to the ROIs and by changing their layering positions. At each time step we choose uniformly one of the ROIs to Figure 8: Our view of fashion. Different random initializa- tions produce different collages. Figure 9: A collage of the wedding of Kate and Ian (Thanks to Rosie Parsons for letting us use these beautiful pictures). A few manual corrections to ROIs were applied at the final phase. That took less than 10 minutes. be translated by −→r pixels, rotated by θ degrees, and scaled by a factor s. These are sampled from normal distributions: r ∼N(0, 30), θ ∼N(0, 5), s∼N(1, 0.2). With probability 0.5 we also change the ROI’s layer by uniformly sampling a new layer. We consider only samples where s ∈ [0.5, 2] and θ ∈ [−30, 30] and accept only those that reduce the compo- sition cost function Eq. (2). The sampling is stopped when a cumulative acceptance rate of 5% is reached. Figure 7 illus- trates the result. 6. Results Our proposed algorithm deals well with a broad class of im- ages, taken by professionals and amateurs alike. Figures 1– 2,8–13 illustrate some of our results. Most of the collages were created using the default parameters. The user needs only give the requested aspect ratio for each collage. Since the images are randomly scaled, we created a few different collages for each set of images (as illustrated in Figure 8) and c© 2010 The Author(s) Journal compilation c©2010 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. S. Goferman, A. Tal, L. Zelnik-Manor / Puzzle-like Collage Figure 10: Parents love their children. The collages of Shelly (left) and the boys (right) are great gifts for their parents. Our survey (Figure 14) shows most people prefer these over the corresponding AutoCollage results. Figure 11: A collage of 47 images, created by our system, summarizing news highlights of 2008. selected the one we liked the most. Figure 9 shows another collage of images taken by a professional photographer. Figure 10 shows two collages of everyday images. They con- sist of photographs of children taken mostly by their parents. These collages represent the sort of appealing summaries people would like to create of their home photos. To make the collage more interesting, we added to one of them im- ages of Bratz dolls. Figure 11 shows a collage that summarizes some of the important events of the year 2008 (the US elections, the Olympic games, the economic crisis, some disasters, etc.). This collage is comprised mostly of images of complex scenes with busy, yet informative backgrounds. Despite its unusual busyness (47 images, 47 events), most of the col- lage pixels are informative and the composition stays visu- ally pleasing and interesting. Our user study (details reported below) showed that about 70% of people preferred this col- lage to the alternative. In this collage, we manually selected the Obama images as the most important ones, together with the 2008 text-image. Limitations: Our system is not perfect, due to its automatic nature. The assembly algorithm always produces an accept- able composition, however at times the user might find the result not pleasing enough, as some of our evaluators found Figure 12(a). This is easily solved by generating a different collage from the same images (Figure 12(b)). The random- ness in the system allows to easily create a number of col- lages, letting the user select the preferred one (this approach was adopted from AutoCollage and Picasa). Running time: Our algorithm is implemented in MATLAB and runs on a 2.4GHz, dual core desktop computer. ROI ex- traction takes about 90 seconds per image (500 pixels larger dimension). The initial assemblage takes about 5 seconds to place a pair of images and the refinement (if applied) takes a few minutes. User study: Since beauty is subjective we evaluated our col- c© 2010 The Author(s) Journal compilation c©2010 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. S. Goferman, A. Tal, L. Zelnik-Manor / Puzzle-like Collage (a) a less favored collage (b) a nicer collage generated with a single mouse click Figure 12: Limitations (a) Our collage (b) AutoCollage Figure 13: (a) Our idea of an “advertisement” for the Olympic games. (b) AutoCollage produces a less compact collage of the same images. The survey of Figure 14 shows ∼50% preference to our collage (a) over the AutoCollage result (b). lages via a user study. We published on the web 10 pairs of collages, one created by our system and the other by Auto- Collage [RBHB06] (in a random order). For each pair of col- lages, the participants had to mark the one they liked more or select “can’t decide”. Figure 13 shows one such example – a collage of the 2008 Olympic games. It demonstrates how the shapes complete each other, just like a puzzle. Conversely, the collage of Au- toCollage (Figure 13(b)) places the rectangular regions sur- rounding the athletes almost on a grid. Our result is more compact due to the elimination of the pixels that do not be- long to the ROI and the puzzle-like placement. 160 unbiased people, who were unfamiliar with any of the approaches, participated in the survey. In 8 out of 10 cases our collages were favored. For instance, 103 people liked our collage better and 4 could not decide for the collages in Fig- ure 13. In one case (Figure 12(a)) the AutoCollage compo- sition was significantly preferred (58% vs. 42%), and in one other (“‘trip”) they had roughly the same score. Figure 14 shows the results; the complete survey (which includes col- lages that are omitted from the paper) is presented in the supplementary material. We conclude that our puzzle-like collages would be a wel- comed addition to the type of collages one can create today with existing technology. c© 2010 The Author(s) Journal compilation c©2010 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. S. Goferman, A. Tal, L. Zelnik-Manor / Puzzle-like Collage Figure 14: Survey results 7. Conclusion This paper presented a framework for producing informative and pretty collages of exact cutouts of interesting regions in a puzzle-like manner. The paper makes several contributions. First, a novel region-of-interest (ROI) extraction algorithm is presented. It is shown to extract non-rectangular regions that coincide with the meaningful objects and background boundaries. Second, the paper describes a composition al- gorithm that places these non-rectangular pieces together. Finally, a system is presented, which can generate collages from everyday as well as professional images. Our results and user study show that assembling non- rectangular shapes produces compact and pretty summaries of image sets. We have created collages of a variety of dif- ferent scenarios, including sports event, news, and family photos, which demonstrate the general applicability of the proposed method. Acknowledgements: We thank the authors of the following software that we’ve used, for making them public: Google’s Picasa, Dirk B. Walther’s Saliency toolbox, Xiaodi Hou’s spectral residual code, and the trial version of Microsoft’s AutoCollage 2008. Thanks to Nicolas Evariste for letting us use his Zoo beautiful images. 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[SKKC00] SEBASTIAN T., KLEIN P., KIMIA B., CRISCO J.: Constructing 2D Curve Atlases. In IEEE Workshop on Mathe- matical Methods in Biomedical Image Analysis (2000), pp. 70– 77. [Sle80] SLEATOR D.: A 2.5 Times Optimal Algorithm for Pack- ing in Two Dimensions. Information Processing Letters 10, 1 (1980), 37–40. [VJ01] VIOLA P., JONES M.: Rapid Object Detection Using a Boosted Cascade of Simple Features. In CVPR (2001). [WAC07] WANG J., AGRAWALA M., COHEN M.: Soft scissors: an interactive tool for realtime high quality matting. ACM Trans. Graph. 26, 3 (2007). [WSQ∗06] WANG J., SUN J., QUAN L., TANG X., SHUM H.: Picture collage. In CVPR (2006), pp. 347–354. c© 2010 The Author(s) Journal compilation c©2010 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. work_k5lw5nq3rvd7bayygaf3wqwigq ---- Acrobat Distiller, Job 25 NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES MASTERPIECES AND MARKETS: WHY THE MOST FAMOUS MODERN PAINTINGS ARE NOT BY AMERICAN ARTISTS David W. Galenson Working Paper 8549 http://www.nber.org/papers/w8549 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 October 2001 The views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily those of the National Bureau of Economic Research. © 2001 by David W. Galenson. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Masterpieces and Markets: Why the Most Famous Modern Paintings Are Not by American Artists David W. Galenson NBER Working Paper No. 8549 October 2001 ABSTRACT A survey of the illustrations in art history textbooks reveals that the most important modern American painters, including Pollock, Johns, and Warhol, failed to produce individual paintings as famous as the masterpieces of a number of major French artists, such as Picasso, Manet, and Seurat. Analysis of the textbooks reveals that art historians do not consider the American artists to be less important than their French predecessors, or judge the Americans’ innovations to be less important. The absence of American masterpieces instead appears to be a consequence of market conditions, as changes over time in the primary methods of showing and selling fine art reduced the incentive for artists to produce important individual works. David W. Galenson Department of Economics University of Chicago 1126 E. 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 and NBER sogrodow@midway.uchicago.edu 3 Paris and New York It has become a commonplace of art history that "after the Second World War, the art world witnessed the birth and development of an American avant-garde, which in the space of a few years succeeded in shifting the cultural center of the West from Paris to New York."1 The Abstract Expressionists and the painters who followed them in New York dominate histories of modern art in the second half of the twentieth century as decisively as the Impressionists and the painters who followed them in Paris dominate histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper documents and explores a striking fact about the history of modern art that involves a neglected contrast between these two episodes. Specifically, the great American painters of the modern era failed to produce individual paintings as famous as those produced by a number of the great French painters who preceded them. This is not because the American painters are less important than their predecessors; indeed, the same evidence that establishes that the greatest American masterpieces are less famous than their French counterparts reveals that the American masters themselves are at least as important as several of the French painters who produced the most celebrated individual works. The resolution of the puzzle appears to lie instead in a basic difference in practice between the French and American painters, which was a product of a change over time in the market institutions of modern art. Explaining why modern French painters produced more famous paintings than their American successors highlights a very concrete way in which changes in the methods of showing and selling fine art have changed the way artists work. 4 Famous Paintings The puzzle considered here is posed by a comparison between the results of two earlier studies.2 Both studies counted the illustrations of paintings contained in published surveys of art history in order to identify and rank the painters and paintings considered most important by art historians. The approach is analogous to a citation study, in which the importance of scholars, and of individual publications, is measured by the frequency with which they are cited. Yet using illustrations as the unit of study has an advantage over analyzing written references, because of the greater cost involved. In addition to the greater expense of printing photographs, authors or publishers must bear the cost of obtaining permission to reproduce each painting, and a suitable photograph. The much higher cost in both time and money should tend to make authors more selective in their use of illustrations, thus making illustrations an even more accurate indication than written references of what an author believes to be genuinely important.3 The first of the earlier studies alluded to above identified the most often reproduced paintings done by 35 leading artists born during 1819-1900 who lived and worked in France, while the other did the same for 35 leading artists born during 1900-40 who lived and worked in the United States.4 The results of these studies are shown in Tables 1 and 2, respectively, which list the leading 10 paintings (actually 11, in both cases, because of ties) done by these two groups of artists. Neither table appears surprising in itself. The 15 artists listed, including Picasso, Manet, and Matisse in Table 1, and Pollock, de Kooning, and Johns in Table 2, are obviously among the most influential artists who worked in the relevant times and places. And the 22 paintings are all landmarks of modern art, their images immediately familiar to students of art history. 5 A puzzle appears, however, in a striking contrast in the relative frequency with which the French and American paintings appear in the books surveyed. The Demoiselles d’Avignon appears in 91% of the books considered, a percentage more than 2 ½ times as great as that of any American painting. Six French paintings appear in more than half of the books considered, while no American painting reaches that level. In fact, all 11 French paintings appear in at least 45% of the books, a level greater than any one of the American paintings. To be included in Table 2, an American painting did not have to appear in even a quarter of the books surveyed; only six of the works listed in Table 2 reached that level. This comparison suggests that the most celebrated French modern paintings are considerably more famous than their American counterparts. Yet one other possibility must be considered, for Tables 1 and 2 are not based on identical sets of books. The study of French artists surveyed a total of 33 books, whereas the study of American artists surveyed a larger number of books, totaling 56. Although the two sets of books overlap to some extent, some of the books used in each study could not be used in the other, because of limitations in subject matter by time and place. The difference observed here could consequently be due, at least in part, to differences in the use of illustrations by authors whose books were included in only one of the studies: perhaps books on French modern art systematically include more illustrations than books on American art. To eliminate this possibility, illustrations of the paintings of Tables 1 and 2, and of all the works of the artists who produced them, were searched in a common set of books. The books used were all those that could be found that were published in English, from 1980 on, that provide illustrated treatments of the entire history of modern art. Some of the books analyzed 6 survey all periods of art history, some only the modern period, but the necessary requirement for use of a book was that no artist listed in Table 1 or 2 was excluded by the definition of the book’s designated coverage by time and place. Twenty-nine books were found that satisfied these criteria for selection.5 Table 3 shows the ranking of the 22 paintings from Tables 1 and 2 that results from the survey of the illustrations in these 29 books. The Demoiselles d’Avignon remains in first place, and the 97% of the books in which it appears is again more than 2 ½ times as great as any American painting. Seven of the French paintings appear in more than half of the books surveyed, compared to none of the American works. All but one of the French paintings appear in more books than any of the American paintings; the two highest-ranked American works tie Courbet’s L’Atelier, the lowest- ranked French painting, by appearing in 38% of the books. Six of the eleven American works appear in less than a quarter of the books surveyed. Table 3 therefore shows that the puzzle posed by comparing Tables 1 and 2 is not an artifact of differing practices of the different sets of authors of the books used to produce those earlier rankings. For Table 3 yields the same result: when measurement is restricted to a set of books that survey both the French and American painters, it remains the case that the most famous French modern paintings are simply much more often reproduced than the most famous American modern paintings. And this finding is reinforced by Table 4, which lists all other paintings by the 15 artists whose work appears in Table 3 that appear in at least one quarter of the 29 books surveyed. Table 4 shows that there are 11 other paintings that satisfy this criterion, and that all 11 are by French artists. Considering Tables 3 and 4 together, a total of 8 works by the 15 artists considered in this study appear in at least half of the books examined that survey both 7 French and American modern art, and all of these are by French painters. Furthermore, 27 works by these artists appear in at least one quarter of the books, and 22 of these - 81% - are by French artists. Simple quantitative analysis of evidence produced by art historians thus poses an intriguing puzzle that does not appear to have been studied - or even noticed - by art historians. And the interest of this question may not be solely historical, for ownership of famous individual paintings appears to be a key determinant of the ability of museums to attract visitors.6 From this vantage point, the puzzle raised here would be why some leading nineteenth-century French modern artists were more likely than their American successors to produce superstar paintings.7 The task of this paper is to solve this puzzle. Famous Painters Perhaps modern French painters produced more famous paintings than their American successors simply because they themselves were more important. It would hardly be surprising that the most important works of great artists would be more celebrated than the major works of lesser artists. Yet the evidence of the art history surveys indicates that greater eminence of the artists cannot explain the dominance of French over American paintings seen in Table 3. Based on the same 29 books used in Tables 3 and 4 to rank individual paintings, Table 5 measures the importance of the artists who produced these paintings, by listing the total illustrations of each painter’s work. French artists do dominate the top positions. Remarkably, Picasso has more than twice the illustrations of any other artist, but Matisse, Manet, Duchamp, and Gauguin also have more total illustrations than any American artist. Yet two Americans - Pollock and Johns - rank 8 above Courbet, and Warhol ties Courbet in total illustrations. Furthermore Pollock, Johns, and Warhol all rank above Seurat, who is also tied by Rauschenberg. Table 5 clearly demonstrates that the greater fame of individual French paintings cannot simply be explained as a consequence of the greater importance of French modern artists. The evidence of the texts does show that the ranking of the Demoiselles d’Avignon at the top of Table 3 can be explained by the enormous importance of Picasso, as witnessed by his dominant position in Table 5. Yet Seurat, whose painting of the Grande Jatte ranks second in Table 3, is outranked in this measure of importance by no less than three Americans, and tied by a fourth. Why did Seurat produce a painting that is surpassed in frequency of illustration only by the Demoiselles d’Avignon, while none of the four Americans whose overall achievement was deemed at least as important as his produced a single work that was reproduced even half as often as Seurat’s masterpiece? Similarly, Courbet produced three paintings that are illustrated more often than all but two paintings by all the American artists considered here. Why did Courbet produce more famous individual works than all the Americans combined, even though the overall importance of his work is considered no greater than that of three Americans? Famous Innovations Perhaps French modern painters produced more famous paintings than the Americans because their innovations were more specific and highly concentrated in time. Thus whereas some great artists’ contributions have arrived suddenly, and could consequently be embodied in individual works, the advances of other great artists have been made much more slowly, and have therefore appeared gradually in a larger body of work.8 If the French artists made contributions of the first type, and the Americans made advances of the second type, this could 9 account for the greater emphasis on specific works of the French painters. Yet the evidence of the texts suggests that greater suddenness of innovations cannot account for the greater fame of the French artists’ paintings. Table 6 presents evidence on the total illustrations of the work of each artist in the specific years in which they executed the paintings listed in Table 3. The goal here is to measure the importance of particular innovations rather than of particular works. Although the choice of the period of time is to some extent arbitrary, one year is a sufficiently short period of an artist’s career that it is unlikely to capture more than one discrete contribution. Picasso places first in Table 6 for the works he produced in 1907, the year he initiated the Cubist revolution. Manet stands second for 1863, the year he painted both the Olympia and the Déjeuner sur l’herbe , from which many scholars date the modern era in art. Andy Warhol’s work of 1962, in which he made his seminal contributions to Pop Art, stands third in Table 6, ahead of all the other great French innovations, including Seurat’s contribution of 1886 to Neo- Impressionism and Matisse’s 1906 innovations in Fauvism. Pollock’s work of 1950, in which he reached the peak of his signature drip style, ties Seurat’s work of 1886 for fifth place in Table 6. In all, four of the top nine entries in Table 6 are for American painters. Since the table can be considered to rank the most important temporally concentrated contributions made by the masters of modern art considered by this study, this prominent representation of Americans among its highest entries suggests that the failure of American artists to produce individual paintings as famous as those of the French cannot be attributed to any absence of suddenness in the important innovations of the Americans. 10 From Group Exhibitions to Gallery Shows The greater fame of the major French masterpieces of the modern era thus does not stem simply from the greater fame of their creators, or the greater importance of the innovations they embody. Providing a complete explanation for the absence of American paintings from the highest ranks in Table 3 may lie beyond the scope of this investigation. Yet it is possible to point to one powerful factor that made a direct contribution to the change observed here. Specifically, the lesser importance of individual paintings from the later episode appears to be related to a difference in artists’ practices that stemmed from a differing conception of artistic success in Paris before World War I and New York after World War II. The change in these practices and attitudes between the two episodes may have been in turn a consequence of a major change in market institutions.9 Throughout most of the nineteenth century - certainly until the last quarter of the century - French artists understood that the government’s official Salon was the sole means of having their work “published”- presented to the public in a setting that would assure critics and collectors of its worth.10 Historian Jacques Lethève described the significance of the Salon for French artists: [F]or the nineteenth-century artist in France there was only one place to exhibit, only one place which could set the seal on his success: the Salon... To be accepted for the Salon marked a turning point in an artist’s life. The various prizes and medals awarded by the jury were essential steps in their career for those who wanted to succeed. The contacts made at the Salon with art lovers and potential patrons made sales and commissions much easier to secure, particularly as the general public regarded those excluded from the Salon as bad painters or bad sculptors. Some purchasers would only buy a work of art on condition it was accepted for the Salon.11 Artists who wished to have successful careers consequently devoted considerable attention to the 11 style and subject matter favored by the Salon’s jury. The growing size of the Salon over time also had implications for artists’ behavior, as the competition for attention at the crowded exhibitions grew more intense.12 The growing congestion increased the danger that an artist’s work would be ignored because it was hung in a bad location. Historian George Heard Hamilton observed that “one way for an artist to avoid such a calamity was to paint a picture so large it could not possibly be overlooked. Such huge ‘machines,’ by reason of their size alone, attracted critical and popular attention quite out of proportion to their merit.”13 As an ambitious young artist, Gustave Courbet took for granted that reputations were made at the Salon, and he quickly realized that it was necessary to exhibit large and important individual works there in order to attract notice. When Courbet was 26, one of the five paintings he submitted to the 1845 Salon was accepted. He told his family that “at the Salon it has attracted some potential buyers,” but he explained that this success would not greatly advance his career because the painting was too small: “When you don’t yet have a reputation you cannot sell easily and all those small paintings do not make a reputation. That is why this year I must do a large painting that will definitely show what I am really worth.”14 For many years Courbet made it a practice to produce large paintings that would gain attention at the Salon. All three of Courbet’s works listed in Tables 3 and 4 were prepared for the Salon: both the Stone Breakers and the Funeral at Ornans were exhibited at the Salon of 1851, while L’Atelier was rejected by the 1855 Universal Exhibition. Courbet is of course celebrated for his “challenge [to] the hegemony of official art” in 1855, when the jury’s rejection of L’Atelier and two other paintings prompted him to mount an independent exhibition of his work near the Universal Exhibition.15 Even then, however, Courbet believed that the legitimacy of his enterprise would be established 12 by the jury’s acceptance of the other paintings he had submitted, as when he wrote to tell a patron of his decision to stage a private show he explained that “I am taking advantage of the boost the government has given me by receiving eleven paintings in its exhibition.”16 Edouard Manet was firmly committed to the goal of achieving success at the Salon. Despite numerous snubs of his work by the jury, including the Salon’s famous rejection of the Déjeuner sur l’herbe in 1863, he held steadfastly to the position that “the Salon is the true field of battle - it is there that one must measure oneself.”17 This attitude led him consistently to decline invitations from his younger friends to join them in the renegade Impressionist group exhibitions of the 1870s and early ‘80s. Manet’s three paintings of Table 3 were all submitted to the official jury; the Déjeuner sur l’herbe was exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, the Olympia at the 1865 Salon, and the Bar at the Folies-Bergère at the Salon of 1882, the year before his death. It is a staple of art history that the influence of the Salon dwindled during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1881 its government sponsorship was ended, and in 1884 it lost its monopoly as Paris’ only large annual group exhibition.18 Yet in historians’ concern for the decline of the official Salon, what has sometimes been overlooked is the continuing importance of group exhibitions in general in allowing artists to create reputations. The Impressionists are often identified as the artists who undermined the Salon system, by selling their work through one-man shows.19 Monet did begin to have successful shows at the galleries of Paul Durand- Ruel and Georges Petit in the late 1880s, and his friends Renoir and Pissarro would do the same in the next decade, but their successes came only after the Impressionists’ reputations had been established in the group exhibitions they had held during 1874-1886.20 Although no one 13 institution would any longer be the exclusive forum in which artists could become recognized, it would still be some time before private galleries could successfully introduce new talents to the public, and during this period group exhibitions would continue to be critical in allowing young artists to publish their work. One consequence of this was that young artists were still conditioned to produce important individual works that could compete successfully for attention in large halls filled with paintings by many other artists: thus “much of the general education and the instruction in Paris ateliers continued, in the mid to late nineteenth century, to inspire the desire to create the great work, the tableau worthy of being hung beside Poussin.”21 Georges Seurat’s career illustrates the continuing desire to produce individual major works for group shows. Seurat first submitted his work to the Salon of 1883, but the jury accepted only one drawing and refused his other entries. His work first gained attention the following year, when his large composition, Une Baignade à Asnières, was rejected by the Salon but was subsequently shown at the exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendents. Seurat first exhibited his monumental Grande Jatte in 1886 at the final Impressionist group exhibition, where the painting quickly became an object of controversy. Throughout his brief career, Seurat followed the practice of producing many preparatory studies for occasional major individual works, which he then presented to the public in group exhibitions.22 Unlike Seurat, Paul Gauguin had no formal training in art, and had consequently not been indoctrinated with the traditional respect for the Salon. Yet the ambitious Gauguin may have learned indirectly the importance of producing major individual works. Although Gauguin exhibited at the five Impressionist group shows held during 1879-86, his paintings attracted little notice from critics or collectors. A biographer has suggested that Gauguin realized at the 1886 14 Impressionist exhibition, where his were among the many works overshadowed by Seurat’s Grand Jatte, that he would have to produce a powerful and bold work to have a comparable impact. His masterpiece of 1888, The Vision After the Sermon, may have been a result of that lesson.23 Henri Matisse routinely exhibited at Paris’ major group exhibitions early in his career - initially at the Salon de la Nationale, then annually at the Salon des Indépendents and the Salon d’Automne. In 1896, after Matisse had studied with Gustave Moreau for five years, the teacher told his pupil that it was time for him to produce a major work to demonstrate his progress. On a canvas larger than any he had used before, Matisse executed The Dinner Table, which he exhibited at the 1897 Salon de la Nationale.24 Matisse would later continue to demonstrate his progress with large works, including Luxe, calme, et volupté, his major Divisionist painting, which he exhibited at the 1905 Salon des Indépendents, and The Joy of Life, his Fauve manifesto, which was shown at the 1906 Indépendents. An outsider who arrived in Paris after completing his formal training in art, Pablo Picasso was the first major modern artist who established himself without participating in large group exhibitions.25 His dominant work of Table 3 may nonetheless have been prompted by the French tradition described here. Early in his Paris career, the ambitious young Picasso recognized Matisse as his rival for the informal leadership of the artistic avant-garde. Picasso particularly envied the attention Matisse gained from showing his Joy of Life at the 1906 Indépendents.26 A friend and biographer of Picasso observed that Matisse’s painting challenged Picasso in part “because of its success within the terms of traditional Salon canvases.”27 Picasso responded methodically, as for months during the winter of 1906-07 he filled one sketchbook after another 15 with preparatory drawings for his own major work. Historian William Rubin estimated that in all Picasso produced between four and five hundred studies for the Demoiselles d’Avignon, “a quantity of preparatory work...without parallel, for a single picture, in the entire history of art.”28 Picasso had deliberately set out to produce a painting that would be recognized as a masterpiece by the artists, critics, and collectors who made up Paris’ advanced art world.29 Remarkably he succeeded, as Table 3 echoes the judgments of many art historians that the Demoiselles is the most celebrated painting of the twentieth century. The latest of the French artists considered by this study, Marcel Duchamp, followed a more conventional path than Picasso in exhibiting his work. Early in his career, Duchamp regularly exhibited his work at group shows, both the Salon des Indépendents and the Salon d’Automne. His Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was rejected by the Indépendents in 1912, but created a sensation when it was exhibited at the American Armory Show the next year. Duchamp disliked what he considered the commercialization of modern art, and his distrust of dealers led him consistently to avoid having shows of his work at private galleries.30 His overall output, with a limited number of major works that were often preceded by a large number of preparatory studies, reflects his belief that “in the production of any genius, great painter or great artist, there are really only four or five things that really count in his life.”31 Even this brief survey appears sufficient to demonstrate that the traditional importance of group exhibitions in the French nineteenth-century art world influenced many artists’ practices, even after the demise of the official Salon. For much of the nineteenth century success at the Salon was virtually required for commercial success, and even after the demise of the official Salon, for a time success at other large group exhibitions continued to be necessary to establish 16 young artists’ reputations. One consequence of this central role of group exhibitions was to fix in the minds of artists the importance of producing significant individual works - large, important paintings that might stand out among rows of paintings crowded onto the walls of great rooms. Many painters annually devoted disproportionate time and effort to producing these works, as a means of establishing and advancing their reputations. This conception of the importance of the masterpiece persisted even after the conditions that had motivated it had disappeared: so, for example, it appears to have influenced even the young Picasso, who had no interest in exhibiting his work together with that of scores of other artists. The central role of the large group show, and the attendant importance of individual master works, eventually ended. When Barnett Newman was interviewed for a documentary film in 1970, his description of the early opportunities for the Abstract Expressionists to present their work to the New York art world was expressed exclusively in terms of the names of individuals, taking for granted that viewers would understand that the galleries run by these dealers were the only significant exhibition spaces available to the artists: We had no general public. The only thing we did have was the opportunity of seeing each other in shows, so to speak. There were just a few galleries: Peggy Guggenheim up until 1947... and between ‘47 and ‘52, you might say Betty Parsons, Charlie Egan, and to some extent Sam Kootz were the only places where any of us had an opportunity of presenting ourselves, of showing the work.32 Nor would a more prestigious exhibition format have been available had these artists been more successful: of the same period, Robert Motherwell recalled that “in those days it was impossible for an unknown American to show in a first-rate modern gallery, such as Curt Valentin or Pierre Matisse.”33 Thus one-man shows were the primary means of publishing artists’ work, with the 17 prestige of the imprimatur varying among galleries rather than among types of exhibition.34 Instead of Salon acceptances or medals, in New York one-man shows became the units by which artists’ careers were measured, and their progress assessed. So for example, critic Clement Greenberg began his review of a 1945 exhibition by declaring that “Jackson Pollock’s second one-man show at Art of this Century establishes him, in my opinion, as the strongest painter of his generation.”35 Two years later Greenberg again began in similar fashion, writing that “Jackson Pollock’s fourth one-man show in so many years at Art of this Century is his best since his first one and signals what may be a major step in his development.”36 The format of these shows tended to shift the focus of critics from individual paintings to an artist’s recent work more generally, and reviews often discussed an artist’s style or methods without reference to specific paintings. The importance of the one-man show changed the task of the artist. Instead of concentrating on producing a single work that might satisfy the jury and attract public attention at a large group show, the artist had to produce a body of work that would impress critics and collectors. Curator Henry Geldzahler’s comments reflected this change in emphasis when he recalled “in the late 1950s being shocked to hear painters, who believed in the primacy of de Kooning’s position and who admired him, wondering aloud whether next year’s show would repeat his success, whether he could consolidate his lead not by painting a beautiful show but by changing in an unexpected and unpredictable way.”37 Although Geldzahler’s point was to express his dismay at the pressure on an artist repeatedly to innovate, he simply assumed the form the artist’s new work would take, whatever its contribution: the emphasis had thus shifted from producing major paintings to painting important shows. 18 Painters of the New York School typically did not set out to produce individual master works. Willem de Kooning explained that “for many years I was not interested in making a good painting - as one might say, ‘Now this is a really good painting’ or a ‘perfect work.’ I didn’t want to pin it down at all. I was interested in that before, but I found out it was not my nature.”38 The Abstract Expressionists became known not for individual landmark paintings, but for signature images that recurred in large bodies of work. Mark Rothko defended his repeated use of the stacked rectangles that provided the basis for his work for two decades by declaring that “if a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again - exploring it, probing it, demanding by this repetition that the public look at it.”39 The artists often stressed the continuity of their work. Thus Clyfford Still declared that “No painting ... is complete of itself. It is a continuation of previous paintings and is renewed in successive ones,” and Barnett Newman observed that “I think a man spends his whole lifetime painting one picture or working on one piece of sculpture.”40 The critic David Sylvester observed that Picasso and Duchamp were the twentieth century’s “most practiced creators of legendary works” of art - a judgment impressively confirmed by Table 3 - then asked: But what of American Abstract Expressionism, a movement steeped in legend? - legendary hopes, legendary deeds, legendary battles, legendary rags to riches, legendary drinking and, alas, legendary deaths. It did not produce many legendary masterpieces, for it flourished at a moment in art history when the masterpiece had given way to the series.41 Historian Anna Chave has pointed out one consequence of this: “The usual procedure has been to write or speak about Rothkos, Pollocks, or Newmans in generic terms ... In the three most widely read books on the New York School, by Dore Ashton, Irving Sandler, and Serge Guilbaut, 19 the authors rarely or never focus on specific works of art.”42 Jackson Pollock’s signature image was a product of the drip style he first used in 1947, and there is a broad critical consensus that his best work consisted of the all-over compositions he produced from then through 1950. No one or two paintings emerged from that period as definitive examples or statements; Pollock’s career is understood as having a plateau rather than a peak. A typical account of this is provided by curator Kirk Varnedoe’s summary essay for the recent Pollock retrospective. Varnedoe begins by declaring the importance of the innovation: “Pollock in 1947 ruptured the existing definitions of how art could be made.” He then observes that no landmark marks the origin: “There is no grand incident to mark this passage - no legendary effort or single ‘breakthrough’ picture.” He asserts the homogeneity of Pollock’s mature work: “When the poured paintings did get underway, the manner arrived full-blown, and then showed no standard, linear development over the next three years.” The absence of a specific masterpiece follows: “One of the smallest and earliest canvases ... is generally consonant with one of the largest and last ... and in between, works of widely varying sizes and formats are remarkably coherent in manner.”43 The books surveyed for this study contain 43 illustrations of Pollock’s paintings from 1947-50; these constitute more than three-fifths of the total illustrations of Pollock’s work, although the four-year period represents less than one-fifth of the 22-year career documented by Varnedoe’s retrospective. Those 43 illustrations could have placed two paintings among the top five entries in Table 3, or three among the top ten, but instead they are divided among 15 different paintings, of which only Autumn Rhythm appears in Table 3, tied for 17th place. The next generation of American artists would go even farther than the Abstract 20 Expressionists in emphasizing bodies of work rather than individual paintings, not only producing paintings that were closely related, but often conceiving and creating groups of individual works that were intended to be seen as a whole.44 Table 6 shows the great importance art historians attach to the paintings Andy Warhol produced during 1962. One of the central influences on his work during that year was the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, which prompted Warhol to begin a series of portraits of the movie star. Yet probably more significant for Warhol’s art was his discovery during the same year of silkscreening. A biographer observed that “Andy quickly realized that this process was tailor-made for his talent,” and he would make silkscreening his primary painting medium for the rest of his career.45 Using the technique in the living room of his apartment, Warhol prepared for his first New York one-man show by painting one hundred pictures in three months.46 Yet Warhol’s repeated use of particular themes had begun even before his adoption of silkscreening. Earlier in 1962 his first one-man show, at Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery, had consisted of 32 paintings of Campbell’s soup cans. The size of the show was determined by the number of varieties of Campbell’s soup available at the time: as he worked Warhol checked off a list of Campbell’s products to keep track of the flavors he had already painted.47 Warhol’s repetitive use of images naturally gave rise to discussions of groups of paintings. So for example the critic Michael Fried’s review of Warhol’s exhibition at the Stable Gallery in the fall of 1962 referred to the “beautiful, vulgar, heart-breaking icons of Marilyn Monroe ... These, I think, are the most successful pieces in the show.”48 More generally, an art historian has observed that Warhol’s works should be considered in groups: “since Warhol generally conceived and presented new works as ensembles, a single work removed from its original setting operates at a loss.”49 21 Jasper Johns’ first one-man show was held at Leo Castelli’s gallery in 1958. Paintings from that single exhibition appear in a total of 19 of the books surveyed for this study.50 This would be sufficient to put one painting in fourth place in Table 3, but instead the illustrations are divided among eight different works, none of which appears in more than seven books. Only Flag appears in Table 3, and only in a tie for 17th place. It is remarkable that nearly half of all the paintings in an artist’s first exhibition are illustrated in these texts, and also that none emerges as a dominant individual work. Yet these appear to be consequences of Johns’ approach, and of the message of his work. He selected commonplace objects as his motifs, “things the mind already knows.”51 He painted them with detachment: “I decided that looking at a painting should not require a special kind of focus like going to church. A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.”52 And he used each motif repeatedly, as the 1958 show included four paintings of flags, five of numerals, and six of targets. All of these elements contributed to the impact of Johns’ early work. So for example Frank Stella, a young artist who was directly affected by Johns’ first exhibition, later recalled that “the thing that struck me most was the way he stuck to the motif... I began to think a lot about repetition.”53 Yet the repeated and dispassionate use of commonplace motifs also served to deemphasize the individual paintings in Johns’ show. Interestingly, the press release for the exhibition, which summarized its subjects and their treatment, did not refer to any painting by name.54 A number of Robert Rauschenberg’s contributions have explicitly emphasized groups of works rather than individual pieces. A notable early example is the white paintings, a series of seven canvases without images, on which Rauschenberg applied white house paint evenly with a roller. Rauschenberg wanted the paintings to reflect their surroundings: “one could look at them 22 and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”55 Although the paintings varied in size, each was identically titled “White Painting.”56 In another instance, in 1957 Rauschenberg produced Factum I and Factum II, two paintings with collage elements, done in an Abstract Expressionist style, that appeared identical. The paintings have been interpreted as Rauschenberg’s ironic comment on the belief that the value of a painting lies in its uniqueness. His message may be underscored by the paintings’ titles, for an archaic definition of “factum” is from mathematics: “the product of two or more factors multiplied together.” Rauschenberg’s own words suggest that he does not set out to produce individual works. So for example he told critic Calvin Tomkins that “I just paint in order to learn something new about painting, and everything I learn always resolves itself into two or three pictures.”57 One of the organizers of the recent monumental retrospective exhibition devoted to Rauschenberg observed that he “has always created series, groups, and cycles of work, formally and informally; few works in his oeuvre were conceived as isolated entities.”58 Size Producing a work that would gain attention at a Salon involved more than simply making a large painting. Subject matter, style, originality, and technical virtuosity were all important elements that could contribute to having a painting attract favorable comment.59 Yet although size alone was not sufficient to make a painting successful at a group exhibition, it was often necessary to prevent a work from being overlooked. If the argument of the preceding section is correct, it should therefore be the case that the most famous works of the French painters should be large, and in particular generally larger than those of the Americans. Table 7 shows that this is true. The median size of the French paintings is 4.88 square 23 meters, 65% larger than the median size of 2.95 square meters of the American works. The two largest paintings are French, as are six of the largest nine. Interestingly, when the French works are not large, this can often be traced to particular constraints. The smallest painting in Table 7 is Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon. Gauguin made the painting while living in Pont-Aven in severely straitened conditions. At the time Emile Bernard reported to Vincent van Gogh that “it grieves him to see how Gauguin is often prevented from doing what he could otherwise for purely material reasons, paints, canvas, etc.”60 In the circumstances Vision After the Sermon was a large work; when Gauguin took it to a neighboring town to offer it as a gift to the chapel, he recruited Bernard and another friend to help him carry it there.61 The next smallest French painting in Table 7, Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère, was constrained in size by the progression of the artist’s terminal illness. Painted at a time when Manet was suffering acutely, the combination of the painting’s size and the complexity of its composition mark it clearly as the most ambitious of Manet’s late works.62 It might be objected that Table 7 does not support the argument offered above, because two of the four largest paintings - Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm and Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis - are by Americans. Yet in contrast to the practice of the French painters, the large size of these two paintings does not appear to signal the intent of the artists to produce individual works of exceptional importance. The Abstract Expressionists’ mature work was characterized by the frequent use of large formats: so for example in 1959, when Alfred Barr asked rhetorically what united the work of the group, his answer began “First, their size... They are often as big as mural paintings.”63 In 1947 Pollock had declared “I believe the easel picture to be a dying form, and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural,” and in 1950 when an 24 interviewer asked about the size of his canvases, he responded: “They’re an impractical size - 9x18 feet. But I enjoy working big and - whenever I have a chance, I do it whether it’s practical or not.”64 Autumn Rhythm, which was subtitled Number 30, 1950, was one of a series of wall- sized works Pollock produced in that year; others included One: Number 31, 1950, which was slightly larger than Autumn Rhythm, and Number 32, 1950, which was 12% smaller.65 Barnett Newman often stated his belief that the size of a painting was unimportant in itself, and he followed Vir Heroicus Sublimis by painting Cathedra, another work the same size, in the same year.66 In contrast, the larger French works - not only the wall-sized Guernica, but also Courbet’s L’Atelier, Seurat’s Grande Jatte, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, and others, stood out in these artists’ work: each was by far the largest painting the artist produced in that period.67 It is thus not only the absolute size, but also the size of these paintings relative to each artist’s other work, that signals the French artists’ intent to create an individual work of particular importance. Unlike the paintings of the Americans considered here, those of the French artists generally reflect the recognition expressed by the young artist Frédéric Bazille in 1870: “In order to be noticed at the exhibition, one has to paint rather large pictures that demand very conscientious preparatory studies and thus occasion a good deal of expense.”68 In sum, the evidence of Table 7 appears consistent with the view that the French painters considered here conceived their most important works in a different manner from the Americans who followed them. Conclusion The dominant form of exhibition in nineteenth-century Paris favored a conception of artistic achievement that focused on individual master works. In contrast, the dominant 25 exhibition type in twentieth-century New York privileged a conception of artistic success that considered an artist’s recent output more generally, as evidenced in larger bodies of work. Painters who seek critical and financial success must take account of prevailing exhibition practices in producing their work. In nineteenth-century Paris, the central role of large group exhibitions meant that artists had to devote considerable effort to producing important individual pieces. In twentieth-century New York, the dominance of one-man gallery shows shifted the job of the artist from making striking individual works to producing larger numbers of paintings that would make up significant shows. Differences in exhibition practices thus appear to explain why the most famous modern paintings are not by American artists. American modern artists have not produced paintings as famous as those of their French predecessors not because they were less important artists, or because they produced less important innovations, but rather because of a change in the market environment they faced. In revealing a specific way in which market institutions have influenced artistic practices, this investigation underscores the fact that the study of market conditions is central to an understanding of the history of modern art. 26 1. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 1. 2. David W. Galenson, “Quantifying Artistic Success: Ranking French Painters - and Paintings - from Impressionism to Cubism,” Historical Methods (forthcoming, 2001); Galenson, “Was Jackson Pollock the Greatest American Modern Painter? A Quantitative Investigation,” (unpublished paper, 2001). 3. For additional discussion, see David W. Galenson, Painting outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 24-26. 4. For lists of the artists considered, see Galenson, “Quantifying Artistic Success,” Table 1, and Galenson, “Was Jackson Pollock the Greatest American Modern Painter? Table 1. 5. These books are listed in the appendix. 6. Bruno S. Frey, “Superstar Museums: An Economic Analysis,” Journal of Cultural Economics, Vol. 22, Nos. 2-3 (1988), p. 115; Martin Feldstein, editor, The Economics of Art Museums (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 13-14. 7. Support for the observation that the American artists failed to produce famous individual works comes from a very different source. In 1979 the eminent art historian Kenneth Clark delivered a lecture titled “What is a Masterpiece?” Clark answered the question inductively, discussing a series of examples that ranged widely in time. Clark’s lecture concluded chronologically with Courbet’s Funeral at Ornans, Manet’s Olympia, and Picasso’s Woman with a Guitar and Guernica. Thus Clark considered no painting made after 1937; nor did he explain why he neglected paintings done in the 42 years that preceded his lecture. Clark’s conservatism can be cited as the explanation for his lack of interest in recent art, but that in this context he was able to ignore all art of the 1950s and ‘60s without comment was made possible, or at least facilitated, by the absence of widely recognized and acclaimed individual works from these decades. See Kenneth Clark, What is a Masterpiece? (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1981). 8. Cézanne is a prime example of an artist whose work developed gradually, and I would argue that this accounts for his absence from this study. For discussion see Galenson, Painting Outside the Lines, Chapter 5. 9. A widely accepted study of the shift from large group exhibitions to one-artist shows in private galleries is Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White, Canvases and Careers: Footnotes I thank Robert Jensen for discussions of the issues treated in this paper, and the National Science Foundation for financial support. 27 Institutional Change in the French Painting World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). A different interpretation of this shift will be offered in David W. Galenson and Robert Jensen, “Careers and Canvases: The Rise of the Market for Modern Art in the Nineteenth Century” (in preparation). 10. Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 23. 11. Lethève, Daily Life of French Artists in the Nineteenth Century (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), p. 108. 12. Patricia Mainardi, The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 18-19, 47. 13. Hamilton, Manet and his Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 15. 14. Gustave Courbet, Letters of Gustave Courbet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 53. 15. Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 59-65. 16. Courbet, Letters of Gustave Courbet, p. 139. 17. Anne Coffin Hanson, Manet and the Modern Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 44. 18. From 1881, the official Salon was replaced by the Salon of the Société des Artistes Francais. In 1884 the Société des Artistes Indépendents began to hold an annual Salon, as did the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1890. In 1903 these were joined by the Salon d’Automne. For discussion see Mainardi, The End of the Salon, pp. 84-86. 19. E.g. White and White, Canvases and Careers, pp. 144-45, 150-51. 20. Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, Chapter 3. 21. Martha Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 5. Ward continued: “This was despite the fact that the justifications that had been offered for the production of such paintings and their display in the French public arena - moral didacticism, nationalist sentiments, cultural heritage - had been seriously undermined by the apparent debasement of history painting into a theatricalized, trivialized or propagandized mode of entertainment, and by the gradual demise of any serious commitment to that type of painting on the part of many of the audiences held in high esteem;” ibid. 28 22. Ward observes that “Seurat’s habit of producing a large painting annually [was] perhaps a carry-over from preparing works for the Salon;” ibid., p. 107. 23. David Sweetman, Paul Gauguin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), pp. 130, 201. Also see Mark Roskill, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the Impressionist Circle (Greenwich Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1970), p. 96. 24. Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), pp. 130-35. 25. A minor work of his was shown at the Spanish pavilion of the 1900 Exposition Universelle, but he would not again participate in a large group exhibition until World War I; Marilyn McCully, editor, Picasso: The Early Years, 1892-1906 (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1997), p. 143; Pierre Daix, Picasso (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), pp. 152-53. 26. John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Early Years, 1881-1906 (New York: Random House, 1991), pp. 411-14. 27. Daix, Picasso, p. 56. 28. William Rubin, Hélène Seckel, and Judith Cousins, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), pp. 14, 119. 29. David Cottington, “What the Papers Say: Politics and Ideology in Picasso’s Collages of 1912,” Art Journal, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter, 1988), pp. 353-54. 30. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 67. 31. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), p. 69. 32. Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 305. 33. Stephanie Terenzio, editor, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 161-62; also see Deirdre Robson, “The Avant-Garde and the On-Guard: Some Influences on the Potential Market for the First Generation Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and Early 1950s,” Art Journal, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Fall, 1988), pp. 217-20. 34. Alan Bowness has remarked that the replacement of public group exhibitions by private gallery shows is “an innovation too little recognized;” The Conditions of Success (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1990), pp. 39-42. 29 35. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 16. 36. Ibid., p. 124. 37. Henry Geldzahler, Making It New (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 111. 38. Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), p. 149. 39. James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 329. 40. Clifford Ross, editor, Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), pp. 197, 214. 41. David Sylvester, About Modern Art (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), p. 353. 42. Anna C. Chave, Mark Rothko (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 11-12. 43. Kirk Varnedoe, Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), pp. 48-50. 44. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 257-58; Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 22-23, 118-19, 174; Geldzahler, Making It New, p. 52. 45. Victor Bockris, Warhol (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), p. 151. 46. Ibid., p. 153. 47. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956-1966,” in Kynaston McShine, editor, Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 54. 48. Steven Henry Madoff, editor, Pop Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 267. Warhol’s portrayals of Marilyn Monroe appear to be his most popular among art historians, as they account for a total of 20 illustrations in the books surveyed for this study. 49. Charles F. Stuckey, “Warhol in Context,” in Gary Garrels, editor, The Work of Andy Warhol (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), pp. 3-4. 50. Paintings from the show are listed in Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), p. 128. 51. Jasper Johns, Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), p. 82. 30 52. Ibid., p. 82. 53. William S. Rubin, Frank Stella (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), p. 12. 54. Leo Castelli, Jasper Johns: 35 Years (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), not paginated. 55. Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 71. 56. Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997), pp. 56-59. 57. Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, p. 236. 58. Walter Hopps, “Introduction,” in Hopps and Davidson, Robert Rauschenberg, p. 24. 59. E.g. see Thérèse Burollet, “Pompier Art,” in Alexander V. J. Gaudieri, et. al., William Bouguereau (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1984), pp. 31-38. 60. Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Vol. 3 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1958), p. 34. 61. John Rewald, Post-Impressionism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1956), p. 202. 62. Denis Rouart, Edouard Manet (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), pp. 115-21; Pierre Schneider, The World of Manet (New York: Time-Life Books, 1968), p. 172. 63. David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro, Abstract Expressionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 97. 64. Pepe Karmel, editor, Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), pp. 17, 22. 65. E. A. Carmean and Eliza E. Rathbone, American Art at Mid-Century (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1978), pp. 133-36. 66. Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, pp. 198, 271-72; Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), p. 78. 67. E.g. Alan Bowness, Courbet’s L’Atelier du Peintre (Newcastle: University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1972), p. 3; John Rewald, Georges Seurat (New York: Wittenborn, 1943), p. 20; Roland Penrose, Picasso (New York: Harper 1959), p. 124; Alfred H. Barr, Matisse (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951), pp. 81-82. 68. John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, revised edition (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), p. 140. Table 1: Ranking of Most Illustrated French Paintings Rank % of books Artist, title Date Location 1 91 Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907 New York 2 76 Picasso, Guernica 1937 Madrid 3 73 Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte 1886 Chicago 4(t) 64 Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 1912 Philadelphia 4(t) 64 Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe 1863 Paris 6 61 Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergère 1882 London 7 48 Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even 1923 Philadelphia 8(t) 45 Courbet, L’Atelier 1855 Paris 8(t) 45 Gauguin, The Vision After the Sermon 1888 Edinburgh 8(t) 45 Manet, Olympia 1863 Paris 8(t) 45 Matisse, The Joy of Life 1906 Merion, PA Source: Galenson, “Quantifying Artistic Success,” Table 3. Table 2: Ranking of Most Illustrated American Paintings Rank % of books Artist, title Date Location 1 36 de Kooning, Woman I 1952 New York 2 34 Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis 1951 New York 3 31 Lichtenstein, Whaam! 1963 London 4(t) 27 de Kooning, Excavation 1950 Chicago 4(t) 27 Rauschenberg, Bed 1955 New York 4(t) 27 Rauschenberg, Monogram 1959 Stockholm 7(t) 23 Gorky, The Liver is the Cock’s Comb 1944 Buffalo 7(t) 23 Johns, Flag 1958 New York 7(t) 23 Johns, Three Flags 1954 New York 7(t) 23 Pollock, Autumn Rhythm 1950 New York 7(t) 23 Warhol, Marilyn Diptych 1962 London Source: Galenson, “Was Jackson Pollock the Greatest American Modern Painter?” Table 3. Table 3: Ranking of Paintings from Tables 1 and 2, by Total Illustrations in Common Books Rank N % of books Artist, Title 1 28 97 Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 2 23 79 Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte 3 22 76 Picasso, Guernica 4 18 62 Manet, Olympia 5(t) 17 59 Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe 5(t) 17 59 Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergère 7 15 52 Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 8 14 48 Matisse, The Joy of Life 9 13 45 Gauguin, The Vision After the Sermon 10 12 41 Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even 11(t) 11 38 Courbet, L’Atelier 11(t) 11 38 Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis 11(t) 11 38 Rauschenberg, Monogram 14 9 31 Lichtenstein, Whaam! 15(t) 8 28 de Kooning, Woman I 15(t) 8 28 Warhol, Marilyn Diptych 17(t) 7 24 Johns, Flag 17(t) 7 24 Johns, Three Flags 17(t) 7 24 Pollock, Autumn Rhythm 20(t) 5 17 Gorky, The Liver is the Cock’s Comb 20(t) 5 17 de Kooning, Excavation 20(t) 5 17 Rauschenberg, Bed Source: see text and appendix. Table 4: Ranking of Other Works by Artists Included in Tables 1 and 2 that Appear in More than One Quarter of the Books Surveyed Rank N % of books Artist, Title Date Location 1 15 52 Courbet, The Stone Breakers 1894 Unknown 2 14 48 Picasso, Three Musicians 1921 New York 3 11 38 Courbet, Funeral at Ornans 1849 Paris 4(t) 9 31 Matisse, Green Stripe (Mme. Matisse) 1905 Copenhagen 4(t) 9 31 Matisse, Harmony in Red 1909 Leningrad 6(t) 8 28 Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel 1951 New York 6(t) 8 28 Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. 1919 New York 6(t) 8 28 Gauguin, Where do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 1897 Boston 6(t) 8 28 Gauguin, Manao Tupapau 1892 Buffalo 6(t) 8 28 Matisse, Red Studio 1911 New York 6(t) 8 28 Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning 1912 Paris Source: see text and appendix. Table 5: Total Illustrations for All Painters Considered by this Study Rank N Painter 1 343 Picasso 2 159 Matisse 3 93 Manet 4 85 Duchamp 5 83 Gauguin 6 69 Pollock 7 60 Johns 8(t) 52 Courbet 8(t) 52 Warhol 10(t) 46 Rauschenberg 10(t) 46 Seurat 12 39 Lichtenstein 13 32 de Kooning 14 24 Newman 15 22 Gorky Source: see text and appendix. Table 6: Total Illustrations of Each Artist in the Single Years Listed in Table 3 Rank N Artist Year 1 52 Picasso 1907 2 37 Manet 1863 3 36 Warhol 1962 4 32 Picasso 1937 5(t) 26 Pollock 1950 5(t) 26 Seurat 1886 7(t) 25 Duchamp 1912 7(t) 25 Johns 1955 9 19 Lichtenstein 1963 10(t) 17 Manet 1882 10(t) 17 Matisse 1906 12(t) 15 Gauguin 1888 12(t) 15 Rauschenberg 1959 14(t) 12 Courbet 1855 14(t) 12 Duchamp 1923 16 11 Newman 1951 17 10 de Kooning 1952 18 9 Johns 1958 19(t) 7 Gorky 1944 19(t) 7 Rauschenberg 1955 21 5 de Kooning 1950 Source: see text and appendix Table 7: Ranking by Size of Paintings in Table 3 Rank Artist and Painting Size (m2) 1 Picasso, Guernica 27.12 2 Courbet, L’Atelier 21.59 3 Pollock, Autumn Rhythm 13.97 4 Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis 12.44 5 Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grade Jatte 6.38 6 Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 5.66 7 Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe 5.62 8 de Kooning, Excavation 5.29 9 Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even 4.88 10 Gorky, The Liver is the Cock’s Comb 4.63 11 Matisse, Joy of Life 4.14 12 Rauschenberg, Monogram 3.35* 13 Warhol, Marilyn Diptych 2.95 14 de Kooning, Woman I 2.84 15 Manet, Olympia 2.49 16 Johns, Flag 1.65 17 Rauschenberg, Bed 1.53* 18 Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 1.31 19 Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergère 1.25 20 Lichtenstein, Whaam! 1.09 21 Johns, Three Flags 0.91* 22 Gauguin, Vision After the Sermon 0.69 *These works are three-dimensional. The figure given for each is the product of their two largest dimensions. 31 Appendix: The books surveyed for this study are listed here, in chronological order. In one case, as indicated, four books that were included in a series were treated as a single book. 1. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982). 2. Sara Cornell, Art: A History of Changing Style (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983). 3. Ralph A. Britsch and Todd A. Britsch, The Arts in Western Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984). 4. Dennis J. Sporre, The Arts (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984). 5. Edmund Burke Feldman, Thinking About Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985). 6. H. H. Arnason and Daniel Wheeler, History of Modern Art, third edition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986). 7. Frederick Hartt, Art, third edition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989). 8. Michael Wood, Bruce Cole, and Adelheid Gealt, Art of the Western World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). 9. Kirk Varnedoe, A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990). 10. Horst de la Croix, Richard G. Tansey, and Diane Kirkpatrick, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, ninth edition (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991). 11. Philip Yenawine, How to Look at Modern Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991). 12. Sam Hunter and John Jacobus, Modern Art, third edition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992). 13. Sandro Sprocati, editor, A Guide to Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992). 14. Carol Strickland, The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1992). 15. Four books treated as one: 32 Francis Frascina, Nigel Blake, Briony Fer, Tamar Garb, and Charles Harrison, Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina, and Gill Perry, Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). Briony Fer, David Batchelor, and Paul Wood, Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). Paul Wood, Francis Frascina, Jonathan Harris, and Charles Harrison, Modernism in Dispute: Art Since the Forties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 16. Larry Silver, Art in History (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1993). 17. Laurie Schneider Adams, A History of Western Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994). 18. William Fleming, Arts and Ideas, ninth edition (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1995). 19. H. W. Janson and Anthony F. Janson, History of Art, fifth edition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995). 20. Marilyn Stokstad and Marion Spears Grayson, Art History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995). 21. Liz Dawtrey, Toby Jackson, Mary Masterton, Pam Meecham, and Paul Wood, Investigating Modern Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 22. Alison Gallup, Gerhard Gruitroy, and Elizabeth M. Weisberg, Great Paintings of the Western World (New York: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 1997). 23. David Wilkins, Bernard Schultz, and Katheryn M. Linduff, Art Past, Art Present, third edition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997). 24. Julian Freeman, Art: A Crash Course (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1998). 25. Volker Gebhardt, The History of Art (New York: Barron’s, 1998). 26. Sandro Bocola, The Art of Modernism: Art, Culture, and Society from Goya to the Present Day (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1999). 27. Hugh Honour and John Fleming, The Visual Arts: A History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999). 33 28. Duane Preble, Sarah Preble, and Patrick Frank, Artforms: An Introduction to the Visual Arts, sixth edition (New York: Longman, 1999). 29. Martin Kemp, editor, The Oxford History of Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). work_k63ywphc5vchjl56fw3pryq6ha ---- 천연염색의류에 대한 소비자 반응... The� Research� Journal� of the� Costume� Culture pISSN� 1226-0401 � � eISSN� 2383-6334 RJCC�Vol.25,�No.4,�pp.509-518,�August�2017 https://doi.org/10.7741/rjcc.2017.25.4.509 - 509 - [Original� Article] The color characteristics of Cartier’s exotic design in the early 20th century Jiyoun Hong† Dept. of Jewelry & Metals, Dongyang University, Korea 20세기 초 까르띠에의 이국적 디자인의 색상 특성 홍 지 연† 동양대학교 보석귀금속학과 Abstract As the international competitive landscape deepens, the need to understand foreign cultures and establish effective strategies is increasing. At the beginning of the 20th century, Cartier actively developed exotic designs to secure international competitive- ness; theses designs have also been used as design prototypes for Cartier in modern times. The purpose of this study is to analyze the color characteristics and types of exotic designs in the early 20th century, which was a turning point in Cartier's design. After studying the literature, a total of 248 exotic designs were presented in Cartier catalogs. This study also selected overseas monographs from the early 20th century, and their design types were classified and color analysis was performed based on the Natural Color System(NCS). Cartier’s exotic designs cover wide range of styles, such as Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Indian and Egyptian styles. Multicolor, primary colors, and contrast are all strongly expressed. 97% of designs contained multiple colors, with at least two colors and maximum of six colors. The most frequently used colors are red, green, and blue, which means that only 9% of the designs do not contain the three colors, showing a high preference for theses three colors. In addition, color combina- tions of red and green, red and blue, or all three colors are used to show high contrast and utilize complementary colors, or near complementary colors, for coloration. This study is meaningful in that it analyzes the color characteristics of Cartier’s exotic designs and translates them into practical data for establishing the color strategies of companies in the global market. Keywords: Cartier(까르띠에), Cartier color(까르띠에 색상), exotic color(이국적 색상), exotic design(이국적 디자인) I.� Introduction 1. The purpose of study 「까르띠에(Cartier)」는 전 세계 62개국에 278개의 매장(Richemont, 2017)을 운영 하고 있는 글로벌 럭셔리 브랜드이다. 인터브랜드(Interbrand)는 매년 100개의 베스 Received� June� 28,� 2017 Revised� � August� 23,� 2017 Accepted� August� 28,� 2017 †Corresponding author (jewels21@hanmail.net) ORCID JIYOUN� HONG http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1700-0675 Copyright©2017,� The� Costume� Culture� Association.� All� rights� reserved. 92 20세기 초 까르띠에의 이국적 디자인의 색상 특성 복식문화연구 - 510 - 트 글로벌 브랜드를 발표하는데, 2016년 보고서에서는 62위를 하였다. 이 보고서에서 주얼리 브랜드는 「까 르띠에」와 「티파니(Tiffany& Co.)」만 순위 안에 포함 되어 있으며, 티파니는 74위이다(Interbrand, 2016). 이렇게 강한 브랜드 가치를 지닐 수 있게 된 요인 은 다양한데, 본 논문에서는 20세기 초 「까르띠에」의 이국적 디자인과 색상 특성에 주목하였다. 자사의 특 징적인 디자인을 갖지 못했던 「까르띠에」가 20세기 초 이국적 디자인을 적극적으로 발전시키면서 당대 의 스타일을 선도하고, 국제적 경쟁력을 갖추게 되었 기 때문이다. 이로 인해 20세기 초의 이국적 디자인 은 「까르띠에」의 디자인 원형으로 인정받고 있다. 1980년대에 「까르띠에」가 21세기를 향한 새로운 비전을 세우고, 현대화를 위한 작업으로 ‘뉴 주얼리 (New Jewelry)’를 발표할 때 부활시킨 것은 바로 20 세기 초에 발표한 자사의 이국적 디자인이었다. 1982 년에 ‘까르띠에의 예술(L’Art de Cartier)’이라는 주제 로 이 시기를 조명했으며, 1991년까지 20세기 초에 사 용되었던 이국적 디자인의 테마들을 부활시켰다(Hong, 2015). 1930년대와 1940년대에 「까르띠에」의 디자인 미학을 이끌었던 잔느 투생(Jeanne Toussaint)도 20세 기 초의 이국적 디자인을 자사의 근원적 영감으로 보 았다. 그녀는 1934년에 근원적 영감으로 회귀할 것을 주장했는데, 이는 곧 1906년경의 아이디어로 돌아가 는 것을 의미했다(Nadelhoffer, 2007). 이 시기는 대담 한 색상과 기하학적 조형으로 이국적 디자인을 실험 하던 때로 그녀는 여기에 「까르띠에」의 독창성이 있 다고 믿고, 이후 디자인의 영감으로 활용했다. 이러한 인식은 현대에도 변함이 없다. 「까르띠에」의 이미지 와 스타일, 헤리티지(heritage)를 총괄하고 있는 피에 르 레네로(Pierre Rainero) 역시 자사의 고유한 가치 를 20세기 초에 형성된 이국적 디자인에서 찾았다. 그는 자사의 고유한 가치인 대담하면서도 보편적인 디자인은 20세기 초 다양한 이국 문화를 이해하고 포 용하여 형성된 것이며, 오늘날의 「까르띠에」 또한 같 은 방식으로 추구하고 있다(Brandt, 2011)고 말했다. 이와 같이 20세기 초에 발표한 이국적 디자인은 현재까지도 「까르띠에」의 영감의 원천으로 작용하며, 글로벌 시대에 더욱 중요하게 활용되고 있다. 「까르 띠에」의 디자인에 대한 연구 중 본 논문의 주제와 근 접한 논문으로 ‘주얼리에 표현된 오리엔탈리즘: 까르 띠에를 중심으로’(Lee, 2006)가 있는데, 중국풍에 대 한 디자인 분석만 진행해 「까르띠에」의 다양한 이국 적 디자인과 색상 특성을 거시적으로 고찰하는 데에 는 한계가 있다. 따라서 본 연구는 다음과 같은 목적 으로 진행하고자 한다. 첫째, 20세기 초 「까르띠에」의 이국적 디자인의 유형과 사례를 고찰한다. 둘째, 이국 적 디자인의 색상을 분석하고 특성을 도출한다. 이는 이국문화에 대한 「까르띠에」의 색상 전략을 이해할 수 있는 연구로 의의를 지니며, 글로벌 시장에 진출 하고자 하는 기업들에게 실무적 응용자료로 활용하 는데 기여할 수 있을 것이다. 2. The research method 본 연구에서 사용하는 이국적 디자인이라는 개념 은 이국 문화에서 영감을 받아 유럽인의 시각으로 재 해석한 디자인을 말한다. 「까르띠에」는 중국과 일본, 페르시아와 인도, 이집트 문화에서 영감을 받아 자사 의 디자인 미학과 기술력을 융합해 기존과 다른 새로 운 디자인을 발표했다. 따라서 분석대상은 중국과 일 본, 페르시아와 인도, 이집트 스타일을 반영한 20세기 초 「까르띠에」의 이국적 디자인이다. 연구 방법은 먼저 「까르띠에」 및 이국적 디자인, 이 국풍, 오리엔탈 디자인, 오리엔탈리즘을 주제로 연구 한 해외 단행본과 국내외 관련 논문, 신문 및 잡지에 대한 문헌 연구를 실시하였다. 다음으로 「까르띠에」 의 전시 도록과 해외 단행본에서 20세기 초에 발표한 이국적 디자인 유형과 사례를 추출하였다. 「까르띠 에」는 세계의 대표적인 공공기관에서 자사 제품들을 전시해왔기 때문에 공식 도록은 실물을 직접 분석하 지 못하는 한계를 상쇄시킬 수 있는 자료로 볼 수 있 다. 뉴욕, 모스크바, 서울, 리스본에서 개최된 「까르띠 에」 전시회 도록(Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2007; Moscow Kremlin Museums, 2007; National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008; Rudoe, 1997)과 제네바 에서 개최된 「까르띠에」 단독 경매 도록(Antiquorum & Etude Tajan, 1996), 해외 단행본(Nadelhoffer, 2007) 에서 총 248점의 이국적 디자인을 추출했다. 248점 중 중국과 일본 스타일이 109점, 페르시아와 인도 스타 일이 99점, 이집트 스타일이 40점이다. 이후 각 스타일별로 Natural Color System(NCS)을 적용해 색상 분석을 실시하였다. NCS를 적용한 이유 Vol. 25, No. 4 홍 지 연 93 - 511 - 는 이 표색계의 6가지 기본 색상인 적색, 황색, 녹색, 청색, 백색, 흑색이 20세기 초 「까르띠에」의 이국적 디자인에서 높은 빈도로 나타나기 때문에, 압축되고 유의미한 분석 결과를 도출할 수 있기 때문이다. 수 집한 248점을 NCS의 6가지 기본 색상에 의거해 분석 하였으며, 6가지 기본 색상에 속하지 않을 경우 기타 로 분류하였다. 천연 보석은 자연적 특성상 같은 종 류라도 동일한 색상을 지니기 어렵다. 루비의 경우, 적색, 자주색, 주황색감의 적색, 분홍색감의 적색 등 다양한 색상으로 나타난다. 본 연구에서는 대표성을 위해 루비의 경우 NCS의 6가지 기본 색상을 기준으 로 적색으로 분류하였으며, 적색의 근접색상까지 포 함했다는 것을 나타내기 위해 ‘적색계’로 명시하였다. 다른 보석들의 색상도 동일한 기준을 적용하였으며, 무색투명한 다이아몬드는 백색으로 분류하였다. 색상 분석 후 단색과 다색 수, 다색일 경우 배색 수, 높은 빈도로 사용된 색상 및 배색 상황을 검토하 였으며, 그 결과에 근거해 20세기 초 「까르띠에」의 이국적 디자인의 특성을 도출하였다. 객관성을 위해 본 연구자 외 미술사와 의류학 연구자 2명의 검증을 거쳤으며, 이를 토대로 20세기 초 「까르띠에」의 이국 적 디자인의 색상 특성을 도출하였다. Ⅱ.� Background 1. Colors of exotic design in the early 20th century 20세기 초 교통수단의 발전과 식민지 지배로 문화 교류가 급증하고, 산업화가 가속화되면서 이국문화에 대한 관심이 고조되었고, 페르시아와 중국, 일본, 이집 Red room, 1908. From. The State Hermitage Museum. (n.d.). https://www.hermitagemuseum.org Stage design for Schérérazade, 1911. From. Benton, Benton, & Wood. (2003). p. 109. Persian style. From. Koda & Bolton. (2008). http://www.metmuseum.org Commode à l’anglaise, 1921. From. Sotheby’s. (2014). http://www.sothebys.com
Colors of exotic design in the early 20th century 트, 아프리카 등에서 영감을 받은 디자인이 대두되었 다. 이국적 디자인은 야수주의에서 보여주는 원색을 많이 반영하였다. 은 야수주의를 대표하는 마 티스(Henri Matisse)의 회화로 원색을 사용해 표현적 색채미를 구현하고 있다. 이국적 디자인이 활성화되 는 촉매가 된 것은 1910년 파리에서 열린 러시아 발 레단의 <세헤라자데> 공연이었다. 에서처럼 녹색과 청색, 주황색으로 표현한 무대 장식은 문화예 술계 인사들에게 큰 영감을 주어 다양한 시도가 이어 졌다. 대표적인 사례로 패션 디자이너 폴 푸아레(Paul Poiret)는 이 공연에서 영감을 받아 하렘 팬츠, 중국풍 코트와 같은 이국적 디자인을 발표하였다(Yang & Roh, 2013). 은 푸아레가 1911년에 발표한 페 르시아풍의 디자인으로 녹색과 적색, 청색, 황금색을 배 색하였다. 실내장식 분야의 대표 인물인 장 뒤낭(Jean Dunand)은 원색과 흑색, 백색을 과감하게 배색한 를 비롯해 래커를 사용해 강렬한 색상의 오브 제들을 발표하였다. 이와 같이 20세기 초 이국적 디 자인은 대담한 색상을 주로 사용하면서 전개되었다. 2. Development of design in Cartier from 1847 to early 20th century 1847년 개점 후 약 50년 동안 「까르띠에」는 자사 의 특징을 보여주는 디자인을 확립하지 못했다. 당대 유행하던 양식들을 반영하는 정도에 머물렀으며, 주 얼리와 시계 외에 부채, 조각상, 도자기 등 다양한 품 목의 제품들을 판매했다. 「까르띠에」가 보석제품을 생산하기 시작한 것은 1850~1855년으로 추정된다 (Nadelhoffer, 2007). 는 1850년경에 제작한 팔 94 20세기 초 까르띠에의 이국적 디자인의 색상 특성 복식문화연구 - 512 - Bracelet, circa 1850. From. National Museum of Contemporary Art. (2008). p. 44. Cameo brooch, circa 1860. From. National Museum of Contemporary Art. (2008). p. 45. Sketches from the stock register, 1880. From. Nadelhoffer. (2007). p. 18. ‘Garland Style’ necklace, 1904. From. Nadelhoffer. (2007). p. 53.
Development of design in Cartier from 1847 to early 20th century 찌로 당시 고고학적 발굴로 유행한 복고풍을 반영해 고대의 세공기법을 적용한 것이다. 중앙의 원형 금판 과 가장자리는 가는 금실을 꼬아 만든 필리그리 (Filigree, 細線細工) 기법을 사용했으며, 그래뉼레이 션(Granulation, 鏤金細工) 기법으로 금 알갱이들을 붙 였다. 1860년 경 제작한 의 브로치도 고대 신 상을 조각한 카메오를 사용해 복고풍을 반영했다. 1870년대에 이르면 자연주의 기조와 영국의 영향으 로 자연을 모티프로 한 디자인이 유행했다. 은 「까르띠에」의 1880년 재고 장부로 나비와 벌새, 돌고래, 벌을 모티프로 스케치해 유행을 반영하였다. 「까르띠에」가 디자인 특성을 확립하기 시작한 것은 1899년 이후이다. 18세기 양식에 기초한 ‘화환 스타일 (Garland Style)’을 경쟁사보다 뛰어난 세공 기법과 고 품질의 플래티늄을 사용해 유럽은 물론 미국의 신흥부 자들에게도 인기가 확산되었다. 화환, 꽃줄 장식(swag), 태슬(tassel), 레이스, 리본 매듭을 모티프로 하여 백색 재료인 다이아몬드와 플래티늄, 진주로 제작해 우아함 을 높이고, 당시 유행한 파스텔 색조의 패션과도 잘 어 울린 ‘화환 스타일’은 상류층의 높은 지지를 받아(Hong, 2006) 「까르띠에」의 우위를 다지는 발판이 되었다. 은 1904년에 제작한 전형적인‘화환 스타일’의 목걸 이로 18세기의 화려한 주얼리 문화를 재현하고 있다. 러시아 발레단의 파리 공연을 계기로 「까르띠에」 는 이국적 디자인으로 빠르게 선회했다. 오랫동안 수 집한 다양한 문화권의 자료와 유물을 토대로 역사적 고증에 기반을 두고 유물을 직접 제품에 접목한 차별 화된 이국적 디자인을 발표하면서 디자인 미학을 확 립하고, 경쟁사들보다 우위를 점하게 되었다. 또한 1902년에 런던, 1909년에 뉴욕 지점을 개설하고, 인 도와 보석 무역을 하여 국제적 네트워킹을 확대해 이 국적 디자인의 수용과 확산에 박차를 가했다. 그 결 과, 1939년까지 유럽의 주요 왕실과 이집트, 태국에 이르기까지 15개 왕실의 공식공급자로 채택되어 국 제적 명성을 구축하였다(Nadelhoffer, 2007). 3. Natural Color System(NCS) Natural Color System(NCS)는 1972년 스웨덴 색채 연구소에서 개발한 세계적인 색채표기 시스템이다. 독 일의 생리학자인 헤링(Karl Ewald Konstantin Hering) 의 반대색설(Opponent Color Theory)을 근거로 하고 있다. 헤링은 1878년경 색과 색지각에 관해 연구하였 고, 지각작용의 진상을 밝혀내었다. 그는 적색, 황색, 녹색, 청색을 시각적인 기본이라고 보고, 기존의 3색 이론에 동의하지 않았다. NCS의 특징은 뉘앙스(nuance) 를 기준으로 색의 관계성을 부여한 친 인간적 색채체 계이다. 그리고 인간의 시각기관을 통해 색을 지각하 는 원리로 색의 속성을 명도, 색도, 색상의 3속성으로 구분하지 않고, 색상과 색조의 개념인 뉘앙스로 구분 하고 있다. 이는 색조 중심의 배색을 할 때 용이한 구 조적 특징을 지닌다. 또한 거리, 빛, 표면 구조와 같은 색채지각변수에 따른 관찰자의 반응을 통계적으로 적 용하여 인간과 색채, 환경과의 연계성을 높인 색체계 이다(Park, 2005). NCS의 기본색상은 와 같이 Vol. 25, No. 4 홍 지 연 95 - 513 - NCS elementary colors 적색, 황색, 녹색, 청색, 백색, 흑색으로 이루어져 있다. Ⅲ.� Styles� and� Cases� of� Exotic� Design� of� Cartier 20세기 초 「까르띠에」는 다양한 이국 문화에서 영 감 받은 디자인들을 적극적으로 발표하기 시작했다. 이 시기 이국적 디자인의 유형을 분류하기 위해 다음 과 같은 기준을 적용하였다. 첫째, 「까르띠에」의 전시 회 도록에서 이국적 디자인으로 범주화되어 있으며, 둘째, 디자인 유형으로 분류할 정도의 유의미한 제품 수가 있는지를 고려하였다. 그 결과, 영향을 받은 문 화권으로 기준을 중국과 일본 스타일, 페르시아와 인 도 스타일, 이집트 스타일로 분류하였으며 각각의 대 표적 사례는 아래와 같다. 1. Chinese and Japanese style 중국과 일본은 유럽의 문화예술에 폭넓은 영향을 미쳐 왔다. 중국풍은 17세기 후반부터, 일본풍은 19세 기 중후반부터 유행해 프랑스어로 중국풍은 시누와 즈리(Chinoiserie), 일본풍은 자포니즘(Japonism)이라 고 불렸다(Hong, 2008). 「까르띠에」는 1919년에 중국 의 음양(陰陽)사상에 근거해 과 같은 펜던트 를 발표했다. 음은 검정색 오닉스로, 양은 다이아몬드 로 표현했으며, 금속 체인 대신에 실크 코드(silk cord) 를 사용해 동양적 느낌을 더했다. 1926년에는 처럼 비취로 귀걸이를 제작했다. 중앙에는 장수를 뜻하는 한자 수(壽)를 적색 에나멜로 표현해 비취의 녹 색과 강렬한 대비를 주었다. 일본풍으로는 가 있다. 일본 신사(神社) 입구에 세우는 도리이(鳥居) 를 모티프로 하여 1923년에 제작한 탁상용 시계이다. 무색의 투명한 백수정과 오닉스, 에나멜을 사용해 흑 백 대비를 주었고, 상단에는 복덕을 가져오는 신인 호테에(布袋)로 장식했다. 2. Persian and Indian style 러시아 발레단의 파리 공연을 계기로 「까르띠에」 는 페르시아풍 디자인을 확대해 나갔다. 은 1912년에 제작한 브로치이다. 하단의 직사각형에는 이슬람 문화권에서 볼 수 있는 상징인 ‘행운의 눈(lucky eye)’을 나타내고 있다. 는 1924년에 제작한 화장품 케이스로 이슬람 문양에 터키석과 비취, 자개, 진주로 화려하게 장식했다. 이슬람과 힌두 문화가 혼 합된 무굴양식의 디자인도 발표하였다. 페르시아와 무 굴 예술에서 자주 볼 수 있는 보테(boteh) 문양을 활 용해(Krishnan & Kumar, 2007), 1925년에 와 같은 장식 핀을 제작했다. 녹색 비취와 적색 루비, 검 정색 에나멜을 사용해 강렬한 색상 대비를 주고 있다. 3. Egyptian style 이집트에 대한 유럽인의 관심은 나폴레옹의 이집 트 원정과 수에즈 운하 건설로 인해 19세기에도 존재 했다. 20세기 초에 이집트풍이 큰 유행을 하게 된 것 은 1922년에 투탕카멘 무덤이 발견되면서였다. 파라 오의 황금 마스크와 왕관, 가슴 장식 등 많은 유물이 발굴되면서 문화예술계는 물론 대중들까지 관심을 갖게 되었다. 「까르띠에」는 1924년에 과 같 은 광고를 하였다. ‘투탕카멘이 모던 주얼리에 영향 을 미치다’라는 제목으로 다양한 디자인의 이집트풍 주얼리를 실었다. 또한 같은 해에 과 같이 생명과 부활을 상징하는 스캐럽(scarab)을 모티프로 브로치를 선보였다. 청색과 백색으로 명시성을 높이 고, 흑색 에나멜과 녹색 에메랄드로 엑센트를 주었다. 청색 날개는 기원전 10세기 후반에 만든 파이앙스 (faience)를 사용했다. 1934년에는 연꽃을 모티프로 활 용해 과 같은 티아라를 제작했다. 양식화한 연꽃들을 다이아몬드로 섬세하게 세팅하였으며, 정수 리에서 아래로 갈수록 점점 작아지게 디자인했다. 4. Cases applied to present day 위에서 살펴본 이국적 디자인은 현대에도 「까르띠 에」의 디자인 모티프로 활용되면서 진화하고 있다. 「까르띠에」의 공식 홈페이지에는 처럼 인도 에서 영감을 받아 최근에 제작한 하이 주얼리가 소개 되어 있다. ‘인도의 영감(Indian Influences)’이라는 동 영상도 탑재하여 20세기 초의 이국적 디자인을 현대 96 20세기 초 까르띠에의 이국적 디자인의 색상 특성 복식문화연구 - 514 - Chinese and Japanese style ‘Yin-Yang’ pendant, 1919. From. Nadelhoffer. (2007). p. 188. Jade earrings, 1926. From. Rudoe. (1997). p. 195. Portique mystery Clock, 1923. From. Antiquorum & Etude Tajan. (1996). p. 310. Persian and Indian style Brooch-pendant, 1912. From. National Museum of Contemporary Art. (2008). p. 105. Vanity case, 1924. From. Nadelhoffer. (2007). p. 203. Boteh cliquet pin, 1925. From. National Museum of Contemporary Art. (2008). p. 158. Egyptian style Advertisement, The Illustrated London News, 1924. From. Rudoe. (1997). p. 136. Scarab brooch, 1924. From. Nadelhoffer. (2007). p. 145. ‘Halo’ tiara, 1934. From. Rudoe. (1997). p. 145. Contemporary Tutti-Frutti necklace. From. Cartier. (n.d.). http://www.cartier.com Panda wristwatch. From. WorldTempus. (n.d.). http://en.worldtempus.com
Styles and cases of exotic design in Cartier Vol. 25, No. 4 홍 지 연 97 - 515 - 에도 응용하고 있다. 이전 디자인들을 검토해 보면 중국의 판다를 모티프로 한 처럼 20세기 초 발표했던 다른 이국문화도 지속적으로 활용해왔음을 볼 수 있다. Ⅳ.� Color� Characteristics� of� Exotic� Design� of� Cartier 20세기 초 「까르띠에」의 이국적 디자인 248점을 Natural Color Stytem(NCS)에 의거해 양적 분석한 결 과는 다음과 같다. 중국과 일본 스타일에서는 99%가 다색으로 가장 높은 빈도로 사용된 색상은 적색계, 녹 색계, 청색계 순이며, 93% 사용되었다. 페르시아와 인 도 스타일에서는 95%가 다색으로 가장 높은 빈도로 사용된 색상은 녹색계, 적색계, 청색계 순이며, 92% 사용되었다. 이집트 스타일에서는 98%가 다색으로 가 장 높은 빈도로 사용된 색상은 청색계, 녹색계, 적색 계 순이며, 89% 사용되었다. 또한 모든 스타일에서 이 세 가지 색상을 위주로 2색 또는 3색 배색을 하여 보 색과 근접보색에 의한 대비가 특징적으로 나타났다. 이러한 결과를 고려할 때 20세기 초 「까르띠에」의 이 국적 디자인의 색상 특성으로 다색성과 원색성, 대비 성을 도출하였으며, 각각의 분석 결과는 다음과 같다. 1. Multicolor 총 248점의 분석 대상 중 97%가 다색이며, 단색은 3%에 불과했다. 단색은 모두 백색계로 다이아몬드가 사용되었다. 「까르띠에」가 이국적 디자인을 본격적으 로 전개하기 이전의 디자인인 ‘화환 스타일’은 백색 계를 사용한 단색 기조가 우세하였다. 그러나 이국적 디자인에서는 최소 2색에서 최대 6색 배색을 사용하 여 다색성이 두드러졌다. 처럼 4색 배색이 43%로 가장 많으며, 3색 30%, 2색 14%, 5색 11%, 6 색 2% 순으로 4색과 3색 배색이 73%에 달한다. 2. Primary color 가장 높은 빈도로 사용된 색상은 적색계와 녹색계, 청색계로 강한 원색성을 지니고 있다. 이 세 가지 색 이 들어가지 않은 제품은 9%에 불과하다. 각 스타일 별로 많이 사용된 색상이 다른 점도 주목할 점이다. 처럼 중국과 일본 스타일은 적색계(52%) - The number of coloration 녹색계(30%) - 청색계(18%), 페르시아와 인도 스타일 은 녹색계(45%) - 적색계(32%) - 청색계(23%), 이집 트 스타일은 청색계(46%) - 녹색계(36%) - 적색계 (18%) 순으로 나타났다. 중국과 일본 스타일은 적색 계, 페르시아와 인도 스타일은 녹색계, 이집트 스타일 은 청색계가 50% 전후로 나타나, 각 문화권에 대한 「까르띠에」의 색상 전략을 알 수 있다. 적색계로는 루비, 산호, 에나멜, 녹색계로는 에메랄 드, 비취, 청색계로는 사파이어, 라피스 라줄리가 주 로 사용되었다. 유럽 문화권에서 전통적으로 사용된 루비와 사파이어, 에메랄드 외에 중국과 일본 스타일 에서는 산호와 에나멜, 비취로 적색계와 녹색계를, 이 집트 스타일에서는 라피스 라줄리로 청색계를 나타 내면서 불투명한 재료로 원색을 더욱 강조했다. 3. Contrast 적색과 녹색, 적색과 청색으로 2색 배색하거나 세 Blue Blue Blue Green Green Green Red Red Red The most frequently used colors 98 20세기 초 까르띠에의 이국적 디자인의 색상 특성 복식문화연구 - 516 - Chinese & Japanese style Persian & Indian style Egyptian style Primary coloration Red Green Red Green Blue Red Blue Cartier Pendant watch, 1929. From. National Museum of Contemporary Art. (2008). p. 172. Tutti-Frutti necklace, 1933. From. National Museum of Contemporary Art. (2008). p. 164. Cigarette case, 1929. From. Nadelhoffer. (2007). p. 148. Relic Snuff bottle, 1780-1900. From. Christie's. (2012). http://www.christies.com Turban ornament, early 19th century. From. Krishnan & Kumar. (2007). p. 242. Tutankhamun gold mask. From. Verweij. (n.d.). https://www.pinterest.co.kr
Examples of contrast 가지 색 모두를 3색 배색하여 보색 또는 근접보색에 의한 높은 대비성을 나타내고 있다. 여기에 백색과 흑색을 배색해 분리효과를 줘 명시성을 높이기도 하 였다. 중국과 일본 스타일은 적색계와 녹색계 배색이 38%, 페르시아와 인도 스타일은 적색계, 녹색계, 청 색계 배색이 31%, 이집트 스타일은 적색계와 청색계 배색이 28%로 가장 높게 나타났다. 이러한 배색을 기 본으로 황금과 터키석을 사용하여 액센트 효과와 이 국적 느낌을 부가하였다. 황금은 중국, 터키석은 이집 트, 페르시아와 인도 스타일에서 사용이 두드러졌다. 이러한 대비적 배색의 대표 사례로 ~가 있다. 각 문화권의 전통 배색을 고려할 때 「까르띠에」의 이러한 접근은 해당 국가의 문화예술에 대한 이해를 바탕으로 한 것으로 보인다. 유물을 확인해 보면 은 1780~1900년에 중국에서 제작한 비연호 (鼻煙壺, snuff bottle)로 산호와 비취로 적색과 녹색 대비를 보여준다. 은 19세기 초 인도에서 제 작한 터번 장식이다. 에나멜 공예로 유명한 자이푸르 (Jaipur)에서 제작한 것으로 녹색과 청색, 적색의 대비 가 이 곳 에나멜의 특징이다. 은 투탕카멘의 황금마스크로 적색과 청색 대비를 보여준다. Ⅴ.� Conclusion 국경을 넘어선 치열한 경쟁 구도가 심화되면서 이 국문화에 대한 이해와 효과적인 전략 수립의 필요성 이 증대되고 있다. 럭셔리 주얼리 브랜드로 세계적인 명성을 구축한 「까르띠에」는 110여 년 전에 다양한 문화를 재해석해 이국적 디자인을 적극적으로 모색 하고 발전시켰다. 그 결과, 국제적인 경쟁력을 확보하 였으며, 현재까지도 「까르띠에」의 디자인 원형으로 활용하고 있다. 본 연구에서는 「까르띠에」의 디자인 역사에서 중 요한 전환점이 된 20세기 초의 이국적 디자인의 유형 과 색상 특성에 대해 분석하였으며, 다음과 같다. 1847년에 개점한 「까르띠에」는 50여 년 간 자사의 특 징적인 디자인을 개발하지 못하고, 당대 유행하던 양 Vol. 25, No. 4 홍 지 연 99 - 517 - 식들을 반영하는 수준에 머물렀다. 1899년 이후부터 독자적인 디자인 개발과 제작에 주력하기 시작했으며, 18세기 양식을 응용한 ‘화환 스타일’로 두각을 나타 내었다. 교통수단의 발전과 식민지 지배로 문화 교류 가 급증하고 산업화가 가속화되면서 이국문화에 대 한 관심이 고조되었고, 이국적 디자인이 대두되었다. 「까르띠에」 또한 다양한 이국적 디자인을 발표하였 다. 「까르띠에」가 주력한 이국적 디자인의 유형은 중 국과 일본, 페르시아와 인도, 이집트 스타일로 나눌 수 있다. 색상 특성은 다색성과 원색성, 대비성을 강하게 나 타내고 있다. 총 248점의 분석 대상 중 97%가 다색으 로 최소 2색에서 최대 6색 배색을 사용하였다. 4색 배색이 43%로 가장 많으며, 3색 30%, 2색 14%, 5색 11%, 6색 2% 순으로 4색과 3색 배색이 73%에 달한 다. 가장 높은 빈도로 사용된 색상은 적색계와 녹색 계, 청색계로 이 3색이 들어가지 않은 비율은 9%에 불과해 높은 원색성을 보여주고 있다. 중국과 일본 스타일은 적색계(52%) - 녹색계(30%) - 청색계(18%), 페르시아와 인도 스타일은 녹색계(45%) - 적색계 (32%) - 청색계(23%), 이집트 스타일은 청색계(46%) - 녹색계(36%) - 적색계(18%) 순으로 나타났다. 또한 적색과 녹색, 적색과 청색으로 2색 배색하거나, 세 가 지 색 모두를 3색 배색하여 보색 또는 근접보색에 의 한 높은 대비성을 나타내고 있다. 여기에 백색과 흑 색을 배색해 분리효과를 줘 명시성을 높이기도 하였 다. 중국과 일본 스타일은 적색계와 녹색계 배색이 38%, 페르시아와 인도 스타일은 녹색계, 적색계, 청 색계 배색이 31%, 이집트 스타일은 청색계와 적색계 배색이 28%로 가장 높게 나타났다. 이상의 연구 결과를 통해 20세기 초에 문화예술계 에서 유행했던 대담한 색상이 「까르띠에」의 이국적 디자인에서도 적극적으로 활용되었음을 알 수 있다. 「까르띠에」는 이전의 ‘화환 스타일’에서 보여준 백색 계의 색상에서 탈피하여 적색, 녹색, 청색을 핵심 색 상으로 사용해 강한 다색성과 원색성, 대비성으로 이 국적 색상미를 구현하였다. 또한 중국과 일본 스타일 은 적색계를, 페르시아와 인도는 녹색계를, 이집트 스 타일은 청색계를 50% 전후로 가장 많이 사용해 각 문화권에 대한 「까르띠에」의 색상 전략을 알 수 있다. 그리고 이러한 특성은 서론에서 피에르 레네로가 언 급한 바와 같이 현대에도 「까르띠에」의 고유한 가치 인 대담하면서도 보편적인 디자인의 원형으로 계승 되고 있다. 이러한 「까르띠에」의 색상 전략이 디자인과 세련 되게 결합하여 국적을 초월한 성과를 창출하였고, 현 대에도 지속적으로 활용되고 있는 점을 고려할 때, 본 연구는 글로벌 시장 진출과 경쟁력 강화를 제고하는 기업들에게도 실무적으로 기여할 수 있을 것으로 본 다. 본 연구에서 고찰한 문화권을 대상으로 하는 경 우는 물론 한국의 전통문화를 응용한 디자인 및 마케 팅, 브랜딩에서의 색상 전략 수립에 응용자료로 활용 할 수 있다는 의의가 있다. 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Otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using PMC: Search the complete PMC archive. Browse the contents of a specific journal in PMC. Find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/ work_k2nyanvrtre7hff5oj35ndbnde ---- T H E S Y M B I O S I S B E T W E E N A R T A N D A R C H I T E C T U R E A S E V I D E N C E D I N L E C O R B U S I E R ' S R O N C H A M P by L I N D A M . M U E L L E R B . A . , The University of Alberta, 1983 A THESIS S U B M I T T E D I N P A R T I A L F U L F I L M E N T OF T H E R E Q U I R E M E N T S F O R T H E D E G R E E OF M A S T E R OF A D V A N C E D STUDIES I N A R C H I T E C T U R E in T H E F A C U L T Y OF G R A D U A T E S T U D I E S S C H O O L OF A R C H I T E C T U R E We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard T H E U N I V E R S I T Y OF B R I T I S H C O L U M B I A October 2004 © Linda M a y Mueller, 2004 FACULTY OF G R A D U A T E STUDIES THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH C O L U M B I A Library Authorization In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Name of Author (please print)' Date (dd/mm/yyyy) Title of Thesis: (h C -SV>y? / V £>~fi~ ffa lh <^n4 / I f c ^ / - A g ^ ^ z x ^ g _ (A <, fr/r^&n X L e r^vr-h U S rS\ mr> Degree: / V ^ C ^ fh-OjJ<^ / od^ /v The University of British Columbia Vancouver, B C Canada grad.ubc.ca/forms/?formlD=THS page 1 of 1 i i last updated: 20-Jul-04 A B S T R A C T Le Corbusier was both artist and architect and the symbiosis between these dual roles contributed to his ability to think and create plastically. In order to understand the symbiotic nature of art and architecture in Le Corbusier's designs, a case study of the Chapel of N6tre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp (1951-5), France, is presented that examines the influences and intellectual beliefs that contributed to the architect's works. To appreciate the symbiosis of art and architecture, as it is evidenced in this chapel built in the aftermath of World War II, it is also necessary to understand Le Corbusier's earlier experiences in these two endeavours. A literature review of the writings of critics and commentators central to our understanding of Le Corbusier's development and architectural philosophy illuminates the beliefs and experiences that contributed to his design ideals. Le Corbusier's sketches are considered, from his early drawings while studying with his mentor, L'Eplattanier, between 1902 and 1912, to his individual sketchbooks, which date from 1914, and other media contemporaneous with the chapel's construction during the 1950s, to ascertain the genesis of the design aesthetic that contributed to the plastic values of architectural projects such as Ronchamp. T A B L E OF C O N T E N T S Abstract i i Table of Contents i i i List of Figures v i Acknowledgements v i i C H A P T E R I Introduction 1 1.1 Introduction 1 1.2 Statement o f Purpose 2 1.3 Definition of Terms 4 1.3.1 Art 4 1.3.2 Synthesis 5 1.3.3 Collaboration 5 1.3.4 Symbiosis 5 1.3.5 Other Terminology 6 1.4 Methodology 7 1.4.1 Statement of Methodology 7 1.4.2 Limitations of the Research 8 C H A P T E R II Literature Review 10 2.1 Related Research 10 2.1.1 Review of Selected Writings and Their Relevance to the Research Question 12 2.1.1.1 Function of Art in Architecture 13 2.1.1.2 Function of Art in Le Corbusier's Architecture 17 2.1.1.3 Other Writings 22 2.2 Implications of the Selected Writings for Proposed Study 24 C H A P T E R III Sources and Viewpoints 25 3.1 Introduction 25 3.2 Sketchbooks 25 3.2.1 Sketchbooks 25 3.2.2 Forms from Nature 27 3.2.3 The Outline of the Modulor 29 3.2.4 Folkloric Influences 30 3.2.5 The Symbology of the Hand 31 3.3 Purism 33 3.3.1 History/Inception of Purism 33 3.3.2 Explanation of Concepts Behind Purism 34 3.3.3 How Concepts of Purism are Manifested in Le Corbusier's 36 Paintings and Architecture 3.3.4 Significance of Purism to the Symbiosis of Art and Architecture 39 3.4 Writings and Other Works 40 3.4.1 Writings by Le Corbusier 40 3.4.2 Other Works by Le Corbusier 50 3.4.3 Conclusion About Le Corbusier's Attitudes Toward Art in Architectural Production 51 3.5 Contemporary Debates - C I A M , Other 54 3.5.1 1900 to 1930s 54 3.5.2 Post 1930 58 C H A P T E R I V Looking at Ronchamp: A Case Study 63 4.1 Introduction to the Case Study 63 4.2 Evidence o f Intent at Ronchamp 63 4.2.1 The Architectural Programme 63 4.2.1.1 Requirements of the Commission 64 4.2.1.2 Role of the Roman Catholic Church and its Adherents 66 4.2.1.3 Purpose of Le Corbusier's Design Programme 68 4.3 Theories About Ronchamp 74 4.3.1 Criticisms About Ronchamp 75 4.3.2 Importance of the Design to Ideas About the Symbiosis 81 of Art and Architecture 4.4 Relevance of the Case Study to the Research Question 85 C H A P T E R V Conclusion 86 Bibliography 89 Figures 96 F I G U R E S Figure 1: Pilgrimage chapel, west wall 96 Figure 2: Madonna, west wall 97 Figure 3: Pilgrimage chapel, west wall 98 Figure 4: Second-storey exit, north wall 99 Figure 5: Madonna, west wall 100 Figure 6: North entrance 101 Figure 7: Second-storey exit, north wall 102 Figure 8: Aperture, south wall 103 Figure 9: Aperture, south wall 104 Figure 10: South entrance mural (detail) 105 Figure 11: Apertures, south wall 106 Figure 12: Apertures, south wall 107 Figure 13: Roofscape, south wall 108 Figure 14: Roofscape, south wall 109 Figure 15: Roofscape, south wall 110 Figure 16: Roofscape, south wall 111 A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S I am grateful to my thesis advisor, Dr. Sherry M c K a y , for her wise counsel and to Dr. Jerzy Wojtowicz, Director of the Master of Advanced Studies in Architecture programme, for his support of my research. I would also like to thank the many professors who directed me in my studies and, in particular, Sandy Hirschen and Linda Brock of the University of British Columbia School of Architecture, who encouraged me to study architecture. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their support. v i i C H A P T E R I I N T R O D U C T I O N 1.1 Introduction Le Corbusier (1887-1965) is considered by some to be the greatest architect of the 20th Century.1 Less publicly well known, although many have written about it, is his unwavering commitment to and prodigious production of art.2 Le Corbusier generated an impressive body of paintings, murals, ceramics and sketches, among other media. Examining his evolution as an artist provides significant insight into his architectural interests. Le Corbusier was not unusual for his era in being occupied with questions of the interdisciplinary relationship between art and architecture, however, he is significant for his pursuit of multiple media, including architecture, as integrally symbiotic.3 Other significant architects of the period, including those of the Bauhaus, considered art to be preparatory to, but not a necessary requirement or concommitent parallel of, architecture. It is apparent that Le Corbusier's interests — be they number or geometry, beauty or utility, engineering or painting - were not defined by specific media, as this 1959 laudatio from Cambridge University reveals: " . . .he believes with Pythagoras that number, and with Plato that geometry underlies the harmony o f the universe and the beauty of objects and with Cicero that utility is the mother of dignity. He is also akin to Leonardo, in that he observes the principles of the engineer while applying to them the eye of a painter and sculptor, and to those who are seeking the famous 'Divine Proportion' he has proposed the standard he calls 'Modulor'...."4 - This diversity of approaches is appreciable within the context of his travels, exposure to readings about art, politics and nature, and his own explorations with, first, decorative arts, then Purism and abstraction in painting. His early journeys abroad echoed the struggle between Art Nouveau and the modernist ethos of architects such as Auguste Perret and Peter Behrens. Similarly, the visionary aspects of his late career were evocative of the bold experimentation familiar to 20 t h century art and architecture. Le Corbusier's understanding of the interdependency of art and architecture, as evidenced in projects such as the Chapel of N6tre-Dame-du-Haut (hereafter referred to as Ronchamp), distinguishes his architecture from that of many other modernists. Where the ' Joanna Drew and Susan Ferieger Brades, "Preface and acknowledgements," Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century, catalogue of exhibit, Hayward Gallery, London, 5 March-7 June 1987 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain and Fondation Le Corbusier, 1987) 7. 2 His collection includes over 400 canvases, 8,000 drawings, 100 each engraved works and collages, 30 enamels, 27 tapestries and 44 sculptures. 3 Architecture is the design and construction of human-built environments and structures that respond to the physical, emotional, social, cultural and other needs of its users. 4 W i l l y Boesiger and Hans Girsberger, Le Corbusier 1910-1965 (Berlin: Birkhauser, 1999) 10. 1 Bauhaus sought to establish architecture as primary, uniting the creative arts in the service of architecture in a manner that blurred the distinction between fine and applied arts, Le Corbusier, it w i l l be argued, sought to exploit the symbiotic nature o f art and architecture, recognizing them as co-adjuncts within the design process. Rather than an architecture of unification in which the fine arts were incorporated into a single form, as the Bauhaus advocated, Le Corbusier valued art as distinct from architecture, yet correlative in its ability to explicate the architectural premise.5 1.2 Statement of Purpose The thesis w i l l examine the proposition that Le Corbusier's art making and architecture are symbiotic or interdependent. It w i l l concentrate on Le Corbusier's personal explorations in art and sculpture from the first decade of the 20 t h century to the 1950s, focusing on the Ronchamp chapel as a case study. Le Corbusier's writings and art production, as well as the interpretations of art critics and associates, w i l l be reviewed and his influencers and architectural projects considered in pursuit of an understanding of the significance of his art production in relation to his architecture. The thesis w i l l consider the importance of Ronchamp within the context of various descriptions, such as Denise Pauly's argument that the chapel is a "total work of art" and Peter Childs' suggestion that the chapel is distinguished by a "self-referential attention to form," in support of the contention that the concept of art and architecture as independent but symbiotic forms was integral to Le Corbusier's design aesthetic.6 Chapter II examines selected writings about Le Corbusier's involvement with art making and architecture, and about the function and efficacy of Ronchamp, for the purpose of determining what contemporary thinkers, including architects and critics of the period leading up to Ronchamp, considered to be the function of art in architecture and, more particularly, its purpose in Le Corbusier's architecture. The literature review concludes with an analysis of the implications of the selected writings for the proposed study. Chapter III considers source materials and viewpoints relevant to an understanding of the symbiosis of art and architecture, particularly as expressed by the architect himself. The chapter explores Le Corbusier's sketchbooks to 5 Daniele Pauly, Le Corbusier: The Chapel at Ronchamp (Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1997) 127. 2 gain an understanding of their significance to the thematic development of commissions such as Ronchamp. It traces Le Corbusier's development as an artist and architect by examining his association with art movements such as Purism, including with such French artists as Amedee Ozenfant and Fernand Leger. Le Corbusier's use of forms from nature, his conceptual views on the Modulor, his interest in folklore and the symbology of the hand motif that appears throughout his work and at Ronchamp are considered to gain an understanding of major themes in his art and architecture. The chapter also contextualizes this largely Le Corbusier-derived material by examining other points of view about what was more commonly referred to as the synthesis of art and architecture. Contempary debates, between 1900 and the 1930s and post-1930, including the C I A M (Congr 'es Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) and the Bauhaus, are discussed. The chapter further investigates Le Corbusier's attitude toward the relationship of art to architectural production. Chapter I V is a case study of Ronchamp chapel, which seeks to illustrate how the interplay o f art and architecture achieve symbiosis within Le Corbusier's work. Ronchamp will be examined as an example of the expression of Le Corbusier's beliefs about this interdependent relationship. The chapter w i l l consider the evidence about the intent of Ronchamp, including the specifications and constraints of the architectural programme — as apparent in the requirements of the commission — and the role of the Catholic Church in debates about the synthesis of art and architecture. The purpose of Le Corbusier's design programme w i l l be reviewed in the context of the importance of the design to ideas about the synthesis of art and architecture. The conclusion, Chapter V , summarizes the research and findings of the thesis in support of the proposition that the appropriation o f art to Ronchamp is the consequence of Le Corbusier's understanding of its relationship to architecture. The conclusion reveals the continuity and divergence in Le Corbusier's writings as they relate through time and to,the architectural programme at Ronchamp. The context for the chapel is compared to Le Corbusier's key writings, Towards a New Architecture, L'Esprit Nouveau and other relevant works. 6 "Art had to be about art before it could be about the world: either form before content, or form as content." Peter Childs, Modernism: the New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2000) 111. 3 1.3 Definition of Terms In order to comprehend the body of work, it is necessary to define various terms and their meaning within the context of this thesis. 1.3.1. A r t The use of the term modernism refers to an ideology that underlies modern art, architecture and design: a manner of aesthetic value that favors the present day in reaction to past idioms, such as academic or classical art, and that engages in a critical examination of inauthentic ("the idealized, the sentimental, the euphemistic in our culture") modalities.7 Modern art, which refers to painting and sculpture, is generally considered to have emerged in the mid- nineteenth century as a consequence of the availability of new materials and techniques. The Modern movement is understood as a "succession of avant-garde (Western) styles in art and architecture."8 John A . Walker's description of modernism as ".. .art which takes itself as subject matter, emphasis on medium, process, and technique, 'honest' use of materials, foregrounding of devices" w i l l be adopted for the purposes of this thesis.9 The distinction w i l l be made between fine art, which comprises painting, sculpture, printmaking and architecture and is defined as art that functions to create aesthetic expression, and applied art, which is art used in the design or decoration of an object that remains subservient to the object's function.1 0 Le Corbusier traversed a spectrum of fine art movements from Art Nouveau to modernism, ultimately rejecting the application of art to architecture in any manner that might be construed as dishonest by virtue of being merely decorative. 7 Charles Harrison, "Modernism," Critical Terms for Art History, eds. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Schiff, 2 n d ed. (Chicago and London: The University o f Chicago Press, 2003) 201. 8 Edward Lucie-Smith, The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1984) 122. 9 John A . Walker, Glossary of Art. Architecture and Design Since 1945: Terms and Labels Describing Styles and Groups Derived From the Vocabulary of Artists and Critics (London: Clive Bingley Ltd, 1977) 197. 1 0 Ralph Mayer, A Dictionary o f Art Terms and Techniques (New York: Thomas Y . Crowell Company, 1975) 145, 17. 4 1.3.2 Synthesis Synthesis refers to a combining of parts into a whole." In the context of this discussion of art and architecture, when used with reference to Le Corbusier, synthesis means to integrate fine art (painting, sculpture, ceramics, tapestries), other media, such as electronic music, and architecture for the purpose of balancing humankind's emotional or spiritual needs with its cerebral or functional needs. This distinction is sympathetic to the aims of C I A M , of which Le Corbusier was a leading figure, and by which synthesis is taken to mean to achieve a "reintegration" or alliance of the plastic arts (architecture, painting, sculpture) for the purpose of ensuring that, through this alliance, architectural expression satisfies society's emotional needs in a manner that is " i n tune with" the spirit of the age.1 2 1.3.3 Collaboration Collaboration is distinguished from synthesis and symbiosis as the process of two or more artists or architects working together for the purpose of expression and creation.1 3 While the term is relatively insignificant to the thesis, other than in the context of Le Corbusier's collaboration with Ozenfant and Leger during his Purist period, it is important to establish its parameters, as opposed to other seemingly correspondent terms. 1.3.4 Symbiosis Symbiosis means to be interdependent and to derive benefit from a mutual relationship. For the purpose of this thesis, the form of symbiosis known as "mutualism" w i l l be assumed. Therefore, to suggest that art and architecture are symbiotic is to suggest that they derive meaning from their mutual association and that architecture is in itself art, just as art contributes to the overall aesthetic value of architecture. It w i l l be argued that Le Corbusier practiced an architecture that assumed that the fine arts, and more particularly painting, sculpture, murals and tapestries, were symbiotic. This thesis w i l l contend that Le Corbusier's architecture transgressed synthesis, with the consequence that certain of his architectural pieces became interdependent upon painting, sculpture and/or other fine arts for their realization, acquiring characteristics of fine art that had the effect that the architecture would not have been possible ' 1 F . G . and H . W . Fowler, eds., Pocket Oxford Dictionary, revised 8 t h ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 925. 1 2 Sigfried Giedion, "Our Attitude Towards Problems of Aesthetics," ed. S. A . Giedion, A Decade of New Architecture (Zurich: Editions Girsberger, 1951) 35. 1 3 Fowler 160. 5 without the art co-existing in the service of the architecture. This is distinct from a synthesis of the arts, in which the art is part o f the whole (as in part of the total effect by virtue of being applied to or included in the architecture) but does not, in itself, become a necessary constituent in order for the architecture to succeed. 1.3.5 Other Terminology Other terms specific to this thesis include anonymous production, which refers to machine-produced objects of everyday use, such as vases and bottles, and objets a reaction poetique, by which Le Corbusier references objects from nature, such as shells or bones. References to primitive art or architecture in Le Corbusier's work, and in this thesis, mean folkloric designs produced by cultures external to the European or Western tradition, as witnessed during his Journey to the East.1 4 A s defined by Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, "primitivism" in relation to Western art and, in particular, modernism, refers to: " . . .an act on the part of artists and writers seeking to celebrate features of the art and culture o f peoples deemed 'primitive' and to appropriate their supposed simplicity and authenticity to the project of transforming Western art."1 5 It is acknowledged that aspects of this interpretation are generally out of favor in modern art history, as they assume that Western art and architecture are a victory of creativity over the irrational, in contrast to other cultures in which "cultural production is related to material needs or instinctual drives."1 6 Abstraction refers to art in which the portrayal of real objects is non-primary or omitted in place of an aesthetic that comprises a formal configuration of shapes, lines and colors.1 7 While Le Corbusier practiced a representational style of art during his Purist period, elements of abstraction are present in his paintings and he is generally considered to be among those architects who were receptive to abstract art. Le Corbusier's work is abstract in that is replaces details with primary shapes and forms, as opposed to non-representational, in which images are non-recognizable. 1 4 Mayer refers to this as "the art of peoples who adhere to a traditional pattern of life, without evolving socially or artistically over the generations." Mayer 311. 1 5 Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, "Primitive," Critical Terms for Art History, eds. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, 2 n d ed. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003) 217. 1 6 Antliff and Leighton, "Primitive," 218. 1 7 Mayer 1. 6 1.4 Methodology 1.4.1. Statement of Methodology Although other critics have written about Le Corbusier's interest in the synthesis of art and architecture, including its manifestation at Ronchamp (Daniele Pauly, Stanislaus von Moos, Christopher Green, Stephen Gardiner), this thesis w i l l be distinguished by the assumption that the co-relationship between art and architecture in Le Corbusier's work is symbiotic in nature. The thesis posits that in order for Le Corbusier to reach beyond functionalism in his architecture, it was necessary for the architect's work to achieve a symbiotic state with art. Questions considered in the course of the research were as follows: • Can it be shown that Le Corbusier's art making and ideas about fine and decorative art influenced his architecture? • What other artists, architects and critics were influential within the same period in advocating for a synthesis o f the arts and architecture? • If it is assumed that there is a co-relationship, then, using Ronchamp as a case study, in what ways are Le Corbusier's art and architecture mutually influential or symbiotic? • Why did Le Corbusier consider achieving a symbiosis between art and architecture to be necessary to his practice? • Why is an appreciation of the symbiotic nature of Le Corbusier's art and architecture important to an understanding of 20 t h century architecture? The research contributes to the general understanding of Le Corbusier's design aesthetic by examining the architect's beliefs about the symbiosis of art and architecture in general and in his work in particular. The thesis does not involve quantitative research, but rather references current scholarship about Le Corbusier's design aesthetic, within the analytical context of Le Corbusier's own writings and practices as they refer to the intention of the co-existence of art within his architecture. The study has practical application for architects with an interest in the integration of art and architecture. It w i l l also be of interest to students of art history and architectural theory. 7 The scope of the thesis is those theories, concepts and experiences that enjoined to characterize the symbiotic response within Le Corbusier's work, with emphasis on Ronchamp as an example o f this response. A s a considerable body of work already exists on Le Corbusier and on Ronchamp, and the architect himself was a prolific diarist and writer, it was possible to draw upon on these sources as research materials and as evidence to support the proposition. The thesis consists of secondary research in the form of an analysis of the works of other critics writing about Le Corbusier, his art and architecture, as well as a review of contemporary thinking about art and architecture during the early and mid-twentieth century. The thesis incorporates art and architectural historical knowledge about the influences, training and experiences that contributed to Le Corbusier's development as an artist and architect. The architect's and others' drawings related to Ronchamp and its site are given a brief, but focused, examination. These texts also enable an appreciation of the development of what have been referred to as the three stages of Le Corbusier's architectural career. Primary research consists of a tour of Ronchamp chapel by the writer to gain an appreciation o f the context and impact of the project, including the writer's photographic record of the chapel (Figures). A s well, a review of Le Corbusier's sketchbooks was undertaken to trace the development of relevant concepts and theories about art and architecture. Le Corbusier's own writings were considered in determining the factors that contributed to his understanding of the role of art within architecture. 1.4.2. Limitations of the Research The thesis concentrates on English language translations of Le Corbusier's texts and the work of other critics, artists and architects. It does not examine source material in the original French or other languages. While the thesis examines Le Corbusier's career from his early training in L a Chaux-de-Fonds to the completion of Ronchamp in 1954-55, the review of significant architectural pieces is limited to those that contribute to the thesis' premise about the symbiosis of art and architecture. As a consequence, although the thesis defense includes a review of major milestones in the architect's career as a method of providing context for the case study, major works such as V i l l a Savoye, Unite de Habitation at Marseilles and the architect's urban planning projects are only referenced where such references are relevant to the immediate topic. Similarly, the thesis does not consider, in any comprehensive manner, the influence of factors such as Le Corbusier's interest in Rationalism, Communism, social planning experiments or other historical developments during the time span of his career, unless such examination is necessary to support the 8 proposition. Hence, rather than a social historiographical approach to the subject matter, the thesis assumes a broader art historical and art theoretical context. This approach is intended to focus upon existing sources, including the architect's own descriptions, to determine whether there is evidence of an intent to express art and architecture as symbiotic within Le Corbusier's work. Further, while investigations of a synthesis of art and architecture in Le Corbusier's work are existent, this thesis brings together aspects of the architect's total body of art production in support of the premise that his investigations transgress synthesis and approximate symbiosis. This distinction is perhaps most evident in contrasting the Phillips Pavilion (1958), in which ideas of art and architecture are integrated, through the use of sound, images, design and color, but function autonomously, with Ronchamp chapel, in which the art and architecture are interdependent, functioning in a mutually subordinate relationship. It establishes a basis for further explorations into the significance of Le Corbusier's art making to his architectural aesthetic. 9 C H A P T E R II L I T E R A T U R E R E V I E W 2.1 Related Research The literature review w i l l examine selected writings about the function of art within architecture, and more particularly in Le Corbusier's architecture, in support of the proposition that art and architecture are mutually interdependent. Other literature relevant to art and architectural history w i l l be considered where they contribute to the overall arguments presented in the thesis. Issues relevant to the proposition include the common understanding among critics of the meaning and purpose of a synthesis of art and architecture; other explanations of the impetus for the development of Le Corbusier's design programme at Ronchamp that challenge the contention the chapel epitomizes the symbosis of art and architecture; and theories about Le Corbusier's pursuit of a formal language of architecture that suggest that Ronchamp was the outcome of the architect's research interests, rather than an innovation in the integration of art and architecture. In order to establish the parameters of the literature review, it is important to identify those documents that w i l l not figure significantly or at all in the review and the rationale for omitting them. Since the literature review is limited to selected writings that are specifically relevant to the research question, it w i l l include those major critics who contribute to the component issues of the symbiosis of art and architecture or contribute in some other contextual manner to the understanding of the hypothesis. Documents that contribute to the general appreciation of the design epoch, such as those on Cubism by the authors Bois (1997), Childs (2000), Fry (1966), Metzinger (1966), Picasso (1966), Poggi (1992), and readings on 19t h century thought on the synthesis of art and architecture, including those by Belcher (1887), Dougherty (1982), Giovanni (1982), Powys (1937), Rosenberg (1963), Sonstroem (1982) and V a n Brunt (1893), are peripheral to the hypothesis and, as such, function as background reading, but do not necessarily contribute substantively to the premise of the thesis. Publications of a general nature, such as Janson and Janson (2004) and Norberg-Schulz (1975), and articles on specific topics, such as Purdy (1977), Tafuri (1976), Turner (2000) and Walden (1970), have been consulted 10 primarily for the purposes of gaining a broad understanding of the context of 20' century art and architecture, with the consequence that they do not figure in the thesis in any substantive manner. A number of art dictionaries have also been reviewed with similar intent and w i l l not be detailed in this literature review. A s well, collections of Le Corbusier's thoughts, such as by Guiton (1981), that do not contain critical analysis have been utilized as primary source material, but excluded from the literature review as their discussion would be irrelevant to the intent. Some more specific documents have been consulted for the purposes of providing a social historiological perspective to the thesis. While this scholarship - including Anson (1948), Barrie (1996), Dahinden (1967), Jackson (1955) and Sovik (1973) - does not contribute particularly substantively to the thesis, it does inform the appreciation of various aspects of the social environment in which Ronchamp was positioned. While pertinent documents related to Purism are reviewed in this section, scholarship related to Le Corbusier's associates, Fernand Leger and Amedee Ozenfant, although referenced at length in the bibliography but less so in the thesis, is not included, as it is relevant only for the purposes of illuminating Le Corbusier's thought in relationship to the Purist movement. For this reason, these documents, which include Buck (1982), De Francia (1969, 1983), Golding (1970), Herbert (1997), K u h (1953), Richards (2003), Verdet (1970), as well as Leger's and Ozenfant's own writings, are not considered in the literature review. However, relevant criticism on documents, such as those by Brooks (1997), Turner (1977) and Sekler (1977), that detail Le Corbusier's training and early career is incorporated as appropriate. Scholarship that contributes to an appreciation of Le Corbusier's design aesthetic, but is less generally related to the hypothesis, such as that of Wittkower (1975); publications that contain limited primary or secondary research, including Darling (2000) and Pawley (1970); or publications that focus almost exclusively on the physical form, such as Baker (1994) and Boesiger and Girsberger (1999), are omitted as redundant for the purposes of the literature review. 11 2.1.1 Review of Selected Writings and Their Relevance to the Research Question Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was born in 1887 in the Swiss watchmaking town of L a Chaux-de-Fonds. He assumed the name Le Corbusier in 1923 to distinguish his work as an architect from his work as a painter, for which he continued to use Jeanneret. Le Corbusier began his career as an apprentice watchcase engraver, graduating to the local industrial art school at the age of twelve. He was simultaneously enrolled in evening courses at the Ecole d'Art, where he transferred to the full-time, four-year program in 1902. Though not yet 13, Le Corbusier was advised by his drawing teacher, Charles L'Eplattanier, to study architecture, sculpture and mural painting.1 8 Le Corbusier switched to architecture in his fourth year as a consequence of his inability to continue in engraving because o f his ailing eyesight. L'Eplattanier was influential in Le Corbusier's choice of architecture - it was he who initiated the Cours Superieur d'Art et decoration at the Ecole d'Art in October 1905, which Le Corbusier attended. Le Corbusier obtained his first architectural commission, the V i l l a Fallet, in November 1905, while enrolled in the Cours Superieur. He also undertook the design of a music room at the V i l l a Matthey-Doret (1905-6) and, in 1906, with his fellow students, redesigned and built the interior of the Protestant Chapelle Independante. While it would be possible to dwell at length on Le Corbusier's pre-Ronchamp career, it is sufficient for this thesis to note those events that are significant to Le Corbusier's development as an artist and an architect. They include his various travels between 1908 and 1911, during which he witnessed the vernacular architecture of the Mediterranean and the splendor of the Acropolis; brief apprenticeships with leading modernist architects August Perret (1908) and Peter Behrens (1911), during which time he became familiar with the use of reinforced concrete in construction; and his 1917 parting with L'Eplattanier, his initial teacher and mentor, to pursue an architectural career in Paris. Le Corbusier's increasing obsession with painting is apparent by his involvement, with Ozenfant from 1918 through 1925 and with Leger between 1920 and 1925, in Purism, possibly inspired by the fact Le Corbusier had few commissions between 1917 and 1923; the most notable of these being a workers' housing project at Troyes in 1919 and the Maison Citrohan (1921). Le Corbusier's involvement with regional syndicalism during the 1920s is important to understanding his aim of achieving an ideal society through his architecture and his belief in a bureaucratic, business, scientific and cultural elite that would, "through beneficient acts," fulfill his dream of cities of skyscrapers. This theme is not pursued in this thesis, as it is extraneous to the argument. The volume of Le 1 8 In Le Corbusier, we find traces o f L'Eplattanier. L'Eplattanier had studied painting, sculpture and architecture at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs and Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. A s Le Corbusier was to do, L'Eplattanier travelled broadly after leaving school. As Le Corbusier's almost exclusive teacher of decorative design and ornamental composition, L'Eplattanier shaped his student largely in his own image. 12 Corbusier's architectural work between his Purist buildings of the 1920s and pre-Ronchamp is presented throughout the thesis, as it is pertinent to the topic. A s Le Corbusier's break with Purism in the late 1920s, urban planning experiments during the 1930s and 1940s and resolution of the relationship of man to nature during the 1930s as a consequence of his pursuit of the objets d reaction poetique all contributed to the design aesthetic he evolved with Ronchamp, they are referenced in the body of this thesis. The literature review considers evidence presented by other scholars and critics important to an understanding of Ronchamp within the context of two major themes: the function of art in architecture and the function o f art in Le Corbusier's architecture. Other writings of significance are discussed where they contribute to the hypothesis. The literature review is deliberately limited to those issues involved in the examination of symbiosis in Le Corbusier's art and architecture and is not intended to cover the broad range of interests Le Corbusier pursued prior to his involvement with Ronchamp, the case study that is the subject of this study. 2.1.1.1 Function of Art in Architecture The dilemma o f modernist architecture is what constitutes art, which, then, determines how art functions within the context of architecture. Central among critics who wrestled with this definition is architecture professor Joseph Hudnut, who, writing from a humanist perspective in his 1945 treatise, "The Post-Modern House," argues that space, texture, structure and light are the eloquent elements of a new art, in contrast to the stiff formalism of architectural styles that merely punched holes in walls to emit light. At a preliminary glance, Hudnut agrees with Le Corbusier, in that the latter was also concerned with dematerialization as a necessary element of the transparency of the window wall or "walls of light." 1 9 However, Hudnut considers painting and sculpture to be "harmonious accessories," while deriding the conformity made possible through industrial processes of standardization - the escape from the control of art arising from the inculcation of the individual to mass culture.2 0 While Hudnut was writing about domestic architecture, his point of view that technique has insufficient utility as an expressive element and that progress is not to art as art is to emotion has significance for Ronchamp because it encapsulates the concept that the art is in the poesis, not the technique. This is contradictory to the premise of this thesis, which argues that art and architecture, as 1 9 A s cited in Beatriz Colomina, "Where Are We?" Architecture and Cubism, eds. Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy (Cambridge: The M I T Press, 1997) 157. 2 0 Joseph Hudnut, "The Post-Modern House," Architecture Culture 1943-1968. ed. Joan Ockman (New York: R i z z o l i International Publications, 1993) 76. 13 evidenced in Ronchamp, are mutually influential, however, Hudnut does capture the disillusionment Le Corbusier is known to have experienced, post-Purism, with the beneficience of the machine culture as an arbiter of architecture. Christopher Green, in a variety of works, including "The objet a reaction poetique, the figure and eroticism in painting" (1987), notes the architect's tendency to group objects in a sculptural way in paintings such as L a Cheminee (1918), which supports the contention that Le Corbusier transferred his ability to think plastically to his architecture. Green also notes that, while the architect shared an interest with Leger in objets a reaction poetique, Le Corbusier ascribed a deeper meaning to their significance in the individual's response to the "merest natural fragment."21 Green believes the groundwork for the synthesis of the arts was laid between 1925 and 1939, with Le Corbusier's painting exhibitions (Boston, London, Paris and Lyons) and pieces such as Unite d'Habitation, Marseilles, as well as the subsequent Ronchamp and Chandigarh commissions, which represented the exploration of a new relationship between himself and nature and his art and design work. 2 2 Further, Green presupposes Le Corbusier's secretive pursuit of his painting, which he was able to separate from the commercialism of his architectural career, allowed him to explore his interior responses to nature. Although this viewpoint is engaging and the earlier date corresponds with Le Corbusier's first Purist commissions, it seems apparent that the architect was already engaged in this endeavor as early as his first Swiss villas. Green agrees that Ronchamp is analogous to sculpture and comments, in "The architect as artist" (1987), that the handling of space was pivotal to his appreciation of architecture as art.2 3 Green further suggests that art was Le Corbusier's point of contact between "the sublime chaos of nature and the structure of human concepts, between sensation and idea," or as Green expresses it, the divergence between "the free manipulation of form and the rational analysis of function and structure."24 Green differs from this writer in ascribing the concept of synthesis to Le Corbusier's work, while this paper w i l l argue for a symbiotic interpretation of projects such as Ronchamp. 2 1 Christopher Green, "The objet a reaction poetique, the figure and eroticism in painting," Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century, exhibition catalogue, eds. Michael Raeburn and Victoria Wilson (London: Arts Council of Great Britain and authors, 1987) 126. 2 2 Green, "The objet" 117. 2 3 Christopher Green, "The architect as artist," Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century. Eds. Michael Raeburn and Victoria Wilson, exhibition catalogue (London: Arts Council of Great Britain and authors, 1987) 110. 2 4 Green, "The architect as artist" 111. 14 Sigfried Giedion, commenting on the 1947 Q A M Bridgewater questionnaire on "The Impact of Contemporary Conditions Upon Architectural Expression" ("Our Attitude Towards Problems of Aesthetics," 1947), summarizes the dilemma of art's function within architecture by referencing sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who advocates for collaboration between architects and sculptors. While Giedion's remarks are made within the context of presenting the questionnaire to C I A M ' s membership, they warrant consideration since they represent Giedion's beliefs about the efficacy of painting and sculpture in invigorating architecture, such as when he comments on the inadvisability o f divorcing architecture from urban planning and its sister arts.25 This commentary is consistent with Le Corbusier's own thinking during the 1940s. What is interesting about this discourse is Giedion's discomfort with rationalism, quite unlike Le Corbusier's references, during his Purist period, to the primacy of the machine object in art and architecture. Giedion sees the demise of rationalism as the turning point in the reclamation of aesthetics as an architectural value. It is in this appreciation of the consequence of art as a function of architecture, and as an expression of the contemporary mood, that Giedion's work is relevant to this thesis, although, like Green, Giedion references a synthesis o f the arts, as opposed to their mutual interdependence, as this paper w i l l posit is present in Ronchamp. Beatriz Colomina, in "Where are We?" (1997), suggests another possibility, which is that architects are overly concerned with the inclusion of art in architecture - more particularly of Cubist art which, despite the protests of critics such as V o n Moos or Peter Collins, she suggests is so firmly associated with the domestic box that it has become part of the folklore of modern architecture history. Colomina positions her argument in the context of Cubism, suggesting that references to Cubism in architecture generally relate to Le Corbusier's work (such as the V i l l a Stein-de Monzie). While she concedes that modernism and Cubism share principles manifest in their urban experience, she argues it is the client who fosters architecture as art by commissioning it thusly. She points out that many of Le Corbusier's clients, such as Raoul Le Roche, were art collectors and that, for them, modern architecture functioned "as a 'frame' for cubist and purist paintings," although Colomina does comment that L e Corbusier found the V i l l a L a Roche (1925) too picturesque and, hence, perhaps too Cubist. 2 6 Further, Colomina argues that because modernist architecture was deliberately disorienting, it was akin to the cinema - in constant motion, characterized by seemingly weightless picture (glass) walls reminiscent of a movie screen that display an array of moving images viewed from the inside out and as an exterior image captured upon the glass. Following Colomina's thought, it must 2 5 Giedion, "Our Attitude" 35. 15 be then, that by modernizing the painting's frame (the architecture), the Purists positioned architecture as the corollary of other media, including art. This would be consistent with Ronchamp i f one considers it to be what Pauly refers to as a total work of art, in contrast with architecture as independent from art. This thesis argues that because art and architecture are symbiotic at Ronchamp, they are corollaries, rather than art an accessory to architecture. Polish Q A M member Helena Syrkus, in advocating for the adoption of Le Corbusier's Athens Charter at the seventh annual C I A M meeting, argues in the 1949 article, "Art Belongs to the People," that art must be populist, responsive to human needs and uplifting. Syrkus condemned his machine for living and the eclecticism o f academics (Gropius seems a likely target) who dismiss the spirit of the past. Thus, she chastised C I A M for making a "fetish" of the raw bones of construction, rather than dressing it in "fine muscles and a lovely skin." 2 7 Her comments are prescient in that they predate Le Corbusier's organic period, although it is well accepted that Le Corbusier's comment about a machine for living were misinterpreted. Ronchamp is consistent with this new aesthetic, in that the interdependence of the art and architecture achieve a populist appeal that seemingly responds to the spiritual aspirations of the chapel's adherents. Bruno Reichlin's "Jeanneret-Le Corbusier, Painter-Architect" (1997) posits that Le Corbusier's Purist architecture was characterized by a multiplicity of readings engendered by the shared outlines familiar to his paintings of the same period. Reichlin's treatise is useful to an appreciation of Purism, in that he addresses the manner in which Le Corbusier combines vertical and frontal space to achieve perspectival illusions that are disruptive of the reassuring "spatial constructs" familiar to representational art, which Le Corbusier criticized as providing merely "an accidential view of objects."2 8 He suggests Le Corbusier used similarly antiperspectival devices, such a horizontal strips of windows, in his architecture to fracture the centrality of the space. This has meaning for Ronchamp, since Le Corbusier made similar use of ambiguous space (spatial interference) to establish the structure's non-linearity, such as in the use of the concave south wall to establish a collection receptacle for pilgrims on the exterior and to establish a light tapestry on the interior. Further, Reichlin argues it is the apprehension of the whole, the plan libre, 2 6 C o l o m i n a 155, 159. 2 7 Helena Syrkus, "Art Belongs to the People," Architecture Culture: 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: R i z z o l i International Publications, 1993) 121. 2 8 Bruno Reichlin, "Jeanneret-Le Corbusier, Painter-Architect," Architecture and Cubism, eds. Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy (Cambridge: The M I T Press, 1997) 204. that is necessary to comprehend Le Corbusier's architecture.29 This supports the thesis' central argument that Ronchamp must be understood in terms of a symbiotic relationship between art and architecture. 2.1.1.2 Function of Art in Le Corbusier's Architecture Those critics who comment about the function of art in Le Corbusier's architecture display a diverse array of opinions about the motivations for Ronchamp, however, they generally coalesce around the belief that the chapel represents a synthesis of art with architecture. Remarking, in "Mannerism and modern architecture" (1978), on Le Corbusier's rationalist leanings, C o l i n Rowe suggests that Le Corbusier constructed mathematics and geometry as a counterpoint to the Beaux Arts and the theory of the 1900s, but that his ambiguity is evident in his description of the eternal values of architecture based on Platonic principles, contrasted to the significance of the architect's intervention through "the masterly, correct, and magnificent play o f masses brought together in light." 3 0 His point that Le Corbusier is incapable of delineating a reaction to sensation is well taken, as this deficiency contributes to the viewer's sense o f ambiguity surrounding the purpose o f and response to buildings such as Ronchamp. Daniele Pauly, writing in "The Chapel of Ronchamp as an Example of Le Corbusier's Creative Process" (1987) and Carlo Cresti, author of Le Corbusier (1969), concur that Ronchamp is the outcome of Le Corbusier's research, while Cresti argues that even Le Corbusier's Purist architecture possessed "plastic-formal 'turbulences'."3 1 Cresti intimates that analyses that suggest Ronchamp's plasticism is a destructive manifestation of mannered formalism, an argument perhaps directed at Stirling, are flawed because they neglect the possibility that the architecture may be a resolution of the quest for "interconnecting and modulated relationships" among the components of his vocabulary.3 2 This text supports the thesis that the elements of Ronchamp are arranged in the particular manner they are because of their symbiotic function. 2 9 Reichlin, "Jeanneret" 210. 3 0 Le Corbusier as cited in C o l i n Rowe, "Mannerism and modern architecture," The Rationalists: Theory and Design in the Modern Movement, ed. Dennis Sharp (London: Architectural Press, 1978) 183. 3 1 Carlo Cresti, Le Corbusier (London: The Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited, 1970) 39. 3 2 Cresti 39. 17 Pauly's contribution to the research on Ronchamp is to establish the chapel as a temple for the synthesis of the arts - the outcome o f Le Corbusier's research into fundamental concerns about the plastic arts and the "logical conclusion" to his previous forms, consistent with other organic architecture of the 1950s. This latter argument is weakened by the lack of significant discussion of comparative pieces, although she infers that his 1920s still-life paintings were the stimulus for his interest in organic forms. Although implied, because she has not made specific reference to the concept, it is not clear whether Pauly's references to Ronchamp as a total work of art are consistent with the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, which can be traced to the German Romantics and the Wiener Werkstatte (Vienna Workshops) of Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) and Koloman Moser (1868-1918) and which posited that all of the arts could be unified in the design to embrace every aspect of the building or environment. Regardless of whether that is the case, Pauly's argument about the chapel representing Le Corbusier's effort to achieve a synthesis o f the arts, while valid within its own context, is distinct from this thesis' contention that the structure is symbiotic. Irrespective of that distinction, the writer of this paper supports her contention that Ronchamp represents the translation of poetic elements into the "architectural oeuvre."3 3 Further, Pauly's suggestion that Ronchamp's unstructured forms represent the irrationality of the religious and spiritual realms seems plausible. Like Cresti, Pauly considers Ronchamp to be multi-valenced, borrowing from the architect's store of references, personal memories and the language of technology, such as airplane wings and dams. Although her arguments support the argument developed in this thesis that the design is essentially intuitive, she notes that Le Corbusier researched the site, its importance as a place of pilgrimage, the significance of the Holy V i r g i n to the structure, Catholic ritual and religious art before formulating the final plan. Her proposition, developed through a reading of Le Corbusier's writings, that the architect internalized visual imagery witnessed during his personal and business travels, transcribing those images onto his art and architecture, as in the impressions of diffused/restrained light he brought to the design from his 1931 trip to the Algerian desert, is consistent with the themes presented in this thesis.3 4 Pauly also draws allusions between Ronchamp and his sculptural pieces, such as Ozon, while comparing the blocks of color in the south windows to Mondrian-like mark making. While Pauly is more sympathetic to the poetic aspects o f Ronchamp than other writers, her suppositions are well supported by references to primary source materials and, as such, are accepted as generally valid within the context of architectural scholarship. This thesis 3 3 Pauly, Le Corbusier 127. 3 4 Daniele Pauly, "The Chapel of Ronchamp as an Example of Le Corbusier's Creative Process," L e Corbusier. ed. H . Allen Brooks, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) 133. 18 extends her insights by suggesting that Ronchamp is representative of the symbiotic nature of Le Corbusier's late architecture - that the art is integral to the architecture and that the piece functions as a consequence of the interdependence of the art and architecture, rather than the art functioning as a constituent of the whole. Robert Jordan (Le Corbusier. 1972) presents a different explanation for Ronchamp, which is that it is a timeless architecture that, rather than being based on folkloric references, represents the combination of various modern techniques. Jordan remarks on the "almost primaeval" nature of the structure and considers it primarily peasant architecture by virtue of its isolation. Jordan compares Ronchamp to a sculpture, as do, among others, Pauly and Frampton, but notes that the structure distills all of the religions and architectures (referencing particularly the Greek, Roman and Byzantine) with which Le Corbusier was familiar. Jordan's observations are consistent with those o f Pauly and those other commentators who are influenced by the poetic quality of the building, however, he dismisses the suggestion that Ronchamp's design was solely influenced by folkloric architecture. This observation is useful in that it broadens the scope of the argument, consistent with the contention in this thesis that while the folkloric influence is apparent, the design is primarily a sculpted form. Stanislaus von M o o s ' commentary is probably the most closely aligned with the argument put forward in this thesis. Like the writer, he is impressed by the multifarious influences that were available to inform Ronchamp. V o n Moos argues that, as is the case on those occasions in which Le Corbusier's forms seem inappropriate to the task, the forms were developed fairly independently of the purpose that they serve.3 5 It is conceivable that his approach to the artistry of the endeavor overrode the functionalist programme - the Pessac workers' houses come to mind, developed in the spirit of social reform but inappropriate to the pragmatic needs of the occupants. While von Moos also traces the form to Le Corbusier's 1931 African travels, he suggests that since the architect begins from a stance free of prejudices about religious architecture - this being his first realized religious commission - or about the shared function requiring a design similar to other chapels, Ronchamp can be positioned with Le Corbusier's other secular work. V o n Moos argues that, as there is no language of forms consistent with established social functions, cultural meanings or "institutionalized traditions," this accounts for the uniqueness of the form. 3 6 He suggests Le Corbusier rejected the clean lines of the international style for the violent masses of raw concrete, which, as in Unite d'Habitation, Marseilles, assumed the proportions of a monumental sculpture. V o n Moos refers to Le Corbusier's 3 5 Stanislaus von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis (Cambridge: M I T , 1980) 101. 19 1948 article, "Unity," in which he states his intention to achieve consonance among "the various manifestations of creativity" while enabling architecture, painting and sculpture to remain autonomous, as evidence Le Corbusier was striving for a synthesis o f the arts.3 7 Further, von Moos suggests that painting mediated between Le Corbusier's public and private lives, serving as a integral accompanient to the exploration of the subconscious and that his abandonment of Purist principles in the 1930s led to the cognition that art was an "intuitive dialogue" with nature.38 V o n M o o s ' arguments seem the most considered of those speculations about Le Corbusier's motivations with Ronchamp and about the mediation of his painting and sculpture with his architecture. While the current thesis concurs with von M o o s ' viewpoint, it furthers the discourse by suggesting that Ronchamp extends the concept of consonance to one in which the art and architecture are essentially integral, preferencing the concept of symbiosis to von M o o s ' synthesis. The other critic who w i l l be examined in this literature review is Stephen Gardiner (Le Corbusier. 1974), although the writer is of the opinion that this document reflects inadequate scholarship due to the paucity of the references. Gardiner argues that Le Corbusier was an enigma in that while he thought in visual images, like a painter or sculptor, because he was simultaneously an engineer (sic) and a painter, he was able to re-invent architecture. It is his opinion that L e Corbusier's buildings are, consequently, autobiographical.3 9 Gardiner argues that Le Corbusier's rediscovery of Classical principles and an intense curiousity about "the inexhaustible domain of Nature" inspired Le Corbusier to engage in the pursuit of an indigenous architecture specific to place and location. 4 0 Ronchamp is consistent with this theme by virtue o f responding to the constraints and possibilities of the sense of place - it is influenced by regional architecture and building materials, as seen in the use of water spouts similar to those of Venasque's church, while embracing forms from nature for its context.4 1 Forms from nature, such as tree trunks to enclose the view, are adapted as a source of architectural innovation, enabling the architecture to assume any shape that meets its aesthetic and pragmatic objectives, much as V i l l a Savoye exposes Le Corbusier's desire for fresh air and sunlight by integrating its exterior passages (sun terrace, entrance) with the 3 6 V o n Moos 104. 3 7 V o n Moos 280. 3 8 V o n Moos 284. 39 Stephen Gardiner, Le Corbusier (London: W m Collins & Sons Co Ltd, 1974) 24. 4 0 Gardiner 26. 4 1 Gardiner 25. 20 interior (ribbon windows that encompass the idyllic view). 4 2 Thus, he suggests, Ronchamp's walls intimate the "softness, roundness and changing contours of nature."4 3 Gardiner concludes that the sexualized forms of female nude bathers find their correspondence in Le Corbusier's architecture and it would seem that Le Corbusier's own references to male and female architecture support this proposition.4 4 Gardiner argues that Le Corbusier was constrained by the cube and the machine until he was able to comprehend their meaning, which enabled him to be freed of their influence.4 5 He also suggests, like Frampton, that Le Corbusier's late period architecture, such as Ronchamp, is influenced by the folk architecture - the "irregular jumble" of Greek village life - and by the complexity of Classical Greek design that belies the "simplicity of the natural frame."4 6 The concept of nature as frame is endemic in his suggestion that Le Corbusier personified the architecture by enabling it to be commanded by the landscape that, because it was harmonious with the design, "enlarged" its magnificence. This is a more complete explanation of the concept of the acoustical landscape than revealed in some other literature. Although the thesis won't particularly explore the concept of personification, it is a plausible contention that Le Corbusier assigned human-like attributes to the landscape and architecture, a suggestion supported by Pauly when she remarks about the chapel's towers as listening ears. A brief mention w i l l be made of Charles Jencks' Le Corbusier and the Tragic V i e w of Architecture (1975), which suggests that Le Corbusier's post-WWII aesthetic considered architecture to be sculpture in plastic means.4 7 Jencks refers to the architect's Oeuvre complete (1946-52), in which Le Corbusier comments on his desire to use polychromy and the contrast between crudity and finesse to stimulate reaction, as evidence of his intent. Jencks references the "violently sculptural" qualities of Unite d'Habitation, Marseilles, as Le Corbusier's departure from the idealistic, flattened plane of the International style. In a similar manner, Jencks suggests Ronchamp represents Le Corbusier's realization of ineffable space. However, he is critical about what he refers to as Le Corbusier's fiction regarding ineffable space and visual acoustics. The writer of this paper agrees with Jencks that, in the case of Ronchamp, Le Corbusier may have developed the form, then worked out the inter-relationships that corresponded with the concept of ineffable space. This is consistent with Jencks' comment that Le Corbusier strove to develop 4 2 Gardiner 26-7. 4 3 Gardiner 35. 4 4 Le Corbusier describes Unite d'Habitation's (Marseilles) external pillars as: " . . . l i k e the strong curvaceous thights of a woman". A s cited in H . W . Janson and Anthony Janson, History of Art: The Western Tradition (Upper Saddle River, N . J . : Pearson Education, 2004) 910. 4 5 Gardiner 26. 4 6 Gardiner 37-8. . • . new architectural languages throughout his career, beginning with his concerns with geometric forms from nature during the period of his Swiss Villas at La-Chaux-de-Fonds to his involvement in Purism in the 1920s, his concerns with urban planning in the 1930s and 40s and his evolution of a Brutalist form at Ronchamp in the 1950s. In this context, it would seem more probable that Le Corbusier's concern with the vocabulary of architecture might lead him to evolve the form, then determine the syntax that suited the form. 2.1.1.3 Other Writings Kenneth Frampton, writing in Le Corbusier (2001), asks whether the Purist villa, which preoccupied Le Corbusier with questions of standards and universality, was an industrial product or "a hand-crafted artifact," made to resemble the "naked, polished steel" appearance of the machine product, but finished in an artisan's stucco. This dilemma is most troublesome in structures such as the V i l l a Stein de Monzie and the V i l l a Savoye and reiterates the essential compromise: the divergence between Le Corbusier's commentary and his achievements.48 Further, while Frampton agrees that the Ronchamp's form is related to the whitewashed tradition of Mediterranean vernacular architecture, he argues that the chapel, and the Pavilion des Temps Nouveaux, are the transformation of the nomadic tent and the Hebrew Temple in the Wilderness. The Temple, which represents the sacred, is translated into the "secular inverted tent" of the Pavilion, which Frampton refers to as the profane, then re-created as Ronchamp, which acts as a metaphor for the return of the tent to its sacred state.49 Thus, the design can be seen as a response to spiritual concerns or the manipulation of the spiritual within the pretext of a New Brutalist idiom, rather than a tectonic response to the objets a reaction poetique. Frampton traces the "profound change" evident in Le Corbusier's post-Purist phase of the 1920s, as evidenced by such paintings as Composition avec une poire (1929) in which he combines object-types with organic elements (objets a reaction poetique) such as driftwood and shells, to the influence of Leger. Frampton suggests Le Corbusier and Leger were equally engaged in the recording of "organic forms eroded by nature and time." 5 0 Further, he posits Charles Jencks, Le Corbusier and The Tragic V i e w of Architecture (London: Allen Lane, 1975) 137. Kenneth Frampton, Le Corbusier (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001) 77. Frampton 172. Frampton 205. 22 that Le Corbusier's post-Purist paintings served as the inspiration for a "myriad of otherwise unimaginable formal- cum-methaphorical devices" in his architecture.5 1 Frampton also considers Le Corbusier's involvement with Greek architect/musician Iannis Xenakis, who worked for Le Corbusier between 1947 and 1957, to be significant of his "growing preoccupation" with the concept of creating a total work of art, which Frampton suggests he achieved with the Philips Pavilion (1958). During the lapse between the Pavilion des Temps Nouveaux in 1937 and the Philips Pavilion, Le Corbusier underwent a tectonic transformation, evidenced by the inclusion of design devices such as the double curvature used at Ronchamp and again at the Philips Pavilion. Rather than a reference to his theories about objets a reaction poetique (Le Corbusier suggested he was inspired by a shell he found on a New York beach), Frampton sees the "complex curvature" of Ronchamp's roof as an extension of the architect's "hyperbolic space-frames" from his 1936 Liege and San Francisco exhibition pavilions. That Le Corbusier employed a common aeroplane modelling techique to create a wire model of Ronchamp suggests to Frampton an aerodynamic reference, which serves to support Pauly's comments about the roof as resembling an aeroplane w i n g . 5 2 Frampton also suggests a marine metaphor - the roof as the hull of a ship, keel positioned in the centre, this being a tectonic reference to the "ancient conjunction of church and ship." 5 3 Frampton argues that the "oscillation between the nautical and the aeronautical" is part of an intrinsic pattern in Le Corbusier's work, which shifts between the aquatic origin of all life and the ultimate transformation of this aqueous state into the aerial, a methamorphosis paralleled in the diurnal cycle of evaporation and condensation Le Corbusier witnessed during his flights over the rainforests of Latin A m e r i c a . 5 4 This interpretation of Le Corbusier's work, particularly with regard to the references to the symbolism of marine life and the aerial, which would be well served by further scrutiny to determine their efficacy, is among the more intriguing in the literature. While the thesis w i l l not particularly explore many of the concepts presented by Frampton, they bear referencing in that they broaden the appreciation of the breadth of interests that may have contributed to Ronchamp's design aesthetic. 5 1 Frampton 213. 5 2 A s cited in Frampton 172. 5 3 Frampton 173. 5 4 Frampton 174. The other writer who is central to the discussion of Ronchamp is James Stirling, whose commentary, "Ronchamp: Le Corbusier's Chapel and the Crisis of Rationalism," (1956), disdains Ronchamp as having little intellectual meaning, stimuli or analytical context, beyond its obvious visual appeal to local residents, which Stirling suggests may be more indicative of pride of place than of any achievement by Le Corbusier.5 5 While Stirling concedes Ronchamp is likely "the most plastic building" in modern architectural history, he criticizes the diverse styles that emerged in the 1940s and 50s as originating from an effort to fuse Art Nouveau and late 19t h century engineering.5 6 Stirling raises an interesting point about the paramountcy of the site in many of Le Corbusier's works, notably as seen in Ronchamp's primacy at the point of four horizons, but also noting the use of pilotis to elevate the form where the siting is insubstantial. He compares the subdued lighting to Baroque churches, where no one element dominates as a result of the diffusion of light, however, reflects that European architects sought inspiration from folk art and that this tendency, as far as Le Corbusier is concerned, may be the result of the stockpiling of his vocabulary "with plastic elements and objets trouves of considerable picturesqueness."57 Stirling is critical of whether architecture such as Ronchamp, that appears to draw on folkloric elements, contributes to the progression of the Modern movement or whether the project is simply a "mannered piece" of what he terms conscious imperfectionism.5 8 This is the most critical o f the writings on Ronchamp and possesses some privileged credibility because of Stirling's pre-eminent role in British modernist architecture. The supposition that Le Corbusier's architecture has stalemated by virtue of the use of stored imagery is weak, however, in that the visual pretext is predominant in many architects' work and Ronchamp represents a departure from Le Corbusier's design idiom of the 1920s and 30s. 2.2 Implications of the Selected Writings for Proposed Study This thesis w i l l reference the major writings discussed in the literature review as they are appropriate to the context of this paper. While many of the writings are supportive of the point of view of this paper, the thesis w i l l explore the concept that Le Corbusier's art and architecture, as seen at Ronchamp, are actually symbiotic, in that they are mutually interdependent, as opposed to the concept that his art and architecture exist in a state of synthesis, which infers a combining of singular components into a cohesive whole, as so many of the authors reviewed assert. James Stirling, "Ronchamp: Le Corbusier's Chapel and the Crisis of Rationalism (1956)," Le Corbusier in Perspective, ed. Peter Serenyi (Englewood Cliffs, N J : Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975) 66. 5 6 Stirling, "Ronchamp" 64. 5 7 Stirling, "Ronchamp" 67. 5 8 Stirling, "Ronchamp" 67. 24 C H A P T E R III S O U R C E S A N D V I E W P O I N T S 3.1 Introduction In his art making, Le Corbusier found the expression of the "pure creation of the spirit" that enabled him to innovate in his architecture.59 Le Corbusier was involved in some of the major avant-garde art movements o f the early 2 0 t h century. He participated in professional debates about the synthesis of art and architecture that, along with his own research, refined his perspective on the relationship of art to architectural production. Besides his personal sketchbooks, of which two volumes of the four-volume series w i l l be considered here, he was involved in such media as painting, sculpture and ceramics and in the founding of Purism (1918-1925), a movement that influenced both his painting and his architecture. These various pursuits contributed to Le Corbusier's understanding of the inter- relatedness, or symbiosis, of art and architecture, as opposed to the mere synthesis o f art and architecture. 3.2 Sketchbooks 3.2.1. Sketchbooks In Towards a New Architecture (1923; 1927), Le Corbusier touches upon the concept of architecture as art, as it contrasts with the practical: "The relationships between [primary shapes] have not necessarily any reference to what is practical or descriptive....By the use of raw materials and starting from conditions more or less utilitarian, you have established certain relationships which have aroused my emotions. This is Architecture."6 0 To understand this idea of architecture as a vehicle for art, and art as the creative impetus for architecture, it is necessary to examine the first two volumes of Le Corbusier's sketchbooks, compiled between 1914-1948 and between 1950-1954. 5 9 "Art is this pure creation of the spirit which shows us, at certain heights, the summit of the creation to which man is capable of attaining." Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (Oxford: The Butterworth Architecture, 1994) 221-3. 6 0 A s cited in Frampton 29. 25 Le Corbusier produced a series of sketchbooks throughout his life and from them one can trace his development as an artist and the stimulus for some of his major projects.61 The sketchbooks comprise a documentary of people, landscapes (urban and rural), structures and designed objects and forms from nature, which L e Corbusier observed during his personal travels and while employed on various architectural commissions. They include his comments on imagery and events he witnessed, the beginning outlines of the Modulor (an architectural dimensioning system which Le Corbusier developed in the 1940s and 50s), design explorations into areas that interested him, such as the symbology of the open hand, as well as sketches of human bestiary, drawings of the female form and abstracted imagery. The sketches, which in the first two sketchbooks number over 1,600, vary from pencil drawings to pen and ink sketches and some acrylic paintings. The sketchbooks are inconsistently numbered, as Le Corbusier dated many of his sketches some significant time after they were generated. Thus, they are not as reliable as would be preferred, although the publications remain significant evidence of his design interests, influences and research. The sketchbooks are widely considered to be among the most important documentary evidence of Le Corbusier's development within the Modern movement. Besides this obvious utility, they contribute to social historiography by recording the progression o f Le Corbusier's architectural and artistic interests. Francoise Franclieu comments that the late 1920s (and I might add the 1930s) were "decisive" to Le Corbusier's artistic development.62 Those concepts embodied in the sketchbooks that re-emerge in his architecture are, arguably, representative of design problems that Le Corbusier worked through in the course of resolving his ideas about what w i l l become the symbiosis of art and architecture. Four specific themes found in the sketchbooks w i l l be discussed in terms of the insight they give to Le Corbusier's practice of a symbiosis of art and architecture. The themes are forms from nature, the Modulor, folklore and the symbology of the open hand. 6 1 References to "figure" in this section pertain to drawings in Mary Patricia M a y Sekler, The Early Drawings of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) 1902-1908 (New Y o r k and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1977). Material from Le Corbusier's sketchbooks is referenced in the footnotes. 6 2 This period was distinguished by the emergence of Le Corbusier's objets a reaction poetique. Fondation Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks. V o l . 2, 1914-1918, ed. Francoise Franclieu (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981) 35. 26 3.2.2 Forms F r o m Nature One reason for proposing that Le Corbusier's sketchbooks are relevant to his architecture is that they show the progression of the architect's interest in natural forms and the organic. Specific to his grounding in John Ruskin and Owen Jones and his fascination with Taine's Voyage en Italie - Le Corbusier used his travels to explore nature as a source for fine art - the architect exhibited an intense interest in the forms o f organic objects, such as shells, roots and crystals, and in physical laws, such as erosion. He incorporated these concepts in the Pavilion de L'Esprit Nouveau (1925), the precursor for his objet a reaction poetique, as well as his sculptures of the 1940s and projects such as Ronchamp. Le Corbusier's vision of organic forms as objects to be integrated into his art and architecture, including his early post-Purism designs of 1927-28 and his carnets (notebooks) during the 1930s, inspired him to conduct exploratory studies that ranged from the simple articulation of forms to research into their organization and order for the purpose of understanding their poetic content. Further inspired by surrealism, Le Corbusier was able to integrate these organic forms with his Purist principles during the 1930s, establishing a series of graphic and pictorial works dissimilar to his earlier designs. With this appreciation, the gap between the stylistic phases in Le Corbusier's sketchbooks and the genesis of his organic architecture are not problematic - they are consistent with the architect's changing design aesthetic. The biomorphic, organic forms of his late career are presaged in his ongoing dialogues between nature and machine-made objects. The impetus for the adoption o f organic forms is present in the changes in Le Corbusier's expressive form that began to evolve around 1926, with the incorporation of objets a reaction poetique into his art and architecture. Nature figures prominently in Le Corbusier's early sketches. Although some of his community plans (the Unite d' Habitation projects or the contemporary city of three million inhabitants) might be criticized for separating humans from the exterior (when compared to other contemporaneous models, such as the garden city), Le Corbusier had an enduring appreciation of the place of nature within the human landscape. Projects such as the Unite d'Habitation at Marseilles and Ronchamp chapel, which are sited in a manner that positions the occupants within the landscape, expose the relevance of nature to his design aesthetic. Le Corbusier's earliest drawings, which predate his sketchbooks and reflect his readings of Owen Jones and John Ruskin, illustrate his experience o f the landscape around L a Chaux-de-Fonds, but also motifs copied from Ruskin's and Jones' nature studies.6 3 They are consistent 6 3 A 1903 pencil and watercolor sketch illustrates this: the enframed flowers and natural grasses bear resemblance to a chapter heading in Ruskin's Modern Painters (1860). The use of enframement itself is peculiar to late nineteenth- 27 with the teachings of his mentor L'Eplattanier, but also a childhood spent studying nature: " . . .1 have learned how the flowers were, inside and out, the form and colour of birds. I understood how a tree grows and why it keeps its balance even in the midst of a storm. The tree, friend of man, symbol of all organic creation; the trees, image of a total construction.. . . " 6 4 Thus, the evidence from his sketchbooks and other documents suggests that the biomorphic organicism of his late architecture is a response to his research into building forms, as well as this appreciation of the juxtaposition of "sun, space and greenery" within the architectural programme.65 B y imitating and copying nature, Le Corbusier subsumed nature as an art form whose integration was essential to the architectural event. ,: Subsequent sketches demonstrate an increasing abstraction and much of his earlier work is omitted. Several 1932 sketches show nature treated as isolated objects - still-lifes - for the formal exploration of volume, silhouette and form. 6 6 The influence of readings such as Henry Provensal's L'art de demain is apparent in his drawings, which progressed from complex representational studies made during the early years of his training at L a Chaux-de-Fonds, at which time he began independent studies in decorative art and showed an interest in Art Nouveau, to an economical simplicity consistent with his interest in geometric forms.6 7 This diverse portfolio is seen in Le Corbusier's shift from the ornate sgraffiti of the Jura landscape motifs, like the sapin that decorate V i l l a Fallet (1905- 7), to the sparse modernity of Purist structures like V i l l a Savoye (1931), which embrace nature through devices such as roof gardens and ribbon windows that embrace fresh air and sunlight, exposing the occupant to 'the idyllic w o r l d ' . " 6 8 Ensuing projects, such as Ronchamp chapel, reveal his interest in nature through forms such as the roof, influenced by a shell Le Corbusier retrieved from a New York beach. These approaches illustrate that Le Corbusier acquired inspiration for many of his design forms from the shapes and relationships he derived from nature. century graphics and Art Nouveau. Sekler comments that this design, which appears to be "a straightforward sketch of material from his surroundings" closely resembles the chapter heading from Part VII, " O f Cloud Beauty," in Modern Painters. Sekler also traces his use of enframement to Ruskin's The Elements of Drawing. Sekler 57-8. Ruskin suggested in The Elements o f Drawing use o f a frame "through which one could see what one could 'legitimately' take into the picture." Sekler 58. 6 4 Le Corbusier as cited in Gardiner 29-30. 6 5 " A natural form inspires a composition, which is then re-created as an artifact." Fondation Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks. V o l . 1, 25. Remarks to Columbia University students, M a y 1961. 6 6 Sketches 610 and 611, sketchbook CIO. Also 534, 558, 567-8, 573-4, sketchbook B 9 . 6 7 Paul Venable Turner, The Education of Le Corbusier (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1977) 15. 6 8 V i l l a Fallet was likely inspired by Jones' The Grammar o f Ornament, which allowed L e Corbusier to translate forms from nature into decorative surfaces for his Swiss villas. Le Corbusier's preliminary watercolors for V i l l a Fallet (1905) and the decorative panels on the villa's exterior illustrate how the architect incorporated these repeat horizontal patterns drawn from nature into his architecture. Arts Council of Great Britain 71-2. 28 3.2.3 The Outline of the M o d u l o r The earliest outlines of the Modulor found in Le Corbusier's sketchbooks are important to his conceptual ideas about art and architecture because he based many o f his designs on a regulating system similar to that used in classical architecture;69 Le Corbusier developed the Modulor, which he perfected between 1942 and 1955 and of which he made extensive use at such diverse projects as Unite d'Habitation in Marseilles, Ronchamp chapel, the monastery at the Convent of L a Tourette, and Chandigarh, as a device to resolve plastic problems.7 0 The Modulor is described as "a measuring tool based on the human body and mathematics."71 Inspired by the Golden Section, but also influenced by similar endeavors by artists such as Michelangelo and Vitruvius, as well as his own research, the Modulor is meant to serve as a guide in ensuring that architecture responds to human proportions, while achieving balance and harmony. Le Corbusier's six-foot figure of a man with an upraised arm is mathematically sectioned to enable architects to determine the human proportions necessary to order and clarify the design, indicative of the evolution o f Le Corbusier's interest in traces regulateurs and his grille desproportions of 1943 to 1944, developed under the auspices o f A S C O R A L (Assemblee de Constructeurs pour une Renovation Architecturale), and o f his familiarity with Matila Ghyka's 1931 publication, Le Nombre D ' O r . Le Corbusier frequently includes Modulor-like figures in his drawings, seemingly to establish proportion, as in his gallery and day care centre from 1915.7 2 Subsequent allusions to the Modulor are evident in sketches that contrast the dimension of volumes compared to the human body. Franclieu relates Le Corbusier's notations in a 1932 sketch of a human figure on a porch to his interest in measurements: "This sketch reveals the architect's search for vernacular or pseudovernacular architecture as a confirmation of the correctness of his dimensions and his ideas on an 'efficient height for the home'."7 3 Sketches from 1933 again show this preoccupation and refer to the dimensions 250 and 450, which are similar to those that w i l l be proposed in The Modulor. 7 4 The Modulor reappears in Le Corbusier's Rio sketchbooks, balancing a peasant's baskets with his crayfish-like arm from 1936.7 5 The idea of measurement is also evident when Le Corbusier juxtaposes a standing man with the outstretched limbs of a tree in a 6 9 Franclieu suggests sketches 588, in which Le Corbusier refers to the numbers 2.20 and 4.50, and 587 "pre-figure" the architect's efforts to relate architecture to the ideal human figure. Fondation Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks. V o l . 1, 25. 7 0 Le Corbusier, The Modulor 1 and 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980) 35. 7 1 Le Corbusier, The Modulor 1 and 2 55. 7 2 Sketches 115 and 116, sketchbook D16. 7 3 Sketch 588, notebook B 9 . Fondation L e Corbusier, Sketchbooks. V o l . 1, 25. 7 4 Sketches 670 to 671, sketchbook C10. 7 5 Sketch 718, sketchbook C12. sketch of uncertain origins. A series of 1945 drawings, completed while crossing the Atlantic on the Vernon S. Hood steamship, detail the Modulor's refinement by illustrating the progressive design process.7 7 These sketches pre-date the Modulor's public presentation in 1947, Le Corbusier's defence of it in 1948 and the first published articles about the Modulor, which appeared in 1950. Le Corbusier's Cap Martin sketches between 1951 and 1952 also reference the Modulor and the upraised Modulor arm appears in a pencil crayon sketch of his 1951 sculpture, L'Enfant est l a . 7 8 A series of drawings stimulated by a visit to his cabinet-maker at Ajaccio in 1952 further reference the Modulor, as do a series of 1953 human bestiary sketches.79 What is important about these sketches, and the many other calculations that appear throughout his sketchbooks, is that they represent the development of the Modulor as a poetic device that enabled Le Corbusier to recombine the organic with the mechanical by translating natural proportions into a mathematical formula for use in his art and architecture. They are significant to Ronchamp as its design is predicated on the mathematical proportions of the Modular, imbuing the concept of symbosis with mathematical rigor. 3.2.4 F o l k l o r i c Influences A third influence in Le Corbusier's sketchbooks is his concern for folkloric traditions. Through folklore, Le Corbusier was able to blend the premise of modern architecture with his interest in natural, organic forms and his own ideas about the spiritual. Le Corbusier argued that folklore was essential to reconciling the modern condition with the material and spiritual.8 0 Le Corbusier juxtaposed modern skyscrapers with native, child-bearing women, indolent musicians, solitary adventurers on donkey back, and peasant women bearing their wares across a forbidding desert or posed against the land and sea.8 1 B y contrasting his intrigue with folkloric design with the streamlined aesthetic of the jazz age - aircraft and steamships, the "magnificent moving structures of the modern era" - Le Corbusier was able to introduce the primitive hut into the modernist idiom. 8 2 This technique revealed his concern 7 6 Sketch 25, sketchbook D14. 7 7 Sketch 802-4, notebook D13. 7 8 Sketches 584 to 587, 590 to 595 and 598 to 600, sketchbook E22, 1951, as well as sketch 836 in sketchbook F26. The pencil crayon is sketch 1015, sketchbook H30. 7 9 Sketches 802 and 806 to 807, sketchbook F25, and sketches 1016 to 1020, sketchbook H 3 0 . . 8 0 Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier Talks with Students (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) 61. 8 1 Sketch 263, sketchbook B4; sketches 267, 269, 273, 274, 276, 275 and 282, sketchbook B 4 ; and sketches 433, 435 and 439, sketchbook B 7 , and sketch 698, sketchbook C I 1, as well as sketch 585, sketchbook B 9 . 8 2 Sketches 692 and 710, sketchbook C11, 1936. A s cited in Fondation Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks, V o l . 1,31. 30 about the shallowness - "the emptiness, uneasiness, indifference" and flirtation - of the pre-war period, compared to the simple whitewashed, hand-hewn vernacular architecture he witnessed during his travels through the Balkans and Africa and which re-emerged in the undulating beton brut surfaces of his 1950s architecture.83 Gardiner remarks on this interest in the folkloric when he compares the "accidental casualness" o f Ronchamp to the folk architecture of Greek island villages.8 4 Although Frampton argued that modern culture was fatal to the "authenticity" of vernacular cultures, projects like Ronchamp embody a primitivism, in both their form and "decoration" that bridges the vernacular and modernism.8 5 While the technique of beton brut was not endemic to the region nor was its vernacular nature sympathetic to the aims of innovation - causing Le Corbusier to suggest the use of Paris-trained technicians for its application - Ronchamp was fashioned by individual craftsman using available technology and materials indigenous to the site. Its whitewashed form acts as an "X-ray" upon its surroundings, consistent with its function as a pilgrimage chapel, much as the whitewashed peasant's hut would have dominated the rural landscape amid the verdant imagery of the Greek village. Thus, by referencing folkloric tradition, Le Corbusier was able to advance his architecture from Modernist form to a style that was sympathetic to the rural, isolated landscape and the humble (grotto-like) sanctity of a place of meditation. 3.2.5 The Symbology of the H a n d The concept of the open hand was a continuous motif in Le Corbusier's art and architecture and is, in itself, an integrative element in this discourse. The motif first appears in Le Corbusier's paintings as a disjunctive element, as in Les Lignes de la main (1930).8 6 Le Corbusier's sketches of 1932-33 frequently exhibit disproportionately oversized hands, as in Femme couchee, cordage et bateau a la porte ouverte (1933). Sekler traces the familiar motif from Chandigarh to 1945, while Le Corbusier references it in his 1948 publication, Modulor 2. and incorporates the imagery into a 1950 sketch of a medal bearing his image and sketches from 1952.8 7 The Open Hand sculpture, as it 8 3 Fondation Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks. V o l . 1, 28. 8 4 Gardiner 38. 8 5 Frampton 111. 8 6 Also see sketch 513, sketchbook B 8 , from 1932. 8 7 Sekler as cited in Sunand Prasad, "Le Corbusier in India," in Architect of the Century, eds. Michael Raeburn and Victoria Wilson, exhibition catalogue (London: Arts Council of Great Britain and authors, 1987) 297. Also, sketches 34 and 36 to 38, sketchbook D14. Fondation Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks. V o l . 2, 5. 31 appears at Chandigarh, is evident in his sketchbooks of November 1952. While various interpretations of the sculpture have been preferred (Franclieu, Prasad), Le Corbusier's notes indicate it was meant to represent peace and reconciliation: " A t the moment when the modern world gushes forward in unlimited intellectual and material riches, one has to open the hand to receive and to give." 8 8 The rotation of the Chandigarh sculpture in the wind "indicated symbologically the direction of the wind (the contingent state)."8 9 The symbol appears again in loose association with L e Corbusier's Modulor calculations, as it does in the architect's 1953 sketches for a pivoting sculpture to be executed by Savina and a series of charcoals of claw-like hands, dating to the same period, seemingly inspired by the Modular. 9 0 What can be suggested by the repetitiveness of the open hand motif is a concern with the hand as a symbol for communication, as is his corresponding use of the ear as imagery for listening.9 1 Thus, we see Le Corbusier's intuitive appreciation of art as a means of interpreting the symbolism of the architecture, as well as of the sculptural element as an architectural tangible. B y incorporating the open hand motif into his artwork for Ronchamp, Le Corbusier alluded to the context of the architecture as a means of communication between the worshipper and the divine. While these interests - forms from nature, the appearance of the open hand motif and the Modular and the influence of the folkloric - may seem disparate, they singly and severally contribute to the symbiotic discourse between art and architecture, as evidenced at Ronchamp. 8 8 Franclieu suggests the Open Hand "was born spontaneously in Paris as the expression of the return to harmony among men...." Fondation Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks. V o l . 1, 56-7. Prasad notes Le Corbusier uses hand imagery in his 1930 painting "Hand and Flint," Ferme Radieuse (1933) and a memorial to Valliant-Couturier (1938). Prasad 297. Le Corbusier as cited in Prasad 297. 8 9 Le Corbusier as cited in Prasad 297. 9 0 Sketches 863, sketchbook F26 (1952), and 894, sketchbook F27 (1952), respectively. Sketches 1000 to 1002, sketchbook G29; and sketches 1016 to 1020, sketchbook H30. Franclieu refers to these latter sketches as studies on the bull theme, for a "human bestiary." Fondation Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks, V o l . 2, 77. Sketches 724 to 726, 728, 732 to 733 and 735 to 736, sketchbook F24. 9 1 Sketch 245, sketchbook D16", 1950. 32 3.3 P urism 3.3.1 History/Inception of Purism Besides his personal sketchbooks, Le Corbusier advanced his interest in art making while articulating many o f his beliefs about architecture through his involvement in the post-Cubist art movement, Purism. Purism refers to the artwork produced by Le Corbusier and his associate, French artist Amedee Ozenfant, between 1918 and 1925, along with the work of their colleague, artist Fernand Leger, between 1920 and 1925. The movement was influenced by the Analytic Cubism of Georges Braques and Pablo Picasso, and the geometricism of De Stijl, as well as characterized by elements of French Classicism, and defined by the industrial wares of the machine aesthetic. Purism stimulated the development of an international style of architecture, which emerged in Europe between 1910 and 1920 and that valued functionalism and the fourth dimension (movement) as its precepts. Susan B a l l comments that Piet Mondrian, Theo V a n Doesburg, Ozenfant and Le Corbusier shared a desire to "uncover the changing laws governing nature and reveal this order by means of a universal plastic language."92 For Le Corbusier, this new language was Purism and it refined his concepts about the relationship of art to architecture. Le Corbusier articulated the principles of Purism, which he came to as a result o f his association with Ozenfant, whom he met in Paris at the age of 30, in two pivotal documents - the December 1916 article, "Notes on Cubism," in L'Elan. and the 1918 manifesto, Apres le cubisme. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier represented themselves as Cubism's heirs and Purism as an alternative to non-objectivity, Dada, and Surrealism, intended to extract a contemporary style appropriate to the modern period via mechanical selection.9 3 In Purism, Le Corbusier found expression for his belief that mechanical production and the "aesthetic criteria of modern design" were inextricably linked. The architect was able to abandon the decorative tradition of French architecture and to define concepts that would become central to his architecture: standardization, the object-type and Classicism reduced to its geometric elements. The transition from the handcrafted style of his Swiss villas to the streamlined Pavilion de L'Esprit Nouveau (1925) demarcated Le Corbusier's mid-career aesthetic - the rejection of the pre-First World War irrational, intuitive, self-indulgent abandonment of Cubism in place of an art and architecture that emphasized logic, order and discipline. 9 2 Susan L . B a l l , Ozenfant and Purism: The Evolution of the Style 1915-1930. 2 n d ed. (Ann Arbor: U M I Research Press, 1981)21. 33 3.3.2 Explanation of Concepts Behind Purism Like Analytic Cubism, Purism combined fragmented objects within an unconventional, ambiguous perspective. However, whereas Analytic Cubism was characterized by a multi-faceted, fragmented perspective, Purism was based on the placement of standardized objects in an orderly and precise manner on a regulating line. This approach enabled three-dimensional objects to be portrayed in a flattened, two-dimensional perspective consistent with Purist principles of standardization, mechanical selection and the constancy of the modern and the eternal. Dunnett comments that Le Corbusier was instrumental in advancing an artistic language, inspired by Cubism, of "pure plane, volume, and space," particular to the Machine A g e . 9 4 Fry suggests that Purism attempted to retain the structural aspects of Cubism, while advancing or exploiting the medium's potentially rigorous structuralism. The result was a Cubism stripped of its essential "spatial and formal tension, wit, and ambiguity: (making Purism) a sort of heretical, Calvinist cubism." 9 5 In considering Purism as a vehicle for Le Corbusier's ideas about art and architecture, it is necessary to appreciate that Le Corbusier considered industry, rather than the individual artist, to be the stylist of the modern era and Purism to be the reforming influence that would admit architecture to this modernity. B y discarding the decorative, picturesque features of Cubism that, while consistent with a restless, pre-war society, were extraneous to the post-war period, Le Corbusier was able to establish a relationship between art, industrial objects, and "modern thinking."9 6 Recombining the universal or standardized geometric forms of industrial wares, which the Purists referred to as "object-types," enabled Le Corbusier and Ozenfant to portray the beauty and anonymity of the machine aesthetic. B y imbuing object-types with human qualities, as an extension of the human limb, the Purists infused them with an immediacy consistent with their functional nature. Further, since Ozenfant and Le Corbusier considered the Classical French tradition, characterized by order, economy, clarity of conception and language, to have been interrupted by Synthetic Cubism, Purism also provided the vehicle to re-introduce Classicism into painting and architecture.97 The objects Ozenfant and Le Corbusier chose for their subject matter were typically French and classically detailed, enabling Purist paintings to mimic both the "classical overtones" and "contemporary associations" of Cubist paintings. In this way, Purist design could be anonymous and its use of standard types - 9 3 Mechanical selection is defined as "an impersonal cultural parallel to Darwin's theory of natural selection." Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, Cubism and Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001) 214. 9 4 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, trans. James I. Dunnett (London: The Architectural Press, 1987) ix. 9 5 Edward F. Fry, Cubism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966) 171. 9 6 Christopher Green, Art in France: 1900-1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) 143. 34 abstraction, forms, systems, classicism and proportion - could align modernist architecture with a "machine-age classicism."9 8 To understand this concept of Classicism applied to industry, one must acknowledge the neo-Platonic allusions in Le Corbusier's Purist designs; although Le Corbusier was familiar with Plato only through the teachings and writings of others, Purism associated itself with an ideal of pure geometric primary forms "perfected, or purified, over time by the process o f mechanical selection."9 9 Ozenfant and Le Corbusier believed primary elements - the cube, sphere, cylinder, cone, pyramid, triangle, square, circle and straight and curved lines - were the keys to a composition, since they carried within them the "geometrical constants" that underlay the natural order. 1 0 0 The emphasis on geometrical forms is explained in Apres le cubisme: as nature translated into "pure plastic equivalents."1 0 1 In order for this geometric vocabulary to have "contemporary relevance," it was necessary for the Purists, and other avant-garde groups, to locate it within the "perfection, order, harmony, and collectivity" of the machine i d i o m . 1 0 2 Le Corbusier and Ozenfant distinguished between mechanical selection - man-made objects, identified by the laws of selection as being economical in style, functional in application and orderly in execution, like the machine - and mechanical production - the mass production of industrial wares made possible by the machine.1 0 3 The object-type was the product o f mechanical selection: those objects necessary for the completion of the individual, defined by industrial design wares like bottles, jugs and vases that functioned as an extension o f the hand, and that were identifiable by their invariable and stable form. Thus, Purism's vocabulary consisted of "banal and familiar objects" that were typically standardized, utilitarian and factory made, while other, plastic elements were subordinated to 9 7 What B a l l refers to as "the epitome of the universal transmutable language of Purism." B a l l 94. 9 8 A s evidenced by his comment on the programme for the Pavilion de PEsprit Nouveau: " . . .to illustrate how, by virtue of the selective principle...industry creates pure forms; and to stress the intrinsic value of this pure form of art...." Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and The Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to L e Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) 193. 9 9 B a l l 93. 1 0 0 B a l l 80. 1 0 1 B a l l 44. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier elaborated on non-mimesis thusly: "Nature, when she is beautiful, is beautiful only in proportion to art; beautiful nature is only beautiful insofar as she touches the geometric animal in us." A s cited in B a l l 50. 1 0 2 L'Esprit Nouveau establishes the aesthetic doctrine of industrialization as "...efficiency in everything - and no efficiency without purity of idea and of technique." B a l l 167. 1 0 3 B a l l 92. 35 form. 1 0 4 Le Corbusier and Ozenfant believed Purism's task was to "perceive, retain and express the invariant" of its object-type.1 0 5 In this manner, then, the order and functionalism of the object's structure - qualities related to efficiency such as proportional harmony - were established as the "locus of its quality," whereas the decorative or remarkable elements were disregarded.1 0 6 Purist elements in painting were to be an "equivalent" of the object - Euclidean geometric solids ordered along a series of regulating lines to create harmony and constancy.'0 7 In a similar manner, Purist architecture was analogous with the object-type - manufactured objects because they were devised to respond to constancy needs (what Green refers to as "the constant human need for order"), and architecture because it was created to respond to human needs.1 0 8 Thus, for Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, the relationship of the machine to man was one o f mutualism: machines made possible the perfection o f the modern factory, just as its products were the offspring of the machine. The machine was, thus, a creator of modern life. Similarly, the proportions of nature were a generator of classical geometry, since it comprised geometry's necessary constituents, such as the sphere, cube, prism and cone. Thus, the Purists' juxtapositioning of modern objects within the classical context of Greek architecture and the decorative arts allowed them to claim an historical association with universal and constant laws, while assuming an evolutionary, modernist stance.1 0 9 3.3.3 How Concepts of Purism are Manifested in Le Corbusier's Paintings and Architecture Within their spatially constrained, yet evocative, reference point, Purist paintings had a "calm exactitude." Purist art was to be a medium for contemplation that, as is evident in Le Corbusier's Nature morte a la pile d'assiettes (1920), 1 0 4 The viewer and artist were to discern the object-type's "permanent, underlying structure...rather than its ephemeral, outward form." Troy 200. The flattened planes of Purism and "perspectival distortion" are acceptable in the effort to represent a 3-D object in a 2-D plane. B a l l 40. 1 0 5 Troy, Decorative 201. 1 0 6 Troy. Decorative 201. 1 0 7 "Les Traces Regulateurs" describes regulating lines as a geometric device used to correct proportional relationships in Purist art and architecture. Christopher Green, "Purist painting: principles and processes," in Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1987) 120. 1 0 8 The machine aesthetic was a response to constancy needs, according to Green. Christopher Green, "Purism," Concepts of Modern Art: From Fauvism to Post-modernism. 3rd ed., ed. Nikos Stangos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994) 82. 1 0 9 The French predilection for geometry contributed to efforts to impose "the rigor o f a Classical ordering system" on Cubism: " B y the end of 1916 we see in Paris a literary and artistic style marked by both Cubism and Futurism which was rapidly moving towards a Neo-Platonically motivated classicism, a classical revival." B a l l 22. 36 emphasized: "...the importance of intellect, the unimportance of individuals, the value of precision." 1 1 0 Although their subject matter was reminiscent of a Cubist still life, Purist paintings were set apart by "the clarity of their arrangement, the sobriety of their treatment, the manner in which each object is presented not as an individual item of great complexity but as an example of a class of simple and identical things."1 1 1 In this manner, Purist paintings were like object-types; since their constrained vocabulary depended upon the depiction o f "equivalents" - as opposed to the Cubist emphasis on deformation, Purist paintings consisted of spatially-flattened compositions of recognizable, machine-produced wares alluded to through interlocking contours, the repetition and predictability of which emulated machine production. The fixed and constant response to the Purist painting recognized a universal timelessness, made possible by the incorporation of primary forms that satisfied the human need for order, as apparent in the plastic form of paintings such as L a Bouteille de vin orange (1922) and Nature more pale a la lanterne (1922). The Purists' emphasis on mass production was revolutionary for Le Corbusier's architecture, as evident in such projects as the Ozenfant studio and house (1922); Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau, designed for the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts (1925); and V i l l a Savoye (1929-31). Purism distanced the architect from the influence of Schure, who assumed a worldview that considered the true aim of art to be "the expression.. .of spiritual forms," and Provensal, who considered the role of the artist to be to discover and reveal spiritual truths.1 1 2 Rather, Le Corbusier's Purist architecture was influenced by the opposition between "the disciplined or free manipulation of form and the rational analysis of function and structure."1 1 3 Purist principles of standardization and universality were expressed in his architecture as an "ordered arrangement, noble prisms, seen in light" and illuminated by measure or scale. 1 1 4 His Purist paintings allowed Le Corbusier to articulate the significance of such concepts as the use of regulating lines and classical geometry in his architecture, consistent with prevailing French concerns about social order in what Troy suggests was a fashionable response to pre-war attitudes about the " u Green, "Purism," 80. 1 1 1 Troy. Decorative 199. 1 1 2 Turner 29, 15. 1 1 3 "...behind the resolution of these oppositions in built form lay, as Le Corbusier saw it, the testing-ground of art and ultimately of drawing, the private area in which he could work through his relationship with nature with unrivaled immediacy." Christopher Green, "Purist painting: principles and processes," Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century, eds. Michael Raeburn and Victoria Wilson, exhibition catalogue (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1987) 120. " 4 Le Corbusier, Towards 162-3. 37 decorative arts."5 Indeed, Green suggests the core of Purism was the alliance between painting and architecture, as apparent in one of Le Corbusier's first Purist buildings, the Ozenfant studio.1 1 6 B a l l comments that the Purist painting provided Le Corbusier "with a visual language of precise geometric forms which were both timelessly universal and temporally pertinent to the machine age," as apparent in comparisons of Le Corbusier's schematic drawings and elevations of the V i l l a Stein and the V i l l a Savoye with his and Ozenfant's Purist paintings.' 1 7 His research into standards and types culminated in a vocabulary of object-types - she cites the pilotis, roof garden, free plan, free facade, ribbon window, ramp or bridge, double-height space, scissor and spiral staircase — for his architecture that were consistent with the concept of the use of standardized elements for his Purist paintings. L e Corbusier published this manifesto, on the five points of architecture, in 1926. Le Corbusier's pursuit o f an archetypal form of architecture based on innovations such as the plan libre, as characterized by projects such as the Maison Cook (1926) that "attempted to synthesize the cultural range o f the Purist sensibility," coincided with his disaffection with Ozenfant around 1925. 1 1 8 Thus, Le Corbusier evolved the theoretical typologies of Purism, devised in collaboration with Ozenfant through the medium of painting, into an international style of architecture that established him at the forefront of the Modern movement, along with more prominent architects such as Walter Gropius and Frank L l o y d Wright, during a period of personal introspection and renewal. His consequent expressive/organic forms, achieved through the introduction of the concept of objets 'a reaction poetique, were representative of the stylistic change culminating from the abandonment of his partnership with Ozenfant. Le Corbusier's way of thinking about architecture, society and the world was structured around the way he understood the relationship between himself and nature. Green refers to Le Corbusier's "willingness to exploit the coming together of the geometric and the natural confrontationally," in recognition that the mechanical and natural (primitive) were singular elements and that, by coupling humans with nature rather than setting them against it, the manufactured and natural could assume equal dominance without either being compromised."9 B y incorporating nature, in its primal state, into the architecture, nature was able to respond to the design, acting upon and with it. This dual interest in the natural and the manufactured was found outside aesthetic avant-garde theory; Swiss artist Eugene Grasset (1845-1917), whom Le Corbusier admired, encouraged architects and decorators to study geometric 1 1 5 Troy, Decorative 202. 1 1 6 Green, "The architect" 119. 1 1 7 B a l l 163-4. 1 1 8 Frampton 75. 1 1 9 Green, "The architect" 116. figures to determine the principles of harmony central to nature as co-existent with those principles indigent to ornament.1 2 0 For Le Corbusier, the occupation of space by art, architecture and nature were analogous and essential to the expression of aesthetic emotion: "The flower, the plant, the tree, the mountain, all these are upright, living in an environment...we look, moved by so much unity commanding so much space; and then we measure what we see."1 2 1 Like nature, Le Corbusier considered the process of creating a painting, sculpture or architecture to be transformative; "(Le Corbusier considered)...the surroundings, both immediate and more distant.. .(to be) stirred and shaken, dominated or caressed by it (nature)," just as he acknowledged the imprint of the environment on art. 1 2 2 Thus, by 1920, Le Corbusier apparently saw himself as "a geometrician acting on nature," his Purist architecture a series of object-types conceived through the devices of geometry and regulating lines, in harmony with the order of nature - what Green refers to as the device of modeling the "sculptural interior" through the admission of light through "geometric, prismatic volumes."1 2 3 3.3.4 Significance of Purism to the Symbiosis of Art and Architecture If we consider, then, the importance of Purism to Le Corbusier's aesthetic, it is that he was able to establish guiding principles that enabled him to rationalize the basis for his painting and architecture. His interest in classical Greek art and architecture allowed for their incorporation into his Purist architecture. His pursuit of standardization and regulating lines enabled him to abandon the excesses of the decorative tradition in order to define a presumed universal style of architecture that valued the play of light and space within an economical mass made possible by new technologies. B y placing both his painting and his architecture on a series of regulating lines, Le Corbusier was able to refine ideas about proportion, rhythm and harmony, consistent with classical geometry. He was also able to advance his beliefs about constancy and order, as they applied to the relationship between the man-made and natural. In this manner, Le Corbusier was able to apprehend the mutualism inherent to the mechanical and nature, as well as to art and architecture.1 2 4 Through the integration of the natural with the man-made, Le Corbusier achieved a concordance between his art and architecture: the distinctions between nature as a design form and architecture were reduced by the device of bringing the exterior into the interior through such elements as ribbon windows and roof 1 2 0 Grasset as cited in Green, "The architect" 112. 1 2 1 Le Corbusier, The Modulor 1 and 2 31. 1 2 2 Le Corbusier, The Modulor 1 and 2 31. 123 Green, "The architect" 114. 1 2 4 Peter Blake, The Master Builders: Le Corbusier. Mies van der Rohe. Frank LJovd Wright, 2nd ed. (Toronto: 39 terraces. Similarly, the use of shared devices such as flattened perspective, frontality and containment blurred distinctions between Le Corbusier's painting and architecture.125 Thus, concepts Le Corbusier held about painting came also to dominate his architecture, enabling the coincidence of these media in projects such as Ronchamp. 3.4 Writings and Other Works 3.4.1 Writings by Le Corbusier Besides Le Corbusier's engagement with art movements such as Purism, in order to gain an understanding of the concept of symbiosis as it relates to his work, it is useful to consider the theories and ideas Le Corbusier articulated in his writings. Some of Le Corbusier's earliest philosophies about art and architecture are delineated in his diary, A . Journey to the East, which chronicles his travels through the Balkans, Turkey, Greece and Italy between 1907 and 1911 (Le Corbusier also visited Vienna, Paris and Germany during this period). Le Corbusier collaborated with Ozenfant between 1920 and 1925 on the writing of L'esprit nouveau. a periodical that illuminated their ideas about Purism, and Apres le cubisme. the manifesto of the Purist movement. He produced four books of his own during this period that consisted of extracted and recombined excerpts on his ideas about art and architecture taken from L'esprit nouveau: L'art decoratif d'Auiourdi (1925), Vers une architecture (1927), Urbanisme (1924) and L a peinture moderne (1927). He expounded his theories about measurement in The Modulor I and II (1950-55). Le Corbusier also provided retrospectives of his work in various publications, such as M v Work (1960), Corbusier (1951), Le Corbusier: Early Works (1938) and Complete Architectural Works (1943-65). Aside from these texts, he authored a number of books on city planning, which are not germane to this discussion. O f immediate concern in his writings, as previously referenced in the discourse on his sketchbooks and as apparent in The Journey to the East, is Le Corbusier's fascination with the instinctual, yet abstract aspects of the "naive" folk art of Hungarian and Serbian peasants.126 Le Corbusier considered peasants - "these men who do not reason" - to George J: M c L e o d Limited, 1976) 25. 1 2 5 Green, "The architect" 114. 1 2 6 "First and foremost among these men who do not reason is the instinctive appreciation for the organic line, born from the correlation between the most utilitarian line and that which encloses the most expansive volume - thus the most beautiful." Le Corbusier, Journey to the East, ed. and trans. Ivan Zaknic (Cambridge: M I T Press, 1987) 16. 40 have an instinctual understanding of the beauty of the organic line and contrasted the "simple-minded' potter, "whose fingers unconsciously obey the rules of an age-old tradition," with the jaded draftsman of the modern factory, whose disturbingly fantastic forms are but "foolish whines."1 2 7 In "aesthetic sensuality," vital geometric forms and evocative color of the peasant art - which he considered to rival the work of V a n Gogh and Cezanne - Le Corbusier found support for his ideas about a universal system of dimensioning that would enable him to achieve the ideal proportion.1 2 8 When Le Corbusier commented on the Beaux-Art influence of Bucharest architecture, the "decorative power" of the whitewashed, peasant rooms of Turnovo, or his quest to replicate the proportions, unity and clarity of "a little country cottage," he was arguing for a minimalist (architectural) language that would enable architects to expose their public to the poetic context of architecture.129 A further design source for Le Corbusier lie in the decorative aspect that people and objects recalled for him when silhouetted against the virgin forms of the simple, whitewashed forms of folkloric architecture. Journey to the East references the whitewashed walls of monasteries and hotels, the whitewashed earth, even the white sun or the interplay of light and color between sky and building - symbols that reappear throughout his architecture. A s an illustration, his diaries reveal his dismay at the comparably feeble efforts of modern architecture when compared to the precision of the "silent sanctuaries" of the whitewashed Turkish mosques.1 3 0 Concomittantly, Le Corbusier praised the incalculability of the geometry, materials and color of Mount Athos in achieving the expression of the absolutes of nature.1 3 1 Le Corbusier elaborated on this concern about the integrity of the pure surface in his commentary on his travels to the Orient, wherein he described the whitewashed houses as an "X-ray of beauty...an assize court sitting in permanent judgment. Imperfections and visual deceits were quickly exposed by the whitewash."1 3 2 Le Corbusier's 1935 text When the Cathedrals Were White continued this theme: " ...'the house of the people', where they discussed mysteries, morality, religious, c i v i l affairs or intrigue was entirely white...we must get that image into our hearts."1 3 3 Clearly, these forms established an aesthetic that is apparent in both Le Corbusier's late Purist works and in his New Brutalism experiments. B y establishing the primacy of proportion and rhythm in folkloric tradition, Le Corbusier was able to use the perceptual insights he gained from his travels to affect 1 2 7 Le Corbusier, Journey 16. Le Corbusier, Journey 15-6. 128 1 2 9 Le Corbusier. Journey 177. 1 3 0 Le Corbusier. Journey 193. 1 3 1 Le Corbusier, Journey 177, 217, 238. 1 3 2 Jencks, Tragic 32. 1 3 3 L e Corbusier as cited in Jencks, Tragic 121. 41 the course of his architecture, as we see in this comment: "Wouldn't it take me a lifetime of labor to harness these simple and eternal forces, fraught with the uncertainty of ever attaining the proportions, unity, and clarity worthy of even a little country cottage built in accordance with the invaluable laws of age-old tradition?"1 3 4 Exclusive of this passion for folkloric traditions, many of Le Corbusier's later writings from the Purist period, prior to his 1925 debut at the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, also speak to the rejection o f decorative arts in favor o f the machine aesthetic. This is significant to an understanding of the symbiosis of art and architecture because Purist painting, doctrine, and practice, as we have seen in this thesis, forced Le Corbusier to rethink his earlier endeavors as a decorator and to find a new vocabulary to express his idea that architecture, like art, was a question of emotive form organized according to constants. The contradiction between Le Corbusier's early enthusiasm for the decorative arts and the lessons of Paris and Germany was patent in the contrast between the architect's attitude towards art as a decorative element in his interior design work at L a Chaux-de-Fonds (1912-17), in which he responded to the demands of his clientele by emulating early Restoration, Empire, Louis X V I and Directoire styles, and his Purist period. Two key texts trace this change of posture. In L'art decoratif d'auiourd'hui (1925), Le Corbusier concluded that "the naked man" had no need for trinkets, fetishes or collectibles, but, rather, was seized with an intellectual curiosity that caused him to question history. He argued that the availability of new means of production would stimulate new needs, with universal solutions, while the subsequent collapse of the "hierarchical" decorative tradition would usher in an era of egalitarianism in design. In confronting the paradox of making decorative art of simple tools that were the byproduct of good taste characterized by choice, suitability, proportion, and harmony, Le Corbusier posited that the geometry o f the piece was the essence of its design and that the realization of concepts such as harmony and proportion imbued a painting or a work of architecture with its spirit. 1 3 5 Thus, the utility of rational perfection and precise formulation, as he termed it, represented the realization of the modern spirit in painting and architecture - everyday, utilitarian works of perfection and lasting value that were the outcome of the vigorous pursuit of innovation, or what Le Corbusier described as "clean, concise, brief, economical, intense, essential" design. 1 3 6 Le Corbusier's intense dislike of the decorative arts after 1920 included a critical appraisal of anything that was un-modern. This criticism extended to 1 3 4 Le Corbusier, Journey 177. 1 3 5 Le Corbusier, Decorative 79, 23. 1 3 6 L e Corbusier, Decorative 32. denouncing the practice of decorating objects in order to disguise poor quality and manufacturing faults, which he considered to be an example of the perversion of decoration, contrasted with the harmony o f convenience and utility. In L'art decoratif d'auiourd'hui it is apparent that Le Corbusier found refuge in the precision and constancy of machine art, likening it to the decisive moment that inspired such works as the Parthenon.1 3 7 In his mind, beauty was to be achieved by the attainment of order and unity - through the organization of "all those things which excite and satisfy our visual senses to the fullest degree" - while the act of creation was lauded as the source of spiritual attainment.138 Measure or scale was considered to be the foundation of the poetic moment in architecture. Since the advent of the machine order created an imbalance in society between the contemporary and the ancient, progressive painting and architecture, by virtue of being true to their age, appreciated the urgency of the need to respond.1 3 9 Thus, just as Le Corbusier's architecture during the 1920s and 1930s was the product of principles and laws defined by Purist painting. That being so, the abandonment of the decorative arts was necessary to enable the advent of a modern architecture: " The hour of architecture sounds, now that art awaits the spiritual expression of our age in material form, now that decorative art can no longer be considered acceptable within the framework of contemporary aspiration."1 4 0 These ideas engendered the transformation in Le Corbusier's painting and architecture made possible by Purism, as can be seen in his comments of 1925 about the death of the French decorative tradition: "Glitter is going under. The hour of proportion has arrived.... Decoration is dead and the spirit of architecture is asserting itself."1 4' L'art decoratif d'adiourd'hui and subsequent writings articulate Le Corbusier's belief that architecture was a mindful construct "which gives material form to the sum consciousness of its age."1 4 2 His association with Ozenfant and Purism acted as a clarifying moment in his architecture, enabling him to position architectural sensation as the outcome o f human reaction to geometric form. B y also clarifying his reaction to decorative arts, Le Corbusier was able to adopt a unique, modern linguistic idiom in both his painting and architecture. As Green argues, Le 1 3 7 Le Corbusier, Decorative xxiv. 1 3 8 Le Corbusier, Towards 143. 1 3 9 Le Corbusier was intolerant of the "dead spirit" of decorative arts that threatened to hinder the progress of modernist architecture: "These sanctuaries stifling with elegancies, or on the other hand with the follies of "Peasant Art," are an offence. We have acquired a taste for fresh air and clear daylight." Le Corbusier, Towards 91. 1 4 0 Le Corbusier, Decorative xxv. 1 4 1 Le Corbusier, Decorative 135. His derision is evident: "What a hodgepodge of antiquated ideas occupies most of our intellectual pursuits. Our practical and effective actions are weak and uncertain because we have petrified, like Lot's wife, for having looked too long behind us." Le Corbusier, Journey 173. Corbusier's subsequent paintings of the late 1920s expressed a more "homogeneous view" of man and nature, utilizing the abstracted collages of constructivism, coupled with Purist geometry and object-types, to address the harmony between the man-made and natural forms. This shift is also evident in his architecture: Green points out that Le Corbusier achieved a symbiosis between natural and synthetic materials, combining the use of natural elements such as rough stone with manufactured elements such as reinforced concrete. This, again, supports Green's hypothesis about a transition in Le Corbusier's painting and architecture, through his Purist period, from man-made objects (representative of man) confronting nature to their unification: nature as a device that acts "both with and against architecture."1 4 3 The other text of note is Towards a New Architecture, in which Le Corbusier remarks that decoration is the "essential overplus" of the simple peasant, while proportion is the equivalent for the cultivated man, who is excited by the relationships created by the satisfaction of the mind through the achievement of unity and economy and o f the senses through the employment of geometric volumes, such as the cube and sphere.1 4 4 In this context, in which architecture is governed by standards, art (painting, literature, music), in comparison, is freed from utilitarian motives. A work of art has a "unity of aim," established by a clearly-defined statement that is without ambiguity, so that the harmony of the work is immediately apparent and moves the viewer, just as a work of nature might. Le Corbusier considered this clear statement that accepted the work of art or nature as a unique character to be a "pure creation of the mind." This concept, while evident in painting and music, was absent from modern architecture, which he considered to be mere construction, as opposed to the achievement of poetic emotion, which he believed to be architecture's true a i m . 1 4 5 Thus, works of decorative art should be beautiful tools created by industry and defined by choice, suitability, harmony and proportion, as distinguished from art (painting, sculpture, architecture), which encompassed the realms of emotion and passion. 1 4 6 In this manner, he rejected art as a decorative application to architecture, as in the Beaux-Art tradition, while admitting the pure forms of the modernist painter or sculptor to the architectural ensemble, such as in Leger's "murals" for the Pavillion de 1'Esprit Nouveau (1925): "The hour of Le Corbusier, Decorative 118 Green, "The architect" 116. Le Corbusier, Towards 143. Le Corbusier, Towards 214. Le Corbusier, Decorative. 79. 44 architecture sounds, now that art awaits from the spirit of our age its definition in material form, now that decorative art can no longer be considered compatible with the framework of contemporary thought."1 4 7 Besides his general concern with the role of art in architectural production, a consistent theme for Le Corbusier in Towards a New Architecture was innovation. Le Corbusier argued against the strict utilitarianism o f architecture, advancing the notion that architecture was a harmonizing influence, "a pure creation o f the spirit." A s such, the arrangement of the forms relied on an "appreciable rhythm;" the "destruction of form" by the inclusion of the utility of doors and windows was to be alleviated by the use of the artist's devices to "accentuate" the form. A s L'art decoratif d'auiourd'hui had done, Towards a New Architecture enabled L e Corbusier to articulate his belief that the new era, defined by Cubism and "later researches," represented the struggle to replace the follies of decoration, or its opposite, "Peasant Art," with "fresh air and clear daylight." Commenting on the belief that the machine age marked the birth of a new inventiveness that would stimulate a correspondingly new architecture, Towards a New Architecture declared that architecture was "a thing of art, a phenomenon of the emotions, lying outside questions of construction and beyond them;" it was up to the artist to "animate" functionality so that the forms and shapes provoked plastic emotion.1 4 8 If architecture was to be provocative, then it must be sensory - the elements should be arrayed so as to excite and move the viewer. Conversely, beauty could be understood, Le Corbusier suggested, as the mating of geometry with creativity in the same way engineers "satisfied our eyes" with their geometry and mathematics. It follows that Le Corbusier considered the primary forms to be the most beautiful - "the very nature of the plastic arts" - while the complex geometry of Gothic architecture earned his disdain. Rather, the "geometrical solution" that Le Corbusier referred to might constitute itself in the rectangle, as it did at the V i l l a Savoye, or allow for the organic form of Ronchamp. Le Corbusier considered architecture to consist of plastic forms that "work physiologically" to stimulate the senses and reveal the harmony between the physical and emotional realms - architecture as the plastic expression o f the poetic moment.1 4 9 Towards a New Architecture explained this concept of the resonance between art and architecture 1 4 7 Le Corbusier. Decorative 127. 1 4 8 Le Corbusier. Towards 19. 1 4 9 L e Corbusier postulated a possible definition of harmony as: "...a moment o f congruence with the axis that lies within us and therefore with the laws governing the universe, a return to an underlying order. This could explain why the appearance of certain objects gives us a sense of satisfaction - a satisfaction experienced, time and again, by everyone." Le Corbusier, Towards, as cited in Jacques Guiton, ed., The ideas of Le Corbusier on architecture and modern planning, trans, by Margaret Guiton (New York: G . Braziller, 1981) 19. as an emotive force as follows, exemplifying the poetic approach to architecture that distinguished Le Corbusier's design aesthetic: "One uses stone, wood, cement, and turns them into houses or palaces; that's construction. It calls for skill. But, suddenly, you touch my heart; you make me feel good. I am happy. I say: it's beautiful. This is architecture. It is art....You have not only adapted raw materials to the functional requirements o f a project but also, transcending these requirements, have established relationships that stir my emotions. That is architecture."1 5 0 Thus, Le Corbusier considered the architectural work to be effective only when it coincided with recognized, admired and accepted universal laws and when the elements were arranged in a manner that attained the most visual impact by acting on the senses. This vision is also apparent in his comparison of the relationship of the rhythm of graduated light to the grandiosity of emotion that the architecture evokes: " Y o u are enthralled by a sensorial rhythm (light and volume) and by an able use of scale and measure, into a world of its own which tells you what it set out to tell you. What emotion, what faith!"' 5 1 Le Corbusier's language was expressive of the sense that his architecture was ordered by his art; in referring to architecture as "noble prisms, seen in light" or commenting that "architecture only exists when there is a poetic emotion," Le Corbusier set out his manifesto that architecture is the natural progression of the artistic process.1 5 2 Le Corbusier alluded to this by suggesting that the architect is a purveyor of emotion, beauty and order. His interest in art and architecture as co-existent was symbolic of a shift from a socio-political view of architecture to one that was concerned with symbolism and aesthetics. A s Le Corbusier became increasingly intrigued with the possibility of a synthesis of the arts in the mid-1940s, he advocated for collaboration between architects and the plastic arts. His comments in the 1946 edition of L'architecture d'auiourd'hui. concerning the 1950 Porte Maillot exhibition projects and the inclusion of this topic on the agendas of both the 1947 CI A M congress and the founding meeting of Group Espace, a Paris-based association of artists and architects, are evidence of his increasing interest in a synthesis of the arts or, in its more sophisticated iteration, symbiosis. This development is consistent with his 1945 treatise, "Ineffable Space," in which, tracing his remarks to avant-garde painting, Le Corbusier argued that architecture, sculpture and painting are dependent on space, which "releases" the aesthetic emotion. 1 5 3 The effect of a work of art on the environment is a "phenomenon of accordance" - thus, the victory of proportion (on the bones of the work, as well as the artist's intent) represented the achievement of the fourth dimension, the intuitive leap shaped by the artist's 1 5 0 Le Corbusier, Towards as cited in Guiton, Ideas 17-18. 1 5 1 Le Corbusier, Towards 183. 1 5 2 Le Corbusier as cited in B a l l 79.. 46 collective wisdom. 1 5 4 Le Corbusier referred to this as the miracle of ineffable space, "the consummation of plastic emotion," and intimated that the time (he was writing in 1945) was right for a synthesis (which this thesis w i l l argue approaches symbiosis in certain of his projects) of architecture, painting and sculpture after a decade of separation.1' This devotion to "espace indicible" is considered to represent the transition from the mannered rationalism of Le Corbusier's early/mid career to the synthetic, plastic expressions of his late career, symbolized by Ronchamp, Unite d'Habitation (Marseilles) and Chandigarh.1 5 6 Le Corbusier also articulated key concepts about architecture as art in documents such as his 1946 article, "Ineffable Space," which initially appeared in L'architecture d'auiourd'hui and was republished in The Modulor (1950) and Modulor 2 (1955). These moments of clarity enabled Le Corbusier to reconcile the duality of the poetic, plastic moment with the rationalism of geometry. In "Ineffable Space," Le Corbusier suggested that art was the means for modern man to transgress the fourth dimension (movement) or what Joan Ockman refers to as "an all-encompassing release from real time and space."1 5 7 A s architecture, sculpture and painting are dependent on the space they occupy, they "act" on their surroundings, even as their environment "brings its weight to bear on the place where there is a work o f art."1 5 8 The "phenomenon o f concordance" is the consequence o f the achievement o f proportion by a process of intuition on the part of the artist, architect or sculptor and of comprehension by the privileged few who appreciate its significance. This miracle of ineffable space was what Le Corbusier referred to as "the consummation of plastic emotion." 1 5 9 A t the time he wrote "Ineffable Space," in the mid-1940s, Le Corbusier considered the fine arts to be progressing towards what he termed a synthesis, but what it seems apparent was actually a symbiosis in projects such as Ronchamp, made possible through a concordance of time and events. Having experienced a lifetime of involvement in architecture, painting and sculpture, Le Corbusier felt that this progression righted the "unfortunate disassociation" experienced within the fine arts for the better part of a century. 1 5 3 Le Corbusier, "Ineffable Space," Architecture Culture: 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology, ed. John Ockman (New York: R i z z o l i International Publications, 1993) 66. 1 5 4 Le Corbusier commented in 1945 that the search for harmony opened his mind to the "fourth dimension," which he defined as the "moment of limitless escape evoked by an exceptionally just consonance o f the plastic means employed," through the practice of architecture, sculpture and painting. Le Corbusier, "Ineffable Space" 66. 1 5 5 Le Corbusier, "Ineffable Space" 66. 1 5 6 Ockman refers to this as "the poetic transcendence of his late realizations." Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Culture: 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology (New York: R i z z o l i International Publications, 1993) 65. 1 5 7 Le Corbusier, "Ineffable Space" 64. 1 5 8 Le Corbusier, "Ineffable Space" 66. 1 5 9 Le Corbusier, "Ineffable Space" 66. 47 The other aspect that must be considered in understanding Le Corbusier's aesthetic was his belief that architecture was equivalent to a living organism. He contrasted the development of a building to a bubble: "This bubble is perfect and harmonious i f the breath has been evenly distributed and regulated from the inside." 1 6 0 The argument that "the exterior is the result of an interior" proceeded from Le Corbusier's insistence that, in order to be distinguishable from "mere construction," architecture must have an a i m . 1 6 1 Green comments that Le Corbusier believed that how space was handled - including the space within the building and its response to the space o f its setting - was the key to architecture as art.1 6 2 Synthesis existed in the "forms" of art and architecture, while separateness prevailed in the practices of art and architectural design - art was "a 'free' process of exploration and invention." 1 6 3 This emphasis on the graphics of the painting or architectural design explains why many of Le Corbusier's paintings subjugate the subject to the design. 1 6 4 Consistent with his belief that nature was the source of all design, Le Corbusier approached architecture from the perspective of the creator: "Everything in life is in essence biological. The biology of a plan or section is as necessary and obvious as that of a creation of nature. The introduction of the word "biology" illuminates all research in the fields of building. Living, working, cultivating body and mind, moving from place to place, are parallel processes to those of the blood, nervous and respiratory systems."1 6 5 Le Corbusier's interest in the biological origin of nature predates Purism. However, because he appreciated the potential of everyday objects from nature and human biology as design elements, Le Corbusier placed emphasis on studying natural organisms as a source of architectural inspiration.1 6 6 Drawing from nature represented not only a method of learning architecture, but of acquiring grace, flexibility, precision and serene perfection: "...I would like architects - not just students - to pick up a pencil and draw a plant, a leaf, the spirit of a tree, the harmony of a sea shell, formations of clouds, the complex '"" Le Corbusier, Towards 181. 1 6 1 Le Corbusier, Towards 181, 195. 1 6 2 Green, "The architect" 110. 1 6 3 Green, "The architect" 111. A s Le Corbusier commented: "But where does sculpture begin, where does painting commence, where does architecture start? (....) within the very body of the plastic event, everything forms a whole: sculpture, painting, architecture, volumes...and polychromy, in other words, materials, quantities, specific consistencies, assembled into relationships that arouse our emotions." A s cited in Pauly, Le Corbusier 122. 1 6 4 Jordan argues that Le Corbusier obscured his subject to give emphasis to the form and colour of his paintings, just as the Cubists did. "The real theme of the painting must always be a violent explosion of form and colour to which any literary image, any 'subject', must always be strictly subordinate." Robert Furneaux Jordan, Le Corbusier (London: J. M . Dent and Sons Ltd., 1972) 30. 1 6 5 Le Corbusier, M y Work 201. 1 6 6 Letter from Le Corbusier to M r . Martienssen in Johannesberg, dated 23 September 1936, as cited in Guiton, Ideas 83. 48 play of waves spreading out on a beach, so as to discover different expressions of an inner force." 1 6 7 This practice, he believed, would enable the architect to see beyond sensation and to be uplifted into a state of conscious delight and harmony with the universal laws that controlled people's actions, "in which we can use our full powers of recollection, reason, and creation."1 6 8 Further, as Le Corbusier articulated in Precisions sur un etat present de l'architecture et de l'urbanisme, he considered simplicity to be integral to art: "Great art - we must never tire of repeating this - is produced by simple means.. ..Simplicity, which results from judgment and choices, is a sign of mastery. It gives, through a clearly perceptible play of forms, the means of expressing a state of mind, of revealing a spiritual system. It is like an affirmation, a path leading from confusion to clear geometric statements."169 Similarly, modenature - the "interplay of light and shades" which sets the tone of the architectural piece - was also considered to be essential to the completed piece, since it required the architect to cast aside his (her) persona as engineer in favor of plastic artist or sculptor.1 7 0 Le Corbusier considered the Parthenon to be the supreme example of modenature: "Here stands the purest testimony to the physiology of sensation and to the mathematical speculation that supports it; we are transported by its sensuality, ravished by its intelligence; we reach the axis of harmony."1 7 1 A s Towards a New Architecture substantiates, for Le Corbusier, the process of creating was an inner experience, while perception was sequential, a series of "visual events."1 7 2 If Le Corbusier's conclusion that simplicity is integral to art is correlated to his concern about the economical forms of folkloric traditions, it is apparent that the "aesthetic spirituality" of architecture apparent in Ronchamp is the product of the complex interplay of his theories about the primacy of geometry, the intransigent character of light and volume, the effect of architecture as an emotive force and the phenomenon of accordance that results from the interaction of art and architecture as generators of visual and emotional impact within the environment. Architecture is, thus, instinctual - the mastery of simple and eternal forces - as well as a function of the contemporary context; 1 6 7 L'Architecture d'audiourd'hui, numero special, 1948, 53, as cited in Guiton, Ideas 83. 1 6 8 Le Corbusier in Towards, as cited in Guiton, Ideas 18. 1 6 9 Le Corbusier, Precisions sur un etat present de l'architecture et de 1'urbanisme, as cited in Guiton, Ideas 33-4. He elaborates on simplicity: "Simplicity synthesizes. A ragged agglomeration of cubes is an accidental event, but a synthesis is an intellectual act." Le Corbusier, Precisions, as cited in Guiton, Ideas 35. 1 7 0 "'Modenature' is the acid test of the architect; it leaves him no alternative: to be or not to be a plastic artist." Le Corbusier, Towards, as cited in Guiton, Ideas 42. 1 7 1 Le Corbusier, Towards, as cited in Guiton, Ideas 43. 1 7 2 Le Corbusier, Towards, as cited in Guiton, Ideas 43. 49 while Le Corbusier subjugated this concept during his Purist period, his subsequent pursuit of forms from nature support the suggestion that the essence of his work was innately intuitive, even as it responded to the conditions of the architectural environment. 3.4.2 Other W o r k s by L e Corbusier Besides his paintings and architecture, Le Corbusier also engaged in other aspects of art production, among them his sculptures, ceramics, tapestries and murals o f post-WW II. In the context o f modernism, the ambiguities o f mural painting, from the three-dimensionality of the form to the challenges created by the expansiveness o f the "canvas," lent the medium to the abstract form. With the acknowledgement that art was as important an architectural element as lighting or color, it was appropriate that Le Corbusier would attempt to engage in this art form as an extension of his painting. This experimentation was equally consistent with the work of other avant-garde painters of the 1920s: the November 1923, De Stijl exhibition by Theo van Doesburg and Cor van Eesteren caused Le Corbusier's associate, artist Fernand Leger, to comment that the artist and architect must mutually resolve the social functions of buildings by considering the walls as a component in the entire architectural equation. This is particularly relevant since, as a modernist, Le Corbusier might well have been accused of going to the extreme in stripping buildings of their decoration. That he transcended modernism might be, in part, attributed to the influence o f Leger, for whom the exclusivity of modernism was "socially dangerous." Leger appealed to architects like Le Corbusier to employ artists to enliven the "dead surfaces" of their designs by engaging in a "contract" with the wall to transform it from architectural skeleton to art piece. Thus, just as modern architecture "freed the wall" from Art Nouveau, Leger believed murals relieved the "cheerless soberness" of public architecture. This emphasis on murals as an architectural element was consistent with Le Corbusier's interest in the wall as a two-dimensional element within a three-dimensional space. The architectural composition was a setting for modern man and the mural an element within the pictorial space, like a painting, but freed from the confines of its frame. That Le Corbusier was aware of and participated in the contemporary practice of employing murals as an architectural tangible is apparent by virtue of his familiarity with Leger's murals at sites like N6tre-Dame-de-Toute- Grace (1949), the M i l a n Triennale (1951) and the United Nations General Assembly Hall (1952), as well as Henri Matisse's work at the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence, France. B y abandoning the predictability of Purism for a new art inspired by the cinema, modernism and advertising, Le Corbusier was able to assimilate their vocabulary of devices such as outlining and free form to establish poster-like, anthropomorphic works that had no basis in either geometry or the machine age. (Albeit, Beatriz Columina argues all three of these elements were a part of Le Corbusier's Purist aesthetic.) Regardless of whether these shapes represented the contrast between nature and the mechanical, as K u h suggests, or are an expression of rationalism, they represent a departure for Le Corbusier and evidence of the significance of his art production to his ideas about architecture, as seen at projects like Ronchamp chapel. Certainly, Le Corbusier's large-scale tapestry-murals of the late 1940s - or "mural nomade" as he called them - re-articulated the ambiguity between architecture as art and art as architecture, just as his polychromatic ceramics demonstrated his interest in the sculptural premise of architecture. 3.4.3 Conclusions About Le Corbusier's Attitudes Toward Art in Architectural Production In considering Le Corbusier's texts as a whole, certain themes concerning his attitude towards "art as decoration" compared to "architecture as art" and "architecture as primary" become apparent. We have seen that Le Corbusier's attitude about art as a decorative application to architecture was informed by Owen Jones' Grammar of Ornament (1856), in which Jones proposed that ornament should be based on geometrical constructions. Although his early career was marked by an interest in what Brooks refers to as decoration, light and pattern, more so than three-dimensional architecture, Le Corbusier was disdainful of much of the architecture he encountered during his travels, in particular, Vienna's " sanitary" secessionist architecture, which killed his "purely plastic conception of architecture."1 7 3 His contempt for movements that reached backwards to long-dead styles and institutions was apparent in his denigration of styles as being inconsequential to great architecture, which employed man's faculties by its abstraction and affected the emotions through its physical properties of mass and surface illuminated by light. 1 7 4 B y discarding the "the old clothes of a past age" that left architecture in a diseased state that confused art with mere decoration, Le Corbusier was able to respond to the Machine Age in a manner that supported the new order, surpassing the employment of devices such as chandeliers, wallpaper and faux-stucco stone, that he lectured were impertinent to the modern age, with the clean, efficient geometrical constructs.1 7 5 ' " B r o o k s 150. 1 7 4 Le Corbusier, Towards 26. 1 7 5 Le Corbusier, Towards 94-5, 120. 51 Peter Sereyni notes that Le Corbusier's period of most intensive exploration, between 1918 and 1922, occurred in the company of other painters, sculptors, poets and musicians - " A world which had nothing to do with propriety, conventionality, and established order, qualities which one usually associates with the world of architecture."1 7 6 This sociological approach aids in the understanding of Le Corbusier's sense of architecture as art form. Informed by the simple, folkloric architecture of his travels, readings of other architects and architectural critics including Hippolyte Taine's Voyage en Italie. which inspired in him an appreciation of the "sublime beauty of nature," as well as his own research into concepts about the integration of man, spirit and nature, Le Corbusier considered architecture to be poetic device. 1 7 7 Le Corbusier remained sympathetic to Taine's suggestion that the symmetry of forms in architecture excite and imitate relations that are particular to the realm of nature and, as such, attempts to disengage works of nature from the complexity and laws under which they operate to convey abstract concepts in a manner the common person can understand. Turner points out that Le Corbusier seldom referred to the buildings he witnessed in his voyage in structural terms. Rather they were described as geometric forms, an interweaving with music and other forms of art, much as Provensal proposed, in the pursuit of the divine "Idea." Thus, these researchs and readings informed Le Corbusier's thinking about the transendence of architecture from the mundane.1 7 8 Further, as has been alluded to, Le Corbusier's ideas about architecture as art are apparent in his appreciation of the "Romantic view" of art and architecture, inspired by the "sobriety," technical skill and organization o f German architecture, much the same as the readings of Hermman Muthesius influenced his interest in the simple forms of American grain elevators and the functionalism of bridges and railway stations. Also significant to Le Corbusier's belief in architecture's higher purpose - the integration of spirit and mind through "innate plastic forms" - was the modulating influence of author and artist artist Charles-Albert Cingria, who sensitized him to the formality and "brutality" of an architecture founded on utilitarianism. Cingria re-emphasized for Le Corbusier the importance of spiritual meditation and of an artistic elite characterized by refinement and sensitivity, what Turner refers to as "an elegant Classicism set in an unspoiled mountain landscape."1 7 9 Turner reflects on the essential difference between Le Corbusier and other prominent architects when he comments: "To Viollet-le-Duc or Perret, architecture would be 1 7 6 Peter Sereyni, "Le Corbusier, Fourier, and the Monastery of Ema (1967)," Le Corbusier in Perspective, ed. Peter Sereyni (Englewood Cliffs, N J : Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975) 103. 1 7 7 Turner suggests Le Corbusier was so taken with the symbolism of geometric forms, particularly circles and squares, and the naive purity of the white forms he discovered that he imbued them with metaphorical significance. Turner 95. Hippolyte Taine, Essay XIII: A Philosophy of Art (New York: Leypoldt and Holt, 1867). 1 7 8 Turner 42. http://www.worldwideschool.org/librarv/books/lit/essavs/The%20Unseen%20World. basically the patient empirical solution of problems by a rational and economic application of the materials and techniques at hand, but to Jeanneret it is a solitary search for truth...which when found then allows one to "create" and thus be an A r t i s t . " 1 8 0 Thus, since Le Corbusier thought of art as poetry that evoked sensation via a harmonious union with universal laws, he equated art with the joy of creation and, by so doing, placed architectural production within the realm of art. Finally, Le Corbusier's beliefs about architecture as primary was characterized by his acquaintance with the "diapason" of social phenomenon that enabled him to grasp the concreteness of the architect's task - to "adjust one's nascent dream to the countless elements which must ultimately accept its products as useful."'8 I B y turning from the teachings of the academies - "the burdensome accumulations of vague, pedantic and dangerous teachings" - Le Corbusier was able to promote architecture as the achievement of functional, efficient, healthy and pure structures determined by the spirit of the age.1 8 2 This approach of striving to find new and innovative responses to architectural concerns, stimulated by modern technologies, was characterized by devices such as the sashless window, to which he attached great architectural significance, and by the searching among vernacular architecture for "human houses" inspired by principles of efficiency, economy, lyricism and intelligence.1 8 3 Manifestos such as his five points of architecture supported his belief that academicism in architecture denied the revolutionary nature of the creative act, inspired by "faith, courage, imitation, enthusiasm, curiosity and the joy of discovery." 1 8 4 The influence of the machine in replacing the lyricism of local habit in architecture enabled the architect to transcend the role of a stylist to become a planner, an organizer of building systems, who articulated the design based on the requirements of the architectural programme. This approach elevated the role of the architect to one of the professional, consistent with Le Corbusier's beliefs about architects as noble spirits. The sources and viewpoints Le Corbusier consulted and adopted during his career were central to his design aesthetic. His early training, Purist experiments, concepts about principles such as universal laws and nature compared to geometry, involvement in collectivist notions of urban planning, participation in the C I A M dialogues 1 7 9 Turner 91. 1 8 0 Turner 54. 1 8 1 Le Corbusier, Decorative 213. 1 8 2 Le Corbusier, "Twentieth-century living and twentieth-century building," The Rationalists: Theory and Design in the Modern Movement, ed. Dennis Sharp (London: Architectural Press, 1978) 73. 1 8 3 Le Corbusier, "Twentieth-century" 74. 1 8 4 Le Corbusier, "Twentieth-century" 76. 53 and continuing research into building principles mediated his response to architecture. They informed later projects such as Ronchamp, while providing a rationale central to his desire to attain order and reason even in the face of the irrationality of the creative process. 3.5 Contempary Debates - C I A M , Other 3.5.1 1900 to 1930s To appreciate the environment in which Le Corbusier's major architectural pieces emerged, it is also important to be aware that, contemporaneous to his design commissions, Le Corbusier was involved with other prominent architects in a vigorous debate about the nature of art and architecture and, in particular, about the place of ornamentation, painting and sculpture within architecture. Examining contemporary thought about this debate illuminates the context in which Le Corbusier's own ideas about the symbiosis between art and architecture emerged. What is significant about the immediate post-1900 period is the rejection, by many architects, of the unadorned, functional, modernist, period form, with its abandonment of traditional styles. C. and A . Williams-Ellis commented on this sentiment, arguing that ornament was to architecture as simplicity was to the structure: "No architect living in a vigorous epoch would forgo the use o f ornament any more than he would forgo the use o f simplicity." 1 8 5 Frank L l o y d Wright (1867 to 1959) considered form and function to be synonymous and ornamentation to be a realization of the nature of the structure to be adorned. Although applied ornament as a form of spatial expression was not among his techniques, Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), writing in 1928, referred to building art as neither the achievement of functionalism nor formalism, but rather "the spatial expression of spiritual decisions."1 8 6 The movement to which Le Corbusier's design aesthetic is most frequently compared - the Bauhaus, represented by the Bauhaus School of Art, Design and Architecture, located in Weimar and then Dessau, Germany, between 1919 and 1933 and founded by architect Walter Gropius - also deserves cursory reference. Gropius described the 1 8 5 C. and A . Williams-Ellis, The Pleasures of Architecture (London: Jonathon Cape Ltd., 1924) 78. 54 1 8 6 Ockman, Architecture Culture 163. Bauhaus as a response to the technological environment in which modernist architecture emerged.1 8 7 He envisioned the architect as re-integrating basic human needs with industry: " M y belief is that.. .our disoriented society badly needs participation in the arts as an essential counterpart of science in order to stop its atomistic effect on us." 1 8 8 Artistic design was to be integral to life, rather than "art for art's sake."1 8 9 Thus, the Bauhaus combined technical training with instruction in volume, color and composition on the premise that: "What we preached in practice was the common citizenship of all forms of creative work, and their logical interdependence on one another in the modern w o r l d . " 1 9 0 While the Bauhaus was primarily an establishment for research and exploration into building systems, the problem of integrating art into architecture was approached as an element in the total design activity. Gropius describes this as "saving the mass-product and the home from mechanical anarchy and.. .restoring them to purpose, sense and life" so that art became a constituent part of everyday l i f e . 1 9 1 B y relieving architects of the constraints o f individual labour and imbuing them with "an objective knowledge o f optical facts" (such as proportion and colour) and of old and new forms and technologies, Gropius believed it was possible for architects to invent new orders that would advance their architecture beyond traditional styles.1 9 2 He articulated this way of seeing as "the mutual tension between the subconscious and conscious faculties of our existence...(that) fluctuates between reality and illusion" and contributes to artistic creation.1 9 3 Gropius shared many of Le Corbusier's design concerns - standardization, the search for efficiency - however, the emphasis on art as an antidote to industry through encouraging the integration of the abstract arts and architecture brings his thoughts closest to those articulated by many architects of the period. For these architects and the Bauhaus, architecture was primary, but informed by the processes of art (the emphasis on design principles such as form and colour). Ronchamp illustrates that, for Le Corbusier, the art is integral to the architecture to the extent that the architecture is art and the architecture could not respond to the demands of the form without the art. 1 8 7 Gropius considered the New Architecture to be a new spatial vision made possible by the intellectual and technological achievements of the age. Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (Boston: Charles T. Brantford Company, n.d.) 24. 1 8 8 Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1956) 162. 1 8 9 "Our ambition was to rouse the creative artist from his other-worldliness and reintegrate him into the workaday world of realities; and at the same time to broaden and humanize the rigid, almost exclusively material, mind of the business man." Gropius, New 90. 1 9 0 Gropius, New 85. 1 9 1 Gropius, Scope 24. 1 9 2 Gropius, Scope 29, 58. 1 9 3 Gropius, Scope 38. 55 A n y examination of Le Corbusier's attitude toward the relationship of art to architectural production is incomplete without consideration of how he arrived at his beliefs and those documents and individuals that influenced him. Le Corbusier's conservative introduction to art and architecture, consistent with the thinking o f the Ecole des Beaux- Arts and traditional French academies, is evident in his early drawings and Swiss villas, although he also experimented with new forms, such as Art Nouveau. Le Corbusier's career emerged during an era of innovation, made possible by the availability of new materials such as reinforced concrete, steel and iron, and by his exposure to leading modernist architects, including Peter Behrens and Auguste Perret, whose 25b rue Franklin (1903) and Garage Ponthieu (1905) were among the first forms to exploit aesthetically reinforced concrete frame construction. Although his 1920s and 1930s projects were generally modernist - emphasizing function, utility and honesty in materials while employing modern materials and technology - Le Corbusier's appreciation o f the relationship of art to architectural production was demonstrated in the use of devices such as polychromy and curvature, as well as elements such as rooftop terraces that offset the rationalism of his designs by juxtaposing them with nature. Le Corbusier's Swiss upbringing, his studies at L a Chaux-de-Fonds' Ecole d'Art, his readings of the works of Provensal, Callignon, Ruskin and Shure and his brief internships with Perret and Behrens contributed to an evolving appreciation of the relationships between humans, nature, art and architecture.1 9 4 Some of these influences can be traced to such readings as French architect Henri Provensal's tome, L'art de demain, which urged artists to engage in the discovery and application of universal laws by exposing the essential forms of nature and to pursue unity and harmony through new and universal art forms such as the cube, which he considered to be "the most perfect and universal, and thus the most expressive of ideal reality." 1 9 5 Turner suggests that Provensal's assertion that architecture took its inspiration from mineral forms stimulated Le Corbusier's interest in the correlation between the structure of crystals and structural supports.1 9 6 Similarly, Provensal's concern for primary forms was manifested in Le Corbusier's belief that architecture was "first of all an abstract, sculptural activity, which ought to employ primary volumes because they are purer and more Ideal." 1 9 7 A s Turner comments: "The idealistic assumption that there exist perfect formal principles or Ideas, which can ultimately be discovered and embodied by the artist, was probably the most fundamental influence of Provensal on Jeanneret. A l l of the more specific 1 9 4 Turner 8. 1 9 5 Turner 15, 19. 1 9 6 Turner 19. 56 influences - such as the preference for "cubic" forms and the definition of architecture as (an abstracted form comprised of) the play of volumes under light - are corollaries, in Provensal's aesthetic, of this idealistic assumption."1 9 8 This concern with principles and ideals is seen in Le Corbusier's Purist designs and in manifestos such as his five principles of architecture. O f similar influence was Mvthlogie figuree de la Grece, by Maxime Callignon, which Le Corbusier acquired in 1903 and which intimated the existence of classical norms that architects might use to resolve artistic problems. Also significant was his reading of Les grands inities. by Edouard Schure, given to Le Corbusier by L'Eplattanier in 1907 and which compared Pythagorean mythology to a mathematic system of divine members. Schure's text, as well as L'Eplattanier's belief in local forms (such as the lotus in Egypt and the acanthus in Greece) as the inspiration for art, may have inspired Le Corbusier's journey to the East, which acted as the stimulus for many of his philosophical musings.1 9 9 Le Corbusier's writings during this period indicate that he was also influenced by the decorative artists Lalique and Galle and the architect Guimard; he considered Galle requisite reading for architects and appears to have adopted Lalique's sinuous Art Nouveau style for his watchcase designs while still an engraver in L a Chaux-de- Fonds. Other influences during this early period of his career were John Ruskin, with his concern about the correlation between art and architecture; Owen Jones, who employed the decorative tradition within the architectural idiom; and the Art Nouveau designer Eugene Grosset (also referred to as Grasset). Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85), like L'art de demain. contributed to Le Corbusier's understanding of the architect as a spiritual, noble hero, "seeking out ideal principles and absolute truth" while pursuing the "art of tomorrow," as Perret had taught h i m . 2 0 0 Jencks refers to this as the concept of "...the 'superman' struggling among men and the necessity that he destroy conventional wisdom before he can realize his revolutionary ideas."2 0 1 Le Corbusier's ideas about beauty, harmony and unity, as well as his search for generalization, universality and absolute formal truths, in both art and architecture, can be attributed to this period of introspection, as can his interest in decoration, the elements o f the Modulor and his heroic projects, such as his Palace of the Soviets (1931) in Moscow. 1 9 7 Turner 22. 1 9 8 Turner 24. 1 9 9 Turner 6. 2 0 0 Turner 61. 2 0 1 Jencks, Tragic 25. 57 Thus, Le Corbusier's perception of the role of art in architectural production was that of the complex interlocutory between technology and the aesthetic demands of the form. This dynamic was manifested in his machinist pieces between the 1920s and the 1930s, concluding with his pivotal Cite de Refuge (1933). 3.5.2 Post 1930 The discourse about the relationship of art - more particularly ornament - and architecture continued to dominant architectural thought during the 1930s through 1950s. A series of dialogues referred to as the C I A M (Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) discourses, and ongoing debate among architects about the role of the allied arts in architecture, are significant in understanding the environment in which Le Corbusier's interest in symbiosis between the arts evolved. The formation of C I A M in 1928 by, among others, Le Corbusier; Giedion; members of the Swiss Werkbund; and Gabriel Guerrekian, signaled the recognition of the influence of the modernist movement on contemporary architecture. C I A M was intended to advance the cause of new architecture in an era of neo- Classicism. The efforts of Mies van der Rohe and Gropius to "cleanse" modern architecture of Expressionism and similar influences were as decisive to C I A M ' s foundation as was the involvement of Mart Stam and Hans Schmidt, who represented a collective of avant-garde architects intent on creating an international corps of architects.2 0 2 The "convergence" of factors that contributed to the formation of C I A M was coincident with a movement to promote "the new architecture" to political interests and to solidify a form of architecture that was modern in its social and economic aims; Giedion believed Gropius, van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Oud, V a n Eeasteren, Mart Stam and Hans Schmidt would participate in the effort to define modern architecture.203 This objective of linking specific "formal and technical strategies" for the purposes of achieving social transformation serves to explain some of the motivation for Le Corbusier's participation in C I A M . 2 0 4 That Le Corbusier considered C I A M to be an agent of social change that could intervene in the physical environment "for the common good" was, to some extent, realized; Le Corbusier's proposal for a Charter of Habitat to replace the Athens Charter received a hearing at C I A M in 1953. Similar efforts to position C I A M on questions of aesthetics in 2 0 2 Giedion defined C I A M ' s mandate as: "a) To formulate the contemporary program of architecture, b) To advocate the idea o f modern architecture, c). To forcefully introduce this idea into technical, economic and social circles, d). To see to the resolution of architectural problems." As cited in Eric Mumford, The C I A M Discourse on Urbanism. 1928-1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: The M I T Press, 2000) 10. 2 0 3 Mumford. C I A M 11. 2 0 4 Mumford. C I A M 12. architecture and on what Q A M considered to be a synthesis between architecture and the arts were inconclusive, although Le Corbusier reportedly was pleased with Giedion's suggestion that art should be a "preoccupation" for C I A M members. Mumford remarks that Giedion's and J. M . Richards' "Report on the Plastic Arts" to Q A M (February 1950), intended to determine how artists and architects could collaborate on a synthesis of the arts and whether such a collaboration would be acceptable to the public, was inconclusive, exposing the "confusion and underlying political conflicts behind C I A M ' s effort to explicitly address aesthetic questions," although there was some discussion that public places would be most appropriate.to these efforts.2 0 5 Conversely, Giedion points out that the 1947 C I A M Bridgewater conference applauded the re-integration of the plastic arts and the evolution of a corresponding clarity about contemporary artistic expression. C I A M ' s statement of aims included the desire to "enlarge and enrich the aesthetic language of architecture in order to provide a contemporary means whereby people's emotional needs can find expression in the design of their environment."2 0 6 The tone of the C I A M discussions of 1947 is evident in the concerns expressed by the M A R S group of England about "the emotional reactions of the common man to modern art, and especially to architecture," as well as J. M Richards' contributions to the question of whether architects should design according to their own consciousness or popular taste.2 0 7 In "Contemporary Architecture and the Common M a n " (ca. 1947), Richards asks how architecture should account for public taste so as to create a bond with those who view it. This desire to humanize architecture by re-introducing the common man as its benefactor, rather than aspiring to elitism - "an art of the kind that is appreciated only by connoisseurs" - recognizes architecture's function as an interpreter of modern technology in a visual form. Giedion expressed this as the need to "take into account those qualities in buildings that have, at the present moment, a symbolic or emotional significance for ordinary people, so that architecture shall remain an art in whose adventures they can share."2 0 8 Giedion acknowledged the interest in the aesthetic but argued that, with the expiry of rationalism, architecture must resume its collaborative nature.2 0 9 The 7th C I A M congress acknowledged the desirability of a "synthesis" of the plastic arts and called for the concerted participation of artists, sculptors and architects. The 1947 Bridgewater congress further considered the question of the meaning of art in the modern 2 0 5 Mumford, C I A M 198. 2 0 6 Giedion. Decade 17. 207" j n e s e c o n c j n o i e s s alarming problem was the fact that close contact between the architect and planner, painter and sculptor, has been lost for a century and a half. Is it possible that they will ever again be able to work together from the outset, as was usual in other periods...." Giedion, Decade 30. 2 0 8 Giedion, Decade 33. 59 period and how artists and architects could interact with public buildings. Among the issues the Bridgewater participants debated was the "impact of the Sister Arts" (architecture, painting and sculpture), including whether and how they might collaborate, at what stage, how to overcome the "difficulties" caused by their separation and when the painter or sculptor might take precedence over the architect.2 1 0 Coincident with this interest in a collaboration between the arts, the conclusion of the Second World War brought to the forefront concerns about architecture's populist appeal, characterized by comparisons between modernism and social realism. 2 " Giedion emphasized the importance of collaboration between architects, painters and sculptors to stimulate a modern "optical vision." A treatise, "Nine Points on Monumentality" (1943), commissioned by the American Abstract Artists and expounding upon the writings of Giedion, Josep Luis Sert and Leger, opened this discussion.2 1 2 Giedion's advocacy for monumentality, which already had support among many Swiss architects, was countered by those architects who promoted a return to traditional technique and the village plan as an idealized model of social collectivism. This New Empiricism was widely considered a suitable postscript to Classicism. While it is not necessary to explore the concept of monumentality for the purposes of this thesis, it is appropriate to note that the post-war environment stimulated a re-examination of the role of art in architecture, both as supplemental and as integral to the design process. Other important voices who emerged in the 1940s to critique the concern about modernism and the synthesis of art and architecture included Lewis Mumford who, writing in 1946, commented that while some critics considered the "inclination" to incorporate subjective design elements into modern design to be a rejection of functionalism, yet the impulse to "play with the 'feeling' elements in design - with colour, texture, even painting and sculpture" was irrepressible.2 1 3 Mathew Nowicki suggested the shift that occurred during the 1940s acknowledged that architecture is representational, rejecting the "functional exactitude" that emerged in response to the "new taste for purity and simplicity of form" engendered by Cezanne and Synthetic Cubism (although ironically it is this Synthetic Cubism 2 0 9 Giedion, Decade 35. Giedion points out that prominent sculptor Barbara Hepworth was among those who considered architects to have failed to achieve unity with painters and sculptors. Giedion, Decade 35. 2 1 0 The Bridgewater Questionnaire. Giedion, Decade 31-2. 2 1 1 J. M . Richards argued that modern architecture held little interest for the masses. 2 1 2 Le Corbusier's "Open Hand" sculpture at Chandigarh and the 1938 Monument Paul Vaillant Couturier are representative of the interest in monumentality. Mumford, C I A M 150. 2 1 3 Lewis Mumford, "The Skyline [Bay Region Style]," Joan Ockman, ed. Architecture Culture: 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology (New York: R i z z o l i International Publications, 1993) 109. that Le Corbusier rejected in the 1920s).2 1 4 Nowicki considered the emergence of the Modulor to be an indication that architecture had evolved from quantitative to qualitative - he suggested the Modulor was the vehicle to achieve this, a "measure of beauty" rather than "functional" space or time that acknowledged that the essence of architectural invention was paramount to the pace of its attainment.215 Attendant in this was a surety that although form might change through a process of individual discovery, the "object" of architecture remained the same. The decoration of the structure, rather than form, represented an era of what Nowicki deemed functional flexibility. 2 1 6 J.J.P. Oud argued modernism was deficient due to its creation of a functionalism that is aesthetically arbitrary, rather than acknowledging architecture as an expressive medium. 2 1 7 Joseph Hudnut pointed to the detachment of architecture from the expressive idea as evidence of the ineloquence of modernism.2 1 8 If architecture is space patterned after a person's spirit, besides being expedient, economical and functional, it must also be art, whereas painting and sculpture are accessories to architecture. Reyner Banham, in contributing further to this discussion, notes the white machine-aesthetic style not only wasn't inherent in the "technical and economic realities" of the 1920s and 30s, it was a reaction to C u b i s m . 2 1 9 To position Le Corbusier within this environment of reconciliation and reconsideration, it is necessary to appreciate that the architect spent the post-WW II period atoning for his collaboration with the Vichy regime between 1940 to 1942, a collaboration that resulted in his appointment to the Vichy reconstruction commission, the publication of his "Destin de Paris" Radiant City manifesto for the reconstruction of Paris in 1940 and the completion of his Athens Charter, finally published in 1943. Although abandoned by the Vichy government in early 1942, Le Corbusier attempted to re-establish his ties with pro-Vichy government officials by publishing his own version of the C I A M doctrines through the newly-founded A S C O R A L (Assemblee de constructeurs pour une renovation 2 1 4 Nowicki argues architecture became "idealized" and "dematerialized." The structural challenges in modernism bowed to "functional exactitude" so that buildings became obsolete once they were no longer functional. Matthew Nowicki, "Origins and Trends in Modern Architecture," Architecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993) 152-4. 2 1 5 Nowicki, "Origins" 154. 2 1 6 "Art tends not only to discover the truth, but to exaggerate and finally to distort it. It may be that in this distortion lies the essence of art." Nowicki, "Origins" 156. 2 1 7 "One could say with some exaggeration: it (modernist architecture) is the bass to the music but not its essence." J.J.P. Oud, " M r . Oud Replies," Architecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: R i z z o l i International Publications, 1993) 104. Oud's 1940s Shell Building was criticized by Architectural Record as peasant art. 2 1 8 Despite the freedom modernism gave architecture to model and direct space, it was deficient in a vocabulary to achieve the idea of form. Hudnut, "Post-Modern," 74. 2 1 9 Banham calls it "an applied style, transferred from post-Cubist painting under the pressure o f fashion." Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1966) 86. 61 architecturale). During this period, he also published L a maison des hommes and Sur les quatres routes (1941), both reconstruction-oriented documents, followed by Les trois etablissements humain (1945) and Maniere de penser l'urbanisme (1946). In spite of his obvious interest in reconstruction, other than his Unite projects, Le Corbusier's role in post-war reconstruction was limited and his involvement with C I A M marred by his criticism of the work of the Swiss faction.2 2 1 Le Corbusier concluded the immediate post-war period leading up to the Ronchamp commission bitterly in agreement with other leading thinkers about the relevance of the synthesis of art with architecture, but disappointed with his participation in the design for the United Nations headquarters in spring 1947 and with his proposal for a new society led by a super race of technocrats, scientists and experts discredited. 221 Le Corbusier believed this strategy would enable the continuation of C I A M in a post-war environment. Mumford. C I A M 154. 62 C H A P T E R IV L O O K I N G A T R O N C H A M P : A C A S E S T U D Y 4.1 Introduction to the Case Study Illustrative of Le Corbusier's interest in the symbiosis between art and architecture (or the concept of mutualism, as symbiosis is defined for the purposes of this thesis) is his Roman Catholic pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp, in northeastern France. While the project can be viewed in isolation, some critics, Gardiner included, consider it to be the logical outcome of all of Le Corbusier's experiences: "There are the memories of the Greek island villages which the architect saw in his early travels; the scattering of openings on sunny white backgrounds coincides with the rough irregular imagery of French peasant architecture; there is the ghost of the classical past in the single clean statement of the sculptural object on the top of a hill; there is a freedom of nature and the painter in the interlocking, overlapping, sweeping walls of the superb plan." 2 2 2 Extrapolating from Gardiner's interpretation and within the context o f the hypothesis that Le Corbusier's art and architecture are mutually influential, the case study w i l l examine both the essentialism of symbiosis for Le Corbusier and the contribution o f critical writings and theories about Ronchamp to the understanding of the project's significance to this question of the intent of the design. The architectural programme w i l l be discussed to gain an understanding of the influence of the requirements of the commission on the design, the role of the Roman Catholic Church and the architect's design purpose. The case study w i l l conclude by considering the importance of the design to ideas about the symbiosis of art and architecture. 4.2 Evidence of Intent at Ronchamp 4.2.1 The Architectural Programme A s might be expected of a religious commission of a post-war Roman Catholic chapel, the architectural programme at Ronchamp embraces premises of sanctuary, pilgrimage and humility. Le Corbusier was able to enjoin these 63 concepts because of his appreciation of the sacredness of the site and of the place of the Roman Catholic Church within the circumstances of modernism. 4.2.1.1 Requirements of the Commission Le Corbusier was approached to design Ronchamp in 1950 by the Besancon Commission d'Art Sacre of the Roman Catholic Church. The timing of the commission is significant in that Ronchamp represents a post-WW II reconstruction effort. The 1944 liberation of France, one of the few remaining great powers in Europe, engendered a sense of rebirth, evidenced by reforms introduced by a short-lived coalition government of Socialists, Communists and Republicans and a re-industrialization, particularly as it affected the building of housing and essential community services, such as schools and hospitals. Although France experienced a difficult period of post-WWII reconstruction and modernization, this climate of redevelopment was a stimulus for innovation.2 2 3 Ronchamp embraced the spirit of renaissance, as well as the renewal of spirit and faith through the reconstruction of cultural and religious institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church. The siting of Ronchamp is peculiar to the commission, in that it encompasses diverse concepts of religious sanctuary dating to the 4 t h century; the relationship of the site to military defence by virtue of its history as a Roman fortress and its positioning along a prominent invasion route; the role of Catholicism as a rival to the Calvinist and Lutheran beliefs of the shared landscape's Swiss and German inhabitants; the site as a location of pagan worship as a former sun temple; as well its significance as a place of miracles and pilgrimage. Importantly for Le Corbusier, the site faces north to the Voges foothills, east to the mining town o f Belfort, west to the Langres plateau and South to the Jura mountains, enclosing the four horizons and presenting an aspect not unlike his much-admired Acropolis. For Le Corbusier's purposes, the site and chapel were themselves symbiotic elements.2 2 4 1 1 1 Gardiner 24-5. 2 2 3 Address by Ambassador Francois Bujon de l'Estang to the French Institute Alliance Francaise, "France and the United States: seen through each other's eyes," New York, November 30, 2000, accessed 5 October 2004, . 2 2 4 Frampton 168. 64 http://www.info-firance-usa.org/news/statmnts/2000/be3011%20.asp Significant to the commission is the chapel's relevance as a pilgrimage site, since that constraint affects the conceptual programme. We know that Le Corbusier referenced the site as one of pilgrimage on specific festival days, but also of daily pilgrimage for the chapel's adherents and admirers. This acknowledgement was translated into the subsequent design through a number of subtle, yet ritualized devices. Pilgrimage sites - whether associated with patron saints, as places of worship to petition God (such as to seek penitence, express gratitude through festivals or to attain solitude or spiritual growth) or as healing places dedicated to the Virgin Mary, such as Lourdes and Fatima - involve an individual test of faith, typically comprising an arduous and lengthy journey that the architecture frequently recreates as ritual. 2 2 5 The pilgrimage may consist of successive stages of spiritual preparation and separation from everyday life and experiences, coupled with ritualized behaviors and dress that create a "bridge between the pilgrim's old life and the hoped-for healing cure or spiritual transformation."2 2 6 This pathway to the church, whether ritualized or secular, is typically engendered in the site and building design, contributing to the experience of arrival and revelation. Upon arrival, the pilgrim might pass through a series of obstacles or directional devices, such as gates or labyrinths, or a series of rites, such as praying at the Stations of the Cross, to attain the place of meditation; the return to society is in the form of a transformed spirit. Le Corbusier expressed the pilgrim's extended journey by situating the approach to the chapel along a pathway that obscures the view of the chapel and in proximity to a concrete abutment that must be breached to reach the grassy approach to the concave south wall, which serves to collect worshippers and redirect them to the outdoor chapel and pulpit in the chapel's east face. Thus, by addressing the complexity of the access, Le Corbusier demonstrated his understanding of long-held traditions of pilgrimage church architecture. Besides its religious function, the site has constraints of a more practical, physical nature. Setting aside, for the interim, arguments that the design is "a visual echo of the landscape," the volumetric proportions of Ronchamp were necessitated by the requirement for the extensive use of reinforced concrete and rough rubble. The programme was constrained by a lack of road access to convey building materials to the site, as well as by a specification of the Bescancon commission that salvaged material should be used for the construction, both as a measure of economy and as evidence of the humbleness of the chapel's materials. This accounted for the use of a concrete shell, with rubble from the former chapel, ruined during the Second World War, serving as f i l l which, with the exception of the 2 2 5 " A n internalized world was created in which the pilgrim's journey is re-created in the architectural setting - the spiritual path and place." Thomas Barrie, Spiritual Paths and Sacred Space: Myth, Ritual, and Meaning in Architecture (Boston and London: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1996) 28. 65 south fall, is sprayed with Gunnite coated masonry, the thickness and "curvilinear plan-form" contributing to the structure's stability. 2 2 7 Le Corbusier admitted the chapel walls were rendered "deliberately heavy" in order to exploit the f i l l , while allowing for a frame of reinforced concrete columns, sited within the walls and on which the roof balances; the separation of the roof from the walls is intended to permit a thin slice of natural light to illuminate the chapel interior. The south wall itself is formed from piers, beams and joists united by a skin of sprayed concrete, while the chapel floor is cement paving, the towers masonry and the domes sprayed concrete. Acknowledging the constraints of the church's requirements, the limited budget (consisting generally o f a war grant and funds raised by the parishioners) and the difficulty of transporting materials to the isolated site, there is another explanation for the choice of reinforced concrete: Le Corbusier's exploration of organic form could scarcely have been achieved in anything but a porous material "kneaded and shaped into the mould of the design" - what Pauly refers to as Le Corbusier's realization of his "language of plasticity."2 2 8 4.2.1.2 Role of the Roman Catholic Church and its Adherents The unique circumstances of post-war Europe, with its concern for renewal and renaissance, and the liberalism of particular factions of the Roman Catholic Church are further integral to the innovation of Ronchamp. The Mediator Dei encyclical, proclaimed by Pope Pius XII in 1947, encouraged the employment of modern art and architecture in church buildings. M c K a y suggests the Mediator Dei was inspired by the Pope's interest in "aesthetics, function, modernity, and the humanist traditions with regard to man's contributions to church ritual." 2 2 9 The encyclical addressed issues of functionalism, spatial arrangements, construction materials and meditative space that converged with Le Corbusier's beliefs and the desire of certain avant-garde Roman Catholic priests - represented, for Ronchamp's purposes, by prominent members of the Lyons chapter of the Dominican order - to stimulate a renewed interest in the church by engaging modern artists and architects in their design, as apparent at churches at Audincourt, Assy and Vence. 2 2 6 Barrie 29. 2 2 7 The Library of Contemporary Architects, Le Corbusier (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1970) 130. 2 2 8 Pauly, Le Corbusier 101. 2 2 9 Frances Sherry M c K a y , " A Study of Le Corbusier's Notre-Dame-du-Haut, Ronchamp as a Twentieth-Century Pilgrimage Chapel," M A thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, October 1979, 15. 66 L'art sacre editor Father Alain Couturier, also an artist and among Le Corbusier's supporters on the failed L a Sainte- Baume commission (1947), was responsible for encouraging the Besancon Commission for Sacred Art to engage Le Corbusier for the Ronchamp commission and for mediating the relationship between the Church hierarchy and many other contemporary artists, among them Henri Matisse, Leger and Marc Chagall. Couturier, a member of the Parisian Dominican Order, was responsible for the creation of the Unites des Artistes Modernes in 1925, intended to establish religious art as a preoccupation for a generation of artists and craftspeople, through which he first met Le Corbusier. Over two decades later, Couturier referred to January 20, 1951, the date a diocesan committee approved the design for Ronchamp, as symbolic of the renewal of Christian art. Nevertheless, Le Corbusier was sufficiently sympathetic to Ledeur's entreaties about the significance of the pilgrimage site and its physical possibilities, as well as those of Father Regamy, who advocated for a "living art" of pure forms, to assume the commission and set aside his initial objections about the futility of designing for a "dead institution" (the church). 2 3 0 M c K a y observes that whereas Ledeur established only functional parameters for the architect, Regamy "expressed his ideals in terms such as harmony, proportion, an attendance to line and rhythm, powerful and beautiful volumes and masses, and in ingenious distribution of light and shadow."2 3 1 Thus, while Ledeur and Le Corbusier shared an interest in beauty, truth and "spiritual architecture" that enabled Ledeur to secure Le Corbusier's commitment by assuring him he would retain artistic integrity over the project, in accepting the commission, Le Corbusier was also responding to a concern shared with Regamy for the possibilities of the architectural programme, which he exploited to "create a place of silence, of prayer, of peace and of internal j o y . " 2 3 2 Similarly, Couturier's faith in Le Corbusier extended to an appreciation of his "sacred essence." Le Corbusier related architecture and sculpture to the attainment of ineffable space, "which Le Corbusier equated with the experience of the miracle of faith...." - the aforementioned consummation of plastic emotion." 2 3 3 Couturier's personal correspondence with Le Corbusier purported that it was not the tenor of the artist's religious commitment McKay.22. Instructions from Canon Lucien to Le Corbusier. Frampton 167. 2 3 1 M c K a y 22. 2 3 2 T i m Benton, "The sacred and the search for myths," Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century, exhibition catalogue, eds. Michael Raeburn and Victoria Wilson (London: Arts Council of Great Britain and authors, 1987) 247. 2 3 3 M c K a y 65. 67 that was significant to the revival of sacred art, but rather the moment of artistic inspiration: "To set off this renaissance, this resurrection, it is safer to turn to geniuses without faith than believers without talent."2 3 4 Quite beside this, Le Corbusier's interest in monastic life uniquely positioned him to undertake Ronchamp; elements of the design are reminiscent of the private cells of the monasteries he visited, evidenced in Ronchamp in the private altars, and o f the pervasiveness of their silent, meditative spaces, replicated at Ronchamp in the primaeval, hollow (cave-like) interior. Perhaps Le Corbusier alluded to the monastic quality o f the project in his design manifesto, Textes et dessins pour Ronchamp (1965), when he commented that: "The interior is also sculpture in the round (hollow), the four walls, the ceiling, the floor, everything is pressed into service in a disarming simplicity." 2 3 5 Hence, Le Corbusier was able to parlay the exquisite isolation of the site and of the chapel's meditative function into stimuli for the innovative design, while, through his research, by his separation of the congregation from the altar and the incorporation of objects such as the candlebra, rail and image of the diety to delineate the distinction between the sacred and the secular, also responding to Roman Catholic tradition. 4.2.1.3 Purpose of Le Corbusier's Design Programme Irrespective of the requirements of the commission, Le Corbusier's design programme was essentially intuitive, while informed by considerations of the integral nature of art and architecture, the "visual acoustics" of the landscape and the pragmatic requirements of a Roman Catholic meditation and pilgrimage chapel. Ronchamp refers back to the Greek: the chapel towers echo the Serapeum at Hadrian's V i l l a , which Le Corbusier saw in 1911, while he credits his experiences in Greek villages to the systematic approach to design as a "coherent intellectual system" that employs geometry to explicate the proportion of the form to his experiences.2 3 6 Ronchamp owes much to the Acropolis - its siting on the apex of the four horizons, its towers and whiteness: " A s one looks at those three white towers one remembers that forty years earlier Le Corbusier had lived for a time in Athos and filled a sketch book M i r i a m Rosen, "Sacre Bleu," February 2004, CompuServe, accessed 24 August 2004, . 2 3 5 Le Corbusier, The chapel at Ronchamp (Oxford: Praeger, 1957) n.p. 2 3 6 Le Corbusier, L'art decoratif d'auiourd'hui as cited in Guiton, Ideas 115. 68 http://cssvc.travel.%20travelandleisure.compuserve.com/invoke.cfm?ObiectID=FF466860-3C84-431B-8C72D921A64BC045 http://cssvc.travel.%20travelandleisure.compuserve.com/invoke.cfm?ObiectID=FF466860-3C84-431B-8C72D921A64BC045 with these little Greek churches." Further, Le Corbusier was taken with the possibilities implicit in the duality of designing a small chapel meant to serve thousands of pilgrims, as he alluded to ca. 1908 while standing on the apex o f M t . Athos, when he compared the chapel of the Virgin to "the unleavened bread of an ineffable communion" for the pilgrims. 2 3 8 Further allusions have been made to resemblances to the Church o f S. Maria in Rome. The concept of the "great form," as symbolized by the Parthenon and the Church of S. Maria, is itself amplified by Ronchamp's splendid isolation and domineering presence.2 3 9 Perhaps Le Corbusier was recalling the monasteries of Karies, perched "like eagles' eyries" on the rock faces: "The Virgin has her altar on the great mountain consecrated entirely to her praise." 2 4 0 Le Corbusier envisioned the design during his first glimpse of the site on M a y 20, 1950. The ensuing sketches are prescient of the final design. A pair of clay models from September 1950, produced four months after his initial June 1950 site visit, bring to mind Le Corbusier's polychromed sculptures, Ozon (1940) and Ubu (1947). Fortunately, Le Corbusier's sketchbooks document the thought process for Ronchamp. There are references to early influences: Ronchamp seems foreshadowed by a sketch (703) of a belfry; while Le Corbusier made no comment about this particular sketch, the resemblance is apparent.241 Several Acropolis-like sketches further demonstrate his appreciation for classical architecture and symbolism, while, interestingly, Le Corbusier's sketchbooks also expose a more complex appreciation of Christianity and fellowship than were previously evident in his writings. 2 4 2 His preliminary impressions are contained in sketches 272 to 273 (D17) of summer 1950. The drawings are made from the Paris-Basel train and show a shapeless, but domineering structure that gazes in all directions. Sketch 274 captures the basic shape of Ronchamp's roof and outdoor pulpit. Sketchbook E l 8 of February 1951 chronicles the ultimate design: This series illustrates the punctured south wall and voluminous altar, along with Ronchamp's swayback roof (312), culminating in a sketch that anticipates the final design. This drawing allowed Le Corbusier to play with an intimidating cross figure (313, drawn from his memories of his initial June 9, 1950 site visit) and to scoop out the west facade, as well as the floor plan (314); Le Corbusier seemed to recognize, in these designs, that 2 i l Jordan, Le Corbusier 134. 2 3 8 Le Corbusier, Journey 190; Benton, "The sacred" 249. 2 3 9 Darling is among commentators who have pointed out that the chapel commands the brow of the h i l l . Elizabeth Darling, Le Corbusier (London: Carlton Books Limited, 2000) 22. 2 4 0 Le Corbusier, Journey 181. 2 4 1 Franclieu agrees. Fondation Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks, V o l . 1,31. 2 4 2 "(The) modern world having lost contact with or the memory of its deeper realities, would welcome the teachings of a new Jesus who is strong, simple and human." Fondation Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks, notation 459, V o l . 1, 22. 69 the vast south wall would be in regular shadow because of the voluminous roof (314). 2 4 3 A February 12, 1951 drawing contemplates a double tower - conventional for the west facade of Gothic churches, but also reminiscent of the grain elevators or nuclear cooling towers Le Corbusier admired. The twin tower re-emerges in sketch 322, where the volume o f the south-facing roof is also apparent. The ovoid roofscape, as seen from the west horizon, is further revealed in his preliminary sketches (318). Le Corbusier was able to refine the shape in these sketches, as well as determining the water runoff channel for the roof (319-20): sketches 321 and 325 elaborated on the catch basin and rock f i l l . His sketchbooks also illustrate his attention to the north balcony, while the roof is likened to a ski jump noticed while flying over Crete on February 20, 1951 - the "ski jump" effect is apparent in sketches 327-8. Through his initial sketches, Le Corbusier also clarified the cavern-like interior, with its pulpit and deep-set south windows (326), and anticipated the colored "transparencies" o f the south windows. These simple sketches belie the mastery of Ronchamp. Franclieu sees them as illustrative of Le Corbusier's creative process; they represent visual cues to his 1 • 2 4 4 design pretext. A primary consideration in the design is also Le Corbusier's choice of the situational context, which he believed exploited the daunting views. In what Geoffrey Baker refers to as "the confrontation between movement and the building," Le Corbusier utilized the oblique axis of the site to display the chapel entrance and outdoor assembly area.2 4 5 The downward incline of the roof drags the eye towards the main entrance, where its abrupt intersection with the main tower "creates a dynamic tension at the point o f cleavage."2 4 6 Further, by tilting the chapel along its transverse axis, the architect drew movement along a longitudinal line that bisected the hilltop site. Baker refers to this longitudinal aspect as the secondary zone. The concave "acoustical" south face "arrests the observer's viewpoint, directing them to the main entrance, bulwarked by the larger chapel tower."2 4 7 The denseness of the south wall, what Baker calls a "sawtooth" plan, with its painted glass display of spectacular, oddly-shaped glazed windows, conversely anticipates the necessity to separate visitors from the meditative pilgrimage zone defined by the east 2 4 3 Le Corbusier frequently refrained from sketching his designs until he had worked through the creative problem. Fondation Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks, V o l . 2, 27. 2 4 4 "When I am given a task, I am in the habit of tucking it away in my memory, that is, of not allowing any sketch to be done for several months....then one day, a spontaneous initiative of the inner being takes place, everything falls into place; one takes a pencil, a bit of charcoal, some colored pencils (color is the key to the process) and one gives birth right there on the paper: the idea comes forth, the child comes forth, it has come into the world, it is born." Le Corbusier, Textes et dessins pour Ronchamp (Paris: Forces Vives, 1965) as cited in Fondation Le Corbusier, Sketchbooks. V o l . 2, 27. 2 4 5 Geoffrey H . Baker, Le Corbusier: A n Analysis of Form (Berkshire: Van Nostrand Reinhold (U.K.) Co. Ltd., 1984) I 9 l . 2 4 6 Baker 200. 2 4 7 Baker 192-3. 70 wall. Baker comments that: "The south wall therefore draws in the visitor with its curvature, yet acts as a barrier to be penetrated as a result o f the sloping wall." Just as the convex nature of the northern and western walls separates the pilgrimage area from the functional zones, Baker comments that Le Corbusier, seemingly instinctively, creates another bisection between the location o f the secondary entrance and the eastern exit by obscuring them by means of the oblique thrust of the south w a l l . 2 4 9 O f further significance to the siting is a concept Le Corbusier refers to as the "visual acoustics" of the French landscape. Le Corbusier considered the chapel a "land of acoustic sculpture," or an "acoustic plastic work," like the dichotomy of the positive-negative form that ("the outside is always an inside") that both projects into and is projected upon the surfaces around i t . 2 5 0 Le Corbusier believed acoustic forms were the outcome of the action of a work of architecture or sculpture on its surroundings. B y collaborating with Edgar Varese to produce a musical programme intended to be broadcast from a distinct, metal bell tower, thus supplementing the landscape with electronic music, Le Corbusier hoped to acknowledge the weight of sound and events on the design, creating a consequent "concordance" between the site and sculpture - what he expressed as the idea of architecture as a "veritable manifestation of acoustics in plastic form." 2 5 1 Le Corbusier explained this phenomenon as follows: "...the work (architecture, statue or painting) acts on its surroundings: waves, cries, or clamour (the Parthenon on the Acropolis) flashing out like radiating rays (....); both in the immediate vicinity and further afield these shake, dominate or caress the site (....)."2 5 2 Although Le Corbusier did not fully achieve his envisioned acoustical program, a free-standing set of bells provides a visibly acoustical element, beyond that expressed by what he refers to as the radiation of the form upon the inexpressible space.2 5 3 A s Le Corbusier exhibited in his Purist works, Ronchamp's design presumed that proportion would transport architecture beyond the physical form to a state of innate sensation: Le Corbusier compared proportion to a key that comprises the unifying force in architectural design. What defines the esthetics of the design is the individual, who ensures the architectural event is immortal; architectural sensations are, thus, the result of the human response to s Baker 198. 9 Baker 195. 0 Pauly, Le Corbusier 112. ' Pauly, Le Corbusier 111. 2 A s cited in Pauly, Le Corbusier 111. 3 Le Corbusier, The Modulor 1 and 2 253. 71 geometric forms. In this manner, while Ronchamp's proportion, site and the architect's creativity all contributed to the defining experience, it was the individual response that ensures the architecture's endurance. Further, the "concrete or abstract" elements in an architectural composition should be tempered by the architect's intention, since intention determines the architecture's efficacy.2 5 5 This precept assumes validity i f one accepts Le Corbusier's statement that architecture is an irrefutable event: "It occurs in certain moments of creation when the mind, preoccupied with the strength and practical convenience of a work, is suddenly uplifted by a higher intention....and sets out to express the lyric powers that animate and delight us....This higher intention defines architecture."2 5 6 The proportions, as consistent with the architect's intention, determine the grandeur of the piece, since the greatness is in the intention, not the dimensions.2 5 7 A further dominant feature of Ronchamp is the "reverse-curved asymmetrical roof," supported by reinforced concrete columns above masonry walls. Files 32129 and 7293 from the Fondation Le Corbusier show the architect's preliminary sketches for the roof, while sketchbook H32 elaborates on this detail. Frampton comments that the concrete roof shell "cantilevers its heavy form outwards on the southern and eastern elevations and ingeniously contrives to conceal itself behind whitewashed walls to the north and west."2 5 8 While Le Corbusier compared the "inverted shell" roof to the curved canvas Philips Pavilion roof, it has been variously described as a crab's shell by the architect and a ship's hull, a petrified tent or a distorted plane wing by critics; Frampton points to similiarities between the 1939 Liege and San Francisco exhibition pavilions, with their hyperbolic space frames.2 5 9 Le Corbusier insisted the resolution of the roof form was a response to the site: "Thick walls and a crab's shell to give curves to a static plan. I'll provide the crab's shell; we w i l l lay it on the foolishly but usefully thick walls...." 2 6 0 Benton interprets the form somewhat more symbolically: "This evocative form was both a structural paradigm - strong enough to carry his weight - and a visual symbol of enclosure."2 6 1 His reference to the roofs structural proportions is consistent with the doctrine of New Brutalism. It is known that Le Corbusier continually searched for new and evolving architectural forms, hence, his transition from austerity to an assemblage of "contrasted" construction 2 5 4 "Esthetics thus contains a factor that makes a work immortal and ensures that these w i l l always be immortal works. That factor is the individual." Le Corbusier, Une Maison - un Palais as cited in Guiton, Ideas 26. 2 5 5 " Y o u have to select the proper techniques, choose materials, fulfill a program, etc., but the end result of all these efforts hinges solely on the quality of the intention." Le Corbusier, Entretien avec les etudiants des ecoles d'architecture as cited in Guiton, Ideas 20. 2 5 6 Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals were White, as cited in Guiton, Ideas 20. 2 5 7 Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals were White, as cited in Guiton, Ideas 20. 2 5 8 Frampton 169. 2 5 9 Frampton 172. 2 6 0 Le Corbusier, "Creation Ronchamp," Fondation Le Corbusier file as cited in Pauly, Le Corbusier 72. 72 materials; Frampton suggests Ronchamp's shell roof and the barrel-vaulted megaron at Cherchell are representative of this research. Conversely, Unite d'Habitation (1947-52), Maison Jaoul (1951-55) and Chandigarh (1950-3) exhibit the architect's transition to Brutalism. 2 6 2 Further, Frampton argues that Le Corbusier's break from Purism, with the Mandrot (1930) and Errazuriz (1931) houses, coincided with the abandonment of his faith in the beneficience of a machine-age culture and that his subsequent architecture exposed his sympathies both for Surrealism and for a Mediterranean peasant vernacular, evident in such projects as Ronchamp, but also the Cap Martin house (1949) and Maison Jaoul and Sarabhai House (both 1955).2 6 3 This may also explain the unusualness proportions of the roof form. The Brutalist conceptualism of the windows in Ronchamp's south wall supports Frampton's argument; although the choice of building material influenced their volume, their placement within the deep-set indentures was made possible by the plasticity of the beton brut. The windows serve to relieve the unrelenting reinforced concrete surface, through their varied size and shapes, ranging from inches to feet according to the depth of their enclosure, emitting an irregular pattern of light that defines the interior. The use of tinted glass creates a movable art that traverses the length of the chapel's floors and walls as the qualities of the natural light changes with the time o f day, a subdued essence replicated in the clerestory window that encompasses the roofline. In some regard, the south windows are similar to the "periscope" nature of the three towers: "...it is through the medium of light that the interior space is understood."2 6 4 The interior space must also be understood in terms of Le Corbusier's use of polychromy. Pauly suggests that Le Corbusier considered polychromy to be necessary to the perception of white; by engaging large blocks of color in the windows, L e Corbusier was able to "confer space," creating an additional spatial dimension and, in combination with the light emitted by the windows, defining the project's "architectural locus." 2 6 5 Le Corbusier saw "good walls" as white, while murals functioned to create the illusion of space and arrest the isolated, rectilinear surfaces. Thus, the Pop Art contextualism of the colored windows - a hand, a Janus moon and written text that, like the advertising icons he referenced in his paintings, are seemingly reminscent of L e g e r - and of the other artistic elements of the architecture, such as the enameled south door or the primary colors of the recess that houses the Holy V i r g i n effigy, 2 6 1 Benton 248-9. 2 6 2 Frampton 135-6. 2 6 3 Frampton 135. . 2 6 4 Baker 198. 2 6 5 Pauly, Le Corbusier 118. 73 relieve the harsh surface of the sculptural form. The emphasis Le Corbusier placed on polychromy is further evident in the side chapel, where the "bloodied" surfaces and sacristy recede into the forms. 2 6 6 Le Corbusier seems to acknowledge this effect by commenting that " i n architecture, polychromy...seizes hold of the whole wall and gives it an extra quality, be it the power of blood...." 2 6 7 Another explanation for the uniqueness of the graphic imagery is proposed by Jencks, who suggests Le Corbusier chose this vivid polychromy as an expression of his rebellion towards social ideals - the tragic hero juxtaposed against the conservatism of mainstream religion through the inherent conflict between his ideals and societal norms. While this explanation may have some relevance, it is apparent that Le Corbusier's design was respectful of Roman Catholic tradition. Various elements of Ronchamp are representative of the liturgy: the choice of red (the blood of Christ) for the chapel walls, the symbology of the window graphics (as an example the recognition of the Virgin Mary as a mediator between humans and Christ), the spiritual drama at the close of the pilgrim's journey represented by the design. 2 6 8 However, many of the design elements are also personal, such as the reflections o f nature by use of images of the clouds, moon and animals or the use of the hand on the enameled door, and the overall presentation is unique to Le Corbusier's innate sense of the rhythm of the proportion and scale of architecture. If the purpose of the architectural programme was merely to create function and adornment, that could have been achieved without the intervention o f the artist. It is the appreciation of the poesis particular to Le Corbusier that is responsible for the chapel's success as an architectural set piece. 4.3 Theories About Ronchamp Examining critiques about Ronchamp places the project within the context of experiments in New Brutalism and the rejection of modernism. Some have suggested the project is expressionist or that it is the precursor to post- modernism. Neither explanation is satisfactory, although, like many of Le Corbusier's projects, Ronchamp is both innovative and visionary, preceding in that it precedes similarly bold experiments in church architecture that are 2 6 6 Evoking what Pauly considers to be the Christian concept of sacrifice, but also the imagery o f betrayal. Pauly, Le Corbusier 121. 2 6 7 Pauly, Le Corbusier 121. 2 6 8 M c K a y 87. 74 situated in the 1960s and 1970s (St. John's Abbey, 1953-61; Manhattan Church of Christ, 1967). Rather, these critiques provide support for the premise that the concept of symbiosis was instrumental to the design. 4.3.1 Criticisms About Ronchamp Many references have been made to the sculptural quality of Ronchamp; not the least of these by Jordan, who calls the chapel a wonder of three-dimensionality, like some "marvellous piece of abstract sculpture."2 6 9 Elizabeth Darling suggests that, just as Le Corbusier's painting helped him to find a new visual language for his architecture, concrete's raw, visceral quality allowed him to produce the sculptural forms apparent in Ronchamp. 2 7 0 Pauly credits Ronchamp with incorporating diverse elements "within (a) sculptural ensemble" - she attributes the integrative nature o f Ronchamp to Le Corbusier's research into forms and notes the similarity to the organicism of his post-1920 still life paintings, with their contextual responsiveness to acoustics.2 7 1 Jencks suggests the "antiphonal balance is so exact" that Ronchamp is a rationally perfected sculpture.2 7 2 In contrast to these allusions to the sculptural form, James Stirling, perhaps the most vocal of Ronchamp's critics, refers to the "idioms of popular art and folk architecture" as an explanation for the building's picturesque aspect.2 7 3 Green finds a correlation between the immediacy of Le Corbusier's late architectural projects, like Ronchamp, and his sculptures, tapestries and enamels, compared to the precision of his paintings. He argues that, as Le Corbusier's artwork advanced, progressing from painting through sculpture and tapestries, his architecture became increasingly art-like and sculptural. He notes: "For Le Corbusier himself, the handling of space was the key to architecture as art: the handling of the space within, and o f the building as a response to the space of its setting."2 7 4 Beginning from this reference point, as Le Corbusier's general preoccupations with design aesthetics evolved, along with available technologies, his work became increasingly symbiotic and interior (inner focused). Green contends that L e Corbusier's art and architecture assumed a metaphoric quality during the 1930s, but his architecture became more Jordan, Le Corbusier 134. 0 Darling, Le Corbusier 22. 1 Pauly, Le Corbusier 127. 2 Jencks, Tragic 151. 3 Stirling, "Ronchamp" 67. 4 Green, "The architect" 110 75 "immediate" as it matured. He suggests that Le Corbusier transformed his objets a reaction poetique into his Uzon works and that the polychromatic sculptures that evolved from those forms, as re-interpreted through new stimuli, were translated into the "functional sculpture" of Ronchamp: "The late buildings, with their raw concrete and rough finishes, are not simply sculptural, they are also, visibly, huge built sketches, public structures with the impact of private ideas developed in the act of drawing under concentrated pressures, at speed."2 7 6 Gardiner concurs that Le Corbusier's late 1940s and 1950s paintings explored concepts central to the evolution of his architectural style, including the employment of shapes and lines to create continuous spaces.2 7 7 Gardiner sees Savina's ear sculptures in Ronchamp's light shafts, while the strict dimensions of the Modulor establish the free form shape.2 7 8 If indeed, Le Corbusier "processed" his everyday observations through his paintings and transferred those to sculpture and architecture, Ronchamp is, as Gardiner suggests, no less familiar than Villas L a Roche, Stein and Savoye, framed by the site and the echoes of nature as opposed to the omnipresent cube of his earlier works, and wrapped, like a Christo installation, in the rough skin of his plastic material, concrete.2 7 9 In comparing Ronchamp's form to the Villas Stein or Savoye, Gardiner notes that Le Corbusier carried through the exterior into the interior, enabling the whole of the architectural piece to be conceived as a single element.2 8 0 A s is the case with V i l l a Savoye, Ronchamp's form envelopes the viewer: " Y o u are in the sculpture, in the monastic whiteness o f the block of stone that he excavated and shaped, the interior of which, a moment ago, you saw from below, in the field....little remains of the cube....inside and outside sculpture are one...."2 8 1 Gardiner considers this aspect - the whiteness of Ronchamp, which he traces to Le Corbusier's travels to the Mediterranean and M ' z a b in Algeria (1931) - to be a visually aesthetic "bond" with Le Corbusier's Purist style, establishing a unifying element for any combination of shapes, sizes and objects.2 8 2 Guiton suggests Ronchamp's organicism is a response to the dubious character (porous and calcinated) of the fill and that the form was essential to stabilize the material requirements of the commission.2 8 3 The sculptural quality of the 2 7 5 Green, "The architect" 117-8. 2 7 6 Green, "The architect" 118. 2 7 7 Gardiner 91. 2 7 8 Gardiner 91. 2 7 9 Gardiner 93. 2 8 0 Gardiner 56. 2 8 1 The Virgin in the window at Ronchamp is a literal translation of this effect, as are the concave windows, of exposing the acute dimension by opening up the design to integrate the inside and outside as one. Gardiner 61. 2 8 2 Gardiner 45. 2 8 3 Guiton 47-8. 76 design illuminates the essence of the stone from which Ronchamp, like a sculpture, was created, exposing "what shapes and spaces could be revealed by the cutting away of unnecessary bits." 2 8 4 Pauly also references Le Corbusier's extensive studies of Mozabite architecture, in particular, his interest in light transmission and the distribution of window openings in the dense walls of the Algerian forms that, as at Ronchamp, provide a diffused, yet restrained, environment. However, although she acknowledges similarities between what Le Corbusier refers to as the honesty and directness of the white forms of Mozabite and Ronchamp, Pauly argues that any resemblance is referential, rather than direct, consistent with a creative process that is reliant on a search for architectural sources, as was central to Le Corbusier's design process.2 8 5 Pauly's assertion that the conceptual theme is defined at the start of his creative process is important i f one accepts the intuitive nature of Ronchamp's design. While Pauly refers to Ronchamp as a total work of art, supporting the integral sculptural context, she suggests the design established "an implicit bond with the past" by incorporating elements from certain Roman churches, such as the sacred atmosphere, the bulk of the volumes and weight of the walls, the splayed windows and diffused lighting. 2 8 6 Jencks sees influences on Ronchamp in Le Corbusier's interest in a "rational, complex approach to art," evidenced by his emphasis on regulating lines, murals and the concept of ineffable space.2 8 7 He suggests Ronchamp's curvilinear forms were rationally determined, plastically inter-related variants of the straight line and right angle.2 8 8 He considers Ronchamp's sculptural qualities to be a response to Le Corbusier's post-war aesthetic - "tough and realistic, towards the poverty of reconstruction" and predominated by an emphasis on the primitive, sensual and aggressive: architecture as "sculpture in a new plastic language."2 8 9 Le Corbusier was able to achieve this effect because the imperfect medium of beton brut was uniquely suited to his new aesthetic; like the human landscape: "The defects shout at one from all parts of the structural."2 9 0 Jencks agrees with those critics who attribute Le Corbusier's experiments in New Brutalism to his folkloric interests, the vernacular forms of which, one might argue, further contribute to the sense that the piece is sculptural. A s 2 8 4 Gardiner 53. 2 8 5 Pauly, Creative Process 132. For the purposes of this thesis, creative process means the process of defining the problem, discovering potentially relevant experiences through research or drawing, engaging in intuitive thinking, illuminating the idea and verifying the resolution through revision or editing. Michael Delahunt, "Creative Process," 1996, ArtLex Art Dictionary, accessed 23 August 2004, . 2 8 6 Pauly, Creative Process 135. 2 8 7 Jencks, Tragic 149. 2 8 8 Jencks, Tragic 151. 2 8 9 Jencks, Tragic 137. 2 9 0 Jencks, Tragic 142 77 http://wwww.artlex.com evidence, he refers to Le Corbusier's statement of 1923: "...the business of Architecture is to establish emotional relationships by means of brutal materials."2 9 1 Jencks argues that by the mid-thirties Le Corbusier had adopted Brutalism as a reaction to "a rediscovery of natural orders, primitive societies and a sexual relation with women unconstrained by conventional etiquette, sophistication or snobbism."2 9 2 Frampton also remarks upon the similarity of Ronchamp to Le Corbusier's 1930s architecture to the essential form of the Pavilion des Temps Nouveaux (193 7 ) . 2 9 3 One is further reminded of the integration of the de Mandrot House with its site. Beyond its seeming correspondence with sculptural pieces, one must also consider Ronchamp within the context of Le Corbusier's interest in the relationship of art to nature. While some (Nikolaus Pevsner among them) consider the design to be irrational architecture, V o n Moos argues that the chapel is symbolic of the "atavistic mysticism of nature."2 9 4 Green comments that the merger of art and architecture in Le Corbusier's Boston, London, Paris and Lyons exhibitions, and the "sculptural" architecture of the Marseilles Unite, Ronchamp and the Capital of Chandigarh, with its deeply felt "acoustical" responsiveness to splendid natural settings, were the outcome of Le Corbusier's mature understanding of the relationship between himself, nature and design. 2 9 5 Pauly suggests that Ronchamp is both a product of the architectural technique available to Le Corbusier and a poesis, "a platform for lyricism" as embodied in the poetic moment.2 9 6 She argues that the "poetic moment" is omnipresent in his work because Le Corbusier considered architecture to be a "matter of plastic emotion" that works on the senses and creates a "consonance" with the universe (nature).297 In this manner, Ronchamp's form can be seen as a response to the site, in that the four horizons to which the structure is oriented suggested to the architect an acoustic response "in the realm of forms." 2 9 8 The religious symbolism is further significant to an appreciation of the design o f Ronchamp and here architectural critics have divergent views. Jordan considers the chapel's religious symbolism to be complex, yet reductivist: Le Corbusier commented that Ronchamp represented, " A few scattered symbols, a few written words telling the praises " Jencks, Tragic 110. ' 2 Jencks, Tragic 110. 1 3 Frampton 171-2. 1 4 V o n Moos 254. , s Green, "The architect "117. > 6 Pauly, Le Corbusier 123. > 7 Le Corbusier as cited in Pauly, Le Corbusier 128. 1 8 Le Corbusier as cited in Pauly, Creative Process 128. 78 of the v i r g i n . " 2 9 9 Frampton sees Le Corbusier's interest in electronic broadcasts as an allusion to the medieval belfry. The three light cowls, each of which harbors a chapel, represent the Trinity (Father, Son and H o l y Ghost); he argues this symbolism is also apparent in the hollow cylinder and two pyramids of the concrete cistern that collects rainwater from the roof. 3 0 0 He sees the inside/outside northwest balcony as a symbol for the sun's diurnal passage: " A l l in all, inside and out, the chapel celebrates the ascent and descent of the sun together with the waxing and waning of the seasons, integrated into the life cycle and the rhythmic order of nature."3 0 1 B y shifting between the aquatic origin of life "and the ultimate transformation of this aqueous state into the aerial," Frampton argues that Ronchamp articulates the duality between air and water - as "paralleled in the diurnal cycle of evaporation and condensation" - thematic to Le Corbusier's architecture.302 He further interprets the form as a "subtle transposition" of the structure and form of the Pavilion des Temps Nouveaux, itself inspired by the Hebrew Temple in the Wilderness illustrated in Towards a New Architecture.3 0 3 Pauly argues that the unstructured forms represent the irrationality of the religious and spiritual realms; Ronchamp acts as an exploratory vessel for the plastic arts within the religious form. 3 0 4 She suggests that by questioning traditional chapel design and the concept of the church as a "place of elevation," Ronchamp established itself as a unique manifesto within contemporary religious architecture.3 0 5 A further explanation for the commission is posited by Benton, who suggests Le Corbusier's search for ideas premised on metaphysical and moral assumptions acted as a "substitute" for religious faith, arguing that his sympathy for religious life and explorations into a personal poetics, through documents such as the "Poeme de Tangle droit," "Le modulor" and the "Poeme electronique," contributed to a mythology that enabled Le Corbusier to approach religious commissions with an innate appreciation of their complexity.3 0 6 Le Corbusier's involvement with projects such as L a Sainte-Baume (1946-8) and his prescient 1911 sketches of the Serapeum at Hadrian's V i l l a are indicative of a cautious intrigue with questions of spirituality. Benton suggests that Le Corbusier associated ideas about beauty and truth with an "idealist world-view" that was spiritual, yet agnostic, while simultaneously struggling with "the innate, intuitive idea of a supreme Being" that allowed him to combine concepts of the individual with the universal 2 9 9 Jordan, Le Corbusier 133. 3 0 0 Frampton 171. 3 0 1 Frampton 171. 3 0 2 Frampton 174. 3 0 3 Frampton 172. 3 0 4 Pauly, Le Corbusier 126-7. 3 0 5 Pauly. Le Corbusier 126. 3 0 6 Benton, "The sacred" 240. 79 in his religious architecture. He suggests Le Corbusier's abstracted vocabulary at Ronchamp is the reflection of his contempt for the events of the Second World War, as evidenced in his disregard for representational painting in favor of his beastiary series of paintings, sculptures and drawings, which included Ozon Opus I (1947). These "new," "unexpected" and "unknown" objects were translated in his architecture at Ronchamp, just as his objets 'a reaction poetique (shells, bones, pieces of wood) of 1948 were source material for his sacred architecture. Whether these critics believed that Ronchamp was Le Corbusier's response to the relationship of art to the natural and human domains, or a reaction to his objets a reaction poetique, the argument for symbiosis seems apparent, as the discussion of the architect's intent for the architectural programme supports. The consistent emphasis on the sculptural basis of the design, while refuted by Stirling, is appropriate to the question of symbiosis, since it infers a potential for irrationality. If, as Green suggests, Ronchamp is akin to Le Corbusier's sculptures and paintings, therefore, it might be argued that, in its innate apprehension of the spiritual function of the architecture, Ronchamp replicates the inner focused striving to achieve comprehension through the expressive means specific to a work of art. To carry Green's analogy further, Ronchamp is the sculpture, while the elements of the piece - among them the windows, enameled door, altar pieces and polychromy — are essential to its comprehension as a place of meditation and spirituality, similar to the sanctity of the darkness of the cave. This differs significantly from the concept of synthesis, in which each part of the work comprises the whole, but in which none of the parts are necessarily essential. In this manner, then, the clerestory windows can be understood as central to the experience of spiritual meditation, since they remove the parishioner from the everyday environment, emitting only that light essential for spiritual illumination, symbolizing perhaps the passage from the darkness of the questioning and non-comprehending mind to the light of spiritual awareness, represented by the south windows, which function as an allusion to the four seasons and to the redemptive quality of the light as it passes through the diurnal cycle. Thus, like the pilgrim, as the light of Ronchamp traverses its diurnal cycle, the parishioner travels along a path from the redemption-seeking spirit to the cleansed soul. It might, then, also be argued that the themes of light and darkness represent the duality of righteousness versus the confused state of sin, alluding to the Chrisitian concept whereby the experience of sin informs that which is good. Further, the symbology of the art pieces, from the open hand which infers the Christian concept of giving and receiving, to the Janus moon that functions as a gateway, perhaps to spiritual enlightenment, growth and renewal as the conclusion of the pilgrim's journay, transcend synthesis because they are essential to the architect's ability to respond to the functional requirements of the commission, rather than a representation of creativity or adornment. In the achievement of symbiosis, Le Corbusier contributes to 20 t h century design syntax the 80 appreciation that architecture is a function of emotion. This distinguishes symbiosis from the concept of synthesis, wherein the art is a constituent of the architecture, but not primary to it. 4.3.2 Importance of the Design to Ideas About the Symbiosis of Art and Architecture Le Corbusier has frequently credited painting as the source of his architectural inspiration and, hence, the emphasis in this thesis on looking back to his art training, involvement in Purism and his sketchbooks as definitive moments in the development of painting, sculpture and murals as elements in Le Corbusier's design vocabulary.3 0 7 These explorations position the experimentation evident at Ronchamp; although Le Corbusier could have chosen a more traditional approach to the chapel's design, his is strikingly innovative in the appreciation of art as integral to the architecture, in contrast to art as applied decoration. A n examination of the architect's statements within the context of this paper reveals that besides his preoccupation with standardization, dimension and geometry - the tools of building design - a consistent theme for Le Corbusier was the interdependency of art and architecture. To appreciate this, we might look to Alfred H . Barr, who proposed that 20 t h century architecture was influenced by painting and sculpture in reaction to the "feeble academic mimicry" of the revivalists and the nihilism of the functionalists; Le Corbusier was familiar with or involved in many of the major art movements - Cubism, Purism, de Stijl, constructivism - and advocated for the rejection of academic art in favor of a non-mimetic art.3 0 8 Le Corbusier was privileged to work with Behrens and Perret, who advanced the use of ferro-concrete, which became Le Corbusier's canvas. He is also acknowledged as one of the new group of post- W W I architects (Gropius, Oud, van der Rohe and Le Corbusier) who valued the work of abstract artists. Henry- Russell Hitchcock argues that Le Corbusier's adoption of an aesthetic appropriate to the machine age and "the smooth, flat, rendered surfaces" of his 1920s architecture (such as the Ozenfant studio and V i l l a Savoye) are evidence that Le Corbusier moved beyond the building system to an architectural style that valued the inclusion of the art element.3 0 9 This comment, by extension, remains pertinent to his post-Purist works. Le Corbusier, M y Work 37. Art, as referenced in the case study, refers to manmade products involving manual facility. 3 0 8 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Painting Toward Architecture (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948) 9. 3 0 9 "...his houses were visually organized with all the perfection of his purist paintings." Hitchcock, Painting 26, 28. 81 The informalism of Le Corbusier's late architecture appears to have been intended to achieve a fusion between art and architecture. There is evidence that he strove to surpass the metaphoric character his artwork assumed during the 1930s - with the inclusion of objets a reaction poetique and his experimentation with the translation of his drawings and paintings into polychromatic sculptures - to new forms, as apparent at Ronchamp. 3 1 0 Le Corbusier's clay maquettes for Ronchamp evolved around the same time that Joseph Savina was modelling the architect's drawings into sculptures, while the chapel's development also coincided with Le Corbusier's 1953 Paris exhibition, one of four exhibitions between 1948 and 1956 in which he endeavored to demonstrate the synthesis between art and architecture. His concern with symbiosis is evident not only in the use of art as application (such as on the windows on the south wall), but in the architect's use of reinforced concrete to reveal the plastic event. The fluid quality of beton brut enabled Le Corbusier to explore the sculptural context, what Jordan calls an evolution from the cube to the crystal, just as Gaudi's designs appear to be shaped by hand from clay. Le Corbusier himself remarked on this in The Modulor: "The chapel at Ronchamp w i l l perhaps show, when it is finished in the spring of 1955, that architecture is not a matter of pillars but of plastic events. These are not ruled by scholarly or academic formulae: they are free and innumerable."3" Hence, like many of his buildings of the 1950s, Ronchamp has few straight lines: the downward curving ceiling creates an illusion of size, while the roof itself rises six inches above the walls on concrete pillars hidden in the onerous south wall, 10 feet thick at points. Le Corbusier leaves visual cues in Ronchamp that remind the viewer of V i l l a Savoye, but also of his evolution from the machine-like precision of his paintings of the early 1920s to, as Frampton has remarked upon, the "voluptuous" lines of the female form in his later sketchbooks.3 1 2 V o n Moos comments on some of the motifs evident at Ronchamp. O f particular interest are the sharply articulated stairwell or ramp and curved walls, which von Moos refers to as sculptural articulations that "accompany, paraphrase, and contradict the rectilinear geometry (of Le Corbusier's characteristic rectangles and cubes), charging them with tension." Further, Le Corbusier's appreciation of the window as a vehicle for light, rather than air transmission (in Ronchamp windows are used as what von Moos terms an "instrument of sculptural dramatization") is also noted, as is the employment of a female architecture of undulating surfaces. The "dramatization of the roof as 3 1 0 "...that, before anything else, his buildings should be accepted or rejected as works of art." Green, "The architect" 118. 3 1 1 L e Corbusier, The Modulor 1 and 2 252. 3 1 2 "His drawings were like research notes of ideas perceived in the world about him, records for the 'store house' of particular observation that would someday lead to something of importance." Gardiner 64-5. 82 an autonomous form," by the establishment of a tension between the interior and exterior through narrow clerestory windows situated between the roof and walls, is also remarked upon. 3 1 3 V o n Moos notes that Le Corbusier recreates the clerestory effect of the Serapeum he visited in 1911 by employing periscope-like light shafts to illuminate the side chapels, a device that enabled him to recapture the effect of light upon the walls of a cavern and to "compose" with light. 3 1 4 Ronchamp is a traditional form in terms of design standards. Configured according to the dimensions of the Modulor, the design is influenced by the choice of building materials. It adopts many of the characteristics of typical church architecture, such as the multi-height nave, reminiscent of cathedrals (acknowledging that the sense o f height is also a deliberate effort to make the exterior appear larger than the very small interior) and the concept of diffused light borrowed from Baroque churches, both in the nave by use of the clerestory window and in the chapels by way of the periscope-like towers. The water-spout is adaptive to the site requirements, as one might expect, and the siting and size of the church are logical to the footprint of the landscape. Although Ronchamp contradicts Le Corbusier's search for universal absolutes - unlike V i l l a Savoye, which he suggested could be re-created anywhere in the world, Ronchamp is site specific - the design solution is appropriate to the commission requirements. Le Corbusier is known to have researched aspects of Roman Catholic ritual in developing the chapel. What evidence exists then that Ronchamp represents the symbiosis of art and architecture? In arguing that Ronchamp represents a symbiosis, as opposed to a synthesis of art and architecture, the argument is made that the art is not merely applied decoration nor that any effort is particularly made at Ronchamp to bring together elements of fine art for the purpose of achieving synthesis. Rather, it is argued that the architecture of Ronchamp is the art and that the art. is integral to the architecture in that it enables the architect to achieve the requirements of the commission for a modernist piece of art/architecture. Thus, the art on the windows or the ceramics on the south entrance are not merely adjuncts to the architecture, but support the function of the architecture in providing a meditative, religious space. The siting of the project upon the landscape is as conducive to the artistry of Ronchamp as the treatment of the beton brut is in its adaptation as a sculptural device that corresponds to the listening and reflective qualities of the chapel's intent. This distinction appropriates symbiosis as the mutual interdependence of the elements in enabling the architect to achieve the purpose of the commission, as opposed to synthesis as the bringing together of 3 1 3 V o n Moos 86, 98. 3 1 4 V o n Moos 98. 83 individual elements to form a whole, any element of which could be eliminated without disturbing the completeness of the composition. A s evidence, we have Le Corbusier's writings, in which he makes reference to the importance of his own art to his architectural process, as well as that of various critics and commentators, who advance the premise that Le Corbusier's intent was to create a "temple" for the synthesis of art and architecture. These interpretations, while sympathetic to his writings and approximating the premise for pieces such as Ronchamp, fail to account for the essentialism of his art to his later architecture. Secondly, we see the evolution of Le Corbusier's architecture, in tandem with his art, from the tentative Swiss villas of his youth, decorated with motifs from nature, to the Purist boxes that exhibit the initial evidence of architecture as a work of modern art - Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau (1925), the Ozenfant house and studio (1922), V i l l a Savoye (1928-9), the V i l l a Stein and House at Weissenhof (both 1927) - followed by projects such as Unite d'Habitation, Marseilles (1946-52), which incorporate art directly into the design. Although these developments responded to the unique nature of his clients' design preferences and their architecture is more representative of the application of art to architecture than of the integration of art with architecture, they exhibit the intent that architecture is more than a functional box. We further see his involvement with Greek musician-architect Iannis Xenakis, between 1947 and 1957, who encouraged Le Corbusier to couple visual art with music, culminating in the Philips Pavilion (1958) at the Brussels World Exhibition, with its electronic score by Varese and "kinetic" light and art display, which some argue more completely achieved his vision o f a total work of art.3 1 5 This project builds upon the concept of symbiosis in that it incorporates art as the pretext for the architecture. Further, although this project post-dates Ronchamp, it is indicative of the environment in which Ronchamp was incubated. It is apparent, from his sketchbooks and drawings, that the initial design for Ronchamp was intuitive, which suggests that Le Corbusier adopted the form, then adapted it to the site requirements. Although Le Corbusier might have chosen to apply the art at Ronchamp as decoration - assuming that the architecture was primary - the design, arguably, assumes a sense of mutual interdependence, or symbiosis, in which each artistic and architectural element is reliant on the other in order to support the whole. This is apparent in the manner in which the concave wall supports the shell-like roof, which enables the integration of concepts about objets a reaction poetique, while the imagery of the south window wall integrates religious motifs with those on the platform dias. Looking at 3 1 5 There are other obvious similarities between the two projects: Frampton points out Le Corbusier employed variations of the double curvature - whether through catenary suspension in the Pavilion des Temps Nouveaux or the hyperbolic space frames of his exhibition pavilions - he used this concept at Ronchamp, just as he copied Ronchamp's pivoting entry door from his Pavilion des Temps Nouveaux. Frampton 182. 84 Ronchamp, then, it would be difficult to conclude that the final product is appropriate to the traditional requirements o f a religious commission; rather, it was the support of the Dominican order in providing Le Corbusier with the freedom to design at w i l l and Le Corbusier's appreciation of the integral nature of art and architecture that appears to be responsible for the achievement of this symbiotic piece. 4.4 Relevance of the Case Study to the Research Question The suggestion that the basis for the development of an architectural form is painting or art may imply that the techonology or functional programme are secondary concerns. A more appropriate conclusion in the case o f an architectural work such as Ronchamp is that the technology and programme supported the integration of the architecture as art and that the artwork, in this context, was dependent on the form for its interpretative value. In order for Ronchamp to succeed within its architectural programme, it was necessary for Le Corbusier to apprehend the interdependencies o f the site, technology and artistic programme, however, it is specific to his genius that he achieved, in the process, a symbiotic resolution to the design problem. Although Le Corbusier entertained a general preoccupation with design aesthetics, as evidenced in his substantive writings, at Ronchamp the viewer sees Le Corbusier's design work as an evolution of both the architect's understanding of the plastic fact and of the concepts he first expressed in Towards a New Architecture. While the opportunity to create his own Parthenon, one free of constraints, enabled him to recover some of his wounded pride over the failure of Saint-Baume, it conversely gave expression to Le Corbusier's beliefs about the integral nature of the symbiotic relationship between art and architecture.316 3 1 6 Gardiner suggests Ronchamp is, itself, cavernous, recalling Sainte-Baume and Le Thoronet on the crown of a h i l l . Gardiner 87. 85 C H A P T E R V C O N C L U S I O N To be symbiotic is to have a relationship of dependency. To suggest art and architecture are symbiotic seems obvious, yet the instances of its deliberateness are isolated. Le Corbusier was one of the most prolific of the artist- architects to emerge in the early 20th Century; Gropius and Wright also come to mind. Irrespective of this, Le Corbusier's artistic production is not particularly well known and exhibitions of his work have been infrequent. Le Corbusier was not acknowledged to be a great painter; unlike Leger or Picasso, he was not immediately adept at art- making. Significantly, it is his involvement with art-making that both distinguishes him from his contemporaries and establishes the accomplished architectural surfaces for which he is known. It seems capricious to argue Unite d'Habitation at Marseilles, the Corbusier Centre and Ronchamp aren't the outcome of his experiments in art-making or to point to the Philips Pavilion without acknowledging his interest in multimedia. Consistent with his individualism, Le Corbusier intuited much of the motivations for his own work for us, albeit with some lack of clarity or perhaps distortion of the events and people involved. Nevertheless, his many works are ambitious and Ronchamp reveals the relationship of the sculptor to his form. Modernists believed architecture could create a new order between humans and form. Their architecture evolved from this comprehension that design could reflect the excitement of the moment of possibility. Le Corbusier stood on the edge of the International Style; like Gropius, he was an innovator. Le Corbusier, who approached architecture from the viewpoint of artist, seized upon the innovations of the early 20th century as his manifesto. L'Esprit Nouveau and Towards a New Architecture integrated the new architecture with painting, sculpture, music, literature and the social sciences; Pawley suggests Le Corbusier's architectural themes are to be found in the pages of these influential publications.3 1 7 His design style evolved as he matured but, unlike some, his was an abrupt series of departures, from his stark Purist buildings to the integrative surfaces of the Philips Pavilion and Ronchamp. Several 3 1 7 "Many o f Le Corbusier's later projects, particularly his houses, are to be seen clearly in the illustrations of promenade decks on liners, 'cubist' automobiles and biplane aircraft which crowd its pages." Martin Pawley, Le Corbusier (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970) 10. 86 themes are emergent in his life's work: the decoration of the Swiss Villas and his interior designs give way to the cubic forms of his Pessac project and the organicism of Ronchamp.3 1 8 There is little doubt Ronchamp is Le Corbusier's premiere integrative work of art. The architect himself comments about the symbiosis of architecture with art at Ronchamp: "Architecture is form, volumes, color, acoustics, music." 3 1 9 Ronchamp is all of these; like the Philips Pavilion it is experimental, like many of Le Corbusier's works, timeless. Pauly notes that, with Ronchamp, Le Corbusier was able to "draw forth from a constructed work (architecture) presences engendering emotion, which are essential to the poetic phenomenon."3 2 0 Le Corbusier expresses this sentiment in his own writings: "The architect, by his arrangements of forms, realizes an order which is a pure creation of his spirit;by forms and shapes, he affects our senses to an acute degree, and provokes plastic emotions...he determines the various movements o f our heart and of our understanding; it is then that we experience the sense of beauty."3 2 1 Although Ronchamp is removed from the mechanical objectivism that dominated the experiences of architects and artists in the early 20th century, Le Corbusier's appreciation of the design is formulated on a grounding in mechanical selection. Arguably, Le Corbusier makes the shift from the rigid geometricism of Purism to the organicism of Ronchamp as a consequence of his new appreciation of the relationship of nature to humans, through his involvement in C I A M and as a consequence of his disillusionment with machine architecture. Although his interest in natural systems contributes to this ability to relate the order of things to design, as is evidenced in his interest in the structural dynamics of the crystal, Le Corbusier is able to incorporate art-making into Ronchamp only because he evolves as an artist who suppresses the functionalism of his architecture to enable the manipulation of the light, shade, contour and profile. Le Corbusier's sketchbooks are evidence that the architect was not a particularly gifted artist, but that he was able to achieve a symbiotic relationship between his art and architecture. In his sketchbooks, we see the compendium Le Corbusier drew upon to model his chapel: his urban planning manifestos, intrigue with 3 1 8 Blake suggests Ronchamp's curved masses represented a mystery "as reminiscent o f the catacombs or the massive stone monasteries of the middle ages as it was of some dimly understood spatial concepts of today and tomorrow." Blake as cited in Pawley, Le Corbusier 18. 3 1 9 Le Corbusier as cited in Pauly, Le Corbusier 108. 3 2 0 Pauly advances the concept of a total work of art. Le Corbusier suggests the poetic phenomenon derives from "the combined presence of architecture, painting and sculpture, inextricably linked by harmony, discipline and intensity." Pauly, Le Corbusier 109. 3 2 1 Le Corbusier as cited in Pauly, Le Corbusier 110. 87 the feminine, concern with primitive cultures and involvement in mural making and sculpture. These concerns are given form in his drawings, paintings and notations, but more particularly in his writings and in his final works. Le Corbusier comments on Ronchamp, suggesting that forms "make a noise and are silent; some speaking, others listening...."3 2 2 A s noted, Ronchamp is the culmination of his research into forms, his involvement with art-making through his Purist period to the sculptures and murals of his later years, his understanding of the relationship of humans and nature to art; and his association with other designers through C I A M , and like Leger. The design evolved because the architect was freed from the restrictions of the commission to exhibit his own hand with the design, although riot without some opposition. 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New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993. 66-7. 95 Figure 1: Pilgrimage chapel, west wall Figure 2: Madonna, west wall — 4 mm Figure 3: Pilgrimage chapel, west wall 98 Figure 4: Second-storey exit, north wall 1 0 0 Figure 6: North entrance 102 Figure 8: Aperture, south wall Figure 9: Aperture, south wall Figure 10: South entrance mural (detail) 105 Figure 11: Apertures, south wall 106 107 Figure 13: Roofscape, south wall 109 Figure 15: Roofscape, south wall Figure 16: Roofscape, south wall Figure 14: Roofscape, south wall Figure 15: Roofscape, south wall Figure 16: Roofscape, south wall LIST OF FIGURES I Figure 1: Pilgrimage chapel, west wall Figure 2: Madonna, west wall Figure 3: Pilgrimage chapel, west wall 98 f Figure 4: Second-storey exit, north wall Figure 6: North entrance ure 7: Second-storey exit, north wall Figure 8: Aperture, south wall Figure 9: Aperture, south wall Figure 10: South entrance mural (detail) 105 Figure 11: Apertures, south wall Figure 12: Apertures, south wall 107 Figure 13: Roofscape, south wall ure 14: Roofscape, south wall Figure 15: Roofscape, south wall Figure 16: Roofscape, south wall work_kd77dpwpbne7hayre7br7ssj74 ---- ACEI working paper series RETURNS ON INDIAN ART DURING 2000-2013 Jenny Rae Hawkins Viplav Saini AWP-03-2014 Date: June 2014 Returns on Indian Art during 2000-2013∗ Jenny Rae Hawkins† Viplav Saini ‡ June 7, 2014 Abstract The market for modern Indian art is an emerging art market, having come into a proper existence only in the late 1990s. This market saw tremendous growth in its initial years and then a downturn that started around 2007-2008. Using data from auctions conducted by a major Indian art auctioneer, we estimate via hedonic regression a price index for paintings and drawings by Indian artists sold during 2000-2013. We are able to thus estimate a rate of return on Indian art as an investment and also shed light on what drives the price of a painting in the Indian market. In doing so, we document quantitatively the extent of the rise and fall in Indian art prices. We also distinguish empirically two segments in the Indian art market, namely modern painters and contemporary painters, who appear to command different prices at auction. We find a positive and statistically significant relationship between the state of the Indian stock market and art auction prices. Finally, we use our econometric results to construct a ranking of Indian painters in terms of the market prices for their work. JEL Classification: C20, Z11. Keywords: art, auction, India, price index, hedonic regression. 1 Introduction In this paper, we analyze the trend in prices in an important emerging art market: the market for modern Indian art. Although the bulk of the paintings that are currently categorized as modern Indian art were produced between the early 20th century and the 1980s, the name for the category did not come into existence until the late 1990s. Till then, what is now known as modern Indian ∗We thank Saffronart COO Nish Bhutani and his team members Vipin Jain, Punya Nagpal, and Yamini Telkar for their help with the data and for sharing their insights about the Indian art market. We appreciate advice and feedback from Tobias Pfutze, Eesha Phanse, and the audience and discussants at the Southern Economic Association annual meetings. Yiqin Chen provided competent research assistance. Research support from the Albert Rees fund and the H.H. Powers grant at Oberlin College is gratefully acknowledged. †Department of Economics, Oberlin College, 10 N. Professor St, Oberlin OH 44074, USA. E-mail: jenny.hawkins@oberlin.edu. Phone: +1-440-775-8483. ‡(corresponding author) Department of Economics, Oberlin College, 10 N. Professor St, Oberlin OH 44074, USA. E-mail: viplav.saini@oberlin.edu. Phone: +1-440-775-8485. 1 art was lumped together with antiquities and folk art in “mixed auctions.” With the exception of one auction in 1995, the major auction houses of Christie’s and Sotheby’s did not have regular auctions entirely devoted to modern Indian art until the early 2000s. However, around 1995 onwards a consensus began to emerge among art critics and historians about modern Indian art being recognized as an independent artistic movement. As a result, during the period 1995-2007 the average price of an Indian art painting at auction increased from $6000 to $44,000 (Khaire and Wadhwani, 2010). Currently Indian art prices are considered roughly comparable to prices for art from Latin America, with several paintings fetching prices in excess of $2 million (USD). Crucial to the establishment of modern Indian art as a category was the formation in 2000 of the firm Saffronart which devoted itself to conducting auctions of modern Indian art exclusively. We use price data on paintings auctioned by Saffronart during 2000-2013 to document the trend in the Indian market by calculating a price index. Saffronart was the leading auctioneer of Indian artwork during the period 2000-2007 with a market share of at least 41% compared to 25% each for Christie’s and Sotheby’s (Khaire and Wadhwani, 2010). From November 2000 to June 2013 Saffronart sold around $188 million worth of artwork. The firm is headquartered in Mumbai with additional offices in London, New Delhi, and New York. It conducts several auctions per year and includes a wide variety of Indian artists in its auction catalogue. Being a pioneer in the Indian art market, Saffronart has deep connections within the artistic community, with prestigious Indian art galleries, as well as with art buyers both within India and abroad. This allows the firm access to a great range of authentic and verified artwork to bring to market. The paintings brought to auction by Saffronart are therefore a good representative sample of the Indian art scene. Our paper represents the first rigorous analysis of price trends in the Indian art market, as well as the effects on it of the global financial and economic crises of 2007-2009. Since art is a heterogenous object, the central challenge in computing a price index for it is to control for the heterogeneity. For instance, if the quality of paintings being brought to a market is falling over time, simply looking at the series of total sales might suggest that art prices are falling, but controlling for the quality of the paintings might suggest otherwise. We use the method of hedonic 2 regression that has been employed previously to study price trends in auctions for Western art work in papers by Anderson (1974), Buelens and Ginsburgh (1993), Barre et al. (1994), Chanel et al. (1994), and Czujack (1997). Mok et al. (1993) study the Chinese art market using the same methodology. The hedonic regression method allows one to compute the price of a “standardized painting” auctioned in any given year. The price of a painting at auction is regressed on time dummies and a set of variables that control for the characteristics of the painting, such as the identity of the painter, their artistic style, the size and medium of the painting, the type of paint used, and so on. Having accounted for the variation in the price of paintings due to their specific characteristics, the estimated time dummies can then be used as a price index that tracks the movements in the price of a standardized painting over time. Computing a price index for Indian art in this way allows us to document the initial years of an important emerging market. We find a dramatic increase in prices during the period 2001-2006 when our price index, deflated by 2001 prices, grows by 57% every year. This was likely fueled by several factors including genuine growth in demand, a booming Indian economy, as well as growing international interest from long-term collectors and even speculative investors. However, this trend reversed starting around 2007-2008, when art markets crashed all over the world in response to the global financial crisis. We find a consistent decline in prices during the years 2008-2013 at the rate of roughly 18% per year. One potential explanation for this is the decline in the demand for a luxury cultural good like art due to the worldwide recession that affected the Indian economy as well. Another reason was the exit, following the recession, of international hot money and speculative buying that might have fueled some of the meteoric rise in prices in the Indian and other art markets. Overall, even though some of the initial gains in the price index were reversed post-2007, prices in 2013 still represented an annual real rate of increase of about 11% per year during 2001-2013. Art market analysts expect that as the Indian and world economies recover, and buying in some segments of the market becomes more deliberate and less speculative, Indian art prices might stabilize at reasonable levels in the coming years. Art historians typically have categorized Indian painters into two stylistic groups: modern 3 and contemporary painters, although the work of both groups is termed modern Indian art. The modern painters represent the older and more established set of artists. We find that in the time period under consideration, the price index for modern painters suggests an annualized real rate of return of roughly 12% while the index for contemporary artists yields 7.5%. We also document a statistically significant difference in the average auction prices for these two segments (higher for modern). Thus, we are able to establish quantitatively that modern and contemporary painters represent distinct segments in the Indian art market. We further explore differences in the market valuation of individual artists. A regression specification with artist fixed effects is employed and the estimated artist fixed effect coefficients are used to rank Indian painters in terms of the prices commanded by their work at auction. This exercise allows us to discover which painters are highly valued in this emerging art market. Chanel et al. (1994) generated a similar ranking for Western artists. Our econometric analysis allows us to illuminate the different determinants of the price of Indian art both over time as well as across heterogeneous artwork. In addition to the usual explanatory variables, we discover a positive and statistically significant relationship between the Indian stock market and art auction prices. More broadly, our paper contributes to the research program on understanding the prices realized at art auctions all over the world. Ashenfelter and Graddy (2006) present a detailed survey of this literature. They emphasize that understanding the trend in art prices using an index is useful in determining the profitability of buying art as an investment strategy. The rate of increase of the price index can be taken to be a rate of return on holding art, which can then be compared to the rate of return on other assets in order to determine whether art should be part of an investor’s portfolio. Different studies have found that the return on art tends to vary wildly in the short run, which is consistent with the results that we find. However, the longer run rates of return are often not too different from other financial assets like stocks and bonds. Rates of return in the range of 2.5-5% have been estimated by various studies cited in Ashenfelter and Graddy (2006). The rate of return that we have estimated for the Indian market is higher than this, although given the downward trajectory of prices, we wonder if prices will 4 settle down at levels that offer rates of return comparable to what other studies have found. We are the first to study the Indian art market using econometric techniques and want to emphasize that it is important to understand the trends in this market. India is a country with 1.2 billion people and by 2050 will become the most populous nation in the world, surpassing China. A country’s art is an expression of the broader socio-economic and political trends that shape the life of its citizens. It is hard to overestimate the value of art and the creativity it represents, which in turn must be representative of a larger innovative force in a nation. Looking at the developed world there is a clear correlation between economic development and a thriving art market. The dramatic trends in China’s art market for instance have been taken as yet another signal of its growing economic dominance. The price of art therefore conveys important information about the demand as well as supply of a very important cultural good. To date there has been no rigorous econometric analysis of the long-term price trend in the Indian art market and our paper fills this gap.1 Current market analysts typically use a simple average of sale prices, without controlling for characteristics to standardize the paintings. By controlling for painting and painter characteristics we are able to offer a nuanced understanding of what drives the prices of modern Indian artwork. We describe the data from Saffronart in the next section. Section 3 presents our econometric findings in the form of regression output, price indices and painter rankings, while Section 4 offers concluding remarks. 2 Data from Saffronart Our dataset consists of paintings and drawings by Indian artists that were sold at auctions con- ducted by Saffronart during 2000-2013. The average painting sold for $47,617 and the total value of the sold paintings is about $170 million.2 About 60% of Saffronart’s buyers are based in India. Of the remaining 40% non-resident Indians (NRIs) constitute the bulk. Buyers can pay in either 1We do want to mention the work of Reddy and Dass (2006) who focus on a single Saffronart auction in December 2004 for 107 paintings to understand within-auction price dynamics. Their work is complementary to ours since we focus on trends in auction prices over time. 2We consider paintings by frequently auctioned artists only and exclude some unusual auctions. More details below. 5 Indian rupees (INR) or US dollars (USD); we present the figures in dollars. The highest winning bid in our data was $2.22 million for the painting Wish Dream by artist Arpita Singh. As noted above, Saffronart has been in operation since 2000 and currently has offices in India, the US, and the UK. Although it initially conducted one or two major auctions a year, the firm now regularly conducts four major auctions annually (spring, summer, fall, and winter). The average number of paintings auctioned off at a typical auction in our data is 105. There are two novel features to the way Saffronart auctions work: the auctions are conducted online, and the auctions for all objects begin simultaneously. Interested bidders can log on to Saffronart’s website (www.saffronart.com) and place a bid for the paintings they are interested in.3 This can be done via a computer or through a tablet or smartphone application. Only registered bidders with pre- approved bidding limits are allowed to bid in the auction. Prior to the auction date Saffronart conducts preview exhibitions of the paintings in cities like London, New York, and Mumbai, where potential bidders can physically examine the paintings. Additionally at the time of bidding each auction webpage contains a high-resolution image of the artwork. Figure 1 provides an example of an auction in progress. A typical auction period lasts for about a day and a half and the 105 paintings are divided into three “closing groups” of 35 paintings each. The auctions for all the paintings start simultaneously but the auctions in the first closing group end first, after about 36 hours, followed thirty minutes later by auctions in the second closing group, followed thirty minutes later by auctions in the final closing group. Each artwork has a secret reserve price and if the highest bid does not exceed it the painting goes unsold. Saffronart posts a low and high estimated price for each painting and it is understood that the secret reserve price does not exceed the low estimate. The auctions are similar to those conducted by eBay.com in the sense that it is an open ascending format. Bidders can submit bids as often as they want before the closing of the auction, and all submitted bids are visible to all the bidders.4 A bidder can also submit a proxy 3Online auctions are a growing trend in the art world and several international art auction houses have experi- mented with this format in recent years (Gameran and Crow, 2011). 4The deadline for bidding on a lot gets extended by two minutes if a bid is placed in the last two minutes of the auction. After this, every time a new bid arrives, the countdown clock is reset for two minutes. The auction closes when no new bids are received in a two-minute interval after the previous deadline is passed. 6 Figure 1: An auction in progress bid in which case the software automatically bids the minimum increment on behalf of the bidder as long as the highest bid by the other bidders is below the proxy bid. While Saffronart publishes the winning bids, it does not reveal bid histories in general. Reddy and Dass (2006) were able to get access to the bids for one Saffronart auction during 2004 and present several interesting details. There were 127 unique bidders for 107 paintings. The number of bidders (bids) on a painting ranged from 2 (2) to 8 (23) with an average of 4.06 (9.5). In another auction during December 2005, a reported 299 bidders submitted bids. In addition to the four major art auctions which feature the work of established mainstream painters, Saffronart also conducts several “24-Hour Absolute Auctions” every year. While oth- erwise similar to the major auctions, these auctions usually contain art objects that are either the minor works of major names or works by less well-known artists. The major novelty of these auctions is that they do not have reserve prices and the object is always sold to the bidder with the highest bid. The mean winning bid within absolute auctions is $6504, although 10% of the 7 paintings sell for more than $10,000, with the highest observed winning bid of $184,000. While a major Saffronart auction will mostly sell paintings and drawings, the absolute auctions can sometimes have other artworks in the form of prints, photographs, sculpture, ceramics, digital art, calligraphy and books. These diverse types of art objects vary in average value, demand, and supply. Therefore we focus only on paintings and drawings (described henceforth as paintings), which anyways account for the bulk of art sold by Saffronart. While Saffronart specializes in Indian art, they conducted one auction of Western Impressionist art that included the works of artists like Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, and so on. We do not include this auction in our data in order to focus on Indian artists. Additionally we omit a charity auction conducted by Saffronart since that auction might have attracted a different set of bidders than the usual auctions. Given these restrictions, about 76% of the 5514 paintings we observe brought to auction are sold successfully; we use the data from these sales to estimate our price index. Occasionally some of the unsold lots are sold privately after auction, but we do not have information on the prices for these transactions, and we consider them as unsold at auction (97 paintings). We further restrict our data to sold paintings from artists who sold 15 or more paintings during 2000-2013, which covers 74 artists well-represented in the dataset. This list includes most major names in Indian art as well as many lesser known painters. Restricting our data in this manner leaves us with 3572 paintings that were successfully sold during November 2000 to June 2013. Indian painters are often thought of by art historians as consisting of two distinct stylistic groups: modern and contemporary. Modern artist is a term that usually denotes painters born before or around 1940 (India became an independent country in 1947) and includes artists like M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza, F.N. Souza, V.S. Gaitonde, Ram Kumar, Tyeb Mehta, Jogen Chowdhury, and others. The term contemporary typically denotes artists born after 1940; some important names are Atul Dodiya, Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Anju Dodiya, and Shibu Natesan. Of the 72 artists that sell more than 15 paintings, 36 happen to be modern painters and 36 are contemporary painters. Table 1 details statistics for winning bids by auction type (major or absolute) and artist 8 type (modern or contemporary). Major auctions constitute the bulk of the data, with absolute auctions accounting for about 16% of the recorded sales. Modern painters have the larger market share and within themselves account for 2447 sales, with the average painting selling for $53,114. The contemporary group on the other hand accounts for 1125 sold paintings with an average price of $35,660. Modern painters clearly command higher prices than contemporary painters and this difference is statistically significant (p = 0.0000). In our results section we further analyze trends within each of the two groups of artists. For each of the 3572 sold paintings we have the following Table 1: Summary Statistics: Winning Bids by Auction and Artist Types mean std. dev. min max obs. All Auctions 47,616.58 109,071.40 231.00 2,223,744.00 3572 Modern 53,113.57 119,023.00 231.00 2,223,744.00 2447 Contemporary 35,660.02 82,210.68 240.00 1,427,500.00 1125 Major Auctions 55,933.26 117,702.70 275.00 2,223,744.00 2971 Modern 62,222.39 128,144.70 275.00 2,223,744.00 2045 Contemporary 42,044.19 88,970.20 350.00 1,427,500.00 926 Absolute Auctions 6,503.69 13,848.99 231.00 184,000.00 601 Modern 6,776.42 11,572.96 231.00 100,690.00 402 Contemporary 5,952.75 17,592.33 240.00 184,000.00 199 Note: all numbers are in nominal USD. data: title of painting, name of painter, winning bid amount in USD and INR, and the low and high price estimate. Additionally we know the following characteristics for each painting: type of paint (e.g. oil, watercolor, ink), surface medium (e.g. canvas, paper, cardboard), height and width in inches, category (painting or drawing), style (e.g. figurative, abstract, landscape), and whether the painting is signed and/or dated. Some paintings had multiple pieces, and for these we used the average height, width and so on. Finally, we know the date of painting for 2949 of the paintings in our restricted sample. In Table 2 we present summary statistics on these as well as some additional variables. The dead variable takes value 1 if the painter is dead and 0 if they are alive. To measure the uncertainty regarding the valuation of a painting by the auctioneer, we divide the spread of the estimate (defined as high estimate minus low estimate) by the estimate (defined as the average of the low and high estimate) and take its log to arrive at log(spread/estimate). The larger this 9 ratio is the less certain the auctioneer (and the market) is likely to be regarding the value of the painting. The signed dummy takes the value 1 if the painting is signed and 0 otherwise. Finally, we include the log of the value of the stock index of the Mumbai stock exchange on the day of the auction log(stockindex) as a variable of interest in our data. Table 2: Summary Statistics: Control Variables mean std. dev. min max obs. Winning bid (USD) 47,616.58 109,071.40 231.00 2,223,744.00 3572 (real USD) 39,003.38 88,754.79 173.30 1,755,748.00 3572 (real INR) 1,399,640.00 3,189,326.00 2,421.30 53,800,000.00 3572 Low estimate (USD) 24,267.55 57,573.96 210.00 1,468,927.00 3572 (real USD) 29,817.27 71,920.21 280.00 1,860,470.00 3572 (real INR) 851,754.50 1,952,491.00 6,034.00 43,800,000.00 3572 High estimate (USD) 38,084.47 95,043.32 345.00 2,325,585.00 3572 (real USD) 30,957.11 75,957.13 264.00 1,836,157.00 3572 (real INR) 1,088,882.00 2,587,826.00 7,542.00 54,700,000.00 3572 log (Spread/Estimate) -1.46 0.34 -2.93 0.68 3572 Height (inches) 29.81 19.46 (blank) 287.00 3572 Width (inches) 30.75 24.55 (blank) 341.00 3572 Signed 0.92 0.28 0.00 1.00 3572 Date painted (modern) 1986 18.18 1941 2013 1956 Date painted (contemporary) 2003 4.96 1975 2012 993 Dead 0.31 0.46 0.00 1.00 3572 log (StockIndex) 8.95 0.37 7.88 9.59 3572 Note: real prices are in 2001 dollars or 2001 rupees. 3 Regression Results We are interested in understanding the trend in the prices for Indian paintings sold at auction during 2000-2013. The central challenge in doing so is due to the fact the paintings are heterogenous objects. Like cars and houses, paintings are hedonic goods in that a buyer’s willingness to pay for the good depends on the characteristics it possesses. For a painting, these characteristics could include the identity of the painter, artistic style, size, medium, type of paint and so on. Thus, part of the variation in the prices of the paintings in our dataset is due to variation in their characteristics, while the other part could be due to marketwide shifts in demand and supply. Following Chanel et al. (1994) we decompose the price of a painting using the following hedonic 10 regression: ln pkt = γ + βt + m∑ i=1 αixi,kt + εkt. (1) Here pkt is the price of painting k sold in year t, and βt are year-dummies. The term xi,kt denotes the i-th characteristic of painting k sold in year t. The coefficient αi can then be thought of as an implied market price of characteristic i. We assume that the valuation of the i-th characteristic does not change over time, which is appropriate considering the time period under consideration in our paper. However, time-dependent αs can be estimated when one has a larger dataset and changes in tastes might be expected over time (see Buelens and Ginsburgh (1993) for an application). Using (1), we can think of βt as the price of a standardized painting in year t, with the∑m i=1 αixi,kt term explaining the deviation of pkt from βt due to the specific characteristics of the painting. The sequence β2000,β2001, ...,β2013 then gives us a price index, which allows us to examine the marketwide trend in prices for Indian art while controlling for heterogeneity among the paintings that are being auctioned. Given our price index the annual rate of return on paintings in period t can be approximated by βt−βt−1 βt−1 ×100. For art markets with longer histories of prices an alternative approach to estimating the rate of return on art is possible, namely the repeat-sales method that has been employed by Baumol (1986), Buelens and Ginsburgh (1993), and Mei and Moses (2002). The idea there is to look only at paintings that are sold multiple times in the dataset, tracking the change in price between the successive sales of a painting. An annualized rate of return can then be inferred between any two time periods by averaging the annual return on paintings that were sold before as well as after the period under consideration. The repeat-sales method is useful when there are sufficient repeat sales in the data which is not the case for us. Moreover, using the hedonic goods method allows us to use information on all paintings sold, and not just the paintings sold multiple times. Given the growth in the Indian art market as well as growing availability of data on it, the computation of a repeat-sales price index might be feasible with another ten years worth of data. For further discussion we point the reader to Ashenfelter and Graddy (2006) who survey the general literature on estimation of different price indices for art data, and to Ginsburgh et al. (2006) who 11 present a careful analysis of the relative merits of hedonic regression and the repeat-sales method. In Table 3 we present estimates from the hedonic regression, first using sales at all auctions, and then using sales only at major auctions. Within these categories we run regressions using (1) all paintings, (2) only paintings by modern painters and (3) only paintings by contemporary painters. This allows us to compute separate price indices for modern and contemporary painters as well as the set of all painters. The dependent variable in all regressions is the log of the price of a sold painting in Indian rupees (INR) deflated by 2001 price levels.5 This is regressed on several explanatory variables. We have already discussed height, width, signed, log(spread/estimate), and the dead dummy variable. In addition, there are time dummies, one for each year during 2001-2013, with 2000 as the omitted year. The sequence of these dummies constitutes our price index. Since a painting date is not available for every sale, dateknown takes value 1 if the date the painting was painted is known. Additionally, the dateknown×datepainted variable interacts date known with painting date and its coefficient tells us how the value of a standardized painting with a known painting date changes with the date it was painted. This allows us to account for the price effects of different artistic movements in Indian art history. The painting dummy takes the value 1 if the artwork is a painting and 0 if it is a drawing. There are 13 medium dummies with the omitted medium being the category that collects all rare media (that occurred less than 10 times in the data or were unreported). There are four style dummies with unreported acting as the omitted category. There are 73 artist dummies with Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi as the omitted artist. The estimated coefficients for the artist, medium, style, and time dummies are omitted from the regression results.6 The estimates reveal several interesting features of price determination at these auctions. The price of a painting is decreasing in the spread/estimate ratio. This suggests that buyers might be taking a greater spread on a painting’s estimate as a signal of greater uncertainty regarding its valuation and bidding lower as a result on account of risk aversion. The size of the estimated 5We chose INR for the regressions since the majority of Saffronart’s buyers are either based in India or have substantial financial assets located there. 6The time dummies (βt) are presented later on in Table 4. 12 Table 3: Hedonic Regression of ln(winning bid in 2001 INR) all auctions major auctions (all artists) (modern) (contemp) (all artists) (modern) (contemp) ln(Spread/Estimate) -0.171*** -0.180*** -0.171** -0.0953* -0.0984* -0.167* (-4.73) (-4.36) (-2.76) (-2.50) (-2.35) (-2.33) Height 0.0209*** 0.0239*** 0.0151*** 0.0191*** 0.0220*** 0.0134*** (-23.08) (-18.30) (-13.05) (-19.96) (-17.07) (-10.37) Width 0.0112*** 0.0179*** 0.00902*** 0.0121*** 0.0174*** 0.00960*** (-15.52) (-14.99) (-10.77) (-14.82) (-14.82) (-9.19) Signed 0.0275 0.116* -0.0895 -0.0026 0.0897 -0.083 (-0.58) (-2.01) (-1.21) (-0.05) (-1.50) (-0.93) DateKnown 6.897*** 8.331*** -25.24** 5.264* 6.772** -20.25 (-3.33) (-4.02) (-2.61) (-2.41) (-3.16) (-1.83) DateKnown -0.00341** -0.00416*** 0.0127** -0.00261* -0.00340** 0.0102 × DatePainted (-3.28) (-3.99) (-2.62) (-2.37) (-3.16) (-1.84) Painting 0.708*** 0.625*** 0.127 0.704*** 0.592*** -0.201 (-15.55) (-13.69) (-0.59) (-11.99) (-10.49) (-0.35) Dead 2.179*** 1.109*** 0 0.908*** 0.907*** 0 (-10.30) (-7.48) (.) (-5.74) (-5.95) (.) Constant 8.477*** 9.356*** 9.274*** 10.08*** 9.924*** 9.716*** (-35.63) (-49.13) (-20.77) (-46.68) (-45.08) (-11.12) N 3572 2447 1125 2767 1988 779 adj. R-squared 0.841 0.855 0.86 0.817 0.845 0.82 Note: t-statistics in parentheses. All regressions include Artist, Medium, Style, and Time (βt) dummies. 13 coefficient for this variable is smaller and less statistically significant in the case of major auctions where the artworks tend be well-known or from simply more established painters. Controlling for other factors, larger paintings command higher prices, which is consistent with other studies. Whether a painting is signed or not does not appear to affect its price in a statistically significant manner. The effect of painting date varies for modern and contemporary painters. Older paintings by modern painters sell for higher prices (see the sign of dateknown ×paintdate). For contemporary artists, all of whom are still alive and many at the peak of their careers, newer paintings sell for higher prices (although this is not statistically significant in the case of sales at only major auctions). The painting dummy is statistically significant and positive for modern painters suggesting that, controlling for the other characteristics, an artwork by a modern artist is more valued when it is a painting than a drawing. The sign of the dead dummy suggests either higher demand or lower supply of paintings by dead painters which leads to higher prices. This coefficient is estimated only for modern painters since all the contemporary painters in our dataset are still alive. Overall we are able to account for around 82-86% of the variation in the data.7 3.1 A Price Index for Indian Art Given the extensive set of control variables in our regression in Table 3, the estimated time dummies βt can now be used to construct a price index that tracks changes in the price of a standardized painting over time. We present in Table 4 an index for the entire market as well as the modern and contemporary segments separately. Within each of these three categories we also present the index for the group of paintings sold only at the major auctions. With 2000 being the omitted year, we have normalized β2001 = 100. We also depict the price indices graphically, in Figures 2, 3, and 4. Looking first at all paintings in all auctions (Figure 2), prices rose precipitously from 2001-2006 at an annualized growth rate of 57% per year. Prices then seem to have stabilized relatively till 2008. In addition to genuine growth in demand, part of the meteoric rise in prices is explained by 7Even if we omit the painter fixed effects we are able to explain 61% of the variation. 14 Table 4: Real Price Index using estimated βt from hedonic regression all auctions major auctions (all artists) (modern) (contemp) (all artists) (modern) (contemp) β2001 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 β2002 168.19 195.65 102.85 149.38 169.93 96.61 β2003 262.55 279.96 174.48 229.67 241.19 162.35 β2004 449.93 475.89 316.28 377.08 391.12 284.24 β2005 736.13 774.73 536.14 592.24 611.76 454.41 β2006 945.03 972.79 711.58 758.24 761.30 613.36 β2007 891.66 876.59 703.05 707.43 684.17 600.55 β2008 949.73 865.16 755.87 755.63 686.94 649.80 β2009 659.03 666.79 513.49 535.40 530.62 445.39 β2010 655.66 650.45 537.54 532.84 517.96 472.05 β2011 494.21 524.45 387.50 463.75 468.25 419.66 β2012 393.96 430.26 251.17 438.25 444.70 318.86 β2013 355.62 382.69 239.56 383.80 386.07 321.86 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 Year P ri c e In d e x all auctions major auctions Figure 2: Real price index for all painters 15 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 Year P ri c e In d e x all auctions major auctions Figure 3: Real price index for modern painters 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 Year P ri c e In d e x all auctions major auctions Figure 4: Real price index for contemporary painters 16 what art market analysts have called hot money, being spent by speculative investors and global art funds. This money quickly vanished from the market around 2007-2008 when the global financial crisis occurred, originating from the subprime mortgage crisis in the US. The Indian financial sector is not very tightly interlinked with global financial markets, and as a result, the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 largely left the Indian financial markets unaffected. However, once the financial crisis turned into a global recession it affected the Indian economy as well (Kumar and Vashisht, 2012). During 2008-2009 the Indian GDP growth rate fell by two percentage points and the Mumbai stock exchange index crashed several times. As a result of global and national economic distress Indian art prices appear to have collapsed as well. Starting in the year 2008 our price index declines steeply, falling at an annual rate of about 18% during 2008-2013. Part of this decline is likely due to reduced demand for art in tough economic times but part of it is also due to the sudden exit of global and local speculative investors from the Indian art market. That said, over the entire time period 2001-2013 our price index suggests an annual real rate of return of about 11% which is an economically significant rate of return on investments in Indian art. Next, we look at trends in the market for paintings by modern painters (Figure 3). These painters represent the more established set of painters in the market, with a more stable existing stock of paintings as many of these painters have died or are at the end of their careers. Looking at all the auctions (including absolute auctions), prices grew at roughly 58% every year during 2001-2006 and declined thereafter for the rest of the time period under consideration, falling at an average of 12.5% every year. The average annual growth in real prices for these paintings over 2001-2013 was about 12%. The contemporary painters group is a market segment that is very much in flux, with con- temporary painters still producing many important artworks. This is also a market where there is great scope for speculation as it is not clear which artists or artworks will stand the test of time. In fact corresponding to the Indian boom and bust in art prices was a corresponding boom and bust (in 2008) in prices for Western art which is believed by some to have been fueled by speculative buying of contemporary art (Peers, 2008; Gameran and Crow, 2011). At around the same time, 17 an even more dramatic boom and bust occurred in the Chinese contemporary art market (Ford, 2009; Robertson, 2011). Our index for all contemporary auctions in Figure 4 suggests that prices kept increasing in the Indian contemporary segment longer than in the modern segment (where the decline began two years earlier in 2006), reaching a peak in 2008. Prices for contemporary paintings grew at an average real annual rate of about 33.5% during 2001-2008. The crash in this segment was more intense than the modern painters segment, with prices falling at an annual real rate of 20.5% during 2008-2013. This is likely due to prices during 2001-2008 being less connected to the fundamental value of paintings and more to speculative interest in a risky asset. Once the speculative investors left, prices fell precipitously. The average real rate of return on contemporary art during 2001-2013 has been 7.5%. Thus modern painters appear to have offered a better rate of return than contemporary painters. Focussing now on price trends in the major auctions conducted by Saffronart, note in Figure 2 that for most of the years the price index for major auctions remained below that for all the auctions. The index for major auctions grew and fell less intensely than the one for all auctions. Since the value of art in the major auctions is likely to have been better understood compared to pieces brought for sale in the absolute auctions, it is possible that some of the difference is explained by more speculative activity for lesser known and less well-understood artwork in the absolute auctions. However, around 2011-2012 the two indices appear to be converging. This could be due to greater deliberation being exercised by buyers in this market following the 2008 crash. The rates of return described in the previous paragraphs are for all auctions. Looking only at major auctions, the annualized rates of return for modern, contemporary and all painters are 11.9%, 10.2%, and 11.8% respectively. These are similar to the rates of return using all auctions except for the contemporary paintings which yielded a return of 7.5% based on all auctions. It appears therefore that contemporary paintings being sold in the major auctions are holding onto their pre-2008 gains better than contemporary paintings in the absolute auctions. This could mean that buyers of contemporary paintings in absolute auctions are bidding more cautiously relative to those bidding on contemporary work in major auctions, which are more likely to feature more 18 established painters and pieces. While there has been no rigorous analysis of the Indian art market other than our paper, there has been anecdotal commentary by art market analysts who have typically tracked the total value of paintings sold without controlling for painting characteristics. It is believed that 2007-2008 marked the peak of the Indian market and that the market has been falling since, with some recent trend towards stabilization. Thus, our findings are consistent with the folk wisdom in this market. 3.2 Stock Market and Art Prices Anecdotal commentary by art analysts suggests that the state of the stock market might affect the enthusiasm of buyers at art auctions. Moreover, stocks are an alternative class of assets that an investor in art might also invest in. Therefore it is an interesting exercise to include an index of the stock market as an explanatory variable in the regression. A note of caution should be made here though. Since the stock market and art prices could both be reacting to common events it is not clear whether the stock market index is appropriate as an exogenous variable. However, Chanel et al. (1994) do point out that in general stock markets have been found to ‘cause’ art prices. In Table 5 we report estimates from a hedonic regression like the one in Table 3 except that here the time dummies have been replaced with the log of the Mumbai stock exchange index. We find that the coefficient on ln(StockIndex) is positive, large, and statistically significant: a healthier stock market is associated with higher art auction prices. Compared to the modern seg- ment, the coefficient is about 50% larger for the contemporary segment of the market. This fact is consistent with the hypothesis that bidding for contemporary paintings might be less connected to the long-term value and artistic merit of the paintings and more a function of a general speculative mood that gets heightened when the stock market soars and is dampened when the stock market crashes. 19 Table 5: The Stock Market and Art Prices all auctions major auctions (all artists) (modern) (contemp) (all artists) (modern) (contemp) ln(Spread/Estimate) -0.730*** -0.688*** -0.829*** -0.438*** -0.475*** -0.374*** (-17.95) (-15.07) (-10.61) (-10.94) (-10.50) (-5.06) Height 0.0224*** 0.0253*** 0.0171*** 0.0192*** 0.0225*** 0.0131*** (-20.18) (-15.98) (-10.91) (-18.25) (-14.96) (-9.52) Width 0.0129*** 0.0198*** 0.0107*** 0.0115*** 0.0171*** 0.01000*** (-14.49) (-13.71) (-9.35) (-13.35) (-12.48) -9.73 Signed 0.04 0.06 0.02 (-0.04) 0.02 (-0.12) (-0.75) (-0.80) (-0.16) (-0.67) (-0.28) (-1.25) DateKnown 12.12*** 13.36*** -0.0751 7.541** 9.018*** -9.068 (-4.77) (-5.33) (-0.01) (-3.05) (-3.63) (-0.75) DateKnown -0.00598*** -0.00664*** 0.000181 -0.00370** -0.00446*** 0.00463 × DatePainted (-4.69) (-5.27) (-0.03) (-2.98) (-3.57) (-0.76) Painting 0.915*** 0.789*** 0.926** 0.746*** 0.602*** 0.629 (-16.58) (-14.51) (-3.20) (-11.35) (-9.25) (-0.95) Dead 1.941*** 0.908*** 0 1.905*** 0.788*** 0 (-7.46) (-5.05) (.) (-7.62) (-4.41) (.) ln(StockIndex) 1.372*** 1.226*** 1.883*** 1.457*** 1.324*** 1.921*** (-36.52) (-30.74) (-21.79) (-42.54) (-35.63) (-26.41) Constant -3.688*** -1.330** -8.422*** -3.084*** -0.970* -6.698*** (-8.57) (-3.27) (-9.11) (-7.31) (-2.41) (-5.77) N 3572 2447 1125 2971 2045 926 adj. R-squared 0.758 0.786 0.738 0.752 0.78 0.749 Note: t-statistics in parentheses. All regressions include Artist, Medium, and Style dummies. 20 3.3 Relative Ranking of Painters Following Chanel et al. (1994) we use estimates of artist fixed effect dummies to rank the painters in our dataset in terms of the prices commanded by their artwork. The idea is that the coefficient on the artist dummy reflects the value placed by the market on a particular artist being the painter of a work, while controlling for time effects and painting characteristics. Our aim in this exercise is to understand the relative popularity of different Indian painters over the past decade or so. Since some artists’ work becomes more valuable after their death, we removed the dead artist dummy from the regression so that the increase in interest in a painter after their death is now attributed to the fixed effect coefficient for them. Moreover, since certain artists became synonymous with particular media or styles we dropped these dummies from the regression as well, in order to avoid attributing an artist’s popularity to that for her preferred medium (which might be shared by other lesser known artists). These concerns were less important when we were estimating the price index since we were mostly interested in standardizing a painting’s price. In Table 6, we present three rankings: all painters, modern painters, and contemporary painters. For modern painters we normalized the value of the dummies with respect to M.F. Husain. Here, Tyeb Mehta appears to be the top painter in the category by a wide margin, followed by V.S. Gaitonde, and then by S.H. Raza and M.F. Husain. These painters are widely considered to be, along with some others, in the top echelon in the modern category. In the contemporary segment Subodh Gupta followed by Anju Dodiya and Atul Dodiya appear to be the most valued painters in terms of price at auction. While all these painters are understood to be major figures by art historians, our analysis quantitatively confirms the dominance of these artists in terms of auction prices. Combining both modern and contemporary painters into one basket, Tyeb Mehta again leads the rankings. Some of the rankings of the modern (contemporary) painters change compared to the modern (contemporary) only ranking since now we are using information from paintings by both modern and contemporary painters to estimate the fixed effects. It is interesting that only 3 of the top 25 painters overall are contemporary artists (Anju Dodiya, Subodh Gupta, Atul Dodiya) which underscores the strength of the modern category in the Indian art market. 21 Table 6: Artist Rankings Rank All Artists Modern Artists Contemporary Artists 1 Tyeb Mehta 119.82 Tyeb Mehta 137.89 Subodh Gupta 112.83 2 V S Gaitonde 101.70 V S Gaitonde 108.73 Anju Dodiya 100.84 3 Maqbool Fida Husain 100.00 S H Raza 104.67 Atul Dodiya 100.00 4 S H Raza 99.20 Maqbool Fida Husain 100.00 Surendran Nair 90.04 5 Jehangir Sabavala 92.62 Ganesh Pyne 85.90 Sudhir Patwardhan 82.48 6 Jagdish Swaminathan 89.33 Jehangir Sabavala 84.57 Paresh Maity 75.53 7 Manjit Bawa 88.48 Jagdish Swaminathan 83.35 Nataraj Sharma 73.13 8 Francis Newton Souza 88.44 Francis Newton Souza 83.34 Shibu Natesan 72.24 9 Ganesh Pyne 86.01 Manjit Bawa 80.22 Jayashree Chakravarty 70.00 10 Anjolie Ela Menon 85.56 Anjolie Ela Menon 76.56 Baiju Parthan 68.46 11 Ram Kumar 84.73 Ram Kumar 72.50 Jitish Kallat 68.37 12 N S Bendre 84.48 Jogen Chowdhury 71.80 T V Santhosh 67.21 13 K K Hebbar 83.65 K K Hebbar 70.57 Chittrovanu Mazumdar 64.84 14 Jogen Chowdhury 80.28 N S Bendre 67.98 N S Harsha 62.32 15 Arpita Singh 78.31 Arpita Singh 63.73 Sujata Bajaj 60.55 16 Sakti Burman 77.34 Akbar Padamsee 60.60 A Balasubramaniam 57.64 17 Akbar Padamsee 77.05 Sakti Burman 56.30 Justin Ponmany 54.67 18 Anju Dodiya 75.92 Bhupen Khakhar 52.21 Riyas Komu 53.81 19 Subodh Gupta 75.46 Satish Gujral 51.21 Jagannath Panda 53.57 20 Atul Dodiya 74.43 Krishen Khanna 49.84 G R Iranna 52.17 21 Krishen Khanna 73.80 K G Subramanyan 49.70 Bose Krishnamachari 50.57 22 Satish Gujral 73.73 B. Prabha 47.47 Arpana Caur 48.44 23 B. Prabha 73.61 K H Ara 43.72 Rekha Rodwittiya 48.29 24 Bhupen Khakhar 73.19 Thota Vaikuntam 41.11 Manisha Parekh 43.58 25 K G Subramanyan 71.13 Bikash Bhattacharjee 40.03 Anandajit Ray 40.75 22 4 Concluding Remarks The market for modern Indian art is an emerging market since artwork produced by Indian painters was recognized to be part of an independent artistic movement only around 1995. Given that Indian art represents the creative expression of soon-to-be the most populous country in the world, it is a worthwhile exercise to use data on auction prices for artworks by Indian painters to understand the price trends in this important new art market. We used data from Saffronart, a leading auctioneer of Indian art during 2000-2013, to estimate an art price index for this time period. Since paintings are heterogenous objects, we used a hedonic regression to standardize a painting’s price by controlling for various painting characteristics. This method, which has been used to study prices for Western art by several researchers, has never been applied to the Indian market. In fact our study represents the first instance of the use of rigorous empirical methods to understand the price trend in the Indian art market, where the analysis so far has remained anecdotal and has ignored the heterogeneity of paintings. We document a meteoric rise in the prices for Indian art during 2000-2006. Following the global financial crisis and downturn in 2007-2009, art market prices crashed all over the world and the Indian market was no exception. Using the price index we find a dramatic decline in prices since 2008. We also use the price index to compute annualized real rates of return on Indian art which appear to be in the range of 7.5-12.0%. These are high rates of return, but art markets are known to be quite volatile in the short run, and adding future data will likely change these numbers. Given the downward trend in prices, we wonder whether the index will stabilize at levels that generate rates of return consistent with studies of Western art prices over longer horizons. In the paper we distinguish empirically two segments in the Indian art market, namely modern and contemporary painters, and find that modern painters command significantly higher prices than contemporary painters. We also find a positive relationship between the state of the stock market and auction prices, especially in the case of contemporary art. Finally, we generate a ranking of important Indian painters based on the prices commanded by their paintings at Saffronart auctions. The Indian art market is an important emerging market and much work remains to be done. 23 While Saffronart sold a large number of paintings by a wide range of Indian artists during 2000- 2013, recently Christie’s has begun to rival Saffronart as the dominant auctioneer for Indian art. Sotheby’s also has begun to make inroads into the Indian market. Adding data on paintings sold by these other two firms will enrich the analysis of price trends for Indian art and we leave this to future work. Saffronart’s strategy of holding online auctions allowed it to tap the large market of Indian expatriates living in the US and Europe. Recently however, the firm held its first live auction which resembled a traditional art auction in the sense that one painting is auctioned at a time and most bidders are present in the room placing bids in the presence of a human auctioneer. As data from Saffronart’s live auctions accumulates, it would be interesting to analyze whether (and how) the relationship between price and painting characteristics changes with the auction format. Finally, the usual caveats regarding hedonic regression apply. As the Indian market matures and more repeat sales occur in the coming years, it will become feasible to compute a repeat-sales price index which can be compared to our hedonic price index. References Anderson, R.C., 1974. Paintings as an Investment. Economic Inquiry, 12(1):13–26. Ashenfelter, O. and Graddy, K., 2006. Art Auctions (chapter 26) . volume 1 of Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, 909–945. Elsevier. Barre, M.D.L., Docclo, S., and Ginsburgh, V., 1994. Returns of Impressionist, Modern and Con- temporary European Paintings 1962-1991. Annales d’Economie et de Statistique, (35):143–181. Baumol, W.J., 1986. Unnatural Value: Or Art Investment as Floating Crap Game. American Economic Review, 76(2):10–14. Buelens, N. and Ginsburgh, V., 1993. Revisiting Baumol’s Art as Floating Crap Game. European Economic Review, 37(7):1351–1371. Chanel, O., Gerard-Varet, L., and Ginsburgh, V., 1994. Prices and Returns on Paintings: An Exercise on How to Price the Priceless. The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance Theory, 24 19(1):7–21. Czujack, C., 1997. Picasso Paintings at Auction: 1963-1994. Journal of Cultural Economics, 21(3):229–247. Ford, P., 2009. As Chinese Art Market Crashes, Many Artists Applaud. Christian Science Monitor, 4/7/14. Gameran, E. and Crow, K., 2011. Clicking on a Masterpiece. Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com). Ginsburgh, V., Mei, J., and Moses, M., 2006. The Computation of Prices Indices (chapter 27). volume 1 of Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, 947–979. Elsevier. Khaire, M. and Wadhwani, R.D., 2010. Changing Landscapes: The Construction of Meaning and Value in a New Market Category – Modern Indian Art. Academy of Management Journal, 53(6):1281–1304. Kumar, R. and Vashisht, P., 2012. The Global Economic Crisis: Impact on India and Policy Responses. In M. Kawai, M.B. Lamberte, and Y.C. Park, editors, The Global Financial Crisis and Asia, 162–181. Oxford University Press. Mei, J. and Moses, M., 2002. Art as an Investment and the Underperformance of Masterpieces. American Economic Review, 92(5):1656–1668. Mok, H.M.K., Ko, V.W.K., Woo, S.S.M., and Kwok, K.Y.S., 1993. Modern Chinese Paintings: An Investment Alternative? Southern Economic Journal, 59(4):pp. 808–816. Peers, A., 2008. The Fine Art of Surviving the Crash in Auction Prices. Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com). Reddy, S.K. and Dass, M., 2006. Modeling on-line Art Auction Dynamics using Functional Data Analysis. Statistical Science, 179–193. Robertson, I., 2011. The Art Market in Transition, the Global Economic Crisis, and the Rise of Asia. In J. Harris, editor, Globalization and Contemporary Art, 449–463. Wiley-Blackwell. 25 work_krubkes2qfhdrbwrjopvnzcnby ---- Eyeglasses-free Display: Towards Correcting Visual Aberrationsith Computational Light Field Displays Eyeglasses-free Display: Towards Correcting Visual Aberrations with Computational Light Field Displays Fu-Chung Huang1,4 Gordon Wetzstein2 Brian A. Barsky1,3 Ramesh Raskar2 1Computer Science Division, UC Berkeley 2MIT Media Lab 3School of Optometry, UC Berkeley 4Microsoft Corporation Conventional Display Multilayer Display high-res, low contrast Light Field Display - direct low-res, high contrast Proposed Display high-res, high contrast single display panel (no processing) [Huang et al. 2012] (prefiltering) [Pamplona et al. 2012] (no processing) (prefiltering) (Source image courtesy of flickr user dfbphotos) Figure 1: Vision correction with computational displays. On a conventional screen, people with optical aberrations see a blurred image (cen- ter left). Current approaches to aberration-correcting display use multilayer prefiltering (center) or light field displays (center right). While the former technology enhances perceived image sharpness, contrast is severely reduced. Existing light field-based solutions offer high con- trast but require a very high angular sampling density, which significantly reduces image resolution. In this paper, we explore the convergence of light field display optics and computational prefiltering (right), which achieves high image resolution and contrast simultaneously. Abstract Millions of people worldwide need glasses or contact lenses to see or read properly. We introduce a computational display technol- ogy that predistorts the presented content for an observer, so that the target image is perceived without the need for eyewear. By designing optics in concert with prefiltering algorithms, the pro- posed display architecture achieves significantly higher resolution and contrast than prior approaches to vision-correcting image dis- play. We demonstrate that inexpensive light field displays driven by efficient implementations of 4D prefiltering algorithms can produce the desired vision-corrected imagery, even for higher-order aberra- tions that are difficult to be corrected with glasses. The proposed computational display architecture is evaluated in simulation and with a low-cost prototype device. CR Categories: B.4.2 [Hardware]: Input/Output and Data Communications—Image display; H.1.2 [Information Systems]: User/Machine Systems—Human factors; I.3.3 [Computer Graph- ics]: Picture/Image Generation—Display algorithms; Keywords: computational ophthalmology, displays, light fields Links: DL PDF WEB VIDEO DATA CODE 1 Introduction Today, an estimated 41.6% of the US population [Vitale et al. 2009] and more than half of the population in some Asia countries [Wong et al. 2000] suffer from myopia. Eyeglasses have been the pri- mary tool to correct such aberrations since the 13th century. Recent decades have seen contact lenses and refractive surgery supplement available options to correct for refractive errors. Unfortunately, all of these approaches are intrusive in that the observer either has to use eyewear or undergo surgery, which can be uncomfortable or even dangerous. Within the last year, two vision-correcting computational display architectures have been introduced as non-intrusive alternatives. Pamplona et al. [2012] proposed to use light field displays to en- able the display to correct the observer’s visual aberrations. This correction relies on a 2D image to be shown within the observer’s focal range, outside the physical display enclosure. Light field displays offering such capabilities require extremely high angular sampling rates, which significantly reduce spatial image resolution. As a high-resolution alternative, Huang et al. [2012] proposed a multilayer device that relies on prefiltered image content. Unfortu- nately, the required prefiltering techniques for these particular op- tical configurations drastically reduce image contrast. In this pa- per, we explore combinations of viewer-adaptive prefiltering with off-the-shelf lenslets or parallax barriers and demonstrate that the resulting vision-correcting computational display system facilitates significantly higher contrast and resolution as compared to previous solutions (see Fig. 1). While light field displays have conventionally been used for glasses-free 3D image presentation, correcting for visual aberra- tions of observers is a promising new direction with direct ben- efits for millions of people. We believe that our approach is the first to make such displays practical by providing both high reso- lution and contrast—the two design criteria that have been driving the display industry for the last decade. We envision future display systems to be integrated systems comprising flexible optical con- http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2601097.2601122 http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=2601122&type=pdf http://graphics.berkeley.edu/papers/Huang-EFD-2014-08/index.html http://graphics.berkeley.edu/papers/Huang-EFD-2014-08/Huang-EFD-2014-08.mp4 http://graphics.berkeley.edu/papers/Huang-EFD-2014-08/supplement.zip http://graphics.berkeley.edu/papers/Huang-EFD-2014-08/supplement.zip b lu rr e d im a g e co n ve n tio n a l d is p la y perceived blurring kernel focal range h ig h -r e s, lo w c o n tr a st m u lti la ye r d is p la y (p re fil te re d ) shared pixels with mixed colors shared view with mixed colors effective pixel size h ig h -r e s, h ig h c o n tr a st p ro p o se d d is p la y (p re fil te re d ) lo w -r e s, h ig h c o n tr a st ta ilo re d d is p la y (r a y- tr a ce d ) effective pixel size Figure 2: Illustration of vision-correcting displays. Observing a conventional 2D display outside the focal range of the eye results in a blurred image (top). A multilayer display with prefiltered im- age generation (second row) allows for improved image sharpness at the cost of reduced contrast. Image contrast can be preserved using a light field approach via lenslet arrays on the screen (third row); this approach severely reduces image resolution. Combin- ing light field display and computational prefiltering, as proposed in this paper (bottom), allows for vision-correcting image display with significantly improved image resolution and contrast. figurations combined with sophisticated computing that allow for different modes, such as 2D, glasses-free 3D, or vision-correcting image display. We explore computational displays with applications in correcting visual aberrations of human observers. In particular, we make the following contributions: • We introduce a novel vision-correcting computational display system that leverages readily available hardware components in concert with light field prefiltering algorithms. • We analyze vision-correcting displays in the frequency do- main and show that light field displays provide fundamentally more degrees of freedom than other approaches. • We demonstrate that light field prefiltering offers benefits over alternative vision-correcting displays: image resolution and contrast are significant enhanced; implementations with par- allax barriers are brighter and lenslet-based devices have thin- ner form factors. • We evaluate the proposed display system using a wide range of simulations and build a low-cost prototype device that demonstrates correction of myopia and hyperopia in practice. 1.1 Overview of Limitations The proposed system requires modifications to conventional dis- play hardware and increased computational resources. Although our displays provide significant benefits over previous work, small tradeoffs in both resolution and contrast have to be made compared to conventional 2D displays. We evaluate the prototype using pho- tographs taken with aperture settings corresponding to those of the human eye and with simulations using computational models of hu- man perception. However, we do not run a full-fledged user study. A commercial implementation of the proposed technology may re- quire eye tracking, which is outside the scope of this paper. Our academic display prototype exhibits color artifacts that are due to moiré between the parallax barrier and the display subpixels. These artifacts could be removed with diffusing films tailored for the sub- pixel structure of the screen. Finally, the employed parallax barriers reduce image brightness. 2 Related Work Light Fields and Computational Ophthalmology Since their introduction to computer graphics, light fields [Levoy and Hanra- han 1996; Gortler et al. 1996] have become one of the most fun- damental tools in computational photography. Frequency analy- ses [Durand et al. 2005], for instance, help better understand the theoretical foundations of ray-based light transport whereas appli- cations range from novel camera designs, e.g. [Levin et al. 2009], and aberration correction in light field cameras [Ng and Hanrahan 2006], to low-cost devices that allow for diagnosis of refractive errors [Pamplona et al. 2010] or cataracts [Pamplona et al. 2011] in the human eye. These applications are examples of computa- tional ophthalmology, where interactive techniques are combined with computational photography and display for medical applica- tions. Light Field Displays Glasses-free 3D or light field displays were invented in the beginning of the 20th century. The two dominating technologies are lenslet arrays [Lippmann 1908] and parallax barri- ers [Ives 1903]. Today, a much wider range of different 3D display technologies are available, including volumetric displays [Cossairt et al. 2007; Jones et al. 2007], multifocal displays [Akeley et al. 2004; Love et al. 2009], and super-multi-view displays [Takaki 2006]. Volumetric displays create the illusion of a virtual 3D ob- ject floating inside the physical device enclosure; an observer can accommodate within this volume. Multifocal displays allow for the display of imagery on different focal planes but require either multi- ple devices in a large form factor [Akeley et al. 2004] or vary-focal glasses to be worn [Love et al. 2009]. Super-multi-view displays emit light fields with an extremely high angular resolution, which is achieved by employing many spatial light modulators. Most re- cently, near-eye light field displays [Lanman and Luebke 2013] and compressive light field displays [Lanman et al. 2010; Wetzstein et al. 2012; Maimone et al. 2013; Hirsch et al. 2014] have been introduced. With the exception of [Maimone et al. 2013], none of these technologies is demonstrated to support accommodation. A recent survey of computational displays can be found in Masia et al. [2013]. Building light field displays that support all depth cues, including binocular disparity, motion parallax, and accommodation, in a thin form factor is one of the most challenging problem in display design today. The support for accommodation allows an observer to fo- cus on virtual images that float at a distance to the physical device. This capability would allow for the correction of low-order visual aberrations, such as myopia and hyperopia. Maimone et al. [2013] demonstrate the first single-device solution for this problem that does not require glasses; their device form-factor is—unlike ours— not suitable for mobile displays. We propose a different strategy: rather than aiming for the support of all depth cues with a single device, we employ simple parallax barriers or lenslet arrays with a very narrow field of view to only support accommodation, but not binocular disparity or motion parallax. That means glasses-free 3D display may not be possible with the proposed devices. How- ever, our approach allows us to use inexpensive add-ons to exist- ing phones or tables, facilitating eyeglasses-free 2D image display for observers with visual aberrations, including myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, and higher-order aberrations. Vision-correcting Displays Devices tailored to correct visual aberrations of human observers have recently been introduced. Early approaches attempt to pre-sharpen a 2D image presented on a conventional screen with the inverse point spread function (PSF) of the observer’s eye [Alonso Jr. and Barreto 2003; Yellott and Yellott 2007; Archand et al. 2011]. Although these methods slightly im- prove image sharpness, the problem itself is ill-posed. Fundamen- tally, the PSF of an eye with refractive errors is usually a low-pass filter—high image frequencies are irreversibly canceled out in the optical path from display to the retina. To overcome this limitation, Pamplona et al. [2012] proposed the use of 4D light field displays with lenslet arrays or parallax barriers to correct visual aberrations. For this application, the emitted light fields must provide a suffi- ciently high angular resolution so that multiple light rays emitted by a single lenslet enter the same pupil (see Fig. 2). This approach can be interpreted as lifting the problem into a higher-dimensional (light field) space, where the inverse problem becomes well-posed. Unfortunately, conventional light field displays as used by Pam- plona et al. [2012] are subject to a spatio-angular resolution trade- off: an increased angular resolution decreases the spatial resolu- tion. Hence, the viewer sees a sharp image but at a significantly lower resolution than that of the screen. To mitigate this effect, Huang et al. [2011; 2012] recently proposed to use multilayer dis- play designs together with prefiltering. While this is a promising, high-resolution approach, combining prefiltering and these particu- lar optical setups significantly reduces the resulting image contrast. Pamplona et al. [2012] explore the resolution-limits of available hardware to build vision-correcting displays; Huang et al. [2011; 2012] show that computation can be used to overcome the reso- lution limits, but at the cost of decreased contrast. The approach proposed in this paper combines both methods by employing 4D light field prefiltering with hardware designs that have previously only been used in a “direct” way, i.e. each screen pixel corresponds to one emitted light ray. We demonstrate that this design allows for significantly higher resolutions as compared to the “direct” method because angular resolution demands are decreased. At the same time, image contrast is significantly increased, compared to previ- ous prefiltering approaches, because of the hardware we use. 3 Light Field Transport and Inversion In this section, we derive the optical image formation of a light field on the observer’s retina as well as image inversion methods. For this purpose, we employ a two-plane parameterization [Levoy and Hanrahan 1996; Chai et al. 2000] of the light fields emitted by the device and inside the eye. The forward and inverse models in this section are derived for two-dimensional “flatland” light fields with straightforward extensions to the full four-dimensional formu- lations. 3.1 Retinal Light Field Projection We define the lateral position on the retina to be x and that on the pupil to be u (see Fig. 3). The light field l (x,u) describes the radi- ance distribution inside the eye. Photoreceptors in the retina aver- age over radiance incident from all angles; therefore, the perceived intensity i (x) is modeled as the projection of l along its angular dimension: i (x) = ∫ Ωu l (x,u) du, (1) where Ωu is the integration domain, which is limited by the fi- nite pupil size. Vignetting and other angle-dependent effects are absorbed in the light field. Assuming that the display is capable of emitting a light field that contains spatial variation over the screen plane xd and angular variation over the pupil plane ud, allows us to model the radiance distribution entering the eye as a light field ld ( xd,ud ) . Note that the coordinates on the pupil plane for the light fields inside the eye and on the display are equivalent (u,ud). Refractions and aberrations in the eye are modeled as a mapping function φ : R × R → R from the spatio-angular coordinates of l to a location on the screen, such that xd = φ(x,u). Equation 1 therefore becomes i (x) = ∫ ∞ −∞ l d (φ (x,u) ,u) A (u) du. (2) Here, the effect of the finite pupil diameter r is a multiplication of the light field with the pupil function A (u) = rect ( u r ) . In the full 4D case, the rect function is replaced by a circular function modeling the shape of the pupil. Following standard ray transfer matrix notation [Hecht 2001], the mapping between rays incident on the retina and those emitted by the screen can be modeled as the combined effect of transport be- tween retina and pupil by distance De, refraction of the lens with focal length f, and transport between pupil and screen by distance Do. In matrix notation, this transformation is expressed as( φ(x,u) ud ) = ( −D o De Do∆ 0 1 )( x u ) = T ( x u ) (3) where T is the concatenation of the individual propagation opera- tors and ∆ = 1 De − 1 f + 1 Do . We derive Equation 3 in Supplemental Section A. As a first-order approximation, Equation 3 only models the defocus of the eye by considering its focal length f, which may be constrained due to the observer’s limited accommodation range. However, astigmatism and higher-order aberrations can be included in this formulation (see Sec. 6.2). Discretizing Equations 2 and 3 results in a linear forward model: i = Pl d , (4) where the matrix P ∈ RN×N encodes the projection of the dis- crete, vectorized 4D light field ld ∈ RN emitted by the display onto the retina i ∈ RN . For the remainder of the paper, we assume that the number of emitted light rays N is the same as the discretized locations on the retina, which makes P square. (b) conventional display (in-focus) (c) conventional display (out-of-focus) (d) multilayer display (out-of-focus) (e) light field display (out-of-focus) sp a tia l d o m a in fr e q u e n cy d o m a in (a) optical setup retinal projection light field display Figure 3: Light field analysis for different displays. The light field emitted by a display is parameterized by its coordinates on the screen xd, on the pupil u, and on the retina x (a). This light field propagates through the pupil and is projected into a 2D image on the retina. For an in-focus display, the light field incident on the retina is a horizontal line in the frequency domain (b). For a displayed image outside the accommodation range of the observer, the corresponding light field is slanted and energy is lost at some spatial frequencies (c). Multilayer displays utilize an additional display layer to preserve all spatial frequencies (d). With light field displays, frequency loss is also avoided; the perceived image frequencies are a combination of all spatio-angular frequencies of the incident light field (e). The ray paths in (a) show two effects for a hyperopic eye observing a light field display. First, each photoreceptor on the retina averages over multiple neighboring pixels on the screen (green shaded regions). Second, each pixel on the screen (e.g., xd0 ) emits different intensities toward different regions on the pupil (u0,u1), allowing the same pixel to appear differently when observed from different locations (x0,x1) on the retina (red arrows). 3.2 Inverse Light Field Projection The objective of an aberration-correcting display is to present a 4D light field to the observer, such that a desired 2D retinal projection is perceived. Assuming that viewing distance, pupil size, and other parameters are known, the emitted light field can be found by opti- mizing the following objective function: minimize {ld} ‖i−Pld‖2 subject to 0 ≤ ldi ≤ 1, for i = 1 . . .N (5) Here, i is the target image (given in normalized power per unit area) and the constraints of the objective account for physically feasible pixel states of the screen. Equation 5 can be solved using stan- dard non-negative linear solvers, we employ LBFGSB [Byrd et al. 1995]. As shown in the following frequency interpretation and in Section 4, Equation 5 is an ill-posed problem for conventional 2D displays. The problem becomes invertible through the use of 4D light field displays. 3.3 Frequency Domain Analysis While Equation 5 allows for optimal display pixels states to be de- termined, a natural question that remains is ‘Which display type is best suited for aberration-correction?’. We attempt to answer this question in two different ways: with a frequency analysis derived in this section and with an analysis of the conditioning of projection matrix P in Section 4. Frequency analyses have become standard tools to generate an intu- itive understanding of performance bounds of computational cam- eras and displays (e.g., [Durand et al. 2005; Levin et al. 2009; Wet- zstein et al. 2011]), we follow this approach. First, we note that the coordinate transformation T between display and retina can be used to model corresponding transformation in the frequency do- main via the Fourier linear transformation theorem: ( ωdx ωdu ) = ( −D e Do 0 De∆ 1 )( ωx ωu ) = T̂ ( ωx ωu ) , (6) where ωx, ωu are the spatial and angular frequencies of the light field inside the eye, ωdx, ω d u the corresponding frequencies on the display, and T̂ = T−T [Ramamoorthi et al. 2007]. One of the most interesting results of the frequency analysis is the effect of the pupil outlined in Equation 2. The multiplication with the pupil function in the spatial domain becomes a convolution in the frequency domain whereas the projection along the angular di- mension becomes a slicing [Ng 2005] along ωu = 0: î(ωx) = ( l̂∗  ) (ωx, 0) = ∫ Ωωu l̂ (ωx,ωu)  (ωu) dωu = ∫ Ωωu l̂ d ( − De Do ωx,D e ∆ωx + ωu )  (ωu) dωu. (7) Here, ·̂ denotes the Fourier transform of a variable and  (ωu) = sinc (rωu). Note that the convolution with the sinc function accu- mulates higher angular frequencies along ωu = 0 before the slic- ing occurs, so those frequencies are generally preserved but are all mixed together (see Figs. 3 b-e). Conventional 2D Displays Equation 7 is the most general for- mulation for the perceived spectrum of an emitted light field. The light field that can actually be emitted by certain types of dis- plays, however, may be very restricted. In a conventional 2D dis- play, for instance, each pixel emits light isotropically in all direc- tions, which makes the emitted light field constant in angle. Its Fourier transform is therefore a Dirac in the angular frequencies (i.e. l̂d ( ωdx,ω d u ) = 0 ∀ ωdu 6= 0). Taking a closer look at Equation 7 with this restriction in mind, allows us to disregard all non-zero angular frequencies of the dis- played light field and focus on ωdu = D e∆ωx + ωu = 0. As illustrated in Figures 3 (b-c, bottom), the light field incident on the retina is therefore a line ωu = −De∆ωx, which we can parame- terize by its slope s = −De∆. Equation 7 simplifies to î2D(ωx) = l̂ d ( − De Do ωx, 0 ) sinc (rsωx) . (8) Unfortunately, sinc functions contain a lot of zero-valued posi- tions, making the correction of visual aberrations with 2D displays an ill-posed problem. Correction with Multilayer Prefiltering Huang et al. [2012] pro- posed to remedy this ill-posedness by adding an additional layer, such as a liquid crystal display, to the device. Although stacks of liquid crystal panels usually result in a multiplicative image forma- tion (Wetzstein et al. [2011; 2012]), Huang et al. propose to mul- tiplex the displayed patterns in time, which results in an additive image formation because of perceptual averaging via persistence of vision. As illustrated in Figure 3 (d), this changes the frequency domain representation to the sum of two lines with different slopes. Generalizing Equation 8 to multiple display layers results in the following frequency representation of the retinal projection: îml(ωx) = ∑ k l̂ (d,k) ( − De D(o,k) ωx, 0 ) sinc ( rs (k) ωx ) , (9) where s(k) is the slope of display layer k and l̂(d,k) is the light field emitted by that layer. The offsets between display layers are chosen so that the envelope of the differently sheared sinc functions con- tains no zeros. While this is conceptually effective, physical con- straints of the display, such as nonnegative pixel states and limited dynamic range, result in a severe loss of contrast in practice. Correction with Light Field Displays As opposed to 2D dis- plays or multilayer displays, light field displays have the capability to generate a continuous range of spatio-angular frequencies. Basi- cally, this allows for multiple virtual 2D layers to be emitted simul- taneously, each having a different slope s̃ (see Fig. 3 e). Following the intuition used in Equations 8 and 9, we can write Equation 7 as îlf (ωx) = ∫ Ωs̃ l̂ (ωx, s̃ωx)  (s̃ωx) ds̃ (10) = ∫ Ωs̃ l̂ d ( − De Do ωx,D e ∆ωx + s̃ωx ) sinc (rs̃ωx) ds̃. Although Equation 10 demonstrates that light field displays support a wide range of frequencies, many different solutions for actually computing them for a target image exist. Pamplona et al. [2012] chose a naive ray-traced solution. Light field displays, however, of- fer significantly more degrees of freedom, but these are only un- locked by solving the full inverse light field projection problem (Eq. 5), which we call “light field prefiltering”. We demonstrate that this approach provides significant improvements in image res- olution and contrast in the following sections. 4 Analysis Whereas the previous section introduces forward and inverse image formation and also provides an interpretation in the frequency do- main, we analyze results and capabilities of the proposed method in this section. First, we give an intuitive explanation for when the problem of correcting visual aberrations is actually invertible, and (a) 3x3 prefiltered light field (b) no correction (c) with correction (e) 3 views defocus-sheared (g) 5 views defocus-sheared (d) 3 views (f) 5 views 1st view 2nd view 3rd view pupil aperture ud xd ud xd u x u x display light field retinal light field perceived imagedisplayed image ill-posed prefiltering well-posed prefiltering well-posed prefiltering Figure 4: Light field prefiltering. The proposed prefiltering ap- proach computes a light field (here with 3×3 views) that results in a desired 2D projection on the retina of an observer. The prefiltered light field for an example scene is shown in (a), its simulated projec- tion on the retina in (c), and an image observed on a conventional screen in (b). Spatio-angular frequencies of the light field are am- plified, resulting in the desired sharpening when integrated on the retina. Two sample “flatland” light fields with different angular sampling rates are shown in display (d,f) and in eye (e,g) coordi- nates. Here, the yellow boxes illustrate why 4D light field prefilter- ing is more powerful than 2D image prefiltering: a single region on the retina receives contributions from multiple different light field views (e,g). Wherever that is the case, the inverse problem of light field prefiltering is well-posed but in other regions the problem is the same as the ill-posed problem faced with conventional 2D dis- plays (e). (Source image courtesy of Kar Han Tan) we follow with a formal analysis of this intuition by evaluating the conditioning of the discrete forward model (Eq. 4). We also eval- uate the contrast of generated imagery and analyze extensions of lateral and axial viewing ranges for an observer. Intuition Figure 4 (a) shows an example of a prefiltered light field with 3 × 3 views for a sample scene. In this example, the different views contain overlapping parts of the target image (yellow box), allowing for increased degrees of freedom for aberration compen- sation. Precisely these degrees of freedom are what makes the prob- lem of correcting visual aberrations well-posed. The 4D prefiltering does not act on a 2D image, as is the case for conventional displays, but lifts the problem into a higher-dimensional space in which it becomes invertible. Although the prefiltered light field (Fig. 4, a) appears to contain amplified high frequencies in each view of the 0 2 4 12 11.5 22.5 33.5 4 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 6 8 10 00.5 kernelodiameter (inoscreenopixels) angularosamplingorate (raysoenteringotheopupil) co n d iti o n on u m b e ro (x 1 0 4 ) Figure 5: Conditioning analysis. The light field projection matrix corresponding to a defocused eye is ill-conditioned. With more an- gular resolution available in the emitted light field, more degrees of freedom are added to the system, resulting in lower condition numbers (lower is better). The condition number of the projection matrix is plotted for a varying defocus distance (kernel size) and angular resolution (number of light field views). We observe that even as few as 1.5 angular light field samples entering the pupil of an observer decrease the condition number. light field, the prefilter actually acts on all four dimensions simul- taneously. When optically projected onto the retina of an observer, all light field views are averaged, resulting in a perceived image that has significantly improved sharpness (c) as compared to an image observed on a conventional 2D display (b). We illustrate this principle using an intuitive 2D light field in Fig- ures 4 (d-g). The device emits a light field with three (d,e) and five (f,g) views, respectively. Individual views are shown in differ- ent colors. These are sheared in display space (d,f), because the eye is not actually focused on the display due to the constrained accommodation range of the observer. The finite pupil size of the eye limits the light field entering the eye, as illustrated by the semi- transparent white regions. Whereas we show the light fields in both display coordinates (d,f) and eye (e,g) coordinates, the latter is more intuitive for understanding when vision correction is possible. For locations on the retina that receive contributions from multiple dif- ferent views of the light field (indicated by yellow boxes in e,g), the inverse problem is well-posed. Regions on the retina that only receive contributions from a single light field view, however, are optically equivalent to the conventional 2D display case, which is ill-posed for vision correction. Conditioning Analysis To formally verify the discussed intu- ition, we analyze the condition number of the light field projection matrix P (see Eqs. 4, 5). Figure 5 shows the matrix conditioning for varying amounts of defocus and angular light field resolution (lower condition number is better). Increasing the angular resolu- tion of the light field passing through the observer’s pupil signifi- cantly decreases the condition number of the projection matrix for all amounts of defocus. This results in an interesting observation: increasing the amount of defocus increases the condition number but increasing the angular sampling rate does the opposite. Note that the amount of defocus is quantified by the size of a blur kernel on the screen (see Fig. 5). 0.3 0.5 0.7 0.9 1.1 1.3 1.5 1.7 10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%100% 20 dB 25 dB 30 dB 35 dB 40 dB 45 dB 50 dB contrast P S N R angular sampling rate (rays entering the pupil) Target Image Conventional Display no processing 25 dB / 89% contrast 35 dB / 17% contrast 40 dB / 74% contrast 35 dB / 100% contrast Conventional Display with prefiltering Proposed Display with prefiltering (a) (b) (c) Figure 6: Tradeoff between angular light field resolution and im- age contrast. Top: we reconstruct a test image with different com- binations of angular resolution and image contrast and plot the achieved PSNR. Bottom: using prefiltering with a conventional 2D display (b), we obtain either a low-quality but high-contrast image or a high-quality but low-contrast image. For a light field display with 1.5 or more prefiltered views entering the pupil (c), a similar trend is observed but overall reconstruction quality is significantly increased. (Snellen chart courtesy of Wikipedia user Jeff Dahl) The condition number drops significantly after it passes the 1.3 mark, where the angular sampling enables more than one light field view to enter the pupil. This effectively allows for angular light field variation to be exploited in the prefiltering. As more than two light field views pass through the pupil, the condition number keeps decreasing but at a much slower rate. With an extreme around 7 to 9 views, the system becomes the setup of Pamplona et al.: each ray hits exactly one retinal pixel, but the spatial-angular trade-off reduces the image resolution. Our light field prefiltering method is located in between these two extremes of choosing either high reso- lution or high contrast, but never both simultaneously. Usually, less than two views are required to maintain a sufficiently low condition number. The experiments in Figure 5 are computed with a viewing distance of 350mm, a pupil diameter of 6mm, and a pixel pitch of 45µm. The angular sampling rate refers to the number of light field views entering the pupil. Image Contrast Optimization At the defocus level shown in Figure 6 (a, bottom), naively applying the nonnegative constraint 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 25 27 29 31 33 35 off−axis movement in mm im ag e qu al ity in P S N R without optimization off−axis optimized without optimization off-axis optimized off-axisno movement w /o u t o p tim iz a tio n o ff -a xi s o p tim iz e d 35.57db 35.24db 31.22db 34.64db Figure 7: Compensating for a range of lateral viewpoints. Aberration-free image display is possible when the relative posi- tion of the eye with respect to the display is known. The green plot evaluates image degradation for viewpoints that deviate laterally from the sweetspot. Only slight ringing is visible and, due to peri- odic viewing zones of the employed parallax barrier display, image quality varies in a periodic manner (top, zoom-in). We can account for a range of perspectives in the compensation, ensuring high im- age quality for a wider viewing range (blue plot). The columns on the bottom right show on-axis and off-axis views with and without accounting for a range of lateral viewpoints in the optimization. (Source image courtesy of Wikipedia user Lexaxis7) in Equation 5 results in additional artifacts as shown in (b, top). Al- ternatively, we can shift and scale the target image before solving the system, effectively scaling the target image into the range space of the projection matrix. Although this is a user-defined process, observed image quality can be enhanced. In particular, Equation 5 can be modified as minimize {ld} ‖(i + b)/(1 + b) −Pld‖2 subject to 0 ≤ ldi ≤ 1, for i = 1 . . .N (11) where b is a user specified bias term that reduces the image contrast to 1/(b + 1). We plot achieved image quality measured in PSNR for all contrast levels at various angular sampling rates in Figure 6 (top). With a conventional display, prefiltering results in ringing artifacts (b) because the inverse problem is ill-conditioned. Artificially reducing the image contrast mitigates the artifacts but makes the text illegible (b, bottom). A light field display makes the inverse problem well- posed, allowing for high quality prefiltering (c). The pixel pitch of the experiment shown in Figure 6 is 96µm; other parameters are the same as in Figure 5. Please note that the contrast bias term b may require manual tuning for each experiment. Extending Lateral and Axial Viewing Range We envision most future display systems that incorporate vision-correcting technolo- gies to use eye tracking. In such devices, the projection matrix (see Eq. 4) is dynamically updated for the perspective of the observer. For applications in emerging near-eye displays [Lanman and Lue- bke 2013], on the other hand, the proposed technology would not require eye-tracking because the relative position between eye and display is fixed. Within the context of this paper, we assume that eye tracking is either available or the relative position between dis- play and eye is fixed. w ith o u t o p tim iz a tio n o p tim iz e d f o r e xt e n d e d r a n g e Defocus-error = −20mm Defocus-error = 0mm Defocus-error = +20mm PSNR = 29 dB PSNR = 30 dB PSNR = 27 dB PSNR = 20 dB PSNR = 41 dB PSNR = 21 dB Figure 8: Accounting for a range of viewing distances. Top row: when considering a fixed viewing distance, defocus errors are com- pensated at that exact distance (top center) but image quality de- grades when the observer moves forward or back (top left and right). The proposed method can account for a range of view- ing distances (bottom row), which slightly degrades quality at the sweetspot but significantly improves all other distances. (Source image courtesy of Kar Han Tan) Nevertheless, we evaluate image degradation for viewpoints that are at a lateral distance from the target viewpoint in Figure 7. Such shifts could be caused by imprecise tracking or quickly moving ob- servers. We observe slight image degradation in the form of ring- ing. However, even the degraded image quality is above 30 dB in this experiment and varies in a periodic manner (Fig. 7, top: zoom- in). This effect can be explained by the periodic viewing zones that are created by the employed parallax barrier display; a similar effect would occur for lenslet-based light field displays. We can account for a range of lateral viewpoints by changing the matrix in Equation 11 to P = [PT1 . . .PTM ] T , where each PTi is the projection matrix of one of M perspectives. Although this approach slightly degrades image quality for the central sweetspot, a high im- age quality (approx. 35 dB) is achieved for a much wider range of viewpoints. The lateral range tested in Figure 7 is large enough to demonstrate successful aberration-correction for binocular vision, assuming that the inter-ocular distance is approx. 65 mm. Please also refer to additional experiments in the supplemental video. We also show results for a viewer moving along the optical axis in Figure 8. Just like for lateral motion, we can account for vari- able distances by stacking multiple light field projection matrices into Equation 11 with incremental defocus distances. The resulting equation system becomes over-constrained, so the solution attempts to satisfy all viewing distances equally well. This results in slight image degradations for the sweetspot, but significantly improves image quality for all other viewing distances. 5 Implementation and Results The proposed aberration-correcting display can be implemented us- ing most light field display technologies. For the purpose of this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of our techniques with a par- allax barrier display [Ives 1903], because the required hardware is readily available and inexpensive. Please note that the proposed displays are not limited to this particular architecture, although the image formation (Eq. 4) has to be adjusted for any particular setup. Hardware The prototype is shown in Figure 9. A pinhole-based parallax barrier mask is printed with 5080 DPI on a transparency with a Heidelberg Herkules imagesetter (www.pageworks.com). To optimize light throughput and avoid diffraction, the pinholes have a size of 75 microns each and are spaced 390 microns apart. This mask is mounted at an offset of 5.4 mm in front of a conventional Figure 9: Prototype display. We construct an aberration- correcting display using parallax barriers. The barrier mask con- tains a pinhole array (left) that is mounted at a slight offset in front of an Apple iPod touch 4 screen (lower right). The display emits a light field with a high-enough angular resolution so that at least two views enter the pupil of a human observer. This effect is il- lustrated on the top right: multiple Arabic numerals are emitted in different viewing directions; the finite pupil size then creates an av- erage of multiple different views on the retina (here simulated with a camera). 2D screen using a clear acrylic spacer. The screen is an Apple iPod touch 4th generation display with a pixel pitch of 78 microns (326 PPI) and a total resolution of 960 × 640 pixels. The dimensions of our prototype allow 1.66 light field views to enter a human pupil with a diameter of 6 mm at a distance of 25 cm. Higher-resolution panels are commercially available and would directly improve spatial and angular resolution and also fa- cilitate larger viewing distances. Software The light field prefiltering algorithm is implemented in Matlab on a PC with a 2.7GHz 2-core CPU and 8GB of RAM. The projection matrix is precomputed in about 3 minutes with radiances sampling the pupil at 20 rays/mm, resulting in approx. 11,300 ef- fective rays per retinal pixel. We use the non-negative least squares solver package LBFGSB [Byrd et al. 1995] to solve Equation 11 in about 20 seconds for each image shown on the prototype. The projection matrix only needs to be computed once for each viewing distance and we believe that an optimized GPU implementation of the solver could achieve real-time framerates. Photographs of Prototype We show a variety of results cap- tured from our prototype display in Figure 10 (center right column). These photographs are captured with a Canon T3i DSLR camera equipped with a 50 mm lens at f/8. The display is placed at a dis- tance of 25 cm to the camera. The camera is focused at 38 cm, placing the screen 13 cm away from the focal plane. This camera closely resembles a -6D hyperopic human eye. Figure 10 (right column) shows the simulated results corrected with our techniques. The results captured from the prototype (Fig. 10, third column) closely resemble these simulations but contain mi- nor artifacts that are due to moiré between the barrier mask and the display pixels. Compared to conventional 2D images shown on the screen (Fig. 10, first column), image sharpness is signifi- cantly improved without requiring the observer to wear glasses. We also compare our approach to the method proposed by Pamplona et al. [2012] for the same display resolution and spatio-angular trade- off (Fig. 10, second column). Basically, their approach uses the same display setup as ours but a direct solution rather than the pro- posed prefilter. Our approach outperforms their method and allows for significantly increased resolution. proposed method simulation conventional display photograph [Pamplona et al.2012] photograph proposed method photograph Figure 10: Photographs of prototype display. The hyperopic cam- era simulates a human pupil with a diameter of 6 mm at a distance of 25 cm to the screen. Focused at 38 cm, images shown on a con- ventional screen are blurred (first column). While previous meth- ods theoretically facilitate increased image sharpness (second col- umn), achievable resolution is fundamentally limited by the spatio- angular resolution tradeoff of the required light field display. Light field prefiltering, as proposed in this paper, allows for significantly increased resolutions (third column). The prototype closely resem- bles simulations (right column). (From top, source images courtesy of dfbphotos (flickr), Vincent van Gogh, Houang Stephane (flickr), JFXie (flickr), Jameziecakes (flickr), Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse) 6 Evaluation 6.1 Visual Performance We evaluate achieved quality in Figure 11. For this experiment, we simulate a 10 inch tablet with a 300 PPI panel and the pinhole parallax barrier with 6.5 mm offset. The tablet is held at a dis- tance of 30 cm and viewed with a -6.75D hyperopic eye; images are shown on the center of the display in a 10.8 cm × 10.8 cm area. For each example, we compare our approach with the direct light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vincent_van_Gogh_-_National_Gallery_of_Art.JPG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_C%C3%A9zanne_185.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Sorrows_of_the_King.jpg ContrastD83] QMOSD82.8 ContrastD55] QMOSD22.8 ContrastD81] QMOSD78.6 ContrastD68] QMOSD58.4 ContrastD100] QMOSD24.6 ContrastD100] QMOSD27.1 ContrastD100] QMOSD36.8 ContrastD100] QMOSD36.0 ContrastD15] QMOSD5.6 ContrastD17] QMOSD2.3 ContrastD15] QMOSD5.0 ContrastD13] QMOSD3.4 ContrastD100] QMOSD21.8 ContrastD100] QMOSD23.7 ContrastD100] QMOSD33.7 ContrastD100] QMOSD33.1 25] 50] 75] 100] 0] TargetDImage TailoredDDisplay [PamplonaDetDal.D2012] ProposedDDisplayConventionalDDisplay outDofDfocus MultilayerDDisplay [HuangDetDal.D2012] detection probability Figure 11: Evaluation and comparison to previous work. We compare simulations of conventional and vision-correcting image display qualitatively and quantitatively using contrast and quality-mean-opinion-square (QMOS) error metrics. A conventional out-of-focus display always appears blurred (second column). Multilayer displays with prefiltering improve image sharpness but at a much lower contrast (third column). Light field displays without prefiltering require high angular resolutions, hence provide a low spatial resolution (fourth column). The proposed method combines prefiltering and light field display to optimize image contrast and sharpness (right column). The QMOS error metric is a perceptually linear metric, predicting perceived quality for a human observer. We also plot maps that illustrate the probability of an observer detecting the difference of a displayed image to the target image (bottom row). Our method performs best in most cases. (Source images courtesy of Jameziecakes (flickr), Kar Han Tan, Mostaque Chowdhury (flickr), and Thomas Quine (flickr)) field approach and multilayer prefiltering. The target contrast for prefiltering methods is manually adjusted to achieve the best PSNR for each example. Contrast Metric Prefiltering involves modulating the image con- tent by enhancing weaker frequencies. Without utilizing the full degrees of freedom in the light field sense, the results obtained us- ing multilayer prefiltering suffer from extreme contrast loss, here measured in Michelson contrast. This is defined as (Imax − Imin)/(Imax +Imin), where Imax,min are the maximum and min- imum intensity in the image, respectively. Light field predistortion does not depend on content modifications but on resampling of the light field, so the contrast is not sacrificed. By efficiently using all views, the proposed light field prefiltering approach restores con- trast by a factor of 3 to 5× higher than that of the multilayer pre- filtering. We note that the contrast achieved with light field prefilter- ing is not quite as good as the raytracing algorithm, which always gives full contrast. However, when closely inspecting the image content, the raytracing solution always results in blurred images, which is due to insufficient spatial resolution. Perceptual Metric To assess both contrast and sharpness, we re- sort to HDR-VDP2 [Mantiuk et al. 2011], a perceptually-based im- age metric. The quality mean opinion score (QMOS) gives an eval- uation of overall perceived image quality, and in most examples we score 2 to 3 times higher than other approaches. The images no correction conventional LF display (a) spherical (b) coma (c) trefoil Figure 12: Correcting for higher-order aberrations. We simulate images observers with different types of higher-order aberrations perceive (top row) and show corresponding point spread functions (top row, insets), which exhibit a range of different shapes. Most of them are difficult to compensate with a conventional 2D display (bottom row, lower left parts), although the blur kernel associated with trefoil (lower right) is frequency preserving and therefore in- vertible. The proposed aberration-correcting display is successful in compensating all of these aberrations (bottom row, upper right parts). (Source image courtesy of flickr user Jameziecakes) in the third row are a particularly difficult example for prefiltering- based algorithms, because performance depends on the frequency content of the image which, in this case, does not allow prefiltering to achieve a higher quality. Lots of high frequencies in the example tend to reduce image contrast so that even our light field prefilter- ing scores slightly lower. Visually, our result still looks sharp. In the last row of Figure 11, we show a probabilistic map on whether a human can detect per pixel differences for the fourth example. Clearly, our result has a much lower detection rate. Note that the reduced image sharpness of conventional displays (Fig. 11, column 2) is due to defocus blur in the eye, whereas that of Tailored Displays (Fig. 11, column 4) is due to the low spatial reso- lution of the light field display. All displays in this simulation have the same pixel count, but the microlens array used in Tailored Dis- plays trades spatial display resolution for angular resolution. Our solution also has to trade some spatial resolution, but due to the prefiltering method we basically optimize this tradeoff. 6.2 Correcting Higher-Order Aberrations Although aberrations of human eyes are usually dominated by my- opia and hyperopia, astigmatism and higher-order aberrations may also degrade observed image quality. Visual distortions of a per- ceived wavefront are usually described by a series of basis func- tions known as Zernike polynomials. These are closely related to spherical harmonics, which are commonly used in computer graph- ics applications. Lower-order Zernike polynomials include defocus and astigmatism whereas higher-order terms include coma, trefoil, spherical aberrations, and many others. The effects of any such terms can easily be incorporated into the image inversion described in Section 3 by modifying the projection matrix P. Figure 12 evaluates compensation of higher-order aberrations with the proposed approach. The top row shows the images an observer with these aberrations perceives without correction. Just as in the case of defocus, prefiltering for a conventional display usually fails to achieve high image quality (bottom row, lower left image parts). We observe ringing artifacts that are typical for solving ill-posed de- convolution problems. The proposed aberration-correcting display, on the other hand, successfully compensates for all types of aberra- tions (bottom row, upper right parts). What is particularly interest- ing to observe in this experiment is that some types of higher-order aberration can be reasonably well compensated with a conventional display. As seen in the right column of Figure 12 (bottom row, lower left part), the point spread function of trefoil, for example, is frequency preserving and therefore easy to invert. For most other types of aberrations, however, this is not the case. Extended ex- periments including astigmatism and additional higher-order aber- rations can be found in the supplemental document. 7 Discussion In summary, we present a computational display approach to cor- recting low and high order visual aberrations of a human observer. Instead of wearing vision-correcting glasses, the display itself pre- distorts the presented imagery so that it appears as a desired target image on the retina of the observer. Our display architecture em- ploys off-the-shelf hardware components, such as printed masks or lenslet arrays, combined with computational light field prefiltering techniques. We envision a wide range of possible implementations on devices such as phones, tablets, televisions, and head-worn displays. In this paper, we demonstrate one particular implementation using a low- cost hardware add-on to a conventional phone. In a commercial setting, this could be implemented using switchable liquid crystal barriers, similar to those used by Nintendo 3DS, which would allow the display to dynamically adapt to different viewers or viewing conditions. The proposed techniques assume that the precise location of the observer’s eye w.r.t. the screen is either fixed or tracked. Robust so- lutions to eye tracking, however, are not a contribution of this paper. Each of the envisioned display types provides different challenges for tracking pupils. For generality, we focus discussions on the challenges of correcting vision. Inexpensive eye trackers are com- mercially available today (e.g., http://theeyetribe.com) and could be useful for larger-scale vision-correcting displays; hand-held devices could use integrated cameras. Nevertheless, we evaluate strategies to account for a range of viewer motion, which could not only help decrease jittering of existing trackers but also remove the need for tracking in some applications. Benefits and Limitations The proposed techniques offer signif- icantly increased resolution and contrast compared to previously- proposed vision-correcting displays. Intuitively, light field prefilter- ing minimizes demands on angular light field resolution, which di- rectly results in higher spatial resolution. For device implementa- tions with lenslet arrays, the reduced angular resolution, compared to Pamplona et al. [2012], allows for shorter focal lengths of the em- ployed lenslets resulting in thinner form factors and easier fabrica- tion. For implementations with parallax barriers, pinhole spacings are reduced allowing for increased image brightness. We treat lenslet arrays and parallax barriers as very similar optical elements throughout the manuscript. In practice, the image forma- tion is slightly different and the implementation of Equation 4 is adjusted for each case. As outlined in Section 1, the proposed sys- tem requires increased computational resources and modifications to conventional display hardware. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that an inexpensive hardware attachment for existing phones is suf- ficient to build the required device. Whereas the parallax barriers in our prototype are relatively light inefficient, lenslet arrays could overcome this limitation. Our current Matlab implementation does not support interactive frame rates. Real-time GPU implementa- tions of similar problems [Wetzstein et al. 2012], however, are a strong indicator that interactive framerates could also be achieved for the proposed methods. http://theeyetribe.com While the proposed approach provides increased resolution and contrast as compared to previous approaches, achieving the full tar- get image resolution and contrast is not currently possible. We eval- uate all system parameters and demonstrate prototype results under conditions that realistically simulate a human pupil; however, we do not perform a user study. Slight artifacts are visible on the pro- totype, these are mainly due to limitations in how precisely we can calibrate the distance between the pinhole mask and screen pixels, which are covered by protective glass with an unknown thickness. As artifact-free light field displays resembling the prototype setup are widely available commercially, we believe that the observed ar- tifacts could be removed with more engineering efforts. The pa- rameter b in Section 4 is manually chosen, but could be incorpo- rated into the optimization, making the problem more complex. We leave this formulation for future research. Future Work We show successful vision-correction for a variety of static images and precomputed animations. In the future, we would like to explore real-time implementations of the proposed techniques that support interactive content. Emerging compressive light field displays (e.g., [Wetzstein et al. 2012; Maimone et al. 2013]) are promising architectures for high-resolution display— vision-correcting devices could directly benefit from advances in that field. In the long run, we believe that flexible display architec- tures will allow for multiple different modes, such as glasses-free 3D image display, vision-corrected 2D image display, and combi- nations of vision-corrected and 3D image display. We would like to explore such techniques. 8 Conclusion Correcting for visual aberrations is critical for millions of people. Today, most of us spend a significant amount of time looking at computer screens on a daily basis. The computational display de- signs proposed in this paper could become a transformative tech- nology that has a profound impact on how we interact with digi- tal devices. Suitable for integration in mobile devices, computer monitors, and televisions, our vision-correcting displays could be- come an integral part of a diverse range of devices. Tailoring vi- sual content to a particular observer may very well turn out to be the most widely used application of light field displays. 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SPIE 6492. work_ivve27nrafcn7fxhjdtn2x35g4 ---- Monográfico Los abrazos rotos coordinado por Pedro Poyato Nº 5 - 2012 FOTOCINEMA REVIS TA CIENTÍFICA DE CI NE Y FOTOGRAFÍA R EVUE SCIENTIFIQUE DU CINÉMA ET DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE SCI ENTIFIC JOURNAENTIFIC JOURNAL OF CINEMA & PHOTOGR 2 2 NÚMERO MONOGRÁFICO SOBRE LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS DE PEDRO ALMODÓVAR COORDINADO POR PEDRO POYATO 3 REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), 186 pp. Índice 3 Presentación del Monográfico Los abrazos rotos 5 El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009). Film within film: Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009). Pedro Poyato 7 Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos. Blood, fetish, blindness: wishes and broken embraces. José Luis Castro de Paz 24 La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos. Metafilmic nature of Broken embraces. Ana Melendo 41 Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini. Mummified time and flirting with death in Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken embraces. About the quotation of Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia. Javier Herrera 62 Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar. Between collage and bricolage. A certain look to the Contempt of Godard in Broken embraces of Almodóvar. Agustín Gómez Gómez 76 La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco. La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sex, politics and cannibalism: the staging of the grotesque body. Diane Bracco 94 La fotografía fija en Los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar. Still photography in Broken Embraces: categories and its use in the construction of the brand ‘Almodóvar’. Laura Virué Escalera 112 Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y en Francia. Los abrazos rotos, symptom of a change in the critical reception of Almodovar’s pictures in Spain and France. Julie Amiot-Guillouet 146 El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla. The financial fail of Los abrazos rotos (Broken embraces). Analysis of the box office. Miguel Olid 159 4 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) Reseñas Nieves Sánchez Garre (coord.): Imágenes y escenarios de la Semana Santa vallisoletana (1958-1984). Reseña de Emilio C. García Fernández 174 VV. AA. (Víctor Matellan0 Ed.). ¡Clint, dispara! La “trilogía del dólar” de Sergio Leone. Reseña de Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Villar 177 Vanesa Fernández y Miren Gabantxo (eds.). Territorios y fronteras. Experiencias documentales contemporáneas. Reseña de Mario Cartelle 180 C.V. Autores 185 5 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) Presentación del monográfico Los abrazos rotos Como viene siendo habitual en el último Almodóvar, cineasta del que siempre se espera que contribuya a levantar el ánimo del cine español, Los abrazos rotos resultó un filme controvertido en su estreno, sobre todo para la crítica. Así, la mezcla de referencias cinematográficas de las que se nutre la película, sin duda uno de sus aspectos más relevantes, sirvió a determinados sectores de la crítica para arremeter contra la figura del autor, al ver en ello “un pretencioso auto- homenaje, un plagio de sí mismo” (Época), o “una descarada y vacía forma de autopromoción” (Gara), mientras que otros sectores más reducidos destacaban, por el contrario, cómo esas referencias servían al filme para “evidenciar su calidad estética” (La Razón). Se vertían de este modo opiniones que, limitándose únicamente a expresar puntos de vista sin otro apoyo que el gusto del crítico, para nada entraban en la materialidad de un filme que, por su riqueza plástica y teórica, se constituye en una de las cimas de la obra almodovariana. Se hace por ello necesario volver sobre este filme ahora, cuando ya el tiempo pasado ha contribuido a decantarlo, y aprovechando el espacio que nos brinda la revista Fotocinema, que ofrece sus páginas a los investigadores interesados en reflexionar sobre el cine y la fotografía. Como la crítica señalaba, Los abrazos rotos se nutre de imágenes procedentes de otras obras, entre ellas las del propio Almodóvar; imágenes cuya conjugación resulta del máximo interés teórico por cuanto enriquece de manera notable la teoría de la transtextualidad, a cuyo repertorio de términos añade otros nuevos como la “síntesis intratextual” (reunión de imágenes tomadas de este mismo filme) o la “autocita modificada” (reelaboración de imágenes tomadas de otros filmes almodovarianos), noción ésta sobre la que, por lo demás, se edifica La concejala antropófaga, película que aún estando separada de Los abrazos rotos, es parte estructural de ella. Pero también es importante en Los abrazos rotos su despliegue y declinación de una amplia gama de narradores, desde el personaje-narrador a la voz en over, 6 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) cuyos relatos parciales van construyendo sucesivamente un tejido narrativo a modo de puzzle. Tejido sobre el que a su vez despuntan, en un interesante feed- back, imágenes cuyos ecos, reenvíos y complicidades generan auténticos programas iconográficos. Sobre estas y otras temáticas, abordadas, como podrá constatarse, desde metodologías muy diversas, versan los artículos que componen este dossier, que incluye también sendos trabajos que reflexionan sobre la recepción crítica del filme a ambos lados de los Pirineos y sobre el fracaso comercial de la película. Pedro Poyato 7 REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA POYATO, P.: El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) Recibido: 11/07/2011 – Aceptado: 18/09/2011 ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 EL CINE EN EL CINE: LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS (PEDRO ALMODÓVAR, 2009) FILM WITHIN FILM: BROKEN EMBRACES (PEDRO ALMODÓVAR, 2009) Pedro Poyato Universidad de Córdoba Resumen: El cine en el cine, tema recurrente e n l a f i l m o g r a f í a d e P e d r o Almodóvar, protagoniza también Los abrazos rotos, película que contiene en su interior otra titulada Chicas y maletas. Pero las imágenes de esta segunda película, trasunto de otra anterior del propio Almodóvar, Mujeres al borde un ataque de n e r v i o s , coexisten con las de un documental sobre su rodaje. El resultado es una proliferación de i m á g e n e s s e g u n d a s q u e , incorporadas según una estructura en abismo, el filme va a conjugar de múltiples y variadas maneras. El presente trabajo trata de dar cuenta de la génesis, funcionamiento y declinación de estas imágenes segundas y de los sentidos que de ello emanan. Abstract: Film within film, a recurrent technique in Pedro Almodóvar’s filmography, it is also a main subject in Broken Embraces, a film which includes another film entitled Chicas y maletas. However, the images from this secondary film –reflection of a previous film by Almodóvar himself, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown- c o e x i s t w i t h t h o s e f r o m a documentary which is in fact this film making-of. As a result, there is a proliferation of secondary images that, once incorporated into a mise- en-abîme structure, are combined in the film in multiple and different ways. The present work aims to discuss the genesis, fundamentals and deviation of these secondary images, together with the meanings produced in this interplay. Palabras clave: Cine, Almodóvar, Puesta en abismo, Transtextualidad, Autocita, Hipertexto. Key words: Film, Almodóvar, mise-en-abîme, Transtextuality, Self-quoting, Hypertext. Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 8 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 1. Introducción El cine en el cine es un tema ya trabajado en películas anteriores de Almodóvar, como Átame (1989) o La mala educación (2004), entre otras. Los abrazos rotos vuelve sobre ello descubriéndose así como un filme habitado por las imágenes cinematográficas de Chicas y maletas, la película que rueda Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar), el protagonista. Pero lo novedoso de Los abrazos rotos es que estas imágenes cinematográficas segundas son el trasfondo de una película anterior del propio Almodóvar, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988). Ello permite al cineasta volver sobre las imágenes de este filme para reescribirlas, según una operación de hipertextualidad de cierto calado teórico. Además de estas imágenes, Los abrazos rotos incorpora también otras igualmente nacidas en el interior de la diégesis primera: se trata en este caso de unas imágenes en vídeo grabadas por Ray X (Rubén Ochandiano), uno de los personajes del filme, a propósito del documental que realiza sobre el rodaje de Chicas y maletas. Nos encontramos así con una proliferación de imágenes –cinematográficas y videográficas- segundas que, incorporadas según una operación en abismo, el filme va a conjugar de múltiples y variadas maneras de cara sobre todo a la conformación de programas iconográficos de los que emanan sentidos vinculados, bien a la ontogénesis de las propias imágenes, bien a motivos relacionados con los sentimientos, los estados de ánimo o las relaciones entre los personajes. Por otro lado, la declinación de temas recurrentes en el cine almodovariano como la relación paterno-filial y la cristalización de nuevos modelos de familia, aparece en Los abrazos rotos también vinculada al cine segundo que habita la película. El objetivo de este trabajo es ocuparse de todas estas cuestiones a partir de una metodología de análisis textual de las imágenes cuyos puntos de partida son los estudios de Genette sobre la transtextualidad (1989) y de Gaudreault y Jost sobre el relato cinematográfico (1990). 2. El guión y el rodaje dentro del cine: la relación paterno-filial El cine –en este caso cuando solo es un proyecto de guión– en el cine sirve, como decíamos, a Los abrazos rotos para abordar uno de los temas recurrentes en Almodóvar cual es la relación paterno-filial. Así, en un momento dado de la segunda escena del filme, Harry Cane (Mateo Blanco, antes de quedar ciego) Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 9 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 comenta a su representante, Judit (Blanca Portillo), que su próximo guión será una historia inspirada en la del hijo del escritor Arthur Miller: Arthur Miller –dice Harry, a partir de lo que él mismo pudo leer en El País- tuvo un hijo con la fotógrafa Inge Morath. El niño nació con síndrome de Down y Miller lo ocultó. Nunca quiso verle. Un día se encontraron por casualidad: Miller daba una conferencia en defensa de un retrasado mental que habían condenado a muerte después de una confesión forzada. Entre el público se hallaba su hijo. Al final, el hijo fue a abrazar a su padre. Miller no sabía cómo quitárselo de encima, hasta que el desconocido le dijo: “Soy tu hijo y estoy muy orgulloso de ti”. Todo sobre mi madre (Almodóvar, 1999) es el intertexto aquí convocado a propósito de esta fuerte vectorialización del hijo hacia el padre ausente, por mucho que ahora se trate de un hijo disminuido y de un padre intelectual y mundialmente famoso. Los abrazos rotos plantea así, en su mismo arranque, el tema de la relación paterno-filial, mas no de cara a configurar un programa narrativo en torno a él, como lo demuestra el hecho de que a lo largo del metraje nada más vuelva a saberse de esa historia, ni de si finalmente, como era el deseo de Harry, se convirtió en guión, sino sólo para incorporar una temática que, en el plano discursivo, va a encontrar su continuación en la escena siguiente, allí donde Harry recibe la visita de Ray X, a propósito también de la escritura de un guión cinematográfico. En dicha escena, Ray X propone a Harry redactar un guión acerca de “la venganza de un hijo contra la memoria de su padre”, propuesta que Harry acaba rechazando con rotundidad. Pero en todo caso lo importante de la escena es constatar cómo el filme vuelve sobre el tema de la relación paterno-filial, relación que ahora no pasa, como en el caso de Miller, por la atracción –la admiración- que el padre ejerce sobre el hijo, sino por la animadversión que aquel despierta en éste. He aquí la conversación que al respecto mantienen Ray X y Harry: Ray X: Me gustaría escribir una historia sobre la venganza de un hijo contra la memoria de su padre. Harry: ¿Por qué quiere vengarse el hijo? Ray X: Porque el padre le anuló y le arruinó la vida. Harry: ¿Cómo? Ray X: El padre es un hombre violento, homófono, sin ningún escrúpulo y muy poderoso. […] Cuando muere el padre, el hijo puede por fin Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 10 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 rehacer su vida. Esa es su salvación, su revancha y la historia que yo quiero contar. Como vemos, se trata ahora de un padre que, tachado de violento y sin escrúpulos, anula y arruina la vida de su hijo; hijo cuya salvación pasa, pues, no por la admiración y respeto al padre, como en el caso del hijo de Miller, sino por su desaparición. Nos encontramos así en Los abrazos rotos con dos modalidades de relación paterno-filial tan distintas como conflictivas, pero emanadas ambas de proyectos de guión convocados desde el interior mismo del filme. La negativa de Harry a escribir el guión solicitado por Ray X pone fin al asunto, mas no al tema de la relación paterno-filial, que continúa protagonizando lo que en el filme sigue, una vez que Ray X ha abandonado ya la escena. La búsqueda de unas viejas fotografías sobre el rodaje de Chicas y maletas –de nuevo el cine, ahora en su vertiente del rodaje, en el cine- que Harry, con el fin de cerciorarse de la identidad de Ray X, solicita a Diego, su ayudante, es ahora el pretexto. Pues rebuscando esas viejas fotografías Diego encuentra unas cuantas en las que puede verse a su madre, Judit, con el propio Harry, entonces Mateo Blanco, ambos en traje de baño, disfrutando, felices, de la playa [foto 1]. Si tomamos en c u e n t a q u e E s t e b a n , e l protagonista de la antes citada T o d o s o b r e m i m a d r e , encontraba en unas viejas fotos –a las que entonces faltaba la mitad- la ausencia de ese padre suyo del que su madre no quería hablarle, no resulta difícil adivinar ahora que esas fotos –el corto plano que las recorta llama la atención sobre ellas- que interrogan a Diego [foto 2] estén igualmente vinculadas a sus orígenes. Y así es, en efecto: hacia el final del filme, Judit confesará a Diego que Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 11 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 Harry es su padre; algo que, por cierto, el propio Harry, como sucedía también con el padre de Esteban, en Todo sobre mi madre, desconoce. Una vez más, un hijo cuyo padre es ocultado por su madre, se enfrenta a unas fotografías en las que están contenidos esos orígenes ocultos. Los abrazos rotos vuelve a poner así sobre el tapete las relaciones paterno-filiales, pero ahora introducidas, insistimos en ello, a partir de una serie de escenas cuya temática es el cine –el guión, primero, y el rodaje, después- dentro del cine. 3. El montaje –la creación cinematográfica– dentro del cine: la sanción de la unidad familiar Una vez planteado el asunto de los orígenes, el filme, como también sucedía en Todo sobre mi madre, va a ir poniendo las condiciones para la construcción de la correspondiente unidad familiar. Después de que, con la pérdida de la vista en el grave accidente que cuesta la vida a Lena (Penélope Cruz), Mateo deje de ser Mateo (director de cine) para convertirse en Harry Cane, éste, nada más abandonar el hospital, aparece acompañado en plena calle de Judit y de Diego, entonces un niño de pocos años. El pequeño Diego imita estos primeros pasos de Mateo ayudándose del bastón, en lo que puede entenderse a su vez como metáfora de los primeros pasos del filme hacia la constitución de la familia formada por Diego, que a partir de ahora se convierte en el incondicional lazarillo de un padre todavía no sabido; Harry, quien, tras la muerte de Lena, acaba de nacer a una nueva vida; y Judit, la madre, protectora de ambos. Los tres miembros se reúnen en un coche cuyo trayecto sirve al filme para volver sobre el tema de los orígenes, ahora a raíz del interés de Harry por la suerte de Lena, tras su muerte: “La enterraron junto a su padre, en el pueblo”, apunta Judit, añadiendo: “La tumba era sencilla; la madre dijo que no quería lujos”. Irrumpe así la referencia a los orígenes rurales que Almodóvar no olvida incluir en sus filmes, la presencia del pueblo, de las raíces, en este caso como lugar de reposo definitivo junto al padre; referencia cuyo sentido cataliza el avance del relato hacia el trazado de la unidad familiar antes señalada. Mientras que Judit, en la continuación de la misma secuencia anterior, acude al bungalow para recoger las pertenencias de Harry, éste y el pequeño Diego aguardan en la playa de Famara, el niño jugando y mirando los cometas Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 12 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 mecidos por el viento. La vuelta de Judit reúne de nuevo a los tres en el coche, abandonando ya Famara. Tras el fundido a negro que pone punto final al flash- back de las imágenes anteriores invocadas en su relato por Harry, la vuelta al tiempo presente viene marcada no por casualidad por las siguientes palabras del narrador, Harry, a su interlocutor, Diego: -Harry: ¿Te acuerdas de Famara, Diego? -Diego: Me acuerdo. Era la primera vez que veía el mar. Me acuerdo de los cometas y de un perro que ladraba. -Harry: Yo también me acuerdo de los ladridos del perro. La playa de Famara se descubre así como el lugar donde Diego vio la playa por primera vez, pero también donde Mateo, convertido ya en Harry, no pudo verla. Un lugar, en suma, fuertemente asociado a la memoria –en ella quedaron fijados los ladridos de un perro-, pero también a los orígenes del encuentro del hijo con un padre todavía no sabido y físicamente muy disminuido por su ceguera. Nos encontramos así con la forma en que cristaliza la figura paterna en el cine almodovariano. Los abrazos rotos se cierra con las emocionadas palabras de Diego y de Judit, quienes tras ver junto a Harry la escena de Chicas y maletas que éste acaba de re-montar –de nuevo el cine, en este caso a través del montaje, en el cine– lo animan para que prosiga y elabore de esta manera el filme que en su día Martel no le dejó hacer. Harry concluirá así su obra. Y con ello, vuelve a ser Mateo. Diego, por su parte, sabe ya quién es su padre cobrando de este modo sentido su pasado y su presente. Y Judit, con sus explicaciones a Harry y Diego, se ha liberado de las opresiones del pasado. Los vínculos entre los tres personajes quedan definitivamente establecidos conformándose así una unidad familiar que coincide en este caso con la creación de la auténtica Chicas y maletas. El cine –ahora a través del montaje que da paso a la creación cinematográfica- en el cine deviene, pues, también en motivo que sanciona el núcleo familiar ya cristalizado. 4. Puesta en abismo de las imágenes y relaciones entre ellas Pero el cine en el cine permite igualmente a Los abrazos rotos reflexionar sobre la génesis de las imágenes cinematográficas y las relaciones entre ellas. Tal es el Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 13 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 caso de las secuencias en las que Mateo Blanco rueda Chicas y maletas, mientras que Ray X hace un documental sobre el rodaje. Los abrazos rotos se sirve así de estos dos motivos para incorporar, según una estructura en abismo, como antes decíamos, imágenes que tienen su origen en dos fuentes distintas, pero ambas interiores a la diégesis. Si las imágenes del filme Chicas y maletas se diferencian de las de la enunciación primera en el formato –el encuadre de aquellas se presenta como dentro del encuadre primero-, las del documental destacan sobre todo por el g r a n o, muy acusado por las condiciones de producción. El filme hace coexistir de este modo imágenes del primer nivel del relato con imágenes elaboradas en el interior mismo de ese relato: el resultado es un puzzle de imágenes que, con calidades y formatos diferentes, representan desde tres puntos de vista distintos un referente donde realidad y ficción van a combinarse de modos diversos. Pero las imágenes del documental sobre el rodaje introducen con respecto a las otras una nueva diferencia: el sonido. Mientras los otros dos tipos de imágenes aparecen ya formalizadas por lo que se refiere tanto a la imagen como al sonido, las del documental, grabadas con sonido directo, se presentan como necesitadas del doblaje sonoro. Para la realización de esta tarea, Ernesto Martel, espectador único de tales imágenes, pues sólo a él van destinadas, contrata a una lectora de labios. Es así cómo se dan cita en el filme imágenes de la enunciación primera, de Chicas y maletas y del documental, éstas convenientemente dobladas por la lectora de labios a la vez que son contempladas por Martel. Por otra parte, no es difícil leer ya en las primeras imágenes de Chicas y maletas un trasunto, como antes anunciábamos, del filme Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, tema éste sumamente interesante al que dedicaremos un epígrafe posterior. Una operación de montaje alterna imágenes de Chicas y maletas con otras d e l d o c u m e n t a l m i e n t r a s s o n contempladas por Martel, de manera que, por ejemplo, a las imágenes donde aparece la protagonista de Chicas y maletas, Tina (Lena), cortando los rojos tomates para el gazpacho que va a preparar para Iván, por la piel de uno de ellos resbalando la lágrima que acaba de caer en él [foto 3], Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 14 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 le siguen imágenes del documental donde puede verse a Mateo y Lena [foto 4] haciendo comentarios sobre el rodaje, ella diciéndole a él: “Lo que me emocionaba no eran los tomates, sino las cosas tan bonitas que me decías…”; palabras que, pronunciadas por la dobladora, desencadenan el lógico desasosiego en un Ernesto lleno de celos [foto 5]. He aquí una estructura en abismo en la que el filme conjuga imágenes de la enunciación primera [foto 5] con las otras dos que contiene en su interior [foto 3, primero, y foto 4, después]. Esta parte del filme concluye con un fragmento en el que a la escena donde Mateo y Lena hacen el amor, le sigue un plano cercano de Ernesto, en su casa, mirando, pensativo, hacia un off indeterminado, según una operación de montaje que, prolongando la estructura anterior, muestra a Ernesto como si estuviera viendo, por mucho que ahora no tenga delante imágenes documentales algunas, la escena de amor de Mateo y Lena1. Y esta misma estructura en abismo presidirá también el fragmento siguiente alternando imágenes del relato primero con imágenes de Chicas y maletas y del documental grabado por Ray X cuando éstas son contempladas por Martel junto a la lectora de labios. Comienza dicho fragmento con unas imágenes del rodaje de Chicas y maletas en las que vemos a Tina encontrándose en la escalera con la portera (Chus Lampreave), imágenes donde se hacen evidentes las carencias interpretativas de Lena, y que ella misma justifica a Mateo en una escena posterior que a su vez está siendo grabada por Ray X. Ello motiva que las imágenes correspondientes puedan ser contempladas por Martel, quien, en palabras de la lectora de labios, oye cómo Lena, refiriéndose a los días pasados con Ernesto, en un hotel de Ibiza, dice a Mateo: “He tenido un fin de semana espantoso. He tenido al hijo de puta ese las cuarenta y ocho horas encima”. El fragmento alterna ahora imágenes de la enunciación primera con las del 1 Las notas de la melodía El sabor de tu boca, soldando unas imágenes y otras, acentúa esta vinculación. Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 15 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 documental, visualizadas por un Ernesto con el rostro cada vez más demudado oyendo a Lena, que prosigue: “Tú no sabes lo que es tener a ese monstruo encima durante cuarenta y ocho horas. ¡Qué asco! Mejor que no te lo imagines…”. Un nuevo plano muestra ahora a la dobladora, que continúa poniendo voz a Lena: “Mejor que no hablemos de Ernesto. Ese melón es mejor no abrirlo”. Lo dramático de esta situación que Lena relata se mezcla con la comicidad emanada de su puesta en forma –puesta en forma en la que es determinante la conjugación de las imágenes en abismo barajadas por el filme, las de la enunciación primera y las grabadas por Ray X– según un combinado característico del cine de Almodóvar2. Cuando, finalmente, la dobladora se marcha, Ernesto queda solo, enfrentado a una pantalla donde aparece el fotograma lleno de grano de Lena y Mateo besándose [foto 6]. Precisamente, esta imagen robada, como aquella otra donde Harry palpaba con sus manos la página escrita en braille [foto 7] de un fragmento anterior, es guardada en memoria por el filme para generar, a partir de la síntesis de ambas, una de las imágenes nucleares de Los abrazos rotos: la del último beso entre Lena y Mateo acariciada por las manos de éste [foto 8]. 2 De «almodrama» ha sido caracterizada por algunos autores (Poyato, 2007). Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 16 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 Ray X graba con su cámara todos los movimientos de Lena, incluso cuando ésta se encuentra fuera del set del rodaje. En una de estas grabaciones, la agresión de Lena a Ray X se traduce en unas imágenes dotadas de un molesto movimiento interior, como así acusa la mirada de Martel, que las contempla proyectadas en la pantalla. Como en escenas anteriores, al plano de Martel le sigue el de la mujer lectora de labios haciendo las veces de dobladora. Mas he aquí que de súbito cambia esta estructura, pues al plano anterior de la dobladora le sigue ahora otro que muestra la puerta de entrada al salón, a ambos lados de la misma los cuadros de las láminas de las pistolas de Warhol, por la que no tarda en hacer su aparición Lena. Se configura así un espacio fílmico en torno a dos ejes perpendiculares: uno, horizontal, definido por las posiciones de Martel y la dobladora, en medio de ambos el cañón de vídeo; vertical, el otro, definido por la pantalla y, frente a ella, Lena. Las imágenes de Ray X proyectadas en la pantalla ocupan ahora la totalidad del encuadre: en ellas, Lena, mirando a cámara, interpela a Martel [foto 9], pero en esta ocasión sus palabras proclamando que ama a Mateo, no son dobladas por la lectora de labios, sino por la misma Lena, no por casualidad flanqueada, como se ha dicho, por sendas pistolas. Un Martel atónito, que no sabe si mirar a la Lena que tiene delante –la filmada que le mira [foto 9]– o a la que tiene detrás –la real que le habla [foto 10] con palabras que son también disparos, si apelamos al dispositivo escenográfico–, aparece así enfrentado a una duplicación de su dolor, según una construcción dramática ejemplar en la que este desdoblamiento de la imagen audiovisual en las dos dimensiones que la componen, imagen y sonido, sirve como vehículo de confesión y traición amorosa de la mujer. Por lo demás, el desenlace del fragmento emparienta la Lena real y la filmada, tanto en sus gestos como en sus movimientos abandonando, ambas, a Martel, como si la una fuera un reflejo de la otra: la filmada se aleja dándole la espalda y la real sale de la sala. Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 17 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 5. Chicas y maletas como transtexto: del hipertexto a la síntesis intratextual Además de las incorporaciones de imágenes de determinados filmes como Te querré siempre (Viaggio in Italia, Roberto Rossellini, 1951), o de las alusiones a otros, entre ellos Blow-up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) y Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), Los abrazos rotos contiene en su interior, lo venimos señalando desde el principio, Chicas y maletas, película que es a su vez un trasunto de otra anterior: Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. El mismo Almodóvar (Heredero y Reviriego, 2009: 10) ha justificado esta elección en los siguientes términos: Elegí Mujeres porque era una comedia y también porque eso me permitía trabajar sobre una película mía sin pedirle permiso a nadie. De este modo, la comedia Chicas y maletas se yuxtapone al drama Los abrazos rotos forjándose así una variante más del combinado cómico-dramático propio de los filmes almodovarianos. Pero sin duda lo más interesante de esta operación de inclusión de un filme en otro es ese trabajo sobre Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios al que se refiere el cineasta en la cita anterior; trabajo que permite a Almodóvar volver sobre sus propias imágenes para experimentar con ellas, para reescribirlas, en aras de conseguir nuevos logros. Los abrazos rotos acude a determinados pasajes de Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios modificando sus imágenes para así adaptarlas al nuevo contexto donde se insertan. Ahora bien, lo llamativo de estos pasajes es que, más allá de ceñirse a unas cuantas imágenes que pudieran servir para amueblar el rodaje que de Chicas y maletas está llevando a cabo el cineasta Mateo Blanco, el protagonista de Los abrazos rotos, se extienden hasta reescribir escenas completas –dos, concretamente-, adquiriendo así éstas tal presencia e importancia, que si una de ellas acapara para sí prácticamente toda la parte final de Los abrazos rotos, la otra se ve obligada a salir de este filme para convertirse en una película aparte, con entidad y título propios, La concejala antropófaga. En este sentido, Chicas y maletas –filme del que La concejala antropófaga sería, pues, una parte- ofrece suficientes argumentos como para que pueda ser leído como hipertexto de Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 18 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 Como es sabido, Gerard Genette (1989: 9-20) propone el término «transtextualidad» para referirse a todo aquello que pone un texto en relación con otros. Considera Genette cinco tipos de transtextualidad, entre ellos intertextualidad, paratextualidad e hipertextualidad. En la intertextualidad, o co-presencia efectiva de dos textos, un texto, o un fragmento del mismo, aparece inscrito en el otro bajo la forma de cita, plagio o alusión. Pero estas categorías establecidas por Genette han sido ampliadas por Stam, Burgoyne y Flitterman- Lewis (1999: 236), quienes, dentro del mismo paradigma de la intertextualidad, han introducido otras nuevas, así la «intratextualidad» para el caso de un texto que se cite a si mismo, y la «autocita» para el caso de un autor que se cite a si mismo. De acuerdo con este despliegue anterior de categorías, el fragmento de Te querré siempre incluido en Los abrazos rotos cobraría la forma de cita, del mismo modo que la elaboración de la imagen ya referida del último beso que sobre la pantalla palpan las manos de Mateo [foto 8] nace de la síntesis intratextual de dos imágenes anteriores del filme, y los fragmentos de Chicas y maletas no serían sino autocitas modificadas de Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. Pero si tomamos en consideración, además, que, como hemos dicho, Chicas y maletas reescribe hasta dos escenas completas de Mujeres, aquel filme puede ser nominado hipertexto de éste3. Y por lo que se refiere a La concejala antropófaga, además de hipertexto de Mujeres, puede ser también considerado paratexto de Los abrazos rotos4, ya que se trata de un texto que, aún estando materialmente fuera de este filme, es parte estructural del mismo5. Esta operación de inclusión del filme Chicas y maletas en Los abrazos rotos resulta por ello del máximo interés desde el punto de vista teórico, pues baraja y enriquece muchos de los términos establecidos por la teoría de la transtextualidad. Prestaremos atención en lo que sigue a cómo Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios se transforma, por medio de la operación de transtextualidad antes 3 «Llamo hipertexto a todo texto derivado de un texto anterior por transformación simple o por transformación indirecta». En Genette (1989: 12). 4 De ahí que los títulos de crédito del filme recojan, prolongando lo tratado en Los abrazos rotos, que el director es Mateo Blanco y el guionista Harry Cane. 5 La comercialización de Los abrazos rotos en DVD ha permitido la inclusión de La concejala antropófaga como uno de los capítulos extras. Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 19 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 referida, en Chicas y maletas a partir de una selección y reelaboración de sus imágenes según una poética específica propia. Poética que tiene que ver en primer lugar con el nuevo contexto temporal tanto del filme como de la historia contada, el año 2009. Por ello, el personaje de Tina, interpretado por Penélope Cruz, musa del Almodóvar actual, sustituye a Pepa, que interpretaba Carmen Maura, entonces actriz-fetiche de Almodóvar, en Mujeres. Por su parte, Rosy de Palma, una de las llamadas chicas Almodóvar, pasa de interpretar a la novia de Iván hijo, en Mujeres, a la ex-mujer de Iván, en Chicas y maletas, cambio éste motivado, fácil es adivinarlo, para acoplar la edad de la actriz con la de su personaje. Sin embargo, Chus Lampreave, otro de los iconos de Almodóvar, sigue encarnando, aunque con unos cuantos años más, a la portera testigo de Jehová del edificio donde vive la protagonista. En cuanto a los personajes, la actriz de anuncios televisivos de Mujeres, Carmela (María Barranco), es reemplazada en Chicas y maletas por una concejala de Asuntos Sociales, Chon (Carmen Machi), figura ésta de más actualidad, en el año 2009, que la anterior. Veamos ahora con detalle estas actualizaciones en cada uno de los fragmentos cinematográficos reescritos. En el corto fragmento donde Tina se dispone a hacer el gazpacho con barbitúricos para Iván, un plano cercano –escatimado en Mujeres- muestra una lágrima resbalando por la piel de intenso rojo de uno de los tomates. La incorporación de este plano viene motivada por el nuevo contexto diegético donde el fragmento se inserta, concretamente la historia de amor que, en Los abrazos rotos, están viviendo Mateo y Lena: son lágrimas de emoción, como así lo dice Lena a Mateo en sus comentarios sobre el rodaje de Chicas y maletas, y que, como en su momento apuntábamos, oímos por boca de la lectora de labios cuando ésta dobla para Ernesto Martel las imágenes grabadas por el hijo de éste: “Lo que me emocionaba no eran los tomates, sino las cosas tan bonitas que me decías”. Las relaciones mantenidas por los personajes son, pues, aquí el pretexto narrativo que permite al cineasta reescribir, introduciendo nuevas y atractivas imágenes, el filme anterior. En otro de los fragmentos de Chicas y maletas la exmujer de Iván, tras hacerse con la nota que Tina acaba de dejar a Iván en la puerta del piso, la empuja por las escaleras. En Mujeres, por el contrario, la exmujer de Iván (Julieta Serrano) Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 20 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 se limitaba a tirar esa misma nota al contenedor de basura. Este cambio, como en el fragmento anterior, viene también determinado por el universo diegético de Los abrazos rotos, donde Lena acaba de fracturarse una pierna al caer por las escaleras, en un accidente provocado por Martel. Es interesante anotar esta nueva modificación por cuanto la operación de reescritura que la misma motiva sirve ahora a Los abrazos rotos para plasmar una de las máximas almodovarianas referidas a cómo la ficción imita a la vida, análogamente a cómo, en otros filmes, así en múltiples escenas de Todo sobre mi madre, la vida imita a la ficción. El pase por televisión de Chicas y maletas lleva a Harry a hacer un nuevo montaje de la película, catorce años después de su estreno. Es éste el motivo de que una de las escenas completas de este filme tome para sí el encuadre primero, en unas imágenes que, con su incorporación, acaban desplazando, como antes decíamos, las del filme primero. Se trata de una escena cómica, al igual que en Mujeres, pero donde ahora cambian los elementos conjugados. Así, Chon, una concejala madrileña de Asuntos Sociales, sustituye a Carmela, del mismo modo que Tina –que, como consecuencia de la caída por las escaleras, camina con muletas- sustituye a Pepa. Por su parte, el terrorista chiíta de Mujeres, personaje popular en la década de los años ochenta del pasado siglo, se convierte ahora en capo de la droga, personaje, como la concejala, de más actualidad en la primera década de este siglo. El transcurso de la escena es sin embargo semejante en los dos filmes: así, la amiga de la protagonista -Carmela y Chon- relata a ésta -Pepa y Tina- su aventura con un fuera de la ley –terrorista, en un caso, y capo de la droga, en el otro- con el que ha mantenido unas relaciones sexuales tan placenteras, que, todavía, mientras lo relata, la carne se le pone “de gallina”, aspecto que recalca invitando a su interlocutora a que lo compruebe ella misma mirándole el brazo. Por lo demás, en ambas películas el outlaw dejó una maleta –en un caso repleta de armas, en el otro de drogas- en casa de la mujer -la actriz y la concejala-, maleta de la que ella, tras comprobar la verdadera identidad de su amante, quiere ahora deshacerse, en un caso abandonándola en un basurero, en el otro tratando de llevarla a casa de Tina. Y una maleta es también el primer obstáculo con el que esa misma mujer –Carmela y Chon– se encuentra cuando acude a Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 21 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 casa de su amiga a relatarle el problema; maleta en este caso que, repleta con las pertenencias de Iván, deviene en testigo de la ruptura sentimental de la otra mujer, Tina. Dos maletas, pues, y dos mujeres: he aquí el enunciado del que deriva el título del filme segundo o hipertexto. Es así cómo Chicas y maletas reescribe Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios adaptándola, como decíamos, al nuevo contexto –tal es el reto almodovariano– pero recreando una situación análoga a la del filme de partida, situación de la que brota una comicidad –lo que es un rasgo del mejor Almodóvar– vinculada al habla tan popular del personaje, quien relata, ayudándose de una desmedida gestualidad, una experiencia por lo general vinculada al sexo; comicidad que se ve en el caso de Chicas y maletas extraordinariamente potenciada por el trabajo interpretativo de la actriz, Carmen Machi. Tras esta larga escena, finaliza Los abrazos rotos, lo señalábamos más atrás, con Diego y Judit animando a Harry para que prosiga remontando Chicas y maletas. Harry asiente, proclamando: “las películas hay que terminarlas aunque sea a ciegas”, palabras que, recogiendo un dicho popular, deconstruyen en este caso la metáfora que encierran para descender hasta una significación literal de las mismas. Con esta promesa de Harry concluye Los abrazos rotos, no así Chicas y maletas, que, saliéndose del interior del filme anterior, prosigue, como decíamos más arriba, con una nueva escena que en este caso cobra una entidad propia con el título de La concejala antropófaga. El mismo Almodóvar (Heredero y Reviriego, 2009: 12) se ha referido a las motivaciones de este añadido: El corto nace de mi fascinación por lo que hace Carmen Machi durante su breve aparición en la película. Sea como sea, Chicas y maletas prosigue su proceso de creación con esta escena autónoma que prolonga, en efecto, las calidades interpretativas de Carmen Machi. Como en Mujeres, la escena arranca cuando Tina y el hijo de Iván abandonan la casa. Ello propicia que la novia de éste, Maribel (Marta Aledo), profundamente dormida como consecuencia de haber ingerido el gazpacho con barbitúricos destinado a Iván, quede a solas con Chon, la concejala de Asuntos Sociales. Aprovecha entonces ésta para manifestar su adicción al sexo, la Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 22 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 cocaína y la comida, y que va a poner en práctica, en un fragmento de corte esperpéntico, relatando su atracción desde la más tierna infancia por el sexo y, vinculado a éste, por los pies masculinos, especialmente los dedos gordos, mientras da buena cuenta de un flan, que deglute a grandes cucharadas, y de una considerable cantidad de cocaína, que esnifa entre cucharada y cucharada. La línea de comicidad de la escena se prolonga en su parte final cuando, despertando ya del profundo sueño, Maribel relata a Chon que ha tenido un sueño erótico vinculado a los pies de un hombre. La concejala antropófaga, al igual que algunos fragmentos de otros filmes anteriores del cineasta, como Kika (1993) o La flor de mi secreto (1995), entre otros, sitúa el cine almodovariano en nuestra más pura tradición esperpéntica: el monólogo hilarante de la actriz, la escenografía de llamativos colores propia de la cultura pop, así como elementos como el gazpacho, el flan o la coca nos devuelven ahora al Almodóvar más popular, al más profundamente español. 6. Final Concluimos. El cine –en sus diversas fases, desde el guión hasta el rodaje y pasando por el montaje y la sonorización– dentro del cine, sin duda una de las columnas sobre las que se levanta Los abrazos rotos, sirve al filme, bien para reelaborar temas recurrentes en la filmografía de Almodóvar, como la relación paterno-filial o la constitución de modelos de familia, bien para reescribir las imágenes cinematográficas, así algunas extraídas del filme Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, de cara sobre todo a la creación de otras nuevas como las del filme Chicas y maletas. A su vez, estas imágenes segundas pueden trabarse a las imágenes primeras, en cuyo caso emanan sentidos vinculados a diversos aspectos del relato, por ejemplo el sentimiento que embarga a los personajes –el dolor de Martel, el amor de Lena por Mateo, entre otros–, o incluso independizarse de ellas para configurar filmes autónomos, como es el caso de La concejala antropófaga. Pedro Poyato, El cine en el cine: Los abrazos rotos (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009) 23 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 7-23 Referencias bibliográficas BORDWELL, David (1996). La narración en el cine de ficción, Barcelona: Paidós. GAUDREAULT, André y JOST, François (1990). Le Récit Cinématographique, Paris: Natham. GENETTE, Gérard (1989). Palimpsestos, Madrid: Taurus. HEREDERO, Carlos F. y REVIRIEGO, Carlos (2009). “El cine protector. Entrevista con Pedro Almodóvar”, en Cahiers du cinema. España, nº 21. KOZLOFF, Sarah (1988). Invisible Storytellers, Berkeley: University of California Press. POYATO, Pedro (2007). Todo sobre mi madre. Pedro Almodóvar (1999), Barcelona: Octaedro. PRINCE, Gerald (1987). A Dictionary of Narratology, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. SEGUIN, Jean-Claude (2009). Pedro Almodóvar, o la deriva de los cuerpos, Murcia: Tres Fronteras. STAM, Robert, BURGOYNE, Robert y FLITTERMAN-LEWIS, Sandy (1999). Nuevos conceptos de la teoría del cine, Barcelona: Paidós. STRAUSS, Fréderick (2001). Conversaciones con Pedro Almodóvar, Madrid: Akal. 24 REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA CASTRO DE PAZ, José Luis: Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos. Recibido: 31/09/2012– Aceptado: 16/09/2012 ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 SANGRE, FETICHE, CEGUERA: DESEOS Y ABRAZOS ROTOS BLOOD, FETISH, BLINDNESS: WISHES AND BROKEN EMBRACES José Luis Castro de Paz Universidad de Santiago de Compostela joseluis.castro@usc.es Resumen: Segunda parte de la (hasta ahora) oscura trilogía almodovariana sobre el deseo masculino, la “Mujer” objeto de ese deseo, y sus desoladores avatares (con Hable con ella [2002] y La piel que habito [2011]), Los abrazos rotos constituye una de las cimas de la filmografía de Pedro Almodóvar, conjugando la reformulación de ciertos temas formales provenientes del cajón de formas fílmicas hitchcockiano –pero también, y aquí muy especialmente, del mejor cine español (Lorenzo Llobet- G r à c i a ) – c o n u n a s u t i l í s i m a e intransferible destilación formal. Una escritura que, partiendo de imágenes en cierta forma “alejadas del mundo” por saturación gráfica y metacinemato- gráfica, lleva el proceso a tal grado de a b s t r a c c i ó n q u e e s c a p a z d e (re)activarlas mediante la frotación de cada una con otras semejantes, alcanzando una inusitada potencia emocional para hablarnos de las heridas del mundo y del deseo, para volver a tocar la realidad perdida a través de una ostentosa y extravagante pero a la postre fructífera hipertrofia formalista. Abstract: Second part of the (so far) dark Almodovarian trilogy about male desire, the "Woman" as an object of desire, and their devastatingvicissitudes (with Talk to Her [Hable con ella, 2002] and The Skin I Live In [La piel que habito, 2011]), Broken Embraces ( Los abrazos rotos) is one of the creative high points in the filmography of Pedro Almodovar. It combines the reformulation of certain themes and images from the Hitchcockian drawer of film forms –but also, and especially here, the best Spanish cinema (Lorenzo Llobet-Gràcia)– with a subtle and nontransferable formal distillation. A work that, from images which in a sense are "worlds away" due to graphic and metacinematic saturation, leads the process to such a degree of abstraction that is able to (re)activate the images by rubbing each other and tose similar to them, reaching an unusual emotional power to speak of the wounds of the world and the desire and finally touches again the lost reality through an ostentatious and seemingly extravagant but ultimately fruitful formalist hypertrophy. Palabras clave: Alfred Hitchcock; Análisis fílmico; Deseo insconsciente; Forma Fílmica; Lorenzo Llobet-Gràcia; Metacinematográfico; Pedro Almodóvar. Key words: Alfred Hitchcock; Film análisis; Unconscious desire; Film form; Lorenzo Llobet-Gràcia; metacinematographic; Pedro Almodóvar. José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 25 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 “El amor es la presencia fantasmatizada del amado en mi inconsciente.” (NASIO, 2004: p. 46) “El fantasma es el nombre que le adjudicamos a la soldadura inconsciente del sujeto con la persona viviente del elegido.” (NASIO, 2004: p. 49) “Es muy difícil sustraerse a la influencia de Hitchcock, y de Vértigo concreto. En Los abrazos rotos, cuando el director Mateo Blanco dirige con un susurro a Lena en las pruebas de maquillaje y peluquería, está creando una nueva mujer para su propio placer (…). Ahí estaba Vértigo, y James Stewart encargándose del estilismo, del color del pelo, el peinado, la ropa de Kim Novak, hasta convertirla en la mujer muerta a la que tanto amó. (…). James Stewart representa la figura del director.” “El Doble, tan presente en Los abrazos rotos, aparece también en La piel que habito (...). Vértigo nos lleva al doble, a la repetición, a la recreación del amado.” (ALMODÓVAR, 2012: pp. 160-161) 0. No tiene demasiado interés además de haber sido hecho ya enumerar pormenorizadamente las citas, motivos o ecos hitchcockianos a los que, de forma directa o indirecta, Pedro Almodóvar recurre desde Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980) hasta la oscurísima obra maestra que es La piel que habito (2011), la más inaudita y salvaje reelaboración que el director español compusiera nunca a partir de temas y formas (o, mejor aún, temas formales) esencialmente vinculados con la obra del cineasta británico.1 Empero, sí conviene señalar que, mucho más allá de la conocida relación de ciertos elementos del argumento de ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!! (1984) con el del telefilm de Alfred Hitchcock Cordero para cenar (Lamb To The Slaughter, 1958, basado en un relato de Roald Dahl), las relaciones intertextuales comienzan a ser más fértiles y profundas a partir de esta película (Castro de Paz, 2009). Parece indudable que en su inequívoca voluntad de 1 Baste decir que la intención de la presencia de éstos en sus tres primeros títulos (los punkies que, con castizas gorras, se disponen a propinar una paliza al policía violador mientras la banda sonora recurre a ciertos compases de la partitura de Bernard Herrmann para Psicosis o, en el mismo film, el voyeur que espía con prismáticos a través de una ventana [como en La ventana indiscreta, Rear Window, 1954]; la Sexilia con traumáticos complejos infantiles en Laberinto de pasiones (1982) y su claro antecedente invertido en Marnie, la ladrona [Marnie, 1964]...) no está lejana del pastiche y/o la parodia. Sobre la presencia de elementos hitchcockianos en la hasta ahora última película de Pedro Almodóvar puede verse Almodóvar (2012). José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 26 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 realizar un film más serio, de nítido contenido social, entroncado en cierta manera con lo que considera la versión hispana del neorrealismo italiano, Almodóvar trata de adecuar con rigor sus “citas” o apropiaciones al plano del contenido y recuerda, quizás lejanamente, un viejo episodio televisivo en el que un ama de casa, despreciada por su marido y a punto de ser abandonada por otra mujer, asesta un golpe mortal en la cabeza del hombre utilizando como arma lo que tiene más a mano: una pata de cordero. Lo en verdad sustancial, con todo, ha de ser señalar que, rodado en febrero de 1958 y emitido en abril, Cordero para cenar se realiza mientras Vértigo/De entre los muertos (Vertigo, 1958, rodada en los últimos meses del año anterior) está en periodo de posproducción y cómo, en él, Hitchcock utiliza de nuevo a la actriz Barbara Bel Geddes que acaba de encarnar a Midge Woods, la mujer terrenal, doméstica y no deseada en el célebre título protagonizado por James Stewart y Kim Novak,2 con lo que, de algún modo, parece establecer una irónica conexión intertextual con ese otro/mismo personaje, encarnación del cruel destino de la condición femenina, de la mujer de carne y hueso al margen del fantasma del deseo masculino, condenado, como señalara Jacques Lacan, a un trágico y desolador vagar sin remedio “de representación en representación”. Y no es imposible suponer, por tanto, que en el recuerdo de Almodóvar, ese(os) personaje(s) femenino(s) llegase(n) a (con)fundirse en uno solo, a entrecruzarse al menos, lo que quizás ayudaría a explicar el origen último en ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!! de esa fantasmática Imago femenina (Ingrid Muller, extranjera, rubia, sofisticada, imposible objeto de deseo de Antonio, el marido taxista) que multiplica el dolor del personaje de Carmen Maura (mujer vulgar, de pelo castaño, española y no deseada) y que salvo en el insulso episodio alemán sólo existe en forma de canción.3 De forma que el personaje masculino, negativo, cruel y machista, es también y de algún modo una víctima, y ya no sólo de su perra vida de taxista madrileño, sino, y al mismo tiempo, de 2 Cfr. un detenido análisis de la película en Castro de Paz (1999a) y del telefilm en Castro de Paz (1999b). 3 “[E]s el fantasma que hay entre ellos señalaba Almodóvar (…). A mí me gustaba que este hombre, que lleva una vida tan perra, hubiera tenido una gran historia de amor. Aunque fuera una historia de amor en la cual le habían utilizado, él la recuerda como la historia de amor de su vida. [Carmen] no puede evitar que esa canción le ponga negra cada vez que la oye, para ella representa un abismo que los separa mientras que por otra parte redime un poco al personaje del taxista” (Vidal, 1989: 140). La cursiva es nuestra. José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 27 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 una profunda herida masculina4 que, paulatinamente, despertará el interés intelectual y formal del cineasta manchego, que hará de la misma el motivo (profundamente hitchcockiano) cada vez más destacado de algunos de sus textos más relevantes (Kika, 1993) hasta llegar a ocuparse de él, como nuclear centro semántico, en Hable con ella (2002), Los abrazos rotos (2009) y La piel que habito, extravagante, progresivamente desquiciada, magistral y desolada trilogía. 1. Es bien conocido, por otro lado, cómo, a partir de ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!!, la escritura fílmica de Almodóvar no deja de transformarse y depurarse, haciéndose más geométrica y abstracta, a la vez que paradójicamente pierde en apariencia su carácter transgresor, mientras profundiza más y más en lo que podríamos denominar deconstrucción psicológica del melodrama hollywoodiense. De algún modo, entonces, la desde entonces insistente investigación almodovariana en los conflictos edípicos del sujeto del inconsciente5 el “sujeto auténtico de su cine como lo es sin duda de los de Luis Buñuel y Alfred Hitchcock” en palabras de Víctor Fuentes (Fuentes, 2005: 93-107) corre paralela a un universo fílmico progresivamente reflexivo, abstracto y conceptual, construido como texto, como representación, casi como “ensayo”. Santos Zunzunegui lo resumía muy bien cuando, refiriéndose a ese singular collage conceptual que es Kika, señalaba que el trabajo de estilización llevado a cabo en el film estaba plásticamente “basado en superponer sobre el relato un 4 Y es curioso que el personaje masculino esté también, ya aquí, desdoblado en dos: el marido tradicional y despreciable en su actitud hacia la mujer; el policía (como el marido de Mary Maloney en Cordero para cenar, como el Scottie Fergusson de Vértigo) incapaz de mantener relaciones sexuales por ciertos traumas psíquicos nunca claramente expuestos. 5 Conjunto organizado de deseos amorosos y hostiles que el niño experimenta respecto a sus padres, desempeña un papel fundamental en la estructuración de la personalidad y en la orientación del deseo humano, determinando un tipo particular de elección de objeto amoroso. La elección de la persona amada depende menos de esta misma que del fantasma que el sujeto posa sobre ella, imagen-pedestal “fabricada” a partir de imágenes psíquicas vinculadas con la figura materna perdida durante el conflicto edípico (prohibición del incesto encarnada por el padre). El triste itinerario del deseo del sujeto masculino, cuya satisfacción es imposible por estar estructurado sobre esa falta o vacío originario y condenado a buscar sin cesar ese objeto primordial, reemplazándolo por objetos sustitutivos que jamás alcanzarán la altura del original, lleva siempre consigo, como final de trayecto, la desilusión, el dolor de vivir. José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 28 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 patrón visual geométrico, cromático destinado a enfatizar la superficialidad de la imagen cinematográfica” (Zunzunegui, 1997: 936-939). Una escritura conformada  y nada más lógico si se trata de dar forma a pasiones imaginarias por imágenes centrípetas, geométricas, tendentes a la simetría y construidas con frecuencia a partir de la utilización de reencuadres y dobles pantallas, bien a través de la presencia de pinturas, marcos, ventanas, etc., bien, incluso, de pantallas televisivas formando parte del encuadre. Como se supondrá, la referencia a Kika no es casual, y no sólo por sus estrechas vinculaciones con ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!!, sino, pero en relación con ello, porque aquí el personaje femenino, pese a seguir siendo protagonista, es ahora víctima directa de la perversión de sujetos masculinos cuyo conflicto edípico nunca se ha resuelto satisfactoriamente. De hecho, y como La ventana indiscreta (Rear Window, 1954), el voyeurismo es parte central de la trama, pero también objeto de reflexión y análisis por parte del cineasta (y, dado el distanciamiento que se le impone, del espectador del film). Obsesionado por la figura materna, Ramón es aquí un sujeto atrapado en la red imaginaria del deseo y prisionero por tanto de una relación especular con las mujeres (fotografía a Kika mientras realizan el acto sexual; delira a su madre convertida en personaje de un film emitido por televisión, al que acompañan los acordes de Pscosis [Psycho, 1960]), hasta el punto de rodar la violación de su pareja, que es, aquí, la sustituta (el cuerpo) que ocupa provisionalmente ese fantasma masculino, radicalmente inalcanzable6. Con todo, a la búsqueda de comprender el comportamiento del hombre7 y el desalentador y esencialmente melancólico destino del deseo masculino, e incluso de activar fórmulas para un hipotético hombre reconstruido (con probabilidad tan rigurosas discursivamente como a la vez bienintencionadas e ingenuas en rigor psicoanalítico), nada más lógico que Almodóvar plantee en Hable con ella su primera, nítida y singularísima aproximación a la cuestión 6 Y no es de extrañar que sea con relación a Kika cuando Frédéric Strauss señale la proximidad de las heroínas de Almodóvar con las hitchcockianas (Strauss, 1995: 160). 7 “El centrarse en la masculinidad vuelve a cobrar relevancia en Hable con ella, la película de Almodóvar que quizás otorgue mayor atención a sus protagonistas hombres. La exhibición de las relaciones de géneros es compleja, incluso equívoca. Y a diferencia de otros filmes que ven las relaciones hombre-mujer exclusivamente en términos de estructura de poder, Hable con ella se concentra en la comunicación entre los sexos y, más inquietamente, en las consecuencias del fracaso de la comunicación” (Allinson, 2003: 113). José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 29 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 masculina a partir de dos de las grandes obras maestras hitchcockianas sobre el tema: Vértigo y Psicosis, aunque no falten tampoco referencias incluso muy evidentes a otros dos títulos también citados ya que abren y cierran, además y respectivamente, el trascendental periodo manierista de la filmografía del realizador británico: La ventana indiscreta y Marnie, la ladrona (Marnie, 1964). De hecho, si como afirmó Almodóvar “Vértigo es una película madre de muchas películas” (Strauss, 1995: 160) no debe sorprender que, sobre todo, vuelva su mirada al film de 1958, el más profundo y desgarrador melodrama hitchcockiano sobre el deseo masculino y sus desoladores avatares y trágica metáfora sobre la pulsión escópica y la mirada masculina (fetichista) que se halla en la base misma del placer cinematográfico institucional. Dejando a un lado las a todas luces injustificadas acusaciones de misoginia que Hable con ella suscitó tras su estreno entre cierto sector de una crítica todavía empantanada en una pedestre teoría del cine como reflejo de la realidad, es claro que el cineasta vuelve a colocar su anécdota en el límite mismo de lo decible y lo visible, en el territorio fantástico del cuento de hadas (una sombría y aterradora versión de La bella durmiente de Perrault) y a indagar en el motivo dramático de la estabilidad mental y sus ambigüedades y desdibujamientos en una sociedad en la que la palabra ha perdido fuerza simbólica bajo un inacabable manto de imágenes casi siempre banales. Y es que sus protagonistas masculinos, Benigno (Javier Cámara) un nuevo Norman Bates, benigno, virgen, cariñoso y hablador, ejemplarmente edípico, con una madre, posesiva y postrada en la cama, de la que sólo escuchamos su voz en off y a la que el joven dedica sus primeros veintitantos años de vida; enamorado a su vez de una Imago Femenina (Alicia, Leonor Watling) a la que observa, como el voyeur Stewart de Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), a través de la ventana y que, lógicamente, se petrifica como estatua ante su proximidad, al modo de una nueva y no menos bella Madeleine y el melancólico Marco (Darío Grandinetti), digno personaje de bolero, doblemente abandonado (capaz de teñir de melancolía, en un típico juego almodovariano, hasta la más repulsiva culebra), habrán de conjugarse y fundirse literalmente superpuestos en la conversación final en la prisión para dar auténtica vida a la Mujer (creada, en magistral metáfora, por la pantalla en blanco: la cámara, José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 30 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 cenital, nos muestra la impoluta sábana —que ocupa la totalidad del encuadre—; bajo ella, poco a poco dibujada, surge la forma femenina...). A Marco quedará la difícil pero sin duda gratificante misión que Benigno no fue capaz de lograr en su locura (sus bienintencionadas palabras, pese al título, no despiertan a Alicia, sino ese enfermizo y brutal coito con su cuerpo inerte, ejemplar y lúcidamente metaforizado en el film “mudo” El amante menguante y su gran vagina-pantalla que engulle al minúsculo protagonista): comprender y asumir que la Figura (Alicia) que ha venido a tapar el vacío que a su lado ha dejado su primer amor (el lado derecho de ese encuadre de profunda belleza en el que dos tiempos se funden dolorosamente mientras escuchamos a Caetano Veloso) es también un ser humano, de existencia renovada, al que hablar y querer. Es precisamente de ese lado derecho del encuadre de donde surgirá, en un plano de punto de vista de Marco que cita de forma explicita pero extraordinariamente la sutil aparición de Madeleine en la floristería en Vertigo, la imagen con la que, por doloroso que resulte, habrá que aprender a convivir. 2. Como anticipábamos, y mientras la vía de la filmografía almodovariana más enraizada en el sainete y la comedia grotesca se mantiene viva en títulos como Volver (2006), con el estremecedor melodrama Los abrazos rotos, más angustiado y pesimista que Hable con ella —en parte gracias a la contraposición con la comedia Chicas y maletas, uno de los films dentro del film y olvidado ya el espejismo de un final feliz construido en la película de 2002 sobre la muerte de Benigno y el triunfo final de su complejo de castración—, un Almodóvar ya internacionalmente reconocido como el “spanish Hitchcock” (Allen, 2011: 587) retoma su indagación sobre el dolor de la nada masculina, sobre las razones y las consecuencias de la ceguera simbólica del hombre. Con lógica, la crítica más rigurosa no ha dejado de señalar una y otra vez la íntima relación de la película con la obra de Hitchcock en general y con Vértigo en particular,8 también thriller y melodrama, y, de hecho, incluso, su inicio bien 8. Así lo entendió también el músico Alberto Iglesias, al componer una excelente partitura de nítida raíz herrmanniana, aun sí —en plena coherencia con el universo de Pedro Almodóvar— parte asimismo de la hermosísima copla “A ciegas” de León y Quiroga (1953, interpretada en su José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 31 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 podría enlazarse con el final de este film, con un nuevo Scottie ya sin nada que mirar y atrapado definitivamente por el ojo-abismo femenino —como anticipaban en Vértigo los créditos de Saul Bass [Foto 1, Foto 2]— sobreviviendo (tal y como sucedía también en el final apócrifo de la película de 1958, con el que se estrenó fuera de EE.UU.) gracias a los cuidados de Judit, trasunto de Midge Woods, mujer real, combinación de enfermera y madre y antigua y efímera amante (a la que, aquí literalmente, él no ve).9 Además, si como afirmó el filósofo Eugenio Trías, Scottie Fergusson era en Vértigo “el cine mismo andando” persiguiendo sin poder atrapar más que como obra de arte a la “Mujer”, objeto único de la mirada (Trías, 1982), nada debe extrañarnos que, tras la muerte de su Madeleine10 —y Magdalena es también el nombre del personaje interpretado por Penélope Cruz, aunque recurra al Severine buñueliano cuando ejerce la prostitución— el protagonista se convierta en un cineasta ciego, condenado a dedicarse a la escritura de guiones para otros. Pese a todo lo dicho, si una película —tan extraordinaria como desconocida para la mayor parte de la crítica internacional— late en el corazón de Los abrazos día por Concha Piquer). Sobre la banda sonora de Los abrazos rotos puede consultarse en la red (MundoBSO) un interesante ensayo escrito por Laura Marshall. 9 No la ve, ni la desea. Pero buscará en cambio relaciones efímeras con otros “cuerpos”, marcadas por la neurosis y el fetichismo. En este sentido, la primera secuencia es modélica por su claridad y concisión: el personaje masculino, ciego, en el ojo de la chica, poseído por la mirada del otro; la inequívoca cita de Un perro andaluz (Un chien andalou, Luis Buñuel, 1929) mientras le acaricia los pechos; el vacío del plano durante el coito, horizontalmente seccionado por el sillón que lo atraviesa: solo gemidos sin imagen humana alguna y el pie de la chica, el fetiche con las uñas pintadas de rojo, surgiendo hacia la izquierda del encuadre. Es la única y falaz solución para una ceguera irresoluble. 10 De la que además, cual Scottie, se enamora al primer golpe de vista. Como Madeleine, además, Magdalena cumple las tres “condiciones” fundamentales de esa peculiar elección del objeto por parte del hombre neurótico que Freud analizó en su ensayo “aportaciones a la psicología de la vida erótica”: en primer lugar el “perjuicio del tercero” (“el sujeto elegirá “invariablemente […] alguna mujer sobre la que ya pueda hacer valer algún derecho de propiedad otro hombre”, clarificando al máximo el origen edípico de la elección), en segundo, ser “sexualmente sospechosa” y de dudosa “pureza y fidelidad” y, finalmente, debe necesitar “ser salvada”, convencido el hombre de que sin su ayuda caería a los más bajos niveles de la existencia humana (Freud, 1967). Como Scottie, Mateo tampoco podrá salvarla. José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 32 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 rotos, casi hasta el punto de poder interpretarse ésta como un r e m a k e inconfeso, es Vida en sombras (1948) de Lorenzo Llobet-Gràcia, a su vez fuertemente influenciada por el cine de Alfred Hitchcock, pero capaz de anticipar en una década el más oscuro núcleo semántico de Vértigo. Como en el no menos metacinematográfico film de Almodóvar, pero sesenta años antes, el protagonista de Vida en sombras es un cineasta retirado (del cine y del mundo) por la incurable herida psíquica provocada por la pérdida de la mujer, objeto de deseo. Y es en la película de Llobet-Gràcia —estamos seguros— donde debe buscarse el origen último de la poderosísima, inolvidable imagen que, tras la muerte de la mujer en un primer nivel narrativo, condensa y resume el dolor provocado por la imposibilidad del sujeto masculino de fundir la “Mujer” con mayúsculas —esa Imago fascinante, pedestal, resplandeciente y cegadora, creada con restos de imágenes primordiales; esa “Mujer que no existe” a la que el psicoanalista Jacques Lacan, tan mal comprendido en este punto, se refería— y la mujer cotidiana con la que compartir la vida; imagen fuerte que —por cierto— volverá a presidir, omnipresente y obsesiva, la brutal pesadilla psicoanalítica que esconde la estremecedora La piel que habito. Como el Carlos Durán de Vida en sombras (metafóricamente dado a luz por el mismo proyector), el Mateo Blanco/Harry Caine de Los abrazos rotos es, también, el cine mismo encarnado, girando su angustia y su deseo al ritmo mismo de la bobina de celuloide,11 y solo por medio de las imágenes podrá comprender, aunque ya no eludir, los límites de sus imaginarias pasiones. Y es que la Lena de Mateo es imagen puramente cinematográfica, imaginaria, y aunque Almodóvar le concede la efímera e insensata posibilidad de poseerla, la pérdida es, otra vez, inmediata: de nuevo —como en Hable con ella— bella durmiente, viva en el recuerdo y en el cine. Y de igual manera que en Vida en sombras Carlos Durán solo puede volver a rodar tras confrontarse directamente con la imagen viva de su esposa muerta en las películas familiares, inscribiendo la falta en celuloide, Mateo únicamente recupera su identidad (su nombre y su vida como director, lo que le permitirá remontar su malograda película) tras 11 “No es casual —escribe Almodóvar sobre su película— que aparezca un primer plano del núcleo de un rollo rebobinándose frenéticamente, y que esta imagen se encadene con la de Mateo bajando rápidamente las escaleras del estudio. Ambos movimientos evolucionan al mismo ritmo y en el mismo sentido. Ambos poseen el mismo centro y la pasión que les impulsa es la misma” (ALMODÓVAR, 2009). José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 33 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 acariciar la última imagen, apenas entrevista, descompuesta en píxeles de pasado, de Lena besándolo instantes antes de morir [Foto 3, Foto 4]. Para Llobet-Gràcia y Almodóvar el cine parece ser incluso más poderoso que ese Vesubio capaz de conservar para siempre el amor pompeyano en Te querré siempre (Viaggio in Italia, Roberto Rosselllini, 1954): el único medio —locus sagrado— capaz de resolver el conflicto del deseo, de dar vida a la imagen, de revivir a los muertos. Pero reparemos en que esas imágenes inolvidables —huellas de lo real, único rescate y salvación final para Mateo Blanco— son rodadas (en la diégesis de Los abrazos rotos) por Ernesto Martel hijo/Ray X, homosexual, afeminado e infantil, emocionalmente castrado12; el otro cineasta de nombre doble que es, además, parte de un personaje masculino de nuevo —como en Hable con ella— violentamente desdoblado. Como Mateo y sus Chicas y maletas, el joven Martel también dispondrá del privilegio —otorgado por un narrador que parece asimismo y de alguna manera desdoblarse en ambos— de intercalar sus imágenes en el discurso del film y, así, la secuencia del intento de transformación de Lena en una mujer “de otro género más feliz” alejado del rojo de la fatalidad y la tragedia, como (la) quiere Blanco (y señala el propio Almodóvar), será también (de)construida desde el interior del texto por la inclusión de planos de su cámara, encargados por el mal padre Ernesto Martel para vigilar a una Lena que es su amante pero también, y en cierto modo, su creación. De hecho, si Mateo y Ernesto hijo representan dos posiciones masculinas —otra vez destinadas a colaborar finalmente—, el poderoso magnate Ernesto Martel ha de ser también, en cierto modo, a la vez y por ello, padre y 12 Al que podemos imaginar, cual nuevo Benigno, criado por una madre sobreprotectora ante la ausencia del padre. José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 34 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 doble de Mateo, lo que termina de dibujar el complejísimo conflicto edípico que preside la película.13 Al modo del perverso Gavin Elster de Vértigo, Martel es el que modela a su antojo, por vez primera y hasta convertirla en objeto de deseo (la femme fatale del cine negro),14 a una muchacha de origen rural que —como la joven Judy Barton a San Francisco desde Salina (Kansas)— probablemente llegara hace años a Madrid de un pueblo manchego muy similar a aquél en el que se desarrolla Volver o, quizás, incluso, del que provenía la desgraciada familia protagonista de ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!!15 3. Partiendo de una compleja y espesa estructura narrativa, intrincada y enigmática como el funcionamiento del inconsciente, compuesta de viscosos bloques de tiempo que se entrecruzan y amalgaman16 hasta el punto de infectarse de significantes provenientes de otros bloques y otros tiempos 13 Y el texto no deja de insistir, narrativa y visualmente, una y otra vez, en dicho conflicto. Así, por ejemplo, tras el (no) (re)encuentro entre Ray X y Harry Caine —dos hombres, dos pseudónimos, uno a cada lado de la puerta, lateralizados, partes centrales del conflicto— y una vez arreglada la cita entre ambos, el guión que quiere hacer Ray X (la venganza contra el padre malo) con la ayuda de Harry no es sino el contraplacado negativo del que éste deseaba escribir junto a (su hijo) Diego, sobre la generosidad de ese hijo abandonado de Arthur Miller con Síndrome de Down. Los dos, por lo demás, se dedican a lo mismo: rodar a (poseer imágenes de) Magdalena, mientras el padre posee su cuerpo. No obstante, al modo del Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) de Encadenados (Notorious, Alfred Hitchcock, 1946) la obsesión amorosa dota al personaje interpretado por José Luis Gómez de cierta densidad trágica. Y Almodóvar le dedica, quizás por ello, una de las más hermosas secuencias, aquella en la que —utilizando como otras veces en su filmografía el “doblaje” cinematográfico con enorme potencia dramática—, las más impúdicas imágenes documentales rodadas por su hijo se redimen ofreciendo a Magdalena la posibilidad de hablarle a la vez desde dentro y desde fuera de la pantalla, diciéndole la verdad. 14 Con evidentes referencias a la Gilda casada con el malvado y maduro hombre de oscuros negocios Ballin Mundson (George Macready), el padre malo, poseedor de esa “mujer imposible” para un Glenn Ford mucho más joven (Gilda, Charles Vidor, 1946). 15 La película no evita mostrar, sin ambages, las causas sociales, de clase, que explican en última instancia la transformación de los ocres y los marrones de la tierra y del barrio popular en ese rojo del poder, la violencia y el deseo; los pasos, marcados por la necesidad económica, desde la inmigración a la capital de la chica a su “objetualización” como Mujer Objeto (de deseo). Martel es el padre y el doble, pero también un empresario corrupto en tiempos de desenfrenada expansión económica bajo los últimos gobiernos del PSOE de Felipe González. En un plano de punto de vista de su madre (Ángela Molina) vemos a Lena, ya de rojo (color con el que se ha vestido/desnudado antes de llamar a la madame para ejercer de “Severine”), atravesar (y con ello pagar), de espaldas a la cámara y hacia el fondo, el pasillo del hospital privado donde ha internado a su moribundo padre y cuyos costes corren “desinteresadamente” a cargo de Martel. Cuando volvamos a verla será ya la creación del magnate: obscenamente enjoyada y rodeada de rojo en su lujosa mansión. 16 Aunque todas las piezas, organizadas por el poderosísimo “Gran Imaginero” almodovariano, se conjugan de tal forma que, más allá del aparente desorden temporal, la estructura discursiva de Los abrazos rotos responde, también, a los pasos de la realización de una película: Mateo y Diego escriben un guión al inicio; se rueda Chicas y maletas en la parte central y la (re)monta finalmente. José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 35 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 —singular y si se quiere posmoderna pero con todo radical imagen-tiempo (Deleuze, 1987) — la película lleva hasta el paroxismo formal ese proceso de grafismo geométrico y muy elevada autorreferencialidad al que ya nos referimos y que convierte el plano de Almodóvar, prácticamente vaciado de toda relación con el mundo por saturación, a un nivel desconocido hasta ahora de digitalización abstracta capaz de reactivar, al modo eisensteiniano (o si se quiere, y en términos hollywoodienses, hitchcockiano), y por frotación con otros planos igualmente saturados, una escritura de ejemplar potencia significante para referirse a las heridas del mundo y del deseo, para volver a tocar la realidad perdida a través de esa inaudita, ostentosa y aparentemente extravagante pero a la postre y sin discusión única y fructífera hipertrofia formalista.17 Dentro de ese sistema formal puesto en pie por el texto, los elementos cromáticos adquieren, como es sabido, importancia decisiva, hasta el punto de que ciertos aspectos íntimamente ligados al ya citado y central conflicto edípico 17 En fin, una singularísima evolución estilística que, surgiendo de la superficie del plano posmoderno del primer Almodóvar, acaba por extraer todo el espesor de las huellas de real de sus composiciones plásticas por medio de un proceso de grafismo progresivamente abstracto y matemático hasta construir un sistema formal (por paradójico que resulte, e incluso incomprensible para cierta crítica) de desesperada e intransferible virulencia emocional y significante a la hora de hacer frente fílmicamente a los sutiles recovecos del deseo y de la pérdida. Obsérvese la cada vez más obsesiva proliferación de planos cenitales que indagan con delectación en signos difícilmente legibles para los espectadores (las páginas en braille, la máquina de escribir, la bicicleta estática, las múltiples radiografías de los huesos fracturados de Lena, las esculturas de Cesar Manrique en Lanzarote, escaleras lámparas…) elementos muchas veces en apariencia narrativamente inservibles pero que conforman el núcleo gráfico central a partir del que se expande(n) la(s) forma(s) del deseo y de la angustia. José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 36 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 sobre el que se construye el film están puestos en discurso por medio de la recurrente presencia en el encuadre de una mancha roja que, además, se expande cual metástasis entre planos, espacios y tiempos. Una mancha roja —esa mancha materna de la que hablara Julia Kristeva en su célebre Poderes de la perversión (Kristeva, 1988) — que se constituye en dispositivo que, siempre a la izquierda del encuadre (el lugar de la pérdida en el texto),18 impregnará de imposibilidad y de dolor una relación edípicamente marcada por ese malvado y envidiado padre que en última instancia —insistimos— representa Ernesto Martel. Aunque dicha figura formal solo adquirirá pleno y evidente sentido en composiciones como la de Magdalena, ensangrentada y vestida de rojo, ocupando el extremo izquierdo del encuadre cenital tras la “caída” por las escaleras [Foto 5] o, definitivamente, en la del automóvil brutalmente empujado hacia la izquierda en la secuencia del accidente mortal en Lanzarote, el omnipresente color de la sangre y del deseo inunda como resto doloroso e incurable innumerables superficies plásticas en las que su aparición es tan llamativa (las ya citadas uñas del pie femenino durante el fetichista coito inicial [Foto 6], el vestido sin cuerpo colgado en la ventana del despacho de Judit y reflejado en el cristal [Foto 7], las flores en las macetas, el abrigo en el perchero u otros numerosos planos en la casa de Mateo/Harry [Foto 8] o en las oficinas [Foto 9] y la lujosa mansión de Martel [Foto 10]) como en ocasiones incoherente desde los postulados de una lógica narrativa convencional (la conversación entre Judit y Mateo durante el rodaje, antes de toda herida). 19 Y 18 Y Almodóvar es extremadamente riguroso en lo que a la distribución del espacio en la composición del plano y su relación con el punto de vista se refiere. Así, por ejemplo, la fotografía en blanco y negro de Lena en el cajón de la mesa de trabajo de Harry Caine ocupa el lado izquierdo del encuadre mientras éste debe ser adscrito al narrador, pero no inmediatamente después, cuando se trate de un plano de punto de vista de un Diego que lo desconoce todo del drama. 19 En definitiva, un uso del color —que, al modo hithcockiano, resulta ilegible para los espectadores en un primer visionado— mediante el cual Almodóvar funde inextricablemente tiempos y heridas. Convertido en huella (de la imposible posesión) materna, es capaz de teñir José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 37 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 todavía, dicha composición cromática dispondrá de una versión puramente abstracta en los dos planos que unen la luz roja a la izquierda de esa cámara fotográfica que tras dispararse debería dar como resultado una (nunca vista) foto de la pareja —mientras disfruta y se emociona con el amor geológico de Te querré siempre en su imposible, lunático e irreal refugio isleño— con el blanco absoluto del vacío, premonición de la tragedia [Foto 11, Foto 12]. Un solo ejemplo, finalmente, habrá de servirnos para comprobar la extrema sutileza de la escritura fílmica de Almodóvar en la película que nos ocupa, aun si, en primera instancia, en él la puesta en escena parece limitarse a dar forma, mediante el uso del espejo, al tema del Doble que —como vimos— lo preside obsesivamente.20 Las primeras palabras que escuchamos en el film son las que la desconocida rubia de la secuencia inicial pronuncia para preguntarle su de melancolía composiciones que, según el puzzle temporal establecido por la narración, no podrían estar cargadas de esa ausencia. Así, de algún modo y por ejemplo, la amargura y pesadumbre de Judit, debida en primera instancia al asma de Dieguito, es también, y de alguna forma, posterior a la tragedia. 20 Desde los peculiares créditos. En ellos, mientras escuchamos la música de Alberto Iglesias, vemos a los dobles de Penélope Cruz y Lluis Homar grabados por la cámara de control, hasta que dejan sus sitios a los actores. Las letras que conforman el título Los abrazos rotos parecen surgir de formas similares a los del punto central en cruz que ocupa el centro del plano. José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 38 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 nombre. Tras responder (“Harry Caine”), Mateo/Harry comienza a narrar(nos),21 mediante voz en off, la historia de su “desdoblamiento” ( “Antes me llamaba Mateo y era director de cine. Desde muy joven siempre me tentó la idea de ser alguien más, además de yo mismo [...]”) mientras vemos esos planos cenitales —o, en su caso, fragmentarios, en cierto modo digitalizados, a los que ya nos hemos referido— de su brazos sobre la bicicleta estática, de sus manos en el teclado de la máquina de escribir eléctrica e, incluso, un primerísimo plano de la cinta de la misma mientras golpea el papel (y cuya temporalidad es incierta: ¿es, como parece, la máquina con la que escribía antes del accidente y entonces parte de un fugaz flash-back?). En el momento en que comienza la frase “Durante años Mateo Blanco y Harry Caine compartieron la misma persona: yo…”, plano medio del personaje afeitándose y con una geométrica forma roja (la rectangular pared lateral de un mueble de baño) justo a la izquierda de su rostro. Pero ese “yo” no es más que un espej(o)(ismo) roto por la muerte de la encarnación de su fantasma y, por tanto, la cámara comienza a retroceder, oblicuamente, para mostrarnos que la imagen anterior no era sino el reflejo de su cuerpo en el espejo. Por un instante, a m b o s comparten el encuadre (Mateo a la derecha, ante la mancha roja; Harry a la izquierda), pero —coincidiendo con la frase “(…) hubo un momento en que de modo abrupto no pude ser otro que Harry Caine. Me convertí en mi p s e u d ó n i m o ” — el tomavistas avanza sobre H a r r y, ciego, dejando completamente fuera el espejo (y por tanto a Mateo y la mancha roja que acompañaba al desaparecido director). Ese tránsito entre la mancha y la ceguera, entre el rojo y su ausencia, entre el deseo y la nada se construye de tal forma que el movimiento de cámara lleva consigo un (imperceptible en un primer visionado pero) en verdad singular espesamiento del tiempo que, si no afecta al primer nivel narrativo (se trata “simplemente” del personaje afeitándose ante el espejo), activa un complejo juego de tiempos y heridas que Pedro Almodóvar ensayara ya en ciertos planos de Hable con ella, pero aquí, si cabe, de modo más subrepticio y sutil [Foto 13, Foto 14, Foto 15]. 21 Pero no a ella. Si en efecto esa voz en off es un recurso de guionista para facilitar al espectador datos que necesita saber desde el inicio (lo cual no debe extrañarnos, pues Harry también se dedica a escribir películas…) es un modo brutalmente efectivo de mostrar hasta que punto la chica está fuera del asunto. José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 39 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 Una escritura fílmica, en definitiva, tan barroca y construida como deseante y desesperada, que todavía habría de ofrecernos una nueva pieza de su doloroso e intransferible discurso masculino en ese delirante, atroz vértigo negro titulado La piel que habito. Referencias bibliográficas ALLEN, Richard (2011). Hitchcock Legacy. En Leitch, Thomas y Poague, Leland (ed.), A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell (2011), pp. 572-591. ALLINSON, Mark, (2003). Un laberinto español Las películas de Pedro Almodóvar, Madrid: Ocho y Media/Semana de Cine Experimental de Madrid. ALMODÓVAR, Pedro (2009). Pressbook. En: http://www.losabrazosrotos.com/ ALMODÓVAR, Pedro, (2012). La piel que habito. Barcelona: Anagrama. CASTRO DE PAZ, José Luis, (1999a). El surgimiento del telefilme. Barcelona: Paidós. CASTRO DE PAZ, José Luis, (1999b). Vertigo/De entre los muertos. Barcelona: Paidós. José Luis Castro de Paz, Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos 40 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 24-40 CASTRO DE PAZ, José Luis (2009). Almodóvar y Hitchcock, Relecturas y mestizajes de Hollywood a Chamberí. En: Cueto, Roberto (ed.). ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!! de Pedro Almodóvar. Valencia: IVAC-La Filmoteca, pp. 175-203. DELEUZE, Gilles, (1987). La imagen-tiempo. Estudios sobre cine 2. Barcelona: Paidós. FREUD, Sigmund (1967). Aportaciones a la psicología de la vida erótica. En Freud, Sigmund, Ensayos sobre la vida sexual y la teoría de la neurosis. Madrid: Alianza, pp. 66-111. FUENTES, Víctor (2005). Buñuel y Almodóvar: un discurso cinematográfico de las pasiones y el deseo. En: Zurian, Fran A. y Vázquez Varela, Carmen, Almodóvar: el cine como obsesión. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. KRISTEVA, Julia, (1988). Poderes de la perversión. Buenos Aires: Catálogos. NASIO, Juan David, (1991), La mirada en psicoanálisis. Barcelona: Gedisa. NASIO, Juan David, (2004), El libro del dolor y del amor. México: Gedisa. STRAUSS, Fréderic, (1995). Pedro Almodóvar. Un cine visceral. Madrid: El País/Aguilar. TRÍAS, Eugenio, (1982). Lo bello y lo siniestro. Barcelona: Seix-Barral. VIDAL, Nuria, (1989). El cine de Pedro Almodóvar. Barcelona: Destino. ZUNZUNEGUI, Santos (1997) Kika (1993). En: Pérez Perucha, Julio (ed.), Antología crítica del cine español (1906-1995). M a d r i d : Cátedra/Filmoteca Española, pp. 936-939. 41 REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA MELENDO, Ana: La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos Recibido: 02/06/2012 – Aceptado: 06/09/2012 ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 LA NATURALEZA METAFÍLMICA DE LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS METAFILMIC NATURE OF BROKEN EMBRACES Ana Melendo Universidad de Córdoba Resumen: El artículo profundiza en las señas escriturales marcadas por la autorreferencialidad y la autorre- flexión diseñadas a partir, entre otras cuestiones, de la recurrencia al uso de material cinematográfico como fuente de inspiración que se dan cita en Los abrazos rotos; y cómo Almodóvar encuentra un método eficaz en el metacine para meditar y teorizar sobre la imagen y su evolución activando con esa finalidad los mecanismos necesarios que le permiten bucear en un territorio afín que se viene denominando poscine, un territorio en el que el artista demuestra, una vez más, su innegable amor hacia el arte y la imagen cinematográfica, reaccionando ante esa pulsión meta- ficcional que lleva al cine a volverse sobre sí mismo para pensar sobre sus propios medios expresivos. Abstract: This article analyzes the narrative elements in Broken Embraces marked by self-referentiality and self-reflection arising from, among o t h e r t h i n g s , t h e u s a g e o f cinematographic material as a source of inspiration. It examines how Almodóvar encounters an effective method in metafilm to meditate and theorize on the image and its evolution. The filmmaker activates the necessary mechanisms in order to explore a related territory that has come to be called post- cinema. Once again, the artist shows his undeniable love for art and the cinematic image. Almodóvar reacts to the metafictional impulse that permits cinema to reflect upon itself and its own means of expression. Palabras clave: Metacine; poscine; metaficcional; autorreferencialidad; autorreflexión. Key words: Metafilm; post-cinema; metafictional; self-referentiality; self-reflection. Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 42 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 En la década de los años veinte del pasado siglo, surge una serie de artistas procedentes de distintas disciplinas interesados por trasladar al cine muchos de los planteamientos que se venían desarrollando en las vanguardias artísticas, y también para algunos de ellos, el cine supone el motor de arranque de determinados conceptos que se trasladarán a otras artes como la pintura. Pero desde el punto de vista que aquí nos ocupa, lo más interesante de la producción fílmica de artistas como Man Ray, René Clair, Fernad Leger o el mismo Buñuel, es que se cuestionan de una manera radical el lenguaje cinematográfico. Efectivamente, en contra de lo que promulga el cine clásico de Hollywood o cine de la transparencia, existe otra corriente de cineastas que lejos de pasar desapercibida o de borrar todo rastro de estilo en favor de la historia que la película pone en pie, se preocupan por manifestar la subjetividad del creador y una autoconciencia lingüística que alcanza su máximo esplendor en la década de los años cincuenta con movimientos como la modernidad cinematográfica, la Nouvelle Vague o los Nuevos cines, de tal manera que la transparencia narrativa se ve mermada al primarse la forma sobre el contenido, por lo que comienzan a proliferar los estilemas y los rasgos de la personalidad creativa de dichos autores. Es ahora, después de que el cine haya afianzado sus propios medios de expresión, influido en muchos casos por las teorías escénicas de Bertolt Brecht, cuando este medio de expresión siente la necesidad de interrogarse sobre sí mismo y sobre las actitudes narrativas que se habían venido manifestando hasta entonces en él. Pedro Almodóvar, en línea con esta tradición de cineastas que surge a mitad del siglo XX, promueve en su cine unas señas escriturales marcadas por la autorreferencialidad y la autorreflexión diseñadas a partir, entre otras cuestiones, de la recurrencia al uso, al igual que sus colegas franceses, de material cinematográfico como fuente de inspiración (Marku, 2001:118). Pero además y sobre todo, el artista manchego encuentra un método eficaz en el metacine para reflexionar y teorizar sobre la imagen, y su evolución, una reflexión que da un paso más, como veremos, con respecto a estos Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 43 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 representantes de la modernidad, porque, como dice Ángel Quintana: “Es como si la modernidad cinematográfica se encontrara ante unos caminos propios que la llevaran a reflexionar sobre la imagen al margen del arte, como si las investigaciones de los videoartistas que empezaron a surgir en el territorio de la cultura visual no le interesaran excesivamente al no formar parte de su mundo” (Quintana, 2011: 133). Pues bien, a Almodóvar sí le interesa, y mucho. Por eso, activa los mecanismos necesarios para bucear en ese territorio afín que finalmente se ha denominado poscine, un territorio en el que el artista demuestra una vez más su innegable amor hacia el arte y la imagen cinematográfica reaccionando ante esa pulsión metaficcional1 que lleva al cine a volverse sobre sí mismo y a reflexionar sobre sus propios medios expresivos. El mismo artista declara al respecto: “En mis películas el cine está presente, pero no soy un cinéfilo, no soy una persona que cita a otros autores […] Cuando una película sale en una película mía no es un homenaje, es un robo. Lo robo y hago que forme parte de la historia que he escrito, por eso funciona de un modo activo, mientras que un homenaje siempre responde a una cosa pasiva […] Convierto el cine que he visto en mi propia película, y por lo tanto en la de los personajes (Strauss, 1995: 65)”. Es nuestro propósito en este artículo, a partir del análisis textual de Los abrazos rotos, indagar sobre la naturaleza metafílmica que plantea el penúltimo film del cineasta manchego, hasta el momento, para detectar las estrategias metaficcionales, reflexivas y e intertextuales que el mismo pone en juego. Y más allá de eso, establecer las formas de hacer del film en relación a las mismas, profundizando en las relaciones que estas prácticas formales sostienen con el plano del contenido. Para ello partimos de la clasificación establecida por José Antonio Pérez Bowie en relación a la descripción del fenómeno y las peculiaridades que puede revestir dicho tratamiento en la pantalla, pues consideramos que en Los abrazos rotos se dan cita todas ellas. Es decir, que la película de Almodóvar, en la terminología utilizada por Pérez Bowie, responde al contenido originario del término metaficción o el cine dentro del cine; propone una reflexión sobre 1 Entiéndase metaficción como la ficción en segundo grado o ficción dentro de la ficción. Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 44 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 sus propios medios expresivos transgrediendo las convenciones de la narración clásica a través de una instancia enunciadora; y el cine aparece como intertexto en sus múltiples variantes según la noción genettiana de intertextualidad2 (Pérez Bowie, 2006: 122-123). Eso sí, entendiendo siempre que los géneros cinematográficos, como dice Mark Allinson, y Pedro Poyato subraya posteriormente, en el cine del artista manchego, “adquieren, al estar recontextualizados, nuevos significados” (Allinson, 2003: 282); “esos fragmentos de otros textos, como si de una operación de trasplante se tratara, empiezan a latir al ritmo marcado por el nuevo cuerpo textual donde son implantados, adquiriendo por ellos una nueva dimensión, un nuevo sentido” (Poyato, 1999: 97-98). En esta lógica, anota Jean-Max Méjean que “todas estas referencias, si bien no son exhaustivas, intentan demostrar la voluntad de un Pedro Almodóvar perfectamente consciente de que no basta con adorar el cine, sino que también hay que perpetuarlo (Méjean, 2007: 32). Esta idea cobra un particular interés en Los abrazos rotos puesto que, a través de los mecanismos que el film incorpora, se establece un estudio muy interesante sobre el nuevo futuro de la imagen cinematográfica amparada en la imagen tecnológica y su integración en la nueva cultura informática durante todas las fases del desarrollo del film. Pero veámoslo en lo que sigue. 1. Los abrazos rotos: el cine más allá del cine El protagonista de Los abrazos rotos es un cineasta que, al igual que Almodóvar, crea relatos a partir de otros relatos. No es la primera vez en la filmografía de este autor que aparece la figura del director de cine como un síntoma, sin duda, de carácter autorreferencial; pensemos en títulos como Laberinto de pasiones (1982) y ¡Átame! (1990), entre otros. De tal manera que, como dice Daniela Aronica, “la autorreferencialidad se convierte así en una herramienta para insinuarse hasta los más recónditos pliegues de su universo existencial sin tenerse que desnudar ante el espectador de forma explícita” (Aronica, 2005: 78). En este caso, se trata de un cineasta que, 2 Véase al respecto: (Genette, 1989). Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 45 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 paradójicamente, queda ciego tras un accidente de coche sufrido en Lanzarote en el que la mujer que ama pierde la vida, con lo cual, los ojos, mecánicos o no, que aparecen en la película, adquieren una pregnancia especial. El film comienza con un prólogo en el que se invita al espectador a que se identifique con el ojo artificial de una cámara de vídeo de control que, conectada a una de las Panavision3 con las que se lleva a cabo parte de la película, permite ver las tomas durante e inmediatamente después de rodarlas sin que estas sean impresas [foto 1]. Precisamente, las características particulares de dicha cámara hacen posible la diferenciación textural entre este grupo de imágenes y las que aparecen después del segundo fundido a negro que tiene lugar en el film. El primero de ellos, ese en el que se impresiona el título de la película, provocado por uno de los miembros del equipo al interponerse entre la cámara y los personajes que se encuentran detrás de la misma –después de que el director de fotografía de la película haya ensayado posiciones con ellos–, adquiere un protagonismo esencial porque propone una representación en abismo –“el cuadro dentro del cuadro” que diría Julián Gállego para referirse a un procedimiento recurrente en la pintura barroca (Gállego, 1987)–, que anticipa el interés que muestra la película p o r presentar al cine como un contenedor que puede albergar en su interior distintas representaciones cinematográficas dispuestas a modo de matrioskas que se relacionan entre sí, estableciendo lazos de continuidad entre la realidad y la ficción, unos lazos que, si bien parecen rotos por la 3 Es un detalle a tener en cuenta para el desarrollo de este artículo que la película fue rodada con una Panavision Millennium como cámara A, la Arriflex 435, la Arriflex 416, y la Panavision Platinum, que además de funcionar como segunda unidad, aparece en la película como atrezzo cuando el protagonista, que es director de cine, rueda Chicas y maletas. En digital, la Panavision Genesis captó unas imágenes de la cena en un restaurante donde los protagonistas estaban en total oscuridad, aunque no llegó a la versión final de la película. Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 46 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 intromisión del título del film en un momento determinado de este prólogo, la textura de la imagen –que continúa siendo la misma– y la aparición de Penélope Cruz y Lluís Homar en la pantalla sustituyendo a los miembros del equipo y ocupando posiciones para interpretar una de las escenas que tendrá lugar posteriormente en este largometraje, confirman la fusión entre realidad y ficción en la película de Almodóvar [foto 2]. El propio cineasta declara al respecto: “Elegí estas imágenes para empezar la película porque son imágenes usurpadas y furtivas que ya establecen el cine como territorio donde transcurrirá gran parte de la acción. También porque me fascinan las escena casuales que cruzan por delante de la cámara en los momentos que no se está rodando” (Almodóvar, 2009: 7). Almodóvar reivindica así la ruptura del espacio fílmico tradicional, de manera que el elemento fundamental de la imagen pasa a ser la superficie y constitución de la misma. Ángel Quintana anota para referirse a este proceso que tiene lugar en el cine cómo: “A partir del momento en que el artista ha manipulado el mundo mediante los instrumentos propios del arte cinematográfico –la tecnología de la puesta en escena y la tecnología del montaje– la mímesis deja de tener la apariencia de analogía respecto al mundo originario para transformarse en el elemento determinante de la puesta en serie” (Quintana, 2003: 61). En todo caso, tras ese fundido a negro, el espectador se ve sumergido de lleno en la ficción a través de un primerísimo primer plano, cuya textura ya ha variado con respecto a los anteriores. Efectivamente, la Panavision da cuenta de un ojo femenino que ocupa todo el plano. A modo de telón, el párpado y las largas pestañas bañadas en rímel del mismo dejan al descubierto un iris de color verde que, como si de un espejo se tratara, muestra aquello que queda fuera de campo: la imagen de Harry Caine, según la voz del propio protagonista del film, y las páginas de un periódico que vinculadas al rostro de él, mediante el reflejo de las mismas en el ojo de la chica, lo devuelven al Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 47 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 pasado, un pasado del que la película da cuenta en estos primeros instantes a través de la voz de un narrador autodiegético4, el propio Harry Caine [foto 3]. La voz de Caine, pone de manifiesto en este inicio una de las señas de identidad del film: la figura del doble, que queda inmortalizada a través del espejo a la vez que la voz over explica cómo Mateo Blanco, director de cine, pasa a ser de manera abrupta Harry Caine, escritor. Es así cómo el doble se consolida desde el comienzo, a partir del encuentro de Mateo Blanco, el sujeto principal, con su otro “yo”, Harry Caine. El espejo se convierte así en el lugar que mediante el reflejo duplica la realidad convirtiéndola en otra cosa [foto 4]. Francisco Perales anota al respecto que: “La doble identidad y la suplantación física es una de sus fijaciones [refiriéndose a Almodóvar] permanentes. A través del espejo (The Dark Mirror, 1946, Robert Siodmak), Su propia víctima (Dead Ringer, 1964, Paul Henreid) y Tú a Boston y yo a California (The Parent Trap, 1961, David Swift), son referentes a los que suele recurrir” (Perales, 2008: 191). A tal efecto, explica Almodóvar: “Como para muchos autores la ficción fue un ensayo de la realidad. Un director que no puede dirigir, que además ha perdido a la mujer que adora, solo tiene ante sí dolor y desesperación; si quiere sobrevivir tendrá que hacerlo a través de la impostura” (Almodovar, 2009: 11). A partir de este momento, y precisamente partiendo de la imagen especular, la película de Almodóvar se puebla de imágenes que profundizan en el misterio de la percepción más allá de la apariencia, bien sean fotográficas, digitales, o incluso radiográficas; sin obviar, por su puesto, aquellas que dan cuenta de algunos de los textos artísticos más queridos por el cineasta español como: la pintura explícita de Warhol o la de Magritte a través del 4 Término utilizado por Genette para referirse a aquél que narra los acontecimientos de la historia y que puede ser un personaje testigo de lo que ocurre o puede ser protagonista de lo que está contando. Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 48 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 tableau vivant protagonizado por Lena y su amante; carteles de películas como el de La noche, de Antonioni; y fotografías de actrices fetiches del cineasta manchego como Bette Davis o Romy Schneider, quien aparece en un fotograma extraído de la película Lo importante es amar (Zulawski, 1975), e implícitamente en las palabras que configuran el cuadro que cuelga sobre el cabecero de la cama de Lena: “Je t’aime”. Pero, en este juego de intertextos al que Almodóvar nos tiene acostumbrados, nos interesa destacar tres títulos que cobran una importancia fundamental en el film en relación al estudio de la imagen y la naturaleza metaficcional y autorreflexiva que este pone de manifiesto. Nos estamos refiriendo a: E l fotógrafo del pánico (1960) de Michael Powell, Blow up (1966) de Michelangelo Antonioni y Persona (1966) de Ingmar Bergman. Si hemos de hallar un nexo de unión entre El fotógrafo del pánico, Blow up, Persona y Los abrazos rotos, diríamos que se encuentra en un intento por parte de los cuatro films, por cifrar el mito de la creación fo-cinematográfica como posibilidad constitutiva del mundo, constructora de una realidad que desemboca en un alto nivel de verdad, así trataremos de mostrarlo en lo que sigue. 1. 1. Restitución de una verdad a través de la imagen fo-cinema- tográfica5 en Blow up, Persona y Los abrazos rotos Nos sumamos a la teoría de Ángel Quintana en la que explica que la imagen nodal creada por Almodóvar, aquella en la que los amantes se funden en un beso, reúne en ella a esa otra fundacional del cine moderno, los amantes calcinados de Viaggio in Italia (Rossellini, 1954) por un lado, y por otro, a la última ampliación de la fotografía protagonista en Blow-up (Quintana, 2009: 2 8 ) . Pero recordemos, que sobre esa imagen nodal a la que se refiere Quintana, o mejor dicho, acariciándola, aparecen las manos de Mateo Blanco 5 Con el término “fo-cinema-tográfica”, tratamos de sincretizar la doble vertiente de la imagen fotográfica y cinematográfica; imágenes patentemente vinculadas en relación a su naturaleza, pero a la vez diferentes en lo que respecta a sus posibilidades estética y de significación (Poyato, 2006: 5). Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 49 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 recorriendo la pantalla en la que se muestra este instante sustraído al tiempo; de manera que, aunque solo sea por la vinculación iconográfica, hemos de añadir a este trío intertextual un cuarto título, Persona, cuya presencia implícita veremos que no es tan simple como podría parecer. Nos gustaría, por tanto, profundizar en cómo Blow up, Persona y Los abrazos rotos disponen redes de ida y vuelta con fines comunes desde el origen mismo de su creación. En relación a los lazos que Los abrazos rotos establece con Blow up, hemos de comenzar recordando que el protagonista de la película de Almodóvar se desdobla en dos pasiones: la literatura y el cine, y en cada caso adopta un nombre diferente: Harry Caine y Mateo Blanco respectivamente. En este sentido, hemos de explicar que el germen de Blow up se halla en un cuento de Cortázar: Las babas del diablo (1959), cuyo protagonista, Michel, es un escritor y fotógrafo a la vez, que adquiere una conducta aparentemente esquizofrénica con trastorno de personalidad múltiple, que hace patente la ambigüedad desde el comienzo del relato, con lo cual, Almodóvar vincula el suyo a la matriz misma del origen de Blow up. Así, el cineasta manchego cuenta, cómo la raíz, a nivel visual, de su película se haya en una foto que hizo en Lanzarote en un momento de profunda oscuridad para él (Heredero, 2009: 9), de forma que la conexión entre el hipotexto en el que se basa el film antonioniano y el texto de Almodóvar, encuentran justificación, igualmente, desde el momento en que Cortázar, partiendo de una fotografía realizada por su amigo Larraín en la Isla de Saint Louis, inventa un alter ego, mitad Cortázar y mitad Larraín, es decir, mitad escritor y mitad fotógrafo, con la intención de dinamitar los mecanismos de la ficción y el discurso narrativo. De más está señalar que ese cuento es transduccido, según la terminología utilizada por Darío Villanueva (Villanueva, 2008: 54), pertinentemente por Antonioni y su guionista inseparable, Tonino Guerra ¿Será casualidad que el nombre de este último figure inserto en la ficción almodovariana? Desde luego que no. El hecho de que Judit, una de las protagonistas del film, demande a su hijo el libro de Tonino Guerra, incluyéndolo en su maleta antes de salir a buscar localizaciones, solo es una argucia más de Almodóvar para Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 50 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 mostrarnos algunos de los caminos reescriturales que ha recorrido hasta construir su relato, un relato en el que por cierto, aunque la historia cobra un protagonismo esencial, no desdeña la posibilidad de investigar sobre el poder y el misterio de la imagen y la dualidad inseparable que entraña; esa que, igualmente, se constituye en uno de los puntos nucleares del film antonioniano: la diferencia entre ver y percibir. Llegados a este punto cabe señalar cómo la película de Almodóvar se puebla de imágenes fotográficas, insistiendo una vez más, como dice Nuria Vidal, en la importancia que adquiere este medio de expresión en todas las películas del autor, jugando un papel decisivo en la narración e interviniendo directamente en el relato (Vidal, 1998: 340). Pero de entre todas las fotografías que Mateo realiza con su cámara en esa especie de luna de miel que llevan a cabo los protagonistas en la Isla de Lanzarote, destaca una a la que el protagonista denomina “El secreto de la playa del Golfo” [foto 5], porque hasta que no procede al revelado, no percibe que en ella aparece una pareja a la que no vio en el momento de realizar la fotografía, precisamente en la Playa del Golfo, según las palabras del propio Mateo que e x p r e s a l o s i g u i e n t e a l respecto: “Cuando hice la foto no vi a la pareja besándose”. Y sin embargo, se trata de un secreto que tiene que escribir Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 51 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 para, según él, averiguar cuál es. Es pues, sin lugar a dudas, una fotografía que claramente remite a Blow up, pero no solo porque los protagonistas de ambos film hacen visible a través de este medio de representación la forma no visible, sino porque la pareja fotografiada parece inscribirse en uno de esos cuadros de Bill, el personaje pintor de la película de Antonioni [foto 6, precisamente cuando dicha fotografía comienza a dar cuenta de su materialidad misma; o incluso, en una de Las montañas encantadas6 de Antonioni. En todo caso, ese abrazo de la pareja fotografiado por Mateo en la Playa del Golfo, solo marca el inicio de otros muchos protagonizados por Lena y él en lo sucesivo del film que quedan inmortalizados, como certificado de su existencia, en los numerosos fragmentos que, años después, el hijo de Mateo intenta reconstruir. No obstante, en uno de los gestos más bellos del cine almodovariano la imagen de otro beso es congelada y ampliada hasta alcanzar sus cotas más altas de expresión, a través, precisamente, de mostrar su materialidad [foto 7]. Según Almodóvar: “En esta imagen, puede ser un defecto que se vea el pixelado, pero esto es lo bueno de la tecnología digital, que si la conoces a fondo puedes encontrar muchas cosas que no son las convencionales, pero sí son dramáticamente interesantísimas, y ese es un camino que tenemos que recorrer y que yo quiero recorrer” (Heredero, 2009: 11). 6 Serie pictórica en la que el cineasta ferrarés fotografía la obra original para luego fotografiarla, dejando así al descubierto las texturas que surgen de la misma. Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 52 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 Lejos de incurrir en un defecto la imagen apenas perceptible de Mateo y Lena besándose, similar a la última de la serie del fotógrafo de Blow up [foto 8], esa que Mateo no puede ver, se convierte en la imagen reveladora a través del gesto del protagonista que desliza sus manos sobre la superficie emborronada y saturada de texturas que, tras apretar el play, adquiere de nuevo temporalidad. Ambos cineastas, Antonioni y Almodóvar, dotan de sentido a esa pérdida de la forma reconocible, cuando, en palabras de Fontcuberta, “se alcanza el grado cero de la inscripción visual, que permite indagar en la composición íntima de las imágenes” (Fontcuberta, 2010: 46), por mucho que la estructura interna de la imagen almodovariana esté constituida a partir de pixeles y de que, como afirma Quintana, el molde original que preservaba la huella del mundo físico se halle difuminado; aún así esta imagen digital continúa capturando la huella de la realidad empírica (Quintana, 2011: 72). Es así cómo, apoyándose en el dramatismo que supone este gesto de Mateo, mostrando en una imagen las manos de él acariciando otra imagen, el cineasta manchego descubre que detrás de una imagen no hay ningún misterio, sino otra imagen. El protagonista construye así una imagen mental de aquello que su ceguera se empeña en ocultar; una imagen que supone su Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 53 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 pasarela personal entre la realidad y el mundo al que desearía regresar, una pasarela que aparece igualmente en el comienzo de Persona como veremos. Y es que, después de que Bergman destruye, tal y como anota Juan Miguel Company, “la fascinación del efecto de realidad, base de la representación cinematográfica dominante, mostrando toda la cacharrería distanciadora que encuentra a mano, toda la tramoya del dispositivo” (Company, 1981: 85) al que, aunque de forma distinta, también Almodóvar somete el inicio de Los abrazos rotos, un adolescente abandona su posición fetal buscando la mirada del Otro materno, aquella que lo sostiene y que lo certifica en la formación del yo (Lacan, 1984: 211-212), una mirada que este chico encuentra en la imagen borrosa y fluctuante de un retrato sobre el que pasa la mano, formado por la conjunción de dos: Alma y Elisabeth, una conjunción, que en la película de Bergman pone de manifiesto, a igual que en L o s abrazos rotos, la dualidad del yo (foto 9). En este sentido, se produce en la segunda parte de Persona, la simbiosis entre estas dos mujeres, “una fusión simbólica” en palabras de Company (Company, 1981: 93), una fusión que se va trabajando a lo largo de todo el film a través de los distintos modelos de imagen que van apareciendo; nos referimos fundamentalmente a la imagen especular y la imagen fotográfica. La imagen especular se muestra en el film como identificadora del sujeto, de Alma en este caso, que la confronta con ella misma y al mismo tiempo supone una experiencia de división, recordemos que Alma confiesa a Elisabeth que quisiera ser como ella. Lo mismo que el fotograma nuclear del film, aquel que bajo la pérdida de la forma real, mediante un primerísimo primer plano termina por unir los rostros de ambas protagonistas y los escinde a la vez convirtiéndolos en materia moldeable que encuentra su continuidad en la última imagen del relato, esa en la que el niño del comienzo sigue acariciando la imagen borrosa, de contornos desdibujados, Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 54 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 configuradora, según expone Lacan en su teoría del estadio del espejo, de la imago corporal del chico, una imagen que no hace sino certificar, al igual que el fotograma acariciado por Mateo Blanco, la pura materialidad de una película que insiste en la componente constitutiva del film, y que ofrece al espectador distintos mecanismos de reflexión en relación a la imagen, incluida la televisiva o electrónica y su carácter de inmediatez, algo que también podemos observar en el film almodovariano que nos ocupa. Y es que, tanto Bergman como Almodóvar, parecen estar de acuerdo en la observación realizada por el cineasta sueco en la que afirma que: “Literatura, pintura, música, cine y teatro se procrean y se dan a luz a sí mismos. Surgen y se aniquilan nuevas mutaciones, nuevas combinaciones, el movimiento visto desde fuera parece nerviosamente vital –no es más que el extraordinario afán de los artistas por proyectar, para sí mismos y para un público cada vez más distraído, la imagen de un mundo que ya no se preocupa de sus gustos o sus ideas” (Bergman, 1992: 47). 1. 2. Ray X y su cámara de vídeo Dice Ángel Quintana en relación a la imagen electrónica: “La imagen electrónica transformó la huella del referente en electrones móviles susceptibles de ser transportados de un sitio a otro […] El vídeo posibilitó que se pudiera conservar la emisión y volver a verla, traicionando de este modo la esencia del medio, pero confiriendo a la imagen un estatuto más privilegiado como producto, como archivo o como creación susceptible de ser considerada obra por su valores artísticos” (Quintana, 2011: 58,63). Almodóvar, en su periplo por el estudio de la imagen en Los abrazos rotos, no quiere pasar por alto las posibilidades de la imagen electrónica e introduce la figura del marking of, que encarna en el personaje de Ray X. En estos momentos, estaríamos en situación de comparar la película almodovariana con otra de las fuentes de la que, sin lugar a dudas bebe, nos estamos refiriendo a El fotógrafo del pánico. Aunque es cierto que en numerosas ocasiones Los abrazos rotos remiten al film de Powell en multitud de detalles –recordemos el primerísimo primer plano de un párpado que se abre dejando al descubierto el iris asustado y azul que Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 55 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 permanecía oculto [foto 10] y que podemos asemejar a ese otro diseñado por Almodóvar [ver foto 3]; en el gesto del protagonista midiendo con una cinta métrica el rostro de su próxima víctima, semejante a otro que se da en el comienzo de Los abrazos rotos; o en la propia ceguera, presente también en El fotógrafo del pánico; y un largo etcétera–, lo verdaderamente interesante de ambos films es cómo uno y otro abandonan la intriga de lo que podría haber sido un thriller, convirtiendo la trama en una excusa para centrarse en el proceso creativo del cine. El mismo Almodóvar declara al respecto que: “Los abrazos rotos es un drama con tintes muy negros, lo más parecido a un thriller de los años 50” (Almodóvar, 2009: 10). Para ello, el cineasta manchego no duda en crear un personaje mediante el cual establece una narración paralela a la original: Ernesto “hijo”, alias: Ray X. A través de este personaje, Almodóvar insiste en resquebrajar los límites entre unos textos y otros, de tal forma que, nuevamente, se vale de la duplicidad que impera en todo el film, extrapolando así a Mark, el protagonista de El fotógrafo del pánico, para convertirlo, a su modo, en Ray X. Es un trauma infantil lo que impulsa a Mark Lewis a cometer todos los asesinatos que son visualizados a través de su 16 mm de la que nunca se separa. Una relación tortuosa con su padre que, igualmente, vemos reflejada en el binomio Ernesto “padre” y Ernesto “hijo”, una relación a la que el joven solo encuentra salida a través de su cámara de video, que como Mark, siempre lleva consigo, con el fin, en los dos casos, de realizar un documental, un documental que convierta a la imagen en la prueba absoluta de lo real, en imagen reveladora. Y para que no quepa duda de que Mark, o mejor dicho, la cámara de este, encarna en Ray X, y teniendo en cuenta que nada es casual en el cine de Almodóvar, el origen de la creación de dicho personaje, se encuentra justo allí donde acaba Mark, dotándolo así de una continuidad absoluta. La voz over de Mark, ya muerto por cierto, lee aquello que el último plano del film Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 56 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 muestra en imágenes: un cuaderno en el que aparece escrito: “¡Una cámara mágica que necesitará la ayuda de otro! X” [foto 11], y ese otro, es convertido por Almodóvar en Ray X. Y es que tal y como indica Francisco Perales, “Pedro Almodóvar utiliza una situación o personaje como elemento de arranque argumental y lo ubica en un nuevo contexto donde se relacionará con otros individuos” (Perales, 2008: 288). De esta manera, con la excusa narrativa de que Ray X y su cámara de vídeo capture y registre todo aquello que necesita Ernesto “padre” como prueba de la infidelidad de Mateo Blanco y su querida Lena, Almodóvar inserta la imagen electrónica en la propia textura del film, de tal manera que, tal y como explica el mismo cineasta: “Martel “padre” ve el material grabado en estado crudo. Proyecta las cintas de vídeo recién salidas de la cámara de su hijo, supervisadas solo por la autómata lectora de labios […] En ese momento el marking of, producido por Martel con intenciones perversas, se vuelve contra él. Lena le abandona por partida doble, en la pantalla y desde la puerta del salón, a sus espaldas” (Almodóvar, 2009: 10). Ray X toma el testigo de Mark Lewis y convierte la imagen en prueba irrefutable de una realidad, que como huella de un referente arrastrado, Ernesto “padre” no duda en aceptar como verdad. Es así, como el joven, al igual que los rayos X –no causales igualmente– realizados a Lena tras ser empujada por Ernesto escalera abajo después de que ella lo abandone, en lo que se supone un examen médico no invasivo, a través de los cuales se muestra lo más oculto del cuerpo de la protagonista, va más allá de la figura del voyeur para penetrar hasta lo imperceptible, exponiendo la relación de la joven y Mateo Blanco, con imágenes que brotan del interior mismo de ambos y que se resumen en el primer beso que queda congelado y que prefigura el último de la pareja, aquel que se traduce en la poderosa imagen surgida de las esencias de Rossellini y Antonioni [ver foto 7]. Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 57 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 Ciertamente, Ray X, en su documental como él lo llama sobre Mateo Blanco, reescribe la historia que comenzara Mark Lewis y la convierte la imagen reveladora del terror en la imagen reveladora del amor. Almodóvar sitúa en un momento determinado del film, ese en el que Harry Caine visita a Ernesto “hijo” en su estudio, en la posición que ocupa la madre ciega de Helen en El fotógrafo del pánico, y para que no haya dudas al respecto, el mismo protagonista le dice al joven documentalista: “Me recuerdas a Peeping Tom”, mientras apunta con su bastón, en este caso no lacerante, hacia la cara de Ray X; a lo que este responde: “Si, pero yo nunca quise matarte”. Sin embargo, la imagen subjetiva a la cual el espectador de la película de Powell tiene acceso, se transforma en el f i l m almodovariano en una mirada enunciativa, de tal manera que, al igual que sucede en Blow up, la cámara se hace autónoma en un gesto protagonizado por el propio Ernesto, quien la antropomorfiza y la convierte en el copiloto que registra todo lo acaecido la noche del accidente [foto 12] para, posteriormente, digitalizarla, proporcionando a Mateo el placer de recrearse en ella con un gesto, que aunque visualmente remite al protagonizado por Mark Lewis y la madre de Helen cuando acarician desesperadamente las imágenes del terror –que no dejan de sucederse en la pantalla y que incluso invaden los cuerpos de ambos–, se encuentra en las antípodas de lo planteado por Powell. Por eso, Mateo Blanco se recrea en dicho placer y las posibilidades que le ofrece la imagen electrónico-digital y solicita a su hijo que le pase esta imagen cuadro a cuadro, “para que dure más”, por mucho que lo verdadero en la imagen digital, como dice Quintana, sean las sensaciones ópticas que genera la superficie de dicha imagen (Quintana, 2011: 78), inmortalizada en origen por la ligereza de la cámara electrónica que ha permitido capturar el instante revelador que lo resume todo en este film, aceptando la exploración de una nueva temporalidad expresada mediante el propio gesto de Mateo. Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 58 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 1. 3. Finalmente ¿Chicas y maletas? Solo nos queda hablar por último en esta reflexión propuesta por Almodóvar sobre la imagen y su construcción, de esa parte de film gracias a la cual la cámara almodovariana penetra en los intersticios del medio cinematográfico con la intención de recrearse en el acto creativo: el protagonista de L o s abrazos rotos, en su roll como cineasta, construye otro film que finalmente se inserta en la ficción: Chicas y maletas, un film que tampoco se agota en él mismo como veremos. En torno al universo ficcional creado por Mateo Blanco, se produce, como ya hemos explicado, un discurso autorreflexivo y autorreferencial que traspasa los límites del propio relato almodovariano, y al mismo tiempo, desborda los márgenes de los distintos textos que el film moviliza para resquebrajarlos. Así, Chicas y maletas funciona en Los abrazos rotos como el eslabón que une Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, película en la que encuentra su origen, y La concejala antropófaga, una pequeña joya que surge, como decimos, de la película creada por Mateo Blanco en la ficción. Sin embargo, no es la intención del artista autohomenajerse “espero –dice– que nadie lo interprete así” (Almodóvar, 2009: 13), por eso, quizá haya que referirse a él como un palimpsesto en el que, aunque se conservan huellas de una escritura anterior, el diseño de producción ha hecho posible una nueva escritura que reinterpreta a la anterior. En cuanto al resultado de la obra generada a partir de la elaboración de Chicas y maletas: La concejala antropófaga, podríamos encontrar el referente más próximo, en relación al gesto autorreferencial que representa, en Tráiler para amantes que, aunque sin mostrar ni una sola imagen de su otro film, ¡Qué he hecho YO para merecer esto!, “hace una extraordinaria y gratuita publicidad del film, al mismo tiempo que inventa otra historia basada en él” (Holguín, 2006: 122). De esta forma, los cortometrajes que surgen en el interior mismo de Los abrazos rotos se convierten en palimpsestos, como decíamos más arriba, de las obras que reescriben y que les preceden. Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 59 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 Sin embargo, más allá de esta autodigestión de textos que se haya explícita en el film, nos interesa destacar cómo Almodovar utiliza la realización de Chicas y maletas dentro del universo ficcional, para seguir analizando y profundizando sobre el acto creativo en relación al proceso cinematográfico. Y es que, el fundido a negro que se produce después de que la cámara se recree en la imagen nuclear del film, trae consigo unas imágenes que no hacen sino constatar la importancia de las nuevas tecnologías en el desarrollo de la creación. Por eso, Almodóvar dota de protagonismo en esta última parte del film, al instrumento sin el cual la fase de montaje, en la actualidad, no sería posible: el ordenador. En este sentido hemos de subrayar que tanto las imágenes analógicas como la digitales que han sido filmadas previamente pasan al disco duro de estos aparatos, antes de ser montadas y sonorizadas, convirtiéndose este en “determinante en todos los procesos creativos del cine” (Quintana, 2011: 71), procesos a los que el cineasta manchego presta singular atención puesto que muestra detalladamente el momento en el que el puntero del ratón movido por Mateo [foto 13], va seleccionando en la computadora aquellos fragmentos de imagen y sonido que una vez afinados se muestran como definitivos, de tal forma que se produce un doble reencuadre en el que la pantalla cinematográfica alberga en su interior esa otra, la del ordenador que reproduce la secuencia de Chicas y maletas [foto 14]. Ciertamente, el propio Almodóvar se refiere a cómo: “En la trama de Los abrazos rotos, aparece dramatizada la importancia del montaje, su relación directa con el autor y la fragilidad de la obra si alguien se interpone en el montaje y él” (Almodóvar, 2009: 8). Pero más allá del hecho narrativo, el cineasta manchego hace hincapié en la importancia de las nuevas tecnologías Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 60 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 que han barrido –según él– todos los materiales magnéticos y fotográficos de las salas de montaje (Almodóvar, 2009: 8). De esta manera, el homenaje a las mismas por arte del autor, pone el broche final a este film almodovariano en el que el hecho fílmico se impone sobre cualquier otro elemento. Tanto es así que el film manifiesta como imperativo el deber de todo cineasta de acabar sus películas, “aunque sea a ciegas”, tal y como concluye Mateo Blanco, alter ego de Almodóvar en este universo ficcional. Referencias bibliográficas ALLINSON, Mark (2003). Un laberinto español. Las películas de Pedro Almodóvar, Madrid: Ocho y Medio. ALMODÓVAR, Pedro (2009). Los abrazos rotos, Madrid: El deseo, URL: http://www.losabrazosrotos.com/, 3-5-2012. ARONICA, Daniela (2005). “Intertextualidad y autorreferencialidad: Almodóvar y el cine español”. En Almodóvar: el cine como pasión, pp. 57-80. BERGMAN, Igman (1992). Imágenes, Barcelona: Tusquets. COMPANY, Juan Miguel (1981). El autor y su obra. Bergman, Barcelona: Barcanova. FONTCUBERTA, Joan (2010). Blow-up Blow-up. Cáceres: Editorial Periférica. GÁLLEGO, Julián (1987). El cuadro dentro del cuadro. Madrid: Cátedra. GENETTE, Gérard (1989). Palimpsestos, Madrid: Taurus. HEREDERO, Carlos (2009). “Entrevista Pedro Almodóvar. El cielo protector”, Cahier du cinema (España), Nº 21, Madrid, Ediciones Caimán, pp. 7-12. HOLGUÍN, Antonio (2006). Pedro Almodóvar, Madrid: Cátedra. LACAN, Jacques (1984). Seminario III: Las Psicosis (1955- 1956). Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós. MARKU, Sas (2001). La poética de Pedro Almodóvar. Barcelona: Littera. MÉJEAN, Jean-Max (2007). Pedro Almodóvar. Barcelona: Ediciones Robinbook. PERALES, Francisco (2008). “Pedro Almodóvar: heredero del cine clásico”. En Revista Zer, Nº 24, Vol. 13. Universidad del País Vasco. pp. 281- 301. PÉREZ BOWIE, José Antonio (2006). “El cine en, desde y sobre el cine: Ana Melendo, La naturaleza metafílmica de Los abrazos rotos 61 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 41-61 metaficción, reflexividad e intertextualidad en la pantalla”. En Revista Anthropos, nº 208. Barcelona: Anthropos Editorial, pp. 122- 137. POYATO, Pedro (2006). Introducción a la teoría y el análisis de la imagen fo-cinema-tográfica. Granada: Grupo Editorial Universitario. POYATO, Pedro (2007). Todo sobre mi madre. Valencia: Ediciones Octaedro. QUINTANA, Ángel (2003). Fábulas de los visible. El cine como creador de realidades. Barcelona: Acantilado. QUINTANA, Ángel (2009). “A ciegas”. En Cahiers du cinema (España), Nº 22, Madrid, Ediciones Caimán, pp. 28-29. QUINTANA, Ángel (2011). Después del cine. Imagen y realidad en la era digital. Barcelona: Acantilado. STRAUSS, Frédéric (1995). Pedro Almodóvar. Un cine visceral. Madrid: El País Aguilar. VIDAL, Nuria (1998). El cine de Pedro Almodóvar. Barcelona: Ediciones Destino. VILLANUEVA, Darío (2008). “Autobiografía (Camilo José Cela) y Biografía (Ricardo Franco) de Pascual Duarte”. En El realismo y sus formas en el cine rural español, P. Poyato (ed.), Córdoba: Ayuntamiento de Dos Torres y Diputación de Córdoba, pp. 51-84. 62 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA HERRERA, Javier: Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini Recibido: 15/07/2012 – Aceptado: 13/08/2012 ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) TIEMPO MOMIFICADO Y COQUETEO CON LA MUERTE EN LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS DE PEDRO ALMODÓVAR. A PROPÓSITO DE LA CITA DE VIAGGIO IN ITALIA DE ROBERTO ROSSELLINI MUMMIFIED TIME AND FLIRTING WITH DEATH IN PEDRO ALMODÓVAR’S BROKEN EMBRACES. ABOUT THE QUOTATION OF ROBERTO ROSSELLINI’S VIAGGIO IN ITALIA Javier Herrera Filmoteca Española Resumen: Desde nuestro punto de vista Los Abrazos rotos supone dentro de la trayectoria de Almodóvar una culminación provisional de todas las características que han definido la p e c u l i a r i d a d d e s u e s t i l o posmoderno, una de las cuales, el robo de imágenes procedentes de otras películas y otros directores, se ha convertido casi en una obsesión. Dentro de ese proceder, en dicha p e l í c u l a , a d q u i e r e e s p e c i a l relevancia una cita directa que realiza de una secuencia muy reveladora de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini que le sirve a Almodóvar para plantear la relación amor-muerte de una forma muy original y así apropiarse para sí del concepto rosselliniano del cine como fluir de la vida y alejarse de la concepción del cine como versión de la realidad. Abstract: Broken Embraces can be considered a provisional culmination of all the characteristics that defined the p e c u l i a r i t y o f A l m o d o v a r ’ s postmodern style. One of these characteristics, which has become almost an obsession, is the theft of images from other films and directors. In this regard, a direct quotation he makes of Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia a c q u i r e s s p e c i a l r e l e v a n c e . Almodóvar uses this reference in order to pose the love-death connection in a very original fashion while appropriating rosselinian concept of film as course of life and moving away from the idea of film as a version of reality. Palabras clave: Los abrazos rotos; Roberto Rossellini; Viaggio in Italia; amor y muerte; imágenes robadas; cita fílmica. Key words: Broken Embraces; Roberto Rossellini; Viaggio in Italia; love and death; stolen images; film quotation. Javier Herrera, Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini 63 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 1. La mirada del travestí y el robo de imágenes como fundamento del estilo almodovariano Es en Todo sobre mi madre cuando Almodóvar consigue por fin un estilo personal y distinguible, plena y sólidamente posmoderno, en base no a la suma del sinnúmero de operaciones intertextuales de todo tipo que pueden detectarse en esa obra (Poyato, 2007) sino a través de las imitación de estilos y géneros que lleva a cabo (lo que hemos denominando “territorio del pastiche”1) y, sobre todo, de la transformación de infinidad de imágenes “robadas” a otros directores, fruto de su experiencia como espectador “cinéfilo” por excelencia en la oscuridad de las salas de cine. Es lo que hemos llamado la “mirada travestida” que no es sino una consecuencia lógica de su identificación con el tipo socio- psico-sexual del travestí, manifestada tanto en la profusión de esos personajes en su obra como en operaciones retóricas, llamadas travestimientos, que se incluyen en la trama sin ningún tipo de miramientos. A través de esas presencias –en Todo…, se acentúa aún más que en las veces anteriores la importancia concedida al travestí como elemento perturbador a través de la figura de un padre llamado Lola– Almodóvar pretende introducir en la dualidad normativa masculino/femenino, y en los consiguientes patrones de mirada a ella asociados, un tercer elemento indefinible, amenazante y anormal, que puede ser asimilable a lo monstruoso porque produce “un colapso de la norma fálica” e interfiere “la operación de sutura del cine dominante” (Yarza, 1999: 206). Además, es también en esta película donde la tendencia al “robo” se manifiesta igualmente de un modo más rotundo, literal y explícito: de un lado, el pase televisivo de All about Eve (Eva al desnudo, 1951) de Joseph L. Mankiewicz y de otro la escena del accidente de Opening Night (Noche de extreno, 1978) de John Cassavetes. Si en el primer caso asistimos a un claro ejemplo de “cita literal”, muy similar a la empleada en Carne trémula (1997) con Ensayo de un crimen (1955) de Buñuel, que nos sitúa en un contexto teatral y en un problema de 1 Hemos desarrollado este concepto así como los de “imágenes robadas” y la “mirada travestida”, que nos parecen claves para entender el estilo almodovariano, en tres ensayos para otras tantas ediciones recopilatorias de textos acerca de Almodóvar. El único publicado hasta la fecha (Mellen Press) es el que aparece reseñado en la bibliografía (Herrera 2012). Los otros dos, uno editado por Marvin d’Lugo y Kathleen Vernon y el otro por Jorge González del Pozo, aparecerán publicados por Blackwell y la Michigan State University respectivamente. Javier Herrera, Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini 64 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 vampirización entre grandes actrices, el segundo es un claro ejemplo de ese mirar travestido típicamente suyo, en el que conviene detenerse un poco para mostrar dicho proceder. En la obra de Cassavetes, Nancy, una joven de 17 años, espera la salida de su actriz favorita, Gena Rowlands, para pedirle un autógrafo; tras abrirse paso entre la multitud que hay a las puertas del teatro, logra llegar hasta la estrella, que se encuentra dentro del coche. Llueve torrencialmente. Nancy pegada a la ventanilla no para de lanzarle besos y decirle que la quiere pero cuando el coche de la actriz se pone en marcha, otro coche la atropella. En la película de Almodóvar, Esteban (Eloy Azorín), que tiene la misma edad que Nancy, hijo de Manuela (Cecilia Roth), tras esperar los dos bajo la lluvia la salida del teatro de su actriz favorita, Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), para que le firme un autógrafo, es atropellado por un coche; sin embargo (y he aquí el rasgo distintivo de Almodóvar), a pesar de las concordancias de la anécdota (admiración de dos jóvenes por una actriz y la petición del autógrafo a la salida del teatro), de la edad, la lluvia, la noche y el atropello, el manchego introduce dos variantes para camuflar el origen y hacer suyo el resultado. El mismo lo explica de la siguiente manera: “En Opening Night la escena está rodada a la altura de los ojos… El fan que pide el autógrafo de Gena Rowlands se arrodilla ante ella y ella es muy directa, va hacia el coche y le habla… Pero en mi film, se trata de una madre y de su hijo que esperan la salida de los artistas y que, en esta especie de vacío de la espera, intercambian las palabras más importantes de su vida… La escena, pues, tiene otra significación… Pero en el film de Cassavetes la actriz que representa Gena Rowlands comprende lo que ha pasado, quiere saber lo que le ha sucedido a su admiradora. Yo preferí que el personaje de Marisa [se refiere al personaje Huma Rojo que interpreta Marisa Paredes] desapareciera sin saber lo que había ocurrido. Y para el accidente, puse la cámara en el lugar de los ojos de Esteban” (Strauss, 1999: 39. Traducción nuestra). He aquí un caso típico de lo que Almodóvar llama “robo” pero que se trata realmente de un travestimiento2 en toda regla porque, a pesar de que Almodóvar cambia el punto de vista de la cámara –lo que Poyato llama “la mirada del muriente” (2007: 92-95)–, añade un personaje más a la espera de la actriz famosa y esta no sabe nada del atropello; se trata de elementos circunstanciales que, por supuesto, Almodóvar aprovechará para sus fines pero que no trastocan el sentido de la secuencia original que no es otro que mostrar 2 Recordemos que para Genette el travestimiento “se hace siempre sobre un (o varios) texto (s) singular (es), nunca sobre un género” (1989: 103). Javier Herrera, Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini 65 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 cómo el azar puede en un instante truncar la vida de una persona haciéndole transitar, acaso en uno de los días más felices de su vida –acercarse a la actriz idolatrada–, desde el máximo de felicidad al fatalismo de la muerte; una idea, por otro lado, sumamente poética: la imposibilidad del disfrute pleno de la sublimidad del arte, que en su caso es recurrente pues la volveremos a encontrar en Los abrazos rotos. Así pues, tendríamos que “lo almodovariano”, en lo que respecta al uso que hace del cine de otros directores, consistiría en crear una película diferente a partir de las películas de otros pero que mantendría con ellas un “diabólico” (para utilizar la terminología en su día usada por Umbral) (D’Lugo, 2005: 84) hilo conductor que las conectaría y al mismo tiempo las subvertiría, las desnaturalizaría e incluso las mezclaría entre sí; se trataría entonces de un estilo fundado en el pastiche como procedimiento imitativo y en el travestimiento como procedimiento de transformación: de igual modo que el travestí puede convertirse en muchos “otros” en cuanto a aspecto, es decir copiar, imitar su “imagen”, sin embargo no puede por mucho que quiera “ser” ese otro, teniendo que aceptar su personalidad dual y equívoca, que es lo que provoca una distorsión en el sistema binario masculino/femenino. Desde ese punto de vista, pues, “lo almodovariano” coincide con las tesis de Genette (146) cuando afirma –y es lo más característico, personal y original en Almodóvar– que en el travestimiento puede haber parte de pastiche pero nunca al contrario; y efectivamente en sus acusados procesos de transformación de imágenes de otros directores caben pastiches de todas clases en cuanto que se imitan los clichés, los estereotipos o las convenciones de género, estéticas o de lenguaje de películas concretas pero –y he ahí la singularidad– cuando se decide a imitar un estilo autorial (Warhol por ejemplo), un movimiento (como el neorrealismo) o una tendencia de moda (las películas de Lester), tal y como sucede en sus primeras películas, los travestimientos se reducen al máximo aunque aumenta el tono y las transformaciones operadas por la parodia. Dicho proceso, que es sintomático de la búsqueda de un estilo propio, es el que culmina en Todo sobre mi madre y no hace sino acentuarse, una vez logrado, en cada película posterior con un mayor grado de complejidad argumental, alarde de virtuosismo y referencias culturales. Javier Herrera, Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini 66 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 Asi, por ejemplo, en su siguiente película, Hable con ella, logrará fundirlos con especial maestría al integrar una pequeña película muda, El amante menguante, que remite a la clásica de Jack Arnold, The Incredible Shrinking Man (El increíble hombre menguante, 1957) pero que al mismo tiempo, según sus propias palabras, está inspirada en Sunrise (1927) de Murnau3; es decir por un lado hay una clara imitación de estilo (la estética y formato del cine mudo, la poética concreta de Murnau) y por otro ha transformado de forma lúdico- satírica (es decir parodia + travestimiento) el film de Arnold, que al ser integrado dentro de otra obra que a su vez contiene abundantes travestimientos de Persona (Persona, 1966) de Ingmar Bergman4, ha acentuado su valor prototípico como mirada travestida por antonomasia al introducirnos virtualmente en un “espacio de lo abyecto” (Yarza, 1999: 206) que el travestí convoca, un espacio que en esa película se resuelve de una manera ciertamente monstruosa: con la violación por parte del enfermero Benigno –no explicitada porque la película muda sirve de “tapadera” de la realidad vivida a diario en la habitación del hospital (Maurer, 2009: 142)– de una mujer en coma, Alicia, de la que está enamorado y a la que, al dejarle embarazada, le devuelve, paradójicamente, a la vida. Con La mala educación se produce una vuelta de tuerca más en la complejidad narrativa del pastiche almodovariano al integrar, según el modelo clásico de la “construcción en abismo” metacinematográfica, dentro de la película el rodaje de otra película, titulada La visita. A pesar de que Almodóvar no resuelve bien la fusión entre las dos ficciones (habría que hablar más de confusión), sin embargo se produce un avance muy notable en lo que respecta a su mirada travestida y lo que tiene de irrupción del monstruo en el momento en que la película discurre por las convenciones del cine negro y los personajes perpetran acabar con Ignacio, y, tras asistir a una sesión de ese tipo de cine dentro de un festival especializado, les invade el sentimiento de culpa y ya, sin máscaras ni chantajes y condicionamientos, se entregan con desenfreno a su pasión amorosa 3 “De todos los films mudos que yo he visto antes de abordar El amante menguante, ha sido Amanecer el que se correspondía mejor con mis intenciones. Incluso la letra de los cartones, como si fuera una escritura manuscrita, me ha inspirado” (Almodóvar, 2006). 4 Esta relación ha sido sobre todo destacada por estudiosos franceses de su obra, concretamente Bremard, 2003, J-L.L, 2006 y Law, 2010. Javier Herrera, Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini 67 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 y voyeurística5; en efecto, el travestimiento está aquí señalado tanto por la inversión de los convencionalismos respecto a la pareja convencional de amantes (se trata de homosexuales) como por la condición de travestí del personaje de Ignacio y de las actuaciones de su hermano Angel interpretándolo, presencias que, cada vez que aparecen, alteran en un sentido transgresor la normalidad del relato, llevándolo al terreno más almodovariano por excelencia. Desde el punto de vista de la mirada travestida, Volver –como el propio título indica– supone un aparente retroceso porque no hay travestimientos explícitos y el monstruo ha sido sustituído por un fantasma; por otro lado, aunque se produce un retorno a las fuentes primigenias de la poética neorrealista, su tendencia al pastiche, esta vez de películas de fantasmas, está más contenida e incluso la cita explícita de Bellissima (Bellísima, 1951) de Luchino Visconti, sirve para reforzar la condición maternal por excelencia del personaje de Penélope Cruz relacionándola con la gran Anna Magnani. Por otro lado, se percibe de una forma cada vez más patente el deseo de organizar el relato de una forma cada vez más equívoca entre, por una parte, la tradición productora de imágenes, puramente cinefílica, y la realidad, una realidad cada vez más artificialmente creada a imagen y semejanza de esos modelos ficticios y más alejados de la realidad objetiva. Desde esa óptica, al menos, tenemos una novedad importante para el discurso que nos ocupa pues supone el primer enfrentamiento de la mirada travestida con uno de los dos polos vitales de esa realidad hasta ahora enmascarada: nos referimos a la muerte. En efecto, es la primera película en la que se explicita el miedo personal que tiene Almodóvar a la muerte mediante “una cierta reflexión sobre su inevitabilidad y la necesidad de su aceptación” (Alarcón, 2006: 58); pero casi diríamos más: se trataría de la constatación racional de la imposibilidad de la vida después de la muerte, salvo que la imagen –“el cine nos sobrevive”, llega a decir en una ocasión (Sardá, 2009: 47)– pudiera ejercer ilusoriamente esa función y resucitarnos. 5 Recordemos que Berenguer graba con su cámara de vídeo el rostro de Angel mientras están follando en un intento por perpetuar lo más posible esos instantes de máximo placer; esa actitud “prolongadora” del medio reproductor lo tendremos también en Los abrazos rotos cuando Mateo capta con su cámara reflex el instante de máxima felicidad con Lena acoplados en el sofá tras haber visto en televisión el pase de Te querré siempre. Javier Herrera, Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini 68 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 2. Y en el principio fue la fotografía Consolidada plenamente la mirada travestida con el mínimo arsenal de procesos transformadores pero con el máximo de autorreferencias –de citas, de parodias, de recurrencias– y aceptando la posibilidad de la extinción implícita en el monstruo, con Los abrazos rotos realiza una suerte de intento de síntesis de todos los contrarios anteriormente citados comenzando por una de sus más socorridas obsesiones artísticas: fusionar el melodrama con el noir, que es al mismo tiempo una de las características fundamentales de la mirada del travestí. De otro lado, también es perceptible otra característica de esa mirada como es el actuar al mismo tiempo como espectador y como director y representarse en esa dualidad a través de personajes interpuestos que hacen sus veces: ya sea los que ven películas en el cine o en pases televisivos o bien sus alter ego6, el último de los cuales, Mateo Blanco/Harry Caine (Lluis Homar), es un continuador de la estela de Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela) en La ley del deseo (1986), de Máximo Espejo (Francisco Rabal) en Atame (1989) y de Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) en La mala educación (2004), y aúna al mismo tiempo, además de ese natural interés cinefílico, las otras dos facetas más importantes de la creación cinematográfica: la de director y la de guionista; no obstante, Almodóvar precisa que en todos ellos “hay un reflejo mío, pero en ninguno hay demasiados datos biográficos” (Heredero-Reviriego, 2009: 8). Un matiz que se añade a lo ya dicho es la precisión de que todas las referencias que lleva a cabo del cine de otros las hace en tanto que espectador y no como realizador, lo cual nos demuestra hasta qué punto los espectadores que aparecen en sus películas viendo películas no son sino interposiciones o proyecciones de sí mismo en la pantalla: “el cine –afirma- es una experiencia muy personal y yo siempre he querido recordar lo que yo sentía cuando descubrí esos films” (Ciment-Rouyer, 2009: 11). No es extraño, en consecuencia, que Los abrazos rotos haya sido considerada por más de un observador autorizado (Grenier, 2010; Kinder, 2010) como un equivalente respecto a la carrera de Almodóvar de lo que significó 8 1/2 (8 y medio, 1963) respecto a la de Fellini (Metz, 1972: 7) pues no se trata sólo de que haya una referencia a la mítica película ni de la admiración siempre reconocida que profesa al director italiano, 6 Sobre el tema de las duplicidades, dualidades, desdoblamientos, etc. remito a Herrera 2012. Javier Herrera, Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini 69 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 sino de que en ella también hay una reflexión sobre su oficio a través de una mirada retrospectiva hacia todo lo que de cine hay dentro de su obra anterior. Se trata, pues, de una obra síntesis que refleja más que ninguna otra su pasión cinéfila y su mundo personal como hilvanador de imágenes, unas imágenes que son tan reales para él como la misma realidad, “como si las imágenes de las ficciones sólo pudieran llenarse de ficciones para decir las realidades” (Seguin, 2009: 180). Pero, aparte esa función de síntesis, Los abrazos rotos tiene un aspecto, nada original por cierto, pero que le dota, por su carácter autobiográfico, de una apreciable singularidad: la importancia que se le concede a la fotografía no sólo como imagen generadora de la ficción sino como prolongación de la vida en el recuerdo, como conformadora de la memoria, como momificación del tiempo. En relación con la génesis de la película, el propio director ha repetido que la primera idea, la primera línea de su historia, es real: “…fue una foto que hice hace nueve años en Lanzarote y de la oscuridad en la que yo vivía en ese momento. De ahí viene también lo del director ciego” (Heredero-Reviriego, 2009: 10), una oscuridad que tiene que ver con la muerte –con la de su madre, acaecida en 1999– y con la aparición de los primeros síntomas de una enfermedad (unas terribles migrañas) aún no curada; la foto –fortuita, podríamos hablar de “foto encontrada”– de una playa y el descubrimiento en una esquina, casi imperceptible, de una pareja abrazada, fundida en un solo cuerpo; una foto que Mateo Blanco en la ficción también toma y que se integrará como un elemento más de su huída-refugio junto a Lena en Lanzarote, una isla (no lo olvidemos) de origen volcánico y lugar histórico de destierro, refugio y de exilio forzado. Es decir, ya en el primer acercamiento a la ficción se parte de unas realidades vividas que la foto consagra, para después, según él mismo confiesa, comenzar el proceso de invención: la historia de esa pareja real y viva pero ausente, muerta pero existente, y en esa isla, en aquél momento: “La segunda línea me la tengo que inventar, y ese es el juego que me atrae, porque primero debo descubrirla, y no la quiero descubrir en la realidad. Prefiero descubrirla en la imaginación” (Heredero-Reviriego, 2009: 10). Hay, pues, toda una poética sobre el azar en un sentido surrealista muy ligada a la teoría (desde Benjamin a Barthes, desde Sontag a Dubois, desde Freund a Debray) sobre la fotografía como punctum indicador de la muerte, es decir como realidad congelada, de “lo Javier Herrera, Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini 70 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 que ha sido” y estuvo allí delante del objetivo de la cámara en aquel preciso instante; es por ello que ab initio la película surge de una experiencia personal de su vida real en un momento en que el paisaje volcánico, negro, de la isla concuerda con su estado anímico igualmente oscuro y que la foto al cabo del tiempo se encarga de actualizar: “Las fotos captan cosas que el ojo no ve a primera vista. Las fotos adquieren una densidad y expresividad que multiplican con mucho la emoción y la realidad del momento en que se hizo” (Sardá, 2009: 47); es decir, partimos de la imagen fotográfica, que es detención del tiempo, oscuridad y muerte pero mágica revelación de lo invisible –imposible no recordar aquí la alusión al planteamiento de Blow-up de Antonioni– y en un estado de ceguera, por supuesto metafórica, de olvido de lo visible, que representa Harry Caine (Lluis Homar) en la trama, hay que inventar la historia de esa pareja de amantes con el solo concurso de la imaginación; lo que sucede es que el imaginario de Almodóvar está poblado casi en exclusiva de esas imágenes reminiscentes o anamnésicas procedentes de otras películas que “salen como un elemento dramático del guión, casi como un personaje del que me sirvo” (Heredero-Reviriego, 2009: 10). Para Almodóvar entonces inventar la historia en base a su imaginación, inspirada en el cine, supone siempre, pero aún más en Los abrazos rotos, pasar de la muerte a la vida, de la oscuridad a la luz, pero a una luz interior que sirve para iluminarle en el momento de encajar los diferentes elementos del puzzle fílmico en una historia propia: hacer una película en base a otras películas, hacer cine sobre cine. Pero el travestí tiene también una pulsión voyeurística innegable que se manifiesta en la abundancia en casi todas sus películas de fotos pegadas en la pared o reproducidas en revistas, de ojos, de cerraduras, de objetivos, pues la cámara se torna ojo corporal como medio para conquistar la realidad pero también como medio para que el travestí sea visto en su otra identidad, la interior, que ahora, en el decurso temporal del film, se externaliza. No es casualidad por lo tanto que Peeping Tom (El fotógrafo del pánico, 1960) sea su película más socorrida en este sentido: desde Kika hasta Los abrazos rotos pasando por La mala educación subsiste esa obsesión por eternizar el instante fugitivo (que aquí representa Ernesto Jr., con su making-off, presencia constante del falo paterno), en matar simbólicamente al objeto amado: “El ojo del fotógrafo siempre está como redoblando las imágenes [se refiere a Kika], Javier Herrera, Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini 71 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 desdoblando los sentidos” (Seguin, 2009: 194), pero es una muerte que es vida puesto que subsiste en imagen, aunque sólo pueda ser percibida mediante el tacto, como en ese momento culminante en que Harry Caine toca la pantalla del televisor “recordando” en tanto que “vivido/visto” ese último beso que dio a la amada antes de morir fatalmente. Y es que si el cine es el terrritorio del doble, la fotografía propicia ese continuo desdoblarse de todos los elementos puestos en liza por el director y coadyuva a su transformación mediante el ojo travestido en cámara: de lo uno en lo otro, de lo fijo en lo móvil, de lo masculino en lo femenino, del tiempo en el espacio, etc., pero todo en su caso con su correspondiente viceversa o “tanto monta”; es ni más ni menos que el privilegio (o la tortura) de ser un “ser doble” asumiendo los problemas de identidad sexual que ello comporta. 3. De la fotografía al molde vivo… calcinado Pero, para que Los abrazos rotos, sea fusión de fusiones, y sobre todo reflexión sobre el tiempo momificado, sobre la muerte, hace falta que el azar se ficcionalice doblemente, es decir, que no sea fruto de un azar real como en la foto –fijación muerta al fin y al cabo– sino que esa misma realidad se torne cine –movimiento, simulacro de vida– como consecuencia igualmente de la intervención del azar en su discurrir como doble de la vida representada. Y ahí es donde interviene el recurso a la secuencia de Viaggio in Italia (Te querré siempre, 1953) de Roberto Rossellini, respecto de la cual sabemos fue fruto del azar, pues Rossellini no tenía previsto, según cuentan las fuentes (Guarner 1972; Rossellini 2005; Quintana 1995; Hovald 1962), que en el momento de la filmación se estuviera sacando un molde de la pareja de amantes calcinados por la lava del Vesubio, por eso la elección de Almodóvar es distinta por partida doble a las citas textuales de otras películas realizadas anteriormente (como en la relación All about Eve-Todo sobre mi madre o Ensayo de un crimen-Carne trémula), ya que tiene en cuenta incluso –lo que es raro– las condiciones originales de rodaje del documento fílmico original (incluída su faceta estrictamente documental) aparte, claro está, las referencias, en este caso efectivas y profundas, al momento culminante de la trama argumental de la “película-marco” (Bowie, 2005) con la cual establece una complicidad Javier Herrera, Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini 72 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 manifiesta y coherente con el planteamiento del arranque fotográfico –momificación del tiempo– y que lleva a la película, en el fondo, a ser una reflexión sobre la muerte, sobre la imposibilidad del arte –en este caso la fotografía y el cine–de expresar la verdad de la vida. Lo primero que destaca Almodóvar es su condición de película-faro, es decir, iluminadora, incluso para la “nouvelle vague”, por su transparencia, por estar rodada en exteriores y con pocos artificios (Ciment-Rouyer, 2009: 11), pero, sobre todo, por su planteamiento nada apriorístico acerca de la verdad en el cine en relación con la realidad pues en ella se desarrolla la idea de que el cine “no puede partir de una verdad anterior, preescrita en el guión, sino de una verdad revelada” (Quintana, 1997: 161) y la realidad es “vista como un mundo objetivo, preexistente que actúa en la conciencia de los personajes” (ibid., 162), y el mundo exterior “existe de una forma independiente a la ficción, pero puede afectar profundamente al interior de unos personajes ficticios sumidos en una profunda crisis existencial” (ibid.). En efecto, la secuencia escogida, cuando la pareja formada por Katherine y Alex (Ingrid Bergman y George Sanders) visita las ruinas de Pompeya, es paradigmática de esa iluminación que proyecta sobre el resto del film de Rossellini y sobre el de Almodóvar, pues en éste forma parte como un personaje más de la trama y además está colocada, no al principio como en los casos antes citados, en el quicio, en el eje argumental de su película: en el recuerdo más doloroso de Mateo Blanco, el de la felicidad que precede a la tragedia y que inmortaliza en una autofoto como si presintiera que ese momento no volvería más. En ese instante de vida, contemplando la película en un pase televisivo, Lena, al ver la turbación de Katherine-Ingrid Bergman tras ver ella a su vez los cuerpos calcinados de los amantes, se identifica con ella y siente lo mismo que ella: le gustaría morir así y ser “modelada” como esa pareja pompeyana para la eternidad, pero intuye que ese no será su caso, que tendrá que conformarse con la inmortalidad que le proporcionan las sombras en la pantalla o las imágenes grabadas por el sol en el papel fotográfico. En torno a esta identificación Lena-Katherine y el abrazo eternizado, Almodóvar teje una sutil urdimbre de otras identificaciones que es lo que le otorga a Los abrazos rotos una especial significación dentro de la estética almodovariana y Javier Herrera, Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini 73 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 sus planteamientos metacinematográficos, muy alejados ya por fortuna de “esa ligereza con la que el realizador recoge restos de una tradición audiovisual cualquiera y los coloca unos junto a otros, despreocupándose a continuación de los nexos que los unen” (Sánchez Biosca, 1995: 61). Así, por ejemplo, la profunda relación metafórica que se establece entre Pompeya y Lanzarote debido a su común carácter volcánico y que tanto en un caso como en otro condicionan “geológicamente” a las parejas implicadas, puros volcanes a punto de estallar –los Joyce por su propia abulia existencial y Lena-Mateo por la persecución a que les somete Ernesto Martel. Pero junto a la geología hay también una “geografía”, unas islas a las que se viaja, so pretexto de un turismo ficticio, para huir en ambos casos y desembocar en un descubrimiento personal que consolida milagrosamente la relación o la destruye: si en un caso se viaja al pasado y ese pasado se muestra inquieta y atrozmente benéfico, en el otro se viaja fatalmente hacia el olvido que unas fotografías (más que abrazos) rotas no pueden rescatar de un tiempo que Mateo –ya Harry Caine– quiere dejar para siempre encerradas en ese cajón cuya cerradura sólo podrá ser abierta por su hijo no declarado, su lazarillo. Es por eso que no tiene nada de extraño que, como el mismo Almodóvar reconoció, uno de los protagonistas de Los abrazos rotos sea “la propia construcción del relato” (Heredero-Reviriego, 2009: 7) pues se tiene la impresión de que esta vez sí que hay un arquitecto que ensambla mejor que antes todos los elementos heterogéneos puestos en liza y que el puzzle o la coctelera están manejados con brío y sentido del ritmo. Y ello se debe en mi opinión a que el “faro” cumple una doble función: iluminadora por un lado y falocrática por otro, pudiéndose decir respecto a lo primero que “una ficción del pasado irrumpe en el interior de una ficción del presente, a la que trata de legitimar culturalmente y a la que sirve como espejo. La ficción se mira en la ficción. El cine se mira en el cine” (Heredero, 2009: 47) y respecto a lo segundo que la parte masculina de la mirada travestida (al menos en esta película) sale triunfante debido a que por lo menos una de sus manifestaciones, los papeles- personajes masculinos (salvo algún desliz) mantienen un cierto equilibrio con los papeles-personajes femeninos, con lo que la transgresión implícita en su mirada está más amortiguada que nunca; lo que equivale a decir en su caso que Almodóvar en la medida que madura retorna al clasicismo y se reconoce entre Javier Herrera, Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini 74 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 sus maestros: así Rossellini no podía ser menos que Visconti, Fellini y Antonioni; al menos con él ha descubierto el milagro de que el cine no tiene nada que ver con la realidad sino que es pura y simplemente revelación del fluir de la vida, y como tal también de la muerte, a la que ya se atreve a mirar directamente a la cara y hasta coquetear con ella. Referencias bibliográficas ALARCON, Tonio L., (2006). “Pedro Almodóvar: cine provocación”. Dirigido por…, nº 355, pp. 40-59. ALMODOVAR, Pedro. (2006). Almodovar Exhibition. Paris: Cinemathéque Française; Madrid: El Deseo, 2006. Fascículo VII. La vie spectacle. BARTHES, Roland, (1982). La cámara lúcida. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. BREMARD, Benedicte, (2003). Le cinéma de Pedro Almodóvar: tissages et métissages. Paris: Difussion ANRT. CIMENT, Michel et Philippe Rouyer, (2009) “Etreintes brisées. Mirage de la vie”. Positif, nº 579, pp. 9-13 D’LUGO, Marvin, (2005). “Genealogía de las “sórdidas comedias Neosurrealistas almodovarianas”. En: Zurian, Fran y Carmen Vázquez Varela, (eds.). Almodóvar: el cine como pasión. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, pp. 81-91. FERNANDEZ-SANTOS, Elsa, (2009). “Historia de un abrazo”. El Pais Semanal, 8 marzo, pp. 54-58. GENETTE, Gérard, (1989). Palimpsestos. La literatura en segundo grado. Madrid: Taurus. GRENIER, Pascal, (2010). “Etreintes brisées. Je me fais mon cinema”. Séquences, nº 264, janvier-février, pp. 42-43. GUARNER, José Luis (1972). Roberto Rossellini. Madrid: Fundamentos. HEREDERO, Carlos F. y Carlos Reviriego, (2009) “Entrevista Pedro Almodóvar. El cine protector”. Cahiers du Cinéma España, nº 21, pp. 6-13. HERRERA, Javier, (2012). “El cine dentro del cine en la obra de Pedro Almodóvar: pasión cinéfila y tradición barroca”. En: MATZ, Maria and Carole Salmon (ed.), How the Films of Pedro Almodovar Draw Upon and Influence Spanish Society: Bilingual Essays on His Cinema. New York: Mellen Press, pp. 67-85. HOVALD, Patrice, (1962). El neorrealismo y sus creadores. Madrid: Rialp. J.-L.L., (2009). Almodovar et la cinéphile: du décalquage au palimpseste. http://www.cineclubdecaen.com/realisat/almodovar/. Consultado 10.2.2011 KINDER, Marsha, (2010). “Restoring Broken Embraces. On cinema’s resilience, intertextuality, and father-son relations in “Almodovar 8”. Film Quaterly, vol. 63, nº 3, pp. 28-34. LAW, Clementine, (2010). La intertextualidad en el cine de Pedro Almodóvar. [Trabajo de Licenciatura] Clermont-Ferrand: Université Blaise Pascal. Javier Herrera, Tiempo momificado y coqueteo con la muerte en Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar. A propósito de la cita de Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rossellini 75 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 62-75 MAURER QUEIPO, Isabel, (2008). “La estética de lo híbrido en Hable con ella de Pedro Almodóvar”. En: FEENSTRA, Pietsie y Hub. Hermans (eds), Miradas sobre pasado y presente en el cine español (1990-2005). Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi. METZ, Christian, (1998). Filme(s) en el film. El intexto fímico. Valencia: Ediciones Episteme. PEREZ BOWIE, José Antonio, (2005). “El cine en, desde y sobre el cine: metaficción, reflexividad e intertextualidad en la pantalla”. Anthropos, nº 208, pp. 122-137. POYATO, Pedro, (2007). Todo sobre mi madre. Valencia: Nau Llibres; Barcelona: Octaedro. SARDÁ, Juan, (2009). [El regreso de Almodóvar. Entrevista]. El Cultural, 13 marzo, pp. 44-47. QUINTANA, Angel, (1995). Roberto Rossellini. Madrid: Cátedra. QUINTANA, Angel, (1997). El cine italiano, 1942-1961. Del neorrealismo a la modernidad. Barcelona: Paidós. ROSSELLINI, Roberto (2005). Roberto Rossellini. La herencia de un maestro. Valencia: IVAC. La Filmoteca; Barcelona: Filmoteca de Catalunya; Madrid: Filmoteca Española. SANCHEZ-BIOSCA, Vicente, (1995). Una cultura de la fragmentación: pastiche, relato y cuerpo en el cine y la televisión. Valencia: Filmoteca Generalitat Valenciana. SEGUIN, Jean-Claude, (2009). Pedro Almodóvar o la deriva de los cuerpos. Murcia: Tres Fronteras Ediciones. STRAUSS, Frederic, (1999). “A coeur ouvert. Entretien avec Pedro Almodovar”. Cahiers du Cinéma, nº 535, pp. 36-40. YARZA, Alejandro (1999). “Estudios cinematográficos. «La herida al aire : travestismo y ansiedad cultural en el cine de Pedro Almodóvar”. En: DEL PINO, José María, Francisco La Rubia Prado (eds.), El hispanismo en los Estados Unidos. Discursos críticos-Prácticas textuales. Madrid: Visor. 76 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA GÓMEZ GÓMEZ, A.: Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar Recibido: 3/09/2012 – Aceptado: 21/09/2012 . ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) ENTRE EL COLLAGE Y EL BRICOLAJE. UNA CIERTA MIRADA HACIA EL DESPRECIO DE GODARD EN LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS DE ALMODÓVAR BETWEEN COLLAGE AND BRICOLAGE. A CERTAIN LOOK TO THE CONTEMPT OF GODARD IN BROKEN EMBRACES OF ALMODÓVAR Agustín Gómez Gómez Universidad de Málaga aggomez@uma.es Resumen: En Los abrazos rotos, Almodóvar construye un relato a partir de otros relatos. Lo hará de dos formas. Por u n a p a r t e m u e s t r a - l o q u e denominamos collage- un conjunto d e o b r a s p i c t ó r i c a s y cinematográficas principalmente. Por otra construye unas relaciones más ocultas, menos visibles, que englobamos dentro de la definición de bricolage de Levi-Strauss. Esta última forma nos conduce a E l d e s p r e c i o (Le mépris, 1963) de Godard, que es la que utiliza para narrar la relación entre Martel y Lena. Abstract: Almodóvar constructs a story from other stories in Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces). He will do it in two ways. On the one hand, he develops a evident visualization, what we call “collage”, which brings into play mainly pictorial and cinematographic works. On the other hand, he builds a more hidden visualization, that we include within the definition of “bricolage” of Levi- Strauss. This latter form leads us to Godar’s C o n t e m p t (Le mépris, 1963), which is that he uses to narrate the relationship between Martel and Lena. Palabras clave: Almodóvar; collage; bricolaje; posmodernidad; Godard; Le mépris. Key words: Almodóvar; collage; bricolage; postmodernism; Godard; Le mépris. Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 77 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 El actual Almodóvar es un director que navega por el rumbo que la posmodernidad ha venido construyendo desde los años 90. Del cine visceral marcado por el fin del franquismo que representaron sus primeras películas, ha pasado a otro marcado por el fin de los grandes relatos, a los que, por cierto, tiene tanto aprecio y debe tanto. Sin querer entrar en los diferentes análisis que sobre la periodización de su obra se han realizado, sí queremos incidir en su inmersión en un cine que podríamos englobar, en muchos aspectos, dentro de una tendencia posmoderna tanto en lo formal como en lo temático: fragmentación del relato, inserción de relatos dentro de la narrativa, duplicidad de textos, simultaneidad de relatos, transparencia y opacidad, intertextualidad y despliegue de citas y alusiones a otras manifestaciones artísticas, puestas en abismo, reflexividad cinematográfica, etc. Los abrazos rotos representa dentro de su producción cinematográfica uno de los mejores ejemplos de esta forma de mostrarse posmoderno. La referencia a sí mismo, aunque la habíamos visto en otras películas, se hace más evidente a través de Chicas y maletas con Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, y crea todavía un juego de derivación del relato a través de la Concejala antropófaga, de manera que aun siendo independientes, el corto le permite lo que no puede, o no se permite, contar en el largo, manierismo que no tenía parangón en su filmografía. Igualmente posmoderna es la construcción en collage. Las incesantes citas intertextuales es algo que caracteriza a las obras que se engloban dentro de estas coordenadas formales y estéticas. Almodóvar en esto es un maestro. De una u otra manera todas sus obras están adobadas por esta forma de organizar el relato. Aquí nos vamos a detener en dos de los niveles en los que estructura Los abrazos rotos, uno que se hace explícito a través de citas que funciona como un collage, y otro implícito, de los que nos detendremos en las referencias a L e mépris (El desprecio, 1963) de Godard, que utilizará para la construcción de la relación entre Martel y Lena, que englobamos dentro del bricolage, según la terminología de Claude Levi-Strauss. Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 78 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 1. El collage Recordemos que el collage es una técnica que consiste en construir una obra a partir de fragmentos preexistentes de otras obras, no necesariamente artísticas ni del mismo género, que integrados producen otra obra original. Esa reutilización de materiales de toda índole se hacen visibles y no imponen una jerarquía entre sí, pues interesa sobre todo evidenciar una multiplicidad de voces (Grupo µ, 1978). Esta polifonía en la utilización de los materiales ha tenido como principal valedor a la pintura, aunque no ha sido la única. En las artes audiovisuales el comportamiento del collage es diferente por razones obvias. En el estricto sentido del término, un collage audiovisual sólo lo encontraríamos en algunas formas de experimentación, como las de Nam June Paik en las que las pantallas de televisión son un elemento más en la instalación; o desde otro punto de vista en prácticas de found footage en las que la apropiación de diferentes materiales aportan un sentido de collage. Sin embargo, también se alude al termino collage cinematográfico para referirse a un tipo de obra en la que se dan cita voces o imágenes de diferente procedencia como forma narrativa. Entre otras cosas esto supone una diálogo con esos fragmentos o cuanto menos una conexión paradigmática con los mismos. Desde estas posiciones se ha llegado al collage visual, que en lo cinematográfico es una forma de aunar singularidades al servicio de la unidad, incluso, llegando más lejos como encontramos en muchas ocasiones en Godard, sería una manera de confrontar una miscelánea de pensamientos, citas, reflexiones y obras de todo tipo (Font, 2008). Jacques Aumont añade sobre el collage que no pretende capturar un momento sino varios, y esos instantes múltiples se concentran en el interior de una misma y única imagen, lo que además implica un proceso netamente intelectual, que deja a la obra resultante como “aplastada por la metáfora” (Aumont, 1997: 71-72). La idea de la metáfora puede ser muy acertada, pues el espectador reconoce aquello externo en el interior del relato y le conduce inexorablemente a construir una relación de analogía o semejanza. La filmografía de Almodóvar está repleta del encuentro de otras obras. Pero él las toma y las (re)construye. Esto nos lleva a un modo de intertextualidad cuya recurrencia produce un modo de mosaico de citas que lo convierten en un collage visual. Insistimos que la idea de hacerlo presente, enunciarlo con todo Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 79 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 lujo de detalles, es lo que lo torna en collage. Este sería un primer nivel en el que trabaja. Almodóvar proclama de manera evidente las referencias de los directores y obras sobre los que se sustenta la suya. En Los abrazos rotos recurre de forma explícita a un encuentro de imágenes heterogéneas. En la casa de Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) se dan cita obras de Andy Warhol, Julio Romero de Torres, Henri Matisse, Juan de Espinosa, Robert Motherwell, y en otros espacios encontramos a Francesco Clemente o Enzo Mari entre otros. La explicación se encuentra oculta en el obituario que aparece en el periódico en el que se resalta de él su papel como coleccionista de arte contemporáneo, además de Patrono del Museo Reina Sofía y de la Fundación Juan March [foto 1]. En algunos casos las obras están ampliadas [foto2], como el bodegón de Espinosa, Manzanas, cuyo tamaño real es de 21 x 36 cm, que preside el comedor de su casa, mientras que otras permanecen casi ocultas como la obra Mujer con pistola (1925) de Julio Romero de Torres que únicamente se ve en un breve instante y de forma fragmentada, o el Desnudo azul. Recuerdo de Biskraj (1906) de Henri Matisse que se encuentra bajo unas escaleras [foto 3]. Tanto aquellas que llenan la pantalla como las que sólo asoman constituyen un complejo heterogéneo de presencias al servicio de la unidad que construyen. Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 80 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 Estas citas intertextuales, que corren en paralelo con la construcción de los personajes, son piezas del collage pictórico que se suma al collage cinematográfico. La abundancia de referencias hace que la película se espese en un juego barroco en el que el espectador atrapa sin dificultad las obras expuestas, y las más “ocultas” quedan para una segunda lectura, que suele redundar en la primera. El ejemplo de Mujer con pistola de Romero de Torres es significativo [fotos 4 y 5]. En una primera visualización apenas si se percibe. Hay que recurrir a procedimientos de parar la imagen para poder comprobar qué es lo que hay en esa pared (que además queda parcialmente oculto por una columna), y cuando lo descubrimos observamos que simplemente refuerza las muchas pistolas y cuchillos que hemos visto en otros cuadros, ahora sí, claramente en otras estancias de la casa de Martel. Aunque también se podría recurrir a una dialéctica pintura-cine, la primera como forma sofisticada propia del mundo culto de Enrique Martel, y el cine como arte de una cultura popular que representa Mateo/Harry (Lluís Homar). Formalmente pertenecen a un mismo discurso de marcas enunciativas en forma de collage que deviene en Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 81 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 estética posmoderna. Es decir, no son solo marcas cargadas de significación, sino que además son una forma de materializar la narración. Almodóvar recurre a la cita de obras, que guardan una relación directa con el desarrollo del film que vemos, mientras visualmente configura simple y llanamente un mosaico. Significativo es el momento en el que Harry Caine y Diego (Tamar Novas) se disponen a ver una película. El primero le dice que quiere ver Ascensor para el cadalso (1957) de Louis Malle. Mientras busca la película en una estantería va citando algunas obras y directores que encuentra entre su videoteca: - Busca Ascensor para el cadalso de Louis Malle –le dice Harry Caine. - Fritz Lang, Jules Dassin, Nicolas Ray –va recitando Diego. - Busca en la parte de arriba. - Fanny y Alexander, Fellini Ocho y medio, Obsesión, Ascensor para el cadalso. Aquí la tengo. Yo no la he visto. La referencia a cinco directores, más dos películas de Douglas Sirk e Ingmar Bergman no deja de ser una de las formas habituales de Pedro Almodóvar de dar a conocer algunas de las obras a las que muestra dependencia. En todos estos casos las películas son citadas de manera explícita, lo que hace que su visualización contribuya en la edificación de un collage cinematográfico. Además, en la construcción de Los abrazos rotos se ven paralelismos con esos filmes citados. Baste recordar que en la película de Malle hay un triángulo amoroso igual que en Los abrazos rotos; en Obsesión (1954) de Douglas Sirk uno de los personajes se queda ciego (Jane Wyman) igual que Harry Caine en Los abrazos rotos; en Ocho y medio (1963) vemos a un director en el proceso de construcción de una película; y en Fanny y Alexander (1982) de Ingmar Bergman se ponen en juego las pasiones humanas con un conjunto de relaciones intertextuales entre cine, pintura, teatro y literatura muy del gusto almodovariano. Además, en el caso de Bergman, nos lleva a otra de las películas del sueco, concretamente a Persona (1966) con la que comparte elementos formales evidentes, como el comienzo y final con el niño que palpa la pantalla, pero también con el hecho de la pérdida, en esta caso voluntaria, de la voz (frente a la vista de Mateo en Los abrazos rotos) de la actriz Elisabet Vogler, de duplicidades presentes en ambas (Elisabet y Alma terminan fusionándose igual que Mateo Blanco y Harry Caine) o las confesiones (Alma a Elisabet, Judit a Harry). Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 82 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 En otro momento se citará Peeping Tom (1960) de Michael Powell y veremos un fragmento de Viaggio in Italia (1954) de Roberto Rossellini. Con todas las diferencias y distancias entre las dos películas, Almodóvar toma de la de Rossellini la descomposición de una pareja, lo que ocurre entre Lena (Penélope Cruz) y Enrique Martel; mientras que en la de Powell hay un mirón afectado por una patología construida a partir de la figura paterna, lo mismo que en la de Almodóvar en el hijo de Martel, el personaje de Ray X (Rubén Ochandiano) o una mujer ciega que posee una extraordinaria sensibilidad que nos aproxima al personaje de Harry Caine. Hay otras alusiones al collage de diferente manera, por ejemplo a través de las fotos rotas, que aunque se hayan borrado con su fragmentación el contenido, su persistencia en pequeños trozos componen un índex de lo que contenían, ahora solo visible como una sinfonía de colores en forma de collage. También los títulos de crédito se configuran como un collage audiovisual. Éstos están realizados con las imágenes de la cámara de video de control para ver la tomas que se ruedan y que se suelen descartar, pero Almodóvar las incorpora como si de un autoapropiacionismo se tratara. Es una suma de material que se incorpora al de Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios a través de Chicas y maletas. Los abrazos rotos queda por tanto construido como un collage que facilita el concurso de formas diferentes, que genera un encuentro entre elementos diversos con los que se relaciona y establece una relación. Con este proceder en collage consigue fundamentalmente tres cosas: construye una determinada poética visual, es una forma de materializar la narración y a través de las citas deja abierto un campo especulativo de relaciones. No hay que olvidar que se trata del encuentro con singularidades fuertes en las que no se penetra más que de forma epidérmica, lo justo para considerarlas a partir de su cita, de su visualización dentro del collage. Almodóvar no reflexiona sobre la pintura Barroca, ni sobre la obra de Andy Warhol, menos aún sobre la de Julio Romero de Torres, ni siquiera sobre la de Robert Motherwell, sino que la desnaturaliza porque al integrarlas en la poética visual que construye queda fuera la reflexión sobre el material que maneja. Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 83 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 2. El bricolage Además de la forma de collage, Almodóvar actúa como un bricoleur que está al acecho de mensajes pretransmitidos que colecciona, según definición de Levi- Strauss para este concepto (1964: 40). Como el bricoleur trabaja de forma retrospectiva, volviéndose hacia un conjunto ya constituido de obras heteróclitas a las que interrogará para saber qué le puede aportar cada una de ellas (Levi-Strauss, 1964: 38). El resultado será, o debe ser, una obra que vagamente recuerda a la “colección de residuos” empleados, o si se prefiere, opera a fuerza de analogía y paralelos. Por señalar una diferencia entre el collage y el bricolaje, en el primero la materia prima empleada queda a la vista, es signo de cuya procedencia somos partícipes para construir una forma nueva, mientras que el bricolaje queda oculta –“escombros indefinibles” los llamará Levi-Strauss–, son parte de un relato anterior aprovechable para “participar útilmente en la formación de un ser de una nueva clase” (Levi-Strauss, 1964: 41), en este caso en una obra nueva con pleno sentido propio. En Los abrazos rotos, y esto es extensible a buena parte de su filmografía, Almodóvar muestra varios de los fragmentos empleados para que ofrezca una homología definible. Como en el ejemplo del caleidoscopio que utiliza Levi- Straus en el que los trozos de cristal mantienen la talla, vivacidad del color y transparencia, en el director manchego reconocemos, él mismo se adelanta a proclamar, que parte de sus “trozos” provienen de Peeping Tom o de Te querré siempre, como antes hemos señalado. No se trata, siguiendo la terminología de Genette, de una alusión, sino de una cita clara, directa e inequívoca. Pero al mismo tiempo realiza otras más subterráneas. Algunas se han señalado en alguna ocasión, como Blow-Up (1966) de Michelangelo Antonioni o con Alfred Hichcock, pero otras han pasado más desapercibidas, como con El desprecio (Le mépris) de Godard con la que guarda una estrecha relación y con la que establece un verdadero bricolaje para la parte del relato que concierne a la relación entre Martel y Lena. Godard parte de Moravia y llega a Homero (igual que Moravia)1 y Rossellini principalmente. La forma de “ensamblar” las piezas es completamente disímil, con resultados desiguales. Las diferencias entre 1 Moravia mantiene en toda la novela una relación especular con La Odisea de Homero, pero además convoca a La divina comedia de Dante, a Petrarca, el Ulises de Joyce y a Freud. Hay, por tanto, también una construcción intertextual en la obra literaria. Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 84 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 Godard y Almodóvar son enormes, son universos cinematográficos que se encuentran en las antípodas, aunque el manchego haya homenajeado en alguna ocasión a Godard, como con el nombre de Goded que tiene el personaje del director de cine en La mala educación en clara alusión al franco-suizo. El desprecio es una película que trata sobre el cine y en la que asistimos a la destrucción de una pareja (igual que en Los abrazos rotos). Paul (Michel Piccoli) es un guionista y Camille (Brigitte Bardot) una mecanógrafa con la que está felizmente casado (las profesiones también son coincidentes). A petición de un productor norteamericano, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance), Paul acepta escribir algunas escenas en el guión de La Odisea que dirige Fritz Lang. De esta manera se establece una relación por la necesidad del guionista de dinero y del productor de hacer una película que sea más comercial. La aceptación para tomar una copa en su lujosa villa rodeada de obras de arte (de nuevo coinciden) provoca un primer desencuentro entre Paul y Camille. La invitación y posterior viaje a la isla de Capri mientras se rueda la película, les separará más. Primero por las dudas que van surgiendo en ella con su relación, al tiempo que él se muestra celoso con lo que ella hace. Allí todo acentuará la separación. Finalmente, ella aprovecha un viaje de Prokosch a Roma para marcharse. En el viaje, sufrirán un accidente y ambos morirán. Al comienzo se señala con una voz over que la película es la adaptación de la novela homónima (1954) de Alberto Moravia. Un crítico de cine, Riccardo Molteri, casado con una mecanógrafa, Emilia, es contratado para hacer el guión de La odisea para Battista, un productor de Holywood, junto al director alemán Rheingold. Para él este nuevo trabajo supone un cierto alivio en su maltrecha economía, pero las inseguridades y celos respecto a todo lo que ella hace y dice, le conducirán a un sin fin de obsesiones que terminará con un cambio de actitud de Emilia, y pasará del amor al desprecio. Para escribir el guión se van a la isla de Capri, ella continuará en su proceso de desprecio hacia su marido, mientras el productor comienza a pretenderla. Finalmente, Battista y Emilia se marchan y Riccardo se queda solo en la Grotta Rossa. Más tarde recibirá un telegrama del productor en la que le anuncia que han tenido un accidente y que Emilia está grave, aunque realmente ya ha muerto. Después del funeral vende el apartamento y regresa a Capri. Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 85 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 Godard hace una película a partir del libro de Moravia, pero introduce algunas lógicas diferencias. Una de ellas es el final, en el que productor y esposa del guionista mueren mientras que en Moravia sólo es ella la que muere (igual que en Los abrazos rotos). Otra no menos importante es la conversión del director alemán, que en Moravia es un personaje de ficción y en Godard es Fritz Lang que hace de sí mismo. Pero uno de los aspectos más relevantes, es que en ambas se plantea una reflexión sobre el amor conyugal a partir de la Odisea. Así, tanto Moravia como Godard reflexionan sobre Ulises y Penélope como una pareja que no se quieren, que ella le desprecia, y él acepta con agrado la Guerra de Troya para marcharse y posteriormente demorar todo lo que puede su regreso. Cada uno de ellos representa dos formas de carácter, pero sobre todo ella representa la barbarie y él la civilización, –“en la Odisea, Penélope representa a la barbarie, y Ulises representa a la civilización… (Moravia, 2010: 204)”, llega a decir Rheingold–, ella es el instinto –“Penélope no es una mujer civilizada, es una mujer tradicional; no comprende la razón, sólo comprende el instinto, la sangre, el orgullo…” (Moravia, 2010: 204), insiste el director alemán por boca de Moravia–, y Ulises es el prototipo de héroe civilizado y esto quiere decir que no tiene prejuicios (Higueras, 2011: 5). En El desprecio de Godard esto mismo se materializa en un diálogo entre Paul y Camille, cuando él le dice que defiende la teoría de Prokosch, según la cual “la Odisea es la historia de un hombre que ama a su mujer y ella no le corresponde”. Godard introduce en la reflexión de Moravia sobre la apatía del matrimonio, la película de Roberto Rossellini Viaggio in Italia (1953). El director italiano construyó un relato en el que vemos la descomposición de una pareja de ingleses que han viajado a Nápoles. La indiferencia, el desgaste en la relación y los celos, provocarán una ruptura que sólo al final tendrá un final feliz. El mismo extrañamiento que padecen los ingleses en Nápoles, lo padecerán los franceses en Roma y Capri (García, 2009), lo que contribuirá en ese desapasionamiento que se convierte en distancia y termina en desprecio. Para que quede más reforzada la deuda con Rossellini, Godard introduce en su película la del italiano. En el apartamento de Roma, Paul y Camille discuten sobre qué hacer. Prokosch les ha invitado a ver una película (no se dice cuál es). Ante la negativa indolente de Camille, Paul le dice “pero yo quiero ver la Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 86 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 película, me dará ideas”. Camille le contesta: “Te iría mejor si tomaras las ideas de tu cabeza en vez de robarlas a los demás”. Posteriormente, ya en el cine, vemos que la película que se p r o y e c t a e s Viaggio in Italia [foto 6]. Pero Godard está lejos de robar ideas, m á s b i e n d e considerarlas, y en el caso que nos ocupa no deja de ser otra reflexión sobre el cine dentro del cine con el planteamiento teórico que sobre el cine tenía Rossellini enlazado con el de André Bazin, al que se cita al comienzo. Esto se pone de manifiesto a través de Fritz Lang dentro de la sala en la que se proyecta Viaggio in Italia, donde tiene lugar un diálogo entre el director alemán y Paul, pero que podrían ser las palabras del italiano (García, 2009: 78): -El mundo de Homero es un mundo real –señala Lang. Y el poeta pertenece a la civilización, que ha crecido en armonía, no en oposición a la naturaleza. Y la belleza de La Odisea reside precisamente en esta creencia en la realidad, tal cual es. -Por lo tanto, en la realidad como se presenta objetivamente –replica Paul. -Exactamente, y en una forma que no puede ser descompuesta, y es la que es. Tómala o déjala –concluye Lang. Godard, y en esto coincide Almodóvar, se aproxima a lo que Harold Bloom denominó en La ansiedad de la influencia la tésera: cuando un autor utiliza los mismos elementos o símbolos que su precursor pero cambiando el significado dado. En la literatura un poeta antitéticamente “completa” a su precursor al leer el poema-padre conservando sus términos, pero logrando otro significado, como si el precursor no hubiera ido suficientemente lejos (Bloom, 2009:23). En el caso de Godard y Almodóvar diríamos que se le da un giro en relación con unas preocupaciones conceptuales diferentes, aunque manteniendo claramente la línea trazada por el padre (Rossellini) al que no se termina de matar porque ayuda más que estorba. Para ver cómo articula Almodóvar la herencia de sus predecesores lo primero es comparar el argumento de El desprecio y Los abrazos rotos, en donde encontraremos algunas similitudes evidentes. Lena, la secretaria de un Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 87 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 importante hombre de negocios, tiene un padre enfermo. Ante la necesidad de ayuda, recurre a su jefe que está enamorado de ella. Las atenciones que éste le brinda harán que termine viviendo con él. Martel, el hombre de negocios, tiene un hijo de un matrimonio anterior. Éste comienza a realizar grabaciones con su cámara (de aquí surge otra dirección del relato relacionada con Peeping Tom de Michael Power). Ella irá a hacer una prueba para una película que dirige Mateo Blanco. Desde el primer momento surge una atracción entre ellos. Martel, a regañadientes, decide producir la película y todo ello conducirá a un amour fou entre Lena y Mateo. La relación entre Martel y Lena quedará dominada por el desprecio de ella y el sentimiento de traición, celos y abuso de poder por él. Almodóvar recurre a dos tiempos. Un presente en el 2008 en el que el director está ciego y se dedica a escribir guiones ayudado de su antigua directora de producción, Judit García (Blanca Portillo) y de Diego (Tamar Novas), el hijo de ésta. Y un tiempo pretérito situado en Madrid que arranca en 1992 y termina en un accidente de coche en la isla de Lanzarote en el que Mateo perdió la vista y Lena murió. Entre esos dos tiempos el director de cine consigue que Martel le produzca su película, su mujer la interprete y surja una relación apasionada entre director y actriz. Esta es la parte del desprecio y la que guarda relación con la obra de Godard. Los paralelismos son evidentes, aunque Almodóvar los redirecciona hacia lugares que se alejan del planteamiento de Godard, quien está ligado al texto de Moravia. En ambas películas tenemos un triángulo formado por secretaria, guionista y productor. Un cuarto personaje común sería Fritz Lang, que en el caso de Almodóvar lo fusiona con el personaje del guionista, es decir, Mateo Blanco como director y Harry Caine como guionista, en un proceso de duplicidad que se extiende por buena parte de la película. La dependencia con El desprecio se encuentran especialmente en la relación entre Lena y Martel, en la descomposición de la pareja. Pero mientras Godard es fiel a Moravia, incluso acentuando la posición de que no hay una clara relación de causa y efecto, prácticamente no sabemos porque Camille pasó del amor al desprecio, en todo caso por el hastío e incomunicación, Almodóvar fiel a su idea de amor loco, introducirá la pasión como motor del desencadenante del desprecio. La pasión de Lena por Mateo y de Martel por Lena se volverá irresoluble y terminará trágicamente. La muerte no será la clausura del filme, sino que Almodóvar dará continuidad donde Godard lo había terminado, y Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 88 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 construirá un relato nuevo: donde la muerte cerraba el relato, él le da continuidad al accidente y añade la ceguera como prolongación. Dicho con la definición de la tésera de Bloom, Almodóvar utiliza elementos y símbolos de Godard pero cambiando el significado que éste les da, y continuando el relato que su precursor había clausurado. Esta forma entra de lleno en esa manera de bricolaje, un modo de interrogarse sobre El desprecio para ver qué le puede aportar, aunque luego vagamente recuerde a los materiales empleados y los encontremos a través de analogías y paralelismos. Almodóvar, que suele dejar “pistas” sobre sus fuentes más subterráneas, introduce a través de Harry Caine un comentario que es aclaratorio. Está pensando en un guión sobre Arthur Miller y el hijo con síndrome de Down que tuvo con la fotógrafa Inge Morath, al que nunca quiso ver. Blanca Portillo que no ve con agrado esta historia, le dice que no cree que la familia de Arthur Miller diese los derechos para esa película, a lo que Harry Caine le responde: “cambiamos los nombres”. Es una declaración, igual que la que hace Paul cuando dice que quiere ir al cine porque la película le dará ideas (recordemos que es Viaggio in Italia, que le sirve a Godard para la construcción de El desprecio), en la que de forma oculta está indicándonos que detrás de su película hay otra, u otras. Otra “señal” que deja Almodóvar es el uso de la peluca. En El desprecio, cuando están en el apartamento, Bardot se pone una peluca morena que oculta su cabello rubio [fotos 7 y 8]. Esto, que no está en el relato de Mora- via, le sirve para esta- blecer una dualidad en el personaje. En Almo- dóvar, en el personaje que interpreta Homar, hay también esa dualidad, pero es Penélope Cruz la que sigue la idea de colocarse una peluca, en este caso de una morena que se pone una peluca rubia. Esto ocurre cuando están haciendo pruebas para el personaje de Chicas y maletas. No deja de ser curioso que en todas las escenas del rodaje Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 89 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 que vemos y cuando la película ya está montada su personaje tiene su pelo moreno natural [foto 9], aunque en el cartel aparezca como rubia y se insista en repetidas ocasiones en probarse pelucas [fotos 10 y 11]. La idea de la peluca rubia carece de sentido dentro del relato de Chicas y maletas, más aún si consideramos que en Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios no tiene cabida. Durante el desarrollo del alejamiento entre Paul y Camille, Godard filma en el apartamento una escena en la que él le recrimina a ella que ha cambiado. Ante la negativa de Camille a aceptar este hecho y su insistencia a que le dé pruebas, él le dice que ya no hacen el amor. Ella entonces se tumba en el sofá y le dice “esta bien, vamos, pero rápido”, en un desinteresado ofrecimiento. A partir de ese momento oímos las voces en off de ambos y ella dice “yo me encontraba en los brazos de Paul sin casi acordarme de lo que había pasado”. Godard toma casi al pie de la letra el texto de Moravia. La conversación va por los mismos derroteros y en un momento Emilia le dice “Si quieres que hagamos el amor, hagámoslo (…) Vamos, si quieres hacerlo, hagámoslo” (Moravia, 2010:45). El acto no se consuma [foto 12]. Riccardo expresa que se “había encontrado entre Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 90 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 los brazos de Emilia casi sin poder recordar cómo había sucedido” (Moravia, 2010:46). Al final, él la contempla como a una prostituta, cercana pero remota “como si no se hallara a pocos pasos de mí, sino en alguna región muy lejana, fuera de la realidad lejos del alcance de mis sentimientos” (Moravia, 2010:47). Godard es fiel a Moravia. En ambos, con el distanciamiento el deseo ha desaparecido o se ha convertido en algo mecánico. Mientras que Godard realiza una reflexión filosófica sobre el amor conyugal a partir de la obra de Moravia, Almodóvar fiel a sí mismo lo hace derivar hacia las pasiones. La indiferencia de Camille y Paul, incluso de Prokosch aunque trate de conquistar a Camille, contrasta con la pasión con la que manifiestan su deseo Martel, Harry o Lena. Almodóvar mantiene el desapasionamiento de Lena y el deseo de Martel, pero lo resuelve de una manera más física. En la única escena de amor que vemos entre Lena y Martel [foto 13], recurre a René Magritte y su cuadro Los amantes (1928) [foto 14] como forma simbólica de alejamiento de la pareja. La tela que les cubre la cabeza es el obstáculo que imposibilita la unión amorosa. En Los abrazos rotos da igual que se amen físicamente porque existe una distancia tal que ese amor es imposible. Además, Lena piensa que después de hacer el amor él ha muerto, lo que lejos de horrorizarla queda presa de un vacío liberatorio, aunque finalmente este fallecimiento no es más que una broma. Una de las ideas motores sobre la que pivota E l desprecio de Moravia y Godard es la asimilación de Emilia/Camille con Penélope y Riccardo/Paul con Ulises. Almodóvar hace la misma analogía, pero la lleva en otra dirección. Recordemos que Lena, que Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 91 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 había sido prostituta, no duda en volver a retomar ese oficio con tal de conseguir dinero para ayudar a su padre enfermo, e incluso Almodóvar parece decirnos que en agradecimiento a las atenciones de Martel finalmente acepta vivir con él. En este sentido es tradicional, una mujer que se mueve por el instinto, lo que Moravia (y Godard) viene a englobar en ese concepto de barbarie. La diferencia es que el director manchego introduce como instinto también al amor y el cine. Ernesto Martel representa a Ulises. Es el hombre civilizado, culto, que no tiene prejuicios. El diálogo que construye Godard entre Paul y Camille, en el que se refieren a la Odisea como la historia de un hombre que ama a su mujer y ella no le corresponde, es la traslación a lo que vemos en Los abrazos rotos. El cine es otro de los motores del desprecio. Mientras que Camille le recrimina a Paul su dedicación al cine y por tanto su abandono de la literatura (Godard sigue a Moravia), Martel le recriminará a Lena su intento de hacer cine. El cine será el motivo de los primeros desencuentros. “Ya lo intentaste [ser actriz] y mira como acabaste” le replica él cuando ella le dice que lo que quiere ser es actriz, refiriéndose a su oscuro pasado vinculado a la prostitución. Almodóvar lleva el desprecio al límite y a la locura, intensidad que es propia del director manchego. Él le maltratará y ella sólo aguantará la situación por su afán de terminar la película. En Godard estos extremos no existen, y en Moravia no de la forma tan acentuada como se construye en Los abrazos rotos. Esta oposición se establece también entre Martel y Blanco. La mansión del primero llena de grandes obras pictóricas contrasta con el collage que vemos en el despacho de Mateo Blanco en su despacho donde se dan cita reproducciones de fotos, cuadros, postales y otros referentes que evocan el mundo del personaje del director. De esta urdimbre visual emana el planteamiento que dibuja el director manchego sobre el cine como un arte más popular que de alta cultura, aunque sus citas sean cultas, y en el que Lena es el personaje que se mueve entre uno y otro mundo, y se transforma cada vez que está en cada uno de ellos aunque su predilección sea el del cine. El final de la película es también una extensión de lo que vemos en El desprecio. Almodóvar adopta respecto a novela y película una posición intermedia. Un accidente de coche hace que ella muera, lo mismo que ocurre en la novela de Moravia, pero con la diferencia de que él quedará ciego. Por el contrario, Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 92 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 mientras que en Moravia él espera en Grotta Rossa el regreso de ella, que se produce de forma fantasmal en una barca, Almodóvar aporta el regreso a partir de la filmación de su muerte por Ray X, y el momento en el que él abraza la pantalla en la que se encuentra ella, y por la escena final en la que vemos montada de nuevo la película Chicas y maletas. Es la magia del cine. Y esta magia es también la que cierra las películas de Godard y Almodóvar. En E l desprecio, cuando Paul se despide de Fritz Lang ,que está rodando la llegada de Ulises a Itaca, le pregunta qué va a hacer, éste le responde: “Terminaré la película, siempre hay que acabar lo que se empieza”. En el caso de Los abrazos rotos, cuando están visualizando el material que no se empleó en el “montaje del productor”, Mateo Blanco/Harry Caine expresa: “Las películas hay que terminarlas, aunque sea a ciegas”. 3. A modo de conclusión Al comienzo de este texto nos hemos referido a Los abrazos rotos como una obra manierista. Quizá convenga terminar de nuevo con este concepto aplicándolo al origen etimológico del termino. Con maniera se hacia referencia a los artistas que pintaban a la manera de. Eran aquellos que tomaban a los grandes artistas como referencia pero que conseguían una verdadera personalidad artística. Este origen se fue perdiendo para referirse a una técnica imitativa y trabajo artístico deliberadamente artificial. Existe un peligro evidente en tomar como referencia a los grandes maestros y perderse en disquisiciones o interpretaciones no convincentes. Almodóvar desde sus orígenes se ha postulado como un director manierista, declaradamente manierista, y ha jugado a la transparencia (collage) y opacidad (bricolaje) al mismo tiempo. Mientras que en declaraciones y promociones manifestaba sus deudas y homenajes, al tiempo que en el propio texto dejaba claras huellas de esas correspondencias, por otra articulaba un relato lleno igualmente de otras deudas pero ahora más difusas u ocultas. Almodóvar recontextaliza aquello que utiliza de otros. Los abrazos rotos está hecha de interrelaciones más o menos implícitas, más o menos explícitas, de ecos y referencias que maneja para ahondar en su propio texto o como argamasa para dar solidez a su construcción. Las formas de collage y bricolage que hemos traído a colación no es más que la Agustín Gómez, Entre el collage y el bricolaje. Una cierta mirada hacia El desprecio de Godard en Los abrazos rotos de Almodóvar 93 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 76-93 materialización de una forma, si se prefiere de una poética visual, que deviene en ensayo manierista, ya testado con éxito en obras anteriores. En Los abrazos rotos Almodóvar despliega unas formas que quiere convertir en una declarada política icónica marca de la “factoría Almodóvar”. Su propuesta es decididamente manierista pero lejos de la frialdad y artificiosidad. Los dos niveles en los que trabaja le permiten encontrar a Rossellini sin fracasar, e igualmente a Godard y tampoco naufragar. Referencias bibliográficas AUMONT, Jacques (1997). El ojo interminable, Barcelona, Paidós (París, 1989). BLOOM, Harold (2009). La ansiedad de la influencia. Una teoría de la poesía, Traducción de Javier Alcoriza y Antonio Lastra. Madrid: Trotta Ediciones. FONT, Josep (2010). “Entre la política de Jaguar y la estética de Bogart. El intersticio del collage godardiano”, DISTURBIS Número 8 Otoño. GARCÍA GÓMEZ, Francisco (2009). “Los dos ingleses y el sur: Te querré siempre, Rossellini”, en Cine, arte y rupturas, Málaga: Fundación Picasso, pp. 31-79. GRUPO µ (1978). “Collage”, Révue d’esthétique. HIGUERAS, Mario (2011). “El desprecio, de Moravia a Godard: la linealidad intervenida”, en http://es.scribd.com/doc/55366604/El-Desprecio-De- Moravia-a-Godard LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude (1964). El Pensamiento Salvaje, México D.F. (París, 1962): Fondo de Cultura Económica. MORAVIA, Alberto (2010). El desprecio, traducción de Enrique Mercadal, Barcelona: Contemporánea. 94 REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA BRACCO, Diane: La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco Recibido: 11/07/2012 – Aceptado: 03/09/2012 ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 LA CONCEJALA ANTROPÓFAGA, PEDRO ALMODÓVAR (2009). SEXO, POLÍTICA Y CANIBALISMO: LA PUESTA EN ESCENA DEL CUERPO GROTESCO LA CONCEJALA ANTROPÓFAGA, PEDRO ALMODÓVAR (2009). SEX, POLITICS AND CANNIBALISM: THE STAGING OF THE GROTESQUE BODY Diane Bracco Universidad de París 8 Resumen: En 2009, durante el rodaje de Los abrazos r o t o s , Pedro Almodóvar dirige un c o r t o m e t r a j e c ó m i c o , La co ncej al a antropófaga, pretexto para un juego de reescritura paródica y emblemático de las conexiones transtextuales que se establecen en toda la producción almodovariana. Este artículo se propone esbozar un análisis del relato fílmico desde la perspectiva grotesca bajtiniana. Se tratará de determinar en qué medida sexo, política y canibalismo se conjugan para forjar una figura grotesca p ro p ic ia a u na c e l e b rac ió n d e l a materialidad del cuerpo, celebración teñida de sátira política. El personaje de la concejala golosa, cocainómana y ninfómana se caracteriza por una tendencia al desbordamiento –físico y verbal– y un exceso de vitalidad sintomáticos de la relación dialógica que ella mantiene con el m u n d o . F i g u r a h u m a n a c o n v i g o r sobrehumano, aparece como un ser híbrido y monstruoso, un organismo excéntrico en el sentido grotesco del término, ansioso de devorar literalmente el mundo. Tal exaltación del cuerpo grotesco se plasma en un monólogo a medio camino entre la confesión íntima y el discurso político, verdadera sátira de la retórica derechista. Abstract: In 2009, during the shooting of L o s abrazos rotos, Pedro Almodóvar directed a c o m i c s h o r t film, L a c o n c e j a l a a n t r o p ó f a g a , in which he indulged in a game of parodical rewriting, emblematic of the transtextual connections that are woven into his entire work. Through this article, we wish to lay the basis for an analysis of the film narrative from the perspective of Bakhtin’s “grotesque”. We will determine how sex, politics and cannibalism combine to forge a grotesque figure conducive to a celebration of the materiality of the body—a celebration tinged with political satire. The greedy town councillor, a cocaine addict as well as a nymphomaniac, is characterised by her tendency to overflow —both physically and verbally— and by her excess of vitality, which are the symptoms of the dialogic relationship she establishes with the world. This human figure endowed with a superhuman vigour seems to be a hybrid, monstrous being—an eccentric body in the grotesque meaning of the word, eager to literally devour the world. Such an exaltation of the grotesque body is made through a monologue which is halfway between intimate confession and political discourse, thus constituting a genuine satire of right-wing rhetoric. Palabras clave: Almodóvar, transtextualidad, grotesco, canibalismo, sátira. Key words: Almodóvar, transtextuality, grotesque, cannibalism, satire. Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 95 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 En 2009, durante el rodaje de Los abrazos rotos, Pedro Almodóvar dirige La concejala antropófaga: este cortometraje de 7’31 se emite en Internet a modo de teaser a fin de promover el estreno de la película protagonizada por Lluis Homar y Penélope Cruz. El espectador de Los abrazos rotos identifica a posteriori la única secuencia que constituye este breve relato fílmico como un fragmento de Chicas y maletas, la obra realizada por el personaje de Mateo Blanco (Lluis Homar) en la diégesis del largometraje. La concejala antropófaga hace eco a otro pasaje de este filme ficticio inserto según un procedimiento de mise en abyme en la penúltima obra de Almodóvar: dicho pasaje se inscribe en el relato de primer nivel de Los abrazos rotos, que narra los desengaños de Mateo para llevar a cabo su proyecto. El montaje de la película es saboteado a petición del productor Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez), celoso de la relación clandestina que su mujer Lena (Penélope Cruz), la actriz que encarna Pina –protagonista de Chicas y maletas–, mantiene con Mateo. Esta estructura narrativa de cajas chinas así como el tema de la dirección generan una reflexión no sólo en torno al acto cinematográfico y al proceso de creación sino también acerca de las redes intertextuales en la producción almodovariana. En efecto, el cortometraje se inserta en un entramado de guiños y es pretexto para un juego de reescritura: una conexión se establece primero con la obra que pretende promover, en particular el fragmento de relato fílmico integrado en Los abrazos rotos. Dicho fragmento plantea el decorado e introduce al personaje de la concejala interpretado por Carmen Machi1, desarrollado en la secuencia que constituye La concejala antropógafa. Además, el filme metadiegético Chicas y maletas, al que pertenecen estos dos pasajes contiguos en su desarrollo dramático, resulta ser un hipertexto de Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1989). Gérard Genette define esta forma transtextual del modo siguiente: 1 Apareció antes en Hable con ella (2002), donde interpretaba una enfermera, colega de uno de los protagonistas masculinos, Benigno. Su papel muy breve ya la vinculaba con la temática de la corporalidad: en el ejercicio de sus funciones, el personaje tenía que cuidar de pacientes en coma, organismos inertes reducidos a sus funciones vitales mínimas. Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 96 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 J’entends par là toute relation unissant un texte B (que j’appellerai hypertexte) à un texte antérieur A (que j’appellerai, bien sûr, hypotexte) sur lequel il se greffe d’une manière qui n’est pas celle du commentaire.2 Penélope Cruz retoma el personaje de Pepa-Carmen Maura, abandonada por su pareja. Vuelve a aparecer el tema de la ruptura amorosa (en ambos relatos, la protagonista busca desesperadamente contactar con su amante Iván, esposo infiel de una mujer psíquicamente desequilibrada), que se declina en distintos motivos: la cama quemada, la maleta y el gazpacho con somníferos que esta mujer al borde de un ataque de nervios le destina al fugitivo (la mixtura es ingerida por Marisa en Mujeres y por Maribel en el cortometraje). Si una primera maleta materializa para Pina la separación y el imposible diálogo amoroso, existe otra que Chon afirma haber encontrado por casualidad en su armario, descubriendo kilos de cocaína al abrirla. A la par que devora golosamente unas magdalenas, cuenta su relación fugaz con un desconocido, amante “virtuoso” pero también peligroso narcotraficante perseguido por la policía, que habría dejado dicha maleta en su casa. El personaje de Chon reactualiza, pues, el de la ingenua Candela en Mujeres, amiga de Pepa, desesperada tras haberse percatado de que su última conquista no era sino un terrorista chiita. Dicho de otro modo, lo que nos propone Almodóvar a través de esta secuencia de Chicas y maletas es una relectura condensada de la trama de la película de 1989. La concejala antropófaga se sitúa a un doble nivel y realza el vínculo que une a ambos creadores, Almodóvar y Mateo Blanco, su alter ego en L o s abrazos rotos. Mateo asume de paso una segunda identidad puesto que escribe guiones bajo el seudónimo de Harry Caine. Por una parte, el espectador se halla ante un cortometraje, una unidad independiente provista de una coherencia propia (con títulos de crédito, un mundo diegético y una progresión dramática) dirigido por el cineasta manchego en una perspectiva promocional. Por otra parte, se trata de una de las secuencias de una película 2 GENETTE, Gérard, Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré, Paris, Seuil, 1982, p. 13. “Entiendo por ello toda relación que une un texto B (que llamaré hipertexto) a un texto anterior A (que llamaré hipotexto) (sic) en el que se inserta de una manera que no es la del comentario.” (traducción española de Celia Fernández Prieto). Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 97 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 ficticia titulada Chicas y maletas, rodada por un director no menos ficticio, personaje diegético de Los abrazos rotos; una secuencia que, no obstante, Almodóvar no incorpora en su película. La fusión de ambos estatutos y el cruce de los mundos diegético y extradiegético se materializan en los títulos de crédito: La concejala antropófaga se presenta como una realización de Mateo Blanco, con guión de Harry “Huracán” Caine, informaciones que remiten a la doble identidad del personaje ficticio de Los abrazos rotos. Pero el cortometraje está relacionado asimismo con la filmografía almodovariana y por consiguiente con un director real ya que se señala al final que “El Guión está inspirado en un personaje anecdótico de Los Abrazos Rotos de Pedro Almodóvar”. A continuación, los títulos de crédito mencionan al equipo técnico de Los abrazos rotos y la compañía productora de Pedro Almodóvar, El Deseo. Esta doble aprensión del relato fílmico así como la descodificación de la referencia intertextual son permitidas por la complicidad lúdica que el cineasta establece con su espectador: éste queda libre de integrar a su vez la ficción como público de un cineasta imaginario, Mateo, o de visionar el último cortometraje que un director de carne y hueso, Almodóvar, dirige para promover su nueva película. Aunque la meta-secuencia de Chicas y maletas incluida en Los abrazos rotos le ofrece a Pina (Lena-Penélope Cruz) un papel de primer plano –es indudablemente la heroína de la obra de Mateo Blanco, al igual que Pepa- Carmen Maura es la de Mujeres–, La concejala antropófaga la excluye desde los primeros segundos, como lo sugiere el título, para enfocarse en Chon, la interlocutora locuaz de Pina en el fragmento que precede cronológicamente esta secuencia. La figura de la concejala se sitúa en las antípodas no sólo de la frágil Candela sino también del modelo hollywoodiense a partir del que la actriz plasma el personaje de Pina: Audrey Hepburn, cuyos peinado, atuendo y expresión maliciosa imita3. Además, sus extravagantes consideraciones políticas y sexuales tienen poco que ver con el amour fou trágico que une a Mateo, Lena y Ernesto: paradójicamente, La concejala antropófaga se 3 El homenaje al cine americano aparece claramente en la secuencia de la sesión de fotos de Los abrazos rotos: Lena prueba varias pelucas, reproduce las mímicas de las actrices hollywoodienses y se transforma por unos instantes en Marilyn Monroe o Audrey Hepburn. Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 98 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 presenta como el teaser cómico del drama que pone en escena la pasión de estos tres seres. Almodóvar bosqueja el retrato de un personaje excesivo, risible, que se define en el título del cortometraje por unas prácticas antropófagas anunciadoras de su sentido de la desmesura y del desbordamiento. Este trabajo propone esbozar una reflexión sobre el cortometraje, que no parece haber sido objeto de análisis fílmicos hasta ahora. Se procurará determinar en qué medida sexo, política y canibalismo se conjugan para forjar una figura grotesca propicia a una celebración de la materialidad del cuerpo, celebración teñida de sátira política. 1. Chon, figura del exceso A diferencia de la joven Pina, morena y vestida de blanco y negro, Chon, corpulenta cuarentona, exhibe una feminidad llamativa que se expresa visualmente a través de toda una gama de colores cálidos [fotos 1 y 2], desde su corta cabellera roja hasta su vestido color naranja chillón pasando por su bolso de charol, sus joyas y botones dorados y sus uñas carmín. Otros toques rojos y naranjados completan este juego cromático en el espacio de la cocina donde se desarrolla la totalidad del cortometraje: la batidora que contiene un líquido naranja (la secuencia inserta en el relato de primer grado de Los a b r a z o s r o t o s y e l desciframiento de la referencia a Mujeres permiten identificar l a n a t u r a l e z a d e e s t a preparación: es un gazpacho con Morfidales), los azulejos Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 99 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 bermellón en el trasfondo, la nevera color naranja, los cuadros en la pared que representan pimientos, la bandeja adornada con reproducciones coloridas de botellas de Coca Cola a la manera de Andy Warhol. El predominio de estos tonos recuerda los colores saturados que caracterizan el universo de Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios –sobre todo los atuendos femeninos [foto 3] y el piso de Pepa– y la conexión de la obra almodovariana con la estética pop, influencia particularmente sensible en las primeras películas del director (Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón, Laberinto de pasiones, Entre tinieblas). El plano que sigue al prólogo, tras la partida de Pina, y el que cierra el cortometraje aparecen asimismo como reminiscencias del cromatismo pop: en ambos casos, la imagen – un plano americano o medio corto de Chon – se inmoviliza y se tiñe de colores primarios, amarillo y / o azul. El primer plano inicial de la protagonista en el umbral de la cocina inaugura los títulos de crédito: el nombre de Carmen Machi aparece en letras mayúsculas moradas y una espiral roja movediza se superpone a la imagen fija [foto 4]. Las dos partes del título aparecen a ambos lados del campo: LA CONCEJALA en letras capitales azules, ANTROPÓFAGA en una grafía que remite visualmente al tema de la antropofagia [foto 5]. De igual modo, al final, los títulos de crédito desfilan por un plano medio corto de Chon teñido de azul y se asiste a un lento cierre en iris [foto 6]. Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 100 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 Todos estos procedimientos convocan entre otras cosas en la mente del espectador el recuerdo del universo coloreado del primer largometraje de Almodóvar, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón, crónica de la Movida en la encrucijada de las estéticas pop, cómic y punk, (Vidal, 2000: 15-38), el de su “comedia disparatada” Laberinto de pasiones (Vidal, 2000: 39-65) o las visiones místicas de Sor Estiércol, monja drogadicta en Entre tinieblas (Vidal, 2000: 66-107) [foto 7]. Más allá del simple guiño intertextual y del “autohomenaje”, La concejala antropófaga pone de relieve el designio autófago de un cineasta que parece haber ingerido y digerido sus propias obras para dar a luz un filme en el que recicla algunas de sus primeras influencias. El director ha hecho de la desmesura un axioma de su obra: el exceso caracteriza la puesta en escena de las aventuras de numerosas figuras almodovarianas, personajes in- tensos y extremos. Que éstos protagonicen comedias extravagantes o que intervengan de modo anecdótico en realizaciones más oscuras (piénsese en la prostituta Cristal en ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?, comedia de acento neorrealista), se mueven generalmente por espacios urbanos en plena efervescencia y persiguen una búsqueda: de un pasado, de una identidad o del objeto de su deseo. Chon se inserta de lleno en esta genealogía. Su energía desbordante es sintomática de un deseo al que procura satisfacer a toda costa, así como de una fuerza dionisíaca que se traduce por una insaciable ansia vital y una voluntad de devorar literalmente el mundo. En este sentido, encarna el espíritu grotesco tal como lo define Mijaíl Bajtín en su estudio de la cultura popular en la Edad Media y el Renacimiento: el cuerpo grotesco es un organismo en movimiento perpetuo que se crea, se construye y se regenera mediante una constante interpenetración con el mundo (Bakhtine, 1965: 302-305). Aunque los vaivenes de Chon permanecen confinados en el Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 101 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 espacio reducido de la cocina, ella aparece como un personaje agitado, que se mueve continuamente de la mesa de la cocina al frigorífico, del frigorífico a la encimera, de la encimera a la silla en la que vuelve a sentarse antes de levantarse de nuevo. La cámara efectúa discretos movimientos para encuadrar mejor o seguir al personaje y la impresión de cinetismo que emana de los escasos planos que componen el cortometraje procede en realidad esencialmente de los desplazamientos de la protagonista. Su agitación y sus desbordamientos de energía se ven además subrayados por el inmovilismo total de la mujer dormida en la mesa de la cocina, espectadora pasiva e inconsciente de una prestación que se puede calificar de teatral. La exageración llevada hasta sus últimos extremos y la hipérbole que raya en la monstruosidad, dos elementos definitorios de la estética grotesca según H. Schneegans (Bakhtine, 1965: 304-305), citado por Bajtín, se manifiestan en este personaje caracterizado por su propensión a rebasar los límites de su propia humanidad. Su inagotable vitalidad y su glotonería desaforada hacen de ella un ser surreal y monstruoso: híbrida con apariencia humana y vigor sobrehumano, Chon se sitúa al margen de la norma que define al común de los mortales. Esta relación entre centro y periferia constituye precisamente la clave de la estética grotesca (Fauconnier-Eizyman, 2003: 17-19): excesiva y por lo tanto literalmente e x - c é n t r i c a, la figura de la concejala es eminentemente grotesca. Por cierto, recuerda a otras dos encarnaciones del exceso en la obra de Almodóvar, Sexilia, la ninfómana de Laberinto de pasiones, y Patty Diphusa, heroína multiorgásmica de los escritos publicados por el cineasta en la revista La Luna a principios de los años 19804. El organismo de Chon resulta ser la sede de fantasías antropófagas y el lugar de la circulación del deseo, palabra clave en el universo almodovariano. El deseo parece ser el motor de sus desplazamientos y desahogos verbales, al igual que debería ser desde el punto de vista del personaje “el principal motor de una sociedad mejor”. Verdadero ímpetu vital, anima a un organismo sobrehumano que la concejala alimenta con flan y cocaína. A falta de 4 Como Chon, Patty Diphusa padece insomnio: estrella del cine pornográfico, se pasa las noches vagando incansablemente por la ciudad, en busca de nuevos amantes susceptibles de satisfacer su apetito sexual desaforado. Véase (Lenquette, 2000: 75-92) . Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 102 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 encontrar el sueño, Chon regenera su energía alternando cucharadas golosas y dosis de droga sacadas de dos grandes platos que la cámara barre en primer plano [fotos 8-9]. Emanación del cuerpo grotesco, la verborrea constituye otra expresión del exceso encarnado por la impetuosa concejala. La rapidez del flujo de palabras de Chon y sus modulaciones de voz se conjugan con una gestualidad exagerada y refuerzan el impacto y el alcance cómico de un monólogo a medio camino entre el discurso político y la confesión íntima. La protagonista se dirige a una interlocutora dormida, drogada con somníferos (lo cual se adivina a raíz del desciframiento del vínculo hipertextual y de la referencia al personaje de Marisa en Mujeres) y por lo tanto silenciosa: le da explicaciones como si la otra la escuchara atentamente, le hace preguntas sin esperar respuesta, poco preocupada por las razones del estado letárgico de su oyente. Machaca a la vez verbal y físicamente sus convicciones sexuales y políticas, acompañando algunas de sus aserciones de golpecitos repetidos en la mesa de la cocina (“Hay que incentivar la cultura de la promiscuidad”, “Le dije que ése es el problema del PAP”). La boca se halla, pues, en el centro de la dinámica de este cuerpo grotesco ya que es de la cavidad bucal de donde brota el incontrolable torrente de palabras: es sede del Verbo pero también, como vamos a ver ahora, instrumento de la devoración. 2. Devorar el mundo El término antropófaga en el título del cortometraje, del que la última réplica de Chon se hace eco (“Pues yo creo que la antropofagia te ha sentado muy bien. Estás radiante.”), tiene un valor programático pues anuncia las Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 103 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 variaciones en torno al tema del canibalismo y de la devoración. La concejala confiesa desde el principio de su monólogo estar harta “de las dietas, de los colágenos, de las liposucciones”, sintomáticos de la delgadez obsesiva en una sociedad que refrena cualquier forma de gozo relacionado con la comida, y al rato saca de la nevera un enorme flan5 del que engulle algunas cucharadas con una delectación ostensible (en la otra secuencia de Chicas y maletas, el espectador ya la veía comerse las magdalenas que Pina tenía guardadas en un armario). El hedonismo de la concejala parece corroborar las observaciones de Bajtín cuando afirma que [l]a rencontre de l’homme avec le monde qui s’opère dans la bouche grande ouverte qui broie, déchire et mâche est un des sujets les plus anciens et les plus marquants de la pensée humaine. L’homme déguste le monde, sent le goût du monde, l’introduit dans son corps, en fait une partie de soi.6 La absorción del pastel materializa esta interacción con el mundo, que se opera vía la boca. Ésta permite “saborearlo”, integrarlo y, como los otros orificios o excrecencias de la anatomía humana, saca a la luz el aspecto irregular e inacabado del cuerpo grotesco, organismo en mutación perpetua que se deja penetrar por su entorno: el mundo entra en el cuerpo, circula por dentro o sale de él, revelando fronteras porosas entre ambos espacios. Como se ha señalado antes, la degustación se acompaña de la inhalación de algunas dosis de la droga7 que Chon ha sacado previamente de su bolso y ha 5 El flan es considerado como un verdadero personaje en este cortometraje, como lo sugieren humorísticamente los títulos de crédito: aparece después de los nombres de Pina y Maribel, respectivamente encarnadas por Penélope Cruz y Marta Aledo. Fue cocinado por la hermana de Pedro Almodóvar, Chus, cuyo nombre viene a continuación del de las actrices (fotograma 6): este detalle de los títulos de crédito traduce el placer lúdico de un cineasta que no duda en integrar a sus parientes a su propio proceso de creación. Almodóvar también parece establecer de alguna forma un paralelismo entre la elaboración del flan y la realización de la película. 6 Bakhtine, M., op. cit., p. 280. “el encuentro del hombre con el mundo que se opera en la boca abierta de par en par que muele, despedaza y mastica es uno de los asuntos más antiguos y más relevantes del pensamiento humano. El hombre saborea el mundo, siente el sabor del mundo, lo introduce en su cuerpo, hace de él una parte de sí mismo.” (traduce la autora) 7 La temática de la droga cruza toda la obra de Almodóvar. El personaje de Chon se inscribe menos en la categoría de las víctimas que en aquélla de los consumidores sin complejos: aunque corre el riesgo de ser detenido – teme que la policía encuentre la maleta llena de cocaína en su casa –, no duda en usarla y proyecta también distribuirla entre los miembros de su partido. Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 104 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 dispuesto en un plato: la absorción del mundo se efectúa a través de la nariz, a la vez orificio y protuberancia que favorece el diálogo con lo que se sitúa más allá de los límites del cuerpo humano8. La cocaína es un sicótropo que tiene por efectos notorios desinhibir al consumidor, creando en él el sentimiento de una infinita potencia, y quitarle toda sensación de saciedad y cansancio. La concejala drogadicta resulta ser precisamente un personaje sin límites físicos ni morales, un ser inagotable que ninguna sustancia parece poder hartar. Su corpulencia y el consumo de un flan entero reflejan un deseo de satisfacer su glotonería más allá de las necesidades reales de su propio cuerpo. Chon somete éste a una sobre-estimulación artificial y le confiesa que padece insomnio a su interlocutora, la cual está profundamente dormida (“Lo que pasa es que últimamente no duermo bien. A veces pienso que puede ser la coca.”). Por lo demás, derriba las barreras del pudor y del decoro para describir detalladamente sus experiencias íntimas y sus fantasías antropófagas, reveladoras de su insaciable apetito sexual. Así pues, esta ausencia de límites traduce una especie de bulimia existencial, una voluntad de borrar las fronteras entre el cuerpo y su entorno para que aquél pueda absorber mejor éste: la concejala utiliza su boca como un instrumento para “moler, despedazar y masticar” el mundo, erigiendo la devoración en postura vital. Chon relaciona explícitamente sus inclinaciones sexuales y su gusto por el buen comer en dos ocasiones: primero cuando recuerda su despertar erótico precoz e, ilustrando sus palabras con un gesto [foto 10], compara los “paquetes” masculinos con frutas que se cogen –quizás se pueda contemplar como una interpretación paródica del famoso “Carpe diem”–; luego cuando se ríe de la hipocresía de sus compañeros del ayuntamiento, arguyendo que no existe 8 Esta concepción del cuerpo grotesco se opone a los cánones literarios y plásticos clásicos, que consideran el cuerpo como una unidad rigurosamente acabada, cerrada, liberada de su materialidad, demarcada de los otros organismos y que excluye toda relación dialógica con el mundo (Bakhtine, 1965: 38-39). Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 105 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 ninguna diferencia entre consumir pies de cerdo y comerse los pies de un hombre. En ambos casos, el elemento comparador es un alimento que remite a la idea de ingestión y connota una noción de deleite, siendo éste la finalidad del deseo que anima a la concejala. Por lo demás, la atracción de Chon por el sexo antropófago está estrechamente vinculada con la ninfomanía del personaje: la concejala confiesa estar “harta de todo […] de todo menos del sexo”, obsesión que impregna su vida profesional y sus iniciativas políticas. Defiende una visión de la sociedad resumida a una concepción del sexo como “asunto profundamente social”. Esta concejala especializada precisamente en asuntos sociales reduce el buen funcionamiento de una comunidad humana a las prácticas sexuales que desde su punto de vista se deben estimular –“intercambio de parejas”, “parejas múltiples”–, en el marco del desarrollo de una cultura de la promiscuidad y de la solidaridad. En realidad, dichas prácticas no hacen sino confirmar su increíble vitalidad sexual y su inclinación por la cantidad, la sobreabundancia, la desmesura. Prosigue su monólogo evocando las fantasías que la asaltan durante las asambleas y reuniones del ayuntamiento, fantasías nutridas por su voyeurismo: “Mi único interés es mirar los culos de los tíos, sus pies, sus paquetes”. La devoración por la mirada precede, pues, la devoración por la boca y atomiza el objeto del deseo: el cuerpo masculino se ve cosificado, desmembrado, reducido a un ensamblaje de zonas erógenas. La ninfomanía de Chon se acompaña de un fetichismo por los pies, que ella usa como instrumentos de su propio placer (“Los pies… ¡Me vuelven loca!”). Freud define el fetichismo como una práctica que consiste en sustituir el objeto sexual normal –los genitales, que permiten el cumplimiento del acto erótico– “par un autre en rapport avec lui et qui n’est nullement approprié au but sexuel normal”9, en este caso el pie10. Éste se halla en el centro de las fantasías antropófagas de Chon: “Bueno, una de mis fantasías es comerme un tío entero empezando 9 “… por otro en relación con él y que no es apropiado en absoluto para la meta sexual normal” (traduce la autora) (Freud, 1905: 94-95). 10 Esta parte del cuerpo le permite al hombre mantenerse en pie y desplazarse pero está también cargada de connotaciones sexuales en la mitología y en la literatura: por ejemplo, el zapato de los cuentos envuelve el pie, sustituto del falo en la mujer según Freud. Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 106 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 por los pies”11. El apetito sexual desaforado de Chon y su obsesión por la devoración representan una amenaza para la virilidad de los hombres que la rodean desde su más tierna infancia: recuerda con amargura que su ninfomanía precoz provocó su aislamiento, en ausencia de cualquier “pederasta” susceptible de saciar sus pulsiones. Además, supera su ruptura amorosa reciente declarándose dispuesta a consumir una nueva relación: “Mira, cuando a mí me dejó mi marido, hace unos días, le estaba cerrando la puerta y a la vez gritaba bien alto pa’ que me oyera bien: ‘a ver, que pase el próximo’. Salí a la calle y ahí estaba esperándome. El próximo.”12 El paso del monólogo al diálogo con Maribel, que se despierta un minuto antes del final del relato fílmico, conlleva una transferencia de la fantasía antropófaga de Chon a la joven: en efecto, ésta, que conoce a su interlocutora en esta ocasión, se abre a su vez y le cuenta haber soñado que devoraba a un hombre empezando por los pies. El inconsciente de la joven durmiente parece haber asimilado las confidencias de la concejala y las ha traducido en un sueño erótico que suscita la curiosidad de la protagonista. Este breve intercambio es pretexto para un juego por parte del director: la reescritura de la secuencia final de Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios [fotos 3-11]. Marisa (el juego paronímico entre los nombres Marisa y Maribel subraya la conexión intertextual), drogada con los somníferos diluidos en el gazpacho, se despierta tras la resolución de conflictos a los que no ha asistido conscientemente y le confiesa a Pepa haber perdido su virginidad en sueño. En ambas películas, el gazpacho aparece entonces como una especie de elixir o de llave que permite acceder a otro mundo (Méjaen, 2004: 86-87): el del sueño y de las fantasías. El universo onírico de la joven se ha impregnado del 11 La confesión de esta fantasía antropófaga recuerda la inmersión total del protagonista de Amante menguante – metarrelato fílmico inserto en el relato principal de Hable con ella – en el sexo de su mujer: en ambos casos, el hombre es totalmente absorbido por el cuerpo femenino, ya por la cavidad bucal, ya por el orificio vaginal. 12 El “próximo” resulta ser el narcotraficante con quien Chon revela en la otra secuencia de Chicas y maletas haber mantenido una relación sexual. Al evocar el dedo gordo de su amante, se estremece de placer. Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 107 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 erotismo que la concejala no ha dejado de entremezclar con sus consideraciones políticas, a lo largo de su monólogo. 3. Discurso político y confesiones eróticas: un desfase con efecto humorístico El título del cortometraje pone a un mismo nivel el universo político, a través de la alusión a la función municipal de concejala, y el canibalismo erótico sugerido por el término antropófaga, comentado antes. Desde un punto de vista formal, las confesiones de Chon se insertan en un monólogo que evoca el discurso político, monólogo al que Almodóvar confiere cierta dimensión satírica. La extravagante concejala en asuntos sociales pertenece al PAP, partido cuyos acrónimo e ideología motivan en la mente del espectador un paralelismo con el Partido Popular español: el PAP aparece como una proyección diegética y paródica del PP. La sátira estriba en el desfase entre los valores conservadores de este partido de derechas y el erotismo liberal y liberado reivindicado por Chon, por añadidura consumidora de cocaína. Ninfomanía y antropofagia conforman una especie de sexualidad alternativa poco compatible con el único modelo avalado por los sectores conservadores de la sociedad, a saber la heterosexualidad practicada en el marco del matrimonio y con fines esencialmente procreativos. La concejala asume totalmente su drogadicción y su marginalidad erótica –dos formas de excentrismo grotesco–, inspirándole ésta el título de un ensayo dedicado al sexo social, asunto “muy interesante e inexplorado hasta ahora”: Una cerda en el PAP. Son precisamente opciones inéditas que pretende brindarles a sus conciudadanos, en una perspectiva progresista y hedonista: “A los ciudadanos hay que ofrecerles alternativas, que les hagan evolucionar y ser más felices”. Incluso parece considerar su apetito sexual desmesurado como una actitud vanguardista, que ya la caracterizaba a los cuatro años: “También en esto fui una adelantada de mi tiempo”. Sin rechazar radicalmente la ideología de su partido, denuncia su apariencia conservadora, hasta anticuada (“la imagen de un partido desfasado y anclado en el pasado”), principal problema del PAP en su opinión. No reniega de la filiación Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 108 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 ideológica entre la derecha española contemporánea y el conservadurismo franquista (“Yo creo que Franco fue un buen gobernante”) pero sí expresa sus discrepancias con la concepción erótica del dictador (“en lo referente al sexo no se enteraba”), causa de sus frustraciones sensoriales y sensuales pasadas (“Me educaron bajo el grito de ‘eso no se toca’, ‘eso no se come’. Dios mío, ¡qué tiempos!”). Su alegato a favor de una forma de socialismo sexual, fundado en la multiplicación de las relaciones íntimas como expresión de la solidaridad entre los hombres, hace de ella la portavoz de un partido de derechas que busca atraer a los “socialistas aburridos”. El divorcio entre conservadurismo político y desmesura sexual se acompaña de un efecto humorístico de ruptura entre los dos lenguajes usados por la concejala. Por una parte, Chon pone la terminología política al servicio de sus demostraciones y su proselitismo a favor del PAP: se considera el sexo como un “asunto social” y cualquier individuo debe poder acceder al placer físico “sin prejuicios ni cortapisas”, en nombre de un principio “democrático”; en el caso contrario, puede ser víctima de una situación de “marginación”, dolorosa experiencia que la propia concejala vivió de niña. El recurso a esta jerga política revela una voluntad por parte del director de hacer escarnio de una retórica artificial y estancada y de un discurso político desacreditado por el contenido que se le asocia. Por otra parte, Chon recurre a un léxico grosero y atrevido para designar el acto sexual, sus propios genitales o los de sus amantes (“culos”, “paquetes”, “coño”, “pollones”, “que me follen”, “polla”): el registro usado revela la ausencia total de tabúes en el personaje y traduce verbalmente su impudor, sus costumbres liberales, incluso cierto mal gusto, reminiscencia de las primeras realizaciones de Almodóvar. Esta obscenidad por toques en el espacio del monólogo hace hincapié en una aprensión fragmentaria y metonímica de la anatomía humana, como se ha señalado antes en el caso del cuerpo-objeto masculino, y materializa el encuadre mental en los órganos fuentes de excitación y placer eróticos para Chon. Esta visión atomizada del organismo se revela típicamente grotesca: el discurso de la concejala (que brota de la boca), se enfoca en los orificios (el ano, la vagina) y protuberancias (el miembro viril), ofreciendo una puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco fundada en la celebración de “lo bajo material y corporal” Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 109 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 (“le bas matériel et corporel”) bajtiniano. En efecto, aperturas y excrecencias patentizan la materialidad del cuerpo y lo inscriben en un movimiento de rebajamiento (“rabaissement”) espacial: de arriba hacia abajo, de la faz a los genitales, al vientre y al trasero (Bakhtine, 1965: 29-30). La ingestión del flan supone una trayectoria del alimento que va de la boca al ano pasando por el vientre mientras que las prácticas sexuales de Chon implican una comunicación de sus propios orificios con el pene y los pies de su pareja, siendo el pie el órgano-nexo entre el hombre y el suelo: los cuerpos se interpenetran, aboliendo las fronteras que los demarcan los unos de los otros. Satisfacción de las necesidades naturales y vida sexual se hallan en el centro de la concepción grotesca del organismo humano: anclan a éste en la tierra, en la materialidad. Chon absorbe el mundo, devora a sus amantes por la boca, por el sexo, por el ano y encarna por lo tanto este principio del rebajamiento grotesco y de la celebración corporal de la existencia. Aparece en este sentido como un personaje profundamente material y telúrico. Por si fuera poco, la concejala no duda en entremezclar desde un punto de vista formal la descripción de sus fantasías y la demostración política: el ejemplo más emblemático es sin duda la exposición en tres puntos de los distintos modos en que usa el pie masculino cuando le practica una felación a su amante. Remata su descripción con una leve inflexión de voz y una mirada a la cámara que materializan un contacto directo con los espectadores extradiegéticos [foto 12], invitados a participar en la ficción como futuros miembros potenciales del PAP: “propongo a los ciudadanos para que lo experimenten en sus casas porque no hay nada más democrático que el placer”. Su confesión semeja un discurso con acentos demagógicos pronunciado en el marco de un mitin o un programa político. Además, la mirada a la cámara le confiere una dimensión metafílmica al fragmento puesto que el propio Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 110 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 personaje parece derribar las barreras que separan la diégesis de nuestra realidad, sugiriendo que su prestación no es sino una representación. Así pues, el humor satírico que caracteriza este monólogo nace de los efectos de ruptura y desfase entre preocupaciones políticas y consideraciones eróticas, entre conservadurismo derechista y prácticas sexuales liberales, entre retórica estancada y lenguaje crudo que celebra el cuerpo grotesco. A través de Chon, figura del exceso, es el mismísimo Almodóvar quien parece expresarse, haciendo escarnio de una derecha española por esencia poco propensa a alentar prácticas inéditas y nuevos esquemas sociales. “Antifranquiste sans le montrer” (“Antifranquista sin mostrarlo”) (Méjean, 2004: 13), si rechaza toda forma real de compromiso político – aunque sus tomas de posición se hacen cada vez más obvias –, se empeña con todo en construir una visión progresista de la sociedad: en el conjunto de su filmografía, desarrolla espacios de la diferencia y de la heterogeneidad, propicios entre otras cosas a la emergencia de sexualidades alternativas (homosexualidad, travestismo, transexualidad, sadomasoquismo…) y al desplazamiento de las nociones tradicionales de centro y margen, fundamentales en la problemática grotesca. A la luz de los trabajos bajtinianos sobre lo grotesco, se ha procurado esbozar una posible lectura de La concejala antropófaga. Pedro Almodóvar inserta este cortometraje en su filmografía y teje una red de relaciones transtextuales que convida al espectador a un desciframiento de las referencias sembradas no sólo en este relato fílmico sino también en la otra secuencia de la obra ficticia Chicas y maletas. El director forja un personaje con prácticas políticas y sexuales poco ortodoxas, celebrando la materialidad del cuerpo grotesco: éste es inagotable, antropófago, en interacción constante con un mundo que engulle, absorbe y del que se apropia. La figura de esta concejala ex-céntrica en todos los sentidos del término se convierte en la abanderada de un partido que parodia claramente la actual derecha española. Empero, el designio del cineasta parece menos político que lúdico. Además de divertir a su público con una marioneta que se agita en el escenario de su teatro, el cineasta-demiurgo sugiere que se debe leer la antropofagia abiertamente Diane Bracco, La concejala antropófaga, Pedro Almodóvar (2009). Sexo, política y canibalismo: la puesta en escena del cuerpo grotesco 111 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), pp. 94-111 reivindicada por Chon como una metáfora de su propio proceso creativo: Almodóvar interacciona con su obra y su mundo personal, los despedaza, los engulle, los digiere y los recicla, erigiendo la autofagia en postura estética. ¿Acaso será necesario devorarse a sí mismo para seguir creando? Referencias bibliográficas BAKHTINE, Mikhaïl (1965). L’œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen-Âge et sous la Renaissance, Paris: Gallimard, 1982, traduction française d’Andrée Robel, 471 p. FAUCONNIER, David, EIZYKMAN, Claudine (dir.) (2003). L’esprit grotesque dans le cinéma espagnol : 1960-1965 (tome I), thèse de doctorat, Université Paris 8, 349 p. FREUD, Sigmund (1905). Trois essais sur la théorie de la sexualité, Paris : Gallimard, coll. «Idées», 1962, traduction française de B. Reyerchon- Jouve, 189 p. GENETTE, Gérard (1982). Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré, Paris : Seuil, 573 p. LENQUETTE, Anne (2000). “Almodóvar y la Movida: Patty Diphusa, una obra de juventud desconocida”, España contemporánea, Ohio State University / Universidad de Zaragoza, otoño, n°2, pp. 75-92. MÉJEAN, Jean-Max (2004). Pedro Almodóvar, Rome: Gremese, coll. «Les Grands réalisateurs», 121 p. VIDAL, Nuria (2000). El cine de Almodóvar, Barcelona: Destino, 440 p. 112 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA VÍRUÉ ESCALERA, L.: La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar Recibido: 23/07/2012 – Aceptado: 3/09/2012 ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) LA FOTOGRAFÍA FIJA EN LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS: CATEGORÍAS Y USO EN LA CONSTRUCCIÓN DE LA MARCA ALMODÓVAR* STILL PHOTOGRAPHY IN BROKEN EMBRACES: CATEGORIES AND ITS USE IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BRAND ‘ALMODÓVAR’ Laura Virué Escalera laura.virue@gmail.com Resumen: En este artículo se estudia la fotografía fija de Los abrazos rotos de Pedro Almodóvar con el fin de poner de manifiesto los motivos iconográficos que aparecen en dichas imágenes y que irán conformando una serie de categorías o modelos. Estas fotografías participan en la construcción de la marca que representa el universo Almodóvar, más allá de los recursos ligados a este filme concreto. Recibido 23 julio. Aceptado 3 de re Abstract: This article analyse the still photography in the film Broken Embraces by Pedro Almodovar. The objective is to show the iconographic marks that appear in these images and will constitute a group of categories. These photographs take part in the process of forming Almodovar’s brand, further than their presence in this film in concrete. Palabras clave: Almodóvar; los abrazos rotos; fotografía; cine; fotofija. Key words: Almodovar; broken embraces; photography; still photography; cinema. * Las fotografías que ilustran este artículo son propiedad de El Deseo/Paola Ardizzoni y Emilio Pereda y El Deseo/José Luis Alcaine. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 113 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 1. Introducción 1.1. Definición y antecedentes: ¿qué entendemos como fotografía fija? El término fotografía fija en el contexto de un filme, tal y como se plantea en este artículo, puede ser definido siguiendo a Nekane Parejo quien se refiere a la fotofija de una película como “aquellas tomas paralelas [al rodaje] que servirán para promocionar la cinta o aquellas instantáneas que se colocan bajo los títulos de crédito que pueden tener relación directa con la narración o ser una mera aproximación a ésta” (Parejo, 2006: 241-246). Antonio Cuevas, por su parte, se refiere a ellas como fotografías de escena, y las define como “las imágenes realizadas por un técnico del equipo durante el rodaje. Constituyen la única referencia gráfica de la historia del filme, y son utilizadas para su difusión en prensa, en los press books, los carteles murales, fotografías en fachada, etc.” (Cuevas, 1976: 260-261). Las instantáneas se realizan en ocasiones entre dos tomas, pidiendo a los actores que vuelvan a interpretar una acción o se queden en una posición determinada. Estas imágenes deben reunir las siguientes características: ser representativas del contenido de la película, incluir a los personajes más destacados, tener el máximo de calidad en cuanto a encuadre y técnica fotográfica y que tengan el atractivo suficiente como para cumplir su función principal: despertar el interés de los futuros espectadores. Tradicionalmente, estas imágenes han estado ubicadas en vitrinas dentro del espacio de las salas de cine, son las conocidas como carteleras o lobby cards (Sánchez, 1997: 26). Es interesante su uso en las salas de exhibición ligadas al cartel del filme, ya que presentan al espectador las características argumentales de la película a través de la rapidez propia de la imagen, pero en mayor profundidad que el mismo, el cual transmitirá un estímulo único y fácilmente descifrable, que condense la idea de conjunto de la película. Como decimos, las fotografías exhibidas en este contexto, permitirían una mayor profundización, más argumentos, más detalles, de lo que el espectador encontrará en la gran pantalla. Hay que presuponer al espectador dispuesto a Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 114 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 prestar atención a las imágenes, pues ya ha acudido a la sala, el contexto de consumo es el propicio. Por tanto, es el momento para ampliar los mensajes a transmitir, de una manera más completa que en la comunicación de inputs sobre la película en medios masivos; ya no es solo una llamada de atención, o un intento con el propósito de que el espectador (o potencial espectador) grabe en su memoria el título del filme, sino que con esta serie de imágenes se complementa todo el argumentario que envuelve el sentido de la película. A pesar de ello, y dada la aparición de multitud de soportes on line y off line junto al cambio de pautas de consumo por parte del espectador cinematográfico, el concepto tradicional de las lobby cards es cada vez menos usual, lo que ha permitido, por otra parte, mayor creatividad en este tipo de imágenes. Y no solo ello, sino que el espectador acude a la red en busca de estas imágenes de forma activa, por lo tanto, la página web de la película se ha convertido en otro de los principales canales en los que se exponen estas imágenes. Las lobby cards, solían presentar un formato horizontal, en torno a 11 x 14 pulgadas (28 x 35 cms.) e impresas en papel grueso, tipo cartulina. Se producían en colecciones de ocho cartelas que ilustran las escenas claves de la película. Una de ellas es siempre la llamada Title Card, que representa a toda la película más que a una sola escena, con un diseño especial donde las estrellas protagonistas adquieren la presencia más relevante y donde se añadía una lista de créditos. El resto de cartelas, muestran diferentes escenas y se conocen como Scene Cards. Esta descripción hace intuir cuáles son las tipologías básicas que se encuentran al analizar la fotofija de una película, puesto que estos precedentes sentaron las bases de lo que serían las instantáneas promocionales de los filmes. Presuponemos, por tanto, que abundarán las fotografías de los actores protagonistas, que el primer plano será habitual, que las imágenes representarán las escenas principales y que alguna toma tendrá el objetivo de referirse a la película en su conjunto y no solo a una escena puntual. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 115 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 1.2. La función publicitaria de la fotografía fija Desde los inicios de la industria cinematográfica, la publicidad ya era comprendida como un arma importante para los resultados comerciales. Una de las funciones de la campaña publicitaria, tal y como cita Amiguet, será la de “preparar-motivar-atraer al público los días antes del estreno, de modo que una vez que éste se produzca no se pierda ni un solo día de exhibición, ya que los espectadores potenciales estaban esperando que éste se produjera” (Amiguet, 2000: 40). En la actualidad, cuando el período de exhibición se ha acortado al máximo y se ha establecido como estrategia de distribución copar el máximo número de salas en un escaso período de tiempo, es indispensable que el potencial espectador conozca el producto cuanto antes y acuda a la sala con la mayor premura posible ya que el filme tiene un escaso margen de dos semanas para demostrar su atractivo en taquilla. Para ello, se utilizan desde medios tradicionales: anuncios en exteriores, cartelería, revistas, anuncios y tráilers en televisión; hasta las acciones de marketing viral y social media marketing en medios y redes sociales de Internet, estrategias de más reciente aparición pero que se han convertido en fundamentales en los últimos años. El Deseo, la productora que fundan los hermanos Almodóvar para producir La ley del deseo en 1986 y que desde entonces produce todas sus películas, suele comenzar a lanzar datos del nuevo filme en fase de preproducción para así crear expectativas desde que la película es un proyecto; por tanto, el trabajo de los expertos en publicidad es crucial ya durante la fase de rodaje. Numerosas comparecencias ante la prensa antes del lanzamiento en salas, entrevistas, sesiones de fotos, apariciones en programas de televisión y otros, son solo algunas de las herramientas para preparar el terreno antes de que el largometraje llegue a las pantallas. Para Los abrazos rotos, Almodóvar escribe en su blog el desarrollo del rodaje, a modo de diario, y ya publica diversas fotografías tomadas por él mismo o por los fotógrafos encargados de la fotofija del filme (Paola Ardizzoni y Emilio Pereda). Algo parecido ya hizo en Volver (2006), integrándolo en la página oficial donde presenta un “diario de rodaje” ilustrado con fotografías y posteriormente vuelve a hacerlo en La piel que habito (2011). Y es que como afirma Jacoste “las Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 116 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 posibilidades publicitarias se pueden dar desde el mismo momento en que se tiene la idea de realizar un filme” (Jacoste, 1996: 157) y Almodóvar sabe cómo utilizarlas. 1.3. Los nuevos soportes digitales Como se ha comentado anteriormente, en los últimos años han aparecido nuevos soportes de promoción de las películas que requieren de fotografías. Ya es impensable un estreno en salas que no tenga su propia página web, incluso meses antes de que la película esté acabada, debido a que Internet se ha convertido en un importante medio de promoción. Según las características del público objetivo del filme, la web ofrecerá uno u otros recursos (juegos, concursos, venta de otro material –merchandising, otros títulos-, vídeos; información sobre el rodaje, actores, director, etc.) pero la fotografía seguro que va a formar parte del diseño y el contenido de página. Almodóvar cuenta con una página web oficial1, y desde Hable con ella las películas tienen una web propia2, además de toda la información presente en el sitio de El Deseo3. Por otra parte, el Electronic Press Kit ha evolucionado desde una cinta en formato vídeo con información que se entregaba a las televisiones, donde se recogían imágenes del rodaje y entrevistas, a un CD o DVD con una gran variedad de material. En él se adjunta también el press book, el dossier de prensa, que contiene datos del rodaje, el director, frases publicitarias, una copia del cartel en pequeño formato, sinopsis, etc. Toda esta información se ha integrado en un solo soporte con las nuevas características de capacidad e interactividad –entre otras- que ofrecen los nuevos formatos digitales. En el caso de Los abrazos rotos, el press book se puede descargar en formato .pdf desde la propia página web de la película, así como consultar (pero no descargar para su uso) distintos vídeos publicitarios (teaser, tráiler, spots, rueda de prensa), fotografías y músicas de la película. Cualquier persona interesada, y ya no solo la prensa especializada4, puede obtener toda la información sobre la 1 Página oficial de Pedro Almodóvar en http://www.pedroalmodovar.es; anteriormente alojada dentro del sitio http://www.clubcultura.com/clubcine/clubcineastas/almodovar 2 Página web de Los abrazos rotos http://www.losabrazosrotos.com/ 3 Página web de El Deseo http://www.eldeseo.es 4 La página web es de acceso público y no requiere registro para profesionales en ningún caso. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 117 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 película, consultas a archivos de audio, al tráiler y a una buena selección de imágenes con una calidad considerable. Otros medios digitales no relacionados directamente con la producción cinematográfica, también servirán de canal en el que transmitir las imágenes, en el caso de Los abrazos rotos es destacable el especial del diario El País en soporte digital, que a modo de monográfico presenta una web dedicada al filme, con tráiler, galería de imágenes, entrevistas al director y al reparto, etc. Otros medios de comunicación especializados en cine, como puede ser la revista Fotogramas en su versión digital5 ofrece una galería de 55 fotografías de la película y como este ejemplo, muchas otras páginas web sobre actualidad, crítica o venta de películas serán vehículos de transmisión de las fotografías del filme. 1.4. Fotografía fija como constructora de marca El valor de la marca en el medio cinematográfico es constatado por José María Amiguet en su tesis El concepto de marca en la comunicación publicitaria del cine donde afirma que “el umbral de expectativas es la clave a partir de la cual se valora la calidad del producto cinematográfico” (Amiguet, 2000: 398). Los potenciales espectadores del filme esperarán encontrar determinados rasgos que ellos asignan a la marca. Onaindia explica que “el espectador elige una determinada película porque el título le resulta atractivo, por los intérpretes, y en algunos casos, por el director. Todos estos datos funcionan como indicios para generar un horizonte de expectativas en su mente” (Onaindia, 1996: 91). La fotofija de una película -tal y como lo hacen el cartel, el tráiler u otros posibles elementos publicitarios del filme- anticipa lo que después el espectador podrá ver en la pantalla y a través de ella se va a transmitir una serie de valores ligados a la marca de la película. En este caso, la fotofija de Los abrazos rotos se convierte en difusor de la marca del propio filme y a su vez de la firma Almodóvar (el director) e incluso la marca corporativa El Deseo (la empresa productora)6. Un espectador que se acerque a 5 Revista Fotogramas www.fotogramas.es 6 “La marca es aquel elemento que un consumidor toma como referente en su contacto con el producto. Por lo tanto, el elemento de referencia que usa para identificar y distinguir la película Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 118 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 las salas a ver la película, va condicionado por los estímulos que ha recibido hasta ese momento. Tiene unas expectativas puestas sobre Los abrazos rotos que las imágenes que haya visto anteriormente –fotos, tráiler, cartel, etc.- habrán ayudado a crear. Además, estará condicionado por sus experiencias previas ante otras obras del mismo director, de los mismos actores, de las críticas leídas, etc. En resumen, la fotofija se eleva como un elemento capaz de (o que al menos ayuda a) establecer un marco perceptivo desde el cual el espectador verá la película. Ésta tiene que despertar el interés del público, presentar el tema, el estilo visual, el género y, por supuesto, fijar los principales estímulos que se van a utilizar para publicitar el filme, en este caso, el reparto y Pedro Almodóvar. Es conocido que el director manchego tiene una gran capacidad para llamar la atención y sabe vender sus productos. Boquerini cita sus palabras: “trato siempre de que se me vea en el sitio donde estoy y de tener peso; quiero vivir todo lo que hago con mucha intensidad y por eso se me nota donde estoy” (Boquerini, 1989: 38). En la misma dirección comenta Holguín, “Almodóvar, al no tener medios económicos, comienza solo su andadura cinematográfica, siendo él su mejor relaciones públicas. Es, en sí mismo, un showman […]. Nadie como él acerca su obra al público” (Holguín, 1994: 40). Y Cobos y Marías recogen la declaración: “si yo quería hacer cine, tenía que inventarme casi hasta los medios de distribución de las películas. Yo las estrenaba en sitios, hacía fiestas…” (Allison, 2003: 19). Boquerini, recoge una cita de la revista Fan Fatal (nº1. Abril 1988) en la que el director comenta que “es una equivocación muy grande pretender que una película solo es un rollo largo de fotogramas, y no hacer caso a la promoción, al envase comercial, a lo que se dice sobre ella. Cuantas más brillantes, originales y atractivos sean estos detalles, mejor será la película y más gente se acercará a verla” (Boquerini, 1989: 140). y que le evoca una serie de significaciones, la suma de todo lo cual influirá en sus opiniones y decisiones en relación con el filme. Por lo que podría darse el caso de que un mismo largometraje contuviera diferentes marcas para distintos receptores, es decir, que para un individuo operase como marca el nombre del actor y para otro el director de la misma película”. (AMIGUET, 2000: 575-576). Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 119 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 Smith expresa que una distribuidora de cine europea ha manifestado que “lo que se vende es Pedro, la marca Almodóvar” (Smith, 2005: 144). En relación a esta cuestión, Amiguet ha estudiado los indicadores de marca en este director y ha establecido los títulos de crédito como uno de ellos. En su análisis, señala que a partir de la tercera película de su filmografía, Entre tinieblas, Almodóvar aparece siempre dos veces en los títulos de crédito y esta doble aparición apoya y promociona la función de marca del director respecto de la película (Amiguet, 200: 487). Guiándonos por esta cuestión, podemos derivar que pronto en su filmografía Almodóvar se empieza a constituir como marca propia, y que esta posición no se va a limitar solo a los títulos de crédito, sino que afecta a toda la campaña de promoción, ya no solo de sus películas por separado, sino de toda su marca como una unidad. En el mismo sentido, este autor estudia la información sobre las películas de Pedro Almodóvar en la prensa escrita y observa si el director como marca se convierte en principal elemento de referencia en las noticias. Como conclusión, indica que “desde la perspectiva de la prensa, soporte que podríamos considerar ilustrativo del comportamiento de los medios, existen dos fases diferentes en el uso de Almodóvar como signo principal de la identidad de sus películas. Un primer momento, que abarcaría sus seis primeras obras, en las que Almodóvar tiene una función como marca potencial o latente […]. El segundo momento se iniciaría con el estreno de Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios […], en esta fase la operatividad de Almodóvar como marca de sus largometrajes parece clara […]. Se convierte en el elemento más utilizado, y, en consecuencia, más notorio para informar sobre las películas, el director se constituye en una auténtica marca que al ser usada como referente por los medios acabará obteniendo una gran repercusión social” (Amiguet, 2000: 503). Este hito en su carrera también es destacado por Carlos Polimeni quien escribe: “con su séptima obra [...] Almodóvar se convirtió en una estrella, en una marca registrada. De ahí en adelante, viviría en el mundo de las celebridades, siendo [...] más importante que sus propias películas” (Polimeni, 2004: 83). En el mismo estudio, el autor también expresa el papel relevante de la fotografía dentro de la noticia. Casi el 71% de los textos tenidos en cuenta contienen alguna fotografía y, de ellas, en más del 72% se observa la presencia de Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 120 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 Almodóvar. Estos datos ratifican de nuevo la existencia de Almodóvar como marca, y además, Amiguet señala que el porcentaje medio de apariciones de Almodóvar en las imágenes que acompañan a los artículos se incrementa en la misma fase que definíamos más arriba. Por otra parte, el segundo contenido que destaca en esas imágenes son los actores, en el 45’5% de los casos. A continuación, y a distancia, los fotogramas de las películas (lo que denominamos aquí fotografías de escena), formato clásico de presencia visual del producto. Esta tendencia en el uso de las fotografías indica que se requiere no solo fotografías de escena, sino que los posados del director y/o los actores, van a ser muy demandados. Además, Amiguet indica que las cifras de la evolución del uso de los fotogramas va claramente en descenso. Durante las seis primeras películas es reproducido en el 56% de las ocasiones, y en la segunda fase que describe, la media baja hasta el 8’75%. Por todo ello, no parece arriesgado afirmar que en la fotografía promocional del film la presencia de Almodóvar tendrá un lugar muy relevante, lo cual va a afianzar su posición como marca, en consonancia con lo expuesto en este apartado. 2. La fotografía fija en Los abrazos rotos 2.1. Modelos de fotografía fija: aplicación en Los abrazos rotos En primer lugar, se distinguen dos tipos de fotofija, las llamadas on-set –en el set– y off-set –fuera del set– (Bergala, 1995). Esta es una división muy general pero también una forma muy evidente de plantear unos modelos desde los que partir. Robert Dance y Bruce Robertson, diferencian tres tipos básicos de imágenes en los estudios del Hollywood de finales de los años veinte. La primera, la más común, constituye las scene stills (fotografías de escena) tomadas en el set para documentar la producción. Estas fotografías tienen dos funciones básicas: registrar cada posición de cámara y la situación de los actores, esto asegura el raccord de cada escena. Las scene stills también proveen al departamento de Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 121 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 publicidad de imágenes de los personajes que podían ser usadas para las lobby cards, posters y para enviar a las revistas (Dance, 2000: 88). El segundo tipo, es lo que llaman el publicity shot (la toma publicitaria), imágenes tomadas fuera del rodaje, pero fuera del retrato de estudio, normalmente se utilizan como fotografías de moda o para la promoción de productos, algunas veces dejan ver a la estrella en momentos de ocio. En tercer lugar, los retratos, son la categoría más rígida por ser la más importante para crear o redefinir la imagen del actor. El fotógrafo Fred Archer publicó en 1930 un artículo titulado “The still Picture's Part in Motion Pictures” en el que refiere una subcategoría de retratos a la que llama c a n d i d s , instantáneas de las estrellas con una cuidada puesta en escena, en sus casas o en su rutina habitual, con sus familias, alrededor del estudio o en localizaciones atractivas7 (Dance, 2002: 92). Por otra parte, el fotógrafo Matías Nieto plantea otra división haciendo hincapié en la forma de trabajar del fotógrafo y no en el lugar en que se ha realizado la toma, como proponía en su caso Bergala. Nieto señala una división entre las instantáneas que se toman en el rodaje y las “publicitarias”, y explica así las diferencias: “en la fotografía publicitaria puede haber más medios y tiempo disponibles y así se pueden utilizar, si es preciso, luces, cámaras de un formato superior y otros elementos. También el concepto es distinto. […] Debería haber un concepto muy claro a la hora de hacer el trabajo por parte de la productora y los responsables de promoción. […] Durante el rodaje el fotofija no suele disponer de todo lo que se tiene al alcance en la fotografía publicitaria. El rodaje prima sobre todo. La similitud principal es que los dos tipos están relacionados con la película, es decir que tienen que tener una relación con la historia y su realización”8. Nekane Parejo advierte, siguiendo a Dubois, otro tipo de fotofijas que “aglutina fotografías como objetos directamente relacionados con el desarrollo del filme, 7 Tengamos en cuenta que en aquel momento el estudio controlaba totalmente la persona de la estrella y diseñaba una vida completa en torno a su figura, de ahí que fuera tan importante unir la publicidad de las películas (basadas más en la aparición de una estrella que en la propia trama) con la vida diaria de sus protagonistas. 8 Entrevista realizada a Matías Nieto Köning, en la revista digital Cómo Hacer Cine, el 5/01/2003. “Matías Nieto, fotofija”, http://www.comohacercine.com/articulo.php?id_art=42 &id_cat=2. Última consulta: 9/07/2012. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 122 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 normalmente como presencia justificada en el rol de agente genuino de una biografía. Las copias fotográficas servirán para otorgar solidez a una narración [...] basada en una ilusión perceptiva, es decir, la imagen cinematográfica” (Parejo, 2006:243). Son estas las fotografías que no solo forman parte del decorado de un filme, como caracterización de las personas que habitan el hogar, por ejemplo, o como elemento de atrezzo, sino que muchas veces van a ser esenciales para la trama. Para llevar a cabo el análisis propuesto en este artículo9, s e ha procedido a una clasificación que pudiera resultar útil para afrontar este estudio. Para ello, se ha tomado en consideración si aparecían ciertos rasgos con la finalidad de establecer categorías, a saber: - La identificación directa de la fotografía con un plano o escena de la película. - La correspondencia del espacio fotográfico y cinematográfico, es decir, la toma está situada en el set de rodaje. - La presencia de elementos que se refieran al personal o material técnico del filme (quienes aparecen no son los actores). - La presencia de Almodóvar, que no se ha considerado junto a los elementos anteriores por su predominante relevancia. - La evidencia de la pose, que se trate de un posado exclusivamente para la toma fotográfica. - Fotografía utilizada como atrezzo dentro de la acción del filme. 9 Se ha tomado como base metodológica, la propuesta de análisis de fotografía del profesor Javier Marzal Felici, realizada dentro del trabajo desarrollado por el Grupo de investigación “I.T.A.C.A-UJI”. Este trabajo fue presentado en el marco del “I Congreso de Teoría y Técnica de los Medios Audiovisuales: El análisis de la imagen fotográfica” celebrado el 13, 14 y 15 de octubre de 2004 en la Universitat Jaume I (UJI) de Castellón. También puede ser consultado on line en la página web www.analisisfotografia.uji.es. La propuesta de este autor es un método de análisis bastante exhaustivo pero muy cerrado, que comprende los niveles contextual, morfológico, compositivo, enunciativo y una interpretación global del texto fotográfico, de carácter subjetivo. Es este un procedimiento analítico que pretende adoptar una perspectiva descriptiva, pero en la que inevitablemente, según indica el propio autor, afloran consideraciones de índole valorativa. Además, también contempla la dificultad de plantear una búsqueda de los mecanismos de producción de sentido de los elementos simples que conforman la imagen, sin tener una idea general acerca de la interpretación global del texto fotográfico. Por todo ello, deja claro que se debe tomar con un carácter absolutamente orientativo para que no se convierta en una suerte de “rejilla” a aplicar mecánicamente al estudio de los textos fotográficos. Así se ha empleado en este trabajo. Además, indica que es un método apropiado para el análisis y valoración de las fotografías artísticas. No es este lugar para debatir qué se puede considerar dentro de este género, pero lo cierto es que las fotografías artísticas tendrían una función estética predominante que no se puede aplicar al conjunto de imágenes objeto del estudio aquí presentado. En cuanto a la cuestión de la autoría, no se ha tenido en cuenta quién ha sido en cada caso el encargado de tomar las imágenes y no se hace distinción a priori de las tomadas por los fotógrafos Paola Ardizzoni y Emilio Pereda (http://ardizzonipereda.wordpress.com) de las tomadas por el propio Almodóvar. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 123 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 A partir de aquí, se propone la siguiente clasificación propia: 1. Fotografía de escena, en el set. Coincide con un plano de la película o se identifica directamente con él. 2. Fotografía del set de rodaje en la que aparecen elementos y personal técnico, remite al propio rodaje o a su preparación. Adquiere una función documental secundaria que acompaña a la publicitaria. 3. Posados. Pueden ser fuera o dentro del set. La toma fotográfica está mucho más controlada, pues el fotógrafo dispone los elementos según su conveniencia. Su contenido tendrá mayor o menor relación con la película según los elementos que se utilicen (el espacio de la toma y vestuario serán los más habituales). 4. La fotografía objeto. A pesar de no tener una función publicitaria, se ha considerado dentro del objeto de estudio en esta ocasión por la especial relevancia que tiene dentro del filme. 2.2. Análisis de la fotografía fija de Los abrazos rotos Se ha tomado como muestra un total de 100 fotografías, procedentes de la página web de la película, la galería de la película en la página de la distribuidora Sony Classics, el blog del diario de rodaje del director y un especial de la película publicado por el periódico El País en su versión digital10. En general, las principales galerías on-line a través de las cuales se considera que se hace mayor promoción de la película y donde se puede acceder a las fotografías directamente distribuidas bien por la productora, bien por la distibuidora. Además, se han tenido en cuenta las fotografías publicadas en el press book. 2.2.1. Fotografía de escena Estas imágenes son las primeras en las que se piensa cuando se hace referencia a la fotofija de una película. Suelen ser las más numerosas, en este estudio las fotos de escena representan aproximadamente la mitad. Coinciden con un plano del filme o se va a identificar con él directamente, en ocasiones se denominan “fotogramas”. 10 Galerías de imágenes: www.losabrazosrotos.com, www.sonyclassics.com/brokenembraces/main.html, www.pedroalmodovar.es y www.elpais.com/especial/pedro-almodovar. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 124 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 Son instantáneas que deben ser representativas de las escenas clave para dar pequeñas pistas sobre el argumento. Las imágenes que toma el fotógrafo, por muy similares que sean a la toma elegida por la cámara de cine, difícilmente serán idénticas ya que el fotógrafo va a hacer su propia elección de lente, tiempo de exposición, composición y encuadre. Como comenta Chion, “el fotofija tiene el difícil cometido de encontrar el punto medio entre la fotografía de pose y la instantánea, sin ser ni la una ni la otra: la primera parecería estática y la segunda podría ser ridícula por su carácter de foto ‘detenida’” (Chion, 1992: 226). Muchas veces, la foto se hace entre toma y toma del rodaje, siendo el fotógrafo quien solicita a los actores que repitan una acción en concreto. Por ello, en ocasiones, estas imágenes se van a encontrar a medio camino entre esta categoría y la que se han denominado “posados”. Lo primero que se observa de este conjunto de imágenes es que se trata de fotografías de personajes. Esto tiene una lógica concordancia tanto con Los abrazos rotos como con la filmografía del director en su totalidad, pues en su obra predomina el drama sobre la acción. Son historias cuyo peso recae en los personajes y en los diálogos. Chicas y maletas, la película que está rodando Mateo Blanco (el personaje interpretado por Lluís Homar), ese filme dentro del filme, es una comedia, con- trapunto del drama que es Los abrazos rotos, un drama que con tintes de thriller e incluso de cine negro. Por lo tanto, esa duplicidad que propone Almodóvar, podría tener presencia también en la imagen fija pero ¿cómo represen-tar la diferencia de género en las fotografías? En este caso, es principalmente la propia expresión del personaje retratado, su capacidad como actor y la del fotógrafo al captarla, la que puede dar el matiz. Como la instantánea en la que el personaje de Rossi de Palma se come la nota, una escena de humor absurdo, esperpéntico y surrealista [foto 1]. Sin embargo, no siempre es evidente la presencia de elementos icónicos que se conviertan en una extensión gráfica del código genérico y sean fácilmente identificables como Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 125 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 en películas policíacas, western o aventuras. ¿Qué iconos distinguirían el drama de la comedia en Almodóvar? Almodóvar es profundamente consciente del potencial de las convenciones de género y su iconografía específica siempre desempeña un papel en sus películas, pero muchos de los elementos que explotan estas convenciones también llegan a socavarlas o combinan mecanismos que habitualmente están separados. La conciencia de los códigos de género los convierte en parodia, vuelve a contextualizarlos y los mezcla con la cultura popular. El propio Pedro Almodóvar señala que en los últimos tiempos tiene debilidad por el thriller, y comenta “a lo largo de mi carrera he pasado de un modo natural de la screwball comedy-pop-con-sentimientos al melodrama y al drama para aterrizar en el noir. Todo ello mezclado con música y canciones que a veces acercan mis películas al género musical”11. El director manchego es, por tanto, un creador de productos híbridos. Dice Epps que aunque no cabe duda de que el suspense, la comedia, la farsa, el sainete y el cine negro también entran en juego, casi todos los críticos coinciden [...] en que lo que predomina en el cine de Almodóvar es el melodrama. Y lo define como “un exceso de sentimiento y sentimentalismo, de emoción y emocionalismo, [...] un patetismo exagerado y falso, excesivo y artificial” (Epps, 2005: 271). Así pues es típica en su cine la imposibilidad de un análisis directo de los componentes genéricos. En el estudio de las imágenes se ha tratado de encontrar aquellos elementos icónicos que funcionen como indicadores de género, a pesar de la hibridación de la que Almodóvar hace gala. Elementos que se suponen presentes, pues como se ha comentado, el director es conocedor de su importancia para la conexión con el público. Por otra parte, tras su larga trayectoria, ha hecho suyos ciertos rasgos estéticos (la brillantez de los colores, el rojo, los estampados, etc.) que podrían funcionar después de dieciocho películas en su haber, como iconos de un género que podría llamarse “género Almodóvar”. En las fotografías de escena de Los abrazos rotos, como decimos, se podría hacer una división entre las escenas de la propia película y de Chicas y maletas. 11 Almodóvar, Pedro. “Gays y Escaleras”. En Pedro Almodóvar blog. www.pedroalmodovar.es/PAB_ES_07_T.asp Consulta realizada el 5 de agosto de 2008. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 126 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 Esta última, adaptación de su célebre Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1987) con una estética pop, muy colorista. Este grupo de imágenes, son más cálidas y con una luz más uniforme –difusa- que el resto, con colores muy brillantes, especialmente en las instantáneas pertenecientes a la escena del salón. La presencia de los decorados nos sitúa en Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios y de la estética en general más allá de la participación de actrices que formaron parte de aquel reparto que forjó la idea de “las chicas Almodóvar”. Por su parte, las instantáneas pertenecientes al argumento principal de la película, suelen tener mayor contraste en cuanto a las luces y dan una apariencia de espacios más cerrados, incluso un ambiente claustrofóbicos, exceptuando las tomas al aire libre, y es aquí donde ese uso de luces, nos puede recordar al cine negro, aunque será en el press book donde aparezcan fotografías con más clara referencia a ese género con un uso estudiado del blanco y negro, se puede apreciar ese uso de luces que crean sombras muy definidas, creando un ambiente siniestro, misterioso en imágenes como la 2. Todas las instantáneas de este grupo y de las denominadas “fotografías del set” son en color. La obra de Almodóvar, en su conjunto, se distingue por su estética brillante y colorista, las tonalidades son exuberantes y están basadas en un esquema personal y no, en general, en la verosimilitud. No es Los abrazos rotos la obra en la que esta característica sea más predominante (exceptuando Chicas y maletas), aunque no deja de estar presente. Lo cierto es que – junto al director de fotografía- sabe acentuar la fuerza cromática y para ello se presentan unos colores muy saturados, de manera que el resultado transmite potencia, energía y plenitud. Parece lógico que estas características coloristas se vean representadas en la fotofija ya que el uso del blanco y negro, si bien presente en algunas fotografías de escena aislada como en Matador (1986) pero sobre todo en posados, adquiere funciones estéticas que en cierto modo, especialmente en Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 127 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 el caso de las fotografías de escena, limitaría ese vínculo directo de la fotografía con la película que se pretende en este caso. Otro de los parámetros interesantes del nivel contextual es el formato, este elemento viene definido por la proporción que existe entre los lados de la imagen y condiciona su composición. En las imágenes estudiadas el horizontal es el más habitual, guardando una estrecha relación con la proyección cinematográfica en formato apaisado. Como señala Villafañe, la ratio corta, es decir, cercana al cuadrado, es fundamentalmente descriptiva. La narración, generalmente asociada a la secuencialidad, requiere una ratio larga -cuyo lado horizontal es considerablemente mayor que el vertical- en los que sea posible crear direcciones y ritmos (Villafañe, 1992:157). Según esta apreciación, el formato que predomina es el más adecuado para crear temporalidad y, por lo tanto, para relacionar la fotofija con la película, ya que una de las claves que sobresale del medio cinematográfico frente a la fotografía es la inclusión de esa dimensión temporal que lo orienta a las áreas de las narratividad, gracias a su capacidad para “reconstruir ante los ojos del espectador el desenvolvimiento del mundo” (Carmona, 2005: 33). Apréciese en este sentido la diferencia entre las imágenes 3 y 4, donde la primera es más narrativa y la segunda (utilizada para el cartel de la película) más expresiva. En cuanto al nivel morfológico de nuestro análisis, el uso de los planos12 es un elemento destacable. Medios planos, primeros planos y primerísimos primeros 12 Nos referimos al tamaño de la figura en la imagen, siendo el tamaño del cuerpo humano en el encuadre el principio organizador de las diferentes opciones que se puede hallar. Cuanto más Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 128 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 planos son muy frecuentes en la fotofija de Los abrazos rotos. Son estos los que transmiten el drama, el sentimiento de los personajes en un momento determinado o la relación cercana de los mismos –normalmente correspondiendo a un diálogo importante de la película, o a un momento de tensión alta–. La elección de estas distancias narrativas se corresponde tanto al tipo de películas basada en los personajes y el diálogo que plantea Almodóvar como con las decisiones del director en la película. Almodóvar utiliza un cuidado tratamiento del primer plano y del plano detalle, explotando el dramatismo en los rostros de sus personajes. En relación a los planos de profundidad espacial (superposición de las figuras del encuadre y disposición desde un ángulo determinado, perspectiva), es de resaltar la presencia de “marcos” y “ventanas”, elementos muy relacionados con el fenómeno de figura-fondo [véase fotos 5-8]. En sus películas, Almodóvar utiliza incontables veces un doble encuadre (un marco dentro del marco). Esta multiplicación de cuadros forma parte de la fragmentación que caracterizan los espacios en los que sitúa la acción. Suele reproducir dentro de la imagen el marco de la pantalla cinematográfica y la televisión, como dos verdaderas ventanas a veces, pero también como proyección, como reflejo o duplicidad, tal y como hace con los espejos. Además, abundan los planos que se sirven de la geometría de las ventanas, las puertas, las aperturas, las fotos, los cuadros, etcétera. En definitiva, es un juego de espacios que se abren o que se cierran, pero en los que se adivina que hay otros espacios que no podemos ver, más que como concepto de selección, de fuera de campo, con un concepto psicológico directamente ligado a las emociones de los personajes. cercana es la vista del objeto o sujeto fotografiado, mayor es el grado de aproximación emotiva o intelectual del espectador hacia el motivo de la imagen, de tal modo que una escala reducida (un primerísimo primer plano o un primer plano) suele favorecer la identificación del lector; por el contrario, cuanto más general es la escala del motivo fotográfico, mayor es su distanciamiento. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 129 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 En cuanto a la composición, ya que los primeros planos tienen tendencia a ofrecer composiciones cerradas y centrípetas, esta es una de las características predominantes en el conjunto de fotografías. Así, las expresiones de los rostros, acompañadas del efecto de la luz, transmiten la emoción del personaje en ese momento [fotos 9 y 10]. Lo habitual es que los centros de interés se correspondan con los rostros de los personajes, generalmente con sus ojos y son la iluminación y la nitidez los elementos utilizados para concentrar la atención en estos puntos. El centro geométrico es en ocasiones centro de interés, esto provoca imágenes de cierto estatismo, muy equilibradas, como la composición en simetría que también está muy presente en este grupo de imágenes [fotos 11 y 12]. Es una forma de transmitir la ligazón entre los personajes, esas relaciones cerradas, los triángulos amorosos, la dependencia, ya que en el argumento del filme, los personajes actúan movidos más que por características individuales, por sus relaciones y cómo estas les afectan. Esto puede explicar que, a diferencia de en otros filmes de Almodóvar donde hay una gran presencia de fotografías en las que aparece una sola persona, aquí encontremos muchas donde aparecen dos [fotos 13 y 14]. Dos como en un abrazo. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 130 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 El ritmo de las imágenes lo suele marcar el eje de mirada de los personajes, en mayor medida, como en la foto 14, por ejemplo, donde se da esa alternancia continua de derecha a izquierda creando dinamismo. Pero también la postura de los cuerpos que aportan tensión a la imagen, como al crear un triángulo en la disposición de los dos personajes en la foto 3, donde la creación de profundidad con el uso de foco-fuera de foco acentúa el movimiento, o en la foto 15, donde el juego de luz y sobra y la disposición de los cuerpos en diagonal rompiendo la cuadrícula de las horizontales y verticales dominantes, aporta también dicho ritmo. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 131 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 Para terminar con los elementos morfológicos, se debe profundizar en un aspecto que, como refiere Marzal, es tal vez el elemento morfológico más importante que cabe destacar en el estudio de la imagen: la luz (Marzal, 2007: 98). Todo este grupo de fotografías está iluminado artificialmente para la cámara cinematográfica. Por lo general, predomina una iluminación suave, difusa, debido al uso de filtros y difusores para la caracterización cinematográfica. Se ha optado por una iluminación clásica en la que destacan las luces laterales y de relleno, bastante equilibrada. El objetivo de la luz es, con frecuencia, iluminar los rostros y desplazar la atención hacia ellos. Aunque también aparecen imágenes con un uso más dramático de la luz, con luz dirigida o contraluces. En cuanto a la pose, los personajes no están posando para el fotógrafo, están actuando para la toma cinematográfica (posan para otra cámara). Tal y como se ha comentado, en ocasiones, el fotógrafo solicita al actor que vuelva a interpretar un gesto con el objetivo de captar la imagen. Lo cierto es que las fotografías de escena no deben evidenciar la pose, no hay miradas a cámara, porque se trata de captar la espontaneidad como si la trama de la película fuese realidad y no ficción, como si los personajes no estuvieran representando un papel. Esta pretendida espontaneidad contrastaría con el grupo de imágenes de posados, en los que la colocación artificial de las figuras se evidencia frecuentemente con las miradas a cámara. Atendiendo al espacio de la representación, se plantea una doble lectura ya que se sabe que son decorados preparados para la película –sean naturales o creados-, pero deben parecer reales y creíbles (por el género del film). Se utilizan tanto exteriores como interiores, espacios concretos y realistas, que estén acorde con la acción dramática de la trama. Ésta es la percepción que debe tener el receptor, pero no podemos evitar considerar que todo está ahí para la cámara de cine y una evidencia que se hace palpable en las fotografías del set. Como ocurre con el espacio, el tiempo de una imagen es siempre una modelización de lo real, toda fotografía supone un corte del continuo temporal, una selección interesada de un momento esencial. En el mismo sentido aquí también se puede realizar una doble lectura, pues el fotógrafo ha seleccionado Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 132 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 un momento esencial de la película, que a su vez es otra representación temporal, más o menos realista. El encuadre de una fotografía es el resultado de la selección de un espacio y un tiempo dados que responde a un punto de vista y a una determinada manera de mirar. En este caso, los encuadres están muy condicionados por lo que Almodóvar haya decidido para la película, no obstante, el fotógrafo hace su propia selección, como se explicaba al comienzo. Como ya se ha comentado, en las fotografías de escena las tomas se identifican directamente con un plano de la película pero no siempre – más bien nunca- es una copia exacta, por ello, se aprecia una tendencia a que en la fotofija los personajes están más próximos al espectador –el plano es más corto-, pues la cercanía a su rostro, la detección de sus expresiones, es la principal forma de acercarse a ellos, de saber lo que sienten; en cambio, en el cine, elementos como la música o los movimientos de cámara pueden conseguir esos efectos. Al igual que en las películas, se intenta que el espectador se sienta identificado con los personajes, si la fotofija pretende transmitir la esencia del film al que pertenece, también buscará esa empatía. 2.2.2. Fotografía del set de rodaje En las fotografías del set de rodaje el espectador tiene la oportunidad de contemplar el set y lo que hay a su alrededor. Esto conlleva un destape de la construcción de la ficción fílmica en contraposición con la veracidad fotográfica, ya que estas instantáneas se sitúan en lo que consideraríamos “real”, en un contexto mucho más cercano al reportaje y a lo documental que la fotofija de escena. El tema de estas imágenes es el trabajo del rodaje de la película, más que la trama en sí, como sucedía con el grupo anterior. La primera vez que en la fotofija de las películas de Almodóvar se encuentra alguna referencia al momento del rodaje es en una instantánea de La flor de mi secreto, 1995. La foto muestra un Almodóvar pensativo tras el respaldo de la silla de Marisa Paredes que ensaya antes de la toma. Se trata de la primera ocasión en que el director se sitúa dentro del espacio cinematográfico ejerciendo como tal, aunque sí había protagonizado numerosos posados. Pero no será hasta Hable con ella, 2001 cuando verdaderamente se encuentre una variedad de Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 133 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 fotografías que remite al rodaje y le dan relevancia al material y al personal técnico que participa. En Los abrazos rotos, las fotografías del set son bastante significativas, aunque no tan numerosas como las de escena. Estas, tienen una vinculación más o menos directa con la trama de la película, en función de los elementos que aparecen en ellas. Destaca, ante todo, la presencia de Almodóvar en su trabajo de director de actores como figura esencial de la película. De este modo, aparecen desde imágenes en las que simplemente aparece Almodóvar mirando a través del visor de la cámara sin ningún elemento en la composición que vincule la foto con Los abrazos rotos, como otras imágenes situadas en el momento de la toma cinematográfica que podrían servir de documento si se quisiera conocer cómo ha sido la técnica de iluminación o qué tipo de material técnico se ha utilizado [fotos 16 y 17]. La claqueta aparece como símbolo del rodaje por excelencia. Se vincula directamente con la escena que corresponde, ya que es el último momento que precede a una toma, todo está listo. De forma genérica, cuando se registra la claqueta se transmite la sensación de representación (la toma fotográfica) de la representación (la toma cinematográfica), debido a que la artificiosidad del cine queda de manifiesto. A través de la mano que la sujeta, el personal de rodaje se hace patente. Si se prescindiese de la claqueta, la composición correspondería a una foto de escena como se visualiza en las siguientes instantáneas pertenecientes a La mala educación, [fotos 18 y 19]. El momento al que remiten ambas imagen es distinto, por la inclusión de la claqueta. La número 18 se identifica más con la trama de la película por ser lo mismo que veremos proyectado en la pantalla; la 19, sin embargo, remite al rodaje y la claqueta toma protagonismo frente al actor. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 134 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 En la selección de imágenes analizadas de Los abrazos rotos, la claqueta solo aparece en la imagen 20, pero se convierte en un elemento iconográfico importante en otras dos fotografías del grupo de escena, ya que se ha utilizado para situar la acción dentro de ese rodaje ficticio de Chicas y Maletas [foto 21]. Además de la claqueta, la cámara es otro de los elementos que tiene mayor relevancia en las fotografías del set y no solo esta, sino el objetivo, la lente o la cámara fotográfica aparecen en ocasiones [foto 22]. A veces, aparece vinculada al propio director, otras veces, se pone de manifiesto la artificiosidad del punto de vista elegido para la toma cinematográfica [foto 23] y, en ocasiones, se trata de mostrar el hecho de rodar en sí y el campo cinematográfico queda fuera la vista del espectador. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 135 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 Uno de los aspectos que llama la atención en este conjunto de fotografías, es la presencia de pantallas en múltiples ocasiones. Almodóvar aparece en varias instantáneas contemplando el monitor en el que hace el seguimiento de la toma, pero no solo eso, sino que encontramos dos fotografías en las que el director se sitúa frente a proyecciones de la película en pantallas [fotos 24 y 25], tal y como el personaje Mateo Blanco, como su alter ego, en el filme ante la televisión en la que se emite Chicas y Maletas, pero sobre todo cuando abraza en el televisor el mismo beso digitalmente ampliado. Además, se encuentra una serie de fotografías de Penélope Cruz que han sido tomadas por Pedro Almodóvar directamente de dos pantallas distintas: el monitor en el set de rodaje y en la sala de montaje13 [fotos 26 y 27]. Coincide por tanto con el aspecto ya comentado en las fotografías de escena con respecto a la obsesión de Almodóvar por la representación, la imagen proyectada, por el cuadro dentro del cuadro y con la propia idea de duplicidad que se desarrolla en la trama de Los abrazos rotos. 13 El montaje adquiere un papel relevante en la película ya que como el mismo Almodóvar comenta en el press book, en la “trama de Los abrazos rotos aparece dramatizada la importancia del montaje, su relación directa con el autor y la fragilidad de la obra si alguien se interpone entre el montaje y el autor. El montaje está en el origen de la narración, es la narración cinematográfica propiamente dicha”. Además, desde el punto de vista tecnológico ya que Almodóvar estrenaba un proceso de montaje en Avid que además permitía visualización de los dailies en HD, por lo que la calidad era mucho mayor al anterior sistema utilizado en Volver (Véase Los abrazos rotos. Dailies y montaje en HD, revista Cameraman. Consultado el 15 de julio de 2012, www.cameraman.es/detalleNoticia.php?codigo=255). Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 136 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 A modo de resumen, podemos subrayar que en las fotos del set destacan los siguientes aspectos: hay menos homogeneidad en cuanto al estilo de las imágenes en comparación a las fotografías de escena. No hay tanto predominio del primer plano como en las anteriores y en general, son composiciones menos cuidadas. No se intenta ocultar la artificialidad de la puesta en escena, manifiesta por la presencia de los focos y los materiales técnicos del rodaje. Al igual que en las fotografías de escena, todas las instantáneas son en color, pero no destaca de la misma forma de la que se venía hablando hasta ahora, ya que este no adquiere un valor expresivo, como significación o como creación de contrastes y tensión, tal y como se apreció en el apartado anterior. 2.2.3. Posados En oposición a las fotografías de los apartados anteriores, en este grupo la puesta en escena se prepara para la toma fotográfica. Así pues, estas imágenes carecen de la instantaneidad de la fotografía de escena y, sobre todo, de la del set de rodaje. En estos posados fotográficos, las actrices y actores tienen un rol más cercano a su persona que al papel que interpretan como sucedía en las fotografías de escena. Lo cual no quiere decir que no se esté requiriendo algún tipo de interpretación que vincule la imagen al filme, eso no solo se consigue con Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 137 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 la pose, sino también con todos y cada uno de los elementos que forman parte de una composición y, en este caso, especialmente con el vestuario y la caracterización. A diferencia de otras películas como Volver, 2008, cuando se publican una serie de posados tanto dentro como fuera del set, con gran variedad de fotografías que iban desde las que tenían una vinculación directa con la película hasta otras que se desligaban completamente del espacio-tiempo fílmico; en Los abrazos rotos se encuentran pocas imágenes de este tipo, mas que una serie de imágenes que aparecen en el press book, en el que se incluyen también fotografías de escena y del set. Destaca en primer lugar, los utilizados para los carteles que Chicas y Maletas [fotos 29 y 30], que contrastan enormemente con los carteles de Los abrazos rotos. Podrían remitir a una comedia romántica, incluso a un musical el segundo, pero no al drama/thriller/noir de Los abrazos rotos. En escala de grises y con letras rojas y con una Penélope Cruz cuyo personaje no se parece al que ilustra el cartel de Los abrazos rotos, cuyo look fue bastante difundido antes de la presentación de la película, una imagen muy distinta a la que el público está acostumbrado a ver de ella, inocente y glamorosa rubia, que recuerda a una Marilyn Monroe modernizada, algo pop (véase la imagen coloreada, 28) , y que en nada se parecía a Raimunda, a la que había dado vida en Volver, su anterior película con Almodóvar. En este conjunto de fotografías del press book aparecen los retratos de los actores [fotos 31-34], en blanco y negro y con una puesta en escena cuidada, luz Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 138 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 estudiada y en formato vertical. Remiten en mayor o menor medida al filme, en este caso por su caracterización, como es el caso de la de Penélope Cruz frente a la de José Luis Gómez, cuya imagen es la que más se desliga de la trama. Generalmente, el posado lo evidencia la mirada a cámara y la pose y muchas veces los elementos de unión con la película se eliminan casi por completo. Se utilizan pocos elementos para el decorado y los fondos suelen ser neutros, se prima la presencia de los personajes que son colocados cuidadosamente en el encuadre. En contraste con las anteriores imágenes, clasificamos también en este grupo otras fotografías con una toma mucho más espontánea, en las que la pose la revela la mirada a cámara, fotografías que pertenecen a las tomadas por el propio director y que han sido difundidas en su página personal. La función de promoción la adquieren al ser interesante la propia visión del director, por lo tanto, es por esa relación con Almodóvar como marca y el interés que despierta que sea él quien dispara, no porque él se haga presente a través de la imagen como en las fotografías del set y no son utilizadas por la productora o la distribuidora para publicitar el filme. Nos referimos a una serie de fotografías de las pruebas de maquillaje y vestuario [fotos 35 y 36]. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 139 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 2.2.4. Fotografías-objeto A pesar de que estas imágenes no poseen una función publicitaria ni de registro del rodaje, parece oportuno en esta ocasión tener en cuenta esta categoría. No solo como objeto, como se exponía anteriormente, sino por la existencia de una fotografía que, según Almodóvar, le inspiró Los abrazos rotos. Es por ello que esta imagen ha sido difundida y utilizada también como atrezzo. A su vez, aparecen otras fotografías de escena que remiten directamente a ella [foto 38). Se trata de “El beso de la playa del golfo” [foto 37], de la que cuenta el director: “es una vista general de la playa de El Golfo, hecha a muy poca velocidad, por eso las olas parecen pintadas más que fotografiadas, en primer término hay una roca color burdeos profundo, desde donde se abarca el mejor panorama de la playa […]. Lo que más me impactó de la fotografía además de su oscura belleza, fue descubrir en la base a una pareja abrazándose. Cuando hice la foto atardecía, el plano era muy amplio y no vi a la pareja. De hecho hay que fijarse mucho, Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 140 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 porque dentro de la inmensidad de la playa negra, a primera vista no se advierte su presencia. Pensé que el paisaje fotográfico entrañaba un secreto, que ni siquiera la pareja fotografiada conocía. Un secreto que probablemente fuera una amenaza para ellos”14. En la película, Lena y Mateo se abrazan contemplando esta misma playa, ellos no los ven, pero abajo, hay otra pareja abrazada, como la de la foto original. Mateo toma una fotografía desde el mismo lugar desde donde la tomó el director y tampoco descubre a la pareja, tal y como hizo Almodóvar, hasta que la imprime; toma la foto y la pincha en el bungalow donde él y Lena se refugian. Almodóvar reproduce así, a modo de homenaje fortuito, la relación del fotógrafo con su obra planteada por Antonioni en Blow up, 1966; donde la fotografía impresa revela nuevos significados que habían quedado fuera de la mirada del fotógrafo y, en cambio, son captados por el objetivo de la cámara. Almodóvar se encuentra así experimentando esa “inquietud” de la que hablan Parejo y Mancebo al exponer el concepto de “distancia fotográfica” como “la separación entre lo que se apreció al apretar el disparador y lo que se constató al visionar la obra” (Parejo y Mancebo: 2007, 165-172). Casualmente o no, en un filme que habla del cine, concebido como homenaje al cine, Almodóvar se encuentra frente a frente al cineasta italiano en otro de los juegos de duplicidades15 que se presentan en Los abrazos rotos. Por otra parte, aparecen otras fotografías-objeto en las imágenes que promocionan la película, en concreto en la primera página interior del press book y se utiliza como fondo en la web de Sony Classics [foto 39]. Es un mosaico de fotografías rotas, de las que llama la atención especialmente la de la derecha, una foto que remite al momento en que 14 Lanzarote, la isla quemada, en www.pedroalmodovar.es. 15 Ente las claves sobre la película que Almodóvar escribe en el Press book se haya un texto sobre la duplicación, como uno de los elementos que conducen el filme (http://www.losabrazosrotos.com/pressbook.php): “El ‘doble’ es una de las señas de identidad de Los abrazos rotos. El “doble” no entendido como término moral, (“ambigüedad”, “duplicidad”), sino como “duplicación, repetición o ampliación”. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 141 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 Lena y Mateo se abrazan en el sofá y que aparece en la foto 15. Por lo tanto, vemos como en este caso, la fotografía-objeto se relaciona con la fotografía de escena y adquiere nuevas cualidades de interrelación e intertextualidad, más allá de su función de atrezzo y más allá de su función publicitaria. 3. Conclusiones En las categorías de fotofija definidas, se aprecian diferencias sustanciales. En primer lugar, en las fotografías de escena, toda la iluminación, el color, la puesta en escena, en definitiva, está en relación directa con la toma cinematográfica, se ha adecuado para estar al servicio de la atmósfera que se quiere representar en esa escena del film a la que se refiere la fotografía. En ellas, destaca ante todo el uso de planos cortos y de la disposición de distintos elementos con el objetivo de destacar los rostros (iluminación, nitidez, etc.), con ello se logra que los personajes adquieran relevancia, y que el diálogo se haga presente en las fotografías. Es en este grupo donde mejor se puede relacionar la fotografía con los rasgos estilísticos de la película o del conjunto de la obra de Almodóvar. El predominio del diálogo sobre la acción, la tendencia al uso de planos cortos o el uso de motivos recurrentes como la geometrización del espacio, los marcos, los decorados de diseño o el color rojo también están muy presentes en la fotografía de escena. También su insistencia en la comida (Allison, 2003: 55) aparece reflejada en varias fotografías, tanto en el grupo de escena como en el del set. Penélope Cruz cortando tomates para gazpacho (que aparece también en Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios)en una escena de Chicas y Maletas, Lena pelando fruta, un lienzo con manzanas tras un abrazo por la espalda que le da Ernesto Martel; Lena y Ernesto enfrentados ante la mesa puesta… En muchas escenas a lo largo de su filmografía la comida juega un importante papel, los personajes se sientan alrededor de una mesa camilla como en Volver y ya en Pepi, Luci, Bom… (1980) Pepi prepara bacalao al pil-pil o en La flor de mi secreto (1995) Rosa está obcecada en preparar la comida. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 142 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 Otro elemento recurrente, la televisión (Allison, 2003: 72), también está representada en la fotografía fija de Los abrazos rotos. Almodóvar la suele usar como parodia, con un cierto espíritu crítico. En Kika (1993), idea el programa “Hay que leer más” cuya conductora es la propia madre del director quien también había interpretado a una presentadora de noticias en Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1987). En Hable con ella (2002), se parodia un programa de entrevistas, llevado a cabo por una Loles León algo descarada que intenta sonsacarle a Lydia (Rosario Flores) detalles íntimos sobre su vida o en Volver donde Agustina (Blanca Portillo) acude a un reallity show. Es cierto que en Los abrazos rotos, la relación de Mateo Blanco con este medio es distinta, pero no deja de ser significativa su presencia tanto en el filme como en las imágenes escogidas para promocionarlo16. Las fotografías del set de rodaje reflejan el ambiente del trabajo. Aparece el equipo técnico y elementos como los focos, la claqueta o la cámara adquieren protagonismo. La composición no está tan cuidada como en las de escena, aquí es donde se aprecia la mayor instantaneidad de la imagen y son las que tienen mayor relación con la realidad y no con la ficción del film. Este grupo de imágenes tienen una función referencial, es decir, aluden al contexto, el entorno. Se descubre en ellas un valor de documento, toda la fotofija tiene el objetivo de promocionar la película, pero en éstas se da, además, una función informativa ya que quedan reflejadas las rutinas de trabajo, los materiales que se utilizan, etc. El que elementos del rodaje aparezcan representados en la fotofija, incluyendo las fotografías del set, también tiene su sentido en relación con la propia filmografía de Almodóvar. Ya en ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto! (1984), se comienza con un plano en el que está representado el equipo y el material de rodaje y escuchamos al director dando instrucciones a la actriz Carmen Maura. En Átame (1989), es el proceso de creación de una película lo que se descubre en las primeras secuencias que muestran el rodaje de un film de terror (Seguin, 2005: 271). Y, por supuesto, en Los abrazos rotos, donde vuelve a mostrar un rodaje de una película, además de girar la trama en torno al mundo del cine, de 16 Para profundizar en la relación del cine de Almodóvar y la televisión, véase el artículo GÓMEZ, A., (2012). El modelo de televisión en Pedro Almodóvar. Cine vs. televisión, en Fonseca, Journal of Communication, n.4, pp. 60-81. Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 143 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 ser esta película como él mismo apunta “una declaración explícita de amor por el cine, no en una secuencia específica sino a lo largo de toda una película” (Sotinel, 2010: 95). Se constata, por tanto, que Almodóvar insiste en desvelar los mecanismos de la representación, advirtiendo al espectador que lo que va a ver es puro teatro, por lo tanto, la abundancia de imágenes sobre el “cómo se rodó” tiene que ver con ese deseo de jugar a mezclar lo real y lo ficticio. La misma situación se da con la presencia del director en las fotografías, es susceptible de relacionarse con su tendencia a reservarse un papel para sí mismo en algunas películas. En Pepi, Luci, Bom… (1980), es el presentador del concurso “Erecciones generales” o en ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!(1984) interpreta en televisión la canción “La bien pagá”. De igual manera, se hace protagonista en las fotografías, lo cual evidencia que a través de ellas el director también se eleva como imagen de su propia marca. Es en los posados donde se tiene un mayor control de los elementos al servicio de la toma fotográfica y donde se planea la composición más cuidadosamente, es aquí donde mejor se puede evidenciar el “estilo del fotógrafo”. Estas instantáneas adquieren la función conativa – expresiva propia de la fotografía de moda, manifiesta la implicación del destinatario en el discurso, y ésta será mayor si el modelo mira a cámara, lo cual es muy habitual en las imágenes estudiadas. En el caso de la fotofija de Los abrazos rotos son las fotografías de escena y del set las que tienen mayor relevancia y los posados quedan en un segundo lugar, a pesar de que en su anterior película, Volver, los posados habían sido muy comunes y encontrábamos gran cantidad y variedad de ellos. Este hecho puede tener que ver con que en la promoción de Volver se hizo un gran hincapié a la vuelta de “las chicas Almodóvar” y al reencuentro de Carmen Maura con el director, interrumpido durante años. Además, el premio a mejor interpretación femenina colectivo otorgado al reparto en el Festival de Cannes de 2006 y la buena crítica que obtuvo la película supuso un éxito no comparable a la mediana aceptación que ha recibido Los abrazos rotos en general. Finalmente, el uso de la fotografía como objeto, evidencia la propia relación de Almodóvar con la fotografía, quien en numerosas ocasiones ha manifestado su pasión por captar imágenes con su cámara. En 2002, Fnac España y El Deseo, Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 144 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 publican un libro con las imágenes que el director fotografía en el rodaje de Hable con ella y en 2011, se publica en la editorial Taschen Los archivos de Pedro Almodóvar, una monografía con imágenes de su archivo, muchas realizadas por él mismo. Por ello, no es sorprendente que Los abrazos rotos nazca de una de estas instantáneas, un paisaje oscuro en el que una pareja que se abraza pasa casi desapercibida. Referencias Bibliográficas ALLISON, M., (2003). Un laberinto español, las películas de Pedro Almodóvar. Madrid: Ocho y medio. ALMODÓVAR, P., Gays y Escaleras. En www.pedroalmodovar.es/PAB_ES_07_T.asp. Consultado el 13/07/12. A L M O D Ó V A R , P . , L a n z a r o t e , l a i s l a q u e m a d a . En www.pedroalmodovar.es/PAB_ES_04_T.asp. Consultado el 13/07/12. AMIGUET, E., J.M., (2000). El concepto de marca en la comunicación audiovisual y publicitaria del cine. Un estudio de los indicadores de marca en el caso Almodóvar. Madrid: Universidad Complutense, Inédita. BERGALA, A., (1995). Magnum cinema, photographs from 50 years of movie- making. Michigan: Phaidon. BOQUERINI, (1989). Pedro Almodóvar. Madrid: Ediciones JC. CARMONA, R., (2005). Cómo se comenta un texto fílmico, Madrid: Cátedra. CUEVAS, A., (1976). Economía cinematográfica. La producción y el comercio de película. Madrid: Antonio Cuevas. DANCE, R. y ROBERTSON, B., (2002). Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography. Los Ángeles: University of California Press. EPPS, B.,S., (2005). Entre la efusividad multicolor y la desaparición monocromática: melodrama, pornografía y abstracción en Hable con ella. En: Almodóvar: el cine como pasión. Actas del Congreso Internacional Pedro Almodóvar. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla La Mancha, pp. 269- 286. GÓMEZ GÓMEZ, A., (2012). El modelo de televisión en Pedro Almodóvar. Cine vs. televisión, en Fonseca, Journal of Communication, n.4, pp. 60-81. HOLGUÍN, A., (1994). Pedro Almodóvar. Madrid: Cátedra. JACOSTE, J., (1996). El productor cinematográfico. Madrid: Síntesis. “Los abrazos rotos. Dailies y montaje en HD”. En C a m e r a m a n . www.cameraman.es/detalleNoticia.php?codigo=255 Consultado el 15 de julio de 2012 Laura Virué Escalera, La fotografía fija en los abrazos rotos: categorías y uso en la construcción de la marca Almodóvar 145 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 112-145 “ M a t í a s N i e t o , f o t o f i j a ” . En C ó m o H a c e r C i n e , 5 / 0 1 / 2 0 0 3 . www.comohacercine.com/articulo.php?id_art=42&id_cat=2. Consultado el 9/07/2012. ONAINDIA, M., (1996). El guión clásico de Hollywood. Barcelona: Paidós. PAREJO JIMÉNEZ, N., (2006). La presencia de la fotografía en el cine. ¡Savia Nutricia? El lugar del realismo en el cine. Córdoba: Junta de Andalucía. p. 241 – 246. PAREJO, N. y MANCEBO, N., (2007). La distancia fotográfica. En: Quintas Jornadas Imagen, Cultura y Tecnología: [celebradas durante los días 3, 4 y 5 de julio de 2006]. Madrid. pp. 165-172. POLIMENI, C., (2004). Pedro Almodóvar y el kitsch español. Madrid: Campo de ideas. SÁNCHEZ LÓPEZ, R., (1997) El cartel de cine. Arte y publicidad. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza. SEGUIN, J. (2005). El espacio-cuerpo en el cine: Pedro Almodóvar o la modificación. En: Almodóvar: el cine como pasión. Actas del Congreso Internacional Pedro Almodóvar. Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla La Mancha, pp. 229-242. SMITH, P. J., (2005). La estética Almodóvar. En: Almodóvar: el cine como pasión. Actas del Congreso Internacional Pedro Almodóvar. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla La Mancha, pp. 141-193. SOTINEL, T., (2010). Pedro Almodóvar. Masters of Cinema. París: Cahiers du Cinema. VILLAFAÑE, J., (1992). Introducción a la teoría de la imagen. Madrid: Pirámide. 146 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 146-158 REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA AMIOT-GUILLOUET, Julie: Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y Francia Recibido: 04/09/2012 – Aceptado: 21/09/2012 ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS, SÍNTOMA DE UN DESLIZ EN LA RECEPCIÓN CRÍTICA DE ALMODÓVAR EN ESPAÑA Y EN FRANCIA LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS, SYMPTOM OF A CHANGE IN THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF ALMODOVAR’S PICTURES IN SPAIN AND FRANCE Julie Amiot-Guillouet Universidad París-Sorbona julie.amiot@gmail.com Resumen: Este trabajo parte de la comparación de la recepción crítica de L o s abrazos rotos en España y en Francia para mostrar cómo puede ayudar a apreciar el cambio que se ha dado en la valoración de la obra de Almodóvar en ambos países. Si en los años 1980 se podía observar que la crítica española era poco favorable a un cineasta que en cambio se granjeaba elogios en el extranjero, esta situación se ha ido modificando a lo largo de los años 1990-2000. Ahora, se puede notar una casi inversión en la aceptación crítica de la obra de Almodóvar, ya que la crítica francesa emite juicios más matizados sobre su obra mientras que la prensa nacional española se muestra mucho más unánime en la celebración de un cineasta del que se espera que contribuya a sacar el cine nacional de las dificultades comerciales que está atravesando. Abstract: This work deals with a comparison of the critical reception of Los abrazos rotos in Spain and France in order to show how it can concur to explain the change that has come in the appreciation of Almodovar’s work in the two countries. If during the eighties Spanish critics were little favorable to a director who on the contrary was widely celebrated abroad, this situation has known a progressive modification through the 1990s and 2000s. Nowadays, there is almost an inversion in the way that critics accept Almodovar’s work: the judgments of French critics appear to be more balanced whereas Spanish national press seems much more unanimous in its celebrating a director who is expected to contribute in getting the national cinema out of the commercial difficulties it has been enduring. Palabras clave: Crítica; España; Francia; Autor; Cambio Key words: Critics; Spain; France; Author; Change. Julie Amiot-Guillouet, Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y Francia 147 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 146-158 La recepción del cine de Pedro Almodóvar, desde sus inicios asociados con la Movida madrileña y frecuentemente tachados de “marginales”, hasta sus contundentes éxitos, tanto entre el público nacional y sobre todo extranjero, como en los festivales internacionales de cine –fase que se estrena con Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1986) y se ha prolongado con altibajos hasta la fecha– siempre ha sido contrastada, en varios niveles. Primero porque, como subrayan María Antonia García de León y Teresa Maldonado en su libro sobre la recepción de Almodóvar, la obra del cineasta “interesó fuera de España muy pronto”, mientras que dentro de España, “las críticas oscilaron entre regulares y pésimas”, hasta tal punto que las autoras se valen del término peyorativo de “una Almodovarada más” para designar la manera como la crítica española apreciaba este cine en la década de los ochenta, es decir, en la fase de transición de su estatuto de “underground” a taquillero y reconocido artísticamente. Para confirmar esta impresión de que la crítica española permanece a la zaga del público y del resto del mundo en su manera de (no) valorar el cine de Almodóvar, las autoras añaden: “no es la crítica española, como en otros casos (Gutiérrez Aragón, Erice, etc.) quien lo aupa sino el público y la crítica extranjera (García León y Maldonado, 1989: 197,201, 203)”. Esta situación resulta tanto más reveladora cuanto que, en lo que a crítica se refiere, parece evidente que el cineasta resulta capaz de granjearse legitimidad en España a partir del momento en que su obra es acuñada por revistas críticas de prestigio, las cuales se publican en el extranjero: en su citado análisis de la recepción crítica de Almodóvar, María Antonia García de León y Teresa Maldonado consideran casi exclusivamente la crítica norteamericana, así como una reseña de la revista francesa Cahiers du cinéma. Por su parte, Antonio Holguín, en el trabajo monográfico que dedica a Almodóvar en 1999, parece confirmar esta tendencia, al citar un comentario publicado en el diario español El Mundo firmado por Manuel Hidalgo y fechado el domingo 12 de abril de 1998, que también acude a revistas extranjeras de prestigio como señal de legitimidad artística: La valoración de Almodóvar no sólo no disminuye, sino que su prestigio se incrementa y los juicios sobre su cine se depuran. Por citar un caso muy significativo, la revista Sight and sound, británica, una de las más relevantes publicaciones especializadas del mundo, dedica su portada del mes de abril a Carne trémula, como en su día Julie Amiot-Guillouet, Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y Francia 148 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 146-158 hiciera la francesa Cahiers du cinéma, e incluye una elogiosísima crítica del film, previa a su estreno en mayo en las islas (Holguín, 1999: 395). Al respecto, cabe notar el papel particular que desempeñó la crítica francesa, y en particular la revista Cahiers du cinéma, que sigue siendo una de las revistas de mayor alcance en cuanto a crítica cinematográfica. La influencia de esta revista en la recepción del cine de Almodóvar fue estudiada por Nancy Berthier en un artículo en el que plantea el problema de la valoración del cine español desde el criterio de la nacionalidad en los Cahiers. Refiriéndose a Almodóvar, la investigadora constata en la revista francesa una “sobrevaloración de Almodóvar, unida a la infravaloración de los otros directores de cine español”, y añade que: Este predominio del cineasta en el imaginario cinematográfico francés a través de los Cahiers du cinéma se podría explicar como uno de los avatares en la revista de la célebre política de los autores cuya sombra sigue extendiéndose sobre ella, a pesar de ser abandonada oficialmente hace ya años. Sin embargo, nuestra experiencia cotidiana de la prensa francesa evidencia que se trata de un rasgo que excede el marco de los Cahiers du cinéma […] (Berthier, 2007: 20-21). El recordar esta tradición contrastada en la recepción española y francesa de la obra de Almodóvar permite entender por qué se puede considerar al respecto que la película Los abrazos rotos, objeto de este monográfico, puede marcar un hito o por lo menos señalar un cambio, por no decir una inversión, en la habitual valoración de las películas almodovarianas, como mostrará el siguiente balance de su recepción en la prensa española y francesa. 1. Los abrazos rotos en la prensa española1: necesidades de la industria y contraste entre la prensa nacional y autonómica A partir de las reseñas que fueron consultadas, la lectura de los recortes de prensa españoles sobre Los abrazos rotos evidencia varios elementos que ilustran la idea de que dicha película señala (o, mejor dicho, confirma) un giro en la valoración del cine de Almodóvar en su propio país. Notablemente, la 1 Este acercamiento a la recepción de Los abrazos rotos, tanto en la prensa española como en la francesa, no pretende ser exhaustiva. Se logró aprovechando los expedientes de reseñas críticas de la película facilitadas por la Filmoteca Española de Madrid, del lado español, y por la BIFI en París, del lado francés. A pesar de las limitaciones que siempre conlleva este tipo de archivos, permiten dar una buena muestra de las tendencias críticas desde ambos lados de los Pirineos para con la película. Julie Amiot-Guillouet, Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y Francia 149 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 146-158 prensa nacional aparece bastante elogiosa a la hora de enjuiciar la película, valiéndose de varios argumentos entre los cuales destacan particularmente dos que se repiten a lo largo de las críticas favorables a la película, tanto en España como en Francia: el homenaje al cine y la actuación de Penélope Cruz, que suscita el entusiasmo de todos los críticos (con contadas y notables excepciones) en los dos países. Esta doble valoración de la película aparece en el subtítulo de la crítica de la película publicada en el diario El País (Minguell, 2009:3): “La película de la semana. Los abrazos rotos, un optimista homenaje al cine con Penélope en escena”. Destaca de esta nota crítica una apreciación que en este caso se convierte en elogio, aunque en otras ocasiones será motivo de rechazo a la película: su “complejidad”, ya que el crítico Jordi Minguell no vacila en escribir que se trata de la “más freudiana y compleja película del director”. Surge aquí la idea de que la calidad de la película estriba en la virtuosidad narrativa del director-guionista, así como de las múltiples referencias al séptimo arte que encierra, haciendo del nivel de enredo y complicación de la trama una garantía de su aceptación, tanto por la crítica como por el público amante de este tipo de cine autorreferencial. Esta misma vertiente crítica se puede percibir en las primeras líneas de la reseña publicada en el diario El Mundo (Martínez, 2009.46), en las que abundan las referencias prestigiosas (Samuel Beckett, Buster Keaton) y artísticamente legítimas para introducir la presentación de Los abrazos rotos, en la que destaca también la dimensión referencial. Surge en estas líneas la palabra “autor” para designar a Beckett, y, por analogía, al propio Almodóvar. Esta perspectiva que consiste en valorar la autoría del cineasta, perceptible en su capacidad por manejar citas y referencias, también se puede comprobar con la fotografía a color que ilustra el artículo, en la que se ve al director en pleno trabajo (se lee al pie de la imagen: “Penélope Cruz, tumbada, y José Luis Gómez escuchan las órdenes de Pedro Almodóvar en un momento del rodaje de ‘Los abrazos rotos’”), haciendo ademanes muy expresivos que ilustran el acto creador al que se refiere el texto. Estos dos artículos, sacados de los dos periódicos españoles de referencia, marcan la pauta de los criterios desde los cuales la prensa nacional alaba la película de manera bastante unánime. Siguiendo esta vía, el periódico La Razón (Sánchez, 2009:52-53) presenta la crítica de la película con el título “Almodóvar mira el ombligo del cine”, y el crítico Sergi Sánchez no vacila en aludir a la Julie Amiot-Guillouet, Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y Francia 150 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 146-158 dimensión “metatextual” de la película, noción que sirve para evidenciar la calidad artística del film. La idea de la complejidad argumental y referencial llega al paroxismo en la reseña publicada en El cultural, (Sardá, 2009: 43-47), en la que Juan Sardá no duda en escribir que la película “contiene un enigma en su interior tan difícil de desvelar como la piedra Rosetta”. Retomando los mismos argumentos, el periódico El Correo (Crespo, 2009: 30-31) añade por su parte, como prueba del prestigio y de la legitimidad artística que ha alcanzado el cineasta español la buena acogida de la que goza en el extranjero, tanto desde el punto de vista de la crítica y de los premios que ha ganado, como del público: se presenta en efecto a Almodóvar como “nuestro cineasta más internacional”, y se recuerda de paso que Penélope Cruz obtuvo un Óscar a raíz de su actuación en Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona, de Woody Allen. ¿Cómo explicar tal unanimidad en la celebración de la película? Tal vez se puedan aducir dos explicaciones complementarias: primero, la actitud de desprecio que observaran María Antonia García de León y Teresa Maldonado a finales de los años 1980 en la crítica española se ha ido modificando con el tiempo, en un proceso en el que, como vimos, la aceptación de Almodóvar e incluso su conversión en parangón del cine español en el extranjero, desempeñaron un papel importante. Además de este innegable elemento, el periódico El Economista (I, 2009:30) introduce otro factor, coyuntural, que puede ayudar a entender las buenas críticas que Los abrazos rotos logró granjearse en la prensa nacional: en efecto, la crítica que dedica a la película se titula “Almodóvar al rescate”, y explica que se espera de ella nada menos que contribuya a sacar el cine español de la “crisis de taquilla que atraviesa”. Así, en un contexto de dificultades para el cine nacional, E l Economista sugiere que Almodóvar es el Mesías que la industria espera para salir de este mal paso, o por lo menos que esta situación difícil hace que el cineasta merezca un benevolente empuje por parte de una crítica que no siempre se ha mostrado complaciente hacia su obra. Dentro de este marco globalmente laudatorio, destacan sin embargo sectores que no acogen la película con el mismo entusiasmo que la mayoría de la prensa nacional. Para terminar con ésta, se encuentran dentro de los artículos consultados dos que desentonan con el resto, valiéndose de los mismos argumentos que en las críticas elogiosas, pero manejados en una perspectiva opuesta. Así, I n f o r m a c i ó n (Dopazo, 2009, 61) plantea la incursión de Julie Amiot-Guillouet, Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y Francia 151 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 146-158 Almodóvar en distintos géneros cinematográficos como un fracaso, perceptible desde el título de la reseña: “Almodóvar en territorio ajeno”. Antonio Dopazo desarrolla la idea para demostrar que Almodóvar malogra estas referencias y no es capaz de situarse a la altura dramática de sus modelos del cine hollywoodense clásico entre los que se menciona a Douglas Sirk: para el crítico, Almodóvar resulta mucho más convincente en sus ámbitos familiares, es decir los de la comedia y no de los dramas sofisticados. La condena resulta tajante: “Es el menos estimulante de los últimos trabajos de Almodóvar y marca un significativo paso atrás respecto a ‘Volver’’’. Por su parte, el periódico Epoca (Casas, 2009: 61) se hace más radical aún: para la crítica Belén Ester Casas, lo que para muchos de sus colegas señala la madurez y el alcance artístico de la película, a saber las referencias cinematográficas de las que se nutre el film, se convierte en “pretencioso autohomenaje”, un “plagio de sí mismo”. Lo que sugiere el título de la reseña (“Almodóvar ‘reloaded’”, referencia al título del segundo opus de la superproducción comercial hollywoodense Matrix que se inscribe en la absoluta continuación del primero) es que Los abrazos rotos no es sino la repetición de lo que la crítica llama al principio de su texto “la receta mágica” antes de concluir que aunque en algunos momentos, la película “nos recuerda al Almodóvar más loco que ya no volverá”, al fin y al cabo “no cuela”. Como prueba de la saña con la que la crítica arremete contra la película, la actriz Penélope Cruz, cuya actuación fue homenajeada por todos los demás, sólo es caracterizada de “siempre eficiente”, y descrita como uno de los elementos caricaturescos de la famosa “receta” almodovariana: “ponga a Penélope Cruz a remojo de sus propias lágrimas y téngala llorando sin parar, péinela, vístala y muestre bien su belleza”. Una muñeca que actúa de manera estereotipada, que dista mucho de la magnífica actriz ganadora del Óscar… De manera significativa, la proporción de artículos elogiosos y críticos se invierte en la prensa autonómica, como si ésta se mostrara menos admiradora de las proezas referenciales de Almodóvar o de la situación del cine nacional en la que parece bien claro que Almodóvar no va a desempeñar ningún papel de Salvador. De los 13 artículos consultados –se descartaron los que se contentaban con describir la película sin emitir un juicio sobre ella– sólo 3 la juzgan favorablemente, mientras que el resto emite opiniones ya sea matizadas, ya sea francamente críticas. Los argumentos que se encuentran para criticar la Julie Amiot-Guillouet, Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y Francia 152 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 146-158 película son los mismos que los que utiliza la prensa nacional para valorarla: la mezcla de referencias que hace la película ilegible y formal, y la repetición por parte del director de los ingredientes típicos de su “estilo”, considerada en las reseñas más críticas como una descarada y vacía forma de autopromoción, como en el periódico vasco Gara, (Landaluce, 2009: 43) que se vale de un comentario entre sumamente irónico y francamente peyorativo: Superado el vendaval promocional que hemos padecido y degustado ya el maná de celuloide que el divino manchego regala a las paupérrimas arcas de la cinematografía española, caemos en la evidente realidad de que hemos asistido a un nuevo fiasco perpetrado por un Almodóvar que, una y otra vez, se estrella contra los molinos de viento cada vez que pretende ahondar en el drama con mayúsculas. A continuación, toda la reseña se empeña en condenar la película desde todas las perspectivas posibles (el argumento dramático, las referencias a autores del cine clásico, etc.). 2. Recepción francesa de la película: un acercamiento plural y matizado desde la perspectiva del “autor” Desde el lado francés, también se puede observar en la valoración de la película una evolución, que no impide ciertas permanencias. De los 16 artículos consultados, 8 despliegan comentarios entusiastas a la película, 4 se muestran más matizados en sus juicios, y 4 expresan opiniones claramente hostiles al film. Lo que ya de por sí significa que la crítica de cine francesa dista mucho de la “sobrevaloración” sistemática de Almodóvar que Nancy Berthier observara en los Cahiers du cinéma. Lo que sin embargo no ha cambiado es la perspectiva a partir de la que se enjuician las películas del director, es decir la del “autor” de su propia obra de cine. Encontramos así en Francia el mismo argumento que ya vimos manejado por la crítica española, y la lectura detallada de las reseñas muestra que, al igual que en España, el enfoque auteurista puede servir tanto para alabar la película (en tanto que representativa del estilo del maestro), como para criticarla (en nombre de una facilidad repetitiva y de una artificial autocelebración de sus propios clichés y estereotipos). También cabe observar, de manera más perceptible entre los críticos franceses que entre los españoles, que el hacer una reseña crítica de una película de Almodóvar es en muchas Julie Amiot-Guillouet, Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y Francia 153 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 146-158 ocasiones una oportunidad para expresar puntos de vista cuya subjetividad se asume plenamente y se expresa en primera persona, tanto en las críticas favorables como en las que condenan la película, ya sea de manera matizada, ya sea de manera radical. Así por ejemplo, Eric Libiot en la revista Le Point2 (Libiot, 2009) empieza su texto bajo la forma de un testimonio personal de sus gustos y disgustos frente a las distintas películas de Almódovar, emitiendo juicios personales que nunca se toma la pena de justificar: “Me gusta poco Kika, Entre tinieblas me divierte, La flor de mi secreto me aburre, pero Hable con ella es una obra maestra de tal tamaño que me reconcilió con toda la filmografía venidera de Almodóvar”. Este procedimiento le permite a continuación destacar los elementos que le permiten valorar Los abrazos rotos dentro de la filmografía del director. En un tono mucho más desabrido, se puede leer en el periódico satírico Charlie Hebdo: “Para los (de los que formo parte) que a menudo resultaron indiferentes a las películas de Almodóvar, Los abrazos rotos, amplia empresa de reciclaje ombligo-centrada, no provocará mucho cambio”3. Este rasgo se debe sin duda relacionar con el estatuto que ha adquirido la crítica de cine en Francia desde los heroicos años 1950 durante los que se fraguó la mirada intransigente y con toda la arbitrariedad reivindicada que supuso la famosa “política de los autores” ideada en las columnas de la revista Cahiers du cinéma a mediados del decenio. Las huellas de esta perspectiva se pueden vislumbrar en las dos reseñas citadas, como si el hecho de expresar un punto de vista que desentona con los elogios que se suele granjear Almodóvar fuera una prueba de la integridad del crítico, más allá del valor intrínseco de la película y de su director. La referencia al concepto del “autor” como categoría de juicio crítico de las películas funciona de manera implícita en la mayoría de los críticos, como una postura totalmente interiorizada que ya (en el año 2009) no necesita justificarse y ni siquiera expresarse claramente. Prueba de ello es la tendencia, más frecuente aún que en la crítica española, en jugar en los títulos de las reseñas con referencias a otras películas de Almodóvar, como en prívate jokes que los críticos franceses comparten supuestamente con sus lectores, 2 “Je goûte peu Kika, Dans les ténèbres m’amuse, La Fleur de mon secret m’ennuie, mais Parle avec elle est un tel chef d’œuvre qu’il m’a réconcilié avec toute la filmographie à venir d’Almodóvar.” De las reseñas francesas, todas las traducciones al español son mías. 3 Etreintes brisées de Pedro Almodóvar. En: Charlie Hebdo, París, 27 de mayo de 2009. “Pour ceux (dont je suis) que les films d’Almodovar ont souvent laissés indifférents, Etreintes brisées, vaste entreprise de recyclage nombrilo-centrée, ne fera guère bouger les lignes.” Julie Amiot-Guillouet, Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y Francia 154 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 146-158 todos aficionados al auteurismo. Un rasgo que otra vez se encuentra tanto en las críticas elogiosas como en las más severas. Así, Gérard Lefort, en el diario Libération, (Lefort, 2009) titula su texto “Pedro al borde de la Cruz de nervios”, jugando, además de la referencia a Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios con la analogía sonora entre “Cruz” y “crise” en francés… lo que afirma de entrada el virtuosismo del crítico en su propio oficio. Por su parte, Hervé Aubron, en los Cahiers du cinéma (Aubron, 2009: 40-41), titula su artículo “La peau sur les os” (“en los huesos”), haciendo referencia a la versión francesa del título de Carne trémula, traducido como En chair et en os (En carne y hueso). También el artículo ya citado de Le Point se titula, significativamente al respecto, “La ley del deseo”, en referencia a la película de Almodóvar estrenada en 1987. En un país en el que la crítica valora tanto la noción de autor, que ha pasado a formar parte de su propio mito glorioso, no es de extrañar que los artículos que alaban la película lo hagan en nombre del talento del autor, considerado en la perspectiva de una trayectoria ascendente que lo lleva a mejorarse de película en película. Esta idea se encuentra en la crítica citada de los Cahiers, elogiosa (cómo no, así permanece la revista fiel a su tradición de valoración del cine almodovariano…), porque ve en Los abrazos rotos una señal de la maduración constante del estilo de su autor: “Almodóvar no hace sino precisar, de película en película, una sequedad creciente, una melancolía sofocada, y acaso una morbidez que ha ido agudizando desde mediados de los años 19904.” De manera más directa, Emmanuel Hecht, en las columnas de la revista Les Echos (Hecht, 2009), escribe: “El espectador se complace en volver a encontrar los temas, los procedimientos del cineasta español y esta connivencia es la huella de los grandes autores.”5 La misma idea se percibe en la crítica entusiasta de Arnaud Schwartz en el diario La Croix (Schwartz , 2009): “Los abrazos rotos tranquilizará a los que se inquietan del nivel de inspiración del maestro español, que alcanza una nueva cumbre en su arte.”6 La reseña de Le Point llega a convertir la noción de autor en un auténtico fetiche, que tiene poderes mágicos 4 “Almodovar ne fait que préciser, de film en film, une sécheresse grandissante, une mélancolie suffoquée, sinon une morbidité qu’il aiguise depuis le milieu des années 1990.” 5 “Le spectateur a plaisir à retrouver les thèmes, les procédés du cinéaste espagnol et cette connivence est la marque des grands auteurs.” 6 “Etreintes brisées, rassurera les inquiets sur le niveau d’inspiration du maître espagnol, qui atteint un nouveau sommet de son art.” Julie Amiot-Guillouet, Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y Francia 155 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 146-158 frente a los que el crítico (por otra parte tan virtuoso, como hemos visto) no puede sino rendirse, abandonando la argumentación crítica, es decir, el fundamento de su oficio: “Algo ha pasado, que desafía las leyes de la crítica –que, por otra parte, no existen7”. El colmo del entusiasmo hacia el autor se encuentra en el texto de Danièle Heyman publicado en la revista Marianne (Heyman, 2009), que empieza con un muy expresivo “¡Ay! ¡Pedro! ¡Pedro! Gracias por la película ésa, tan absolutamente Almodóvar, tan exactamente lo que hemos querido, queremos y seguiremos queriendo en su cine”, y lo concluye con un contundente: “!Gracias, Pedro!”8. Por lo demás, encontramos en la crítica francesa los mismos argumentos que en la española a la hora de celebrar la película, en particular las referencias al cine, la mezcla de géneros y la audacia narrativa. La reseña de Le Figaro Madame9 explica que “Almódovar no se contenta con digerir los grandes mitos, los integra en el corazón de un huracán narrativo perfectamente dominado que clama su fe intacta en el cine”, cuando por su parte la crítica publicada en la revista L e Nouvel Observateur (MER, 2009) admira su “gusto por la puesta en abismo [llevado a] un punto extremo”10. Por fin, observamos que la mezcla de géneros y registros dentro de la película también sirve para alabarla, como en la reseña de David Fontaine publicada en el periódico satírico Le Canard Enchaîné (Fontaine , 2009) que ve en la película “un Almodóvar de primera” gracias a “un relato retrospectivo virtuoso” que coexiste con “una forma más clásica, inspirada de los grandes melodramas americanos y europeos de los años 1950.”11 En cuanto a las críticas desfavorables a la película, se observa la misma dinámica que en la prensa española, es decir, la presencia de los mismos argumentos que en la crítica elogiosa, pero interpretados de una manera distinta. Así, en las reseñas que expresan un punto de vista más matizado hacia el film, se observa que las esperanzas que suscita el autor, colmadas en el caso 7 “Quelque chose s’est passé, qui défie les lois de la critique –lesquelles, d’ailleurs, n’existent pas”. 8 “Ah ! Pedro ! Pedro ! Merci pour ce film-ci, si totalement Almodovar, si exactement tout ce qu’on aime, a aimé et aimera dans son cinéma”, “Merci, Pedro !”. 9 “Etreintes brisées”. Attraction fatale. En: Le Figaro Madame, París, 16 de mayo de 2009. “Almodóvar ne se contente pas de digérer les grands mythes, il les inclut au cœur d’un ouragan narratif parfaitement maîtrisé qui clame sa foi intacte pour le cinéma.”] 10 “Son goût pour la mise en abyme [poussé à] un point extrême.” 11 “Un Almodovar grand cru”, “un récit rétrospectif virtuose”, “une forme plus classique, inspirée des grands mélodrames américains et européens des années 1950“. Julie Amiot-Guillouet, Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y Francia 156 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 146-158 de las críticas favorables, resultan defraudadas. En otras palabras, sigue operando el concepto del autor, pero con resultados opuestos. Así, la reseña del diario Le Monde (Sotinel, 2009) empieza proclamando su decepción: “No es lo que se esperaba de Pedro Almodóvar.” Las referencias cinematográficas se convierten entonces en un “reciclaje [que] atestigua una crisis de inspiración”12. La misma idea de un autor que defrauda al crítico se encuentra en la reseña del periódico L ’ H u m a n i t é - D i m a n c h e (MM, 2009), en la que leemos: “este Almodóvar 2009 parece menos carnal que otras entregas”13. La idea también se despliega en las críticas más radicales hacia la película: para Lisa Gougué, en el diario France-Soir (Gougué, 2009), “Almodóvar se duerme en los laureles”14, cuando en su artículo ya citado Gérard Lefort opina que “con los ojos bien cerrados, Almodóvar se niega a ver que el mundo ha cambiado y su cine también. Que ya se fueron los tiempos en los que se estilaba andar con la movida.15” 3. Conclusiones Este repaso a la recepción crítica de Los abrazos rotos desde los dos lados de los Pirineos permite destacar varios fenómenos. Primero, se observa un cambio en la tónica de las reseñas en ambos países, que remata una evolución que empezó a finales de los años 1980 y se fue acentuando a lo largo de los años 1990-2000. En efecto, si en épocas pasadas se notaba un fuerte contraste en la valoración de las películas de Almodóvar en España y en Francia, con un rechazo predominante en el primer caso, y una bastante unánime celebración en el segundo, la situación ha evolucionado: se puede observar con el ejemplo de la película que nos ha ocupado aquí una reconfiguración de este esquema, por no decir una casi inversión, ya que, si nos atenemos a la prensa nacional española, se comprueba que la aceptación de la película es bastante buena en España. Al contrario, en Francia, el balance es más mitigado: si la mitad de las críticas estudiadas siguen siendo elogiosas, sobre todo en nombre del “autor” cuyo estilo se va puliendo con el tiempo, ya no faltan reseñas que expresan un punto de 12 “Ce n’est pas ce qu’on attendait de Pedro Almodovar”, “recyclage [qui] témoigne d’une crise d’inspiration”. 13 “Cet Almodovar 2009 apparaît moins charnel que d’autres millésimes.” 14 “Almodovar se repose sur ses acquis.” 15 “Les yeux grands fermés, Almodovar ne veut pas voir que le monde a changé et son cinéma aussi. Que le temps s’est évaporé où il faisait bon se bouger movida.” Julie Amiot-Guillouet, Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y Francia 157 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 146-158 vista más matizado, por no decir francamente hostil a la película y a su director en algunos casos. Los que sí trasparece de la lectura de todas estas reseñas es al fin y al cabo una especie de estandarización de los juicios críticos en ambos países, a base de una interiorización – tal vez algo más aguda y perceptible en Francia – del concepto del autor que es el punto de partida tanto de las críticas favorables como de las opuestas a la película. En filigrana de estos textos se aprecia la idea según la que el “buen cine” sólo puede ser un cine de autor auténtico, capaz de manejar referencias de las que también se valen los críticos, en un juego de espejos que les permite al fin y al cabo granjearse algo del prestigio del que suelen gozar con más facilidad los creadores. Así, finalmente, más que del desliz crítico hacia la obra de Almodóvar, la recepción en la prensa de Los abrazos rotos puede verse como el ejemplar síntoma de la eterna relación de amor y rivalidad que une a los críticos con los cineastas. Referencias bibliográficas AUBRON, Hervé (mayo de 2009). “La peau sur les os“. En: Cahiers du cinéma, París, pp. 40-41. BERTHIER, Nancy (2007). “Crítica cinematográfica y nacionalidad“. En: BERTHIER, Nancy y SEGUIN, Jean-Claude (dir.), Cine, nación y nacionalidades en España. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, pp. 11-24. CASAS, Belén Ester (20 de marzo de 2009). “Almodóvar reloaded“. En: Epoca, Sección reportaje, Madrid, p. 61. CRESPO, Borja (13 de marzo de 2009). “Pedro, en estado puro“. En: El correo, guía para salir, sección cine, Madrid, pp. 30-31. DOPAZO, Antonio (22 de marzo de 2009). “Almodóvar en territorio ajeno“. En: Información, sección cultura, Madrid, p. 61. FONTAINE, David (27 de mayo de 2009). “Etreintes brisées (Aveuglément) “. En: Le Canard Enchaîné, París. GARCÍA DE LEÓN, María Antonia y MALDONADO, Teresa (1989), Pedro Almodóvar, la otra España cañí (sociología y crítica cinematográficas). Toledo: Area de cultura, respectivamente p. 197, 201 y 203. GOUGUE, Lisa (20 de mayo de 2009). “Dans les bras de Penélope Cruz“. En: L’Humanité-Dimanche, París. HECHT, Emmanuel (20 de mayo de 2009). “La vie en miettes“. En: Les Echos, París. HEYMAN, Danièle (16 de mayo de 2009). “Etreintes brisées, Almodovar talent intact“. En: Marianne, París. Julie Amiot-Guillouet, Los abrazos rotos, síntoma de un desliz en la recepción crítica de Almodóvar en España y Francia 158 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 146-158 HIDALGO, Manuel (1998). “El Nautilus”. En: El Mundo, domingo 12 de abril, Madrid. HOLGUÍN, Antonio (1999), Pedro Almodóvar, Madrid: Cátedra. I. L. (14 de marzo de 2009). “Almodóvar al rescate“. En: El Economista, sección Evasión, Madrid, p. 30. LANDALUZE, Koldo (24 de marzo de 2009). “Los abrazos rotos. Una película ciega“. En: Gara, Sección Kultura, San Sebastián, p. 43. LEFORT, Gérard (20 de mayo de 2009). “Pedro au bord de la Cruz de nerfs“. En: Libération, París. LIBIOT, Eric (14 de mayo de 2009). “La ley del deseo“. En: Le Point, París. M. M. (27 de mayo de 2009). “Etreintes brisées. Almodovar, le cinéaste du destin des femmes“. En: L’Humanité-Dimanche, París. M.-E. R (21 de mayo de 2009). “Etreintes brisées, de Pedro Almodovar“. En: Le Nouvel Observateur, París. MARTÍNEZ, Luis (7 de marzo de 2009). “Almodóvar contra sus demonios“. En: El Mundo, sección cultura, Madrid, p. 46. MINGUELL, Jordi (2009). “La película de la semana, Los abrazos rotos“. En : El País (20 de marzo), Madrid, suplemento EP3, Cine, p. 3. SÁNCHEZ, Sergi (20 de marzo de 2009). “Almodóvar mira el ombligo del cine“. En: La Razón, sección cine, Madrid, pp. 52-53. SARDÁ, Juan (13 de marzo de 2009). “Pedro Almodóvar: No he pensado nunca en términos de ética profesional pero sé que existe, la siento”. En: E l Cultural, sección cine, Madrid, pp. 43-47. SCHWARTZ, Arnaud (20 de mayo de 2009). « Le cinéma de Pedro Almodovar qui perfectionne la vie ». En: La Croix, París. SOTINEL, Thomas (20 de mayo de 2009). “Almodovar fait briller son manque d’inspiration“. En: Le Monde, París. 159 REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA OLID, Miguel: El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla Recibido: 30/08/2011 – Aceptado: 20/09/2011 ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 EL FRACASO COMERCIAL DE LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS. ANÁLISIS DE LA RECAUDACIÓN EN TAQUILLA THE FINANCIAL FAIL OF LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS (BROKEN EMBRACES). ANALYSIS OF THE BOX OFFICE Miguel Olid Resumen: Los abrazos rotos fue un fracaso comercial. Después del éxito de Volver, Los abrazos rotos consiguió menos de la mitad de la recaudación y casi un tercio de espectadores. También obtuvo peores resultados que el resto de las películas dirigidas por Almodóvar en este siglo. El fracaso no sólo sucedió en España, sino también en Francia, Estados Unidos y fue, de las cinco últimas, la que en menos países se ha estrenado. ¿Cuáles pudieron ser los motivos de este fracaso? En España coincidió en cartel con Gran Torino de Clint Eastwood, con un público similar y también adulto. Malas críticas en su estreno, una agria polémica con el principal crítico de cine, y una excesiva duración (se trata de la más larga en la obra de Almodóvar) pudieron influir en estos malos resultados económicos. Abstract: L o s a b r a z o s r o t o s (B r o k e n e m b r a c e s ) was a financial failed movie. After the box office success of Volver, Los abrazos rotos got less of half of the total gross in Spain and almost the third of its audience. This movie got the worse box office tham the Almodovar’s movies released in this century. The fail was also in France, the United States and was, among the five latest movies, the less sale around the world. Which reasons could cause this financial fail? The release date in Spain was the same day of Gran Torino, directed by Clint Eastwood, with a similar and also adult audience. The movie had very bad reviews, Almodóvar and the main s p a n i s h c r i t i c h a d a bitter controversial and an over length running time could cause this financial fail. Palabras clave: Almodóvar; taquilla; crítica de cine; fracaso; éxito. Key words: Almodóvar; box office; film review; financial fail; success. Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 160 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 1. Introducción Los abrazos rotos (Broken embraces en su título en inglés), de Pedro Almodóvar, se estrenó el 18 de marzo de 2009, justo un lustro después de La mala educación. En su lanzamiento se proyectó en 246 salas de toda España, donde permaneció en cartel durante 16 semanas. Según datos del Ministerio de Cultura obtuvo una recaudación total de algo más de cuatro millones de euros (4.172.843,54) y fue vista por 696.622 espectadores. Esto la convirtió en la novena producción española más taquillera de 2009, una posición inaudita para una película de Almodóvar (al menos en las estrenadas el presente siglo; Hable con ella, La mala educación y La piel desnuda se situaron en 4º lugar mientras que V o l v e r fue la 2º, tras Alatriste). Además, ese año, entre las ocho que precedían Los abrazos rotos figuraban títulos como Fuga de cerebros, Spanish movie y Mentiras y gordas. 2. Fracaso comercial en España Se había despertado mucha expectación con Los abrazos rotos, tras el gran éxito que logró con Volver, en la que Almodóvar regresaba a sus raíces y en la que se reencontraba con su antigua actriz fetiche, Carmen Maura, pero los resultados, comparados con el resto de las películas de Almodóvar estrenadas en los primeros años de este siglo, fueron decepcionantes. La notable suma de premios obtenidos por Volver, la repercusión mundial que alcanzó y, especialmente, los excelentes resultados en taquilla de este filme propiciaron que Pedro Almodóvar pudiera contar con el doble de presupuesto para su siguiente producción, pasando de los siete millones y medio de euros a los quince de Los abrazos rotos. Sin embargo, como se puede apreciar en el cuadro nº 1, el rendimiento económico de este filme no fue parejo con la duplicación del presupuesto. Así, de entrada, a pesar de contar con un mayor número de copias en su lanzamiento (246 frente a las 228 de Volver) la recaudación en el primer fin de semana fue prácticamente la mitad respecto al título precedente. La diferencia en el rendimiento entre ambos títulos creció notablemente en los ingresos totales que consiguió cada una y aumentó aún más si tomamos como referencia el número de españoles que acudieron a verla al cine, ya que casi uno de cada tres Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 161 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 espectadores de Volver compró una entrada de Los abrazos rotos. Similar proporción también se puede apreciar al analizar el rendimiento medio de cada copia en ambos títulos. Cuadro nº 1 TÍTULO VOLVER LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS Fecha de estreno en España 16/03/2006 18/03/2009 Número de salas en estreno en España 228 246 Presupuesto € 7.500.000 € 15.000.000 Recaudación primer fin de semana España € 1.875.000,00 € 978.046,00 Recaudación total en España € 10.242.587,56 € 4.172.843,54 Rendimiento por copia € 44.924 € 16.963 Número de espectadores total en España 1.930.895 696.622 Datos del Ministerio de Cultura Podría argumentarse que la comparación con Volver no es del todo justa por la extraordinaria repercusión que logró este filme de modo que incluimos un segundo cuadro donde se pueden comparar los resultados de taquilla así como número de espectadores con la película que precedió a Volver, La mala educación. Este título partió con dos dificultades que lastraban de antemano su explotación comercial. El primer factor era intrínseco y se encontraba en el propio planteamiento argumental de la película. Al contar una historia de abusos sexuales en un colegio católico durante el régimen franquista, pudo provocar el rechazo de un determinado sector del público potencial descontento con el tratamiento que podía dar a este tema. Independientemente de este elemento, más subjetivo y difícil de cuantificar en una determinada reducción de espectadores, La mala educación sí contó con un obstáculo que dificultó su explotación comercial y que bien pudo condicionar su rendimiento: el conflicto entre la distribuidora Warner (la misma de todas sus últimas películas) y la cadena de cines Renoir, que provocó la retirada de la película de una docena de ANÁLISIS COMPARATIVO RECAUDACIÓN EN TAQUILLA ESPAÑA VOLVER / LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 162 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 cines en Madrid (sólo de esta capital salieron siete copias), Barcelona, Zaragoza, Palma de Mallorca y Cuenca. Este conflicto, recogido ampliamente por la prensa nacional, fue protagonizado por Enrique González Macho (actual presidente de la Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España), como propietario de dicha cadena de cines. González Macho retiró no sólo este título sino también otras copias del catálogo de Warner como Mystic River, de Clint Eastwood, en protesta por lo que consideraba un acto de deslealtad empresarial de Warner. Cuadro nº 2 TÍTULO LA MALA EDUCACIÓN LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS Fecha de estreno en España 18/03/2004 18/03/2009 Número de salas en estreno en España 158 246 Presupuesto € 5.000.000 € 15.000.000 Recaudación primer fin de semana España € 1.195.000,00 € 978.046,00 Recaudación total en España € 6.110.253,78 € 4.172.843,54 Rendimiento por copia € 38.672 € 16.963 Número de espectadores total en España 1.241.637 696.622 Datos del Ministerio de Cultura Este conflicto no fue el causante de que sólo se estrenara en poco más de centenar y medio de pantallas, una cifra muy inferior en una película de Almodóvar (su último trabajo, La piel que habito, llegó a 287 salas). Sin embargo, a pesar de que Los abrazos rotos tuvo un 55% más de salas que La mala educación (y a pesar de triplicar su presupuesto e indirectamente la partida destinada a publicidad y marketing), ésta logró más de 200.000 euros de recaudación en el primer fin de semana y casi dos millones más de euros en la recaudación total en salas. Dada la notable diferencia de copias y los mayores ingresos de La mala educación, el rendimiento por copia de este título más que duplicó el de Los abrazos rotos. Similares cifras nos encontramos si realizamos un análisis comparativo entre este filme y el primero que realizó Almodóvar la pasada década, Hable con ella. ANÁLISIS COMPARATIVO RECAUDACIÓN EN TAQUILLA ESPAÑA LA MALA EDUCACIÓN / LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 163 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 Tal como se puede ver en el tercer cuadro, al igual que sucedió con La mala educación, Hable con ella superó los seis millones de euros de recaudación consiguiendo, por tanto, una recaudación superior de algo más de dos millones de euros que Los abrazos rotos. En cuanto al número de espectadores, la diferencia es aún mayor, ya que Hable con ella casi duplica a la película objeto de análisis en este monográfico. Cuadro nº 3 TÍTULO HABLE CON ELLA LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS Fecha de estreno en España 15/03/2002 18/03/2009 Recaudación total en España € 6.208.691,42 € 4.172.843,54 Número de espectadores total en España 1.367.450 696.622 Datos del Ministerio de Cultura Por último, si realizamos un análisis comparativo entre Los abrazos rotos y la siguiente (y última) producción de Almodóvar, La piel que habito, de nuevo podemos comprobar cómo las cifras de Los abrazos rotos siguen siendo peores, tanto en recaudación, como en asistencia de espectadores. Así, aunque no alcanza, por bastante diferencia, la recaudación de seis millones de euros, como sí habían conseguido las tres películas precedentes, la suma total de la taquilla es de más de 400.000 euros. También fue bastante más lo que recaudó en su primer fin de semana, algo más de 200.000 euros. Sin embargo, donde la diferencia es menor, es en el apartado de espectadores, dado que la diferencia entre ambas es de tan sólo 30.000 asistentes. Cuadro nº 4 TÍTULO LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS LA PIEL QUE HABITO ANÁLISIS COMPARATIVO RECAUDACIÓN EN TAQUILLA ESPAÑA HABLE CON ELLA / LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS ANÁLISIS COMPARATIVO RECAUDACIÓN EN TAQUILLA ESPAÑA LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS / LA PIEL QUE HABITO Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 164 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 Fecha de estreno en España 18/03/2009 01/09/2011 Número de salas en estreno en España 246 287 Presupuesto € 15.000.000 € 10.000.000 Recaudación primer fin de semana España € 978.046,00 € 1.207.937,00 Recaudación total en España € 4.172.843,54 € 4.604.903,78 Número de espectadores total en España 696.622 726.713 Datos del Ministerio de Cultura 3. Razones de este fracaso comercial Realizado este análisis comparativo con cada una de las películas de Pedro Almodóvar estrenadas desde la pasada década, podemos colegir que Los abrazos rotos ha supuesto su mayor fracaso comercial: ha obtenido menos ingresos en términos absolutos y en proporción al número de copias en su lanzamiento, ha tenido las peores cifras de taquilla en el primer fin de semana y es la que ha sido vista por un menor número de espectadores. Siendo todos ellos datos negativos, hemos de añadir que todo ello coincide además en la producción de mayor presupuesto de las realizadas hasta el momento por Pedro Almodóvar. ¿Cuáles han podido ser las razones de este fracaso económico en España? ¿Qué factores pudieron influir en que esta, a priori, atractiva propuesta de Almodóvar no lograra suscitar el interés del público, siendo, además, su regreso al cine tras el gran éxito de Volver? Son varios los aspectos que hay que analizar en este sentido y que siempre están presentes cuando se estudia el lanzamiento de una película. El primero es la elección del día en que la película comienza su andadura comercial, tal como señala Jaime Fuertes: “Todo el trabajo de diseño de promoción de un proyecto va encaminado hacia una de las decisiones más peliagudas de todo el proceso: elegir una buena fecha de estreno” (Fuertes, 2008: 45). En la industria del cine es habitual que producciones de este calibre tengan ya este día establecido antes de comenzar siquiera el rodaje. Es el caso de la distribuidora Warner Spain que puede llegar a anticipar el estreno de una película con un año y medio de antelación, cuando ésta no deja de ser un proyecto, del que sólo se anticipa el nombre del director y la productora, porque Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 165 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 se desconoce incluso quiénes formarán el elenco protagonista. En cuanto a la fecha, Almodóvar, es un director que se deja llevar más por la tradición y por cuestiones personales, al menos en el período analizado, que por un estricto criterio profesional. Salvo La piel que habito, las otras cuatro películas que ha rodado en los últimos doce años se han estrenado siempre en las mismas fechas, a mediados de marzo (con un margen de cuatro días, entre el 15 y el 18). No debe entenderse este detalle como un capricho exclusivo de Almodóvar porque se da con cierta frecuencia en directores con el poder y la capacidad de poder elegir la fecha de estreno (potestad de la que carecen la inmensa mayoría de los directores). Así, por citar sólo a dos directores de renombre, Fernando Trueba y Santiago Segura, coinciden con el cineasta manchego en mostrar, título a título, su preferencia por una fecha en concreto: principios de diciembre en el caso de Trueba y al igual que Almodóvar, en marzo, en el caso de Segura. Para los tres directores se trata de una cuestión supersticiosa; los buenos resultados que cosecharon con alguna película (Belle epoque y Torrente 1) les lleva a querer estrenar los siguientes trabajos en la misma fecha. Es de señalar que tras el fracaso de Los abrazos rotos, Almodóvar rompió con la tradición de estrenar a mediados de marzo y La piel que habito se estrenó en España el primer día de septiembre. Ejemplo de este carácter supersticioso lo encontramos en un artículo de Sara Brito en Público cuando la periodista recoge un fragmento del blog de Almodóvar la noche en que está pendiente de conocer los datos de recaudación del primer fin de semana de La piel que habito, mientras ve en televisión un partido de Nadal en el US Open: “Si gana Nadal la taquilla se portará bien con La piel que habito. Si pierde... No quiero ni pensarlo” (Brito, 2011). Nadal ganó y la recaudación superó a la del primer fin de semana de Los abrazos rotos. La importancia de la elección del día no se debe exclusivamente a la elección de una fecha idónea según las características de la película (un título destinado a un público infantil siempre preferentemente en vacaciones escolares, por ejemplo), sino que también está condicionado por qué otras películas se estrenan ese mismo día. Tal como recoge Fuertes: En Estados Unidos [...] si dos películas que buscan el mismo público deciden estrenar en el mismo día, acaban recurriendo a un árbitro para decidir cuál de ellas cambiará su fecha de estreno. [...] El Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 166 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 encargado del arbitraje es una empresa de investigación de mercados llamada National Research Group (NRG)” (Fuertes, 2008: 48). Cuando dos películas eligen un mismo día recurren a esta entidad que, de acuerdo con un informe semanal que elabora sobre preferencias del público, determina cuál de los dos títulos tiene menos posibilidades para que busque una fecha alternativa. Fue el caso de La guerra de los mundos, Batman begins y Los cuatro fantásticos, que eligieron la codiciada fecha del 4 de julio de 2005. La película de Spielberg fue la afortunada mientras que la nueva entrega de Batman se adelantó dos semanas y la tercera se retrasó cuatro días. “Las tres vencieron en la taquilla de sus respectivos fines de semana. La NRG evitó una vez más un descalabro económico e hizo ganar millones de dólares a cada uno de los tres estudios implicados” (Fuertes, 2008: 49). En España no existe ninguna institución similar u organismo con una función de arbitraje en una situación como ésta, de modo que en el caso de Los abrazos rotos, Almodóvar, al confirmar su preferencia por estrenar a mediados de marzo, no tuvo en cuenta qué títulos tenían previsto su estreno en la misma fecha o en la semana inmediatamente anterior y posterior. De las estrenadas simultáneamente tan sólo dos producciones más, la comedia romántica Pareja de tres y la cinta de espías y humor Duplicity se situaron entre las diez primeras en recaudación ese primer fin de semana. Ninguna de las dos contaba con un público similar al de Los abrazos rotos, por lo que no cabía competencia con otros títulos relevantes. Con lo que no contaban era con entrar en la primera semana en segunda posición por culpa de una película que en su tercera semana de explotación seguía liderando el ranking, Gran Torino, de Clint Eastwood. Aunque ambos directores comparten un público adulto que suele acudir al cine con una frecuencia mensual o en ocasiones especiales de películas “must see” (Brunet, 2009), los datos fueron decepcionantes porque no se esperaba que Almodóvar pudiera sucumbir ante la película de Eastwood en su tercera semana en cartel. Considerada como un “sleeper” (modesta película que alcanza un éxito comercial inesperado), Gran Torino se benefició de las favorables opiniones que transmitían sus espectadores. De hecho, en la siguiente semana las diferencias con la película de Eastwood aumentaron. Mientras que los ingresos en taquilla de la cinta de Almodóvar eran un 32% inferiores a la semana precedente, en el caso de Eastwood, eran tan sólo de un 9%, según datos de Box Office.es. En Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 167 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 cualquier caso, la lista de películas más comerciales eran liderada esta semana por otra producción española, Mentiras y gordas, que lograba en una semana casi el triple que Los abrazos rotos en dos (algo más de un 1.800.000 euros frente a 670.000 euros). Otro factor que pudo influir en el rendimiento económico del filme de Almodóvar fue la mala acogida que recibió por parte de la crítica. La relación entre la crítica de cine y el director ha sido singular. A lo largo de su carrera fueron varias las ocasiones en que Almodóvar realizó comentarios irónicos, mordaces o sarcásticos: “A un crítico le montaría un piso, pero con condiciones. Previamente me aseguraría de que el piso estuviera endemoniado para que por fin le ocurrieran cosas en su vida” (Deubi, 1986, sin numerar). En otra entrevista expresaba su opinión de un modo más contundente: “La crítica es un género que me da miedo y me parece muy triste. Ver cosas toda la vida para criticarlas luego es un destino bastante amuermante. Como decía Boadella, los críticos son parásitos de lo que hacen los demás. Y a un parásito es difícil respetarle, ¿no? Y nadie respeta a un parásito a menos que esté locamente enamorado de ellos, y yo no estoy enamorado de ningún crítico” (Boquerini, 1989: 126). En cualquier caso, puede sorprender la opinión negativa del director sobre la crítica si tenemos en cuenta el dato que proporciona Holguín en su libro sobre Almodóvar: “La lluvia de críticas en todo el mundo ha sido enorme, de las cuales el 90 por 100 son positivas” (Holguín, 1994: 23). Con motivo del estreno de Los abrazos rotos se desató una polémica especialmente dolorosa entre el crítico de cine de El País, Carlos Boyero y el cineasta, que alcanzó bastante notoriedad y que, en gran parte, pudo perjudicar la explotación comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Boyero recurrió al título de una célebre película de Almodóvar para el enunciado de su crítica, ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?, que concluía del siguiente modo: “Y no te crees nada, aunque el envoltorio del vacío intente ser solemne y de diseño. Y los intérpretes están inanes o lamentables. La única sensación que permanece de principio a fin es la del tedio. Y dices: todo esto, ¿para qué?” (Boyero, 2009). Almodóvar decidió no permanecer en silencio y a través de su blog personal descalificó a Carlos Boyero por no haber escrito una crítica de cine: Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 168 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 “Un hombre que emplea el 75 por ciento del espacio para despotricar sobre mi persona (lo que ni siquiera es una novedad, porque lleva casi treinta años haciéndolo), y alrededor del 25 por ciento para despachar la película diciendo cosas como que la interpretación de los actores es “inane y lamentable” (dos de sus adjetivos favoritos) sin mostrar un sólo ejemplo que nos ayude a entenderle... Un texto en el que casi no habla de la película y por supuesto no aporta la más mínima razón en la que basar el tedio infinito que le provoca… Un texto así no es una crítica. Es una no-crítica” (Almodóvar, 2009). Desatada la polémica, a ella tampoco fue ajena el propio Comité de Redacción de El País que ponía el acento justamente en toda la campaña de promoción que este diario había difundido con motivo del estreno. “Olvida Almodóvar mencionar la cantidad de páginas que se han dedicado antes del estreno a su película, Los abrazos rotos. Desde El País Semanal y las páginas de Cultura, la información y los despliegues que se le han dedicado no le han debido parecer suficientes. Tampoco los artículos elogiosos que le han brindado Gustavo Martín Garzo y otros columnistas y colaboradores” (Comité de Redacción de El País, 2011). Además, unos meses antes este mismo diario había realizado una promoción con la colección de las películas dirigidas por Almodóvar en dvd mientras que en Los abrazos rotos son varias las menciones a este periódico, de modo que diario y cineasta se recurrían a la promoción mutua. Precisamente a este aspecto, entre otros muchos, hacía referencia Almódovar, de nuevo en su blog, al replicar al Comité de Redacción de El País: “También hemos colaborado en la nueva etapa de elpais.com. Hemos llegado a producir materiales audiovisuales exclusivos para que figuraran colgados en su web. ¿Que esta inversión nos interesaba como material promocional? Por supuesto. Y también se beneficiaba el periódico de ello” (Almodóvar, 2009). La prestigiosa publicación francesa Cahiers du C i n é m a es la que más ha profundizado en las, a veces, tormentosas relaciones entre críticos de cine y directores. En el volumen Teoría y crítica del cine, compilación de artículos publicados en la revista a lo largo de cincuenta años se recoge un conflicto similar analizado por Charles Tesson, que concluye así: “No extrañará que, sobre ese punto, la polémica, muy mal formulada (el ego de autor herido y no la reivindicación artesanal de un savoir- faire honorable, sobre el cual nos gustaría ser juzgados sin ser automáticamente descalificados), se haya transformado en un diálogo de sordos, propicio a que viejas ideas, bastante convencionales, sobre el papel necesario de la crítica, vuelvan a Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 169 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 adquirir carta de naturaleza” (Antoine de Baecque, compilador, 2005: 352). De no ser porque corresponde al número 542 de Cahiers du Cinéma de enero de 2000, podría afirmarse que está escrito a propósito del conflicto entre Almodóvar y Boyero. En el mismo volumen Serge Toubiana reflexiona sobre la función de la crítica y su posible influencia en el público frente a las multitudinarias campañas de marketing que acompañan las películas de Almodóvar, por ejemplo. “Cuanto más funciona la publicidad basándose en la seducción, en la atracción por el merchandising de la película, menos el discurso de la culpabilidad, que es el discurso fundamental de la crítica, puede operar sobre el público” (Antoine de Baecque, compilador, 2005: 321). Sobre el consumo mayoritario por parte del público es interesante la referencia a Pierre Bourdieu que realiza Sassatelli a propósito de los gustos de la denominada por él “clase dominante”, en la que bien podría encuadrarse el público potencial del cine de Almodóvar de acuerdo con la siguiente enumeración que realiza: “Preferían Le Monde a un diario popular, la cocina china a los picnics, ir a un festival de música de vanguardia en vez de escuchar música ligera tradicional, el pop art de Warhol en lugar del virtuosismo de los impresionistas” (Sassatelli, 2004: 137). Además de la polémica a propósito de la crítica, también debió de influir la duración de la película. No sólo tiene Los abrazos rotos la mayor duración de todas las películas de Almodóvar sino que al alcanzar los 130 minutos, el número de sesiones que se puede proyectar cada día disminuye y por consiguiente son menos los espectadores que pueden verla en un mismo día. Es significativo el dato de la duración porque hasta el título precedente, (con 125 minutos), nunca una película de Almodóvar había sobrepasado las dos horas de duración. De hecho la duración media de su cine es de 107 minutos, con dos de sus películas más significativas, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón y Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, con una duración inferior e igual, respectivamente, a la hora y media. Analizando las duraciones de sus última cinco películas tanto en España como Estados Unidos se observa que no siempre coinciden. Así, por ejemplo, en la versión americana de Volver hay 14 minutos menos que en la española, pero esta diferencia es aún mayor en Los Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 170 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 abrazos rotos ya que de los 130 minutos de la versión estrenada en España se pasó a los 105’ que vieron en Estados Unidos, 25 minutos que suponen casi una quinta parte de la película. Otro dato significativo es que la versión de Los abrazos rotos comercializada en España en dvd tiene una duración de 120 minutos. Ambos detalles pueden apuntar a que el propio director recapacitara sobre la adecuada duración que debía tener la película y a que comprendiera que su excesiva duración pudo ser uno de los factores que contribuyó a que el filme no tuviera una mejor acogida entre el público. 4. Fracaso comercial fuera de España Enumerados los posibles motivos de este fracaso comercial analizamos ahora cómo fue el rendimiento en la taquilla en otros mercados importantes para el cine de Pedro Almodóvar: Francia y Estados Unidos. Como se puede ver en el cuadro número 5, en Francia Los abrazos rotos consiguió casi una tercera parte menos que Volver y un 25% menos que Hable con ella, pero sin embargo, su recaudación sí superó en casi 300.000 dólares a la de La mala educación y en algo más de 1.200.000 dólares a la de La piel que habito, el título con menos taquilla de las cinco últimas estrenadas en Francia. Cuadro nº 5 TÍTULO RECAUDACIÓN HABLE CON ELLA 9.264.928 $ LA MALA EDUCACIÓN 6.649.775 $ VOLVER 17.010.675 $ LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS 6.936.672 $ LA PIEL QUE HABITO 5.729.704 $ Datos de Box Office Mojo Podemos observar en el cuadro número 6 que en Estados Unidos hay unas cifras similares a las de Francia, prácticamente en la misma proporción, que confirman el fracaso de Los abrazos rotos, especialmente si se compara su RECAUDACIÓN EN TAQUILLA FRANCIA Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 171 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 rendimiento con el de Volver. En cualquier caso, el público norteamericano se mostró de un modo menos entusiasta que el francés y no se da la misma diferencia que en el país vecino entre ambos títulos. La recaudación de Hable con ella es prácticamente la misma en los dos países, mientras que La mala educación tuvo un mejor rendimiento que Los abrazos rotos en Estados Unidos al revés de lo que sucedió en Francia. En ambos países el desplome en la taquilla de Los abrazos rotos alcanza también al siguiente título, La piel que habito, donde a diferencia de lo que ocurría en España logra un menor ingreso en taquilla. Mientras que en Francia, como ya se vio, la diferencia entre ambos títulos fue de casi 1.200.000 dólares, en Estados Unidos, fue un 50% superior: es decir, más de 1.800.000 dólares. Por el contrario, en España La piel que habito recaudó más del 10% que Los abrazos rotos, lo que confirmaría el hecho de que fue en España donde más fracasó esta película. Cuadro nº 6 TÍTULO RECAUDACIÓN HABLE CON ELLA 9.285.469 $ LA MALA EDUCACIÓN 5.211.842 $ VOLVER 12.899.867 $ LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS 5.014.305 $ LA PIEL QUE HABITO 3.185.812 $ Datos de Box Office Mojo Por último, si analizamos en el cuadro número 7 la recaudación total de las últimas cinco películas de Pedro Almodóvar se confirma que el mayor éxito mundial en esta última etapa del cineasta manchego es Volver, estrenada comercialmente en 41 países y con una recaudación que duplica la del título precedente, La mala educación y casi triplica la del siguiente título, Los abrazos rotos. En cuanto al número de países donde cada una de estas producciones se ha estrenado en salas es significativo que La mala educación haya obtenido RECAUDACIÓN EN TAQUILLA ESTADOS UNIDOS Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 172 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 menores ingresos en taquilla que Hable con ella a pesar de haber llegado a más países. De nuevo encontramos que la temática que afrontaba este film bien pudo provocar el rechazo entre algunos sectores del público y en algunos países. También es de destacar que, a excepción de Hable con ella, Los abrazos rotos es el único de estos títulos que se ha estrenado en menos de treinta países, doce menos que Volver y nueve menos que La piel que habito. Cuadro nº 7 TÍTULO RECAUDACIÓN PAÍSES DONDE SE HA ESTRENADO HABLE CON ELLA 41.716.081 $ 23 LA MALA EDUCACIÓN 35.062.088 $ 34 VOLVER 72.685.310 $ 41 LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS 25.977.046 $ 29 LA PIEL QUE HABITO 27.656.541 $ 38 Datos de Box Office Mojo Referencias bibliográficas ALMODÓVAR, Pedro (2009). Blog Pedro Almodóvar: “Notas sobre Crónica negra del Festival de cine de Cannes”. http://www.pedroalmodovar.es/ PABES_11_T.asp [Consultado 17/07/2012] ALMODÓVAR, Pedro (2009). Blog Pedro Almodóvar: “Notas sobre Segunda Crónica, Respuesta a El País”. h t t p : / / w w w . p e d r o a l m o d o v a r . e s / PABES_12_T.asp [Consultado 17/07/2012] BEJARANO, Antonio y HERMOSO, Borja (2004). “Enrique González Macho rompe con Warner y retira de todos sus cines La mala educación. En El Mundo, 1 de abril de 2004. BOQUERINI (1989). Pedro Almodóvar. Madrid: Ediciones JC. BOYERO, Carlos (2009). “¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?” En El País, 18 de marzo de 2009 BRITO, Sara (2011). “Almodóvar recupera la confianza tras el roto de “Los abrazos”. En Público, 6 de septiembre de 2011. BRUNET, Pau (2009). “Clint rompe con los abrazos de Pedro”. http://www.eleconomista.es/boxoffice/reports_spain/2009/clintrompe- los-abrazos-de-pedro/ [Consultado 16/07/2012] RECAUDACIÓN EN TAQUILLA TODO EL MUNDO Miguel Olid, El fracaso comercial de Los abrazos rotos. Análisis de la recaudación en taquilla 173 FOTOCINEMA. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) , pp. 159-173 DE BAECQUE, Antoine (2005). Teoría y crítica del cine, avatares de una cinefilia. Barcelona. Ediciones Paidós Ibérica. DEUBI, David (1986). No se lo digas a nadie. Muestra Cinematográfica del Atlántico, Alcances. Cádiz. FUERTES, Jaime (2008). Un negocio de cine. Sevilla: Editorial Almuzara HOLGUÍN, Antonio (2006). Pedro Almodóvar. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra (Grupo Anaya). SASSATELLI, Roberta (2004). Consumo, cultura y sociedad. Madrid: Amorrortu editores. STRAUSS, Frédéric (1995). Pedro Almodóvar, un cine visceral. Madrid: El País Aguilar. VÁZQUEZ VARELA, Carmen y ZURIÁN, Fran A. (coordinadores) (2005). Almodóvar: el cine como pasión. Actas del Congreso Internacional “Pedro Almodóvar”. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. VIDAL, Nuria (1988). El cine de Pedro Almodóvar. Madrid: Instituto de la Cinematografía y las Artes Audiovisuales. 174 REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012), RESEÑAS: Nieves Sánchez Garre (coord.): Imágenes y escenarios de la Semana Santa vallisoletana (1958- 1984). Reseña de Emilio C. García Fernández Nieves Sánchez Garre (coord.): Imágenes y escenarios de la Semana Santa vallisoletana (1958-1984). Valladolid, Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad Europea Miguel de Cervantes, 2012, 189 pp. La fotografía es objeto de estudio desde hace muchos años, sobre todo porque desde diversas perspectivas se puede atender y entender la tradición y costumbres de un pueblo, ciudad o país, la vida y la m e m o r i a , e l a l m a y l a s emociones de un pasado vivido por una persona o conjunto de ellas que llevan en su intimidad parte del paraíso perdido. Las líneas de investigación que se proponen en este sentido permiten incrementar el conocimiento sobre el patrimonio cultural que ayuda, evidentemente, a enriquecernos con todo aquello que puede encerrar una imagen mirada con curiosidad o desde la perspectiva del análisis y el estudio. En este sentido, hay que resaltar la aportación de la obra Imágenes y escenarios de la Semana Santa vallisoletana (1958-1984) porque se adentra en un territorio que va más allá de la apariencia. Se puede pensar en la referencia religiosa simplemente, pero cuando se contemplan las imágenes de un acontecimiento tan arraigado en la sociedad española, con sus límites localistas necesarios, se debe entender que lo superficial encierra parte de la historia personal de muchos ciudadanos que han apostado por una idea, por la convivencia y participación emocional de unos valores que trascienden la tradición. 175 La investigación fotográfica impulsada por Nieves Sánchez Garre en el Archivo Municipal de Valladolid ha dado varios frutos en formato libro (a modo de ejemplo: Ocho alcaldes, ocho miradas. Valladolid, 1961-1984. 2007) y varias exposiciones que proyectaron el imaginario colectivo desde nuevas miradas y lecturas. El pasado retenido en los fondos documentales llega al presente a través de una lectura que exige la revisión de unos referentes clásicos y una apuesta por la perspectiva original basada en la representación y teatralidad que proporciona una puesta en escena previsible, organizada y eminentemente simbólica y que, sin embargo, se propone como algo nuevo, especialmente distinto por su cercana interpretación que va más allá del valor del acto religioso. La selección fotográfica que se presenta en la obra puede ser un juego con el tiempo a través de un acontecimiento único en la ciudad vallisoletana (piénsese, en igual medida, en otras ciudades españolas) que vive intensamente el silencio y la música, la plegaria y las lágrimas. El tiempo se detiene, las personas miran más que nunca a los demás; proyectan la emoción contenida el resto de los días. En el fondo, en el transfondo del documento, se encuentra y sintetiza el referente comunicativo, aquel que sufre con el tiempo una profunda transformación derivada del instante captado por la cámara fotográfica y la mirada que sobre dicho instante ejerce el lector en el momento de disfrutar del resumen gráfico que realiza la prensa local. Un referente comunicativo que pasadas las décadas adquiere un nuevo valor porque quien detiene su mirada sobre la imagen captada entiende que la historia ha pasado, que los años dejan huella o, simplemente, para los más jóvenes, que son restos de una época con la que no guardan ninguna vinculación, por la que no sienten nada especial. Y más allá de esta perspectiva social, está el estudio de los signos, referentes que ya dejan huella en la portada del libro y que permiten establecer diferencias narrativas entre lo real y lo ficticio, entre iconografía e iconología, entre comunicación y arte; es decir, la imagen a través de la imagen. El doble símbolo –sudario y concha- se transforma en clave del pórtico de la Semana Santa en esta portada reconvertida en escenario teatral, teniendo en cuenta que en la Edad Media el auto sacramental derivó en el teatro de tipo profano, con la celebración de los desfiles procesionales en la Semana Santa barroca. La 176 portada cobra vida con una fotografía de la procesión de las Palmas recogida del suplemento de Diario Regional de 1963, que representa la entrada de Jesús en Jerusalén ante la atenta mirada de un monaguillo con roquete blanco. Es el plenilunio de la primavera que se repite cíclicamente en cualquier la Semana Santa, aparte de la de Valladolid. A partir de una diagnosis fotográfica se ha efectuado un análisis que se sustenta en la teoría semiótica, volcada en la indagación y en la búsqueda de la significación de las prácticas discursivas sobre la Semana Santa, recogidas en la prensa vallisoletana. De esta manera, se muestran los datos identificativos, la descripción del motivo fotográfico y los elementos sintácticos o compositivos, del espacio y tiempo de la representación a modo de semiótica teatral. En definitiva, la reunión de documentos fotográficos supone la reconstrucción de la memoria visual para quienes vivieron de cerca los años recogidos. De ahí la importancia de rememorar aquellos momentos, desde la madurez que nos da el tiempo, recuperando un documento histórico válido para la crítica historiográfica y sociocultural actual, y para la contribución al conocimiento de la historia de la fotografía en España. Emilio C. García Fernández Universidad Complutense de Madrid 177 REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) RESEÑAS: VV. AA. (2012). ¡Clint, dispara! La “trilogía del dólar” de Sergio Leone. Reseña de Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Villar VV. AA. (Víctor Matellan0 Ed.). ¡Clint, dispara! La “trilogía del dólar” de Sergio Leone. Madrid, T&B Editores, 2012, 392 pp. Con los años las películas de Sergio Leone han alcanzado el reconocimiento que la crítica negó durante casi una década. Fenómeno icónico del cine moderno, el concepto visual, sonoro y estético del western creado por el directo italiano, se mantiene vigente en el ideario colectivo y en la cultura popular, traspasando el propio género. El western leoniano sigue siendo además fuente de inspiración para muchos cineastas. Desde que los “Movie Brats”, aquella generación de jóvenes directores formada entre otros por George Lucas o Steven Spielberg, visionara las primeras películas del italiano con fervor, la lista de referencias a Leone es interminable. Un ejemplo cercano lo encontramos en la filmografía de Quentin Tarantino, o en la reciente (y oscarizada) película de animación “Rango”. Profundamente intercultural y referencial, el cine de Sergio Leone es además el catalizador de todo un subgénero cinematográfico, el spaghetti-western, ampliamente denostado pero que respondió a una lógica económica propia (la débil industria cinematográfica europea buscaba una nueva fuente de ingresos tras el ascenso y caída de los peplums). A partir de “Por un puñado de dólares” el eurowestern fue muy rentable y todos se lanzaron a hacer negocio. El estilo Leone, tal y como titulaban algunas revistas de moda francesas tras el estreno de “Hasta que llegó su hora”, trasciende del género que le dio fama. El discurso fílmico del director italiano rompe estereotipos narrativos y visuales, y aporta un nuevo tratamiento que, eso sí, recoge aportaciones de todo tipo, desde la incuestionable influencia del director japonés Akira Kurosawa, al cine negro, pasando por el cómic y el propio John Ford, padre del género. Precisamente, sobre la importancia del discurso fílmico leoniano incide ¡Clint, dispara! La “trilogía del dólar” de Sergio Leone. 178 ¡Clint, dispara! se centra en el estudio de los diferentes aspectos que configuran la denominada Trilogía del dólar; tríptico fílmico formado por las películas “Por un puñado de dólares”, “La muerte tenía un precio” y “El bueno, el feo y el malo”. El libro, editado por el escritor cinematográfico y guionista Víctor Matellano, recopila una serie de textos ya publicados, pertenecientes a obras de autores como Christopher Frayling o Carlo Gaberscek, junto a otros análisis inéditos de Saturnino García, Juan Gabriel García, Miguel Losada, José Enrique Martínez Moya y el propio Matellano. Los autores hacen un repaso a los elementos que definen el westerm leoniano, abarcando aspectos como la producción o las características estético narrativas de la trilogía. La obra, que podría adquirir carácter de manual, incluye una curiosa recopilación de críticas en prensa en el momento del estreno de las películas. También hay espacio para destacar la importancia de los elementos españoles que participaron en la confección de la trilogía; desde la aportación visual y escenográfica del escenario-paisaje arquetípico del oeste (Colmenar Viejo, Burgos, Almería), hasta el trabajo del personal técnico-artístico español. En este sentido, hay un capítulo dedicado exclusivamente a las localizaciones en nuestro país y otro a los intérpretes españoles, en donde se defiende su contribución al concepto leoniano de western. Gabriel García lo define perfectamente: “Sin la presencia de esos magníficos secundarios en los westerns del maestro italiano, los protagonistas se difuminarían, perderían su magnetismo, su poder de seducción, que en cierto modo sustentaban y alimentaban esas caras familiares y agrestes de los secundarios españoles”. Otra de las aportaciones de ¡Clint, dispara!, es la inclusión entre sus páginas de algunas de las supresiones de guión que llevó a cabo el propio Leone. Nadie duda a estas alturas de la influencia del cine de Sergio Leone. Su concepto fílmico no solo ha dejado huella en la historia del cine; su estética visual, la confección del antihéroe, las composiciones de Morricone que rompen con el canon del género y crean a su vez un nuevo estilo a seguir, su particular puesta en escena, la utilización del formato Scope, el montaje, etc., siguen vigentes. Como afirma el propio Matellano: “la Trilogía del dólar pertenece a la mítica y leyenda cinematográfica, por supuesto con derecho propio.” 179 ¡Clint, dispara! se suma, por tanto, a otras obras que inciden en la importancia del western leoniano más allá del spaghetti-western. Continúa en la línea de autores como Aguilar, Frayling, o Cumbow, que han venido estudiando y analizando en profundidad desde hace años, de manera rigurosa, las características y aportaciones del cine de Sergio Leone. Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Villar Universidad de La Laguna 180 REVISTA CIENTÍFICA DE CINE Y FOTOGRAFÍA ISSN 2172-0150 Nº 5 (2012) RESEÑAS: Vanesa Fernández y Miren Gabantxo (eds.): Territorios y fronteras. Experiencias documentales contemporáneas. Reseña de Mario Cartelle Vanesa Fernández y Miren Gabantxo (eds.). Territorios y fronteras. Experiencias documentales contemporáneas, Bilbao, Servicio editorial de la Universidad del País Vasco, 2012, 167, pp. En los últimos años, el documental español ha experimentado un auge d e s c o n o c i d o t i e m p o a t r á s . S o n numerosos los autores que se han sentido atraídos por este género y el resultado ha sido una obra vasta, dispersa, variada en los enfoques y las técnicas y con una calidad muy desigual. Territorios y fronteras surge de la iniciativa de un conjunto de profesores de la UPV que a través de unos cursos de extensión universitaria, pusieron en contacto a un grupo de directores, críticos, académicos y, por supuesto, al público asistente. La finalidad era tratar de organizar, de “cartografiar” la labor de aquellos cineastas más creativos e innovadores que habían sido capaces de desarrollar un estilo propio dentro del campo del documental. En las páginas del libro se recogen tanto las intervenciones de los participantes en los cursos como el contenido de las charlas mantenidas y aportaciones diversas. A estas alturas es posible que alguien piense que estamos ante un libro de actas tradicional. Nada más lejos de la realidad. Las coordinadoras de la obra, Vanesa Fernández y Miren Gabantxo han sabido dotar a su libro de un dinamismo y de un ritmo que hace su lectura sumamente agradable. Los quince capítulos que integran Territorios y fronteras están articulados en torno a dos grandes bloques temáticos, En los límites de la realidad y Horizontes desconocidos precedidos por un prólogo de obligada lectura en el que Santos Zunzunegui hace 181 una acertada síntesis del panorama del documental en España, que sirve de justificación tanto para el título como para la selección de cineastas que se hace en el libro. Apuntes sobre varias charlas inconclusas es el título del primero de los artículos que se ofrecen en el libro. Sus autoras Miren Gabantxo y Vanesa Fernández guiadas por la necesidad, empujadas por la pasión y con determinación hacen de este capítulo un elemento justificativo no solo de la existencia del libro, sino también de la necesidad de atraer el estudio del arte contemporáneo al ámbito universitario a la vez que defienden la necesidad de que su libro sirva de refugio a aquellos autores y obras difícilmente visibles en la historiografía del cine español a la vez que sea un lugar de encuentro de todas las personas interesadas en el tema. Germán Rodríguez es el autor del segundo de los artículos denominado Algunas cuestiones en torno al cine presente. Tras constatar la dificultad de realizar un análisis fundamentado del documental español debido a la falta de perspectiva temporal, deja entrever la existencia de un grupo de autores cuya obra, o al menos una parte de ella, trasciende del modelo de documental tradicional al incorporar la experiencia y la visión propia del autor. Es el caso de Isaki Lacuesta de quien comenta con un cierto detalle sus Microscopías, de León Siminiani o de Lluis Escartín. Cine de cerca: Escartín, Iriarte, Lacuesta y Siminiani es la propuesta que hace en el tercer capítulo del libro Jorge Oter. Su interesante reflexión acerca de estos autores parte de la proyección de cuatro películas pertenecientes a estos directores y de una mesa redonda celebrada a continuación. La posible relación existente entre películas como Teoría de los cuerpos, El mar, Pene y T a b ú Maná centran los esfuerzos del autor quien tras un breve pero intenso análisis de cada una, acaba afirmando que ese nexo común es la mirada cercana o íntima que se da en todas ellas aunque plasmada de forma diferente y personal. Eulàlia Iglesias con su artículo Variaciones en torno a un cuerpo: identidad y ausencia en el cine de Isaki Lacuesta inaugura el segundo bloque temático. Tras hacer un breve recorrido por la formación del director, pasa a centrarse en lo que ella considera característico de él: su preferencia por tratar las huellas de “una serie de personajes, algunos de ellos míticos y en todo caso siempre 182 ausentes”. Pone como ejemplo la película Cravan vs. Cravan que analiza brevemente y concluye resaltando la heterodoxia de un autor que ejemplifica mejor que ningún otro la confusión existente entre la frontera del cine independiente y el cine comercial. El quinto artículo del libro corresponde a Isaki Lacuesta y su título Los amores invisibles. Notas provisionales sobre el cine de León Siminiani y Víctor Iriarte, es un fiel reflejo del contenido del capítulo pues el autor, mediante el análisis de las películas Mapa de Siminiani e Invisible de Iriarte, nos proporciona una serie de notas sobre el cine de ambos autores unidos por lo que él denomina “encanto”. Particular y absolutamente diferente es el enfoque que Víctor Iriarte ofrece al lector en su artículo Caja con cosas dentro presenta. A través de 40 puntos rigurosamente numerados, el autor nos ofrece una interesante serie de pensamientos, de ideas dispersas en los que nos permite asomarnos a un mundo interior formado por sensaciones, afirmaciones y sentimientos personales relacionados con su universo creativo. Josep M. Català, en su artículo Guía de perplejos. El cine imposible de León Siminiani realiza un profundo y documentado estudio de la obra de Siminiani y de los diferentes recursos narrativos presentes en ella centrándose en aspectos como la alegoría o la bipolaridad. El siguiente protagonista del libro es León Siminiani quien en su ¿Hacia una poética de la contradicción? realiza un análisis de su obra, de sus motivaciones y de aquellos elementos que caracterizan su cine y que se organizan en torno a cuatro aspectos fundamentales: la relación con la ficción, el intento de control, la utilización de un lenguaje propio y la autobiografía, todos ellos desde la óptica de la contradicción. Lluis Escartín también tiene su espacio en el libro que nos ocupa. Y lo hace con un artículo denominado Nada que decir. Fiel a su título, el artículo está compuesto por dos páginas en blanco. Nada que decir. Hijos sin hijos: Un disparo en medio de un concierto es el título que da a su capítulo Gonzalo de Pedro. En él repasa las singularidades del colectivo Los Hijos con su novedoso sistema de trabajo en el que el concepto de autor queda 183 diluido, centrándose en su obra Los materiales y en la polémica surgida a raíz de la decisión del jurado del Festival Internacional de Cine Punto de Vista de otorgar al colectivo el Premio Jean Vigo a la mejor dirección. El colectivo Los hijos presenta, a su vez, un artículo titulado Tres por dos en el que detallan el proceso de creación de su película Los materiales desde la grabación hasta el montaje final. Aspectos como la inexistencia de la división del trabajo tradicional en cualquier montaje cinematográfico, el empleo sistemático del material de descartes, la utilización de subtítulos en vez de las voces de los protagonistas, son explicados en este más que interesante escrito que resume la forma de hacer de uno de los colectivos más innovadores del panorama del documental español. WeareQQ. Apuntes y paisajes. Una conversación con Usue Arrieta es el nombre que recibe la segunda aportación de Víctor Iriarte en el libro. Su contenido responde a la curiosidad que siente Iriarte tras la visualización de la película Canedo en la que ve una “sugerente mezcla rural/paisajístico/rara” y que se concreta a través de una conversación con Usue, uno de los miembros del colectivo. Precisamente, la reproducción de esa conversación en la que se trata acerca de la génesis del grupo, de su forma de concebir el cine y de su trayectoria artística es el contenido de este capítulo. El colectivo weareqq y Rivet presentan CA NE DO, capítulo en el que detallan cuestiones como la esencia de la película Canedo, la construcción de su realidad, el casi nulo empleo del lenguaje verbal y la aparente absurdez del ciclo de producción representado. Se trata, sin duda, de un esclarecedor capítulo que facilita la comprensión de esta película. Con la forma de notas tomadas a vuelapluma, Josetxo Cerdán nos presenta Apuntes de campo sobre el trabajo de Andrés Duque y Virginia García del Pino (o por qué los artistas son un coñazo). Se trata de una revisión del trabajo de ambos directores, tanto de sus obras más exitosas como de las que no lo han sido tanto. Novedoso en cuanto a las formas es la aportación de Andrés Duque y que con el título ¿Quién fue Rodolfo II, el patrón de visionarios y estafadores, en cuya corte me parece que he vivido? se nos presenta como un diálogo entre dos personajes, uno de los cuales acaba de hacer un guion cinematográfico acerca de 184 la afición del emperador Rodolfo II por coleccionar objetos extraños. Precisamente el artículo concluye con una curiosa lista de los objetos coleccionados. Él último de los capítulos del libro corresponde a Virginia García del Pino y se titula Notas que nunca utilicé. El texto está formado, como indica la autora, por un conjunto de notas elaboradas a lo largo de los años pero nunca utilizadas. La temática abarca aspectos como la razón por la que hace películas, la forma en que las hace o los comienzos de la directora. También hay notas acerca de Lo que tú dices que soy, Mi hermana y yo o Espacio simétrico. Como se indica en diferentes partes del libro, Territorios y fronteras es un libro que trata de cartografiar el actual panorama documental español, pero no el documental oficialista o institucional, sino el realizado por los autores más creativos e innovadores que es aquel que está en las lindes, o incluso más allá de los límites del espacio conocido. La lectura de esta obra es inexcusable para quienes se consideren estudiosos o meramente aficionados al documental y lo es por la calidad de los autores que intervienen, por el interés de los contenidos de los artículos y por la clarificación que, finalmente supone del panorama de la producción documental actual en España. Mario Cartelle 185 C.V. Autores Pedro Poyato Sánchez es profesor titular de la Universidad de Córdoba y director del Master en Cinematografía por la Universidad de Córdoba. Ha publicado los siguientes libros: Las imágenes cinematográficas de Luis Buñuel, León, Caja España, 1998; El cine de Buñuel: fotografías que se suceden vermicularmente, Madrid, Universidad Complutense, 2001; Introducción a la teoría y análisis de la imagen fo-cinema-tográfica, Granada, Grupo Editorial Universitario, 2006; Todo sobre mi madre, Pedro Almodóvar (1999), Barcelona, Octaedro, 2007; El sistema estético de Luis Buñuel, Bilbao, Universidad del País Vasco, 2011. Ha coordinado los volúmenes: Historia(s), motivos y formas del cine español, Córdoba, Plurabelle, 2005; Documental, carcoma de la ficción, Córdoba, Filmoteca de Andalucía, 2006; El realismo y sus formas en el cine rural español, Córdoba, Diputación de Córdoba, 2009; Profundidad de campo, Girona, Luces de Gálibo, 2010, éste último junto a Agustín Gómez. José Luis Castro de Paz (A Coruña, 1964). Historiador del cine y catedrático de comunicación audiovisual de la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. Ha publicado artículos en revistas especializadas españolas y extranjeras, participado en importantes obras colectivas, coordinado diversos volúmenes sobre autores o aspectos de la historia del cine español y dirigido, con Julio Pérez Perucha y Santos Zunzunegui, el volumen colectivo La nueva memoria. Historia(s) del cine español (1939-2000) (2005). Entre sus numerosos libros destacan títulos como La crisis de la transparencia clásica (1996), De entre los muertos/Vértigo (1999), El surgimiento del telefilme (1999), Alfred Hitchcock (2000), Un cinema herido. Los turbios años cuarenta en el cine español (1939- 1950) (2002), Cine y exilio. Forma(s) de la ausencia (2004), Fernando Fernán- Gómez (2010), Del sainete al esperpento. Relecturas sobre cine español de los años 50 (2011, con Josetxo Cerdán), o, muy recientemente, Sombras desoladas. Costumbrismo, humor, melancolía y reflexividad en el cine español de los años cuarenta (2012). Ana Melendo Cruz es profesora Contratada Doctora del Departamento de Historia del Arte, Arqueología y Música de la Universidad de Córdoba. Se doctoró con Mención Europea en Historia del Arte, por la Universidad de Córdoba en 2006. Ha publicado los libros Antonioni: Un compromiso ético y estético, Filmoteca de Andalucía, Córdoba, Consejería de Cultura, 2010 y Paisaje industrial y Neurosis en “El desierto rojo” (1964), Córdoba, El granado, 2011. Sus últimas aportaciones son “En la estela de Friedrich. Desde Michelangelo Antonioni”, Boletín del Museo Instituto Camón Aznar (2010); “Futurismo: Realidad en el cine utopía en la realidad”, Annali Online Lettere: Revista di Linguitica, Letteratura, Cinema y Teatro, Università degli studi di Ferrara, 2010; “¿Está dirigido el Arte Nuevo a una minoría especialmente dotada? El caso de Michelangelo Antonioni”, Fotocinema. Revista científica de cine y fotografía (2010); “La locura seduce al arte”, Ámbitos. Revista de 186 estudios de ciencias sociales y humnidades, Asociación de Estudios de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, nº 24, 2010; “El universo plástico y sensorial de La mano (Wong Kar Wai, 2004)”, Fonseca Journal of Communication, Universidad de Salamanca, 2012. Javier Herrera es director de la biblioteca de la Filmoteca Española de Madrid donde se conserva el archivo personal de Luis Buñuel. Ha sido profesor arte contemporáneo e historia del cine e impartido cursos, seminarios y conferencias en universidades de diferentes países. Autor de Las Hurdes un documental de Luis Buñuel (MEIAC 1999), El cine en su historia (Arco Libros 2005), El cine. Guía para su estudio (Alianza 2005) y Estudios sobre Las Hurdes de Buñuel (Renacimiento 2006) y editor La poesía del cine y Los poetas del cine (Málaga 2003), El documental latinoamericano (Madrid 2004), Hispanismo y cine (Madrid 2007) y Buñuel y/o Almodóvar. El laberinto del deseo (Davidson, NC. 2010) Agustín Gómez es profesor titular de comunicación audiovisual de la Universidad de Málaga. Ha publicado artículos en revistas especializadas y participado en libros colectivos sobre cine –“Las instalaciones de Santiago Sierra, casi un documental”, en Doc 21. Panorama del reciente cine documental en España; “Repensar el cine. La mirada cinematográfica de Win Wenders”, en El cielo sobre Wenders; “Lecciones autobiográficas del maestro Oliveira”, en Solos ante la cámara; “La periferia londinense como radicalidad de un no lugar en el cine de los noventa”, en Icono 14 (2009); “El modelo de televisión en Pedro Almodóvar. Cine vs. televisión”, en Fonseca. Journal of Communication–, ha coordinado diversos libros –Cine, arte y artistas (2008); Laberinto visual (2008); Cine, arte, rupturas (2009); Profundidad de campo. Más de un siglo de cine documental en España (2010 con Pedro Poyato); Picasso: cine y arte (2011); Campo y contracampo en el cine documental español (2012 con Pedro Poyato)– y ha participado en las muestras de Cine rural de Dos Torres en 2006, 2007, 2009 y 2011. Diane Bracco es titular de la oposición francesa para profesores de enseñanza secundaria y superior (Agrégation), cursa actualmente un doctorado en cine español contemporáneo en la Universidad París 8 bajo la dirección de la Profesora Pascale Thibaudeau. Sus investigaciones se enfocan en las manifestaciones del exceso en algunas películas de los años 1990-2000 y en sus conexiones con la tradición literaria, pictórica y cinematográfica nacional. Paralelamente imparte clases de letras y artes hispánicas en la Universidad de Limoges (Limousin). Laura Virué es licenciada en Comunicación Audiovisual (2006) y DEA obtenido con el trabajo La fotofija en Volver de Pedro Almodóvar (2008) en la facultad de Ciencias de la Comunicación de la Universidad de Málaga. Es master en el programa Desarrollos Sociales de la Cultura Artística (2010) en el Dpto. de Historia del Arte de la misma Universidad. Julie Amiot-Guillouet es doctora tras la defensa de una tesis titulada E l melodrama cinematográfico mexicano en sus relaciones con Cuba (1938- 1958), problemas estéticos y críticos en 2003, y profesora titular de filología hispánica en la universidad de París-Sorbona desde 2007. Es autora de varios artículos y libros sobre cine hispánico clásico y contemporáneo 187 Miguel Olid es doctor en Comunicación Audiovisual por la Universidad de Sevilla. Autor de varios libros sobre cine para la Filmoteca de Andalucía, Ayuntamientos de Sevilla y Granada y el Festival de cine iberoamericano de Huelva. Ha sido co-director del programa de cine de Canal Sur 2 Andalucía, miembro del Comité Asesor de Ayudas a la cinematografía del Ministerio de Cultura y presidente de la Asociación de Escritores Cinematográficos de Andalucía, ASECÁN. Desde 1992 escribe artículos sobre cine para diversos medios de comunicación como El País y ABC. work_kuaoa5c4sfctlhk7bmh43nbq6i ---- DOI: 10.1126/science.1199644 , 176 (2011);331 Science , et al.Jean-Baptiste Michel Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. clicking here.colleagues, clients, or customers by , you can order high-quality copies for yourIf you wish to distribute this article to others here.following the guidelines can be obtained byPermission to republish or repurpose articles or portions of articles ): January 14, 2011 www.sciencemag.org (this infomation is current as of The following resources related to this article are available online at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176.full.html version of this article at: including high-resolution figures, can be found in the onlineUpdated information and services, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2010/12/16/science.1199644.DC1.html can be found at: Supporting Online Material http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176.full.html#related found at: can berelated to this article A list of selected additional articles on the Science Web sites http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/collection/sociology Sociology subject collections:This article appears in the following registered trademark of AAAS. is aScience2011 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science; all rights reserved. The title CopyrightAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science, 1200 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005. (print ISSN 0036-8075; online ISSN 1095-9203) is published weekly, except the last week in December, by theScience o n J a n u a ry 1 4 , 2 0 1 1 w w w .s ci e n ce m a g .o rg D o w n lo a d e d f ro m http://www.sciencemag.org/about/permissions.dtl http://www.sciencemag.org/about/permissions.dtl http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176.full.html http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2010/12/16/science.1199644.DC1.html http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176.full.html#related http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/collection/sociology http://www.sciencemag.org/ Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books Jean-Baptiste Michel,1,2,3,4,5*† Yuan Kui Shen,2,6,7 Aviva Presser Aiden,2,6,8 Adrian Veres,2,6,9 Matthew K. Gray,10 The Google Books Team,10 Joseph P. Pickett,11 Dale Hoiberg,12 Dan Clancy,10 Peter Norvig,10 Jon Orwant,10 Steven Pinker,5 Martin A. Nowak,1,13,14 Erez Lieberman Aiden1,2,6,14,15,16,17*† We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities. R eading small collections of carefully cho- sen works enables scholars to make pow- erful inferences about trends in human thought. However, this approach rarely enables precise measurement of the underlying phenome- na. Attempts to introduce quantitative methods into the study of culture (1–6) have been ham- pered by the lack of suitable data. We report the creation of a corpus of 5,195,769 digitized books containing ~4% of all books ever published. Computational analysis of this corpus enables us to observe cultural trends and subject them to quantitative investigation. ‘Culturomics’ extends the boundaries of scientific inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena. The corpus has emerged from Google’s effort to digitize books. Most books were drawn from over 40 university libraries around the world. Each page was scanned with custom equipment (7), and the text was digitized by means of optical character recognition (OCR). Additional vol- umes, both physical and digital, were contributed by publishers. Metadata describing the date and place of publication were provided by the li- braries and publishers and supplemented with bibliographic databases. Over 15 million books have been digitized [~12% of all books ever published (7)]. We selected a subset of over 5 million books for analysis on the basis of the quality of their OCR and metadata (Fig. 1A and fig. S1) (7). Periodicals were excluded. The resulting corpus contains over 500 billion words, in English (361 billion), French (45 billion), Spanish (45 billion), German (37 billion), Chinese (13 billion), Russian (35 billion), and Hebrew (2 billion). The oldest works were published in the 1500s. The early decades are represented by only a few books per year, comprising several hundred thousand words. By 1800, the corpus grows to 98 million words per year; by 1900, 1.8 billion; and by 2000, 11 billion (fig. S2). The corpus cannot be read by a human. If you tried to read only English-language entries from the year 2000 alone, at the reasonable pace of 200 words/min, without interruptions for food or sleep, it would take 80 years. The sequence of letters is 1000 times longer than the human genome: If you wrote it out in a straight line, it would reach to the Moon and back 10 times over (8). To make release of the data possible in light of copyright constraints, we restricted this initial study to the question of how often a given 1-gram or n-gram was used over time. A 1-gram is a string of characters uninterrupted by a space; this in- cludes words (“banana”, “SCUBA”) but also num- bers (“3.14159”) and typos (“excesss”). An n-gram is a sequence of 1-grams, such as the phrases “stock market” (a 2-gram) and “the United States of America” (a 5-gram). We restricted n to 5 and lim- ited our study to n-grams occurring at least 40 times in the corpus. Usage frequency is computed by dividing the number of instances of the n-gram in a given year by the total number of words in the corpus in that year. For instance, in 1861, the 1-gram “slavery” appeared in the corpus 21,460 times, on 11,687 pages of 1208 books. The corpus contains 386,434,758 words from 1861; thus, the frequency is 5.5 × 10−5. The use of “slavery” peaked during the Civil War (early 1860s) and then again during the civil rights movement (1955–1968) (Fig. 1B) In contrast, we compare the frequency of “the Great War” to the frequencies of “World War I” and “World War II”. References to “the Great War” peak between 1915 and 1941. But although its frequency drops thereafter, interest in the un- derlying events had not disappeared; instead, they are referred to as “World War I” (Fig. 1C). These examples highlight two central factors thatcontributetoculturomictrends.Culturalchange guides the concepts we discuss (such as “slavery”). Linguistic change, which, of course, has cultural roots, affects the words we use for those concepts (“the Great War” versus “World War I”). In this paper, we examine both linguistic changes, such as changes in the lexicon and grammar, and cul- tural phenomena, such as how we remember peo- ple and events. The full data set, which comprises over two billion culturomic trajectories, is available for download or exploration at www.culturomics.org and ngrams.googlelabs.com. The size of the English lexicon. How many words are in the English language (9)? We call a 1-gram “common” if its frequency is greater than one per billion. [This corresponds to the frequency of the words listed in leading dic- tionaries (7) (fig. S3).] We compiled a list of all common 1-grams in 1900, 1950, and 2000, based on the frequency of each 1-gram in the preced- ing decade. These lists contained 1,117,997 com- mon 1-grams in 1900, 1,102,920 in 1950, and 1,489,337 in 2000. Not all common 1-grams are English words. Many fell into three nonword categories: (i) 1-grams with nonalphabetic characters (“l8r”, “3.14159”), (ii) misspellings (“becuase”, “abberation”), and (iii) foreign words (“sensitivo”). To estimate the number of English words, we manually annotated random samples from the lists of common 1-grams (7) and determined what fraction were members of the above nonword categories. The result ranged from 51% of all common 1-grams in 1900 to 31% in 2000. Using this technique, we estimated the num- ber of words in the English lexicon as 544,000 in 1900, 597,000 in 1950, and 1,022,000 in 2000. The lexicon is enjoying a period of enormous growth: The addition of ~8500 words/year has increased the size of the language by over 70% during the past 50 years (Fig. 2A). Notably, we found more words than appear in any dictionary. For instance, the 2002 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (W3), which keeps track of the contemporary American lexicon, lists approximately 348,000 single-word wordforms (10); the American Heritage Dictionary of the En- glish Language, Fourth Edition (AHD4) lists 116,161 (11). (Both contain additional multiword entries.) Part of this gap is because dictionaries often RESEARCH ARTICLE 1Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 2Cultural Observatory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 3Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 4Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 5Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA. 6Laboratory-at-Large, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 7Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. 8Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 02115, USA. 9Harvard College, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 10Google, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA. 11Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, MA 02116, USA. 12Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, IL 60654, USA. 13Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 14Department of Mathematics, Harvard Uni- versity, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 15Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 16School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 17Harvard Society of Fellows, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. *These authors contributed equally to this work. †To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jb.michel@gmail.com (J.-B.M.); erez@erez.com (E.L.A.) 14 JANUARY 2011 VOL 331 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org176 o n J a n u a ry 1 4 , 2 0 1 1 w w w .s ci e n ce m a g .o rg D o w n lo a d e d f ro m http://www.sciencemag.org/ exclude proper nouns (fig. S4) and compound words (“whalewatching”). Even accounting for these factors,we found many undocumented words, such as “aridification” (the process by which a geo- graphic region becomes dry), “slenthem” (a musical instrument), and, appropriately, the word “deletable.” This gap between dictionaries and the lexicon results from a balance that every dictionary must strike: It must be comprehensive enough to be a useful reference but concise enough to be printed, shipped, and used. As such, many infrequent words are omitted. To gauge how well dictio- naries reflect the lexicon, we ordered our year-2000 lexicon by frequency, divided it into eight deciles (ranging from 10−9 to 10−8, to 10−2 to 10−1) and sampled each decile (7). We manually checked how many sample words were listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (12) and in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary(MWD). (We excluded proper nouns, because neither the OED nor MWD lists them.) Both dictionaries had excellent coverage of high-frequency words but less coverage for frequencies below 10−6: 67% of words in the 10−9 to 10−8 range were listed in neither dictionary (Fig. 2B). Consistent with Zipf’s famous law, a large fraction of the words in our lexicon (63%) were in this lowest- frequency bin. As a result, we estimated that 52% of the English lexicon—the majority of the words used in English books—consists of lexical “dark matter” undocumented in standard references (12). To keep up with the lexicon, dictionaries are updated regularly (13). We examined how well these changes corresponded with changes in ac- tual usage by studying the 2077 1-gram headwords added to AHD4 in 2000. The overall frequency of these words, such as “buckyball” and “netiquette”, has soared since 1950: Two-thirds exhibited recent sharp increases in frequency (>2× from 1950 to 2000) (Fig. 2C). Nevertheless, there was a lag be- tween lexicographers and the lexicon. Over half the words added to AHD4 were part of the English lexicon a century ago (frequency >10−9 from 1890 to 1900). In fact, some newly added words, such as “gypseous” and “amplidyne”, have already un- dergone a steep decline in frequency (Fig. 2D). Not only must lexicographers avoid adding words that have fallen out of fashion, they must also weed obsolete words from earlier editions. This is an imperfect process. We found 2220 ob- solete 1-gram headwords (“diestock”, “alkales- cent”) in AHD4. Their mean frequency declined throughout the 20th century and dipped below 10−9 decades ago (Fig. 2D, inset). Our results suggest that culturomic tools will aid lexicographers in at least two ways: (i) find- ing low-frequency words that they do not list, and (ii) providing accurate estimates of current fre- quency trends to reduce the lag between changes in the lexicon and changes in the dictionary. The evolution of grammar. Next, we exam- ined grammatical trends. We studied the English irregular verbs, a classic model of grammatical change (14–17). Unlike regular verbs, whose past tense is generated by adding -ed (jump/jumped), irregular verbs are conjugated idiosyncratically (stick/stuck, come/came, get/got) (15). All irregular verbs coexist with regular com- petitors (e.g., “strived” and “strove”) that threaten to supplant them (Fig. 2E and fig. S5). High- frequency irregulars, which are more readily remembered, hold their ground better. For in- stance, we found “found” (frequency: 5 × 10−4) 200,000 times more often than we finded “finded.” In contrast, “dwelt” (frequency: 1 × 10−5) dwelt in our data only 60 times as often as “dwelled” dwelled. We defined a verb’s “regularity” as the percentage of instances in the past tense (i.e., the sum of “drived”, “drove”, and “driven”) in which the regular form is used. Most irregulars have been stable for the past 200 years, but 16% underwent a change in regularity of 10% or more (Fig. 2F). These changes occurred slowly: It took 200 years for our fastest-moving verb (“chide”) to go from 10% to 90%. Otherwise, each trajectory was sui generis; we observed no characteristic shape. For instance, a few verbs, such as “spill”, regularized at a constant speed, but others, such as “thrive” and “dig”, transitioned in fits and starts (7). In some cases, the trajectory suggested a rea- son forthetrend.For example,with “sped/speeded” the shift in meaning from “to move rapidly” and toward “to exceed the legal limit” appears to have been the driving cause (Fig. 2G). Six verbs (burn, chide, smell, spell, spill, and thrive) regularized between 1800 and 2000 (Fig. 2F). Four are remnants of a now-defunct phono- logical process that used -t instead of -ed; they are members of a pack of irregulars that survived by virtue of similarity (bend/bent, build/built, burn/ burnt, learn/learnt, lend/lent, rend/rent, send/sent, smell/smelt, spell/spelt, spill/spilt, and spoil/spoilt). Verbs have been defecting from this coalition for centuries (wend/went, pen/pent, gird/girt, geld/ gelt, and gild/gilt all blend/blent into the domi- nant -ed rule). Culturomic analysis reveals that the collapse of this alliance has been the most significant driver of regularization in the past 200 years. The regularization of burnt, smelt, spelt, and spilt originated in the United States; the forms still cling to life in British English (Fig. 2, E and F). But the -t irregulars may be doomed in England too. Each year, a population the size of Cambridge adopts “burned” in lieu of “burnt”. Fig.1.Culturomic analy- sesstudymillionsofbooks at once. (A) Top row: Au- thors have been writing for millennia; ~129 mil- lion book editions have been published since the adventoftheprintingpress (upper left). Second row: Libraries and publishing houses provide books to Googleforscanning(mid- dle left). Over 15 million bookshavebeendigitized. Third row: Each book is associatedwithmetadata. Fivemillionbooksarecho- senforcomputationalanal- ysis (bottom left). Bottom row:Aculturomictimeline shows the frequency of “apple” in English books over time (1800–2000). (B) Usage frequency of “slavery”. The Civil War (1861–1865) and the civil rights movement (1955–1968) are highlighted in red. The number in the upper left (1e-4 = 10–4) is the unit of frequency. (C) Usage frequency over time for “the Great War” (blue), “World War I” (green), and “World War II” (red). Frequency of the word "apple" Year 129 million books published 15 million books scanned 5 million books analyzed BA C www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 331 14 JANUARY 2011 177 RESEARCH ARTICLE o n J a n u a ry 1 4 , 2 0 1 1 w w w .s ci e n ce m a g .o rg D o w n lo a d e d f ro m http://www.sciencemag.org/ Although irregulars generally yield to regu- lars, two verbs did the opposite: light/lit and wake/woke. Both were irregular in Middle English, were mostly regular by 1800, and subsequently backtracked and are irregular again today. The fact that these verbs have been going back and forth for nearly 500 years highlights the gradual nature of the underlying process. Still, there was at least one instance of rapid progress by an irregular form. Presently, 1% of the English-speaking population switches from “sneaked” to “snuck” every year. Someone will have snuck off while you read this sentence. As before, this trend is more prominent in the United States but recently sneaked across the Atlantic: America is the world’s leading exporter of both regular and irregular verbs. Out with the old. Just as individuals forget the past (18, 19), so do societies (20) (fig. S6). To quantify this effect, we reasoned that the fre- quency of 1-grams such as “1951” could be used to measure interest in the events of the corre- sponding year, and we created plots for each year between 1875 and 1975. The plots had a characteristic shape. For example, “1951” was rarely discussed until the years immediately preceding 1951. Its fre- quency soared in 1951, remained high for 3 years, and then underwent a rapid decay, dropping by half over the next 15 years. Finally, the plots Fig. 2. Culturomics has profound consequences for the study of language, lexicography, and grammar. (A) The size of the English lexicon over time. Tick marks show the number of single words in three dictionaries (see text). (B) Fraction of words in the lexicon that appear in two different dictionaries as a function of usage frequency. (C) Five words added by the AHD in its 2000 update. Inset: Median fre- quency of new words added to AHD4 in 2000. The frequency of half of these words exceeded 10−9 as far back as 1890 (white dot). (D) Obsolete words added to AHD4 in 2000. Inset: Mean frequency of the 2220 AHD headwords whose current usage fre- quency is less than 10−9. (E) Usage frequency of irregular verbs (red) and their regular counterparts (blue). Some verbs (chide/chided) have regularized during the past two centuries. The trajectories for “speeded” and “speed up” (green) are similar, re- flecting the role of semantic factors in this instance of regularization. The verb “burn” first regularized in the United States (U.S. flag) and later in the United Kingdom (UK flag). The irregular “snuck” is rapidly gaining on “sneaked”. (F) Scatterplot of the irregular verbs; each verb’s position depends on its regularity (see text) in the early 19th century (x coor- dinate) and in the late 20th century (y coordinate). For 16% of the verbs, the change in regularity was greater than 10% (large font). Dashed lines sepa- rate irregular verbs (regularity < 50%) from reg- ular verbs (regularity > 50%). Six verbs became regular (upper left quadrant, blue), whereas two be- came irregular (lower right quadrant, red). Inset: The regularity of “chide” over time. (G) Median reg- ularity of verbs whose past tense is often signified with a -t suffix instead of -ed (burn, smell, spell, spill, dwell, learn, and spoil) in U.S. (black) and UK (gray) books. words added to AHD in 2000 0 2 4 x10-8 1800 2000 yc n e u q erf n ai d e M Decade rare words still in AHD 0 2 4 x10-9 yc n e u q erf n a e M 1800 2000 Decade AHD4 W3 OED A B C D E F G 14 JANUARY 2011 VOL 331 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org178 RESEARCH ARTICLE o n J a n u a ry 1 4 , 2 0 1 1 w w w .s ci e n ce m a g .o rg D o w n lo a d e d f ro m http://www.sciencemag.org/ enter a regime marked by slower forgetting: Collective memory has both a short-term and a long-term component. But there have been changes. The amplitude of the plots is rising every year: Precise dates are increasingly common. There is also a greater fo- cus on the present. For instance, “1880” declined to half its peak value in 1912, a lag of 32 years. In contrast, “1973” declined to half its peak by 1983, a lag of only 10 years. We are forgetting our past faster with each passing year (Fig. 3A). We were curious whether our increasing tendency to forget the old was accompanied by more rapid assimilation of the new (21). We di- vided a list of 147 inventions into time-resolved cohorts based on the 40-year interval in which they were first invented (1800–1840, 1840–1880, and 1880–1920) (7). We tracked the frequency of each invention in the nth year after it was invented as compared to its maximum value and plotted the median of these rescaled trajectories for each cohort. The inventions from the earliest cohort (1800–1840) took over 66 years from invention D o u b lin g t im e: 4 y rs Half life: 73 yrs Year of invention 0 5 x10-5 yc n e u q er F A B C D E F F re q u e n cy F re q u e n cy F re q u e n cy ( lo g ) M e d ia n f re q u e n cy (% o f p e a k va lu e ) M e d ia n f re q u e n cy M e d ia n f re q u e n cy ( lo g ) Fig. 3. Cultural turnover is accelerating. (A) We forget: frequency of “1883” (blue), “1910” (green), and “1950” (red). Inset: We forget faster. The half-life of the curves (gray dots) is getting shorter (gray line: moving average). (B) Cultural adoption is quicker. Median trajectory for three cohorts of inventions from three different time periods (1800–1840, blue; 1840–1880, green; 1880–1920, red). Inset: The telephone (green; date of invention, green arrow) and radio (blue; date of invention, blue arrow). (C) Fame of various personalities born between 1920 and 1930. (D) Frequency of the 50 most famous people born in 1871 (gray lines; median, thick dark gray line). Five examples are highlighted. (E) The median trajectory of the 1865 cohort is characterized by four parameters: (i) initial age of celebrity (34 years old, tick mark); (ii) doubling time of the subsequent rise to fame (4 years, blue line); (iii) age of peak celebrity (70 years after birth, tick mark), and (iv) half-life of the post-peak forgetting phase (73 years, red line). Inset: The doubling time and half-life over time. (F) The median trajectory of the 25 most famous personalities born between 1800 and 1920 in various careers. www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 331 14 JANUARY 2011 179 RESEARCH ARTICLE o n J a n u a ry 1 4 , 2 0 1 1 w w w .s ci e n ce m a g .o rg D o w n lo a d e d f ro m http://www.sciencemag.org/ to widespread impact (frequency >25% of peak). Since then, the cultural adoption of technology has become more rapid. The 1840–1880 invention cohort was widely adopted within 50 years; the 1880–1920 cohort within 27 (Fig. 3B and fig. S7). “In the future, everyone will be famous for 7.5 minutes” – Whatshisname. People, too, rise to prominence, only to be forgotten (22). Fame can be tracked by measuring the frequency of a person’s name (Fig. 3C). We compared the rise to fame of the most famous people of different eras. We took all 740,000 people with entries in Wikipedia, removed cases where several famous individuals share a name, and sorted the rest by birth date and frequency (23). For every year from 1800 to 1950, we constructed a cohort consisting of the 50 most famous people born in that year. For example, the 1882 cohort includes “Virginia Woolf” and “Felix Frankfurter”; the 1946 cohort includes “Bill Clinton” and “Steven Spielberg”. We plotted the median frequency for the names in each cohort over time (Fig. 3, D and E). The resulting trajectories were all similar. Each cohort had a pre-celebrity period (median frequency <10−9), followed by a rapid rise to prominence, a peak, and a slow de- cline. We therefore characterized each cohort using four parameters: (i) the age of initial celebrity, (ii) the doubling time of the initial rise, (iii) the age of peak celebrity, and (iv) the half-life of the decline (Fig. 3E). The age of peak celebrity has been con- sistent over time: about 75 years after birth. But the other parameters have been changing (fig. S8). Fame comes sooner and rises faster. Between the early 19th century and the mid-20th century, the age of initial celebrity declined from 43 to 29 years, and the doubling time fell from 8.1 to 3.3 years. As a result, the most famous people alive today are more famous—in books—than their predecessors. Yet this fame is increasingly short- lived: The post-peak half-life dropped from 120 to 71 years during the 19th century. We repeated this analysis with all 42,358 people in the databases of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (24), which reflect a process of expert curation that began in 1768. The results were similar (7) (fig. S9). Thus, people are getting more famous than ever before but are being forgotten more rapidly than ever. Fig. 4. Culturomics can be used to detectcensorship.(A)Usagefrequen- cy of “Marc Chagall” in German (red) as compared to English (blue). (B) Suppression of Leon Trotsky (blue), Grigory Zinoviev (green), and Lev Kamenev (red) in Russian texts, with noteworthy events indicated: Trotsky’s assassination (blue arrow), Zinoviev and Kamenev executed (red arrow), the Great Purge (red highlight), and perestroika (gray ar- row). (C) The 1976 and 1989 Tianan- men Square incidents both led to elevated discussion in English texts (scale shown on the right). Response to the 1989 incident is largely ab- sentinChinesetexts(blue,scaleshown on the left), suggesting government censorship. (D) While the Holly- wood Ten were blacklisted (red highlight) from U.S. movie studios, their fame declined (median: thick gray line). None of them were cred- ited in a film until 1960’s (aptly named) Exodus. (E) Artists and writ- ers in various disciplines were sup- pressed by the Nazi regime (red highlight). Incontrast,theNazisthem- selves (thick red line) exhibited a strong fame peak during the war years. (F) Distribution of suppres- sion indices for both English (blue) andGerman (red) for the period from 1933–1945. Three victims of Nazi suppression are highlighted at left (red arrows). Inset: Calculation of the suppression index for “Henri Matisse”. 天安門 F re q u e n cy F re q u e n cy F re q u e n cy F re q u e n cy A B C D E F 14 JANUARY 2011 VOL 331 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org180 RESEARCH ARTICLE o n J a n u a ry 1 4 , 2 0 1 1 w w w .s ci e n ce m a g .o rg D o w n lo a d e d f ro m http://www.sciencemag.org/ Occupational choices affect the rise to fame. We focused on the 25 most famous individuals born between 1800 and 1920 in seven occupations (ac- tors, artists, writers, politicians, biologists, phys- icists, and mathematicians), examining how their fame grewasa functionofage(Fig.3Fandfig.S10). Actors tend to become famous earliest, at around 30. But the fame of the actors we studied, whose ascent preceded the spread of television, rises slowly thereafter. (Their fame peaked at a frequency of 2 × 10−7.) The writers became fa- mous about a decade after the actors, but rose for longer and to a much higher peak (8 × 10−7). Politicians did not become famous until their 50s, when, upon being elected president of the United States (in 11 of 25 cases; 9 more were heads of other states), they rapidly rose to become the most famous of the groups (1 × 10−6). Science is a poor route to fame. Physicists and biologists eventually reached a similar level of fame as actors (1 × 10−7), but it took them far longer. Alas, even at their peak, mathematicians tend not to be appreciated by the public (2 × 10−8). Detecting censorship and suppression. Sup- pression of a person or an idea leaves quantifiable fingerprints (25). For instance, Nazi censorship of the Jewish artist Marc Chagall is evident by comparing the frequency of “Marc Chagall” in English and in German books (Fig. 4A). In both languages, there is a rapid ascent starting in the late 1910s (when Chagall was in his early 30s). In English, the ascent continues. But in German, the artist’s popularity decreases, reaching a nadir from 1936 to 1944, when his full name appears only once. (In contrast, from 1946 to 1954, “Marc Chagall” appears nearly 100 times in the German corpus.) Such examples are found in many coun- tries,includingRussia(Trotsky),China(Tiananmen Square), and the United States (the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted in 1947) (Fig. 4, B to D, and fig. S11). We probed the impact of censorship on a person’s cultural influence in Nazi Germany. Led by such figures as the librarian Wolfgang Hermann, the Nazis created lists of authors and artists whose “undesirable”, “degenerate” work was banned from libraries and museums and publicly burned (26–28). We plotted median usage in German for five such lists: artists (100 names) and writers of literature (147), politics (117), history (53), and philosophy (35) (Fig. 4E and fig. S12). We also included a collection of Nazi party members [547 names (7)]. The five suppressed groups exhibited a decline. This decline was modest for writers of history (9%) and literature (27%), but pronounced in politics (60%), philosophy (76%), and art (56%). The only group whose signal increased during the Third Reich was the Nazi party mem- bers [a 500% increase (7)]. Given such strong signals, we tested whether one could identify victims of Nazi repression de novo. We computed a “suppression index” (s) for each person by dividing their frequency from 1933 to 1945 by the mean frequency in 1925–1933 and in 1955–1965 (Fig. 4F, inset). In English, the distribution of suppression indices is tightly cen- tered around unity. Fewer than 1% of individuals lie at the extremes (s < 1/5 or s > 5). In German, the distribution is much wider, and skewed to the left: Suppression in Nazi Germany was not the exception, but the rule (Fig. 4F). At the far left, 9.8% of individuals showed strong suppression (s < 1/5). This population is highly enriched in documented victims of repression, such as Pablo Picasso (s = 0.12), the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius (s = 0.16), and Hermann Maas (s < 0.01), an influential Protestant minister who helped many Jews flee (7). (Maas was later recognized by Israel’s Yad Vashem as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.”) At the other extreme, 1.5% of the population exhibited a dra- matic rise (s > 5). This subpopulation is highly enriched in Nazis and Nazi-supporters, who bene- fited immensely from government propaganda (7). These results provide a strategy for rapidly identifying likely victims of censorship from a large pool of possibilities, and highlight how cul- turomic methods might complement existing his- torical approaches. Culturomics. Culturomics is the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture. Books are a begin- ning, but we must also incorporate newspapers (29), manuscripts (30), maps (31), artwork (32), and a myriad of other human creations (33, 34). Of course, many voices—already lost to time— lie forever beyond our reach. Culturomic results are a new type of evidence in the humanities. As with fossils of ancient crea- tures, the challenge of culturomics lies in the in- terpretation of this evidence. Considerations of space restrict us to the briefest of surveys: a A B C D E F G H Fig. 5. Culturomics provides quantitative evidence for scholars in many fields. (A) Historical epi- demiology: “influenza” is shown in blue; the Russian, Spanish, and Asian flu epidemics are highlighted. (B) History of the Civil War. (C) Comparative history. (D) Gender studies. (E and F) History of science. (G) Historical gastronomy. (H) History of religion: “God”. www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 331 14 JANUARY 2011 181 RESEARCH ARTICLE o n J a n u a ry 1 4 , 2 0 1 1 w w w .s ci e n ce m a g .o rg D o w n lo a d e d f ro m http://www.sciencemag.org/ handful of trajectories and our initial interpreta- tions. Many more fossils (Fig. 5 and fig. S13), with shapes no less intriguing, beckon: (i) Peaks in “influenza” correspond with dates of known pandemics, suggesting the value of culturomic methods for historical epidemiol- ogy (35) (Fig. 5A and fig. S14). (ii) Trajectories for “the North”, “the South”, and finally “the enemy” reflect how polarization of the states preceded the descent into the Civil War (Fig. 5B). (iii) In the battle of the sexes, the “women” are gaining ground on the “men” (Fig. 5C). (iv) “féminisme” made early inroads in France, but the United States proved to be a more fertile environment in the long run (Fig. 5D). (v) “Galileo”, “Darwin”, and “Einstein” may be well-known scientists, but “Freud” is more deeply ingrained in our collective subconscious (Fig. 5E). (vi) Interest in “evolution” was waning when “DNA” came along (Fig. 5F). (vii) The history of the American diet offers many appetizing opportunities for future research; the menu includes “steak”, “sausage”, “ice cream”, “hamburger”, “pizza”, “pasta”, and “sushi” (Fig. 5G). (viii) “God” is not dead but needs a new publicist (Fig. 5H). These, together with the billions of other trajectories that accompany them, will furnish a great cache of bones from which to reconstruct the skeleton of a new science. References and Notes 1. E. O. Wilson, Consilience (Knopf, New York, 1998). 2. D. Sperber, Man (London) 20, 73 (1985). 3. S. Lieberson, J. Horwich, Sociol. Methodol. 38, 1 (2008). 4. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, W. Marcus, X. Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution (Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 1981). 5. P. Niyogi, The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution (MIT, Cambridge, MA, 2006). 6. G. K. Zipf, The Psycho-biology of Language (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1935). 7. Materials and methods are available as supporting material on Science Online. 8. E. S. Lander et al.; International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, Nature 409, 860 (2001). 9. A. W. Read, Am. Speech 8, 10 (1933). 10. Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, P. B. Gove, Ed. 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Soc. 64, 1 (1958). 22. L. Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & Its History (Vintage Books, New York, 1997). 23. Wikipedia, 23 August 2010, www.wikipedia.org/. 24. Encyclopaedia Britannica, D. Hoiberg, Ed. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, 2002). 25. Censorship: 500 Years of Conflict, V. Gregorian, Ed. (New York Public Library, New York, 1984). 26. W. Treß, Wider Den Undeutschen Geist: Bücherverbrennung 1933 (Parthas, Berlin, 2003). 27. G. Sauder, Die Bücherverbrennung: 10. Mai 1933 (Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 1985). 28. S. Barron, P. W. Guenther, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1991). 29. Google News Archive Search, http://news.google.com/ archivesearch. 30. Digital Scriptorium, www.scriptorium.columbia.edu. 31. Visual Eyes, www.viseyes.org. 32. ARTstor, www.artstor.org. 33. Europeana, www.europeana.eu. 34. Hathi Trust Digital Library, www.hathitrust.org. 35. J. M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (Viking Press, New York, 2004). 36. J.-B.M. was supported by the Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology Prize Fellowship and the Systems Biology Program (Harvard Medical School). Y.K.S. was supported by internships at Google. S.P. acknowledges support from NIH grant HD 18381. E.L.A. was supported by the Harvard Society of Fellows, the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship, a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, an NSF Graduate Fellowship, the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, and National Human Genome Research Institute grant T32 HG002295. This work was supported by a Google Research Award. The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics acknowledges support from the Templeton Foundation, NIH grant R01GM078986, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Some of the methods described in this paper are covered by U.S. patents 7463772 and 7508978. We are grateful to D. Bloomberg, A. Popat, M. McCormick, T. Mitchison, U. Alon, S. Shieber, E. Lander, R. Nagpal, J. Fruchter, J. Guldi, J. Cauz, C. Cole, P. Bordalo, N. Christakis, C. Rosenberg, M. Liberman, J. Scheidlower, B. Zimmer, R. Darnton, and A. Spector for discussions; to C.-M. Hetrea and K. Sen for assistance with Encyclopaedia Britannica's database; to S. Eismann, W. Treß, and the City of Berlin Web site (berlin.de) for assistance in documenting victims of Nazi censorship; to C. Lazell and G. T. Fournier for assistance with annotation; to M. Lopez for assistance with Fig. 1; to G. Elbaz and W. Gilbert for reviewing an early draft; and to Google’s library partners and every author who has ever picked up a pen, for books. Supporting Online Material www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/science.1199644/DC1 Materials and Methods Figs. S1 to S19 References 27 October 2010; accepted 6 December 2010 Published online 16 December 2010; 10.1126/science.1199644 14 JANUARY 2011 VOL 331 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org182 RESEARCH ARTICLE o n J a n u a ry 1 4 , 2 0 1 1 w w w .s ci e n ce m a g .o rg D o w n lo a d e d f ro m http://www.sciencemag.org/ work_kwy3ddpkmzgm3o5hntjpcwj3me ---- Sham–Real Shadows On Navigating the Anthropocene Trevor Van den Eÿnden MAA, Emily Carr University of Art + Design A thesis essay submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Applied Arts in Visual Arts Emily Carr University of Art + Design 2015 © Trevor Van den Eÿnden, 2015 Trevor Van den Eijnden On Navigating the Anthropocene Trevor Van den Eijnden Sham–Real Shadows On Navigating the Anthropocene Abstract | i Sham–Real Shadows Abstract I make intimate scale objects that encourage audience interaction through their mobile devices, or small to larger scale works utilizing phenomenological engagement with projections, or mirrors. My research is focused on the Anthropocene, our current human-influenced global geological epoch born of the Industrial Revolution. It is my hope that my passion for the ideas contained in this subject will have some resonance in the work, while the things I make and the experiences they permit can be understood as meditations, and salves for bleak subject matter. The works discussed herein do not lecture toward my personal thinking around the Anthropocene (we get the planet we make), rather they direct themselves toward suggestions of how nature is presented, understood and utilized in a human-dominated world, and what that does to how we understand our relationship vis-à-vis nature. I believe that these are symptom and source for the problems we currently face and will carry with us into the future. The works discussed in detail are Familiar Strangers, Sham–Real Shadows, and The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple. These works utilize human-made materials sourced from nature such as paper, MDF, light, and plastics, as well as contemporary technology such as lasers (an Anthropocene futuristic form of primitive fire). Frequent research sources, such as naturalist wallpaper, are chosen for their presentation of a commodified and rationalized Nature; a shadow of a shadow used as simulacrum to decorate interiors in a human world. The areas of inquiry focus on two streams with the attempt to answer the question, “are there ways to explore the ideological underpinnings and ramifications of the Anthropocene?” These two primary avenues of exploration are: • Nature–human dichotomies and ways of designing nature, presenting and thus knowing Nature as simulacrum re-presented in repetitive patterns and then used to decorate human space, and • Hyperobjects as Burkeian, and Kantian sublime presented as patterning of indeterminate space as meditations on, and signifiers of bleakness and hope, light and darkness destabilization and interconnectedness, time and the unknown knowing. These two outcomes are explored in detail with in this document, and have formed the basis of my current practice. ii | Table of contents Sham–Real Shadows Table of contents Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i Table of contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii List of images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Dedication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii Key terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Part I: Shooting through mirages from the past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 Representations and ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 02 Familiar Strangers 03 Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 05 Materials and processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 05 On arriving at the final form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 07 Where the project began . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 07 Subverting wallpapers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 09 Authenticity and legitimacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Naturalist wallpaper designs since circa 1784 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 The 23 intervals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Ideology, and thinking on nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Evocative objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Harm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Nature as un-re-presentable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Sham–Real Shadows 25 Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Inspiration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Similarity to other artworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Shadowpaper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 The overlaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Mapping the past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 The 23 intervals infographic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Part II: Pointing aimlessly with accuracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 On arrows, and thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Ways of knowing: nature, and us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Ways of knowing: Capitalocene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Ways of unknowing: are there any? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Table of contents | iii Sham–Real Shadows Part III: Shooting into illusions from the future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 A little bit Anthroposcene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple 47 Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Inside The Temple 49 Similarity to other artworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 What was in the shadows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 On the purpose of art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Green modernism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 The sublime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 The future as not presentable, art as salve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Are there ways to explore? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Appendix A: Other images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Appendix B . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Table 01 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Appendix C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Additional documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 iv | List of images Sham–Real Shadows List of images Figure 01. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 04 Adjacent page An audience member illuminates and traces the outer edges to cast “shadows of nature” from the chosen form that attempts to place “nature in a box”. Note: the closer a cell phone light is to the sculpture the more all encompassing the shadows cast become. Shown: Interval 09: life is an act of consumption, jupiter (working title). Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, Phillips screws. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. Figure 02 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 06 Under bright lights (such as a from a cell phone flash-light) the laser process is made evident—the burns show that these are things that have survived fire (metaphoric and literal). Shown: Interval 08: four years before, and 156 after the origins of the species and we’re still here (working title) Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, Phillips screws. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. Figure 03 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 08 Lace-work designs, such as this, there are no corner supports thus making the form extremely prone to breaking and eventual collapse. This speaks to the delicateness of the human relationship with nature—careless and brash breaks it; earnestness and concern keeps it standing. Shown: Detail of Interval 09: life is an act of consumption, jupiter (working title) showing delicateness of form. Figure 04 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Sham–Real Shadows Exhibition, The GAM Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 23 January–21 February 2015. Shown above left: Final display on C-shaped MDF ledges. Shown above right and left: Interval 13: a parliament of effective distances (working title). Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, on custom light fixture, with custom light bulb. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. Figure 05 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Left: Untitled chinoserie design by Linon Batiste, circa 1785. Right: Les Metamorphoses d’Ovide by an unknown artist, 1785. Figure 06 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Upper: Lucullus by Auguste Clésinger, 1855, with die cut overlay showing cut outs in both shape and halftone points. Dark areas represent the cuts out of the paper material. Middle: Process excerpt of four tone rendering in preparation for halftone die cut for Interval 08: four years before, and 156 after the origins of the species and we’re still here (working title) in Figure 02. Lower: Interval 08: four years before, and 156 after the origins of the species and we’re still here (working title) on display at the GAM Gallery. Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, on custom light fixture, with custom light bulb. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. List of images | v Sham–Real Shadows Figure 07 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Left: Untitled wallpaper design by Owen Jones, 1855. Right: Die cut for Interval 07: that which is beautiful is never true (working title). Figure 08 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Left: Die cut for Interval 09: life is an act of consumption, jupiter (working title). Right: Acanthus by William Morris, 1875. Figure 09 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Die cut for Interval 15: these will never be banana leaves (working title) showing original pattern along the four sides and new blended patterns for the top and bottom. Figure 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Die cut for Interval 22: the heat of the sun is you (working title), 2014. Figure 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Die cut for Interval 23: we are our own ghosts in a landscape of our own making (working title). Figure 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Audience members illumes the “box that failed”—in cutting this one the lasers cut too far and several birds were cleaved from the design. Here they are presented as breaks from the patterning, laying “dead” on the ground. Shown: Interval 22: the heat of the sun is you (working title). Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, Phillips screws. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. Figure 13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Left: Audience members light up Interval 11: this is how we dance under waves you can not see (working title). Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, Phillips screws. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. Right: Audience members light up Interval 20: the world does not die with us (working title). Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, Phillips screws. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. Figure 14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Fragility remains as a consistent element as the interior design depends on only a few 0.3175 cm supports just as the little cube cousin depends on 0.15875 cm supports. Another important distinction is that the lighting for Sham-Real Shadows is provided, and integrated in its display. This permits a projection of shadows further outward so that the piece may fill an entire space with shadows, and light. Shown: Sham–Real Shadows. Laser-cut MDF, embroidery thread, custom light fixture, and you. 55.8 x 55.8 x 55.8 cm. 2015. Figure 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Shadowpaper cast from Sham–Real Shadows. Figure 16 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Overlapping shadowpaper cast by Sham–Real Shadows and by other audience generated light sources. vi | List of images Sham–Real Shadows Figure 17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 The 23 intervals research info-graphic. 61 x 61 cm. 2015. (See Appendix A for a high- resolution version). Figure 18 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Illustration showing The Anthropocene Temple including placement of The Relics, walls, curtain (denoted by dotted line), and light leaks. Note: The largest work, Sham–Real Shadows, is in the small place, while the smaller Relics are in the big space. This misplacement was calculated to craft a tension of scale that gives way to an open blackness with spots of brilliance. Shown: Layout of The Anthropocene Temple Exhibit: 1. Sham–Real Shadows, 2. Relic I, 3. Relic II, 4. Relic III, 5. Relic IV, 6. The Temple Prints (located on the walls), 7. Didactic panel. Figure 19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Relic I: No esteemed deed; nothing of value here. Laser-cut MDF, surveillance Plexiglas, wool, paper, 3D printed sculpture, fixture, LED light bulb. 25.4x25.4x25.4 cm. 2015. Figure 20 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Sketch I have made of “landscape of repulsion” from a mock of a conceptual landscape of concrete thorns to warn future generations to steer clear of New Mexico’s Yucca Mountain radioactive wastes burial ground as commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy sometime in the early 1970s. Sourced from WIT’s World Ecology Report - Vol. 04, No. 5—The Digest of Critical Environmental Information (WIT, 1992, 12 pages) Figure 21 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Relic II: The wood between the worlds. Laser-cut MDF, surveillance Plexiglas, paper, mirror, 3D printed sculpture, fixture, LED light bulb. 25.4x25.4x25.4 cm. 2015. Figure 22 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Relic III: Mine #000. Laser-cut MDF, surveillance Plexiglas, paper, mirrored paper, 3D printed sculpture, string LED lights. 25.4x25.4x25.4 cm. 2015. Figure 23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Relic IV: Lawn (plasti–phoenicopteriphobia). Figure 24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 The Temple Prints. Black ink, black rag paper, black thumbtacks Dimensions vary. 2015. Acknowledgements | vii Sham–Real Shadows Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the faculty of MAA program for their dedication and assistance, keen minds and support. Foremost among them I especially owe thanks to my advisor Fiona Bowie for her patience and willingness to encourage and push me to explore new materials and methods for making art as today I am producing work that is very much different from what I was making when I began this journey. Besides my advisor I would also like to thank Kathleen Ritter and Simon Levin who provided keen insight and earnest support for the development of many new projects that worked in ways of making and thinking that I would have never considered otherwise. And I would also like to thank Dr. Chris Jones for taking a chance on me and offering his support. I would also like to thank the support staff at the Soft Shop’s Laser Output Centre who pushed the laser cutter to its edge of capabilities for me, as well as Angeles Hernandez Correa for her organization and assistance throughout the past two years. Finally I thank my cohort Christann Kennedy, Melany Nugent-Noble, Valérie Tremblay Blouin, Troy Gronsdahl, Dionne Paul, Galan Aitken, Jay Havens and Cadine Navarro for their generous support and honest critiques. viii | Dedication Sham–Real Shadows Dedication To my partner Andrew and my four-legged companion Sherlock for their tireless, patience, love and support during this journey. Thank you, and “woof, woof”. Key terms | ix Sham–Real Shadows Key terms Anthropocene: Our current geological era born of the industrial revolution that is dated to 1784 to coincide with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine, and exacerbated after immediately after 1944 with the first atomic bombs and subsequently the Great Leap forward of the 1940s and ’50s. Anthroposcene: There are two ways I define this neologism. Both definitions speak to “setting the stage” for the Anthropocene. 1. A work of art (time-based, 3D, 2D or other) that when pulled out of its original context appears as something quite different than probably intended, specifically that it appears to speak too, relate with, predict, or present the Anthropocene. 1. A work of art (time-based, 3D, 2D or other) that specifically references the Anthropocene. Dystopia: A utopia that is negative relative to the global impact of the Anthropocene. Eutopia: A utopia that is positive relative to the global impact of the Anthropocene. Hyperobject: Another term coined by Timothy Morton referring to objects massively distributed throughout time and space relative to human life spans. Examples include polymers, nuclear waste, the oceans, Mount Krakatau, genetic DNA, the planet Earth, the Sun, and so on. The mesh: A theoretical mesh within which all things sit. This is a term coined by Timothy Morton that implies a theoretical mesh that exists as the interwoven fabric of (all) life and non-life. The word mesh carries with it a two dimensional visualization that should be set aside in order to fully understand it as an every expanding multi- dimensional weaving of all that we currently do and do not know or understand. Therefore the mesh that Morton (and I) speaks of is 3D, multidimensional, and each piece is woven to every other piece. Something of this complexity lacks a sufficient word in the English language, but the Greek word ametros, meaning “unmeasured”, comes close. Nature: A generalized romantic or exploitative view of nature as usually found in a Nature–Human dichotomy. Nature: An open definition of nature that opens its scope by refusing to explicitly define it. This is a term that references a collapse of the Nature–Human dichotomy in preference of acknowledging our implication within the systems of the natural world, i.e. the before mentioned Mesh of all living and nonliving things that is obscured by the Fog of Anthropomorphism. x | Key terms Sham–Real Shadows Solvo desertum: Free-willed Nature; a form of wilderness predicated on Romantic notions of what nature should look and be like. Perhaps this, in outcome, is identical to voluntas desertum, but it is differentiated through its intent. Strange stranger: Another term coined by Timothy Morton, this refers to the conceptual distance that is required in order to better understand and relate to the other life forms entangled in the Mesh and lost in the Fog. Utopia: Defined henceforth as a “no-place” that could equally be eutopian or dystopian. Voluntas desertum: Already and always free nature; an acknowledgement of an unknowable knowing of our enmeshment within nature through choice of acceptance of nature as is over a decision to purposely abandon any specific way of understanding and categorizing Nature. Part I: Shooting through mirages from the past | 01 Sham–Real Shadows Part I: Shooting through mirages from the past Sham–Real Shadows 02 | Representations and ideology Representations and ideology “Ideology isn’t just in your head. It’s in the shape of a Coke bottle. It’s in the way some things appear ‘natural’—rolling hills and greenery—as if the Industrial Revolution never occurred.” —Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought The works discussed in Part I are enmeshed in past ways of knowing, representing, and burying nature behind façades of itself. These works point toward Aesop’s arrow as idealized replicas of nature aligned to our thinking about Nature, that are then made from materials sourced from its own destruction. Nature in the arts (and elsewhere) is a discombobulated concept that is tossed between and betwixt opposed and confused uses: basis, authority, genesis, metaphor, raw material, frontier, divine, sublime, evil, fear, and escape among many others. The found patterns employed in the work reference prevailing romanticized ideals of nature since the start of the Industrial Revolution. In turn those ideals limit our engagement with nature and our understanding of it as something that we are a part, not apart. The works discussed in Part I re-represent these ideals in new modes of presentation. Familiar Strangers | 03 Sham–Real Shadows Familiar Strangers 04 | Familiar Strangers Sham–Real Shadows Figure 01: Adjacent page An audience member illuminates and traces the outer edges to cast “shadows of nature” from the chosen form that attempts to place “nature in a box”. Note: the closer a cell phone light is to the sculpture the more all encompassing the shadows cast become. Shown: Interval 09: life is an act of consumption, jupiter (working title). Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, Phillips screws. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. Familiar Strangers | Description | Materials and processes | 05 Sham–Real Shadows Description Familiar Strangers is a sculptural time lapse of iconic, award winning Western naturalist wallpaper designs since the onset of the Industrial Revolution (circa 1784), thus linking them directly to the start of the transition toward the Anthropocene proper1. These works are delicate, fragile, laser-cut cubes intendended as disruptions of their paper surfaces to re–present these patterns from nature. These works are then displayed to encourage audience interaction with their cell phones lights (Figure 01) to investigate these re-presentations of nature in a familiar, yet strange form—as simulacrum as pattern. Materials and processes As a material, paper is a foundational item in modern knowledge—the primary formats for the dissemination of information for over 800 years in the West, and nearly two thousand in China, yet it was not popularized in décor until the Industrial Revolution made mass printing possible2. Patterning our man-made environments has existed for millennia3 and today patterning dots our materialized landscapes, actively influencing thoughts, actions, and plans in active ways (modern urban street grids), passively (décor patterns such as wallpaper), and somewhere in between (concrete, gravel, asphalt and other built textures). Within all of these patterns, wallpaper is a passive daily reminder that nature can be turned into Nature; that it can be bent, controlled, and broken. Wallpaper, indirectly (as ideology via pattern) and directly (it is made from plants, and trees, dyes, chemicals, and glues) points to the destruction of nature for a solely human (such as the arts), as well as capitalist purposes. Laser–cutting as a process and material choice leaves behind trace evidence of a form of highly controlled fire alongside proof that these works survived it (Figure 02). This is paramount to Familiar Strangers, for in a grand sense our Anthropocene journey, from the very beginning of human evolution to becoming the driving force of nature4 that we are today, began with our control of fire. Arguably it is the first thing to allow humans to separate from the rest of the natural world (our control 1. The first machine–made wallpaper was crafted by the French “royal manufacturer” Christophe-Phillppe Oberkampf and dates to 1785 2. Wall hanging of cotton or silk have existed since at least the 1600s while other forms of patterned wallcoverings have existed for millenia. 3. The chevrons on the 700,000 year old Java Island pseudodon shell engravings are the oldest known “man–made” patterns—made by a human predecessor, homo erectus, and whose intent for the pattern is subject to some debate. (“Zigzags on a Shell From Java Are the Oldest Human Engravings”, 2014) 4. For example, the United Nations estimates that we now move more sediment globally and annually than all of the powers of erosion combined. 06 | Familiar Strangers | Materials and processes Sham–Real Shadows Figure 02: Under bright lights (such as a from a cell phone flash-light) the laser process is made evident— the burns show that these are things that have survived fire (metaphoric and literal). Shown: Interval 08: four years before, and 156 after the origins of the species and we’re still here (working title) Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, Phillips screws. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. over natural forces), and such a ubiquitous and deep-in-time hyperobject (we can not know how we came to know how to produce and control it) is an important reference as it suggests that, although not visible unless investigated closely, there is more to the work to consider than pattern alone. Laser is fire’s 20th century high– technology update, rendering a process that encapsulates the deep past, the present, and the future—the perfect tool for the Anthropocene. The fire the laser produces is texture both literally, and metaphorically as the boxes display the evidence of burning to craft such fragility, but their shadows carry no such reference. Familiar Strangers | On arriving at the final form | Where the project began | 07 Sham–Real Shadows On arriving at the final form Artist David Thomas Smith creates kaleidoscopic patterns from composited aerial photographs as a way to explore sites of global capitalism (“Imagery, Imagination, Earth”, 2013). Smith’s work is disturbing and beautiful, and quite literally shows the vast ways in which capitalism and human demand has patterned the earth’s terrain. I choose to work with commercial wallpaper because to me it represents a patterning of nature in a micro way that in turn primes us to accept the macro patterning that Smith spells out for us in his photography. Wallpaper, to me, demonstrates nature as simulacra; as a thing that is beautiful yet disturbing in how it flattens and bends that-which-is-not-us (Nature) into rational repeating shapes and forms. In an even deeper sense Familiar Strangers et al. is a response to the patterning of capitalism, and of green modernism that proposes management of the Earth as if it were a giant garden. In this scenario global capitalism decides the pattern, and ultimately what gets to grow and what (and whom) is weeded out. Like the connection between wallpaper patterning and ideological patterning, several key aesthetic decisions I made with Familiar Strangers depended on linguistic connections. These Familiar Strangers re–presents simulacra of nature inside cubes to speak to placing nature in a metaphoric and literal box. This is an answer to Timothy Morton’s ponderance that our failed Nature ideas “force organic forms into [ideological] boxes that cannot do them justice” (Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 2007, 20), while the white cube shape is also a nod to the gallery space in which the work is disseminated. When explored with light the work casts shadows of pseudo– nature that in its layers presents a shadow of a shadow of a shadow of nature. It is also important to note that the boxes are hollow because nothing truly natural exists inside an ideological box. Where the project began I see the premising Familiar Strangers designs as “small acts of violence”5. They may not be large-scale clear cuts like one would find in an Edward Burtynsky photograph, but they are small subconscious actions that suggest and condition toward tolerance, and acceptance of violence against the natural world. With the idea of violence, and the material of paper, I began exploring the work of Thomas Demand, specifically his photographs of life-sized replicas of sites of social or political trauma. Familiar Strangers began by building intricate hand-cut replicas of the interior framing of 5. Analogous to the term micro-aggressions. 08 | Familiar Strangers | Where the project began Sham–Real Shadows Figure 03: Lace-work designs, such as this, there are no corner supports thus making the form extremely prone to breaking and eventual collapse. This speaks to the delicateness of the human relationship with nature—careless and brash breaks it; earnestness and concern keeps it standing. Shown: Detail of Interval 09: life is an act of consumption, jupiter (working title) showing delicateness of form. suburban homes that would be subjected to simulations of landscape burning, flooding, or glacier crushing to see what residue would be left to photograph. From these artifacts of trauma I crafted patterns, but this approach felt too focused on illustrating dystopia rather than thinking on patterning in literal, and ideological ways. With that observation I began to search for something more simple yet related to human dwellings. In this I kept coming back to wallpaper as simulacrum. For me these small cubes represent the possibility of a room somewhere (or anywhere) where these small acts of violence work on someone’s subconscious, or my own. Familiar Strangers | Subverting wallpapers | 09 Sham–Real Shadows Subverting wallpapers Many Western patterns stem from adaption, and mixing of styles, more commonly taking the form of appropriation of non-Western cultures, such as Scottish re- interpretations of 200–600 CE Persian Paisley patterns (“The History of the Paisley Symbol and Paisley Pattern”, 2014), or Dutch willow patterns based off of Chinese designs depicting pastoral scenes in blue, and white (Joseph Portanova, 2013). CNTRLZAC designs dishware for Italian company Hyb|rid that juxtaposes original Middle Eastern or Asian designs with the European adaptation onto the same dish, bowl, or glass. It seems far too poignant that these are designed in Italy, manufactured in China, and sold in North America. I see these decorative crafts as Anthropocene products that explore the origins of patterns while pointing out that colonialism’s history with pattern didn’t end as its commercialized appropriation and exploitation continues today. Today, wallpapers are the focus of numerous artists. In Domestic Interventions (CityScape Community Art Space, North Vancouver, BC, 17 October–15 November 2014) artist Janet Wang subverted Toile de Jouy—a less expensive, printed style of repetitive images of the idyllic (Azzarito, 2009)—by seeding typical pastoral scenes with the detritus of everyday Toronto including images of needles, used condoms, as well as its ignored, and underprivileged people. The pattern was silkscreened by hand on fabric and used to craft a tent typical of persons without proper housing that survive in the parks, and streets of that city. Wang’s approach of subverting an old style to create her own take is poignant, but it is not a solution that felt right for this project as I desired to work with designs that were in someway approved by a capitalistic system inside a timeline, which would necessitate that they already exist. This meant that altering the designs beyond reducing them to solid and void, and blending them together to make the tops and bottoms of the cubes, couldn’t be done. If I alter the designs then they are more motif then historical proof, less re-presentation than opinion; and this doesn’t feel right. As a result I must struggle with the strong probability that the aestheticism of the final forms will be seen as reinforcing the ideological patterning that I seek to undermine with Familiar Strangers. This sets up a difficult tension where the earnestness of the designs to sign–post nature meets the ideological patterning pointing to Nature I see imbedded in them. Making my own patterns, or subverting historical ones are not a rejected way of working, but is something for another project. A more direct approach, artist Kristin Schoppi’s 1993 vegetable wallpaper installation at Access Gallery (see Appendix A, figures A-01, and A-02) made of real vegetables left to rot, takes the odious conceptual underpinning of naturalist wallpaper— taming, and controlling nature—and lets it rot. What a stark way to speak to the rot in humanity’s relationship to nature as Nature. In this way the work becomes something much more visceral, that demands interaction without choice. I need 10 | Familiar Strangers | Authenticity and legitimacy Sham–Real Shadows Figure 04: Sham–Real Shadows Exhibition, The GAM Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 23 January–21 February 2015. Shown above left: Final display on C-shaped MDF ledges. Shown above right and left: Interval 13: a parliament of effective distances (working title). Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, on custom light fixture, with custom light bulb. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. my work to do something of Schoppi’s in providing something more than just being pattern, therefore getting the wallpaper to be something else in a form that can lead to reader to a conclusion similar but not necessarily identical to my own is critical. This is why I think of these pieces as suggestions—they suggest thinking around nature and Nature but do not directly address it via their forms alone. Authenticity and legitimacy As I did not want to subvert patterns, or make up my own historicist ones I set out to create a list of patterns that would have the authenticity of having been consumed inside a capitalist system. Likewise, legitimacy stems from designs that have in Familiar Strangers | Authenticity and legitimacy | 11 Sham–Real Shadows some way been sanctioned within their own discipline, specifically the design of wallpapers. The steps to selecting what source materials to work with are: 1. Use designs found within the publicly accessible library survey books6, 1. Craft a shortlist of naturalist wallpapers that connect visually to narrative breaks in Nature thinking, 1. Chose finalists for their contribution to that shifting narrative. In this I am seeking an overall narrative within the context of capitalist hegemony, and the lead up to the Anthropocene. The individual designers7 are not a consideration. I am aware that these designers come from diverse backgrounds, and that many may be actively working in ways aligned or opposed to my own. This, however, is not the point of Familiar Strangers—the objective being to work with designs that are celebrated, or otherwise acknowledged within an industry that in turn promotes their usage as décor, thus filtering down into the everyday lives of people. In Dr. Joanna Boehnert’s paper Design versus the Design Industry (2014) she argues that all fields of design fail at addressing our current global crisis because the design industry is beholden to capitalism’s pursuit of profit, which weeds out those works that do not support this. In her own words, “The exclusive focus on profit and quantitative economic growth results in distortions of knowledge, and reason thereby undermining prospects for the design of long-term prosperity within the context of the current political, and economic regime” (Joanna Boehnert, 2014, 1). Wallpaper is just one aspect of design, and can’t speak for a whole multifaceted set of distinct disciplines, but it is very much in bed with the same regimes that Dr. Boehnert speaks of. With this in mind the main objective of Familiar Strangers is to be critical of visual representation that supports impoverished thinking about nature within a broader Anthropocene and capitalist narrative—not to critique the intentions of the individual designers referenced here. If I accept Winston Churchill’s axiom, “we shape our [environments]; thereafter they shape us”, then the designers, artists, curators, and broader system absolutely have a role to play in this regime (or what follows it). I hope that I do as well. 6. Thus making this experiment not only replicable but also based on information within the accessible public record that anyone can gain access to without barriers. This first methodological step presents a major benefit in that it allows me to source designs selected by experts rather than through my personal taste, however, it also means depending on those experts. As it turns out the experts do not appear to be without bias as the overwhelming majority of naturalist designs in these books are Western. In fact until the later half of the 20th Century they are all predominately, and specifically, European. 7. I also do not wish to treat all of the designers the same, and through my research I have found some moments of earnestness that, in part, speak to my interests in nature, William Morris being one. Morris approached his designs earnestly in a hope that they spoke to natural things, but also to make clear to the viewer that they were not replicants, rather that they stood out as natural, and as designs in equal measure. They are Nature designs that through their non-Cartesian grids, and repetition speak to indeterminat (the repeats could go on indefinitely), nature, and an approach to design that could only be human. 12 | Familiar Strangers | Naturalist wallpaper designs since circa 1784 Sham–Real Shadows Figure 05: Left: Untitled chinoserie design by Linon Batiste, circa 1785. Right: Les Metamorphoses d’Ovide by an unknown artist, 1785 Naturalist wallpaper designs since circa 1784 Each design presents a locked-in-step shifting relationship with the natural world vis- à-vis representations of it. At the onset of the Industrial Revolution papering one’s walls became a populist pursuit in the West. A popular contemporary design was the Versailles8 print that presented diagonal repeats of clusters of florals, branches, and birds often in highly stylized neoclassical forms. Most, however, did not present a dramatic break with the past, often referencing neoclassical, or appropriated non- Western styles such as chinoiseries9 (Teynac, 1982). As the Industrial Revolution progressed wallpapers speak more to contemporaneous Western thinking on Nature 8. Named after the palace of the same name. 9. A chinoiserie is any pattern derivative of classical Chinese designs. Familiar Strangers | Naturalist wallpaper designs since circa 1784 | 13 Sham–Real Shadows Figure 06: Upper: Lucullus by Auguste Clésinger, 1855, with die cut overlay showing cut outs in both shape and halftone points. Dark areas represent the cuts out of the paper material. Middle: Process excerpt of four tone rendering in preparation for halftone die cut for Interval 08: four years before, and 156 after the origins of the species and we’re still here (working title) in Figure 02. Lower: Interval 08: four years before, and 156 after the origins of the species and we’re still here (working title) on display at the GAM Gallery. Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, on custom light fixture, with custom light bulb. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. 14 | Familiar Strangers | Naturalist wallpaper designs since circa 1784 Sham–Real Shadows in relationship to The Age of Empires. Its at this time that wallpaper morphs into full scenic murals panoramically depicting landscapes in colonial or mythologized contexts, such as the hunting scenes as seen in Auguste Clésinger’s 1855 piece Lucullus (Figure 06) (Thibaut-Pomerantz, 2009). Many worked within the Romantic sublime tradition of foreboding landscapes seemingly void of people in “newly discovered” far off lands. These room-wrapping scenes provided any person of means the ability to dream of colonization while at the supper table. By the mid 19th century this eventually progressed to tight repetitions of manicured plants as seen in Owen Jones’s 1850 untitled piece (Figure 07) (Greysmith, 1976). These diverged either into trompe l’oeil patterns or towards works that speak eloquently to heavily reconstituted organic forms. William Morris’ 1875 Acanthus (Figure 08) that explores the qualities of a single type of leaf is one example that captivates. Morris’ take on the acanthus plant (a classical motif) is earnest and visually pleasing, but it hardly compares to the actual plant that is more bristle than calculated French curve (Greysmith, 1976). For me both nature and human design, ultimately reading as a uniquely Morrisian attempt to signpost Natue over Figure 07: Left: Untitled wallpaper design by Owen Jones, 1855. Right: Die cut for Interval 07: that which is beautiful is never true (working title). Familiar Strangers | Naturalist wallpaper designs since circa 1784 | 15 Sham–Real Shadows nature. It is a failure as it ultimately points towards order, design, and pattern more clearly than its subject; and yet it is also a coup d’état in wallpaper design for its seamlessness, and kinetic energy. Somehow it seems simultaneously arbitrary and calculated; natural and man–made; organic and architectonic—a perfect Anthropocene pattern. In the later half of the 19th century other wallpaper designs are clearly influenced by Morris as they begin to appear (as a general observation) more realistic while simultaneously becoming more machined in their patterned qualities. I think Morris, in particular, represents one of the best articulated aesthetic breaks from voluntas desertum, an “already, and always free nature,” in how his work acknowledges that it is simulacrum, in effect being an exercise in design (as a sign–post) first; representation (realism) second. In a way Morris’ work is less representation of nature and more design–for–design–sake’s that is based off of things that exist in nature. In the early 20th century approaches to wallpaper design shifted to celebrating not escaping the Industrial Revolution through machined appearances—a hallmark of Figure 08: Left: Die cut for Interval 09: life is an act of consumption, jupiter (working title). Right: Acanthus by William Morris, 1875. 16 | Familiar Strangers | Naturalist wallpaper designs since circa 1784 Sham–Real Shadows Figure 09: Die cut for Interval 15: these will never be banana leaves (working title) showing original pattern along the four sides and new blended patterns for the top and bottom. many early modernist styles. These shifts coincide with the explosive growth of urban areas as well as newly accepted revelations about nature, such as definitive proof for the concept of extinction as found in the dramatic, and well-publicized demise of the American Passenger Pigeon (Forbush, 1917). The last of these pigeons died in captivity on 01 September 1914 thus signally the annihilation of an animal nicknamed “a living wind”10 that once blacked out the daylight skies of North America for hours in flocks 300 kilometres long (Mackinnon, 2013, 54). This came as a deep shock to the public, dominated headlines, inspired works of art, and was a major impetus behind the growth of conservation movements in the United States (“Why the Passenger Pigeon Went Extinct”). It is also around this point onwards that I’ve observed that all of the lauded designs 10. The description of the flocks can be attributed to Aldo Leopold’s 1947 poem On a Monument to the Pigeon where he wrote “Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons; trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a few decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.” (‘Why the Passenger Pigeon Went Extinct’) Familiar Strangers | Naturalist wallpaper designs since circa 1784 | 17 Sham–Real Shadows depart from any attempt at realism, rather focusing on machined repetition of nature as (re)source. A popular, yet anonymous design of the Art Déco eara, for example, features repeat of banana leaves so machined as to barely be recogizable as leaves at all11 (Figure 09). The mid-twentieth century continued this trend of eviscerating nature for more man-made aesthetics through cartoonish depictions adhering more to style, thus doing away with attempts at a true enmeshing with nature. Perhaps in an era of atomic blasts rejecting the natural for the over the top pop art12 or midcentury modern abstractions felt more appropriate. During the ’70s Alain Le Foll created a distinctive instance of naturalism through a wallpaper design titled The Cliff (Figure 13) that translates a single cliff face into a 11. This pattern will sometime appear as titled as Manhatten but there is no evidence to suggest that this was its original title. In my discussion around the work I refer to the pattern as banana leaves because those were a popular motif at the time to which this design adheres. This is the only pattern in the Familiar Strangers series that I can not attest with 100% certainty that it is a nature derived pattern, but I am convinced beyond the shadow of any doubt. 12. I’m especially thinking of Yayoi Kusama’s pop art flowers here. Figure 10: Die cut for Interval 22: the heat of the sun is you (working title), 2014. 18 | Familiar Strangers | Naturalist wallpaper designs since circa 1784 Sham–Real Shadows floor to ceiling mural-sized panorama13. Despite this high point, overall in the last third of the 20th century naturalism appears to wane in popularity (Greysmith, 1976). Of those that I found most are overly derivative of earlier periods and thus present a romantic historicism over any new shift in nature–human thinking. Finally, in the twenty-first century nature patterns return but abruptly abandon the false promise of presenting a romantic Nature and instead present animals as vestigial parts of the urban landscape (Figure 10) or even worse: as resource for genetic and human manipulation (Figure 11) (Blackley, 2006). Perhaps these designs are meant to be ironic, but even so my aversion to them persists. 13. This is also the only naturalist wallpaper design to focus on mineral rather than flora or fauna that I have located at the time of publication. Figure 11: Die cut for Interval 23: we are our own ghosts in a landscape of our own making (working title). Familiar Strangers | The 23 intervals | 19 Sham–Real Shadows The 23 intervals Although this is not an exhaustive study at this point, the evidence from inquiry here presents shifts in naturalist designs alongside new ideological stances, terms, theories or breakthroughs in our understanding of nature, or Nature. The trajectory these wallpapers appear to suggest, when placed in context with the research is a procession of ideological violence against nature—mythology fades to romanticism, which fades to hyperrealism, which turns into machined nature, and finally ends in habitat obliteration, and genetic modification (see Appendix B: The 23 intervals, Table 01 for a full list of environmental, social, and economic events so far during the Anthropocene alongside descriptions, titles, and interpretations of the chosen wallpaper designs). To me, this appears to be plotting a course of knowing nature not on its own terms, making “in what way can I make these shifts apparent” becomes the follow-up question to the primary investigative question, “are there new visual ways to present evidence of the ideological underpinnings of the Anthropocene?” In Anselm Franke’s 2013 essay Earthrise and the Disappearance of the Outside in discussing the exhibition he curated in the same year, The Whole Earth and the Disappearance of the Outside, he speaks to the importance of seeing the whole picture (and perhaps even the small details we often overlook): “Within the context of the discussion of the “Anthropocene” as the term for a period in Earth’s history shaped by human influence, an age in which mankind becomes a geological factor and the borders between “nature” and “man” need to be rethought in the context of an ecological paradigm, The Whole Earth aims to situate the invocations of the “big picture” within a specific historical frame, without which it will become increasingly difficult to even address the relations of power and exploitation as such” (Franke, 2013). Franke is interested in the question of how we can address any pressing issue in the Anthropocene if we do not address the entrenched borders between nature as Nature, and us14. It is through exploring these lauded wallpaper designs that I present a conclusion that designing nature to suit ideological shifts can be traced even through simulacra of nature re-presented in repetitive patterns. Familiar Strangers then presents ever-worsening shifts of these borders in the familiar spaces of home décor—and then asks another follow up question, “if we can find them here, could we find them elsewhere?” The answer is most probably “yes”, but then I wonder what anyone can do with this knowledge, specifically under capitalist (and colonialist) systems so invested in Nature–human dichotomies that any attempt to address the relations of power and exploitation found in the Anthropocene seems impossible? 14. I use the word “entrenched” here to provide context for my intent by using “us”. I do not mean to imply that every single human being is stuck in these ways of thinking, but I do believe that the vast majority are entrenched within systems that propose, and support these ideological divides for their own benefit. It’s easier to exploit the world till the end of profit if peoples are already conditioned to think of “nature” as mere resource, and not as a constitute whole of which we are part, and of which our very survival depends. 20 | Familiar Strangers | Ideology, and thinking on nature Sham–Real Shadows I respond to this by making art and hopefully, through it’s dissemination and resulting discussions, raise awareness of issues relating to nature and the subliminal ways we are programmed to think of it as Nature. Ideology, and thinking on nature The hyper-aestheticism, and fragility of these boxes signify paper-thin aestheticized concepts of Nature, while suggesting human destructiveness through evidence of burning. These works suggest a place for an audience to contemplate their own ideas of Nature, and their own capacity to explore and engage with it. To quote Paul Klee, as stated in 1920, “art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible” (Parry et al., 2011, 24), and I hope that Familiar Strangers suggests something worth thinking about that is buried behind the ideological lies of modernity: that nature as Nature is a hollow box ultimately with nothing to offer. I hope that the series speaks for a thinking approach to nature, arguing that we do not need to know it in absolutes, but that we simply need to experience it as voluntas desertum (already and always free nature) as opposed to solvo desertum (free-willed Nature15). The first requires nothing of us, while the latter implicates us at its centre. I am not arguing for a world where we free ourselves from the ideologies surrounding Nature, but via these introduced Latin terms—the language of flora, fauna and minerals—I am suggesting that we need try to forget the old ways of thinking entirely for the moment, and spend some more time getting to know nature on (and in) its own terms. The roughly 10-year intervals in the Familiar Strangers timeline are purposely fluid, presenting an echo of shifting ideological stances. Like Martin Heidegger’s “soundless wind”16 or J.B. Mackinnon’s “shifting baselines”17, it is something you never directly see but which presents itself over time through its affects. It is the storm in the chimney, the rustle of leaves, the Caribou Island18 where no one living has ever seen caribou (an ecological echo on the map). Through these works I hope to gently remind my audience that, as the lead quote of this chapter suggests, even if it does not directly engage us consciously, design is never passive. 15. The suggestion here is that the nature has never existed independently of us, and therefore requires no freeing up of its bondage. The only chains that must be broken are the modes of thinking about Nature. 16. “Heidegger poetically said that you never hear the wind in itself, only the storm whistling in the chimney, the wind in the trees.” (Morton, The Ecological Thought, 2012, p. 57) The wind has no real physical presence and just like ideology it must come into contact with something to exist. 17. Shifting baselines is a concept predicated on the idea that each person carries a baseline of how they have seen the world and that as new generations arrive their baselines for measuring change are shifted from their ancestors. 18. The region of Nova Scotia where I grew up. There hasn’t been Caribou there in over two hundred years, and I’ve only known Caribou Island as a peninsula with an odd name. This is because three months before I was born a massive hurricane forced sandbanks to rise and block Caribou Harbour thus making the island a natural peninsula which carries two ecological echos of the past. Familiar Strangers | Evocative objects | 21 Sham–Real Shadows In the same way the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo19 primes us to think of them as the swiftest, wallpaper (and other designs) subliminally shape our thoughts as to what constitutes “natural”. Local Vancouver writer, J. B. MacKinnon opines, “We shape the world, and it shapes us in return. We are the creator and the created, the maker and the made,” (Mackinnon, 2013, 152), a thought I share and that I hope is evident in the work—specifically that it suggests an entanglement as part of nature (as an Aesopian arrow) and not outside it as Nature requires. In Ecology without Nature Timothy Morton states: “But ultimately, theory (and meditation, for that matter) is not supposed to make you a “better person” in any sense. It is supposed to expose hypocrisy, or if you prefer, to examine the ways in which ideological illusions maintain their grip” (Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 2007, 12). I continue to look for these strange yet familiar ways of seeing in the many things around me everyday. I see it in the shape, and textures of the urban environment as much as see it in the landscapes in video games. I think these both familiar, and strange things become subconscious background noise. My desire is to then amplify, miniaturize, or otherwise make these visual signifiers for ideology worthy of further exploration, and contemplation focused on the ways we think about nature, and us. Ultimately I do this to remind others and myself that, “Nature is not a temple, but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same” (Mackinnon, 2013, 101). Evocative objects Familiar Strangers presents a moment where the audience is obliged to cast shadows using the light on their mobile phones, thus crafting a photographic moment where fleeting shadows span across walls. As they push, pull and drag the shadows they give this work life. This photographic interplay of light and shadow, negative and positive, group and intimacy, that when approached meditatively provide a phenomenological experience to engage with simulacrum of nature that can never be voluntas desertum—yet the life of the object is there as long as the audience maintains it (Figure 12, and see Sham–Real Shadows Exhibition video documentation in Appendix B). In her book Evocative Objects Sherry Turkel puts forth the term evocative object as a conceptual framework for understanding our everyday personal objects as “emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, 19. Between the “e” and the “x” there lays a hidden arrow pointing left-to-right that subconsciously implies forward motion (in a Western function) through a form of cognitive reading expectation referred to as page gravity. 22 | Familiar Strangers | Evocative objects Sham–Real Shadows Figure 12: Audience members illumes the “box that failed”—in cutting this one the lasers cut too far and several birds were cleaved from the design. Here they are presented as breaks from the patterning, laying “dead” on the ground. Shown: Interval 22: the heat of the sun is you (working title). Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, Phillips screws. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. and provoke new ideas” (Turkel, 2007). The most accessible tool today is one’s own mobile phone, which is also usually their primary photographic tool, as well as a simple lighting device. Corrine Vionnet’s composite photographic works utilize this anchoring of memory through combining hundreds of different tourist shots scoured from the Internet all taken by different people from extremely similar vantage points (vistas built for tourists). The result is a ghostly image—a collective memory rather than an individual straight photographic replica. This points to apparent human need to understand something through photographing it with their own tools. I hope then by forcing the audience to interact with Familiar Strangers via their own evocative objects that they come to a different, perhaps more personal outcome than via passive observation. I also think it’s important to have in the audience’s hands an investigative tool in Familiar Strangers | Evocative objects | 23 Sham–Real Shadows order to search for data hinted at in the titles20 to ultimately lead to discovery and engagement with the broader issues my work, their titles, and the accompanying didactic text touches on. This is especially important when considering that these issues are only suggested at in the various accompany text, and are not inherent in Familiar Strangers directly. 20. All keywords are chosen for their ability to land the audience on the first page of an online search should they seek more data on the presented topic. Figure 13: Left: Audience members light up Interval 11: this is how we dance under waves you can not see (working title). Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, Phillips screws. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. Right: Audience members light up Interval 20: the world does not die with us (working title). Laser-cut paper and MDF, glue, embroidery thread, Phillips screws. 10.16 x 10.16 x 10.16 cm. 2014. 24 | Familiar Strangers | Harm | Nature as un-re-presentable Sham–Real Shadows Harm By presenting these delicate cubes outside of vitrines on thin nearly invisible shelves they are left vulnerable to an increased desire to touch that opens up the possibility of harm. Morton describes art as space not for “positive qualities (Eros),” but of negative ones, that holds our attention long enough so we may stop “destroying things”. He then goes on to remind us that for Walter Benjamin the aesthetic alienates, and distances us from the world (Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 2007, 115). I like to think that both—aesthetic alienation from nature, and a desire to not destroy the work—are at play in Familiar Strangers. However, should any harm to the sculptures come to pass (this has not yet happened) I intend to let it remain until the exhibition is complete. The natural world is not smoothed over, and to that end the breaks and entanglements resultant of an accident would serve as another layer reminding the viewer of the beautiful lies inherent in the work. That it happened “organically” (as opposed to premeditatively) would also not interfere with my desires for authenticity and legitimacy. Nature as un-re-presentable To close, the work takes its name from the mash of Morton’s term strange stranger, and an observation by René Magritte, that “there’s something else of an unfamiliar nature that appears at the same time as familiar things” (Virilio, 1991, 47). In this work exists a strangeness familiar to us all, which presents, and acts more than just décor: it points to its own strange strangeness in its stamped repetition devoid of any wildness. It is an impossibility masquerading as plausibility. In the same way that nature should require no re-presentation (because it’s impossible, yet at some level it is always familiar) and that Nature requires re-presentations (because it is always estranged from the actual), Familiar Strangers draws the audience towards itself because of its familiarity, but disorients them because of its strangeness. Sham–Real Shadows | 25 Sham–Real Shadows Sham–Real Shadows 26 | Sham–Real Shadows Sham–Real Shadows Figure 14: Fragility remains as a consistent element as the interior design depends on only a few 0.3175 cm supports just as the little cube cousin depends on 0.15875 cm supports. Another important distinction is that the lighting for Sham-Real Shadows is provided, and integrated in its display. This permits a projection of shadows further outward so that the piece may fill an entire space with shadows, and light. Shown: Sham–Real Shadows. Laser-cut MDF, embroidery thread, custom light fixture, and you. 55.8 x 55.8 x 55.8 cm. 2015. Sham–Real Shadows | Description | Inspiration | 27 Sham–Real Shadows Description Sham-Real Shadows isn’t just an aggrandizement of its Familiar Strangers cousin (Interval 09). The pattern, technical aspects, and shape are indeed similar, however as an installation the work creates a space where the audience can be immersed in projected shadow and light of romantic patterning of Nature. It is also a single work that compresses Nature to a single moment (rather than a serial timeline) that pulls the audience in, and implicates them as explorers inside an environment in which they are participants (with or without knowing). As a result it crafts a landscape of shadows and metaphor. Inspiration As a master of naturalist home décor, who also rejected the processes of industrialization, William Morris favoured stylized evocations over literal transcriptions of nature, deploring the later depictions as “sham-real houghs21 [sic] and flowers, casting sham-real shadows” (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011). In other words, Morris rejects overly realistic depictions of nature in pattern, yet I read this as a statement of desire to do the opposite—to reinforce nature as man-made through highly aestheticized, complex patterning. Close to the same time I came across this quote I stumbled upon the before-mentioned Magritte quote on the strangeness of the familiar (Virilio, 1991, 47). These quotes are the genesis of my thinking around shadows as a source for double meaning. As a part of my practice shadows take on many forms both as substances to manifest, as metaphor for ideologies, as photographic play, and as a presentation of a flattened hollowing out of nature when compared to the real deal. 21. Hough is word loosely defined as a suggestion of a useless limb, and in this instance a severed, decorative branch. 28 | Sham–Real Shadows | Similarity to other artworks Sham–Real Shadows Similarity to other artworks Sham-Real Shadows was developed independently of Anila Quayyum Agha’s 2014 work Intersections22, a piece it bears a strong material resemblance to. It’s important to note that Intersections carried no relative bearing on the decisions I made in making my work as I was not aware of Agha’s work until after I finished prototyping. Fortunately the two pieces diverge at several points. For example Sham-Real Shadows grew out of the process of crafting Familiar Strangers whereas Intersections does not appear to grow out of a trajectory of working with cubes at all, although it does grow out of a long term interest in pattern. With that in mind it’s important to state that although it did not impact my creative process, discovering Intersections did affect how I present it as I do not suspend my work as Agha does, rather I present it on a narrow plinth or bespoke legs. In this way Sham–Real Shadows has an imposing yet familiar presence (like a silent gramophone in the middle of room filled with shadow and light) different from imposing, alien presence of Intersections. At a surface level the two works are also conceptually dissimilar. Agha describes Intersections as “interrogat[ing] a motif…believed to represent…Islamic sacred spaces” and speaks to a lived “experience of exclusion as a woman from a space of community and creativity…in Pakistan” (“Anila Quayyum Agha”, 2015). In a way we are both speaking about embedded ideologies—small acts of violence as I call them—evidenced in pattern motifs, but the limitations facing Muslim women in Pakistan, and dangerous Romantic ideals of Nature do have limited overlaps beyond the idea of hegemony (and patriarchy) as controller which both do speak toward. Additionally, although I have not seen it in person, the audience for Intersections appears relegated to observation23, but in Sham-Real Shadows the audience is an integral part of the materials of the work, with the materials list directly listing “you” as a material. Marianne Nicolson’s Bakwin-a’tsi Container for Souls (2006) is another visually similar work. The precision, and consideration of detail in her design is something I appreciate, and while it is interesting that we both speak to colonialism in visually similar works, she speaks of it in much more personal ways by using pattern to explore ceremony, family and the genocide perpetuated by the Canadian residential schools system. Susan Rome, Coordinator of School Programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery, writes of the work “Was I inside the box or outside it? I became an active part … as my own body created more shadows on the walls” (Rome, 2011). This is the same sort of phenomenological experience I hope my audience takes away when they are inside the Sham–Real Shadows space. 22. This is also a laser-cut wood cube. 23. I have not personally seen this work, but am basing my evalution off of various video and photographic documentation. Sham–Real Shadows | Shadowpaper | 29 Sham–Real Shadows Shadowpaper The changes to scale, and lighting fundamentally change the engagement with the form. Where Familiar Strangers functions when explored up close Sham–Real Shadows is explored at a distance, while at the same time on the audience’s bodies. I call the projection of light, and shadow onto the adjacent walls shadowpaper (Figure 14). Unlike wallpaper it does not merely decorate a surface, but the surface is temporarily decorated because of it. It is shadow wallpaper, but is also a shadow of wallpaper. Furthermore, when a viewer passes through the space they cannot avoid disruption to the shadowpaper, finding it on their bodies just as shadows of their bodies are cast upon the walls. The phenomenological experience is that the audience implicates themselves in the work, and its theoretical framework, by becoming literally awash with a Romantic patterning of Nature. This is not Figure 15: Shadowpaper cast from Sham–Real Shadows. 30 | Sham–Real Shadows | Shadowpaper Sham–Real Shadows Figure 16: Overlapping shadowpaper cast by Sham–Real Shadows and by other audience generated light sources. Sham–Real Shadows | The overlaps | 31 Sham–Real Shadows something that is noticed immediately by a lone audience member, rather becoming most apparent when a second person occupies the space, thus providing an example of this implication. The Vancouver Art Gallery’s recent presentation of Vancouver-based collective WALLPAPERS24 exhibit Beyond the Trees: Wallpapers in Dialogue with Emily Carr (25 April to 7 September 2015) “reflect[s] on their perceptions of British Columbia’s coastal landscape … through the use of digitally animated patterns … [where] nature is viewed through powerful aesthetic filters” (‘Beyond the Trees: Wallpapers in Dialogue with Emily Carr’, 2015). This exhibition of video projected wallpapers reflected issues relating to sublime landscapes, clear cuts forests, and paper products—primarily relating to the logging industry often critiqued by Emily Carr through her landscapes. There are some overlaps of concerns with WALLPAPERS’ work, but for me it was the user engagement that spoke most. In both there is a permission of delight, or even whimsy, by having the patterns project onto the audience’s bodies. There is something in this joy of engagement that translates the experience first as salve for bleak subject matter—clear cutting, and the horrors of industrial logging on the British Columbian landscape being a dominate theme in WALLPAPER’s work; large scale terrains of the future in mine—that invites a phenomenological engagement, that then carries with it an acknowledgement, and remembrance of the concepts, and contents the works suggest. Both works draw attention to “how one experiences nature in a constructed setting” (“Beyond the Trees: Wallpapers in Dialogue with Emily Carr”, 2015), but ultimately it is in the enjoyment of the work that space opens up for an audience who avoids thinking about, or discussing painful issues surrounding nature in contemporary world. These projected wallpapers, Sham–Real Shadows included, function as salves to sooth those nerves, and as gentle passageways to discussions so desperately needed today. The overlaps As with Familiar Strangers, Sham–Real Shadows is the mesh writ large—the only way to truly see Nature (visually or cognitively) is to disturb it—too see past the fog of anthropomorphism, and see clearly. With this in mind the box can be viewed as indicative of passive repetition of a conceptual structuralism that ensnares our ideas about nature as Nature, while the shadowpaper becomes the phenomenological engagement with the installation space that activates it and frees it from any specific, applied thought. It’s toying with the notion of putting nature in a double 24. This collective consists of artists Nicolas Sassoon, Sara Ludy and Sylvain Sailly. 32 | Sham–Real Shadows | The overlaps Sham–Real Shadows box, one solid, and the other made of only shadows, and then placing the audience in the middle of it all. This becomes more apparent and dynamic with the myriad overlapping shadowpapers on the walls, floor, ceiling, and audience—yellow-toned from the provided light source, and blue-toned from cell phone lights—that result from exploring the physical sculpture (Figure 16). Like the upward fettering of the pattern, only generated by the audience, these are doubled shadows layering upon themselves where the viewer and the artist meld. It’s a moment where this repetitious permanently applied thing, wallpaper, starts to fall apart. I’ve created something solid (like wallpaper), but delicate, to project shadows that are reliant on a light source, which in turn questions the way the pattern is now reliant on something new. The never-moving light is no longer the sole actor, and the result is a shift, a disturbance, in its form that renders the source no longer solid, and knowable. I am inviting my audience to come to my work, and resist it, to add to it, to mess around with it. As a metaphor that suggests that although the pattern source (ideology) is static, the energy we (humanity) bring to it is not. This points more directly to an immutable Nature, to life in engagement, and entanglement in the mesh. There are always possibilities in shadows. Mapping the past | 33 Sham–Real Shadows Mapping the past 34 | Mapping the past | The 23 intervals infographic Sham–Real Shadows Figure 17: The 23 intervals research info-graphic. 61 x 61 cm. 2015. (See Appendix A for a high-resolution version). 1 78 4 2 0 14 1 79 4 1834 18 14 1 80 4 1 824 1844 1854 1864 1924 1914 1934 1884 1874 190 4 1894 19 84 1 99 4 1 974 1964 1954 1944 2 00 4 1867: Dom inion of Canada created 1869: First N A transcontinental railway 1866: First transatlantic telegraph cable laid 1866: Term ecology coined 1878: N orthern Sea Route navigated 1862: Parkesine patented (first plastic) 1865: Periodic Table of the Elements published 1865: US slavery ends 1865: First typewriter invented 1864: Man and Nature published (first book to 1864: Trading of futures begins 1863: Alkali Acts (first air pollution laws) 1863: First underground urban railway opens 1871: England legalizes trade unions (first nation) 1877: Phonograph invented 1875: Term biosphere coined 1872: Desirability of Establishing a “Close-tim e” for the 1873: Anthropozoic Era proposed (early Anthropocene) 1874: Telephone patented 1851: Crystal Palace Exhibition 1853: World’s first public aquarium 1852: First multi-city trip through the air 1848: The Communist Manifesto published 1859: Carrington Event 1860: Pollution used to describe enviro. contamination 1858: BEIC territory annexed into BE 1857: Mughal territory conquered by BE 1857: Symbolism movement begins 1854: The US “Black Ships” force Japan to 1856: Second Opium War 1885: Post–Im pressionism m ovem ent begins 1885: D ry cell battery invented 190 2: First w ireless telephone 190 1: E xpressionism and Fauvism m ovem ents begin 190 1: U S Steel first billion d ollar com pany 1899: First transatlantic rad io signal 190 4: Trans-Siberian R ailw ay opens 1898: Ecological succession pioneered 190 5: T he Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of 190 5: T he term sm og coined 1896: R ad ioactivity d iscovered 1909: Futurism m ovem ent begins 1909: B akelite invented 1911: N ew found land W olf goes extinct 190 8: M odel T released for sale 190 7: C ubism m ovem ent begins 1883: First intellectual property treaty 1883: Krakatau eruption 1895: T he term greenhouse eff ect coined 1884: Berlin C onference on colonization of 1879: Standard tim e proposed 1879: Term Psychozoic proposed (early Anthropocene) 1886: First eight hour w orkday law 1886: C oca-C ola invented 1889: L’Exposition U niverselle 1845: The term/policy Manifest Destiny coined 1845: The Great Irish Famine begin 1893: W om en’s suff rage first granted 1893: U S annexation of K ingdom of H aw aii 1898: N ational G eographic Society founded 1892: Sierra C lub founded 1890 : A rt N ouveau m ovem ent begins 1890: M anifest D esitiny fullfilled 1 80 2: F irs t a nt i-c hi ld la bo ur la w s 18 02 : H um an p op ul at io n on e bi lli on 17 99 : F irs t c on se rv at io n la w 17 96 : E xi nc tio n es ta bl is he d as fa ct 18 03 : L ou isi an a Pu rc ha se 18 03 : N ap ol eo ni c W ar s b eg in 17 98 : N eo cl as sc ism e nd s 17 98 : E ss ay o n th e Pr in ci pl es o f P op ul at io n pu bl ish ed 18 07 : B rit ish sl av e tra de en ds 18 07 : F irs t p as se ng er ra ilw ay 18 04 : L ew is an d Cl ar k ex pe di tio n be gi ns 18 11 : L ud dit e M ov em en t f ou nd ed 18 10 : S pa nis h c olo nia l re vo lts be gin 18 08 : C oa l fi rst b ur ne d fo r r es id en tia l h ea t 18 08 : U nk no wn vo lca ni c e ru pt io n lo we rs glo ba l c. 1 78 4: R om an ti c m ov em en t be gi ns 17 85 : C oa l g as fi rs t us ed f or li gh ti ng 17 92 : F re nc h Re vo lu ti on ar y W ar s be gi n 17 92 : S to ck e xc ha ng e ex cl us iv it y be gi ns 17 95 : U ni te d in di ge no us K in gd om o f H aw ai i f ou nd ed 1 79 1: H ai tia n Re vo lu tio n (o nl y ev er s uc ce ss fu l s la ve re vo lt) 17 87 : C ol on iz at io n of A us tr al ia b eg in s 17 89 : F re nc h R ev ol ut io n be gi ns 1833: First Factory A ct regulat es factory condition s 1844: First central banking 1844: Great Auk extinct 1832: Fir st world travel g uide pub lished 1835: English be comes only o� cial 1834: Indust rial capitalis m as social 1834: Slaver y abolished in British Em pire 1829: Geno cide o f the B eothu k peo ple 1830: I ndian Remov al Act (US) 1839: First Opium War and Hong Kong seized 1842: First state managed forest 1828: Vital ism’s first m ajor d isaccr edita tion ( élan v ital) 1828: First elect ric m otor 1838: Trail of Tears begins 1837: Telegraph patented 1837: Woodman Save That Tree is writte n 1840: First national claims to the Antarctic 181 7: T erm co mp ara tiv e a dva nta ge coi ne d 181 7: F irst ch ole ra ep ide mi c 181 8: B riti sh Eas t In dia Co mp any qu ells 181 6: Ye ar Wi tho ut A S um me r 18 12 : D ea th pe na lty fo r in du str ial di sru pt ion 18 13: W orl d’s fir st na tu re pre se rve 181 5: M ou nt Ta mb oro er up ts an d d ras tic ally eff ec ts 18 14 : F irs t m ass -pr od uc ed m ac hin e 181 9: F irst ste am sh ip c ros ses At lan tic 1825 : Firs t pu blic railw ay 1826 : Firs t tru e ph otog raph 1824 : RS PCA fou nde d18 21: Wo rld’ s fir st g eog rap hic soc iety fou nde d 182 1: F irst ad opt ion of gol d st and ard 1869: Sea Birds Preservation Act (w orld’s first 1870: Standard O il 1945: First nuclear bomb used 20 08 : S ub -p rim e m or tg ag e cr is is 20 13 : H yp er ob je ct s, a nd T he O nc e an d Fu tu re W or ld p . 20 12 : T he E co lo gi ca l T ho ug ht p ub lis he d 20 13 : T he A nt hr op oc en e Pr oj ec t, H K W B er lin 20 11 : F uk us hi m a nu cl ea r di sa st er 20 11 : L ea de d ga so lin e ba nn ed in te rn at io na lly 20 11 : D ee p G re en R es is ta nc e fo un de d 20 10 : D ee pw at er H or iz on d is as te r 20 00 : T er m A nt hr op oc en e co in ed in c ur re nt d efi ni tio n 19 97 : E xt irp at io n of b ee s i n M ao ; w or ke rs h an d po lle na te 20 03 : H ur ric an e Ju an s la m s in to N ov a Sc ot ia 1949: A Sand County Almanc published (land ethic 1952: The Great Smog (London) 1952: Pop Art movement begins 1946: WWII in Asia ends 1947: Hydraulic fracturing process invented 1947: Term evolutionary synthesis clarified 1948: United Nations founded 20 15 : s ti ll se ek in g an sw er s 1957: Sputnik is first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth 1956: UK Clean Air Act passed 20 07 : S te p It U p ra lli es 20 07 : T er m b io ce nt ris m c oi ne d 20 07 : fi rs t he ar d D ea r M ia m i 1969 : First hum ans o n the moo n 1968: The P opula tion B omb p ublish ed 1971 : UN ESC O M an a nd B iosp here 1971 : Firs t em ail 1970 : U.S . Env ironm enta l Pro tecti on A genc y 1972 : Co nfer ence on the Hum an E nviro nme nt 1972 : Gre en P eace fou nde d 197 2: Fi rst D DT ban 19 95 : S hi fti ng B as eli ne S yn dr om e pu bl ish ed 1973 : Ter m d eep ecol ogy coin ed 1973 : Gr een Par ty fo rme d 1973 : OP EC oil c risis 1961: World Wide F und for Nature (WW F) founded 1962 Cuban M issile Crisis1962: LED lig ht technology developed 1962: Silent Sp ring published 1960: OPEC founded 1965: Fi rst succ essful la wsuit fo r enviro nmenta l harm 1964: Ear th Art an d Op Art moveme nts begin 197 4: W orld ’s la rges t lan d pa rk f oun ded 19 90 : T er m re wi ldi ng co in ed 19 89 : E xx on V ald ez d isa st er 19 91 : C ol lap se o f t he S ov ie t B lo c 197 7: F irst ful ly s equ enc ed DN A g eno me 19 92 : R io ’9 2 E ar th S um m it 19 86 : C he rn ob yl nu cle ar dis as te r 198 0: Vo lck er Sh ock (h ype r in flat ion ) 198 0: Ea rth Fir st! Fo un de d 197 8: N eol ibe rali sm firs t us ed in c urr ent sen se 197 9: T hre e M ile Isla nd nu cle ar e ven t 197 9: G aia : A ne w l ook at life on Ea rth pu blis hed 197 9: my ba sel ine st art s h ere 19 85 : H ole in oz on e l ay er pr ov en 19 84 : T erm ec oc en tri sm co ine d 1920: British cod fishery collapse 1914: Panam a C anal opens 1914: A m erican passenger pigeon is declared extinct 1914: W orld W ar I begins 1919: Treaty of Versailles— m ap of Europe redraw n 1939: World War II begins 1929: Abstract Expressionism begins 1929: Black Tuesday (stock m arket crash) 1930: The Great Dust Bowl begins 1930: Socialist Realism begins 1913: T he assem bly line invented 1916: Easter U prising— decolonization of Europe begins 1916: Technicolour invented 1916: Plant Sucession published (landscapes evolve 1933: Nazis came to power federally in Germany 1935: Terms ecosystem, biocoenosis, biotype coined 1935: Term Dauerwald coined (“perpetual 1936: Keynesian Economics theory published 1936: Tasmanian Tiger extinct 1915: T he Ecological Society of A m erica is founded 1917: First national dependence on food im ports 1922: Term s Anthropogene and N oosphere coined 1927: First “Talkie” film 1943: First big smog attributed to automobiles 1942: The Manhattan Project begins 1925: Television invented 1925: Scopes Trial on teaching of evolution versus 1944: First nuclear bomb test 1944: International Monetary Found founded 17 87 : F irs t st ea m s hi p is p at en te d 18 04 : F irs t l oc om ot ive glo ba l w ea the r a nd te mp era tur es 181 7: E rie Ca nal co nst ruc tio n b egi ns rem ain ing Ind ian co lon ial res ista nce 1825 : Firs t sto ck m arke t cra sh 1829: Hot b last in dustri al pro cess in vente d te m pe ra tu re s f or at le as t t en ye ar s system begi ns language of Ind ia 1839: Rubber vulcanized 1840: Tea plantations established in India 1839: Electricity is clarified 1844: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation published 1847: The Vegetarian Society formed 1848: Realism movement begins 1859: On the Origins of Species published 1859: Greenhouse effect explained open its borders to trade 1869: Suez Canal opens examine man’s effects on nature) 1865: Principles for genetics established nature protection law) Preservation of Indigenous Anim als series first published 1872: W orld’s first national park established 1865: Impressionism movement begins 1877: Victoria I proclaim ed Em press of India 1879: Light bulb patented 1883: First solar cell invented 1890 : First successful airplane flight 1887: G ram ophone is patented 1887: First w orking w ind turbine 1885: First autom obile patented A frica and the regulation of N ew Im perialism 190 2: First artificial clim ate m achine 1896: C O 2 em issions first linked to clim ate change 1898: T he C oal Sm oke A batem ent Society form ed (first environm ental N G O ) 190 4: Standard O il controls 91% oil 190 4: Study of geopolitics coined C apitalism published (C apitalism as C alvinist) 1914: Ford: sets 8/5 w ork w eek/pays m ore 11917: Red O ctober Revolution 1917: Surrealism , D ada, and D e Stijl m ovem ents begin tow ard perfection/ nature can repair itself) (pre–Anthropocene term s) 1922: Term environm entalism coined 1925: Process for frozen food invented 1929: Great Depression begins creationism in U S public schools 1925: Art D éco and Surrealist m ovem ents begin 1936: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money published forest” meaning eternal; forest management) 1945: Rapid global political decolonization begins 1945: WWII in Europe ends 1946: Great Acceleration begins (how evolution proceeds) —responsible relationship between humans and nature) 1949: Term desertification coined 1952: Caribbean Monk Seal extinct 1952: Term global warming coined 1962: First com puter game 1960: First working laser 1971 : Bre tton Wo ods syste m ab ando ned 1970 : Cas pian Tiger extin ct 1970 : Firs t Ear th D ay ce lebra tions 1972 : Th e Ga ia Th eory , Th e Lim its to Gro wth , and Shou ld Tr ees H ave Stan ding all p ublis hed 1973 : US End ang ered Spe cies Act 19 72: “ Thin k glo bally , act loca lly” c amp aign 197 9: T he Sin kin g A rk i s p ub lish ed 198 0: En vir on me nta l Ju stic e m ove me nt be gin s 19 84 : S ea of Sl au gh ter pu bli sh ed 19 86 : C he rn ob yl wi ldl ife pr es er ve be gin s 19 86 : R isk So cie ty pu bli sh ed 19 92 : N ew fo un dl an d co d fis he ry co lla ps e 19 97 : K yo to P ro to co l c re at ed 20 07 : T he W or ld W it ho ut U s, a nd E co lo gy W it ho ut N at ur e pu bl is he d an d A n In co nv ie nt T ru th r el ea se d 20 12 : W or ld ’s la rg es t m ar in e pa rk f ou nd ed 20 13 : H um an –m ad e gl ob al w ar m in g is d ec la re d r ea lit y Inte rval 2 3 I nte rva l 22 In te rv al 21 In te rv al 2 0 In te rv al 1 9 In te rv al 1 8 In te rv al 1 7 In te rv al 1 6 In te rv al 15 I nte rva l 14 Interv al 13 Interval 12 Interval 11 Interval 10 Interval 09 Interval 08 Interval 07 Interval 0 6 Interval 0 5 Interval 04 Interval 03 Interval 02 Interval 01 Mapping the past | The 23 intervals infographic | 35 Sham–Real Shadows The 23 intervals infographic The intention with The 23 intervals (Figure 17), infographic is to make more apparent the connections I see between the chosen patterns shifting nature– human ideologies, and the socio-political landscapes of the Anthropocene. When finished, The 23 intervals will present a timeline of the Three Pillars of Sustainability (environmental, social, and economic) milestones since 1784 alongside milestones in literature, design, and art, against the chosen wallpapers (Table 01). The graph also charts the active lived baseline of my own life, starting in 1979, for I can only truly know, in an embodied way, how bad things have gotten since I have been alive. The colouring is derived from a photograph of an exoatmospheric denotation event (a nuclear bomb in space) from October 1962 as part of the strangely named Operation Fishbowl Bluegill (also found at the centre of the infographic). I chose this because it resembles the first complete, clear image of the Earth from space, dubbed The Blue Marble, which was taken on my birth date (seven years earlier to the day) on 07 December 1972. The difference between the two images is that one pretends to speak to the futility of human existence in the vast expanse of space, while the speaks to our ability to render any pontification moot as it is a nuclear bomb exploding in space. The conflation this juxtaposition presents is the world I was born into that continues to go down the proverbial rabbit hole where the systems trapping us do not wish to control nature at all—they wish to use it till the end of profit. Or us.25, 26 25. The two sentences at the end is a paraphrase of an impassioned discussion between my advisor, Fiona Bowie, and myself in August 2015. The thought was not my own at the time, but it is one that I now see reflected in my thinking around human–nature dichotomies and paradoxes and I have now adopted as my own. 26. In another autobiographical note, Van den Eijnden is a curious, and awkward name most likely stemming from Napoleon’s census 1811. It translates to “Of the End”. The emphasis on the E is important as the 19th century south Dutch spelling transitions the word from the “end” of some thing to the End of all things. It would then appear that I am demarcated as being of the apocalypse in more ways than one. 36 | Sham–Real Shadows Part II: Pointing aimlessly with accuracy | 37 Sham–Real Shadows Part II: Pointing aimlessly with accuracy 38 | On arrows, and thinking Sham–Real Shadows On arrows, and thinking “The haft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle’s own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.” —Aesop The problem with arrows is that they can be accurate without being precise—a tool in the midst of negotiation is never quite straight. I see all things as having trajectories of their own while remaining interconnected in the mesh of all living and nonliving things that haunts at every moment of every day.27 Aesop speaks to this ironically when he speaks to small bits left behind used to hunt and kill the eagle. But in the second line he implicates us as a warning that what we leave in our wake we cannot escape. Today, we have caused our own haunting from our own fantasies of Nature. Now we are our own ghosts having brought about the possibility and the means of our own destruction, and the potential to take everything else with us when we do. In the base rhetoric of foreshadowing in the Anthropocene we find the suspects adrift in eutopia and its sibling dystopia. These heterogeneous conjoined twins present only two utopian options in the form of futures. Yet even as these tales present scenarios where the arrow has already struck, the embodied distance is always lacking in the narrative. Aesop suggests that we are made up of each other: archer as us and as nature; the target as nature and as us. If this is true then there is no gap, just a conceptual distance that grows bigger in time. Lao Tzu said “if you are depressed you are living in the past, if you are anxious you are living in the future, if you are at peace you are living in the present.” When applied to today’s ecological crisis there is a great deal of investment of the future, and the past, but not enough of the present. Admittedly my own work is awash with both anxiety (The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple is focused on the future) and depression (Familiar Strangers is focused on how we got to where we are today), but in their construction and their reception they become something more. Sham-Real Shadows suggests this “something more” through enveloping, and crafting a new space that hints at some new way of seeing our relationship with nature right now in that moment, but I would not describe it as being one “at paece”. In her 08 June 2014 talk Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chtulucene: Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway argues that we need to spend more time right where we are (I agree). “In the midst of The Three Guineas Virginia Woolf insists, “Think 27. Mesh and haunt are words employed by Timothy Morton when discussing nature. The Mesh refers to his concept of an interconnected, multi directional web of all living and non-living things (this is my interpretation). Haunts is a word Morton uses when referring to the way ideological ways of thinking interact and obfuscate our relationship with nature, which he refers to as fantasies (“The Ecological Thought: A Reply to a Critic”, 2010). Ways of knowing: nature, and us | 39 Sham–Real Shadows we must.” Think we must. If ever there has been a time for the need seriously to think, it is now, and it has got to be the kind of thinking that Hannah Arendt accused [Adolph] Eichmann of being incapable of. … [The] banality of evil in the figure of Eichmann was condensed in Hannah Arendt’s analysis into the incapacity to think the world that is actually being lived [emphases are my own]. The inability to confront the consequences of the worlding28 that one is in fact engaged in, and the limiting and thinking to functionality. The limiting of thinking to business as usual. Being smart, perhaps, being efficient, perhaps, but that Eichmann was incapable of thinking, and in that consisted the banality and ordinariness of evil. And I think among us, the question of whether or not we are Eichmann’s is a very serious one” (Haraway, 2014). I am no Eichmann, but that doesn’t mean that I’m a great thinker either, which is beside the point. We may all see Aesop’s arrow, but what of its shadow(s)? Aesop warns us, “Beware that you do not lose the substance by grasping at the shadow”, but this is exactly what we must do—grasp the shadow tight, and if we cannot change the direction of the arrow, then like Peter Pan, by grabbing its shadow the arrow will follow us. If we aim to think with intent to see and think more clearly, undermining the systems that support the systems that made the Anthropocene may just be possible. Maybe then eutopia and dystopia don’t have to be the only choices. Perhaps something more is possible? Ways of knowing: nature, and us Possibilities for the future are limited primarily because the problem with grand ecological narratives is that they centre us, the human, in their prognostications. Eutopia and dystopia are two ends of the forward march of time, and both place the story in a swirl around our lone survival. My research driven works, such as the wallpaper-derived Familiar Strangers, look at the way the nature-human divide has evolved since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, while The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple (discussed in detail in Part III) focus on how this divide might carry forward into the future. In Animism, Anselm Franke posits that what makes us “modern” today is a way of distinguishing ourselves from nature. He defines it as a: 28. Worlding won’t be found in any dictionary, even though the term has been in use for nearly a century. Martin Heidegger popularized the neologism in his 1927 Being and Time to mean “being-in-the-world.” The idea was to use a verb signifying something ongoing and generative, which could not be reduced to either a philosophical state or a scientific materiality. Since then “worlding” has appeared dozens of times in philosophy, politics, cultural studies, and technology studies. The word has been appropriated, contested, but never quite pinned down––and so remains a floating signifier. Linguists have taught us that terms like “worlding” work less as fixed essences than as mediators of differences among the utterances and concepts around them. But this undetermined character hardly makes “worlding” innocent, deriving as it does from a noun referencing concepts of origins, boundaries, ethnicities, governance, and even consciousness itself. (“Definition « Worlding”) 40 | Ways of knowing: nature, and us Sham–Real Shadows “… categorical distinction between nature and society … [that] differentiate between facts, the universal laws of nature and matter, and cultural symbolic meanings or social relations … [and this] knowledge of the indisputable, universal truths of nature is acquired through objectification, by distinguishing what is inherent to the object from what belongs to the knowing subject and has been projected onto the object. … It is this dissociation of the subjective from the realm of nature and things that simultaneously constitutes the self-possessing subject … [where the] very act of division … produces at once an objectified nature composed of absolute facts, and a free, detached subject: the modern, Cartesian self” (Franke, Animism, 2010, 14–15). Franke speaks to the worlding of our world today: we are unable to truly grasp our individual finitude, nor embrace the possibility of a world (or a universe) without us. So how then can one possibly bridge the divide when these nature–human dichotomies and paradoxes are rooted so deeply in our individualism, and not found within living and non–living societies independent of us? In his 1926 novel The Silver Stallion James Branch Cabell wrote, “An optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.” If dystopia is the time we live in, then the future holds only two options: a pessimistic further downward spiral (more dystopia), or optimistic salvation (coming eutopia). These visions are often problematic because they’re based on an intrinsically dystopian present, and while there is merit in critiquing the detrimental present, these fail because they rely on ways of thinking that premise knowing what is intrinsically unknowable. Dionisio González’ utopic manipulated dwellings provide optimistic answers to the problems of climate change in one localized context, namely Dauphin Island, Alabama. Although intriguing, and meticulously fabricated (digitally) these proposed structures would exist not to mingle within nature, but to resist it—specifically to resist the devastating effects of ever increasing brutality in hurricanes, and ocean level rise, spurred on by global climate change (“Dionisio Gonzalez Imagines Disaster Resistant Surrealist Structures”, 2014). Gonzáles refers to the structures as sustainable, but they seem designed to resist reality, and to sustain the current modus operandi (see Appendix A, Figure A-03 for a digital sketch of one of Gonzáles buildings). I believe that the search for ecological stability should not lie down in the middle with neutopia, nor in the present, but in a radical other space. To find this, we must think. In a March 2014 TED talk, How the teddy bear taught us compassion, Jon Mooallem declares that our imagination has become an ecological force, while already having become an ecological echo (Jon Mooallem, TED, 2014). Is there a fan in the house? The affective sensibility of fandom is an essay in which Lawrence Grossberg defines ideology as: “the structures of meaning within which we locate ourselves. That is, ideologies are the maps of meaning [taken for] granted as the obviously true Ways of knowing: nature, and us | 41 Sham–Real Shadows pictures of the way the world is. By defining what is natural, and commonsensical, ideologies construct the ways we experience the world”, and those constructs filter down into how we present it (as is the case with Familiar Strangers, Sham–Real Shadows, and The Relics). What I take away from Mooallem and Grossberg is that ideologies are the maps, while thinking is the terrain. So perhaps we should spend more time in the terrain and do our best to toss the maps aside? In Animism Franke summarizes Bruno Latour’s similar thinking of “the division of nature and culture, and the subsequent purification of the two domains of subjects on the one side, and things on the other” as being ‘only possible by a repression of the middle ground, the mediation that connects subjects with objects in multiple forms’. For Latour everything happens in the middle, and it is here that our thinking needs to function as mediation, translation and networks” (Franke, Animism, 2010, 26). From this I think that there is possibility for a third space between the terrain and the map? These are the strange thoughts that keep me awake at night. What happens to our thinking about nature when Nature is excluded from the view? Timothy Morton’s concepts the mesh, and the strange stranger, may provide an answer: “The ecological thought imagines interconnectedness … “the mesh”. … The mesh of interconnected things is vast, perhaps immeasurably so. Each entity in the mesh looks strange. Nothing exists all by itself, and so nothing is fully “itself”. There is curiously “less” of the Universe at the same time, and for the same reasons, as we see “more” of it. Our encounter with other beings becomes profound. They are strange, even intrinsically strange. Getting to know them makes them stranger. When we talk about life forms, we’re talking about strange strangers. The ecological thought imagines a multitude of entangled strange strangers” (Morton, The Ecological Thought, 2012, 15). So, if the map is all the knowledge we have, and the terrain is the “real deal”, then this possible third space Franke and Latour speak of may be Morton’s mesh. To account for the mesh and the strange stranger is to work in the void between romanticized Nature and the real nature; a space where we are part of the subject and the nature–human dichotomy and paradoxes fades from view. I think this third space is the radical acceptance of the “not knowable knowing” (Morton, The Ecological Thought, 2012, 168)—of what I think is the forced phenomenological experience of a space and a place we’re already in and not paying much attention to. In the paintings of Josh Keyes humans have all vanished without explanation. The works are inspired by Alan Weisman’s investigations in The World Without Us, and illustrate a future Earth where the human world decays and is slowly reintegrated into the natural one. In these works sky, animals, objects, and ground plain are “cut” from the scene in architectonic slices that float on a field of white, while animals appear naturalistic, or surrealist (in one an orca swims underground ripping up old asphalt with its dorsal fin). I interpret Keyes paintings to be less of an illustration 42 | Ways of knowing: Capitalocene Sham–Real Shadows of what will happen, than a demonstration of what is already happening today— specifically that nature is among us, is around us, for we are a part of it. In this view nature knows us, but we do not seem to know it, or at least would rather not truly know it on its own terms as voluntas desertum. I see these works as a nod toward this radical third space: the mesh. J. B. Mackinnon defines nature by “our most ordinary definition [as] the sum total of everything that is not us and did not spring from our imaginations” (Mackinnon, 2013, 9). In the future we are facing human extinction, but at this moment the fog of anthropomorphism empowers, and entitles humanity to cause mass extirpations and extinctions within the mesh of all living and nonliving things that annihilates what makes us human—our connections and uniqueness within the extended realm of life—today. This distance has enabled us, but it does not—must not—define us. A prominent line of inquiry in Anselm Franke’s curated two-year The Anthropocene Project (2013–2014) was “How do we re-sensitize ourselves to the world we live in?” and “How do we connect what we do with what we know?” (“The Anthropocene Project. A Report”, HKW, 2014). The answer is in this radical third place, possibly the mesh, but to access it we must first do what Haraway insists: we must think. Ways of knowing: Capitalocene As we ratchet the world ever further to feed our insatiable appetites, our desperate bid to advance technology, and increase organization so that we may escape the ramifications only adds fire to the flames. Alongside this we have corporations as the predominate social institution of our day, and to quote the opening lines of Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott’s 2003 documentary The Corporation, “like the telephone system ... [corporations extend] everywhere.” Khan Lee explores systems of capitalism and commerce in Hearts & Arrows where he cuts an ice diamond of literal ice at sunrise with Vancouver’s iconic shipping cranes in the background. This exhibition at Centre A (23 May–27 July 2013) had a huge impact on my thinking on the possibility of, in Lee’s own words, “creating meaning from an imperfect situation” (“Hearts and Arrows”, Centre A, 2013). He was speaking to the act of production, but I read it as Anthropocene metaphor. In the Age of Man29, this imperfect situation I’m interested in, humans are often cast as the principal cause of doom, but I do not believe this to be true. Some are more directly to blame, but the majority of humanity finds itself trapped within a system 29. The folly of Man as a gendered signifier is apt as it is hard to see how the same state of affairs could arise of a more pluralistic system void of the fog of patriarchy. To quote from University of Wisconsin: Milwaukee’s Anthropocene Feminism conference website: “In many ways, however, the Anthropocene is a strikingly resonant iteration of the problematic forcefully articulated in Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” which sees the human, nonhuman, culture, and nature as inextricably entangled, and warns that the consequences of attempts to dominate human and nonhuman nature can be at once devastatingly successful and productively perverse. Indeed, the concept of the Anthropocene has arguably been implicit in feminism, critical theory, and queer theory for decades, a genealogy that is largely ignored, or worse, erased, by the masculine authority of science.” (“Anthropocene Feminism | April 10-12, 2014”) Ways of knowing: Capitalocene | 43 Sham–Real Shadows from which escape is not an advertised option. In her talk Haraway also discusses this entrapment, and then places the blame for “the failings of the Anthropos and the Anthropocene” to the underlying Capitalocene, a neologism of her own that references the death grip of capitalist systems (Haraway, 2014). Everything that is wrong with the Anthropocene is very important to the Capitalocene, which Haraway dates to the mid-twelfth century rise of massive trade routes, and banking systems. For example, the melting arctic means that more oil (approximately 30% of the world’s reserves) are now up for grabs. In her words, “The sucking of the last calorie of carbon out of this planet is a big deal” (Haraway, 2014). But it’s not just the arctic, or things far, far away from most of us. Lily Allen, in the song The Fear, writes “... I am a weapon of massive consumption / And it’s not my fault it’s how I’m programmed to function.” Everyone is at risk to being converted by the Capitalocene into weapons of massive consumption or they will find themselves facing elimination (weeding) from the system (the pattern)—for what does not contribute to economic value does not have value under capitalism30. Capitalism is intent to use up this world and all its inhabitants until the end of profit, but Colonialism isn’t dead either, having merely morphed from nation states to corporations. It’s ramped up, on speed and steroids, and it’s hungry—and in the Anthropocene–Capitalocene what, and who does not fit the pattern is weeded out. In his 2013 book 24/7: Late capitalism and the End of Sleep Jonathan Crary, in his discussion on sleep as the final frontier of capitalism, posits that a world that never sleeps needs no awakening (Crary, 2013). Capitalism has no interest in the Anthropos as its raison d’être is augmented financial gain without limit—a purpose driving and greatly benefitting from the technological and industrial advancements of the Anthropocene. It is a system that has ensnared all of us as consumer, consumed, or that which is weeded away in order to underscore short–term gain over long– term sustainability. Crary summarizes the real problems facing the Anthropocene today: “even among plural voices affirming that ‘another world is possible,’ there is often the misconception that economic justice, mitigation of climate change, and egalitarian social relations can somehow occur alongside the continued existence of corporations like Google, Apple, and General Electric” (Crary, 49). On Karl Marx he reminds us that, “the first requirement of capitalism, [Marx] wrote, was the dissolution of the relation to the earth” (Crary, 63). The book is a tour-de-force in its critique of capitalism as the driving force behind a destructive Anthropocene, but it also presents mediations on why we “conjure an exemption for the biocide underway everywhere on this planet” (Crary, 101) while reminding the reader that our “fate is not terminal” and that it is possible to envision a world without billionaires, which has a future other than barbarism or the post-human, and in which history can take on other forms than reified nightmares of catastrophe”31 (Crary, 128). Inside me is a battle between my inner cynic and my depressed sense of hope that whispers to 30. I am not against consumption, nor am I directly opposed to some aspects of capitalism which is in social and human forms of measurement often much better than the feudal systems it replaced, but yet even as I type this on my 2010 MacBook Air and do so in the hopes of better explaining a practice that is embedded in the exchange of capital, I can not find any way to deny that we all consume far too much, and that the effects of this is that of a supernova on the resources, systems, and societies that we need to survive. And that is to say nothing to the mineral, plant and animal forms we must share this world with. 31. I have not overlooked the irony that this is what the works of The Temple discussed in Part III presents first for the audience. 44 | Ways of unknowing: are there any? Sham–Real Shadows me that the future that Crary envisions is just not possible. I do not want the End to be dark, and it may be cynical, but I find his “world without billionaires” as much a fantasy as romantic Nature. To overcome this perhaps hope is a commodity that needs to be reclaimed, and spread liberally. Ways of unknowing: are there any? It is my belief that utopian thinking will not save us, nor will it provide a reason to. As Martin states we need to spend more time in the “mud” to know that we know what we know; to really think as Haraway states. Through this we may reach a way of unknowing, despite “not knowable knowing” being a slippery slope. I beleive art should not be made on the acceptance of ignorance, but I find most ecological art comes across as didactic one–liners. Problematically art also has the liberty of not having to be for anything—to subvert functions. All of this leaves me thinking that the possibility for “not knowable knowing” art must exist. So think we must; unknow we must. Think I must; unknow I must. I have no answers for this, but Haraway does provide a novel solution in the Cthulucene, a new possible epoch defined by “an understanding that to be a one at all, you must be a many, and it’s not a metaphor” (Haraway, 2014). Similar to Morton’s mesh this new possible epoch requires an entanglement with everything living and not, and a dissolution of the divisions of us versus everything else. I also believe that we get the planet that we make, but when we make a decision about what kind of world to live in, we must accept that we are also choosing what kind of human beings we will be. Haraway’s hope for a Cthulucene reworlding is summarized as “the activation of the cthulonic powers that is within our grasp as we collect up the trash of the Anthropocene and the exterminism of the Capitalocene, to [create] something that might possibly have a chance of ongoing” (Haraway, 2014). As Irmgard Emmelhainz stated in the Anthropocene, “the spaces of publicity now occupy the spaces of hope” (Emmelhainz, 2015). I believe the Cthulucene could be one way to push back the occupation of hope. It gives me great energy for future work that I hope will dig deeper into this third space: the Mesh; the Cthulucene; the thinking; the unknowing. Part III: Shooting into illusions from the future | 45 Sham–Real Shadows Part III: Shooting into illusions from the future 46 | A little bit Anthroposcene Sham–Real Shadows A little bit Anthroposcene “In my understanding, an artwork is fundamentally tied to its surroundings, to the present, to society, to cultural, and geographic determinants. It activates this dense texture, thereby examining the world in which we live—and by doing so, it can ultimately change the world.” —Olafur Eliasson, Art Now, Vol 4 The works discussed in Part III are awash in ideas of patterning the future via dystopian narratives. These works point toward the Aesopian arrow’s trajectory of willful self-harm that are inspired by personal stories, as well as the writings, artworks, and things that I have encountered that, despite their origins or intentions, in a contemporary context seem a little too Anthroposcene. The artwork I immediately think about when saying this is Paul Kos’ The Sound of Ice Melting (1970)—all of those microphones listening intently, and then amplifying the sounds of a block of ice melting in a gallery is such a beautiful metaphor for global warming, and the need to really imagine the ever-augmenting effect our current way of life is having on our collective futures. In a way my thinking aligns well with Eliasson evaluation of art as I see it connected to its and my present in different ways. These actants activate the mesh when they come in context with the Anthropocene in ways I would not otherwise consider them. Yet beyond heralding catastrophe the legacy of the Anthropocene is to leave permanent proof of human existence in the sediments of the Earth. Perhaps, in the distant future, a new intelligent life form will find this proof, and ponder it. There is a long and large list of possible surroundings, presents, societies, cultures and geographic determinants that will come in contact and alter the context of our world as we’ve made it today. Part of me sees this as poetically beautiful. But a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts forever, and part of this cleaving from original context is shifting meanings in mixing bowl that is the Anthropocene. In this tension The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple project rose to explore hyperobjects as things that we destroy or create that will leave behind proof of our existence. To answer Eliasson’s proposition they examine the world while simultaneously distorting it. The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple | 47 Sham–Real Shadows The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple 2. 3. 5. 6. 4. 7. 1. 48 | The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple Sham–Real Shadows Figure 18: Illustration showing The Anthropocene Temple including placement of The Relics, walls, curtain (denoted by dotted line), and light leaks. Note: The largest work, Sham–Real Shadows, is in the small place, while the smaller Relics are in the big space. This misplacement was calculated to craft a tension of scale that gives way to an open blackness with spots of brilliance. Shown: Layout of The Anthropocene Temple Exhibit: 1. Sham–Real Shadows, 2. Relic I, 3. Relic II, 4. Relic III, 5. Relic IV, 6. The Temple Prints (located on the walls), 7. Didactic panel. The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple | Description | Materials | Inside The Temple | 49 Sham–Real Shadows Description The Anthropocene Temple (Figure 18) is an imagining of a future place for reverence (and confusion) from objects of an unknown(able) future looking back to today. Each piece is a discrete work, but together they compose a space for quiet contemplation, anxiety (and maybe some grotesque humour) around hyperobjects. As defined by Timothy Morton in his 2013 book of the same name, a hyperobject is a thing that is massively distributed throughout time and space relative to human life spans. These can range from Styrofoam to global warming. Materials The Relics presented inside The Temple are small dioramas ensconced in infinity boxes, that are made from five sides of surveillance Plexiglas. The man-made materials used to craft the dioramas within include laser-cut paper, MDF, 3D printed sculptures, plastics, LED lighting, batteries, embroidery thread, and found materials. It’s truly a mixed bag of various ecological impacts with a heavy use on non-biodegradable hyperobjects (that will in turn become part the geologic proof of the geologic epoch, called Anthropocene), that must also be connected to a power grid of some kind. The use of surveillance Plexiglas was critical in order to focus on the idea of patterning into the future. These patterns are single repeats of dioramas representing future landscapes deep in time that exist in an exterior space. The patterns inside The Relics represent to me a colonization of the future by the anxieties of today. The end result is an outward expanding repeat of reflections—a patterning—of the dioramas on the inside that goes on and on into indeterminate space that warps and darkens. This is a phenomenon called regressive infinity, and in its observation one finds a disorientation of depth, and scale. Inside The Temple The first Relic that the audience generally encounters when entering The Temple proper is the dimmest and least visible before the eyes have adjusted to the dark of the space. In a usual clockwise procession, the second encountered Relic (also the a brightest) is landscape filled with menacing spikes and fog, made from 3D printed black plastic and fluffed wool. The title, Relic I: No esteemed deed; nothing of value here (Figure 19), refers to a United States Department of Energy’s proposed 50 | The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple | Description | Materials | Inside The Temple Sham–Real Shadows Figure 19: Relic I: No esteemed deed; nothing of value here. Laser-cut MDF, surveillance Plexiglas, wool, paper, 3D printed sculpture, fixture, LED light bulb. 25.4x25.4x25.4 cm. 2015. The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple | Description | Materials | Inside The Temple | 51 Sham–Real Shadows Figure 20: Sketch I have made of “landscape of repulsion” from a mock of a conceptual landscape of concrete thorns to warn future generations to steer clear of New Mexico’s Yucca Mountain radioactive wastes burial ground as commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy sometime in the early 1970s. Sourced from WIT’s World Ecology Report - Vol. 04, No. 5 - The Digest of Critical Environmental Information (WIT, 1992, 12 pages) landscape installation of menacing spikes (Figure 20), and accompanying written warning (see Appendix A, Figure A-04), above a nuclear waste disposal site in order to warn distant civilizations to stay away; to “not settle here.” The third work encountered (and also the second brightest), Relic II: The woods between the worlds (Figure 21) is a much bleaker variant of its namesake. In CS Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, the original Woods are green lands filled with deciduous trees under perpetual sun. But it’s not the trees nor sun that is important, rather the magical ponds betwixt the trees that have the power to magically transport someone to a new, and different world. It is a little Anthroposcene: a world between worlds where one can literally choose what kind of world they would like to go to! Rendered via a forest of pillars on a plane of gasoline sheen, the ponds of magical water are replaced with mirrors. The mirror–pond is not there to reflect the viewers back at themselves, but to reflect this world back onto itself. This suggests an inception; of 52 | The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple | Similarity to other artworks Sham–Real Shadows being trapped inside human constructs—a world of indecision we need to escape from. It is an aesthetic place, but not somewhere I would like lingering for too long. Relic III: Mine #000 (Figure 22), is part homage to the photographs of mines by Edward Burtynsky, and a reference to the massive quantities of sediments that are moved by human forces each year—more than all natural forces combined. This work consists of a laser-cut paper sculpture of an open-pit mine in three tiers that go down into the plinth, and then opens up to a “plasticy” oil sheen interior. Copper string lights are being pulled out of the Earth by a miniature representation of a massive-scale industrial crane used in mining. This sits on a mirrored, ice–like surface being cut into by the mines as a repeat of indeterminate resource extraction. The final Relic (also the first seen) focuses a massive flock of indefinite pink lawn flamingos spread out over an abstraction of a city grid lit at night. Titled Relic IV: Lawn (plasti–phoenicoptera phobia) (Figure 23) when viewed the flock of miniature lawn ornaments becomes a grotesque massing of the bizarre. It speaks to simulacra of nature, in a way similar to how I operated with Familiar Strangers, but more directly through it’s horror vacuii and for asking what could be more false than a plastic flock of pink flamingo on suburban lawns? Finally, as an assemblage these works speak to each other by literally (and metaphorically) reflecting off of each other in the dark of The Temple. Each Relic, in carrying the reflection its neighbouring Relic creates an effect akin to looking at a settlement on the horizon. This does not repeat inside the vitrines, but rather exists on the outside, suggesting to the audience that each of these scenarios is but one of many possibilities. Similarity to other artworks Visually the works can be thought of as miniaturized suggestions of future worlds visually akin to Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms—works that specifically speaks to me as an optimistic gestures toward space travel. They are also related Guillaume Lachapelle’s work with infinity boxes. Although some of his works have the Anthroposcene vibe it does not directly address these concerns, but rather intends to be meditation on virtual space. I find his infinity boxes have became a major point of inspiration for the development of my Relics in materiality but not in concept. The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple | 53 Sham–Real Shadows Figure 21: Relic II: The wood between the worlds. Laser-cut MDF, surveillance Plexiglas, paper, mirror, 3D printed sculpture, fixture, LED light bulb. 25.4x25.4x25.4 cm. 2015 54 | The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple Sham–Real Shadows Figure 22: Relic III: Mine #000. Laser-cut MDF, surveillance Plexiglas, paper, mirrored paper, 3D printed sculpture, string LED lights. 25.4x25.4x25.4 cm. 2015. The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple | 55 Sham–Real Shadows Figure 23: Relic IV: Lawn (plasti–phoenicopteriphobia). Laser-cut MDF, surveillance Plexiglas, paper, repainted dollhouse lawn ornaments, string LED lights. 25.4x25.4x25.4 cm. 2015. Note: 30-second exposure. Not indicative of actual brightness of the piece. 56 | The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple | What was in the shadows Sham–Real Shadows Figure 24: The Temple Prints. Black ink, black rag paper, black thumbtacks Dimensions vary. 2015. What was in the shadows Any good temple hides secrets. The Temple Prints (Figure 24) are expressions (some incomplete, some just blank paper) that were made of black ink on black paper pinned to the wall. Like Peter Gee’s meditation on the 04 April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, the future is as the ink on that work: layers of more darkness devoid of hope where the future seems a fait accompli. Nearly invisible, the work provides another layer of reveal. When the eyes fully adjust the works are possible to see, but as all three materials (ink, paper, wall) are of the same flat black, it is easily missed. They consist of scribbled anxieties, statistics, and facts from the present that line the walls of this proposed future place. As a metaphor they ask “if we managed to crawl so far out of the darkness why couldn’t we bring along more light?”32 32. This is a variation of a question posed in the SyFy channel’s 2015 television series The Expanse. The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple | On the purpose of art | 57 Sham–Real Shadows On the purpose of art When I was young I recall my mother describing art thus: “Art is a hole punched through the fabric of time that attempts to unravel the whole thing”. In a time of hyperobjects—those things massively distributed throughout time and space—it’s hard to imagine how any work could punch through a bigger hole than an open pit mine, an acidic ocean, or a mass extinction event. If Mount Rushmore will carry visible faces at least seven million years into the future, what then could my art (or any art) possibly do to achieve an impact of equal measure? In the face of such massive beasts I shrink, pulling my work into defensive miniaturization. Each of the interior Relics speak toward hyperobjects: Relic I to nuclear waste, Relic II to humanity, Relic III to landscapes, and Relic IV to plastics respectively. Indirectly, they speak to anxieties about the future, our long-term impact, and the evisceration of nature alongside its replacement with simulacra. To quote from Irmgard Emmelhainz’ essay Conditions of Visuality Under the Anthropocene and Images of the Anthropocene to Come, our “long-term geomorphic implications have become unintelligible” (Emmelhainz, 2015). We are lacking ground on which to stage the future and any typical way of conceiving the world no longer applies. The Anthropocene is less about lauding the coming of the Age of Man than acknowledging that the ways we think of our relationship to the world have allowed things to get wildly out of any sense of control. Even if we could abruptly place down our tools, the world will still end up being one shaped by man (Mackinnon, 2013). Inside The Temple can be found a few of the things that will continue to haunt us into whatever the future holds: Relic I’s inhospitable landscapes, Relic II’s indecision, Relic III’s destruction, and Relic IV’s distance from nature. In a 2008 interview included in the exhibition catalogue for Mythologies in the Making Anish Kapoor stated “… artists don’t make objects, artists make mythologies, and it’s through the mythologies that we read the object” (Kapoor, 2008). In regard to time, these dioramas are future places not-yet-made, seen as Relics in a future temple whose only congregants are people from today. Everything here is out of time, with hyperobjects having too much, and us having too little. It may prove a mistake to so carelessly let Aesopian feathers drop, but that no longer matters as the changes we have made manifest can no longer be undone.33 Our modern world exists in a new era of our making, an Anthropocene that announces the collapse of the future through “slow fragmentation towards primitivism, perpetual crisis, and planetary ecological collapse” (Emmelhainz, 2015). This is a prime landscape to answer Kapoor’s call by making ever more mythologies. 33. Current global warming will continue unaided for at least 500 more years. 24,100 years is the half-life of plutonium-139. (Morton, Hyperobjects, 2013) 58 | The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple | Green modernism | The sublime Sham–Real Shadows Green modernism The reflection-based patterning speaks to this indeterminateness through the effect of regressive infinity but isn’t just a parlour-trick. The use of mirrors was important to reference the enlargement of controlled space to something that becomes immeasurably vast. This is a direct foreshadowing of green modernism as a contemporary real world patterning of the Earth. The green modernist movement is an aggrandizement of nature-as-garden to be churned out as template across the globe—patterning-cum-ecumenoplis34. It is the opposite of Haraway’s Cthulucene for its goal is not to think, but to act via control. Gardening the world carries with it the weight of deciding what and who, lives and dies. This is a world where the Capitalocene drives the future. It is a fantasy that implores its adherents to stay the course and let technology solve all of our problems. Technology will help, but only we can save us, and that means a radical rethinking of the way things are, before we can think through how they can be. These Relics set up and become my own Anthropocene mythologies to counter radical and dangerous delusions like these that are already in the mix.35 The sublime In his introductory essay to The Sublime editor Simon Morley introduces seven major categories of the sublime, as they exist in art today. Those are The Unrepresentable, Transcendence, Nature, Terror, The Uncanny, and Altered States. Using this book as a tool for analysis the works of The Temple seem to fall most snugly in the first category, while aligning to Edmund Burke’s36 notion of the sublime as “a destabilizing force”, and Immanuel Kant’s concept of the sublime “as revealing a reality that is fundamentally indeterminate” (Morley, 2010, 19–20). Morely’s collection of disparate writings about the sublime have come to greatly influence my own understanding of this nebulous concept, but not as much as the included writing and analysis of French philospher Jean-François Lyotard. In his 1988 essay, The Sublime and the Avant-Garde, Lyotard declares that it is essential to finding the feeling of the sublime as being not of the here-and-now, but that it is “essential … that it alludes to something which can not be shown, or presented…” (Morley, 2010, 27). This aligns to the longer-term effects of hyperobjects 34. This concept is not dissimilar from the massive capital planet Trantor in Issac Asimov’s Foundation Series (1942–1993), Coruscant in George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977–) series, or Ores in The Wachowskis Jupiter Ascending (2015). 35. During the ten days of installation not all interpretations of The Temple and The Relics brought forth ideas of the Anthropocene but mythologies, and “toxic fairytales” were common readings that although not exact are on par with what I hoped the audience would take away from the work. 36. “The best-known theory published in Britain is Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke’s definition of the sublime focuses on such terms as darkness, obscurity, privation, vastness, magnificence, loudness and suddenness, and that our reaction is defined by a kind of pleasurable terror.” (“Art and the Sublime”, 2015) The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple | The sublime | 59 Sham–Real Shadows as things that are so massively distributed in time and space relative to humanity that we cannot ever truly know them, and thus never truly capture them. The indeterminate space inside The Relics is that thing which can’t be shown, while the darkness and stillness of The Temple echoes the indeterminate space inside the vitrines. It is within this context that the audience’s inability to interact with The Relics directly speaks to Lyotard’s continuation of thought that the sublime exists in places where “the possibility of nothing happening” is associated with anxieties around existence, and the unconscious (Morley, 2010, 29). In the same essay Lyotard declares that the sublime occurs in a moment when the aesthetic beauty is disrupted by something else (Morley, 2010, 33). He then goes on to write “Art does not imitate nature, it creates a world apart, eine Zwischenwelt, as Paul Klee will say; eine Nebenwelt, one might say in the which the monstrous and the formless have their rights because they can be sublime” (Morley, 2010, 33). In the past the monstrous sublime was used to craft daunting landscapes of the “new world”. In these the natural world is usually presented as monstrous and insurmountable, but American landscapes of the time balance this sublime via paths through the obstacles (river, canyon, footpath, or valley). That allows these landscapes to read as propaganda for colonization—an invitation to conquer, and to stamp the patterning of Western civilization on a supposedly uninhabited and untamed land. These, we know, were mythologies captured in art, and like them my Relics present a future of ramped up colonialism where the future landscapes are now colonized by fear, anxiety, and dystopia—all byproducts of the Capitalocene. Furthermore this presentation of indeterminate space in The Relics are disturbing, and provoking in a generative way that appears to match Longinus’ stance on the sublime as assessed by Lyotard. Longinus could not write about the sublime in a traditional intellectual way indicative of his time (techne rhetorike) but in his inability to pin it down within a framework of rational rhetoric he does state: “il y a à partir d’elle beaucoup de réflexion [from the sublime springs a lot of reflection]” (Morley, 2010, 31). Perhaps within these works the disturbance that forces reflection comes from their paradoxes—high degree of aesthetic polish (jewel like) contrasted against their conceptual framework (Anthropocene) and the phenomenology of the space (dark, quiet, a little foreboding). In terms of how my work should read I do not want The Temple to require an intimate knowledge of the specific points of reference, but rather to evoke feeling first, followed by thinking, and hopefully further exploration by the audience. Perhaps from my unconscious I created these mythologized landscapes as a betrayal to the complexity and specificity of scientific knowledge that Thomas Struth’s photography of massive human constructions require37, and that are described by Benjamin Buchloh as depicting the “technological sublime”. Yet perhaps more accurately it was an unconscious desire to create work that functioned as narrative rather than a lecture.38 Jacques Derrida, when summarizing G. W. F. Hegel in his 1978 essay Parergon said “... the sublime is not in nature but only in ourselves…” (Morley, 37. Such as his Tokamak Asdek Upgrade Interior 2 (2009). 38. A generous way of describing the installation from fellow graduate student Troy Gronsdahl. 60 | The Relics of the Anthropocene Temple | The sublime Sham–Real Shadows 2010, 44) and that is perhaps the key to the feeling of the sublime in The Temple. I believe that a general conscious or subconscious understanding of the scale of damage we (as a species) are having on the mesh, alongside the alien and alienating ways we interact with and outside it is already present in the world. I would go so far as to argue that it is obvious, even if we do not wish to admit it. That is why the works lean toward eine Zwischenwelt, or a cause for réflexion, and thus function as a destabilization force (of Anthropocene mythologies) in this world we think we know. Barbara Freeman in her 1995 article The Feminine Sublime explains Lyotard’s ideas on the sublime further: “In the formulation of Jean-François Lyotard, for example, the sublime is not the presentation of the unpresentable, but the presentation of the fact that the unpresentable exists” (Morley, 2010, 65). There is a great deal of anxiety around the Anthropocene because when accessing the current state of things, and making predictions, we cannot possibly know the fate of humanity, nor any living or nonliving thing. The future is then unknowable, but the beauty and aesthetic qualities of The Relics very much are. To summarize Philip Shaw’s take on the sublime, the pleasure from viewing the work comes from the ability to avoid—to not be inside—the “signifier for the deadly encounter with the Thing” (Morley, 2010, 54). Inside The Temple that “Thing” is the Anthropocene—the end of this worlding as we now know it—and because of their jewel like aesthetics and whimsical scale The Relics safely ensnare these deadly mythologies at a comfortable distance from the viewer, thus making room for the sublime inside the installation. The future as not presentable, art as salve | 61 Sham–Real Shadows The future as not presentable, art as salve 62 | Are there ways to explore? Sham–Real Shadows Are there ways to explore? My thesis line of inquiry has been, “are there ways to explore the ideological underpinnings and ramifications of the Anthropocene?” For the works in The Temple I believe the answer to be yes as the work brought forward the notions of “toxic fairytales” and Burkeian, and Kantian sublime to give answers for the things we cannot know. The Anthropocene has been presented as a synonym for Armageddon, and for good reasons as the subject matter is dark, and difficult to pin down without falling into areas of hope or despair. I do not consider myself an optimist, nor a pessimist, but rather as an activist that in my own way is fostering dialogue and thinking around issues that are important to not only me, but to all things inside the mesh. We have caused this current state of affairs, and we cannot undo it, so we must navigate a new world with a new climate that is in our own making, and in the eye of the storm no one can truly see. The past is factitious ideology and, the future is unknowable mythology, and both are poisoning the present. So if true nature cannot be replicated and presented, and the future is unknowable, what I produce are not glimpses forward or backward, but salves for things or ways of thinking I can’t escape. I do not know how they could be otherwise yet, but there is still time for me to evolve, for as Donna Haraway surmises the state of our contemporary situation, “the sky has not fallen. Not yet.” (Haraway, 2014) and as Jonathon Crary proposes there is activism even in daring to imagine a “world without billionaires”. Bibliography | 63 Sham–Real Shadows Bibliography 64 | Bibliography Sham–Real Shadows Anderson, D. R. ‘The Critical Importance of Sustainability Risk Management.’ Risk Management 53.4 (2006): n. pag. Print. “Anila Quayyum Agha.” N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Mar. 2015. “Anthropocene Feminism | April 10-12, 2014.” N.p., n.d. Web. 5 June 2015. “Art’s Utopian Function.” David M. Bell. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Mar. 2015. “Art and the Sublime.” Art gallery. Tate Modern. N.p., 17 Aug. 2015. Web. Azzarito, Amy. ‘Past & Present: The History of Toile de Jouy.’ Design*Sponge. N.p., 2009. Web. 30 Nov. 2015. ‘Beyond the Trees: Wallpapers in Dialogue with Emily Carr.’ Art gallery. Vancouver Art Gallery. N.p., 25 Apr. 2015. Web. 3 Sept. 2015. Blackley, Lachlan. Wallpaper. London, England: Laurence King, 2006. Print. Boehnert, Joanna. ‘Design versus the Design Industry.’ Centre for Science and Technology Policy Research, Boulder, Colorado, USA: Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, 2014. Print. Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep. Verso, 2013. Print. “Definition « Worlding.” N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2014. “Dionisio Gonzalez Imagines Disaster Resistant Surrealist Structures.” designboom | architecture & design magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Sept. 2015. Emmelhainz, Irmgard. “Conditions of Visuality Under the Anthropocene and Images of the Anthropocene to Come.” e-flux 63 (2015): n. pag. Web. 26 Mar. 2015. Forbush, Edward Howe. Birds of America. Garden City Publishing Company, 1917. Print. Franke, Anselm. Animisn. New York, NY: Stenberg Press, 2010. Print. ---. The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearence of the Outside. New York, NY: Sternberg Press, 2013. Print. Greysmith, Brenda. Wallpaper. London, England: Studio Vista, 1976. Print. Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action. Beacon Press, 1985. Print. Haraway, Dona. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble.” Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Santa Cruz, California. 2014. Lecture. “Hearts and Arrows | Centre A.” N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Sept. 2015. Bibliography | 65 Sham–Real Shadows ‘Imagery, Imagination, Earth.’ ImaGeo. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2015. Kapoor, Anish. Anish Kapoor In Conversation with Nicholas Baume. 2008. Klingan, Katrin et al. The Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain. Vol. 1. The MIT Press, 2014. Print. 3 vols. ---. The Textures of the Anthropocene: Vapor. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: The MIT Press, 2014. Print. 3 vols. Mackinnon, J.B. The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be. Random House Canada, 2013. Print. Mooallem, Jon: The Strange Story of the Teddy Bear and What It Reveals. N.p., 2014. Film. Morley, Simon. The Sublime. New York, NY: The MIT Press, 2010. Print. Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007. Print. ---. Hyperobjects. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2013. Print. ---. The Ecological Thought. Boston, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012. Print. Parry, Joseph et al. Art and Phenomenology. Routledge, 2011. Print. Portanova, Joseph. ‘Porcelain, The Willow Pattern, and Chinoiserie.’ New York University. N.p., 2013. Web. Rome, Susan. ‘Marianne Nicolson.’ Art Gallery. Around the Gallery in 80 Artworks. N.p., 23 Aug. 2011. Web. 5 Sept. 2015. “Studio Olafur Eliasson.” N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. Teynac, Françoise. Wallpaper, a History. New York City, New York: Rizzoli, 1982. Print. “The Anthropocene Project. A Report.” HKW. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Sept. 2015. ‘The Ecological Thought: A Reply to a Critic.’ Larval Subjects. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Dec. 2015. ‘The History of the Paisley Symbol and Paisley Pattern.’ N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2015. Thibaut-Pomerantz, Carolle. Wallpaper A History of Style and Trends. Paris, France: Flammarion, 2009. Print. 66 | Bibliography Sham–Real Shadows Turkel, Sherry. Evocative Objects. MIT Press, 2007. Print. Victoria and Albert Museum, Online Museum. “William Morris.” N.p., 17 June 2011. Web. 6 Apr. 2014. Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Semiotextet, 1991. Print. Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Print. “Why the Passenger Pigeon Went Extinct.” Audubon. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Dec. 2015. Zerefos, C. S. et al. “Atmospheric Effects of Volcanic Eruptions as Seen by Famous Artists and Depicted in Their Paintings.” 2 Aug. 2007: n. pag. Print. ‘Zigzags on a Shell From Java Are the Oldest Human Engravings.’ Smithsonian. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2015. Appendix A: Other images | 67 Sham–Real Shadows Appendix A: Other images 68 | Appendix A: Other images Sham–Real Shadows Figure A-01: Kristin Schoppi. Papered Wall #6. 8 artichoke leaves, 85 red cabbages, 4 asparagus, 4 red peppers, 9 beets, 1952 sprouts, 1 cauliflower, 7 sui choy, 10 cherry tomatoes, 15 250 staples, 4 coriander, 1952 pins, 12 garlic cloves, 47 nails, 8 green beans, 9 screws, 5 green onions, 135 cm of wire, 36 mung beans. 1993. (Included with permission from the artist.) Appendix A: Other images | 69 Sham–Real Shadows Figure A-02: DETAIL. Kristin Schoppi. Papered Wall #6. 8 artichoke leaves, 85 red cabbages, 4 asparagus, 4 red peppers, 9 beets, 1952 sprouts, 1 cauliflower, 7 sui choy, 10 cherry tomatoes, 15 250 staples, 4 coriander, 1952 pins, 12 garlic cloves, 47 nails, 8 green beans, 9 screws, 5 green onions, 135 cm of wire, 36 mung beans. 1993. (Included with permission from the artist.) 70 | Appendix A: Other images Sham–Real Shadows Figure A-03: Sketch I have made from a photo-image of a conceptual building proposal from Dionisio González series Dauphin Island. Appendix A: Other images | 71 Sham–Real Shadows Figure A-04: The text that is to accompany the “landscape of repulsion”. Sourced from ‘This Place Is Not a Place of Honor.’ N.p., n.d. Web. 20 October. 2014. 72 | Appendix B: The Anthropocene intervals Sham–Real Shadows Appendix B Appendix B: The Anthropocene intervals | 73 Sham–Real Shadows Table 01 Mapping wallpaper designs against historical events and impacts pertaining to the environment, society, and economy during the Anthropocene over a 229 year period since the start of the Industrial Revolution (the date I’ve chosen for the beginning of the Anthropocene proper). This is done to remain consistent with the Three Legged Stool of Sustainability’s categories of Planet, People, and Profits (Anderson, 2006). The corresponding symbols represent the need to multiple the environment (⊗), to add human society into the equation (⊕), and need for limitations on economic activities at the expense of the first two (∅). I have done my best to list events I have found relevant to researching the Anthropocene, or that have had a profound impact on the way I see the world personally, however given the breadth and depth of this survey there will be need for future expansion. I have limited each item to one category—the principle category for that group—although each may be applicable to more than one, or all three categories. It is important to note that this table does not indicate a direct correlation, but it does establish some convincing inferences (for my research and work) between the motifs, styles, or subject matters that were popular in the years mapped, and against the major events presented. 74 | Appendix B: The Anthropocene intervals Sham–Real Shadows Interval Years Title, designer, date, and source Description of pattern and critique from a personal perspective Historical events and impacts pertaining to the Environment (⊗), Society (⊕), and Economy (∅) during the Anthropocene Corresponding working titles for Familiar Strangers 01 1784 – 1793 Les Metamorphoses d’Ovide Unknown 1785 Trompe-l’œil neoclassical wall repeat with individual panels illustrating Ovid’s Metamorphosis including the creation myths of Ancient Rome. Nature is relegated to background, myth, and a peculiar border of roses that occurs around the five panels of each section between a set of pillars. Everything is grey, or gold except these roses and a repeat of sashes along the upper perimetre. Presents view of nature as source for mythology. ⊕ 1784 (circa) Romantic movement begins ∅ 1785 Coal gas first used for lighting ∅ 1787 Colonization of Australia begins (last continent of European colonization) ∅ 1787 First steam ship is patented ⊕ 1789 French Revolution begins ∅ 1792 Stock exchange exclusivity begins (Wall Street stockbroker insider trading pack signed) ⊕ 1791 Haitian Revolution begins (only successful slave revolt ever) ⊕ 1792 French Revolutionary Wars begin Interval 01: creationism by any other name smells the same 02 1794 – 1803 Chinoise Unknown 1797 Two repeating panels of trees, birds, and aviaries bordered by a repeat of what looks like corn. Left panel features a naturalist illustration of a grey crane and a small tree; right panel features several birds and an aviary in the distance. Presents a view of nature as source for vicarious knowledge and collection. ⊕ 1795 United indigenous Kingdom of Hawaii founded ⊗ 1796 Extinction established as fact ⊕ 1798 Neoclasscism ends ⊗ 1798 Essay on the Principles of Population published ⊗ 1799 First conservation law ⊗ 1802 Human population one billion ⊕ 1802 First anti-child labour laws ⊕ 1803 Napoleonic Wars begin ∅ 1803 Louisiana Purchase Interval 02: there is always more somewhere else 03 1804– 1813 Jardins de Bagetelle Joseph Dufour 1804 A grande paramique designed to cover all the walls of a room. Graphic illustration of neoclassical architecture and one East Asian styled outbuilding set in a French garden. A variety of wealthy patrons are in the garden. The Château de Bagatelle was a pleasure ground for the French aristocracy and was used only occasionally when hunting in the adjacent woods—essentially a maison de plaisance. Presents a view of nature as resource for pleasure. ∅ 1804 First locomotive ∅ 1804 Lewis and Clark expedition begins ⊕ 1807 British slave trade ends ∅ 1807 First passenger railway ⊗ 1808 Coal first burned for residential heat ⊗ 1808 Unknown volcanic eruption lowers global temperatures for at least ten years ⊕ 1810 Spanish colonial revolts begin ⊕ 1811 Luddite movement formed ∅ 1812 The Frame Breaking Act makes machine breaking punishable by death ⊗ 1813 World’s first nature preserve Interval 03: send me away to where the weight of the world we have failed can not touch me 04 1814 – 1823 Les Chasses de Campiegne Carle Vernet 1815 A two panelled illustration repeat of an idyllic American South hunt respite with finely dressed gentlemen, horses, hounds, lower class workers being interrupted while going about their day, and vistas of far off ships and towns. Was original installed in a Kentucky plantation home. Presents a view of nature as resource for class differentiation. ∅ 1814 First mass-produced machine (machine made by a machine) ⊗ 1815 Mount Tamboro erupts and drastically effects global weather and temperatures ⊕ 1816 "Year Without A Summer" ∅ 1817 Erie Canal construction begins ⊕ 1817 First cholera epidemic ∅ 1817 Term comparative advantage coined (capitalism benefits the weak as well as the strong) ∅ 1818 British East India Company quells remaining Indian colonial resistance ∅ 1819 First steam ship crosses Atlantic ⊗ 1821 World’s first geographic society founded ∅ 1821 First adoption of gold standard Interval 04: here, where we starve, we can see the workings of our comparative advantage 05 1824 – 1833 Famous Hunts Zuber 1831 A grande paramique illustration of a somber hunt. Features well-to-do pleasure hunters along side hounds along a creek between two fields populated with simple peasants. Two trees, and a far off castle dominate the image but not as much as the curious sky. In this version near three quarters of the image area is dominated by a white horizon to blue-sky gradient. It is a graphic and distinctive piece compared to others of its interval. Presents a view of nature as resource for pleasure. ⊕ 1824 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is founded ∅ 1825 First public railway ∅ 1825 First stock market crash ⊕ 1826 First true photograph ∅ 1828 First electric motor ⊗ 1828 Vitalism’s first major disaccreditation (élan vital; non-living and living entities are fundamentally different because of souls) ∅ 1829 Genocide of the Beothuk people complete with death of Shanawdithit ∅ 1829 Hot blast industrial process invented ∅ 1830 Indian Removal Act (US) ∅ 1832 First world travel guide published ⊕ 1833 First Factory Act regulates factory working conditions Interval 05: the skies are alive with sounds muffled by the cries of the dying Appendix B: The Anthropocene intervals | 75 Sham–Real Shadows Interval Years Title, designer, date, and source Description of pattern and critique from a personal perspective Historical events and impacts pertaining to the Environment (⊗), Society (⊕), and Economy (∅) during the Anthropocene Corresponding working titles for Familiar Strangers 06 1834 – 1843 Scenes of North America Zuber et Cie 1834 A large A grande paramique illustration of North American natural landmarks such as Niagara Falls. The sublimity of the natural landscape’s imposing features is mitigated by insertion of modern transportation devices such as steam ships and stagecoaches, and representation of tourism. It also features a slew of ethic stereotypes while curiously portrayed as well-to-do. Presents a view of nature as obedient, and pleasurably conquerable over being sublime. ∅ 1834 Industrial capitalism as social system begins ⊕ 1834 Slavery abolished in British Empire ∅ 1835 English becomes only official language of India ∅ 1837 Telegraph patented ⊗ 1837 Woodman Save That Tree written (first environmentalist song) ∅ 1838 Trail of Tears begins ∅ 1839 First Opium War begins, and Hong Kong is seized ∅ 1839 Rubber is vulcanized ∅ 1839 Electricity is clarified ∅ 1840 First national claims over Antarctic made ∅ 1840 The first tea plantations established in India ∅ 1842 First state managed forest Interval 06: whose glory and renown are spread o’er land and sea 07 1844 – 1853 Untitled Owen Jones 1850 A diagonal repeat of a manicured plant–like motif. Overall framing device within the repeat is evocative of a shield repeat with a concave cone shape at its top. The curled forms and round ball finials border and fall into this shape. Presents a view of nature as source for obviously man-made, rationalized geometric repeat that could be described as wholly abstract—a celebration of design over nature (Figure 07). ⊗ 1844 Great Auk extinct ∅ 1844 First central banking ⊗ 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation published (early evolutionary and transmutation theories written in accessible manner) ⊕ 1845 The Great Irish Famine begins ⊕ 1845 Term Manifest Destiny is coined ⊕ 1847 The Vegetarian Society formed ⊕ 1848 The Communist Manifesto published ⊕ 1848 Realism movement begins ∅ 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition (first large scale exhibition of industrially made products) ∅ 1852 First multi-city trip through the air ∅ 1853 World’s first public aquarium Interval 07: that which is beautiful is never true 08 1854 – 1863 Lucullus Auguste Clésinger 1855 Trompe-l’œil illustrative multi-panel repeat evocative of a neoclassical frieze. There are a range of foreground forms that fade in a series of flat tones into the darkness of the implied narrow interior space between the top and the bottom of the repeat. Figures and forms in the piece include geese, hounds, baskets of food, farming paraphernalia and cherubs. Presents a view of nature as mythologized fancy. It is also a celebration of design over nature for it’s graphic and blatant colour separations and depiction of nature as provision of the gods to man (Figure 05). ∅ 1854 The US “Black Ships” force Japan to open its borders to trade ∅ 1856 Second Opium War begins ∅ 1857 British take over of Mughal territory complete ⊕ 1857 Symbolism movement begins ∅ 1858 Territory of the British East Indian Company is annexed into the Empire proper ⊗ 1859 The Carrington Event (last large electrical disruption from the sun ⊗ 1859 On the Origin of Species published (Theory of Evolution within) ⊗ 1859 Greenhouse effect explained ⊗ 1860 Term pollution first used to describe environmental contamination ∅ 1862 Parkesine patented (first man-made plastic) ⊗ 1863 First underground urban railway opens ⊗ 1863 Alkali Acts (first air pollution laws) Interval 08: four years before, and 156 after the origins of the species and we’re still here 09 1864 – 1873 Acanthus William Morris 1875 A striking rework of a classical motif. The repeat is on an organic, non-rectilinear frame, while the interior designs appear to follow an arrangement of consecutive circle shapes that read as a chain of number 8s or an infinite repeat of the infinity symbol (∞). The work is illustrative and bends the source material (acanthus leaves) into a striking geometry that speaks more to a man-made nature than too any attempt at realism whilst still managing to capture something of the original plant. Presents a view of nature as something that should be dominated, and controlled by man, while simultaneously respecting it for its innate beauty (Figure 08). ∅ 1864 The Chicago Board of Trade approves trading of “futures” ⊗ 1864 Man and Nature published (first book to examine man’s effects on nature) ⊕ 1865 Impressionism movement begins ⊗ 1865 Principles for genetics established ⊕ 1865 American slavery ends ∅ 1865 First typewriter invented ⊗ 1865 Periodic Table of the Elements published ⊗ 1866 Term ecology coined ∅ 1866 First transatlantic telegraph cable laid ⊕ 1867 Dominion of Canada created ∅ 1869 First North American transcontinental railway ∅ 1869 Suez Canal opens ⊗ 1869 Sea Birds Preservation Act (world’s first nature protection law) ∅ 1870 Standard Oil founded ⊕ 1871 England legalizes trade unions ⊗ 1872 World’s first national park established ⊗ 1872 First of Desirability of establishing a “Close-time” for the preservation of indigenous animals series published ⊗ 1873 Term Anthropozoic era proposed (precursor to Anthropocene) Interval 09: life is an act of consumption, jupiter Interval Years Title, designer, date, and source Description of pattern and critique from a personal perspective Historical events and impacts pertaining to the Environment (⊗), Society (⊕), and Economy (∅) during the Anthropocene Corresponding working titles for Familiar Strangers 10 1874 – 1883 Untitled (irises) CFA Voysey 1880 A cartoonish depiction of irises and bull rushes on the banks of a river or pond. Overall structure is indicative of typical curve–peaked church windows. Presents a view of nature as simplified, dull, and passive—one that conforms to simple geometry and line work over any attempt to represent the actual. ∅ 1874 First telephone patented ⊗ 1875 Term biosphere coined ∅ 1877 Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India ∅ 1877 Phonograph invented ∅ 1878 Northern Sea Route successfully navigated ⊗ 1879 Term Psychozoic proposed (precursor to Anthropocene) ∅ 1879 Light bulb patented ∅ 1879 Standard time proposed ∅ 1883 Earliest industrial intellectual property treaty signed ⊗ 1883 Krakatau eruption ⊗ 1883 First solar cell invented Interval 10: the world keeps moving on but in my repetition i steal more time 11 1884 – 1893 Seahorses CFA Voysey 1887 A striking but simplistic, cartoonish line drawing illustration of ocean waves and sea horses. The main compositional structure consists of repetitive oval shapes within which two sea horses either look away or towards each other. Presents a view of nature as static—that simulacrum as signpost is sufficient to speak to nature. ∅ 1884 The Berlin Conference on colonization of Africa and the regulation of New Imperialism ⊕ 1885 Post–Impressionism movement begins ∅ 1885 First automobile patented ∅ 1885 Dry cell battery invented ∅ 1886 Coca-Cola invented ⊕ 1886 First eight hour workday law ∅ 1887 First working wind turbine ∅ 1887 Gramophone is patented ⊗ 1898 National Geographic Society founded ∅ 1889 L’Exposition Universelle (largest exhibition of industrially made products) ⊕ 1890 Art Nouveau movement begins ∅ 1890 First successful airplane flight ∅ 1890 End of the American Frontier (colonization of US controlled North America declared complete) ⊗ 1892 Sierra Club founded ∅ 1893 US annexation of Kingdom of Hawaii ⊕ 1893 Women’s suffrage first granted Interval 11: this is how we dance under waves you can not see 12 1894 – 1903 Flamingoes Otto Eckman 1898 Three part panel repeat. Top panel is a repeat of a flamingo in flight with a vibrant sky above and sea below. Middle panel is a pattern repeat of a flock of flamingoes crafting a dense impenetrable wall—you can not see past them and may forms overlap and confuse on top of each other. Bottom panel features a row of frogs underwater with foliage between and above them. Although illustrative over realist— and somewhat goofy in mood—the design presents a nature that is interdependent, dense, and alive, but ultimately merely entertaining for us to look at. ⊗ 1895 The term greenhouse effect coined ⊗ 1896 CO2 emissions first linked to climate change ⊗ 1896 Radioactivity discovered ⊗ 1898 Study of Ecological succession pioneered ⊗ 1898 The Coal Smoke Abatement Society formed (first environmental NGO) ∅ 1899 First successful transatlantic radio signal ⊕ 1901 Expressionism, and Fauvism movements begin ∅ 1901 US Steel first billion dollar company ∅ 1902 First wireless telephone ∅ 1902 First artificial climate machine patented (air- conditioner) Interval 12: all of us is present for your infinite and indefinite pleasure 13 1904 – 1913 Whoot CFA Voysey 1904 Another strong illustrative graphic repeat of birds that works on a simple mirror reflection repeat of a tall skinning rectangle composition. The design presents foliage and owls alongside newly hatched offspring—a parliament of repetition. Presents a life cycle of an animal in a clear way, but in a simple repeat that creates a textured surface from a distance and abundance up close. Presents a view of nature and the cycle of life as infinite and indefinite. ∅ 1904 Study of geopolitics coined ∅ 1904 Standard Oil controls 91% of US oil production ∅ 1904 Trans-Siberian Railway opens ∅ 1905 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism published (justifies Capitalism as Calvinist) ⊗ 1905 The term smog coined ⊕ 1907 Cubism movement begins ∅ 1908 Model T released for sale ∅ 1909 Bakelite invented ⊕ 1909 Futurism movement begins ⊗ 1911 Newfoundland Wolf extinct ∅ 1913 The assembly line invented Interval 13: a parliament of effective distances Interval Years Title, designer, date, and source Description of pattern and critique from a personal perspective Historical events and impacts pertaining to the Environment (⊗), Society (⊕), and Economy (∅) during the Anthropocene Corresponding working titles for Familiar Strangers 14 1914 – 1923 Les Sonsonnets Paul Marrot 1921 A simplistic line drawing pattern illustrating starlings and branches bent to a spiral shape. The pattern consists of a single drawing with a mirrored twin slightly below it and to the right to craft the illusion of one branch with two twigs. The birds are supplied with food in the form of berries that grow on the branches. This presents an ideal of nature as plentiful and able to take care of itself. ⊗ 1914 American passenger pigeon is declared extinct (populist proof of extinction) ∅ 1914 Panama Canal opens ⊕ 1914 World War I begins ⊗ 1915 The Ecological Society of America is founded ⊕ 1916 Easter Uprising—beginnings of decolonization of Europe ⊗ 1916 Plant Sucession published (proposed that landscapes evolve toward perfection and that nature can repair itself) ⊕ 1916 Technicolor invented ⊕ 1917 Surrealism, Dada, and De Stijl movements begin ⊕ 1917 October Revolution ⊕ 1917 First time a nation depended primarily on food imports to feed its citizens ⊕ 1919 Treaty of Versailles ends WWI and creates many new European nations carved from multi-ethnic continental empires ⊗ 1920 British cod fishery collapse ⊗ 1922 Terms Anthropogene and Noosphere coined (precursors to Anthropocene) ⊗ 1922 Term environmentalism coined Interval 14: despite the extinction of my brethren i will return orderly and predictable 15 1924 – 1933 Unknown (banana leaves) Anonymous 19251 A machined geometric repeat of highly aesthetic banana leaves.39 The pattern is made of a single leaf constructed from a half oval (cut along the horizontal horizon) and a concave stem that is cut out of the void from the repeating half oval form. The interior of each leaf is a vertically extending series of architectonic lines as stand-ins for the veins and stem of the leaf. Presents a wholly machined, simulacrum of nature indicative of an era that highly celebrated technological advancement and continued large scale colonization between the World Wars. ⊕ 1925 Art Déco and Surrealist movements begin ⊕ 1925 Scopes Trial on teaching of evolution versus creationism in US public schools ∅ 1925 Television invented ∅ 1925 Process for frozen food invented ∅ 1927 First “Talkie” film ⊕ 1929 Abstract Expressionism begins ∅ 1929 Black Tuesday (stock market crash) ∅ 1929 Great Depression begins ⊗ 1930 The Great Dust Bowl begins ⊕ 1930 Socialist Realism begins ⊕ 1933 Nazis came to power federally in Germany Interval 15: these will never be banana leaves 16 1934 – 1943 Chamilles René Gabriel 1936 A cut paper style illustration of diagonally repeating tree branches and love birds. Presents a whimsical, crafty, colloquial representation of nature I read as idyllic idealism versus the reality that most lovebirds the purchasers of this wallpaper will encounter will be in cages in residential settings. ⊗ 1935 Term ecosystem coined ⊗ 1935 Term Dauerwald coined (“perpetual forest” meaning eternal; related to forest management) ⊗ 1936 Tasmanian Tiger extinct ∅ 1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money published ∅ 1936 Keynesian Economics Theory published ⊕ 1939 World War II begins ⊕ 1942 The Manhattan Project begins ⊗ 1943 First big smog attributed to automobiles Interval 16: nothing is beautiful because it lasts 17 1944 – 1953 The Parakeet and the Mermaid Henri Matisse 1952 A discombobulated assemblage of various shapes indicative of seaweed, apples arranged in an energized scattering that gets ever more dense as they encroach on to a crude silhouette of a mermaid on the right and a parakeet on the left. The paper is a direct representation of Matisse’s “cut outs” work of the same name and of the same year. Presents a fantastical, imagined world of plenty that is mythological and impossible—an acerbic take on impossible views of nature.40 ∅ 1944 International Monetary Found founded ⊕ 1944 First nuclear bomb test ⊕ 1945 First nuclear bomb use ⊕ 1945 Rapid political decolonization begins ⊕ 1945 WWII in Europe ends ⊕ 1946 WWII in Asia ends ⊕ 1946 Great Acceleration begins ∅ 1947 hydraulic fracturing process invented ⊗ 1947 Term evolutionary synthesis clarified (consensus on how evolution proceeds) ⊕ 1948 United Nations founded ⊗ 1949 Term desertification coined ⊗ 1949 A Sand County Almanc published (argues for land ethic—responsible relationship between humans and nature) ⊕ 1952 Pop Art movement begins ⊗ 1952 The Great Smog (London) ⊗ 1952 Caribbean Monk Seal extinct ⊗ 1952 Term global warming coined Interval 17: space has the boundaries of my imagination—i am anticipating things to come 39. This is the only pattern in the series not sourced from a library book. It breaks the system of selection that I crafted however it is a distinctive iteration of Art Déco pattern and an iconic one appearing on fabrics and dishware that I have personally encountered numerous times, and although it breaks my rules they are my rules to break. 40. A quote often attributed to Henri Matisse (but unconfirmed by the time of the publication): “When we speak of nature it is wrong to forget that we are ourselves a part of nature. We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.” 78 | Appendix B: The Anthropocene intervals Sham–Real Shadows Interval Years Title, designer, date, and source Description of pattern and critique from a personal perspective Historical events and impacts pertaining to the Environment (⊗), Society (⊕), and Economy (∅) during the Anthropocene Corresponding working titles for Familiar Strangers 18 1954 – 1963 Woods Cole & Son 1959 A strong repeat of diagonal braches stem from and interweaving between trunks in direct horizontal alignment. The effect is of a prison made of trees that can extend indefinitely to the left, right, top, or bottom. It is an endless plenty of woods that presents nature as a boundless resource without possible end. ⊕ 1956 UK Clean Air Act passed ∅ 1957 Sputnik—first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth ∅ 1960 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries founded ∅ 1960 First working laser ⊗ 1961 World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) founded ⊗ 1962 Silent Spring published ⊕ 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis ∅ 1962 LED light technology developed ∅ 1962 First computer game Interval 18: there are satellites in the skies, lasers on the ground, and in the woods a silent spring all around 19 1964 – 1973 Frog Treillage Charles Tausch 1970 A fanciful repeat of frogs in spread eagle position that has the graphic effect of an interlocking web of Xs. It is cartoonish, and whimsical in its presentation of frogs formed into a grid indicative of garden fencing and vine growing (treillage). Presents a view of nature as conforming to a pattern that itself is referencing gardening—the ordering of nature to our benefit. ⊕ 1964 Earth Art and Op Art movements begin ∅ 1965 Astroturf invented ⊕ 1965 First successful lawsuit for environmental harm ⊗ 1968 The Population Bomb published ⊕ 1969 First humans on the moon ⊗ 1970 Caspian Tiger extinct ⊗ 1970 First Earth Day celebrations ⊗ 1970 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ∅ 1971 First email ∅ 1971 Bretton Woods system abandoned ⊗ 1971 UNESCO Man and Biosphere ⊗ 1972 First national ban on DDT ⊕ 1972 Conference on the Human Environment ⊕ 1972 “Think globally, act locally” campaign ⊗ 1972 The Limits to Growth published ⊗ 1972 Should Trees Have Standing published (should non- human living things have legal status) ⊗ 1972 The Gaia Theory published ∅ 1973 OPEC oil crisis ⊗ 1973 Ecology Party founded (becomes the multi-nation Green Party) ⊗ 1973 Term deep ecology coined (human life is just one equal component in a broader global ecosystem) ⊗ 1973 US Endangered Species Act Interval 19: gardens, gardens everywhere 20 1974 – 1983 The Cliffs Alain Le Foll 1977 The only clear isolated study of a non-living, non-human made subject in any naturalist wallpaper I have found in my searches. The illustration is graphic, heavy, and somber. Presents a view of nature as ancient, sublime and indomitable. ⊗ 1974 World’s largest land park founded ∅ 1978 Term neoliberalism first used in current sense ⊗ 1977 First fully sequenced DNA genome ⊗ 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear event ⊗ 1979 Gaia: A new look at life on Earth published ⊗ 1979 The Sinking Ark is published ∅ 1980 Volcker Shock (hyper inflation) ⊗ 1980 Earth First! Founded ⊗ 1980 Environmental Justice movement begins Interval 20: the world will not die with us 21 1984 – 1993 Malita P Frey 1980 A bright and garish repeat of flower bouquets. The bouquets feature five of the same flower in a fanned repeat with each set contained within a outlined shape. That shape is created by bisecting a circle and then crafting a downward point concave point that sits snuggly between the circle shapes below it to the right and left. Illustration style presents an orderly take on nature that borders on kitsch indifference to the subject matter while the repeat reflects a mass consumerist idea toward packaged cut flowers that squares nicely with a massive boom in the flower market in the 1980s. ⊗ 1984 Term ecocentrism coined (a nature centred system of values) ⊗ 1984 Sea of Slaughter is published ⊗ 1985 Hole in ozone layer proven ⊗ 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster ⊗ 1986 Risk Society published ⊗ 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster ⊗ 1990 The term rewilding coined (a movement to re-wild the human developed world) ⊕ 1991 Collapse of the Soviet Bloc ⊗ 1992 Rio ’92 Earth Summit ⊗ 1992 Newfoundland cod fishery collapse, moratorium goes into effect Interval 21: flowers with impact 22 1994 – 2003 Garden Birds Louise Body 2001 A stark motif of crossing telephone wires with birds perched upon them. This presents the first full replacement of the natural world as backdrop with the human one suggestive of an urban environment. Presents a frank and blunt representation of animals existing in a human-made environment. ⊗ 1995 Shifting Baseline Syndrome published (we can not truly understand the totality of environmental degradation as our own baselines within our own lifetimes are already skewed) ∅ 1997 Chinese workers hand pollinate apple blossoms due to extirpation of bees ⊗ 1997 Kyoto Protocol created ⊗ 2000 Term Anthropocene coined in current definition ⊗ 2003 Hurricane Juan slams into Nova Scotia (first major environmental catastrophe that had a deep impact on me) Interval 22: the heat of the sun is you Appendix B: The Anthropocene intervals | 79 Sham–Real Shadows Interval Years Title, designer, date, and source Description of pattern and critique from a personal perspective Historical events and impacts pertaining to the Environment (⊗), Society (⊕), and Economy (∅) during the Anthropocene Corresponding working titles for Familiar Strangers 23 2004 – 2013 Hybrid Nice 2005 A presentation of silhouettes of various fauna. In the centre of each panel there is a complete animal or insect, while adjacent to the left and right appears half of the creature bisected vertically through the middle. These half-forms line up with entirely different fauna also in half-form to create new mutant animals. Presents a violent take on nature as a resource for experimentation and genetic manipulation. ⊗ 2007 An Inconvient Truth released ⊗ 2007 Step It Up rallies ⊗ 2007 The World Without Us published ⊗ 2007 Ecology Without Nature published ⊗ 2007 The term biocentrism coined (biology is the fundamental science for understanding the universe) ∅ 2008 Sub-prime mortgage crisis ⊗ 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster ⊕ 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster ⊕ 2011 Leaded gasoline banned internationally ⊗ 2011 Deep Green Resistance founded ⊗ 2012 The Ecological Thought published ⊗ 2012 World’s largest marine park founded ⊗ 2013 Hyperobjects published ⊗ 2013 Human–made global warming is declared reality (United Nations) ⊗ 2013 The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be published ⊕ 2013 Two year Anthropocene Project at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt opens Interval 23: we are our own ghosts in a landscape of our own making 80 | Appendix C Sham–Real Shadows Appendix C Additional documentation | 81 Sham–Real Shadows Additional documentation There is a DVD and or USB drive, titled Sham–Real Shadows DVD and TrevorMAA respectively, attached to this document that includes additional film, and high- resolution photographic documentation for the projects discussed within this document, as well as the In the Grass 8:45 video work mentioned but not discussed in this document.  The same information is also available online at: http://lowresgradstudios.ecuad.ca/tvdeynden/sham-real-shadows-final-thesis- document/ 82 | Sham–Real Shadows | 83 Sham–Real Shadows work_kxdk6f5targsxjynlgc2vf3dl4 ---- Putting reward in art: A tentative prediction error account of visual art | Semantic Scholar Skip to search formSkip to main content> Semantic Scholar's Logo Search Sign InCreate Free Account You are currently offline. Some features of the site may not work correctly. DOI:10.1068/i0466aap Corpus ID: 7780019Putting reward in art: A tentative prediction error account of visual art @article{Cruys2011PuttingRI, title={Putting reward in art: A tentative prediction error account of visual art}, author={Sander Van de Cruys and J. Wagemans}, journal={i-Perception}, year={2011}, volume={2}, pages={1035 - 1062} } Sander Van de Cruys, J. Wagemans Published 2011 Psychology, Medicine i-Perception The predictive coding model is increasingly and fruitfully used to explain a wide range of findings in perception. Here we discuss the potential of this model in explaining the mechanisms underlying aesthetic experiences. Traditionally art appreciation has been associated with concepts such as harmony, perceptual fluency, and the so-called good Gestalt. We observe that more often than not great artworks blatantly violate these characteristics. Using the concept of prediction error from the… Expand View on SAGE journals.sagepub.com Save to Library Create Alert Cite Launch Research Feed Share This Paper 132 CitationsHighly Influential Citations 6 Background Citations 55 Methods Citations 4 Results Citations 12 View All Figures and Topics from this paper figure 1 figure 2 figure 3 figure 4 figure 6 figure 7 figure 8 figure 9 figure 10 figure 11 View All 10 Figures & Tables Rewards Movement Experience Auditory Perceptual Disorders confirmation - ResponseLevel Esthetics (discipline) 132 Citations Citation Type Citation Type All Types Cites Results Cites Methods Cites Background Has PDF Publication Type Author More Filters More Filters Filters Sort by Relevance Sort by Most Influenced Papers Sort by Citation Count Sort by Recency The predictive mind and the experience of visual art work L. Kesner Computer Science, Medicine Front. Psychol. 2014 17 Highly Influenced View 8 excerpts, cites background Save Alert Research Feed On the joys of perceiving: Affect as feedback for perceptual predictions. A. Chetverikov, Á. Kristjánsson Psychology, Medicine Acta psychologica 2016 27 Highly Influenced PDF View 4 excerpts, cites background and results Save Alert Research Feed “Stopping for knowledge”: The sense of beauty in the perception-action cycle P. Sarasso, M. Neppi-Mòdona, I. Ronga Psychology, Medicine Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 2020 1 PDF Save Alert Research Feed From Unconscious Inference to the Beholder’s Share: Predictive Perception and Human Experience A. Seth Psychology European Review 2019 6 Save Alert Research Feed Perceived cognitive challenge predicts eye movements while viewing contemporary paintings. Joanna Ganczarek, Karolina Pietras, Roman Rosiek Psychology, Medicine PsyCh journal 2020 Save Alert Research Feed Affective Value in the Predictive Mind S. V. D. Cruys Psychology 2017 34 View 2 excerpts, cites background Save Alert Research Feed From beauty to knowledge: a new frame for the neuropsychological approach to aesthetics G. Consoli Psychology, Medicine Front. Hum. Neurosci. 2015 6 View 2 excerpts, cites background Save Alert Research Feed Expertise Affects Aesthetic Evolution in the Domain of Art Jan Verpooten Sociology 2018 1 PDF View 1 excerpt, cites background Save Alert Research Feed When Challenging Art Gets Liked: Evidences for a Dual Preference Formation Process for Fluent and Non-Fluent Portraits B. Belke, H. Leder, C. Carbon Biology, Medicine PloS one 2015 28 Highly Influenced PDF View 4 excerpts, cites background Save Alert Research Feed Predictive coding: Neuroscience and art. J. Wolf Psychology, Medicine Progress in brain research 2020 Save Alert Research Feed ... 1 2 3 4 5 ... References SHOWING 1-10 OF 114 REFERENCES SORT BYRelevance Most Influenced Papers Recency Can science account for taste? Psychological insights into art appreciation A. Lindell, J. Mueller Psychology 2011 62 View 2 excerpts, references results and background Save Alert Research Feed The visual system as a constraint on the survival and success of specific artworks. David Melcher, F. Bacci Psychology, Medicine Spatial vision 2008 16 Save Alert Research Feed Perception, memory and aesthetics of indeterminate art A. Ishai, S. Fairhall, R. Pepperell Psychology, Medicine Brain Research Bulletin 2007 66 PDF Save Alert Research Feed Connecting Art and the Brain: An Artist's Perspective on Visual Indeterminacy R. Pepperell Psychology, Medicine Front. Hum. Neurosci. 2011 26 Highly Influential PDF View 3 excerpts, references background Save Alert Research Feed The science of art: A neurological theory of aesthetic experience V. Ramachandran, W. Hirstein Psychology 1999 716 PDF Save Alert Research Feed A model of art perception, evaluation and emotion in transformative aesthetic experience Matthew Pelowski, F. Akiba Psychology 2011 89 Highly Influential View 4 excerpts, references background Save Alert Research Feed A universal model of esthetic perception based on the sensory coding of natural stimuli. C. Redies Psychology, Medicine Spatial vision 2007 125 PDF Save Alert Research Feed The Artification Hypothesis and Its Relevance to Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Aesthetics, and Neuroaesthetics E. Dissanayake Psychology 2009 47 View 3 excerpts, references background Save Alert Research Feed Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver's Processing Experience? R. Reber, N. Schwarz, P. Winkielman Psychology, Medicine Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc 2004 1,692 PDF View 1 excerpt, references results Save Alert Research Feed Visual mismatch negativity and its importance in visual cognitive sciences M. Kimura, E. Schröger, I. Czigler Psychology, Medicine Neuroreport 2011 113 Save Alert Research Feed ... 1 2 3 4 5 ... Related Papers Abstract Figures and Topics 132 Citations 114 References Related Papers Stay Connected With Semantic Scholar Sign Up About Semantic Scholar Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the Allen Institute for AI. Learn More → Resources DatasetsSupp.aiAPIOpen Corpus Organization About UsResearchPublishing PartnersData Partners   FAQContact Proudly built by AI2 with the help of our Collaborators Terms of Service•Privacy Policy The Allen Institute for AI By clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Dataset License ACCEPT & CONTINUE work_l6ssnchitneonfnevyfbhqirb4 ---- Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 Barbara Lutz, independent scholar With the title “Learning from Athens,” the fourteenth edition of documenta— the internationally renowned exhibition series for contemporary art in Germany—opened in 2017.1 It took place in two separate locations for one hundred days each: in the Greek metropolis of Athens from April onward and in the city of Kassel in central Germany from June. As artistic director Adam Szymczyk proposed upon his election in 2013, documenta should manifest “in the form of two autonomous, simultaneous, and related exhibitions in two very different cities and countries” to express “the dissolution of barriers separating those who lack the simplest means from those who are usually all too willing to give them lessons but seldom a hand.”2 Thus, both projects of documenta 14 aimed not only at “learning from their respective places and from each other,”3 but also at disengaging from its well-established position as a German hosting institution for artists and cultural creators from all over the world despite their different cultural, political, and socioeconomic contexts. By creating these aims, Szymcyzk assigned documenta a new role—“as a guest, with all the limitations and possibilities such a status implies.”4 Thus, the curatorial approach to documenta 14 comprised a structural shift and extension of its spatial and temporal dimension. It can be argued that the strategic repositioning of the institution as a guest that has to adapt itself to the conditions of a nation facing an ongoing crisis, coupled with the call to not only to learn from Athens but also provide concrete assistance, may appear to be an affront to documenta, because it shakes the foundations 1 This text is an edited version of a lecture given at the Workshop “De-essentializing Difference—Acknowledging Transculturality. Art (History) Education and the Public Sphere in a Globalized World” on the occasion of documenta 14, Kunsthochschule Kassel, June 9, 2017, organized by RNTP—Research Network for Transcultural Practices in the Arts and Humanities. 2 Adam Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” in 60 Jahre documenta. Die lokale Geschichte einer Globalisierung, ed. Hans Eichel (Berlin: B&S Siebenhaar, 2015), 237–246, on 243. 3 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 240. 4 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 241. 90 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 90 of the venerable art institution, which has been in existence for more than sixty years. However, this approach is closely tied to its origins; documenta was founded after the Second World War in 1955 through an initiative by a group surrounding the painter, designer, and teacher Arnold Bode in Kassel. Bode is not only responsible for setting the duration of documenta, which is based on his idea of the “Museum of 100 Days,”5 but also for the realization and periodic recurrence of the exhibition at its venue in Kassel, which, in addition to the election of a new artistic director,6 has been an essential characteristic of each documenta to date. At the same time, the educational claim of Szymczyk’s curatorial approach to documenta seems to be entirely incongruous with the ongoing precarious financial situation of Athens and Greece, the full extent of which first became apparent in 2010. Still, “Learning from Athens” was “not meant to be the definite title of the exhibition,”7 and thus does not imply, for example, a thematic priority or a selecting criterion for the artworks on show. However, the term raises numerous questions: how is it possible to meet the expectations of the prestigious and well-attended international art institution8 in learning from a city or nation in crisis, where cultural institutions are affected by financial cutbacks and closures?9 What can be learned 5 Bode used the term for the first time in the preface to the catalogue of documenta III (1964, XIX). With this, he not only wanted to rehabilitate the notion of the international exhibition, which he considered at the time unfocused and meaningless, but he also indirectly criticized the museum’s preserving function as a mummification of the past and instead appealed to the museum to act as a production site and a lively place of encounter. See Klaus Siebenhaar, “Die Ausstellung als Medium. Überlegungen zu einem Zentrum kuratorischer Theorie und Praxis,” in 60 Jahre documenta, 223–229, on 226–227. 6 Although Bode headed the first four editions, he helped shape the position of the artistic director at documenta when he stepped down from the board of directors of the documenta council and appointed Harald Szeemann as head of the fifth edition, designated as “general secretary.” From then on, the advisory board regulated the selection process for this position, which up to and including documenta 14 corresponds to the position of a curator solely responsible for one edition. The only exception was in 2019, when the Supervisory Board appointed ruangrupa—a collective of ten artists and creatives from Jakarta, Indonesia—as the artistic direction of documenta 15, which will open its doors in 2022. 7 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 242. 8 Since its beginnings, documenta’s prestige and international success is, for example, confirmed by its steadily increasing visitor numbers. See “About documenta,” documenta Archive, accessed April 12, 2019, http://www.documenta-archiv.de/en/documenta/51/about-documenta. 9 According to Greece’s Minister of Culture Lydía Koniórdou Λυδία Κονιόρδου in 2017, the ministry has had to face a forty percent budget cut since 2009, making it impossible to create new jobs for the increasing number of museums and archaeological sites, or even keep the sites running during their opening hours. See Lydía Koniórdou, “Zwischen dem Antiken und dem Zeitgenössischen. (Ein Gespräch mit der Kulturministerin Griechenlands von Heinz-Norbert Jocks),” Kunstforum International 248–249 (August/September 2017): 112–119, on 118–119. 91The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 from Athens, traditionally regarded as the birthplace of democracy10 and considered to be the cradle of Western civilization? Moreover, who is invited to participate in this exhibition and who is supposed to learn? Furthermore—referring to the establishment itself—is it possible for documenta to change its status as an art institution in the northwest of Europe and unlearn its cultural perspective and politics in order to learn from a city located in the southeast of Europe? And finally, how should learning—understood as continuous act(ion) or even a mode of being— be arranged in the context of this major project, and are there any preconditions required for that process? On the one hand, these questions can hardly be answered comprehensively. Referring to the educational scientists Sönke Ahrens and Michael Wimmer, it could be stated that learning, especially in the context of political education and learning democracy, is bound to the possibility of participating in social life, while this possibility is at the same time a precondition for learning and getting access to education. Thus, learning and participating are not only mutually dependent but also coincide.11 According to this, the educational claim of “Learning from Athens” requires a detailed analysis of its theoretical foundations and its practical implications in relation to participation in documenta 14, and must address the question of who is allowed or encouraged to participate, as well as which modes or formats are provided for that exchange. On the other hand, a closer look at the curatorial concept of documenta 14 suggests that Szymczyk does not simply disregard the history of the exhibition institution, but that he is particularly concerned with the primary “sense of cultural urgency,” as he defines the initial situation of documenta in 1955, which, in his opinion, “brought forth an experimental exhibition understood both as a harbinger of change and as a means to build a national and international community with the help of an aesthetic experience.”12 For Szymczyk, the decisive factors of the significant development and achievement of documenta are determined by “the specific timing and choice of locale.”13 Facing the current Greek financial crisis, the increase in migration worldwide, and the refugee crisis at the borders of Europe at the end 10 For more on the invention of democracy by the ancient Greeks and how Greek democracy differs from modern forms of democracy, see, for example, Paul Cartledge, Democracy: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 11 Sönke Ahrens and Michael Wimmer, “Das Demokratieversprechen des Partizipationsdiskurses,” in Hegemonie und autorisierende Verführung: Zum Verhältnis von Politischem und Pädagogischem, ed. Alfred Schäfer (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014), 175–199, on 177–178. 12 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 237. 13 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 239. 92 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 of 2013—which continue to affect the world today—he sees the need to restore this sense of cultural urgency founded in the origin of documenta and thus aims to reclaim its social relevance for its fourteenth edition.14 However, Szymczyk neither discusses the meaning of this initial cultural urgency of documenta in his curatorial concept nor does he describe its potential effects on the cultural ethics of documenta 14. Meanwhile, the practical implementation of this theoretical concept can be examined from a visitor’s perspective. For example, documenta 14 was advertised with the slogan “transdocumenta,” which was printed on a T-shirt and sold as a souvenir together with documenta 14’s publications in the accompanying gift shops (Fig. 1).15 What is actually meant by this self-image of documenta, that connects to the Latin prefix “trans-” in its meaning of “across,” “beyond,” or “through,” and how does it relate to the cultural understanding of documenta 14 with its specific twofold structure of Kassel and Athens? 14 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 237. 15 The souvenir was part of the product line of three black T-shirts with white letters on a red and blue background, commissioned by, and printed with slogans from, the artistic director. They were designed by Niko Mainaris, a graduate student in design at Reutlingen University, Germany. Fig. 1: T-Shirt with the slogan “transdocumenta,” souvenir shop of documenta 14, Kassel, 2017. Photo: Barbara Lutz 93The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 In this essay, I will investigate how the curatorial concept of documenta 14 takes on the cultural self-conception of documenta’s origins and how it challenges not only the history, structure, and status of the institution, but also how it resumes and transforms documenta’s initial understanding of a community between nations in times of crisis and traumatic historical ruptures in the face of today’s global cultural relations. In this respect, it can be useful to question the meaning of “trans-” with regard to the cultural ethics of documenta 14 and to analyze the curatorial concept and its realization in relation to a transcultural understanding. In order to do so, I refer to Monica Juneja’s art historical approach to transculturality, which is based “on an understanding of culture that is in a condition of being made and remade, [and] does not take historical units and boundaries as given, but rather constitutes them as a subject of investigation, as products of spatial and cultural displacements.”16 As such, this approach refers to different kinds of transcending binaries17 and not only takes into account postcolonial and decolonial debates, but goes beyond oppositions and “views cultural phenomena as multi-sited interactions” in a global context.18 In relation to this understanding, I will critically reflect on how documenta 14’s claim of “Learning from Athens” addresses a shift and repositioning of documenta in the global context of art, and how it correlates with democratic demands of participation and the legitimacy to produce knowledge and meaning in a globally interconnected and increasingly unpredictable world. The origins of documenta’s cultural self-conception The cultural self-conception at the origin of documenta is closely linked to its Kassel-born founder, Arnold Bode, and his confrontation with the post-war situation in the city of Kassel, which had been mostly destroyed in 1943 and was considered culturally desolate19 by the remaining population. 16 Monica Juneja and Christian Kravagna, “Understanding Transculturalism (A Conversation),” in Transcultural Modernisms, ed. Model House Research Group (Berlin: Sternberg, 2013), 22–33, on 28. 17 From a transcultural perspective, Juneja points to binaries “in which culture is seen as flowing from high metropolitan centres to absorptive colonial peripheries,” as the approach is based on postcolonial and subaltern studies with their focus on the asymmetries of power from the margins. In order to dismantle “the colonizer-colony binary,” she locates “these processes in a global context that transcends this opposition and views cultural phenomena as multi-sited interactions.” Juneja and Kravagna, “Understanding Transculturalism,” 29. 18 Juneja and Kravagna, “Understanding Transculturalism,” 29. 19 See Alfred Nemeczek, documenta (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2002), 16. 94 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 As an art-creating visionary and university lecturer,20 Bode was not only committed to restoring the city to more decent and humane conditions, but also felt the urge to comment on and document21 the artistic practices between 1933 and 1945 in Germany that had been denounced and prohibited during the Nazi regime. Seeing the bombed ruins of the classicist Museum Fridericianum, Bode believed in the improvement of conditions through aesthetic interventions.22 Furthermore, he saw the necessity of finding a way to reorient himself with new friends in Kassel, in post-war Germany, and in Europe, emphasizing the importance of active engagement.23 Thus, Bode, in close collaboration with art historian Werner Haftmann, implemented an international exhibition of twentieth-century art with two aims. The first was to represent the development and European interconnectedness of modern art.24 The second was to present works of artists ostracized by the Third Reich, which in Germany up to this point had never been exhibited together with abstract and expressionist works by artists from Europe and the United States.25 As Haftmann stated, according to his understanding of art at that time, all of Europe was involved, in a kind of call-and-response, in creating forms of expression through which the contemporary world would be able to articulate itself artistically.26 In order to resume this mutual cultural exchange on the aesthetic level after the isolation of Germany during the war, the curatorial ambition of the 20 In 1948, after the war, together with artists and colleagues, Bode re-established the Kassel Art Academy, which had been closed in 1932 by the Nazi regime, and later founded the association for the Abendländische Kunst des XX. Jahrhunderts e.V., through which he was able to realize his plans for a major international art exhibition, known today as the first documenta. 21 With this focus on documentation, the name documenta came into being. 22 See Nemeczek, documenta, 32. 23 See Nemeczek, documenta, 12. (Original quote: “Die Notwendigkeit, sich wieder zurechtzufinden mit neuen Freunden in Kassel, in Deutschland, in Europa – sich ‘zurechtzufinden’, aber nicht einfach wieder einzurichten – das kam hinzu.”) 24 See Werner Haftmann, “Einleitung,” in documenta. Kunst des XX. Jahrhunderts. Internationale Ausstellung im Museum Fridericianum in Kassel [July 16 to September 18, 1955, exhibition catalogue], ed. Museum Fridericianum (Munich: Prestel, 1955), 15–25, on 18. (Original quote: “Als Aufgabe stellte sich also: Entwicklung und Verflechtung der modernen Kunst.”) 25 For the first time, the founders of modern art in Germany, including, for example, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, and Max Beckmann, were put on display together with the established artists of European modernity, such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, and Henry Moore. The only included artists living in America were Josef Albers, Kurt Roesch, and Alexander Calder. 26 See Haftmann, “Einleitung,” 18. (Original quote: “Ganz Europa war daran tätig, in Ruf und Gegenruf die Ausdrucksweisen zu schaffen, in denen der bildnerische Ausdruck der zeitgenössischen Weltvorstellung möglich werden konnte.”) 95The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 first documenta was to restore the international interplay by picking up the interrupted dialogue and bringing it back to its own turf.27 From today’s point of view, the first documenta followed an understanding of art that represented the perspective of European modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century, while the cultural dialogue with other countries remained largely limited to Europe and the Western art world at that time. Regarding the participating artists of the first documenta, Walter Grasskamp, for example, speaks of a “selective Eurocentrism”28 and critically points to a lack of true internationality in adopting “the notion of art’s universality”29 in the exhibition. At the core of documenta’s civilizing mission was, according to Nuit Banai, the formal language of abstraction that “became a symbol of individualism and artistic freedom, and a means to differentiate West from East in the early years of the Cold War,” in which Kassel became “the stage for the construction of the contemporary in relation to highly contested (art-)historical, socio-political, and ideological entanglements.”30 Thus, in its desire to socially and culturally revitalize the city of Kassel as well as to reconnect Germany internationally, the beginning of documenta can be understood as a place of reflection on the artistic practice and its working conditions on one the hand, and as a place for engaging in a specific socio-political situation on the basis of art on the other. This is shown, for example, in the selection and representation of artists in the catalogue of the first documenta, where they were listed by location. Over one third of the 148 participating artists were listed under Germany, England, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and North America. It is worth noting that for reasons of voluntary or involuntary migration, artists no longer identified with their national origin but with their various cultural affiliations related to their respective place of residence and work. According to Grasskamp, when national origin is taken into 27 See Haftmann, “Einleitung,” 23. (Original quote: “Man soll sie [die Ausstellung] sehen als einen breit angelegten Versuch, wieder den internationalen Kontakt in breiter Form aufzunehmen und in ein lange unterbrochenes Gespräch sozusagen im eigenen Hause wieder einzutreten.”) 28 Walter Grasskamp, “Becoming Global: From Eurocentrism to North Atlantic Feedback— documenta as an ‘International Exhibition’ (1955–1972),” in documenta. Curating the History of the Present, ed. Dorothee Richter and Nanne Buurman, OnCurating 33 (June 2017): 97–108, on 99. 29 Grasskamp, “Becoming Global,” 101. 30 Nuit Banai, “Border as Form,” Artforum [September 2017]: 302–305, on 303. 96 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 account, artists from around eighteen nations31 participated in the first documenta.32 Thus, the artists were classified according to their official national origin in only some cases in the catalogue. This discrepency reflects that in cases of political emigration—e.g. from Russia and Germany—where the national affiliation of a number of artists had become uncertain, they were assigned either to their home or to their host countries depending on their (artistic) impact.33 However, although the transcultural biographies of the artists were not mentioned explicitly or indicated in the catalogue of the first documenta due to the labeling rules at that time,34 they were implicitly acknowledged and taken for granted because of their cultural significance to the arts. Despite the Eurocentric understanding of art in the early days of documenta, its specific reference to the present was characterized by the curatorial ambition to grasp artistic positions and tendencies transnationally and transculturally, rather than merely within or between individual nations or clearly defined cultures. In this sense, documenta was driven by the idea of a place and an aesthetic for the “future of ‘Europe’ as moral arbiter and guardian of humanistic values” in Kassel.35 While the first efforts to mend the foreign relationships of post-war Germany focused on Germany’s struggle to regain its rights as a sovereign 31 Most of the artists that were attributed to Germany and Italy actually originated from these countries, while many of the artists who lived in Paris at that time and were attributed to France, were born in Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Hungary, Denmark, Bohemia, or Greece. Other native countries, such as Austria, were not even mentioned. See Grasskamp, “Becoming Global,” 97–98. 32 See Grasskamp, “Becoming Global,” 99. 33 See documenta. Kunst des XX. Jahrhunderts, 27. This is demonstrated by the fact that the artists Josef Albers and Kurt Roesch, who were both born in Germany and had emigrated to the United States in 1933 after the National Socialists seized power, were attributed to North America, while American-born Lyonel Feininger was listed under Germany. See Walter Grasskamp, “Kunst, Medien und Globalisierung. Ein Rückblick auf die documenta 11,” in Die Kanäle der Macht. Herrschaft und Freiheit im Medienzeitalter, ed. Konrad Paul Liessmann, (Wien: Paul Zsolnay, 2003), 195–213, on 202. 34 According to Grasskamp, the “official list of artists and nations […] was still regarded as possible, necessary, and helpful” in the context of the first documenta. The problematic classification of art and artists along national lines, which is still being practiced for example by national museums today, goes back to “the nineteenth century, when European art was explicitly meant and officially supported to profile and celebrate national cultures,” and “started to become difficult and outdated, when radical modernism arose from many widespread national centres and mingled in international metropoles like Berlin, Paris, or New York.” Grasskamp, “Becoming Global,” 99. 35 Banai, “Border as Form,” 303. 97The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 state,36 documenta can also be understood as a means to restore international contacts. From today’s perspective, it rather represents an attempt to develop a social transformation of the culturally desolate, local situation of Kassel and within Germany by means of an art exhibition. According to Okwui Enwezor, documenta can therefore be related to a huge number of large-scale, perennial exhibitions, which have gained importance as post-war activities. By comparing documenta in regards to its significance as biennial37 with the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea and the Johannesburg Biennale in South Africa, he questions the degree to which “the desire to establish such an exhibition forum have [sic] been informed by responses to events connected to traumatic historical ruptures.”38 While, in this respect, documenta can be considered as an “attempt to rebuild the basis of its destroyed civil society as well as the artistic and intellectual frameworks […] of the avantgarde,” all three exhibitions reflect in different ways “the political and social transitions of each of the countries.”39 Even though the biennials in Gwangju and Johannesburg commenced forty years after documenta in 199540 and differ substantially in the political histories of their countries, all three exhibitions mark “an important part of the transition,” which is based on “the work of the imagination, as a fundamental part of society in transition towards democracy and development of new concepts of citizen.”41 As the end of apartheid, for example, gave an 36 With the termination of Germany’s status as an occupied territory (the State of Hesse belonged to the American occupation zone) in 1955 and the re-establishment of the Foreign Office in 1951, the Federal Republic of Germany widely regained its sovereignty in foreign affairs. On that basis, the Foreign Office founded the first cultural institutes in 1955, which later became the Goethe Institute. 37 Although documenta traditionally occurs every five years and significantly differs from the history of the oldest biennial established in 1895, the Venice Biennale, which is modeled on the nineteenth-century world exhibition, it ranks among the world’s more than two hundred existing biennials today. This is because the term biennial is no longer only considered a two-year cycle, as its etymology suggests, but represents “a type or model of large-scale, perennial, international manifestation that has become so common in the landscape of exhibition-making today”, as Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø state. See Filipovic, van Hal, and Øvstebø, “Biennialogy,” in The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, ed. Filipovic, van Hal, and Øvstebø (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 12–27, on 14. For a directory of the currently listed biennials in the world, see for example the homepage of the Biennial Foundation: http://www.biennialfoundation.org/. 38 Okwui Enwezor, Großausstellungen und die Antinomien einer transnationalen globalen Form [German/English] (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), 47. 39 Enwezor, Großausstellungen und die Antinomien einer transnationalen globalen Form, 48. 40 While the Gwangju Biennale still takes place every two years, the second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997 was closed one month before it was due to occur and never continued. 41 Enwezor, Großausstellungen und die Antinomien einer transnationalen globalen Form, 48. 98 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 important impetus for the artistic power of imagination in South Africa, each of the exhibitions that are responding to traumatic historical ruptures can be understood as a translation of this imagination into practice, in the sense of an ethical approach to change the social and cultural self-understanding of society for democratic reasons.42 Moreover, by comparing the post-war activity of biennials, documenta is set in relation to the “South” in the global discourse of art and its institutions. According to Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, this term is “clearly not restricted to exhibitions, but part of a broader, significant invocation of the South as inspiration for resisting the North Atlantic’s devouring of space, resources, alternative histories and epistemologies43 […] for antagonising the neo-colonial sweep,” and can thus be generally considered as “a model for change.”44 Situating documenta 14 in space and time Szymczyk’s idea of taking Athens as a starting point for conceptionalizing documenta 14 indirectly involves Enwezor’s proposed strategy of responding to a traumatic situation on the basis of artistic imagination and by the means of an art exhibition. In this respect, documenta 14 can be considered as an opportunity to reflect on and cope with the economic crisis of the Greek state and the ruinous social and cultural situation in its capital. As ruins, in the literal sense, also played a central role in the conception and realization of the first documenta—for example, the reconstruction 42 While the first Johannesburg Biennale was meant to restore the dialogue between South Africa and the international art scene after the years of isolation caused by the apartheid policy, the first Gwangju Biennale, titled “Beyond the Borders,” was intended to establish new orders and relationships between the arts and mankind, as well as to convey a kind of global citizenship that transcends divisions between ideologies, territories, religion, race, culture, humanity, and the arts. See “1st Gwangju Biennale, 1995,” Universes in Universe, accessed April 12, 2019, https://universes.art/en/gwangju-biennale/1995. 43 For more on the recovery and valorization of epistemological diversity into an empowering instrument against hegemonic globalization see, for example, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014). In his book, he argues that Western domination has profoundly marginalized knowledge and wisdom in the global South, and, therefore, global social justice is not possible without global cognitive justice. He points to a new kind of bottom-up cosmopolitanism that would promote a wide conversation of humankind, celebrating conviviality, solidarity, and life against the logic of market-ridden greed and individualism. See Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide (Boulder: Paradigm, 2014). 44 Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, “South as Method. Biennials Past and Present,” in Making Biennials in Contemporary Times: Essays from the World Biennial Forum N° 2 São Paulo, Brazil, ed. Galit Eilat et al. (Amsterdam: Biennial Foundation, 2015), 3–45, on 38. 99The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 of the Museum Fridericianum45—the ancient Greek ruins, whose aesthetics have always inspired artists as well as travellers, in a certain way still reflect the relationship between ruinous pasts and the present-day situation of Athens and Greece, and can thus be considered a possible source of life and revitalization.46 However, at second glance, the situation of Athens and Greece is not only addressed in a narrow sense, but also more broadly in a more global perspective. As Szymczyk points out, “Athens, located forever between cultures, connecting three continents and holding multitudes, remains the nexus of challenges and transformations that the entire continent is now experiencing.”47 In this sense, the city not only reflects an important connection between several parts of a system that spans different cultural and geopolitical settings in Europe, but according to Szymczyk actually indicates “the stiffening embrace of neoliberalism.”48 While the ideas of neoliberalism go back to the nineteeth century and are primarily associated with economic liberalism at the end of the twentieth century,49 they have gained hegemonic power on a global scale today. Moreover, Szymczyk argues that these ideas are part of the crisis that reached Greece in 2008, broadening its geopolitical and economic impact, and led up to “the present and its defining, as-yet-unresolved moments 45 The Museum Fridericianum was almost entirely destroyed in 1941 and 1943 during the Second World War (apart from the enclosing walls and the Zwehrenturm tower) and reconstructed for the purpose of documenta’s main venue in 1955, as it remains today. 46 The confrontation with past, present, and future ruins in connection with documenta 14 was, for example, part of the two-year research project “Learning from documenta” that started in 2015. The independent project was situated in Athens between anthropology, art, and media with the aim to critically observe and discuss aspects of documenta 14’s presence in Athens in relation to artistic, economic, and socio-political developments in Greece and internationally. See “About,” Learning from documenta, accessed September 25, 2017, http://learningfromdocumenta.org/about/. 47 Adam Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness—Learning and Working from Athens,” in The documenta 14 Reader, ed. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (Munich: Prestel, 2017): 17–42, on 29. 48 Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 25. In this context, Szymczyk speaks about “the neoliberal war machine” that is supported by the “hegemonic order” and occurs as “the neocolonial, patriarchal, heteronormative order of power and discourse.” 49 The term neoliberalism refers to market-oriented economic concepts that have gained hegemonic power on an international scale since the end of Fordism around the 1970s. In comparison to the traditional liberal definition of a self-regulating, free market in the nineteenth century, neoliberal concepts of the twentieth century are characterized by a deep mistrust in any kind of interference with the market and only tolerate a minimum of involvement by the state and other institutions in economic activities. See Fernand Kreff, Eva-Maria Knoll, and Andre Gingrich, Lexikon der Globalisierung (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), 259 and 427. 100 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 in Europe and around the Mediterranean.”50 In his view, it is exactly this “complex entanglement of political and military powers” that keeps “the old and untenable concept of a world comprised of sovereign nation-states” alive and provides “an inescapable framework that must be addressed anew in order to understand our current circumstances.”51 Taking into account this statement for situating documenta 14 temporally and spatially in Athens, it is also interesting to note that Szymczyk also ideologically points to “that part of Europe, which seems to be a model example of often extremely violent contradictions, fears, and fragile hopes” which could as well take place in “any other precarious contemporary democracy.”52 Thus, he not only points to Greece’s confrontation with the consequences of the economic crisis, the destruction of social structures and the associated rise of right-wing populism in the Western world, which in times of crisis often flourishes and calls democracy into question, but he also addresses the shared challenge for the entire continent of Europe to handle the increasing migration at its borders. With this in mind, he argues that documenta 14 cannot just be considered as “a good starting point for reflection on the contemporary condition of actually existing neoliberalism,”53 but rather stresses the need to give “a real-time response to the changing situation of Europe, which as a birthplace of both democracy and colonialism is a continent whose future must be urgently addressed.”54 With this conceptual approach to documenta 14, Szymczyk seems to resume, transfer, and translate the particular cultural relevance founded in the origin of documenta, which helped to enable a social transition of the desolate country after the Second World War through a new idea of democracy, according to the political and historical experiences of the people at that time. According to Banai, Szymczyk and his curatorial team have not only considered recent permutations of the institution’s foundational conditions and aspirations, but they also “responded to the changed landscape of today […] with timely questions about borders and their power 50 Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 26. By this, Szymczyk especially addresses the Arab Spring, the war in Syria, Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, followed by the war in Eastern Ukraine, and the advances of authoritarian rule in Turkey. See Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 25–26. 51 Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 26. 52 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 241. 53 Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 24. 54 Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk, “Editors’ Letter,” South as a State of Mind #6 [documenta 14 #1] (Fall–Winter 2015): 5–6, on 5. 101The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 to police people, knowledge and (art) history.”55 While this goes along with Enwezor’s notion of the founding principles of documenta, in a certain way Szymczyk also adopts the transnational and transcultural perspective of the first documenta. Just like Bode, he does not consider the local situation of the city or country as an issue limited to itself. He sees nationally and culturally interrelated processes and entangled (hi)stories of the European continent as a necessity and an opportunity to critically reflect upon its difficult times, to react to them, and to transform them by the means of art and in the format of an exhibition. Moreover, he seems to be convinced that, “rather than being a mere reproduction of existing social relationships, art can produce and inhabit space, enable discourses […], and act to challenge the predictable, gloomy course of current political and social global events that keep us sleepless and suspended.”56 As the living and working conditions of artists are far more international and globally intertwined than in 1955, for a number of artists, their national identity is in question, as they affiliate with various cultures at the same time. According to the transcultural understanding that describes culture as being in a permanent process of becoming, the artists in documenta 14’s Daybook57 are also neither assigned to a single nation nor characterized by linear biographies.58 Situating documenta 14 in relation to the desolate conditions of a city and country at the border of Europe can thus be considered as referring in a more comprehensive way to “the uncertain future of Western-European democracy in a world gradually losing fixed points of reference,” which “makes Athens possibly the most productive location from which to think and learn about the future to come,” as Szymczyk points out. In this sense, 55 Banai, “Border as Form,” 303. Here, Banai goes even further by relating the history of documenta to its present when she recognizes documenta 14’s geographical focus as an update of “the mega-exhibition’s historical status as a frontier and bellwether of Western humanism for contemporary conditions of neoliberal global capitalism.” 56 Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 32. 57 The Daybook is a kind of polyphonic anthology in which each living artist of documenta 14 is granted one day of the exhibition’s 163-day period and, respectively, two pages including a newly commissioned text in the form of a close reading of the artist’s practice (e.g., a criticism, a letter, a poem, or a parable) by different writers, such as critics, curators, poets, novelists, or historians, and images selected by each artist. See “Publications—documenta 14,” documenta 14 Daybook, accessed April 12, 2019, http://www.documenta14.de/en/publications/15730/ documenta-14–daybook. 58 In some cases, biographical data of the artists and their (trans)cultural affiliations are mentioned in the text of the two pages or can be read between the lines and in the selected images. 102 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 the additional claim “Learning from Athens” as a working title59 specifies both the transitional stage of Europe’s current social, political, economic, and cultural upheavals, and the provisional stage for the emerging event of documenta 14 as a nationally and culturally shared process of working and learning, which can no longer be limited to a temporary and local exhibition of exactly one hundred days in one single place—which first and foremost addresses the well-established Western and Northern European position and status of the institution60—as the origin and tradition of documenta implies. Decentralizing documenta’s institutional and ideological structures In fact, documenta 14’s focus on Athens does not completely disregard the institution’s home in Kassel. However, the specific relationship to the world that documenta 14 holds with its twofold structure is neither based on a one-sided reference of Kassel to Athens, nor on its exchange or any kind of comparison between Germany and Greece. Thus, instead of importing the crisis to Kassel and analysing it on an aesthetic level in Germany alone, Szymczyk decided from the beginning of his conceptual preparations for documenta 14 to move one part of its production from the centre of Europe to its southeastern border. Szymcyzk adopted a transcultural perspective by taking into account a postcolonial approach to current socio-political and cultural affairs in the global intertwinings of art on the structural level of documenta. This can firstly be seen in the way he takes the historical units and boundaries of the Western art institution as a subject of investigation and as products of spatial and cultural displacements, on the one hand,61 while on the other 59 The two words were designed with a blue hand-lettered font and presented in brackets right underneath the block letters of the heading “Learning from Athens,” and appeared in every newsletter of documenta 14, beginning with its ninth release on November 15, 2016. See “Newsletter Archive,” documenta 14 Newsletter, accessed April 12, 2019, http://www.documenta14.de/en/press- materials. 60 According to Szymczyk, “[t]he world cannot be explained, commented on and narrated from Kassel exclusively—a vantage point that is singularly located in Northern and Western Europe—or from any one particular place at all.” Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 26–27. 61 In contrast to the modern Western conception of culture during the colonial past that is founded on the notion that a people, nation, or race bear and represent merely one culture, contributions to early transcultural thought are not only based on the attempt to dissociate race from culture, but also on acknowledging the permeability of boundaries (e.g., between European, Amerindian, and African cultures) and the hybrid forms of cultures and races—even as a means of undoing racist orders of domination, as Kravagna points out in reference to the development of cultural studies in South America between the 1920s and 1940s. See Christian Kravagna, “Transcultural Beginnings: Decolonisation, Transculturalism, and the Overcoming of Race,” in Transcultural Modernisms, 34–47, on 36. 103The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 hand, he applies the divide and shift of a part of the exhibition as a curatorial method to deconstruct, rethink, and confront the institution with its Western history and its implicit narratives of modernity. Here, one of documenta’s main venues in Kassel, the Museum Fridericianum, plays an important role, being one of the first public museums on the European continent,62 and is thus also a bearer of Europe’s colonial history. Secondly, Szymczyk aims to free Athens from the role of the subordinate. He does so by taking into account the fact that “Athens stands metonymically for the ‘rest’ of the world that is lacking privileges.”63 With this approach, he not only implicitly refers to the binary notion of the West in contrast to the rest of the world, as it was taken up in postcolonial theory,64 but he rather goes beyond the binary thinking of Western superiority in opposition to non-Western inferiority, or any kind of hierarchical order, when he brings up a “distrust toward any essentializing and reductive concepts of identity, belonging, roots, and property in a world that is visibly out of joint” and claims to “think in solidarity”—with Germany and Greece acting both “as simultaneously real and metaphoric sites.”65 In this sense, Szymczyk’s concerns can be related not only to a post- and decolonial discourse, but also to a transcultural thinking in the arts which, for example, refers to the understanding of the dissolution of artistic limits, its pluralization, decentralization, and interconnectivity in terms of its production and reception. The perspective of a transcultural history of art would furthermore involve questioning the “canonical premises” and “the taxonomies and values that have been built into the discipline since its inception and have been taken as universal,”66 particularly according to stable and homogeneous units of national, stylistic, or epochal categories of Western art historiography. In what ways Szymczyk’s concerns for a practical realization of his ideas for both Germany and Greece can be linked to “transformatory processes that constitute art practices through cultural encounters and relationships,”67 as Juneja’s conception of a transcultural history of art also implies, will be considered later on. 62 The Museum Fridericianum was built and completed in 1779, in the spirit of enlightenment and classicism. 63 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 243. 64 See Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Formations of Modernity, ed. Stuart Hall and Bram Geiben (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 275–295. 65 Latimer and Szymczyk, “Editors’ Letter,” 5–6. 66 Monica Juneja, “Global Art History and the ‘Burden of Representation’,” in Global Studies. Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture, ed. Hans Belting, Jacob Birken, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 274–297, on 281. 67 Juneja, “Global Art History and the ‘Burden of Representation’,” 281. 104 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 With regard to previous editions of documenta 14, it can be argued that the curatorial idea of a spatial extension and geographical decentralization is nothing new and has already been applied in various ways and dimensions by some of its direct predecessors: documenta 11 (2002), documenta 12 (2007), and documenta 13 (2012) have each developed specific formats taking place outside of Germany and Europe on different continents before or simultaneously, and partially with direct reference to the exhibition in Kassel.68 With differing emphasis, whether explicitly or implicitly, the Western centralization of the institution was questioned, destabilized, or at least suspended for the duration of the respective documenta. Although documenta 14’s structure does not extend beyond the European continent, it falls in line with the global perspective of its predecessors by creating a counterhegemonic position with Athens towards the established center of the West. Furthermore, documenta 14 not only refers to, but rather connects with a specific location in Southern Europe where “the contradictions of the contemporary world, embodied by loaded directionals like East and West, North and South, meet and clash.”69 Therefore, Athens, or rather Greece, can be recognized as a European hub of key importance that marks a point of intersection. It is at this point where people with different world perspectives and cultures are gathering and interacting with each other—notably at a time of rising levels of migration, which recalls the climate of documenta’s origin. Thus, by relating documenta’s home to a specific location that is characterized by challenges and changes affecting the whole of Europe in an increasingly interconnected and complex world, Szymczyk does not want to reproduce colonial categories, but enables, encourages, and induces a fundamental repositioning of the institution on the structural, organizational, and discursive level. This is also shown, for instance, in the name and meaning of the documenta 14 magazine South as a State of Mind,70 which is designed to represent a “counterhegemonic library for present battles.” It is “filled with essays, images, stories, speeches, diaries, and poems” and therefore considered 68 One year before the opening of documenta 11, five transdisciplinary, discursive platforms were presented on four continents, taking place in Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, St. Lucia, and Lagos. Before the opening of documenta 12, transregional meetings for the documenta 12 magazines project were held in Hong Kong, New Delhi, São Paulo, Cairo, Johannesburg, and New York with participating editors, authors, and theorists of local magazines. documenta 13 organized a parallel exhibition in Kabul and a study and exchange program in Cairo and Alexandria, as well as a retreat and research residency program in Banff in Alberta, Canada. 69 Latimer and Szymczyk, “Editors’ Letter,” 6. 70 The magazine was founded by Marina Fokidis in Athens in 2012. In 2015, it temporarily became the journal of documenta 14, publishing four special issues, with the last one published in the summer of 2017. 105The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 as a “guiding vision for […] the documenta 14 publication program as a whole,”71 as the editors claim with reference to the contribution of Françoise Vergès in the first volume. As such, documenta 14’s relation to the South describes a working concept beyond the postcolonial center–periphery model. In considering the South operating on a synchronic axis of the trans-local,72 this concept “extends beyond geographical location and beyond the contours of the ‘global South’ as a category of geo-economic development [and] tries to resist easy assimilation within hegemonic global currents.”73 According to Marieke van Hal, who asks for the meaning of South in the context of the ongoing “North-South dialectic of postcolonialism” in the making of biennials in contemporary times, “South as a state of mind” represents “a more abstract or creative concept” in contrast to “a geo-political focus that relates to a certain history tied to the struggle against colonization and the necessity of decolonization.”74 Documenta 14’s successive start at two locations, with the earlier than usual opening of one part of the exhibition in Athens outside the institution’s home in Kassel and its temporal extension by a total of sixty days can thus be understood as a practical implication of acknowledging the institution’s Western position from a post- and decolonial point of view. It can further be seen as a creative attempt to equalize its cultural significance with other institutions in other parts of the world. According to this approach, the claim of learning from Athens seems to be, first and foremost, an invitation to question Western (i.e. white and male, as well as nationalist and colonialist) privileges. This is also apparent in Marina Fokidis’s critique of the “idea of the purity of so-called mythical Ancient Greece” that is not only represented through the assumption of Greece as the cradle of Western civilization, but is in fact “a construct” and a result of several cleansing processes of “Western hegemonic culture” with 71 Latimer and Szymczyk, “Editors’ Letter,” 6. 72 For Gardner and Green, the South emphasizes not only “a rich history generated from long-standing unease with North Atlantic hegemony” and thus operates on “the diachronic axis of reference back to rich if unstable histories of trying to conceive different models of trans-local exchange,” but it also requires a kind of “transnational response through which that hegemony might be displaced,” and thus operates as well on “a synchronic axis of the transnational—or better still, the trans-local, given the vicious arbitrariness of national frontiers.” Gardner and Green, “South as Method. Biennials Past and Present,” 29. 73 Gardner and Green, “South as Method. Biennials Past and Present,” 29. 74 Marieke van Hal, “[Untitled Preface],” in Making Biennials in Contemporary Times, 5. 106 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 the aim of creating a pure past.75 In line with this recognition, Szymczyk wants to “see the world again in an unprejudiced way, unlearning and abandoning the predominant cultural conditioning that, silently or explicitly, presupposes the supremacy of the West, its institutions and culture.”76 Accordingly, a space of possibility should be created to unlearn what is known, such as outdated concepts of belonging, rootedness, and identity, instead of giving lessons to people.77 In order to overcome the form of an “asymmetrical power relationship between the sovereign and the subalterns” criticized by postcolonial theory, Szymczyk suggests that we “imagine a symmetrical situation of the encounter of equals” as is shown and implemented for him especially in the way artists are “‘learning to learn from below’,” as Szymczyk points out with reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or “learning from others in order to live together,” with reference to Souleymane Bachir Diagne.78 While the latter two theorists are part of the postcolonial discourse that suggests submitting any Westernized self to the opposite and thereby defining a kind of prerequisite for the encounter of equals, Spivak’s claim especially relates to the challenge of a critically minded education. It does not merely advocate an improvement or change of conditions, but rather suggests that we “learn to let the logic of what constitutes the ‘here-and-now’ emerge and render that aspect accessible,” as Nikita Dhawan and María do Mar Castro Varela point out in relation to postcolonial strategies of unlearning.79 In practical terms, documenta 14 aimed to create an awareness for the individual cultural (pre)conditions of both locations. 75 Marina Fokidis, “Learning from Athens—A Working Title and a Working Process for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel,” in Stages #6: The Biennial Condition, ed. Joasia Krysa (Liverpool: Liverpool Biennial, 2017), 2–6, on 2. Here, she also argues that the “classicists’ idea of the pure white of the Greek statues and temples” is “a construct, since everything was painted in vivid colours: fuchsia, gold, cyan, red, terracotta. Even the columns of the Parthenon were painted with stripes […]. The assumption of whiteness […] was a kind of a cleansing process, eradicating paganism, multi-theism, multivalent expression, a successful effort to create a pure past, stripped not only of its shadows but also of its variety of aesthetics.” 76 Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 29–30. 77 See Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 32. 78 Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 33. As Szymczyk clarifies here, artists like “writers, filmmakers, sculptors, painters, musicians, actors, and all those once excluded from the Republic—can teach us that we must first learn to become strangers to ourselves, and thus undergo a decreation […] instead of sustaining overproduction. They can show us how to shake the foundations of our positive and passive understanding of the world, teach us how to abandon the cities and then inhabit the cities again (Kassel and Athens are cases in point), and how to care about the way in which we work and what we do with the fruits of our labors.” 79 Nikita Dhawan and María do Mar Castro Varela, “Breaking the Rules. Education and Post-colonialism,” in documenta 12 education II: Between Critical Practice and Visitor Services. Results of a Research Project, ed. Carmen Mörsch (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2009), 317–329, on 327. 107The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 Challenging documenta’s host role According to the idea of learning in relation to the encounter of equals, the structural repositioning of the institution also addresses an adjustment or a change of the cultural-political involvement, which, in the case of the internationally-operating institution of documenta, is related to European foreign (and integration) policy. Concerning this policy, an involvement in cultural affairs basically refers to the framework of intercultural dialogue.80 According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), this framework should facilitate an “[e]quitable exchange and dialogue among civilizations, cultures and peoples, based on mutual understanding and respect and the equal dignity of all cultures,” which in turn marks “the essential prerequisite for constructing social cohesion, reconciliation among peoples and peace among nations.”81 However, the concept of interculturalism as such was strongly criticized from the perspective of postcolonial studies in the 1990s because in most cases, dialogue did not occur on a level playing field, while the focus on cultural difference and hybridity tended to conceal social and political inequality, as Carmen Mörsch stated.82 Furthermore, from the philosophical perspective of transculturality, an intercultural understanding is not sufficient to overcome classical cultural boundaries because it only advocates a mutual understanding of different cultures and refers to the concept of culture as part of a homogeneous and separate sphere, which can only collide with, defame, or combat other cultures, as Wolfgang Welsch points out.83 Thus, in the framework of the intercultural dialogue, documenta’s historically established, cultural-political position of host, which for Szymczyk “becomes ideologically difficult to maintain if the host never 80 According to art educator Carmen Mörsch, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of intercultural dialogue is still a dominant approach in German-speaking areas in discussions of appropriate guiding principles for cultural institutions in a migration society. See Carmen Mörsch, “Über Zugang hinaus: Nachträgliche einführende Gedanken zur Arbeitstagung ‘Kunstvermittlung in der Migrationsgesellschaft’,” in Agency, Ambivalence, Analysis: Approaching the Museum with Migration in Mind, ed. Ruth Noack (Milan: Politecnico di Milano, 2013), 51–62, on 51. 81 “Intercultural Dialogue,” UNESCO, accessed April 12, 2019, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/ culture/themes/dialogue/intercultural-dialogue/. 82 See Mörsch, “Über Zugang hinaus,“ 51–52. 83 See Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality—the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London: Thousand Oaks, 1999), 194–213, on 196–197. 108 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 dares to assume the role of guest and leave home,”84 would keep its traditional, privileged Western perspective and could only end up in the symbolic meaning of a bridge85 or a mere cooperation between Greece and Germany. While cooperation describes a number of actors who work together and split into intact entities after their joint activity, thus remaining separate from each other,86 a necessary prerequisite for rethinking and shifting the traditional Western position of the institution is seen in abandoning its “exclusive role of host,”87 which has been assumed by documenta over the decades, and instead take on the role of guest. But how can an institution’s established role of host be subverted into the role of guest without being invited as such? The proposed guest status of documenta 14 challenges the stable position of the more than sixty-year-old art institution to welcome artists and artworks from around the world in Kassel. Moreover, it creates a paradoxical attitude especially towards the role of the artistic director, if one assumes that a “curatorial situation is always one of hospitality” because it “implies invitations—to artists, artworks, curators, audiences, and institutions; […] which have left their habitual surroundings and find themselves in the process of relocation in the sense of being a guest,” as Beatrice von Bismarck and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer say.88 According to the claim of decentralizing and repositioning the institution, the “nation-regulated right to hospitality,”89 which once created the position of the foreigner,90 would have to be relinquished. This relates to Jacques Derrida’s fundamental tension 84 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 240. 85 Instead of “a bridge in the form of projects that complete each other between the two locations, or end up as two isolated sequences of displays addressing the specifics of each of the two sites separately,” Szymczyk wanted the exhibition to be built on a “structure of gaps, disconcerting repetitions and dislocations” that “would embrace discontinuity.” Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 244. 86 See Mark Terkessidis, Kollaboration (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), 14. 87 Latimer and Szymczyk, “Editors’ Letter,” 6. 88 Beatrice von Bismarck and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, “Introduction,” in Hospitality. Hosting Relations in Exhibitions: (Cultures of the Curatorial 3), ed. von Bismark and Meyer-Krahmer (Berlin: Sternberg, 2016), 6–15, on 8. 89 Von Bismarck and Meyer-Krahmer, “Introduction,” 11. 90 With reference to Evi Fountoulakis and Boris Previsic, “Gesetz, Politik und Erzählung der Gastlichkeit. Einleitung,” in Der Gast als Fremder. Narrative Alterität in der Literatur, ed. Fountoulakis and Previsic (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), 7–27, on 9, the open concept of accommodating all those who travel—understood as an anthropological, fundamental right that persisted into the Middle Ages—was already redefined in ancient times by laws on hospitality in the sense of the law concerning foreigners. See von Bismarck and Meyer-Krahmer, “Introduction,” 9–10. 109The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 between the regulated and unregulated conditions of hospitality,91 in which the latter is based on an altruistic concept that abandons all claims to ownership and control of the guest but is thereby, at the same time, circumventing the possibility of hospitality. Therefore, in whatever way the mutual relationship of host and guest is built, it has to deal with questions of superiority and with the negotiation of the conditions for its functioning. In connection with the worldwide increase in migration and the refugee crisis in Europe, the status of the host as well as the status and conditions of the guest seem more than ever to be a key question for transnational and transcultural cohabitation and social interaction. Taking a look at the political structure of the exhibition, according to Beatrice von Bismarck, the relation of hospitality generally raises questions about responsibility, dependencies, rules, codices, and the conditions of inclusion and exclusion, while also describing a situation in which people and things transfer from a familiar setting into the exposed setting of an exhibition and could thereby experience uncertainty and defenselessness. Thus, hospitality constitutes a necessary antithesis to the foreignness, unfamiliarity, or strangeness towards all people and things that are arranged in the process of curating an exhibition.92 In this sense, hospitality also marks a kind of cultural-political position from which the institution of documenta should think and learn about its hierarchical and powerful role in the cultural sector and in the global intertwinings of art with other institutions. From the perspective of critical education, Szymczyk’s abovementioned claim of “unlearning and abandoning the predominant cultural conditioning” points to “the necessity of unlearning, [as] a reflexive approach and […] a shift in the position of cultural institutions from representing civil society to an active role as agents and arenas in the political domain.”93 On the other hand, his reference to Spivak’s “learning to learn from below” especially addresses those who are advocating change to be willing to change themselves.94 Taking into account Szymczyk’s claim to “think in solidarity” with Germany and Greece acting both “as simultaneously real and metaphoric 91 According to Derrida, any attempt to be hospitable is inevitably associated with keeping guests under control, with the closing of boundaries, with nationalism, and even with the exclusion of particular groups or ethnicities. See Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 151–155. 92 See Beatrice von Bismarck, “Die Politizität des Gastspiels: Zur politischen Struktur der Ausstellung,” in When Exhibitions become Politics, ed. Verena Krieger and Elisabeth Fritz, (Cologne: Böhlau, 2017), 139–153, on 142. 93 Mörsch, “Über Zugang hinaus,” 51. 94 See Dhawan and Castro Varela, “Breaking the Rules. Education and Post-colonialism,” 327. 110 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 sites,” documenta 14’s aim to reposition the institution stresses the necessity not only to acknowledge its emergence and historical development in the Western context but also to question its own privileges. Consequently, documenta 14’s claim of learning proposes an inherent process of “unlearning the given,” as documenta 14’s Curator-at-Large, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, stated in a joint project with Elena Agudio, which paralleled his work on documenta 14.95 In his view, “the dominant Western and Eurocentric educational structure intimately supports racist power structures and knowledge systems” and continues “along a universal qua Western educational system that has found or forced its way into almost all four corners […] of the globe.” In line with this thinking, the project’s concept points to the challenge “of deconstructing the ideologies and connotations eminent to the constructs that frame our societies today.” While the project also refers to Spivak’s notion of the fundamental process of unlearning privilege96—for example, in relation to race, class, nationality, and gender— both curators want to open up to “a certain kind of Other knowledge” that does not imply receiving more information but “knowledge that we are not equipped to understand by reason of our social position.” In this sense, the process of unlearning privilege can be considered “the beginning of an ethical relation to the Other.”97 Similarly, from the perspective of critical education, this process means more “than being well-read and accumulating information; in fact, it involves confronting the often painful process of self-questioning,”98 and draws attention to the necessity of allowing oneself to experience a fundamental uncertainty in relation to self-image, in the sense of not reproducing but shifting power relations.99 95 The project was called “Unlearning the Given. Exercises in Demodernity and Decoloniality of Ideas and Knowledge” and was conceived as “a performative, discoursive and corporeal curatorial framework” for The Long Night of Ideas in Berlin, which took place on April 14, 2016 at Savvy Contemporary. See Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Elena Agudio, “Unlearning the given. Exercises in Demodernity and Decoloniality of Ideas and Knowledge,” ART at Berlin (April 14, 2016), accessed April 12, 2019, https://www.artatberlin.com/savvy-contemporary-zur- langen-nacht-der-ideen-art-at-berlin/. 96 For the original quotation, see Gayatri C. Spivak, Donna Landry, and Gerald Maclean, The Spivak Reader: Selected works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: Routledge, 1996), 4. 97 See Ndikung and Agudio, “Unlearning the given.” 98 Dhawan and Castro Varela, “Breaking the Rules: Education and Post-colonialism,” 328. In this context, Dhawan and Castro Varela relate to Spivak’s term of “‘transnational literacy,’” which can only be achieved by questioning one’s own privileges. 99 Mörsch, “Über Zugang hinaus,” 58–59. 111The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 Sharing experiences by means of an art exhibition As noted above, in line with the post- and decolonial demand for a critical self-reflection of one’s position and privilege, Szymczyk aimed to free Athens from the role of the subordinate, or rather refused to relegate the city or country to the role of a guest of documenta 14 in the first place. Although he tries to change documenta’s established position of host, he nevertheless speaks of invitations. Obviously, this does not mean a unilateral request from Athens or from the inside of documenta. According to his idea of reconnecting documenta 14 to “the urgency of its beginnings,” this is conceived as a more open approach of a “journey” in order to get “a better understanding of the world and of ourselves.” However, this journey has no clear purpose and should not be misunderstood as an expedition. It is rather meant as an inner journey in the way of a “willful estrangement that is supposed to lead to new realizations for those who undertake it.”100 According to Sepake Angiama, Head of Education at documenta 14, from a geographical perspective, “Learning from Athens” implies a deliberate way of distancing oneself “from a location that is considered on the edge of Europe but is almost a central connection between Europe and other geographies, between Europe and its shared histories with the Middle East and Africa.”101 In respect to the fact that learning is closely tied to “unlearning,” Angiama stresses the need for “considering forms of knowledge that have been suppressed and excluded from the ‘canon’” and, even more fundamentally, of recognizing that also “education has been colonized.” Thus, she first pleads for the decolonization of education in the form of an “acceptance and acknowledgement of wrongdoing.”102 While this requires a process that will question, change, and leave behind usual ways of knowledge production in order to gain new or different insights than the ones already established, the entire project of documenta 14 cannot simply be “divided into exhibition, public program, and education,” but must be defined as a whole organism that relies both on “collective action and individual capacity,” as documenta 14’s education program of 100 See Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 240. 101 Sepake Angiama and Elke aus dem Moore, “Under the Mango Tree (A Conversation),” Contemporary And (C&) 7 (2017): 40–43, on 42. 102 While the “process of colonizing education was a violent and brutal obliteration of indigenous cultures, traditions, and language,” as Angiama states, the “process of decolonization will bear the fruits of a painful process of recognition, repatriation, and reconciliation.” Angiama and aus dem Moore, “Under the Mango Tree,” 42. 112 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 “aneducation”103 implies.104 The question that remains is, did this way of learning take place within the production and reception of documenta 14, and if so, how did it take place? Or, returning to one of the fundamental arguments of this essay, namely that learning is bound to the possibility of participating in educational processes: who is actually invited and how could the process of (un)learning be realized in relation to participating in documenta 14? Taking into account the reconsideration or reinvention of democracy in difficult times “when authoritarian thinking prevails over the participatory model,”105 Szymczyk points to the role of the “‘audience’—which the art world and its institutions, including documenta, conventionally tends to think of less as participants in a common task and rather as voters.”106 With the aim of taking a different, much more collective approach from the bottom up, he therefore suggests that documenta 14 should overcome “normative economic, political and geographic divisions” by “attempting a shared experience mediated by culture and, more specifically,by the contemporary art exhibition.”107 According to this experience, the visitors to documenta were invited “to take a similar route as its makers,” with the hope that “the exhibition will thus become an agent of change and a transformative experience for its audience and participants in both cities.”108 From the curatorial point of view, it has therefore not been a matter of fulfilling “one predetermined scenario during the three years of making,”109 but rather a “thorough onsite research to forge connections including political ones and to find local allies willing to engage.”110 Within this process, Szymczyk wanted to develop “forms of collaboration” and to negotiate “terms of invitation.”111 In order to become 103 In connection with education, the prefix “an-” refers to undoing something and describes learning as a way of shifting positions or seeing something from another point of view. See Angiama and aus dem Moore, “Under the Mango Tree,” 42. 104 See “About,” documenta 14 Public Education, accessed April 12, 2019, http://www. documenta14.de/en/public-education/. 105 Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 31. 106 Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 35. 107 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 243. 108 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 240. 109 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 245. 110 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 241. 111 Szymczyk, “documenta 14: Learning from Athens,” 241. 113The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 a “participatory experience, and an exercise in presentist democracy,” documenta 14’s visitors should be empowered “as the true owners of documenta, each holding a share in a common undertaking, together with the makers and the organizers of documenta 14, alongside the artists and other participants”.112 Hence, the possibility of inviting others should not be based “on the representative capacity of legitimate elected officials.”113 This relates to the context of museum studies in the cultural sector where participation is used to define the possibility of opening up and reconnecting the museum or the exhibition to society as the actual owner of public space. Here, in the sense of “ownership,” visitors are encouraged to leave behind the role of passive consumers and to take on a more active role as coworkers in the process of mediating, designing, selecting, denoting, and representing works within the museum.114 Thus, documenta 14’s call for participation does not mean to simply go and visit an exhibition or to accept an invitation to it. Instead, visitors need to have “the possibility to question the rules of the game: the conditions under which education, the public realm and representation within institutions happen,” as Nora Sternfeld points out in connection to “participation in the post-representative museum.”115 In doing so, the existing logics of society can be shifted and participation opens up “the possibility of transformation.”116 But how could this “shared experience mediated by culture” be realized, and to what extent does it actually involve all the participants of documenta 14, such as curators, institutions, artists, artworks, visitors, and the citizens of Athens and Kassel? And finally, does the self-image of documenta 14 as “transdocumenta” reveal itself in relation to these practical implications? Since collaboration is based on participation and only 112 Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 36. Similarly, Marina Fokidis, Curatorial Advisor of documenta 14, points out that “[n]othing can be completed, assumed, learned without the participation of the visitors, whom we like to think of as part of our team in this endless process of learning.” Fokidis, “Learning from Athens,” 4. 113 Szymczyk, “14: Iterability and Otherness,” 36–37. 114 Anja Piontek, “Einführung,” in Museum und Partizipation. Theorie und Praxis kooperativer Ausstellungsprojekte und Beteiligungsangebote, ed. Anja Piontek (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017), 13–29, on 17. 115 In doing so, Sternfeld relates to the political theory of Jacques Rancière, for whom “demanding to have a part is also a question of politics. Extending an invitation does not result in participation: this is achieved through struggles that transgress and reshape the hitherto existing social logics.” Nora Sternfeld, “Playing by the Rules of the Game. Participation in the Post-Representative Museum,” CUMMA PAPERS 1: 1–7, on 7; see also Jacques Rancière, Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 116 Sternfeld, “Playing by the Rules of the Game,” 4. 114 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 takes place when actors work together interactively and welcome being truly transformed through this process,117 a look at its particular forms could provide insight into how far the collaborations of documenta 14 go beyond intercultural cooperation and open up to various modes of a transcultural practice. For the realization of documenta 14, various collaborations were specifically developed for the exhibition, and also for parallel projects, public meetings, and events set up by a variety of actors in different locations. Besides the position of the artistic director, about twenty curatorial co-workers were located in Athens, in addition to about twelve curatorial co-workers in Kassel, together with a large team responsible for organizing the exhibition at the many venues, for presenting art, mediating art, and running the public programs in both cities.118 After the three years of the curatorially proposed process of making, a large number of institutional and urban interventions could be found both in Athens and in Kassel. Besides several main institutional partners and venues, documenta 14 spread across the city of Athens in more than forty different public institutions, squares, cinemas, university locations, and libraries in approximately thirty different locations in Kassel, including many conversions of existing buildings.119 A special form of collaboration was realized by one of documenta’s main venues. The Museum Fridericianum became the temporary home for the collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST) during the exhibition in Kassel. As Katerina Koskina, Director of the EMST and curator of the exhibition at the Museum Fridericianum, pointed out in the wall text of the entrance hall, the exhibition marked the first extensive presentation of the collection of the EMST and presented artworks by “pioneering Greek artists, highlighting and revisiting their national and international journeys.”120 Futhermore, this exchange not only allowed both institutions to learn more about their diverse missions and common goals, but also strengthened their links to showcase the social role of art and its capacity to denounce and transform the traumatized world. With the title “ANTIDORON,” the exhibition referred to concepts of negotiation, such as sharing and offering or, more literally, “the returning of a gift.” Thus, the prefix “anti-” points to “a distinct position and consequently a view, not necessarily opposed to, 117 See Terkessidis, Kollaboration, 14. 118 “Team,” documenta 14 Team, accessed April 12, 2019, http://www.documenta14.de/en/team. 119 “Athens Venues/ Kassel Venues,” documenta 14 Venues, accessed April 12, 2019, http://www. documenta14.de/en/public-exhibition/. 120 As such, the exhibition also took up issues of border crossings, diasporas, and cultural exchange. 115The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 but departing from a different point in order to communicate, to argue, to bridge, to converge, and to accept each other’s stances,” and should embody “the mutual respect of both institions.”121 From a transcultural perspective, the curatorially initiated terms of invitation and forms of collaboration for this part of documenta 14’s exhibition could, on the one hand, be acknowledged as a shared cultural practice going beyond the simple logic of differences or oppositions between Kassel and Athens. On the other hand, this approach resembles the established invitation from documenta as a hosting institution, where the guest is generously invited on the basis of individual conditions and unintentionally returns the favor with a gift for the duration of documenta 14 in Kassel. The act of giving that is implied in this approach by documenta 14 could easily turn into a patronizing attitude. This becomes even more clear in documenta 14’s support to open the four floors of the museum in Athens, including those which had been open to the public since the museum’s reconstruction in 2014. Although it might be also the first time for the Museum Fridericianum to host a collection from another museum in Europe during documenta, the question remains whether this approach goes beyond an intercultural dialogue and whether it helps decolonize the Western perspective of modernity, or if it is just reconstructing the canon of art in its definition of international, contemporary art for both museums on a joint basis and for the institution of documenta itself.122 Another concept of collaboration was to involve artists who do not belong to the established art market. This can be said for most of the nearly two hundred artists who were invited to present their works in Kassel and Athens. These artists presented the same or different artworks to the exhibitions and could thus respond to one or both contexts, establishing contingent, possible, or new connections between different narratives. According to Fokidis, by “receiving artists from all over the world,” documenta 14 was not only “sharing the organisation, the implementation, and later, the presentation of the work” in both cities, but “has triggered the ‘locals’ of each city to think actively about issues of identity and relationships between economy and power structure rather than in terms of nation.”123 From the perspective of Athens, this became apparent in a specific manner. Here, the reversal of the relationship between guest 121 See Katerina Koskina, Fridericianum Wall Text, unpublished photography at documenta 14 (Kassel, 2017) by Barbara Lutz. 122 In terms of an in-depth analysis of the exhibition, this question should also be asked in relation to the visual realization of the exhibition and the design of its display. 123 Fokidis, “Learning from Athens,” 5. 116 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 and host remained quite ambivalent. The questions that emerged first concerned the possibility for such a hierarchically structured and financially powerful institution to come to Athens with the aim to provide concrete assistance to “those who lack the simplest means”—to return to the initially mentioned claim of documenta 14—without running the risk of exoticizing or colonizing the city and its citizens, or exploiting their trauma for the institution’s own benefit. This concern, for example, became visible in two artworks—a poster and a work of graffiti—critical of documenta 14 that were on the walls at the premises of the Athens School of Fine Arts. One criticized the kind of capitalistic gesture inherent in the financial support of documenta 14 while at the same time misstating the amount of the budget (Fig. 2).124 The other excoriated the hierarchical structures of the documenta institution by portraying a decapitated depiction of the owl with a turned head adopted 124 Each documenta is funded by the City of Kassel and the State of Hesse with 14 million euro, and by the German Federal Cultural Foundation with 4.5 million euro. The remaining portion of the budget has to be generated by each documenta itself through the exhibition (e.g., tickets, catalogues, merchandising products, and sponsors), brings the total up to 37 million euro. In Athens, documenta 14 was additionally supported by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany and the Goethe Institute. Fig. 2: Graffiti at the premises of the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA), 2017. Photo: Barbara Lutz. 117The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 as a symbol by documenta 14, due to its status as the traditional symbol of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and learning, and mythological patron of the Greek capital. This poster, with its rolling head, can be interpreted as harshly questioning the claim “Learning from Athens” (Fig. 3). Furthermore, the art scene of Athens was split on the matter. While many local artists who were not included in documenta 14 complained that documenta 14 did not care for the reality in Athens or its residents but was, first and foremost, perceived as an event for tourists, local gallerists and curators welcomed the international attention for the local art scene and presented alternative concepts or projects,125 thus also offering a platform for artists who were not invited to take part in documenta 14. 125 One of those projects was the 6th Athens Biennale (2017–2018), which was titled “Waiting for the Barbarians.” With reference to documenta 14, it critically reflected on questions like, “Will there ever be any ‘Learning from Athens’? What do words such as ‘education,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘queer,’ ‘north,’ ‘south,’ ‘indigenous’ signify in contemporary cultural debates? Are we witnessing the coming of the Barbarians, or the taming of the Barbarian?” However, since the Barbarian was neither considered to be “the ominous Other, the refugee, the migrant, the Muslim, nor […] the ‘northern colonialist’,” here, the Barbarian was supposed to be “closer than ever.” According to this, the 6th Athens Biennale did not consider itself a host, but “invite[d] the Barbarians in.” “6th Athens Biennale 2017–2018,” Athens Biennale, accessed April 12, 2019, http://athensbiennale.org/barbarians/. Fig. 3: Poster at the premises of the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA), 2017. Photo: Barbara Lutz. 118 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 The Greek anthropologist Elpida Rikou Ελπίδα Ρίκου articulates another critique of documenta 14’s presence in Athens.126 She problematizes the legacy of documenta in adopting “a discourse of the oppressed other, of the refugee, of the trans subject, or of the marginalized indigenous,” while “at the same time, documenta is a powerful institution that comes to a city in crisis.” Taking into account this kind of relationship, she compares it to the situation when “activists acquire an important role in an important institution,” while their discourse changes the context and creates other effects. In this respect, she calls on every art production to consider “the relationship between grassroots projects and the institutions that adopt the same language.”127 While, from a transcultural perspective, the selection of artists, their site-specific work, and their multi- and trans-local ways of presentation can be acknowledged as a step beyond the master program of the Western art canon, from a post- or decolonial point of view, the institution does not seem to have reflected on its own position of superiority—be it culturally or economically—and has proved to be sucessful mainly in connection with comparable institutions in the cultural and educational sector.128 In order to truly experience the exhibition venues and to learn from documenta 14, visitors were faced with its geographical extension, and thus with the financial and logistical challenges of visiting both cities. As it was almost impossible, or not the aim of documenta at all, to attend all venues during a stay in one of the cities,129 visitors were not only invited but expected to select a few locations or drop in randomly. In this way, individuals were encouraged to find their own route through the urban infrastructure, thereby getting the opportunity to deeply involve themselves in the matrix of the respective city and its people, or at least gaining a better understanding of (their capacity to involve) themselves. 126 Together with anthropologist Eleana Yalouri Ελεάνα Γιαλούρη from the department of social anthropology of Panteion University, Rikou is one of the coordinators of the research project “Learning from Documenta,” that has been investigating documenta 14’s impact on Athens since its curatorial team first arrived in the city in 2015. 127 Risa Puelo, “The Messy Politics of Documenta’s Arrival in Athens,” Hyperallergic (April 10, 2017), accessed April 12, 2019, https://hyperallergic.com/371252/the-messy-politics-of- documentas-arrival-in-athens/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The. 128 In Athens, institutional partners were, for example, national museums, theaters and festivals, libraries, universities, foundations, or research centers. See Latimer and Szymczyk, The documenta 14 Reader, 680. 129 As stated in documenta 14’s newsletter on September 19, 2017, during the one hundred days of documenta 14 in Kassel 891,500 people visited the exhibition venues, the events, and works in public space, while the exhibition venues of documenta 14 in Athens were visited over 339,000 times. See “Newsletter Archive,” documenta 14 Newsletter, accessed April 12, 2019, http://www.documenta14.de/en/press-materials. 119The Journal of Transcultural Studies 2019, Issue 1 In this context, “aneducation” invited “the visiting public to engage with contemporary artistic practices and to leave traces in Athens and Kassel.” It provided a public program which focused on learning as a process that engages one’s body and senses in an active way.130 One of the activities that exhibition visitors in Kassel and Athens could attend, for example, was a walk in a group with one of the nearly two hundred members of the documenta 14 Chorus, who took their point of departure from the encounter between different “voices” of different people, with the aim of learning from each other’s contexts in relation to art, artists, and the public. In this respect, the program did not refer to usual “dichotomies,” such as “knowing and not knowing, sense and nonsense, significance or insignificance.” Instead, it was rather pointing to the “absence of grand narratives” and approaching “the project of working and learning together through a reorientation guided by shadows and echoes.”131 Athough this process of art mediation could also be experienced as a disillusion for visitors hungry for factual, easily accessible knowledge, it was in line with the curators’ claim of “learning from” as a “working process that forms multiple questions rather than concrete answers,” as Fokidis points out with the intention of “a creative and necessary confusion.”132 By adopting this approach, participating in documenta 14 could be an “unsettling experience,” as it is termed in postcolonial pedagogy in order to question what remains uncontested in educational and cultural machinery. This kind of experience should make us realize how we are inevitably intertwined in specific histories, social settings, and cultural conditions that let us (re)produce difference, because “[o]nly then does unlearning become a means to imagine non-dominant futures.”133 Closing thoughts Almost two years after documenta 14 finished, the question remains whether its various forms of collaboration turned out to be anti-authoritarian and thereby have actually effected transformation and ensured equality for the various positions, such as those of the participating institutions, artists, curators, visitors, and the many other actors in and beyond Kassel and 130 As the education program for documenta 14, aneducation adopted methodologies and approaches that were based on the work and understanding of different artists, architectural practitioners, thinkers, or educators, such as Annemarie and Lucius Burckhardt, Lina Bo Bardi, Oscar and Zofia Hansen, and Ulises Carrión, who lived and worked mainly in the twentieth century. 131 “About,” documenta 14 Public Education, accessed April 12, 2019, http://www.documenta14. de/en/public-education/. 132 Fokidis, “Learning from Athens,” 4. 133 Dhawan and Castro Varela, “Breaking the Rules. Education and Post-colonialism,” 329. 120 Learning from Crisis? On the Transcultural Approach to Curating documenta 14 Athens on a cultural level. Another question is whether and in what way the high demands of the curatorial concept could generally meet the educational claim of the postcolonial approach to exhibiting and mediating art in a global context, and could also be of value for documenta 14’s successors. In order to overcome the shortcomings of intercultural dialogue in the light of current realities, the process of learning with instead of from others could have been the next reasonable step to reduce or even dismantle hierarchies and overcome binaries from a transcultural perspective. Thus, in addressing principal aspects of postcolonial pedagogy in the global intertwinings of art today, many of documenta 14’s initiated collaborations seem to reveal an international exchange for the benefit of some powerful intitutions. In this way, documenta 14 only appears as a powerful catalyst for the image of the institution in the global context of art with reference to Athens, or respectively to a European hub of key cultural importance. work_lj6a2uvk2vbzlbnpx5wtdgac3i ---- Nissim Gal, Landscape Painting, RIHA Journal 0017 RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 Landscape Painting Rewriting Painting in the Postmedium Condition Nissim Gal Peer review and editing organized by: Institut za povijest umjetnosti / Institute of Art History, Zagreb Reviewers: Sandra Križić Roban, Ivana Mance Abstract Is landscape painting still relevant today? To answer this question the article examines the work of the contemporary artist Yehudit Sasportas. Sasporas offers a unique kind of written-drawn landscape painting that moves between the manual and the mechanical. The theoretical perspectives from which it is approached are taken, among others, from Plato, Heidegger and Derrida on the issue of writing. Sasportas painting, which may be characterized as "painting under erasure" or "Landscape Painting", serves as a key to understanding the status of painting as a relevant medium, not because it defines medium according to the modernist Greenbergian formula, but because it enables an understanding of painting as a field that exists in a variety of media. Painting as a field, in Sasportas's art, works and lives within various techniques and materials, even when it includes within itself a melancholic mark indicating doubt about its own relevance. Contents Introduction Writing Landscape Painting between Logic and Sensation Landscape Painting Re-Painting the Medium Introduction [1] In his report on the book Landscape Theory James Elkins classifies landscape painting as obsolete: "A 'serious' historical and critical consideration has to count landscape painting […] as among the passé or recherché genres, if only because the issue now, or at least after minimalism, is whether or not painting itself is dead."1 Elkin's comment continues the funeral procession in the art discourse that gained momentum in the 1980s and continues to this day. The present article sets out to examine the question of whether we can indeed talk about a relevant landscape painting today. I do not want to suppress death from the story of painting; as Yve-Alain Bois showed, the story of modern painting is a tale of the work of mourning, and death is contained within the infrastructure of modern painting.2 Rather, I wish to trace a painting that preserves the question of painting as a question related to its material conditions, the conditions of its appearance and the way it works. This means tracing a painting that examines the 1 See James Elkins and Rachael DeLue, Landscape Theory, New York 2008. For the report see James Elkins, "Report on the book Landscape Theory," 7, http://saic.academia.edu/JElkins/Papers/71313/On_the_Book_Landscape_Theory_English_ (accessed 16 Feb 2011). 2 Yve-Alain Bois, "Painting: the Task of Mourning," in: Endgame. Reference and simulation in recent painting and sculpture, exh. cat. Boston, ed. Thomas Crow, Boston 1986, 29-49. Repr. Yve-Alain Bois, "Painting: The Task of Mourning," in: Painting as Model, Cambridge, MA, 1990, 229-244. License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en http://saic.academia.edu/JElkins/Papers/71313/On_the_Book_Landscape_Theory_English_ RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 medium specificity that the postmodern period has suppressed, a painting that examines the painterly expression, a painting that is also a field, and as such, is always already a landscape, a painting that cannot be reduced to a single value ideology.3 Even if my analysis of the works with which I engage here does not sanctify the medium according to the modernist conceptualization of Clement Greenberg (i.e. according to the concept that preserves the sanctity of pure medium), my subject is nonetheless the investigation of the material and conceptual boundaries of the medium as revealed in these works. [2] These questions may seem to be outmoded in this postmedium era, and indeed I accept the perception that the kind of works of art that I wish to explore are attached to an early tradition; however, this repetition or return to early works does not mean postmodern, pastiche retro-avantgarde, but a post-avantgarde that under the terms of the death of art, or in our case the death of painting, attempts to resuscitate painting, to portray its specific conditions while melancholically testifying to its death through investigating the paintings' signs and not by repressing them.4 Using a particular corpus of works of art, I shall examine the field of painting through an artistic inquiry that ranges among different types of art objects, employing an investigation of painting as a field that exists on canvas or paper, inside and on architecture, in drawing, video and installation works. [3] The corpus of contemporary art that I discuss here was created between 2000 and 2010 by the international artist Yehudit Sasportas, who divides her time between Israel and Germany, and persistently paints landscapes. Her paintings consist primarily of drawings in black on a range of white or colored linen. They have the appearance of the type of expansive drawing that covers formal installations, often representing visual panoramas tied to literary names, paintings that encompass and construct architectural components and structures, paintings that extend into the space of the video.5 This painting does not seek a simple resuscitation of traditional painting and does not offer a "romantic" two-dimensional renaissance; but, as aforementioned, it seeks to map painting while at the same time mourning its death. 3 On the radical dependency of landscape discourse in the ideological perspective see: "The Art Seminar," in: Landscape Theory, 118-150. 4 The question of the medium and the postmedium condition is discussed by Rosalind E. Krauss in various texts. I will discuss her theoretical suggestions in the last part of this article, see notes 31, 32 below, and see also Rosalind E. Krauss, 'A Voyage on the North Sea': Art in the Age of the Post- Medium Condition, London 2000. 5 I mention here briefly only some of her latest exhibitions: Cosmic Rifts, Sommer Gallery, Tel Aviv (2009); The Clearing of the Unseen, DA2 Domus Artium 2002, Salamanca (2009); The Laboratory, KUNSTVEREIN Braunschweig (2008), Galerie EIGEN+ART, Frieze Art Fair, London (2008); The Guardians of the Threshold, The 52nd International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2007); The Cave Light, Leonhardi Museum, Dresden (2005); The Pomegranate Orchard, Galerie EIGEN+ART, Berlin (2005). License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 Writing Landscape [4] Sasportas's painted landscapes convey a sense of uncertainty. Her exhibition The Laboratory shows how nature looks after a catastrophe: treacherous swamps, paralyzed mountain ranges, frozen landscapes crusted over by death.6 The paintings discussed here all present nature; we can describe them as sketchy-techno-drawings. The linear elements that fill the composition, as in the case of Where is the Deadwood (fig. 1), Corefire and Laughter (fig. 2), Birgit's Dream (fig. 3), or Mechanical Rain, Ants Movements (fig. 4) suggest associations with writing: on the one hand with the writing of the seismograph that registers the vibrations of the ground, and on the other hand with the scratchings of the polygraph, the "truth machine" that measures and records a person's involuntary responses. 1 Yehudit Sasportas, Where is the Deadwood, 2002, ink on paper, 109,5 x 139 cm. Private collection, Bonn. Photograph: Uwe Walter7 [5] The written sign appearing on the painting's surface is a formal depiction of what is not supposed to appear in itself, the thing that seeks to avoid form: that is, within the morphology of the paintings, the sketchy writing of traces, lies the seed of what opposes writing (much as the person attached to the polygraph machine opposes the invasion by the machine to his world). The way Sasportas's painting emphasizes the drawn or written sign, creates a sense that the act of drawing has not been subjected to representing reality or to a defined world. The image of the painting is constructed of enigmatic marks of writing that are not subordinated to any clear transcendental signified that is independent of the painting itself. The landscape that appears in the painting is a writing or a script, the stain in the painting becomes a sign, a letter; the drawn repeated lines 6 KUNSTVEREIN Braunschweig 2008. See Yehudit Sasportas: The Laboratory, exh. cat. Braunschweig, Berlin/Munich 2008. 7 Copyright for all works of art and photographs in this article is held by Yehudit Sasportas. License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 weave chains of signifiers that determine the path of the landscape. The visible landscapes are artificial sights of nature, they project alienation, nature in ruins, images of catastrophe in black and white. Writing is used here as a tool to describe the futility of art. The written landscapes bear no fruit apart from images of life and places frozen after the disaster created by the black toxic-ink. The written paintings depict the face of destruction. 2 Yehudit Sasportas, Corefire and Laughter, 2008, ink on paper foil- claded on MDF, circle engraving, 200 x 300 cm. Private collection. Photograph: Uwe Walter 3 Yehudit Sasportas, Birgit‘s Dream, 2005, ink on paper, 200 x 150 cm. Private collection. Photograph: Uwe Walter License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 4 Yehudit Sasportas, Mechanical Rain, Ants Movement, 2005, drawing, ink marker on paper, 200 x 158 cm. Private collection, France. Photograph: Uwe Walter [6] The infertility of writing that produces poisoned fruit alludes to the philosophical discourse that condemns writing. Writing was one of the major objects of criticism by Plato, who wrote, paradoxically, that only the naive would believe in writing and its letters: "Writing is unfortunately like painting."8 In Plato's Phaedrus, writing is compared to decoration, to an entertainment celebrated for the glory of the festivities of Adonis. Writing as the making of signs is obscene, explains Socrates: "Then he [husbandman] will not seriously incline to 'write' his thoughts 'in water' with pen and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others?"9 Sign- making, therefore, discussed in the dialogue in terms of writing, is the evidence of the distancing from the dialectical seeds of speech that are planted in the mind. If Plato offers the key to reading our images, then Sasportas's writing is a dangerous act of concealment, of decoration that covers the path to truth. [7] Derrida indicates the connection between text and fabric when he writes about "the dissimulation of the woven texture"; he formulates an analogy between the line of the letter, the thread of thought and the sewn sheet in his essay "Plato's Pharmacy".10 He explains that it is impossible to investigate "all the threads at once," and that it is 8 Plato, Phaedrus, in: Benjamin Jowett , ed. and trans., The Dialogues of Plato, New York 1937, vol. 1, 275. 9 Ibid., 276. 10 And see Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy," in: Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, Chicago 1981, 61-84. License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 necessary to see the connection between writing, reading and touch. Writing and reading are similar to the seamstress's operations, in that they will always reach a state of "getting a few fingers caught" as a result of the discovery of "the addition of some new thread." Derrida does not talk of embroidery work incidentally, but introduces it as "the ability to follow the given thread. That is […] the hidden thread."11 [8] The written-painted space of Sasportas thus echoes the danger not only of the written text but also of the products of the sewing hand. In 2000 Sasportas created an installation called The Carpenter and the Seamstress at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (fig. 5), and in the following year at the Deitch Projects in New York (fig. 6). 5 a / b Yehudit Sasportas, The Carpenter and the Seamstress, 2000, acrylic and ink on MDF, dimensions variable, installation at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Collection of the artist and Sommer Gallery, Tel Aviv. Photograph: Igal Pardo 6 a / b Yehudit Sasportas, The Carpenter and the Seamstress, 2001, acrylic and ink on MDF panels, dimensions variable, installation view at the Deitch Projects, Nr. 200, New York. Collection of the artist and Sommer Gallery, Tel Aviv. Photograph: Tom Powell [9] This installation consists in MDF slabs painted with decorative patterns. We are invited to look at the walls and floor and see the linear patterns, drawn sewing lines that merge in the work of the carpenter. The surfaces of the painting map the installation; they present a graphical-digital drawing within which are planted distant and inaccessible plants and landscapes. The seamstress's act of spinning and sewing becomes here an act 11 Ibid., 63. License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 of producing drawing marks, operations of writing in the world. The metaphor of writing as sewing emphasizes how the operation of writing/drawing is an act of inscribing material in the world, touching being, while in this writing there is also a sense of discovery by wandering. [10] The needles painted or positioned in the space of The Laboratory exhibition, for example, are evidence of the tools that are used to discover matter (fig. 7).12 The handicraft signified in Sasportas's linear images reveals the sewer and that for which we produce something, whether it is called Dasein, the world, environment or nature.13 It can be argued that the action of the hand that drives the process of writing and painting returns the concept of truth to the painted work of art. The painting hand obtains a visible sign. The manual operation that paints, writes and spins the surfaces, creates a place for appearance. 7 Yehudit Sasportas, Disconnected Land, ink on 35 panels in different size, foil-calded MDF on Canvas, 260 x 475 cm. Collection of the artist and Sommer Gallery, Tel Aviv. Photograph: Uwe Walter [11] The painterly operation of writing is not one of observation. Only the activation of the hand in painting, performing the contact between the hand and the surfaces, leads to the drawing of the image. The hand that composes the space of exhibition from the various paintings to the painterly field of the installation, suggests the emergence and appearance of things; the movement of the hand enables the breakthrough of the image as a thing. 12 The elongated rods that can resonate writing tools or embroidery needles appear as images in some of Sasportas's works and as three-dimensional props next to the paintings as part of the installation. See also the installation view of How Long Is Now, 2008, ink on 35 panels of different sizes foil-cladded on canvas, 260 × 475 cm, in: Yehudit Sasportas: The Laboratory, 49. 13 Dror Pimentel, The Dream of Purity, Heidegger with Derrida, Jerusalem 2009 (Hebrew), 153. License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 [12] The hand can be described as a conductor, the leader of the human, it draws the space for the appearance of being. As Heidegger writes: "Through the hand occur both prayer and murder, greeting and thanks, oath and signal, and also the 'work' of the hand, the 'hand-work,' and the tool. The handshake seals the covenant."14 Derrida interprets the action of the hand as the spatial exposure of the word and he quotes Heidegger: "The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes – and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hand of the other. The hand keeps. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a (monstrous) sign."15 For Heidegger the hand is grouped with the word as the hallmark of human, the hand reveals the hidden by pointing and signifying, it formulates signs. The word and the hand unite into one composed entity by the operation of manual writing. Writing grants the hidden its shape. The writing, drawing and painting hand give the pictorial things their shapes. Forms, therefore, appear in the space of the being of the hand, they take their shape from the hand and inscribe in the painting, in the space of the hand. 8 Yehudit Sasportas in her Studio, Berlin 2008. Screen shot from the film Electric Table Model (working process documentary) by Katja Anzelewsky [13] The operation of the hand allegedly indicates an indexical relation between the artist and the sign appearing on the painting's surface (fig. 8). The "pure" sign supposedly maintains the status of painting as evidence of presence. The manual dimension of painting lies apparently in maintaining it within the framework of the metaphysics of presence. In Sasportas's written paintings, however, the repetitive lines and marks, which look as if they were created by a mechanical process, neutralize the proximity between the artist and the sign. Sasportas offers manual writing that is an hybrid act, a mechanized writing. 14 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington 1992, 80. 15 Quoted in Jacques Derrida, "Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand," in: Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., Chicago/London 1987, 168. License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 [14] While the writing of the hand is perceived as if it brings the sign and truth closer, as if it rejects representation and offers instead the presentation of presence and of the signified, mechanized writing is associated with print, seemingly distant from the source, a secondary transcription of the initial writing, a mechanical alternative inferior ontologically and chronologically in comparison to the manual original writing. Mechanized writing, as Heidegger sees it, turns writing into a communication tool, it hides the specific traces of the writer. The mechanized writing seemingly distances Sasportas's images from contact with the external presence, turning the signs into a distant representation of a distant present. Heidegger writes: "The word-signs become type, and the writing stroke disappears. The type is 'set,' the set becomes 'pressed.' This mechanism of setting and pressing and "printing" is the preliminary form of the typewriter. In the typewriter we find the irruption of the mechanism in the realm of the word. The typewriter leads again to the typesetting machine. The press becomes the rotary press. In rotation, the triumph of the machine comes to the fore."16 These words indicate Heidegger's perception of a presence that preserves a hierarchic model of separation between the "truth" at present and its pale appearances. The mechanical writing reduces the specific signs of the hand to a type, it mechanizes the hand and leads to a loss of presence. [15] This loss is alluded to in those works of Sasportas that push the field of painting to its logical edge, in which the field of painting is in danger of turning into a drawing, an absolute writing, an architectonic structure-installation, a mechanical sign that gives the drawings-paintings a repetitive structure. The mechanization of the paintings threatens the possibility of an indexical reading of the painted sign, it suppresses the main actor in the expressionist play, the identified artist. Hilke Wagner, who studied the works presented at The Laboratory exhibition by Sasportas, offers an instrumental perception of the sense of anxiety and death in the works: "For only in consideration of the certainty of death is the existence of being made certain; it is assured of its own being in the world."17 Wagner also uses the writings of Karl Jaspers to argue that in the end the negative experience of failure facing the landscape will lead to a positive birth of the self. We experience ourselves according to this approach only when we encounter a nullity of being; when we experience life in the presence of death. Thus the danger that Plato identified of writing covering the truth, was translated by Heidegger to a fear of mechanization done to the sign and to writing, and this is translated in artistic terms by Sasportas, following Wagner's theoretical offer, to a painting that echoes the dyadic pair of life and death. Thus the images as writing reflect the painterly position of Sasportas in respect to the task undertaken by modernist painting, "the task of mourning." 16 Heidegger, Parmenides, 85. 17 Hilke Wagner, "Yehudit Sasportas. The Laboratory," in: Yehudit Sasportas: The Laboratory, 31. License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 Painting between Logic and Sensation [16] Jay M. Bernstein refers to life and death as a central axis in his theoretical attempt to understand beauty in modern art, and especially in modernist painting. Bernstein characterizes the modernist painting of Henri Matisse as a kind of life form. Matisse's painting shows breath, life.18 We can find in his paintings, he suggests, what might be called "vegetable" consciousness. This suggests that true modernist painting defeats representation in order to be life-giving. Proper painting produces a sense of tangible, sensual, complete experience, like the growth of a plant. This analogy between plant and painting conduces to an ethical discussion of painting and life. True painting defeats the mimetic representational mode or, better, defeats representation and enlivens an experience of life that is opposed to death. [17] Bernstein describes a historical-philosophical picture in the spirit of Theodor Adorno: modern forces (technology, rationalization, capitalism) led to a situation in which the sensory experience was completely repressed.19 Our experience of reality is subjected to cognitive conceptualizations. The obvious examples here are the philosophy of Kant and modern sociology. Modern art, by this narrative, enters exile; with the role of art being to offer an alternative experience to the rational-cognitive sentencing of experience to oblivion. [18] Modern art, according to Bernstein, includes a moment of violence and destruction. This moment leads the beholder to an enlivening experience. The death latent in the works guides the viewer's understanding of elusive life.20 Thus Yehudit Sasportas claimed: "I expect a good work of art to remind me of my own alienation from the things around me; that I'm not more than a guest in this life."21 Bernstein explains that one of the goals of modern art is actually to bring about an encounter with beauty, one that will shake the viewer out of his dogmatic sleep, and cause him a sensual awakening that will lead to a reflection on life. He argues that the basic behavior of the subject, at least according to Freudian psychoanalytic theory, is as if he is immortal. Death is always the death of the other, and representation of death is the means to make death itself an-other. Direct contemplation of death, experiencing our own mortality, gives a heightened life experience and intensifies the sensuality of life.22 Bernstein's approach is based on how it interprets the concept of beauty. The roots of the concept of beauty are found in the experience of death and in the sense of the transience of life. The 18 Jay M. Bernstein, "In praise of pure violence (Matisse's war)," in: The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon, Ithaca 2008, 37-63. 19 Jay M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting, Stanford 2006. 20 Bernstein, "In praise of pure violence," 41-42. 21 Wagner, "Yehudit Sasportas. The Laboratory," 25. 22 Bernstein, "In praise of pure violence," 39-40. License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 beauty inherent in the art of painting has an enlivening quality precisely because it conceals the seeds of the death of the represented world.23 In order to quicken life the work should break (violently) with "good taste"; proper painting should reject the academic order, bringing to the fore the decorative efforts, the power of painting as painting. Therefore, according to Bernstein's equation, beauty promotes the sensuality of the material painting at the expense of representation. The painting that emphasizes its components, the line, the spot, i.e. the painting's materials as a body, at the expense of representation, is the proper painting. [19] I shall briefly read the following paintings by Sasportas in light of the interpretation offered by Bernstein to Matisse's painting as an illustration of a worthy art. Examination of Sasportas's installation The Carpenter and the Seamstress (figs 5, 6) will reveal that the painting's field comprises a dual ratio of form and formlessness. The work offers a linear drawing system that produces a decorative structure. This painting allegedly operates a system of violence against the formation of figurative images. It is a violence that could be called painting's immanent violence, violence directed against illusory representation of purpose in order to elicit a true sensation. The drawn lines in Sasportas' paintings do not function for descriptive purposes, nor as a means for designing representative space or the formulation of objects in that space, but as a means dismissed from any representative role. The field of painting releases the eye of the viewer from the need to identify and locate a formulated structure of an entire organism; the viewer is neither bound nor invited to control all the components of the aesthetic space that stretch before him. In front of an image of this sort a sensory encounter is performed. The nature of painting, based on these decorative elements, would seem to be the elements of painting themselves, line itself and not what it represents because it presents itself. Lines function as images, as non-figurative figures; they are indicators undermining pictorialism in favor of non-figurative painting. The uniformity of all the elements in the visual field, as painterly elements that are not subject to figurative logic, offers a tool for liberating the painting; such painting allegedly operates violence against representational painting. Thus too the non-representational color in the works of Sasportas can be considered as deforming the image, the field or the painting in its totality, allegedly attacking the integrity of the visual. [20] The problem with this reading lies in its disregarding the fact that Sasportas's paintings are, in the end, representational. Although they are disrupted or garbled spatially, proportionally and formally, they still maintain representativeness. While her work on the one hand seeks to revive sensitivity to the line, the stain and the colorful and monochromatic surface, as elements that are not subjected to the world of representation, i.e. as sensory conductors, they are still irremediably representational! 23 Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon, Introduction to The Life and Death of Images, 21. License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en http://www.riha-journal.org/articles/2011/galleries-2011/gallery-gal-riha-journal-0017/ RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 Bernstein, however, argues that representationality echoes classical conservative perception. Representational art is poor because: "It composes one of those conventional responses to death and, hence, to life that make both death and life virtually impossible to feel."24 For him, representationality is the oblivion of death, a death-creating situation in which painting kills sensuality; representationality prevents an effective immediate impact on the senses, on the nervous system, that awaken when we encounter a painting. I believe that the point of division between Bernstein's thesis and the work of Sasportas is located in the understanding that, in her techno-graphical painting, Sasportas never decided upon or chose the sensual side rather than the conceptual and the discursive one, which Bernstein would reject as an oppressive tool of modernity's rationalization. [21] This is the basis for the legitimacy or freedom that the artist takes when she paints and investigates painting. As we shall see, she creates video works combining seductive music and sensual dimensions, but which are still dependent on their referent, in a dual level of representationality and conceptualization. Investigation of the painting as a pictorial field is interpreted in Sasportas's work beyond the anachronistic dichotomy of figurative versus abstract. There is no clear starting point for her painting in the sense of sight/vista, which is completely outside the act of painting, an "external" territory that is responsible for the visibility or the final composition of the field of painting. On the other hand, there is no absolute separation between the field of painting and the natural topography; it may be a forest near Hamburg or a swamp. The written paintings of Sasportas, like those of other artists of her generation, abandon the thinking or perception of the source, in favor of a split perception of a variety of confluences between the painting's field and the world of art. Out of this concession was born a new platform for painting - video/painting – that synthesizes the various fragments painted by hand and the mechanized temporality of the video that enables the appearance and disappearance of the image. [22] When Sasportas led her written-drawn images into the medium of video, she created a hybrid that is incomprehensible in modernist terms. In her exhibition Cosmic Rifts (2009), she exhibited two video installations that integrate painting and video. The installation The Magnetic Hearts (fig. 9) was a diptych composed of two black circles onto which was projected what appeared to be still-life fragments that dissolved into one another during the projection; the emergence and disappearance of the images looked as if the video was trying to "catch" the still-life drawings that had escaped the movement of the virtual radar. 24 As described by Judith Butler in her "Response To JM Bernstein," in: The Life and Death of Images, 58. License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 [23] Duchamp's Rotary Demisphere (Precision optics) (1925), which could be implied from this work, was in constant motion between the two- and three-dimensional, creating a mechanism whose illusory movement deceives and destabilizes the immobility and stillness of painting. Where Duchamp mutilated the painting, Sasportas returns the painting to the machine; her image is produced as the effect of a mechanical disruption of the dull mechanical repetitiveness, or the hypnotic illusion of the video or the early Duchampian machine. The potential of the painting's expansion, whose seeds are found in the parodical illusory mechanism of Duchamp, is stretched back to the still-life of the field of painting. 9 Yehudit Sasportas, The Magnetic Hearts, 2008, film installation, video with sound, format CD-Rom, two film collages projected on discs, 2 m diameter, facing each other across a distance of 16,5 m, 6 min looped. Collection of the artist. Here installation view from The Laboratory, KUNSTVEREIN Braunschweig. Photograph: Uwe Walter [24] The second video installation in the exhibition was GHARDY Local Voices (fig. 10), a dark room with six screens displaying panoramas of landscape paintings by the artist. The projected images pierced the walls of darkness in six-minute videos. The viewer entered the "black box" of the gallery without possessing the keys to read the codes within. The six screens showed painted landscapes linked into a progressive narrative through the music that filled the space. The observers walking around the "box" participated in the work; the music moved their body slowly, tracking their way in space; their viewing experience became a dynamic and proceeded as a response to the visual and the audible. In her video work Sasportas leads the written-drawn painting into the medium of cinema. While film is defined as a medium often leaning significantly on its reference, Sasportas leads it to the drawn painting; the video shows the landscape paintings that the artist had painted: that is, the film's references are the artist's License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 handmade paintings; the cinematic elements, its automatic mechanism, its temporary development and its projection used to expose Sasportas's drawn-paintings.25 10 Yehudit Sasportas, GHARDY Local voices, 2009, six films installation, EIGEN+ART Gallery, Leipzig. Collection of the artist and EIGEN+ART Gallery, Leipzig. Photograph: Uwe Walter Landscape Painting [25] Sasportas's video works map and present monochromatic condensed paintings. Their field is perceived as a black and white cinematic relic; as painting positioned in the early cinematic world, a kind of early silent film set, inducing a sense of technological genesis. At the same time, the space of installation becomes a dark field in which the "windows" of paintings are used as openings to another world. Thus the cinematic field of painting unfolds within two-dimensional landscapes that were recorded in what seems to be an ironic documentary work; one that expands throughout the space of the room (the gallery) in which the viewer moves. These various technical and conceptual supports eventually assemble into the field of painting in which "painting" is a lost object moving between the subconscious or cinematic memory and the concrete space of the gallery installation. [26] The projected and concrete landscape paintings displayed in Sasportas's exhibitions turn to traditional painting, but at the same time they also erase the identity between them and the early painting. Her contemporary painting borrows its linguistic, syntactical and lexical resources from early landscape painting in order to rethink its language. The question is whether this move produces a pictorial alternative or duplicates an existing territory. Sasportas's paintings, even if based on "traditional" painting, nonetheless require another apparatus in order to examine questions of visual 25 For a discussion of the film properties as crossing the dependency on the referent see Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edition, Cambridge 1979. License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 representation, while at the same time embodying the impossibility of escaping from the metaphysics of painting. The repetitive drawn lines in these paintings, as much as they outline-write an image on the surface, they also mechanize and unify themselves into what resembles a digital bar-code attached to the painting; they mark and erase the painting, they form and deform the painting. The making of a painting that was subjected to a conventional surface – a painting whose production was based on the easel or the symbolic space of the canvas, into a painting that functions as a field, undermines the constituent dialectic of painting as an image on the ground. We thus come to the question of how to characterize a painting that tries to cross painting out? We cannot do so, however, because the language is still the language of painting. In the absence of another word to describe the mechanism of representation or to describe the painting that tries to cross out painting, I would say that Sasportas creates a painting under erasure.26 Sasportas's painting, as mechanical-hand writing, produces a sense of impersonality, ironing out the stylistic features, the signature style and individual expressiveness of early landscapes in favor of a bar-code uniformity. These drawings draw us along and into their lines and withdraw us from presence. As McNeill writes: "What withdraws, therefore, is nothing determinate. It is nothing, no thing. It is the withdrawing itself. This withdrawing is not other than the sign, it is of the sign. The sign itself remains without interpretation because all interpretation would already be drawn in a particular direction."27 This kind of writing is writing under erasure. [27] Considering painting as painting, that is as painting under erasure, recognizes the relevance of painting but also challenges the accepted use of it. Sasportas puts painting under erasure. She opens the way to thinking of painting not as essence or transcendental totality, as stable signified, but as practice, historical material engendered, contaminated and full of doubts. She is nonetheless working in this very zone in which the concept of painting is still a necessity; she writes or draws the painting and at the same time crosses it out. A painting that neutralizes painting, or a painting that doubts the illusion of painting, brings us back to the issue of violence and how the painting threatens itself, lived through the exposure of its potential death. Sasportas's works are encoded through the beauty of semblance; at least some of them gain their strength through the visibility of the romantic forest, showing nature and revealing themselves as naked beauty; this is the deceptive presentation of painting. The view is apparently of an image that preserves life, the pulse of Eros in the veins that web the paintings. Sasportas, however, as we have already seen, subverts this appearance, the 26 In the context of the romantic painting's "glossary," landscape painting is perceived as committed to concrete topography, to representation; thus the metaphysical framework understood painting as obligated to the concept of presence. 27 Will McNeill, "Spirit's Living Hand," in: David Wood, ed., Of Derrida, Heidegger and Spirit, Evanston, Ill., 1993, 113; cf. Adam Roberts, "Is SF handwritten?," in: Writing Technologies 2.2 (2009), 68, n. 12, http://www.ntu.ac.uk/writing_technologies/current_journal/86049.pdf (accessed 16 Feb 2011). License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en http://www.ntu.ac.uk/writing_technologies/current_journal/86049.pdf RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 landscape turns into a still life, with the painting using a violent approach, destabilizing itself, and thereby approaching the "truth in painting."28 [28] The darkness of the paintings created by Sasportas works against the sweetness and the availability of beauty in the landscapes: the overshadowing of landscape or the cooling of space, the attempt to freeze and petrify beauty, to threaten the landscape itself. The blacking out or the freezing are measures of dissociation of landscape from life. The loss of a transparent relationship between the image of art and life, the undermining of the perception of the work as an expression of a female artist, framed by a celebratory identity of a female subject, the attempt to subvert temptation, to debase the beauty of the work as if beauty is the purpose of art, reveal Sasportas's landscape painting project anew: to discover beauty in order to blacken it, to make art in order to destroy its semblance. As Butler writes: "When a work of art no longer works as semblance, it becomes paralyzed as a kind of 'truth' distinct from beauty and its life. Indeed, the expressionless is a curious sign of this truth, one that works against the seductive claims of beauty and life."29 Re-Painting the Medium [29] The paintings attack semblance, taking us back to the beginning of our discussion and the question of the relevance of painting. If Sasportas offers us a new relevant painting, then it should be understood as a field that deals with conventions and schemas from the history of painting in order to reveal the possibility of its own survival. Painting as a field brings together material properties, technical strategies, design configurations that do not hold together "naturally" as paintings. The traditional linguistic lexicon of painting (line, color, stain, surface, texture, value, light and shadow, volume, and shape) continues to exist alongside its expansion to other media such as installation, sculpture, architecture, video and TV. The attempt to understand painting as a field examines it in accordance with its neighboring relations with other media, rather than identifying the ultimate physical condition that will enable its examination; instead identifying its materiality as part of a general alignment that confers upon painting broad and new operations (not independent of political, social and historical settings). [30] Painting exists in a constant dialectical relation between its present situation and its past heritage; moreover, it allows us to review a new variety of ways by which to deal with the past. Its interaction with new media in the present provides new keys for re- reading anew the history of painting. Thus for example, the written painting in 28 Sasportas's action can be called an act of violence, a painter's action that turns against painting. The purpose of this violent process can be read as an attempt to be ethical. The ethical dimensions of this stand will be discussed in another framework. 29 Judith Butler, "Beyond seduction and morality: Benjamin's early aesthetics," in: The Life and Death of Images, 71. License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 Sasportas's video installation positions the field of painting inside the spatio-temporal expansion of the video installation, which polarizes the time of the video with the spatiality of the installation. The specificity of each of these media is not deleted but polluted by the other media. The architectural wall echoes the movie screen that echoes the painting's surface; the installation conditions allow the expansion of painting into the field, and enable a new painting that traditional painting could not imagine. The pictorial field offers an alternative to the postmedium condition. The melancholy inherent in the pictorial field that I have been trying to map, suggests the existence of painting that allows discussion of specific qualities within an intermedial and not a postmedium framework. [31] Rosalind Krauss discusses the new appearance of the medium; she talks about reinvention of the medium in relation to the "outmoded" concept of Walter Benjamin. This concept allows her to argue that the medium itself became outmoded, acquiring redemptive qualities only after it had lost its popularity and autonomy. The reinvented mediumality is art's key resistance to becoming just another piece of industrial product in the world of technology.30 The problem lies in that Krauss states categorically that painting, sculpture, drawing and architecture are traditional media that the "age of mechanical reproduction" have assimilated and made non-functional; they have become forms of merchandise. In their place she offers a new definition of the relevance of medium in the postmedium age: "medium as a set of conventions derived from (but not identical with) the material conditions of a given technical support, conventions out of which to develop a form of expressiveness that can be both projective and mnemonic."31 [32] Painting's limitation is found in its commodity status in the cultural economy, and as such it has lost its ability to take a critical reflexive stand against culture, in the sense that it cannot look at society critically. I argue, nonetheless, for the specific relevance of the painting discussed here, not because it has escaped its functionality in the commodity or global economy, but because it functions as a reflexive field, a hybrid of field-painting, a space of possibilities that relocates the question of painting's death, the loss of its relevance, its anachronism, the signs of its rejection, to its existential place of "origin." [33] Kraus offers the idea of "technical support" as an alternative or supplement to the concept of medium; precisely because medium is strongly tied to the exhausted world of painting and sculpture, "technical support" is supposed to bind us more to a technological world.32 Examples of such support are television, cars, the "synch sound" and so forth. The logic of Krauss's inquiry which seeks a renewed alliance between the works of contemporary art and modernism, cannot imagine a similar alliance between painting as 30 And see Ji-Hoon Kim, "The post-medium condition and the explosion of cinema," in: Screen 50 (2009), 117. 31 Rosalind Krauss, "Reinventing the Medium," in: Critical Inquiry 25 (1999), 296. 32 Rosalind Krauss, "Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition," in: October 116 (2006), 58. License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en RIHA Journal 0017 | 24 February 2011 a field and the medium of modernism, and this is puzzling. Kraus chooses to use the term "technical support" to avoid what she defines as: "positivism of the term 'medium' which, in most readers' minds, refers to the specific material support for a traditional aesthetic genre, reducing the idea of medium to […] 'literalism'."33 [34] Painting as a field that does not devote itself exclusively to such early concepts of painting as the subjectivity of the artist, signature style, self-sufficiency, purity, etc., opens a new path by which to examine a variety of relationships between contemporary art and modern tradition.34 Painting has been perceived in modernist tradition as the canonical medium of the arts; it was related to such firm rules as flatness, optical priority, anti-narrative, etc., while any other media were repressed. However, when a painting is defined as a field, one that spreads across the walls of the gallery, and to the medium of installation and video, print materials, etc., it becomes "aware" or inseparable from the institutions that produce and show it (the museum establishment); it indicates the discursive fields that produce it and how agents design its forms and contents. Painting as a field is affected by institutional activity and by consumption, their meanings and values. The main importance in defining painting as a field lies in the avoidance of a phenomenological reduction to matter; that is, unlike the painting hanging on the wall as an object framed by specific proportions, painting as a field avoids the opposition between interior and exterior and crosses the fixed borders of painting as a two- dimensional medium. The field is fashioned and designed in respect to the viewer who gazes at and participates in the painting's field, sensually and conceptually. The field of painting is not structured according to the structuralist opposition, as suggested by Rosalind Krauss in "Sculpture in the Expanded Field",35 but takes place within the cultural codes and conditions of display with which it is lived. 33 Kraus herself indicates the importance of the ratio between eras as evidence of the importance of the medium or technical support. See ibid., 55-56. 34 For a critical discussion on the implications of Krauss's analysis of cinema as a medium that is in the end self-contained, and on her "aversion" to installation, as symptoms of her rigid opposition between the modern and the postmodern, see Kim, "The post-medium condition and the explosion of cinema," 119. 35 Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," in: October 8 (1979). License: This text is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/deed.en Introduction Writing Landscape Painting between Logic and Sensation Landscape Painting Re-Painting the Medium work_mk2gagjjbrb3vpvkpjwglc6rve ---- Atenea 504 II Sem. 2011193 RESUMEn El trabajo analiza el escenario de la crítica de arte en el país, desde las últimas décadas del siglo XIX hasta la mitad de la pasada centuria. Revisa las voces y discursos inicia- les, estableciendo sus modelos, estilos y formas de expresión y difusión. Profundiza en algunos autores tales como Ricardo Richon-Brunet, Antonio Romera y Jean Emar, vin- culando sus discursos teóricos con aquellos momentos y contenidos más importantes del arte nacional. Analiza también la gravitación que tuvieron algunas exposiciones de arte realizadas en Chile, concluyendo con una revisión a la historiografía de la escultura en el país. Palabras clave: Crítica, pintura, escultura, Chile, artistas, modelos. ABSTRACT This work analyses the scene of critics of Art in the country from the last decades of the XIX century up through the last half of the XX century. It reviews the voices and initial speeches, establishing models, styles and forms of expression and diffusion. It goes deeper into some authors such as Ricardo Richon-Brunet, Antonio Romera y Jean Emar, relating their theoretical speeches with the most important moments and con- Artes visuales en Chile durante la primera mitad del siglo XX: Una mirada al campo teórico1 Pedro Emilio Zamorano2 1 El presente artículo corresponde al Proyecto de Investigación “Escultura chilena 1854-1960: el trasluz de su identidad”, Fondecyt nº 1085295, dirigido por el autor de este trabajo e integrado por el académico Claudio Cortés López, coinvestigador; el escultor Francisco Gazitúa, coinvesti- gador, y las historiadoras Marisol Richter y Cynthia Valdivieso. 2 Dr. en Historia del Arte, Profesor Titular Instituto de Estudios Humanísticos Abate Juan Ignacio Molina, Universidad de Talca. Talca, Chile. E-mail: pzamoper@utalca.cl Visual Arts in Chile during the first half of the XX century: a look at the theoretical field ISSn 0716-1840 193 Atenea 504II Sem. 2011 pp. 193-212 194Atenea 504II Sem. 2011 tents of national art. It also analyses the importance that some of the art expositions had in the country, concluding with a revision of the local sculpture historiography. Keywords: Critics, painting, sculpture, Chile, artists, models. AnTECEDEnTES E XISTEn dos momentos claramente diferenciados en el panorama de la crítica de arte en Chile durante las primeras cinco décadas del siglo XX: el primero, que calificaremos como de orientación e in- formación inicial, a través de crónicas escritas, entre otros, por Ricardo Ri- chon Brunet, nathanael yáñez Silva, más algunas figuras provenientes del ámbito literario. Otro, de conformación del gusto o esclarecimiento de los movimientos vanguardistas, en figuras como Jean Emar y Antonio Romera, personalidades que se encargaron de instruir a un público masivo, diletante y con poca información sobre procesos estéticos. La labor crítica de estos autores consistió en alfabetizar al público nacional en torno al desarrollo universal del arte, especialmente las corrientes más vanguardistas. Distinguimos también un tercer momento, materia de otro trabajo, que dice relación con la aparición de un conjunto de críticos, entre ellos Luis Oyarzún, Jorge Elliot y Enrique Lihn, que legitiman sus proyectos de escri- tura desde el campo académico. La actividad de estos teóricos se proyecta hasta la década de los setenta. VOCES y DISCURSOS InICIALES El desarrollo de las artes visuales en Chile ha tenido por característica una cierta orfandad de sustento teórico. Del quehacer de nuestros artistas han quedado sus pinturas o esculturas, y una escasa información sobre aspectos relacionados con la historia, la teoría o la crítica. Durante la segunda mitad del siglo XIX encontramos ya algunas crónicas, ensayos y textos que nos ilustran acerca de la sensibilidad y conceptos estéticos de la época. Entre ellos, el discurso de Alejandro Cicarelli, leído con motivo de la inaugura- ción de la Academia de Pintura en 1849, también algunos textos de José Miguel Blanco, Pedro Francisco Lira Recabarren, Paulino Alfonso, Ignacio Domeyko, Emilio Rodríguez Mendoza, Arturo Blanco, Vicente Grez y Vir- ginio Arias, entre otros3. 3 Escritos de estos autores figuran en Anales de Artes Plásticas de la Universidad de Chile, re- Atenea 504 II Sem. 2011195 En los años iniciales del siglo XX la contribución teórica más importan- te fue el Diccionario biográfico de pintores4, de Pedro Lira (1902). Luego van adquiriendo protagonismo otras voces, entre ellas las de Ricardo Richon- Brunet5 y nathanael yáñez Silva6, además de varios aportes procedentes del ámbito literario, entre ellos Manuel Magallanes Moure7, Pedro Prado8, ál- varo yáñez Bianchi (Jean Emar)9, Augusto D’Halmar10, Vicente Huidobro y, ya hacia el ecuador del siglo, el español Antonio Romera. A estos nombres debemos sumar la figura del maestro Juan Francisco González. Estos in- telectuales, sin lugar a dudas, contribuyeron a la formación de una cierta cultura estético-visual en el país, mas no lograron dar forma a una crítica profesionalizada, o a configurar una tradición historiográfica demasiado profunda en el ámbito de las artes visuales en el país. Hay todavía mucha información referida a movimientos, escuelas, monografías, catalogaciones y otros antecedentes importantes, que están a la espera de un examen teóri- co, de una publicación o, al menos, de su registro documental. copilación de Rosario Letelier, Emilio Morales y Ernesto Muñoz, publicado por el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de esa Universidad, en 1993. 4 Lira escribió, además, desde 1866 sobre arte en los Anales de la Universidad de Chile, en la Revista de santiago y en el Correo Literario. 5 Ricardo Richon-Brunet (1866-1946), pintor y crítico de arte francés, llegado a Chile en 1900. En 1910 fue designado como Comisario General de la Exposición del Centenario, oportu- nidad en que escribió el catálogo oficial de la exposición. 6 nathanael yáñez Silva (1884-1965). Periodista, dramaturgo y crítico teatral. Obtuvo el Pre- mio nacional de Teatro en 1953. Se dedica también a la crítica pictórica, la que enfrenta desde una mirada tradicional, adhiriendo a los principios neoclasicistas. En la revista Zig-Zag publicó crónicas de arte, bajo el título de “Actualidad artística”, “Horas de taller” y “Visiones artísticas”. En sus crónicas “Interiores” habla de las principales colecciones artísticas de las familias santia- guinas. 7 Manuel Magallanes Moure (1878-1924). Poeta, cuentista, pintor y dramaturgo. Realizaba crítica literaria, crónica, comentarios pictóricos y reportajes. Junto a Pedro Prado y otros integra el Grupo Los Diez y también la Colonia Tolstoyana. En la revistas Zig-Zag, Pacífico Magazine y selecta, entre otras, escribió sobre pintura chilena, escultura, artistas, etc. 8 Pedro Prado (1886-1952). Poeta, novelista y cuentista. En 1949 recibió el Premio nacional de Literatura. Escribió artículos de arte en la revista Arte y Cultura, en Zig-Zag, la revista Juventud, entre otras. 9 álvaro yáñez Bianchi (1893-1964), más conocido como Jean Emar. novelista, crítico, pintor y viajero. Escribió sus crónicas de arte en el diario La Nación. Fue un entusiasta impulsor en Chile de las vanguardias artísticas europeas, especialmente aquellas que estaban en el patrón genético de los artistas vinculados al Grupo Montparnasse. 10 Augusto D’Halmar (1882-1950). Escritor y diplomático, en 1900 fue nombrado redactor de la revista Luz y sombra. Junto a Fernando Santiván y el pintor Julio Ortiz de zárate fundó en 1904 la Colonia Tolstoyana, convocando en ella a algunos pintores y escultores de la época. M. Magallanes A. D’Halmar (retrato de J. F. González) 196Atenea 504II Sem. 2011 CAMPO TEÓRICO: FORMALIDADES y CIRCULACIÓn Al analizar la primera mitad del siglo XX nos encontramos con una pro- ducción, más heterogénea que abundante, de textos que glosan la escena estética local. Es posible distinguir aquí dos tipos de escritos. Uno, a nivel de crónicas y artículos breves, que relevan un tipo de información mono- gráfica y documental. Estos trabajos ilustran sobre distintos aspectos del quehacer estético local: autores, exposiciones, biografías, obras, entre otros. Varios fueron los autores y los medios a través de los cuales se difundieron estos escritos que, en lo formal, se relacionan con un tipo de información más genérica e informativa, muy confiada a “impresiones” y a la sensibili- dad de la pluma de sus autores. El soporte más frecuente de estos escritos fue la prensa escrita. Este tipo de información adquirió en nuestro país una gran significación, pues pasó a ser el orientador, casi exclusivo, de la opinión pública en este ámbito. La breve extensión de un artículo y su ne- cesidad de informar sobre temas contingentes a un público masivo y hete- rogéneo hacen que el texto quede liberado a la crónica y a la opinión y no tanto a la reflexión o la investigación, esferas, éstas, propias de un discurso teórico más profesional, articulado por contenidos y argumentaciones de mayor rigor conceptual. Así como fueron escasas las voces teóricas, también fueron precarias las fuentes de divulgación a nivel de revistas especializadas. En el período que comprende este estudio son pocas las revistas nacionales de estudios o investigaciones estéticos asociadas a espacios académicos o centros de in- vestigación. Algunas de ellas fueron la Revista de Artes de la Universidad de Chile, la revista Pro Arte y, en un plano más misceláneo, la revista Atenea de la Universidad de Concepción, y la revista Zig-Zag, entre otras. Por otra parte, encontramos también otros textos, construidos bajo for- malidades y metodologías más rigurosas, que apuestan por una lectura de escenario y que intentan establecer ciertas articulaciones conceptuales más complejas. En este sentido, el Catálogo Oficial Ilustrado, publicado por Ri- cardo Richon-Brunet con motivo de la Exposición Internacional de Bellas Artes (1910b), intenta dar cuenta del desenvolvimiento de las artes visuales en el país, organizando conceptos y presencia individuales. En 1921 Miguel Luis Rocuant11 publicó en Madrid el ensayo de arte tierras y cromos: Pin- 11 Miguel Luis Rocuant (1877-1948). En 1902 Rocuant publicó el libro Brumas; en 1905, Poe- sías; en 1908, Impresiones de la vida militar. En 1918 fundó, junto a Fernando Santiván, la Revista de Artes y Letras. Publicó una serie de trabajos de orientación estética, entre ellos: “Los líricos y los épicos”, “Las blancuras sagradas”, dedicado a la escultura, y “Los ritmos anunciadores”, dedicado M. L. Rocuant Atenea 504 II Sem. 2011197 tura chilena12. De este autor encontramos también el texto Blancuras sagra- das, en donde examina algunas obras escultóricas. Otro texto que apuesta por una conceptualización de la pintura nacional fue el de Luis álvarez Urquieta13, publicado en 1928 bajo el título La pintura en Chile. En este libro-catálogo se establecen periodos y conceptos tales como precursores, maestros y movimientos, que encontramos todavía vigentes en textos de autores posteriores e incluso contemporáneos. Tomás Lago, por su parte, en su trabajo El Museo de Bellas Artes 1880-1930, intenta establecer crite- rios de ordenación para la colección del Museo. Habla ya de precursores extranjeros, de la Academia de Pintura, distinguiendo algunos maestros nacionales gravitantes. RICARDO RICHOn-BRUnET: LA FROnTERA EXTRAVIADA14 La pluma de este crítico se erigió en las décadas iniciales de la pasada cen- turia en la voz oficial en un escenario fuertemente mediatizado por el cen- tralismo del Estado, por la mirada de las oligarquías sociales y culturales, y por un poder de opinión y formación estética acaparado por la Escuela de Bellas Artes. Sus comentarios de arte, escritos en revista selecta, en cró- nica Conversando sobre Arte, y otros medios, valoran la capacidad de los chilenos, después de haber conquistado su Independencia, de organizar su vida social y cultural tomando como modelo a las naciones europeas, por entender que allí –especialmente en Francia– estaba localizado el epicentro artístico. El comentario a este respecto de Richon-Brunet (Revista selecta 1912) es elocuente: “Todo hombre tiene dos patrias: la suya y París”. En este contexto este crítico confiere a Raimundo Monvoisin el mérito de ser el introductor y fundador del arte de la pintura en Chile, en tanto que a Pedro Lira, la virtud de haberla afianzado y proyectado. Respecto de la escultura, señala a nicanor Plaza como “el iniciador de la gran escuela escultórica chi- a la música. Rocuant siguió la carrera diplomática, llegando a desempeñarse como subsecretario de Relaciones Exteriores. 12 En el texto de 99 páginas se incluyen 7 capítulos. La Luz, Retrato, Desnudo, Paisaje, Marina, Animales, Flores. 13 Luis álvarez Urquieta (Limache, 1874 - Santiago, 1945). Coleccionista, artista e historiador. Se integra a la Academia de la Historia de Chile en 1933. Dos años después, la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, con sede en Madrid, lo designa como su Miembro Correspon- diente. Parte importante de su colección personal de pintura pasó luego a la colección del Museo nacional de Bellas Artes de Chile. 14 Para profundizar en este aspecto, ver zamorano y Cortés (1998). 198Atenea 504II Sem. 2011 lena: él hizo en la escultura lo que Monvoisin en la pintura: fundar el arte en Chile, y como el pintor también, supo el mismo levantar monumentos her- mosos y duraderos sobre estos cimientos echados por él” (Richon-Brunet, 1910a). El modelo europeo clasicista fue el paradigma que impregnó el escena- rio de las artes visuales en el país en los inicios de la pasada centuria. Carac- terizó la estructura académica de la Escuela de Bellas Artes, los estándares de la crítica, el incipiente mercado artístico local, los criterios de valor para otorgar becas de estudio y las actividades relacionadas con exposiciones y salones de arte. Adherían a este modelo los actores principales de la ofi- cialidad estética nacional, además de aquellos personajes vinculados con la sociedad influyente y el gobierno. Este paradigma, con las mutaciones románticas y realistas que de hecho tuvo, gozará todavía de vigencia hasta mediados del siglo XX, teniendo mayor fidelidad en el concurso social y en ciertos sectores de la crítica conservadora. Su cuestionamiento proviene de algunas voces vinculadas a la literatura, que comienzan a coparticipar de los movimientos vanguardistas internacionales. Junto a ello, en los prime- ros decenios del siglo XX adquiere mayor gravitación social en el país la cla- se media y los sectores sociales más postergados, quienes acceden a mayores niveles de educación, incluso al mundo universitario. Un buen ejemplo de ello lo constituye la conformación, en la Escuela de Bellas Artes, de la ge- neración de pintores de 1913, integrada por artistas vinculados a sectores sociales medios e incluso bajos, y a sectores campesinos. LA CRíTICA DE ARTE y LOS PROCESOS VAnGUARDISTAS LOCALES La crítica de arte se diversificó con el aporte de literatos e intelectuales. Des- de la revista del grupo Los Diez (1916-17), la revista Juventud (1911-12 y 1918-21) y la revista Claridad (1920-25) comienzan a objetarse las normas académicas, a la vez que a valorarse las tendencias emergentes. El antago- nismo, que se produce entre conservadores y vanguardistas, tiene por pro- tagonistas, de una parte, a aquellos artistas identificados con el Consejo y la Escuela de Bellas Artes y con la crítica más conservadora; y, de otra, a los artistas más jóvenes, liderados por Juan Francisco González. Estos se agru- pan en la Sociedad nacional de Bellas Artes, creada en 1918, entidad cuyo signo contestatario la transforma en alternativa de los esquemas académi- cos predominantes. El cuestionamiento al modelo clásico y la aparición del J. F. González Atenea 504 II Sem. 2011199 fenómeno vanguardista tiene una cierta correspondencia con los procesos políticos y sociales que se dan en el país. Una de las figuras que tuvo un impacto potente en estos procesos de innovación estética en Chile fue el poeta Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948). Su vinculación con los movimientos vanguardistas europeos y el conocimiento directo que tuvo de algunos de sus protagonistas, tales como Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, André Bretón, Pablo Picasso y Juan Gris, entre otros, generan una vinculación entre la vanguardia internacional y los procesos estéticos locales. El Non serviam (1914), del vate creacionista, dio sentido y contenido a la innova- ción en el espacio estético local. Otro antecedente que ilustra acerca del debilitamiento de la hegemonía del modelo clásico proviene de la visión innovadora del grupo Los Diez15, quienes, desde sus distintas disciplinas y sensibilidades, cuestionan al mo- delo imperante, a la vez que manifiestan claros afanes de renovación ar- tística. Se trata de una alianza espontánea de poetas, pintores, músicos y arquitectos. Donde mejor se definen Los Diez es en la “Somera iniciación al Jelsé”, manifiesto escrito por Pedro Prado en 1916. Los Diez represen- tan una organización peculiar, de naturaleza contestataria, que no profesa adhesión disciplinar, ni propuesta estética definida. Su credo consiste en dignificar un concepto de libertad y de ruptura con lo establecido. En cierto modo se representa en nuestro país similares posturas a las planteadas por los intelectuales dadaístas en Europa, más o menos por esta misma época. El grupo Los Diez no establece un estilo corporativo; cada cual cultivó su arte conforme a su propio criterio y visión. En este escenario, varios artistas comienzan a sumar su voz teórica al debate artístico. Muchos fueron los pintores y escultores que incursiona- ron en el ámbito teórico16. Las dos figuras que marcaron con más fuerza el escenario estético local en los inicios del siglo XX, a los cuales cabe la denominación de figuras patriarcales, fueron Pedro Lira y Juan Francisco González, quienes, además de su obra pictórica, destacan por sus escritos e iniciativas artísticas institucionales. Juan Francisco González (1853-1933)17 15 A pesar de su nombre, los integrantes de este grupo no fueron necesariamente diez. El nú- cleo fundamental está constituido por Pedro Prado, Manuel Magallanes Moure, Juan Francisco González, Armando Donoso, Julio Bertrand Vidal, Eduardo Barrios, Alberto García Guerrero, Alberto Ried, Acario Cotapos, Ernesto Guzmán, Augusto D´Halmar y Alfonso Leng. 16 Durante el siglo XIX el pintor Pedro Lira y los escultores José Miguel Blanco, Virginio Arias y Arturo Blanco tuvieron un fuerte protagonismo en el terreno teórico. 17 Juan Francisco González dictó conferencias, escribió en la prensa con el pseudónimo de “Araucano” y se mezcló en crudas polémicas con los defensores del arte académico. P. Prado 200Atenea 504II Sem. 2011 fue un pintor antiacadémico, cuya propuesta innovadora le hacía recha- zar de plano los preceptos tradicionales y el detallismo fotográfico. Estas concepciones innovadoras arraigan fuertemente en los pintores del Gru- po Montparnasse. Otros artistas involucrados en el debate teórico fueron Camilo Mori, Jorge Letelier, Waldo Vila y Samuel Román. En general, la incursión teórica de estos artistas, limitada en cantidad y rigor conceptual, no está articulada por doctrinas o ideas estéticas. Se trata de una escritura impresionista, que nace de una demanda de información y que se posiciona con cierta jerarquía en nuestro medio, durante las primeras décadas del siglo XX, dada la ausencia manifiesta de teóricos del arte. LA MIRADA InnOVADORA DE JEAn EMAR álvaro yáñez Bianchi, que escribió con el pseudónimo de Jean Emar18, ha- bía conocido en París a varias figuras que lideraban la vanguardia europea. En la capital francesa tuvo también contacto con varios pintores chilenos que por esa época residían allí y que luego integran el Grupo Montparnas- se. De regreso a Chile, en febrero de 1923, Emar se transformó en crítico de arte y entusiasta promotor de los pintores asociados a este grupo. Des- de el diario La Nación, empresa periodística de su padre, Eliodoro yáñez, comenzó su trabajo de divulgación a través de artículos que hablaron por primera vez en el país sobre distintos temas del arte moderno. Los nombres de Cézanne, de Vlaminck, Van Dogen, entre muchos otros, a los que habría que sumar los de los artistas chilenos vinculados al Montparnasse, son glo- sados ampliamente en los artículos, crónicas y notas de arte que escribió en La Nación entre los años 1923 y 1927. En cierto modo, Jean Emar dio sustento teórico a un nuevo marco ideológico estético que hacía su estreno en el país, con la presencia de los artistas montparnasseanos. Dedica cróni- cas a cada uno de sus integrantes, en donde ilustra sobre los fundamentos de este nuevo lenguaje estético. Intenta en esos escritos dar cuenta de la evolución personal y artística de ellos, a la vez que relevar la importancia de su formación en París. Su pluma abre un espacio en el medio local para 18 Jean Emar es el pseudónimo de álvaro yáñez Bianchi (1893-1964). novelista, crítico de arte, pintor y viajero. Sus principales obras literarias fueron: Miltín (novela, 1934), Ayer (novela, 1934), Un año (novela corta, 1934), Diez (cuentos, 1937), entre otras. Se ha explicado que Jean Emar viene de “J en ai marre”, lo que significa en argot francés “estoy hasta la coronilla”. Emar había llegado a la capital francesa en 1919, trabajando en la Embajada de Chile como Primer Secretario. Viaja por Europa y asiste a la Academia de La Grande Chaumiére. C. Mori S. Román Atenea 504 II Sem. 2011201 conocer y entender la pintura moderna. Ilustra a la cultura nacional sobre las concepciones de vanguardia y acerca de los debates sobre la estética con- temporánea. Los escritos de Emar ahondaron, sin dudas, los debates ideológico-es- téticos en el país. Los conflictos y desavenencias también se dieron, y con fuerza, al interior de la Escuela de Bellas Artes. En este contexto se da la excéntrica intervención del gobierno del general Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, quien cierra la Escuela en 192919, enviando a veintiséis alumnos y profeso- res a estudiar a Europa. Esta medida debe ser entendida como la reacción de un Estado conservador, orientador e interventor, que no entendía ni respaldaba esta estética de quiebre. AnTOnIO ROMERA: UnA VOz FUnDACIOnAL20 En términos generales, el panorama descrito fue el que conoció el espa- ñol Antonio Romera21 cuando llegó a Chile, a fines de 1939, y sobre este medio ejerció su influencia. Romera desarrolla en Chile una vasta labor en el campo de la teoría y la historia de la pintura. Además de sus libros y catálogos, una parte muy relevante de su obra está constituida por sus artículos de prensa, publicados en el diario El Mercurio y otros medios de información, que en su conjunto cubren casi cuarenta años de reflexión y análisis estéticos. En Chile este autor ha sido considerado como un pio- nero en el estudio de la pintura nacional. Antes de su libro Historia de la pintura chilena, publicado por Editorial del Pacífico en 1951, existían sólo algunas monografías y artículos dispersos publicados en periódicos y re- vistas. Romera marca el escenario de la crítica de arte en Chile por casi cuarenta años, desde su llegada al país y hasta su muerte, en 1975. Su obra literaria y su pensamiento crítico son un referente obligado a la hora de 19 Decreto Supremo del 31 de diciembre de 1929. 20 Para profundizar en el discurso teórico de Romera, ver zamorano et al. (2007), pp. 98-117. También Romera (1967), p. 199. 21 En España Romera había tenido una formación inicial en pedagogía, ejerciendo desde muy joven la docencia. Entre los años 1935 y 1939, en plena época de la Guerra Civil española, es en- viado por el Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores (Junta de Relaciones Culturales del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores) a ejercer su profesión a la localidad francesa de Lyon, en donde, además, complementa sus estudios de pedagogía y de estética. En 1937 había contraído matrimonio con Adela Laliga, quien le acompañará hasta su muerte. Estando en Chile, entre 1949 y 1952, fue profesor en el Windson School, al mismo tiempo que crítico de artes visuales, dramáticas y de cine, en distintos periódicos capitalinos. Entre 1942 y 1967 ejerció el oficio de caricaturista en Las Últimas Noticias y, también, en El Mercurio. 202Atenea 504II Sem. 2011 P. Lira R. Richon-Brunet n. yáñez S. A. Romera J. EmarV. Huidobro Atenea 504 II Sem. 2011203 analizar el desenvolvimiento estético-plástico chileno. Los escasos estudios o escritos de arte que se habían publicado a fines del siglo XIX y comienzos del XX revistieron algunas de las siguientes connotaciones: fueron concebi- dos principalmente como crónica artístico-periodística, género interesante pero carente de rigurosidad conceptual22; fueron unilaterales y herméticos en sus posiciones estéticas, especialmente a la hora de legitimar los dogmas académicos; y, en general, fueron realizados por personas que no poseían una formación sistemática en aspectos relativos a la teoría o la historia del arte. Al respecto Milan Ivelic señala lo siguiente: “nuestra tradición crítica no se ha caracterizado, precisamente, por el rigor conceptual y por la am- plitud de criterios para ponderar y valorar el fenómeno artístico. nombres como Richon-Brunet, nathanael yáñez o Goldschmidt, ilustran muy bien una etapa de la crítica de arte francamente insuficiente” (Ivelic y Galaz, 1988). A decir de Waldemar Sommer, Romera es una especie de “organiza- dor teórico” (Sommer, 1987) en el desenvolvimiento de la pintura chilena. “Supo situarse respecto a la polémica figuración - no figuración y calibró con mesura y ponderación las nuevas tendencias gracias al estudio que hizo de ellas” (Ivelic y Galaz, 1988). Romera estableció un modelo de análisis para la pintura nacional. Éste consideró una doble mirada. Por una parte, determinó claves y constantes23 (Romera, 1976), es decir, propone una for- ma de organización conceptual, que intenta definir el carácter de nuestra plástica a partir de sus orientaciones y caracteres específicos; por otra, plan- tea una estructuración de desarrollo cronológico, cuyo mérito fue haber es- tablecido un orden, una estructura diacrónica que jerarquizaba presencias individuales y grupos24. Su modelo de análisis no se inscribe en corrientes, ni en escuelas estéticas determinadas. Es un ecléctico, que valora las distin- tas propuestas estéticas, atendiendo su especificidad formal y su contexto 22 En muchos casos, cuando se habla de un pintor, las referencias críticas apuntan más bien a cuestiones de entorno y no a la obra misma, o a su proceso creativo. Consideraciones tales como el abolengo del artista, su amplia cultura de origen europeo, su gusto refinado, etc., son muy frecuentes en los textos de Ricardo Richón-Brunet y nathanael yáñez Silva, quienes intentan sustantivar el mérito estético de la obra en razón de tales argumentaciones. 23 Romera habla de las Claves y las Constantes de la pintura chilena. Dentro de las primeras distingue la Exaltación, la Realidad, el Sentimiento, y la Razón Plástica; dentro de las segundas, el Paisaje, el Color, el Influjo Francés, y el Carácter. Estas categorías fueron definidas por primera vez en el estudio Asedio a la pintura chilena, Santiago, Editorial nascimento, 1969. 24 Romera definió doce conceptos en torno a los cuales articula el desarrollo de nuestra plásti- ca: los Precursores, el Romanticismo, la Academia de Pintura, Tres maestros solitarios, Los cuatro maestros y sus seguidores, la Generación de 1913, Persistencia del naturalismo, los Independien- tes, Grupo Montparnasse, Seguidores y movimientos, Generación del 40, nuevas tendencias y últimos nombres. 204Atenea 504II Sem. 2011 histórico. La particularidad radica en que mira al arte nacional bajo los parámetros del arte europeo, haciendo permanentes extrapolaciones entre nuestra plástica y las escuelas del Viejo Mundo: la francesa, la española y la italiana, principalmente. Tal situación no resulta extraña en un país como Chile, permeado fuertemente en sus manifestaciones culturales por mode- los foráneos. Romera desarrolla y profesionaliza una actividad, cuyo nivel anterior era insuficiente. Ello, tanto por la escasez de críticos cuanto por el bajo nivel de su preparación teórica. De hecho, la posibilidad de realizar estudios de estética, de teoría o crítica de arte en el país es tema reciente. Las universidades nacionales comienzan recién a formar teóricos a partir de los años sesenta25. Estimamos que la obra más importante de este autor, por su extensión y profundidad, fue aquélla desarrollada a través de sus artículos de prensa, publicados en los diarios Las Últimas Noticias (don- de escribe hacia 1940 con el seudónimo de Federico Disraeli), La Nación (1940 a 1952) y El Mercurio (desde 1952 a 1975), medio de información, este último, especialmente relevante por marcar una fuerte línea de opinión estética en nuestro país. ALGUnAS EXPOSICIOnES EMBLEMáTICAS26 Algunas exposiciones de arte han tenido en nuestro país una importancia especial y, en algunos casos, hasta una cierta capacidad de articulación del escenario estético local. Unas lo fueron por su significación protocolar, en tanto que otras por su alto impacto mediático o por los niveles de polémi- ca o nuevos conceptos y miradas que lograron instalar. En este sentido, la primera muestra que destaca, en los inicios del siglo XX, fue la Exposición Internacional de Bellas Artes de 1910, conocida como del Centenario27. En esta actividad es posible colegir un par de consideraciones; en primer lugar, 25 De hecho la formación profesional de teóricos comienza en forma bastante tardía. La Uni- versidad Católica desarrolla algunos cursos de estética a partir de la década del cincuenta. Crea el Centro de Investigaciones Estéticas en 1966; el Departamento de Estética en 1968 y el Instituto de Estética, dependiente de la Facultad de Filosofía, el año 1971. Desde 1975 imparte la carrera de Licenciatura en Estética. La Universidad de Chile crea el Departamento de Teoría e Historia del Arte el año 1969, egresando las primeras promociones en 1975. 26 Aun cuando los Salones Oficiales de Arte cobraron en Chile gran importancia desde el siglo XIX, su análisis e impacto merece ser abordado en toda su extensión en otro trabajo. 27 La exposición se inauguró el 21 de septiembre de 1910 en el nuevo edificio del Museo y la Escuela de Bellas Artes, en el Parque Forestal. Con tal motivo se constituyeron comisiones orga- nizadoras en los principales países de Europa y América. Atenea 504 II Sem. 2011205 la importancia diplomática que tuvo por el hecho de solemnizar los actos conmemorativos de la celebración secular. Una segunda cuestión tiene que ver con la envergadura de la exposición y el impacto que produjo sobre la escena artística local. Recordemos que, aparte de los salones oficiales, esca- sas eran las exposiciones de arte que se efectuaban en el país en los inicios del siglo. La Exposición del Centenario, que sirvió también para inaugurar el nuevo edificio del Museo nacional y la Escuela de Bellas Artes, reunió obras de artistas de más de quince países, principalmente europeos28. La muestra fue administrada por el Consejo de Bellas Artes, entidad que era integrada por artistas e intelectuales influyentes del medio local. El catálogo oficial estuvo a cargo del crítico Ricardo Richon-Brunet (1910b). Detrás de la iniciativa estaba el Gobierno, siendo figuras relevantes en la organi- zación el pintor español Fernando álvarez de Sotomayor29, director de la Escuela de Bellas Artes en esa época, y el diplomático Alberto Mackenna Subercaseaux, a quien se designó, además, como comisario general de la Exposición. La gran cantidad de obras extranjeras exhibidas en la muestra, además de los artistas que en ella figuraban, fue vista por algunos como una forma de traer el mundo del arte a nuestro país. La sola representación española –estimulada por la presencia en Chile de Fernando álvarez de Sotomayor– consideró envíos de casi cuarenta de los mejores artistas pe- ninsulares de la época, muchos de ellos ex becarios Roma y estrechamente vinculados a la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando30. El co- mentario de nathanael yáñez Silva es elocuente respecto de la percepción que se tuvo en nuestro medio sobre la exposición: “Jamás en Chile había habido una fiesta de arte como aquella. Se refrescaba el espíritu entrando 28 Las bases generales fueron establecidas por el gobierno de Chile mediante Decreto 3786, estableciendo cuatro secciones para la Exposición: a) Internacional, b) nacional, c) Arte Retros- pectivo nacional, y d) Arte aplicado a la Industria. Todo esto, en lo que dice relación con pintura, escultura, grabado y arte aplicado a la industria. 29 Fernando álvarez de Sotomayor (1875-1960) fue contratado en 1908 para servir docencia en la Escuela de Bellas Artes, en la cátedra de Colorido, Dibujo y Composición. En 1910 fue nombrado director de la entidad. Sobre su regreso a España la mayor parte de las fuentes señalan que fue en 1915, sin embargo otras apuntan que su partida fue en 1913. Entre estas últimas apun- tamos los datos aportados por yáñez Silva, nathanael en La segunda, Charlas de los sábados, “La época de Álvarez de sotomayor”, 2 de junio de 1945. 30 Llegaron obras de Fernando álvarez de Sotomayor, Manuel Benedito, Aureliano Berue- te, Ramón Casas, Eduardo Chicharro, Francisco Llorens, Santiago Rusiñol, Joaquín Sorolla, José Villegas, entre otros. La nómina de escultores hispanos estuvo integrada por Mariano Benlliure, con siete piezas de bronce, Miguel Blay y Fábrega, con tres (dos en piedra y una en bronce), Juan Clará, con tres obras, José Clará (seis obras, tres en mármol y tres en bronce), Julio Antonio (dos obras), Antonio Marinas García (una obra), Luciano Oslé (tres obras), Miguel Oslé (cuatro obras) y Enrique Marín Hidalgo, con una obra. 206Atenea 504II Sem. 2011 en esas salas, se sentía uno muy bien, como si visitase Europa, porque Eu- ropa había venido a nosotros, con su mejor producción y su mejor cariño por esta tierra” (yáñez Silva, 1955). Esta opinión releva también una valo- ración al modelo académico europeo que evidenciaba la mayor parte de las obras expuestas. Un modelo todavía vigente en los espacios oficiales del Viejo Continente, como la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando y la propia École de Beaux Arts de París, en donde no hacían todavía su entrada las voces vanguardistas. Los delegados chilenos que actuaron en Europa, entre los que se cuenta a Alberto Mackenna Subercaseaux, se ha- bían entendido directamente con las tradicionales academias oficiales, enti- dades que tenían aún cierta hegemonía sobre el espacio cultural en el Viejo Continente. Recordemos que, en los inicios del siglo XX, España y Francia tenían academias de Bellas Artes en Roma; el Premio Roma era todavía considerado por muchos como la más alta distinción. Este hecho explica que no hayan sido invitados a la Exposición aquellos artistas vinculados a la vanguardia europea, que circulaban por lo general en la periferia de la oficialidad cultural. En la Exposición del Centenario estuvieron también presentes varios artistas chilenos que habían sido alumnos en la Escuela del pintor espa- ñol álvarez de Sotomayor. Algunos de ellos participan años más tarde, en 1913, en una exposición realizada en los salones del diario El Mercurio, en donde adquiere presencia y connotación en la historiografía artística lo- cal una generación de pintores que será luego conocida como del Trece o del Centenario. Esta muestra inicial estuvo integrada por el artista español José Prida Solares y los pintores chilenos Pedro Luna y Ulises Vázquez31. Se trata del primer grupo generacional que aparece en el arte chileno, unido por circunstancias sociales e intereses estéticos coincidentes. Su obra marca un acento más popular y costumbrista respecto de la pintura que se había hecho en Chile en el siglo XIX. A esto debemos agregar alguna inspiración de raíz hispana, sugerida por el maestro álvarez de Sotomayor. Los artistas de esta generación manifiestan cierta homogeneidad y sintonía como gru- po. En primer lugar, la mayoría procede de niveles sociales medios y bajos, situación que en ocasiones vehicula su pintura hacia un espacio de crítica y enjuiciamiento social. Las pinturas de Gordon, Lobos y Plaza, a modo de ejemplo, plantean una mirada cuestionadora y una vindicación visible 31 Junto a estos artistas, integran luego al grupo los pintores Agustín Abarca, Enrique Bertrix, Abelardo Bustamante, Jerónimo Costa, Jorge Letelier, los hermanos Alberto, Enrique y Alfredo Lobos Aránguiz, Arturo Gordon, Guillermo Vergara, Elmina Moissan, entre varios otros. F. Alvarez S. Atenea 504 II Sem. 2011207 sobre temas sociales. En el plano estético, estos artistas son principalmente figurativos y su paleta está más cercana de la gama de los colores fríos. De- sarrollaron una obra renovada en temas y en concepciones estéticas, que colisionó con los esquemas académicos decimonónicos que imperaban todavía en el corazón de la Escuela. Se trata de una obra muy ajena a los preceptos formales e icónicos en los cuales se había fundado, en la media- nía del siglo XIX, la Academia de Pintura. Por esta razón la obra de estos pintores no fue, en su momento, apreciada y reconocida por la oficialidad cultural, por la crítica y por el poder comprador. Sobre estos artistas se ha ido tejiendo un paradigma, que releva más las difíciles circunstancias de vida de los integrantes del grupo, que el mérito propiamente estético de su obra. “Vivieron –anota Waldo Vila– apresura- damente, como destruyéndose a sí mismos, en una carrera violenta, lle- na de brillo, pero que duró escasamente algunos años” (Meltcherts, 1963). Pablo neruda se refirió a ellos como una “Heroica capitanía de pintores” (neruda, 1966). Independiente de la lectura contemporánea que se haga de la obra de estos autores, su pintura tiene el mérito de acuñar un registro distinto y renovador respecto de los modelos que habían imperado en Chi- le durante el siglo XIX. Algunos críticos e historiadores se refieren a la obra y presencia de estos artistas como un paréntesis de hispanidad en la pintura chilena; lapso de tiempo que comienza en 1908, con la llegada al país del pintor álvarez de Sotomayor, y termina con la irrupción del grupo Montparnasse. A decir de José María Palacios: “Fernando álvarez de Sotomayor venía a crear un paréntesis en el proceso pictórico chileno. Dicho paréntesis tendrá, por un lado, un carácter neutralizador de la influencia francesa y, por otro, vendrá a provocar un cambio de actitud frente a las motivaciones, mostrando a la vez un cambio significativo en el trato del color” (Palacios, 1983). Di- mensionar cuán ancha y profunda fue esta adhesión local respecto de la pintura española es un tema que se hace necesario elucidar. Cierto acento “goyesco” en la obra de Gordon (a quien se llegó a denominar como el “Goya chileno”), la fuerte presencia del retrato y una evidente inclinación hacia la gama de los fríos, pueden definir espacios de coincidencia que, por cierto, resultan insuficientes para apostar por un sello o una inclinación. Quizá sean las nostalgias y los protocolos del Centenario los que propicia- ron una mirada de mayor empatía con la “Madre Patria”. Este sentimiento de hispanidad fue recogido también por algunas plumas locales, tales como la de Domingo Gómez Rojas, cuando comenta el viaje a España del pintor Alfredo Lobos (zamorano, 1994, p. 188). W. Vila 208Atenea 504II Sem. 2011 Renovados aires franceses llegan al país con otra exposición emblemática. Se trata de una muestra realizada en el mes de junio de 1923, en la Casa de Remates “Rivas y Calvo” de Santiago, por los pintores del Grupo Montpar- nasse32. Estos artistas habían tenido contacto con el ambiente parisino y con algunas figuras de la vanguardia europea de ese entonces. “Montparnasse, barrio de artistas en París, en cuyos cafés, academias y exposiciones, bulle gran parte del porvenir de las artes plásticas y donde muchos ‘ídolos cadu- cos’ se han destrozado, muchas ideas rancias sepultado y no pocas semillas, que luego germinaron, han sido sembradas” (Emar, 1923). Reintegrados en el país y liderados por el pintor Luis Vargas Rosas se unen para levantar un testimonio de disconformidad en contra del predominio academicista que todavía imperaba en el país. La exposición de 1923 produjo asperezas y convulsionó al público y a la crítica oficial, que adhería todavía a los relictos academicistas. nathanael yánez Silva, una voz ciertamente conservadora, señaló acerca de la mues- tra: “no creemos que en esta exposición se realice innovación alguna” (yá- ñez, 1923). La muestra pretendió exaltar los lenguajes artísticos y los autores más cercanos a las vanguardias, soslayando los relictos académicos (naturalis- mos, romanticismos, realismos, etc.) que todavía gozaban en el país de gran aceptación. La posición revolucionaria de los montparnassianos produjo más reacciones que adeptos, pero entre los que miraron con buenos ojos esta propuesta se encontraba el maestro Juan Francisco González. El códi- go del Grupo Montparnasse –estimulado por la reflexión teórica de Jean Emar– mira con simpatía los preceptos teóricos de Paul Cézanne, el ra- cionalismo cubista y el desborde cromático de los fauves. Sumemos a todo esto la gran acentuación proyectiva de los sentimientos dados por el Expre- sionismo alemán, recogidos por algunos integrantes del grupo. En junio de 1925 este grupo vuelve a exhibir en la sala “Rivas y Calvo”. La muestra “Salón de Junio” fue apoyada por el diario La Nación y la llamaron “Exposi- ción de Arte Libre”. Se exhibieron también obras “extranjeras” al concurrir con piezas de Picasso, Gris y Lipchitz, entre otros. 32 En junio de 1923, en la Casa de Remates “Rivas y Calvo” de Santiago, se presenta la primera exposición de estos artistas que se habían formado en París. Integran este grupo, entre otros, Luis Vargas Rosas (1897-1977), Enriqueta Petit (1900-1984), Julio Ortiz de zárate (1885-1946), Ma- nuel Ortiz de zárate (1887-1946), Augusto Eguiluz (1893-1969), José Perotti (1898-1956), Jorge Letelier (1887-1963), Hernán Gazmuri (1901-1979), Camilo Mori (1896-1973) e Isaías Cabezón (1891-1936). Atenea 504 II Sem. 2011209 Otra muestra que tuvo un gran impacto en la escena artística local fue la Exposición de Pintura Francesa Contemporánea, conocida con el nombre “De Manet hasta nuestros días”, realizada en el Museo nacional de Bellas Artes, en mayo de 195033. El catálogo oficial de la muestra cuenta con textos del entonces conservador del Museo del Louvre, René Huyghe, y de Gastón Diehl, comisario general de la Exposición. Los textos de ambos teóricos, que reflexionan sobre la escena pictórica francesa de fines del siglo XIX y primera mitad del XX, en cierto modo, reeditan en nuestro país, a partir de obras originales, un debate abierto en Chile, 25 años antes, por los artistas montparnassianos y la pluma de Jean Emar. Huyghe comenta lo siguien- te: Mas, si el ‘Fauvismo’ abría una brecha en la Realidad todavía en pie, si el cubismo empleaba sin escrúpulos sus ruinas derribadas, los Surrealistas traían como secuela la anarquía tras haber introducido la revolución: en medio de esas ruinas dispersas, entre esa ‘membra disjecta’, hicieron saltar su dinamita e imaginaron profanaciones vengativas y refinadas. En sus lienzos asistimos a los vagidos de una génesis todavía incierta o la disolución última de la creación (Huyghe, 1950). La exposición, que se realiza nada más trascurridos cinco años de fi- nalizada la Segunda Guerra Mundial –“1940-1944, ese ancho vacío, esa pesadilla poblada de gritos guturales y de soldados con botas” (Huyghe, 1950)–, además de ser un acontecimiento estético de la máxima jerarquía, puede ser entendido también como un acto de vindicación diplomática; una manera en que Francia se sobreponía a un momento dramático de su historia, mostrando al mundo una parte muy significativa de lo mejor de su producción pictórica. La muestra incluyó 137 obras originales de distintos artistas: impresionistas, simbolistas, fauvistas, cubistas, surrealistas, hasta las generaciones más jóvenes. El público y los artistas locales pudieron ver obras de Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pizarro, Augusto Renoir, Henri de Tolouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, George Braque, André Derain, Roaul Dufi, Fernand Leger, André Lhote, Albert Marquet, Henry Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Roault, Jacques Vi- llón, además de los artistas jóvenes más promisorios de la Escuela Francesa. 33 La muestra se realizó con los auspicios del Ministerio de Educación Pública de Chile y a iniciativa del Comité France-Amerique, por el Instituto de Extensión de Artes Plásticas de la Universidad de Chile. 210Atenea 504II Sem. 2011 La exposición fue atacada por algunas voces conservadoras, entre ellas na- thanael yáñez Silva y Miguel Venegas Cifuentes. yáñez Silva hizo el siguien- te comentario: “Al pintor ya formado esta exposición le servirá de estudio. Pero para el joven pintor que está empezando, todo aquello va a ser contra- producente, le va a esgrimir, no lo va a lanzar a la cara. Cosa peligrosísima, como elija de proyectil el cuadro Coutaud (n. 89) ‘Los siete fierros’… ¿Hay en el conjunto un gran cuadro, una gran emoción artística? Fuera de Monet y Sisley, no la sentimos” (yáñez, 1950). La muestra, sin embargo, tuvo un impacto significativo en las genera- ciones más jóvenes de artistas y estudiantes de arte. A decir de José Balmes, tuvo la capacidad de modificar la mirada de los que entonces eran estu- diantes de arte; al respecto comentó: “Para nosotros fue muy importante. Recuerdo que durante más de un mes de exposición pasamos todos los días en el museo. Porque en ese momento encontramos que ahí estaba la respuesta a la modernidad; nos decíamos que así como ellos hablan de sus propios problemas, nosotros teníamos que hablar con ese lenguaje pero de nuestros problemas” (Badal, 1950). En 1968 se realizó en la Quinta normal de Agricultura, en el antiguo edificio del Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, la célebre Exposición “De Cézanne a Miró”. La muestra, cuya importancia radica sobre todo en su capacidad de movilización de opinión pública, fue visitada por miles de personas. Mario Carreño en El Mercurio de santiago, diario que auspició la exhi- bición que se realizó entre el 21 de junio y 17 de julio de ese año, señaló lo siguiente: “Uno de los aspectos más fascinantes de este arte en esta excelente exposición que se inauguró en el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, es que los maestros escogidos, más que pintores, en su mayoría son inventores” (Ca- rreño, 1968). Fue una exposición que hizo historia en nuestro país, tanto por la singularidad de las obras expuestas como por su efecto mediático. REFEREnCIAS Badal, Gonzalo (Ed.) (1995). “Los años de formación 1939-1959”, Balmes. Via- je a la pintura. Santiago de Chile: Ocho Libro Editores, 50. Emar, Jean (1923, 22 octubre) “Grupo Montparnasse”, diario La Nación, p. 3. Carreño, Mario (1968, 22 de junio). “De Cézanne a Miró. Los inventores nue- vos”, diario El Mercurio, p. 10. Diario El Mercurio (1950, 8 de mayo). “nathanael yáñez Silva”, p. 77. Atenea 504 II Sem. 2011211 El Diario Ilustrado nº 7842 (1923, jueves 25 de octubre). “nathanael yáñez Silva”, p. 4. Emar, Juan (1925, 11 de junio). “Alrededor del Salón de Junio”, en diario La Nación, p. 7. Huyghe, René (1950). “La joven pintura francesa y sus maestros”, Catálogo de Exposición “De Manet hasta nuestros días”. Santiago de Chile: Museo na- cional de Bellas Artes. Ivelic, Milan y Galaz, Gaspar (1988). Chile: arte actual. Valparaíso, Chile: Edi- ciones Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. Letelier, Rosario; Morales, Emilio y Muñoz, Ernesto (1993). Anales de Artes Plásticas de la Universidad de Chile. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universi- taria. Lira, Pedro (1902). Diccionario biográfico de pintores. Santiago de Chile: Im- prenta Encuadernación y Litografías Esmeralda. Lago, Tomás (1930). El Museo de Bellas Artes 1880-1930. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universidad de Chile, Departamento de Extensión Cultural y Ar- tística. Lizama, Patricio (2003). Jean Emar, Notas de Arte. Santiago, Chile: Centro de In- vestigación Barros Arana, Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos. Meltcherts, Enrique (1963). “Relaciones entre la pintura chilena y española”. Goya n° 55, julio-agosto, p. 65. neruda, Pablo (1966). “Una capitanía de pintores” (prólogo), en Vila, Waldo, Una capitanía de pintores. Santiago, Chile: Editorial del Pacífico. Palacios, José María (1983). Catálogo exposición del artista Arturo Gordon. San- tiago, Chile: Instituto Cultural de Las Condes. Revista selecta, 5 (1912, agosto). “Richon Brunet”, p. 141. Richon-Brunet, Ricardo (1910a). Catálogo Oficial Ilustrado, Exposición Inter- nacional de Bellas Artes. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Barcelona. Richon-Brunet, Ricardo (1910b, abril). Crónica Conversando sobre Arte, “Un recuerdo de La Araucana - El Caupolicán” de Don nicanor Plaza. selecta n° 1, p. 9. Romera, Antonio (1969). Asedio a la pintura chilena. Santiago de Chile: Edito- rial nascimento. ______ (1967). “Experiencias de un crítico de Artes Plásticas”. Aisthesis nº 2, La crítica de arte y sus problemas en Chile (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago de Chile), p. 199. ______ (1976). Historia de la pintura chilena. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Andrés Bello. Sommer, Waldemar (1987). “Panorama de la pintura chilena desde los precur- sores hasta Montparnasse”, en catálogo de exposición del Instituto Cultural de Las Condes. yáñez Silva, nathanael (1923, 25 de octubre). Exposición del grupo Montpar- nasse” (Sala Rivas y Calvo). Diario Ilustrado, p. 4. 212Atenea 504II Sem. 2011 ______ (1950, 8 de mayo). El Mercurio, p. 77. ______ (1955). “Grandes exposiciones de arte”, en número Especial de Revista Zig-Zag, Medio Siglo de Zig-Zag 1905 a 1955, Santiago de Chile, impreso en los talleres de la revista, p. 222. zamorano Pérez, Pedro (1994). El pintor F. Álvarez de sotomayor y su huella en América. La Coruña, España: Ediciones Universidad de La Coruña. zamorano Pérez, Pedro y Cortés, Claudio (1998). “Pintura chilena a comien- zos de siglo: hacia un esbozo de pensamiento crítico”. Aisthesis n° 31, 89- 107. zamorano Pérez, Pedro, Cortés, Claudio y Muñoz, Patricio (2007). “Antonio Romera; asedios a su obra crítica”. Aisthesis n° 42, 98-117. g work_li7f6zj7bfdnpkeofl3b3z7ufe ---- America in the Transatlantic Imagination: The Ballets Russes and John Alden Carpenter’s Skyscrapers Carolyn Watts Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Post-Doctoral Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the M.A. degree in Musicology School of Music Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Carolyn Watts, Ottawa, Canada, 2015 ii Abstract/Résumé During its twenty-year lifespan, the Ballets Russes (1909 to 1929) was celebrated for bringing together illustrious artistic and cultural figures to collaborate on exotic productions based on Russian, Spanish, English and French themes. Notable by its absence from the Ballets Russes’ exotic interests is the culture and music of America, and this despite that during the 1920s Americans culture was a source of fascination and unease in the European cultural imagination. The Ballets Russes’ impresario, Serge Diaghilev, is recognized as holding the culture of the New World in disdain, yet nonetheless commissioned a “typically American” ballet score from Chicago composer John Alden Carpenter in 1923, which resulted in a score featuring a skyscraper-inspired machine aesthetic, and the inclusion of jazz and spirituals. Carpenter’s ballet was dropped by the Ballets Russes before production and was ultimately premiered as Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life by the Metropolitan Opera Company on 19 February 1926. This thesis seeks to better understand Diaghilev’s perceived disdain for American culture, the reasons that caused him to avoid the inclusion of an American ballet in the Ballets Russes’ repertory, and his motives for commissioning a score from Carpenter. Drawing on archival documents from the Library of Congress, I construct a historical narrative of the commission and offer insight into the complex politics of patronage in the Ballets Russes. Furthermore, I position Skyscrapers as a product of cultural transfer, thus illustrating the manner in which Carpenter conceived of his ballet as an American work for an international audience. Finally, I examine the Metropolitan production of Skyscrapers and how it perpetuated racial stereotypes and participated in the debates about the mechanization of American life during the 1920s. Au cours de son existence les Ballets Russes (1909-1929) ont été célébrés pour avoir rassemblé des figures artistiques et culturelles illustres afin de produire des productions exotiques sur des thèmes russes, espagnols, anglais et français. Notable par son absence des intérêts exotiques des Ballets Russes est la culture et la musique des États Unis, et ce malgré le fait que durant les années 1920 l’Amérique était une source de fascination et de malaise dans l'imaginaire culturel européen. L'impresario des Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev, est reconnu pour avoir cultivé peu d’intérêt pour la culture et la musique du Nouveau Monde; néanmoins il a tout de même passé une commande en 1923 pour un ballet "typiquement américain" au compositeur de Chicago, John Alden Carpenter. Ce ballet intègre une esthétique de mécanisation inspirée des gratte-ciels et incorpore des références aux genres du jazz et du spiritual afro- américain. Le ballet de Carpenter n’a pas été monté par les Ballets Russes et a finalement été créé le 18 février 1926 sous le titre Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life par le Metropolitan Opera Company. Cette thèse vise à mieux comprendre l’attitude de Diaghilev envers la culture américaine, les raisons qui l'ont poussé à vouloir inclure un ballet sur des thèmes américains dans le répertoire des Ballets Russes, et enfin les motivations qui sous-tendent sa commande à Carpenter. S'appuyant sur des documents d'archives de la Library of Congress, je reconstitue l’historique de la commande et offre un aperçu de la politique complexe au sein des Ballets Russes. En outre, je positionne Skyscrapers comme un produit de transfert culturel, illustrant ainsi la manière dont Carpenter a conçu son ballet comme une œuvre américaine pour un public international. Enfin, j'examine la production newyorkaise de Skyscrapers, sa tendance à perpétuer des stéréotypes raciaux et la façon dont elle participait aux débats entourant la mécanisation de la vie américaine dans les années 1920. iii Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the support of a number of individuals and institutions without which the writing of this thesis would have not been possible. This thesis was financially supported by the University of Ottawa, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Nicole Sénécal Scholarship. I would like express particular thanks to Mme. Sénécal, whose generous support of the arts (and kind encouragement) allowed me the opportunity to travel to Washington D.C. to undertake research at the Library of Congress, an experience for which I am sincerely grateful. I would like to acknowledge the contribution of my thesis advisor Prof. Christopher Moore, who guided me through the research and writing of this thesis; his enthusiasm and encouragement always reinvigorated my excitement towards this project. I am also appreciative of Prof. Dillon Parmer’s suggestions on my thesis proposal, and for the comments, guidance and insight of my thesis committee comprised of Prof. Julie Pedneault-Deslauriers and Prof. Murray Dineen. I owe thanks to the librarians at the University of Ottawa for processing my countless Interlibrary Loan requests, and to the staff and librarians at the Music Division of the Library of Congress who assisted in my research on the Carpenter Collection. I am appreciative to Pauline Hubert, the great-granddaughter of John Alden Carpenter, for granting me permission to include unpublished materials from this collection in my thesis. Finally, I am extremely thankful for my supportive friends and family who encouraged me through the composition of this document. To my friends and colleagues at the Univeristy of Ottawa and home in Thunder Bay, the Fraser family, and my sisters Nicole and Valerie I give my deepest gratitude. And to my mother, Judy, whose kind honesty, heartfelt encouragement and unwavering belief I owe the completion of this work. iv Contents Abstract/Résumé ............................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... iii Contents ........................................................................................................................................ iv Table of Musical Examples, Table of Figures .............................................................................. vi Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 Literature Review................................................................................................................ 3 Chapter Outline ................................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER 1 - The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes ........................................ 11 “A Most Idiotic Affair:” The Ballets Russes American Tours ......................................... 12 “Palpably Vulgar:” Diaghilev on American Culture ........................................................ 17 Modernism and the Appropriation of American Culture: The Ballet Suédois ................. 20 America as a Threat .......................................................................................................... 24 Parade ............................................................................................................................... 26 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 27 CHAPTER 2 - Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 29 John Alden Carpenter’s Transatlantic Career ................................................................... 30 Carpenter and Ballet: The Birthday of the Infanta and Krazy Kat .................................... 36 The Pursuit of Diaghilev ................................................................................................... 44 The “Typically American” Commission .......................................................................... 50 Carpenter as an “Episode .................................................................................................. 58 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 59 CHAPTER 3 - America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz ....................................... 61 The Skyscraper Muse: America at Work .......................................................................... 62 Skyscrapers Translated Through a Machine Aesthetic ........................................ 67 Modernist Primitive: America at Play .............................................................................. 77 Jazz, The “American Folklore” ............................................................................ 78 Chorus of Spirituals and Ragtime ......................................................................... 80 The Collaboration: Robert Edmond Jones and Sammy Lee ............................................. 90 v Skyscrapers at the Metropolitan........................................................................................ 97 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 103 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 106 The Chicago Allied Arts and Onwards ........................................................................... 108 Final Words ..................................................................................................................... 111 Appendix A - Skyscrapers Program Notes ................................................................................. 113 Appendix B - Permission Letter from Pauline Hubert of the Carpenter Estate .......................... 115 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 116 vi Table of Musical Examples Ex. 1.1 John Alden Carpenter, Krazy Kat, mm. 23-28. 44 Ex. 1.2 Claude Debussy, L'après midi d'un faune, mm. 1-4. 44 Ex. 2 John Alden Carpenter, Skyscrapers, mm. 1-4. 73 Ex. 3.1 Carpenter, Skyscrapers, mm. 5-8. 75 Ex. 3.2 Igor Stravinsky, Pétrouchka, “Malédictions de Pétrouchka,” 76 mm. 1-2. Ex. 4.1 Carpenter, Skyscrapers, Scene IV, No. 40, mm. 1-16. 82 Ex. 4.2 Carpenter, Skyscrapers, Scene IV, No. 46, mm. 9-17. 84 Table of Figures Fig. 1 John Alden Carpenter, undated. 33 Fig. 2 Carpenter, Adolph Bolm, Robert Edmond Jones, undated. 39 Fig. 3 The Birthday of the Infanta, Jones’ design. 40 Fig. 4 The Birthday of the Infanta. 41 Fig. 5 The Birthday of the Infanta. 41 Fig. 6 Carpenter, Skyscrapers, manuscript. 71 Fig. 7 Wolkencratzer in Munich, 1928, “America at Play.” 92 Fig. 8 Carpenter and Jones, undated. 95 Fig. 9 Wolkencratzer in Munich, 1928, “America at Work.” 99 Fig. 10 Wolkencratzer in Munich, 1928, “Transition.” 102 Introduction During the twenty-year lifespan of the Ballets Russes (1909 to 1929), the famous ballet company was celebrated for bringing together illustrious figures of art and culture to collaborate on exotic productions. The Ballets Russes’ repertory included spectacles based on stories and myths derived from several national cultures that were served by scores equally inspired by national styles and origins: Le tricorne (1919) composed by Manuel de Falla was based on a the nineteenth-century Spanish novella entitled El sombrero de tres picos, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was given a surrealist spin to music by British composer Constant Lambert in 1926, Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie engaged with Parisian popular culture in the landmark 1917 production of Parade, Igor Stravinsky’s early ballets (L’oiseau de feu, 1909; Pétrouchka, 1911; Le sacre du printemps, 1913 and Les noces, 1923) assimilated Russian folk-material, and finally, Soviet Russia was evoked in Serge Prokofiev’s Le pas d’acier of 1926. Notable by its absence in the Ballets Russes’ exotic subjects is an American ballet, and this despite that during the 1920s American culture was a source of fascination and unease for the European cultural imagination. The impresario of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929), is often recognized as holding New World culture in disdain, and yet, in 1923 he did commission a “typically American” ballet score from Chicago composer John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951), which resulted in a score featuring a skyscraper-inspired machine aesthetic, jazz and spirituals. Carpenter’s ballet was dropped by the Ballets Russes before production and was instead premiered by the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York City as Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life on 19 February 1926, based on the themes of America at work and play. In this thesis I seek to better contextualize Diaghilev’s commission to Carpenter by reevaluating the impresario’s opinion of American culture; by examining possible motives that Introduction 2 would have prompted him to want to produce an American ballet; and by outlining how Carpenter’s compositional career caught the attention of Diaghilev and influenced the impresario’s decision to commission an American for a ballet for the Ballets Russes. I also examine the score Carpenter wrote for Diaghilev in terms of transatlantic networks and the notion of cultural transfer (as an American ballet conceived for an international audience), as well as discuss how the Metropolitan production of Skyscrapers may be viewed in the context of contemporaneous debates about the perpetuation of racial stereotypes and the mechanization of American life in the 1920s. Ballet is an interdisciplinary art and thus necessitates an interdisciplinary approach, particularly when discussing ballet of a high-collaborative nature like the Ballets Russes. This thesis draws on sources from the fields of dance, literature, and fine arts as a means of better understanding Carpenter’s music in relationship to the institutional and artistic constraints of the genre, as well as the particular cultural forces and social networks at work within the Ballets Russes. This thesis draws upon materials located in the John Alden Carpenter Collection housed at the Music Division of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. 1 This collection contains many of Carpenter’s scores in various states of completion, photographs, scrapbooks, programs and a wealth of correspondence. Letters Carpenter wrote to Ellen Borden (his mistress during the time Skyscrapers was commissioned and composed, and who he would marry in 1933 after his first-wife’s death) contained in this collection are invaluable for piecing together the narrative of the commission from Diaghilev during the composer’s trip abroad in 1923. Additional archival 1 John Alden Carpenter Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. These letters, as well as other material from the Carpenter collection, will be referenced in proceeding footnotes as “C-DLC.” Introduction 3 materials from the Adolph Bolm Collection and Serge Diaghilev/Serge Lifar collection at the Library of Congress are also referenced in this thesis. 2 Literature Review There has been extensive literature published about the Ballets Russes and its impresario. The large body of work by dance historian Lynn Garafola dominates Ballets Russes scholarship; her numerous articles approach the company from a variety of perspectives, and her monograph Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which outlines in three sections the “art,” “enterprise,” and “audience” of the ballet company, is widely referenced. 3 In this book, Garafola coins the term “lifestyle modernism” to describe the popular trend of representing an elevated “everyday” in the arts, which has been taken up in proceeding literature, notably Richard Taruskin’s Music in the Early Twentieth Century, and is adopted in this thesis. 4 For Diaghilev’s personal and professional life, I have turned primarily to Richard Buckle’s book Diaghilev, which chronologically outlines Diaghilev’s life and career, as well as Diaghilev: A Life by Sjeng Scheijen, which focuses on Diaghilev’s personal life and relationships. 5 A collection of essays edited by Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer looks into particular aspects of Diaghilev’s life and the Ballets Russes, and contains a useful appendix of every opera and ballet produced by Diaghilev (the chapter “Adolph Bolm in America” by Suzanne Carbonneau is referenced in this thesis). 6 Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929, edited by Jane Prichard and published by the Victoria and Albert Museum of 2 Adolph Bolm Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Serge Diaghilev/Serge Lifar Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Materials from these collections will be referenced as “B-DLC” and “D-DLC,” respectively. 3 Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 4 Ibid, 115; Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 5 Richard Buckle, Diaghilev (New York: Atheneum, 1979); Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev: A Life, trans. Jane Hedley- Prôle and S.J. Leinbach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 6 Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer, ed. The Ballets Russes and Its World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Introduction 4 London (which houses many Ballets Russes artifacts), contains several colour photographs of scenery, costumes, sketches and photos from their Ballets Russes collection, as well as timelines of important events, productions, and tours of the company. 7 Valuable information about Diaghilev and his ballet company is found in the memoirs of those who worked directly with the impresario. Memoirs of Ballets Russes dancers, such as Tamara Geva (1907-1997), Lydia Sokolova (1896-1974) and Alice Nikitina (1904-1978), provide insight into the hierarchical relationships within the ballet and contain descriptions of Diaghilev’s complex character. 8 Books written by Léonide Massine (1896-1979), the Ballets Russes’ main choreographer from 1915 to 1921, and writings by premier danseur Serge Lifar (1905-1986), who was with the ballet for the last years of Diaghilev’s life, contain memories by men who were exceptionally close to the impresario both professionally and personally. 9 The composers who wrote music for the Ballets Russes also remember Diaghilev and their activities with the company in published sources, including Vernon Duke (also known as Vladimir Dukelsky) (1903-1969), Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), Serge Prokofiev (1891-1953) and Nicolas Nabokov (1903-1978). 10 Edward L. Bernays (1891-1995), the publicist of the Ballets Russes’ 1916 American tour, provides insight into the impresario’s first and only visit to the New World in his autobiography, which is beneficial in any discussion concerning Diaghilev's reaction to 7 Jane Pritchard, ed. Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes (London: V&A Publishing, 2010). 8 Tamara Geva, Split Seconds: A Remembrance (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Lydia Sokolova, Dancing for Diaghilev, ed. Richard Buckle (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1960); Alice Nikitina, Nikitina: By Herself, trans. Baroness Budberg (London: Allan Wingate, 1959). 9 Léonide Massine, My Life in Ballet, ed. Phyllis Hartnoll and Robert Rubens (London: Macmillian, 1968); Serge Lifar, Serge Diaghilev, His Life, His Work, His Legend (New York: De Capo, 1940). 10 Vernon Duke, Passport to Paris (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1955); Darius Milhaud, Notes Without Music: An Autobiography, trans. Donald Evans (New York: De Capo, 1970); Sergei Prokofiev, Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1915-1923:Behind the Mask, ed. trans. Anothony Phillips (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1974). Introduction 5 and understanding of America. 11 Boris Kochno (1904-1980), who created a handful of librettos for the Ballets Russes and acted as Diaghilev’s personal assistant (and with whom he shared intimate relations as well), published the book Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. 12 This source discusses the Ballets Russes’ feature productions chronologically, and contains pictures and transcriptions of letters the impresario had sent to him, all of which have proved valuable to this thesis. Through these sources we may read intimate, unfiltered remembrances of the inner- workings of the Ballets Russes that only those who had experienced it directly could convey. Of all the sources surrounding Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes (and of which this literature review only provides a sampling), few mention Diaghilev’s commission to Carpenter. In a footnote in Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, Garafola briefly uses Carpenter’s commission to illustrate the seriousness of a forthcoming American tour, however she does not discuss the relevance of the commission in terms of the Ballets Russes artistic aesthetic. 13 In “Adolph Bolm in America,” Suzanne Carbonneau discusses the ex-Ballets Russes dancer’s collaborations with Carpenter, and mentions in a footnote Carpenter as being the “only American composer with whom Diaghilev ever considered working.” 14 Buckle describes Carpenter as someone “who kept bothering” Diaghilev to stage one of his ballets, when the impresario had indeed requested it. 15 In the monograph Prokofiev’s Ballets for Diaghilev, Stephen D. Press includes a brief discussion of the commission of Skyscrapers to set up a discussion of its seminal influence on Prokofiev’s ballet Le pas d’acier. Press writes that Diaghilev’s commission to Carpenter was a 11 Edward L Bernays, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965). 12 Boris Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, trans. Adrienne Foulke (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). 13 Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 457n26. Garafola mistakes the year of Diaghilev’s commission to Carpenter as 1924, when according to a letter Carpenter wrote to Ellen, Diaghilev requested the score on 5 July 1923. 14 Suzanne Carbonneau, “Adolph Bolm in America,” in The Ballets Russes and Its World, ed. Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 377n17. 15 Buckle, Diaghilev, 463. Introduction 6 misunderstanding: that, “he had not actually received a commission.” 16 In my thesis, I argue against Press’s interpretation and claim that Diaghilev’s request for a score to Carpenter was sincere. The most extensive conversation about the commission and production of Skyscrapers appears in a monograph by American music specialist Howard Pollack, John Alden Carpenter: A Chicago Composer, a 2001 republished edition of Pollack’s Skyscraper Lullaby: The Life and Music of John Alden Carpenter (1994). 17 Pollack’s book is the only study devoted to the career of Carpenter, and contains two chapters dedicated to Skyscrapers: “The Making of Skyscrapers,” and “The Reception of Skyscrapers.” Much of the biographical information and aspects of Carpenter’s career in the periphery of Skyscrapers mentioned in this thesis stems from this source; however my work on Skyscrapers and Carpenter’s associations with the Ballets Russes aims to complement the absence of this discussion in Pollack’s research. In his book, Pollack constructs the narrative of the commissioning process of Skyscrapers primarily from Carpenter’s perspective. Pollack does, however, ask questions regarding Diaghilev’s motive for the commission and why it was ultimately abandoned, yet their answers lay outside the scope of his book. As such, Pollack does not address the significance of the commission in the chronology of the Ballets Russes and how it reflects on Diaghilev’s relationship with the New World, nor does he point to the composer’s compositional career, at least his compositions in ballet, as being influenced by the Ballets Russes. In this thesis, by examining Carpenter’s career and the commission and composition of Skyscrapers in relation to the Ballets Russes, I seek to answer some of Pollack’s proposed questions and understand more fully the politics surrounding Diaghilev’s only American commission. Additionally, Pollack chooses to avoid a critical 16 Stephen D. Press, Prokofiev’s Ballets for Diaghilev (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 223. 17 Howard Pollack, John Alden Carpenter: A Chicago Composer (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995). Introduction 7 examination of Carpenter’s appropriation of African-American culture in Skyscrapers, nor does he comment on the statement on American life suggested in the scenario of the ballet. In my thesis, I address these difficult issues by proposing that the ballet both perpetuates racial stereotypes and participates in the contemporaneous debate on the mechanization of American life. There exists an abundant literature discussing the role and nature of Modernism in Europe during the early twentieth century. When using the term “Modernism” in this thesis, I adhere to the definition proposed by musicologist Richard Taruskin: “[Modernism] asserts the superiority of the present over the past (and, by implication, of the future over the present), with all that that implies in terms of optimism and faith in progress.” 18 When speaking of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” distinctions, I have accepted the predisposed cultural hierarchies commonly recognized in studies of twentieth century culture, such as Lawrence W. Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. 19 Consequently, as Levine points out, what constituted “lowbrow” culture is that which was “actively and regularly shared by all segments of the population,” thus, popular entertainments, such as jazz/ragtime and popular songs, and the entertainments featured in vaudeville and music halls are typically considered “lowbrow.” 20 Conversely, exclusive, “legitimate” culture stemming from or maintaining European traditions of the rich and powerful are deemed “high brow,” or “high art.” What constituted “jazz” in the 1920s was interchangeable, as Nicholas M. Evans has explained in Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism and Modern Culture in the 1920s, “from World War I into the 1920s, the lines separating what we now call jazz, ragtime, Tin Pan Ally, 18 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 1. 19 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 20 Ibid., 234. Introduction 8 vaudeville music, and other relevant forms were quite unclear.” 21 This thesis does not intend to study specific nuances in the musical language of any piece of music, but instead is interested in the cultural connotations (race and nationalism) that surrounded the music that was considered to be “jazz” during this period. Therefore, for the purpose of this study, I apply the methods of David Savran in Highbrow/Lowdown: Theatre, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class and Jeffery H. Jackson in Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris of using the term “jazz” for all music that was regarded as such, regardless of who may have written or played it. 22 One exception to this general approach is my discussion of ragtime in Carpenter’s score for Skyscrapers, in which “ragtime” is viewed according to the precise characteristics that define the genre in contemporary scholarship. Chapter Outline The first chapter of the thesis (“The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes”) surveys Diaghilev’s opinion of America in order to prepare the reader for themes and issues that arise in Chapter 2. I demonstrate Diaghilev’s opinion of America as a country unable to appreciate the refinements of his ballet by discussing the impresario’s reaction to the controversies that aroused during the Ballets Russes 1916 American tour. I also propose that Diaghilev’s avoidance of American imports in the Ballets Russes was due to their “lowbrow” associations, and his resistance to the culture of the New World derived from his belief that it constituted a threat to European high art. I conclude the chapter by discussing the problematic nature of the ballet Parade (1917) in my characterization of Diaghilev and his artistic values. 21 Nicholas M. Evans, Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism and Modern Culture in the 1920s (New York: Garland, 2000), 120. 22 David Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theatre, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2009), 27; Jeffery H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 10. Introduction 9 Chapter 2 (“Diaghilev’s American ‘Episode:’ John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers”) serves to reconstruct the historical narrative that led to the commission by Diaghilev of a “typically American” ballet from Carpenter, and to better understand the ultimate dismissal of Carpenter’s ensuing ballet score. The chapter provides a brief overview of Carpenter’s compositional career leading up to the commission, and emphasizes how the composer’s early career, particularly his first two ballets The Birthday of the Infanta (1917) and Krazy Kat: A Jazz Pantomime (1922), was shaped by the exotic and modernist aesthetics associated with the Ballets Russes. I rely on Carpenter’s correspondence to his mistress Ellen Borden as well as written accounts from figures in the Ballets Russes entourage to piece together the narrative of the commission from multiple perspectives. I challenge Stephen D. Press’ notion that the commission was a misunderstanding on the part of Carpenter and claim that it may be viewed as a strategic move by Diaghilev that may be understood for both financial and artistic reasons. The chapter closes with a discussion of why Skyscrapers was ultimately not produced by the Ballets Russes, concluding that Carpenter was merely an “episode” in the Diaghilev’s creative plan. In Chapter 3 (“America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz”) I discuss the ballet score Carpenter composed for Diaghilev and the ensuing production by the Metropolitan Opera Company in 1926. In Carpenter’s score, I highlight how the incorporation of both American and European aesthetics and musical idioms is the result of transatlantic cultural transfer, a phenomenon Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist have defined as “the migration of sets of practices or cultural materials from one geographical location to another.” 23 I critically examine the Metropolitan production of Skyscrapers as a collaboration between Carpenter, set and costume designer Robert Edmond Jones (1887-1954), and Broadway choreographer Sammy Lee 23 Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist, Stage Music and Cultural Transfer: Paris 1830-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 6. Introduction 10 (1890-1968), and propose that the ballet participated in the perpetuation of degrading racial stereotypes while also constituting an artistic statement regarding the mechanization of contemporary American life. I include photos of the Skyscrapers production by the Munich National Opera in 1928 to support the conversation around the setting designs; although the designs are not from the Metropolitan production discussed in this thesis, the settings were very much influenced by the original backdrops, and thus supports the discussion contained in this chapter. 24 In the final chapter, I summarize the ideas presented in this thesis, and discuss how the Ballets Russes continued to shape Carpenter’s career after Skyscrapers by the founding of the Chicago Allied Arts and his continuing interest in the ballet genre. 24 Photographs of Jones’ set designs for the Metropolitan production are published in Deems Taylor, “America’s First Dramatic Composer,” McCalls Magazine, April, 1922, 23. CHAPTER 1 The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes Many historians have concluded that the absence of an American ballet in the Ballets Russes repertoire is the result of Diaghilev’s personal disdain for popular American cultural imports that were in vogue in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Surely, the numerous anecdotes relating Diaghilev’s critique of American culture that figure prominently in this discussion (such as Boris Kochno’s claim that the impresario had a “horror of jazz”) has bolstered this idea throughout Ballets Russes scholarship. 25 However, at a time when America had grown to become an emerging cultural force in much of Europe, Diaghilev’s feelings towards the New World, like those of many Europeans, were conflicted and complex. This chapter seeks to clarify and better understand the impresario’s opinion of America and its culture in order to prepare the reader for themes and issues that arise during the discussion of Diaghilev’s commission to Carpenter and the ultimate abandonment of his score in Chapter 2 of this thesis. An examination of the negotiations between Diaghilev and the Metropolitan Opera Company for the Ballets Russes’ American tours of 1916 and 1917, and the impresario’s reaction to the controversy regarding the morality of two ballet productions, provides important information about Diaghilev’s opinion of America. Through a reading of his correspondence and the recollections of those closest to him it emerges that Diaghilev viewed Americans as being unable to appreciate the productions of his troupe, although he nonetheless viewed tours of America as a crucial, albeit, last-resort option for keeping his enterprise financially afloat. These 25 Boris Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, trans. Adrienne Foulke (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 222; For example, “[Carpenter] was apparently unaware of the impresario’s aversion to jazz to say nothing of his dislike of American music in general,” in Stephen D. Press, Prokofiev’s Ballets for Diaghilev (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 223. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 12 documents also reveal that Diaghilev found American culture amusing, but vulgar, and therefore not appropriate for the high-art status he championed with the Ballets Russes. Furthermore, Diaghilev viewed the culture and economy of America as a threatening to European art traditions and his ballet. Taken together, these negative appreciations of the New World help explain why he was so apprehensive, even unwilling, to include an American ballet in the repertory of the Ballets Russes. “A Most Idiotic Affair:” The Ballets Russes America Tours The Metropolitan Opera Company had tried to contractually engage the Ballets Russes for an American tour as early as 1910 (only one year after the ballet’s first Parisian season), but it was not until the financial trials prompted by World War I that Diaghilev finally agreed to embark on the transatlantic journey. 26 Ballets Russes dancer Lydia Sokolova confirmed, “nothing but the desperate extremes of war could have made Diaghilev go to America,” and choreographer Léonide Massine recalled, “Diaghilev would have much preferred to be embarking on his usual seasons in Paris and London… he had only consented to go through with this ambitious undertaking because of the difficult situation created in Europe by the war.” 27 Diaghilev’s phobia of water may have also contributed to his apprehensions about bringing the Ballets Russes to America before the war, for as conductor Ernest Ansermet (1883-1969) recalled, “He was so afraid of the water, of crossing the ocean, that it made him feel antagonistic, coming to [America].” 28 Fear of drowning aside, it seems that Diaghilev’s skepticism towards American audiences, which in his mind were more accustomed to the fares of the music hall than to the art of the ballet, weighed heavily on his decision. William J. Guard (1862-1932), a press 26 Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 213. 27 Lydia Sokolova, Dancing for Diaghilev, ed. Richard Buckle (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1960), 72; Léonide Massine, My Life in Ballet, ed. Phyllis Hartnoll and Robert Rubens (London: Macmillan, 1968), 79. 28 Edward L. Bernays, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 126. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 13 representative of the Metropolitan Opera Company recalls that during contract negotiations the impresario asserted, “this is not a ‘show’ that I am going to take to America. It is an art exposition,” and Sokolova recalled Diaghilev as “doubtful that the New World had much to teach him or if it would be capable of appreciating the refinements of his repertory.” 29 Diaghilev was correct in concluding that the New World did not possess the long- standing balletic traditions of countries like Russia, France and Italy. The dance that prevailed in America during the first decades of the twentieth-century was primarily performed in “lowbrow” settings of vaudeville and dancehalls, and featured tap, stepping, interpretive, hula, and ballroom among other popular styles that “existed to titillate, decorate, or entertain, never to edify.” 30 What America learned of ballet was through foreign (usually Russian) ballet stars, notably the Mariinsky trained Anna Pavlova (1881-1931), who first appeared in America in 1910 and toured the country almost annually for the next fifteen years. 31 In America there were few opportunities to learn classical ballet technique, and certainly no established American ballet tradition. It was not until 1909 that the Metropolitan Opera instituted America’s first dance school under the direction of Italian ballerina Malvina Cavallazzi (1862-1924) who taught the traditional Italian style of ballet. The school consisted of mostly foreign dancers until 1914, when there were enough American dancers to discontinue importing entire ballet casts. 32 Most historians mark the beginning of an American style of ballet only in the 1930s with the work of impresario Lincoln Kirsten (1907-1991) and dancer/choreographer George Balanchine (1904-1983). 33 29 William J. Guard, “A Talk with Serge de Diaghileff, Ballet Wizard,” New York Times, 9 January 1916, SM16. 30 Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 2. 31 Reynolds and McCormick, No Fixed Points, 108. 32 George Dorris, “The Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Fresh Starts: Rosina Galli and the Ballets Russes, 1912-1917,” Dance Chronicle 35/2 (2012): 173-174. 33 See Jennifer Dunning, “But First A School:” The First Fifty Years of the School of American Ballet (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985). The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 14 The Ballets Russes sailed into the New York harbour for the first time on 12 January 1916 for a two-month tour of northwestern cities between seasons at the Century Theatre in New York City and the Metropolitan Opera House. 34 While the overarching reception of the Ballets Russes by American audiences was relatively positive, a few incidents arose that would have perpetuated Diaghilev’s cynicism with regard to American audiences. During their first engagement at the Century Theatre, two of the Ballets Russes’ most successful productions came under fire by the Catholic Theatre Movement, an organization that sought to ensure popular entertainment was appropriate for American audiences; L’après-midi d’un faune was condemned for the faun-character’s implied masturbation, and Scheherazade received criticism for depicting interracial sexual relations between black men and white woman. These accusations brought the Metropolitan Opera Company and the Ballets Russes to court, where Diaghilev defended his company by shifting the responsibility to culturally-conservative America, stating “‘The Faun’ has been given fifty times, and Scheherazade 150 times in other countries without the slightest objection.” 35 Seeing that these ballets were performed in Europe without issue, Diaghilev was forced to see that the problem lay with American morals, stating: “I believe that my mind and the minds of those who planned and executed the ballets are less vicious than the minds of those that made the protest.” 36 To Diaghilev’s despair, the business manager of the Metropolitan, John Brown, approved of the court’s request to modify the productions to make them more suitable for the American public. As much as this controversy offended the impresario (he called it “a most idiotic affair”), the media attention served well for the Ballets Russes ticket sales. The New York Sun reported that the first post-court performance sold out with hundreds of additional people turned away at 34 Richard Buckle, Diaghilev (New York: Atheneum, 1979), 303-304. 35 “Russians Make ‘Faun’ Behave,” New York Tribune, 26 January 1916, 3. 36 “House Sold Out to See A Tamer Ballets Russes,” New York Sun, 26 January 1916, 14. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 15 the door. 37 Diaghilev took advantage of the attention the controversy had brought to the ballet by teasing reporters that they would have to “wait and see” if the court-ordered modifications were applied to the productions. Ultimately, the productions of L’après-midi d’un faune and Scheherazade were adjusted to meet the conservative standards, however Diaghilev did not let it go without a snide comment, for after the first modified performance the impresario approached Brown and other leaders of the Metropolitan Opera to mockingly remark, “America is saved!” 38 The Ballets Russes came across other issues during their first American tour. The ballet’s two-week engagement at Chicago’s Auditorium Building marked the first time the Ballets Russes performed to half-empty theatres for reasons historian Hanna Järvinen attributes to high ticket prices and the tendency of Chicagoans to dislike being treated as secondary in importance to New York audiences. 39 In Kansas City, the Deputy Chief of Police (who referred to Diaghilev as “Dogleaf, or whatever his name is”) threatened to “call down the curtain” on the Ballets Russes production if it was not “toned down to the decency of a high class city where they don’t stand for any monkey shines.” 40 From these events, Diaghilev’s prediction that America was unprepared for the high-art of his Ballets Russes was confirmed, causing him to declare “Americans still [seem] to think of ballet as light entertainment, to be enjoyed after a hard day at the office!” 41 But still, the impresario allowed his ballet to embark on another fifty-two city American tour the following year, this time without his presence. Diaghilev saw this opportunity as an efficient method of making money to fund his European seasons, and while his ballet troupe was touring America 37 Ibid. 38 “Russian Ballet Modified,” New York Times, 26 January 1916, 12. 39 Hanna Järvinen, “Failed Impressions: Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in America, 1916,” Dance Research 42/2 (2010): 87; For more on the Ballets Russes in Chicago, see Nesta Macdonald, Diaghilev Observed by Critics in England and the United States 1911-1929 (London: Dance Books, 1975), 154-160, 208. 40 Kansas Star, 16 March 1916, quoted in Leslie Norton, Léonide Massine and the 20 th Century Ballet (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 15. 41 Massine, My Life in Ballet, 80. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 16 (under the direction of Vaslav Nijinsky [1890-1950], whose mental health was deteriorating), he was traveling Italy with Massine and a few of his closest collaborators planning new productions for his more important European audience. The impresario would look to America for potential tours at least two more times during the Ballets Russes’ existence, but only during periods of extreme financial instability. During the second tour of America in 1917, Diaghilev showed little concern as to how his ballet was being presented to American audiences, and allowed Nijinsky to produce two new ballets, Till Eulenspeigel and Mephisto Waltz, with virtually no input. As Romola Nijinsky, the wife of the dancer, remembers, “Vaslav began to speak to him about his new compositions, Tyl (sic) and Mephisto Waltz, but Diaghilev uncharacteristically showed no interest.” 42 Edward L. Bernays, the publicist of the Ballets Russes’ first American tour, recalls the pressure from American audiences for the involvement of an American artist, claiming there was “agitation for some American participation in the ballet” that “became so vocal that, as a concession, someone suggested that an American designer do the décor and costumes for the forthcoming Till Eulenspeigel.” 43 To satisfy this request, Nijinsky recruited young American scene designer, Robert Edmond Jones (1887-1951), who created backdrops in line with the “New Stagecraft.” The New Stagecraft movement stemmed from the writings of theatre designers Adolphe Appia (Switzerland), Edward Gordon Craig (England) and Georg Fuchs (Germany), and promoted the fusion of acting, lighting and setting into a dramatic whole, and vouched for simplification of designs and stages shorn of literal detail, or “simplified realism.” 44 Diaghilev did never see Jones’ contribution to Till Eulenspeigel, for the ballet was produced exclusively in America, 42 Romola de Pulszky Nijinsky, Nijinsky (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934), 328. 43 Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 122. 44 Ralph Pendleton, ed., The Theatre of Robert Edmond Jones (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1958), 15, 25. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 17 however the aesthetic of the New Stagecraft was in line with Diaghilev’s artistic values, particularly the attentive manipulation of light and shadows given the impresario’s role as the ballet’s lighting designer, a task he took quite seriously. 45 In later years, Jones described the project as one where “the artistic approach of old Russia and the artistic approach of new America met and fused for the first time in theatre history.” 46 Diaghilev’s abnormal withdrawal regarding artistic decisions being made under the banner of the Ballets Russes resulted in the only time an American successfully contributed to the Ballets Russes, and supports the notion that he viewed America as a last-resort opportunity to make money, while Europe was the place to make art. “Palpably Vulgar:” Diaghilev on American Culture During Diaghilev’s stay in America in 1916, reporters were interested in the impresario’s thoughts on America and its status in the arts. In interviews from this time, Diaghilev kept in mind that the readers of these articles were the same group of people who would buy tickets to his ballet and likely held back any anti-American sentiments he may have had, as one Milwaukee journalist noted, “[Diaghilev] couldn’t be cornered into saying anything uncomplimentary about America or American audiences.” 47 A lengthily statement published in the New York Times illustrates Diaghilev’s opinion of American culture, and his advice for Americans artists: Dear Sir, there is plenty of American art – good, virile, characteristic art. But how long is it going to take America, I wonder, to realize this? The idea here is still imitation of Europe, and in America that which is palpably vulgar and parvenu is beautiful, and that which is beautiful is, of course, vulgar. For instance, when I marvel and am thrilled by the life and the power of Broadway at night, people laugh at me. They think I am joking. Well I am not joking. America will produce much great art when she has realized herself, but not before. Broadway is one of the genuine places in America. Broadway is certainly one of your sources of a strong and expressive art. But Americans, while they love it, will deny its 45 Barry Jackson, “Diaghilev: Lighting Designer,” Dance Chronicle 14/1 (1991): 6. 46 Robert Edmond Jones, “Nijinsky and Til Eulenspiegel,” Dance Index IV (1945): 44. 47 Quoted in Buckle, Diaghilev, 304. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 18 existence in their drawing rooms. It is unrefined! And they copy Europe. Copy Europe, and continue their futile attempts to establish here the art which is the result of centuries of culture originating in the temperament and the experiences of races which are daily receding further and further from the temperament and the experiences of American people. 48 Diaghilev’s appreciation of Broadway and other forms of American entertainment was sincere. As Massine recalled, “The influence of popular culture [and] the polished professionalism of Broadway’s musical comedies all interested [Diaghilev].” 49 The impresario was known to indulge in American amusements while in Europe, particularly since so many of this colleagues participated in such forms of cultural “slumming.” French pianist and composer Jean Wiéner (1896-1982) remembered Diaghilev’s presence at Le boeuf sur le toit (then called The Gaya, a bar where “one could enjoy performances of American Tin Pan alley, blues and dance tunes”) with fellow artists Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Misia Sert (1872-1950) and Boris Kochno. 50 The impresario had also reportedly attended the American Negro Revue Blackbirds (1928) at the Moulin Rouge, which he “so much enjoyed.” 51 Diaghilev encouraged American artists to creatively use these indigenous materials to forge a national identity separate from that of Europe, however he was actively opposed to the assimilation of this “palpably vulgar” (read: “lowbrow”) American culture in European art, and most importantly in the repertory of the Ballets Russes. Sokolova wrote, “[Diaghilev] had admired the novelty of rag-time, the cake- walk, and Negro spirituals, but the day had not come when he could imagine his ballet borrowing subjects from the popular American art forms of vaudeville or cinema.” 52 48 Olin Downes, “The Revolutionary Mr. Diaghileff,” New York Times, 23 January 1916; Buckle has acknowledged that this interview took place only four days after Diaghilev’s arrival to New York City, thus the impresario likely had yet the opportunity to see much of the city at the time of the interview, Buckle, Diaghilev, 300. 49 Massine, My Life in Ballet, 85-86. 50 Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 93. 51 Quoted in Buckle, Diaghilev, 521. 52 Sokolova, Dancing for Diaghilev, 72. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 19 The importance of maintaining a “high-art” status in the Ballets Russes was particularly important to Diaghilev as his ballet gained a new audience-base during the war years. Before World War I, the Ballets Russes’ seasons were an affair exclusive to the plutocratic haute bourgeoisie of Europe; royalty, bankers, the press, and important cultural figures filled seats in the grand European theatres and auditoriums that the ballet frequented. 53 The impresario, once described as “an unscrupulous caterer to the corrupt tastes of a decadent upper-crust,” strived to maintain the ballet’s high-class associations to accommodate his fashionable audience (and perhaps even more so to encourage the opening of their pocketbooks to fund his enterprise). 54 However, the poor economic environment brought on by the onset of the Russian Revolution and World War I forced Diaghilev to present the Ballets Russes through outlets he would have never previously considered: America (as discussed above) and London music halls, therefore rendering the ballet more accessible to a wider, more varied audience. Like the American tours, Diaghilev repeatedly refused to host his ballet in European music halls in pre-war years. Music halls were casual venues for rotating popular entertainment such as revues, theatre, dance, song, circus, with an informal atmosphere, and thus not acceptable for his high-art ballet. 55 Massine remembered, “Diaghilev was irritated by the music hall acts. He clearly resented having his productions sandwiched between performing dogs and acrobats and clowns.” 56 The Ballets Russes’ engagements at London music halls between 1918 and 1922 lowered the exclusivity of the ballet, and therefore opened it to a middle-class audience. Ballets Russes dancer Alice Nikitina recalled that having the Ballets Russes perform in music halls 53 For an in depth discussion of the Ballets Russes’ changing audience, see Lynn Garafola, “Audience,” in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 273-375. 54 Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951), 71. 55 Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 213. 56 Massine, My Life in Ballet, 129. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 20 “meant for Diaghilev the defeat of his ambition. He was deeply hurt by it and suffered to see that one part of the world was too backward to appreciate his revolutionary talent.” 57 The new audience acquired through the American tours and stints in London music halls sustained the Ballets Russes through an era of financial uncertainly; Diaghilev himself admitted in a letter to Ansermet, “London has saved me.” 58 In spite of this, the impresario, as Lynn Garafola has noted, continually strived “to regain his company’s lost cachet and its erstwhile society public.” 59 To Diaghilev, “lowbrow” American culture would not assist in making his ballet a high-art affair, but instead cheapen his art to the standards of the country that he thought “[knew] nothing about art!” 60 Modernism and the Appropriation of American Culture: The Ballets Suédois During the war years, the Ballets Russes experienced a shift of aesthetic. Historians often mark the 1917 premiere of the ballet Parade, with its all-star cast of collaborators (Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Picasso, and Massine), as the Ballets Russes’ first step into Modernism; Garafola credits the ballet as “a public notice of the switch in [Diaghilev’s] allegiance to the avant- garde.” 61 Beginning with Parade and onwards, Diaghilev left behind the passé aesthetics of prewar Russian collaborators (such as artists Leon Bakst and Alexandre Benois) and plunged into partnerships with artists tied to Futurism, Cubism and Neo-Primitivism. Many figures and schools of the protean European avant-garde celebrated idioms of American popular culture, such as jazz and cinema, as “refreshing” in war-devastated Europe, and consequently assimilated them into their own works. For example, composers of the French avant-garde, particularly certain members of Les Six like Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) and 57 Alice Nikitina, Nikitina: By Herself, trans. Baroness Budberg (London: Allan Wingate, 1959), 60. 58 Quoted in Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 211. 59 Ibid., 333. 60 Tamara Geva, Split Seconds: A Remembrance (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 349. 61 Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 76. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 21 Geroges Auric (1899-1983), used jazz influences in their scores in order to articulate a revitalization of French music that they deemed to be weighed down by the impressionism of Debussy and the musical legacy of Wagner. In ballet culture, the Ballets Suédois assimilated American idioms and popular vernacular in their productions, which ultimately caused the Swedish company to surpass the Ballets Russes experiments in modernity. The Ballets Suédois, active between 1920 and 1925, worked within a similar modernist aesthetic championed by the Ballets Russes and attracted the same audience, which inevitably resulted in the two companies being compared to one another. 62 The Ballets Suédois, however, distinguished itself from their Russian counterparts by embracing trends of American and popular culture in their ballet productions. Impresario Rolf de Maré (1888-1964), often referred to by the French press as the “Swedish Diaghilev,” explained the motive of the Ballets Suédois as seeking to “translate through ballet the image of our time” and having “a duty to be the expression of modern life.” 63 With productions such as Sculpture Nègre (1920) and La création du monde (1923) the Ballets Suédois worked in a territory the Ballets Russes had not much ventured: the perceived “primitiveness” of the African and African-American. As art historian Petrine Archer Straw has described, “the Ballets Russes favored a modernism harmonized with folk and classical forms, while the Ballets Suédois courted a modernist shot through with contemporary references in which black culture was an important source.” 64 Sculpture Nègre was a project by the Ballets Suédois choreographer, Jean Börlin (1893-1930), which the dancer designed a sculpture of an 62 For a detailed comparison of the Ballets Suédois and the Ballets Russes, see Lynn Garafola, “Rivals for the New: The Ballets Suédois and the Ballets Russes,” in Paris Modern: The Swedish Ballet 1920-1925, ed. Nancy Van Norman Baer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 63 Quoted in Charles R. Batson, Dance, Desire, and Anxiety in Early Twentieth-Century French Theatre: Playing Identities (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 102. 64 Petrine Archer Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 67. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 22 African mask and danced to Francis Poulenc’s (1899-1963) Rhapsodie Nègre with costumes by Paul Colin (1892-1985), who in 1925 would be made famous for his posters for La Revue Nègre starring Josephine Baker. 65 In La création du monde, Milhaud composed a score inspired by the jazz music he heard while visiting clubs in Harlem to a scenario based on Swiss novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars’ translations of African mythology. 66 Alongside the primitive African-American aesthetic, the Ballets Suédois produced a ballet showcasing the lighter side of popular America with Within the Quota (1923). With a scenario and designs by American expatriate Gerald Murphy (1888-1964) and music by composer and charismatic performer of American-style popular songs, Cole Porter (1891-1954) (orchestrated by Charles Koechlin), Within the Quota represented to Murphy, “nothing but a translation on the stage of the way America looks to me from over here.” 67 The ballet satirically illustrated a Swedish immigrant’s arrival to New York City, and featured exaggerated characters partially inspired by American cinema (such as a Millionairess, a Colored Gentleman, a Jazz- Baby, a Cowboy and America’s Sweetheart, who ultimately whisks the Swede to Hollywood) accompanied by Porter’s score featuring elements of jazz and ragtime, and parodies of silent movie music. Porter was a member of the Ballets Russes social circle and a benefactor of the ballet company (partly because he had fallen “head over heels” for Kochno), however Diaghilev purposely ignored Porter’s musical talents. As Kochno remembered, “Diaghilev never talked to [Porter] about his music and pretended not to know that this charming, high-living ‘American in 65 Pascale De Groote, Ballets Suédois (Ghent, Belgium: Academia Press, 2002), 20. 66 In his autobiography, the composer states, “At last in La création du monde, I had the opportunity I had been waiting for to use those elements of jazz to which I had devoted so much study. I adopted the same orchestra as used in Harlem, seventeen solo instruments, and made a wholesale use of the jazz style to convey a purely classical feeling. ” Darius Milhaud, Notes Without Music: An Autobiography, trans. Donald Evans (New York: De Capo, 1970), 118. 67 “American Ballet in Paris Tonight,” New York Herald, 25 October 1923. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 23 Paris’ was a composer.” 68 Upon hearing of the Ballets Suédois commission to Porter, Diaghilev wrote to Kochno, “Cole is writing a ballet… Danger!” 69 The “danger” alluded to in this letter can be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, Diaghilev may have had concerns about Porter’s treatment of the ballet genre, given that his musical output lay mainly in the popular music stream with contributions to revues, comedies and musicals. Porter’s inevitable application of popular American techniques to ballet would be, in the eyes of Diaghilev, a manner of lowering the cultural status of the art form. Another interpretation may be that the impresario perceived a ballet by Porter as a competitive threat to the status of the Ballets Russes. Within the Quota was one of the Ballets Suédois most successful productions on their American tour in 1923/1924. La création du monde, however, had to be removed from the program during the tour because it was considered “too modernist” for the American audience, resulting in de Maré, like Diaghilev, to view American audiences as an “infantile public that went to the theatre for relaxation and a good laugh and was completely uninterested in the creative and the innovative.” 70 Unlike the Ballets Suédois, Diaghilev avoided using American culture as a means of representing a modernist aesthetic, and instead expressed avant-gardist tendencies through different outlets; as Garafola has described, the Ballets Russes approached modernism while still “married to the traditional ballet themes and genres.” 71 One modernist trend Diaghilev did support is Garafola’s concept of “lifestyle modernism.” 72 In order to cast off the melodramatic, mythical scenarios of the prewar repertoire (such as Pétrouchka), lifestyle modernism instead 68 Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev: A Life, trans. Jane Hedley-Prôle and S.J. Leinbach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 405; Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 222. 69 Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 222. 70 Erik Näslund, Rolf de Maré: Art Collector, Ballet Director, Museum Creator, trans. Roger Tanner (Alton, UK: Dance Books, 2009), 349. 71 Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 82. 72 Ibid., 115. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 24 used the “everyday” as a bases for ballet. For example, Francis Poulenc’s 1924 ballet Les biches, as Taruskin notes, was “plotless,” and “simply portrayed a soirée, hosted by a rich society matron, at which girls in summer dresses danced and flirted with young men in bathing suits.” 73 Several other Ballets Russes productions followed this trend, including Parade (representing the “everyday” of the music hall), and Milhaud’s 1924 ballet Le train bleu (which depicted an afternoon at a fashionable vacation spot). America as a Threat Diaghilev’s refusal to produce an American ballet with the Ballets Russes may also be understood at the impresario seeing the wealth and culture of the New World as a threat to European art and traditions. Thus by promoting an American ballet, he would be contributing the dominant culture. Diaghilev showed resentment towards the economic prosperity he found in America. As war-torn Europe led to poor economic environments in many European countries, the New World was continuing to grow more powerful and more moneyed. Upon his return from the first American tour, Diaghilev expressed to his confidant Misia Sert, “It’s inconceivable! A country where there are no beggars. Not one! It can’t have any atmosphere, any local colour. What would Italy be without her beggars!” 74 Diaghilev’s association of wealth with the atmosphere of America can be interpreted as a defense of the broken economy of Europe, affirming that although Europe had poverty, at least it had culture. Diaghilev also showed resistance to the wealth of Americans around him, even if they were fiscally contributing to the Ballets Russes. Bernays recognized this in Diaghilev during the impresario’s time abroad, stating “I couldn’t help noting his disdain for America and Americans, particularly those who had showered hundreds of thousands of dollars on him to bring the ballet 73 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 568. 74 Quoted in Scheijen, Diaghilev, 320. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 25 here.” 75 Another anecdote that supports this is from 1925, when Porter hired members of the Ballets Russes to perform for a party at the Palazzo Papadopoli in Venice. When the American added a few “presents” in the dancer’s “usual envelopes,” dancer Serge Lifar recalls the impresario caused a scene by shouting, “How dare they give presents to my artists - my artists have no need of such paltry sops!” 76 This reaction shows Diaghilev’s vulnerability when his dancers received more money from an American than he could provide for them. Diaghilev also saw many of his dancers leave the Ballets Russes to peruse a career in America or in the more lucrative and popular streams of dance. Pavlova, who danced in the Ballets Russes first season in 1909, left the Diaghilev’s company with another Ballets Russes dancer, Mikhail Mordkin (1880-1944), to tour America, which Lifar remembers “pained him greatly… especially as he was unable to compete with the fees she could obtain in America.” 77 Others followed suit. Adolph Bolm chose to stay in America after the Ballets Russes’ 1917 American tour to choreograph revues and run a small touring company, the Ballet Intime, and the Chicago Allied Arts. Tamara Geva left the Ballets Russes to participate in the American tour of the revue Chauve Souris (1922). Two of Diaghilev’s main choreographers also made their way to the New World: Michal Fokine (1880-1942) in 1919 to choreograph revues and open a “prestigious and successful school” in New York, and Massine in 1928 to choreograph vaudeville sequences for New York’s Roxy Cinema. 78 Diaghilev saw in moneyed America and its lucrative popular entertainment a threat and an injustice. While his high-art Ballets Russes and other European institutions were constantly hard pressed for funds, money was being poured into American popular entertainments, and in 75 Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 110. 76 Serge Lifar, Serge Diaghilev, His Life, His Work, His Legend, (New York: De Capo, 1940), 305. 77 Ibid., 136. 78 Reynolds and McCormick, No Fixed Points, 115, 117. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 26 turn was tempting his dancers to step-down to cultural levels he considered too “low” for their training and technique, and more importantly their association with the Ballets Russes. Parade This chapter has thus far illustrated that Diaghilev viewed the “lowbrow” associations of American culture as being inappropriate for assimilation in his ballet, even as the Ballets Russes adapted a modernist aesthetic. An important exception, however, concerns the very ballet that marked the Ballets Russes’ shift to Modernism, Parade, for it featured idioms drawn from the popular vernacular of the music hall, the circus and most noteworthy to this discussion, American cinema. Whereas the content and treatment of the popular and American cultural materials in Parade has been discussed at length elsewhere, Diaghilev’s agreement to produce the ballet raises questions around the programming and patronage in the Ballets Russes. Was the impresario under the influence of Cocteau and perhaps less invested in the production than others? Was it that, as Buckle remarks, Diaghilev wanted to “show that the Russian Ballet was capable of taking new turnings” and that Parade represented the ultimate answer for Diaghilev’s request for Cocteau to “astonish” him? 79 Whatever the case may be, one of the reasons for the out-of-character production of Parade seems to have been for financial gain. The conception of Parade began in Paris with French artist and poet Jean Cocteau (1889- 1963) and composer Erik Satie (1866-1925), who from the outset endeavored to have their ballet produced by the Ballets Russes. When the concept of the ballet began to materialize in the first half of 1916, Diaghilev was abroad with the Ballets Russes American tour, so the pair perused their next best option, Misia Sert. To Diaghilev, Misia was a beneficiary, confidant, and some 79 Buckle, Diaghilev, 330. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 27 one whose judgment he often relied on. 80 Although getting Misia’s support was initially difficult (she encouraged a ballet by Satie, but was less thrilled with Cocteau’s contribution), upon securing Picasso as the designer for the ballet, she became supportive of the project. When Diaghilev returned to Paris later that year, he befriended Picasso, and with Misia’s support (artistically, and even more importantly, financially), agreed to produce the ballet. 81 The Parisian audience at the 1917 premiere of Parade was outraged by the assimilation of popular amusements in their ballet, and as Taruskin states, viewed it as “insulting ballet’s proud aristocratic heritage.” 82 Parade constituted the Ballets Russes’ first brief fling with popular entertainments, one that paved the way for companies like the Ballets Suédois to produce such class-bending productions in the 1920s. Diaghilev, however, swore off the elision of the “lowbrow” with the high-art of ballet for the remainder of the Ballets Russes existence. Conclusion As this chapter has discussed, Diaghilev’s opinion of America and its culture was multifaceted. Diaghilev found his skepticism of the American public’s ability to appreciate the refinements of his ballet confirmed during the Ballets Russes American tours in 1916 and 1917, which he agreed to only as a last-resort to maintain his ballet financially through the war years. As for American culture, the impresario enjoyed popular entertainments from the New World, but found their “lowbrow” associations unacceptable for the high-art status he strove for in the Ballets Russes, especially as the ballet became more accessible to a middle-class audience and adapted a modernist aesthetic. Not all impresarios felt the same as Diaghilev, as illustrated in the Ballets Suédois popular culture inspired productions. Above all, this chapter has introduced 80 Scheijen, Diaghilev: A Life, 245. 81 Billy Klüver, A Day With Picasso: Twenty-four Photographs by Jean Cocteau (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 77- 80. 82 Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 562. The New World, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 28 themes and issues that are discussed in regards to Diaghilev’s commission for an American ballet score in Chapter 2 of this thesis. CHAPTER 2 Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers Edward L. Bernays, the publicist for the Ballets Russes’ first American tour, wrote in his 1965 memoir that Diaghilev would have never considered producing an American ballet: “No one thought of commissioning an American ballet composed by an American. Diaghileff, I am sure, would have been cold to such a suggestion.” 83 Bernays, who had described Diaghilev’s opinion of Americans as “materialistic, insular, sauvage and gross,” recapitulated the common assumption that Diaghilev felt nothing but disdain for the New World. However, and as discussed in Chapter 1, Diaghilev’s aversion to American culture was in relation to its “lowbrow” associations which he deemed inappropriate for the high-art of the Ballets Russes. 84 And yet, unknown to Bernays and excluded from much of the Ballets Russes literature, is that in 1923, Diaghilev did commission a “typically American” ballet score from an American composer, Chicagoan John Alden Carpenter. This uncharacteristic commission illustrates one instance of Diaghilev compromising his high artistic standards to keep his ballet financially secure and culturally relevant in vanguard Europe. The commission process, from the initial request to Carpenter through to the ultimate dismissal of his score, provides insight into the complex politics of patronage of the Ballets Russes. Furthermore, the commission to Carpenter can be perceived as the consequence of the composer’s overriding ambition to work with the Ballets Russes, a strategic professional positing that dates back to Carpenter’s first encounter with the Ballets Russes during their tours of America in 1916 and 1917. 83 Edward L Bernays, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 122. 84 Ibid. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 30 John Alden Carpenter’s Transatlantic Career John Alden Carpenter’s compositional career transcended national borders. Although a life-long resident of Chicago and a product of upper-class America (Harvard educated, manager of his father’s wholesale business and financially well-off), Carpenter’s compositional output was molded by contemporary European trends. His early works emulated the impressionism of Claude Debussy, followed by the adaptation of modernist trends inspired by the European avant- garde during the inter-war years, which later developed into a neoclassical aesthetic. Throughout this stylistic progression (especially in his more mature works), Carpenter did not merely imitate the music of Europe as many American composers were criticized for doing, but instead tailored European-inspired aesthetics to the culture of America. It is for this reason that American composer Henry Cowell (1897-1965) referred to Carpenter as a composer who does “not attempt to develop original ideas or materials but who takes those which they already find in America and adapt them to a European style,” and Howard Pollack considers Carpenter’s most notable characteristic to be “a unique melding of European high art and American popular traditions.” 85 Carpenter’s transatlantic career leading up to the commission from Diaghilev, particularly his first two ballets, illustrates the development of a compositional style in line with the aesthetic of the Ballets Russes. Carpenter’s music education began with piano lessons from his mother, Elizabeth Curtis Greene, who was an amateur organist and mezzo-soprano. 86 Between the ages of eleven and seventeen, Carpenter continued to study piano with Amy Fay (1844-1928) (the author of Music 85 Henry Cowell, American Composers on American Music: A Symposium (California: Stanford University Press, 1933), 8; Howard Pollack, John Alden Carpenter: A Chicago Composer (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 3. 86 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 5. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 31 Study in Germany) and Viennese pianist-composer William C.E. Seeboeck (1859-1907), who provided the young musician with a base of knowledge and appreciation of the great European composers of previous centuries, particularly Liszt, Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, Chopin and Beethoven. 87 During these formative years, Carpenter began improvising on the piano and was notating his compositions by age ten. From this point forward, Carpenter’s interest was geared more towards composition than piano performance. 88 During his four years at Harvard (1893- 1897) Carpenter studied music with John Knowles Paine (1839-1906), one of the first Americans to gain acceptance as a composer of large-scale concert music and to be appointed professor of music at an American university. 89 Under Paine, Carpenter composed his early works, mostly songs and piano pieces, in a sentimental American parlor tradition that Pollack characterizes as having modest technical demands, small vocal ranges, square phrases and tuneful melodies. 90 And yet, these works exhibited particularly sensitive treatment to text setting, voice leading and refinement of harmony through the use of non-chord tones, ninth and eleventh chords and polytonal touches. After graduation from Harvard, Carpenter returned to Chicago and joined his father’s wholesale business, George B. Carpenter and Company, where he held the position of vice- president until his retirement at the age of sixty. Carpenter, like Charles Ives, worked simultaneously as an entrepreneur and a composer, a dual activity which allowed him to travel often to New York and Europe to investigate compositional opportunities. The composer admitted, “It was a family business, and I was able to regulate my hours and vacations. If I 87 Amy Fay, Music Study in Germany (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1887); Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 9-11. 88 Madeleine Goss, Modern Music-Makers (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1952), 34. 89 Carpenter also took classes in history, government and law, and economics, Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 14. 90 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 17-19. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 32 needed a couple extra weeks for composition, I could take them.” 91 In 1900, Carpenter married Rue Winterbotham (1879-1931), who would play an important role in the composer’s professional life. From 1908 to 1912, Carpenter continued to develop his compositional techniques though studies with his most influential teacher, German-American theorist Bernhard Ziehn (1845- 1912), after a brief and unsuccessful winter studying under Edward Elgar in Rome. According to Carpenter, Ziehn “did more” for him than anyone he had ever worked with. 92 Through hundreds of harmonic and contrapuntal exercises and free composition with Ziehn, Carpenter fostered a mature style of orchestration, sophisticated use of chromatic harmony, and refined musical expression. It was during this time that the influence of ragtime became apparent in the composer’s music (such as his 1905 song “Treat Me Nice”), a trend that threaded through much of Carpenter’s oeuvre through to the 1920s. In the early 1910s, Carpenter’s compositions began to take on an impressionist aesthetic similar to that of Debussy. Songs such as “Looking Glass River” and “The Green River,” both written in 1909, first suggest the influence of the French composer. Debussy’s impact on Carpenter’s music becomes most evident in his 1910 setting of five poems by Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), “Chanson d’automne,” “Le Ciel,” “Dansons la gigue!” “Il pleure dans mon coeur,” and “En sourdine,” that contain distinctively Debussian trademarks such as richly spaced ninth chords, open intervals in the high range of the piano, modal and tonal ambiguities and harmonies constructing of major and minor seconds. 93 Carpenter was praised for breaking away from the 91 Walter Monfried, “Carpenter, Businessman-Composer,” The Milwaukee Journal, 30 April 1947, 20. 92 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 50; Ziehn is most notably recognized for his contribution to completing J.S. Bach’s Der Kunst der Fuge with Ferruccio Busoni. Carpenter was the only composer to study with Ziehn for an extended period; Carpenter described Elgar as “a fine man but a poor teacher,” Thomas C. Pierson, “The Life and Times of John Alden Carpenter” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1952), 4; Goss, Modern Music-Makers, 35. 93 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 76. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 33 American song tradition, with one critic describing his songs as “beauty undisfigured by cheap tunefulness” and containing “harmonic subtlety” that “stuck a new note in native composition.” 94 Fig 1. John Alden Carpenter, undated. 94 Felix Borowski, “John Alden Carpenter,” The Musical Quarterly 16/4 (1930): 451. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 34 Carpenter’s sensitivity and careful selection of texts also set him apart from contemporaneous American composers. The texts in his songs are reflective of Chicago’s active literary community, which cultivated in the composer an appreciation for the poems of modern French writers (as evidenced by his setting of the Verlaine poems), English decadents, as well as Japanese, Chinese, and modern verse. 95 Carpenter’s involvement in America’s literary scene is evident in the 1913 song cycle Gitanjali (Song Offerings), a setting of six English translations of poems by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), composed at the cusp of the poet’s popularity in England and recognition in America. 96 By 1914, Carpenter’s interest in song composition began to “fade out,” as he entered the field of orchestral programmatic music, the first step towards his compositions for ballet. 97 His orchestral suite, Adventures in a Perambulator (1914) featured “the frightfully exciting things that a child sees when he is out with his nurse.” 98 Scored for full orchestra, the suite is divided into six movements: “En Voiture!” “The Policeman,” “The Hurdy-Gurdy,” “The Lake,” “Dogs,” and “Dreams,” all of which feature leitmotifs representing the perambulator (a syncopated ostinato resembling the limping noise of a faulty wheel) and the nurse. In this work, Carpenter places American and contemporary French musical idioms side-by-side: In “The Hurdy-Gurdy,” there are quotations of Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1911), followed by a formless and free flowing “Lakes” with textures and colours akin to Debussy. Adventures in a Perambulator was premiered by Fredrick Stock (1872-1942) with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra 19 March 1915 and was an immediate success, applauded for its wit and humour, and 95 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 82-83. 96 For more information regarding Tagore’s success in America, see Stephen N. Hay, “Tagore in America,” American Quarterly 14/2 (1962): 439-463; Gitanjali was one of Carpenter’s most successful works, performed internationally in Berlin and London, and included in the repertoire of songstresses Eva Gauthier and Conchita Supervia, Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 100. 97 Goss, Modern Music-Makers, 37. 98 Letter from Carpenter to Ellen Borden, undated, C-DLC Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 35 praised by one critic as “the cleverest score by an American composer we have heard in the history of the resident symphony orchestra.” 99 Carpenter was active in the conversation surrounding the formation of an American school of music during a time when Americans were searching for their own voice in the arts. Carpenter encouraged American composers to use indigenous materials in their works, such as jazz (which the composer recognized as “the American folklore”), describing it as having “roots in the American soil,” and containing “certain elements that should be used by musicians.” 100 At the same time, Carpenter defended the criticisms surrounding the European influence in his music, stating in a 1915 interview with the Christian Science Monitor that “all our [American] art is bound to be polyglot, and that does not mitigate against individualism in the accomplishment of large and serious things.” 101 The synthesis of European styles and American cultural idioms is explicitly represented in Carpenter’s two piano works Polonaise américaine (1912) and Tango américain (1920), where, as the titles suggest, dance forms from other cultures are Americanized. Polonaise américaine, described by Carpenter as “queer raggy,” is written in the form of a polonaise (a traditional Polish dance in triple metre with accented first beat, ternary form and “grandeur”), made American by the use of ragtime-inspired syncopations. 102 In the same manner, Carpenter’s piano piece Tango American (1920) incorporated tango-like materials into a short work that resembles a Cole Porter-type popular song with tuneful eight-measure phrases and an improvisatory middle section. 103 Both of these works, along with other instrumental works in Carpenter’s catalogue (such as Berceuse de guerre, “En Voiture!” from Adventures in a 99 Quoted in Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 117. 100 Ibid., 199. 101 Ibid., 143. 102 Ibid., 89. 103 For further analysis of Tango américane, see Pollock, John Alden Carpenter, 262. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 36 Perambulator), are given French titles. By this, Carpenter may have been trying to portray an air of French sophistication in his works to distinguish them from the average American popular tune. Carpenter and Ballet: The Birthday of the Infanta and Krazy Kat Carpenter’s first venture into composing for dance began soon after the Ballets Russes’ American tours in 1916 and 1917, performances of which he likely attended in Chicago. The Ballets Russes first appeared there on 14 February 1916 for a two-week engagement at the Chicago Auditorium Building, which is now infamous for being the first time the ballet company performed to half-empty theatres (as discussed in Chapter 1). Carpenter, however, had the cultural motivation and financial means to purchase the pricey tickets for these shows and therefore likely attended them. It is also probable that Carpenter would have been present for the Ballets Russes’ second visit to Chicago on 28 January 1917, a single matinee performance at Cohan’s Grand Opera House that was much more successful than the previous year due to Nijinsky’s appearance. 104 Pollack suggests that Carpenter may have hosted members of the Ballets Russes entourage in their home during the company’s Chicago engagements, particularly dancer Adolph Bolm, who would reside in America after the Ballets Russes 1917 tour, collaborate with Carpenter on multiple occasions, and sustain a life-long friendship with the composer. 105 The strongest evidence pointing towards Carpenter’s attendance at the Ballets Russes’ American tours may be found in the composer’s own compositional output: in 1917, Carpenter began work on his first ballet score, The Birthday of the Infanta, followed by the “jazz 104 The ballets produced during the Ballets Russes’ visits to Chicago were L'oiseau de feu, Le Carnaval, Scheherazade, l'Après midi du faune, Prince Igor, Pas de deux, Le Soleil de Nuit, Les Sylphides, Pétrouchka, Thamar, Le spectre de la rose, Cléopâtre, The Sleeping Princess and Till Eulenspiegel, Jane Pritchard, “Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes-An Itinerary. Part I (1909-1921),” Dance Research 27/1 (2009): 140, 152. 105 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 166. Pollack also suggests that Carpenter may have seen the Ballets Russes as early as 1910, during a visit to Paris. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 37 pantomime” Krazy Kat in 1922. The collaborative nature, modernist leanings and representation of national exoticism in these productions show influence of the Ballets Russes model, and can be interpreted as “stepping stones” towards a commission from Diaghilev and the composition of Skyscrapers. Carpenter’s first venture into the ballet genre was with The Birthday of the Infanta, based on the 1889 Oscar Wilde short story of the same name. 106 Set in seventeenth-century Spain, Wilde’s story centers on a Spanish Infanta and a “crooked” Dwarf named Pedro, who misunderstands mockery as a sign of love and ultimately dies of heartbreak upon realizing his mistake. Heather R. Lanctot found Carpenter’s setting of Wilde’s Birthday of the Infanta reflective of the story’s prominence in America at the time (the story was adapted into plays, children’s books, drawings in newspapers, etc.), however the story’s tragic narrative and exotic locale is in line with the Ballets Russes prewar and wartime aesthetic. 107 Pollack has identified the resemblance of Pedro with the “pathetic anti-hero” Pétrouchka in Stravinsky’s 1911 ballet, in that both characters suffer shattered idylls that lead to fatal consequences. 108 The Spanish setting of The Birthday of the Infanta paralleled the contemporaneous trend of Spanish culture-inspired ballets in the Ballets Russes, one that Sjeng Scheijen has coined the “Spanish Period,” which includes the ballets Las Meninas (1916), Le tricorne (1919), and Cuadro Flamenco (1921). 109 In his score for The Birthday of the Infanta, Carpenter conveyed the Spanish locale by 106 Oscar Wilde, The Birthday of the Infanta (New York, The Macmillian Company, 1929); Carpenter had previously set text by Wilde in two songs from 1912, “Les Silhouettes” and “Her Voice.” 107 Heather R. Lanctot, “The Birthday of the Infanta: An Early Twentieth-Century Chicago Ballet Contextualized” (Masters thesis, University of Oregon, 2012). 108 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 169. 109 Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev: A Life, trans. Jane Hedley-Prôle and S.J. Leinbach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 335. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 38 incorporating a reoccurring “exuberant Spanish waltz,” an “exotic gypsy dance,” castanets and a “quasi-guitarre effect” in the piano created by placing paper between the instrument’s strings. 110 Carpenter’s collaborators for The Birthday of the Infanta, Bolm and Robert Edmond Jones, had previously worked with the Ballets Russes and helped contribute to the Ballets Russes-like collaboration and aesthetic (Figure 2). Bolm was engaged by the managers of the Chicago Grand Opera to choreograph the ballet and dance the role of the Dwarf in the production. As a graduate of the Russian Imperial Ballet School, Bolm was recruited by Diaghilev to dance the Chief Warrior in Prince Igor for the Ballets Russes inaugural season in 1909. The dancer remained with the Ballets Russes until 1917, playing important roles such as Pierrot in Carnival, the Moor in Petrushka, and King Dodon in Le Coq d’or. He maintained this success even though he was frequently overshadowed by Diaghilev’s favorites (Nijinsky followed by Léonide Massine) and thus allotted only small choreographic assignments in opera productions. 111 When a spinal injury during the Ballets Russes second American tour left him in a body cast, Bolm decided to stay permanently in America and establish the Ballet Intime in New York, a small ballet company dedicated to Fokine-inspired choreography that the dancer referred to as a “petit Ballets Russes.” 112 Robert Edmond Jones’ invitation to work on The Birthday of the Infanta was likely through a recommendation from Carpenter and Bolm, who were both familiar with his work for Nijinsky’s production of Till Eulenspeigel in 1917. 113 As discussed in Chapter 1, Jones’ “New Stagecraft” aesthetic was in line with Diaghilev’s artistic values. His designs for Carpenter’s 110 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 171; Although there is no authoritative copy extant of Carpenter’s completed 1918 score of The Birthday of the Infanta as it would have been heard at the ballet’s premiere in 1919, Pollack has analyzed the manuscript 45-page condensed piano score and a 182-page orchestral score housed at the Library of Congress. 111 Suzanne Carbonneau, “Adolph Bolm and America,” in The Ballets Russes and Its World, ed. Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 222. 112 Ibid., 225. 113 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 177. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 39 ballet depicted Spanish Baroque architecture in his “abstract realist” aesthetic, with “larger than life” constructions and period costuming that is comparable to José Maria Sert’s (1974-1945) costume designs for the Ballets Russes Las Meninas (Figures 3-5) Fig. 2 – Carpenter, Adolph Bolm, Robert Edmond Jones, undated. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 40 Bolm’s expressive pantomime and Jones’ Spain-inspired setting, accompanied by Carpenter’s Spanish-inflected score, was premiered at the Chicago Auditorium Theatre on 23 December 1919, and was produced again at the Lexington Theatre in New York two months later. The ballet was recognized by a critic of the Chicago Daily Journal as in line with the aesthetic of the Ballets Russes: “It is my sincere belief that this Chicago composer has turned out a score to which among the moderns the only ones comparable are those of Igor Stravinsky, as presented by the Diaghileff Ballets Russes on the same stage some four or five years ago.” 114 Fig. 3 - The Birthday of the Infanta 114 Edward Moore, “J.A. Carpenter ‘Skyscrapers,’ Put on Records,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 August 1932. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 41 Fig. 4 - The Birthday of the Infanta Fig. 5 - The Birthday of the Infanta Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 42 Carpenter’s second ballet, Krazy Kat: A Jazz Pantomime, is often noted as the first authentically American ballet for its incorporation of two distinctive forms of American culture: George Herriman’s (1880-1944) comic strip of the same name, and jazz. Herriman’s Krazy Kat first appeared in New York newspapers in 1913 and featured a gender-bending love triangle between characters Krazy Kat (a cat whose ambiguous gender is never revealed), Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pup, which always ended with Ignatz Mouse throwing a brick at Krazy Kat. 115 The cultural nuances and surrealism within Herriman’s comic catered to a niche audience of the artistic and intellectual elite (such as Carpenter), and prompted cultural critic Gilbert Seldes (1893-1970) in The Seven Lively Arts (1924) to refer to the comic as a “work of art” and a “masterpiece.” 116 The explicit use of jazz in Krazy Kat: A Jazz Pantomime (the first time the word “jazz” appeared in the title of a composition by a composer of concert music) was novel, premiering over two years before George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924). 117 Pollack has identified features in Carpenter’s score that gave it its jazz identification: syncopated rhythmic figures, blue notes, parallel harmonies, the use of jazz instrumentation (alto saxophone, drum set), jazz instrumental techniques (muted trumpets, trombone glissandi, fortissiamo clarinet in its highest register), and performance markings like “jazzando” and “traps ad lib.” 118 Carpenter’s use of these explicitly American forms in his ballet may be considered as a fitting into Diaghilev’s advice to American composers to use their indigenous materials to forge a national identity in their art. A concert version of Krazy Kat was premiered by the Chicago Symphony on 23 December 1921 under the baton of Frederick Stock (1872-1942) and the revelation of Krazy Kat 115 Craig Yoe, ed., Krazy Kat and the Art of George Herriman: A Celebration (New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2011), 17. 116 Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924), 231. 117 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 195. 118 Ibid., 200. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 43 in its ballet form occurred at New York’s Town Hall on 20 January 1922 by Bolm’s Ballet Intime conducted by French flutist and conductor Georges Barrère (1876-1944). Herriman devised the ballet’s scenario, designed the full-bodied costumes and make-up, and created a comic book-like background by having the scene unfold as a panorama on a roller mechanism which made the comic strip come to life. 119 Bolm choreographed the dance and played the role of Krazy Kat. A common sentiment expressed by critics was that Bolm, as a Russian, was an inappropriate choreographer and dancer for the lead role in an American-themed ballet; critic Henrietta Straus expressed this in Nation magazine by writing, “Their failure was due to no lack of artistry, but merely to the fact that one was Russian and the other [Barrère] was French.” 120 Carpenter’s use of jazz in Krazy Kat was attacked from several quarters, with critics reprimanding the score for “trying too hard;” complaining that it “did not elevate jazz;” and chastising it for being “too polished.” One critic, Richard Aldrich, praised Carpenter’s treatment of jazz in his score, but felt that Carpenter was composing in a style too “lowbrow” for his educational level, …it behooves Mr. Carpenter to remember that art is long and life is short: that he was graduated in the Class of 1897, Harvard, already about to have its twenty-fifth anniversary, and that there is still a great deal for him to do in music besides the admirable things he has already done, and that jazz pantomime is not among it. 121 In Krazy Kat, as Howard Pollack has identified, there is a parody of the Ballets Russes 1912 production L’apres-midi d’un faune. 122 As the curtain opens on Carpenter’s ballet, Krazy is seen asleep on the stage similar to Nijinsky’s Faun character in the Ballets Russes production. During this time, a chromatic theme similar to the “Faun’s theme” from Debussy’s score is 119 Carbonneau, “Adolph Bolm and America,” 229. 120 Henrietta Straus, “Marking the Miles,” Nation 114, 1 March 1922. 121 Richard Aldrich, “Music: Modern Music and Ballet,” New York Times 21 January 1922, 16. 122 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 193. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 44 presented, except that in Krazy Kat the theme is written for a muted trumpet marked “Jazzando,” compared to the breathy, lower register flute in Debussy’s score (Examples 1.1 and 1.2). Ex. 1.1 - John Alden Carpenter, Krazy Kat, mm. 23-28 Ex. 1.2 - Claude Debussy, L'après midi d'un faune, mm. 1-4 By this, Carpenter makes Debussy’s theme “jazzy,” and foreshadows the Americanizing of French themes in Skyscrapers. The parody also illustrates Carpenter’s familiarity with the Ballets Russes production, and may be considered as homage to Debussy and the ballet company that inspired his venture into ballet, which he was actively seeking to work with. The Pursuit of Diaghilev After the success of The Birthday of the Infanta, Carpenter had his eyes set on composing a ballet for the Ballets Russes. The composer’s distinguished friends and colleagues advocated for his introduction to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes circles, including his wife Rue, Prokofiev, conductor Pierre Monteux, and Sara and Gerald Murphy. It would not be until the summer of 1923 (after the production of Krazy Kat) that Diaghilev would commission a score from Carpenter. Rue Winterbotham Carpenter was a distinguished figure in her own right in Chicago cultural life. She worked as an interior designer and held the position of president with the Chicago Arts Club from 1918 until her death in 1931, and which under her direction blossomed Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 45 into one of the leading American organizations to exhibit modern art. Described as “avant-garde when the word was unknown to Chicago,” Rue’s objective was to present the highest in the fields of contemporary plastic-arts, literature, theatre, dance and music from around the world, which in turn included exhibitions and performances by many artists associated with the Ballets Russes, including Natalia Goncharova, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Picasso, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Massine. 123 Through the Arts Club, Rue had established contacts with international artists. American journalist Arthur Meeker (1902-1971), who was a close friend of the Carpenter’s only daughter, Genevieve (born in 1904), recalls Rue’s social connections, Mrs. Carpenter was a personal friend of painters and sculptures, in Paris and else where, who were leading the avant-garde movement; this happened to be because she had traveled widely abroad, frequenting precisely those circles; also because, an artist herself, she was greatly beloved by other artists, who naturally told her their plans, let her know when they were coming to America, and came to see her whenever they could. 124 Rue was instrumental to Carpenter’s professional career. Meeker recalls that “without the active co-operation of his wife, his artistic career would have been much less successful than it was. She knew how to push him as he couldn’t push himself.” 125 True to her reputation, Rue began to facilitate Carpenter’s entrance into the Ballets Russes during a trip to Paris in 1920, creating what may have been the composer’s first impression on Diaghilev. While in Paris in the spring of 1920, Rue asked Prokofiev, with whom the Carpenters had become friends with during the Russian’s visits to Chicago, to arrange an introduction to Diaghilev with the hopes the impresario would be interested in producing The Birthday of the Infanta. 126 Prokofiev obliged, and as the pair drove to the meeting together, Rue remarked, “Oh, 123 James M. Wells, Portrait of an Era: Rue Winterbotham Carpenter and the Arts Club of Chicago 1916-1931 (Chicago: Arts Club of Chicago, 1986), 6. 124 Arthur Meeker, Chicago, With Love: A Polite and Personal History (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1955), 166-67. 125 Ibid., 171. 126 Sergei Prokofiev, Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1915-1923:Behind the Mask, ed. trans. Anothony Phillips (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 516. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 46 what would John not give to have Diaghilev accept his ballet!” 127 Rue brought to the meeting the score of The Birthday of the Infanta, photos of the production, and a letter of introduction written by Pierre Monteux (1875-1964). 128 The letter read: Monsieur Carpenter est un des plus talentueuse [sic] parmi les compositeurs Américains; ses tendances sont modernes et je suis sûr que son ballet, que vous apporte Madame Carpenter, vous intéressera comme il m’a intéressé moi-même, musicalement et scéniquement. Il a été monté à Chicago, par Bolm et a obtenu un très grand succès. 129 Monteux’s letter, meant as an icebreaker into the world of Diaghilev, was sincere. The conductor thought highly of Carpenter’s compositions, for he conducted the Boston premiere of the composer’s Piano Concertino with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 13 February 1920, and continued to program works by Carpenter nearly every season after the war. 130 It is unknown how Diaghilev responded to this meeting with Rue, however her charming personality (she had been compared to Misia Sert and Coco Chanel, two of Diaghilev’s closest female friends), worldliness, fluency in French and Italian (qualities obtained from her European travel and education) and knowledge of art make it promising that the two got along well. A successful meeting with Rue may have reflected well on Carpenter, but nowhere is there evidence that the impresario considered producing the The Birthday of the Infanta, nor was it likely for the impresario agree to produce a modern ballet that had been premiered elsewhere, particularly America (Stravinsky’s Apollo musagète [1928] an outstanding exception). Previous to the meeting, Prokofiev played though Carpenter’s score and predicted in his diary, “I doubt whether Diaghilev will want to produce this ballet: a procession from the banal to the ephemeral, 127 Ibid. 128 Monteux worked with the Ballets Russes for some of their most memorable performances in Europe and American tours before obtaining position as principle conductor with the Metropolitan Opera (1916 to 1919), and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1920 to 1924). 129 Quoted in Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 459n2. 130 Ibid., 139, 296. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 47 often easy on the ear but always nugatory.” 131 Nevertheless, the adaptation of the Wilde story may have reflected well on Carpenter’s literary tastes, for as Annabel Rutherford has distinguished, Wilde was an important literary figure to Diaghilev. 132 Perhaps what most deterred Diaghilev from producing The Birthday of the Infanta was Carpenter’s adaptation of a Spanish theme and aesthetic, which was exactly what the impresario discouraged from Americans, and went against his suggestion that Americans should look to their own culture in their art instead of using materials from other countries. Although Rue’s meeting with Diaghilev was unsuccessful in ensuring a performance of The Birthday of the Infanta by the Ballets Russes, her introduction of Carpenter to the impresario surely contributed to the commission he received when he traveled to Europe in the summer of 1923. Along with Rue and their daughter, Carpenter spent several weeks in Paris, and some time in Venice visiting with Gerald Murphy and Cole Porter as they were working on their ballet for the Ballets Suédois, Within the Quota. During this time, Carpenter regularly wrote to his mistress Ellen Borden regarding his activities and thoughts on his experiences abroad. From these letters, we gain insight into the cultural events Carpenter attended, who he was spending time with, and his general impressions of the Parisian cultural environment. The overarching theme in the letters is the sheer amount of cultural activity occurring in Paris; Carpenter wrote to Ellen, “Oh- oh – plenty to do – plenty to see – plenty to hear… It’s been awfully interesting and exciting and stimulating and I’m sure that I am going to get a lot of new push and confidences out of it.” 133 During his time in the French capital, Carpenter 131 Prokofiev, Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1915-1923, 516. The editor of this edition of Prokofiev’s diaries mistakenly identifies this ballet as Skyscrapers, when in fact it was The Birthday of the Infanta, Carpenter’s only ballet composed at the time of the letter. 132 Annabel Rutherford, “The Triumph of the Veiled Dance: The Influence of Oscar Wilde and Beardsley on Serge Diaghilev’s Creation of the Ballets Russes,” Dance Research 27/1 (2009): 93-107. 133 Letter from Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 5 June 1923, C-DLC. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 48 socialized with the cultural elite (he wrote of Gerald and Sara Murphy, Cole and Linda Porter, Darius Milhaud, Leon Baskt and the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, and one can assume that he mingled with others), took in at least one opera (Padmavati by Albert Roussel, which the composer found “rather formidable and dull”), saw productions by the Ballets Suédois (who Carpenter considered “the next best after Diaghileff”) and attended every performance of the Ballets Russes season. 134 The Ballets Russes had a particularly short season in Paris that summer, with only eight days of performances between 13 June to 21 June at the Thèatre de la Gâité. The new ballets Carpenter saw that were not performed during the American tours were Contes Russes, Pulcinella, Le sacre du printemps, Chout, Parade and most notably the premiere of Stravinsky’s new ballet, Les noces. 135 There was a lot of activity in Paris surrounding Les noces, which was to be premiered to the public on the first night of the Ballets Russes season. Before the premiere, the ballet was unveiled to a private audience at the home of the Princesse Edmond de Polignac (1865-1943), in which Carpenter was in attendance. Carpenter’s invitation to this exclusive event illustrates his position with the inner circle of the Ballets Russes, likely the result of his and Rue’s position in the international arts community. Carpenter’s integration into the Ballets Russes social circle may have also been facilitated by expatriates Sara (1883-1975) and Gerald Murphy (the couple was known to support and promote the works of fellow Americans), who through studying painting with Natalia Gonacharova (1881-1962) had the opportunity to assist in painting their teacher’s set designs for Les noces and attend the rehearsals of the ballet. 136 Carpenter was 134 The Ballets Suédois productions Carpenter attended were Skating Rink, L’homme et son désir, Marchand d’Oiseaux, and Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, letter from Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 5 June 1923, C-DLC. 135 Jane Pritchard, “Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes-An Itinerary. Part II (1922-9)” Dance Research 27/2 (2009): 272. Ballets Carpenter saw in both America in Paris were Pétrouchka and Prince Igor. 136 Deborah Rothschild, ed., Marking it New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 41-42. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 49 stimulated by the action around the private viewing of Les noces and expressed his awe in a letter to Ellen: “an extraordinary occasion,- such a wonderful house – and such a gathering of people that one had always heard about – musicians – painters, royalty – everything.” 137 Carpenter and his family were also invited to the exclusive party hosted by the Murphys in celebration of Stravinsky’s new ballet. The party took place on a péniche docked in the Seine in front of the Chambre des Députés on 1 July, and was intended “for everyone directly connected to the ballet… as well as for those friends of ours who were following its genesis,” and yet the corps de ballet was not invited by specific request of Diaghilev. 138 This boat party has become infamous for the party-antics of the elite guest list that included Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Ansermet, Goncharova, Milhaud, Picasso, Porter, Mikhail Larionov, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Walter Damrosch, Marcelle Meyer, the Princesses de Polignac, Germaine Tailleferre, Tristan Tzara, Boris Kochno and of course the hosts, Gerald and Sara Murphy. 139 Carpenter’s attendance at this party, once referred to as “a kind of summit meeting of the modernist movement in Paris,” speaks again to his integration into the Parisian modern art community. 140 Carpenter regarded Stravinsky’s Les noces as a “genuine creation,” describing it as “Absolutely new and almost terrifying in its fundamental rigor and austerity;” it is no surprise that influence of this ballet should appear in the ballet Carpenter wrote for Diaghilev. 141 137 Letter from Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 14 June 1923, C-DLC. 138 Quoted in Rothschild, Marking it New, 169; Charles Spencer, The World of Serge Diaghilev (London: Paul Elek, 1974), 109. Many sources claim the date of this infamous party was June 17, yet an invitation to Stravinsky from the Murphy’s published in Making It New dates the party as July 1 st at 8pm. 139 Calvin Tomkins, Living Well is the Best Revenge (New York: The Viking Press, 1971), 32; Rothschild, Making it New, 169. 140 Tomkins, Living Well is the Best Revenge, 32. 141 Letter from Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 14 June 1923, C-DLC. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 50 The “Typically American” Commission The day after the public premiere of Les noces, Carpenter wrote to Ellen, “Now some news! I think I am going to be commissioned to do something for the Russian Ballet. There is nothing definitive yet – but they seem to be very much interested. Wouldn’t it be great sport!” 142 What it was that gave Carpenter the impression of an oncoming commission is unknown, but seeing as the letter was written so soon after Les noces activities, one can speculate the composer and Diaghilev (or Diaghilev and his entourage, given the use of the “they” pronoun) partook in preliminary discussions surrounding an American ballet during one of these events. Regardless, three weeks after Carpenter wrote of this premonition, Diaghilev did officially commission Carpenter for a ballet score for the Ballets Russes; in a letter to Ellen dated 6 July, Carpenter wrote, “The grand climax came yesterday afternoon when Diaghileff definitely asked me to so something for the Russian Ballet.” 143 Stephen D. Press, in his book Prokofiev’s Ballets for Diaghilev, proposes that the “commission” was a misunderstanding on the part of Carpenter, in which the composer mistook a conversation with Diaghilev about American ballet as an official request for a score when the impresario was simply making discussion. 144 Although this is one way of dealing with the uncharacteristic commission of an American score by Diaghilev, one can also speculate cultural and financial motives that would cause the impresario to want an American production in his arsenal of ballets. In the early to mid 1920s, Diaghilev was faced with competition from other modernist production companies that had sprung up due to the success of the Ballets Russes, particularly 142 Ibid. 143 Letter from Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 6 July 1923, C-DLC. This letter is evidence against many sources that cite the year of commission as 1924. 144 Stephen D. Press, Prokofiev’s Ballets for Diaghilev (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 223. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 51 the Ballets Suédois. As discussed in Chapter 1, the Ballets Suédois drew on popular American culture as a means of expressing modernity in their productions, and thus, as Garafola describes, “succeeded in edging Diaghilev to the sidelines of avant-garde Paris.” 145 Garafola marks the influence of the Ballets Suédois on Ballets Russes programming as beginning in 1923 (the same year Diaghilev commissioned a score from Carpenter) in that the Russian impresario began request ballet scores from artists associated with the Ballets Suédois, particularly members of Les six (these commissions resulted in Les Biches (1924) from Poulenc, Les fâcheux (1924) from Auric, and Le train bleu (1924) from Milhaud). 146 Also at this time, the Ballets Suédois was in the midst of organizing two ballets influenced by American culture, the Harlem-infused Le création du monde, and the American-cinema-inspired Within the Quota by Porter and Gerald Murphy. Perhaps, then, Diaghilev’s commission to Carpenter can be understood as the impresario wanting an American ballet in his repertoire to keep the Ballets Russes in line with their Swedish counterpart. Diaghilev’s consideration of staging an American ballet may have also been influenced by someone closer to him, namely dancer-turned choreographer, Massine, who had filled the void as Diaghilev’s “pet” after the impresarios’ break from Nijinsky in 1913. Massine conceived of two ballets based on the New World’s cultural past and contemporary phenomena, which in turn may have encouraged Diaghilev to mount his own American ballet. After seeing a series of war dances performed by a group of Sioux Indians at the National Theatre in Washington D.C. during the Ballets Russes 1916 tour, Massine envisioned a ballet based on the story of Pocahontas. Along with Ballets Russes conductor Ernest Ansermet, the dancer visited the 145 Garafola, “Rivals for the New: The Ballets Suédois and the Ballets Russes,” in Paris Modern: The Swedish Ballet 1920-1925, edited by Nancy Van Norman Baer, 66-85 (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1995), 69. 146 Ibid., 72. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 52 Smithsonian Institutions to research tribal moon dances, nuptial ceremonies, funeral rights and Native American musical instruments as study for the projected ballet. 147 Massine’s other American-motivated ballet idea was a polar-opposite to the folklore of Pocahontas; he wanted to create a ballet based on the New York City skyline. In his autobiography, Massine wrote of the idea for a ballet that was influenced by skyscrapers: What particularly interested me was the fact that each unit of those monumental constructions represented a different aspect of life in New York. I thought it would be amusing to make a choreographic composition based on individual rooms, superimposed on one an another, seen simultaneously, a sort of spiritual and visual counterpoint of various characters and their moods, typical of the daily happenings in this great city. As our ship entered the harbour, I visualized vast choreographic ensembles spiraling upwards to express the frenetic tempo of modern life. 148 Like many Europeans who sailed to the port of New York, Massine was impressed by the grandiose architecture of the uniquely American skyscraper. In his autobiography he expressed that skyscrapers, “are more beautiful than anything I have ever seen… their simplicity is so much better than all the decorative sculpture which ruins so much European architecture.” 149 Although no evidence of these ballets materializing exists in the ballet literature, we can speculate that these ideas may have had an influence on Diaghilev’s decision to commission an American ballet, or at least the content of the scenario that the impresario would propose to Carpenter eight years later in Paris. It seems most likely that Diaghilev’s primary reason for commissioning an American- themed ballet was to be able to use it in a future American tour. Previously, Diaghilev turned to America during periods of extreme financial crisis; the Ballets Russes’ American tours in 1916 and 1917, as discussed in Chapter 1, were planned solely for the purpose of keeping the company afloat during the war years. Although 1923 found the Ballets Russes in good economic terms 147 Vicente Garcia-Márquez, Massine: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 64. 148 Léonide Massine, My Life in Ballet (Boston: Macmillian, 1968), 79. 149 Ibid., 8. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 53 (the company had recently been appointed the resident ballet troupe in Monte Carlo), Diaghilev may have been preparing for any situation that would require another American tour. Having felt the pressure from American audiences to have an American artist featured in a production during the Ballets Russes 1917 American tour (resulting in Jones’ contribution to Nijinsky’s Till Eulenspeigel), Diaghilev may have anticipated that a subsequent tour would require a ballet by an American composer. This was indeed the case, for preliminary discussion around a third American tour in 1924 with the Metropolitan Opera Company required an American ballet on the program. Even as late 1928, accounts show the impresario looking for an American composer for his ballet during another time of financial uncertainty. 150 If Diaghilev did commission an American score as it seems likely he had, Carpenter would have had the best credentials for writing the Ballets Russes’ first American score. The most obvious feature that set Carpenter apart from most contemporary American composers is that he had experience composing for ballet. Diaghilev knew of the success of Carpenter’s The Birthday of the Infanta through Rue and was given a piano score of Krazy Kat by Gerald Murphy sometime around Carpenter’s arrival in Paris. 151 In Krazy Kat, the impresario may have found what he was looking for in an American ballet composer, especially with regard to Carpenter’s use of American musical materials. Carpenter’s pre-existing notoriety in America would also have been an asset for Diaghilev, for in the event of an American tour Carpenter’s popularity and reputation as “America’s first dramatic composer” could be used to attract American audiences 150 Vernon Duke, “Gershwin, Schillinger, and Dukelsky: Some Reminiscenes,” Newsweek 24 23 October 1944, 14. 151 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 210; A piano score of Krazy Kat is included in the Serge Diaghilev/Serge Lifar Collection at the Library of Congress. This collection contains materials that were in Diaghilev’s Venice apartment at the time of his death in 1929. The score contains two stamps of Gerald Murphy’s name and Paris address. The address on the score, 23 quai des Grands-Augustins, helps to date when Diaghilev received the score. The Murphy’s moved to the small apartment at 23 quai des Grands-Augustins in 1923, dating Diaghilev’s acquisition of the score as no later than 1923; Amanda Vaill, Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), 392n112. The score for The Birthday of the Infanta is not a part of this collection. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 54 to the Ballets Russes. 152 Additionally, Carpenter’s wealth may have been attractive to Diaghilev, for the impresario may have wished to engage Carpenter as both collaborator and patron to form an artistic and business relationship similar to that which he enjoyed with Coco Chanel (1883- 1971). Prokofiev recalled that the commission occurred over a meal, with Diaghilev asking, “Why is it that you Americans have never written a genuinely American ballet?” followed by a discussion of possible scenarios to which the ballet could be set to. 153 In a letter to Ellen, Carpenter recounts a scenario Diaghilev suggested to him of a police strike in New York City: It’s simply the idea of a Policemen’s strike. In the beginning there you see a row of far New York policemen against a background of N.Y. skyscrapers. Great formality for a few moments, until the chief of police comes in and pastes up an announcement that the police dept. has gone on strike. Then begins a gradual crescendo of lawlessness in which all the populace men women and children, and policemen join. Anything can happen and everything does happen – until at the end, the “strike” is called off and the Law and Order are restored. That’s all. 154 Pollack makes a connection between Diaghilev’s idea of a police strike as originating from the Boston police strike of 1919. 155 Perhaps the scenario proposed by Diaghilev can be interpreted as a reflection of a more personal concern. Diaghilev’s scenario, as described by Carpenter, represents an artistic depiction of mass psychology couched within the narrative of working class concerns. Interestingly, these are all themes that had profound importance in the Soviet Union at this time, a subject of special anxiety for Diaghilev, who longed to revisit his homeland right up until his death in 1929. 152 Deems Taylor, “America’s First Dramatic Composer,” McCalls Magazine April 1922, 23. 153 Sergei Prokofiev, Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1924-1933: Prodigal Son, ed. trans. Anothony Phillips (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 270-271. 154 Letter from Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 6 July 1923, C-DLC. 155 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 214. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 55 Diaghilev did not hold Carpenter to this scenario, and encouraged the composer to write the music to which a narrative would be applied post-composition. 156 Evidence suggests that Diaghilev had Jean Cocteau lined up to create the scenario for the ballet, a natural choice for the impresario given the artist’s fondness of American imports and popular culture. 157 In mid-July 1924, one year after the commission took place, Carpenter traveled to Venice to bring the piano score of his new ballet to Diaghilev at the Excelsior Hotel on the Lido, which coincided with the meeting of an entourage from the Metropolitan Opera gathered to discuss the forthcoming season, including directors Otto Kahn (1867-1934) and Giulio Gatti-Casazza (1869- 1940). During this time, the Metropolitan directors and Diaghilev partook in preliminary discussions about a potential third American tour, and this time, the Metropolitan stipulated that the Ballets Russes would have to present an American ballet. Diaghilev found having Carpenter (and likely more so his ballet score) as beneficial to these negotiations, for in a letter to Kochno from this time the impresario wrote, “Carpenter’s presence has been a great help in the present instance, for both Kahn and Gest find him a serious and important person.” 158 During these preliminary discussions, Diaghilev included Carpenter’s ballet on a list of repertoire for the proposed American tour, and tentatively scheduled the premiere of Carpenter’s ballet for the 1925 Monte Carlo season. 159 Upon Carpenter’s return to America this was announced in Musical America: 156 Ibid., 215. 157 David Gullentops and Malou Haine, ed., Jean Cocteau: Textes et Musique (Sprimont: Mardaga, 2005), 265. In this survey of Cocteau’s contribution to the music community, it is documented in regards to Skyscrapers that “Cocteau devait écrire le scenario sur la musique terminée du compositeur.” 158 Letter from Diaghilev to Kochno, 19 July 1924, quoted in Boris Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, trans. Adrienne Foulke (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 223. 159 Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 457n26, among the Boris Kochno papers at the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra is a document on the letterhead of the Excelsior Palace where Diaghilev vacationed in 1924, listing ballets for an American tour in which Carpenter’s ballet is listed under ballets “never performed in America.” Garafola states that Diaghilev commissioned the ballet to Carpenter in the summer of 1924, whereas the actual commission occurred on 5 July 1923. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 56 A ballet, as yet unnamed, the work of John Alden Carpenter, will be mounted at Monte Carlo about March 1 of next year, according to the composer, who returned to Chicago on Wednesday from a trip to Europe undertaken especially to confer with Serge Diaghileff. 160 The impresario’s proposal to have the ballet unveiled in Monte Carlo is in accord with many of the Ballets Russes premieres during the mid-twenties. Dancer Alice Nikitina remembers, “Our Monte Carlo seasons, in spite of their importance, were considered by Diaghilev to be a kind of dress rehearsal, a first confrontation with the audience which enabled him to assess the value of the ballet according to reactions and judge as to what alterations were necessary.” 161 Diaghilev’s valuation of Carpenter’s score is illustrated in a letter he wrote to Kochno: Happily, his ballet is not as bad as I expected. It’s not a “false-note,” but rather, I’d say, it is American de Falla, with appropriate folklore. Also, the famous ‘policemen’s strike’ no longer takes place on the Strand but in an American factory, with alarm whistles and workers and such. 162 Diaghilev’s inclusion of the statement “not as bad as I expected” hints of his skepticism of an American composing a score fit for his ballet, and reveals that Carpenter had to some extent risen to the occasion. His mention of “appropriate folklore” shows that the composer had succeeded in pleasing Diaghilev with his use of American cultural idioms that are discussed in Chapter 3 of this thesis. Lastly, the impresario’s impression that the ballet now centered on a factory shows his own characterization of the score, or perhaps of a scenario that had been discussed with Carpenter. During this same visit, Diaghilev requested that Carpenter make a few changes in his score (most notably the removal of a choral section) for “questions of expense and complications 160 Eugene Stinson, “New Carpenter Ballet for Monte Carlo Delineates Industrial Activity in the U.S,” Musical America, August 9, 1924. 161 Alice Nikitina, Nikitina: By Herself, trans. Baroness Budberg (London: Allan Wingate, 1959), 52. 162 Letter from Diaghilev to Kochno, 19 July 1924, quoted in Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 223. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 57 of production.” Diaghilev’s editing of Carpenter’s score is telling of his intentions, for according to Russian composer Nicholas Nabokov (who himself composed a score for the Ballets Russes in 1928, Ode), Diaghilev only made suggestions on a score if he was sincerely interested: I remember the way he listened to a new work, always earnest and respectful. If he liked it, he would discuss it page by page and point by point, and make you play sections of it over and over again. If, on the contrary, he did not like the piece, his face would look bored and sleepy. As soon as the composer had finished playing Diaghilev would thank him with that icy, exaggerated politeness with which French courtiers brushed off inopportune commoners, and leave the room without saying another word. 163 Diaghilev’s approval of Carpenter’s score in the letter to Kochno is inconsistent with an anecdote Russian composer Vernon Duke (also known as Vladimir Duklesky, who composed the score for the Ballets Russes’ Zéphyr et Flore in 1925) published in his autobiography. Duke wrote: “[Diaghilev] asked John Alden Carpenter for a ballet score, had it read to him by myself and, although the work was entitled ‘Skyscrapers’ renamed it ‘Massacre du Printemps’ and rejected it after one unsatisfactory hearing.” 164 By this, Duke was surely referring to the score’s resemblance to Stravinsky’s early ballets (as discussed in Chapter 3), and implied that Carpenter’s score was a defamation of the aesthetic the Russian had created. Although amusing, this anecdote was likely an example of hyperbole on the part of Duke. Firstly, the piano score was un-named when given to Diaghilev, therefore it would be difficult to “rename” a score that already had no title. 165 Furthermore, the idea of the title Massacre du printemps may have been lifted by Duke from a 1913 caricature with same name by the artist known as Sem (born Georges 163 Letter from Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 22 August 1924, C-DLC; Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music, 80. 164 Vernon Duke, Passport to Paris (Boston: Little, Brown & Company Limited, 1955), 143. 165 In a letter to Ellen dated over a month after the piano score was given to Diaghilev, Carpenter debates possible name choices for his ballet; 28 August 1924, C-DLC. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 58 Goursat, 1863-1934) which depicted Nijinsky in his Le Spectre de la Rose costume, dancing with theatre manager Gabriel Astruc (1864-1938) and his exaggeratedly enlarged nose. 166 Carpenter as an “Episode” In early September of 1924, Carpenter wrote to Ellen that he sent another draft of his ballet to Diaghilev with the alterations suggested by the impresario less than two months prior, specifying “Antonin Barthélemy [French artist] is getting it into the official French Embassy mail for me so that it may not be lost or delayed.” 167 By February of the following year, with no response heard from Diaghilev (“Still no word from the unspeakable Diaghileff. Isn’t it rotten to not know anything!?”), Carpenter learned that his score had not successfully made its way into the impresario’s hands: I heard yesterday from the American Express Co. that they were all wrong last October when they called that they had delivered my piano score to Diaghileff in Monte Carlo. They now say that he was not there and that they have been sending the miserable thing to different forwarding addresses ever since. It has now come to rest in the Express office in Paris with $1.81 storage charges draped around its neck. Isn’t that pretty! 168 Carpenter recognized upon hearing this news that there was little chance of his ballet being produced by the Ballets Russes that spring, and remarked, “I’m glad now that I never allowed myself to set too much stars on it. It does make me a little mad though.” 169 Still, Carpenter contacted Gerald Murphy to ask him to pick up the score and deliver it to Diaghilev himself with the hopes that it could be programmed for another time. 166 This caricature was published in Sem’s 1913 folio Tangoville-sur Mer: Everybody is doing it now! 167 Letter from Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 1 September 1924, C-DLC. 168 Letter from Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 20 January 1925, C-DLC.; Letter from Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 25 February 1925, C-DLC. 169 Letter from Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 25 February 1925, C-DLC. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 59 Less than two months later, Carpenter had made a deal with the Metropolitan Opera to produce his ballet, now entitled Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life. 170 Carpenter wrote that, “I don’t know if I am doing the best thing or not but I’m tired of waiting around for the silent Russian and all the second hand news I hear from.” 171 Still, Carpenter awaited a response from Diaghilev regarding his ballet, however Diaghilev would not have accepted a ballet that had been premiered elsewhere. From Carpenter’s letters, it seems that Diaghilev was stringing the composer along, by not returning his letters or messages regarding the status of his ballet. The composer was apparently warned by Diaghilev, “I do not write letters - not even telegrams,” which of course was untrue. 172 One can speculate the reasons the impresario did not get back to the composer, however it seems that Carpenter had fallen victim to the whim of the impresario, and was merely, in the words of Lifar, an “episode” in the history of the Ballets Russes: Diaghilev loved friends and mankind, and was faithful to that love; but individuals were purely episodes in his creative activity, necessary at one moment, but nuisances when new horizons, incomprehensible or unacceptable to these friends, opened before him. From that moment, they ceased to exist for him, and though he in no wise denied his ancient friendships or repudiated them, they simply dropped from his mind. 173 Carpenter, then, was one of the many instances Diaghilev commissioned a score from a composer, and then abandoned it once the value of the project was no more. As Duke described, “With so many offered and so few chosen, becoming a Diaghilev composer in the twenties was quite a feat.” 174 170 Carpenter’s contract with the Metropolitan Opera Company (with exclusive performance rights in New York and other cities east of Chicago, at Carpenter’s request) granted him three hundred dollars for orchestra parts and seventy-five dollars for each of a minimum of three performances for the 1925-26 season and the right to renew the contract for the 1926-27 season; Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 221. 171 Letter from Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 14 April 1925, C-DLC. 172 Goss, Modern Music-Makers, 39. 173 Serge Lifar, Serge Diaghilev, His Life, His Work, His Legend (New York: De Capo, 1940), vii. 174 Duke, Passport to Paris, 143. Diaghilev’s American “Episode:” John Alden Carpenter and Skyscrapers 60 Conclusion Although Carpenter never successfully had one of his ballets produced by the Ballets Russes, he still held the honour as the only American composer to be commissioned a score by Diaghilev. Carpenter’s compositional career up to the commission, particularly his ballets The Birthday of the Infanta and Krazy Kat illustrate how the composer shaped his musical aesthetics to the exotic and modernist interests of the ballet company. Carpenter pursued a commission from Diaghilev as early as 1920, with Rue introducing her husband’s music to the impresario during a trip abroad. Three years later, through the help of distinguished colleagues, Carpenter entered the Ballets Russes social circle and was commissioned a score by Diaghilev, most likely for the use in future American tours. Carpenter in turn, composed a score for the Ballets Russes that the impresario found acceptable enough to consider producing it in Monte Carlo and on an American tour that was then in negotiation. After several months of not hearing from the impresario, Carpenter made arrangements for his ballet to be premiered by the Metropolitan Opera Company, thus putting to an end any possibility that it would be produced by the Ballets Russes. The fact that Diaghilev commissioned a score to an American composer says a lot about the state of the Ballets Russes in the 1920s. To maintain his ballet company in post-war Europe, Diaghilev had to forgo some of his high-artistic standards, which included the consideration of producing an American ballet, something he never would have thought of when the Ballets Russes was sufficiently funded and had the monopoly on contemporary ballet. Although Diaghilev managed to go through the twenty-years of the Ballets Russes without staging an American ballet, the commission to Carpenter was all the same a noteworthy achievement not realized by any other American composer. CHAPTER 3 America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz The 1926 published score of Carpenter’s ballet Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life, contains the following description, written by the composer himself: “Skyscrapers” is a ballet which seeks to reflect some of the many rhythmic movements and sounds of modern American life. It has no story, in the usually accepted sense, but proceeds on the simple fact that American life reduces itself to violent alterations of WORK and PLAY, each with its own peculiar and distinctive rhythmic character. 175 Skyscrapers was not composed with this particular scenario in mind; as mentioned in the previous chapter, when Diaghilev commissioned a ballet score from Carpenter for the Ballets Russes he told the composer not to concern himself with writing around a specific narrative as one would be applied to the music post-composition. Diaghilev did urge, however, for the composer to write “something typically American.” 176 With this in mind, Carpenter composed a score for Diaghilev without a definite story, but with themes that represented America in his mind and in the cultural imagination of a transatlantic audience: the skyscraper via a machine aesthetic, jazz/ragtime, spirituals and American popular song. These symbols of American culture would find their place in the scenario of Skyscrapers that Carpenter devised with American set designer Robert Edmond Jones after the ballet had been signed on to be premiered by the Metropolitan Opera Company instead of the Ballets Russes. From one perspective, Carpenter’s assimilation of popular American cultural materials in his ballet can be attributed to his first-hand experiences while living in Chicago and frequent visits to New York City; certainly, the growing skyline of Chicago and the syncopations from Harlem jazz clubs would come to the composer’s mind while writing a score to represent his 175 John Alden Carpenter, Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life (New York: G. Schirmer, 1926), program notes; for the full program notes of Skyscrapers as published in the score, refer to Appendix I. 176 Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 6 July 1923, C-DLC. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 62 homeland. This being said, and bearing in mind the ballet score was composed for a Monte Carlo premiere by one of the most influential cultural organizations in Europe, Carpenter crafted his score with consideration of a broader transatlantic perspective. Just as musicologist Annegret Fauser has described Aaron Copland’s formation of a national identity as being “constructed in dialogue with French culture and its understanding of American cultural practice,” so too was the American identity portrayed by Carpenter in his works, especially Skyscrapers. 177 By the 1920s, aspects of American culture had made their way to Europe through cultural transfer (be it through immigration, the arts or technologies) and had contributed to a sense of “Americaness” in Europe’s cultural imagination. Americans associated themselves with these decidedly American characteristics to portray a national identity, and many of the European avant-garde (for example, Les six and artists tied to Futurism and Dada) assimilated idioms of American culture in their works for its perceived modernist associations. Therefore, by incorporating the skyscraper, jazz/ragtime, spirituals and American popular music in his ballet, Carpenter was representing an explicit American identity recognizable to an international audience, while simultaneously aligning himself with European modernist aesthetics and ultimately the trends associated with Ballets Russes. America at Work: The Skyscraper Muse Diaghilev may have sowed the initial seeds of a ballet inspired by the skyscraper. As discussed in Chapter 2, the impresario suggested a scenario to Carpenter of a policeman’s strike “against a background of New York skyscrapers” that causes “a gradual crescendo of lawlessness” until the strike is called off and the city returns back to its original state. 178 Diaghilev, who encouraged Americans to find their own national identity (or more importantly 177 Annegret Fauser, “Aaron Copland, Nadia Boulanger, and the Making of an ‘American’ Composer,” Musical Quarterly 89/4 (2007): 526. 178 Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 6 July 1923, C-DLC. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 63 an identity separate from that of Europe) through the use of American indigenous materials, found the skyscraper a uniquely American entity and thus appropriate for an American ballet. This is illustrated in a 1928 interview in which Diaghilev supported the neo-classicist aesthetic adopted by the Ballets Russes in the mid-1920s by praising the skyscraper as a source of burgeoning classicism in America: The creators of the marvelous American skyscrapers could easily have turned their hands to the Venus of Milo since they had received a complete classical education. But if anything does offend our eye in New York, it’s the Greek porticos of the Carnegie Library and the Doric columns of the railway stations. The skyscrapers have their own kind of classicisms, i.e. our kind. Their lines, scale, proportions are the formula of our classical achievements, they are the true palaces of the modern age. 179 Although Carpenter decided to forgo Diaghilev’s police strike idea, the composer extracted three elements from the impresario’s recommendation for his ballet. Firstly, Carpenter maintained the implied ABA form of Diaghilev’s narrative (order, disorder, order) by creating two distinct sections arranged in rough ternary form – work, play, work. Secondly, the ballet’s production included a brief appearance (roughly four bars in length) of a police-person character who enters the scene to break up a brawl, perhaps as a tribute to Diaghilev’s proposed scenario. Lastly, and most influential of all, Diaghilev’s suggestion of a New York cityscape for the ballet’s set was elevated to the main theme of “America at work,” and ultimately the ballet’s title. Carpenter’s skyscraper muse may also be attributed to his first-hand encounters with the architecture. As a Chicagoan, the skyscraper was a part of Carpenter’s everyday consciousness; aside from New York City, Chicago had the most skyscrapers of any American metropolis at the turn of the twentieth century, the consequence of the 1870 Great Chicago Fire that allowed the 179 Interview with Diaghilev in Parisian Russian language journal Vozrozhdeniye, from 18 December 1928, quoted in Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev: A Life, trans. Jane Hedley-Prôle and S.J. Leinbach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 429. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 64 city to practically rebuild with the new steel and iron structures. Chicago was on its way to becoming the worlds tallest city until concern regarding the future of the industrial metropolis and its unknown repercussions on quality of life caused the Chicago City Counsel to apply height restrictions to new buildings beginning in 1893. 180 Restrictions aside, many of Chicago’s most recognizable skyscrapers were built in the 1920s, including the Wrigley Building, the Tribune Tower, and numerous buildings along the Magnificent Mile. Carpenter credited the active construction in Chicago as a motivation for the ballet’s skyscraper theme in an article published the Chicago Daily Tribune, remarking that the “rhythmic basis” of Skyscrapers came from “the rattle of riveting machines” heard from his studio window. 181 Additionally, Carpenter shared with pianist and writer Verna Arvey (1910-1987) a conversation he had with Adolph Bolm in New York regarding the source of inspiration of his ballet stemming from the sounds of construction: [Carpenter says] “I am composing a ballet which I want to be free, and to have scope and breadth.” They both glanced briefly, in passing, at a huge building that was being erected near Bolm’s hotel. Bolm replied, “then I hope you will put into it plenty of this modern sound!” Carpenter smiled whimsically and answered, “That’s what I’ve already planned!” 182 As much as the growing skyline of American metropolises influenced Carpenter’s use of the skyscraper in his ballet, he may have also considered the architecture’s position as an international signifier of America as a means of representing the New World to a European audience; as English architect Alfred C. Bossom (1881-1965) wrote in 1934, “One can hardly think of America apart from skyscrapers and one cannot think at all of skyscrapers apart from 180 Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 177. 181 Edward Moore, “J.A. Carpenter ‘Skyscrapers,’ Put on Records,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 August 1932, F7. 182 Verna Arvey, Choreographic Music: Music for the Dance (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1941), 290. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 65 America.” 183 As the rate of cultural transfer in the first decades of the twentieth century increased, so did the discussion surrounding the uniquely American architecture. On the one hand, skyscrapers were perceived as the “technological sublime,” and one of the first truly American creations during a time when the New World was striving for an identity separate from Europe. 184 To some, like Diaghilev, the skyscraper was the American equivalent to the romantic buildings of Europe. American photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1964), in defense of his now famous photograph of the Flat Iron building in New York (entitled The Flatiron, 1903), remarked that the building represents “the new America. The Flat Iron is to the United States what the Parthenon was to Greece.” 185 Swiss-French architect and influential figure in the field of urban planning Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887-1965), better known as Le Corbusier, positioned the skyscraper as form of architecture more modern than contemporary Parisian buildings, admitting that “in the last twenty years, facing the old continent, [America] has set up the Jacob’s ladder of the new times.” 186 Henry James (1843-1916) an expatriate who supported European tradition, upon his return to America after twenty-five years in Europe described the skyscraper as a “fifty-floored conspiracy against the very idea of ancient graces.” 187 Skyscrapers were also perceived as reflections of larger social issues, such as the Americanization of Europe, American consumerism (“the perfect business machine”), capitalist culture, mass production (“the citadel of functionalism”), and the perceived dehumanization of society. 188 183 Alfred C. Bossom, Building to the Skies: The Romance of the Skyscraper (London: The Studio, 1934), 9. 184 David E. Ney, “The Sublime and the Skyline: The New York Skyscraper,” in The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories, ed. Roberta Moudry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 256. 185 Quoted in Thomas Bender and William R. Taylor, “Culture and Architecture: Some Aesthetic Tensions in the Shaping of Modern New York City,” in Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature, ed. William Sharp and Leonard Wallock (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1983), 206. 186 Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White, trans. Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), 42. 187 Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907), 89. 188 Sheldon Cheny, The New World Architecture (New York: AMS Press, 1930), 10; Fiske Kimball, “What is Modern Architecture?” Nation 199 (30 July 1924): 128. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 66 Ultimately, whether praised or condemned, the skyscraper was inarguably symbolic of the modern America that drew the attention of a transatlantic audience; Harold A. Loeb (1891- 1974), the founding editor of American little magazine Broom, wrote that his French peers often remarked such statement as, “Your intellectual America, yes, it bores me, but that other America of the skyscraper, of the movies, of the streets, that is admirable.” 189 It is for this reason that so many Americans, like Carpenter, utilized the skyscraper’s association with America as a tool for creating a national identity. For example, artists associated with the American modernist movement in the visual arts (a cross-fertilization of European avant-garde aesthetics with the “practical art” of America) often depicted the skyscraper in their works, such as Georgia O’Keeffe’s City Night (1926), and John Storrs’ Forms In Space (1927), among others. 190 Carpenter, given his ties with the Chicago Arts Club, may have observed this trend in the works of American modernists as a means of creating an American identity within European aesthetic styles. Carpenter’s use of the skyscraper in his ballet can also be understood as stemming from previous modernist ballet productions by the Ballets Russes and the Ballets Suédois. During the Ballets Russes 1923 season in Paris, Carpenter would have seen a production of Parade, in which an “American Manager” character is costumed in Picasso’s cubist design that incorporates a three-dimensional skyscraper-figure protruding from the character’s back. Additionally, Gerald Murphy’s set design for the Ballets Suédois’ Within the Quota utilized the skyscraper to complement the American theme of the ballet by incorporating a picture of the Woolworth building, then the largest skyscraper in America, beside a vertically oriented picture of a transatlantic steamer, the SS. Leviathan, in his reconstruction of an American newspaper front 189 Harold A. Loeb, “Foreign Exchange,” Broom 2/2 (May 1922), 178. 190 See Merrill Schleier, The Skyscraper In American Art, 1890-1931 (New York: Da Capo, 1986). America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 67 page. Carpenter did not see Within the Quota during its first run in Paris in October of 1923, however the composer did visit Murphy and Cole Porter in Venice when the pair was working on the ballet and may have seen Murphy’s designs at that time. It is also probable that Carpenter attended the production during the Ballets Suédois 1923-24 American tour in which Within the Quota received critical acclaim. 191 Whether Carpenter saw Murphy’s designs or not, the artist encouraged Carpenter to use the skyscraper as inspiration for his ballet. Carpenter received a letter from Murphy late in 1923, advising the composer to “think in terms of what is real and most American:” The principles behind the sounds of machinery and life are the same as those behind musical instruments, aren’t they? Build your hearers a towering big structure of riveted steel and stone and then play all the color and ornament on it you want, it means so much to all of us. 192 Murphy’s suggestion of using the mechanical and colossal is unsurprising, for the artist himself incorporated these themes in his works. 193 Skyscrapers Translated Through a Machine Aesthetic Carpenter translated the skyscraper into the musical language of Skyscrapers though the formation of a machine aesthetic. The skyscraper and the machine were often mentioned in the same breath. For example, in his essay The Composer in the Machine Age (1930), George Gershwin wrote, “a skyscraper is at the same time a triumph of the machine and a tremendous emotional experience, almost breathtaking.” 194 Like the skyscraper, the growing dominance of the machine in early-twentieth century society was met with ambivalence, described by 191 Robert M. Murdock, “Gerald Murphy, Cole Porter, and the Ballets Suédois Production of Within the Quota,” in Paris Modern: The Swedish Ballet 1920-1925, ed. Nancy Van Norman Baer (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1995), 116. 192 Quoted in Deborah Rothschild, ed. Making it New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 174. 193 Murphy’s 18-foot high canvas Boatdeck (1922) exhibits the towering smokestacks of an ocean liner, and his painting Watch (1925) is a close-up of the inner screws and gears of a Mark Cross wrist watch. 194 George Gershwin, “The Composer in the Machine Age,” in The George Gershwin Reader, ed. Robert O. Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 120. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 68 musicologist Christine Fena as “sometimes configur(ing) an iconic representation of the creative power of human invention, and sometimes present in opposition of the personalized labour of human hands.” 195 The machine’s opposition of Romantic notions of the metaphysical and the sublime resulted in its celebration by the Futurists and Dadaists, which lead to machines becoming a common image in the visual arts in the 1910s and 1920s. American composers also found inspiration in the machine, such as Leo Ornstein (1893-2002) (his piano piece Suicide on an Airplane of 1915 uses tone-clusters to simulate an engine) and George Antheil (1900-1959) (whose 1924 Ballet Mécanique for pianolas and percussion makes use of extensive repetition to mimic the monotony of machines). Additionally, European composers such as Milhaud, Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) and most notable for his influence on Carpenter, Stravinsky, incorporated the machine aesthetic in their music (described below). According to musicologist Deborah Mawer’s examination of the influence of machines on the music of Maurice Ravel, there are five techniques that a composer may utilize to “relate to machines:” He could simply be an illustrator; a celebrator of invention as a modern act of homage (Darius Milhaud, Machines agricoles); a promoter of new musical definitions that include noise (Varèse, Ionisation); an advocate of machines as performers (Stravinsky, Etude for Pianola; Ravel, Frontispice); or an exponent of musical mechanics to convey properties of machines, especially movement (Honegger, Pacific 231; Ravel, Boléro). 196 Carpenter assimilated all of Mawer’s identified techniques of mechanism in Skyscrapers. Machines were illustrated in Jones’ backdrops through the representation of a skyscraper and an amusement park (as discussed later on in this chapter), and like Milhaud’s chamber work with lyrics taken from a farm machine catalogue, Skyscrapers “celebrated” American architecture 195 Christine Fena, “Composing in the ‘Land of Sewing Machines and Type Writers:’ American Modernist Music and the Piano the Machine Age 1918-1933” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2011), 43. 196 Deborah Mawer, “Musical Objects in Machines,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Deborah Mawer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 64. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 69 through the production’s scenario, backdrop and musical language. Skyscrapers promoted the use of “noise” by incorporating an anvil in the instrumentation of the score, similar to Varèse’s use of a siren in Ionisation (1931). Carpenter did not employ an automatic piano in his compositions, however he featured the machine as an “instrument” by including flashing red lights in the instrumentation of Skyscrapers that were “played” as a part of the musical score, and like Honegger’s imitation of the train in Pacific 231 (1923) and the repetitiveness in Ravel’s Boléro (1928), Carpenter conveyed the properties of the machine (the skyscraper) in Skyscrapers through the score’s instrumentation, the “ostinato machine,” and bitonality, as discussed below. The methods Carpenter uses to create a machine aesthetic in the score for Skyscrapers can be attributed to the work of Stravinsky. The Russian’s early “primitive” ballets (mainly Pétrouchka, Le sacre du printemps and Les noces) have been interpreted by several critics and scholars as mechanical; French critic and composer Émile Vuillermoz (1876-1960) remarked “[Stravinsky’s] genius resides in the organization of the rhythmic gasping of his sound factory,” and Albert Jeanneret (1886-1973, Le Corbusier’s brother) claimed that Stravinsky’s aesthetic was “lit by the light of the choice of this singular sonorous material, whose properties are dryness, force, and mechanical cleanness.” 197 Critics also made the connection between Carpenter’s score and Stravinsky’s music, describing it as having “modern Russian influences,” being a “fatal invitation to imitate Pétrouchka,” and containing rhythmical ideas that “savor strongly of Stravinsky.” 198 Pollock recognizes Skyscrapers’ affinity with Les noces, a work Carpenter praised as a “genuine creation,” citing that “the basic impulse behind the work – that 197 Quoted in Berman, “From Le sacre to Les noces,” 17-18; Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 14 June 1923, C-DLC; Howard Pollack, John Alden Carpenter: A Chicago Composer (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 224. 198 Winthrop P. Tryon, “Carpenter’s New Ballet,” The Christian Science Monitor, 20 February 1926, 8.; Pitts Sanborn, “The 1925-1926 Season,” Modern Music 3/4 (1926): 4; Olin Downes, “‘Skyscrapers’ Here With ‘Jazz’ Score,” New York Times, 20 February 1926, 15. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 70 blend of cool irony and inexhaustible energy – derives in large part from Le noces.” 199 By modeling the “America at work” section of Skyscrapers after Stravinsky’s instrumentation, prevalent use of ostinato and bitonality, Carpenter was able to create a machine aesthetic in his ballet. The instrumentation of Skyscrapers is indicative to the influence of Les noces; an extended percussion section, the inclusion of two pianos, and a chorus (discussed later in this chapter) in Carpenter’s score can easily be accredited to the four-piano, percussion and chorus instrumentation featured in the Russian’s ballet. The percussion section in Skyscrapers (consisting of xylophone, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, oriental drum, snare drum, tambourine, glockenspiel, cylinder bells, gong, tam-tam, wood black, tenor drum, and anvil) imitates the sounds one hears around a skyscraper construction site. For instance, the sharp attack of the glockenspiel, the cymbal (played with stick) and cylinder bells mimic the metallic hammering sounds of iron and steel. The anvil in the instrumentation is especially relevant given that its conventional use is as a tool used by blacksmiths for metalworking. The employment of the anvil as a musical instrument dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, appearing in music related to work and labour such as “Coro di zingari” (the “Anvil Chorus”) from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Il trovatore (1853) and Gustav Holst’s “Song of the Blacksmith” from his Second Suite in F for Military Band (1922). 200 Carpenter’s use of the anvil in Skyscrapers likely stemmed from Il trovatore, given that he quoted the opera’s “Misire” in Adventures in a Perambulator, and was involved with the Harvard and Radcliffe’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Pirates of Penzance (1879), which makes a “spoof” of the “Anvil Chorus.” 201 199 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 224. 200 In Verdi’s Il trovatore, the chorus sings the refrain, “All'opra! all'opra! Dàgli, martella!” (“So, to work now! Lift up your hammers!”). 201 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 114, 24. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 71 Fig. 6 – Carpenter, Skyscrapers, manuscript. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 72 This heavy use of percussion in Skyscrapers is indicative to the trend Fena has identified in music of the 1910s and 1920s of a shift in dominance from the string section in an orchestral ensemble to an enlarged brass and percussion section, the result of increased sensitivity to “noise” in concert music (for example Ballet Méchanique and Ionization). 202 This trend is also reflected in Skyscrapers by giving the main themes to the trumpet, French horn and wind section while the strings take on a colouring role. A reoccurring ostinato in the work section of Skyscrapers, named the “hammer motive” by Pollack, can also be attributed to the machine and Stravinsky. 203 The hammer motive consists of alternating octave ostinato in 5/4 time, and is often featured in the piano parts and sometimes doubled by other instruments (Example 2). The regular repetition of a motive, such as the hammer motive, has been equated to the machine by theorist Derrick Puffett, who has discussed the idea of the “ostinato machine:” “The machine metaphor is apt because such structures tend to assume a kind of autonomy, unfolding alongside, or even in opposition to, whatever mode of organization prevail for the piece as a whole.” 204 The use of ostinato motives is a defining characteristic of Stravinsky’s early works, and in Skyscrapers the hammer motive plays a similar function as the ostinato in Les noces. Theorist Pieter C. van den Toorn finds the fragmentary motives and ostinato in Les noces as “assuming a mosaics-like appearance,” similar to how the hammer motive in Skyscrapers does not serve a developmental function, but rather appears and re-appears between other motives in the work 202 Fena, “Composing in the ‘Land of Sewing Machines and Type Writers,’” 46. 203 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 224. The names of themes in Skyscrapers referred to in this chapter stem from Pollack’s work. 204 Derrick Puffett, “Debussy’s Ostinato Machine,” Papers in Musicology 4 (Nottingham: University of Nottingham Press, 1996): 5. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 73 section. 205 For this reason, Pollack states that the motives in Skyscrapers “form a collage much like the brittle, mosaicked forms of Stravinsky and the cubist painters.” 206 Ex. 2 - John Alden Carpenter, Skyscrapers. mm. 1-4 The hammer motive, accompanied by the bass drum on the down beats (which Pollack deems “particularly effective in suggesting hard, manual labour”) begins on the first measure of the score as repeated E ostinato. 207 The motive continues for ten measures as a common tone for the F#M7/CM bitonality represented in the rest of the orchestration, grounding the otherwise 205 Pieter van den Toorn and John McGinness, Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 114. 206 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 224. 207 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 224. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 74 dissonant harmonies (more on this below). The ostinato and the bass drum also help maintain a consistent meter during an otherwise quickening pace and increasing urgency that takes place until the abrupt stop of the hammer motive for the statement of the first theme: the “trumpet fanfare.” The hammer motive returns after the introduction of the “work motive,” three highly dissonant accented eighth notes that occur during shifting bars of 3/4. This time, the hammer motive is transposed from a repeated E to B as the surrounding bitonality resolves into EM, changing the function of the hammer motive to a dominant pedal. The hammer motive continues for another ten measures, however it is interrupted again by appearances of the work motive and the introduction of the “Song of the Skyscrapers.” The hammer motive returns for a brief four measures before texture thickens as the music leads up to the transition from work to play. By the end of the first work section, the hammer motive is established as an aural signifier for the “America at work,” and immediately signals the return to work when it reappears later in the ballet. Another Stravinskian aspect of Carpenter’s score is in the bitonality of the work section, specifically the use of a C major-F sharp major triad, the so-called “Pétrouchka-chord” (Examples 3.1, 3.2). The Pétrouchka-chord’s most dominant appearance in Stravinsky’s ballet, where it seems most likely Carpenter would have drew inspiration from, appears in the second tableau, “Malédictions de Pétrouchka,” where the two triads are heard in the piano at a fortissimo possibile dynamic. Skyscrapers, too, presents the Pétrouchka-chord in the piano voice in a fortissimo dynamic, however, when placed into the context of the rest of the orchestration, Carpenter’s Pétrouchka-chord plays a different function than Stravinsky’s. Taruskin has analyzed the function of the Pétrouchka-chord in the Russian’s ballet, stating that Stravinsky “regarded the two triadic subsets of the Pétrouchka-chord as independent functional agents, America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 75 potentially (and at times actually) in conflict,” creating an “active polarity” between the two chords. 208 Conversely, in Skyscrapers, Carpenter creates what Taruskin would call a “passive blend,” for the sustaining E ostinato “hammer motive” in the piano, supported by the bass drum, changes the quality of the F-sharp major chord to an F-sharp major-minor seventh chord, resulting in the E ostinato acting as a common tone between both chords (Pollack too, identifies the harmony in this section as a bitonal C-major and F-sharp dominant seven with the common E pedal). 209 Furthermore, the texture of the Pétrouchka-chord in the piano parts of Skyscrapers illustrates a particular affinity to the use of the chord in Stravinsky’s ballet. Ex. 3.1 - Carpenter, Skyscrapers, mm. 5-8 208 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 167. 209 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 224. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 76 Ex 3.2 - Igor Stravinsky, Pétrouchka, "Malédictions de Pétrouchka" Musicologist Eric Walter White has examined the bitonality in Pétrouchka as a representation of the two sides of the ballet’s Pétrouchka character – the puppet and the human. 210 It is tempting to consider that the bitonality in Skyscrapers portrays the binary of American life, work and play. The bitonality may also be understood, as Nancy Perloff recognizes the bitonality in Milhaud’s La création du monde, as an imitation of “the simultaneity of urban sounds.” 211 In February of 1925, the Carpenter family hosted Stravinsky in their Chicago home during the Russian composer’s first visit to America, where he conducted two concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and was given a dinner in his honour by the Chicago Arts Club. Along with catering to “the wild and wonderful little Stravinsky,” Carpenter took the Russian on a tour of Chicago’s famous stockyards, and played for him his score for Skyscrapers. 212 Carpenter wrote to Ellen about the experience, I played my music yesterday afternoon for little Igor – and had a lot of fun. It was at his request and I think he liked it – anyways he studied the score with great concentration and made a few very interesting suggestions designed to giving certain places more kick – and of course he is the original professor of Le Kick. 213 210 Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 199. 211 Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 6. 212 Letter to Ellen Borden, undated, C-DLC; Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882-1934 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 401-406. 213 Carpenter to Ellen Borden, undated, C-DLC. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 77 By this time, Carpenter’s score was fully composed and he was awaiting word from Diaghilev on the production of the ballet. As such, it seems unlikely that any of the Stravinskian elements discussed above stemmed from these suggestions made by Stravinsky, but instead through the imitation of his music. Still, one has to wonder what recommendations Stravinsky offered to Carpenter for Skyscrapers, and how (or if) the score changed because of them. Modernist Primitive: America at Play The middle section of Skyscrapers that came to represent “America at play” was conceived with idioms of the popular American vernacular - jazz, ragtime, popular music, and spirituals - all of which were perceived under the edifying umbrella of “lowbrow” African- American culture that was in vogue on both sides of the Atlantic. At the turn of the twentieth century, African-American presence in northern metropolises, particularly Chicago and New York City, had increased as many African-Americans migrated from rural southern states to where industrial jobs were plenty. Along with the growth in population was the increasing interest in the “Negro music” of jazz and spirituals. The music heard in seedy Harlem clubs performed by African-American musicians caught the attention of the country, and was raised up as the herald of American music and considered the ultimate expression of national identity. As early as 1895, Antonín Dvořák suggested in his essay “Music in America” that “inspiration for a truly national music might be derived from negro melodies or Indian chants.” 214 Meanwhile, the trend of l’art nègre, a fascination with the art and culture of Africans (and African-Americans, the same) was at the forefront of the European avant-garde’s aesthetic, celebrated by figures such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Guillaume Apollinaire, who affirmed that 214 Antonín Dvořák, “Music in America,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 90, February 1895, 438. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 78 “Negro art is the fructifying seed of the spiritual twentieth century.” 215 Therefore, by including African-American cultural materials in Skyscrapers, Carpenter was adhering to trends in America as well as abroad – the composer himself admitted that some of the “negroisms” in his music “travel by way of Paris.” 216 Jazz, the “American Folklore” In America, jazz is often thought of as America’s first original contribution to music. As Otto Kahn explained, “out of this jazz wave, developed in America, there will come a medium of artistic expression in music which will be characteristically American.” 217 Carpenter recognized jazz as “the American folklore,” and saw the music as having “roots in the American soil” and containing “certain elements that should be used by musicians.” 218 As discussed in the previous chapter, Carpenter had used jazz idioms in his compositions as early as 1905 (for example, in his song “Treat Me Nice,” which Pollack identifies as containing “hints of ragtime”) and had previously brought jazz to the ballet stage in his jazz pantomime Krazy Kat. 219 As a Chicagoan, Carpenter had many opportunities to hear all varieties of jazz in the 1910s and 1920s, due to the city’s large black population, the multitude of nightclubs in the city, and the enthusiastic response to jazz by Chicago’s white population that provided an outlet for jazz in posh hotels, private clubs and grand ballrooms. 220 As much as Carpenter was exposed to jazz music at home, his use of the genre in his works, especially Skyscrapers, may perhaps best be seen as a reflection of the genre’s interest for French musical modernists. 215 Quoted in Bernard Gendron, “Fetishes and Motorcars: Negrophilia in French Modernism,” Cultural Studies 4/2 (1990): 143. 216 Goddard Lieberson, “Modern American Music,” The Listener, February 1939, 23. 217 Mary Jane Matz, The Many Lives of Otto Kahn (New York: Pendragon Press, 1984), 226. 218 Quoted in Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 199. 219 Ibid., 89. 220 Ibid., 196-197. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 79 As mentioned in Chapter 1, many of the French avant-garde incorporated jazz influences in their scores in order to articulate a revitalization of French music, particularly members of Les six. Jean Cocteau proclaimed, “Impressionism music is outdone… by a certain American dance which I saw in the Casino de Paris.” 221 Milhaud, for one, praised the primal quality in jazz, which he viewed as stemming from Black America’s African origins: There can be no doubt that the origins of jazz music is to be sought among the Negros Primitive African qualities have kept their place deep in the nature of the American negro and it is here that we find the origin of the tremendous rhythmic forces as well as the expressive melodies that this oppressed race alone can produce. 222 Even Stravinsky, the composer who most influenced Carpenter’s music, experimented with jazz in his Piano-rag (1919), Ragtime for Eleven Instruments (1918) and the “Ragtime” from L’Histoire du soldat (1918), and claimed that the latter was an indication “of the passion I felt at the time for jazz… enchanting me by its freshness and the novel rhythm which so distinctly revealed its Negro origin.” 223 While jazz was perceived as originating from “negro” identity, both American and African, it was also perceived by some musicians as a form of urban music, as when George Gershwin described it as “the folk music of the cosmopolitan.” 224 Thus, jazz and the machine became closely related topics throughout the 1920s, and lead to the interchangeable names that have come to designate the decade: the “Jazz Age,” and the “Machine Age.” French author George Duhamel (1884-1966) attributed jazz to the sounds he heard in the stockyards of Chicago and French poet Paul Claudel (1868-1955) compared jazz to the noise of a train. The link of jazz 221 Quoted in Jed Rasula, “Jazz as a Decal for the European Avant-Garde,” in Blackening Europe: The African American Presence, ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez (New York: Routledge, 2004), 16. 222 Darius Milhaud, “The Jazz Band and Negro Music,” Living Age, 18 October 1924, 172. 223 Barbara B. Heyman, “Stravinsky and Ragtime,” The Musical Quarterly 68/4 (1982): 543-562; Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), 78. 224 Quoted in Anthony Clyne, “Jazz,” The Sackbut, August 1925. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 80 with the machine is best illustrated in a comment by American novelist and social critic Waldo Frank (1889-1967): Jazz syncopates the lathe-lunge, jazz shatters the piston-thrust, jazz shreds the hum of wheels, jazz is the spark and sudden lilt centrifugal to their incessant pulse… The song is not an escape from the Machine to limpid depths of the soul. It is the machine itself! 225 Jazz was even linked to skyscrapers by Le Corbusier who once described them as “hot jazz in stone or steel,” a description reasserted by American author Matthew Josephson (1899- 1978) who felt that “skyscrapers rise lyrically to the exotic rhythm of jazz bands.” 226 Carpenter, however, believed that jazz was unable to be directly translated into a symphonic score, and explained the use of the idiom in his ballet was an exaggerated and distorted “reflection” of jazz rather than a representation of authentic jazz: It must be understood that the music is not jazz, as jazz is generally heard and understood. It would be impossible to give jazz through the medium of a symphony orchestra. Therefore, Skyscrapers may be called jazz filtered through an orchestra of that sort. It is jazz once removed. Jazz itself depends of the sonority of the jazz band. To get something of this sonorous jazz effect we have used the saxophone and a banjo. 227 By this, Carpenter was shielding himself from the inevitable criticism of the assimilation of jazz in symphonic score as he experienced with this previous “jazz-pantomime,” Krazy Kat. Choir of Spirituals and Ragtime The short choral section near the end of “America at play” illustrates Carpenter’s appropriation of African-American culture in his ballet. Scored for sopranos and tenors, this choral section has described by musicologist Carol Oja as “loosely built of four-bar segments 225 David Savran. Highbrow/Lowdown: Theatre, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2009), 183; George Duhamel, America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future, trans. Charles Miner Thompson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), 104; Quoted in Jeffery H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 79; Waldo Frank, In the American Jungle (New York: Frank and Rinehart, 1937), 118-119. 226 Quoted in Gail Levin, “The Ballets Suédois and American Culture,” in Paris Modern: The Swedish Ballet 1920- 1925, ed. Nancy Van Norman Baer (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1995), 120. 227 Philip Hale, “Program,” concert program for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s performance of the Skyscraper suite, 9/10 December 1927, 594, C-DLC. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 81 suggestive of the blues, with ‘blue notes’ and the call-and-response form in the chorus’s melody and in the orchestral accompaniment.” 228 While these characteristics are certainly present in the chorus, further analysis reveals that the choral segment is divided into two distinct sections, the first featuring musical materials of the spiritual (that theatre historian David Savran has described as a “pseudo-spiritual”) and the second that emulates a ragtime song. 229 Carpenter’s decision to have the text of these sections consist of nonsense syllables invites a discussion of Carpenter’s treatment of the spiritual as both a modernist gesture and as a perpetuation of African-American stereotypes, particularly when examined in the context of the Metropolitan Opera production of the work, one that featured an African-American choir and a dancer in blackface. A spiritual is an African-American slave song that originated in the southern plantations of America and is commonly recognized as contributing to the origins of the blues, ragtime and jazz. During his trip to the United States, Dvořák suggested that American composers should harness the spiritual in the creation of a national music aesthetic, writing that “so-called plantation songs are indeed the most striking and appealing melodies that have yet been found on this side of the water.” 230 By the 1920s, spirituals had been adapted for concert performance and were internationally disseminated via performances by groups such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers as well as through written anthologies such as James Weldon Johnson’s (1871-1938) The Book of American Negro Spirituals from 1925. 231 Carpenter’s incorporation of spiritual-like music in a symphonic score was a further step towards assimilating this song-type to the high-art world, one 228 Carol Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 338. 229 Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown, 195. 230 Dvořák, “Music in America,” 438. 231 James Weldon Johnson, Book of American Negro Spirituals (New York: The Viking Press, 1925). America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 82 which had been predicted by the “father of the Harlem Renaissance” and author of 1925’s The New Negro, Alain Locke (1885-1854): [Spirituals’] next development will undoubtedly be, like that of the modern Russian folkmusic, their use in the larger choral forms of the symphonic choir, through which they will re-achieve their folk atmosphere and epic spirituality. 232 The music of the spiritual section, marked lento cantabile, aligns with the distinctive characteristics of spiritual songs, including a repetitive call-and-response form between the sopranos and tenors, unison ensemble singing, limited vocal range and “blue notes” (Example 4). The voices are supported in the orchestra by doubling voice parts with the violins, in addition to the oboe accompanying the soprano part and the saxophones playing with the tenors. Ex. 4 – Carpenter, Skyscrapers, Scene IV, No. 40, mm. 1-16. Carpenter avoided integrating some characteristics of the spiritual, most notably the 4/4 metre typical of the genre, choosing rather to write the chorus in 3/2 time while nonetheless 232 Alain Locke, The New Negro, 1925 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968), 199. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 83 integrating an anacrusis and syncopations which destabilize the metrical regularity. The ensuing measures (not included in Example 4) repeat the soprano and tenor call-and-response themes, however the soprano’s second call is not answered by the tenors as it was before, thus differentiating it from most spirituals which normally contain no form of variation. After a six- measure instrumental section, a new melody appears in the soprano voice that is immediately repeated by the tenors transposed up by a third. The two voices join again for a melody based firmly in G major. To many critics, this choral section was effectively understood as a spiritual. In the New York Times, the subtitle to the review of the ballet was “Negro Spirituals are Sung,” and the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote: “The chorus sang a plaintive melody not so recognizable, except as a suggestion of the old time ‘spirituals.’” 233 The second choral section, reminiscent of ragtime, is distinctive from the spiritual section stated thirty-six bars earlier (Example 5). Historian Vera Lee has described the difference in the spiritual and ragtime genres by pointing out that “in contrast with most of the old slave spirituals and the blues that would follow, ragtime inherited the march’s unremitting cheerfulness.” 234 The choir sings the ragtime in a regular 4/4 time in the key of C-major with blue notes (flattened third and seventh), marking a clear contrast to the minor-modal harmonies and blurred rhythm of the previous section. The inclusion of a piano reinforces the section’s ties to ragtime with its typical alternation between on-beat accentuations and off-beat chordal accompaniments. The chorus sings a mildly syncopated melody in unison (against the regular accompaniment), one that contains vocal slides reminiscent of both the vocal and instrumental styles of jazz. 233 H. I. Brock, “Jazz is to do a Turn in Grand Opera,” New York Times, 14 February 1926, SM5; “Carpenter Jazz Ballet Gives New York Kick,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 February 1926, 15. 234 Vera Lee, The Black and White of American Popular Music: From Slavery to World War II (Rochester: Schenkman Books, 2007), 46. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 84 Ex. 5 – Carpenter, Skyscrapers, Scene IV, No. 46, mm. 9-17. When Carpenter brought his score for Skyscrapers to Diaghilev in July of 1924, the composer had yet to set the text to the choral section. Upon reviewing the ballet, the impresario asked Carpenter to remove the voices, claiming that such choral writing effects had been “over done” in recent Ballets Russes productions, presumably referring to Le Noces and Francis America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 85 Poulenc’s Les biches (1924). 235 In a letter to Ellen, one can sense Carpenter’s resistance to the injunction of removing the voices (“I hate to give them up”), however the composer acknowledged the value of Diaghilev’s suggestion, admitting that the impresario was also likely considering the expense and complications that would inevitably arise from including a choir in the score: “Leaving out the voices will make the music much more practical for possible performances by other orchestras.” Only when the premiere of the ballet was secured by the Metropolitan Opera Company instead of the Ballets Russes did Carpenter decide to reinsert the choral section into his ballet. The scenario formulated for this section of the ballet is particularly interesting given the scenic treatment applied to the two separate choral sections. The spiritual section begins as the character “White Wings,” a “negro street cleaner,” (played by white vaudeville and jazz dancer, Roger Dodge [1898-1974] in blackface) finishes his work and takes a nap on the stage. Carpenter’s program notes best describes what happens next: The ensuing scene… represent[s] the dream fantasy of the sleeping negro. Through the gauze curtain just beyond him, we see gradually taking shape in the dim light a group of negros, men and women, half-forgotten types of the poor south. We hear their actual voices, in a song, first slow and soothing, then more animated and rising at last to a fierce religious fervor… This is when the spiritual section starts – hinted in Carpenter’s notes by characterizing the choir as “half-forgotten types of the poor south,” and “fierce religious fervor.” At the end of the spiritual, the “tension breaks” and the chorus begins to dance, waking White Wings from his dream– “his legs begin to twitch, he turns he tosses and at last he springs to his feet … and throws himself into the dance.” At this point, the ragtime-chorus section begins during which White Wings performs a cakewalk. 235 Carpenter to Ellen Borden, 22 August 1924, C-DLC. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 86 The Metropolitan hired African-American Frank Wilson (1886-1956) to direct and “furnish twelve colored singers to sing the music allotted to them in John Alden Carpenter’s ballet Skyscrapers.” 236 Wilson was a member of the famed Lafayette Players and an experienced Broadway performer, having appeared in the 1924 production of Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings (with designs by Jones), and who would go one to play the role of Porgy in the 1927 play Porgy and Bess, the same work Gershwin would appropriate for his 1935 opera. 237 What is perhaps most interesting about the chorus section of Skyscrapers is that Carpenter chose to have the choir sing a nonsense text. The lyrics of spirituals regularly drew on retold stories from the Old and New Testaments, and often contained themes of liberation, divine justice, living in exile, faith in adversity, antislavery sentiment among other significant subject matters. 238 Some spirituals are even thought to have contained hidden messages, such as references to the Underground Railroad, or instructions to help fugitive slaves avoid capture. Carpenter, however, chose to ignore the significance of the text in spirituals, by writing his own nonsense lyrics: “Manola Bola, manola manabola/ Fiamalo, fiamalo.” This text was likely meant to imitate the African-American dialect, described in the Oxford Book of Spirituals as “the result of the effort of the slave to establish a medium of communication between himself and his master.” 239 This the slave did by dropping his original language, and formulating a phonologically and grammatically simplified English in which the harsh and difficult sounds were elided, and the secondary moods and tenses were eliminated. In the 1920s there were two schools of thought regarding African-American dialect. On the one hand, as proposed by 236 Dorel J. Soria, “Treasures and Trifles: A Glimpse into the Metropolitan Opera Archives,” Opera News 52/3 (September 1987), 26. 237 Oja, Making Music Modern, 336-337. 238 William C. Banfield, Cultural Codes: Makings of a Black Music Philosophy: An Interpretive History from Spirituals to Hip Hop (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 100. 239 Moses Hogan, ed., The Oxford Book of Spirituals (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2002), xvii. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 87 African-American songwriter James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), the use of dialect should be purposely avoided. Given that such dialects reinforced “the minstrel tradition of Negro life,” they tended to perpetuate the stereotype of African-Americans as “happy-go-lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo-picking beings.” 240 Conversely, Locke advocated for the maintenance of dialect, stating, “In this broken dialect and grammar there is almost invariably an uttering sense of euphony.” 241 In the score of Skyscrapers, Carpenter included a statement at the beginning of the choral section reading, “The “words” sung by the singers have of course no meaning, and are used merely for sonority,” thus aligning his use of nonsense syllables to Locke’s notion of euphony. 242 However, Carpenter’s use of nonsense syllables can be interpreted in two other ways. 243 Firstly, Carpenter may have been using these technique as a super-modernist gesture, as in Poulenc’s seven-movement work for piano, small ensemble and voice, Rapsodie Nègre (1917), which features a baritone part with the text “Honoloulou, poti lama!/ Honoloulou, Honoloulou/ Kati moko, mosi bolou, Ratakou sira, polama!” 244 In hindsight, Poulenc remarked that Rapsodie nègre was “a reflection of the taste for negro art which had flourished since 1912 under the impetus of Apollinaire.” 245 The Dadaists, too, often incorporated “pseudo-African” languages in their Dadaist poems. For example Richard Huelsenback’s (1892-1974) “Chorus Sanctus” of 1916 had the text “n aao e ei iii oii/ou ou o ou ou e ou ie a ai” etc. 246 240 Michael North. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 19. 241 Locke, The New Negro, 204. 242 Carpenter, Skyscrapers, 99. 243 Carpenter, Skyscrapers, program notes. 244 Poulenc claimed that the text was drawn from a collection of poems entitled Les Poésies de Makoko Kangourou he had found in a bookstall along the banks of the Seine. Kangourou is not a recognized poet, but has been suggested as a possible pseudonym for Parisian poet Marcel Ormoy. Carl B. Schmidt, Entrancing Muse: A Documented Biography of Francis Poulenc (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2001), 43. 245 Quoted in Schmidt, Entrancing Muse, 43. 246 North, The Dialect of Modernism, 30. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 88 On the other hand, and as Oja has discussed, the use of nonsense words sketched the stereotype of African-Americans as untutored, barbaric and inchoate. 247 These negative stereotypes stem from the minstrelsy tradition, which characterized African-Americans as “watermelon addicts, chicken thieves, irresponsible, stupid, lazy (especially the men), and dishonest.” 248 Some antebellum Blackface Minstrel songs used nonsense syllables in the filler text function (later be filled in by banjos and like the banjo interludes) such as “Ole Tar River:” “Oh, way down in old Tare riber/ Hu hu lu a hu ahoo/ On de banks of Alama/Lum tum tum tum Todday um de da.” 249 Skyscrapers notably marks the first time that African-Americans were professionally hired by the Metropolitan Opera to perform on their stage, with each performer earning 120 dollars for each performance. 250 The hiring of an African-American choir may have been seen as a means of creating an image of authenticity around the depiction of African-Americans in Carpenter’s ballet. For some artists in the interwar years, African-American singers were regarded as having an innate talent for interpreting music. Such an idea is reflected in Carl Van Vechten’s (1880-1964) introduction to the Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) opera of 1934, Four Saints in Three Acts, which featured a sizable cast of African- American singers and dancers: “[Negro Singers] alone possess the dignity and the poise, the lack of self-consciousness that proper interpretation of the opera demands. They have the rich, resonant voices essential to the singing of my music and their clear enunciation required to 247 Oja, Making Music Modern, 340. 248 J. Stanley Lemons, “Black Stereotypes as Reflected in Popular Culture, 1880-1920,” American Quarterly 29/1 (1977): 111. 249 William J. Mahar, Behind The Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 232-233. 250 This wage was inclusive of all fees for performances, rehearsals and preliminary work; Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 223. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 89 deliver Gertrude’s text.” 251 In the case of Four Saints in Three Acts, Lisa Barg argues that the performance of the opera represented “African-American singers not so much as people or actors performing roles, but as symbolic objects. The cast acted, in effect, as ciphers for the opera’s avant-garde ‘nonsense.’” 252 The use of an African-American chorus in Skyscrapers may be viewed as participating in a similar aesthetic project, one that somewhat uncomfortably incorporates the ambitions of the New Negro Movement with the perpetuation of stereotypes derived from the traditions of minstrelsy. Minstrelsy is represented, as well, with the casting of a white dancer in blackface to play the role of White-Wings, whose cakewalk (a dance recognized as stemming from African- American slave origins) may be understood by some as “a degrading reminder of slavery.” 253 Carpenter further allies his work to such minstrelsy traditions by quoting various “coon songs” during “America at play.” Pollack has identified Carpenter’s inclusion of themes from “When You Ain’t Got No Money Well You Needn’t Come Round” (1898), written by prolific Broadways composer Alfred Baldwin Sloane (1872-1926) with lyrics by Clarence S. Brewster, and “Massa’s in de Cold Cold Ground” (1852) by the “troubadour of American music,” Stephen Foster (1826-1864). 254 The “coon song” is a genre of American comic song with words in a dialect purporting to be typical of African-American’s speech, a form of minstrelsy tradition whose popularity extended into the 1920s. “When You Ain’t Got No Money” portrays a black man who loses his money through gambling, resulting in his love interest to refuse him (“de only 251 Carl Van Vechten in Virgil Thompson, Four Saints in Three Acts: An Opera to be Sung (New York: Random House, 1934), 7-8. 252 Lisa Barg, “Black Voices/White Sounds: Race and Representation in Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts,” American Music 18/2 (2000): 151. 253 Eroll G. Hill and James V. Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 152. 254 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 298-230; Clarence S. Brewster and Alfred Baldwin Sloane, When You Ain’t Got No Money Well You Needn’t Come Round (New York: M. Witmark & Sons, 1898); Stephen Foster, Massa’s in de Cold Cold Ground (New York: Firth, Pond & Co., 1852). America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 90 coon dat I see/ Is de one dat blows his dough on me”) and “Massa’s in de Cold Cold Ground,” was a popular minstrel song that tells of slaves mourning the death of the their master. By incorporating these songs in Skyscrapers, Carpenter was recalling and participating in the traditions of minstrelsy. Although appearing in the score without their slanderous words, the songs were popular enough that the association between the tune and the lyrics may be made. Although it is not my intention to pass judgment on Carpenter’s racial leanings or intentions, the treatment of the choral section in Skyscrapers certainly does seem to perpetuate African-American stereotypes stemming from the minstrelsy tradition. The setting of spiritual- like music to nonsense words sung by an African-American choir, whether conceived as a modernist gesture or not, signified not only the degradation of the spiritual song type (whose lyrics were of a highly personal nature) but also upheld typecasts of African-Americans represented in minstrel shows as “stupid,” “lazy” and “inchoate.” This, paired with the choir singing (and dancing) alongside a blackface cakewalking White-Wings and the quotations of popular coon songs, renders “America at play” as a representation of the stereotypes stemming from the nineteenth-century, that by the 1920s cultural movements such as the New Negro and Harlem Renaissance were actively trying to suppress. Yet in Skyscrapers, this popular way of thinking was appropriated for the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, as entertainment for the Metropolitan’s mostly white, high-society audience. The audience found this representation of African Americans appropriate, for nowhere is there mention of an uprising in regards the degrading treatment of African Americans culture or people contained in Skyscrapers. The Collaboration: Robert Edmond Jones, Sammy Lee When it came to Carpenter devising a scenario for the Metropolitan Opera Company production of his ballet, he enlisted the assistant of his past collaborator, Robert Edmond Jones. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 91 Jones recalls that “At the outset, Carpenter expressed the intention to indicate moods of work and play, but beyond that he had not committed himself, not even to a literal locale.” 255 Carpenter and Jones’ collaboration yielded a six-scene ballet illustrating the binary of America at work and play: I: Introduction, II: America at work, III: Transition from America at work to America at play, IV: America at play (throwback to work), V: Transition from America at play to America at work, VI: America at work. 256 While “America at work” was represented through the construction of skyscrapers, “America at play” was ultimately set in a “Coney Island style of Amusement park.” 257 With its roots in the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893 (Chicago), the Coney Island type amusement park was a product of America. These parks functioned as an “escape” from the daily grind for many middle class workers, a place where they could forget about their daily lives and enter the alternate reality created in the park. The popular amusements offered at these parks (the merry- go-round, the roller coaster and the Ferris wheel) were powered by machinery, creating what cultural historian Judith A. Adams has described as a “juxtaposition of mechanical amusement devices with an atmosphere of illusion and chaos.” 258 The amusement park in Skyscrapers, then, is another manifestation of the machine in the lives of Americans, now not only taking over their work, but also their play. By representing America at play at an amusement park, Carpenter was entering the conversation surrounding the mechanization of American life. As Savran has discussed, Skyscrapers testifies to “the ubiquity of mass production and consumption, to the fact that even 255 Minna Lederman, “Skyscrapers: An Experiment in Design An Interview with Robert Edmond Jones,” Modern Music 3/2 (1926): 22. 256 Carpenter, Skyscrapers, program notes. 257 Ibid. 258 Judith A. Adams, The American Amusement Park Industry: A History of Technology and Thrills (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 41. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 92 leisure pursuits by the 1920s had become mechanized and standardized.” 259 Along with Carpenter’s jazz inflected score (jazz, as discussed above, has connotations to the machine), Jones’ backdrop and the choreography of this section of the ballet supports this notion. Fig. 7 - Wolkencratzer in Munich, 1928, “America at Play.” Jones’ design for “America at play” emphasizes the steel frames and structures of amusement; the backdrop features rollercoaster tracks framing the sides of the stage and depicts the silhouette of a Ferris wheel in the distance. American music critic Deems Taylor’s description of this “nightmare version of any American amusement park” is worth noting for his attention to the machine-like qualities of the setting: “In the background writhed a convulsed scenic railway, while overhead strange baskets rose and fell dangling form the steel arms of various bone breaking engines of amusement.” 260 A section of the choreography in which the 259 Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown, 195. 260 Deems Taylor, “America’s First Dramatic Composer,” McCalls Magazine, April 1922, 23. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 93 dancers “become” a merry-go-round can be interpreted as a representation of the dehumanization of Americans by machines, or conversely, the humanization of machines. Brought on the stage is a mirror-covered cylinder, in which pairs of dancers circle around, “giving the effect, with their prancing step and the nodding plums on their heads, of the day maneuvers of the wooden horses of a Merry-Go-Round. 261 Olin Downes with the New York Times further illustrates the dancer’s embodiment of the horse with his description: “The carousel comes slowly to a halt: the horses slow up, droop their heads or remain as if stopped in mid-air.” 262 By stringing mechanistic elements though the “work” and “play” of America, Skyscrapers came to represent the tensions felt by many upon the growing reliance on machines. Musicologist Scott D. Paulin suggests that elements of Skyscrapers’ scenario may have stemmed from fellow American writer and critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972). In 1924, Jones was designing sets for Wilson’s play, The Crime in the Whistler Room while the writer was in the midst of brainstorming an American-themed ballet production for the Ballets Suédois (for whom he was the press agent for one of their American tours). 263 This ballet, entitled Cronkhite’s Clocks and designed to feature Charlie Chaplin with a score by Ornstein, did not come into fruition, however the themes of the ballet overlap with what became the thematic basis underlying Skyscrapers: a representation of the modern American city, the contrast of jazz and cacophonic music, and a dancer in blackface. Another work that Richard Hammond in Modern Music mentions as a possible forerunner of Skyscrapers’ scenario is American composer Emerson Whithorne’s (1884-1958) “dance satire” Sooner or Later (1925), which was based on “the work and play of mankind, from the tribal days of primitive man though the Jazz-Age to 261 Carpenter, Skyscrapers, program notes. 262 Downes, “‘Skyscrapers’ Here with ‘Jazz’ Score,” 15. 263 Scott D. Paulin, “Chaplin and the Sandblaster: Edmund Wilson’s Avant-Garde Noise Abatement,” American Music 28/3 (Fall 2010): 295-6n83. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 94 those crystalline cities of the future.” 264 These proposed origins of Skyscrapers scenario may have some validity, seeing that Carpenter and Jones did not begin to collaborate on a scenario until mid-1925. Nevertheless, as discussed above, Carpenter at least had the idea of skyscrapers in his mind for the ballet during composition in 1923 and 1924. Additionally, the scenario created for Skyscrapers may have been created to fit in with the lifestyle modernism trend forged by the Ballets Russes, for it contained no particular narrative but instead depicted the “everyday” of American life. Carpenter explained the lack of narrative in his ballet: “I have not tried to tell a story in Skyscrapers. In fact, there is no story to it. It is simply based on the idea that in this country we work hard and play hard.” 265 One critic recognized the depiction of the “everyday” in the production of Skyscrapers, describing the ballet as follows: The different scenes bring before us the familiar sights and sounds of our everyday American life, but transformed through a powerful artistic imagination into something intensely suggestive of all the vital forces that lie beneath external things and that are forming our distinctive national life. 266 Upon completion of the “scenario” for Skyscrapers, Carpenter and Jones began searching for an appropriate choreographer to work on their ballet. According to Jones, the pair was looking for an “American Adolph Bolm to create the ballet as choreographers do for Diaghilev.” 267 The team wanted a choreographer like Bolm (who had worked with Carpenter and Jones in The Birthday of the Infanta and Carpenter in Krazy Kat), but felt that an American would be best suited for staging Skyscrapers, particularly after Bolm had been chastised by critics for being unable to interpret the “peculiarly native flavor” of Krazy Kat. 268 “It seemed a little devious to say the least,” Carpenter stated, “that we should take one of the Europeans who 264 R. Hammond, ”Emerson Whithorne,” Modern Music 8/2 (1930–31): 25-26. 265 Philip Hale, “Program,” 594, C-DLC. 266 Quoted in Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 236, emphasis mine. 267 Lederman, “Skyscrapers: An Experiment in Design,” 25. 268 Quoted in Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 204. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/subscriber/article_citations/grove/music/30227#abbr-explained America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 95 after six months spent watching Florence Mills and other cabaret starts, go home and skillfully apply the borrowed devices of our jazz.” 269 Fig. 8 – Carpenter and Jones, undated. 269 Lederman, “Skyscrapers: An Experiment in Design,” 24-25. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 96 An interview with Jones published in Modern Music details the challenges the pair faced in finding a choreographer for their ballet and unveils the state of American dance at the time: After weary search in pursuit of every possibility from the famous revue choruses and their trainers to the hodge podge of ideas that emanated from the intelligentsia, it became perfectly clear that there was as yet no discoverable American Bolm, no choreography and no way to bring either of these suddenly into existence. 270 Without a suitable American choreographer for their ballet, Carpenter and Jones chose to contrive the choreography themselves. The team spent six months creating a “choreographic manuscript” that contained popular dance figures such as “strut,” “Charleston, “trot” and pantomime directions “with indications of pattern changes definitely tied to the numbered bars of music.” 271 Given that neither Carpenter nor Jones could translate their choreographic manuscript into actual choreography, Broadway dance director Sammy Lee was invited to work on Skyscrapers upon the suggestion of Broadway theatre producer Arthur Hopkins (1878-1950). 272 Sammy Lee, born Samuel Levy, was born in New York City to Russian immigrant parents. Lee was a regular performer in the vaudeville circuit by 1909, in which he achieved enough success to make a career in Broadway. Between the years 1920 and 1929, Lee choreographed twenty-six Broadway musicals, many of notable stature such as Gershwin’s Lady, Be Good (1924) and Oh, Kay! (1926), and the Ziegfeld Follies Show Boat (1927). 273 In these productions, Lee would choreograph various popular styles of dance typically found in Broadway productions (such as precision, tap, ballroom, adagio, acrobatic, and eccentric) except classical ballet dancing, for when featured in Broadway shows was often performed by a troupe hired externally with set routines. Consequently, the dancing performed in Skyscrapers was in 270 Ibid. 271 Ibid., 26. 272 H.I. Brock, “Jazz is to do a Turn in Grand Opera,” SM5. 273 Frank W. D. Ries, “Sammy Lee: The Broadway Career,” Dance Chronicle 9/1 (1986): 1. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 97 the popular-style adapted from the Broadway stage and complemented the descriptors in the choreographic manuscript designed for Skyscrapers. The popular-style of dance was unfamiliar to the Metropolitan’s ballet troupe, nevertheless Lee found the dancers well equipped for this sort of dancing: It’s remarkable how the members of the ballet have picked up these steps. I have been used to dealing with dancers who are trained in American stage dancing. I thought there might be some difficulty in teaching these steps to dancers who had been trained in an entirely different school. But there was not. There is a great difference in these two type of dancers – something which I can hardly explain- but I have had no difficulty in getting these Metropolitan dancers into the intricacies of jazz dancing. As a matter of fact, dancing of that sort can be done by anybody who had a real sense of rhythm. 274 With Carpenter’s score, along with Jones’ set designs, Lee’s choreography and a well prepared dance troupe, Skyscrapers was premiered on 19 February 1926 under the baton of Louis Hasselmans (1878-1957) at the sold-out Metropolitan Opera House. Skyscrapers at the Metropolitan The first scene of Skyscrapers is only twenty-one measures in length, and although technically the “Introduction” of the ballet, it contains the same musical materials as the “America at work” scenes. Jones’ opening drop curtain for this scene is a simple pattern of alternating black and white diagonal stripes, which Carpenter referred to as a “symbol of danger.” 275 Critics concurred about its menacing character, with one viewing it in relationship to the caution signs found at railroad crossings, whereas art historian Merrill Schleier has read it as an “inescapable prison” that “foreshadowed the activity to follow.” 276 In spite of how the abstract scenery was perceived, New York Times critic H.I. Brock recognized the aesthetic break from what had been traditionally exhibited at the Metropolitan Opera House: “The golden yellow curtain that has been wont to open and reveal the Wagnerian heroics of the Ring and Isolde will 274 Philip Hale, “Program,” 500, C-DLC, 275 Carpenter, Skyscrapers, program notes. 276 Ibid.; Merrill Schleier, The Skyscraper In American Art, 1890-1931 (New York: De Capo, 1986), 105. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 98 rise shivering upon a drop that cried danger in staring diagonals of white and black and two winking red signal lights.” 277 The “winking red signal lights” mentioned by Brock were one of the many ways Jones worked with light for the scenery of Skyscrapers. On each side of the stage stood two hexagon- shaped red lights that blinked on and off along with the music of the ballet. Carpenter included the lights in his instrumentation of Skyscrapers, and notated their blinking in the score like a percussion instrument with both the right and left lights notated on the same staff. The lights were flashed on during the accented beats of the music, and were operated by a keyboard located in the wings of the stage, presumably for the musician to be out of sight but still able to “play” along with the conductor and the rest of the orchestra. Although the red lights were on the stage for the entirety of the ballet, they were only active during the work sections, adding another layer of the machine aesthetic in the stage production. Reacting to their presence, one critic wrote: “What better symbols of the speed of American life could there be?” 278 Further descriptions of the unique use of lighting in Skyscrapers are noted in Carpenter’s program notes. These include the use of shadows (“the brightening floodlight, cast its black- looming labour shadows on the back-stop as the curtain falls”), blackouts (“there is a sudden ‘black out’ of the lights”), coloured tints (“dim greenish obscurity”), dimming (“The lights are gradually dimmed”), and the use of a spotlight (“the sharp ray of a spotlight from above picks out the whiteness of his costume from the surrounding gloom”). 279 According to Jones, “the play of light” was planned along side the initial sketches of the production’s choreography, “and the line of their changes was paralleled with the score.” 280 The overarching pattern in the ballet’s 277 Brock, “Jazz is to do a Turn in Grand Opera,” SM5. 278 “Skyscrapers,” The Outlook, 3 March 1926, 215. 279 Carpenter, Skyscrapers, program notes. 280 Lederman, “Skyscrapers: An Experiment in Design,” 26. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 99 lighting is that the work sections are dark and employ shadow effects, whereas the play section contrasts with brighter lights. This attention to the light is characteristic of Jones’ visual aesthetic, and the use of shadow in particular shows the influence of the New Stagecraft movement of which Jones was an adherent. The representation of “America at work” begins at the outset of Scene II. Jones’ backdrop for this section was described by Carpenter as “a huge and sinister skyscraper in the course of construction, a tangled mass of red and black shapes.” 281 Fig. 9 – Wolkencratzer in Munich, 1928, “America at Work.” 281 Carpenter, Skyscrapers, program notes. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 100 In 1916, a zoning regulation in New York required that buildings above a certain height had to be set back from the street, therefore revolutionizing the skyscraper design to a pyramid like shape, creating a new “dynamic, variegated silhouette.” 282 Jones’ symmetrical background features the black outline of triangularly-oriented steel frames and shapes suggesting the shape of this new style of skyscraper – a skyscraper so tall that it does not fit the backdrop curtain and demands of the audience to imagine its ultimate height and form. To each side of the skyscraper are silhouettes of people representing the “dreary and endless shadow-procession of the indifferent city crowd.” 283 In the foreground, in addition to the blinking red lights, scaffolding was erected in which the dancers would “swing from girder to girder, as in a trapeze act,” and mimic the movements of hammering and construction to the rhythm of Carpenter’s music. 284 One has to wonder if the multi-level concept and shadows of the city crowd come from Audrey Parr’s design for the Ballets Suédois production of Milhaud’s L’Homme et son désir (1921), which also features three platforms and silhouettes of jazz musicians on the sides of each level. Indeed, Jones’ geometrically abstract, “suggestive” duochromantic representation of the skycraper is characteristic of the New Stagecraft movement, but also, as Savran has acknowledged, of German expressionism and Russian constructivist design that anticipates the urban stagecraft of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). 285 Jones’ constructivist designs may have been encouraged by Carpenter, who had suggested to Diaghilev to hire “a Russian Bolshevik painter” to design the sets for the Ballets Russes production that never materialized. 286 282 Schleier, The Skyscraper In American Art, 111-112. 283 Carpenter, Skyscrapers, program notes. 284 Ibid; Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown, 192. 285 David Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown, 193. 286 Boris Kochno, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, trans. Adrienne Foulke (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 223. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 101 The transition scenes in Skyscrapers represent the changeover between work and play in both the music and the staging of the scene. Scene III (work to play) contrasts with the preceding work section by being in a slower tempo and employing a softer dynamic, yet a march-like passage contributes to the maintenance of a “slight air of the mechanical,” a style that Pollack attributed to the scene in Modern Times when Charlie Chaplin leaves work. 287 Instruments of work slowly begin to dropout of leading orchestral roles as the instruments of play (banjo, saxophone and high-hat) emerge. The bitonality representing “work” dissipates into a secure C- major tonality and the motives of work are subdued until they are replaced by motives of play (in the case of the work motive, the three “punched” eight notes appear less dissonant, unaccented and in a softer dynamic). The backdrop for both transition scenes are the same: two white arched doorways upon an otherwise black backdrop (reminiscent of Jones’ design for The Birthday of the Infanta) which, according to Jones, suggested “the atmosphere of factory egress, of the subway, of the crowded vehicle tearing away from the centers of labor.” 288 During the transition from work to play, the workmen enter from the wings of the stage, “right-pass with stiff and mechanical step though the first doorway, and reappear almost at once through the other door, now with movement gay and relaxed, and each with his girl on his arm.” 289 The door on stage right (the symbolic exit from work) is garnished with a clock which represents the time past at work. The opposing transition scene, from play to work (Scene V) is much shorter in length, and is begins with a “shrill blast of a factory whistle” (played on a compressed air whistle) that reintroduces the hammer motive while the workers now enter the door leading to work. 290 287 Pollack, John Alden Carpenter, 226. 288 Lederman, “Skyscrapers: An Experiment in Design,” 25. 289 Carpenter, Skyscrapers, program notes. 290 Ibid. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 102 Fig. 10 - Wolkencratzer in Munich, 1928, “Transition.” “America at play” is the longest scene in the ballet and features a series of isolated events (reminiscent of the Shrovetide Fair scene of Pétrouchka) typical of what one would see in an amusement park. These include the appearance of a German street band, three mechanical dolls, two side-show booths each with a “barker in front” (also recalling Parade), a snake-charmer, a “Wild Man of Borneo,” and a fight between two woman that turns into a brawl broken up by police. 291 The ballet’s three “characters” are also introduced in this scene, the Strutter, Herself, and White Wings. Although not situated with each other or with any sort of narrative, these characters can be perceived as Americanized versions of the characters in Pétrouchka: the Ballerina, the Moor, and Pétrouchka. Skyscrapers’ Strutter, like Pétrouchka’s Moor, was successful in courting female companionship (in the case of Pétrouchka, the Moor seduces the Ballerina, while the Strutter is joined by a group of female dancers partway through his solo dance). The unique characteristic of Pétrouchka’s Ballerina is that she stayed en pointe for the 291 Ibid. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 103 entirety of the ballet; her American equivalent in Skyscrapers, “Herself,” wears pointe shoes, but almost as a spoof of Pétrouchka’s Ballerina, is quickly defeated by the pointe tradition and settles for a more American style of dancing in the Charleston (this described by one critic as “[Herself] manages to get up on her toes for a few steps, but is quickly brought to earth by a lively Charleston tune.”) 292 Finally, the tragic “underdog” character Pétrouchka can be seen in the character of White Wings, with his white janitorial costume a distortion of the characteristically white Pierrot costume. This illustrates yet other instance Carpenter drew from a Stravinsky ballet in Skyscrapers The two distinctive sections of Skyscrapers, work and play, are representational of the two perceived sides of mythical America Musicologist Nancy Berman describes as “a strange but alluring amalgam of the primitive and the modern, where the rhythms of tribal music melded with the incessant rhythms of daily life and work.” 293 By incorporating both parameters of America in his ballet score, Carpenter was able to capitalize on the two sides of American culture Otto Kahn once noted: “America has only produced two great national inspirations. One of these jazz music, and the other the skyscraper.” 294 Conclusion During the composition of his ballet for Diaghilev, Carpenter looked to the skyscraper, a uniquely American architectural construction, as his muse. As a Chicagoan, Carpenter had firsthand exposure to the towering structures, however also understood the skyscraper’s position as an international symbol of America and which had been utilized in literature, the visual arts, and even ballet, as a signifier of the New World. Carpenter translated the skyscraper into musical 292 Frank Getty, “Moderns Replace Ballet at ‘Met,’” Palm Beach Daily News, 19 February 1926, 1. 293 Nancy Berman, “From Le sacre to Les noces: Primitivism and the Changing Face of Modernity,” Canadian University Music Review 20/1 (1999): 13. 294 Quoted in Nesta MacDonald, Diaghilev Observed by Critics in England and the United States 1911-1929 (London: Dance Books, 1975), 309. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 104 language by adapting a machine aesthetic influenced by Stravinsky’s instrumentation in Les noces, the Russian’s regular use of ostinato, and the bitonality of the Pétrouchka-chord. Carpenter also represented the popular American vernacular in his ballet score, by incorporating what he considered the “folklore” of America that was in vogue on both sides of the Atlantic: jazz. Carpenter’s appropriation of the “negro” spiritual in a short choral section lends itself to being interpreted as a perpetuation of racial stereotypes of the minstrelsy tradition when considered in the context of the ballet’s production. The production of Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life by the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York gathered the talents of Robert Edmond Jones and Broadway dancer Sammy Lee to create a ballet that depicted “America at work,” through the construction of skyscrapers, and “America at play” by depicting a Coney Island-type amusement park. By representing both America’s work and play through the machine, the production can be viewed as a representation of the mechanization of American Life. Given that the bases of the ballet was completely grounded in contemporary trends of the 1920s, it was destined to become what we know now as a “period piece,” indicative of the time it was conceived but somewhat less interesting to present-day audiences. Taruskin finds this of many productions conceived for the Ballets Russes after the war: “Today's actualité is tomorrow's period piece, and that has been the fate of the vast preponderance of the postwar Diaghilev repertory.” 295 In 1940, Carpenter had come to realize this about his ballet, writing to Bolm that he considered “Skyscrapers as a ballet, somewhat ‘dated,’ – that it reflected an era of American life which we are all trying our best to forget.” 296 Nevertheless, Skyscrapers allows us 295 Taruskin, On Russian Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 211. 296 Letter from Carpenter to Adolph Bolm, 30 November 1940, B-DLC. America at Work and Play: Skyscrapers and Jazz 105 to return back to the 1920s and examine how an American composer represented his country during a period of intense cultural exchange between the Old and New Worlds. Conclusion In the preceding chapters I explored some of the questions raised by the one known instance the impresario of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev, commissioned a score by an American composer, Chicagoan John Alden Carpenter. My work began by surveying Diaghilev’s complex opinion of America and its culture, finding that the impresario viewed America as a country more attuned to popular entertainment than to the high-art aesthetics of his ballet. This was demonstrated by Diaghilev’s negotiations with the Metropolitan Opera Company for the Ballets Russes American tours in 1916 and 1917 (that he partook in only as a last-resort option during times of financial crises), and the controversy surrounding the American productions of L’après-midi d’un faune and Scheherazade. Diaghilev’s apprehension towards America was also viewed as stemming from its threat to European art, both financially and artistically, for the impresario found that wealthy America and its lucrative entertainments tempted his collaborators to pursue alternative employ (the music hall, Broadway, popular music) or abandon the Ballets Russes completely to embark on careers in the New World. Above all, I found that the “lowbrow” associations of American culture dissuaded the impresario from assimilating American cultural idioms in his ballet in order to maintain a high-art status while his ballet transitioned into a modernist aesthetic and became accessible to a middle-class audience. A notable exception of this is the very ballet that marked the Ballets Russes entrance into modernity, Parade, which marks the only time the Ballets Russes represented “low” forms of entertainment of the music hall, circus and American cinema. The second chapter, stemming from discussions in Chapter 1, serves to further construct the historical narrative surrounding the commission, composition and ultimate dismissal of Carpenter’s ballet score for the Ballets Russes. I began by examining Carpenter’s transatlantic Conclusion 107 music career, particularly his first two ballets The Birthday of the Infanta and Krazy Kat: A Jazz Pantomime, and situated them as the composer’s attempys to match the Ballets Russes’ exotic and modernist aesthetics in the hopes of receiving a commission by Diaghilev. Relying on Carpenter’s correspondence to his mistress, Ellen Borden, as well as on written accounts from figures in the Ballets Russes entourage, I found that with the help of his wife and distinguished colleagues, Carpenter managed to infiltrate the Ballets Russes social circles by 1923. Consequently, Carpenter was at last asked by Diaghilev to compose a “typically American” ballet score for the Ballets Russes in the summer of 1923. I discussed the complex politics of patronage within the post-war Ballets Russes, and determined that Diaghilev compromised his high-artistic standards for the sake of upholding the Ballets Russes’ position in European culture among competing modernist ballet companies, and to meet the requirements for another American tour. Diaghilev’s ultimate rejection of Carpenter’s score has been attributed to Carpenter being, in the words of dancer Serge Lifar, an “episode” in Diaghilev’s plans for the Ballets Russes, meaning that as soon as the composer’s score was no longer of use to the impresario, Carpenter, too, became irrelevant to the impresario and his ballet. In the third chapter, Carpenter’s ballet for Diaghilev, Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life, was examined in terms of its indebtedness to both American and European aesthetics and musical idioms, and thus viewed as product and example of cyclic transatlantic connections and cultural transfer. The ballet, consisting of two distinct sections that came to represent “America at Work” and “America at Play,” incorporated elements of American culture that were internationally recognized as or representative of the New World. In “America at work,” Carpenter’s inspiration came from skyscrapers, which I argued stems from his home town of Chicago, as well as their status as transatlantic symbols of America recognized Conclusion 108 throughout the world. I proposed that the skyscraper is translated into the music of Carpenter’s score through a machine aesthetic derived from Stravinsky, one created by the use of an enlarged percussion section, the “ostinato machine” and Pétrouchka chord-like bitonality. For “America at Play,” Carpenter incorporated elements of American popular entertainment that were fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic, including jazz (a musical style internationally understood as American) and a choral section reminiscent of spirituals and ragtime songs. Finally, I discussed the Metropolitan production of Skyscrapers, encompassing the scenario (by Carpenter and Robert Edmond Jones), the set and costume designs (by Jones) and the choreography (by Sammy Lee). In the production of Skyscrapers, I suggested the employment of an African American choir to interpret the a spiritual-like choral section set to nonsense text, in combination with the quotations of “coon” songs and a dancer in black face, perpetuated degrading racial stereotypes that originated in the minstrelsy tradition. Furthermore, I argued that in the setting of “America at Work” in a skyscraper-construction cite and “America at Play” at an amusement park, Skyscrapers participated in the debate around the mechanization of America life during the 1920s. The Chicago Allied Arts and Onwards The influence of the Ballets Russes and the commission from Diaghilev resulted in more than Carpenter’s initial venture into composing for ballet and the score of Skyscrapers, for it also had concrete repercussions in the fledgling American ballet community. In 1924, one year after Diaghilev requested a score from Carpenter, the composer founded with Adolph Bolm the Chicago Allied Arts, an organization that came to be considered the “first progressive field of ballet in America.” 297 The company was modeled after the ideology and values of the Ballets 297 George Amberg, Ballet in America: The Emergence of an American Art (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949), 23. Conclusion 109 Russes by encouraging new ballets from international artists in a collaborative environment. The company’s première danseuse, Ruth Page (1899-1991), recalls that the principle of the Chicago Allied Arts was “to give Chicago a permanent and growing ballet commensurate with the expense and limitations of a small orchestra and devoted almost entirely to the production of work of living composers of every country.” 298 Like the Ballets Russes, the Chicago Allied Arts was a collaborative effort between the arts. Bolm acted as the company’s artistic director, choreographer and premier danseur, therefore holding a type of artistic authority that he was never permitted with the Ballets Russes. American dancer Ruth Page, who studied under Bolm and played the role of the Infanta in Carpenter’s first ballet, The Birthday of the Infanta, danced the main female roles. The role of music director for the organization was filled by Eric DeLamarter (1880-1953), an American who also held the position of assistant conductor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the chief designer was Russian artist Nicolai Remisoff, (1887-1975) who designed in the “colourful Russian peasant style of Larionov and Goncharova.” 299 Carpenter’s main responsibility was to attract donors to fund the operation given his ties to the wealthy families of Chicago, however one can also expect the composer would have contributed to the programming and artistic decisions of the company. The Chicago Allied Arts presented music and ballet productions from numerous contemporary international composers. The programming contained music by many composers who had previously been featured in the Ballets Russes repertoire, including de Falla, Milhaud, Poulenc, Prokofiev, Satie and Stravinsky. Previous to Remisoff’s appointment as designer, Carpenter and Bolm planned to feature rotating designers including many of Diaghilev’s artists 298 Ruth Page, Page by Page, ed. Andrew Mark Wentink (New York: Dance Horizons, 1978), 29. 299 Suzanne Carbonneau, “Adolph Bolm and America,” in The Ballets Russes and Its World, ed. Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 232-233. Conclusion 110 such as Leon Bakst, and Nicholas Roerich. 300 The company also arranged for the American debut of the Ballets Russes’ principle ballerina Tamara Karsavina (1885-1978), whose appearance in the Ballets Russes’ American tours had been highly anticipated but never actualized, as the dancer was pregnant. As Suzanne Carbonneau has noted, many of The Chicago Allied Arts’ ballets were parallel to previous productions by the Ballets Russes: The Chicago Allied Arts production of The Rivals (1925), based on an ancient Chinese legend with score by American composer Henry Eichhein (1870-1942), was based on themes similar to Stravinsky’s opera Le Rossignol (1914); A ballet with a score by Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) entitled Mandragora (1925) shared the commedia dell’arte characters of Carnival (1910) and Pulcinella (1920) (and inspired a critic from the Chicago newspaper Chicago American to established Bolm’s “right to the surname of our idol Diaghileff”); and the “grotesque” Bals des Marionettes (1925) that borrowed seven dances from Satie’s “La Piège de Méduse” was comparable with the Ballets Russes’ La Boutique Fantastique (1919). 301 Ironically (and in line with Diaghilev’s skepticism of America), the Chicago Allied Arts, a company established as a means of bringing a higher standard of art to Chicago, was dismissed as “too arty” and disbanded in 1926. 302 Although Skyscrapers was Carpenter’s last ballet score and the Chicago Allied Arts disseminated in the mid-1920s, the composer maintained an interest in the genre for the rest of his career. This is illustrated in the many letters written by Carpenter to Bolm from the 1930s and 1940s regarding contemporary ballet companies that are housed in the Adolph Bolm Collection 300 Ibid. 301 Ibid., 236-237. 302 Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 117. Conclusion 111 at the Library of Congress. 303 The composer kept tabs on the workings of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, a company established in 1932 as a successor to Diaghilev’s ballet by impresarios René Blum (1878-1942) and Wassily de Basil (1888-1951). Carpenter found the company “one of the few dependable ballet producing groups,” and expressed interest in a possible collaboration (“I would, of course, be interested in any bona fide idea which they might have concerning any of my works”). 304 The composer wrote to Bolm about potential new ballet ideas (“it may turn out in the end to be ballet material”), possible re-stagings of their ballet The Birthday of the Infanta, and chorographical opportunities for the dancer. 305 Carpenter also critiqued contemporary productions by Fokine (his L’Epreuve d’Amour was “dull and conventional”), Massine (praising his Nobilissima Visione with a score by Paul Hindemith as a “masterpiece” and “the most important work in my opinion since Les Noces”), and Lincoln Kirsten’s company the Ballet Caravan (Carpenter thought some of their works were “good,” especially Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid, which is “excellent.”) 306 Final Words The influence of the Ballets Russes impacted Carpenter’s compositional career far more than his instance as one of Diaghilev’s “episodes.” From his first encounter with the ballet company, his compositional focus changed towards ballet and his aesthetic paralleled the contemporary trends in the Ballets Russes. While he was composing this ballet for the Ballets Russes, Carpenter kept in mind his European audience and created a work that illustrates transnational influences reflective of the time it was composed. Finally, even after Skyscrapers was dropped by the Ballets Russes (but successfully premiered in America), ballet continued to 303 Adolph Bolm Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 304 Letter from Carpenter to Bolm, 2 March 1936, B-DLC. 305 Ibid; Letter from Carpenter to Bolm, 20 May 1940. B-DLC. 306 Letter from Carpenter to Bolm, 21 October 1938, B-DLC; Letter from Carpenter to Bolm, 21 October 1938, B- DLC; Letter from Carpenter to Bolm, 21 September 1939, B-DLC. Conclusion 112 play a role in Carpenter’s compositional career through the Chicago Allied Arts, and he remained interested in the genre for the rest of his life. This shows yet another instance of the powerful cultural role the Ballets Russes played in arts and culture around the world in the 1910s and 1920s. Appendix 113 Appendix A Skyscrapers Program Notes, by John Alden Carpenter “Skyscrapers” is a ballet which seeks to reflect some of the many rhythmic movements and sounds of modern American life. It has no story, in the usually accepted sense, but proceeds on the simple fact that American life reduces itself to violent alterations of WORK and PLAY, each with its own peculiar and distinctive rhythmic character. The action of the ballet is merely a series of moving decorations reflected some of the obvious external features of this life, as follows: SCENE I: The curtain rises with the beginning of the music, disclosing a drop painted with wide converging black and white stripes, symbol of danger, and two red traffic-lights at front of stage, which flash intermittently until No. 2 (in score) is reached. SCENE II (No. 2 to No.7): The first drop is lifted at this point, revealing a huge and sinister skyscraper in course of construction, a tangled mass of red and black shapes. A group of workmen are engaged on a scaffold in the foreground, and beneath them is another group, working over an opening in the stage, out of which come occasional jets of smoke and fire. In the background is seen in silhouette, the dreary and endless shadow-procession of the indifferent city crowd. SCENE III (No. 7 to No. 11): This scene represent the transition from WORK to PLAY. This accompanying drop is a plain black curtain with two low, arches doorways outlined in white. The workmen enter from the wings, right-pass with stiff and mechanical step though the first doorway, and reappear almost at once through the other door, now with movement gay and relaxed, and each with his girl on his arm. SCENE IV (No. 11 to six bars before No. 53): The background of this scene represents an exaggeration of the Coney Island type of American amusement park, complete with all its gay and tawdry trappings and a preposterous moon. As the scene is revealed (No. 10), a little German street-band is discovered surrounded by a crowd of excited pleasure seekers. A boisterous dance movement fills the stage, until - At No. 13 every dancer is suddenly “frozen” in the posture of the moment, by a vivid flash of lightening, followed by a roll of thunder and a darkening stage. The effect intended is that of a sudden “throw-back” in the minds of the revelers, to the thought of WORK. Out of the obscurity of the now darkened stage (No. 14), emerges the group of workmen, grouped again over the smoking aperture at their feet, and performing again their stern and mechanical pantomime of labour, as in Scene II. At No. 16 the lights are up again, the workmen have disappeared and PLAY had been resumed. The eager throng is crowding about a little platform up-stage on which three mechanical dolls are stiffly performing. From No. 17 to two measures before No. 20, there is further diversion in two side-show booths on either side of the stage near the footlights, each with a fabulous “barker” in front, the only offering a snake-charmer, the other a “Wild Man of Borneo.” From No. 20 to No. 23 there follows a general dance movement. From No, 24 to No. 27 there is a solo-dance of “Herself,” supported by her followers. At No. 28 a group of red-coated attendants wheel in from the wings a fantastic cylinder covered with mirrors, which they place in the center of the stage, where it slowly revolves, catching and Appendix 114 throwing back a thousand lights and colours. In a wide circle around the revolving mirror moves a double file of dancers, giving the effect, with their prancing step and the nodding plums on their heads, of the day maneuvers of the wooden horses of a Merry-Go-Round. Mirror and horses begin at No. 32 to move more and more slowly until, then measures later, they come to a complete stop. There follows, at once, the quick exit of the horses, the wheeling off of the revolving mirror by the guards, all of which is covered, from No. 33 on, with a short interlude by another small group of dancers. At the first note of No. 34 “The Strutter” makes his sudden entrance on an empty stage, through a trap in the floor. He begins his dance alone, - at the thirteenth measure after No. 35 he is joined by four girl dancers, and one measure before No. 37 he makes his exit in a headlong dive over their bended backs into the wings. From No. 37 to No. 39 there follows a sudden crescendo of excitement growing out of an encounter between two street women, in which their followers quickly join, until at No. 39 the brawling crowd is driven from the stage by the police. Remaining alone on the stage is a negro street-cleaner, in the white suit of his profession. The lights are gradually dimmed, “White-Wings” finished his work, and at last throws himself down to sleep, reclining against the base of the traffic-light at from of stage. The sharp ray of a spotlight from above picks out the whiteness o his costume from the surrounding gloom. The ensuing scene, from No. 40 to Bo. 44, represents the dream fantasy of the sleeping negro. Through the gauze curtain just beyond him, we see gradually taking shape in the dim light a group of negros, men and women, half-forgotten types of the poor South. We hear their actual voices, in a song, first slow and soothing, then more animated and rising at last to a fierce religious fervor toward the end of No. 43. Suddenly, without warning, the tension breaks and at No. 44 the singing stops and they dance. The strong rhythm begins slowly to penetrate the sleeping “White-Wings”- his legs begin to twitch, he turns and tosses and at last he springs to his feel at No. 45 and throws himself into the dance which ends in a wild accelerando at No.47. At this point there is a sudden “black-out” of the lights, followed by a dim greenish obscurity, in which is seen a slow-moving procession of white-masked sandwich-men – a macabre symbol of poverty. At the seventh measure after No. 48 the last of the sandwich-men has disappeared and the lights flash suddenly up again, revealing the gay “Coney Island” crowd in the climax of their PLAY, which continues with increasing frenzy up to the sudden pause in the twelfth measure after No. 52, when the scene is blacked out. SCENE V (The return from PLAY to WORK): At the fourth measure before No. 53 the lights go up again on the black and white two-door drop which was used in Scene III, and the symbolism of the movement on the stage is the same as in the earlier scene; but this time, of course, reversed. The gay crowd of men and girls from the wings through one door, and from the other, almost at once, files a stiff and relentless procession of workmen, lock-stepping to their JOB. SCENE VI: At No. 54, with the shrill blast of a factory whistle, we are confronted again with out Skyscraper, stripped now of all non-essentials, a stark and ominous skeleton of black and red. Again we see a group of workmen on an up-flung scaffold, while below, another group moving slowly, inch by inch toward the brightening footlights, cast its black-looming labour shadows on the back-stop as the curtain falls. Appendix 115 Bibliography Archival Materials Adolph Bolm Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. John Alden Carpenter Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Serge Diaghilev/Serge Lifar Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Newspaper and Magazine Articles Aldrich, Richard. “Music: Modern Music and Ballet.” New York Times, 21 January 1922. “American Ballet in Paris Tonight.” New York Herald, 25 October 1923. Brock, H. I. “Jazz is to do a Turn in Grand Opera.” New York Times, 14 February 1926. Clyne, Anthony. “Jazz.” The Sackbut, August 1925. Downes, Olin. “‘Skyscrapers’ Here with ‘Jazz’ Score.” New York Times, 20 February 1926. ——. “The Revolutionary Mr. Diaghileff.” New York Times, 23 January 1916. Duke, Vernon. “Gershwin, Schillinger, and Dukelsky: Some Reminiscences.” Newsweek 24, 23 October 1944. Dvořák, Antonín. “Music in America.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 90, February 1985. Getty, Frank. “Moderns Replace Ballet at ‘Met.’” Palm Beach Daily News, 19 February 1926. Guard, William J. “A Talk with Serge de Diaghileff, Ballet Wizard.” New York Times, 9 January 1916. “House Sold Out to See A Tamer Ballet Russes.” New York Sun, 26 January 1916. Kimball, Fiske. “What is Modern Architecture?” Nation 199, 30 July 1924. Lieberson, Goddard. “Modern American Music.” The Listener, February 1939. Loeb, Harold A. “Foreign Exchange.” Broom 2/2, May 1922. Milhaud, Darius. “The Jazz Band and Negro Music,” Living Age, 18 October 1924. Monfried, Walter. “Carpenter, Businessman-Composer.” The Milwaukee Journal, 30 April 1947. Bibliography 117 Moore, Edward. “J.A. Carpenter ‘Skyscrapers,’ Put on Records.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 August 1932. “Russian Ballet Modified.” New York Times, 26 January 1916 “Russians Make ‘Faun’ Behave.” New York Tribune, 26 January 1916. “Skyscrapers,” The Outlook, 3 March 1926. Straus, Henrietta. “Marking the Miles.” Nation 114, 1 March 1922. Taylor, Deems. “America’s First Dramatic Composer.” McCalls Magazine, April 1922. Tryon, Winthrop P. “Carpenter’s New Ballet.” The Christian Science Monitor, 20 February 1926. Music Scores Carpenter, John Alden. Krazy Kat: A Jazz Pantomime. New York: G. Schirmer, 1922. Carpenter, John Alden. Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life. New York: G. Schirmer, 1926. Debussy, Claude. Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. Paris: E. Fromont, 1895. Stravinsky, Igor. Pétrouchka. Berlin: Editions Russes de Musique, 1912. Sources Adams, Judith A. The American Amusement Park Industry: A History of Technology and Thrills. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Amberg, George. Ballet in America: The Emergence of an American Art. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949. Arvey, Verna. Choreographic Music: Music for the Dance. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1941. Banfield, William C. Cultural Codes: Makings of a Black Music Philosophy: An Interpretive History from Spirituals to Hip Hop. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010. Barg, Lisa. “Black Voices/White Sounds: Race and Representation in Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts.” American Music 18/2 (2000): 121-61. Bibliography 118 Batson, Charles R. Dance, Desire, and Anxiety in Early Twentieth-Century French Theatre: Playing Identities. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Bender, Thomas, and William R. Taylor. “Culture and Architecture: Some Aesthetic Tensions in the Shaping of Modern New York City.” In Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature, edited by William Sharp and Leonard Wallock, 189-219. Baltimore: John Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1983. Berman, Nancy. “From Le sacre to Les noces: Primitivism and the Changing Face of Modernity.” Canadian University Music Review 20/1 (1999): 9-21. Bernays, Edward L. Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965. Borowski, Felix. “John Alden Carpenter.” The Musical Quarterly 16/4 (1930): 449-68. Bossom, Alfred C. Building to the Skies: The Romance of the Skyscraper. London: The Studio, 1934. Buckle, Richard. Diaghilev. New York: Atheneum, 1979. Carbonneau, Suzanne. “Adolph Bolm and America.” In The Ballet Russes and Its World, edited by Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer, 219-244. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Cheny, Sheldon. The New World Architecture. New York: AMS Press, 1930. Cowell, Henry. American Composers on American Music: A Symposium. California: Stanford University Press, 1933. De Groote, Pascale. Ballet Suédois. Ghent, Belgium: Academia Press, 2002. Dorris, George. “The Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Fresh Starts: Rosina Galli and the Ballet Russes, 1912-1917.” Dance Chronicle 35/2 (2012): 173-207. Duhamel, George. America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future. Translated by Charles Miner Thompson. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931. Duke, Vernon. Passport to Paris. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1955. 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The Black and White of American Popular Music: From Slavery to World War II. Rochester: Schenkman, 2007. Lemons, J. Stanley. “Black Stereotypes as Reflected in Popular Culture, 1880-1920.” American Quarterly 29/1 (1977): 104-116. Bibliography 121 Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Levin, Gail. “The Ballet Suédois and American Culture.” In Paris Modern: The Swedish Ballet 1920-1925, edited by Nancy Van Norman Baer. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1995. Lifar, Serge. Serge Diaghilev, His life, His work, His legend. New York: De Capo, 1940. Locke, Alain. The New Negro, 1925. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968. MacDonald, Nesta. Diaghilev Observed by Critics in England and the United States 1911-1929. London: Dance Books, 1975. Mahar, William J. Behind The Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. 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Electronics 2021, 10, 297. https://doi.org/10.3390/ electronics10030297 Received: 12 November 2020 Accepted: 19 January 2021 Published: 26 January 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neu- tral with regard to jurisdictional clai- ms in published maps and institutio- nal affiliations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Li- censee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and con- ditions of the Creative Commons At- tribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Deptartment of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Gyeonggi-do 16419, Korea; luis@skku.edu (L.C.Q.); jorgedavid@skku.edu (J.I.B.) 2 Department of Human ICT Convergence, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Gyeonggi-do 16419, Korea * Correspondence: jdcho@skku.edu Abstract: Despite the use of tactile graphics and audio guides, blind and visually impaired people still face challenges to experience and understand visual artworks independently at art exhibitions. Art museums and other art places are increasingly exploring the use of interactive guides to make their collections more accessible. In this work, we describe our approach to an interactive multimodal guide prototype that uses audio and tactile modalities to improve the autonomous access to information and experience of visual artworks. The prototype is composed of a touch-sensitive 2.5D artwork relief model that can be freely explored by touch. Users can access localized verbal descriptions and audio by performing touch gestures on the surface while listening to themed background music along. We present the design requirements derived from a formative study realized with the help of eight blind and visually impaired participants, art museum and gallery staff, and artists. We extended the formative study by organizing two accessible art exhibitions. There, eighteen participants evaluated and compared multimodal and tactile graphic accessible exhibits. Results from a usability survey indicate that our multimodal approach is simple, easy to use, and improves confidence and independence when exploring visual artworks. Keywords: accessibility technology; multimodal interaction; auditory interface; touch interface; vision impairment 1. Introduction Museums have traditionally employed several methods to make their collections more accessible in support of the participation of blind and visually impaired people in arts and culture and to comply with laws [1,2] that protect the right to access art. For example, some leading art institutions [3–5] offer accessible “touch tours” and workshops similar to Art Beyond Sight [6] and the Mind’s Eye Program [7] where participants can experience art by touching some of the collection artworks while listening to tailored audio descriptions given by the staff. Two additional methods to support access are descriptive audio guides and accessible Braille leaflets of the artworks that may include embossed tactile graphic diagrams. Unfortunately, these methods have limitations. Accessible tours and workshops are available only on specific dates, schedules, and often must be reserved in advance. Moreover, they fail to support independent visits, exploration, and the artworks prepared for touch exploration are not the most prominent collection pieces due to the risk of damage [8]. Audio descriptions and accessible leaflets fail to convey much of the spatial information in the artwork. The latter also requires Braille proficiency, which remains low even in developed countries (about 5% in the UK [9] and less than 10% in the USA [10]). Nowadays, the development and display of relief models of artworks made using low-cost digital fabrication techniques such as 3D printing are becoming an alternative for improving the accessibility to art. Several art institutions like the Prado Museum [11] Electronics 2021, 10, 297. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10030297 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics https://www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics https://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5120-1644 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7015-8274 https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10030297 https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10030297 https://creativecommons.org/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10030297 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/10/3/297?type=check_update&version=2 Electronics 2021, 10, 297 2 of 19 and The Andy Warhol Museum [12], among others, have pioneered the use of this alter- native in their exhibitions. Compared to tactile graphic diagrams, they offer advantages like improved volume shape, depth, and more diverse texture representation. However, without any verbal descriptions, they might still be challenging to understand. Interactive multimodal guides (IMGs) combine modalities such as audio, tact, smell, flavor, or others to convey and communicate information. Doing so mitigates the individual modalities’ shortcomings and complements their strengths. In this work, we describe our approach to the design, implementation, and evaluation of an interactive multimodal guide for blind and visually impaired people that uses local- ized on-demand audio descriptions and tactile relief models to improve the independent access and understanding of visual artworks. Motivation and Objective Several challenges prevent the adoption of interactive multimodal guides at art muse- ums and galleries. One of them is the preservation efforts and prioritization of the primacy of vision to experience the art pieces [13]. Also, making and exhibiting models based on artists’ works may lead to ownership, copyright infringement, and artistic integrity argu- ments [14]. Furthermore, determining effective methods for accessible art representation is challenging. Motivated by these challenges, our objective was to develop an interac- tive multimodal guide and study its feasibility to improve accessible art representation compared to tactile graphics. Our main contributions are: 1. A formative study performed with the help of eight blind and visually impaired participants, art museum and gallery staff, and two artists to understand the different needs of these stakeholders and the current state of the accessibility tools available to experience visual artworks. 2. A low-cost alternative implementation of an interactive multimodal guide that enables blind and visually impaired people without previous training to independently access and experience visual artworks. 3. In collaboration with an accessible art gallery and a school for blind and visually impaired people, we performed two art exhibitions using the proposed guide. Within those exhibitions, we performed a survey with eighteen blind and visually impaired participants to compare the proposed interactive guide and a tactile graphics alternative. 2. Related Work 2.1. Tactile Graphics Tactile graphics (TG) are made using raised lines and textures to convey drawings and images by touch. They are frequently used by blind and visually impaired people because the tactile modality is the best for their graphical image comprehension [15]. Their use is recommended where spatial relationships among the graph’s objects are important [16], such as simple graphs, diagrams, and drawings. Unfortunately, they are ineffective to express visual information of complex images [17,18], such as those present in many visual artworks. For this case, adding Braille labels is of limited use due to the large space needed by the Braille characters to be legible. Moreover, including labels within the artwork area obstructs exploration. Advances in low-cost prototyping and 3D printing technologies bring the potential to tackle the complexity of expressing complex images without exploration obstruction by adding interactivity to tactile graphics. 2.2. Interactive Tactile Graphics and 3D Models In the last decades, researchers have explored the improvement of tactile graphics ac- cessibility by adding interactivity through diverse technologies. Some of the improvements are better content exploration [18], learning facilitation [19], and expansion of the amount of information provided without over-complications [20]. Table A1 summarizes several of these projects and their interaction technologies. Three early works are NOMAD [21], The Talking Tablet [22], and IVEO [23], all of which function by placing a tactile graphic on Electronics 2021, 10, 297 3 of 19 a high-resolution touch-sensitive pad that detects user touch gestures that trigger audio descriptions. This method provides independent and detailed access to graphic elements, and since it does not rely on Braille, the possible audience is broader. Taylor et al. [24] and LucentMaps [25] make use of the touch screens in mobile devices to detect user–touch interactions in a portable way. They attach 3D printed tactile overlays of city maps to the device screen. Taylor et al. [24] 3D print sections of the overlay using conductive filament to provide interaction points on discrete sections of the map. LucentMaps instead uses translucent filament for their overlays coupled with a mobile application that visually highlights sections of the overlay using the device screen. MapSense [26] also uses a touchscreen to identify user touch gestures and conductive tangible tokens placed on the surface. The tangibles are additionally infused with smell and taste to foster reflective learning and memorization. Using touch-sensitive surfaces to detect user input and trigger audio feedback increases the amount of information communicated to the user. How- ever, this approach is limited to thin overlays. Otherwise, the system can’t recognize the touch gestures. An alternative approach is using cameras to track either the content or the user ’s hands. CamIO [27], Tactile Graphics with a Voice [28,29], and The Tactile Graphics Helper [30] are examples of projects using this approach. The Tactile Graphics with Voice projects work by using a mobile or wearable device’s camera to identify QR codes printed along a tactile graphic. Then, the system tracks the user’s hand to trigger localized verbal descriptions. CamIO and The Tactile Graphics Helper use mounted cameras that identify the content using image processing algorithms, instead of using QR codes or visual markers. With the exception of CamIO, the previous projects focus on adding interactivity to 2D tactile graphics, and mainly propose their use for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education and orientation and mobility improvement. Both approaches are effective to improve the amount of information and the comprehension of the spatial arrangement of images. However, to facilitate comprehension, they abstract the com- plexity of images to contour lines, which hinders the aesthetic aspect and exploration of artwork images. 3D printing opens up the possibility to create low-cost reliefs and 3D models of objects with added expressive volume. Holloway et al. [31] propose a touch interactive prototype that uses 3D printed volumetric representations of map models embedded with discrete capacitive touch points that users can touch to trigger audio descriptions. This approach improved the short term recollection and the understanding of the relative height among the map elements. Other studies focused on symbolic representation on 3D maps models, like Holloway et al. [32] and Gual et al. [33,34], they report improvements in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and memorability compared to two-dimensional symbols. Alternative methods to add interactivity involve using other type of devices. For example, pen-shaped devices like The Talking Tactile Pen [35] or wearables like the ring-shaped Tooteko [36]. In this approach, the user must hold or wear the device, which can detect sensors embedded in the tactile graphic or models on approximation. 2.3. Interactive Multimodal Guides for Blind and Visually Impaired People The body of work on interactive multimodal guides focused on artwork exploration is limited, as seen in Table A1. However, there are several related works. The American Foundation for the Blind offers guidelines and resources for the use of tactile graphics for the specific case of artworks [37]. Cho et al. [38] present a novel tactile color pictogram system to communicate the color information of visual artworks. Volpe et al. [39] explore the semi-automatic generation of 3D models from digital images of paintings, and classifies four classes of 3D models (tactile outline, textured tactile, flat-layered bas-relief, and bas-relief) for visual artwork representation. After an evaluation with fourteen blind participants, the results indicate that audio guides are still required to make the models understandable. Holloway et al. [14] evaluated three techniques for visual artwork representation: tactile graphic, 3D print (sculpture model), and laser cut. Notably, 3D print and laser cut are Electronics 2021, 10, 297 4 of 19 preferred by most participants to explore visual artworks. Hinton [40] describes the use of tactile graphics of visual artworks made using thermoforming intended to be explored along with tape recordings. Blind study participants reported that the approach helped them understand the space and perspective of the artworks and found the approach fun, interesting, informative, and even stimulating to their creative efforts. There are the few projects that add interactivity to visual artwork representations and museum objects. Anagnostakis et al. [41] use proximity and touch sensors to provide audio guidance through a mobile device of museum exhibits. Vaz et al. [42] developed an accessi- ble geological sample exhibitor that reproduces audio descriptions of the samples when picked up. The on-site use evaluation revealed that blind and visually impaired people felt more motivated and improved their mental conceptualization. Leporini et al. [43] explore the use of a three-dimensional archeological map and fascade models to communicate historical, practical, and architectural information on demand, using 3D printed buttons with success to provide autonomous and satisfying exploration. Reichinger et al. [44–46] in- troduce the concept of a gesture-controlled interactive audio guide for visual artworks that uses depth-sensing cameras to sense the location and gestures of the user’s hands during tactile exploration of a bas-relief artwork model. The guide provides location-dependent audio descriptions based on the user’s hand position and gestures. We designed and implemented an interactive multimodal guide prototype based on the needs found through our preliminary study described in Section 3.1 and inspired mainly in the related works Holloway et al. [31] and Reichinger et al. [44]. Table 1 compares the main technical differences between the related works and our approach. Besides these differences, this work introduces a comparison between our approach and using traditional tactile graphics to measure potential improvements of the multimodal approach. Table 1. Features of the proposed interactive multimodal guide and selected related works. Author Description Halloway et al. [31] - Sensing technology: Capacitive sensor board connected to discrete copper interaction points placed on the surface of the model. - Input: Double tap and long tap gestures on the surface. - Tactile presentation: Tactile 3D map model. - Output: Audio Descriptions. - Objective: Improve Mobility and Orientation. Reichinger et al. [44–46] - Sensing technology: Color and depth mounted camera. - Input: Tap gestures on the surface and hand gestures above the surface. - Tactile presentation: Tactile bas-relif model. - Output: Audio Descriptions. - Objective: Improve visual artwork exploration. Cavazos et al. * - Sensing technology: Capacitive sensor connected to conductive ink-based sensors embedded under the surface of the model. - Input: Double tap and triple tap gestures on the surface. - Tactile presentation: Tactile bas-relief model. - Output: Audio Descriptions, Sound effects, and Background music - Objective: Improve visual artwork exploration. * This work. 3. Materials and Methods 3.1. Formative Study To better understand the current state of the accessibility tools available to experience visual artworks and to explore the requirements for the use of interactive multimodal guides, we conducted a formative study with blind and visually impaired participants, art museums and gallery staff, and artists. Electronics 2021, 10, 297 5 of 19 3.1.1. Accessible Visual Artworks for Blind and Visually Impaired People The formative study focused on the current access to visual artworks through tactile graphics and other means with eight blind and visually impaired participants, with an average age of 29.13 (standard deviation of 7.7). Other characteristics of the participants are described in Table 2. Of the eight participants in the study, three (37.5%) are male, and five (62.5%) are female. While five (62.50%) of the participants attend university studies, three (37.5%) of them work. All the participants gave signed informed consent based on the procedures approved by the Sungkyunkwan University Institutional Review Board. Table 2. Characteristics of blind and visually impaired participants in our formative study. Participant Sex Age Occupation Sight FP1 Female 24 University student Total vision loss FP2 Male 40 Worker Near vision loss FP3 Female 42 Worker Total vision loss FP4 Female 30 Worker Profound vision loss FP5 Male 27 University student Near vision loss FP6 Male 24 University student Total vision loss FP7 Female 23 University student Total vision loss FP8 Female 23 University student Total vision loss We followed a semi-structured interview focused on the access and availability of tac- tile materials at museums, galleries, and through their education. Moreover, we inquired about their experience when using tactile graphics and interactive guides, if any. While all the participants stated having experience using tactile graphics, most of the encounters with this type of materials were limited to educational materials and tactile books during their early education or related to STEM subjects and maps. Four participants stated having experience with tactile graphics related to visual artworks. All the participants that said having experience with tactile graphics in the art fields had access to them during their primary and secondary studies. Only two mentioned having experienced them during a visit to a museum or gallery. All of the participants expressed having visited a museum or art gallery; they reported that the most common accessible tools during their visit were guided tours and the use of audio guides. Seven of the participants mentioned that they were accompanied by someone (relatives or friends) during their visits. They added that they mostly relied on that person’s comments and help to use the audio guide during their visit to experience the artworks. Regarding their experience exploring tactile graphics, the participants mentioned that they are convenient to understand simple diagrams of mathematical concepts or simple graphics in educational fields, learning language characters, and storybooks. Mixed results were reported in their use for tactile maps. Three participants considered tactile graphics easy to understand, while five found them over-complicated or not very useful. However, all of the participants with previous experience with tactile graphics of visual artworks stated dissatisfaction due to their limitations. In particular, one participant commented: “FP2: Using the tactile graphics is a hit and miss. If the contents are simple and separated is easy to get an idea of what the picture looks like, but often there are so many shapes and textures that is difficult to imagine what the picture looks like, it becomes hard, like thinking about math, art is not supposed to be like that." This reflects the known problem of producing tactile graphics of complex images, which is usually dealt with by simplifying and abstracting the objects in the image. However, this approach often doesn’t solve the problem in the case of tactile artworks. “FP3: So much detail is lost when touching a tactile graphic. Even if I can find and feel the silhouette of a person or their face, I cannot know if the person in the painting is smiling or crying, and that’s what people usually talk about." Another problem is the challenge to represent perspective and volume. “FP3: When exploring a tactile graphic everything is on the same level, there’s no depth like in the real world. If it’s a landscape, I don’t know what is in front Electronics 2021, 10, 297 6 of 19 and what’s on the back. Even something simple like a ball, I only feel a circle, and many things can be a circle. I’m told that in the painting you can know it’s a ball because of the color and shadows, but I just feel a circle." Despite the shortcomings, the participants expressed the need for tactile graphics and desired for them to be available for more artworks and more locations. “FP5: Even when they are not perfect (tactile graphics), they are still useful to know what is where in the painting, I still can be in the conversation. I just hope they were available in more places and for all the works." 3.1.2. Accessible Visual Artwork at Art Museums and Galleries Some of the participants in the formative study mentioned the shortage in the avail- ability of tactile graphics or other accessibility tools in their visits to art museums and galleries. We met with a couple of administrators and curators at a national art museum, a private art gallery, and an accessible gallery at a social welfare center for blind and visually impaired people, to shed some light on their approach and efforts towards the accessibility to their collection. At the national art museum, they described several of their initiatives towards accessibility. Their current effort is mostly directed to accessible tours. Besides the tours and available audio guides, some of their exhibitions are made accessible through 3D-printed models that can be explored by touch. However, this tool is not always available, and it is used mostly for large modern art installations. The private gallery just offered guided tours by its staff. There were two main concerns. First, any accessible tool or display must be unobtrusive. One of the concerns was that any display co-located with the artwork can become a distraction and deviate the attention from the artwork. The second concern is about the contents. The administrators commented that presenting the artwork through a different medium than the one used by the artist could have implications in the message and intention that the artist wanted to express. Because of this, the use of accessible exhibits is more often available for modern artworks, where the artist can provide guidelines or collaborate in the development of the exhibits or even make their artworks considering accessibility needs. 3.1.3. Accessible Visual Artwork and Artists We interviewed two artists separately to inquire about the use of accessibility tools and other mediums to experience their art. To generate richer insights, we provided one tactile graphic representation of a painting and discussed it with them. Both artists agreed on the importance of making visual art more accessible to blind and visually impaired people and that it may require the introduction of other tools or mediums. To this end, they strongly suggested collaboration with the author or experts when possible, noting that while the artist may not be an expert on the added medium, it can provide feedback to improve it. One of the artists expressed his concern regarding tactile graphics “Artist 1: I believe too much emphasis is placed on what is in the painting and not the painting itself. Yes, the recognition of shapes, objects, colors, and elements is relevant, but I dare to say it is not the most important aspect. Viewers should not be passive, just saying to them ’this is this’ or ’this means this’ is a failure. The goal of my art is to cause a reaction when someone sees it, they (viewers) should think, they should react. That’s what experiencing art is." We believe that this is a very relevant point, since most of the research literature is centered in the improvement of recognition of the objects in the painting, but there is almost no improvement related to the reaction and interpretation studies when using accessible artwork guides. 3.1.4. Design Requirements Based on the feedback obtained during the formative study, we identified the following design requirements to develop our interactive multimodal guide. Independent exploration is the most important need derived from the formative study. It is largely derived from two factors, adequate access to the artwork and the information presentation method to facilitate understanding and experience. To improve it, the IMG should tackle the following: Electronics 2021, 10, 297 7 of 19 1. Simple to learn and use. The guide should offer a low entry barrier to the user. It should avoid the need for Braille literacy for operation and exploration to improve the access for blind and visually impaired people without or limited Braille literacy. It should avoid, as much as possible, the need for training or previous experience for its operation. For example, using a limited set of intuitive and well-known interaction gestures and interfaces to avoid cognitive load. 2. Self-contained. The guide should avoid requiring blind and visually impaired people to carry external devices or install software on their own. Blind and visually impaired visitors often already carry several items such as a personal bag, white cane, leaflets, and audio guides. External devices add to their carrying load, add the need to check-in and out the device, as well as to learn the device operation and interface. 3. Facilitate access to information. Exploring the artworks by touch is essential to un- derstand the spatial arrangement of the artwork. The design of the model should be simple and abstract enough for easy comprehension, while avoiding oversimplifica- tion. Audio descriptions should be detailed but not long. Users should be able to skip them if desired. 4. Promote active engagement. The IMG should promote active user engagement by facilitating exploration rather than just providing information. As much as possible, the guide should encourage critical thinking, reflection, and emotional responses. 5. Unobtrusive and versatile. The guide should avoid being obtrusive to the original artwork within an art museum and gallery environment such that it can be colocated and avoid user isolation. The IMG should be able to support different artwork styles, sizes, and shapes. 3.2. Interactive Multimodal Guide (IMG) Based on the design requirements that we identified from the formative study to address the limitations of tactile graphics and audio guides, we decided to develop an interactive multimodal guide. Our IMG will use a combination of tactile and audio modalities to communicate information and promote the exploration of visual artworks such as paintings. The tactile modality is covered by employing a 2.5-dimensional bas- relief model representation of the visual artwork. This model is accessible by touch and will convey the spatial and composition information of the artwork and will be the primary input interface of the IMG. The audio modality will be delivered through speakers or headphones and will include: narrations, sounds, and background music to convey iconographic and iconological information. The following subsections will cover the implementation of the several components of our proposed IMG. 3.2.1. 2.5D Relief Model Users of the IMG can touch the 2.5-dimensional model to get an idea of the objects, textures, and their locations in the artwork. The main difference between a tactile graphic and a 2.5D model is that the latter can provide depth perception by giving volume to the objects in the model. There are several techniques to extract the topographical infor- mation from artworks like paintings to make a 2.5D model. Three of them are 3D laser triangulation, structured light 3D scanning, and focus variation microscopy [47]. The advantage of these techniques is that they are highly automated and provide close to exact information to reproduce the artwork’s surface. Blind and visually impaired people using a model designed using these techniques can perceive the direction of the strokes made by the artist, but often cannot recognize the objects. Only artworks made with simple strokes or rich in textures like splatter, impasto, or sgraffito are good candidates to be experienced with models designed using these techniques. Instead, we decided to use a semi-automated hybrid approach combining a technique known as shape from shading (SFS) [48]. SFS only requires a single image of the painting to generate the depth information to create a 2.5-dimensional model [49]. We chose this technique for three reasons: First, we do not need to have direct access to the artwork. Only a high-resolution image of the artwork is Electronics 2021, 10, 297 8 of 19 required to generate the depth information. Second, the process is automated and does not need specialized equipment like stereo cameras. Third, the output of the process is a greyscale height-map image that can be easily modified with any image editing software for corrections, or like in our case, to abstract, simplify or accentuate features and objects on the image. The process to design a 2.5-dimensional relief model to use with our IMG is graphically described in Figure 1 and is as follows: (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) Figure 1. Touch sensitive 2.5D relief model fabrication process. (a) Original image; (b) Grey scale height-map; (c) 2.5D digital model; (d) 2.5D printed model; (e) Conductive paint coat (f) Completed 2.5D relief model. 1. A high resolution picture of the visual artwork is taken or obtained. Figure 1a. 2. The picture is processed using the SFS based methodology proposed in Furferi et al. [50] to obtain a grayscale height-map. Figure 1b. 3. The height-map image is modified using a digital image software to correct, modify, abstract, simplify or accentuate features and objects in the painting to improve their legibility and recognition by blind and visually impaired people. 4. A three-dimensional model is generated from the original picture and the height-map image using the ’Embossing Tool’ in the ZW3D 3D drawing software. Figure 1c. Once the digital model of the relief model is ready, there are several methods to pro- duce it. We chose to 3D print it using a fused filament fabrication 3D printer due to the variety and low cost of the materials, as well as the popularity and production services available (Figure 1d). It is also possible to 3D print the model using other 3D printing methods, as long as the material is non-conductive. Such methods are selective laser sintering (SLS) or stereolithography (SLA), which offer improved printing resolution at a cost trade-off. Another alternative is to use a CNC mill to carve the model out of a solid block of material. Electronics 2021, 10, 297 9 of 19 The relief model is the primary input interface of our IMG. The touch interactivity on the relief surface is implemented by treating the surface with conductive paint. Conductive paints are electrical conductive solutions composed of dissolved or suspended pigments and conductive materials such as silver, copper, or graphite. We chose to use a water-based conductive paint that uses carbon and graphite for their conductive properties because of its easy to use, safe, and low cost nature. For our IMG, we used electric paint by bare conductive, but there are other suppliers in the market, as well as online guides to self-produce it. Once the relief model has been 3D printed, making touch-sensitive areas is a simple procedure that only requires painting the areas that must be sensitive using conductive paint. The only requirement is to be careful to paint each touch-sensitive area isolated from the others, as seen in Figure 1e. If two treated areas with conductive paint overlap, they will act as one. The conductive paint dries at room temperature and does not require any special post-processing. One limitation of this method is that while extending or adding zones to the relief model is as simple as painting more areas or extending the existing ones, reducing or splitting existing ones is a more complicated process that involves scrapping or dissolving the paint. Therefore, it is recommended to plan the location and shape of the touch-sensitive areas. Each sensitive area must be connected with a thin conductive thread or wire to the circuit board. To this end, holes can be included in the model design before production or be made using a thin drill. Once the process is complete, the relief model can be sealed using a varnish or coating, preventing smudging and acting like a protective layer. It is possible to add subsequent layers of paint to produce a range of more aesthetic finishes, like a single color finish, a colored reproduction (Figure 1f), or different color palette combinations to improve visibility. 3.2.2. Control Board The control board is the processing center of the IMG. It receives the touch sensor input from the 2.5D relief model described in Section 3.2.1 and peripherals, processes the signals, and provides audio output feedback. The control board is primarily composed of three components: An Arduino Uno microcontroller (Arduino, Somerville, MA, USA), a WAV Trigger polyphonic audio player board (SparkFun Electronics, Boulder, CO, USA) and an MPR121 proximity capacitive touch sensor controller (Adafruit Industries, New York, NY, USA). The wire leads from each of the touch sensitive areas of the relief model connect to one of the electrode inputs of the MPR121 integrated circuit. The MPR121 processes the capacitance of each of the touch areas in the relief model, which changes when the users touch the area, and it communicates touch and release events to the microcontroller through an I2C interface. One MPR121 integrated circuit is limited to 12 electrodes. It can only handle input for up to 12 touch areas. While this was enough for our prototypes, if more touch areas are required, up to four MPR121 can be connected by configuring different I2C addresses for a total of 48 touch areas. If more areas are needed, an I2C multiplexer, such as the TCA9548A (Adafruit Industries, New York, NY, USA), can be used to extend the number of supported touch zones. The microcontroller acts as the orchestrator of the control board. It receives input signals from the MPR121 and its general purpose input/output ports, processes them, and depending on the current state of execution, issues commands through its UART port to the audio board to trigger audio feedback. The WAV Trigger polyphonic audio player is a board that can play and mix up to 14 audio tracks at the same time and outputs the amplified audio through a mini-plug speaker connector. The audio files are read from an SD card and should be stored using WAV format. 3.2.3. External Hardware Besides the relief model and the control board, the IMG is composed of an enclosure display. The enclosure was designed for different exploration scenarios. For example, for our preliminary test, a portable box-shaped enclosure is made of laser-cut acrylic. The box itself acts as an exhibit, the relief model is on its top surface, and the control board Electronics 2021, 10, 297 10 of 19 and electronics are in its interior. Headphones or speakers are connected to listen to the audio, and there is a button that the user can push to start using the IMG prototype. This prototype is meant to be placed on a desk to be used in a seated position during the early preliminary tests to make its use more comfortable for longer periods. For the IMG evaluation, we designed an exhibition display made of plywood for standing up use, as this is the more frequently used display arrangement in art museums and galleries. This version includes three physical buttons with labels in Braille to listen to use instructions, general information of the artwork, and to change the speed of the audio. Headphones are on the right side of the display. Depending on the size of the relief model or the floor space of the gallery, it might be difficult to explore the relief model if it is displayed horizontally or at a near angle, so a full-size vertical display was also developed, as seen in Figure 2c. (a) (b) (c) Figure 2. Interactive Multimodal Guide prototypes. (a) Portable IMG prototype; (b) Standing exhibition IMG; (c) Verti- cal exhibition IMG. 3.2.4. Interaction Design Since there is no standard for interactive relief interfaces, and users are likely to lack previous experience with them, it is important to carefully design the interaction so that using the IMG is intuitive and easy to learn. A session with the IMG starts with the user already located in front of the display. The first task is to wear the exhibit’s headphones. The exhibition stand only has a label in Braille inviting the user to wear the headphones and indicating their location. This is a barrier for blind and visually impaired people with limited Braille literacy. While it is possible to trigger a speaker to inform the user about the location of the headphones using a proximity sensor, from our user test experience, just verbally informing the user one time and maintaining consistency on the location is enough for users to find and wear the headphones independently across different exhibition stands. In our prototypes, we maintained consistency, by placing the headphones hanging on a hook at the right side of the exhibition display. Electronics 2021, 10, 297 11 of 19 The interactive session with the IMG starts when the user either touches anywhere on the relief or presses the “Instructions” physical button on the surface to the right of the artwork relief model. At the beginning of the session, the user listens to a short instruction recording that suggests exploring the relief using both hands. Then, it instructs the user to double-tap to hear more localized detailed information about any point of interest in the relief model or triple tap to listen to localized sounds. The recording also introduces the functionality of the other two physical buttons on the surface. The “General description” button provides general information about the artwork. The “Audio Speed” button changes the speed of the audio narrations. The “Instruction” and “General description” narrations can be interrupted any time another button is pressed or by double or triple tapping on the relief model. This is intended to give freedom to the user to skip the narration if desired. 3.2.5. Information Hierarchy To provide intuitive artwork information access, we divided the information into two layers: 1. General information: Refers to the general information of the artwork such as name, author, short visual description, and any information that is not already present in the artwork or related to information that can be accessed in a single point of interest. 2. Localized information is information related to a specific point of interest in the art- work such as the object name, detailed description, color, meaning, and their relation- ship with neighboring points of interest and their sound, among others. The general information narration of the artwork is accessed only through the physical button on the IMG. Localized information is accessed by double or triple tapping on any of the points of interest in the relief model. Mapping the localized description to the point of interest being touched helps the user to relate what is touched (location, shape, and texture) to what is heard (localized information narration or sound). Sound design plays an important role in the IMG to communicate non-textual information. In collaboration with a music expert, background music was composed for each of the artworks to reflect the artwork’s general mood. This track is reproduced through the entire exploration session. Sound effects representing the objects in each of the points of interest are reproduced on demand. The objective of these sounds is to facilitate the formation of a mental image of the artwork, using familiar sounds instead of images like sighted people would do. 3.3. Evaluation 3.3.1. Accessible Exhibitions Using IMG and Tactile Graphics We expanded our formative study to receive feedback on our interactive multimodal guide prototype and compare it with a tactile graphics approach as a reference. 3.3.2. Participants We recruited eighteen participants for the study and divided them into two groups. We held the study with the first group of seven participants at an accessible gallery at a social welfare center for blind and visually impaired people. At a later date, we performed the study with the second group of eleven participants at a school for blind and visually impaired people. Participant age ranged from 15 to 52, with an average of 27.7 years. All of the participants had previous experience using tactile graphics and stated having an interest in arts. None of the participants took part in the formative study. Other characteristics of the participants are described in Table 3. All the participants or their legal guardians gave signed informed consent based on the procedures approved by the Sungkyunkwan University Institutional Review Board. Electronics 2021, 10, 297 12 of 19 Table 3. Characteristics of participants in our Standard Usability Scale evaluation study. Participant Sex Age Occupation Sight EP1 Female 16 High school student Total vision loss EP2 Female 16 High school student Near vision loss EP3 Female 19 High school student Profound vision loss EP4 Male 15 High school student Total vision loss EP5 Male 15 High school student Total vision loss EP6 Male 18 High school student Total vision loss EP7 Female 19 High school student Profound vision loss EP8 Female 16 High school student Total vision loss EP9 Male 17 High school student Near vision loss EP10 Male 18 High school student Profound vision loss EP11 Female 15 High school student Total vision loss EP12 Female 39 Worker Total vision loss EP13 Male 38 Worker Total vision loss EP14 Female 43 Worker Total vision loss EP15 Male 52 None Near vision loss EP16 Male 50 Worker Near vision loss EP17 Female 47 Housewife Near vision loss EP18 Female 45 Worker Total vision loss 3.3.3. Materials and Apparatus Two sets of test materials were prepared for the usability study. The IMG set is composed of five standing exhibition IMG prototypes similar to Figure 2b. Each prototype exhibits the 2.5D relief model of a distinct artwork from the selection in Figure 3. Since the participants may not had recently experienced visual artworks through tactile graphics, the second set of materials consisted of tactile graphics reproductions of the same artworks and was produced by a designer with extensive experience in the production of tactile graphics and reading materials for blind and visually impaired people. Descriptions of the artworks in Braille were provided side by side with the tactile graphics. (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) Figure 3. Usability study IMG artwork models. (a) The Starry Night—Vincent van Gogh; (b) Dance—Henri Matisse; (c) Senecio—Paul Klee; (d) Flowers and Insects—Sin Saimdang; (e) Hyunsook’s House—Kim Yong-il. Electronics 2021, 10, 297 13 of 19 3.3.4. Methodology The first group study was held at an accessible gallery located in a social welfare center for blind and visually impaired people. The gallery has a permanent accessible exhibition, and we were able to install our test materials and perform our study in a temporal gallery next to the main gallery, and arranged them as shown in Figure 4a. The second group study was held at a school for blind and visually impaired people. The materials were installed in the main hall of the school, as shown in Figure 4b. The study was performed in the absence of other people. c d b ea P F O (a) b d c P F O a e (b) Figure 4. Usability study setup (P = Participant; F = Facilitator; O = Observer) (a) Accessible gallery setup; (b) School for blind and visually impaired people setup. It began with a short introduction of our team and an interview with the participant to learn about their personal information, level of vision, interests in arts, and their experience at art museums and galleries. Participants were told that they would be experiencing visual artworks through different mediums and would be asked about their experience. A 2 × 2 Latin square test design was used to counterbalance the medium (tactile graphic or IMG) and presentation order, so that the participants would experience both mediums. The artwork selection was random among the five artworks prepared, and the participants responded to a standard usability scale survey immediately after each of the first two interactions with the exhibits. After the survey and a questionnaire, they could freely explore the rest of the exhibits. To replicate the experience that they would face at an art gallery, no training on how to use the exhibits was given to the participants. Only the location of the headphones in the IMG exhibit was communicated. Participants were able to freely explore the artwork exhibit for about ten minutes, after which, they completed the survey and moved to the next exhibit. 4. Results and Discussion 4.1. General Impressions All the participants received the interactive multimodal guide and tactile exhibits well. The first impression of the IMG was much more exciting for the participants. They expressed surprise since, for most, it was the first time to use such a system, while reading tactile graphs was something they had already experienced. They eagerly expressed their desire to use both tactile graphics and IMG frequently at art galleries, and museums (Table 4-S1) and even demanded it, with expressions such as “EP13: I can’t understand why these (tactile graphics) are not available everywhere for every single artwork.". The IMG was considered extremely easy to use (Table 4-S3), mostly for two reasons; because it requires almost no effort to start using it, “EP7: With this exhibit (IMG) you can feel the artwork from the beginning, you touch it, and it automatically starts telling things to you.", and because it is easier to access and confirm information about their point of interest in the artwork directly “EP11: I think one of the advantages is that with the speaking model (IMG), I can check what I’m touching by tapping two times right there, it is immediate. With the other one (tactile graphics), I need to go and read the Braille and come back, and sometimes I get lost in the graphic or with the Braille." Having to switch between the Braille annotations, texture Electronics 2021, 10, 297 14 of 19 legends, and the tactile graphics was perceived as the largest factor to perceive the tactile graphics as unnecessarily complex (Table 4-S2). Table 4. Tactile Graphics and Interactive Mulitmodal Guide Exhibits Standard Usability Scale report. 1 2 3 4 5 M SD S1. I think that I would like to use this system frequently. 2 8 8 4.33 0.69 9 9 4.50 0.51 S2. I found the system unnecessarily complex. 4 5 4 5 2.56 1.15 11 4 2 1 1.67 1.08 S3. I thought the system was easy to use. 5 8 5 4.00 0.77 6 12 4.67 0.49 S4. I think that I would need the support of a technical person to be able to use this system. 2 2 5 7 2 3.28 1.18 9 8 1 1.67 0.97 S5. I found the various functions in this system were well integrated. 2 6 10 4.44 0.70 4 14 4.78 0.43 S6. I thought there was too much inconsistency in this system. 4 6 5 3 2.56 1.34 2 7 3 3 3 2.89 1.32 S7. I would imagine that most people would learn to use this system very quickly. 2 3 9 4 3.83 0.92 1 5 12 4.61 0.61 S8. I found the system very cumbersome to use. 4 5 4 5 2.56 1.15 12 5 1 1.39 0.61 S9. I felt very confident using the system. 7 9 2 3.72 0.67 3 15 4.83 0.38 S10. I needed to learn a lot of things before I could get going with this system. 1 3 5 7 2 3.33 1.08 11 5 2 1.50 0.71 Tactile Graphics Interactive Multimodal Guide SUS score range from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 5 (“Strongly agree”). Participants found the functions of both approaches well integrated (Table 4-S5). Participants were already used to exploring tactile graphics accompanied by Braille an- notations. The simple touch interface on the artwork relief of the IMG coupled with the localized audio descriptions was well received. The participants expressed that hearing the localized audio while touching the 3D model area helped them to create a better spatial image of the shape and location of the object to the canvas. A couple of participants perceived background music. One of them reported two effects; the first was that it made them think about the atmosphere of the scene in the artwork and the second was that it made her wonder about the time and circumstances that the artwork was made. “EP8: When I heard the Korean traditional background music of the painting (Figure 3d) I could feel the solemnity of the painting and I wondered if the painter felt that way when making the painting". All the participants expressed feeling very confident when using the IMG (Table 4-S10) because they could always revisit the points of interest quickly and trigger the audio descriptions or sounds to confirm the object that they are touching. For the tactile graphics, the opinion was divided between participants that felt very confident and those that didn’t Electronics 2021, 10, 297 15 of 19 because of the uncertainty of not being sure that they were correctly identifying the point of interest. In general, the IMG was less cumbersome to use compared to the tactile graphics exhibit (Table 4-S8). Participants stated the following reasons: the difficulty of Braille, “reading Braille is more difficult than listening to a conversation", the cognitive load of switching between the tactile graphic and Braille annotations: “touching the object and getting its infor- mation is much better than having to read through Braille text and tactile graphics." which adds up with each session: “after trying several tactile graphics and Braille notes I felt more tired.". 4.2. Interaction One of our design requirements was to make interaction with the IMG as simple to learn and use as possible. Requiring to remember the location and use of buttons as well as gestures or commands can be burdensome for most people since it will be the first time that they use a device. Moreover, many users often skip instructions, even if they are short. Because of this, the IMG only has three user interactions, pressing buttons with a single-use, and double and triple tapping on the relief model to access localized information and audio. A simple interaction interface has its benefits. It makes the system easy to learn to use (Table 4-S7) and avoiding the feeling of the burden that can come when facing a new device (Table 4-S10) as evidenced by one participant’s response, “EP8: With the talking exhibit you don’t need to know anything, you just stand there, touch something, and it starts talking to you about the picture." By keeping consistency throughout the IMGs, once a user knows how to use one IMG, it knows how to use the rest. Unfortunately, tactile graphics have drawbacks. Experience goes a long way to read tactile graphics proficiently, and every time the user faces a new tactile graphic, it will need to learn the meaning of the texture and line styles to recognize their meaning. As expressed by one of the participants, “EP15: You need to know Braille to read the tactile drawings with Braille and that takes time and effort.” Moreover, the lack of Braille proficiency affects the experience across all the exhibits, since the burden is on the user. The participants reported a higher degree of inconsistency (Table 4-S6) for the IMG. Upon further investigation, we found out that it was due to a failure in some of the IMG prototypes to register some touch gestures correctly, causing the wrong audio feedback to trigger or not at all. Similarly, at the exhibition, not all the interactive zones in some of the artworks had ambient sound audio feedback, causing some users to believe that the system was malfunctioning or that their gesture was not recognized when they tapped the area and audio was not reproduced. Audio feedback should be added to the interaction zones that lack audio tracks, like empty or background space, to manage user expectations. Non-obtrusive audio or vibrotactile feedback could be added to help the user become aware that their input is sensing. 5. Conclusions and Future Work In this work, we have presented the development of an interactive multimodal guide for improving the independent access and understanding of visual artworks. The IMG design was developed following the needs uncovered through a formative study in collab- oration with people with vision impairments, art museums and gallery staff, and artists. Through an evaluation with eighteen participants, results demonstrate that the multimodal approach coupled with a simple to learn interaction interface is more effective in com- parison to tactile graphics guides in providing independent access across a diverse style of artworks. Feedback collected during the multiple exhibition points in new directions for our work. As seen in Figure 5b, the IMG is sometimes used as a collaboration tool to socially interact with art. We would like to explore this possibility, as this could alleviate the perceived burden that some participants expressed when going to the art gallery with an acquaintance. Moreover, our current prototype was designed for use in an exhibition environment. Art educators at schools have expressed their interest in using the guide as an educational tool in class. To this end, more research is needed to explore the difference in audio description content and delivery methods to provide tailored information, while Electronics 2021, 10, 297 16 of 19 making it manageable for users with different content needs. The current prototypes only make use of tactile and audio modalities. We look forward to develop new experi- ences with other modalities such as smell, and explore how they might improve visual artworks exploration. (a) (b) Figure 5. Exhibition visitors using the interactive multimodal guide. (a) Stand alone use (b) Social interaction. Author Contributions: Conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, data curation, writing— original draft preparation, visualization, and project administration, L.C.Q.; Software, J.I.B. and L.C.Q.; Investigation, L.C.Q., J.I.B. and J.C.; Resources, writing—review and editing, supervision, funding acquisition, J.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. Funding: This research was funded by the 2018 Science Technology and Humanity Converging Research Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea grant number 2018M3C1B6061353. Institutional Review Board Statement: The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki, and approved by the Institutional Review Board (or Ethics Committee) of Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU202011005-UE003 2020-11-05). Informed Consent Statement: Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study. Data Availability Statement: The data presented in this study are available within the article. Acknowledgments: We would like to thank all volunteers for their participation and the reviewers for their insights and suggestions. Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest. Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used in this manuscript: IMG Interactive Multimodal Guide TG Tactile Graphics STEM Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Electronics 2021, 10, 297 17 of 19 Appendix A Table A1. Interactive tactile graphics and multimodal guide projects. Author - Name Input Output Focus Parkes [21] NOMAD - Touch (Surface) - Tactile overlay- Verbal descriptions - Mathematics, Geometry, Geography, and Biology Education- Orientation & Mobility Landau et al. [22] The Talking Tablet - Touch (Surface) - Tactile overlay- Verbal descriptions - Mathematics, Geometry, Geography, and Biology Education- Orientation & Mobility Gardner et al. [23] IVEO - Touch (Surface) - Tactile overlay- Verbal descriptions - Education & Scientific Diagrams Taylor et al. [24] - Touch (Touchscreen) - Tactile overlay- Verbal descriptions - Orientation & Mobility Gotzelmann et al. [25] LucentMaps - Touch (Touchscreen)- Voice - Tactile overlay- Visual agumentation - Orientation & Mobility Brule et al. [26] MapSense - Touch (Touchscreen)- Tokens (Capacitive)- Tactile overlay- Smell and taste infused tangible tokens- Verbal descriptions - Geography Education- Map Exploration- Orientation & Mobility Shen et al. [27] CamIO - Touch (Mounted camera) - Tactile graph- Tactile 3D Map-Tactile ObjectVerbal descriptions - Access to 3D objects- Map Exploration- Access to appliances- Access to documents Baker et al. [28]Tactile Graphics with a Voice - Touch (Mobile Camera) - Tactile graph- Verbal descriptions - STEM Education Baker et al. [29] Tactile Graphics with a Voice - Touch (Wearable Camera)- Voice - Tactile graph- Verbal descriptions - STEM Education Fusco et al. [30] The Tactile Graphics Helper - Touch (Mobile Camera)- Voice - Tactile graph- Verbal descriptions - STEM Education- Map Exploration Holloway et al. [31] - Touch (Embedded capacitive sensors) - Tactile 3D Map- Verbal descriptions - Orientation & Mobility Vaz et al. [42] - Touch (Embedded capacitive sensors) - Tactile Objects- Verbal descriptions- Visual augmentation - Museum Object Exploration Anagnostakis et al. [41] - Touch (PIR and touch sensors) - Tactile Objects- Verbal descriptions - Museum Object Exploration Leporini et al. [43] - Touch (Physical buttons) - Tactile 3D Map & Model- Verbal descriptions - Archeological site exploration- Artwork exploration Reichinger et al. [44–46] - Touch (Camera)- Hand gestures (Camera) - Tactile 3D Artwork Model- Verbal descriptions - Artwork exploration Landau et al. 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[CrossRef] http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2854005 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173772 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0264619614540291 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2014.10.018 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25683526 http://touchgraphics.com/portfolio/ttpen-stem-binder/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/isprsarchives-XL-5-W4-207-2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/col.22567 http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/IJCAET.2014.058012 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0145482X9108500409 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2018.10.076 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3399679 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2982142.2982176 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3155286 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40494-019-0331-5 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/34.784284 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/0-387-28831-7_23 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gmod.2014.10.001 Introduction Related Work Tactile Graphics Interactive Tactile Graphics and 3D Models Interactive Multimodal Guides for Blind and Visually Impaired People Materials and Methods Formative Study Accessible Visual Artworks for Blind and Visually Impaired People Accessible Visual Artwork at Art Museums and Galleries Accessible Visual Artwork and Artists Design Requirements Interactive Multimodal Guide (IMG) 2.5D Relief Model Control Board External Hardware Interaction Design Information Hierarchy Evaluation Accessible Exhibitions Using IMG and Tactile Graphics Participants Materials and Apparatus Methodology Results and Discussion General Impressions Interaction Conclusions and Future Work References work_n3t7oh2ndjb2lkgbyhiw4iaaqi ----                City, University of London Institutional Repository Citation: de Rooij, A., Broekens, J. and Lamers, M. F. (2013). Abstract expressions of affect. International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), doi: 10.4018/jse.2013010101 This is the unspecified version of the paper. This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/2822/ Link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/jse.2013010101 Copyright and reuse: City Research Online aims to make research outputs of City, University of London available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to. City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ publications@city.ac.uk City Research Online http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ mailto:publications@city.ac.uk January-June 2013, Vol. 4, No. 1 RESEARCH ARTICLES 1 Abstract Expressions of Aff ect Alwin de Rooij, Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice, City University London, London, UK Joost Broekens, Interactive Intelligence Group, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands Maarten H. Lamers, Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands 32 A Scene-Based Episodic Memory System for a Simulated Autonomous Creature Elisa C. Castro, Department of Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation, University of Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil Ricardo R. Gudwin, Department of Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation, University of Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil 65 The Tell-Tale Heart: Perceived Emotional Intensity of Heartbeats Joris H. Janssen, Department of Human Technology Interaction, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, & Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands Wijnand A. Ijsselsteijn, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands Joyce H.D.M. Westerink, Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands Paul Tacken, ASML, Veldhoven, The Netherlands J.J.G. (Gert-Jan) de Vries, Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, & Johann Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science, Groningen University, The Netherlands BOOK REVIEW 92 Epistemology and Emotions Jordi Vallverdú, Department of Philosophy, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SYNTHETIC EMOTIONS Table of Contents Copyright The International Journal of Synthetic Emotions (ISSN 1947-9093; eISSN 1947-9107). Copyright © 2013 IGI Global. All rights, including translation into other languages reserved by the publisher. No part of this journal may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher, except for noncommercial, educational use including classroom teaching purposes. Product or company names used in this journal are for identifi cation purposes only. Inclusion of the names of the products or companies does not indicate a claim of ownership by IGI Global of the trademark or registered trademark. The views expressed in this journal are those of the authors but not necessarily of IGI Global. The International Journal of Synthetic Emotions is currently listed or indexed in: ACM Digital Library; Bacon’s Media Directory; Cabell’s Directories; DBLP; Google Scholar; INSPEC; JournalTOCs; MediaFinder; The Standard Periodical Directory; Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 1 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Keywords: Abstraction, Affect, Attribution, Computing, Design, Emotion, Expression, Interaction, Morphology, Robotics INTRODUCTION In the last decade human machine interaction research has seen the addition of research aimed at exploring the role of affect within and among humans to develop technologies that can func- tion appropriately and intelligently in personal and social environments. This is fundamental to a variety of techno-scientific research areas such as affective computing (Picard, 1997) and social robotics (Fong et al., 2003). Such tech- nologies can be applied as real-world research platforms for theoretical affective and social science (Cañamero, 2005), but mostly thrives on the promise of practical application in for example healthcare (Broekens et al., 2009), therapy (Dautenhahn et al., 2002), and educa- tion (Saerbeck et al., 2010). Abstract Expressions of Affect Alwin de Rooij, Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice, City University London, London, UK Joost Broekens, Interactive Intelligence Group, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands Maarten H. Lamers, Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands ABSTRACT What form should happiness take? And how is disgust shaped? This research investigates how synthetic affective expressions can be designed with minimal reference to the human body. The authors propose that the recognition and attribution of affect expression can be triggered by appropriately presenting the bare essentials used in the mental processes that mediate the recognition and attribution of affect. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the fact that it is based on mental processes involved in the recognition of af- fect, independent of the configuration of the human body and face. The approach is grounded in (a) research on the role of abstraction in perception, (b) the elementary processes and features relevant to visual emotion recognition and emotion attribution, and (c) how such features can be used (and combined) to generate a synthetic emotion expression. To further develop the argument for this approach they present a pilot study that shows the feasibility of combining affective features independently of the human configuration by using abstraction to create consistent emotional attributions. Finally, the authors discuss the potential implications of their approach for the design of affective robots. The developed design approach promises a maximization of freedom to integrate intuitively understandable affective expressions with other morphological design factors a technology may require, providing synthetic affective expressions that suit the inherently artificial and applied nature of affective technology. DOI: 10.4018/jse.2013010101 2 International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. At the core of these technologies lies the challenge of how to design an appearance that is intuitive to people in terms of social and affective interaction, but simultaneously satis- fies technological and functional requirements. Current design strategies typically attempt to mimic the human or animal form realistically or iconically, often bolstered by design principles from character animation (Bartneck & Forlizzi, 2004; Blow et al., 2006; Fong et al., 2003; Hegel et al., 2009). There can however be situations where anthropomorphic or zoomorphic mim- icry constrains the optimal design of affective technologies. For instance, affective communi- cation benefits the design of a rescue robot by facilitating an intuitive warning signal to people, however the configuration of the human body may not be optimal for a rescue robot because it needs to operate in circumstances where humans cannot. Indeed, can you imagine a humanoid design effectively finding its way through small holes in a wall or corridors filled with rubble? This is just one example that illustrates the need for synthetic affective expressions that seamlessly integrate with other, often more important, morphological design requirements of a technology. However, little work has been done to develop such an alternative approach. We present such an alternative. Recent research on visual emotion rec- ognition offers substantial evidence that the recognition of some emotions neither requires the resemblance to, nor the configuration of, the human body or face per se (Aronoff, 2006; de Gelder et al., 1999; Lundqvist & Öhman, 2004). Instead, the recognition of these emo- tion expressions can rely on the sole presence of basic motion and form features essential to the recognition of emotion, which are extracted at the highest levels of abstraction in perception (Aronoff, 2006; Lundqvist & Öhman, 2004; Pavlova et al., 2005). Additionally, a large body of experimental research exists on emo- tion attribution to simple abstract geometrical shapes, based on such essential affective features (Aronoff, 2006; Aronoff et al., 1992; Collier, 1996; Heider & Simmel, 1944; Larson et al., 2008; Locher & Nodine, 1989; Oatley & Yuill, 1985; Pavlova et al., 2005; Rimé et al., 1985; Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000; Visch & Goudbeek, 2009). These theoretical insights motivate us to investigate the possibilities of emotion expres- sion independent of the configuration of the human body and face, based on the minimal essential components of visual emotion recog- nition. However, developing a design strategy for affective robots based on these insights requires a novel and fundamentally different theoretical framework. This article proposes such a framework. A similar but more general approach can be found in abstract art. Abstract art focuses on finding essential features and ways to exploit these features in relation to experience through an intuitive process of abstraction (Zimmer, 2003). Recently, the psychology behind abstract art has been taking shape, which proposes that abstract art can inform science on the role of abstraction in perception, and its relation to the construction of experience, e.g. aesthetics and emotions (Di Dio & Gallese, 2009; Freedberg & Gallese, 2007; Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999; Zeki & Lamb, 1994; Zimmer, 2003). From a design perspective abstract artists de- fined ways to reflect these perceptual processes of the brain in a design (Zeki & Lamb, 1994; Zimmer, 2003). This approach fits the design requirements posed by our findings from af- fective science and can be used as design tools that operate on essential affective features. Therefore, taking this psychological perspective on abstract art provides the scientific context to develop practical and theoretical insights that can facilitate the effective presentation of these essential affective features. Based on these two lines of research we argue that the use affective form and motion features, while explicitly not using configura- tion features of the human body and face (or any reference to it), combined with lessons from feature based design from abstract art, can facilitate the development of synthetic emo- tion expressions that pose minimal restrictions to other morphological design requirements. International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 3 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. This paper develops a theoretical framework for the design of such synthetic expressions by bringing together the science behind ab- stract art and research on affect attribution to features that are presented independent of the configuration of the human body and face. To bolster our arguments we present a pilot study that shows consistent emotion attribution to specific combinations of abstract form features. Finally, we discuss the potential implications of our approach using affective robotics as an example application. The long term goal of this project is to arrive at a design process that maximizes the freedom of designers to invent affective tech- nologies with widely varying morphological design requirements, without being limited by the technological, morphological, and psycho- logical complexities that are inherent to human and animal mimicry. As such, we envision that the proposed abstract expression without resemblance to the human form can help create genuine and believable synthetic expressions that suit the inherently applied and technological nature of affective devices, that are still intui- tively understandable to people. We call this approach: abstract expression of affect. ABSTRACTION Abstraction can be defined as a strategy for the simplification of the concrete, which through a process of removing all inessential information arrives at its essential universal aspects (Zim- mer, 2003). From a psychological perspective abstraction refers to a complex of processes that facilitate the ability to dismiss the irrelevant and focus on essential information only, which is a fundamental operation that is applied at many levels of cognition and perception (Barsalou, 2003; Hampton, 2003; Zimmer, 2003). For example, abstraction is a critical feature in the acquisition and processing of knowledge and it allows for reduced memory storage and rapid processing of information (Barsalou, 2003; Hampton, 2003). This allows people to reason with generalizations instead of being stuck to details (Hampton, 2003). VISUAL ABSTRACTION Abstraction is a fundamental perceptual op- eration (Zimmer, 2003). The brain perceives an abstraction of the world by selectively extracting features from sensory information, after which it reintegrates this abstraction into a whole and organic experience. Similar to the levels of abstraction involved in percep- tion, people show a remarkable ability to shift the level of abstraction in the real world to extract relevant information (Goldstone & Barsalou, 1998). At the highest level of abstraction individual features are computed from sensory information, i.e., from color, form and movement. Sensory information is relayed to specialized filters, which contains for example specializations for the processing of geometrical form, biological motion or the human face, followed by the reintegration of features into objects, events and finally into an individual-centered reality. We refer to Snowden et al (2006) for an overview of the major processes involved. What is relevant to our research is that attention processes delegate the extraction of these features based on their perceived relevance (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002; Lavie, 1995), and that the processes involved in the extraction of such essential features interconnect with the mechanisms that generate experience, e.g. emotions and aesthetics (Di Dio & Gal- lese, 2009; Pessoa & Adolphs, 2010). How perceptual mechanisms interact with the construction of experience is still an open problem in science. The way abstraction has been applied within the arts may hint on how perceptual mechanisms relate to the construction of experience (Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999; Zeki & Lamb, 1994; Zim- mer, 2003), and is particularly relevant to our research because of the way this has already been applied practically within the context of creative design. 4 International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. ABSTRACTION VERSUS REALISM Perceiving abstraction differs from perceiving realistic artifacts in some key aspects, both are however a means to arrive at the same se- mantic and experiential qualities. We perceive realistic artifacts against the model we have of the real world. Therefore, the violation of reality is an important factor in realism. Real- ism facilitates rich and consistent associations due to the wide availability of features and context (Kennedy, 2008), at the cost of in- creased complexity in information processing. In contrast, presenting information abstractly simplifies information processing, at the risk of more open interpretations due to a lack of contextual information (Kennedy, 2008; Vessel & Rubin, 2010). Indeed, increased abstraction increases the reliance on cogni- tive processes involved in interpretation and association to fill in missing information, and allow us to understand things in terms they are not (Lakoff, 2008; Landau et al., 2010; Zimmer, 2003). This exactly pinpoints the main challenge in the design of abstract expressions of affect: as the interpretation of abstraction is more vulnerable to context and individual difference, it is important to study the exact affective associations hu- mans have with abstract features, but also the interactions between different features, to trigger exactly those cognitive processes and associations that will result in a specific affective experience. ABSTRACT ART Abstraction in art has been documented in cave paintings, and through the ages in for example African, Indian, Islamic and twenti- eth century western culture (Zimmer, 2003). The core principle in creating abstract art is that through a process of abstraction the artist discards all inessential information of an object or experience in order to represent it by only its minimal and essential aspects. Such a pro- cess does not limit itself to objects or scenery, but can also be used to uncover features that exhibit strong experiential qualities. As such, abstract art is argued to visualize the mental representation of emotional and aesthetic experience (Zimmer, 2003). Western abstract art was specifically motivated by the desire to formalize a minimal visual language of color, form, movement and composition through the process of abstraction and artistic methodol- ogy, i.e., movement, form and color studies, scale models and introspective evaluation. Such formalisms were to represent a gram- mar through which the artist could compose specific features into emotional and aesthetic effects (Kandinsky, 1926; Malevich, 1927; Mondriaan, 1925; Van Doesburg, 1925). THE SCIENCE BEHIND ABSTRACT ART Zeki & Lamb (1994) state that since visual art comes from the brain it has to obey the laws of visual processing. As such, the formal- isms developed by artists are likely to reflect brain mechanisms governing abstraction and perception in relation to experience (Di Dio & Gallese, 2009; Ramachandran & Histein, 1999; Zeki & Lamb, 1994; Zimmer, 2003). This makes abstract art and the developed formalisms by artists an interesting knowl- edge base from which the role of abstraction in perception and its connection to the con- struction of experience can be investigated. There have been several schools from psychology that have attempted to explain abstract art with different implications for psychology. Gombrich (1960) takes the per- spective that abstract artistic work requires an artist to decompose an image similar to the way cognition forms abstractions, and tells us something about the formation of knowledge structures, concept manipula- tion and abstraction. Complementarily, the work of Arnheim (1974) interprets abstract International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 5 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. art using Gestalt principles, and shows that from this perspective abstract art informs us on the role of abstraction in perception. More recently abstract art has gained interest from the neuroscience community, which at- tempts to explain the neurology of aesthetic experience through the analysis of art. Zeki and Lamb (1994) attempt to explain spe- cific formalisms developed by artists from the perspective of visual processing, hence confirming some foundations of formalisms developed by artistic methodology from a neuro-scientific perspective. Ramachandran & Hirstein (1999) attempt to match perceptual mechanisms to frequently used techniques within the creative arts, and explain these in relation to their connectivity to brain function, e.g. how they affect experience, and guide visual attention. Freedberg & Gallese (2007) explain abstract art from the perspective of embodied simulation. We review the current state of the psy- chology behind abstract art and focus specifi- cally on design methods used in abstract art that affect the perception of essential features, which are proven to be grounded in human cognition and perception. Literature indicates three processes in abstract design. Therefore we also distinguish between (a) the process of arriving at essential features (as informed by a review on affect attribution research), (b) design operations that affect individual essential features, and (c) design operations that affect the composition of (essential) features, both in terms of the construction of features, the effects on experience and visual attention. Taking this psychological perspec- tive on abstract art provides an empirical and theoretical basis to formalize the design of abstract expressions of affect in a scientific context. The design operations can form a practical basis for manipulating combina- tions of (affective) features to influence the perception of affective specificity and inten- sity. We explicitly do not include formalisms developed by artists, because these are not proven using scientific methods. DESIGN OPERATIONS ON INDIVIDUAL ESSENTIAL FEATURES FROM NEURO-AESTHETICS This section describes the different findings from neuro-aesthetics on the presentation of essential features. Although we provide basic depictions to illustrate the discussed principles, we encourage the reader to take a look at the examples of artworks that are mentioned to gain a better and more complete understanding of the described design operations. ISOLATION OF ESSENTIAL FEATURES A fundamental aspect of abstraction in visual art is to isolate a modality, e.g. colors, shapes, contours or movement, which conveys the essence of a sensation or object in an image, by removing or reducing any other visual information that does not contribute specifically to conveying that essence. As such, isolation emphasizes essential features by purging the image of non-essential information, allocating attention to the essential features we normally must search for (Ramach- andran & Hirstein, 1999; Zimmer, 2003). Hence the cliché: less is more. This is well illustrated by for instance ‘La Gerbe’ (1953) by Henri Matisse, who shows that by using simple outlines, i.e., the absence or reduction of other structural and detailed visual information than contour, essential visual aspects are well communicated and understood. Leaving out inessential information differenti- ates the essential features from the environment and guides attention towards its essential aspects more quickly and easily (Ramachandran & Hirstein 1999). The downside of such abstraction is that by reducing an object to its essential features you reduce the amount of contextual information available as well. Research shows that indeed people make very specific and consistent at- tributions to representational and realistic pictures, but interpret abstract imagery more openly (Vessel & Rubin, 2010). 6 International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. EXAGGERATION OF ESSENTIAL FEATURES USING THE PEAK-SHIFT PRINCIPLE Ramachandran & Hirstein (1999) identify the peak-shift principle as one of the fundamen- tal perceptual mechanisms behind abstract art but also artistic practice in general. This principle states that a human or animal will show a stronger response to a feature when it is exaggerated as opposed to a previously presented similar instance of that feature. The general idea is as follows. If we learn to respond, for example, positively to a rect- angle and negatively to a square, then, when presented later with several rectangles, the strongest response will be to the rectangle with the most elongated aspect ratio rather than to the rectangle most similar to the one that was used in training (Figure 1). As such, we know that we do not respond to the object, but we respond proportionally to the underlying pattern. In practice applying the peak-shift prin- ciple starts with isolating an essential feature or set of features (Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999). Based on the characteristics of the essential feature, an anchor point and a path away from that anchor point needs to be determined. This path should represent a continuum of the exact perceptual character- istics of the essential feature. If we travel along the path away from the anchor point, then in principle we increasingly exaggerate the essential characteristics. This exaggera- tion creates a starker contrast between simi- lar instances of features (the anchor point), emphasizing the essential feature (Ramach- andran & Hirstein, 1999; Zimmer, 2003). Hence exaggeration leads to specification; as such an exaggerated feature stands out in terms of visual perception and easily captures attention. It was shown that peak-shifting increases visual information processing both in terms of speed and intensity, and in some cases manipulates visual information to the point that it turns out to be better recognizable than its realistic counterpart (Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999). This is a promising find- ing for the possibility to create abstract af- fective expressions that are still interpreted by the majority of people as a specific emo- tion (e.g., the expression of fear). The peak-shift principle is well illustrated by the work of caricaturists (Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999). A caricaturist is trained to identify the essential features of for example the human face. If the caricaturist caricatures Barack Obama, the essential features, in this case the features that we use to distinguish between faces, of Obama are compared to those of the average face of all people. This Figure 1. The peak-shift principle: people respond proportionally to the underlying pattern of a learned feature (such as the elongation ratio of a rectangle) instead of to the object itself International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 7 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. average face becomes an anchor point, and the differences between essential features determine the path away from the anchor point. Perceptually this makes for a clearer Obama-experience. It is clear that the success of using the peak-shift principle in visual art is highly dependent on the anchor point and chosen path away from it. Naturally this phenomenon is not exclusive to caricatures or any other type of figurative depiction and thus can be applied to realistic as well as abstract, and representational as well as non-representational features. In that sense one could for example say that in his work ‘Number 207 (Red over Dark Blue on Dark Gray)’ (1961) Mark Rothko peak-shifts some iridescent feature of color. In summary, exaggeration using the peak- shift principle affects essential features in such a way that their experience is intensified, and attention is allocated to these features. In practice exaggeration can be used to pre- vent misinterpretation as well, as it is easier to distinguish between similar instances of essential features. In any case, the challenge remains how to identify essential features, the anchor point and the appropriate direction or path away from it, which is always dependent on the qualities of the essential feature. TRANSLATION OF ESSENTIAL FEATURES TO OTHER MODALITIES A different fundamental aspect of abstract art can be found in the way experiences natural to one modality, e.g. form, movement, color, sound, can be conveyed using another modality. Indeed, some features may be specific to one modality, however, others have been shown to translate to different mo- dalities as well. In other words, essential features specific to one modality can sometimes be mapped to another, different, modality. This suggests that essential features can mediate an experience or characteristic natural to one modality to another through a process called cross-modal abstraction, or translation. Such phenomena are fundamental to the work ‘Composition VIII’ (1923) by Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky wanted his paintings to evoke the experience of sound through sight, a painted equivalent to the musical symphony that would not only stimulate the eyes, but the ears as well, through vision alone. Such vision-sound correspondences have been evidenced by Köhler (1947), who showed that there exist cases where sound is consistently translated to shape based on corresponding features. In his experiment he found that when using nonsense words, rounded vowels (bouba) translate to rounded shapes and sharp angular vowels (kiki) translate to angular shapes (Figure 2). Additionally, research on Figure 2. The word Kiki is more often associated with the left shape, while the work bouba is more often associated with the right shape. This is a classic example of cross-modal abstrac- tion, or translation. 8 International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. synaesthesia elaborates on such correspondences (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001, Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2003). For different known strategies and building blocks for translation see Lakoff (2008) for a good discussion and overview. The flexibility of translation is well il- lustrated by the work ‘Number 18’ (1950) by Jackson Pollock. Freedberg and Gallese (2007) showed that the emotional impact of the work is guided by the painted evidence of the motion and gestures made, and as such translates movement to a static image (Figure 3 provides an example of this principle). Do note that although features can be translated over modalities, it is not always clear to what extent its experiential quality is retained, let alone the affective experience. DESIGN OPERATIONS BETWEEN (ESSENTIAL) FEATURES Apart from design operation on single es- sential features, there exist operations that operate between multiple essential features, such as copying or multiplying a feature to make it more apparent. We now review such operations. MULTIPLICITY OF ESSENTIAL FEATURES Multiplicity is a design operation fundamental to abstract art and comes in part from a recent development called generative art (Whitelaw, 2007). In most cases the quality of essential features is the focal point of abstract work. Multiplicity extends this by exploiting quantity as well (Figure 3). Multiplicity is characterized by the use of very simple features such as basic geometric primitives in very large multitudes. It is believed that the quality of this approach relies in part on the formation of gestalts (see section on grouping and binding) (Whitelaw, 2007). Complementarily, Aronoff (2006) evidences that the intensity of affective quality is partly determined by the amount of affectively mean- ingful features present. This is well illustrated by the work ‘Process 9’ (2005) by Casey Reas. So, to rephrase: the more of a certain feature, the higher its intensity is perceived. CONTRAST BETWEEN (ESSENTIAL) FEATURES We can define contrast by the difference between features or modalities. This is relevant in com- position because high contrast areas are shown to be more attention grabbing than homogeneous areas (Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999). As such contrast can be used to accentuate essential Figure 3. An example of how movement traces and kinematics are translated from the movement itself to a static image International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 9 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. features by contrasting different features. Con- trast often appears between dissimilar features that are close together, for example, aligning different textures next to each other will create a highly contrasting area where the textures meet, creating an edge, which automatically captures the eye’s attention (Figure 4). Next to allocating attention to specific contrasting regions, contrast is also of importance because of the relative nature with which features can be perceived (Figure 4). For example, a bright color is perceived brighter if it is contrasted to a dark color. Contrast plays a role across modali- ties as well. This is well illustrated by the work of kinetic artist Alexander Calder, who wrote that motion was most efficiently represented by the juxtaposition of highly contrasting surfaces (Zeki & Lamb, 1994). To attain the desired con- trast, Calder limited the color use in his work to black, white and red, for which he claimed that red was the color that contrasts the most with black and white, while the use of other colors confuses the clarity of motion. Calder’s intui- tive understanding is confirmed by findings in neuroscience that suggest that motion is indeed perceived more clearly by contrasting surfaces as motion perception is sensitive to luminance (Zeki & Lamb, 1994). GROUPING AND BINDING OF (ESSENTIAL) FEATURES Grouping and binding mechanisms are con- cerned with the emergence of objects in visual processing. Gestalt psychology describes the perceptual mechanisms used to perceptually unify features into a group or into a whole. This shows that combinations of features can be interpreted in ways that cannot be explained by considering each single feature in isolation. As such, interpretation depends on the focus of attention of a person. For example, features may group together when they are symmetrical to each other or configured in parallel, move in the same direction or change simultaneously, as is explained by the gestalt grouping principles (Figure 5). Similarly, binding principles may cause the illusion of contours because of the form and configuration of objects (Figure 6). For an overview of the gestalt grouping and binding principles we refer to Wolfe et al (2005) and Snowden et al (2006). The importance of grouping and binding mechanisms in relation to affect is shown by the work of Aronoff (2006) who evidenced in a study on 17th century Dutch art that people attributed emotions based on the amount of angular versus rounded forms found Figure 4. The large squares illustrate the principle that increased contrast is attention grabbing. The small squares illustrate the relative nature of perception. Even though the small squares are the same shade of grey, they are perceived as darker or lighter. 10 International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. in a work of art. The angular forms were associ- ated with negative emotions and rounded forms with positive emotions. Emotion attributions were in part based on the formation of angularity resulting from the configuration of how people were distributed over the painting, i.e., grouping. These emergent forms were shown to have the same effect as those forms would have if they were perceived singular and isolated (Aronoff, 2006). In other words, forms created by group- ing also convey meaning and affective quality as if they would be singular. For further use of Gestalt psychology in abstract art and design we refer to van Campen (1997) and Arnheim (1974) for an extensive overview. CONCLUSION ON ABSTRACTION Abstract art provides empirical evidence that we can construct experience from perceiving an abstraction alone. The reviewed literature im- plies that the brain constructs experiences based on the extraction of specific essential features, Figure 5. Feature grouping: the similarity between features mediates the perception of groups and whole making. Do you see the cups or the vases? Figure 6. Feature binding. A configuration of four shapes implies a square in the middle. International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 11 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. which constitute such perceptual abstractions. We have reviewed basic perceptual mechanisms governing abstraction and how these perceptual mechanisms relate to the processing of essential features in terms of the formation of features, the intensification of experience, and the allocation of attention. We have specifically distinguished between design operations that affect individual features and design operations that affect the composition of features. However, we did not touch upon the specifics of essential features themselves, i.e., what features are essential in the recognition of affect, which we will review in the context of affect attribution in the next chapter. As such, the reviewed design operations found in the discussed neuro-aesthetics research are the basis for manipulating features used in the design of abstract expressions of affect. Note that the science behind abstract art is just starting to take shape. As a consequence, this review is by no means complete, it is meant to be illustrative. Most current day research in neuro-aesthetics treats static works of art (e.g. painting or sculpting). The work on kinematic art by Zeki and Lamb (1994) is an exception to this. It does for instance dismisses a whole body of work on abstract animation (and visual music),e.g. the work of Oscar Fischinger. There- fore, it is important for future developments for the design of abstract affective expressions to keep track of new developments into research that investigates the construction of experience form and movement perception, such as neuro- aesthetics, but also the creative arts. AFFECT Affect can be defined as the experiential qual- ity common in emotion, mood, and affective attitude. Affect is thought to be woven through the whole of human functioning and as such plays a fundamental role in cognition (Damasio, 1994; LeDoux, 1998), perception (Atkinson & Adolphs, 2005; Pessoa & Adolphs, 2010) and behavior (Fischer & Manstead, 2008). Emo- tions are relatively short but intense episodes that influence attention, action selection, action preparation, memory, motivation and homeo- stasis. Emotions are typically directed to some cause (Izard, 2009) (I am angry at a friend when he wrecks my car because he was drunk). In contrast, emotions differ from mood in the sense that mood is typically not consciously attributed and is a less intense but longer-term affective state (I feel relaxed). For example, a mood may arise when an emotion is repeatedly activated, accumulating into an overall affective state. Affective attitude refers to the affective at- tribution to objects, events and persons, learned or innate, but not necessarily as a cause of that object, event or person (I like Chinese food). Feeling refers to the experience of affect. THEORIES OF EMOTION Contemporary affective science has developed three major views on the structure of emotion: discrete, continuous and componential. First, the discrete view of emotion states that emotions are distinct categories (Izard, 2009). Emotion categories can be described as a complex of expressive, physiological, behavioral and expe- riential characteristics. For example, joy could be described by exhibiting a happy facial ex- pression, being physiologically highly aroused, exhibiting playful behavior and experiencing a good feeling. Many basic sets of emotion categories have been proposed, a famous ex- ample is Ekman’s six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise (Ekman, 1993). Second, the continuous approach states that affect can be described along (orthogonal) dimensions (Russel, 2003). Typically, a two- factor model is used to describe emotions using the dimensions of pleasure/displeasure and arousal/relaxation. Other dimensions have been proposed as well, depending on the focus of research. The dimension dominance/submission can for instance be used to account for affect attributed to relations between the individual and his/her environment (Mehrabian, 1980). Third, the componential view states that emo- tions are formed by the combined activation of different underlying cognitive and physiological 12 International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. components (Scherer et al., 2001). Typically, componential theories regard emotion as the result of an evaluation of the environment against personal relevance (cognitive appraisal theory) (Scherer et al., 2001). Famous examples include Scherer’s stimulus checks, where the evaluation of an event in terms of appraisal di- mensions (novelty, pleasantness, goal and need conduciveness and coping potential), culminate into specific emotional episodes, and the OCC model (Ortony et al., 1980). Most of the affect attribution studies to abstract features review in this chapter, study affect in terms of factors (pleasantness, arousal). Only some study emo- tion specific effects in terms of attribution to a particular category of emotion. None focus on cognitive appraisal, for obvious reasons (what should the subject cognitively appraise about an abstract feature?). Affective science is still very much in debate on the nature of emotions, and these three different views are often seen as com- plementary. A further review of affect per se would not do justice to current developments. Instead we would like to refer to some of the major contemporary literary works in the field (Davidson et al., 2009; Lewis et al., 2008). We will now continue towards reviewing essential affective features. VISUAL EMOTION EXPRESSION An emotional episode can manifest itself physi- cally in what is called an emotion expression, e.g. facial expressions (Matsumoto 2008), body postures and gestures (Wallbott, 1998). Emotion expressions play a fundamental role in interpersonal communication (Clark & Bris- sette, 2003), e.g. non-verbal communication and efficiency (affective channel) (Fischer & Manstead, 2008; LeDoux, 1998) as well as inducing empathy and evoking pro-social behavior (Hoffman, 2008), and can occur with or without being aware of the expression (Picard, 1997). Facial expressions are thought to communicate emotions by expressive muscles resulting in minute differences in the relative position of facial features (e.g. the eyebrows, nose, and mouth) (Duchenne, 1990). Facial expressions are governed by social display rules, which determine the specific actions and intensity of expressions appropriate in particular social situations (Matsomuto, 1990). Similarly, emotions may result in specific muscle ten- sions that influence movement behavior and postures (Lowen, 1971), as well as the relative configuration of anatomical features, e.g. head, shoulders, upper body, arms, hands and move- ment qualities (Wallbott, 1998). VISUAL EMOTION RECOGNITION AND ATTRIBUTION The role of visual emotion recognition is evi- dent as it mediates the interpretation of emotion expressions (Atkinson & Adolphs, 2005; Izard, 2009; Pessoa & Adolphs, 2010; Russel, 2003, Scherer et al., 2001). Recent research evidences the involvement of and interaction with a variety of visual processing mechanisms, object recogni- tion and salience, delegation of attention, and the mechanisms that generate emotions (Pessoa & Adolphs, 2010). Particularly relevant to our work is the separation between two major processing mechanisms: the extraction of configuration infor- mation, i.e., the relative positions and limitations of anatomical features of the human body and face (Atkinson et al., 2007; Lundqvist & Öhman, 2004), and the extraction of affectively essential features (Aronoff, 2006; Lundqvist & Öhman, 2004). Though essentially a separate process, it is thought that when configuration information is present, it interacts with the extracted essential features, and weighs them according to a specific hierarchical structure (Lundqvist & Öhman, 2004). Experi- mental evidence shows that the involvement of configuration information is not a prerequisite for recognizing basic affect (Aronoff, 2006; Atkinson & Adolphs, 2005; Lundqvist & Öhman, 2004), and very likely some basic emotions as well (de Gelder et al., 1999). Configuration overrides and contextualizes the effect of individual features on International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 13 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. the condition that configuration information is available (Lundqvist & Öhman, 2004). As such it is not clear to what extent specific emotions can be recognized from essential affective features, independent of the configuration of the human body and face. What is clear is that the absence of configuration weakens the affective effects of essential features (Lundqvist & Öhman, 2004). Recognizing emotions independently of configu- ration is evidenced to not only enable the recogni- tion of affect from the human body and face, but also mediates the (mis)attribution of emotions and basic affect to places and things. Such evaluations are evidenced to be mediated by sheer presence of essential affective features in visual emotion recognition (Aronoff, 2006). Additionally, there exists a relatively large body of work on emotion attribution to simple geometrical shapes. These are shown to evoke specific emotion attributions, devoid of any resemblance to the human body or face, and independent of its configuration, based solely on the presence of specific essential affective features of visual emotion recognition. REVIEW OF ESSENTIAL AFFECTIVE FEATURES FROM AFFECT ATTRIBUTION Following these findings, we review emotion attribution research and limit this review to research related to movement and form. The reviewed literature shows experimental evi- dence of emotional attribution towards simple two dimensional shapes based on the presence of essential affective features independent of the configuration of the human body and face. This is important for the design of abstract expressions of affect as it indicates that it is possible to define abstract features that still convey specific affective meaning to humans. Together with the abstraction operations previ- ously reviewed, this indicates that given further research it should be possible to select, combine and enhance abstract features for basic affect expression and potentially for the expression of specific emotions. MOVEMENT FEATURES Literature suggests that motion is sufficient to evoke basic affective attributions. Such attributions are shown to be automatic and consistent, and independent of form (Oatley & Yuill, 1985; Pavlova et al., 2005; Rimé et al., 1985). In general, essential motion features can be distinguished at two levels of abstrac- tion: movement described by kinematic and by dynamic features. KINEMATIC MOVEMENT FEATURES Affect from movement can be described by the interaction between different kinematic and other movement features and in some cases by individual kinematic features. Research shows that the relative interpretation of kinematic features is more informative than the absolute interpretation of kinematic features (Lee et al., 2007; Pollick et al., 2001; Saerbeck & Bartneck, 2010; Sawada et al., 2003). Furthermore, ki- nematic features relate strongly to the arousal factor of an emotion, and the general intensity of specific emotions (Pollick et al., 2001). Particularly, average speed and movement time have been shown to be strong features in affect attributions towards movement patterns (Pollick et al., 2001; Sawada et al., 2003). The combination of increased speed and jerkiness evokes attributions of anger, where fearful and sad emotional states are associated with smaller and slower movements (Pollick et al., 2001; Rime et al., 1985; Roether et al., 2010; Sawada et al., 2003). Pollick et al (2001) add that fast and jerky movements may also evoke attributions of happiness. Furthermore, Pollick et al (2001) state that energetic motion is characterized by shorter direction, acceleration, jerkiness, and greater magnitudes of average and peak velocity. Additionally, individual kinematic features are found to relate to specific emotion dimensions: Lee et al (2007) evidence that the smoothness of a movement is an indicator for pleasant- ness, Saerbeck & Bartneck (2010) found the 14 International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. level of acceleration can be used to predict the perceived arousal of a motion pattern, while Lee et al (2007) show activation is correlated to average velocity. Additionally, a relatively large body of experimental work exists on social and emo- tional attributions to the relative movement of shapes opposed to other shapes. One of the first of such experiments was performed by Heider and Simmel (1944), who revealed that people attribute a human-like role and intention to simple animated shapes based solely on their relative directional and ki- nematic features. Subjects tend to describe such animations in terms of shapes vigor- ously chasing one another, getting ready for attack or being madly in love. Especially the combination of the kinematic features speed and acceleration, and direction rela- tive to another shape play an important role (Dittrich & Lea, 1994; Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000). The emotional attributions are evoked through some perceived intentionality of the shapes. See Scholl and Tremoulet (2000) for a complete overview of such attributions and their essential features. DYNAMIC (MOVEMENT) FEATURES Movement described in terms of its dynamic characteristics is also shown to play a role in emotion attribution. Pavlova et al (2005) argues that the dynamics implied by a static image also enables specific emotional attribution, and as such a dynamic feature does not require the actual movement per se. Perceived instability was found to be an essential feature in emotion attribution (Pav- lova et al., 2005). The perceived instability is dependent on form at the perceptual level, but the emotional attributions made are consistent with the measure of perceived instability, and as such do not directly rely on form. Perceived instability increasingly entails attributions of negative emotions. This is especially true for negative emotions such a fear and suffering. Vertical orientation was found to evoke positive attributions, especially joy and surprise. It has been suggested that these findings correspond to the dynamics in bodily expression in terms of balance and imbalance. We tend to take upright postures and make upright movements when we are joyful or surprised, take slumped and downward postures when we are sad, and lose our dynamic balance and fail to hold ourselves upright when we are fearful or suffering. As such, the perceived instability is shown to have a strong effect on valence. Additionally, dynamics expressed in the perceived effort of a movement have been shown to evoke emotion attributions. It is suggested that dynamic features from Laban analysis can evoke emotion attribution. For example, the emotion sadness described by shape dynamics can be expressed by enclosed, descending and retiring movements (Fagerberg et al., 2003; Zhao, 2001). Furthermore, de Meijer (1989) shows the involvement of mo- tion dynamics described in for example force and directedness in emotion attribution, where increased force contributes mainly to attribu- tions of anger. However, to the knowledge of the authors of this paper it has not been inves- tigated to what extent these dynamic motion features depend on the specific configuration of and reminiscence to the human body with respect to emotion attribution. FORM FEATURES Complementary to movement features, litera- ture suggests an important role for form features in visual emotion recognition. Essential form features evoke emotion attributions independent of movement. From literature, we distinguish essential affective form features extracted from shape contour, symmetry, and size. SHAPE CONTOUR FEATURES Studies by Aronoff (1988; 1992; 2006) pro- vide empirical evidence that the contour of a shape plays an important role in emotion International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 15 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. attribution. It was evidenced that the angu- larity of a shape contour evokes negative, arousing and potent emotion attributions, and rounded shape contours evoke positive, less arousing emotion attributions and have no effect on the perceived potency. Similarly, diagonal lines evoke negative emotion attri- butions, and curvilinear lines evoke positive emotion attribution (Aronoff, 2006). There exists some evidence for the exception that curvature can also evoke negative valence, low arousal attributions (Collier, 1996). The effects of shape contour features on emotion attribution are found in gestalts (grouping and binding) as well (Aronoff, 2006). The origin of geometric form features is thought to be in the recognition of facial expressions, and is thought to be essential in the evaluation of the holistic face (Bassili, 1978) and the expressive facial features, e.g. eye brows and the mouth (Aronoff, 2006; Lundqvist & Öhman, 2004). A similar role for contour features has been shown in several preference studies where it is shown that people prefer rounded over an- gular shapes (Bar & Neta, 2006; 2007; Silvia & Barona, 2009). A special case has to be made for V-shapes and downward pointing triangles. V-shapes and downward pointing triangles were shown to receive significantly more negative attributions than similar shapes with an angular contour in a different orientation (Aronoff, 2006). V-shapes and downward pointing triangles are shown to elicit a specific threat response (Larson et al., 2007; 2008). Additionally, there also exist cases where geometrical form features are translated to movement traces. For example, the angularity and curvature of movement traces is shown to evoke emotion attributions (Aronoff, 200 6; Bassili, 1978). Saerbeck & Bartneck (2010) add that the attribution of valence in movement is, at least in part, mediated by interaction of ac- celeration (kinematic feature) and the curvature of movement patterns. ASYMMETRY AND SYMMETRY Locher and Nodine (1989) show that asym- metrical shapes and configurations (grouping and binding) evokes attributions of heightened arousal while symmetry evokes attributions of low arousal. Their work shows a connection to the complexity of visual processing and the perception of arousal in general (Bedyne et al., 1963; Reber et al., 2004). Additionally, symme- try also plays a central role in preference studies, where it is shown that symmetrical shapes are preferred over shapes that are asymmetrical (Reber et al., 2004). SIZE FEATURES Evidence exists that the size and height of people and animals increases their perceived dominance and social status (Ellis, 1994). Studies using simple geometrical patterns show that the surface area of a shape is associated with attributions of potency, where increased size entails increased potency (Aronoff, 2006). Similarly, the height (and position) of a shape is positively correlated to the perception of dominance (Schubert, 2005). COMBINING ESSENTIAL AFFECTIVE FEATURES The reviewed literature predominantly shows attributions of basic affect to essential features of motion and form. Research by Visch and Goudbeek (2009) for example indicates that for basic emotions different parametric move- ment descriptors contribute to the attribution of different basic emotions, and also contribute with a varying strength. As such, it shows that combining specific essential affective features, according to a specific structure, can result in the attribution of at least some specific emotions instead. We have obtained similar results for combining essential affective form features in our pilot study, which is presented later in this paper. The specifics for multimodal combination of essential affective features are not known. 16 International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. HIERARCHY AND DEPENDENCE AMONG ESSENTIAL AFFECTIVE FEATURES Additionally, it is unknown whether there exists a specific hierarchy and dependence among es- sential affective movement features, essential affective form and between movement and form features. It has been speculated that when combining form and movement, movement is used to distinguish between basic emotions, while form may complement motion and allows for the recognition of more specific emotions (Atkinson et al., 2007). These findings suggest a hierarchy among the two modalities move- ment and form. However, no research exists that investigates the combined effects of form and movement features specifically. CONCLUSION ON AFFECT ATTRIBUTION The above review shows that basic affect can be recognized through the presence of emotionally essential features independent of the configura- tion of the human body and face, and that the combination of these essential features can result in the recognition or attribution of some specific emotions. The review shows that explicitly not using configuration features of the human body and face still enables the recognition or attribu- tion of at least some emotions. The review also shows that there are some grand challenges that are fundamental to the development of abstract expressions of affect. First, the reviewed research is fragmented concerning the existing types of essential af- fective features, e.g. the role of dynamic move- ment features at the highest level of abstraction remains to be investigated. Second, to the knowledge of the authors of this paper no experimental evidence is available on the hierarchy and dependence among differ- ent levels of abstraction, e.g. motion features expressed in kinematics and dynamics, and among different modalities, e.g. the relation between motion and form features. Third, even though some evidence exists, it is unknown to what extent specific emotions can be recognized from combining essential features independent of configuration features of the human body and face. So, the emotional vocabulary we can express with abstract features remains subjected to further research. Such open questions are fundamental to the future development of affective devices that can benefit from abstract affective expressions and require further research. Keeping track of developments in attribution research and visual emotion recognition can also aid our research. Developing abstract expression of affect may in turn contribute to these research areas as well. DESIGNING ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONS OF AFFECT (SUMMARY OF THE REVIEWS) Until now we have reviewed the science behind abstract art and research on affect and emotion attribution to abstractly presented essential affective features. To inform the development and design of abstract expressions of affect we present these results in table form, to provide easy lookup to find how affect attribution is influenced by the selection of essential fea- tures, and operations on the essential affective features. This informs the design of abstract expressions of affect. The reviews also indicate a design approach that can be followed when one aims to design abstract expressions of affect. The process of abstraction indicates three design phases. In the first design phase essential affective features from visual emotion recognition are selected (Table 1 and Table 2). Essential features are the fundamental building blocks of abstract affective expressions, (combinations of) such features facilitate affect and emotion attribution and can therefore be used to express affective states using an artificial medium such as an affective technology. The second design phase involves operations on the selected essential af- International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 17 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. fective features (Table 3 and 4). These operations change the appearance of individual features (e.g. exaggeration). The third design phase in- volves operations between (essential affective) features (Table 5). These operations change the relation between features (e.g. contrast). Design operations in phases two and three can be used to guide attention towards essential features, to express different intensities of ex- pression, and to increase specificity of the expressed affective state. The effect of such operations is, however, subject to future re- search. These design operations provide the Table 1. Effects of essential affective movement features on emotion attribution Essential Feature Attribution Reference Perceived instability negative emotions, fear, suffering Pavlova et al (2005) Perceived stability positive emotions, joy, surprise Pavlova et al (2005) Acceleration perceived arousal Saerbeck & Bartneck (2010) Velocity activation Lee et al (2007) Smoothness of movement pleasure Lee et al (2007) Fast, jerky movement happiness Pollick et al (2001) Large, fast, jerky movement Anger Pollick et al (2001), Rime et al (1985), Sawada et al (2003) Small, slow movement Sadness, fear Pollick et al (2001), Rime et al (1985), Sawada et al (2003) Rounded movement trace Positive emotions Aronoff (2006), Saerbeck & Bart- neck (2010) Angular movement trace Negative emotions Aronoff (2006) Relative motion and perceived goal- directedness Social attributions, animacy, emo- tional attributions through perceived intentionality Dittrich & Lea (1994), Heider & Simmel (1944), Scholl & Tremoulet (2000) Table 2. Effects of essential affective form features on emotion attribution Essential Feature Attribution Reference Roundness, curvilinearity Positive valence, lessened arousal, no effect on potency, happy, warmth Aronoff (2006), Collier (1996) Roundness Negative valence, low arousal, sadness Collier (1996) Angularity, diagonality Negative valence, heightened arousal, heightened potency, threat, coldness Aronoff (2006), Collier (1996) V-shapes, downward pointing triangles Threat Aronoff (2006), Aronoff et al (1988), Larson et al (2007, 2008) Asymmetry Heightened arousal Bedyne et al (1963), Locher & Nodine (1989) Symmetry Low arousal Bedyne et al (1963), Locher & Nodine (1989) Size, height, surface area Arousal, potency, surprise Aronoff (2006), Schubert (2005) 18 International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. necessary tools to design a range of different abstract affective expressions and associated expressions. Please note that design operations described in the second and third design phase can be applied, but do not have to be applied per se. A PILOT STUDY TO TEST THE FEASIBILITY OF COMBINING ESSENTIAL FEATURES Here we present a brief rationale and the results of a pilot study that implements the design guidelines presented in the previous chapter. In principle, essential affective features can be combined to target a set of intended emotion expressions. However, it is important to realize that the structure of visual emotion recogni- tion poses restrictions to combining essential features (see our review on essential affective features). Hence interactions between features must be taken into account. However, the ef- fects of such interactions are often unknown. For kinematic and movement trace features Visch and Goudbeek (2008), Sawada et al (2003) and Pollick et al (2001) are a good start- ing point. Little is known about the effects of combining form features, but also the effects of multimodality, on emotion attribution. We have performed a pilot study (n=44, age mean=32, sd=12, 27 male) on the effects of combining Table 3. Summary of design operations on essential affective features Design Operation Effects on Feature Reference Isolation Attention Ramachandran & Hirstein (1999), Zimmer (2003) Exaggeration Attention, attribution (intensifica- tion) Ramachandran & Hirstein (1999), Zimmer (2003) Translation (see also Table 4) Formation of features, using fea- tures in other modalities Freedberg & Gallese (2006), Lakoff (2008), Ramachandran & Hubbard (2003) Table 4. Cross-modal abstractions or translations that mediate affective experience Essential Feature Translation Reference Kinematics, movement traces static image that reflects movement and kinematic traces Freedberg & Gallese (2007) Roundness Movement traces Aronoff (2006), Bassili (1978), Saerbeck & Bartneck (2010) Angularity Movement traces Aronoff (2006), Bassili (1978) Table 5. Summary of design operations between (essential affective) features Design Operation Effects between Features Reference Contrast Attention, formation of features Ramachandran & Hirstein (1999), Zimmer (2003) Grouping & Binding Principles Attention, formation of features Ramachandran & Hirstein (1999), Zimmer (2003) Multiplicity Attribution (intensification) Aronoff (2006), Whitelaw (2007) International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 19 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. essential affective form features on specific emotion attribution. We tested if combining abstract features into one dynamic form (2D blob; controlled by contour, symmetry, size, and rotation; see Figure 7), using isolation as a design principle, resulted in consistent affective attributions. We used a within subject design in which participants were presented with a series of 16 forms. The participants were asked to rate the associated emotional intensity on with each form using Shaver et al’s (1986) six semantic emotion categories. These forms were based on the outer 8 corners of the feature space and the points in feature space halfway the neutral point and those outer corners (as an example see Figure 1, shape contour). A repeated MANOVA (Table 6) and subsequent univariate analysis was performed (Table 7) to analyze the effect of essential affective form features on emotion attribution. Results are promising for effects of individual features but also for combinations of features; in particular the combination contour and asymmetry seem to have specific influences on affect attribution (see Table 6 and Table 7). Our results indicate the feasibility of combin- ing essential affective form features to trigger specific affective attributions (and hence use these combinations for the expression of affect). IMPLICATIONS OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONS OF AFFECT To discuss how abstract affective expressions might impact the design of affective technolo- gies we feel it is constructive to work out its pos- sible implications using affective robotics as an example application field. Affective robots are artificial agents, usually of electro-mechanical design, that utilize affective behaviors to func- Figure 7. Examples of blob figures resulting from the manipulation of the three essential features contour, size and symmetry. Combinations of these features were used to test affect attributions. If asymmetry is not 0, the shape is randomly rotated on four rotation changes (0PI, 0.5PI, PI and 1.5PI). Table 6. Significant results from repeated MANOVA on emotion categories. Table shows significant affective form features, interaction effects, and F-values. The ‘**’ and ‘*’ denote a significance of p<0.005 and p<0.05. Essential Feature Emotion Categories (F) Contour 30.54** Asymmetry 16.26** Size 10.86** Contour Asymmetry 17.38** Contour Size 3.63* 20 International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. tion in social environments, or at least be able to interact socially (Fong, 2003). An important aspect of the design of affective robots is the design of the channels with which they can convey an affective expression. These expres- sive capabilities can be utilized to facilitate natural and efficient non-verbal communication (Fong et al., 2003; Picard, 1997), induce an emphatic response in the human user (Picard, 1997; Takeuchia & Hada, 2006), and play a fundamental role in attaining believability for robotic devices (Rose et al., 2008). As we will show, the design approaches that are currently available to the affective robotics community pose a limitation to the applicability and ac- ceptance of affective robots. The use of abstract expressions of affect, such as we develop in this paper, may pose a promising alternative to the current de facto approaches. DESIGNING EXPRESSIONS FOR AFFECTIVE ROBOTS The design of an affective robot typically requires the integration of two different design objectives. First, design choices are made about the means by which the robot influences the user’s emotional and social information processing. Second, af- fective robot design requires the integration of widely varying form factors relating to the intended function and technological possibilities of the robot. Such factors can be diverse, such as ergonomic, affordance, or cost effectiveness design requirements (Bartneck & Forlizzi, 2004; Hegel et al., 2009). A successful robotic design integrates the factors required for social and affec- tive interaction with the factors that are relevant to optimally fulfill other, often more important, design requirements. However, the integration of these two objectives often conflicts on a morpho- logical level. For instance, the human form easily facilitates synthetic affect expression, but is not likely to be cost effective, typically affords the things that are associated with another person, and is not likely to be too ergonomic, to name just a few. On the user end, there are also psychological considerations that may complicate the integration of affective with other design requirements. Note that little comparative experimental research has been done on design strategies for social robots (Broekens et al., 2009). Table 7. The relationship we found between essential geometric features and rated intensity of specific target emotions. Table shows F-values, significance and their effect on emotion attribu- tion. Where ‘**’ and ‘*’ denote a significance of p<0.005 and p<0.05, and ‘+’ and ‘-’ denote a positive and negative relation with respect to emotion attribution. For instance, in the case of contour a negative relation denotes a relation with angular contour, and a positive relation denotes a relation with rounded contour. The added ‘∆’ denotes a specific structure: if shape contour features are increased, increased asymmetry lessens its effects on emotion attribution, i.e., the negative effect of asymmetry only impacts rounded contour features, but has no impact on angular contour features. The ‘○’ denotes a specific structure as well: when asymmetrical, contour is not relevant, if symmetrical, then angular contour is sadder than rounded contour. Emotion Category Contour (Round vs. Angular) Asymmetry Size Contour Asymmetry Love +129.68** -75.54** ∆63.22** Joy +177.85** -36.47** +23.94** ∆34.03** Surprise +35.86** Anger -127.47** +11.52** ∆4.73* Sadness +26.72** -14.98** ○14.55** Fear -66.99** ∆14.69** International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 21 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Currently, the de facto approaches in the design of robotic expressions are realism and iconism, often bolstered with animation tech- niques. We will use these approaches as a point of reference from which we will develop the hypothetical implications of the use of abstract expressions of affect for the design of affective robots. REALISTIC EXPRESSIONS OF AFFECT Realism aims to create a robotic morphology that resembles the human or animal body as close as possible. The philosophy is that proper realistic design entails proper affective and social interaction. The complexity and amount of elements needed for successful realistic de- sign transcend implementation of the affective component alone, and requires mimicking the full human or animal embodiment. It has been hypothesized that an increasing amount of real- ism yields an increasing amount of positive and empathic responses from humans to realistic affective robots (Mori, 1997). Mimicking people and animals draws heav- ily on familiarity (Guthrie, 1997), and therefore on the expectations people have of real humans and animals (Duffy, 2003; Fong et al., 2003). This has important consequences for the attitude the user forms about the realistically designed robot. First, the attitude of a user towards a robot is in part informed by a sort of trust relationship informed by the expectations about the robot (Duffy, 2008). So, when such expectations are not met, the illusion is broken, which is detrimental to the attitude of the user towards the robot. Second, people are very well tuned to detect abnormalities in other people, and respond negatively if abnormalities are detected. This response is similar to realistically designed robots and becomes particularly relevant when a robot approaches full realism (e.g. when the tone of the skin is just off someone looks sick or dead). This is particularly true for imbalances in realisms among different modalities (e.g. a realistic physical appearance combined with unrealistic movement lead to the association that something is wrong with that person/ robot). Furthermore, when technological artifacts sur- face this may be seen as looking unnatural (e.g. a cyborg) or painful (e.g. metal breaking through the skin). Such issues constitute the uncanny valley (MacDorman et al., 2009; Mori, 1997; Vinayagamoorthy et al., 2005), and highlight some of the psychological complexities that need to be addressed with realism. These psychological complexities also make it difficult, if not impossible, to integrate other design requirements than those posed by the production of affective expressions, simply because realism does not permit another form (e.g. cost effectiveness, ergonomics, functional requirements) than the human form. This limits the use of such devices to situations in which users would naturally expect a human, and can draw on their previous experiences (and perceived affordances) of a human being in that situation (e.g. a receptionist or a dentist’s patient). As such, the use of realistic design is intolerant with respect to the technological nature of robots on both a psychological and a design level, while it can be powerful in some situations where one normally interacts with a human being. ICONIC EXPRESSIONS OF AFFECT The iconic design strategy increases the level of abstraction relative to realism. The bodily features used in affective interaction are iso- lated and exaggerated (Blow et al., 2006; Mead & Mataric, 2010; van Breemen, 2004). The advantage is that affective expressions can be conveyed, without being subjected to the full complexity of realistic mimicry (Duffy, 2008). The expectations of a user are determined by how the robot looks and acts and to a lesser extent by preformed expectations (Duffy, 2008), a restriction well exploited in character anima- tion (Thomas & Johnston, 1995). As such, expectations are constructed through interaction and observation of the robot’s behavior (Duffy, 22 International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. 2008). The detrimental effects described in the uncanny valley theory decrease when the level of abstraction is increased. The advantage of this approach is that when the level of abstraction in- creases, the integration of non-anthropomorphic features (see for instance van Breemen et al., 2005) or the visibility of technology (see for in- stance Breazeal, 2002), is increasingly tolerable from a psychological perspective. For instance, the iCat merges appearances of a child and a cat to manage expectations and affordances about the robot’s abilities (van Breemen et al., 2005). This is acceptable in an iconic design, but unlikely to be acceptable in a realistic design. Therefore, iconic design of affective expression does not suffer as strongly from psychological complexities as realistic design. Because the psychological complexities associated with iconic design are more manage- able, the iconic designed robot is more tolerant to its inherent technological and applied nature, which benefits the freedom with which the designer can integrates affective expressions with other morphological design requirements. There is however, still one major limitation to iconic expressions. This is simply because iconic design is dependent on the replication of the configuration of the human face and body to convey an expression. In other words, the mouth, eyes, and eyebrows with which an expression is synthesized, must not only be reproduced in some form, they must also be placed such that they acceptably resemble the way they are placed in a real human or animal face and body. Indeed, there are many examples of robotic application areas (e.g. the famous dull, dirty, and dangerous applications) where it is not desirable to mount a face on the device, or to shape the device after the human or animal body, but it could be beneficial to be able to integrate efficient and intuitive affective communication though an expressive channel. ANIMATION TECHNIQUES FOR SYNTHETIC EXPRESSIONS Character animation is an (applied) art form that is traditionally engaged with techniques to design and stage objects’ movements, actions and to some extent appearance such that the animated character is life-like and believable as a (social) actor. Character animation techniques are typically used as a means to attain a sus- pension of disbelief through which a character is staged and remains believable as a (social) actor even though there cannot be a realistic real-world counterpart. Animators have spent a great deal on uncovering features that enable the recognition of social cues and emotion expressions, but also to present them naturally, clearly and in a compelling way. Design tools and guidelines developed by animators take into account the spectator’s perception, and include a wide variety of means to (realisti- cally) convey movement and dynamic patterns after the laws of physics, and after patterns of (social) interaction and behavior, and but also issues related to character appeal, e.g., tricks to make a character likeable or dislikeable such as a baby-face or thick eyebrows, and how to present these signals clearly (Lasseter, 1987; Thomas & Johnston, 1995). See Thomas & Johnston (1995) and Lasseter (1987) for a good overview on animation principles. Although developed for animation, these techniques are often used in the design of affec- tive robots. Animation techniques can be used to complement iconic design (Breazeal, 2002; Breazeal & Wistort, 2009; Scheeff et al., 2000), and to a lesser extent realistic design techniques. Specifically design tools from animation to present movement and dynamics clearly and naturally can be used to improve the quality of emotion expressions. Also knowledge on the time course and timing of expressions and actions can complement research from psychol- ogy, and are thus valuable for the design of robotic expressions (Breazeal, 2002). Though animation proves useful in affective robotics, animation and robotics are not the same me- dia, therefore animation techniques are often retested for implementation and reformulated to fit the medium of robotics (Breazeal, 2002; Breazeal et al., 2003; Breazeal & Wistort, 2009; Hoffman, 2010; Maed & Mataric, 2010; Scheeff et al., 2000; Takayama et al., 2011). International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 23 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Animation techniques have also been used to endow non-anthropomorphic or non- zoomorphic designs with affective capabili- ties. Pixar’s mascot Luxo Jr. is an interesting borderline example of this approach (for a description and imagery, see Lasseter 1987). Luxo Jr.’s morphology is that of a prototypi- cal desk-lamp which is clearly a technological artifact designed after the cost effective and functional requirements of a lamp. Animation techniques are utilized in such a way that Luxo Jr. becomes an animate, expressive, and com- pelling character. Animation techniques stage Luxo Jr.’s expressive movements (kinematics, dynamics, direction) and actions clearly and realistic. Additionally, a desk lamp of Luxo Jr.’s design easily translates to the human body (e.g. the cap is used metaphorically as a head) which adds expressive posture based on configuration features to the used kinematics and dynamics for emotion expression, which overall is a very limiting factor in introducing widely varying form factors in a design. Although clearly a technological object, it’s clear reference to the configuration of the human body and realistic (though exaggerated) expressive movements and behaviors create such a strong reference to anthropomorphism that one could argue that Luxo Jr.’s design is actually an anthropomorphic design introduc- ing realism (or sometimes even hyper realism) on movement and behavioral features, and very high abstraction on human form features and there configuration, hence mimicking the human body in a visually metaphoric way. As such its clever design and the use of animation techniques create a strong suspension of disbe- lief concerning the sociability of the character. Therefore, animation techniques may in some cases, that realism and iconism may not cover, help to integrate synthetic emotion expressions with morphological design require- ments other than those posed by synthetic affec- tive expressions. However, a case can be made that this is in fact a clever way of increasing levels of realism or iconism to the modalities where there is little need for other requirements (in the case of Luxo Jr. this would be move- ment), and removing or abstracting affective expressive features where other design require- ments are integrated (in the case of Luxo Jr. this would be the body of the lamp). However, it is expected that not all robotic devices can offer a full modality (e.g. movement or form) that can sufficiently accommodate the restrictions posed by realism or iconism, or the requirements of animation techniques themselves. Indeed, as described in the chapters on abstraction, affect, and the presented design guidelines (sum- mary), we feel that the integration of affective expressions can be attained at an even higher level of abstraction, using even more minimal requirements. ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONS OF AFFECT Then how can abstract expression of affect ben- efit an affective technology such as the robot? The design of abstract expressions of affect such as we develop in this paper focuses on how to apply emotion expression in its cleanest form, such that the technological requirements of a technological artifact are minimally compro- mised. The core idea is that if we maximize the detachment from the human form, while retaining minimal recognizable affect, this satisfies both the requirements of people for affective interaction, and provides a maximum of freedom with respect to the technological requirements of robots as a species. The novelty of our approach lies the fact that it is grounded in how abstraction plays a role in perception, and how this connects to the recognition and attribution of emotions, independent of the configuration of the human and animal body and face. This perspective allows for an approach that is purely feature based; using essential features from emotion attribution and recognition, and operations on these features which affect their presentation in terms of the discovery of, formation of, and attribution to essential affective features features to designs based on the abstract affec- tive design approach. Using affective features, 24 International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. while explicitly omitting configuration features, provides significantly more freedom to integrate emotion expressions with widely varying form factors such as functional, ergonomic or other product design paradigms, which traditionally require a very different type of behavior and morphology than human behavior and form. Design principles taken from abstract art fit the feature based approach and provide a design process and specific design tools. The promise is that abstract affective expressions can ensure that essential affective features are attention grabbing, that features are interpreted emotionally as intended, and finally that there are guidelines and restrictions on how to place such features for successful affective design. As such, we argue that constructively combining results from the science behind abstract art, affect attribution and various schools of robot design can contribute to our aims. See chapters on abstraction and on affect for a review on related theories and data, and the chapter on designing abstract abstractions of affect for a summary of the found features and design principles, which can be used for further explorations into the design of abstract affective expressions for robotic media. Based on the presented theoretical work we argue that the design of abstract expressions of affect is a novel field of research in the design of synthetic emotion expressions. Abstract expressions differ from realism in the fact that it is focused on reproducing only the minimal, instead of the equal, necessary to convey emo- tion expressions. The role of abstraction in the design approach we develop here is shared partly with iconism (see for instance the sections on isolation and exaggeration in the chapter on abstraction). However, the explicit omission of using configuration features separates abstract affective design from realism and iconism at a fundamental level. This fundamental differ- ence is highlighted by the following findings. First, the knowledge on the features involved, the conditions under which they can be recog- nized as affective, and how to combine these features such that emotions can be targeted, has proven consistent in some cases, but also requires substantial further investigation (e.g. this requires a partly novel vocabulary for af- fective expressions). Second, the design pro- cess is purely feature based, which in itself is different from realism and limited in iconism, which focus on mimicry. Third, configuration features are a restricting factor in affective robot design. This makes our purely feature based approach especially useful in situations where configuration features will complicate the design of a robotic device. The difference with animation techniques is less apparent. Abstract expressions of affect and animation techniques share the perception- based nature of design principles involved. Hence there is overlap in the design principles advocated in our review, for instance the feature based approach used in the design of abstract expressions of affect is also found in anima- tion, which also utilizes design tools to present features clearly (e.g. staging and exaggeration principles, but also change-up, which relates directly to our contrast between features). This is historically obvious as well because both are drawn from strongly related art forms. Ad- ditionally, there is a lot of knowledge on the kinematics and dynamics of expressive move- ment uncovered by animators over the years, such knowledge may complement the design of abstract expressions of affect. However, principles to convey biological movements and actions realistically and character design are explicitly not taken into account in the design of abstract expressions of affect. Abstract af- fective expressions for instance explicitly do not deal with perceived animacy, personality, or character appeal. In principle the goal is to circumvent or overrule the use of features related to such attributions, which are central to animation principles used for affective robot design. Therefore, the main difference between the design of abstract expressions of affect and animation is its focus on minimal requirements for perceiving emotion expressions and the in- tegration of these expressions with other widely varying morphological requirements as freely as possible. In that sense one could frame abstract affective design as a sub-set of animation or as International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 25 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. a separate approach which has some overlap with animation, either way we feel this does not contribute too much to the discussion here because their aims differ. Animation is focused on character design, whereas the abstract expres- sion of affect is focused on the generation of recognizable affective expressions constrained by other morphological design requirements. Although not a robot, an interesting ex- ample that served as a source of inspiration for the concept of abstract expressions of af- fect is the sensual evaluation instrument (SEI) (Isbister et al., 2006; 2007; Laaksolahti et al., 2009). The SEI is a set of simple objects that involve basic form features including variations in shape contour, asymmetry and the amount of features present, but no apparent configura- tion features. These objects were successfully utilized by people to convey emotional states with just these objects. We argue that these provide a very different approach to equipping non-anthropomorphic and non-zoomorphic designs with affective expressive qualities as compared to the approach based on animation principles in for example Luxo Jr. This illustrates the differences with animation principles and highlights the novelty of the design approach we advocate here. Such a turnaround in design strategies not only has implications from a design theoretical perspective, but also impacts how people shape their attitude towards affective technologies (such as robots), and has implications for the extent to which the technological nature of robots integrates with the goal of emotionally expressive machines. We hypothesize that abstract affective design can benefit a user’s attitude towards a robot. First, expectations are shaped in line with the technological nature of the robot. As such, expressing affect without resemblance to the human form is not expected to suffer from issues related to the uncanny valley. Therefore, both issues and advantages that arise due to fa- miliarity do not play a role in shaping the user’s attitude towards the robot. On the other hand abstract design may already fit the expectations of technological artifacts better because of its apparent simplicity and detachment from the human configuration. Therefore, there is little illusion. Second, because of its simplicity incon- sistencies with preformed expectations do not play a negative role because we under-attribute the robot’s affective capabilities. In other words, we do not instantaneously expect affective in- teraction from very simple or technologically looking artifacts, and this may even come as a pleasant surprise. As such, we hypothesize that expectations of the robot are shaped through observation of its behavior and interaction. Which benefits the attitude of user’s towards the robot in terms of believability and acceptance. The detachment from the human form and additional level of abstraction allows more freedom in developing robots with respect to its inherently applied and technological nature. The structure of visual emotion recognition does pose its limitations; these are however of a more flexible and, with respect to the user´s attitude, forgiving nature compared to the de facto stan- dard in affective robot design. Therefore, we hypothesize that abstract expressions of affect can enable the construction of machines that are less restricted by affordances and perceived affordances of the human form. Instead, this allows more flexibility to match the intended function of a robot to its perceived affordance in a way that matches the general product and machine design paradigms. As such we envision that abstract affective expressions can enable the construction of robots with a whole new range of affordances, which can still benefit from intuitive affective interaction. The major implication of the design of abstract expressions of affect is the potential integration of affect expressions with the in- herent technological nature of robots. Within the context of abstract design balancing form and function takes on a very literal meaning. Essential affective features pose limitations at the level of for example kinematics and shape contour, which is oftentimes the same level of abstraction at which the mechanical functional- ity of robots is designed. The independence of the human form provides more flexibility in such construction. Therefore, essential affective 26 International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. features can be woven through the construction of a robot. As such, balancing form and function becomes finding a balance between features that are needed for performing a function well, and the emotional interpretation of these features. This transposes the affective requirements posed by the human brain, and technological requirements of robots as a species (such as its function) to the same level of abstraction. Therefore, the development of abstract affective expressions may be the first step towards the actual integration of affect with the functional- technological aspects of robot design. It is clear that robots as a technological species have very different requirements than human beings. This can be because of the functions we intend for robots to perform, or to create robotic autonomy, with genuine robot affect. It is clear that such purpose requires a morphology that is very different from the hu- man or animal form, and is always restricted by the current state of technology. Following the proposed implications of our approach we hypothesize that the development of abstract expressions of affect is a step towards bridging the requirements of people for affective interac- tion, and the specific requirements of robotics as a species. Therefore, we envision that abstract expressions of affect can help create genuine robotic expressions of their own kind, that are still intuitively understandable to people. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE CHALLENGES In this paper we reviewed and unified knowl- edge from the science behind abstract art and affect attribution research. This paper aims to constructively bring these fields together within the context of the design of synthetic expression for affective technologies, in order to provide a pragmatic and scientific basis for the pro- posed design approach. Furthermore, we have presented a pilot study that shows consistent emotion attribution to combined form features, and we discussed the potential implications of the design of abstract affective expressions within an example application field (affective robotics). The developed work proposes an approach of minimal design for affect attribu- tion, which should lead to a maximal freedom in integrating intuitively understandable affect with other morphological design requirements (e.g. functional, ergonomic or product design approaches). On the basis of this work we envision that we and other people can build further to expand ideas surrounding the design of abstract expressions of affect, such that it can develop into a usable novel alternative for the design of affective technologies. However, since this paper is a first step into that direction, our reviews show that there are some important open questions that are fundamental for the suc- cess of abstract expression of affect as a design method for affective technologies. These future challenges include funda- mental questions regarding the development of abstract affective expressions for affective technologies. First, abstract affective expressions require a partially novel vocabulary for emotion expressions. Our review on affect attribution shows that although many the basic features involved in emotion attribution are known, how to combine affective feature to target specific emotions is less known, especially with respect to form features and multimodal combinations. We have presented preliminary results show- ing that the combination of features could be used for specific affective expressions. What is clear though is that interactions can be expected between features, which must be taken into ac- count, and further researched. Furthermore, it is currently unknown what range of emotions can be targeted when we structurally omit the use of configuration features. Second, on the note of man-machine relations we have hypothesized that an abstract design approach to synthetic affect expression liberates affective technology from the (perceived) affordances of the human and animal form, positively impacts the way people construct their attitude towards such a technol- ogy, and is a first step towards the integration of affect with the inherent technological nature of such devices. Whether these three hypotheses will hold is the subject of further research. International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 4(1), 1-31, January-June 2013 27 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. 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CALL FOR ARTICLES ISSN 1947-9093 eISSN 1947-9107 Published semi-annually work_n5qsfhdyrrhsbexrn7ha2sxixu ---- Time-Resolved Photoluminescence Microscopy for the Analysis of Semiconductor-Based Paint Layers materials Article Time-Resolved Photoluminescence Microscopy for the Analysis of Semiconductor-Based Paint Layers Daniela Comelli 1,* ID , Alessia Artesani 1 ID , Austin Nevin 2 ID , Sara Mosca 1, Victor Gonzalez 3,4, Myriam Eveno 3 and Gianluca Valentini 1 ID 1 Physics Department, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 20133 Milano, Italy; alessia.artesani@polimi.it (A.A.); sara.mosca@polimi.it (S.M.); gianluca.valentini@polimi.it (G.V.) 2 Istituto di Fotonica e Nanotecnologie-Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IFN-CNR), Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 20133 Milano, Italy; austinnevin@gmail.com 3 Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France (C2RMF), Palais du Louvre, F-75001 Paris, France; victor.gonzalez@culture.gouv.fr (V.G.); myriam.eveno@culture.gouv.fr (M.E.) 4 Chimie Paris-Tech, PSL Research University, CNRS, Institut de Recherche de Chimie Paris (IRCP), F-75005 Paris, France * Correspondence: daniela.comelli@polimi.it; Tel.: +39-2-23996165 Received: 29 September 2017; Accepted: 18 November 2017; Published: 21 November 2017 Abstract: In conservation, science semiconductors occur as the constituent matter of the so-called semiconductor pigments, produced following the Industrial Revolution and extensively used by modern painters. With recent research highlighting the occurrence of various degradation phenomena in semiconductor paints, it is clear that their detection by conventional optical fluorescence imaging and microscopy is limited by the complexity of historical painting materials. Here, we illustrate and prove the capabilities of time-resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) microscopy, equipped with both spectral and lifetime sensitivity at timescales ranging from nanoseconds to hundreds of microseconds, for the analysis of cross-sections of paint layers made of luminescent semiconductor pigments. The method is sensitive to heterogeneities within micro-samples and provides valuable information for the interpretation of the nature of the emissions in samples. A case study is presented on micro samples from a painting by Henri Matisse and serves to demonstrate how TRPL can be used to identify the semiconductor pigments zinc white and cadmium yellow, and to inform future investigations of the degradation of a cadmium yellow paint. Keywords: time-resolved photoluminescence; photoluminescence microscopy; semiconductor pigments; trap state levels; zinc white; cadmium yellow 1. Introduction Photoluminescence (PL) microscopy is a powerful optical method for the study of crystal defects in semiconductors and organometallic complexes [1], with important applications in the manufacturing process of nanostructures [2–4], optoelectronic devices and solar cell systems [5]. Semiconductors are the constituent matter of the so-called semiconductor pigments. Illustrative examples of this class of coloring matter include ancient pigments, such as the brilliant red vermillion (HgS), first used during the Neolithic Age [6], and the lemon yellow orpiment (As2S3), extensively found on ancient Egyptian objects and paintings. Thereafter, a variety of novel semiconductor pigments were produced in the Modern Age, starting from the second half of the 19th century when synthetic semiconductor pigments were introduced, and include zinc white (ZnO), zinc sulphide (ZnS), titanium white (TiO2), cadmium yellow (ZnxCd1−xS) and red (CdS1−xSex). These synthetic pigments were extensively used by painters, and offered new hues and significantly greater covering power than many paints based on natural minerals. Materials 2017, 10, 1335; doi:10.3390/ma10111335 www.mdpi.com/journal/materials http://www.mdpi.com/journal/materials http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7175-2870 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5534-0630 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1911-1045 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6340-3021 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ma10111335 http://www.mdpi.com/journal/materials Materials 2017, 10, 1335 2 of 16 While much work has been carried out on the characterization of the photo-physical and optical properties of semiconductors, both in bulk materials and nanostructures, modern semiconductor pigments have received less attention [7–11]. Recent research has highlighted the complexity of historical semiconductor pigment samples, elucidating the presence of trace metal impurities [12] and various reaction products [13,14] following the imperfect synthesis processes developed at the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution. The situation is further complicated in real painted layers, where the interaction of pigments with surrounding inorganic and organic compounds can give rise to various degradation phenomena induced by the formation of metal carboxylates [15,16] and by oxo-reduction processes [17,18]. In this context, analytical methods with micro- and nano-mapping capabilities become essential for probing the spatial heterogeneities of historical samples. The great interest in this kind of analyses is demonstrated by recent outstanding research on cultural heritage materials. Non-linear microscopy and nanoprobe FTIR have been employed for the visualization of fibrillar collagen in degraded parchments [19], while high-resolution nanoprobe X-ray fluorescence has been utilised for mapping metal impurities in submicron particles of zinc white paints [14]. A novel synchrotron-based full-field photoluminescence microscope has been effectively employed to probe the spatial fluctuation of crystal defects in historical zinc white paints [20], and of cuprous oxide phases in an ancient copper amulet [21]. Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) is a standard technique for probing tiny emission lifetime differences in microscopy samples [22], and both commercial and research-level devices with very high temporal (close to few picoseconds) [22] and spatial resolution are now available. High spatial resolution can also be achieved with advanced super-resolution microscopy methods [23]. FLIM is widely employed in many application fields, ranging from biology [24] to material science, including nanomaterials [25]. Recently, the method has been extended to the analysis of longer (microsecond) emission lifetimes. In this latter case, it is typically referred to as phosphorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (PLIM) [26] and it is employed for the sensing of cell environmental properties by probing the emission lifetimes of specific metal–ion complexes [26]. FLIM and PLIM set-ups are typically based on time-correlated-single-photon-counting (TCSPC) detectors and femtosecond mode-locking laser sources, while imaging of samples is achieved through sample raster scanning. However, these devices are designed for probing emission lifetimes in a specific time range, and are thus poorly suited for the analysis of heterogeneous samples with lifetimes ranging from nanosecond to hundreds of microseconds. In this latter case, the use of a time-gated approach [27] is preferred. Paint stratigraphic microsamples are heterogeneous samples, typically made of different, and unknown, paint layers, with each layer being a mixture of pigments, binding media, additives and possible reaction products. As a consequence, the optical emission from these samples can be very heterogeneous, not only in terms of spatial distribution, but also in terms of decay kinetics and spectral properties. Therefore time-resolved imaging of such heterogeneities requires a versatile and flexible device, capable of measuring the PL emissions in various spectral regions, and the detection of both fast and slow emission decay kinetics. Recently, we have demonstrated the potential of lifetime-resolved and spectrally-resolved PL microscopies for the detection of luminescent centers, ascribed to metal substitutions, in historical samples of the lithopone pigment (ZnS + BaSO4) [12]. On the basis of our initial study, we have now developed a novel and optimized time-resolved PL (TRPL) microscope, based on a time-gated camera, which combines both multispectral and lifetime detection with a temporal resolution spanning from nanosecond to hundreds of microseconds. The system, characterized by a micrometric spatial resolution, allows the detection of emission lifetimes in a wide temporal range. This is a key feature for the in-depth investigation of heterogeneous semiconductor materials characterized by PL emissions occurring following both direct band-edge (BE) and trap state (TS) recombination paths. In the present work, the advantages of such a novel setup are illustrated through the study of precious stratigraphic micro-samples from a painting by Henri Matisse (1869–1954), which present interesting questions on the use of modern pigments by the famous Post-Impressionist painter. Materials 2017, 10, 1335 3 of 16 2. Materials and Methods 2.1. The Micro-Samples Two micro-samples, originally taken in 1977 in different locations of Henri Matisse’s painting Still Life with Eggplant (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble, France, 210 × 245 cm, 1911, Figure S1 in Supplementary Materials), have been selected for the present research. Prior to analysis, samples were prepared as stratigraphic cross sections, by embedding them in polyester resin. For scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDX) analysis, the stratigraphic cross-sections were carbon coated. In the rest of this text, samples will be quoted with the same numbering used for their archiving at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France (C2RMF) (2105 and 2107). Still Life with Eggplant, painted in Collioure in 1911, belongs to the ensemble of Symphonic Interiors and is considered one of the most important paintings by Matisse preserved in France. Previous analysis on microsamples [28] have revealed that the painting was painted on an unprimed linen cloth and that animal glue has been used as pigment binder. 2.2. TRPL Microscopy The system is based on a Q-switching laser source (FTSS 355-50, Crylas GmbH, Berlin, Germany, pulse energy = 70 µJ, pulse duration = 1.0 ns, repetition rate = 100 Hz), emitting light pulses at 355 nm, and on a time-gated camera, made of an image intensifier (C9546-03, Hamamatsu Photonics, Hamamatsu, Japan) optically coupled to a cooled monochrome digital camera (R6, Qimaging, Surrey, BC, Canada). The image intensifier is capable of gated detection with a temporal width adjustable from few nanoseconds to the continuous mode. In conservation science, this imaging device has been used extensively to capture the emission decay kinetics of a variety of artworks [29–32]. In this work both the laser and the time-gated image detector have been coupled to a microscopy stage and to a filter wheel, placed in the detection path, in order to analyze the decay kinetics and the spectral properties of the optical emissions from selected painting micro-samples. A scheme and a detailed description of the setup is provided in the Supplementary Materials (Figure S2) and here is briefly summarized. In addition to the excitation laser and the image detector, the set-up comprises an optical system, specifically designed for imaging the head of the laser output optical fiber (core diameter Ø = 600 µm) on the sample stage with an uniformly illuminated field of view, independent of the employed objective. The optical system, made of two collecting lenses and of a finite conjugate reflective 15X objective (ReflX™ Objectives, Edmund Optics GmbH, Barrington, NJ, USA), allows the illumination of a field of view of 0.9 mm in diameter with a mean power density on samples of 1 mW/mm2. The spatial distribution of the PL signal emitted by the sample and collected by the microscope objective is then detected by the time-gated image intensifier. The system is completed with an excitation filter (FL355-10, Thorlabs Inc., Newton, NJ, USA), a dichroic filter (LPD01-355RU, Semrock, Lake Forest, IL, USA) and a set of nine band pass transmission filters (FKB-VIS-40, Thorlabs Inc.) mounted on a filter wheel in front of the gated camera. The transmission filters allow the detection of the PL emission in selected spectral bands (40 nm FWHM) within the spectral range of 380–870 nm (Figure S3 in Supplementary Materials). The lateral resolution of the device, which is essentially limited by the spatial resolution of the image intensifier (57 lp/mm), has been estimated as 0.9 µm. The developed TRPL microscope allows the detection and the discrimination between short-lived and long-lived emissions in samples (Figure S4 in Supplementary Materials) on the basis of the following measurement and data analysis protocols: � Spectral measurements at the nanosecond (ns) and microsecond (µs) timescale: a sequence of PL gated images at a fixed delay is recorded in different spectral bands. In the present case study, analysis of ns and µs emissions are achieved by employing a gates with a temporal width of W = 10 ns synchronous with laser pulse (delay D = 0 ns) and a gate with a temporal width of W = 10 µs set at a delay D = 0.2 µs after the pulsed excitation, respectively. Materials 2017, 10, 1335 4 of 16 � Spectral data analysis: following correction for the detector efficiency, it is possible to reconstruct the PL spectrum in selected regions of interest (ROIs) of the analyzed sample. In this reconstruction procedure, for the sake of simplicity, each bandpass filter is modeled as a Dirac delta function centered at the filter central wavelength and the spectral transmission of filters are accounted for in the overall spectral detection efficiency (Figure S3 in Supplementary Materials). ROIs are selected on the basis of intensity thresholds on a selected spectral image. Following selection, the PL spectrum in each ROI is shown as the mean of intensity values within the ROI with error bars reporting the ROI standard deviation. � Decay kinetic measurements at the ns and µs timescale: a sequence of PL gated images at a fixed spectral band is recorded at different delays with respect to laser pulses. For this work, analysis of ns emission decay kinetics is achieved by employing a gate with a temporal width of W = 10 ns and temporally sampling the emission decay kinetic from 0 to 60 ns. Emission decay kinetics for the µs timescale are analyzed by employing a gate with temporal width of W = 1 µs and temporally sampling the emission decay kinetic from 0.1 to 10 µs. � Decay kinetic analysis: it is possible to reconstruct the emission decay kinetic in each point of the analyzed sample. A qualitative estimate of lifetime heterogeneities in the field of view is first provided by the lifetime map, calculated by fitting the data with a simple mono-exponential decay model on a pixel-by-pixel basis [28]. Following this, the emission decay kinetics of selected areas (ROIs) of the specimen are extracted and analyzed through non-linear fitting of a multi-exponential decay model with a maximum of three components. In the employed decay model, the intensifier gate has been considered as a rectangular function of width W, and the temporal width of laser pulses (~1 ns) has been neglected [31]. As for spectral analysis, ROIs are selected on the basis of intensity thresholds. Following selection, the PL decay kinetic in each ROI is shown as the mean of intensity values within the ROI with error bars reporting the ROI standard deviation. 2.3. Optical Microscopy and Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy-Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (SEM-EDX) A commercial optical microscope (Leica DM RE, Easley, SC, USA), equipped with a color digital camera (NIKON D750, Tokyo, Japan), was employed for sample observation in dark-field illumination and in epifluorescence configuration. In the latter case, images were obtained by exciting fluorescence with the 365 nm line of a mercury lamp, while detection was performed in the visible spectral range by employing proper dichroic (T365lpxt, Chroma Technology Corporation, Bellows Falls, VT, USA) and transmission (FELH0400, Thorlabs Inc., Newton, NJ, USA) filters. A Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) (Philips XL30 CP), coupled with Energy-Dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) (Oxford Instruments AZTEC, Oxford, UK), was employed for detecting the spatial distribution of the elemental composition in selected areas of samples. For the purpose, samples were analyzed under high vacuum conditions using a using an accelerating voltage of 20 kV. 3. Results 3.1. Sample 2105 Sample 2105 (Figure 1), taken from a green painted area of the painting (Figure S1 in Supplementary Materials), showed a complex stratigraphy made of a light red layer (layer 1) below a much thicker green layer (layer 2), with a further yellow layer (layer 3) embedded in the latter. Layers 1 and 3 showed detectable PL signals, whereas no emissions were detected in other parts of the sample. In the following, PL data are reported for luminescent layers only. Results of multispectral time-gated measurements of the short-lived (nanosecond) and long-lived (microsecond) emissions are displayed in Figures 2 and 3, respectively. In layers 1 and 3 of the sample, we detect a nanosecond intense emission which peaked in the 380–420 nm spectral band (Figure 2), Materials 2017, 10, 1335 5 of 16 as well as a broader emission occurring at the microsecond timescale and spectrally distributed between 400 nm and 650 nm (Figure 3). Materials 2017, 10, 1335 5 of 16 Figure 1. Images of the stratigraphic microsample 2105 taken with the benchtop optical microscope in dark-field illumination (a) and epifluorescence configuration (b). Borders between painted layers within the sample are highlighted with white dashed lines. The stratigraphic sample is shown in its upright position (as indicated by the white arrow) with the inner layers of the painting being displayed at the bottom of the images. (a) (b) (c) Figure 2. Spectral features of the nanosecond photoluminescence (PL) emission of sample 2105. (a) Spatial distribution of the nanosecond PL emission of sample 2105 (delay = 0 ns, gate width = 10 ns) in different spectral bands; (b) Regions of interest (ROIs) corresponding to layer 1 and layer 3 of the microsample, selected on the basis of the intensity thresholding of the spectral PL image in the band (a) (b) Figure 1. Images of the stratigraphic microsample 2105 taken with the benchtop optical microscope in dark-field illumination (a) and epifluorescence configuration (b). Borders between painted layers within the sample are highlighted with white dashed lines. The stratigraphic sample is shown in its upright position (as indicated by the white arrow) with the inner layers of the painting being displayed at the bottom of the images. Materials 2017, 10, 1335 5 of 16 Figure 1. Images of the stratigraphic microsample 2105 taken with the benchtop optical microscope in dark-field illumination (a) and epifluorescence configuration (b). Borders between painted layers within the sample are highlighted with white dashed lines. The stratigraphic sample is shown in its upright position (as indicated by the white arrow) with the inner layers of the painting being displayed at the bottom of the images. (a) (b) (c) Figure 2. Spectral features of the nanosecond photoluminescence (PL) emission of sample 2105. (a) Spatial distribution of the nanosecond PL emission of sample 2105 (delay = 0 ns, gate width = 10 ns) in different spectral bands; (b) Regions of interest (ROIs) corresponding to layer 1 and layer 3 of the microsample, selected on the basis of the intensity thresholding of the spectral PL image in the band (a) (b) Figure 2. Spectral features of the nanosecond photoluminescence (PL) emission of sample 2105. (a) Spatial distribution of the nanosecond PL emission of sample 2105 (delay = 0 ns, gate width = 10 ns) in different spectral bands; (b) Regions of interest (ROIs) corresponding to layer 1 and layer 3 of the microsample, selected on the basis of the intensity thresholding of the spectral PL image in the band 380–420 nm; (c) Reconstructed mean time-gated PL spectra at the nanosecond timescale detected in ROIs corresponding to layers 1 and 3, with error bars reporting the standard deviation within each ROI. Materials 2017, 10, 1335 6 of 16 By employing intensity thresholding of gated spectral images we have selected two regions of interest (ROIs) that correspond to the painting layers 1 and 3 of the microsample. In the selected ROIs we have then extracted the gated PL spectra at the nanosecond and microsecond timescales (calculated as mean spectral data in ROIs) that provide an estimate of the mean spectral emissions within layers 1 and 3. These spectra (displayed in the bottom panels of Figures 2 and 3) suggest the use of zinc white (ZnO) as the main pigment employed in the two painted layers on the basis of the well-known PL properties of this semiconductor pigment [7,8,33]. Indeed, ZnO has a bright and narrow emission which is spectrally centered at 380 nm, with an effective lifetime of 1.0 ns, ascribed to direct and exciton-assisted electon-hole recombinations through the bandgap. Moreover, the pigment is characterized by the so-called visible or green emission, spectrally broad with a main center at 520 nm and occurring at the microsecond timescale [33], which originates from a variety of defects within the crystal structure [34]. Materials 2017, 10, 1335 6 of 16 380–420 nm; (c) Reconstructed mean time-gated PL spectra at the nanosecond timescale detected in ROIs corresponding to layers 1 and 3, with error bars reporting the standard deviation within each ROI. By employing intensity thresholding of gated spectral images we have selected two regions of interest (ROIs) that correspond to the painting layers 1 and 3 of the microsample. In the selected ROIs we have then extracted the gated PL spectra at the nanosecond and microsecond timescales (calculated as mean spectral data in ROIs) that provide an estimate of the mean spectral emissions within layers 1 and 3. These spectra (displayed in the bottom panels of Figures 2 and 3) suggest the use of zinc white (ZnO) as the main pigment employed in the two painted layers on the basis of the well-known PL properties of this semiconductor pigment [7,8,33]. Indeed, ZnO has a bright and narrow emission which is spectrally centered at 380 nm, with an effective lifetime of 1.0 ns, ascribed to direct and exciton-assisted electon-hole recombinations through the bandgap. Moreover, the pigment is characterized by the so-called visible or green emission, spectrally broad with a main center at 520 nm and occurring at the microsecond timescale [33], which originates from a variety of defects within the crystal structure [34]. (a) (b) Figure 3. Cont. Materials 2017, 10, 1335 7 of 16 Materials 2017, 10, 1335 7 of 16 (c) Figure 3. Spectral features of the microsecond PL emissions of sample 2105. (a) Spatial distribution of the microsecond PL emission of sample 2105 (delay = 0.2 μs, gate width = 10 μs) in different spectral bands. For better visibility, some images have been amplified by a proper multiplication factor as reported in the figure; (b) Regions of interest (ROIs) corresponding to layer 1 and layer 3 of the microsample, selected on the basis of intensity thresholding of the spectral PL image in the band 530– 570 nm; (c) Reconstructed mean time-gated PL spectra at the microsecond timescales detected in ROIs corresponding to layers 1 and 3, with error bars reporting the standard deviation within each ROI. In the inset, microsecond time-gated PL spectra are shown following normalization at intensity maxima. Interestingly, we observed significant spatial variations of the PL intensity within the two layers in all the blue and green spectral bands (from 400 to 550 nm) (Figures 2 and 3). To the authors’ knowledge, these heterogeneities should be only partially ascribed to variations of ZnO concentration within each layer. Indeed, we suggest that selective reabsorption phenomena [35] of the emitted PL light by the colored (red and yellow) pigment particles play a major role for the observed fluctuations. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that PL intensity variations are almost negligible in the spectral bands (from 650 nm to 800 nm), where red and yellow pigments have a low optical absorption. We further report the presence of a faint, but detectable microsecond PL emission in the near-infrared spectral region (centered around 750 nm) in the localized pigment grains of layer 3 (Figure 3). This occurrence suggests the co-existence of a second luminescent compound in this layer, and lifetime analysis confirms this hypothesis. Indeed, when considering the microsecond PL emission in the spectral band 530–570 nm (where zinc white is the main emitter), we detect similar emission decay kinetics in the two layers of the sample (Figure S7 in Supplementary Materials). Lifetime analysis in the spectral band 730–770 nm (Figure 4) highlights the differences in chemical composition between the two layers, with the PL signal detected in layer 3 dumping more rapidly than the one from layer 1. Figure 3. Spectral features of the microsecond PL emissions of sample 2105. (a) Spatial distribution of the microsecond PL emission of sample 2105 (delay = 0.2 µs, gate width = 10 µs) in different spectral bands. For better visibility, some images have been amplified by a proper multiplication factor as reported in the figure; (b) Regions of interest (ROIs) corresponding to layer 1 and layer 3 of the microsample, selected on the basis of intensity thresholding of the spectral PL image in the band 530–570 nm; (c) Reconstructed mean time-gated PL spectra at the microsecond timescales detected in ROIs corresponding to layers 1 and 3, with error bars reporting the standard deviation within each ROI. In the inset, microsecond time-gated PL spectra are shown following normalization at intensity maxima. Interestingly, we observed significant spatial variations of the PL intensity within the two layers in all the blue and green spectral bands (from 400 to 550 nm) (Figures 2 and 3). To the authors’ knowledge, these heterogeneities should be only partially ascribed to variations of ZnO concentration within each layer. Indeed, we suggest that selective reabsorption phenomena [35] of the emitted PL light by the colored (red and yellow) pigment particles play a major role for the observed fluctuations. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that PL intensity variations are almost negligible in the spectral bands (from 650 nm to 800 nm), where red and yellow pigments have a low optical absorption. We further report the presence of a faint, but detectable microsecond PL emission in the near-infrared spectral region (centered around 750 nm) in the localized pigment grains of layer 3 (Figure 3). This occurrence suggests the co-existence of a second luminescent compound in this layer, and lifetime analysis confirms this hypothesis. Indeed, when considering the microsecond PL emission in the spectral band 530–570 nm (where zinc white is the main emitter), we detect similar emission decay kinetics in the two layers of the sample (Figure S7 in Supplementary Materials). Lifetime analysis in the spectral band 730–770 nm (Figure 4) highlights the differences in chemical composition between the two layers, with the PL signal detected in layer 3 dumping more rapidly than the one from layer 1. Materials 2017, 10, 1335 8 of 16 Materials 2017, 10, 1335 8 of 16 Figure 4. Analysis of the microsecond emission decay kinetics of sample 2105 in the spectral band 730–770 nm. (a) Intensity of the PL emission detected at 0.1 μs after pulsed excitation; (b) ROIs corresponding to layer 1 and layer 3 of the sample, selected on the basis of intensity thresholding of the PL image shown in (a); (c) PL lifetime image reconstructed following mono-exponential fit of the emission decay kinetic in the temporal range from 0.2 to 10 μs; (d) Reconstructed decay kinetic of the microsecond PL emission detected in the two ROIs corresponding to layer 1 (black filled squares) and layer 3 (red filled circles). Standard deviation values within each layer (ROI) are reported as error bars. Results of non-linear data fitting on the basis of a tri-exponential decay model are reported as continuous lines (Table S2 in Supplementary Materials). SEM-EDX analysis (available as elemental maps in Figure 5 and EDX spectra in Figure S9) performed on a selected area of the micro-sample revealed the presence of Zn, O, Ba, S and Hg as the main elements of layer 1. On the basis of this elemental composition, we confirmed the presence of zinc white mixed with barium white (BaSO4) (probably employed as an extender), and with vermillion (HgS) employed to achieve the desired reddish hue of the paint. In layer 3, beside the distinctive elements of zinc white and barium white pigments, we underline the presence of cadmium, hypothesized as cadmium yellow (ZnxCd1−xS) in the layer. Further considerations of this hypothesis will be reported in the Discussion section. Figure 4. Analysis of the microsecond emission decay kinetics of sample 2105 in the spectral band 730–770 nm. (a) Intensity of the PL emission detected at 0.1 µs after pulsed excitation; (b) ROIs corresponding to layer 1 and layer 3 of the sample, selected on the basis of intensity thresholding of the PL image shown in (a); (c) PL lifetime image reconstructed following mono-exponential fit of the emission decay kinetic in the temporal range from 0.2 to 10 µs; (d) Reconstructed decay kinetic of the microsecond PL emission detected in the two ROIs corresponding to layer 1 (black filled squares) and layer 3 (red filled circles). Standard deviation values within each layer (ROI) are reported as error bars. Results of non-linear data fitting on the basis of a tri-exponential decay model are reported as continuous lines (Table S2 in Supplementary Materials). SEM-EDX analysis (available as elemental maps in Figure 5 and EDX spectra in Figure S9) performed on a selected area of the micro-sample revealed the presence of Zn, O, Ba, S and Hg as the main elements of layer 1. On the basis of this elemental composition, we confirmed the presence of zinc white mixed with barium white (BaSO4) (probably employed as an extender), and with vermillion (HgS) employed to achieve the desired reddish hue of the paint. In layer 3, beside the distinctive elements of zinc white and barium white pigments, we underline the presence of cadmium, hypothesized as cadmium yellow (ZnxCd1−xS) in the layer. Further considerations of this hypothesis will be reported in the Discussion section. Materials 2017, 10, 1335 8 of 16 Figure 4. Analysis of the microsecond emission decay kinetics of sample 2105 in the spectral band 730–770 nm. (a) Intensity of the PL emission detected at 0.1 μs after pulsed excitation; (b) ROIs corresponding to layer 1 and layer 3 of the sample, selected on the basis of intensity thresholding of the PL image shown in (a); (c) PL lifetime image reconstructed following mono-exponential fit of the emission decay kinetic in the temporal range from 0.2 to 10 μs; (d) Reconstructed decay kinetic of the microsecond PL emission detected in the two ROIs corresponding to layer 1 (black filled squares) and layer 3 (red filled circles). Standard deviation values within each layer (ROI) are reported as error bars. Results of non-linear data fitting on the basis of a tri-exponential decay model are reported as continuous lines (Table S2 in Supplementary Materials). SEM-EDX analysis (available as elemental maps in Figure 5 and EDX spectra in Figure S9) performed on a selected area of the micro-sample revealed the presence of Zn, O, Ba, S and Hg as the main elements of layer 1. On the basis of this elemental composition, we confirmed the presence of zinc white mixed with barium white (BaSO4) (probably employed as an extender), and with vermillion (HgS) employed to achieve the desired reddish hue of the paint. In layer 3, beside the distinctive elements of zinc white and barium white pigments, we underline the presence of cadmium, hypothesized as cadmium yellow (ZnxCd1−xS) in the layer. Further considerations of this hypothesis will be reported in the Discussion section. Figure 5. Results of SEM-EDX analysis of microsample 2105 shown as: (a) the optical image of the microsample with the white rectangle highlighting the area analyzed by SEM-EDX; elemental maps of Zn (b) and Cd (c). Materials 2017, 10, 1335 9 of 16 3.2. Sample 2107 A complex and heterogeneous stratigraphy characterizes the spatial features of sample 2107 (Figure 6), taken from a light blue painted area of the painting (Figure S1 in Supplementary Materials). From bottom to top, we observed the presence of a thick bottom white layer embedding bluish pigment grains (layer 1), a thin green layer (layer 2) and an extremely thin white layer (layer 3). Materials 2017, 10, 1335 9 of 16 Figure 5. Results of SEM-EDX analysis of microsample 2105 shown as: (a) the optical image of the microsample with the white rectangle highlighting the area analyzed by SEM-EDX; elemental maps of Zn (b) and Cd (c). 3.2. Sample 2107 A complex and heterogeneous stratigraphy characterizes the spatial features of sample 2107 (Figure 6), taken from a light blue painted area of the painting (Figure S1 in Supplementary Materials). From bottom to top, we observed the presence of a thick bottom white layer embedding bluish pigment grains (layer 1), a thin green layer (layer 2) and an extremely thin white layer (layer 3). Figure 6. Images of the stratigraphic microsample 2107 taken with the benchtop optical microscope in dark-field illumination (a) and epifluorescence configuration (b). Borders between painted layers within the sample are highlighted with white dashed lines. The stratigraphic sample is shown in its upright position (with top indicated by the white arrow). Layers 1 and 3 showed detectable, but different PL emissions, suggesting the presence of different luminescent materials (Figure 7 and S10 and S11 in Supplementary Materials). The thin green layer did not show any emissions. In detail, in layer 1 we detected a nanosecond emission with maximum intensity in the 380–420 nm spectral band and a microsecond emission spanning the visible spectral range from 450 nm to 650 nm. As in sample 2105, these PL features let us hypothesize the use of zinc white as the main white pigment of the layer, whereas no indications on the composition of the bluish pigment grains can be given, due to the lack of PL emission. Conversely, in layer 3 we detected a very bright PL emission in the 380–420 nm spectral band, occurring at both the nanosecond and microsecond timescales, whereas we did not register the microsecond-visible emission characteristic of the zinc white pigment. Analysis of the emission lifetime allowed us to confirm the different nature of the luminescent materials used in the two layers: in particular, in relation to the nanosecond emission decay kinetic in the 380–420 nm spectral band, we detected a substantial longer emission lifetime in layer 3 than in layer 1 (Figure 7). (a) (b) Figure 6. Images of the stratigraphic microsample 2107 taken with the benchtop optical microscope in dark-field illumination (a) and epifluorescence configuration (b). Borders between painted layers within the sample are highlighted with white dashed lines. The stratigraphic sample is shown in its upright position (with top indicated by the white arrow). Layers 1 and 3 showed detectable, but different PL emissions, suggesting the presence of different luminescent materials (Figure 7 and Figures S10 and S11 in Supplementary Materials). The thin green layer did not show any emissions. In detail, in layer 1 we detected a nanosecond emission with maximum intensity in the 380–420 nm spectral band and a microsecond emission spanning the visible spectral range from 450 nm to 650 nm. As in sample 2105, these PL features let us hypothesize the use of zinc white as the main white pigment of the layer, whereas no indications on the composition of the bluish pigment grains can be given, due to the lack of PL emission. Conversely, in layer 3 we detected a very bright PL emission in the 380–420 nm spectral band, occurring at both the nanosecond and microsecond timescales, whereas we did not register the microsecond-visible emission characteristic of the zinc white pigment. Analysis of the emission lifetime allowed us to confirm the different nature of the luminescent materials used in the two layers: in particular, in relation to the nanosecond emission decay kinetic in the 380–420 nm spectral band, we detected a substantial longer emission lifetime in layer 3 than in layer 1 (Figure 7). Materials 2017, 10, 1335 10 of 16 Materials 2017, 10, 1335 10 of 16 Figure 7. Analysis of the nanosecond emission decay kinetics of sample 2107 in the spectral band 380–420 nm. (a) Nanosecond PL gated image detected in the spectral band 380–420 nm; (b) ROIs corresponding to layer 1 and layer 3 of sample, selected on the basis of proper intensity thresholding of the PL image shown in (a); (c) Lifetime image of the nanosecond PL emission reconstructed on the basis of mono-exponential data fitting in the temporal interval from 0 to 10 ns. For better visibility, results are shown only for the white rectangular area depicted in (a); (d) Reconstructed decay kinetic of the nanosecond PL emission detected in ROIs corresponding to layer 1 (black filled circles) and layer 3 (red filled squares). Standard deviation values within each layer are reported as error bars. Results of non-linear data fitting on the basis of a tri-exponential decay model are reported as continuous lines (Table S3 in Supplementary Materials). Data from SEM-EDX analysis confirm the different nature of the pigments employed in the sample (Figures 8 and S12). Indeed, in layer 1 the presence of Zn, O, Ba and S indicates the use of zinc white as the main white pigment, with barium white used as an extender, in a similar way to that reported for sample 2105. Moreover, the detection of Al and Co in the blue grains (data not reported) suggests the use of the cobalt blue pigment (CoO·Al2O3). Conversely, in layer 3, we detected Zn and S, but no Ba, thus pointing to the use of zinc sulphide, another white pigment, as the main white pigment of the layer. Figure 8. SEM-EDX analysis of sample 2107: (a) optical image of the microsample with the white rectangle highlighting the area analyzed by SEM-EDX; (b–d) spatial distribution of Zn, Ba and S. Figure 7. Analysis of the nanosecond emission decay kinetics of sample 2107 in the spectral band 380–420 nm. (a) Nanosecond PL gated image detected in the spectral band 380–420 nm; (b) ROIs corresponding to layer 1 and layer 3 of sample, selected on the basis of proper intensity thresholding of the PL image shown in (a); (c) Lifetime image of the nanosecond PL emission reconstructed on the basis of mono-exponential data fitting in the temporal interval from 0 to 10 ns. For better visibility, results are shown only for the white rectangular area depicted in (a); (d) Reconstructed decay kinetic of the nanosecond PL emission detected in ROIs corresponding to layer 1 (black filled circles) and layer 3 (red filled squares). Standard deviation values within each layer are reported as error bars. Results of non-linear data fitting on the basis of a tri-exponential decay model are reported as continuous lines (Table S3 in Supplementary Materials). Data from SEM-EDX analysis confirm the different nature of the pigments employed in the sample (Figure 8 and Figure S12). Indeed, in layer 1 the presence of Zn, O, Ba and S indicates the use of zinc white as the main white pigment, with barium white used as an extender, in a similar way to that reported for sample 2105. Moreover, the detection of Al and Co in the blue grains (data not reported) suggests the use of the cobalt blue pigment (CoO·Al2O3). Conversely, in layer 3, we detected Zn and S, but no Ba, thus pointing to the use of zinc sulphide, another white pigment, as the main white pigment of the layer. Materials 2017, 10, 1335 10 of 16 Figure 7. Analysis of the nanosecond emission decay kinetics of sample 2107 in the spectral band 380–420 nm. (a) Nanosecond PL gated image detected in the spectral band 380–420 nm; (b) ROIs corresponding to layer 1 and layer 3 of sample, selected on the basis of proper intensity thresholding of the PL image shown in (a); (c) Lifetime image of the nanosecond PL emission reconstructed on the basis of mono-exponential data fitting in the temporal interval from 0 to 10 ns. For better visibility, results are shown only for the white rectangular area depicted in (a); (d) Reconstructed decay kinetic of the nanosecond PL emission detected in ROIs corresponding to layer 1 (black filled circles) and layer 3 (red filled squares). Standard deviation values within each layer are reported as error bars. Results of non-linear data fitting on the basis of a tri-exponential decay model are reported as continuous lines (Table S3 in Supplementary Materials). Data from SEM-EDX analysis confirm the different nature of the pigments employed in the sample (Figures 8 and S12). Indeed, in layer 1 the presence of Zn, O, Ba and S indicates the use of zinc white as the main white pigment, with barium white used as an extender, in a similar way to that reported for sample 2105. Moreover, the detection of Al and Co in the blue grains (data not reported) suggests the use of the cobalt blue pigment (CoO·Al2O3). Conversely, in layer 3, we detected Zn and S, but no Ba, thus pointing to the use of zinc sulphide, another white pigment, as the main white pigment of the layer. Figure 8. SEM-EDX analysis of sample 2107: (a) optical image of the microsample with the white rectangle highlighting the area analyzed by SEM-EDX; (b–d) spatial distribution of Zn, Ba and S. Figure 8. SEM-EDX analysis of sample 2107: (a) optical image of the microsample with the white rectangle highlighting the area analyzed by SEM-EDX; (b–d) spatial distribution of Zn, Ba and S. Materials 2017, 10, 1335 11 of 16 4. Discussion For the analysis of painted layers made of luminescent semiconductor pigments, the capabilities of discriminating among spectral and timing PL properties provides key information which is useful for understanding composition. In Table 1 results are summarized in terms of pigment identification provided by the combination of TRPL microscopy and SEM-EDX analysis. Table 1. Summary of the main results of TRPL (time-resolved photoluminescence) microscopy and SEM-EDX (scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy) analysis and proposed pigment identification. Sample/Layer Main PL Emissions (Reported As: Spectral Band of Maximum Intensity/Decay Kinetic Timescale) Elemental Composition (Main Components) Proposed Pigment Identification 2105/Layer 1 400 nm/ns timescale (BE); 550 nm/µs timescale (TS) Zn, O, S, Ba, Hg zinc white (ZnO); cinnabar (HgS) 2105/Layer 3 400 nm/ns timescale (BE); 550 nm/µs timescale (TS) Zn, O, S, Ba, Cd, Cr (trace) 750 nm/µs timescale (TS) zinc white (ZnO); barium white (BaSO4); cadmium yellow (ZnxCd1−xS)—(altered or unperfectly synthetized) 2107/Layer 1 400 nm/ns timescale (BE); 550 nm/µs timescale (TS) Zn, O, Ba, S, Al, Co zinc white (ZnO); barium white (BaSO4); cobalt blue (CoO·Al2O3) 2107/Layer3 400 nm/ns timescale (BE or shallow TS); 400 nm/µs timescale (TS) Zn, S zinc sulphide (ZnS) On the basis of PL data, in two painted layers we have clearly evidenced the presence of the well-known luminescent zinc white pigment. Conversely, the interpretation of the PL signal detected in layer 3 of sample 2105 and sample 2107 require further considerations, which are reported below. In the yellow layer of sample 2105 (identified as a cadmium-based painted layer by SEM-EDX analysis), we have reported the presence of an infrared luminescent emission. The microsecond time-scale of the emission suggests that it is a defect-related emission occurring in a crystal solid. A first hypothesis is the optical recombination from the first deep trap state of the cadmium yellow pigment (ZnxCd1−xS), characterized by a broad emission spectrally centered between 650 and 750 nm, depending on the Zn molar fraction of the crystal pigment [9,11,36]. Nevertheless, in the analyzed paint layer we have not detected the rapid picosecond emission ascribable to direct recombination paths in CdS. Indeed, following the analysis of cadmium yellow paints produced with contemporary synthesis processes, it has been reported that this emission is easily excited by Q-switch laser pulses [11,37], like the ones employed in the present research. This observation supports two possible hypotheses: (i) The cadmium yellow paint, produced with the imperfect synthesis processes available at the beginning of the 20th century, is characterized by a high density of crystal defects, which can give rise to the formation of high density of states within the forbidden CdS bandgap. As a consequence, electron trapping of excited electrons is favored with respect to direct recombination, giving rise to a strong quenching of the radiative BE emission. (ii) The cadmium yellow paint has suffered severe chemical degradation that has altered the original CdS pigment into novel reaction products. In this vision, the detected PL could be ascribed to TS optical emission of novel compounds. This hypothesis is supported by the recent research on altered cadmium yellow paints [18,38–40], where pigment degradation has been associated with the formation of cadmium carbonates, sulphates, oxalates and hydroxides. A clear answer to these hypothesis is not straightforward and would require the use of other complementary analytical methods, which could include synchrotron-based micro-X-ray diffraction and FT-IR mapping. However, it is clear that TRPL microscopy poses important questions regarding possible paint degradation. Materials 2017, 10, 1335 12 of 16 In the analysis of layer 3 of sample 2105, it is of further interest to note that the two main pictorial components (zinc white and cadmium yellow) are non-homogeneosly distributed in the layer, with the yellow pigment being localized in a thinner central region only. This issue is demonstrated in Figure 9 by combining the microsecond emission of the sample in the spectral regions where zinc white is the main emitter (430–470 and 530–570 spectral regions) with the microsecond emission detected in the infrared spectral region (830–870 nm), where cadmium yellow is the main luminescent specie. It is hence clear how results from TRPL microscopy can guide the application of further elemental or molecular spectroscopy analyses in selected areas of samples. Indeed, here similar spatial variations are observed by looking at the spatial distribution of the elemental composition provided by SEM-EDX. Materials 2017, 10, 1335 12 of 16 In the analysis of layer 3 of sample 2105, it is of further interest to note that the two main pictorial components (zinc white and cadmium yellow) are non-homogeneosly distributed in the layer, with the yellow pigment being localized in a thinner central region only. This issue is demonstrated in Figure 9 by combining the microsecond emission of the sample in the spectral regions where zinc white is the main emitter (430–470 and 530–570 spectral regions) with the microsecond emission detected in the infrared spectral region (830–870 nm), where cadmium yellow is the main luminescent specie. It is hence clear how results from TRPL microscopy can guide the application of further elemental or molecular spectroscopy analyses in selected areas of samples. Indeed, here similar spatial variations are observed by looking at the spatial distribution of the elemental composition provided by SEM-EDX. Figure 9. Visualization of the spatial distribution of pigments layer 3 of sample 2105 as highlighted by TRPL microscopy and SEM-EDX analysis: (a) false color map created by combining microsecond PL gated images in the spectral bands 430–470 nm (blue), 530–570 nm (green), 830–870 nm (red; amplified in intensity by a factor of 10 for better visibility). The white rectangle highlights the subarea analyzed by SEM-EDX; (b) ROIs outlining the spatial distribution of the emission in the green spectral band (530–570 nm) ascribed to zinc white (white contours) and in the infrared spectral band (830–870 nm) ascribed to cadmium yellow (red contours); (c) False color map created by combining the SEM- EDX elemental maps of Zn (gray) and Cd (green). In the analysis of sample 2107, the interpretation of the PL signal detected in layer 3 is not straightforward. Here, we provide some possible interpretations. The use of ZnS as the main white pigment of the layer suggests that the nanosecond and microsecond PL emission detected in the 380– 420 (2.9–3.3 eV) spectral band is ascribable to this material. ZnS is an important II–VI semiconductor with a large direct band gap of 3.68 or 3.8 eV, depending on the crystal phase [41]. Today this semiconductor, produced as thin film, quantum dots or nanoparticles, is widely studied as a key material for optoelectronics [42]. PL analysis of materials has elucidated a variety of optical emissions, occurring at different spectral bands and timescales, which are generated by ZnS native defects and uncontrollable impurities depending on the material synthesis process [43]. In particular, an optical emission centered at 396 nm (3.1 eV) has been associated with zinc vacancies in ZnS thin films [44], and this could account for the PL signal detected in the sample. 5. Conclusions Despite being widespread amongst conservators and museum curators, the analysis of the fluorescence emission from samples and artworks is usually employed as a visual and qualitative method for documenting the presence of luminescent compounds. Similar considerations can be Figure 9. Visualization of the spatial distribution of pigments layer 3 of sample 2105 as highlighted by TRPL microscopy and SEM-EDX analysis: (a) false color map created by combining microsecond PL gated images in the spectral bands 430–470 nm (blue), 530–570 nm (green), 830–870 nm (red; amplified in intensity by a factor of 10 for better visibility). The white rectangle highlights the subarea analyzed by SEM-EDX; (b) ROIs outlining the spatial distribution of the emission in the green spectral band (530–570 nm) ascribed to zinc white (white contours) and in the infrared spectral band (830–870 nm) ascribed to cadmium yellow (red contours); (c) False color map created by combining the SEM-EDX elemental maps of Zn (gray) and Cd (green). In the analysis of sample 2107, the interpretation of the PL signal detected in layer 3 is not straightforward. Here, we provide some possible interpretations. The use of ZnS as the main white pigment of the layer suggests that the nanosecond and microsecond PL emission detected in the 380–420 (2.9–3.3 eV) spectral band is ascribable to this material. ZnS is an important II–VI semiconductor with a large direct band gap of 3.68 or 3.8 eV, depending on the crystal phase [41]. Today this semiconductor, produced as thin film, quantum dots or nanoparticles, is widely studied as a key material for optoelectronics [42]. PL analysis of materials has elucidated a variety of optical emissions, occurring at different spectral bands and timescales, which are generated by ZnS native defects and uncontrollable impurities depending on the material synthesis process [43]. In particular, an optical emission centered at 396 nm (3.1 eV) has been associated with zinc vacancies in ZnS thin films [44], and this could account for the PL signal detected in the sample. 5. Conclusions Despite being widespread amongst conservators and museum curators, the analysis of the fluorescence emission from samples and artworks is usually employed as a visual and qualitative Materials 2017, 10, 1335 13 of 16 method for documenting the presence of luminescent compounds. Similar considerations can be reported for the use of fluorescence optical microscopy, which is occasionally applied to stratigraphic samples of paintings to put light on sample heterogeneities. Indeed, conventional optical techniques are limited by the material complexity of artist-painted layers, which comprise heterogeneous mixtures of pigments, organic binders, protective treatments and possible reaction products. For this reason, other analytical microscopies are employed for material identification, such as those based on energy dispersive X-ray, infrared and Raman spectroscopy. In this work, we have illustrated and proved the effectiveness of TRPL microscopy through the analysis of unique microsamples. The method takes advantage of spectral and lifetime-resolved data and can provide valuable information for the identification of semiconductor pigments in paints. In the specific case study, the analysis has allowed the identification of zinc white and cadmium yellow, and poses specific questions about the degradation of these modern pigments and how luminescence may be modified with chemical changes. In this context, it is important to stress the benefits provided by lifetime analysis with respect to the analysis of PL intensity only. In fact, the independence of the emission lifetime from material concentration allows the detection of the presence of weak PL from pigments even when they are present at very low concentrations. In conservation science, the method could be extended to the study of other samples and materials, which include ancient photoluminescent pigments, such as Egyptian Blue and lead white. In particular, the sensitivity of the method to the variation of crystal defects in pigments could be addressed to the study of the origin and history of pigments, as has been recently of interest for the lead white pigment [45]. In addition, the analysis of trap state emissions could provide valuable information on painting degradation phenomena that are associated with the migration of ions from pigments (as occurs for the formation of metal carboxylates [15]), and for mechanisms of zinc yellow degradation [39]. Supplementary Materials: The following are available online at www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/10/11/1335/s1. Figure S1: Image of the painting Still Life with Eggplant by Henri Matisse (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble, France, 210 × 245 cm2 (1911)). The location of microsampling is indicated by numbered black or white squares; Figure S2: Top panel: Scheme of the TRPL-microscopy set-up designed for the present experiment. The black rectangle encloses the optical system specifically designed for achieving a uniform illumination of the sample field of view. Bottom panel: Scheme of the designed optical system with focal lengths and distances between lenses listed in the bottom table; Figure S3: Optical transmission of the employed bandpass filters (colored continuous lines) and estimated relative efficiency of the detection path (dashed black line). The latter has been calculated by modeling each bandpass filter transmission as a Dirac delta function centered at the filter central wavelength and by taking into account the spectral efficiency of the image intensifier input window, of the collecting mirrors and of the bandpass filters; Figure S4: Simplified scheme of the typical PL emission paths in a direct bandgap semiconductor material (with VB and CB referring to the semiconductor valence and conduction band) depicted in terms of energy levels (left panel) and emission decay kinetics (right panel); Figure S5: Spatial distribution of the nanosecond PL emission of sample 2105 (delay = 0 ns, gate width = 10 ns) in the spectral bands 380–420 nm, 430–470 nm, 480–520 nm, 530–570 nm, 630–670 nm, 730–770 nm; Figure S6: Spatial distribution of the microsecond PL emission of sample 2105 (delay = 0.2 µs, gate width = 10 µs) in the spectral bands 380–420 nm, 430–470 nm, 480–520 nm, 530–570 nm, 630–670 nm, 680–720 nm, 730–770 nm, 780–820 nm, 830–870 nm. For better visibility, some images have been amplified by a proper multiplication factor as reported in the figure; Figure S7: Reconstructed decay kinetic of the nanosecond PL emission in the spectral band 380–420 nm detected in layer 1 (black filled squares) and layer 3 (red filled circles) of sample 2105. Standard deviation values within each layer are reported as error bars. Results of non-linear data fitting on the basis of a tri-exponential decay model are reported as continuous lines; Figure S8: Reconstructed decay kinetic of the microsecond PL emission in the spectral bands 530–570 nm (top panel) and 730–770 nm (bottom panel) detected in layer 1 (black filled squares) and layer 3 (red filled circles) of sample 2105. Standard deviation values within each layer are reported as error bars. Results of non-linear data fitting on the basis of a tri-exponential decay model are reported as continuous lines; Figure S9: SEM-EDX analysis of sample 2105: (a) optical image of the microsample with the white rectangle highlighting the area analyzed by SEM-EDX; (b) back-scattered electron map; (c–f) spatial distribution of Zn, Hg, Cd and S; (g) SEM-EDX spectra detected in selected areas (highlighted by white rectangles in (b)) of layer 1 and 3; Figure S10: Spatial distribution of the nanosecond PL emission of sample 2107 (delay = 0 ns, gate width = 10 ns) in the spectral bands 380–420 nm, 430–470 nm; Figure S11: Spatial distribution of the microsecond PL emission of sample 2107 (delay = 0.2 µs, gate width = 10 µs) in the spectral bands 380–420 nm, 430–470 nm, 480–520 nm, 530–570 nm, 630–670 nm, 680–720 nm, 730–770 nm, 780–820 nm. For better visibility, some images have been amplified by a proper multiplication factor as reported in the figure; Figure S12: SEM-EDX analysis of sample 2107: (a) optical image of the microsample with the white rectangle highlighting the area analyzed by SEM-EDX; (b) back-scattered electron map; (c–f) spatial www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/10/11/1335/s1 Materials 2017, 10, 1335 14 of 16 distribution of Zn, S, Cr and Ba; (g) SEM-EDX spectra detected in selected areas (highlighted by white rectangles in (b)) of layer 1 and 3; Table S1: Results of non-linear data fitting of the nanosecond PL emission in the spectral band 380–420 nm detected in layer 1 and layer 3 of sample 2105. The non-linear fit has been performed on the basis of a tri-exponential decay model and in the table results are reported as lifetime and relative amplitude values for each component; Table S2: Results of non-linear data fitting of the microsecond PL emission in the spectral bands 530–570 nm and 730–770 nm detected in layer 1 and layer 3 of sample 2105. The non-linear fit has been performed on the basis of a tri-exponential decay model and in the table results are reported as lifetime and relative amplitude values for each component; Table S3: Results of non-linear data fitting of the nanosecond PL emission in the spectral band 380–420 nm detected in layer 1 and layer 3 of sample 2107. The non-linear fit has been performed on the basis of a tri-exponential decay model and in the table results are reported as lifetime and relative amplitude values for each component. Acknowledgments: Research was partially funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research within the framework of the JPI Cultural Heritage—JHEP Pilot call through the LeadART project “Induced decay and ageing mechanisms in paintings: focus on interactions between lead and zinc white and organic material”. This work has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme within the project GoPhoton and from the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 654148 Laserlab-Europe. Author Contributions: All authors contributed to research and writing this article. Daniela Comelli coordinated the publication. Daniela Comelli and Gianluca Valentini were responsible for the development of the TRPL microscopy set-up. Myriam Eveno and Victor Gonzalez were responsible for samples preparation, SEM-EDX analysis and following data analysis. 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Introduction Materials and Methods The Micro-Samples TRPL Microscopy Optical Microscopy and Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy-Dispersive X-raySpectroscopy (SEM-EDX) Results Sample 2105 Sample 2107 Discussion Conclusions work_nco3rqchcndw3hdgkydiuyetqq ---- An Interview with David C. Driskell An Interview with David C. Driskell Xavier Nicholas, David C. Driskell Callaloo, Volume 38, Number 1, Winter 2015, pp. 87-92 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article [ Access provided at 6 Apr 2021 02:46 GMT from Carnegie Mellon University ] https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2015.0034 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/576187 https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2015.0034 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/576187 87Callaloo 37.2 (2014) 87–92 AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID C. DRISKELL by Xavier Nicholas David C. Driskell was born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1931. In 1953, he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He received his Bachelor’s degree in art from Howard University in 1955 and a Master of Fine Arts from Catholic University of America in 1962. In 1964, he received a fellowship to study at The Netherlands Institute for the History of Art in The Hague. He has taught at a number of historically black colleges and universities, including Talladega College, Fisk University, and Howard University. In 1977, he accepted an appointment at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he taught for twenty-two years. He retired from the University of Maryland in 1998, and he is presently the Distinguished University Professor of Art, Emeritus. In 2001, the Uni- versity of Maryland established the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora in his honor. His works are in major collections of art museums in the United States and throughout the world. He is the author of several books on African American art, including Two Centuries of Black American Art, William H. Johnson: An American Modern, and The Other Side of Color: African American Art in the Collection of Camille O. and William H. Cosby, Jr. Professor Driskell is one of the foremost authorities on African American art in the United States and in the world. This interview was conducted on January 22, 2010, at the Mobile Museum of Art at the exhibition Successions: Prints by African American Artists from the Collection of Jean and Robert Steele. NICHOLAS: It is rare to find a major artist who is also a major art collector. When did you begin to collect art? DRISKELL: I actually began to collect art when I was a student at Howard University. I won’t say all of our teachers were collectors, but certainly Professor James V. Herring, who founded the Howard University Department of Art in 1921, was a collector. His first art graduate was a woman named Alma Thomas, who graduated in 1924. Then Professor Herring later founded the Howard University Art Gallery and the Barnett-Aden Gallery. Professor James A. Porter, a student of Herring who later picked up the mantle from his professor, was certainly a collector. Their philosophy was: “Someday, you’re going to be a major artist, and you should start collecting. You buy other artists’ work and they will buy yours.” I bought a print from Professor James L. Wells when I was a student. I didn’t really see myself as a collector as a student, but I amassed quite a few things. Then we were told to collect books, and so I remember buying Lois Mailou Jones’s very first book 88 C A L L A L O O called Peintures 1937-1951, which was published in 1952. It cost thirty dollars, and that was a lot of money to put out at that time. But I bought it, and, of course, Professor Porter’s book Modern Negro Art, which was published in 1943. I would buy anything I could get my hands on that had any images of black artists in it. NICHOLAS: When did you attend Howard University? DRISKELL: I went to Howard in 1949-1950 as a history major, and a year and a half later I just kind of decided that I wanted to have a minor in art. So I went over to the art depart- ment to take a course in art. I was in Professor Wells’s class one day, and Professor Porter came and looked over my shoulders at my drawings and said, “What is your name?” and I told him. He said, “You’re not in art?” and I said, “No.” He said, “What is your major?” and I said, “History.” He said, “Well, you don’t belong over there; you belong here.” So I went and changed my major. That’s really how I came into art. NICHOLAS: I’ve read where you said that Professor Porter was your mentor. DRISKELL: Indeed. I took a course with Professor Porter in 1952, the year after I came into art. He called the course “Negro Art,” and he used his textbook Modern Negro Art. I guess I was probably the only student in the United States, maybe in the world, taking a legitimate course in Negro art at that time because it was only taught at Howard. I mean, they would mix a little in here and there in courses. I was his only student that semester. Now he had more students at other times, but you really couldn’t get many students to take a course in Negro art; they took Western art. At Professor Porter’s memorial in February of 1970, I was asked to speak by his wife, Dorothy, and I mentioned that course. I said, “He taught that course as though he had a hundred students there, and I was the only one.” I was so enamored of his scholarship that I almost committed to memory the lineage of history in his book Modern Negro Art. NICHOLAS: What did you do after graduating from Howard University? DRISKELL: As I mentioned earlier, I changed my major to art at Howard in 1952, and then I was given a scholarship at the Skowhagen School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in the summer of 1953. That was only for summer work, and so I came back to Howard pretty much with the notion that I was going to continue working as a painter. But what happened is that, after I finished my work at Howard in 1955, I went immediately into teaching on the college level at Talladega College, where I helped to develop the curricu- lum after Professor Claude Clark retired in 1955. I taught at Talladega for seven years, and then I decided to go back to school to get my Master of Fine Arts at Catholic University of America. After I finished the MFA in 1962, I returned to Howard and served as Acting Head of the Department of Art and Director of the Gallery of Art two of the four years I was there. In 1966, I left Howard to go to Fisk University, where I immediately put Pro- fessor Porter’s course in the curriculum and I taught it. In 1967, I became Chairperson of the Department of Art and Director of the University Art Galleries at Fisk. I left Fisk 89 C A L L A L O O in December of 1976 and started teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park, in January of 1977. I taught for a year and a half, and then, in the fall of 1978, I became Chairperson of the Department of Art from 1978 to 1983. They really recruited me with the purpose in mind that I would establish an African American art history component to the curriculum because they had none in the art history program. So I established that first on the bachelor’s level and then on the master’s level. Then students started saying that they wanted to do a PhD in that area, and so we expanded it. Since the 1980s, we have offered courses and probably produced more scholars in that area than any other school. I retired from teaching at the University of Maryland in 1998. NICHOLAS: Would you say that, at Howard University, you were trained to collect art? DRISKELL: Yes, I was trained to collect. My teachers at Howard said, “You must collect,” and some of us did. I guess I took it more seriously because I continued collecting. Every place I went, I would look up young artists. I collected not only African American artists, but I collected worldwide. I have, for example, a fairly large collection of nineteenth-century Japanese prints, including artists like Hiroshige and others. NICHOLAS: In one of Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Theo, he talks about how he has all these Japanese prints pinned on the wall of his studio. You can clearly see the influence of Japanese art in his painting Bridge in the Rain, which is actually a copy of one of Hiroshige’s woodcut prints. What was it that attracted European artists to Japanese art? DRISKELL: They were very much taken with the flatness of style and yet the projection. You can see the Japanese influence very much in Matisse, too, and other European modernists. NICHOLAS: Why did you collect Japanese prints? DRISKELL: I collected them because I was interested in the difference between Eastern painting and Western painting, Eastern printmaking and Western printmaking. But then I started concentrating on African American art, and I collected people like Bannister. By the time I really understood what was going on, I couldn’t afford to collect Tanner. I did collect a print by Tanner. But I was friends of Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, and so I collected their work. With a number of artists, you could exchange works. Romy was such a kind-hearted man that he would give you a work. I would go to his studio in Astoria, Long Island, and he would never let me leave without giving me a gift. He was just like that. I also bought his work from the ACA Galleries in New York. Jake didn’t do that. You would always have to go through his dealers. I bought Jake’s work from the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York that he was associated with for a number of years. I helped the printmaker Lou Stovall and the Workshop people in Washington, DC, make the deal between Jake and the Workshop in printing a silkscreen series based on the Toussaint L’Ouverture series, which is now located at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans. I also had a friend in New York, Mary Beatie Brady, who was head of the Harmon Foundation in New York. She helped me collect, and she emphasized the impor- 90 C A L L A L O O tance of collecting. She was the first and only director of the Harmon Foundation, which preserved all of those works at the Smithsonian by William H. Johnson and so many other artists. There is a segment of William H. Johnson’s works at Tuskegee University that she also donated from the Harmon Foundation. She was like a sponsor in certain ways, even though one didn’t have sponsors like the old-time sponsorships. She sent me to Europe for the very first time in 1964. NICHOLAS: Where did you go in Europe? DRISKELL: I went first to Greece, and then came all around the panhandle, all the way up to Copenhagen and back down to England. That same summer, I did art history studies in the Netherlands. I was always interested in Rembrandt, and I had gotten a fellowship from the Dutch government in the Netherlands to study at the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthis- torisches Documentatie den Haag. The English interpretation is the Netherlands Institute for the Study of the History of Art in The Hague. I spent six weeks there studying Rem- brandt’s etchings and drawings. I would go to classes during the day, and in the evenings I would get on the train with my Eurail pass and go to Amsterdam to the Rijksbureau where Rembrandt’s Night Watch and other famous paintings are and stay there until they closed, and then I would go to the Gemeente Museum next door. NICHOLAS: What, in particular, attracted you to Rembrandt’s work? DRISKELL: Well, I was very much interested in drawing and draftsmanship. I tried to go every place that I knew Rembrandt had gone. I would draw the same scenes that he had drawn. I kept a visual diary. I would draw and write what I was doing. I turned out a lot of drawings, and a number of the drawings are now at the Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. I would even draw in sepia ink, very much the way Rembrandt did. I studied Rembrandt religiously. I was just fascinated with the proficiency with which he was able to sketch so quickly and get the essence of something. So that was my interest, and that is why I went to Rijksbureau to study because of the Rembrandt specialist and the Vermeer specialist. NICHOLAS: Speaking of Vermeer, did the Vermeer specialist discuss the controversy surrounding the number of Vermeer paintings that are still in existence, since there have been a number of fakes? DRISKELL: Yes. I remember the Vermeer class. We were from all over the Western world, but there were a couple of us from the United States. I couldn’t speak Dutch, but they all spoke English. The professor said that there weren’t any more than twenty to twenty-five paintings by Vermeer in existence. Somebody in the class said, “We have more than that in the United States,” and the professor said, “Well, you have fakes.” Then somebody asked him, “Who was the person that identified all those Vermeers after the Second World War that turned out to be fakes?” The professor hesitated for a moment, and then he said, “It was I.” He told us that when they found this man who had done all these works, they 91 C A L L A L O O learned about the process that he had gone through to create these works. The professor told us about how this man would paint them and then put them in the oven and bake the paint so that it would crack a little and look old. It was a perfect formula. So the professor said it took them years before they were able through radiocarbon-14 to figure out that these works were fakes. NICHOLAS: Were you able to collect any art while you were in Europe? DRISKELL: I did a little. I collected drawings and prints. No paintings. In 1964, you could still buy wonderful prints in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and London. I still have portfolios of woodcuts by Albert Durer that I collected. I also collected woodcuts from the Nurem- burg Chronicle. I had a friend that was the curator of prints and drawings at the Statens Museum in Copenhagen, and I kept saying to her, “Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful to find a Rembrandt drawing,” and she said, “Oh, forget it. You won’t.” I went to Copenhagen, and I was walking down a street with some antique shops. It was Kierkegaard—”Kierk” means church in both Dutch and Danish and “gaard” means street. There was a philosopher by that name, Soren Kierkegaard. That name simply means Church Street. So as I was walk- ing down Kierkegaard, I saw this little antique shop and I walked in. There was a little print in the window that I thought was a reproduction. It was a self-portrait of Rembrandt on a windowsill. It was framed and under glass, but I could tell that the ink was raised. I thought to myself, “It couldn’t be. It’s too good to be true.” So I asked the gentleman in the shop if I could take it outside and look at it, and he said, “Sure, sure.” I looked at it and I knew it was an etching and I took it back in. I said, “Is it a Rembrandt restrike?” and he said, “No, it’s a facsimile.” In those days, we used the word facsimile for a very fine reproduction; very often, people would exhibit them. I said, “How much is it?” and he said, “Ten dollars.” So, you know, I put on my act and said, “Ten dollars for a reproduction?” and he said, “Well, it’s a good facsimile, and I can’t let it go for less.” So I said, “Okay,” and I bought it. I was confident that it was an original, but I went to the museum where my friend was working and I told her, “Well, I found a Rembrandt,” and she said, “Oh, no, no, no. But bring it back anyway.” So I took it over to her and she took her glass out and she looked at it and said, “My God, this is a better impression than the one that we own.” It was further explained to me by the curator of the Dutch and Flemish Painting at the National Gallery that it was a very good impression of Rembrandt’s original. I also took it by the British Museum when I was there, and you know how hoity-toity the British people are, and they were like, “We don’t do this kind of thing, but if you want to sell it, I’ll tell you where to go.” Well, I knew it was an original. I had already ascertained that. NICHOLAS: Have you ever come across a find like that here in the United States? DRISKELL: Yes. When I was teaching at Howard University in 1962, I went one Saturday to the flea market in Alexandria, Virginia. It was called the Thieves Market. This was before I found the Rembrandt in Copenhagen. I saw this black and white piece, and I thought, “Hmm, that looks like a Matisse.” I knew the image. It’s called “Nina.” I asked the lady how much she wanted for it, and she said, “Two dollars and ninety-eight cents.” So I 92 C A L L A L O O bought it. It was an original linocut by Henri Matisse. I still have it. So the Rembrandt and the Matisse were my two aces in the hole. NICHOLAS: As an art collector, would you say that you look at works of art with a dif- ferent set of eyes than someone who is not an artist? DRISKELL: Well, I suppose I do only because I have been trained as a visual artist. Now it doesn’t mean that my eyes are better than someone who is not a visual artist. I also read, and I still read and praise a book called Learning to Look: A Handbook for the Visual Arts by the late Joshua Taylor, who was the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art. In that book, you get help—it’s not a formula—along the way. How do you visualize? But I do think that, as an artist, you have maybe a little extrasensory understanding of what it means to visualize things, what it means to interpret them, and what it means to see them in another kind of light. NICHOLAS: What is your focus as an art collector? DRISKELL: I like all kinds of art, and I collect all kinds. I collect realism. I collect abstrac- tion. I collect, as I said earlier, Eastern art, African art, and Western art. But my focus is African American art, and part of that is because of the paucity of literature on African American art and the paucity of these works in museums. It is my hope that I can add to the understanding of these forms. I also think you become a guardian or a steward of the culture when you understand the necessity of collecting, when you understand the importance of doing it. work_neg7q52odffhjeafdnhykarjbu ---- Sparks_Thesis_Painting Things PAINTING THINGS By M.E. Sparks BFA, NSCAD UNIVERSITY, 2013 A THESIS ESSAY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF APPLIED ARTS EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN 2016 © M.E. Sparks, 2016 Abstract This essay traces the evolution of my practice-driven, reflexive investigation surrounding the iterative process of painting things. The body of work described in the essay follows the chronology of my studio production as I explore methods of observational painting. The accompanying historical and theoretical research revolves around contemporary painting discourse, object-hood and visual perception. Questions around painting as contemporary practice are approached through topics of still life, materialism, observation, repetition, abstraction, and painting’s material language. The object retains a central role in this research as my paintings are grounded within the context of the still life. Referencing critical theory surrounding human-object interactions, including the writing of Jane Bennett and Bill Brown, I consider how vibrant matter and thing theory inform my perception of still life objects, as well as the vitality and agency of the painting itself. Weaving together writing of WJT Mitchell, James Elkins and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I propose that the practice of observational painting can reveal a transformational and reciprocal exchange between observer and observed from which dominant subject-object hierarchies are dispelled. Through the repetition, obstruction and the concept of afterimage, I intend for my work to move beyond observed depictions of objects to approach the questions of where an object ends, the subject begins, and how these dualisms mingle and coalesce within the space of painting. To further my awareness and understanding of what constitutes the work of a painting, this essay aims to interrogate the double nature and function of the medium: as a mimetic representation of things in the world, and as an autonomous, vibrant entity composed of its own material logic and language. From this logic, the potentials of representation give way to the immanent qualities of surface, colour, form and materiality. The complexities and limits of representational painting are further addressed through historical and contemporary artist references, including Paul Cézanne, Giorgio Morandi, Philip Guston and Amy Sillman. ii Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………….. …………….ii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………….iii List of Figures……………………………………………………………………. iv Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………. v Introduction……………………………………………………………………….. 1 Collection…………………………………………………………………………. 2 Still Life……………………………………………………………. …………….. 5 Painting Things…………………………………………………….. ……………. 12 Observational Painting…………………………………………………………… 19 Circling Forward…………………………………………………………………..27 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………. 33 Works Consulted.………………………………………………………………….36 iii List of Figures Figure 1: M.E. Sparks, Grid Collection, 2014…………………………………….. 2 Figure 2: M.E. Sparks, Silver Lining, 2015…………………………………………4 Figure 3: M.E. Sparks, Roadblock, 2015………………………………………….. 5 Figure 4: M.E. Sparks, Island, 2015……………………………………………….. 6 Figure 5: Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1962 Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Siegen, DE……………………………….. 9 Figure 6: M.E. Sparks, Resting Obstruction, 2015………………………………… 11 Figure 7: M.E. Sparks, We’d Like To Help, 2015………………………………….. 14 Figure 8: Philip Guston, Painter’s Table, 1973 National Gallery of Art, Washington DC……………………………………………16 Figure 9: Philip Guston, Painter’s Forms, 1972 Private Collection, Woodstock NY………………………………………………… 17 Figure 10: M.E. Sparks, Floor Life (Painters’ Forms), 2016……………………… 18 Figure 11: M.E. Sparks, Pink Kiss, 2015………………………………………….. 20 Figure 12: Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-04 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia PA……………………………………. 22 Figure 13: M.E. Sparks, Afterimage, 2016………………………………………… 25 Figure 14: M.E. Sparks, Vision Block (No.4), 2016……………………………….. 26 Figure 15: M.E. Sparks, Vision Block (No.1-3), 2016………………………………27 Figure 16: Amy Sillman, Still Life #3, 2014 Capitain Petzel, Berlin, DE. ……………………………………………………….. 28 iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Ben Reeves, for his tremendous support, enthusiasm and guidance throughout the program. I would also like to extend thanks to David MacWilliam for his dedication as my internal examiner; Liz Wylie for her generosity as my external examiner, Landon Mackenzie for her unwavering encouragement and energy; Elizabeth McIntosh for her dependable critiques; Dr. Randy Lee Cutler for her honest conversations; Dr. Chris Jones for his continuous support; and BC Arts Council for providing scholarship funding. I am forever grateful for the love and support of my family, my partner and, of course, my cohort. It was an honour and a privilege to be in such excellent company. v Painting functions mimetically in its ability to emulate the world around us and in its inherent self-referentiality; every gesture situated within and bound to art history. The potential for painting to advance beyond strategic historical gestures lies in its internal logic and material 1 presence. This immanent logic and language of painting can function beyond historical mining to continue developing new forms of making and questioning. Art critic David Geers questions how contemporary painting may serve “not as a shrine to the past, but as a platform for reforming the present and prefiguring the future”(37). While Geers calls for a rethinking and reinvention of painting to evade the revival of concluded histories, I question how to still acknowledge painting’s weighted history, avoid the lure of nostalgia , and generate new ways of experiencing 2 the medium through methods of observation, representation, obstruction and repetition. From the broad and evolving discourse on contemporary painting, my research has centred on still life painting, its history and its current potential. Still life provides a platform to address the following questions: 1) How can still life painting influence our understanding of objects and the meaning ascribed to them? 2) How does the process of observation influence the development of painting? 3) How can still life be used to further expand and understand the work of a painting? This final question informs an overarching investigation of my practice: how to paint? This refers to technical and formal concerns and also reflexively considers the medium The strategic and situative gesture is discussed by art critic Jan Verwoert in his seminal essay “Why Are Conceptual Artists 1 Painting Again? Because they Think It’s a Good Idea” (2005). He refers to the writing of art historian Yve-Alain Bois from Painting as Model (1990), in which Bois defines the strategic model in painting as a well-considered location of a work within a network of references. Verwoert proposes that this gesture functions as a self-justifying effort to legitimize the work and may be limiting on its own: “the artist would be limited to the declaration of his or her own position over and over again”. Verwoert proposes that painting’s ability to communicate lies in its immanent material qualities rather than its conceptual position as a strategic situative gesture. I consider the nostalgia for painting’s history to be one causal factor of “zombie-formalism”, a term presented by art critic Walter 2 Robinson in his 2014 article “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism”. Robinson argues that contemporary painting is bringing back to life discarded aesthetics and tropes of formalist abstraction. This argument intersects with Geers’ theory of neo-formalism presented in his essays “Neo-Modern” (2012) and “Post-Script to Neo-Modern”(2014). 1 specific, image-making practice of painting within the post-medium art world and image-3 saturated society. Although my research has come to revolve around the still life and the representation of objects, painting remains the crux of my thesis as a method of production and site of methodological inquiry. Collection Grid Collection (see fig. 1) forms a foundation for my current work and is re-used as objects within my still lifes. The grid paintings use varying shapes and sizes of discarded In A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (2000), Rosalind Krauss proposes that with the onset 3 of conceptual art a post-medium condition developed. This created an irreversible move away from media-immanent (medium- specific) practices. Fig. 1 - M.E. Sparks, Grid Collection (installation view) 2014, latex paint on plywood 2 plywood that I collected from the city, intrigued by their stained, rough surfaces. Each painting consists of thick lines stretching across the plywood in an all-over grid composition . There is an 4 optical push and pull between squares of unpainted wood and painted lines: one momentarily asserts itself as figure while the other becomes ground. Collecting urban detritus has become a foundational process in the beginning stages of my paintings. Similar to gathering plywood, I collect discarded objects from peripheral spaces within the city and reassemble them in the studio as still life arrangements. Over the past year I have focused on a small selection of found objects including found plywood, pallets, broken cinderblocks, bricks and pieces of concrete. 5 The concrete objects’ relationship to the ‘natural’ world intrigues me as they mimic organic rock forms yet retain evidence of manufactured, architectural structures. Each of these objects is a fragment, its origins often unknown. The partial objects are decontextualized, physically abstracted, and often appear as familiar yet undefinable painted forms (see fig. 2). My transition from the plywood grids to still life painting echoes American painter Philip Guston’s shift from abstraction to figuration: “Only when certain doubts cleared in 1968 and I began feeling more positive about drawings of the tangible world did I begin to paint again. Finally, only total immersion in painting ‘things’ settled the issue.” (in Yau “Phillip Guston’s Line”). The simplicity and ambiguity of the phrase “painting things” describes both my plywood paintings and the observational depiction of still life. “Painting things” is an effort to generate new ways of looking and to deepen my understanding of the objects under scrutiny: to The grid emerges in early 20th century modernism, seen in the suprematist work of Kazimir Malevich and the compositions of Piet 4 Mondrian. From there, the grid maintains a critical position in modern history, from the paintings of Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, and Mary Heilmann, to sculptures of Carl Andre, Sol Le Witt and Donald Judd. The grid’s persistence is noted by Krauss in her 1979 essay “Grids”: “Yet it is safe to say that no form within the whole of modern aesthetic production has sustained itself so relentlessly while at the same time being so impervious to change….As the experience of Mondrian amply demonstrates, development is precisely what the grid resists” (50). In his book What Do Pictures Want? (2005), WJT Mitchell defines the found object by what it is not : the sought object, the 5 aesthetic, desired, valued, symbolic, hated, or lost object” (116). The life of the found object continuously evolves once it is “discovered, revealed, reframed, and put on display, consequently becoming fetishes and […] foundational for a whole series of new findings and appropriation” (116). 3 understand them through the medium specificity, and perhaps limitations , of painting. The 6 specific material qualities of paint - the process of laying down colours side by side, or the composing of forms within a rectangular, flat support - all influence the formal relationships that emerge in the process of painting something from observation. The representation of objects is inherently mediated through these historically laden, material-specific limitations . While I gain 7 an intimate knowledge and understanding of the objects through painting them from observation, In Painting as Model (1990) Bois quotes Henri Matisse, who writes: “I have always believed that a large part of the beauty of a 6 picture arises from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium”(26). The medium-specific limitations of painting are presented by Clement Greenberg in the seminal 1960 essay “Modernist Painting” : 7 “…the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment -- were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly” (“Modernist Painting”). While Greenberg’s ideas of painting’s formal purity have been subverted and proven untenable, I remain intrigued by what may still constitute a medium-specificity of painting as it continues to retain a unique autonomy in contemporary practices. For example, this topic is taken up by contemporary critic Isabelle Graw, who describes a less restrictive medium specific quality of painting as a highly personalized production of signs that is inherently indexical, evoking a strong bond between product and maker (50). Fig. 2 - M.E. Sparks, Silver Lining, 2015, oil on canvas, 48” x 48” 4 this learning process inevitably extends into a new and evolving understanding of how to paint. I aim to propose a renewed interpretation of still life painting that simultaneously interrogates the banal and inanimate object, its overlooked agency and vitality, as well as the historically weighted yet ever-present and evocative material vitality of painting. Still Life The painting Roadblock (see fig. 3) depicts three centrally positioned stacked objects. The picture’s pictorial space is shallow and flattened, splitting open to reveal deeper space of washed colour and loose gestures. Dark shapes push into the frame and position themselves on the same Fig. 3 - M.E. Sparks, Roadblock, 2015, oil on canvas, 48” x 48” 5 plane as the objects. Undefined scale and flatness adds to the objects’ ambiguity as they hover between the familiar and abstract, yet remain in what appears to be observed, receding perspective. I consider the foreground centrality of the objects, as well as the table-like support they rest on, to situate this work within a system of still life painting. Similar to working through the historical and formal limitations of a medium, I am intrigued by these found objects for the challenge of representing them. Both the banal plywood pieces and the stolid, concrete forms are used to obstruct my habitual methods of painting, and in turn generate a deeper understanding and awareness of working from observation. In the painting Island (see fig. 4) a plywood grid is positioned with the collection of undefined things. It acts as both a doorway into Fig. 4- M.E. Sparks, Island, 2015, oil on canvas, 60” x 48” 6 abstract space as well a tangible, although unfamiliar, object resting precariously on top of its companions. The table edge, which creates a horizontal break in the vertically dominant composition, again positions the objects within a still life structure. In an analysis of western still life painting, art historian Norman Bryson briefly explores the “life of the table” as a “passive and dependent”(13) receptor to the cultural and historical objects it presents. The table in Island reclaims a kind of agency; its narrow legs and tilting edge appear ready to upend the pyramid of objects. The still life, throughout history, implies a human subject outside of the frame (the collector, arranger or painter of the objects), however in Island there is a suggested liveliness to the relationships among the objects, bringing human involvement into question. In Bryson’s book Looking At The Overlooked (1990) still life painting is defined as a form of rhopography: “the depiction of those things which lack importance, the unassuming material base of life that ‘importance’ constantly overlooks”(61). While the subject matter of my paintings corresponds to this definition, the identity and function of the objects, as in Roadblock and Island, remain ambiguous, which shifts focus to surface, colour, edges and spatial relationships between forms. I am interested in how the flattened, unfamiliar objects also function as undefined, blank slates for viewers’ projections. Although each object asserts a distinct identity, they are simultaneously neutral and receptive. I recognize this as a contradiction between the specificity of each object and their undefinable form. It is also a contradiction of subject matter versus formalism, or perhaps a contradiction between meaning and lack thereof. I acknowledge these contradictions in an attempt to work between them and resist prescribed binaries, predominantly representation and abstraction. By working within a liminal space, the still life objects function formally while also generating narrative through dynamic, and often playful, inter-relationships. 7 Art historian Hanneke Grootenboer investigates the historical exclusion of still life from dominant art and philosophy discourse, describing how the genre has “confronted scholars with the simple yet disturbing question of what still lifes are ‘about’ ”(22). Bryson also addresses this exclusion in his historical account of the still life , while Grootenboer goes on to analyze what 8 provoked this perceived lack of meaning or narrative. Focusing on 17th century Dutch Still Life, Grootenboer describes how the use of trivial objects and the absence of human figures positioned still life as a low-ranking art form for its lack of narrative (compared to history or landscape painting, for example). It is the historical silencing of still life, provoked by its superficial silence and stillness, that intrigues me; its resistance to language and to being ‘about’ something readily describable. Grootenboer recounts 18th century philosopher Denis Diderot’s failed attempt to describe a Chardin still life: “Diderot’s failing words betray that the complexity of still lifes resides precisely in the difficulty of saying something about them to begin with. I believe that what still life communicates is not a story, but a theory that is a form of thinking in visual terms” (25). The failure of language when faced with the “silence” of still life is significant in my decision to engage with this genre because I understand it to be one of painting’s fundamental qualities - communication through the visual and material, independent of language. At the 9 same time, I question if it is possible for still life to remain silent. Still life painting resists narrative language and is used throughout history to serve the formalities of Bryson begins his historical discussion of still life with the Roman still life category ‘xenia’(17), and next to Dutch 17th century still 8 lifes, and to modernist painting, spanning centuries through which still life remained an autonomous genre that was considered absent of narrative and therefore a lower genre of painting. He writes: “it pitches itself at a level of material existence where nothing exceptional occurs: there is a wholescale eviction of the Event”(61). I consider this intrinsic silence of still life is a determining factor in its persistence throughout painting history and particularly 9 abstraction. From the work of Paul Cezanne, Georges Braques, Henri Matisse, to Giorgio Morandi, the still life was used as a vehicle to interrogate ideas beyond the objects presented - to arrange elements of composition, colour, painted marks, and move painting away from an illustrative function. I consider this function of still life echoed in contemporary painting, as seen in Amy Sillman’s suggestive abstractions, Etienne Zack’s cluttered studio scenes, or Katherine Bernhardt’s all-over compositions of trivial, consumer objects. 8 painting, yet simultaneously, the objects tell their own story, have cultural and socio-political connotations, and generate agency and new meaning as assembled, interacting painted forms. The paintings of Italian 20th century painter Giorgio Morandi evoke contradictory qualities of still life. His paintings depict domestic items centrally arranged on a tabletop from which figure and ground often merge as edges fall apart and areas of brushwork blend together (see fig. 5). The objects are distilled of symbolism and narrative as Morandi searches instead for ideal compositions of form, colour and value, often inventing shadows and altering colours to achieve this (Fergonzi 16). Through repetition and simplification, the objects become Morandi’s visual lexicon used as a “point of departure to explore abstraction” (Abramowicz 13). While Morandi’s paintings are seemingly void of narrative, it is their silent exterior that provokes 9 Fig. 5 - Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1962, oil on canvas, 12” x 14”, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen. Used with permission from © 2016 Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen. Removed Due To Copyright Restrictions deeper meaning. Belgian painter Luc Tuymans addresses the quiet nature of Morandi’s work as an act of political escapism: “a self-recusal from the political crisis enveloping his country” (Painting the Unseen). Morandi’s still lifes generate narrative through their 10 purposeful silence, telling of his absorbed, isolated, “escapist” practice of repeatedly painting the same objects. The work is also, undeniably, about paint itself: a devoted investigation into the work of a painting through formal explorations. In relation to Paul Cézanne, who’s paintings influenced Morandi, the historian and philosopher Gottfried Boehm writes: “This double nature of the picture - to consist of elements and to show a subject - can also be observed in Morandi’s work. Its colouristic structure oscillates between formal and figurative; both ways of seeing becoming interwoven” (14). Morandi’s recurring composition of central objects on a shallow foreground edge informs my painting Resting Obstruction (see fig. 6), which depicts two stacked objects supported by a base of planks. While edges coalesce and fall apart and the scale and density of forms is ambiguous, like Morandi’s still lifes, the objects remain grounded within perspectival space while oscillating between what is observed, imagined, familiar and unfamiliar. Although Morandi’s objects appear silent, they generate dynamic, shifting relationships. The blocks in Resting Obstruction, like heavy bodies, also form a reciprocal, dependent relationship to one another. In an attempt to represent both the stillness and the inherent vibrancy of these objects, I have chosen to paint them face-on with little perspective, obscuring their “other” sides from view. I paint their edges and surfaces to imply both specificity of form and the possibility for mergence or falling apart, implying a kind of latent vitality and potentiality within the objects. Tuymans, who’s work often deals with overt political subject matter, intentionally adopts Morandi’s escapist, seemingly apolitical 10 gesture in his painting Still Life (2002) , presented for Documenta 11 following the 9/11 attacks (Painting the Unseen). The large- scale painting depicts a humble arrangement of banal objects, superficially void of narrative and political commentary yet heavily charged through its intentional silence. 10 These found, trivial objects I work with are, on the surface, blank and neutral, but not expressionless. In Resting Obstruction the painted objects present flat, expansive faces that give little away to painter or viewer. They function simultaneously as open, blank slates as well as opaquely stolid, even confrontational, forms. I feel provoked to represent the objects at an expanded scale in order to obstruct the kind of comfort or straight-ahead stability I find in the process of observational painting. Enlarging the objects broadens the reading of the work beyond still life painting, as the expanded forms evoke a relationship in size to the viewer’s body and Fig. 6 - M.E. Sparks, Resting Obstruction, 2015, oil on canvas, 84” x 72” 11 become new things entirely, from doorways, landscapes to monoliths and monuments. This decision to continue using found concrete objects as central characters in my paintings correlates with research surrounding object-hood, specifically the historical reappearance of the stone as an essential nonliving thing . The stone has come to represent the 11 passivity perceived in objects, referred to as fundamentally inanimate throughout western philosophy. It is perhaps an ideal thing to propose a reconsideration of object agency, at once passive, silent and overlooked as well as receptive to metaphor and poetics: solid yet impressionable. The concrete forms I work with are conglomerates of broken stone and sand, which I have come to consider as physical and metaphorical assemblages of energies held within cold, stolid exteriors. Painting Things Still life painting has led me to contemporary theories of materialism, including political scientist Jane Bennett’s theory of vibrant matter and critical theorist Bill Brown’s thing theory. In the book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things (2010) Bennett recognizes the politicized, autonomous power of objects by identifying them as active agents in the world. She proposes that all things are in fact “vivid entities”, citing her experience of looking at pieces of garbage on the road: “at one moment disclosing themselves as dead stuff and at the next as live presence: junk, then claimant; inert matter, then live wire” (5). The tableau of objects were expressive actants, calling out, positioning the viewer as a thing among things, and subverting the distinction of subject (living) and object (non-living). Bennett defines these dynamic For example, 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza writes of free will and desire, using the inanimate stone to further 11 exemplify his idea that humans, like stones, do not exercise free will: “Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish….” (391). 12 groupings as assemblages: “[the material’s] efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces” (21). Assemblages are pulsing, always changing, as every thing within them emits a distinct and shifting vital force (24). The energy and agency of vibrant material exists as thing-power, defined as an autonomous, inexplicable vitality in all non-living things (18). In correlation to the inexplicable thing-power of vibrant objects, I draw connections to Brown’s essay “Thing Theory” from 2001, stemming from Heidegger’s distinction between things and objects . Brown 12 posits that when the normal function of an object is altered, it reasserts itself as an unnamable thing and redefines dominant subject-object hierarchies: “The story of objects asserting 13 themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relationship to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation”(4). Brown goes on to describe how a thing is both specific and general, particular to a singular object yet also used to describe any and all objects or enigmas. The term “thing” is therefore used when all other words fall short. For this reason, I consider the quality of a thing, as defined by Brown, inherently connected to both the block forms in Resting Obstruction, as well as to the immanent qualities of painting. The material language and logic of painting lie outside the realm of naming, in the same way a thing is confounding and elusive to a point where it cannot be named, and as Brown states, “lies beyond the grid of intelligibility” (6). “…all his (Heidegger’s) writing aims to make as sharp a distinction as possible between, on the one hand, objects, Gegenstand, 12 and, on the other, the celebrated Thing. The handmade jug can be a thing, while the industrially made can of Coke remains an object. While the latter is abandoned to the empty mastery of science and technology, only the former, cradled in the respectful idiom of art, craftsmanship, and poetry, could deploy and gather its rich set of connections.” (Latour 233) Object-hood, materialism and subject-object dichotomies are addressed in art, philosophy and the sciences throughout history, 13 from Kant, to Heidegger, Adorno, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and Jane Bennett, all of whom present intersecting yet distinct accounts of how we think about objects. I am intrigued by Adorno’s collapsing of the subject and object and how this idea has evolved over time. The contemporary school of thought of Object Oriented Ontology considers the hierarchy between living and non-living, and claims that objects exist independently from human perception and cognition, contrary to Kant’s theory that objects exist relative to and dependent on human cognition. These intersecting philosophies continue to inform my research, yet are so complex and distinct from one another that, for this thesis work, I have chosen to comment only on Bennett’s and Brown’s relatable descriptions of things and objects. 13 Intrigued by the ideas surrounding thing theory and vibrant matter, I consider the painting We’d Like To Help (see fig. 7) to express both the theoretical and poetic notion of a thing’s agency. A foreground arrangement of painted block-like objects sits on top of a white, receding surface. The space around them is empty and shallow, half obscured from view by a leaning blue rectangle. Within its washy blue surface a faded speech bubble emerges, intended to echo the title of the painting, or perhaps form a response. The forms interact like awkward bodies to produce a theatrical yet unheard exchange. Relating to Brown’s thing theory, writer and art historian W.J.T. Mitchell writes: “objects are the way things appear to a subject— Fig. 7 - M.E. Sparks, We’d Like To Help, 2015, oil on canvas, 48” x 48” 14 that is, with a name, an identity, a gestalt or stereotypical template. . . Things, on the other hand, are simultaneously nebulous and obdurate, sensuously concrete and vague . . . It signals the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can looks back…” (156). The painted forms in We’d Like To Help bring into question this distinction between object and thing, asserting themselves as representations of objects while remaining stubbornly undefinable. I intend for the forms to return the viewer’s gaze and, as Bennett describes, emit an inaudible yet persistent call. They remain obdurately, superficially still, however, like in Roadblock, produce quiet dialogue as an assemblage of curiously animated, vibrant, painted things. The work of Philip Guston strongly influences my thinking around the depiction of objects, inanimate animation , and formal painterly exploration. Guston’s painted things are 14 intrusions of the everyday yet resist a settled, comfortable representation, informing my own attempts to represent objects as simultaneously familiar and undefinable, inanimate and lively. In Guston’s Painter’s Table (1973) (see fig. 8 ) still life objects become actors within a lively assemblage. Eyes, limbs and mouths protruding from non-living things reappear throughout Guston's work and defy the expected passivity and stability of the familiar objects he depicts. As well as revealing an intrinsic liveliness, which I view in relation to Bennett’s vibrant materialism, Guston’s objects also function to activate the construction of painting. Historian and critic Dore Ashton writes: “If he arrays his objects, as on Painter's Table, one to another, side by side, in the rhythms peculiar to him (the familiar bunching together of nearly similar forms and the strange shifts in scale), there is a formal satisfaction that overrides the still-life motif and almost reverts to pure painting”(175). Ashton’s description corresponds with my own investigation of how still Sigmund Freud analyzed the ways in which we animate objects during childhood and our early confusion between living and 14 inanimate things. WJT Mitchell claims that the subjectivized, animated object is an incurable symptom of the human condition, suggesting that we hold a “premodern” attitude towards objects (Mitchell 30). Topics of anthropomorphism, fetishism, totemism and animism continue to inform my current research. 15 life painting functions beyond the depiction of objects: how colour, line and surface of each distinct form generate a comprehensible whole from which representation gives way to materiality and abstraction. As well as revealing an intrinsic thing-power of common objects, Guston, like Morandi, repeatedly uses the same alphabet of ready-made forms to explore the material language and logic of painting. Guston’s Painter’s Forms from 1972 (see fig 9) is another foundational work that has 15 influenced my considerations around visual lexicons (the forms painter’s use), as well as the role language plays in representational painting. The objects in Painter’s Forms are expelled from a Painter’s Forms II from 1979 is perhaps the more regarded work sharing the same title. The painting depicts a similar image of a 15 mouth, but in this newer form it appears to cannibalize a grouping of the the iconic limb-like forms that reappear throughout Guston’s work. (As Painter’s Forms from 1972 is a less recognized work, I was unable to find a digital reproduction online. The image included is a photograph from the 2014 book Go Figure! New Perspective on Guston). 16 Fig. 8 - Philip Guston, Painter’s Table, 1973, oil on canvas, 77.25” x 90”, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Removed due to copyright restrictions. Removed Due To Copyright Restrictions human mouth as solidly defined representations, inherently tied to the names of the familiar objects they symbolize. Art historian Ara H. Merjian describes how Painter’s Forms: …announces - quite literally - the correlation between figuration and the contour of linguistic sense. From the mouth of a disembodied head issues a group of singular things: a boot, a bottle, a shoe sole, a fragment of wood. The origin of these objects - the image insinuates - is not simply the pigment that forms their more immediate vehicle but the words by which we make sense of them. These things only assume substance to the extent that they have been shaped by, made real by, the more invisible carapace of language - and only then by the brush (65). Merjian implies that the viewer reads the objects as signifiers, rendered through painterly marks yet symbolically married to their namable, signified identity. I consider the title Painter’s Forms to suggest Guston’s internalization and digestion of these objects, which reappear throughout his Fig. 9 - Philip Guston, Painter’s Forms, 1972, oil on panel, 40” x 60”. Private Collection, Woodstock NY. From Dore Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston (1990). Used with open access permission from © 2016 University of California Press. 17 paintings and constitute his primary alphabet of forms. While I am interested in the viewer’s tendency and need to ascribe language to the visual representation of a thing, I am intrigued by the moment when words fail, and yet the painting continues to function as a depiction of things, slipping into the space between representation and abstraction. In my painting Floor Life (Painters’ Forms) (see fig. 10) an array of shapes extends across the composition, simultaneously resting on and floating above a receding floor space. The specific shapes are culled and extracted from historic works as well as from objects in Fig. 10 - M.E. Sparks, Floor Life (Painters’ Forms), 2016, oil on canvas, 84” x 72” 18 my studio, next cut into ply-wood forms and arranged on the studio floor as a kind of compressed still life. The painted shapes, although flattened, assert their volume and tangibility as objects through raised edges, shadows and perspective. Although the shapes originate from representational sources, their specific identities remain ambiguous. Similar to the block forms, they evade a singular name or definition, instead summoning an array of references to other things in the world. Although the shapes are decontextualized from their origins and inherently undefinable, I intend for them to evoke the viewer’s desire to name them. Contrary to this, Guston’s painted forms are readily nameable as he presents his objects as solidly as possible, to the point where they move away from the particular thing and instead function as illustrative motifs for the objects they represent. However, I still consider Floor Life (Painters’ Forms) to coincide with Guston’s principle intention “to underscore the strangeness, finally, even of everyday things” (Ashton 173). In addition to emphasizing strangeness of things, his work also speaks to the strangeness of representation itself; its complex dependence on language and yet, in the end, the inability for words to fully describe and represent the inherent qualities of the painting . 16 Observational Painting French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes that the philosopher and the painter share the same problem: not only representing what one sees, but “expressing what exists” (Johnson 8). I consider observational painting able to encompass the complexities of perception and representation, as well as reveal the thing-quality and agency of objects described In A Critical Study of Philip Guston Ashton writes: “In the complex, often labyrinthine processes of Guston's thought, he has 16 never doubted the enduring significance of created form. Throughout his oeuvre, with all its returns to the very beginning, there is a constant and readable striving to discover the immanent structures of painting in itself, insofar as its history reveals it” (178). 19 by Brown and Bennett. The simple act of looking generates an awareness and reconsideration of inanimate objects. Looking at something for a length of time seems to dislocate it from its surroundings, abstract and revitalize it, as if the concentrated gaze somehow evokes a change within the object and in turn alters the perception of the looker. Extending beyond this process of observation, the painting itself represents the alternative view and awareness that arises through looking. The viewer who observes the painting is then woven into this reciprocal action of looking at things. Recalling the fluid mergence of humans and things that both Brown and Bennett describe when looking at objects, I believe painting from observation exposes the Fig. 11- M.E. Sparks, Pink Kiss, 2015, oil on canvas, 84” x 72” 20 transformative exchange between object and observer. In The Object Stares Back: On The Nature Of Seeing (1996), art historian and critic James Elkins describes looking as a transformative, corrosive interaction between observer and observed (37). Through a fusion of subject and object, Elkins identifies a mutual transformation that occurs while claiming we never look at a singular object but instead look “among the objects”(39) as our perception is continuously evolving in relation to our subjective experiences and memory recall. By defining the object, it in turn defines the observer. Both Merleau-Ponty 17 and Elkins consider looking a transformational and hierarchical break-down of subject and object, similar to Bennett's perception of objects as vibrant, autonomous entities, in turn eliciting an awareness of her own mutual thingness. My methods of painting from observation correlate to Elkins’ experience of looking, of which he writes: “If I observe attentively enough, I find that my observations are tangled with the object, and the object is part of the world and therefore part of me, that looking is something I do but also something that happens to me [...]” (35). The central objects in Pink Kiss (see fig. 11) are painted from observation, again placed on top of wood planks, and appear as specific yet undefinable things. The objects are continually redefined by their surroundings and by my own shifting perception of them. A reciprocal and evolving relationship is formed between the objects, the space of the studio, the physical painting and me, weaving a web of vision between all of us. I attempt to represent these interacting elements through the co-existence of multiple, disparate spaces within the pictorial space of the painting. Areas of observed space, flattened space and imagined space merge and coalesce. From bottom to top, the painting shifts from representational perspective to abstract planes of colour In his book Art And Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, art historian Ernst Gombrich defines this way of 17 looking at art in particular, naming it as the "beholder's share”. The art work is determined equally by each viewer’s experience, projections, memories, and desires. The artist is the first viewer (beholder) of the work, as it is defined by their individual perceptions. The work then remains incomplete without the viewer’s subjective interpretation and projection. This constitutes a collaborative creation of the artwork, as the viewer is of equal importance to its formation and function. 21 and brushwork. Merleau-Ponty writes: “The world is experienced[…]as ‘inexhaustible’- stretching beyond my immediate visual field…” (29). I intend for this “stretching beyond” to occur through a transition from observed to beyond-representational space of Pink Kiss. As I continually adjust my definition of abstraction, “stretching beyond” accurately describes my current approach to the abstract, incomprehensible space and experience of observational painting. In his late 19th century still life and landscape paintings Paul Cézanne challenges established western modes of seeing, such as linear perspective and self-other dualisms, in an 22 Fig. 12 - Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-04, oil on canvas,  28.7” x 36”, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Used with open access permission from © 2016 Philadelphia Museum of Art. attempt to merge objects, space, colour and perception into “lived perspective”. In the 1945 essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” Merleau-Ponty recounts Cézanne’s painting of lived perspective: “that which we actually perceive, and is not a geometric or photographic one” (64). Cézanne defines this as a self-world fusion as opposed to an “imitation of the world as object by painter as subject, nor a subjective projection of the world by the artist’s imagination” (13). I understand the idea of lived perspective and self-world fusion to be realized through Cézanne’s iterative series of paintings depicting Mont Sainte-Victoire (see fig. 12), which he produced a multitude of times in oils and watercolours from the late 1800’s to the end of his career in 1906. His repetitive process of painting the motif of the mountain reveals an incredibly diverse and shifting of perception of light and colour. Each painting depicts the same subject matter yet represents a unique perceptual experience of the landscape. I believe Cézanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire represent our ever-changing relationship to the world around us, the unstable nature of perception and the ability for painting to embody this. In my own practice the iterative process of painting something is like saying a word too many times. It becomes distanced from its meaning and origins, unfamiliar, strange and uncomfortable in the mouth - a new, unnamable thing entirely. The block forms that reappear throughout my recent paintings have, in a way, become that strange, abstracted word. Through methods of repetition I question how we may look at and experience objects in a new way as they shift from object to thing, from concrete to abstract, from known to unknown, and from inanimate to strangely lively and vibrant. Just as Cézanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire came to represent much more than a depiction of the landscape, I believe that the blocks have become completely new things through the iterative practice of painting them. This repetition elicits both a loss of definition (of their identity and function) as well as a generation of 23 something new as they become increasingly metaphorical, totemic, bodily, humorous and poetic. In every iteration the blocks also gain an alternative sense of familiarity as they come to be recognizable elements of my own visual repertoire. I am intrigued by this balance of familiar and unfamiliar, for the painted forms still remain undefinable as the potentials of representation are obstructed. This failure of representational stability occurs as both the material qualities of painting and the perceptual distance between myself and object interrupt a direct translation from object to depiction. As a result of observing and painting the same things again and again, I now realize a fundamental element of the observational painting process is the lasting effects of looking. While the term “afterimage” refers to a physiological optical phenomenon, the concept of afterimage has become fundamental to my understanding of observational painting. Over the course of my thesis work I began to paint the same two blocks almost exclusively. I have become less dependent on the actual objects and can now work from memory, as the objects’ textures, blemishes, profiles, edges, temperature, and weight all seem to be imprinted in my mind. My recall of these specific objects is also inherently shaped by the many paintings I have made of them. As Elkins claims that we can never look at one object, but instead look among objects, the two physical blocks have come to exist as all of their previous representations; they are each an assemblage of the many versions of themselves - singular things but also many things at once. In this practice of painting things, observation has become a expanded component of my working methodology. It extends beyond a singular experience of looking and now encompasses working with the imperfections of memory, with the aftereffects of iteration, and with an embodied awareness of perception as an unfixed, residual and ever-changing thing. Afterimage (see fig.13) developed through this kind of memory retrieval, as I painted the blocks from brief observation 24 and next attempted to render their surfaces and profiles from memory. The darkness of the painting developed from what I consider to be the negative, shadowed quality of an afterimage. A bright light shines from behind the objects as if to signify that what is intelligible and illuminated is obstructed from view, casting the unyielding forms in the darkness of their own shadow. Just as Mitchell describes how the “sardine can looks back”, Elkins similarly describes looking as a tangled, reciprocal exchange with objects as they, too, return his gaze. However, of 25 Fig. 13 - M.E. Sparks, Afterimage, 2016, oil on canvas,  66” x 54” greater interest to me is the moment when the painting looks back to assert its elusive thing- power. I recognize the dual function of painting as both a window into pictorial space and an opaque, material thing. This summons Brown’s explanation of how we see through an object much like a window to its culturally constructed meaning, whereas looking at a thing is like looking at a window, seeing its dirt, suddenly confronted with its incomprehensible thingness (4). Forming connections between Brown and Mitchell’s accounts of things and objects, and 18 This leads me again to Mitchell’s What Do Pictures Want?, in which he describes the image (rather than the object it depicts) as 18 an “animated, living thing, and an object itself with intentions and desires and agency. […] They present not just a surface but a face that faces the beholder” (30). 26 Fig. 14 - M.E. Sparks, Vision Block (No.4), 2016, oil on canvas, 20” x 20” reframing these through Bennett’s theory of vital materialism, I understand painting to be a comprehensible object/window into pictorial space, as well as an autonomous and vibrant thing that gazes outwards to its viewers and to the objects it depicts. The recent, on-going series of paintings titled VisionBlock (see fig. 14, 15) have evolved from this concept. Painted only from my memory of the two blocks, the forms appear distilled yet specific, and their density somewhat undecided. Oval shapes appear as halos around the blocks, forming a binocular-shaped motif that passes behind and on top of the forms. I intend for these paintings to move beyond an observed depiction of objects and instead approach the questions of where an object ends, the subject begins, and how these dualisms may mingle within the space of painting. I consider this work to exist within the liminal gap between abstraction and representation, as the painted oval gestures function to reveal the falsity of pictorial depiction and reassert the material surface and thingness of the paintings themselves. Fig. 15 - M.E. Sparks, Vision Block (No.1-3), 2016, oil on canvas, each 20” x 20” 27 Circling Forward To tie together intersecting theories of still life, object-hood, and observational painting, I look to New York-based artist Amy Sillman who’s work strongly informs my interest in both illusionistic and material potentials of painting. Although Sillman’s paintings retain referential stability as she borrows from things in the world, she acknowledges the “limits of representation - how our experiences of the morass of things juxtaposed in the world do not easily translate into a single picture surface…” (Ellegood et al. 55). In 2014 Sillman painted Still Life #1, 2, 3 (see 28 Fig. 16 - Amy Sillman, Still Life #3, 2014, oil on canvas, 75” x 66”, Capitain Petzel, Berlin. Used with permission from © 2016 Capitain Petzel. Removed due to copyright restrictions. Removed due to copyright restrictions fig. 16), all of which contain a central object, shallow pictorial depth and often a table-like support. Through an elaborate play with surface, colour and layered shapes, the paintings develop an autonomous material logic that is informed by, yet distinctly separate from, the objects which the artist refers to. The forms instead speak through their painted thingness - their scraped and pushed liquid surfaces - rather than as depictions of existing objects. Sillman has carved out her own alphabet of painted forms and colour (human limbs, Matisse-esque bottles, distinct lemon yellows and mauve-greys) and reconfigures this vocabulary in endless variations, much like Morandi and Guston. My considerations of paint as a vibrant material stem from Sillman’s use of colour and how, when describing painting, she uses “paint” and “colour” synonymously. In her paintings Sillman’s colours (which she addresses as a consumed, luxury material composed of minerals, insect secretions and oils ) reveal themselves as energized 19 substances. Although her paintings are often considered abstractions that playfully suggest figurative elements, the colours themselves produce their own representational narrative. About Sillman’s colour, New York artist Paige Bradley writes: With a practice that grinds to dust a binary of figuration versus abstraction, the purity of abstract painting is corrupted in her work, where forms are blocks of colour floating in gentle encounters or sometimes clamouring for the eye’s attention before spluttering out into a hand, a foot, or a plumbing spigot. Her shapes and colours are gaily capricious; when they stumble and smear, they laugh it off and say ‘I meant to do that’. (“The Labour of Painting”) Throughout my thesis research, it is this material language of painting, as well as the notion of a visual lexicon specific to every painter, that has taken root in my own practice. The concrete blocks have become a generative, repeating motif. Initially used as confrontational obstructions to interrupt my habitual methods, they have evolved into unexpectedly rich, fecund See Amy Sillman’s lecture “Colour as Material”, November 2014. 19 29 forms that simultaneously obstruct and provoke the construction of each painting. They push to the surface of the canvas and sink back into pictorial depth. The blocks are inherently contradictory, for they can be perceived as both shapeless and neutral yet uniquely specific, while their empty, flat surfaces also contain infinite complexity. They are stolid, silent and confrontational, yet have become increasingly vibrant and suggestive things. Working with these found forms was intended as a method to generate alternative ways of painting. I now realize how they have also generated an expanded understanding and perception of inanimate objects, the slippery, reciprocal nature of looking, the emergent space between prescribed binaries, and the immanent material qualities of painting. The blocks are still here, and will reappear perhaps indefinitely, having laid a foundation for my visual vocabulary of painter’s forms. Although they are contained within limited, concrete exteriors, their possibilities never seem to be exhausted, at least not yet. I have come to consider the blocks as metaphorically tied to the processes of painting. They are inanimate, yet full of expression, performing as blank slates for the viewer’s projections as well as autonomous characters in their own narrative. They transform through the act of looking. Looking at them, I believe, is like looking at painting; at one moment inanimate, and next generating an immense, inexplicable life force. I understand that using these objects as obstructions reflects the same urge I have to continue painting: for the specific limitations, obstructions and challenges of the medium, and for what emerges from these, which I believe is a limitless potential. As I continue to circle around my initial query - to better understand the work of a painting - my circles seem to grow wider as I gain a greater viewpoint yet move further and further away. I have formulated my own convictions surrounding the definition of abstraction, how abstract space arises through representational modes of observation, and how the collapsing 30 of dualisms is an intrinsic function of painting. Painting is never one or the other; it is a fluid and undefinable enigma. I realize that searching for the answer to my question “how to paint?” is like following a mirage; the answer always hovering within reach, always moving away, and when it’s finally found, it’s gone again. The work of a painting is therefore, perhaps, beyond words. I understand painting to have an agency of its own, or as art historian and theorist Isabelle Graw writes, to function as a thinking subject or a quasi-person, able to “tell the painter what to do” (56). With this understanding, I conclude that the work of a painting will inevitably speak for itself. Painting, beyond the vitality and thing-power of its material elements, is also an historical thing, or can perhaps be considered a temporal object in itself that carries with it the weight of history. I continually pull from painting’s dense web of traditions, piecing together historical vocabularies of abstraction, depiction, flatness, pictorial illusion, and still life with the present, tangible objects I observe. Research surrounding art history and current discourse on painting’s function, economy and autonomy deeply inform and contextualize my practice. Perhaps more importantly is how my practice, through material-driven explorations, determines and informs the research. This generative loop creates a reciprocal relationship between my intuitive and playful relationship to painting and its weighted discourse. By re-evaluating the historical denigration of still life painting, it is evident that the still life has never been silent, and by no means still. It is vibrational, conversational and evolving as we continue to expand our awareness of the agency of things and of painting. While approaching the contradictory slippages between materiality and illusion, object and thing, as well as silence and vitality, it is the immanent material qualities of painting that continue to push me forward (while I continue to push and pull it around), as paint itself remains the incomprehensible thing I strive to get to grips 31 with. Through the iterative and evolving methods of collecting, looking and painting, I hope to continue broadening my understanding of how we observe, represent and situate ourselves among things. 32 Works Cited Ashton, Dore. A Critical Study of Philip Guston. New York: Viking, 1976. UC Press E-Books Collection. University of California Press. Web. 1 Oct. 2015. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter : A Political Ecology Of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 4 Dec. 2015. Berry, Ian, Anne Ellegood, and Amy Sillman. Amy Sillman: Third Person Singular. Saratoga Springs, NY: Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, 2008. Web. 1 Jan. 2015. Boehm, Gottfried. “Giorgio Morandi’s Artistic Concept.” Giorgio Morandi: Paintings, Watercolours, Drawigns, Etchings. Ed. Ernst-Gerhard Guse and Franz A. Morat. Munich: Prestel, 1999. 9-20. Print. Bois, Yve-Alain. “Matisse and ‘Arche-drawing’.” Painting As Model. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1990. Print. Bradley, Paige K. "Amy Sillman: The Labour Of Painting." The White Review. The White Review, Mar. 2015. Web. 1 Mar. 2016. Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990. Print. Cézanne, Paul. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 1902-04. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Elkins, James. "Just Looking." The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. San Diego, New York, London, A Harvest Book Harcourt Inc., 1997. 17-45. Print. Elkins, James. “How To Count in Oil and Stone” What Painting Is: How to Think About Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print. 33 Fergonzi, Flavio, and Elisabetta Barisoni. Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life. Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, 2009. Print. Geers, David. "Postscript to Neo-Modern." David Geers. Ed. Peter Rostovsky, 10 Oct. 2014. Web. 01 Oct. 2014. Greenberg, Clement. Modernist Painting. Washington, D.C.: Voice of America, 1959. Print. Graw, Isabelle, Daniel Birnbaum, Nikolaus Hirsch, and Peter Geimer. Thinking through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas. Berlin: Sternberg, 2012. Print. Grootenboer, Hanneke. The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth- century Dutch Still-life Painting. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2005. Print. Guston, Philip. Painter’s Forms. 1972. Private Collection, NY. A Critical Study of Philip Guston. By Dore Ashton. New York: Viking, 1976. UC Press E-Books Collection. University of California Press. 174. Web. 1 Oct. 2015. Guston, Philip. Painter’s Table. 1973. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Krauss, Rosalind. "Grids." October 9 (1979): 50-64. MIT Press. Web. 01 Feb. 2015. Latour, Bruno. "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern." Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-48. Web. 01 April 2016. Merjian, Ara H. "Guston's Italian Badness." Go Figure!: New Perspectives on Guston. By Peter Benson Miller and Robert Storr. New York: NYREV, 2014. Print. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Galen A. Johnson, and Michael B. Smith. “Cezanne’s Doubt.” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Print. 34 Morandi, Giorgio. Still Life. 1962. Oil on canvas. Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Siegen, Germany. Sillman, Amy. Still Life #3. 2014. Oil on canvas. Capitain Petzel, Berlin, Germany. Spinoza, Benedictus De. Chief Works Of Benedict De Spinoza, Vol. 2: De Intellectus Emendatione, Ethica, Select Letters. London: Bell, 1887. Web. 01 Jan. 2016. Verwoert, Jan. “Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again? Because They Think It’s A Good Idea.” Afterall 12 (2005): n. pag. Web. 10 Sept. 2014. Yau, John. "Philip Guston's Line." Hyperallergic RSS. Hyperallergic Media, Inc., 24 Mar. 2013. Web. 30 Mar. 2015. 35 Works Consulted Elsner, John. "“Jean Baudrillard: The Systems of Collecting."" The Cultures of Collecting. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1994. Print. Geers, David. "Neo-Modern." October 139. 2012. 9-14. Web. Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print. Graw, Isabelle, Daniel Birnbaum, Nikolaus Hirsch, and Peter Geimer. Thinking through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas. Berlin: Sternberg, 2012. Print. Kalina, Richard. "The Four Corners of Painting." The Brooklyn Rail. (2012) Web. 01 Feb. 2015. Lash, Scott. “Objects that Judge: Latour’s Parliament of Things.” Another Modernity, A Different Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. Print. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. Print. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Galen A. Johnson, and Michael B. Smith. "Eye and Mind." The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Print. Morton, Timothy. "Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology." Qui Parle 19.2 (2011): 163-90. Web. 5 Dec. 2015. Rubinstein, Raphael. “Provisional Painting.” Art in America. n.p. 04 May 2009. Web. 10 Sept. 2014. Rubinstein, Raphael. “Provisional Painting Part 2: To Rest Lightly On Earth.” Art in America. n.p. 01 Feb 2012. Web. 10 Sept. 2014. 36 Sillman, Amy. “Stages of Laughter 2.” Art in America. 01 June 2015. Web. Sillman, Amy. “Amy Sillman: Colour as Material." Seminars With Artists. Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. 12 Nov. 2014. Youtube. Web. 1 Feb. 2016. "Thomas Scheibitz - Studio Imaginaire." Thomas Scheibitz - Exhibitions - Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. 2014. Web. 4 Dec. 2015. Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007. Print. Van Den Boogerd, Dominic. Mary Heilmann: Good Vibrations. Ed. Paula van den Bosch and Angelika Nollert. Köln: Walther König, 2012. Print. Verwoert, Jan. “Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again.” 36th Association of Art Historians Society Conference. The University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland. 16 Apr 2010. Lecture. 37 work_nezhe4c6jjf55fitl5myezzkty ---- Gertrude Stein, Pétain, and the Politics of Translation Gertrude Stein, Pétain, and the Politics of Translation Rachel Galvin ELH, Volume 83, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp. 259-292 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article [ Access provided at 6 Apr 2021 02:46 GMT from Carnegie Mellon University ] https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2016.0008 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/612081 https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2016.0008 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/612081 259ELH 83 (2016) 259–292 © 2016 by The Johns Hopkins University Press gerTrUde sTein, PéTain, and THe PoliTics of TranslaTion by racHel galvin Was gertrude stein a fascist, as some are now asserting? Her deci- sion to remain in france during World War ii and translate speeches delivered by Maréchal Philippe Pétain, the vichy chief of state, has led critics to state as much. When france and england declared war on germany on 3 september 1939, stein was in her mid-sixties and had been living in france for more than three decades.1 she and her partner alice b. Toklas had summered in the village of bilignin for 15 years and decided to stay there during the war.2 They trav- eled briefly to Paris on a two-day pass to collect some of their things from their apartment at rue christine, taking only two paintings with them—Pablo Picasso’s portrait of stein and Paul cézanne’s portrait of Madame cézanne—leaving behind stein’s remarkable collection of modern art. When gestapo agents entered their apartment on 19 July 1944, Picasso alerted stein’s long-time friend, vichy collaborator bernard faÿ, who deterred the agents from removing anything but some linen, some silver, and a footstool that Toklas had embroidered after a watercolor by Picasso.3 Much of the artwork that remained in stein and Toklas’s Paris apartment during the war was displayed in a 2012 exhibition titled “The steins collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian avant-garde,” which toured the grand Palais in Paris, the san francisco Museum of Modern art, and the Metropolitan Museum of art in new york.4 a controversy erupted around the exhibition when critics complained that the wall labels did not specify that stein’s remarkable collection had most likely survived the war thanks to the aid of a vichy collabo- rator.5 The exhibition happened to coincide with the publication of barbara Will’s monograph, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma, which asserts that stein acted as a “vichy propagandist” because she drafted a translation of a book of speeches delivered by Pétain, Paroles aux Français. Messages et écrits (1934–1941).6 The popular media reported on the controversy, from the Washington Post to the Huffington Post and from the Los Angeles Review of Books to the New York Review of Books, leading to headlines 260 The Politics of Translation in spring 2012 such as “When great artists do bad Things” and “gertrude stein, fascist?”7 in response, a group of scholars including Marjorie Perloff, Joan retallack, ed burns, and others published a dossier of studies in Jacket 2 for the purpose of “setting the record straight,” as charles bernstein’s piece is titled.8 The dossier touches briefly on stein’s translations of Pétain’s speeches.9 stein may have undertaken the project at the suggestion of faÿ, but with the evidence currently at hand, we can only speculate. did she wish to garner american support for her adopted country and its new leader, as she wrote in her introduction to the speeches? did she carry out the translation because of her admiration for Pétain? as a move to ingratiate herself with the vichy administration, given the precarious status she and alice had as Jewish lesbians? as an opportunity to make money at a juncture when she was low on funds? To help faÿ, who felt that arranging for this translation would aid his career?10 all of the above? faÿ may have proposed that she take on the project to help “ensure her safety in wartime france,” some scholars suggest (A, 405).11 between december 1941 and January 1942, stein began trans- lating Paroles aux Français. Messages et écrits (1934–1941). The book had been published in september 1941, at a moment when Pétain’s popularity was dipping in the free zone.12 she appears to have signed a contract for the translation, and wrote an introduction for the volume (which shows that she was interested in bolstering his reputation), but it was never published. in January 1943, a neighbor in bilignin, in addi- tion to the sub-prefect of her town, “supposedly prevailed upon her to abandon the [translation] project because it drew excessive attention to her in an already risky situation under the occupation” (A, 410).13 she had translated more than half of the volume and was in the process of translating Pétain’s new year speech of 1941 when, according to her manuscripts, she suddenly stopped in mid sentence.14 This was highly unusual, for she insisted on completing projects and frequently “wrote into given spaces,” allowing the parameters to determine the length of her composition—for example, making sure to complete a story when she arrived at the end of a notebook.15 drafts of 29 speeches, two of which are incomplete, are held among the gertrude stein and alice b. Toklas Papers at yale University’s beinecke rare books library. The speeches present the official ideology of the new french state and cover topics such as national recovery, foreign policy, and the alsace-lorraine refugees.16 stein’s translation generally follows the order of the speeches collected in 261Rachel Galvin the 1941 volume. The time that she devoted to the translation (one year) and the intensity with which she corrected her drafts show her intellectual commitment to the project. she was engaged in a reflective translation process, in which each word was weighed and debated with her companion, alice b. Toklas, whose corrections were made in red. The outcome is a text that is thoroughly hers: Pétain’s speeches were steined. (However, i want to note that “steining” a text necessarily implies the participation of Toklas, who was a textual collaborator in all of stein’s work.) in the present essay, i suggest that stein’s unpublished translation of Pétain’s speeches, which has yet to be studied in depth, ought to be included in considerations of Modernist literary experiments of reac- tionary nature.17 The translation reveals a carefully crafted poetics that fits within the general idiosyncratic style, or steinese, of her published work. one of my goals is to demonstrate this similarity and in so doing to unsettle prevalent readings that depict stein as intellectually and creatively subservient to Pétain. such readings flatten the complexities of artistic production under occupation, and are underpinned by biases concerning the creativity and originality inherent in translation. They perpetuate the gendered logic by which translation is understood as a secondary and derivative activity (reproductive rather than produc- tive). stein’s translation constituted a creative practice through which she produced a new text. she took ownership of Pétain’s text and placed her own stamp on it; it is structured by her hallmark sonic play and repetitions. as i’ll demonstrate through genetic and comparative linguistic analysis, there are clear resemblances between the syntax, parallel structures, repetitions, and driving rhymes in stein’s Pétain translation and her published work. stein brought Pétain’s language into her own idiolect, rendering it in the same english-french inter- language (a variety “intermediate between the speaker’s native language and the target language”) that characterized much of her writing of this period.18 on a broader level, stein’s translation reveals her abiding conviction in the autonomy of the text, and the importance of pursuing her “own interest” even when working on a translation project.19 stein’s wartime writing has been criticized for insufficiently responding to its moment and for a hermetic style that evades political engagement. yet her translation can be considered one way she sought to bridge her relative distance from the events of the war and to involve herself in politics. The aesthetics of collaboration is interest- ingly double-voiced in this case: her translation expresses an agency that at once corroborates and generates the language of vichy. it is 262 The Politics of Translation therefore complicit with the aims of the regime. Her contribution to politics remained within the covers of her handwritten notebook, but had the translation been published, stein would have very likely been considered a collaborator. Thus, while currently circulating claims that stein “signed up” to become a “vichy propagandist” are factually incorrect, archival evidence demonstrates that in 1942 she wished to help introduce Pétain’s ideas to americans.20 The work of translation was filtered through stein’s experience of the war. it contains a “domestic remainder,” as lawrence venuti calls it, or “an inscription of values, beliefs, and representations linked to historical moments and social positions in the receiving culture.”21 The translation sheds light on stein’s views during key years of World War ii, when she, like many middle-class inhabitants of her village, first welcomed Pétain as a savior—based on his 1916 triumph at the battle of verdun—before becoming disenchanted with him. in the introduction she drafted, stein glorifies Pétain, citing the opinions of her french neighbors to suggest that he has once again become the country’s much-needed hero, comparing him to the american founding fathers.22 but in in Wars I Have Seen, from 1943 onward, she repeat- edly expresses fervent support for the maquis, the resistance fighters, whom she likens to robin Hood, and worries about her neighbors, “firm reactionaries who are convinced that all maquis are terrorists.”23 in october 1943 she writes that Pétain is “an old man a very old man and mostly nowadays everybody has forgotten all about him” (W, 92). in august 1944 she describes vichy as an “oligarchy and dictatorship,” and adolf Hitler as a “monster” (W, 228, 231). an incident concerning a long-delayed letter illustrates stein’s own sense of her shifting views. in an undated letter from early 1942, stein wrote to random House editor bennett cerf that she had begun translating Pétain’s book of speeches, noting that her opinion of him had already seen fluctuations in 1941: “i found the book convincing and moving to an extraordinary degree and my idea was to write an introduction telling how my feelings have changed about him, i have had strong ups and downs and i think it would all do a lot of good, we all now over here can begin to understand that life with its reverses, are not what they were when all went alright” (A, 413). This letter went astray during the war and did not reach cerf until 1946, reappearing unexpectedly, somewhat like a time capsule. When cerf responded with outrage, stein sent him a telegram: “KeeP yoUr sHirT on benneT dear leTTer re PeTain Was WriTTen in 1941” (A, 413). 263Rachel Galvin on 10 May 1943, stein was placed on the “liste otto,” a list of blacklisted Jewish authors who wrote in french (“Juedische autoren, écrivains Juifs”).24 However, she continued to publish in resistance publications such as Confluences, Fontaine, and L’Arbalète.25 an essay recounting her experience returning to Paris with Toklas after the war ended was published in Fontaine in april 1945, in the same issue as texts from Paul éluard, vercors (author of the resistance novel The Silence of the Sea), Pierre emmanuel (on Jean-Paul sartre), g. e. clancier (on poetry and resistance), françois Mauriac (an excerpt from his occupation journal), and federico garcía lorca. The editors’ decision to feature her work in such company indicates that they viewed her as supportive of the resistance. Thus, given the scope of her writings during the war and the fluctuation of her views, stein’s translation of 1942 preserves traces of a particularly reactionary moment. examining the draft uncovers her thinking and her understanding of the war as it took place, and demonstrates the complexities of living under occupation. since the late 1990s, scholars have begun to pay closer attention to stein’s wartime writing, and her friendship with faÿ has been regularly noted.26 but the 2012 debate, in its mediatization and presentation as a long-obscured truth coming to light, resembles exposés of Martin Heidegger, Paul de Man, and louis-ferdinand céline—or controver- sies around the reactionary politics held by T. s. eliot, Wyndham lewis, W. b. yeats, and ezra Pound. Pound, for one, maintained views that led him to outright fascism commitment, a stint as radio propagandist for benito Mussolini, and eventually, a trial for treason in the United states.27 There is far more significant detail about these histories than can be discussed here, but suffice it to say that in analyzing stein’s reactionary politics, there is at least one major difference that needs to be taken into account, and which i keep in mind throughout this essay: none of the preceding writers shared stein’s precarious status as a Jew and a lesbian living in nazi-occupied territory. While there is no historical or literary evidence that stein was a fascist, she was most certainly a political conservative. she disliked communism and supported the general francisco franco-led nationalists during the spanish civil War (A, 413). one of her corre- spondents, Will rogers, wrote that she had the mentality of a “rentier”: Without her fixed income we might never have heard of the rue de fleurus, but with it we should not be surprised to find her disapproving of roosevelt and the new deal, believing in rugged individualism, favoring a gold basis for the dollar, regarding a man out of work as lazy or incompetent, thinking every american could take care of himself.28 264 The Politics of Translation she has been described as a patrician, and during the war she main- tained friendships with upper-class women who were members of the Croix de Feu, a pro-vichy organization (see A, 414–16). Unlike her contemporaries who poured their efforts into the resistance (éluard, louis aragon, robert desnos, and rené char, to name just a few), stein must be grouped with those who made compromises and focused their energies on making art. she continued to write while german troops were quartered in her home, just as Henri Matisse continued to paint when they were lodged in his, and as Picasso persevered with his painting despite harassment and regular visits from german officers. “Those who stayed . . . exchanged overt freedom for inner exile or in some cases collaboration,” writes cultural historian frederic spotts: “They believed it was necessary to work in familiar surroundings and that their work was more important than the circumambient ideological environment of occupation.”29 assessment of cultural production under the vichy regime is an ongoing process, and the case of stein’s wartime writing is an example of the challenges that persist. one of the many after-effects of the postwar purge (épuration) of collaborators has been a glorification of the resistance in french culture, and a disinclination to explore the myriad modes of compromise and outright collaboration among artists, intellectuals, and average citizens alike.30 Monographs devoted to the question of “how artists and intellectuals survived the nazi occupation,” as spott’s study The Shameful Peace is subtitled, have been few and slow to appear.31 but the rhetoric involved in the recent debate about stein—and the slippage between the concepts of fascism, nazism, and Pétainism in the articles on stein mentioned above—is directly related to the knowledge gaps in this still evolving field of inquiry. i. THe ProbleM of sTeinian sTyle in the recent debate about stein’s views on Pétain, her distinctive poetics are at issue.32 rabbi Michael lerner, the editor of Tikkun, a leftist-progressive magazine of Jewish culture and politics, writes in an editorial dated 4 June 2012, “[a]rtists, writers, poets, and intellectuals are not exempt from the moral obligation to fight against the rise of evil.”33 His argument is consonant with those of public intellectuals in the west who, at least since émile Zola, have called for writers and artists to provide counter-discourse and aid social change. lerner links moral behavior to the choice of subject matter, criticizing those artists and intellectuals who may have “received protection from nazis and may arguably have even unintentionally helped fascist regime[s],” 265Rachel Galvin writing that they had a “moral obligation to use their creativity and smarts to alert those who listened to them or read their poems, articles, or books to inform people about what was evil about fascism, and why it should be resisted with all one’s energies.”34 He goes on to expand his argument to a writer’s choice of style: nor is it an excuse to say, as some have, that gertrude stein or others like her who benefited from the protection of nazi collaborators had no obligation to do this [“to speak out clearly and unambiguously”] since their form of writing and communication was not that of discursive sentences or positions. one’s form of communication is itself an ethical choice, and cannot be given a blanket permission in the face of mass murder happening around oneself. if you choose to be ambiguous in the face of evil, you become one of its collaborators, empowerers, or enablers.35 it is true that stein did not speak out to denounce vichy or the nazis, as many of her peers did. lerner characterizes this in religious terms as a “sin of silence,” and numerous other scholars, although avoiding moral judgment, have considered her silence as a form of complicity.36 archival records do not show with any clarity what she knew or did not know about vichy, the deportations from france, or the camps, but rabbi lerner makes an important argument. The idea that stylistic ambiguity is equivalent to moral and political ambiguity is articulated in several other essays from 2011–13 that criticize stein’s wartime activities. but are one’s poetics necessarily coextensive with one’s ethics and politics? Poetry scholars such as Mutlu Konuk blasing, James longenbach, and david caplan have argued that form cannot be understood as possessing trans-historical political value (free verse is not inherently liberating, for example).37 The fact that the same poetic form can convey contradictory political meanings leads longenbach to caution against the “easy confluence of formal and social vision,” caplan to argue for attention to form’s changing, contextually dependent political and aesthetic implications, and blasing to assert the ultimate neutrality of form.38 These scholars would agree that a sonnet is not fascist per se, as William carlos Williams had claimed it was in 1938.39 yet difficult texts—whether they are called hermetic, opaque, indeterminate, obscurantist, or ambiguous—continue to be read as willfully elitist and, as in stein’s case, reactionary in their retreat from explicit political statement. This raises the question of what stein was writing and publishing between 1939 and 1945, and whether those texts display her signature 266 The Politics of Translation poetics. despite being blacklisted on the liste otto, stein continued to write about the war while it was taking place, in In Savoy; or, Yes Is for a Very Young Man, A Play of the Resistance in France; Brewsie & Willie (1945); and the autobiographical Wars I Have Seen, which was written from 1943 through 1945. as complex as her wartime writing is, much of it, including Wars I Have Seen, Paris France (1940), and Brewsie & Willie, is much clearer, discursively, than her earlier work— and arguably may be considered part of her “audience writing,” as she called her works that include, most famously, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).40 The jacket copy of the first edition of Wars I Have Seen, signed by random House editor bennett cerf, boasts that “when she wants to, [stein] can write straightforward english that any average high-school student can understand. Wars I Have Seen, with a very few minor aberrations, is another such book.” random House marketed Wars I Have Seen as a “noteworthy” book about the war, in the company of richard Tregaskis’s Guadalcanal Diary, cecil brown’s Suez to Singapore, and captain Ted W. lawson and robert considine’s Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, all of which are listed on the back inside jacket. The first edition includes a red banner across the cover with a description in all capitals: “a firsT-Hand rePorT of foUr years of naZi rUle in france and THe Joy of liberaTion in 1944.” (figure 1). in the jacket copy, cerf describes Wars I Have Seen as an eyewitness account of the french experience of occupation that was smuggled out like an urgent message. bear in mind that this entire book was written in longhand under the very noses of the nazis. after they were driven out of france, alice Toklas typed the manuscript and frank gervasi, who moved in with general Patch’s seventh U.s. army, brought it back with him to america. Wars I Have Seen is the on-the-spot story of what the common people of france endured from 1940 to september, 1944. not quite reportage, and not quite memoir, Wars I Have Seen is set to the war in real time.41 stein always includes the dates on which she wrote, explaining that she intends to end the book only when the first american soldier came to culoz. archival evidence shows that she considered the book an autobiography. she tried out a series of titles on the cover of the first notebook of drafts: “an emotional autobiography,” “gertrude stein’s autobiography,” and “i am really writing my autobiography,” as well as “civil domestic and foreign Wars.”42 in the middle figures a large “i” with squiggles radiating 267Rachel Galvin figure 1. front cover of first edition of Wars I Have Seen, 1945. au- thor’s copy. from it. The book may be about the many wars she lived through, from the spanish-american War, the russo-Japanese War, the boer War, the chinese-Japanese War, two balkan wars, World War i, the abyssinian War, and the spanish civil War, through World War ii, but stein herself is always at the center of it (figure 2). Her title indicates that the book’s point of view is “at once relative and self-emphasizing, at once involved and detached.”43 The fact that stein made writing a daily practice, and did not correct the book with hindsight, makes Wars I Have Seen a useful document of the time. it offers a nuanced portrait of village life in the bugey region and expresses stein and her fellow villagers’ increasingly vigorous support for the resistance. in this 268 The Politics of Translation figure 2. cover of notebook draft of Wars I Have Seen. courtesy of the gertrude stein estate. gertrude stein and alice b. Toklas Papers, yale collection of american literature, beinecke rare book and Manuscript library, yale University. way it charts the circulation of ideologies in france between 1939 and 1944 and the “belated rise of the antifascist opposition in france.”44 The language of Wars I Have Seen may not be as limpid as that of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but it is closer to that end of the spectrum of her work. However, the idea that stein espoused a poetics of ambiguity and indeterminacy remains predominant among scholars. depending on the critic, her “indeterminacy,” a synonym for the undecidability of poetic associations, signals that her work is either politically subversive or reactionary.45 The frequently cited hallmarks of her opacity, difficulty, or indeterminacy include her lexical 269Rachel Galvin repetitions, recursive structures, and highly abstract texts, such as the cubist poetry of Tender Buttons (1914); the apparent simplicity of some of her syntax, which has been read as puerile; and conversely, the sheer volume of lengthy, run-on sentences. This is not surprising, given that since she began publishing, her poetics has been met with bewilderment and, at times, ridicule. in 1929, Max eastman memorably identified stein with “the cult of unintelligibility,” later calling her its “high priestess,” a phrase that has been widely repeated.46 Her more accessible “audience writing” is overlooked in such assessments, and in particular, the relative clarity of her wartime writing, which often features straight-ahead, discursive sentences. While the majority of scholars of twentieth-century poetry have focused on the indeterminacy of stein’s language, a few have shown that her style and mode of composition do anything but invite indeterminacy, and that stein in fact eschews it in her search for exactitude, mastery, authorial control, and textual autonomy.47 in this line of thinking, her modernism is “absolutely devoted to the name and the determinacy it entails,” as Jennifer ashton has observed; stein is committed to the integrity of the text, which, if it is to be a “masterpiece,” can never be an open text.48 The reader’s experience is irrelevant to the meaning of the poem that she, the author, creates and which will “force itself” upon the reader (PG, 321).49 The complications that she invents, as she writes in “Poetry and grammar,” “make eventually for simplicity”: “Why if you want the pleasure of concentrating on the final simplicity of excessive complication would you want any artificial aid to bring about that simplicity” (PG, 321). stein’s writing is anything but inde- terminate, given the tight control she wielded over her texts and her desire to bend language to her “own interest” (PG, 320). in the next section i expand on this claim to show that the same is true of stein’s translation, and that her draft demonstrates a level of authorial control that is similar to that of her original compositions. Her manipulation of the speeches contradicts the notion that she ceded aesthetic control. Quite to the contrary, she embellished the original. stein appears to have been committed to a sense-for-sense translation, casting herself as a generator of text, an orator who would trumpet Pétain’s texts to americans. stein’s style is deliberately crafted to maintain total control over the text and its reception. she is interested in “exactitude of abstract thought . . . creating sense by intensity of exactness.”50 it is up to the audience to follow along. The same is true of her translational disobedi- ence and her “steining” of Pétain’s speeches. close examination of her 270 The Politics of Translation archive unsettles readings that depict her as intellectually and creatively subordinate to Pétain as a figure of authority. Her creativity remained apart and sovereign, despite the fact that her political ideas were marked by allegiance to Pétain. she insisted on translating according to her own poetics, and indeed it seems she thought she could improve Pétain’s style (which has been called “dry and didactic”) (M, 79n1).51 she believed that she had a role to play in disseminating information about Pétain to her fellow americans. This is consonant with the self- aggrandizement visible both in her published and unpublished work (vividly figured by the “i” on the cover of the notebook in which she wrote Wars I Have Seen). ii. sTein’s “oWn inTeresT” in THe PéTain TranslaTions some have claimed that stein’s version is conspicuously maladroit. one scholar calls it an “exercise in shallowness and ambiguity” that makes Pétain sound “foolish, childish, or inept,” and another writes that stein makes the language “unreadable” in her “word-by-word translation that must be a joke.”52 a third, barbara Will, describes it as “‘almost stupefyingly literal,’” suggesting that stein translated “word by word” and “completely ignores questions of idiom or style.”53 Will claims that based on the translation’s linguistic ineptitude, stein was “in thrall to the aura of a great man”; for her, the translation shows a “compositional submissiveness” and “the attempt to render the french original into english through a one-to-one correspondence between signs seems to be conceding authority, interpretation, and interrogation to the voice of Pétain.”54 This account implies that stein viewed Pétain’s speeches as something like a sacred text, and followed a pietistic theory of translation resembling that advocated by early christian commenta- tors, who urged equivalence between original and target texts.55 This interpretation would have stein relinquish her aesthetic principles and set aside her hallmark, aggressively self-asserting poetics when she translated. but these complaints ignore stein’s very particular sense of style and her command of french. any translation decision she made must be taken as deliberate. she had lived in france since 1902, had translated georges Hugnet’s Enfances (1933) and gustave flaubert’s Trois Contes (1877), and had written her own works in french (as Will notes). The above interpretation of her translation poetics as puerile also fails to account for the resemblances between the style of her translations and her wartime writing.56 it does not make sense given the mix of phono-semantic matching and interlanguage that characterizes the translation. 271Rachel Galvin To read stein’s translation as “submissive” rehearses an old canard about the secondary nature of translation. Translation, as activity and text, has long been gendered as derivative and female, according to what lori chamberlain calls the “politics of originality and its logic of violence.”57 Tropes used to characterize translation often imply sexual domination, as in the work of george steiner, who describes translation as an “act of appropriative penetration” in After Babel, or Jerome, who writes of the translator “[carrying] the sense captive into his own language.”58 These tropes have been thoroughly analyzed by feminist critics such as chamberlain, who notes that “the reason translation is so overcoded, so overregulated, is that it threatens to erase the difference between production and reproduction which is essential to the establishment of power.”59 stein produced a new text that corresponded to the text by Pétain and yet at the same time was indelibly her own. Her translation is subversive—not politically, to be sure, since it is complicit with the aims of vichy—but linguisti- cally subversive, as it aims to take control of the text. Ultimately, this intensifies her responsibility for the project. stein develops her credo of authorial control in the essay “Poetry and grammar,” an essay that extensively analyzes parts of speech and the “inner life of sentences and paragraphs” (PG, 321). she explains that certain types of punctuation undermine her independence and precision, and therefore casts them out of her republic: as i say commas are servile and they have no life of their own, and their use is not a use, it is a way of replacing one’s own interest and i do decidedly like to like my own interest my own interest in what i am doing. a comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it and to me for many years and i still do feel that way about it only now i do not pay as much attention to them, the use of them was positively degrading. (PG, 321) stein chafes against the idea of being a passive writer, and argues that commas undercut the writer’s mastery of the sentence as well as the reader’s experience of it. This is a motif of control that runs through all of her work. steinian sentences are carefully designed to “force” themselves upon the reader. (in Tender Buttons stein had written “secure the steady rights and translate more than translate the authority, show the choice and make no more mistakes than yesterday.”)60 This aesthetic principle applies to her translation poetics in several ways. 272 The Politics of Translation in the translation, stein neither systematically dilates nor condenses the sentences. at times, she makes them more declarative and direct, stripping them down to their basic components, while at others, she echoes the latinate structure of french syntax for a foreignizing effect, as translation theorists from friedrich schleiermacher to antoine berman have called it. schleiermacher defines “a feeling of the foreign” as the sense a translator imparts to her readers that they are encountering a foreign tongue even when reading a translation in their own language.61 Her english is a steinese version of english, however. (i use the term steinese even though critics have tended to employ it pejoratively ever since stein began first published. i want to recuperate the term to indicate her characteristic style, cadence, word play, and sound play.)62 i’ll mention three features of steinese that are salient in the translation: 1) the omission of punctuation; 2) a tendency toward parallel structures and repetitions on all levels (allit- eration, lexical repetition, syntactical parallels); and 3) the cultivation of a narrative logic according to which sound leads sense (often marked by word play and calque). conventional punctuation is often absent from the translation. Question marks, for example, are consistently replaced by periods. “Pourquoi faut-il que les heureuses dispositions, tirées de nos malheurs, se soient estompées dans la prospérité?” becomes “Why must it be that the excellent qualities created by our distresses are stamped out by our prosperity.” similarly, “où en sommes-nous en 1938?” becomes “Where are we in 1938.”63 This translation decision is in keeping with stein’s composition method as she sets it out in “Poetry and grammar,” where she explains that she does not consider questions marks “interesting.” The question mark is aright when it is all alone when it i used as a brand on cattle or when it could be used in decoration but connected with writing it is completely entirely completely uninteresting. it is evident that if you ask a question you ask a question but anybody who can read at all knows when a question is a question as it is written in writing. Therefore i ask you therefore wherefore should one use it the question mark. . . . a question is a question, anybody can know that a question is a question and so why add to it the question mark when it is already there when the question is already there in the writing. Therefore i never could bring myself to use a question mark, i always found it positively revolting, and now very few do use it. (PG, 316–17) additionally, as in typical steinian syntax, which can unfurl like kudzu, clauses in the translation that would be normally set off by commas are not, as in “Those which remain to us considerable though they are 273Rachel Galvin constitute only a mangled victory” [ce qui nous en reste [des clauses des traités de 1919], si appréciable que ce soit, ne constitue plus qu’une victoire mutilée] (S; P, 19). stein is vociferous on the topic of commas and how they “enfeeble” sentences (PG, 319). commas undercut the writer’s mastery of the sentence as well as the reader’s experience of its definitude. a comma is “at most a poor period that it lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath” (PG, 320–21). Writing lengthy sentences, which string together “long dependent adverbial clauses,” thus becomes “a passion” for her: complications make eventually for simplicity. . . . you can see how loving the intensity of complication of these things that commas would be degrading. Why if you want the pleasure of concentrating on the final simplicity of excessive complication would you want any artificial aid to bring about that simplicity. do you see now why i feel about the commas i did and as i do. Think about anything you really like to do and you will see what i mean. When it gets really difficult you want to disentangle rather than to cut the knot, at least so anybody feels who is working with any thread, so anybody feels who is working with any tool so anybody feels who is writing any sentence or reading it after it has been written. . . . a long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it[.] (PG, 321) in this crucial essay, stein sets out a philosophy of composition char- acterized by control and exactitude. its fruits are equally visible in her own texts of the time and those that she translated and made her own. The distinct “pleasure of concentrating on the final simplicity of exces- sive complication” is clearly a far cry from championing indeterminacy. stein also makes robust use of parallel structures and repetitions, even when they do not appear in Pétain’s original. for example, in the following excerpt, where Pétain employs two different verbs (relever, redresser), stein uses just one, “reestablish,” and carries it forward through the text as a key term: “The same way as we reestablished ourselves in 1871 after our defeat, germany beaten in 1918 reestab- lished itself as soon as we prematurely quit the banks of the rhine” [nous nous sommes relevés en 1871 . . . de même l’allemagne . . . s’est redressé dès que nous avons quitté prématurément les bords du rhin.] (S; P, 19). on the following page, when Pétain refers to redressement, or recovery, stein tries out several possibilities: “our destiny is still in our hands, the conditions way of possibilities of pulling ourselves 274 The Politics of Translation together reestablishing ourselves are easy to state explain tell” [notre destin reste dans nos mains: les conditions du redressement sont faciles à énoncer] (S; P, 20). Here, we see that stein ultimately maintains the slightly strange “reestablish” as a translation for redresser, as she did earlier. in her version, redresser is not just “recovery” or improvement, nor its alternate denotation, the physical gesture of straightening up, but instead becomes a national movement of self-assertion, both in the case of germany and france. alliteration is often a guiding principle of word selection; stein offers “nothing nevertheless is lost,” for “rien cependant n’est perdu,” rejecting Toklas’s suggestion of translating cependant as “however” (S). a similar logic explains her translation of “le combat reste le même” as “the struggle continues the same” (S). she considers “fight” and “combat” “remains the same,” “continues the same,” and “is the same,” but ultimately chooses a slightly odd formula- tion. it may sound unconventional, but it follows an alliterative logic. The drafts are also particularly marked with instances of calque, such as translating discours as “discourse” instead of “speech.” Will cites this particular calque of “discourse” as prime evidence for stein’s “incongruous, even inept” translation: “arguably, this is the work of a writer with little or no real familiarity toward the foreign language being translated.”64 However, stein’s translation of “discourse” occurs near the end of the third notebook held in the archive; in the first two notebooks, constituting more than two hundred pages of handwritten drafts, she systematically translates discours correctly as “an address.” This indicates that deviations such as the choice of “discourse” are either unconscious slips or deliberate translation decisions, and as i will discuss below, they are instances of stein’s interlanguage between french and english. The following example from the 1938 “Pour l’union des français” demonstrates stein’s lexical choices that create word play. she links “remembrances” and “dismembered country,” yoking together memory and the body, suggesting that it is the work of memory to reconstitute the country torn apart like osiris’s body: in spite of the understanding never to speak of it, all our remembrance was faithful to it and our emotions turned toward the blue line of the vosges which marked henceforward the boundary of our dismembered country. (S) [Malgré les consignes de n’en parler jamais, toutes les mémoires restèrent fidèles et les esprits tournés vers la ligne bleue des vosges, qui marquait désormais à l’est les frontières de la Patrie mutilée.] (P, 14) 275Rachel Galvin it seems fair to conclude that stein employed different translations of mutilée based on the context of the sentence and the rhetorical effect she was after. she is likely to have chosen “dismembered country” for “Patrie mutilée” in the passage above because of the suggestive sonic and semantic links between “dismembered” and “remembrance.” This is especially probable given that in the instance cited earlier, in which she rendered “une victoire mutilée” as “a mangled victory,” neither she nor Toklas made any edits to the line, indicating that they were in accord about the translation’s accuracy. The translation of Patrie, or homeland, as “country” is also notable, as it seems to undo Pétain’s tripartite slogan Travail, Famille, Patrie (Work, family, fatherland), which had replaced the republican motto Liberté, Egalité, Fraterntié. but as in characteristic steinese, sound leads the way. “country” paired with “boundary” is more euphonious, and perhaps more generalizable for her american readership. How different the translation would have been, and potentially more alienating for the american reader, had stein opted for “the borders of our mutilated fatherland” rather than “the boundary of our dismembered country.” To delve more deeply into the ways that sound leads sense in these drafts, i will take a closer look at another text, Pétain’s notorious speech, “appel du 17 juin 1940,” in which he took the helm of the vichy government. in it he portrays himself as france’s savior, expresses compassion for his people’s suffering, and announces the end of hostili- ties. The next day, charles de gaulle broadcast a response in london that is commonly considered the origin of the resistance movement, the infamous “appel du 18 juin 1940” rejecting Pétain’s call. shortly thereafter, on 22 June 1940, the armistice was signed at rethondes in a symbolically charged location: the same train car where the reich had accepted defeat in 1918. The number and intensity of corrections to stein’s translation indicate her sense of the momentousness of this particular speech, and it is clear that she invested particular energy into translating it (figure 3). 276 The Politics of Translation The officially sanctioned version of Pétain’s speech was a 1940 transla- tion by emile Pons, a professor at strasbourg, which was published (along with a spanish translation) in a pamphlet by the Fédération des associations françaises pour le développement des relations avec l’étranger and the Comité France-Amérique, titled L’armistice du 25 Juin 1940 and edited by gabriel louis-Jaray. louis-Jaray later edited the 1942 volume of Pétain’s Messages et écrits from which stein translated; and he was the editor who offered stein the contract for this translation: french People at the request of the President of the republic i assume from to-day the direction of the government of france. convinced of the devotion of our admirable army which is fighting with a heroism worthy of its long military tradition against an enemy superior in numbers and in arms, convinced by its magnificent resistance it has fulfilled its obligations to our allies, convinced of the support of the veterans whom i have pride in having commanded, convinced of the confidence of all the people i dedicate all of myself to france to appease its agony. figure 3. Manuscript page of Wars I Have Seen. courtesy of the gertrude stein estate. gertrude stein and alice b. Toklas Papers, yale collection of american literature, beinecke rare book and Manuscript library, yale University. 277Rachel Galvin in these melancholy days i think of the unhappy fugitives who suffering every extremity of privation cover our roads. i convey to them my compassion and my solicitude. it is with a heavy heart that i say to you to-day that it is necessary to attempt to stop fighting. This night, i have sent to our opponent to ask him if he is ready to consider with us as between soldiers and after battle and in all honor the means of putting an end to hostilities. That all the french will gather to the government over which i preside during this time of difficulty and stress, and quiet their anxieties in order to be conscious only of their faith in the destiny of their country. (S) [Maréchal Pétain, 17 June 1940 français! à l’appel de M. le président de la République, j’assume à partir d’aujourd’hui la direction du gouvernement de la France. Sûr de l’affection de notre admirable armée, qui lutte avec un héroïsme digne de ses longues traditions militaires contre un ennemi supérieur en nombre et en armes, sûr que par sa magnifique résistance elle a rempli son devoir vis-à-vis de nos alliés, sûr de l’appui des anciens combattants que j’ai eu la fierté de commander, sûr de la confiance du peuple tout entier, je fais à la France le don de ma personne pour atténuer son malheur. en ces heures douloureuses, je pense aux malheureux réfugiés, qui, dans un dénuement extrême, sillonnent nos routes. Je leur exprime ma compassion et ma sollicitude. c’est le cœur serré que je vous dis aujourd’hui qu’il faut cesser le combat. Je me suis adressé cette nuit à l’adversaire pour lui demander s’il est prêt à rechercher avec nous, entre soldats, après la lutte et dans l’honneur, les moyens de mettre un terme aux hostilités. Que tous les français se groupent autour du gouvernement que je préside pendant ces dures épreuves et fassent taire leur angoisse pour n’écouter que leur foi dans le destin de la patrie.]65 as in her own compositions, here stein carefully crafts the language of the translated speech according to her “own interest.” This is visible in her calculated acceptance of some of Toklas’s editorial suggestions and rejection of others. in comparison with other, much less marked-up pages, stein’s draft of the opening passages of this speech is particularly revised. The second version in slanting script on the left-hand page is unusual for her notebooks (figure 3). stein appears to have tried out the loaded word “armistice” in the title at the top of the second version of the translation, and then crossed it out. “armistice” would have been her addition, since the word does not appear in Pétain’s speech. in 1940, it had been a much-discussed, contested term, offered as a more dignified alternative to “capitulation” (M, 65). by the time stein was carrying out the translation in 1942, however, the idea that 278 The Politics of Translation an armistice would bring peace had been shown to be a false hope. it is possible that, as she prepared the draft with her american audience in mind, she had considered calling it an armistice and then thought better of it because of this shift. sound leads sense in the translated passage above. stein reaches for alliteration in oratorical phrases such as “convinced of the confidence” and “to appease its agony.” “convinced of” is a strange translation for “sûr de,” implying the process of persuasion, unlike its near synonyms “certain of” or “sure of.” but the alliteration of the hard c in “convinced of the confidence” lends a ring to the phrase. in the last crucial line of the first paragraph, Pétain infamously casts himself as a christ figure, sacrificing himself for his people: “je fais à la france le don de ma personne pour atténuer son malheur.” This resounding phrase, which articulated Pétain’s posture toward his direction of the vichy govern- ment, reflected a popular french belief, political scientist and World War ii specialist Philippe burrin writes: He himself encouraged people generally to identify themselves with him, appealing to both their republican and their christian sentiments. The former element went with the image of the hero of the great War and also with that of educator and teacher, in this instance of national rehabilitation; the latter emphasized the father of the family, the good shepherd, the christ-like figure. . . . This savior, at once glorious, paternal and suffering, called forth a wave of devotion fuelled by the most archaic sources of personal power: here at last was a public figure who could be loved. it was a many-sided popularity that gave Pétain a long-lasting appeal that he did much to foster by presenting himself as the best possible option in the face of the occupier, a guardian of peace in the midst of raging war.66 because of his prestige, patriotism, track record as a winner, and reputation for common sense and disinterestedness, Pétain was viewed as a point fixe (fixed point), a protector from the internal as well as external demons of the french nation.67 as one song had it in 1940, Marshal, here we are before you, france’s savior, We, your fellows, swear To serve and follow you. [Maréchal, nous voilà! devant toi, le sauveur de la france nous jurons, nous tes gars de servir et de suivre tes pas.] (M, 79) 279Rachel Galvin but stein makes a subtle, crucial change in the valence of Pétain’s famous declaration offering himself up as sacrifice and savior. instead of “i make the gift of my person [myself],” stein has “i dedicate all of myself,” which subtracts the religious resonance. it also reduces the grandeur of Pétain’s phrase. “i did not like his way of saying i Philippe Pétain, that bothered me,” she wrote in Wars I Have Seen in september 1943, indicating that she resisted his self-aggrandizement, despite the admiration she had for him (W, 87). The phrase “atténuer son malheur” in the 17 June address, meaning to mitigate or relieve its distress, becomes “to appease its agony.” This term “appease” simply could not be used lightly in 1941 when stein began the translations, since it had entered the popular lexicon as a tarnished phrase associated with the Munich Pact. signed by france, the United Kingdom, italy, and germany, the 30 september 1938 agreement had permitted germany to annex czechoslovakia. but the “policy of appeasement,” as it was known, failed to stall Hitler’s aggression. To create an alliteration with “appease,” stein insisted on keeping “agony” as the last word, instead of “misery” or “woe” as alice suggested, which would have been closer to the french term “malheur.” she translates as an orator, not an interpreter; and she translates the text into steinese. given the range of rhetorical structures that her translation employs, and in this sentence in particular (“convinced of the support of the veterans whom i have pride in having commanded, convinced of the confidence of all the people i dedicate all of myself to france to appease its agony”), it is likely that she opted for allit- eration as a way to add polish and persuasiveness to the speech. The strange substitution of “convinced” for “certain,” (“sûr de”) reinforces this interpretation. The term implies the process of persuasion, unlike its near synonym “certain,” “sure,” or “confident.” compared with the Comité France-Amérique’s sanctioned translation, which renders this phrase as “in the hope that it may allay the calamity befallen her,” the idiosyncrasies of stein’s version are apparent (P, 69). Her rendition is more direct, more poetic, and more memorable. in its relative clarity, her translation is of a piece with her wartime books Wars I Have Seen, Paris France, and Brewsie & Willie. This translation is an improvement on the original, in that Pétain’s speech does not contain a marked sensitivity to sound or oratorical structures other than the refrain (“sûr de”). The fact that in translating other speeches stein renders malheur as “misery” (“la france est en proie au malheur veritable” becomes “france is the victim of real misery”) is further evidence that she expressly translates it as “agony” 280 The Politics of Translation here (P, 69). other translation decisions show stein dissipating the force of Pétain’s original declaration. “en ces heures douloureuses,” or “in these painful hours,” becomes in the sanctioned translation the less urgent and immediate “in these melancholy days,” which reduces the element of Pétain’s expression of compassion for the difficult times that the french people were living through.68 Most significantly, the key sentence that represents Pétain’s damaging legacy, “c’est le coeur serré que je vous dis aujourd’hui qu’il faut cesser le combat” (or, as the sanctioned translation has it, “it is with a broken heart that i am telling you to-day: we must cease fighting”) becomes in stein’s translation “it is with a heavy heart that i say to you to-day that it is necessary to attempt to stop fighting.”69 neither she nor Toklas marked any doubts about or revisions to the addition of “attempt,” which hedges the assertion and potentially casts doubt upon Pétain’s announcement of the cessation of hostili- ties. This choice changes the meaning of the sentence, mitigating the illocutionary force of the declaration. stein’s version is strikingly less direct than the sanctioned translation, “we must cease fighting.” but there is a probable historical source for this modification. it is very likely that stein would have heard on the radio or read in the newspapers the modified version of the speech, disseminated after the first caused confusion—some claimed it was fraudulent, created by the enemy—as fighting continued throughout the country (such as in the loire valley and near lyon) (see M, 64). The second version of Pétain’s statement was amended to “we must try to cease fighting” [il faut tenter de cesser le combat].70 since the printed volume stein was working with only includes the first version of the speech, this slight change in wording demonstrates one of the ways in which stein’s translation was filtered through her experiences. stein’s treatment of polemical terms and phrases reveals her position on key events such as the armistice and the consolidation of the vichy government. The translation is much more than a rote, literal transference of Pétain’s language. it holds within its folds signs and signals of stein’s own experiences of the war, and her inescapably contemporary gaze in 1942 as she looked back to speeches spanning from the late 1930s to the current year. The translation is a palimpsest which, when closely examined, shows fractures and fossils from this year of crisis. 281Rachel Galvin iii. THe arMisTice: frencH vicTory in defeaT? The archive also offers an important clue to understanding one of stein’s recurrent phrases that has drawn critical heat. “The winner loses,” a conceptual reversal suggesting that the germans were the actual losers in signing the armistice, not the french, has been inter- preted as an indication of stein’s desire to write “propaganda” for vichy. iterations of the phrase appear throughout her wartime writing, and she titled a november 1940 essay in the Atlantic Monthly “The Winner loses: a Picture of occupied france.” some critics argue that this notion represents a deluded wish on stein’s part to bury her head, ostrich-like, in a sandpit of rhetoric and torque france’s capitulation into a victory. but this reading ignores the rhetoric of national renova- tion circulating at the time, as i will explain in a moment. it is an exaggeration to call the essay a “notorious instance” of the “propaganda pieces” that stein wrote “for vichy.”71 “The Winner loses” was neither commissioned nor approved by the vichy regime, as far as can be ascertained; and stein later folded it into her diaristic Wars I Have Seen. stein made repeated use of this provocative verbal paradox, structured by a chiasmus, like a verbal talisman promising france’s resurgence.72 it evokes her understanding of the french national character, current events, and her hopes for her adopted country. Historically situating stein’s writing offers context for her choice to use such a seemingly strange phrase. Primarily, it bears a strong connection to contemporary ideas circulating in france on the benefits of the armistice, and to a broader rhetoric of expiation and phoenix-like renewal through suffering (see OF, 224–29). based on french historians’ accounts of the year 1940, intertextual evidence, and archival traces (particularly in her translation of Pétain’s 1938 speech to the anciens combattants), it is clear that her text channels a widespread idea, or meme, and feeds it into the mill of her composition process. The phrase “la victoire des vaincus” (the victory of the vanquished) is the title of a book by andré fribourg that appeared in 1938, which Pétain presented to the Académie des Sciences morales et politique on 14 May of that year.73 fribourg’s book warned against the return of germany (“the vanquished”), condemning france’s tolerant position toward its longtime enemy in the post-World War i period. Twelve days later, in his address to World War i veterans (le congrès des anciens combattants), Pétain elaborates on this notion, considering whether germany, having been defeated in 1918, was now rising to power once again: “one has even been able to speak of the victory of the vanquished. What is there to say. Will victory have changed sides 282 The Politics of Translation camps” [on a même pu parler de la victoire des vaincus. Qu’est-ce à dire? la victoire aurait-elle change de camp?] (S; P, 19). Pétain identifies germany as a growing threat and appeals to the assembled veterans to once again adopt a soldier’s mentality and help france become more unified, so that “[u]nited and awakened they will defend with arms the fortune of their country and will prevent the victory of the vanquished developing until it becomes the defeat of the conquerors” [unis et eclairés, les français defendront avec success la fortune de leur pays et empecheront que la victoire des vaincus, en s’accentuant, ne devienne la defaite des vainqueurs] (S; P, 21). Pétain emphatically refers to germany as “the vanquished” and france as “the conqueror” in 1938, 20 years after the conclusion of World War i. Two years later, after the armistice, Pétain revivified this idea in another speech, announcing that french honor had been “saved” and national sovereignty preserved. “from abject defeat, the new regime in embryo extracted its own putative victory,” writes historian James shields; “soon the term ‘occupation,’ with its connotations of defeat and passivity, would give way to a quite different term suggesting that france could remain at the helm of its own destiny.”74 The idea seems to have been provocative for stein, as she rewrote these sentences in english in 1941. committed as she was to a cyclical idea of history, it would have been logical to her that war caused first the germans and now the french to pull themselves back up by their bootstraps. as stein composed her Atlantic Monthly essay in 1940, the idea would have rung with new significance for her. it indicated the possi- bility that the french would be strengthened by hardship and had only to strive to come out on top once again. she sets out a rationale for the armistice in her essay, arguing that france will emerge triumphant from its capitulation: “The french do naturally not like that life is too easy, they like, like the phoenix, to rise from the ashes. They really do believe that those that win lose.”75 she argues that young french people are taking an optimistic view, expressing excitement about meeting the challenge of improving and strengthening their country, which they see as bracing for the national character: They say now . . . that if they had had an easy victory the vices would have been weaker and more of them, and now well, now there is really something to do they have to make france itself again and there is a future; . . . they are looking forward. . . . in short, they feel alive and like it.76 283Rachel Galvin The rhetoric of autonomy and national renovation was current at the time, and it went hand in hand with self-reproach for the current state of affairs. Military commanders such as general Maxime Weygand and Pétain blamed the french post-World War i cultivation of ease and pleasure rather than a national “spirit of sacrifice” (OF, 225). bishop Jules saliège of Toulouse, who was recognized after the war for being a friend of the resistance and one of the Just, wrote in La Croix on 28 June 1940, lord, we ask you forgiveness. What use have we made of the victory in 1918? What use would we have made of an easy victory in 1940? (OF, 227) This meditation came to be used as a prayer in the Toulouse region. from newspaper editorials in La Dépêche to statements by intellectuals such as andré gide and Julien benda (who wrote of the obligation to “consent to sacrifice”), self-flagellation and the discussion of the benefits of not achieving an easy victory were prevalent (OF, 232).77 as laborie notes, in the summer of 1940, france was psychologically ready for the aid of a redeemer (see OF, 228). Just so, stein writes in her essay that the signing of the armistice signified that france was “saved” and “everything was over,” yet, she adds, “but it wasn’t, not at all it was just beginning for us.”78 The importance of this loaded phrase, “the winner loses,” also illuminates Toklas’s vigorous interchange in the notebook surrounding Pétain’s affirmation in his 1938 address to the veterans: “c’est un fait reconnu que la défaite réveille toujours les français” (P, 14). in her first draft, stein leaves out this one-sentence paragraph, only to include it on the following page of her notebook. Toklas marks the gap on the first page with a red star and translates the sentence herself on the left-hand page in red: “it is a recognized fact that a defeat always awakens the french people.” stein crosses this out vigorously. Her first attempt at the statement about french perseverance in the face of defeat runs like so, including the phrases she considered: “it is a recognized [a well known] fact that it is in defeat always that the real quality of the french shows itself. quickens the french people” (S). after the changes, the line reads, “it is a recognized fact that defeat always quickens the french people.” on the facing page, where stein and Toklas have the habit of marking their corrections and possible substitutions—their many exchanges revealing how intimately they 284 The Politics of Translation collaborated on the translation—Toklas writes again in red, with a small variation, “it is a recognized fact that defeat always rouses / awakens the french people” (S). stein crosses this out with her black pen. This debate between Toklas and stein shows stein considering how to frame this statement about the french character in light of current events. it has oratorical qualities; it is a grand phrase with the ring of aphorism. rather than Toklas’s suggestion of “awakens” or “rouses” for the key verb, she chooses the more active “quickens,” which implies an imminent leap into action. she crosses out her earlier, less direct syntactical structure, which would have more closely mirrored french syntax (“it is in defeat that”), opting for the more direct “defeat always quickens.” Whereas Toklas first offers “a defeat ” stein makes it more generalizable by leaving out the article. The statement not only hear- kens back to World War i (as Pétain would have it in 1938), but it is also generalized to anticipate the armistice of 1940. Translating this statement in 1942 as the war intensified around her, stein was reliving the speeches and events of just a few years previously. Her transla- tion is crafted out of a layered awareness of history, and reveals how the act of translation may make history continuous with the present. iv. conclUsion by 1941, french and english had become mixed for stein in a kind of interlanguage. “interlanguage” is a sociolinguistic term that describes a variety of language that is idiosyncratic to the speaker, and is intermediate between the speaker’s native language and the target language, since the target language will be subject to interference or admixture from the learner’s native language. crucially, though, the interlanguage will also contain elements which are not present in either the native language or the target language. The interlanguage will develop and change as the learner progresses, but may also be subject to fossilisation.79 interlanguage is found in stein’s compositions in english as well as her translations. in Paris France, which is arguably an example of her “audience writing,” stein does not capitalize “french,” just as it wouldn’t be capitalized in french; and instead of writing “neighbor- hood,” she employs phono-semantic matching and uses “quarters” for quartier. Phono-semantic matching camouflages a borrowed foreign word because it matches a target-language word phonetically and semantically (like “chase lounge” for chaise-longue).80 in Paris France 285Rachel Galvin she writes, “not to know the well known in Paris does not argue yourself unknown, because nobody knows anybody whom they do not know.”81 The phrase “argue yourself” phono-semantically matches the french argumenter, in the sense of “to prove”—a more idiomatic sentence would be, “not to know the well-known in Paris does not prove that you yourself are unknown.” The frequency of interlanguage in stein’s later work indicates that it is important to take into account her nearly 43 years of living in france and how it influenced both her political beliefs and her language use. one of my points is that stein was less of an american writer and more of an international writer poised between languages. near the end of Wars I Have Seen, when the americans have liber- ated france, stein notes the differences between british english and american english, in a comment that would serve well as a gloss on her own french-english interlanguage: so the only way the americans could change their language was by choosing words which they liked better than other words, by putting words next to each other in a different way than the english way, by shoving the language around until at last now the job is done, we use the same words as the english do but the words say an entirely different thing. (W, 171) stein indeed chose the words she liked best and shoved the language around until the job was done—not only in Wars I Have Seen, Paris France, and other wartime texts, but in her unpublished translations of Pétain as well. The translation follows a poetics that values euphony, sonorous repetition, parallel structures, and other rhetorical flourishes. Her manipulation of the speeches contradicts the notion that she ceded aesthetic control. Quite to the contrary, she embellished the original. she falls within the tradition of translators and translation theorists ranging from cicero to Jorge luis borges to venuti who have argued for the translator’s visibility. she demonstrates a commitment to a sense-for-sense translation, which, as cicero once wrote, makes the translator not a mere “interpreter” but an “orator.”82 stein sought to become the generator of text, an orator who re-voiced Pétain’s texts so as to publicize them to americans. it is of course impossible to locate stein’s intentions in these transla- tions. There are lacunae in the story of how the translations came to be, why stein abruptly stopped translating, and why the drafts remained within her notebooks rather than seeing publication. it is not simple to read a writer’s politics into her half-made gesture of an unpublished 286 The Politics of Translation translation. However, what i hope to have made clear is that the translation is a startling departure from the original and shows stein’s own distinct signature. for this reason i maintain that it is fruitful to read the translation as part of her oeuvre, and to place it within the context and the stylistic spectrum of her other writing. Her project is worth bringing out of the archive and reading as one of the literary artifacts of modernist reactionism. exploring it illuminates some of the complexities of cultural production under the occupation. i have also aimed to show that thinking about translation can bring much to socio- historical, political, and aesthetic questions in the study of modernism. Translation was famously central to many modernist poetic projects, such as Pound’s translations from the chinese, or eliot’s translations of Jules laforgue.83 but the influence courses in the other direction, too. stein’s poetics significantly informed how she translated, even when working with a utilitarian text such as a political speech. familiar steinian elements are prevalent in the text’s poetics, undermining the claim that the project was a departure for her; it indubitably reflects her idiosyncratic poetics. in recent debates about her wartime activity, the assumption that translation is a secondary and derivative activity persists. However, translation is a primary production of text, and this is what makes stein’s translation double-voiced. Ultimately, it indicates that she was even more responsible for her aspiration to complicity than her critics would have it. University of Chicago noTes i would like to thank the curators at the beinecke rare books and Manuscript library at yale University for their help. i am also grateful to Joshua Kotin, liesl olson, lindsay reckson, and the members of the spring 2013 andrew W. Mellon seminar at Johns Hopkins for the generous responses to this essay. 1 for narration of this period, see linda Wagner-Martin, Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family (new brunswick: rutgers Univ. Press, 1995) and W. g. rogers, When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person (new york: reinhart, 1948), 191. 2 Matisse traveled to nice; James Joyce and his family went to a village near vichy. for an overview of prominent artists and intellectuals’ locations when war was declared and at the armistice, see frederic spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (new Haven: yale Univ. Press, 2008), 8–13. 3 see edward burns, “gertrude stein: a complex itinerary, 1940–1944,” Jacket 2 (9 May 2012), https://jacket2.org/article/gertrude-stein-complex-itinerary- 1940%e2%80%931944; and faÿ, Les Précieux (Paris: librairie académique Perrain, 1966), 160–63. 287Rachel Galvin 4 This criticism built on similar protests that had been expressed the previous year in reaction to the 2011 “seeing gertrude stein: five stories” exhibition, which toured the contemporary Jewish Museum of san francisco and the national Portrait gallery in Washington, dc. Those protests aimed to reveal stein’s “dark side”; as one reporter wrote, “[t]he faÿ controversy is increasingly dogging the stein legacy” (Philip Kennicott, “gertrude stein in full form at Portrait gallery,” The Washington Post [21 october 2011], http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-10-21/lifestyle/35276647_1_art- collector-matisse-and-picasso-leo-stein). even earlier, information about stein’s politics was framed as a scandalous revelation in scott Heller’s article, “a study shows That gertrude stein backed the vichy government during World War ii” (Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 october 1996: a14, a16). The study Heller’s title refers to is Wanda van dusen’s essay in Modernism/modernity analzying stein’s translations of Pétain; see “Portrait of a national fetish: gertrude stein’s ‘introduction to the speeches of Maréchal Pétain’ (1942),” Modernism/modernity 3.3 (1996): 69–92. 5 not only scholars and exhibition-goers, but politicians, too, expressed their disgrun- tlement, including Manhattan borough President scott stringer and new york state assemblyman dov Hikind, who published a press release on the issue (see “Hikind demands Metropolitan Museum of art Unmask gertrude stein’s nazi Past” [1 May 2012], http://dovhikind.blogspot.com/2012/05/hikind-demands-metropolitan-museum- of.html). The museum curators amended the wall labels and pointed out that the exhibition catalog refers several times to the intercession of faÿ on stein and Toklas’s behalf. see cécile debray, “gertrude stein and Painting: from Picasso to Picabia,” in The Steins Collect, ed. Janet bishop, debray, and rebecca rabinow (new Haven: san francisco Museum of Modern art and yale Univ. Press, 2011), 238; see also, in The Steins Collect, edward burns, 265; Kate Medillo, 329; and Hélène Klein, 244, 250n26. 6 barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (new york: columbia Univ. Press, 2011), 140. see also barbara Will, “The strange Politics of gertrude stein” (Humanites Magazine [March/april 2012], www. neh.gov/humanities/2012/marchapril/feature/the-strange-politics-gertrude-stein), where she writes: “and yet throughout her life stein hewed to the political right, even signing up to be a propagandist for an authoritarian, nazi-dominated political regime.” vaclav Paris calls the drafts the “corpus delicti of her collaboration with the vichy regime” (“gertrude stein’s Translations of speeches by Philippe Pétain,” Jacket 2 [6 May 2013], http://jacket2.org/article/gertrude-steins-translations-speeches-philippe-petain). 7 see robin bates, “When great artists do bad Things,” Better Living through Beowulf (7 May 2012), http://www.betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/?p=13609. see also christopher benfey, “The alibi of ambiguity,” New Republic (28 June 2012), www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/103918/barbara-will-gertrude- stein-christopher-benfey#; emily greenhouse, “Why Won’t the Met Tell the Whole Truth about gertrude stein?,” The New Yorker (8 June 2012), www.newyorker. com/culture/culture-desk/why-wont-the-met-tell-the-whole-truth-about-gertrude- stein; alan dershowitz, “suppressing Ugly Truth for beautiful art,” Huffington Post (1 May 2012), www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/met-gertrude-stein- collaborator_b_1467174.html; and “gertrude stein: Why Her fascist Politics Matter,” The Jewish Week (24 april 2012), www.thejewishweek.com/blogs/well_versed/ gertrude_stein_why_her_fascist_politics_matter; and eitan Kensky, “gertrude stein, fascist?,” Jewish Ideas Daily (29 february 2012), http://www.jpost.com/opinion/ op-ed-contributors/Jewish-ideas-daily-gertrude-stein-fascist. for the suggestion that this furor had an impact on the White House’s correction to its 2012 Jewish 288 The Politics of Translation Heritage Month press release, see natasha Mozgovaya, “obama corrects controversial Jewish Heritage Month Proclamation” (3 May 2012), www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/ obama-corrects-controversial-jewish-heritage-month-proclamation-1.427880. 8 charles bernstein, “gertrude stein’s War years: setting the record straight,” Jacket 2 (9 May 2012), https://jacket2.org/feature/gertrude-steins-war-years-setting-record-straight. 9 see Paris; and “appendix iX—gertrude stein: september 1942–september 1944,” in The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, ed. edward burns and Ulla e. dydo (new Haven: yale Univ. Press, 1996), 401–21. Hereafter abbreviated A and cited parenthetically by page number. 10 faÿ was trained at the sorbonne and Harvard and was the first professor of american civilization at the collège de france. He became director of the bibliothèque nationale when the incumbent, Julien cain, was dismissed because he was Jewish. faÿ, who had known Pétain for twenty years, was tasked with aiding vichy in identifying freemasons and members of other secret societies, and cataloguing the archives and objects seized from Masonic lodges. after the liberation, faÿ was prosecuted for collaboration and sentenced to twenty years of forced labor. for a detailed narrative of his activities, see Will, “faÿ’s War,” in Unlikely Collaboration, 149–84. 11 burns and dydo do not provide a source for this suggestion. i have been unable to substantiate it elsewhere. 12 Pétain’s popularity rose again in January 1942. see Philippe burrin, France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise (new york: norton, 1996), 181–82. 13 stein’s neighbor was named Paul genin, and the sous-préfet, Maurice sivan. genin had helped stein translate her introduction to Pétain’s speeches into french. see A, 410. 14 burns and dydo speculate that perhaps stein continued the translation in another notebook that has been lost. see A, 409. Paris suggests that rather than recognize the “political ramifications” of her project, stein may have stopped translating because her interest waned. 15 dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934 (evanston: northwestern Univ. Press), 40. 16 see Jean-Pierre azéma, De Munich à La Libération, 1938–1944 ([Paris]: éditions du seuil, 1979), 78. Hereafter abbreviated M and cited parenthetically by page number. 17 The two scholars who have most closely examined the translations held in the stein archives are Will, whose arguments i discuss further on, and van dusen, who published stein’s draft introduction in Modernism/modernity (gertrude stein, “[introduction to the speeches of Maréchal Pétain],” ed. van dusen, Modernism/modernity 3.3 [1996], 93–96). Her reading opened the way for Will’s interpretation. in “Portrait of a national fetish,” van dusen claims that stein’s introduction to Pétain’s speeches carries out a “redemptive fetishistic ritual” (71) with an “idolatrous dimension” (75) as she portrays Pétain as “national savior and benevolent father” (75). see also Paris; burns and dydo; Will, Unlikely Collaboration; Will, “The strange Politics of gertrude stein”; and Will, “gertrude stein, bernard faÿ, and the ruthless flowers of friendship,” Modernism/ modernity 15.4 (2008): 647–63. 18 Peter Trudgill, A Glossary of Sociolinguistics (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 2003), 65. 19 gertrude stein, “Poetry and grammar,” in Stein: Writings 1932–1946, 2 vol. (new york: library of america, 1998), 2:320. Hereafter abbreviated PG and cited parenthetically by page number. 20 it is useful to contextualize stein’s translation project within the fluctuations of public opinion in france during the turning-point year of 1942. The difference between maréchalisme, or the admiration for or attachment to the person of Maréchal Pétain, 289Rachel Galvin and pétainisme, or support for the vichy government, is essential for understanding the history of the time period and situating stein’s translation (see M, 78). 21 lawrence venuti, “Translation, community, Utopia,” in The Translation Studies Reader (new york: routledge, 2000), 485. 22 stein writes in the introduction to the speeches she drafted, “about one thing they were all agreed and that is that he had achieved a miracle, without arms without any means of defense, he had succeeded in making the germans more or less keep their word with him” (stein, “[introduction],” 95). 23 stein, Wars I Have Seen (new york: random House, 1945), 206. Hereafter abbreviated W and cited parenthetically by page number. for stein’s assessment of the maquis, see W, 227. in Gertrude Stein, le Bugey, la guerre: d’août 1924 à décembre 1944 (bourg-en-bresse: Musnier-gilbert éditions, 2009), dominique saint-Pierre states that the fact that stein does not mention the maquis until page 53 of Wars I Have Seen is not surprising, given that they had a very minimal presence in belley until June 1943. 24 burns, “gertrude stein.” 25 burns (“gertrude stein”) details the specifics surrounding her work’s appearance in these resistance publications. 26 Mention of stein’s friendship with faÿ had been made in memoirs, biographies, and critical studies as early as W. g. rogers’s 1948 When This You See Remember Me, robert bridgman’s Gertrude Stein in Pieces (new york: oxford Univ. Press, 1979), James Mellow’s Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (new york: Praeger, 1974), and Wagner-Martin’s Favored Strangers. for discussion of stein’s wartime writing, see dydo and burns; Jean gallagher, The World Wars Through the Female Gaze (carbondale: southern illinois Univ. Press, 1998); Maria diedrich, “‘a book in Translation about eggs and butter’: gertrude stein’s World War ii” in Women and War: The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930s to the 1950s, ed. Maria diedrich and dorothea fischer-fornung (new york: berg, 1990), 87–106; van dusen; Marianne deKoven, Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991); Phoebe stein davis, “‘even cake gets to Have another Meaning’: History, narrative, and ‘daily living’ in gertrude stein’s World War ii Writings,” Modern Fiction Studies 44.3 (1998): 568–607; liesl olson, “gertrude stein, William James, and Habit in the shadow of War,” in Modernism and the Ordinary (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 2009), 89–114; John Wittier-ferguson, “The liberation of gertrude stein: War and Writing,” Modernism/modernity 8.3 (2001): 405–28; and dana cairns Watson, Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens (nashville: vanderbilt Univ. Press, 2005). 27 a study based on archival research in Pound’s fbi files shows that the poet engaged in myriad “seditious actions on behalf of the fascist axis,” not just the radio broadcasts (Matthew feldman, “The ‘Pound case’ in Historical Perspective: an archival overview,” Journal of Modern Literature 35.2 [2012]: 92). 28 rogers, 219. 29 spotts, 15. 30 investigation of vichy only began in earnest in the early 1970s, prompted in large part by the work of american political scientist and historian robert o. Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (new york: alfred a. Knopf, 1972). see also dudley andrew and steven Ungar, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2008); denis Hollier, Absent Without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War (cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997); and Zeev sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (berkeley: Univ. of california Press, 1986). 290 The Politics of Translation 31 a picture of what life was like has begun to emerge with spotts’s study and those of stéphanie corcy (La vie culturelle sous l’Occupation [Paris: Perrin, 2005]); laurence bertrand dorléac (L’art en guerre, France 1938–1947 [Paris: Paris Musées, 2012]); gilles and Jean robert ragache (La vie quotidienne des écrivains et des artistes sous l’Occupation: 1940–1944 [Paris: Hachette, 1988]); and Jean-Pierre rioux (La vie culturelle sous Vichy [brussels: éditions complexe, 1990]). The “shameful peace” was Jean cocteau’s term for the period. 32 among the multiple examples of this sort of critique published in 2011 and 2012, Philip Kennicott wrote in a particularly choleric article for The Washington Post that stein “wrote reams of gibberish, either in a singsong style . . . or in a hermetically sealed private language that she absurdly considered an analog of cubism” (Kennicott, “gertrude stein in full form”). 33 Michael lerner, “editor’s note on ‘Why the Witch-Hunt against gertrude stein?’ by renate stendhal,” Tikkun Magazine (4 June 2012), http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/ editors-note-on-why-the-witch-hunt-against-gertrude-stein-by-renate-stendhal. 34 lerner, “editor’s note.” 35 lerner’s argument centers on the moral obligation incumbent upon all artists, writers, and intellectuals “to fight against the rise of evil (as manifested in racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism, anti-islam, anti-democracy, destruction of human rights, repression of free speech and freedom of assembly, destruction of the environment, militarism, torture, etc.)” (lerner, “editor’s note”). 36 lerner, “editor’s note.” see also Zofia lesinska, “gertrude stein’s War autobiographies: reception, History, and dialogue,” LIT 9 (1999): 313–42. 37 see david caplan, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 2005), 14; Mutlu Konuk blasing, Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O’Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrill (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 1995); and lawrence s. rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (new Haven: yale Univ. Press, 1998). 38 James longenbach, Modern Poetry after Modernism (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 6. caplan discusses both blasing and longenbach, differentiating his own method from both of theirs by specifying that he attends to historical contingency (see caplan, 141n17). see also blasing, 16–17. 39 Williams writes: “To me the sonnet form is thoroughly banal because it is a word in itself whose meaning is definitely fascistic” (Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets [new york: new directions Publishing, 1985], 88). 40 for a discussion of stein’s concept of “audience writing,” see dydo, Gertrude Stein. 41 in Poetry and the Press in Wartime (1936–1945), forthcoming from oxford Univ. Press, i argue that stein composed Wars I Have Seen to record what was happening in bilignin in the near absence of daily newspapers. she creates lyric outbursts within the prose that encode and dwell on moments of fear and danger, even as they inscribe an authorial presence above and against the norms of war reportage. These lyric outbursts, which i call “reverse epiphanies,” work to contain disturbing incidents and rein in the felt perception of threat, instead of signaling a sudden revelation as epipanies usually do. reverse epiphanies are lyric eruptions within the continuity of the prose that assert the author’s presence. 42 stein, Wars I Have Seen, gertrude stein and alice b. Toklas Papers, yale collection of american literature, beinecke rare book and Manuscript library, Mss 76, box 80. 43 Peter nicholls, “Wars i Have seen,” in A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, ed. stephen fredman (Malden: Wiley-blackwell, 2005), 16. 44 lesinska, 314. 291Rachel Galvin 45 Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (evanston: northwestern Univ. Press, 1999), 18. 46 Max eastman, “The cult of Unintelligibility,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 158 (1929): 632–39; eastman, “non-communicative art,” The Freeman 4.16 (3 May 1954): 571. 47 see Jennifer ashton, From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 2005); annalisa Zox-Weaver, Women Modernists and Fascism (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 2011); and lisa ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (ithaca: cornell Univ. Press, 1991). 48 ashton, 68. “Masterpiece” is a term that stein used throughout her work; see, for instance, “What are Master-pieces and Why are There so few of Them,” in gertrude stein, Writings, 1932–1946 (new york: The library of america, 1998), 353–364. This argument has been made persuasively by ashton and by lisa siraganian, who argues that stein’s work is not in fact “indeterminate,” as scholars ranging from Perloff to Juliana spahr have maintained (“out of air: Theorizing the art object in gertrude stein and Wyndham lewis,” Modernism/modernity 10.4 [2003]: 669). 49 see also siraganian, 661–66. 50 in a letter dated 1932, stein writes of the “exactitude of abstract thought and poetry as created by exactness and as far as possible disembodiedment if one may use such a word, creating sense by intensity of exactness” (cited in dydo, Gertrude Stein, 25). 51 Pétain’s own composition method was simply to revise the draft provided by his assistants. 52 benfey; renate stendhal, “Why the Witch-Hunt against gertrude stein?,” Tikkun Magazine (4 June 2012), http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/ why-the-witch-hunt-against-gertrude-stein. 53 Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 139. 54 Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 140. 55 saint augustine, for one, argued that word-for-word translation of the Hebrew bible into greek preserved its divinely inspired message. see augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. d. W. robertson, Jr. (indianapolis: bobbs-Merrill, 1958). 56 John Whittier-ferguson observes that since the 1930s, it has been a commonplace of criticism to describe stein as childish and incapable of sophisticated analysis, from Wyndham lewis’s negative assessment in Time and Western Man to ben ray redman’s positive evaluation in The Saturday Review. see “The liberation of gertrude stein: War and Writing,” Modernism/modernity 8.3 [2001]: 405–28. 57 lori chamberlain, “gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” in The Translation Studies Reader, 314. 58 george steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 314; Jerome, “letter to Pammachius,” trans. Kathleen davis, in The Translation Studies Reader, 25. steiner continues, “There is a also a sadness after success, the augustinian tristitia which follows on the cognate acts of erotic and of intellection possession” (steiner, 314). 59 chamberlain, 314. 60 stein, Tender Buttons, in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. carl van vechten (new york: random House, 1946), 508. 61 friedrich schleiermacher, “on the different Methods of Translating,” in The Translation Studies Reader, 53. 292 The Politics of Translation 62 steinese is an alternative is “steinish,” which was used in the newspapers during stein’s lifetime. see olson, 339. 63 Philippe Pétain and gabriel louis-Jaray, Paroles aux Français. Messages et écrits, 1934–1941 (lyon: H. lardanchet, 1941), 16, 19 (hereafter abbreviated P and cited parenthetically by page number); gertrude stein, “The speeches of Maréchal Pétain,” gertrude stein and alice b. Toklas Papers, yale collection of american literature, beinecke rare book and Manuscript library, Mss 76, box 64, folders 1140–42 (here- after abbreviated S and cited parenthetically). 64 Will, “lost in Translation: stein’s vichy collaboration,” Modernism/modernity 11.4 (2004): 653. 65 Philippe Pétain, ferdinand bouyssy, gabriel louis Jaray, and émile Pons, L’Armistice du 25 juin 1940: appels aux Français (royat: fédération des associations françaises pour le développement des relations avec l’étranger et comité france- amérique, 1940), 41–42. 66 burrin, 70. 67 see Pierre laborie, L’opinion française sous Vichy (Paris: seuil, 1990), 229–30. Hereafter abbreviated OF and cited parenthetically by page number. 68 for discussion of the emotional tone of this speech, see burrin, 10. 69 Pétain, L’armistice; P, 69. 70 andré Kaspi. La deuxième guerre mondiale: chronologie commentée (Paris: éditions complexe, 1995), 98. My translation. 71 Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 103. 72 stein uses similar language in the first scene of her 1944 play in savoy; or Yes Is for a Very Young Man, which is set in June 1940 (stein, In Savoy: Or, Yes Is for a Very Young Man [alexandria: alexander street Press, 2005]). 73 see Jacques le groignec, Pétain et les Allemands (Paris: nouvelles editions latines, 1997), 206. 74 James shields, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (london: routledge, 2007), 16. 75 stein, “The Winner loses: a Picture of occupied france,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, 560. 76 stein, “The Winner loses,” 566. 77 see OF, 225–28. 78 stein, “The Winner loses,” 553. 79 Trudgill, 65. 80 see ghil’ad Zuckermann, Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (london: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 81 stein, Paris France, 14. 82 Marcus Tullius cicero, De inventione, De Optimo genere oratorum, Topica, trans. H. M. Hubbell (cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press: 1976), 356. 83 H. d., W. b. yeats, James Joyce, and many other modernists maintained an active translation practice. see stephen yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (new york: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) for analysis of how modernist poets pursued a program of cultural renewal through translation. see also yao, “Translation studies and Modernism,” in A Handbook of Modernism Studies, ed. Jean-Michel rabaté (chicester, West sussex: Wiley-blackwell, 2013), 209–20. work_lzapa7ym3rac3gium7fbirfhcm ---- The Botanical within the Built: Visual Art and Urban Botany Julie-Anne Milinski Diploma of Visual Art Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) Bachelor of Fine Art Honours (1st Class) Queensland College of Art Arts, Education and Law Griffith University Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy February 2016 i Abstract This research project considers the urban environment as a valuable site to examine humanity’s relationship to nature, specifically botany, through a visual arts practice. Botany as it is used here is defined as all plant life. The project investigates a fascination with the evidence of humans’ endeavours to contain, control, and manipulate the flora in their urban habitats. The creative works and exegesis speculatively explore the potential of everyday urban encounters with botany to perceive nature as something intrinsic to both the city and ourselves, by considering flora as a tactile, vital cohabitant. Using botany as a metonym for the wider natural world, the creative works are informed by specific contemporary environmental issues, including habitat damage and encroachment, and the effects of waste associated with consumer culture. Urban botanical sites and domesticated plants have informed the drawings, sculpture, and installations that form the studio outcomes. In addition to living plants, two significant groups of materials were used in the creation of the sculptural works. The first are products associated with construction and landscaping, which signify the human intention to alter natural environments. The second are forms of consumer packaging commonly linked to environmental degradation. The creative and theoretical research asserts the vitality of these materials, revealing their potential liveliness in an ecosystem. By highlighting the entanglement of living and non-living entities that make up our urban habitats, the creative works challenge the concept of the ‘natural’ environment as being distant, wild and pure, and unsullied by the presence of humans. This research contributes to the complex discussions surrounding environmental care, and the significance of personal practices in the construction of environmental ethics and aesthetics. It considers how an individual art practice can focus on personal interactions with the botanical world to demonstrate new ways of seeing this symbiotic relationship. ii Statement of Originality This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself. _____________________________ Julie-Anne Milinski Table of Contents Abstract i Statement of Originality ii List of Illustrations iii Acknowledgment of Assistance xii Introduction : Dismantling Binaries 1 Chapter 1 : Biosphere—The Environment of the City 8 Introduction 8 Personal Perceptions of Nature and Culture: From Town and Country to the City 10 The Biophilia Hypothesis 10 The Hybrid City 14 Aesthetic Appreciation of the Hybrid City 23 The Vitality of Plants 29 The Interconnectedness of ‘Things’ and the Vibrancy of Matter 34 Contemporary Consumer Culture and Waste 36 Chapter 2 : Glasshouse—The Environment of Artists 41 Introduction 41 Natural Manhattan: Time Landscape, The Highline, and The New York Earth Room 46 Judy Pfaff: Second Nature 56 Joanna Langford: Waste Lands 63 Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger: The Water Hole 71 Patricia Piccinini: Ethical Dilemmas 79 Simon Starling: Lively Plants and Materials 87 Chapter 3 : Indoors and Outdoors—Materials and Methods 93 Introduction 93 Walking 95 Collecting 98 Crocheting 99 Botanical Drawing 103 Chapter 4 : Hothouse—The Environment of the Studio 111 Introduction 111 re-inventing eden (scenario #7) – revisions and emergents, 2012 112 A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession, 2012-15 120 Wilhelmina Szeretlek! 2012-13 128 Geniculum, 2013 136 Jardinière, 2014 146 Transplanted: Philadelphia Residency, Crane Arts Centre, 2014 157 • NYC / Philadelphia perambulatory harness proposition (come together fall apart, come together again fall apart again), 2014 160 • Soft Tags for the City, 2014 167 • The Philadelphia Magic Gardens 170 PlastiCity and PlastiScenery (not-so-still lives), 2015–16 173 Conclusion 182 Bibliography 186 iii List of Figures Figure 1. Natasha Bieniek Biophilia 2015, oil on Dibond, 9 x 9cm. Image source: http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/wynne/2015/29647/. 13 Figure 2. Base of tree on Grey Street, Southbank, Brisbane 2013 15 Figure 3. Queensland College of Arts Graduation Exhibition’s opening night, 27 November 2014. View from the Griffith University Art Gallery, marquee collapsing under the weight of golf-ball size hailstones. 19 Figure 4. Vertical and Balcony Gardens, One Central Park, Sydney 2015 21 Figure 5. Abandoned fishing village of Houtouwan, China 2015. Image source: https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/creeping-vines-abandoned- village. 22 Figure 6. Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) and Gemini Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawaii 2015 25 Figure 7. Sansevieria trifasciata ‘Laurentii’ cuttings 2014 30 Figure 8. Chris Jordan Midway: Message from the Gyre (I) 2009, digital print, 63.5 x 76cm. Image source: http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery /midway/#CF000313%2018x24. 38 Figure 9. Peter Dombrovskis Election Day Poster 1983, offset lithograph, 90 x 75cm. Private collection, Victoria. Image courtesy and © The Wilderness Society Collection and Liz Dombrovkis. Image source: Rachel Kent, In the Balance: Art for a Changing World, ex. cat. (Sydney NSW: Museum of Contemporary Art Limited, 2010). 42 Figure 10. Alan Sonfist Time Landscape 1978, plot of land planted with native flora, 776 x 1219cm. Image source: http://www.alansonfist.com /landscapes_time_landscape_nomenu.html. 47 Figure 11. Alan Sonfist Time Landscape 1978 (detail) 2012 49 Figure 12. Christo and Jeanne Claude Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida 1980–83, eleven islands situated in Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, surrounded with 603,870 square metres of floating pink woven polypropylene fabric covering the surface of the water and extending out from each island into the bay, dimensions variable. © 1983 Christo. Photographer: Wolfgang Volz. Image source: http://christojeanneclaude.net/projects/surrounded-islands ?images=completed#.Vl0bttDrPGs. 51 Figure 13. The High Line, Manhattan 2012 52 iv Figure 14. Walter De Maria The New York Earth Room 1977, dirt and Plexiglas barrier, 197m3 of dirt, covering 335m2 x 56cm. Installation view, Walter De Maria. The New York Earth Room, DIA Foundation, New York 2014. Image source: https://everplaces.com/users/a1711d 45eec24afba396373d49665a29/places/5476cc869d2e4ed3883b3c3 826cc5001/images/1be0b2adfdb94057bc7edffbd85e02dd.jpg. 54 Figure 15. Judy Pfaff There Is a Field, I Will Meet You There (Rumi) 2014, steel, Plexiglas, fluorescent lights, plastic, expanded foam, dimensions variable. Installation view, Judy Pfaff. Run Amok, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York 2014. Image source: http://lorettahoward.com/ artists/pfaff. 56 Figure 16. Judy Pfaff Hanging Judge (centre) 2014, metal, wood, dimensions variable (centre) and Let Sixteen Cowboys Sing Me a Song (far wall) 2014, mixed-media construction, 284 x 737 x 122cm. Installation view, Judy Pfaff. Second Nature, Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York 2014. Image source: http://lorettahoward.com/artists/pfaff. 57 Figure 17. Judy Pfaff Second Nature 2014. Installation view, Judy Pfaff. Second Nature, Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York 2014. Image source: http:// lorettahoward.com/artists/pfaff. 58 Figure 18. Judy Pfaff Cahoots 2014, paper lantern, paper, pigmented expanded foam, acrylic, resin, leaves 101.6 x 61 x 50.8cm. Image source: http://www.judypfaffstudio.com/sculpture/?album=5&gallery=136&pi d=1250. 58 Figure 19. Kelly Jazvac Recent Landscapes (plastiglomerate) 2014, plastiglomerate samples, ceramic stand, wooden shelf, 21.25 x 44.38 x 10.63cm. Image source: http://www.louisbjames.com/?cat=33. 59 Figure 20. Adrián Villar Rojas The Evolution of God 2014–15, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view, Adrián Villar Rojas. The Evolution of God 2014 –2015, The High Line, New York, 2014. 61 Figure 21. Building site in Chelsea, Manhattan 2014 62 Figure 22. Garbage on a footpath in Chelsea, Manhattan 2014 63 Figure 23. Joanna Langford Crawl Space 2012, galvanised wire, acrylic paint, electrical wire, LED lights, plywood, recycled silage wrap, dimensions variable. Installation view, The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT7), Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 2012. Image source: http://www.abc.net.au/news /2012-12-11/joanna-langford/4420518. 64 Figure 24. Louise Bourgeois Crouching Spider 2003, bronze, dimensions variable. Image source: https://mikebyrne30.files.wordpress.com /2013/11/crouching-spider-2003.jpg. 65 v Figure 25. Joanna Langford The High Country 2012, mixed media including plastic milk bottles and silage wrap, dimensions variable. Installation view, Christchurch 2012. Image source: http://www.scapepublic art.org.nz/scape-6-the-high-country. 66 Figure 26. Joanna Langford The High Country (detail) 2012. Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/christchurchcitylibraries/8165613227/i n/photostream/. 67 Figure 27. Pascale Marthine Tayou Plastic bags 2001–10, plastic bags, 600 x 600 x 600cm (variable). Installation view, The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT7), Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 2012. Image source: https://www .flickr.com/photos/queenslandartgallery/5248486740. 68 Figure 28. Gimhongsok Canine Construction 2009, resin, edition 1 of 2, 162 x 235 x 88cm. Image source: http://blog.qagoma.qld.gov.au /gimhongsoks-canine-construction/. 69 Figure 29. Jeff Koons Balloon Dog (Blue) 1994–2000, mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent colour coating, 307.3 x 363.2 x 114.3cm © Jeff Koons, 5 unique versions (Blue, Magenta, Yellow, Orange, Red). Image source: http://www.jeffkoons.com/artwork/celebration/balloon -dog-0. 70 Figure 30. Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger The Water Hole 2008, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view (figures 30–33), Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger. The Water Hole, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2008. Image source: Juliana Engberg, Gerda Steiner, and Jörg Lenzlinger, Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger: The Water Hole, ex. cat. (Melbourne: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2008). 72 Figure 31. Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger The Water Hole (detail) 2008 73 Figure 32. Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger The Water Hole 2008 75 Figure 33. Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger The Water Hole (detail) 2008 76 Figure 34. Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger Bush Power 2014, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view (figures 34–35), You Imagine What You Desire: 19th Biennale of Sydney, Cockatoo Island, Sydney, 2014. Image source: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign /australia-culture-blog/gallery/2014/mar/19/sydney-biennale-2014- in-pictures#img-3. 77 Figure 35. Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger Bush Power (detail) 2014 78 vi Figure 36. Patricia Piccinini, Plasticology, 1997–2000, interactive video installation, 57 TV monitors, motion-sensors and computer digital modelling and animation, dimensions variable. Image source: http: //www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/31/Patricia_Piccinini/250/35056/. 79 Figure 37. Patricia Piccinini The Stags 2009, fibreglass, automotive paint, plastic, stainless steel, leather, rubber tyres, 196 x 224 x 167cm. Image source: http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/31 /Patricia_Piccinini/1202/42827. 80 Figure 38. Patricia Piccinini Nest 2006, fibreglass, auto paint, leather, steel, polycarbonate, 90 x 150 x 170cm. Image source: http://www.ngv .vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/81434/. 81 Figure 39. Patricia Piccinini Truck Babies 1999, fibreglass, automotive paint, plastic, steel, wood, truck parts, 120 x 184 x 88cm. Image source: http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Learning/docs/Online_Re sources/Piccinini_online_resource.pdf. 82 Figure 40. Patricia Piccinini Radial 2005, fibreglass, automotive paint, stainless steel, 70 x 60 x 21cm. Image source: http://www.patriciapiccinini.net /165/102. 83 Figure 41. Patricia Piccinini Radial (detail) 2005. Image source: http://www .patriciapiccinini.net/286/38. 84 Figure 42. Patricia Piccinini Metaflora (Twin Rivers Mouth) 2015, silicone, bronze, fibreglass, human hair, 150 x 32 x 34cm. Image source: http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/381/78. 85 Figure 43. Patricia Piccinini Meditations on the Continuum of Vitality (Garden) 2014, ink and gouache on paper, 57.2 × 76.8 cm. Image source: http://www.artnet.com/artists/patricia-piccinini/meditations-on-the- continuum-of-vitality-garden-a-Zf-CwR5nebak0KXr26qA_A2. 86 Figure 44. Simon Starling Plant Room 2008, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view (figures 44–45), Simon Starling Plant Room, Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria 2008. Image Source: http://www .lehmtonerde.at/en/projects/project.php?pID=59. 87 Figure 45. Simon Starling Plant Room (interior view) 2008 88 Figure 46. Simon Starling Rescued Rhododendrons 5 1999, C-type print on aluminium. Image source: http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk/work.aspx ?obj=32356. 90 vii Figure 47. Simon Starling Island for Weeds 2003, soil, Rhododendrons, water, plastic, metal, self-regulating pressure system, dimensions variable. Installation view, Simon Starling, 50th International Exhibition of Art, Venice Biennale, Scottish Pavillion, Venice 2003. Image source: http://arttattler.com/Images/NorthAmerica/Massachusetts/North%20 Adams/Simon%20Starling/Island-for-Weeds.jpg. 91 Figure 48. Robert Smithson Floating Island to Travel around Manhattan Island 1970, pencil on paper, 48 x 61cm. Image source: http://blogs. walkerart.org/ecp/wp-content/ecp/floating_island_800.jpg. 91 Figure 49. Detail of Julie-Anne Milinski’s studio at Queensland College of Art 2015 94 Figure 50. Paris bus shelter with rooftop garden 2012 96 Figure 51. Flower Dome, Gardens by the Bay Singapore 2013 97 Figure 52. Monstera deliciosa leaf crocheted from flagging tape 2014 101 Figure 53. Scented plastic bin-liners, cut and crocheted 2013 103 Figure 54. Snapshot of backyard biodiversity Camp Hill, orchid, fern and weeds 2013 105 Figure 55. Margaret Mee Clusia grandiflora 1987, watercolour on paper, 66 x 48.5cm. Image source: Shirley Sherwood, Contemporary Botanical Artists: The Shirley Sherwood Collection (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson Ltd, 1996). 106 Figure 56. Margaret Mee Philodendron Rio Negro Amazonas (undated), watercolour on paper, 64 x 47cm. Image source: Shirley Sherwood, Contemporary Botanical Artists: The Shirley Sherwood Collection (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson Ltd, 1996). 107 Figure 57. Julie-Anne Milinski Untitled (subject Sansevieria trifasciata growing through sponge, recovered from under Jude’s deck on the Brisbane River) 2013, pencil on watercolour paper, 28 x 33cm 108 Figure 58. Pollarded willow trees in Zeeland, Netherlands. Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollarding. 109 Figure 59. Gardens by the Bay construction site Singapore 2012 113 Figure 60. Tree staking Singapore 2012 114 Figure 61. Julie-Anne Milinski re-inventing eden (scenario #7) – revisions and emergents (detail) 2012, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view (figures 61–65), Triangulate, Brisbane Experimental Art Festival, Metro Arts, Brisbane 2012. Photographer: Heidi Stevens. 115 viii Figure 62. Julie-Anne Milinski Brachychiton rupestris linoleumii 2012, acrylic paint, nylon builders line, plastic bottles, plastic bottle rack, vinyl flooring, steel, hand cut acrylic sheeting, 190 x 165 x 172cm. Photographer: Heidi Stevens. 116 Figure 63. Video still of live performance, BEAF 2012. Photographer: Rick Milinski. 117 Figure 64. Julie-Anne Milinski re-inventing eden (scenario #7) – revisions and emergents (detail) 2012. Photographer: Heidi Stevens. 118 Figure 65. Julie-Anne Milinski re-inventing eden (scenario #7) – revisions and emergents 2012. Photographer: Heidi Stevens. 119 Figure 66. Plastic bag in tree, Brisbane River 2012 121 Figure 67. Julie-Anne Milinski A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession 2012, lime-, rose-, orange-, and apple- scented plastic bin-liners, dimensions variable. Installation view, The Line, Webb Gallery, Queensland College of Art, Brisbane 2012. Photographer: Heidi Stevens. 124 Figure 68. Julie-Anne Milinski A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession (detail) 2012. Photographer: Heidi Stevens. 125 Figure 69. Julie-Anne Milinski A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession 2012–15, lime-, rose-, orange-, and apple- scented plastic bin-liners, dimensions variable. Installation view (figures 69–70), Julie-Anne Milinski. A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession, White Studio, QCA, Brisbane 2015. 126 Figure 70. Julie-Anne Milinski A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession 2012–15 127 Figure 71. Wilhelmina Milinski’s Sansevieria trifasciata, Carnegie, Melbourne 2013 129 Figure 72. Julie-Anne Milinski Wilhelmina Szeretlek! (detail) 2012–13, Sansevieria trifasciata, soil, hessian, nylon builders line, marine ply, pine, acrylic paint, dimensions variable. Photographer: Carl Warner. 131 Figure 73. Julie-Anne Milinski Wilhelmina Szeretlek! (detail) 2012–13 132 Figure 74. Julie-Anne Milinski Wilhelmina Szeretlek! (trial installation) 2012–13 133 Figure 75. Julie-Anne Milinski Wilhelmina Szeretlek! (trial installation) 2012–13 134 Figure 76. Studio documentation, rampant doilies 2015 135 Figure 77. Work in progress (trial installation) 2013 137 ix Figure 78. Henri Rousseau The Dream 1910, oil on canvas, 204.5 × 298.5cm. Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Rousseau#/media /File: Henri_Rousseau_-_Il_sogno.jpg. 138 Figure 79. Monstera deliciosa QCA Library 2013 139 Figure 80. Julie-Anne Milinski geniculum drawing study #1 (observation + forgetting MHO5/6) 2013, pencil and acrylic on marine ply, 31 x 31cm. Installation view (figures 80–85), Julie-Anne Milinski. Geniculum. The Hold Artspace, West End, Brisbane 2013. Photographer: Luke Kidd. 140 Figure 81. Julie-Anne Milinski geniculum drawing study #2 (observation + reflection on G.O.) 2013, pencil and acrylic on marine ply, 21 x 21cm. Photographer: Luke Kidd. 141 Figure 82. Julie-Anne Milinski geniculum drawing study #3 (observation + reflection on H.R.) 2013, pencil and acrylic on marine ply, 50.5 x 31cm. Photographer: Luke Kidd. 142 Figure 83. Julie-Anne Milinski Monstera mirabilis 2013, coconut fibre, earthworms, flagging tape, Monstera deliciosa, plastic sheet, soil, wire, dimensions variable. Photographer: Luke Kidd. 143 Figure 84. Julie-Anne Milinski 1.194 km (green-mound drawing) 2013, flagging tape, dimensions variable. Photographer: Luke Kidd. 144 Figure 85. Julie-Anne Milinski emerge/recede (branch studies) 2013, acrylic paint, poplar dowel, pine dowel, dimensions variable. Photographer: Luke Kidd. 145 Figure 86. Jeff Koons Puppy (Vase) 1998, glazed white ceramic vase, 44.5 x 27.9 x 41.9cm with incised signature, dated ‘98 and stamp numbered 931/3000 on the underside. Image Source: http://www.phillips.com /detail/JEFF-KOONS/NY030115/298?fromSearch=jeff&search Page=1. 148 Figure 87. Studio documentation, maquette 2014 149 Figure 88. Julie-Anne Milinski Jardinière (detail) 2014, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photographer: Joachim Froese. 150 Figure 89. Patricia Piccinini Summer Love (detail) 2001, fibreglass and automotive paint, 62 x 90 x 100cm. Image source: http://www .patriciapiccinini.net/archives/carnuggetsgl/carnug02.html. 151 Figure 90. Monstera deliciosa fruit and flower, SW1 Offices, South Brisbane (near my studio in Southbank) 2014 152 Figure 91. Julie-Anne Milinski Soft deliciosa 2014, flagging tape, cotton, polyester fibre, dimensions variable 152 x Figure 92. Jardinière in progress with wallpaper experimentation 2014 153 Figure 93. Jardinière in crate 2014 154 Figure 94. Julie-Anne Milinski Jardinière 2014, mixed media including flagging tape, marine ply wood, Monstera deliciosa, soil, wire, plaster bandage, Plaster of Paris, plastic bottles and containers, PVC pipe, gloss enamel paint, dimensions variable. Installation view, Julie-Anne Milinski. Jardinière, artisan, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane 2014. Photographer: Joachim Froese. 156 Figure 95. Caity Reynolds, Sonya Peters and Debra Porch, studio at Crane Old School, Philadelphia 2014 157 Figure 96. Road works outside Crane Old School Studios, Philadelphia 2014 159 Figure 97. Potted plants next to Freeway, Philadelphia 2014 160 Figure 98. Walking rope. Image source: http://www.amazon.com/Brand-New- World-Walking-Rope/dp/B001AZ9UCI#biss-product-description- and-details. 161 Figure 99. Julie-Anne Milinski NYC / Philadelphia perambulatory harness proposition (come together fall apart, come together again fall apart again) 2014, brass rings and connectors, flagging tape, found flagging tape, found packaging, plastic bag, dimensions variable. Installation view, The Unpredictable Conceptions in Trans-disciplinary Collaboration, Crane Arts, Philadelphia 2014. 162 Figure 100. Julie-Anne Milinski NYC / Philadelphia perambulatory harness proposition (come together fall apart, come together again fall apart again) (detail) 2014 163 Figure 101. Julie-Anne Milinski NYC / Philadelphia perambulatory harness proposition (come together fall apart, come together again fall apart again) (detail) 2014 163 Figure 102. Julie-Anne Milinski Top loader 2014, brass ring and connector, flagging tape, found packaging, dimensions variable 164 Figure 103. Julie-Anne Milinski and workers unknown Cautionary tails 2014, found flagging tape, 93 x 25cm 165 Figure 104. Julie-Anne Milinski NYC / Philadelphia perambulatory harness proposition (come together fall apart, come together again fall apart again) (detail) 2014 166 Figure 105. Studio experimentation, pipe cleaner leaves 2014 167 Figure 106. Julie-Anne Milinski Soft tag: pipe cleaners 2014, pipe cleaner, dimensions and locations variable 168 xi Figure 107. Julie-Anne Milinski Soft tag: pipe cleaners 2014, pipe cleaner, dimensions and locations variable 168 Figure 108. Julie-Anne Milinski Soft tag: rose petals 2014, rose petals, locations variable. Photographer: Caity Reynolds. 169 Figure 109. Philadelphia Magic Gardens Philadelphia 2014 170 Figure 110. Isaiah Zagar in mosaic-covered laneway off South Street, Philadelphia 2014 171 Figure 111. Philadelphia Magic Gardens (stairway) Philadelphia 2014 172 Figure 112. Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiCity and PlastiScenery (not-so-still-lives) (trial installation) 2016, mixed media including water, concrete, glass jars and bottles, plastic bottles, PVC pipe, soil, artificial turf, plants, plastic bags, aluminium, dimensions variable 173 Figure 113. Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiScenery (not-so-still-lives) (detail) 2016, sand-blasted bottle, found concrete, ivy, water, dimensions variable 175 Figure 114. Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiCity (trial installation) 2016, aluminium, mixed media including PVC pipe, plastic containers, Sansevieria trifasciata ‘Laurentii’, soil, dimensions variable 176 Figure 115. Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiCity (detail) 2016, plastic container, Sansevieria trifasciata ‘Laurentii’, soil, dimensions variable 177 Figure 116. Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiCity (detail) 2016, plastic container, Chlorophytum comosum, water, frosted and laser etched acrylic sheet, pine dowel, dimensions variable 178 Figure 117. Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiCity (detail) 2016, sanded PVC pipe, acrylic on plywood, concrete, pine, plastic, dimensions variable 179 Figure 118. Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiScenery (not-so-still-lives) (detail) 2016, mixed media including sand-blasted bottles, cast concrete, plastic, radiata pine, steel, paint, water, dimensions variable 180 xii Acknowledgement of Assistance I would like to express my immense gratitude to my academic supervisors, Associate Professor Debra Porch and Dr Sebastian Di Mauro. Throughout this project, they have challenged and supported my work, assisting me to develop as a researcher and an artist. I am also grateful to the QCA community: Associate Professor Donna Marcus for her support and advice; my postgraduate peers Alannah Gunther, Sonya Peters, Jude Roberts, Michelle Roberts, and Glen Skein for their interest, assistance and companionship in the studio; Andrew Forsyth and David Sawtell in the QCA workshop for their knowledge and expertise; and Aileen Randle for her administrative assistance. My sincere thanks to Evie Franzidis for her feedback, editing assistance, and encouragement. The support and understanding from my family and friends has been appreciated over the course of this project. Wendy Grace and Kellie Wells have maintained an enduring interest in my progress; their friendship has been grounding and a reminder of life outside the research bubble. Their commitment to their own art practices is a source of inspiration to me. Most significantly, the unwavering faith, extraordinary support, and endless good humour of my husband Rick Milinski has sustained me through this project, for which he has my deepest grattitude. The usual answer that environment is our natural surroundings obviously will not do, for this overlooks the fact that most people’s lives are far removed from any kind of nature setting. Indeed, such a setting is even difficult to identify, since nature, in the sense of a landscape unaffected by human agency, has long since disappeared in nearly every region of the world. —Arnold Berleant1 1 Arnold Berleant, ed., “Introduction: Art, Environment and the Shaping of Experience,” in Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2002), 6. 1 Introduction: Dismantling Binaries With more than half of the world’s population residing in cities, the majority of humanity’s contact with other species, both plant and animal, is experienced within the built environment.2 My PhD research project, “The Botanical within the Built: Visual Art and Urban Botany”, has focussed on the commonplace botanical settings that city residents would typically encounter within the context of densely populated, built places. I question how urban encounters with botany, specifically “the plant life of a particular region, habitat, or geological period”, offer the potential to perceive nature as something intrinsic to both the city and ourselves.3 At the core of my speculative studio research is a lifelong fascination with plants and gardens, and the evidence of human endeavours to contain, control, and manipulate the flora within our habitats. While I appreciate the significance of ecosystems where human presence is less intrusive, and acknowledge the importance of preserving habitats to maintain biodiversity, this is not the focus of my enquiry. The consideration of flora as a lively, tactile cohabitant is key to the research. By collapsing the distance between our immediate habitat and an out-dated notion of some exterior wilderness as being ‘true nature’, I have investigated current concerns of both domesticated and urban-situated botany in our immediate vicinity, and how these relate to our attitudes and actions towards the greater environment. I argue that this approach denaturalises a nature–culture division by looking at alternative ways of seeing our entanglement to both the living and non-living entities that make up our personal environment. Geographer Sarah Whatmore has examined the continuous daily interactions between society and nature that destabilise the notion of these concepts as two distinct geographical sites. She notes that contemporary places and creatures deemed to be 2 United Nations, “World’s Population Increasingly Urban with More Than Half Living in Urban Areas,” United Nations: Department of Economics and Social Affairs, last modified 10 July 2014, accessed 20 July 2015, http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-urbanization-prospects- 2014.html. 3 Angus Stevenson, ed., “Botany," in Oxford Dictionary of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), accessed 10 January 2016. Oxford Reference. 2 wild are considered to reside “outside the compass of human society”.4 She cites Tim Ingold’s observation that “something . . . must be wrong somewhere, if the only way to understand our own creative involvement in the world is by first taking ourselves out of it”.5 Whatmore argues that the parameters of contemporary environmental politics have been set by this concept of the wild as “pristine exterior, the touchstone of an original nature”.6 Biologist Tim Low concurs that we have been “sold” a concept of nature that is detached from humanity—living “in wild places”—but he argues that wilderness is all around us in the populated areas in which we reside.7 Low argues vehemently that when making environmental decisions, humans, as “ecosystem engineers”,8 need to consider the wild plants and animals thriving in human environments that have adapted to rely on our infrastructure and activity for survival.9 Thus, both Whatmore and Low interrogate urban environments for inclusive understandings of human relationships to nature. Similarly, my research has examined the built environment and the specific botany I encounter and experience in the course of everyday life. I argue that this approach to the mundane has revealed nature as intrinsic to both the city and humans. As Pauline von Bonsdorff, Professor of Art and Education at University of Jyväskylä, notes, Although we humans have a tendency to conceive of ourselves as different from the rest of nature, it is worth remembering that our relation to other species includes cohabitation in cities as well, and while we may not like some of our co-inhabitants, they all add up to the diversity and richness of a city.10 By observing the urban environment as a habitat to living, non-human entities, and focusing on the relevance of the plants growing in humanised landscapes as a 4 Sarah Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: Nature, Culture, Spaces (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2002), 9. 5 Tim Ingold, cited in ibid., 2. 6 Ibid., 9. 7 Tim Low, The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia (Camberwell, Vic: Penguin, 2002), 3. 8 Ibid., 311–12. 9 The draining of the Yandina Creek Wetlands in July 2015 destroyed the habitat of numerous species of wildlife but was not contested by the Australian Conservation Foundation because the area was “highly modified” by human intervention. See Greg Roberts, “Yandina Creek Wetlands Draining Leaves Wildlife High and Dry,” The Australian, 25 July 2015, accessed 12 October 2015, http://www.theaustralian.com .au/news/inquirer/yandina-creek-wetlands-draining-leaves-wildlife-high-and-dry/story-e6frg6z6-122745 5989730. 10 Pauline von Bonsdorff, “Urban Richness and the Art of Building,” in The Aesthetics of Human Environments, ed. Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson (Orchard Park: Broadview Press, 2007), 68–69. 3 metonym for the wider natural world, the research has enriched my view that botany plays an active role in cities. The metonym has equipped me to interrogate what the mundane might reveal about wider notions of the environment both visually and conceptually. The research has been contingent on the domestic entanglement of living and non-living things, focusing on the vitality of these in urban ecologies that can be visualised through a range of mechanisms and methodologies. Key to the project has been establishing how my research considers the concept of nature, given my argument that the dualism of nature and culture denies the rich intermingling of the urban environment to the wider environment’s detriment. The term ‘nature’ is the cause of much debate among writers focused on the topic, evidenced by the titles of some publications identified during the research, such as Nature, The Death of Nature, Ecology without Nature, Radical Nature, and Second Nature.11 Nature is not a term I use lightly, or without attempting to articulate a clear definition. It is relatively easy to accept that a nature reserve or national park contains a certain amount of nature, but what about an urban botanical garden? While the natural elements in the gardens are planned, cultivated, controlled, and maintained by humans, the flora and fauna in the park also actively participate in this environment. For the purpose of my research, I have used Glenn Parsons’s definition of nature to describe the aspects of human environments that are neither built nor synthetic constructions. Parsons’s definition extends on that of nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, posing nature as “what takes place without the agency, or without the voluntary and intentional agency of man”.12 Parsons reasons that this more inclusive definition allows for nature to be all around and within civilisation; i.e., “not all of nature, in this sense, is remote from human beings”.13 He cites examples such as clouds, rain, insects, birds, and plants as being natural things that are present “even in the midst of civilization’s greatest cities”. 14 Therefore, I argue that while humans intentionally situate much of the botany that grows in cities, the plants 11Jeffrey Kastner, ed., Nature: Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper, 1980); Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2009); Francesco Manacorda and Ariella Yedgar, eds., Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009 (London: Koenig Books Ltd, 2009); Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (New York: Grove Press, 1991). 12 Glenn Parsons, Aesthetics and Nature (New York: Continuum Publishing, 2008), 2. 13 Ibid., 3. 14 Ibid. 4 themselves are natural and, once situated, demonstrate their independent agency. This research contributes to the complex discussions surrounding environmental care, and the significance of personal practices in the construction of environmental ethics and aesthetics. It considers how an individual art practice can focus on personal, bodily interactions with the botanical world to demonstrate new ways of seeing this interdependent relationship. The exegesis component analyses and scrutinises the creative studio research conducted between 2012 and 2016. My research and studio investigations have been motivated by the following key questions: • How can an art practice imagine new ways of visualising the reciprocal and interdependent relationship between humans and the urban botanical world? • Using the botany encountered in contemporary urban society as a leitmotif, how can creative works explore issues of the wider natural environment? • How can materials associated with consumer culture (and known to impact the environment) be used to reveal their ongoing vitality and presence in the wider environment? • Can this exploration enrich notions of what constitutes a natural environment in contemporary urban society? This exegesis outlines the theoretical discourse relevant to my enquiry, an examination of specific artworks supporting the assertions of my project, the methodologies employed in the studio, and the outcomes of my creative research. It consists of four chapters and a conclusion, which will be summarised below. Chapter 1 investigates and documents the theoretical context and issues that have framed my enquiry. Locating the fascination with my research topic through my personal history and Edward O. Wilson’s Biophilia hypothesis, I argue that the conceptual separation of natural and built environments is not reflective of most 5 people’s lived experience. Using Arnold Berleant’s description of an “expanded sense of environment where person and environment are continuous”15 to understand the ‘natural environment’ of contemporary urban life, the exegesis argues for an abandonment of wilderness as some sort of imaginary container of ‘pure nature’. The ineffectiveness of a nature–culture division is explored through the writing of Sarah Whatmore, Donna Haraway, and Mathew Gandy. I argue the importance of developing an aesthetic appreciation for the hybrid city as a way of exploring the complexity of human–nature entanglements in our shared ecosystem. Identifying the agency of botany has been a crucial aspect of the studio research, as has the use of plants as a metonym for wider concepts of nature. Similarly, Jane Bennett’s argument for the consideration of matter as vibrant is linked to the impact of contemporary consumer culture in this shared habitat.16 Chapter 1 also interrogates visual evidence of current environmental degradation as a by-product of consumerism and waste practices. The analysis of Professor Gay Hawkins’s argument for examining “everyday actions of cultivating a self . . . crucial for understanding how new waste habits and sensibilities might emerge” has assisted in navigating through these ideas and issues.17 In the spirit of what Hawkins describes as “active experimentation”18 and Berleant’s “environment . . . thought of in a new expanded sense”, 19 the research examines nature typically encountered in urban environments of the Western world. The experience of these more personal habitats is scrutinised to reveal the interconnectedness of our daily practices and our surroundings, which is also key to the research findings. In Chapter 2, I compare Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape (1978), a key environmental artwork located in Manhattan, with a contemporary public park in proximity, The Highline, to demonstrate the historical progression and complexity of issues surrounding such spaces. Time Landscape is used as a starting point to problematise the traditional division between art and environmental aesthetics. The chapter examines selected artworks by contemporary artists who explore aspects of human 15 Berleant, “Introduction: Art, Environment and the Shaping of Experience,” 7. 16 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 17 Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Sydney: University of NSW Press, 2006), 7. 18 Ibid. 19 Berleant, “Introduction,” 7. 6 interactions with the environment, among them, Judy Pfaff, Joanna Langford, Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger, Patricia Piccinini, and Simon Starling. Utilising Emily Brady’s approach of privileging imagination as one of the five essential aspects of aesthetic appreciation, I have focussed on artists who demonstrate highly imaginative approaches to consider current environmental topics. Chapter 3 outlines the key themes of urban botany in relation to control and containment, environmental hazard, and the shifting of geographical territories. It describes how I have examined these ideas using the following methodologies: walking, collecting (photographs, plants, and consumer plastic packaging), crocheting, and botanical drawing. Further, I analyse how these key themes are materially linked to contemporary consumer society and waste through the studio research. As I detail in this chapter, my artworks were predominantly fabricated from consumer packaging and materials associated with construction, intervention, and the control of environments, such as builders line and flagging tape. A range of works utilised crochet to emphasise the human hand as a counter to the machine-made materials. Botanical drawing also formed part of the research as both an investigative tool in the studio and a historical reference pertinent to concepts of classification. Chapter 4 analyses the series of artworks created through my studio research during the research project that were exhibited in Brisbane, Toowoomba, and Philadelphia between 2012 and 2016. re-inventing eden (scenario #7) – revisions and emergents was shown at Metro Arts in Brisbane (2012); A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession at the Webb Gallery, Queensland College of Arts (QCA), Brisbane (2012) and at the White Studio, QCA (2015); Wilhelmina Szeretlek! at Bleeding Hearts Gallery, Brisbane (2012), Project Gallery, QCA (2013), and the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba (2013); Geniculum at The Hold Artspace, West End (2013); Jardinière at artisan, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane (2014); NYC / Philadelphia perambulatory harness proposition (come together fall apart, come together again fall apart again) at Crane Arts, Philadelphia (2014); and PlastiCity and PlastiScenery at the White Studio, QCA (2016). 7 Over the past four years of this project, the slowly increasing number of botanical counterparts in my working ecosystem, the studio, has expanded my awareness of the nuances of this environment. The research has cultivated a complex awareness of the sensation that the studio is a porous site with constant exchanges between, and links to, external natural environments. The botany and I share the space and, in return for minimal care on my part (watering, fertilising, leaf wiping), I receive a constantly growing source of visual stimulation and purer air. My research experiments and experience have focussed on this complex and intimate entanglement that has provided new discoveries of reciprocities and links of the living (plants) and the non-living things that share my and our space. Here I argue that through affording time and attention to the mundane actions and materials of everyday urban life, this research project reveals the interconnection between living and non-living cohabitants. 8 Chapter 1: Biosphere – The Environment of the City The spatialities in which the ontological separation of nature and society inheres are woven through all manner of scientific, policy, media and everyday practices that enact nature as ‘a physical place to which you can go’ (Haraway 1992, 66). —Sarah Whatmore20 Introduction This chapter examines the theoretical framework of my research, focussing on Edward O. Wilson’s Biophilia hypothesis and associated theories of habitat enculturation as a starting point and the relevance that I establish through my personal history. I discuss my observations of urban environmental issues relevant to my enquiry, such as the increase of urban building density, consumerism’s effects on the environment and our relationship to waste. I also discuss the existence of botanical boundaries—both the invisible legislated boundaries of plants considered as weeds and the physical boundaries where the presence of botany can be felt through temperature difference. Through examining contemporary discourses surrounding climate change, the political ethics of litter and environment degradation, and environmental aesthetics in hybrid environments, the city is established as a logical site for investigating human–nature relationships. Significantly, the agency of things other than human, particularly botany, is discussed in relation to my studio research. Personal Perceptions of Nature and Culture: From Town and Country to the City I spent my childhood in a small country town, with my grandparents living nearby on a farm. This experience largely shaped dichotomous views of my environment: for me, the small town that I lived in represented culture (despite its lack of sophistication), while my grandparents’ farm represented nature (despite its relentless cycles of planting and harvesting). Men farmed, women gardened. Agriculture was about 20 Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies, 2. 9 necessity—income, labour, machinery, the land. Gardening was about leisure— nurturing, creativity, hand tools, soil. However, my concept of what was ‘natural’ was permanently altered when I was twelve years old. Deemed to be fast approaching a height considered socially disadvantageous for a female (over 177 centimetres), I was prescribed a course of high-dose oestrogen for three years to arrest my growth.21 An article in the Archive of Diseases of Childhood in 1975 encapsulates the prevailing attitude of the time in its title “What Can We Do about Tall Girls?”22 As the daughter of tall parents (my father is 188 centimetres tall, my mother 177 centimetres), my height was not a pathological condition, simply genetics. This medical intervention to achieve an aesthetic, societal norm in what I had up until that time considered to be a natural process—growing— led me to consider an ongoing duality between my artificial height of 183 centimetres and my predicted natural height of 195 centimetres. From the ages of twelve to fifteen, my body was routinely X-rayed and measured by an endocrinologist at a Brisbane hospital to monitor my growth. As my body was assessed as a series of disconnected parts—limbs, trunk, head, hands, feet—I wondered if there was the potential for some part of me to ‘grow rogue’. I imagined my body becoming disproportionately structured or perhaps even that I would lose symmetry. I pondered scenarios where my bones, frustrated by this medical intervention, would be held back for only so long, then burst through my skin in an uncontrollable growth spurt, a rupture of interior and exterior boundaries. I came to view my skeleton as having its own vital force, distinctly separate from the rest of my body, and having the power to stretch my skin beyond its limits. When my bones were deemed fused, the treatment, the hospital visits, and the measuring stopped. This experience led to my fascination with distinctions between the authentic, organic natural and the synthetic natural, modified in some way by humanity. For the past thirty years, I have lived in cities, predominantly Melbourne but also Sydney and Brisbane. The high-density dwellings provided a stark contrast to the vast 21 W. A. Marshall, "What Can We Do about Tall Girls?" Archives of Disease in Childhood 50, no. 9 (1975): 671–73, doi: 10.1136/adc.50.9.671. 22 Ibid. 10 open spaces of my rural upbringing where childhood play was not restricted by space. The wide expansiveness of the countryside encouraged exploration and instilled the feeling of freedom and adventure. The city, by comparison, initially seemed restrictive and confining. Urban life made me acutely aware of a loss of sanctuary that the rural landscape had provided. During this period of adjustment to the urban environment, I viewed visits to the country as an escape from the containment of the city and an opportunity to enjoy the natural landscapes of national parks and bushland settings. In time, I sought out this sanctuary in urban public parks and gardens and soon felt more comfortable in these ordered botanical environments. Thus, my personal history has had an enduring influence on my interest in urban botanical environments and has been the core focus of my art practice and research since 2005. Central to this is my interest in the growing body of global research drawing on Wilson’s Biophilia Hypothesis, investigating the benefits of humans’ relationships with other living things beyond resource exploitation. The Biophilia Hypothesis Written in 1984, Wilson’s Biophilia Hypothesis claims that humans have an “innate tendency to focus on life and life-like processes”.23 Wilson believes that developing this human tendency to be drawn to other living things and developing an understanding of other organisms can lead to us valuing them more.24 Stephen R. Kellert elaborates on Wilson’s hypothesis, claiming that our dependence on nature for personal fulfilment is not restricted to material utilisation, but extends to emotional, cognitive, aesthetic, and even spiritual development.25 Even in 1984, this was not a new concept. As Robert Ulrich writes, The belief that contact with nature is somehow good or beneficial for people is an old and widespread notion. The gardens of the Ancient Egyptian nobility, the walled gardens of Persian settlements in Mesopotamia, and the gardens of merchants in medieval Chinese cities indicate that early urban peoples went to considerable lengths to maintain contact with nature.26 23 Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 1. 24 Ibid., 2. 25 Stephen R. Kellert, “The Biological Basis for Human Values of Nature,” in The Biophilia Hypothesis, ed. Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), 42. 26 Robert S. Ulrich, “Biophilia, Biophobia and Natural Landscapes,” in The Biophilia Hypothesis, 73. 11 Historically, the garden has functioned variously as a site of agriculture, retreat, spirituality, scientific discovery, lavish ornamentation, status, and recreation. Whatever the purpose, gardens share a supposition of an intensified encounter with nature. The need for green spaces in cities for reasons other than leisure was identified during the Industrial Revolution when a major societal shift away from an agricultural existence caused large-scale migration to cities in Europe and North America. Farming practices become mechanised, requiring less human labour, while in urban regions, factories flourished. As overcrowding and pollution plagued industrial cities, the importance of public parks and gardens for the working classes for reasons of health and recreation was identified. In England, Sir Ebenezer Howard, founder of the Garden City Association, proposed an urban planning model of garden cities surrounded by agricultural land. Published as Garden Cities of Tomorrow in 1902, Howard’s proposal sought to reverse the trend of overpopulated Victorian slums.27 Today, as Western cities continue to become more densely populated, the need for garden spaces is recognised by urban planners, with Wilson’s hypothesis gaining traction in urban architecture, where the term “biophilic design” is now commonplace. John Falk and John Balling state that the innate human preferences for savanna-like settings (which once would have signalled a better chance of survival) are modified through personal experience and enculturation.28 This concept is discussed in more depth in Chapter 2 in my examination of Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape, as is the negative reaction from residents of Greenwich Village when this living artwork became overgrown. In the extreme, the antithesis of biophilia is biophobia, described by social ecologist Stephen R. Kellert as destructive tendencies and rejection towards, and the avoidance of, certain natural environments.29 The reality is that while urban residents may feel at home in a park or community garden, they might be ill-equipped to survive in the wilderness, unless perhaps supported by a reality television crew—“Survivor” style. Fear of snakes and spiders and their habitats is a frequently cited biophobic tendency. David Byrne adopts the role of a biophobe (albeit facetiously) in a Talking Heads song, “Nothing but Flowers”. Finding himself helpless in a city where the 27 “Sir Ebenezer Howard: British Urban Planner,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online, last modified 23 February 2012, accessed 3 June 2015, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/273428/Sir- Ebenezer-Howard. 28 John Falk and John Balling, "Evolutionary Influence on Human Landscape Preference,” Environment and Behavior 42, no. 4 (2010): 479–93, doi: 10.1177/0013916509341244. 29 Kellert, “The Biological Basis for Human Values of Nature,” 42. 12 conveniences of contemporary urban living have been reclaimed by nature, Byrne laments, There was a factory, now there are mountains and rivers . . . There was a shopping mall, now it's all covered with flowers . . . If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower . . . I miss the Honky Tonks, Dairy Queens, and 7-Elevens . . . We used to microwave, now we just eat nuts and berries . . . Don't leave me stranded here, I can't get used to this lifestyle.30 While humorous, Byrne’s biophobic irony contains a degree of truth. My personal experience concurs with Falk and Balling’s argument of enculturation, where, after my relocation from a rural to an urban environment, I noted the gradual change in my preference towards more ordered natural environments. Each geographical shift brought about a preferential shift, and not only in my visual predilections. The longer I resided in cities, the more my feelings of mild discomfort in rugged bushland settings became evident. This change in preference now extends to the level of avoidance of dense bushland settings, even urban examples such as the Seven Hills Bushland Reserve, which is less than five minutes walk from my home. This is despite a childhood spent enjoying playtime on the riverbanks at my grandparents’ farm, and regular family camping trips in unmediated natural environments devoid of basic amenities such as running water and toilets. Marente Bloemheuvel and Toos van Kooten, curators of the 2011 exhibition Windflower: Perceptions of Nature, articulate the concept of environmental enculturation in relationship to artists, noting, The different perceptions of nature arise from the interaction between the individual and his or her cultural background, between the artist and the society in which he or she lives and was raised. Views on the role and meaning of nature are different in every culture and the changing world, globalization and consumerism have had a big influence on people’s relationship to nature.31 This statement is illustrated by the winning entry of the 2015 Wynn Prize, Biophilia (figure 1), by Natasha Bieniek. This prize is awarded by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for “the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture by Australian artists”.32 Melbourne resident 30 Talking Heads, “Nothing but Flowers,” Naked (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers Records, 1988). CD. 31 Marente Bloemheuvel and Toos van Kooten, eds., “Introduction,” in Windflower: Perceptions of Nature, ex. cat. (Rotterdam, NAi Publishers, 2011), 11. 32 “Wynne Prize,” Art Gallery of NSW (website), accessed 2 October 2015, http://www.artgallery.nsw .gov.au/prizes/wynne/. 13 Bieniek describes her prize-winning painting of a lone figure in an inner-city garden as depicting “a sense of tranquility that contrasts with its active surroundings”.33 She hopes that by highlighting this type of natural environment, she can “present the idea that we, as humans, are not above nature but very much a part of it”.34 For me, this painting validates the sanctuary that nature provides to urban residents, connecting them to natural environments, no matter how ordered, that relate to the wider natural world. Figure 1 Natasha Bieniek Biophilia 2015 Bloemheuvel and van Kooten’s observation of the role that societal upbringing plays in an artist’s perception of nature is certainly true of my own experience. Key to the formation of my perceptions was my experience of medical science’s ability to alter a seemingly unstoppable course of nature by altering how tall I would grow. Further, my migration from country to city has been pivotal in shaping both my concepts of nature and my desire to seek a connection with nature in the urban environment. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 14 The Hybrid City Cities are not distinct or separate from nature, or somehow unnatural (Harvey 1993; Heynan et al. 2006). They represent processes of human transformation of the material environment, in the same way that rural agriculture and other, what might be seen as more natural, environments are transformed by human activity, including the demands of cities and their emissions. —Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson35 The city is the site of my investigation and the place in which I most frequently experience nature. This encompasses my studio at QCA, which is surrounded by parklands on the banks of the Brisbane River; my home in suburban Camp Hill; and the passages, footpaths, and roads that I navigate as part of my daily life between these places. These are the urban locations of my human activity where I observe the liveliness of things other than human. During the course of my research, other cities have broadened these experiences, most notably London, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Philadelphia, Rome, Singapore, Sydney, and Venice, where I was able to compare the similarities and differences between these geographically, architecturally, and climatically varied metropolises, and return to my own habitat with a fresh perspective. These experiences are further discussed in Chapters 2–4 in relation to the work of my exemplar artists and my own studio work. To research the city and to observe the space of my human activity, I established walking as an essential methodology. While traversing suburban and city streets on foot, I have considered the difference between the inner city and the Brisbane suburbs, where backyard gardens and large shady trees are still prevalent. When moving from the concrete-and-glass matrix of Brisbane’s Central Business District (CBD) into the tropical, riverside botanical gardens, I have noticed the slightly cooler, moister air. The time and space that these urban walks have provided for observations and experiences were crucial to the research and the artworks, which have been created in ways that I never envisaged at the outset of this project. Minor observations of the interstices of the built and the botanical experienced at a walking pace, where sensory faculties are in full attention, go unnoticed when viewed from mechanical 35 Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds., “Reflections on Materialities,” in Wiley Blackwell Companions to Geography: New Blackwell Companion to the City (Somerset, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Incorporated, 2011), 10. 15 modes of transport such as car or bus, and when feet do not connect with the ground that is being observed. The city provides a multitude of instances where the natural and built environments overlap and intersect. My observations while walking in the CBD, where roads and footpaths cover every ground surface and towering vertical structures dominate the landscape, led me to ponder what lies beneath the bitumen and concrete that seals the city like a skin (figure 2). The evidence of city trees’ dependency on soil is hidden, along with the myriad of underground cables and pipes that provide power, water, technology and waste removal, organic and synthetic life-sustaining systems intermingling. Figure 2 Base of tree on Grey Street, Southbank, Brisbane 2013 Haraway identifies nature/culture as one of the traditional dualisms in Western society that aids in the domination of “all constituted as other”, such as “women, nature and animals”.36 Technological and scientific practices that obliterate these distinctions 36 Donna Jeanne Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 177. 16 enable the construction of her cyborg vision, an interconnection of the organic and synthetic, which she posits as a liberator from dualisms. She calls for the acknowledgment of science and technology’s entanglement in social relationships and an “embracing” of “the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life”.37 Matthew Gandy expands on Haraway’s concept of the cyborg to construct his concept of cyborg urbanisation, infinitely porous organic and synthetic networks, as a way of “rematerializing the city and establishing practical connections between the body, technology and space”.38 Gandy believes Haraway’s cyborg manifesto “open[s] up new possibilities for the understanding of relations between nature and culture”.39 He argues that the cyborg is essentially a spatial metaphor, which he examines using the concept of the physical interface between the body and the city; that is, the material infrastructure that joins humans to technological networks. He states, “If we understand the cyborg to be . . . a hybrid of machine and organism, then urban infrastructures can be conceptualized as a series of interconnecting life-support systems.”40 Gandy vividly describes the home as acting as the human body’s exoskeleton by providing shelter and other life-supporting functions.41 He describes the function of home as both “‘prosthesis and prophylactic’, in which modernist distinctions between nature and culture, and between the organic and the inorganic, become blurred (Vidler 1990, 37)”.42 He extends this metaphor beyond the home to the shared, interlinked services that modern cities require to operate, noting, “these interstitial spaces of connectivity within individual buildings extend through urban space to produce a multi-layered structure of extraordinary complexity and utility”.43 Gandy’s description gives form to my urban perambulatory observations whereby my thoughts permeate the layers of the concrete structures of the built environment to imagine the synthetic and organic entanglements that exist in the urban environment with a blatant disregard for clear-cut delineations of nature and artifice. 37 Ibid., 181. 38 Matthew Gandy, “Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 1 (2005): 28, doi: 10.1111/j.1468- 2427.2005.00568.x. 39 Ibid., 27. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 28. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 17 The seeming impenetrability of the city has also been ruptured during walks through my neighbourhood in Camp Hill, one of the many suburbs in Brisbane that is undergoing extensive residential development. Here I have had the opportunity to observe buildings slowly rise from the ground, where their usually hidden infrastructure is temporarily exposed. In Camp Hill (and similar Brisbane suburbs within a ten-kilometre radius of the city), for each existing home demolished, two or more dwellings are constructed in its place. On many suburban blocks, houses are dismantled and disconnected from foundations, gardens uprooted, and earth levelled in preparation for a new structure to be erected. The evidence of underground pipes and cables, usually concealed, is revealed momentarily emerging from the ground. As soon as new buildings are erected, the ground is once again covered in concrete, and the networks of water, sewerage, power, and communication are re-established and hidden. These seemingly banal observations of suburban life have been important to my research for the very reason that they are commonplace, and involve thinking about how everyday human activity is made possible by the hidden infrastructure of the home environment. These concealed life support systems have expanded my thinking regarding the role of plants in urban environments, whose contribution to humans’ well-being is also partly invisible (e.g., air purification and temperature control). The move towards higher-density dwellings means that the surface area of the ground covered is substantially greater, which essentially results in less land for lawns and gardens. Tony Hall, Adjunct Professor, Urban Research Program at Griffith University, examines the impact of the loss of the garden space on the wider environment. In his detailed quantitative study of increasing housing density and the importance of backyards in a wider ecological function, Hall notes, The land around the houses has played an important ecological role sustaining biodiversity, absorbing storm water run-off and providing shade from the sun. Given the large land area taken up by suburbs, these effects have not been inconsequential. The presence of vegetation within the back garden, when taken in aggregate, has been important for the microclimate and biodiversity in a way that has benefited the community as a whole.44 44 Tony Hall, The Life and Death of The Australian Back Yard (Collingwood, Vic: CSIRO Publishing, 2010), 147. 18 In the face of global warming, any change to temperatures caused by the loss of garden space may seem significant. In his 2014 lecture at the Danish Royal Academy, Bruno Latour described the world we inhabit as first nature, with capitalism being our second nature, lamenting that “second nature is more solid, less transitory, less perishable than the first . . . this world of beyond is not that of salvation and eternity, but that of economic matters”. 45 As Latour suggests, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence of global warming, and that this is “very likely due to human activities”,46 there has been a global political reluctance to make the changes required to reduce atmospheric CO2 due to the potential effect on world economies. However, the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Paris in December 2015 has resulted in the negotiation of the “Paris Agreement”, with 195 countries adopting a legally binding global climate deal aimed at limiting global warming to less than 2oC.47 While the “Paris Agreement” is promising, plans for countries to convert to clean energy is of major concern to the Australian government given the economic reliance on coal. When interviewed at the conference, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop stated that “of course if we're being ambitious over time we will need to work even harder. But we don't want to damage our economy without having an environmental impact.”48 As one of the world’s highest per capita emitters, Australia’s response to the “Paris Agreement” will no doubt be closely scrutinised by the rest of the world. While some of the visible indications of global warming such as glacial retreat, declining Arctic Sea ice, and deforestation are geographically distant, the existence of “urban heat islands” 49 may be more immediately apparent to the 66 percent of 45 Bruno Latour, “On Some of the Affects of Capitalism” (Lecture presented at the Danish Royal Academy of Science, 26 February 2014), http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/136-AFFECTS-OF-K- COPENHAGUE.pdf. 46 NASA, “Climate Change: How Do We Know?” NASA Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet, last modified 26 January 2016, accessed 4 February 2016, http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/. 47 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, “Adoption of the Paris Agreement,” 12 December 2015, accessed 31 December 2015, https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng /l09r01.pdf. 48 Francis Keany, “Paris Climate Deal: What Will the Historic Agreement Mean for Australia?” ABC News, 14 December 2015, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-13/what-will-the-paris-climate-deal-mean-for- australia/7024476. 49 This term is used to describe the phenomenon of urban regions being warmer than surrounding rural areas; see Environmental Protection Authority, “Heat Island Effect,” last modified 4 December 2015, accessed 13 December 2015, http://www.epa.gov/heatisland/. 19 Australians living in a capital city.50 As previously stated, I have experienced this phenomenon when walking from densely built areas of the city into parklands, noticing the slight cooling of the air. Notably, when travelling on other modes of transport, such as car or bus, this change is not perceivable. Figure 3 Queensland College of Arts Graduation Exhibition’s opening night, 27 November 2014, view from the Griffith University Art Gallery, marquee collapsing under the weight of golf-ball size hailstones I am one of the 62 percent of Australians who believe that “climate change is already impacting our nation’s environment by causing more extreme drought events”.51 Memorable weather events personally experienced in last decade have ranged from one extreme to the other. I lived in Melbourne at the time of the ‘Millennium Drought’ (2002–7) where the dramatic impact of water restrictions dramatically changed routines of daily life. (I elaborate on this in relation to Gerda Steiner and Jörg 50 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Capital Cities: Past, Present and Future,” last modified 2 April 2014, accessed 7 February 2014, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/products/AC53A071B4B231A6 CA257CAE000ECCE5?OpenDocument. 51 IPSOS, “Climate Change: Australians Believe Extreme Weather Events Are Already More Frequent,” IPSOS Climate Change Report April 2015, accessed 26 August, 2015, http://ipsos.com.au/australians- believe-extreme-weather-events-and-climate-change-is-more-frequent/. 20 Lenzlinger’s installation The Water Hole in Chapter 2.52) The Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria resulted in the deaths of 173 people, with 414 injured, when an intense heat wave combined with high winds.53 During this time, the skies of Melbourne were ominous with the glow of fire and smell of smoke as the fires caused widespread damage to townships not far from the city. In late November 2010, I moved to Brisbane, just weeks prior to the 2010/11 floods, where the Brisbane River rose up and into the CBD and suburbs. Then, on 27 November 2014, a super cell storm in Brisbane lasted less than an hour, causing more than $1.1 billion damage (figure 3). John Allen, Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University, believes that there is “an increasing likelihood that we will see severe thunderstorms more often” due to climate change.54 As governments look to the most efficient ways to house growing populations, higher density cities have both financial and environmental advantages, as Bridge and Watson assert that, as an alternative to . . . urban sprawl, higher density cities are increasingly being seen as the solution, rather than the main cause, of global warming. High-density, more compact settlements are seen as more energy efficient than the car-based, low-density, energy-sapping suburbs.55 New architecture in cities manifests both the need for gardens and the need for energy efficiency; consequently, there is a growing prevalence of gardens utilising previously non-traditional sites, such as rooftops, indoor spaces, and exterior vertical walls. These contemporary gardens demonstrate both the human desire for frequent contact with nature and the environmental benefits that the presence of botany can provide. Examples of these types of gardens can be seen in newly constructed apartment blocks, hotels, and corporate office blocks, as well as retrofitted to existing buildings. As high-rise residential apartments see backyards replaced with balconies as a site for gardening, city dwellers embrace small-scale botanical projects from terrariums to balcony vegetable gardens and shared community plots to naturalise 52 Australia Government, “Natural Disasters in Australia,” last modified 18 December 2015, accessed 26 January 2016, http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/natural-disasters. 53 Ibid. 54 John Allen, “Australia Faces a Stormier Future Thanks to Climate Change”, Environment & Energy, The Conversation, last modified 19 December, 2014, accessed 16 August 2015, http://theconversation.com /australia-faces-a-stormier-future-thanks-to-climate-change-35327. 55 Bridge and Watson, New Blackwell Companion to the City, 10. 21 their habitats. Rather than focus on escaping the city to spend time in nature, biophilic urban architecture is weaving botany into the fabric of the built environment. Like traditional gardens, these green environments are ordered, contained, and maintained, incorporating botany into the cityscape. In the twenty-first century, these are the natural environments of the everyday urban resident, satisfying our biophilic desires. Figure 4 Vertical and Balcony Gardens, One Central Park, Sydney 2015 In this contemporary architecture, dichotomies of nature and culture are destabilised, since botany is not an afterthought but an integral element in the environment (figure 4). The appearance of plants growing on the external surfaces of buildings embraces an aesthetic of nature reclamation (figure 5), commonly associated with abandoned human habitats. However, in developments such as One Central Park in Sydney, the reclamation is engineered and designed to attract human-habitation. 22 Figure 5 Abandoned Fishing Village of Houtouwan, China, 2015 Like Haraway and Gandy, Whatmore also engages with the spatialities and knowledge practices of everyday life to critically examine the hybridity between natures, cultures, and spaces, suggesting, Here the notion of thinking through the body is invested in a particular direction, admitting the know-hows, tacit skills and bodily apprehensions through which everyday life goes on into the repertoire of knowledge that social/scientists need to take seriously (see de Certeau et al. 1998; Schatzki et al. 2000). These everyday knowledge practices have been argued to be performative rather than cognitive, such that ‘talk’ itself is better understood as action rather than as communication (see Shusterman 2000; Thrift 2000a).56 By being cognisant of the boundaries of daily life, and questioning these borders through observations within my urban habitat, I have witnessed the rich commingling that occurs between humans and nature, and the extent of the hybridity of the urban environment. Our everyday, mundane, domestic contact with botany has proven to be a source of inspiration and illumination to enrich notions of the natural environment as being right here, located in and integrated with the city. These revelations relied on my ability to cultivate an aesthetic appreciation of the botanical presence within cities, framed by and integrated with the built environment. 56 Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies, 6. 23 Aesthetic Appreciation of the Hybrid City Environmental aestheticians seek to find an appropriate way to appreciate both natural and human environments, with some theorists believing that this will directly benefit the environment.57 Contemporary debate within this field has emerged from a growing awareness of environmental issues that began in the 1960s, with philosopher Ronald Hepburn’s pivotal 1966 article “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty” 58 described as “almost single-handedly initiating the renewal” of environmental aesthetics.59 Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant write “environmental aesthetics considers philosophical issues concerning the aesthetic appreciation of the world at large and, moreover, the world as constituted not simply by particular objects but also by larger units, such as landscapes, environments, and ecosystems.”60 In the field of environmental aesthetics, there is a distinct separation of human and natural environments. In the concepts of nature most commonly adopted in natural environmental aesthetics, the evidence of humanity’s existence compromises the authenticity of a natural environment. Considering that 54 percent of the world’s population resides in cities, where the entanglement of natural and constructed environments is most evident, it seems idealistic to overlook the abundance of natural elements in the complex urban ecosystems in which we reside. While the rich conglomeration of buildings, beings, infrastructure, and organic and synthetic networks is not necessarily the site that comes to mind when contemplating ‘the (definitive) environment’, it is in fact the natural habitat of many living entities. The term ‘environment’ has become increasingly politicised and multifaceted, requiring a location with rigid geographical parameters to define it, no matter how arbitrary these parameters may be. In questioning what the environment is, Timothy Morton asks, Is there such a thing as the environment? Is it everything ‘around’ us? At what point do we stop, if at all, drawing the line between environment and non 57 See Arnold Berleant, “The Aesthetics of Art and Nature,” in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, ed. Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2004), 86, and Yuriko Saito, “The Role of Aesthetics in Civic Environmentalism,” in The Aesthetics of Human Environments, ed. Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2007), 203. 58 Ronald Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, 43. 59 Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson, eds., “Introduction: The Aesthetics of Nature,” in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, 14. 60 Ibid., 11. 24 environment? The atmosphere? Earth’s gravitational field? Earth’s magnetic field, without which everything would be scorched by solar winds? The sun, without which we wouldn’t be alive at all? The Galaxy? Does the environment include or exclude us? Is it natural or artificial, or both? Can we put it in a conceptual box? Might the word environment be the wrong word?61 Berleant attempts to define the term, rejecting a simple expansion of the environment to encompass built/altered landscapes as well as the idea of the environment as surroundings that lie “outside a person . . . a container within which people pursue their private purposes”.62 He describes ‘environment’ as “one of the last survivors of a mind–body dualism, a place beyond” that requires distance for contemplation.63 He questions, for where can we locate ‘the’ environment? Where is ‘outside’ in this case? . . . Such a purportedly outside environment dissolves into a complex network of relationships, connections and continuities of those physical, social, and cultural conditions that circumscribe my actions, my responses, my awareness, and that give shape and content to the very life that is mine. For there is no outside world . . . there is no inner sanctum in which I can take refuge from inimical external forces. The perceiver (mind) is an aspect of the perceived (body) . . . person and environment are continuous. Thus both aesthetics and environment must be thought of in a new expanded sense. In both art and environment, we can no longer stand apart but join in as active participants.64 In terms of humanity’s ability to impact on the environment, Parsons concurs with Berleant’s observation of the omnipresence of human agency. He notes that even in the most remote areas of wilderness, the presence of air-borne pollutants may be detected, and aircrafts and satellites may pass through the sky.65 In February 2015, I had a profound experience of the extent of humanity’s reach and impact on the environment when I observed the night sky from 10,700 feet above sea level on the road to Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on the island of Hawaii. The world's largest astronomical observatory (figure 6) is located on the summit of Mauna Kea, a unique site ideally suited as stated by the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, The exceptional stability of the atmosphere above Mauna Kea permits more detailed studies than are possible elsewhere, while its distance from city lights and a strong island-wide lighting ordinance ensure an extremely dark sky, allowing observation of the faintest galaxies that lie at the very edge of the 61 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 8. 62 Berleant, “Introduction: Art, Environment and the Shaping of Experience,” 6. 63 Ibid., 7. 64 Ibid., 6–7. 65 Parsons, Aesthetics and Nature, 2. 25 observable Universe. A tropical inversion cloud layer about 600 meters (2,000 ft.) thick, well below the summit, isolates the upper atmosphere from the lower moist maritime air and ensures that the summit skies are pure, dry, and free from atmospheric pollutants.66 The remoteness of the observatory’s location to avoid atmospheric pollutants was evident as we made our way by bus through dimly lit towns up the steep roads. Standing on the side of the dormant volcano, a group of us took turns to peer into a telescope to view planets in our solar system, with the moons of Jupiter clearly visible. The feeling of awe and vastness was momentarily disrupted as we observed the International Space Station passing through the sky. Humans’ presence in space seemed to make the other planets seem closer, reachable, another territory in our environment. Just as nature may once have been considered as a location somewhere ‘out there’, a distant place, the idea of ‘outer-space’ seemed less remote. Figure 6 CFHT (Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope) and Gemini Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawaii 2015 Moreover what do the residents of the International Space Station consider ‘the environment’? A 1989 report commissioned by NASA titled “Interior Landscape Plants for Indoor Air Pollution Abatement”, which is discussed in detail in Chapter 4 was commissioned to investigate the feasibility of using indoor plants to purify the air of harmful organic compounds emitted from building materials in sealed environments 66 University of Hawaii, “About Mauna Kea Observatories”, Institute for Astronomy, accessed 7 March 2015, https://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/mko/about_maunakea.shtml. 26 such as space stations.67 This report has been pivotal to my appreciation of the agency of plants and the reciprocity of our relationship to botany, including indoor plants. Research continues on the International Space Station as to the benefits of the astronauts growing plants, including the non-nutritional value of providing comfort and relaxation to the crew.68 The ‘space garden’ is a living link to the blue planet they gaze upon from 200 miles away. These plants connect to the wider natural environment back on earth as the data from their experiments “will help advance Earth-based greenhouses and controlled-environment agricultural systems and help farmers produce better, healthier crops in small spaces”.69 Michel Foucault describes the garden as being an example of a heterotopia—a single, physical space in which multiple spaces are juxtaposed. He states that the garden is simultaneously “the smallest parcel of the world” and “the totality of the world”.70 From their unique vantage point, the astronauts on the Space Station can see both their small parcel of once-terrestrial botany and the totality of the blue planet it came from. Similarly, the urban gardener tending to their balcony pot plants is mindful of weather, water, and soil nutrients, giving them an appreciation for factors affecting the wider natural environment. With no place on earth left unaffected to some degree by humanity (regardless of the visibility of the effect), the interconnectedness of the world’s environments is indisputable. Some of the detrimental environmental effects of damaging practices are felt in locations geographically distant from where the activity is being conducted. Rather than focusing on large-scale abstract concepts, I have directed my project to urban botany as a metonym for nature. Through cultivating an aesthetic appreciation of natural aspects of the urban habitat—the location of our everyday activities and practices—the interconnectedness of our actions and the environment may have more resonance. It may be in part that my experience of my natural height being altered has 67 B. C. Wolverton, Anne Johnson, and Keith Bounds, “Interior Landscape Plants for Indoor Air Pollution Abatement,” Final Report, 15 September 1989, NASA Office of Commercial Programs-Technology Utilization Division and the Associated Landscape Contractors of America, 2, http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive /nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19930073077.pdf. 68 Lori Meggs, “Growing Plants and Vegetables in a Space Garden,” NASA: International Space Station, last modified 15 June 2010, accessed 2 April 2015, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research /10-074.html. 69 Ibid. 70 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 26. 27 instilled in me an appreciation of nature that is cultivated, hybridised, and manipulated. However, my appreciation for hybridised natural environments is not popular in the field of environmental aesthetics, the practitioners/theoreticians of which prefer to keep their environments delineated. Emily Brady, Reader in Aesthetics at the University of Edinburgh, School of Geosciences, notes the tension in the aesthetic appreciation of objects with “mixed origins”—those “things that have both natural and human causes”, such as gardens, topiary, and some environmental art, which she sees as examples of these problematic hybrids.71 Brady believes this tension in aesthetic appreciation to be unresolvable but also “what makes this appreciation so interesting and complex”.72 However, she does attempt to find ways to appreciate topiary in a paper co-authored by Isis Brook. Introducing the ethics of the aesthetics of topiary, the writers question whether thwarting a tree’s growth is ethical.73 The writers go on to establish that a tree’s goal is to “thrive”, which is also the goal of the topiarist, arriving at the conclusion that topiary can be a creative relationship between culture and nature.74 The tensions in natural environmental aesthetic theory are largely in part due to a reluctance to relinquish nature–culture distinctions. Parsons introduces his argument for the unnaturalness of gardens in an explanation of how it is only in contrast to the built environment that the garden may seem natural, saying, The intuitive idea that gardens are natural is supported by the fact that gardens contrast sharply and vividly with the most visually prominent aspect of the human world: architecture. Unlike buildings, bridges and other architectural structures, gardens tend to be green, lacking in planar surfaces and sharp angles, and largely alive. This dramatic contrast can make it easy to assume that gardens and their contents belong to the category other than architecture: that they must be natural entities, rather than artificial ones.75 As contemporary gardens insinuate themselves into the category of architecture as vertical walls and rooftops, Parsons’s observation of “dramatic contrast” diminishes. 71 Emily Brady, Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2003), 62. 72 Ibid. 73 Emily Brady and Isis Brook, “Topiary: Ethics and Aesthetics,” Ethics and The Environment 8, no. 1 (2003): 129. 74 Ibid., 129–30. 75 Parsons, Aesthetics and Nature, 115. 28 However, he attempts to further his claim of unnatural plants by denying the inherent agency of botany, bestowing humans with credit for their vitality, stating, The size of particular plants in the garden, at any given time, is also often unnatural: by a judicious combination of pruning and fertilizing the gardener sculpts plants and hedges into desired forms. Indeed, even the mere growth of the plants can be somewhat unnatural, being brought about by the gardener’s deliberate irrigation of an arid plot.76 This anthropocentric viewpoint diminishes the nature in cities to commodity and ornament and artificially isolates urban flora as distinctly excluded from the category of natural entities. The antithesis to my argument, Parsons’s decrying of all human presence and action as despoiling natural settings and compromising its natural aesthetic does not champion nature in cities. Rather than award degrees of naturalness to plants and botanical urban settings, my project uses botany as a metonym for a wider natural environment, something Low argues when he states that ancient trees cities offer a continuity with the past, “serving as windows onto landscapes we will never see”.77 I argue that by seeing the relationship we have to nature in the mundane, ‘up close and personal’ encounters with botany, we may more readily understand our interconnectedness and the consequences of our daily activities and actions on a larger scale. By developing an aesthetic appreciation for hybrid environments and the plants that we cohabit with, observing the small and often unremarkable ways in which they grow, multiply, flourish, or die, we may recognise the goal we share with botany: to thrive. In my studio, these observations have been noted and creatively explored through artworks that use botany. Brady notes the possibility “of the role that art may play in creatively articulating relations between humans and the natural environment” and that whether these relationships are harmonious or conflicting, they “draw attention to human impact on nature and highlight through artistic means the complexity of human-nature-entanglements”.78 76 Ibid. 77 Low, The New Nature, 307. 78 Emily Brady, “The Human-Nature Relationship in Environmental and Land Art,” in Art, Ethics, and Environment: A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, ed. Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir and Ólafur Páll Jónsson (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing and GSE Research, 2006), 109. 29 The Vitality of Plants My research on botany uses plants as a metonym for, and connection to, the wider concept of nature. Specifically, my project has embraced the botanical activity in the built environment that speaks of a connection with humans as cohabitants of the city, with each benefiting from the others’ presence. To assert the reciprocity of this relationship, it is imperative that the agency of botany is established. This agency of plants in the urban environment is clearly visible as they wind their way over, under, through, and around built obstacles. Roots split through concrete and bitumen, vines creep through cracks. Less visible effects but still evidence of their vitality, plants are introduced as a visual and olfactory enhancement to domestic and commercial environments. Botany’s visual presence alone has been found to have beneficial effects on human well-being that range from improved cognitive function and stress relief to pain reduction and enhanced recovery by patients suffering from clinically diagnosed disorders.79 Additionally, plants’ life processes have been proven effective in the abatement of indoor air pollution, which confirms their role as active participants rather than passive objects in shared environments.80 Geographer Renate Sander-Regier notes that some geographers looking for alternatives to an anthropocentric domination of agency are “registering the ‘creative presence’ of non-human entities among us”, with a view to bringing faculties of empathy and imagination as counters to traditional observational research methodologies.81 He determines the hybrid space of the personal garden as ideal to explore “botanical agency of presence, action, intent, association and capacity”.82 The active participation of personal gardeners, well documented in contemporary personal gardening literature, reveals insights into human–plant relationships not necessarily experienced by the observer passing through a site, whether it be a garden, park or other natural environment. The gardener’s calendar of seasonal activities involves both creative and routine tasks that all involve hands-on engagement with plants and soil; for example, planting, watering, fertilising, pruning, and striking cuttings. Through 79 Stephen R. Kellert, "Biophilia," in Encyclopedia of Ecology, ed. Sven Erik Jørgensen and Brian D. Fath (Oxford: Academic Press, 2008), 463–4, doi:10.1016/B978-008045405-4.00636-4. 80 Wolverton, Johnson, and Bounds, “Interior Landscape Plants for Indoor Air Pollution Abatement.” 81 Renate Sander-Regier, “Bare Roots: Exploring Botanical Agency in the Personal Garden,” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 21 (2009): 64. 82 Ibid., 63. 30 the creative research, I have experienced this engagement and used botany as a leitmotif to explore issues of the wider natural environment. It should be noted that while Sander-Regier’s observations resonate with my studio experience, prior to my PhD candidature, my interest in personal gardening was limited to general maintenance and very occasional seasonal enthusiasm for planting seedlings in spring. I saw the relationship between my garden and me as one-sided, where I worked to maintain an environment, failing to acknowledge the reciprocity of the arrangement. This research has made me more attentive to what I reap from my efforts as the plants respond (or not) to care. The more success I witness with a particular specimen, the more I persevere with their time-consuming care requirements. This is also evident in the studio where I cultivate plants from cuttings, propagating the necessary specimens required for artworks where they receive more attention than they might in a garden. Whether it is the exotic bloom of an orchid or the emergence of new growth from a single succulent leaf, evidence of the agency of the plants in my care continues to delight and fascinate (figure 7). Figure 7 Sansevieria trifasciata ‘Laurentii’ cuttings 2014 Thus, the recognition of the agency of plants is key to this research. Referring to the findings of degraded and overstressed environmental systems in the Millennium 31 Ecosystem Assessment Reports83, Val Plumwood notes that these natural systems “support human life and all other lives on earth”.84 She emphasises, a key cultural challenge for survival is to recognize, represent, and value the health and services these systems, collectively designated ‘nature’ provide for us. A high priority issue for theorists interested in changing the situation is: How we should recognize the agency of these disregarded service-providers, and how should we recognize and represent the ‘environmental services’ these systems provide for us?85 An example of the “environmental services” that Plumwood urges us to recognise is the phytoremediation of pollutants from indoor air performed by house plants.86 While some of the city’s air pollution is visible, such as the emissions from industrial facilities and vehicular traffic where exhaust fumes may be both seen and smelt, the chemical vapours emitted from the structures, surfaces, and furnishings of our built environment are more discreet. Formaldehyde is highly toxic to humans and animals, and is emitted from common construction materials, including medium-density fibre- board, particle board, and hardwood ply-board. Its botanical counter, Chlorophytum elatum, also known as the spider plant, was significant in NASA’s “Interior Landscape Plants for Indoor Air Pollution Abatement” report for its ability to remove formaldehyde from the atmosphere.87 More recently, Chlorophytum comosum has been found to take up particle matter (PM), one of the most harmful pollutants to humans.88 As an artist, I research the toxicity of the materials I use in my practice and take the necessary precautions for the sake of my own health and that of my studio peers. Given that many of the materials I use are general household plastics and building products commonly found in domestic environments, it is concerning to note the volatile organic compounds emitted by these seemingly inert materials. In Chapter 4, the hidden activity of ‘off-gassing’ by materials and the service that plants provide to humans is explored in greater detail through the rationale of my studio work. While we 83 For a copy of these reports please see Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, “Overview of Reports,” last modified 2005, accessed 11 December 2015, http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/Global.html. 84 Val Plumwood, "The Concept of a Cultural Landscape: Nature, Culture and Agency in the Land," Ethics and the Environment 11, no. 2 (2006): 116, doi: 10.2979/ETE. 85 Ibid. 86 Helena Gawrońska and Beata Bakera, “Phytoremediation of Particulate Matter from Indoor Air by Chlorophytum comosum L. Plants,” Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health 8, no. 3 (2015): 266. doi:10.1007 /s11869-014-0285-4. 87 Wolverton, Johnson, and Bounds, “Interior Landscape Plants.” 88 Gawrońska and Bakera, “Phytoremediation of Particulate Matter,” 265. 32 may consider our house plants as ‘breathing’, we do not think of the plastic container they were purchased in as doing one long, slow, toxic exhalation into our shared atmosphere. The agency of plants may also lie in their ability to seduce us, an idea that writer Michael Pollan explores in in his examination of the reciprocity between humans and domesticated plants. He focuses on the apple, marijuana, the tulip, and the potato, and traces the plants’ evolution to satisfy the human desires of sweetness, intoxication, beauty, and control (in relation to size and shape). Some plants have been particularly successful at seducing humans throughout history; for example, orchids, which are sold year round in hardware stores and supermarkets. When a plant, no matter how quotidian, is included as part of an artwork, it becomes a focal point. While a plant may be admired as part of the overall composition of a garden or park, when isolated as a specimen away from a competing environment, a more focused view is afforded. In the case of the Monstera deliciosa plant that appears in two of my artworks, I was seduced by the exotic, holey leaves of the plant, finding them simultaneously sculptural, tropical, and comical. I am not alone in finding this plant an inspiration studio presence; both Henri Matisse and Judy Pfaff have also been noted to have had the plant in their studios. Numerous photographs show a Monstera deliciosa growing in Matisse’s studio in Nice,89 and the specimen growing in an indoor garden in Pfaff’s Tivoli studio is so memorable that Jan Garden Castro was compelled to make mention of the plant in her article on Pfaff’s 2014 concurrent solo exhibitions.90 Pollan describes the moment when he realised the agency of botany, saying, That May afternoon, the garden suddenly appeared before me in a whole new light, the manifold delights it offered to the eye and nose and tongue no longer quite so innocent or passive. All these plants, which I’d regarded as the objects of my desire, were also, I realized, subjects, acting on me, getting me to do things for them they couldn’t do themselves.91 89 An image appears in Marguerite De Sabran, “Félix Fénéon and “Art from Remote Places,” Sotheby’s, n.d., accessed 31 December 2015, http://www.sothebys.com/en/news-video/auction-essays/fang- mabea-statue/2014/05/flix-fnon-and-ar.html. 90 Jan Garden Castro, “In the Studio with Judy Pfaff: the Genesis of Two Solo Exhibitions,” re:sculpt, International Sculpture Center, 5 November 2014, accessed 31 December 2015, http://blog.sculpture.org /2014/11/05/judy-pfaff/. 91 Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2002), xv. 33 It is interesting to question whether I have selected the plants used in this research or whether they have selected me. Certain research, such as the previously mentioned NASA report, has led me to particular plants. In using certain plants identified in this report, I aim to reveal their contribution in an indoor-environment. Like Sander-Regier, geographer Russell Hitchings also found the human–plant relationship in the intimate space of the personal garden useful to test a diffuse set of Actor Network ideas. Hitchings explored the collaborative processes of human and plants (non-human actors) in creating a garden to identify how they enlightened the human understanding of these gardens. Interested only in the plant and human actors, Hitching mimicked Latour’s methodology of “following the actors” and moving between “a social research paradigm of human feeling and identity and a natural science concern for plant biology and behavior” to gather information from gardeners and their plants.92 Hitchings identified the gardener’s creativity in planning an aesthetically appealing space and that the labour involved was part of this creative process.93 The knowledge of what plants were best suited to the environment and the notion of value (colour, texture, shape) ascribed to plants was also integral in this planning.94 This direction and organisation were aimed at having the plants behave in the way that the gardeners desired. Hitchings also identified the way that certain plants, particularly more unusual varieties, inspired gardeners to persevere with extra care or work, saying, “what was evident here was how these different plant ‘characters’ would gradually draw the person down into their world, and make for an understanding of their concerns and a commitment to their care”.95 Through observing the plants in my studio in proximity, I have become more attentive to the individual requirements of each different ‘character’ and over time have developed knowledge of what thrives where. I have accepted that, despite my best efforts, some plants do not flourish in the studio environment, while others have 92 Russell Hitchings, “People, Plants and Performance: On Actor Network Theory and the Material Pleasures of the Private Garden,” Social and Cultural Geography 4, no. 1(2003): 103, doi:10.1080. /1464936032000049333. 93 Ibid., 104. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., 107. 34 reproduced to become the most dominant species. By including plants in my artworks, the mundaneness of the species selected has been important in establishing that even though these ordinary, commonly available species might not immediately seem remarkable, their agency has taken them from garden to gallery. The Interconnectedness of ‘Things’ and the Vibrancy of Matter Urban botanical environments nearly always contain some sort of litter, be it plastic bottles, wrappers, or bags. During a 2013 studio critique of my work, Professor Janis Jeffries, Goldsmiths, University of London, discussed an artwork in progress, A virescent series of things connected or following in succession (2012-15), in which I was attempting to make static plastic bags appear to grow. Surrounded by plants and plastic bin-liner bags, Jeffries drew an immediate connection between my work and Jane Bennett’s text Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.96 We discussed Bennett’s text in connection to my studio experimentation. Bennett implores that when thinking about matter, we reconsider the tendency to instantly categorise something as being “passive” and “inert”. 97 Through a more considered contemplation, she hopes to disrupt the common practice of separating material from life, which neglects the potential of matter to be vital, and in doing so to cultivate more ecologically sound politics.98 She questions, Why advocate the vitality of matter? Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and our earth- destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of non- human powers circulating around and within human bodies. These material powers, which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us, in any case call for our attentiveness.99 This call to see the vibrancy in materials directly relates to my interest in the “off- gassing” of volatile organic compounds from plastics, building, and furnishing materials. It also connects with my attempt to make the materials in my artworks infer growth and accretion, and to maintain a sense of liveliness. In A virescent series of 96 Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. 97 Ibid., vii. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid., ix. 35 things connected or following in succession (2012–15), the fact that the plastic bags gave off a scent further demonstrated an active contribution to an environment—in this instance, the studio, and later, the gallery. By employing consumer packaging in my creative works, I sought to highlight complexities in consumer behaviour. Poignantly, Bennett asks, “How, for example, would patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash or “the recycling” but an accumulating pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter?”100 No matter how stringent the laws against littering may be in any given city, to varying degrees, litter is part of the urban landscape. Bennett describes an urban encounter in Baltimore with a cluster of objects trapped in a storm-water drain grate: “one large men’s black plastic work glove, one dense mat of oak pollen, one unblemished dead rat, one white plastic bottle cap, one smooth stick of wood”.101 She recounts the provocation that this collection of items affected on her, including repulsion and dismay, but also that the assemblage of debris “exhibited its thing-power”, where the “materiality of [the objects] started to shimmer and spark . . . because of the contingent tableau they formed with each other, with the street, . . . with the weather that morning, with me”. 102 Bennett’s experience mirrors one of my own, which I discuss in Chapter 4, where seeing plastic flagging tape and a plastic bag caught in the branches of a tree on the banks of the Brisbane River triggered a series of feelings and thoughts about the impact of humanity on an environment. In my case, litter in a group of trees marked with flagging tape indicated both human presence through the discarded plastic bag, and some past or future human endeavour relating to the trees through the flagging tape. Bennett’s comments on her specific encounter echo my own thoughts on what I had seen when she says, It hit me then in a visceral way how . . . materialism, which requires buying ever- increasing numbers of products purchased in ever-shorter cycles, is anti- materiality. The sheer volume of commodities, and the hyper-consumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter . . . thing-power rose from a pile of trash. Not Flower Power, Black Power, Girl Power. Thing Power: the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.103 100 Ibid., viii. 101 Ibid., 4. 102 Ibid., 4–5. 103 Ibid., 5–6. 36 I wondered about the longevity of the plastic bag on the banks of the river, where it would eventually end up, and how long it would take to disintegrate. While litter raises these feelings of anxiety, the efficiency of cities in Australia and many other Western countries ensures that we are not confronted with our domestic and workplace rubbish long enough for it to cause us too much self-reflection. It is only when our efficient systems are interrupted that the by-products of contemporary consumer culture confront our sensibilities. Bennett’s words and the thoughts they provoked were to have an immediate and ongoing effect in the studio with the way I viewed and responded to the materials used in artworks. Contemporary Consumer Culture and Waste We know how much the affluence of rich societies is linked to waste, given all the talk of a “throwaway society” and the fact that some have even envisaged a “garbage-can sociology”: “Tell me what you throw away and I’ll tell you who you are!” —Jean Baudrillard104 In his visionary critique of modern consumerism as a coercive system misleading Western societies into a false sense of fulfilment, Jean Baudrillard positioned waste as having a function that gives symbolic value to affluence105. He interprets wastage as “defy[ing] scarcity and, contradictorily, signify[ing] abundance”106. He notes: “Is not the fact that the glass packaging can be thrown away the mark of the golden age?”107 More recently, plastic bags and bottles are more commonly first conjured in a mental image of consumer packaging. For this reason, when artists use these materials in artworks, the original usefulness of the container is overshadowed by the legacy of negative associations that these ubiquitous, environmentally detrimental motifs carry. Slight shifts in perception can occur either through concealing (even temporarily) the materiality of familiar packaging, or transforming it in a way that suspends immediate value judgments that may elicit a more meaningful engagement with an audience. Hawkins suggests, 104 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage Publications, 1998), 42. 105 Ibid., 44–45. 106 Ibid., 45. 107 Ibid. 37 I want to open up another way of making sense of waste beyond the trope of environmentalism. My concern is with our most quotidian relations with waste, what they mean and how they might change. I want to think about the habits and practices that shape what we do with waste.108 This statement connects with my desire to reveal other ways of thinking about the environment through focusing on quotidian habitation practices and places, and the interconnectedness of all residents, specifically, humans and plants. The presence of rubbish in many cities has become omnipresent in everyday life, an irritating yet unremarkable presence on footpaths, nature strips, and traffic islands. The location of litter may dramatically affect this level of irritation, as evocatively described by Hawkins, Waste can generate powerful emotions. And not just bodily or organic waste— things don’t have to be slimy or foul smelling to disturb us. The empty Coke can just quietly biding its time can really upset the order of things when it’s encountered on a hike into pristine wilderness. You’ve made all this effort to get to a place where the ugly, shit end of capitalism won’t be present, only to discover that your quest has been futile. A bit of rubbish has found its way into paradise and exposed all your yearnings for purity as doomed to failure.109 Hawkins’s reaction to the ruination of “pristine wilderness” through evidence of our own species’ presence is somewhat of a recent sentiment in Australia, where state and federal anti-litter movements were formed in the 1960s.110 “Do The Right Thing” advertisements, “Tidy Towns” competitions, “Keep Australia Beautiful” and “Clean Up Australia” organisations all focused on educating individuals to take responsibility for their actions in regard to litter. Hawkins links the state of consciousness of “being rendered environmentally aware” in contemporary consumer society to the ambivalence with which we relate to waste.111 Litter in urban environments, such as a plastic food wrapper or cigarette butts in a gutter, may at most register as mildly disgusting, but when the offending rubbish has passed through storm water drains to wind up in a waterway, its true potential for destruction is revealed. Images in Chris Jordan’s Midway: Message from the Gyre series (2009–ongoing, figure 8) 108 Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish, vii. 109 Ibid. 110 Keep Australia Beautiful, “Our Rich History,” accessed 12 August 2015, http://kab.org.au/our-rich- history/. 111 Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, 22. 38 simultaneously invoke repulsion, sadness, anger, and guilt. Here, the evidence of consumer behaviour is viscerally evident; however, the consumer is unidentifiable. Figure 8 Chris Jordan Midway: Message from the Gyre (I) 2009 Jordan’s photographic series and soon-to-be-released movie of the same name is the result of his research of Midway Atoll, which lies north-west of the Hawaiian Islands, near to what is referred to as “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch”. While images such as Jordan’s are frequently used to motivate changes to human behaviour, the overwhelming volume of rubbish is removed from a personal scale to one of a large faceless guilty party, and the distance from local gutter to the invisibly connected waterway affected can dilute our level of involvement. The Midway Atoll may seem like someone else’s fault and someone else’s problem; ‘it’s not my litter’. Having witnessed the regular flooding events in Brisbane and seeing the resulting increase in litter flushed through storm water drains into the Brisbane River, which then flows into Moreton Bay, I can imagine how such a vast accumulation of packaging ends up in the vortices formed by ocean currents and atmospheric winds. Hawkins notes that “our ordinary encounters with [waste] are implicated in the making of a self and an object world”112 and that the “everyday actions of cultivating a self . . . 112 Ibid., 4. 39 are crucial for understanding how new waste habits and sensibilities might emerge”.113 She locates methods of waste removal in Foucault’s “arts of existence”, citing “all those actions and rules of conduct through which we organize ourselves according to particular ethical and aesthetic criteria”.114 Hawkins writes, The art of existence also involves habits. Habits locate us not simply in a social context but in a habitat, a specific place of dwelling or position. Our interactions with that place—what we make of it, what it makes of us—generate a mode of being or ethos that structures social behavior, often below the threshold of conscious decision making. Rosalyn Diprose reminds us that the Greek word ethos, defined as character and dwelling, gives dwelling a double meaning as both noun and verb, place and practice. And from this notion of dwelling as both habitat and habitual way of life the idea of ethics was derived.115 This connection of habitat, habit, and ethics is something I witness on morning walks when, if I walk early enough, I pass an elderly woman in Seven Hills who always carries a full plastic bag. She is out soon after 5.30am, even in the dark of winter. She lives in an immaculately maintained, post-war, fibro-sheet house, with a large well- kept garden. Because of her shopping bag, I used to think that when I saw her she was returning from the shops. However, I came to realise the bag she was carrying was filled with the litter that she collected from her street. While it is not her litter, it is her habitat and the presence of the litter concerns her enough to be in the habit of acting on it. Roslyn Diprose describes this relationship between habits and habitat, These habits are not given: they are constituted through the repetition of bodily acts the character of which are governed by the habitat I occupy. From this understanding of ethos, ethics can be defined as the study and practice of that which constitutes one’s habitat, or as the problematic of the constitution of one’s embodied place in the world.116 With more and more of our habitats becoming hybridised, without clearly defined boundaries between natural and built environments, it is necessary to find new ways to appreciate the nature within our city habitats. The focus of my research has been driven by my urban, daily lived experience, which is the also the experience of more than half of the world’s population. As Bridge and Watson state, 113 Ibid., 7. 114 Ibid., 24. 115 Ibid., 25. 116 Diprose cited in ibid. 40 Whether addressing global warming requires ultimately a replacement of the capitalist economy, or a series of sweeping measures within it, advocates of both approaches might agree that cities have a crucial role as the material assemblages of the transformative potential for the environment. Now that we have reached the point in human history where, for the first time, over 50 percent of the global population live in urban areas, the environmental future of the planet is increasingly an urban one.117 The themes explored in this chapter have defined and guided the creative research through reflective practice and experimentation. My personal perceptions of nature and history of increasingly urban habitation have been explored in connection to Wilson’s Biophilia Hypothesis. The importance of developing an aesthetic appreciation of the hybrid nature of the city as both a built and natural environment has been established. The writings of Bennett and Hawkins have been shown to support my focus on the vibrancy of plants and other materials also present in the city as a way of discussing the interconnectedness of the urban environment. This research has informed and enriched my creative work and assisted in the scrutiny of artworks of other contemporary artists whose work has supported my creative research strategies. 117 Bridge and Watson, Wiley Blackwell Companion to Geography, 10. 41 Chapter 2: Glasshouse – The Environments of Artists When art and nature are placed in each other’s context, the understanding and appreciation of both increases. . . . For more and more people, nature no longer has any direct presence in their everyday lives, but appears in derived forms. It is increasingly the task of art and artists to adopt this altered relationship to nature as a point of departure. —Evert van Straaten118 Introduction Increasing uncertainty as to the future of the planet has had a profound impact on the way that contemporary artists engage with the natural environment and the materials and practices that threaten to degrade it. In this chapter, I will discuss the specific artists whose responses to environmental ideas and issues in the twenty-first century have informed my artworks. To understand their approaches, it is important to consider the increasing concern for the environment that began in the 1960s with critical investigations that drew attention to harmful human practices. Rachel Carson’s landmark text Silent Spring of 1962 is frequently cited as crucial in raising mainstream awareness of ecological damage caused by pesticides.119 The text is credited as triggering a wave of environmental activism in the late 1960s, a time of enormous social and political upheaval. ‘Environmentalism’, which David L. Levy defines as “a social movement and associated body of thought that expresses concern for the state of the natural environment . . . [and seeks] to limit the impact of human activities on the environment”,120 became a key motivation for certain artists, such as Helen and Newton Harrison, Agnes Denes, and Mel Chin. In Australia, photographers Peter Dombrovskis and Olegas Truchanas were prominent environmental activist artists. 118 Evert van Straaten, “The Vulnerability of Nature and Art,” in Windflower: Perceptions of Nature, ed. Marente Bloemheuvel and Toos van Looten (Rotterdam, NAi Publishers, 2011), 7. 119 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (London: Hamilton, 1962). 120 David L. Levy, “Environmentalism,” in Key Concepts in Critical Management Studies, ed. Mark Tadajewski, Pauline Maclaran, Elizabeth Parsons and Martin Parker (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2011), 108. 42 Figure 9 Peter Dombrovskis Election Day Poster 1983 Dombrovskis and Truchanas documented wilderness areas of Tasmania at risk of destruction through industrialisation. From the mid-1960s to early 1970s, Truchanas actively campaigned as a founding member of the Tasmanian Conservation Trust.121 He presented slide shows of his photographic images of Lake Pedder to community groups to highlight the loss of a unique wilderness environment through flooding by the Tasmanian Hydro Electric Commission (HEC). The Wilderness Society used Dombrovskis’s image Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River (1979, figure 9) on posters and pamphlets distributed prior to the 1983 Federal Election, urging the public to use their vote to save the river from being destroyed by the HEC’s planned Gordon Below Franklin Dam.122 While the Labor Party was elected and passed 121 Dan Sprod, “Truchanas, Olegas (1923–1972),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2002, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/truchanas-olegas- 11882/. 122 Hans Bandler, “Gordon Below Franklin Dam, Tasmania, Australia: Environmental Factors in a Decision of National Significance,” The Environmentalist 7, no. 1 (1987): 50, and Environmental Law Australia, “Tasmanian Dam Case,” accessed 2 November 2014, http://envlaw.com.au/tasmanian-dam-case/. In order to comply with copyright this image has been removed. 43 regulations to protect the site, the Tasmanian Liberal Government fought to proceed with the dam, a battle that resulted in the High Court case Commonwealth v Tasmania, with the Commonwealth successful in stopping construction.123 Martin Thomas notes of Dombrovskis’s photographs of the Tasmanian landscape that the photographer emphasised “absence as the overwhelming condition of the wild spaces he traversed”, observing that “the depiction of human presence in the natural world is highly vexed, pointing to a wavering between nature and culture, alien and indigene, self and other.”124 It is interesting to imagine what Dombrovskis would make of the historical role of this now iconic image in raising the public’s awareness of the remote site, which is now a popular destination for tourists seeking ‘wilderness’ adventures.125 When examining the period of art history from the late 1960s until the present, it is critical to make the distinction between the environmentalist artists who used their practice to give voice to their politics, and artists who were engaging with the environment as material and/or site. Land Art (which arose from Conceptual Art) was ostensibly a rejection of the art market and gallery system arising from conceptual art. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, land artists such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim, and Walter De Maria all made works that engaged with and subsequently brought attention to particular sites in the landscape for reasons unrelated to environmental issues.126 Some works required massive earth-moving equipment and resulted in permanent changes to the landscape, which garnered criticism for their impacts on the environment. In his survey of contemporary art focussed on ecology, author Andrew Brown notes, “from our perspective today, we may question the ecological ethics of these artists and their use of heavy earth- moving equipment to displace tons of natural materials and permanently scar the face of the earth in the name of art”.127 123 Ibid., 50. 124 Martin Thomas, ed., “Introduction”, in Uncertain Ground: Essays Between Art and Nature (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 1999), 14. 125 The Franklin River is listed as #22 of 503 things to do in Tasmania on TripAdvisor’s website with one reviewer describing his trip with Water by Nature tour company as “Best Trip Ever” fulfilling his desire to experience “real wilderness” and not a “Disney Trip”. See John B. Palau, “Best Trip Ever,” Franklin River, TripAdvisor, accessed 2 January 2016, https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Attraction_Review-g255096- d603004-Reviews-Franklin_River-Tasmania.html 126 I refer particularly to Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Heizer’s Double Negative (1969–70), De Maria’s Lightning Field (1977) and Oppenheim’s Whirlpool (Eye of the Storm (1973). 127 Andrew Brown, “Introduction: At the Radical Edge of Life,” in Art and Ecology Now (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd), 11. 44 Given the remote locations of works such as Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970, Utah, USA) it was the photographic documentation of the works that was exhibited in galleries. The only humans’ presence in the landscape of ‘Land Art’ documentation is the heroic artworks themselves, solitary traces of the connection between artist and site, with the rest of humanity removed. However, some, like Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (discussed later in this chapter), were literally installed into the gallery space itself. My project has not been shaped from a distanced, solitary perspective, nor has it arisen from political activism, rather it finds more resonance with the contemporary artists discussed in this chapter. As I will describe in this chapter, artists Alan Sonfist, Judy Pfaff, Joanna Langford, Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger, Patricia Piccinini, and Simon Starling all explore humanity’s interconnectedness with the natural environment, critiquing various aspects of this relationship in the contemporary realm, and demonstrating curiosity rather than judgment. Some of these artists employ motifs that are known to undermine the integrity of particular landscapes, such as plastic waste, invasive exotic plants, and agricultural practices, and while these are contentious environmental topics, the artists’ approaches are not overtly political. Nor do they resort to alarmist tactics or didactic methods to voice their concerns in their engaging and highly imaginative artworks. I concur with Gay Hawkins belief that political approaches can “lapse into creating moralist blueprints for changes in consciousness”, denying the role of “how bodies and feelings are implicated in thinking”.128 These artists have not sought out pristine wildernesses in search of an unadulterated, human-free nature as inspiration, recognising that the twenty-first- century urban habitat is many humans’ natural environment. Aspects of their practices and methodologies have resonated with my own creative research and the way I have approached the themes that are crucial to this project. Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape (1978), which I visited twice during the course of my candidature, is an example of both an artwork and an urban natural environment that has shifted in meaning due to changing perceptions of the residents in its Greenwich Village neighbourhood. Time Landscape also demonstrates the agency of other living things—namely, wildlife, plants and humans—that share its urban location and have 128 Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, 7. 45 contributed over time to the botanical make-up of the site. The changing role of specific urban nature spaces will also be discussed, using examples from Manhattan, one of the most densely populated cities in the Western world,129 and home to Central Park, one of the world’s most iconic urban gardens. After discussing Sonfist’s work and the nearby High Line, I move on to artists working in the twenty-first century. I identify the effectiveness of their individual artistic strategies in specific artworks and exhibitions, and offer comparisons to the methodologies employed in my own practice. Judy Pfaff’s works, where synthetic and organic materials meld and morph, have been scrutinised to expand my research on the hybridity of the city. Joanna Langford’s and collaborators Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger’s artworks utilise consumer packaging in thought-provoking ways, and I compare their work to other artists’ in relation to inherent material meanings. Patricia Piccinini’s art practice is discussed, with a focus on the vibrancy of matter and contemporary consumerism. Simon Starling demonstrates humorous engagements with plants both in and beyond the gallery environment. Artworks viewed during my candidature in Brisbane and a number of cities, including London, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Philadelphia, Rome, Singapore, Sydney, and Venice, have enriched my knowledge of the broader field of contemporary artists engaged in similar dialogues and have afforded an appreciation for the variance in local and global issues. Brisbane is still a relatively low-density city by world standards and even compared to Sydney and Melbourne. Crucial to my research and of significance is the time spent in some of these older, more densely populated cities, observing the way residents utilise public parks, balconies, and indoors to experience botany in their lives. 129 Wendy Cox, “Largest World Cities,” New Geography, last modified 24 April 2014, accessed 3 April 2015, http://www.newgeography.com/content/004280-largest-world-cities-2014. 46 Natural Manhattan: Time Landscape, The High Line, and The New York Earth Room American artist Alan Sonfist was an emerging artist at the time that Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria were also rising in profile, but he felt no affinity with the Land Art movement, which he thought used “an entirely different vocabulary”.130 Having grown up in the urban environment of South Bronx, his appreciation of nature was shaped by his urban experience, and he reasoned, My feeling is that if we are going to live within a city, we have to create an understanding of the land. And that includes suburban dwellers as well. We have to come to a better understanding of who we are and how we exist on the planet.131 As he grew up, Sonfist witnessed the loss of natural environments in his neighbourhood through both development and arson, leading him to propose the planting of a series of forests to the Commissioner of Parks. In 1965, he devised a project in Lower Manhattan to restore a piece of land on the corner of West Houston Street and La Guardia Place to a state of native flora through the planting of ancient indigenous plant species.132 Time Landscape (figures 10–11), measuring 7.76 x 12.19 metres, was planted in 1978 as “a living monument to the forest that once blanketed Manhattan Island”.133 Time Landscape has been described as a natural landmark and its purpose compared to the preservation of historical architectural landmarks in the Greenwich Village neighborhood.134 The City of New York Parks and Recreation department promotes Time Landscape as a “forest plot invit[ing] city dwellers—including insects, birds, people and other animals, to experience a bygone Manhattan”.135 However, this experience is from a distance, at least for humans, as the park is fenced off and the gate padlocked. The city dwellers not invited—namely, birds, squirrels, and the invasive plant species 130 Alan Sonfist cited in Ann Landi, “Separating the Trees from the Forest,” Artnews, last modified 15 August 2011, accessed 24 April 2015, http://www.artnews.com/2011/08/15/separating-the-trees-from- the-forest/. 131 Ibid. 132 NYC Parks, “Greenstreet: Time Landscape,” accessed 24 April 2015, http://www.nycgovparks.org /parks/greenstreet-mz31/history. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid. 47 transported to the site by wind and water, and the feathered and furred creatures previously mentioned—have made their way into the indigenous garden over time despite the locked fence and yearly clean-ups. Sonfist describes this as a natural progression, stating that Time Landscape “is an open lab, not an enclosed landscape. The intention was never to keep out all non-native species, but rather to see how they come into the space with time”.136 The ‘open lab’ revealed the existing systems of human, plant, animal, and material distribution in this urban habitat, and the arbitrary nature of the fence as a means of containment. Figure 10 Alan Sonfist Time Landscape 1978 As time passed, it was more than the appearance of non-native plants that concerned local residents. The overgrown nature of the space made it attractive to homeless people seeking shelter.137 Thus, as a deterrent, the trees and shrubs within the garden were heavily pruned to create clear sightlines through the foliage. Roger Ulrich notes that in urban areas where crime is an issue, “learned fear/risk associations intensify 136 Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke, “Clean up Time for Time Landscape Indigenous Garden,” The Villager (Manhattan) 77, no. 17 (26 September–2 October 2007), accessed 2 December 2012, http://thevillager .com/villager_230/cleanuptime.html. 137 Ibid. 48 negative respon[ses] to settings having dense foreground vegetation that blocks surveillance”.138 Landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh notes there is a widely held misconception that landscapes designed to appear natural are self-sufficient. Citing Time Landscape as an example of landscape failure due to ongoing maintenance, he says, Sonfist put a fence around an abandoned lot, called it Time Landscape, and asked us to reverentially view what nature did with the site. I suppose that in its day this was an important work of conceptual art. But now not only can this landscape not be ‘inhabited’, it also is truly an eyesore, or worse, not legible as a deliberate thing. It takes untouched natural landscapes several decades to sort out their long-surviving species in a way that might offer appealing visual coherence, and such a time span isn’t available on disturbed urban sites like this—coherence may never exist on Sonfist’s site.139 This lack of visual coherence and the very ‘wildness’ of Sonfist’s landscape may be overwhelming for Manhattan residents, who are potentially enculturated to appreciate more ordered botanical environments. David W. Orr, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College, refers to quintessential Manhattan resident Woody Allen’s quote, “I am at two with nature”, as an acknowledgement of Allen’s biophobia. Explaining the role urban life plays in the enculturation of biophobia, he notes, Allen’s aversion to nature, what can be called ‘biophobia’, is increasingly common among people raised with television, Walkman radios attached to their heads and video games, living amid shopping malls, freeways and dense urban or suburban settings where nature is permitted, tastefully, as decoration. More than ever we dwell in and among our own creations and are increasingly uncomfortable with the nature that lies beyond our control.140 On visiting Time Landscape in October 2012, I found it to be well-tended. I could not find much to differentiate it from other parks in the area; indeed, without its signage, it may have been indistinguishable from them. In its high-density location, it provides a botanical contrast with the surrounding buildings and provides a form of sanctuary, 138 Roger S. Ulrich, “Biophilia, Biophobia and Natural Landscapes,” in The Biophilia Hypothesis, ed. Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), 96. 139 Michael Van Valkenburgh, “Landscapes over Time,” in Landscape Architecture Magazine, March 2013, accessed 11 August 2014, http://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2013/03/14/landscapes-over- time/#more-2810. 140 David W. Orr, "The Coming Biophilia Revolution." Earth Island Journal 9, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 38. 49 particularly for birds and squirrels now that there is no human access. Sonfist’s visionary comment on the artwork in 1968 registered the agency of other living beings in an ecosystem when he noted that “increasingly, as we come to understand our dependence on nature, the concept of community expands to include non-human elements”. Perhaps the evolution of the work into a community of multiple species, plant, animal, and human aligns with Sonfist’s original conceptual intentions.141 Figure 11 Alan Sonfist Time Landscape 1978 (detail) 2012 Does an audience engage with this work through a framework of art aesthetics or one of environmental aesthetics? I experienced Time Landscape as an engaging botanical environment, finding the variation in plant species aesthetically pleasing. Furthermore, knowing Sonfist’s conceptual framework, I believe it to have enduring relevance as an artwork. From a residential perspective, Director of the local residents group the SoHo 141 Alan Sonfist, “Natural Phenomena as Public Monuments (1968),” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 624. In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 50 Alliance, Sean Sweeney, sees Time Landscape as an artwork, albeit negatively, calling it “a piece of 80’s art”.142 Sweeney claims that the time has come for alternative uses for the land to be considered. Artists and researchers Reiko Goto Collins and Timothy M. Collins believe that the reception of Time Landscape as an artwork is challenged by its operation on three levels: as a sculptural idea; a purely visual artwork (since access is not possible); and as something that fosters general interest in preservation of the historical fabric of both buildings and forest.143 I responded to Time Landscape as an artwork perhaps because of the injunction on entering the work, with the locked fence acting as a frame. From an environmental aesthetic perspective, Emily Brady declares Sonfist’s “pre- colonial forest ecosystem” successful as a community green space but refutes that the work can be reducible to a natural environment.144 In his criticism of Environmental Art in regards to environmental aesthetics, Allen Carlson describes some artwork as being an affront (or insult) to nature, even when they cause no environmental damage.145 He judged Time Landscape as not committing an affront to nature only insofar as he does not consider it an artwork.146 Similarly, Carlson cites work by Christo and Jeanne Claude as “temporary insults” to the landscape.147 For example, Christo and Jeanne Claude’s Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida (1980–83, figure 12) temporarily introduced 603,870 square metres of floating pink woven polypropylene fabric to a natural environment, creating a spectacle that the artists stated “was a work of art underlining the various elements and ways in which the people of Miami live, between land and water”.148 While the artists made no claim of the work being an act of environmentalism, they do note on their website that in preparation for installation, forty tons of garbage was removed from the islands. No statement is made as to how the polypropylene was disposed of after the event. 142 Bloomgarden-Smoke, “Clean up Time for Time Landscape.” 143 Reiko Goto Collins and Timothy M. Collins, “Art and Living Things: The Ethical Aesthetic Impulse,” in Human-Environment Relations: Transformative Values in Theory and Practice, ed. Emily Brady and Pauline Phemister (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2012), 124, doi:10.1007/978-94-007-2825-7_10. 144 Emily Brady, “Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental and Land Art,” Ethics, Place & Environment: A Journal of Philosophy and Geography 10, no. 3 (2008): 295–96. 145 Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, 156. 146 Ibid., 157. 147 Ibid., 156. 148 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, “Surrounded Islands,” accessed 3 January 2016, http://christojeanne claude.net/projects/surrounded-islands?view=info#.VbhO0YvrPGs. 51 Figure 12 Christo and Jeanne Claude Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida 1980–83 Carlson’s refusal to appreciate the environmental aesthetic potential in Sonfist’s Time Landscape as an artwork seems arbitrary and idealistic, and his insistence that only the pristine environments are worthy of such appreciation refutes the benefits of a range of urban botanical environments. Time Landscape is a topical site to consider the debate within environmental aesthetics as it defies categorisation, operating to varying degrees as both artwork and natural environment. Sonfist’s attempted reclaiming of a pre-seventeenth-century Manhattan wilderness is now legislated by the NYC Parks Department, which also controls the nearby High Line Public Park in Chelsea (figure 13). Utilising an elevated freight rail that was built in the 1930s and decommissioned in 1980, and extending from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to West 34th Street between 10th and 12th Avenues, the wildness of the disused railway tracks was transformed between 2004 and 2014 52 through the addition of landscaped trees, grasses, and shrubs. This created an elevated botanical walkway that has become a major Manhattan tourist attraction. Figure. 13 The High Line, Manhattan 2012 This site has been the cause of much debate since its inception. Criticism focuses on the gentrification and subsequent rise in property prices that has ensued to cater for the influx of tourists.149 In contrast, supporters credit the park with making the neighbourhood cleaner and safer.150 The park is a biophobe’s delight—the natural elements are contained, controlled, and, in the endless stream of pedestrian traffic, only very briefly encountered. Perhaps there is reason to be fearful of less manicured environs: in the last decade, ten lawsuits have been filed as the result of injuries and 149 Kelly Chan, “Getting to the Bottom of the High Line Controversy: How Good Design Spurred Chelsea's Gentrification,” BlouinArtInfo International, 24 August 2012, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story /821368/getting-to-the-bottom-of-the-high-line-controversy-how-good-design-spurred-chelseas- gentrification. 150 Ibid. 53 fatalities caused by falling tree branches in Central Park.151 However, as Simon Schama reminds us, Central Park was always supposed to answer both arcadian myths that have survived in the modern memory: the wild and the cultivated; the place of unpredictable exhilaration and the place of bucolic rest. Olmsted could have had no inkling, of course, how the very features that made his park unique—the sunken roads, the gullies and hollows that closed off views to the streets—would shelter a savagery at which even Pan himself might have flinched. . . . Central Park divides its arcadian life by the hours of the clock. By day it is all nymphs and shepherds, cupids and fêtes champêtres. But at night it reverts to a more archaic place, the realms of Pelasgus where the wolf-men of Lykaon prowl, satyrs bide their time unsmiling, and feral men, hungry for wilding, postpone their music.152 These sites in Manhattan—Sonfist’s Time Landscape attempting to recreate an indigenous environment; The High Line, a contemporary park built upon a disused railway; and Central Park, a historical park designed to retain the “picturesquely- varied, rocky formations of the [Manhattan] island”153—are evidence of humans’ evolving relationship with botanical nature in the face of increasing urbanisation. I have examined these sites to enrich notions of what constitutes a natural environment in contemporary urban society, noting that the increasing hybridity of such spaces calls for new ideas of aesthetic appreciation. While savanna-like settings might once have been most suitable for survival, enculturation in contemporary cities suggests that within the urban environment, natural environments with clear sight lines and safe paths make residents feel safer, even when their feet don’t actually connect with the earth—as is the case in the elevated High Line. Not far from the High Line is an artwork that brings the substance of ‘earth’ indoors and that, I argue, creates a profound urban experience with nature. Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room was constructed in 1977 and has been on public view since 1980 in a SoHo loft (figure 14). The artwork, commissioned and maintained by the DIA foundation, is described as an “interior earth sculpture”, 127,300 kilograms of soil to be precise.154 Viewing this artwork in 2014 had a profound 151 William Glaberson and Lisa W. Foderaro, “Neglected, Rotting Trees Turn Deadly,” The New York Times, 13 May 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/14/nyregion/in-new-york-neglected-trees-prove- deadly.html?_r=0. 152 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1995), 570. 153 Fredrick Olmsted, landscape architect and co-designer of Central Park, cited in ibid., 569. 154 DIA Art Foundation, “Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room,” accessed 1 February 2015, http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/52/1365. 54 effect on me as I was filled with a feeling of reverential awe and found the stillness of the space palpable. The earth here seemed to exaggerate the emptiness of the loft, and the smell of the soil evoked my childhood memories of farms with vast ploughed paddocks and wide-open skies. The acoustic qualities of the loamy soil seemed to absorb any noise and activity made by the viewers, offering an experience of profound quietude in ‘the city that never sleeps’. My experience of The New York Earth Room was not unlike visiting a church or cathedral—the calm, solemnity and stillness of the room lit only by sunlight—a place of worship for the urban biophile. With no artificial light to illuminate the dirt to reiterate its role as art subject, there is a sense of calm in the loft—the daylight seen through windows alludes to natural rhythms and time. The space seemed ripe with potential, like a fertile field lying fallow, waiting for something to germinate. The earth positively radiated vitality. Figure 14 Walter De Maria The New York Earth Room 1977 Thinking about the materiality of the contained soil in The New York Earth Room transported my thoughts outside the loft space, connecting to ideas and associations with the earth outside. For me, the way the work compartmentalises nature in an interior urban space might be seen as generating an environmentalist reading, where nature is a commodity in an increasingly urbanised society. Indeed, for the city 55 gardener, soil is an expensive material purchased in brightly packaged plastic bags and available as specialty mixes to suit particular plants. The poignancy of this work may lie in the fact that, for over thirty years, an enormous volume of soil not covered by concrete or asphalt has remained indoors like some strange relic, occupying some of the world’s most expensive real estate. While there are still vacant blocks in Manhattan where the ground is visible, they did not evoke in me the same connections to a wider world. In The New York Earth Room, there is no litter to mar its purity, no footprint, human or otherwise—no weeds, just earth. It is seemingly hyper natural earth, despite its domestic setting. In my Brisbane studio, my thoughts are also transported by contained soil. In The New York Earth Room, a Plexiglas155 barrier holds the dirt in, and it is seeing soil through this barrier that allows the viewer to appreciate the depth and volume contained in the space. In my studio, I strike plant cuttings in clear, round plastic containers, the soil visible through the sides. When my attention is drawn to new growth emerging from the soil, I become aware of other things residing within the containers such as insects and small fungi. I can sometimes see the root systems of the plants below the surface. I appreciate that each plastic tub is an ecosystem within the larger ecosystem of the studio. As the way humans encounter nature is affected by residing in cities, what we come to appreciate as nature changes. Intimate encounters offering a few simple natural elements—a balcony garden, a potted plant, a room filled with a layer of earth—may satiate our biophilic desires. Cultivating a focus and appreciation for these mundane botanical experiences can remind us of the connection to a wider natural world. Contemporary artists may play a role in developing this appreciation by bringing these connections to life in the gallery. 155 Plexiglas is an acrylic sheet trade name used in this document where the artist or gallery has specified. 56 Judy Pfaff: Second Nature In October 2014 during a residency in Philadelphia, I had the opportunity to see American artist Judy Pfaff’s concurrent exhibitions Run Amok at Loretta Howard Gallery (figure 15) and Second Nature at Pavel Zoubok Gallery (figures 16 and 17) in New York. On seeing Second Nature, I felt an instantaneous sense of connection to Pfaff’s hybrid world. Eleanor Heartney notes that while both these exhibitions “paid homage to the distinction between the forces of nature and the effects of human activity . . . what was most strongly conveyed was the chaos that comes from their intermingling”.156 This chaotic intermingling is the reality of the urban environment, and far from chaotic, I found a sense of familiar urban order in Pfaff’s simultaneously formal yet exuberant works. As Alexandra C. Anderson identifies in her catalogue essay, The assembling process, while it may appear random and largely improvisational, is actually governed by Pfaff’s strict and disciplined attention to underlying structures upon which she subsequently builds, or better yet, extemporizes, using unpredictable found objects, unusual textures, wild color and appropriated industrial fragments and materials.157 Figure 15 Judy Pfaff There Is a Field, I Will Meet You There (Rumi) 2014 156 Eleanor Heartney, “Judy Pfaff: Loretta Howard and Pavel Zoubok, October 18 to November 15,” Art News 114, no. 2 (February 2015), 82. 157 Alexandra C. Anderson, “Nature and Culture: Total Immersion,” in Judy Pfaff: Second Nature / Run Amok (New York: Pavel Zoubok Gallery, Loretta Howard Gallery, 2014), 3, http://issuu.com/lorettahoward /docs/judypfaff_issu. 57 Just as botany in the built environment organically weaves around the geometry of architecture, so Pfaff’s work sets up a dynamic tension by both contrasting and tempering the chaos in her works with ordered substructures. This is achieved through the physical frameworks in her sculptural forms that provide a structure for the other materials used. In the case of There Is a Field, I Will Meet You There (Rumi) (2014, figure 15), those materials are Plexiglas, fluorescent lights, plastic, and expanded foam. The artist takes the same approach with the composition of her print works and the way in which these works are installed. Gridded prints contrast with organic sculptural forms (figure 16) and framed works hung over grids of images (figure 17). Figure 16 Judy Pfaff Hanging Judge (centre) 2014 and Let Sixteen Cowboys Sing Me a Song (far wall) 2014 58 Figure 17 Judy Pfaff Second Nature (installation view) 2014 The material and conceptual hybridity of Second Nature resonated strongly with me. Pfaff’s fascination with flora as a subject was evident in the mixed-media two- dimensional works containing botanical references, and the presence of plant matter in her sculptural works. In both instances, Pfaff then transformed the familiar subject material into ambiguous, fantastical forms, the combination of natural and artificial materials amplifying the organic aesthetic of some of the synthetic elements; for instance, the paper lantern on the right side of Cahoots (2014, figure 18). The other materials are imbued with life, appearing to grow and ooze from this synthetic shell. Figure 18 Judy Pfaff Cahoots 2014 59 Cahoots also reminded me of the discovery of a new stone, the plastiglomerate, identified by scientists at Kamilo Beach in Hawaii.158 A paper co-authored by geologist Patricia L. Corcoran, oceanographer Charles J. Moore, and artist Kelly Jazvac describes the plastiglomerate as consisting of melted plastic, beach sediment, basaltic lava fragments and organic debris (figure 19).159 Plastiglomerates register the preservation of plastics in the earth’s rock record, meaning the material “has great potential to form a marker horizon of human pollution, signalling the occurrence of the informal Anthropocene epoch”.160 Figure 19 Kelly Jazvac Recent Landscapes (plastiglomerate) 2014 Speaking in 1992, comedian and social critic George Carlin appeared to foresee the existence of a material such as plastiglomerate saying, 158 Patricia L Corcoran, Charles J. Moore and Kelly Jazvac, “An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in the Future Rock Record,” GSA Today 24, no. 6 (6 June 2014): 4, accessed 6 October 2015, http://www .geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/24/6/article/i1052-5173-24-6-4.htm. 159 Ibid. 160 Ibid. The Anthropocene is defined as an epoch “in which human activities have had a tangible impact on the earth’s ecosystems”, with debate as to whether the period begins with the rise of agriculture or the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. See Noel Castree, Rob Kitchin, and Alisdair Rogers, "Anthropocene," in A Dictionary of Human Geography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), accessed 1 January 2016, Oxford Reference. 60 The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself . . . [be]cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. . . . And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question “Why are we here?”161 My prior research on plastiglomerates (undertaken while making my artwork Jardinière in 2014) also came to mind when, on my way to view Judy Pfaff’s New York exhibitions, I viewed a site-specific artwork at the High Line, The Evolution of God (2014–15, figure 20), by Adrián Villar Rojas. Thirteen cubes, each originally measuring 115cm3, were designed to disintegrate during the course of the exhibition, the organic matter vulnerable to weather conditions. Ashley Tickle describes the work as follows, layers clashing temporalities, revealing ecological concerns and a fascination for the “deep time” history of our planet . . . resembl[ing] archaeological sites where the future is simultaneously excavated and entombed. As his works incorporate a mixture of animal, mineral, and vegetal ingredients, their metamorphosis over time inherently reflects the material qualities of each of these primordial elements. His sculptures exhibit an animal growth, decay, and repose; a vegetal sprouting and composting; and a mineral, tectonic cracking and settling.162 The layers of clay and concrete laced with human-made materials, including clothing, sneakers, and rope, appear as if they could have been excavated from one of the surrounding building sites. Seeds embedded in the sculptures sprouted from cracks in the cubes, their growth both a contrast to the decay of the cube, and a connection to the surrounding plant life of the High Line. Reflecting on the work, Villar Rojas says, “This is the basics of life on earth. . . . Inside [the cubes] you have all these tiny things that are happening, going back to billions of years ago when the first primitive organisms appeared. This is it. This is the primordial soup.”163 The artist believes that he experienced humans’ evolutionary connection to nature in making the cubes, speculating, 161 Carlin, George, “George Carlin: Saving The Planet,” YouTube video, 8:03, posted by “Dadniel”, 21 October 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c. 162 Ashley Tickle, “High Line Art Presents Adrián Villar Rojas ‘The Evolution Of God’, a Major New Site- Specific Sculptural Installation at The High Line at the Rail Yard,” Press release, 21 September 2014, http://assets.thehighline.org/original_site/press/highlineart/AdrianVillarRojas-0914.pdf. 163 Adrian Villard Rojas cited in Andy Battalion, “High Line Opens Last Section with Adrián Villar Rojas Sculptures,” in The Wall Street Journal, 19 September 2014, accessed 23 March 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/high-line-opens-last-section-with-adrian-villar-rojas-sculptures-1411076002. 61 It has this kind of childish attitude, playing with mud and soil, vegetables and seeds. Our first moments as hominids and homo sapiens were all linked to a relation with nature and agriculture and farming. We humans have a super-strong connection. The moment you work with soil, you feel some sort of pleasure in reconnection.164 Figure 20 Adrián Villar Rojas The Evolution of God 2014–15 As I walked the streets of Chelsea having seen the work of Pfaff and Villar Rojas, I felt synergies were emerging with the work I was making and the artists I had seen in this metropolis, enriching the possibilities of what constitutes a natural environment in contemporary urban society. The commingling of humans and other living things in this vibrant, hybrid ecosystem constantly revealed intriguing entanglements of the built and natural environments. The influences of the urban environment were evident in both Pfaff’s and Villar Rojas’s work. It could be seen in the building sites nearby where massive pits revealed the foundations of the structures yet to rise out of the 164 Ibid. 62 ground—strata of earth and human-made materials (figure 21). The bright colours in Pfaff’s works were ubiquitous on the streets where fluorescent colours compete with the constant noise and movement. The layers of detritus in Villar Rojas’s sculptural cubes were echoed in the clear plastic garbage bags on the city streets—items fallen out of favour now destined for landfill (figure 22). Figure 21 Building site in Chelsea, Manhattan 2014 Robert Sullivan’s evocative description of a garbage hill outside Manhattan illustrates the persistence of waste materials’ vitality, The garbage hills are alive . . . there are billions of microscopic organisms thriving underground in dark, oxygen free communities [that] multiply and even evolve so that they can more readily digest the trash at their disposal. . . . After having ingested the tiniest portion of leftover New Jersey or New York, these cells then exhale huge underground plumes of carbon dioxide and of warm, moist methane, giant stillborn tropical winds that seep through the ground to feel the Meadowlands’ fires, or creep into the atmosphere where they eat away at the Earth-protecting layer of Ozone.165 165 Robert Sullivan, “Valley of the Garbage Hills,” in The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of New York City (London: Granta Publications, 2006 (1998), 96. 63 Echoes in these ideas of the vitality of waste materials can also be seen in the work of Joanna Langford whose practice also supports my argument that the utilisation of consumer packaging can reveal the materials’ enduring liveliness. Figure 22 Garbage on a footpath in Chelsea, Manhattan 2014 Joanna Langford: Waste Lands Joanna Langford’s installations draw inspiration from the geography of her homeland, New Zealand. Langford seeks to employ the very materials that pose a threat to, or are used to alter, New Zealand’s natural environment. Her practice is representative of contemporary currents within art that critique the effects of the waste produced through industrial and agricultural practices as well as consumer packaging. Crawl Space (2012, figure 23) was exhibited in the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial at the 64 Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. The work is described as “appear[ing] to emerge from the ground”.166 However, when I viewed the work, its connection to the floor seemed less an emergence than a gentle alighting of the plastic and wire constructions on the earth’s surface. Figure 23 Joanna Langford Crawl Space 2012 With an arachnoid presence that recalls Louise Bourgeois’s Crouching Spider (2003, figure 24), the works are suspended from the ceiling with nylon line, adding to their gravitational orientation. The tattered industrial wrapping material of pale-green plastic silage167 wrap alludes to a botanical presence reminiscent of seaweed. The network of miniature white and safety orange scaffolding seems positioned to observe the artificial, mountainous landscape, yet the barrier surrounding the work is also a scaled down-version of fencing used on building sites to keep the site secure. In the gallery 166 Andrea Bell, “Joanna Langford: Imagined Worlds,” in The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT7), (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, 2012), 145. 167 Silage is a fermented livestock food made from green crops; see "Silage," in A Dictionary of Plant Sciences, ed. Michael Allaby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), accessed 1 January 2016, Oxford Reference. 65 space, Langford’s miniature barrier directed the flow of traffic and also discouraged entry into the fragile floating world. Figure 24 Louise Bourgeois Crouching Spider 2003 Crawl Space contrasts a geometric framework that alludes to construction with the fragile floating mountains described by Langford as “a new synthetic landscape (the city)”.168 The work also implies a very tentative balance between the worlds of the built and the natural. The temporality of the pale-green plastic has a direct visual and material connection to discarded and weathered plastic found outdoors as litter. This association and its use to create a form that infers vegetation or terrain alludes to potential environmental peril—transforming the plastic from something lifeless to something vital with the potential for further alteration. However, I believe that the work would have benefitted from some of the green, organically shaped plastic straying into the geometric structures in the work, as the artist has done in The High Country (2012, figure 25). I encountered a similar issue in my artwork, A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession (2012), and the strategies I used to overcome this are discussed in Chapter 4. 168 Ibid. 66 Figure 25 Joanna Langford The High Country 2012 The High Country (2012, figures 25 and 26) was described by curator Blair French as reflecting Langford’s interest in the “unsettled, unstable changing condition of landscape—its dynamic morphic quality”.169 This quality of the landscape was something the artist had to contend with when the installation of the work was delayed twice by earthquakes in New Zealand, first in Canterbury in 2010 and then again in Christchurch in 2011. It was finally installed in Christchurch in November 2012. Constructed from plastic milk containers and silage wrap, the work links the recognisable consumer container with the less recognisable industrial packaging used by the dairy industry. The High Country brings to mind Italo Calvino’s fictitious city of Leonia where “perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia’s boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption”.170 Through the materials used to construct The High Country, Langford reminds us that prior to becoming waste, the detritus of the dairy industry—the industrial silage used to wrap livestock food, and the plastic containers used to package the milk—were formerly useful. Sometimes, the potency of negative associations of plastic packaging as a metaphor for environmental threat can obscure its original intended purpose and usefulness. The High Country suggests profusion elegantly, conveying Langford’s ideas with clarity through the inference of the liveliness of her materials. Langford’s work creatively explores systems in place that contribute to waste while avoiding 169 Blair French, “Joanna Langford: The High Country,” Art & Australia, 49, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 314. 170 Italo Calvino, 1974, Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver (London: Random House), 102. 67 environmentalist reprimands or presenting an artwork that evokes an instantaneous reaction of revulsion (such as Chris Jordan’s work, figure 8). By countering the presence of materials that have negative connotations with more intricate elements in her work—for example, the scaffolding in Crawl Space—Langford invites an engagement beyond an immediate reaction to spectacle through scale or volume, allowing time for the consideration of the concepts presented. This is something I have also paid attention to in my artworks where I use consumer packaging. Figure 26 Joanna Langford The High Country (detail) 2012 Simultaneously representing both consumption and waste, plastic bags are one of the most iconic types of consumer packaging associated with pollution. Seen en masse, either in the kitchen drawer or the gallery, they may be a worrying sight. However, relying on vast quantities of material alone can be less effective in works such as Pascale Marthine Tayou’s Plastic Bags (2001–10, figure 27). Although it is described as an “ominous spectacle of consumerism that hangs from the ceiling, as if threatening to spill its junk on the gallery floor”,171 there is no junk, the bags hang limp and lifeless, empty and in pristine condition, making it hard to imagine that they were ever full. Tayou’s sculpture has a formal aesthetic appeal; the plastic bags used are 171 Nicholas Chambers, “21st Century Recession Art,” in 21st Century: Art in the First Decade, ex. cat., ed. Miranda Wallace (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, 2010), 43. 68 brightly coloured and carefully arranged to create the large, regular form. While the work’s scale gives it a formidable presence, it is decidedly static, the impotence of the flaccid bags detracting from their potential to appear threatening. In Chapter 4, I discuss my use of plastic bags in artworks, arguing that while the aesthetic appeal of bright colours can counteract the more menacing aspects in a work, this allure requires a contrast. I argue that by constructing plastic bags into forms that hold visible tension and appear to grow, the dilemma of consumer desire and potential environmental threat is both more evident and more engaging. The seduction of consumerism is inferred as well as the botanical environment that the plastic bags pose a threat to. Figure 27 Pascale Marthine Tayou Plastic Bags 2001–10 One can negate the menace inherent in the materiality of plastic bags to the point of rendering them enchanting, yet still allude to ideas of social behaviour surrounding our relationship to waste. An example of this is Korean artist Gimhongsok, who makes plastic garbage bags seem simultaneously ephemeral and permanent. In the comical In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 69 Canine Construction (2009, figure 28), proposed as a potential public artwork, the materiality of the garbage bags is transformed by casting them in resin. The texture, lightness, and detail captured in the resin is so visually convincing that the sculpture begs to be touched for confirmation that it will not yield to pressure. The only aspects that belie this lightness are the tied bag ends that form the dog’s ears and tail, relentless in their verticality. Figure 28 Gimhongsok Canine Construction 2009 More mutt than art-world pedigree, the work bears a lowbrow resemblance to Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (1994–2000, figure 29). While Canine Construction evokes ideas of mundane, domestic, and personal consumerism, Koons’s Balloon Dog embodies the shinier, elitist capitalism of the art market. Canine Construction’s familiar form of plump garbage bags gives the sculpture a universal humility. Gimhongsok highlights the participatory aspect of humans in bagging garbage, noting, “because there are not set guidelines for the use of plastic bags, this dynamic social narrative is a totally 70 spontaneous manifestation and can be seen as a true social agreement.”172 Here, one can relate back to Hawkins who describes the act of putting out the garbage as, a cultural performance, an organised sequence of material practices that deploys certain technologies, bodily techniques and assumptions. And in this performance waste matter is both defined and removed; a sense of order is established and a particular subject is made. Waste then, isn’t a fixed category of things, it is an effect of classifications and relations.173 Figure 29 Jeff Koons Balloon Dog (Blue) 1994–2000 Even as a public artwork in a natural environment, the quirky presence of Canine Construction would invite contemplation before potentially setting off environmental alarms. These garbage bags are contained, their contents secure. The social role in the containment of garbage has been executed with precision and humour. Once the personal performance of taking out the garbage is complete, it is easy to forget the infrastructure that removes our discarded matter to some remote location where the sight and smell of our excesses no longer trouble us. Our rubbish dumps as well as our sewerage treatment plants and water reservoirs reside beyond the urban fringe. Our connection to these places is mostly buried underground, and only 172 Gimhongsok cited in Reuben Keehan, “Gimhongsok: Irreconcilable Differences,” in The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 118. 173 Hawkins, “The Ethics of Waste,” 2. 71 revealed during a building’s construction or demolition (as described previously). The Water Hole (2008, figures 30–33) by Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger reveals the path of the urban water supply, critiquing the impact on consumer behaviour on the natural environment. In the next section, I discuss this work to illustrate how adopting a viewpoint at a remove from the issue at hand may appear condescending, or worse accusatory, particularly when a sense of personal scale is overwhelmed in an installation. Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger: The Water Hole Swiss artists Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger create immersive environments that explore the interconnectedness of humans to the natural world, sometimes highlighting human ambivalence to this relationship. In their large-scale work The Waterhole (2008), installed at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, the artists critiqued aspects of consumer culture affecting the environment while simultaneously revealing hidden of aspects of urban infrastructure. The installation, which explored Melbourne’s water supply in the face of the longest drought in the region’s history, comprised a series of interlinking rooms within in the gallery: a silver tunnel that led to a lookout to view the waterhole; a kaleidoscopic video installation; the waterhole itself; a space for contemplation; and a laboratory space containing a desalination plant for tears. The Water Hole came at a time where Melbourne residents were highly sensitive to critique of their water consumption. With Stage 3 water restrictions in place, residents had to make changes to the most intimate aspects of their daily lives. Toilet and bathing habits were altered,174 and households endeavoured to recycle water wherever possible. Steiner and Lenzlinger articulate the journey of water from storage dam to urban household in their artists’ catalogue statement, saying, The dammed water rushes down to the boomtown in a huge pipe, branching into millions of smaller pipes to end up in sinks, basins, toilets, showers, bathtubs— the urban water holes. And between the fern tree gully and the wet sponge to 174 In regard to toilet flushing, a popular expression at the time was “If it’s brown, flush it down; if it’s yellow, let it mellow.” Timed showers were strongly recommended, with baths considered an act of wanton waste. 72 clean the car lays a dried-up landscape. Isn’t it strange that the rituals humans perform around their urban water holes, mainly locked up in small rooms, are all about spoiling the water?175 Figure 30 Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger The Water Hole 2008 The artists’ preparatory research began a year in advance, building on their existing knowledge of the city from a visit in 1999 when they participated in Melbourne’s only Biennial.176 Significant to their engagement with both location and community were a three-month residency in Melbourne and a pivotal field trip to the Upper Yarra Reservoir, which is located approximately one hundred kilometres from the city centre. Travelling through the suburbs to the reservoir, they noticed the extent that the city had sprawled in ten years, and the lack of natural environments incorporated into new housing developments. From this initial exploration, Steiner and Lenzlinger 175 Steiner and Lenzlinger, “The Water Hole,” in Juliana Engberg, Gerda Steiner, and Jörg Lenzlinger, Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger: The Water Hole (Melbourne: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2009), 4. 176 Gerda Steiner, “Interview with Shelley Hinton,” Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (website), accessed 2 May 2012, http://www.accaonline.org.au/GerdaSteinerJorgLenzlinger. In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 73 determined that their installation would take the form of a waterhole, which they related to the waterhole in Indigenous dreamtime stories.177 The artwork more directly connected ideas of the urban supply of water as a valuable resource at risk from human activity impacting the natural environment. Figure 31 Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger The Water Hole (detail) 2008 The artists used diverse methods to attract the viewers’ attention, so that each interlinked area provided a different sensory experience. For example, a tunnel constructed from tree branches and insulation foil rustled as one walked through the space, creating an instant awareness of the body’s impact on the environment. Curator Juliana Engberg notes of this experience that “immediately you have a sense that you are a destructive force of change”.178 The central waterhole space was one of chaotic excess, described by Urszula Dawkins in Art Monthly as “a near-living thicket 177 Ibid. 178 Juliana Engberg, “47oC in the Shade,” in Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger: The Water Hole, 66. In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 74 of PVC piping, coloured household buckets, artificial flower-parts, plastic drink bottles and gaudy crystals”.179 Steiner and Lenzlinger often use plastic packaging sourced at the site of their investigation, so that the labelling on the litter is familiar to local audiences. This methodology of using recognisable consumer packaging has attracted criticism in the past. Reviewer Henry Lehmann described their installation in Montreal as “pompous…thrown together” and taking the “theme of urban bleakness . . . to comic extremes”.180 Construed as an accusatory gesture, Steiner and Lenzlinger’s use of consumer packaging in their installation in Montreal National Park in 2001 offended Lehmann’s civic pride when he stated, In this work, Montreal is transformed into a nightmare of pollution and wilful ignorance. . . . [T]here’s a hit and miss aspect about the piece, at once deeply bitter and devil-may-care. It seems the two artists came to Canada and the New World in search of paradise on Earth only to discover plastic wrappers blowing in the wind.181 The perception of the artists’ judgmental stance is echoed in Dawkins’s review in her wry comment, “we’ve made our environmental bed; now it’s time to lie in it.”182 This research has made me cognisant of the possibility of being construed in this way when using consumer packaging. In Chapter 4, I discuss the creative techniques I have used in my work to avoid this misunderstanding, particularly work Jardinière (2014) which is largely constructed from plastic packaging. In acknowledgment of my participation in consumer culture, I identify the plastic packaging as being sourced from my own household waste. Waste, as a noun or a verb, can invoke a degree of guilt in Western society. Waste is known to be the byproduct of more affluent economies, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics cites international evidence that economic growth contributes to the increase in waste generated per person.183 Robert Smithson held a similar view in 1973, when he commented, 179 Urszula Dawkins, “Pipe Dreams: Steiner and Lenzlinger's The Water Hole,” Art Monthly Australia 220 (June 2009), 52. 180 Henry Lehmann, "Adams Brings Whimsy to Life: Childhood Fantasies Become Monstrosities," The Gazette (Montreal), 30 June 2001, accessed 15 October 2015. 181 Ibid. 182 Dawkins, “Pipe Dreams,” 52. 183 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Waste,” Australia’s Environment: Issues and Trends, Jan 2010, last modified 2 May 2010, accessed 12 September 2015, http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf /Lookup/7EBBE339D6A3C2DBCA2576C000193942?opendocument. 75 It seems that when one is talking about preserving the environment or conserving energy or recycling one inevitably gets to the question of waste and I would postulate actually that waste and enjoyment are in a sense coupled. There's a certain kind of pleasure principle that comes out of preoccupation with waste. Like if we want a bigger and better car we are going to have bigger and better waster productions. So there's a kind of equation there between the enjoyment of life and waste. Probably the opposite of waste is luxury.184 Figure 32 Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger The Water Hole 2008 While the detritus of excess feels far from luxurious, Sterner and Lenzlinger offered a respite from the confrontation of the waterhole with three beds in a clinical white space (figure 32). Over the first bed, a thirty-three-kilogram meteorite suspended directly above the viewer’s head gave cause for some anxiety as to the strength of the support netting. Above the second, a mobile constructed from both natural and synthetic detritus, including plastic bags and dead branches, natural and artificial elements, teetered in a precarious, metaphorical balance, activated by the viewer getting on to the bed. The third bed was suspended, its swaying motion putting the viewer in similar motion to the mobile, which I found mildly disorienting. In his review 184 Robert Smithson, “Entropy Made Visible,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 303. In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 76 of the work, Robert Nelson described it as leaving him “wobblier and weaker”.185 Nevertheless, of all the rooms of the installation, I found this one to be the most successful; these distilled experiences were more amenable to contemplation than the more spectacular and hallucinatory spaces. The final, quiet encounter was a quasi-scientific desalination plant for tears (figure 33) of which the artists commented in the catalogue “in the end, no worries, we can still drink our tears!”186 A planned desalination plant was a cause for contention between the government and environmental groups at the time of the artist residency. It was subsequently built and on completion in 2012, immediately went in to standby mode, the drought broken and dam levels in Victoria back at an acceptable level.187 Figure 33 Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger The Water Hole (detail) 2008 185 Robert Nelson, “Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger,” The Age, 22 January 2009, viewed 1 May 2011, http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/arts-reviews/gerda-steiner-and-joerg-lenzlinger /2009/01/22/1232471461969.html. 186 Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger, “The Water Hole,” 4. 187 Simon Lauder, “Victorians Pay Dearly, But Not a Drop to Drink,” The World Today, ABC News, accessed 12 September 2015, http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2012/s3656791.htm. In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 77 Weaving together utopian and dystopian ideas, with the familiar transformed to appear strange, the artists were able to create a sense of awe in both beauty and decay. However, some of the more salient observations made by the artists seemed to be overshadowed in the waterhole space by chaos, spectacle, and massive volumes of materials. Their exploration of urban water supply was more engaging where humour, wonder, and poetic staging were evident, for example, the contemplative space and the desalination plant for tears. Compared to Pfaff’s more artfully constructed chaos, I concur with Lehmann’s contention that Steiner and Lenzlinger’s work can seem “thrown together”.188 Unrestrained characteristics in artworks are useful to infer growing plants, mounting rubbish, and teeming cities—but there is a fine line between controlled chaos and confusion. This is something I am conscious of in my work and have refined through documentation and reflection of each work in the studio, followed by trial installations where possible in the gallery space. Figure 34 Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger Bush Power 2014 More recently, Steiner and Lenzlinger participated in the 19th Biennale of Sydney with their installation Bush Power (2014, figures 34 and 35). Less conceptually complex than The Waterhole, the work appeared overly reliant on spectacle and audience participation. Repurposing gymnasium equipment sourced on eBay in a series of artworks, the artists drew on Cockatoo Island’s history of power generation and ship 188 Lehmann, "Adams Brings Whimsy to Life: Childhood Fantasies Become Monstrosities." 78 building requiring human labour.189 The kinetic works constructed from modified weight machines exaggerated the effects of physical exertion by the viewer/participant. Through the addition of colourful extensions to the apparatus, human energy is rendered visible as an exaggerated range of motion—bringing the machines to life. However, this is where the transaction between artwork and viewer ends. Because the machine became lifeless once the interaction ceased, for me, it held the same limited appeal as actually being in a gymnasium—moving from one machine to the next, going through a range of motions. Figure 35 Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger Bush Power (detail) 2014 Whereas Steiner and Lenzlinger’s critique of humans’ behaviour can seem detached— their own place in society removed to that of observer—Australian artist Patricia Piccinini’s practice seems framed by a more personal understanding of humanity’s strengths and weaknesses. Her work also evidences a willingness to embrace dilemmas without the solace of solutions. I discuss her work in the following section. 189 Juliana Engberg, ed., “Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger,” in You Imagine What You Desire: 19th Biennale of Sydney, ex. cat., (Sydney, NSW: Biennale of Sydney Ltd, 2014), 248. 79 Patricia Piccinini: Ethical Dilemmas At the end of the twentieth century, Australian artist Piccinini made an installation Plasticology (1997–2000, figure 36) that envisaged a dystopian future. A virtual, computer-generated forest displayed over fifty-seven monitors created an alienating and disconnected environment. While the virtual trees appear lush and perfect, their dense verdant foliage is animated to lash furiously in high winds, creating an anxious atmosphere. In his essay “What Is Installation?”, Peter Hennessy states that Piccinini began Plasticology with the question “what is my ‘natural’ habitat? What is the natural environment of the contemporary person?”190 These questions resounded strongly with me, as they are the sorts of questions that I constantly ponder while researching the botany encountered in the urban environment. Figure 36 Patricia Piccinini Plasticology 1997–2000 Piccinini’s work focuses on the relationship between humans and other living beings, and raises questions of ethics and care. By avoiding moralistic dualisms and embracing the ambivalence with which her creatures may be met, the artist invites contemplation and discussion rather than arousing fear or promoting science as a cure-all. Her artworks seem at once of this world and alien, their everyday familiarity 190 Peter Hennessy, “Patricia Piccinini: Early Installations” (originally published as: “What Is Installation?”), Patricia Piccinini (website), accessed 20 September 2015, http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/writing /9/286/38. 80 estranged through the artist’s transformative approach. Viewpoints other than human are revealed to give agency to her unheimlich creatures and objects. Piccinini has created vehicle-derived sculptures to address contemporary debates of consumerism and desire. By using automotive finishes, the artist makes her surfaces sleek, colourful and strangely desirable. In works such as The Stags (2009, figure 37) and Nest (2006, figure 38), the anthropomorphised machines appear to display emotions of aggression and love, respectively. The works alludes to the machines’ reproductive capabilities without human-operated production lines. While the automotive industry conjures images of large-scale robotic machinery, Piccinini’s work disturbs this scale, alluding to intimacy between machines—the stare-down between two aggressors competing for a female Vespa (The Stags), or the baby Vespa holding the adoring gaze of its mother (Nest). Figure 37 Patricia Piccinini The Stags 2009 81 Figure 38 Patricia Piccinini Nest 2006 In her essay on another of her automotive works with anthropomorphic overtones, Truck Babies (figure 39), the artist explains her intention with the work, to take something as frightening and unfriendly as a truck and turn it into something that is cute, desirable and seductive. In the same way, consumer culture creates the beauty and desire that blinds you to the pollution and other problems of the industry and economics that lie behind it.191 The artist acknowledges that her own feelings towards the seduction of beauty as a ploy in consumer marketing are ambiguous, wanting her work to question the “nature” of contemporary society; as she states, “the increasingly strange and confused relationship between what we see as ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ . . . The work also talks about the seductive nature of consumer culture, attempting to find a position that is both positive and critical.”192 191 Patricia Piccinini, “Truck Babies,” Patricia Piccinini, accessed 8 April 2015, http://www.patriciapiccinini .net/printessay.php?id=11. 192 Ibid. 82 Figure 39 Patricia Piccinini Truck Babies 1999 This statement resonates with specific concepts I have explored through my studio work. I use brightly coloured plastic bin-liner bags and flagging tape as materials to construct works that infer organic forms and growth. Suggesting the potential for the inert materials to run wild is something Piccinini also exploits, though in her case it is the potential wildness of technology. The Stags have the features of deer rather than sheep, and imply a technological realm no longer under human control.193 For Piccinini, the motivation is to explore notions of technology’s vibrancy and potential for physical and emotional autonomy. However, in my practice, I am motivated to acknowledge a vibrancy that already exists in the materials in our environment. Piccinini also acknowledges the liveliness of matter in Radial (2005, figures 40 and 41) where the mutation on the tyre presents the object with the organic potential to change, mutate, and grow. By endowing the work with this evidence of agency, the artist challenges our all-knowing superiority and shows an alien potential in the mundane tyre. Radial draws attention to materiality through taking the factory-made object and imbuing it with an organic uniqueness, inviting the viewer to slow down and consider the object more carefully. The tyre’s pristine tread indicates it has not 193 Patricia Piccinini, “The Lovers,” Patricia Piccinini, accessed 8 April 2015, http://www.patriciapiccinini .net/writing/40/323/29. 83 nor will ever be used, the organic mound oozing from its top surface, rendering it unusable for its original purpose. Figure 40 Patricia Piccinini Radial 2005 It is not surprising that Haraway embraces Piccinini as a “sister in technoculture”, saying, A co-worker committed to taking ‘naturecultures’ seriously without the soporific seductions of a return to Eden or the palpitating frisson of a jeremiad warning of the coming technological Apocalypse. . . . Piccinini’s worlds require curiosity, emotional engagement and investigation; and they do not yield to clean judgments or bottom lines—especially not about what is living or non-living, organic or technological, promising or threatening.194 194 Donna Haraway, “Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s Generations: Taking Care of Unexpected Country,” in Australian Humanities Review, Issue 50 (2011): 95, accessed 8 April 2015, http://press.anu.edu.au/apps/bookworm/view/Australian+Humanities+Review+-+Issue+50,+2011 /5451/ch06.xhtml. In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 84 Figure 41 Patricia Piccinini Radial (detail) 2005 While Haraway sees Piccinini “as a compelling storyteller in the radical experimental lineage of feminist science fiction”,195 Whatmore’s insistence on the hybridity of geographies is a similar quest, battled in the concrete world of the present when she argues for: An upheaval in the binary terms in which the question of nature has been posed and a re-cognition of the intimate, sensible and hectic bonds through which people and plants; devices and creatures; documents and elements take and hold their shape in relation to each other in the fabrications of everyday life.196 Hennessy notes that Piccinini “is less interested in debunking the idea of nature than she is in exploring what it might mean within a contemporary context”.197 Here, Jacqueline Millner draws a connection between Piccinini’s work and the theories posited by Bennett in Vibrant Matter, when she suggests, not only are objects alive because of their capacities to shape the interrelationships of which they are a part, but humans are not autonomous; rather, they comprise a complex web of active bodies and materials. If we rethink the human/object dichotomy in this way, it leads us to accept that ‘any action is always a transaction, and any act is really but an initiative that gives birth to a cascade of legitimate and bastard progeny’.198 195 Ibid., 95. 196 Whatmore, “Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces,” 3. 197 Hennessy, “Patricia Piccinini: Early Installations.” 198 Bennett cited in Jacqueline Millner, “Mysterious Matter,” in ARTAND 52, no.1 (Summer 2014): 138. In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 85 Thus Piccinini, like Haraway, Whatmore, and Bennett, focuses on contemporary entanglements rather than a neat blend of two clearly defined categories of nature and culture. Similarly, my research and studio work has been driven by a desire to arouse curiosity, engagement, and investigation through revealing entanglements between seemingly mundane living and non-living entities in my urban ecosystem. Figure 42 Patricia Piccinini Metaflora (Twin Rivers Mouth) 2015 With the assistance of artisan collaborators, Piccinini births her “bastard progeny” in extremely realistic detail (figure 42).199 Her inference to humanity’s role in her hybrid creatures is through ideas relating to scientific practices of genetic engineering and cloning. In my work, the human hand is evident in the construction of hybrids with no attempt to be lifelike or seamless, which I detail in Chapter 4. Whereas Piccinini’s offspring are born of the laboratory, mine issue from the domestic realm. Whereas Piccinini ponders the implications of frontier scientific and technological discoveries, my practice is a reflection on the potential for personal revelations with a focus on botany. 199 Bennett cited in Jacqueline Millner, “Mysterious Matter,” 138. In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 86 Figure 43 Patricia Piccinini Meditations on the Continuum of Vitality (Garden) 2014 In recent works, Piccinini has taken her ongoing themes and entered the botanical realm of the garden (figure 42–3) where works such as Metaflora (figure 42) defy categorisations of plant or animal. I share an interest in species’ categorisations though rather than focussing on scientific distinctions, my interest lies legislative classifications of plants as weeds depending on geographical location, and my research was informed and supported through the interrogation of artworks by Simon Starling. In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 87 Simon Starling: Lively Plants and Materials Figure 44 Simon Starling Plant Room 2008 British artist Simon Starling explores ecological concerns through his art practice as part of a larger investigation. For Plant Room (2008, figure 44), the artist created a mud-brick structure inside the Kunstraum Dornbirn—an environment within an environment—to display a selection of botanical photographs by renowned photographer Karl Blossfeldt. His mud-brick plant room was climate-controlled (whereas the larger Kunstraum space was not), which was essential to maintain the archival integrity of the delicate photographic works. Starling refers to the material liveliness of both the photographs and the materials used to construct the Plant Room, and how one impacts on the other, when he says, it was more an incubator, a perfect nurturing climate for fragile photographic prints. I very much liked the idea of using mud (for the structure) and water (for the fuel cell driven cooling system) to keep these plant images alive, so to speak. The building controlled the light levels, the humidity, and the temperature—creating as near perfect museum conditions as possible.200 The correlation that Starling draws between the materials of the structure and the materials associated with a plant’s survival (earth and water) speaks of the vitality of both the images and the mud structure. The fragility of the photographic image necessitates a very particular environment to ensure that its archival integrity is not 200 Simon Starling and Christiane Rekade, "Clever Objects–Tell‐Tale Objects," Art History 36, no. 3 (2013): 640–51. doi: 10.1111/1467-8365.12021. In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 88 compromised. By using a mud hut, Starling acknowledges the potential for heat and humidity to damage the photographic material while simultaneously counteracting this with the mud hut’s ability to protect the fragile plant images. Figure 45 Simon Starling Plant Room (interior view) 2008 Discussing the materiality of the art object, Arjun Appadurai says, despite their aspiration to the illusion of permanence, they [art objects] are only momentarily aggregations of material such as paint, bricks, glass, acrylic, cloth, steel and canvas. These underlying materials are ever volatile, which is why museums always insist that we “do not touch”. What is at risk is not just aura or authenticity, but the fragility of objecthood itself.201 Appadurai’s identification of the art object as volatile when observed in terms of its underlying materials speaks to Bennett’s thoughts on material vibrancy. In the gallery, every effort is taken to ensure that this material volatility is controlled through maintaining appropriate light, humidity, and temperature conditions. Outside the gallery, this care and attention to the volatility of stuff (particularly garbage with no dollar value) has less of a priority. My interest in Starling’s Plant Room is the way in 201 Arjun Appadurai, "The Thing Itself," Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 15–22, accessed 2 June 2015, doi: 10.1215/08992363-18-1-15. In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 89 which he links the idea of organic materials—earth and water—to supporting the ‘life’ of the photographic images of plant. The mud-brick structure has agency. This building within the gallery building houses the work and, due to its material make-up, is able to create conditions that sustain the work inside—just as greenhouses, or ‘plant rooms’, provide a nurturing environment for delicate plants. The Kunstraum becomes the outside, with its unregulated climate and varied light conditions. Starling’s artwork Rescued Rhododendrons (1999, figure 46) highlights a different type of vitality in the territorial disputes we sometimes have with botany, when plants that are introduced to an environment escape human control and become a threat to existing native species. Shown as a video installation, Rescued Rhododendrons documents Starling’s rescue of a carload of Rhododendron ponticum plants from Scotland and their return to their native land. Botanists believe that, after its introduction from Spain in 1763, the plant hybridised with a more cold-tolerant North American variety, allowing it to survive and thrive in cooler conditions.202 Scotland has a Rhododendron Society for avid collectors and breeders of this colourful flowering plant. Unfortunately, the plant’s popularity means it is now a serious threat to biodiversity in Scottish woodlands and heathlands, requiring major initiatives to control its spread. Brady cites the cultivation of this variety in the United Kingdom as an example of where humans indirectly harm something (the environment) to achieve an aesthetic goal, which raises the issue of ethics in environmental aesthetics.203 Starling became aware of the intended destruction of a particular area of filled with Rhododendron ponticum plants through an announcement for a Scottish landscape sculpture project.204 He then set about returning plants to their homeland in a red Volvo 240 Estate, documenting the journey. Despite the presence of key subject matter—environmental endangerment, compromised biodiversity and invasive species—Starling’s small historical reversal does not have the political fervour of extreme environmental activism. Nevertheless, it does raise awareness of the plant as 202 Scottish Natural Heritage, “Rhododendron Ponticum and Hybrids,” accessed 6 February 2013, http:// www.snh.gov.uk/land-and-sea/managing-the-land/forestry-and-woodlands/looked-after/rhododendron/. 203 Emily Brady, “Aesthetics, Ethics and the Natural Environment,” in Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics, ed. Arnold Berleant (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2002), 114. 204 Secession, “Simon Starling May 4–June 24, 2001,” accessed 2 December 2015, http://www. secession.at/art/2001_starling_e.html. 90 an environmental issue. The witty treatment of the subject matter is engaging and memorable rather than didactic. In a curious twist, Starling’s Rhododendron’s homecoming was not permanent. Artist Roisyn Byrne located the Rhododendrons through correspondence with Starling via his gallery. In an act of environmental vandalism or parasitic practice, she went to Spain, located the plants, dug some up and smuggled them back to the United Kingdom. Pollan would probably give at least part of the credit to the plant’s seductive powers of beauty.205 Figure 46 Simon Starling Rescued Rhododendrons 5 1999 Nevertheless, Starling’s fascination with the Rhododendron was far from over. He revisited the plant in Island for Weeds (2003, figure 47)—an “ad-hoc extraterritorial space for the plant to grow freely”.206 Echoing Robert Smithson’s propositional Floating Island to Travel around Manhattan Island (1970, figure 48), Starling’s heterotopic non-place is a clever approach to overcome limitations of jurisdiction. 205 Pollan, The Botany of Desire, xvii. 206 Francesco Manacorda and Ariella Yedgar, eds., “Simon Starling,” in Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009 (London: Koenig Books Ltd, 2009), 216. In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 91 Figure 47 Simon Starling Island for Weeds 2003 Figure 48 Robert Smithson Floating Island to Travel around Manhattan Island 1970 In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. In order to comply with copyright the image has been removed. 92 Starling’s interest in Rhododendrons connects to my interest in the Sansevieria trifasciata, classified as a class R weed by the Brisbane City Council, which advises that it is “a moderate threat and eradication is not a viable option . . . look out for infestations and plan for their removal during routine maintenance.207 As I argue in Chapter 4, the Sansevieria’s highly visible migration from indoors to outdoors to a nature reserve in my local area has been a useful exemplar to explore multiple—and, sometimes, conflicting—concepts in my work. Through my examination of the contemporary artworks discussed in this chapter, I have been able to situate my art practice within a canon of contemporary artists critiquing specific aspects of human/nature relationships. The visual analysis of specific artworks has identified both the positive strategies and less successful tactics employed by the artists. Scrutinising their methodologies has both validated aspects of my practice and motivated me to investigate more effective approaches to articulate my ideas. In the next chapter, I will discuss the creative output of my research, the culmination of my speculative theoretical and visual research, and my studio investigations. 207 Brisbane City Council, “Weed Classification,” Brisbane City Council Weed Identification Tool, accessed 17 March 2015, http://weeds.brisbane.qld.gov.au/weed-classification. 93 Chapter 3: Indoors and Outdoors, Materials, and Methods Introduction Diverse encounters with urban botanical environments in Brisbane, London, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Philadelphia, Rome, Singapore, Sydney, and Venice, and the evidence and experiences acquired from these sites informed the studio research of this enquiry. For the artworks produced during the research, I have re-situated botany from the outdoors by bringing plants into both the studio and gallery spaces. Through my studio investigation, I have asserted the abandonment of the concept of a distanced nature or wilderness by creating intimate, personal encounters with botany. By focusing on specific plants and the sometimes contradictory environmental dilemmas posed and benefits provided, the effects of consumer culture, as well as the urban entanglement of living and non-living entities, the artworks attempt to challenge assumptions of the natural environment as something external, wild and pure, unsullied by the presence of humans. Key to the studio enquiry was my pursuit of evidence of the vitality of things other than humans, both living and non-living. The studio environment has been a laboratory for experimenting with ways of permeating the visible and invisible divisions of environments, and the series of metaphorical and legislated territorial bubbles that separate home from garden from city from urban fringe from farmland from wilderness. My ongoing engagement with how humans cohabitate with botany in cities has been central to my speculative creative research. The interstices of built and botanical environments where humans’ presence and influence is clearly evident has captivated my interest, rather than more unmediated natural environments where that same presence is considered as an intrusive or detrimental force. While we may desire to spend time in pristine wildernesses, Hawkins succinctly reminds us that the evidence of our own kind’s presence in such places sullies our paradise fantasies, as noted in Chapter 1.208 I argue that focussing on human interaction with urban botany, and developing an aesthetic appreciation for these hybrid environments, enables new ways of visualising the reciprocity and interdependence of this relationship. 208 Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, vii. 94 The ideas that compel and influence my visual art practice reside in the intersections and overlaps of nature and artifice, organic and synthetic, living and non-living. At the sites of my research—the city and suburbs—botany is framed, contained, isolated, and sometimes completely disconnected from the ground, growing on balconies, roof-tops, and clinging to walls. Despite the amount of human endeavour directed towards controlling urban flora in interstitial spaces, plants assert their agency, growing against and between hard and sealed surfaces of concrete and bitumen. Whether intentionally planted or introduced by urban wildlife, wind, or water, opportunistic plants find the cracks and ruptures of sealed cities. As discussed in Chapter 2, Sonfist’s Time Landscape demonstrates the activity of other urban inhabitants, such as birds and squirrels, that influence the species presence on a piece of ground. Figure 49 Detail of Julie-Anne Milinski’s of studio at Queensland College of Art 2015 This chapter outlines the creative methodologies I have employed to explore and extend this research that centres on the key themes of the urban environment, botany, consumer culture, and urban waste. They encompass the methodologies of walking, photographing, collecting, crocheting, and botanical drawing. 95 Walking As noted in Chapter 1, walking has played a crucial role in my experience and examination of urban botany. I have appreciated wide environmental variances as I meander between my studio, and across the Brisbane River, through to the city Botanical Gardens, and into the Brisbane CBD. In doing so, I transgress between parkland, residential, and commercial zones. In “Walking the City”, David Macauley describes urban walking as being “a transformative practice because the moving body and the plurality of places it inhabits are constantly conjoined and then decoupled in new ways that come to reveal the metropolitan world in its manifold dimensions”.209 He asserts that, urban strolls are generally the most basic and direct mode of apprehending our surroundings, of attuning ourselves to the aesthetic environment. In this sense, they both orient the lived body while ceaselessly dislocating and relocating us within new boundaries, regions and territories.210 In the range of cities visited during my candidature, I have used walking to orient myself and experience these locations through the transformative practice described by Macaulay. In these cities, walking was my most utilised method of transport (apart from using public transport where absolutely necessary due to long distances or extreme weather). The minutiae experienced during this perambulatory research provoked insights into contemporary urban botanical environments, and having the time for these speculations to unfold within the very places that provoked them was key. The visual stimulation of these varied locations has broadened my aesthetic appreciation of various approaches to the inclusion of botany, sometimes in unlikely places (figure 50). Important was the way these spaces enhanced pedestrians’ experiences of place. Macauley eloquently describes how the physical experience of urban walking affects the consciousness, saying, In the urban walk, there is a continuous stream of ‘information’ parading past and through us, most of it more culturally encoded than in the countryside or wilderness. Like the catalysts and cues provided by a smell that takes us to remembrances of places past, walking loosens, unties, and releases the mnemonic knots in the body, triggering an active engagement with an archival recollection of the places through which we walk.211 209 David Macauley, “Walking the City,” in The Aesthetics of Human Environments, 100. 210 Ibid., 101. 211 Macauley, “Walking the City,” 115. 96 Figure 50 Paris bus shelter with rooftop garden 2012 My experience of urban walking varied greatly due to the fact that some older cities are more easily navigated on foot, while others have been designed for automotive travel.212 Macauley notes the allure of older European cities that were built in an era where scale was determined by “a walker’s sense of aesthetic appreciation, bodily needs, and a desire for public participation”.213 Increasing urban density and the need of transportation options for inner-city residents has prompted urban development to consider pedestrians, providing the impetus for projects like the Goods Line in Sydney, designed to encourage pedestrian traffic. The inclusion of botany in these developments is significant in increasing natural environments in cities, with Macauley seeing “trees for shade and overhead cover . . . and flower beds for aesthetic pleasure” as provisions required to stimulate pedestrian activity within a city.214 212 Los Angeles is a prime example of the latter, described by Peter Hall as “a laboratory for the late twentieth century urban future . . . for attempts by planners and architects to accommodate the car”. See Peter Hall, “The City on the Highway,” in Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880 (Chichester, West Sussex : Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 334. 213 Macauley, “Walking the City,” 114–15. 214 Ibid., 114. 97 Figure 51 Flower Dome, Gardens by the Bay Singapore 2013 Walking is a key support in my methodology of collecting photographic documentation. As well as visual discoveries, pedestrian exploration has also prompted me to observe and experience the climate of these places. I have memories of long walks in Singapore where the temperature was frequently over 30oC, and I appreciated large shady trees and the cooling sea breeze I experienced on the perimeter of the island. A curious experience in a climate-controlled flower dome at Gardens by the Bay (figure 51) became even more surreal after walking through the humid, outdoor garden admiring a myriad of exotic tropical plants. Moving into to the enormous glass enclosure, I was impressed by the vast plant collection, which included a thousand-year-old olive tree that was so unlike the plants that could survive outside. As dazzling as the display of glass-house plants appeared, I spent much of my time looking out at the palm trees blowing in the wind. Strangely, I was reminded of Piccinini’s Plasticology (figure 36), discussed in the previous chapter. I marvelled that I was in a reverse of the simulated reality she created on a television screen. In that moment, my environment was a glass bubble of unreality with botany that had been transported from all over the world to reside inside a cool, dry habitat, while outside, the reality was a hot, humid city. 98 Collecting Collecting has been a key methodology I have employed in the studio research, and three distinct collections have emerged during the project. The first is that of photographs I have taken while walking in urban environments, which generated ideas and operated as catalysts and inspirations for studio outcomes. These images exist physically on the walls of my studio, and on the noticeboard next to my computer, and digitally on hard disks and in the ‘Cloud’. I have drawn upon this collection to inform individual artworks as well as the arrangement of multiple works, as will be detailed in Chapter 4. The second collection focuses on consumer-packaging materials, important in relation to studio experimentation and, in some cases, the final artworks. The act of amassing containers from food and cleaning products has been simultaneously enlightening and concerning. Two large cupboards full of plastic, glass, and cardboard have filled to overflowing numerous times during the project. It has made me acutely aware of the enormous volume of material that passes through my household despite our best efforts to buy products with minimal packaging. When I disrupted the pattern of consuming, disposing and recycling, I was confronted by the sheer physical presence of plastic containers, glass jars and bottles accumulating in my studio and garage. While I had the comfort of knowing that I could dispose of the packaging at any time in the normal recycling collection (even if it was over the course of a couple of months), arresting this flow from household to rubbish tip was a disturbing exercise, the volume of ‘stuff’ overwhelming. In 1969, Victor Burgin noticed artists responding to waste materials, saying, Each day we are faced with the intractability of materials which have outstayed their welcome. Many recent attitudes to materials in art are based in an emerging awareness of the interdependence of all substances within the ecosystem of earth. The artist is liable to see himself not as creator of new material forms but rather as a coordinator of existing forms, and may therefore choose to subtract forms from the environment. As art is being seen increasingly in terms of behaviour, so materials are being seen in terms simply of quantity rather than quality.215 215 Victor Burgin, “Situational Aesthetics,” in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 895. 99 Burgin’s recognition of an emergence of artistic attention directed towards ecosystems and the interdependence of the materials within them speaks directly to my research’s key themes. However, while the collecting process has informed my ideas and concerns with material quantities, it the studio experimentation which has revealed material qualities, with my manual attempts at material transformation being an essential aspect of the discovery and research. The third collection of the research comprises botanical specimens. There has been a constant stream of botany through my studio, and my research took on a propagating tangent, with many of the plants growing from cuttings gifted to me by fellow postgraduate candidates. The care required with this collection (watering, rotating for sunlight, fertilising) has been a rewarding endeavour as plants flourished and provided drawing subjects and materials for works. The project has also had an impact on my home environment as plants that did not thrive in the studio made their way into a once barren garden. Growing plants from cuttings, particularly in the case of a Sansevieria where just a small section of leaf is enough to grow a new plant, or succulents that can be grown from a single leaf, has been a constant reinforcement of the agency of the plant, confirming that I was not the only one ‘at work’ in my studio. Watching these and other virulent plants become the most prevalent botany in the studio also reminded me of why these species are an environmental issue in terms of habitat domination. Crocheting Crocheting was introduced in the studio research as a way of transforming the materials I was frequently encountering alongside botany in the urban environment. As Brisbane building developments increase both the size and density of the city, the fluorescent colours of nylon builders line and flagging tape are ubiquitous among the seemingly endless number of construction sites. These materials are also prevalent in parklands and public gardens undergoing some form of human intervention or alteration. Most of the construction, landscaping, and road works industries that use these materials are still male-dominated. These materials tend to be stretched into straight lines to mark out borders and barriers on areas of land. They are also used to 100 signify potential hazards, such as fallen tree branches. Used for their intended purposes, flagging tape and builders line create quick, temporary guidelines, passing quickly through the hands of workers. These materials are rapidly manufactured and subsequently rapidly consumed; their temporary presence in the environment is short- lived before becoming waste material. By contrast, crocheting is a technique that involves time and extensive manual handling. I decided to use crochet as a studio methodology to contrast with the non- traditional materials I have chosen to crochet with, which are all machine-made, mass-produced, and synthetic. Crocheting slows down this rapid consumption. I hold these materials for hours as they pass over my crochet hook and between my fingertips. Rather than the quickly dashed out straight lines, crochet involves creating a chain, stitch by stitch, then repeating this gesture to form thousands of interconnecting loops to create a woven fabric. The scented plastic bin-liner bags, plastic flagging tape, and nylon builders line used for my artworks are manufactured in a process where quality control ensures that one plastic bag is the same as the next, one roll of tape the same as the next. Unlike wool and other natural fibres, where it is important to match dye-lots when making a garment to ensure colour continuity, in the world of industrial plastics, green is green. However, the human process of crochet is idiosyncratic as tension varies, with no two loops identical. Crochet acts subversively on the mundane materials used and, in the process, transforms uniform, temporal plastics used in linear, rapid, one-off gestures into irregular, slow, solid, fleshy, weighty, networks and arrangements that hold the investment of my time and touch in their net of loops and knots. The associated inferences of traditional crafts such as women’s work, and the romantic notion of the matrilineal passing down of skills were frequently raised by viewers wanting to trace a familial lineage of craft tradition. Both my grandmother and my mother worked outside the home in paid employment, and their limited time at home was consumed by running the household. Most of my crochet instruction has come from the twenty-first-century upholders of craft traditions and techniques: the craftspeople who post instructional videos on YouTube. My left-handedness has not been an issue, with an array of left-handed crochet demonstration videos available. The only patterns used have been templates taken directly from plant leaves such as 101 the Monstera deliciosa, which has created a relationship between the organic and crocheted leaves (figure 52). Figure 52 Julie-Anne Milinski Monstera deliciosa leaf crocheted from flagging tape 2014 Traditionally, crochet would involve the use of a natural fibre such as wool or cotton, or perhaps even a more luxurious fibre, such as silk or cashmere. Whatever the yarn used, the process involves touch, predominantly with the fingertips. When using a natural fibre or even acrylic yarn, there is a sensuality to the feel of the fibre against the skin. Natural fibres have minor yet unique variations in each skein of yarn or ball of wool. This is not the case with plastics and nylon, which have a monotonous consistency. Some lightweight plastics feel slippery and can be difficult to manipulate. Heavier plastics can grab and require extreme pressure to hook through the crocheted stitches. The scented plastic bags I used to construct A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession (a work discussed in the following chapter) have a slight powdery surface, which caused the skin on my hands to dry out. There is also difference in smell between natural fibres and plastic bags. Wool and cotton have a natural smell, which, when coloured with natural vegetable dyes, 102 can be relatively pleasant. In contrast, plastics often emit an unpleasant chemical odour, and while the selection of scents in the plastic bags I used were botanically inspired (apple, orange, lime, and rose), the synthetic perfumes became unpleasant when crocheting with this material for extended periods of time. These sensations experienced through touch and smell seemed to linger with the length of contact time of the materials. The experience of the materiality of the plastic bags was revealed through my prolonged manual cutting of long strips. In a similar scenario, Hawkins describes a frantic Monday morning where a child needs a plastic bag to store a wet bathing suit in a schoolbag. Her description of the frustration of trying to coerce the bag to open conveys its clingy materiality and suggests that it is not just the usefulness of the plastic bag as a waterproof container that is present in this situation. She draws on John Law’s term “in-here enactment”, described as the “processes whereby material presence is enacted into being in distinct relations and practices”.216 Upsetting “oppositions between environmentally aware subject and hated object”, the useful plastic bag in this domestic scenario presents its “material presence” and in doing so disturbs assumptions of its negative connotations.217 Hawkins explains, Its mundane practicality challenges the circuits of guilt and conscience that drive command moralities: say no to plastic bags! Instead, the in-here enactment of the bag reveals a different plastic materiality that rearranges conduct and perceptions. Our response to the invitation from the bag to be patient disturbs arrogant senses of human agency and mastery. This inanimate thing is animate: it is suggesting particular actions.218 Through the extensive manipulation of crochet, I came to know these plastics in a new way; the strength of these temporal materials that at first had appeared to be flimsy became apparent. No longer simply a temporarily useful then troublesome object, the plastic bags’ material potential beyond its inert state was a revelation to me, discovered through the hand (figure 53). 216 Gay Hawkins, "Plastic Materialities," in Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, ed. Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 127. 217 Ibid. 218 Ibid. 103 Figure 53 Scented plastic bin liners cut and crocheted 2013 Botanical Drawing In 2013, I undertook botanical drawing classes through a sixteen-week course at the Mt Coot-tha Botanical Gardens run by the Botanical Artists’ Society of Queensland. The course covered techniques in pencil drawing, shading, and watercolour. The prolonged observation required for these classes using a magnifying glass and a ruler to ensure accuracy differed from all previous drawing instruction I had received at art school. The overall approach was largely scientific rather than creative. In fact, the only creative aspect encouraged was how to best portray the specimen’s features through composition. I felt that this new way of seeing and treating a subject matter would benefit my studio practice; by making botany the focus of my attention, the course would assist me in understanding the structure of plants. Not only did it fulfil these expectations, but it also provided visual provocations to the speculative theoretical research I was undertaking. Botanical Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) is a global organisation whose goal is to ensure the worldwide conservation of threatened plants to maintain diversity. It explains that the primary aim of botanical illustration is scientific accuracy rather than art, where an illustration is required to “portray a plant with the precision 104 and level of detail for it to be recognized and distinguished from another species”.219 Therefore, the BGCI promote the contemporary relevance of botanical illustration, stating, Although photography may help inform botanical work, botanical illustration can represent clearly what may not easily be seen in a photograph. Outline drawings distinguish elements that cannot easily be made out using reflected light alone. Also, the composition of the image can be manipulated more fully in illustration, and features displayed together which may not easily be shown simultaneously in nature.220 Importantly, botanical illustration is used to present “the ideal version or representative of [a] species”, something not always available to photograph but able to be constructed from multiple specimens.221 Botanical illustration is extremely time-consuming and requires intense concentration and complete immersion in the subject. It is common practice to complete a line drawing, take a tracing, do a new drawing with shading; and then use the tracing again to make an outline for a painting. Most traditional botanical illustration depicts perfection in a subject; however, watching the deterioration of a specimen can reveal a great deal about its structure. In the focused contemplation of plants through botanical drawing, one encounters both the mundane and the exotic. The simplest of leaves may make an excellent study, particularly when they have dried and curled. An exotic orchid may seduce the amateur drawer/painter only to provide endless frustration with their complex structure and hard to reproduce colours. A search for a drawing subject while undertaking the classes reacquainted me with a forgotten Phalaenopsis that I had relegated to a back corner of the garden next to the compost bin once it had ceased to bloom (figure 54). At some point, it was stripped of its decorative container and replanted in a pot that once housed a Silver Break Fern (according to the Bunnings barcode label affixed to it). With its adhesive misrepresentations of classification and commercial value, this pot now contains a variety of plants, a strange grouping that has occurred through the spread of seeds 219 Botanical Gardens Conservation International, “Resources: Botanical Illustration,” accessed 12 May 2013. http://www.bgci.org/resources/botanical_illustration/. 220 Ibid. 221 Susanna Speier, “Why Botanical Illustration Still Matters in the Digital Age,” Colorado Public Radio, 30 December 2013, accessed 12 June 2014. https://www.cpr.org/news/story/essay-why-botanical- illustration-still-matters-digital-age. 105 and spores in that particular microcosm of my garden. This orchid was to be the subject of a still life, but, with its potted collection of diverse flora, it became more a miniature landscape representative of a very specific corner of my Camp Hill backyard. I began to see the pot as significant and a container of a particular botanical environment representative of a larger natural environment; namely, the backyard. This realisation has had a direct impact in the studio research, as noted in Chapter 4 when I analyse the conceptual investigation of my artwork Jardinière (2014). Figure 54 Snapshot of backyard biodiversity Camp Hill, orchid, fern and weeds 2013 In botanical illustration, it is common practice for a specimen to be drawn floating on the page, casting no shadow (figure 55). Devoid of habitat, the plant is isolated for scientific observation. A white card is often placed behind the subject to assist in the removal of background distractions, in the same way that white gallery walls focus the viewer’s attention to the art being exhibited. Whereas in previous centuries, botanical illustrators accompanied expeditions to record newly discovered flora, more recently, contemporary botanical artists often choose to focus on endangered species. Botanical artist and activist Margaret Mee documented the flora of the Amazon, making fifteen trips to work from the live plants. During this period, she witnessed the 106 destruction and exploitation of the Amazonian rainforests and campaigned against the mining and deforestation practices there.222 Figure 55 Margaret Mee Clusia grandiflora 1987 A tactic that Mee employed in her later paintings was to reintroduce the background in her paintings of rare Brazilian plants in the hope that by including their habitat, the interdependency between plant and environment would be emphasised (figure 56).223 Undoubtedly, Mee would be saddened to see the continuing degradation of the environment she cherished. Scientist Antonio Donato Nobre, the author of The Future Climate of Amazonia Scientific Assessment Report, compares the current climate crisis to the 2008 financial crisis, saying, 222 Anita McConnell, “Mee, Margaret Ursula (1909–1988),” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article /60330. 223 Shirley Sherwood, “The Renaissance of Contemporary Botanical Art,” in A New Flowering: 1000 Years of Botanical Art, ed. Shirley Sherwood, Stephen Harris, and B. E. Juniper (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2005), 14. 107 The climate crisis has the potential to be immeasurably worse than any financial crisis, nonetheless the ruling elite has been procrastinating for over fifteen years on making effective decisions to save humanity from climate disaster. Despite the abundance of scientific evidence and of viable, creative and appealing solutions, this procrastination seems to be worsening. . . . Zero deforestation, which was already a matter of urgency a decade ago, is still presented as a goal to be met some time in the distant future.224 Figure 56 Margaret Mee Philodendron Rio Negro Amazonas (undated) Perhaps if those that Nobre describes as the ruling elite witnessed the unique plants first-hand as Mee had, they may have shared her enchantment and developed an appreciation of the assets of the forest less evident than the land it lies on. In attending botanical drawing classes, I created a framework with which to engage with botanical specimens for several hours each week (figure 58). This level of intensity and concentration would not have occurred without a formal structure and, 224Antonio Donato Nobre, The Future Climate of Amazonia, Scientific Assessment Report, Sponsored by CCST-INPE, INPA and ARA (São José dos Campos, Brazil, 2014), 34-35. Accessed 3 October 2015, http://www.ccst.inpe.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/The_Future_Climate_of_Amazonia_Report.pdf. 108 during those hours, my focus shifted from a macro to a micro perspective and from landscape to still life. In doing so, I saw that a potted plant could contain a miniature landscape, what Foucault called the “smallest parcel of the world . . . and the totality of the world”.225 Figure 57 Julie-Anne Milinski Untitled (subject Sansevieria trifasciata growing through sponge, recovered from under Jude’s deck on the Brisbane River) 2013 The focused study of plant structures resulted in my investigation of arboreal practices, such as coppicing226 and pollarding 227 (figure 57), to be able to recognise a plant’s distinct type of growth as a reaction to being cut back. This evidence of the agency of botany in response to human alterations is a visible marker of shared human–plant cohabitation that I frequently notice on city trees pruned to fit within their 225 Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 26. 226 Coppicing is the practice of a “ small wood or thicket of deciduous trees . . . grown for the purpose of periodical rotational cutting (coppicing) down to a low stump (coppice-stool) to encourage the growth of long, thin uprights used for basket-making, fences, hurdles, thatching, etc.”. See James Stevens Curl and Susan Wilson, "Coppice" in The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), Oxford Reference. 227 Pollarding is “a system of management in which the main stem of a (usually young) tree is severed about 2 m above ground level, favouring the development of lateral branches. Repeated pollarding leads to the formation of a slightly swollen boll in the main stem immediately below the lateral branches and frequent pollarding, common with willows (Salix species), produces many thin-stemmed lateral branches.” See Michael Allaby, ed., "Pollarding," in A Dictionary of Ecology, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Oxford Reference. 109 urban confines. In the tracing and reproduction of drawings of specimens, I considered the aesthetic implications associated with the reduction of biodiversity. Like the white cardboard used to block out the visual distraction from behind a specimen, I deliberated on the effect of white gallery walls, and how the material presence of my work may have a different potency indoors. Figure 57 Pollarded trees in Zeeland, Netherlands These studio research methodologies of walking, photographing, collecting, crocheting, and botanical drawing created a framework through which I became more sensorially engaged with my environment. Through the measured pace of walking, I perceived my environment as a multi-sensory experience where the sounds and smells of the city and suburbs deepened my understanding of what I saw. Collecting consumer packaging raised my awareness of the cumulative potential of waste when not expediently removed from my environment. Collecting plants enhanced the same environment, visually and imperceptibly through air purification. Crochet and other manually repetitive tasks, such as cutting and bending plastic bags and containers— to use Law’s term, “in-here enactments”228—raised my awareness of the durability and utility of these disposable materials. Botanical drawing increased my knowledge of plants’ structures and growth. 228 Hawkins, “Plastic Materialities,” 127. 110 The creative research was guided by these methodologies, revealing the relationships between the living and non-living co-habitants in my urban habitats of home and studio. Through these practices, I have used botany as a leitmotif to explore issues of the larger natural environment, enriching notions of what constitutes a natural environment in contemporary urban society. The artworks that resulted from these methodologies focus on botany within the urban environment to reveal the reciprocity and interdependency of our relationship with plants and the vibrancy of the materials we introduce to the environment. 111 Chapter 4: Hothouse – The Environment of the Studio Introduction The studio I have worked in for the past four years at QCA, Griffith University, is located in Southbank on the banks of the Brisbane River. With parklands on one side and a major building development on the other, I find myself situated at the intersection of the built and the botanical. From the balcony of the studio building, there is a view across the river of the city skyline, populated with cranes on construction sites, where tall towers rise higher each year. The Botanical Gardens on the river’s edge provide a languid respite from the built environment, with time seeming to slow in the shade of the Moreton Bay fig trees. From the studio, I have experienced the view of this tropical city, and the visual and conceptual borders of city and suburbs. The botany that resides in both locations has informed the work produced during my candidacy. My studio research focuses on human interactions with urban botany and speculatively explores ways of visualising the reciprocity and interdependency of this relationship. Botany has been used metonymically to connect to a larger concept of nature. Through creative experimentation, the potency of materials associated with our contemporary consumer society has been established through their transformation in artworks. The creative works discussed in this chapter visually expand and enrich notions of what constitutes contemporary natural environments. 112 re-inventing eden (scenario #7) – revisions and emergents, 2012 At the commencement of my PhD candidature in 2012, I exhibited re-inventing eden (scenario #7) – revisions and emergents (figures 61, 62, 64–65) at Metro Arts in the Brisbane CBD, as part of the Brisbane Emerging Arts Festival (BEAF).229 Using the modus operandi of a gardener, I took ‘cuttings’ from a previous installation to create a new garden that was transplanted into the gallery environment. The previous installation had represented the culmination of my Honours research in 2011, where I argued that the increasing presence of the simulacra of nature in urban environments and the subsequent supplanting of reality in our imaginations affect our connection to the natural environment. My intention with re-inventing eden (scenario #7) – revisions and emergents was to introduce consumer-packaging materials into the constructed botanical environment. With a focus on plastic bottles due to their ubiquitous presence as litter in urban parks and gardens, I drew attention to the robust materiality of the objects through the way they were used in the work. Earlier in 2012 I had travelled to Singapore, which proved crucial to the conceptual and visual breakthroughs in the work. Singapore’s government is heavily invested in their commitment to urban botanical environments. At the time of my visit, the country’s already impressive Botanical Gardens were in the process of being augmented with the construction of Gardens by the Bay (figure 59). As Singapore’s Prime Minister states, Singapore has long recognised the importance of a green environment to our wellbeing, peace of mind and sense of belonging. Nature is an integral part of our urban landscape. Green spaces such as the Botanical Gardens, neighbourhood parks, nature reserves, and Active, Beautiful and Clean Waters are fully integrated into our environment. Gardens by the Bay is the latest expression of our vision to transform Singapore into a City in a Garden.230 This ambitious development presenting nature as spectacle includes the world’s largest glass greenhouse, a cloud forest with the world’s tallest indoor waterfall, and a grove of artificial “supertrees”.231 229 This has been changed in recent years to Brisbane Experimental Art Festival. 230 Lee Hsien Loong, Prime Minister Singapore, cited in Buck Song Koh, Perpetual Spring: Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2012), 8. 231 Gardens by the Bay, “Conservatory: Flower Dome,” “Conservatory: Cloud Forest,” and “Supertree Grove,” accessed 29 December 2015, http://www.gardensbythebay.com.sg/en.html. 113 Figure 59 Gardens by the Bay construction site Singapore 2012 During my stay, I came to experience Singapore as a city within a garden, noting the commitment by both the government and the public to introduce plants to the environment at every opportunity. While I visited the Singapore Botanic Gardens and viewed the construction site of Gardens by the Bay, both spectacular examples of urban garden projects, some of my more memorable encounters with Singapore’s urban botany were experienced during my walks through the streets of the city. I took photographs of local gardening practices, including the triangulated staking of trees (figure 60), the temporary arrangements of potted plants as traffic islands, and potted vegetable gardens outside retail stores, all of which demonstrated the importance of botany to the Singaporeans. From these seemingly mundane encounters, ideas germinated that were manifested in the work re-inventing eden (scenario #7) – revisions and emergents, and also in the studio research, in ways that I could not have envisaged prior to the trip. 114 When installing the work in the Metro Arts gallery space, I encountered several challenges due to the building’s heritage status listing meant that any attachments to the walls and ceiling requiring perforation of the surface had to be minimised. These limitations necessitated alternative installation methods for works that were to be suspended. One of these strategies became a tripod structure from which plants were suspended (figure 61), an idea resulting directly from visual research undertaken in Singapore. In both Singapore and the gallery, the structure’s purpose is to support botanical life. Figure 60 Tree staking Singapore 2012 115 Figure 61 Julie-Anne Milinski re-inventing eden (scenario #7) – revisions and emergents (detail) 2012 Modelled on the Brachychiton rupestris, or Queensland Bottle Tree, a significant new work within the installation, Brachychiton rupestris linoleumii (figure 62), connected a distinctive indigenous tree with a distinctive form of consumer packaging, the plastic bottle. Specimens of the Brachychiton rupestris are located in the gardens at Southbank and Anzac Square in the Brisbane CBD. The artwork incorporates a readymade bottle dryer, which I had been using in my studio to dry the plastic bottles I was collecting and cleaning. Marcel Duchamp made this form iconic in his work Bottle Dryer (1914), however, whereas his was constructed from galvanised iron, the object I used is plastic. The base of the tree was fabricated from vinyl flooring material with a simulated wooden-floor board pattern. Bottle-shaped panels cut from the vinyl were sewn together with nylon builders line. 116 Figure 62 Julie-Anne Milinski Brachychiton rupestris linoleumii 2012 The BEAF attracts a large audience due to a number of live performances staged as part of the program. I was invited to collaborate with spoken-word poets Scott Sneddon and Rhyll Tonge, which resulted in them writing a work focussing on re- inventing eden (scenario #7) – revisions and emergents, that they performed in the gallery on the opening night (figure 63). Eleanor Jackson, curator of BEAF’s spoken word program, described the collaboration, based on the tradition of ekphrasis, as offering “a chance to engage audiences around one piece, with a specific response to the work that gives the audience an opportunity to develop their vocabulary of 117 description/response/engagement with the visual art”.232 The collaboration provided the experience of seeing the installation as both the subject of and a backdrop to the performance, which I reasoned might stimulate discussion. This proved to be the case, with members of the audience approaching me to discuss the work that may not have done so otherwise, commenting on both elements of the work highlighted by Sneddon and Tonge and individual observations. The spoken-word performance activated a starting point for the audience to be able to articulate and express their own interpretation of the work. Figure 63 Video still of live performance, BEAF 2012 Feedback suggested that parts of the installation could stand alone as individual works (figure 64). Reflecting upon the photographic documentation of the exhibition, I decided to continue the methodology of photographing the urban environment as a starting point of my next work. Additionally, I decided to limit the materials I used, with a focus on a single material/botanical connection, as I had with the Brachychiton rupestris linoleumii, where the plastic bottles resonated with the shape of the bottle tree. 232 Eleanor Jackson, e-mail message to the author, 31 January 2012. 118 Figure 64 Julie-Anne Milinski re-inventing eden (scenario #7) – revisions and emergents (detail) 2012 Through my research, I was conscious of the criticism engendered by Steiner and Lenzlinger’s haphazard use of consumer packaging. In my installation, all the plastic bottles had been altered in some through way either cutting, sanding, or painting. While I was careful to ensure that the bottles remained recognisable as objects, I wanted the transformations to acknowledge the strength and permanence of the material. Through investing time in applying artistic processes, rather than considering the bottles as a disposable, wasted object, I viewed their permanence in the environment as warranting the same attention to transformation as more traditional art materials, such as bronze or marble. This reflection was to be significant in my development of subsequent artworks during my candidature. 119 Fi gu re 6 5 Ju lie -A nn e M ili ns ki re -in ve nt in g ed en (s ce na rio # 7) – re vi si on s an d em er ge nt s 20 12 120 A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession, 2012– 15 A photograph I had taken while walking along the Brisbane River (figure 66) acted as a catalyst for A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession (2012, figure 67–68). My focus when taking this picture was on the pink and yellow flagging tape marking many trees in this area. However, when I analysed the image in the studio later, what struck me most was a green plastic bag caught in a branch. In the image, the bag was static but when I had observed it, the breeze may have animated the bag, making it similar to the moving foliage. Thinking about the omnipresence of plastic rubbish in the landscape and its reluctance to break down, I imagined the bag behaving like a plant, growing and spreading. My intention was to enliven the bag, making visible its agency as an environmental ‘creeper’. Preliminary studio investigations involved working with my household collection of plastic bags, accumulated despite our commitment to reusable bags. In 2008, a KPMG Report on the trial of a charge on plastic carrier bags showed that 61 percent of people re-used these bags as bin-liners, and 58 percent of them felt that they would buy bin-liners if the bags were banned.233 In Australian cities, states, and territories where plastic carrier bags have been banned, there was an increase in the sales of plastic bin-liners.234 Four years after South Australia’s ban on plastic carrier bags, research conducted by the University of South Australia confirmed that bin-liner sales had increased from 15 to 80 percent.235 This research would eventually lead to a material shift in my work. Having never purchased bin-liners before, I was enthralled not only with the variety of colours available, but also that some of these products were scented. 233 KPMG, Trial of a Government and Industry Charge on Plastic Bags: Report of Findings, 20 October 2008, 15, http://www.scew.gov.au/system/files/resources/0c513e54-d968-ac04-758b-3b7613af0d07 /files/ps-pbags-rpt-kpmg-final-report-trial-charge-plastic-bags-20081030.pdf. 234 Mary Westcott, Plastic Shopping Bags, Research Brief 2010/28, accessed 22 May 2012, http://www. parliament.qld.gov.au/documents/explore/ResearchPublications/ResearchBriefs/2010/RBR201028.pdf. 235 Martin Aspin, “Review of the Plastic Shopping Bags (Waste Avoidance) Act 2008,” Zero Waste SA, accessed 2 November 2014, http://www.zerowaste.sa.gov.au/upload/resource- centre/publications/plastic-bag-phase-out/PBActReview_maspin_Nov2012_2%20-%20final.pdf, 8. 121 Figure 66 Plastic bag in tree, Brisbane River 2012 Initial material experimentations were more directly representational of the Madeira vine, Anredera cordifolia. This creeper is a Class C declared plant in Brisbane due to its rampant climbing and cloaking behaviour.236 While I chose to use motifs associated with threatening the integrity of local landscapes, I wanted to ensure that the work posed a dilemma, being simultaneously seductive yet repellent. Plastic bags, while a symbol of consumerism, are primarily a useful object, as discussed in Chapter 3 through Hawkins’s recounting of a scenario where the usefulness of their material presence disrupts negative connotations.237 Further, depending on their materiality and design, plastic bags can have aesthetically pleasing qualities, as can some flora classified as weeds that pose no threat in their right environment. 236 Brisbane City Council, “Environmental Weeds,” Brisbane City Council Weed Identification Tool, accessed 17 March 2015, http://weeds.brisbane.qld.gov.au/controlling-weeds. 237 Hawkins, "Plastic Materialities,” 127. 122 Hawkins links “being rendered environmentally aware” in contemporary consumer society to the ambivalence with which we relate to waste. Describing the power of the plastic bag as a negative environmental motif, she describes her reaction to a well- known scene from the 1999 film American Beauty, For me, this scene was haunted. As alive as the bag was, as lyrical as its dance with the wind was, it was still a plastic bag. The aesthetic resonances and animation could not completely override the moral undertones. The bag was rendered beautiful, but this didn’t make it good.238 Informed by Hawkins’s words, I wanted my work to surpass the immediate recognition of the plastic bags, which I found to be less effective in Tayou’s work Plastic Bags (2001–10, figure 27) critiqued in Chapter 2. Through rigorous testing of installation variations using both re-used carrier bags and scented bin-liner bags, I chose to work solely with the latter to strengthen associations to botany through colour and the olfactory aspect of the bags’ synthetic fruity and floral perfumes. The process of repurposing the bags from objects designed for temporary containment to a robust material capable of supporting greater weight than their original form involves cutting the plastic into strips and crocheting these strips into chain. This manual process of crocheting strengthens the plastic, changing its materiality from a flat surface to a curving, elastic line, revealing the amount of plastic in each bag as a linear distance. Where the strips are joined, knots indicate units of both time and material. The method of making the work involves extensive handling through which the inherent qualities of the plastic are revealed and exploited. Some bags were left uncut and worked into a chain stitch by hand alone forming a thick ‘rope’, which was a much slower process than using a crochet hook. When installed in the gallery, the work loosely graphs these various rates of production in three dimensions. The work mimics organic processes of growth, which in turn, raises the notion of decay; something that plastic does not readily succumb to. Interestingly, the information I had reviewed in relation to the statistics of plastic bag usage seemed meaningless in relation to the materiality of bags, offering no information on their size and weight. Hawkins acknowledges the environmentalist critique of recycling as being a panacea to consumerism and of dubious 238 Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, 21. 123 environmental merit. However, she suggests a potential benefit of recycling is the knowledge acquired through the performative aspect of recycling and the personal contact required to sort through rubbish, In making us handle waste differently recycling has made us open to the materiality of waste in ways that chucking it in the bin denies. The boundary between the self and waste become ambiguous when new habits allow wasted things to become more familiar, to imprint us with their phenomenological specificity; the cardboard box that’s surprisingly tough to crush, the sharp edge of the empty can. . . . In the physical work of recycling, waste things become incorporated into new movements and habits as the body becomes open to waste.239 My extensive physical handling of the plastic created a different engagement with the material, and the time I invested in this transformation was commented on by viewers, with several people curious as to how much time the work took to construct, a question often followed with discussion about the archival quality of the bags and their potent scent. A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession was shown in The Line exhibition at the Webb Gallery, QCA, in 2012 (figure 67). Exhibited as a work in progress, the installation engaged with the air-conditioning duct at the rear of the gallery. This major structural presence makes visible the connection between the outside air and the interior gallery space. A circular crocheted work originally envisaged as a floor work was suspended, and a rosette of rolled pink and orange twine (rose- and orange-scented) was pinned to the back wall; by chance, a shadow cast from the work created a stem (figure 68). 239 Ibid. 124 Figure 67 Julie-Anne Milinski A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession 2012 125 Figure 68 Julie-Anne Milinski A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession 2012 (detail) The scent of the bin-liner bags triggered discussion among viewers regarding the absurdity and futility of scenting garbage. Hawkins notes the role of hygiene in promoting disposable objects; adding fragrance to mask the aroma of garbage would seem to take this a step further.240 Some viewers described the circular work as a spider’s web, something unintended, as I had originally imagined it as a floor work. Overall, I felt that the work lacked tension and I was not satisfied with the way it simply hung in the space. The feedback I received was largely positive, but it was agreed that the work would benefit by being more profuse. The completed work was exhibited in June 2015 in the White Studio (figure 69), with more complexity and randomness in the work than the original installation, which more effectively conveyed the research focus. The installation required an element of appeal through colour, detail, and intrigue—something aesthetically seductive that 240 Ibid., 26. 126 resonated with ideas of consumerism and desire, so that the bags were not just a repugnant, environmentally detrimental material. However, so that it was not merely decorative, I also sought to create a degree of tension or anxiety in the work. When the work was shown ‘in progress’ in 2012, I was not overly concerned with the way the web hung. However, the more I researched Bennett’s argument on acknowledging the vitality of non-living materials, which resonated with my original photograph of the plastic bag fluttering in the tree on the banks of the Brisbane River, the more I wanted the plastic bags to appear to have a life of their own. The idea that the plastic bags were proliferating or, as Bennett would argue, had a material vibrancy, was crucial. I addressed the issue of the flaccidity by pulling the centre of the web up and back, creating a dynamic void space. The crocheted twine used to pull the work back was fashioned to look like vines in a combination of tautness and drooping strands (figure 69). Figure 69 Julie-Anne Milinski A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession 2012–15 Over the course of the week, I continued to experiment to achieve an element of seduction or intrigue with the work while at the same time ensuring that the unease remained. I did this bearing in mind Langford’s effective use of plastic packaging in 127 her work The High Country (2012, figure 25) where the artist teased out the life in the materials, and also remembering the inertia of Tayou’s flaccid bags that, while impotent, had a daunting presence. Figure 70 Julie-Anne Milinski A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession 2012–15 A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession successfully suggests notions of the botanical albeit in an unsettling, synthetic environment. The vibrancy of the material is highlighted through its mimicry of growth and insinuation into the gallery ceiling’s framework, as a living vine would weave itself into the built environment. While raising notions of the detriment of plastic bags, it aims to do so with an understanding of the seduction at play in consumer society. The human scale of the work, particularly the web, seeks to engage the viewer in an encounter that is intimate, with the detail in the web drawing in their gaze. 128 Wilhelmina Szeretlek! 2012–13 There is a similarity between plants classified as weeds and discarded plastic packaging, in that they can both cause harm to indigenous plants and wildlife when they encroach on natural environments. However, weeds are less visually disruptive and often their menace is not immediately apparent. Our familiarity with certain popular plants also helps them to blend into the landscape. One such plant is the Sansevieria trifasciata, which is a widespread indoor and landscaping plant as a result of its robustness and tolerance of low light. The fascination I have around this plant originates from its presence in both the exterior and interior environments, which prescribes different meanings to the plants. As an environmental weed in the Seven Hills Bushland reserve near my home, the plant is evident on the borders of the reserve where it has spread from neighbouring domestic gardens. For my late mother- in-law Wilhelmina Milinski, the Sansevieria was a treasured houseplant, with her own plant, grown from a cutting given to her by a relative and placed in her Melbourne sunroom, more than forty years old (figure 71).241 The Brisbane City Council classifies Sansevieria trifasciata as a Class R, low-priority, pest species.242 It recommends that its population be reduced “as part of routine maintenance”.243 The threat posed by the plants is their ability to spread into large colonies through creeping underground stems. Additionally, just a small piece of leaf or root is enough to propagate a new plant, so the main method of dispersal of the species is at sites where garden waste is dumped.244 The plant’s common name, ‘mother-in-law’s tongue’, draws a comparison between the stiff, lance-shaped leaves of the plants and the sharp, cutting words that may be spoken by one’s mother-in-law. English was my mother-in-law’s second language, and she frequently used expressions that become ambiguous and humorous rather than unkind. Growing with such vigour, the long leaves of Wilhelmina’s Sansevieria required binding with rope to stay upright. Despite being a drought-tolerant plant, Wilhelmina’s plant was permanently situated in a blue tub filled with water. 241 Wilhelmina Milinski, conversation with the author, August 2013. 242 Brisbane City Council, “Weed Classification and “Environmental Weeds.” 243 Ibid. 244 Brisbane City Council, “Mother-in-law’s Tongue,” Brisbane City Council Weed Identification Tool, accessed 12 March 2015, http://weeds.brisbane.qld.gov.au/weeds/mother-laws-tongue. 129 Figure 71 Wilhelmina’s Sansevieria trifasciata, Carnegie, Melbourne 2013 While researching the plant, I viewed a TED talk by Kamal Meattle, an environmental activist whose personal experience with breathing difficulties due to degraded air quality in New Delhi led him to create office spaces where Sansevieria trifasciata is used in conjunction with two other plants, the Acera Palm (Chrysalidocarpus lutescens) and the Money Plant (Epipremnum aureum) to improve air quality.245 His research documents how these plants have proven to be capable of enhancing humans’ indoor environments, demonstrating that introducing approximately 1,200 plants to a 50,000-square-feet, twenty-year-old building housing 300 human occupants caused a marked improvement to their air quality.246 He states, “compared to other buildings, there is a reduced incidence of eye irritation by 52 percent, 245 Kamal Meattle, “How to Grow Fresh Air,” TED video, 4:04, accessed 4 May 2013, http://www.ted.com /talks/kamal_meattle_on_how_to_grow_your_own_fresh_air?language=en. 246 Ibid. 130 respiratory systems by 34 percent, headaches by 24 percent, lung impairment by 12 percent and asthma by nine percent.”247 Meattle credits NASA’s research as raising his awareness to the air-purifying properties of plants.248 As mentioned previously, NASA’s commissioned report “Interior Landscape Plants for Indoor Air Pollution Abatement” of 1989 notes the connection between various health issues and the presence of various organic compounds emitted from synthetic materials in enclosed environments.249 The report documents the effectiveness of using indoor plants to decrease levels of formaldehyde, benzene and trichloroethylene in a sealed environment.250 The exchanges between plants, the environment, and humans that the report outlines reinforce the agency of plants, and the reciprocity in this relationship. Meattle’s statistics verify the exchange between humans, the office environment, and the plants. What the human occupants, furniture, and other contents exhale and emit, the plants filter from the air. Therefore, they are not passive occupants, but active, valued contributors to the air quality of the shared habitat. As a starting point for Wilhelmina Szeretlek! (figures 72–75), I focussed on the conflict between the local classification of Sansevieria trifasciata as an environmental weed, a negative connotation, and its positive value as an indoor plant that converts carbon dioxide into oxygen at night.251 Considering the dilemma of whether to “reduce the population” of the plant as per the Brisbane City Council’s instructions252 or afford it the tender care, including daily leaf-wiping, that Meattle suggests,253 I arrived at the decision to both control and care for the plant. Through the title of the work, I play on the common name of the plant and acknowledge my mother-in-law Wilhelmina, who was an avid painter, craftsperson, and gardener. Szeretlek means ‘I love you’ in Hungarian, my mother-in-law’s native language (tongue). Just as Starling’s Rescued Rhododendrons (figure 46) were the protagonist for multiple contemporary concepts—the species’ origins and migration, its popularity as an ornamental plant, and its potentially detrimental environmental impact depending on where it is planted, the role of the Sansevieria Trifasciata was fundamental. 247 Ibid. 248 Ibid. 249 Wolverton, Johnson, and Bounds, “Interior Landscape Plants for Indoor Air Pollution Abatement.” 250 Ibid., 3–5. 251 Meattle, “How to Grow Fresh Air.” 252 Brisbane City Council, “Weed Classification.” 253 Meattle, “How to Grow Fresh Air.” 131 Figure 72 Julie-Anne Milinski Wilhelmina Szeretlek! (detail) 2012–3 The plants used in this work were sourced from friends’ gardens and the Seven Hills Bushland Reserve due to their scarcity in local nurseries in 2012.254 The cuttings were divided, wrapped in hessian with a minimal amount of soil, and bound together with string. I then crocheted ‘cosies’ from nylon builders line for each plant, which concurrently bound and restricted the growth of the plant and provided a container for their soil (figure 72). Prosthetic leaves were attached to damaged plants and broken leaves were stitched together (figure 73). These were quite visceral interactions with the plants, where sap would ooze from the freshly cut holes and the distinct smell of the cut leaves would fill the air. Pom-poms on lengths of chain stitch reference the practice of using rocks and chains as tools used to manipulate the directional growth 254 This situation changed over the course of my candidacy, with the plant now commonly available at nurseries in Brisbane despite the City Council’s directive to reduce the population. 132 of larger plants and trees. The fluorescent colours of the nylon builders line are prevalent in high-visibility equipment and safety-wear on construction sites. The builders line is a material connection to concepts of boundaries, which is what it is used to create in construction and landscaping. The Sansevieria’s classification in Australia differs along state and territory boundaries, being “regarded as an environmental weed in Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory, and as a ‘sleeper weed’ in other parts of Australia”. Grown in containers indoors, the plant appears to be enjoying a return to fashion as part of the general renewed interest in indoor plants.255 However, if planted in the garden, it will spread rapidly if it is not contained. Falling out of fashion results in some indoor plants ending up in external environments through dumping of plants and cuttings where they become an environmental issue. Figure 73 Julie-Anne Milinski Wilhelmina Szeretlek! (detail) 2012–3 255 I observed many examples of Sansevierias in restaurants, hotels, and retail stores in Paris, London, New York and Singapore during the course of this project. 133 Figure 74 Julie-Anne Milinski Wilhelmina Szeretlek! (trial installation) 2012–13 The works were positioned on wooden plant stands constructed to enable an arrangement of the works at different heights and in different dialogues with each other. The stands were constructed on a scale intended to be both precarious and relatable to dimensions of the human body (figure 74). This method of presenting the work also implied a domestic setting, with crocheted doilies reinforcing this connection. Through trial installations and peer feedback, some plants migrated to the floor, with the intention that it appears as if they are escaping their domestic containment. In her critique of the work during a trial installation in 2013, Melbourne artist Susan Jacobs described the plants as being cute but unnerving, and pushing against domestic primness. She curiously noted that it reminded her of Chinese foot- binding and breeding animals to stay small and cute, an interesting association given my experience with hormone therapy to limit my height. Initially, I wondered if the 134 cosies would stunt the growth of the plant, which it did in some cases where the plant was small to start with. Larger specimens fought harder against this ‘soft-bonsai’ technique, pushing through their bindings within a year. As I watched these plants force their way through the cosies, I recalled wild imaginings of my bones breaking through skin, neither contained nor restrained. As the plants grew, they were shaped by both care and control, asserting their will to grow no matter how contorted. Through further feedback, I ascertained that the work had more liveliness on the floor, with the removal of the stands liberating the works from the domestic, and making them appear more mobile (figure 75). The viewer could then walk in and around the plants. Additionally, the doily demarcates areas within which the plants can be situated or excluded from. The doily’s deviation from the regularity of the pattern of the interior to a more haphazard spreading of the exterior loops implies something running amok, a freak growth no longer conforming to a pre-determined arrangement (figure 76). Figure 75 Julie-Anne Milinski Wilhelmina Szeretlek! (trial installation) 2012–3 135 Figure 76 Studio documentation, rampant doilies 2015 Wilhelmina Szeretlek! was exhibited at Bleeding Hearts Gallery, Brisbane, as part of the exhibition RGBcmyk (2012) curated by Monica Rohan and also at QCA and the University of Southern Queensland in Down the Rabbit Hole (2013) curated by Sebastian Di Mauro and Beata Batorowicz. In the second instance, new plants were struck from these existing works, growing into new shapes that inspired new forms and arrangements. The different generations were evident—the new cuttings appeared small and fresh, while their parent plants seemed older and wearier in their water-stained cosies. Wilhelmina Szeretlek! successfully demonstrated my exploration of the agency of botany and inferred an interdependency between human and plant, since the artworks were created around and relied on the plant’s growth. The relatively mundane plant, common in Brisbane urban areas as both a house plant and an environmental weed, demonstrated the ability of botany in an artwork to act as a metonym for the wider natural environment. 136 Geniculum, 2013 The works in Geniculum256 (2013, figures 80-85) demonstrated most directly the influence and evidence of the botanical drawing classes I had completed earlier that year. Extending on thoughts that arose during the making of previous artworks, I was experimenting with ideas that resided in the blurred space between dichotomies: built/botanical, culture/nature, inorganic/organic, masculine/feminine, mass- produced/hand-made, and art/craft. The prominence of flagging tape in photographic research documentation collected from local parklands had led me to experiment with the material. Flagging tape denotes areas undergoing change brought about by humans, and was a ubiquitous presence in riverside parklands in the Brisbane CBD— namely, Southbank Parklands and the Brisbane Botanical Gardens—due to ongoing repairs caused by the 2011 floods. I transformed this mass-produced, uniform, and quotidian material through the process of crocheting, so that it became soft, fleshy, and substantial. While I was working with the material, its durability became apparent, and it altered from a material intended as a temporary marker to a robust form with significant weight and strength. I continued working with crocheted forms as a conflation of leaf shapes from photographic source material of plants in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens. I had experimented with the soft forms as both wall and floor works, but had yet to arrive at a resolution that would speak to the concerns of the research. I considered how I could use the flagging tape to ‘flag’ my human endeavours to shape a botanical specimen, creating a hybrid that was simultaneously familiar and strange, as if the plant had morphed with the flagging tape and now incorporated it into its structure, in a similar fashion to the plastiglomerates discussed in Chapter 2 where rock subsumes plastic. 256 “Geniculum (Latin), n. a knot in a plant.” D. P. Simpson, Cassell's New Latin–English, English–Latin Dictionary (London: Cassell, 1968), 263. Geniculum was shown at The Hold Artspace, West End, in November 2013. 137 Figure 77. Julie-Anne Milinski Work in progress (trial installation) 2013 During this time, I was also investigating the jungle paintings of Henri Rousseau (figure 78) to analyse the methodology he used to find the ‘wild’ in the city. Rousseau found Paris’s botanical and zoological gardens sources of inspiration and subject matter for his artworks. In 2012, I had visited the Jardin des Plantes and Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, two sites that he regularly frequented in order to transport his imagination beyond the urban realm. He is said to have commented “when I go into the glass houses and I see those strange plants from exotic countries, it seems to me that I enter into a dream. I feel I am somebody else completely.”257 For Rousseau, the urban botanical and zoological gardens transported him to a distant and surreal environment. In his paintings, the artist was able to liberate the caged animals and exotic glasshouse plants, interpret them “without the slightest truth to life”, and re- 257 Henri Rousseau cited in Christopher Green, “Souvenirs of the Jardin des Plantes: Making the Exotic Strange Again,” in Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris, ed. Frances Morris and Christopher Green, ex. cat. (New York: Abrams), 41. 138 situate them in a jungle entirely of his own dreaming.258 While rumours circulated that Rousseau’s military service in Mexico provided him with experiences of tropical forests in Mexico, he never left France, and “was happy to confess that his Mexican stories were confabulation”.259 As Frances Morris confirms, Despite Apollinaire’s claim that Rousseau’s military service in Mexico provided him with memories of “tropical forests, the monkeys, and the bizarre flowers”, we know from direct testimony that it was the splendid plantations of Paris hot houses and dusty cages of exotic creatures in the zoological gardens that more immediately generated these compelling visions.260 Figure 78 Henri Rousseau The Dream 1910 In the spirit of Rousseau, I turned to Brisbane’s Botanical Gardens and surrounding parks in search of exotic-looking plants that were also commonplace in the local area. I settled on the Monstera deliciosa, a plant with very distinctive leaves that grows in abundance in Brisbane. Larger specimens of the plant in the Botanical Gardens climb trees, tenaciously clinging to the trunks with their aerial roots. Less impressive scale wise, a nonetheless interesting specimen was located in the QCA Southbank Library, 258 Italian painter-critic Ardengo Soffici cited in ibid., 37. 259 Ibid., 30. 260 Frances Morris, “Jungles in Paris,” in Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris, 14. 139 which I borrowed to use as a drawing study. Neglect and lack of a vertical structural support to climb had forced the plant to grow into a low, tortured formation (figure 79). Figure 79 Monstera deliciosa QCA Library 2013 The plant resided in my studio for some time, during which I came to know every leaf and stem through prolonged study (drawing and photography). In order to capture less-familiar perspectives of the plant, I elevated it onto a high table. By sitting on the floor and looking up at the underside of the Monstera leaves, I was able to invoke a sense of uncanniness about the plant. Its scale seemed to increase—I could imagine that the plant was towering overhead as it would in a rainforest. I became enthralled by its tortured kinks and twists. My viewpoint also offered a focus on the stems rather than its decorative leaves. I witnessed the strange, elbow-like bends producing new heart-shaped leaves. From preparatory photographs and sketches, I produced three final drawings, all graphite and acrylic ground on marine plywood. 140 Figure 80 Julie-Anne Milinski geniculum drawing study #1 (observation + forgetting MHO5/6) 2013 These drawings demonstrated the close studies of the botanical specimen that informed the work of the Monstera Mirabilis (figure 83). They also offered perspectives of the Monstera deliciosa as I had come to view it in the studio. While adhering to the conventions of botanical drawing in attempting to depict the plant with scientific accuracy, the drawings also relied on artistic compositional strategies to reveal a unique plant rather than an example of a species. Geniculum drawing study #1 (observation+forgetting MHO5/6) (figure 80) refers to my botanical drawing instructor, Margaret Hastie. I used this title to acknowledge that my compositional decisions were at odds with Hastie’s expert advice, but very much in 141 the spirit of her insistence that her students continually question the rigid rules of botanical drawing with which she instructed her classes. The second drawing, Geniculum drawing study #2 (observation+reflection on G.O.) (figure 81), acknowledges the influence of cropping techniques used by Georgia O’Keeffe to create intriguing botanical imagery. I had taken numerous photographs, which I would then crop to arrive at compositions for the drawings. The third drawing, Geniculum drawing study #3 (observation+reflection on H.R.) (figure 82), refers to Henri Rousseau who would exaggerate the scale of certain plant leaves in his paintings (figure 78). Figure 81 Julie-Anne Milinski geniculum drawing study #2 (observation + reflection on G.O.) 2013 142 Figure 82 Julie-Anne Milinski geniculum drawing study #3 (observation + reflection on H.R.) 2013 Monstera Mirabilis was fabricated from flagging tape, wire, and a Monstera deliciosa plant grown from a cutting taken from the QCA Library’s plant. Whereas in the Library, the plant had no support structure, which thwarted its attempts to climb and thrive, in my work not only was the plant nurtured, but also elevated from its mundane existence. Monstera Mirabilis (figure 83) highlighted the liveliness of both plant and the flagging tape material, and, through proximity of real and artificial, asked the viewer to contemplate hybrid aesthetic possibilities. 143 Figure 83 Julie-Anne Milinski Monstera mirabilis 2013 Tracing patterns from the plant’s leaves that I then crocheted, I ‘grew’ the Monstera with these constructed additions. A structure of plastic-covered wire formed a container for the living plant and became the framework for leaves on long stems, creating a hybrid of organic and synthetic materials. The constructed leaves and stems both supported and contained the plant, as well as providing a visual contrast. The crocheted leaves on wire stems were carefully weighted so that the plant was never still—many of the stems were struggling with the weight of the foliage. A single coil of wire extended to the right gallery wall with a single leaf at its tip. This leaf was in the path of the vent of an air-conditioning unit, animating both it and the rest of the wired leaves. The precarious arrangement of these wired tendrils ensured that even 144 the slight air displacement created by viewers navigating the work also contributed to the motion of the plant. This immediate visual registering of the impact of human activity on the plant, enlivening its synthetic prosthetics, sought to establish an interaction between viewer and plant. The larger flaccid leaves slumped on the floor, their weightiness providing a counter to the aerial leaves. Figure 84 Julie-Anne Milinski 1.194 km (green-mound drawing) 2013 A separated floor-based crocheted form (figure 84) is a conflation of leaf shapes that reference botanical specimens in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens, collapsed into a single hybrid mutations with something vaguely familiar in the folds of fleshy, green plastic leaves. A discreet, pink protrusion emerging from the mound acted as a lure, inviting closer inspection. Wooden nodules protruding from the walls were painted in high-visibility colours to alert their presence (figure 85). This is a technique used in tree removal, where stumps close to ground heights are painted a fluorescent colour to avoid being a trip hazard. By adhering the small wooden pieces flush to the wall and 145 floor, my intention was to allude to these emergents as being something that had grown through the plasterboard, puncturing the gallery walls and raising questions of their origins. In arranging the nodules, I referenced photographs of branch growth patterns, further alluding to a natural process. By insinuating an agency in the wooden dowel pieces, I hoped to return liveliness to the wood, a reminder of its growing and branching history. The fluorescent paint cast a glow that contributed to this vibrancy. Figure 85 Julie-Anne Milinski emerge/recede (branch studies) 2013 Geniculum presented an exhibition that took visual cues from urban botanical sites and explored an engagement between plant and human. The presence of viewers in the gallery caused the Monstera mirabilis floor work to tremble, making visible the human influence on the environment. Presenting an extreme of artificiality in the representation of aspects of nature, the works respond to the hybridity of contemporary urban experience, where the evidence of human control and maintenance in natural environments is as familiar as the plants themselves. The hybridity of the Monstera deliciosa, partly real plant and partly human-engineered, used the juxtaposition of organic and synthetic materials to illuminate and exaggerate the vibrancy of materials. Much audience discussion around the care of the plant and how it would survive without sunlight and water for the duration of the exhibition reiterated that both reciprocity and interdependence were evident in the work. 146 Jardinière, 2014 There are some English words which have no equivalent in French, but then there are a great many more French words . . . for which we have no English. One of these is jardinière. Even in French it does not quite rightly express its meaning, because the obvious meaning of jardinière is female gardener, whereas what we understand by it . . . is a receptacle for holding pot-plants. —Gertrude Jekyll (1907)261 Gertrude Jekyll’s musings about the French word jardinière having dual meanings inspired the title of an exhibition I held in 2014, while Catherine Horwood’s history of indoor plants stimulated ideas surrounding the notion of containment as a barrier between nature and culture. The way that plants reside in the urban environment can be imagined as a series of containers and containments. Plants purchased from nurseries come packaged in a plastic container, and with some then planted in a garden bed or more decorative pot, the plastic container quickly becomes redundant. The garden bed may be viewed as the next level of containment, then the house-yard, the park, and beyond. Once out of the container, some specimens require vigilance to stop them from spreading and taking over as much space as they can physically occupy. While the built environment is frequently partitioned with garden edging and barriers, plants may not recognise these borders and experience them as a temporary disruption to their colonisation efforts. Horwood’s history of plants in the home provided both visual and conceptual provocations to this studio investigation, particularly as the role of indoor plants was not solely for their visual appeal. While initially some of the reasons for introducing plants indoors included keeping “exoticks” alive in cold climates (e.g., oranges in England), the masking of odours and medicinal uses also became reasons for growing particular plants indoors.262 My attraction with bringing plants into the gallery space was a question of proximity, and from previous works, I had established that introducing botany into artworks approximated a more intimate encounter for the viewer, similar to that of a gardener, and through the work, promoted the plants as lively occupants in the space rather than passive organic matter. The gardeners’ unique viewpoint is recognised by Sander-Regier when he says, 261 Gertrude Jekyll (1907) cited in Catherine Horwood, Potted History: The Story of Plants in the Home (London: Francis Lincoln Ltd, 2007), 153. 262 Ibid., 15–20. 147 The botanical agency of presence, of plants ‘being there’ and making a strong impression, reinforces the general perception of plants as being immobile, not a mistaken notion, considering they are essentially rooted in one spot. But rootedness does not mean plants are incapable of action, an important aspect of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of agency. . . . Botanical action and aliveness manifest their nuances to those who are present in the garden to experience it—like gardeners.263 Jardinière, exhibited from May to June 2014 at artisan in Brisbane, responded to the intimate scale of the gallery space, 3.7 x 2.6 metres, with the idea of reworking the Monstera Mirabilis work. Extending on materials and offering a more imposing scale, this work would embrace jardinière’s dual meanings described in Jekyll’s comments by being both a receptacle for a plant and a monument of a female gardener. The position of the entry point of the gallery was also crucial to the early stages of my planning; on approach, the doorway allowed only a limited view into the gallery and I wanted the first thing visible to be a curious lure, and only a partial indicator as to what lied around the corner. During my initial investigation as to how I might fabricate my jardinière, my thoughts repeatedly returned to a contemporary, iconic receptacle for plants, Jeff Koons’s Puppy (Vase) (1998, figure 86), with its smooth white ceramic waves of puppy fur.264 Initially, I investigated having a fibreglass stand manufactured to my design so that the surface would be smooth and slick. I constructed a maquette attaching plastic containers and bottles cut into botanically inspired shapes (figure 87). This experimentation led me to imagine Jardinière as a tower of plastic waste, an un- monument, to borrow the term from the exhibition Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, a survey of sculpture at New Museum in New York in 2007. Massimiliano Gioni’s description of these contemporary sculptural works resonated with me in both his conceptual and metaphorical observations, The work of many sculptors at the beginning of this new century, in fact, depicts a society that is so dramatically suffocating under the weight of toxic waste that it is now forced to turn garbage into an art form. And yet it is not the realm of artificiality that these sculptors inhabit. There is something slightly organic to the way these sculptures grown and expand, like twisted branches and tortured trees. The forms of this twenty first century sculpture evoke a kind of urban vegetation; they grow like weeds or like the strange, mutant flora that mysteriously spring up 263 Sander-Regier, “Bare Roots,” 69. 264 Koons’s Vase number 931 from an edition of 3000 sold for $18,750 on 21 April 2015. See http://www.phillips.com/detail/JEFF-KOONS/NY030115/298?fromSearch=jeff&searchPage=1. 148 in community gardens, where the natural and the artificial slowly come to resemble one another.265 Gioni’s evocation of a mutant, urban vegetation instantly brought to mind my Monstera mirabilis. It also assisted me in determining that these waste materials needed to be embedded in the final piece rather than having an empty fibreglass shell formed in their likeness, which I realised was no longer authentic or relevant. Figure 86 Jeff Koons Puppy (Vase) 1998 The internal structure of the work needed to be strong enough to support the weight of the plant and wired crocheted leaves. Fabricated from plywood and PVC pipe, layers of cut plastic bottles and containers were attached to the framework, covered in plaster bandage for strength, with a layer of plaster of Paris encrusting the surface (figure 87). In places, the end result appeared as a contemporary take on classical architectural decorative plaster mouldings with vegetal references. Cutting the packaging was an illuminating experience in the same way that cutting the plastic bags had revealed their strength. Given all the containers were designed for single 265 Massimiliano Gioni, “Ask the Dust,” in Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, ed. Richard Flood, ex. cat. (New York; London: Phaidon in association with New Museum, 2007), 65–66. 149 use, their robustness was alarming. The materiality of the plastic and plaster provided contrasts of traditional and contemporary sculpture materials, and of strength and fragility. Builders foam was used to fill larger gaps, oozing and erupting as it made its way through crevices between the plastered, plastic forms. Figure 87 Studio documentation, maquette 2014 The work was painted fluorescent yellow then over-sprayed with gloss white, so that a toxic glow remained in the crevices (figure 88). This amplified the seductive qualities of the materials’ surface, understanding that seduction can be vital to entice one to consuming commodities beyond necessity. By momentarily suspending judgment of the material, I wanted the viewer to see the structure as a whole before recognising identifiable shapes of plastic bottles in the substructure. A frequent comment I received about the Jardinière was that it appeared “edible”, with comparisons made to cake icing, confectionary, and ice cream; one viewer said that it looked as though it would taste “delicious, but be bad for you”. 150 Figure 88 Julie-Anne Milinski Jardinière (detail) 2014 This function of surface related to a description of Piccinini’s work, where Jacqueline Millner gives evidence of the artist employing the aesthetic tactics of advertising and consumer design, noting that “it is attentive to formal exigencies such as colour and composition, it is well finished often to the point of slick.”266 The slickness in works such as Summer Love (figure 89) begins with the fibreglass structure and is emphasised by the gloss automotive paint, with Piccinini’s conceptual focus firmly on the machine and technology. The surface of the Jardinière is glossy; however, the thin veneer of paint contrasts with its congealed mass of plastic packaging, not attempting to disguise the ‘underbelly’ of the work. It has an aesthetic of the domestic rather than the factory. My decision to always retain the evidence of the human hand in the works is in keeping with my investigation’s focus on human interactions with botany rather than scientific or mechanical aspects such as genetic modification and agriculture. 266 Jacqueline Millner, “Love in the Age of Intelligent Machines,” in Conceptual Beauty: Perspectives on Australian Contemporary Art (Sydney: Artspace, 2010), 20. 151 Figure 89 Patricia Piccinini Summer Love 2001 (detail) While Monstera deliciosa grow successfully indoors, it is uncommon for the plant to flower and bear fruit (figure 90). However, when a plant does bear fruit it is commonly referred to as the ‘fruit-salad fruit’ because of its strange combination of fruit flavours—typically, jackfruit and pineapple. The Jardinière exhibition contained a large fruit crocheted from plastic flagging tape, measuring 150 centimetres long and 106 centimetres at its widest and weighing 9.5 kilograms, including the white sheath (figure 91). The soft sculpture was slumped against the wall, which gave a flaccid quality to the exaggerated, comically phallic shape. The fruit is a lure into the space, a folly. The odd plastic fruit is the mutant offspring of its hybrid parent Monstera plant, part organic and part plastic. 152 Figure 90 Monstera deliciosa fruit and flower, SW1 Offices, South Brisbane (near my studio in Southbank) 2014 Figure 91 Julie-Anne Milinski Soft deliciosa 2014 153 I designed a wallpaper using a botanical drawing to be installed behind the work, however when trialled in the studio and critiqued with peers and supervisors, it became apparent that the pattern was too distracting given the detail in the Jardinière itself (figure 94). Instead, one wall of the gallery was painted pale pink. Barely perceptible, the colour made the work’s silhouette more pronounced, and the colour of the stand slightly more artificial. Figure 92 Jardinière in progress with wallpaper experimentation 2014 During the making of the Jardinière stand, I imagined it to be a statuesque, female gardener, the pot forming a head and the stand an elongated body. In my anthropomorphising of the work, I came to regard it as a taller version of myself—me at my natural height, sharing the studio space. The scale of the work and the plaster of Paris crust made it difficult to move, and while I had contended with the fragility of the plaster throughout the entire construction process, transporting the work to the gallery proved to be a challenge. I constructed a wooden crate to facilitate the move (figure 93), and in its travel packaging, the work’s fragile shell did not need to be handled. It brought to mind the nonsensical need of packaging for packaging—but this is not so unusual in that all consumer packaging is boxed then crated as consumer goods are 154 shipped from one country to another. The more I worked with consumer packaging materials, the more time I had to dwell of the unseen aspects of the material circulations in contemporary society. Figure 93 Julie-Anne Milinski Jardinière in crate 2014 Jardinière propelled its botanical specimen skyward on a pedestal of consumer packaging, simultaneously an un-monument to consumerism and a monument to the female gardener. Situating the plant growing out of a tower that contained botanical references connected issues of material and subject. The Jardinière also reinstated the plant to an elevated position—as it would be seen in tropical forests—from underneath. The discussion surrounding this work was firmly around consumer packaging, with viewers noting recognisable elements in the stand. The combination 155 of materials also prompted conversation about packaging that eventually ends up in the wider environment, and new material realities, like plastiglomerates, where organic and synthetic transmogrify. Again, viewers were concerned that the Monstera plant would survive for the eight-week duration of the exhibition, which it did, growing noticeably during that time. Later in 2014, when I had the opportunity view the works of Judy Pfaff and Adrián Villar Rojas in New York, I reflected on both the construction and conceptual aspects of Jardinière at length. I felt a synergy with these artists’ responses to the increasing hybridised urban environment, where the organic and the synthetic did not sit neatly contained side by side but rather seeped, oozed, mingled, and joined. This was to influence my final studio outcomes, as was the residency in Philadelphia. 156 Fi gu re 9 4 Ju lie -A nn e M ili ns ki J ar di ni èr e 20 14 157 Transplanted: Philadelphia Residency, Crane Arts Centre, 2014 From 24 October to 15 November 2014, I participated in a collaborative studio residency at Crane Arts in Philadelphia, instigated by my supervisor Associate Professor Debra Porch, along with two fellow doctoral candidates Sonya Peters and Caity Reynolds (figure 95). As described by Porch in our successful Griffith University Collaborative Research Grant application, the project focused on the research question “How can the unpredictable and unknown occurrences of site/place be heightened through collaborative observation and the immediacy of the ‘everyday’ experience through what is visible and invisible?”267 Figure 95 Caity Reynolds, Sonya Peters and Debra Porch, studio at Crane Old School, Philadelphia 2014 The focus of our collaborative residency was on the everyday, and involved the key methodology of walking as a means to “assist and stimulate observation and perception”, which was aligned with my PhD research project’s methodology and 267 Debra Porch, Griffith University Arts Education and Law Group Collaborative Research Project Grant Application Form, 2014. 158 focus. The residency provided an opportunity to work alongside three artists with unique practices and approaches, something I believe both refreshed and expanded my existing research strategies. During our month-long residency, we shared a studio at Crane Arts Old School and held an exhibition of new work produced titled The Unpredictable Conceptions in Transdisciplinary Collaboration at the Crane Arts Center. It was immediately apparent that our differing research focuses would impact on our time spent walking through Philadelphia, and one of my earliest observations was how trained our individual eyes had become in seeking out specific subjects that were key to our individual research in our new environment. The discussions we had on these walks, while stopping to wait for each other as we photographed our individual fascinations, opened me up to the city through multiple sets of eyes, multiple minds, and multiple experiences. We became attuned to each other’s interests and would alert one another to those aspects of city we thought may be of significance. From exploring Philadelphia’s art museums to wandering the aisles of the Superfresh Supermarket, our daily group excursions revealed the city from multiple viewpoints that intersected, overlapped, and sometimes nudged our trained gaze ever so slightly off its well-worn path into the less-frequented zone of the periphery. Philadelphia is a city undergoing substantial gentrification in areas just outside the old central city. Northern Liberties, according to the hosts in of our various accommodations, is an area undergoing tremendous change and has been for the last ten years. There were many new residential developments being constructed during our stay and, with a large number of restaurants, bars and retail stores in the area, the general feel of the neighbourhood was one of vibrancy. Further north towards the Crane Arts Galleries and Crane Old School Studios, there was more vacant land, but it is not hard to imagine that in another ten years, the streets north of North Girard will be unrecognisable. Our accommodation was situated at three locations approximately ten minutes apart, and from there approximately ten minutes to the studio at Crane Old School. 159 Figure 96 Road works outside Crane Old School Studios, Philadelphia 2014 The new developments under construction are built all the way to the street, as are the traditional row houses in Philadelphia. It was not uncommon to have to walk on the road to get around a construction site. Flagging tape was a ubiquitous presence (figure 96), marking hazards, delineating boundaries, and steering pedestrians on a safe course. I decided to employ it in my work because it was so prevalent in the urban environment and was a familiar material. Due to the lack of yard-space, another common feature in the neighbourhood were window boxes and potted plants at the front of houses. These small-scale gardens, no matter how humble, were evidence of biophilic tendencies in the gritty, urban environment (figure 97). 160 Figure 97 Potted plants next to Freeway, Philadelphia 2014 NYC / Philadelphia perambulatory harness proposition— (come together fall apart, come together again fall apart again), 2014 On Monday 27th October 2014, the four of us caught the bus from Philadelphia to Manhattan. Walking from Chinatown to the Larchmont Hotel, wrong turns were taken. Blood sugar plummeted. Bladders filled. Tempers frayed. Energy levels varied. As we stopped in various couplings on street corners, checking maps, scanning crowds for familiar faces, we disconnected and reconnected. We separated and joined. We lost patience. Found our bearings. This was to be our perambulatory pattern in NYC, and in Philadelphia for the weeks that followed. — Julie-Anne Milinski, journal entry, 7 November 2014 Our walking methodology was to be the focus of the work I made and exhibited during the residency. As we walked around the city as a group, we were constantly stopping and starting—to take photographs, to look at street signs, to venture into shops. We were content to wander and would drift into various combinations of 1+1+1+1, 2+1+1, 2+2 and 3+1. Trying to ‘stick together’ on a single path proved futile, and the words of Buddhist nun and author Pema Chödrön came to mind, 161 We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.268 I was interested in how we kept coming together and making connections based on what we wanted to look at, how well we felt (we all suffered from a cold at various stages), then disconnecting to rest and recuperate. In both Philadelphia and New York, this pattern of coming together and parting repeated again and again in various combinations. I decided to make a work that spoke of the experience of our walking together and separately, and to use a material I was familiar with which was also prevalent in the streets of Northern Liberties. This approach sought to focus on human and material circulations through the city. Figure 98 Walking rope Improvising on the idea of a walking rope used to keep groups of children together when on walking excursions (figure 98), I made a work that gave each of us an autonomous harness that could be worn over the head and one shoulder or pulled down to sit on the waist. Three harnesses had a lead with a connector that the wearer could choose to connect to or disconnect from another harness (figure 99 and 101). Crocheted from flagging tape, the leads were made from tape with text containing the warning “LEAD HAZARD” (figure 100). The longest lead was exhibited with the tape unaltered to allow the text to be read. The homonym lead in the case of the work 268 Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heartfelt Advice for Hard Times (London: Element, 2005), 14. 162 advised of the hazards of leading which became apparent during excursions where we lost our bearings. Figure 99 Julie-Anne Milinski NYC / Philadelphia perambulatory harness proposition (come together fall apart, come together again fall apart again) 2014 163 Figure 100 Julie-Anne Milinski, NYC / Philadelphia perambulatory harness proposition (come together fall apart, come together again fall apart again) (detail) 2014 The works were installed on the wall pinned at hip height, and immediately viewers saw the connection of the works to the body (figure 101). However, one of the harnesses sat on the floor without a lead, offering the potential reading as being disconnected, or alternatively whole and open to potential connections. Figure 101 Julie-Anne Milinski, NYC / Philadelphia perambulatory harness proposition (come together fall apart, come together again fall apart again) (detail) 2014 164 Figure 102 Julie-Anne Milinski Top loader 2014 The duration of the residency necessitated an optimum way of working that I now realise brought a spontaneity to my work. I was able to utilise familiar techniques and materials to work with the ideas generated from my new environment. For example, I found a roll of black plastic packaging in the gallery that was left over from a QCA Design exhibition shipped from Brisbane. In the spirit of collaboration proposed by our residency, I decided to use the plastic as a material collaboration with whoever had rolled the plastic into a coil. I unrolled the plastic then re-enacted this gesture in a more sculptural structure. Three stickers on the plastic indicated that the packaging had contained work that was ‘top load only’; this text gave the work its title, Top loader (figure 102). I crocheted a long chain, which was wound into an oblong coil that emerged from the top loader. The resulting work sits in an odd dialogue with one of the harnesses, a remnant shell (husk) that protected a previous work in the space now embellished and participating in a new way as part of the work itself. Recognising the 165 discarded packaging as something with potential and a possible vibrant addition to my work is in keeping with Bennett’s plea for us to consider the “material powers” circulating around human bodies and to be “more attentive encounters between people materialities and thing materialities”.269 Its placement with the harness brings it into circulation with the (absent) human body. Figure 103 Julie-Anne Milinski and unknown workers Cautionary tails 2014 A play on language was employed in Cautionary tails (figure 103). I collected caution tape from several building sites where it had been tied in place. The resulting lengths frequently contained knots made by the workers who had tied tape onto the site I had torn them from. I took these lengths and, working with the existing knots, would crochet between them; my gesture thus joined the workers’ gesture. The work’s name 269 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, ix–x. 166 was inspired in part by our recent experience of Halloween costumes and the suggestion that the work could be worn as a tail. Additionally, because of the frequent incident of crime in the neighbourhood, our hosts provided us with “cautionary tales” in the hope of making our visit safer, particularly given our long walks that passed through even less desirable neighbourhoods. More caution tape was presented escaping from the black plastic bag that was used in its liberation from a building site (figure 104). Sitting on the floor, the work engaged in a dialogue with a fire extinguisher, expanding the conundrum from “Is it rubbish?” to “Is the fire extinguisher a part of the work?” As Brian O’Doherty notes, the modern gallery’s removal of all references to the outside world makes all such fixtures an aesthetic conundrum.270 Figure 104 Julie-Anne Milinski, NYC / Philadelphia perambulatory harness proposition (come together fall apart, come together again fall apart again) (detail) 2014 Much of the audience feedback related to our experience of Philadelphia and people’s surprise that we had spent much of our time walking around the city. The notions of connectedness and disconnectedness were evident to viewers who related this not only the status quo of our working group, but also to new acquaintances with 270 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, 2nd ed. (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 15. 167 colleagues and host families, and the separation from home through geographical distance. While the work did not use botany as a leitmotif, it was successful in its utilisation of materials associated with the construction industry and familiar to the local audiences on the many local building sites. The physical strength of the crocheted works aroused a great deal of interest and prompted discussion of both the prevalence of plastic in all aspects of daily life and its potential life cycle in the environment. Soft Tags for the City, 2014 The Philadelphia residency also facilitated a tangential work involving temporary gestures exploring ideas of circulation carried out during our city walks. On one of the first days in Philadelphia, I found a lime-green pipe cleaner in the gutter, which I took back to the studio. Within twenty-four hours, I had found another pipe cleaner, the same colour but in a different location. I imagined someone leaving them all over the city, but did not see any more so decided it had been purely coincidental. In one of our many forays into the $2 store, I bought a bag of pipe cleaners. I would carry them in my bag and occasionally make a leaf shape with one and connect it to a plant (figures 105–6). I associated this gesture with a very quick, botanical line drawing. Figure 105 Studio experimentation, pipe cleaner leaves 2014 168 Figure 106 Julie-Anne Milinski Soft tag: pipe cleaners 2014 Rendering the pipe cleaners into accurate leaf shapes hindered the project, so I decided instead to leave a stylised initial, a ‘soft tag’. My tagging was fluffy and easily removable and in my experience, the material of the tag (i.e., the pipe cleaner) was appealing, so I hoped that the tags would be removed by passers-by as I had done. I left a couple in paths I walked along daily, so that I could see if the tags were being removed. When I established that the pipe cleaners were being taken, I became more prolific in my output, confident that they were more than a flagrant act of littering. Figure 107 Julie-Anne Milinski Soft tag: pipe cleaners 2014 169 The weather during our stay had been extremely mild, with daytime temperatures averaging between 12 and 20oC. On our last day in Philadelphia, the weather turned, and for the first time during the trip, I felt the icy bite of the wind permeate layers of clothing the instant that I went outdoors. The sky was a particular shade of grey that locals assured me was indicative of snow on the way. Rain and frost had affected the Halloween decorations; pumpkins slowly rotted and fake cobwebs became matted and sodden clumps in gutters. The plants in window boxes I had so admired when I first arrived had suffered the effects of cold, with their flowers and leaves blackening. Snow was visible on cars that had travelled in from outer lying areas, even though it had not snowed in the city centre. Figure 108 Julie-Anne Milinski Soft tag: rose petals 2014 After I packed up my room on this last morning, I took a bouquet of wilted roses with me and I walked into the city centre with two of my companions. I asked one of the artists to take photographs as I scattered the rose-petals along a particularly bleak stretch of North 2nd Street from the intersection of Callowhill (figure 108). I was genuinely sad to leave Philadelphia, and saw this gesture as a parting declaration of my affection for this vibrant, gritty, urban environment. Even in their decaying state, the rose petals left a colourful trail, mingling with the stuff already on the street: rose petals, autumn leaves, litter, pipe cleaners. I thought of Bennett’s evocative debris that 170 triggered her thinking about “thing-power”: glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick.271 Philadelphia had provided another rich site connected to the concerns of my research in the Magic Gardens (figure 109). The relevance of this site became evident in my final creative works. The Philadelphia Magic Gardens The Magic Gardens in Philadelphia is a mosaic public artwork created by Isaiah Zagar. Commenced in 1994 on a block of privately owned vacant land near the artist’s studio, the work was completed over fourteen years, resulting in a network of mosaic- covered tunnels, grottos, and walls.272 The work was at risk of being dismantled when the Boston-based landowner decided to sell the property; however, through community support, the site was saved and opened to the public in 2008.273 Zagar’s neighbourhood beautification efforts have not been restricted to this site, with mosaics being a prominent feature in the surrounding neighbourhood (figure 110). Figure 109 Philadelphia Magic Gardens Philadelphia 2014 271 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 4. 272 Philadelphia Magic Gardens, “About Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens,” accessed 3 March 2015,http://www.phillymagicgardens.org/about-us/. 273 Ibid. 171 I visited the Magic Gardens on a cold, overcast day, and the weather amplified the bleakness of the South Street precinct. The gardens are a labyrinth of stairs and doorways, with every surface encrusted with broken crockery, bottles, bicycle wheels, toilet bowls, and other assorted, discarded objects, mortared together to create a vibrant, colourful oasis. Zagar’s heroic display of kitsch enlivens the disparate materials so that they appear to grow in arrangements that bombard the eyes. While initially the Magic Gardens appears to be visually overwhelming and bordering on chaotic, closer inspection reveals the painstaking care that has been taken in arranging the fragments (figure 111). Figure 110 Isaiah Zagar in mosaic-covered laneway off South Street, Philadelphia 2014 The Magic Gardens brought to mind my construction of the Jardinière, and the processes of cutting and attaching the collected packaging materials to form a surface over the structural framework. The Magic Gardens seem to exemplify the “kind of urban vegetation . . . like the strange, mutant flora . . . where the natural and 172 the artificial slowly come to resemble one another” that Gioni speaks of in relation to contemporary sculpture.274 Zagar has taken the flotsam and jetsam of the city and planted them in mortar, where they appear to have grown from, organically over time, retaining a sense of the materials’ vitality. For example, the shattered shards of ceramic and glass reveal their brittleness in sharp angles, and the rust on bicycle wheels is evidence of the metal’s oxidation—its activity despite its fixed location. I also found the experience of walking through the grottos and spaces of the Magic Gardens like looking at an archaeological excavation site, with layers of anthropogenic markers revealing our history of consumerism through the evidence of our discarded objects. Zagar’s Philadelphia Gardens parallels my project’s tactic of using botany as a leitmotif in creative works to infer material vitality, and is an extreme example of an urban garden in contemporary consumer society. Figure 111 Philadelphia Magic Gardens (stairway) 2014 274 Massimiliano Gioni, “Ask the Dust,” 65–66. 173 PlastiCity and PlastiScenery (not-so-still-lives), 2015–16 PlastiCity and PlastiScenery (not-so-still-lives) (2015–16, figure 112) align and explore the themes of this PhD research—namely, botany, the urban environment, and consumer packaging, including its ongoing, material liveliness in the environment after its single, domestic use. A contemporary interpretation of traditional artistic genres of nature representation, landscape and still life, the towering forms and obscured views in PlastiCity are derived from my visual experiences of the city centre, while PlastiScenery (not-so-still-lives) focuses on more domestic and suburban observations. Ruminations on the Philadelphia Magic Gardens, with its fragments of glass and ceramics embedded in concrete, contributed to thoughts on material and compositional approaches. Also pivotal in arriving at this work has been the studio environment, where I have surrounded myself with plant cuttings in jars filled with water and containers of soil. My prolonged observations of these plants, noticing the emergence of new growth and of roots as they form, has caused me to consider life support systems usually hidden from view by earth. Figure 112 Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiCity and PlastiScenery (not-so-still-lives) (trial installation) 2016 Concrete and glass are materials frequently associated with the city, which is sometimes referred to as a concrete jungle, and the combination of these materials has a distinctly urban aesthetic. Considering approaches I could take with these 174 materials, neither of which I had used previously, I began studio experimentations that would assist me in coming to understand their properties and the knowledge that comes from extensive handling. Concrete also holds autobiographical relevance; prior to his retirement, my father drove a concrete truck. I have childhood memories of going with him to the concrete plant and climbing on the mountains of sand and gravel that would be mixed with cement in the back of the trucks. I am certain that my father viewed concrete as the great liberator from lawn-mowing, and over the years, the lawn-to-concrete ratio of our yard was reduced through the addition of a number of concrete patios. These memories of concrete as a means of supressing nature were embedded early, and often resurface when I see new homes being built in my neighbourhood, with most of the block being covered by the concrete slab that the house is being built upon. Referencing both the house slab and the domestic environment, I cast concrete supports in square and rectangular forms in cake tins. Some concrete objects have been cast in plastic and glass containers, forming their shape and sometimes imprinting them with Plastics Identification Codes.275 These imprinted inscriptions reminded me of the concrete slabs that cover access holes to subterranean telecommunications and power services in suburban streets. My collection of glass packaging includes jars from Philadelphia, Singapore, and France. Although some of these jars are simple, they were chosen for the way they captured and held my attention. For example, I was drawn to small, delicate jars, which once contained yogurt, imported from France into Singapore, which I then carried to Australia. These deliberations of material-circulations had become more frequent after my Philadelphia residency and the observations made through my work Soft tags (2014). I came to appreciate the substance of glass through the process of sandblasting, which eroded the shiny surface, rendering it opaque and eventually creating holes in the vessel. This experience altered my understanding of glass from being a molten liquid that could be formed into whole, fragile objects, to individual, moveable particles (figure 113). I liken the experience of holding a glass vessel in front of the high-pressure stream of water and silica in the sanding booth to holding a block of ice under a water tap, the once solid shape slowly dissolving at the point of where liquid and solid make contact. In comparison, plastic containers do not yield as easily 275 The Plastics and Chemical Industries Association, “Plastics Identification Code,” accessed 24 December 2015, http://www.pacia.org.au/Content/PIC.aspx. 175 to the abrasive process and are far more resilient. The sandblasting also had the curious effect of estranging the glass as a recognisable material. The sandblasted vessels were mistaken as something I had cast, with the eroded surfaces’ indentations being construed as finger-prints. Rather than being identical, machine made objects, sandblasting gave each vessel a unique identity. Figure 113 Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiScenery (not-so-still-lives) (detail) 2016 I imagined the time spent sandblasting the glass and plastic as a way of ‘fast- forwarding’ what might happen to the materials in an outdoor environment; the sandblasted objects worn appearance is similar to glass and plastic washed up on a beach, eroded by the natural forces of the ocean. As the bottles and jars I had sandblasted were brought into the studio and placed on shelves among the plants, vignettes began to appear to me through the sandblasted holes. These glimpses reminded me of how botany is sometimes experienced in the city—framed by architecture, sometimes through glass, and only partially visible. 176 Figure 114 Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiCity (trial installation) 2016 A prominent presence in the work is a large number of plastic tubs that once contained yoghurt (figure 114). The physical quality of these particular containers that led me to collect them is their solidity; they seem more like multi-use storage containers (similar to Tupperware) than temporary packaging. After attempting to sandblast a hole through one of the tubs, their durability was confirmed and a sustained effort, significantly more than would be required to make a hole in very thick glass, barely penetrated the plastic. Hawkins notes the potential for new ways of thinking that might arise from the physical handling involved in recycling where rubbish requires further consideration to be sorted. She says, This doesn’t necessarily make us think about how most of the waste we make comes from exploited labour and goes to an exploited nature. But it does entangle us in new relations and bodily practices that could be the first small step towards a more radical ethics of waste that is based on corporeal generosity rather than just “doing the right thing”.276 Interestingly to my project, the terminology used in the process of making yoghurt includes both nature (flora) and culture: living ‘cultures’ containing the bacteria lactobacillus when ingested, sustain intestinal ‘flora’. It was curious to note how the 276 Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, 115. 177 modular tower of monotonous yoghurt tubs seemed to emphasise my consumption. Upon viewing this arrangement, a number of people have exclaimed that I eat a lot of yoghurt, recognising the packaging and finding the number of units confronting. Innate consumer guilt seems to compel me to draw attention to the expiration dates on the tubs as testimony to the four years that I have been collecting the tubs. This arresting of flows of circulation through collecting rather than disposing or recycling again proved a useful provocation for discussions surrounding consumer culture. Figure 115. Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiCity (detail) 2016 There are three organic references in PlastiCity. The first is botanical, a single leaf from a Sansevieria trifasciata ‘Laurentii’, which is cut into thirds and planted in three containers situated on the two towers and on the floor (figures 114 and 115). As a botanical monoculture, the plant’s ability to enhance its environment is limited, re- enforcing the monotony of the environment it inhabits. The plant is rendered into an architectural form in the frame-tower, supporting a section of PVC pipe. On the floor, closer inspection reveals that the cut leaf has produced an offspring. However, the plant’s bright lime-green border is lost in propagation, further diminishing its visual impact (figure 115). The second botanical specimen is a spider plant, Chlorophytum comosum, emerging from a sandblasted plastic bottle, partially visible in the same way botany is framed or obscured by architecture in cities (figure 116). Third, a turned wooden totem with an anthropomorphic ‘eye’ formed from a knot in the wood, gazes 178 at the abraded surface of a length of PVC pipe, the sanded marks similar to woodgrain (figure 117). Figure 116. Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiCity (detail) 2016 I implicate myself as a physical presence in PlastiCity in the form of an aluminium tower (figure 114). In the same way that the city has shaped my views on nature, the constructed frame shapes my physical frame, registering both my altered height and my absence. The construction of this frame, the sensation of standing and fitting so neatly inside it and then stepping outside it brought back memories of X-rays and measurements and made me conscious of the space I occupied in the world. 179 Figure 117. Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiCity (detail) 2016 PlastiScenery (not-so-still-lives) explores key themes of the research in a tableau of objects and specific plants identified by Wolverton in his guide How to Grow Fresh Air.277 This ecosystem revels in the entanglements of plants and materials, drawing attention to precarious balances inspired by urban botanical environments (figure 118). Simultaneously, unseen exchanges are occurring as the toxic gasses emitted from materials within the arrangement and wider gallery environment (including plywood, plastic, adhesives, paint, and PVC pipe), are removed by the plants that absorb the airborne toxins and break them down through microbes that exist around 277 Bill C. Wolverton, How to Grow Fresh Air: 50 Houseplants That Purify Your Home or Office (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2008). 180 the plants roots.278 As Wolverton notes, “to the human eye, plants may appear static and non-reactive as they continue their normal processes of living and growing. But in scientific terms, plants are highly dynamic”.279 Figure 118 Julie-Anne Milinski PlastiScenery (not-so-still-lives) (detail) 2016 278 Ibid., 25. 279 Ibid., 15. 181 As seen in this chapter, the creative works produced for “Botanical within the Built: Visual Art and Urban Botany” manifest my art practice’s focus on human interaction with plants in urban habitats. Arising from a continuous reflexive dialogue with the theoretic research conducted in parallel to the studio project, the works use botany as a metonym for the larger natural world. The inclusion of botany and the utilisation and transformation of consumer packaging materials, known to be environmentally detrimental, speaks to my aim of revealing the liveliness of things other than human in our shared habitat. The studio research represents the hybridity of the natural urban environment, and the reciprocities and interdependence of its inhabitants. 182 Conclusion As seen in many Western cities, the urban density of Brisbane is increasing in both the CBD and the surrounding suburbs. Indicative of this trend, the view from my home’s front veranda has changed dramatically in the time that it has taken me to complete this project. Three houses have been demolished, the blocks of land split in half, and now three new houses sit beside three vacant blocks of land, awaiting construction. Most days, my writing has been accompanied by the soundscape of this development—earthmoving equipment, trucks delivering concrete and building materials, nail guns, power saws, drills, and the voices of tradespeople. Similarly, time spent at my QCA studio has been filled with these familiar sounds, as the twenty-one- level ‘Southpoint’ development is erected on the opposite side of Grey Street; a constant reminder of the city’s expansion. I have gradually moved the plants growing in my studio from one side of the space to the other to catch the remaining light, as the new building casts its growing shadow across the QCA campus. Across the river, the CBD skyline has been in a constant state of flux as new buildings rise slowly to ever increasing heights. Construction of the city’s tallest residential apartment building, the eighty-nine-storey Brisbane ‘Skytower’ began in 2015. In 2016, the way we live in Brisbane is changing, and becoming more like other large cities where high- density living is the norm. The aspect of this change that is important to me is how we cultivate and fulfil our biophilic desires the twenty-first-century city. In this exegesis, I have focused on how investigating the unremarkable botany within the built environment of the city enriches conceptions of nature through proximity and our everyday, mundane encounters with plants. I have argued and established that the use of botany as a leitmotif in artworks can stimulate ideas relating to the larger natural environment. Additionally, the inclusion of materials associated with contemporary consumer culture that have been transformed to reveal dormant aspects of their materiality can activate connections between humans and the living and non-living things that reside in the urban environment. In Chapter 1, I considered how personal perceptions of nature were shaped through my personal history of growing up in a country town and moving to a city as an adult. 183 In addition to this geographical shift, my fascination with dichotomies of nature and artifice was explained through my experience of having my growth halted through medical treatment, an intervention that raised my awareness of my natural, biological state being subjected to cultural expectations that could be realised through science. Humans’ desire to affiliate with nature was explored through Wilson’s Biophilia Hypothesis, and I discussed how our urban environment shapes our preferences for natural environments. I argued the relevance of developing an aesthetic appreciation for the hybrid city where built and botanical environments overlap, given that this environment is where more than half the world’s population reside and interact with nature. Drawing on research by Bennett, Hawkins, and Whatmore, I established the liveliness of other inhabitants of the city, both living and non-living. I determined the vitality of plants, supporting my decision to use botany as a metonym for the wider natural world. Similarly, by establishing that non-living materials possess a liveliness, as Bennett theorises, the full extent of their presence in an environment was expanded. In Chapter 2, I interrogated the visual methodologies used to explore themes related to my enquiry by selected contemporary artists, ascertaining the effectiveness of various materials in commenting on the natural environment. The use of consumer packaging was noted as prevalent in contemporary art and not without risks, as the materials bear inherent negative associations with environmental degradation. I established the need to conceptually and materially refine artworks to avoid the audience alienation that can arise when artworks are construed as accusatory. Material transformations that engage the audience were concluded to be a more effective way of engendering interest in the concepts explored in the research; namely, botany in the built environment, with a focus on contemporary society. A more detailed analysis of my studio activity in Chapter 3 argued for the effectiveness of my chosen methodologies—walking, collecting, crocheting and botanical drawing. I identified the way that these methodologies facilitated specific experiences that enhanced and directed my research. Through walking, I was able to perceive the city and suburbs in a way that validated the theoretical research on the 184 effects of botany on microclimates. I cultivated an aesthetic appreciation of the nuanced presence of urban botany through time spent wandering in a variety of locations. Collecting disrupted the flow of consumer packaging through my own household, forcing a confrontation with the physical presence of the disposable ‘stuff’ of everyday life. The collection of plants in the studio both enhanced the environment and introduced into my periphery the constant activity of botany—growing, living, dying, and decaying. The most mundane of plants revealed their magical ability to propagate from a single leaf. Through crocheting and the prolonged handling involved, I came to know the materiality of plastic bags in a way never envisaged through normal, every-day use where the contact would be fleeting. This material knowledge led me to other forms of extended manual handling, such as cutting and sandblasting, which in turn led to visual and theoretical discoveries inconceivable without this studio experimentation. Botanical drawing required me to fine tune my visual analysis of botany and turned my gaze to the microcosm. Because plant specimens physically altered in the time it took to draw them, my assertion of botany’s agency was again confirmed. Again, the time demanded by the methodology allowed for contemplation of the physical subjects of my enquiry that would probably not have occurred through any other instance. This focus on the characteristics of plants’ structures directly influenced the way in which I constructed and installed artworks. Chapter 4 presented the artworks produced during this project as evidence of the knowledge I have acquired through the theoretical and visual research, and tested and refined using the stated methodologies. The effectiveness of using botany in artworks to explore issues of the wider natural environment was demonstrated in Wilhelmina Szeretlek! (2012–13), Geniculum (2013), Jardinière (2014), PlastiCity and PlastiScenery (not-so-still lives) (2015–16). The transformation of materials associated with consumer culture was crucial in these works, as well as in re-inventing eden (scenario #7) – revisions and emergents (2012), A virescent series of things, connected or following in succession (2012), and NYC / Philadelphia perambulatory harness proposition (come together fall apart, come together again fall apart again) (2014). Bringing to light these material properties that might otherwise go unnoticed and linking them with notions of botanical growth reinforced the ongoing vitality of consumer packaging when it is 185 discarded from the domestic environment to the wider environment as either litter or land-fill. The exegesis and the artworks produced in this speculative research confirm the interconnectedness and interdependence of humans and their constructed habitat and the nature that shares the environment. 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Wolverton, Bill C., Anne Johnson and Keith Bounds. “Interior Landscape Plants for Indoor Air Pollution Abatement.” Final Report, 15 September 1989, NASA, Office of Commercial Programs-Technology Utilization Division and the Associated Landscape Contractors of America. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi .ntrs.nasa.gov/19930073077.pdf. 1 Title Page 2 Abstract edited 3 Statement of Originality 4 Table of Contents TABLE VERSION 5 List of Illustrations edited 5a Acknowledgement of Assistance edited 6 Introduction edited 7 Theoretical Context edited 8 Visual Context edited 9 methodologies edited 10 My artworks edited 11 Conclusion edited 12 Bibliography edited work_m3gj3nmpcbdq3nq4xlvpdwlgeu ---- TIME, ART AND RESISTANCE: VISUAL ART PROGRAMS IN PRISONS by Graeme Knight B.F.A., Queen's University, 1981 B.Ed., Queen's University, 1985 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of Curriculum Studies) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard The University of British Columbia March 1997 © Graeme Knight, 1997 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada DE-6 (2/88) A B S T R A C T The following study evolved out of a pilot study which I conducted in the summer of 1995 at a correctional facility in eastern Ontario. The testimony of two volunteer inmates there led me to the present enquiry: How do inmates experience time, what are their perceptions of it, and to what extent art making has any impact on those perceptions? Using the temporal theories of two sociologists, Edward Hall (1983) and Victor Gioscia (1971), which I illustrated through relevant literary works concerning inmates of long-term institutions, I sought evidence of alternative temporal constructs in the behavior and testimonies of the volunteer inmates. The twelve week case study involved setting up a course of art similar to the one offered in 1995. This one took place in a medium security correctional facility for men in the lower mainland of British Columbia, during the summer of 1996. Unlike the pilot study, which operated during regular school time, the latter study was held during inmates' leisure time, two evenings a week, for three hours each evening. The following ethnographic methods of data collection were used: pre-program questionnaires, field notes, interviews, and document analysis. Thirteen men originally participated in the art course, of whom, six agreed to be interviewed. Because the art course was canceled mid- way through my research, I reconsidered my study, my double role as researcher-teacher, and the data that I had so far collected, to ponder the dynamics of research and volunteer programs within the prison bureaucracy. Evidence of Hall's temporal notions was scant; however, some of the inmates interviewed indicated negative effects of long-term incarceration that corresponded to Gioscia's definitions; these men also demonstrated resistance mechanisms through the practice and mentoring of art and hobbies. As well, prison staff, particularly administrators, are implicated in the failure of volunteer/adult education program delivery. Closing reflections support participatory strategies in qualitative research in the light of postmodern research theory and end with practical and theoretical recommendations. ii T A B L E OF CONTENTS A B S T R A C T i i T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S i i i L I S T O F F I G U R E S v i i A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S v i i i C H A P T E R O N E : A P R O P O S A L F O R S T U D Y I N G A R T IN PRISONS 1 P R E F A C E : 1 I N T R O D U C T I O N . 1 H O W I C A M E T O S T U D Y T H I S G R O U P O F L E A R N E R S 2 B E N E F I T S O F A R T S P R O G R A M S I N P R I S O N S 4 P R I S O N S , P R I S O N E R S A N D T I M E 9 C O N C E P T S O F T I M E - T E A C H E R S V E R S U S A D M I N I S T R A T O R S 1 1 C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S O F P R I S O N E R S 1 2 A P P R O A C H I N G A R E S E A R C H Q U E S T I O N 1 3 S I G N I F I C A N C E O F T H I S S T U D Y F O R A R T E D U C A T I O N 1 4 C H A P T E R T W O : A L I T E R A R Y C O M P A R I S O N O F PRISONER S U R V I V A L A N D S O C I O L O G I C A L T H E O R I E S O F T I M E 16 T W O L I T E R A R Y E X A M P L E S O F P O L Y C H R O N I C T E M P O R A L O R I E N T A T I O N S : 1 8 T H E G E O G R A P H Y O F T I M E 2 1 S Y N C H R O N Y A N D I T S V A R I A N T S 2 2 T H E B O D Y A S A S I T E O F R E S I S T A N C E 2 6 C H A P T E R T H R E E : M E T H O D O L O G Y 3 2 M E T H O D O L O G I C A L O R I E N T A T I O N 3 2 T H E P I L O T S T U D Y , : 3 5 iii THE STUDY 36 SITE SELECTION 37 STUDY POPULATION 38 TIMELINE 38 DATA COLLECTION PROCEDURES 39 DATA ANALYSIS 42 BIAS AND SlIBJECTTVITY 44 NAMES AND LANGUAGE 46 WHOSE VOICE? 47 RECIPROCITY • 49 VALIDITY 51 C H A P T E R 4: DISCUSSION O F D A T A C O L L E C T I O N : E I G H T T H E M E S 5 3 RESEARCHER/TEACHER DILEMMAS 54 Instructional/Curriculum Dilemmas 54 Enrollment and Attendance 63 Material and Logistical Problems 64 Conflicting Roles: Researcher versus Teacher 67 SECURITY AND SPACE • 70 Volunteer Access 70 Materials and Supplies 75 Information and Surveillance • 76 Space • 78 STAFF RESISTANCE 8 0 Access and Orientation 8 ' Renegotiated Space 82 Security Clearances 83 Program Scheduling and Enrollment 84 INMATE RESISTANCE • 8 9 iv Inmate Indifference 89 Education and Experience 92 Paranoia 95 Perceived Slights 97 CONFRONTATIONS 98 Personal Barbs : 99 Curriculum Differences ' 104 CO-OPERATION AND SUCCESSFUL ARTS PROGRAMS 106 Co-operation with Inmates 107 Positive Art Experiences 109 Staff Co-operation 110 Other Successful Arts Programs , 112 PRISON STRUCTURE r 114 Prison Programs 115 Prison Routine 117 Inmates' Routine 118 Prisoners' Concepts and Experiences of Time 120 Effects of Prisonization 123 INMATES' WORLD 124 Knowledge and Mentoring 125 Inmate Imagery and Values 128 Inmate Ethos 133 CHAPTER FIVE: REFLECTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 136 TIME AND PRISONIZATION: PRISON AS HAVEN OR HELL 136 ART AS PSYCHIC RESISTANCE 139 RESISTANCE TO ART COURSES • 139 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR TEACHING AS A VOLUNTEER ACrTVTTY : . . 141 MENTORING 142 V T H E J O Y O F P A R T I C I P A T I O N : 1 4 4 T H E P R O B L E M O F C R I T I C I S M 1 4 5 W O R K I N G W I T H A D M I N I S T R A T O R S 1 4 6 A C R I T I Q U E O F T H E P R A X I S O F R E S E A R C H 1 4 8 S U G G E S T I O N S F O R T H E O R Y 1 4 9 A N D F I N A L L Y , A G A L A O P E N I N G A N D A D R E A M 1 5 0 R E F E R E N C E S 152 A P P E N D I X I 156 A P P E N D I X II 157 A P P E N D I X III 159 A P P E N D I X IV 160 A P P E N D I X V ....161 A P P E N D I X VI I 6 2 vi LIST O F FIGURES FIGURE 1: GIOSCIA'S DIAGRAM OF TEMPORAL STATES 2 3 FIGURE 2: ABE'S LINOLEUM PRINT 1 3 2 vii A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Rita Irwin for her support from the very beginning. It was she who answered my call to the department of Curriculum Studies, suggesting I would be "an ideal candidate" for admission to the art education program at U . B . C . , in the spring of 1994. Her encouragement and advice since then have pulled me through many of my darkest hours. Also, I was privileged to work with Dr. Stephen Duguid, the guiding force behind the Correctional Education program at Simon Fraser University, whose formidable experience with prisoner education he was so generous in sharing with me, outside his faculty and university. He supported my findings throughout my research and analysis as a true friend and mentor. Thanks also to Dr. Ron MacGregor, who agreed to join my committee the year before his retirement, on top of all his other commitments. Tactfully steering me towards greater clarity in my writing and thinking, his comments were always exact and welcome. Thanks go to my friends, family and the staff of U . B . C . Faculty of Education. Due to spacial constraints I can name only one here, Rosa Mastri: without her technical and emotional support, this thesis might not have been realized. The directors of Prison Arts Foundation, Gary Wyatt and Marian Otterstrom, arranged for my placement and provided me with art supplies and funds. As important, their comments validated many of my own subjective impressions while conducting the research. Lastly, I wish to thank the volunteer inmates at the host institution, who, unfortunately, must remain unnamed. This thesis is written for them. vm Chapter One: A Proposal For Studying Art in Prisons Only your freedom of movement has been taken away, (hobbycraft officer of a British Columbia prison, May 1996) Preface The two worlds appear, at first glance, worlds apart: The notion of prisons conjures a closed society where all freedom has been successfully managed and, where necessary, aggressively suppressed. Art/artists stand for freedom - of thought and expression, of voice, of mobility if need be, of the dispensing of one's civic duties only as one sees fit, without regard for the petty responsibilities of 'normal' society - that only an elite segment of society enjoys. As if inscribing, via F M broadcast, this divide, the C . B . C . on February 7, 1997 isolated two stories: The first, highlight of the 'arts report', announced a meeting in Ottawa of major chiefs of government and the corporate sector to discuss the future of the arts in Canada. Meanwhile, on the regular news cast, another riot broke out in a midwestern Canadian penitentiary: inmates were stabbed and rushed to hospital; reasons for the uprising included double bunking of prison cells. Introduction Many administrators and teaching staff laud prison art/s programs, citing such intrinsic attributes as inmate interest and the potential for therapeutic effects. As such these effects comprise part of the menu of rehabilitation training and education in the prison milieu. However, an equally vocal and powerful body of correctional staff regard arts in prisons as evidence of inmate coddling (Cleveland, 1989; Peaker & Vincent, 1991; Szekely, 1982). The judicious program coordinator must administer carefully between these two mutually antipathetic interests in order to operate a course of equitable access to educational programs and a mutually sustaining work/study environment. By proposing to study a group of inmates in a long-term correctional facility, I wished to understand issues 1 specific to prison art programs. The teaching of art in any situation brings its own constraints and problems; within the prison environment some of these problems are reduced - classroom discipline, for example - while others are exacerbated. It is with respect to the latter set of issues that my research is concerned. The amount of research conducted in the area of prison arts is relatively scant; what does exist is largely contained within the context of adult correctional education. Some issues which affect correctional education are: restriction of access to visual artifacts, artists and visual stimuli; security surrounding the appropriateness of material and processes; theft of materials; censorship/self-censorship of imagery; space restrictions (for studio work, storage and display); dealing with emotional consequences and therapeutic management of intense artistic engagement; program timetabling/duration within an open-ended school calendar; and other disruptions to class scheduling and size due to parole, court dates, transfers, visits and lockdowns. In researching art programs in prisons, I intended to concentrate on one aspect in particular, taking into account those aforementioned issues where they occured: the impact of visual art education on prisoner/students' perception of time, paying particular attention to inmates': a) Potential for improved ability to deal with time during their sentence; b) Change in their experiential conception of time; c) Ability to 'suspend' time, by engaging with visual art, 'leaving prison' for portions of the day, thereby mitigating some of the negative effects of prisonisation. Prisonisation refers to a complexity of counterproductive effects upon incarcerated people, including institutionalization, forced immersion in an authoritarian environment, and the long-term results of having too much time and too little to do (Duguid, 1996). How I Came to Study This Group of Learners Kingston, Ontario is famous for its correctional institutions. As little information as those high walls admit either way, their presence is unmistakable. From 1971 to 1981 I 2 lived almost literally within the shadow of Kingston Penitentiary (now a detention centre). Across the street from our house, a large cement fence post reminded us that the neighbourhood was built on former penitentiary farmland. The street around the corner was lined with homes of many penitentiary staff. The Correctional Staff College was located across from a park at the end of this street; across from the college, on the shore of Lake Ontario, and sandwiched improbably between an exclusive neighborhood known as Alwington Place to the east, and the Olympic Sailing Harbour to the west, was Kingston Pen itself. The summer we moved to Kingston (1971), fourteen men escaped from Bath (minimum security) Institution, exciting panic among all good citizens within a fifty mile radius until, one by one, the escapees were all rounded up. The idea of teaching art iri prison first occurred to me as a pre-B.F.A. student at Queen's University, when an instructor mentioned that was what he did during the summer when he was not teaching the open studio course. He was in his late 20s, had had a couple of significant exhibitions locally, and presented a role model for me. I was intrigued by the danger and the aura of mystery that prisons exuded. Here was someone who had been inside and appeared to enjoy the experience. Arranging a teaching practicum at a prison was an option in the Education program at Queen's, although our professor advised us that the experience of being locked up for an entire working day, exactly as the inmates were, was not to everybody's taste: one education student had to be evacuated within two hours, so great was his anxiety over his forced containment. When I returned to Kingston on a visit in the spring of 1994, the opportunity presented itself again: A permanent teaching position at a nearby correctional facility was advertised in a local newspaper. I applied, and although the position was filled, I accepted the offer of a summer supply position, working at various institutions in the Kingston area. At one of these institutions, which was to become my home base, two summer arts courses, visual art and music, were offered concurrently for five weeks. My impression of the visual art course was such that I thought I could do better, and shared this with the 3 institution's principal, who invited me to submit a syllabus. I was hired for the following summer's art course. I used the situation to construct a pilot study research project, looking at art in prisons. Out of that pilot study the present research proposal was born. Among my list of friends I can name no convicts or ex-cons. My empathy for prisoners stems from a general empathy for the powerless and dispossessed members of society. This empathy derives, in turn, from a Christian upbringing, and has been fostered recently by an interest in Buddhism, and neo-Marxist liberatory educators and philosophers such as Paolo Friere(1970). Professionally, my decision to become a teacher derived in part from experiences as a volunteer counsellor with inner city youth, many of whom had histories of minor offences. For five years I was a member of Amnesty International, among whose activities, writing letters on behalf of political prisoners is paramount. For two years I worked part-time as a counsellor in an addiction recovery home for men. Although this was not a 'halfway house', most of the residents had been ordered to spend time there as part of, or in lieu of, their probation or parole. Part of my job was enforcing curfew. Without engaging in the debate as to whether prisoners deserve the sentence they have been handed down, my basic response to the environment that these people must endure is one of deep revulsion. Any intervention must be an improvement into the lives of these human beings, for whom a complex assortment of restrictions - social/familial, sexual, intellectual, sensory, and geographic - comprises their lived reality. The sum effect of these privations on the individual has not yet been accurately assessed. Benefits of Arts Programs in Prisons While research on prison arts programs indicates real and measurable benefits, different parties involved in prisoner containment and education hold differing views regarding those benefits. Peaker and Vincent (1991) conducted an extensive survey on arts programs in prisons and young offender institutes in England and Wales between 1987 and 1989. They distinguished those benefits cited by: a) artists-in-residence and art therapists; 4 b) educational staff, including regular art teachers; c) administrative staff: governors, heads of inmate activities, parole and other uniformed officers, and chaplains; and d) prisoners. This section summarizes their findings. Observations of other researchers, teachers and art therapists are included where relevant. a) Artists and art therapists: Among the benefits to prisoners, those therapeutic in nature are most praised: the arts provide a sense of achievement, a humanizing environment, a sense of internal freedom within the confines of prison, and the opportunity to develop latent skills, thereby improving self-esteem. Artists and art therapists view their contact with prisoners as vehicles for increasing prisoners' self-knowledge, via significant emotional contact and opportunities to explore old problems in new ways. Joyce Laing (1982) considers the expression of the inner psyche as fundamental to real growth. The teaching of art with this emphasis provides prisoners with opportunities for significant rehabilitative gain. Piazza (1996; 1997) finds the work he does with young offenders fosters their awareness of their situation, among whose existential realities include the notion of living under surveillance. Art activities can also alleviate tension around stressful periods, such as waiting for parole. End products are valued only insofar as they give inmates tangible proof of an acquired skill and success. Art therapists caution against fostering conformity through the pursuit of unchallenging crafts, such as casting from molds, or already attained skills (Carrel & Laing, 1982; Peaker & Vincent, 1991; Uren, 1979). Social benefits are provided through the sharing of equipment, supplies and ideas, working together on projects, and forging links with the outside world. In this sense, artists-in-residence assume the role of ambassador for inmates. The acquisition of an enjoyable skill which prisoners can retain upon release, provides a recreational and vocational benefit (Cleveland, 1989; Skelly, 1992; Szekely, 1982). b) Educational staff: The kinds of benefits cited by educational staff fall roughly into the categories mentioned above: therapeutic, social and recreational. Arts courses are believed 5 to encourage prisoners in resisting their imprisonment from an intrapersonal level, countering a view common among prisoners that prison life is somehow a suspension of their real lives (Szekely, 1982). Prisoners can make decisions, be open to stimuli, take responsibility, make decisions and thereby gain some control over their immediate environments. In young offender reformatories, arts activities are emphasized for the positive occupation and social skills they provide. A tutor at a women's open prison (Peaker & Vincent, 1991:82), used role play and encouraged skills like dressmaking and soft sculpture. Encouraging the participants to take the broadest view of what constitutes art, she elicited the natural creativity of everyone in her class. The inmates took pride in their work and appreciated the opportunity to communicate on a deeper level than in regular classes. Prison staff do not unanimously endorse indications of inmate freedom: many take the view that prisons are intended only for punishment: to them, arts courses are further evidence of inmate coddling. Meticulous observation of prison policies and regulations, building personal relationships with uniformed staff and keeping them informed of program goals and progress can help the intrepid arts instructor convince prison staff of the value of arts courses (Cleveland, 1989; Peaker & Vincent, 1991; Szekely, 1982). From Peaker & Vincent's survey (1991), commercial benefits encompassed a twofold purpose: the production of goods for a): personal sale and exchange, and b): charities. The latter purpose was considered more valuable. Traditional educational benefits applied to arts activities included broadening intellectual boundaries, acquiring alternative learning strategies and skills, and developing creativity and imagination. In general, educational staff evaluated the success of arts activities on a personal effect basis; that is, how well they countered the negative effects of prison life. In this respect, arts were seen as tools by which prisoners could construct positive channels for their energy and emotions. The adult education model - free choice, experimentation and personal responsibility - was emphasized, to counter memories of negative school experiences. 6 c) Administrative staff: Administrators regard therapeutic benefits as most important. Arts activities are considered a help in relieving frustrations, developing self-understanding, self-esteem and skills: painting, for example, enables the constructive expression of aggression. Participation in the arts are believed to humanize 'hardened' characters, and offer a means of escape from the more punitive aspects of prison life. One governor (Peaker & Vincent, 1991:140) cautioned against the potential for therapists and psychologists to misdiagnose, or 'trap' prisoners (identifying personality traits, thereby influencing decisions regarding a prisoner's length and/or condition of sentence). Administrators considered any educational benefits of arts programs as part of the general effects of education. Staff noted the potential of arts subjects as a means of enticing inmates toward more academic subjects, with which many inmates have had unsuccessful experiences. From this perspective, arts subjects were considered secondary (and therefore expendable) to the more pressing need for adult basic education. Another advantage of arts in prisons, social benefits were understood as those which improved relationships, the environment, and the smooth operation of prison life. Particularly in young offender institutes, social control was considered a priority. Staff and inmates alike welcomed the break in routine offered by arts activities, which constituted for them a recreational benefit. Commercial benefits were understood as those that suggested marketable skills, although cash transactions within the prison were discouraged. The governor of a women's prison saw a superior legitimacy in creative art work over crafts, but mentioned the difficulty of encouraging inmates toward these less certain, riskier and messier activities. All but one governor stressed the security and control advantages of traditional crafts and busy-work. This attitude informs many prison decisions, where concerns for security and authoritarian control take precedence over program accessibility (Cleveland, 1989; Goldin & Thomas, 1984; Nicolai, 1981; Szekely, 1982). 7 d) Prisoners: Peaker and Vincent's (1991) survey did not include annotated responses from prisoners. The following benefits are inferred from discussions between the researchers and prisoners, observations of, and recorded comments by, prisoners. Other researchers' observations are noted as well. Prisoners need to be able to mark the passage of time, to keep records of the progress of their sentence. They are constantly addressed and managed as groups; in contrast, the intimate scale of the art class allows them to be treated on a personal level. Individual instruction fosters a prisoner's sense of uniqueness, building trust and openness, which in turn may lead to prisoners' greater risk-taking (Carrel & Laing, 1982; Congdon, 1984; Szekely, 1982). Enrollment in school and especially evening programs may help to break up a prisoner's day, thereby augmenting the sense of the passing of time. Bored prisoners with little or no previous art or musical experience will often take up individual activities, especially those that can be easily transported from cell to cell, or from one facility to another. Arts classes can also offer a safe and informal common ground where prisoners can communicate with one another with less fear of surveillance. Drawing, writing, small model and soft toy making, and playing a small instrument are especially popular. Creating a tangible artifact confirms one's existence in an environment that some have described as a state of limbo. For example, in a women's county jail in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Congdon (1984) found that inmates were compelled to take art for the opportunity it provided them to make something to give to a loved one on the outside. Some prisoners will establish contact with family through extensive writing or drawing, intending to pass on or show their collections to relatives. While the prospect of continuing one's success with post-release sales of artwork can be a worthy incentive, prisoners may harbour unrealistic expectations of lucrative careers in art. In this respect professional artists may provide essential career counseling. Prisoners' frustration with the lack of contact with other artists, including writers and musicians, may be alleviated as well. 8 Restrictions on materials pose a formidable and ongoing constraint. One prisoner described his method of inspiration in terms of a bricoleur. "Well you haven't got much to work from in here. You have to use bits of this and bits of that and put them together" (Peaker & Vincent, 1991:60). The lack of art books and other visual resources in libraries poses a further obstruction to prisoners and visiting artists and teachers alike. Policies concerning the clearance of materials can seem inconsistent and unfair to the novice outside artist, unfamiliar with the complexities of prison security. One positive outcome is the shared frustration by teacher and inmate students; thus teachers are welcomed more closely into the inmate ranks, and in their view, further distanced from the 'other'; that is, uniformed staff. Where arts activities have been provided, prisoners have championed them. One prisoner appreciated the general therapeutic benefits of the arts. Another remarked how his involvement in sculpture helped him expend physical energy in a constructive and creative way. A group of prisoners involved in a multicultural arts week of music and dance described the event as "fun, pleasure, information, release of tension, an escape from day to day life in prison" (Peaker & Vincent, 1991:66). From the foregoing accounts, it is clear that prisoners do not categorize the benefits of art programs into discreet parameters. These categories, while providing useful distinctions to researchers, become less clearly defined, and overlap more readily, within the prisoners' purview. Rather, if they distinguish the various benefits of arts activities at all, they concentrate on the diversionary and possibly gainful outcomes, in the form of tangible items for barter and exchange. Prisons. Prisoners and Time One of the problems that both prisoners and staff, particularly teaching staff, must deal with in prisons is that of time. The typical prisoner's experience of time is qualitatively different from that of the teacher. Teachers and prisoners are, however, constrained by a hierarchical system that is based on an understanding of time that undermines both. The 9 severe regimentation of prisoners' routine, imposed by a seemingly indifferent and anonymous administration, automatically forestalls any extended discussions or studio work beyond the allotment of hours parceled out to a class (Goldin & Thomas, 1984; Otterstrom & Wyatt, 1996). To the novice teacher of art/s, the routine is rendered more unpredictable by the loss of inmate-students due to parole hearings or transfers, or closures of schools due to lockdowns and other security measures. Prisoners generally view time spent in prison as something they are forced to endure, in some way separate from the "real" time of their lives on the outside (Szekely, 1982). An exception is the institutionalized prisoner, who may experience more status and meaning within prison than in the outside world. This is the 'professional' prisoner, for whom prison has replaced the free world as home. For inmates, school and work routines break up an otherwise monotonous day. Several prison instructors note that inmate students tend to escape 'into' the class, in contrast to regular students who escape out of it (mentally), so much do prisoners appreciate the opportunity to learn (Duguid, 1996; McEwen & Martinez, 1981). Locked in their cell at any time between 1600 and 2100 hours, prisoners experience these unstructured hours as tedious. Anything that helps collapse this time is welcomed. At the other extreme, a highly regimented structure, wherein prisoners are constantly shuffled from place to place, forced to wait in line and submit to depersonalizing counts and searches, can have deleterious effects on their self-esteem. Lack of personal control over the environment can induce a passive or depressive state with some inmates; others may experience mounting frustrations. Violent outbursts often result as the only available stress releaser (McEwen & Martinez, 1981; Szekely, 1982). Arts teachers and therapists may also experience frustration with the administration's seemingly high-handed and hierarchical management of prison routines (Carrel & Laing, 1982; Williams, 1983). Teachers' syllabi need to be flexible enough to accommodate the capricious logic of the prison system. 10 Concepts of Time - Teachers versus Administrators While prisoners' daily lives are aggravated by having too much free time on their hands, the typical teacher does not have enough time in a day to implement her or his course. Planning, preparation, meetings, extracurricular activities and personal time all vie for attention, beyond scheduled classroom time, in the daily routine of almost any teacher. Administrators' increasing demands on teachers' limited temporal resources are receiving consideration as one cause of an alarming rise in teacher 'burnout' (Hargreaves, 1990). Prison administrators fare no better in this respect; if anything, the relative isolation and autonomy of the prison system only exacerbates this basic differential experience and management of time, by teachers and administrators. Hall's (1983) identification of two opposing views of time: monochrome and polychrome, helps to explain this lack of agreement in temporal understanding. According to Hall, Monochronic time pervades Western civilization; it is embedded in the policies and organization of governmental and other bureaucracies. In this view, time is an objective, rational resource to be carved up and distributed managerially. It is fixed, linear, and external to humanity or anything else (see also Hargreaves, 1990; Priestly, 1968). People who operate from this paradigm delegate responsibility with little regard for spontaneity, change, or subjective, contextual peculiarities. Of greater importance to them is the completion of a task within the allotted time: qualitative criteria are obliged to give way to a measurable appearance of success. A predominantly male social construct (Hargreaves, 1990), time's objective aspect can be traced to ancient Greece and earlier: Greek civilization distinguished chronos, measurable time, from cairos, subjectively experienced time (MacGregor, in conversation, 1996). The Enlightenment, with its infatuation with mechanistic inventions, promoted time's carving up into increasingly smaller units through the perfection of chronometers. Sir Isaac Newton formulated these arbitrary divisions into a grand, infallible, mechanistic theory of the universe. Despite the discoveries of later physicists, particularly Einstein with his theory of relativity, this limited and linear 11 understanding of time continues to predominate in the popular imagination (Priestly, 1968). Prison structure and administration, based on the operational schema of military life, which in turn evolved from medieval monastic orders (Foucault, 1979), incorporated the monochronic understanding of time. Polychrome time, on the other hand, supports the simultaneous occurrence of a multiplicity of tasks and events. Its proponents' experience of time is subjective, phenomenological and situation-based. Relationships, quality, character and context take precedence over strict adherence to schedules and the quantifiable appearance of change. Quantitatively, time can seem to stretch endlessly (as with prisoners awaiting release) or fly past (as with a condemned man awaiting his last hours before the gas chamber). These two very different mindsets (teachers and administrators) are forced to co-exist and cooperate in large institutions. Much of the frustrations that teachers experience, to the bafflement of administrators, arises from these fundamentally opposing world views (Hargreaves, 1990). Characteristics of Prisoners Bearing in mind the danger and arbitrariness of generalizing any social group, certain identifying characteristics can help in understanding how prisoners relate to time. In North America, the majority of prisoners are between sixteen and thirty-five years of age (Williams, 1981). Predominantly from the poorest socio-economic classes, few prisoners will have completed high school (Speckman, 1981). In the United States, African- Americans comprise the largest single ethnic group, an indication, more accurately, of the racist underpinnings of American justice, as well as the constrained economic conditions of this visible miniority, rather than a predisposition to crime as such. In Canada, West Indian, Aboriginal, Middle Eastern, and Asian minorities similarly constitute larger proportions of the ethnic distribution inside prisons than outside. Limited educational and skills resources, marginal literacy levels and scant employment history in regular 12 occupations, handicap the majority of prisoners' opportunities for gainful employment in mainstream society (Nicolai, 1981). Two issues vital to the discussion of time in prisons invite scrutiny. First is a shared cultural attitude to time to which many prisoners' backgrounds predispose them: having grown up outside of the bourgeois, monochronic, time-as-money paradigm, they are, so to speak, polychronically-oriented.Also of note in this regard, and supporting Hall's (1983) thesis, is the relative predominance of non-white cultures that comprise the majority of prisoners in North America. Might a significant component of their conflict with society, with its culturally-approved conventions of clock-time (Gorman & Wessman, 1976; Hall, 1983; Hargreaves, 1990; Priestly, 1968), be grounded in this fundamentally different temporal understanding? The second issue concerns the excess of discretionary time that many prisoners have had, previous to their incarceration. A function of their reduced employment opportunities or motivation (many have chosen to engage with mainstream economy in only the most opportunistic and illegal ways), prisoners' former leisure times have often occasioned destructive, rather than constructive, activities (Garibaldi & Moore, 1981). Several recreational instructors and researchers have found prisoners will exhibit very limited leisure time resources and imagination. These researchers believe that constructive use of leisure time is paramount to prisoners' rehabilitation and re-integration into society (Garibaldi & Moore, 1981; McCall, 1981; Nicolai, 1981; McEwen & Martinez, 1981; Speckman, 1981; Williams, 1981). Leisure time management is of particular importance as the prospect of worthwhile, steady employment is further limited by a criminal record. Approaching a Research Question The aforementioned issues, briefly glossed over, indicate a need for research in the area of prisoners' experiential understanding of time. There are two dimensions to my enquiry. The first comprises an exploration into prisoners' values and attitudes 13 surrounding their sentence: How do inmates make sense of their world, and how does their perception of time in particular influence their learning? These values and attitudes constitute the matrix of the prisoners' time-related constructs. This question involves two sub-components: long-term and day-to-day. Each can be treated as discrete but related categories; for example, how do prisoners define their long-term sentences? What emotions and attitudes do they bring to them? Do these attitudes change over time; for example, as prisoners approach the end of their sentence? From my experience working with prisoners, I suspect they will demonstrate a polychronic understanding of time; further, I think that this orientation, insofar as it conflicts with the monochronic structure of prison routine, represents an ongoing source of prisoners' malaise. The second dimension of my enquiry is: do these individuals' perceptions of time change as a result of an immersion in art, and if so, how? Might the practice of art in prison enhance their sense of time, not only its quantity, but the quality of time as well? I expect to find evidence of identifiable and positive results from this immersion, with respect to prisoners' experience and understanding of time. Significance of this Study for Art Education The relative dearth of literature devoted to researching issues surrounding prison education, and art education in particular, points to a gap in the spectrum of education. Without additional research, this stratum of society will continue to be marginalized. Prisoners, by their forced containment and shared experiences, comprise a unique culture in society. Yet to the general population, this culture remains out of sight. Part of the mandate of the criminal justice system is, apparently, to keep prisoners invisible and silent. In the context of postmodern educational theory and praxis, this approach is misguided, anachronistic and inappropriate: it harms the majority of offenders for whom it was established: This suppression of individual voices constitutes a punishment which exceeds the crime. 14 The current trend in prison reform is one of humane containment, as opposed to the former term of rehabilitation. What this means, in lay terms, amounts to an admission of failure, on the part of prison administrators, to rehabilitate prisoners. What is now hoped for, more realistically, is that prisoners end their sentences no worse off than when they began. This is a frank admission of the harm that these institutions perpetuate. This proposed intervention of art immersion is supported by a considerable record of improvement in the lives of the incarcerated. What is astonishing is the continued struggle in which these 'frills' must engage. Evidence of positive behavioral change, improved self-esteem and important networking with committed outsiders can be wiped away with the malevolent sweep of an indifferent administrator's pen: another casualty of the overriding concern for fiscal restraint. While prison populations expand, pressuring already limited facilities, their operations budgets continue to shrink. If the arts have anything to offer for the care of the soul, or repair of damaged psyches — and I believe that they do — then the need for these kinds of strategies is greater now than ever before. Any research into this cloistered world opens a window in its walls. From this window, prisoners can, with effort and the collaboration of concerned outsiders, make their voices heard. This is a right that all people possess, regardless of their crime or their debt to society.. 15 Chapter Two: A Literary Comparison of Prisoner Survival and Sociological Theories of Time "I... was sixteen years old when I learnt that the hour was divided into minutes. In my village, when the peasants had to travel to town, they would go to the railway station at sunrise and lie down to sleep in the waiting room until the train came, which usually was about midday; sometimes it only came in the evening or next morning. These are the peasants who now work in our factories.... In all other countries, the peasants had one or two hundred years to develop the habit of industrial precision and of the handling of machines. Here they only had ten years.... You [comrade Rubashov] were given a watch as a child...." (Koestler, 1941, pp. 224-225) This chapter concentrates on two theories of time that I have selected for their relevance to the particular milieu of long-term incarceration and its psychological effects on prisoners. Other social researchers and historians who have lent credibility to these authors' works are cited where their findings bear mentioning. The temporal theories that I paraphrase here find their corresponding exemplars in two literary works, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1969) and Brothers and Keepers, by John Wideman (1984). Working in the 1960s and 1970s, two sociologists have delineated similar conceptions of cultural orientations to time. Edward Hall (1983), working from empirically gathered data from the 1950s and 1960s, found that cultures approach time in either of two fundamentally different ways. He identifies these opposing temporal attitudes as monochronic and polychronic orientations. Monochrony defines the operative temporal system of world trade, commerce and administration, a quantitative model that parcels out regular, predictable units of time from an otherwise undifferentiated day. Within this view, time becomes a commodity, linked with money in a profane industro-commercial union of efficiency, energy and speed. Progress is bound up with time, and linked to productivity (the efficient use of time). Since the industrial revolution, workers' behavior has been tailored increasingly to fit this technological paradigm. Natural rhythms of work, rest and play, and calendar feast days that honored the cycles of nature in 16 agrarian, pre-industrial Europe, have all but disappeared. In their place, tight schedules, hourly wages interrupted by crisp, regular breaks, have been implemented to maximize the productive potential of a working day. From factories to hospitals, prisons, schools and government offices, this model has served Western civilization without serious disturbance until the counter-culture revolution of the 1960s. Leading philosophers such as Aldous Huxley (1954) and Timothy Leary (1968) disseminated accounts of alternate experiences of time via Eastern mystical disciplines or (for those impatient of the time required) psychoactive drugs such as L.S.D.. A generation disenchanted with their parents' chronometric work ethic began to 'tune in, turn on and drop out' in significant numbers. The revolution did not last. Today proponents of the work ethic cast disparaging glances on those who consciously buck its mainstream values. Nonetheless, important as this orientation is to Northern European and North American cultures, with their short growing season and, consequently, its urgent demand for planning and preparation, monochronism is a learned trait, as Piaget (1976), has demonstrated. By comparison, communist civilizations such as the former U.S.S.R. and mainland China entered the industrial revolution much later, between 120 and 170 years after Europe, with only 20 to 50 years to catch up with the rest of the developed world. Evidence suggests that China is still making adjustments: an acquaintance, recently traveling there, when he asked whether a train was leaving for Shanghai at 2:00 p.m., was told, "Perhaps." What rural Chinese culture shares with developing nations, as well as agrarian societies, Mediterranean, Aboriginal, and Hispanic-American cultures, is, according to Hall, a polychronic orientation to time. These societies tend to experience time in a more varied and less structured way than their monochronic counterparts. At work, several tasks might be managed at any time, each at a different speed and stage of completion. Time has multiple layers, rather than a linear, numeric aspect. This qualitative 17 understanding allows for metaphoric descriptions of time: 'Hard time' (a common prison expression), 'good times/bad times,' 'an easy time,' 'big time' and so on (Gioscia, 1971). Problems occur when the two temporal systems must operate in tandem. As time and money become increasingly intertwined, highly numerate administrators, adept at balancing budgets and timesheets, are increasingly placed in positions of authority and power. Workers lacking a monochronic aptitude become the 'managees', disposable and disempowered. Two Literary Examples of Polychronic Temporal Orientations The authors Thomas Mann and John Wideman, in their respective books The Magic Mountain (Mann, 1969) and. Brothers and Keepers (Wideman, 1984), portray two individuals with very different backgrounds: one white, German upper-middle class, the other black, American lower class, who nonetheless share a common orientation to time. The facilities described in these works, the one patho-physiological, the other correctional, share characteristic effects of long-term institutional residency. Mann's fictional protagonist Hans Castorp finds his innate sense of time's cyclic nature supported in the rarefied world of a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium, in the early part of the twentieth century. The two 'incarcerated' men in Mann's opus, Hans Castorp and his cousin Joachim, demonstrate opposing attitudes to time, and hence different tolerances of their residency in the sanatorium. Wideman presents a personal voyage of self-discovery as he re-integrates his brother's criminal status with his own as a successful author and professor. Wideman's distant association with his brother Robby, a drug addict forced to steal to support his habit, is dramatically telescoped when the younger brother arrives bleeding at the professor's door after a bungled sale of stolen televisions. This catalyzing moment compels the author to trace the paths of each brother that led them to such different lifestyles. In his search Wideman discovers the roots of his identity: his shame and his pride. He fleshes out a portrait of Robby that is loving and full of admiration: 18 You were a pinprick of light, a spark whose radiance momentarily upheld the design, stabilized the ever expanding V that opens up to infinity. At some inconceivable distance the light bends, curves back on itself like a ram's horn or conch's shell, spiraling toward its greatest compass but simultaneously narrowing to that needle's eye it must enter in order to flow forth bounteously again. You hovered at that nexus, took your turn through that open door. (Wideman, 1984, p. 24) In tracing their ancestral links the way an astronomer might search for new constellations, Wideman's metaphysics hint at the beginning of creation, of time itself. One of society's conventions, objective, sequential time, had to be set aside if Wideman wished to understand his brother: "The usual notion of time, of one thing happening first and opening the way for another and another, becomes useless pretty quickly when I try to isolate the shape your life from the rest of us..." (Wideman, p. 19). One of the tenets of sequential time, progress, had no meaning to young Robby. For him, every day was like another, its main purpose to find the party, to enjoy the here and now. In their mother's words, "Every day God sends here Robby thinks is a party....he's thinking, Where's it at today?...Where's the fun?" (p. 20). In his carefree disregard for work, with its attendant schedules, appointments and remote payoffs, the young Robby resembles that other dreamy youth, the fictional Hans Castorp, who ... did not keep inward count of the time, as does the man who husbands it, notes its passing, divides and tells and labels its units....but he was arrested by its appeal to the senses. ...by nature and temperament passive, [Hans Castorp] could sit without occupation hours on end, and loved, as we know, to see time spacious before him, and not have the sense of its passing banished, wiped out, or eaten up by prosaic activity. (Mann, 1969, pp. 226, 122) Hans' adjustment to sanatorium life is, not surprisingly, quite effortless. He discovers, after a bout of fever, that the passing days are merely "...the same day repeating itself..." (Mann, p. 183). This same discovery arouses in Robby Wideman a different reaction: "Outside your cell ain't nothing going on but the same old shit. That's what gets to you after awhile. 19 Repetition. Same ole same ole all the time" (Wideman, p. 230). Robby's background is markedly different from that of Hans Castorp. Both 'characters' reject the rules and rewards of life lived according to middle-class societal expectations. Hans, while not having chosen the sanctuary of the sanatorium, has no pressing desire to leave it; sanatorium life suits his temperament. Hans has been raised in a comfortable, bourgeois milieu. His rejection of the businessman's calling (at the beginning of the novel, he has just completed his degree as a marine engineer) incurs his uncle's uncomprehending wrath for wasting so much time at the 'House Berghof.' Neither did Robby Wideman choose life in prison. The Wideman roots are set in the underclass world of the African-American ghetto. John Wideman makes frequent references to the narrowness, the lack of opportunities, the near impossibility of escape from this predetermined existence. His mother railed against the biased legal forces that denied her son the basic rights of humanity. She came to understand "...that most of the ugliest things that happen to black people are not accidental but the predictable result of the working of the plan" (Wideman, p. 72). Wideman's blackness is a constant reminder, an inescapable source of embarrassment and anger in the face of white oppression: whenever he must submit to humiliating searches at airports (p. 186), or when prison staff harass him while visiting his brother (p. 192). His kid brother had long before decided that for him, the only way out of the ghetto was to 'melt the rock', to grasp whatever he could, materially, from its mean streets. Robby's attitude toward his birthright seems more accepting than that of John. He played by the rules of the street, and ultimately accepts its odds, prison or death: "If we had made it to the big time it just be a matter of time before somebody off us. Wheel's always turning. You can get to the top but ain't no way you gon stay at the top" (p. 131). Robby has no illusions about crossing those two invisible but inviolable lines, colour and class: "The money ain't nothing. You just use the money to make your play....You throw it away cause it's here today and gone tomorrow....People in the life ain't looking for no home and grass in the yard and shit like that. We the show people. The 20 glamour people.... See, it's rep. It's glamour. That's what it's about.... You make something out of nothing". (Wideman, p. 131) The Geography of Time Wideman's description of the approach to Western Penitentiary on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, with its setting removed from mainstream society, recalls the geographic remove of that august institution, the sanatorium in Mann's The Magic Mountain. They differ in one significant aspect, however: Mann's House Berghof (literally, 'High Mountain House')is set high aloft in the Swiss Alps, vertically suspended over the 'flat- land dwellers' with their worldly cares below. Here time is suspended: alternately compressed, expanded, or distorted. Might Mann have had in mind that Medieval conception of the vertical intersection of timelessness, via the advent of the Son of Man, into a Western, horizontal temporal alignment (Gioscia, 1971)? The possibility is suggested by his many ruminations, as omniscient narrator, over alternative conceptions and metaphors of time. He appears favorably disposed toward the Medieval view, "...that time is an illusion, and the real existence of things is an abiding present" (Mann, p. 547). Wideman's Western Penitentiary is all too earth-bound, removed though it is from normal daily concerns. Nonetheless, its inner life follows its own secular schedule: "At some point the rules change. Visitors must take leave of the certainties underpinning their everyday lives" (Wideman, p. 182). As at House Berghof, typical rules, implicit in normal society, are suspended: "Inside the walls, nothing can be taken for granted except the arbitrary exercise of absolute power" (p. 183). Earthly powers are thus inverted and recast. Unlike the staff at the sanatorium, who reside at the institution, prison staff must return to and from mainstream civilization every day. Wideman asks, "how could one world reside so placidly next to the other?" (p. 183). Robby Wideman, raised in a culture whose polychronic values are discounted by the dominant culture, failed at his only socially respectable employment, as a careworker for retarded and autistic children. His innate indifference to strict routines, for example, 21 arriving on time for regularly scheduled shifts, conflicted with the professionals' administration of the organization. Wideman sheds some understanding on the culture out of which Robby's polychronic aptitude was formed. He admits, "None of us knew how traditional West African families were organized or what values the circular shape of their villages embodied, but the living arrangements we had worked out among ourselves resembled the ancient African patterns" (p. 79). Each member was granted as much privacy as s/he needed, yet no one needed to feel alone. Mothering was shared between all older women, while family ties extended to a wide, all-embracing network. Opposed to the Wideman's polychronic, multivalent household, the white, middle class ideal of the nuclear family is unitary and finite, its generations discrete. Monochronist values flourish more readily in this milieu. Synchrony and Its Variants Paralleling Hall's construction of two temporal systems is Victor Gioscia's (1971) theory of vertical time intersecting Newtonian horizontal time. He derives his theory from Medieval eschatology, which posited the end of human history with the second coming of Christ. Within this view, 'upward' was the heavenly realm above time, i.e. beyond normal quotidian concerns. Below the conventional earth-bound time lay hell. Both realms were considered eternal: one reward, the other punishment, for one's thoughts and deeds on earth. Similarly, ancient Greeks placed their gods high on Mount Olympus, as, later, Law was considered to emanate from on high. In recent years, users of drugs refer to their altered state as a 'high'. The depressive, negative meanings associated with the 'below time' zone of the vertical axis are many: a bad experience makes one feel 'low'; one speaks of being 'in the depths of despair'; one is 'weighed down' by cares; the poor are referred to as 'downtrodden', forming the 'lower' or even 'underclass' of society. 22 Sensitivity to time in either the low or high condition places one in a position along a diagonal axis between these two intersecting vectors. Thus Gioscia's construction of metaphoric understanding/experience of time: Figure I: Gioscia's Diagram of Temporal States EPICHRONY (above time) HYPOCHRONY (insensitive to time) ANACHRONY SYNCHRONY METACHRONY (behind time) (ahead of time) HYPERCHRONY (overly sensitive to time) CATACHRONY (below time) © Victor Gioscia, 1971. According to this diagram, people who are overly-sensitive to time, 'hyperchronics', would experience a slowness, a dragging of time. Such is the typical experience of the prisoner, whose real punishment consists in the variable quantity of time added to or subtracted from his or her sentence. All too fleeting are those moments when one is truly happy: for example, 'quality time' spent with family and friends, on vacation, during sex or 'riffing' with other musicians, can be occasions which often seem to rush by, unaware as we are of time's passing. One experiences at these times a diminished 23 temporal sensitivity, or 'hypochrony'. These states are located at opposite ends of the diagonal vector. They are not fixed, but fluid, although environment may predispose one to either end of the scale. Synchrony describes the realm whose diameters are equivalent: one's personal rate of time is felt_to be in harmony with that of society. Conversely, achrony may assume any of four realms: anachrony, wherein one feels one's personal pace to be lagging behind societal expectations or rate as a whole; for example, when one's rate of attainment at work is experienced as falling behind the company's or boss's guidelines. A metachronic orientation, on the other hand, might be used to describe a precocious child or avant-garde painter. Workers confronted with technological advancement, without the knowledge required to operate it, would find themselves in a metachronic situation, and may well find their positions declared redundant due to their suddenly anachronistic skills. The company may experience a shortfall of metachronically prepared workers. This is a common scenario today, when rapid advancements in computer and electronic circuitry are displacing technicians, mechanics and front line office staff. As Gioscia reminds us, physically mature young men and women must wait until they attain the legal age before they may enjoy the full rights and freedoms of society. Gioscia and his colleagues' interpretation of delinquency literature leads them to view this disparity between biological (metachronic) and societal (anachronic) maturation as anachronistic, thus anxiety-inducing, for the adolescent. This understanding helps to explain the case of Robby Wideman, whose social and sexual maturity developed counter to society's expectations: "These aspirations of love and desire turned on me when I wasn't able to live up to this sweet-self morality, so I began to self-destruct, burning up in my sensitivity, losing direction, because nowhere could I find this world of truth and love and harmony." (Wideman, p. 58) Epichrony is the experience of being 'above' time, when one rises above a situation to take a broader, more distant and detached view of it. Philosophers, futurists and 24 visionary politicians will often assume this stance. During periods of epichrony society grants special privilege to those in power, such as declaration of martial law (Gioscia, p. 91); the War Measures Act initiated by the Trudeau government in 1970 may come to mind. In incarceral settings, which have developed and administer their own rules outside of normal society, void of democratic checks and limitations such as those provided by electoral processes, epichronic-style power is arrogated with similar caprice and oppression. Wideman makes several references to such occasions in his frequent dealings with prison guards (pp. 43, 51, 81, 83, 187-188, 192). To the catachronic individual, time weighs heavy. Life is felt to be unfair, and any hope of improving upon one's circumstances is delimited by few choices and fewer chances. Decisions are made by people 'up on high', but the road to that place is too arduous for the catachronic person to reach it. Depression, despair and even suicide may result (Gioscia, pp. 91-92). Wideman's referral to his ghetto upbringing fits the catachronic domain. His brother tells him: "You know the shit's coming down and it's falling on everybody in Homewood....I'm in here but it's still falling on me. It's falling on Daddy and Mommy and Dave and Gene and Tish and all the kids. Falls till it knocks you down." (Wideman, p. 152) Wideman's account of that other arena, prohibited to black Americans, assumes a quasi- mythical dimension: If you're born black in America you must quickly teach yourself to recognize the invisible barriers disciplining the space in which you may move....You ignore the visible landscape. It has nothing to do with you, it will never change, so you learn a kind of systematic skepticism, a stoicism,...I can't get to the mountain and the mountain ain't hardly coming to me no matter how long I sit and holler, so I mize well do what I got to do right here on level ground and leave the mountain to them folks think they own it. (Wideman, p. 221) Gioscia describes the catachronic state as a prison. Metaphorically or literally, its severely depressive effects are known to be relieved, temporarily, by narcotics, whose users describe their bliss as a 'high', an epichronic realm wherein time seems not to move at all (Cheek & Laucius, 1971). The catachronic's propensity for narcotics also sheds 25 understanding on the underworld of Robby Wideman and his friends, with their habitual escapes via heavy drug use. The Body as a Site of Resistance Given Robby Wideman's background, his drug habit and his subsequent incarceration, it is surprising to find no mention of his using any drugs while serving time. This is not to suggest that it did not happen: both author and subject would prefer, understandably, to present a more flattering portrait. But Wideman emphasizes, wisely, alternative forms of survival in prison. Ironically, one of the reasons Robby functioned well in prison may rest in his never having had to give up a regular, monochronic routine. The typical benchmarks of time's passing - the eight hour working day, the weekend, holidays, visits to relatives and other planned trips - were not part of his reality previous to his incarceration. Such mundane events help the monochronized citizen to cope with an otherwise undifferentiated landscape of time, a 'misty abyss', as some prisoners have described it (Cohen & Taylor, 1972, p. 95). Pondering the temporal landscape of his sentence, Robby assumed a kind of bifocal vision, not unlike that of the long-term prisoners in Cohen & Taylor's study. They focused partly on the distant horizon, their release date, and otherwise on the quotidian events that filled and passed their days, the moments 'at close range'. The landscape's middle ground was thus scrupulously avoided. Like Hans Castorp, Robby Wideman seemed at greater ease with his forced removal from a monochronic society than some of his cohorts (Wideman, p. 187-188). Never fully submitting to the caprices of prison routine, he maintained his wits and integrity. He put his energies into constructive uses: developing his mind and maintaining his youthful body. Resistance to the cruel disruptions of guards and administrators, who would arbitrarily cancel programs, change schedules and single out individual inmates who 26 caught their cruel fancy, required a kind of tightrope mindfulness: "Vigilance is the price of survival. ...To pretend you could control your own destiny was a joke" (Wideman, p. 84). Robby's situation bears comparison with the residents of the sanatorium in Mann's The Magic Mountain. Unlike monks and nuns, who are privy to a personal communion with their Lord, or hippies, who disdain all concepts of past or future, neither prisoners nor hospitalized patients have chosen their solitude, their removal from normal society. These two kinds of 'incarcerees' also share an important existential conidtion with respect to time: bargaining. For patients of the tuberculosis asylum, bargaining with their doctor and negotiating an earlier release date occupies a good deal of their energy (Roth, 1962, in Cohen & Taylor, 1972). This is the strategy which Hans' cousin, the good soldier Joachim, uses. In spite of his strenuous physical discipline, none of his efforts win him a single day's shortening of his 'sentence'. His frustration mounts to such a pitch that he ultimately acts on his own, defying his doctor and leaving the House Berghof. His choice proves fatal. Prisoners are generally told what length of time to expect to spend behind bars. For the long-term prisoner, this knowledge opens up a paradox: to contemplate the entirety of one's sentence becomes unbearable; one prisoner advised another to do his twenty-year sentence "...five years at a time" (Cohen & Taylor, 1972, p. 97). At the same time, the contemplation of one's future release sustains one through temporally undifferentiated days. To alleviate the interminable futurity of this release date, long-term prisoners will devote years of their sentence negotiating, plea bargaining, applying for parole, in order to reduce their sentences: As of this writing,the convicted child killer Clifford Olsen has been granted the right to apply for parole, under a controversial 'faint hope' clause of his sentence. Untenable is the idea that one's life in prison is being played out; one may be serving life, but not one's own. Time has been served them as punishment, but someone else's time: their own time has been abstracted by the courts and in its place, prison time is 27 served out like a monetary fine. Time becomes a controller, not a resource, to be served rather than used. This abstraction of time may be one reason for the qualitative metaphors prisoners use to describe it: enduring a difficult situation, or when days seem to stretch out endlessly, is known as doing 'hard time'. Bothering another inmate with one's own complaints or problems, a prisoner might be admonished to "Do your own time, not mine!" One inmate has said, "You try to eat time, rather than enjoy it." (Cohen & Taylor, 1972, p. 96). Contemplating his brother's fate, Wideman makes similar observations: A narrow sense of time as a material entity, as a commodity like money that can be spent, earned, lost, owed or stolen is at the bottom of the twisted logic of incarceration....By surrendering a certain portion of his allotment of time on earth the malefactor pays his debt to society....Prison time must be hard time, a metaphorical death, a sustained, twilight condition of death-in-life....Prison is an experience of death by inches, minutes, hours, days. (Wideman, p. 35) In his historical analysis of modern prisons, Discipline and Punish (1979), the socio-historian and philosopher Michel Foucault traces the codification and adoption of monastic habits of discipline by schools, armies, factories and prisons. Coeval with a strict application of techniques of mastery over the body, time became increasingly regulated, parsed and systematized. [The religious orders] had been masters of discipline: they were the specialists of time, the great technicians of rhythm and regular activities. But the disciplines altered these methods of temporal regulation from which they derived. They altered them by refining them. One began to count in quarter hours, in minutes, in seconds. This happened in the army, of course:... in the elementary schools, the division of time became increasingly minute;... The gradual extension of the wage earning class brought with it a more detailed partitioning of time. (Foucault, p. 150) Historically, military life was assigned exclusive domain over control of the body: The individual body becomes an element that may be placed, moved, articulated on others. Its bravery or strength are no longer the principal variables that define it; but the place it occupies, the interval it covers, the regularity, the good order according to which it operates its movements. (Foucault, p. 164) Outside this 'good order', the worthy soldier Joachim founders. No amount of military training can help him. He has internalized not only the discipline but the clocklike, mechano-temporal mode that motivates it (as though the two could be separated!). 28 A carry-over from military regimens, the functioning of prisons retains much of the military ideology, albeit submerged in its present operations. Still necessary are the logistics of maintaining control over a large corpus of men or women. Only the enemy has changed: those in positions of authority command obedience, but no respect, from their charges; in place of honour and fidelity, a grudging, simmering complaisance. Paradoxically, Robby Wideman's survival consisted in submitting a part of himself to the bizarre order of the prison. He remained intact through a constant vigilance: "Robby watched it all. Ups and downs. What was consistent was the watching, the consciousness, the vision in which he saw himself as counting, as being worth saving at any cost" (Wideman, p. 195). Wideman laments the sacrifice of his own abilities, considered suspect, in order to gain admittance into the collegiate ideal: '"Playground move' was synonymous with bad move. Not bad move, but something undisciplined, selfish, possibly immoral" (Wideman, p. 226). For Wideman, a natural propensity for basketball was gradually systematized, broken apart and reassembled, until the 'natural' element was all but deracinated. Wideman's experience recalls Foucault's medieval scholastics, who conflated morality and physical discipline. Central to their coda was the timetable with its principle of non-idleness: "It was forbidden to waste time, which was counted by God and paid for by men; the timetable was to eliminate the danger of wasting it - a moral offence and an economic dishonesty" (Foucault, p. 154). Robby managed an alternate tactic: for him, as for many prisoners, the body represented personal property. The guards and authorities might bend, coerce and restrain it but he was in command insofar as he could shape it; resistance to external pressure was thereby strengthened: "Staying in shape is more than recreation. It's a necessity for survival" (Wideman, p. 219). Cohen and Taylor critique this dependency on physical exercise as a viable method of countering the deteriorative effects of long-term prison life. One inmate remarked, "Some of the prisoners in question would rather put an inch on their biceps than take a year 29 off their sentence" (Cohen & Taylor, p. 95). This sort of physical gain for its own sake indicates a loss of focus; indeed, deterioration may well have already taken place. Progress in prison, represented by books read, courses and degrees earned, or inches of muscular girth achieved, must reach a leveling off, as Cohen and Taylor point out. Time, as measured against these milestones, may well appear to be slowing down. But their critique of physical therapy misses a larger, more complex motivation. Robby's regimen of one thousand push-ups, which he attained after only six months (Wideman, p. 219), would serve him no purpose otherwise. At an early stage in their visits, John Wideman asks his brother whether he measures his sentence time by the rate of growth in his daughter (p. 35). Perhaps Wideman senses he is missing the point, for he never returns to the analogy. Robby allows how he gauges his body's own rate of resistance against that of his elder brother (p. 219). Robby's index reveals his concern to maintain as much of his original self, when he was sentenced, as he can upon his release. Only in this way can he minimize the portion of his life extracted from him. His victories arrive in small but significant episodes: John gloats at the authorities' inability, despite their best efforts, to extinguish his brother's sexuality: "No way it's spozed to happen. Prisons are organized to prevent it. He's a man in love with a woman, being loved in return. The gates remain locked but for the moment he's holding the key in his hand" (p 212). In this chapter I have deliberately glossed over many other methods of survival/sites of resistance, each as valid as the physical: the consistent flexing of mental energy, via study, keeps one mentally alert. Visitors, especially loved ones (as Robby was privileged to experience), keep one's thoughts and emotions focused on their future well- being, and hence one's own. Other visitors from free society: teachers, guest lecturers, artists and researchers, are reminders of time's passing on the outside, and act as antidotes to gradual,deterioration, or anachrony. The inmates that I met, in the institution where I conducted my research, demonstrated remarkably similar attitudes to those of Robby 30 Wideman and the inmates in Cohen and Taylor's study. It is with these men, and their uses of art as a form of resistance, that the following chapters are concerned. 31 Chapter Three: Methodology Exactitude is not truth . (Henri Matisse) Methodological Orientation Given the nature of my enquiry, I decided a qualitative methodology was most appropriate. The qualitative researcher seeks understanding, rather than the proof of a particular hypothesis. The underlying epistemology of qualitative research is naturalistic, as opposed to the positivism that guides quantitative studies (Lancy, 1993). In particular, I thought my investigation would be best served by a case study. Prisons are closed societies, which free citizens, on the whole, would prefer to remain out-of-sight. A prison offers the outsider/researcher a unique, self-sustaining environment for study. For the purpose of understanding this group's perception of time, and how art practice clarifies and influences that perception, phenomenology guided my study as well. According to Lancy, "phenomenology is best employed in situations that have relatively confined temporal and physical boundaries" (1993, p. 9). Phenomenological research is also open to alternative constructions of reality, an important consideration given the unusual existential circumstances that prison inmates must face every day. Elements of ethnography informed my method of enquiry. Developed by anthropologists from the beginning of this century, "Ethnography, a hybrid activity,... appears as writing, as collecting, as modernist collage, as imperial power, as subversive critique" (Clifford, 1988, p. 13). As a research method it has guided a number of educational studies (Lancy, 1993; Wolcott, 1973; Woods, 1986). Education uses ethnographic methods for different ends from anthropology (Stanhouse, in Lancy, 1993). Case studies, for example, are aimed at the improvement of practice in educational research. Lately, ethnography as a discrete discipline has moved between cultures, neither following anthropology's tradition of mapping the full range of a culture's diversity, nor seeking conclusive, generalizable results (Clifford, 1988). Ray Rist, an anthropologist, 32 notes that: "The term ethnographer is being applied to people neither trained nor having studied in this methodology. The idea of going into the field and allowing issues and problems to emerge ... has given way to the preformulation of problems..." (in Lancy, 1993, p. 8). In the spirit of research methodologies which criticize earlier, positivist assumptions, postmodern ethnography acknowledges its artificial nature, with writing being the researcher's predominant method of communication (Clifford, 1986; 1988; Tyler, 1986). Lately, theorists of research methodology admit to a shift in qualitative research communication procedures, notably, the production of text evolving from the observation-writing dyad (researcher-subject) to one of discourse-speech (researcher and researched as co-producers)(Jansen & Peshkin, 1993). While ideally I would have chosen this latter approach to research, that is, as a shared activity between myself and the volunteer inmate participants, I abandoned the idea because of the overwhelming difficulties involved with full inmate cooperation. These difficulties, including restriction of access to inmates, the seriousness regarding breaches of confidentiality, and paranoia (shared by inmates and staff) surrounding my intentions as a researcher, are intrinsic to life within prison. As problematic as it is, I assumed the traditional role in ethnography of participant- observer. Ideally, this position vis-a-vis the subjects allows one to engage in their everyday activities over a long period of time, and experience first hand the formal and informal processes, schedules and other interactions of a group (Woods, 1986). Participant- observation is predicated upon "an ideology claiming transparency of representation and immediacy of experience" (Clifford, 1986, p. 2). Intrinsic to this notion is an emphasis on observation as the primary mode of data discovery. Until recently, seeing was preferred over other senses, such as hearing, touch and smell (Tyler, 1986). Visual imagery of exotic, oriental cultures was safely 'flattened' and recoloured in order to augment presentation to an occidental readership (Barthes, 1983). Traditional anthropological 33 accounts have presented the researchers' data within this one-point perspective framework: alternative expressions and interpretations were conveniently omitted in the interest of the singular, conclusive reading of a given culture (Clifford, 1986; 1988). As Clifford (1986) notes, participant-observation leaves little room for (other) texts. In the past twenty years, authors versed in feminist and neo-Marxist theory have challenged this notion, based upon the scientific paradigm of positivist and Platonic conclusivity (Clifford, 1986; 1988; Lather, 1991; Tyler, 1986). Their appeals to other constructions of experience, inconclusive results and subjective, reflexive and poetic methods of data gathering have gained influence with the academic disciplines from which they derived. It is with these latter theorists that my presentation is aligned. In particular, I am attracted by the idea of research as an empowering activity for those individuals and societies being studied: a transformational agenda informs my ideology both as a teacher and as a researcher. This rejection of a neutralist stance in research accords with Lather (1991), who adapts Friere's (1970) cogent remark that education is never value-free: neither is research. Intrinsic to this approach - and, ergo, my study - is the notion that theory is discovered through, or 'grounded in' data (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, in Lather, 1991). In practice, the participant-observer's outsider status is never completely forgotten; nonetheless over time one manages to penetrate one or two layers of access to the inner levels of operations of a society. Woods (1986) posits three layers of access: 1) the outer, or public face such as that which one encounters during 'open houses'; 2) the natural, everyday business as long-term visitors are gradually trusted and accepted more; and 3) 'deep penetration,' to the vitals of an organization, as key subjects take the researcher into their confidence. Unlike Wolcott's (1973) classic account, restrictions of access and security concerns circumscribed the 'participant' aspect of my researcher status: for example, experiencing all aspects of the lives of this group of men, such as eating, sleeping, programs and recreation on a day-to-day basis, was unfeasible. 34 Educational research often takes place in institutions 'under siege': the sense of vulnerability that an outsider/researcher induces may throw up a wall of resistance (Lancy 1993). One's motives are suspect, one's allegiances are questioned, and proper etiquette is learned after the fatal faux pas has been committed (Scott, 1989, in Lancy, 1993). These exigencies in many ways could summarize the varying degrees of access and liberty I experienced at the institution to which I was assigned. As with the administrators of many institutions, I had the impression that there was some anxiety that my research findings would amount to evaluation. The Pilot Study During the summer of 1995 I was hired to teach at a medium security correctional facility in eastern Ontario. I was responsible for two grade ten level art classes lasting five weeks. One of the classes was composed of English as a Second Language students, the majority of whom came from Vietnam. I used this opportunity to set up a pilot study with the inmates. My intention was to find a particular aspect to consider within a general study of prison art programs. Initially I wished to investigate what effect(s), if any, art had on inmates' self-esteem. My hunch was that it would improve within the structure of an intensive immersion in art practice, relieving some of the deleterious effects of incarceration. Three inmates agreed to be interviewed, twice; one of them opted to drop out of the study after the first interview. The comments that both of them made, separately, during the second interview intrigued me: both expressed a desire for more time to spend on their art work. This apparently innocent remark presented a paradox: I thought that the last thing anybody serving time for a sentence wanted would be more time, in any form. Yet it made sense when I recalled the level of engagement that I witnessed when teaching the men: For the early classes of this pilot study I prepared a number of drawing lessons designed to sharpen the inmates' skills in observation. On one or two of these occasions I joined the men in the ESL class. My rushed, anxious tempo relaxed as I became absorbed 35 in my drawing. One inmate told me that I should allow them more time to complete their drawings: I was always rushing them. This man (the most gifted artist in the class), was also the most articulate in English. Now that I was immersed in what the others were doing, I understood his criticism. As a teacher, despite my own practice of drawing and painting, I had no concept of the amount of time required for students to engage in this form of mental and physical activity: the completion of these drawings could not, under any circumstances, be imposed by any external agency; each unfolded at the inmate-artist's own pace, according to his internal 'schedule'. Most of the men in the art classes showed a similar focus, a nearly palpable like-mindedness. From other classrooms the students would file out, and wait in the halls for the gates to clear at day's end, but not those from the art class. These men had to be pried almost physically from their seats, and rushed to vacate the school area by 1600 hours. From interviewing the two volunteer inmates, I was intrigued enough that I thought further investigation was warranted into the phenomenology of these unique learners: how does time affect them and how do they see it? And what are the effects of art practice on (these) long term prisoners, particularly with regard to their attittudes and perceptions of time? The Study The five-week art program I taught at the eastern Ontario facility that summer gave me a structure for gaining entry into another prison site, in the lower mainland of British Columbia. While setting up a course of instruction for the purpose of studying a social group is highly artificial, it is considered acceptable to a case study (Creswell, 1994). The differences inherent in the two sites would have made a comparative study difficult: In the first situation, I was invited, and paid to teach a credit course within the auspices of the institution's school, during regular program hours. Unlike the eastern Ontario institution, the staff and inmates who comprised my longer study (see below) were as strange to me 36 as I was to them. More importantly, the art course at the second institution was delivered during the inmates' leisure time. Some comparisons between the two sites, related to this qualitative difference, emerge throughout the data discussion of chapter four. Site Selection Between myself, the director of the Correctional Staff College for British Columbia, and the coordinators of Prison Arts Foundation, we decided upon an appropriate institution. The major constraints guiding my selection were: proximity to the site from U.B.C. (for example, William Head, on Vancouver Island, was too inaccessible for commuting, twice a week, for three hour classes), existence of an ongoing hobby/arts and crafts program on the site, and risk factor of the inmate population. The staff college director took my letter of proposal (see Appendix I) to the directors of the Prison Arts Foundation, who in turn distributed it to three institutions. Although I told the college director I had no aversion to higher security institutions, relating my experience in eastern Ontario prisons, no maximum security institutions were considered. My original intention was to visit an existing art program, perhaps contributing a lesson at the invitation of the resident art instructor, and simply observe. This plan had to be abandoned, when the Correctional Staff College director informed me that there were no ongoing courses in art at any institution in the lower mainland. In order to stay with my intended enquiry, I was compelled to offer one, thereby assuming the dual role of teacher- researcher, an artifice which, as the course unfolded, became increasingly problematic. The facility selected was a large medium-security institution, built in the mid- 1970s. The compound sits on a majestic spread of land overlooking the Fraser valley, at the edge of a rural town which maintains a predominantly white, Christian, working class ambience, despite a visible influx in recent years of southeast Asian immigrants. The facility consists of a complex of low-lying structures, linked by semi-open walkways: they are covered, with one side open to landscaped enclosures. This 'open wall' is secured with a chain-link fence spanning the entire height of the walls, greatly reducing the possibility of 37 escape. From outer offices, classrooms and meeting rooms, one can see verdant pastures and distant hills, reinforcing the dire sense of confinement inside. Two rows of chain-link fencing, about four metres high, topped with razor ribbon and barbed wire, and interspersed with guard towers, surround the complex of buildings. Study Population The group of potential volunteers was comprised of up to fourteen men, differing in age (from mid-twenties to mid-forties), personality, background (ethnic, geopolitical, economic, educational) and belief system. These men were notified of the art course by a posting announcing its date and duration. I asked Alicia, the Social Development Coordinator to distribute the announcements throughout the prison on my second visit there. I came to offer a brief art lesson in the hope of generating interest in the course among the men. Many of the original participants later dropped out of the course, and others 'dropped in', rendering the original cohort somewhat difficult to track. For the greater part of the course, around six inmates regularly attended. Timeline Dr. Stephen Duguid, one of my thesis committee members, advised a timeline of twelve weeks for the duration of the art course/site study. This would give me sufficient familiarity with the site and the volunteer participants; also, I hoped that this term would allow enough time to uncover the phenomena I was seeking, that is, any evidence of art making as a coping mechanism in the harsh environment of a medium-security prison. To investigate the volunteers' perceptions of time, I had to rely on the interview format to direct attention to this query; other evidence, such as behaviour, or spontaneous expressions indicating their attitudes to time, would be more difficult to discern, given the limited time and access I had with the inmates: three hours, twice a week. The art course ran in toto from late May to mid-July, being canceled at the mid- point. Up to that time I had spent a total of six weeks in succession, at six hours per week, at the site. The surprise cancellation signaled the end of my field data gathering, and shifted 38 the focus of my enquiry: the feeling of being unjustly 'de-invited' spurred me to reflect on the dynamics of my interactions both with the inmates and with staff. Data Collection Procedures In order to maximize the validity, and ensure accuracy of observations, I took the following approaches: 1) preprogram questionnaires - given to all participants; 2) field notes - primarily of my interactions with staff and inmates, descriptions of the physical site and structure, and reflections on my role as researcher and teacher; 3) interviews - with inmate-participants and with other art instructors who had experience working in incarceral settings (namely, the directors of the Prison Arts Foundation); and 4) analysis of documents and artwork relating to the project. These included reports concerning interactions with inmates, volunteer and visitor orientation materials (including videotapes), and inmates' artworks. With these last items, 'analysis' is understood as formal, aesthetic description, rather than any psychological interpretation, which I am in any case unqualified to give. As the course I offered was not for credit, the issue of evaluation is moot; nonetheless, my experience as a teacher and maker of art at times influenced the kinds of observations and remarks I made about the inmates' art work. On the whole I have attempted to alert the reader to my formalist bias whenever it informed my evaluations. 1) Questionnaires: The questionnaire was distributed during the beginning of the third evening's class, and took about twenty minutes to fill in. As with all new art students, I wished to know the inmates' formal and informal experiences as makers and consumers of art. Here 'consumer' is understood to include not only purchaser, but witness: for example, somebody who attends a visual display of any cultural event, such as an art gallery, museum, zoo or automobile show. Personal background questions were avoided as I considered them intrusive. The questionnaire was two pages in length, with mostly open-ended questions, beside which, underlined blank spaces encouraged short phrase- type answers. To identify their experiences as art consumers, I supplied a list of specific 39 venues, with instructions to check off ones that they had attended, and an additional space, underlined, to add any others not on the list. (See appendix II.) The signing of names, which all participants did, was optional. 2) Field Notes: The collection of field notes constitutes the bulk of the data I collected. For recording observations, I made notes in the evening after a particular class, or the following morning. On occasion, I was unable to make entries until a day or more had passed. Naturally, some bias with interpretation of a situation is inevitable. This bias may be exaggerated by the increase in passage of time between the occurrence and its recording. If the narrative that my notes formed shows myself cast in the role of protagonist, that is an admission of subjectivity which it would be hypocritical to discount, or attempt to diminish. Save descriptions of the most neutral, unpopulated areas, my observations are concentrated upon those interactions I had with inmates and staff. Despite having several opportunities to do so, only once or twice did I endeavor to record observations in class. The few points I jotted in were filled out after class. M y self- consciousness when I attempted this was acute. I had the impression that the inmates were aware of my furtive entries, although they showed no notice. Having experienced this situation, wherein I was coolly observed and written about, from a distance of perhaps ten meters, among preschool children, I find this method of social science data collection to be intrusive and paternal. A North American Native woman has described a similar feeling of being almost violated, when a female anthropologist made notes whilst observing her enjoying an intimate moment of hair braiding amongst her female companions. (Unfortunately I cannot locate this source.) Similarly, postpositivist ethnographic theorists have begun critiquing this commonly accepted practice of field data gathering (Lather, 1991). For this reason I rejected the tradition of taking notes in the midst of the study population. Instead, I have relied on my imperfect ability to remember conversations, unusual behaviors and common practices of the inmates. When I wrote about a class immediately 40 afterward, I found that my notes tended to be more pithy and direct. Even the distance in time of a single night worked itself into my memory, in the form of more discursive and introspective prose, more attention to my emotions at the time, and more inductive conclusions. If this constitutes a fault of field collection, then I am in error. While I consider my visual and auditory memory unusually sharp, nonetheless, contrary to Warhol's expressed wish, we are not machines. 3) Interviews: The interviews I conducted primarily focused on the inmates' backgrounds as hobby and art practitioners, as well as their attitudes to, and experiences of, time.As preconstructed interviews are considered incompatible with a phenomenological stance (Lancy, 1993), the questions were designed to allow for a discursive style of conversation, and any probing that I thought might be necessary. The questions I chose to elicit their attitudes to time (see appendix III, questions 16-23) were broad enough to allow the inmates to philosophize as far as they were comfortable, yet pinned to their every day realities. Interviews took place once, after the end of the course. This represented a change in my plans, outlined on the volunteer consent form (Appendix IV), to have two interviews. I had intended to interview the men either singly or in pairs, in the art room, while the rest of the men were busy with their art work. Because the art course was canceled before I could set up a schedule for the first set of interviews, I had to return to the institution about two weeks after the last class. The interviews took place during one evening's regular visitor hours in the Visitor and Correspondence Area, from 1800 hours to 2100 hours, within the institution where I had held the course. As three inmates had agreed to meet with me, I had to allow a maximum of 45 minutes for each interview; this would allow time to 'wind down', during which time I could debrief the inmates as to the categories of my questions, and we could chat informally about sundry matters. Of five inmates who had initially agreed to being interviewed, two rescinded. Another would not allow me to tape record his answers. This 41 person arrived late (he was the last of the three) and as a result our interview was cut short by the termination of visiting hours. An earlier interview took place toward the end of the course, when two of the more outspoken inmates approached me spontaneously to interview me. I made brief notes on the spot, and used the occasion to reflect upon the artificial nature of the research I was conducting. Other, informal interviews occurred when inmates casually approached me to talk during class, or Susan, the acting hobbycraft officer, would share some item of information about an inmate or prison routine. 4) Documents and visual material: Collection of documents is restricted in a medium security correctional facility. On one occasion I asked for a copy of an incident report form. The hobbycraft officer told me that was impossible. Other documents I was able to look at included several manuals for orientation of volunteer and other temporary staff, including a small book published by Canada Corrections, entitled Games Criminals Play. (date and author unknown). The orientation material included three videotapes. These materials are described in detail in chapter four, under the section "Staff Resistance: access and orientation". The other 'documents' are the art works of the inmates, which are described in context throughout chapter four. Data Analysis Once the last day's field notes were gathered, and the interviews transcribed, I sifted through a randomly chronological account of the proceedings of the art course. This account comprised careful notations of each day's events, including all telephone conversations, shopping for supplies, records of all expenditures, conversations with my thesis committee and with the directors of Prison Arts Foundation. Not every lesson day reaped the same amount of writing: some situations lent themselves to 'thicker descriptions' than others. The sum total surpassed 200 pages of rough notes: handwritten, in a small field notebook; and typed on a word processor. 42 As I read through the narrative, I would underline or jot down some of the concerns - mine, the inmates, and those of the staff, - that came up time after time. These concerns began to repeat certain themes, gradually clustering around the eight themes introduced in chapter four. By the time three or more themes began to appear, I decided a greater range of colours to highlight the themes was required. My choice of colours followed no symbolic association, but was motivated by the range of hues available in highlighters. As each theme was assigned a certain colour, the notes soon took on a rainbow hue that not only announced the number of themes throughout, but graphically depicted the complexity of issues which, overlapping, jostled for prominence: a single sentence was often shot through with as many as three colours. Deciding which of the themes should take precedence became a demanding and time-consuming task, one which often ended in a kind of impasse; the result was a tendency to repeat an incident at different places in the body of the discussion of data findings (chapter four). Once hard copies of the entire transcripts and notes were broken down under the appropriate theme headings, I cut and reassembled them on to fresh paper. Some of the notes with overlapping colors were used in more than one section, but generally, where three competing themes occurred, one would predominate. Ultimately I had several sheets of each of eight colors. The section/theme entitled "Security and Space" began as two separate categories, but for want of more evidence, I decided to collapse them into one: as they were concerned with the "hard" data of the institution, that is, the non-negotiable issues of security that are intrinsically connected to the physical plant and its operation, I felt the proximity of these two themes warranted their joining together. Each theme, as I sifted through the (reassembled) notes, gave rise to minor themes; thus sub-headings are found under each of the larger headings of chapter four. From there I arranged the themes into a sequence that corresponded as much as possible with the original chronology of the study. I sought to maintain a narrative flow to the data presentation: this is my preferred 'style', in writing, and one I felt would best serve all t 43 parties involved in the story/ies that unfolded. Particularly as my compromised research efforts formed the thrust of the narrative, I thought this approach would work best as well. Otherwise, I have avoided the tendency to present the data in a general, ongoing manner, with the following exception: If an inmate told me of a particular habit, or attitude, that is prevalent in the institution, I would use his revelation as authority. As I sought greater understanding of the inmates' perceptions, my tendency was to take their remarks at face value - provided they did not seem too unlikely - rather than the opinions of staff. Often an inmate's revelation would find its support in some of the accounts of other art instructors, via the directors of Prison Arts, from conversations with professor Stephen Duguid, who has had considerable experience researching in prisons, or in the published literature. At the same time I have taken care to assign credit to the individual inmate- authority, whenever making any generalizations. Many of the 'leftovers' (the uncoloured notes) from the raw data had to do with feelings, insupportable suspicions and other emotions I was going through at the time of writing. I excluded most of these notes in my analysis, largely because they were secondary to the larger concern, which was with the inmates' lives. To deny that what followed was as much my story as theirs would amount to a kind of lie. Nonetheless, I intended the presentation to reflect a more balanced view, which one arrives at, often, only through time. By reducing the extreme aspects of my own subjectivity, yet including a large quantity of first-level data, I follow Woods' (1986) prescription to researchers, in order to permit readers to draw their own conclusions, and feel (or not) their own vicarious emotions. Bias and Subjectivity In the above admission I realize I am entering a contentious arena, the issue of subjectivity. Once thebete noir of positivist research methodology, subjectivity has been steadily gaining credence in postmodern research practices. It is closely aligned with another thorny issue, bias. Together these aspects of sociological research are receiving 44 overdue attention as feminist and postpositivist research theorists address new approaches to research praxis in the spirit of postmodernism (Clifford, 1986; Jansen & Peshkin, 1993; Lather, 1991; Tyler, 1986). The following discussion is intended to situate my approach within this literature. Once considered a methodological weakness, which the scrupulous researcher exorcized in the collection and presentation of data, subjectivity is now understood as a necessary component of qualitative research, particularly in its epistemological and methodological aspects. Shipman (1982) reminds social researchers that not only one's hypothesis, but one's discipline, education, value system and personal philosophy will direct the kinds of observations that one seeks, makes, and writes. Jansen and Peshkin (1993) add that one's social class, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity are factors which together predispose the researcher to certain findings; these factors can and should be admitted as biases early on, in order to alert others to the nature of the conclusions presented. Agar (in Jansen & Peshkin, 1993), asks ethnographers to state the nature of their biases, and how they can document the way they operate. He notes that ethnographers shape the responses of subjects. Rubin (in Jansen & Peshkin, 1993) reveals her Freudian training in clinical psychology, in asserting that it is our personal experiences which shape all knowledge. As she points out, lack of awareness of our own subjectivity traps us inside that subjectivity. Bias and subjectivity result from interactions between the researcher and the researched, according to Ginsberg and Matthews (in Jansen & Peshkin, 1993). Similar to Rubin, they laud this intersubjectivity, finding its roots in the psychoanalytic process of transference and countertransference. Subjects may, according to this view, act upon researchers in unexpected ways, as they (researchers) substitute for various figures (authority, parent, and so on) in the subjects' lives and histories. Researchers may find the setting and the subjects conjure long-forgotten feelings and associations, which will 45 influence their emotions while in the field, and shape their conclusions in the presentation of data. Roman and Apple (in Jansen & Peshkin, 1993) adopt a materialist-feminist approach to ethnography that 1): is antipositivist in the relationships between theory and data and researcher and researched; 2): credits the subjective experiences of researchers; 3): addresses underlying power issues that affect access to, and rapport with, subjects; and 4): acknowledges the researcher's own class, ethnicity, gender, age and sexual orientation. Each of these four aspects of subjectivity influenced the process of data gathering in which I was engaged. They surface in context in the data discussion in chapter four, and are discussed in detail in chapter five. Because of the methodological question I had prepared, concerning the issue of inmates' perception of time, I was sensitized to any remarks the inmates made with regard to that area. As their remarks were generally offered only after my direct prompting, many of the observations I made in the course of the time I spent at the institution, involved other issues. Where my deeper biases and personal credos surface, I hope I have alerted the reader to how they have guided my observations. Some of these biases will surface more conclusively, in the final discussion of the data in chapter five. Other biases may resist my active scrutiny, remaining buried in my unconscious. Names and Language I have changed the names of all the participants, staff as well as inmates, with the following exceptions: myself, Gary Wyatt and Marion Otterstrom (with permission), the latter two representing Prison Arts Foundation: While they had some involvement in the progress of the course, their reputation as experts in arts programs in prisons lends authority to my discussion of other art/s programs and the accounts of other artists and instructors, (see 'Cooperation' section, chapter four). Also, I interviewed them beyond the confines of the institution, in order to validate some of my experiences. Other proper names I have kept belong to published writers: Alan Duff and Susan Musgrave. 46 The names I have chosen for the inmates parallel as much as possible their real names, and where applicable, the ethno-linguistic source, as a way of indicating the various ethnicities of the participants. I retained the use of surnames for the two most powerful mandarins, Messrs. Hyde and Sandstone, not because I did not learn their first names, but I felt their lofty, distancing airs were better suggested through keeping this formal term of address. The institution I was assigned to is nameless, in accordance with the guidelines of the U . B . C . ethics review committee. At the same time its general location renders complete anonymity difficult, as logistical details are relevant to the problems I encountered and other issues that are raised. I have identified one institution, William Head, as its reputation as a comfortable, minimum security institution is relevant to issues I raise in chapter four. In the data discussion I have tried to maintain the kinds of language I used and the expressions the inmates preferred. The inmates were surprisingly articulate, informed and generally polite. In the body of the data discussion (chapter four) the reader will find several instances where the inmate or staff person speaks in quotations. Other than where indicated, these quotations are not verbatim transcripts of tape recorded interviews. This license on my part approximates more accurately the speaker's voice, than the awkward use of qualifiers, such as 'that' or 'whether', as in: X asked me whether I wished I could have thrown him out, versus: X said, "Don't you wish you could throw me out?". There is a sense of immediacy conveyed by the use of quotations that is missing in the more 'correct' rendering. Whose Voice? Having said the above, I admit the issue of speaking on behalf of these men is problematic with respect to paraphrasing often disenfranchised members of society. Alcoff (1993) asks social researchers to consider this issue whenever we collect and present data that purport to stand in for the voices of the subjects of our research. She points to the contention surrounding such traditionally vaunted practices of speaking on behalf of others 47 in anthropology, when summarizing and translating into writing the spoken words of one's subjects. More and more often, the silent 'other' is claiming centre stage, demanding to be heard in her or his own voice. Since the admission of gender studies and other postmodernist, inclusionary guidelines in academia, notions of author, authority and authorization are being constantly challenged and revised. In educational research, speaking about and speaking for others, namely children, has been an assumed right, understood as having similar dominion to the rights of parents over their children. Prisoners' access to self-expression in some ways mimics that of children; their right of speech, among other freedoms, has been seriously curtailed subsequent to their conviction. Combined with a typical history of restricted educational opportunities, prisoners are doubly handicapped in the opportunities to communicate their stories and points of view. The literature on prison life spans a continuum of empathy and understanding, from the first-person accounts of prisoners (Boyle, 1978; Caron, 1978; Leary, 1970), through varyingly empathetic field accounts of socio-anthropologists, journalists, teachers and social workers, (Carrel & Laing, 1982; Cleveland, 1989; Cohen & Taylor, 1972; Liebman et al, 1994; Peaker & Vincent, 1991; Piazza, 1996; 1997; Szekely, 1982), into a broad field of legal, medical and psycho-sociological literature of deviance (see references in Foucault, 1979, and Harris, 1991), to antipathetic and simplistic publications by authors whose authority is highly questionable. One of these last publications, a slim book entitled Games Criminals Play (author and date unknown), is discussed in chapter four. Other than the first person accounts, few of these authors speak in a voice that any prisoner would heartily endorse. For one reason, the use of jargon pertaining to that author's field of enquiry denies access of understanding by the uninitiated. For another, distribution of relevant, up to date material is restricted within the institutions by administrators who are often as much the subjects of sociological study as the prisoners themselves. 48 These realities of inmates' existence support, in part, a justification of speaking for them, while maintaining constant vigilance over one's intentions, and the ultimate ends or purpose for engaging in the discourse. To simply retreat from the discourse, as many members of the disempowered would have us do, is to abnegate a social responsibility belonging to members of a minority of educated citizens with access to corridors of power (Alcoff, 1993). The issue of responsibility cannot be overstated whenever researchers deem to tell the stories of those they would study: even the power imbalance implicit in the researcher-subject relationship implies a dominance on the part of the researcher, a throwback to the positivist era of scientific rationality, when the doctor would study and diagnose the patient (the subject as object). The research methods I adopted took the form of a dialogue, in which I played a central part. In the subsequent textualization of this 'event,' understood in Foucault's (1977, in Alcoff, 1993) term as including speaker, words, hearers, location, language and so on, I have tried to fix the momentary, the specific and the incidental, and to avoid the general and the hearsay. In so doing, I wish to present anything but a conclusive document. To describe my account as a 'speaking to,' in Alcoff s sense, suggests the existence of an ongoing discourse in prisoner-staff and prison-society relations, in which inmates and ex-inmates freely take part. Unfortunately, there is yet scant evidence of this situation in prison research, even in the advent of deconstructionist, inclusive political and academic writing. For example, inmates are denied access to internet as well as mobility which members of a free society take for granted. The coda, 'nothing in, nothing out' refers to control and censorship of information as well as material contraband. I am therefore compelled to speak, to a certain extent, on behalf of the men whose lives I touched and who touched mine. Reciprocity Ideally, the more feedback a researcher obtains from subjects, the better: the desired quality in postmodern ethnography, of true discourse, as opposed to a singular 49 monologue, is approached more closely, the more inclusive one's methods of data gathering (Clifford, 1988; Lather, 1991; Tyler, 1986). While reciprocity in field work has been known to generate rich data (Wax, 1952, in Lather, 1991), the opportunity to show one's data to the subjects themselves is problematic in a prison situation. Volunteer participants may rescind their cooperation without notice, a condition I found quite common in a correctional facility. Inmates often wish to present themselves in their most appealing image, and my fear was that, should I return the transcripts of the interviews we had, one or two of the respondents might have wished to alter, or withdraw, relevant passages. Admissions of illicit drug use in prison, for example, probably comprised the most sensitive passages, from a punishment concern; for me they indicated evidence of theories of time that I was seeking. My other concern with sending copies of transcripts to the volunteer interview subjects was the possibility of information leaking to the wrong people, namely staff who might seize such documents to use against those inmates, or other inmates who might feel implicated, and exert some form of retribution of their own. None of the men I interviewed had anything to say about their mates, one way or the other, but I thought the chances of the transcripts falling into the wrong hands was too great a risk to take. For this reason I regret the circumstances that prevented what I had hoped for, a true sharing of tales, in the narrative I have constructed. By whose approval, whose authorization, then, do I presume to render the accounts of these men's lives? I do not wish to present a generalizable summary that would speak for the experiences of all male inmates in Canada, or even British Columbia: I assume no comprehensive understanding of each of the inmates' plights, among the men I was privileged to meet and work with.What I describe instead is a specific situation that occurred over a period of time, roughly two months. Readers with any involvement or interest in the life of prisons will, I hope, recognize something of their experience (the 50 former group), or imagine what it was like (the latter group). In this way I hope to add to the literature that speaks about, not for, those who would be denied any voice at all. Validity As with other aspects of research formerly considered sacrosanct (such as objectivity), postmodern and antipositivist theorists have lately criticized validity, especially within qualitative research methodology. The former, quantitative model of validity, which proponents of qualitative methodology adopted in their early practice, corresponded to a psychometric paradigm in which reliability and generalizability were entwined, and shared equal importance (Kvale, 1995). Validity gained credence as a process for developing sounder interpretations of observations. The positivist notion that there is a one-to-one correspondence between elements in the real world and our knowledge of it has few serious supporters today. In 1971 Cronbach (in Kvale, 1995) noted that one problem with validity is that 'value-free standards for validity' is a contradiction in terms. Recent practitioners such as Lincoln and Guba (in Kvale, 1995), reinterpret validity to reflect the particular, the vernacular and the personal, with a focus on daily life and narrative. Accordingly, truth can be ascertained in several ways, among which are trustworthiness, credibility, dependability and comfirmability. Kvale describes three aspects of validity that are pertinent to postmodern methodology: craftsmanship, communication and action. As a form of craftsmanship, validity is ongoing, entrenched in the process of research through continual checking of one's findings: analyzing sources for biases, following up hunches and surprises, and getting feedback from informants, to name but a few methods. I have alluded to my problems with obtaining feedback from the inmates; as a way of validating many of my experiences, particularly with staff, I sought the opinions of other practitioners in the field of prison education, namely the directors of the Prison Arts Foundation and Professor Duguid. 51 The communicative approach to validity relies on a negotiated understanding, whereby theories and impressions of reality are shared, debated and ultimately agreed upon: "With the conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood, the nature of the discourse becomes essential." (Kvale, 1995, p. 31). Eisner (1991, in Kvale, 1995), supports the personal, literary and poetic as valid sources of knowledge. Kvale describes two main approaches to communicative validity, transactional psychotherapy and philosophical discourse. My own interactions with the inmates and with staff suggested both of Kvale's domains; ultimately, however, the narrative I have constructed is my own: Missing from Kvale's prescription is the role of impartial witness. I have tried to minimize the most obvious distortions in my account; other participants would surely differ in theirs. Kvale delineates one ultimate aspect of postmodern research: action. He describes this end result as a pragmatic validity. In this neo-Marxist orientation, the relevance of research findings lies in their ability to effect change. Knowledge as action supersedes mere observation. According to Kvale, communicative validity has an aesthetic aspect; that of pragmatic validity is ethical. Truth according to this view involves taking whatever action is required to produce a desired result; hence ethics and values are summoned. From a psychotherapeutic dimension, "...research and treatment go hand in hand." (Freud, in Kvale, 1995, p. 33). In the larger socio-political arena, the impact of these changes necessitates the cooperation, if not consensus, of the wielders of the instruments of power. Lather (1991) supports a similar approach to ethnography which she calls 'empowering' (after Friere, 1970) and participatory research. Her concern is with research as praxis; its ultimate aim is transformation and emancipation. The preceding discussions of validity and subjectivity did not explicitly guide my research; nonetheless they support the methodological approach that I followed in my data gathering. The following chapter describes the extent to which I was able to implement that approach, and what I discovered as a result. 52 Chapter 4: Discussion of Data Collection: Eight Themes From the field notes I gathered and the interviews held, both with the prisoners at the Visitor Control Area, and with the directors of Prison Arts Foundation, eight themes emerged. This chapter has been organized around those themes. They are: 1): Researcher/Teacher Dilemmas: 2): Security and Space: 3): Staff Resistance: 4): Inmate Resistance: 5): Confrontations: 6): Co-operation and Art/s Programs That Work; 7): Prison Routine and Time Management: and 8): Inmates' World. I have arranged them according to a logic of deeper levels of penetration, to paraphrase Woods (1986), rather than following a strict chronology.Within each theme is a subset of other themes, or issues. For example, under "Art/s Programs That Work", I have included other arts programs, such as theatre and creative writing, that have succeeded in other correctional settings. Any observations I was privy to, other than those concerning the most neutral, 'fixed' areas (such as physical space and routine security checks), were in reference to interactions between me, staff and prisoners. Many of their remarks were promted by my presence. As well, during the interviews after the dissolution of the course, I found occasions where the inmates appeared to want to give me the 'correct' or safe answer. Some observations will appear in two or more categories: prisons are fluid environments in spite of the hard surfaces and highly visible boundaries that contain them. Schedules change, inmate populations rise and fall, with constant adjustments being felt as so many ripples across a wide sea of programs. Staff are promoted, transferred, and relocated within a particular institution. Some of this sudden change in routine is deliberate: guards' shifts are constantly juggled, for example, in order to reduce staff s predictability, particularly those who might be perceived as weaker, more open to manipulation, by prisoners. Wherever observations are deemed to straddle two themes, the reader will be alerted, and may find them continued under the appropriate theme heading. 53 Researcher/Teacher Dilemmas Entering an institution as both teacher and researcher introduces a dual function: the roles may at times harmonize; more often they are in opposition. To the prisoners, the researcher role is never ignored, and casts a shadow of suspicion over the teacher role, however nobly one dispenses one's duties in that capacity. This section is intended to illustrate some of the tensions inherent in this dilemma. I have organized them around the following concerns: 'instructional/curriculum dilemmas', 'enrollment and attendance', 'materials and logistics', and'conflicting roles: researcher versus teacher'. Instructional/Curriculum Dilemmas This category includes any instance when the art course conflicted with the inmates' values and previous learning. Having a background as an instructor of secondary level art in public schools, I esteem those building blocks of visual grammar, the elements and principles of design. For an early class, I asked the men to examine the effects of one of the elements, value, and how it could be manipulated in their drawings. On sheets of manila paper they laid a thin cover of charcoal, then proceeded to pull out the shapes, working in a light-additive process, using blunt erasers. As source, a table was set up with household items on a white sheet, illuminated by a pole lamp. The ambient light of the summer evening was sufficient for them to see their own drawings. While they worked I went about kibitzing individuals, and drawing their attention to the varieties of light and shadow. On the following evening, I asked the class what it was we had been paying attention to, in our drawings of the previous class. My enquiry was answered with blank stares. When I reminded them that it was light, a few men showed expressions of recall. Apparently, isolating this aspect of the visual domain was a foreign practice to these men. I felt their exposure to this element should occur heuristically, rather than in a dogmatic lecture-style. 54 My purpose in emphasizing this traditional, discipline-based approach within the structure of a leisure-time prison art program is indeed suspect: a more sensitive consideration of the inmates' world, their needs and desired outcomes, would have served them more favourably. As an academically-trained art educator I have supported certain fundamental tenets of art, among them the idea that without a thorough investigation of the elements and principles of art, one's aesthetic vocabulary is seriously diminished. When one cannot identify those elements from the natural world, one's choices as a maker of artifacts, or art consumer, are limited. The danger of this formalist approach manifests itself when, as a teacher of art, one is confronted with alternative values, namely the imagery that predominates and inspires people in incarceral settings. This imagery can encompass a limited but imaginative range from their lives on the outside, their fantasies, and from popular graphic media. Of note is the dearth of imagery from their immediate surroundings: prisoners will typically choose to work on images that allow a psychic escape from, rather than a reminder of, prison (Riches, 1994). Within this practice, any formalist concerns are secondary. On the evening described above, I showed them overhead transparencies of charcoal drawings by artists. One example, a picture of a woman in repose, expressed with beauty and economy the elements of mass, volume and value. My efforts to draw their attention to such lofty sentiments were met with derisive laughter: to the men, the woman depicted was obese. I found the men's reaction crude and sexist, and in defense, took the aesthetic high road. I mentioned that an image can have appeal for other reasons than the conventional meaning of the subject portrayed - in this case a stout woman. I doubt whether I made many converts at the Temple of Art that day. At the same time, I wonder whether I chose nude and partially draped female figures as a way of inducing the inmates' attention. If so, my reaction was in some way hypocritical. A hazard of teaching any adult population arises whenever one's intended curriculum does not match the knowledge or ability levels of the students. There are few 55 accurate means available of 'pretesting' a class of adults, especially prisoners, for preparedness in art. One standard I have relied upon is a general interest and experience questionnaire which I adjust to suit the needs and profile of the members of my class (see appendix II). On this questionnaire is a list of art museums and special events, encompassing a broad range of twenty possible venues. To my surprise, all of the seven inmates who responded checked off at least twelve categories. M y general guidelines, based upon what formal knowledge of art I had assumed inmates possessed, had to be reworked constantly. Tasks I would take for granted, such as using a metric ruler, posed a daunting hurdle to some of the older students who had left their formal education before the metric system had been established in Canadian public school classrooms. On one occasion, introducing colour theory, I presented the class with a video on color mixing. To my dismay the production values of this local effort were low-budget, and 'pre-dundant': what I wanted to lead the men through - how to mix colours from the three primaries - was about to be revealed. Sensing my agitation with the program, which I found boring, one inmate leaned over and told me, "You must have attention deficiency syndrome." [sic] The inmates watching the program were rapt with attention. My assumption in this case, about what they already knew, had to be laid aside. I stopped the video at the point where the host was about to demonstrate the magic moment. This part was better left to the inmates' own discovery. I distributed the materials and systematically demonstrated the placement of the primaries, mixing of other colours, and their placement on the wheel, using oil pastels. The inmates repeated my applications on their own colour charts, in coloured pencil. That evening's class, albeit very transmission-oriented, was one of the most successful of the course. Within the grey confines of the Program Office Vestibule, little circles of color blossomed and shone defiantly. The men painted seriously, and had to be rushed out of the P.O.V. in order for me to be evacuated from the premises by 2100 hours. 56 Unfortunately the carry-over of this exercise was minimal. Rarely did an inmate bring his colour wheel to a subsequent class, despite the obvious care lavished on its creation. Any manipulation of colour temperatures, or increased sophistication in mixing of colours, was difficult to see in their later work. One inmate, a self-taught painter, told me he had devised his own colour mixing theory, but was glad to have a guide as systematic as this one. This fellow later dropped out of the class, frustrated by the follow-up painting exercise: they were to reproduce colour photographs of their choice, using a grid scale to enlarge their photos, then paint them in the complementary hues of the originals. The inmate asked why we could not simply paint from life: this exercise was engineering, not art. I admitted we were using engineering techniques - the grid - but in the service of art, as a way of preparing the inmates to approach painting from real life. It was easier, I rationalized, to make the transition from a two-dimensional original onto a flat surface, than to start with a three-dimensional source. Doug heard me out, then left. This outcome harmed my confidence in the approach I was taking. Articulate and thoughtful, Doug had told me earlier that evening that he had much to share regarding the variable qualities of time he had experienced while serving his sentence. Art making had a profound impact on these experiences, he said. He had been cued by reading my volunteer consent form (appendix IV). Now I had lost one of my potentially best volunteers. What did adult inmates know? What did they not know, and how could I help them overcome their resistance to new information? What did they want to learn? To expect that with this exercise or any other, I could satisfy all their expectations, was too optimistic even for me. If a match between my background, as an art teacher, theorist and practitioner, and theirs, was ever achieved, it was ill-fitting and short-lived. A formalist orientation also framed the approach I took with any critique of inmates' work. Such critiques occurred in an ad-hoc fashion, were generally one-on-one, with little input - but much attention - from the other inmates. Hoping to familiarize inmates with verbal critiques, and elicit their participation, I showed several slides of other artists' 57 work, at regular times throughout the course. The slides were selected to illustrate the predominant element we were examining, or art process, such as printmaking or collage, we were doing. At times I found myself challenging or 'correcting' an inmate's opinion. For example, during the class with the overhead transparencies of nudes, I showed a detail from a self-portrait by Kathe Kollwitz. The detail, of her eye, was mistakenly shown on its side, so the eye line ran vertically. Before I could set it aright, one inmate, Jabhar, remarked that it resembled a vagina. I immediately cautioned him on his use of language: a woman - Susan, the Hobbyshop officer, was in our midst, within earshot. Moments later, Jabhar challenged me: Would I say that art was in the eye of the beholder? I reflected a moment, and allowed that was a reasonable statement. Then, he pursued, if he saw a vagina in the image I showed, that was sufficient for him. I said that line of reasoning could permit other viewers to see any body parts, adding, the vagina shape was obvious, now that he drew everybody's attention to it. He asked, if it was so obvious, why did I jump on him when he made the remark? I could see no happy conclusion to this repartee; so I explained that was how the unconscious worked with visual material; once we saw it revealed, it could no longer recede back into our unconscious. This answer appeared to stymie, rather than satisfy, Jabhar. From that day forward, he appeared to assume the role of watchdog in the class, waiting to pounce on any contradiction or ambiguity I might utter. This glimpse into Jabhar's value system, his preoccupation with sex, will be elaborated in greater detail under the theme 'Inmates' Values'; I mention this instance as one in which I felt divided: an overriding sense of propriety, in mixed company, caused me to censure Jabhar undeservedly. The rift my action created impaired the hoped-for candor that can only come from the inmates' secure sense of freedom of expression, and acceptance from me as a researcher and teacher. With each new unit, I would haul out the usual cartel, a slide set of famous artists, giving a brief art-historical overview in order to locate a process within some context. The 58 thought that this approach was not working with these men, who would have preferred to launch directly into the process, never changed my strategy. What purpose did my efforts to impart a new vocabulary serve these men? Our last completed unit was collage. The spontaneity and messiness of this process, combined with a minimum of technique, augured unpromising results with a class of adult men who have fairly fixed notions of art, within which, skill and technique rank high. With this process I had hoped to circumvent the inmates' concentration on labour- intensive, product-oriented crafts such as leatherwork and stained glass, in order to access their expressive sides, their emotional lives, and thereby effect a transformation of their basic self-concepts. We viewed the video, "The Threshold of Liberty" (1992), a British- produced documentary on the Dada and Surrealist movements of the early part of this century. I hoped the mention of a few artists would trigger their memory of those to whom I had previously introduced the class, with large monographs of Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters in particular. Luck was with me: Neil opened a book on Ernst and drew Sean's attention to an image which had just flashed upon the screen. For the previous class I had assembled some materials on the Surrealists and other collage artists, namely Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst, along with various textures and images typical of their working methods - caning, burlap, other cloth, bits of wallpaper, and photocopies of Victorian engravings. The exercise was to identify a wild animal for oneself, then select images from the magazines and Victorian illustrations. As a theme I suggested animals in captivity, drawing the obvious parallel to their own condition of confinement. Nobody appeared to be bothered by the glib psycho-therapeutic tone of the exercise: perhaps they felt safe enough to venture to express an aspect of their lives that needed to come out. Everybody got started quickly, and soon were engaged in their pieces. After about half an hour, Neil, the first finished, called me over to interpret his collage piece. Given the art therapeutic nature of the exercise, I did not consider it my role to 59 interpret his piece. Any interpretation should come from the client, the person who made the work (Karban, 1994). Confronted with a hastily-cut array of buildings, highways, bridges and so forth surrounding a polar bear in a pristine setting, I was at a loss to interpret. I expressed some confusion with the way he had distant shapes overlapping the central, close shot of the bear. I could not make sense of it, spatially, I told him. "That's my point," Neil said with obvious annoyance. He deciphered the image for me: human civilization, encroaching on Nature, was threatening to wipe it out. I retreated to my comfortable post as formalist critic, and pointed out the sloppy arrangement which impaired the impact of his statement. Rather than praise his effective piece of agit-prop, I had grasped at some excuse for him to continue on the work, not to be satisfied with this brief burst of creative effort. Some art therapists such as Karban (1994) believe that any art criticism in a therapeutic setting is aggressive. Unfamiliar with the therapeutic dimension of art practice, as an instructor, I might have had a more disruptive situation from the awkward and insensitive way I handled this interaction. Neil seemed to mark me out from that first, introductory session, and I was quick to get ensnared in his little set-ups. In this situation an opportunity to appear clever, to advance at his expense, was too tempting to ignore. In any case, then as at other times, my encouragement to push his art work further was ignored. In a leisure-time setting, with competition for inmates' time from other programs, any incitement to added effort is generally rejected: when an inmate has invested sufficient effort in a particular exercise, he or she feels no compulsion to remain for the duration of the class, and may simply leave at any time (Otterstrom & Wyatt, 1996, in conversation). Strong arguments are needed to convince an inmate of the value of taking a longer, more traditional procedure, rather than skipping any unnecessary steps in the interest of expediency. 60 One new student who attended the last two classes, a unit in linoleum printmaking, asked me in the design transfer stage, why we could not simply draw our image directly onto the linoleum surface, then begin carving. I answered that it was important to work out one's composition beforehand, paying attention to the distribution of lights and darks, and considering the impact of the reversal of the image, upon printing. Further, I mentioned, this was the traditional method for many artistic processes, explaining that the art-historical term cartone is the root of cartoon, in which, traditionally, the artist worked out his design and then used the cartone to transfer his image to a wall or other surface. My little lesson in art history seemed to have no impact on Abe, who nonetheless went through the steps good-naturedly. Of the remaining three students, two gave up early; one was Neil, who had already demonstrated an extremely limited patience, even within this classroom profile. The other student had to leave to attend a regular meeting, but as he had an already-prepared design (an eagle, with wings spread) and his own set of carving tools, he appeared earnest in his promise to complete the carving on his own and be ready to print the following evening. Then as at other times, I found myself straining to explain, to fill these non- cognoscenti with my bookish learning. My traditional high school role as an art teacher/aesthete/artist was one that refused to die. Yet it ran counter to my express purpose as researcher: to find out their experiences, their values, knowledge, needs and desires. Several times I asked whether the inmate/students were satisfied with the course content. All save Neil and his buddy Sean answered with mute expressions. The course began with some old-fashioned exercises intended to sharpen their visual sense and their hand-eye coordination. About half-way through, it would open up to allow more unusual and interesting projects: papier-mache, plaster casting, clay, animated film, and finishing with a four week project of their own choosing, to develop a medium explored in the previous weeks (see appendix V). Linocut was one process that I expected would appeal to their preference for planning, skill, use of knives, carving and printing. The financial 61 incentive of producing cards which they could sell through the Visitor and Correspondence Area was another potential draw. What happened? On what turned out to be the last evening of regular classes, during which only Abe returned to print his linocut, Susan ascertained that we could hold the class in the room known as 'Social D.'. This was the room I had staked out on my first day of orientation, with Alicia, the coordinator of space allocation for prisoners' leisure-time activities. Susan notified the security officer to make an announcement as to the change of venue for the class, and together we spent about twenty minutes seeking out the light switch for the space. Eventually an inmate had to be called over to show us. I set up the equipment and Abe soon appeared. I waited for the others to show up. None did. Perhaps half an hour passed, then Neil and Sean strode in, visibly excited. Neil took command. He demanded to know what I was up to, what was my true agenda with the art course. I calmly replied that it was all clearly laid out on the consent forms. This did not appear to satisfy Neil. He gave me a specific list of 'do's and don'ts' for my course; Seeing the virtual non-attendance, and fearing the dissolution of the course, I was anxious for any strategy available to salvage the course. I considered Neil's advice with extreme interest. Neil told me to drop the course. It was a ruse, he said, and fooled nobody. I should simply put away the bag of tricks and ask the inmates themselves how they felt about time, art and leisure activities in prison. I answered that that possibility was unlikely, given inmates' resistance to researchers, and their territorial behaviour in the hobbyshop. Neil and Sean offered some suggestions, which I wrote down as they dictated. They are summarized here: * Don't offer the art course during inmates' free time. They have other activities, such as weight lifting and canteen, competing for their time. * Native art work is popular, not only to the Native population, but many other men in the institution. If I could offer that I could probably look forward to greater numbers in the class. 62 * Neil suggested the art course might be a little too high-level for the majority of participants, many of whom have short attention spans. Sean concurred, "You get a lot of crack babies in here". When I asked what the inmates would like to do, they answered: animation, clay, sculpture, painting and drawing. Enrollment and Attendance Just as ticket sales indicate the success of a theatre performance, the voluntary attendance at a course offered within the prison site during leisure time will give a true indication of its viability. As accurate as Neil's recommendations were, they arrived too late. Naively, I expected the art course would be an easy sell. I told those inmates who attended my introductory class that I was hoping for between fifteen and twenty volunteer students. I envisioned turning away extra men at the thirty mark, on the first day. Instead, thirteen participants showed up, including the outgoing hobbyshop officer, Tanya. From that day the numbers continued to drop. By the beginning of the second month, the numbers had stabilized at around six or seven. Sean told me then, that since the numbers had settled out, perhaps they could concentrate on what the remaining men wanted to do. Every evening of class I had the same anxiety: would a sufficient number of men wend their way to the art area to justify the course's continued existence? Or did they have more important places to be? Would the attendance peter out before the program ran its course? I made the logistical error of arriving late on the first night of regular classes. Neil criticized me for my tardiness, telling me that for prisoners, structure is very important within their world. I noticed the inmates operated by another set of principles when it came to their own punctuality: rarely would a full complement of men arrive for class before twenty minutes had passed. During this time I would make myself busy with paperwork. There seemed to be endless forms to distribute and collect. I found small talk difficult, although my discomfort lessened as the weeks passed. Except for Colin, who by his 63 loquaciousness made himself an outsider to the group, or Neil, whose verbal thrusts typically carried a hidden barb, the men were clamlike, taciturn. There was no point in forcing them. A few times, some of the men would come forward, quietly, when the class was well under way, and share details of their past lives on the outside. These moments were the richest for me, as both teacher and researcher, for they came unsolicited, were freely offered and generally unguarded. They bespoke both a desire for communication and a level of trust with me. Their remarks are treated under the section, 'Inmates' World'. Material and Logistical Problems My initial letter of request was picked up by the director of Prison Arts Foundation, a non-profit provincial funding agency for artists working in prisons. Since I had to sell myself as a researcher, I knew any enticement to accept me was contingent upon the least incursion into the routine of prison staff. This meant, primarily, that my course of art and research would not cost them a penny, in material, personnel, extra space or any ancillary capital outlay. I confidently assured the host institution that I would provide all materials and services without charge. Incidentals such as how I would pay for materials, or get out to the institution - some 60 kilometers east of my home - would, I assumed, be forthcoming by virtue of my polite asking. I also expected to depend upon the largesse of the hobbyshop officer, who, I reasoned, would see the logic in providing a good portion of the materials for her charges, since they would be the primary users. I hoped to stay within an estimated budget of $200.00 - 300.00. Perhaps for this reason, when somebody suggested the inmates be responsible for the cost and care of their own materials, through the purchase of art kits, I hastily agreed. After tendering the best prices, I offered to collect the materials we would require, and assemble them into the individual kits. The inmates had a discretionary account, known as Current Account Deposit, or C.A.D., from which they could finance their kits. I suggested a ballpark figure of about $15.00. When I reached a reasonable summary of items, 64 including a sturdy container from Canadian Tire, the total had climbed to nearly $50.00. With the help of Prison Arts, who promised up to $200.00 toward materials, I brought the reworked sum back to the inmates. After much negotiating, we settled for the sum of $20.00. The inmates were allowed to spend up to $5.00 per week from their C.A.D.; hence a $20.00 outlay represented four weeks' allowance, or two pay periods. Thus considerable advance planning had to be worked out, to ensure the money was available when it came time to order the kits. The matter of the art kits threatened to derail the course. Neither I nor Susan wished to commit to investing until the inmates could guarantee the money was in their accounts, and would be there when it came time to distribute the kits. While I waited, various inmates capitulated, or threatened to quit, or wished to buy parts of a kit, claiming they already possessed certain items from it. The date the art kits finally were assembled, and I had invested nearly $200.00 of my own money, was the day the course was canceled. Naturally, at that point not a single inmate, nor, therefore, Susan, wished to follow through on their part of the arrangement. Had the art kits been made available to those six individuals earlier, this tangible evidence of their commitment might have persuaded them to continue the investment of their time as well. With each passing week, art kitless, the inmates' frustration mounted. Neil laid the onus of blame squarely at my feet. I told him the matter was in the hands of the institution: I had done all I could do to expedite the release of funds. Neil taunted me, "Passing the buck too, are you?" I protested my innocence but of course the arrow had found its mark. A few days after the course was canceled, Susan told me over the phone that the institution would not allocate the funds, and therefore Prison Arts was retracting its financial aid as well. I would be left with six unwanted art kits. I had some difficulty explaining what this reversal of their promise meant to me. I had shopped at more than six different stores, and tendered a special discount or sale price with most, long after the sale period had ended. In other words, favors were done for me; I hardly felt keen to return all 65 the items to said suppliers. Susan listened to my panic-laced protests, then calmly said, "I get the feeling you aren't being very cooperative with us, Graeme". I resisted a litany of indignation, but quietly agreed that we should wait to hear from Prison Arts to determine the fate of the art kits. When I called Gary Wyatt of Prison Arts that evening, he told me the main concern they had with the art kits was with providing funds toward the purchase of art materials for the sole and personal use of the inmates, something they are averse to doing under any circumstances. Normally they will provide materials they have, or allocate funds toward their purchase, when an artist brings a program into the prison. But when the program finishes, any remaining materials come back to Prison Arts. He agreed to buy back all art supplies I had collected and parceled into each kit. The kits themselves, plastic tackle boxes, I was able to return to Canadian Tire. I cannot recall who suggested the art kits in the first place. In a way they came to symbolize the art course itself - long in gestation, yet underutilized; supported initially, then rejected by the inviting institution, and ultimately delivered back to the same service provider, Prison Arts Foundation. They were responsible for matching my request to the host site. The art kits consumed only part of my material concerns. For each class paper, paints, brushes and drawing media needed to be in place. I made an arrangement with the art technician at the U . B . C . Faculty of Education to replace any equipment and supplies I borrowed. Prison Arts provided some drawing supplies - charcoal, pastel and sundry tempera paints - and the institution had a supply of assorted materials. As with the operation of any art course, various items had to be purchased 'on the fly'; I kept all receipts and Prison Arts kindly reimbursed me for those incidentals as well. Books, slides, slide projectors and videotapes had to be moved into and out of the site each evening. Most of these came from the U . B . C . library and the Audio-Visual Centre at the Faculty of Education. Magically, everything came back without a single theft or loss. 66 The need for a vehicle at my disposal meant having to approach the same few friends I knew who had cars, and were willing to give them up from between 4:00 and 10:00 p.m. or later, either of two evenings a week. Transportation became such an ongoing uncertainty, and taxed the patience of one friend so much, that I was compelled to purchase an old vehicle, a 1984 Plymouth Reliant. The drive to the prison meant heading into rush hour traffic, which caused the delays early on in the course, as I had not anticipated the extra time required for the journey, typically one and a half hours to travel 60 kilometres. One evening I had to cancel a class for lack of a vehicle. On those days I did arrive on time, I would be stressed by the pressure of time, or having all the materials I needed at my disposal. Neil's reproach over my tardiness impressed upon me the importance of being punctual, even if I was only a volunteer staff. From other prison teaching and reading, I was aware of the importance of change in routine and its adverse effect on prisoner morale. Some of this is deliberate, intended to keep the prisoners at a manageable level of uncertainty. Otherwise there seems no rational purpose in the capricious alterations of schedules on the part of the administration. My course was offered during the prisoners' leisure-time: relatively unstructured, compared with daily programs. I was soon made to realize the importance of these apparently casual hours. Conflicting Roles: Researcher versus Teacher From the outset I wished to be open about the purpose of my offering the art course free to the inmates at this medium security institution. Describing my intentions on my first day there, I told them clearly what it was I was hoping to find from them, and what they could expect from me, with a brief synopsis of the course. This synopsis I handed out to the men who came to try the introductory 'potato print' class. Again, at the end of the second regular class, I explained to the men - most of whom were new - what kind of research I intended to conduct. I read aloud from the consent form, clarifying any unfamiliar concepts or unclear passages. I explained what ethnographic research was, what 67 it was not, and told them that as members of an all-male society in confinement, they constituted a kind of culture. The men seemed to listen to all this intently: perhaps this was the first time they had thought of their existence as prisoners in any remotely positive way. Neil asked me whether I intended to publish the results in a book. I told him I was considering submitting an article from this in a journal such as Art Education, a copy of which, fortunately, I had brought with me that evening, and which I showed him. I gathered he was concerned about confidentiality; I took care to ensure them of my discretion in that regard. There seemed a desire on his part to discover my true, hidden intention: this question resurfaced throughout the duration of the course, refusing to die no matter what assurances I offered. The suspicion was that I was not who I appeared to be, that under the guise of art education I was conducting psychological profiles, which I intended to release to the authorities. There was some reason for the men's quasi-paranoia: Before my arrival, a researcher from U.B.C. had devised psychological questionnaires which he administered to several inmates at this institution. The results were used to determine those inmates who demonstrated potential psychopathic tendencies. These men were then 'encouraged' to submit to specific rehabilitative programs. I was happy to offer the copy of Art Education as tangible proof of my professional background: even the concept of therapy was one I had no active interest in exploring. Nonetheless, the inmates live under constant siege of surveillance and psychological testing. Neil asked me what would happen should staff get their hands on interview tapes or any notes I had taken of my time in here. I told him in that case I would destroy the documents. One or two of the inmates took time to return their consent forms and the interest/experience questionnaires I had passed out. The other members of the class were invited to remain, as was indicated on the consent form. As added incentive to the volunteer participants, I offered free sketchbooks, hoping they would use them on a day- 68 to-day basis as sketch diaries, which I could then examine as further data. Satyajit was quick to point out the hidden cost, of permission to examine them, attached to the books. The men filled out their consent forms with an air of resignation, as if this were yet one more piece of evidence that might be used against them. Satyajit asked me who else would be interviewing them. I misunderstood him, thinking he had asked who the other person would be, in the classroom, when I was interviewing them one-on-one. I told him, Louise Howard, the colleague from my department who had promised to teach a session in papermaking. My answer only alarmed him further. On the consent form, I had asked for two occasions to interview the men. Satyajit had understood this passage as two people: hence the confusion. It took a few minutes to clarify the misunderstanding. Neil's suspicion of my research intentions reached its apogee when he interrogated me on that last evening of classes. He accused me of trying to 'put one over' on the men. I confessed that I too found the entire procedure a little artificial: having set up the parameters, I had in effect a 'captive audience'. I allowed how I would have preferred to come in during regular art classes, but that no institution in the lower mainland had any such course operating in a systematic, long-term way. Certainly there was nothing like the eastern Ontario medium security institution where I had taught the two previous summers. There, because of the province's different secondary school completion requirements, prisoners must amass a certain number of credits toward their graduation diploma. One of these credits may be in visual art. In British Columbia, inmates work on a general secondary school equivalency program to attain their diplomas. Specific credits are not assigned or completed in a cumulative way. So, I told Neil, this little construction of mine would have to stand in. When I repeated my 'hypothesis' to Neil and Sean, they appeared intrigued by my search for evidence of how inmates in incarceral settings experience time. Neil suggested I go 'under cover', and stay on the premises a few days, posing as an inmate. I admitted I 69 would be afraid for my personal safety, and besides, the deception would pose a serious breach of research ethics. Neil's assurance that, of the over 350 inmates in this institution, fewer than half were serving time for violent crimes, gave me little comfort. Security and Space In this section issues pursuant to institutional policy are covered. I claim no insider knowledge with regard to general correctional policy. Indeed, what policies I could surmise from one institution, with respect to security, seldom matched those of another. The issues surrounding space include both those I was permitted and those I was denied, for the purpose of implementing the art course. Logistical problems and staff maneuvers are treated more fully in the following two sections; here I concentrate on physical descriptions of those areas. My treatment of security clearance issues as a separate section concerns itself mainly with the ways in which the institution's policies effected access of volunteers, materials and supplies, and information and surveillance. Volunteer Access One of the earliest items of confusion came about in my first week at the institution when Mr. Hyde took responsibility for my security orientation. This duty is normally carried out by Alicia, but for reasons unknown, Mr. Hyde assumed the job. On my second visit to the institution, when I arrived to teach the mini-art lesson that afternoon, he offered me a seat adjacent to his and Freida's desks in the Program Office, handing me a large folio of reading material concerning security and the history of Canada Corrections. Freida had me fill out an application for an 'enhanced security check' - required of anyone applying to volunteer in a correctional facility in Canada. This document, a two page questionnaire, contains a list of straightforward statements beside which are two columns, 'yes' and 'no'. Following Freida's instructions, I checked off the appropriate box beside each question. 70 The application was then sent to Ottawa, and returned 'incomplete', a week later: they required one's initials in the spaces I had marked with a check. The oversight set back my plans by another week The volume of literature Mr. Hyde laid before me posed a challenge to get through in the two hours that Alicia had advised me to set aside. Nonetheless, the material had to be read, if not wholly understood, before I could sign a form stating that I had been briefed as to internal security procedures and protocol. I read a thick document called the Volunteer Orientation Manual, in addition to a small booklet with statistics about Canada's justice system and incarceration history, and watched three videotapes (a total running time of about one hour). The first video, produced in the United States, and featuring what appeared to be real inmates and security personnel, (It was filmed at San Quentin and Soledad Prisons in the 1970s) dealt with some of the set-ups, or ways that prisoners will attempt to coerce or manipulate staff. The second, produced locally, was targeted at the close friends and relatives of prisoners, and took a hard view of visitors caught bringing any form of contraband into an institution. The third was a slick piece of propaganda produced by the Department of the Solicitor General. Titled "A Different Perspective: The Mission of the Correctional Service of Canada" (1989), it outlined five core 'values': 1): The rights and dignities of individuals; 2): The law-abiding potential of offenders; 3): the importance of professional staff; 4): the sharing of ideas and knowledge; and 5): the importance of operating with openness and integrity in a democratic society. My impression of this institution was that it made no effort to live up to the last two of the noble objectives of Canada Corrections. Mr. Hyde also lent me a bright yellow book, entitled Games Criminals Play, to take home and read at my leisure. Written by a former guard and published by Canada Corrections, on its cover was a crude drawing of a prison guard dangling on strings like a marionette, while a much larger man, dressed like a convict, held the controls. Mr. Hyde 71 told me the book was an important introduction to the various set-ups and other ways inmates attempt to manipulate new staff and volunteers. I felt ambivalent about reading the book, imagining it took a hard line with convicts. Still it was my intention to scan its contents. Before I could do so, Mr. Hyde asked me to return it. My session at the Program Office consumed the entire morning and threatened to eat into the afternoon as well. Only when I asked Freida whether I would have a chance to teach my mini-lesson, did she intervene and send me over to the school. When I asked Mr. Hyde about the wide disparity between the time required for his orientation and Alicia's, his answer was, he had a more thorough security package, one which demanded an entire day to get through. The difference seemed to be a matter of personal preference, rather than set policy. The end result was the same: I had the privilege of wearing a pink ' V pass, which meant that I could walk and teach unaccompanied within the compound. A yellow pass requires a security escort at all times. In spite of the level of access I was granted, initially I found Susan kept a close watch over me, perhaps more for my protection than due to any suspicion of my intentions. For the first two classes, she remained in a classroom adjacent to the P.O.V.. Each night after that, the length of her presence in the P.O.V. area diminished until she would allow me to wander down at the beginning of each class and leave me alone with the inmates the entire time, making her appearance only at the end, to let me know it was time to pack up. Most evenings, Susan would be called up from the front gate, to meet me and escort me over to the hobbyshop in the Social Development wing. To get there, one has to pass the front desk, go through a metal detector, where another guard will sweep a metal- detection baton over one, before they open an electric fence. Passing through this gate will gain one entry to the Visitor Control area, a sort of middle ground in terms of security, as prisoners are released unaccompanied into this area when they have visitors. Beyond this section, before entry to the cell blocks and Social Development wing, another formidable 72 gate must be passed through. On either end of this second gate are electrically secured doors, with a glassed-in guard station, known as a 'bubble', in between. Here Susan would pick up the keys required to open the P.O.V.: one regular 'Yale' type key, several small, flat keys for turning lights on and off, and a large, heavy brass key, perhaps six inches by three inches, to secure the door of the P.O.V.. She also would obtain an emergency personal paging device, or P.P.D.. Somewhat larger than a regular pager, it is used to alert guards in case of an attempted hostage taking, or other threatening incident. The pager is connected to a panel in the bubble, and electronically matched to a particular room. On rare occasions I was left to pick up these items on my own. Another panel in the bubble showed several video monitors linked to areas within the cell units: Foucaults' (1979) Panopticon redesigned for the 1990's. I wondered what might happen, should I be assailed at some moment outside the P.O.V. area. The front gate presented inconsistent levels of scrutiny, depending on the personal whim of the guard on duty on a given evening. While a man in the bubble checked a list of staff or special visitors, another guard, male or female, would look through the materials I was bringing inside. The outside guard generally would have a more personable manner, although one female guard would look through my possessions with a hawk's eye, carefully noting all items on my return. One evening I encountered some difficulty with my usual easy access. Apparently the official document stating my intent and the duration of the course, which had to be posted inside the bubble, had been mislaid. The outside guard, an older man, made a very cursory check of my materials and told the guard inside the bubble, a much younger, burly man, to let me on through. The inside guard was not about to let me through for, try as he might, he could not find the pass sheet anywhere. The older guard got visibly angry, verbally abusing the younger one, who insisted on producing the letter of permission before he would grant me access. He telephoned Susan, who had to come to the gate to allow me through: evidently she had more authority than the older guard. Susan promised 73 him she would obtain another copy of the pass sheet, which I noticed was in place when I left that evening. My interactions with the front guards comprised some of my most pleasant exchanges with staff. One evening I noticed an outside guard glancing at the book Games Criminals Play. I told him what it was about and asked him whether he had read it. He answered no, that as part of their regular training, security staff get an intensive exposure to types of set-ups that some inmates will attempt on staff. He added, he thought the book should be a lot larger. Canada Corrections' policy toward security would appear to be administered internally, allowing a variety of strictness with respect to volunteer clearances. My problems with obtaining clearance for Louise Howard, a papermaker, appeared all the more unreasonable when she told me that, due to the interest Prison Arts showed toward her upcoming placement at this institution, she was assigned to do a workshop at the local women's correctional facility in advance of the return of her security check. Her application with the men's institution was returned, like mine, with an 'incomplete' designation: She had put an initial in place of her first name (one she never used) and a bureaucrat at Regional Headquarters wanted to know what it was. My clearance with the eastern Ontario institution required no red tape: Having been hired as a teacher through the facility's educational service may have had some bearing in that situation. Although the policy of Canada Corrections clearly states, on its application for volunteer and contract worker clearance, that a criminal record does not necessarily deny one access, this condition would be considered grounds for refusal in all but the most exceptional cases. Applicants with Prison Arts are asked this question, and are screened for that reason. Minimum security institutions have a more lenient policy in this respect. At any institution, the major hindrance to security clearance is a record of drug trafficking. 74 Materials and Supplies My second entry into the facility took nearly 45 minutes at the front gate, as I had not been assigned a regular security pass, a page-long document describing the nature of the course I would be teaching and for how long. I was carrying some questionable items, the greatest security concern being a class set of X-acto knives, and enough potatoes and yams for each inmate student to make an illicit distillery. The X-acto knives fell within the institution's one inch allowance for blades. Other cutting implements, such as scissors with blades up to three and a half inches, were permitted. Generally, I was impressed with the range of supplies that are permitted (see Appendix VI). For unusual equipment and supplies, special approval could be arranged through the Hobbyshop Officer. A letter of request is sent to Regional H.Q.; the turnaround time can be up to two weeks. This policy applies to materials used in the inmates' cells as well. Not everything is permitted: beside the suspect food items, explosives, glass and diamond wire (used to file through metal) are prohibited. A surprise to me, Frank told me solvents and flammable liquids are not restricted. An inmate is allowed two hobbies in his cell, and two in the hobbyshop. Unlike the eastern Ontario facility, for example, clay was allowed. When I ordered clay for the summer art course back east, the principal gave his blanket approval. At that facility, unlike the one in the Lower Mainland, guards would visit the art classroom twice each day: morning and afternoon. One unhappy day, they demanded I remove the clay. The principal told me that clay was deemed a security risk as it could be used to make impressions of keys. How and why inmates were given access to keys, he would not say. As with volunteer security, each correctional facility is given a wide margin of discretion when it comes to permitting materials. Nearly as arbitrarily-dispensed is the way the front guards will search through one's belongings. The female guards I encountered were more careful in their scrutiny than 75 the males, but I could not generalize, based on my experiences. One woman took extreme care in counting out the set of gouges I had brought for linocut printing. She told me they could not be left at the facility, and that inmates were not permitted them in their cells. One exception to this rule was Rick, who had a larger woodcarving set of his own. One's own level of tolerance will also determine the type and number of tools that one might bring into the facility and use with complete ease. Again, the eastern Ontario institution had a 'no blades' policy, which impaired the delivery of one session I wished to teach: cardboard construction. For this activity, a carpet knife is required to cut the cardboard shapes. I smuggled one in, in the interest of artistic freedom, assuring myself and the class that only I would use it: I precut a variety of standardized shapes, and told the men if they wished to have a cardboard piece cut further, they would have to come to me. That policy lasted about half a day. As I trusted them with the knife, I felt comfortable allowing them to pass it around, and braced myself for any vexation from staff. At the Lower Mainland institution, instead of pushing the limit on materials, I stopped well behind it: for the enlargement exercise, I opted to bring push pins, instead of the more precise and manageable biological probes, for the inmates to trace a gridiron on to their sheets of mylar. Information and Surveillance There were few but noticeable incidents when the feeling of being watched by an anonymous system made itself present. The most obvious example was the space I was assigned for the course, the Program Office Vestibule. Mr. Sandstone was open about his purpose in having the course where it was: the area had video surveillance. Given the tense atmosphere of a medium-security institution, any evidence of electronic supervision should come as no surprise. Additional observation, in the form of staff designated to the area, seemed like an unnecessary caution. My protestations had no effect, despite my oft- repeated claim that I had taught in a medium-security institution before. Susan was 76 dispatched to the area until, in her estimation, I was able to handle the class alone. When she drew my attention to the noise from the overhead fan I wondered, at first, whether she was bothered by its interfering with her ability to hear us. The sensation occurred to me that there was an endless loop of watching and observing going on: here was I, researching through observation of the inmates. They in turn were watching me, looking for any weak spots or hidden agendas; meanwhile we both were being observed by guards somewhere via the video camera. And Susan was observing us as well. By simply repositioning myself, joining Susan, I crossed an invisible boundary of 'observee' (by Susan) to observer (Susan and Graeme: inmates). Meanwhile we (Susan and I) were also observees, by both the inmates and the camera. I brought up this issue of surveillance with the inmates one evening, when I distributed copies of an article by Michael Piazza (1996) from the alternative culture magazine White Walls. I asked them whether they thought the video monitors could pick up sound. As inmates would have already ascertained this feature, I knew the question was rhetorical. Nobody said anything. My intention was to invite their trust, to demonstrate that I was unequivocally on their side. I told them that whatever we said within the P.O.V. was confidential. I was not about to run to the guards, or Susan, with the information they gave me. The exception, I told them, was anything that threatened security. Passing around the large article, which included several illustrations whose size I wished to keep intact, I attempted to draw parallels with their situation. The article documented an art exhibition, curated by the author, within the walls of a youth detention centre in Chicago. The multimedia show drew on the residents' experience and attitudes of being incarcerated. One exhibit, titled 'Surveillance/Surveilled, or Andy In/Andy Out', concerned a former resident of the centre, Derrick H., who had made a videotape of the building's exterior upon his release. My effort at inspiring a politically based art form that challenged the safety of their regular imagery and realistic 77 style, was perhaps too abstract. The inmates dutifully took the articles away, and that was the last I saw or heard of them. Space The Program Office Vestibule where my course was allocated gave no sense of intimacy or containment. Being a vestibule, it was literally a thoroughfare to other areas: the main office at one end, classrooms and washrooms along both sides, a custodial closet with open grating looking out to the compound beyond. The ceiling was two stories high, with a mezzanine and gallery overlooking the area from above. From the ceiling hung a large fan and the ubiquitous fluorescent tubes. A loud, intrusive hum came from the central air unit, which could not be turned off. That, combined with the flat, hard surfaces, rendered the acoustics abysmal: Video players became audibly useless at any level. Even with seating close enough that one could almost touch the monitor, the reverberation made listening an ordeal. Given the choice of P.O.V. or nothing, I had to humanize it, as much as possible. I would circumscribe the cavernous area by pulling the side tables into a comfortable horseshoe arrangement, with seats placed along the outside edge. This left an open area of about two metres square, inside the horseshoe, in which I could stand and talk, set up a video monitor or screen for viewing slides, or pull up another table to use for still life arrangements. There was no question of being allowed to install any short-term displays, to tell the rest of the institution, "Here we are." My view, that communication of one's art to an audience, no matter how restricted, is the final, linking stage of a process, had no currency here. The exercises we were doing would remain just that. The other consideration, storage, had no available solution. Limited space in the hobbyshop closet was taken up with other supplies. The prospect of taking finished works back to their cells was limited by the inmates' extremely confined personal space. A cell of roughly two meters squared will soon be taken over by art supplies, never mind finished work, as Rick pointed out to 78 me. He told me his cell in Saskatchewan was even more crammed than his cell here, with all his art supplies stuffed under his bed. M y first choice, the room known as 'Social D.', had a slightly ramshackle, forgotten appearance, a variety of textures and variegated surfaces, including a sloping ceiling, a faux skylight (it actually housed a fluorescent fixture), cupboards, wood paneling, even a dais on the floor. Alongside two walls were stacks of institutional tables. One wall had thin, ersatz stained-glass windows, with stacks of cinder blocks in decorative fan-shapes, which allowed some light penetration. This was a prison, after all. The space resembled an abandoned chapel. Most important, it had a sense of containment, and removal from the panoptic surveillance system. It was approached from a corridor which branched off the hall outside the hobbyshop, then through a set of wooden doors. Washrooms and a small windowed office extended off either side of this corridor. By the time Susan offered me the space, my art course was foundering. This was my last full evening, when Abe finished his linoprint and Sean and Neil came in to interrogate me. In other respects, this institution housed a considerable array of art and hobby equipment: two large kilns, several workbenches, two potter's wheels, and a separate and completely-equipped woodworking area. The ongoing nature of the inmates' other hobbies, chiefly stained glass, prohibited my entry to the hobbyshop, except to access the etching press. The inmates' work was left in careful arrangement on their benches. And those who were at work in the area would keep a watchful eye over their mates' projects. As Gary Wyatt confirmed, one's ideal studio area does not exist in any institution. Art teachers worth their pay are adept at improvising whatever area they are assigned in which to conduct their program. The irony was that here was a nearly perfect space, unusable, for reasons that in my hubris I considered secondary to the more important cause of program delivery. 79 Staff Resistance This section addresses any unsuccessful aspects of interaction with staff: breakdowns in communication, resistance to requests for alternative space and scheduling, and other impressions I had of bad faith. Problems arose chiefly with administrative staff, who, between Programs and Social Development, typically would shuffle off my entreaties with bureaucratic finesse. Other researchers, teachers and art therapists working in prisons have described the bureaucratic side-stepping that characterizes administrative attitudes to rehabilitative and educational programs there. Goldin and Thomas (1984) found that adult education programs may be more symbolic than substantive. Tentative or newly formed programs are threatened by administrative subversion; conflicts between administrators and teachers create slippages that can undermine self-directed learning. Knights (1989), summarizing Foucault (1979) and Quebec educator Lucien Morin (in Knights, 1989), traces the particular ethos of bureaucracies, how they have developed according to the dominant capitalist social structure, and how this system operates to inhibit significant effects from rehabilitative programs in favour of maintaining the social status quo. This 'business-as- usual' attitude manifests itself in the greater value given to security, over rehabilitation, in prisons. Working in Bedford Prison, England, Edwards (1994) located the problem of impaired programs with the scant communication between the different agencies working in prisons, and prison administration. Evidence of agreement or common direction was rare, and seldom were prisoners included in decisions. Clearly, prison security and programs constitute two discreet streams of management, each with its own agenda and operating budget. Less clear, but highly suggestive, is the greater importance assigned to security, or safe containment, within the prison structure. The following incidents are offered as evidence of the symbolic, as opposed to substantive, support for my research which the administrators and support staff of this institution demonstrated. 80 Access and Orientation Between the time my letter of request was dispersed throughout the correctional network in the lower mainland, and I received contact from the first and only institution, over a month had passed. Tanya, the hobbycraft officer there, expressed an interest in hosting my art course; she told me to contact their Program Director in order to set up a time for me to begin. I called Mr. Hyde and left a message with his secretary to contact me. After nearly six weeks of unreturned messages, I began to doubt the viability of this institution as host, and considered returning to the eastern Ontario prison where I had taught the Pilot Study art course the previous summer, to conduct my research. At that point the Program Director returned my call. We decided on a date for me to visit, fortunately within that week. The first day I visited, Mr. Hyde was not available, but his assistant Freida introduced me to the new, interim hobbyshop officer, named Gus. Tanya had left the position - one she had held for over two years - to assume another within the institution. Mobility of staff within an institution is frequent: Ascending levels of power, in prison management, present themselves regularly. Gus escorted me throughout the institution, introducing me to several staff. The tour took us most of the working day. I met with the Assistant Warden, in charge of programs, who gave me her official endorsement. Gus brought me inside a "bubble", the thick-glassed corner office at the juncture of two cell blocks, or wherever a security gate is located. Between these privileges and the free lunch, I felt I had been given the V.I.P. treatment. I thanked Gus profusely when he returned me to the Program Office. From there Freida and I arranged a date for me to return for security clearance and orientation. I also asked to offer a 'demo' class, in potato printmaking, as a way of generating interest in the course. This did not seem to present a problem: the orientation typically required about two to three hours; the afternoon we selected, a Friday, would be ideal to offer the art course, as regular classes were fairly loose and attendance was optional on the last afternoon of the week. 81 In retrospect, my return visit that Friday likely did not leave Mr. Hyde with a positive impression. That morning, I interrupted him several times, asking for clarification of passages: Given the context of a certain passage, was the word goal the incorrect spelling of gaol? He agreed it was, appearing somewhat distratced. Were inmates held in segregation still denied all personal items, including T.V.s? Mr. Hyde said he would have to check on the latter item. Some time later, he returned with an answer, no. The document he had given me, written in the mid-1980s, needed updating. At this point, he made no effort to conceal his agitation and embarrassment. Renegotiated Space Although Tanya had left the hobbyshop management, she attended my first evening class. Her presence was invaluable, as we were doing gesture and contour exercises, a difficult class in which to involve students, especially adult males, as it requires every student to act as model by striking short poses while the others make rapid gesture drawings. Tanya's enthusiasm helped the men overcome their.inhibitions. My late arrival that evening put me in a poor position to complain, but I did, when I saw where the art class was to be held. Without warning, somebody had overruled my choice of space, and put us in the Program Office Vestibule, or P.O.V.. The unexpected change shocked me. On the day Gus had escorted me around, I had met with Alicia, the woman in charge of allocating spaces for inmate clubs and groups. Her department is known as Social Development, and concerns itself with any non-program, or leisure-time activities. With her I had selected the room known as 'Social D.', located across the hall and down about 20 metres from the hobbyshop. I chose those evenings the room was available to teach the art class. Tanya told me it was reserved for Native programs. When I expressed my dismay with Tanya, she told me I would have to take it up with Mr. Hyde. The next morning I phoned him. He told me the matter was out of his hands, and referred me to Mr. Sandstone, the Director of Social Development. This man 82 sounded mystified that I should find the P.O.V. less than ideal. His main rationale for the switch was that this area had video surveillance. I told him I had worked previously in a medium security institution, one that was, if anything, more dangerous than this one, and in a room without video monitors. In a calm but strained voice I outlined several reasons for my dissatisfaction. I mentioned the lack of adequate storage, and the sterility of the space. Mr. Sandstone heard me out, then said, "I'll see what I can do." A follow-up call two days later connected me with Gus: Mr. Sandstone was "not available at the moment". Gus told me the space had not been changed, and assured me that, in spite of my protestations, the matter had been taken "to the highest level"; I would simply have to accept whatever space they saw fit to assign me. When I started to protest, Gus asked me if he could speak to me "on the level." He proceeded to say the staff and inmates did not like my personality; they found me arrogant, and acting as though I were doing everybody a big favour by offering the course. I asked him whether the inmates felt this way about me as well. Gus clarified, but added that they were bothered by my late arrival on the first evening. I listened, chastened. Gus advised me to simply "play along by the rules," and once I proved myself by the strength of the program, I would eventually "have the power" to demand more privileges. I thanked him for the advice and hung up. This antipathy of which Gus enlightened me was to cast a pall over my relations with the staff for the duration of the course. Security Clearances Some weeks into the course, I prepared to have Louise Howard, a papermaker, cleared for security. This meant approaching Alicia who, as Social Development Co- ordinator, also gave volunteer staff their orientations. After two calls through the institution's switchboard, who told me she was not in her office, I discovered Alicia was not expected in for the entire week. A call to Mr. Hyde's office brought me the now familiar refrain that the matter was "out of his hands." 83 Meanwhile, Gus had moved up the institution stream, into Case Management. His replacement, Susan, was a law student with work experience at that institution as security guard, and was acting as temporary fill-in for the summer. She told me that the institution could not do Louise's orientation until her security application was cleared from Ottawa. How odd - they had managed to do so for me. Susan said I would have to get Louise's completed application back to her first; she would then send it to Regional Headquarters with a priority request. Thus another week was needed before Louise could even set foot inside the institution. My understanding was that she had to sign the enhanced security clearance in person, at the site: that is what Mr. Hyde had demanded of me. I asked Susan why she did not let me know of this a month before: I could have returned with Louise's signature long before this time. Susan's reply was that Alicia had already informed me of all of this. If Alicia had told me of this protocol, it would have had to have been the only time I spoke to her at any length, on my first day of orientation - before my security clearance was even sent away! I could not fault Susan for the misinformation, as deliberate as it seemed. Application delivered, I contacted Alicia to determine when Louise might be allowed to meet with her for her orientation. Alicia informed me that she had nothing to do with Louise's security clearance, nor with the operation of the hobbyshop as such. Her feeling was that it would take more than a week for Louise's clearance to return. Program Scheduling and Enrollment Well into the summer, fewer and fewer men were showing up to class. Susan suggested my art course might recoup some of its declining enrollment if I were to offer classes on Saturdays, for five to six hours. On weekends, the inmates found themselves with more free time on their hands than during weekday evenings. I considered her suggestion, and added that it might be advantageous to the inmates, to start and finish a unit on the same day: they had demonstrated little carry-over, from one evening's class to 84 the next; the projects we started were often abandoned or resumed with desultory energy. Several times an inmate had to miss a follow-up class for the purpose of attending some other function, or meeting visitors. This way, if an inmate had no interest in a unit such as papermaking, he could simply forego the class, waiting until another day's unit appealed to him. The oil painting class that the itinerant painting teacher offered every few months at the institution was always well-attended. Part of her classes' success owed, I believe, to the immediate gratification of being introduced to a project, practicing it, and seeing its completion, all on the same day. The reduced competition for programs on weekends would mean less demand for certain spaces as well. Finally, the revised schedule would reduce my number of trips out to the institution by half. Considering all these advantages, I accepted her suggestion, telling her the following evening, I would like to change to Saturdays that week, if possible. Susan told me that would be highly unlikely: as a summer staff person, her wage was pre-set, and her hours, while they changed from day to day, were confined to weekdays. Bringing her on site on a weekend would entail additional wages, at time-and-a- half. I hastened to agree that would not work, reiterating my promise that my course would not cost the institution anything. Susan made no reference to the fact that the idea was her suggestion in the first place. Neither did I remind her, or question how the woman managed to teach the oil painting course on weekends. Tanya used to attend these sessions: I had noticed one of her efforts from that course hanging in the hobbyshop. But Tanya was on a salary, and, from my impression and the inmates' testimony, had been unusually devoted to her job. I had the impression, largely unprovable, that certain decisions regarding the status and fate of my course were being made, between Mr. Sandstone, Susan, Alicia and Mr. Hyde. Susan's role in this shadow play appeared to be one of appeasing me, giving the appearance of help, while acting on the decisions of Mr. Sandstone et al, who presumably wished to remain behind a veil of bureaucratic secrecy. Seldom could I reach them on the 85 telephone, and if by chance I did, the familiar line was "It's out of my hands." Between them the fate of my course and my research was being determined, yet nobody wanted to admit responsibility. My worst suspicions were confirmed when, on what became my last evening there, Susan delivered the shock announcement. Her news came out in small increments. She met me at the front gate in the usual way, we cleared the security posts and headed to the hobbyshop. On the way over Susan told me not to expect many men to show up that evening. The likelihood was that it would be my last evening at the institution. The full impact of what she told me did not register: I still hoped that we could work out a Saturday schedule. I set out the materials for a class in watercolour, and we waited about 20 minutes. Presently Jabhar arrived. As I began telling him what we were doing, Susan told him there would be no class that evening. One fellow who had not been attending the art course, but expressed an interest in pottery, came by. I told him I was planning to do pottery the next Saturday; this Saturday I had set aside for Louise to teach her papermaking unit. At that point Susan laid bare the institution's policy regarding extra pay for Saturday staff. Finally she made herself clear: Mr. Sandstone had decided to cancel the art course immediately. I asked to speak with Mr. Sandstone, who happened to be in the area, preparing to take part in a Native ceremony known as a 'Wee-pee'. As he advanced to the ceremony site (the room known as 'Social D.'), I introduced myself with what I considered a cordial yet serious demeanor. He said, "We've met," with obvious disdain. When I asked when, he answered, "On the phone." He told me that the art course was being canceled due to declining enrollment. I asked whether Louise, who had only then received security clearance, would still be allowed to come out that weekend. He said no, the activity would probably be well-attended, but for the wrong reasons, because Louise was a young woman. I pointed out that at 50, Louise could hardly be called young. Mr. Sandstone was resolute, speaking without a hint of apology. His attitude toward me was suspicious, more 86 suited to an unwanted intruder than an invited guest. His argument bespoke a lack of awareness of the positive influence of women instructors in prisons (Boyle, 1977; Carrel & Laing, 1982; Szekely, 1984). When asked whether I might return to interview those inmates who had volunteered, he allowed that would be possible in the Visitor Control Area. In short, my access to the unit was henceforth denied. He added that he saw no useful purpose to the research I was conducting. A Native woman was urging Mr. Sandstone to come along; the ceremony was about to begin. Back in the hobbyshop office I continued my discussion with Susan, accusing Mr. Sandstone of undermining my course from the beginning by assigning me to the P.O.V.. Susan said that there was no way they would allow me into the room known as Social D., as that was restricted. If so, I wondered, why had Alicia promised it to me on my first day there? Susan admitted Mr. Sandstone had been in favor of canceling my art program all along. She said the administration perceived me as a threat, a potential carrier of contraband because, as a volunteer, I had nothing to lose. I wondered whether her remark was a veiled reference to my having given a banana each to two inmates, a few weeks earlier, to 'bribe' them into helping me clean up after a still life painting session. Knowing bananas can bemused to make stills, I had stressed that they had to eat them there. Once the offending bananas were handed over, the inmates pocketed them and bolted for the door; I realized my error in judgment: Jabhar insisted that taking fruit from the kitchen happened all the time; to be caught with a banana would be considered a minor offense. My hunch was that if they were stopped and asked, my name would have escaped their lips like gas under pressure. Susan urged me to gather my supplies, many of which were mixed with those of the hobbyshop, and be on my way. She and Frank, the inmate hobbyshop manager, helped me out with my gear, Susan accompanying me as far as my car. At that point I gave vent to my feelings of frustration and indignation. Neither supporting nor arguing with me, 87 Susan heard me out; by this time she had revealed, in spite of her typical diplomacy, where her true allegiance lay. She suggested I write a letter to Mr. Hyde, the man responsible for approving my access to the institution in the first place. During a phone call to Gary Wyatt of Prison Arts Foundation, Gary assured me that I had done nothing untoward, that this kind of outcome with prison placements was not uncommon, and that I should not take it personally. He added that the particular institution I had been assigned to had a history of internal politics that impaired educational interventions by outsiders, an item of hearsay substantiated by two former employees of that institution. Later, in interview, Gary outlined a number of reasons why an art course can run aground in a prison. A negative experience with a previous art/s instructor can leave a lasting impression. Two of the hobbyshop officers that I dealt with came from a position of security. Gary said: So some people crossing over from guard into arts and crafts bring a whole different mindset. They actually don't believe that maybe [inmates] deserve what it is you're offering them. And they don't see it as something that they truly in their hearts support. Gary's partner, Marian Otterstrom, allowed that it has taken a long time for Prison Arts to gain the trust and respect of many arts and crafts officers, who initially were quite suspicious. The rapid turnover in arts and crafts officers within a given institution can also damage any inroads into private, below-the-surface operations. The institution where I was assigned witnessed a changeover of four arts and crafts officers during my brief tenure. Marian added that communication between prison staff and volunteers, and from one department to another in the same prison, is not always very good. Such things as advertising a program may not be handled very well, which can in turn affect attendance. I have deliberately avoided discussion of security guards within this section. On the whole, they acted in a professional, non-obstructing manner. Indeed, their cooperation and show of interest in what I was doing was a refreshing change from the officious manner in which many of the front gate guards at the eastern Ontario institution treated me. 88 Inmate Resistance Of a different kind from that of staff, the inmates' resistance was ongoing, and manifested itself in the form of unwillingness to experiment with certain art mediums, as well as a general suspicion with my real purposes in the institution. Some of these concerns have been discussed in the first section of this chapter, "Researcher/Teacher Dilemmas". A fear of psychoanalysis of the inmates, through their comments and their art work, seemed to permeate their interactions with me. Overall, with occasional exceptions, their comments were guarded. Perhaps due a tradition of verbal abuse, from other inmates, guards or their upbringing, at times they reacted to remarks I made as though they were intended slights. Where past experience and values might have created any blockage to the kinds of discussion and outcomes I had hoped for, I deal with these situations more completely in the section, "Inmates' World." Naturally, some overlapping is inevitable. Inmate Indifference By crediting a failure of my instructional strategies to excite the inmates' attention to the inmates themselves, the inference is that I am assigning the onus of responsibility to the inmates. The reality is, it was a shared responsibly. Whatever mismatches occurred did so because of a lack of awareness on my part of the needs and interests of the inmates. Thus to speak of indifference in this subsection is not to lay blame at anyone's feet, but to explore reasons for these mismatches. Only this way can such mistakes in judgment be circumvented in future art instructions in prisons. Early evidence of a mismatch presented itself during the introductory potato print session. My selection of this process was guided by its economy, a hoped-for familiarity, relative ease of execution and fairly high level of success: one can achieve satisfactory results without having to rely on exceptional drawing skills. I replaced potatoes with yams for their firmer, woody texture: they will allow more subtle detail in the carving, and stand up to a longer run of prints than potatoes. 89 As I discovered, a highly successful outcome is no guarantee of interest on an inmate's part. Neil, the most contrary of the inmates in my class, finished his printing early. He had carved a sunset, using the ovoid shape of the yam's surface effectively in his design. One of the sun's rays was lopped off during the carving stage. He tried to correct the error by brushing in the area where the sunbeam should have been. This attempt at compensation is typical of novice printmakers: guided by an unreasonable perfectionism, and unfamiliar with the unique character of the print process, their efforts stand out more than if they were to leave the area blank, and instead make provisions for it through reworking the design. I said nothing, allowing Neil to try to overcome his frustration on his own. He showed no interest in trying another color, or altering his composition, or attempting another design. Instead he disparaged the process, calling it childish. The more sophisticated technique, linoleum printing, elicited similar indifference. As with many of the lessons, this one was spread over two evening classes. On the first class, Neil, Sean, Rick, Jabhar and a new student, Abe, joined in. I introduced the general medium of printmaking, by showing the class several different types: woodcuts by Durer, Piranesi's series of prison etchings, Japanese wood/serigraphy prints, and the lithographs and woodcuts of Kathe Kollwitz. These last were, I felt, closest to the possibilities inherent in linocutting; as well, they demonstrated a mastery of light and dark distribution, which I thought the men would recognize as they had been exposed to this element. Neil quickly gave up, proceeding to work on his stained glass in the hobbyshop. After some desultory efforts, Jabhar and Sean followed suit. None of them had a strong image they wished to render on paper. Had they only done that, I would have been able to guide their images through the intricacies of transferring, carving, inking and printing. Sean made the most concerted effort, but a general fatigue or lassitude overcame him, and he left. (Sean had a tendency to fall asleep from time to time, in other classes, especially during video presentations.) Only Rick and Abe remained. On the following evening, only Abe returned. Rick had his 'lifer's' meeting to attend. 90 The other process that received severe criticism was the drawing enlargement technique, in which a gridiron was employed to transfer a photographic image onto paper. In that situation, as mentioned, Doug was so discouraged that he left, never to return. The other inmates, however, submitted willingly to the rigors of this necessary conceptual stage. More obvious inmate indifference presented itself when I attempted to generate discussion, through the showing of videos and slides of artists' work, and raising of theoretical concerns. One successful occasion had to do with the symbolic properties of color. There was ample feedback as to the various symbolic associations with color. Here Colin and Satyajit were most vocal. Other inmates such as Jabhar offered their disputes; in this instance I welcomed the controversy. Neil, in a show of obvious boredom, made an ostentatious and abrupt departure without venturing a comment. Other discussions showed less success in the amount and kind of inmate response: perhaps their lack of experience and vocabulary with criticizing art works inhibited them. Large numbers of slides could be shown with a minimum of commentary. Then again, my selection of pieces may have left them cold. More provocative subject matter was, in retrospect, avoided. One slide, showing a cattle train loaded with Jews being delivered to Auschwitz, by Linda Frimer, was deciphered quickly by Jabhar. His interpretation consisted of the pithy, "Hitler's boys." When I asked for a more specific reading, none came forth, so I explained the location and incident. Jabhar, typically, asseverated, "That's what I said. It doesn't have to be any more specific than that." Jabhar's contradictory stance, here as with other occasions, seemed to be based upon a suspicion that any additional commentary on my part, even to round out his response, constituted an attack. Even well-produced videos, concerning the lives of artists, were received with tepid enthusiasm, except in the odd instance of a student knowing about the work of the artist being presented. This happened once, when I showed a video of the Surrealist movement, and Frank was pleased to watch a section on Salvador Dali that included a shot 91 of his famous work, The Persistence of Memory. When, after an especially lacklustre response to a video, I asked the class whether they found these videos interesting or worthwhile, Neil erupted with a characteristically sarcastic remark of "Oh, very." Part of the problem may have been the annoyingly poor acoustics in the P.O.V. space. The possibility of allowing inmate students to select their own slides from a folder, then present their selection, is worth pursuing with a longer, more formal credit-type art class. As this one was strictly for amusement, any aesthetic and art historical discussions were seen as cutting into the more important studio time. Education and Experience M y attempt throughout the duration of this course, as with any art instruction, was to build upon inmates' previous experience. Where that experience is lacking, or forgotten or incomplete, I consider it important to offer a course whereby each exercise continues and expands upon the lessons and skills gained in the previous ones. Without knowing what the inmates already had done, I was compelled to select and streamline a curriculum that I hoped both newcomers and those with previous art experience would find interesting. Anecdotal evidence suggests that students, especially those non-academically- streamed, hold alternative attitudes about the value of building upon previous learning. M y finding was that, if an inmate had done a given exercise, regardless of when and at what level, that was sufficient unto itself; further exploration in that area, or its use to other purposes, was irrelevant. Possibly, the want of stimuli in prisons, combined with a general lack of interest or experience in imaginative pursuits, inhibits an inquisitive mind and investigative spirit. Whatever the reason, the typical response to familiar exercises was one of almost reflexive dismissal. One of Neil's justifications for calling the potato print lesson childish may have been that another inmate had remarked that he had done this in grade school. Neil returned to this criticism when, on the last evening of regular classes, he and 92 Sean sat down with me to discuss my art research agenda. He told me he found the exercises beneath his ability, and considered them an insult to his intelligence. He apparently was unaware of how his statement contradicted his earlier point, that the course I taught was beyond the level of most of the inmates. The inmates' tendency was to treat each lesson as a discrete event, with little connection to the previous ones, save where a process had been interrupted by the end of the evening's session. The colour wheels were never used in any systematic way, despite specific lessons in painting, such as the reverse-colour painting, that called on considerable knowledge of colour theory. Neil dismissed with a single remark, the usefulness of viewfinders for selecting objects from a still life to make an effective life-size composition. He told me that they had done this method of viewfinding before. One evening Rick arrived later than usual, and, seeing what the class was doing, said "Oh, we're doing dot paintings, are we?", as if by this show of familiarity, he had some advantage over the rest of the class. A kind of preconception of what constitutes art influenced inmates' attitude toward materials. If a material was not fresh, and purchased from an art supply or craft store, it was suspect. For the unit in collage, I had brought in caning, burlap and other used items. Despite my introduction of the process showing the works of Picasso and Kurt Schwitters, nobody showed any interest in these materials, preferring to use color photographs, and (secondly) the photocopies of Victorian engravings. Sean joked that I was "Bringing the dregs to us in the joint." His remark recalled a telling comment that Don, from the eastern Ontario institution where I had taught the previous summer, had made regarding my using recycled yoghurt containers for water. He thought I was resorting to desperate measures because of the prison's niggardly budgetary allowance for the art course. The concept of using recycled materials in any artistic capacity is largely foreign to prisoners. A notable exception was Frank, the hobbyshop coordinator. He told me that when he is on the 93 outside, one of his favorite pastimes is foraging through garbage dumps in search of material for his sculpture and craft projects. Problems with teaching prisoners any discipline can occur whenever criticism is broached. Many prisoners have had unsuccessful experiences in regular art classes, and feel inadequate as art students; these negative memories will often inhibit the kinds of risk- taking needed in artmaking (Karban, 1994). Some of the most useful advice I received as a teacher in prisons came from the head teacher at the eastern Ontario institution, who told me to concentrate on the work when discussing a student's progress. In this way the inmate student's tendency to take criticism personally is reduced. At the institution this summer I refrained from the usual depth of criticism I might normally mete out, my role as a teacher being compromised by my volunteer status, the voluntary participation of the students, the non-credit status of the course and my other function as researcher. Still, occasions arose when I could not restrain my unsolicited tips. Sean, struggling with the contour drawing of a pepper mill, was one example. I offered assistance, showing him the 'ellipses' method of construction of the cylinder shape, thereby making an easier match between the two sides. He told me defensively he knew it was wrong and that he had not finished. Rather than listen to my suggestion, he seemed to hear only a rebuke, and recoil from it. This same student had earlier indicated a redefinition of his own capabilities as a nascent artist, when he proudly showed me a drawing he had finished between one class and the next. Apparently another inmate in his cell block showed him some tricks with shading. Sean had achieved accuracy with the drawing's contours via the gridiron exercise that I had set up, the one which Doug had rejected. Sean excitedly told me how he was looking at his surroundings in a new way, with a view to translating the most mundane scenes into carefully shaded drawings. Other arts instructors in prisons have noted similar instances of an inmate attempting to integrate important new information, not always as enthusiastically. Gary Wyatt spoke to me of one inmate who had to leave a creative writing class for a period of 94 time, in turmoil, "...to do some reassessment of what he had written." Edwards (1994) notes that she will only offer individual instruction in drawing when an inmate approaches her for it. A n art therapist, she differs in her rationale from me, but the two aspects of art overlap in prisons, where self-esteem, learning and self-expression are so closely linked. Differences in education and skills do not always translate into the handicap belonging to the inmate. In many crafts, for example, prisoners enjoy a level of skill and expertise to rival the professional on the outside. Stained glass, leathercraft, and woodworking are three domains in which, locally, inmate artists excel. I found all three of these crafts were approached with great seriousness in the institution. Without even amateur experience in any of these areas, I was averse to offering any input, beyond marveling at the inmates' sophistication. Artists hoping to teach in an institution where such media are entrenched securely in the leisure curriculum may find their proficiency directly challenged by the dominant inmate in that craft. Marian Otterstrom mentioned the trouble Prison Arts have had when placing an instructor of stained glass into one institution. Because one inmate has claimed the unofficial title of expert/teacher, he has generated resistance to any challenge to his influence, in spite of any additional information or technical skill outsiders may offer. Paranoia This subsection concerns those comments and other behaviors of inmates that suggested a level of distrust bordering on a paranoid attitude. A general suspicion of outsiders prevails with any initial contact: convicts are habituated to being measured, assessed, categorized and documented, as wards of society, for most of their lives (Foucault, 1979; White, 1993). Most have experienced incarceration from an early age. Anybody who presents him or herself as a researcher in prison can expect a wary reception on the prisoners' part. Attempting to overcome this wariness, and prove beyond doubt that you are on their side, not that of administration, can absorb a great deal of mental and 95 emotional energy. For my part, I never succeeded entirely. 'Fence sitting' is not an option; thus the classic notion in ethnography of the detached, non-partisan observer, has no meaning in a prison. From the start I tried to be open about the kind of research I was hoping to conduct, and the sorts of experiences that I thought might occur as a result of the art interventions I could offer. Time after time, Neil challenged me as to my true intentions. Satyajit's reluctance to turn in his consent form, and his concern over the number of interviewers I intended to use, suggested a hypersensitivity to the use I would put to the information I was seeking. Joking, I once replied to his query about what I intended with the inmates' art works I was gathering, that they would form a special collection in a museum somewhere. His expression was one of alarm as he said, "Really?" Despite repeated claims that I had no intention of submitting their art work to any psychoanalysis, Satyajit frequently asked me what plans I had for their art. To one of Neil's repeated questions, "Why am I so impatient?", I answered, "I don't know, Neil. Why are you so impatient?" He rejoined, "That's just what a psychologist would say. They always answer a question with a question." He and Sean then chatted about the subject of psychologists and psychiatrists in general. When Abe finished his printmaking, kindly allowing me a number of prints to keep, he joked that I could use it to analyze him. By this time I had given up trying to convince them of my indifference to psychoanalysis. Whatever recreational psychoanalysis occurred was in fact more often directed at me than the other way around. One evening I remarked to Colin my astonishment at the number of behaviour and attitude management programs he had undergone. Another inmate summed up an inmate's typical 'curriculum' this way: "After all the courses in psychology, all the behaviour modification and cognitive skills programs, we're about one half psychiatrist and one half psychologist. We can figure a person out pretty fast." The most transparent show of paranoia emerged when I arranged to interview those four or five inmates who had promised me their cooperation. Once I had called Alicia to 96 confirm that I would bring a tape recorder, she told me (with barely suppressed glee, I sensed) that three inmates had rescinded, adding that the inmates had found me altogether too pushy: I was accused of treating them like a class of kindergarten children. I had even, reputedly, forced them to use fingerpaint! The closest medium that they might have mistaken for fingerpaint was chalk pastel. Discussing this incident with Gary Wyatt and Marian Otterstrom, I was again relieved to find my experience not unusual. Prisoners have long memories, and transferring stories from one to another, as between any two people, can create fictions and wild exaggerations. One framing and matting session that Marian had offered elsewhere ran afoul when an inmate's mat was accidentally bent. Subsequent sessions were declined because, as rumour went, they (i.e. Marian/Prison Arts) broke the inmates' mats and frames. Perceived Slights Closely related to the previous section are those incidences of perceived slights and outwardly hostile interactions that impaired the delivery of the art course. I am not claiming personal exemption from responsibility in these situations; in the highly sensitive environment of prison, extra caution must be taken in one's personal interactions. At times, due to fatigue, or the feeling of being under siege, I would react more spontaneously, and with more aggression, than my professional role demanded. On the other hand, if the men enjoyed 'setting me up' I was a willing victim. At least it showed I was human, and in a fundamental way, on their level. This subsection deals more with their perceived humiliations than mine. For the latter I refer the reader to the section, 'Confrontations'. The most significant situation in this regard occurred early on: During the beginning of a class, I had to stop repeatedly when one inmate chose to talk and joke at precisely those moments when I had something to say. This strategy of classroom disruption will be familiar to any teacher. I approached the student and asked him to stop interrupting me. 97 Juan took offense at my direct reproach and left indignantly. Immediately I regretted what I had done. He was a lively and entertaining personality, one whom I had looked forward to having in the class. At the end of class, I asked his buddy, Neil, what was it that so offended Juan. Without answering directly, Neil told me that the inmates were annoyed at my showing up late for the second time in a row. Perhaps Neil wished to deflect attention away from Juan's embarrassment. Much later, when the art course was sputtering to its demise, Susan suggested that the reason I was losing so many men from my class might be partly due to my altercation with Juan. One of the cardinal rules in inmate-teacher interfaces is, never dress down a student in front of his mates. One should always take that student aside. The same student, feeling humiliated, may persuade others to boycott the course. Unlike regular schools, these men have to live with each other all day, every day. One's influence in a cell unit is much greater than on the streets. Gary Wyatt and Marian Otterstrom concurred with Susan's analysis. I doubted the extent of Juan's tactic of vengeance, assuming he engaged in one. Neil, for example, was one of the last remaining members of the class. There were occasions when an inmate would goad me, hoping that I would get enmeshed in his trap. These situations were intended, according to Paul (in interview), to determine on which side my allegiance lay. Alternatively, if they sensed a weak spot, any vulnerability on my part, they would close in. Confrontations This section deals with those episodes when I was directly culpable in my least successful communications with inmates. Some of the incidents may have the ring of familiarity, but my purpose here is in determining where my level of participation lay, even to the extent of initiating disputes. The section has been broken down into the following subsections: personal barbs and differences with program or curriculum. 98 Personal Barbs The principal character in the following scenes is Neil. Young, good-looking, witty, with a deceptively charming air, he appeared to take delight in stealing the attention of the class whenever he could. Of all the inmates there, his personality is perhaps the most intact, the least damaged by long-term incarceration. He first caught my attention when, during the introductory class, he asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Sensing the sarcasm in his remark, I replied that I was already 'grown up'. M y reply elicited a terse laugh from another inmate. Might this moment of levity, at Neil's expense, inspired an ongoing vendetta to persecute me? To believe the opinions of Susan and the directors of Prison Arts, it is possible. What I failed to grasp at the time was his genuine concern with my professional aims, a subject he returned to with almost obsessive persistence. He clarified his question: what did I hope to do with my art education degree? I told him that I was doing it, that is, teaching in prisons. M y answer did not seem to appease him. During the second class, Neil, bored after finishing his drawing, began to sort through a pile of contour and gesture drawings we had done on the first evening. Most of these were on newsprint, and as always I had stressed the disposable, exercise-only aspect of the pieces. I had brought in a can of charcoal fixative to spray some light/dark eraser drawings which the inmates were doing that evening. N e i l demanded that I find and spray his gesture drawings from the previous evening. I told him I would allow him one drawing to spray, as I did not have enough fixative to do everybody's. He accused me of being cheap. I told him I was paying out of pocket for the spray, and nobody was reimbursing me. He then crumpled up the pile of drawings he had set aside (many of which had been done by other inmates) and stomped off. I calmly set aside one unharmed drawing, intending to spray it for Neil's benefit, and put the others in the rubbish bin outside the P.O.V.. Neil returned and accused me of willfully destroying his artwork. I asked him what possible satisfaction he was getting from teasing me in this way. He seemed 99 momentarily at a loss for words. He grinned and said, "Don't you wish you could throw me out?" I answered, "But you are the best artist in my class." Earlier that evening Neil had spent a good deal of energy teasing me with a childish setup. When I refused to participate or acknowledge it, he persisted, until forced to explain the joke. This seemed to dissipate the energy of his attack. After a few evenings of this sort of persecution, I began to dread my sessions at the institution for the prospect of dealing with Neil. It required a great deal of energy to be on mental alert the entire time, beyond the customary 'automatic guard' that I summoned whenever I entered this 'high-medium' security institution. One evening, after a stressful day of planning, gathering materials, arranging transport and driving out in the midst of rush-hour traffic, I had a moment of relative peace when the men were quietly involved in their art. I collapsed in a chair. Neil saw me slouched, my eyes red-rimmed, and said, without a trace of empathy, "You look really tired." I admitted that I was. To his credit, he backed off a little that evening. Neil's most virulent attack ultimately hurt him. He had been volleying the usual barbs at me, such as "How did you ever get to be a teacher? This [exercise] is stupid. [Your Education Faculty] don't have very high standards if they let you in," and so on. I was passing around a blank sketchbook as a sample of the bonus I was offering to those inmates who volunteered to participate in my research. Neil snatched the book from his neighbour, turned it spine up and flipped through the pages. Out fell a receipt from Opus, the framing and art supply store. It is the store's policy to print the name, address and telephone number of their regular customers on each receipt. Neil picked up the receipt, read it, and in a bold voice announced, "I know a lot about you!" He waved the paper tauntingly and read it out. I tried to dismiss the import of his discovery, saying that the information was available in any phone book. Not convinced by my nonchalance, he said, "I think I'll pass this on to some of the gay guys in my cell wing. I'll tell them to give you a call when they get out." Satyajit laughed and, grinning, said there was a gay guy in the 100 kitchen where he works (as though this fact in itself were sufficient cause for humour). I told Neil, "Do that. M y social life is pretty boring; I could use a few dates." I might have used the opportunity to discuss the implicit homohatred in this incident, but felt the subject was a little too close for comfort. While I have no difficulty about being 'out' as a gay man, I feel the classroom is not an appropriate forum to proselytize. M y principal aim at the time was to defuse Neil's attack, which I felt I did. Still concerned by Neil's level of abuse, I called Susan the afternoon of the following class and described to her the incident, including, upon her asking, what Neil had said. She offered to do one of three things: bring the matter to Neil's Unit Manager, talk to Neil with me present, and talk to him by herself. We agreed she should speak with him alone. When I arrived for that evening's class, Susan told me that Neil had initially decided to quit the art class, but after some reflection, had opted to alter his behaviour. Susan added that if I had made it a major incident, I might have experienced a boycott of the class. N e i l , in the hobbyshop, wished to speak with both of us. In a clear voice, without his typical sarcasm, he spoke of various matters, refusing all the while to acknowledge that his conduct in the class had been anything but salutary. When I confronted him with his remarks about my professional abilities, he said that he was merely interested in where I had received my training and what my credentials were. He then apologized in an abstract way, saying, "If I have insulted or injured you personally in any way, then I apologize for it and w i l l not display such conduct in the future." I accepted his apology and welcomed him back to the class. Susan added her comments where appropriate, and had us all sign an incident report form, a copy of which she gave to Neil. Scanning this formal looking document, which would go into Neil's file, I noticed her closing comment: "It is my opinion that M r . L . has decided to reverse his decision to quit the art course in order to improve his chance at attaining transfer to William Head in the near future." William Head 101 is one of the softest institutions, in terms of security and on-site facilities, in British Columbia. It is known popularly as 'Club Fed'. One of the characteristics of a convicted offender's denial is a tendency to minimization, particularly with respect to the victim, when recounting his or her offense (Aulich, 1994). Neil, in my opinion, was acting in typical offender fashion, when he denied the nature and impact of the kinds of abuses he indulged in with me. At the same time, it is difficult to determine the limit of one's own tolerance, to know when innocent teasing becomes outright abuse. A l l teachers must find their own limits, and without being dogmatic, let their students know well in advance what behaviours they will and will not accept. At times I was oversensitive to Neil's goading. Once, telling a story of my earliest forays with oil paint, I recounted how I would mess around with my older brother's paint- by-number sets. Neil picked up the narrative: "I'll bet your brother used to beat up on you a lot, didn't he?" I panicked at what I considered a taunt about an abusive past, and accused him of making a non-sequitur. As I had hoped, he was mystified, so that the time required for me to explain the term was sufficient to divert attention from his rejoinder. Had I paid greater attention to the remark, I might have appreciated Neil's impeccable timing. Frank and Paul, in interview, both suggested I avoid being confrontational at all costs. I asked them for useful advice with setting up an art course at other institutions. Tellingly, what mattered to them much more than any curriculum content issues (what I had expected) was my behaviour and interaction with inmates. Frank put it plainly: I think a person has to understand we're not normal; it's not a normal environment. You have to be more willing to go that extra yard kinda thing, to give a guy a break without becoming confrontational. Because the guys in here are just looking for an outlet for their anger, somebody to dump on. I think a person has to be more compassionate, but yet assertive, but not aggressive... Paul shared with me some of the inmates' apprehensions with new instructors: But I'm just saying guys in here pick up, if a person's coming in here, it's either on our side or not. And if they're not, or not sympathetic enough you might say these guys w i l l give you static. It's that simple. Or if you go for the hook when guys 102 needle you? And you seem to get hurt by it or you can't blow it off easy enough. Then they'll just keep on doing it. The punctuality issue was one possible tactic which Neil might have seized upon: Was he holding me to account for any mistake in order to subvert my confidence? M y quick and profuse apology may have compelled him to upbraid me for several imaginary slights as the course unfolded. His scolding tone, and introductory remarks of, "You've got to understand..." became a kind of familiar litany. I am tempted to discount almost anything this manipulator told me: his arguments were so often a mixture of facts, hyperboles, lies and fabrications, it became pointless to bother sorting out any truth behind his criticisms. Neil did make a dramatic improvement in his behaviour, following the incident report; only at the end did he resort to his customary manipulation. This occurred when he approached me on the last evening of classes, with Sean, to find out my real intentions with the research I was doing there. Some of this scene has been related in the first section, 'Researcher/Teacher Dilemmas'; here I wish to emphasize the skillful way Neil managed to elicit from me, in spite of my resistance, personal information, without giving any useful information in return. Not satisfied with my assertion that I was looking for whatever they cared to divulge regarding their experiences of time (as, I repeatedly emphasized, is outlined on their consent forms) Neil asked me again what it was I was looking for. I told him, whatever they could give me. He accused me of being evasive, as he did when he asked me what my plans were after I received my degree and I could not think of an answer. Neil allowed he would give me information, but that it would have to be two-way. I agreed to this. He asked me what I had done to get into this institution, making a leading statement, "They sent you here to find out..." I told him nobody sent me here but me. Abe, who was in the room preparing to print his linoleum, told me Neil and Sean wanted to know my hidden agenda. Neil told me to drop the art business, as if everybody knew it was nothing 103 more than a sham, to cover my real intention. I repeated that, my degree program being art education, it would be quite impossible to drop the 'art' part. To Neil's query as to whether I had any children, I quickly asserted that I would not answer questions of a personal nature. As he continued his questions in this way, questions to do with my career history, age, any professional wrong turns and personal failures I might have had, it occurred to me that Neil had managed to turn the situation around: he was the interviewer, I the interviewee, and he had no intention of switching back the roles. Neil had one agenda, to ferret out whatever dirt he could about me. His credibility vanished; I felt I had had my confidence betrayed. The revelation angered me, and I swore, accusing him of playing mind games with me. Neil and Steve left the room. Abe told me not to worry about Neil: he used that manner with everybody there, including most of the other inmates. Curriculum Differences Neil and Sean started their discussion with valid criticism, which I have noted in the first section of this chapter. In order not to dismiss this entire meeting, despite its unfortunate outcome, more of their comments are noted in this section. These, as well as certain remarks of other inmates, suggest the onus of the inmates' resistance in these instances lay with me. I was quick to defend, for example, the complexity of the exercises I had brought into the art classes. When asked what he considered more challenging, Neil cited the oil painting course. I countered that the skills I was teaching had little to do with rendering a specific set of diagrammatic images, as I considered the oil painting course did (trees, clouds, mountains, water). Rather, I said the exercises were intended to open up alternative ways of seeing one's environment. For confirmation, I asked Sean whether he had not told me previously how his way of looking at his surroundings had altered, as a result of the shading exercise he had done. Sean grunted in agreement. To Neil's repeated criticism that he had done many of the exercises before, and they were therefore boring, I 104 said simply that many professional artists still use the same techniques, to develop their skill in these areas. Regarding the place and nature of aesthetic discussion in a leisure art course, at times certain inmates were quite outspoken about aesthetic and cultural matters that came up in discussion, and strongly defended their opinions. Neil was, surprisingly, not among them. Jabhar, ever combative, happened to be the most articulate as well. Discussing the many cultural symbolic associations of colors, I acted as scribe while the inmates offered their opinions. From time to time I added a few of my own. I wrote them all on the charts I had fixed to the wall behind me. The color black elicited much input. Jabhar accused me of perpetuating a Eurocentric bias with my use of the term "black magic". I refuted the charge, saying the term was well-known, even being used to advertise chocolates; my function, I told him, was to draw up all associations, good and bad alike. As an example, I mentioned that within Sufism and other religious traditions, the color black has had a long tradition of spiritual richness, representing the via negativa, the mystical emptiness of the ego. Thus blackness represented a desirable state, connoting total annihilation in God. In my explanation, I said that Sufism was an ancient mystical sect that predated Christianity, ultimately influencing Islam. Jabhar was quick to counter my claim: There were three basic branches of Islam, he said: Sunni, Shiite, and Sufi. A l l derived from the prophet Mohammed. So how could Sufism be older than Mohammed? Assuming by his name and ardent defense that he was a devotee of Islam, I conceded to his superior knowledge in this area. Jabhar frequently demonstrated fixed opinions, admitting no compromise. During the class regarding his perception of the vagina shape, Jabhar took issue with the title and meaning of another image. The drawing, I Am So Handsome, by Mildred Walker, shows an ass in human dress admiring himself in a hand-held mirror. In the reflection a young man with a trim beard stares back. Given the title, I suggested that the reflection shows the way the donkey sees himself. Jabhar disputed my interpretation, offering his own, that the 105 man in the mirror may be the devil, who is known to appear to people this way. Seeking a kind of synthetic explanation, I suggested that the sin being committed is vanity, which would then account for the devil's image in the mirror. Jabhar said nothing either way. Other instances where I defended my opinion met with Jabhar's equal or greater resistance. The incident with Doug, regarding my choice of gridiron exercise, needs no repetition here. One may, and ought to, teach from a position of authority. Such authority must, however, be grounded in knowledge, and be made manifest in a spirit of kindness and compassion, not dogmatism or authoritarianism. In an incarceral setting, one may find one's authority being challenged for its own sake. At such moments I occasionally floundered, not certain whether or not to push my point of view: doing so seldom, if ever, accomplishes what one has intended. Had I the chance to relive those situations where my statements were actively challenged, I should have abandoned my position more readily. In those cases, I seem to have forgotten my role as a researcher. Inmates are adults, and must be respected for their knowledge, which is considerable, and values, which are deeply entrenched and which they will defend passionately. Co-operation and Successful Arts Programs This section refers to those moments when teaching and research were successful: when inmates seemed focused and engaged in class, or volunteered information from a personal perspective or history. The actual content of these moments will be elaborated under the section, 'Inmates' World'. Included here are those examples of co-operation from staff as well as recollections of the directors of Prison Arts Foundation and the inmates I interviewed, of successful art/s interventions in prisons. 106 Co-operation with Inmates Just as Neil embodied the majority of situations of inmate barbs, and Jabhar those of inmate contention, Colin comprised the bulk of co-operative interactions. So helpful was he, that early on I surmised he was, socially, an outcast, not welcomed into the inner circle of inmate solidarity. I have little evidence to substantiate this claim, other than the mute, slightly embarrassed regard the others paid him on those occasions when he indulged me with anecdotes of his past, his present experiences and attitudes with art and craft activities, and his religious and moral beliefs. Colin's open, intense expression and his willingness to support my position during disputes with Jabhar or Neil set him apart from the rest of the inmates. Where many of my attempts to generate discussion fell flat with other inmates, Colin always had something to offer. His contributions during the session on colouur kept the momentum flowing. To my suggestion of religious devotion for the colour black, Colin offered the example of the black robes of the Jesuits. Indeed, subjects of religious and moral interest stimulated his attention. In general, the colour session was perhaps the most successful of all the discussions I initiated. During the discussion with Jabhar involving the image of the ass, I asked whether anybody had seen the film 'Seven', as a way of backing up my argument that vanity comprised one of the seven deadly sins. Colin, defying the unwritten inmate code that forbids taking the side of staff under any circumstance, offered that he had. That evening Frank came to my rescue as well. Engrossed in a debate with Jabhar over the intentional hidden imagery that one encounters in some art work, Frank offered the example of Dali. I was grateful for his intercession at a time when Jabhar was defending his opinion. In retrospect, Jabhar may have been correct all along. I recall listening to a professor of modern art discussing the phallic symbol of a moon's reflection in a painting by Edvard Munch, The Dance of Death. Then there is Freud's (1947) classic thesis on Leonardo's The Saints Mary and Anne with the Infant John the Baptist. Turning the image of the 107 painting sideways, Freud describes the convincing outline of a vulture, which possesses a significant symbolic power related to Leonardo's childhood. Once, a relatively innocuous conversation with Neil finished with his declaring, "Basically, I'm a good guy, aren't I?" I said nothing either way. When he repeated his question, Colin said, "You have to look inside yourself to answer that question." Neil snapped, "No comments from the peanut gallery!" suggesting the low regard in which he (and other inmates?) held Colin. After classes, Colin and Frank, the inmate unofficially in charge of hobbyshop operations, would stay on to help me clean up and bring the materials back to the hobbyshop for storage. The P.O.V. space having a somewhat aseptic appearance, this involved some effort: tables we had pulled out from the walls would have to be returned, and the several fliers and folders replaced in tidy stacks on them. Many of the programs taking place in the adjoining rooms dealt with substance abuse and addiction, hence much of the literature on the tables described the various support groups and memberships such as Alcoholics Anonymous. The inmates' willingness to volunteer their opinions and be subjected to my scrutiny should not be overlooked as evidence of co-operation on their part. When the program was cancelled, of the five remaining inmates who agreed to being interviewed, three followed through despite my insistence on using a tape recorder. Mysteriously, Colin was one whose co-operation in this respect was tentative: Ihad to remind him, through Alicia, of his verbal agreement, and upon hearing of my proviso, he declined completely. Neil's co-operation, not only in this instance, but throughout the course, was predicated on my giving him a certificate of completion at the end: evidence of completion of any programs while incarcerated can enhance one's personal file. Neil's manner was not always manipulative. During our second-to-last interview, both he and Sean had very positive things to say about M r . Hyde, who, in their opinion, did a great deal for programs in the facility. As well, Tanya, the former hobbycraft officer, 108 treated the inmates as men, unlike Susan, who, in comparison, brought a security guard's perspective to the position. Positive Art Experiences In addition to examples of co-operation on the inmates' part, following are those incidents where one or more inmates had positive experiences with a particular aspect of the art program. One of the episodes of art history and criticism that elicited some interested questions and comments occurred with some samples of Canadian, Mexican, European, Middle Asian and Primitive art I had chosen at random to illustrate different approaches to color. M y guiding focus was arbitrary, symbolic and emotive uses, as opposed to naturalistic ones, the artists had made. Man, Controller of the Universe (1940s), by Diego Rivera, received ample commentary, especially regarding the ominous rows of soldiers and atomic imagery. Frank astutely pointed out the blood cell motif, a common one in the work of Rivera. A Persian miniature of a hunting scene (anon., mid-sixteenth century), received more of the men's attention, with several inmates finding hidden animal shapes in the landscape. Frank asked whether one of the foreigners depicted might be Portuguese. I supported his hunch, given the figure's dress and physical characteristics. Neil asked how the cave drawings of Lascaux were preserved so long. Louis Muhlstock's Rust Triptych (1970s) generated a remark from an inmate who was fascinated by the idea of finding inspiration in common rust. The collage session began with promise; unfortunately as so often happened, the inmates' energy of the session's first evening failed to survive into the following one. I feared the topic that I gave them, the idea of finding their 'spirit familiar' (to borrow a North American Native concept), might be a little too personal: they were asked to select a wild animal with which they might identify, then assemble an imaginary setting for it. I offered my suggestion of animals in captivity, openly drawing a parallel with their own 109 situation. The men appeared taken by the idea, although not everybody chose the theme of captivity. A studio session that generated real interest, as opposed to a sort of rote, automatic response, was the pointillist color exercise. I asked for help arranging the fruit and kitchen crockery I had brought in from home. Nobody came forward, but as I started to place objects on a table in front of them, Neil, Jabhar and Sean gave me specific directions. The application of the paint in a dot-like pattern, using the eraser end of office pencils as paint reservoirs, had sufficient novelty and ease to engage the men quickly. Soon the entire class was softly tapping; conversation was intermittent and limited to one's immediate neighbour. Jabhar's pounding, louder and more intense than the rest, posed a minor irritant to Sean. Satyajit demonstrated his usual flair, executing a fine drawing, which he proceeded to cover with dots in Australian Aboriginal fashion. Neil, sitting beside Satyajit, punctuated his frequent expressions of impatience by emitting several sighs. Signaling his loss of contact with the exercise, as often happened, he got up and began to wander. I felt a familiar rising tension, anticipating some snide outburst, or playful distraction of another inmate. He sauntered to where I was painting, and leaned over me. After a moment he said, "You're blending those colors real-ly nice!" Ever suspicious of his ironic intent, I asked, "Do you really think so?" When he answered, "Yes!", I thanked him. Nick commented later that he thought the class went well, and further, that the art course was running on schedule - an item of importance to Neil: he had checked the calendar (appendix V ) and found our rate of progress satisfactory. Staff Co-operation The other component of working as a volunteer art teacher in an incarceral setting, the co-operation of regular staff, can be as important as the inmates themselves in establishing and maintaining a positive art instruction. I have discussed those instances whereby the communication and co-operation with staff broke down. To bring some 110 measure of balance to this account, I turn here to those instances of genuine helpfulness on the part of staff. Both Freida and M r . Hyde, in the face-to-face exchanges I had with them, showed tact and patience with me. Freida in particular showed an almost motherly quality of reassurance, which had immeasurable value in the hostile and tense environment that a medium-high security correctional facility can project. Her style of dress was appropriate to her position, yet showed a certain personal freedom. Whenever M r . Hyde left the room, she engaged me in her personable manner, managing to tease out intimate details of my professional life. Such is her shrewd ability to inspire trust and confidence in newcomers. M r . Hyde made himself available to answer my sometimes irrelevant questions during most of the second morning, even treating me to a free lunch: a privilege, given the funding cutbacks of late which have eliminated free meals for volunteers and teachers. The teachers I met on my first day, with Gus, were very interested in the research I was conducting and the art course I was offering. One teacher went so far as to make herself available to my ad-hoc class on the second day, supporting my lesson with enthusiasm and offering help to the inmates who needed it most. Gus spent nearly the entire day escorting me throughout the facility, on my initial visit, taking me inside such highly secure office areas as a 'bubble' on a cell unit. Tanya, according to the inmates, participated in many extracurricular events without additional pay. Susan kept the lines of communication open, even to the end, when I was constantly frustrated by the lack of interest shown by the higher-echelon staff. On her own initiative, she would often telephone me at my home to establish when I would be arriving, to anticipate clearance for any additional materials and equipment I might be bringing, and to find out what other preparations she and the inmate students might need to make. Her hesitancy to participate in some of the exercises (unlike Tanya, she refused to model for the class) may have been a function of her uncertainty of her own power and limitations within the prison bureaucracy:, Refusing to pose, she explained, "It's pretty political in here." She 111 disposed herself in a professional manner with regardto my altercation with Neil, acting as mediator while demonstrating to Neil the gravity of his offence and supporting my position. To the end, she offered suggestions for ways I might rekindle interest in the art course, or obtain the data I required for my research through other means, such as coming into the hobbyshop during weekdays when there were more men: I could wait and relax in the office area, interviewing men as they wished, in a less self-conscious or formal way. Her initial suggestion that I change my schedule to Saturdays was made possibly without her awareness of the restrictions placed upon her work schedule. Unfortunately I cannot concur with her endorsement of M r . Sandstone. A l i c i a was warm and personable with me when Gus introduced me that first day. Her terse conversations with me on the phone thereafter, and rescinding of promises, left me uncertain of her support; also, I found her habit of addressing me as 'dear' was inappropriately familiar and condescending. Other Successful Arts Programs M y description of this subsection must be taken on faith: I have no personal experience, as observer or participant, of other, more successful programs which are mentioned herein. These successes are recounted by Gary Wyatt and Marian Otterstrom of Prison Arts Foundation, and Paul and Frank, the two inmates who submitted to taped interviews. In offering them here I hope to approach an answer to the question about prison art/s programs which ultimately came into focus during the unfolding of the art course: what works, and why? Gary and Marian cited several examples of other visual artists, writers and dramatists whose contacts with the prisoners they taught left positive memories, both among the prisoners and staff. They mentioned the difficulties several experienced volunteer art instructors had with existing staff, such as resident arts and crafts officers and front desk security personnel, and the means they used to overcome them. Marian mentioned that since scheduling regular meetings between staff and volunteers, 112 communications have improved: they realize that they have similar clients and tasks. She recalled how long it would take, previously, for inside staff to accept incoming volunteers and contract workers. Some arts and craft officers will telephone Prison Arts to make arrangements for art instructors to visit. Gary reminded me that suspicious guards are simply doing their jobs: personalities are as variable in these positions as anywhere on the outside. He recalled a situation whereby one guard was very suspicious of a drama and music festival that was scheduled to perform at one facility. The inmates so enjoyed the performance that this same man spent considerable energy helping the artists move their equipment. One multimedia artist will bring in whatever she is working on at the time, including writing, and will use the different media to invite prisoners to participate in a loose, casual way. Discussion is generated from the interdisciplinary activity as well. Another artist works in a similar way, using such discarded materials as videotape to weave improbable objects, without a specific product in mind. A well-known poet, who routinely holds creative writing workshops in prisons throughout North America, uses his encounters with fractious security staff as material for poetry. One of the most unexpected arts program successes, considering the level of risk- taking required, has been in theatre. Some of the inmates who participated in an introductory theatre program at the institution where I was assigned have since developed their program at William Head. Both have been self-sustaining for years. Their productions (some in collaboration with drama students from the University of Victoria) draw a wide audience from outside the institution. Female actors have made significant contributions in these collaborations. A rewarding outcome of the theatre efforts of one inmate actor has been the establishment of the Station Street Arts Centre in Vancouver, which has flourished under this man's direction since his release. Storytelling is another example of a type of art which was greeted with suspicion at first. Marian said, "I went in with this storyteller, and they really didn't know ... 113 storytelling. 'So what's storytelling, are you just a good bullshitter?', they said. 'Cause we get a lot of that in here, you know!'" Out of these workshops some very personal narratives have emerged. The influence of Prison Arts, and the artists they have contracted, extends well beyond the Canadian border. The Maori poet Alan Duff, author of Once Were Warriors, agreed to organize some writing workshops in local prisons. Having a background of reform school residency, Duff supplies books and educational opportunities to underprivileged communities. Closer to the lower mainland, the poet Susan Musgrave and her husband, an inmate, have set up intensive writing workshops as well. Experience serving time, while giving many of these artists and writers a spiritual kinship with the inmates they teach, is not a prerequisite; indeed, the security clearance required for ex-inmates to come into prisons as volunteers can pose an impossible barrier in many instances. Generally, Gary and Marian have found that the inmates they teach appreciate the contact with people from the outside. The inmate hobbyshop manager Frank echoed this sentiment in interview: "...I phone my mom maybe once every two months and that's the only contact I have with the street. Except for like yourself when you come in here and the staff around here but that's about it." The other inmate I interviewed, Paul, observed that knowing the instructor's value system or politico-philosophical orientation can help: One local researcher/instructor, a self-confessed Marxist, is perceived as having a social conscience, and therefore being more sympathetic to the plight of these men. Prison Structure As with any bureaucracy, prisons operate according to an internal logic that does not offer easy explanation to the outsider. M y concern here is with the ways in which the structure of the institution impacted upon both the established routine of leisure activities, and the art course I attempted to deliver. Under the pervasive influence of prison life, time, 114 in the ways in which it is decimated, reassembled and distributed, becomes something very different to inmates than to people in free society. This difference increases, the longer one's term of incarceration. For example, how prisoners internalized the bureaucratic, monochronic paradigm astonished me. Offering a mere hint at (as I was only able to determine) the complexity of this phenomenon, this section is subdivided into the following domains: prison programs, prison structure and routine, inmates' routine, inmates' concepts and experiences of time, and effects of prisonisation. The last three domains w i l l lead into the final section, 'Inmates' World'. Prison Programs It is tempting to infer the status accorded to the arts from the lack of any formal art or craft instruction at any correctional facility in the lower mainland. Knowing this, I set about constructing an art course using a content and structure which I knew intimately and hoped would stimulate the intended clientele. This discipline-based general secondary school level course, set at about the grade ten level, had a flexibility I thought would ensure adequate input from adult students. I made certain assumptions about what provisions would be at my disposal; among them was an on-site hobbyshop officer who had a background and interest in arts and crafts. M y first assumption about staff was quickly destroyed when I discovered that the person responsible for obtaining my access to the facility, Tanya, had moved on within the system. Gus, her replacement, came from a background in Security. He told me his degree had been in psychology. Arts and crafts come under a separate department, Programs. In spite of a cut in pay many security personnel will make the switch, tempted by the regular working schedule, from 0800 hours to 1600 hours, Monday to Friday. Prisoners regard staff in Programs more positively than Security personnel, since the former are offering something. This is Marian's opinion, one for which I found support among some of the inmates. Unfortunately, arts and crafts' status within Programs is provisional: neither Gus nor 115 Susan had any formal education or interest in art or hobbies: Susan had been assigned the hobbyshop officer's position as a summer job placement, and Gus used the position as a quick stepping stone to the higher-paying one of Case Management. One of Gary's assurances with respect to my experience was that each prison operates according to its own guidelines. M y other experience with teaching a similar art course, at the eastern Ontario institution, bore this out. Much of the variability of an art program's success has to do with the receptivity of the site: the existing staff can either support or oppose it. On rare occasions, art teachers have found a permanent vocation within such an austere pedagogical climate. A head teacher with whom I worked, at a minimum-security institution in eastern Ontario, had a background in fine arts, although she was not teaching art at that institution, and Marian cited a woman who used her contact with a facility, through Prison Arts, to enroll in an anger management course, in order to teach that program at other correctional facilities. Such cases may be less unusual than at first supposed: the therapeutic dimension of art would dispose one toward other personality and behavioral modification programs that have been the mainstay of prison rehabilitation. As the art course I ran operated during leisure time I encountered a different attitude and greater competition for inmates' attention than I did during my placement at the eastern Ontario facility, where the art course was offered for secondary school credit. In British Columbia, where art and craft/leisure sessions will run during an inmate's own time, novice art/s instructors can expect inmates to get up and leave, and re-enter a classroom at w i l l . Other programs being held at the same time, such as twelve step addiction recovery, various Native ceremonies open to non-Native inmates, and lifers' meetings, may interfere with one's course. Canteen at this institution was open every second Wednesday and Thursday, from 1630 to 2030 hours, and with over 300 men lined up to purchase tobacco and toilet items, took up a good deal of their time. One evening Neil told me he felt guilty for missing his workout sessions while the art course was being held. These leisure activities are taken seriously, are managed by the inmates themselves and are well-attended. 116 Given an inmate's restricted timetable, the number of hours available at the end of a working or school day can be as few as three and a half: supper is finished at 1800 hours, leaving the men at their disposal until lockup at 2200 hours. Prison Routine Expecting the unexpected in a prison can mean being ready to spring into action at a moment's notice. M y long wait for a response from the prison I had been assigned was followed by two brief visits, and sudden clearance to start the course up within the week. The second day there, before finishing an impossibly long reading assignment, I was ushered to the school area without five minutes to mentally prepare myself. That day being a Friday, there were few inmates present. Although my little lesson had finished by 1500 hours, and a friend had announced his arrival to pick me up shortly thereafter, I was detained until after 1600 hours when M r . Hyde could escort me back outside. M y tardy arrival on my first two evenings of classes impaired my relationship with both staff and inmates, and may have handicapped my credibility for the duration of the course. After Neil's sharp criticism, I took care to arrive on time for future classes, but it seemed the damage was irrevocable. Classes had to finish by 2045 hours, to allow time for me to vacate the premises by the close of visiting time, 2100 hours. Any complex media or processes, such as printmaking or casting, would have to be either complete or at a stage where they could be relocated easily and set aside, further complicating one's sense of timing when planning for specific media. In a regular school, certain subject areas such as chemistry, art and physical education, for example, are understandably indulged with respect to late arrivals from those subject classes. In prisons, as Marian said, "You can't run a program ten minutes later.... It is over when it's over." Outside these prescribed hours, there was no opportunity to relax and talk in a leisurely way. Susan would take her dinner break between 1630 and 1800 hours. On occasion, when I arrived early, I was escorted as much as fifteen minutes early into the facility. These were unusual instances, 117 however, and ones which some of the front desk guards treated with uncertainty. Normal visiting hours are from 1800 to 2100 hours, and at times I would have to wait outside with the partners and families of inmates. The impossibility of having regular classes held on a Saturday, which might have saved the art course, has been documented. Even so, I would have faced the loss of additional men through weekend conjugal visits. Other weekday evenings were difficult to schedule: I was fortunate to re-schedule a class for the following Friday, when I missed an evening due to lack of transportation. Normally Susan's work shifts varied from week to week (her hours lasted from 800 to 1600 hours, or from 1300 to 2100 hours), making any unusual alterations to regular classes impossible. Two other factors that impinged on the destiny of my art course were, the unusually high turnover in hobbyshop staff (four officers within three months), and the fact that I was constrained to offer the course during the summer months: the added hours of daylight and warm weather induced many men to play sports outdoors, further reducing attendance in the art classes. Little of the above will appear foreign to the teacher of regular schools. The few changes to routine were serious, and came about at the governance of such staff as M r . Sandstone, for apparently arbitrary reasons. The resultant feeling of being out of control of my course's destiny was disconcerting. It undermined my sense of confidence and autonomy while in the institution. Inmates'Routine The extent to which inmates' routines varied within the same institution surprised me. The importance of established routines in inmates' lives was evident in the way others protected their areas: the room I had been promised for the art course was used for card playing, and surrendered grudgingly. A n inmate who was lifting weights in the gym beside the P.O.V., came out to the breezeway that connected the two areas, when Frank and I were spraying some pastel drawings, to complain about the smell. Given the heightened 118 capacity for breathing and oxygen need when undergoing intensive physical exercise, I could appreciate the fellow's concern. But his territoriality appeared to extend into what I considered a fairly common, neutral area. Evidently I was mistaken. The amount of freedom granted prisoners in determining their own schedules also surprised me. Frank told me he kept a day planner, his daily routines were so busy. In it he would write lists of things he had to do; specific times as such were not entered. A l l three interviewees - Frank, Paul and Neil - mentioned they spent at least 21 hours a week on their hobbies, outside of other leisure routines. Neil broke his hours down in a systematic, day-to-day manner. Frank and Paul, not having regular visitors, put their free time toward personal uses. Paul kept an active writing file, into which he made entries nightly, his schedule having gone completely nocturnal since his incarceration. Outside his cell, Paul spends most of his time in the hobbyshop, working on his stained glass. Frank's involvement with managing the hobbyshop kept him busy; his expertise with different materials was demanded when it came to ordering materials. He was also committed to developing a hobby therapy program, and spent his evenings helping other men with their hobbies. He hopes to work his course up to a recognized program, which can be implemented in this institution. Because he is so busy, Frank has noticed time passes very quickly, from day to day. He no longer sees his family, and spends little time with his mates in sports activities: he enjoys his work and interacting with his boss and other staff. Marian pointed out that the availability of arts courses outside of regular program time can be advantageous: the inmates are not as suspicious of any hidden, 'therapeutic' purpose, and will only attend out of interest. As the course is being offered in their time, it is not mandatory. Many inmates look forward to their arts activities as they give them something to do to pass the time. Marian warned me that any early weekend activity may compete unfavorably with the inmates' coveted extra hours of sleep. 119 Prisoners' Concepts and Experiences of Time Given the brief time I had to interact with these men, the following discoveries are based upon questions I posed to Frank, Paul and Neil during the interview sessions. There was no evidence that any art activity, certainly none that I implemented, had any effect one way or the other on these or any other inmates' sense of the passage or quality of time. To describe some of the times we spent together as an easy time, a good time, and so on, has little purpose and just as little meaning here. The most spontaneous expression from an inmate came from Doug, who was prompted by reading my letter of request. He told me that he felt the fifteen years he has spent in prison have passed relatively quickly, without his really thinking about it. He attributed some of this effortless time passage to his deep involvement in painting. Unfortunately he dropped out of the art course long before I could follow up on his intriguing remarks. Thus the respondents were tipped as to the kinds of answers I sought (the "Hawthorne effect"). Nonetheless, Paul was very articulate in his descriptions of the kinds of temporal experiences he has had as a result of his incarceration. He heartily endorsed artistic activity as a valuable means of utilizing one's time in prison. He likened the creative process to a rebirth: It's like, art and being creative is breaking down your boundaries in your mind and everything. And that's what doing time's all about, arid if you can transcend just your normal, the boundaries, you know your thinking patterns beyond that, there's no limits. Time just dissolves,... you get into that that space where it's, next thing you know it's lockup and you have to put your tools away,...you just disappear into what you're doing.... It's like a meditation too, if meditation is focusing on something, where your thoughts are stopping. You're just in the moment. Paul's career as a free man (he had dealt drugs) indicated a polychronic temporal orientation (see chapter two). Perhaps his way of rejecting the highly structured, monochronic environment of prison lay in his adapting to a totally nocturnal lifestyle. Now serving his eleventh year of a fourteen year sentence, his previous episodes of release have not been happy times. He complained bitterly of the rapid acceleration of technology while 120 he has languished in prison, expressing frustration over his inability to use such commonplace services as automatic bank machines and cordless phones. He blamed his inability to fit in and adjust to free society on the 'screws' who kept him behind bars for so long. Paul's sense of slippage with respect to the pace of regular urban society recalls the anachronic position in Gioscia's theory (1971) of different temporal orientations: People with a temporal sense in this position generally feel their own rate of time is advancing more slowly than that of the general population. This perception is often accompanied by feelings of despair and helplessness over one's inability to keep pace with the rest of society. Paul's comments on how the seasons influence a prisoner's sense of time's passing are noteworthy. He viewed summer as the worst season, the inverse of many a free person's notion, but one that makes perfect sense within the confines of prisons. He cited the stuffy, oppressive heat, and the much longer days during summer. Time seems to stretch out, a desirable quality when enjoying oneself on vacation. However, given a prisoner's main objective while serving time is to collapse it as quickly as possible, anything that does the inverse is, understandably, not welcomed. In winter, by 1700 hours it is already dark: to an inmate, the day is done. One begins preparing psychologically for the escape of sleep. Being locked up while it is still light out, on the other hand, exacerbates one's feeling of confinement: "And then you also feel like you're missing out on a lot more." Recalling the times Paul spent in segregation he described how, after about a month, commonplace tasks such as urinating or taking a meal became filled with significance. To most people, these moments are uneventful breaks in a hectic day. Removed from the petty routines of normal life, awareness of bodily functions can take on a preternatural sensitivity. Jimmy Boyle (1977) described how, in segregation, he developed the ability to hear conversations and smell the guards' leather boots from great distances. Contiguous with this heightening of bodily senses, time seems to slow down. 121 Paul's description recalled sensations experienced under the influence of marijuana, or the writings of mystics. Continued deprivation of normal distractions can sharpen the significance of events to such a degree that these small moments are anticipated as ways of marking the passing of time. Paul's own experience as consumer of narcotic drugs has likely influenced his perceptions, even during those times when he was not using drugs (see also Cheek & Laucius, 1971). He told me he counsels other inmates in alternative ways of dealing with time, including the practice of meditation, as a way of managing the effects of their sentences. Asked to conceptualize a metaphor of time, both Paul and Frank came up without an answer. I posed the question with little understanding of its difficulty to non-literary specialists. Paul, in an effort to define it, suggested it was like spirit or energy: in other words, intangible in its essence, but obvious in its manifest effects. Frank's answer was less positive: he described time as a big void, and redirected his answer to talk about how, with each passing year, he feels he is losing his connection with normal society. His resignation apparent in his voice, his answer suggested the anachronic perspective in Gioscia's (1971) article. Neil's answer to my question took the form of three speeds and/or quantities of time: looking ahead, future time seems very long; looking back, past time/time as history passes quickly; present time seems to last forever. For Frank, the best time of the day, morning, was also the slowest. This optimistic sounding paradox may have been an attempt to gloss over a comment he made a moment earlier, "If I'm not doing anything, [time] really drags." I had the impression that Frank wished to present a more positive, 'normal' portrait than what he felt himself to be. To another question, what time period would he like to live in, if he could, he snapped, "Now." Later, speaking of his plans for when he w i l l be released, he mentioned early retirement on a friend's farm, raising hens and using his hobbies to generate a small income. He concluded, "I'm gonna get back to the sixties. I'm just gonna love it." Frank reminded me that time passes most quickly when sleeping. He seemed to express no 122 preference for this situation, unlike a number of inmate students, Sean among them, who appeared to drift out of consciousness with little effort: such was my astonishment when I first worked as a substitute teacher at the eastern Ontario institution, that I suspected many inmates suffered from narcolepsy. While Frank may have been straightforward in his paradoxical remark about his favorite time of day, his other comments regarding the pleasure he has with his duties and people he meets in the course of a day, suggested otherwise. One of Gary Wyatt's reminiscences, once removed, of a writing instructor who had returned to a lower mainland institution after twelve years, eerily recalled Mann's tuberculosis asylum in The Magic Mountain (1976). The teacher found, upon returning to the institution, that except for one inmate, the class was identical to the one he had left twelve years previously. The men nonchalantly picked up their writing portfolios as though he had been away for no more than a week. Gioscia's anachrony, the sense of time slowing to a near stop in some individuals and societies, seems to be in evidence. Effects of Prisonization Without prodding, I found some examples of the negative effects of long-term imprisonment, or prisonization, in some of the remarks and attitudes expressed by Paul and Frank. Paul sounded extremely bitter over the fact that he had been sentenced to twelve years, of which he served eleven and a half, for a non-violent crime. He was released and, presumably, is now serving time for acting on the rage and the skills he developed during his incarceration, to rob banks. To mentally prepare himself for his assault, he would visualize the bank staff as the guards who had forcibly detained him for so many years. He admitted that spending fifteen years or so in prison "...does fuck you up in here, being in here... you get bitter...." His anachronic distress, the problems he has had with modern technology, with feeling out of synchronicity with society, has only fueled his anger. 123 Frank expressed a milder sense of similar dread, and wondered aloud if he might be so institutionalized that he may not be able to function in the outside world. While admitting he hated being locked away, he felt it was getting easier to serve his time, because he has done so much of it. Nearing forty at the time of our interview, Frank had been in and out of institutions since the age of seven. Part of his success on the outside, he feels, depends upon his ability to market his hobby skills, either as a producer of crafts, or a teacher to others. Combined with the management of his behaviour, Frank has hopes that he will remain out of trouble upon his release. He identifies his improved skills as patience and compassion, as well as hand-eye coordination and mechanical skills. Colin mentioned, one evening as we were putting materials away, that he found his practice of arts and crafts was a method of resistance of the effects of life within prison. As he told me this after class has finished, I had no chance to engage him further: another lost opportunity. Inmates' World As with any culture, the world of prisoners is composed of a collection of individuals. The capricious nature of their fate, being thrown together by judicial and sentencing procedures, nonetheless reveals some common elements. These elements consist, often, of shared backgrounds, as well as acquired characteristics as a result of their forced community. This last section addresses the inmates' admissions of personal choices, past experiences and learning, and other behaviors which collectively suggest the existence of an inmate ethos. At the same time, the responses and unsolicited comments that I witnessed reflect the values of individuals. By setting them within one framework I hope to maintain the sense of distinctness that each inmate demonstrated in an environment that encourages conformity and none but the coarsest sensitivities. The following 124 subsections are used to investigate these distinctions and trace any shared characteristics: knowledge and mentoring, inmate inagery and values, and ethos. Knowledge and Mentoring One of the presumptions about prisoners I held, that they shared a mostly dysfunctional formal education, was modified by the discovery of the vast amount of learning that these men had acquired and of which they continued to avail themselves in prison. Through compulsory courses in behavior management, many had developed a sophisticated vocabulary of psychology that would rival that of an undergraduate majoring in this discipline: Doug suggested I suffered from "attention deficiency syndrome", when I complained of boredom with one video program. Another inmate, Joe, alerted me to the subtle skills of 'emotion reading', through studying another person's body language, facial expression, voice control and so on, that inmates develop from the many self-improvement programs they are encouraged to take. More than once, Joe commented on whether my interaction with another inmate was assertive or not. As well, it is not uncommon to find prisoners, through correspondence and distance education, working on an undergraduate degree. Beside these formal avenues of learning are the informal ones: mentoring took place in many crafts, and was, as far as I could determine, a more significant method of skills transference than any techniques taught by outsiders. Sean aquired the ability to shade his drawing through watching and asking another inmate on his cell block. Leatherwork, taught from inmate to inmate, is one of the most popular crafts in prison. Joe told me about the leatherwork he practiced, when I complimented him on the fine cap he was wearing. As I had guessed, it was one of his creations, but in his view, not his best. He had stitched it together from five pieces; together they formed a braid which traversed the front, forming a bridge between the skull cap and brim. The handiwork was prodigious. He told me 125 without a trace of boasting that he sells his work out of the Visitor Control area, which displays samples of his and other inmates' crafts. Neil's facility with the yam printmaking and collage sessions indicated a strong aptitude for the graphic arts. He was unwilling to share his educational background, however, during the few opportunities we had for co-operative discussion. While his talent in these areas seemed innate, it did not translate into the more complex medium of linocut. With other art media he showed some difficulty: a tempera painting exercise proved too much. With little experience using wet media (so I gathered), he quickly mixed a mess of brown sludge, and his brush was frequently overloaded with paint. He and Joe told me proudly they knew about Emily Carr, during a slide-viewing session of Canadian art: they had visited her house, now a historic site, in Victoria. As with any adult leisure activity, the inmates who chose to enroll in the art course came with a variety of backgrounds, strengths and interests in art. The questionnaire I distributed early in the course turned up a surprising experience with art and cultural exhibitions. Of five respondents (Frank, Neil, Colin, Rick and Sean), only one inmate, Frank, showed a previous interest with arts and crafts: he had done leatherwork, beading and woodcrafts, among other unspecified hobbies. Sean and Colin had had some experience with car detailing and bodywork. Neil's impatience with foreign media and his own working habits sometimes got the better of him: if a process did not come easily, he would abandon it quickly. Others, such as Colin and Sean, showed far less natural ability, but a willingness to stay with a process, from which they were able to wrest some level of accomplishment. They showed justifiable pride in their successes. Rick demonstrated some initiative in the area of linocut, chiefly as he owned a fine set of gouges, and had an already-prepared image of the eagle with wings spread. Otherwise, on the sporadic occasions he came to class, his work was indistinguishable from the others'. Abe, who only appeared for the final unit, in linoprint, demonstrated perhaps the most outstanding ability of anybody in the class. He mixed 126 colours together freely, using his fingers to add spots of blue to the red on the brayer, and printed a unique image with each pull. Not satisfied with the amount of pressure we could achieve by hand, he suggested we take the linoleum to the etching press, located in the pottery area of the hobbyshop. Abe's carefree and confident manner with the materials, and his claimed experience with serigraphy and other media, eased my apprehension with his breaking of traditional rules. Unlike Neil, he had the patience and foresight to see his project through to completion. He was able to visualize and render his image quickly, without external aids. Frank, Paul and Neil told me they learned their craft of choice from another inmate, through watching that person working on it, and asking questions. Upon his release from segregation, Paul was impressed with another inmate's stained glass product, a sun- catcher. After learning to make that shape, he moved on to more creative ventures. He would start with a pattern in mind, find an example of the predominant shape (in his example, a bird), then sort through other pattern books for different backgrounds and add them in. Paul emphasized the ritual aspect of this sharing procedure, likening it to passing dope: "You're giving ...something to somebody to make his time go easier." He noted that out of this learning, certain styles of art tend to emerge, depending on which inmate was the mentor: even work habits, such as cleaning up, will reflect this man's approach. Marian and Gary of Prison Arts corroborated Paul's disclosure. They allowed that, while some of the inmates may have known something about a craft, they have an opportunity to develop their skill in that area in prison. Many others arrive in prison with no previous experience. Such is the level of resident expertise that a prospective volunteer artist or artisan in a chosen field is advised to have considerable prowess in that area; otherwise he or she will only be wasting inmates' time, and they w i l l let him or her know it. Active resistance may be encountered from a resident expert who feels his authority challenged by this outsider. 127 Inmate Imagery and Values The inmates' symbolic associations and selection of imagery indicated a set of values that were similar enough to suggest that certain deprivations, particularly of women, motivated their choices. Some responsibility belongs to me: I had selected, for overhead projector transparencies, images of nude or semi-nude women. The traditional predominance of the female form in books on life drawing presupposes a male heterosexual bias which I did nothing to resist. It was therefore hardly surprising to find Neil and Sean taking liberties with an image of a bare-topped woman in a crouched position. They had indicated one nipple in dark, sharply delineated charcoal. I pointed out the discrepancy between their version and the original, which only suggested the nipple with a faint smudge. While they giggled Jabhar rose to their defense: " Y o u have to understand, we don't see a lot of women in here." Jabhar's earlier remark regarding his perception of the vagina shape became poignmantly clear. For the enlargement exercise, Neil chose a photograph from the magazine Flash Art, showing a middle-aged woman suckling a young boy of indeterminate age, perhaps 13, and waved it about the class for shock value. Eventually he settled for a safer image, of a seated woman facing a wall of red bricks. Sean chose a detail of a woman's crotch, from an underwear advertisement in Cosmopolitan. Despite my expressed approval, he switched to an image of a woman in jeans and jacket with a barnboard background. The model's pose and expression suggested she was about to fling open her jacket and reveal her breasts. Sean decided aloud to concentrate on her upper torso (I had told them to select a detail from their chosen images) and so saying, took a pair of scissors and snipped away the woman's head and lower body. Even though this was only a photograph, Sean's sudden and casual objectification of the female form disturbed me. Other inmates showed no particular sexual imagery in their selections. Colin and Satyajit, both openly religious, chose innocuous images: Satyajit selected a reproduction of a still life by Cezanne, while Colin chose a photograph I had taken of a 128 wheat field in Washington state. Jabhar was taken by a reproduction of Fuseli's A Lion Attacking a Horse. Was his own religious fervour (for Islam) reflected in his choice of this noble king of the beasts? Frank disappeared before long, a habit he seemed to indulge with greater frequency as the course wore on. Eventually he withdrew from the course, but remained on hand to help move materials and join us whenever I was bringing something in that interested him, such as the videotape on Surrealism. Later he told me he preferred to spend his time working on his leathercraft. Cultural and religious values emerged during the discussion of colour symbolism. Colin made the gender association of the colour blue, masculine, to which I offered the alternative, feminine construct of the color of the Virgin Mary. To my assertion that blue represented a passive state, Satyajit countered that within Sikh religion, blue is the colour of the warrior's turban. "So if you see me wearing a blue turban, look out!" he joked. Jabhar's vigilant manner surfaced in the discussion over the colour black. His African- American background might have sensitized him to the term I suggested, 'black magic', in pointing out its pejorative meaning and "Eurocentric bias" (his words). Colin was, typically, the most candid in speaking of his own values and beliefs. His religious persuasion, Roman Catholicism, appeared to anchor him, and give him a sense of hope pending his release: he had plans to work as a caretaker at the parish church of the visiting Catholic pastor. Noticing the U B C letterhead on the consent forms, he asked me if I knew of the theological college there. He knew the Jesuits were a teaching order, and wished to take some courses in religious studies. He wore as many as three rosaries at any time around his neck, and indicated on the questionnaire that his artistic inspiration came from religious experiences, of which he has had several since his incarceration. During a discussion about dreams, in relation to the Surrealists, Colin asked me what I meant by my claim that there was no such thing as a moral dream. He had had dreams which he felt at the time were moral. I told him this came from Freud's theory of the unconscious, or id. To appease him, I added that within most religious traditions, 129 dreams play a significant role in the communication of messages from the spirit world. Colin appeared relieved, adding that some dreams we can control; therefore they are not really happening in the unconscious at all. Colin left one class early to attend a memorial service for another inmate who had died in prison. When he returned, fifteen minutes before the end of class, he was disappointed to find it was too late to resume his painting. After Colin in the extent of self-disclosure was Sean. He presented a potpourri of desires in his collage: pretty women, yachts, racing cars, fine wine, exotic travel locations, and spiffy clothes. These are the things he wishes for, but cannot enjoy, inside the joint'. I remarked how such images are the stock in trade of advertising: if we buy these commodities, we will be happy. Intrigued, Sean related how money represented for him so much of his time, his labour. We carried on this quasi-Marxist discussion for several minutes. Another time, he ventured to speak about his tattoos. Both his forearms are heavily decorated by an inmate tattoo artist. His aesthetic choices over body decoration included having both his nipples pierced He mentioned insightfully that one's occupation determines to a large extent just how far one can go with a personalized style: the degree of public/social interaction will influence one's freedom of dress. Later in the course Sean expressed a desire to have his tattoos removed, especially the one on his left arm, which showed a grim Father Time-like skeleton brandishing a sickle, a la Iron Maiden, the heavy metal rock group. His other tattoo, which he preferred, showed a more benign figure, a kind of wizard, with a medieval castle in the background. Sean told me he would approach the tattoo artist to see whether he would agree to an informal interview. Given the illicit status of tattooing in prisons, Sean could not promise anything. Rick showed little commitment to the art course; although his attendance was sporadic, he remained to the end, and would freely offer his opinions on the relative value of kinds of art. As well as leaving to attend his lifers' meetings, he often missed all or part of a class to take advantage of the fine summer weather to play softball. He proudly told 130 me his hometown in the prairies has a reputation for athletic ability, chiefly in baseball, hockey and curling. It is the home of at least two famous sportsmen, one of whom plays for the Pittsburgh Penguins. Asked about intramural team sports in prison, he assured me there was no movement of teams from one prison to another, although this prison boasted four baseball teams. Rick told me there was a good deal of talent in the institution, most of which went toward lucrative ends such as tattooing. One man, he told me, is an incredible draughtsman, but has no use for paper: only human skin inspires him! A n ex-inmate, a Native artist, has a solid reputation, but is handicapped by an anger control problem: he once destroyed a painting worth $5,000.00 in a fit of rage. Rick measured artworks in terms of their monetary value. A couple of exercises he disparaged, saying, "If you can't sell it, what good is it?" His own woodcarvings, predominantly from carefully-rendered line drawings of wildlife, fetched as much as $2,500.00, as he indicated on his questionnaire. A latecomer to the art course, Abe provided me with one of the most original and expressive art pieces of any inmate there. His linoprint shows a man in profile, from the shoulderst up, with his hands at the side of his face. His mouth is stretched open as if screaming (Figure II, page 131). Above and across from him, in the upper left corner, is the hand of God (Abe's explanation), pointing down like the hand in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Rays of light fan out from this corner, cross-cut with smaller, lighter marks from lower left to upper right. The image has great emotional force. I told Abe it reminded me of Munch's The Scream, which he did not know. When I said how it must be satisfying to him, having other men approach him to help them draw designs, for tattoos and so on, He began, "I tell you, it's about the only - Yea, it gives a good feeling, that's for sure." 131 F i g u r e II: A b e ' s L i n o l e u m P r i n t For Neil, the primary benefit of art making in prison was "staying away from trouble, problem-causing behaviour, bad elements, and drugs." For Frank, "...it's kept me in touch with the human side of myself." Asked what kinds of images inspired them, Frank and Neil played it safe. Frank said he liked to make 'soft', non-threatening images, things that made one feel good, but not cartoons. Neil said scenery, mountains and water appealed to him. Neil got his ideas from his thoughts or fantasies, while Frank turned to magazines, especially Workshop. Both had plans to continue some form of craft after they were released. Frank wished to continue teaching his hobby therapy program. Paul approached art from a more sociopolitical perspective. In a long, discursive talk he mentioned how artists are at the vanguard of society, acting as social lightning rods, and often getting into trouble with the dominant power. He tended to discount his crimes by identifying with political prisoners from the past, many of whom were poets, citing a radical movement, 'The Revolution of the Poets', that was based in Nicaragua. For him, as for Frank, self-expression was more important than technique, although he did not discount the value of the latter. Inmate Ethos By parsing the comments and behaviors of the inmates in this way I am asserting that there is an unwritten code of behaviors, norms of interaction that inmates are loathe to reveal to all but the most trusted allies, other inmates. Of course, I made very few inroads into this esoteric language. What follows are hints, suggestions of a system of communication, information transfer and code of ethics that rivals the most secret societies of our western world. Frequently, the rivalries and tensions between different gangs in prisons will erupt in violence. These situations are often sparked by one gang member trespassing, often unawares, on the sacred ground of another's value system. A s an example, to insult another inmate with the word 'goof is an invitation to a fight. In free society, the epithet would hardly cause a second glance. 133 The inmates' high regard for staff punctuality tokened no show of reciprocation on their part: this double standard seemed to present no problem to the inmates, but was taken as a matter of hard-won privilege. Each evening as I was setting up, I waited with anxiety until, as if by some mental transfer, a full complement of men appeared, drifting in as quietly as lint on the air. Joking to Jabhar one evening that I missed him at the previous class, he retorted, "I was here but you weren't!" referring to the class I missed for want of a vehicle. Speaking to me about tattooing, Sean was explicit in describing the contraband methods the tattoo artists would use: a 'walkman' type tape player was taken apart, and the motor used to provide the pump mechanism. The needle could be as simple as a piece of guitar wire. Many prison staff may already know about these details; for me they had the currency of covert information. When I asked him how this kind of illicit activity becomes known inside prison, he shrugged and said, "I dunno. It just gets around. It doesn't take long in here." His words recalled the reply of one inmate when I asked him to advertise my upcoming art course to his mates, "Don't worry. Word travels fast around here." And long before, at a minimum security institution in eastern Ontario, one of the teachers there briefed me on the concept of collective consciousness as applied to the prison environment. During a later conversation, Sean discounted his tattoos, saying if he could he would have them removed. He told me he received his first one when he was fourteen. When he sent a tattoo artist over to speak with me, as he had promised, I was ill-prepared, unfortunately. Sean, Neil and I had just broken off our interview regarding the nature of the art course, my 'hidden agenda', and I was distraught and angry. In walked the tattoo artist to the hobbyshop. He seemed as uncomfortable being there as I felt, and I had no questions prepared to ask him. To make matters worse, we had no privacy. The entire meeting was over in less than a minute. M y coveted entry into their private world ended before it even began. 134 Colin's equivocal status with the other inmates - his 'uncool' religiosity, and his tendency to break rank by supporting me in minor differences with inmates such as Jabhar, may have been clues to the reason he stopped attending the art classes without warning: perhaps he wished to go into hiding, in segregation. Often an inmate will choose this course if there's pressure on him to fight, if he owes money for drugs, or for any other reason he may have to fear for his life. Colin's disappearance without warning was one of the biggest mysteries during the course, for if I ever felt I had one ally, it was he. He and Satyajit were the only inmates ever to excuse themselves when they had to leave a class early, or miss a future one. Mistakes in visitor-inmate relations would have continued to be made, had I fulfilled my intention of operating the course to its end. Had somebody overheard the remark I had made to Susan, in confidence, in the presumed safety of the hobbyshop office, about Colin? If so, did that compel him to deny me further access into his interior world? M y error of remonstrating with Juan, embarrassing him in front of his mates, has been documented. If the word 'goof has so much power, how grave was my oversight? Perhaps another book should be made available to incoming staff and guest workers, a manual of appropriate behavior and language when working with prisoners. Gary Wyatt confirmed my uncertainties with these issues, assuring me that it is very difficult to figure out an inmate. One never knows what are the underlying issues. Internal politics, family obligations (many inmates are under pressure to produce crafts as a viable source of income) and other invisible factors can undercut the novice art teacher's best intentions. A l l newcomers have to learn the hard way, making mistakes as they go. With luck they will learn what works, and be prepared to discard what does not. Frank's advice for newcoming teachers in prisons is most sound: I think you just have to come right out and say, 'You know I don't care what you guys are in here for, you know we're all human beings in here and we're all here to learn, we're supposed to have fun',... Try and open up some kind of dialogue that way on a human level. You know on a human level. 135 Chapter Five: Reflections and Recommendations Time and Prisonization: Prison as Haven or Hell In his insightful roman a clef, Darkness at Noon , based on the arrests and imprisonment of Soviet party loyalists under the Stalinist regime of the 1930s, Arthur Koestler (1941) introduces an old prisoner, nicknamed Rip van Winkle for obvious reasons. After spending twenty years in solitary confinement, this minor character is released, and two weeks later is re-incarcerated. This individual is so mystified by his changed world that he cannot function in it. Completely institutionalized and half mad, he takes refuge in the prison, awaiting death. I began this search for an understanding into the long-term effects of incarceration, particularly, how inmates made sense of their world, how they perceived time, and what impact the practice of art has on those perceptions. From my brief intervention/study, it would be impossible to suggest a direct cause-and-effect relationship between inmates' experiences of time and the effects of art immersion on those experiences, given the small sample of volunteers with whom I worked. Frank and Paul, and, to a lesser extent, Neil (he was the youngest inmate student), showed definite signs of stress as a result of their incarceration. To conclude that this stress resulted from forcing them into a monochronic environment, supposedly conflicting with their poly chronic orientation, would be extravagant. Most of the men in the art class showed a surprising internalization of the strict routines of prison structure, with an important proviso: While they adhered to, and appeared to respect, the externally imposed monochronic structure, their attitude to it seemed less than 'convert-like.' As with Robby (Wideman, 1984), their adaptation might be a concession to the greater power structure that surrounds them: allowing the 'screws' and other staff to dictate these external routines in exchange for a small measure of peace. As Robby learned, active resistance requires certain bargaining chips. The inmates I taught appeared to follow such matters as mealtimes, lockdowns, and program hours, with little complaint, while at the same time, showing an indifference to the habits and customs of the 136 truly 'monochronized.' Even when they had prepared lists of things to do on a given day, nobody carried a timetable, as their own daily agendas were predetermined. They expected this adherence to prison time from me, as a volunteer, and showed remarkable lack of understanding for the contingencies outside that can effect punctuality. Perhaps this is significant: did they lose so much contact with the free world that they forgot it does not operate according the chronometric model of prisons? If so, could this be evidence of a breakdown of their own internal (polychronic?) orientations? These men, in their passive adaptation to the monochronic prison routine, might have been demonstrating evidence of institutionalization. This condition showed itself most obviously in the attitudes and conduct of Frank and Paul. Frank initially struck me as a depressed individual. His tired eyes gave no sense of joy or hope; on the contrary, they communicated a deep loss. In speaking with me, he seemed resolved to the severed ties with his family (his only remaining contact was with his mother); Frank emanated a musky body odor that never left him, perhaps to keep other inmates physically and emotionally at a distance. Having experienced one loss, was he avoiding the possibility of others? Yet his day-to-day activities suggested he had adapted to his environment with some success. Frank appeared intent on assuring me that his personality had improved through residing in a series of confining institutions, intermittently, since the age of seven. He mentioned how he kept mentally active by helping other inmates with their hobbies, and designing his hobby therapy course. He restricted his concern for those inmates working on their hobbies; he had no use for other social activities such as team sports. His conduct with me was always civil, even subordinate. Frank's adaptation to his environment suggests the professional prisoner, one who has more or less given up on the possibility of reintegration in society and turned his focus inward (Cohen & Taylor, 1972; Duguid, 1996; Koestler, 1941). Several of Mann's (1976) House Berghof residents, including his protagonist Hans Castorp, demonstrate this 137 aversion to free society. I wondered whether Frank truly believed, as he wistfully expressed, that he could "get back to the sixties." Like Frank, Paul appears to have not only made the best of his situation, but to have gone to an extreme rejection of free society's diurnal schedule. Paul's preference for his own cell, working into the early hours of morning on his writing, suggested a monk- like devotion to his craft. Neither Paul nor Frank could easily be identified as having a 'polychrome' temporal orientation, although Paul's tendency to use narcotic drugs such as heroin would suggest, as with this orientation, an alternative to the fast-paced, linear sequencing of events typical of the monochronic orientation. According to Cheek and Laucius (1971), narcotics users describe a slowing-down, or even stopping of time, as one of the drugs' effects. Long-term users show difficulty functioning in a regular temporal mode. Whether Paul was still procuring narcotics in prison - and given the reputation of this institution, the possibility is not remote - his advocacy of other temporal and consciousness shifting techniques (among which, meditation and writing were prominent), reveals his unique ability to manage the time of his sentence. Paul's lifestyle might pose little hardship to one who is safely contained within a medium-maximum security penitentiary, with the caveat of having access to illicit drug use. The difficulty lies in Paul's (and other long-term prisoners') attempts at reintegration into society. Paul found himself a stranger in his own land, and acted out his resentment and bitterness with society for his stolen years by stealing from society. I am oversimplifying in order to make a point, but Paul's truncated life, which spurred him to react in the violent manner he did, should not be minimized. Central to Paul's rage was his feeling of being out of synchrony with the rate at which the rest of the world had advanced. Gioscia (1971) describes the 'catachronic' individual as being in a mental prison, one for whom time weighs heavily, and who - not incidentally - has frequent recourse to narcotics in order to escape, momentarily, this condition. For the person suffering from catachrony, the 'epichronic' realm presents an attractive escape. Time in each instance appears to move 138 with the same slow rate; the difference is that with the former, one feels 'under' time; in the latter, one is 'above' time. Mystical states such as samadhi are similarly described as conditions of timelessness (Sekida, 1987). Zen Buddhism stresses the awareness of a continual present that is achieved via complete psychological absorption in the moment; during this condition the reflective, temporally conscious ego is forgotten. Such states are known to most of us: during intense engagement in any activity, whether writing an exam or rescuing a drowning person, there is no past or future, only the immediate present. Art as Psychic Resistance The other dimension of my enquiry - what effect, if any, art making had on prisoners' experience of time - was not rendered transparent as a result of this study. If anything, my pedagogical hubris was most evident in the claim I had made, that prisoners' lives would be notably improved with the introduction of any art program. Still, certain of the inmates indicated they chose to work with their art or hobby projects as a method of sustaining resistance to the pressures of life behind bars: Colin mentioned he used art a form of resistance (his word), and Doug told me he was aware of how art activity helps him forget about the passage of time. This 'conscious forgetting' is a useful state of consciousness, given the fact that a prisoner's greatest enemy is the imposition of time (Cohen & Taylor, 1972; Wideman, 1986). The testimonies of Frank and Paul, concerning their uses of hobbies in prison, also lend support to opportunities for art making in prison. Resistance to Art Courses Art programs in prisons are not received with categorical enthusiasm: many inmates showed indifference to the exercises I introduced, and the general decline in enrollment strongly suggests that what will engage one group of learners might just as quickly be rejected by another, for reasons that remain mysterious. As Gary Wyatt and Marian Otterstrom concurred, "You just never know what works." In this respect art is no 139 different from other disciplines, inmates no different from other students. A medium that appeals to one person may induce considerable frustration or anxiety in another. Some of the resistance I encountered resulted from my lack of understanding, or appreciation, for the considerable knowledge that these men possessed. They in turn may have sensed an academic lack of regard, on my part, for their street wisdom, their life experiences and their value system, especially the kinds of art they valued. A kind of impasse can result; neither side willing to concede to the other. Lather (1991) has broached the issue of learner resistance, imploring educators to listen to alternative constructions of knowledge, and ways of learning. Certainly more background in the principles and praxis of adult education would have helped me. One of my earliest disappointments in offering the art course gratis was the lack of respect I sensed, for the course (and, consequently, for me as the instructor), on the part of the administration and the inmates. Most of the inmates showed little regard for their own punctuality, arriving when it suited their convenience, and leaving before the end of class if they chose (Satyajit and Colin were the exceptions in this respect). What I had failed to grasp was the fundamental difference in status that my course received, compared with the art course I taught, for credit, at the eastern Ontario facility the previous year. In essence, the staff at the second site perceived me as a nuisance, an additional distraction in their busy day, and a potential security threat. In conversation, Stephen Duguid drew my attention to this ongoing problem whenever one teaches adult, as opposed to higher, education: The former situation would describe the art course I gave at the lower mainland facility, or any leisure activity. Payment for a course does not appear to be as significant a factor in winning the respect of the students, as whether the course has the potential to contribute to a degree or diploma. The latter situation, higher education, would describe the eastern Ontario prison art program. There my status as a licensed teacher was recognized; my opinion was called upon during the meetings we held for inmate promotions, graduation and pay scale 140 reviews. A n indicator of inmate-student respect, attendance was compulsory: chronic lateness and absenteeism could result in a reduction or suspension of pay, or even expulsion from the course. Compared with the regular course offerings, art and music (offered only for five weeks a year) were seen as privileges: only those inmates who demonstrated previous experience with art or music, and a keen desire to participate, were allowed into the course. A course of art that evolved within a regular school timetable was introduced into a leisure situation. One model, designed for a more predictable structure than one encounters in leisure time, is juxtaposed with another: problems of fit are inevitable. Recommendations for Teaching as a Volunteer Activity Teaching in a volunteer capacity demands the suspension of practices one might normally value highly. In general, the idea that these inmates knew a great deal about their situation, as well as about art and hobby activities, needs to be respected and accepted on the same level of importance, if one expects to gain even a provisional acceptance. Only with inmate acceptance can one expect to make more than a temporary and grudging impression on their lives. The need to recognize that research subjects are fully aware of their situation has only recently been addressed in postmodern research (Lather, 1991). With that, one's sense of importance, as sort of a herald of intellectual or political freedom, is qualified. I had certain preconceptions, based on my understanding of life in captivity, from the little reading and previous experience I had working with inmates. One of those preconceptions was that my role as a volunteer researcher/teacher would have a liberating effect on their consciousness. However arrogant it appears, I would posit that this claim is one of the implicit understandings, however false, that the teaching profession in general does little to criticize 141 Mentoring From my immersion in the site, I was privileged to witness examples of tendencies showing how inmates learn, through the transference of skills: watching, asking questions, while the expert in the craft silently goes about his or her business. Marian Otterstrom pointed out how important it is that teachers of any craft be well-versed and highly skilled; otherwise they are wasting the inmates' time. It is useful to recall Laing's account (Carrel & Laing, 1982) of plying her clay sculpture, without otherwise interacting with the wary inmates at Barlinnie prison; at least one inmate, Jimmy Boyle, following her example, began his own experiments with this novel medium. His successful reformation of his identity through sculpture is legendary. If mentoring has more validity in prisons than stand-up lecturing (see also Riches, 1994), what implications does this form of learning have for regular schools? Gardner (1991) addresses the significance of this traditional method of skills transference, pointing to its renewed practice and increasing acceptance in European trade guilds. Are teachers aware of the perpetuation of power relations implicit in the traditional lecture-style method of instruction (Friere, 1970; Lather, 1991)? Prison inmates are only too aware of, and will challenge at any moment, the self- proclaimed expert, as soon as his or her 'expertise' appears to threaten the inmate's sense of autonomy. How many of the transgressions that inmates have perpetrated have stemmed from a fundamental mistrust of, and resentment toward, the powered classes? Within this mindset lies perhaps a failure of schools to address the perpetuation of a class system via inappropriate propagation of values and attitudes from one class (that represented by teachers, the ones in power), onto certain students. To give a concrete example, a student I taught for years in a regular high school in Ontario, was Cree. His community lived, not on a reserve, but in a 'reserved' area of town, a mobile-home park, shared by other lower-income families and individuals. Besides showing an indifference to my preference for modernist, formalist art methods, this young man lived a semi-nocturnal lifestyle, one which resulted in his missing half of 142 the classes in art, due to the school's incomprehensible rotating timetable. In spite of his astonishing talent, according to the letter of the curriculum, he was deemed a failure, not only in my class, but with the school in general. M y hunch was, it was the system that had failed him, not the other way around. Of note in this context, Native inmates have a much harder time adjusting to the monochronic routines imposed by prison structure than other inmates (Duguid, 1997). Teachers in any setting need to adapt quickly to the needs and interests of the student body they serve. Nowhere is this fact more apparent than in the prison. With a voluntary, leisure art program adaptability is paramount: often inmates will have a better idea than the ingenue art teacher as to what projects are impractical, or logistically unfeasible. The hobbycraft officer who refused to pose (draped) for the inmates did so out of an awareness of the political realities there. At other times, inmates' expectations of what an art teacher might do need to be exposed to cultural sensitivities: I told Neil and Steve that I could not teach Native art, for the fact that I was not Native, and would not feel comfortable disseminating ideas and symbols from a culture to which I did not belong. M y lack of expertise in other areas also formed a prohibition to some of the skills that the inmates wished to learn. At frequent junctures I felt my aims with this art program were at cross-purposes with those of the inmates: where I wanted to inculcate in the inmates a fresh way of seeing and responding to their environment, they wanted to learn or develop skills in tried and true, and preferably marketable, media. I refused to give up what I considered (and still do) a more valuable purpose and rationale of art and art instruction. Our opposing attitudes informed much of the dialogue that ensued; in the frequent differences of opinion, perhaps the men perceived my stance as arrogant or classist. I can offer no easy solution to this potential impasse. Much of my identity as an art teacher is predicated upon the belief that / know better, and it is my purpose here to teach you what I know. While the arrogance of this statement is all too clear, there needs to be some way of reconciling the strong wills of 143 instructors and adult, inmate students. Perhaps by laying out one's values early on, so that each side understands better where the other is situated, a more equitable and cooperative spirit might reign in the art room. Part of the difficulty lies in unearthing the extremely deep-rooted, personal values that are tapped when called to answer the fundamental question^/za? is art for? Posing this question to (inmate) students may be as good a point of departure as any at the beginning of a course in art. The Joy of Participation A l l of the above is not to deny a possibility of resolution or success. Not all participants in the art course had specific projects in mind, hoping to find a market for them. Some had one purpose, to pass their time enjoyably. Inmates such as Colin and Satyajit bent their art works toward religious ends: it was Satyajit's aim to construct a papier-mache Sikh temple. Colin averred that religious experiences informed his art imagery. For all men, at certain times oppositions gave way when all were quietly engaged in the process of art making. These moments occurred too seldom. When they did, separation between teacher and student, inmate and freeman, broke down. Issues of authority and active resistance shifted to background; the process of making art was foregrounded. In a volunteer situation, where evaluation is moot, this aspect of instruction is vital: the regular school art teacher will use these quiet times judiciously, to mark assignments or prepare for the next day's classes. In a setting where the students are already highly sensitized to one's presence, any opportunity to merge with them should be gratefully accepted and acted upon (provided one is not putting oneself at undue risk). For the qualitative researcher hoping to put into practice the worthy concept of participant- observer, these moments are invaluable. Even should the data gathering be reduced during these situations, a foundation of trust is being established that is worth more than the lost pages of potential notes. This trust takes careful nurturing to sustain. 144 The Problem of Criticism Except where expressly invited, I would caution against any but the most practical kinds of criticism. By practical I refer to those problems that arise in the procedure/s of art making. Unless the art course has an academic value attached with it, the issue of criticism in a volunteer course is moot. Inmates will, to a person, resent the implication of a personal attack, a criticism of their worth as people, regardless of the intensity of focus one brings to bear upon the work itself. Many of the inmates' histories include personal criticism and abuse - from parents, from school teachers and administrators, from the various members of the judicial procedures; hence their tendency to take criticism personally. Attempting any form of criticism of their work, however well-intentioned, is fraught with peril. One stands to destroy more than the tenuous bonds of trust with an inmate. Rather, any commentary should arise only when asked for, and then, should be expressed in the subtlest terms: having ascertained that an inmate-student desires help, or feedback about a piece, it is useful to listen to his or her 'other' voice, the tone of feeling, any indication of dissatisfaction with her or his progress. Asking them how they feel about the work, what they think it needs, and so on, puts the solution in their hands, empowering them to take control of their own problems and find their own solutions. Action research presents a viable model for constant and regular self- and program- monitoring. While it did not comprise part of my research methodology at this institution, I have had the opportunity to use it with another group of adult learners: while not all students presented a unanimous voice at that time, the response strongly indicated the students' ability to isolate key concerns. The presentation of this opportunity for feedback has its dangers: some students, under cover of anonymity, overstated the case, which caused me some grief. I would recommend that students append their names as a way of taking responsibility for their criticisms. For two of the inmates I interviewed after the end of the course, of significance were my emotional honesty and interpersonal style of 145 delivery. Content did not appear to be an issue of consequence. Even Neil and Steve's concerns had little to do with the curriculum and much to do with my 'hidden agenda'. To return to my earlier discussion in this chapter, of the ambivalence I felt over my role as a teacher in light of the evidence of more effective learning strategies which I witnessed, perhaps the word 'teacher' needs to be reconsidered. The inmates were fully adept at teaching themselves. What role, what function could I have assumed in order to learn from them, as a researcher? The closest word that comes to mind is 'facilitator.' This word has replaced 'leader' for obvious reasons, in the context of workshops, formal discussions and similar short-term learning situations. It connotes a less authoritarian personage, one who serves rather than governs the participants (another word for which I would replace student, as the latter infers the reciprocal role of teacher, and hence, the dialectical struggle). In a prison environment this distinction is important. Alternatively, one's sense of duty may be seriously challenged as inmates gradually accept their altered status, within the prison culture. Abuses of power are temptingly offered when an inmate's sense of freedom is even marginally broadened: The softer and more pliant personality of a facilitator - as opposed to the 'screws' - may be perceived as weakness. On occasion I felt the treatment I received at the hands of certain inmates amounted to a lack of respect: hard-won gains in personal mobility within the prison environment can reinforce a combative, 'war-zone' mentality; one unfortunate result can be manipulative and inauthentic behaviour (see also Aulich, 1994; Mackie, 1994). However, for the greater body, the inmates were respectful, if guarded. Working with Administrators When M r . Sandstone told me he thought my research was of no particular value to the institution, he spoke, presumably, from experience and knowledge. What I suggest is intended to form part the literature of interest to readers intent on, or curious about, 146 teaching or researching in long-term facilities in Canada. I take responsibility for any generalizations implied. It would be simplistic to recommend that one's course of action not follow my own. Any alternative approach with staff will not necessarily be an improvement. The aura of mystery surrounding the social development director's decision to cancel the art course, the lack of warning or chance of redress, were, I feel, deliberate. Assuming some truth in the casual remark that Gus, the acting hobbycraft officer made, regarding the staffs perception of my personality, M r . Sandstone's want of communication with me is at least partly understandable. Some suggestions, notwithstanding, might be: 1) Keep staff informed at all times as to your intentions and progress. If this involves extra effort and unnatural displays of goodwill, it is energy well spent. Staff take an interest in all aspects of prison operation, although not the same interest as one would think; for staff, security issues are paramount. Any information imparted to them alleviates suspicion: as with any of us, it is the unknown that is feared and suspected rather than the known. Insofar as one represents the institution from which you are conducting your research, one is an ambassador of that institution. Inmates are not the only people with long memories. 2) Resist any temptation for altercation with staff. In spite of whatever knowledge and expertise one brings into the prison milieu, the operational procedures of a prison are kept mysterious for a reason: any unnecessary information passed to outsiders may fall into 'enemy' hands (the paramilitary language is appropriate, given the high security, weaponry and hierarchical distribution of responsibility and obedience within this bureaucracy). What information one is privileged to know represents the 'tip of the iceberg.' Rules and decisions that appear arbitrary and even cruel operate out of an internal logic that defies understanding by the uninitiated. As frustrating as some of these decisions will be, in the interest of goodwill and continued access, it is advisable to bear them with equanimity. 3) Draw up a plan and keep to it, for the sake of the staff and the inmates. This last point cannot be over stressed. Prisons depend upon quick communications and coordinated 147 plans: an emergency evacuation - of a single prisoner injured in a fight, or the entire population due to a hostage-taking incident, reinforces the importance of precise spatial and temporal coordinates. Having a relaxed, 'polychrome' attitude to time may be acceptable or even expected within a society of artists. In the tight, monochronic style of prison operation, to which many of the inmates I met had adapted, punctuality is not merely a matter of courtesy; it can, in some instances, mean the difference between safety and personal hazard. A Critique of the Praxis of Research In much of the preceding account I have been aware of, and criticized my presence within the penal institution. Taking an 'epichronic' view, my experience can be understood as part of a critique of the power structure of prisons and my own appropriation of knowledge - with the grudging cooperation of the inmates - in order to wrest some of the answers I came in search of. The classic model of participant observation is highly regarded in the tradition of ethnographic methodology. In my research situation, not finding an existing course of art in which to observe and participate, I had to construct my own. Much of the tension I felt as a researcher, which caused me unnecessary difficulty, had to do with this awareness of my artificial presence among the men. M y discomfort erupted at least once, when Neil and Steve thrust me into the unusual role of interviewee. I felt keenly aware of the imbalance of power: as interviewers, Neil and Steve were directing the outcome, probing me with their 'social scientists' lens. As an exercise it formed one of the most profound examples of empathy: What do we mean when we throw questions at willing participants? What are the limits of enquiry, and who gets to determine them? I can no longer act as irresponsible interviewer. Had I been more informed of the alternative strategies that liberatory researchers such as Lather (1991) espouse, I would have had at least a context in which to ground my confusion and suspicion. If I had approached the interview as an exercise, I might have been prepared as well, but the experience would 148 have been diminished. If the preceding account has shown me at fault, as a kind of intruder, or poseur, it is an admission of the artificial, constructed nature of ethnographic research. What I have discovered, then, is not what I sought: one might wonder, how much of what one seeks is ever truly found in ethnographic research? The aforementioned does not discount the value of this research experience, here presented in its loose and rough edges. Fortunately, postmodern research criticism addresses the imbalances of power, and the constructed nature of so-called ethnographic enquiry (Clifford, 1986; Lather, 1991). The documentation of my enquiry is presented here as an 'inconclusion', allowing that the discoveries I made, regarding administrative power structure, and inmate ethos, are valid in themselves. That my intended course did not go according to plan, and these discoveries were not what I had expected to find, in no way diminishes the importance of this research. I do not really wish to conclude and sum up, rounding off the argument so as to dump it in a nutshell on the reader. A lot more could be said about any of the topics I have touched upon.... I have meant to ask the questions, to break out of the frame....The point is not a set of answers, but making possible a different practice....(Kapeller, 1986, quoted in Lather, 1991, p. 159) Suggestions for Theory The nature of enquiry that I embarked upon began as a phenomenological investigation into prison inmates' perceptions of time. What I ended up with was a journey of self-discovery: in experiencing some of the dynamics of prison bureaucracy, through my direct interaction with prison staff, I was compelled to confront - and reconsider - personal values that I had long ago submerged. These values concerned ways of teaching, particularly the power relations implicit in any teaching relationship, as well as values about art. The process of designing a curriculum, for example, implies by definition that decisions are made about what content will be included and excluded. Alternative values are presented when these latter contents return to haunt one, as happened so often with me. Confronted with these 'ghosts', one must somehow accommodate their voices, or be guilty 149 of perpetuating the hierarchical distribution of power that implies: "I'm the teacher, and therefore my opinion has more validity than yours." It would be presumptuous for me to make specific recommendations for educational theory, based upon this relatively brief encounter. The self-reflection in which I was bound to engage was precipitated by the collision and opposition of at least two very different value systems, mine and theirs ('they' understood here as both the inmates and the prison staff). This in itself is significant: my self-understanding was tested (and broadened) more than any specific learning I was able to facilitate with the men. In the spirit of postmodern reflectivity, it is important to keep this process foregrounded when engaging in any research, and research involving human subjects in particular. I can think of no better way of keeping check on one's intentions. Reflectivity renders one's motives transparent, through the exposition of values not otherwise wholly acknowledged. This notion of self-reflectivity invites a new understanding of social research, that is, as a subjective activity, whereby one's feelings and reactions are included as vital and real. With that, the inter-subjectivity lauded by postmodern human research theorists such as Lather (1991) can be implemented. In this way alternative stories and realities are increasingly legitimated and heard. And Finally, a Gala Opening and a Dream Friday, January 24, 1997, evening: A well-heeled and animated crowd is milling around the lobby of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Two dignitaries are welcoming Vancouver's elite to the opening of the exhibition "Pierced Hearts and True Love: a Century of Drawings for Tattoos." Members of the street element - youngsters with hair dyed in shocking hues of ultrablue, sonic yellow and magenta, body piercings, and 'retro' clothing; a burly man with a ponytail and thick, tattoo-covered forearms - jostles with the regular audience, who circumnavigate this colorful admixture with flair. I make a mental note of acquiring a few invitation cards to send to Frank, Paul, Neil, Sean and Colin. The cards' image, of a cobra 150 about to strike, set between a cluster of roses, is from a tattoo drawing in ink on parchment, now weathered and resembling flesh. I wonder if these cards would be considered contraband, as is any Other tattooing paraphernalia in prisons. In a recent dream, I am being searched at the front gate of a penitentiary where I have arrived to teach a course in art. A female guard takes special interest in a book I have brought to show to the inmates, unaware it may pose a risk. The contents of the (textless) book are black and white illustrations: elegant, old-fashioned woodblock or silkscreen prints of knives, pistols and other weapons. I am detained indefinitely.... 151 References Alcoff, Linda (1991). The problem of speaking for others. Cultural Critique, Winter, 5-31. Aulich, Lynn (1994). Fear and loathing: Art therapy, sex offenders and gender. In Marian Liebmann (Ed.), Art therapy with offenders (pp. 135-164). London: Jessica Kingsley. Boyle, Jimmy (1977). A sense of freedom. Edinburgh: Canongate. Caron, Roger (1978). Go Boy!: Memoirs of a lifetime behind bars. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Carrell, Chris & Laing, Joyce (1982). The Special Unit, Barlinnie Prison: Its education through its art. Glasgow: Third Eye Centre. Cheek, Frances and Laucius, Joan (1971). The time worlds of three drug-using groups - alcoholics, heroin addicts, and psychedelics. In Henry Yaker, Osmond Humphrey and Frances Cheek (Eds.), The future of time: Man's temporal environment (pp. 330-347). New York: Doubleday. Cleveland, William (1989). The history of California's Art-In-Corrections program. In Stephen Duguid (Ed.), Yearbook of Correctional Education 1989, 175-191. Burnaby, British Columbia: Simon Fraser Institute for the Humanities. Coakely, Catherine (1990). Creativity in prison. Yearbook of Correctional Education, 7990,105-111. Clifford, James (1986). Partial truths. In James Clifford and George Marcus (Eds.). Writing culture: The politics and poetics of ethnography (pp. 1-26). Berkeley: University of California Press. (1988). The predicament of culture: Twentieth century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Cohen, Stanley and Taylor, Laurie (1972). Psychological survival: The experience of long- term imprisonment. Middlesex: Penguin. Congdon, Kristen (1984). Art in jail settings. Art Education 37(2), 10-11. Creswell, John (1994). Research design: Qualitative and quantitative approaches. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications. Duguid, Stephen (1996). Electronic mail correspondence, January. Edwards, Shan (1994). Out of line: art therapy with vulnerable prisoners. In Marian Liebmann (Ed.), Art therapy with offenders (pp. 121-134). London: Jessica Kingsley. Freud, Sigmund (1947). Leonardo: A psychosexual study. New York: Random House. 152 Friere, Paulo (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Foucault, Michel (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage/Random House. Gardner, Howard (1991). The unschooled mind: How children think and how schools should teach . New York: Basic Books. Garibaldi, Michele & Moore, Mary (1981). The treatment team approach. Journal of Physical Education and Recreation 52(4), 28-32. Gioscia, Victor (1971). On social time. In Henry Yaker, Osmond Humphrey and Frances Cheek (Eds.), The future of time: Man's temporal environment (pp.73-121). New York: Doubleday. Goldin, Carol and Thomas, Jim (1984). Adult education in correctional settings: Symbol or substance? Adult Education Quarterly 34(3), 123-134. Gorman, Bernard & Wessman, Alden (1977). Images, values and concepts of time. In Bernard Gorman and Alden Wessman (Eds.), The personal experience of time (pp.217-263). New York: Plenum Press. Hall, Edward (1983). The dance of life: The other dimension of time. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Hargreaves, Andy (1990). Teachers' work and the politics of time and space. Qualitative Studies in Education 3(4), 303-320. Harris, Ruth (1991). Murders and madness: Medicine, law and society in the fin de siecle. Oxford: Clarendon. Huxley, Aldous (1954). Doors of perception. New York: Harper. 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New York: Putnam. Mackie, Barry (1994). Art therapy - an alternative to prison. In Marian Liebmann (Ed.), Art therapy with offenders (pp. 220-249). London: Jessica Kingsley. Mann, Thomas (1969). The magic mountain. New York: Vintage/Random House. M c C a l l , Gail (1981). Leisure restructuring. Journal of Physical Education and Recreation 52(4), 38-39. McEwen, Douglas & Martinez, Armando (1981). "You can do your time or let your time do you". Journal of Physical Education and Recreation 52(4), 56-57. Nicolai, Sandra (1981). Rehabilitation and leisure in prisons. Journal of Physical Education and Recreation 52(4), 33-35. Peaker, Anne & Vincent, Jill (1991). Arts in prisons: Towards a sense of achievement. London: Home Office Research and Planning Unit. Piaget, Jean (1976). A child's construction of reality. London: Routledge & Regan Paul. Piazza, Michael (1997, February). Members only: From the Art Institute to the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center. New Art Examiner 24(5), 32-35. (1996, March). At night in the grand court - a renovation. White Walls, a Journal of Language and Art 95, 36-50. Priestly, J.B. (1968). Man and time. New York: Dell Publishing. Riches, Colin (1994), The hidden therapy of a prison art education programme. In Marian Liebmann (Ed.), Art therapy with offenders (pp. 77-101). London: Jessica Kingsley Sekida, Katsuki (1987). Zen training. New York, Tokyo: John Weatherhill Inc.. Shipman, Marten (1981). The limitations of social research. London: Longman. Skelly, Tom (1992, Winter). On the yard. High Performance 58/59, 32-35. Speckman, Ray (1981). Recreation in prisons - a panacea? Journal of Physical Education and Recreation 52(4), 46-47. Szekely, George (1982). Art education in correctional settings. Studies in Art Education 24(\), 33-42. Tyler, Stephen (1986). Post-modern ethnography: From document of the occult to occult document. In James Clifford and George Marcus (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography (pp. 122-140). Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 154 Uren, J. (1981). Craft education. In W . Forster (Ed.), Prison education in England and Wales (pp. 100-108). Leicester, U . K . : National Institute of Adult Education (England and Wales). Vincent, Isabel (1996, November). The most powerful thirteen-year-old in the world. Saturday night, 40-50, 138. White, Edmund (1993). Genet: A biography. New York: Alfred A . Knopf. Wideman, John (1984). Brothers and keepers. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Williams, Ellen (1983). A n artist/advocate for the inmate voice. In Steven Hart and Mark Waren (Eds.), The arts in prisons (pp. 93-109). New York: Center for Advanced Study in Theatre Arts. Williams, Larry (1981). Women's correctional recreational services. Journal of Physical Education and Recreation 52(4), 55, 58. Woods, Peter (1986). Inside schools: Ethnography in educational research. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul. 155 T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F B R I T I S H C O L U M B I A Appendix I Faculty of Education Department of Curriculum Studies 2125 Main Mall Vancouver, B . C . Canada V6T 1Z4 Tel: (604) 822-5422 Fax: (604) 822-4714 March 5, 1996 To Whom It May Concern: This letter is a request to visit a correctional facility in the Lower Mainland in order to conduct research in the area of art education. I am a Master's student at U . B . C . and the data from this research will be used in my thesis. My interest with prisoners and art stems in part from a five-week pilot study I made at r*************^ Ontario, last summer. I was looking at the effect that an intensive engagement in visual art has on prisoners' self-esteem. One of the surprises that emerged from interviews with two volunteers was the wish they expressed for more time to do their art — both a longer duration for the course, and longer periods of class time. This discovery struck me as somewhat paradoxical, given my assumption that the last thing a prisoner would wish for was more time. It occurred to me that prisoners' sense of time may be qualitatively different from what we, as outsiders, experience. From this and other issues, I have developed the following proposal, to study how prisoners perceive time, and to what extent an immersion in a visual art program affects that perception. Related to this is a secondary issue: to what extent does an immersion in art affect the renegotiation of prisoners' identity? For the purpose of this study, I am seeking a site to offer a course of instruction in art. I would like to involve prisoners as much as possible in the design of the course, in order to allow maximum participation and self-expression. However, as a working theme, I am suggesting using the body as a point of exploration. Students would begin with basic drawing exercises focused primarily on the body, leading through painting, and culminating in three-dimensional constructions, using their own bodies as reference. More metaphors than literal likenesses, the images should encourage a wide variety of styles as students explore their own histories and identities. This course will last between ten and twelve weeks, depending upon the number of hours per class (ideally, six), and number of classes offered per week. I would like eight to ten volunteers to participate in the study; however, enrollment in the course would not be limited to those few. A maximum of fifteen students in a class would work best, I feel, but more than one class may be offered concurrently. M y schedule is quite flexible; I am available weekends and Tuesday, Thursday and Friday evenings. As this proposal benefits me as much as inmate students (and possibly staff), I am offering this service free. I may submit a request to cover supplies, depending upon what materials are available on site, and what funds I can pry out of my department. As we will emphasize working with what is at hand, and active recycling, any amount suggested should be modest. If you wish to discuss this proposal with me further, you can reach me at: [*=*******]. You may also contact my Faculty Advisor, Rita Irwin, at [****•***]. Thank you for your co-operation. Sincerely, Graeme Knight. 156 Appendix II Questionnaire A (beginning of the course) 1. When was the last time you made a drawing, painting or other item of visual interest (anything, including 'useful' articles like tooled leather or tattoos, that is pleasing to the eye)? a week ago or less more than a week ago but within the past month between one and twelve months ago one to three years ago more than three years ago can't remember 2. What was it? 3. Overall, were you: A) really pleased; B) satisfied; C) disappointed but felt you learned something; or D) totally discouraged with the result of your effort? 4. (answer if you checked B , C , or D for #3.) What could or would you have done to improve the result of your art project? 5. Do you like to draw? a lot sometimes ; only when I'm really bored not at all. 6. What things do you like to draw? 7. What materials, or mediums, (e.g. pencil, charcoal, ink, etc.) do you like to use? 8. Have you ever made an art piece in three dimensions (e.g. soapstone or wood carving, clay modelling, cardboard construction)? yes no 9. If yes, what was it? 10. Circle the following museums or events you ever attended: animal show, such as the Royal Winter Fair, or a dog show antique show aquarium art gallery (commercial) art gallery (public, like the Art Gallery of Ontario) automobile or boat show botanical house or garden 157 craft museum fashion show home show Museum of Civilization, Ottawa Maritime museum military or airforce base "open house" military museum museum of natural history (dinosaurs, etc.) Native American Powow pioneer village, fort or other historical reconstruction planetarium provincial or national parks Science Centre zoo other (please specify) . 11. What do you like to do in your spare time? (please underline) play sports (which ones?) : work out with weights read watch TV listen to music listen to the radio play music (your own instrument: ) write (circle any): letters, poetry, short stories, in a journal play cards talk play board games work on crossword or other puzzles work on school assignments other (please specify) 12. How many hours a week would you say you watch TV? 13. Which programs do you watch most often? 14. What do you hope to do when you are released? Thank you for your cooperation! 158 Appendix III Interview Questions - [********] Inmate Art Attitudes and Histories Interviewer: Graeme Knight Interviewee: Place: [*******̂ Room: Date: 1. How many hours per week would you say you spend on your hobby? This includes all the time preparing, ordering materials, reading and other research you do on your project. 2. Describe the procedure for obtaining materials for your art or craft. 3. What materials are restricted? 4. Are there any skills you have acquired in prison that you will use for leisure time, when you are released? 5. Tell me about some of the things in art or crafts that you did before you were incarcerated. 6. What other pastimes did you enjoy before your prison sentence, that is, on the 'outside'? 7. What sorts of images do you like to make (draw, sculpt, paint, etc.)? 8. Where do you get your ideas, or images from, to do your hobby? 9. Have you noticed any positive, beneficial effects from doing hobbycrafts or art? If so, what are they? 10. Have you noticed any harmful or negative effects from doing hobbycrafts or art? What are they? 12. What would you say is your best, or favorite, hobby? 13. How did you learn it? 14. In general, what would you say is more important, mastering a skill or technique, or expressing yourself? 15. How does the time you spend in hobby activities compare with other time, such as a) other free time activities (please specify); b) regular daytime program activity; c) visiting time; and d) other time? 16. What are some words or expressions you would use to describe time? 17. In general, how quickly does time pass for you, in here? 18. Are there times, for example, times of day, seasons, during certain activities, when time seems to pass more slowly? More quickly? 19. Please describe a typical week at Matsqui: the structure, periods of school, work, meals, visiting hours, "free time", weekends, and so on. 20. In general, how does the time you spend in prison compare with time on the outside? 21. What changes have you noticed in yourself during your time spent in prison? 22. Has working on a hobby or an art activity had any impact on this (these) change(s)? 23. Do you have any other thoughts or insights about time you would like to share? 24. Where are you at in your sentence (near the beginning, somewhere in the middle, or close to the end)? 25. What advice can you give me, or any art teacher who wants to set up a course in prison? 26.1s there any thing else you would like to say? 159 T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F B R I T I S H C O L U M B I A A p p e n d i x IV Faculty of Education Department of Curriculum Studies 2125 Main Mall Vancouver, B . C . Canada V6T 1Z4 Tel: (604) 822-5422 Fax:(604) 822-4714 May 28, 1996. . Dear Volunteer: I am a student at the University of British Columbia, specializing in art education. I would like to conduct some interviews and observations with you as part of my research which I w i l l use toward a thesis for my M . A . degree. The purpose of this study is to discover how inmates in a long-term correctional facility understand and experience time, and how art activity impacts on their experience of time and their identities of themselves. To find this out, I would like to interview you, and observe your conduct in class, throughout the course of instruction. I w i l l need two interviews: at the beginning of the course and at the end. Each time I w i l l ask you questions regarding what you think about time in general: how you experience it and the way(s) you define it; and other questions to do with how art activity impacts on your sense of time, and on yourself in general. The second interview w i l l also concern specific artistic problems that you w i l l be involved with at the time. Each interview should take no more than twenty minutes (Total time: one hour maximum). I w i l l use audio tape only. It is important that I record your own words verbatim. Your answers, and any observations I make, will be treated with total confidentiality. Nobody other than yourself, me, and my advisor, Dr. Rita Irwin, w i l l see or read the information I collect. A l l names w i l l be changed in any written descriptions. After I have summarized my findings, all data w i l l be destroyed. If you have any questions or concerns about the procedure at any time, either during or after the session, please let me know. Y o u may refuse to participate, or, if you wish to drop out of this study at any time you may do so and remain in the art course. Of course, I can offer you no cash payment or gift of any sort, only gratitude. Your cooperation is extremely valuable to me. Thank you for your consent and assistance. Sincerely, Graeme Knight. I, understand the purpose of this study and freely volunteer my permission to Graeme Knight to interview me and observe my conduct in art class. I have received a copy of this consent form for my records, page 1 of 1 Signed: Date: ; page 1 of 1 160 A p p e n d i x V E X P L O R A T I O N S T H R O U G H A R T C O U R S E C A L E N D A R - Summer 1996 - [**************], B.C. Week 1: E x p l o r a t i o n s Through Art: introduction/drawing Tuesday, May 21 no class Thursday, May 23 introduction to drawing: a): gesture, colored chalk pastel. NOTES: outline of course, request for research participant volunteers Week 2: Drawing II Tuesday, May 28 drawing b): contour, value, texture, lines' expressive meanings. Thursday, May 30 drawing c): inverted shapes, .positive and negative space exercises. Visuals: slides of drawings from European and Asian artists; 10th century to present. Week 3: Painting Tuesday, June 4 Introduction to color: emotional & physical properties; color wheels Thursday, June 6 Painting with tempera: Imaginary landscapes, copying modern masters and/or still lives Visuals: Slides of Impressionist & modern work, real objects, color images from books Week 4:Political and Issue Art: "pushing buttons." Tuesday, June 11 Collage and Montage: Making use of everyday materials. Thursday, June 13 images - magazine photos, to create personal statements Visuals: Pop. conceptual, and Native artists. Week 5 (?): Papermaking with Wendy Stephenson Tuesday, June 18 M s . Stephenson w i l l lead class in their own creation of paper Thursday, June 20 Continuation of papermaking. To Be Announced. Week 6: Printmaking Tuesday, June 25 Brief review of relief printmaking (new to some): linocutting Thursday, June 27 Linocutting continued. Advanced students are encouraged to experiment with own paper & multicolors. Visuals: Prtints from Japanese woodblocks, M u n c h , Picasso, Rauschenburg Warhol, Sawai, etc. Note:Personal meaning w i l l be emphasized.. Week 7: Sculpture I: clay modelling/casting. Tuesday, July 2 Design and execute a relief sculpture Thursday, July 4 Casting of relief sculpture in plaster of Paris. Body parts may be cast as well, at discretion of teacher. Visuals: Renaissance (15th & 16th centuries) doorways and freestanding statues, to George Segal, prisoner-artists. Week 8: Sculpture II: construction/assemblage Tuesday, July 9 Students may continue themes developed with collage unit; combination of... Thursday, July 11 ...found materials and objects with casting and/or plaster. Visuals: M a r i s o l . Nevelson, Picasso, Native and African sculpture. Week 9: Preparation for A n i m a t i o n : Comic b o o k Tuesday, July 16 Students w i l l write and illustrate an autobiographical comic b o o k . . . . Thursday, July 18 which may be later developed into a three- minute animation sequence. Visuals: Adult themed comics ( N O T porn!) from various comic artists (Robert Crumb, Japanese styles, etc.) Week 10 (?) Animation with guest artist Michelle W i l l m o t t Tuesday, July 23 A four-week unit in animated film for those, interested.... Thursday, July 25 ...Students may also work in their own chosen medium over the next four weeks. Visuals: T . B . A . A diverse show of animated film styles, featuring some real classics. Week 11: Animation unit or one's Tuesday, July 30 ...own medium continues Thursday, August 1 ..until the end of classes! Week 12: Tuesday, August 6 Thursday, August 8 Week 13: Tuesday, August 13 Thursday, August 15 Instructor: Graeme Knight 161 A p p e n d i x V I Correctional Service Canada Service correctionne! Canada Number — Numero: Date 1 9 9 2 - 0 3 - 1 1 Resp. Center 1 2 C o d e Centre de resp. Page: of/de LIST OF APPROVED CELL HOBBIES AND RELATED TOOLS AND MATERIALS Hobby Toola Mater Artwork: Painting, Drawing C a l l i g r a p h y , C r e a t i v e Writing Copper Tooling Drafting Fly Tying jewellery Craft, S i l v e r Craft Knitting I Crocheting Leather-craft Model Building Exacto Knife, Knife Blades, Scissors , Pencils, Brushes, Palettes, 3 oz. Thinner, Palette Knife, Stretch F raaie a , D r a f t i n g Set, Scissors Needles, Beading, Looms, Scissors, Exacto Knife, Knife Blades Pens & nibs Pens & nibs Moulding t o o l s , Exacto Knife, Knife Blades, Scissors Exacto Knife, Knife Blades, 2' T-Square, L-Square, Scissors Small Needle Nose, P l i e r s , Scissors, Budding needles, Fly-Tying Vise Needlenose P l i e r s , Engraver, Needles, Small Snips, Tool Sharpener, Engraving Tools, Jewell ers Block, *o_r_- iCharponocv K n i t t i n g needles, Scissors, Needles, Crochet Hooks, Tape Measure, S t i t c h Holders, Cauges, Yarn Holder Scissors, Needles, Swivel Knife, 8"L.Wooden Mallet, Stamping Tools, Leather Punch, Brushes, Cauges Exacto Knife, Knife Blades, Tweezers, Vise, Hand D r i l l Paints, Charts, Masking Tape, Paper, Charcoal, fli«wng i Pay a* t Canvas, Drawing Pens, Inks, Water Paints, L e t t r a Set, Matting Board, O i l Paints. Beads, thread, wax, Scrap leather, p e n c i l s , Pencil crayons, fasteners, Masking Tape, Patterns Ink, Paper, Books Paper, Ink Copper Pins t Paints, 4 sq.f t. Copper sheeting, Spackle, Patterns & Mould, Steelwool, Tracing Film Pens, Pencils, S t e n c i l s , Masking Tape, Paper Hooks, Feathers, Thread, Wool, White glue. Fur, S i l k , Masking tape, Fishing Line Wire, Stones, Metal, Emery Paper, Pencils, Paper, Wax, Feathers, Beads, Shells, Emery Cloth, Leather, Ivory and/or Tangua Nuts, Findings Wool, Books, Charts, Pins, Zippers, Buttons, Masking Tape Leather, Lacing, Patterns, 4 oz. Contact Cement or White G lue, Dyes,~ Waxes, Studs t Findings, Leather Weld Model K i t s , Brushes, Paints, B-uohcc, Pens, Non-Toxic Clue, Wire, Wood Pieces, F i t t i n g s Petit Point, Needle Point Scissors, Needles, Exacto Knife, Wooden Frames, Knife Blades, Magnifying Device Wool, Beads, Ring3, Hangers, Books, Threads, Cotton Wool, Patterns, Masking Tape, Paper, Screen, Mat Board LIST Or APPROVED CELL HOBBIES AND RELATED TOOLS AND MATERIALS H o b b y Rug Hooking Soap Stone 4 A r g a l l t e Carving Tools Rug Hook, Stapler, Wood Frame, Exacto Knife, Knife Blades, S c i s s o r s Exacto Knife, Knife Blades Materials Wool, Canvas, Charts, Staples, Needles Pens, Pencil Crayons, Soap Stone, A r g a l i t e C S C - 3 C C 1-15 (R-fl7-l0) 7 " o - 2 - . - 9 0 3 - i 5 6 9 DIRECTIVE "Introduction'' 162 £1*1 Correctional Service Canada Service correctionnel Canada N u m b e r — N u m e r o : Date 1 0 . 0 9 - 0 3 - 1 1 P a g e : : o f / d e . R e s p . C e n t e r C o d e i C e n t r e d e r e s p . String Art Hood Carving/Woodwork Exacto Knife, Wooden Mallet, Knife Blades Set of 6 Carving Knives, or Gouge Set, Brushes t Compass Set, Sharpening Stone, Exacto Knife, Knife Blades 3/4" F i n i s h i n g H a i l s , Plywood (12" X 12"), Thread, White Clue, Water base Faints Wood (max. 2 s q . f t . ) . Sandpaper,. Faint, White glue, Beeswax, Screws, F i t t i n g s , Pens, Pencils, Steelwool, Material/Cloth, Polish NOTE: A l l scissors must be Blunt-end and 4 inches or l e s s . Carving Tool blades must not exceed I 1-1/2 inches. Materials include applicable books & patterns f o r hobby. Pelican 100 Series Ink j^—noj^jillowed. THE FOLLOW I KG ARE NOT ALLOWED TN THE LIVING UNITS Class, Carving Tools with a blade that exceeds 1-1/2 inches, Toxic Clue, Lacquer/varnish, screwdrivers. F i l e s or Saws. J a - i n T - f l - f i a t i thinners must Solvent Base Paints, pprovejl. auth,ojrized .3_p_z. cojv^a^ g e j r s ^ A l l Shop Hobby a c t i v i t i e s must be done i n the Hobby Shop and not taken into the C e l l s . " A l l carving knives and engraving tools must be kept i n a locked container when not i n use. Engraving tools for s i l v e r a c t i v i t i e s are not subject to the 1-1/2 inch l i m i t a t i o n , but must be personally inspected and approved by the Arts & Crafts O f f i c e r before being allowed i n the Living Unit. APPROVED SHOP ACTIVITIES Ceramics/Pottery Exacto Knife, 4 Knife Blades, Shaping Tools, Shaping Needles, Clay S l i c e r , .Brushes Ceramic C l u e , C l a y , Creenware, Glazes , Paints, Sponges, Plaster of Paris, Glass &. Hirror Etching Exacto Knife, Class Cutter, Knife Blades, Brushes Mirror, Class, Masking Tape, Pens, Pencils, Paper, Paint Stained Class Class Cutters, P l i e r s , Mallets, Class Grinders, Soldering Iron, Exacto Knife, Knife Blades, Lead Knives, Side C u t t e r s , Brushes, Mallets Class, Solder, Flux, Moulds, Patterns, Forms, Glue, Patina, Lamp Parts, Nails, Wax, Masking Tape, Pens, Pencils, Paints, Grinding Stones, Copper F o i l , Class Polish Hand Tools, Small Power Tools, Router B i t s Wood, screws, n a i l s . Wood f i l l e r , varnish, paints NOTE: A l l Shop Tools must remain i n the Hobby Shop and s h a l l not be taken to the c e l l s . A l l Shop Hobby shall be done i n the shop only and riot taken to the c e l l s . Inmates are not allowed to own Hacksaws or Grinders. CSC/SCC 1-15 (R-87-10) 7530-21-903-1569 163 DIRECTIVE "Wrcc-.j.iGn" work_mba6cdcvofaxpj263in73kem3a ---- The music phase of modern painting THE MUSICAL PHASE OF MODEHN PAINTING. The MUSICAL PHASE of MODERN PAINTING A Thesis presented for the DIPLOMAINFINEAR S (HONOURS) in the Unipersity of Canterbury CHRISTCHURCH New Zealand by ,... J. N. MANE rg6g To ss. Cecilia and Luke. For the joy of ear and eye, For the be art and brain's delight, li'or the mystic harmony * I! inking sense to sound and sight: "Today a synthesis between the worlds of sound and appear- ance seems to be a possibil i ·ty. "--Paul Klee. * Sacraments and other rites, The English Hymnal, no. 309. Preface Introduction Variations on a Theme 1. 2 3 The Interfusion of Modern Painting and Music Impressionism in Painting and Music Pos Impressionism: 'l1he Flusical 5 The Symbolist Decade: c.1890-1900 6 Fauvism and Music 7 Guld.sm and Music H Orpldsm and Music 9 li'uturism and Music 10 ~xpressionism: Painting and Music 11 Dada Coda Append Bibliography Notes on "Colour MusicH ase i iii lJ: 1. 55 61. 72 77 83 97 106 -i- PREFACE. Painting and music interest me much. They a.l'e the twin summits of my artistic ambitions. In this thesis, I have tried to render intelligible to myself, in a very elementary way, the relationship between modern painting and musio, and the develornnent of painting towards the condition of music. rrhis is not to deny that other valid parallels may be drawn between music and, say, sculpture, architecture, poetry, or lrinetic art--such relationships do, of course, exis·t--but they do not seem to have been to each other's evolution as painting and music use the past tense advisedly because I cannot discuss tl:~ any semblance of competence developments in the arts of the present day, nor discern in them ·the trends likely to influence the arts of the future. rrhe interfusion of painting and music is a phenomenon of modern art. Because the most influential ideas in twentieth century painting and mu-sic have their origins in the period immediately prior to the First World War, I have centralized my area of study there. 1l'bere the patterns for subsequent developments in modern art were set. My aim has been to touch on the main areas of con- tact between the two arts in those years• -i:i.- Not for a moment do I regard this thesis as having, in any way, exhausted the topic. It merely "scratches tbe surface~" so to speak--it is a l»egtnninr;. I shoulO. like to timnk my friends for their interest, encouragement, advice, and practical assistance. '!'o the painters and composers-~musicians alll--whose ideas laid the foundations of this thesis, and whose works sus- tairled me in its darkest moments--my gratitude. J. N. Mo -iii- Music and painting are, matertally spealdng, 1 Very different arts. In the former a temporally presented mode of expression addresses itself to the ear, in the latter a SJlatially presented mode addresses itself to the eye, and they would not appear to admit of any comparison. Modern painting interfuses the dimensions of time and space, challenging the traditional distinctions between temporal and spatial arts. A kind of multi-dimensional art results. Gauguin and van Gogh believed that painting promised to become more like music. It bas. Modern painting has entered a "musical" pbase~-for the painter has turned composer and performer, c:md his works owe an obvio~us debt to the sister art. Music, in turn, has drawn from the :painter's domain such material as bas considerably enriched the language of sound. In no previous age were they so interdependent, and this assertion is confirmed in the astonishing parallels between them before the First World War, when the notion (._~ ofvrelationship between painting and music was at its zenith. "Musicality" in modern painting associated with a tendency towards abstraction. The nearer painting -iv- approaches a pictorial art which makes no specific refer- ence to nature, the more nearly must it align itself with an autonomous and independent system such as music. Painting and music have come to share fundamental principles ·of organization. What malres a painting "musical"? A musical painter? So it would seem. A number of musicians and composers have abandoned promising musical careers in order to take up painting--among them Ciurlionis, Klee, l~'eininger, 11ussolo, and Larry Poons. Other painters have deemed it necessary to acquire musical skills0 Such painters as these were "musically" committed in their works: music instructed their visual sense and info~med their expression. But not all modern painting could be described as "musical". 111N1ere are musical pictures, just as there are unmusical ones, pictures t[Jat are posi.tively hostile to the r l t . f . '' i ( D tl t 1 th . 1 WelD e no 1.on o .. mus1c. y ·1e same "O(en, ·ere 1s a so music "positively hostile to the whole notion of music, and coHsequently, to the whole notion of modern J)ai.nting.) Some pai~ti.ngs which invite musical association are ambiguous and confusing. They may remind us of music, they may not. One cannot hear a painting or see music save in the experience of abnormal sensory agitation. However much synaesthetes would persuade us to tlle contrary, painting is :not music. . 1 Anil da Silva, Otto von Simson, Roger llinks, Man through his Art: Musi£ (London: E. P. Publishing Co. Ltd., 196t1), p. -v- The relationship between painting and music is best explained in terms of their Qarallel developments, and in order to do this I have looked for corresponding gestures in the two arts. Painting arrived at abstractlon by anulogy with music (a useful ally, since music is fundamentally non-representational.) Before the First World War (and fo~ a short while after) painters and .o:amposers were attuned to each other in a way that had few precedents in history: a strong bond was cemented between them, and there were a great many areas in which they met. All subsequent developments in painting and music refer, in some way, to the innovations and inventions of the musical phase of modern painting. Til~ LIGRAI\Y Chapter :1.. VARINriONS ON A rrrrEME. Colours may mutually relate lil<:e musical concords for their pleasantest arrangel:fent; lil<:e those con- cor •. ds mutually proportionate. Those words, uttered over two thousand years ago by Aris- totle, express the essence of an idea constantly elaborated whenever and wherever it has since manife:la~ed itself. The notion that painting and music are in someVinterrelated is a recurrent theme in the history of painting, but one which has eluded definition until very recent times. Numerous tings testify to the fascination which the notion afforded: such a relationship exist, the writers were sure, but there appeared to be little evidence to encourage further investigation., Thus, curiously, variations on the same theme occurred again and ain as original consideration, reconstituted and presented accord- ing to the spirit and tenor of the epoch, only to be deferred because they failed to fulfil their initial pro- mise. 1Aristotle, "De Sensu", quoted Image 1965. -1- ~;ome would have it tha.t, of all the arts, mustc ancl architecture make a more convincing·equation. Goetlle descril:lctl arch i tee ture as "dmub music", and he quo ted ·wt th approval Gtlrres' famous aper~u of arcld.teeture as "frozen music". :1. "Music", said the famous German philosopber, Hegel, "is Architecture translated from space into t:Lrile....,- for in music, besides the deepest feeling, there is also a vigorous mathematical in tell ig;encf~ • 112 In addition to spatial and temporal considerations, music often resembles arch:i.tecture in the formidable distance f:that separates the ereator and his creation. Medieval man constructed lds arclli tecture accord~ ing to musical harmonl.c proportion. rrhe beauties of musical consonance were considered to be an echo of meta- pllysical truth, and visual heanty had to he the mirror of that truth. The proportions, 1:1; 1:2; 2:3, were felt to be as pleasing to the eye as the corresponding conso- nances were to the oar. fJ.1hat is why st. Augustine and his pupils considered architecture, the 'rt of geometrical proportion, the sister of music. 1L. A. Willoughby, rrhe Homan tic Movement in Germany: (Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 179. 2 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770-1831), quoted in King l)almer's Compose Music (London: 'l'he English Uni- versities Press, 1947), p. 2. 3Anil de Silva, Otto von Simson, lloger Hinks, Man Through His Art: Music (London: E. P. Publishing Co. Ltd • , 1 96l.~:) , p • 28 • -3- The Middle Ages conoeived the cosmos as a kind of musical universe, a symphony composed of an in- finite variety of individual parts related to 1 one another by the harmony of musical proportion. · If architecture was the visual equivalent of music, painting, sculpture and allied crafts contributed, as com- ponent parts to the unity of the composition. In the fourteenth century, perspective and prehar- mony evolved together out of the basically unperspective and unharmonic world of tlle later !vficldle Ages. At the be- ginning of the Henaissance there was a radical shift to per- spective and harmony proper. As long as painting had per- sisted in a two-dimensional attitude, music bad been 'linear~ proceeding either in one single unaccompanied line, as in the Gregorian chant, or else combining these single lines with other single lines simultaneously in a type of counter- point essentially different from the harmonically based counterpoint of tbe polyphony of the J_,ater Ages.. 'rhe painter's increasing confidence in perspective is syn- chronized with the composer's confidence in harmony. In Henaissance times musical consonance now formed the basts of ideal proportion in painting. Alberti taught that the musical inte1·vals most agreeable to tbe (Renais- sance) ear, the octave, fifth and fourth~ correspond to the division of a string in two, in three, or in four--1:2; 2:3; 3:4. 1Anil de Silva, otto von Simson, Roger llinks, p. 29. Prom whence I conclude that same Numbers, by means of which the Agreement of Sounds affects our Ears wi til Del igllt, are 1 the very same which please our Byes and our :Mind.-- These proportions, universally employed in s- sance pai_nting, were known as the 2 , and n.3 itaph , (1483-1520), and Leonardo da Vinci • .;._..__,_, ___ _ 151.9), were aware of the music relationsllips and macle use of the matios of consonance. lvloreover, l1eonardo, who had a passion for music, one of his many accompli ments, wrote wi tb great subtlety on its relations th painting. the s At the time of the transition from the fif·teenth to enth century, Venice becmne the nerve centre of the great new movements the mus spirit is Giovanni Bellini, (c. the field of music. The in siori of rceptible in the later paintings of 1430-1516), continued in- creasing significance in the works of his successors. To the list of parallels and influences--musical consonances, perspective and harmony--may now be added the exploration of space in music, hl:lrmony standing to music as spective 2 . cf. music. [l_iapason originally meant octave; later in l''rance, a tuning; fori{, and t,hon the pitch given by tile tun fork; the cooonon name fur the chief flue stop on Eng- li j. 1.e. the o , fifth urtb of music. and the representatton of space stood to pai:lbti:ng. 1 11he fact that many Venetian painters were so com- patent performers on a variety of musical ins ents points to a lively spi t of co-operation between the two arts • ••• it is hardly a coincidence that the agent for the change in the visnal arts should have been one who, in addition to his own profession as a painter, should have been renowned among his contemporari2s as a supremely accomplished musician: Giorgione. Giorgione sang and played the lute so divinely that he was often.engaged to do so.at the.c~nce5ts and other gathe:n.ngs of the Venet1an nob1l1 ty. 1 The notion of space in music is cxornplifi in the soaring motets of the Vene ans Andrea Ga.bri~li, (c. 1510~86), and his nephew and pupil Giovanni, ( 155 161~. It is also evident. of course, in the polyphony of the lloman School chief among whose composers were P estrina 9 (c. 1524-9~, and Vi ttoria, (c. 1535-:t611). An eme examr>l e of the ex- ploitaion of music and architectural space is the motet, Sl)OJ!l in al iem by tbe English Renaissance composer Thomas Tall is, (c .1505-85), which is scored for eight f:i.ve-part choirs, 40 parts in all, in rich polyphony. 2 d c 'l S' IIi k 37 e ,.,l. va, von , 1mson• .. · n s, p. .. 3Jean-Louis Vau.cloyer, Thames and Hudson, 1958) , p. __ ..,...;;;..;;.;...;;...;..;;;;..;;--.--=;;.;;;...;;...;;;.;;;;~ (London: -6- Two of his finest paintings, the and the , have music as their subject. And the 'Gio onesque' painters in their turn introduced this sub- ject into their paintings, not in a spirit of imitation, but in one of communion. 1 The Venetian langu of colour lent to these works the illusion of sensations and impressions as fugitive as tbe language of sound.. "Colours and sounds be- come ind:ts·tinguishabl e from eaob other in these enchantt"ld paintings. 112 And remarking the musical significance of the Venetian t s colour, ,Joubert s: ur.rhere are emo tiona so delicate that it would he impossihle to ss them save in "t sound or colour.n 3 Jacopo Tintoretto, 1518-94, in addition to his activities as a painter, was a student of music who h cer·t,ain strument and even invented nmv ones. His penchant for music is confirmed by ari: In the same city of Venice and about the same time there lived, as he still does, a painter called Jaoopo Ti.ntoretto, who has delighted in all the art;s, and patticularly in playing various musicalinGrrtH11Gi\ts, :te.g. Titian's 2 Vaudoyer, p. 22. 3ibid. lt 4Giurgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Soul tors and Architects, vol.VIII, new ·&rans. Gaston Du c .. Devere London: Philip Lee Warner, 1912-15), p. 101o -7- Tintoretto 1 s contemporary Paolo Veronese, (1528-88),- -continued to depict palaces resembling those of the patricians of Venice and to fill them with men and women of high society, invited to listen to some famous quartet, in which he himself might be shown playing the cello, Tintoretto the viol, 1 Bassano the flute, and Titian the double-bass. The interfusion of painting and m~~ic in sixteenth century Venice was unique among the countries of Europe which were discovering similar relationships along the arts along less unified lines. 2 The quest for ideal proportion which had led Renaissance painters to mathematics and philosophy, geo- metry and logic was continued through the Classical period of French painting. Again painting was related to music., 1 Vaudoyer, p. 29. 2 e.g. as in isolated attempts to equate colours and musical tones. Guiseppe Arcimboldi, (1527-93), a Milanese painter, experimented with a system of colour harmony based upon a colour scale analogous to the musical scale. (Discussed in "Colour Music", Image 1.965). -8- F~libien, taking Poussin as his authority, stated (in the Conf,rences de !'Academia royale de peinture et de ·paulp- ture pendant l'ann~e 1667): rrhe soul that loves proportion and equality takes more pleasure in the sounds of instruments and in the accents of voices in which the numbers are whole, and in which ·there is less dissonance. So also the painting of which the whole betuty con- sists in symmetry and fine proportion. o. Nicolas Poussin, (1593/4-1655), conceived of each class of subject as if it had to be treated in way com- parable to architectural orders or musical modes. Like tbe ltenaissance painters in Italy he employed musical conso- nances as a means of unifying and rationalizing the arts. Le Brun ••• said that M. Poussin, conforming to the harmonic proportion which musicians observe in their compositions, desired that in his pictures all things should contain recipr~cal harmonies and should conspire to the same end .. 1Charles Bouleau, The Painter's Secret Geometr : A Study of Composition in Art London: Thames and Hudson, 196 3) ' p • 110 • 2 'b'd LL•t P• 111. -9- During the Baroque and llococo periods there was a shift in emphasis from harmony of structure to harmony of colours. Classical painters had looked on colour dis- sonances with much disfavour. Baroque painters found colour dissonances useful (by analogy with music) to the expression of "busier" ideas, seeking movement where Classical painters had sought rest. Such changes in taste and fashion are closely paralleled in the arts. The perfect harmonies in music must be rendered in a picture by a perfect sympathy of colours; and the great painter must, just as much as the musician, make a proper use of. dissonances, which are strong oppositions of aroscura and of colours, and, in order to wake up his picture from time to time, fill it with an eable ety that ravishrs, astonishes, and takes the spectator unawares. In eighteenth century France there was a growing attraction for a musical conception of colour, the analogy between colours and tones being drawn with ever-increasing refinement. Has not the painter, just like the musician, his treble, alto, tenor and bass, sometimes produced by the gradations of his lights and of his browns, 2 and at other times by the shadings of the colours? We find in music as well as in painting all the colours which are appropriate to t~e description of varied emotions and characters. 1Antoine Coypel, ( 1661-1722), (see Bouleau, p. 1:1.2) 2 ibid. 3Andr~ Ernest Gr~try, Composers on Music, -10- In Germany, too, such metaphor confusion was be- coming common. Johann Reichardt, Kappelmeister to the court of Berlin about 1800, spoke of the crescendo and de- crescendo of the Mannheim orchestra as giving "a darker or a lighter shade to the whole colouring 11 • 1 In 1773 Dr. Charles Burney characterized the Mannheim achievement "as new colours--the colours in music having their shades as II 2 colours like red or blue have them in painting. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (1749-1832) 9 the great German poet and leader of iJihe Weimar looked at the relationship between tones and colours objectively. "That a certain relationship exists between the·two has always been felt; this is proved by the fre- quent comparisons we meet with, sometimes as passing allusion, sometimes as circumstantial parallels.") If the word tone, tune, is to be still borrowed from music, and applied to colouring, it might be used in a better sense than hereto:fbre. For it would not be unreasonable to compare a painting of powerful effect with a piece of music in a sharp key; a painting of soft effect with a piece of music in a flat key, while other equiva- lents might be fou'd fof the modifications of these two leading modes. ed. Sam Morgenstern (London: Faber & Faber, 1958)., 1 curt Sachs, The Commonwealth of Art (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1946), p. 17. 2 'b'd 1:.._!_· 4 J. W. von Goethe, Theory of Colours (F'rank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1967), p. 342, pars. 889 and 890 . .3 ibid. p. 1.08, l'qr-, 74-l -:1.1.- Summarizing the relationship, he said: Colour and sound do not admit of being directly compared together in any way, but both are refer- able to a higher formula, both are derivable,al- though each for itself, from this higher law •••• Both are general, elementary effects acting according to the general law of separation and tendency to union, of undulation and oscillation, yet acting thus in wholly different ,pr~~'!uces, in different modes, on differ!nt elementary mediums for different senses. Owing to the close ties in Uermany between painting, music, poetry and philosophy, Romantic art became there the expression of the unconscious world, and artists regarded nature as the means of attaining the absolute, of merging the finite in the infinite. Philosophy made such union of opposites possible. Hegel taught that truth or reality has three aspects revealing itself in dialectical development: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis .. 2 Arthur Scbopenhauer, (1788-1860), who held that the will is superior to know- ledge, established a hierarchy of the arts with music as the most perfect. The synthesis of painting and music was a favounite idea of the Uomantics. It was postulated by the Frflh- romantik poets Ludwig rrieclc, ( 1773-1835), and Noval is, (177 1801), and the painters Philipp Otto Runge, (1777- 18iO)t and Caspar David Friedrich, (1774-1840). 1Goethe, pp. 298-9, par. 748. 2Developed in art by Richard Wagner. -12- Colour was for Runge the "suprame" art. He discussed the scientific study of tones and colours in correspondence with Goethe. During the years 1806-10 he laid the basis for a more or less scientific approach to colour theory 9 including a good deal on the symbolic meaning of colour., "The analogy between vision and hearing gives great promise of a future union between painting and music or between the tones and colours," 1 he wrote. In France and England (as in Germany) a spiritual bond brought artists as writers together. Painters and poets tried to express the "music" they felt thin them- selves, and in return composers wrote "landscape" sym- phonies and tried to draw their music closer tp painting and poetry. Artists continued to search for an underlying spirit in which they felt all the arts were unified, so much so that by the middle of the nineteentll century Richard Wagner, (1813-83), had a tremendous amount of material from which to fashion his notion of Gesamkunstwerk --"a work of art embracing all the arts." German nomanticism is the heritage which succeeded to the Expressionist painters and composers, although it is the heritage they most sought to reject. And their tower- ing forefather, Wagner, had tremendous impact not only on 1Paul Klee, The rrhinldng h:ye, ed. Jtlrg Spiller, (London: Lund Humphries, 1961), p. 521. -13- the cultural life of ti,ermany but also on that of France-- indeed, on the whole of Europe--and be was widely admiredo Eug~ne Delacroix, (1798-1863), the major painter of the Romantic movement in France, equated painting with music. 1 He who wavered between the choice of painting or music as a career, was in a very strong position to note similarities and differences between the two. An accom- plished violinist, he is said to have interpreted Mozart, (the composer he admired above any other), brilliantly. He was a close friend of Chopin and they corresponded with each other over many years. "Painting," be observed 9 resembles music in so many ways. 112 The craft of the painter is the most difficult •f all and it takes longest to learn. Like composing, painting requires erudition, but it 3 also requires execution, like playing the violin • •••• if it were only a question of arranging lines and colours to create a visual effect an arabesque would do just as well, but when you add to a com- position already interesting on account of ts sub- ject, an arrangement of lines that heightens the 111 The art of the colourist is evidently in some respects related to mathematics and to music" .--B'audel aire in an essay on Delacroix~ (See Loclcspeiser, vol. 2, p. 17). 2The Journal of Eug~ne Delacroix, ed. Hubert Wel- lington, trans. from the French by Lucy Norton, (London: Phaidon, 1951), p. 267. 3ibid., p. 81 -14- the impression, a chiaroscura that grips the imagination 9 and a colour scheme suited to the characters, you have solved a more difficult problem and, moreover, you are moving on a higher plane.. Lilte a musician, you are adapt- ing to a simple melody the wealth of harmony and its mut~tions. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, (1780-1867)P the main prop of a rigid classicism diametrically opposed to the l1omanticism of Delacroix, had f~~st earned his living as a violinist. He, too, professed a deep admiration for Mozart 1 s music, and also that of Glucl{, Beethoven and "that charming Haydn. 112 Like Delacroix: he adopted a musical attitude in his approach to painting. If I could make musicians of you all, it would be t;o your advantage as painters. All is harmony in nature, a little too mush, or a little less, dis- turbs the scale and strikes a discordant note. One bas to learn to sing true with the pencil or brush, just as witb 3 the voice; correct form is like correct sound. Delacroix and Ingres drew analogies with music appropriate to the style of their paintings, hence the basic disagreement in the application of the analogies. 1nelacroix, p. 187. 2Ingres, Letters of the ~reat Artists (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), p. 48. 3ibid., 11 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres 1 Advice on Art given to his pupils", p. 54. -15- Ingres emphasized "correctness" of form. His is an art of rest--emotion is disciplined, "music" is silenced, there is no movement. Delacroix tended more towards a "melodic" conception of "musical" colour. The two extremes co-exist, as they have continued to do in modern art. Today, the dialogue between form and colour remains with painting (and music), form alternating with colour in importance to succeeding generations of artists. Painting and music evolved intexdependently, yet they remained two distinct and highly specialized streams. But they were destined to converge in the twentjeth century For centuries the notion that painting and music were inter<" related had persisted. Now a scientifically informed sensibility would show how and that was so. Science would show in how many respects painting and music were similar. And such revelations were to provide the basis for modern art. Chapter 2. -16- THE INTERFUSION OF MODERN PAINTING AND MUSIC .. The interfusion of painting and music, essentially a phenomenon of the era of modernism, has its roots in the shifting attitudes of the nineteenth century. rrhe coun- tries of Europe were all subject to the same powerful ex- pansionist and industrial drives and to the same threats of war and destruction. In the climate of political, scientific, technolo cal, indus and philosophical ferment, it followed that the arts would reflect the ten- sions of rapid progress. The social$ psychological, and cul·tural shooks were to have far-reaching consequences on the future courses of painting and music. Before the First World the most important events in the arts were to take the form of a dialogue between France and liermany. (Italy, the U.S.A., and other national schools were to join the discussion much later.) In G.ermany the disintegration of iihe harmonic tradition was already evident in Wagner's shifting tonality, and his influence on a younger generation of French composers doomed to eventual extinction Romantic declamatory mannerisms. -17- The world was opening up rapidlyt and neither painting nor music had yet the means of expressing the shifting patterns of thought or the changing environments. What was called for in each language was a complete re- structuring. Science sharpened both the faculties of looking and listening,ofseeing and hearing, and encouraged the analysis of -llbings in terms of their essentials. Researches into colour and the invention of photo- graphy, (c. 184U) contributed to a much greater unders ing about the appearance of objects. Colour phenomena were investigated and rationalized in elaborate detail, and ·t1e paintings produced from the 1870 t s on show, in per- manent chronological record, the benefits of familiarity with the behaviour of colour. Such researches increased the painter's confidence in the autonomous power of colour .. Photography released the painter from his obligation to record the faces and events of his day and encouraged him to seek a 11 personal" view of the modes, manners, and general aspect of his own time and in this way create a 11living art'1with the realistic aim of being 11true to nature".. In France Realism, as expounded by Gustave Courbet, (1819- 77), became a force with considerable impact. Science encouraged a return to essentials and that journey first took the painter back to an objective study of nature., -18- Modern art is an affirmation of the scientific attitude. The results of research with the X-ray and the microscope, the breaking up of the atom, new concepts of time and space, psychological research by men such as Freud and Jung--all these phenomena challenged the artist. Painters and composers subjected their own materials and techniques to the same objective scrutiny 9 discovering therein an infinte variety of new orders and possible com- binations capable of expressing the extraordinary complexity of modern life. Every frontier was approached. 'l'he questing mind ranged far outside the boundaries of Europe interesting itself in the cultural expressions of very different human societies for very different reasons--partly because of the curiosity about the unknown which s~u•!Vst satisfaction in enlightenment, partly because the technological expansion of l!:urope demanded the creation of new markets as outlets for her products. Paradoxically, Napoleon the Third's defeat at the Battle of Sedan in 1870 catapulted France into a new era bright with promise. As far as France was concerned, the ideal of the Romantic hero died in "llhat last battle of the Franco-I)russian War. A defeated and war-weary country, she set abput resolving the difficulties which must accrue in a country at war: the oppressor must take steps to avoid be- coming the oppressed. -19- In spite of Germany's continuing superiority in respect of material progress, France made a spectacular economic recovery, Her series of international expositions from 1878 on was intended to show tbe world that, though no longer a military power, she was now an industrial force of great stnmgtll, At the Paris Exposition of 1878 produqts of almost every country in Europe (except Germany) and of several in Asia, Africa, and America were exhibited. For industry- conscious Europe the greater interest lay with the con- venience of a single location for fue comparison of techno- logical products. But the additional attractions of national culture--displays of art-objects and performances of music and dance from Polynesia, Micrones , Africa, and the Orient--were to acquaint Europeans, th exotic cultures and unsettle painters and composers in their visual and aural traditions. Of course, popular taste was already being satis- fied by curiosities from Japan. With the establishment of trade with Japan, (the result of a treaty signed between the United States, Great Britain and Japan in 1854), curios and artifacts flooded the European market, Among these curios the woodcut was immediately appreciated for its artistic merits. Many French artists became collectors of works by Hokusai and Utamaro, and it was not long before the influence of such masters became apparent in the work of French painters. -20- The Japanese print showed that colour had a value ~art from that of imitating natural appearances and it .1 so suggested new resources in composition and arrange- ent.1 Painters such as Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec must .ave absorbed the lessons of the Japanese colour system ntuitively~ as the formalities governing such .n Japan were probably quite unknown to them,. 1attered was that which they saw and felt--the :olour system workedl colour usage What Japanese Instead of the Western method of deriving the spec- colours from the three 'primary' colours (red, yellow, blue), classical Japanese painting proposes five primary, or 'parent', coloursq the secondary colours in Japanese art thus differ from our secon':"' dary colours, due to the differing initial sub- division. Iro no kubarit a cardinal principle of Japanese colour harmony, states that a primary or parent colour should never, in a painting$ be placed so that it is contiguous to any of the secondary colours of which it is a component; both colours would lose by such a juxtaposition.. The parent colour, white, should not, for example, be placed next to sky blue, 1 since white is one of the components of sky blue. In answer to the "spectrum" of five colours, Japanese music proposes a scale of five tones.. Both scale and spectrum are part of a formal universe reminiscent of the European Middle Ages. In Chinese music similar cor- ia"Patricia Sloane, Colour: Basic Princi:eles and New Directions (London: Studio Vista, n.d.), p. 10 .. b" 1N1e five primary or parent colours are: yellow, IJlue, black, white, and red., -21- relations are made between the five basic scale tones and considerations of politics, seasons, elements, colours, directions and planets. 1 Chinese pai~ting employs tbe ele- \1'\troduc.eQ\ ment of time--a concept first oonsciouslyYinto modern European painting by the Cubists--and tbe picture is deliberately composed for one part to be seen at a time, in sequence. In Hindu music there exists a correlation between Ute musical mode, (or raga), and visual portrayal, colour, architecture, times of day and night .. 2 'l1 he possible correspondence between the arts and a certain mysterious relationship between painting and music is not specifically Indian, but no-one has gone as as the Indian in its comprehension. The Sanskrit word Sangita signifying music embraces all three notions of vocal and instrumental music and the dance. It is therefore not surpris that it was in India that this garland of miniatures, the Uagamala, was born~ in whi~h music, poetry and painting are brought together. 1 Laurence E. R. Picken, "Chinese Music", Groves Dictionar of Music and Musicians, 5th. ed., ed. Eric Blom London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., :1.954). 2w. G. Raffe, 11 hagas and Haginis: A Key to Hindu Aesthetics", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, no. 11, 19 52. 3de Silva, von Simson, Hinks, pp. 52-3. -22- The miniature is meant to be a "visualization of the emotiomal and aesthetic experience which the music gives. 111 There were many valuable lessons to be learaed from the painting and music of these far-away lands. The first "students" were the Impressionist painters, and the com- posers, Debussy and Ravel, who absorbed the "externaln effects. More recently, composers such as Olivier Messiaen and John Cage have embraced the philosophies as well, thus fusing the "external" effects with the "internal". But equally as distant as the Orient was the folk art of Europe--distant in time. Composers and painters recognized the dignity of the folk art of their distant past. rrhe culture of exotic societies had tnrown a di r- ent perspect:i. ve on indigenous l~uropean oul tul'e, a result of which was the late flowering of nationalist music in Hungary, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Bobemia 9 Russia, Finland, Moravia, England, Spain~ Poland, and Roumania, to be joined later by national schools in the United States and Latin America. In each of these countries composers rediscovered a musical future--in the music of their past. 2 1de Silva, von Simson, Hinks, pp. 52-3 2Bartok said:"A genuine peasant melody of our land is a musical exwnple of a musical masterpiece--in miniature-- as a Bach fugue or a Mozart sonata is a masterpiece in the larger forms. 11 --Jo seph Machl is, Introduction to Contem- ~orart Music (New York: w. w. Norton & co. Inc., 1961), p. 25 • -23- The decorative aspects of folk art found their way into painting, too, and the works of Matisse and Rouault have gained in resonance and expressive power as a result. (Although folk art has been more usefully employed, and with greater effect in textile design, interior decorating, fur- nishings, and the other design arts.) In the modern era, painters and composers over- lapped in identical patterns of development, and experienced influences from similar sources as a result of the same events--poli&,ical, scientific and social. In France they rejected the immediate past in order to "satisfy" their national a)lpirations"• absorbing any substitute that would usefully serve that purpose. The first movement of the modern age looked to science, to music, to poetry, in order to rid l"rench art of Germanic influence. That movement was Impressionism. Meanwhile German painting and music continued in grossly inflated versions of Romanticism veering tonally (visually and aurally) on the brink of collapse. This bloated Romanticism was to surge on into the early years of the twentieth century in the works of Uichard Strauss, Anton Bruclrner, Mahler, the Jugendstil, and in the early worlts of two who were soon to jump from this sh·-'icke~. ship on to new shores--Sch~nberg and Kandinslcy. -24- Chapter 3. IMPRESSIONISM IN PAIWriNG AND MUSIC., Briefly, the term Impressionism originated with, and broadly applies to, the painters who contributed to a series of ekhibitions in Paris between 1874 and 1876, all but the first being so described. 1 In 1874 a French critic used the word in ridicule of a painting by Claude Monet, • and thereafter the painters adopted the title in a spirit of defiance. Although Impressionism in music 2 occurred later than in painting, ;they •were united in their desire to dis- card everything in the Romantic tradition that had hardened into academic formula. In seeking to reproduce, by means of a careful analysis of colour, the effect of light upon objects in 1926l; 1916 ; 191.7 ; as the 1Principle contributors were: Claude fo.tionet, l18li0- Auguste Renoir, (1841-1919); Alfred Sisley, 1840- Camille Pissarro, ( 1830=1903); Edgar Degas, 1834- and Berthe Morisott (1841-95)., Monet is regarded leading figure., 2In 1882, nenoir spoke to Wagner of the "Impress- ionists in music", probably alluding to Wagner's own Forest Murmurs (see Lookspeiser, vol 2, p. 18 .. ) -25- nature, the Impressionist painters made use of the latest results in colour chemistryo In order to arrive at an analytical, more scientific approach to painting they sub- stituted the Romantic's palette for a simplified palette of seven or eight of~he most brilliant colours nearest to the colours of the spectrum--yellow, orange, vermillion, lal\:e, red, violet, blue and green, with the addition of white. Colo,urs were applied relatively freely and juxta- posed so that they fused in the eye of the viewer at a certain remove from the piotureo Researches into the response of the retina to colour in optical science inspired in the Impressionists a radical shift in attitude to accepted values in painting, resulting in the colour freshness with ich they sub- sequently invested their arto Working with an unprecedented spontaneity and freedom, they animated their picture sur- faces with direct statements of high key colour (even in the representation of chadows.) The resulting effect is a kind of luminous flickering haze enveloping ·the subj eots of their s. A close link between Impressionism in painting and music exists in their delight in creating luminous atmospheres. Although the work of physicists such as the German, Hermann Helmholtz, ( 1821-94), who conducted exbaus·tive en- quiries into the properties of sound and colour, showed that there was no scientific basis for drawing the sorts of inference that painters and composers were attempting to draw. Painters, composers and poets continued to behave as if there were discoverable "inner" relations. -26- The notion was rendered more by the in- creasing importance of music in the lives of Parisians, since Paris was fast becoming the music capi·tal of the world. Musical soire'es were the common social ex11erience of all artists. In such a musical environment painters were nurtured. Degas' father held musical evenings to which musicians and artists came., On this intimate scale dialogues between the arts were established, as dialogues between the art s involved. in those arts, and it \Vas natural, under such circumstances, that they should seek the fundamental principles underlying and unifying their arts.. But the Impressionist painters remained on the sur- face, so to speak, contenting themselves with the maJdng of simple analogies only 9 as colour "orchestration", concern with scales of colour, colour "sono ty 11 , and so on. Impressionist painters were particularly intrigued by the possibilities of colour 11 sonority 11 , and the sym- pathetic or antagonistic vibrations of contiguous colours. Renoir said:: I arrange my subject as I want it, then ;!;. go ahead and })aint i·t lil(e a child. I want a red to be son- OII1ous--to sound like a bell; if it doesn't turn out that way 1 I put on more reds or o·ther colours till I get it. 1charles Edward Gauss, the French Artists (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1949), P<> 43. -27- ... Impressici'ism in painting succeeds as "sonorous patches': as Camille Mauclair wrote, comparing Debussy's music to Monet's paintings: The landscapes of Claude Monet are in fact sym- phonies of luminous waves, and the music of Mon- sieur Debussy, based not on a succession of themes but on the relative value of soun•s in themselves, bears a remarkable resemblance to these pictures. It is Im~reasionism consisting as sonorous patches. Covering much the same ground in music as the Impressionist and pos Impressionists in painting~ Claude Achille Debussy, (1862-1918), was one of the first French composers to point new directions in the art pf sound 9 effecting radical changes in the harmonic and melodic thinking of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Debussy, (as for the Impressionist painters and Symbolist poe·ts), art was sensuous rather than intellectual. As did the painters, be experimented with new ways and means of achieving colouristic effects. He sought to express the the shimmerimg effects of light and shade in painting by means of tone colour and chordal structure in music. Like Monet's paintings, his music is evasive, and is marked by vague, filmy effects, hued with delicate tints rather than solid colours, reflecting the oversensitive mind of the late nineteenth century. 1Lockspeiser, vol. 2, P• ii• -28- Debussy was much affected by specific trends in the visual arts. Three painters whom he particularly admired were Turner, Hokusai, and Monet, (an admiration for the two former being shared with him by Monet.) often com- pared his manner of working with theirs. Although he did not 1 ike being called an Impressionist, his work tloes re- semble that of the French painters. Pointillist lawH of contrast and analysis could also be said to be present in his music .. 1 In their choice of subjects, Impressionist painting and music resemble each other. 1-:~aintings which invite com- parison with Debussy's music are: Le (1867) by Renoir; (1868) by Monet; the two paintings of the riverside cafe La (1869); (1873-4); and Monet's (1873-4). The water pieces of Debussy which cenvey the spirit of these pictures so spe- cifically are En Bateau (1889); (1889); (1905); Voiles (1910); and La Cath~drale engloutie (1910)~ 2 1Debussy felt that there was an essential di ference between the art of the composer and that of the painter. Whereas the play of light, in a painting, can only be rendered in a static manner, as in a series of pictures such as Monet's haystacks, ponds, cathedrals, in music, a continuous fluid art, all these effects of light can be combined, although light and colour are nor- mally metaphysical terms in music., ~1uch of the information here presented has been gleaned from the two volumes on Debussy's life and work by Edward Lool{speiser,. -29- James McNeill Whistler, (:1.834-1903), though not an Impressionist, did work along similar lines and was sub- ject to the same sorts of influence as the Impressionist painters. A marked influence in his worlr was that of Japan ese art: another was music--the former suggesting to him Earallels of organisatiQ!! with the la·tter.. Whistler wrote much on the relationship between painting and music .. Nature contains the elements, in colibur and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music .. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful--as the musician gathers his note and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony. 'ro say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she i~, is 1 to say to the player, that he may sit on the p1ano. (We have since dec i dad that the keyboard does not contain tbe notes of all music. And it is no longer incumbent upon the painter to bring forth glorious harmony. Such ideas seem curiously old-fashioned and quaint by com- parison with the Impressionists achievements. But Whistlers utterances are prophetic and look to the artistic self- determination of modern abstract painting.) 1James McNe.l.ll Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making (lJondon: William Heinemann, 1890}, PP· 14.2-3 -30- As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with the harmony of sound or of colour •••• The great musicians knew this. Beethoven and the rest wrote music--simply music; s¥:mphony in this key, concerto or sonata in that. It was Whistler's custom to call his paintings "Notes", "Harmonie~', "Symphonies", "Arrangements", or 11 Nocturnes 11 • in this or that colour--a practice which pre- figured by more than half a century a fashion for musical titles to abstract paintings. Such "affectations" found little favour with Whist- ' lers contemporaries who, outraged and scandalized, detailed their reactions to his offensive practices in correspon- dences to that nineteenth century forum of opinion, the newspaper. In a celebrated court action Whistler success- fully sued John Husldn for 1 il)el to the tune of one far- thing. Ruskin had declared him a fraud for "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face. 112 Whistler was handsomely equipped with a distinctive·- ly knife-edged turn of phrase with which he defended himself against newspaper criticism. One critic carped: In the "Symphony in White No. 111" by Mr. Whistler there are many dainty varieties of tint, but it is 1Whistl er ., p. 1).1 2A Dictionary of Art and Artists, eds. Peter and Linda Murray (Penguin, 1959), p. Jl16 -31- not precisely a symphony in white. One lady has a yellowish dress and brown hair and a bit of blue ribbon, the other has a red fan, and there are flowers and green 1 eaves. rrhere is a girl in white on a white sofa, but even this girl has red- dish hair; and of cyurse there is the flesh colour of the complexions. Whistler's reply: How pleasing that such profound prattle should in- evitably find its place in print! "Not precisely a symphony in white ••• for there is a yellowish dress ••• brown hair etc •.• another with reddish hair ••• and of course there is the flesh colour of the complexions." Don Dieu! did this wise person expect white hair and chalked faces? And does he then, in his astounding consequence, believe that a symphony in F contains no other notd, but shall bB a con- tinued repetition ofF, F, F? •••••• Fooll nrrhe vast majority of the English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture,"3 he complained. To the vaster public of Europe such considerations were not to be tolerated. But disintegration of ingrained artistic habits had set in, (in painting as in music), and the pub- . were . lie's expectat1onsvcont1nually frustrated. 1whistler, ~·he 2 'b'd .!......!__.' 3 'b'd .!......!__·' p.-4'5 r· 1.2G Gentle Art of Making Enemies, p.44 -32- They saw a ne\V type of subject matter--intimate and per- sonal--replace the overblown allegories of "public" academic painting and treated according to unfamiliar systems of colour and pictorial organisation. Impressionism pointed the waj to an art of painting analogous to music--an art of colour composition addressing itself~ as music does, directly to the senses. -33- Chapter lJ:. POST-IMPRESSIONISM: THE MUSICAL PHASE. Making of Impressionism "something solid and durable 111 was the particular task which commended itself to C~zanne, Gauguin, van Gogh and Seurat, 2 all of them cursors to the main movements of twentieth century painting. The post-Impressionist masters differed con- siderably one from another in temperament, style and thought yet each in his own way, starting from Impressionism. and working in isolation, contributed to the new developments in painting. Music played an important role in post-Impression- ist innovation. Both van Gogh and Gauguin tried to estab- lish colour scales and harmonies directly analogous to music. Van Gogh even took piano lessons and attempted to learn music in order to see the relationship more clearly.3 "Why do I understand the musician better, why do I see the of his abstractions better? 11 he asked. 4 1Paul Cezanne (ref. Peter and 1Jil1Cla Murray, p. ~;Jl1.) 2Paul Cezanne, (1839-1906); Paul Gauguin, (18lJ:8- 1903); Vincent van Gogh, (1853-1890); Georges Seurat, (1859-91). 3The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, vol .. 3 (New York Graphic Society, 1959), p. 44. -34- Whereas the Impressionists had largely contented themselves with the rendition of "external" effects, van Gogh and Gauguin sought ression ofii1e artist's psychic state, wondering at the creative impulses which enshrine themselves in aestbe:ttc products such as painting, poetry and music. Music often seems to have more suitable means of giving expression to the fleeting moments of these feelings. Both van Gogh and Gauguin decided that colour more nearly corresponded to the 11 silent music" of their "inner states", and they developed colour as the 11 musioal 11 element in painting. Van Gogh said: Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle--more lilce music and less lilre sculpture --and above all it ~:r.omises • If only it keeps this promise. · Gauguin wrote:. Think of the musical role which colour will be playing in modern painting from now on. Colour, which is vibration just like music, is capable of attaining what is most general and, in its originl, most vague in nature: its internal force. 1van Gogh, vol. 3, p. 21. 2Frank Popper, Origins and Development of Kinetic (London: Studio Vista, 1968), p. 29. -35- In the evolution of painting towards abstraction the analogies of van Gogh and Gauguin are particularly happy ones, since the (then) materials of music, tones, are not required to refer to extra-musical considerations, and are answerable to the impulses which give them auto- nomous shape and to the response which the whole elicits through aural involvement.. r11 hus the "raison d ''~tre'' of the musician's abstractions which van Gogh had so admired, is lfl revealedvsound-structures through which the composer pro- jects his thoughts and/or feelings .. Might not colour be employed similarly to articu- late the painter's elings'l 1 For Gauguin and van Gogh this demanded trutl1 to the "inner man" rather than "truth to nature .. 11 Colour as a phenomenon was thoroughly in- vestigated. Psychology and the physiology of vision, optic and the analysis of light s:tnd colour were detailed in pub- lished works all appearing about the same time.. Ilelmhol tz, Edmund Rood, and Blanc continued the discoveries of Chevreul, whose work, De la loi du contraste simultan~ des couleurs, (published in 1839), was reprinted by the state in 1889 for the centenary of the birth of the scientist .. 1 de Silva, von Simson, Rinks: "Yet a kind of un- heard, unhurrying music, echoes the back- ground of their minds; and they seek to ix it in the still but somehow vibrant shapes of c~rttain works of visual ar·t." (Hoger llinks, 11 Introduction. 11 ) -36- Like music, colour was subject to 11 fixed 11 --though different --physical laws, (regard! ess of 11 associative" relationships which it was becoming fashionable to draw.) Painting and music employed the same fundamental principles of organi- sation. Noting this, Charles Blanc wrote, (in his Gram- maire des arts du dessin) :. "Not only can colour, which is under fixed lawst be taught lil{e music 9 but it is easier to learn than drawing whose absolute principles cannot be taught. 111 Encouraged by the objectivity of the day, the neo- Impressionists produced worl{S which wedded strict, formal composition to carefully controlled colour contrasts. 2 In attempting to define the essentials of painting Seurat objectified the qualities of feeling inherent in the painter's materials. Gaiety of value i~ the light dominant; of hue, the warm dominant; of line, lines above the horizontal. Calmness of value is the equality of dark and light; of hue, of warm and cool; and the hori- zontal for l:j,ne 1 william Innes Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting (M.I.T. Press, 1964), p. 29. 2neo-Impressionists, (also known as Ponitillists and Divisionists), were Georges Seurat, (1859-91), Paul Signac, (1863-1935), Henri-Edmond Cross, (1856-1910), and Maximilian Luce, (1858-1941)$ -37- Sadness of value is the dark dominant; of hue, the oo~l dominant; and of , downward direc- tions. Starting from Chevreul's 11 law of simultaneous con- trasts11,2 Seurat and Gauguin constructed harmonies of analogous colours and of contrasts, 11 triads 11 of colours, colour 11 seal es", dissonances, mel so on. Gauguin applied these experiments in his paintings and extended them through 11 colour orchestration." But Gauguin insisted that there was more to colour phenomana than what was merely observable.. Both he and van Gogh believed that painting and music were united inter- sensory experience, and that the basis for unity was psy- chological and Sl)iri tual. "To judge 11ainting and music special sensations in nature are neces besides inte ligence and artis c science," wrote Gauguin.3 L Hedon, he preferred to keep the areas between paint and music indeterminate. !hus, ••• 11 You may dream fre when you listen to music as well as when you look at painting. 111! 1 Homer, p .. 199. 2 ibid., IJ• 20: 11 In the case where the eye sees at the same time two contiguous colours, they will appear as dissimilar as possible, both in their optical composition and the height of their tnne. We have then, at the same time, simultaneous contrast oA colour properly so called, and contrast of tone. 11 3Jolm Rewald, Gauguin (London: William Heinemann Ltd., n.d.), pp. 161-3. -38- Gauguin's intuitive gropings into the psycho- logical significance of colour and his attempts to formulate laws of colour analogous to laws of music accorded with the investigations of the behaviourial sciences and the physical sciences.. With a foot in each camp, he was uniquely placed to explore the "felt" qualities of colour and the soul's responsiveness to colour cho , (and thus to realize the autonomous expressive power of colour.) Colour, being an enigmatic thing in the sensations it gives us, can logically only be used eni matically, every time it is employed, not for drawing but fofgiving the musical sensations which procedd out of its own natury, its own interior, mysterious, enigmatic force. For centuries painters had thought the art in- ferior to art to which they red: music. Now the position was quite reversed with Gauguin asserting,not the equality of the two arts, but the superiority of painting over music. There is an impression resulting from any certain arrangement of colours, lights, and shadows. It is what is called the music of the picture. Even be- fore knowing what the picture represen (as when) you enter a cathedral and find yourself at too great a distance to malhe out the picture--frequent- ly you are seized by this magic accord. Here is the true superiority of painting over other forms of art, for this emotion addre1ses itself to the most intimate part oftbe · .. 1Gau s s, p. 56 • 2 ibid. -39- Painting is the most beautiful of all the arts •••• Like music, it acts on the soul through the inter- mediary of the senses, the harmonious tones corres- ponding to the harmonies of sounds, but in painting1 a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another~ and the judgement experiences s fatigue if it wants to reunite the end and the beginning. In the main, the ear is an inferior sense to the eye. The hearing can only ,grasp a single sound at a time, whereas the sight takes in everyt~ing and at the same time simplifies at its will. Musical equivalents are easily found in painting, yet painting has more than music alone can offer. Gauguin and van Gogh were consciously "musical" painters in whose wo may be discerned colour as "vibrating'' tones, 11 chords", "orchestration", "melodic 11 colour, colour 11 counterpoint 11 , linear 11 melody 11 and rhythm. There is a wealth of invention in their paintings. They were virtuoso painters. So, too, was C~zarine. 1Gauguin (Uewald, pp. 161-3.) of. also Leonardo da Vinci, Paragone (oxford, 1949), p. 68: "Leonardo tells the story of King 'Mathias who on his birthday, when a poet pre- sented him a poem in his honour, and a painter a portrait of his beloved, preferred the paintingt and said to t,he poet: 11 Do you not see tbat, in your science there is no proportion created at a (given) instant, but one part is bm1rn of the other successively and the next is not born unless the former dies? For this reason I judge your wo of art to be distinctly inferior to the painter's, simply because no harmonic proportion is composed by yours."" -00- Paul C~zanne, (1839-1906), shared van Gogh and Gauguin's delight in music and enthusiasm for Wagner's music. But unlike his fellows he was not a consciously ''musical" painter, although in his researches into form and construction the fundamental principles of organization remain the same. lie determined the essentials of form. "Everything in Nature is based on the sphere, the cone and the cylinder,n 1 be declared. He endeavoured to rpjresent solids by the various geometric planes they offered, to create a kind of architecture out of space, (as in his views of the Montagne Ste. Victoire.) Such practices point not only to Cubism, but to the parallel creative gesture of Stravinsky who combined "planes" of harmony presented simul taneonsly in polytonal and polyrhythmic works. In Paul C~zanne, the classic tradition is perpetuated,. Numbered among his descendents are, the Cubists, the Purists, the neo-Classicists, and De Stijl, and, where th can be found, the musical equivalents (for the efforts of pioneers such as Ce'zanne make subsequent developments in all the arts possible.) 1 Peter and Linda Murray, p e 54. Chapter 5. -4:l- THE SYMDOLIS 1r DECADJ!:: c. 1890-1.900. In direct contrast to tbe realist tendencies of Impressionism were the artistic movements of the 1890's, many of which aligned themselves with Symbolism.. An earlier Symbolism which flourished between 1860 and 1870 was the first Symbolist movement of the and included Gustave Moreau, (1826-98), Odilon Hedon, (1840-1916), and Puvis de Chavannes, ( 182Li-98), whose directions and achieve- ments were extremely varied. rrheir Symbolism came just. be- fore Impressionism and ·then the two styles ran concurr:ently giving impetus to the later movement of the '90's, especially in literature. The formal founder of Symbolist theory, and its premier poet, Stephana Mallarme, ( 1842-98), taugb·t that beauty can best be sensed through words mysteriously suggestive of colour, sound, taste and touch. Charles Baudelaire had earlier written of an inner relationship among the senses in the poem, Correspondances, 1 contained in , a collection of his poems published in 1857: 1rl1he Pen uin Boolr of French Verse, 3, ed. Anthony Hartley (Great Britain: 1957 , p. 155. La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers Laissant parfois sort de confuses paroles; L'homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles Qui l'observent avec des regards familiars. Comma de lonJS echos qui de loin se confondent Dans una t1;;nebreuse et profonde unit-e 1 Vaste comme la nuit et comma la clarte, , Las parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent. II est des parfums frais comma des chairs d'enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comma les prairies, --E"t d 1 autres, oorrompus, riches et triomphants, Ayant !'expansion des ohoses infinies, Comma I'ambre, le muse, le benjoin et l'encens, Qui chantent les transports de l 1 esp:rit et des senso According to Symbolist theory reality is not limited to physical matter, but inclu s thought. The mind consciously meditating, steadily unearths the significance underlying outward a11pearances & Symbol ism is a search for the mysterious meanings, the magic, the hidden in physical things. 1 One of the principle Symbolist painters was Odilon Radon, (1840-1916), a close friend of Mallarm,. His work became known in Paris between 1879 and 1882 and was much admired by the literary Symbolists. -43- Hedon formulated the basic law of Symbolism: "Nothing can be created in art by the will alone. All art is the result of submission to the unconscious." 1 His younger contemporaries were influenced by contemporary scientific research, but Redon recognized that if science and philosophy put "one side of the truth", then this was not the whole truth. At the same time he held that Impressionism was exhausted, that the Impressionists wereijreal parasites of their subject matter, which they looked at from a single viewpoint, and that they were blind to anything beyond what they saw. 112 What Uedon saw beyond the material realities of the world was an underlying relationship be·tween painting and music, and himself as an intermediary between them. "My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined," be said. nrrhey do not determine anything. Like music, they take us into the ambiguous world of the indeterminate."3 They are, 4 be explains, "a kind of metaphor." rl1 be "musical" element in his paintings is obvious. He described himself as a "peintre symphonique"5, and boasted of having been "born on a musical wave. " 6 1Micbel Florisoone, p. 185. 2 ""h "d ~· 3Klaus Berger, Odilon Uedon (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p. 32. 4 "b"d 1 1 • -4l~- If an artist's art is the song of his li~e, a melody that may be grave or melanc~oly, I first struck a gay note by using colour. Symptomatic of a spiritual restlessness sweeping across l!:urope, Symbolism attuned the artistic aspirations of other members of the Western cultural community to the mystical and spiritual contentions of the movements in France, the core of influence being centralized in Paris. Symbolism was essentially a literary movement which influenced, and was in turn influenced by, painting and music. Wagner's symbolism exerted a profound influence. That his music dominated the period is confirmed in the tings of van Gogh, Gau.gu other artists of the period. / , Debussy, Ma1larme, and many The Symbolist decade is by a growing spirit of co-operation among artists. Music assumed more and more importance in the lives of painters: composers took greater note of specific trends in the visual arts, and there was a lively interchange of ideas. 5Haftmann, vol. 6 Berger, p. 32. 1 Berger, p. 1 1' p. t 36. The purely personal and fantastic side of Symbolism which Redon developed strongly influenced the Nabis. 1 Gauguin's advice to them to paint in flat, pure colours prompted Maurice Denis to utter "one of the great battle- cries of modern art 11 : 2 "Remember that a picture, before being a horse, a nude, or some ldnd of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order. 11 3 Temporarily disillusioned by the materialistic bias of the scientific revolution, many artists turned again, (in their insecurity), to religion. The confidence which science had first inspired now gave way to pessimism. The reappearance of religious art coincided with the revival of medieval ecclesiastical modes and Gregorian chant which were cultivated by the newly-founded Schola Cantorum in Paris. During this period Gauguin painted his religious works. Georges Rouault continued the fervour and intensity of neo-Catholioism into the twentieth century. Other artists looked to exotic or primitive religions, or to mysticism. 1Paul Serusier, (1865-1927), Maurice Denis, (1870- 1943), Pierre Bonnarcl 1 (1867-1947), Edouard Vuillard, (1868 -1940), Paul Ranson, \1862-1909), Ker Xavier Roussel, (1867 -1944). Serusier, Gauguin's disciple had a fine tenor voice and at one point considered making music his career. (ref. Crespelle, p. 37). The Nabis were encouraged b~ the composers Duparc, Chausson, Debussy and Vincent d'Indy who were their friends and shared their ideals., 2 & 3ref. :Murray, p. 222. During the Symbolist decade Debussy's musical idiom evolved towards a personal Impressionistic style. In many ways, the pattern of his development sums up the general artistic progress of the period. Just as Wagner's music had inspired Impressionist and post-Impressionist painters and Symbolist writers, so Wagner proved to be an early model for the young Debussy's compositions. Brik Satie, (1866-1925), a "cubist 11 composer and musician, wrote: When I first met Debussy, he was full of Moussorgsky and was very deliberately seeking a way that wasn't very easy for him to find ••• At that time I was writing Le Fils des 'toiles to a libretto by Joseph P6ladan, and I explained to Debussy that a Frenchman bad to free himself from the Wagnerian adventure, which wasn't the answer to our national aspirations. I also pointed out that I was in no way anti-Wagnerian, but that we should have a music of our own--if possible without any sauerlrrau t. Why should we not use the means that Claude Monet, c6zanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and others had made known? Why could we not 1 transrwse these means into music? Nothing simpler. First, the influence of Wagner; now--like the painters--from the East, a fresh source of musical pos- sibilities. 1Erik Satie, 11 Debussy 11 , Contemporary Composers on Contemporary ·Music (New York: H~ It, l\'•neho.r1 o.not Winsrot\)J p.6,Z . At the Exposition of 1889, held in Paris to cele- brate the centenary of the French Revolution, were displays of oriental dancing, music, and artifacts. Visual, musical, and literary imaginations were given a tremendous boost by Javanese dancers and musicians and by the Chinese theatre from Cochin, both appearing in Europe for the first time. At the Exposition Debussy heard musicians from Java, Bali, and Indo-China. He was deeply impressed by the charm and possibilities of their music, especially the music of the Gamelan--a type of Javanese native orchestra--with its in- tricate interplay of percussive rhythms and enchanting in- strumental colours. Here was a world of sonority that could be drawn upon to refresh the tired musical convention of Europe. Inspired by the genus of five steps to the octave which he had heard on the Gamelan, Debussy de- vised a pentatonic scale and a whole-tone scale in order to free himself from the (apparent) limitations of the Western major-minor tonality. By the use of such exotic scales, he enlarged the European musical horizon to embrace the civilizations of the Orient. He also adopted Gregorian modes. Thus, an aspect of his work reaches back into the Middle Ages. The first tonal ambiguities taking the form of a musical counterpart of Impressionism are revealed in the use of the dominant ninth chord or, without its funda- mental, the dimisished seventbo 1 1Employed, too, in the works of Satie, Duparc, Chausson, and Havel. -48- The particular property of the chord of the diminished seventh is that it is a pivot, mo(lulating chord which may branch out into one of eight tonalities (four major and four minor). If, however, this chord is not used to modulate into another key but is linked to other seventh chords in the form of a succession, a continuous feeling of suspense is created. The juxtaposition of common chords, each belonging to a different tonality, creates a feeling of rootlessness. Tonality, music's law of gravity, was undergoing a quiet transformation. For centuries music had centred around tbe inter- vals of the third and the sixth. Debussy's emphasis of the bare intervals of the fourth and fifth was a departure of prime importance for his contemporaries and followers. Impressionism released the chord in regard to the movement and goal of music. "Gliding" chords became an essential feature of the Impressionist style, a suocesslon of "blobs" of sound, like the succession of individual notes in a melody. '1.1be harmony is a thickening out of the melody, (as in many an Impresslonist painting, the luminous haze is a thickening out of the single line.) The resulting tonal ambiguities create the impression that "we never see anything clearly". 2 1Lockspeiser, vol. 2, p. 240. 2As Ruskin had remarked of Turner's paintings. (Lockspeiser, vol. 2, p. 23.) -49- In La Catb6drale engloutie (1910), a work for piano, the f t chord is sustained by the pedal, creating a sonorous haze against which the succeeding harmonies un- fold. This use of Pedal or Organ Point created an effect prized throughout the Classic and Romantic eras. The Impressionist adopted the device and used it with great imagination, deriving many striking effects from the clash of transient and sustained harmonies. Such effects challenged orthodox distinctions between consonance and dis- sonance, directing composers to different forms of tonal reference. A concert devoted entirely to his works was given in the gall of La Libre tlie'tique in Brussels, (then the main centre of the Art Nouveau movement), on March 1 1894. The gall , turned into a tempo concert hall, diSJ)layed not only the latest canvases of Pissarro, Heno Gauguin, and Signac, together with the posters of Toulouse- Lautrec, but also lliam Morris' illuminated books of the Kellilscott Press, Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Salome, and buckles and bracelets designed by the London Guild of Handicrafts. Debussy's music identified with the avant-garde. 2 1 e.g. the pentatonic and whole-tone scales. La Cath,drale engloutie employs a medieval procedure known as org~~um in which the melody is harmonized in parallel fourths or fifths. 2This information condensed from Lockspeiser, vol.i P• 119. -50- Debussy 1 s ( :1.905), considered the greatest example of an orchestral Impressionist wor1r, is said to have been inspired by rrurner' s paintings, which he pro:Sably saw in 1902-3. 1 The first performance of L took place at the time of the Paris Autumn Salon where Fauve paintings were hung for the first time. Debussy was not especially attracted to the l1'auves, bnt, possibly because of the powerful impact made by this exhibition, the programme note introducing drew parallels between his tech- nique of orchestration and the approach to primary colours of the Fauves. rrhe orchestral effects were procured by means of a "palette of sounds and by skilful brushstrokes designed to conve~ in gradation of rare and brilliant colours the play of light and shade and the ":i of the ever-changing seascape. ".J During the Symbolist decade this type of analogy became increasingly more frequent. Between 1895 and t902 several studies appeared which attempted to draw con- clusions on the relationship between colours and tones. In describing a picture art critics speak of roaring reds, shrill greens, singing blues, a noisy note o:f yellow and of chromatic narmonies and dis- sonances. A symphony, on the other hand, is described i.n terms belonging to painting: the melodic line is coloured with different hues ••• the three colours of the wind instruments in the Ullper registers are harmoniously oombinetl. Above is the luminous blue ol the flutes, the bright red 1Just as Pissarro and Monet had been inspired by Turner 1 s paintings when they visited the Natif,nal Gallery, London, in 1871. -5t- of the oboes is in the centre and the warm, 1 brown- ish tints of the clarinet are in the base. - La peinture est, si l'on veut, une musique des couleurs sans mouvement, une mus~que mort mais c 1 est d~jhs une sort de musique. Debussy, too, wrote in like manner to describe his own works. Of his three Nocturnes for viol and orchestra he wrote: The orchestra of the first consists of strings; of the second, flutes, four horns, three trumpets and two harps; of the third, of both these groups. It is an experiment with the different combinations that can be obtained 3 from one colour--like a study of grey in painting. s orchestral work, , he described as the musical equivalent of "grey tones lightly tinged with whi II lj, 2 15 October, 1905. 3Lockspeiser, vol. 2, p. 16. 1Paul Souriau, 11 Le Symbolism des couleurs", La Revue de Paris, 15 April, 1895) (ref. Lockspeiser, vol. 2, p. 17} 2Lucien J:!,avre, 3Lockspeiser, vol. 1, p. 128. 4 ibid. (Reminiscent of the influence of photography on Impressionist painting.) -52- In confusing their terms painters and composers moved closer together: painters discussed colours and forms in terms belonging to music, composers discussed tones and harmonies in terms belonging to painting. Both attempted to explore the "felt" qualities of their media through thein· "associative" aspects. Such practices reflected the emergence and developments of the new science, psychology, and researches into the phenomena of synaesthesia and chromesthesia. Some artists sought syntheses of their media (as Wagner had earlier advocated in Gesamkunstwerke.) Scriabin, Sch8nberg, and Kandinsky tried to combine music? coloured lights, and movement to address all the senses simultaneously. 1 While radical changes were taldng place in the arts the conservative core of artists retai~ed their popularity over the newer experimental artists. Composers such as Saint-SH.ens and Faure in France, Mabler and Bruckner in Germany, and IJeoneavallo and Verdi in Italy, whose works continued in a H.omantically nationalis~ vein, represent the mainstream of resistance to radical change in European music., Although there was still the academic tradition of historical and portrait painting which, like its parallels in music, maintained its hold on established society and culture, the new non-academic art began to malce its pre- seance felt at the turn of the century. It had impact as truth to shifting contemporary values. 1 see Appendix. -53- The young painters were sensitive to this new atmosphere and nowhere more than in Paris which, as a result of the acceptance by the critics of Impressionism and its successors, became the art capital of the the world~ In 1905 Homain Rolland was able to write about "the sudden change which is being brought about in music., li'rench art, quietly, is in the act of taking the place of German art. 111 Musically, Paris became the most important centre in Europe To Paris, young painters and composers gravitated, from Germany, Spain,. Italy, England, Hussia and America. To remain in their own countries was not to be free of the influence of developments in France. European art began to take on an international flavour. At the same time -in other parts of Europe, other revoluti.onary groups were formed which were antipathetic to traditional art and sensitive to the exciting possibilities of the dawning twentieth century. But Paris was the centre for the earli- est movements. Painting could take either of the paths which led to Cubism or Expressionism: music could twnn to either polytonal i ty or atonality. rl1he artistic atmosphere was bristling with possibilities: the fund of artistic ideas was swelling. The destinies of painting and music were t Machlis, p. 115. -54- inextricably intertwined. Painters, poets, and composers met, too, in "la vie Bohemienne", which had arisen in consequence of the artist'~ alienation from society. The Bohemian life allowed great freedom of artistic behaviour and practice, but exacted its toll in other respects, in material sacrifice and poverty. Still, if, on the one hand, the artist had nothing to lose in identifying with 11 la vie", on the other, .he. had every- thing to gain. The period preceding the First World War was an age of eccentricity. Such behaviour disguised quivering sensibilities in innovators such as the poet and playwright, Alfred Jarry, the composer,Erik Satie, the l)ainter, Henri Rousseau, and the poet, Guillaume Apolli- naire. -5 Chapter 6. FAUVISM AND MUSIC. Fauvism, the first movement of the twentieth century to present itself as a united front, had specific affinities with music. Most of the Fauve painters were musicians and they drew upon their musical experience in order to advance new pictorial ideas. A group of paintings hung together in the Autumn Salon of 1905 were dubbed collectively , 1 the wildness objected to beimg primarily a matter of colour and of its (so-called) "liberation". In the collective impact of their works, the individuals concerned discovered a certain sympathy of purpose: the expressive potential of colour as a means to composition. Fauve painters liberated colour from its sub- ordinate role as merely conveying a certain amount of in- formation into the position of an independent force. Colour had previously been subservient to the aim of representing some natural effect. Gauguin and van Gogh had shown that 1The original contributors were: Henri Matisse, l i869-1954l, Albert Marquet, (187 1947), Andr~ Derain, 1880-1954 , Georges H.ouaul t, ( 1871-1958), Henri Manguin, 1874-1949, Jean Puy, (1876-1960), and Othon Friesz, 1879-1949. Kaoul Dufy, (1877-1953), Braque, (1881-1963), and Metzinger, (1883-1956), joined with them briefly. -56- it could do more than this; that like music, it could appeal directly to the senses, and that it could convey the artist's feelings as well as simply describe an aspect of ·the object seen. It did not necessarily destroy the ex- perience of reality, but on the contrary more actively con- veyed the artist's experience of reality. That the l'i"auves drew analogies between their art and music, follows in consequence of their musical back- grounds. rrheir emotive temj>eram:ants were better attuned to music. Braque played both the accordeon and the guitar. Vlaminck earned his living as a music teacher until he was thirty, ancl both Matisse and Dufy l)layed the violin• Derain played the organ and the harpsichord. Vlaminck was the eldest son of musical parents. s mother, a former Conservatoire prize-wi.nner, gave pi.ano lessons; his father taught the violin, was head of tne cho society of Chatou, Emd choirmaater at the clnuch of Saint-Merri. Vlaminclc described himself as having been "born to music". 2 From my earliest years I ate, slept, and ~olce to the sounds of the violin and the piano ••• 1Jean-Paul Crespelle, The Fauves: History of the (Oldbourne Press, London}, p. 31. 2 'b'd ..!.....!_., 3ibid. p. 1.04 • -57- I grew up to the so-Lmds of my father 1 s pupils doing their exercises, the Carnival of Venice, The Maiden's Prayer, and the sonatinas, scales t and duets yhich were a permanent background to our lives.·· Vlaminck's father taught him music, and he earned his living as a violin teacher because there was much money in painting. 112 "didn't think 'l'he Dufy household, like the Vlaminck's, was always full of music. M. Dufy played the organ and was a choir- master, and the other two sons, Leon and Gaston, were also the organ, the other, a flautist, ~~~~~~~~~' a musical publi- musicians; one played became editor of the cation. Raoul Dufy said that his early years were cradled by the sea and by music. He himself sang in a church choir and throughout his life he was an ardent concert-goer. Braque loved music, and learned to play the flute, the violin and the accordeon from Gaston Dufy. Music has played a large lJart in his worlc: Bach or Mozart scores appear in many of his pictures. His first private exhibition took place in November 1908, sponsored by Apollinaire. In some of the canvases exhibited the artist introduced for the first time in modern painting the musical-instrument theme. 1 crespelle, p. 104. 2 ibid. -58- Fauve painters found a common identity in music. As a point of reference, music justified their innovations, and provided them with parallels, which they easily adapted~ and with subject matter. Considered as equivalents of the music which formed a background to their lives, Fauve paintings are of immense interest., But it is in the prac- tical application in Fauve teaching that the role of music becomes apparent. Matisse's theories are a "musical" re- finement of the language of painting. An exhibition of Moslem art in 1903 awoke in Matisse a taste for pure tone and a feeling for the arabesque in colour. He was also imt)ressed by Gauguin 1 s unbroken sur- faces of vibrating colour, the pure colour of Signac and Seurat, and the expressive spontaneity of van Gogh. In Matisse, the influences from these various sources are fused. Colour is his art. The relationship of all the tones I have found must result in a living harmony of colours, analogous t~ the harmony of a musical composition. Matisse insisted on the importance of composition, the organization of the picture surface and the placement of colours.. "To my mind composition is everything. So it iB 1 Haftmann, vol. 1, P• 77 • -5 essential to have a clear vision of the whole from the ou 1 set." Matisse had little use for the theories of complementaries: as did Debussy and Ravel, he sought har- mony in dissonance. "One tone is just a colour; two tones are a chord, a life, 112 the latter consideration contribu- ting to the desired "living harmony of colours." Here was the essence of colour composition. Matisse successfully translated his feeling for music into pictorial equivalents. His paintings t pure colour and are "concertos of colour 7 " 3 full of melodic variations and strongly rhythmical. He translated the musical arabesque on to canvas. 4 His series of r collage compositions, , completed in 1947 (when illness and old age were beginning to overtake him),bear eloquent testimony to his musical gifts. 1Escholier, Matisse from the Life (Faber & Faber, t960) t p;. 81. 2 ibid., p. 74, (Dabreuil writing on Matisse's teaching methods. 3The musical arabesque was originally inspired or borrowed from the visual arts. Both Matisse and Delacroix employed the arabesque as a rhythmic, linear surface deco- ration, inspired by Islamic or Moorish art. Both phhyed the violin. Did painters such as Klee, Braque, Vlruninck, etc. increase in their feeling for the melodic potential of the drawn line as a result of their abilities with musical instruments of the single melodic line type? It iBvites speculation. ~, -60- Having established in painting the inde1)endence of colour through expressive use, in free arabesques and pictorial surface decoration, Fauve ideas spread through the youthful movements of painting in other European countries, (particularly in Germany where considerable in- fluence was exerted on the Expressionists), and looked to the pure abstraction of Orphism in France. The connecting link between Fauvism and Orphism is expressed in a phrase of Othon Friesz, the only unmusical Fauve. scribed Fauve paintings as "orchestrations a phrase used with increasing frequency by describe their art. l''ri esz de- of colour" 1 ' the Orphists to Perhaps the most touching statement on the relationJ ship between painting and music concerns Matisse's fear of blindness. In order to meet the affliction, should it ever be visited upon him, Matisse took up the violin in 1918 and began to study it seriously. It's a fact that I'm afraid I shall lose my sight, and not be able to paint any more. So I thought of something. 2 A blind man must give up painting• but not music. 1Escholier. 2 ibid. -6 Chapter 7. CUBISM AND MUSIC. "After the music of the silk-brush the mu c of the axe. 11 --Cocteau. Cubism began in 1907, the year of the great C~zanne memorial exhibition in Paris. As the discoveries of van Gogh, Gauguin and late Impressionism had stimulated the l~'auves, so the teachings of C~zanne had a radical effect on Cubism. Whereas the principle concern of the Fauves was the investigation of the potential of colour, that of tbe Cubists was the sis of form. Cubists c ed much further the idea of the unity of the picture surface, and they abandoned the representation of things as tbey appear in order to an account of the whole structure of ob- jects and its position in space. Other starting points for Cubism are to be found in the influence of negro sculpture (currently intriguing artists in Europe) in which forms are reduced to inter- related planes, and the reaction from the pattern-making of l"auvism. In their desire to express structure, the Cubists renounced Fauve colour and painted in a monochrome. By 1909 they had greatly refined the process of analytical dissection of objects. They began by -6 separating the facets of objects, spreading them out, and blending them with the forms of other objects. These com- binations gave rise to the idea of simultaneity, in which different aspects of an object were represented in juxta- position--simultaneou "so that the partial view of an object can be turned into a mental view with the help of factual data, such as dimensions, ground plans, and pro- files.111 About the same time that juxtaposed simultaneous views of objects appeared in painting, the concept of time was introduced into the static space of the picture. In the realm of science, three-dimensional space, which can be visu.aU. , gave way to the time-space continuum, with time playing the part of the four·t;b (limen ion which cannot be visualized but only expres in mathematl.cal formulae. 2 Minowski's mathematical formulation of the dimensions of space-time appeared in i908. Einstein postulated that space and time were functions of each other. Independent!~ painters arrived at an understanding of the functions of space and time in visual art. Now painting was stepping into the temporal domain of music. Gleizes wrote: I have completed pictures by forcing myself to situate clearly, and in their natural places, the expressions of space and time--the latter being ~o more than a counterpoint or fugue on the former 1r::raftmann. vo 1 1 p 100 . .t I O t O <> -63- The distinctive feature of Cubism, then, is the interpenetration of space and time. Giedi.on presents the following definition of Cubism: It ews objects relatively: that is, from several points of view, no none of which has exclusive authority. And in so dissecting objects it sees them simultaneously from all sides--f~om above and below, from inside and outside. It goes around and into its objects. Thus, to the three dimensions of the Renaissance which have held good as constituent facts throughout so 1 many centuries, there is added a fourth one--time. Gleizes looked to a period when "the fact of moving around an object to seize from it several successive appear ... ances, which, fused into a single image" would "reconstitute it in ·time," and (would) "no longer malre reasoning people indignant. 112 But to an unwilling public, CulJist ideas remained incomprehensible. Cubism, (as were the parallel movements in science and music), was up against ignorance and resistance to change. Simultaneity, tbe dynamic principle of Cubism, Orphism and li'uturism, was begotten by modern technological city life. In modern music that principle was applied in 1sigfried Giedion, (London: 1956), p. 13. 2Gleizes and Metzinger "Cubism", Modern Artists on Art, ed. Robert L. Herbert {Englewood Cliffs, N. J: Prentice::::Hall, 1964), p. 15. -64- ·two fields: tonality and rhythm. Composition on more than one tonal plane had been pioneered by such composers as Debussy, Scriabin, and Richard Strauss. 1 Polytonality, the simultl\l,neous presen- tation of two or more keys, and polyrhy~nn, the simul- taneous presentation of rhythms with different character- istics, were the musical answers to Cubism .. Igor Stravinsl{y, (h. 1882), (whose achievemnnts are 0 en COillJ)El.l'Cd th Ptcasso's), with po tonality and polyrhy iclioms in which he ll L Picasso, he renounced the heen school sound-images would more ne dynamism of modern 1 ife.. ly 0 to devt:lop correspond to consisting of co rlieto me s and stresses make j:o t ambigut ·ties Simulta:neou pres ed f of io i.n parallel, but unrelated,keys contrast v ical tension th the ho zontal struggle r metrical domination. insl{y often plays vertical textures and horizontal constructions in oppo tion to each other so that a kind of aggression results. Such effects confuse the ear and deny it the reassurance of gravity or location. 1 e.g. Strauss' Also S"Qrach Zarathustra combines the keys of C major and B major. Scriabin inventecl the so- called "mystic" chord of ascending :fourths (C-F sharp- flat-E-A-D), as a replacement for major and m:i.nor chords. '11he first of Bartol{' s f.~urteen Bagatelles ( t908) is the first example of two simultaneously sounding melodic pa:rts written in different keys. Prokofiev's Sarcasmes (1911) also contain bitonal passages. Charles Ives, (1874-1954), -6 The Cubists and the polytonal composers fragmented their subject matter and recombined the facets in a way that challenged the validity of time and space as absolute dimensions. 'l!ime as a 1 imi tceo\ factor in painting, Spi..'We. as a limit, factor in music, both were jet·tisoned in favour of more mul ti-climensional structures in pain tin€; and music, and both cubism and polytonality attempt to recon- cile the media to these new considerations. Bitonality and polytonality became prevalent in French and Italian music after 19t2 1 , and between 1912 and 1925 the possibilities of simultaneity were gradually realizedo. Hbythmic simultaneity 2 was achieved in poly- metric and polyrbythmic writing. also experimented with polytonality, quite independently,in his orchestral and piano music before the First World War. s fellow American,, Cowell, added to the vocabulary of music with tlle invention of tone-clusters. Stravinslry' s famous chord combines the broken triads of C major s arp major--a particularly striking effect sinee keys whose tonics lie a tritone apart have the least number of notes in common. Such innovations opened up new prospects for orchestral colour. 1 stravinsky's (1911) is an example. Alfredo, (1883-1947), compos in a polytonal style in Notte di Maggio ( 1.9:f.l1), and his ano Sonatina ( 1916) has a polytonal minuet and a bitonal inale. Darius MiJ.haudt (b. 1892), also writes in a polyton style, incorporating into many of his wo jazz elements and folk mu c. 2 e.g. Stravinsky's -66- Hhythm is the mainspring of Stravinsky's art and it is significant that bis music has its roots in dance forms. Rhythm is one o the main considerations in abstract painting, too, and it is significant that painters in l 1 aris should be associated with the dance. Enthusiasm for Wagner's music was still maintained in Pari at a high level, and both Strauss and Mahler won a band of French admirers. (The vogue for Strauss reached its height in 1907--the year of Picasso's en Strauss himself conducted performances of in Paris.) Like Wagner, Diaghilev similarly proposed to unite the arts of painting, music and the dance~ Diagbilev's encouraged a new spi t of i bt •t i 1 coitlaborat· on e ween pa1n ers anc composers.· Between 1909 and 19:1.4_, Diaghilev, the cl ctor of the Ballets Husse:s in Paris, primarily on Russian artists :, Stravinsky the composer, and the painters, Bakst, Benois, Larionov, and Gontcharova. From 1917 on, Diaghilev turned more to French and other national composers and painters for their collaboration: (in addition to Stravinsl\:y and Prokof:ie~, fue composers, Sauguet, Sa tie, Mil haud, Poulenc, Manuel de Palla and Hindemi th, and the pain-liers, 1rrhe contribution of Hussian expatriate composers and painters to the development of modern painting and music has been considerable. Such artists as Stravinsky, Sou tine and Marc Cbagall in France, and Kanclinsky, von J awl en sky and Mariana Werefkin in Germany, have done much ~o blend the disparate artistic threads of Europe into the lnternational cultural community which succeeded to the national schools. -67- Picasso, Derain, Matisse, Braquet Marie Laurencin, Gris, Utrillo, Max Ernst, and Miro., Co-operation among the artists was a positive means of materially synthesizing their arts. In a sense, a spirit of socialism succeeded to, or ra•ther, transformed, the earlier Bohemian! sm. One of Satie's works will serve to illustrate that spirit of collaboration$ rrhe most important of his worlcs for the stage, , was written for Diaghilev, on a s by Jean Cocteau, with decor and costumes by Picasso and choreo by Massine. 1 Parade (1917) has well been called a "cubist manifesto". The Cubist painters broke up the familiar objects of everyday life and reintegrated them in unusual contexts in order to achieve a fresh personal vision. In the same way, Satie's music juxtaposed seemingly incompatible elements and recombined them in a formal integration: snappy fragments of music-hall melody and a strict fugato, lyrical phrases and driving ostinato rhythms, simple diatonic harmonies and clangorous polytonal effects. The inclusion in the score of a typewriter, steam whistle, rattle, and similar noisemakers was allied to the "shock-the-bourgeois" mentality of Paris during the second decade of our century. What reaches beyond the period is:-1t!!e freshness of the montage achieved by Satie ••• 111 At the time Cocteau was obs&ssed by visual images~ especially the Harlequins, Pierrots and musical instruments in Picasso 1 s painting. As. Cocteau recalled later, "My dream was to hear the music of Picasso 1 s guitars, 11 and he set about building his ballet around them ••. " --"Picasso's Theater Period, 11 'rime, August 1. 3, 1965, p. 52. 2 Machlis, pp. 213-4. -68- During the 1920's the Ballets Suedois appeared in Paris. On the whole, the dancers and choreography were mediocre, but Jean Borlin, the company's choreographer, had the good fortune to find some first-rate collaborators amon9 the musicians, painters, end poets of the day: the group of composers known as , 1 and Cocteau, Pirandello, Jean Hugo, de Chirico, and Fernand Leger. Leger designed sets for two ballets: La Patinoire (1921) Honegger, and La Creation du Monde (1922) by Milhaud. Another interes·ting parallel between painting and music concerns the introduction and organization of tex- tures, (a consideration of paramount significance in the development of electronic music later in the century.) The first stage of Cubism, 11 Analytic 11 , concerned with the essentials of form, was followed, in 1910-12, by a "Syn- thetic phase. "Synthetic" Cubism endeavoured to convey ibhe idea of raali~y without resorting to illusionism by means of light and shade. Reality itself was introduced in the form of a piece of newspaper, cloth, wallpaper, musical manuscript paper, or other material stuck on to the canvas and combined with painting or drawing to provide contrast or comparison. Music incorporated natural or mechanically produced sounds with musical tones and harmonies, (e.g. 1Auric, Durey, Honegger, Milhaud$ Poulenc, and '.llailleferre. -69- Satie' s Parade and Antheil' s Ballet Me"chanigue.) Visual and aural collages emd montages reflect identical aims~ to organize the sights and sounds of technological society into structures that symbolize the values of that societyo The mechanical aspect of the First World War had a profound effect on the Cubist, Fernand L , (1881-1955) 9 and resulted in ·t.he dynamic phase of his work after 1917 .. In 1924 he created the first film without scenario, Le~ Ballet M~chanigue, for which George Antheil, ( 1900-59), wrote music. When he wrote the ballet, Antheil was developing a new principle of musical construction, based on rhythm alone. He called it "time-space" and com- pared it with a panvas on which tunes and chords were applied .like colours and shapes. He wrote the ballet originally for an abstract motion picture, but then rewrote it for the concert hall •• The version on this record includes a recording of an airplane engine, two doorbells of different sizes, and four pianos (replacing the original pia.nolas) on which occasional tone clusters are banged with the palm of the hand. The three-part piece, played without a pau~e, has been dubbed a "mectrnistic dance of 1 ife." Contrasting planes of sounds, musical and unmusical.,pointed to cacophony. In opposition to the "horizontal i ty 11 of Classical and Romantic music, "verticality" in the form of textures became the norm. Noise, tonal densities and 1Ann M .. Lingg, sleeve notes, Ballet M~chaniquet US5i34<> -70- nvertical 11 conglomerates of sound--new "colours" which challenged the composer'.s ingenuity and inventiveness. Stravinsky's use of such aments gave rise to a texture based on pure colours so limuid that, as Diaghilev re- marked, 11 0ne could see through it with one's ears." 1 "You have enlarged the boundaries of the perm];ssible in the emvire of sound, 11 said Debussy in a letter to Stravinsb:y thanking him for his gift of the score of lje Sacre du printemps. 2 Likewise, in the matter of texture, the Cubist had "enlarged the boundaries of the permissible" in the "empire" of vision. F'icasso, Braque, and Gris were foremost among the Cubist constructors of collages. "Braques collages •.•••• follow musical rhythms which transcend the object that is represented, whether the theme of the woxk is musical or '% not 11 J Another parallel be en painting and nm i.e con- cerns those facets of the two arts which appeal to the diff levels of perception. Marc Chagall, (b. 1887), was,for a time, associated with the Cubists. His highly individual sensi.bil ty welded together i.n ch 11 symphonic" colour, disparate figments and images of dreams, childhood, 1 Machlis, p. 170. 2Donald Mitchell, The Language of Modern lih:tsic (London: Faber & ll""'aber, t963), .p. 22. 3Popper, p. 39. -71- and fantasy. Images of the past and from the present, incongruously juxtarwsed, challenge the authority of time ancl space as absolute dimensions. 11 1 will be a musician, 11 t he said in his childhood. In his paintings be has ful- filled his own prophecy; they are bathed in a musical effulgence. "Now your colours sing, 112 Bakst told Chagall. Cbagall's paintings remind us that all art attempts to fuse proportions of thought and feeling, to find appropriate images for them, in order address the conscious and sub- conscious levels of perception. As a rule, form delimits the aspects of an aesthetic idea and gives it materiality; the internal aspects are "de-coded" through the appects of its ~xpressive elements. It is a dialogue between intellect and feeling, objectivity,and subjectivity, structure and expression, the material and the spiritual, ethos and pathos, and pathos. On the whole, Cubism proceeded objectively& Its off-shoot, Orphism, was to re-apply the notion of 11 musical 11 colour. 1 da Silva, von Simson, llinks, p. 61. 2 ibid. (Chagall's pai~ting The Green Violinist was inspired by his uncle who played the violin .. )- -72- Chapter 8. ORPHISM AND MUSIC. Throughout the Cubist period musical analogies were drawn with increasing frequency. Around 1910, sonte of the newer Cubists set out to "humanise" strict Cubism and to 11poeticise 11 its subject matter. 1 1l'his development, d.esignated Orphism by Guillaume Apollinaire, looked to an absolute painting that would be as independent of nature as music; pictures whose very subject matter would be the spontaneous life of colour, its harmonies and dissonances, and ihe play of its proportions. The primary characteristic of Orphist art is the pre-eminence of colour, a radical consequence of Gauguin's theory of 11 orchestrated 11 colours, and the investigations of the neo-I:mpressionists and the J:l,auves. Orphi sm asserted the primacy of pure colour over form. Apollinaire first bestowed his epithet upon the work of Robert Delaunay, (1885-1941), because be felt it to be more lyrical and sensuous than the rather austere Cubism of the period, and also because he saw it as a form of "peinture pur_e" with analogies to music. 11 Thus we are progressing towards an intensely new kind of art, which will be to painting what one bad hitherto imagined music was to pure literature,n he said. 2 1Haftmann, vol. 2, p. 96. 2Golding, p. 35. Orphism which represented it f as a Cubist tteresy moved very quicldy towards abstraction. In 1912 Delaunay, the central figure of Orphist painting, arrived at his entirely abstract es, and , in which circular areas of colour inter ... ~~~~~~~~~ penetrate and revolve around one another in harmonies intended to correspond to the abstract harmonies of musical sounds. "Colour alone," he said, "is form and subject.n 1 He extended the language of painting to incorporate spatio- temporal elements of dynamism, rhythm and the movement inherent in colour. Delaunay tried to represent the eXJ}erience of time through the portrayal of .. Kupka, (1.87 1957), reached abstract colour compositions by way of neo-Impressionism, without going through Cubism as .uelaunay had done.. Kupka and Delaunay oped indepe:ndently of each other g yet both arrived at identical conclusions in painting by analo with music. Kuplt:a wrote: Music is the only art of sound which does not exist in nature and must be almost wholly created. Man has created words to articulate his thought. has created writing, the aeroplane and the locomotive. Why then should he not create in painting and sculpture, independently of the forms and colours which surround him in the world •••• I believe that I 1 Haftmann, vol. 1, p. 11.3. -74- can find something between vision and hearing and that I can produce a figur-e in colours just as Bach did in music. In all events, I shall no loyger be satisfied with a slavish copying of nature. With the emergence of such ideas, many felt that painting had become completely "musicalized". 2 In 1911/12 Kupka painted his first abstract work, Fugue in lled and Blue, (musical titles were fashionable at the time), in which concentric rhythms in blue, red, green and black are ranged on a white groundo the (1913) evolved at the same time as another aspect of the same idea. In the Fugu~ Kupka basically demonstrated the concept of rotation on a plane; in he attempted to define the rising harmonies of the colour scale and the law of upward and downward thrust.. In 1912 he painted his , concentric forms in pure colours without representational reference. In all the works of this period, he deliberately fostered external associations with musiot an art in which he was deeply interested, particularly in Bach's structure. 1 Popper, p. 48. 2John Golding, Cubism~ A Histor and an Analysis, !907-14 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1959 , Po 35. -75- By 1909 Kupka had achieved a "musical" cone on of colour composition. This is demonstrated in his por- trait of a friend, entitled , in which the colour scale ranges from orange to lemon yellow throughout the cture includ the background. 1 Another work dating from same year 1 mal{es external reference to music. 1Fhe worlr was originally conce as a landscape. In the upper part of the composition the o gin al preserved~ rro the lower part Kupka later added an didactic exposition of the piano keyboard., At the bottom a hand is seen playing the A major chord and tones (as colours) eme from the centre as if to ize the sounds. 2 Kupka and Delaunay were associated with the , the name of an ibition in 1912, which revived the ideals of Renaissance proportion and mu cal consonance. Kupka was the forerunner of the who formed a group about 1920.. Valensi, the inventor of the theory of 11 Mu calism 11 , pursued a path which lay between music and plastic dynamism. Why should we not invent pure painting? Since the musician works with notes, why should we not accept that colour by its intr io fo3oe is capable of expressing a painter's thought? 1.Ludmila Vaehtova, Hudson, 1.968), p. 69. 2~.' p .. 102. 3Golding, p .. 35. (London: 'l1hame s and -76- Valensi was attracted to the idea that colours and musical tones corresponded in audition coloree, but Kupka did not concur with bim in that belief, and would not sign the Musicalist manifesto published by Valensi in 1913, which declared that "in order to interpret new forms of life the arts must be more musical. 111 Valen eventually went over to Colour Music in order to explore the possibilities of animated colour. His constant dream was the introduction of symphonic musical movement into his plastic works. What Valensi intended was that the picture, itself a preliminary and preparatory moment, should be wholly composed in view of its further development in the film; the film was to be the authentic work, the goal and ideal of the artist's effort. Certainly it was a symphony that he dreamed of, and he realizes it patiently, image 2 by image, with the techniques of animated drawing. l!,rancis Picabia and Blane-Gatti also joined the Musicalists. Of Picabia, an American critic wrote that "the comparison that Pioabia is fondest of making is tbat of pure musio.n3 Picabia, Kupka, Delaunay, and Kandinsky arrived at abstract painting, independently, and by drawing direct relations with music. Painting had become non-represent- ational, as music is fundamentally non-representational. 1 Vachtova, P• 258. 2 Popper, lh 174. 3Golding, P• 35o -77- Chapter 9. li'UTUIUSM AND MUSIC. "All the new art which is being elaborated in France seems to have hardly held on to a melody and the Futurists have come to teach us--by their titles not by ttwir worl{s--that it could be elevate(.( to a symphony"--Guillamne Apollinaire. In 1895 the first Venice Biennale confronted Italian painters with l1'rench, German, Austrian and Swiss works. 2 Such exhibitions as the Biennale and the inter- national exposition of decorative arts in Turin acquainted the young Italian painters with the Symbolism, Jugendstil, and Secessionism of a changing artistic climate. So far the aesthetic pendulum had swung between Paris and Mu:ilich. Now Italian painters struggled against their country's acceptance of her inferior position in EuroJJean art, and modern ideas took shape in a climate of furious controvers~ In order to join the main stream of modern develop- ments in art, a small group of Italian artists, continually varying in composition, formed around Ardengo Soffici and Gino Severini in Paris. They were visited occasionally by the wealthy and widely travelled poet F. T. Marinetti. 1 Marianne W'I;J Martin, Futurist Art and rrheory 1909- (0xford: Clarendon Press, 1968), Po 124. -78- Between the years 19QO and 1905 the Italians quickly absorbed the phases of modern European art, from the .Jugenstil to Impressionism and ce'zanne, and on to the Cubists, until their pictorial concpptions had attained the general European level. They were particularly attracted to 'the pictorial architecture of Cubism, admiring, as Soffici expressed it, "the sober consistency of the bodies and objects, tl1e weight, the gravitation of the masses, the balance of the planes and volumes." 1 Distilling the essences of modernism, the Italians paved the way for their country's first important contribution to the art of the twentieth century: Futurism. Futurism was the Italian expression of an art which adopted a contemptuous attitude to the glories of the Italian cultural heritage. On li'ebruary 20, 1909, Marinetti launched the first F'uturist manifesto, strategically oh.oosing Paris where cultural ferment was at a high pitch. Ultra-nationalistic and shockingly aggressive, the manifesto dealt almost entirely with the situation in Italy. Tbe rhythm of modern life, speed, and the aesthetics of the machine were extolled as heralding a new era for Italy. A year later the first manifesto of Futurist painting, signed by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi 2 (Previous page). Among the painters represented were Puvis de Cbavannes, Moreau, H.edon, Klimt, and Stuck. 1Haftmann, vol. 1, p. 105. -79- o, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini was published. This was followed by the (1910), festo dei drammaturghi (1910) drawn up by Marinetti, Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi (1911) by the composer F'rancesco Balilla 1) la, and (1911). Pratella, (b. 1880), followed the painter's mani- festo in repeating Futu st principles as they applied to the Italian music of the time. Like the painters, he was fully acquainted th the various trends in his field. Discarding the traditional values of consonance and dis- sonance, he advocated tonal, modal~ and rhythmtc change (with which a number of l!:uro an composers were already experimenting$) Such ideas were in the r. The technical manifesto establi its final sentence that lhe musician must 11 add. the vower of the mach and the vic- torious reign of electricity to the great central motifs of the musical poem. 111 In 1913 s became the central thesis of Russolo's daring conception of an art of noiseso Russolo studied music, and then painting at the Milan academy 9 Like many Ilainters of ·the twentieth century he was a gifted musician and played the piano, the violin, and the organ. From his musical experimentation emerged considerations which were to provide a different outlook for the future of mu~ic,. He has been called a "forgotten -80- master" at a time when "n'o-Russolians a la John Cage, 1 ' ' Varese or Schaeffer (music concrete) sweLl with impudence." In the course of 1913/14 he refined his ideas into a com- plex system of noisemaking and performances were given on the Intonarumori, which he had invented. In his manifesto, The Art of Noises, were to be found proto-Dada ingredientso After the publication of the Art of Noises Russolo neglect- ed painting until 1942, concentrating, rather, on develop- ing an intricate form of musical composition which fore- shadowed the more extreme experiments made before and after ,ihe Second World War by composers sucb a.s Varese, John Cage, Morton J:i'el dman, Earl Brown, and ol ectronic com~~ pose:r'fJ. Carra explored re1 ationships amOilf•; Lho fH::Jn;ws. In his manifesto La Pittura dei suoni, rumori, odori he suggested that the artist should live in a creative frenzy, becoming "a vortex of sensations, a pictori.al force, and not a cold, logi.cal intellect ••• painting sounds, noises and colours the way drunlrards sing and vorni t. 112 In 1914 be created his Dipinto parolibera--Festa patriottica, (Free- word painting--patriotic celebration), as a visual counter- part to Russolo 1 s Spirali di rumori intonati, (Spirals of Intonated Noises). The three Spirali, performed on the Intonarumori in 1914, reflected particular Futurist subject 1 Martin, p. 70 o 2 'b'd ]. ]. "' p. 136. gonvegno d'aeroplani e d'automobili. The painter and sculptor, Boccioni, attemted to give his picture surfaces "musical" animation, and to con- cretize flickering motion. (1910-11), a painting which marks the starting point of Futurist theory in practice, has this "mu cality". rl'he complexity of the composition is comparable, in its counterpoint of rhythms, to the rhythmical experimentation advocated by Pratella in his manifesto o1' music., Boccioni spoke of the aspirations of the visual arts towards music, selecting Michelangelo from among the old masters as the one "who potentially came closest to the state of mind. For him anato1tl~ becomes music ••• and the melodic 1 ines of the L/ muscles follow each other according to musical principles, not the law of logical representation, 111 Boccioni's works combine rationally discontinuous motifs as in musical com- position, (e.g. his sculpture nello spazio)o Of those who saw his sculpture in 1913, perhaps only his admirer~ Ferruccio Busoni, understood its J)rofound originality and significance when he remarked: "Compared to this art •••••• Schonberg's tepid lemonade .. " 2 1 Martin, p., 93 .. 2 ..;;;;.;.;,.,.;;;;,.;;;;;., 172 .. is a -82- Futurists regarded movement, speed, and the simul- taneity of all sensory impressions as the new "absolute of modernity," fusing in painting, objects in motion and environment, and in music, natural sounds, musical tones, and mechanical sounds. "While the Impressionists create a picture in order to render a particular moment, and sub- ordinate the life of the picture to this moment, we syn- thesize all moments (time, place, form, colour-tone) and so construct a picture. 111 Chapter 10. EXPRESSIONISM: PAINrl1 ING AND MUSIC o More than any previous movement in Germany, ::.;;:.;;:;_..:;:;.;;;;.;:;.:;.;;;;;..;;;.._.;;;.;.=...;:;..;:;=, the second phase of Expressionism ( suc- ceeding to Die Brficke), regarded musical concepts as indLspensible elements in the development of painting. Music, the "soul" of Expressionist patnting, gave se to detailed "musical" theories of painting which have influenced particular schools of abstract ting in many different parts of the wo d. The Germanic tradi on, to which the Blaue Reiter group was heir, had always held that the s were united in intersensory experience.. At the turn of the century, the experiments of Freud in the field of Psychology renewed interest in that supposition. Psychology was delving into ·the realm of feeling and its conclusions were to revo- lutionize art. Artists looked for symbols that would render sible feeling. "How happy I would be if I could give figurative expression to the unconscious feeling that murmurs so softly and sweetly within me, 111 wrote Paula Modersohn-Becker .. 1 Haftmann, vol. 1, P• 82. -84- As did the Symbolists, German artists defied the materialistic attitudes of the scientific revolution and aimed to resolve the contradiction between the material and the spiritual. Some fulfilled such aspirations in "colour" music 1 --extensions or variations of \Vagner' s Gesamlmnstwerk. Others sought to awal{en imaginative responses in direct translations from one medium to another. Whatever the mode, artists tried to express spiritual feeling through the material symbols of their media. At the end of the nineteenth cemltury Romanticism was in the final stages of its development. Strauss, Mahler, and Bruckner mark those stages. Debussy, Scriabin, and the young Kandinsky and Scb~nberg, Edvard Munch and the painters of eke, belong to the transitional period where nineteenth and twentieth century ideas merge .. The association of painting and music had been a favourite idea of the ll.omantics. At the turn of the century it "coloured" the imagination of every thinldng painter and composer in Germany, (as it had done in France 9 and was so to continue.) August l!:ndell, (1871-1925), looked to ui1 art that would ope1·ate "with freely found forms, as music with free tones. 112 1 see Appendix. 2 Haftmann, Po 137. -8 In 1891 Edvard Munch's painting, , called forth which already clearly demonstrates the need for new critical perspectives in order to come to terms with the painters responses to their changing sual environments. 11 r:L1he latest catchword today is 11 sonorous" colour. Have colours ever before been so sonorous? Perhaps this is music rather than painting. "t 1.1he same sorts of analogy attended movements in li'rance, but German painting and music were the products of a rather pantheistic hysteria shrieking out tha joys and agonies of a lonely heart. The feeling of Impressionism, Pointillism, Fauvism, Cubism~ Orphism 9 and so on 9 1loes not appear to pre'0ail in German art., .h:ven in groups such as and , pre- eminence is given to the expreasion of the deepest recesses of the human soul: this emphasis tends to isolate artistic personalities. Emil Nolde, (:1.867-1965), exclaimed: Colours, the materials of the painter; colours in their own lives, weeping and laughing, dream and bliss, hot and sacred, like love songs and the erotic, like songs and glorious chorals1 Colours in vibration, pealing lil{e silver bells and clanging like bronze bells, proclaiming ~appiness, passion and love, soul, blood and deatho 1Haftmann, p. 61. 2Patricia Sloane, p. 37· -86- 1l'hough working in comple;1;.e isolation, Scriabin and the Lithuanian, Ciurlionis, independently, arrived at the same ideas which they expressed through different media. Art was for both of them a mystical experience, and their worlrs are mmmorable in their expression of remoteness, heightened emotion, and strange, weird atmospheres--for these are the subjects of their art of the senses. A painter who much interested me--he was }JOssibly the most talented member of the Russian School at the beginning of the century--was the Lithuanian M. K. Ciurlionis. I myself bought a picture by llim.". It depicted a row of pyramids, of a pal! nacreous tint, in flight towards a horizon. Ciurlionis, (1875-1911), had an extraordinary synaesthetic gift. He tried to draw serious conclusions between painting and music from the external comparison between coloured and musical tones. As a child he was a musical prodigy. Later, on graduating from the Warsaw Conservatory, he devoted himself to musical composition. Suddenly, in 1905, he turned to painting with the aim of painting music in colour compositions which he conceived as symphonic movements. 1J.lo these he gave such titles as "Ocean Sona·ta? 11 11 Sun Sonata", 11 Snake n, and they con- o tain such musical directions as Andante, Scherzo, etc."' :t.Igor Stravi.nsky, (London: Paber& F1 aber, t <) ~llaftmann, vol. 1, p. 136. -87- Scriabin's music and Ciurlionis' paintings founded no specific schools in Germany, but the circle of Hussian artists who formed a small colony in Munich before the First World War advanced their ideas with enthusiasm. wassily Kandinsky, (1866-194L.~c) ~ went to Munich in 1909. With Alexei von Jawlensky and Mariana Werefldn he founded the Neue Ktlnstler verei.nigung from which the Blaue Ueiter later sprang. The young pianist, composer and writer, Thomas von Hartmann also joined this group. He was a supporter of Scriabin whose "colour" music influenced him in his collaboration with Kandinsky as composer in the mul t media project, Der gelbe Klang. Der blaue Reiter was a loosely-knit group of like- minded artists. It included Franz Marc~ August Macke, Heinrich Campendonck, Gabrielle Munter~ the composer Arnold Schtlnberg, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and von Jawlensky. The first aue Reiter exhi-bition held in Munich in 191:1. also included works by tbe two French painters who Kandinsky regarded as the cornerposts of modern painting-- Delaunay and H.ousseau. The importance of music in the movement is evident in the Blaue Reiter catalogue ( 191.2) .. It contained, be sideS articles on painting, an essay by Hartmann on anarchy in music 9 an article by Leonid Sabaniev on Scriabin 1 s Prom,th,e, compositions by Schftnberg and his pupils» Berg and Webern, and other contributions. rrtms, the main agents of change converged in German art. -88- Kandinsky was greatly impressed by Wagner's music. In Lohengrin, he said, "it became entirely clear to me that art in general is much more powerful than I had realised and that, on the other hand, painting can develop just as much power as music possesses." 1 He carried mucb further the ideas of Scriabin and Ciurlionis: as a painter and musician he was well qualified to follow in their traces. From early childhood Kandinsky passionately loved colours and he painted already as a little boy. Colours mark tl>e e~ents o:f his lifeo Araong colouru he distinr;uished the particular musical sound of eaoh--1 say musical because Kand sky was also a mu sic~an; hf; pl ay~d t~1e IJiano. and the 2 1 cello, One senses lus mus1cal g1ft 1n all lns wo • rmann Bahr, Viennese mouthpiece for the , looked forward to a public "which no longer asks for the object, but is happy to listen to the music of the oolours."3 Henri Ravel said that the "laws of harmony" were the same for painting and music<> 4 Kupka, Delaunay, and Kandinsky were ftrm in tllat co:nvietion. 1 Kandinsky, "Iteminiscences", Modern Artists on Art, ed. Robert L. Herbert (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 26. 2Ni:na Kandinsky, "Some Notes on the Development of Kandinsl{y's Painting", 'l'he Doeuments of Modern Art, volo 5 (New York: George Wittenborn, 1966), Po 9o 3naftmam1, vol. t, P• 5L.~:. 5Kandinsky, "Concerning the Spiritual in Art", QQcuments of Modern Art, vol. 5, P• 67, -89- Colours mark the events of Kandinsky 1 s life. Generally speaking, colour directly influences the soul. Colour is the l(ftyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. rr'he art.ist is the band that plays~ touching one key or anotb~r purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul o · l~'auvism influenced German Expressionism in the acceptance of colours as values in themselves. Kandinsky believed that colour could be the sole means of artistic expression in painting and need not refer to specific objects in nature; that colours could be regarded as values in painting as tones in music; that (as Worringer bad suggested) the introduction. of objects into a painting might interpose serious obstructions between the work of art and the empathy of its viewer. Kandinsl{y wanted an art that would address itself directly to the human soul, with- out let or hindrance. He found the means in colour. "Colour," he wrote» "itself offers contrapuntal possibilities and, when combined with design, may lead to the great pictorial counteqJoint ••• 112 When Otto Fischer, spokesman for the Neue KUnstlervereinigung, wrote in 19:1.2, that colour was a "means of expression which appeals directly to the soul. Colour is a means to compositi.on,"j he was merely restating, not only Matisse' theories, but the 1 Kandinsky, p o l.«:5 a '7. .JHaftmann, vo:i. i, Po 93., -90- beliefs of Expressionists such as Kandinsky, Klee, and the Orphists, Kupka, Delaunay and Picabia. "Next to music, painting will the second art in- conceivable save in terms of construction, and already eonceivable otherwise today, 111 KandinsJcy declared. "Matisse--co lour o l'icasso--form .. 2 pointing toward a great end,. 11 Two great signposts Now the task was to "obtain the status of rule; to uncover tne e capable of serving as a rule,"' as Le Corbusier had written (with regard to the ne·w architecture~) "Every combination o no a.dvance is }Jossible, but I am beginning to feel that there are clef te rules and conditions ich in- t 4 cline me to the use of this or hat dissonance 9 11 wrote Scht.lnberg. ogies with Kandinsl{y moved to the realm of pure abstraction in painting. "Painting has caught up tb music, and both have a constantly growing tendency to create "absolute" works, that is, completely objective works which, like the works of nature» grow "from themselves" purely according to laws as independent beings .. "5 l Harry No Abrams, 2 Kandinsky, Po 39. (New Yorlc: 3Le Corbusier, 195 1tt) , p.. 109 0 (London: Faber & Faber 9 4 ( Kandinsl 3n. H Stuclcenschmidt, rrwentieth Cerr~ury Music (London: 1.\'orld University IJillrary, 1969), p .. 52. 5 -9 He first experimented with timbre in the third of his p. 16 in t909. This piece be entitled "Summer Morning by a Lake", adding in brackets the word "Colours". Schurn, "El eetronic Music", il, 1968, P~ l~5o -109- Pierre Boulez, Messiaen, and Sauguet have produced a few Concrete pieces as uy-products of their main activ ties. Edgard Va:t·~se, I .. uc Ferrar, Yarlis Xenakis, and Henry have synthesized natural and musical sounds. (Xenakis is an architect as well as a composer, and was one of Le Corhusierg collaborators.) Musique concr~te. Recognisable sound-effects in electronic composition offer moments of high- definition information which act as focal points in their co.nt , generating perspactive much as -~he vani~lli:ng P?in·~ an~ the light source function In classical painting. Space has come to the foregrou.nd in electroni.c music. Edgard Varese was one of the f:i .. rst cmnposers to bring the concept to a significant stage of development. Iv!:y first physical attem11t to give music greater freedom was by the use of sirens in several of my scores, and I think it was these parabolic and hypertJol io trajectories of sound. that made certain writers as far back as 1925 gra~p my conception of music as moving in space. ~' Varese worked on and off on what might be called a "montage in space", entitled Espace, to be simultaneous- ly broadcast from various points of the worldo 111. J. Maconie, "Blectronic Musi.c", ri'hird Stream, :tvlay, 1968, p., 32. ( 111U1e new dim ens ion of electronic musi o is depth: the new music is polyphonic (not contrpuntal). Pop music offers tlle best examples. Electronic music shifts the emphasis from structure to process.") 2 1 ... t J.'.tdgard Varese, Col!L emporary Composers on Contem- -:1.10- is the musical part of a spectacle. of light and sound, presented during the Brussels l':xpo- sition. Le Corbusier was the author of the visual It consisted of moving coloured lights, image projected on the walls of the pavilion, and music. The music was distribu d by 425 louds11eakers; there were twen·ty amp- lifier combinations. It was recorded on a track magnetic tape tbat muld be varied in intensity and qual :i ty o The loudspeakers were mounted in groups in what is c led to achieve various effec such as that c pav ion, as vw·ell as comi :l':t'Olll cliff d:irectioils. 11 1''or tl1e first t e n , d se, "I heard music lito jected We have actually three cltmensions music: 110 zontal, ver c clynandc 1 ing o decreas I shall a fourth, sound jection--that feeli that sound is leaving u.s with no hope of being re ected back, a fe ing to that aroused by beams of light s rth by a powerful searehl igh i'or the ea.r as for the , t~at sense of projection, of a journey into spaeeo Var~se 1 s music unfolds in geometric patternR remi- niscent of tbe designs of Cubist painting. Music , p . ..?.05 p·:107 -111- Stockhausen's for t, hree orchestras stems out of his preoccupation with the spatial dimension in music,. trrrbe spatial aspects of the music are functional .. One finds oneself listening in the midst of several temporal-spatial manifestations which together create a new musical time-space. 111 Another aspect of the visn.al arts exists in the idea of i.nterchangeable e:t.ementso Inaugurated by Stock- hausen in the (1957), in which the order of performance of a number of juxta- posed musical fragments is left to the performer, the genre is the musical eqrdvalent of Calder's plastic forms .. 2 Of course the analogies with music still continue to be drawn in painting, and probably will so continue. But one or two examples will show that the notions have by now a familiar ring.. 'rhe case for abstraction has long ago been argued to its conclusion. Abraham Rattner recasts the old theme: In painting I find that the articulative force is colour. Colour is to painting what sound is to music. It is not iliimited by the colour we experience in the objective world, but the experiences of our livi.ngness touch the keys and chords of our inner be:i.ng and bring into play that 1 Macblis, p. 431 .. 2Hollo H. Myers, ed.,, ic ( Cal de r & Do y ar s , London : t9 6 ~ ,---~--:c:---~-..:.~,.;.__;.,;.;.._;;;_;;. -:1.12- wonderful colour world of our imagination. 1 It is the world of emotions that is expressed by an appropriate technique. ~rhe spectator is free to interpret, according to his sensations, in the same manner that be would react to a sonata •••• The painter had to find his own language in order to communicate his affective condition without having to have recourse to the representative o~t­ side world. By abstract art, he bas brought about the perfe tUlLi.ty between the "condition" and the 11 work". In fact, I don't describe a condition, but I follow up a condition, and the work com- mun~cates this in the same manner that music might do@ rard Schneider. 3 My basic concern in paintin.g is, I bel teve, rhythm --M.ark 111o bey. 1!1lle instances of composers wlw turn to patld;ing;, and painters who find nmsio necessary to their particular are still common., ~:hey range from Gl.Jsta Nystroem, a dish composer who practised painting, and whose artistic out- look was influenc by Picasso and llraque, to Larry Poons, whose paintings have been heavily influenced by his musical training. Poons started out as a guitar player with a high school llillbilly band, and then studied at tlle New England Conservatory o:f Ivlusic.. "His earliest painti_ngs 1 Allen Leepa, , (Peter Owen Ltd., 1949, 1957), 2 'b'd 1 1 • PP• 19 8 -1.1 were hard-edged and geome c attempts to pre counterrwint in visual terms. 11 t Bacb's In the hundred years of modern art that have passed there were many different areas of contact between palnting and music. Pai.:nters have tried to sent musi.cal phenomena; composers have attempted to give musical impress- ions of particular paintings (e.g. Mussorgsky 1 s .;;;.;.;;;;;;,..;;==~;:;.,;;..==' composed in 1871! in memory of the painter and A. Hartmann to illustrate paintings and desi shown at the H::trtmann !v1emoriftl Exhibition; by the American, Guntber r11he pain tor cc 's appeared as a tragic figure ra-~ ~~~::;;;._,.=~.:;::._~,.;;::;;,;:::,.=, (whose and Hi.ndemith' s ·theme was approi>riate to thi ies.) There is a visual aspect of music that requires ) mention--musical graphics. Gothic and aissance forms of musical notation presented a most attractive addition to the aural oharms of the music. The visual haF:~ lJecome imJ)ortant in musical manuscripts IHectronic music scores suggest numerous visual posstbl.lities. Musical graphic become, in the words of Gytirgy Ligeti, "~'~· means., not of conmmnication but of association., 11 3 111 Pools of ancc 11 , November 8, :t968, p .. lJ6 2 Broadcast Ap l 12, 3YC, 8 p.m. ':!. Ystuckenschmidt, p. 228. -t1 John Cage produced some ry olo His for C Berberian (:t958) is nota l scores. the form coloured curves that leave full to per- :lna.tton. II supplant of the ear by the eye in nrusioal graphic illustrate a trend served various other fields. According can be ob- the "psycho- visu ism" of sscll Atldns 1 the hierarcl1y of the senses is such that the ear is qui incapable of reo let alone creating i tj.o formso 111 sing, Atkins a sharp 1 between music and com- posit n, ol "musical that tb are con ctions. called sition" is a visual • The ear may be able to dist ish frequencies but it cannot reco se t or depth, struc organi e rms 11 ve I''u thermore t are visu positions. or geome ic relat ns~ II zon re and more, the graphics of music forced em- selves upon his consciouness, Paul Klee s d., His use of line shows the influence of musical 11 Stravinsl\.y 1 s scores are magnific C. I" .. Ramuz. .. , 11 declared 2 He is above all ( all matters and in every sense of 1he word) a calligrapher .• ~His writ sk 2 'b'd ~· schmidt, p. 229. resembled a surgeon's instrument case. Bottles of rli:Lferent coloured in their ordered h:lerqrchy and eabb had a separate part to play in the order~ ing of his art. Nearby were india-rubbers of various kinds and apes anc1 all sorts of glitter- ing st,eel tmpl ements: rulers, erasers, peu-k.ntves and a roulette instrument for drawing staves in- vented hy Strav].nsJry hi.msel:r. One was reminded o:f the definition of St. Thomas: beauty is the splen- dour of order. l the lar pages of tb~ score were fill eel with writing with the help of the different coloured inks--blue, green, red, two kinds o:r black (ordinary and Chinese) each having its purpose, its meaning, its speoial use: one for tlJe notes, another for the tex.t, a th:i.rcl for tbe trans- lation; one for the titles, another for the musical directions; meanwhile the bar tines were ruled and the mistakes oarefully erased. 'l1 oday the relationship between painting and music ears to have reached an impasse. Husical anategy is no longer to justify abstraction in painting: the visual arts are quite capable of prooeeding independently now. Abstract painting, originally conceived by analogy with music, has become a vi tal and dynamic foroe in mod.ern art. Its innovators have passed into death, and in·to which inspired in them a spirit of collaboration seems to have passed vv-:ith them. 1~ric Walter White, (John J.;ehmann, :1.9lx7), p. 63. -116- 11 rd:usical i ty 11 has been absorbed into the tradition of modern art: its sphere of influence has been world-wide. Modern art has spanned a century. During the first fifty years, painting and music very (lHickly became nece ·to each other, and evolved interd.ependently. A peak was reached just before the ~irst Wo d War. In their breakthrough to abstraction, the IJioneers, l'icabia, Kupka, D aunay and Kandinslry brought to an exciting climax, the notion of an inner relationship hetr'leen vainting and music. r11heirs was the outstanding achievement of the musical ase of modern painting. Append 'rllere have been a number of successfu.l at·tempts i;!.t. audio-vis synthesis in the arts-~hallet, opera, drama, happenint!;s, films: all of them employ a variety of formulael all approximate to r's conception of 11 a wo o:f art ertbrac l the arts~ ( Gesamlmns twerlc) • de ire to :t'tnd an y is for all e s gave ri. se to a:n art forw which is 011(? of the more intri ing results of equation o:f lt to ting and music: Colour Music, the art o:f There bas long sted a de ire to see colours as cifio su equival s of musical tones in a related hierarchy. Since few of ~be postulated theories differ~·tiated between colour as pigment and colour as 11gt.t --two very different considerations--a great deal of con- fusion resulted. A number of highly arbitrary music-colour scales a1)peared which, did not, and could not, be uni- versally applied. Agreement among the dtifferl;)lnt systems was rare. Sir Isaac Newton related the following prismatic colours and musical tones: 0 red; D orange; E yellow; F green; G blue; A indigo; and B v1ol et. :1. 1 Peter F'el ix Ganz, 11 0ri tical Hemarks of a Musician on Sound-Colour l~elations", P e te , p. 8. May not tbe barmony ancl discord of Colours se from the proportions of the vibrations propagated through the fibres of the optick Nerves into the Brain; as the harmony and discord of sounds arises from the proportions of the vibrations of the air~ 1 Louis Bertrand Castel, (1688-1757), a French Jesuit priest and music theorist, constructed a Clave~in with a colour scale corresponding to that of the diatonic s He considered the chromatic octave of twelve semitones a "circular system of sounds" and produced a matching circular system of colour shades: C blue; D flat/ C sharp blue-green; and then ascending, green, olive, yellow, apricot, orange, red, crimson, agate, violet, and indigo, to arr at next C again with blueo 2 "J.i'or want of knowing how to paint with ears, peo e have presumed to sing with their eyes," growled Jean-Jacque& Housseau, (1712-78) 9 "I have seen the famous harpsicho on which music may supposedly be made with colours .. 11 3 AlexanrYbl.i"" ",:>cr-1~:>1 n ... onOtOn!\Johl\ ~--C':\'f\e.. 1 1\)e "Rod\e.tt Head, I CZ>l 3), p ~ S Key-;: c major G major D major A major E major n major F sharp major D flat major A flat major E flat major B flat major li' major llimsky-Korsakov: white brownish-gold, bright yellow, sunny rosy, clear blue, sapphire, sparkling sombre, dark, blue shot with steel greyish-green dusky, warm grey is iolet dark, gloomy, bluish- grey green Scriabin: red orange-rose yellow, brilliant green bluish-white bluish-white bright blue violet purple-violet steel colour with a metallic lustre steel colour with a metallic lustre 1 red. H.imsky-Korsakov and Scriabin concurred, surprising- ly, more often than not. Hachmaninoff disagreed with their key-colour charts in conversation with them. 2 :!_Alan P. Merriam, r11he Anthropology of Music Kandinslry, who considered Scriabin one of the most gifted of the y leUR 1lied to music is a metaphor. rrone as a vrimary sensation has nothing to do th colour as a primary sensation~ A tone sens ion its pl1enomenolgical form is diame cally different from a colour sensation. At times they can arouse the same emotional reactions, linked together by associfl,ti ve processes. But sensory impressions they admit of no comparison@ SobtJnberg and Webern experimented with They gave the idea of sound-colour in relation to visual colour, synethe s. rrhe notion of some sort of mystical relationship between sound and colour persists to the present day. Olivier Messiaen, (b. 1908), writes: Colour: the sounds colour the durations because they are bound to colour by unseen tiesa When I listen to music, and even when I read it, I have an inward vision of marvellous colours--colours i(' .. , .x., hevcsz, (London: Longmans, which blend like combinations of notes, and which shift and revolve with the sounds. l!'or example a certain series of cho s may be red touched \vi tb bl ue~-ano ther w'"' be milky white' decorated with ora.nge and cclged tll golfl.·-- another will be green, orange and violet in parallel stripes~-another will be e grey, with reflections of green and viole et another with be entirely v.lo o o e1>t,txely red. 'rhere will also be complementary colours, 'simultaneous contrasts' by resonance, colours fading towards white, shaded by black, the chords and timbres of hot or cold colours. Dy means of a eyotl--extracted from a small can oactus, it is possible to transform aural sensations into coloured visu sensations. ',Vithout going to such long , mOf'lt people have th:ls sixth sense--this awareness of corres- pondence between sotuld colouro · ell i reoust the earlier theo es of riabin, Ka:ndinslcy, Kubin, and lluy sm.ans. d 1 the founder of the Art Institute of Light in New Yorlr, never attempted to develop any analog of sound and colour. He promoted (Colour Music) as a new, independent and expressive form from about 1920 on. His colour music is devoid of any aural effects of musical accompaniment. s light-producing instrument, the , was pl ayecl by an ingenious array of levers, switches, pulleys, and gliders. :i.From the programme notes accompanying the recording of Messiaen's Chronochromie, Music 'roday series, no. ASD639 Adrian Bertrand ein also promoted colour music as an independent art form., He suggested that light and sound as well as other art forms, could, and should be used to create new, integrated, complex, "super art :forms". Audio-visual ar·t forms are still in their infancy o fierre Schaef r and his Paris group are experiment with sound-colour-light-motion-smell synthesis. Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma and associates are pl'esenting worl1:s in which electronic sounds and light eff:ects surround the audience., these are taking place in Ann Arbor's Space Theater? n~i chi g an U., S o A. Anna Lockwood describes her as a form of 11 live music concrete" using amplified sounds of glass, wa:ter 1 fo j 1, and e1'fects invol vi light, c lm and . lit ep1oscope. Robert Rauschenbe ~as assembled an electro c sculpture, e, wbich consists of a connected wagons of carefully arranged " · b 11 11 out of' sound~ 11 "'" cr1 es as a co age _ are audito :fou ' tuni. tl L::l , _( akers, series of :f dis- junk which he des- The connecting links tl1eir own :i.o the Ivf.arsh The notes accompany istcburch, New Ze a concert andt July 1967. 0 k"B Land so Cl II ,, ' any ters have turned to the film in order to express colours and forms in tenrporal sequences (~}.g. L , Eicbter, linr~, the mustcalists). SELESrrED BI IO Cl1apter :t. 1. L. A. loughby, (Oxford Universi 2. King I)almer, varsities Pres 4 6 7 8 9 Alberti, Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, and son, 1958). Andre u:rnest Gretry, stern (London: Faber 10 J. W. von Goethe, Ltd. , t967) • j 1 Paul Lund (London: The Engli Uni- , Chapter V0 (London: Thames (New Yorlr: VI. W. ( Cass Co"' iller, (London: 1l!. Lock eiser, , ( vols.,) (London: C 1;:1. 3loane, Colour: ( n(l nn: 21 18. Silva, von Simson, Hinkso :t9~ Jo Ma.chlis, (New Yo : w. Vv. 26~ Lo :iser, vol. 2. 21.. 22. James :Mcneill 1Nbistler, (London: VJ limn 23., Peter and Id.rHla ~.:1 (Penguin, 1.959)" 2lt G Chapter 1:1: .. 24 26. Frank Popper, (London: Stud 27. William Innes Domer, ( M • I • rp • Pres s , 28. John ltewald, (London: William Heinemann Ltd) Leo11arc1o cta Vinci, Chapter 5 .. 30. • ed. lhme )t. Klaus Be r, NicolsoH, :196 (London: We enfold and '.Verner Haft mann, 2 vols. (London: Lu )lt • • Jcan~llaul Crespelle, (London: Oldbourne 0 Haymond colier, l''aber, :t:)60) o (I•'aber and Chapter 7., 36. Sigfried Giedion, '\ (! i e, 'llime and Archi tee ( nudr' J. Modern Artists on Art, ed. Robert L. llerbert (~ngle­ wood Cliffs, N. Jl Prentice Hall, 1964.) 38. 39. Donald Mitchell, don: Faber and l•' Anil de Silva, Otto von Simson, Roger llinks, Through His Art: !vlusic (London: E. P. Publish Ltd.,, 1.964). Co. Chapter 8. 40. John Golding, Cubism: J\ Histor and an Anal sis (London: rl1hames and Hudson, 1959 o 41 .. Ludmilla Vachtova, Hudson, 1968) • Chapter 9. (London: 'l'hames and lt2. Marianne We Mart.in , Futurist Art and 'l'heory 1909-191~ {Oxford: Clarendon Pres;; 1968) .. Chapter 10., ll3.. Igor Stravinsky, Ex-gositions and lJeveloRments (London Faber and Faber, 19J2). l1L1., Kandinsky, 11 Heminiscences 11 , Modern Artists on Art, ed. llobert L. Herbert (Englewood Cliffs, N. J: (Prentice Hall, 196•). l15. Nina Kand:lnslw, "Some Notes on the Development of Kandinskj'' s Painting", vol. 5 (New York: Geo lJ:6,. Kandinslw, "Concerning the Spiritual in Art", Documents of Modern Art, vol. 5 Will Grohmann, (New Yorlr: Harcy 48. Le Corbusier, The Modular (London: Faber and Faber, J95l•). 50 Paul Klee, 'l1he 'J.'llinldn Lund Humphries, t961 ,. H. H. Stnclcenscludd t, World University Lib , edo Jttrg Spiller (London (London Chapter tt., 51. 52. Calvin Tomkins 1 Hans Hicllter, and Hudson, 1 )lJ:. Marcel Janco, and Ilans Bolltger, (Verlag Arthur Ni Coda., 57. 58. John Cage, Darius 1vlil haud, gvans, ed. Holl 1953) .. H.ollo H. Myers, Boyars, London Allen Leepa, !Jtd.' 1.949, 59. E~ic Walter White (John Lehmann, 19 (Calder and (Peter Owen t 60. 66. 68. BACKGHOUND lU~ADING Constant JJambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in (Eb:allton: F,aber and Faber, :f966y:----·- Hoger Shattu~k, 'rl~ct~t~t Years: 'rbe ~~~ Avant-Garde 1n France 188~ to World War 1 lNew York: Vintage Books, 19b8). , · Bernard. S. tviyers, .li:X]2_!:_essionism: A Generation in Revolt (London: rrhames and Hudson, 1963). Sir Isaac Newton, Q:pticl\:s: Treatise of L .. !ght (London: 1704). Facsimile ~dition by Impression Anastaltique, Culture et Civilisation, Bruxelles: 1966. IJ.1homas Munro, ('rhe l'ress of 1967). l::tienne Gilson, Joim Hospers, si ty of North and: (Meridian, 1957) ( Uni ver·~ 69. Man rice de Sausmarez, V (London: 70. Herbert Read, 71. John 'raslrer Howard and James Lyons, -·:-"-__..... ____ c (New York: New American Library, 1 73~ Brewster Ghiselin, York: New American Aa:ron Copeland, New American Jjjb (University of (New (New York: 7r:' ') . 76. 77. Ian Parrott, Dennis Dobson Gyorg;y. Ke. pes, Co., j9)9) 78. Robert W. Lundin, ~~ew York: The Ro 79- 80. St. Alfred J. Swan, 1923). Carlton J. Hayes, York: liarper and (London: (London: The Bodley Head Ltd (New 82. l[~or Stravinsky and Hobert Craft, (London: Faber 86. 88. 89. 90. R. G. Collingwood, Clarendon Prens, 1 \Vi 11 i am n aunt , ~~ondon: f•'reder ~>tewart MacPll orson, W i 11 i am s , L t d • , :t 9 Alfr(:~d Neumeye:r', ( f' r e 11-l· i <' e l ] ] 1 -~- __ ill~~ ~ .~ _tO, ~ __ , --· (London (Ox:l'o ( l.Jondon: Ol dbourne rrea s, (Londou: Josepb { f'ren t. ice 1Ia11 , Art 91. 92. 93 Paul Kl ee, r r, J lhelm \iorringer, Houtledge a.nd ( York: London: 1\ •" j • ('t'he University 9~. Der Ueraus gegeben von Wassily Kandin- sky- t :t6o Abbihmg;en. Dokumentarische Neua.sgabe von 1\laus Lan1dteit, 1t. PlJier und Co. Verlag, Mttnchen, :1965. Contents Preface Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 CODA Appendix Bibliography HistoryItem_V1 AddMaskingTape Range: current page Mask co-ordinates: Horizontal, vertical offset -89.07, -3.77 Width 201.58 Height 802.56 points Mask co-ordinates: Horizontal, vertical offset -107.82, -3.77 Width 764.12 Height 150.01 points Mask co-ordinates: Horizontal, vertical offset 491.29, 135.93 Width 133.13 Height 693.80 points Origin: bottom left 1 0 BL Both 2 CurrentPage 156 CurrentAVDoc -89.069 -3.7663 201.5771 802.5582 -107.8203 -3.7663 764.1179 150.0109 491.2856 135.9313 133.1346 693.8003 QITE_QuiteImposingPlus3 Quite Imposing Plus 3.0e Quite Imposing Plus 3 1 0 142 0 1 1 HistoryItem_V1 AddMaskingTape Range: current page Mask co-ordinates: Horizontal, vertical offset -30.00, 689.10 Width 819.43 Height 156.57 points Mask co-ordinates: Horizontal, vertical offset 500.66, -3.77 Width 553.17 Height 716.30 points 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142 82 1 1 HistoryItem_V1 TrimAndShift Range: current page Trim: cut bottom edge by 2.83 points Shift: none Normalise (advanced option): 'original' 32 D:20131111094026 841.8898 a4 Blank 595.2756 Wide 1 0 No 2331 340 None Left 42.5197 0.0000 Both 89 CurrentPage 91 CurrentAVDoc Smaller 2.8346 Bottom QITE_QuiteImposingPlus3 Quite Imposing Plus 3.0e Quite Imposing Plus 3 1 82 142 82 1 1 HistoryItem_V1 TrimAndShift Range: current page Trim: cut left edge by 1.98 points Shift: none Normalise (advanced option): 'original' 32 D:20131111094026 841.8898 a4 Blank 595.2756 Wide 1 0 No 2331 340 None Left 42.5197 0.0000 Both 89 CurrentPage 91 CurrentAVDoc Smaller 1.9843 Left QITE_QuiteImposingPlus3 Quite Imposing Plus 3.0e Quite Imposing Plus 3 1 64 142 64 1 1 HistoryItem_V1 TrimAndShift Range: current page Trim: cut bottom edge by 2.83 points Shift: none Normalise (advanced option): 'original' 32 D:20131111094026 841.8898 a4 Blank 595.2756 Wide 1 0 No 2331 340 None Left 42.5197 0.0000 Both 89 CurrentPage 91 CurrentAVDoc Smaller 2.8346 Bottom QITE_QuiteImposingPlus3 Quite Imposing Plus 3.0e Quite Imposing Plus 3 1 64 142 64 1 1 HistoryItem_V1 TrimAndShift Range: current page Trim: cut left edge by 1.98 points Shift: none Normalise (advanced option): 'original' 32 D:20131111094026 841.8898 a4 Blank 595.2756 Wide 1 0 No 2331 340 None Left 42.5197 0.0000 Both 89 CurrentPage 91 CurrentAVDoc Smaller 1.9843 Left QITE_QuiteImposingPlus3 Quite Imposing Plus 3.0e Quite Imposing Plus 3 1 61 142 61 1 1 HistoryItem_V1 TrimAndShift Range: current page Trim: cut bottom edge by 2.83 points Shift: none Normalise (advanced option): 'original' 32 D:20131111094026 841.8898 a4 Blank 595.2756 Wide 1 0 No 2331 340 None Left 42.5197 0.0000 Both 89 CurrentPage 91 CurrentAVDoc Smaller 2.8346 Bottom QITE_QuiteImposingPlus3 Quite Imposing Plus 3.0e Quite Imposing Plus 3 1 61 142 61 1 1 HistoryItem_V1 TrimAndShift Range: current page Trim: cut left edge by 2.27 points Shift: none Normalise (advanced option): 'original' 32 D:20131111094026 841.8898 a4 Blank 595.2756 Wide 1 0 No 2331 340 None Left 42.5197 0.0000 Both 89 CurrentPage 91 CurrentAVDoc Smaller 2.2677 Left QITE_QuiteImposingPlus3 Quite Imposing Plus 3.0e Quite Imposing Plus 3 1 58 142 58 1 1 HistoryItem_V1 TrimAndShift Range: current page Trim: cut bottom edge by 2.83 points Shift: none Normalise (advanced option): 'original' 32 D:20131111094026 841.8898 a4 Blank 595.2756 Wide 1 0 No 2331 340 None Left 42.5197 0.0000 Both 89 CurrentPage 91 CurrentAVDoc Smaller 2.8346 Bottom QITE_QuiteImposingPlus3 Quite Imposing Plus 3.0e Quite Imposing Plus 3 1 58 142 58 1 1 HistoryItem_V1 TrimAndShift Range: current page Trim: cut left edge by 1.98 points Shift: none Normalise (advanced option): 'original' 32 D:20131111094026 841.8898 a4 Blank 595.2756 Wide 1 0 No 2331 340 None Left 42.5197 0.0000 Both 89 CurrentPage 91 CurrentAVDoc Smaller 1.9843 Left QITE_QuiteImposingPlus3 Quite Imposing Plus 3.0e Quite Imposing Plus 3 1 53 142 53 1 1 HistoryItem_V1 TrimAndShift Range: current page Trim: cut bottom edge by 2.83 points Shift: none Normalise (advanced option): 'original' 32 D:20131111094026 841.8898 a4 Blank 595.2756 Wide 1 0 No 2331 340 None Left 42.5197 0.0000 Both 89 CurrentPage 91 CurrentAVDoc Smaller 2.8346 Bottom QITE_QuiteImposingPlus3 Quite Imposing Plus 3.0e Quite Imposing Plus 3 1 53 142 53 1 1 HistoryList_V1 qi2base work_mo2mvasy5bd3pdmg6o4gqk726q ---- IN THE FIFTH ZONE: ABSTRACT PAINTING, MODERNISM, AND CULTURAL DISCOURSE IN THE WESTERN ZONES OF GERMANY AFTER WORLD WAR II By YULE FREDERIKE HEIBEL B i A . Hons., The U n i v e r s i t y o-f B r i t i s h Columbia, 1983 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS i n THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of Fine A r t s ) We accept t h i s t h e s i s as conforming to the r e q u i r e d standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA September 1986 (g) Yule F r e d e r i k e H e i b e l , 1986 In p r e s e n t i n g t h i s t h e s i s i n p a r t i a l f u l f i l m e n t of the requirements f o r an advanced degree at the U n i v e r s i t y o f B r i t i s h Columbia, I agree t h a t the L i b r a r y s h a l l make i t f r e e l y a v a i l a b l e f o r reference and study. I f u r t h e r agree t h a t p e r m i s s i o n f o r e x t e n s i v e copying of t h i s t h e s i s f o r s c h o l a r l y purposes may be granted by the head o f my department o r by h i s or her r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s . I t i s understood t h a t copying or p u b l i c a t i o n o f t h i s t h e s i s f o r f i n a n c i a l gain s h a l l not be allowed without my w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . Department of -r̂ W / f W ? • The U n i v e r s i t y of B r i t i s h Columbia 1956 Main Mall Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Y3 Date l(> 'Ctph^lyt^ M?(r ABSTRACT A f t e r t h e de-feat of H i t l e r Germany i n 1945, m o d e r n i s t p a i n t i n g i n a n o n - g e o m e t r i c , l a r g e l y a b s t r a c t s t y l e took h o l d i n the w e s t e r n o c c u p i e d zones of t h e c o u n t r y ( 1 9 4 5 - 4 9 ) , and f l o u r i s h e d f o r a l l i n t e n t s and p u r p o s e s u n c h a l l e n g e d as the f o r e m o s t e s t a b l i s h e d s t y l e of p a i n t i n g d u r i n g the e a r l y y e a r s of t h e F e d e r a l R e p u b l i c of Germany (1949 t h r o u g h t h e 1950s). Most a r t h i s t o r i c a l s c h o l a r s h i p t o d a t e p o s i t s t h i s phenomenon i n one of two modes: 1. Germany, e n t h r a l l e d by b a r b a r i s m f o r t w e l v e y e a r s , i n the west opened i t s e y e s t o t h e modern p a i n t i n g of i t s European n e i g h b o r s and of t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s , and v i a s t u d i o u s a p p l i c a t i o n , managed t o c a t c h up t o t h o s e a l l e g e d l y p r e - e x i s t a n t s t a n d a r d s ; o r , 2. Western Germany became a pawn of t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s i n i t s C o l d War s t r u g g l e w i t h t h e S o v i e t Union and i t s a r t " r e f l e c t s " t h i s . In c o n t r a s t , my t h e s i s shows t h a t t h e s e v i e w s , w h i l e " t i d y i n g up" the c o n t r a d i c t i o n s of the p e r i o d , i n the f i n a l a n a l y s i s a r e u n t e n a b l e s i n c e : 1. A s t a t i c s t a n d a r d or "norm" o f m o d e r n i s t p a i n t i n g had nowhere i n Europe s u r v i v e d i n t a c t the u p h e a v a l s of t h e e a r l i e r p o r t i o n of the t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y — and i n p a r t i c u l a r of the war; 2. The i n i t i a l postwar p e r i o d , from c.1945/46 t h r o u g h t o 1948/49, cannot be d e s c r i b e d as a p e r i o d of c u l t u r a l " A m e r i c a n i z a t i o n " because US c u l t u r a l p o l i c y i t s e l f was a t t h i s time f a r from u n i v o c a l ; and 3. W i t h i n Germany, many c u l t u r a l opponents of N a z i s m , p e o p l e who had been p r o p o n e n t s of advanced a r t b e f o r e t h e N a t i o n a l S o c i a l i s t p e r i o d , were a c t i v e l y i n v o l v e d i n f o r g i n g a renewed c u l t u r e of modernism. F a r f r o m b e i n g i i p a s s i v e r e c i p i e n t s , t h e s e a r t i s t s , w r i t e r s , and i n t e l l e c t u a l s were h e l p i n g t o c r e a t e t h e new i n d e x of postwar modernism. C r e a t i n g t h i s new i n d e x took p l a c e w i t h i n the c o n t e x t o f g r e a t p o l i t i c a l and s o c i a l i n s e c u r i t y w i t h i n Germany as w e l l as w i t h i n Europe g e n e r a l l y , and i t took p l a c e w i t h i n t h e c o n t e x t o f renewed i n t e r n a t i o n a l — i n p a r t i c u l a r F r a n c o - G e r m a n — c o - o p e r a t i o n . These c o n d i t i o n s i n t u r n a f f e c t e d the a r t i c u l a t i o n of advanced a r t . My t h e s i s then a l s o s u g g e s t s answers t o t h e q u e s t i o n of why the p a r t i c u l a r s t y l e of a b s t r a c t i o n based on s u b v e r t i n g f o r m , r e j e c t i n g non- o b j e c t i v e p a i n t i n g , and e m p l o y i n g a r c h a i c and p r i m i t i v e m o t i f s , w h i l s t e s c h e w i n g a l l f o r m s of d i d a c t i c i s m or o t h e r d i r e c t a d d r e s s t o the v i e w e r , s h o u l d become t h e p r e f e r r e d s t y l e of advanced p a i n t i n g i n West Germany. The d i s c u s s i o n i n c l u d e s t h e a r t i s t s W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , F r i t z W i n t e r , E.W.Nay, Theodor Werner, H e i n z T r f l k e s , and o t h e r s . To answer t h e s e q u e s t i o n s and t o p r o v e my c o n c l u s i o n s , I employ a method of i n v e s t i g a t i o n based on a c l o s e r e a d i n g of the c r i t i c a l t e x t s r e l a t i n g t o a r t and c u l t u r e p r o d u c e d d u r i n g t h i s p e r i o d , i n p a r t i c u l a r as f o u n d i n a r t m a g a z i n e s l i k e Das Kunstwerk; a c o m p a r a t i v e a n a l y s i s o f c o n c u r r e n t d e v e l o p m e n t s i n F r a n c e and the US, n o t a b l y s i m i l a r q u e s t i o n i n g s of t r a d i t i o n a l h i g h modernism by F r e n c h " i n f o r m e l " and " a r t a u t r e " s t y l e s ; and a r e - e x a m i n a t i o n of p o l i t i c a l movements and t e n d e n c i e s i n postwar Germany w h i c h t o d a y have been l a r g e l y f o r g o t t e n , e s p e c i a l l y t h o s e s o c i a l i s t movements w h i c h s t r i v e d f o r a u n i f i e d and n o n - a l i g n e d Europe. The u n d e r l y i n g a s s u m p t i o n t h r o u g h o u t i s t h a t the postwar p e r i o d p r i o r t o c.1958/52 i n w e s t e r n Germany was one o f s u r p r i s i n g c u l t u r a l v i t a l i t y and f e r m e n t w h i c h was, however, l a r g e l y e c l i p s e d by t h e more f a m i l i a r image of an e c o n o m i c a l l y r e s u r g e n t , a r t i s t i c a l l y more c o m p l a c e n t , and s u p p o s e d l y A m e r i c a n i z e d West Germany i n t h e 1950s. TABLE OF CONTENTS L i s t of I l l u s t r a t i o n s v Acknowl edgements . v i I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 N o t e s 1? C h a p t e r One: S e a r c h f o r a M e a n i n g — P o s t w a r I n t e l l e c t u a l and C u l t u r a l D i s c o u r s e The " D a r m s t a d t e r Gesprach 1958": M i r r o r of C u l t u r a l Concern 22 T h e o r y of C r i s i s , T h e o r y i n C r i s i s : The E f f e c t of H i s t o r y on A r t and C u l t u r e 27 L o o k i n g f o r t h e New R e a l i t y : The I n t r u s i o n of the A r c h a i c 34 "Europeans A f t e r A l l " — t h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Resonance of Breakdown 43 Breakdown as B r e a k o u t : The R e s t o r a t i v e F u n c t i o n of E x i g e n c y 54 N o t e s 62 C h a p t e r Two: The I n t e r a c t i o n of P o l i t i c s and C u l t u r e : The N e c e s s i t y of F i n d i n g an A p p r o p r i a t e R e p r e s e n t a t i o n i n A r t B e r l i n e r K O n s t l e r 1958: An E x h i b i t i o n w i t h a P u r p o s e 71 When 4 E q u a l s 2 Because 3 E q u a l s 1: W e s t - I n t e g r a t i o n and B l o c P o l a r i z a t i o n . . . . . 79 "One B o r e s Us": Propaganda and O p t i m i s m , a S o p o r i f i c C o m b i n a t i o n 83 The F r e n c h C o n n e c t i o n and the "Germany of Tomorrow" 97 Changes i n t h e A m e r i c a n A p p r o a c h — T h e F l u i d i t y of C o n c e p t s 187 N o t e s 114 Cone 1 u s i o n 122 N o t e s 123 B i b l i o g r a p h y 138 i v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS F i g . 1: W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , Two E r a s , 1947 p.12 F i g . 2: W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , Composi t i o n . c . 1938 p. 13 F i g . 3: W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , V a r i a t i o n of E i d o s . 1938 p.14 F i g . 4: W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , P e r f o r a t i o n . 1944 p.15 F i g . 5: George G r o s z , The P a i n t e r of the Hole. 1948 p. 16 F i g . 6: W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , U r z e i t q e s t a l t e n . 1946 p.59 F i g . 7: E r n s t W i l h e l m Nay, Autumn Sono. 1945 p.68 F i g . 8: E r n s t W i l h e l m Nay, M e l i s a n d e . 1948 p.61 F i g . 9: F r i t z W i n t e r , BlacK-Whi t e . 1955 p.113 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I w o u l d l i k e t o thank S e r g e G u i l b a u t and D a v i d S o l k i n -for a l l o w i n g me t o p u r s u e t h i s t o p i c and w r i t e the t h e s i s w i t h c o m p l e t e and u t t e r independence w h i l e s i m u l t a n e o u s l y m a i n t a i n i n g t h e i r e x p e c t a t i o n of e x a c t i n g s t a n d a r d s — n o mean f e a t c o n s i d e r i n g t h e f a c t t h a t t h i s t h e s i s was p r o d u c e d " l o n g d i s t a n c e , " t h a t i s , c i r c a 2,480 mi 1 e s - a s - t h e - c r o w - f 1 i e s - 1 o n g - d i s t a n c e . F u r t h e r m o r e , I thank my husband Werner Bah I k e f o r h i s u n w a v e r i n g s u p p o r t , c r i t i c i s m , h a r a s s m e n t , and h a r a n g u i n g — i n the end, i t d o e s n ' t m a t t e r who i r r i t a t e s whom, i t ' s the p e a r l t h a t c o u n t s . ( O l d o y s t e r wisdom.) And then t h e r e a r e f r i e n d s who, whether they know i t or n o t , p r o v i d e needed r e s p i t e s from a r t h i s t o r y — l i k e h o l d i n g up a m i r r o r and l e t t i n g me see some r e a l human comedy. In p a r t i c u l a r , I thank G a b r i e l a and C h r i s t i a n , S e v e r i n and L i o b a , who " M e i s t e r " - f u l 1 y c o d d l e d me back t o l i f e d u r i n g my s t a y a t t h e i r house i n M u n i c h , and M a r i l y n D a n i e l s and S c o t t M a c k e n z i e f o r making 2,688 m i l e s f e e l l e s s l i k e i t was on a n o t h e r p l a n e t , and B e t s y B u r k e f o r t h a t and many o t h e r t h i n g s b e s i d e s — l i k e memory, f o r i n s t a n c e . v i INTRODUCTION To t h e e x t e n t t h a t t h e l a s t works of a r t s t i l l communicate, t h e y denounce t h e p r e v a i l i n g forms of communication as i n s t r u m e n t s of d e s t r u c t i o n , and harmony as a d e l u s i o n of decay. — M a x H o r k h e i m e r , " A r t and Mass C u l t u r e " (1941) T h i s s t a t e m e n t , made d u r i n g Max H o r k h e i m e r ' s e x i l e from N a z i Germany i n New Y o r k , 1 announces what c o u l d not be s a i d a l o u d w i t h i n the T h i r d R e i c h , but what w o u l d become the k e y n o t e i n t e l l e c t u a l v i e w p o i n t a f t e r the d e f e a t of f a s c i s m i n 1945. I t a n t i c i p a t e s the deep p e s s i m i s m w h i c h r e s u l t e d from t h e p e r c e i v e d c r i s i s of o c c i d e n t a l c u l t u r e , a c r i s i s w h i c h was f e l t t o be never c l e a r e r than i n the y e a r s f o l l o w i n g t h e war. Whereas i n the e a r l i e r p a r t o f t h e t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y t h e hope f o r a r a d i c a l p o l i t i c a l change i n w e s t e r n s o c i e t i e s , a change b o r n e by the w o r k i n g c l a s s i n c o a l i t i o n w i t h p r o g r e s s i v e c u l t u r e p r o d u c e r s and i n t e l l e c t u a l s , k e p t a l i v e t h e image of a humanity w i t h o u t o p p r e s s i o n , the r i s e o f f a s c i s m i n E u r o p e , the 1939 H i t l e r - S t a l i n p a c t , and W o r l d War I I d e r e a l i z e d the r e m a i n i n g v e s t i g e s of t h i s hope i n the h e a r t s and minds of many. The e n s u i n g " n i h i l i s m " — a c a t c h - a l l p o p u l a r i n the postwar p r e s s 2 — w a s such a p r e v a l e n t theme i n Germany t h a t we have t o ask i n what way i t a f f e c t e d and i n t e r a c t e d w i t h c u l t u r e and m o d e r n i s t p a i n t i n g . To do t h i s we can compare a p a i n t i n g made i n 1947 by W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r t o H o r k h e i m e r ' s p r e s c i e n t s t a t e m e n t of 1941. B a u m e i s t e r , a l o n g w i t h p a i n t e r s such as E r n s t N i l helm Nay, Theodor Werner, and F r i t z W i n t e r , among o t h e r s , came t o r e p r e s e n t the m o d e r n i s t a b s t r a c t p a i n t i n g i d i o m of the 1958s i n West Germany. W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r was born i n t h e - 1 - late nineteenth century, like Horkheimer, in Stuttgart. 3 He had not emigrated, instead staying in Germany during the twelve years of NS rule, holding out in what was referred to as "inner emigration." Denounced as a degenerate a r t i s t , he was forbidden to paint, and like many others, was conscripted into some sort of service to the regime—in Baumeister's case, he worked as an advisor in a paint factory. Whilst the "outer emigres" were often isolated in their new, sometimes temporary homes,4 the "inner emigres" were totally cut off from international developments, isolated by the censorship of the "thousand year realm." The painting, called Two Eras (fig. 1), shows two crudely marked totemic figures bunched toward the right of the canvas and set on a pale ground. These rough figures partially overlay geometric shapes which look to be free-floating in a kind of utopic, imaginary space. The scene is anchored by a horizon line made of the same crude material as the primitive shapes arising from i t — i t is their humus, so to speak. This ground and its totemic offspring are the dominant force in the painting: both are drawn in a purplish brown, heavy line, contrasting greatly with the much brighter squares and circles— green, yellow, orange, blue, dark pink—in the background, overcoming geometry's vibrancy through sheer oppressive darkness. Although threateningly dominant, they are not substantial because they are sheer, that i s , they exist only in outline and hence thereby increase their ghostliness. What is striking is that the lighter, elegant geometry floating in the void behind the figures came f i r s t , while the totems, overlaying their ground, came after. And, adding to the paradox, that this ideal stencil which is the impossible ground of the figures is also connected by fine broken lines to the humus of primitivism. One era is overlaying another, and both are facing the viewer. The older era forms -2- the ground -for the newer, and it is shown as an impossible world where gravity counts -for nothing. Yet this Utopia has to be an illusion since i t , too, is rooted in the ground. The same ground, in fact, as the era which follows i t , and which takes the shape of a kind of mute and ghostly primitivism. A look at Baumeister's prewar work leaves one with the impression that Two Eras is a comment on recent history. Baumeister, who was already a well-known artist during the Weimar period, had been passingly associated with the Bauhaus,5 and during the 1920s and 1930s he made paintings which depended on geometric regularity, as, for example, his Composi tion. circa 1930 ( f i g . 2 ) . This constructed vision gradually gave way during the later 1930s to more disturbingly irregular, amorphic shapes and sometimes surrealist themes, an attention to the subconscious, and to myth. Thus, a painting like variation of Eidos I, 1938 ( f i g . 3) has relinquished the geometric faith in reason which in Composi tion shows a human figure, newly designed, taking pride of place in a series of logically ordered squares, and instead shows the disintegration of the human figure: although not yet headless, the depicted figure's head, located top centre, is separate from the rest of i t s anatomy which consists of amoebic, only vaguely articulated shapes. During the war years and after, this breakup of rational figuration is increasingly exacerbated, as is clear in the 1944 Perforation ( f i g . 4), and disintegrates into a world of mute, hermetic, non- communicative informal ism. 6 In Two Eras, the harmony between those two worlds of reasoned geometry and subsequent primitivism is a delusion of decay and the communication of this idea shows the destructiveness of the f i r s t era, the rawness i t has begat. The question which then arises for culture itself is: given the examples of Horkheimer's pessimistic statement and the seemingly irreconcilable "two - 3 - worlds" shown in Baumeister's painting, what were the options open to culture after the Second World War? How could artists and intellectuals, and through them the country, rebuild culture, especially in relation to its failures before and during the war? In dealing with this topic, the researcher is bound to encounter a number of prejudices which must be dismantled. Due to the postwar creation of two r i v a l l i n g power blocs in Europe, one beholden to the leadership of the United States and the other to the Soviet Union, abstraction, according to a pro-western view, is seen primarily as an expression of "freedom" in contradistinction to the propagandists art of social realism which, being the Soviet aesthetic, is "dictated."7 The apologists for "freedom" then r a l l y around abstraction and proclaim the vital superiority of occidental culture: Hardly had the ideal of modernism risen again to the surface here and there, in the midst of the hunger and misery of a ruined Germany, than it was at once clear that it had not been affected by the war and the horrible political events. Rather i t had completely preserved that former continuity of thought which nourished i t , and was responding to the same forces which guided the new European generation in p a i n t i n g . 8 By presenting the "ideal of modernism" as some sort of (ideal) essence which miraculously rises all by i t s e l f , Werner Haftmann, the art historian just quoted, makes of a l l modernism a wholly unhistorical process which then in turn can dismiss history: "not been affected by the war..." Haftmann presents a continuity untouched by historical events by relying on an essentialist view of modernism. Using a different strategy, but arriving at the same destination, are those historians who harp on the concept of the "Zero Hour," that i s , that with the defeat of the Third Reich one had the chance of starting over completely, utterly, from "scratch," as it were, again giving the false impression that the past would not intrude.9 Here again it is appropriate to cite another 1941 essay by Horkheimer: "It is vain to hope that in better times [ i . e . , when the war is over and Hitler is defeated] men will return to morality," 1 0 a warning, it seems, against "zero hour" naivete. Meanwhile, those in the west who are c r i t i c a l of the point of view presented by Haftmann in his 1957 Museum of Modern Art catalog essay tend to denounce all hermetic and non-communicative art as having been instrumental in the failure of the German people to come to terms with their past and, i t seems to be implied, with their "German-ness."11 Here again we face an essentialist outlook. The historically determined tendency of Germans to regard themselves as having a "special" history is here repeated in the assumption that only the Germans among all modern nations have failed to come to terms with their past.* 2 In those art histories which point an accusing finger at the west and in particular the United States, but which also maintain the basic assumption that in the course of historical development Germany has taken a "Sonderweg," an essential s p i r i t is supposed to exist a p r i o r i . On the one hand this "spirit" is "special," whilst on the other it is continually made the object of others's whims—that i s , it is prevented from coming into its own. The resultant Weitschmerz then becomes an a f f e c t - f i l l e d vehicle designed to run down windmills. Hence, when in the 1970s the grip of American dominated formalism loosened, "neo-expressionism" could be brought on stage as the incorporation of the Zeitqeist (German, of course) and as the supposed coming to terms with past history (special, of course). Typical of this is a 1983 catalog-book, Expressions; New Art from Germany, in which Siegfried Gohr, one of the authors, wri tes: [Baselitz's] conception of painting has shown both that it is impossible for modern art to deal naively with nature, and that artists must defend themselves against pressures to conform—a necessity particularly marked in Germany, a society that in the immediate postwar period derived its standards from external sources and, oriented to the West and to America, once again relinquished its own t r a d i t i o n . 1 3 In particular the suggestion that Germany "once again relinquished its own tradition" hearkens back to a pre-modernist, pre-critical concept of nationalism which the Second World War had bankrupted. That this is an ahistorical view clothing i t s e l f in History should no longer surprise those who examine the immediate postwar production of culture—including intellectual discourse and painting—and thereby r i d themselves of the attitude that German postwar culture was on the one hand "special"—in relation to the rest of bombed and burning Europe—and on the other hand solely "object," that i s , s t r i c t l y at the whim of the A l l i e d occupiers and assorted "bad" Germans. Hermetic, non-communicative painting could be as c r i t i c a l of the past, of Nazism, and of the failures of occidental culture in general as the most accusative expressionism or realism of the time. There i s , for example, no garantee that, had realism dominated abstraction in the 1950s, a work such as George Grosz's 1948 The Painter of the Hole ( f i g . 5) would not have generated a formulaic, standardized style. This is a work f i l l e d with interesting allusions —note the hole in the painter's head, the same hole repeated on every canvas, the rats crawling from the hole and over the rim of the canvas, the fact that the painter is but a living corpse with a hole where his viscera should be, a rat where his genitals should be, a manacle s t i l l round his neck—but even though i t speaks of the painter's inability to speak, of his lack of any subject left untouched by the ravages of war which could s t i l l be painted, one nonetheless associates the work with preconceived ideas of pain, exigency, and despair. It could thus be argued that since abstract, non-communicative painting was a negative response, a refusal to engage in outworn categories of thinking, it was often more c r i t i c a l than i t s humanist-inspired counterpart. That this kind of art should in later years help to engender a non-commital relationship with the past, as Ganter Grass has maintained in the a r t i c l e -6- cited above, is an historically determined matter, not one which is essentially of the art. Only by rejecting this essential ist view and making our analysis historical can we understand the conditions o-f culture's production and in turn understand the product. We will also come closer, I hope, to better understanding the intricate process whereby a c r i t i c a l , negative culture helped to reshape history affirmatively. That i s , I am suggesting that abstract painting in postwar Germany was the logical counterpart of a discourse of pessimism, and that in turn the reshaping of the negativity entailed in this culture was crucial to the regrouping and reintegration of western Europe today. Affirmation—of conformist modernism and "Americanization" on the one side and social realism and "Stalinization" on the other—did not occur immediately upon the division of Germany into four zones and i t s later consolidation into two states. The complexity of postwar culture was far too unmanagable for anyone to impose an instant conformity on i t . In the Soviet- occupied zone, for example, where a similar cultural policy was followed as in the western zones, art exhibitions featuring a broad spectrum of styles were mounted.1 4 The f i r s t major show in the east zone took place in Dresden in 1946 and included all major styles from realism through to expressionism, surrealism, and abstract a r t . 1 5 Likewise did the west zones show all the art which had been suppressed during the Nazi period. In June 1946 a major exhibition of modern German art was mounted in Konstanz (southern Germany), where again the core of the exhibition was formed by the art suppressed during the Third Reich: i t included the expressionism of the "Brflcke" group, Nolde, Schmitt-Rottluff, Rohlfs, Heckel, Dix, and others, as well as the cool constructivism of Bauhaus artists such as Oskar Schlemmer, and also abstractionists like Max Ackermann and W i l l i Baumeister.is In this immediate postwar period, an emphasis on pluralism provided the keynote theme to almost every exhibition. The reason •for this can be found in a desire to evade the stigma of dictatorship which the Nazis had imposed during their twelve year reign. But what was also at stake for the German organizers of these exhibitions was reaching the generation of twenty- to thirty-year olds who had grown to maturity during the Third Reich and who were wholly unfamiliar with the aims and history of modern art. As one reviewer of the Konstanzer show put i t : What, for example, can a twenty-year old today, one who was not blessed with receiving in his parents's home an a r t i s t i c stimulus and an awareness of the tradition of a r t i s t i c development, know of the expressionists, of the strivings of abstractionists or s u r r e a l i s t s ? 1 7 The need to escape from the enforced backwardness of "blood and soil" culture was crucial to regaining a measure of c r e d i b i l i t y within Europe. This need was perceived by almost everyone—excepting those who s t i l l adhered to Nazism—in the German postwar political and cultural spectrum, and the way that it could be exploited and forged into an ideological vehicle is a major concern of this paper. One of the ways of rectifying the damage wrought by Nazism was through a recourse to humanism. Here again the eastern and the western establishment did not d i f f e r . Whilst the western establishment recuperated the c r i t i c a l thrust of a painting like Two Eras into the uninterrupted continuum of modern art, firmly entrenched in a humanist idealism (we need only recall Haftmann, cited above, as one example among many of this), an orthodox marxist view denies the existence of c r i t i c a l content, and instead chides the west for its anti-humanism, its attempt to thwart the humanism of communism: A coalition of all reactionary, anti-humanist, and anti-national forces -8- ever brought forth by the dominant culture of German imperialism along with the equally reactionary forces of American imperialist culture was made possible on the basis of Americanization and militarization. The importation of imperialist mass culture brought about a kind of fusion of these imported cultural goods with the ruling imperialist culture of the Federal Republic of Germany at the expense of the humanist cultural tradition and of the progressive national cultural h e r i t a g e . 1 8 Analysis will show that the traditionalists on both sides wanted to claim "humanism" for themselves, whereby each side modified its definition. For the west, humanism is that factor supposedly common to all men and women which binds us to each other, to which we can all relate, and which ameliorates our community. C r i t i c s of this ideology have pointed out, however, that the appeal to "our common humanity" is in an exploitative, capitalist society used to whitewash basic structural injustices which have l i t t l e to do with an abstract concept of humanity or humanism, but which are brought about through man's ruthless and arrogant ambition to dominate other men and women. In a commmunist ideology, "humanism" is more akin to a radical potential which will be liberated as a result of revolutionary struggle; here, too, it is an abstract principle drawing heavily and largely uncritically on earlier, nineteenth-century conceptions of humanism, only now linked to revolution, a bourgeois bete noir. Yet there was another discourse at work during this period which through its pessimism and nihilism called into question the very concept of nineteenth- century humanism, which critiqued it and posed a threat to i t , thereby gnawing at the bourgeois roots of the concepts which supported social configuration in the west and in the east. This critique gained momentum due to the abhorrent culmination, at war's end, of twentieth century history: genocide, millions dead, the survivors—natives and "d.p.'s" alike—living in rubble without heat in winter and very l i t t l e food, a social structure that was in shambles, the guilt of being responsible for this, the fear that war would break out yet - 9 - again, this time -fought with atomic weapons. As conditions o-f li-fe changed, however—in the west notably with Marshall Aid from 1947 onward—so did the grounds o-f the negative response to the original c r i s i s , which in turn changed the way cultural products -functioned ideologically in society. Beyond attempts by traditionalists to re-implement a prewar style attached to a humanist outlook were c r i t i c s who at a very early stage were demanding a more current, selective, and rigorous painting in the attempt to detoxify German culture of Nazism. One writer in the independent magazine Die Geoenwart specifically called on modern art to help in this task. But a clear caveat was added: If one tries to upkeep a "Modernity" with works whose masters are today standing at the edge of old age, if one thus tries to reestablish a connection with an a r t i s t i c style that was valid over thirty and more years ago, one would yet again rescucitate a past as model for the present. That this would be a mistake does not need to be elaborated. 1 3 The f i r s t voices to call for an art appropriate to the time were making themselves heard. The reference to taking "a past" as a model seems to refer to the NS credo of trying to turn the clocks backward, of rejecting modern culture. They, too, took "a past" as a model, and any attempt to do so after their defeat —even if one takes a "good" past—is doomed from the outset. Embracing the modern and the future was in this sense not simply a flight from the past, but a necessary corrective to i t . The dilemma, then, was one of having to face an immediate past which is tainted forever, of not being able to reconnect with an even more distant past without running the risk of repeating a NS tactic, and also of facing on the one hand an orthodoxy of the left and the right which wants to reinstate "humanism," and on the other hand the presence of dissatisfaction, disillusionment, and "nihilism," which, by rejecting almost everything, is threatening the very possibility of rebuilding society. In the following chapters, we will examine a series of events, occuring around 1958, which will enable us to understand how a discourse of negativity could be recuperated into affirmation and why only the abstraction of artists like Baumeister and those associated with a brand of "informal" painting succeeded in establishing itself as the emblem of postwar German painting. The f i r s t chapter will deal with the intellectual/cultural discourse and i t s relation to painting. A 1958 symposium on "the image of man in our time," held in Darmstadt, will serve as the introductory event to the issues as well as some of the protagonists. In this chapter I will examine how the concerns of 1958 were rooted in the previous decade and what their international resonance was. The second chapter leads more immediately into the political issues of the day. By examining an exhibition of Berlin artists held in the Federal Republic's new capital city of Bonn in 1958, I will show why the p l u r a l i s t i c approach of the f i r s t postwar exhibitions could by 1958 no longer represent modern and free culture. These inquiries will show in what way modernism— discredited by the Nazi regime—could be restored f i r s t in the western zones of Germany, and eventually reach its dominant position in the Federal Republic of Germany. Unless specifically noted otherwise, all translations into English of the German a r t i c l e s , books, and catalogs quoted in this thesis are my own. - 1 1 - F i g . 1: W i l l i Baumeister, Two Eras, 1947, oil on canvas. - 1 2 - Fig- 2 : W i l l i Baumeister, Composi tion. c. 1938, pencil and gouache on cardboard, Cambridge, Busch-Reisinger Museum. - 1 4 - F i g . 4: W i l l i Baumeister, Perforation, 1944, oil on canvas. F i g . 5: George Grosz, The Painter o-f the Hole. 1948, aquarelle, Cambridge, Courtesy o-f The Harvard U n i v e r s i t y Art Museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum) Purchase-Germanic Museum Association -16- NOTES iThe quote heading this paper comes -from Max Horkheimer, "Art and Mass Culture," Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941), p.295. Horkheimer left Germany for New York City in 1934; the journal Zeitschrift fOr Sozialforschunq. published by the Institut fdr Sozial- forschung and edited by Horkheimer, existed from 1932 (Frankfurt) to 1941(New York). Until volume 8 nr.3 (1939/48) articles were s t i l l published primarily in German, with a few English-language pieces throughout. Thereafter, the journal appeared in English, also changing its name to Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. 2 A perusal of journals like Frankfurter Hefte and Die Geoenwart confirms this, as do Max Frisch's observations in his postwar journal: The word with which one can cause the most mischief these days is Nihilism—one only has to leaf through our papers and already another one has been spotted! Sartre is one, Wilder is one, Jflnger is one, Brecht is one... A truly binding word! I can l i t e r a l l y see them, our second-rate reviewers, dashing about with their germicide spray, and as soon as something living frightens them, they spray with eyes closed: "Nihilism, nihilism!" N i h i l i s t in the sense of our press is the doctor who x-rayed me today instead of rouging my cheek: because what shows up when he x-rays won't be p r e t t y . . . . What they call positive: The fear of the negative. — entry from late Autumn, 1947, in: Max Frisch, Taoebuch 1944-1949 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1985), pp.176-7. Max Frisch became one of the best-known and most important authors in postwar Europe. Born in 1911 in Zurich, he became an architect and only gradually relinquished this profession in favor of writing. His 1946-49 journal was published in 1958; later journals were published in 1972. He began publishing fiction in 1948; his best-known works include Sti11er. 1954, and Homo Faber. 1957. In 1948 he came into contact with Bert Brecht who was in Zurich at this time, passing from exile in America to the east zone of Germany. Brecht was at this time also consolidating his most important postwar play, Die Taoe der Commune, about the 1871 Paris Commune. In 1946 Frisch had travelled through Germany, Italy, and France, and in 1948 he travelled to Prague, Berlin, and Warschau. 3 W i l l i Baumeister, b.Stuttgart in 1889, died in 1955; Max Horkheimer, b.Stuttgart in 1895, died in 1973. 4See Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise; German Refuoee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1938s to the Present (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983). -17- 5For biographies and monograms on Baumeister, see Will Grohmann, Wi11i Baumeister (Stuttgart: W. Kohl hammer Verlag, 1952)—this was the -first postwar monogram published on a German artist—and, for a more comprehensive work, G6tz Adriani, editor, Baumeister: Dokumente. Texte. Gemalde (Cologne: DuMont, 1971). 6 " In-formal ism" is the English translation -for "l'art informel." This term was -first extensively used by Michel Tapie in his book Un art autre (1952). It is "an extremely broad term" used in the 1950s to describe "a mainly abstract but non-geometric style characterised by such terms as "shapeless", "intuitive", 'psychic improvisation". L'Art Informel included such tendencies as Tachisme, Matter Art, Lyrical Abstraction, and American Action painting (though i t refers primarily to European art)." —see John A. Walker, 61ossarv of A r t . Architecture and Design since 1945. 2nd rev. ed. (London: Clive Bingley L t d . , 1977), s.v."L'Art Informel," pp.41-42. S t y l i s t i c a l l y , "informal ism" bears certain, identifiable hallmarks: it is largely abstract, although some artists associated with it s t i l l use figuration, provided that the figurative elements are distorted or otherwise "estranged" from their "natural" appearance; i t s forms are "informe" in the sense that they f a l l outside of conventional recognizabi1ity or accepted/ traditionalist categories of aesthetic beauty; its abstraction is rooted in surrealism, automatism, and even expressionism, but never in geometric styles of abstraction. In a way, it is an assault on form and on almost everything conventional associated with "form." It is a style of painting which burgeoned during the post-WW II period in practically every European country. One of the most codified manifestations of "informal ism" occured in Paris when the art c r i t i c Michel Tapie began writing about "art autre"—he published a book by that name in 1952. Phi 1osophical1y and ideologically, "informal ism" goes far beyond the categories of style and becomes very d i f f i c u l t to pin down. In part, this text is an attempt to "pin down" whatever there was of informal ism (and why) in the art produced in Germany during the postwar period. Pitting itself against conventions of "form," informal ism was often also a challenge to other conventions, such as those of traditional language and communication. In that sense, it can be called non-communicative. But I have to point out that I am not using the word "non-communicative" because the artists at the time here under discussion thought of their work in this way (at least I have not found any published statements to support this); the designation "non-communicative" stems more from the pejorative statements of informal ism's foes—Gunter Grass's later statements, discussed in the following pages, are such an attack, for example. While it is my contention that the art under discussion here posed a challenge to conventional modes of communication, it also seems to me that its "non-communicativeness" was something which became dominant and which was exarcerbated by this informal type abstraction's success and acceptance in the 1950s. The more it was embraced into the bosom of the art market, the more "non-communicative" i t perforce became since communication would have entailed making apparent i t s differentiated "historical becoming" and its reasons for its "crisis in reception" and its "lack of social compliance"—see my discussion of Adorno's 1950 statements regarding this issue, page 26 of this text. By using the label non-communicative, while simultaneously analyzing in what way this art was engaged in communication or in establishing an alternate language, I hope to push the reader toward seeing the paradox, and possibly realizing that it was a - 1 8 - subsequent development—in which popularity and sales play a dominant r o l e - - which made people -forget that this painting once had something important to say. 'There have been a number o-f thoroughgoing studies in recent years on the ideological usefulness of American abstract expressionism as a means of furthering American goals and policies. See for example Eva Cockcroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," Artforum 12 (June 1974):39-41, John Tagg, "American Power and American Painting: The Development of Vanguard Painting in the United States since 1945," Praxis 1 Nr.2 (Winter 1976):59-78, Jane de Hart Mathews, "Art and P o l i t i c s in Cold War America," American His- torical Review 81 (Oct. 1976):762-787, and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern A r t , trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). ^Werner Haftmann, German Art of the Twentieth Century (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1957), p. 130. Original English text quoted. 9The "not been affected by the war" analysis as well as the "zero hour" analysis are really both just two sides of the same coin. In both cases, there is a stubborn insistance on separating art from history, culture from p o l i t i c s . Culture is at best allowed a spurious relation to p o l i t i c s . The "zero-hour" analysis is also sometimes used in an "historical- c r i t i c a l " manner, that i s , it is assumed that Germans truly could "start over," build a just society, etc., and that they failed to do so even though they—and only they—had this once in a lifetime opportunity. A moderate version of this is Karin Thomas, Zweimal deutsche Kunst nach 1945; 48 Jahre Nahe und Feme (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1985). The f i r s t chapter is called "The victory of the 'great abstract' over the 'great real'—the search for a reconnection to modernism after 1945" and is subdivided as follows: "1. 1945—'Zero Hour' and new beginning; 2. Reconnection with the 'International Style'; 3. Realism on the sidelines; 4. Sculpture betwixt convention and avant-gardism." The problem with this seems to me to be one of assuming that a "norm"— in this case "modernism," "international style" (Thomas does not refer to architecture here, but to abstract painting), etc.—exists, prefabricated, so to speak, ready to be "reconnected" to (which then makes those who reconnect either "modern" or "conformist") or "deviated" from, as the case may be. I would prefer to argue that "norms" do not exist pre-given, in a void, but rather are worked out, worked on, and bargained, bartered, and traded upon by all parties concerned. Norms change and are continuously adapted; such a thing as a modernist norm could hardly survive intact the history of the twentieth century and hence, I would argue, did not even exist in a consentaneous, "international" form at war's end. That a new norm was worked out by the early 1950s does not mean that it existed in 1947 or that it spontaneously appeared above the players's heads like an epiphany. 10Max Horkheimer, "The End of Reason," Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941), p.376. Original English text. J 1See the criticism launched by GOnter Grass, "Geschenkte Freiheit; Versagen, Schuld, vertane Chancen," Die Zeit Nr.20. 17 May 1985, pp.14-15. 1 2 F o r a thoroughly revised look at the thesis of the German "Sonderweg" -19- see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History; Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Eley's and Blackbourn's book was originally published in German, Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibuno. by the Ullstein verlag in 1988. Although this book deals mainly with the period up to Weimar, it has repercussions on the way post-World War II history has been written. It caused a major furor amongst German historians and was the subject of extensive media debates. The book is pertinent to this paper since much postwar art history, especially in view of the recent resurgence of neo-expressionism, focusses on the idea that Germany has not come to terms with its past, and that Germany is somehow unique in this regard. This, however, would presuppose that, for example, Britain has come to terms with colonialism, France with Algeria, the United States with Vietnam. Since f a i l i n g to come to terms with the national past is not a purely German t r a i t , as the preceding references indicate, an insistence that only Germany has committed this error seems to me to be another way of evading history. Eley and Blackbourn refer to Hans-Magnus Enzensberger who, in the 1960s cited the words, "qui s'accuse, s'excuse," as an illustration of how the ideology of the "Sonderweg" can function as an opiate and/or excuse. This is in no way intended as a lessening of the enormity of Germany's crime as perpetrator of genocide, racism, and war, but I do suggest that the often s h r i l l insistence on German "uniqueness" strikes me as an almost gloating excuse for what Germany has done. It gloats at having succeeded at evading a real coming to terms with history. Eley's qualifying remarks in the book's introduction explain his intent and also serve as an example of what I hope to do in this paper: ...the purpose of these remarks and the detailed exposition which follows is not to minimize the differences between Germany and other European societies and to homogenize nineteenth-century and twentieth- century European history in some kind of capitalist developmental stew. My aim is not to argue that before 1914 Germany was merely one capitalist society like any other, separated only by certain "accidents" of previous historical development from Britain or France. I have no desire to demote the importance of specific political differences amongst societies or to explain away the patent authoritarianism of the German political system, diminishing the latter to a pure epiphenomenal significance. Nor (to go to the other extreme) am I advocating the practical historian's familiar nominalism, in which every society is "peculiar" and history's comparative calling completely dissolved. (...) I am really arguing for an experimental shift of perspective. In the following pages it will certainly be argued that Imperial Germany was less "backward" and more "modern"—and therefore more positively comparable to say Edwardian Britain—than most historians have been prepared to admit. But in general my wish is not to question the existence of "authoritarian and anti-democratic structures in state and society" (Bracher). My aim is simply to ask how else they might be understood, with a view to generating some new and interesting questions, [p.50] 1 3 S a i n t Louis, Art Museum, Expressions; New Art from Germany. June- - 2 8 - August 1983 (travelling exhibition), p.32. Siegfried Gohr's catalog essay, pp.27-41, is entitled, "The Difficulties of German Painting with i t s own Tradition," and recapitulates the German "Sonderweg" thesis in art history. i^Jutta Held, Kunst und KunstpolitiK 1945-49; Kulturaufbau nach dem 2.Weitkrieq (Berlin: Verlag fur Ausbildung und Studium in der Elefanten Press, 1981), p. 15. 1 5 T h i s i n i t i a l l y flexible cultural policy in the east zone was of course eventually abandoned; by 1947, when the US's policy of Marshall Plan aid made i t clear that there could be not uncompromised participation for communism with capitalism in Europe, a Soviet style of social realism began to be more and more o f f i c i a l l y encouraged as a way for east zone Germany to differentiate itself further from developments in the western zones. 1 6 The "Konstanzer Kunstwoche"—Constance Art Week—was held for a month, from the 1st to the 30th of June 1944 and included an exhibition of German contemporary art (239 paintings plus graphic a r t ) . I' L . E . R e i n d l , "Moderne Kunst in Konstanz," Das Kunstwerk 1 Nr.2 (1944/47), p.32. 18Imperialisrous und Kultur. edited by the Institut far Gesel1schafts- wissenschaften beim ZK der SED, Lehrstuhl fur marxistisch-leninistische Kultur- und Kunstwissenschaften (Munich: Damnitz Verlag, 1975), p.151. isBkd., " S c h r i . k u n s t . s c h r i D i e Geoenwart 1 Nr.4/7 (1944), p.18. "Bkd." could be one of the magazine's contributing editors, Ernst Benkard. The t i t l e of the a r t i c l e refers to the text beneath a Magdalen altar painted in 1431 by Lucas Moser, "Schri.kunst.schri.und.klag.dich.ser.din.begert.jeez.niemen.mer. so.o.we." Roughly translated this means, "Cry art cry and thineself deplore, for no one wants you anymore. So alas." In the 1950s an avant-garde German art magazine took "schri kunst schri" as its t i t l e . -21- CHAPTER I: SEARCH FOR A MEANING—POSTWAR INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL DISCOURSE The "Darmstadter Gespr&ch 1958": Mirror of Cultural Concern In 1958 the Magistrate of the city of Darmstadt and the Committee "Darmstadter Gesprach" sponsored a symposium on the topic of Das Menschen- b i l d in unserer Zeit—"the image of man in our time"—to which were invited some of West Germany's most significant culture spokesmen: W i l l i Baumeister, by then the country's leading abstract a r t i s t ; Theodor Adorno, philosopher and returned emigre; Alexander Mitscherlisch, psychoanalyst; and Hans Sedlmayr, the conservative art historian. While the symposium took place from the 15th to the 17th of July, an art exhibition with the same t i t l e could also be visited through the period of 15 July to 3 September 1958.1 This chapter will examine the issue the symposium meant to address as well as this issue's rootedness in the intellectual history and discourse of the postwar period. The p a r t i c i - pants's contributions as well as a reflection on the t i t l e of the symposium will show that the key issue of the talks was the status of "man" in contemporary society; that i s , primacy seemed to be no longer accorded as a matter of course to the conception that rational man stood at the centre of thought, society, p o l i t i c s , culture. The symposium participants approached this issue in varying ways, stressing different aspects of "the image of man in our time." Hans Sedlmayr, whose 1948 book verlust der Mitte—"loss of the centre"—had garnered a wide response,2 considered the entire modern European cultural development a decline of man from God. As a conservative he prescribed a medicine which differed from that advocated by other symposium participants, yet there was s t i l l a basic -22- agreement on the diagnosis of the ailment. According to Sedlmayr, the usual hierarchies of top and bottom, of anthropocentricism, were in disarray, and their disintegration had become programmatic: The c r i t e r i a for differentiating between the subnatural and the supernatural are also not always easy; in primitive art there is often a fusion of the sacred and the cacodemonic, and thus also an unprecedented blurring of these two spheres of being is occuring today, indeed, it is being consciously strived for by some tendencies, such as the surrealists. The exchanging of top and bottom is the agenda.3 Sedlmayr advocated abandoning modern art altogether in favor of what he perceived to be the secure values of older, humanist art which had given to man an unquestioned central place in exchange for the unquestioned place of God at the head of an hierarchy of values. Whilst this prescription placed him in the camp of the reactionary foes of modernism, his perception of the crisis—the deliberate violation of the separation of "lower" and "upper" spheres and its resultant undermining of a rational image of man—belied an understanding of the modern akin to that of i t s most progressive champions. The notion that "culture" and "barbarism" should be mutually exlusive had given way to the recognition that instead they were indeed often twinned. This was a new perception in the sense that culture criticism had previously focussed on the notion of degeneracy or decadence, a criticism which left the idea of culture i t s e l f intact. Now culture was examined as a theoretical object seen in dialectical relation to its obverse. Seeking a way of coming to terms with this new perception, the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscher1isch, another symposium participant, suggested a therapeutic approach to the problem of the culture-barbarism dialectic. Unlike his conservative colleague, he did not advocate a banishment of the "lower" spheres (inclusive, following Sedlmayr, of most "tainted" modern culture), and instead retained a therapeutic thrust by reminding the audience of the dangers of repression: -23- The "lower" is maybe not at all "demonic" as long as the "upper" doesn't deny its existence! To be sure, when this occurs, it [the "lower"] avenges i t s e l f with a primal power, reaching into the most remote areas of human a c t i v i t y . And let's not forget: it has the power to make of reason a whore!4 Mitscherlisch warned that repression—which Sedlmayr commended—would not equal security against the "lower" or demonic spheres, as the reference to reason's whorishness—its role in the Nazi regime as servant in crimes against humanity— implies. Such a therapeutic strategy, implying a confrontation with the unknown and demonic in order to avoid repressing i t , also is present in W i l l i Baumeister's defense of modern art. "I protest," said Baumeister, "against the claim that modern art is a symptom of a broad degeneracy or that it is degeneracy i t s e l f . " 5 Baumeister tried to defend the symbolic power of art, which, he emphasized, need not be rooted in naturalism and naturalistic depictions of man. Abstract art is able to f a c i l i t a t e a confrontation with the unknown and thereby lead to a positive understanding of man and the unknown, and not, as Sedlmayr would claim, to a furtherance of demonic powers, of decadence and decay in the world. Baumeister, who expressed his philosophy in his book Das Unbekannte in der Kunst6—"the unknown in art"—lauded the recent discovery of cave paintings in the Dordogne,7 primitivism, and "the unknown," thereby c r y s t a l l i z i n g a rather widespread feeling that a recourse to "beginnings," to primary phenomena can be a means of mastering one's present situation. This concern for primitivism also signalled a concern for authenticity. That i s , with the irrational or primitive so strongly f e l t , it could be argued that a repression of "the unknown" would also betray a lack of authentic response to the contemporary condition. The recent past, Nazi atrocities, the Second World War, and the physical as well as spiritual destruction of Europe -24- had taken place, and hence, simply to return to a past model which proposed to advocate a one-sidedly bright, "upper" sphere view of culture which would eliminate the "lower" sphere by decree was seen as inauthentic at best and as caught up in the aesthetics o-f kitsch at worst. 8 The interest in kitsch and its opposite, authentic art, had never been entirely extinguished even during the NS period. In the period from 1933 to 1945, eighty-three articles on the nature and phenomenon of kitsch were published in Germany, and after the war, Clement Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," originally published in the United States in 1939, was translated and published in Germany in 1949.8 That the best modern art is concerned with authenticity was the argument reiterated by Theodor Adorno at the Darmstadt symposium. Besides insisting on the differentiated gualities to be found in "radical painting,"1 0—that i s , that abstract art was not a single undifferentiated mass but rather that it showed layers of historical becoming—Adorno also emphasized the power of attraction which the disharmonious elements in the modern arts exert: A very peculiar relationship which one should want to describe very subtly and very precisely is to be found here, a being-pul1ed-into, a peculiar attraction which exudes exactly from those non-harmonious elements, a being-enticed-by-adventure, by the not-yet-experienced; simultaneously, the willingness to resist harm by helping it to adopt a s i g n . 1 1 Thus, the abstract painting which contains these non-harmonious elements is in fact offering resistance to suffering by providing it with a sign, by making a differentiated emblem in which a viewer can decipher a truthful—because not harmoniously reconciled—picture of the world. It is in this way that the dissonance, the break with the traditional aesthetic of harmony and tradition per se. which had usually accorded priority to the image of man, constitutes art's authenticity in the modern period: If at all there is a preservation of tradition, a rescuing of tradition -25- —I am here citing Juan Gris verbatim—then it could only have its place where one no longer has anything directly to do with tradition, whereas everywhere in modern art where one does re-fer to tradition, precisely those moments which are the salient ones to modern art are obscured and levelled to the category of universal beauty which has become so deeply suspect to us al1 . 1 2 A break such as this in turn has social consequences for art since it brings with it a c r i s i s in reception: That a c r i s i s in reception, in the sense that most of the public is alienated from modern art, exists in today's art is something no reasonable person would deny. (...) This lack of social compliance on the part of modern art is in itself a social expression. If one takes social responsibility as seriously as i t should be taken, ...then one has to own up to the fact that modern art was driven to break with consumption, that the breadth of production, insofar as it wants to remain viable on the market—for the sake of its saleability—has intensified the mechanisms of the commodity character of art i t s e l f , has intensified everything which makes reality despicable and unbearable to us. In actual fact, the interests of human beings (...) are today represented only by that art which orients itself in no way according to conventions, to cliches, to the s p i r i t of the illustrated press, the radio, and the magazines. Probably the only artist today who represents the interests of society is the one who does not let himself be made the mouthpiece of those who pretend to speak for society when in reality they are concerned only with manipulating society as consumers, their own claim to truth notwithstanding.1 3 Adorno is here attacking both Eastern and Western ideologies since he saw both as trying to manipulate people into "buying" a particular "line" which in turn blocks c r i t i c a l t h i n k i n g . 1 4 The artist has to refrain from becoming either side's mouthpiece. While Sedlmayr saw the modern artist in cahoots with modern society in trying to dethrone man—and God—from their centrality as point of reference, Adorno saw modern art as being the authentic resistance to a brutalizing and barbaric history, and even as an authentic attempt to c r i t i c i z e and offer an alternative, whilst in the west the logic of consumer society offered the inauthentic alternative of commodified man. -26- Theory of C r i s i s . Theory in C r i s i s : The Effect o-f History on Art and Culture This then was the state of a particular kind of advanced cultural criticism in Germany in 1959, a criticism that offered.a diagnosis of a point of c r i s i s in modern culture which even conservatives like Sedlmayr would agree with, no matter how different the latter's prescription was. What I would like to ask now is what specifically had produced this sense of c r i s i s , where i t s roots in recent history lay, and how i t manifested i t s e l f in the painting being produced. W i l l i Baumeister, for example, often referred in his immediate postwar production to the thematics outlined above. A painting like the 1946 Urzeitoestalten ( f i g . 6), with i t s cave-wall like ground of sand-colored, thick impasto and i t s primitive, shaman type figures does not provide the renaissance spatial perspective indicative of hierarchy which Sedlmayr valued so highly. Instead, man is dethroned, God is absent except perhaps in the form of ritual magic, and the human figures, outlined with coarse black, purple, and reddish lines, are barely recognizable since they are placed on the same level of differentiation as their environment of signs, symbols, and object-shapes. This conglomeration of shapes also lends a certain impenetrability to the painting, underscoring the sense that everything is taking place on the surface, on the wall of this cave, beyond which no world of man-made architecture can be found. Instead, the cave wall—the canvas—is the only ground on which this new-ancient world acts: the rest is lost in oblivion, or perhaps has been deliberately abandoned. But the viewer is neither delivered into total chaos since the figures and their archaic world are s t i l l placed centrally on their ground. The Menschenbi1d—"the image of man"—however encoded, strives to assert i t s e l f . Ernst Wilhelm Nay, another painter who came to represent German postwar -27- modernism, in his immediate postwar work manifested the same struggle, using different s t y l i s t i c means. His Autumn Song of 1945 ( f i g . 7) shows a canvas covered with a jagged patchwork of brushstrokes creating planes or surfaces which obscure and then reveal parts of houses, figures, and landscapes. In the foreground of this f i e l d , two figures, elongated or otherwise made to f i t the flow of the picture, are discernible. At the bottom left a seated figure holds what could be a flute, while on the right another dances with upraised arms and thrown back head and face. The figures are distorted, they tend to merge with their patterned background, and are perhaps not v i s i b l e to the cursory glance; they do not stand out in the picture the way one might expect i f they belonged to traditional figuration. In some ways the painting looks like it hearkens back to a prewar expressionism, but it does not exactly repeat this affective moment: these figures and their ground are modified by an interweaving of surfaces and passages which does not permit the figurative to dominate. The texture of figures and ground are interwoven. This serves somewhat to mute the affective. This ambivalent "toning down" of affect—ambivalent because it is s t i l l allowed to show through in the agitated brushwork and the choice of colors even if the subject matter is now encoded—is also apparent in a 1948 work called Melisande ( f i g . 8). Somewhat like in a cubist picture the eye is led along the surfaces of different objects and planes, including those of human figures, and sometimes can discern a roof, a head, body parts, something to suggest that there is subject matter intended behind the play of pattern and color. But the human does not dominate, except perhaps in the crass appeal of the painting's colors to e l i c i t a strong—positive or negative—(human) response in the viewer. Nay seems to be trying to use a form idiom associated with Picasso and - 2 8 - with cubism to metamorphose an essentially expressive, affective intention into something which evades direct association with German prewar expressionism. His fusion of cubist and expressionist elements tends to serve to disintegrate any recognizably human figures, but these are nonetheless present in the paintings, simultaneously asserted and called into question.Is This struggle between assertion and cal1ing-into-question must be followed through the 1940s in order to understand its valency in 1950. What must be understood f i r s t is the deep mistrust with which European culture— obviously most especially Germany with its historical self-designation as "a nation of poets and thinkers"—was regarded by many of i t s former masters and apprentices after the war. As the Swiss architect and writer Max Frisch, travelling throughout Europe after the war, noted during a 1948 stay in Hamburg: One of the most decisive experiences which our generation, born in this century but reared s t i l l in the s p i r i t of the previous one, has been able to make—especially during the second world war—is that people who are full of that [ i . e . , 19th c.] culture, connoisseurs who can with wit and enthusiasm discuss Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, can easily act as butchers; both in the same person. Let's call that which distinguishes these people an aesthetic culture. Their special, identifying trait is their non-commitment, the clean separation between culture and p o l i t i c s . . . . It's a frame of mind which can think the loftiest (for the earthly is tossed overboard so that the hot-air balloon can rise) and which doesn't prevent the basest, a culture which rigorously exempts itself from the demands of the day, which is f u l l y at eternity's service. Culture in the sense of an idol which is satisfied with our a r t i s t i c or scientific achievements but which licks the blood of our brothers behind our backs—culture as moral schizophrenia is in our century customary. How often, when once again we speak of Germany, someone brings up Goethe, S t i f t e r , Hblderlin, and all the others which Germany has produced, namely in this sense: Genius as a l i b i . 1 6 Culture, usually removed to ethereal spheres in order to serve as the a l i b i of greatness able to excuse the corruption of p o l i t i c s , was seen to be stripped of i t s ideological veil by Frisch and many other c r i t i c a l thinkers. The illusion of maintaining two separate spheres—politics and culture—was shattered: "Whoever doesn't concern himself with p o l i t i c s has already executed the taking -29- o-f sides which he wanted to spare himself: he serves the ruling p a r t y . " 1 7 The critique of this breakdown of culture, reason, and individuality which was seen to culminate with fascism began prior to war's end, often in exile from NS Germany, and sometimes within the borders of the NS regime i t s e l f as the immediate flourishing of these critiques after H i t l e r ' s defeat indicates. In exile, Horkheimer in 1941 wrote an essay entitled "The End of Reason." He noted that: The destruction of rationalistic dogmatism through the self-criticism of reason, carried out by the ever renewed nominalistic tendencies in philosophy has now been r a t i f i e d by historical r e a l i t y . The substance of individuality i t s e l f , to which the idea of autonomy was bound, did not survive the process of industrialization. Reason has degenerated because i t was the ideological projection of a false universality which now shows the autonomy of the subject to have been an i l l u s i o n . The collapse of reason and the collapse of individuality are one and the same. 1 8 Here the historical groundwork for the struggle between the assertion of the individual and i t s being questioned is described. It is a process rooted in enlightenment thought based on s e l f - c r i t i c i s m . Unforseen was the rigor with which self-critique and analytical reason would undermine their own ontological bases. Yet the problem is not a "purely" philosophical one, but rather is a process aided by concurrent social and economic developments, as Horkheimer i11ustrates: With the disappearance of independent economic subjects, the subject as such disappears. It is no longer a synthetic unit; it has become senseless for it to preserve itself for some distant future or to plan for its heirs. In the present period the individual has opportunities only on short term. Once secure property has vanished as the goal of acquisition, the intrinsic connection between the experiences of the individual disappears. Concern for property under orderly competition and the rule of law has always been constitutive of the ego. Slaves and paupers had no individuality. The "premise of all my acting in the sensuous world, can only be as part of that sensuous world, i f I live amongst other free beings. This determined part of the world . . . i s called...my property." 1 9 Horkheimer links the contemporary breakdown of reason and individuality—of - 3 9 - the subject—with the economic anarchy o-f advanced capitalism and o-f fascism. It should be clear as well that with the collapse of the NS regime, "order" did not return to Germany. Instead, social and economic anarchy increased in virulence as the remnants of society struggled with disease, hunger, "displaced persons," military occupation, and a lawlessness on the streets which manifested i t s e l f in black market dealings, a widespread breakdown in acceptable sexual mores, promiscuity, as well as assorted forms of violence. Pre-Marshal1 plan social conditions in Europe, particularly Germany, did not manifest a return to planned, orderly society, and hence neither to integrated subjectivity. Furthermore, Horkheimer makes an intrinsic connection between oppression and language, an emphasis which is also reexamined by other writers in several postwar a r t i c l e s . Horkheimer writes: [Fascism] strikes down that which is tottering, the individual, by teaching him to fear something worse than death. Fear reaches farther than the identity of his consciousness. The individual must abandon the ego and carry on somehow without i t . Under Fascism the objects of organization are being disorganized as subjects. They lose their identical character, and are simultaneously Nazi and anti-Nazi, convinced and sceptical, brave and cowardly, clever and stupid. They have renounced all consistency. This inconsistency into which the ego has been dissolved is the only attitude adequate to a reality which is not defined by so-called plans but by concentration camps. The method of this madness consists in demonstrating to men that they are just as shattered as those in the camps and by this means welding the racial community together. Men have been released from such camps who have taken over the jargon of their j a i l e r s and with cold reason and mad consent (the price, as it were, of their survival) tell their story as i f i t could not have been otherwise than i t was, contending that they have not been treated so badly after a l l . Those who have not yet been j a i l e d behave as if they had already been tortured. They profess everything. The murderers, on the other hand, have adopted the language of the Berlin night club and garment c e n t e r . 2 0 What has seemingly irrevocably occured is that the identi ty-buildinq function of language has been lost or corrupted. The very language which people speak under fascism and also under advanced capitalism is incapable of creating identity or community. A 1947 a r t i c l e which dealt with German's drift into argot—and with - 3 1 - the concommitant ineffectuality of "straight" language—analyzed the cause to be Fascism's failure to create a new language despite its attempts to create "the new man" and to have left behind nothing but disintegration: The fact is that Fascism f a i l e d , despite i t s claim to total transforma- tion of human beings, in achieving a depth effect on language even remotely comparable to the effect on language which the French and Russian revolutions achieved. A new order was anchored, in language as well, through the force of principles. National Socialism and Fascism, which did not believe in principles, could not have a true language, either.21 The process begun by capitalism run wild, which culminated in Fascism, had left behind disintegration, loss of identity, and loss of language, according to many of the postwar analyses. Despite the claim of the totalitarian regime to explain every facet of l i f e , i t s explanations were always disingenuous because they were made on the basis of preconceived answers to preconceived questions: "The speeches were always the same. And every schoolboy knew how to imitate them. (...) That's where the real danger of thinking in the ' t o t a l ' lay: nothing in the world required a serious examination, a new mental effort; for every question the answer had already been preconceived."2 2 Old language has thus become corrupted but new language is not taking form, either. The dilemma—focussed on language and culture but intricately interwoven with society, economics, and politics—was overwhelming, but both Reifenberg and Krauss, the two writers cited above, warned of the dire effects of relying on a merely passive resistance to the lies of fascist language and on a merely quietist fatalism vis-a-vis the lack of a new, vital language. No one, however, as yet proposed a new program for language's renewal. The pessimistic fatalism which writers warned of could be discerned in the form of radical disinterest on the part of youth in p o l i t i c s , culture, and society. Describing the state of intellectuals in postwar Germany, the magazine -32- Frankfurter Hefte came to the conclusion that the situation was catastrophic— although i t added that this was not restricted to Germany alone. The situation was especially bad among the young, students in this case, who dared not talk of their war experience without running the risk of being accused of harboring Nazi sentiment—who hence were unable to "work through" those experiences—and who displayed an alarming pessimism which far outstripped the sense of c r i s i s experienced by their elders! But the knowledge of what they want is for these students less significant than their knowledge of what they do not want. And that is why pessimism so often lies like a dark shadow over their lives. "You asked me what's going to happen now," a student answered me, "I believe nothing will become of us anymore. There's just going to be another war anyway."23 And what of political parties and their a b i l i t y to generate a committed following? The parties were tainted with the same paralysis and decrepitude which had undermined the v i a b i l i t y of society. The Christian Democrats, a largely conservative, highly anti-communist party, prescribed a warmed-over traditionalism which the younger generation found d i f f i c u l t to believe i n , the Communist Party, a poor cousin to the Social Democrats, seemed incapable— whether due to being shackled to a Stalinist line or to being traditionally distrusted and eventually hounded out of existence in West Germany—of renewing public imagination. The SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany), which should have been able, given i t s traditionally strong support in Germany, to do just that, f a i l e d , it could be argued, more than any other party in f u l f i l l i n g its mandate. This party should have taken on the mantle of a c r i t i c a l reexamination of the past—including the mistakes made by anti-fascists like themselves which helped make Nazism possible. But instead the party radically refused to do this and instead upheld a mythology of innocence and blamelessness for the past: the -33- SPD after the war reasserted its prewar, 1930s rallying cry, Nach H i t l e r , wir! -"after H i t l e r , i t ' s our turn!"—meaning that Social Democracy would take over a-fter H i t l e r ' s defeat, without ever asking any questions about how this overly confident, naive 1930s view had perhaps contributed to the consolidation of H i t l e r ' s power, and how it could possibly survive the war, the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis, intact. Needless to say, the party also failed to examine i t s role in the Weimar government as possibly having aided the rise of fascism. Instead, Kurt Schumacher, himself a survivor of H i t l e r ' s camps, took over the Party's leadership after the war and gave to it the myth of original grace: the Party has never made a mistake. 2 4 Hence, the SPD, too, operated with the language of "the total," of preconceived answers to all questions. Despite the fact that i t had a large following after the war—as it did prior to H i t l e r ' s rise to power—it failed to be a source of real renewal, as i t s willingness to accomodate the occupying powers in their reinstitution of the old capitalist structures demonstrates. Thus the only common denominator which could be said to exist amongst progressive tendencies in Germany after the war was not a political a f f i l i a t i o n with any one party; rather only an unstructured anti-fascism had united them during the war and remained the common bond afterwards. Lookinq for the New Reality: The Intrusion of the Archaic In art also an anti-fascistic, whether passive or active, stance was the identifying characteristic of progressive postwar art p r a x i s . 2 5 The most obvious signifier of this stance was the valorization of styles repressed during the NS period. Hence, as mentioned in the introduction, all the occupied zones - 3 4 - showed a r t t h a t was p r e v i o u s l y s u p p r e s s e d as " d e g e n e r a t e , " and a l s o t r i e d t o put on e x h i b i t i o n s w h i c h c o u l d s e r v e as l e s s o n s i n modern a r t h i s t o r y i n o r d e r t o h e l p o r i e n t the g e n e r a t i o n o-f twenty- t o t h i r t y - y e a r o l d s who, h a v i n g come t o m a t u r i t y d u r i n g H i t l e r ' s r e i g n , had not been exposed t o t h e a r t o f the e a r l y t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y . A s i m u l t a n e o u s t h r u s t r e q u i r e d l o c a t i n g a new, a p p r o p r i a t e s t y l e or v i s u a l language f o r the t i m e . A s u r v e y o f what was d i s c u s s e d and p u b l i s h e d on modern, i n p a r t i c u l a r a b s t r a c t , a r t w i l l show t h a t i n the a r t d i s c o u r s e t h e c r i t i c i s m of o l d language and a concommitant c a l l f o r a new one, f o r a new r e a l i t y was as i n s i s t e n t as i n the l i t e r a r y magazines and t h e d i s c u s s i o n s s u r r o u n d i n g s o c i a l i s s u e s . The p a i n t i n g p r o d u c e d by a r t i s t s l i k e B a u m e i s t e r , Nay, and o t h e r s was o f t e n an a t t e m p t e d e x p r e s s i o n of t h i s c a l l . The p u b l i s h e d a e s t h e t i c d i s c u s s i o n s were u s u a l l y of a n o n - p o l i t i c a l c h a r a c t e r f a r removed f r o m t h e c o n c e r n s of p e o p l e l i v i n g a m i d s t r u b b l e ; however, s i n c e t h e s e d i s c u s s i o n s a r t i c u l a t e a s o c i a l l y r o o t e d c o n c e r n w h i c h emanates f r o m s u b s t r u c t u r a l d i s i n t e g r a t i o n t h e y a r e of i n t e r e s t i n d e t e r m i n i n g how t h e s u p e r s t r u c t u r e , i n r e l a t i o n t o i t s b a s e , r e c o n s t i t u t e s i t s e l f . One of t h e landmarks o f the d i s c u s s i o n s was a book p u b l i s h e d on " t h e c r e a t i v e f o r c e s of a b s t r a c t p a i n t i n g , " i n 1947, by Dr.Ottomar Domnick, a 48-year o l d p s y c h i a t r i s t . 2 6 I t c o n t a i n e d c o n t r i b u t i o n s by the a r t i s t s W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , Max Ackermann, H . A . P . G r i e s h a b e r , Georg M e i s t e r m a n n , R u d o l f P r o b s t , O t t o R i t s c h l , F r i t z W i n t e r , and Hans H i l d e b r a n d t , the w r i t e r K u r t L e o n h a r d who sometimes c o n t r i b u t e d a r t i c l e s on modern a r t t o Das Kunstwerk and o t h e r a r t m a g a z i n e s , and o t h e r s . The theme of the book i s t h e n e c e s s i t y and a p p r o p r i a t e n e s s of a b s t r a c t a r t t o t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y man. As the n e c e s s a r y o p p o s i t i o n t o a m a t e r i a l i s m gone bad, a b s t r a c t i o n r e p r e s e n t s the p o s s i b i l i t y of a r e a r t i c u l a t i o n o f modern man by g e t t i n g r i d of the o l d , s e c u r e , c o n s c i o u s l y d o m i n a t i n g m a t e r i a l man and i n s t e a d - 3 5 - p o s i t i n g h i s s u b c o n s c i o u s o t h e r . In h i s i n t r o d u c t i o n , Domnick d e s c r i b e s the r e a c t i o n , on the p a r t o-f c o n s e r v a t i v e b o u r g e o i s , t o a n t i - n a t u r a l i s t i c s t y l i s t i c developments a t the b e g i n n i n g o f t h e c e n t u r y : "One spoke of ' i n s a n i t y ' and hoped f o r a r e t u r n t o n a t u r e . T h i s d i d not happen. The n a t u r a l i s t s t y l e d i c t a t e d by the T h i r d R e i c h was an e p i s o d e i n Germany. I t o n l y o u t w a r d l y i n t e r r u p t e d t h e development. Hidden f o r c e s a l l o w e d the ' o t h e r ' t o g r o w . " 2 7 T h i s development of t h e " o t h e r " i s i n t e g r a l t o t h e t i m e , a c c o r d i n g t o Domnick. I n f o r m a l - t y p e a b s t r a c t i o n , w h i c h by r e v o k i n g the p r i m a r y p o s i t i o n o f the c o n s c i o u s one and t h e r e b y a l l o w i n g t h e o t h e r t o a p p e a r , i s not o n l y a s t y l e but a l s o the answer t o the r e q u i r e m e n t of t h e age. F u r t h e r m o r e , t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y i s e q u a t e d w i t h m a t e r i a l i s m , and t h e a p p r o p r i a t e s t y l e of m a t e r i a l i s m was n a t u r a l i s m . The u n b r i d l e d f a i t h i n s c i e n c e and t e c h n o l o g y o f the p r e v i o u s c e n t u r y w h i c h attemped t o dominate n a t u r e t o d a y meets w i t h s c e p t i c i s m . I t i s because of t h i s , a c c o r d i n g t o Domnick, t h a t a b s t r a c t i o n i s not o n l y a n t i - n a t u r a l i s t i c , but a n t i - m a t e r i a l i s t i c as wel1 s i n c e i t opposes t h e l e g a c y of t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y . I t i s a t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y o p p o s i t i o n , i t i s modern, and i t i s not n e c e s s a r i l y happy i n i t s t r i u m p h — p e s s i m i s m and d o u b t , i t w i l l be r e c a l l e d , d e t e r m i n e d the postwar t e n o r : No bounds seemed t o r e m a i n f o r a n a l y t i c a l r e a s o n ; h u m a n i t y ' s f o r t u n e , v i a t h e h a r n e s s i n g of m a t e r i a l , seemed a l m o s t made. But a t t h e moment o f v i c t o r y , i t became d o u b t f u l . Romain R o i l a n d has i l l u s t r a t e d t h i s w i t h M i c h e a l a n g e l o ' s V i c t o r who t u r n s away, i n a d i s a p p o i n t e d - r e s i g n e d manner, f r o m the v a n q u i s h e d . V i c t o r y s l i p s away from him. C o n c u r r e n t w i t h the moment when the d o m i n a t i o n of the m a t e r i a l seemed t o t a k e m a t e r i a l i s m t o i t s peak, F r e u d d e v e l o p e d p s y c h o a n a l y s i s w h i c h d i s c o v e r e d f o r c e s o p e r a t i v e beneath t h e s u r f a c e , f o r c e s w h i c h s u b j u g a t e man more than he can s u b j u g a t e m a t e r i a l . T h i s was a shock not e a s i l y overcome. New s p i r i t u a l f o r c e s s t e p p e d i n t o v i e w . The s t r u g g l e a g a i n s t m a t e r i a l i s m , a r t i s t i c a l l y s p e a k i n g a g a i n s t n a t u r a l i s m , i s the d i s t i n g u i s h i n g mark of modern p a i n t i n g . 2 8 The s i m p l i s t i c c a u s a l i t y s t i p u l a t e d by Domnick i n t h i s development has the f u n c t i o n of a p a c i f i e r i n t h r e a t e n i n g l y a c a u s a l t i m e s : the p e s s i m i s m o f postwar - 3 6 - c u l t u r e i s e l e v a t e d t o an a b s t r a c t , s p i r i t u a l r e a l m where m a t e r i a l i s m i s b a n i s h e d . I n s t e a d o-f the s h a r p a n a l y s i s of t h e i n t e r a c t i o n between c u l t u r e and ( m a t e r i a l ) s o c i e t y , as H o r k h e i m e r , K r a u s s , and o t h e r s p r e s e n t e d i t , Domnick u s e s t h e i n s i g h t s of o t h e r s t o a r r i v e a t a d e s c r i p t i o n o f modern p a i n t i n g w h i c h r u n s c o u n t e r t o t h e p o s s i b i l i t y of i t b e i n g a p r o c e s s , a d i f f e r e n t i a t e d becoming ( A d o r n o ) , and i n s t e a d p o s i t s i t as s t a t i c : i t i s a d i s t i n g u i s h i n g mark, a trademark w i t h o u t m a t e r i a l l y - r o o t e d h i s t o r y , w i t h o u t a d i a l e c t i c a l r e l a t i o n s h i p t o m a t e r i a l i s m . In t h i s s e n s e Domnick's t e x t p r e f i g u r e s t h e a f f i r m a t i v e i n t e r p r e t a t i o n of ( n e g a t i v e ) i n f o r m a l p a i n t i n g i n the 1950s by Werner Haftmann and o t h e r s . A l t h o u g h Domnick, a t h e r a p i s t i n o p p o s i t i o n t o r e p r e s s i o n , s o o t h e s the p u b l i c ' s f e a r o f t h e o t h e r , he does not go i n t o d e t a i l e d d e s c r i p t i o n of how t h i s new, t o l e r a n t - o f - t h e - o t h e r s t y l e s h o u l d l o o k ; t h e i n c l u s i o n i n h i s book of B a u m e i s t e r , Ackermann, R i t s c h l , W i n t e r , e t c . , does however i n d i c a t e t h a t i t was t o be a n o n - g e o m e t r i c , i n f o r m a l - t y p e a b s t r a c t i o n . I t was i n the a r t magazines t h a t one c o u l d f i n d more d e t a i l e d p r e s c r i p t i o n s of how t h i s a b s t r a c t i o n s h o u l d l o o k . E s p e c i a l l y n o t a b l e was the magazine Das Kunstwerk. a p p e a r i n g i n Baden- Baden f r o m 1946 onward. I t s p u b l i s h e r was the Woldemar K l e i n v e r l a g w h i c h a l s o p r o d u c e d monographs on modern a r t i s t s and w h i c h showed an o v e r a l l d e d i c a t i o n t o modern, i n p a r t i c u l a r F r e n c h , a r t . Through i t s f o c u s , i n s e v e r a l i m p o r t a n t a r t i c l e s , on p r i m i t i v i s m and i t s i m p o r t f o r modern c u l t u r e , the magazine d i s t i n g u i s h e d i t s e l f from o t h e r , more n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y humanist i n s p i r e d a r t d i s c o u r s e , and t h e r e b y f u r t h e r e d a t y p e of a b s t r a c t i o n w h i c h p a r a l l e l e d t h e s e a r c h f o r a new r e a l i t y i n the i n t e l l e c t u a l d i s c o u r s e . Das Kunstwerk t y p i c a l l y r e p e a t e d t h e r e j e c t i o n of n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y n a t u r a l i s m , but not n e c e s s a r i l y by e q u a t i n g t h i s w i t h a h u m a n i s t i c a n t i - m a t e r i a l i s m as espoused by Domnick. In an -37- a r t i c l e w r i t t e n by one of the e d i t o r s , L e o p o l d Zahn, c a l l e d "Abkehr von der N a t u r " — " t u r n i n g away f r o m n a t u r e " — O r t e g a y G a s s e t i s q u o t e d t o s u g g e s t t h a t n a t u r e and a r t have an a c t i v e r o l e i n d i s m i s s i n g man: t h a t i s , i t i s not o n l y man who t u r n s away from n a t u r e , but r a t h e r n a t u r e , as a t h r e a t e n i n g o t h e r , e x p e l l e d man, t h e c o n s c i o u s one. What t h i s seems t o i m p l y of c o u r s e i s t h a t t h o s e p a i n t e r s d e a l i n g w i t h the " o t h e r " a r e a l s o d e a l i n g w i t h n a t u r e — t h e e x p u l s i o n i s not j u s t a t u r n i n g away from " n a t u r a l i s m "